Contents

1. 1776

2. Brave Companions: Portraits in History

3. The Great Bridge

4. John Adams

5. The Johnstown Flood

6. Mornings on Horseback

7. Path Between the Seas

8. Truman

9. The Course of Human Events

Also by David McCullough

John Adams

Truman

Brave Companions

Mornings on Horseback

The Path Between the Seas

The Great Bridge

The Johnstown Flood

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Copyright © 2005 by David McCullough
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Endpapers: (Front) View of Boston Harbor; (back) the Royal Navy in New York Harbor; both by British Captain Archibald Robertson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCullough, David G.
1776 / David McCullough.

p.          cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. United States–History—Revolution, 1775–1783.
I. Title: Seventeen seventy-six. II. Title.
E208.M396  2005
973.3—dc22                          2005042505
ISBN-10: 0-7432-8770-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8770-8
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5

Picture Credits

The maps at the end of the color insert are courtesy of the Library of Congress. Other illustrations are courtesy of the following:

American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 28, p. 199. Author’s collection: iv. Boston Gazette: 6. British Museum, London, England: 19. The Brooklyn Historical Society: 14. Clements Library, University of Michigan: 1, 5, 18, 35, 36. Emmett Collection, New York Public Library/Art Resource: 3. Frick Art Reference Library, New York: 9. Independence National Historical Park: 10, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30. John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island: 23. Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia: 12. Massachusetts Historical Society: 7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924: 2. Morristown, New Jersey, National Historical Park: 32. National Portrait Gallery, London, England: 20, 38. Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Maryland: 33. Collection of the New-York Historical Society: 8. New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY: front and back endpapers, 4, 11, 15, 16, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bequest of Mrs. Sarah Harrison, the Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection: 21; and Gift of Maria McKean Allen and Phebe Warren Downes, through the bequest of their mother, Elizabeth Wharton McKean: 44. Pennsylvania Museum of Art: 29. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York: 45. Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: 43. R. W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana: 13. The Royal Collection, © 2004, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: 17. Wadsworth

Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, lent by the Putnam Phalanx: 26. Winterthur Museum, p. 1. Yale University Art Gallery: 16, 31, 42.

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Rosalee Barnes McCullough

Contents

Part I: The Siege

Chapter One: Sovereign Duty

Chapter Two: Rabble in Arms

Chapter Three: Dorchester Heights

Part II: Fateful Summer

Chapter Four: The Lines Are Drawn

Chapter Five: Field of Battle

Part III: The Long Retreat

Chapter Six: Fortune Frowns

Chapter Seven: Darkest Hour

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

Bibliography

Index

Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.

—General George Washington

Part I

The Siege

The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in.

—General George Washington
    January 14, 1776

Chapter One

Sovereign Duty

God save Great George our King,

Long live our noble King,

God save the King!

Send him victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign o’er us;

God save the King!

ON THE AFTERNOON of Thursday, October 26, 1775, His Royal Majesty George III, King of England, rode in royal splendor from St. James’s Palace to the Palace of Westminster, there to address the opening of Parliament on the increasingly distressing issue of war in America.

The day was cool, but clear skies and sunshine, a rarity in London, brightened everything, and the royal cavalcade, spruced and polished, shone to perfection. In an age that had given England such rousing patriotic songs as “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” in a nation that adored ritual and gorgeous pageantry, it was a scene hardly to be improved upon.

An estimated 60,000 people had turned out. They lined the whole route through St. James’s Park. At Westminster people were packed solid, many having stood since morning, hoping for a glimpse of the King or some of the notables of Parliament. So great was the crush that late-comers had difficulty seeing much of anything.

One of the many Americans then in London, a Massachusetts Loyalist named Samuel Curwen, found the “mob” outside the door to the House of Lords too much to bear and returned to his lodgings. It was his second failed attempt to see the King. The time before, His Majesty had been passing by in a sedan chair near St. James’s, but reading a newspaper so close to his face that only one hand was showing, “the whitest hand my eyes ever beheld with a very large rose diamond ring,” Loyalist Curwen recorded.

The King’s procession departed St. James’s at two o’clock, proceeding at walking speed. By tradition, two Horse Grenadiers with swords drawn rode in the lead to clear the way, followed by gleaming coaches filled with nobility, then a clattering of Horse Guards, the Yeomen of the Guard in red and gold livery, and a rank of footmen, also in red and gold. Finally came the King in his colossal golden chariot pulled by eight magnificent cream-colored horses (Hanoverian Creams), a single postilion riding the left lead horse, and six footmen at the side.

No mortal on earth rode in such style as their King, the English knew. Twenty-four feet in length and thirteen feet high, the royal coach weighed nearly four tons, enough to make the ground tremble when under way. George III had had it built years before, insisting that it be “superb.” Three gilded cherubs on top—symbols of England, Scotland, and Ireland—held high a gilded crown, while over the heavy spoked wheels, front and back, loomed four gilded sea gods, formidable reminders that Britannia ruled the waves. Allegorical scenes on the door panels celebrated the nation’s heritage, and windows were of sufficient size to provide a full view of the crowned sovereign within.

It was as though the very grandeur, wealth, and weight of the British Empire were rolling past—an empire that by now included Canada, that reached from the seaboard of Massachusetts and Virginia to the Mississippi and beyond, from the Caribbean to the shores of Bengal. London, its population at nearly a million souls, was the largest city in Europe and widely considered the capital of the world.

GEORGE III had been twenty-two when, in 1760, he succeeded to the throne, and to a remarkable degree he remained a man of simple tastes and few pretensions. He liked plain food and drank but little, and wine only. Defying fashion, he refused to wear a wig. That the palace at St. James’s had become a bit dowdy bothered him not at all. He rather liked it that way. Socially awkward at Court occasions—many found him disappointingly dull—he preferred puttering about his farms at Windsor dressed in farmer’s clothes. And in notable contrast to much of fashionable society and the Court, where mistresses and infidelities were not only an accepted part of life, but often flaunted, the King remained steadfastly faithful to his very plain Queen, the German princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, with whom by now he had produced ten children. (Ultimately there would be fifteen.) Gossips claimed Farmer George’s chief pleasures were a leg of mutton and his plain little wife.

But this was hardly fair. Nor was he the unattractive, dim-witted man critics claimed then and afterward. Tall and rather handsome, with clear blue eyes and a generally cheerful expression, George III had a genuine love of music and played both the violin and piano. (His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach and in 1764 had taken tremendous delight in hearing the boy Mozart perform on the organ.) He loved architecture and did quite beautiful architectural drawings of his own. With a good eye for art, he had begun early to assemble his own collection, which by now included works by the contemporary Italian painter Canaletto, as well as watercolors and drawings by such old masters as Poussin and Raphael. He avidly collected books, to the point where he had assembled one of the finest libraries in the world. He adored clocks, ship models, took great interest in things practical, took great interest in astronomy, and founded the Royal Academy of Arts.

He also had a gift for putting people at their ease. Samuel Johnson, the era’s reigning arbiter of all things of the mind, and no easy judge of men, responded warmly to the “unaffected good nature” of George III. They had met and conversed for the first time when Johnson visited the King’s library, after which Johnson remarked to the librarian, “Sir, they may talk of the King as they will, but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen.”

Stories that he had been slow to learn, that by age eleven he still could not read, were unfounded. The strange behavior—the so-called “madness” of King George III—for which he would be long remembered, did not come until much later, more than twenty years later, and rather than mental illness, it appears to have been porphyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century.

Still youthful at thirty-seven, and still hardworking after fifteen years on the throne, he could be notably willful and often shortsighted, but he was sincerely patriotic and everlastingly duty-bound. “George, be a King,” his mother had told him. As the crisis in America grew worse, and the opposition in Parliament more strident, he saw clearly that he must play the part of the patriot-king.

He had never been a soldier. He had never been to America, any more than he had set foot in Scotland or Ireland. But with absolute certainty he knew what must be done. He would trust to Providence and his high sense of duty. America must be made to obey.

“I have no doubt but the nation at large sees the conduct in America in its true light,” he had written to his Prime Minister, Lord North, “and I am certain any other conduct but compelling obedience would be ruinous and…therefore no consideration could bring me to swerve from the present path which I think myself in duty-bound to follow.”

In the House of Lords in March of 1775, when challenged on the chances of Britain ever winning a war in America, Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, had looked incredulous. “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify?” he asked. “They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men.” And Lord Sandwich was by no means alone in that opinion. General James Grant, a member of the House of Commons, had boasted that with 5,000 British regulars he could march from one end of the American continent to the other, a claim that was widely quoted.

But in striking contrast, several of the most powerful speakers in Parliament, like the flamboyant Lord Mayor of London, John Wilkes, and the leading Whig intellectual, Edmund Burke, had voiced ardent support for and admiration of the Americans. On March 22, in the House of Commons, Burke had delivered in his heavy Irish brogue one of the longest, most brilliant speeches of his career, calling for conciliation with America.

Yet for all that, no one in either house, Tory or Whig, denied the supremacy of Parliament in determining what was best for America. Even Edmund Burke in his celebrated speech had referred repeatedly to “our” colonies.

Convinced that his army at Boston was insufficient, the King had dispatched reinforcements and three of his best major generals: William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton. Howe, a member of Parliament and a Whig, had earlier told his Nottingham constituents that if it came to war in America and he were offered a command, he would decline. But now duty called. “I was ordered, and could not refuse, without incurring the odious name of backwardness, to serve my country in distress,” he explained. Howe, who had served in America during the Seven Years’ War—or the French and Indian War, as it was known in America—was convinced the “insurgents” were few in number in comparison to those loyal to the Crown.

War had come on April 19, with the first blood shed at Lexington and Concord near Boston, then savagely on June 17 at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. (The June engagement was commonly known as the Battle of Bunker Hill on both sides of the Atlantic.) British troops remained under siege at Boston and were running short of food and supplies. On July 3, General George Washington of Virginia had taken command of the American “rabble.”

With 3,000 miles of ocean separating Britain from her American colonies, accounts of such events took a month or more to reach London. By the time the first news of Lexington and Concord arrived, it was the end of May and Parliament had begun its long summer holiday, its members departing London for their country estates.

When the outcome at Bunker Hill became known in the last week of July, it only hardened the King’s resolve. “We must persist,” he told Lord North. “I know I am doing my duty and therefore can never wish to retract.”

The ever-obliging North suggested that in view of the situation in America, it might no longer be regarded as a rebellion, but as a “foreign war,” and thus “every expedient” might be employed.

At a hurried meeting at 10 Downing Street, on July 26, the Cabinet decided to send 2,000 reinforcements to Boston without delay and to have an army of no fewer than 20,000 regulars in America by the following spring.

Bunker Hill was proclaimed a British victory, which technically it was. But in plain truth His Majesty’s forces, led by General Howe, had suffered more than 1,000 casualties in an appalling slaughter before gaining the high ground. As was observed acidly in both London and Boston, a few more such victories would surely spell ruin for the victors.

At summer’s end a British ship out of Boston docked at Plymouth bearing 170 sick and wounded officers and soldiers, most of whom had fought at Bunker Hill and “all in great distress,” as described in a vivid published account:

A few of the men came on shore, when never hardly were seen such objects: some without legs, and others without arms; and their clothes hanging on them like a loose morning gown, so much were they fallen away by sickness and want of nourishment. There were, moreover, near sixty women and children on board, the widows and children of men who were slain. Some of these too exhibited a most shocking spectacle; and even the vessel itself, though very large, was almost intolerable, from the stench arising from the sick and wounded.

The miseries of the troops still besieged at Boston, and of those Americans loyal to the King who, fearing for their lives, had abandoned everything to find refuge in the town, were also described in letters published in the London papers or in correspondence to friends and relatives in London. In the General Evening Post, one soldier portrayed the scene in Boston as nothing but “melancholy, disease, and death.” Another, whose letter appeared in the Morning Chronicle and Advertiser, described being “almost lost for want of fresh provisions…. We are entirely blocked up…like birds in a cage.”

John Singleton Copley, the American portrait painter who had left Boston to live in London the year before, read in a letter from his half brother, Henry Pelham:

It is inconceivable the distress and ruin this unnatural dispute has caused to this town and its inhabitants. Almost every shop and store is shut. No business of any kind is going on…. I am with the multitude rendered very unhappy, the little I collected entirely lost. The clothes upon my back and a few dollars in my pocket are now the only property which I have.

DESPITE THE WAR, or more likely because of it, the King remained popular in the country at large and could count on a loyal following in Parliament. Political philosophy, patriotism, and a sense of duty comparable to the King’s own figured strongly in both houses. So, too, did the immense patronage and public money that were his alone to dispense. And if that were not sufficient, there was the outright bribery that had become standard in a blatantly mercenary system not of his making, but that he readily employed to get his way.

Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but at all levels of society. The clergy and such celebrated observers of the era as Jonathan Swift and Tobias Smollett had long since made it a favorite subject. London, said Smollett, was “the devil’s drawing-room.” Samuel Curwen, the Salem Loyalist, saw dissipation and “vicious indulgence” everywhere he looked, “from the lowest haunts to the most elegant and expensive rendezvous of the noble and polished world.” Feeling a touch of homesickness, Curwen thanked God this was still not so back in New England.

To much of the press and the opposition in Parliament, the American war and its handling could not have been more misguided. The Evening Post, the most partisan in its denunciations, called the war “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.” The St. James’s Chronicle wrote contemptuously of “a foolish, obstinate, and unrelenting King.” The Crisis, a vehement new paper, attacked “all the gaudy trappings of royalty” and the villainy of the King.

“What, in God’s name, are ye all about in England? Have you forgot us?” asked a British officer in a letter from Boston published in London’s Morning Chronicle. He wished that all the “violent people” who favored more vigorous measures in America could be sent over to see for themselves. Their vigor would be quickly cooled. “God send us peace and a good fireside in Old England.”

The King, meanwhile, had recalled General Thomas Gage, his commander-in-chief at Boston, and in his place put the stouthearted William Howe. When, in September, an emissary from the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, Richard Penn, arrived in London with an “Olive Branch Petition” in hand, expressing loyalty to the Crown and requesting, in effect, that the King find a way to reconciliation, George III refused to have anything to do with it.

Behind the scenes, Lord North had quietly begun negotiations with several German princes of Hesse and Brunswick to hire mercenary troops. And in a confidential note dated October 15, the King reassured the Prime Minister that every means of “distressing America” would meet his approval.

By the crisp, sunny afternoon of October 26, as George III proceeded on his way to the opening of Parliament, his popularity had never seemed higher. Opposition to the war, as everyone knew, was stronger and more vociferous in London than anywhere in the country, yet here were crowds greater than any since his ascension to the throne. Further, they appeared in the best of spirits, as even the London Public Advertiser took note. Their “looks spoke peace and good humor”; there was “but little hissing”; the King could feel secure “in the affection of his people.”

A BOOM OF CANNON saluted His Majesty’s arrival at Westminster, and with the traditional welcoming formalities performed, the King assumed his place on the throne at the head of the House of Lords, flanked by the peers in their crimson robes. The members of the House of Commons, for whom no seats were provided, remained standing at the rear.

The magnitude of the moment was lost on no one. As expected, the King’s address would be one of the most important ever delivered by an English monarch.

He had a good voice that carried well. “The present situation of America, and my constant desire to have your advice, concurrence, and assistance on every important occasion, have determined me to call you thus early together.” America was in open revolt, he declared, and he denounced as traitors those who, by “gross misrepresentation,” labored to inflame his people in America. Theirs was a “desperate conspiracy.” All the time they had been professing loyalty to the parent state, “and the strongest protestations of loyalty to me,” they were preparing for rebellion.

They have raised troops, and are collecting a naval force. They have seized the public revenue, and assumed to themselves legislative, executive, and judicial powers, which they already exercise in the most arbitrary manner…. And although many of these unhappy people may still retain their loyalty…the torrent of violence has been strong enough to compel their acquiescence till a sufficient force shall appear to support them.

Like the Parliament, he had acted thus far in a spirit of moderation, he said, and he was “anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects, and the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war.” He hoped his people in America would see the light, and recognize “that to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its consequences, is to be the freest member of any civil society in the known world.”

Then came a new charge, based on opinions received from his commander at Boston. There must be no more misconceptions about the true intent of those deceiving the unhappy people of America. “The rebellious war…is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.”

I need not dwell upon the fatal effects of the success of such a plan. The object is too important, the spirit of the British nation too high, the resources with which God hath blessed her too numerous, to give up so many colonies which she has planted with great industry, nursed with great tenderness, encouraged with many commercial advantages, and protected and defended at much expense of blood and treasure.

Since, clearly, it was the better part of wisdom “to put a speedy end” to such disorders, he was increasing both his naval and land forces. Further, he was pleased to inform the Parliament, he had received “friendly offers of foreign assistance.”

“When the unhappy and deluded multitude, against whom this force will be directed, shall become sensible of their error, I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy,” he pledged, and as evidence of his good intentions, he would give authority to “certain persons” to grant pardons “upon the spot” in America, though beyond this he said no more.

In sum, he, George III, Sovereign of the Empire, had declared America in rebellion. He had confirmed that he was committing land and sea forces—as well as unnamed foreign mercenaries—sufficient to put an end to that rebellion, and he had denounced the leaders of the uprising for having American independence as their true objective, something those leaders themselves had not as yet openly declared.

“Among the many unavoidable ill consequences of this rebellion,” he said at the last, “none affects me more sensibly than the extraordinary burden which it must create to my faithful subjects.”

His Majesty’s appearance before Parliament had lasted just twenty minutes, after which, as reported, he returned to St. James’s Palace “as peaceably as he went.”

THE MEMBERS of the House of Commons filed out directly to their own chamber, and debate on the King’s address commenced “brisk and warm” in both houses, the opposition marshaling the case for conciliation with extraordinary force.

In the House of Lords, expressions of support were spirited though comparatively brief. The King was praised for his resolution to uphold the interests and honor of the kingdom, praised for his decisiveness. “We will support your majesty with our lives and fortunes,” vowed Viscount Townsend.

Those in opposition had more to say, and spoke at times with pronounced emotion. The measures recommended from the throne, warned the Marquis of Rockingham, were “big with the most portentous and ruinous consequences.” The hiring of foreign troops was an “alarming and dangerous expedient.” Even more deplorable was the prospect of “shedding British blood by British hands.” Any notion of conquering America was “wild and extravagant,” said the Earl of Coventry. The administration was “no longer to be trusted,” said Lord Lyttleton bitterly.

“How comes it that the colonies are charged with planning independency?” the Earl of Shelburne demanded to know. “Who is it that presumes to put an assertion (what shall I call it, my Lords?) contrary to fact, contrary to evidence?…Is it their intention, by thus perpetually sounding independence in the ears of the Americans, to lead them to it?”

As the afternoon light began to fade and the chamber grew dim, the candles of the chandeliers were lit.

The one surprise, as the debate continued, was a vehement speech by the Duke of Grafton, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, former Prime Minister, who had not previously opposed the administration. Until now, he said, he had concurred in the belief that the more forceful the government in dealing with the Americans, the more likely matters could be “amicably adjusted.” But he had been misled, deceived. Admitting to his ignorance of the real state of things in America—and inferring that this was no uncommon handicap in Parliament—he boldly proposed the repeal of every act concerning America since the incendiary Stamp Act of 1765.

This, I will venture to assert, will answer every end; and nothing less will accomplish any effectual purpose, without scenes of ruin and destruction, which I cannot think on without the utmost grief and horror.

The Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, was astonished. How could any noble lord possibly condemn the policies of the administration, or withdraw support, without at least giving them a fair trial?

IT WAS IN THE COMMONS that the longer, more turbulent conflict ensued. Of the twenty or so who rose to speak, few held back. Attacks on the King, Lord North, the Foreign Ministry in general, and on one another at times brought the heat of debate to the boiling point. There were insults exchanged that would long fester, bombast and hyperbole in abundance, and moments when eloquence was brought to bear with a dramatic effect remarkable even in the Commons.

It was Parliament as theater, and gripping, even if the outcome, like much of theater, was understood all along. For importantly it was also well understood, and deeply felt, that the historic chamber was again the setting for history, that issues of the utmost consequence, truly the fate of nations, were at stake.

The passion of opposing opinion was evident at once, as the youthful John Dyke Acland of Devonshire declared emphatic support of the King’s address. True it was that the task of “reducing America to a just obedience” should not be underestimated, he said, but where “the interests of a great people” were concerned, “difficulties must be overcome, not yielded to.”

Acland, a headstrong young army officer, was ready to serve in America himself (and would), and thus what he said had unusual force, if not perfect historic validity. “Recollect the strength, the resources, and above all the spirit of the British nation, which when roused knows no opposition.”

Let me remind you of those extensive and successful wars that this country has carried on before the continent of America was known. Let me turn your attention to that period when you defended this very people from the attacks of the most powerful and valiant nation in Europe [France], when your armies gave law, and your fleets rode triumphant on every coast. Shall we be told then that this people [the Americans], whose greatness is the work of our hands, and whose insolence arises from our divisions, who have mistaken the lenity of this country for its weakness, and the reluctance to punish, for a want of power to vindicate the violated rights of British subjects—shall we be told that such a people can resist the powerful efforts of this nation?

At about the time the chandeliers were being lighted in the House, John Wilkes, Lord Mayor of London, champion of the people and the homeliest man in Parliament, stood to be heard, and to let there be no doubt that he was John Wilkes.

“I speak, Sir, as a firm friend to England and America, but still more to universal liberty and the rights of all mankind. I trust no part of the subjects of this vast empire will ever submit to be slaves.” Never had England been engaged in a contest of such import to her own best interests and possessions, Wilkes said.

We are fighting for the subjection, the unconditional submission of a country infinitely more extended than our own, of which every day increases the wealth, the natural strength, the population. Should we not succeed…we shall be considered as their most implacable enemies, an eternal separation will follow, and the grandeur of the British empire pass away.

The war with “our brethren” in America was “unjust…fatal and ruinous to our country,” he declared.

There was no longer any question whether the Americans would fight, conceded Tory Adam Ferguson, but could anyone doubt the strength of Great Britain to “reduce” them? And this, he said, must be done quickly and decisively, as an act of humanity. Half measures would not do. Half measures could lead only to the horrors of civil war.

In response, George Johnstone, a dashing figure who had once served as governor of West Florida, delivered one of the longest, most vehement declamations of the night, exclaiming, “Every Machiavellian policy is now to be vindicated towards the people of America.”

Men are to be brought to this black business hood-winked. They are to be drawn in by degrees, until they cannot retreat…. we are breaking through all those sacred maxims of our forefathers, and giving the alarm to every wise man on the continent of America, that all his rights depend on the will of men whose corruptions are notorious, who regard him as an enemy, and who have no interest in his prosperity.

Johnstone praised the people of New England for their courage and fortitude. There was a wide difference, he said, between the English officer or soldier who merely did his duty, and those of the New England army, where every man was thinking of what further service he could perform. No one who loved “the glorious spirit of freedom” could not be moved by the spectacle of Bunker Hill, where “an irregular peasantry” had so bravely faced “the gallant Howe” leading the finest troops in the world. “Who is there that can dismiss all doubts on the justice of a cause which can inspire such conscious rectitude?”

Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor General, belittled the very idea of standing in the way of the King and called for the full-scale conquest of America. “Why then do we hesitate?” he asked.

Because an inconsiderable party, inconsistent in their own policies, and always hostile to all government but their own, endeavor to obstruct our measures, and clog the wheels of government? Let us rather second the indignant voice of the nation, which presses in from all quarters upon the Sovereign, calling loudly for vigorous measures…. Sir, we have been too long deaf. We have too long shown our forbearance and long-suffering…. Our thunders must go forth. America must be conquered.

As the night wore on, Lord North, the stout, round-shouldered Prime Minister, remained conspicuously silent in his front-bench seat, his large, nearsighted eyes and full cheeks giving him the look, as the wit Horace Walpole said, of a blind trumpeter. North was much liked—moderate, urbane, and intelligent. He had made his career in the Commons and, with his affable manner, had acquired few if any enemies among his political opponents. When attacked, he took no offense. He could be a markedly persuasive speaker but was equally capable, when need be, of remaining silent, even napping a bit.

From years of experience North had also learned to count votes in advance, and he knew now, as did nearly everyone present, that the decided majority of the Commons, like the people at large, stood behind the King.

Perhaps the most telling moment of the whole heated session came near midnight, when another army officer, but of an older generation than John Dyke Acland, rose to speak. Colonel Isaac Barré was a veteran of the French and Indian War who had come home from the Battle of Quebec badly disfigured. He had been hit in the head by a musket ball that blinded him in one eye and left his face twisted into a permanent sneer. Further, it had been Isaac Barré, in a past speech in defense of the Americans, who had first called them “Sons of Liberty,” and the name had taken hold.

He had lost one eye, the colonel reminded his listeners, but the one good “military eye” he had left did not deceive him. The only way to avert “this American storm” was to reach an accommodation just as soon as possible.

BETWEEN THEM, Edmund Burke and young Charles James Fox filled the next several hours. Burke, in customary fashion, took his time. Nearly all that he said, he and others had said before, but he saw no harm in repetition, or any need for hurry. He held the floor for nearly two hours, a large part of his speech devoted to the disgrace of British forces cooped up in Boston by those said to be an undisciplined rabble.

There were no ringing lines from Burke this time, little at all for the newspapers to quote. Possibly he did not wish to outshine Fox, his protégé, who spoke next and who, at twenty-six, was already a dazzling political star.

Born to wealth and position, Fox was an unabashed fop, a dandified “macaroni,” who at times appeared in high-heeled shoes, each of a different color, and happily spent most nights drinking or gambling away his father’s fortune at London’s best clubs. But his intellect and oratorical gifts were second to none. He always spoke spontaneously, never from notes or a prepared text. Fox, it would be observed, would as soon write down what he was going to say as pay a bill before it came due.

He attacked immediately and in searing fashion, calling Lord North the “blundering pilot” who had brought the nation to a terrible impasse. If Edmund Burke had failed to provide a memorable line for the night’s efforts, Fox did at once:

Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost—he has lost a whole continent.

It was time for a change in the administration, time for new policies. The present ministers were enemies of freedom.

I cannot consent to the bloody consequences of so silly a contest about so silly an object, conducted in the silliest manner that history or observation has ever furnished an instance of, and from which we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, disgrace, defeat, and ruin.

Once Fox finished, North stood at his place and calmly allowed he had no wish to remain a day in office were he to be judged inactive, inattentive, or inconsiderate.

North was not a man enamored with war. He had nothing of the look or temperament of a war leader. Privately he was not at all sure it would be possible to vanquish the Americans, and he worried about the cost. To General Burgoyne he had written, “I would abandon the contest were I not most intimately convinced in my own conscience that our cause is just and important.” George III relied on him, calling him “my sheet anchor,” and it was, and would remain, North’s role to explain and defend the King and administration policies and decisions before the Commons.

The intention now, he affirmed, was to send a powerful sea and land force across the Atlantic. But with these forces would also go “offers of mercy upon a proper submission.” How “proper submission” was to be determined, or who was to bear such offers, he did not say. As time would show, however, the real purpose of such peace gestures was to speed up an American surrender.

“This will show we are in earnest, that we are prepared to punish, but are nevertheless ready to forgive. This is, in my opinion, the most likely means of producing an honorable reconciliation.”

On that note the debate ended.

In the House of Lords, where work had wound up at midnight, the opposition to the King’s address, and thus to all-out war in America, was defeated by a vote of more than two to one, 69 to 29.

In the House of Commons, their impassioned speeches notwithstanding, the opposition was defeated by an even greater margin, 278 to 108.

By the time the vote in the Commons had concluded, it was four in the morning.

ONE OF THOSE MEMBERS of the House of Commons who had refrained from speaking, and who felt extremely pleased with the outcome, was the gentleman-scholar Edward Gibbon. A supporter of Lord North, Gibbon never spoke on any issue. But in private correspondence from his London home, he had been assuring friends that “some[thing] will be done” about America. The power of the empire would be “exerted to the utmost,” he wrote. “Irish papists, Hanoverians, Canadians, Indians, etc. will all in various shapes be employed.”

Gibbon, who was then putting the final touches to the first volume of his masterpiece, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, now felt even more confident about the course of history in his own time. “The conquest of America is a great work,” he wrote.

Soon after, in early November, King George III appointed a new Secretary for the American colonies, Lord George Germain, a choice that left little doubt, if any remained, that the King, too, considered the conquest of America serious work to which he was seriously committed.

Germain was to replace the Earl of Dartmouth, whose attitude toward the war seemed at times less than wholehearted. He was a proud, intelligent, exceedingly serious man of sixty, tall, physically impressive, and, notably unlike the King and Lord North, he was a soldier. He had served in the Seven Years’ War in Germany and with good reputation, until the Battle of Minden, when, during a cavalry attack, he was accused of being slow to obey orders. He was not charged with cowardice, as his critics liked to say. At a court-martial called at his own insistence, he was found guilty only of disobedience. But his military career ended when the court declared him unfit for further service.

As a politician in the years since, he had performed diligently, earning a high reputation as an administrator. In his new role he would direct the main operations of the war and was expected to take a firm hand. To many he seemed the perfect counterpart to the obliging, unassertive North.

For the “riotous rebels” of America, he had no sympathy. What was needed, Germain said, was a “decisive blow.” The King thought highly of him.

Chapter Two

Rabble in Arms

His Excellency General Washington has arrived amongst us, universally admired. Joy was visible on every countenance.

—General Nathanael Greene

I

HERE WE ARE AT LOGGERHEADS,” wrote the youthful brigadier general from Rhode Island, appraising the scene at Boston in the last days of October 1775.

I wish we had a large stock of [gun]powder that we might annoy the enemy wherever they make their appearance…. but for want thereof we are obliged to remain idle spectators, for we cannot get at them and they are determined not to come to us.

At age thirty-three, Nathanael Greene was the youngest general officer in what constituted the American army, and by conventional criterion, an improbable choice for such responsibility. He had been a full-time soldier for all of six months. Unlike any of the other American generals, he had never served in a campaign, never set foot on a battlefield. He was a foundryman by trade. What he knew of warfare and military command came almost entirely from books.

Besides, he was a Quaker, and though of robust physique, a childhood accident had left him with a stiff right leg and a limp. He also suffered from occasional attacks of asthma.

But Nathanael Greene was no ordinary man. He had a quick, inquiring mind and uncommon resolve. He was extremely hardworking, forthright, good-natured, and a born leader. His commitment to the Glorious Cause of America, as it was called, was total. And if his youth was obvious, the Glorious Cause was to a large degree a young man’s cause. The commander in chief of the army, George Washington, was himself only forty-three. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, was thirty-nine, John Adams, forty, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two, younger even than the young Rhode Island general. In such times many were being cast in roles seemingly beyond their experience or capacities, and Washington had quickly judged Nathanael Greene to be “an object of confidence.”

He had been born and raised in Kent County, Rhode Island, on a farm by Potowomut Creek, near the village of Warwick, approximately sixty miles south of Boston. He was the third of the eight sons of a prominent, industrious Quaker also named Nathanael, and the one, of all the sons, his father counted on most to further the family interests. These included the home-farm, a general store, a gristmill, a sawmill, a coasting sloop, and the Greene forge, all, as was said, in “constant and profitable operation.” The forge, the most thriving enterprise, which produced anchors and chains and employed scores of men, was one of the leading businesses in the colony, and the Greenes, as a result, had become people of substantial means. The fact that the patriarch owned a sedan chair was taken as the ultimate measure of just how greatly the family had prospered.

Because education did not figure prominently in his father’s idea of the Quaker way, young Nathanael had received little schooling. “My father was a man [of] great piety,” he would explain. “[He] had an excellent understanding, and was governed in his conduct by humanity and kind benevolence. But his mind was overshadowed with prejudices against literary accomplishments.” With his brothers, Nathanael had been put to work at an early age, on the farm at first, then at the mills and forge. In time, determined to educate himself, he began reading all he could, guided and encouraged by several learned figures, including the Rhode Island clergyman Ezra Stiles, one of the wisest men of the time, who would later become the president of Yale College.

Nathanael read Caesar and Horace in English translation, Swift, Pope, and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. On visits to Newport and Boston, he began buying books and assembling his own library. Recalling their youth, one of his brothers would describe Nathanael during lulls in the clamor of the foundry, seated near the great trip-hammer, a leather-bound volume of Euclid in hand, calmly studying.

“I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist [of] ignorance to surround me,” he wrote to a like-minded friend. He found he enjoyed expressing himself on paper and had a penchant in such correspondence for endless philosophizing on the meaning of life. Yet for all this no thought of a life or occupation other than what he knew seems to have crossed his mind until the threat of conflict with Great Britain.

The description that would come down the generations in the family was of a “cheerful, vigorous, thoughtful” young man who, like his father, loved a “merry jest or tale,” who did comic imitations of characters from Tristram Shandy, and relished the company of young ladies, while they, reportedly, “never felt lonely where he was.” Once, accused by a dancing partner of dancing stiffly, because of his bad leg, Nathanael replied, “Very true, but you see I dance strong.”

His defects were perceived to be a certain “nervous temperament” and susceptibility to poor health, impetuousness, and acute sensitivity to criticism.

Full-grown, he was a burly figure, about five feet ten inches tall, with the arms and shoulders of a foundryman, and handsome, though an inoculation for smallpox had left a cloudy spot in his right eye. A broad forehead and a full, “decided” mouth were considered his best features, though a soldier sent to deliver a message to the general would remember his “fine blue eyes, which struck me with a considerable degree of awe, that I could scarcely deliver my message.”

In 1770, when Nathanael was still in his twenties, his father had put him in charge of another family-owned foundry in the neighboring village of Coventry, beside the Pawtuxet River, and on a nearby hill Nathanael built a house of his own. Following the death of his father late that same year, he took charge of the entire business. By 1774, when he met and married pretty, flirtatious Katherine Littlefield, who was fourteen years his junior, he was perceived to be a “very remarkable man.”

It was then, too, with war threatening, that he turned his mind to “the military art.” Having ample means to buy whatever books he needed, he acquired a number of costly military treatises few could afford. It was a day and age that saw no reason why one could not learn whatever was required—learn virtually anything—by the close study of books, and he was a prime example of such faith. Resolved to become a “fighting Quaker,” he made himself as knowledgeable on tactics, military science, and leadership as any man in the colony.

“The first of all qualities [of a general] is courage,” he read in the Memoirs Concerning the Art of War by Marshal Maurice de Saxe, one of the outstanding commanders of the era. “Without this the others are of little value, since they cannot be used. The second is intelligence, which must be strong and fertile in expedients. The third is health.”

He took a leading part in organizing a militia unit, the Kentish Guards, only to be told that his stiff leg disqualified him from being an officer. To have it declared publicly that his limp—his “halting”—would be a “blemish” on the company was, as he wrote, a “mortification” beyond any he had known.

If unacceptable as an officer, he would willingly serve in the ranks. Shouldering an English musket he had bought at Boston from a British deserter, he marched as a private in company drills for eight months, until it became obvious that for a man of such knowledge and ability, it would be best to forget about the limp.

Almost overnight he was given full command of the Rhode Island regiments. Exactly how this came about remains unclear. One of his strongest admirers and mentors was Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, a delegate to the Continental Congress, who was also the uncle of Nathanael’s wife Katherine and presumably used his influence. But that Nathanael had so willingly marched in the ranks could only have favored him strongly among his fellow volunteers when it came to choosing a commander.

General Greene had been at Boston since early May of 1775, at the head of what was called the Rhode Island Army of Observation, applying himself every waking moment, at times sleeping only a few hours a night. Thus far no one had found cause to complain about his youth or inexperience.

Whatever he lacked in knowledge or experience, he tried to make up for with “watchfulness and industry,” he would later confide to John Adams.

As commander of the “Army of Observation,” encamped at the American citadel on Prospect Hill, he tried to take in everything, to observe and appraise the situation as realistically as possible. While the American army controlled the land around Boston, the British, strongly fortified in the city and on Bunker Hill, had control of the sea and could thereby supply their troops and send reinforcements. (Only weeks before, in September, reinforcements of five regiments had arrived.) The task at hand, therefore, seemed clear enough: to confine the King’s men in Boston, cut them off from supplies of fresh provisions, and keep them from coming out to gain what one of their generals, Burgoyne, called “elbow room.”

If it ever came to a fight, the American army had scarcely any artillery, and almost no gunpowder, yet to Greene the greater weakness and worry was the continuing disorderly state of the army itself. As he wrote to his friend Samuel Ward at the Continental Congress, the prospect was deeply disturbing, “when you consider how raw and undisciplined the troops are in general, and what war-like preparations are going on [in] England.”

AT THE START of the siege there had been no American army. Even now it had no flag or uniforms. Though in some official documents it had been referred to as the Continental Army, there was no clear agreement on what it should be called in actual practice. At first it was referred to as the New England army, or the army at Boston. The Continental Congress had appointed George Washington to lead “the army of the United Colonies,” but in correspondence with the general, the President of Congress, John Hancock, referred to it only as “the troops under your command.” Washington, in his formal orders, called them the “Troops of the United Provinces of North America.” Privately he described them as the “raw materials” for an army.

To the British and those Loyalists who had taken refuge in Boston, they were simply “the rebels,” or “the country people,” undeserving the words “American” or “army.” General John Burgoyne disdainfully dubbed them “a preposterous parade,” a “rabble in arms.”

In April, when the call for help first went out after Lexington and Concord, militia and volunteer troops from the other New England colonies had come by the thousands to join forces with the Massachusetts regiments—1,500 Rhode Islanders led by Nathanael Greene, 5,000 from Connecticut under the command of Israel Putnam. John Stark’s New Hampshire regiment of 1,000 had marched in snow and rain, “wet and sloppy,” “through mud and mire,” without food or tents, seventy-five miles in three and a half days. The Massachusetts regiments, by far the strongest of the provincial troops, possibly numbered more than 10,000.

By June a sprawling, spontaneous, high-spirited New England army such as had never been seen was gathered about Boston. Washington, arriving in the first week of July, was told he had 20,000 men, but no one knew for certain. No count had been taken until he made it a first order of business. In fact, there were 16,000, of which fewer than 14,000 were fit for duty. More than 1,500 were sick, another 1,500 absent.

In a regular army such a count could have been accomplished in a matter of hours, Washington noted disapprovingly. As things were, it took eight days. The enemy’s total strength was believed to be 11,000. In reality, there were perhaps 7,000 of the King’s men in Boston, or roughly half the number under Washington’s command.

In a formal address from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Washington had been warned not to expect “regularity and discipline” among the men. The youth of the army had little or no experience with military life. Nor were they “possessed of the absolute necessity of cleanliness.” Beyond that Washington found them to be men of a decidedly different sort than he had expected, and he was not at all pleased.

The lay of the land about Boston was also different from anything in the general’s military experience. In the simplest terms, as he drew in his own rough map, the setting was one of three irregular peninsulas at the head of Boston Harbor, with the peninsula of Boston in the middle, that of Charlestown (and Bunker Hill) just to the north, and Dorchester close by to the south. But as Boston was connected to the mainland only by a narrow, half-mile causeway, or neck, it was more like an island than a peninsula. And thus, by barricading the Neck, it had been relatively simple to keep the British “bottled up” in Boston, just as the British had built their own barricades at the Neck to keep the Americans from coming in.

The British still held Charlestown, which was largely in ruins, and Bunker Hill, which was their citadel and a formidable advantage. Neither side had yet moved to fortify the even higher ground of the Dorchester peninsula overlooking the harbor.

With its numerous green hills falling away to blue water, it was a particularly beautiful part of the world and especially in summer. Washington thought it “very delightful country,” and more the pity that it should be a theater of war. A British officer described it as “country of the most charming green that delighted eye ever gazed on.” Views sketched from the uplands of Charlestown by one of the British engineers, Captain Archibald Robertson, show how many broad, open fields and meadows there were, and how modest was the skyline of Boston, its church spires more like those of a country village. They might have been sketches of Arcadia.

Had a seagull’s-eye view been possible, one could have seen the whole American army and its fortifications strung out in a great arc of about ten miles around the landward side of Boston, from the Mystic River on the northeast to Roxbury to the south, with British redcoats camped on the slopes of the Boston Common and manning defenses at the Neck and within the town and on Bunker Hill. A lofty beacon pole rose from the crest of Beacon Hill, and at the center of the town, the Province House, headquarters for the British command, could be readily identified by its large, octagonal cupola and distinctive gold weather vane of an Indian with bow and arrow.

In the harbor off Long Wharf were British ships lying at anchor—and three were ships of the line, ships of fifty guns or more—while over to the right of the Dorchester peninsula, at the narrow entrance to the Inner Harbor, on Castle Island, stood the old fort Castle William, also occupied by the British.

The main concentration of American troops was at Prospect Hill to the north. Others were encamped a few miles farther inland, at the pretty little college town of Cambridge on the Charles River, and close to the Neck at Roxbury, where the white spire of the Roxbury meetinghouse rose from the top of still another prominent hill. At Cambridge troops were encamped mainly on the Common, though most of the town and the red-brick buildings of Harvard College had also been taken over.

Needing more than his rough sketch of the terrain, Washington had assigned a talented nineteen-year-old lieutenant, John Trumbull, the son of the governor of Connecticut, to do a series of maps and drawings. For one sketch of the British defenses at the Neck, young Trumbull had crawled through high grass almost to the enemy line.

For their part, the British had assigned an experienced cartographer, Lieutenant Richard Williams, who, with the help of a small crew, moved his surveyor’s transit and brass chains from one vantage point to the next, taking and recording careful sightings. The result was a beautifully delineated, hand-colored map showing “the True Situation of His Majesty’s Army and also those of the Rebels.” All fortifications were clearly marked, all landmarks neatly labeled, including “Mount Whoredom,” Boston’s red-light district. Lieutenant Williams had been appalled to find prostitution so in evidence in what was supposedly the center of Puritanism—“There’s perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could,” he noted in his journal—and accuracy demanded that this, too, be shown on the map.

Not the least of Washington’s problems was that he had command of a siege, yet within his entire army there was not one trained engineer to design and oversee the building of defenses. Still, he ordered larger and stronger defenses built, and the work went forward. “Thousands are at work every day,” wrote the Reverend William Emerson of Concord after touring the lines. “ ’Tis surprising the work that has been done…. ’Tis incredible.” It had been the Reverend Emerson who declared the morning of April 19, as British regiments advanced on Concord, “Let us stand our ground. If we die, let us die here!”

With telescopes from Prospect Hill and other vantage points, the army kept constant watch on the regulars in Boston, just as the regulars kept watch on the army. (“It seemed to be the principle employment of both armies to look at each other with spyglasses,” wrote the eminent Loyalist Peter Oliver, former chief justice of the province.)

Washington knew little about Boston. He had been there only once and but briefly twenty years before, when he was a young Virginia colonel hoping for advancement in the regular army. And though each side dispatched its spies, he put particular emphasis on “intelligence” from the start, and was willing to pay for it. Indeed, the first large sum entered in his account book was for $333.33, a great deal of money, for an unnamed man “to go into Boston…for the purpose of conveying intelligence of the enemy’s movements and designs.”

The fear that the British were preparing an attack was ever present. “We scarcely lie down or rise up, but with expectation that the night or the day must produce some important event,” wrote one of Washington’s staff.

It was in the first week of August, at the end of his first month as commander, when Washington learned how much worse things were than he knew. A report on the supply of gunpowder at hand revealed a total of less than 10,000 pounds, and the situation was not expected to improve soon. Very little gunpowder was produced in the colonies. What supplies there were came mainly by clandestine shipments from Europe to New York and Philadelphia by way of the Dutch island St. Eustatius in the Caribbean. At present, there was powder enough only for about nine rounds per man. According to one account, Washington was so stunned by the report he did not utter a word for half an hour.

THE SPRAWLING AMERICAN ENCAMPMENTS bore little resemblance to the usual military presence. Tents and shelters were mainly patched-together concoctions of whatever could be found. Each was “a portraiture of the temper and taste of the person that encamps in it,” wrote clergyman Emerson.

Some are made of boards, some of sailcloth, and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of stone and turf, and others again of brick and others brush. Some are thrown up in a hurry and look as if they could not help it—mere necessity—others are curiously wrought with doors and windows.

A notable exception was the encampment of Nathanael Greene’s Rhode Islanders. There, “proper tents” were arranged row on row like “the regular camp of the enemy…everything in the most exact English taste,” recorded Emerson approvingly. On the whole, however, he thought “the great variety” of the camps most picturesque.

Others were considerably less charmed. The drunken carousing to be seen, the foul language to be heard were appalling to many, even among the soldiers themselves. “Wickedness prevails very much,” declared Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins of Ipswich, Massachusetts.

A veteran of Bunker Hill and a cobbler by trade, Hodgkins was thirty-two years old and a man, like many, who had already seen a good deal of trouble and sorrow in his life. His first wife and four of their five children had all died of disease before the war began. To the remaining child and to his second wife, Sarah Perkins, and the two children born of this second marriage, he was a devoted father and husband. Greatly concerned for their welfare and knowing her concern for him, he wrote to Sarah at every chance. But for now, as he told her, he had no time to be “pertickler” about details.

A British ship’s surgeon who used the privileges of his profession to visit some of the rebel camps, described roads crowded with carts and wagons hauling mostly provisions, but also, he noted, inordinate quantities of rum—“for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together.” The rebels, he calculated, were consuming a bottle a day per man.

To judge by the diary of an officer with the Connecticut troops at Roxbury, Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, who enjoyed a sociable drink, there was considerably more besides plain rum to be had. “Drank some grog,” he recorded at the close of one day, after a stop at a nearby tavern; “the gin sling passed very briskly,” reads another entry. “In the morning I attended the alarm post as usual…then down at Lt. Brewster’s tent to drink Ens. Perkins’ cherry rum, came back and eat breakfast….” He imbibed wine and brandy sling, and on an expedition “up into Cambridge town,” after a stop to sample “some flip” (a sweet, potent mix of liquor, beer, and sugar), he made for another tavern, the Punch Bowl, “where there was fiddling and dancing in great plenty…. I came home a little before daylight in.”

Lieutenant Fitch was one of a number of veterans of the French and Indian War, an easygoing Norwich, Connecticut, farmer and the father of eight children. He enjoyed soldiering and felt so sure his fourteen-year-old son would, too, that he had brought the boy along with him. Lieutenant Fitch, an early member of the Sons of Liberty, had been one of the first to answer the call for reinforcements for Boston. Little seemed ever to bother him, though he did object to soldiers “dirty as hogs.” Much of his free time he spent writing in his diary or to his wife. The sound of British shells overhead was like that of a flock of geese, he wrote, and “has done more to exhilarate the spirits of our people than 200 gallons of New England rum.”

For all its lack of ammunition, tents, and uniforms, the army was amply fed. Fresh produce in abundance and at low prices rolled into the camps all through summer and early fall. The men could count on meat or fish almost every day. Jabez Fitch wrote of enjoying fresh eggs, clams, apples, peaches, and watermelons, a “very good” breakfast of “warm bread and good camp butter with a good dish of coffee,” “a hearty dinner of pork and cabbage.” As yet, no one was complaining of a shortage of food.

There had been sickness aplenty from the start, deadly “camp fever,” which grew worse as summer went on. Anxious mothers and wives from the surrounding towns and countryside came to nurse the sick and dying. “Your brother Elihu lies very dangerously sick with a dysentery…his life is despaired of,” wrote Abigail Adams from nearby Braintree to her husband John in Philadelphia. “Your mother is with him in great anguish.” Captain Elihu Adams, a farmer with a wife and three children, was one of several hundred who died of illness.

“Camp fever” or “putrid fever” were terms used for the highly infectious, deadly scourges of dysentery, typhus, and typhoid fever, the causes of which were unknown or only partially understood. Dysentery had been the curse of armies since ancient times, as recorded by Herodotus. Typhus, characterized by high fever, severe headaches, and delirium, was carried by lice and fleas, which were a plague amid the army. (One soldier recorded seeing a dead body so covered with lice that it was thought the lice alone had killed the man.) Typhoid fever, also characterized by a raging fever, red rash, vomiting, diarrhea, and excruciating abdominal pain, was caused by the bacillus Salmonella typhosa in contaminated food or water, usually the result of too little separation between sewage and drinking water.

And it was not the troops alone who suffered from camp fever. Many of those who came to nurse them were sickened, or carried the disease home, and thus it lay waste to one New England town after another. Of the parishioners of a single church in Danbury, Connecticut, more than a hundred would die of camp fever by November.

“Infectious filth” was understood to be the killer. Cleanliness in person, clean cooking utensils, clean water and unspoiled meat and produce were seen as essential to the prolonged health of the army, and this was among the chief reasons for constant insistence on discipline and order, and especially with so many thousands encamped in such close company.

As it was, open latrines were the worst of it, but there was also, as recorded in one orderly book, a “great neglect of people repairing to the necessaries.” Instead, they voided “excrement about the fields perniciously.” The smell of many camps was vile in the extreme.

New England men were also averse to washing their own clothes, considering that women’s work. The British included women in their army—wives and other so-called camp followers, some of whom were prostitutes—who did the washing, but that was not the way with the New Englanders.

The troops were in good spirits, but had yet to accept the necessity of order or obedience. Many had volunteered on the condition that they could elect their own officers, and the officers, in turn, were inclined out of laziness, or for the sake of their own popularity, to let those in the ranks do much as they pleased. Many officers had little or no idea of what they were supposed to do. “The officers in general,” remembered John Trumbull, “[were] quite as ignorant of military life as the troops.”

Washington had declared new rules and regulations in force, insisting on discipline, and he made his presence felt by reviewing the defenses on horseback almost daily. “New lords, new laws,” observed Pastor Emerson. “New orders from his Excellency are read to the respective regiments every morning after prayers. The strictest government is taking place.”

Those who broke the rules were subjected to severe punishment or disgrace. They were flogged, or made to ride the “wooden horse,” or drummed out of camp. One man was whipped for “making a disturbance in the time of public worship,” another for desertion. Another received twenty “stripes” for striking an officer, another, thirty for damning an officer. But change was maddeningly slow in coming.

As scathing as any eyewitness description was that provided by a precocious young New Englander of Loyalist inclinations named Benjamin Thompson, who, after being refused a commission by Washington, served in the British army, later settled in Europe, renamed himself Count Rumford, and ultimately became one of the era’s prominent men of science. Washington’s army, wrote Thompson, was “the most wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier…. They would rather let their clothes rot upon their backs than be at the trouble of cleaning ’em themselves.” To this “nasty way of life” Thompson attributed all the “putrid, malignant and infectious disorders” that took such a heavy toll.

His Loyalist bias notwithstanding, Thompson’s portrayal was largely the truth. Such British commanders as Burgoyne and Percy were hardly to be blamed for dismissing Washington’s army as “peasantry,” “ragamuffins,” or “rabble in arms.” Except for Greene’s Rhode Islanders and a few Connecticut units, they looked more like farmers in from the fields than soldiers.

That so many were filthy dirty was perfectly understandable, as so many, when not drilling, spent their days digging trenches, hauling rock, and throwing up great mounds of earth for defense. At one point early in the siege there were 4,000 men at work on Prospect Hill alone. It was dirty, hard labor, and there was little chance or the means ever to bathe or enjoy such luxury as a change of clothes.

Few of the men had what would pass for a uniform. Field officers were all but indistinguishable from the troops they led. Not only were most men unwashed and often unshaven, they were clad in a bewildering variety of this and that, largely whatever they, or others at home, had been able to throw together before they trudged off to war. (One Connecticut woman was reported to have “fitted out” five sons and eleven grandsons.) They wore heavy homespun coats and shirts, these often in tatters from constant wear, britches of every color and condition, cowhide shoes and moccasins, and on their heads, old broad-brimmed felt hats, weathered and sweat-stained, beaver hats, farmer’s straw hats, or striped bandannas tied sailor-fashion. The tricorn, a dressier hat, was more likely to be worn by officers and others of higher status, such as chaplains and doctors. Only here and there might an old regimental coat be seen, something left over from the French and Indian War.

The arms they bore were “as various as their costumes,” mainly muskets and fowling pieces (in effect, shotguns), and the more ancient the gun, it seemed, the greater the owner’s pride in it. The most common and by far the most important was the flintlock musket, a single-shot, smooth-bore, muzzle-loading weapon that threw a lead ball weighing about an ounce and which could inflict terrible damage. The average musket measured 5 feet and weighed about 10 pounds. Though not especially accurate, it could be primed, loaded, fired, and rapidly reloaded and fired again. A good musket man could get off three to four rounds per minute, or a shot every fifteen seconds.

The trouble now was that so many of the men, accustomed to firearms since childhood, used them any way they saw fit, almost any time they pleased—to start fires, for example, or blast away at wild geese.

In order that officers could be distinguished from those in the ranks, Washington directed that major generals wear purple ribbons across their chests, brigadiers, pink ribbons. Field officers were to be identified by different-colored cockades in their hats. Sergeants were to tie a red cloth to their right shoulders. Washington himself chose to wear a light blue ribbon across his chest, between coat and waistcoat. But then there was never any mistaking the impeccably uniformed, commanding figure of Washington, who looked always as if on parade.

The day he officially took command at Cambridge, July 3, had been marked by appropriate martial fanfare, “a great deal of grandeur,” as Lieutenant Hodgkins, the Ipswich cobbler, recorded, “one and twenty drummers and as many fifers a beating and playing round the parade [ground].” A young newly arrived doctor from Barnstable, James Thacher, assigned to the army’s hospital at Cambridge, described seeing the commander-in-chief for the first time:

His Excellency was on horseback, in company with several military gentlemen. It was not difficult to distinguish him from all others. His personal appearance is truly noble and majestic, being tall and well proportioned. His dress is a blue coat with buff colored facings, a rich epaulet on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword, a black cockade in his hat.

The great majority of the army were farmers and skilled artisans: shoemakers, saddlers, carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, coopers, tailors, and ship chandlers. Colonel John Glover’s regiment from Marblehead, who were destined to play as important a part as any, were nearly all sailors and fishermen.

It was an army of men accustomed to hard work, hard work being the common lot. They were familiar with adversity and making do in a harsh climate. Resourceful, handy with tools, they could drive a yoke of oxen or “hove up” a stump or tie a proper knot as readily as butcher a hog or mend a pair of shoes. They knew from experience, most of them, the hardships and setbacks of life. Preparing for the worst was second nature. Rare was the man who had never seen someone die.

To be sure, an appreciable number had no trade. They were drifters, tavern lowlife, some, the dregs of society. But by and large they were good, solid citizens—as “worthy people as ever marched out of step,” as would be said—married men with families who depended on them and with whom they tried to keep contact as best they could.

It was the first American army and an army of everyone, men of every shape and size and makeup, different colors, different nationalities, different ways of talking, and all degrees of physical condition. Many were missing teeth or fingers, pitted by smallpox or scarred by past wars or the all-too-common hazards of life and toil in the eighteenth century. Some were not even men, but smooth-faced boys of fifteen or less.

One of the oldest and by far the most popular, was General Israel Putnam, a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, who at fifty-seven was known affectionately as “Old Put.” Rough, “thick-set,” “all bones and muscles,” and leathery, with flowing gray locks and a head like a cannonball, he was a Pomfret, Connecticut, farmer who had survived hair-raising exploits fighting the French and Indians, shipwreck, even a face-to-face encounter with a she-wolf in her den, if the stories were to be believed. Old Put also spoke with a slight lisp and could barely write his name. But, as said, Old Put feared nothing.

At the other extreme was little Israel Trask, who was all of ten. Like the son of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, Israel had volunteered with his father, Lieutenant Jonathan Trask of Marblehead, and served as messenger and cook’s helper.

John Greenwood, a fifer—one of the more than 500 fifers and drummers in the army—was sixteen, but small for his age and looked younger. Born and raised in Boston, he had grown up with “the troubles” always close to home. A young apprentice living in his house had been one of those killed in the Boston Massacre. Thrilled by the sound of the fifes and drums of the regulars occupying the city, John had somehow acquired “an old split fife,” upon which, after puttying up the crack, he learned to play several tunes before being sent to live with an uncle in Falmouth (Portland), Maine. In May 1775, hearing the news of Lexington and Concord, he had set off on foot with little more than the clothes on his back, his fife protruding from a front pocket. All alone he walked to Boston, 150 miles through what was still, much of the route, uninhabited wilderness. Stopping at wayside taverns, where troops were gathered, he would bring out the fife and play “a tune or two,” as he would later recall.

They used to ask me where I came from and where I was going to, and when I told them I was going to fight for my country, they were astonished such a little boy, and alone, should have such courage. Thus by the help of my fife I lived, as it were, on what is usually called free quarters nearly upon the entire route.

After reaching the army encampments, he was urged to enlist, with the promise of $8 a month. Later, passing through Cambridge, he learned of the battle raging at Bunker Hill. Wounded men were being laid out on the Common. “Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to prevail.” The boy started running along the road that led to the battle, past wagons carrying more casualties and wounded men struggling back to Cambridge on foot. Terrified, he wished he had never enlisted. “I could positively feel my hair stand on end.” But then he saw a lone soldier coming down the road.

…a Negro man, wounded in the back of his neck, passed me and, his collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back. I asked him if it hurt him much, as he did not seem to mind it. He said no, that he was only to get a plaster put on it and meant to return. You cannot conceive what encouragement this immediately gave me. I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.

In response to concerns in Congress over how much of the army was in fact made up of old men and boys, as well as Negroes and Indians, General William Heath reported:

There are in the Massachusetts regiments some few lads and old men, and in several regiments, some Negroes. Such is also the case with the regiments from the other colonies. Rhode Island has a number of Negroes and Indians. The New Hampshire regiments have less of both.

General John Thomas, who commanded the Massachusetts troops at Roxbury, also responded:

The regiments at Roxbury, the privates, are equal to any I served with [in the] last war, very few old men, and in the ranks very few boys. Our fifers are many of them boys. We have some Negroes, but I look upon them in general equally serviceable with other men, for fatigue and in action; many of them have proved themselves brave.

Like most southerners, Washington did not want blacks in the army and would soon issue orders saying that neither “Negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men” were to be enlisted. By year’s end, however, with new recruits urgently needed and numbers of free blacks wanting to serve, he would change his mind and in a landmark general order authorize their enlistment.

While no contemporary drawings or paintings of individual soldiers have survived, a fair idea of how they looked emerges from the descriptions in notices posted of deserters. One George Reynolds of Rhode Island, as an example, was five feet nine and a half inches tall, age seventeen, and “carried his head something on his right shoulder.” Thomas Williams was an immigrant—“an old country man”—who spoke “good English” and had “a film in his left eye.” David Relph, a “saucy fellow,” was wearing a white coat, jacket and breeches, and ruffled shirt when last seen.

Deserted from Col. Brewer’s regiment, and Capt. Harvey’s company [said a notice in the Essex, Connecticut, Gazette], one Simeon Smith of Greenfield, a joiner by trade, a thin-spared fellow, about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on a blue coat and black vest, a metal button on his hat, black long hair, black eyes, his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion, the masculine rather predominant. Likewise, Mathias Smith, a small smart fellow, a saddler by trade, gray headed, has a younger look in his face, is apt to say, “I swear! I swear!” And between his words will spit smart; had on a green coat, and an old red great coat; he is a right gamester, although he wears something of a sober look; likewise John Daby, a long hump-shouldered fellow, a shoemaker by trade, drawls his words, and for comfortable says comfable. He had a green coat, thick leather breeches, slim legs, lost some of his fore teeth.

For every full-fledged deserter there were a half-dozen others inclined to stroll off on almost any pretext, to do a little clam digging perhaps, or who might vanish for several weeks to see wives and children, help with the harvest at home, or ply their trades for some much-needed “hard money.” Sometimes they requested a furlough; as often they just up and left, only to come straggling back into camp when it suited. It was not that they had no heart for soldiering, or were wanting in spirit. They simply had had little experience with other people telling them what to do every hour of the day. Having volunteered to fight, they failed to see the sense in a lot of fuss over rules and regulations.

IT WAS MIDSUMMER by the time the first troops from outside New England began showing up, companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, “hardy men, many of them exceeding six feet in height,” noted Dr. James Thacher, who was himself short and slight.

One Virginia company, led by Captain Daniel Morgan, had marched on a “bee-line” for Boston, covering six hundred miles in three weeks, or an average of thirty miles a day in the heat of summer.

Mostly backwoodsmen of Scotch-Irish descent, they wore long, fringed hunting shirts, “rifle shirts” of homespun linen, in colors ranging from undyed tan and gray to shades of brown and even black, these tied at the waist with belts carrying tomahawks. At a review they demonstrated how, with their long-barreled rifles, a frontier weapon made in Pennsylvania and largely unknown in New England, they could hit a mark seven inches in diameter at a distance of 250 yards, while the ordinary musket was accurate at only 100 yards or so. It was “rifling”—spiraled grooves inside the long barrel—that increased the accuracy, and the new men began firing at British sentries with deadly effect, until the British caught on and kept their heads down or stayed out of range.

Welcome as they were at first, the riflemen soon proved even more indifferent to discipline than the New Englanders, and obstreperous to the point that Washington began to wish they had never come.

Work on defenses went on steadily, the troops toiling with picks and shovels in all weather, sometimes working through the night when the heat of day was too severe. It was endless, brute labor, but they were remarkably proficient at it—far more so than their British counterparts. As the size and reach of the defenses increased, visitors by the hundreds came to see for themselves. Roads were crowded with spectators to whom the giant ramparts were wondrous works. Nothing on such scale had ever been built by New Englanders before—breastworks “in many places seventeen feet in thickness,” trenches “wide and deep,” “verily their fortifications appear to be the works of seven years.”

The work parties were fired on from time to time. British and American sentries alike were fired on repeatedly. On August 2, as Lieutenant Samuel Bixby of Connecticut recorded in his diary, “One of Gen[eral] Washington’s riflemen was killed by the regulars today and then hung! up by the neck!”

His comrades, seeing this, were much enraged and immediately asked leave of the Gen[eral] to go down and do as they pleased. The riflemen marched immediately and began operations. The regulars fired at them from all parts with cannon and swivels, but the riflemen skulked about, and kept up their sharp shooting all day. Many of the regulars fell, but the riflemen lost only one man.

Both sides staged sporadic night raids on the other’s lines, or launched forays to capture hay and livestock from nearby harbor islands. The night of August 30, the British made a surprise breakout at the Neck, set fire to a tavern, and withdrew back to their defenses. The same night, three hundred Americans attacked Lighthouse Island, killed several of the enemy, and took twenty-three prisoners, with the loss of one American soldier.

Night was the time for “frolicking,” remembered John Greenwood, the fifer, “as the British were constantly sending bombs at us, and sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens.” Some early-morning British bombardments lasted several hours, the British clearly having no shortage of powder. In one furious cannonade from the British works on Bunker Hill, a rifleman lost a leg and a company clerk with Nathanael Greene’s Kentish Guards, Augustus Mumford, had his head blown off.

Mumford was the first Rhode Island casualty of the war, and the horror of his death moved Nathanael Greene as nothing had since the siege began. To his wife “Caty,” who was pregnant with their first child, Greene wrote that he wished she could be spared such news and any fears she had for his own safety.

British deserters kept crossing the lines, usually at night and alone, but sometimes three or four together. Half-starved and disgruntled, they came from both Boston and from the British ships in harbor, and nearly always with bits of news or descriptions of their travails, word of which would spread rapidly through the camps the next day. One night a lone British lighthorseman swam his horse across. Another night, fifteen men deserted the ships in the harbor.

Then days would follow without incident, one day like another. An officer with a company of Pennsylvania riflemen wrote of nothing to do but pick blueberries and play cricket. “Nothing of note…. Nothing important…. All quiet,” Lieutenant Bixby of Connecticut recorded. On the other side, a British diarist drearily echoed the same refrain, writing, “Nothing extraordinary…. Nothing extraordinary,” day after day.

Washington kept expecting the British to attack and failed to understand why they would delay, if an end to the rebellion was what they wanted.

By the close of summer, with increasing losses from disease, desertions, and absences of one sort or other, his army was in serious decline. Spirits suffered. The patriotic fervor that had sent thousands rushing to the scene in late April and May was hardly evident any longer.

It was not just that the army was shrinking; it was due to disappear entirely in a matter of months, the troops having signed on to serve only until the end of the year. The Connecticut enlistments would be up even sooner.

It had been the common expectation that the rising of such an armed force as gathered outside Boston would cause the British to think again and reach an accommodation. A short campaign had been anticipated by nearly everyone, including Washington, who had told his wife he would be home by fall.

There were still too few tents, still a shortage of blankets and clothing, and no one had forgotten that winter was on the way. Farmers and soldiers knew about weather. Weather could be the great determiner between failure and success, the great test of one’s staying power.

In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.

He knew how little money was at hand, and he understood as did no one else the difficulties of dealing with Congress. He knew how essential it was to the future effectiveness of the army to break down regional differences and biases among the troops. But at the same time he struggled with his own mounting contempt for New Englanders. Writing to Lund Washington, a cousin and his business manager at home at Mount Vernon, he railed against the Yankees as “exceeding dirty and nasty,” nothing like what he had expected. He had only contempt for “these people,” he confided in a letter to Congressman Richard Henry Lee, another fellow Virginian. The heart of the problem was an “unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people, which believe me prevails but too generally among the officers…who are ne[ar]ly of the same kidney with the privates.” All such officers desired was to “curry favor with the men” and thereby get reelected.

Still, he allowed, if properly led, the army would undoubtedly fight. And in a letter to General Philip Schuyler, who was in command at Albany, Washington insisted—possibly to rally his own resolve—that they must never lose sight of “the goodness of our cause.” Difficulties were not insurmountable. “Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.”

II

ON FIRST ARRIVING IN CAMBRIDGE, Washington had been offered the home of the president of Harvard, Samuel Langdon, for his residence. But finding it too cramped for his needs and those of his staff (his military “family”), the general moved a few days later to one of the largest, most elegant houses in town, a gray clapboard Georgian mansion half a mile from the college on the King’s Highway. Three stories tall, with an unobstructed view of the Charles River, it belonged to a wealthy Loyalist, John Vassall, who, fearing for his life and the lives of his family, had abandoned the place, fine furnishings and all, to take refuge in Boston. For Washington, who had a fondness for handsome architecture and river views, the house suited perfectly and would serve as his command headquarters through the siege, with his office established in a drawing room off the front hall.

The house became a hive of activity, with people coming and going at all hours. It was there that Washington conferred with his highest-ranking officers, convened his councils of war, and, with staff help, coped with numberless problems of organization, issued orders, and labored over correspondence—paperwork without end, letters to Congress, appeals to the governors of the New England states, and the legislature of Massachusetts. There, too, he received or entertained local dignitaries and politicians and their wives, always in elegant fashion, as was both his pleasure and part of the role he felt he must play. And as with everything connected with that role—his uniform, the house, his horses and equipage, the military dress and bearing of his staff—appearances were of great importance: a leader must look and act the part.

To judge by surviving household accounts, Virginia hospitality more than lived up to its reputation at Cambridge. Purchases included quantities of beef, lamb, roasting pig, wild ducks, geese, turtle, and a variety of fresh fish, of which Washington was especially fond; plums, peaches, barrels of cider, brandy and rum by the gallon, and limes by the hundreds, these to fend off scurvy. One entry accounts for payment to a man named Simon Lovett “for carting a load of liquor from Beverly.”

The domestic staff included a steward, two cooks (one of whom was French), a kitchen maid, a washerwoman, eight others whose duties were not specified and included several slaves, plus a personal tailor for the commander, one Giles Alexander. Washington’s body servant, a black slave named William (“Billy”) Lee, was his steady companion. Riding with Washington on his rounds of the defenses, Billy Lee became a familiar figure, a large spyglass in a leather case slung over one shoulder.

As apparent to all, His Excellency was in the prime of life. A strapping man of commanding presence, he stood six feet two inches tall and weighed perhaps 190 pounds. His hair was reddish brown, his eyes gray-blue, and the bridge of his prominent nose unusually wide. The face was largely unlined, but freckled and sun-beaten and slightly scarred by smallpox. A few “defective teeth” were apparent when he smiled.

He carried himself like a soldier and sat a horse like the perfect Virginia gentleman. It was the look and bearing of a man accustomed to respect and to being obeyed. He was not austere. There was no hint of arrogance. “Amiable” and “modest” were words frequently used to describe him, and there was a softness in his eyes that people remembered. Yet he had a certain distance in manner that set him off from, or above, others.

“Be easy…but not too familiar,” he advised his officers, “lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect, which is necessary to support a proper command.”

It was a philosophy unfamiliar to most Yankees, who saw nothing inappropriate about a captain shaving one of his soldiers, or rough-hewn General Putnam standing in line for his rations along with everyone else. Nor was it easy for Putnam and others of the older officers to change their ways. On one occasion, surveying the work on defenses by horseback, Putnam paused to ask a soldier to throw a large rock in the path up onto the parapet. “Sir, I am a corporal,” the soldier protested. “Oh, I ask your pardon, sir,” said the general, who dismounted and threw the rock himself, to the delight of all present.

The Philadelphia physician and patriot Benjamin Rush, a staunch admirer, observed that Washington “has so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among 10,000 people. There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side.”

A Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, Eliphalet Dyer, who had heartily joined in the unanimous decision to make Washington the commander-in-chief, judged him to be no “harum scarum” fellow. John Adams, who had put Washington’s name in nomination for the command, described him in a letter to his wife Abigail as amiable and brave. “This appointment,” wrote Adams, “will have great effect in cementing and securing the union of these colonies,” and he prophesied that Washington could become “one of the most important characters in the world.” After meeting the general herself for the first time, as a guest at one of his social occasions at Cambridge, Abigail wrote to tell her husband he had hardly said enough.

Washington’s effect on the troops and young officers was striking. “Joy was visible on every countenance,” according to Nathanael Greene, “and it seemed as if the spirit of conquest breathed through the whole army.”

I hope we shall be taught to copy his example and to prefer the love of liberty in this time of public danger to all the soft pleasures of domestic life and support ourselves with manly fortitude amidst all the dangers and hardships that attend a state of war.

Joseph Reed, a young man with a long jaw and a somewhat quizzical look in his eyes, was a charming, London-trained Philadelphia lawyer who had been chosen as part of an honorary escort when Washington departed Philadelphia for his new command. Reed had intended to ride only as far as New York, but found himself so in awe of the general that he continued on to Cambridge to become Washington’s secretary, despite the fact that he had made no provisions for his wife and three young children or for his law practice. As Reed explained, Washington had “expressed himself to me in such terms that I thought myself bound by every tie of duty and honor to comply with his request to help him through the sea of difficulties.”

Few would ever provide a more succinct description of Washington’s particular hold on men.

BORN IN TIDEWATER VIRGINIA on February 11, 1732 (by the Old Style calendar), George Washington was the great-grandson of John Washington, who had emigrated from Northampton, England, in 1657. His father, Augustine Washington, was a tobacco planter also known for his “noble appearance and manly proportions.” His mother, Mary Bell, was widowed when Washington was eleven. Because of the family’s reduced circumstances, he had had little education—only seven or eight years of schooling by private tutor, no training in Latin or Greek or law, as had so many prominent Virginia patriots—and, as those close to him knew, he was self-conscious about this.

By steady application he had learned to write in a clear, strong hand and to express himself on paper with force and clarity. He learned to dance—Virginians loved to dance and he was no exception—and he learned to comport himself in the elaborately polite society of the day with perfect manners and polish. (Of the 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation that he had laboriously copied down as a boy, Rule Number One read: “Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those who are present.”) He enjoyed parties and particularly the company of attractive women. As would be said of British officers, he “liked his glass, his lass, his game of cards,” though gambling never became the obsession it was for so many of his counterparts on the British side.

The great teacher for Washington was experience. At age sixteen, he had set out to make his way in the world, as a surveyor’s apprentice on an expedition into the wilderness of western Virginia, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and as years passed he spent more time in the backcountry beyond the Blue Ridge than all but a few from the Tidewater. In addition, surveying proved highly remunerative.

In 1753, at twenty, he had been sent by the governor of Virginia to the wilds of western Pennsylvania, to challenge French claims to the Allegheny River valley, and publication of his diary of the venture, The Journal of Major George Washington, made his daring and resourcefulness known throughout the colonies and in Europe. A year later, on his first command, inexperience and poor judgment led to his famous encounter with French troops and Indians at Great Meadows, in the same remote corner of western Pennsylvania—the small, bloody backwoods incident, and first defeat for Washington, that set in motion the conflict that ultimately involved much of the world.

“I heard the bullets whistle; and believe me there is something charming in the sound,” he had written in a letter printed later in the London Magazine, which could be taken as the bravado of a callow youth, but, as he had found, he was one of those rare few who, under fire, were without fear.

As a provincial officer fighting with the British army during General Edward Braddock’s defeat in western Pennsylvania, he had shown conspicuous courage under fire and a marked ability for leadership. If, as a young officer, he seemed at times flagrantly, unattractively ambitious, he had long since overcome that. In 1759, spurned in his desire for a royal commission, he had “retired” at age twenty-seven to the life of a Virginia planter and, that same year, married Martha Dandridge Custis of Williamsburg, an attractive, extremely wealthy widow with two children, to whom he gave full devotion. The children, John Parke Custis and Patsy, were treated quite as though they were his own. Indeed, one of the worst tragedies of Washington’s life had been the death of seventeen-year-old Patsy of an epileptic fit in 1773.

Like other planters of the Tidewater, Washington embraced a life very like that of the English gentry. English by ancestry, he was, in dress, manner, and his favorite pastimes, as close to being an English country gentleman as was possible for an American of the day, and intentionally. His handsome green coach with its brass fittings and leather lining had been custom built in England to his specifications. He ordered his clothes from England, and only the finest English wools and linens and latest fashions would do. He wore English boots, English shoes, and Morocco leather slippers, all made to order for him in London. The books on his shelves, including the military treatises, were published in London. The very glass in the windows through which he viewed his domain was imported English glass.

Only the year before taking command at Cambridge, Washington had commenced an ambitious expansion of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, which, when completed, would double its size. He was adding a library and building a two-story dining room, or banquet hall, suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. He was a builder by nature. He had a passion for architecture and landscape design, and Mount Vernon was his creation, everything done to his own ideas and plans. How extremely important all this was to him and the pleasure he drew from it, few people ever understood.

He had an abiding dislike of disorder and cared intensely about every detail—wallpaper, paint color, ceiling ornaments—and insisted on perfection. He hated to be away from the project. Even at the distance of Cambridge, with all that weighed on his mind, he worried that things were not being handled as he wished at Mount Vernon and filled pages of instruction for his manager, Lund Washington.

I wish you would quicken Lanphire and Sears [the carpenters] about the dining room chimney piece (to be executed as mentioned in one of my last letters) as I could wish to have that end of the house completely finished before I return. I wish you had done the end of the new kitchen next the garden, as also the old kitchen, with rusticated boards; however, as it is not, I would have the corners done so in the manner of our new church…. What have you done with the well? Is that walled up? Have you any acc[oun]ts of the painter?

Second only to his passion for architecture and landscape design was a love of the theater, which again was quite characteristic of Virginians. He had seen his first known theatrical production at age nineteen on a trip with his older brother to Barbados. It was the first and only time Washington had ever been beyond American shores and the place where he was “strongly attacked” by smallpox. Later, at Williamsburg, as a member of the Virginia legislature, he had attended the theater regularly. During a visit to Annapolis, he recorded going to “the play” four nights out of five. In New York later he attended the theater seven times and saw his first production of Hamlet.

But of all the theatrical productions he had seen it was Cato, by the English author Joseph Addison, the most popular play of the time, that Washington loved best. One line in particular he was to think of or quote frequently in his role now as commander-in-chief: “’Tis not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”

Though Washington was often said to be the richest man in America, he probably did not rank among the ten richest. He was very wealthy, nonetheless, and in large part because of his marriage to Martha Custis. His wealth was in land, upwards of 54,000 acres, including some 8,000 acres at Mount Vernon, another 4,000 acres in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nearly all of which he had acquired for speculation. In addition, he owned more than one hundred slaves, another measure of great wealth, whose labors made possible his whole way of life.

In a popular English novel of the day, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, Tobias Smollett wrote that to be a country gentleman one was “obliged to keep horses, hounds, carriages, with suitable numbers of servants, and maintain an elegant table for the entertainment of his neighbors.” It could have been a description of life at Mount Vernon, with the difference that the servants were black slaves.

Among the Virginia gentry who had taken up fox hunting with an exuberance no less than to be found on the country estates of England, Washington stood out. Thomas Jefferson considered him “the best horseman of his age.” That Washington was known to hunt up to seven hours straight, riding as close to the hounds as possible, “leaping fences, and going extremely quick,” and always to the end, to be in on the kill, was considered not only a measure of his love of the chase and his exceptional physical stamina, but also of his uncommon, unrelenting determination.

Billy Lee, the body servant, rode with him, rode like the wind by all accounts, and no less fearlessly than his master.

“Found a fox in Mr. Phil Alexander’s island which was lost after a chase of seven hours,” Washington recorded in his diary at the end of one winter day in 1772, but he did not give up, as shown in his entry for the day following: “Found a fox in the same place again which was killed at the end of 6 hours.”

An English sporting writer of a later era would describe fox hunting as “the image of war without its guilt and only half its danger.” In some years, according to Washington’s own records, the days he devoted to fox hunting added up to a month. He kept precise account of exactly how long each chase lasted, to the minute. Again, he was a man who loved precision in everything.

Stories were told of extraordinary feats of strength—how, for example, Washington had thrown a stone from the bed of a stream to the top of Virginia’s famous Natural Bridge, a height of 215 feet. The Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale, who had been a guest at Mount Vernon in 1772 while painting Washington’s portrait, described how he and several other young men were on the lawn throwing an iron bar for sport, when Washington appeared and, without bothering to remove his coat, took a turn, throwing it “far, very far beyond our utmost limit.”

Washington’s wealth and way of life, like his physique and horsemanship, were of great importance to large numbers of the men he led and among many in Congress. The feeling was that if he, George Washington, who had so much, was willing to risk “his all,” however daunting the odds, then who were they to equivocate. That he was also serving without pay was widely taken as further evidence of the genuineness of his commitment.

There were, to be sure, those in the ranks and among the local populace who had little fondness for Virginia planters and their high-and-mighty airs, or who saw stunning incongruity in the cause of liberty being led by a slavemaster.

It was also a matter of record that Washington had been retired from military life for fifteen years, during which he had not even drilled a militia company. His only prior experience had been in backwoods warfare—a very different kind of warfare—and most notably in the Braddock campaign of 1755, which had been a disaster. He was by no means an experienced commander. He had never led an army in battle, never before commanded anything larger than a regiment. And never had he directed a siege.

Washington was quite aware of his limitations. In formal acceptance of the new command, on June 16, 1775, standing at his place in Congress, he had addressed John Hancock:

I am truly sensible of the high honor done me in this appointment, yet I feel great distress from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important trust. However, as the Congress desire i[t], I will enter upon the momentous duty, and exert every power I possess in their service and for the support of the glorious Cause.

He knew he might not succeed, and he gave Congress fair warning:

But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I [am] honored with.

To his wife Martha he wrote that “far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity…. it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service….”

Yet he had attended Congress in his splendid blue and buff uniform, conspicuously signaling a readiness to take command. If he saw the responsibility as too great for his ability, it was because he had a realistic idea of how immense that responsibility would be. For such a trust, to lead an undisciplined, poorly armed volunteer force of farmers and tradesmen against the best-trained, best-equipped, most formidable military force on earth—and with so much riding on the outcome—was, in reality, more than any man was qualified for.

But he knew also that someone had to take command, and however impossible the task and the odds, he knew he was better suited than any of the others Congress might have in mind.

Without question, Congress had made the right choice, and not the least of reasons was political. As a Virginian, Washington represented the richest, most populous of the thirteen colonies. He himself had had years of political experience in the Virginia legislature and as a member of the Continental Congress. It was as one of them that the members of Congress knew him best and respected him, not as a general. He knew the ways of politics and factious politicians. He understood how the system worked. For all the delays and frustrations, however severe the tests of patience he was to suffer in his dealings with them and the system, he never forgot that Congress held the ultimate power, that he, the commander-in-chief, was the servant of some fifty-six delegates who, in far-off Philadelphia, unlike Parliament, met in secrecy.

III

IN THE FIRST DAYS OF SEPTEMBER, Washington began drawing up plans for two bold moves.

He had decided to carry the war into Canada with a surprise attack on the British at Quebec. A thousand men from the ranks longing for action volunteered at once. Led by an aggressive Connecticut colonel named Benedict Arnold, they were to advance on Quebec across the Maine wilderness, taking a northeastern route up the Kennebec River. Hastily conceived, this “secret expedition” was based on too little knowledge of the terrain, but in small units the men began marching off for Newburyport, north of Boston, from where they would sail by sloop and schooner to the mouth of the Kennebec.

He felt he could detach a thousand troops this way, Washington informed Congress, because he had concluded, from intelligence gathered from spies and British deserters, that the enemy in Boston had no intention of launching an attack until they were reinforced.

His second plan was to end the waiting and strike at Boston, which, it was understood, could mean destruction of the town. British defenses were formidable. In fact, defenses on both sides had been strengthened to the point where many believed neither army would dare attack the other. Also, a siege by definition required a great deal of prolonged standing still and waiting. But standing still and waiting were not the way to win a war, and not in Washington’s nature.

“The inactive state we lie in is exceedingly disagreeable,” he had confided to his brother John. He wanted a “speedy finish,” to fight and be done with it. “No danger is to be considered when put in competition with the magnitude of the cause,” he had asserted earlier in a letter to the governor of Rhode Island.

According to his instructions from Congress, he was to take no action of consequence until advising with his council of war, and thus a meeting was scheduled for the morning of September 11, “to know,” he informed his generals, “whether in your judgments, we cannot make a successful attack upon the troops in Boston, by means of boats.”

On September 10, mutiny broke out among the Pennsylvania riflemen, after several of the worst troublemakers had been confined to the guardhouse. Though the mutiny was put down at once by General Greene and a large detachment of Rhode Island troops, it only added to the sense of an army coming apart, and Washington was visibly shaken.

The council of war convened in his office as scheduled the next morning—three major generals, including the venerable Israel Putnam, and four brigadiers. All were New Englanders but one, Major General Charles Lee, who was Washington’s second-in-command and the only professional soldier present. A former British officer and veteran of the French and Indian War, Lee, like Washington, had fought in the ill-fated Braddock campaign and later settled in Virginia. He was a spare, odd-looking man with a long, hooked nose and dark, bony face. Rough in manner, rough of speech, he had nothing of Washington’s dignity. Even in uniform he looked perpetually unkempt.

Lee might have been a character out of an English novel, such were his eccentricities and colorful past. He had once been married to an Indian woman, the daughter of a Seneca chief. He had served gallantly with the British army in Spain, and as aide-de-camp to the King of Poland. Like Frederick the Great, he made a flamboyant show of his love for dogs, keeping two or three with him most of the time. A New Hampshire clergyman, Jeremy Belknap, after dining with the general in Cambridge, thought him “an odd genius…a great sloven, wretchedly profane, and a great admirer of dogs, one of them a native of Pomerania, which I should have taken for a bear had I seen him in the woods.”

Lee was also self-assured, highly opinionated, moody, and ill-tempered (his Indian name was Boiling Water), and he was thought by many to have the best military mind of any of the generals, a view he openly shared. Washington considered him “the first officer in military knowledge and experience we have in the whole army,” and it was at Washington’s specific request that Congress had made Lee second-in-command.

Whatever opinions Lee had of Washington, he kept to himself, except to remark that he thought the appellation “Excellency” perfectly absurd.

In striking contrast to Lee was Major General Artemus Ward, a heavy-set, pious-looking Massachusetts farmer, storekeeper, justice of the peace, and veteran of the French and Indian War, who had had overall command of the siege of Boston prior to Washington’s arrival. Ward was considered “a good man, a thorough New England man,” though uninspiring. General Lee privately called him a “fat, old church warden” with “no acquaintance whatever with military matters.” But if unspectacular, Ward was competent, thoughtful, and not without good sense, as time would show.

Washington had assigned Lee to command the left wing of the army, Putnam, the center, while Ward was responsible for the right wing, which included Dorchester. As early as July 9, at Washington’s first council of war, it had been proposed that the army take possession of Dorchester Heights, but the idea was unanimously rejected. Ward, however, refused to drop the subject. When in August he again recommended that an effort be made to fortify the Heights, again nothing was done.

The brigadiers present now were John Thomas and William Heath of Massachusetts, John Sullivan of New Hampshire, Joseph Spencer of Connecticut, and Nathanael Greene. Thomas was a physician in his early fifties, tall and quiet-spoken. Heath, a much younger man, was a fifth-generation Roxbury farmer, age thirty-eight, who would affably describe himself in a memoir as “of middling stature, light complexion, very corpulent, and bald-headed.” Sullivan, a lawyer and politician in his mid-forties, had served with Washington in the Continental Congress, and Spencer, who was older even than Israel Putnam (his troops referred to him as “Granny”), would play almost no part.

Of these New Englanders, all citizen-soldiers, Washington quickly surmised that Thomas, Sullivan, and Greene were the best he had. Thomas was the most commanding in appearance and had served in the French and Indian War. Earlier, his pride hurt that the less experienced Heath was to outrank him, Thomas had talked of resigning, until Washington sent an urgent plea in which, paraphrasing a line from his favorite play Cato, he said that in such a cause as they were engaged, “surely every post ought to be deemed honorable in which a man can serve his country.”

His council assembled, Washington made the case for an all-out amphibious assault on Boston, by sending troops across the shallow Back Bay in flat-bottomed boats big enough to carry fifty men each. He reminded the generals of what they already knew: that winter was fast approaching and the troops were without barracks and firewood; that men already eager to go home would be extremely difficult to keep on duty once they felt the “severity of a northern winter.” When enlistments expired, the disbanding of one army before another was assembled could mean ruin. Gunpowder was still in short supply, but there was enough at hand to mount an attack. Of course, “the hazard, the loss of men in the attempt and the probable consequences of failure” had also to be considered.

There was discussion of these and other points, including the enemy’s defenses, after which it was agreed unanimously not to attack, not for the “present at least.”

It was a sound decision. The “hazard” was far too great, the chance of disastrous failure all too real. Casualties could have been horrendous. Unless they caught the tide exactly right, the men in the boats could have been stranded on mudflats a hundred yards or more from dry ground and forced to struggle through knee-deep muck while under withering fire. The slaughter could have been quite as horrible as that of the British at Bunker Hill.

In fact, such a headlong attack on their works was exactly what the British generals were hoping for, certain that if the Americans were to be so foolhardy, it would mean the end of the rebellion.

In restraining Washington, the council had proven its value. For the “present at least,” discretion was truly the better part of valor.

Washington accepted the decision, but work on the flat-bottomed boats continued, and in a long letter to John Hancock, he made the case for a “decisive stroke,” adding, “I cannot say that I have wholly laid it aside.” Many in Congress, he sensed, were as impatient as he with the stalemate. “The state of inactivity, in which this army has lain for some time, by no means corresponds with my wishes, by some decisive stroke, to relieve my country from the heavy expense its subsistence must create.”

As Washington also reminded Hancock—and thus Congress—his war chest was empty. The fact that the troops had not been paid for weeks did not help morale or alleviate hardships at home. “The paymaster has not a single dollar in hand.”

Money at least was on the way. On September 29, $500,000 in Continental bills from Philadelphia were delivered to the headquarters at Cambridge, and in a few days thousands of troops were at last receiving some pay. “I send you eleven dollars,” Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins wrote to his wife Sarah on October 6. His monthly pay was $13.

ASKED WHAT THEY WERE FIGHTING FOR, most of the army—officers and men in the ranks—would until now have said it was in defense of their country and of their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen. It was to “defend our common rights” that he went to war, Nathanael Greene had told his wife. The British regulars, the hated redcoats, were the “invaders” and must be repelled. “We are soldiers who devote ourselves to arms not for the invasion of other countries but for the defense of our own, not for the gratification of our own private interest, but for the public security,” Greene had written in another letter to Samuel Ward. Writing to General Thomas, Washington had said the object was “neither glory nor extent of territory, but a defense of all that is dear and valuable in life.”

Independence was not mentioned. Nor had independence been on the minds of those who fought at Bunker Hill or in Washington’s thoughts when he took command of the army. En route to Cambridge from Philadelphia, he had been quite specific in assuring the New York Provincial Congress that “every exertion of my worthy colleagues and myself will be equally extended to the reestablishment of peace and harmony between the mother country and the colonies.”

But more and more of late there was talk of independence. The Reverend Belknap, from his visits to the camps, concluded that independence had “become a favorite point in the army.” A “declaration of independence” was heartily wished for, wrote Nathanael Greene, who was one of the first to say it in writing. “We had as good to begin in earnest first as last.”

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, the discovery that the surgeon general of the army and head of the hospital at Cambridge, Dr. Benjamin Church, was a spy, the first American traitor, rocked everyone. Church had been one of the local dignitaries who had escorted Washington into Cambridge the day of his arrival. He was as prominent and trustworthy a man as any in the province, it was thought, a member of the Provincial Congress, poet, author, a Harvard classmate of John Hancock, and an outspoken patriot. Yet the whole time he had been secretly corresponding with the British in cipher, and was in their pay.

His treachery had been discovered quite by chance. A mysterious, enciphered letter carried by a young woman of questionable morals had wound up in the hands of a friend of Nathanael Greene, who brought the letter to Greene, who in turn carried it directly to Washington. When the woman was apprehended, she confessed she had been keeping company with Church and said the letter was his. The letter was deciphered and Church exposed. The whole army, indeed all New England and the Congress at Philadelphia, were stunned. Who could say how many other Dr. Churches there might be?

Church, who was tried, convicted, and imprisoned, kept insisting he was innocent. Sent into exile, on a ship bound for the West Indies, he disappeared at sea. Only years later did further evidence come to light proving his guilt.

ON OCTOBER 18, a raw, gloomy Wednesday, a congressional committee of three, including Benjamin Franklin, gathered by a roaring fire in Washington’s study and, after lengthy deliberations with the commander and his generals, concluded that if an attack on Boston meant the destruction of the town, they could not approve.

At a meeting of the war council it was decided still again that the risks were too great “under the circumstances,” as said Brigadier General Horatio Gates, who had been absent from the previous meeting. Like Charles Lee, Gates was an experienced, former British officer.

“Things hereabouts remain in pretty much the same situation,” wrote James Warren, president of the Massachusetts Assembly. “We look at their lines and they view ours…. They want courage to attack us and we want powder to attack them and so there is no attack on either side.”

On October 24, a post rider from Maine brought news that British ships had attacked and burned the defenseless town of Falmouth. The townspeople had been given advance warning and consequently no one was killed, but the entire population was without homes on the eve of winter. The attack was decried as an outrage, “proof of the diabolical designs” of the administration in London, as Washington said.

At the same time, Washington was dealt a further setback when his bright and by-now-indispensable secretary, Joseph Reed, decided he could no longer delay a return to Philadelphia to see to his affairs and look after his family. “You cannot but be sensible of your importance to me…judge you therefore how much I wished for your return,” Washington would tell the absent Reed in one of a string of letters. “I miss you exceedingly; and if an express declaration of this be wanting, to hasten your return, I make it most heartily,” he wrote another day.

John Adams, who had come to know Reed in Philadelphia, described him as “very sensible,” “amiable,” even “tender,” and Washington felt much the same way. To Reed, as to almost no one, he signed his letters not with the standard “Your Obedient Servant,” but “Your Affectionate and Obedient Servant.”

The days were turning “cold and blustering,” recorded the still uncomplaining Lieutenant Jabez Fitch. The construction of barracks had begun. Washington authorized an order for 10,000 cords of firewood. With epidemic dysentery sweeping through the outlying towns, Dr. Thacher worried over the numbers of ill soldiers in the camps and crowding the hospital. To add further to the miseries of camp life, local farmers were charging ever-higher prices.

Washington fumed over such absence of patriotism, his dislike of New Englanders compounding by the day. Yet the faith of the local populace and their leaders in him remained high. They understood the adversities he faced and they were depending on him, no less than Congress and patriots everywhere were depending on him. As James Warren wrote to John Adams, “He is certainly the best man for the place he is in, important as it is, that ever lived.”

Adams, who was acutely sensitive to the differences between New Englanders and Virginians, having experienced firsthand in Congress the distrust many from the middle and southern provinces felt for New Englanders, had become gravely concerned about the damage to the Cause such opinions and prejudices could have should they get out of hand.

Gentlemen in other colonies have large plantations of slaves, and…are accustomed, habituated to higher notions of themselves and the distinction between them and the common people than we are…. I dread the consequences of this dissimilitude of character, and without the utmost caution on both sides, and the most considerate forbearance with one another and prudent condescension on both sides, they will certainly be fatal.

Nathanael Greene felt certain that Washington only needed time to make himself “acquainted with the genius” of the New England troops.

Meanwhile, Washington put increasing trust in Greene, as well as another impressive young New Englander, Henry Knox, to whom he assigned one of the most difficult and crucial missions of the war.

COLONEL HENRY KNOX was hard not to notice. Six feet tall, he bulked large, weighing perhaps 250 pounds. He had a booming voice. He was gregarious, jovial, quick of mind, highly energetic—“very fat, but very active”—and all of twenty-five.

“Town-born” in Boston, in a narrow house on Sea Street facing the harbor, he was seventh of the ten sons of Mary Campbell and William Knox, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. When his father, a shipmaster, disappeared in the West Indies, nine-year-old Henry went to work to help support his mother, and was thus, like Nathanael Greene, almost entirely self-educated. He became a bookseller, eventually opening his own London Book Store on Cornhill Street, offering a “large and very elegant assortment” of the latest books and magazines from London. In the notices he placed in the Boston Gazette, the name Henry Knox always appeared in larger type than the name of the store.

Though not especially prosperous, the store became “a great resort for British officers and Tory ladies,” “a fashionable morning lounge,” and its large, genial proprietor became one of the best-known young men in town. John Adams, a frequent patron, remembered Knox as a youth “of pleasing manners and inquisitive turn of mind.” Another patron was Nathanael Greene, who not only shared Knox’s love of books, but also an interest in “the military art,” and it was thus, on the eve of war, that an important friendship had commenced.

Knox read all he could on gunnery and tactics, and, as Greene had joined the Rhode Island Kentish Guards, Knox signed up with the new Boston Grenadier Corps, enjoying everything about it, including the eating and drinking that went on.

At about the same time, Knox suffered an accident which, like Greene’s stiff knee, might have precluded service as an officer. On a bird-hunting expedition on Noddle’s Island in the harbor, his fowling piece exploded, destroying the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. In public thereafter he kept the hand wrapped in a handkerchief.

To further complicate life, Knox had taken up the patriot cause and fallen in love with the daughter of a prominent Tory. She, too, was a patron of the bookstore, a correspondingly plump, gregarious young woman named Lucy Flucker, whose father, Thomas Flucker, was the royal secretary of the province. “My charmer,” he called her, and neither his maimed hand nor his politics deterred her ardor. Despite the objections of her family, they were married. When Lucy’s father, in an effort to give his new son-in-law added respectability, arranged for Knox to be offered a commission in the British army, Knox declined.

In the tense days following the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, the young couple packed what little they could carry and slipped out of Boston in disguise. Lucy was never again to see her mother and father, who would eventually sail for England.

Having settled Lucy safely in Worcester, Knox reported for service with General Artemus Ward, who assigned him to planning and building fortifications. “Long to see you, which nothing would prevent but the flattering hope of being able to do some little service to my distressed and devoted country,” he wrote to her.

Washington first met Knox while inspecting the defenses at Roxbury on July 5, only three days after he had taken command of the army, and apparently he was impressed, while Knox thought Washington everything to be wished for in a commander. “General Washington fills his place with vast ease and dignity, and dispenses happiness around him,” Knox wrote. He was called to confer at headquarters, and later, like Nathanael Greene, invited to dine with the general and his guests on several occasions.

It was Henry Knox who first suggested the idea of going after the cannon at far-off Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, an undertaking so enormous, so fraught with certain difficulties, that many thought it impossible.

The capture of Fort Ticonderoga from the British by Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold, and a handful of Green Mountain Boys earlier in May had been sensational news, but the fort and its captured artillery were abandoned. When Knox told Washington he was confident the guns could be retrieved and hauled overland to Boston, Washington agreed at once, and put the young officer in charge of the expedition.

Like nearly everyone, Washington enjoyed Knox’s company. Probably he also saw something of himself in the large, confident, self-educated young man with the pleasing manners who had lost his father when still a boy and had done so much on his own, and who was so ready to take on a task of such difficulty and potential consequence.

That such a scheme hatched by a junior officer in his twenties who had had no experience was transmitted so directly to the supreme commander, seriously considered, and acted upon, also marked an important difference between the civilian army of the Americans and that of the British. In an army where nearly everyone was new to the tasks of soldiering and fighting a war, almost anyone’s ideas deserved a hearing.

By November 16, Knox was on his way, accompanied by his nineteen-year-old brother, William, and with authority to spend as much as $1,000. “Don’t be afraid,” he wrote to Lucy. “There is no fighting in the [assignment]. I am upon business only.”

WITH THE DAYS GROWING SHORTER and colder, flocks of wild geese overhead grew in such numbers that orders had to be posted to keep the men from firing at them and wasting precious powder. “Every officer that stands an idle spectator, and sees such a wanton waste of powder, and doesn’t do his utmost to suppress the evil, may expect to be reported,” declared Nathanael Greene.

So great was the need to conserve powder that the morning gun, a camp ritual, was dispensed with. Spears were issued to the troops to be used in the event of a British attack.

Every colonel or commanding officer of a regiment [read another of Greene’s orders] to appoint thirty men that are active, bold, and resolute to use the spears in the defense of the lines instead of guns.

The first snow fell on November 21, and in the days to follow it was obvious winter had come to stay, with winds as bitter as January and still more snow. The distress within Boston was reportedly extreme. The British were cutting trees and tearing down old houses for firewood. Supplying the besieged city by sea had become increasingly difficult because of winter storms and American privateers. Food was in desperately short supply. The King’s troops were said to be so hungry that many were ready to desert at first chance. Some of the redcoats said openly that if there were another action and they could “get off under the smoke,” they would choose “the fresh beef side of the question.” Men in their ranks were dying of scurvy. Worse, smallpox raged.

Meanwhile, deserters from the American side were telling the British that Washington’s army was tired and unpaid, that there was too little clothing to keep warm, and that most of the men longed to go home.

A memorable story of an incident that occurred at about this time may or may not be entirely reliable, but portrays vividly the level of tension among the troops and Washington’s own pent-up anger and exasperation. It was told years afterward by Israel Trask, the ten-year-old boy who had enlisted with his father and in whose eyes Washington seemed almost supernatural.

A snowball fight broke out on Harvard Yard between fifty or more backwoods Virginia riflemen and an equal number of sailors from the Marblehead regiment. The fight quickly turned fierce, with “biting and gouging on the one part, and knockdown on the other part with as much apparent fury as the most deadly enmity could create,” according to Trask. Hundreds of others rushed to the scene. Soon more than a thousand men had joined in a furious brawl. Then Washington arrived:

I only saw him and his colored servant, both mounted [Trask remembered]. With the spring of a deer, he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternating shaking and talking to them.

Seeing this, the others took flight “at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict.” If Trask’s memory served, the whole row, from start to finish, lasted all of fifteen minutes and nothing more came of it.

On November 25, the British sent several boatloads of the ragged poor of Boston, some 300 men, women, and children, across the Back Bay, depositing them on the shore near Cambridge for the rebels to cope with.

They were a heartrending sight. Many were sick and dying, “the whole in the most miserable and piteous condition,” wrote Washington. According to one explanation, General Howe was making room in Boston for the reinforcements expected to arrive anytime. But it was also said that numbers of the sick had been sent “with [the] design of spreading the smallpox through this country and camp,” an accusation Washington refused to believe. But when another 150 desperate people were dispatched from Boston, as smallpox continued unabated there, Washington described the disease as a “weapon of defense they are using against us.”

Nearly all his efforts and those of his senior officers were concentrated now on trying to hold the army together. The Connecticut troops, whose enlistments were to expire on December 9, were counting the days until they could start for home. Nothing, it seemed, could change their minds.

A stirring summons to renewed devotion to the cause of liberty, as strong and eloquent an appeal to the men in the ranks, “the guardians of America,” as had yet been seen in print, appeared in the New England Chronicle, signed simply “A Freeman.” Not only did it celebrate the Glorious Cause, but it spoke of a break with Britain soon to come and a future “big with everything good and great,” when Americans would decide their own salvation.

Your exertions in the cause of freedom, guided by wisdom and animated by zeal and courage, have gained you the love and confidence of your grateful countrymen; and they look to you, who are experienced veterans, and trust that you will still be the guardians of America. As I have the honor to be an American, and one among the free millions, who are defended by your valor, I would pay the tribute of thanks, and express my gratitude, while I solicit you to continue in your present honorable and important station. I doubt not America will always find enough of her sons ready to flock to her standard, and support her freedom; but experience proves that experienced soldiers are more capable of performing the duties of the camp, and better qualified to face the enemy, than others; and therefore every friend of America will be desirous that most of the gentlemen who compose the present army may continue in the service of their country until “Liberty, Peace, and Safety” are established. Although your private concerns may call for your assistance at home, yet the voice of your country is still louder, and it is painful to heroic minds to quit the field when liberty calls, and the voice of injured millions cries “To arms! to arms!” Never was a cause more important or glorious than that which you are engaged in; not only your wives, your children, and distant posterity, but humanity at large, the world of mankind, are interested in it; for if tyranny should prevail in this great country, we may expect liberty will expire throughout the world. Therefore, more human glory and happiness may depend upon your exertions than ever yet depended upon any of the sons of men. He that is a soldier in defense of such a cause, needs no title; his post is a post of honor, and although not an emperor, yet he shall wear a crown—of glory—and blessed will be his memory!

The savage and brutal barbarity of our enemies in burning Falmouth, is a full demonstration that there is not the least remains of virtue, wisdom, or humanity, in the British court; and that they are fully determined with fire and sword, to butcher and destroy, beggar and enslave the whole American people. Therefore we expect soon to break off all kind of connection with Britain, and form into a Grand Republic of the American United Colonies, which will, by the blessing of heaven, soon work out our salvation, and perpetuate the liberties, increase the wealth, the power and the glory of this Western world.

Notwithstanding the many difficulties we have to encounter, and the rage of our merciless enemies, we have a glorious prospect before us, big with everything good and great. The further we enter into the field of independence, our prospects will expand and brighten, and a complete Republic will soon complete our happiness.

But reenlistments were alarmingly few. Of eleven regiments, or roughly 10,000 men, fewer than 1,000 had agreed to stay. Some stimulus besides love of country must be found to make men want to serve, Washington advised Congress. Paying the troops a few months in advance might help, he wrote, but again he had no money at hand. By late November, he could report that only 2,540 of his army had reenlisted. “Our situation is truly alarming, and of this General Howe is well apprised…. No doubt when he is reinforced he will avail himself of the information.”

Washington was a man of exceptional, almost excessive self-command, rarely permitting himself any show of discouragement or despair, but in the privacy of his correspondence with Joseph Reed, he began now to reveal how very low and bitter he felt, if the truth were known. Never had he seen “such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue” as among the Yankee soldiers, he confided in a letter to Reed of November 28. “These people” were still beyond his comprehension. A “dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole,” he wrote. “Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”

For six long months there had been hardly a shred of good news, no single event to lift the spirits of the army, no sign to suggest better days might lie ahead.

The next day, amazingly, came “glad tidings.” A privateer, the schooner Lee, under the command of Captain John Manley, had captured an enemy supply ship, the brig Nancy, off Cape Ann, north of Boston. The ship was loaded with military treasure—a supply of war material such as Congress could not be expected to provide for months to come, including 2,500 stands of arms, cannon, mortars, flints, some forty tons of shot, and 2,000 bayonets—nearly everything needed but powder.

The Lee was one of the first of several armed schooners Washington had sent out to prey on enemy shipping. It was a first triumph for his new “navy,” and John Manley, a first hero. It was an “instance of divine favor, for nothing surely ever came more apropos,” Washington wrote immediately to Joseph Reed.

WITH THE END of enlistments only days away, concern grew extreme. “Our people are almost bewitched about getting home,” wrote Lieutenant Hodgkins to his wife Sarah. “I hope I and all my townsmen shall have virtue enough to stay all winter as volunteers, before we will leave the line without men. For our all is at stake, and if we do not exert ourselves in this Glorious Cause, our all is gone.”

“I want you to come home and see us,” she wrote. “I look for you almost every day, but I don’t allow myself to depend on anything, for I find there is nothing to be depended upon but trouble and disappointments.”

“I want to see you very much,” she said in other letters, warning him that if he did not “alter” his mind about staying with the army, it would be “such a disappointment that I can’t put up with it.”

The troops were called repeatedly into formation to be addressed by officers and chaplains. A Connecticut soldier who had decided nothing could keep him from going home, described how his regiment was called out time and again to hear speeches. “We was ordered to form a hollow square,” wrote Simeon Lyman in his diary, “and General Lee came in and the first words was, ‘Men I do not know what to call you; [you] are the worst of all creatures,’ and [he] flung and cursed and swore at us…and our lieutenants begged us to stay.” But for Simeon Lyman, like nearly all the regiment, December 9 was his last day as a soldier. On Sunday, December 10, he wrote:

In the morning we was ordered to parade before the general’s door, and we was counted off and dismissed, and we we[nt] to the lieuten[ant] and he gave us a dram, and then we marched off.

General Lee stood and watched, finding a measure of encouragement only in the response of the troops who remained:

Some of the Connecticutians who were homesick could not be prevailed on to tarry, which means in the New England dialect to serve any longer. They accordingly marched off bag and baggage, but in passing through the lines of the regiments, they were so horribly hissed, groaned at, and pelted that I believe they wished their aunts, grandmothers, and even sweethearts, to whom the days before they were so much attached, [were] at the devil’s own palace.

Washington pleaded with Congress and the provincial governments to send more men with all possible speed. And new recruits did continue to arrive, though only in dribs and drabs.

There was still no news from the expedition to Quebec, and no word from Colonel Knox. When General Schuyler at Albany wrote to bemoan his tribulations, Washington responded, “Let me ask you, sir, when is the time for brave men to exert themselves in the cause of liberty and their country, if this is not?” He understood the troubles Schuyler faced, “but we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.”

EARLIER IN THE FALL, Washington had written to his wife Martha to say he would welcome her company in Cambridge, if she did not think it too late in the season for such a journey. Six hundred miles on dreadful roads by coach could be punishing even in fair weather, and especially for someone unaccustomed to travel, no matter her wealth or status.

On December 11, after more than a month on the road, Martha Washington arrived, accompanied by her son John Custis, his wife Eleanor, George Lewis, who was a nephew of Washington, and Elizabeth Gates, the English wife of General Gates. Joseph Reed, who had looked after the generals’ ladies during their stop in Philadelphia, offered the thought, after seeing them on their way, that they would be “not a bad supply…in a country where wood is scarce.”

Sarah Mifflin, the wife of Colonel Thomas Mifflin, a young aide-decamp, also arrived. The handsome colonel belonged to one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families, and with his beautiful, stylish wife added a distinct touch of glamour to Washington’s circle, while Elizabeth Gates caused something of a sensation, going about Cambridge in a mannish English riding habit.

Martha Washington, who had never been so far from home or in the midst of war, wrote to a friend in Virginia that the boom of cannon seemed to surprise no one but her. “I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun…. To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed. But I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”

In the meantime, after much debate, the Congress at Philadelphia had passed a directive to Washington to destroy the enemy forces in Boston, “even if the town must be burnt.” John Hancock, whose stone mansion on Beacon Hill overlooking the Common was one of the prominent features on the skyline, had spoken “heartily” for the measure.

Work on fortifications continued without letup, and despite freezing winds and snow, the work improved. Washington kept moving the lines nearer and nearer the enemy. A newly completed bastion at Cobble Hill, below Prospect Hill and fully a half mile nearer to Boston, was described in the Providence Gazette as “the most perfect piece of fortification that the American army has constructed during the present campaign.”

ON DECEMBER 24, a storm swept across the whole of the province. In the vicinity of Boston, temperatures dropped to the low twenties, and a foot of snow fell. Christmas Day, a Monday, was still bitterly cold, but clear, and the troops continued with their routine as on any day.

On December 30, several British ships arrived in the harbor, presumably bringing reinforcements.

“This is the last day of the old enlisted soldiers’ service,” wrote a greatly distressed Nathanael Greene to Congressman Samuel Ward the following day, December 31. “Nothing but confusion and disorder reign.”

We have suffered prodigiously for want of wood. Many regiments have been obliged to eat their provisions raw for want of firing to cook, and notwithstanding we have burned up all the fences and cut down all the trees for a mile around the camp, our suffering has been inconceivable…. We have never been so weak as we shall be tomorrow.

On New Year’s Day, Monday, January 1, 1776, the first copies of the speech delivered by King George III at the opening of Parliament back in October were sent across the lines from Boston. They had arrived with the ships from London.

The reaction among the army was rage and indignation. The speech was burned in public by the soldiers and had stunning effect everywhere, as word of its contents rapidly spread. Its charges of traitorous rebellion, its ominous reference to “foreign assistance,” assuredly ended any hope of reconciliation or a short war. It marked a turning point as clear as the advent of the new year.

“We have consulted our wishes rather than our reason in the indulgence of an idea of accommodation,” Nathanael Greene wrote in another fervent letter to Samuel Ward in Philadelphia.

Heaven hath decreed that tottering empire Britain to irretrievable ruin and thanks to God, since Providence hath so determined, America must raise an empire of permanent duration, supported upon the grand pillars of Truth, Freedom, and Religion, encouraged by the smiles of Justice and defended by her own patriotic sons…. Permit me then to recommend from the sincerity of my heart, ready at all times to bleed in my country’s cause, a Declaration of Independence, and call upon the world and the great God who governs it to witness the necessity, propriety and rectitude thereof.

The effect of the King’s speech on Washington was profound. If nothing else could “satisfy a tyrant and his diabolical ministry,” he wrote to Joseph Reed, “we were determined to shake off all connections with a state so unjust and unnatural. This I would tell them, not under covert, but in words as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness.”

Meanwhile, that New Year’s Day, the great turnover of the army commenced, as new regiments arrived and the old departed “by hundreds and by thousands…in the very teeth of an enemy,” as General Heath noted.

Yet substantial numbers who had been in the lines stayed on, including many who had served since Bunker Hill, like Samuel Webb of Connecticut and young John Greenwood, the fifer. Joseph Hodgkins would stay, for all that he and his wife longed for each other. So would the artist John Trumbull and Dr. James Thacher. Many, like Lieutenant Jabez Fitch of Connecticut, would go home, but reenlist a little later in the new year. How many of the “old army” would fight on is impossible to know, but it may have been as many as 9,000.

At the Cambridge headquarters, Washington declared in his general orders for New Year’s Day the commencement of a “new army, which in every point of view is entirely continental.” And thus the army, though still 90 percent a New England army, had a name, the Continental Army.

He stressed the hope that “the importance of the great Cause we are engaged in will be deeply impressed upon every man’s mind.” Everything “dear and valuable to freemen” was at stake, he said, calling on their patriotism to rally morale and commitment, but also expressing exactly what he felt.

With the crash of a 13-gun salute, he raised a new flag in honor of the birthday of the new army—a flag of thirteen red and white stripes, with the British colors (the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew) represented in the upper corner. When the British in Boston saw it flying from Prospect Hill, they at first mistook it for a flag of surrender.

Chapter Three

Dorchester Heights

We are not under the least apprehension of an attack on this place by surprise or otherwise.

—General William Howe

I

THAT DORCHESTER HEIGHTS could decide the whole outcome at Boston had been apparent to the British from the beginning. Their initial plan, agreed to on June 15, had been to seize the high ground on both the Charlestown and Dorchester peninsulas. But then the rebels had made their surprise move at Charlestown, digging in overnight on Bunker Hill, and it had taken the bloodbath of June 17 to remove them. The morning after the battle, in a council of war at the Province House, headquarters of the commander-in-chief, Thomas Gage, it was proposed by Major General Henry Clinton to move immediately on Dorchester. Possession of the heights was “absolutely necessary for the security of Boston, as they lay directly on our water communications and more seriously annoyed the port of Boston than those of Charlestown,” Clinton later wrote, adding that he expected to lead the assault. “I foresaw the consequence, and gave it formally as my opinion at the time, that if the King’s troops should be ever driven from Boston, it would be by rebel batteries raised on those heights.”

But while Gage had kept Bunker Hill heavily armed with cannon and manned by five hundred troops, he had done nothing about Dorchester. Nor had General Howe since taking charge after Gage’s departure for home in October. Nor, indeed, had the Americans. Dorchester Heights remained a kind of high, windblown no-man’s-land, neither side unmindful of its strategic importance, but neither side daring to seize and fortify it.

Among those Loyalists in Boston who had closest contact with the British command, it was commonly understood that Dorchester was the key and commonly questioned why nothing was being done. “It had often been wished,” wrote Justice Peter Oliver, one of the most prominent Loyalists, “that this hill had had proper attention paid to it; and it had been repeatedly mentioned that it was of the last necessity to secure such a position; but the general answers were that there was no danger from it, and that it was to be wished that the rebels would take possession of it, as they could be dislodged.”

Of greater and more immediate interest to the British command was the prospect of abandoning Boston altogether, of packing up and sailing away. As things stood, it was clearly no place to launch an offensive operation. New York should be made the “seat of war,” Gage had stressed in correspondence with the administration in London, and Howe and the others were of the same opinion.

Brigadier General James Grant had said months earlier that Boston should be abandoned while there was still time. “We cannot remain during the winter in this place, as our situation must go on worse and that of the rebels better every day,” Grant had insisted in a long letter from Boston to Edward Harvey, Adjutant General of the British army in London, on August 11.

Grant, a grossly fat, highly opinionated Scot, who had served in the French and Indian War, had an extremely low opinion of Americans. (It was he who had boasted to Parliament that with 5,000 men he could march from one end of the American continent to the other.) The only step that made sense, he wrote, was to burn Boston and move on to New York. Besides, he wanted to turn the fleet loose to burn every principle town along the New England coast. “Lenity is out of the question.”

Such were the delays in communication across the ocean that by the time General Howe received orders from London to “abandon Boston before winter” and “remove the troops to New York,” it was too late—winter had arrived. Besides, there were too few ships at hand to transport the army and the hundreds of Loyalists about whom Howe was greatly concerned, knowing what their fate could be if they were left behind.

Seeing no reasonable alternative, Howe would wait for spring when he could depart at a time and under conditions of his own choosing. He expected no trouble from the Americans. “We are not under the least apprehension of an attack on this place from the rebels by surprise or otherwise,” he assured his superiors in London and further stressed the point at a meeting with his general staff on December 3. Should, however, the rebels make a move on Dorchester, then, Howe affirmed, “We must go at it with our whole force.”

Quite unlike the man in command of the army encircling the town, the British commander was not impatient for action. On the contrary, William Howe had little inclination ever to rush things. Further, it was taken as a matter of course among professional soldiers that winter was no season for campaigning.

And so the British army settled in for a long Boston winter, seeing to their comforts as best they could under the circumstances.

The notable exception was Major General John Burgoyne, “Gentleman Johnny,” an officer of distinguished record and occasional playwright who had added welcome color to the social life of the British officers and their ladies. Impatient with “supineness,” as he said, and ambitious for a command of his own, Burgoyne had sailed for England in early December.

WINTER IN AMERICA was a trial British soldiers could never get used to, any more than they could adjust to the incessant clamor of frogs on spring nights or American mosquitoes or the absence of decent beer. The harsh winter winds and driving snows of the bay area inflicted misery indiscriminately on both armies, of course, but for the King’s men, unaccustomed to such a climate, the punishment was all but unbearable. A young Irish nobleman, Captain Francis Lord Rawdon, wrote of the suffering of his men encamped on Bunker Hill in early December, their tents “so shattered” they could as well have slept on the open ground—“and we hear with some envy of several little balls and concerts which our brethren have had in Boston.” Soldiers froze to death standing watch. Even when the troops moved to winter quarters a few weeks later, keeping warm seemed nearly impossible.

The open sea remained the only lifeline for fuel and food for the town, but with the severity of storms on the North Atlantic, and American privateers operating offshore in increasing numbers despite the weather, fewer and fewer supply ships were getting through. (“The rebels have the impudence to fit out privateers,” wrote an indignant British officer, snug in his quarters, but the day would come, he knew, when “we shall give the scoundrels a hearty thrashing and put an end to this business.”)

British Admiral Samuel Graves, whose responsibility it was to patrol the coastline against privateers, described snowstorms at sea between Cape Ann and Cape Cod as defying the most resolute of men.

This sort of storm is so severe that it cannot even be looked against, and by the snow freezing as fast as it falls, baffles all resistance—for the blocks become choked, the tackle encrusted, the ropes and sails quite congealed, and the whole ship before long one cake of ice…. Indeed, if the severity of the winters be such in this climate that the sentinel on shore is frequently found frozen to death upon his post, though relieved every half hour, the reader may frame some idea of what the seamen of a watch, especially in small vessels, must suffer.

With firewood selling for $20 a cord in Boston, more and more trees were cut down, including the old elm at the corner of Essex and Orange streets, known as the Liberty Tree, which provided fourteen cords. A hundred or more houses were pulled apart. Old barns, old wharves, and derelict ships were chopped up, almost anything that would burn. On orders from General Howe, Old North Church was demolished for firewood.

Only a fraction of Boston’s former, peacetime population remained, thousands having long since fled the town. But others, Loyalists, had sought refuge there, and Loyalists were conspicuous, if not necessarily more numerous than those inhabitants who had chosen to stay in the hope of protecting their property, or because they were too poor or helpless to do anything else. A few, like the town’s selectmen, had been forbidden to leave. In all, there were now about 4,000 civilians under siege, at least half of whom were women and children, and they, too, no less than the redcoat army, were hurting from shortages of all kinds, the poor inevitably suffering most.

Food remained extremely scarce and dear. Young Lord Rawdon described his famished troops as looking like skeletons. Even inferior cuts of horse meat brought good prices. To put a stop to increasing instances of plunder by the troops, Howe initiated punishments more severe even than the standard for the British army. In fact, the new year of 1776 began in Boston with the public whipping of a soldier and his wife who had been caught with stolen goods.

For the British officers, however—the “redcoat gentry,” as Washington called them—life was not entirely unpleasant. They had appropriated Old South Church for a riding ring—Old South Church being odious to them because town meetings had been held there. (Pews were torn out, dirt spread on the floor. According to the diary of Deacon Timothy Newell, one particularly beautiful, hand-carved pew was taken away to serve as a hog sty.) Evening entertainments were numerous. “We have plays, assemblies, and balls, and live as if we were in a place of plenty,” wrote an officer. “In the midst of these horrors of war, we endeavor as much as possible to forget them,” explained the wife of another officer in a letter to a friend at home.

Writing again to General Harvey, James Grant said, “We must get through a disagreeable winter the best way we can. I do all in my power to keep the ball up—I have all ranks of officers at dinner, give them good wine, laugh at the Yankees and turn them into ridicule when an opportunity offers.”

Boston having no theater, Faneuil Hall, sacred to Boston patriots as “the cradle of liberty,” was converted on General Howe’s wish into a “very elegant playhouse” for amateur productions of Shakespeare and original farces, with officers and favored Loyalists taking parts. Sally Flucker, the sister of Henry Knox’s wife, Lucy Flucker, for example, took a lead part in a production of Maid of the Oaks, a satire by General Burgoyne.

On the evening of January 8, uniformed officers and their ladies packed Faneuil Hall for what was expected to be the event of the season, a performance of a musical farce said also to have been written by Burgoyne. Titled The Blockade, it was off to a rollicking start from the moment the curtain rose. A ridiculous figure, supposed to be George Washington, stumbled on stage wearing an oversized wig and dragging a rusty sword. At the same moment, across the bay, Connecticut soldiers led by Major Thomas Knowlton launched a surprise attack on Charlestown, and the British responded with a thunderous cannon barrage. With the roar of the guns, which the audience at Faneuil Hall took to be part of the show, another comic figure, a Yankee sergeant in farmer garb, rushed on stage to say the rebels were “at it tooth and nail over in Charlestown.” The audience roared with laughter and “clapped prodigiously,” sure that this, too, was part of the fun.

But soon finding their mistake [wrote an eyewitness] a general scene of confusion ensued. They immediately hurried out of the house to their alarm posts, some skipping over the orchestra, trampling on the fiddles, and, in short, everyone making his most speedy retreat, the actors (who were all officers) calling out for water to get the paint and smut off their faces, women fainting, etc.

Reportedly, it was General Howe himself who shouted, “Turn out! Turn out!”

THE BRITISH COMMANDER, an easygoing, affable man who had never been averse to taking his pleasures when he could, was openly enjoying himself through the winter with his own elegant dinners, extended evenings at the faro table, and conspicuously in the company of a stunning young woman about whom there was much talk. The lady, who was to become known as Billy Howe’s Cleopatra, was Elizabeth Lloyd Loring, the wife of Joshua Loring, Jr., a member of a prominent Loyalist family whom Howe had hired to run the commissary for rebel prisoners. In the words of a contemporary Loyalist chronicler of the war, “Joshua had a handsome wife. The general…was fond of her. Joshua had no objections. He fingered the cash, the general enjoyed madam.”

William Howe had been a professional soldier from the time he finished school at Eton and at age seventeen received a commission in the Duke of Cumberland’s Light Dragoons. Two older brothers had also chosen military careers and distinguished themselves. The oldest, George Augustus Lord Howe, had fought and died in America in the French and Indian War and was remembered in New England as one of the bravest, best-loved British officers of the time. The other brother, Richard—Admiral Lord Howe—had begun his career in the Royal Navy at fourteen. Like William, he was a member of Parliament and much admired by the King.

The Howe brothers belonged to one of England’s most eminent families. They were rich, accomplished, and extremely well connected. Their mother, still a force in London society, was said to be the illegitimate daughter of King George I. Both men were staunch Whigs and had a decided resemblance, a rather gloomy, dark look, with dark eyes, heavy lids, and a swarthy complexion. But the general was the taller, at about six feet, the heavier, and a man of fewer words. In Parliament he rarely spoke. To Horace Walpole, Billy Howe was “one of those brave silent brothers [who] was reckoned sensible, though so silent that nobody knew whether he was or not.” Nor was it clear how much real heart the general had for the war in America, given his earlier comments about having no wish to serve in it.

William Howe’s ability and courage were indisputable. As a heroic young lieutenant colonel in the French and Indian War, he had led a detachment of light infantry up the steep embankments of Quebec in the first light of dawn to make way for the army of General James Wolfe to defeat the French under Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Wolfe had called William Howe the best officer in the King’s service. At Bunker Hill, assuring his troops he would not ask them “to go a step further than where I go myself,” he had marched in the front line. When the men fell back, after the slaughter of the first assault, he led them up the hill twice again. After one blinding volley during the third assault, he had been the only man in the front line still standing.

But for all his raw courage in the heat and tumult of war, Billy Howe could be, in the intervals between actions, slow-moving, procrastinating, negligent in preparing for action, interested more in his own creature comforts and pleasures.

That he had been stunned by the terrible cost of British victory at Bunker Hill there is no question. “The success is too dearly bought,” he had written to his brother the admiral. Still, he was a soldier, a gifted strategist, and a fighter. He liked to tell his troops, “I do not in the least doubt but that you will behave like Englishmen and as becomes good soldiers,” and he expected no less of himself. He would be a good soldier always, whenever put to the test. He meant business, and at forty-five, or approximately the same age as George Washington, he had far greater experience than Washington, a far more impressive record, not to mention better-trained, better-equipped troops, and ships of the Royal Navy riding at anchor in the harbor.

He also had the ostensible advantage of experienced subordinate officers, professionals all, several of whom had marked ability. When, in the previous spring, Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne had sailed from England for the war in America, they truly represented the pick of the King’s officers. All three were men of proven courage and commitment to duty. Like Howe, Clinton and Burgoyne were well-connected, well-schooled aristocrats, and, as major generals, at the threshold of the peak years of their careers. Clinton, Howe’s second-in-command, was the least impressive in appearance, a short, fat, colorless man who could be shy and petulant. But he had a keen military mind and the advantage of knowing Americans from boyhood. He had grown up in New York, where his father, Admiral George Clinton, served as governor from 1741 to 1751.

Among those of lesser rank, an outstanding example was John Montresor, an officer of engineers whose years of service and experience would seem to make a mockery of the very idea that someone like Nathanael Greene could be a major general. Montresor, too, had served in the French and Indian War, in the Braddock campaign and at Wolfe’s siege of Quebec. In 1760, at age twenty-four, he had led a winter expedition overland from Quebec to New England, and at the war’s end worked on fortifications from Boston to Detroit to New York City, where he bought an island, Montresor’s Island, in the East River. He was resourceful, energetic, probably the best engineer in the British army, and with experience in America to equal any.

But it was also true that Howe and Clinton disliked one another and did not work well together, and that John Montresor, who was not an aristocrat, was still, at nearly forty, only a captain. If the desperate American need for leaders had thrust young men like Nathanael Greene into positions beyond their experience, the British military system, wherein commissions were bought and aristocrats given preference, denied many men of ability roles they should have played. Had Captain John Montresor been a major general, the outcome of the struggle might have been quite different.

Howe’s sources of intelligence, furthermore, were pitiful, virtually nonexistent. As near at hand as the rebels were, the British commander knew almost nothing of their true situation, their perilously thin lines, their lack of gunpowder. Bunker Hill had taught Howe not to underestimate his foe. Still, he had no doubt that the “present unfavorable appearance of things” could be rectified readily enough. All that was wanting was a “proper army” of 20,000.

In mid-January, on orders from London, General Clinton and a small fleet sailed away southward to see what advantage might be gained in the Carolinas, thus reducing the British force at Boston by 1,500 men. And, as pleased as Howe may have been to see Clinton leave, Clinton had at least served as an antidote to Howe’s “supineness.”

Oddly, Howe seems to have had no interest in the man who led the army aligned against him. In all that he and others of the British command wrote at the time, officially and privately, George Washington was rarely ever mentioned except in passing. There was no apparent consideration of what manner of man he was, what his state of mind, his strengths and weaknesses, might be. Or what he might be up to, given the working of his mind. Perhaps this was indifference, perhaps the measure of an overreaching sense of superiority. Washington, by contrast, was constantly trying to fathom Howe’s intentions, his next move. Strange it was that the British commander-in-chief, known for his chronic gambling, seemed to give no thought to how his American opponent might play his hand.

ON JANUARY 14, two weeks into the new year, George Washington wrote one of the most forlorn, despairing letters of his life. He had been suffering sleepless nights in the big house by the Charles. “The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep,” he told the absent Joseph Reed. “Few people know the predicament we are in.”

Filling page after page, he enumerated the same troubles and woes he had been reporting persistently to Congress for so long, and that he would report still again to John Hancock that same day. There was too little powder, still no money. (Money was useful in the common affairs of life but in war it was essential, Washington would remind the wealthy Hancock.) So many of the troops who had given up and gone home had, against orders, carried off muskets that were not their own that the supply of arms was depleted to the point where there were not enough for the new recruits. “We have not at this time 100 guns in the stores of all that have been taken in the prize ship [the captured British supply ship Nancy],” he wrote to Reed. On paper his army numbered between 8,000 and 10,000. In reality only half that number were fit for duty.

It was because he had been unable to attack Boston that things had come to such a pass, he was convinced. The changing of one army to another in the midst of winter, with the enemy so close at hand, was like nothing “in the pages of history.” That the British were so “blind” to what was going on and the true state of his situation he considered nearly miraculous.

He was downcast and feeling quite sorry for himself. Had he known what he was getting into, he told Reed, he would never have accepted the command.

I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulders and entered the ranks, or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity, and my own conscience, had retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies; for surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.

Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us, could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston till this time.

To add to his worries—and this he did not tell Reed—Washington had learned through “undoubted intelligence” that the British were fitting out ships in the harbor for the embarkation of troops, which he took to mean, given the season of the year, they could only be bound for a destination to the south, and almost certainly it was New York. Generals Lee and Greene were convinced New York would be of such “vast importance” to the enemy that no time could be lost seeing to its defense. Loyalists were numerous in New York; their support for the Crown was already strong. “If the tide of sentiment gets against us in that province,” Nathanael Greene warned, “it will give a fatal stab to the strength and union of the colonies.” In Greene’s opinion there were but two choices open: defend New York or burn it. General Lee proposed to Washington that he, Lee, be sent immediately to New York to see about defenses.

Though in agreement that time was of the essence, Washington knew that congressional approval was needed and that there must be no ambiguity over whether his authority extended beyond the immediate theater of war. As he would say, he was not fond of “stretching” his powers, and such sensitivity to and respect for the political ramifications of his command were exactly what made him such an effective political general.

Fortunately, he was able to obtain an immediate opinion from John Adams, who was on a brief leave from Congress at his home in Braintree. The importance of New York was beyond question, Adams formally assured the commander in a letter of January 6 delivered to Cambridge that day. New York was “a kind of key to the whole continent,” Adams wrote. “No effort to secure it ought to be omitted.” On the matter of Washington’s authority, Adams courageously gave him full, unambiguous approval for taking action in New York or anywhere else, and the issue was never to be raised again.

“Your commission constitutes you commander ‘of all the forces…and [you] are vested with full power and authority to act as you shall think for the good and welfare of the service.’ ”

Thus, on January 8, Washington had dispatched General Lee to New York to put the city “in the best posture of defense.”

There was no January thaw in eastern Massachusetts that year, and this meant continued suffering for soldiers without winter clothing, soldiers “sickly” and dying from disease. But with temperatures in the twenties or lower day after day came the increasing likelihood of Back Bay freezing over, and the possibility of an attack on Boston across the ice.

On January 16, two days after his woeful letter to Reed, Washington convened a council of war with Generals Ward, Putnam, Heath, Spencer, Sullivan, Greene, and Gates present, but also James Warren, head of the Massachusetts Assembly, and John Adams. Washington spoke of the “indispensable necessity of making a bold attempt” on Boston. The council listened, then voiced agreement that a “vigorous attempt” should be made, but only when “practicable.”

Late the following day, January 17, well after dark, a dispatch rider dismounted at Washington’s headquarters carrying the worst news of the war thus far. It was a letter from General Schuyler at Albany. The army Washington had sent across the Maine wilderness under Benedict Arnold to attack Quebec had been defeated. Arnold was badly wounded. General Richard Montgomery, who, with 300 men, had joined in the assault, attacking from Montreal, had been killed. Help was urgently needed. How many others had been killed or wounded at Quebec, how many taken prisoner, no one yet knew.

Washington, as he wrote privately, often felt that the eyes of the whole continent were on him, “fixed with anxious expectation.”

When the council of war convened again the first thing the next morning, it was reluctantly concluded that given the “present feeble state” of the army, no troops could be spared for Quebec.

The single glimmer of hope was confirmation from Schuyler, on January 18, that the guns from Ticonderoga were on the way. As it happened, Colonel Knox, who had ridden on ahead, reached Cambridge later that same day.

KNOX HAD BEEN GONE for two months and he had fulfilled all expectations, despite rough forest roads, freezing lakes, blizzards, thaws, mountain wilderness, and repeated mishaps that would have broken lesser spirits several times over. He had succeeded with his bold, virtually impossible idea and at exactly the right moment, justifying entirely the trust Washington had placed in him. The story of the expedition would be told and retold for weeks within the army and for years to come.

Departing from Cambridge on horseback on November 16, Knox and his brother William had traveled first to New York City, where they made arrangements for military supplies to be sent back to Boston, then pressed northward up the Hudson Valley, at times making forty miles a day.

They arrived at Fort Ticonderoga on December 5. Built by the French at the start of the French and Indian War in 1755, the limestone fort had been taken by the British in 1759, then by the Americans in May of 1775. It stood at the southern end of Lake Champlain, where Lake Champlain meets the northern end of Lake George.

The guns Knox had come for were mostly French—mortars, 12- and 18-pound cannon (that is, guns that fired cannonballs of 12 and 18 pounds), and one giant brass 24-pounder. Not all were in usable condition. After looking them over, Knox selected 58 mortars and cannon. Three of the mortars weighed a ton each and the 24-pound cannon, more than 5,000 pounds. The whole lot was believed to weigh not less than 120,000 pounds.

The plan was to transport the guns by boat down Lake George, which was not yet completely frozen over. At the lake’s southern end would begin the long haul overland, south as far as Albany before turning east toward Boston across the Berkshire Mountains. The distance to be covered was nearly three hundred miles. Knox planned to drag the guns on giant sleds and was counting on snow. But thus far only a light dusting covered the ground.

With the help of local soldiers and hired men, he set immediately to work. Just moving the guns from the fort to the boat landing proved a tremendous task. The passage down Lake George, not quite forty miles, took eight days. Three boats and their immense cargo set sail on December 9, and for the first hour had a fair wind. After that progress came only with “the utmost difficulty.” Indeed, from Knox’s hurried, all-but-illegible diary entries, that first hour on the lake appears to have been the only hour of the entire trek that did not bring “the utmost difficulty.”

One of the boats, a scow, struck a rock and sank, though close enough to shore to be bailed out, patched up, and set afloat again. Knox recorded days of heavy rowing against unrelenting headwinds—four hours of “rowing exceeding hard” one day, six hours of “excessive hard rowing” on another. In places, the boats had to cut through ice. Knox’s brother William wrote at day’s end, December 14, of “beating all the way against the wind…. God send us a fair wind.” Nights ashore were bitterly cold.

“It is not easy to conceive the difficulties we have had,” Knox wrote to Washington at the end of the voyage on the lake, in a letter of December 17 that would reach Cambridge only about the time he did.

On his way north to Ticonderoga, Knox had arranged for heavy sleds or sledges to be rounded up or built, forty-two in all, and to be on hand at Fort George at the southern end of Lake George, about thirty-five miles south of Ticonderoga. (“I most earnestly beg you to spare no trouble or necessary expense in getting these,” he had told a local officer.) With the sleds and eighty yoke of oxen, he was now ready to push on. “Trusting that…we shall have a fine fall of snow…. I hope in sixteen or seventeen days to be able to present your Excellency a noble train of artillery.”

To his wife, Knox claimed the most difficult part was over, and speculated, “We shall cut no small figure through the country with our cannon.”

Still there was no snow. Instead, a “cruel thaw” set in, halting progress for several days. The route south to Albany required four crossings of the Hudson. With ice on the river so thin, the heavy caravan could only stand idly by at Fort George and wait for a change in the weather. When the change came, it was a blizzard. Three feet of snow fell, beginning Christmas Day. Determined to go ahead to Albany on his own, Knox nearly froze to death struggling through the snow on foot, until finding horses and a sleigh to take him the rest of the route.

Eventually, the “precious convoy” pushed off from Fort George. “Our cavalcade was quite imposing,” remembered John Becker, who at age twelve had accompanied his father, one of the drivers on the expedition. They proceeded slowly, laboriously in the heavy snow, passing through the village of Saratoga, then on to Albany, where Knox was busy cutting holes in the frozen Hudson in order to strengthen the ice. (The idea was that water coming up through the holes would spread over the surface of the ice and freeze, thus gradually thickening the ice.)

On New Year’s Day, the weather turned warm again. Precious time was wasting, he wrote to Lucy. “The thaw has been so grave that I’ve trembled for the consequences, for without snow my very important charge cannot get along.”

But the temperature plunged again. On January 7, General Schuyler wrote to Washington from his Albany headquarters, “This morning I had the satisfaction to see the first division of sleds with cannon cross the river.”

They moved cautiously over the ice, and for several hours it appeared that Knox’s holes had done the trick. Nearly a dozen sleds had crossed without mishap, until suddenly one of the largest cannons, an 18-pounder, broke through and sank not far from shore, leaving a hole in the ice fourteen feet in diameter. Undaunted, Knox at once set about retrieving the cannon from the bottom of the river, losing a full day in the effort, but at last succeeding, as he wrote, “owing to the assistance [of] the good people of Albany.”

On January 9, the expedition pushed on from the eastern shore of the Hudson, with more than a hundred miles still to go. Snow in the Berkshires lay thick, exactly as needed, but the mountains, steep and tumbled and dissected by deep, narrow valleys, posed a challenge as formidable as any. Knox, with no prior experience in such terrain, wrote of climbing peaks “from which we might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth.”

“It appeared to me almost a miracle that people with heavy loads should be able to get up and down such hills,” reads another of his diary entries.

To slow the descent of the laden sleds down slopes as steep as a roof, check lines were anchored to trees. Brush and drag chains were shoved beneath the runners. When some of his teamsters, fearful of the risks, refused to go any further, Knox spent three hours arguing and pleading until finally they agreed to head on.

News of the advancing procession raced ahead of the lead sleds, and, as Knox had imagined, people began turning out along the route to see for themselves the procession of the guns from Ticonderoga.

“Our armament here was a great curiosity,” wrote John Becker of the reception at the town of Westfield. “We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon.” Becker, at age twelve, had never known such excitement.

We were the great gainers by this curiosity, for while they were employed in remarking upon our guns, we were, with equal pleasure, discussing the qualities of their cider and whiskey. These were generously brought out in great profusion.

At Springfield, to quicken the pace, Knox changed from oxen to horses, and on the final leg of the journey the number of onlookers grew by the day.

The halt came at last about twenty miles west of Boston at Framingham. The guns were unloaded, Knox, meantime, having sped on to Cambridge.

Knox’s “noble train” had arrived intact. Not a gun had been lost. Hundreds of men had taken part and their labors and resilience had been exceptional. But it was the daring and determination of Knox himself that had counted above all. The twenty-five-year-old Boston bookseller had proven himself a leader of remarkable ability, a man not only of enterprising ideas, but with the staying power to carry them out. Immediately, Washington put him in command of the artillery.

To those who rode out from Cambridge to Framingham to look over the guns, it was clear that the stalemate at Boston was about to change dramatically.

II

THERE WAS A PERCEPTIBLE QUICKENING of activity at the big gray house that served as headquarters. The pace of the commander’s correspondence, the numbers of post riders and uniformed officers coming and going, gave evidence of something in the offing. “My business increases very fast…from great changes,” Washington wrote to Joseph Reed without providing details. Reed’s help was needed more than ever. “It is absolutely necessary…to have persons that can think for me as well as execute orders.”

The strength of the army was still deficient, the situation so serious, Washington confided, that he was “obliged to use art to conceal it,” even from his own officers.

That he was about to take action could be read easily enough between the lines of this and other correspondence that went speeding off in the pouches of fast mail riders. The camps were alive with rumors and speculation. “Great activity and animation are observed among our officers and soldiers who manifest an anxious desire to have a conflict with the enemy,” wrote the ever-perceptive Dr. James Thacher, who predicted either a “general assault on the town of Boston, or the erection of works on the Heights of Dorchester, or both.”

The bitter cold continued. On January 27, the thermometer dropped to 4 degrees; the low on January 28 was 1 degree, then 2 degrees on January 30. Yet cold as it was, there was still no “ice bridge” sufficient to carry an army. Some mornings Washington went to the bay to jump up and down on the ice himself to test its strength.

He made a personal reconnaissance of the approaches to Dorchester, even to the heights apparently, accompanied by several of his officers, including Henry Knox. According to one possibly apocryphal account, Washington and the others had left their horses and were proceeding on foot when suddenly two mounted British officers coming at a gallop sent them “running and scampering for life.”

A week later, a British raiding party crossed the ice to Dorchester and burned several farmhouses.

On February 16, Washington convened his council of war for what he hoped would be unanimous agreement that the time had come to attack. A “stroke well aimed at this critical juncture might put a final end to the war,” he argued.

“Perhaps a greater question was never agitated in a council of war,” wrote General Gates of the meeting, and whatever “art” Washington may have exercised to conceal the truth of the army’s strength from his officers, there was, in fact, little that Gates and the others gathered in the room were not aware of. For weeks the demonstrative Israel Putnam had been bewailing the need for gunpowder. Old Put would not relent, wrote one of Washington’s staff. “He is still as hard as ever, crying out for powder—‘powder—ye gods, give us powder!’ ”

Conspicuous by his absence was Nathanael Greene, who had been stricken with jaundice. He was “as yellow as saffron,” and “so weak that I can scarcely walk across the room,” he had written his brother, to whom he also gave his own opinion on the proposed attack. The very thought filled him with dread. An assault on a town garrisoned with regular troops could have horrible consequences, Greene wrote, “horrible if it succeeded, and still more horrible if it failed.”

The council of war marked the fourth time Washington had called for approval for an attack on Boston, and once again, wisely, the generals said no. Very likely the shattering defeat at Quebec had reinforced the view that any assault on so heavily defended a position was not worth the terrible risk.

There was, however, agreement to another plan. Instead of striking at the enemy where they were well fortified, they would lure the enemy out to strike at them, as had been done at Bunker Hill. From the accounts of spies and British deserters, it was by now known that Howe had sworn he would “sally forth” if ever the Americans tried to occupy Dorchester. And so it was resolved that preparations begin “with a view of drawing out the enemy.”

Washington was crestfallen over the decision not to attack. “Behold! Though we had been waiting all the year for this favorable event, the enterprise was thought too dangerous!” he wrote to Joseph Reed. But perhaps he had been wrong, he gracefully conceded. “Perhaps the irksomeness of my situation led me to undertake more than could be warranted by prudence.”

But all that was done with. The issue was “now at an end, and I am preparing to take post on Dorchester.” From this point on, there would be no holding back.

THE PREPARATIONS were elaborate and mammoth in scale, and Washington threw himself into the effort, demanding that not an hour be lost. Intelligence reports that the British intended to evacuate Boston at first chance did nothing to deter him.

Twin hills comprised the Heights of the Dorchester peninsula, and the distance from these summits to the nearest British lines at Boston Neck was a mile and a half, well within range of a 12- or 18-pound cannon. The distance to where most of the British fleet lay off Long Wharf was greater, almost two miles, which was also within range, though barely.

The plan was to occupy the Heights on a single night, before the British knew what was happening, just as had been done at Bunker Hill. This time, however, there were the guns from Ticonderoga to haul in place, and the Heights of Dorchester were considerably steeper than at Bunker Hill and, at an elevation of 112 feet, nearly twice as high. More seriously, the frozen ground on top was “impenetrable as a rock,” in Washington’s words, which meant that digging trenches and throwing up breastworks in the usual fashion would be impossible, at least in one night and with no noise.

The solution was a highly sophisticated scheme whereby the fortifications would be fabricated elsewhere out of sight, then, with massed manpower and oxen, hauled, along with the heavy cannon, to the Heights of Dorchester, where all would have to be in place and ready for action before daylight.

A resourceful lieutenant colonel who had directed the work on the fortifications at Roxbury, Rufus Putnam—a farmer and surveyor in normal times, and a cousin of Israel Putnam—had suggested the idea after seeing an unfamiliar term in a text on artillery, Muller’s Field Engineer, by a British professor named John Muller. Putnam had taken his plan to his superior officer, Colonel Richard Gridley, and to Henry Knox. In turn, the three had gone to see Washington, and in no time hundreds of men were at work building chandeliers, great timber frames that could be filled with “screwed hay” (hay twisted into bales) or compact bundles of branches and brushwood called fascines.

Washington also wanted barrels filled with earth set in rows in front of the parapets, to add to the appearance of strength, but more importantly to stand ready to be rolled down the steep slopes on the advancing enemy. He had “a very high opinion of the defense which may be made with barrels,” he told Artemus Ward, stressing that the hoops should be well nailed so the barrels would not break to pieces.

To divert the enemy and drown out the noise of the work parties, Washington planned to precede the operation with night barrages of artillery fire from Roxbury, Cobble Hill, and Lechmere Point, where a number of the guns from Ticonderoga had been newly emplaced.

As critical and dangerous as any part of the operation would be the crossing of the low-lying causeway of the Dorchester peninsula, which stood in plain view of the British lines at the Boston Neck, less than a mile away. To conceal all movement over the causeway, an extended barrier of hay bales was to be thrown up.

Three thousand men under General Thomas were to take part in fortifying the Heights. Another 4,000 were to stand by at Cambridge for an amphibious attack on Boston, once the British launched their assault on the Heights—amphibious because milder weather had returned and the bay was again largely open water. General Putnam had overall command of the Boston attack. Generals Greene and Sullivan would lead the crossing. On the Charles River at Cambridge, sixty flatboats stood ready.

To bring the army to maximum strength, 2,000 Massachusetts militia were called out, while work details were dispatched to round up wagons, carts, and 800 oxen. At the army’s hospital in Cambridge, thousands of bandages were being prepared, and additional beds made ready. Notices in the Boston Gazette (published in Watertown since the start of the siege) called for volunteer nurses.

For miles around Boston everybody seemed to know someone, or someone who knew someone, who was in the know about what to expect. Bets were wagered on what would happen and when. In the surrounding towns tension and fear grew by the day.

“It is generally thought that there will be something done amongst you very soon,” Sarah Hodgkins wrote from Ipswich to her husband Joseph.

“The preparations increase and something is daily expected, something terrible it will be,” wrote Abigail Adams to her “Dearest Friend,” who had since returned to Philadelphia. “I have been in a continual state of anxiety and expectation…it has been said ‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow’ for this [past] month, but when the dreadful tomorrow will be I know not.”

As he had often before in his life, Washington eased the stress of waiting by catching up with his correspondence, writing again to Joseph Reed and to a young black poet, Phillis Wheatley, then living in Providence, who had sent him a poem written in his honor: “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side / Thy every action let the goddess guide.”

The country had no poets as yet, and Washington was not known to be inclined to poetry or poetic musings. Yet he, a soldier and planter—a slave master—despite all that bore heavily on his mind, took time now to write to her in his own hand.

“I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me,” Washington wrote, “and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents.” Should she ever come to Cambridge, he would be “happy to see a person so favored by the muses.”

In a letter to a Virginia friend, Washington wrote almost lightly of preparing to “bring on a rumpus” with the redcoats.

THE DATE HAD BEEN SETTLED. The move on Dorchester would begin after dark on March 4 and be completed by first light the morning of March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.

How many hundreds, perhaps thousands, understood what was unfolding, even in some detail, no one knew. Yet success depended on secrecy. To this end Washington ordered a stop to all communication with Boston. Generals Heath and Sullivan personally inspected the lines to verify the vigilance of the guards on duty. On the chance that the enemy got wind of what was happening and moved first to occupy the Heights, certain regiments stood ready to march at a moment’s notice.

One of the closest observers of the situation within Boston, Loyalist Peter Oliver, would later write that there was not the least suspicion of what the rebels were up to. But according to the diary of one British officer, a few of the British did find out as early as February 29, from deserters and from a spy referred to only as “Junius,” that the rebels intended to “bombard the town from Dorchester.” The warnings, however, were not taken seriously.

Washington issued orders to the troops clarifying how very serious the moment was and what was expected of them:

As the season is now fast approaching when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in, it is the cause of virtue and mankind, every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions…. But it may not be amiss for the troops to know that if any man in action shall presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his commanding officer, he will be instantly shot down, as an example of cowardice.

On Saturday evening, March 2, Washington wrote in haste to Artemus Ward that everything must be set and ready to go as planned on Monday night, March 4. After folding and sealing the note, he scrawled on the back, “Remember barrels.”

THE BOMBARDMENT of Boston began at midnight Saturday and continued at intervals until morning. The British answered at once with a heavier, louder cannonade. “The house shakes…with the roar of the cannon,” wrote Abigail Adams at her home ten miles away. “No sleep for me tonight.”

Little damage was done by the exchange. It was nearly all noise, just as Washington wished, and the night would have been reckoned a complete success were it not that three of the big mortars burst, due apparently to the inexperience of Henry Knox and his artillerymen.

Sunday night the firing resumed and again the British responded with full crescendo. On the third and crucial night of Monday, March 4, the roar of the guns from both sides became more furious by far.

British captain Charles Stuart described sheets of fire filling the sky. But as he also recorded, “The inhabitants were in a horrid situation, particularly the women, who were several times drove from their houses by shot, and crying for protection.” Watching from the American lines, Lieutenant Samuel Webb wrote, “Our shells raked the houses and the cries of the poor women and children frequently reached our ears.”

At the first crash of the guns, General Thomas and 2,000 men started across the Dorchester causeway, moving rapidly and silently, shielded from view by the long barrier of hay bales. An advance guard of 800 men, a “covering party” made up largely of riflemen, went first, to fan out along the Dorchester shores in case the British made any attempt to investigate during the night. The main work party of 1,200 men followed immediately after, and then came hundreds of carts and heavy wagons loaded with chandeliers, fascines, hay bales, barrels, and most important of all, the guns from Ticonderoga.

“The whole procession moved on in solemn silence, and with perfect order and regularity, while the continued roar of cannon serves to engage the attention and divert the enemy,” wrote Dr. Thacher, who, crossing the causeway with the troops, noted with gratitude the “vast number of large bundles of screwed hay arranged in a line next [to] the enemy…to which we should have been greatly exposed while passing.”

Progress up the steep, smooth slopes was extremely difficult, yet numbers of the ox teams and wagons made three and four trips.

The night was unseasonably mild—indeed, perfectly beautiful with a full moon—ideal conditions for the work, as if the hand of the Almighty were directing things, which the Reverend William Gordon, like many others, felt certain it was. “A finer [night] for working could not have been taken out of the whole 365,” he wrote. “It was hazy below [the Heights] so that our people could not be seen, though it was a bright moonlight night above on the hills.”

At Cambridge, on the moonlit Common, Generals Greene and Sullivan paraded with 4,000 troops in front of the college buildings, ready to move to the river and the shallow draft boats in the event of a signal from the Roxbury church steeple.

Recounting the night’s events later, General Thomas would say it was as early as ten o’clock when the fortifications on the Heights were sufficiently ready to defend against small arms and grapeshot. It was also about ten when a British lieutenant colonel, Sir John Campbell, reported to Brigadier General Francis Smith that the “rebels were at work on Dorchester Heights.” It was news that called for immediate action. But Smith, a stout, slow-moving, slow-thinking veteran of thirty years’ service, chose to ignore it; and from that point on, the work proceeded unnoticed by any other British officers or troops on guard, or by any of the Loyalists in Boston who served as willing eyes and ears for the British.

On the Heights the men toiled steadily with picks and shovels, breaking the frozen ground for earth and stone to fill the chandeliers and barrels. At three in the morning a relief force of 3,000 men moved in, and an additional five regiments of riflemen took up positions near the shore. By the first faint light before dawn, everything was ready, with at least 20 cannon in place.

It was an utterly phenomenal achievement. General Heath was hardly exaggerating when he wrote, “Perhaps there never was so much work done in so short a space of time.”

At daybreak, the British commanders looking up at the Heights could scarcely believe their eyes. The hoped-for, all-important surprise was total. General Howe was said to have exclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”

The British engineering officer, Archibald Robertson, calculated that to have carried everything into place as the rebels had—“a most astonishing night’s work”—must have required at least 15,000 to 20,000 men. Howe, in his official account, would be more conservative and put the number at 14,000.

Later that spring, one of the London papers would carry portions of a letter attributed to an unnamed “officer of distinction at Boston”:

5th March. This is, I believe, likely to prove as important a day to the British empire as any in our annals. We underwent last night a very severe cannonade, which damaged a number of houses, and killed some men. This morning at day break we discovered two redoubts on the hills of Dorchester Point, and two smaller works on their flanks. They were all raised during the night, with an expedition equal to that of the genie belonging to Aladdin’s wonderful lamp. From these hills they command the whole town, so that we must drive them from their post, or desert the place.

THE SHOCK OF DISCOVERY threw the British into “utmost consternation.” Their immediate response, a thunderous two-hour cannonade, proved nothing, as their guns could not be elevated sufficiently to strike a target so high. Meantime, from his flagship, Admiral Molyneux Shuldham (who had replaced Admiral Graves) sent an urgent, unequivocal message to William Howe: not a ship in the harbor could remain unless the rebels were removed from their position.

It was not that the ships were directly “under the guns” on the Heights, as some later accounts gave the impression. At such a distance of nearly two miles, a direct hit would be a lucky shot. Still the ships were theoretically within range, and lucky shots were known to happen.

Howe could dally no longer. With his generals gathered at the Province House at midmorning, he made his decision: he would attack, as he had vowed he would—and as his pride and honor demanded. He had no intention of staying in Boston, but that now seemed beside the point. Being who he was, he could not possibly accept the prospect of being outdone by the ragtag enemy, even if the carnage that had resulted from such an attack at Bunker Hill was as well known to him as to any man alive.

Two thousand troops were ordered to proceed by ship down the harbor to Castle Island, from where the attack on Dorchester would be launched at nightfall.

Captain Archibald Robertson thought the plan little short of madness and said so to others. Writing in his diary during the course of the day, he called it “the most serious step ever an army of this strength in such a situation took, considering the state the rebels’ works are in and the number of men they appear to have under arms.” The fate of the whole town was at stake, “not to say the fate of America.” These were his sentiments, he declared, and he listed the names of the officers he had spoken to, hoping they could persuade Howe to change his mind and embark from Boston as quickly as possible. But starting about noon, the big transports loaded with troops began pushing off from Long Wharf.

Years later, recalling the morning of March 5 on Dorchester Heights, John Trumbull would write, “We saw distinctly the preparations which the enemy were making to dislodge us. The entire waterfront of Boston lay open to our observation, and we saw the embarkation of troops from the various wharves…. We were in high spirits, well prepared to receive the threatened attack.”

Dr. Thacher, setting events down in his journal as they unfolded that “anxious” day on the Heights, wrote of the swarms of spectators covering the nearby hills, waiting to see a bloody battle.

Sometime in the course of the day (the exact hour is not known), Washington arrived to survey the defenses and the panorama below. “His Excellency General Washington is present animating and encouraging the soldiers,” recorded Thacher, “and they in return manifest their joy, and express a warm desire for the approach of the enemy.”

Each man knows his place, and is resolute to execute his duty [he continued]. Our breastworks are strengthened, and among the means of defense are a great number of barrels, filled with stone and sand, arranged in front of our works, which are to be put in motion and made to roll down the hill, to break the ranks and legs of assailants as they advance. These are the preparations for blood and slaughter! Gracious God! If it be determined in thy Providence that thousands of our fellow creatures shall this day be slain, let thy wrath be appeased, and in mercy grant that victory be on the side of our suffering, bleeding country.

According to the Reverend William Gordon, Washington called on those within the sound of his voice to “ ‘remember it is the fifth of March, and avenge the death of your brethren.’ It was immediately asked what the general said by those that were not near enough to hear, and as soon answered. And so from one to another through all the troops, which added fresh fuel to the martial fire before kindled.”

Describing the troops drawn up at Cambridge, waiting for the order to attack, Washington himself said he “never saw spirits higher.”

It was about noon when the first of the British troop transports pushed off for Castle Island and proceeded down the harbor with increasing difficulty against strong headwinds. For by early afternoon, what had been an abnormally warm, pleasant day had changed dramatically. The wind had turned southeasterly, blowing “pretty fresh.” Then, as foreseen in no one’s calculations, the elements took over.

By nightfall, a storm raged, with hail mixed with snow and sleet. By midnight, “the wind blew almost a hurricane.” Windows were smashed, fences blown over. Two of the transports bound for Castle Island were blown ashore. The American lieutenant Isaac Bangs, who was among those freezing at their posts on the high ground of Dorchester, called it the worst storm “that ever I was exposed to.” Clearly there would be no British assault that night.

The morning after, the winds continued to blow with a fury. The snow and sleet had changed to driving rain. General Heath concluded that “kind Heaven” had stepped in to intervene. As so it seemed to many on both sides, when, that morning, Howe called off the attack and gave orders to prepare to evacuate Boston.

Possibly it was not the storm alone that caused Howe’s change of mind. According to Captain Robertson, his pleas to cancel the attack, and the influence of the other officers to whom he had made his case, and John Montresor in particular, had had the desired effect even before the storm reached full force. From what Robertson wrote in the final lines of his diary entry for the day, it would seem that the storm had merely given Howe an easy out.

It is now eight o’clock in the evening. [We] went to headquarters at seven. After waiting some time Captain Montresor came down from the general [and] told me he had been in council and had advised the going off [embarking] altogether, that Lord [General Hugh] Percy and some others seconded him, and that the general said it was his own sentiments from the first, but thought the honor of the troops concerned. So it is agreed immediately to embark everything.

Interestingly, Isaac Bangs, in his account of the day, wondered whether the intent of the whole British expedition to Castle Island was never anything “more than to make a parade” and if the storm was only a “good excuse.”

In the view of General James Grant, however, there was never a doubt of Howe’s desire to attack. “Indeed, we had often talked over the subject and agreed that if the rebels made that move to their right [to Dorchester], we must either drive them from that post or leave Boston.” According to Grant, everything had been prepared, and the plan to attack was “immediately formed, the redoubts to be stormed by the troops in column [and] not to load, that they might be under an absolute necessity of making use of their bayonets.”

Howe, in his own official account, was to say, “I determined upon an immediate attack with all the force I could transport.” He added, “The ardor of the troops encouraged me in this hazardous enterprise,” and this could be the explanation, though an American who saw the British troops waiting on the wharf to embark, commented that “they looked in general pale and dejected, and said to one another it would be another Bunker Hill or worse.”

Howe made no mention in his official account of the council of war convened at seven o’clock, or of any second thoughts on his part. The “contrary” winds of the afternoon of March 5, the storm that followed that night, and the “weather continuing boisterous the next day and night” were the deciding factors, Howe wrote, in that they gave the enemy still more time to improve their defenses of the Heights. “I could promise myself little success by attacking them under all the disadvantages I had to encounter; wherefore I judged it most advisable to prepare for the evacuation of the town.”

III

NO ONE WHO WAS IN BOSTON would forget the days that followed. In less than forty-eight hours, the supposedly invulnerable security of the town had dissolved. Howe’s army and the fleet at anchor were in danger of being destroyed at any time. The very survival of the town itself was in question.

In conference and in dispatches to London, the general had stated repeatedly his confidence that the rebels would make no move. Now he and his vaunted regulars had been outsmarted by “the rabble in arms,” whom they had so long disparaged and despised. Instead of victory, they faced the humiliation of ignominious retreat.

“Never [were] troops in so disgraceful a situation,” wrote one officer. “I pity General Howe from my soul.”

Almost from the moment Howe made his announcement the morning of March 6, ordering the army and fleet to prepare to leave, Boston became a scene of utmost frenzy. “Nothing but hurry and confusion, every person striving to get out of this place,” wrote an American merchant, John Rowe.

Deacon Timothy Newell, who, like John Rowe, was a patriotic American, had been forbidden, as a town selectman, to leave Boston. “This day,” he wrote on March 6, “the utmost distress and anxiety among the refugees and associators [Loyalists]…. Blessed by God, our redemption draws near.”

Howe, who had received no orders—no word of any kind—from London since October, had no long-standing plan for a withdrawal of such magnitude, or any comparable past experience to draw upon. “I told General Howe,” wrote James Grant, “that I had been in many scrapes but that I never was in so thick a wood with all the branches [like] thorns, but that we must look forward and get out.”

It was not just that there were thousands of troops and military stores to transport, but the hundreds of women and children who were with the army. Further, Howe intended to take every Loyalist who chose to go.

The necessary care of the women, sick, and wounded required every assistance that could be given [one man wrote]. It was not like the breaking up of a camp, where every man knows his duty. It was like departing your country, with your wives, your servants, your household furniture, and all your encumbrances.

It seemed everyone had his own dire needs or urgent special request, someone or something to complain about, someone or something to blame for his plight.

There were a sufficient number of transports and other ships at hand, but these all had to be supplied with provisions and water. Equipment of all kinds had to be put aboard. In the meantime, there was very little to eat. Continued storms at sea had prevented nearly all supply ships from even approaching the coast. When a single sloop from the West Indies did make it into the harbor, it was learned that more than seventy food transports, “victualers,” and store ships that had been blown off course that winter were tied up and refitting at Antigua. According to some rumors, there was not enough food left in Boston to last three weeks.

High winds kept blowing, churning the harbor, and the rebel guns remained silent. But while the rebels held their fire, they could be seen in plain view on Dorchester Heights, steadily strengthening their position.

All was still comparatively quiet on Friday, March 8, when Deacon Newell and three other selectmen crossed the lines at the Neck under a white flag carrying an unsigned paper stating that General Howe had “no intention of destroying the town, unless the troops under his command are molested during the embarkation.” Though clearly intended for Washington, this declaration was not addressed to him, and so it was given no reply. But the word had been passed—if allowed to depart peacefully, the British would spare the town.

Then, the night of March 9, when the rebels were seen moving on to Nook’s Hill on Dorchester, a high point of land only a quarter of a mile from the British lines at the Neck, Howe ordered a thunderous all-night bombardment. “Such a firing was never before heard in New England,” wrote Isaac Bangs. Four men were killed by a single ball. But that was the only damage done. The next day the men on the hill gathered up 700 cannonballs that had been fired at them.

In town the pell-mell rush and confusion grew worse. The “cathartic” was drastic, as Loyalist Peter Oliver observed. Hogsheads of sugar and salt, barrels of flour for which there was no room on the ships, were being dumped into the harbor, along with smashed-up furniture, wagons, wheelbarrows, even the commander’s elegant coach. Cannon for which there was no room were spiked or dumped in the harbor.

Americans watching from a dozen hillsides and promontories around the town could see, as Washington wrote, streets full of “great movements and confusion among the troops night and day…in hurrying down their cannon, artillery, and other stores to the wharves with utmost precipitation.” Washington was convinced that Howe was making ready to sail for New York.

THE ALARM AND ANXIETY among the Loyalists was extreme. Leave they must, but no one knew how many there were, or whether there would be room for all, or where they were heading. Not until the morning of March 10 were they told they could begin coming aboard. There was no time for deliberation. Virtually all they owned would have to be left behind.

Those who were already refugees—those who had earlier fled Cambridge, Roxbury, or Milton for the presumed safety of Boston—knew what it was to abandon everything and find themselves dependent on charity. Now Bostonians, too, faced the prospect of forsaking lifelong associations and treasured belongings—indeed, their very homeland and entire way of life.

“It is not easy to paint the distress and confusion of the inhabitants on the occasion. I had but six or seven hours allowed to prepare for this measure, being obliged to embark the same day,” wrote the Reverend Henry Caner.

As rector of King’s Chapel, the first Anglican church in Boston, the Reverend Caner was the leading Church of England clergyman in Massachusetts and a greatly respected figure among all denominations. He had been rector for nearly thirty years and lived alone in a small frame house close to King’s Chapel, at the corner of School and Tremont streets. In his account of “goods left in my house at Boston, March 10, 1776,” he listed, among other items: “a handsome clock,” two mahogany tables, teacups and saucers, “one rich carved mahogany desk and book case [with] glass doors,” pictures of the King and Queen “under glass with rich frames,” a pair of brass andirons, “a fine harpsichord,” 1,000 books, a barn and “appurtenances,” a cow and a calf.

The great majority of the Loyalists had never lived anywhere else, or ever expected to live anywhere else. They were disillusioned, disoriented, and not a little resentful. In their allegiance to the King and to the rule of law, they saw themselves as the true American patriots. They had wanted no part of the rebellion—“the horrid crime of rebellion;” Justice Oliver called it—and had trusted, not unrealistically, in the wealth and power of the British nation to protect them and put a quick end to what, by their lights, had become mob rule.

A Boston merchant named Theophilus Lillie, who owned a store on Middle Street specializing in English dry goods and groceries, had expressed his views in print in the aftermath of the mob assault on British soldiers that erupted into the Boston Massacre.

Upon the whole, I cannot help saying—although I have never entered into the mysteries of government, having applied myself to my shop and my business—that it always seemed strange to me that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty….

If one set of private subjects may at any time take upon themselves to punish another set of private subjects just when they please, it’s such a sort of government as I never heard of before; and according to my poor notion of government, this is one of the principle things which government is designed to prevent.

Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, one of the best-known men in town, would write to a son-in-law:

I found I could not stay in Boston and trust my person with a set of lawless rebels whose actions have disgraced human nature and who have treated all the King’s loyal subjects that have fallen in their hands with great cruelty and for no other crime than for their loyalty to the best of Kings and a peaceable submission to the best constituted government on earth. I don’t believe there ever was a people in any age or part of the world that enjoyed so much liberty as the people of America did under the mild indulgent government (God bless it) of England and never was a people under a worser state of tyranny than we are at present.

It was said the fleet was bound for Halifax in Nova Scotia, but no one could say for certain. And who knew, in any event, what miseries lay in store for them at sea?

Many who wanted desperately to escape had “families they were loath should be separated.” Many who chose to stay did so knowing they could expect “ill-usage” at the hands of the rebels.

Conspicuous among those who began crowding the wharves, and who took their turns going aboard the ships on March 10 and in the days that followed, were many who had once figured prominently in the government of the province and in its professional and commercial life. There were leading churchmen like Henry Caner, jurists like Peter Oliver, physicians, educators, and successful merchants. The elderly Nathaniel Perkins was Boston’s foremost physician. John Lovell was headmaster of the Boston Latin School. Attorney James Putnam of Worcester had been John Adams’s mentor in the law. Foster Hutchinson, jurist and merchant, was the brother of the former royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. General Timothy Ruggles, a veteran of the French and Indian War, was a wealthy landowner and outspoken Tory who had been put in command of three companies of Loyal American Associators, as they were known, who had helped patrol the streets during the siege. John Murray and Harrison Gray were prosperous merchants.

A score or more were Harvard graduates, and many were fourth- or fifth-generation Americans bearing some of the oldest names in the province, such as Coffin and Chandler. Benjamin Faneuil, who was departing with a family of three, was the nephew of wealthy Peter Faneuil, whose many benefactions to Boston had included Faneuil Hall.

These were people of wealth and position among the conservative element of Massachusetts, people of distinction by and large, as well as power. But prominent though they were, they were not the majority of those departing with the fleet. Ultimately, 1,100 Loyalists went aboard the ships, and the greater part were from every walk of life—shopkeepers, clerks, minor customs officials, artisans and tradesmen, and their families. According to one study, 382 heads of families were farmers, mechanics, and ordinary tradesmen. William MacAlpine, printer and bookbinder, declared his “first and chief objective was to convey his wife in safety to Scotland.”

Among the women listed as heads of families was Hannah Flucker, the mother of Henry Knox’s wife Lucy, with a household of six. (Thomas Flucker, Lucy’s father, appears to have departed earlier.) Margaret Draper, who joined the exodus with a family of five, had continued to publish the Loyalist newspaper the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Newsletter, after her husband’s death in 1774. It was the only newspaper available in Boston during the siege.

Also listed was Dorcas Griffith, who ran a notorious waterfront grog shop and was known to be John Hancock’s “discarded” mistress.

Joshua Loring, Jr., was another of those departing, along with the rebel prisoners he was charged with looking after. But his handsome wife Elizabeth is not accounted for, suggesting she may have been provided with more comfortable accommodations aboard the flagship Chatham with General Howe.

Many of the crowd were elderly—the Reverend Caner and Dr. Perkins were in their seventies—and many more were children or infants. William Hill, a baker who had supplied bread for the British troops, went aboard with a family of seventeen.

Accommodations on the crowded transports and other ships were wretched. Foster Hutchinson and his large family were assigned to steerage. Wealthy Benjamin Hallowell found himself sharing a cabin with thirty-six others, “men, women, and children, parents, masters, mistresses, obliged to pig together on the floor, there being no berths,” until they left the harbor.

Appraising the situation, the royal governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, hired a schooner to sail with the fleet and packed fifty people on board.

In the next few days the ships with Loyalists began falling down the harbor with the tide as far as King’s Road, below Castle Island, to anchor out of range of the rebel cannon and to provide space for other vessels to tie up at the wharves. And there the exiles sat, rocking with the tide, day after day.

ON MARCH 10, Howe had issued a proclamation ordering inhabitants to give up all linen and woolen goods that could be of use to the enemy, and assigned a man named Crean Brush, one of a Loyalist corps, to see that the order was carried out.

Sir [Brush’s official commission read]: I am informed there are large quantities of goods in the town of Boston, which, if in the possession of the rebels, would enable them to carry on the war. And, whereas I have given notice to all loyal inhabitants to remove such goods from hence, and all who do not remove them, or deliver them to your care, will be considered abettors of the rebels, you are hereby authorized and required to take into your possession all such goods as answer this description, and to give certificates to the owners that you have received them for their use, and will deliver them to the owners’ order, unavoidable accidents excepted. And you are to make inquiry if any such goods be secreted in stores, and you are to seize all such.

In effect, Brush (remembered later as “a conceited New York Tory”) was authorized to take whatever he wanted in return for worthless certificates. And once he and his men began plundering the town, gangs with axes, drunken soldiers and sailors rampaged in the streets, breaking open houses and shops at will. “There never was such destruction and outrage committed any day before this,” wrote merchant John Rowe. On a visit to Rowe’s wharf and warehouse, Brush and his men made off with goods worth more than 2,000 pounds.

“Soldiers and sailors plundering,” wrote Deacon Newell on March 13. “Same as above,” he recorded the next day.

On March 15, Newell and the other selectmen were summoned to the Province House and told the army would embark that day and that it would be wise for all remaining citizens to stay in their houses. If there were any interference with the King’s troops, Howe warned, he would burn the town. But the wind proved “unfavorable” for departure.

Not until Sunday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, did the wind turn fair and favorable.

The troops began moving out at four in the morning, more than 8,000 redcoats marching through the dark, narrow streets of Boston, as if on parade. By seven the sun was up and ships thronged at the wharves began lifting sail. By nine o’clock all were under way.

“Fine weather and fair wind,” wrote Major Stephen Kemble, a Loyalist serving with the British. “The finest day in the world,” wrote an exuberant Archibald Robertson.

It was a spectacle such as could only have been imagined until that morning. There were 120 ships departing with more than 11,000 people packed on board—8,906 King’s troops, 667 women and 553 children, and in addition, waiting down the harbor, were 1,100 Loyalists.

“In the course of the forenoon,” wrote James Thacher, “we enjoyed the unspeakable satisfaction of beholding their whole fleet under sail, wafting from our shores the dreadful scourge of war.” People on shore were cheering, weeping. “Surely it is the Lord’s doings and it is marvelous in our eyes,” wrote Abigail Adams.

But then the whole fleet came to anchor at King’s Road and with the arrival of General Howe’s flagship, Chatham, every ship-of-war fired a roaring 21-gun salute, and the full 50 guns of the Chatham answered in kind—an ear-splitting reminder of royal might.

THE FIRST CHEERS from the American lines had been heard as early as nine that morning, when the men on Prospect Hill and Dorchester Heights saw clearly what was happening. In no time small boys came running across the Neck from Boston to deliver the news that the “lobster backs” were gone at last.

Puzzled that British troops appeared still to be manning the fortifications on Bunker Hill, even as the fleet was getting under way, General Sullivan mounted his horse and cantered off for a closer look, only to discover that they were hay dummies set up by the fleeing redcoats.

It was early afternoon when the first troops from Roxbury—500 men who had already had smallpox and were thus immune—crossed the Neck and marched into Boston, drums beating, flags flying, and led by Artemus Ward on horseback.

By all rights, it should have been Washington who made the triumphal entry, but in a characteristically gracious gesture he gave the honor to Ward, the “thorough New England man” who had been his predecessor as commander and the first and most persistent in favoring a move on Dorchester Heights—though how much this may have figured in Washington’s decision is impossible to know.

Washington remained at Cambridge where he attended Sunday services conducted by the chaplain of Knox’s artillery regiment, the Reverend Abiel Leonard of Connecticut, who chose for his text Exodus 14:25: “And they took off their chariot wheels, that they drove them heavily; so that the Egyptians said, Let us flee from the face of Israel; for the Lord fighteth for them against the Egyptians.”

Washington rode into Boston the following day, Monday, March 18, and took a close look at the place for the first time, after eight and a half months of studying it through the lenses of his telescope almost every day in every kind of light and from every possible angle. He came without fanfare. His purpose, as he reported to Congress, was to appraise the damage done and see what the enemy had left behind.

The town, although it had “suffered greatly,” was not in as bad shape as he had expected, he wrote to John Hancock, “and I have a particular pleasure in being able to inform you, sir, that your house has received no damage worth mentioning.” Other fine houses had been much abused by the British, windows broken, furnishings smashed or stolen, books destroyed. But at Hancock’s Beacon Hill mansion all was in order, as General Sullivan also attested, and there was a certain irony in this, since the house had been occupied and maintained by the belligerent General James Grant, who had wanted to lay waste to every town on the New England coast. “Though I believe,” wrote Sullivan, “the brave general had made free with some of the articles in the [wine] cellar.”

The last desperate efforts of the British to destroy whatever could be of use to the Americans were in evidence everywhere—spiked cannon, shattered gun carriages and wagons. Ships left behind at the waterfront had been scuttled, their masts cut away. And as Dr. Thacher noted with concern, smallpox was “lurking” still in several parts of town.

But the surprise for Washington was how much had not been destroyed or carried off, so great had been the chaos and rush of the enemy in the last days. An inventory of British goods compiled by Thomas Mifflin, now the quartermaster general, listed 5,000 bushels of wheat at the Hancock wharf, 1,000 bushels of beans and 10 tons of hay at the town granary, 35,000 feet of good planks at one of the lumberyards. There were more than a hundred horses left by the British. Indeed, there was nearly everything that was needed but beef, gunpowder, and hard money. Washington estimated the total value at perhaps 40,000 pounds, but after further examination that figure would be raised to 50,000 pounds.

The other surprise was the strength of the enemy’s defenses. The town was “amazingly strong…almost impregnable, every avenue fortified,” he wrote. But if this gave rise to any second thoughts about his repeated desire to send men against such defenses, or the wisdom of his council of war in restraining him, Washington kept such thoughts to himself.

Just as he had shown no signs of despair when prospects looked bleak, he now showed no elation in what he wrote or in his outward manner or comments.

On March 20, Washington put Nathanael Greene temporarily in command of the town, while he returned to Cambridge to concentrate on his next move. Certain that Howe intended to sail for New York, he had already sent five regiments in that direction. But with the British fleet still hovering below Castle Island, he dared not send more, and worried now that Howe’s withdrawal might be a trick, that the plan was to come ashore somewhere near Braintree and double back to outflank Dorchester and Roxbury.

On the night of March 20, Boston and the whole south shore were rocked by a tremendous explosion when British engineers Montresor and Robertson blew up Castle William. The morning after, in heavy snowfall, Howe’s fleet dropped still further down from the town, to anchor in Nantasket Road off Braintree.

Those on board the ships were as puzzled by Howe’s intentions as anyone. “We do not know where we are going, but are in great distress,” one Loyalist wrote. They had been cooped up now in the harbor for nearly two weeks. One man, wracked with despair, threw himself overboard and was drowned. But to most on board, any destination would be welcome after what they had been through. “You know the proverbial expression, ‘neither hell, hull nor Halifax’ can afford worse shelter than Boston,” wrote an officer in description of the prevailing mood.

At last, on March 27, ten days after the evacuation of Boston, the fleet was again under way, and this time heading for the open sea. When several Loyalists gathered at the rail of one of the ships expressed confidence that they would be returning soon in triumph, a prominent Boston merchant, George Erving, turned and said solemnly, “Gentlemen, not one of you will ever see that place again,” words long remembered by the five-year-old son who stood beside him.

Merchant Erving had sided with the Loyalists primarily because he thought the rebellion would fail. But the success of Washington’s army at Boston had changed his mind, as it had for many.

By day’s end the fleet had disappeared over the horizon, bound not for New York but for Halifax.

IV

FAST RIDERS CARRIED THE NEWS to Providence and Newport, Hartford and New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, then on to Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, 1,100 arduous miles from Boston. For all who believed in the American cause, it was the first thrilling news of the war.

“The joy of our friends in Boston, on seeing the victorious and gallant troops of their country enter the town almost on the heels of their barbarous oppressors was inexplicably great,” reported the New Haven Journal.

“The British,” said the New York Constitutional Gazette, “were completely disgraced.”

Free men under arms had triumphed, with all the world watching, and in the “admirable and beloved” Washington, the country had a hero, as the citizens of Philadelphia and members of Congress read in the Evening Post of March 30:

To the wisdom, firmness, intrepidity, and military abilities of our admirable and beloved general, his Excellency George Washington, Esq.; to the assiduity, skill, and bravery of our other worthy generals and officers of the army; and to the hardiness and gallantry of the soldiery, is to be ascribed, under God, the glory and success of our arms, in driving from one of the strongest holds in America, so considerable a part of the British army.

Congress ordered a gold medal struck in Washington’s honor. “The disinterested and patriotic principles which led you to the field have also led you to glory,” read a formal letter of gratitude.

Those pages in the annals of America will record your title to be a conspicuous place in the temple of fame, which shall inform posterity, that under your directions, an undisciplined band of husbandmen, in the course of a few months, became soldiers.

“What an occurrence is this to be known in Europe?” wrote Elbridge Gerry of the Massachusetts delegation in Congress. “How are Parliamentary pretensions to be reconciled to facts?” What was especially wondrous was that the British had been driven from Boston by only “about the thirtieth part of the power of America.”

It would be six weeks before the news reached London, and on May 6, a storm of criticism and recrimination erupted in Parliament, led by the same ardent Whigs whose real power was no more than it had ever been. In the House of Commons, Colonel Isaac Barre, Lord Cavendish, and Edmund Burke spoke severely against the administration, as Lord North and Lord Germain defended the management of the war.

In the House of Lords, in defense of the ministry, the Earl of Suffolk patiently and correctly explained that abandoning Boston had been the established policy since the previous October.

“Let this transaction be dressed in what garb you please,” answered the Duke of Manchester, “the fact remains that the army which was sent to reduce the province of Massachusetts Bay has been driven from the capital, and that the standard of the provincial army now waves in triumph over the walls of Boston.”

At the headquarters in Cambridge, the Boston selectmen and a delegation from the legislature of Massachusetts came to offer their gratitude to Washington for saving the town “with so little effusion of human blood,” and to shower him with praise. Harvard, in the spirit of the moment, conferred an honorary degree on the man who had had almost no formal schooling.

Responding to such tributes, Washington was duly modest and gracious, and in truth they meant more than he showed. He was happy to “hear from different quarters that my reputation stands fair,” he wrote privately to his brother. He hoped it would be remembered also that none of what happened had come easily or predictably.

We have maintained our ground against the enemy under [a]…want of powder, and we have disbanded one army and recruited another within musket shot of two and twenty regiments, the flower of the British army, when our strength has been little if any superior to theirs, and at last have beat them in a shameful and precipitate manner, out of a place the strongest by nature on this continent, strengthened and fortified in the best manner and at an enormous expense.

He was proud of the part he had played and wanted to say something about that, at least to his brother, and about the misconceptions he had been obliged to maintain.

I believe I may, with great truth, affirm that no man perhaps since the first institution of armies ever commanded one under more difficult circumstances than I have done…. Many of my difficulties and distresses were of so peculiar a cast that in order to conceal them from the enemy, I was obliged to conceal them from my friends, indeed from my own army, thereby subjecting my conduct to interpretations unfavorable to my character.

An attack by Howe on Dorchester Heights had been his “utmost wish,” and he could “scarce forbear lamenting the disappointment” he felt. Like others, he attributed the storm of March 5 to the intervening hand of God. He did not “lament or repine at any act of Providence,” he told Joseph Reed, for “in great measure” he had become a convert to the view of the poet Alexander Pope that “whatever is, is right.”

For the Loyalists who had fled with the enemy, he had only contempt. “Unhappy wretches! Deluded mortals!” he called them. He had heard of some committing suicide and thought it would be well if more did the same. “By all accounts a more miserable set of beings does not exist.”

But then he had little time to dwell on such matters. “I am hurried in dispatching one brigade after another for New York and preparing for my own departure,” he informed Reed.

THE SIEGE had been the stunning success it was proclaimed, and Washington’s performance had been truly exceptional. He had indeed bested Howe and his regulars, and despite insufficient arms and ammunition, insufficient shelter, sickness, inexperienced officers, lack of discipline, clothing, and money. His patience with Congress had been exemplary, and while he had been saved repeatedly by his council of war from his headlong determination to attack, and thus from almost certain catastrophe, he had accepted the judgment of the council with no ill temper or self-serving histrionics.

He had kept his head, kept his health and his strength, bearing up under a weight of work and worry that only a few could have carried.

Having struggled with his festering dislike of New Englanders, he had proven a keen judge of character and ability and pinned his hopes on such untried born-and-bred Yankees as Greene and Knox. Without Knox, there would have been no triumph at Dorchester Heights. Henry Knox, in sum, had saved the day. And while Nathanael Greene had not played so spectacular a part as Knox, the troops under his command were distinguished as the best disciplined in the army, and he himself had emerged as Washington’s ideal lieutenant. In Greene and Knox, Washington had found the best men possible, men of ability and energy who, like Washington, would never lose sight of what the war was about, no matter what was to come. All important, too, was the devotion and loyalty these two young officers felt for Washington.

After the “miracle” of Dorchester Heights, Washington was never again to speak ill of New Englanders because they were New Englanders.

He had no illusions about the gravity of what lay ahead. Nor did many of the wisest heads in Congress. The humiliation the British had been subjected to, John Hancock warned Washington, could well make them an even more formidable foe.

What may be their views, it is indeed impossible to tell, with any degree of exactness [Hancock wrote]. We have all the reason, however, from the rage of disappointment and revenge, to expect the worst. Nor have I any doubt, that as far as their power extends, they will inflict every species of calamity upon us.

But great political change was in the offing, Washington sensed, as he confided to Joseph Reed in one of the last letters written from his Cambridge headquarters. This he attributed in good part to the pamphlet Common Sense, published earlier in the year, the author of which, Thomas Paine, was as yet unknown.

My countrymen, I know from their form of government and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independency [Washington wrote], but time and persecution brings many wonderful things to pass, and by private letters which I have lately received from Virginia, I find Common Sense is working a powerful change there in the minds of many men.

“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” Paine had written. “Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation.”

ONE AFTER ANOTHER the regiments were departing for New York. An army that had moved not at all for nearly a year was on the march, leaving New England for the first time.

The huge bastions that encircled Boston were left standing, but only a holding force under General Ward remained to keep watch.

To most of the men the prospect of being on the move was extremely welcome. Spirits were higher than they had ever been. The soldier’s life, many decided, had much to be said for it after all.

Most of those in the ranks had no idea where they were bound, but were glad to be going. One soldier, John Lapham of Duxbury, wrote to his “Honored Parents” to send a pair of shoes as quickly as possible, “for I expect that I shall march off soon, but whither we shall go I do not know nor can I tell.”

Generals Heath and Sullivan and their forces had already departed. General Greene and five regiments followed on April 1. Three days later, on Thursday, April 4, Washington rode off from Cambridge.

Part II

Fateful Summer

The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.

—General George Washington
    July 2, 1776

Chapter Four

The Lines are Drawn

I would not be understood that I should choose to march, but as I am engaged in this glorious cause, I am will[ing] to go where I am called.

—Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins

I

FOR TWO WEEKS AND MORE, the army was on the move, its long, irregular columns winding through the untroubled countryside of lower Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, where open fields and low-lying wooded hills were only now showing the first faint signs of spring.

In scores of market towns and crossroad hamlets the local citizenry came out to cheer and offer food and drink, or just to stand at gateposts and kitchen doorways taking in the spectacle of so many of their countrymen armed and on the march, whole regiments passing for hours at a time. Large armies—large armies of any kind—were an unfamiliar sight to Americans. No army of such size as this had ever been seen before anywhere in the colonies.

And the army was stepping along “with great expedition,” as General Heath wrote, with high-ranking uniformed officers like Heath on horseback, stragglers and trains of heavy baggage wagons struggling to keep up. Hurry was the order of the day, every day. He must “hasten his march” to New York, Nathanael Greene had been instructed by Washington. Henry Knox and his artillery were to move “as speedily as possible” by “the directest road thither.” Several times Washington referred to his own “extreme hurry.”

On April 5, the day the commander paraded into Providence, it seemed all Rhode Island had come to catch sight of him. Two of Greene’s regiments served as escort (none were to turn out “except those dressed in uniforms,” all “washed, both face and hands clean, their beards shaved, their hair combed and powdered”). At an elegant banquet provided by the “gentlemen of the town” at Hackers Hall, Washington was feted and toasted befitting a national hero. But at first light the next day he was on his way again, with no time to spare.

John Greenwood, the fifer, would remember everyone moving “at great speed.” A five- or six-mile march before breakfast was usual, fifteen to twenty miles a day about average, however seasonably wet and unpredictable the weather or miserable the roads, which, with the frost still coming out of the ground, could be slick with mud even on fair days.

On days of “wet weather” and “very bad traveling,” recorded a soldier named Solomon Nash marching with a Massachusetts artillery company, they made only ten to fourteen miles, while moving ten brass field pieces.

Marching did not trouble him anything like he had expected, Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins wrote to his Sarah after a few days on the road.

I am willing to serve my country in the best way and manner that I am capable of, and as our enemy are gone from us, I expect I must follow them…. I would not be understood that I should choose to march, but as I am engaged in this glorious cause, I am will[ing] to go where I am called.

He had vowed to “march with cheerfulness,” and plainly the spirits of the whole army were greatly improved by being on the move and by the warm reception along the way.

“I am a good deal tired of marching,” he confessed after crossing into Connecticut, “though we get very good entertainment [hospitality] in general. People are very kind to us.” Like the majority of Massachusetts men, Hodgkins had never been so far from home.

Most of the regiments marched only as far as New London. From there they were to proceed by water down Long Island Sound, keeping close to the Connecticut shore to avoid enemy cruisers. But with movement of any kind subject always to the elements—and never more than by water—precious days were lost waiting for favorable winds. Or at great risk ships embarked in the teeth of foul weather. On April 11, Nathanael Greene and his brigade pushed off in a blinding snow squall. Four days later, with still no word from them, Washington, who was by then in New York, reported to Congress that he feared for their lives. As it was, Greene and his men did not reach New York until April 17.

By whatever means they traveled, all seemed to understand what lay ahead. They were going to meet the enemy on the field of battle for the first time. They were headed for “troble,” as Hodgkins wrote.

No one knew how many British there might be, yet few let that bother them. An enthusiastic new recruit in the Connecticut ranks, a farm boy named Joseph Plumb Martin, would recall, “I never spent a thought about numbers. The Americans were invincible in my opinion.”

As another soldier remembered, there was scarcely a militia man who did not think himself equal to two or three of the British.

APPRAISING THE SITUATION from his new headquarters at No. 1 Broadway, a magnificent town house just back from the Battery at the southernmost tip of New York, Washington had no illusions about the difficulties to be faced. He was gravely, realistically apprehensive about the magnitude of the enemy force en route. He fretted over when their ships might appear, and how, with no naval strength, to defend a city bounded by navigable rivers on two sides and a harbor of a size sufficient to accommodate the largest fleet imaginable.

New York was not at all like Boston, geographically, strategically, and in other ways. At Boston, Washington had known exactly where the enemy was, and who they were, and what was needed to contain them. At Boston the British had been largely at his mercy, and especially once winter set in. Here, with their overwhelming naval might and absolute control of the waters, they could strike at will and from almost any direction. The time and place of battle would be entirely their choice, and this was the worry overriding all others.

General Lee, after appraising the situation in February, had been extremely dubious. “What to do with the city? I own [it] puzzles me. It is so encircled with deep navigable water that whoever commands the sea must command the town,” he had succinctly summed up the situation.

Washington, however, expressed no such misgivings. He would later tell Congress he had not a doubt that he could defend the city, and he was eager to do so, for all his anxieties. New York had “vast importance,” he wrote, because control of its harbor could mean control of the Hudson River and thus the whole Hudson–Lake Champlain corridor north to Canada, which if seized by the enemy could isolate New England from the other colonies—which, in fact, was exactly the British intention.

But the decision to make a stand at New York was based more on Washington’s political judgment than on military strategy. It was his political sense that Congress and the patriots of New York expected every effort to be made to hold the city, and that anything less would have devastating political effect on the people at large and thus on the American cause, which Washington fervently hoped would soon become the cause of American independence.

Possibly he had discussed the subject of New York with members of Congress the previous year, before leaving to take command at Cambridge. And John Adams’s letter of January 6, describing New York as “a kind of key to the whole continent” and affirming that “no effort to secure it ought to be omitted,” was anything but ambiguous.

Still, Congress had issued no specific directive to defend the city. The decision was Washington’s alone and he promised unequivocally “to exert myself to the utmost to frustrate the designs of the enemy.”

At Boston, where the comparatively few Loyalists of Massachusetts had either fled the country or were bottled up with the British, there had never been a serious threat from “internal foes,” in Washington’s phrase. (The spy Benjamin Church had turned out to be an aberration.) In New York the atmosphere was entirely different. The city remained divided and tense. Loyalist, or Tory, sentiment, while less conspicuous than it had been, was widespread and ranged from the militant to the disaffected to those hesitant about declaring themselves patriots for a variety of reasons, trade and commerce not being the least of them.

Two-thirds of the property in New York belonged to Tories. The year before, in 1775, more than half the New York Chamber of Commerce were avowed Loyalists. When on a Sunday in January 1776 a prominent pastor, the Reverend John Rodgers, preached an impassioned sermon from the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church on Wall Street, exhorting young men to be brave and fight for the cause of their country, he was himself being notably brave in speaking out. “We are involved in the calamities of a civil war,” he had said, and so it felt in New York.

The city and Long Island would provide Washington with five regiments by summer and they would be led by officers bearing prominent names—Livingston, Fish, Roosevelt, Remsen, and Cowenhoven, among others—but the numbers of Loyalists still in the city were considerable, and they included men and women from all levels of society.

Across the East River on Long Island, in the villages and the rich outlying farmlands, where the population was still mostly Dutch, Loyalists were a decided majority. Staten Island, at the far end of the harbor, or the Upper Bay, was another Loyalist stronghold. Thus the potential for conspiracy, sabotage, or organized armed resistance was all too real. At the moment, armed Loyalist bands were in hiding in the swamps of Long Island, awaiting the chance to take action.

For months British warships, including the 64-gun Asia, had been a formidable presence, anchored in the Upper Bay, reminders that the city was entirely at their mercy. It was only on April 8, just a week before Washington’s arrival, that the Asia and its entourage withdrew to the outer approaches to the harbor beyond the Narrows, the water passage between Long Island and Staten Island. On board the King’s ship Duchess of Gordon, William Tryon, a seasoned soldier-politician who was the royal governor of New York, maintained a headquarters and was believed to be secretly directing Loyalist operations.

At Boston, Washington had benefited greatly from a steady supply of valuable intelligence coming out of the besieged town, while Howe had known little or nothing of Washington’s strengths or intentions. Here, with so much of the population still loyal to the king, the situation was the reverse.

Washington’s New England army was intact, to be sure—exhausted from its march, as he reported to Congress, but intact and in place. In addition, new battalions had arrived from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and still more were expected from Maryland and Delaware. All were urgently needed, but they also compounded the threat of regional animosity and discord, which Washington still feared might tear the army and the country apart. “We have nothing, my dear sir, to depend upon, but the protection of a kind Providence and unanimity among ourselves,” he wrote to John Adams from his Broadway headquarters.

Furthermore, as he knew, discipline was hardly improved, and too many of the new troops were raw recruits as unruly as those of the summer before. Some who were lauded as shining examples of patriotism looked hardly fit for battle, like the Connecticut unit comprised entirely of “aged gentlemen.”

When they were ordered to New York [reads an old account] this company was the first that reached the place of rendezvous. They were twenty-four in number; and their united ages reached one thousand. They were all married men, and left behind a hundred and fifty-nine children and grandchildren.

Nor did the look and manner of Washington’s New England troops necessarily inspire confidence among those from other colonies. In the stilted phrasing of a young captain from Pennsylvania, Alexander Graydon, “The appearance of things was not much calculated to excite sanguine expectations in the mind of the sober observer.” To Graydon, who in what he wrote did little to conceal his feelings of superiority, the Yankees were a “miserably constituted,” “unwarlike” lot who did “not entirely come up to the ideas we had formed of the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill.” Most officers were still indistinguishable from their men. Deportment seemed altogether absent.

Not until the arrival of the men from Marblehead under Colonel John Glover did Captain Graydon see any New England troops that met his approval. “But even in this regiment,” he noted, “there were a number of Negroes, which to persons unaccustomed to such associations had a disagreeable, degrading effect.”

One further large and important difference between New York and the experience at Boston was also clear: this time there would be little call for councils of war to decide whether or not to fight.

WASHINGTON HAD ARRIVED in the city with no ceremony at midday, Saturday, April 13, and went directly to work at the Broadway headquarters. Some days later, after Martha Washington arrived, they would establish a country residence at a beautiful estate overlooking the Hudson River, the Abraham Mortier house (later known as Richmond Hill) two miles north, beyond the city limits.

But No. 1 Broadway remained the commander’s base of operations. Known also as the Kennedy Mansion, it was a famous New York landmark. It had been built a generation earlier by a Scottish immigrant and successful New York land speculator named Archibald Kennedy and had remained the home of a son, Captain Archibald Kennedy of the Royal Navy, until his recent departure for England. The house fronted on Bowling Green and was considered the height of elegance, with a grand stairway, a banquet hall, and a parlor fifty feet long. A garden to the rear reached down to the shore of the Hudson and from a rooftop platform and cupola, one could see for miles in every direction.

As at Cambridge, Washington insisted on having his military “family” in residence with him and thus on duty all the time.

Unfamiliar with the terrain, Washington set about inspecting the fortifications begun earlier by General Lee, works that had been subsequently carried on under General William Alexander of New Jersey, better known as Lord Stirling, after Congress sent Lee to take command in South Carolina. Lord Stirling was a rich, socially prominent, hard-driving, hard-drinking patriot who at age fifty-eight looked the part of commander and claimed his title as a Scottish earl through his father. The claim was questionable, but sincere on his part and generally accepted by his fellow officers and the troops he led. Washington thought well of him and with good reason.

Lee and Stirling had had too little time and too few troops to do the job. Men of the town had been pressed into labor, including large numbers of slaves, but this was hardly enough. “It will require at least eight thousand men to put this place in any posture of defense,” Stirling had stressed.

Washington found the defenses only about half done, and even with the troops he had, he knew more were needed. Crowding the streets of the city, the army seemed an overwhelming multitude. The soldiers themselves were emboldened by their numbers. But only half were fit for duty and Washington worried exceedingly over what the toll from disease would be with the return of warm weather, and from such dissipations as were now readily at hand. Washington had seen enough of New York on prior visits to dislike and distrust the city as the most sinful place in America, a not uncommon view.

Larger than Boston but smaller than Philadelphia, New York had a peacetime population of perhaps 20,000 people crowded into an area of less than a square mile, less than a tenth of the Island of Manhattan—or York Island, as it was then known—which from the Battery to its northern boundary at the Harlem River reached nearly eleven miles. That far larger stretch north of the city, known as the Outward, was a mix of woods, streams, marshes, and great rocky patches interspersed with a few small farms and large country estates, all the way to King’s Bridge, where a narrow wooden bridge over the Harlem connected the island to the mainland.

Normally it was a city of thriving commerce, shipbuilding, and seagoing trade, and with much to see and talk about. “The inhabitants are in general brisk and lively,” wrote one visitor. The women were “handsome,” he recorded—as did others new to the city—though, he added, “it rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets.”

Broadway, straight and wide, was the grand thoroughfare lined with shade trees and fine houses and churches. Queen Street, close to the crowded East River wharves, was the bustling business center. City Hall stood on Wall Street, or “in” Wall Street, as people said.

Henry Knox, stopping at New York for the first time on his way to Ticonderoga in November, had admired the “principle streets much wider than ours” and brick houses “better built than in Boston.” New Yorkers, however, were another matter, as he reported to his adored Lucy:

The people—why the people are magnificent: in their carriages, which are numerous, in their house furniture, which is fine, in their pride and conceit, which are inimitable, in their profaneness, which is intolerable, in the want of principle, which is prevalent, in their Toryism, which is insufferable.

But the city had greatly changed. It had become an armed camp, and thousands of people—perhaps a third of the population—had fled, fearing it was soon to be the scene of terrible calamity. One would “think the city almost evacuated,” wrote a dispirited resident. Business was at a standstill.

Large numbers of troops were quartered in vacant buildings and many of the finest mansions. (“Oh, the houses of New York, if you could see the insides of them!” grieved another resident.) King’s College, west of the Commons, one of the largest, handsomest buildings in town, had been taken over as an army hospital, once the library books were removed, lest the soldiers burn them for fuel.

For the troops from New England a roof overhead of any kind seemed the height of luxury, and New York, however changed, a center of wonders. Joseph Hodgkins decided, “This city York exceeds all places that ever I saw,” though he found the living “excessive dear.”

“They have all the simplicity of ploughmen,” a New Yorker wrote of the Yankee soldiers. And according to one local paper, the New York Packet, they were unexpectedly well behaved, “their civility to the inhabitants very commendable.” They attended prayers “evening and morning regularly,” their officers setting the example, the paper noted. “On Lord’s day they attend public worship twice, and their deportment in the house of God is such as becomes the place.”

But an earnest young Presbyterian chaplain with the New Jersey troops, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Philip Vickers Fithian, found the level of piety alarmingly below his expectations and worried what the consequences might be to the American cause of so many of all ranks so habitually taking the name of the Lord in vain. “But alas, swearing abounds, all classes swear,” he noted sadly.

Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of Massachusetts, who in his journal would provide one of the fullest accounts of unfolding events that spring and summer, wrote of his walking tours about town and such sights to be seen as the waterworks and the larger-than-life equestrian statue of King George III, which dominated Bowling Green in front of Washington’s headquarters. “The design was in imitation of one of the Roman emperors,” Bangs wrote. The King was represented “about a third larger than a natural man,” and both horse and rider were “neatly constructed of lead [and] gilt with gold,” and “raised on a pedestal of white marble” fifteen feet high.

With twenty or more churches of differing denominations to choose from (something unknown in Massachusetts), the lieutenant attended as many as possible—an “English” church (most likely Trinity Church on Broadway, which was Church of England), a Congregational meeting, a high Dutch church (probably Old Dutch Church on Garden Street), where only Dutch was spoken, and the city’s one synagogue, Shearith Israel, on Mill Street. He liked the Dutch church best, he decided, preferring the priest’s manifest piety to the “pomp” of the English church, though he understood not a word of the Dutch sermon. On a later Sunday he and a friend attended a Quaker meeting, but after sitting through two hours during which not a word was said, they happily repaired to a nearby tavern.

In his conscientious way, Bangs proceeded to investigate the darker side of city life that so worried his commander, embarking into the section called the Holy Ground, a foul slum and brothel district west of the Commons, much of which was owned by Trinity Church, hence the name. By some estimates as many as five hundred prostitutes plied their trade there. Robinson Street especially was notorious for its rough gin shops and bawdy houses. If there was trouble after dark in New York, it was nearly always in the Holy Ground.

Bangs, a Harvard graduate with training in medicine, had initiated his own tour of inspection out of concern for the health of his men—though also out of curiosity, as he conceded—and was appalled by what he saw.

“When I visited them [the prostitutes] at first I thought nothing could exceed them for impudence and immodesty, but I found the more I was acquainted with them the more they excelled in their brutality.” How any man could desire “intimate connection” with such “creatures” was more than he could comprehend. But so it was, and among officers and soldiers alike, “till the fatal disorder [syphilis] seized them.”

On April 22, less than a week after the Continental Army moved into the city, all hell erupted in the Holy Ground. The mutilated bodies of two soldiers were found concealed in a brothel. One of the victims had been “castrated in a barbarous manner,” as Bangs recorded. In furious retaliation, gangs of soldiers went on a rampage, tearing to pieces the building where the murders had taken place. Some days later, the remains of “an old whore” were discovered dumped in a privy, “so long dead that she was rotten,” as Bangs also recorded.

Washington condemned all such “riotous behavior.” Were it to happen again, the perpetrators would be subjected to the severest punishment. If they resisted arrest, they would be “treated as a common enemy,” meaning they would be shot dead on the spot.

He ordered a curfew and warned that any soldier found “disguised with liquor” would be punished. Still, it seems, business was business and not to be intruded upon. “Every brutal gratification can be so easily indulged in this place,” wrote William Tudor of Boston, Washington’s judge advocate, to his fiancée, “that the army will be debauched here in a month more than in twelve at Cambridge.”

The whores, the trulls, “these bitchfoxly, jades, hags, strums,” as wrote another officer, Colonel Loammi Baldwin, continued “their employ which is become very lucrative.” Baldwin, an apple grower from Massachusetts, was one of the officers dispatched to the Holy Ground with military patrols, under orders to deal only with drunken or unruly soldiers—“hell’s work,” as he said. Since almost no soldiers had uniforms, it was all but impossible to distinguish who among the drunks and brawlers were soldiers and who were not, in dark, shadowed streets lit only by dim oil lamps. Baldwin and his patrol broke up “knots of men and women” fighting, cursing, “crying ‘Murder!’ ” and “hurried them off to the Provost dungeon by half dozens.” Some were punished and some “got off clear—hell’s work.”

Meantime, the army was “growing sickly.” Smallpox appeared and several soldiers died. Frightful rumors swept through the city, including one that the British had returned to Boston and taken Dorchester Heights. With more bad news from Canada, Washington was directed by Congress to send reinforcements. When approximately 3,000 men under General Sullivan departed by ship up the Hudson, Washington informed Congress he had to have at least 10,000 more.

Drill went on in the streets and on the Commons. Work on defenses continued under steadily increasing pressure.

GENERAL LEE, considered an expert on defense, had concluded that without command of the sea New York could not be held. Still, as he had said, it could be an “advantageous” battlefield. If the British were determined to take the city, they could be made to pay a heavy toll.

Crucial to Lee’s plan was the defense of that part of Long Island directly across the East River and particularly the imposing river bluffs near the tiny hamlet called Brooklyn, which was also spelled Breucklyn, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, or Brookline, and amounted to no more than seven or eight houses and an old Dutch church that stood in the middle of the Jamaica Road, the main road inland from the Brooklyn ferry landing.

From the New York side of the river, the village was out of sight, three-quarters of a mile back from the partly wooded “noble bluff” known as Columbia Heights or Brooklyn Heights. All one saw looking across from New York, as Washington frequently did, was the steep face of the bluff rising above the river and crowned now by the beginnings of Fort Stirling, and to the right, also on the brow of the bluff, the country house of Philip Livingston, a wealthy New York importer and delegate to the Continental Congress.

When finished, the large square bastion of Fort Stirling, mounting eight cannon, was expected to command the East River and New York just as Dorchester Heights commanded Boston and its harbor. From Brooklyn Heights one looked down on all of New York City, the harbor, the rivers, and the long, low hills of New Jersey beyond. It was one of the grandest panoramas to be seen on the entire Atlantic seaboard.

The East River, no river at all but a saltwater estuary nearly a mile wide, was famously difficult to navigate, with swift, contrary currents and tides of as much as six feet. Because of winds and tides, ferryboats to and from Brooklyn often had great difficulty. Even with three men pulling at the oars, crossing the river could take over an hour.

The Hudson, or North, River was greater still, more than two miles wide, and so, as Lee had acknowledged, impossible to keep closed to the enemy. But with batteries along the New York shore of the Hudson, the British might think twice before risking their valuable ships.

Washington agreed with the general outlines of the plan, including, most importantly, the premise that an effective defense of New York City would depend on the defense of Long Island. If New York was the key to the continent, then Long Island was the key to New York, and the key to the defense of Long Island was Brooklyn Heights. “For should the enemy take possession of N[ew] York when Long Island is in our hands,” Lee had written to Washington, “they will find it almost impossible to subsist.”

That New York or Long Island, or both, could be a trap, neither of them seems to have seriously considered, or at least acknowledged for the record.

Given the importance of Long Island, Washington put General Greene in command there, and by the first week of May, Greene and his men, with the addition of a Pennsylvania rifle company, were encamped at Brooklyn. In little time there were several thousand troops on Long Island—which seemed a great many, but were less than a third of those in and around New York—and their efforts began to show. As would be said, the experience at Boston had made them “veterans at least of the spade.”

In addition to Fort Stirling, three more forts were under construction on the other, or eastern, side of the hamlet of Brooklyn, these intended as a defense of Fort Stirling and Brooklyn Heights. If the British were to come ashore on the broad beaches to the west, in the vicinity of the village of Gravesend—as was widely expected—and attack from the open plains to the south, this line of defense would check their drive for the river.

To the left was Fort Putnam, named for Rufus Putnam, who marked out most of the fortifications. In the middle was star-shaped Fort Greene, mounting six cannon and commanding the Jamaica Road. On the right was Fort Box, named for one of Greene’s officers, Major Daniel Box.

Each of these bastions was to be surrounded with a broad ditch and all were to be connected by a line of entrenchments reaching a mile or more. With hundreds of axmen at work, trees were cut to give full sweep to the fire of the cannon, and along most of the line, pointed stakes—pickets—were driven into the ground. Farther still to the right, at an isolated point on the Upper Bay called Red Hook, a fifth defense, Fort Defiance, was being built. From Fort Putnam on the left to Fort Defiance on the right was nearly three miles.

As the days grew longer and steadily warmer, the hard labor continued with unrelenting determination. Any soldier caught leaving the works without proper liberty would do “constant duty” for a week, Greene warned. One Rhode Island officer riding herd on the men, Colonel Ezekiel Cornell, became known as “Old Snarl.”

Greene himself was tireless in his efforts. Nothing escaped his notice. He was everywhere on horseback surveying the work, or scouting the lay of the land, making himself familiar with the whole terrain from Brooklyn to Gravesend, and particularly the densely wooded ridge about a mile and a half to the south known as the Heights of Gowan, which ran like a natural defense between the forts and the broad flatlands to the south.

Earthworks and gun emplacements were also under way on little Governor’s Island between the Heights and Red Hook, in the direct path of the entrance to the East River. “We have done a great deal,” Washington could claim in early May. “Governor’s Island has a large and strong work erected…. The point below (called Red Hook) has a small, but exceedingly strong barbette [mounted] battery—and several new works are constructed and many of them almost executed at other places.”

Barricades were thrown up within the city itself. In the words of a surviving British intelligence report, “every street facing both North and East Rivers has wooden trunks made across ten feet thick filled with earth, in order to intercept any troops that may attempt a landing.”

There were guns along the banks of the Hudson, heavy cannon at old Fort George by the Battery, and more at the Whitehall dock on the East River.

Henry Knox was proud to report that 120 cannon were in place in and about the city and this time ample ammunition was standing by. The one glaring problem was an acute shortage of artillerymen. Knowing how many soldiers in the ranks were without muskets or arms of any kind, Knox persuaded Washington to reassign five or six hundred of them to the artillery. Never mind that they were entirely inexperienced, almost any live body being preferable to nothing.

The daily labors of the artillerymen were hardly less wearisome than those of the troops digging trenches and throwing up earthworks, and potentially a great deal more dangerous, as the diary of the Massachusetts soldier Solomon Nash gives some suggestion.

Monday, May 13…Fetched one 32 pounder from the fort and placed it to the eastward of the grand battery…. Employed in piling up shot.

Thursday, May 16…Some of us employed…in firing our cannon with double charges in them to prove them and they all proved good but two. One of them split at the muzzle and the other at the grand battery burst all in pieces. One piece went 30 or 40 rods [about 200 yards] and fell upon a house…through the roof and all the floors to the last one, which hurt the house very much, but hurt nobody.

Wednesday, May 22…Employed in making cartridges….

Friday, May 31…Bigger part of our regiment employed in making cartridges. So ends this month.

In early June, Knox and Greene rode together to the rugged uppermost end of York Island to survey a craggy ridge 230 feet above the Hudson, the highest point on the island, as the site for still another major defense, and work soon commenced on what was to be called Fort Washington, intended to keep the British navy from coming up the river. Another fort, to be known as Fort Constitution, was also planned for the opposite side of the Hudson.

The friendship of Knox and Greene that had begun in Knox’s Boston bookshop continued to grow, as the two officers found themselves increasingly important in the overall command and nearly always in agreement on matters of consequence. In their admiration of and loyalty to Washington, they were of one heart and both had begun helping Washington in his dealings with Congress.

Greene, in a letter stressing the urgent need for more troops, told John Adams, head of the Board of War, that if Congress were to provide support for those soldiers maimed or killed that this in itself would increase enlistments and “inspire those engaged with as much courage as any measure that can be fixed upon.” He wrote, too, of the low morale among officers whose pay was not enough to defray even ordinary expenses. Good officers were “the very soul of an army,” Greene wrote. The Congress must not be overconfident. “The fate of war is very uncertain,” he warned.

Suppose this army should be defeated, two or three of the leading generals killed, our stores and magazines all lost, I would not be answerable for the consequences that such a stroke might produce in American politics.

At Adams’s request, Knox provided a list of recommended books on military matters, and in a letter to Adams of May 16, Knox expressed in the strongest terms his belief that it was time to declare American independence. Like Washington, like Greene—and like Adams—Knox longed ardently for a separation from Britain, and the sooner the better.

The future happiness or misery of a great proportion of the human race is at stake—and if we make a wrong choice, ourselves and our posterity must be wretched. Wrong choice! There can be but one choice consistent with the character of a people possessing the least degree of reason. And that is to separate—to separate from that people who from a total dissolution of virtue among them must be our enemies—an event which I de[v]outly pray may soon take place; and let it be as soon as may be.

As Martha Washington had joined the commander-in-chief in New York, so Lucy Knox and Caty Greene traveled from New England to be with their husbands, each young woman bringing an infant born within the year—little Lucy Knox and George Washington Greene. An undated invitation sent from Greene’s Long Island quarters that spring reads: “Gen Green[e] and Lady present their compliments to Col. Knox and his Lady and should be glad of their company tomorrow at dinner at 2 o’clock.”

II

THROUGH DAYS OF TOIL ON DEFENSES, through endless hours taken up with military routine, endless problems of supply and paperwork, and the innumerable day-to-day preoccupations of those trying to carry on with the little that remained of normal civilian life, the thought that the British could appear any time was seldom out of mind. Every soldier, every civilian, it seemed, had one eye cocked on the harbor for the first sign of British sails. Every waking day began with the thought that it could be the day.

Washington ordered a signal system set up between Long Island, Staten Island, and New York. On May 18 a rumor flew through the city that the British had been sighted off Sandy Hook in the Lower Bay, and though there was nothing to it, the story carried for days.

The number of sentries at gun emplacements was doubled. They were “not to suffer any person whatever…to go into the batteries at night,” Washington’s order read. “Nor is any person whatever, but generals or field officers of the army, and officers and men of the artillery who have real business there, to be permitted even in daytime.”

More orders followed. Soldiers were to “lay upon [sleep with] their arms and be ready to turn out at a minute’s notice.” To practice the use of their arms, they were each to fire at least two rounds, and practice moving rapidly from their camps into the trenches and fortifications, to become familiar with the ground they would have to cover when the attack came.

According to his own returns, Washington had 8,880 men at hand, 6,923 of whom were fit for duty. At the same time, he received reliable word that no fewer than 17,000 hired German troops were on the way to serve under the British command, and that the full enemy force could number as many as 30,000.

When Washington was called to Philadelphia to consult with Congress, arrangements were made for fast horses to be held ready at intervals along the road, so that if necessary he could get back to New York with “utmost expedition.” It was the first time Washington had left the army since taking command. No sooner had he departed, on May 21, leaving General Putnam in charge, than the rumor spread that he had gone to Philadelphia to resign his command. When he returned, on June 6, after an absence of two weeks, it was to a rousing welcome with drums rolling and five regiments parading.

“Through Broadway we marched, round the King’s statue,” wrote Lieutenant Bangs, jubilant, like all the army, at the commander’s presence among them once more.

There was further bleak news from Canada, including word that General John Thomas, who had been sent north with the expectation that he could set things straight there, had died of smallpox.

The one positive development for Washington was that during his stay in Philadelphia he had convinced Joseph Reed to rejoin the army, to serve as the army’s adjutant general—its administrative head—with the rank of colonel, in place of General Horatio Gates, who had been sent by Congress to see what he could do about Canada.

Reed returned full of misgivings. He questioned his fitness for the job—“It is so entirely out of my line,” he told his wife—and in a few days he was ready to quit again. But Washington’s faith in the gifted Reed, and his need for a confidant, were no less than ever. To Washington his return was a godsend.

SUDDENLY, with the impact of an explosion, news of a Loyalist plot to assassinate the commander-in-chief burst upon the city. A dozen men were arrested, including the mayor of New York, David Matthews, and two soldiers from Washington’s own Life Guard. The plot reportedly was to kill Washington and his officers the moment the British fleet appeared.

Patriot mobs took to the streets to hunt down Loyalists. Those they seized were beaten, tarred and feathered, burned with candles, or made “to ride the rail,” the cruel punishment whereby a man was forced to straddle a sharp fence rail held on the shoulders of two men, with other men on either side taking a grip on his legs to keep him straight, and thus the victim was paraded through the streets.

“Dear Brother,” a New Yorker named Peter Elting wrote approvingly on June 13, “We had some grand Tory rides in this city this week and in particular yesterday. Several of them were handled very roughly, being carried through the streets on rails, their clothes tore from their back and their bodies pretty well mingled with the dust.”

A local Moravian pastor, Ewald Shewkirk, writing in his diary of such “very unhappy and shocking scenes,” noted also, “Some of the generals, and especially Putnam, and their forces had enough to do to quell the riot and make the mob disperse.”

Washington shifted his headquarters to City Hall. Knox and his wife moved into No. 1 Broadway, while Martha Washington remained at the Mortier house beyond the city—all this apparently out of concern for Washington’s safety.

What was learned of the plot, in the course of a court-martial of the two soldiers from the Life Guard, was less sensational than first reported, but serious indeed, even if the evidence was thin. According to the accused themselves, the plan had been to recruit other soldiers to sabotage gun emplacements “when the fleet arrives,” in return for royal pardons and financial bonuses (“encouragement as to land and houses”). Besides the mayor, the others arrested and imprisoned included two doctors, a shoemaker, a tailor, a chandler, and a former schoolteacher. But only one of the soldiers was convicted, an English immigrant named Thomas Hickey, whose defense was that he had gotten involved only “for the sake of cheating Tories and getting some money from them.”

Hickey was hanged before an enormous crowd on June 28, a fate that most in the army approved. (“I wish twenty more were served the same,” wrote Joseph Hodgkins.)

That same night Washington learned for the first time that the British had sailed from Halifax bound for New York on June 9, General Howe having departed somewhat earlier on the frigate Greyhound. The information came by express rider from the captain of an American schooner that had been captured by the Greyhound off Cape Ann, then retaken by an armed American sloop.

The next morning, Saturday, June 29, officers with telescopes on the roof of Washington’s headquarters and other vantage points in the city and on Long Island, saw signals flying from the hills of Staten Island. The first of the British fleet had appeared.

In a matter of hours, forty-five ships had dropped anchor inside Sandy Hook in the Lower Bay, ten miles beyond the Narrows. To a Pennsylvania rifleman closer at hand their masts looked like a forest of trimmed pine trees. “I declare that I thought all London was afloat.”

HENRY AND LUCY KNOX were at breakfast at No. 1 Broadway when they saw the fleet. It had become their practice to enjoy breakfast beside a large Palladian window on the second floor with a panoramic view of the harbor. But now suddenly the morning was shattered and Lucy Knox was in a state of abject terror.

“You can scarcely conceive of the distress and anxiety which she then had,” Knox would write to his brother William. “The city in an uproar, the alarm guns firing, the troops repairing to their posts, and everything in the [height] of bustle. I not at liberty to attend her, as my country cries loudest.”

For weeks Knox had been urging Lucy to leave the city, for her own safety and that of their infant daughter. “My God, may I never experience the like feelings again! They were too much, but I found a way to disguise them, for I scolded like a fury at her for not having gone before.”

By sunset the enemy ships at anchor down the bay numbered more than one hundred.

Riders galloped off to Connecticut and New Jersey to spread the news and “hurry on the militia.” Martha Washington said her goodbyes to her husband and departed the city by carriage with all possible speed, as did Lucy Knox, Caty Greene, and their children, along with hundreds more of the city’s inhabitants.

“The great being who watches the hearts of the children of men, knows I value you above every blessing, and for that reason I wish you to be at such a distance from the horrid scenes of war,” Knox wrote to Lucy after she reached Connecticut, and lest anyone forget all that was at stake, he reminded her, “We are fighting for our country, for posterity perhaps. On the success of this campaign the happiness or misery of millions may depend.”

Further details on the makeup of the enemy armada followed quickly. The ships included the Centurion and the Chatham, of 50 guns each, the 40-gun Phoenix, and the 30-gun Greyhound with General Howe on board, in addition to the 64-gun Asia. In their combined firepower these five warships alone far exceeded all the American guns now in place on shore. Nathanael Greene reported to Washington that the total fleet of 120 ships had “10,000 troops received at Halifax, beside some of the Scotch Brigade that have joined the fleet on the passage.” And as Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Webb of Washington’s staff further noted, an additional 15,000 to 20,000 could be expected “hourly” on still more ships from England under the command of General Howe’s brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe.

The whole of New York was “in commotion,” wrote Pastor Shewkirk. “On the one hand everyone that could was packing up and getting away; and on the other hand country soldiers from the neighboring places came in from all sides.”

On Long Island, one of Nathanael Greene’s field officers took time to pen a note to his son back home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. “I am of opinion our hands will be full,” wrote Colonel Moses Little, a veteran of Bunker Hill.

IN PHILADELPHIA, the same day as the British landing on Staten Island, July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress, in a momentous decision, voted to “dissolve the connection” with Great Britain. The news reached New York four days later, on July 6, and at once spontaneous celebrations broke out. “The whole choir of our officers…went to a public house to testify our joy at the happy news of Independence. We spent the afternoon merrily,” recorded Isaac Bangs.

A letter from John Hancock to Washington, as well as the complete text of the Declaration, followed two days later:

That our affairs may take a more favorable turn [Hancock wrote], the Congress have judged it necessary to dissolve the connection between Great Britain and the American colonies, and to declare them free and independent states; as you will perceive by the enclosed Declaration, which I am directed to transmit to you, and to request you will have it proclaimed at the head of the army in the way you shall think most proper.

Many, like Henry Knox, saw at once that with the enemy massing for battle so close at hand and independence at last declared by Congress, the war had entered an entirely new stage. The lines were drawn now as never before, the stakes far higher. “The eyes of all America are upon us,” Knox wrote. “As we play our part posterity will bless or curse us.”

By renouncing their allegiance to the King, the delegates at Philadelphia had committed treason and embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back.

“We are in the very midst of a revolution,” wrote John Adams, “the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.”

In a ringing preamble, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the document declared it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” and were endowed with the “unalienable” rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And to this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

Such courage and high ideals were of little consequence, of course, the Declaration itself being no more than a declaration without military success against the most formidable force on earth. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, an eminent member of Congress who opposed the Declaration, had called it a “skiff made of paper.” And as Nathanael Greene had warned, there were never any certainties about the fate of war.

But from this point on, the citizen-soldiers of Washington’s army were no longer to be fighting only for the defense of their country, or for their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen, as they had at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and through the long siege at Boston. It was now a proudly proclaimed, all-out war for an independent America, a new America, and thus a new day of freedom and equality.

At his home in Newport, Nathanael Greene’s mentor, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, wrote in his diary almost in disbelief:

Thus the Congress has tied a Gordian knot, which the Parl [iament] will find they can neither cut, nor untie. The thirteen united colonies now rise into an Independent Republic among the kingdoms, states, and empires on earth…. And have I lived to see such an important and astonishing revolution?

At a stroke the Continental Congress had made the Glorious Cause of America more glorious still, for all the world to know, and also to give every citizen soldier at this critical juncture something still larger and more compelling for which to fight. Washington saw it as a “fresh incentive,” and to his mind it had come not a moment too soon.

On Tuesday, July 9, at six in the evening, on his orders, the several brigades in the city were marched onto the Commons and other parade grounds to hear the Declaration read aloud.

The general hopes this important event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer and soldier to act with fidelity and courage, [the orders read] as knowing that now the peace and safety of his country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms: And that he is now in the service of a state possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest honors of a free country.

The formal readings concluded, a great mob of cheering, shouting soldiers and townspeople stormed down Broadway to Bowling Green, where, with ropes and bars, they pulled down the gilded lead statue of George III on his colossal horse. In their fury the crowd hacked off the sovereign’s head, severed the nose, clipped the laurels that wreathed the head, and mounted what remained of the head on a spike outside a tavern.

Much of the lead from the rest of the statue would later be, as reported, melted down for bullets “to assimilate with the brains of our infatuated adversaries.”

NOT SINCE THE SPRING of 1775 had spirits been so high. But the exuberance of the moment, or any thoughts that grand pronouncements and the toppling of symbolic monuments were sufficient to change the course of history, were quickly dashed in dramatic fashion three days later, on July 12. In a surprise move, the British demonstrated for all to see how much the defenders of New York had still to learn, and the larger, ominous truth that without sea power New York was indefensible.

It was a brilliant summer day with a brisk wind out of the southwest, ideal sailing conditions. At approximately three in the afternoon, His Majesty’s ships Phoenix and Rose, in the company of three tenders, cast off their moorings at Staten Island and started up the harbor under full sail, moving swiftly with the favorable wind and a perfect flood tide.

Alarm guns sounded in New York. Soldiers rushed in every direction through streets crowded with panic-stricken people. The cannon at Red Hook and Governor’s Island opened fire, and as the ships swept by lower Manhattan, heading into the mouth of the Hudson, the guns at old Fort George and other shore batteries opened up. Commanding the fire from Fort George was a nineteen-year-old captain of New York artillery, Alexander Hamilton, who had left King’s College to serve in the Cause. The ships returned the fire. Cannonballs slammed into houses and came bounding down streets still swarming with people. Washington would write of the extreme distress he felt at the shrieks and cries of women and children running every which way, and at the spectacle of his own men standing at the water’s edge gawking helplessly, so awestruck—or terrified—were they by the ferocious barrage let loose by the enemy ships.

Private Joseph Martin, the fifteen-year-old Connecticut recruit, would remember enjoying “a complete view of the whole affair.” It was his first experience with the “muttering” of cannon fire, and he “rather thought the sound was musical, or at least grand.”

Every battery along the Hudson fired away until cannon smoke lay thick and heavy over the city, and the air reeked of gunpowder.

The British ships, keeping close to the New Jersey shore, proceeded rapidly up the river and were soon out of sight. By five-thirty they had passed the blasts of cannon from Fort Washington, and by evening they were safely anchored thirty miles above the city in the broadest part of the Hudson, the Tappan Zee at Tarrytown, where their mission was to cut off rebel supplies and rouse local Loyalists.

American gun crews had fired nearly 200 shots—more than 150 from the New York batteries alone—and to no apparent effect. (According to the log of the Rose, the Americans “shot away our starb[oa]rd fore shroud, fore tackle pendant, fore lift, fore topsail clewlines, spritsail and main topsail braces, one 18 pound shot in the head of our foremast, one through the pinnace, several through the sails and some in the hull.”) Knox’s guns had proven more deadly to his own men than to the foe. Six American artillerymen were killed, the only fatalities of the day, when their cannon blew up due to their own inexperience or overconfidence, or possibly, as said, because a great many were drunk.

In his ensuing general orders, Washington could barely conceal his disgust over the inexcusable behavior displayed in the face of the enemy, and the shame he felt over officers who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins. To the proud Washington, he and the army had been made a laughingstock.

Such unsoldierly conduct must grieve every good officer, and give the enemy a mean opinion of the army, as nothing shows the brave and good soldier more than in case of alarms, coolly and calmly repairing to his post, and there waiting his orders; whereas a weak curiosity at such a time makes a man look mean and contemptible.

Knox wrote privately that while the loss of his six men had been a great misfortune, he consoled himself with the hope that the day’s action had taught the rest to be less “impetuous” the next time.

But there was a far larger, more ominous lesson in what had happened. Clearly if two enemy warships with their tenders could pass so swiftly and readily up the Hudson suffering no serious damage from the onshore batteries, then so could ten or twenty warships and transports, or for that matter, an entire British fleet, and by landing an army of 10,000 or more upriver, they could cut off any chance Washington and his forces might have for escape from New York.

To compound Washington’s torment, the day’s drama closed in late afternoon with the spectacle of the 64-gun HMS Eagle steadily advancing up the bay with all canvas spread and the flag of St. George flying at the foretop masthead, signifying it was the flagship of Admiral Lord Howe and that therefore the fleet from England and still more troops could not be far behind. In the gathering dusk of New York, the boom of a Royal Navy salute came rolling across the waters.

III

MORALE IN THE BRITISH RANKS had never been higher. After the miseries of the winter in Boston and months of bleak isolation at Halifax, then more wearisome weeks at sea, Staten Island in summer seemed a paradise.

“[We] are in very comfortable cantonments amongst a loyal and liberal people, who produce [supply] us in plenty and in agreeable variety all the necessaries of life, most of which we have been long deprived of,” wrote a British officer. “We are in the most beautiful island that nature could form or art improve,” declared another. “Here,” reported a third, “we experience greater luxury than we have done since the commencement of hostilities…fresh meat…eggs, butter, milk, and vegetables,” and all on “reasonable terms.”

Captain Archibald Robertson hiked to the nearby hills with his painting kit to do watercolor sketches as he had at Boston. The difference here was the greater scale of everything spread before him—the sweep of the surpassing harbor defined by New York and Long Island in the distance, and the far larger British fleet now riding at anchor in the middle foreground.

The red-coated soldiers found themselves well nourished and welcome on American soil in a way they had never been—indeed, openly greeted “with greatest joy.” “We have now a very good supply of salt provisions,” summarized still another officer, “a great quantity of rum, an immense quantity of ammunition of all kinds, and what is best of all, the very people who we suspected would oppose us are coming over to us in great numbers.” Hardly a day passed without distraught Loyalists or American deserters turning up, filled with tales of woe, many of them having crossed at night by boat from Long Island or New York.

Ambrose Serle, a patriotic young Englishman and fluent writer who served as a civilian secretary to Admiral Howe, recorded in his journal how his heart went out to the Loyalists. “It excited one’s sympathy to see their poor meager faces,” he wrote of several who had escaped from Long Island, “and to hear their complaints of being hunted for their lives like game into the woods and swamps, only because they would not renounce their allegiance to their King and affection for their country.”

For deserters there was considerably less sympathy and little or no trust. There was “no believing these poor deluded wretches,” wrote Colonel Charles Stuart, summing up what most British officers felt. General James Grant thought no American could be trusted, Loyalists any more than the rest. “The inhabitants of this island,” Grant concluded from his observations, “hate the rebel army because they have been oppressed by them…. But from the confession and conversation of our most loyal subjects of Staten Island, I am quite confirmed in my opinion that we have not a friend in America.”

This, however, was not the view of the more astute General Howe, who saw immediately in the Loyalists an advantage he had been denied at Boston. “I met with Governor Tryon on board of ship at the Hook, and many gentlemen, fast friends to [the] government attending him, from whom I have had the fullest information on the state of the rebels,” Howe had reported to Lord Germain, on July 7, just days after landing at Staten Island.

News of the Declaration of Independence served only to underscore “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people,” an outraged Ambrose Serle observed. “A more impudent, false, and atrocious proclamation was never fabricated by the hands of man.”

Soldiers in his Majesty’s ranks talked of “the sporting season” about to begin. The lust for the hunt was stronger than ever, their officers happily took note. All rebels were fair game. “The troops hold them very cheap,” wrote Serle, “and long for an opportunity of revenging the cause of their countrymen who fell at Bunker Hill.”

Lord Rawdon, a veteran of Bunker Hill and of the siege of Boston who had taken delight in the hatred his men felt for Yankees, was cheered now by the number of soldiers being court-martialed for rape, this being perfect proof, he wrote, of their improved diet and of what a “spirited” lot they were.

The fair nymphs of this isle are in wonderful tribulation, as the fresh meat our men have got here has made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished, and they are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation, and of consequence we have most entertaining courts-martial every day.

Yet the courts-martial were themselves proof that such conduct was no laughing matter to the British command, and in fact those convicted faced punishment far more severe than what was customarily dispensed in the American army.

Writing earlier to the Earl of Huntingdon, the handsome Lord Rawdon had expressed the hope that “we shall soon have done with these [American] scoundrels, for one only dirties one’s fingers by meddling with them. I do not imagine they can possibly last out beyond this campaign, if you give us the necessary means of carrying on the war with vigor.” Now, with “the necessary means” gathering in such heartening numbers on Staten Island, he eagerly anticipated the moment when the “Yankee psalm-singers,” as he loved to call them, crossed paths with the likes of the newly arrived Scottish Highlanders armed with their murderous broadswords.

Through telescopes a dozen or more distant rebel camps could be distinctly seen, and the enemy appeared “very numerous.” From what could be learned from Loyalists and deserters, rebel strength in New York and on Long Island was overestimated to be between 30,000 and 35,000. But few if any of the British doubted that the conflict ahead would prove fatal to the rebel army, or that it would be exceedingly bloody.

Among many officers the chief worry was that the Americans might not fight. As one wrote anonymously in a letter published in London’s Morning Chronicle, “Our only fear is that the rebels will not choose to hazard a general action…. If…they are determined to act upon the defensive only…our work will never be done.”

Even before the successful dash of the Phoenix and the Rose up the Hudson, it had been assumed by many British officers that the assault on New York would be made to the north, and thus the army would advance on the city from the undefended rear, while the Royal Navy let loose with a heavy bombardment from the rivers and harbor. But General Howe was saying little of his plans, except that the wait would continue until full reinforcements had arrived. The general, too, was enjoying the comparative comforts of Staten Island, as well as the company of the comely Mrs. Loring, and characteristically he appeared to be in no hurry.

To what extent his brother the admiral would influence or even determine strategy henceforth was an open question, and important, since both the admiral and the general had been lately assigned by the King to serve in the oddly ambiguous, potentially conflicting, role of peace commissioners.

The general was known to want a “decisive action” as the surest way to wind things up quickly—which was also the adamant view of George Lord Germain, from whom he took his orders—and unlike some of his officers, he was certain the Americans would fight. In a letter written before sailing for New York from Halifax, he had said they were undoubtedly spoiling for a fight, that “flushed with the idea of superiority after the evacuation of Boston, [they] may be readier brought to a decisive action,” and that nothing was “more to be desired or sought for” as the most effective means “to terminate this expensive war.”

Whether the admiral carried an olive branch or a sword was unclear. But his presence on the Eagle and the prospect of more men-of-war and transports arriving had a huge effect. The admiral was a renowned fighting sailor, and as the older, less self-indulgent of the brothers—and with an even darker, gloomier cast to his expression—“Black Dick,” as he was known affectionately, was thought to be the wiser of the two.

The fact that they were of like mind on most matters military and political, and got along well, seemed to preclude the friction and jealousies between the Royal Navy and the army frequently endemic to such joint operations. Whatever strategy was resolved, the assumption was that the sea and land forces would work in close cooperation and harmony.

ON SATURDAY, JULY 13, General Howe and his staff, joined by Royal Governor Tryon, dined with the admiral in his cabin on board the Eagle. The discussion “turned upon military affairs, upon the country, and upon the rebels,” and lasted well into the evening.

The next day came another surprise move when Lord Howe sent a picked officer from the Eagle, Lieutenant Philip Brown, across the bay to New York under a flag of truce carrying a letter addressed to “George Washington, Esq.” Brown was met by Joseph Reed, who on Washington’s orders had hurried to the waterfront accompanied by Henry Knox and Samuel Webb.

“I have a letter, sir, from Lord Howe to Mr. Washington,” Lieutenant Brown began.

“Sir,” replied Reed, “we have no person in our army with that address.”

When Brown asked by what title Mr. Washington chose to be addressed, Reed replied, “You are sensible, sir, of the rank of General Washington in our army.”

“Yes, sir, we are,” answered Brown. “I am sure Lord Howe will lament exceedingly this affair, as the letter is quite of a civil nature and not a military one.”

Lord Howe also lamented “exceedingly that he was not here sooner,” Brown added, implying that the admiral regretted not arriving in New York before the Declaration of Independence.

Brown returned to the Eagle to report the response of the Americans. (“So high is the vanity and the insolence of these men!” huffed Ambrose Serle in his journal.) But the admiral persisted. Three days later, Brown departed again under a white flag, the letter now addressed to “George Washington, Esq., etc., etc.” But again it was declined.

The day after the admiral made a third try, this time sending a different messenger, a captain named Nisbet Balfour, to inquire whether General Washington would receive the adjutant general to General Howe, Colonel James Paterson. This time the answer was yes.

Thus exactly at noon, Saturday, July 20, Colonel Paterson arrived at New York and was escorted directly to No. 1 Broadway, where he met Washington with all due formality, with Reed, Knox, and others in attendance.

Washington’s guard stood at attention at the entrance. Washington, as Knox wrote, was “very handsomely dressed and made a most elegant appearance,” while Paterson conducted himself with what Reed considered “the greatest politeness and attention.”

Seated across a table from Washington, Paterson assured him that Lord Howe did not mean to “derogate from the respect or rank of General Washington.” Both Lord and General Howe held the “person and character” of General Washington “in highest esteem,” Paterson said. But when he took from his pocket the same letter—addressed still to “George Washington, Esq., etc., etc.”—and placed it on the table between them, Washington let it lie, pointedly refusing to touch it.

The use of “etc., etc.” implied everything that ought to follow, Paterson offered by way of explanation. “It so does,” said Washington, “and anything.” A letter addressed to a person in a position of public responsibility ought to indicate that station, Washington said, otherwise it would appear mere private correspondence. He would not accept such a letter.

Paterson talked of the “goodness” and “benevolence” of the King, who had appointed Lord and General Howe as commissioners to “accommodate this unhappy dispute.” As Reed would write in a report to Congress—a report soon published in the Pennsylvania Journal—Washington replied simply that he was “not vested with any powers on this subject by those from whom he derived his authority and power.”

It was his understanding, Washington continued, that Lord Howe had come out from London with authority only to grant pardons. If that was so, he had come to the wrong place.

“Those who have committed no fault want no pardon,” Washington said plainly. “We are only defending what we deem our indisputable rights.”

According to Henry Knox, the English officer appeared as “awestruck as if before something super-natural.”

Paterson said he lamented that an “adherence to forms” might “obstruct business of the greatest moment and concern.”

The meeting over, as Paterson himself would write, the general “with a great deal of marked attention and civility permitted me to take my leave.”

It had been a scene that those in the room would long remember. Washington had performed his role to perfection. It was not enough that a leader look the part; by Washington’s rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision. John Adams would later describe Washington approvingly as one of the great actors of the age.

To Washington it had been an obligatory farce. He had no faith, no trust whatever in any peace overtures by the British, however properly rendered. He had agreed to take part in such an “interview,” one senses, partly to show the British—and his own staff—that he could go through the motions quite as well as any officer and gentleman, but more importantly to send a message to the British command absent any ambiguity. And in this he was unmistakably successful.

As Lord Howe would report to Lord Germain on the prospect of an accommodation acceptable to the King, the “interview…induced me to change my subscription for the attainment of an end so desirable.”

BRITISH SHIPS KEPT ARRIVING, their sails at first tiny glints on the eastern horizon, then growing steadily larger by the hour as they came up through the Narrows. Samuel Webb counted five ships on July 25, eight on July 26. On July 29 another twenty arrived.

A midsummer drought had set in; the heat was fierce. Just as the winter of 1776 had been one of extreme cold, so the summer was one of extreme heat. “No air, and the thermometer at 94 degrees,” recorded Ambrose Serle on board the Eagle.

Henry Knox, writing to Lucy at his desk at No. 1 Broadway, said he had never worked so hard or felt so done in by the heat.

I generally rise with or a little before the sun and immediately, with part of the regiment attend prayers, sing a psalm or read a chapter [of the Bible]. I dispatch a considerable deal of business before breakfast. From breakfast to dinner I am boiling in a sun hot enough to roast an egg. Indeed, my dear Lucy, I never suffered so much from fatigue in my life.

On August 1, a swarm of forty-five ships carrying Generals Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis and some 3,000 troops were sighted off Sandy Hook, newly returned from South Carolina and making “a very fine appearance,” in the eyes of the exultant British.

To the Americans the ships and Clinton’s army were as unexpected as “if they had dropped from the clouds.”

And still ships kept coming.

On August 4, Nathanael Greene reported that another twenty-one had been counted on the horizon, the whole of Lord Howe’s fleet. And as if to underscore the ambiguity of the admiral’s mission, transports loaded with troops bore such names as Good Intent, Friendship, Amity’s Admonition, and Father’s Good Will.

“We have had so many arrivals of late,” wrote a nearly giddy Ambrose Serle, “that the rebel commanders, we learn, give out to their people that we send ships down in the night, which come up in the course of the next day, as a maneuver to intimidate them.”

Joseph Reed, writing to a friend, said that no fewer than a hundred ships had arrived within ten days, and as yet only part of the “foreign” (Hessian) troops had come in. Reed, it appears, was indeed intimidated. For the first time he expressed great misgivings over the wisdom of even trying to defend New York against such a force. “It is a mere point of honor that keeps us here now.” He had a different strategy in mind.

“My opinion is,” he wrote, “we should make it a war of posts, prolong, procrastinate, avoid any general action, or indeed any action, unless we have great advantages.”

As things were, he saw no advantages. To what degree he was pressing such views on his commander by this time is not known.

Even stalwart, optimistic Henry Knox suffered his own private anguish. “I shrink and tremble at the importance of our present conduct—the weight absolute without alleviation of perhaps posterity on the shoulders of the present army, an army, I am sorry to say, [that] is not sufficiently numerous to resist the formidable attacks which will probably be made,” he told his brother in a letter of August 5.

Washington remained determined to make a stand, convinced still that the city must be defended.

On August 12 the sea beyond the Narrows was filled with yet another one hundred ships or more bearing down on New York, a fleet so large that it took all day for them to come up the harbor under full canvas, colors flying, guns saluting, sailors and soldiers on the ships and on shore cheering themselves hoarse.

In addition, another 3,000 British troops and more than 8,000 Hessians had arrived after an arduous three months at sea.

Nothing like it had ever been seen in New York. Housetops were covered with “gazers”; all wharves that offered a view were jammed with people. The total British armada now at anchor in a “long, thick cluster” off Staten Island numbered nearly four hundred ships large and small, seventy-three warships, including eight ships of the line, each mounting 50 guns or more. As British officers happily reminded one another, it was the largest fleet ever seen in American waters. In fact, it was the largest expeditionary force of the eighteenth century, the largest, most powerful force ever sent forth from Britain or any nation.

But it was also true that as big as the biggest ships were—and to Americans who had never seen anything like them, they were colossal—they could have been bigger still. Even the Asia and Eagle were small compared to other ships in the British fleet. HMS Victory, for example, mounted fully 98 guns. Concerned about the difficulties of clearing the shallows of Sandy Hook and negotiating the East River and the Hudson, Admiral Lord Howe had wisely chosen speed and maneuverability over size and more massive firepower.

Still, by the scale of things in the American colonies of 1776, it was a display of military might past imagining. All told, 32,000 troops had landed on Staten Island, a well-armed, well-equipped, trained force more numerous than the entire population of New York or even Philadelphia, which, with a population of about 30,000, was the largest city in America.

Joseph Reed, writing to his wife, expressed what many felt:

When I look down and see the prodigious fleet they have collected, the preparations they have made, and consider the vast expenses incurred, I cannot help being astonished that a people should come 3,000 miles at such risk, trouble and expense to rob, plunder and destroy another people because they will not lay their lives and fortunes at their feet.

IN THE TENT ENCAMPMENTS dotting Staten Island the redcoats were in holiday spirits. But so it was, also, on the American side, among such veterans of the Boston campaign as Jabez Fitch in camp in New York, and Joseph Hodgkins, on Long Island, who had no doubt the troops would give a good account of themselves, whatever was to come.

Their confidence was bolstered in large degree by distorted notions of their own strength. It was true enough that the enemy was “coming in almost every day,” wrote Hodgkins to his wife, and they might number as many as 25,000. Yet she need not worry, “for we have 42,000 men now and they are coming in every day.” One newspaper said the American army numbered 70,000.

Many of the new arrivals looked the way soldiers were supposed to, in smart uniforms and well armed, and they marched into town full of pride. Delaware, the smallest colony, had sent the largest battalion in the army, “the Delaware Blues,” a force of 800 turned out in handsome red-trimmed blue coats, white waistcoats, buckskin breeches, white woolen stockings, and carrying fine, “lately imported” English muskets. The proud Maryland battalion commanded by General William Smallwood was composed of “men of honor, family, and fortune,” and, if anything, they were even better armed and more dazzling in scarlet coats lined with buff. Colonel John Glover’s tough Massachusetts fishermen wore the blue jackets of sailors, white shirts, white breeches and caps, while their short, stocky, red-haired commander had silver lace trim on his blue broadcloth coat and carried a brace of silver pistols.

But while the incoming stream of reinforcements had become a daily spectacle, desertions were increasing by the day, and signing up new recruits was proving ever more difficult, in part because that summer of 1776 was a bumper year on American farms and men could rightly claim to be needed at home. “Their complaints are without number,” the colonel of a Connecticut regiment wrote.

Some have got ten or twelve loads of hay cut, and not a man left to take it up. Some have got a great quantity of grass to cut. Some have not finished hoeing corn. Some, if not all, have got their ploughing to do, for sowing their winter grain. Some have all their families sick, and not a person left to take care of them.

In the oppressive summer heat in New York and on Long Island, camp fever had become epidemic. When Lieutenant Hodgkins allowed to his wife Sarah that “a good many of our people are poorly,” that was hardly the half of it. (Hodgkins was worried sick over his youngest child, a two-year-old son and namesake, who, he had learned, was deathly ill at home, and he was no doubt trying to spare her still more worry.) In the regiment in which Jabez Fitch served, 180 men, nearly two-thirds of the regiment, including the commanding officer, Colonel Jedediah Huntington, were too sick for duty. “Sickness prevails greatly in camp,” recorded a regimental surgeon, Albigence Waldo, adding that in other camps conditions were worse.

“The vile water here sickens us all,” wrote the New Jersey chaplain Philip Fithian, who was himself ill.

One died this morning in our hospital of a dysentery…. Two died yesterday in the New England hospital of a dysentery, and thirty more are confined with it and other putrid disorders.

Many also through the camp are much unwell but will not go to [the] hospital. Poor Mr. Donaldson, my old neighbor, is among these. Yesterday he went to the hospital, but crawled back to his tent this morning, and resolves there to die rather than return.

As they had so often at Boston, Washington and his generals insisted on all possible cleanliness. Nathanael Greene, in particular, gave repeated orders that the camp be kept clean, that the vaults—as latrines were known—were covered with fresh earth daily, and new vaults dug weekly.

The general also forbids in the most positive terms [Greene had written in his orders of July 28] the troops easing themselves in the ditches of the fortifications, a practice that is disgraceful to the last degree. If these matters are not attended to, the stench arising from such places will soon breed a pestilence in the camp.

It was thought that anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 men were sick. “The numbers of his [Washington’s] men are daily diminishing,” wrote an English visitor who had recently “escaped from the provincials” at New York.

They desert in large bodies, are sickly, filthy, divided, and unruly. Putrid disorders, the small pox in particular, have carried off great numbers. When I left the city there were six thousand in their hospitals, to which use they have converted King’s College.

General Heath would later estimate that 10,000 of the army were ill. “In almost every barn, stable, shed, and even under the fences and bushes, were the sick to be seen, whose countenances were but an index of the dejection of spirit and the distress they endured.” And those who had not yet been “taken down” lived with the constant dread that their turn could be next.

“These things are melancholy, but they are nevertheless true,” Washington reported to John Hancock. “I hope for better.”

Under every disadvantage my utmost exertions shall be employed to bring about the great end we have in view, and so far as I can judge from the professions and apparent disposition of my troops, I shall have their support. The superiority of the enemy and the expected attack do not seem to have depressed their spirits.

It had been a long time waiting. By mid-August it had been more than four months since the army had set off from Boston for New York, and hurry was the order of the day. The British had not arrived until the end of June and then, instead of attacking at once, as Washington expected, they had kept him watching and waiting week after week, as still more of their navy and more troops arrived. Whatever their plans or however little time remained in the “season for action,” they seemed, inexplicably, in no hurry whatever.

Washington’s quandary over where the British would strike, and how to apportion the strength he had, was no less extreme now than it had been at the start. Greene and Reed, whose judgment he valued most, were certain the enemy would attack Long Island, both because of the numbers of Loyalists there and the broad accessible beaches where troops could readily land under the protection of British ships.

But Washington worried that a landing on Long Island might be a diversion in advance of a full assault on New York. And with no way of knowing, he felt compelled now to violate one of the oldest, most fundamental rules of battle, never to divide your strength when faced by a superior force. He split his army in roughly equal parts on the theory that he could move men one way or the other over the East River according to how events unfolded.

In a long report to Washington dated August 15, Greene stressed a further cause for concern. The new troops coming over to Long Island, besides being undisciplined, inexperienced, poorly armed, and poorly equipped, were “strangers to the ground.” They had no familiarity with the lay of the land, a subject Greene considered of greatest importance. “They will not be so apt to support each other in time of action as those who have long been acquainted, and who are not only attached to each other but to the place.”

He confirmed that the troops were in “exceeding good spirits,” and that, like Washington, he took heart from this. Only at the conclusion did he acknowledge with regret that he was confined to his bed with a raging fever. Greene, the officer who had been the most concerned of all about the health of the troops, was himself stricken at the crucial hour.

AT MEETINGS of the British high command, General Henry Clinton had been making a case for an attack at the northern end of York Island, up the Hudson, but in one conference after another found he could get nowhere with William Howe, who had other plans.

On the morning of Sunday, August 18, taking advantage of a strong northeasterly wind, the Phoenix and the Rose “passed briskly” back down the Hudson to rejoin the fleet. At one point during their sojourn upriver, the Americans had sent a fireship—a ship set ablaze—against the Phoenix, but to no avail; and on the return passage, American guns had blasted away as before, “like incessant thunders,” and again without much effect.

If anyone among the American command saw the return of the two enemy ships from upriver as a sign of trouble, there is no record of it.

The day after, August 19, Washington had a number of old ships sunk at the mouth of the East River, between the Battery and Governor’s Island, in the hope they would stop the British fleet from any attempt at getting between New York and Brooklyn.

Captain William Tudor, the judge advocate, described the whole army as impatient for action. Spade and pick had been so well employed, wrote “Billy” Tudor, that there was “scarce a spot” left undefended. “From the advantage we now possess, I think General Howe must be repulsed whenever he attacks, but should he be able to carry the island, it must be with so prodigious a loss that victory will be ruin.” At the least, in other words, it would be Bunker Hill all over again.

On August 20, Washington learned that Nathanael Greene, upon whom he counted more than anyone, had taken a turn for the worse. Knox, in letters to his wife, reported that “poor General Greene” was “dangerously ill,” “sick nearly to death.” Left no choice, Washington relieved Greene of command, and the stricken general was moved from Brooklyn Heights across the river to the “airy” safety of a house several miles above New York.

In Greene’s place, Washington put the headstrong John Sullivan, who had recently returned from Canada and who had nothing like Greene’s ability or judgment. Further, Sullivan was, in Greene’s expression, a complete “stranger to the ground” on Long Island.

Writing to John Hancock earlier, Washington had offered a candid appraisal of Sullivan as “spirited and zealously attached to the Cause,” but also a man touched with a “tincture of vanity” and too great a “desire of being popular.” Then, generously and realistically, Washington conceded that everyone in command of the army suffered from a greater, more serious failing, himself included. “His wants,” Washington said of Sullivan, “are common to us all; the want of experience to move upon a large scale.”

AT SOME POINT in the course of Wednesday, August 21, Washington scratched off a quick note to John Hancock to say only that he had “nothing special” to communicate.

That same day, at a country estate near Elizabethtown, New Jersey, General William Livingston, a former member of Congress and newly in command of the New Jersey militia, wrote in “utmost haste” to Washington that a spy he had sent to Staten Island had just returned to report that the British were about to attack, both on Long Island and up the Hudson, and that the attack could come any hour, “this night at farthest.”

The reply from Washington, written in Joseph Reed’s hand, said, “We have made no discovery of any movement here of any consequence.”

Chapter Five

Field of Battle

Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of liberty.

—General George Washington

I

ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 21, 1776, a terrifying storm broke over New York, a storm as vicious as any in living memory, and for those who saw omens in such unleashed fury from the elements—those familiar with the writings of the Roman historian Livy, say, or the plays of Shakespeare, of whom there were many—a night so violent seemed filled with portent.

Chroniclers Philip Fithian, Ambrose Serle, and Pastor Ewald Shewkirk called it “a storm like a hurricane,” “a most terrible storm,” “the most vehement I ever saw,” “an uncommon…awful scene.” A Connecticut officer on Brooklyn Heights, Major Abner Benedict, would describe how, at seven o’clock, a monstrous thundercloud rose in the west. Looming higher and higher, “it was surcharged with electricity, for the lightning was constantly searching it from limit to limit,” he wrote. It began to rain. “Then followed a crash louder than a thousand cannon…. In a few minutes the entire heavens became black as ink, and from horizon to horizon the whole empyrean was ablaze with lightning.” The thunder did not follow in successive peals, but in one “continuous crash.”

The storm raged for three hours, yet strangely the cloud appeared to stand still, “and swing round and round,” over the city. “The lightning fell in masses and sheets of fire to the earth, and seemed to strike incessantly and on every side.”

Houses burst into flame. Ten soldiers camped by the East River, below Fort Stirling, were killed in a single flash. In New York, a soldier hurrying through the streets was struck deaf, blind, and mute. In another part of town three officers were killed by a single thunderbolt. A later report described how the tips of their swords and coins in their pockets had been melted, their bodies turned as black as if roasted.

To Major Benedict the roar and bloodshed of battle were something to be expected. “But there seems hidden meaning, some secret purpose, when the bolt is launched by an invisible arm, and from the mysterious depth of space.”

He could not account for the cloud remaining stationary for so long, unless, he speculated, “the vast amount of arms collected in and about the city held it by attraction and drew from it such a fearful amount of electricity.”

BEFORE DAWN THE FOLLOWING DAY, Thursday, August 22, the sky was clear and cloudless, as if nothing unusual had happened. And with a fresh morning breeze and roll of drums, the long-awaited British invasion of Long Island got under way.

The frigates Phoenix (with Lord Howe aboard), Rose, and Greyhound, and two bomb ketches, the Carcass and the Thunder (vessels equipped for shore bombardment), swung loose from their moorings and stood down the Narrows to take their positions to cover the landing. Then, at approximately five o’clock, with day beginning to break, an advance corps—4,000 of the King’s elite troops led by Generals Clinton and Cornwallis—pushed off, the men packed aboard scores of flatboats (these built during the time on Staten Island) with British sailors at the oars.

Slowly but steadily, in glorious early sunshine, the invasion force proceeded across three miles of water, until, at precisely eight o’clock, at the flash of a signal gun from the Phoenix, all 4,000 troops went ashore on the long, flat, empty beach at Gravesend Bay.

Everything had been carefully prepared, every move of the army and navy carefully coordinated. The landing was as smooth as if it had been rehearsed, and there was no opposition. The comparative few of Colonel Edward Hand’s Pennsylvania riflemen posted near the shore had already withdrawn, driving off or killing cattle as they went, and burning wheat fields and farm buildings. The dense columns of smoke rising in the air could be seen in New York eight miles away.

As more troops followed, a naval spectacle of more than ninety vessels filled the Narrows. Wave after wave of soldiers came on, their red coats and polished bayonets gleaming in the bright sunshine. One battalion of blue-coated Hessian grenadiers was ferried over standing in ranks, muskets in hand and in order of battle. By noon a fully equipped army of 15,000 men and forty pieces of artillery had landed and rapidly, smoothly assembled in perfect formation on the adjacent plain. And still more would follow, including the women who were with the army.

Loyalists by the hundreds converged to welcome the invaders, many of them bringing long-hidden supplies of all kinds. The welcome was more effusive even than it had been on Staten Island. Meanwhile, Cornwallis and the advance guard pressed directly inland for six miles to establish a camp at the little Dutch village of Flatbush, near the wooded Heights of Gowan.

It all made a picturesque scene, wrote Ambrose Serle—

15,000 troops upon a fine beach…[then] forming upon the adjacent plain…. Ships and vessels with their sails spread open to dry, the sun shining clear upon them, the green hills and meadows after the rain…. Add to all this, the vast importance of the business…and the mind feels itself wonderfully engaged.

British sailors who came ashore “regaled themselves with the fine apples, which hung everywhere upon the trees in great abundance,” Serle continued. “It was really diverting to see sailors and apples tumbling from the trees together.”

But other aspects of the scene were anything but picturesque. A Hessian officer, Lieutenant Johann Heinrich von Bardeleben, described burned-out houses, fields in ashes, roads lined with dead cattle, and old people looking with sadness at what “appeared previously to have been a paradise standing in blooming abundance.”

Our regiment was camped amidst orchards of apple and pear trees…. Here, too, the picture of destruction was to be seen on all sides. Almost everywhere there were chests of drawers, chairs, mirrors with gold-gilded frames, porcelain, and all sorts of items of the best and most expensive manufacture.

The Hessian and British troops alike were astonished to find Americans blessed with such abundance—substantial farmhouses and fine furnishings. “In all the fields the finest fruit is to be found,” Lieutenant von Bardeleben wrote after taking a walk on his own, away from the path of destruction. “The peach and apple trees are especially numerous…. The houses, in part, are made only of wood and the furnishing in them are excellent. Comfort, beauty, and cleanliness are readily apparent.”

To many of the English, such affluence as they saw on Long Island was proof that America had indeed grown rich at the expense of Great Britain.

In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. Their material wealth was considerably less than it would become in time, still it was a great deal more than others had elsewhere. How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was for the invaders incomprehensible.

WORD REACHED NEW YORK early in the day, but Washington was badly misinformed about the size of the enemy force that had come ashore. Told that there were 8,000 or 9,000, he quickly concluded the landing was the feint he had expected, and consequently he dispatched only 1,500 more troops across the East River to Brooklyn, bringing the total American strength on Long Island to something less than 6,000 men. The expectation of another, larger strike by the British at New York or up the Hudson persisted. But then no one seemed to know what was going on.

Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, whose Connecticut regiment was one of those ordered across the river, wrote in his diary of being marched forward at Brooklyn about a mile before being told to halt and wait for further orders.

While we are waiting we hear many various reports concerning the enemy, some say they are within four miles of us, others, two and a half. Others say they have not advanced more than a mile from where they landed, which is near ten miles. So on the whole we know not what to believe concerning them until we can see them.

Colonel Moses Little, whose information was remarkably accurate, reported to his son that the enemy was within three miles, and said in the same letter, “I have thought fit to send you my will.”

Meanwhile, impressive numbers of Connecticut reinforcements had been arriving in New York. Only that day, twelve Connecticut regiments paraded in the city. “Almost one half of the grand army now consists of Connecticut troops!” an officer boasted to his wife. The whole army, noted Joseph Reed, was in better spirits than he had ever seen.

Not until the following day, August 23, did Washington confirm in his general orders that the British had come ashore on Long Island. Leaving no doubt about the seriousness of the moment for every man in the army, he appealed to their pride and patriotism and love of liberty.

The hour is fast approaching, on which the honor and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men.

Nor should they forget that they faced an enemy who held them in contempt.

Remember how your courage and spirit have been despised and traduced by your cruel invaders, though they have found by dear experience at Boston, Charlestown, and other places, what a few brave men contending in their own land, and in the best of causes can do, against base hirelings and mercenaries.

They must be “cool but determined.” And again, as at Boston, he threatened instant death to any man who showed cowardice.

To General Heath, in command of defenses to the north at King’s Bridge, Washington sent a message saying he dared not weaken his forces in New York until he could be certain of the enemy’s real intentions.

“I have never been afraid of the force of the enemy,” Heath answered. “I am more so of their arts. They must be well watched. They, like the Frenchman, look one way and row the other.”

Joseph Reed, who was as close to Washington as anyone, expressed the same extreme concern. “The greatest vigilance is had to prevent a surprise,” he wrote, “which we have to fear more than anything.”

Washington crossed to Brooklyn that afternoon to confer with General Sullivan. There had been some minor skirmishing only, he was told, and he returned to New York still more convinced that Howe had yet to commit his full force.

If the British had made no advance on New York with their fleet since landing on Long Island, he reported to Congress, that could very well be because it was not in their power. For days the wind had either been head-on against them or too little when the tide served.

Washington was beset by second thoughts. On August 24, he reshuffled the command at Brooklyn, placing Israel Putnam over Sullivan, a move likely to unsettle the troops who had seen the stricken Greene replaced by Sullivan, and now Sullivan superseded by Putnam all in a matter of days.

Brave, popular “Old Put” might be the man to boost morale, but he had neither the experience nor the temperament to direct so large a force under such conditions and was thus a poor choice, as Washington seems to have realized almost at once.

Putnam and six battalions crossed to Brooklyn early the next day, a Sunday, causing a great stir. “Scarcely were religious services finished,” wrote Abner Benedict, “when strains of martial music were heard from the ferry, and not long after column after column came winding up the Heights toward the fort…. The general was received with loud cheers, and his presence inspired universal confidence.”

The day’s orders from Sullivan deplored the disorder and unsoldierly behavior displayed in the camps on the eve of battle. Yet soldiers were here, there, and everywhere, strolling about as if on holiday, some of them miles from the lines. “Carts and horses driving every way among the army,” wrote Philip Fithian. “Men marching out and coming in…. Small arms and field pieces continually firing. All in tumult.”

The contrast between such disorder and flagrant disregard for authority and the perfectly orchestrated landing by Howe’s troops could not have been more pronounced.

Arriving at Brooklyn, Washington was outraged by what he saw, and in a letter written later in the day, he lectured Old Put as he might the greenest lieutenant. All “irregularities” must cease at once. “The distinction between a well regulated army and a mob is the good order and discipline of the first, and the licentious and disorderly behavior of the latter.”

Seeing things as they were, not as he would wish they were, was known to be one of Washington’s salient strengths, and having witnessed firsthand the “loose, disorderly, and unsoldierlike” state of things among the troops at Brooklyn, and knowing how outnumbered they were by the enemy, he might have ordered an immediate withdrawal back to New York while there was still time. But he did not, nor is there any evidence that such a move was even considered.

In New York all the while, more than half the army, including many of his best troops and best officers, like Henry Knox, waited in anxious expectation of an attack there. “We expect the fleet up every tide if the wind serves,” wrote a Connecticut colonel, William Douglas.

That same Sunday another 5,000 Hessians crossed the Narrows from Staten Island bringing Howe’s total forces on Long Island to 20,000.

WASHINGTON RETURNED AGAIN to Brooklyn early the following day, August 26, to confer still again with his commanders and appraise the defenses and deployment of troops. Almost certainly he rode beyond Brooklyn to the Heights of Gowan, where from the ridge line he could have seen the white tents of the British spread across the plain at Flatlands. (“General Washington, with a number of general officers went down to view the motion of the enemy,” reads one account.) With his telescope, he could well have watched Howe’s troops on their daily parade.

The plan was for General Putnam to direct the entire defense from the fortifications on Brooklyn Heights. Generals Sullivan and Stirling and their troops were to be positioned well forward on the “out work” of the wooded ridge, to cover the few main roads or passes through that long, natural barrier.

The Gowanus Road was on the far right, near the Narrows. The Flatbush Road was at the center and thought to be the way the British would come. A third, the Bedford Road, was off to the left. All three were comparatively narrow cuts through the ridge and thus “easily defensible.”

The ridge of hills and woods was all that separated the two armies but was seen by the Americans as the ideal forward line of defense, and so to their decided advantage. Joseph Reed, doubtless reflecting Washington’s view, deemed it “very important.” The fight when it came would surely come there, in the woods, where, it was agreed, Americans fought best.

Stirling was responsible for the Gowanus Road on the right, where about 500 troops were posted. Sullivan had command of both the Flatbush Road at the center, where 1,000 were deployed, and the Bedford Road, on the left flank, where another 800 or so were positioned under Colonel Samuel Miles of Pennsylvania. In the absence of uniforms, every man was to put a sprig of green in his hat as identification.

Washington’s specific order to Putnam, who knew almost nothing about Long Island, having visited there only occasionally, was to position his best troops forward and “at all hazards prevent the enemy’s passing the wood and approaching the works.”

As things stood, a force of fewer than 3,000 soldiers, nearly all of whom had had no experience in battle, were expected to hold a ridge four miles long, while the rest, another 6,000, remained within the Brooklyn forts. In all, the outposts stretched six miles. The terrain was so rugged that units had trouble communicating, and so thickly wooded that in places men were blind to any movement beyond a hundred feet.

Had there been American cavalry to serve as “eyes and ears,” or had there been reliable intelligence, the defenders might have had a better chance. But there was neither. The Continental Army had no cavalry. Congress had not considered cavalry necessary, nor had Washington asked for any. And however adamant he was about the value of spies, as circumstances were, he had none.

Nor in the five days since the British landing had anyone been stationed at a fourth, lesser-known pass on the far left, three miles east of the Bedford Road. The Jamaica Pass, as it was called, was narrower even than the others, and thus the easiest to defend. Yet nothing had been said in any of the orders of Sullivan, or Putnam, or Washington expressing concern about the Jamaica Pass or the need to post sufficient troops there.

Having looked things over and conferred with his commanders, Washington approved the plan, including, presumably, a last-minute idea of having the Jamaica Pass patrolled by five young militia officers who had horses.

Washington returned to New York that evening convinced at last that the British would make their “grand push” against Brooklyn. Or so he wrote to John Hancock. To General Heath he also wrote that by the “present appearance of things” the enemy would make their “capital impression” on Long Island. But then, as if still unable to make up his mind, he cautioned yet again that it might all be “only a feint to draw over our troops to that quarter, in order to weaken us here.”

His army, he knew, was ill prepared for what was to come. There was more sickness in the ranks than at any time before. Only a few of his officers had ever faced an enemy on the field of battle. He himself had never commanded an army in battle. His responsibilities, the never-ending “load of business,” weighed heavily. The same uncertainties that had vexed him in his first days of command at New York vexed him still. The enemy could not delay much longer. The time for warm-weather campaigning, “the season for action,” was fast waning, yet even now he consoled himself with the hope that he had a few more days before the enemy would strike.

It had been a long, anxious day, and in the privacy of his quarters in the Mortier house, Washington turned his mind—turned for relief it would seem—to thoughts of home. Alone at his desk, he wrote a long letter to his manager at Mount Vernon, Lund Washington, filled with thoughts on the marketing of flour and specific directions concerning work on additions to the house. For much of the letter it was as though he had nothing else on his mind.

I wish most ardently you could get the north end of the house covered in this fall, if you should be obliged to send all over Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania for nails to do it with. Unless this is done it will throw everything exceedingly backward—retard the design of planting trees…besides keeping the house in a disagreeable littered situation. It is equally my wish to have the chimneys run up. In short I would wish to have the whole closed in (if you were even to hire many workmen of different kinds to accomplish it).

Of the war he wrote that a few more days would likely “bring matters to an issue one way or other.” If he did not think the struggle just, nothing on earth could “compensate [for] the loss of all my domestic happiness and requite me for the load of business which constantly presses upon and deprives me of every enjoyment.”

What he may have written to his wife Martha that night, or at any point in the course of events to come, is unknown, since she later destroyed all but three of his letters to her, and these survived only by accident. His sleep that night was to be abbreviated, yet the most he would have for days.

GENERAL HENRY CLINTON, not an impressive man in looks or manner, had thus far in the war done little to show that appearances could be deceiving, and that he had, as he knew, marked intelligence and ability. For more than a year he had fared poorly in the service of his King. At Boston, he and William Howe had been continuously at odds, and he had failed most grievously (in his mind) to convince Howe to seize Dorchester Heights before the rebels did. Sent off to South Carolina, he had failed in his mission there. An attack on Fort Sullivan at Charleston in June had been such a humiliating defeat for the British that the campaign had to be abandoned, and largely because Clinton had been too cautious. Then, returning to New York, he had seen all his arguments for an invasion up the Hudson rejected out of hand by Howe.

Clinton knew his failings. He knew he could be difficult, inclined to “speak too freely,” that he was touchy and that in discussion his excessive zeal often worked to his disadvantage.

On paper, however, Henry Clinton could be bold and convincing, and he had returned from Charleston greatly changed in outlook. His defeat had convinced him that the war should be waged not to conquer territory but to destroy the rebel army by outflanking it whenever or wherever possible, if not by water, then on land. As a strategist, he knew well how to use a map. “Look at the map,” he would proclaim.

Soon after the landing at Gravesend, accompanied by another general, Sir William Erskine, and Lord Rawdon, Clinton had ridden off to reconnoiter the rebel defenses and the few passes through the wooded Heights of Gowan. Told by Loyalist farmers of the little-used Jamaica Pass beyond the Bedford Road, and that it appeared to be unguarded, the three British officers continued on to find that what they had been told was true.

Clinton immediately drew up a plan. This time, however, instead of going to Howe to make the case himself, he asked General Erskine to take what he had written to the headquarters at Flatlands. It read as follows:

The position which the rebels occupy in our front may be turned by a gorge about six miles from us, through a country in which cavalry may make the avant garde. That, once possessed, gives us the island; and in a mile or two further we shall be on the communications with their works at Brooklyn. The corps which attempts to turn this flank must be in very great force, for reasons too obvious to require detailing. The attack should begin on the enemy’s right by signal; and a share [should be] taken in it even by the fleet, which (as the tide will then suit) may get under way and make every demonstration of forcing by the enemy’s batteries in the East River, without, however, committing themselves. The efforts to be made by the army will be along the dos d’ane at the points of Flatbush, New Utrecht, etc. These [are] the principle [attacks]; many other small ones to cooperate. They should all be vigorous but not too obstinately persisted in, except that which is designed to turn the left of the rebels, which should be pushed as far as it will go. The moment this corps gets possession of the pass above Howard’s House [Howard’s Tavern], the rebels must quit directly or be ruined. I beg leave also to propose that this corps may begin to move at nightfall, so that everything may be [ready] at its ground by daybreak.

Several days passed. Then on August 26, the same day Washington spent looking things over at Brooklyn, Clinton was sent for and told by Howe that the attack would be made entirely according to his plan and to be prepared to march that night.

General Grant, with two brigades, was to make a “spirited” early-morning diversion close to the Narrows, striking at the enemy’s right. General Leopold Philipp von Heister’s Hessians, another 4,000 men, would move out from Flatbush to keep the Americans occupied at the center. In the meantime, the main body of the army would move under the cover of dark to be in position at daybreak.

Clinton was to command the advance guard on the night march, General Howe following with the rest of the main force, numbering in all 10,000 men.

IF ASKED TO DESCRIBE the common soldiers of the King’s army, the redcoats now falling in and dressing their ranks in the gathering dusk at Flatlands, most of the American soldiers who lay in wait for them would probably have said they were hardened, battle-scarred veterans, the sweepings of the London and Liverpool slums, debtors, drunks, common criminals and the like, who had been bullied and beaten into mindless obedience. It was the common American view. The truth was something else.

That the rank-and-file British regular was far better trained, better disciplined, better equipped, and more regularly paid than his American counterpart was beyond question, as the commanders on both sides well appreciated. Further, the redcoats were in far better health over all. Proper sanitation was part of British army life, and discipline in this regard was as strictly enforced as any aspect of the daily routine. Even after their long summer encampment on Staten Island, the British troops, as their officers noted repeatedly, were in excellent health, in striking contrast to the reports of rampant illness among the rebels.

In an effort to explain why the “provincials” would, in their own climate, be so afflicted with “putrid disorders,” while his Majesty’s troops, who were foreign to the climate, would enjoy near perfect health, the London Chronicle said the difference was the great cleanliness of the regulars.

Among the regular troops every private soldier is obliged to put on a clean shirt twice, perhaps three times a week, according to the season and climate; and there are a certain number of officers appointed every day to see that each man washes his own linen, if he had not a woman to do it for him.

While the dregs of society did indeed count among the King’s troops, the great majority were young countrymen from rural England, Scotland, and Ireland. They were farmers, unskilled laborers, and tradesmen—blacksmiths, cordwainers, carpenters, bakers, hatters, locksmiths, and weavers—who had been recruited, not pressed into service, drawn by the promise of clothing, food, and steady, if meager, pay, along with a chance at adventure, perhaps even a touch of glory. In their rural or small-town origins they were not greatly different from their American counterparts.

The average British regular was in his late twenties, or about five years older than the average American soldier, but the average regular had served five or six years in the army, or five or six times longer than the average volunteer under Washington. To the British rank-and-file there was nothing novel about being a soldier. The harsh life was their way of life. They carried themselves like soldiers. They had rules, regulations, and traditions down pat. They were proud to serve in His Majesty’s army, proud of the uniform, and fiercely proud of and loyal to their regiments.

On a day such as this, on the eve of battle, they would have given close attention to all the particulars of their arms and accoutrements, and each man to his own appearance. Most would be freshly shaved and their uniforms made as presentable as possible. On the move, seen from a distance, they looked glorious in their red coats and crossbelts, marching rank on rank, their huge regimental battle flags flying at the front atop ten-foot poles. Seen up close, however, the red coats, waist-length in front, longer at the back, were often faded and out at the elbows. Cuffs were frayed, knees patched, stockings or marching gaiters often torn beyond mending, try as each man would to look the part.

And with the pride in who and what they were went a very real contempt for, even hatred of, their American foes, whom they saw as cowards and traitors.

But by no means were they all battle-scarred veterans. Some of the older soldiers and officers were veterans of the killing fields of Europe during the Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War in America, or had survived the retreat from Concord or the Battle of Bunker Hill. The rest, the great majority of the British forces on Long Island, including the Germans, knew only the drill and routine of army life. For as long as the average soldier in Howe’s ranks had been in service, it had been longer still, more than ten years, since Britain had last waged war. For most of the redcoats, soldiers and young officers, like nearly all of the Americans, the battle to come was to be their first.

BY NIGHTFALL EVERYTHING WAS READY. At nine came the order to move out. Clinton led a crack brigade of light infantry with fixed bayonets. Cornwallis followed with eight reserve battalions and fourteen pieces of artillery. They in turn were followed by Generals Howe and Percy with another six battalions, more artillery, and baggage wagons. The column of 10,000 stretched more than two miles. At the head of the advance guard rode two mounted officers, Captains William Glanville Evelyn and Oliver DeLancey, Jr., and three Loyalist farmers who knew the way.

The white tents at Flatlands were left standing, campfires burning, all to appear as though nothing were happening.

The night was unseasonably cool. The long column moved with utmost silence and extremely slowly. An exhausted Scottish officer who had had several sleepless nights on duty, described the march as one of the worst he had known and endless. “We dragged on at the most tedious pace,” wrote Sir James Murray, “halting every minute just long enough to drop asleep, and to be disturbed again in order to proceed twenty yards in the same manner.”

By agreeing to Clinton’s plan—by committing a force of such numbers to a night march through unknown country, led like the blind by three local farmers who might or might not be all they professed—William Howe was putting his army at extreme risk. In the event of discovery or sudden, surprise attack by the enemy, his stretched-out column could be chopped to pieces. If all went as planned, the maneuver would look like little more than a classic turning of the enemy’s flank, but it took no great stretch of imagination to picture the unforeseen circumstances, the vagaries of chance that could play havoc.

As it was, no one except the commanders knew the details of the plan. Not an officer or a man knew where they were going.

The route was northeast along what was known as the King’s Highway, then at the village of New Lots the troops would swing north toward the Heights of Gowan.

The advance guard moved more swiftly, at the same time “sweeping up” any local inhabitants who looked as though they might give the alarm. When the three Loyalist guides warned that the rebels could be waiting at Schoonmaker’s Bridge over a little salt creek that emptied into Jamaica Bay, the whole column halted while skirmishers went ahead. But there was no one at the bridge and the army continued on.

Nor was there a sign of the rebels at Howard’s Tavern, which stood a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Jamaica Pass. By then it was two in the morning. The tavernkeeper and his fourteen-year-old son were rousted out of bed, closely questioned, and pressed into service as additional guides. The pass, as far as they knew, was unguarded.

Captains Evelyn and DeLancey and other mounted officers rode ahead into the pass, a winding, rocky road through a narrow gorge over-hung by trees and little wider than a bridle path.

It was only ten minutes or so after leaving the tavern when the officers came up on five dark figures on horseback, the five Americans on patrol. When the Americans, supposing the British officers to be a party of their own troops, fell in with them, all five were immediately captured without a shot fired or scarcely a sound.

The prisoners were taken to General Clinton, who succeeded in learning from them that they alone were patrolling the pass, and that indeed the pass was entirely unguarded.

When Clinton pressed harder, demanding to know how many rebel troops were at Brooklyn, one of the Americans, Lieutenant Edward Dunscomb, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of King’s College, told Clinton indignantly that under different circumstances he would never insult them in such a manner. Called “an impudent rebel” and threatened with hanging, Dunscomb said that General Washington would respond in kind and hang man for man. But Dunscomb’s courage made little difference. He and the other prisoners were taken away, and Clinton and the advance guard moved on.

By first light they were through the gorge and at the Bedford Road on the other side of the ridge. The men were told to lie down in the tall grass by the road and get some rest.

For the main body of the army the march through the pass took nearly two hours. (Wherever a tree had to be cleared to make way for the artillery and wagons, it had to be done with saws instead of axes in order to maintain all possible silence.) By the time Howe and the army reached the Bedford Road, the sun was up.

At exactly nine o’clock, with the blasts of two heavy cannon—the prearranged signal for the Hessians at the center and General Grant on the American right to commence their assaults—Howe’s army pushed on down the road toward the village of Bedford and to Brooklyn beyond.

Years later, Henry Clinton would remember Howe being extremely apprehensive. “The commander-in-chief seemed to have some suspicion the enemy would attack us on our march, but I was persuaded that, as they [had] neglected to oppose us at the gorge, the affair was over.”

Good fortune had accompanied them through the night. Nothing had gone amiss. The troops had marched nine miles in pitch darkness through unfamiliar country and in perfect order. Everything was on schedule and the day, like the day they first came ashore on Long Island, was perfectly beautiful.

II

IT WAS THREE IN THE MORNING when General Putnam was awakened by one of the guards at the Brooklyn headquarters and told the enemy was attacking on the right near the Narrows, at the Gowanus Road.

The British commander, Grant, had decided to occupy the attention of the Americans on that part of the line ahead of schedule. Three hundred British troops had stormed into the Gowanus Pass with a roar of musket fire and the Americans on guard, green militia, fled as fast as they could.

Putnam rushed to Lord Stirling’s camp outside the Brooklyn lines to order Stirling to move to meet the enemy and “repulse them,” little knowing how many of the enemy there were. Alarm guns sounded, drums rolled as troops fell out at the forts. General Samuel Parsons, who with Stirling shared responsibility for defenses on the Gowanus Road, and who, like Putnam, had been resting at the Brooklyn headquarters, mounted his horse and galloped off to arrive first on the scene. Until the year before, Parsons had been a small-town Connecticut lawyer.

I found by fair daylight, the enemy were through the wood and descending the hill on the north side, on which, with twenty of my fugitive guard being all I could collect, I took post on a height in their front at about half a mile’s distance—which halted their column and gave time for Lord Stirling with his forces to come up.

Stirling’s forces numbered 1,600 men and included Colonel Huntington’s Connecticut regiment, in which Jabez Fitch served, and Colonel Samuel Atlee’s Pennsylvania battalion, in addition to Smallwood’s Marylanders and Haslet’s colorful Delaware battalion, which were thought to be the two best units in the army. But as it happened, both their commanders, James Smallwood and John Haslet, were absent, on court-martial duty in New York.

“A little before day, as we marched towards the enemy two miles from our camp, we saw them,” wrote a nineteen-year-old lieutenant with the Delaware troops, Enoch Anderson. In what seemed no time they were in the middle of what Moses Little called “a smart engagement.”

The redcoat regiments came on “in regular order,” colors flying, field artillery out in front. Stirling drew up his lines and, in the words of another American soldier, offered them “battle in true English taste.” The British marched to within two hundred yards, then opened fire with cannon and muskets, “now and then taking off a head,” as the same soldier wrote. “Our men stood it amazingly well, not even one of them showed a disposition to shrink.” Their orders were to hold their fire until the enemy came within fifty yards. “But when they perceived we stood their fire so cool and so resolutely, they declined to come any nearer, although treble our number.”

“We gave them a fair fire—every man leveled well,” young Enoch Anderson recounted:

I saw one man tumble from his horse—never did I take better aim at a bird—yet I know not that I killed any or touched any. The fire was returned and they killed two of our men dead, none wounded. It became proper for us to retreat and we retreated about four hundred yards and were joined by Captain Atlee’s regiment.

Twice within an hour the British assaulted Parson’s troops on their high ground, and twice the American lines held. Stirling’s men were under steady cannon bombardment, but American cannon answered in kind and in the roar and smoke the American troops never flinched.

In this its first hours of battle with the enemy on an open field, the Continental Army fought valiantly, believing they were holding their own against British regulars. Addressing the troops, Stirling reminded them that it was General Grant who had boasted that with 5,000 men he could conquer all of America. But as they could not know, Grant was pressing his advantage only so much, holding back according to plan. “We had a skirmishing and a cannonade for some hours, which drew their whole attention,” Grant would later say.

AT THE CENTER, where Hessian artillery had been bombarding Sullivan’s lines along the ridges since early morning, General von Heister’s brigades could be seen drawn up on the plain to the south, but showed no sign of moving. Three Hessian brigades stood waiting in a line nearly a mile long.

Sullivan had ridden out from Brooklyn to take command at the Flatbush Pass. Seeing that the Hessians were not moving and that Stirling was in trouble on the right, he sent some of his regiments to help.

Until nine o’clock the battle seemed to be unfolding about as the Americans had expected, with the enemy attacking, or poised to attack, head-on.

But at nine came the crash of Howe’s signal guns, and suddenly Sullivan realized that a whole British army was coming at him from behind and that he was surrounded.

On the plain beyond the ridge, General von Heister gave the order and with drums rolling, the Hessians were in motion.

Leaving his advance guard posted along the ridge to do what they could to hold off the Hessians, Sullivan pulled back his main force and swung around to face the oncoming British ranks. And though vastly outnumbered, the Americans returned the British fire with murderous effect. Officers on both sides feared their men would be cut to pieces, and officers and soldiers on both sides often had no idea what was happening. Nor was it the Americans only who, when faced with annihilation, ran for their lives.

A British light infantry officer who led thirty of Clinton’s advance guard into the “very thick” of several hundred American riflemen, saw a third of his men go down in the most ferocious exchange of fire he had ever known. When he and a half dozen redcoats broke for the woods, more rebels sprang up out of nowhere. The fire seemed to come from every direction.

I called to my men to run to the first wall they could find and we all set off, some into some short bushes, others straight across a field…[and] in running across the field we [were] exposed to the fire of 300 men. We had literally run out in the midst [of them] and they calling to me to surrender. I stopped twice to look behind me and saw the riflemen so thick and not one of my own men. I made for the wall as hard as I could drive and they peppering at me…at last I gained the wall and threw myself headlong.

In the turmoil and confusion, Sullivan struggled to hold control and keep his men from panicking. Their situation was desperate; retreat was the only alternative, and in stages of “fight and flight,” he lead them as rapidly as possible in the direction of the Brooklyn lines.

Those left to hold the ridge had by now been overrun by the Hessians. Green-coated jaegers (literally, huntsmen) and the blue-coated grenadiers with their seventeen-inch bayonets had moved up through the steep woods of the ridge—the “terrible hills”—as swiftly and expertly as any Virginia rifleman. So suddenly did they appear that the Americans had time to get off only a shot or two, or none at all. Some fought back, wielding their muskets and rifles like clubs, before being run through with bayonets. Some pleaded for mercy. “Their fear of the Hessian troops was…indescribable,” wrote General von Heister. At the very sight of a blue coat, he said, “they surrendered immediately and begged on their knees for their lives.” Those who could get away fled back down through the trees and out into the open, only to run headlong into a hail of British fire.

At the same time, the whole left side of the American line collapsed. Thousands of men were on the run, hundreds were captured. Sullivan held back, in an effort to see as many as possible to safety, and amazingly most of the men succeeded in reaching the Brooklyn lines.

Sullivan, however, was captured. An American soldier named Lewis Morris, who himself barely escaped, wrote of Sullivan in a letter home. “The last I heard of him, he was in a cornfield close by our lines, with a pistol in each hand, and the enemy had formed a line each side of him, and he was going directly between them. I like to have been taken prisoner myself.”

THE PRECISE TIME of Washington’s arrival on the scene at Brooklyn was not recorded, but it is believed he crossed over from New York at about nine o’clock, or just as Howe’s signal guns sounded.

Like General Putnam, Washington, too, had been awakened in the middle of the night with word of Grant’s early assault, and at daybreak, still apprehensive of a second, larger attack on New York, Washington had watched with increasing anxiety as five enemy warships—Roebuck, Asia, Renown, Preston, and Repulse—started for the East River with a favorable wind and tide. It was what he had most feared.

Then miraculously the wind had veered off to the north. The ships, after tacking to and fro, trying to gain headway, at last gave up. Only the Roebuck could “fetch high enough” to threaten the battery at Red Hook with a few random shots.

So Long Island it was to be, Washington saw. He immediately ordered more troops to Brooklyn and wasted no time having himself rowed across the river, Joseph Reed at his side.

Private Joseph Martin, one of those in the units ordered to march to the Brooklyn ferry, remembered the cheers of the soldiers as they embarked, and the answering cheers of the spectators who thronged the wharves to watch the excitement. “They all wished us good luck apparently.” For his own part, Private Martin could think only of the horrors of war “in all their hideousness.”

On reaching the Brooklyn side, he saw, as he never had, the blood and suffering of wounded men. “What were the feelings of most or all the young soldiers at this time, I know not,” he would remember, “but I know what were mine.”

I saw a lieutenant who…. ran round among the men of his company, sniveling and blubbering, praying each one if he had aught against him, or if he had injured any one, that they would forgive him, declaring at the same time that he, from his heart, forgave them if they had offended him…had he been at the gallows with a halter about his neck, he could not have shown more fear or penitence. A fine soldier you are, I thought, a fine officer, an exemplary man for young soldiers! I would have suffered anything short of death rather than have made such an exhibition of myself.

Accounts of Washington’s activities as the battle raged are few and somewhat conflicting. He would be remembered out in plain view on horseback watching the clash of armies through a telescope. Stories would be told of him riding among the troops exhorting them to “quit yourselves like men, like soldiers,” or saying, “I will fight so long as I have a leg or an arm.” One soldier later described him walking the lines to rally the men. Possibly he did all of that. More likely his place was a vantage point on Brooklyn Heights, and in any case what was happening was out of his hands.

By ten o’clock his army had been hopelessly outflanked. The British were within two miles of the Brooklyn lines. Defeated men by the hundreds were streaming in from the battlefield, many blood-spattered and wounded, all exhausted. Officers were missing. Washington was facing disaster and could do nothing but sit astride his horse and watch.

ONLY ON THE RIGHT did the uproar of cannon and musket fire continue, as the indomitable Stirling and his men fought on against Grant’s far greater force, still in the belief that they were holding the line.

Colonel Samuel Atlee, who commanded the Pennsylvanians, would remember actually thinking that the British were going down to defeat: “For the batteries began to play and mowed them down like grass when they retreated, and our army cried out, ‘The day is our own!’ ”

But Grant kept holding back and in the interval, his division of 5,000 had been reinforced by 2,000 marines from the British ships offshore and two companies of New York Loyalists recruited that spring and summer by Governor Tryon.

Stirling had been ordered by Putnam to “repulse” the enemy, and for lack of orders to the contrary, he and his men had held on for nearly four hours. With great pride and no exaggeration, Colonel John Haslet would describe how his “Delawares” stood with “determined countenance,” in close array, their colors flying, the enemy’s artillery “playing” on them all the while, and the enemy, “though six times their number,” not daring to attack.

But they had stayed too long. At eleven o’clock Grant’s redcoats hit hard at the center of Stirling’s line, as thousands of Hessians struck from the woods to the left. When Stirling at last pulled back, it was too late. More British were coming at him from the rear, on the Gowanus Road, the line of retreat he had been counting on. A full British division led by Cornwallis now stood between him and Brooklyn. The only escape route still open, he saw, was in the direction of Gowanus Bay, now on his left, across a tidal marsh and a creek, which at high tide was about eighty yards wide, and the tide was coming in rapidly.

Stirling ordered his men to “make the best of their way” through the marsh and across the creek. Then, he and Major Mordecai Gist and no more than 250 Marylanders attacked Cornwallis in a headlong, valiant effort to cover the retreat of the others and perhaps even break through the redcoats who had established their line on the Gowanus Road beside a stone farmhouse.

The fighting was the most savage of the day. Driven back by a blaze of deadly fire, Stirling’s men rallied and struck again five times. Stirling himself fought “like a wolf.” The Marylanders, who until that morning had never faced an enemy, fought no less tenaciously than their commander.

Washington, watching from a Brooklyn hill, is said to have cried out as he saw the Marylanders cut down time after time, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”

Giving up at last, Stirling ordered the men to scatter and try to get back to the Brooklyn lines any way they could.

Of those trying to escape through the marshes, many bogged down in the mud and could get nowhere. Men unable to swim struggled pitifully in the swift tide of the creek and under a hail of musket fire. Some officers swam their horses across. A few of the men who could not swim held back and were captured.

An eighteen-year-old, six-month volunteer with a Pennsylvania unit, Private Michael Graham, who started the day posted with eight others on the ridge at the center of the American lines, had been ordered to retreat. With men running in almost every direction, he found himself mixed in with Stirling’s troops in their desperate flight.

It is impossible for me to describe the confusion and horror…. [I] entered a swamp or marsh through which a great many of our men were retreating. Some of them were mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out. But every man was intent on his own safety…. At the side of the marsh there was a pond which I took to be a millpond. Numbers, as they came to this pond jumped in, and some were drowned…. I got safely into camp. Out of the eight men that were taken from the company to which I belonged the day before the battle on guard, I only escaped. The others were killed or taken prisoners.

At the time, I could not account for how it was that our troops were so completely surrounded.

Joseph Hodgkins, as he later recounted for his wife, had run pell-mell into the marshes while being fired on the whole way. He hardly knew who was killed or drowned or taken prisoner.

Lord Stirling, finding himself hopelessly surrounded, and determined not to surrender his sword to the British, broke through their fire to a Hessian regiment and gave himself up to General von Heister.

By noon or shortly thereafter the rout was over, the day lost for the Americans. British troops, having advanced so far so rapidly wanted to keep going and carry the attack straight to the Brooklyn works. Numbers of British officers, too, felt it was no time to stop. But Howe ordered a halt.

In his original plan, General Clinton had said that the principal attacks, while vigorous, should not be pushed too far. The only exception was the all-important flanking attack, which, he said, “should be pushed as far as it will go.”

Clinton would later write of Howe’s decision to halt: “I had at the moment but little inclination to check the ardor of our troops when I saw the enemy flying in such a panic before them.” Howe himself, recalling the mood of the men, would later write that “it required repeated orders to prevail on them to desist.”

IT HAD BEEN the first great battle of the Revolution, and by far the largest battle ever fought in North America until then. Counting both armies and the Royal Navy, more than 40,000 men had taken part. The field of battle ranged over six miles, and the fighting lasted just over six hors. And for the Continental Army, now the army of the United States of America, in this first great test under fire, it had been a crushing defeat.

“O Doleful! Doleful! Doleful!” scrawled Chaplain Philip Fithian in his diary, expressing only the obvious.

To the British it was a “glorious day”—“a cheap and complete victory” in the terse summation of General Grant. “You will be glad,” Grant wrote to General Harvey, “that we have had the field day I talked of in my last letter. If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.”

Everything had gone like “clockwork.” Clinton’s overall plan had succeeded “beyond our expectations,” reported Lord Percy to his father. “Our men behaved themselves like British troops fighting in a good cause.” In the opinion of Sir James Murray, no soldiers had ever behaved with greater spirit.

In one thing only had they failed, thought Ambrose Serle. “They could not run so fast as their foes, many of whom indeed were ready to run over each other.”

In his own official reports, William Howe left no doubt about the magnitude of the victory and was no less generous than others in his praise of the army:

The behavior of both officers and soldiers, British and Hessians, was highly to their honor. More determined courage and steadfastness in troops have never been experienced, or a greater ardor to distinguish themselves, as all those who had an opportunity have amply evinced by their actions.

Howe reported his losses to be less than 400—59 killed, 267 wounded, and 31 missing. The Hessians had lost a mere 5 killed and 26 wounded.

Rebel losses, on the other hand, numbered more than 3,000, Howe claimed. Over 1,000 prisoners had been taken, while another 2,000 had been killed, wounded, or drowned.

The disparity of the losses as reported by Howe was greatly exaggerated, however. Washington, unable to provide an exact count, would later estimate in a report to Congress that about 700 to 1,000 of his men had been killed or taken prisoner.

General Parsons, who had succeeded in avoiding capture, wrote that in the course of the battle the number of American dead he and his men had collected, taken together with “the heap the enemy had made,” amounted to 60, and while the total loss was still impossible to know, Parsons judged the number of killed would be “inconsiderable.”

Some of the other officers who had been in the thick of the fight were convinced that the British had suffered more men killed than had the Americans, but that the British took the most prisoners.

Very few on the American side were ready to acknowledge just how severe a defeat it had been. In fact, American losses, though far less than what Howe had reported, were dreadful. As close as can be estimated about 300 Americans had been killed and over 1,000 taken prisoner, including three generals, Sullivan, Stirling, and Nathaniel Woodhull. Sullivan and Stirling were to be treated with marked courtesy by their captors, would even dine with Lord Howe on board the Eagle. But Woodhull died of wounds a few weeks later.

Among the swarms of prisoners in British hands were Captain Samuel Atlee and Lieutenant Jabez Fitch. Atlee was marched under guard to General Howe’s headquarters at Bedford, where he and other prisoners were subjected to “the most scurrilous and abusive language, both from officers, soldiers, and camp-ladies, everyone…demanding of the guard why we were taken, why we were not put to the bayonet.”

Jabez Fitch, who had fought through the long day and surrendered only after being surrounded, was confined with “a great number of prisoners” in a barn, where he did all he could to comfort his friend and company commander, Captain John Jewett, who had been bayoneted twice, in the chest and stomach, and was in excruciating pain. “I sat with him most of the night, and slept but very little,” Fitch wrote. “The capt[ain]…was sensible of his being near his end, often repeating that it was hard work to die.”

The father of ten children, Jewett made Fitch promise to describe the circumstances of his death to his wife. Later, Fitch would write to tell her that her husband had received his mortal wounds with a bayonet “after he was taken prisoner and stripped of his arms and part of his clothes.”

Accounts of British, Scottish, and Hessian soldiers bayoneting Americans after they had surrendered were to become commonplace. There were repeated stories of Hessians pinning Americans to trees with their bayonets. A letter said to have been written by an unnamed British officer appeared in the Massachusetts Spy describing how readily surrendered Americans were “dispatched.”

The Hessians and our Highlanders gave no quarters [the letter read], and it was a fine thing to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrendered them so that they could not resist…. You know all stratagems are lawful in war, especially against such vile enemies to their King and country.

Numbers of individual Americans were indeed severely beaten after surrendering, or, like Captain Jewett, run through with bayonets, as reliable accounts attest, but no mass atrocities were committed. The letter in the Massachusetts Spy—a letter quoted repeatedly—was very likely a fake, fabricated as propaganda. Nor was there truth to an account in a London paper of Hessians burying five hundred American bodies in a single pit.

Some American prisoners, including Jabez Fitch, recorded acts of genuine civility and kindness on the part of their captors. Even the infamous General Grant, wrote Fitch, “was so good as to make us a present of a side of mutton.”

For their British and Hessian captors, and particularly for the Hessians, the prisoners were great curiosities, a first chance to see close up what the rebel foe looked like. “They could not have been taken as soldiers as they had no uniforms, but only torn blouses of all colors,” wrote one astonished Hessian. Lieutenant von Bardeleben, too, was surprised to see how badly clothed the Americans were. Most, he wrote, “have nothing but a wretched farmer’s costume and a weapon. Most of their officers are no better dressed and until recently were only ordinary manual laborers.”

Writing in his diary in a code, Lieutenant von Bardeleben also recorded that some of his fellow officers “shed their ideas of being heroes. The prisoners who knelt and sought to surrender were beaten.”

For most of the prisoners still worse treatment lay in store, when confined and starved in old jails, church crypts, and vile British prison ships anchored in the harbor.

IN THE REMAINING HOURS of the day, after the guns grew silent, the Americans inside the Brooklyn defenses, expecting the British to attack full force, waited tensely hour after hour as nothing happened. All afternoon and into the night, pitiful cries could be heard from wounded men who lay among the unburied dead on the battlefield. Stragglers who had escaped capture kept coming into the lines almost by the hour, bedraggled single soldiers or clusters of three or four, many badly wounded. (“And the distressed wounded came crying into the lines!” wrote Philip Fithian.) The morning after, Mordecai Gist and nine others crossed into the camps. They were the only ones of the valiant Marylanders to have made it back.

III

ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, August 28, the situation faced by Washington and the army was critical. Having been outsmarted and outfought, they were now hemmed in at Brooklyn in an area about three miles around, their backs to the East River, which could serve as an escape route only as long as the wind cooperated. With a change in the wind, it would take but a few British warships in the river to make escape impossible. Brooklyn was a trap ready to spring.

Yet early that morning Washington ordered still more of his army over from New York, almost as though he did not comprehend how perilous his position was.

Two Pennsylvania regiments and Colonel John Glover’s Massachusetts troops—approximately 1,200 men—crossed the river and marched into the Brooklyn entrenchments with considerable show. Possibly it was this, the show, that Washington wanted, and if so, he succeeded. The sight of the new troops, wrote the Pennsylvania officer Alexander Graydon, brought a marked change. “The faces that had been saddened by the disasters of yesterday assumed a gleam of animation on our approach, accompanied with a murmur…that ‘These were the lads that might do something.’ ”

In command of the fresh Pennsylvania brigades was handsome, self-assured Thomas Mifflin, formerly of Washington’s staff at Cambridge and now, at thirty-two, a brigadier general. Mifflin immediately volunteered to survey the outermost defenses and report back to Washington, little expecting the part he was soon to play.

Joseph Hodgkins, so exhausted from the battle that he could hardly hold his head up, nonetheless took time to write home to report that “through the goodness of God,” he was still in one piece. Like everyone, he expected at any moment to be in action again. “The enemy are within a mile and a half of our lines,” he noted.

The weather had changed dramatically from the day before. Under darkening skies, the temperature dropped ten degrees.

Riflemen in the outermost defenses were ordered to keep up a steady fire at the enemy, if only to raise spirits, and the British fired back steadily on into the afternoon when the clouds opened in a cold, drenching downpour, the start of a northeastern storm that brought still further misery to the defeated army.

Afternoon, at three, an alarm [gun] in the midst of a violent rain [wrote Philip Fithian]. Drums heavily calling to arms. Men running promiscuously and in columns to the lines. All the time the rain falling with an uncommon torrent. The guns of the whole army are wetted. And after the alarm was over, which was occasioned by the regulars coming in a greater body than usual to drive our riflemen, our troops fired off their guns quite till evening, so that it seemed indeed dangerous to walk within our own lines—for we could from every part hear perpetually firing, and continually hear the [cannon] balls pass over us.

The storm and the roar of the guns continued into the night. Across the river in New York, Pastor Ewald Shewkirk wrote of the boom of cannon at Brooklyn intermixed with flashes of lightning and the roar of thunder.

The following day, Thursday, August 29, the storm continued, heavy rains fell. Troops without tents also had little or no food. Fires were nearly impossible to keep going for cooking or warmth. Private Martin got by with biscuits he had had the foresight to stuff into his knapsack before leaving New York, biscuits “hard enough to break the teeth of a rat,” as he wrote. Anyone who had a bit of raw pork to gnaw felt privileged. Nearly all were hungry and soaked to the skin. In places in the trenches men stood in water up to their waists. Muskets and cartridges were almost impossible to keep dry. Soldiers, unable to stay awake any longer, fell asleep standing upright in the rain or sitting without cover in the mud.

Washington, who had had little or no sleep, sent off a brief, somewhat incoherent report to Congress at four-thirty in the morning, saying his people were much “distressed.” Of the defeat of the day before he said only that there had been “engagement” with the enemy and that he had heard nothing from General Sullivan or Lord Stirling. “Nor can I ascertain our loss.” Nor did he report that in the night the British had started “advancing by approaches,” as it was known. Instead of risking an open assault, they were digging trenches toward the American lines and throwing up embankments that already were no more than six hundred yards from Fort Putnam.

Yet for all the miseries it wrought, the storm was greatly to Washington’s advantage. Under the circumstances, any ill wind from the northeast was a stroke of good fortune. For as long as it held, Lord Howe’s ships had no chance to “get up” where they could wreak havoc.

But who knew how long such good fortune might serve? And what if his luck ran out? (“But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation,” he had told Congress when accepting his command, “I beg it may be remembered by every gent[leme]n in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I [am] honored with.”)

He was now advised that the old ships that had been sunk in the East River could not be counted on as a serious barrier against British warships, and especially the smaller ships, which could come up through that part of the East River between Governor’s Island and Brooklyn where there were no barriers at all.

With the situation as grim as it could be, no one was more conspicuous in his calm presence of mind than Washington, making his rounds on horseback in the rain. They must be “cool but determined,” he had told the men before the battle, when spirits were high. Now, in the face of catastrophe, he was demonstrating what he meant by his own example. Whatever anger or torment or despair he felt, he kept to himself.

Since he first arrived in New York in April, the essence of Washington’s policy had been to keep close watch and make decisions according to circumstances. Sometime before noon, having heard General Mifflin’s report on the progress made by the British with their “approaches” during the night, as well as the strongly expressed views of Joseph Reed, and having looked things over himself, he made a momentous decision.

A secret and deliberately deceiving urgent message went off to General Heath at King’s Bridge. Every flatbottomed boat or sloop, almost any watercraft available, was to be rounded up “without delay” for the reason that “we have many battalions from New Jersey which are coming over to relieve others here.” The message was signed by Mifflin.

Washington would later recall emphasizing that there be no “ceremony” in carrying out the order—meaning that whatever boats would serve should be confiscated on the spot.

Heath assigned the roundup to Colonel Hugh Hughes, a New York schoolteacher, who, in pursuit of his mission over the next twenty-four hours, would scarcely ever dismount from his horse.

At four in the afternoon, with still no letup in the rain, Washington called a meeting with his generals at the Livingston mansion, on the brow of Brooklyn Heights overlooking the river.

Mifflin, who had advised Washington that he must either fight or retreat immediately, asked to be the one to propose the retreat, with the understanding that if it were agreed on, he and the Pennsylvania regiment would serve as the rear guard in the outermost defenses, and thus hold the line until the rest of the army had departed. This would be the most dangerous assignment of all and he insisted it be his, Mifflin told Washington, lest by proposing retreat his reputation should suffer.

In the words of the minutes of the meeting: “It was submitted to the consideration of the council whether, under all circumstances, it would not be eligible to leave Long Island and its dependencies [fortifications] and remove the army to New York.”

Only one man expressed doubts: General John Morin Scott, a leading New York attorney and ardent patriot-turned-soldier.

“As it was suddenly proposed, I as suddenly objected to it,” Scott later wrote, “from an aversion to giving the enemy a single inch of ground, but was soon convinced by the unanswerable reasons for it.”

Of the reasons put forward—ammunition spoiled by heavy rains, the miseries and discouragement of the exhausted troops, the enemy’s advancing by approaches, the precarious situation of an army divided in half—the most serious was the looming threat of the British fleet suddenly in command of the East River. As Joseph Reed wrote in explanation, with Lord Howe trying every day to “get up” against the wind, “it became a serious consideration whether we ought to risk the fate of the army, and perhaps America, on defending the circle of about three miles fortified with a few strong redoubts, but chiefly open lines.”

The decision was unanimous. Orders went out and by evening the plan was rapidly unfolding.

At Dorchester the year before, Washington had taken advantage of the night to catch Howe by complete surprise. On Long Island, Howe had sent 10,000 men through the night to catch Washington by surprise. The night of Thursday, August 29, it was Washington’s turn again.

THE ORDERS CAME AT SEVEN. The troops were to be “under arms with packs and everything.” It was to be a night attack on the enemy, they were told.

To Alexander Graydon, who was with the Pennsylvania regiments assigned to the rear guard, it seemed a desperate measure, almost suicidal. “Several nuncupative wills were made upon the occasion, uncertain as it was, whether the persons to whom they were communicated would survive, either to prove or to execute them.” Graydon concentrated on summoning his own courage.

At about nine o’clock the troops with the least experience, along with the sick and wounded, were ordered to start for the Brooklyn ferry landing, on the pretext that they were being relieved by reinforcements. But of this the soldiers nearer the front lines knew nothing. “The thing was conducted with so much secrecy,” wrote another of the Pennsylvanians, Lieutenant Tench Tilghman, “that neither subalterns or privates knew that the whole army was to cross back again to New York.” Nor were the officers told.

Alexander Graydon kept thinking what “extreme rashness” it was to order an attack, given the condition of the men and their rain-soaked arms. The more he thought, the more puzzled he became, until suddenly it “flashed upon my mind that a retreat was the object, and that the order for assailing the enemy was but a cover to the real design.” The fellow officers to whom he confided his thoughts “dared not suffer themselves to believe it.”

Others elsewhere in the forts and defenses began thinking that a night escape had to be the true intent, and to weigh the risks involved. As one particularly clear-headed officer, Major Benjamin Tallmadge of Connecticut, would later write, putting himself in Washington’s place:

To move so large a body of troops, with all their necessary appendages, across a river full a mile wide, with a rapid current, in face of a victorious well-disciplined army nearly three times as numerous as his own, and a fleet capable of stopping the navigation, so that not one boat could have passed over, seemed to present most formidable obstacles.

The rain had stopped at last, but the northeast wind that had kept the river free of the British fleet was blowing still, and this, with an ebb tide, was proving no less a deterrent to an American retreat.

The first troops ordered to withdraw to the ferry landing found that the river was so rough that no boats could cross. The men could only stand and wait in the dark. According to one account, General Alexander McDougall, who was in charge of the embarkation, sent Washington a message saying that with conditions as they were, there could be no retreat that night.

It was about eleven o’clock when, as if by design, the northeast wind died down. Then the wind shifted to the southwest and a small armada of boats manned by more of John Glover’s Massachusetts sailors and fishermen started over the river from New York, Glover himself crossing to Brooklyn to give directions.

Glover’s men proved as crucial as the change in the wind. In a feat of extraordinary seamanship, at the helm and manning oars hour after hour, they negotiated the river’s swift, contrary currents in boats so loaded with troops and supplies, horses and cannon, that the water was often but inches below the gunnels—and all in pitch dark, with no running lights. Few men ever had so much riding on their skill, or were under such pressure, or performed so superbly.

As the boats worked back and forth from Brooklyn, more troops were ordered to withdraw from the lines and march to the ferry landing. “And tedious was the operation through mud and mire,” one man remembered.

Wagon wheels, anything that might make noise, were muffled with rags. Talking was forbidden. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough,” wrote Private Martin. “All orders were given from officer to officer and communicated to the men in whispers.”

They moved through the night like specters. “As one regiment left their station on guard, the remaining troops moved to the right and left and filled up the vacancies,” wrote Benjamin Tallmadge, recalling also that for many of the men it was their third night without sleep. Washington, meanwhile, had ridden to the ferry landing to take personal charge of the embarkation.

The orderly withdrawal of an army was considered one of the most difficult of all maneuvers, even for the best-trained soldiers, and the fact that Washington’s ragtag amateur army was making a night withdrawal in perfect order and silence thus far, seemed more than could be hoped for. The worst fear was that by some blunder the British would discover what was afoot and descend with all their superior force.

Those in greatest jeopardy, the troops in Mifflin’s vanguard, were still holding the outer defenses. Waiting their turn to be withdrawn, they kept busy creating enough of a stir and tending campfires to make it appear the army was still in place, knowing all the while that if the enemy were to become the wiser, they stood an excellent chance of being annihilated.

In the event of a British attack, they were supposed to fall back and rally at the old Dutch church in the middle of the road in the village of Brooklyn. As the hours passed, there was no mistaking the sound of British picks and shovels digging steadily toward them in the darkness.

The full garrison at Fort Stirling on Brooklyn Heights also had orders to stay through the night, as cover against an attack by enemy ships.

At about two in the morning a cannon went off. No explanation was ever given. “If the explosion was within our lines,” Alexander Graydon later speculated, “the gun was probably discharged in the act of spiking it.”

For the rest of his life, Graydon could never recall that night without thinking of the scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V of the long night wait before the Battle of Agincourt, in which, as Graydon wrote, “is arrayed, in appropriate gloom, a similar interval of dread suspense and awful expectation.”

IT WAS APPROXIMATELY four o’clock and still dark when a young officer on horseback, Major Alexander Scammell, came riding through the outer defenses looking for General Mifflin.

Scammell was twenty-nine years old and well liked. A Harvard graduate and an attorney in civilian life, he was quick-witted, charming, six feet two inches tall, and had been serving as an aide-de-camp to General Sullivan.

Scammell told Mifflin the boats were ready at the river landing and that Washington was anxiously waiting for the arrival of the last remaining troops. Mifflin said Scammel had to be mistaken. He could not imagine that Washington meant his own vanguard. Scammel insisted he was not mistaken, saying he had ridden from the extreme left where he had ordered all the troops he met to march for the ferry, that they were then on the move, and that he would continue on to give the same orders.

Mifflin then ordered General Edward Hand to form up the regiment and move out as soon as possible.

But Scammell was mistaken. He had misunderstood Washington. The order was a blunder of exactly the kind that could spell disaster.

The troops left the trenches and started for the river “without delay,” until just beyond the Dutch church, within a half mile of the landing, where the column halted.

Washington, astride his horse in the middle of the road, demanded to know what was going on. General Hand was explaining when Mifflin rode up. Faces were hard to see in the dark, but Hand would remember Washington exclaiming, “Good God! General Mifflin, I am afraid you have ruined us!”

Mifflin responded “with some warmth” that he was only obeying Washington’s orders as delivered by Major Scammell.

Washington said it was a “dreadful mistake,” that they had come too soon, that things were in “much confusion at the ferry,” and they must turn at once and go back to their posts.

For the weary troops who had held the lines through the night, counting the hours until they could be relieved and escape with the others, and who waited now in the dark, it was a moment of extreme difficulty, “trying business to young soldiers,” as Alexander Graydon wrote. “Whoever has seen troops in a similar situation, or duly contemplates the human heart in such trials well knows how to appreciate the conduct of these brave men on this occasion.”

They returned to the lines as ordered, and in the words of General Hand “had the good fortune to recover our stations and keep them for some hours longer, without the enemy perceiving what was going forward.”

AT THE FERRY LANDING all this time troops and supplies and artillery were being loaded aboard one boat after another as quickly as humanly possible and sent on their way. Everyone worked furiously. A Connecticut soldier manning one of the boats would remember making eleven crossings in the course of the night.

But the exodus was not moving fast enough. Some of the heavy cannon, mired in mud, were impossible to move and had to be left behind. Time was running out. Though nearly morning, a large part of the army still waited to embark, and without the curtain of night to conceal them, their escape was doomed.

Incredibly, yet again, circumstances—fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often—intervened.

Just at daybreak a heavy fog settled in over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the night. It was a fog so thick, remembered a soldier, that one “could scarcely discern a man at six yards distance.” Even with the sun up, the fog remained as dense as ever, while over on the New York side of the river there was no fog at all.

At long last Mifflin and the rear guard and the troops at Fort Stirling were summoned. “It may be supposed we did not linger,” wrote Alexander Graydon.

Major Tallmadge, who with his regiment was among the last to depart on the boats, would write later that he thought he saw Washington on the ferry stairs staying to the very end.

Graydon estimated that it was seven in the morning, perhaps a little later, when he and his men landed in New York. “And in less than an hour after, the fog having dispersed, the enemy was visible on the shore we had left [behind].”

In a single night, 9,000 troops had escaped across the river. Not a life was lost. The only men captured were three who had hung back to plunder.

IV

Friday, August 30th. In the morning, to our great astonishment, found they had evacuated all their works on Brookland…with not a shot being fired at them…neither could our shipping get up for want of wind, and the whole escaped…to New York.

The immediate reaction of the British was, as Major Stephen Kemble recorded in his diary, one of utter astonishment. That the rebel army had silently vanished in the night under their very noses was almost inconceivable. The surprise for the British was no less than it had been the morning of March 5, at Boston, when they awakened to see the guns of Ticonderoga on Dorchester Heights. The great difference now was a feeling of relief, not dread. All at once the whole of Brooklyn and its elaborate defenses were theirs for the taking and the rebels were on the run.

“We cannot yet account for their precipitate retreat,” wrote General Grant. Like many of the British, Grant failed to understand how the Americans, having labored for months on their massive fortifications, could so readily abandon them.

General Howe had performed most admirably and deserved his success, Grant thought. The lesson of Brooklyn, Grant decided, was that if pushed the Americans would never face the King’s troops again.

Lord Percy agreed. “They feel severely the blow of the 27th,” he wrote to his father, “and I think I may venture to assert that they will never again stand before us in the field. Everything seems to be over with them, and I flatter myself now that this campaign will put a total end to the war.” To Lord Germain as well, he predicted, “This business is pretty near over.”

General Clinton, justifiably proud of his role in the triumph, wrote to his sister that he expected to be home by Christmas.

As many officers as could came to see the rebel works and enjoy the view from Fort Stirling. “This and the parts adjacent is the most beautiful and fertile spot I have yet seen in America,” recorded Ambrose Serle, who was disturbed only by the reek of the unburied dead still strewn about in the fields.

As for the rebels and their flight, Serle, like many of the British, thought they had “behaved very ill as men.”

But there were those, including General Grant, who saw that the Americans had made a daring and superbly executed move. They had “wisely” gotten out when they did, General Clinton would later comment, and “very ably effected the retreat of their whole army.” Charles Stedman, an officer under Lord Percy, would later write a widely respected history of the war—one of the few histories by someone who was actually in the war—in which he called the retreat “particularly glorious to the Americans.” Further, he saw, as apparently Grant did not, the peril the Americans would have faced in the event of a change in the wind. Had the Phoenix and the Rose, with their combined 72 guns, fetched up into the East River as they had done before on the Hudson, Stedman emphasized, any chance of escape would have been cut off “most completely.”

AS COMMENDABLE as Washington’s leadership during the retreat had been, good luck had played a very large part, and wars were not won by withdrawals, however well handled. Nor could a successful evacuation compensate for the losses suffered in dead and wounded and the thousand or more who had been taken prisoner by the enemy.

The Battle of Brooklyn—the Battle of Long Island as it would be later known—had been a fiasco. Washington had proven indecisive and inept. In his first command on a large-scale field of battle, he and his general officers had not only failed, they had been made to look like fools.

Almost from the moment he took command in New York, Washington had put himself in an impossible position. He had failed to recognize that whether the British were to attack Manhattan or Long Island, he was in a trap either way. General Lee had seen clearly that “whoever commands the sea must command the town,” and from the moment Washington chose to ignore that warning, he was in trouble.

Dividing his army, he had counted on his ability to respond to circumstances as need be, as though moving his forces back and forth over the East River would always be his choice to make. On the very eve of the British attack on Long Island, he was still baffled over whether it was the real thing and, if so, what he ought to do.

For the British everything went as planned, from the landing at Gravesend Bay to the night march of 10,000 men through the Jamaica Pass to the battle itself. For Washington almost nothing went as planned. The assumption that the British would make an all-out frontal assault at Brooklyn, as at Bunker Hill, and as they had seemed ready to repeat at Dorchester Heights, was the heart of the American strategy, and it was largely wishful thinking. So quickly, so completely was Washington outmaneuvered, the battle was virtually over before it began. It was as though in all his anguish over where and how he might be outflanked by water, he forgot that it could happen on land.

How a man so characteristically insistent that things be done just so, David McCullough who took such care about details, could have let the Jamaica Pass stand unguarded is impossible to explain—and particularly when he had spent the full day at Brooklyn, August 26, studying the situation.

Washington never accounted for his part in what happened at the Battle of Long Island, and for many the brilliant success of the night escape would serve both as proof of his ability and a way to ease the humiliation and pain of defeat. The Americans could also rightly claim that they had been vastly outnumbered by a far-better-trained army, and that given the odds against them, they had, in several instances, shown exemplary courage and tenacity.

General Putnam was blamed for not ordering Stirling to withdraw sooner. Sullivan was blamed for knowing too little about the terrain. Putnam and Sullivan were both faulted for leaving the Jamaica Pass unattended. Colonel Samuel Miles, the one supposed to be in charge of the left flank, later claimed to have had a hunch the enemy would make use of Jamaica Pass, yet he had done nothing about it. Stirling, for all his bravery, was criticized for trying to fight the British on the open field in their own fashion.

Many, including Henry Knox, would insist that had Nathanael Greene, with his familiarity with every detail of the Heights of Gowan, been present, the British would have met stiff opposition at the Jamaica Pass and things would have gone differently. Possibly they could have. Greene’s illness and consequent absence was without question one of Washington’s severest blows.

Washington would hold Sullivan largely to blame, for too little vigilance at the Jamaica Pass, thus implying that in his view Greene would never have allowed a British surprise to succeed there.

But in fact a British victory had been certain all day, no matter what the Americans did. The struggle might have lasted longer, the cost to the British might have been greater, but outnumbered by such superior troops and without control of the sea, Washington and his army never really had a chance—and this quite apart from the far greater experience of the British command.

General Howe’s decision not to continue the attack the afternoon of the battle would be a subject of endless speculation and debate. Among Howe’s severest critics was Captain John Montresor, who, the morning of August 30, had been the first to discover that the Americans had vanished in the night. To Montresor there was no question that Howe should have pressed the attack and that to have failed to do so was a grievous mistake. “Never pursues his victories” was Montresor’s curt assessment of William Howe.

General Clinton, too, seemed to feel that with the Americans “flying in such a panic” Howe had as good a chance as he would ever have to finish them off and end the war at a stroke. But Clinton would never say so when questioned. Rather he would write that had he been in Howe’s position, he, too, would have “judged it prudent” to hold back.

In testimony before Parliament, General Cornwallis would refuse to say that the Brooklyn lines could have been taken by an immediate attack, and said that at the time he never heard anyone claim they could have been.

The Americans had wanted another Bunker Hill. Howe, remembering Bunker Hill, had no desire to squander lives with another bloody frontal attack on an army dug in on a hill, if, with a little patience, that same hill could be taken by less costly means. “It was apparent the lines must have been ours at a very cheap rate by regular approaches,” he would say in explanation. “I could not risk the loss that might have been sustained in the assault.”

Had Howe pressed on the afternoon of the 27th, the British victory could have been total. Or had the wind turned earlier, and the British navy moved into the East River, the war and the chances of an independent United States of America could have been long delayed, or even ended there and then.

WHEN NEWS OF THE BATTLE, together with Howe’s exaggerated estimates of American losses, at last reached London, it caused a sensation. A victory so grand, said the press, “fully controverted” all the “full-mouthed predictions” of the opponents of the war. Edmund Burke, Charles Fox, and others in Parliament opposed to the war were as downcast as prominent Tories were jubilant. News to “enliven our countenances,” the Tory historian Edward Gibbon called it.

All Britain was in “an ecstasy which I cannot express,” a friend wrote to Henry Clinton. Bells were rung in London and in rural hamlets, windows lighted with candles. The King was reported to have paused during a stroll in Kew Gardens to express his “great satisfaction” with the report of General Howe, upon whom he was to confer the Order of Bath.

IN CONGRESS the defeat was spoken of privately as an “unfortunate beginning” at best, and more candidly as a “disaster.” But there was no panic.

Elsewhere in the country early reports of the battle were taken at first as “Tory news.” Afterward, great anxiety, if not panic, set in. “All in solicitude,” recorded the Reverend Ezra Stiles at his home in Newport. “Tories rejoicing. Sons of Liberty dejected.”

Newspapers put heavy emphasis on Washington’s daring night retreat, calling it renewed cause for confidence in the army and in Washington most of all. The escape from Brooklyn was “a masterpiece,” read a report in the New England Chronicle. “The manner in which our retreat was performed,” reported the Virginia Gazette, “reflects the highest credit upon our commander-in-chief, and the officers in general.”

While one writer in the New England Chronicle declared, “Providence favored us,” another in the Massachusetts Spy assured his readers that the defeat on Long Island and consequent distress were “loud speaking testimonies of the displeasure and anger of Almighty God against a sinful people.”

We have thought God was for us, and had given many and signal instances of his power and mercy in our favor, and had greatly frowned upon and disappointed our enemies; and verily it has been so. But have we repented and given him the glory? Verily no. His hand seems to be turned and stretched out against us—and strong is his hand.

In New York the gloom of defeat hung heavy. The high spirits of the soldiers that had been counted on for so long to compensate for, even overcome, whatever advantages the enemy might have, were gone. The army that had crossed in the night from Brooklyn was, in the light of day on August 30, a sorry sight to behold—filthy, bedraggled, numb with fatigue, still soaked to the skin, many of them sick and emaciated. The army that had gone off to Brooklyn cheering was no more.

“It was a surprising change,” Pastor Shewkirk noted in his diary, “the merry tones on drums and fifes had ceased…. It seemed a general damp had spread, and the sight of scattered people up and down the streets was indeed moving.”

They had been swiftly, overwhelmingly defeated. “A hard day this, for us poor Yankees” was young Enoch Anderson’s unadorned summing up of the Battle of Brooklyn.

But as resounding as the British victory had been, it was not a decisive victory. The war had not been ended at a stroke by a superior force of professional soldiers. Washington and his 9,000 troops had survived to fight another day.

FOR THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in New York, nearly all were collapsed in sleep, including the commander-in-chief. Not until Saturday, August 31, could Washington summon the strength even to notify Congress of the escape. He had been “entirely unfit to take pen in hand,” he explained. “Since Monday scarce any of us have been out of the lines till our passage across the East River was effected yesterday morning, and for forty-eight hours preceding that I had hardly been of[f] my horse and never closed my eyes.”

Presently he was “much hurried and engaged in arranging and making new dispositions of our forces,” he said. He would save for another letter the extremity of the concern he felt.

Part III

The Long Retreat

These are the times that try men’s souls.

—Thomas Paine, The Crisis
    December 1776

Chapter Six

Fortune Frowns

We want great men who, when fortune frowns, will not be discouraged.

—Colonel Henry Knox

I

IHAVE ONLY TIME to say I am alive and well,” Joseph Reed reported to his wife Esther. His spirits, however, were but “middling.”

The justice of our cause, the hope of success, and every other circumstance that can enliven us, must be put into the scale against those of a contrary kind, which I allow to be serious…. My honor, duty, and every other tie held sacred among men, call upon me to proceed with firmness and resolution…. My country will, I trust, yet be free, whatever may be our fate who are cooped up, or are in danger of being so, on this tongue of land, where we ought never to have been.

It was “a mere point of honor which keeps us here,” he had written earlier to a friend. Now, in the dismal aftermath of defeat, the idea of risking the fate of America in defense of New York seemed so senseless that submitting to the “dispensations of Providence,” as he said, was about the only recourse left.

The army that had shown such remarkable discipline and unity through the long night of the escape from Brooklyn had rapidly become engulfed with despair, turned surly and out of hand. Gangs of soldiers roamed the streets of New York breaking into houses and taking whatever they wanted. Even Lord Stirling’s mansion, at the corner of Broad and Beaver streets, was wantonly ransacked.

Joseph Hodgkins, already as downcast as he had ever been over the defeat, learned in a letter from his wife of the death of their small, ailing son. It was “heavy news,” he told her. He was trying hard not to be discouraged over the way the war was going.

But only consider a minute, we have been all this summer digging and building of forts to cover our heads and now we have been obliged to leave them and now we are here and not one shovel full of dirt to cover us…. I don’t write this to discourage you or to increase you[r] trouble, but only to let you know as near as I can of our circumstances.

Still concerned for her, he wrote again the next day to assure her he himself had suffered no real damage thus far. “I had my sleeve button shot out of my sleeve and the skin a little grazed, but through mercy, received no other hurt.” There was no mention of giving up and coming home.

But others by the hundreds were doing just that, many walking off with their arms and ammunition. (One soldier was found lugging a cannonball, to give to his mother, he explained, to use to pound mustard seed.) Entire Connecticut militia units were departing en masse, saying they had had enough. The roads in Connecticut and New Jersey were filled with soldiers heading home. Probably one in four carried disease, and those who did not spread their own corrosive discouragement.

Men in the ranks complained they had been “sold out.” Some were openly saying they longed for the return of General Lee. Washington’s leadership was in question. Colonel John Haslet wrote to Caesar Rodney, a delegate to Congress, “I fear General Washington has too heavy a task, assisted mostly by beardless boys.”

Henry Knox, whose faith in Washington never faltered, wrote to his wife that the pressing need was for great men “who when fortune frowns will not be discouraged.” If there was a grievous flaw in how things were being run, it was the “stupid parsimony” of the Congress.

Washington had concluded his general orders for September 2 with a call for steadfastness and valor in the defense of New York: “Now is the time for every man to exert himself and make our country glorious or become contemptible.” But by all signs his words had little effect. Indeed, in a letter to Congress written that same day, Washington portrayed much of the army as plainly “contemptible.”

The militia, instead of calling forth their utmost efforts to a brave and manly opposition, in order to repair our losses, are dismayed, intractable, and impatient to return. Great numbers of them have gone off, in some instances almost by whole regiments.

Worse, their example had “infected” others to the point that he no longer had confidence in the army as a whole and for the first time questioned whether New York had become a lost cause.

He needed to know from Congress whether, in the event he had to abandon the city, it should be left to “stand as winter quarters for the enemy”—meaning, should it be burned? “They would derive great conveniences from it, on the one hand, and much property would be destroyed on the other.” The question, he wrote, allowed “but little time for deliberation.”

The letter went immediately off to Philadelphia, where, as it happened, General John Sullivan arrived that same day, September 2, having been temporarily paroled by Lord Howe to deliver a peace overture to Congress. Washington, who took a dim view of Sullivan’s mission, had nonetheless given his approval, feeling it was not for him to withhold whatever Howe had to say. As Sullivan reported, His Lordship, being “desirous of an accommodation with America,” wished to meet “almost any place” with a delegation from Congress.

British troops all the while were advancing on the opposite shore of the East River, heading north in the direction of King’s Bridge. Then, in the dark of night, September 3, the first enemy ship, the frigate Rose, towing thirty flatboats, started up the river with a north-flowing tide, anchoring ultimately in the mouth of Newtown Creek, directly across from a large cove on the New York side known as Kips Bay.

The day after brought a “mighty movement” of transports and more flatboats up the East River, while two more frigates, the Repulse and the Pearl, sailed into the Hudson.

In Philadelphia, Congress resolved that in the event General Washington found it necessary to withdraw from New York, there must be “no damage” done to the city, as Washington was informed in a letter from John Hancock. And as if to underscore how little the members of Congress comprehended the actual situation, it was further stated that they had “no doubt of being able to recover” the city, should the enemy “obtain possession of it.”

Where the British would strike was as uncertain as it had been from the start. What Washington feared most was an attack from the rear, in the vicinity of King’s Bridge, and having convinced himself that this was Howe’s intention, he began moving troops there. General Heath warned that the enemy might land on the coast of Westchester County, beyond the Harlem River. Everything depended on reliable intelligence, Washington told Heath, and he had none. He urged Heath to “leave no stone unturned” or spare any expense in finding out all he could as soon as possible.

“We think (at least I do) that we cannot stay,” Joseph Reed wrote again to his wife, “and yet we do not know how to go, so that we may be properly said to be between hawk and buzzard.”

Reed, who seemed older and wiser than his years, had tried always to take a large, philosophical view of life’s travails, and this, in combination with a natural cheerfulness and a strong, analytical mind, had put him at the head of the legal profession in Philadelphia while still in his early thirties. But it was a struggle now for him to offer even a fragment of hope. It was the sluggards and skulkers, the tavern patriots and windy politicians, who evoked a wrath he could not contain.

When I look round, and see how few of the numbers who talked so largely of death and honor are around me, and that those who are here are those from whom it was least expected…I am lost in wonder and surprise…. Your noisy sons of liberty are, I find, the quietest in the field…. An engagement, or even the expectation of one, gives a wonderful insight into character.

Though an observer only through the Battle of Brooklyn, Reed had been with Washington throughout. For six days there had not been time even for a change of clothes, and, like Washington, he had had no sleep for several nights. Whether he could continue to bear up under the strain and fatigue, as Washington seemed able to do, remained to be seen.

Esther, as she wrote, hoped he would come home to be with her at the birth of their fourth child.

It was thought that the American army, spread now from the Battery to King’s Bridge, numbered 20,000, but with men deserting in droves, it was difficult to tell. Perhaps a quarter of the men were sick, and officers, as well as men in the ranks, often feigned sickness.

One of the most seriously ill had recovered, however, and with immediate consequences. On September 5, Nathanael Greene returned to duty and promptly submitted to Washington an emphatic, closely reasoned argument for abandoning New York at once. If illness had denied him the chance to play a part at Brooklyn, he had by no means let his mind drift from the fate of the army, or all that was at stake. While others, like Reed, were of the same mind, Greene alone committed his views to paper.

I think we have no object on this side of King’s Bridge. Our troops are now so scattered that one part may be cut off before the others can come to their support. In this situation suppose the enemy should run up the North River several ships of force and a number of transpo[rts] at the same time, and effect a landing between the town and middle division of the army. Another party from Long Island should land right opposite. These two parties form a line across the Island and entrench themselves. The two flanks of this line could be easily supported by the shipping. The center, fortified with the redoubts, would render it very difficult, if not impossible, to cut our way through…. Should this event take place, and by the by I don’t think it very improbable, your Excellency will be reduced to that situation which every prudent general would wish to avoid, that is of being obligated to fight the enemy to a disadvantage or submit.

It had been agreed, Greene continued, that without the possession of Long Island, New York could not be held. The army, dispersed as it was from one end of York Island to the other, could not possibly stop an attack, and another such defeat as at Brooklyn could be ruinous. “ ’Tis our business to study to avoid any considerable misfortune.” Besides, two-thirds of the city belonged to Tories. There was no sound reason to run any great risk in its defense.

“I give it as my opinion that a general and speedy retreat is absolutely necessary and that the honor and interest of America require it.”

Further, he would burn the city. Once taken by the British, it could never be recovered without a naval force superior to theirs. Left standing, it would guarantee them abundant housing, wharves, and a market for their every need. Greene could not conceive of a single benefit to the American cause that could come from preserving New York, and he urged Washington to summon a war council.

By the time the council convened, on September 7, at Washington’s headquarters at the Mortier house north of town, the letter from John Hancock had arrived saying Congress wanted no damage done to New York.

It was agreed by the council that if the British were to bring up their fleet and open fire, the city was untenable. Greene, Reed, Israel Putnam, and several others called for a total and immediate withdrawal from all of York Island. This, they argued, would deprive the enemy of the advantage of their sea power, “put nothing to the hazard,” and keep the army together.

But they were overruled by the majority, as Washington promptly reported to Congress. What Washington said at the meeting is not known, as no record survived, though it appears he thought the directive from Congress was an egregious mistake and that Nathanael Greene had the right idea. In a letter to Lund Washington he would later write, “Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment, New York should have been laid in ashes.”

To Congress on September 8, Washington expressed his fear of being outflanked again by the enemy. “On every side there is a choice of difficulties,” he wrote. And with every decision went the possibility that his army would not fight. It was a fear that never left him. Young, inexperienced soldiers who were so greatly outnumbered ought never be drawn into an open conflict, he wrote.

“We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk unless compelled by a necessity.”

Yet he seemed unable to make up his mind. “On the other hand, to abandon a city which has been by some deemed defensible and on whose works much labor has been bestowed, has a tendency to dispirit the troops and enfeeble our cause.” Strong posts at Fort Washington and on the opposite side of the Hudson would secure the Hudson corridor. A retreating army was always “encircled with difficulties,” and “declining an engagement subjects a general to reproach.”

But then he held out the possibility that some “brilliant stroke” might save the cause, though who knew what that might be.

It did not help that the men were badly fed and unpaid—many had seen no pay for two months—while across the East River the British were well supplied with fresh provisions from the farms of Long Island, “a pleasing circumstance,” as Ambrose Serle noted, “both for the health and spirit of the troops.” The Hessians especially claimed they had never fared so well.

AT PHILADELPHIA, after days of debate, Congress decided to send a delegation of three—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge—to meet with Lord Howe. The three men departed on September 9.

On September 10, advancing British forces crossed from Long Island to occupy Montresor’s Island at the mouth of the Harlem River.

Nathanael Greene pressed Washington to reconvene the war council. The situation was “so critical and dangerous” that a decision must be made, Washington read in a joint statement signed by Greene and six other general officers, this written September 11, the day the three-man congressional delegation crossed from New Jersey to Staten Island to confer with Lord Howe.

The Staten Island meeting lasted several hours, during which Lord Howe did most of the talking. “It is desirable to put a stop to these ruinous extremities, as well for the sake of our country as yours,” said the resplendently uniformed admiral. Was there no way of “treading back this step of independency?” There was not, he was told, and the meeting came to nothing, as expected.

But it had at least brought a pause to enemy movements. The British had suspended operations during what could have been a golden opportunity to attack, as one perfect, late-summer day followed another.

Washington’s war council met again on September 12 and this time resolved to abandon the city. The main part of the army was to move north to King’s Bridge as rapidly as possible, while some 4,000 troops under General Putnam remained to hold off an attack. The sick were to be moved first. Cannon and tons of supplies and ammunition had to be hauled from the city, a mammoth undertaking. Every available horse and wagon was pressed into service.

On the afternoon of Friday the 13th, the British were on the move again. Clearly some “grand military exertion” was under way, in Joseph Reed’s words. The warships Roebuck and Phoenix, and the frigates Orpheus and Carysfort—four ships mounting 148 cannon—proceeded up the East River with six troop transports, to anchor in Bushwick Creek. Fired on “briskly” by American batteries, the ships received no serious damage, nor bothered even to return the fire.

On Saturday the 14th, Washington received another directive from John Hancock. After further consideration, Congress had now decided to leave the timing of an evacuation of New York entirely to the commander-in-chief. He and the army were to remain not “a moment longer” than he thought necessary.

Washington replied at once:

We are now taking every method in our power to remove the stores, etc…. they are so great and so numerous that I fear we shall not effect the whole before we meet with some interruption…. Our sick are extremely numerous and we find their removal attended with the greatest difficulty.

Yet by late afternoon the larger part of the army had moved north to King’s Bridge and Harlem Heights. Washington and his staff would depart from the Mortier house that night and head north.

SURVEYING THE SHORE of Kips Bay with his telescope, from the deck of the Roebuck, General Henry Clinton could see entrenchments “lined with men whose countenance appeared respectable and firm,” as he later wrote. The invasion of New York was about to begin, and Clinton was again to lead the attack.

Kips Bay was not his choice. He had adamantly opposed the plan, insisting that the Harlem River and King’s Bridge were the key to victory. If York Island was a bottle, then Harlem was the neck. Close it off, Clinton argued, and Washington and his rebel army would be trapped, the war won.

Though overruled, Clinton continued to press his opinions almost to the last hour. Even if the landing at Kips Bay were to succeed, he said, it would still be necessary to drive the rebels from Harlem and from King’s Bridge.

General Howe and his brother the admiral were not unmindful of Clinton’s logic, but the captains of the ships in the East River feared the infamously treacherous currents at Hell Gate, at the confluence of the East River and the Harlem.

William Howe issued a final order to the troops saying an attack on the enemy was “shortly intended,” and recommending “an entire dependence upon their bayonets, with which they will ever command that success which their bravery so well deserves.” There was no ringing call for valor in the cause of country or the blessings of liberty, as Washington had exhorted his troops at Brooklyn, only a final reminder of the effectiveness of bayonets.

The invasion was set for Sunday the 15th. Had Howe and the rest of his command known more, and waited one more day, the American evacuation would have been complete, and they could have walked into New York without a worry.

On the opposite shore, at Kips Bay, Private Joseph Martin was among the Connecticut troops posted in shallow trenches to help secure the retreat of the rest of the army. As night came on, sentinels by the water’s edge reported regularly on the half hour, “All’s well.” From one of the British ships, Private Martin heard a voice answer, “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night.”

II

ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL ROSTER, the Connecticut brigade commanded by Colonel William Douglas numbered 1,500 men. But a third or more were sick, and only about half of those fit for duty were manning the trenches by Kips Bay. They had been awake all night and had had little or nothing to eat in twenty-four hours. Many were the greenest of green American troops, farm boys who had joined the ranks only the week before. Some who had no muskets carried homemade pikes fashioned from scythe blades fixed to the ends of poles.

Colonel Douglas, a New Haven shipmaster and merchant who had fought gallantly at Brooklyn, thought New York untenable. Still, in the expression of the time, he was a thorough soldier. “I think if we will stand by each other, and not run like cowards, with God’s blessing, [we] may keep them off,” he had written to his wife.

In the course of the night, five British frigates had maneuvered into position off Kips Bay, and in the gray half-light before dawn Douglas and his men could see their dark hulls anchored in a row, broadside to the shore about two hundred yards out, so close that they loomed much larger and more menacing than they had ever looked before. Private Martin would remember being able to read the name of the 44-gun Phoenix “as distinctly as though I had been directly under her stern.”

The sun rose on a warm late-summer morning with clear skies and a fine, southwest breeze. “We lay very quiet in our ditch…till the sun was an hour or two high,” Martin wrote. “We heard a cannonade at the city, but our attention was drawn toward our own guests.”

The distant roar was an exchange of fire on the other side of York Island, as more of the British fleet, taking advantage of the ideal winds and a running tide, moved into the Hudson, making it appear that the attack was to come there.

The five ships off Kips Bay lay “entirely quiet” as the day grew oppressively hot. Then four long columns of enemy flatboats could be seen emerging from Newtown Cove across the river, brimming with red-coated troops. “When they came to the edge of the tide,” wrote Martin, “they formed their boats in line…until they appeared like a large field of clover in full bloom.”

At about ten o’clock, a first wave of more than eighty flatboats pushed off into the river. On board were 4,000 British and Hessian soldiers, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder. Lord Rawdon, who was with General Clinton in the lead boat, later wrote that the Hessians, unaccustomed to “this water business” and fearful of being fired on when packed so closely, began singing hymns, while the redcoats responded in their own fashion, “by damning themselves and the enemy indiscriminately with wonderful fervency.”

The crossing went slowly, almost noiselessly, until all at once, the ships standing broadside to Kips Bay went into action, and the quiet of the nearly three weeks since the Battle of Brooklyn came to a thunderous end.

Just three days earlier, at Staten Island, Admiral Lord Howe had spoken solicitously of putting “a stop to these ruinous extremities,” if only the Americans would give up “independency.” Now, at about eleven o’clock, he lay aside the olive branch in a manner that none of the three members of Congress, or anyone, could have imagined, or that any of those present at Kips Bay would ever forget.

The fury let loose was impossible to conceive, wrote a British midshipman. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” recorded Ambrose Serle.

It continued without stop for a full hour, a total of nearly eighty guns pounding point-blank at the shore and shrouding the river with acrid smoke. Joseph Martin, who had made a “frog’s leap” into a ditch, thought he might die of the sound alone.

The barrage pulverized the meager breastworks, buried men under sod and sand, and kicked up such dust and smoke that there was no possibility of firing back at the enemy.

When the guns at last ceased, the first wave of flatboats emerged from the drifting smoke into the sunlight and made for shore. By then the Americans had fled as fast as their legs would carry them.

Colonel Douglas had told his men to save themselves and run, but the order was hardly necessary. The fire from the enemy ships, he wrote, was as “hot” as ever could be imagined, “but they mostly overshot us. The brigade was in such a scattered [position] that I could not collect them and I found the whole army on a retreat.”

From the lead landing craft, Lord Rawdon saw the rebels break instantly, “happy to escape” to the nearest woods. “We pressed to shore,” he wrote, “landed, and formed without losing a single man.”

Not all the Americans got away. As another British officer would write, “I saw a Hessian sever a rebel’s head from his body and clap it on a pole in the entrenchments.”

Clinton and his advance corps pressed inland unopposed for a quarter of a mile, to secure high ground known as Inclenberg. There they halted and waited.

FROM HIS NEW COMMAND POST on the crest of Harlem Heights, four miles to the north, Washington had heard the roar of cannon at Kips Bay and seen smoke rising in the distance. In an instant he was on his horse and racing south at a gallop, down the post road. Reining up at a cornfield about a mile inland from Kips Bay, he found men “flying in every direction.” It was everything he had feared and worse, his army in pell-mell panic, Americans turned cowards before the enemy.

In a fury, he plunged his horse in among them, trying to stop them. Cursing violently, he lost control of himself. By some accounts, he brandished a cocked pistol. In other accounts, he drew his sword, threatening to run men through. “Take the walls!” he shouted. “Take the corn field!” When no one obeyed, he threw his hat on the ground, exclaiming in disgust, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”

When an advance party of Hessians appeared, and the fleeing men refused to make a stand, Washington is said to have flogged some of their officers with his riding crop. A few soldiers turned and fired on the enemy, killing and wounding several. When a number of other Americans surrendered, with their hands uplifted, the Hessians shot or bayoneted them.

Two Continental brigades, a force of more than 2,000 under Generals Samuel Parsons and John Fellows, arrived in support, but at the sight of men fleeing in panic all around, they, too, turned and ran, strewing the ground with muskets, cartridge boxes, canteens, knapsacks, hats, and coats—this at the sight of fewer than a hundred enemy soldiers.

“The demons of fear and disorder,” said Joseph Martin, “seemed to take full possession of all and everything that day.” All, that is, but Washington, who, in a rage, heedless of his own safety or the chance of being captured, rode to within a hundred yards of the enemy. Only with difficulty were two of his aides able to grab the bridle of his horse and get him to leave the field.

More British troops were landing. By late afternoon, another 9,000 would be ashore at Kips Bay. When word came that the rebels had abandoned New York, a British brigade headed rapidly south and the city was theirs.

They were welcomed with open arms. “Nothing could equal the expressions of joy shown by the inhabitants, upon the arrival of the King’s officers among them,” wrote Ambrose Serle. “They even carried some of them upon their shoulders about the streets, and behaved in all respects, women as well as men, like overjoyed Bedlamites.” At old Fort George on the Battery, a woman pulled down the flag of the Continental Army and trampled it under foot before raising the Union Jack.

Serle had watched the whole scene from Lord Howe’s flagship. His contempt for the rebels had never been greater: “Thus this town and its environs, which these blustering gentlemen had taken such wonderful pains to fortify, were given up in two or three hours without any defense, or the least appearance of a manly resistance.”

For the remnants of the American army who had gotten away, it had been a close call. Henry Knox had managed to escape at the last minute only by seizing a boat on the Hudson. Israel Putnam and several thousand of his troops had set off on a forced march up the post road, a route that would have taken them up the east side of the island and straight into the invading British army had Putnam not been convinced by a young aide, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Aaron Burr, to head north by less traveled roads along the Hudson.

Leading his soldiers through the sweltering afternoon, rugged “Old Put” was at his best, riding up and down the long line exhorting them to stay together and keep moving, to get past the British before they had the island sealed off from the East River to the Hudson. At one time the two armies were passing each other less than a mile apart, only a stretch of woods dividing them.

Another young officer who made the march, Captain David Humphreys, would later write of General Putnam:

Having myself been a volunteer in his division and acting adjutant to the last regiment that left the city, I had frequent opportunities that day of beholding him, for the purpose of issuing orders, and encouraging the troops, flying on his horse covered with foam, wherever his presence was necessary. Without his extraordinary exertions…it is probable the entire corps would have been cut to pieces.

Putnam and his exhausted men marched into the main camp at Harlem after dark to rousing cheers. They had been given up for lost. When Knox turned up later, he, too, was greeted with shouts of welcome, even an embrace from the commander-in-chief.

WASHINGTON WOULD CALL the conduct of those who had fled at Kips Bay “shameful,” “scandalous,” “disgraceful and dastardly.” Nathanael Greene wrote of the “miserable disorderly retreat” and described Washington’s behavior as he tried to rally the terrified men as close to suicidal. “Fellows’s and Parsons’s whole brigade[s] ran away from about fifty men,” Greene reported to a friend, “and left his Excellency on the ground within eighty yards of the enemy, so vexed at the infamous conduct of the troops that he sought death rather than life.”

Washington’s anger may also have been partly with himself, as the attack at Kips Bay had been nearly as great a tactical surprise as the enemy’s night march through the Jamaica Pass. He had been made to look a fool by Howe still again.

The Connecticut militia, already in disgrace for deserting in such appalling numbers, were tagged now with cowardice. The Connecticut “runaways” were held to blame for the whole fiasco, which only made worse the hard feelings between the troops of New England and those of the other states that had plagued the army almost from the beginning.

Not all judgments were so harsh, however. Other things had to be weighed in the balance, wrote General Heath. “The wounds received on Long Island were yet bleeding; and the officers, if not the men, knew that the city was not to be defended.” A Connecticut chaplain, Benjamin Trumbull, who only a short while before had delivered a rousing sermon calling for courage and heroism in battle, wrote in his diary:

The men were blamed for retreating and even flying…but I imag[in]e the fault was principally in the general officers…to give the men [a] rational prospect of defense and a safe retreat, should they engage the enemy. And it is probable many lives were saved…though it was not honorable. It is admirable that so few men are lost.

In fact, many lives were saved, and even veteran troops would have fled under such a murderous cannonade as at Kips Bay. For the Connecticut men to have stayed would have been truly suicidal.

Henry Knox attributed the failure at both Brooklyn and Kips Bay to inadequate leadership by ill-trained, inexperienced officers, and a woefully overworked commander-in-chief. “The general is as worthy a man as breathes, but he cannot do everything and be everywhere,” Knox reflected in a letter to his brother.

We ought to have men of merit in the most extensive and unlimited sense of the word. Instead of which, the bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men who might make tolerable soldiers but [are] bad officers.

There should be military academies established to “teach the art of war,” Knox wrote, “and every other encouragement possible to draw persons into the army that may give luster to our arms.”

Again, as on Long Island, the enemy effort had gone like clockwork. But why their commanders had delayed in crossing the island, why they had not pushed straight on to the Hudson, remained a puzzle. Had they advanced another mile or so, they could have cut the island in two, just as Nathanael Greene had predicted, sealing off any chance Putnam and his troops had to escape.

In explanation, a romantic story spread—a story that would become legendary—that a Mrs. Robert Murray, a Quaker and an ardent patriot, had delayed William Howe and his generals by inviting them to afternoon tea at her country home at Inclenberg, later known as Murray Hill. “Mrs. Murray treated them with cake and wine, and they were induced to tarry two hours or more,” the story went, and thus Mary Lindley Murray was credited with saving part of the army, perhaps even the cause of liberty. She would be portrayed as a veritable Circe charming the gallant Britons with her feminine wiles. Possibly she did invite the officers to tea, and she may have been extremely charming, but she was also a woman in her fifties and the mother of twelve children.

More to the point, Clinton’s delay at Inclenberg was according to plan. His orders had been to hold the line there until General Howe and the rest of the invading force had landed later in the afternoon.

The British, quite understandably, considered the invasion an immense success. Howe had wanted to seize and occupy New York as quickly as possible and at the least cost in bloodshed, and all that had been accomplished. New York, the key to British strategy, was at last in British hands. Howe and his generals were entirely satisfied with the day’s work, and by nightfall their troops had crossed the middle of the island to the Hudson and pressed north to within striking distance of the rebel lines by the Harlem River.

But then, the very next day, September 16, to the astonishment of everyone, it would be the Americans’ turn to claim success.

WASHINGTON, AS USUAL, was up before dawn, drafting correspondence at his spacious new headquarters, the Palladian-style mansion of a departed Loyalist, Colonel Roger Morris, with whom he had once served in the French and Indian War. The house, about a mile south of Fort Washington, commanded the summit of Harlem Heights—indeed, it stood at the highest elevation on all of York Island. From the balcony of its columned portico, one could see the Hudson on the right, and off to the left, three miles down the Harlem River valley, the old Dutch village of Harlem and the waters of Hell Gate. To the south, on clear days—and they were nearly all clear, dry days that September—one could pick out the distant spires of New York and further still, the hills of Staten Island, twenty miles away.

According to Joseph Reed, who was with Washington, it was still very early when word came that the enemy was advancing, and Washington sent Reed cantering off to investigate.

Washington had been expecting an attack. “I have sent out some reconnoitering parties to gain intelligence if possible of the disposition of the enemy,” he had already reported in a letter to Congress that morning. More than a hundred Connecticut Rangers, some of the best soldiers in the army, had left on the mission before dawn, led by one of the best field officers in the army, a strapping Connecticut farmer and veteran of Bunker Hill, Colonel Thomas Knowlton. (It was Knowlton at Bunker Hill who, with Colonel John Stark, had famously held the rail fence in the face of the oncoming British lines, and Knowlton who, during the siege of Boston, had led the night attack on Charlestown that so upset the British officer’s production of the Burgoyne farce The Blockade at Faneuil Hall.)

Knowlton and his Rangers were to probe for the enemy along the wooded ridges to the south, which rose beyond a narrow, intervening valley known as the Hollow Way. And it was there at daybreak, in the woods of the highlands to the south, that Knowlton and his men ran into the British and a “brisk” skirmish ensued.

Reed arrived just as the enemy attacked, with some four hundred light infantry, thus outnumbering the Americans by nearly four to one.

I went down to our most advanced post [he wrote] and while talking there with the officer of the guard, the enemy’s advanced guard fired upon us at about fifty yards distance. Our men behaved well, stood and returned the fire, till, overpowered by numbers, they were obliged to retreat.

Reed raced off to get help from Washington, who had since ridden to the southern reaches of Harlem Heights, where Nathanael Greene’s brigades were drawn up, overlooking the Hollow Way. By the time Reed arrived, Knowlton and his men could be seen retreating swiftly down the slopes on the opposite side.

Then out of the far woods and down the hill came the British in pursuit, sounding their bugles, as if on a fox hunt. “I never felt such a sensation before,” Reed wrote. “It seemed to crown our disgrace.”

What the Virginia fox hunter watching the scene from his saddle may have felt or thought can only be imagined, for he never said. But his response was an immediate decision to make a fight, if only, as he later explained to Patrick Henry, “to recover that military ardor which is of the utmost moment to an army.”

Washington ordered a counterattack across the Hollow Way, and sent Knowlton and his men, plus three companies of Virginians led by Major Andrew Leitch, on the encircling move to the left, with Reed as guide. They were to get behind the redcoats and entrap them in the Hollow Way. Greene and Putnam led the main attack, and both were soon in the thick of it.

The enemy had “rushed down the hill with all speed to a plain spot of ground,” wrote Joseph Hodgkins, who was back in action with Greene’s troops for the first time since Brooklyn. “Then our brigade marched out of the woods. Then a very hot fire began on both sides.”

But Knowlton’s encircling move ran into trouble when some of his men opened fire too soon, attacking the enemy’s flank, instead of getting behind and cutting off their retreat. The fighting grew fierce. Within minutes Knowlton and Major Leitch both fell, mortally wounded.

With the chance to encircle and capture the British gone, Washington threw more of his forces into the main attack, and the British, too, rushed in reinforcements. In little time the British had committed 5,000 men.

The struggle went on for hours, the Americans, for once, holding their own. Slowly the British began to give way. Then the British turned and ran, and the Americans took after them. “[We] drove the dogs near three miles,” wrote one of the Connecticut men.

Fearing the enemy might bring up still more strength, and that his men might be running into a trap, Washington called off the attack, which was not easily done. “The pursuit of a flying enemy was so new a scene, that it was with difficulty our men could be brought to retreat,” wrote Joseph Reed.

From all that Joseph Hodgkins had seen, and from what others had told him, he reckoned they had killed no fewer than 500 of the enemy and wounded that many or more. “They were seen to carry off several wagon loads. Besides our people buried a good many that they left.”

Probably the British and Hessian losses were 90 killed and about 300 wounded. The number of American casualties was far lower, fewer than 100 wounded and 30 killed, but these included Major Leitch and Colonel Knowlton, whose deaths were a heavy blow to the army. To Reed, who had carried the wounded Knowlton from the field, and to Washington, Thomas Knowlton was the “greatest loss.”

REPORTING TO CONGRESS on the Battle of Harlem Heights, Washington referred to it only as “a pretty sharp skirmish” and made no claims to a great victory. But to the troops it was a genuine victory at long last, and an urgently needed lift to their self-respect. They had seen the backs of redcoats on the fly. As Henry Knox wrote, “They find that if they stick to these mighty men, they will run as fast as other people.”

Nathanael Greene, who from the first weeks at Boston had never doubted that the army would fight if properly led, wrote proudly to William Ellery, a delegate to Congress from Rhode Island:

Our people beat the enemy off the ground…. Had all the colonies good officers, there is no danger of the troops; never was troops that would stand in the field longer than the American soldiery. If the officers were as good as the men, and had only a few months to form the troops to discipline, America might bid defiance to the whole world.

British prisoners captured in the fight said they had never expected the Americans to attack, and were “never more surprised.” Henry Clinton, in accounting for what happened, blamed the “impetuosity” of the light infantry for pursuing the rebels in the first place. For contrary to what Washington thought, the British had had no plans for or any intention of engaging the rebels that day, or anytime soon.

FOR DAYS THE TWO ARMIES, close as they were, remained perfectly quiet, “as quiet,” wrote Lieutenant Tilghman of Washington’s staff, “as if they were a thousand miles apart.”

The position of the Americans on the rocky heights above the Harlem River was as advantageous as any they had held since the war began, and they labored on steadily to make it still more secure. “If we cannot fight them on this ground, we can on none in America,” concluded Joseph Reed. Nor was the point lost on the British commander-in-chief who, with New York in hand, saw no reason to press the attack just yet.

In his own good time William Howe was drawing up plans to outmaneuver the rebels once again, while his brother, Lord Howe, reflected on whether it might be the opportune moment for another peace overture. Increasing numbers of rebel soldiers, all “much dispirited,” were crossing the lines to defect, reinforcing the commonly held opinion among the British commanders that the rebellion had run its course.

Meanwhile, others of the British army were finding New York delightful. There were “many fair houses” for quarters. Food was more plentiful than ever. It was the height of the harvest season and the supply of fresh produce from the farms of Long Island seemed limitless. As a bonus, the rebels, in their hurry to leave, had left behind more than 5,000 barrels of flour.

Off-duty British soldiers and officers flocked like tourists to inspect the abandoned rebel fortifications, marveling at their size and number and the work that had gone into them.

“The shore of the Island, from Hell Gate on the East River, quite round by the town, up to Bloomingdale on the North River, an extent of near fourteen miles, is fortified at almost every accessible part, and there is hardly a height without a redoubt or battery on it,” wrote Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie in admiration. Ambrose Serle, after a walking tour of the town, recorded his “astonishment” at the sight of rebel breastworks and embrasures at the end of nearly every street and avenue.

The infinite pains and labor which they must have bestowed, one would have thought, from regret alone, would have inclined them to make some kind of stand. But their fears overpowered their resolution, and they evacuated the object of all their toil in one short hour, without making the least defense or anything like a handsome retreat.

On September 19, against the judgment of most of the British high command, including presumably his brother the general, Lord Howe issued a direct appeal to the people of America, in the form of a proclamation warning that the stubbornness of their representatives in Congress was leading to their downfall and misery. Americans ought to “judge for themselves,” he wrote, “whether it be more consistent with their honor and happiness to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the unjust and precarious cause in which they are engaged,” or “to return to their allegiance, accept the blessings of peace,” and thus be “secured in the free enjoyment of their liberty and properties.”

The proclamation seemed only to irritate everyone on both sides, and was all but forgotten after the night of September 20–21, when fire raged out of control in New York and a large part of the city burned to the ground.

Fire was a constant fear in every town and city of the time, and never more than when the weather was as hot and dry as it had been that summer. Fire at night was the most terrifying of all.

The fire, it appears from several eyewitness accounts, began shortly after midnight in a “low grogery” called the Fighting Cocks, at Whitehall Slip, at the southern tip of New York.

Driven by a southwesterly wind, the flames turned quickly to wildfire. Choking smoke and fiery-red, windborne flakes of burning shingles filled the air, as the flames swept uptown, across Dock Street, Bridge Street, Stone, Marketfield, and Beaver streets. Seen from the American lines at Harlem, ten miles to the north, it looked as though the very heavens were ablaze.

No warning bells rang, because Washington had ordered every bell in the city carried away to be recast for cannon. British soldiers and others rushed to help, but the heat was so intense, the fire so out of control, that no one could get near it. There were too few buckets and little water at hand. The few fire engines there were proved useless.

Houses were torn down in advance of the flames, but then nothing seemed to check the inferno. Had the wind not shifted to the southeast at about two in the morning, the entire city might have been consumed. As it was, the fire raged up the west side, destroying nearly everything between Broadway and the Hudson, including the infamous Holy Ground, to as far as the open field at King’s College. When Trinity Church, at Broadway and Wall Street, burst into flames, its shingled steeple became a vast “pyramid of fire,” until it burned to its timbers and crashed to the ground.

“It is almost impossible to conceive a scene of more horror and distress,” wrote Frederick Mackenzie, who was among those trying to fight the flames.

The sick, the aged, women, and children, half naked, were seen going they knew not where, and taking refuge in houses which were at a distance from the fire, but from whence they were in several instances driven a second and even a third time…. The terror was increased by the horrid noise of the burning and falling houses, the pulling down of such wooden buildings as served to conduct the fire…the rattling of above 100 wagons, sent in from the army, and which were constantly employed in conveying to the common such goods and effects as could be saved. The confused voices of so many men, the shrieks and cries of the women and children…

Concerned that the burning city could be the prelude to a night attack by the rebels, the Howes held back from sending more soldiers and seamen to fight the blaze until daybreak, and by ten o’clock the fire had burned itself out.

Nearly five hundred houses were destroyed, or approximately a quarter of the city, and in the shock and horror of the moment it seemed certain the disaster was the villainous work of the enemy. Rebel incendiaries had been caught in the act, it was widely reported. One such man, caught with “fire brand” in hand, had been knocked down by a British grenadier and “thrown into the flames” for his reward. Another who was seen cutting off the handles of water buckets was hanged from a signpost by British sailors, then hung up by the heels like a slaughtered animal.

Witnesses reported having seen the fire break out in several different places, not just at Whitehall Slip, and this was taken as proof of arson. But Frederick Mackenzie, who was no less certain than others that the town had been “designedly” set afire, acknowledged in his diary, “There is no doubt…that the flames were communicated to several houses by means of the burning flakes of the shingles, which being light, were carried by the wind to some distance and…kindled the fire anew.”

In a letter to Lord Germain, General Howe charged the deed to unnamed “lurking” villains. “The Yankees [New York Loyalists] are convinced that the New England men set fire to the town; they will never forgive them,” wrote General James Grant. Governor William Tryon went further, implying in a letter to Germain that Washington himself had devised the plot and instructed the incendiaries.

More than a hundred suspects were rounded up, but no evidence was found against them. None were brought to trial. All were eventually released. It was never determined, then or later, that the “Great Fire” was anything other than accidental.

Washington, in his report to Congress, called it an accident. Writing privately, however, he allowed to Lund Washington that “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.” Beyond that he said no more.

Nor was Washington to say anything about Captain Nathan Hale, who was “apprehended” by the British the day after the fire and, it appears, as part of the roundup of suspected incendiaries.

By several accounts, Hale’s capture took place in New York. A report in the New York Gazette, a Tory paper, said an unnamed “New England man who had a captain’s commission” was seized in the city with “dreadful implements of ruin [firebrands]” and, when searched, “the sum of 500 [pounds] was found upon him.” This could refer to Hale, although Frederick Mackenzie noted that “a person named Nathan Hales” was apprehended on Long Island on the night of September 21.

Whatever the circumstances of his capture, Hale admitted to being a spy, and General Howe ordered him hanged without trial.

Hale was twenty-one years old, a handsome, athletic graduate of Yale, a schoolmaster and wholehearted patriot. Raised on a Connecticut farm, he was one of six brothers who served in the war. He had signed up more than a year before, taken part in the Siege of Boston, and lately joined Colonel Knowlton’s Rangers. Yet thus far he felt he had rendered no real service to the country, and when Knowlton, on orders from Washington, called for a volunteer to cross the lines and bring back desperately needed intelligence, he had bravely offered to go.

A fellow Connecticut officer, Captain William Hull, who had known Hale in college, tried to talk him out of it, warning that he was by nature “too frank and open for deceit and disguise,” and that no one respected the character of a spy. Hale had said only that he would “reflect, and do nothing but what duty demands.” The next thing Hull knew, his friend had disappeared.

The mission was doomed from the start, ill-planned and pathetically amateurish, and Hale was a poor choice. He knew nothing of spying. The scars from a powder burn on his face made him readily identifiable, and a Loyalist cousin who knew him well was serving as General Howe’s deputy commissary of prisoners.

Hale went under the guise of a Dutch schoolmaster in search of work. Apparently it was from naïvely confiding the truth of his mission to the wrong people that led to his capture.

He was hanged on the morning of September 21, in an artillery park near the Beekman house, a country estate not far from the East River that served as Howe’s headquarters.

It was Captain John Montresor, who, only hours afterward, under a white flag, brought word of Hale’s fate to the Americans and described what had happened to Hale to his friend Captain Hull. And it was Hull, later, who reported Montresor’s account of Hale’s last words as he was about to be executed: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” which was a variation on another then-famous line from the play Cato. (One imagines that in delivering the line to his British executioners, Hale, knowing that it was as familiar to them as to him, put the emphasis on the second-to-last word: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”)

On September 26, a British officer wrote in a letter,

We hung up a rebel spy the other day, and some soldiers got out of a rebel gentleman’s garden a painted soldier on a board, and hung it along with the rebel, and wrote upon it, General Washington, and I saw it yesterday beyond headquarters, by the roadside.

Hale’s place in the pantheon of American heroes, as the martyr spy of the Revolution, was not to come until years later. For now very little was known or said of his story. Washington, angry or saddened as he may have been, is not known to have mentioned the subject.

AMERICAN SOLDIERS WERE DESERTING as if leaving a sinking ship, thirty or forty at a time, many defecting to the enemy. Disobedience and theft were epidemic. It was far from an army of heroes only. “A spirit of desertion, cowardice, plunder, and shrinking from duty when attended with fatigue or danger, prevailed but too generally,” wrote Joseph Reed, who had become so demoralized that even he was on the verge of quitting.

An experience on the battlefield on September 16 had had a searing effect. In the heat of the fight, Reed had seen a soldier running from the enemy. Ordered to stop and go back, the soldier, a Connecticut private named Ebenezer Leffingwell, had raised his musket, taken aim from a distance of only a few yards, and pulled the trigger. But the lock only snapped. When Reed grabbed the gun of another soldier and pulled the trigger, it too snapped. Reed drew his sword and, striking twice, wounded Leffingwell on the head, severed a thumb, and forced him to surrender. “I should have shot him, could I have got my gun off,” Reed said at Leffingwell’s court-martial on September 19.

Leffingwell, who confessed he had been running away, was found guilty of cowardice and of “presenting his firelock at his superior officer.” He was sentenced to be executed before the assembled troops the following day. But at Reed’s urging, Washington pardoned Leffingwell at the last moment, after Leffingwell had kneeled to be shot. The next such offender would “suffer death without mercy,” warned Washington.

“To attempt to introduce discipline and subordination into a new army must always be a work of much difficulty,” Reed wrote to his wife, “but where the principles of democracy so universally prevail, where so great an equality and so thorough a leveling spirit predominates, either no discipline can be established, or he who attempts it must become odious and detestable, a position which no one will choose.”

Washington was no less a commanding presence than ever, and except for his raging outburst at Kips Bay, he seemed imperturbable, entirely in control. In truth, he was as discouraged as he had ever been in his life, and miserably unhappy. It was all he could do to keep up appearances.

“Unless some speedy, and effectual measures are adopted by Congress, our cause will be lost,” he told John Hancock in a long, foreboding letter dated September 25.

Like Greene, like Knox and Reed, Washington knew the problem with the army was not so much the men in the ranks as those who led them. The war was to be no “work of a day,” he warned, and must be carried on “systematically.” Good officers were mandatory, and the only means to obtain good officers was to establish the army on a permanent footing. There must be an end to short-term enlistments. Officers must be better paid, better trained. Soldiers must be offered a good bounty, adequate clothing and blankets, plus the promise of free land.

Inflamed by passions, stirred by patriotism, men will “fly hastily and cheerfully to arms,” Washington continued, but to expect “the bulk of an army” to serve on selflessly, come what may, once the first emotions subsided, would be “to look for what never did, and, I fear, never will, happen.” Even among officers, those who acted with true “disinterestedness” were “no more than a drop in the ocean,” wrote this most disinterested and selfless of officers.

To place any dependence on militia is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life—unaccustomed to the din of arms—totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge, and superior in arms, makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows.

He wrote of the “lust after plunder” among the men, of regimental surgeons taking bribes to certify sickness or infirmities that would qualify for discharges. He understood the fear there was in Congress and among the people of a standing army, but he thought the evils imagined were remote. On the other hand, were there to be no standing army, the cause of independence faced ruin.

He wanted rules and regulations adopted, punishments made more severe. As it was, for the most “atrocious offenses,” the maximum was thirty-nine lashes, and these, he had found, were seldom layed on as they should be, but more as “sport.” It was punishment of a kind that, for a bottle of rum, many “hardened fellows” were quite willing to undergo.

But as Washington had no way of knowing, Congress had already acted on most of what he wanted, due largely to the efforts of John Adams as head of the Board of War and in floor debate. Every soldier who enlisted for the “duration” of the war was to receive $20 and one hundred acres of land. New Articles of War, drawn up by Adams and based largely on the British Articles of War, went far to ensure justice for the individual soldier, provided stiffer punishments for major offenses (up to one hundred lashes), and increased the number of crimes for which the penalty was death. Adams also proposed for the first time the creation of a military academy, as Knox had urged, but nothing came of the motion.

Writing to Lund Washington on September 30, Washington was even more candid about his miseries. “Such is my situation that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings.” He was “wearied to death” with problems. One regiment had fewer than fifty men left, another, all of fourteen fit for duty. “In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.” And the enemy, all the while, was “within stone’s throw.”

Then, as he had before, and as though such a giant shift of mind was perfectly natural, he turned to the subject of Mount Vernon. He was concerned about the fireplaces:

That in the parlor must, I should think, stand as it does; not so much on account of the wainscotting, which I think must be altered (on account of the door leading into the new building), as on account of the chimney piece and the manner of its fronting into the room. The chimney in the room above ought, if it could be so contrived, to be an angle chimney as the others are: but I would not have this attempted at the expense of pulling down the partition. The chimney in the new room should be exactly in the middle of it—the doors and everything else to be exactly answerable and uniform. In short, I would have the whole executed in a masterly manner.

If all could not be as he wished with the army, if all could not be “exactly answerable and uniform” or “executed in a masterly manner,” concerning the war he was expected to wage and win, then he would at least have it so at his distant, beloved home.

THE CRYSTAL DAYS of late September and early October in New York followed one after another, with lucent skies and stands of maple and sumac just beginning to turn color. The East River had become a spectacle of British ships of every kind lining nearly its entire length. The Hudson, in the sharp light of the season, sparkled like an inland sea. In all, it could not have been a more beautiful setting for the strange, extended intermission in a war that many hoped might be put to rest for the winter, not to resume until spring, and then, preferably, not too early.

On the morning of October 9, any such hopes ended. Three of the British warships, Phoenix, Roebuck, and Tartar, weighed anchor and with the advantage of a flood tide and a brisk southwesterly wind, proceeded up the Hudson to force passage beyond Forts Washington and Constitution, where, at enormous effort, the Americans had tried to block the river from shore to shore with sunken hulks and a submerged chain of spike-studded logs.

The guns of the forts high above the river opened fire. The ships answered with a pounding barrage, and by holding close to the eastern shore, where the river was deepest, they sailed straight, if slowly, through to safe anchorage upriver at the broad Tappan Zee, off Tarrytown.

Washington had observed the whole sorry scene. “To our surprise and mortification, they ran through without the least difficulty, and without receiving any apparent damage from our forts, though they kept up a heavy fire from both sides,” he wrote. Again, no end of time and labor devoted to defense had come to nothing.

In fact, the British had suffered nine seamen killed and considerable damage to their ships, while showing once more in spectacular fashion that the Hudson was undeniably theirs to employ as they wished.

The day could have led to a decisive change in American strategy. If the purpose of the forts was to deny the British navy use of the river, then all the effort and risk of holding the forts should have been reconsidered at once. Clearly the forts had been shown to be useless.

Yet Washington raised no questions then, and Nathanael Greene declared confidently, at day’s end, that the army was so strongly positioned in the forts that there was “little more to fear this campaign.” Instead of a lesson learned, the day marked the onset of one of the greatest American blunders of the war, and what was to be a painful humiliation for Washington and Greene.

THE BRITISH PLAN, once again, was to outflank the rebels, and again by water. Early on October 12, in an unexpected morning fog, a massive armada got under way on the East River.

With Admiral Lord Howe in command, 150 ships set sail upstream, through the dangerous Hell Gate channel “in very thick fog”—a mariner’s nightmare—and into Long Island Sound, and all without mishap. It was a stunning feat of seamanship. By noon an advance force of 4,000 troops led by Henry Clinton had landed at Throg’s Neck (also known as Frog’s Neck), a marshy point of land on the shoreline of Westchester County, due east of the American lines at Harlem Heights and King’s Bridge.

Throg’s Neck had been Lord Howe’s choice and proved to be a poor one for the army. What appeared to be a peninsula on the map was more an island connected to the mainland only at low tide. When the British tried to advance over a causeway, a small detachment of American riflemen, crouched behind log piles, held them in check, and when more American support moved in, after more British troops had landed, General Howe decided to reembark once sufficient supplies arrived and still more reinforcements were at hand, which consumed another four days. (“Tweedledum business,” an exasperated Henry Clinton called it.) But the reinforcements Howe expected were worth the wait—7,000 newly arrived Hessians under the command of the extremely able General Wilhelm von Knyphausen. And when Howe moved, he moved with astonishing speed, landing this time a short way up the sound, at Pell’s Point, a part of the mainland.

At the first report of the Throg’s Neck landing, Washington knew the Harlem Heights bastion had become a trap. The British were up to “their former scheme of getting to our rear,” he wrote. They had only to strike inland toward King’s Bridge. The army must withdraw as soon as possible. He would concentrate his forces at safer ground eighteen miles to the north at White Plains, the seat of Westchester County.

Through prisoner exchanges, Lord Stirling and General Sullivan had rejoined the army, in what seemed the nick of time. Both were warmly welcomed by Washington and assigned commands.

On October 14, the gaunt, odd-looking figure of General Charles Lee reappeared, dogs and all, and immediately resumed his place as second-in-command. Lee was the subject of much talk, raising spirits in the ranks and in Congress. Always popular in Congress, he had become even more so since the defeat of Clinton’s expedition to South Carolina, where Lee had had overall command of the American forces. While Washington’s ability had become subject to question, as one failure followed another, Lee’s reputation had never been higher. Some in Congress saw him as a potential savior.

For his part, Lee recklessly told General Gates that he thought Washington was only compounding his troubles by tolerating such “absurd interference” by the “cattle” in Congress in his conduct of the war, and that Washington was remiss for not “menacing ’em” with threats of resignation. (Were Washington to resign, of course, it would be Lee who succeeded him.)

Washington well knew the quirks and vanity of his old military friend and was glad to have him back. As a gesture of appreciation, he gave Fort Constitution a new name, Fort Lee.

At a council of war on October 16, it was decided that Fort Washington and its garrison should be, in the words of the brief minutes, “retained as long as possible.” The passage of ships on the Hudson was no longer the issue—the obstructions in the North River had proved insufficient—still, “communication” across the river to New Jersey had to be maintained.

Besides Washington and Lee, the general officers present included Heath, Sullivan, Stirling, and Mifflin. Colonel Knox was also present, but General Greene was not. According to the minutes, there was only one dissenting voice, and it was General George Clinton, not Lee, as he later implied.

The week before, Congress had resolved that, if “practicable,” every effort be made to “obstruct effectually” navigation on the Hudson at Fort Washington, but whether this was known in advance of the council of war, or had any bearing on the decision, is not clear.

All of York Island was finally to be evacuated. The entire American army would march off, except for 1,000 men left to hold Fort Washington.

Officially it was to be called “an alteration of our position,” not a retreat. The commander’s orders for October 17 read, in part, as follows:

As the movements of the enemy make an alteration of our position necessary…tents are to be struck and carefully rolled, the men to take the tent poles in their hands, two men out of a company, with a careful subaltern, to go with the baggage and not leave it on any pretense. No packs (unless of sick men), chairs, tables, benches, or heavy lumber [are] to be put on the wagons. No person, unless unable to walk, is to presume to get upon them. The wagons [are] to move forward before the regiments…Every regiment under marching orders, to see they have their flints and ammunition in good order and complete.

The exodus was soon under way, the army crossing the narrow bridge at King’s Bridge and heading north along the west bank of the little Bronx River. The sick were the greatest burden. With teams and wagons in short supply, the trek was slow and difficult, the men themselves, in many cases, hauling the baggage wagons and cannon.

Private Joseph Martin would remember lugging a cast-iron kettle the size of a milk pail until his arms were nearly dislocated. During a rest, he put it down, and, as he wrote, “one of the others gave it a shove with his foot, and it rolled down against a fence, and that was the last I ever saw of it. When we got through the night’s march, we found our mess was not the only one that was rid of their iron bondage.”

AS THE FIRST of Washington’s army struggled toward White Plains, the British made their swift landing at Pell’s Point. Again an advance force of 4,000 British and Hessian troops went ashore in the early morning and, this time, were unopposed. They moved directly inland a mile or more and might have kept going had it not been for the intrepid John Glover and his men. The date was October 18.

From a hilltop before dawn, Glover had seen through a telescope what looked like upwards of two hundred ships. “Oh! The anxiety of mind I was in then for the fate of the day…. I would have given a thousand worlds to have had General Lee, or some experienced officer present to direct, or at least to approve what I had done,” Glover later wrote.

Acting on his own, he rushed forward with some 750 men who fought tenaciously from behind stone walls, inflicting heavy casualties and stalling the enemy advance for a full day before forced to fall back.

Colonel Loammi Baldwin, the Massachusetts apple grower who, with his small regiment, joined in the fight, later claimed the men stayed as calm as if shooting ducks. He thought the enemy dead numbered at least 200, which was undoubtedly an exaggeration. But even if he was wrong by half, the British lost more men killed at Pell’s Point than in the Battle of Brooklyn. By Glover’s calculations, American casualties numbered 8 dead, 13 wounded.

Such ferocity as the Americans had shown appears to have stunned Howe, leading him to conclude that, with stone walls lining every road and adjacent field, more deadly fire could be waiting at any turn. Had the British kept moving inland with speed, they might have caught Washington’s retreating army head-on.

As it was, the British advance—along the shore as far as Mamaroneck, then inland toward White Plains—was slow and extremely cautious, seldom more than a few miles a day and against little or no resistance.

Probably Howe saw no more need to hurry now than he had before, and in fact, he did not expect to cut the rebel retreat. Rather, in eighteenth-century military fashion, he hoped to maneuver Washington onto the open field, and then, with his superior, professional force, destroy the Yankee “rabel” in one grand, decisive victory. Even after reaching White Plains, Howe took another few days to be sure all was ready.

AT LAST, on October 28, ten days after landing at Pell’s Point, William Howe sent 13,000 redcoats and Hessians up the main road to White Plains. It was early morning and yet another sparkling fall day. Washington, determined to avoid any test of strength on an open field, was well dug in on high ground in back of the village, his lines reaching more than a mile in length. For a brief time, it looked as though Howe intended to attack head-on, as the Americans hoped he would. British field guns opened fire, and Howe’s army marched in perfect order in two columns straight for where Washington commanded at the center. “The sun shone bright, their arms glittered, and perhaps troops never were shown to more advantage than these now appeared,” wrote General Heath of the oncoming foe.

Suddenly, one column wheeled sharply left in the direction of a higher hill on the American right, on the other side of the Bronx River. Chatterton’s Hill was thickly wooded on its slopes but had open fields above, and it dominated the American lines. “Yonder is the ground we ought to occupy,” Charles Lee had reportedly told Washington, but only at the last hour had troops been rushed to defend Chatterton’s Hill and these were mainly militia.

The British artillery moved to closer range. Cannon roared on both sides. “The air and hills smoked and echoed terribly,” wrote a Pennsylvania soldier. “The fences and walls were knocked down and torn to pieces, and men’s legs, arms, and bodies mingled with cannon and grapeshot all round us.”

Washington ordered more men to the top of Chatterton’s Hill. The British and Hessians forded the river, and the Hessians, part of the newly arrived 7,000 led by Colonel Johann Rall, launched the uphill charge. The militia broke and ran, and while the reinforcements, including Colonel Haslet’s Delaware troops and Smallwood’s Marylanders, fought bravely, they had to give way at the last.

The Battle of White Plains was the battle of Chatterton’s Hill and the British and the Hessians carried the day. But it was at a cost of more than 250 casualties, twice what the Americans suffered. Nor was it a victory that achieved anything.

The day after, October 29, Howe decided to pause again, to wait for still more reinforcements. The day after that, October 30, it poured rain. On the morning of November 1, Howe found that overnight Washington and his army had pulled back half a mile to a stronger position on high ground across the Bronx River.

For two more days the two armies waited and watched. “The enemy are determined on something decisive,” Henry Knox wrote to his brother, “and we are determined to risk a general battle on the most advantageous terms.”

When, on the night of November 3, American sentinels reported the rumbling of enemy carriages in the dark, it was assumed another attack was imminent. There was more stirring among the British ranks the next day, and the Americans braced themselves. But on the morning of November 5, to the complete surprise of the Americans, the whole of the British army was in motion, heading off in another direction, southwest toward the Hudson and King’s Bridge.

III

“OPINIONS HERE ARE VARIOUS,” Joseph Reed confided to his wife, following a council of war during which he had kept the minutes.

Some of the generals thought the British were headed for Fort Washington, or were bound for the Hudson to board ships and proceed upriver to attack from the rear. “Others, and a great majority, think that, finding this army too strongly posted, they have changed their whole plan…intending to penetrate the Jerseys and so move on to Philadelphia.”

Who had said what or the most in the course of the meeting, Reed did not mention. In his own opinion, however, it was too late in the season for any British movements of consequence, other than a few “excursions” into New Jersey perhaps, to revive the “drooping” spirits of the many Loyalists there.

Washington doubted that Howe would close the campaign “without attempting something more,” as he wrote to John Hancock. Almost certainly Howe was headed for New Jersey.

Nearing the close of the letter, Washington added a further worry: “I expect the enemy will bend their force against Fort Washington and invest it immediately,” he said, the term “invest” meaning to surround and lay siege, not necessarily to attack all-out.

Like most of the army he led, Washington was still exhausted and dispirited. To some who were closest at hand he seemed a little bewildered and unsuitably indecisive. Reed in particular, as he would later reveal, was having second thoughts about Washington’s capacity for leadership.

Increasingly worried over Fort Washington, the commander pondered whether to pull the troops out while there was yet time. In a letter to Nathanael Greene from White Plains dated November 8, Washington had reasoned, as he might well have earlier:

If we cannot prevent vessels passing up [the Hudson], and the enemy are possessed of the surrounding country, what valuable purpose can it answer to attempt to hold a post from which the expected benefit cannot be had. I am therefore inclined to think it will not be prudent to hazard the men and stores.

Yet he left the decision to Greene. “But as you are on the spot, [I] leave it to you to give such orders as to evacuating…as you judge best.”

Central to all that had to be taken into consideration was the Hudson River, which loomed as large in everyone’s calculations as it had for nearly a year, from the time Washington first dispatched Charles Lee south from Cambridge to take charge of fortifying New York—the Hudson, key to the whole British strategy.

Would the British decide to take care of the unfinished business of Fort Washington on this side of the river? Or would they cross over and strike into New Jersey? Or might they do both? And what in any case should be done?

Howe and his army were known to have reached Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson, less than ten miles above King’s Bridge, and were now moving south.

Once again, Washington decided to divide his army, and this time four ways. Seven thousand troops, much the largest part of the army, were to remain east of the Hudson under General Lee, to check any British move on New England. General Heath and another 3,000 were to guard the Hudson Highlands at Peekskill, New York, thirty miles to the north. Washington, with what was left of the army—only 2,000 men or so—would cross to the other side of the river, where, it was expected, he would be joined by New Jersey and Pennsylvania reinforcements. Nathanael Greene was to maintain his same position on the river, with overall command of the troops at Fort Washington and Fort Lee.

Washington and his 2,000 left White Plains on November 10. At midmorning, November 12, at Peekskill, he crossed the Hudson and headed directly south for New Jersey, reaching Fort Lee on November 13—all told, a sixty-five-mile march in three days.

For the better part of two days he and Greene conferred. Greene, who had yet to fight a battle, remained optimistic, convinced that Fort Washington could be held, and especially as he had more than doubled the number of troops at the fort, bringing the total force there to more than 2,000.

It was a remarkable reversal of roles. Washington, who in September had refused to abandon New York, seemed ready now to do so. Greene, in September, had seen no reason to remain a day longer on York Island, and had he had his way, the whole present crisis would have been avoided. Yet it was Greene now who wanted to make a stand on the last bit of the island still in American hands, arguing that it would keep communications open across the river, tie up British troops that might otherwise join in an attack on New Jersey (and ultimately Philadelphia), and lead possibly to another slaughter of the enemy as at Bunker Hill. Further, Greene reasoned, one more retreat could be devastating to the army’s already demoralized state.

Despite its formidable presence high over the river, its steep, rock-bound approaches, Fort Washington was, in several ways, not the impregnable bastion it seemed. An irregular pentagon in plan, it covered about four acres, its walls made of piled-up earth. There were no barracks for the troops, and there was no water supply, other than what could be hauled up from below—hardly what was needed in the event of a long siege with winter approaching.

Nonetheless, its commander, Colonel Robert Magaw, thought the fort could hold out until the end of December, and Greene agreed.

In his letter to Greene from White Plains, Washington had said he was “inclined to think” it prudent to abandon the fort, but left the decision to Greene, who was “on the spot.” Now that he himself was on the spot, Washington still could not decide what to do and so again, in effect, he let the decision be Greene’s.

“His Excellency General Washington has been with me for several days…but finally nothing concluded on,” Greene wrote to Henry Knox.

“The movements and designs of the enemy are not yet understood,” Washington reported to John Hancock.

TO THE BRITISH CAPTAIN Frederick Mackenzie it was all-but-perfect campaigning weather. There had been a frost nearly every night, but it disappeared once the sun was up. The only thing lacking was a stiff breeze to accommodate the navy. “No wind for some days past,” he recorded in his diary, “so that if it was intended to send any number of ships up the North River, it could not have been effected.”

The entry, dated November 7, affirmed that General Howe had by then established headquarters just six miles above King’s Bridge, and that the next move would “probably be against Fort Washington.” But then Captain Mackenzie never doubted that “reduction” of the fort was “the first object,” and like others, he felt more confident than ever of success, for a fund of timely and accurate intelligence had unexpectedly fallen into British hands. If Washington failed still to understand British “designs,” the British now knew quite a lot about the American situation, or at least a great deal more than they might have.

On November 2, when Howe’s army was still at White Plains, an American staff officer named William Demont (whom Mackenzie referred to as William Diamond), turned traitor, defecting to the British from Fort Washington and bringing with him copies he had made of plans of the fort and the placement of cannon, as well as accounts of the mounting discontent and animosity between the rebels from New England and those from the South.

Only days before a packet of letters written by Washington, Reed, and others of Washington’s staff wound up in British hands, after being left unguarded at an inn at Trenton by a careless post rider bound for Philadelphia. In one letter Washington complained bitterly of the lack of discipline in the army and wrote with scorn of the “dreaming, sleepy-headed” officers he had to contend with. Another letter, written by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hanson Harrison of Washington’s staff, provided the far more important revelation that Washington was dividing his army.

The purloined letters and the plan of Fort Washington provided by Demont’s treachery may not have greatly altered the course of events to follow. But the British rightfully considered them a windfall, as both Mackenzie’s diary and that kept by Ambrose Serle attest. Washington’s decision to divide the army was taken as a clearest possible sign of weakness. “It is easy to see whither all this tends, and what will be the probable consequence of such a division,” wrote Serle, who as Lord Howe’s secretary had been the first to see the letters. If the rebels could not “find spirit to act under the encouragement of their present numbers, there is little reason to believe that their courage will increase upon a reduction of their strength.” The letters, thought Mackenzie, were certain to be “of much service to General Howe.”

The British by this time had doubtless picked up sufficient information from deserters to know a considerable amount about the state of things at Fort Washington, but having the plans and Demont’s account were of importance all the same, if only as confirmation.

Be that as it may, the famously cautious William Howe, who, supposedly, would never risk a frontal attack on a heavily fortified rebel position, because of the painful lesson learned at Bunker Hill, was about to disprove that theory, and with the full agreement of his commanders.

Frederick Mackenzie had total confidence in the attack, predicting further, “from the general appearance of matters,” that as soon as Fort Washington was taken, Howe would move on to New Jersey. The fact that the rebel troops from New Jersey and Pennsylvania that Washington counted on for help had never materialized was also well known to the British, and this, thought Mackenzie, left little “to prevent our arrival at Philadelphia.”

By November 12, the day Washington crossed the Hudson, Howe’s army was within four miles of King’s Bridge. The plan was for a four-part assault, with the Hessians playing the major role.

The plan began to unfold at midday, November 15, when Howe sent Colonel James Paterson under a white flag to deliver a message to the American commander at Fort Washington, Colonel Magaw. Paterson was the same British officer who, in July, had carried letters to Washington from Lord Howe proffering the possibility of peace. This time he bore an ultimatum: surrender the fort or face annihilation.

Told he had two hours to make up his mind, Magaw responded at once with a written reply:

Sir, if I rightly understand the purport of your message…‘this post is to be immediately surrendered or the garrison put to the sword.’ I rather think it is a mistake than a settled resolution in General Howe to act a part so unworthy [of] himself and the British nation, but give me leave to assure his excellency that actuated by the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in, I am determined to defend this post to the very last extremity.

Howe had no intention of carrying out his threat of slaughter. The ultimatum was designed to play on the fears and distress of the rebels. Magaw’s bold response was written in the belief that he and his men could indeed hold out, or if need be, escape across the Hudson after dark.

WHEN WORD OF THE ULTIMATUM, and of Magaw’s answer, reached Fort Lee later that afternoon, Nathanael Greene dispatched a rider to tell Washington, who, earlier, had ridden to Hackensack, six miles away, where his army had pitched camp.

Washington dashed back, arriving at Fort Lee at nightfall. Finding that Greene and Israel Putnam had been rowed across the river to meet with Magaw and appraise the situation, Washington followed in a small boat.

Halfway across, he met Greene and Putnam, who were on their way back, and there, at midriver in the dark, Greene and Putnam gave an encouraging report. The troops were in “high spirits and would make a good defense.” And thus, “it being late at night,” in Washington’s words, the three returned to Fort Lee.

The same night, as went unobserved by the Americans, the British brought a fleet of thirty flatboats up the river with oars muffled, past Fort Washington, into Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and down the Harlem, to be ready for morning.

AT FIRST CHANCE, early Saturday, November 16, Washington, with Greene, Putnam, and another of his generals, Hugh Mercer of Virginia, again crossed the Hudson, “to determine,” as Greene wrote, “what was best to be done.” No sooner had their boat pushed off than the sound of heavy cannon carried over the water, and off in the distance, to the left of Fort Washington, they could see the attack had begun.

Landing on the opposite shore, downriver from the fort, the four generals scrambled up the steep slopes to the crest, to a point near the Morris house.

“There we all stood in a very awkward situation,” wrote Greene. “As the disposition [of the troops] was made and the enemy advancing, we durst not attempt to make any new disposition.” Somehow, they still could not see the disaster in store. “Indeed, we saw nothing amiss,” Greene wrote.

Concerned for Washington’s safety, the three generals urged him to leave and go back over the river. Greene volunteered to stay, as in turn did Putnam and Mercer. But Washington thought it “best” that they all go.

THE ASSAULT CAME from three directions, after a prolonged pounding of the fort’s outer defenses by British cannon. Four thousand Hessians came down from the north, over the bridge at King’s Bridge, led by General von Knyphausen, who had requested the honor of leading the main attack.

The Hessians were professionals hired to perform a duty, and this was to be their day to show themselves superior in a profession they took extreme pride in. (During the time he had been held prisoner, Lord Stirling had heard Hessian officers remark that they had never considered it their duty to inquire which of the two sides in the American controversy was right.)

A force of British troops under Cornwallis, plus a battalion of Highlanders, struck from the east, crossing the Harlem River in the flatboats that had been brought up during the night. The third force of some 3,000 men, both British and Hessians, came up from the south, led by Lord Percy.

By ten o’clock General Howe had committed 8,000 troops to the assault, nearly four times the number of those defending Fort Washington.

The farthest reach of the fort’s outer defenses was about five miles, north and south, and Knyphausen’s Hessians faced the steepest, roughest terrain and withering fire from Virginia and Maryland riflemen positioned among the rocks under Colonel Moses Rawlings. It was the scene of the most ferocious fighting of the day, and the Hessians were dauntless. The rock slopes they scaled would have been a rough struggle even had no one been firing at them. One of their officers, Captain Andreas Wiederhold, would describe attacking up “this almost inaccessible rock,” and yet, “every obstacle was swept aside…the precipitous rocks scaled.”

A Hessian soldier, John Reuber, wrote in his journal, “We were obliged to drag ourselves by the beech-tree bushes up the height where we could not really stand.”

At last, however, we got about on top of the hill where there were trees and great stones. We had a hard time of it there together. Because they now had no idea of yielding, Col. Rall gave the word of command thus: “All that are my grenadiers, march forwards!” All the drummers struck up the march, the hautboy-players [oboe players] blew. At once all that were yet alive shouted, “Hurrah!” Immediately all were mingled together, Americans and Hessians. There was no more firing, but all ran forward pell-mell upon the fortress.

General Grant, who disliked the Hessians almost as much as he disliked Americans, wrote with unalloyed admiration of how they “surmounted every difficulty,” and after gaining the heights kept on “at a trot…and if General Knyphausen had not stopped Colonel Rall, I am convinced he would have been in the fort in five minutes.”

The other sides of the attack advanced accordingly, with some of the American defenders putting up little resistance, while others fought tenaciously. Alexander Graydon, who commanded a company facing the assault by Lord Percy from the south, described how 150 men with a single 18-pound cannon held off 800 of the British.

When Percy’s attacking troops captured the Morris house, it was, according to Graydon, only fifteen minutes after Washington and his generals made their exit.

But courage was not enough. The Americans were too few to hold such extended lines. The only recourse was to retreat to the fort with all speed. A seventeen-year-old private from York, Pennsylvania, John Adlum, described running such a distance uphill that he had hardly breath enough to keep going. “As I was a good deal fatigued and the firing had in a great measure ceased, I walked to the fort very leisurely,” he wrote.

Before I was near the fort the British began to fire at it with a field piece with round shot, at the men who were standing in huddles between the fort and the lines within the abbitis that was round the fort. When I arrived at this work, I sat upon it looking at the enemy who were firing at us with the field piece and not more than four hundred yards of us, or from where I was then sitting, when at length a ball took off a part of two men’s heads and wounded another. I then went into the fort.

By one o’clock nearly all the defending force had been driven inside the fort, where there was scarcely room for them.

An hour or so later, the Hessian commander, Knyphausen, demanded surrender. Colonel Magaw said he needed time to decide, and asked for half an hour. General Howe arrived and ordered the Americans to surrender immediately, and with no terms other than a promise of their lives.

It was three o’clock when Magaw capitulated, and about four when the entire garrison of 2,837 Americans marched out of the fort between two lines of Hessians and lay down their arms.

IN A DISASTROUS CAMPAIGN for New York in which Washington’s army had suffered one humiliating, costly reverse after another, this, the surrender of Fort Washington on Saturday, November 16, was the most devastating blow of all, an utter catastrophe. The taking of more than a thousand American prisoners by the British at Brooklyn had been a dreadful loss. Now more than twice that number were marched off as prisoners, making a total loss from the two battles of nearly four thousand men—from an army already rapidly disintegrating from sickness and desertions and in desperate need of almost anyone fit enough to pick up a musket.

(As Frederick Mackenzie recorded, the British were astonished to find how many of the American prisoners were less than fifteen, or old men, all “indifferently clothed,” filthy, and without shoes. “Their odd figures frequently excited the laughter of our soldiers.”)

The crushing defeat at Fort Washington, the capture of its garrison, plus quantities of arms, tools, tents, blankets, and some 146 brass and iron cannon, had been accomplished by the British and Hessians in a matter of hours. And it need never have happened.

Fifty-nine Americans had been killed and 100 or more wounded. The British lost 28 killed and over 100 wounded. Hessian losses were heavier, 58 killed and more than 250 wounded.

Bad as it was, it could have been even worse. In the view of both General Grant and Colonel Mackenzie, an all-out slaughter of Americans had been avoided only because General Knyphausen stopped Colonel Rall and his Hessians from entering the fort. “They had been pretty well pelted [in the battle], were angry and would not have spared the Yankees,” Grant wrote. “The carnage would then have been dreadful,” wrote Mackenzie, “for the rebels were so numerous they had not room to defend themselves with effect, and so frightened they had not the power.”

What lay ahead of the Americans taken prisoner was a horror of another kind. Nearly all would be held captive in overcrowded, unheated barns and sheds, and on British prison ships in the harbor, where hundreds died of disease.

WASHINGTON IS SAID TO HAVE WEPT as he watched the tragedy unfold from across the river, and though this seems unlikely, given his well-documented imperturbability, he surely wept within his soul. He had faced ruin before, but never like this. To his brother Jack he would write, “I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motions of things.”

Nathanael Greene, in an anguished letter to Henry Knox, said, “I feel mad, vexed, sick, and sorry. Never did I need the consoling voice of a friend more than now. Happy should I be to see you. This is a most terrible event. Its consequences are justly to be dreaded.”

Both Washington and Greene had been badly mistaken in their judgment. Both worried over what would become of their reputations. Indeed, it would be hard to say which of them was the most sensitive to what others thought of them, and criticism of both was to be severe, and especially among those who had been taken prisoner. Alexander Graydon, writing more than a generation later, could still barely contain his disdain for the decisions that had been made.

Most immediate and blistering was the reaction of Charles Lee. By his own account, Lee became so furious over the news of Fort Washington he tore out some of his hair. “I must entreat that you will keep what I say to yourself, but I foresaw, predicted, all that has happened,” Lee wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush, an influential member of Congress, who, Lee knew, would never keep it to himself. Lee claimed his last words to Washington were, “Draw off the garrison, or they will be lost.”

“Had I the powers, I could do you much good,” he told Rush not very subtly, “but I am sure you will never give any man the necessary power.”

“Oh, General,” Lee admonished Washington in a letter, “why would you be over-persuaded by men of inferior judgment to your own?”—thereby inviting the commander to blame it all on Nathanael Greene.

Washington had failed to override Greene’s judgment and make a clear decision of his own, and, as commander-in-chief, he was, of course, ultimately responsible. Greene’s responsibility for what happened ceased with Washington’s arrival at Fort Lee on November 13, three days before the attack. Washington never blamed himself for the loss of Fort Washington, but then he never openly blamed Greene either, which he could have. He said only that he had acted on the judgment of others.

Nor, importantly, did he fire Greene, or shuffle him off to some meaningless, out-of-the-way command. He undoubtedly thought less of the young general than he had before. Still, he knew Greene’s strengths. Only weeks before, Greene had demonstrated both rare foresight and a marked gift for organization when he recommended to Washington, and Washington agreed, that a series of supply depots be established across New Jersey, along what might, of necessity, become the army’s path of retreat, should the British make a drive toward Philadelphia.

Washington needed Greene. He knew that Greene, like Knox, would never give up, never walk away, any more than he would, or lose sight of what the war was about, any more than he would. Washington would repay loyalty with loyalty, and this, after so many bad decisions, was one of his wisest decisions ever.

Only one American hero was to emerge from what happened at Fort Washington. She was Margaret (“Molly”) Corbin, the wife of a Pennsylvania soldier, John Corbin, who had gone into battle at her husband’s side, and when he was killed, stepped into his place, to load and fire a cannon, until she fell wounded, nearly losing one arm. After the surrender, she was allowed by her captors to return home to Pennsylvania.

THE USUALLY UNHURRIED WILLIAM HOWE made his next move with hardly a pause. Three nights later, he sent 4,000 British and Hessian troops under the cover of darkness and drenching rain across the Hudson to land upstream from Fort Lee at a point called Closter. There, led by Cornwallis, they scaled the Palisades, climbing a steep, almost perpendicular footpath, and once on top, advanced on Fort Lee. It was a daring attack very like the one Howe himself, as a young officer, had led up the steep slopes of Quebec early on the morning of the British triumph there in the French and Indian War.

Warning of the attack reached Fort Lee in advance, possibly from a local farmer, possibly from a British deserter—accounts differ. Washington rushed to the scene from Hackensack and shouted orders to abandon the fort at once. Everything was to be left behind, guns, stores, hundreds of tents, even breakfast cooking on the fire. When the British arrived, they found the place deserted, but for a dozen men who had gotten into the rum supply and were all drunk.

Washington and his army fled in haste down the road and over the Hackensack River farther into New Jersey.

Chapter Seven

Darkest Hour

I hope this is the dark part of the night, which is generally just before day.

—General Nathanael Greene

I

THE RETREAT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON and his battered little army, southward across New Jersey, began the morning of November 21. They were headed for a crossing point called Acquackanonk on the Passaic River, five miles away, retreat being their only choice and rivers offering the one possible defense against the oncoming foe in “dead flat” country, as Washington described it, with no stone walls. Once over the Passaic, they pushed on another twenty miles down the west bank of the river to the little port town of Newark.

Heavy rains had left the narrow road sloppy with mud, and the men were in tatters, many without shoes, their feet wrapped in rags. Washington rode at the rear of the column, a point long remembered by a newly arrived eighteen-year-old Virginia lieutenant named James Monroe. “I saw him…at the head of a small band, or rather in its rear, for he was always near the enemy, and his countenance and manner made an impression on me which I can never efface.”

By young Monroe’s estimate, Washington had at most 3,000 men, yet his expression gave no sign of worry. “A deportment so firm, so dignified, but yet so modest and composed, I have never seen in any other person.”

Washington had set the army on the road in the early morning but not before getting off an urgent request to General Lee at North Castle, New York, in which he had made his worries and troubles abundantly clear. The men were “broken and dispirited.” They had no tents, no baggage, no entrenching tools. (Every pick and shovel had been left behind at Fort Lee.) As things were, he dared not risk contact with the enemy, Washington wrote, and “so must leave a very fine country open to their ravages.”

He urged Lee to cross the Hudson with his brigades and join forces before it was too late. New Jersey was too rich a prize to give up without even the “appearance” of a fight. Were New Jersey to fall, it could have devastating effect on Pennsylvania.

To be certain Lee understood what he wanted, Washington said it again. “I would have you move over by the easiest and best [swiftest] passage.”

Yet it was a request only, not an order.

The letter had been dictated to Joseph Reed and sent off by express rider in a dispatch case into which Reed put a letter of his own to Lee. But of this Washington was told nothing.

Reed’s letter was a stunning indictment of Washington. At best, it could be taken as a desperate indiscretion; at worst, an underhanded act of betrayal.

His commander’s indecision over whether to abandon New York and again at Fort Washington had left Reed badly shaken. His confidence in Washington was shattered. But instead of confiding his feelings to Washington, he secretly poured them out to Lee, leaving no doubt as to who he thought should be leading the army in its hour of need.

He wished “most earnestly” to have Lee “where the principle scene of action is laid,” Reed wrote, seconding what Washington had said. Then, claiming he had no wish to flatter Lee, he went on to do just that and to make his main point.

I do not mean to flatter or praise you at the expense of any other, but I confess I do think it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America, so far as they are dependent on it, are not totally cut off…. You have decision, a quality often wanted in minds otherwise valuable…. Oh! General, an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an army. How often have I lamented it this campaign. All circumstances considered, we are in a very awful and alarming situation—one that requires the utmost wisdom and firmness of mind. As soon as the season will admit, I think yourself and some others should go to Congress and form the plan of the new army.

Washington worried about the health of his men. He worried about rumors of a British invasion to the south of Newark at Perth Amboy, at the mouth of the Raritan River, where New Jersey and Staten Island were separated by only a narrow channel.

In less than two weeks, on December 1, the enlistments of 2,000 of his troops would be up, the men free to go. It was the same nightmare prospect he had faced at Boston exactly a year before, and with the misery of the men greater now than ever, and morale suffering, there seemed every chance that his army would evaporate before his eyes.

Privately, Washington talked with Reed about the possibility of retreating to western Pennsylvania if necessary. Reed thought that if eastern Pennsylvania were to give up, the rest of the state would follow. Washington is said to have passed his hand over his throat and remarked, “My neck does not feel as though it was made for a halter.” He talked of retreating to the mountains of Augusta County, in western Virginia. From there they could carry on a “predatory war,” Washington said. “And if over-powered, we must cross the Allegheny Mountains.” He knew, as the enemy had little idea, just how big a country it was.

The problem was not that there were too few American soldiers in the thirteen states. There were plenty, but the states were reluctant to send the troops they had to help fight the war, preferring to keep them close to home, and especially as the war was not going well. In August, Washington had had an army of 20,000. In the three months since, he had lost four battles—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, White Plains, and Fort Washington—then gave up Fort Lee without a fight. His army now was divided as it had not been in August and, just as young Lieutenant Monroe had speculated, he had only about 3,500 troops under his personal command—that was all.

Desperate for help, he sent Reed off to Burlington, New Jersey, on the eastern bank of the Delaware River, upstream from Philadelphia, to impress upon the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, the urgent need for reinforcements. As it was, New Jersey militia were not turning out in any numbers that could make a difference.

General Mifflin was dispatched on a similar mission to Philadelphia, to alert Congress to the “critical state of our affairs,” and do everything possible to round up Pennsylvania troops and send them on with all speed.

These were two critical undertakings, and in the choice of Reed, his closest confidant, and the very able Mifflin, the Philadelphian who had shown such valor in command of the rear guard at Brooklyn, Washington felt confident he was sending two of the best men he had, and that this would not be lost on any who listened to what they had to say.

The first report from Mifflin was bitterly disappointing. His fellow Pennsylvanians were “divided and lethargic,” Mifflin wrote, “slumbering under the shade of peace and in the full enjoyment of the sweets of commerce.” From Reed, Washington heard nothing.

IT RAINED HEAVILY on November 22, the day the army reached Newark, and rain fell through that night and again the next day. “The sufferings we endured are beyond description—no tent to cover us at night—exposed to cold and rains day and night,” one soldier would remember. Colonel Samuel Webb, writing at the time, said it was impossible to describe conditions as they were. “I can only say that no lads ever showed greater activity in retreating than we have…. Our soldiers are the best fellows in the world at this business.” Webb, who had only just recovered from wounds received at White Plains, served still on Washington’s staff.

But of greatest importance, as time would tell, was the impression made on Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, who had recently volunteered to serve as a civilian aide on Greene’s staff. Greene, with his love of literature and political philosophy, had taken a great liking to the brilliant Paine, an impoverished English immigrant, who, like Greene, had been raised a Quaker, and whose pamphlet, Common Sense, since its appearance early in the year, had become more widely read than anything yet published in America. Greene called him Common Sense. (“Common Sense and Col. Snarl, or Cornell, are perpetually wrangling about mathematical problems,” Greene had reported to his wife during less troubled times before the fall of Fort Washington.)

Sick at heart over the suffering and despair he saw, but inspired by the undaunted resolution of many around him, Paine is said to have committed his thoughts to paper during the retreat, writing at night on a drumhead by the light of a campfire. He himself, however, said it was not until later, at Philadelphia, that in a “passion of patriotism,” he began what he called The Crisis, with its immortal opening lines:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

On November 24, Washington sent off another message to General Lee saying he must come by a “safe and secure route,” and asking that he bring a particular 24-pound cannon, “provided it can be done without great inconvenience.”

With Loyalists more prevalent in New Jersey than in any other of the thirteen states, and American deserters continuing to go over to the enemy, Washington’s plight was well known to the British command.

“The fact is,” wrote Lord Rawdon, “their army is broken all to pieces, and the spirit of their leaders and their abettors is all broken…. I think one may venture to pronounce that it is well nigh over with them.”

SINCE THE FALL of Fort Washington there had been a major shift in British plans. General Clinton was reassigned. He was to sail with an expedition of 6,000 troops to take Rhode Island, or more specifically Newport. For in the time when the fortunes of the rebel army were going steadily from bad to worse, rebel privateers off the New England coast had been attacking British supply ships with increasing success, and Admiral Lord Howe was in need of a secure, ice-free winter roadstead in the vicinity for some of his fleet.

Clinton thought ill of the Rhode Island expedition. He had argued that it be postponed and that instead he and his forces land at Perth Amboy and thus outflank and destroy the crippled rebels in one sweeping, concentrated effort before the onset of winter snow. Or, Clinton proposed, he could carry his attack directly to Philadelphia, by sailing up the Delaware. “This, in all probability,” he later wrote, “would have dispersed the Congress, and…deranged all their affairs.”

It was a critical moment in the management of the war, with Clinton and William Howe once more opposed on how best to proceed. Clinton continued to see Washington’s army as the heart of the rebellion, and the envelopment of the army, therefore, as the most expeditious strategy. Howe wanted to keep the Americans on the run, and continue to clear the board, so to speak—to clear New Jersey and Rhode Island of the rebel forces just as he had cleared New York, and by such conquests of vital territory bring the deluded American people and their political leaders to their senses and end their demonstrably futile rebellion.

Clinton was overruled, and though unconvinced, he departed dutifully for Rhode Island, where his expedition seized Newport without opposition and the predominantly Quaker inhabitants seemed quite happy to live in peace under his protection. But it was a conquest of little importance. As would be said, its effect on the course of the war was about what it would have been had Clinton’s forces occupied the town of Newport on the Isle of Wight.

Difficulties between Clinton and William Howe, the friction of the two contrasting personalities, had grown steadily worse. At White Plains, in an outburst of frustration and anger, Clinton had told General Cornwallis he could not bear to serve under Howe, and this Cornwallis had chosen to tell Howe. Thus it was with considerable relief that Howe saw Clinton sail off from New York, just as when Clinton had departed Boston for South Carolina.

In Clinton’s place, Howe put Cornwallis, knowing he had a far more reasonable man to deal with and a highly energetic and effective field commander.

Like Howe—indeed, like Clinton—Charles Cornwallis was a true eighteenth-century English aristocrat, a shining representative of Britain’s ruling class, born to wealth, position, and influence. Schooled at Eton, he had decided in his youth on a military career, in which he had distinguished himself ever since. At age thirty-seven, he was at his professional prime but, unlike Howe, a man with no bad habits or inclinations to self-indulgence, and if not as intellectually gifted as Clinton, he had no peevish or contrary side.

Tall and somewhat overweight, as was the fashion, he carried himself well and was considered handsome, except for a cast in one eye. (In fact, he had lost sight in one eye as a result of a boyhood accident.) He was devoted to his ailing wife, whom he missed dreadfully, and devoted to his men—“I love that army,” he had once declared—and their devotion to him was notable. He was the most popular British general serving in America, known to be strict but fair, and genuinely concerned for the well-being of his troops. Repeatedly in the year’s campaign—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, Fort Washington, and in his stunning surprise capture of Fort Lee—he had shown himself to be enterprising and aggressive. Thus far, he had done everything right.

On November 23, two days after the capture of Fort Lee, Cornwallis had met there with General Howe (who, having been made a Knight of the Bath by the King, was now Sir William Howe). The two conferred for several hours, going over the map of New Jersey and reviewing plans.

Howe gave orders to Cornwallis to pursue the rebels as far as New Brunswick, or Brunswick as it was then known, another fifty miles south of Newark, on the Raritan River, and stop there until further orders.

On November 25, after the rains subsided, Cornwallis and an army now numbering 10,000 set off, determined to catch Washington, Cornwallis said, as a hunter bags a fox. But on the rain-drenched roads, in muck ankle-deep or worse, the long columns of redcoats and Hessians with their heavy baggage trains and artillery moved slower even than the Americans had. They were three days reaching Newark.

At nine o’clock on the morning of November 28, the British engineering officer, Captain Archibald Robertson, recorded, “All the army marched in two columns towards Newark, where it was said the rebels would stand.” About one o’clock, the British advanced on the town in force, only to find it empty.

Washington had pressed on toward Brunswick and the Raritan. “The enemy gave us not the least interruption upon our march,” he wrote to General Heath.

There was word at last from Charles Lee, but only to report his own tribulations with foul weather and men without shoes. He was still at North Castle and made no mention of plans to leave.

Washington replied at once. “My former letters were so full and explicit as to the necessity of your marching as early as possible…that I confess I expected you would have been sooner in motion,” he said sharply. Yet he was still reluctant to issue a clear order to Lee.

By the time he reached Brunswick the morning of November 29, Washington had been joined by the dauntless Lord Stirling and more than 1,000 reinforcements. They were a first glimmer of hope, though hardly enough. Numbers of Stirling’s men, too, were shoeless and without coats or even shirts, and the December 1 expiration of enlistments, when twice that number would be free to leave, was only two days away.

ON NOVEMBER 30 AT BRUNSWICK, a sealed letter from General Lee to Joseph Reed arrived by express rider. With Reed still absent, Washington tore it open thinking it might be news that Lee and his men were at last on the way. The letter was dated November 24. “My dear Reed,” it began.

I received your most obliging, flattering letter—lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.

Lee went on to explain why he had not started for New Jersey as Washington wished, and apparently he did not intend to do so.

What Washington thought or felt as he read the letter, or how many times he may have reread its first paragraph, no one knows. Clearly Reed, his trusted confidant and supposed friend, and Lee, his second-in-command, had both lost faith in him.

Washington resealed the letter and sent it off to Reed with a note of explanation.

The enclosed was put into my hands by an express [rider]…. Having no idea of its being a private letter…I opened it…. This, as it is the truth, must be my excuse for seeing the contents of a letter which neither inclination or intention would have prompted me to.

He thanked Reed for the “trouble and fatigue” of his journey to Burlington and wished him success in his mission. And that was all.

Possibly, Washington was more hurt than angry. Later he would tell Reed, “I was hurt not because I thought my judgment wronged by the expressions contained in it [the letter], but because the same sentiments were not communicated immediately to myself.” Possibly the charge of “fatal indecision of mind” also hurt deeply, because Washington knew it to be true.

Above all, he must have felt profoundly alone, as alone as he had ever been. First Greene had let him down, now Reed. And who was to say what Lee had in mind, or might do?

At Philadelphia many of the Congress were ill or exhausted or absent. All three of the principle contributors to the Declaration of Independence were no longer present. Thomas Jefferson had gone home to Virginia in September. John Adams was at Braintree. Benjamin Franklin had departed on a mission to France. At times there were not enough delegates for a quorum, and as the news from New Jersey became more bleak, and the British army drew nearer, Philadelphia was beset by an extreme outbreak of the jitters.

The Pennsylvania Journal announced “very good intelligence that the British intend to make a push for Philadelphia,” and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, among others, reported “much alarm” in the city and in Congress. Delegate William Hooper of North Carolina, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, described a prevailing “torpor” in Congress. Hooper, however, had no patience with those blaming Washington for every misfortune.

Oh how I feel for Washington, that best of men [he wrote]. The difficulties which he has now to encounter are beyond the power of language to describe, but to be unfortunate is to be wrong and there are men…who are villains enough to brand him. There are some long faces here.

Once, during the Siege of Boston, when almost nothing was going right and General Schuyler had written from Albany to bemoan his troubles, Washington had replied that he understood but that “we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.” It was such resolve and an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be, that continued to carry Washington through. “I will not however despair,” he now wrote to Governor William Livingston.

ON SUNDAY MORNING, December 1, with British and Hessian columns advancing on Brunswick, 2,000 of Washington’s troops, New Jersey and Maryland militia, their enlistments up, walked away from the war, and without apology. “Two brigades left us at Brunswick,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “notwithstanding the enemy are within two hours march and coming on.”

Washington sent off still another urgent summons to Lee to come with all speed, “or your arrival may be too late to answer any valuable purpose.”

“The enemy are fast advancing,” he reported in a hurried dispatch to John Hancock, noting that the time was half past one. “Some of them are in sight.”

He ordered the only bridge over the Raritan at Brunswick destroyed, and this had been largely accomplished. But the river was fordable—in some places only knee-deep—and as he also told Hancock, mincing no words, his present force was “totally inadequate” to stop the enemy.

The first of the British artillery arrived at the river, and by late afternoon British and American cannon were exchanging fire, the American guns commanded by young Captain Alexander Hamilton. But again, as at Newark, when the British troops pressed on to the town the next morning, they found that the Americans had taken off.

Washington had decided what must be done. He was heading for Trenton. “It being impossible to oppose them with our present force with the least possible prospect of success,” he informed Congress, “we shall retreat to the west bank of the Delaware.”

“When we left Brunswick,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “we had not 3,000 men—a very pitiful army to trust the liberties of America on.” The hour had never looked darker.

The post road, or King’s Highway, from Brunswick to Trenton, the main thoroughfare between New York and Philadelphia, was as straight and flat and fine a thirty-mile stretch of road as any in the country, and the retreating army made good time. The retreat was not at a run. It was a forced march, not a rout, as sometimes portrayed. Washington and the main body of the army, marching through the night, reached Trenton on the Delaware the morning of December 2, having left Lord Stirling and two brigades as a rear guard at the little college town of Princeton.

Orders were issued to round up all boats along the east bank of the Delaware and to destroy any that could not be used, to keep them out of enemy hands.

Among the delegates to Congress, the distances from Brunswick to Trenton and Trenton to Philadelphia were well known, and so if Cornwallis was at Brunswick, then he and his army were a mere sixty miles from Philadelphia. “The inhabitants of Princeton and Trenton…are evacuated,” wrote Massachusetts delegate Robert Treat Paine. “The people left them on Sunday night with panic and precipitation.” People in Philadelphia were getting out, too, many taking all the possessions they could carry. “Numbers of families loading wagons,” a citizen recorded. “All shops ordered shut…people in confusion, of all ranks.”

The great question on everyone’s mind was where were Lee and his men. It was said they were not far, “close in the rear of the enemy.” But no one knew. “I have not heard a word from General Lee since the 26th of last month,” John Hancock read in a letter from Washington dated December 3.

II

WITH HIS BROTHER Sir William’s campaign succeeding splendidly in New Jersey, and the war rapidly losing support among the people there, David McCullough Admiral Lord Howe decided to make yet another appeal for conciliation. Signed also by Sir William, the new proclamation was their boldest, most generous gesture thus far, they felt. It was issued in the spirit of their obligation, as commissioned by the King, to serve as peace negotiators as well as military commanders, but also because Lord Howe genuinely believed that a negotiated settlement with the Americans was yet possible and vastly preferable to a long-drawn-out conflict. He had no desire to lose any more British lives or to inflict any more destruction and suffering on the Americans than necessary.

The proclamation, dated November 30, was an immediate success. It offered all who, within sixty days, would come forth and take an oath of allegiance to the King—and pledge their “peaceable obedience”—a “free and general pardon,” and that they would

reap the benefit of his Majesty’s paternal goodness, in the preservation of their property, the restoration of their commerce, and the security of their most valuable rights, under the just and most moderate authority of the crown and Parliament of Britain.

Hundreds, eventually thousands, in New Jersey flocked to the British camps to declare their loyalty. Considering the way the war was going, the size and might of the British army, and the pathetic state of Washington’s meager band, it seemed the prudent thing to do. As a farmer near Brunswick named John Bray wrote to a kinsman:

You can come down and receive protection and return home without molestation on the part of the King’s troops and you best know the situation of the provincial army. Do advise Cousin Johnny and Thomas and Cousin Thomas Jones, for if they do stay out to the last, they will undoubtedly fare the worst.

HAVING CROSSED THE RARITAN and occupied Brunswick on December 1, Cornwallis called a halt, as he had been ordered by General Howe. For six days—six merciful days for Washington and his army—the ritish and Hessians made no move, a decision that puzzled, even infuriated many of the British and local Loyalists who saw no reason to let up on the chase.

Called on to explain later, Cornwallis would say his troops were exhausted, footsore, hungry, and in need of rest. More important, it had not seemed at the time that excessive haste was wise or necessary. There were dangers in too rapid a pursuit. He worried about General Lee, who was variously reported just ahead or coming up from behind. But had it looked like he could catch Washington, Cornwallis said, he would have kept going, whatever the risks, no matter the orders.

Some would see the pause as a horrendous blunder and blame William Howe. Captain Charles Stedman, one of Cornwallis’s own officers and the earliest British historian of the war, would speculate that had Cornwallis been allowed “to act at his own discretion…he would have pursued the weakened and alarmed enemy to the Delaware, over which, without falling into his hands, they never could have passed.” But this assumed that Washington and the army could not have escaped down the east side of the river, which seems unreasonable.

The Hessian officer Johann Ewald, an intelligent and experienced soldier, concluded that Cornwallis had no desire to put his valuable troops in needless jeopardy. On the night of the capture of Fort Lee, when Ewald and his jaegers had started after a column of rebels retreating in “a cloud of dust,” Cornwallis had ordered them back. “Let them go, my dear Ewald, and stay here,” Cornwallis had said. “We do not want to lose any men. One jaeger is worth more than ten rebels.” By the time of the halt at Brunswick, Ewald wrote, the hope of the whole British command was “of ending the war amicably, without shedding the blood of the King’s subjects in a needless way.”

Others would say it was for political reasons related to the latest peace move that Cornwallis intentionally let Washington get away. No one would ever prove this, and it seems unlikely, especially since General Howe, sensing that a final blow might now indeed be struck, arrived at Brunswick on December 6 with an additional brigade commanded by General Grant, and ordered the advance to continue at once.

The weather had turned unseasonably warm, ideal for campaigning. A Loyalist newspaper in New York had already set the scene in a report published the day before:

It is said by some persons who have lately seen the rebel forces that they are the most pitiable collection of ragged, dispirited mortals that ever pretended to the name of an army…and that if the weather continues fair but a little longer, there is no visible impediment to His Majesty’s troops in completing a march to the capitol of Pennsylvania.

Everything seemed to the advantage of the conquering army, all was going as wished except for one vexing problem that had been growing steadily worse for several weeks. Marauding and pillaging by redcoats and Hessians had gotten out of hand. “Scandalous behavior for British troops,” wrote Major Stephen Kemble, the Loyalist serving with the British army, “and the Hessians outrageously licentious, and cruel to such a degree as to threaten with death all such as dare obstruct them in their depredations.” Kemble had recorded this in his diary in early November, before the capture of Fort Washington. “[I] shudder for New Jersey,” he had written.

The plenty of New Jersey, the “Garden of America,” its broad, fertile, well-tended farms, abundant supplies of livestock, grain, hay, food put up for winter, barrels of wine and beer for the taking, were all too much to resist. On the first night his Hessian troops set foot in New Jersey, Captain Ewald wrote, “All the plantations in the vicinity were plundered, and whatever the soldiers found in the houses was declared booty.” Ewald was appalled by what he saw.

On this march [through New Jersey] we looked upon a deplorable sight. The region is well-cultivated, with very attractive plantations, but all their occupants had fled and all the houses had been or were being plundered and destroyed.

The British blamed the Hessians. (“The Hessians are more infamous and cruel than any,” wrote Ambrose Serle, after hearing reports of British plundering.) The Hessians blamed the British. The Americans blamed both the British and the Hessians, as well as the New Jersey Loyalists, and the British and Hessian commanders seemed no more able to put a stop to such excesses than Washington had been. The stories, amplified as many may have been, were a searing part of a war that seemed only to grow more brutal and destructive.

Accounts of houses sacked, of families robbed of all they had, became commonplace. American reports of atrocities were often propaganda, but many were also quite accurate. The Pennsylvania Journal, the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and the Freeman’s Journal carried reports of the sick and elderly being abused, of rape and murder. No one was safe, according to the British officer Charles Stedman. “The friend and the foe from the hand of rapine shared alike.”

The New Jersey Loyalists were the most villainous of all, Nathanael Greene reported to his wife Caty.

They lead the relentless foreigners to the houses of their neighbors and strip poor women and children of everything they have to eat or wear; and after plundering them in this sort, the brutes often ravish the mothers and daughters and compel the fathers and sons to behold their brutality.

“The enemy’s ravages in New Jersey exceed all description,” Greene would report to Governor Nicholas Cooke of Rhode Island. “Many hundred women ravished.”

At Newark, according to the report of a congressional committee, three women, one of whom was in her seventies, another pregnant, were “most horribly ravished.”

Fear and outrage spread across New Jersey and beyond. “Their footsteps are marked with destruction wherever they go,” Greene said of the enemy.

What remained of Washington’s army, the “shadow army,” as Greene called it, was pitiful to behold. “But give me leave to tell you, Sir,” Greene would write to John Adams, “that our difficulties were inconceivable to those who were not eye witnesses to them.”

BRITISH AND HESSIAN FORCES got under way from Brunswick on December 7 and came on faster than ever, William Howe having decided that, “The possession of Trenton was extremely desirable.” With the continuing success of the Proclamation of November 30 and hardly any opposition from the rebels, Howe intended to secure another large part of New Jersey where Loyalists were plentiful, and where, as he also said, Philadelphia was in easy striking distance.

Washington was on his way from Trenton to look things over at Princeton when he received word of the enemy’s strength and rapid advance. Immediately he turned back.

“Our retreat should not be neglected for fear of consequences,” advised Nathanael Greene, who had also ridden to Princeton earlier in the day. In the trek across New Jersey, Washington had become increasingly dependent on Greene. But it was “beyond doubt” that the enemy was advancing, Greene reported. Lord Stirling expected them by noon. Lee was also said to be “at the heels of the enemy,” but Greene cautioned Washington that, whatever happened, Lee ought to be kept under control “within the lines of some general plan or else his operations will be independent of yours.”

Washington had already made his decision, and he calmly, deliberately, carried it out. A fleet of boats was standing ready at Trenton. By nightfall, the weary troops and their commander were crossing the Delaware to the Pennsylvania shore, where bonfires had been set ablaze to light the way.

One of those watching from the Pennsylvania side was the artist Charles Willson Peale, who had arrived with a Philadelphia militia unit in answer to Washington’s call for help. Peale wrote later of the firelight on the river and shore, of boats laden with soldiers, horses, cannon, and equipment, of men calling out orders. It was “a grand but dreadful” spectacle: “The hallooing of hundreds of men in their difficulties getting horses and artillery out of the boats, made it rather the appearance of Hell than any earthly scene.”

The long retreat that had begun in New York and continued from the Hudson to the Delaware was over. Casualties had been few in New Jersey, and its pitiable appearance and miseries notwithstanding, the army, or the semblance of an army, had once again survived.

“With a handful of men we sustained an orderly retreat,” wrote Thomas Paine in The Crisis, which soon appeared in Philadelphia. No sign of fear was to be seen, he insisted. “Once more we are collected and collecting…. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue.”

Henry Knox, writing on the morning of December 8, his first letter to his wife in weeks, said she might be surprised to find he was in Pennsylvania. Though physically exhausted, he, like Paine, refused to be downcast. It was “a combination of unlucky circumstances” that had brought things to such a pass, he told her. “We are now making a stand on the side of the Delaware toward Philadelphia.”

In truth, men were dreadfully dispirited. Many had given up, in addition to the 2,000 who had refused to sign on again after December 1. Hundreds had deserted. Many of those left were sick, hungry, altogether as miserable as they appeared.

To Charles Willson Peale, walking among them by the light of the next morning on the Pennsylvania shore, they looked as wretched as any men he had ever seen. One had almost no clothes. “He was in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long, and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it.” So “disfigured” was he that Peale failed at first to recognize that the man was his own brother, James Peale, who had been with a Maryland unit as part of the rear guard.

THAT THE ENEMY MIGHT CROSS the Delaware at one or several points and move quickly to seize Philadelphia, as they had New York, no one doubted. On Washington’s orders every boat not commanded to bring the army across had been destroyed for sixty miles along the east bank of the river, which was no small accomplishment. But broad and swift as it was, the river could remain a barrier to Howe only so long, as Washington warned the members of Congress repeatedly in a series of urgent dispatches.

“From several accounts, I am led to think that the enemy are bringing boats with them,” he wrote.

If so, it will be impossible for our small force to give them any considerable opposition in the passage of the river…. Under the circumstances, the security of Philadelphia should be our next object.

In another letter to John Hancock, he stated flatly that “Philadelphia beyond all question is the object of the enemy’s movements,” that “nothing less than our utmost exertions” could stop Howe, and that his own force was too thin and weak to count on.

Washington and his staff had taken up quarters in a brick house directly across the river from Trenton, where he hoped to keep watch on the enemy. His troops were scattered close by the river for nearly twenty-five miles, camped in the woods and brush out of sight from the river, the greater part of them about ten miles to the north of Washington’s headquarters.

While Joseph Reed had gotten nowhere with his recruiting efforts in New Jersey, Mifflin’s efforts had produced some results. The Philadelphia volunteer militia (or Philadelphia Associators as they were called) that Charles Willson Peale had arrived with numbered 1,000 and marched into camp “in a very spirited manner,” as Washington noted approvingly.

On December 10, word came at last that Lee and 4,000 troops commanded by General Sullivan had reached Morristown to the northeast.

“General Lee…is on his march to join me,” Washington wrote to the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull. “If he can effect this junction, our army will again make a respectable appearance, and such as I hope will disappoint the enemy in their plan on Philadelphia.”

Everything depended on Lee.

The letter to Trumbull was written December 14, when Washington knew nothing of events of the day before, Friday the 13th—events wholly unexpected and of far-reaching consequences. As time would show, that Friday the 13th had been an exceedingly lucky day for Washington and for his country.

IN AN INEXPLICABLE LAPSE of judgment, General Lee had spent the previous night of the 12th separated from his troops, stopping at a tavern about three miles away at Basking Ridge, for what reason is not known.

With Lee was a personal guard of fifteen officers and men. The next morning, in low spirits and no apparent hurry, Lee sat at a table in his dressing gown attending to routine paperwork, then took time to write a letter to General Gates for no other purpose than to blame Washington for all his troubles and for the woeful state of affairs in general.

“Entre nous, a certain great man is damnable deficient,” Lee told Gates.

He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties: if I stay in this province, I risk myself and army; and if I do not stay, the province is lost forever…. In short, unless something which I do not expect turns up, we are lost.

It was just after ten when a swarm of British cavalry appeared suddenly at the end of the lane. They were a scouting party of twenty-five horsemen commanded by Colonel William Harcourt, who had once served under Lee in Portugal. They had been sent out from Trenton by Cornwallis to gather intelligence on Lee’s “motions and situation.” At Basking Ridge, a local Loyalist had given them the answer.

From the end of the lane to the tavern was a distance of about a hundred yards. Six of the horsemen, led by Lieutenant Banister Tarleton, came at a gallop. In minutes they had the building surrounded, killed two of the guards, and scattered the rest.

“I ordered my men to fire into the house through every window and door, and cut up as many of the guard as they could,” Tarleton later wrote.

Some of those inside fired back. Then the owner of the tavern, a woman named White, appeared at the door. Screaming that Lee was inside, she begged for mercy.

Tarleton shouted that he would burn the building unless Lee gave himself up. In a few minutes Lee appeared and surrendered, saying he trusted he would be treated as a gentleman.

A young American lieutenant who had been inside and managed to escape, James Wilkinson, would later describe how a cheer went up among Lee’s captors and a trumpet sounded. Then off they dashed with their prize, the “unfortunate” Lee, hatless, still in his dressing gown and slippers, mounted on Wilkinson’s horse, which happened to have been tethered at the door. The astonishing raid had taken no more than fifteen minutes.

News of Lee’s capture spread in all directions as fast as the fastest horses could move. The British were jubilant. At Brunswick, where the prisoner was put under lock and key, Harcourt’s cavalrymen celebrated by getting Lee’s horse (Wilkinson’s horse) drunk, along with themselves, as a band played into the night.

A Hessian captain wrote in his journal, “We have captured General Lee, the only rebel general whom we had cause to fear.” The hero of the hour, Lieutenant Tarleton, wrote triumphantly to his mother, “This coup de main has put an end to the campaign.”

When the news reached England it was thought at first to be too improbable, then set off bell-ringing and joyful demonstrations as if a great battle had been won.

Among the British, it was thought that because Lee was a British soldier and gentleman, he was therefore, of course, superior to any raw American provincial who had assumed high rank, but then for the same reason, he was also that much more of a traitor to his King.

To the American officers and troops deployed along the west bank of the Delaware, and all whose hopes were riding on them, the loss of Lee seemed the worst possible news at the worst possible moment.

To Nathanael Greene it was one of a “combination of evils…pressing in upon us on all sides.” Washington, on first hearing what had happened, called it a “severe blow,” then said he would comment no further on “this unhappy accident.” Privately he was furious with Lee for having been such a fool. “Unhappy man! Taken by his own imprudence,” he told Lund Washington. And privately he must also have breathed a sigh of relief. After the continuing frustrations and anxieties Lee had subjected him to, there must have been a feeling of deliverance for Washington.

The popular, egotistical general who considered the members of Congress no better than cattle and longed for the “necessary power” to set everything straight was no longer a factor. In little time, fearing he might be hanged as a traitor and hoping to ingratiate himself with his old military friend William Howe, Lee would resort to offering his thoughts to Howe on ways the British could win the war.

The same day as Lee’s capture, Washington learned that Congress had adjourned in order to move to a safer location at Baltimore. It was abandoning Philadelphia for the first time since convening there for the First Continental Congress in 1774.

EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE HAPPENING at once. On December 13, at his Trenton headquarters across the river from Washington, William Howe made one of the fateful decisions of the war. He was suspending further military operations until spring. Beginning immediately, he and his army would retire to winter quarters in northern New Jersey and New York. To secure the ground gained in the campaign, he would establish a string of outposts in New Jersey.

There had been a change in the weather. The days had turned much colder. The nights were the coldest yet with a “hard frost” and snow flurries, and this was all Howe had needed to make up his mind, “the weather,” as he wrote, “having become too severe to keep the field.”

It was commonly understood that eighteenth-century professional armies and their gentlemen commanders did not subject themselves to the miseries of winter campaigns, unless there were overriding reasons to the contrary. Considering all he had accomplished in the year’s campaign and knowing the helpless state of the rebel army, Howe saw no cause to continue the fight or to remain a day longer than necessary in a punishing American winter in a place like Trenton.

And there were, besides, compelling reasons to retire to New York City, for quarters for the army, and for the comforts and pleasures that so appealed to the general himself.

Howe departed for New York on Saturday, December 14, joined by Cornwallis, whom he had granted leave to return to England to visit his ailing wife.

General Howe cozily accommodated in New York, as pictured in the minds of many, would rekindle old gossip and give rise to some popular doggerel:

Sir William, he, snug as a flea,

Lay all this time a-snoring;

Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm

In bed with Mrs. Loring.

NO BOATS WERE TO BE BUILT or hauled overland by the British to cross the Delaware. And for now there was to be no march on Philadelphia. The members of Congress could as well have stayed where they were.

But of this Washington seems to have known little or nothing. Close as he was to the enemy he had almost no idea of what they were doing, no knowledge that Howe and Cornwallis had departed, and that neither he nor Congress were any longer under immediate threat.

“The Delaware now divides what remains of our little force from that of General Howe whose object, beyond all question, is to possess Philadelphia,” Washington wrote on December 18, four days after Howe’s departure, to James Bowdoin, a member of the Massachusetts Council. Were the river to freeze, Washington feared, the enemy might attack over the ice. “Strain every nerve for carrying out the necessary works,” he told Israel Putnam, who was charged with the defense of Philadelphia. “There seems to be the strongest reason to believe the enemy will attempt to pass the river as soon as the ice is sufficiently formed.”

Desperate for reliable intelligence—for information of almost any kind—Washington let it be known he was willing to pay for it, at almost any price. In a dispatch to his general officers, he implored them to find a spy who would cross the river and determine whether any boats were being built or coming overland. “Expense must not be spared in procuring such intelligence, and will readily be paid by me.” To Lord Stirling, he wrote, “Use every possible means without regard to expense to come with certainty at the enemy’s strength, situation, and movements—without this we wander in a wilderness of uncertainties.”

As early as December 15, he had received a report from a commander of Pennsylvania militia posted below Trenton, John Cadwalader, saying, “General Howe is certainly gone to New York, unless the whole is a scheme to amuse and surprise.” Perhaps Washington found it impossible to believe, or suspected that it was indeed a ruse. Whatever the reason, he seems to have ignored it.

The foe gathered on the other side of the river was the British army no longer, but a holding force of 1,500 Hessians settled in for the winter under the command of Colonel Johann Rall, the veteran officer who had led the fierce Hessian assaults at White Plains and Fort Washington.

Concerned about “the apparent designs” of the enemy—the “wilderness of uncertainties”—Washington moved his headquarters ten miles upstream to Buckingham Township, closer to the main body of the army, where Greene, Stirling, and Knox had their headquarters.

In two weeks, on New Year’s Day, all enlistments would expire. And what then? “Our only dependence now is upon the speedy enlistment of a new army,” he wrote to Lund Washington. “If this fails, I think the game is pretty near up.”

On December 20, in the midst of a snowstorm, General Sullivan rode into Buckingham at the head of Lee’s troops, having marched at a pace four times what Lee had set in order to join Washington as soon as possible. But instead of the 4,000 that Washington had been expecting, there were only half that number, and the men were in more wretched condition even than Washington’s own ranks. When Lee had complained of his troops having no shoes, it had been no exaggeration for effect. General Heath would later write of seeing Lee’s troops pass through Peekskill, many “so destitute of shoes that the blood left on the frozen ground, in many places, marked the route they had taken.”

One of those who had made the trek from Peekskill was Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins. In a letter headed “Buckingham in Pennsylvania, December 20, 1776,” Hodgkins reported to his wife Sarah:

We have been on the march since the 29th of last month and we are now within 10 or 12 miles of General Washington’s army. We expect to be there tonight. But how long we shall stay there I can’t tell. Neither can I tell you much about the enemy, only that they are on one side of the Delaware River and our army on the other.

They had marched about two hundred miles, Hodgkins thought, and the greatest part of the way was dangerous—“the enemy being near,” but also because so much of the country was “full of them cursed creatures called Tories.”

General Gates, too, arrived, but to Washington’s disappointment, he had with him only six hundred men.

Before departing for Baltimore, Congress had named Robert Morris to head the committee to look after affairs in Philadelphia, by now an all-but-abandoned city. Writing to Morris three days before Christmas, Washington said he thought the enemy was waiting for two events only before marching on Philadelphia—“Ice for a passage, and the dissolution of the poor remains of our debilitated army.”

As near as could be determined, Washington now had an army of about 7,500, but that was a paper figure only. Possibly 6,000 were fit for duty. Hundreds were sick and suffering from the cold. Robert Morris and others in and around Philadelphia were doing everything possible to find winter clothes and blankets, while more and more of the local citizenry were signing the British proclamation. Congress had fled. Two former members of Congress, Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, had gone over to the enemy. By all reasonable signs, the war was over and the Americans had lost.

Yet for all the troubles that beset him, all the high expectations and illusions that he had seen shattered since the triumph at Boston, Washington had more strength to draw upon than met the eye—in his own inner resources and in the abilities of those still with him and resolved to carry on.

In Greene, Stirling, and Sullivan he had field commanders as good as or better than any. Though Greene, his best, and the very able Joseph Reed had let him down, both had learned from the experience, just as Washington had, and were more determined than ever to prove themselves worthy in his eyes. Greene, as he would confide to his wife, was extremely happy to have again “the full confidence of his Excellency,” confidence that seemed to increase “the more difficult and distressing our affairs grow.”

Henry Knox, a novice artilleryman no longer, and the steadfast John Glover, could be counted on no matter how tough the going. (In recognition of the part played thus far by the twenty-six-year-old Knox, Washington had already recommended him for promotion to the rank of brigadier general.) Junior officers and soldiers in the ranks, men like Joseph Hodgkins, were battered, weary, ragged as beggars, but not beaten.

Washington himself was by no means beaten. If William Howe and others of like mind thought the war was over and the British had won, Washington did not. Washington refused to see it that way.

With Lee gone and Congress entrusting him with more power, Washington was fully the commander now and it suited him. Out of adversity he seemed to draw greater energy and determination. “His Excellency George Washington,” wrote Greene later, “never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress.”

His health was excellent. The loyalty of those he counted on was stronger than ever.

On December 24, the day before Christmas, Washington’s judge advocate, Colonel William Tudor, who had been with him from the beginning, wrote again, as he often had during the campaign, to tell his fiancée in Boston of his continuing love for her, and to explain why his hopes of returning soon to Boston had vanished. “I cannot desert a man (and it would certainly be desertion in a court of honor) who has deserted everything to defend his country, and whose chief misfortune, among ten thousand others, is that a large part of it wants spirit to defend itself.”

BRISTOL, PENNSYLVANIA, was a small town on the western side of the Delaware, downstream from Trenton, across the river from Burlington, New Jersey. It was from Bristol, where he was helping to organize Pennsylvania militia, that Joseph Reed had written a remarkable letter to Washington dated December 22.

It was time something was done, something aggressive and surprising, Reed wrote. Even failure would be preferable to doing nothing.

Will it not be possible, my dear General, for our troops or such part of them as can act with advantage to make a diversion or something more at or about Trenton? The greater the alarm, the more likely success will attend the attacks….

I will not disguise my own sentiments that our cause is desperate and hopeless if we do not take the opp[ortunit]y of the collection of troops at present to strike some stroke. Our affairs are hastening fast to ruin if we do not retrieve them by some happy event. Delay with us is now equal to total defeat.

Apparently the letter was unsolicited. What was remarkable was the degree to which it corresponded with Washington’s own mind and plans.

In the bleak days after the Battle of Brooklyn, Washington had told Congress, “We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk unless compelled by a necessity.” But he had also written of the possibility of some “brilliant stroke” on his part that might save the cause.

On December 14, he had written to Governor Trumbull that a “lucky blow” against the enemy would “most certainly rouse the spirits of the people, which are quite sunk by our misfortunes.”

Now, compelled by necessity, his “brilliant stroke” worked out in his mind, he was ready to put almost everything at risk.

With Greene and a few others at the Buckingham headquarters, he had been going over the plan for days, insisting on the strictest secrecy.

But on December 21, Robert Morris had written to say he had heard an attack across the Delaware was being prepared and that he hoped this was true.

Responding now to Reed, Washington confirmed that an attack on Trenton was to begin Christmas night. “For Heaven’s sake keep this to yourself, as discovery of it may prove fatal to us…but necessity, dire necessity, will, nay must, justify an attempt.”

III

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Washington called a meeting at Greene’s headquarters to go over the final details.

The army was to attack across the Delaware at three places. A force of 1,000 Pennsylvania militia and some 500 veteran Rhode Island troops, led by General John Cadwalader and Joseph Reed, were to cross downriver at Bristol and advance toward Burlington.

A second smaller force of 700 Pennsylvania militia under General James Ewing was to attack directly across the river at Trenton and hold the wooden bridge over Assunpink Creek at the foot of Queen Street, which the enemy might use as an escape route.

The third and much the largest force of 2,400 of the Continental Army led by Washington, Greene, Sullivan, and Stirling would cross the Delaware, nine miles upstream from Trenton, at McKonkey’s Ferry.

Once over the river, Washington’s army would head south, then halfway to Trenton divide into two columns, one led by Sullivan, taking the River Road, the other, commanded by Greene, taking the Pennington Road farther inland. Four of Knox’s cannon were to advance at the head of each column. Washington would ride with Greene.

According to the latest intelligence, the enemy’s force at Trenton numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 men.

The first step, the crossing, was set for midnight, December 25, Christmas night. By marching through the night, the two columns were to arrive at Trenton no later than five in the morning. The attack was set for six, an hour before daylight. Officers were to have a piece of white paper in their hats to distinguish them. Absolute secrecy was demanded. A “profound silence” was to be observed, the orders read, “and no man to quit his ranks on pain of death.”

Christmas Day the weather turned ominous. A northeast storm was gathering. The river was up, and filled with broken sheets of ice.

In the course of the day, Joseph Reed arrived from Bristol, accompanied by Congressman and physician Benjamin Rush, who, since the adjournment of Congress, had reported to Reed and Cadwalader to volunteer his services. Years later, Rush would recall a private meeting with Washington at Buckingham, during which Washington seemed “much depressed.” In “affecting terms,” he described the state of the army. As they talked, Washington kept writing something with his pen on small pieces of paper. When one of them fell to the floor by Rush’s foot, he saw what was written: “Victory or Death.” It was to be the password for the night.

When Rush, or possibly Reed, warned the general not to expect very much from the militiamen under Cadwalader, Washington scratched out a note that he asked Rush to take to Cadwalader as soon as possible:

I am determined, as the night is favorable, to cross the river and make an attack on Trenton in the morning. If you can do nothing real, at least create as great a diversion as possible.

The crossing of Washington’s force was to be made in big flat-bottomed, high-sided Durham boats, as they were known, normally used to transport pig iron on the Delaware from the Durham Iron Works near Philadelphia. Painted black and pointed at both ends, they were forty to sixty feet long, with a beam of eight feet. The biggest of them could carry as many as forty men standing up, and fully loaded they drew only about two feet, and so could be brought close to shore. The oars—or sweeps—used to propel the boats were eighteen feet long.

Henry Knox was to organize and direct the crossing, and the biggest, most difficult part of the task, as he knew, would be transporting eighteen field cannon and fifty horses or more, including those of the officers. Again, as at Brooklyn, John Glover and his men were in charge of the boats.

Before leaving his headquarters to lead the march, Washington, in what seems to have been a state of perfect calm, wrote to Robert Morris, “I agree with you that it is vain to ruminate upon, or even reflect upon the authors of our present misfortunes. We should rather exert ourselves, and look forward with hopes, that some lucky chance may yet turn up in our favor.”

Drums rolled in the camps, and starting about two in the afternoon the army began moving out for the river, each man carrying sixty rounds of ammunition and food enough for three days.

IT WAS NEARLY DARK and raining when the first troops reached McKonkey’s Ferry where the boats waited. Henry Knox’s unmistakable bass voice could be heard bellowing orders above the rising wind and rain. According to one account, had it not been for the powerful lungs and “extraordinary exertions” of Knox, the crossing that night would have failed.

Knox himself later praised the heroic efforts of Glover and his men, describing how ice in the river made their labor “almost incredible,” and the “almost infinite difficulty” they had getting the horses and cannon on board the boats.

The Delaware was not so broad at McKonkey’s Ferry as at Trenton or below Trenton, where it became a tidal estuary. Under normal conditions the width of the river at McKonkey’s Ferry was about eight hundred feet, but with the water as high as it was that night, the distance was greater by fifty feet or more, and the current strong, the ice formidable, as all accounts attest.

Glover’s men used oars and poles to get the big boats across. The troops went standing, packed on board as close as possible.

Washington crossed early and watched the slow process from the New Jersey side. About eleven o’clock, the storm struck, a full-blown northeaster.

Among the most vivid firsthand accounts of the night was that of John Greenwood, the young fifer from Boston, who after the march to New York in April had been sent off to serve in Canada and had only just rejoined Washington’s army.

Fifes not being a priority under the circumstances, sixteen-year-old Greenwood carried a musket like every other man and crossed in one of the first boats.

Over the river we then went in a flat-bottomed scow [he wrote]…and we had to wait for the rest and so began to pull down fences and make fires to warm ourselves, for the storm was increasing rapidly. After a while it rained, hailed, snowed, and froze, and at the same time blew a perfect hurricane, so much so that I perfectly recollect, after putting the rails on to burn, the wind and fire would cut them in two in a moment, and when I turned my face to the fire, my back would be freezing. However…by turning myself round and round I kept myself from perishing.

As during the escape from Brooklyn, Washington’s other daring river-crossing by night, a northeaster was again, decisively, a blessing and a curse—a blessing in that it covered the noise of the crossing, a curse in that, with the ice on the river, it was badly slowing progress when time was of the essence. The plan was to have the whole army over the river no later than midnight, in order to reach Trenton before dawn.

According to Washington, it was three o’clock, three hours behind schedule, before the last of the troops, horses, and cannon were across.

At that point the attack might have been called off, the men sent back over the river, since the entire plan rested on the element of surprise and the chances for surprise now seemed gone. It was a decision that could not be delayed and involved great risk either way.

Washington decided without hesitation. As he would explain succinctly to John Hancock, “I well knew we could not reach it [Trenton] before day was fairly broke, but as I was certain there was no making a retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the river, I determined to push on at all events.”

Downstream, as he had no way of knowing, the other part of his plan was failing badly. General Ewing had called off his attack on Trenton because of ice in the river. At Bristol, where ice was piled higher even than at Trenton, Cadwalader and Reed had succeeded in getting some of their troops over to the other side, but then, unable to move their cannon across, they, too, had called off the attack.

“It was as severe a night as I ever saw,” wrote an officer with Cadwalader,

and after two battalions were landed, the storm increased so much that it was impossible to get the artillery over, for we had to walk one hundred yards on the ice to get on shore. General Cadwalader, therefore, ordered the whole to retreat again, and we had to stand at least six hours under arms—first to cover the landing, and till all the rest had retreated again—and by this time the storm of wind, rain, hail, and snow with the ice was so bad that some of the infantry could not get back till next day.

Unable to recross the ice with their horses, Reed and another officer chose to stay on the New Jersey side, concealed in the house of a friend.

Thus, of the three planned attacks on the enemy, only one was moving forward and it perilously behind schedule.

The march south from McKonkey’s Ferry was for many the most harrowing part of the night. The storm grew worse, with cold driving rain, sleet, snow, and violent hail. The troops, as Henry Knox wrote, pushed on “with the most profound silence.”

For the first half mile or more the dark road from the ferry was a steep uphill climb. After another two miles the road dropped into a ravine and crossed Jacobs Creek.

John Greenwood remembered moving no faster than a child could walk, stopping frequently, and suffering terribly from the cold.

I recollect very well that at one time, when we halted on the road, I sat down on the stump of a tree and was so be-numbed with cold that I wanted to go to sleep. Had I been passed unnoticed, I should have frozen to death without knowing it.

In fact, in the course of the night two of the men did freeze to death.

There was little light to see by. A few men carried lanterns, and torches were mounted on some of the cannon.

The entire 2,400 on the march kept together for five miles, as far as a little crossroads called Birmingham, where the army divided, Sullivan’s column keeping to the right on the River Road, while Washington’s and Greene’s force veered off to the left on the Pennington Road, both routes slick with ice and snow. The distance to Trenton was the same either way, about four miles. Men and horses kept slipping and skidding in the dark.

A Connecticut lieutenant, Elisha Bostwick, remembered Washington coming along on his horse, telling the men “in a deep and solemn voice” to keep with their officers. “For God’s sake keep with your officers.”

When his army had marched out of Boston heading for New York and their first field of battle, the commander-in-chief had traveled by coach. Much of the time since, he had conducted the war from established headquarters in elegant houses. And though he had been with the army the night of the escape from Brooklyn and through the retreat across New Jersey, until now he had never been with them as a field commander on the attack.

When handed a message from General Sullivan saying that the men had found their guns too soaked to fire, Washington answered, “Tell the general to use the bayonet.”

“None but the first officers knew where we were going, or what we were about,” John Greenwood wrote.

This was not unusual, however, as I never heard soldiers say anything, nor ever saw them trouble themselves, as to where they were or where they were led. It was enough for them to know that wherever the officers commanded they must go…for it was all the same owing to the impossibility of being in a worse condition than their present one, and therefore the men always liked to be kept moving in expectation of bettering themselves.

The two columns reached their assigned positions outside Trenton at about the same time, a few minutes before eight, an hour after daylight.

TRENTON WAS OFTEN REFERRED TO as a pretty village, which was an exaggeration. With perhaps a hundred houses, an Episcopal church, a marketplace, and two or three mills and iron furnaces, it was, in peacetime, a busy but plain little place of no particular consequence, except that it was at the head of navigation on the river and a stop on the King’s Highway from New York to Philadelphia. There was also a large two-story stone barracks built during the French and Indian War, and the bridge over Assunpink Creek below town.

The principal streets were King Street and Queen Street, which ran parallel toward the river, sloping downhill from the point above town where the Pennington Road and the King’s Highway converged. By Washington’s plan of attack, this point, the head of King and Queen streets, would decide the day.

But in the early light of December 26, in the white blur of the continuing storm, it was difficult to distinguish much of anything about Trenton.

Most of the townspeople had fled, taking as much as possible of their belongings. In the bare houses and the stone barracks were quartered the 1,500 Hessians who occupied the town. Their commander, Colonel Rall, had established himself in an ample frame house on King Street, the home of an owner of an iron furnace, Stacy Potts, who was happy to have the colonel as his guest.

Johann Gottlieb Rall was a sturdy, able career soldier, and at age fifty-six a senior among officers. The command at Trenton had been conferred in recognition of his valor at White Plains and Fort Washington. He was a man of limited imagination. He spoke little or no English and had only contempt for the rebel army. His pleasures were a game of cards, a good drink or two, and martial music, which he relished to the point of absurdity, marching himself with his military band at almost any excuse.

Rall would be roundly criticized later by some of his junior officers for being lazy, lax, indifferent to the possibility of surprise attack, and a drunkard. Captain Johann Ewald, as fair-minded as any Hessian officer who served in America, later wrote that many who criticized Rall after his death were not fit to have carried his sword.

Harassed by rebel patrols that kept coming over the Delaware, Rall had established outposts beyond the town and insisted that each night one company sleep with their muskets ready to be called out at a moment’s notice, and they were called out, it seemed to some, more often than necessary. If anything, the colonel was thought to be too much on edge. (An officer complained in his diary, “We have not slept one night in peace since we came to this place.”)

It was the size of the attack to come, and in such weather, that Rall did not anticipate, and in this he was not alone.

Before departing for New York, General Howe had put James Grant in overall command of the string of outposts in New Jersey. Grant was at Brunswick, twenty-five miles from Trenton. On December 24, he received “certain intelligence” that the rebels were planning an attack on Trenton. While he did not think them “equal to the attempt,” he alerted Rall, telling him to be on guard. Rall received the message at five o’clock the afternoon of the 25th.

Not long after, a dozen Hessians on guard on the Pennington Road beyond town were fired on in the dark by an American patrol, which had quickly withdrawn. Rall himself rode out through the storm to look things over and concluded that this was the attack he had been warned about. On such a night, he assumed nothing more would happen.

Later in the evening Rall attended a small Christmas gathering at the home of a local merchant and was playing cards when, reportedly, a servant interrupted to deliver still another warning message that had been delivered to the door by an unknown Loyalist, and this Rall is said to have thrust into his pocket.

It is not known what time he returned to his quarters or whether, as later said, he had had too much to drink.

THE ATTACK BEGAN just after eight o’clock. The Americans under Nathanael Greene came out of the woods and across a field through driving snow about half a mile from town. They were moving fast, at what was called a “long trot.” The Hessians on guard on the Pennington Road had trouble at first making out who they were and how many there were. “The storm continued with great violence,” Henry Knox wrote, “but was in our backs, and consequently in the faces of the enemy.”

The Americans opened fire. The Hessians waited for them to get closer, then fired and began quickly, smoothly falling back into town, exactly as they had been trained to do when retreat was the only choice. Washington thought they performed particularly well keeping up a steady retreating fire.

As Greene’s and Sullivan’s columns converged on the town, Washington moved to high ground nearby on the north where he tried to keep watch on what was happening.

His 2,400 Americans, having been on their feet all night, wet, cold, their weapons soaked, went into the fight as if everything depended on them. Each man “seemed to vie with the other in pressing forward,” Washington wrote.

In town the Hessians came rushing out of their houses and barracks into the streets. Drums beat, the band played, officers shouted orders in German, and as fast as the Hessians began forming up, Knox’s artillery were in position at the head of King and Queen streets.

The cannon opened fire with deadly effect down hundreds of yards on each street, and in minutes—“in the twinkling of an eye,” Knox said—cleared the streets.

When the Hessians retreated into the side streets, they found Sullivan’s men coming at them with fixed bayonets. For a brief time, a thousand or more Americans and Hessians were locked in savage house-to-house fighting.

It was all happening extremely fast, in wild confusion and swirling snow made more blinding by clouds of gunpowder smoke. “The storm of nature and the storm of the town,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “exhibited a scene that filled the mind during the action with passions easier conceived than described.”

When the Hessians rolled out a field gun midway on King Street, a half dozen Virginians led by Captain William Washington (a distant cousin of the commander) and Lieutenant James Monroe rushed forward, seized it, and turned it on them.

Colonel Rall, who had been rousted from his bed and was quickly on horseback and in command in the midst of the fray, ordered a charge. Men were being hit all around him. The line faltered. He ordered a retreat into an orchard at the southeast edge of town. Then Rall, too, was hit and fell from his horse. Mortally wounded, he was picked up and carried to the Potts house.

The Hessians in the orchard, finding themselves surrounded, lay down their arms and surrendered.

It had all happened in forty-five minutes or less. Twenty-one Hessians had been killed, 90 wounded. The prisoners taken numbered approximately 900. Another 500 had managed to escape, most of them by the bridge over Assunpink Creek.

Incredibly, in a battle of such extreme savagery, only four Americans had been wounded, including Captain Washington and Lieutenant Monroe, and not one American had been killed. The only American fatalities were the two soldiers who had frozen to death during the night on the road.

“After having marched off the prisoners and secured the cannon, stores, etc.,” wrote Knox, “we returned to the place nine miles distant, where we had embarked.” Thus after marching through the night a second time, back to McKonkey’s ferry, the army crossed the Delaware once again back to the Pennsylvania side of the river.

NOT SINCE TAKING COMMAND the summer of 1775 had Washington ever addressed the army with such words of praise, affection, and gratitude as he did in his general orders for the following day, December 27. And never had he greater reason. It had been their triumph, he wanted them to know.

“The general, with the utmost sincerity and affection, thanks the officers and soldiers for their spirited and gallant behavior at Trenton yesterday,” he began. “It is with inexpressible pleasure that he can declare that he did not see a single instance of bad behavior in either officers or privates.”

In appreciation of such “spirited behavior” he would see that all who had “crossed the river” would receive, in cash, a proportionate part of the total value of the cannon, arms, horses, and “everything else” captured at Trenton.

Allegedly there had been some less-than-stellar behavior, which either Washington did not see or chose to ignore given the spirit of the moment. With the battle over, a number of soldiers reportedly broke into the Hessian rum supply and got roaring drunk.

Far more, however, would be said later and repeated endlessly of Hessians who supposedly, on the morning of the attack, were still reeling drunk or in a stupor from having celebrated Christmas in the Germanic tradition. But there is no evidence that any of them were drunk. John Greenwood, who was in the thick of the fight, later wrote, “I am willing to go upon oath that I did not see even a solitary drunken soldier belonging to the enemy.”

Major James Wilkinson, the young officer who had been present at the capture of General Lee and who also fought at Trenton and later wrote an account of the battle, made no mention of anyone being drunk.

What Wilkinson did record, memorably, was riding to Washington with a message just after the Hessians had surrendered. “On my approach,” he wrote, “the commander-in-chief took me by the hand and observed, ‘Major Wilkinson, this is a glorious day for our country.’ ”

They all felt something of the kind. They knew they had done something big at last. “The troops behaved like men contending for everything that was dear and valuable,” Knox wrote to Lucy. Nathanael Greene told his wife, “This is an important period to America, big with great events.”

Writing to Governor Trumbull earlier, Washington had prophesied that some “lucky blow” would “rouse the spirits of the people,” but he could hardly have imagined how stunning the effect of the news of Trenton would be on the morale of the country.

In a matter of days, newspapers were filled with accounts of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, the night march and the overwhelming success of the surprise attack, the numbers of prisoners taken, the cannon, arms, swords, horses, even the number of drums and trumpets from Colonel Rall’s military band. But fast post riders and word of mouth spread the story more rapidly still.

John Adlum, the seventeen-year-old private from York, Pennsylvania, who had been captured at Fort Washington and was among the fortunate prisoners—mostly officers—confined to houses in New York and allowed some freedom of movement, wrote later of how he heard the news of Trenton. The owner of a grocery store had pulled him into a back room and kept shaking his hand and trembling with such emotion he was unable to speak.

“I looked at him and thought him crazy or mad,” Adlum wrote, “but as soon as he could give utterance to his word he says to me, ‘General Washington has defeated the Hessians at Trenton this morning and has taken 900 prisoners and six pieces of artillery!’ ”

I did not wait to hear anything more said, but dropped the basket and ran out into the street and passed two [British] sentinels that I had given the countersign on my way to the store. Though they challenged me, I did not stop, but ran as fast as I could to my quarters…. By the time I got home I was quite out of breath and ran into the room where the officers were sitting around the table. Several of them asked what’s the matter, and as soon as I could recover breath to speak I spoke with considerable emphasis: “General Washington has defeated the Hessians at Trenton this morning and has taken 900 prisoners and six pieces of artillery.”

“Who told you so?”

I could not tell as I did not know the gentleman’s name, but I told them it was where I purchased the groceries…. At which some of theofficers laughed and asked me various questions, while others did not say a word and looked very serious, as if doubting the news, and others thought it too good to be true.

Washington was extolled as he had been at Boston, as a hero and savior. “It appears to us that your attack on Trenton was…[a] success beyond expectation,” wrote Robert Morris from Philadelphia on behalf of the Executive Committee of Congress, and this was entirely befitting “a character which we admire and which we have long wished to appear in the world with that brilliancy that success always obtains and which members of Congress know you deserve.”

From Baltimore, addressing Washington on behalf of the entire Congress, John Hancock said that the victory at Trenton was all the more “extraordinary” given that it had been achieved by men “broken by fatigue and ill-fortune.”

But troops properly inspired, and animated by a just confidence in their leader will often exceed expectation, or the limits of probability. As it is entirely to your wisdom and conduct, the United States are indebted for the late success of your arms.

To General James Grant, Howe’s commander of the New Jersey outposts, and thus the one who bore the responsibility for what had happened, Trenton was an “unlucky,” “cursed” affair, quite beyond comprehension. “ ’Tis an infamous business. I can not account for the misbehavior of the Hessians,” Grant wrote to General Harvey. He had been sure, Grant told Harvey, that the Hessians at Trenton were “as safe as you are in London.”

How Colonel Rall could have failed to act upon the warning he had been given was more than Grant could understand. But then Rall had died of his wounds and would have no chance to speak in his own defense.

In New York, William Howe responded to the news of Trenton by taking immediate action. Cornwallis, his leave canceled, was ordered to return at once to New Jersey with an army of 8,000.

WASHINGTON HAD BEEN WEIGHING his next move and worrying over how possibly to keep his army together. His decision, given the way events had turned and his own nature, was not surprising. He would go after the enemy once again.

Thinking that Washington was still in New Jersey, General Cadwalader, in a bold move, had crossed the Delaware downstream at Bristol, and General Mifflin was joining him with more recruits.

On December 29, Washington, Greene, Sullivan, Knox, and their troops were on the move, marching through a six-inch snowfall, to cross the Delaware at McKonkey’s Ferry and nearby Yardley’s Ferry, an undertaking that was as harrowing as the crossing of Christmas night. At Yardley’s Ferry, where Greene’s troops crossed, the river was iced over, just thick enough for the men to pick their way warily across, but too thin for horses and cannon. At McKonkey’s, it was only with the greatest difficulty that Washington and the rest were able to get over. Amazingly, Knox and Glover succeeded this time in transporting some 40 cannon and their horses, twice what had been managed Christmas night.

At Trenton, Washington drew up his forces on a low ridge along the south side of Assunpink Creek, with the Delaware on their left flank, a patch of woods to the right. It was December 30. The following day, the last day of 1776, he made a dramatic appeal to the veteran troops of the Continental Army to stay with him.

Having no authority whatever to do so, he offered a bounty of ten dollars for all who would stay another six months after their enlistments expired that day—a considerable sum for men whose pay was six dollars a month.

“I feel the inconvenience of this advance,” Washington would later tell Congress. “But what was to be done?” To Robert Morris he said more bluntly, “I thought it no time to stand on trifles.”

One of the soldiers would remember his regiment being called into formation and His Excellency, astride a big horse, addressing them “in the most affectionate manner.” The great majority of the men were New Englanders who had served longer than any and who had no illusions about what was being asked of them. Those willing to stay were asked to step forward. Drums rolled, but no one moved. Minutes passed. Then Washington “wheeled his horse about” and spoke again.

“My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than could be reasonably expected, but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you can probably never do under any other circumstance.”

Again the drums sounded and this time the men began stepping forward. “God Almighty,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “inclined their hearts to listen to the proposal and they engaged anew.”

In the last hours before New Year’s Day, Washington would learn that on December 27, by the vote of Congress, he had been authorized to “use every endeavor,” including bounties, “to prevail upon the troops…to stay with the army….” Indeed, for a period of six months the Congress at Baltimore had made him a virtual dictator.

“Happy it is for this country,” read part of the letter transmitting the resolution, “that the general of their forces can safely be entrusted with the most unlimited power, and neither personal security, liberty, nor property be in the least degree endangered thereby.”

In his letter of reply to the members of Congress, Washington wrote:

Instead of thinking myself freed from all civil obligations by this mark of their confidence, I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established.

“The year 1776 is over. I am heartily glad of it and I hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another,” Robert Morris wrote to Washington on New Year’s Day. But the campaign was not over just yet.

BY JANUARY 1, 1777, Cornwallis and his army had reached Princeton. On January 2, Cornwallis left part of his force there, and with 5,500 strong, set off down the road to Trenton, ten miles away.

There had been a sudden thaw and the mud of the road slowed the march.

Colonel Edward Hand and the Pennsylvania riflemen sent to check the enemy advance fought with deadly effect but could only fall back against such a force. By dusk the Americans were retreating back through Trenton, down Queen Street toward the bridge over the Assunpink, and it was only Knox’s cannon from across the creek that held the British at bay.

“The enemy pushed our small party through the town with vigor…[then] advanced within reach of our cannon, who saluted them with great vociferation and some execution,” Knox wrote. British artillery answered and Cornwallis ordered three successive attacks on the bridge, only to be driven back each time.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had arrived with Cadwalader’s brigades to help establish a field hospital, wrote later of this his first direct encounter with war. Indeed, Rush was one of the very few signers of the Declaration of Independence yet to see the reality of the war firsthand.

The American army retired and left the British in possession of Trenton. The scene which accompanied and followed this combat was new to me. The first wounded man that came off the field was a New England soldier. His right hand hung a little above his wrist by nothing but a piece of skin. It had been broken by a cannon ball. I took charge of him and directed him to a house on the river which had been appropriated for a hospital. In the evening all the wounded, about 20 in number, were brought to this hospital and dressed by Dr. [John] Cochran, myself, and several young surgeons who acted under our direction. We all lay down on some straw in the same room with our wounded patients. It was now for the first time war appeared to me in its awful plenitude of horrors. I want words to describe the anguish of my soul, excited by the cries and groans and convulsions of the men who lay by my side.

In the last light of day Cornwallis and his commanders had convened to decide whether to carry the attack across the Assunpink still again, or to wait for daylight. “If Washington is the general I take him to be,” one of them, Sir William Erskine, is alleged to have commented, “he will not be found in the morning.” Cornwallis is said to have replied that they would “bag him” in the morning.

It was an understandable decision. Night attacks could be extremely costly and there seemed no reason not to wait.

The British engineer Captain Archibald Robertson thought the Americans had positioned themselves extremely well. “We…durst not attack them,” Robertson recorded in his diary. “They were exactly in the position Rall should have taken when he was attacked, from which he might have retreated towards Borden’s Town [downstream on the Delaware] with very little loss.”

It had turned cold again. The British troops slept that night on the frozen ground and without campfires in order to keep watch on the rebels and their fires across the creek.

But when morning came, the Americans were gone. Leaving a small force to keep the fires burning and make the appropriate noises of an army settling in for the night, Washington and some 5,500 men, horses, and cannon had stolen away in the dark. But instead of heading south to Bordentown as would be expected, he struck off on a wide, daring sweep on little-known back roads to attack Cornwallis’s rear guard at Princeton.

They marched east to Sandtown, then north-northeast to Quaker Bridge by mud roads frozen as hard as rock. Fields along the way were covered with hoarfrost, and with a few dim stars overhead the night was not as dark as it might have been. But for men with scant clothing and broken shoes, or no shoes, it was again an extreme ordeal.

Washington’s plan, as at Trenton, was again to divide his force, with Greene’s column going off to the left, Sullivan’s column to the right.

The battle broke out at sunrise, Friday, January 3, when Greene’s vanguard and British forces ran into each other by chance two miles out from Princeton. General Hugh Mercer with several hundred men went off to the left to destroy a bridge on the King’s Highway, to stop any enemy retreat from the town in that direction. Mercer and his men arrived just as the British commander at Princeton, Colonel Charles Mawhood, and two regiments were setting off from Princeton to join Cornwallis at Trenton.

For the British the appearance of the Americans at that hour and in such numbers was totally unexpected. “They could not possibly suppose it was our army, for that, they took for granted, was cooped up near Trenton,” Knox would write. “I believe they were as much astonished as if an army had dropped perpendicularly upon them. However, they had not much time for consideration.”

Both sides opened fire, and in a battle that quickly escalated on the sweeping open fields and orchard of William Clarke’s farm, the fighting turned as furious as any of the war, the dead and bleeding strewn everywhere.

Mercer, who had dismounted when his horse was hit in the midst of a British bayonet attack, fought with his sword until he was clubbed to the ground, then bayoneted repeatedly—bayoneted seven times—and left for dead. Colonel John Haslet, who tried to rally the brigade, was killed instantly by a bullet in the head.

More Americans rushed forward, many of them Pennsylvania militia with little or no training, who refused to yield, as Washington, Greene, and Cadwalader rode among them to lead the way. The sight of Washington set an example of courage such as he had never seen, wrote one young officer afterward. “I shall never forget what I felt…when I saw him brave all the dangers of the field and his important life hanging as it were by a single hair with a thousand deaths flying around him. Believe me, I thought not of myself.”

“Parade with us, my brave fellows,” Washington is said to have called out to them. “There is but a handful of the enemy, and we will have them directly!”

More Americans descended on the enemy’s flanks and Mawhood and his redcoats were soon in full flight toward Trenton. (“A resolution was taken to retreat,” remembered one of Mawhood’s junior officers, “i.e., run away as fast as we could.”) Washington, unable to resist, spurred his horse and took after them, shouting, “It’s a fine fox chase, my boys!”

The ferocious battle on the Clarke farm, the deciding action of the day, had lasted all of fifteen minutes.

By the time Washington had reigned in his horse and called off the pursuit, another part of the army had entered the town, where some 200 of the British garrisoned there had barricaded themselves inside the large stone main building of the college, Nassau Hall. When Captain Alexander Hamilton and his artillerymen fired a few rounds into the building, the redcoats gave up.

The American dead numbered 23, including Colonel Haslet and General Mercer, who suffered nine days before dying of his wounds. Mercer, a doctor and pharmacist in civilian life who came from Fredericksburg, Virginia, not far from Mount Vernon, had been a favorite of Washington’s.

But losses were greater in British dead and wounded, and the Americans had taken three hundred prisoners. The British, though greatly outnumbered, had put up a fierce fight. But for Washington and the army it was another stunning, unexpected victory.

Washington’s impulse was to push on to Brunswick, to destroy enemy supplies there and capture a British pay chest of 70,000 pounds, and thereby, he speculated, end the war. But his exhausted army was in no shape for another forced march of nineteen miles or another battle, and Greene, Knox, and others talked him out of it, warning of the danger of losing all they had gained “by aiming at too much.”

Thus, the army marched north to Somerset Courthouse and, in the days that followed, on to the comparative security of the hilly, wooded country near the village of Morristown for the duration of the winter.

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1776 had ended with a second astonishing victory. Had Washington been born in the days of idolatry, declared the Pennsylvania Journal, he would be worshiped as a god. “If there are spots on his character, they are like the spots on the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope.”

As Nathanael Greene wrote to Thomas Paine, “The two late actions at Trenton and Princeton have put a very different face upon affairs.”

But as thrilling as the news of Princeton was for the country, coming so quickly after the triumph at Trenton, it was Trenton that meant the most, Trenton and the night crossing of the Delaware that were rightly seen as a great turning point. With the victory at Trenton came the realization that Americans had bested the enemy, bested the fearsome Hessians, the King’s detested hirelings, outsmarted them and outfought them, and so might well again.

Among some of the British command, and some skeptical Americans, what happened at Trenton was seen as only a minor defeat, an aggravating affair, but of no great consequence when compared to such large-scale British victories of 1776 as the Battle of Brooklyn or the taking of Fort Washington. Trenton was a “skirmish,” an “engagement,” not a battle.

But some on the British side grudgingly conceded that the “rabble” must henceforth be regarded with new respect. Colonel William Harcourt, the cavalry officer who had led the capture of Charles Lee, wrote in a letter to his father that though the Americans remained ignorant of military order and large-scale maneuver, they had shown themselves capable of great cunning, great industry, and spirit of enterprise. And while it had been “the fashion in this army to treat them in the most contemptible light, they are now become a formidable enemy.”

Measured by the size of its importance to those fighting for the Cause of America, those everywhere in the country who saw Washington and his army as the one means of deliverance of American independence and all that was promised by the Declaration of Independence, Trenton was the first great cause for hope, a brave and truly “brilliant” stroke.

From the last week of August to the last week of December, the year 1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American cause had ever known—indeed, as dark a time as any in the history of the country. And suddenly, miraculously it seemed, that had changed because of a small band of determined men and their leader.

A century later, Sir George Otto Trevelyan would write in a classic study of the American Revolution, “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”

Closer to the moment, Abigail Adams wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our later misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief.” “ ‘Affliction is the good man’s shining time,’ ” she wrote, quoting a favorite line from the English poet Edward Young.

Mercy Warren, the wife of James Warren and an author, would write in her own history of the American Revolution that there were perhaps “no people on earth in whom a spirit of enthusiastic zeal is so readily kindled, and burns so remarkably, as among Americans.”

The energetic operation of this sanguine temper was never more remarkably exhibited than in the change instantaneously wrought in the minds of men, by the capture of Trenton at so unexpected a moment. From the state of mind bordering on despair, courage was invigorated, every countenance brightened.

WITH THE NEW YEAR, news arrived from England that on October 31 in London, His Majesty King George III had once again ridden in splendor from St. James’s Palace to Westminster to address the opening of Parliament on the still-distressing war in America.

Nothing could have afforded me so much satisfaction [said the King] as to have been able to inform you…that my unhappy people [in America], recovered from their delusion, had delivered themselves from the oppression of their leaders and returned to their duty. But so daring and desperate is the spirit of those leaders, whose object has always been dominion and power, that they have now openly renounced all allegiance to the Crown, and all political connection with this country…and have presumed to set up their rebellious confederacies for independent states. If their treason be suffered to take root, much mischief must grow from it.

Another military campaign would be undertaken in America.

The same Whig leaders in Parliament spoke out as they had before, ardently denouncing the “wicked war.” Lord Germain, in response, said the army in America would be reinforced. And as it had before, in what seemed the long-ago October of 1775, the Parliament approved the King’s policy by an overwhelming margin.

When, in March 1777, the news of Trenton reached England, it was said (in the London General Evening Post and elsewhere) that the defeat of the Hessians, while “disagreeable,” was “more than counter-balanced” by the capture of General Lee. Lord Germain saw at once that the importance of the news was the effect it would have on American opinion. Still, he had no doubt that the rebel army was all but finished.

In New Jersey the fighting would continue sporadically as winter wore on. The war itself would continue, endlessly it seemed to many. In all, it would be another six and a half years before the Treaty of Paris ending the war was signed in 1783.

Some who had been with the army and Washington at the beginning, like Joseph Hodgkins, would serve several more years before deciding they had done their duty. Some, like Private Joseph Martin, would serve to the end.

In the campaign in the South that set the stage for the last major battle, at Yorktown, Virginia, Nathanael Greene would prove the most brilliant American field commander of the war. Washington felt that if anything were to happen to him—were Washington to be captured or killed—Greene should become the commander-in-chief.

Of all the general officers who had taken part in the Siege of Boston, only two were still serving at the time of the British surrender at Yorktown, Washington and Greene. Henry Knox, who had become a brigadier general after the Battle of Trenton, and who fought in every battle in which Washington took part, was also present at Yorktown. Greene and Knox, the two young untried New Englanders Washington had singled out at the beginning as the best of the “raw material” he had to work with, had both shown true greatness and stayed in the fight to the finish.

Financial support from France and the Netherlands, and military support from the French army and navy, would play a large part in the outcome. But in the last analysis it was Washington and the army that won the war for American independence. The fate of the war and the revolution rested on the army. The Continental Army—not the Hudson River or the possession of New York or Philadelphia—was the key to victory. And it was Washington who held the army together and gave it “spirit” through the most desperate of times.

He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

Again and again, in letters to Congress and to his officers, and in his general orders, he had called for perseverance—for “perseverance and spirit,” for “patience and perseverance,” for “unremitting courage and perseverance.” Soon after the victories of Trenton and Princeton, he had written: “A people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove.” Without Washington’s leadership and unrelenting perseverance, the revolution almost certainly would have failed. As Nathanael Greene foresaw as the war went on, “He will be the deliverer of his own country.”

The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate. By the time it ended, it had taken the lives of an estimated 25,000 Americans, or roughly 1 percent of the population. In percentage of lives lost, it was the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.

Acknowledgments

MATERIAL FOR THIS BOOK has been gathered at more than twenty-five libraries, archives, special collections, and historic sites here in the United States, and in the United Kingdom, at the British Library and the National Archives. I am greatly indebted to the staffs of all of them and wish to thank the following in particular for their many courtesies and help:

William Fowler, Peter Drummey, Brenda Lawson, and Anne Bentley of the Massachusetts Historical Society; Philander Chase, Frank Grizzard, Jr., and Edward Lengel, editors of The Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia; James C. Rees, Carol Borchert Cadou, Linda Ayres, and Barbara McMillan of Mount Vernon; Gerard Gawalt, Jeffrey Flannery, James Hutson, Edward Redmond, and Michael Klein of the Library of Congress; Richard Peuser of the National Archives; John C. Dann, Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Barbara DeWolfe, and Clayton Lewis of the William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Jack Bales, Roy Strohl, and Tim Newman of the Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington; Ellen McCallister Clark, Jack D. Warren, Sandra L. Powers, Lauren Gish, and Emily Schulz of the Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.; Andrea Ashby-Leraris of Independence National Historic Park, Philadelphia; Roy Goodman and Robert Cox of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; David Fowler, Greg Johnson, and Kathy Ludwig of the David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania; Michael Bertheaud of the Washington Crossing Historic Park; Cathy Hellier and John Hill of Colonial Williamsburg; James Shea and Anita Israel of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Vincent Golden of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; Jan Hilley and Ted O’Reilly of the New-York Historical Society; Leslie Fields of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Rick Statler of the Rhode Island Historical Society; Greg and Mary Mierka of the Nathanael Greene Homestead, Coventry, Rhode Island; Martin Clayton, the King’s Map Collection, Windsor Castle; Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Russell, Ballindalloch Castle, Banffshire, Scotland; Bryson Clevenger, Jr., of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Helen Cooper of the Yale University Art Gallery; and Eric P. Frazier of the Boston Public Library.

Peter Drummey, the incomparably knowledgeable Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Major General Josiah Bunting III, soldier, scholar, author, and generous friend, were good enough to read the manuscript and offer valuable suggestions. And so, too, was Philander Chase, senior editor of The Papers of George Washington, whose insights into the life and character of Washington and close reading of and comments on the manuscript helped immeasurably.

Sean P. Hennessey and his associates at the National Park Service in Charlestown, Massachusetts, gave me a superb tour of Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights; Martin Maher of the New York City Parks Department took me the length and breadth of Brooklyn on a memorable all-day survey of the events that took place there August 27, 1776; and on another expedition, John Mills, superintendent of the Princeton Battlefield State Park, guided me along the route of the famous night march to Trenton, beginning at the point where Washington and the army crossed the Delaware, then through the battles of both Trenton and Princeton. For their time, their illuminating commentary and infectious enthusiasm for their subjects, I thank them all.

For the privilege of visiting the birthplace of Nathanael Greene at East Greenwich, Rhode Island, I am ever grateful to its present owner, Thomas Casey Greene, who, as a direct descendant, knows much about the general not to be found in the usual texts.

Over the years I have benefited repeatedly from the friendship and the insights of historians Richard Ketchum, Thomas Fleming, Don Higginbotham, and David Hackett Fischer, each the author of landmark works on the Revolutionary War.

For their interest and a great variety of thoughtful suggestions and favors, I thank William Paul Deary, Philip A. Forbes, Wendell Garrett, Richard Gilder, J. Craig Huff, Jr., Father Michael Greene, Tim Greene, Daniel P. Jordan, Michael Kammen, Ravi Khanna, William Martin, Sally O’Brien, Doug Smith, Matthew Stackpole, Renny A. Stackpole, Clarence Wolf, and John Zentay.

Thomas J. McGuire has read so much about the realities of soldiering in the Revolution that it is almost as though he fought in it himself. He was a great help from the start of my efforts, supplying a wealth of material from his own wide-ranging research and abundant knowledge.

Gayle Mone helped with correspondence, typed the manuscript, and assisted superbly and tirelessly in the work of the Bibliography and Source Notes.

Mike Hill, my research assistant on this and previous books, has been a mainstay. His expertise and enterprise, his amazing stamina and unfailing good cheer, are beyond compare.

Again, I proudly acknowledge the parts played by my editor Michael Korda and my literary agent, Morton L. Janklow. I am ever grateful for their support and counsel, not to say the pleasure of their company. And again I thank my lucky stars for copy editors Gypsy da Silva and Fred Wiemer, for Amy Hill, who designed the book, and Wendell Minor, who designed the jacket. I think it is no exaggeration to say they are the best in the business.

As always, I thank my family, who know how much help and support they have given me and how much I appreciate all they have done.

To my wife Rosalee, to whom the book is dedicated, I owe the most by far. She is editor-in-chief. Her spirit never flags. She holds a steady course in all seasons.

David McCullough

West Tisbury, Massachusetts

November 29, 2004

Source Notes

Abbreviations Used

LOC | Library of Congress
MHS | Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.
NYHS | New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y.
PGW | The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, Vols. I–VIII, W. W. Abbott, Philander D. Chase, and Dorothy Twohig, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985–1998).
PNG | The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, Vols. I, II, X, Richard K. Showman and Dennis Conrad, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976, 1980, 1998).

1. Sovereign Duty

1 60,000 people: London Public Advertiser, October 27, 1775.

2 “mob”: Oliver Andrew, ed., The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 82.

3 “the whitest hand”: Ibid., 42.

4 King’s procession: London Public Advertiser, October 27, 1775.

5 royal coach: Royal Mews in London, England, where actual coach is still housed.

6 “superb”: Fact Sheet, “Gold State Coach,” Golden Jubilee Media Centre, London, Eng.

7 nearly a million souls: Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in 18th-Century England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 57.

8 plain food: Christopher Hibbert, George III: A Personal History (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 53.

9 Socially awkward: Ibid., 18–19, 80.

10 farms: Ibid., 197.

11 Handel: Ibid., 75.

12 loved architecture: Ibid., 178.

13 “unaffected good nature”: Ibid., 79.

14 “Sir, they may talk”: Ibid., 61.

15 appears to have been porphyria: Ibid., 267.

16 “George, be a King”: Barbara W. Tuchman, March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), 138.

17 “I have no doubt”: George III to Lord North, July 5, 1775, in John Fortescue, ed., Correspondence of King George the Third, III (London: Macmillan, 1927–1928), 233.

18 “Suppose the colonies”: Peter Force, American Archives, 4th series, Vol. I (Washington, D.C., 1846), 1682–1683.

19 conciliation with America: Paul Langford, ed. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, III (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1996), 102–169.

20 “I was ordered”: Bellamy Partridge, Sir Billy Howe (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), 7.

21 had taken command: Mark M. Boatner, III, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David McKay, 1966), 1167.

22 “rabble”: John Rhodehamel, ed. The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (New York: Library of America, 2001), 123.

23 “We must persist”: George III to Lord North, July 26, 1775, in John Fortescue, ed., Correspondence of King George the Third, III (London: Macmillan, 1927–1928), 235.

24 “foreign war”: Lord North to George III, July 26, 1775, in John Fortescue, ed., Correspondence of King George the Third, III (London: Macmillan, 1927–1928), 234.

25 1,000 casualties: Howard H. Peckham, ed. Toll of Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4.

26 “A few of the men”: New England Essex and Gazette, December 14, 1775.

27 “melancholy, disease, and death”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 190.

28 “almost lost for want of fresh provisions”: Ibid., 200.

29 “It is inconceivable”: Henry Pelham to John Singleton Copley, May 15, 1775, Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 324.

30 “the devil’s drawing-room”: Tobias Smollett, Adventures of Roderick Random (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1904), 119.

31 “vicious indulgence”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, I (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926), 21, n. 1.

32 “unnatural, unconstitutional”: Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press, 1775–1783 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1967), 59.

33 “all the gaudy trappings”: The Crisis, 1775, Nos. 4, 6.

34 “What, in God’s name”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 205.

35 recalled General Thomas Gage: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 319–320.

36 “distressing America”: George III to Lord North, October 15, 1775, in John Fortescue, ed., Correspondence of King George the Third, III (London: Macmillan, 1928), 269.

37 crowds greater: London Gazetteer and News Daily Advertiser, October 27, 1775.

38 “looks spoke peace”: London Public Advertiser, October 27, 1775.

39 “The present situation of America”: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 695.

40 “anxious to prevent”: Ibid., 696.

41 “When the unhappy and deluded multitude”: Ibid., 696–697.

42 “as peaceably as he went”: London Public Advertiser, October 27, 1775.

43 “We will support”: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 706.

44 “big with the most portentous”: Ibid., 708–709.

45 “wild and extravagant”: Ibid., 709.

46 “no longer be trusted”: Ibid., 714.

47 “How comes it that the colonies”: Peter Force, American Archives, 4th series (Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1837–1846), 12.

48 “amicably adjusted”: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 710.

49 “reducing America to a just obedience”: Ibid., 730.

50 “Let me remind you”: Ibid., 730–731.

51 “We are fighting”: Ibid., 735.

52 “reduce”: Ibid., 739.

53 “Men are to be brought”: Ibid., 734–750.

54 “the glorious spirit of freedom”: Ibid., 752.

55 “Because an inconsiderable party”: October 26, 1775, Peter Force, American Archives, 4th series (Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1837–1846), 41.

56 blind trumpeter: Peter D. G. Thomas, Lord North (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 1.

57 napping a bit: Peter Force, American Archives, 4th series (Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1837–1846), 41.

58 “Sons of Liberty”: Mark M. Boatner, III, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David McKay, 1966), 1017.

59 “military eye”: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 767.

60 held the floor for nearly two hours: London Gazetteer and News Daily Advertiser, October 28, 1775; London Chronicle, October 26–28, 1775.

61 “macaroni”: L. G. Mitchell, Charles J. Fox (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13.

62 “blundering pilot”: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 769.

63 “I cannot consent”: John Drinkwater, Charles James Fox (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1928), 130.

64 no wish to remain: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 770.

65 “I would abandon the contest”: F. J. Huddleston, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1927), 71.

66 “my sheet anchor”: Peter D. G. Thomas, Lord North (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 89.

67 “offers of mercy”: William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 771.

68 House of Lords: Ibid., 726.

69 House of Commons: Ibid., 772.

70 “some[thing] will be done”: Edward Gibbon to J. B. Holroyd, August 1, 1775, in The Letters of Edward Gibbon, II, J. E. Norton, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 82.

71 “The conquest of America”: Ibid., 91.

72 “decisive blow”: Piers Mackesy, The War for America: 1775–1783 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1964), 46.

2. Rabble in Arms

73 “Here we are at loggerheads”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, October 23, 1775, in PNG, I, 139–140.

74 asthma: Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene: Strategist of the American Revolution (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), 26.

75 on a farm: Author’s visit to Nathanael Greene homestead.

76 “constant and profitable operation”: George Washington Greene, Life of Nathanael Greene, I (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1962), 5.

77 “My father was a man”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, October 9, 1772, in PNG, I, 49.

78 Locke’s Essay: Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), 21.

79 Euclid: Ibid., 24.

80 “I lament the want”: George Washington Greene, The Life of Nathanael Greene, I (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1962), 47.

81 “cheerful, vigorous, thoughtful”: Ibid., 25.

82 imitations of characters: Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), 24.

83 “Very true, but you see”: George Washington Greene, The Life of Nathanael Greene, I (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1962), 27.

84 cloudy spot in his right eye: Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), 26.

85 “The first of all qualities”: Marshal Maurice de Saxe, Reveries on the Art of War, Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips, ed. (Harrisburg, Pa.: The Military Service Publishing Co., 1944), 117.

86 “halting”: Nathanael Greene to James Varnum, October 31, 1774, in PNG, I, 75–76.

87 “watchfulness and industry”: Nathanael Greene to John Adams, July 14, 1776, in PNG, I, 254.

88 “Army of Observation”: George Washington Greene, Life of Nathanael Greene, I (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1952), 79.

89 “when you consider how raw”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, October 23, 1775, in PNG, I, 140.

90 “the army of the United Colonies”: Congress to George Washington, June 19, 1775, in PGW, I, 7.

91 “the troops under your command”: John Hancock to George Washington, July 5, 1775, in PGW, I, 64.

92 “raw materials”: George Washington to Philip Schuyler, July 28, 1775, in PGW, I, 189.

93 “rabble in arms”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, I (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926), 298.

94 1,500 Rhode Islanders: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 77.

95 “wet and sloppy”: Journal of Simeon Lyman, Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, VIII, 131.

96 “through mud and mire”: Lois K. Stabler, ed., Very Poor and of a Lo Make: The Journal of Abner Sanger (Portsmouth N.H.: Historical Society of Cheshire County, 1986) 37.

97 “regularity and discipline”: Massachusetts Provincial Congress to George Washington, July 3, 1775, in PGW, I, 52–53.

98 “possessed of the absolute necessity”: Ibid., 53.

99 own rough map: Washington’s map of the Boston area, in PGW, I, 186–187.

100 “very delightful country”: George Washington to Samuel Washington, July 20, 1775, in PGW, I, 135.

101 “country of the most charming green”: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 164.

102 John Trumbull: Theodore Sizer, ed., The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 21–22.

103 “the True Situation”: Map drawn by Lieutenant Richard Williams, Boston, October 1775, MHS.

104 “Mount Whoredom”: Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), 7–8.

105 “There’s perhaps no town”: Journal of Lieutenant Richard Williams, MHS.

106 “Thousands are at work”: Amelia Forbes Emerson, ed., Diaries and Letters of William Emerson, 1743–1776 (Boston: Thomas Todd, 1972), 79.

107 “ ’Tis surprising the work”: Ibid.

108 “Let us stand our ground”: David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 204.

109 “It seemed to be the principle”: John Rhodehamel, ed., The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (New York: Library of America, 2001), 51.

110 account book was for $333.33: John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., George Washington Accounts of Expenses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 6.

111 “We scarcely lie down”: Thomas G. Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 23.

112 “Some are made of boards”: Amelia Forbes Emerson, ed., Diaries and Letters of William Emerson, 1743–1776 (Boston: Thomas Todd, 1972), 80.

113 “the regular camp of the enemy”: Ibid.

114 “Wickedness prevails very much”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, September 20, 1775, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Officers in Washington’s Army (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 174.

115 cobbler by trade: Ibid., 8.

116 “pertickler”: Ibid., 174.

117 “for without New England rum”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 152.

118 “Drank some grog”: “Diary of Jabez Fitch, Jr.,” Proceedings of the MHS, 2nd series, IX (1894–1895), 47.

119 “the gin sling”: Ibid., 55.

120 “In the morning I attended”: Ibid., 62.

121 “up into Cambridge town”: Ibid., 76.

122 “dirty as hogs”: Ibid., 52.

123 “has done more to exhilarate”: Ibid., 45.

124 “very good”: Ibid., 57.

125 “a hearty dinner”: Ibid., 59.

126 “Your brother Elihu”: Abigail Adams to John Adams, August 10, 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 272.

127 “Camp fever”: Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1071–1076; Anton Sebastian, Dictionary of the History of Medicine (New York: Parthenon Publishers, 1999), 268.

128 dead body so covered with lice: Journal of Simeon Lyman, Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, VIII, 123.

129 Danbury, Connecticut: Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 132.

130 “Infectious filth”: George H. Guttridge, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, III (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 293.

131 “great neglect”: Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 33.

132 “The officers in general”: Theodore Sizer, ed., The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 18.

133 “New lords, new laws”: William Emerson to his wife, July 17, 1775, in George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 83.

134 “wooden horse”: North Callahan, Henry Knox: George Washington’s General (South Brunswick, Maine: A. S. Barnes, 1958), 37.

135 “the most wretchedly clothed”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 153–154.

136 “fitted out”: New England Chronicle and Essex Gazette, September 14, 1775.

137 Washington himself chose to wear: “Uniforms of the Revolutionary Army,” Proceedings of the MHS, IV (1858–1860), 152–163.

138 “a great deal of grandeur”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, September 3, 1775, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 171.

139 “His Excellency was on horseback”: James Thacher, M.D., Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 37.

140 “worthy people”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, II (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), 187.

141 Old Put: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 83.

142 “the troubles”: Isaac J. Greenwood, ed., Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 1775–1783 (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 3.

143 “an old split fife”: Ibid., 4.

144 “They used to ask”: Ibid., 6.

145 “Everywhere the greatest”: Ibid., 12.

146 “a Negro man”: Ibid., 12–13.

147 “There are in the Massachusetts regiments”: William Heath to John Adams, October 23, 1775, in Papers of John Adams, III, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1979), 230.

148 “The regiments at Roxbury”: John Thomas to John Adams, October 24, 1775, in Papers of John Adams, III, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 329.

149 “Negroes, boys unable to bear arms”: George Washington, General Orders, November 12, 1775, in PGW, II, 354.

150 notices posted of deserters: New England Chronicle and Essex Gazette, July–September 1775.

151 “Deserted from Col. Brewer’s regiment”: Ibid., November 2, 1775.

152 “hardy men”: James Thacher, M.D., Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 37–38.

153 “bee-line”: Joseph Whitehorne, “Shepardstown and the Morgan-Stevenson Companies,” Magazine of the Jefferson County Historical Society, LVIII (December 1992), 16–19.

154 Washington began to wish: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 86.

155 “in many places”: Thomas G. Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 274.

156 “His comrades”: “Diary of Samuel Bixby,” August 2, 1775, Proceedings of the MHS, Vol. XIV (1875–1876), 291.

157 “frolicking”: John Greenwood, The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston, Isaac J. Greenwood, ed. (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 21.

158 “Nothing of note”: “Diary of Samuel Bixby,” August 3–12, 1775, Proceedings of the MHS, Vol. XIV (1875–1876), 293.

159 “Nothing extraordinary”: Stephen Kemble, Journals of Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Kemble, 1773–1789, and British Army Orders: General Sir William Howe, 1775–1778; General Sir Henry Clinton, 1778; and General Daniel Jones, 1778 (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 55–60.

160 “exceeding dirty and nasty”: Lund Washington to George Washington, August 20, 1775, in PGW, I, 336.

161 “these people”: George Washington to Richard H. Lee, August 29, 1775, in PGW, I, 372.

162 “the goodness of our cause”: George Washington to Philip Schuyler, August 20, 1775, in PGW, I, 331.

163 Georgian mansion: Research and discussions with curators and Park Service staff at Longfellow House National Historic Site, Cambridge, Mass.

164 household accounts: See “George Washington’s Revolutionary War Expenses and Accounts, 1775–1776, kept by Ebenezer Austin,” LOC.

165 William (Billy) Lee: James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783, II (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 60.

166 “Be easy”: George Washington to William Woodford, November 10, 1775, in PGW, II, 347.

167 “Sir, I am a corporal”: John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 392.

168 “has so much martial”: Benjamin Rush to Thomas Rushton, October 29, 1777, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, I (Princeton N.J.: American Philosophical Society, 1951), 92.

169 “harum scarum”: Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, I (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976), 499–500.

170 “This appointment”: John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 11, 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 215.

171 “one of the most important”: Ibid., June 17, 1775, 216.

172 hardly said enough: Abigail Adams to John Adams, July 16, 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 246.

173 “Joy was visible”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, July 14, 1775, in PNG, I, 99.

174 “expressed himself to me”: John F. Roche, Joseph Reed: A Moderate in the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 66.

175 “noble appearance”: Frank Grizzard, Jr., George Washington: Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Cl10, 2002), 326.

176 “Every action done”: Richard Brookhiser, ed., George Washington’s Rules of Civility (New York: Free Press, 1997), 27.

177 “liked his glass”: Bellamy Partridge, Sir Billy Howe (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), 34.

178 “I heard the bullets”: George Washington to John Washington, May 31, 1754, in Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, I, W. W. Abbot, ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 118.

179 glass in the windows: Author’s conversation with Carol Borchert Cadou, curator, Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens, Mount Vernon, Va.

180 “I wish you would quicken”: George Washington to Lund Washington, August 20, 1775, in PGW, I, 337.

181 “strongly attacked”: Paul Leicester Ford, Washington and the Theater (New York: Dunlap Society, 1899), 7.

182 Cato: Ibid., 2–21; James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 30.

183 His wealth was in land: Information on George Washington’s landholdings from Frank Grizzard, associate editor, Papers of George Washington.

184 “obliged to keep horses”: Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1966), 321.

185 “the best horseman”: Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Walter Jones, January 21, 1814, LOC.

186 “Found a fox”: Donald Jackson, ed., Diaries of George Washington, III (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 160–191.

187 “the image of war”: R. S. Surtees, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour (London, The Folio Society, 1950), 10.

188 “far, very far”: Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale: Early Life, I (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1947), 109.

189 “I am truly sensible”: George Washington to Continental Congress, June 16, 1775, in PGW, I, 1.

190 “far from seeking”: George Washington to Martha Washington, June 18, 1775, in PGW, I, 3–4.

191 “secret expedition”: Instructions to Nathaniel Tracy, September 2, 1775, in PGW, I, 405.

192 “The inactive state”: George Washington to John Washington, September 10, 1775, in PGW, I, 447.

193 “speedy finish”: George Washington to General Officers, September 8, 1775, in PGW, I, 432.

194 “No danger”: George Washington to Nicholas Cooke, August 4, 1775, in PGW, I, 221.

195 “to know”: George Washington to General Officers, September 8, 1775, in PGW, I, 432.

196 Seneca chief: John Richard Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 9.

197 “an odd genius”: Ibid., 83.

198 Boiling Water: John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 137.

199 “the first officer”: George Washington to John Washington, March 31, 1776, in PGW, III, 570.

200 “a good man”: William Cooper to John Adams, April 22, 1776, in Naval Documents of the American Revolution, IV, William Bell Clark, ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1969), 1192.

201 “fat, old, church warden”: Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes (New York: Avon, 1990), 70.

202 “of middling stature”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 15.

203 “surely every post”: George Washington to John Thomas, July 23, 1775, in PGW, I, 160.

204 “severity of a northern winter”: George Washington, Council of War, September 11, 1775, in PGW, I, 450.

205 “the hazard”: Ibid., 451.

206 “decisive stroke”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 21, 1775, in PGW, II, 28–29.

207 “I send you eleven dollars”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, October 6, 1775, Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 178.

208 “defend our common rights”: Nathanael Greene to Catharine Greene, June 2, 1775, in PNG, I, 83.

209 “We are soldiers”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, July 4, 1776, in PNG, I, 98.

210 “neither glory”: George Washington to John Thomas, July 23, 1775, in PGW, I, 160.

211 “every exertion”: George Washington to New York Provincial Congress, June 26, 1775, in PGW, I, 41.

212 “become a favorite point”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, October 23, 1775, in PNG, I, 140.

213 Dr. Benjamin Church: Clifford K. Shipton, ed., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1965), 380–398.

214 “Things hereabouts remain”: James Warren to Samuel Adams, October 23, 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, II, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1925), 422.

215 “proof of the diabolical designs”: George Washington to William Ramsay, November 10–16, 1775, in PGW, II, 345.

216 “You cannot but be sensible”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, November 20, 1775, in PGW, II, 407.

217 “I miss you exceedingly”: Ibid., November 28, 1775, 448.

218 “very sensible”: L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 131.

219 “cold and blustering”: “Diary of Jabez Fitch, Jr.,” November 12, 1775, Proceedings of the MHS, 2nd series, IX (1894–1895), 79.

220 “He is certainly the best”: James Warren to John Adams, November 14, 1775, in Papers of John Adams, III, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983), 306.

221 “Gentlemen in other colonies”: John Adams to Joseph Hawley, November 25, 1775, in Papers of John Adams, III, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 316.

222 “acquainted with the genius”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, December 18, 1775, in PNG, I, 163.

223 Henry Knox: George F. Scheer and Hugh R. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 79–104.

224 “very fat, but very active”: Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, I, Howard C. Rice, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 112.

225 seventh of the ten sons: North Callahan, Henry Knox: George Washington’s General (South Brunswick, Maine: A. S. Barnes, 1958), 16.

226 “large and very elegant: Ibid., 21.

227 “of pleasing manners”: L. H., Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 446.

228 Another patron was Nathanael Greene: North Callahan, Henry Knox: George Washington’s General (South Brunswick, Maine: A. S. Barnes, 1958), 29–30.

229 “military art”: Ibid., 35.

230 bird-hunting: Ibid., 26.

231 Lucy Flucker: Ibid.

232 “My charmer”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 17, 1775, NYHS.

233 “Long to see you”: Ibid., July 7, 1775.

234 “George Washington fills”: Ibid., July 9, 1775.

235 “Don’t be afraid”: Ibid., November 18, 1775.

236 “Every officer that stands”: Nathanael Greene’s Orders, November 7, 1775, in PNG, I, 149.

237 “Every colonel”: Nathanael Greene’s Orders, November 15, 1775, in PNG, I, 151.

238 smallpox raged: Allen Bowman, The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army (Washington, D.C: American Council of Public Affairs, 1943), 21.

239 “I only saw him”: John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 409.

240 “the whole in the most miserable”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, November 27, 1775, PGW, II, 442.

241 “with [the] design”: George Washington to John Hancock, December 4, 1775, in PGW, II, 486.

242 “weapon of defense”: Ibid., December 14, 1775, 548.

243 “Your exertions”: Frank Moore, Diary of the American Revolution, I (New York: Scribner, 1860), 171–173.

244 “Our situation”: George Washington to John Hancock, November 28, 1775, in PGW, II, 446.

245 “such a dearth”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, November 28, 1775, in PGW, II, 449–450.

246 “glad tidings”: Ibid., November 30, 1775, 463.

247 “instance of divine favor”: Ibid.

248 “Our people are almost bewitched”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, October 6, 1775, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 178.

249 “I hope I and all my townsmen”: Ibid., November 25, 1775, 185.

250 “I want you to come home”: Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, December 10, 1775, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 187.

251 “I want to see you very much”: Ibid., May 23, 1775, 203, and June 2, 1775, 204.

252 “alter”: Ibid., November 19, 1775, 184.

253 “We was ordered”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 102.

254 “In the morning”: Journal of Simeon Lyman of Sharon, August 10 to December 28, 1775, Collections of Connecticut Historical Society, VII, 131.

255 “Some of the Connecticutians”: George G. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 103.

256 “Let me ask you”: George Washington to Philip Schuyler, December 24, 1775, in PGW, II, 599–600.

257 “not a bad supply”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 103.

258 “I confess I shudder”: Martha Washington to Elizabeth Ramsay, December 30, 1775, in Joseph E. Fields, ed., Worthy Partner: The Papers of Martha Washington (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 164.

259 “even if the town must be burnt”: Diary of Richard Smith, December 22, 1775, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, Paul Smith, ed., II (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1977), 513.

260 “the most perfect piece”: Providence Gazette, December 23, 1775.

261 “This is the last day”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, December 31, 1775, in PNG, I, 173–174.

262 sent across the lines from Boston: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 630.

263 “We have consulted”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, January 4, 1776, in PNG, I, 176–177.

264 “satisfy a tyrant”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, February 10, 1776, in PGW, III, 288.

265 “by hundreds”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 43–44.

266 “new army”: George Washington’s General Orders, January 1, 1776, in PGW, III, 1.

267 new flag: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 630.

3. Dorchester Heights

268 “absolutely necessary”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782. William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1954), 20.

269 “It had often been wished”: John Rhodehamel, ed., The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (New York: Library of America, 2001), 120.

270 “We cannot remain”: James Grant to Edward Harvey, August 11, 1775, James Grant Papers, LOC.

271 “Lenity is out of the question”: Ibid.

272 “abandon Boston before winter”: K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, Colonial Office Series, XI (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1976), 99.

273 “We are not under”: Ibid., 191.

274 “We must go at it”: Sir Henry Clinton memorandum, December 3, 1775, in The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 23n.

275 “Gentleman Johnny”: David Hackett Fisher, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 36.

276 “so shattered”: Francis, Lord Rawdon, to Francis, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, December 13, 1775, in Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, III (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930–1947), 161.

277 “and we hear”: Ibid., October 5, 1775, 160.

278 “The rebels have the impudence”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 259.

279 “This sort of storm”: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 650.

280 “redcoat gentry”: George Washington to John Washington, October 13, 1775, in PGW, II, 161.

281 Pews were torn out: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 148–149.

282 “We have plays”: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 651.

283 “In the midst of these horrors”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 255.

284 “We must get through”: James Grant to Edward Harvey, November 29, 1775, James Grant Papers, LOC.

285 “very elegant playhouse”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 255.

286 The Blockade: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 634.

287 “But soon finding”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 97.

288 “Turn out!”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 166.

289 Billy Howe’s Cleopatra: Thomas Fleming, 1776: Year of Illusions (New York: Norton, 1975), 63.

290 “Joshua had a handsome wife”: Thomas Jones, History of New York During the Revolutionary War, I (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1879), 351.

291 “one of those brave”: Richard M. Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 94.

292 “to go a step further”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, I (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), 306.

293 “The success is too dearly bought”: Thomas J. Fleming, Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 330.

294 “I do not in the least”: Ibid., 235.

295 “proper army”: Troyer Anderson, Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 116.

296 “The reflection upon my situation”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, January 14, 1776, in PGW, III, 89.

297 “We have not at this time”: Ibid.

298 “I have often thought”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, January 14, 1776, in PGW, III, 89–90.

299 “undoubted intelligence”: George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull, January 7, 1776, in PGW, III, 51.

300 “vast importance”: Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, January 4, 1776, in PNG, I, 177.

301 “stretching”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, February 26–March 9, 1776, in PGW, III, 372.

302 “a kind of key”: John Adams to George Washington, January 6, 1776, in PGW, III, 37.

303 “put the city”: George Washington to Charles Lee, January 8, 1776, in PGW, III, 53.

304 “indispensable necessity”: George Washington, Council of War, January 16, 1776, in PGW, III, 103.

305 “the eyes of the whole continent”: George Washington to John Hancock, February 18–21, 1776, in PGW, III, 336.

306 “present feeble state”: George Washington, Council of War, January 18, 1776, in PGW, III, 133.

307 guns Knox: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 655; North Callahan, Henry Knox: George Washington’s General (South Brunswick, Maine: A. S. Barnes, 1958), 40–41.

308 “the utmost difficulty”: “Ticonderoga Diary of Henry Knox,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XXX (1876), 323.

309 “rowing exceeding hard”: Ibid.

310 “beating all the way”: William Knox to Henry Knox, December 14, 1775, NYHS.

311 “It is not easy to conceive”: Henry Knox to George Washington, December 17, 1775, in PGW, II, 563.

312 “I most earnestly beg”: Henry Knox to Captain Palmer, December 12, 1775, NYHS.

313 “Trusting that”: Henry Knox to George Washington, December 17, 1775, in PGW, II, 564.

314 “We shall cut”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 17, 1775, NYHS.

315 “cruel thaw”: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 655.

316 “Our cavalcade”:John Becker, The Sexagenary; or, Reminiscences of the American Revolution (Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1866), 30.

317 “The thaw has been so grave”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, January 5, 1776, NYHS.

318 “This morning I had the satisfaction”: Philip Schuyler to George Washington, January 5–7, 1776, in PGW, III, 34.

319 “owing to the assistance”: Henry Knox Diary, January 8, 1776, MHS.

320 “from which we might almost”: Ibid., January 10, 1776.

321 “It appeared to me”: Ibid.

322 “We were the great gainers”: John Becker, The Sexagenary; or Reminiscences of the American Revolution (Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1866), 34.

323 Henry Knox to George Washington, December 17, 1775, in PGW, II, 564.

324 “My business increases”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, January 23, 1776, in PGW, III, 172–173.

325 “obliged to use art”: Ibid., February 10, 1776, 287.

326 “Great activity”: James Thacher, M.D., January 22, 1776, Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 45–46.

327 two mounted British officers:Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 648.

328 “stroke well aimed”: George Washington, Council of War, February 16, 1776, in PGW, III, 321.

329 “Perhaps a greater question”: Council of War, February 16, 1776, in PGW, III, 323, n. 5.

330 “He is still as hard as ever”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, I (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926), 358.

331 “as yellow as saffron”: Nathanael Greene to Jacob Greene, February 8, 1776, in PNG, I, 193.

332 “horrible if it succeeded”: Ibid., February 15, 1776, 194.

333 “Behold!”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, February 26–March 9, 1776, in PGW, III, 370.

334 “now at an end”: Ibid.

335 “impenetrable as a rock”: George Washington to John Washington, March 31, 1776, in PGW, III, 567.

336 fortifications: Allen French, First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 656–657.

337 “screwed hay”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, February 26–March 9, 1776, in PGW, III, 371.

338 “a very high opinion”: George Washington to Artemus Ward, March 3, 1776, in PGW, III, 409.

339 “It is generally thought”: Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Officers in Washington’s Army (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 193–194.

340 “The preparations increase”: Abigail Adams to John Adams, February 21, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, I (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 350.

341 “I have been in a continual state”: Ibid., March 2, 1776, 352–353.

342 “Proceed, great chief”: PGW, II, 243.

343 “I thank you most sincerely”: George Washington to Phyllis Wheatley, February 28, 1776, in PGW, III, 387.

344 “bring on a rumpus”: George Washington to Burwell Bassett, February 28, 1776, in PGW, III, 386.

345 “Junius”: Lachlan Campbell, “British Journal from Aboard Ship in Boston Commencing January 1776 and Then Moving to New York,” NYHS.

346 “As the season is now fast approaching”: George Washington, General Orders, February 27, 1776, in PGW, III, 379.

347 “Remember barrels”: George Washington to Artemas Ward, March 2, 1776, in PGW, III, 401.

348 “The house shakes”:Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 2, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 353.

349 “The inhabitants were in a horrid situation”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 182.

350 “Our shells raked the houses”: Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Correspondence and Journals of Samuel Blachley Webb, 1772–1775, I (Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham Press, 1893), 134.

351 “covering party”: William Gordon to Samuel Wilcon, April 6, 1776, Proceedings of the MHS, LX (October 1926–June 1927), 362.

352 “The whole procession”: James Thacher, M. D., March 4, 1776, in Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 46.

353 “vast number of large bundles”: Ibid., March 5, 1776, 46–47.

354 “A finer [night] for working”: William Gordon to Samuel Wilcon, April 6, 1776, Proceedings of the MHS, LX (October 1926–June 1927), 363.

355 Recounting the night’s events: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 659.

356 “Perhaps there never was”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 49.

357 “My God, these fellows”: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 660.

358 “a most astonishing night’s work”: Archibald Robertson, March 4, 1776, in Archibald Robertson: His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762–1780 (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 74.

359 number at 14,000: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 660.

360 “This is, I believe”: London Chronicle, May 15, 1776.

361 “utmost consternation”: George Washington to Charles Lee, March 14, 1776, in PGW, III, 467.

362 “the most serious step”: Archibald Robertson, March 5, 1776, in Archibald Robertson (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 74.

363 “We saw distinctly”: Theodore Sizer, ed., The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 23.

364 “Each man knows his place”: James Thacher, M.D., March 5, 1776, in Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 47.

365 “ ‘remember it is the fifth of March’ ”: William Gordon to Samuel Wilcon, April 6, 1776, Proceedings of the MHS, LX (October 1926–June 1927), 363.

366 “never saw spirits higher”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, February 26–March 9, 1776, in PGW, III, 374.

367 “pretty fresh”: William Gordon to Samuel Wilcon, April 6, 1776, Proceedings of the MHS, LX (October 1926–June 1927), 364.

368 “that ever I was exposed to”: Isaac Bangs, April 1, 1776, in Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 12.

369 “kind Heaven”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 50.

370 “It is now eight o’clock”: Archibald Robertson, March 5, 1776, in Archibald Robertson (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 74.

371 “more than to make a parade”: Isaac Bangs, April 1, 1776, Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 12.

372 “Indeed, we had often talked”: James Grant to General Harvey, March 26, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

373 “I determined upon an immediate”: K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, Colonial Office Series, XII (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1976), 82.

374 “contrary”: Ibid.

375 “Never [were] troops”: London Chronicle, May 15, 1776.

376 “Nothing but hurry and confusion”: Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762, 1764–1779 (Boston: W. B. Clarke Co., 1903), 301.

377 “This day”: Josef and Dorothy Berger, eds., Diary of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 112.

378 “I told General Howe”: James Grant to General Harvey, March 26, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

379 “The necessary care”: Thomas G. Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 302.

380 “no intention of destroying”: Ibid., 303.

381 “Such a firing”: Isaac Bangs, April 1, 1776, in Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 13.

382 “cathartic”: John Rhodehamel, ed., The American Revolution (New York: Library of America, 2001), 122.

383 “great movements and confusion”: George Washington to John Hancock, March 7–9, 1776, in PGW, III, 424.

384 “It is not easy to paint”: James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (Boston: W. B. Clarke Co., 1910), 348.

385 “goods left in my house”: Loyalist Claims, Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London, Eng.

386 “the horrid crime of rebellion”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 350.

387 “Upon the whole”: James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1910), 311.

388 “I found I could not stay”: Catherine S. Crary, The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 125.

389 “first and chief objective”: Memoir of William MacAlpine, Loyalist Claims, Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London, Eng.

390 Margaret Draper: Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, I (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennicat Press, 1966), 387.

391 “discarded” mistress:Alfred E. Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts (London: St. Catherine Press, 1930), xvii.

392 “men, women, and children”: Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 665.

393 “I am informed”: Thomas G. Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 306.

394 “a conceited New York Tory”: Ibid., 307.

395 “There never was such destruction”: Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762, 1764–1779 (Boston: W. B. Clarke Co., 1903), 302.

396 “Soldiers and sailors”: Joseph Berger and Dorothy Berger, eds., Diary of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 112.

397 “Fine weather”: Journal of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kemble, 1783–1789 (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 73.

398 “The finest day”: Archibald Robertson, March 17, 1776, in Archibald Robertson: Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762–1780 (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 80.

399 “In the course of the forenoon” James Thacher, M.D., March 8–21, 1776, in Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 49.

400 “Surely it is the Lord’s doings”: Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 16, 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 360.

401 “thorough New England man”: William Cooper to John Adams, April 22, 1776, in Naval Documents of the American Revolution, IV, William Bell Clark, ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1969), 1192.

402 “suffered greatly”: George Washington to John Hancock, March 19, 1776, in PGW, III, 490.

403 “Though I believe”: John Sullivan to John Adams, March 15–19, 1776, in Papers of John Adams, IV, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 55.

404 “lurking”: James Thacher, M.D., March 22, 1776, Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, July 1775 to February 17, 1777 (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1823), 50.

405 “amazingly strong”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, March 19, 1776, in PGW, III, 494.

406 “We do not know where”: London Chronicle, May 4–6, 1776.

407 “You know the proverbial expression”: Ibid.

408 “Gentlemen, not one of you”: Clifford K. Shipton, ed., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates: 1756–1760, XIV (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1968), 153–154.

409 “The joy of our friends”: New Haven Journal, March 27, 1776.

410 “were completely disgraced”: Constitutional Gazette, March 30, 1776.

411 “To the wisdom”: Philadelphia Evening Post, March 30, 1776.

412 “Those pages in the annals”: John Hancock to George Washington, April 2, 1776, in PGW, IV, 16.

413 “What an occurrence”: Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of the Delegates to Congress, III (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–1979), 440.

414 “Let this transaction be dressed”: Thomas G. Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 323.

415 “with so little effusion”: Address from the Boston Selectmen, March 1776, in PGW, III, 571.

416 “hear from different quarters”: George Washington to John Washington, March 31, 1776, in PGW, III, 569.

417 “We have maintained”: Ibid., 566.

418 “I believe I may”: Ibid., 569.

419 “utmost wish”: Ibid., 567.

420 “lament or repine at any act”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, February 26–March 9, 1776, in PGW, III, 373.

421 “Unhappy wretches!”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, April 1, 1776, in PGW, IV, 12.

422 “By all accounts”: Ibid., 11.

423 “I am hurried”: Ibid., 9.

424 “What may be their views”: John Hancock to George Washington, March 25, 1776, in PGW, III, 532.

425 “My countrymen, I know”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, April 1, 1776, PGW, IV, 11.

426 “The sun never shined”: Thomas Paine, “Rights of Man” and “Common Sense” (New York: Knopf, 1994), 265.

427 “for I expect that I shall march”: John Lapham to his parents, March 17, 1776, published in the Boston Transcript, March 17, 1928, Allen French Papers, MHS.

4. The Lines Are Drawn

428 “with great expedition”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 53.

429 “hasten his march”: George Washington to John Hancock, April 1, 1776, in PGW, IV, 7.

430 “as speedily as possible”: George Washington’s Orders and Instructions to Henry Knox, April 3, 1776, in PGW, IV, 23–24.

431 “extreme hurry”: See, for example, George Washington to Joseph Reed, April 23, 1776, in PGW, IV, 115.

432 “at great speed”: John Greenwood, Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 1775–1783, Isaac J. Greenwood, ed. (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 25.

433 “wet weather”: Solomon Nash Diary, March 31–April 7, 1776, NYHS.

434 “I am willing to serve”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, March 20, 1776, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Officers in Washington’s Army (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 195.

435 “I am a good deal tired”: Ibid., April 10, 1776, 198.

436 “troble”: Ibid., April 4, 1776, 197.

437 “I never spent”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 16.

438 There was scarcely a militia man: John Adlum, Memoirs of the Life of John Adlum in the Revolutionary War, Howard H. Peckham, ed. (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1968), 12.

439 “What to do with the city?”: Charles Lee to George Washington, February 19, 1776, in PGW, III, 340.

440 “vast importance”: John Adams to George Washington, January 6, 1776, in PGW, III, 37.

441 “to exert myself to the utmost”: George Washington to John Hancock, April 1, 1776, in PGW, IV, 7.

442 “internal foes”: George Washington to Philip Schuyler, January 27, 1776, in PGW, III, 203.

443 “We are involved”: “Sermon of Rev. John Rodgers, Jan. 14, 1776,” New York Times, March 16, 2003.

444 “We have nothing”: George Washington to John Adams, April 15, 1776, in PGW, IV, 67.

445 “When they were ordered”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, II (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), 184.

446 “The appearance of things”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 147.

447 “unwarlike”: Ibid., 156.

448 “not entirely come up”: Ibid., 140.

449 “But even in this regiment”: Ibid., 149.

450 “It will require”: Alan Valentine, Lord Stirling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 170.

451 population of perhaps 20,000: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part 1, 36.

452 “The inhabitants”: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island 1498–1909, I (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 862.

453 “principle streets”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, January 5, 1776, NYHS.

454 “The people”: Ibid.

455 “This city York”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, April 24, 1776, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 199.

456 “excessive dear”: Ibid., May 9, 1776, 201.

457 “They have all the simplicity”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 132.

458 “their civility”: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, I (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 926–927.

459 “But alas, swearing abounds”: Philip Vickers Fithian, July 24, 1776, in Philip Vickers Fithian: Journal, 1775–1776, Written on the Virginia-Pennsylvania Frontier and in the Army Around New York, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 194.

460 “The design was in imitation”: Isaac Bangs, April 19, 1776, in Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 25.

461 twenty or more churches: Ibid., April 21, April 28, and June 8, 1776, 28, 30, 31, 41.

462 “pomp”: Ibid., April 28, 1776, 31.

463 Quaker meeting: Ibid., June 30, 1776, 54.

464 Holy Ground: Ibid., April 25, 1776, 29.

465 five hundred prostitutes: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, I (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 862.

466 “When I visited them”: Isaac Bangs, April 19, 1776, in Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 29.

467 “castrated in a barbarous manner”: Ibid., 30.

468 “an old whore”: Ibid., 31.

469 “riotous behavior”: George Washington, General Orders, April 27, 1776, in PGW, IV, 140.

470 “disguised with liquor”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 147.

471 “these bitchfoxly”: Loammi Baldwin to May Baldwin, June 12, 1776, Baldwin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 420–421.

472 “growing sickly”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 56.

473 “advantageous”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 57.

474 ferryboats to and from Brooklyn: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, I (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 846.

475 “For should the enemy”: Charles Lee to George Washington, February 19, 1776, in PGW, III, 339–340.

476 “veterans at least”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 78.

477 “constant duty”: Nathanael Greene, General Orders, May 5, 1776, in PNG, 1, 212.

478 “Old Snarl”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 79.

479 “We have done”: George Washington to Charles Lee, May 9, 1776, in PGW, IV, 245.

480 “every street”: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, I (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 923.

481 diary of the Massachusetts soldier: Solomon Nash Diary, NYHS.

482 “inspire those engaged”: Nathanael Greene to John Adams, May 24, 1776, in PNG, I, 219.

483 “the very soul”: Ibid., June 2, 1776, 224.

484 “Suppose this army”: Ibid., 226.

485 “The future happiness”: Henry Knox to John Adams, May 16, 1776, in Papers of John Adams, IV, Robert J. Taylor, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 190.

486 “Gen Green[e] and Lady”: Nathanael and Catharine Greene to Henry and Lucy Knox, June 1776, in PNG, I, 245.

487 “not to suffer”: George Washington, General Orders, May 20, 1776, in PGW, IV, 343.

488 “lay upon”: Ibid., May 7, 1776, 224.

489 with the “utmost expedition”: George Washington to Israel Putnam, May 21, 1776, in PGW, IV, 355.

490 “Through Broadway”: Isaac Bangs, June 6, 1776, in Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 40.

491 “It is so entirely”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, June 21, 1776, NYHS.

492 Loyalist plot: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 92, n. 2.

493 “We had some grand”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 146.

494 “very unhappy”: Ewald Shewkirk Diary, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 108.

495 “I wish twenty more”: Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause: (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 210.

496 “I declare”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 148.

497 “You can scarcely conceive”: Henry Knox to William Knox, July 11, 1776, NYHS.

498 “My God, may I never”: Ibid.

499 “The great being”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 11, 1776, NYHS.

500 “10,000 troops”: Nathanael Greene to George Washington, July 5, 1776, in PNG, I, 248.

501 “hourly”: Chauncey Ford Worthington, ed., Correspondence and Journals of Samuel Blachley Webb, 1772–1775, I (Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham Press, 1893), 152.

502 “in commotion”: Ewald Shewkirk Diary, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 109.

503 “I am of opinion”: Moses Little to his son, July 6, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 42.

504 “The whole choir”: Isaac Bangs, July 6, 1776, in Journal of Lieutenant Isaac Bangs, April 1–July 29, 1776, Edward Bangs, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1890), 56.

505 “That our affairs”: John Hancock to George Washington, July 6, 1776, in PGW, V, 219.

506 “The eyes of all America”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 8, 1776, NYHS.

507 “We are in the very midst”: Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, IX (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 391.

508 “skiff made of paper”: John Dickinson, July 1, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, Paul H. Smith, ed., IV (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979), 352.

509 “Thus the Congress”: Frank Bowditch Dexter, ed., Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, II (New York: Scribner, 1901), 21.

510 “fresh incentive”: George Washington, General Orders, July 9, 1776, in PGW, V, 246.

511 “The general hopes”: Ibid.

512 The formal readings: New York Gazette, July 22, 1776.

513 “to assimilate with the brains”: Frank Moore, Diary of the American Revolution, I (New York: Scribner, 1860), 271.

514 “a complete view”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 18.

515 “shot away our starb[oa]rd”: William James Morgan, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, V (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1970), 1038.

516 “Such unsoldierly conduct”: George Washington, General Orders, July 13, 1776, in PGW, V, 290.

517 “impetuous”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 13, 1776, NYHS.

518 “[We] are in very comfortable”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 341; and William Carter, A Genuine Detail of the Several Engagements, Positions and Movements of Royal and American Armies During the Years 1775 and 1776 (London: Printed for the Author, 1784), 32.

519 “We have now a very good supply”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 345.

520 “It excited one’s sympathy”: Ambrose Serle, July 23, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 40.

521 “no believing”: Charles Stuart to Lord Bute, July 9, 1776, in A Prime Minister and His Son: From the Correspondence of the Third Earl of Bute and of Lieutenant General the Honorable Sir Charles Stuart, The Honorable Mrs. E. Stuart Wortley, ed. (London: John Murray, 1925), 83.

522 “The inhabitants”: James Grant to Edward Harvey, July 9, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

523 “I met with Governor Tryon”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 139, n. 1.

524 “the villainy and the madness”: Ambrose Serle, July 12, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 30.

525 “A more impudent”: Ibid., July 13, 1776, 31.

526 “The troops hold them”: Ambrose Serle, July 13, 1776, in The American Journalof Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 30.

527 “The fair nymphs”: Francis, Lord Rawdon, to Francis, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, August 5, 1776, in Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, III (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930–1947), 179–180.

528 “we shall soon”: Ibid., January 13, 1776, 167.

529 “Our only fear”: Margaret Wheeler Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution: 1774–1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 344–45.

530 “flushed with the idea”: Troyer Steele Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 121.

531 “Black Dick”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 156.

532 “turned upon military affairs”: Ambrose Serle, July 13, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 31.

533 letter addressed to “George Washington”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 15, 1776, and July 22, 1776, MHS; Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 97–98.

534 “So high is the vanity”: Ambrose Serle, July 14, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 33.

535 “very handsomely dressed”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 22, 1776, NYHS.

536 “the greatest politeness”: Joseph Reed to Charles Pettit, July 15, 1776, in Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, 1 (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 207.

537 “awe-struck”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 22, 1776, NYHS.

538 one of the great actors of the age: David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 593.

539 “interview”: K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, Colonial Office Series, XII (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1976), 179.

540 “No air”: Ambrose Serle, July 28, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 49.

541 “I generally rise”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, August 2, 1776, NYHS.

542 “a very fine appearance”: Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778 (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1940), 52.

543 “We have had so many arrivals”: Ibid., 54.

544 “It is a mere point”: Joseph Reed to Charles Pettit, August 4, 1776, NYHS.

545 “My opinion is”: Ibid.

546 “I shrink and tremble”: Henry Knox to William Knox, August 5, 1776, NYHS.

547 harbor under full canvas: Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 62.

548 “When I look down”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, August 9, 1776, NYHS.

549 “coming in almost every day”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, July 17, 1776, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 209.

550 “the Delaware Blues”: Charles M. Lefferts, Uniforms of the American, British, French, and German Armies of the War of the American Revolution (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1926), 26.

551 “Some have got ten”: Sir George Otto Trevelyan, The American Revolution, II (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), 190–191.

552 “a good many of our people”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, August 11, 1776, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds.,This Glorious Cause (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 212.

553 “Sickness prevails”: John Waldo to his parents, August 3, 1776, in The New York Diary of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch of the 17th (Connecticut) Regiment from August 2, 1776, to December 15, 1777, W. H. Sabine, ed. (New York: Colburn & Tegg, 1954), 12.

554 “The vile water”: Philip Vickers Fithian, July 19, 1776, in Philip Vickers Fithian: Journal, 1775–76, Written on the Virginia-Pennsylvania Frontier and in the Army Around New York, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 190.

555 “One died this morning”: Ibid., July 22, 1776, 193.

556 “The general also forbids”: Nathanael Greene, General Orders, July 28, 1776, in PNG, I, 268.

557 “They desert in large bodies”: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, I (New York, Arno Press, 1967), 1002.

558 “In almost every barn”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 61.

559 “Under every disadvantage”: George Washington to John Hancock, August 8–9, 1776, in PGW, V, 627.

560 “season for action”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 8, 1776, in PGW, VI, 252.

561 “strangers to the ground”: Nathanael Greene to George Washington, August 15, 1776, in PGW, VI, 29.

562 “exceeding good spirits”: Ibid., 30.

563 the Phoenix and the Rose: William James Morgan, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, VI (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1972), 224–225.

564 “From the advantage”: William Tudor to John Adams, August 18, 1776, in Papers of John Adams, IV (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 473.

565 “poor General Greene”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, August 26, 1776, NYHS.

566 “spirited and zealously attached”: George Washington to John Hancock, June 17, 1776, in PGW, V, 21.

567 “nothing special”: George Washington to John Hancock, August 21, 1776, in PGW, VI, 97.

568 “this night at farthest”: William Livingston to George Washington, August 21, 1776, in PGW, VI, 99.

569 “We have made no discovery”: George Washington to William Livingston, August 21, 1776, in PGW, VI, 100.

5. Field of Battle

570 “a storm like a hurricane”: Ewald Shewkirk Diary, August 21, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 113.

571 “a most terrible storm”: Philip Vickers Fithian, August 22, 1776, in Philip Vickers Fithian: Journal, 1775–1776, Written on the Virginia-Pennsylvania Frontier and in the Army Around New York, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 214.

572 “the most vehement”: Ambrose Serle, August 21, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 71.

573 “an uncommon”: Ewald Shewkirk Diary, August 21, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 113.

574 “it was surcharged”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 349.

575 “But there seems hidden”: Ibid., 351.

576 as if nothing unusual: Ibid., 350.

577 precisely eight o’clock: William James Morgan, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, VI (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1972), 267.

578 “ships and vessels”: Ambrose Serle, August 22, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1940), 71–73.

579 “regaled themselves”: Ibid.

580 “Our regiment”: Bruce Burgoyne, An Anonymous Hessian Diary, Probably the Diary of Lieutenant Johann Heinrich von Bardeleben of the Hesse-Cassel von Donop Regiment (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1998), 54–55.

581 “While we are waiting”: Jabez Fitch, August 22, 1776, in The New York Diary of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, W. H. W. Sabine, ed. (New York: Colburn & Tegg, 1954), 25.

582 “I have thought fit”: Moses Little to his son, August 22, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 43.

583 “The hour is fast approaching”: George Washington, General Orders, August 23, 1776, in PGW, VI, 109–110.

584 “Remember how your courage”: Ibid.

585 “I have never been afraid”: William Heath to George Washington, August 23, 1776, in PGW, VI, 114.

586 “The greatest vigilance”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, August 23, 1776, NYHS.

587 “Scarcely were religious”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 351.

588 “Carts and horses”: Philip Vickers Fithian, August 25, 1776, in Philip Vickers Fithian: Journal, 1775–1776. Written on the Virginia-Pennsylvania Frontier and in the Army Around New York, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 218.

589 “The distinction between”: George Washington to Israel Putnam, August 25, 1776, in PGW, VI, 126–127.

590 “loose, disorderly”: Ibid.

591 “We expect the fleet”: William Douglas to his wife, August 23, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society), Part II, 68.

592 “General Washington, with a number”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 58.

593 “very important”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, August 24, 1776, NYHS.

594 “at all hazards”: George Washington to Israel Putnam, August 25, 1776, in PGW, VI, 128.

595 “grand push”: George Washington to John Hancock, August 26, 1776, in PGW, VI, 129.

596 “present appearance”: George Washington to William Heath, August 26, 1776, in PGW, VI, 131.

597 “load of business”: George Washington to Lund Washington, August 26, 1776, in PGW, VI, 137.

598 “I wish most ardently”: George Washington to Lund Washington, August 26, 1776, in PGW, VI, 136.

599 “could compensate [for] the loss”: Ibid., 137.

600 failed most grievously: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 20.

601 “speak too freely”: Sir Henry Clinton to William Phillips, December 12, 1775, in The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), xviii n.

602 “Look at the map”: Henry Clinton, September 24, 1776, Henry Clinton Papers, Clements Library.

603 “The position which the rebels”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 41.

604 attack would be made: Ibid.

605 British troops: See Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of the Horse and Musket (New York: Norton, 2001); J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1981); and Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America (Austin: University of Texas, 1981).

606 “Among the regular troops”: London Chronicle, October 12–15, 1776.

607 “We dragged on”: Eric Robson, ed., Letters from America, 1773–1780 (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1951), 33.

608 “an impudent rebel”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 178.

609 “The commander-in-chief”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 42.

610 “I found by fair daylight”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 235.

611 “A little before day”: Personal Recollections of Captain Enoch Anderson: An Officer of the Delaware Regiments in the Revolutionary War, XVI (Wilmington, Del.: The Historical Society of Delaware, 1896), 21.

612 “a smart engagement”: Moses Little to his son, September 1, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society), Part II, 43.

613 “battle in true English taste”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 165.

614 “Our men stood it amazingly well”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 168.

615 “I saw one man”: Personal Recollections of Captain Enoch Anderson, XVI (Wilmington, Del.: Historical Society of Delaware, 1896), 21.

616 “We had a skirmishing”: James Grant to General Harvey, September 2, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

617 “I called to my men”: Letter of Captain William Dancey to his mother, Mrs. Dancey. Dancey, August 30, 1776, Delaware Historical Society.

618 “Their fear of the Hessian troops”: Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen: Kissel in the American Revolution (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 68.

619 “The last I heard”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 167.

620 “They all wished”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 22.

621 “I saw a lieutenant”: Ibid., 23.

622 “quit yourselves”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 166.

623 “For the batteries began”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 365.

624 “determined countenance”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 168.

625 “make the best”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 396.

626 “like a wolf”: Charles G. Stevenson and Irene Wilson, The Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Bicentennial Commission, 1975), 14.

627 “Good God, what brave fellows”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 168.

628 “It is impossible”: John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 50.

629 Lord Stirling, finding himself: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 396–397.

630 “should be pushed”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 41n.

631 “I had at the moment”: Ibid., 43.

632 “O Doleful!”: Philip Vickers Fithian, August 27, 1776, in Philip Vickers Fithian Journal, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 218.

633 “You will be glad”: James Grant to Edward Harvey, September 2, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

634 “beyond our expectations”: Charles Knowles Bolton, ed., Letters of Hugh Earl Percy from Boston and New York 1774–1776 (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 68.

635 behaved with greater spirit: Eric Robson, ed., Letters from America, 1773–1780 (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1951), 33.

636 “They could not run”: Ambrose Serle, August 27, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 79.

637 “The behavior”: K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, Colonial Office Series, XII (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1976), 218.

638 “the heap”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 34.

639 “the most scurrilous”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 360.

640 “a great number”: Jabez Fitch, August 27, 1776, in The New York Diary of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, W. H. W. Sabine, ed. (New York: Colburn & Tegg, 1954), 31.

641 “I sat with him”: Ibid., August 28, 1776, 34.

642 “The Hessians”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 186, 206.

643 “was so good”: Jabez Fitch, August 28, 1776, in The New York Diary of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, W. H. W. Sabine, ed. (New York: Colburn & Tegg, 1954), 34.

644 “They could not have been taken”: Bruce E. Burgoyne, ed., The Hesse-Cassel Mirbach Regiment in the American Revolution (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1998), 54.

645 “And the distressed”: Philip Vickers Fithian, August 27, 1776, in Philip Vickers Fithian Journal, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 219.

646 “The faces”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 164.

647 “through the goodness”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, August 28, 1776, in Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds., The Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Officers in Washington’s Army (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 215.

648 “Afternoon, at three”: Philip Vickers Fithian, August 28, 1776, Philip Vickers Fithian Journal, Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934), 220.

649 boom of cannon: Ewald Shewkirk Diary, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 114.

650 “hard enough to break”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 22.

651 “distressed”: George Washington to John Hancock, August 29, 1776, in PGW, VI, 156.

652 “Nor can I ascertain”: George Washington to John Hancock, August 29, 1776, in PGW, VI, 155.

653 “get up”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 396.

654 “we have many battalions”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 218.

655 “ceremony”: Ibid., 219, n. 1.

656 “It was submitted”: Council of War, August 29, 1776, in PGW, VI, 153.

657 “As it was suddenly proposed”: John Morin Scott to John Jay, September 6, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 37.

658 “it became a serious consideration”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 398.

659 “under arms with packs”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, August 31, 1776, in This Glorious Cause, Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 216.

660 “Several noncupative wills”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 166.

661 “The thing was conducted”: Tench Tilghman to his father, September 3, 1776, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 85.

662 “flashed upon my mind”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 166–167.

663 “To move so large a body”: “Major Tallmadge’s Account of the Battles of Long Island and White Plains,” in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 78.

664 “And tedious was the operation”: Thomas W. Field, Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1869), 519.

665 “We were strictly”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 26.

666 “As one regiment”: “Major Tallmadge’s Account of the Battles of Long Island and White Plains,” in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 78.

667 “If the explosion”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 167.

668 “is arrayed”: Ibid.

669 Major Alexander Scammell: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats: (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 170–171.

670 “without delay”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 167.

671 “Good God!”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 171.

672 “trying business”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 168.

673 “had the good fortune”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 171.

674 “could scarcely discern”: “Major Tallmadge’s Account of the Battles of Long Island and White Plains,” in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 78.

675 “It may be supposed”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 168.

676 saw Washington on the ferry: “Major Tallmadge’s Account of the Battles of Long Island and White Plains,” in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 79.

677 “And in less than an hour”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, John Stockton Littell, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846), 168.

678 “In the morning”: “Journals of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kemble, 1773–1789,” Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1883), 86.

679 “We cannot yet account”: James Grant to Edward Harvey, September 2, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

680 “They feel severely”: Lord Percy to his father, September 1, 1776, in Charles Knowles Bolton, ed., Letters of Hugh Earl Percy from Boston and New York, 1774–1776 (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 69.

681 “This business”: Ibid., 71.

682 “This and the parts adjacent”: Ambrose Serle, September 1, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 86.

683 “behaved very ill”: Ibid., August 30, 1776, 84.

684 “very ably effected”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 44.

685 “particularly glorious”: Charles Stedman, The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, I (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 197.

686 “most completely”: Ibid., 198.

687 “Never pursues”: “Journals of Captain John Montresor,” Collections of the New York Historical Society (1881), 310.

688 “flying in such a panic”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 43.

689 “judged it prudent”: Ibid., 44.

690 “It was apparent”: Troyer Steele Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 134.

691 “fully controverted”: London Morning Chronicle, October 14, 1776.

692 “enliven our countenances”: Edward Gibbon to Dorothea Gibbon, October 24, 1776, in The Letters of Edward Gibbon, II (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 117.

693 “great satisfaction”: London Morning Chronicle, October 15, 1776.

694 “unfortunate beginning”: Josiah Bartlett to Nathaniel Folsom, September 2, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, V, Paul H. Smith, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979), 91.

695 “disaster”: John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 4, 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, II, L. H. Butterfield, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 118.

696 “All in solicitude”: The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles: President of Yale College, II Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed. (New York: Scribner, 1901), 51.

697 “a masterpiece”: New England Chronicle, September 19, 1776.

698 “The manner”: Virginia Gazette, September 14, 1776.

699 “Providence favored us”: New England Chronicle, September 19, 1776.

700 “We have thought”: Massachusetts Spy, October 23, 1776.

701 “It was a surprising change”: Ewald Shewkirk Diary, in Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society), Part II, 115.

702 “A hard day this”: Personal Recollections of Captain Enoch Anderson (Wilmington, Del.: Historical Society of Delaware, 1896), 22.

703 “entirely unfit”: George Washington to John Hancock, August 31, 1776, in PGW, VI, 177.

704 “much hurried”: Ibid., 178.

6. Fortune Frowns

705 “I have only time”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 2, 1776, NYHS.

706 “a mere point”: Joseph Reed to Charles Pettit, August 4, 1776, in Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I, William B. Reed, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 212.

707 “dispensations of Providence”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 2, 1776, NYHS.

708 “But only consider a minute”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, September 5, 1776, This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Officers in Washington’s Army, Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 217.

709 “I had my sleeve button shot”: Ibid., 219.

710 “I fear General Washington”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 227–228.

711 “who when fortune frowns”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, September 5, 1776, NYHS.

712 “Now is the time”: George Washington, General Orders, September 2, 1776, in PGW, VI, 199.

713 “The militia”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 2, 1776, in PGW, VI, 199.

714 “stand as winter quarters”: Ibid., 200.

715 “desirous of an accommodation”: Josiah Bartlett to William Whipple, September 3, 1776, in Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, V (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979), 94.

716 “no damage”: John Hancock to George Washington, September 3, 1776, in PGW, VI, 207.

717 “no doubt”: Ibid.

718 “leave no stone”: George Washington to William Heath, September 5, 1776, in PGW, VI, 224.

719 “We think”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 6, 1776, in William B. Reed, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), I, 230–231.

720 “When I look round”: Ibid.

721 “I think we have”: Nathanael Greene to George Washington, September 5, 1776, in PGW, VI, 222.

722 “ ’Tis our business”: Ibid., 223

723 “I give it as my opinion”: Ibid.

724 “put nothing to the hazard”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 8, 1776, in PGW, VI, 251.

725 “Had I been left”: George Washington to Lund Washington, October 6, 1776, in PGW, VI, 494.

726 “On every side”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 8, 1776, in PGW, VI, 248–251.

727 “We should on all occasions”: Ibid.

728 “On the other hand”: Ibid.

729 “a pleasing circumstance”: Ambrose Serle, September 6, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 94.

730 “so critical and dangerous”: Officers to George Washington, September 11, 1776, in PGW, VI, 279.

731 “It is desirable”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 453.

732 “grand military exertion”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 14, 1776, in Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, William B. Reed, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), I, 235.

733 “a moment longer”: Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, V, 97, n. 1.

734 “We are now taking”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 14, 1776, in PGW, VI, 308–309.

735 “lined with men”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 45.

736 “an entire dependence”: Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 45.

737 “We will alter your tune”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 30.

738 “I think if we stand”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 70–71.

739 “as distinctly as though”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin), 30.

740 “We lay very quiet”: Ibid., 31.

741 “When they came”: Ibid., 30.

742 “by damning themselves”: Francis, Lord Rawdon, to Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, September 23, 1776, in Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, III (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930–1947), 183.

743 “So terrible”: Ambrose Serle, September 15, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 104.

744 “frog’s leap”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 31.

745 “but they mostly overshot”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part II, 71–72.

746 “happy to escape”: Francis, Lord Rawdon, to Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, September 23, 1776, Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, III (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930–1947), 184.

747 “I saw a Hessian”: Journal of Bartholomew James, September 15, 1776, in Naval Documents of the American Revolution, William James Morgan, ed., VI (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1972), 841.

748 “flying in every direction”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 16, 1776, in PGW, VI, 313.

749 “Take the walls!”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 182.

750 “Are these the men”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 70.

751 “The demons of fear”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 32.

752 “Nothing could equal”: Ambrose Serle, September 15, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 104.

753 “Thus this town”: Ibid., 105.

754 “Having myself been a volunteer”: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 89.

755 “disgraceful and dastardly”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 6, 1776, in PGW, VI, 314.

756 “Fellow’s and Parson’s whole brigade”: Nathanael Greene to Nicholas Cooke, September 17, 1776, in PNG, I, 300.

757 “The wounds received”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 70.

758 “The men were blamed”: Benjamin Trumbull, “Journal of the Campaign at New York, 1776–1777,” Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, VII (1899), 195.

759 “We ought to have men”: Henry Knox to William Knox, September 23, 1776, NYHS.

760 Mrs. Robert Murray: Henry P. Johnston, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn (Brooklyn: Long Island Historical Society, 1878), Part I, 239.

761 “Mrs. Murray treated them:” Ibid.

762 Washington sent Reed cantering: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 17, 1776, NYHS.

763 “I have sent out”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 16, 1776, in PGW, VI, 314.

764 “I went down to our most advanced”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 17, 1776, NYHS.

765 “I never felt such a sensation”: Ibid.

766 “to recover that military ardor”: George Washington to Patrick Henry, October 5, 1776, in PGW, VI, 479.

767 Washington ordered a counterattack: George Washington to John Hancock, September 18, 1776, in PGW, VI, 331.

768 “rushed down the hill”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, September 30, 1776, in This Glorious Cause, Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 222.

769 Knowlton’s encircling move: George Washington to John Hancock, September 18, 1776, in PGW, VI, 331.

770 “[We] drove the dogs”: Henry Phelps Johnston, The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776 (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 155.

771 “The pursuit of a flying enemy”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 1776, in Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, William B. Reed, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 238.

772 “They were seen to carry off”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, September 30, 1776, in This Glorious Cause, Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 222.

773 “greatest loss”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 17, 1776, NYHS; George Washington to John Washington, September 22, 1776, in PGW, VI, 374.

774 “a pretty sharp skirmish”: George Washington to Philip Schuyler, September 20, 1776, in PGW, VI, 357.

775 “They find that if they stick”: Henry Knox to William Knox, September 23, 1776, NYHS.

776 “Our people beat the enemy”: Nathanael Greene to William Ellery, October 4, 1776, in PNG, I, 307.

777 “impetuosity”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 46.

778 “as if they were a thousand”: Tench Tilghman, Memoir of Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 143.

779 “If we cannot fight them”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, October 11, 1776, in Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I, William B. Reed, ed. (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 244.

780 “many fair houses”: Ambrose Serle, September 19, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 109.

781 “The shore of the Island”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 66.

782 “The infinite pains”: Ambrose Serle, September 19, 1776, in The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 109.

783 “judge for themselves”: Troyer Steele Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 160.

784 “pyramid of fire”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 60.

785 “The sick, the aged”: Ibid.

786 “thrown into the flames”: Ibid., 59.

787 “There is no doubt”: Ibid., 59–60.

788 “lurking”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 475.

789 “The Yankees [New York Loyalists]”: James Grant to Richard Rigby, September 24, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

790 called it an accident: George Washington to John Hancock, September 22, 1776, in PGW, VI, 369.

791 “Providence, or some good honest fellow”: George Washington to Lund Washington, October 6, 1776, in PGW, VI, 495.

792 “New England man”: New York Gazette, September 30, 1776.

793 “a person named Nathan Hales”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 61.

794 “too frank and open”: Henry Phelps Johnston, Nathan Hale, 1776 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1914), 106.

795 “reflect, and do nothing”: Ibid., 107.

796 “I only regret that I have but one life”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 476.

797 “We hung up a rebel”: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, I (New York: Arno Press, 1967), 1025.

798 “A spirit of desertion”: Joseph Reed to Congress, in William B. Reed, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 240.

799 Reed had seen a soldier running: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, in William B. Reed, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), I, 238.

800 “I should have shot him”: PGW, VI, 367, n. 3.

801 “presenting his firelock”: George Washington, General Orders, September 22, 1776, in PGW, VI, 366.

802 “suffer death without mercy”: George Washington, General Orders, September 23, 1776, in PGW, VI, 375.

803 “To attempt to introduce discipline”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, October 11, 1776, in William B. Reed, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 243.

804 “Unless some speedy, and effectual measures”: George Washington to John Hancock, September 23, 1776, in PGW, VI, 394.

805 “fly hastily and cheerfully”: Ibid.

806 “To place any dependence”: Ibid., 396.

807 “lust after plunder”: Ibid., 399.

808 “atrocious offenses”: Ibid., 398.

809 “Such is my situation”: George Washington to Lund Washington, September 30, 1776, in PGW, VI, 441–442.

810 “That in the parlor”: Ibid., 442.

811 “To our surprise and mortification”: George Washington to John Hancock, October 8–9, 1776, in PGW, VI, 507.

812 “little more to fear”: Nathanael Greene to Nicholas Cooke, October 11, 1776, in PNG, I, 315.

813 “Tweedledum business”: Sir Henry Clinton, July 6, 1777, The American Rebellion, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 49, n. 23.

814 “their former scheme”: George Washington to Nicholas Cooke, October 12–13, 1776, in PGW, VI, 546.

815 “absurd interference”: John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 142.

816 “retained as long as possible”: George Washington, Council of War, October 16, 1776, in PGW, VI, 576.

817 “obstruct effectually”: William James Morgan, ed., Naval Documents of the American Revolution, VI (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Navy, 1972) 1221.

818 “As the movements of the enemy”: George Washington, General Orders, October 17, 1776, in PGW, VI, 582.

819 “one of the others gave it a shove”: Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Penguin, 2001), 46.

820 “Oh! The anxiety of mind”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 487.

821 enemy dead: George Athan Billias, General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners (New York: Holt, 1960), 121.

822 “The sun shone bright”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 88.

823 “Yonder is the ground”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 194.

824 “The air and hills smoked”: Peter Force, American Archives, III (Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1837–1853), 474.

825 Washington ordered more men: PGW, VII, fn. 3, 52–53.

826 “Opinions here are various”: Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, November 6, 1776, in William B. Reed, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1847), 248.

827 “Others, and a great majority”: Ibid.

828 “without attempting something more”: George Washington to John Hancock, November 6, 1776, in PGW, VII, 97.

829 “If we cannot prevent”: George Washington to Nathanael Greene, November 8, 1776, in PGW, VII, 115–116.

830 “His Excellency General Washington”: Nathanael Greene to Henry Knox, November [17], 1776, in PNG, I, 351.

831 “The movements and designs”: George Washington to John Hancock, November 14, 1776, in PGW, VII, 154.

832 “No wind for some days past”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 99.

833 “probably be against Fort Washington”: Ibid.

834 “the first object”: Ibid., 95.

835 William Diamond: Ibid.

836 “dreaming, sleepy-headed”: Ambrose Serle, December 8, 1776, The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 156.

837 “It is easy to see”: Ibid., November 10, 1776, 138–139.

838 “of much service to General Howe”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 97.

839 “from the general appearance”: Ibid., 105.

840 “Sir, if I rightly understand”: PGW, VII, n. 1, 162.

841 “it being late at night”: George Washington to John Hancock, November 16, 1776, in PGW, VII, 163.

842 “what was best to be done”: Nathanael Greene to Henry Knox, November [17], 1776, in PNG, I, 352.

843 “There we all stood”: Ibid.

844 “every obstacle was swept aside”: “The Capture of Fort Washington, New York. Described by Cpt. Andreas Wiederhold,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, XXIII (1899), 96.

845 “At last, however”: Henry P. Johnston, The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897), 230.

846 “surmounted every difficulty”: James Grant to Richard Rigby, November 22, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

847 “Before I was near the fort”: John Adlum, Memoirs of the Life of John Adlum in the Revolutionary War, Howard H. Peckham, ed. (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1968), 69–70.

848 “indifferently clothed”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 111–112.

849 “They had been pretty well pelted”: James Grant to Richard Rigby, November 22, 1776, James Grant Papers, LOC.

850 “The carnage would then have been dreadful”: Frederick Mackenzie, Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 110.

851 “I am wearied almost to death”: George Washington to John Washington, November 6–9, 1776, in PGW, VII, 105.

852 “I feel mad, vexed, sick”: Nathanael Greene to Henry Knox, Nov. [17], 1776, in PNG, I, 352.

853 “I must entreat”: George H. Moore, The Treason of Charles Lee (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970), 42.

854 “Draw off the garrison”: Ibid.

855 “Had I the powers”: Ibid.

856 “why would you be over-persuaded”: Charles Lee to George Washington, November 19, 1776, in PGW, VII, 187.

7. Darkest Hour

857 “dead flat”: George Washington to Charles Lee, November 21, 1776, in PGW, VII, 193.

858 “I saw him…at the head”: Arthur S. Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat: The Calamitous American Defense of New Jersey, 1776 (Metuchen, N.J.: Upland Press, 1998), 82.

859 “A deportment so firm”: Ibid.

860 “broken and disspirited”: George Washington to Charles Lee, in PGW, VII, 193.

861 dictated to Joseph Reed: Ibid., 195.

862 “most earnestly”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, November 30, 1776, in PGW, VII, 238, n. 1.

863 “My neck does not feel”: William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), 5.

864 “critical state of our affairs”: John Hancock to George Washington, November 24, 1776, in PGW, VII, 203.

865 “divided and lethargic”: Thomas Mifflin to George Washington, November 26, 1776, in PGW, VII, 219.

866 “The sufferings we endured”: William M. Dwyer, The Day Is Ours: November 1776–January 1977 (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 41.

867 “I can only say”: Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Correspondence and Journals of Samuel Blachley Webb, 1772–1775, I (Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham Press, 1893), 172.

868 “Common Sense and Col. Snarl”: PNG, I, 330.

869 “passion of patriotism”: David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 59.

870 “These are the times”: Ibid.

871 “safe and secure route”: George Washington to Charles Lee, November 24, 1776, in PGW, VII, 210.

872 “The fact is”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 497.

873 “This, in all probability”: Sir Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782, William B. Willcox, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 55.

874 true eighteenth-century English artistocrat: Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 8.

875 lost sight in one eye: Ibid., 7.

876 “I love that army”: Ibid., 75.

877 “All the army marched”: Archibald Robertson, Archibald Robertson: His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762–1780 (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 114.

878 “The enemy gave us”: George Washington to William Heath, November 29, 1776, in PGW, VII, 227–228.

879 “My former letters”: George Washington to Charles Lee, November 27, 1776, in PGW, VII, 224.

880 “I received your most obliging”: Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, November 24, 1776, in PGW, VII, 237, n. 1.

881 “the enclosed was put into my hands”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, November 30, 1776, in PGW, VII, 237.

882 “I was hurt not because”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, June 14, 1777, The Writings of George Washington, From the Original Manuscript Sources 1745–1799, VIII, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), 60.

883 “very good intelligence”: Pennsylvania Journal, November 27, 1776.

884 “much alarm”: Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, V (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979), 543.

885 “torpor”: Ibid., 553.

886 “Oh how I feel for Washington”: Ibid., 558.

887 “I will not however despair”: George Washington to William Livingston, November 30, 1776, in PGW, VII, 236.

888 “Two brigades left us”: PNG, I, 362.

889 “or your arrival may be too late”: George Washington to Charles Lee, December 1, 1776, in PGW, VII, 249.

890 “The enemy are fast advancing”: George Washington to John Hancock, December 1, 1776, in PGW, VII, 244.

891 “totally inadequate”: Ibid.

892 “It being impossible”: George Washington to John Hancock, December 1, 1776, in PGW, VII, 245.

893 “When we left Brunswick”: PNG, I, 362.

894 “The inhabitants of Princeton”: Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, V (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979), 581.

895 “I have not heard a word”: George Washington to John Hancock, December 3, 1776, in PGW, VII, 256.

896 “reap the benefit”: Peter Force, American Archives, 4th Series, V (Washington, D.C.: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1837–1853), 927–28.

897 “You can come down”: William M. Dwyer, The Day Is Ours: November 1776–January 1777, An Inside View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 77.

898 “to act at his own discretion”: Charles Stedman, The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, I (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 243.

899 “a cloud of dust”: Captain Johann Ewald, Diary of the American War: A Hessian Journal, Joseph P. Tustin, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 18.

900 “We do not want to lose any men”: Ibid.

901 “of ending the war amicably”: Ibid., 25.

902 “It is said by some persons”: I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1929, I (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1040.

903 “Scandalous behavior”: Stephen Kemble, Journals of Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Kemble, 1773–1789, and British Army Orders: General Sir William Howe, 1775–1778; General Sir Henry Clinton, 1778; and General Daniel Jones, 1778 (Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), 98.

904 “[I] shudder for New Jersey”: Ibid.

905 “All the plantations in the vicinity”: Captain Johann Ewald, Diary of the American War, Joseph P. Tustin, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 18.

906 “On this march”: Ibid., 22.

907 “The Hessians are more infamous”: Ambrose Serle, The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776–1778, Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940), 246.

908 “The friend and the foe”: Charles Stedman, History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, I (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 242.

909 “They lead the relentless foreigners”: PNG, I, 368.

910 “The enemy’s ravages”: Nathanael Greene to Nicholas Cooke, January 10, 1777, in PNG, II, 4.

911 “Their footsteps are marked with destruction”: PNG, I, 365.

912 “But give me leave”: Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, V (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983), 95.

913 “The possession of Trenton”: Troyer Steele Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 206.

914 “Our retreat should not be neglected”: PNG, I, 269.

915 “a grand but dreadful”: Lillian Miller, ed., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, V (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 50.

916 “With a handful of men”: Moncure Daniel Conway, Writings of Thomas Paine, I (New York: Putnam, 1894), 178.

917 “a combination of unlucky circumstances”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 8, 1776, NYHS.

918 “He was in an old dirty blanket”: Lillian B. Miller, ed., Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 50.

919 “From several accounts”: George Washington to John Hancock, December 9, 1776, in PGW, VII, 283.

920 “Philadelphia beyond all question”: George Washington to Charles Lee, December 11, 1776, in PGW, VII, 301.

921 “in a very spirited manner”: George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., December 12, 1776, in PGW, VII, 321.

922 “General Lee…is on his march”: Ibid.

923 “Entre nous”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 500.

924 “I ordered my men to fire”: Ibid., 502.

925 “unfortunate”: General James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, I (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1816), 106.

926 “We have captured General Lee”: William M. Dwyer, The Day Is Ours: November 1776–January 1777 (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 150.

927 “This coup de main”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 503.

928 “combination of evils”: PNG, I, 368.

929 “this unhappy accident”: George Washington to James Bowdoin, December 18, 1776, in PGW, VII, 365.

930 “Unhappy man!”: George Washington to Lund Washington, December 10–17, 1776, in PGW, VII, 290.

931 “the weather”: William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), 38.

932 “Sir William, he”: John R. Alden, A History of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969), 303.

933 “The Delaware now divides”: George Washington to James Bowdoin, December 18, 1776, in PGW, VII, 365.

934 “Strain every nerve”: George Washington to Israel Putnam, December 21, 1776, in PGW, VII, 405.

935 “Expense must not be spared”: George Washington to Brigadier Generals James Ewing, Hugh Mercer, Adam Stephen, and Lord Stirling, December 14, 1776, in PGW, VII, 332.

936 “Use every possible means”: George Washington to Lord Stirling, December 14, 1776, in PGW, VII, 339.

937 “General Howe is certainly”: John Cadwalader to George Washington, December 15, 1776, in PGW, VII, 342.

938 “Our only dependence”: George Washington to Lund Washington, December 10–17, 1776, in PGW, VII, 291.

939 “so destitute of shoes”: William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 107.

940 “We have been on the march”: Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, December 20, 1776, in This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Officers in Washington’s Army, Herbert T. Wade and Robert A. Lively, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), 227.

941 “the enemy being near”: Ibid., 228.

942 “Ice for a passage”: George Washington to Robert Morris, December 22, 1776, in PGW, VII, 412.

943 “the full confidence of his Excellency”: Nathanael Greene to Catharine Greene, January 20, 1777, in PNG, II, 7.

944 “His Excellency”: Nathanael Greene to Christopher Greene, January 20, 1777, in PNG, II, 8.

945 “I cannot desert a man”: William Tudor to Delia Jarvis, December 24, 1776, MHS.

946 “Will it not be possible”: Joseph Reed to George Washington, December 22, 1776, in PGW, VII, 415.

947 “lucky blow”: George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull, Sr., December 14, 1776, in PGW, VII, 340.

948 hoped this was true: Robert Morris to George Washington, December 21, 1776, in PGW, VII, 404.

949 “For Heaven’s sake”: George Washington to Joseph Reed, December 23, 1776, in PGW, VII, 423.

950 “profound silence”: George Johnston to Leven Powell, December 29, 1776, in PGW, VII, 437, editorial note.

951 “much depressed”: George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), 124.

952 “affecting terms”: Ibid.

953 “Victory or Death”: Ibid., 125.

954 “I am determined”: George Washington to John Cadwalader, December 25, 1776, in PGW, VII, 439.

955 “I agree with you”: George Washington to Robert Morris, December 25, 1776, in PGW, VII, 439.

956 “extraordinary exertions”: General James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, I (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1816), 128.

957 “almost incredible”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 28, 1776, NYHS.

958 “Over the river”: John Greenwood, The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood, Isaac J. Greenwood, ed. (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 38–39.

959 it was three o’clock: George Washington to John Hancock, December 27, 1776, in PGW, VII, 454.

960 “I well knew we could not”: Ibid.

961 “and after two battalions”: William B. Reed, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, I (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston; 1847), 276.

962 “with the most profound silence”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 28, 1776, NYHS.

963 “I recollect very well”: John Greenwood, The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood, Isaac J. Greenwood, ed. (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 39.

964 “in a deep and solemn voice”: William S. Powell, “A Connecticut Soldier Writing Home: Elisha Bostwick’s Memoirs of the First Years of the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, VI (1949), 102.

965 “Tell the general to use”: William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), 190.

966 “This was not unusual”: John Greenwood, The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood, Isaac J. Greenwood, ed. (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 40.

967 criticized Rall after his death: Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessian-Kassel in the American Revolution (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 89.

968 “We have not slept one night”: William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), 484.

969 “certain intelligence”: James Grant to General Harvey, December 26–27, 1776, LOC.

970 “equal to the attempt”: Ibid.

971 “The storm continued”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 28, 1776, NYHS.

972 “seemed to vie”: George Washington to John Hancock, December 27, 1776, in PGW, VII, 456.

973 “in the twinkling of an eye”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 28, 1776, NYHS.

974 “The storm of nature”: Nathanael Greene to Catharine Greene, December 30, 1776, in PNG, I, 377.

975 “After having marched off”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 28, 1776, NYHS.

976 “The general, with the utmost sincerity”: George Washington, General Orders, December 27, 1776, in PGW, VII, 448.

977 “I am willing to go upon”: John Greenwood, The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood, Isaac J. Greenwood, ed. (New York: De Vinne Press, 1922), 40.

978 “On my approach”: General James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, I (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1816), 131.

979 “The troops behaved”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, December 28, 1776, NYHS.

980 “I looked at him”: John Adlum, Memoirs of the Life of John Adlum in the Revolutionary War, Howard H. Peckham, ed. (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1968), 102.

981 “I did not wait”: Ibid., 102–103.

982 “It appears to us”: Executive Committee of the Continental Congress to George Washington, December 28, 1776, in PGW, VII, 465.

983 “But troops properly inspired”: John Hancock to George Washington, January 1, 1777, in PGW, VII, 505.

984 “ ’Tis an infamous business”: James Grant to General Harvey, December 26, 1776, LOC.

985 “as safe as you are in London”: Ibid.

986 his leave canceled: Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 95.

987 “I feel the inconvenience”: George Washington to John Hancock, January 1, 1777, in PGW, VII, 504.

988 “I thought it no time”: George Washington to the Executive Committee of the Continental Congress, January 1, 1777, in PGW, VII, 500.

989 “in the most affectionate manner”: Sergeant R——, “Battle of Princeton,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, XX (1896), 515–516.

990 “My brave fellows”: Ibid.

991 “God Almighty”: Nathanael Greene to Nicholas Cooke, January 10, 1777, in PNG, II, 4.

992 “use every endeavor”: John Hancock to George Washington, December 27, 1776, in PGW, VII, 462, n. 1.

993 “Happy it is for this country”: William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), 244.

994 “Instead of thinking myself”: George Washington to Executive Committee of the Continental Congress, January 1, 1777, in PGW, VII, 500.

995 “The year 1776 is over”: Robert Morris to George Washington, January 1, 1777, in PGW, VII, 508.

996 “The enemy pushed our small party”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, January 7, 1777, NYHS.

997 “The American army”: George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), 128.

998 “If Washington is the general”: William S. Stryker, Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Trenton: Old Barracks Association, 2001), 268.

999 “bag him”: Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 96.

1000 “We…durst not attack them”: Archibald Robertson, Archibald Robertson, Harry Miller Lydenberg, ed. (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 119.

1001 “They could not possibly suppose”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, January 7, 1777, NYHS.

1002 “I shall never forget”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 219.

1003 “Parade with us”: Alfred Hoyt Bill, The Campaign of Princeton: 1776–1777 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 108.

1004 “A resolution was taken”: David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 336.

1005 “It’s a fine fox chase”: Alfred Hoyt Bill, The Campaign of Princeton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 110.

1006 “by aiming at too much”: George Washington to John Hancock, January 5, 1777, in PGW, VII, 523.

1007 “If there are spots”: Douglass Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, IV (New York: Scribner, 1951), 359.

1008 “The two late actions”: Nathanael Greene to Thomas Paine, January 9, 1777, in PNG, II, 3.

1009 “the fashion in this army”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 524.

1010 “I am apt to think”: L. H. Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 151.

1011 “The energetic operation”: Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, I (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1989), 195.

1012 “Nothing could have afforded me”: William Cobbett. The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 1366–1368.

1013 “disagreeable”: London General Evening Post, March 4, 1777.

1014 Lord Germain saw at once: K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, XIV (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1976), 46–47.

1015 “A people unused to restraint”: George Washington to Lord Stirling, January 19, 1977, in PGW, VIII, 110.

1016 “He will be the deliverer”: Nathanael Greene to James Varnum, September 7, 1781, in PNG, X, 36.

Bibliography

A Note on Sources

For a year of such momentous events and historic consequence as 1776, source material dating from the time is appropriately voluminous. The primary sources I have drawn on—the letters, diaries, memoirs, maps, orderly books, newspaper accounts, and the like—are listed in the bibliography. But those of the utmost importance have been the letters of George Washington, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Joseph Reed, and Joseph Hodgkins. That these men found the time, and energy, to write all that they did, given the circumstances, is a wonder, and ought to be acknowledged as another of their great services to their country. Washington, in the time covered by this narrative, from July of 1775 to the first week of 1777, wrote no fewer than 947 letters!

On the British side, the letters of the irrepressibly opinionated James Grant were also a particularly rich and welcome source. Privately held at Ballindalloch Castle in Scotland, the ancestral home of the Grants, the papers are now available on microfilm at the Library of Congress.

Of the more than seventy diaries I have consulted, much the most valuable have been those of Jabez Fitch, James Thacher, Philip V. Fithian, Ambrose Serle, Archibald Robertson, Frederick Mackenzie, and Johann Ewald. Of the memoirs, those of Alexander Graydon, Joseph Plumb Martin, and John Greenwood are outstanding.

I have drawn a great deal also from three of the earliest histories of the Revolutionary War, all published in the last decade of the eighteenth century, when memories were still relatively fresh and many of the principals were still alive. The History of the American Revolution by David Ramsay and The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America by William Gordon are both the works of Americans. (Ramsay was a physician from South Carolina; Gordon, a Massachusetts clergyman.) The third is the first full account by an Englishman and by someone who actually fought in the war: The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War by Charles Stedman.

In addition, I have relied on a number of exceptional secondary works on the war overall: Angel in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick; The War for America, 1775–1783 by Piers Mackesy; The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff; A Revolutionary People at War by Charles Royster; and A People Numerous and Armed by John Shy.

Christopher Ward’s two-volume The War of the Revolution, published more than fifty years ago, remains an excellent military study. Don Higginbotham’s The War of American Independence is masterful, clear, and balanced. (Its bibliographical essay is especially valuable.) And the grand old multivolume classic, The American Revolution by Sir George Otto Trevelyan, first published in 1899, is a joy for the prose alone, but also filled with illuminating observations and details to be found almost nowhere else.

Of the books on the war in 1776, four are first-rate and essential: Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer; 1776: Year of Illusions by Thomas Fleming; The Year That Tried Men’s Souls by Merritt Ierly; and The Winter Soldiers by Richard M. Ketchum. And four skillfully edited anthologies of the letters and reminiscences of many who played a part in the war, both American and British, have been mainstays: The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, in two volumes, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris; The Revolution Remembered, edited by John C. Dann; Rebels and Redcoats, edited by George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin; and Letters on the American Revolution, 1774–1776, edited by Margaret Wheeler Willard.

One of the early surprises of my research was to find how very much material there is on the Siege of Boston. (I could readily have focused on that alone.) Yet for some strange reason, it is a subject that has been largely overlooked by historians for years. The one book of consequence, The First Year of the American Revolution by Allen French, was published in 1934. But it is an expert study, and in combination with Mr. French’s extensive notes, on file at the Massachusetts Historical Society, it has been invaluable.

For the war in New York, the best accounts are Under the Guns and Battle for Manhattan, both by Bruce Bliven, Jr.; The Battle of Long Island by Eric I. Manders; The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 by John J. Gallagher; and The Battle for New York by Barnet Schecter. The earliest scholarly work, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn, written by Henry P. Johnston and published by the Long Island Historical Society in 1878, has been indispensable.

The best study of the Siege of Fort Washington is “Toward Disaster at Fort Washington,” by William Paul Deary, an unpublished dissertation submitted to the Columbian School of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University, in 1996.

Of the books devoted to the campaign in New Jersey, I have drawn from the first serious work on the subject, William S. Stryker’s Battles of Trenton and Princeton, published in 1898, as well as Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s more concise The Long Retreat, published in 1998; The Campaign of Princeton, 1776–1777 by Alfred Hoyt Bill; and The Day Is Ours by William M. Dwyer.

The biographies that have been of continuous value throughout my work include first and foremost Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington, and especially volumes III and IV. Though a bit old-fashioned in manner, Freeman’s Washington still stands second only to The Papers of George Washington in its comprehensive treatment of Washington’s leading part in the war and in its plenitude of exceptional footnotes.

Other biographies repeatedly consulted are George III: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert; Theodore Thayer’s Nathanael Greene; The Life of Nathanael Greene by George Washington Greene; North Callahan’s Henry Knox; John Richard Alden’s General Charles Lee; General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners by George Athan Billias; William B. Willcox’s insightful study of Sir Henry Clinton, Portrait of a General; The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution by Ira D. Gruber; The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution by Troyer Steele Anderson; and Cornwallis: The American Adventure by Franklin and Mary Wickwire.

The American Rebellion, another mainstay, is Sir Henry Clinton’s own narrative of his campaigns, edited by William B. Willcox.

And, like all who write about the Revolutionary War, I am everlastingly indebted to The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 by I. N. Phelps Stokes, American Archives by Peter Force, and the Encyclopedia of the American Revolution by Mark Mayo Boatner III.

I have, as well, referred repeatedly to portraits by John Trumbull, most of whose works are at the Yale University Art Gallery, and by Charles Willson Peale, particularly those at the National Independence Park in Philadelphia. In the works of these two great painters, both of whom served in the war, we see not only the faces of the protagonists on the American side but a delineation of character.

Finally, I must include five historic houses that figure in the story:

The old white-frame homestead at East Greenwich, Rhode Island, where Nathanael Greene was born and raised, still stands and still belongs to the Greene family. Its treasures include the cradle Nathanael Greene was rocked in, numbers of his books, and even the musket he bought from a British deserter before marching off to war. The handsome, foursquare house Greene built shortly before he was married also still stands at Covington, Rhode Island, near the site of his iron foundry.

Mount Vernon, Washington’s home in Virginia, is in many ways the autobiography that Washington never wrote, in all that it tells us about him. Then there are two that served as his headquarters during the course of 1776, the magnificent Longfellow House, as it has long been known, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, and the Morris-Jumel Mansion on Jumel Terrace in New York City, off 160th Street. With the exception of the Greene homestead at East Greenwich, all of these great houses are open to the public, and in their way their old walls can truly talk.

Manuscript Collections

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

Newspaper, manuscript, and broadside collections

American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia

Nathan Sellers Journal

Boston Public Library

Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Loftus Cliffe Papers

Henry Clinton Papers

James S. Schoff Revolutionary War Collection

Colonial Williamsburg Reference Library, Williamsburg, Va.

Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.

John Winthrop Papers

Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Edward Hand Papers

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Peter Force Archives

Geography and Map Division

James Grant Papers

Consider Tiffany Papers

George Washington Papers

Longfellow House National Historic Site, Cambridge, Mass.

George Washington Papers and Park Service Archives

Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

John Adams Papers

Reverend Samuel Cooper Diary

Allen French Papers

Richard Frothingham Papers

Henry Knox Diary

Timothy Pickering Papers

Samuel Shaw Papers

William Tudor Papers

Lieutenant Richard Williams Papers

Hannah Winthrop and Mercy Warren Correspondence

Mount Vernon Department of Collections, Mount Vernon, Va.

Museum of the City of New York Archives

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Revolutionary Pension Records

New-York Historical Society, New York City

William Alexander, Lord Stirling, Correspondence

Lachlan Campbell Journal

William Duer Papers

Nathan Eells Papers

Henry Knox Papers (Gilder-Lehrman Collection)

Alexander McDougall Papers

Solomon Nash Journal

Joseph Reed Papers

Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City

John Trumbull Papers

Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London

Lord William Howe Papers

Loyalist Claims Records

Sir George Osborn Papers

Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence

Thomas Foster Papers

Nathanael Greene Papers

Captain Stephen Olney Papers

Society of Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.

Manuscript, Map, and Graphic Material Collections

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

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Reference Works

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Diaries, Journals, and Memoirs

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Bixby, Samuel. “Diary of Samuel Bixby, August 3–12, 1775.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Vol. XIV (1875–1876).

Black, Jeannette D., and William Greene Roelker, eds. A Rhode Island Chaplain in the Revolution: Letters of Ebenezer David to Nicholas Brown, 1775–1778. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.

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Bradford, S. Sidney, ed. “A British Officer’s Revolutionary War Journal, 1776–1778.” Maryland History Magazine, Vol. LVI (June 1961).

Bray, Robert, and Paul Bushnell, eds. Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution: 1775–1783. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978.

Burgoyne, Bruce E. An Anonymous Hessian Diary, Probably the Diary of Lieutenant Johann Heinrich von Bardeleben of the Hesse-Cassel von Donop Regiment. Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1998.

———, ed. Defeat, Disaster, and Dedication: The Diaries of the Hessian Officers Jakob Piel and Andreas Wiederhold. Translated from manuscripts in the New York Public Library. Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, Inc., 1997.

Campbell, Lachlan. “British Journal from Aboard Ship in Boston Commencing January 1776 and Then Moving to New York.” New-York Historical Society.

Carter, Lt. William. A Genuine Detail of the Several Engagements, Positions, and Movements of Royal and American Armies During the Years 1775 and 1776. London: Printed for the Author, 1784.

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Cheever, William. “William Cheever’s Diary, 1775–1776.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Vol. LX (October 1926–June 1927).

Clinton, Sir Henry. The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782. Edited by William B. Willcox. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954.

Cresswell, Nicholas. The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777. New York: Dial Press, 1924.

Curwen, Samuel. The Journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist. Vols. I–II. Edited by Andrew Oliver. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

“Diary of Reverend Benjamin Boardman” (July 31, 1775–Nov. 12, 1775). Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 2nd series. Vol. VII (1891–1892).

“Diary of Obadiah Brown.” Quarterly Bulletin of the Westchester County Historical Society. Nos. 4–5 (1928–1929).

Diary of Reverend Samuel Cooper. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Diary of John Kettel. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Diary of Loyalist Thomas Moffatt. Peter Force Papers. Library of Congress.

“Diary of Nathan Sellers, 1776.” American Philosophical Society.

“A Diary of Trifling Occurrences: Sarah Fisher Logan.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. LXXXII (1958).

“Diary of Ebenezer Wild.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 2nd series. Vol. VI (1891).

Duane, William, ed. Diary of Christopher Marshall, 1774–1781. Albany, N.Y.: Joel Munsell, 1877.

Emerson, William. Diaries and Letters of William Emerson, 1743–1776. Edited by Amelia Forbes Emerson. Boston: Thomas Todd, 1972.

Ewald, Captain Johann. Diary of the American War: A Hessian Journal. Edited by Joseph P. Tustin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.

Fitch, Jabez. “Boston Siege Diary of Jabez Fitch.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 2nd series. Vol IX (1894–1895).

———. The New York Diary of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch of the 17th (Connecticut) Regiment from August 2, 1776, to December 15, 1777. Edited by W. H. W. Sabine. New York: Colburn & Tegg, 1954.

Fithian, Philip Vickers. Philip Vickers Fithian: Journal, 1775–1776, Written on the Virginia-Pennsylvania Frontier and in the Army Around New York. Edited by Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Leonidas Dodson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1934.

Graydon, Alexander. Memoirs of His Own Time: With Reminiscences of the Men and Events of the Revolution. Edited by John Stockton Littell. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1846.

Greenwood, John. The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood of Boston and New York, 1775–1783. Edited by Isaac J. Greenwood. New York: De Vinne Press 1922.

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Hanson, Robert Brand, ed. The Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1758–1822. Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1998.

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“Journal of Samuel Correy, New Jersey Militia.” Clements Library.

“A Journal Kept by John Leach, During His Confinement by the British, in Boston ‘Gaol’ in 1775.” New England Historic and Genealogical Register. Vol. XIX (1865).

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Kemble, Stephen. Journals of Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Kemble, 1773–1789, and British Army Orders: General Sir William Howe, 1775–1778; General Sir Henry Clinton, 1778; and General Daniel Jones, 1778. Boston: Gregg Press, 1972.

Kipping, Ernst, ed. At General Howe’s Side, 1776–1778: The Diary of General William Howe’s Aide de Camp, Captain Friedrich von Muenchhausen. Monmouth Beach, N.J.: Philip Freneau Press, 1974.

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Leggett, Abraham. The Narrative of Major Abraham Leggett. New York: Arno Press, 1971.

Lender, Mark E., and James Kirby Martin, eds. Citizen Soldier: The Revolutionary War Journal of Joseph Bloomfield. Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1982.

Lyman, Simeon. Journal of Simeon Lyman of Sharon, August 10 to December 28, 1775. Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society. Vol. VII (1899).

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Nash, Solomon. Journal of Solomon Nash, a Soldier of the Revolution, 1776–1777. Edited by Charles I. Bushnell. New York: Privately printed, 1861.

“The Papers of General Samuel Smith.” Historical Magazine. 2nd series. Vol. VII (February 1870).

Rau, Louise, ed. “Sergeant John Smith’s Diary of 1776.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review. Vol. XX (1933–1934).

Rawdon, Reginald Lord. Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings. 4 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930–1947.

“Recollections of Incidents of the Revolution: General Jeremiah Johnson.” Journal of Long Island History. Vol. XII, No. 2 (Spring 1976).

Robertson, Archibald. Archibald Robertson: His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762–1780. Edited by Harry Miller Lydenberg. New York: New York Public Library, 1930.

Rowe, John. Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762, 1764–1779. Edited by Anne Rowe Cunningham. Boston: W. B. Clarke Co., 1903.

Sargent, Winthrop, ed. “Letters of John Andrews, Esq. of Boston: 1772–1776.” Cambridge, Eng.: Press of J. Wilson & Sons, 1866.

Scull, G. D., ed. Memoir and Letters of Captain W. Glanville Evelyn, 1747–1776. Oxford, Eng.: James Parker & Co., 1879.

Serle, Ambrose. The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776–1778. Edited by Edward H. Tatum, Jr. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1940.

Sleeper, Moses. Diary of a Soldier, June 1775–September 1776. Longfellow House National Historic Site, Cambridge, Mass.

Stabler, Lois K., ed. Very Poor and of a Lo Make: The Journal of Abner Sanger. Portsmouth, N.H.: Historical Society of Cheshire County, 1986.

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Tudor, John. Deacon Tudor’s Diary. Boston: Press of W. Spooner, 1896.

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Webb, Samuel Blachley. Correspondence and Journals of Samuel Blachley Webb: 1772–1777. Vol. I. Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham Press, 1893.

———. Family Letters of Samuel Blachley Webb, 1764–1807. Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1912.

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Articles

Anderson, Fred W. “The Hinge of the Revolution: George Washington Confronts a People’s Army, July 3, 1775.” Massachusetts Historical Review. Vol. I (1999).

Baker, William S. “Itinerary of General Washington from June 15, 1775, to December 23, 1783.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. XIV, No. 2 (1890).

“British Officer in Boston 1775.” Atlantic Monthly. April 1877.

Brookhiser, Richard. “A Man on Horseback.” Atlantic Monthly. January 1996.

Brown, Wallace. “An Englishman Views the American Revolution: The Letters of Henry Hulton, 1769–1776.” Huntington Library Quarterly. Vol. XXXVI (1972–1973).

“The Capture of Fort Washington, New York. Described by Cpt. Andreas Wiederhold.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. XXIII (1899).

“Contemporaneous Account of the Battle of Trenton, Pennsylvania Evening Post, December 28, 1776.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. IV (1880).

Conway, Stephen. “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. Vol. LIX, No. 1 (January 2002).

Davis, General W. W. H. “Washington on the West Bank of the Delaware 1776.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. IV, No. 2 (1980).

Delancy, E. F. “Mount Washington and Its Capture on the 16th of November, 1776.” Magazine of American History. Vol. I (February 1877).

Gelb, Norman. “Winter of Discontent.” Smithsonian Magazine. May 2003.

Gordon, Reverend William. Letters, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Vol. LX (October 1926–June 1927).

Greene, George Washington. “Major-General Nathanael Greene.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. II (1878).

Gruber, Ira. D. “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain: British Politics and the Winning of American Independence.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. Vol. XXII, No. 2 (April 1965).

Heathcote, Charles William. “General Israel Putnam.” Picket Post (Valley Forge Historical Society). February 1963.

“House of Lords and the House of Commons.” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. No. 688 (November 1, 1834).

Ketchum, Richard M. “Men of the Revolution: Israel Putnam.” American Heritage. Vol. XXIV (June 1973).

Koke, Richard J. “Forcing the Hudson River Passing.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly. Vol. XXXVI (October 1952).

Kranish, Michael. “Washington Reconstructed.” Boston Globe, February 17, 2002.

Kurtz, Henry I. “Victory on Dorchester Heights.” American History Illustrated. Vol. IV (December 1969).

“Late House of Commons and Antiquities of St. Stephen’s Chapel.” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. No. 690 (November 8, 1834).

“Letter of Reverend William Gordon to Samuel Wilcon, April 6, 1776.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Vol. LX (1926–1927).

“Letters from a Hessian Mercenary.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. LXII, No. 4 (October 1938).

“Letters Written During the Revolutionary War by Colonel William Douglas to His Wife Covering the Period July 19, 1775, to December 5, 1775.” New-York Historical Society Bulletin. Vols. XII–XIII (January 1929–January 1930).

Luther, F. S. “General Israel Putnam.” Proceedings of the Worcester Society of Antiquity for the Year 1904. Vol. XX, No. 4 (1905).

“Major General John Thomas.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 2nd series. Vol. XVIII (1903–1904).

“Occupation of New York City by the British.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. IV (1980).

Paltsits, Victor Hugo. “The Jeopardy of Washington, September 15, 1776.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly. Vol. XXXII (October 1948).

Pogue, Dennis J. “General Washington: One of the Wealthiest Men in American History?” Mount Vernon Library (2002).

Powell, William S. “A Connecticut Soldier Writing Home: Elisha Bostwick’s Memoirs of the First Years of the Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series. Vol. VI (1949).

R——, Sergeant. “Battle of Princeton.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. XX (1896).

“Sermon of Rev. John Rodgers, Jan. 14, 1776.” New York Times, March 16, 2003.

Shelton, William Henry. “Nathan Hale Execution.” New York Times, September 22, 1929.

Vernon-Jackson, H. O. H. “A Loyalist’s Wife: Letters of Mrs. Philip Van Cortlandt, 1776–1777.” History Today. Vol. XIV (August 1964).

Wakin, Daniel J. “Pastor’s Call to Arms in 1776 Has Echoes in 2003.” New York Report in New York Times, March 16, 2003.

Warren,———. “Uniform of the Revolutionary Army.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Vol. IV (1858–1860).

“Washington’s Headquarters in New York.” National Historical Magazine. July 1944.

Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. “The Battle of Princeton.” In The Princeton Battle Monument. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1922.

Whitehorne, Joseph. “Shepardstown and the Morgan-Stevenson Companies.” Magazine of the Jefferson County Historical Society. Vol. LVIII (December 1992).

Newspapers and Journals

Boston Gazette

Boston Newsletter

Boston Transcript

Connecticut Gazette and Universal Intelligencer (New London)

Connecticut Journal (New Haven)

Essex Gazette (Salem, Mass.)

Essex Journal (Newburyport, Mass.)

Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia)

Gentleman’s Magazine (London)

Hartford (Connecticut) Courant and Weekly Intelligencer

Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle (London)

London Chronicle

London Gazette

London Gazette and New Daily Advertiser

London General Evening Post

London Public Advertiser

Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly Newsletter

Massachusetts Spy (Boston)

Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (London)

Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser

New England Chronicle and Essex Gazette (Cambridge, Mass.)

New Haven Journal

Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury

New York Constitutional Gazette

New York Gazette

New-York Packet

New York Sun

Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia)

Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia)

Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser (Philadelphia)

Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia)

Providence Gazette

St. James’s Chronicle (London)

Universal Magazine (London)

Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg)

Index

Acland, John Dyke

Acquackanonk, N.J.

Adams, Abigail

John Adams’s correspondence with

Adams, Elihu

Adams, John

Articles of War drawn up byBoard of War headed byin delegation to Lord Howeon GWGW’s communications withmarriage of, see Adams, Abigail

Addison, Joseph

Adlum, John

African Americans:

in Continental Armysee also slaves

Agincourt, Battle of

Albany, N.Y.

Alexander, Giles

Alexander, Phil

Alexander, William, see Stirling, William

Alexander, Lord

Alexander the Great

Allegheny Mountains

Allegheny River valley

Allen, Andrew

Allen, Ethan

American army, see Continental Army American colonies

British establishment ofBritish sympathy withcoach travel inhigh standard of living inLoyalists inthirteen originalsee also specific colonies

American naval forces

inadequacy ofprivateers engaged by

American Revolution:

American lives lost inBritish peace overtures infirst blood shed infirst great battle of, see Brooklyn Battle offoreign financial support inFrench and Indian War veterans inas the Glorious Cause of Americaheroes ofindependence as emerging object ofParliamentary debate ontreachery insee also specific battles and campaigns

Anderson, Enoch

Annapolis, Md.

Arnold, Benedict

Asia, HMS

Assunpink Creek

Atlee, Samuel

Bach, Johann Sebastian

Back Bay

Baldwin, Loammi

Balfour, Nisbet

Baltimore, Md.

Bangs, Isaac

Barbados

Bardeleben, Johann Heinrich von

Barnstable, Mass.

Barré, Isaac

Basking Ridge, N.J.

Becker, John

Bedford, N.Y.

Belknap, Jeremy

Benedict, Abner

Berkshire Mountains

Bible

Bixby, Samuel

Blockade, The (Burgoyne)

Bloomingdale, N.Y.

Blue Ridge Mountains

Boston, Mass.

American army encampment nearBeacon Hill inbitter winter of inBritish army under siege inBritish headquarters inBritish plunder and destruction ofchurches incivilians living under siege inCommon inGW’s triumphal entry intohasty British evacuation ofLoyalists inmelancholy and disease in“Mount Whoredom” red-light district inprominent families ofrefugees fromsmallpox intaverns invictorious American occupation of

Boston Gazette,

Boston Grenadier Corps

Boston Harbor

British ships inLong Wharf in

Boston Latin School

Boston Massacre

Boston Neck

Bostwick, Elisha

Bowdoin, James

Box, Daniel

Braddock, Edward

Braintree, Mass.

Bray, John

Breed’s Hill

Bristol, Pa.

British army:

aristocrats inin BostonBoston abandoned bybuying of commissions incasualties and hardships ofcavalry ofContinental Army compared withcouncils of war incourt-martials for rape indeserters fromelite troops inEnglish battle style offormidable numerical strength ofGerman mercenary troops hired in support of, see Hessian troopsGW’s early experience inhealth and hygiene ofLoyalists recruited bymorale ofin New Yorknight raids and plunder byprisoners taken bypunishment inpurloined letters of GW acquired byrecreation inred coats ofregulars inreinforcement ofsentries inspies fortraining and discipline ofwomen and camp followers with

British Articles of War

British Empire

see also American colonies; Canada; England; Ireland; Scotland

British Foreign Ministry

British navy, see Royal Navy

British Parliament

conduct of war in debated inGeorge III’s appearances at opening ofwar opposition insee also House of Commons; House of Lords

Bronx River

Brooklyn, Battle of

American casualties inAmerican defeat inBritish casualties incapture and treatment of American prisoners inGW atsavage and valiant fighting insecret escape of American forces after

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bedford Road inBritish occupation offerry landing inFlatbush Road infortifications inGowanus Road inJamaica Pass in

Brooklyn Heights,

fortification ofstrategic importance of

Brown, Philip

Brunswick, N.J.

Brush, Crean

Bunker Hill

British fortifications at

Bunker Hill, Battle of

American surprise attack atBritish casualties atBritish victory atterror and confusion ofveterans of

Burgoyne, John

character and personality ofplays of

Burke, Edmund

Burlington, N.J.

Burr, Aaron

Bushwick Creek

Cadwalader, John

Caesar, Gaius Julius

Cambridge, Mass.

American occupation ofarmy hospital atCommon inGW’s headquarters in

Campbell, John

camp fever

Canada

Caner, Henry

Cape Ann

Cape Cod

Carcass, HMS

Caribbean Sea

Carysfort, HMS

Castle Island

Castle William

Cato (Addison)

Cavendish, Lord

Centurion, HMS

Charles River

Charleston, S.C.

Charlestown, Mass.

American attack onBritish occupation ofsee also Bunker Hill

Charlotte Sophia, Queen of England

Chatham, HMS

Chatham, Lord

Chatterton’s Hill

Church, Benjamin

Civil War, U.S.

Clarke, William

Clinton, George

Clinton, Henry,

military strategy ofin New Yorkphysical appearance and personality ofRhode Island expedition ofSouth Carolina defeat ofWilliam Howe and

Closter, N.J.

Cobble Hill (Mass.)

Cochrane, John

Common Sense (Paine)

Concord, Mass.

Connecticut

army units from

Connecticut Rangers

Continental Army:

absence, desertion and defection fromalcohol available toammunition and provisions lacking inblacks and Indians inbonuses granted toat BostonBritish army compared withBritish capture and treatment of soldiers inBritish contempt forcasualties incavalry lacking inchaplains incowardice and insubordination indaily prayers indecline ofdiverse ethnicity, trades and classes indrinking and foul language inexchange and reinforcement of troops inexperience and discipline lacking infife and drum corps infirearms offitness offlag ofFrench and Indian War veterans inGW’s divisions ofGW’s personal exhortations tohard labor and resourcefulness ofin march from Boston to New Yorkmedical care inmilitary dress ofmilitias and volunteer troops inmonthly pay inmorale ofmutiny and fighting innumerical strength ofolder men inprisoners taken bypunishment and restriction ofrecruiting ofreenlistments inregional differences and biases inreinforcement ofsentries insickness and lack of hygiene insignal system ofslaves pressed into labor byas “Sons of Liberty,”spies fortents and shelters ofunruliness and theft inyoung boys insee also specific army units

Continental Congress

appointment of GW as commander-in-chief byBaltimore relocation ofBoard of War ofdelegates toExecutive Committee ofGW honored byGW’s communications withHancock as president ofinactivity inindependence declared by

Cooke, Nicholas

Copley, John Singleton

Corbin, John

Corbin, Margaret “Molly,”

Cornell, Ezekiel

Cornwallis, Charles, Lord

background and education ofin Battle of Brooklynleadership and popularity of

Coventry, Earl of

Coventry, R.I.

Crisis (London)

Crisis, The (Paine)

Cumberland, Duke of

Curwen, Samuel

Custis, Eleanor

Custis, John Parke

Custis, Patsy

Daby, John

Danbury, Conn.

Dartmouth, Earl of

Declaration of Independence

principle contributors to

DeLancey, Oliver, Jr.

Delaware, army units from

Delaware River

GW’s crossing of

Demont, William

Dickinson, John

Dismal Swamp

Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Dorchester Heights

artillery barrages covering preparations atBritish failure to gain control ofelevation of twin hills ofsecret American fortification and capture ofstrategic importance of

Dorchester peninsula

low-lying causeway of

Douglas, William

Draper, Margaret

Duchess of Gordon,

Dunscomb, Edward

Durham Iron Works

Dyer, Eliphalet

dysentery

Eagle, HMS

East River

British ships infortifications onHell Gate onold ships sunk to block passage insecret retreat of American troops acrosstreacherous tides and currents ofWhitehall dock on

Elizabethtown, N.J.

Ellery, William

Elting, Peter

Emerson, William

England

country estates ofDevonshire inLoyalists inritual and pageantry insee also Great Britain; London, England

Erskine, William

Erving, George

Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke)

Essex Gazette,

Eton

Evelyn, William Glanville

Ewald, Johann

Ewing, James

Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, The (Smollett)

Falmouth, Maine

British attack on

Faneuil, Benjamin

Faneuil, Peter

Faneuil Hall

Fellows, John

Ferguson, Adam

Fitch, Jabez

Fithian, Philip Vickers

Fitzroy, Augustus Henry (Duke of Grafton)

Flatbush, N.Y.

Flucker, Hannah

Flucker, Sally

Flucker, Thomas

Fort Box

Fort Constitution

Fort Defiance

Fort George

Fort Greene

Fort Lee

American abandonment of

Fort Putnam

Fort Stirling

Fort Sullivan

Fort Ticonderoga:

American capture ofretrieval of artillery from

Fort Washington

American defense ofBritish siege and capture ofbuilding ofcasualties atdisadvantages ofheroine ofplan and fortification ofprisoners taken at

Fox, Charles James

Framingham, Mass.

France

Franklin, Benjamin

French mission of

Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia

Fredericksburg, Va.

Freeman’s Journal,

French and Indian War

American veterans ofBritish veterans ofGW’s experience

Gage, Thomas

Galloway, Joseph

Gardiner, Sylvester

Gates, Elizabeth

Gates, Horatio

Canadian mission of

General Evening Post (London)

George I, King of England

George III, King of England

artistic sophistication ofCabinet of“madness” ofmarital fidelity ofParliamentary appearances ofpolitical opposition ofpolitical policy and appointments ofpolitical support ofpopularity ofsimple tastes ofsense of duty and patriotism ofsuccession to the throne by

Germain, Lord George

Gerry, Elbridge

Gibbon, Edward

Gist, Mordecai

Glover, John

“God Save the King,”

Gordon, William

Governor’s Island

Grafton, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of

Graham, Michael

Grant, James

in Battle of Brooklyn

Graves, Samuel

Gravesend, N.Y.

Gravesend Bay

Gray, Harrison

Graydon, Alexander

Great Britain

see also England; Ireland; Scotland

Greene, George Washington

Greene, Katherine “Caty” Littlefield

Greene, Nathanael

in Battle of Trentoncharacter and personality ofchildhood and adolescence ofas field commanderFort Washington defense urged byfriendship of Henry Knox andon GWGW andillness ofLong Island command ofmarriage of, see Greene, Katherine “Caty” Littlefieldmilitia organized byphysical appearance ofphysical disability ofQuaker background ofrecommendations to GW byself-education ofThomas Paine and

Greene, Nathanael (Gen. Greene’s father)

Green Mountain Boys

Greenwood, John

Greyhound, HMS

Gridley, Richard

Griffith, Dorcas

Hackensack, N.J.

Hackensack River

Hale, Nathan

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Hallowell, Benjamin

Hamilton, Alexander

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

Hancock, John

correspondence of GW andas president of the Continental Congress

Hand, Edward

Handel, George Frederick

Harcourt, William

Harlem, N.Y.

Harlem Heights

Hollow Way in

Harlem Heights, Battle of

Harlem River

Harrison, Robert Hanson

Harvard College

GW awarded honorary degree by

Harvey, Edward

Haslet, John

Heath, William

Heights of Gowan

Heister, Leopold Philipp von

Henry, Patrick

Henry V (Shakespeare)

Herodotus

Hessian troops

Americans as viewed byarrival and numbers ofin Battle of Brooklynin Battle of Kips Bayin Battle of White Plainsin capture of Fort Washingtoncasualties ofmarauding and pillaging byprofessionality oftreatment of captured Americans by

Hickey, Thomas

Hill, William

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon)

Hodgkins, Joseph

infant son ofmarriage of, see Hodgkins, Sarah Perkins

Hodgkins, Sarah Perkins

Joseph Hodgkins’s letters to

Hooper, William

Horace

House of Commons

House of Lords

Howard’s Tavern

Howe, George Augustus, Lord

Howe, Richard, Lord

attempted contact with GW bycharacter and personality ofpeace overtures ofRoyal Navy commanded by

Howe, William

British forces in Boston commanded byBritish forces in New York commanded bycharacter ofcriticism ofeducation and early career ofFrench and Indian War experience ofHenry Clinton andleisurely and cautious military style ofLoyalist mistress ofOrder of Bath conferred onpolitical life oftroops and Loyalists withdrawn from Boston by

Hudson Highlands

Hudson River

British ships onfortifications onold ships sunk to block passage instrategic importance ofTappan Zee in

Hughes, Hugh

Hull, William

Humphreys, David

Huntington, Earl of

Huntington, Jedediah

Hutchinson, Foster

Hutchinson, Thomas

Inclenberg

India

Ipswich, Mass.

Ireland

Isle of Wight

Jacobs Creek

jaundice

Jefferson, Thomas

on GW

Jewett, John

Johnson, Samuel

Johnstone, George

Journal of Major George Washington, The,

Kemble, Stephen

Kennebec River

Kennedy, Archibald

Kennedy Mansion

Kentish Guards

Kew Gardens

King’s Bridge

King’s Chapel

King’s College

King’s Highway (Mass.)

King’s Highway (N.J.)

King’s Highway (N.Y.)

Kips Bay, Battle of

American flight inBritish attack in

Knowlton, Thomas

Knox, Henry

artillery from Fort Ticonderoga retrieved bybookselling business ofcharacter and personality ofdiaries ofmarriage of, see Knox, Lucy Fluckermilitary academies urged bymilitary leadership ofNathanael Greene and

Knox, Lucy

Knox, Lucy Flucker

Henry Knox’s letters tomotherhood of

Knox, Mary Campbell

Knox, William (Henry Knox’s brother)

Knox, William (Henry Knox’s father)

Knyphausen, Wilhelm von

Lake Champlain

Lake George

Langdon, Samuel

Lapham, John

Lechmere Point

Lee,

Lee, Charles

British capture ofcriticism of GW byas defense experteccentricities and colorful past ofas GW’s second-in-commandNew York fortifications built bySouth Carolina command of

Lee, Richard Henry

Lee, William “Billy,”

Leffingwell, Ebenezer

Leitch, Andrew

Leonard, Abiel

Lewis, George

Lexington, Mass.

Light Dragoons

Lighthouse Island

Lillie, Theophilus

Little, Moses

Livingston, Philip

Livingston, William

Livy

Locke, John

London, England

Americans infashionable society inpolitical corruption inwar dispatches received inwar opposition inas world capital

London Book Store

London Chronicle

London Magazine

London Public Advertiser

Long Island, Battle of, see Brooklyn, Battle of

Long Island, N.Y.

American occupation and fortification ofarmy units fromBritish invasion and occupation ofDutch population inFlatlands ofas key to New YorkLoyalists inNathanael Greene as commander invillages and farmland insee also Brooklyn, N.Y.; Brooklyn Heights; specific locations

Loring, Elizabeth Lloyd

Loring, Joshua, Jr.

Lovell, John

Lovett, Simon

Loyal American Associators

Loyalists:

in Bostonin Englandin New Jerseyin New York

Lyman, Simeon

Lyttleton, Lord

MacAlpine, William

McDougall, Alexander

Mackenzie, Frederick

McKonkey’s Ferry, Pa.

Magaw, Robert

Maid of the Oaks (Burgoyne)

Maine

Mamaroneck, N.Y.

Manchester, Duke of

Manley, John

Marblehead, Mass.

Martin, Joseph Plum

Maryland

army units from

Massachusetts

army units fromlegislature ofvillages and farmland ofsee also Boston, Mass.; specific locations

Massachusetts Assembly

Massachusetts Bay

Massachusetts Council

Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Newsletter

Massachusetts Provincial Congress

Massachusetts Spy

Matthews, David

Mawhood, Charles

Memoirs Concerning the Art of War (Saxe)

Mercer, Hugh

Mifflin, Sarah

Mifflin, Thomas

Miles, Samuel

militias

Milton, Mass.

Minden, Battle of

Mississippi River

Monroe, James

Montcalm, Louis Joseph, Marquis de

Montgomery, Richard

Montreal

Montresor, John

Montresor’s island

Morgan, Daniel

Morning Chronicle and Advertiser (London)

Morris, Lewis

Morris, Robert

Morris, Roger

Morris house

Morristown, N.J.

Mortier, Abraham

Mortier house

Mount Vernon

expansion and improvements of

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

Muller, Richard

Muller’s Field Engineer (Muller)

Mumford, Augustus

Murray, James

Murray, John

Murray, Mary Lindley

Mystic River

Nancy, HMS

Nash, Solomon

Native Americans

Natural Bridge

Netherlands

Newark, N.J.

Newburyport, Mass.

Newell, Timothy

New England army

in Boston to New York marchrelations of officers and men inSouthern disdain forsee also army units from specific states

New England Chronicle

New Hampshire

army units from

New Haven Journal

New Jersey

army units fromfertile farms ofGW’s retreat toLoyalists insupply depots in

New Jersey, College of (at Princeton)

New London, Conn.

New Lots, N.Y.

Newport, R.I.

Newtown Cove

Newtown Creek

New Utrecht, N.Y.

New York:

army units fromDutch families inGW’s headquarters inLoyalists inprominent families inWestchester County insee also New York, N.Y.; specific locations

New York, N.Y.

affluent citizens ofAmerican retreat fromarmy hospital inAugust hurricane inBattery inBeekman house inBoston compared withBowling Green inBritish advantages inBritish invasion and occupation ofchurches and synagogue inCity Hall inCommons inContinental Army march from Boston todivided political loyalties inequestrian statue of King George III inflight of citizens fromfortifications built in defense ofGreat Fire ofGW’s decision to make a stand atHoly Ground brothel district inLoyalists inNo.1 Broadway inOutward region ofpatriots inpeacetime population ofsinful reputation ofstrategic importance oftaverns intrade and commerce inWall Street inWhitehall Slip in

New York Chamber of Commerce

New York Constitutional Gazette

New York Gazette

New York Harbor:

Gowanus Bay inLower Bay inmassive British naval presence inNarrows inUpper Bay in

New York Packet,

New York Provincial Congress

Noddle’s Island

North, Frederick, Lord:

affable manner ofGeorge III andGerman mercenary troops engaged byphysical appearance ofpolitical attacks onas prime minister

North Castle, N.Y.

Norwich, Conn.

Old Dutch Church

Old North Church

Old South Church

“Olive Branch Petition,”

Oliver, Peter

Orpheus, HMS

Paine, Robert Treat

Paine, Thomas

Palisades

Parsons, Samuel

Passaic River

Paterson, James

patriotism

Pawtuxet River

Peale, Charles Willson

Peale, James

Pearl, HMS

Peekskill, N.Y.

Pelham, Henry

Pell’s Point, N.Y.

Penn, Richard

Pennsylvania

army units from

Pennsylvania Evening Post,

Pennsylvania Journal,

Percy, Hugh, Lord

Perkins, Nathaniel

Perth Amboy, N.J.

Philadelphia, Pa.

meeting of Continental Congress inpopulation of

Philadelphia Associations

Philadelphia Evening Post,

Phoenix, HMS

Plains of Abraham, Quebec

Plymouth, England

Pomfret, Conn.

Pope, Alexander

porphyria

Potowomut Creek

Potts, Stacy

Preston, HMS

Princeton, N.J.

Proclamation of November

Prospect Hill (Mass.)

prostitution

Providence, R.I.

Providence Gazette,

Province House

Puritanism

Putnam, Israel

character and personality ofNew York command of

Putnam, James

Putnam, Rufus

Quaker Bridge, N.J.

Quakers

Quebec

Quebec, Battle of

British victory at

Rall, Johann Gottlieb

rape, British courts-martial for

Raritan River

Rawdon, Francis, Lord

Rawlings, Moses

Red Hook, N.Y.

Reed, Esther:

Joseph Reed’s letters tomotherhood of

Reed, Joseph

as adjutant generalcharacter and personality ofcriticism of GW byGW’s letters toGW’s reliance onlegal profession of

Relph, David

Renown, HMS

Repulse, HMS

Reuber, John

Reynolds, George

Rhode Island

army units fromClinton expedition toKent County in

Rhode Island Army of Observation

Richmond Hill

Robertson, Archibald

Rockingham, Marquis of

Rodgers, John

Rodney, Caesar

Roebuck, HMS

Rose, HMS

Rowe, John

Roxbury, Mass.

Royal Academy of Arts

Royal Navy

in Boston HarborFalmouth attack byleadership of, see Howe, Richard, LordNew York defenses againstin New York watersoverwhelming strength ofprison ships inrelations of British army andsupply ships of

Ruggles, Timothy

“Rule Britannia,”

Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,

Rumford, Benjamin Thompson, Count

Rush, Benjamin

Rutledge, Edward

Sandwich, Lord

Sandy Hook

Saxe, Maurice de

Scammell, Alexander

Schoonmaker’s Bridge

Schuyler, Philip

Scotch Brigade

Scotland

British army units from

Scott, John Morin

Serle, Ambrose

Seven Years’ War:

in Europesee also French and Indian War

Shakespeare, William

Shearith Israel synagogue

Shelburne, Earl of

Shewkirk, Ewald

Shuldham, Molyneux

slaves:

GW’s ownership ofon New York streetsin southern colonial outlookin work on New York’s defenses

smallpox

Smallwood, James

Smallwood, William

Smith, Francis

Smith, Mathias

Smith, Simeon

Smollett, Tobias

South Carolina

British defeat in

Spain

Spencer, Joseph

Spuyten Duyvil Creek

Stamp Act of 1765

Stark, John

Staten Island

British occupation ofBritish ships at,Loyalists in

Stedman, Charles

St. Eustatius

Stiles, Ezra

Stirling, William Alexander, Lord

in Battle of BrooklynBritish capture offortifications built by

St. James’s Chronicle (London)

St. James’s Palace

Stuart, Charles

Suffolk, Earl of

Sullivan, John

in Battle of BrooklynBritish capture ofCanadian assignment ofcharacter ofparole and exchange of

Swift, Jonathan

Tallmadge, Benjamin

Tarleton, Banister

Tarrytown, N.Y.

Tartar, HMS

Thacher, James

Thomas, John

Thompson, Benjamin

Throg’s Neck

Thunder, HMS

Tilghman, Tench

Tory party

in New York

Townsend, Viscount

Trask, Israel

Trask, Jonathan

Treaty of Paris

Trenton, Battle of

Trenton, N.J.

Trevelyan, George Otto

Trinity Church

Tristram Shandy (Sterne)

Trumbull, Benjamin

Trumbull, John

Trumbull, Jonathan

Tryon, William

Tudor, William

typhoid fever

typhus

Union Jack

United States of America

Vassall, John

Victory, HMS

Virginia

army units fromAugusta County inculture and hospitality oflegislature ofas richest, most populous colonyTidewater region of

Virginia Gazette,

Waldo, Albigence

Walpole, Horace

Ward, Artemus

Ward, Samuel

Warren, James

Warren, Mercy Otis

Warwick, R.I.

Washington, Augustine

Washington, George

anger ofappeal of architecture and landscape design toappointment as commander-in-chiefarmed schooners sent to prey on enemy shipping byassassination plot againstbirth ofBritish acquisition of secret letters byburning of New York considered bycharacter and personality ofchurch attendance ofcouncils of war called bycriticism ofdaily review of troops and defenses bydecision to make a stand in New York bydiaries ofdiscipline and leadership ofdislike of New Englanders byearly military career ofenlistment of free blacks authorized byfortifications ordered built byhonors and tributes accorded tohorsemanship ofimpeccable uniform and grooming ofimposing physical appearance and stature ofintelligence gathered byLife Guard oflifestyle and hospitality ofmaps and drawings available tomarriage and family life ofmilitary “family” in residence withmilitary indecisiveness and mistakes ofNew York country residences ofNew York retreat planned and carried out bypayment for service rejected by,periods of discouragement and distress ofperseverance and determination ofpersonal and domestic staff ofpersonal instructions to the army byplantation home of, see Mount Vernonpolitical judgment ofportrait ofrealism ofrespect of officers and men forrudimentary education ofself-command and precision ofslaves owned bysmallpox attack ofsplitting up of the army bystrategic military planning ofsurveying work ofVirginia legislative service ofwealth and social position of

Washington, John (GW’s brother)

Washington, John (GW’s great-grandfather)

Washington, Lund,

Washington, Martha Dandridge Custis

children ofGW joined in military quarters byGW’s letters to

Washington, Mary Bell

Washington, William

Watertown, Mass.

Webb, Samuel,

Wedderburn, Alexander

Wentworth, John

West Florida

West Indies

Westminster Palace

Wheatley, Phillis

Whig party

White Plains, Battle of

British casualties atBritish victory at

White Plains, N.Y.

Wiederhold, Andreas

Wilkes, John

Wilkinson, James

Williams, Richard

Williams, Thomas

Williamsburg, Va.

Windsor, England

Wolfe, James

women:

with British armyand British views on rapein brothel districts,in Loyalist exodus

Woodhull, Nathaniel

Worcester, Mass.

Yale College

Yeomen of the Guard

York Island, see New York, N.Y.

Yorktown, Va., British surrender at

Young, Edward

King George III by Johann Zoffany. Crowned in 1760, at age twenty-two, George III had ruled for fifteen years by the time he went before Parliament in late 1775 to declare the American colonies in rebellion and affirm his resolve to bring them to heel. In this 1771 portrait he is portrayed as a robust, dutiful man of substance, which, in fact, he was, as well as considerably more acute and accomplished than history has often remembered him.

Lord George Germain by George Romney. Appointed by the King as Secretary of the American colonies in the late autumn of 1775, Lord Germain stood in marked contrast to the very unwarlike Prime Minister, Lord North. A soldier and politician, Germain was proud, commanding, and keenly intelligent. The American rebellion could best be resolved, he believed, with one “decisive blow.”

Edmund Burke, from a caricature by James Sayers. Of those sympathetic to the American cause, Edmund Burke was preeminent, his speeches among the most eloquent ever heard in the House of Commons. But Burke and others of like mind were a decided minority, and even he spoke of the American colonies as “our” colonies.

Frederick, Lord North, by Nathaniel Dance. Instinctively obliging, liked by all in Parliament, the Prime Minister, Lord North, had little heart for the war in America, yet dutifully served his King, who called North his “sheet anchor.”

George Washington by Charles Willson Peale. One of the strongest, most characteristic portraits ever done of Washington was this by Peale, painted in 1787, a dozen years after Washington first took command at Cambridge at age 43. With his height (six feet, two inches) and his beautifully tailored military attire, the commander-in-chief was easy to distinguish in an army where almost no one was as tall and few had even a semblance of a uniform. A leader, he believed, ought both to act and look the part.

Joseph Reed by Charles Willson Peale. Of those on his immediate staff, his military “family” as he called it, Washington prized especially Joseph Reed, a talented young Philadelphia attorney who served as secretary and became his closest confidant. Reed’s admiration for his commander was boundless.

In this excerpt from one of a series of private letters to Reed, Washington expressed his ardent wish for Reed to return to help him. “It is absolutely necessary…for me to have persons that can think for me, as well as execute orders,” Washington wrote on January 23, 1776.

General Nathanael Greene by Charles Willson Peale. Greene of Rhode Island, a handsome, good-natured Quaker who walked with a limp, knew little of military life other than what he had read in books, when, at thirty-three, he became the youngest brigadier general in the American army. With experience, he would stand second only to Washington. The portrait is one of Peale’s “Gallery of Great Men.”

General John Sullivan by Richard Morrell Staigg. An ambitious New Hampshire politician turned soldier, Sullivan had courage and tenacity, but nothing like Greene’s ability.

General Israel Putnam by John Trumbull. Indomitable, popular “Old Put” of Connecticut was afraid of nothing but unsuited for the multiple responsibilities of a large command.

William Alexander, Lord Stirling by Bass Otis. The only American general to claim a title, Stirling of New Jersey led his small force at Brooklyn with extraordinary valor.

Captain C. W. Peale self-portrait. To please his wife, the artist painted himself in his new Pennsylvania militia uniform.

Thomas and Sarah Mifflin in a portrait by John Singleton Copley. Especially during the escape from Brooklyn, Thomas Mifflin proved to be one of the best officers in Washington’s command.

General Henry Knox by Charles Willson Peale. Big, gregarious, artilleryman Knox, the former Boston bookseller, was, like his friend Nathanael Greene, a man of marked ability, which Washington saw from the start. Under the most trying conditions, through the darkest hours, Knox proved an outstanding leader, capable of accomplishing almost anything, and, like Greene, he remained steadfastly loyal to Washington.

Map 1. The “situation” at Boston as drawn by a British army engineer in October 1775.

Map 2. A detail from a 1776 British map of the battles of Brooklyn and New York shows British movements in red, American in green.

Map 3. A 1777 British map of the battles of Trenton and Princeton.

John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, in a detail from the Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776 by John Trumbull.

The Washington Family by Edward Savage. A post-war print depicts the commander-in-chief at home at Mt. Vernon, surrounded by his wife, Martha, and her grandchildren, Eleanor Custis and George Washington Parke Custis, and the slave William Lee, who served at Washington’s side through the war. The elegance of the general’s world was in sharp contrast to the ragtag army he led in 1776. The cartoon, a British rendition of a representative Yankee patriot, is not widely different from Washington’s own privately expressed view.

Washington’s headquarters through the Siege of Boston was a Cambridge mansion that still stands, now known as the Longfellow House.

General William Howe, who belonged to one of England’s most influential families, was a courageous professional soldier but inclined to dawdle when there was no action. The daring mission by the young amateur artilleryman Henry Knox, to bring the guns of Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights, took Howe completely by surprise.

A big man of big ideas, Knox liked to advertise the “very large” selections of his London Book-Store in Boston with advertisements displaying his own name written largest of all.

A page from Knox’s diary kept through the epic winter expedition to Ticonderoga and back is shown in its actual size. Here he writes of climbing peaks in the Berkshires “from which we might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth.” The date was January 10, 1776.

The British evacuation of Boston began before daylight, Sunday, March 17, 1776. Cannon were spiked or dumped in the harbor, as nearly 9,000 of the King’s troops, and 1,100 Loyalists went aboard British ships bound for Halifax. Americans on shore witnessing the spectacle were cheering and weeping. “Surely it is the Lord’s doing,” wrote Abigail Adams.

Among the Loyalists who fled were many of Boston’s leading citizens, like Justice Peter Oliver. The majority, however, were from every walk of life, farmers and tradesmen, who, firm in their loyalty to the King, considered themselves true patriots.

Washington generously conferred the honor of leading the American troops into Boston to the Massachusetts general, Artemus Ward, shown at left in a portrait by Charles Willson Peale.

Before the British set sail for the open sea, two of their engineers, Captains John Montresor and Archibald Robertson, blew up Castle William in Boston Harbor. The scene below was drawn by Robertson, who had done numerous sketches in and around Boston and kept a diary all through the Siege.

The British armada that sailed into New York Harbor in early summer, 1776, numbered more than 400 ships. It was the largest naval force ever seen in American waters, the largest sent out from the British Isles to defeat a distant foe. With no fighting ships of their own, the Americans faced an almost impossible task of defending against such might.

General Henry Clinton was neither impressive in appearance nor easy for his fellow British commanders to work with, but his plan for a night flanking movement on Brooklyn succeeded brilliantly. Had Clinton’s overall strategy for defeating the Americans been adopted, the outcome of the year’s campaign might have been different.

The fury of the first great battle of the war—and the first colossal defeat for the Continental Army—at Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, is dramatically portrayed in a painting by Alonzo Chappel. In the distance at left, Lord Stirling leads a few hundred Marylanders in a brave attack on the British lines, while in the right foreground other American troops in desperate retreat plunge into Gowanus Creek.

The night escape of the American army from Brooklyn, across the East River, could never have succeeded without the intrepid Marblehead mariners who manned the boats. The pencil sketch of their commander, Colonel John Glover, is by John Trumbull.

In a single night, 9,000 troops, plus equipment and horses, were transported across a mile of turbulent water to New York, without the British ever knowing and without the loss of a single life. In a print by M. A. Wageman, Washington is shown directing the exodus at the Brooklyn ferry landing.

A German engraving of the burning of New York, September 20, 1776, shows great drama but little knowledge of what the city looked like. The British blamed the fire on “lurking” American villains. Washington wrote, “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”

A British flotilla, led by Phoenix and Roebuck, defies the American guns of Fort Lee and Fort Washington to sail up the Hudson on October 9, 1776. The painting by a French marine artist, Dominic Serres, makes the Hudson look narrower—and thus the ships larger—than in reality.

One of the most revealing of the many diaries kept by American soldiers in 1776 was that of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, a Connecticut farmer who recorded his experiences through one ordeal after another, including his time as a prisoner of war. The page at left, from August 28, records how, unexpectedly, the British general James Grant gave the famished prisoners “two quarters of mutton well cooked,” and, from August 29, that the prisoners are to be put aboard a ship.

Captured Americans by the thousands were crowded aboard rotting British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor, where they were to perish by the thousands, mostly from disease.

Grossly fat and contemptuous of Americans, the British general James Grant was also capable of small kindnesses to prisoners like Jabez Fitch (see diary at left) and wrote particularly vivid letters describing the campaign of 1776 from the British point of view.

British troops commanded by General Cornwallis scaled the Hudson River Palisades November 20, 1776, in a watercolor attributed to Lord Rawdon. In fact, this daring British move on New Jersey took place in the dead of night, not in daylight as shown.

Charles Cornwallis by Thomas Gainsborough. The most popular British general serving in America, Cornwallis had shown himself to be enterprising and aggressive. On November 25, 1776, with 10,000 men, he set off across New Jersey determined, he said, to catch Washington as a hunter bags a fox. The one looming uncertainty was the whereabouts of Charles Lee, the eccentric British general turned American patriot who was thought to be a more adroit and dangerous foe than Washington. a caricature of Lee with one of his numerous dogs.

A war of words came to a crescendo during the long retreat of Washington’s battered army across New Jersey. A Proclamation issued by Admiral Lord Richard Howe on November 30, 1776, offered pardon to all Americans who would take an allegiance to the King, and throngs in New Jersey flocked to British camps to sign their names. By contrast, Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, which appeared on December 23, was a powerful summons to American patriotism second only to his Common Sense. Page one with its immortal opening lines is shown at left.

The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey, 26 December 1776 by John Trumbull. Though the ceremony portrayed in Trumbull’s great, stylized painting, with the mortally wounded Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall, surrendering before George Washington, never happened, and no one after the battle looked so costume-perfect, the principals are all readily indentifiable (see key below), and the high drama of Trumbull’s scene was considered in the eighteenth century entirely suitable for the American triumph at Trenton, one of the turning points of the war.

A rapid sketch by John Trumbull, one of several preliminary studies, shows General Hugh Mercer being bayonetted in the fury of the Battle of Princeton.

KEY

1. Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall

2. Colonel William Stevens Smith, aide-de-camp to Major General Sullivan

3. Colonel Robert Hanson Harrison, Military Secretary to Washington

4. Captain Tench Tilghman, Military Secretary to Washington

5. General George Washington

6. Major General John Sullivan

7. Major General Nathanael Greene

8. Captain William Washington

9. Brigadier General Henry Knox

Washington at the Battle of Princeton by Charles Willson Peale. Painted in 1779, this full-length portrait became immediately popular, and Peale produced a number of replicas, one of which was ordered as a present for the King of France. The sash Washington wears is the light blue insignia he chose as commander-in-chief beginning with the summer of 1775. Nassau Hall at Princeton is shown on the distant horizon on the left.

As the war continued after 1776, Nathanael Greene wrote prophetically of Washington’s singular place in history as the “deliverer of his country.”

ALSO BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

John Adams

Truman

Mornings on Horseback

The Path Between the Seas

The Great Bridge

The Johnstown Flood

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020

Copyright © 1992 by David McCullough
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6123-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6123-4

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

American Heritage: “The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man,” December 1969; “The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe,” August 1973; “Steam Road to El Dorado,” June 1976; “The Treasure from the Carpentry Shop,” December 1979; “I Love Washington” (titled here, “Washington on the Potomac”), April-May 1956.

Audubon: “The Man Who Rediscovered America” (titled here, “Journey to the Top of the World”), September 1973; “The American Adventure of Louis Agassis,” January 1977.

The Brooklyn Museum: “The Builders,” from The Great East River Bridge, 1883-1983, 1983.

Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal: “Cross the Blue Mountain,” February 1977.

Geo: “Glory Days in Medora,” October 1979.

Life: “Extraordinary Times,” 1986, Vol. 9, No. 12, Time Inc.

The New York Times Magazine: “Aviator Authors” (titled here, “Long Distance Vision”), October 12, 1986.

The Saint Louis Art Museum: “Remington,” from Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988.

Smithsonian: “A Rothschild Who Is Known as the Queen of the Fleas” (titled here, “Miriam Rothschild”), June 1985.

Viking Press: “South of Kankakee: A Day with David Plowden,” from An American Crenology by David Plowden, 1982.

For Rosalee Barnes McCullough

Contents

Introduction

I PHENOMENA

CHAPTER ONE Journey to the Top of the World

CHAPTER TWO The American Adventure of Louis Agassiz

CHAPTER THREE The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe

II THE REAL WEST

CHAPTER FOUR Glory Days in Medora

CHAPTER FIVE Remington

III PIONEERS

CHAPTER SIX Steam Road to El Dorado

CHAPTER SEVEN The Builders

CHAPTER EIGHT The Treasure from the Carpentry Shop

CHAPTER NINE Long-Distance Vision

IV FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

CHAPTER TEN Cross the Blue Mountain

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man

CHAPTER TWELVE Miriam Rothschild

CHAPTER THIRTEEN South of Kankakee: A Day with David Plowden

V ON WE GO

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Washington on the Potomac

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Extraordinary Times

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Recommended Itinerary

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Simon Willard’s Clock

Index

Introduction

THERE is a story that goes with the painting of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent that hangs in the White House.

Sargent, it is said, had been waiting about the mansion for several days, hoping for a chance to see the president and talk to him about doing his portrait, when one morning the two met unexpectedly as Roosevelt was descending the stairway.

When might there be a convenient time for the president to pose for him, Sargent asked.

“Now!” said the president.

So there he is in the painting, standing at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the newel post. It is a great portrait, capturing more of the subtleties of the Roosevelt personality than any ever done of him.

And it’s a good story. Moments come and go, the president was telling the painter. Here is the time, seize it, do your best.

My earliest ambition was to be an artist. When I was ten or so, our art teacher at Linden School in Pittsburgh, Miss Mavis Bridgewater, demonstrated two-point perspective on the blackboard, and it seemed to me a miracle. I don’t think I would have been much more amazed had she caused her desk to levitate.

I began to draw and paint. At Yale later, though an English major, I studied under an artist named Dean Keller, who, because of the rather old-fashioned portraits he did (largely for the university of its prominent professors) and his insistence on understanding anatomy, was anathema in a department then dominated by Joseph Albers, the German cubist known for his paintings of squares. I wanted to be a portrait painter.

As a writer I am still drawn to the human subject, to people and their stories, more often than to large current issues or any particular field of academic inquiry. The explorer interests me more than geography, the ichthyologist more than his fish, Theodore Roosevelt before, say, the Progressive Movement.

Nor have I ever been able to disassociate people or stories from their settings, the “background.” If character is destiny, so too, I believe, is terrain.

Seeing how the light falls in a marble room on Capitol Hill, or smelling the coal smoke in the air on a winter night in Pennsylvania, helps in making contact with those who were there before in other days. It’s a way to find them as fellow human beings, as necessary as the digging you do in libraries.

At times I’ve not known for certain whether I wanted to go ahead with a story until I have been where it happened.

“The sun was scorching hot and we should have had hats, but we dipped our hands in the water and the farther we went the cooler it got and especially when we hit the rapids,” I read now in a letter I wrote to my wife from Panama years ago, after a first reconnaissance of the Chagres River wilderness made in a dugout canoe with two young sons, two Cuna Indians, and an American hydrologist, Frank Robinson, who knew the names of every tree, most birds and insects, and all about the stupendous cycle of Panama rainfall. A day or two in such country goes far in stirring your sympathy and admiration for those intrepid souls, the pioneer builders, who came there in the last century, first to build a railroad.

Surroundings are essential to contemporary subjects no less. To spend time with someone like Miriam Rothschild in the fervently bizarre atmosphere of the family estate north of London, for example, or to follow David Plowden through the cornfields and small towns of Illinois, is for me the only way to see them clearly.

So the portraits here are often figures in a landscape.

Most of these essays were written for magazines. That they might one day be companion pieces in a book was a thought that never occurred at the time. Each was an individual undertaking. Several of them, for reasons personal or professional, had to be done on short notice, “Now,” as Roosevelt said. They were produced over a period of nearly twenty years, at very different times in my life, and about subjects as dissimilar as Alexander von Humboldt and Conrad Richter. Two of the stories, one set in Panama, the other in the Badlands of North Dakota, resulted from research I was doing for books. Another represents a return to a subject I had already covered in a book, but about which I found I had some new things to say. It was written as a way of honoring the 100th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the final section, I’ve included two speeches written for such different occasions as a college commencement in Vermont and the ceremonies celebrating the bicentennial of the United States Congress.

Yet I find my subjects are more closely connected than I knew. Reading these essays again, selecting and arranging them as a book, I am struck by how much they have in common. In my way, I see now, I have been writing about the same kinds of people all along. And I see, too, the extent to which they have revealed the world and times past for me, and things about myself, that I would not have known otherwise.

Because of the ichthyologist, the incomparable Louis Agassiz, I was introduced not only to his world of fish, but to his way of seeing.

“Look at your fish!” Agassiz admonished his students in what for me remains one of the most valuable of all lessons. “Look at your fish!” are the words of the small, framed reminder I’ve since kept by my desk: discoveries are as likely to be found in material already in hand, before your eyes, as anywhere.

Agassiz was one of the greatest of the great teachers of the nineteenth century. His influence reverberates down to our own day. But then it’s fair to say my subjects are nearly all teachers. They are writers, civil engineers, men and women of science, aviators, wives and mothers, politicians. One of them, Frederic Remington, is a painter and sculptor; another, Harry Caudill, is a small-town lawyer; David Plowden is a photographer. Yet each in his or her own way is teaching us to see, and to experience the exhilaration, or magic, or outrage, or understanding they feel from what they see.

“What a grand and solemn spectacle! The very sight of it renewed our strength,” writes Humboldt of the moment in 1802 when, exhausted, gasping for air at an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet, he and his partner, Aime Bonpland, catch a sudden glimpse through the clouds of the summit of Mount Chimborazo.

“My microscope is my marijuana,” says Miriam Rothschild, who in many ways is Humboldt’s present-day counterpart.

“I don’t think that the men at the top of those enormous corporations are wicked men,” observes Harry Caudill as he and I survey the ravages of strip mining in his native Letcher County, Kentucky. “But you know there’s not a one of them that has been down here to see things with their own eyes, to see what is going on here. Not one. And yet the decisions they make have everything to do with how we live here.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe sees the evil of slavery and sees her duty plain. From the vantage point of the airplane, Charles and Anne Lindbergh and their fellow pioneer aviators, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Beryl Markham, begin to understand their place in the large order of things.

Finding my subjects over the years has been mostly a process of one thing leading to another. Reading about Henry Ward Beecher, as a way to understanding what life was like on Brooklyn Heights at the time the Brooklyn Bridge was being built, I came upon his sister Harriet, as described in Constance Mayfield Rourk’s vivid book, The Trumpets of Jubilee. Reading about early explorations of Central America for background on Panama, I encountered Humboldt for the first time, and research for an article on Humboldt led me to Agassiz, one of whose star students, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, was Theodore Roosevelt’s professor of geology at Harvard. It was to understand Roosevelt and his time in the Badlands that I looked into the life and influence of Remington. And so it has gone.

The research has rarely been dull, for the farther one goes in the pursuit, the more fascinating it becomes, like being on a detective case. Conrad Richter once told me he was seldom happier than when working at a big library table, with books, notes, and old letters all about him. It was later I found out what he meant.

How can I spend so much time on one subject, I am sometimes asked. The answer, of course, is that no subject is ever just one subject, but ten, twenty, more. You never know.

What is your theme, is another familiar question, and I rarely can say, not at least in the early stages of a project. “I can’t tell as yet,” I have to reply. To find the answer is one of the chief reasons for undertaking the story.

Reading about the lives of such great figures of the nineteenth century as Mrs. Stowe, Agassiz, the Roeblings, one is struck again and again by how much they accomplished in a lifetime. Where did they find the time or energy—if only to write all those letters? Or to keep such diaries? I wonder if perhaps it was because tuning out boredom had not yet been made so easy as in our day, before commercial entertainment took over in American life.

Those I have written about here nearly all led lives of active discovery and right to the last. They are immensely charged, renewed by what they do. Their work and interests are inspiriting forces. Harriet Beecher Stowe felt obliged to make herself useful. But then, I see now, they nearly all do in these stories. With the books they write, their bridges, pictures, their breakthroughs in science, the children they raise, their record journeys, the risks they take, they are the givers of civilization.

But I know the primary reason why I write about them: the great pull after all, is that they are good stories, even the few I don’t like, such as the Marquis de Mores. Many of their lives are deeply moving. To me they themselves are often very glamorous, in the old, true sense of the word.

If there is a prevailing, unifying theme, I suppose it is the part courage plays. The exuberant daring of the Humboldt expedition is one kind. The moral resolve of Harry Caudill is another. Young Teddy Roosevelt’s determination to remain himself in the Wild West, in the face of ridicule, is another kind still.

Courage, moreover, is communicable. It was not Humboldt alone, but he and Bonpland together, who set off on the Orinoco; not one railroad builder who went into the Panama jungle in the 1850s, but a force of many. She flew as her husband’s copilot across thousands of uncharted miles, remembers Anne Lindbergh, knowing sheer terror much of the time. These are brave companions.

Every writing task involves new problems, some larger than others. Mainly writing means a great deal of hard thinking, the popular impression notwithstanding. (Paul Weis, who taught philosophy at Yale, one remarked, “I’m not as bright as my students. I find I have to think before I write.”) Yet sometimes the very struggle of getting the words down on paper does result in unexpected discoveries or clarifications.

In 1986 I was called by an editor of Life. The magazine, he said, would soon be fifty years old and he wanted me to do an essay for a special anniversary issue.

Would I sum up the importance of world history since 1936 in five thousand words?

I could hardly believe he was serious. The world since 1936 indeed! I stalled, said I would have to get back to him.

When I put the phone down and explained what he wanted to my wife, she said quietly, “You must do it.”

The article, “Extraordinary Times,” different in focus from others here, is included because I think it still stands on its own, for all the tumultuous change since 1986, in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East, but also because the experience impressed on me as nothing before had the extent to which the little-known events of a given time, and people who are not in the headlines, can be what matter most in the long run. And the long run is the measure of history.

In writing history, to catch the feeling as well as the “truth” of other times, it is of utmost importance, I believe, to convey the sense that things need not have happened as they did. Life in other times past was never on a track, any more than it is now or ever will be. The past after all is only another name for someone else’s present. How would things turn out? They knew no better than we know how things will turn out for us.

The problem, as Thornton Wilder said, “lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.”

It is a shame that history is ever made dry and tedious, or offered as a chronicle almost exclusively of politics, war, and social issues, when, of course, it is the full sweep of human experience: politics, war, and social issues to be sure, but also music, science, religion, medicine, the way things are made, new ideas, high attainments in every field, money, the weather, love, loss, endless ambiguities and paradoxes and small towns you never heard of. History is a spacious realm. There should be no walls.

What history is chiefly about is life, and while there are indeed great, often unfathomable forces in history before which even the most exceptional of individuals seem insignificant, the wonder is how often events turn on a single personality, or the quality called character.

I have been going through some of the research files for the stories that follow, remembering not only the work and where it was done, but much else about my own life at the time. I had ventured into the serious business of the historian as an amateur, and with a growing family to support, I was often near the end of my rope financially. But again and again, there were my subjects to lend encouragement, setting a standard by example. How could I not have taken heart from finding that it was as an amateur that Agassiz did his work on glaciers? Or from the picture of him descending by rope’s end into one of the “blue wells” on the Aar and surviving to tell the tale?

These, as I have said, are brave companions, the best of companions.

Humboldt never reached the summit of Chimborazo. Agassiz’s star faded. Washington Roebling endured the painful effects of his work on the Brooklyn Bridge for the rest of his days. Harry Caudill did not live to see an end to strip mining or poverty in Kentucky.

Yet, as I recognize now, these are all success stories. The key is attitude. I hope the reader will remember what Agassiz says to young William James as they lie sleepless in their hammocks on the deck of a steamer on the Amazon, on still another expedition, and how it was that Simon Willard made his clock and why it keeps ticking.

—David McCullough

West Tisbury, Massachusetts
April 8, 1991

I

PHENOMENA

CHAPTER ONE

Journey to the Top of the World

ON A MORNING in May 1804, there arrived at the White House by Baltimore coach, and in the company of the painter Charles Willson Peale, a visitor from abroad: an aristocratic young German, age thirty-four, a bachelor, occupation scientist and explorer. And like Halley’s comet or the white whale or other such natural phenomena dear to the nineteenth century, he would be remembered by all who saw him for the rest of their days.

He had come to pay his respects to the president of the new republic, Thomas Jefferson, a fellow “friend of science,” and to tell him something of his recent journeys through South and Central America. For the next several weeks he did little else but talk, while Jefferson, on their walks about the White House grounds; or James Madison, the secretary of state; or the clever Mrs. Madison; or Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury; or those who came to dine with the president or to do business with him, listened in awe.

The young man, they found, was a naturalist, an astronomer, a geographer, a geologist, a botanist, an authority on Indian antiquities, a linguist, an artist—an academy unto himself, as the poet Goethe would say. He was at home in any subject. He had read every book. He had seen things almost impossible to imagine. “We all consider him as a very extraordinary man,” Gallatin told his wife, speaking apparently for Jefferson’s entire official family, “and his travels, which he intends publishing on his return to Europe, will, I think, rank above any other productions of the kind.” He also talked at double the speed of anybody Gallatin had ever met before and would shift suddenly from English, which he spoke superbly, into French or Spanish or German, seemingly unaware of what he was doing, but never hesitating for a word, apparently to the very great confusion of his newfound American friends, Jefferson and the Swiss-born Gallatin not included.

Gallatin, a man not easily impressed, found the extent of the visitor’s reading and scientific knowledge astonishing. “I was delighted,” he said, “and swallowed more information of various kinds in less than two hours than I had for two years past in all I had read and heard.”

In a letter to Jefferson written from Philadelphia a few days earlier, the young man had said, “[I would] love to talk to you about a subject that you have treated so ingeniously in your work on Virginia, the teeth of mammoth, which we too discovered in the Andes.” Jefferson had responded immediately and most cordially. “A lively desire will be felt generally to receive the information you will be able to give.” In the new capital city, Jefferson wrote, there was “nothing curious to attract the observations of a traveler,” which was largely so, save, of course, for Jefferson himself. Upon arrival the young man had found the presidential mansion anything but imposing—crude wooden steps led to the front door, rooms were still unplastered—and at one point he had inadvertently encountered the chief executive sprawled on the floor, wrestling with his grandchildren.

But there they were in Washington for several days, two of the most remarkable men of their time, fellow spirits if ever there were, talking, talking endlessly, intensely, their conversation having quickly ranged far from fossil teeth.

The young man’s name was Humboldt, Alexander von Humboldt—Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt—or Baron von Humboldt, as he was commonly addressed. He had been born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, the second son of a middle-aged army officer, a minor figure in the court of Frederick the Great, and of a rather solemn, domineering young woman of Huguenot descent who had inherited a sizable fortune. He was a baron in about the way some Southerners are colonels.

William Burwell, Jefferson’s private secretary, described him as looking considerably younger than his age, “of small figure, well made, agreeable looks, simple unaffected manners, remarkably sprightly.” And Humboldt’s passport, issued in Paris in 1798, has him five feet, eight inches tall, with “light-brown hair, gray eyes, large nose, rather large mouth, well-formed chin, open forehead marked by smallpox.” However, in a portrait by Peale, done shortly after the trip to see Jefferson, the eyes are as blue as Dutch tiles.

Years later, when the phenomenon of Humboldt had become known the world over, the learned and curious would journey thousands of miles for the chance to see him, and his published works would be taken as the gospel of a new age. He would be regarded as the incomparable high priest of nineteenth-century science—a towering godlike inspiration to such a disparate assortment of individuals as John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Charles Lyell, Simon Bolivar, W. H. Hudson, William Hickling Prescott, Edward Whymper, Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz. Darwin, during the voyage of the Beagle, would carry with him three inspirational books—the Bible, Milton, and Humboldt.

But at this point the name Humboldt meant very little. The honorary citizenships, the countless decorations, were all still to come. No Pacific Ocean current, no bay or glacier or river had been named for him as yet, no mountains in China. Humboldt, Kansas, and Humboldt, Iowa, were still prairie grass, part of that incomprehensibly vast piece of the continent purchased by Jefferson from Napoleon only the year before and that Jefferson had just sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to investigate. So it was the young man himself, not a reputation, and the story he had to tell that captivated everyone. After nearly five years he had returned from one of the great scientific odysseys of all time. It was a journey that would capture the imagination of the age, but that has been strangely forgotten in our own time. It is doubtful that one educated American in ten today could say who exactly Humboldt was or what he did, not even, possibly, in Humboldt, Iowa, or Humboldt, Kansas. Perhaps this is because his travels were through Spanish America. Perhaps his extraordinary accomplishments were simply overshadowed by the popular impact of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In any event, his was a journey of enormous scientific consequence (far more so than the Lewis and Clark expedition) and a fascinating adventure by any standards.

In the company of a young French medical doctor turned botanist, Aime Bonpland, Humboldt had departed from La Coruña, Spain, in June 1799, on a Spanish frigate, slipping past a British blockade in the dark of night, in the midst of a storm, and carrying with him a unique document from the Spanish government. He and Bonpland had been granted complete freedom to explore—for scientific purposes—any or all of Spain’s largely unexplored American colonies; to make astronomical observations, maps; to collect; to go wherever they wished, speak to whomever they wished. The whole arrangement was quite unprecedented (prior to this Spain had rigorously denied any such travels by foreigners), and it had come about quite by chance.

Humboldt, after completing his education and serving as a government inspector of mines in Prussia, had decided to lead his own far-flung scientific expedition. Just where was an open question, but both of his parents had died, with the result that he had become a man of ample private means and was free to do whatever he wished. His impulse had been to go to Egypt, to catch up with Napoleon’s troops there. But he and Bonpland (whom he had met by chance in Paris) had proceeded no farther than Spain when Humboldt, during an audience with Charles IV, expressed an interest in His Catholic Majesty’s overseas empire. An expedition, to be paid for by Humboldt, was immediately and most unexpectedly sanctioned, and the two young men were on their way.

The ship followed Columbus’s route, going first to the Canary Islands, and though it was Humboldt’s intention to commence his scientific discovery of the New World at Cuba, the Spanish captain, after an outbreak of typhoid fever on board, decided to put the two explorers ashore at Cumaná, on the coast of present-day Venezuela, or New Granada, as it was then known.

They landed, bag and baggage, on July 16. Their gear included forty-odd scientific instruments, the most versatile and finest available at the time and just the sort of thing Thomas Jefferson would have found fascinating. Included were a tiny, two-inch sextant (a so-called snuffbox sextant), compasses, a microscope, barometers and thermometers that had been standardized with those of the Paris observatory before departure, three different kinds of electrometers, a device for measuring the specific gravity of seawater, telescopes, a theodolite, a Leyden jar, an instrument by which the blueness of the sky could be determined, a large and cumbersome magnetometer, and a rain gauge. Their excitement was enormous. No botanist, no naturalist or scientist of any kind, had ever been there before them. Everything was new, even the stars in the sky. “We are here in a divine country,” Humboldt wrote to his brother. “What trees, Coconut trees, fifty to sixty feet high, Poinciana pulcherrima, with a foot-high bouquet of magnificent, bright-red flowers; pisang and a host of trees with enormous leaves and scented flowers, as big as the palm of a hand, of which we knew nothing…And what colors in birds, fish, even crayfish (sky blue and yellow)! We rush around like the demented; in the first three days we were quite unable to classify anything; we pick up one object to throw it away for the next. Bonpland keeps telling me that he will go mad if the wonders do not cease soon.”

And then they were on the move. For three months they explored and mapped the coastal plain, collecting some sixteen hundred plants—palms, orchids, grasses, bamboos—among which they were able to identify six hundred new species. They witnessed a total eclipse, an earthquake, and, on a night in November, a spectacular meteor shower that went on for hours. They paddled up the Apure River to its confluence with the Orinoco and there commenced what was to be their major effort: they would trace the Orinoco to its source, something no one had done before, and establish that there is a connection, by the Rio Negro, between the Orinoco and the Amazon.

In all—on the Apure, the Orinoco, the Atabapo, the Negro, and Casiquiare—they spent seventy-five days in open boats or canoes, traveling an estimated 6,443 miles through one of the most difficult and little-known places on Earth. Sometimes, on the Casiquiare, for example, they could make almost no headway against the current, they and their Indian guides rowing strenuously for fourteen hours to go all of nine miles. The smothering humidity and torrential rains destroyed most of their provisions. For weeks they lived on bananas and ants, or an occasional fried monkey.

They went as far as Esmeralda, a tiny mosquito-infested village, which Humboldt put on his map and which, curiously, remains on most every map of South America to this day despite the fact that there is no longer a single trace of the place. By September 1, 1800, when they again reached Cumaná, they had beheld, examined, sketched, collected, and classified more plants than any botanist before them (some twelve thousand, by their count). They had gathered rock samples, fishes and reptiles placed in phials, the skins of animals—enough in fact to keep Humboldt occupied for the rest of his life. Yet they had been barely able to collect a tenth of what they had seen, and the humidity and insects had destroyed more than a third of what they had in their plant boxes.

They themselves, miraculously, held up very well. For two such thoroughly inexperienced, ill-prepared young Europeans to have plunged ahead as they did, knowing nothing of life in the jungle, virtually unequipped by modern standards, had been both amazingly presumptuous and reckless. Bonpland did not even know how to swim. Yet they withstood the broiling climate and every other kind of tropical discomfort with little more to protect them than their own “cheerful character,” as Humboldt noted. “With some gaiety of temper,” he said, “with feelings of mutual good will, and with a vivid taste for the majestic grandeur of these vast valleys of rivers, travelers easily supported evils that become habitual.” The mosquitoes he described as being an atmosphere unto themselves, covering the face, the hands, filling the nostrils. Invariably, he said, they “occasion coughing and sneezing whenever any attempt is made to speak in the open air”—terrible punishment for someone who so loved to talk.

To avoid the suffocating heat, he and Bonpland often started the day at two in the morning. Their only salvation from the mosquitoes was to bury themselves in sand.

Toward the end of their journey back down the Orinoco, both men came down with typhoid fever. Bonpland very nearly died, but Humboldt, who had been troubled by ill health most of his life, made a rapid recovery and except for that one instance remained perfectly fit throughout, healthier than at any time in his life. He seemed made for the tropics. The days were never long enough. His spirits soared. This for him was life at its fullest and best. “I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration,” he wrote to his brother. “I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning.”

He believed, this brilliant, determined young man being eaten alive by mosquitoes, that there is a harmony of nature, that man is a part of that harmony, and that if he himself could observe things closely enough, collect enough—if he knew enough—then the forces that determine that harmony would become apparent.

Nothing seems to have escaped his notice. His physical energy was boundless—incredible really. Literally everything seems to have interested him. He sketched, he made astronomical observations, magnetic observations. He gathered up rocks and minerals and Indian artifacts. Above all, he kept the most copious notes imaginable—on tides, soils, petroleum, chocolate, rubber; on missionaries; on the physique of the Carib Indian, the anatomy of shellfish; on turtle eggs, howling monkeys, alligators (one found sunning itself on a sandbank on the Orinoco measured twenty-two feet); on vampire bats and poison darts and electric eels (wonder of wonders); on the nighttime cacophony of the jungle and the sudden silence imposed by the roar of the jaguar (an observation that would intrigue Audubon); on a tribe of Indians, the Otomaco, that overcame annual seasons of famine by eating a particular kind of dirt; on a dark, ugly nocturnal bird called the guacharo (the oilbird), a bird about the size of a chicken, which he encountered in screeching hordes inside a gloomy grotto; on the ravages of termites; on an exotic tree that gave milk (it was actually an Artocarpus, which had been brought to America by the Spanish only a score of years earlier); on the great grass fires that lit up the night on the Ilanos, the sweeping plains that reach southward from Caracas; on Indian legends, Indian diet, Indian apathy, Indian languages. (W. H. Hudson, the great English author whose classic Green Mansions is set in the same general locale, would tell a story that Humboldt acquired a parrot from which he was able to produce the vocabulary of an extinct tribe, and that Humboldt later took the bird back to Paris, where it became something of a sensation. Humboldt makes no mention of such a bird in his own writings, but he did include the vocabulary in question in his discussion of comparative native tongues.)

Few Europeans had ever responded with such fervor to an equatorial wilderness as Alexander von Humboldt. Sir Walter Raleigh, two hundred years earlier, on his own famous and abortive expedition up the Orinoco, wrote that he had never seen a more beautiful country and described “all fair green grass, deer crossing our path, the birds toward evening singing on every side a thousand different tunes, herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the riverside…” Humboldt had read every word Raleigh had written, and his response was no less to a world that had changed not in the slightest in all the intervening time. Often he-found himself emotionally overwhelmed by his surroundings, and his notebook entries were set down with a depth of feeling that had little to do with science. There was, for example, the moment on April 15 when he and his party first reached the mouth of the Apure and beheld the Orinoco:

In leaving the Rio Apure we found ourselves in a country presenting a totally different aspect. An immense plain of water stretched before us like a lake, as far as we could see. White-topped waves rose to the height of several feet, from the conflict of the breeze and the current. The air resounded no longer with the piercing cries of herons, flamingos, and spoonbills, crossing in long files from one shore to the other…All nature appeared less animated. Scarcely could we discover in the hollows of the waves a few large crocodiles, cutting obliquely by the help of their long tails the surface of the agitated waters. The horizon was bounded by a zone of forests, which nowhere reached so far as the bed of the river. A vast beach, constantly parched by the heat of the sun, desert and bare as the shores of the sea, resembled at a distance, from the effect of the mirage, pools of stagnant water. These sandy shores, far from fixing limits of the river, render them uncertain, by enlarging or contracting them alternately, according to the variable action of the solar rays.

In these scattered features of the landscape, in this character of solitude and greatness, we recognized the course of the Orinoco, one of the most majestic rivers of the New World.

Or there was this extraordinary description of the jungle at midday:

How vivid is the impression produced by the calm of nature, at noon, in these burning climates! The beasts of the forests retire to the thickets; the birds hide themselves beneath the foliage of the trees, or in the crevices of the rocks. Yet, amidst this apparent silence, when we lend an attentive ear, we hear a dull vibration, a continual murmur, a hum of insects, filling, if you may use the expression, all the lower strata of the air. Nothing is better fitted to make man feel the extent and power of organic life. Myriads of insects creep upon the soil, and flutter round the plants parched by the heat of the sun. A confused noise issues from every bush, from the decayed trunks of trees, from the clefts of rocks, and from the ground undermined by lizards [and] millipedes…. These are so many voices proclaiming to us that all nature breathes; and that under a thousand different forms life is diffused throughout the cracked and dusty soil, as well as the bosom of the waters, and in the air that circulates around us.

“This aspect of animated nature,” he would add, “in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad.”

It was such passages that would so stir the soul of the nineteenth century, when they appeared in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of the expedition.

Darwin would confide that Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics, read over and over again during his youth, had inspired his entire career. Darwin also liked Humboldt’s account of an earthquake at Caracas enough to have lifted some of it, pretty much intact, for his Voyage of the Beagle.

From Venezuela, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed for Cuba, arriving at Havana and the comforts of civilization in November of 1800. Humboldt wandered about Havana’s botanical garden, made more maps (the first accurate maps of Cuba), and observed with sinking heart the institution of slavery (“no doubt the greatest of all evils that afflict humanity”). He and Bonpland also divided up their collections three ways, shipping one part to France, another to Germany, and leaving the third with friends in Havana. Their anxiety over the safety of these treasures was very great indeed, and one gets the impression that Humboldt now had certain misgivings about their own chances of survival. “It is really quite uncertain, almost unlikely,” he wrote, “that both of us, Bonpland and myself, will ever return alive.”

The following spring they sailed for the coast of present-day Colombia, to the mouth of the Magdalena, by which, for the next fifty-odd days, they headed south again, deep inland for hundreds of miles against the current, as far as an outpost called Honda. Before them stood the cordillera of the Andes. They left the river and went overland to Bogotá, where a brightly dressed cavalcade of distinguished citizens rode out to escort them into town.

All told they spent nearly two years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. From Bogotá they went over the Andes on foot, picking the more difficult of two possible routes. They were in the Andes, crossing and recrossing, from September 1801 until October 1802, and they must have made a picturesque caravan, with their guides and mules and scientific instruments. Mountains were measured, valleys sounded, the distribution of vegetation traced on windswept upland slopes. Humboldt was struck by the distinct variations in plant life, according to elevation. The vegetation on the mountains was stratified, he found, and that stratification, he concluded, was dependent on soil, temperature, and weather conditions. There were vertical zones, in other words, and these were characterized at a glance by their plant life. It was a new concept and an extremely important one. As a latter-day biographer was to write, “He began to see what nobody had understood clearly before him: that life’s forms and their grouping with one another are conditioned by physical factors in their environment, that atmospheric and geologic conditions need to be known if we are to learn the meaning behind organic life. As in his student days he had described rocks and minerals in relation to plants, he now realized more fully that to classify and identify counted for little unless you understood how to relate such information to integrated natural processes.”

He would be called the second Columbus. He had rediscovered America, it would be said. He was also seeing relationships and interrelationships between the Earth and life on Earth in a way that others before him had failed to do. So it would be perfectly fitting also to say that he was among the first ecologists.

They arrived at Quito, Ecuador, on January 6, 1802, and spent the next several months sorting out the new collections acquired along the way. In May, Humboldt and an Indian whose name is unknown climbed an active volcano called Pichincha, something only one man had done before as near as Humboldt could determine. Then on June 9, 1802, he, Bonpland, a number of Indians, and a young Spanish naturalist named Carlos Montufar, who had joined the expedition in Quito, set out to climb Chimborazo, the extinct, snow-capped volcano, elevation 20,561 feet, the highest mountain in Ecuador and then thought to be the highest mountain anywhere on Earth.

Humboldt and Bonpland had by now been in the mountains long enough to know what they were about and to be in exceptional physical condition. They were very likely the finest mountaineers in the world, since mountaineering as a sport and the whole philosophical concept of mountain “conquering” had yet to dawn on the nineteenth-century mind. But again, as on the Orinoco, they set off with little in the way of equipment as we know it, no special clothing, and with little or no knowledge of the mountain itself. Yet “by dint of extreme exertion and considerable patience” they very nearly made it all the way to the top.

How Humboldt and his companions went up, the route they took, is not at all clear from his account. But in many places, he writes, the ridge was no wider than eight or ten inches. On their left a snow-covered precipice shone like glass, on their right “a fearful abyss” dropped away a thousand feet or more. “At certain places where it was very steep, we were obliged to use both hands and feet, and the edges of the rock were so sharp that we were painfully cut, especially on our hands.” Much of the time they were shrouded in mist so thick they were unable even to see their own feet. Then all at once the air would clear for an instant and the dome-shaped summit would stand out before them, gleaming in the sunshine. “What a grand and solemn spectacle! The very sight of it renewed our strength.”

At 15,000 feet Bonpland captured a butterfly. At 15,600 feet the Indians, with one exception, refused to go any farther. At 16,600 feet Humboldt spotted an ordinary housefly. Above the snow line, at about 16,900 feet, rock lichens were the only sign of life. The next reading was taken at 17,300 feet, at a spot where the ridge was just barely wide enough to set up the barometer and two of them could stand side by side in safety.

They were stopped finally by an impassable ravine. Nauseated by the thin air, they were all so dizzy they could barely stand. Their lips and gums were bleeding. The time, Humboldt says, was an hour after noon. Again the barometer was set up. The temperature, they found, was three degrees below freezing, which both Humboldt and Bonpland, “from our long residence in the tropics,” found “quite benumbing.” The altitude where they stood was 19,286 feet, higher than anyone had ever been before, even in a balloon.

They had attained the top of the world, they thought. For Humboldt it was a supreme, indescribable moment. Nearly thirty years later, in 1828, when the surpassing magnitude of the Himalayas, long a subject of much conjecture, was verified by the first reliable instrument surveys, Humboldt was noticeably stunned. To a friend he wrote, “All my life I prided myself on the fact that of all mortals I had reached the highest point on Earth.”

Chimborazo itself would not be climbed for another seventy-eight years. In 1880, Edward Whymper, the British mountaineer and artist, the first man to climb the Matterhorn (in 1865), would reach the top of Chimborazo, following what he figured to be Humboldt’s route. That Humboldt had come as far as he did, Whymper found extraordinary. Darwin, after a brief hike in the Chilean Andes, at an elevation of about 13,000 feet, would write that it was “incomprehensible” to him how Humboldt had done it.

Humboldt and the others in his party descended from Chimborazo in a great hurry—the first 3,600 feet in all of an hour, according to Humboldt, a claim Edward Whymper would declare preposterous. And like our own men on the moon, they busily gathered up all the rocks they could carry. “We foresaw that in Europe,” Humboldt said, “we should frequently be asked for a fragment from Chimborazo.” Whether he had such a memento with him when he arrived at the White House is not known.

From Chimborazo the party pushed farther south, into the valley of the upper Amazon. Then they were climbing again into the rarefied air of the Andes, traveling now, on occasion, along the “wonderful remains of the Inca Roads” and taking, as it happens, about the same route as the present-day Pan-American Highway. The Inca Road and the thought of the effort and ingenuity it represented left the two Europeans feeling strangely humbled. Nothing built by the Romans had ever struck Humboldt as so imposing, and at one point, according to his calculations, this road was at an elevation of thirteen thousand feet. At Paramo and Cajamarca they examined Inca ruins. No ignorant savages were these, he concluded.

He was immensely taken, too, by the giant condors that circled overhead, high above all the summits of the Andes. How was it possible—physiologically—he wondered, for a creature to fly in circles for hours in air so thin, then descend all at once to the level of the sea, “thus passing through all gradations of climate.”

Then, on a western slope of the Andes, they saw the sea. The sky brightened suddenly, as a sharp southwest wind came up, clearing the mist and revealing an immense bowl of very dark blue sky. The entire western slope of the cordillera, as far as the eye could carry, was spread at their feet. “Now for the first time,” he wrote, “we had our view of the Pacific. We saw it distinctly in the glitter of a vast light, an immeasurable expanse of ocean.” Humboldt was so excited that for once he forgot to take a barometric reading.

On October 23, 1802, they arrived at Lima, where they spent two uneventful months. The collections were carefully gone over and repacked; Humboldt made notes on the local use of guano, the fertilizing properties of which were still unknown in Europe. In late December they sailed north for Mexico, and it was during this voyage, as they skirted the shores of Peru, that Humboldt took soundings, temperature readings and the like, in that icy, north-flowing Pacific current so rich in marine organisms that now bears his name. He would insist always that he had simply studied it, never discovered it, that it had been known to sailors and fishermen for centuries; and on his own maps he would label it the Peruvian Current. He could protest as much as he liked, however. The Humboldt Current it would be, and ironically, it is probably the thing for which he is now best known.

They spent a year in Mexico, from March 1803, when they landed at Acapulco, until March 1804, when they sailed from Veracruz for Havana again. It had been a long time since Mexico was a wilderness, and there was little of the natural splendor and mystery of the Orinoco or of the Andes to entice the explorers. But Humboldt’s zest for the place seems to have been none the less for all that. He was seldom still. He worked mainly on a map that, once finished, would be the finest thing ever done on Mexico until then. So at variance and imperfect were most maps of the day that the position of Mexico City, for example, differed as much as three hundred miles from one map to another. His was not only geographically accurate, being based on astronomical observations, but would include quantities of political, economic, and ethnological information.

He also studied silver mining, climate, volcanic action, meteorological phenomena. And again he was absorbed in remnants of the pre-Columbian past. With Bonpland in tow, he took a day’s ride out to Teotihuacán and the two of them stood spellbound before that ancient temple city. He made measurements of the great pyramids and later sketched Aztec codices and the Aztec calendar stone. Humboldt was, in fact, the first European to sense the scale and greatness of America’s ancient civilizations, to take their religious traditions seriously, and his subsequent writings on the subject would open an entire new world for scholars, inspiring, in particular, such latter-day giants in the field as Stephens, who discovered the Maya temples of the Yucatan, and Prescott, author of The History of the Conquest of Mexico.

Humboldt and Bonpland stayed only a short while at Havana when they stopped there the second time. After gathering up the collections they had left for safekeeping, they sailed for Philadelphia, where Charles Willson Peale showed them about his amazing museum of natural history, set up in Independence Hall, where now stood, among numerous other curiosities, a mammoth, the first fossil skeleton ever mounted in America.

There was a banquet in Humboldt’s honor at Peale’s museum, attended by Alexander Wilson, William Bartram, and, among others, a young guest brought by Wilson, John Bachman, then just fourteen years old, who was to be Audubon’s great friend and collaborator (on the three-volume Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America). Then came the visit to Washington, followed by a brief trip with Jefferson to Monticello, where their conversations continued during more long walks in the gathering heat of the Virginia summer. A famous lifelong friendship had been founded.

On August 3, 1804, Humboldt and Bonpland arrived at Bordeaux, causing a great commotion, since their death by yellow fever had been widely reported some time earlier. They had been gone five years. In addition to all their instruments and Humboldt’s journals and record books, they had brought with them “forty-two boxes, containing an herbal of six thousand equinoctial plants, seeds, shells, insects, and what had hitherto never been brought to Europe, geological specimens from the Chimborazo, New Granada, and the banks of the river of the Amazons.” It was a very different kind of loot from the New World.

But the journals and the collections were only part of what had been accomplished, only a beginning. Humboldt would spend the next thirty-odd years and virtually all his personal fortune publishing thirty monumental volumes under the general title Voyages aux Régions Equinoctiales du Nouveau Continent, Fait Dans Les Années 1799 à 1804. These colossal works were issued in folio and quarto size and contained well over a thousand illustrations and maps, many of them hand-colored. Humboldt did most of the text, but others, specialists of one kind or another, were also enlisted, among them Georges de Cuvier, the zoologist. The books appeared between 1807 and 1839. The complete set cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000. How much the entire enterprise cost is impossible to say, since Humboldt kept secret all his expenses, as well as the total number of books published. The one available figure is for paper, plates, and printing, which came to $226,000.

But Humboldt also produced Views of Nature (1807), Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), and the very popular Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, which appeared in French first, then English, and in a variety of different editions starting in 1815. The Personal Narrative was a smashing publishing success and made his name known everywhere. The overall effect of his writing and the extent of his influence were enormous and in a few instances had some interesting consequences.

The Personal Narrative, to give one example, included a long, detailed discussion of a future ship canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific somewhere on the Central American isthmus—the first such study ever presented in print. Humboldt, during his travels, had never set foot anywhere on the isthmus, and this he plainly acknowledged, but he was taken as the irrefutable voice of authority all the same. He named five likely routes for a canal, and of these he thought Nicaragua the most suitable, everything considered, with the result that his opinion and his name would be used to support one Nicaragua canal scheme after another throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and right up until the spring of 1902, when the United States Senate by an extremely narrow margin decided instead on Panama.

Some of what he wrote was nonsense, based on hearsay or wild guesswork. He was completely taken in by stories told in the Andes of live fish being spewed out of an erupting volcano. He reckoned the Rocky Mountains to be perhaps 3,500 feet high. But many of his calculations, such as the length of the Orinoco, were uncannily accurate. He also made some astonishing, educated guesses that put him years ahead of his time. It had long been thought, for example, that there is a difference between the levels of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Pacific was believed to be as much as twenty feet higher, and this supposedly would cause overwhelming problems should a canal ever be opened between the two oceans. But from his own observations, Humboldt was convinced there was no difference in levels—only in the size and timing of the tides. Not until the 1850s, during the surveying of the Panama Railroad, was the issue settled by American engineers. Humboldt was proven to be quite correct.

There are also passages in the Personal Narrative substantiating the idea that Humboldt must be ranked among the earliest ecologists. In his speculations on a tide-level canal he shows himself to be deeply and uniquely concerned about the effect of such a channel on the whole pattern of the great ocean currents. But even more pointed, more remarkable, considering when it was written, is something he wrote after examining a lake in Venezuela, a lake that had been mysteriously declining, even though it had no visible outlet. The answer to the riddle, Humboldt said, was not in the lake but in what man was doing to the surrounding countryside:

By felling trees that cover the tops and sides of the mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations: the want of fuel and a scarcity of water…. When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappear with the brushwood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course; and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil, and form those sudden inundations that devastate the country. Hence it results that the destruction of the forests, the want of permanent springs, and the existence of torrents are three phenomena closely connected together.

Humboldt’s books were praised on both sides of the Atlantic. Louis Agassiz was to remark that a walk through the largest botanical garden would hardly be more impressive than an examination of the Humboldt plates. But the Spanish American odyssey had resulted in still more. Major contributions had been made to natural science, to man’s knowledge of the Earth and its life systems. Humboldt had been the first to recognize the essential relationships that unite the physical features of the planet, the laws of climate for which he originated the system of isothermal lines (his term) that has been accepted as a standard concept for so long that few remember who started it; the distribution of vegetation over the Earth according to climate and elevation (the basis of plant ecology). He had laid the foundations for modern descriptive geography. He had drawn the first geological sections (in Mexico). He had made vital observations concerning the Earth’s magnetism, volcanism, and the role it plays in mountain building. Perhaps most important of all, he and Bonpland had demonstrated how relatively little had been known of the richness and variety of life on Earth, the infinite abundance of life’s forms, and how infinitely much more there was to know.

Humboldt lived long enough to see most of his ideas become old hat, and he concluded toward the end that his chief contribution had been to influence younger men. The young Latin American intellectual Simon Bolívar had sought him out in Rome one year to talk about political freedom. John Charles Frémont, who regarded Humboldt as a god, had gone off exploring and sprinkled Humboldt’s name all over the map of Nevada. John Bachman would say that his own interest in natural history began with meeting Humboldt at the dinner at Peale’s museum. An intense young Englishman named Charles Lyell, who was to become the great geologist, wrote after a long interview, “There are few heroes who lose so little by being approached as Humboldt.”

Most impressive of all perhaps is the case of Louis Agassiz, who as a struggling young zoologist in Paris received from Humboldt not only encouragement and guidance, but a donation of a thousand francs to assist in the publication of his initial work on fishes. “How he examined me,” Agassiz was to write later, describing a dinner with Humboldt in a Paris restaurant, “and how much I learned in that short time! How to work, what to do, and what to avoid, how to live, how to distribute my time, what methods of study to pursue.”

In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new career in politics as an adviser to the Prussian king, the keen, relentless observation of the natural world that lasted more than seventy years. “But Humboldt is not only an observer,” Agassiz would declare, “not only a physicist, a geographer, a geologist of matchless power and erudition, he knows that nature has its attraction for the soul of man; that however uncultivated, man is impressed by the great phenomena amid which he lives; that he is dependent for his comforts and the progress of civilization upon the world that surrounds him.”

The final work, the master work, the grand summing up, was something called Cosmos. It was to contain all Humboldt knew—of art, nature, history, all branches of science—portraying as never before the grand harmonies of the Earth and universe. He wished to convey the excitement of science to the intelligent nonscientific reader. He had been thinking about such a work for fifty years. He could not accept what he called the narrow-minded, sentimental view that nature loses its magic, “the charm of its mysteries,” by a study of its forces.

The first of five volumes appeared in 1845, when Humboldt was seventy-six. (Jefferson by now had been in his grave at Monticello for nearly twenty years.) It was an even greater sensation than his Personal Narrative. By 1851, eighty thousand copies had been sold. Indeed, Cosmos was one of the publishing events of the age, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It stirred a whole new generation, in America particularly. It popularized natural science as nothing had before and made Humboldt a household word.

He was venerated in America as few Europeans have ever been. “I came to Berlin,” wrote Bayard Taylor, the American essayist, near the end of Humboldt’s life, “not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters,…but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world’s greatest living man—Alexander von Humboldt.” Emerson was to call him “one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle…who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind.”

Humboldt died on May 6, 1859. He was in his ninetieth year and still at work, on the final volume of Cosmos. He had never returned to Spanish America, unlike Bonpland, who, after serving for a time as the head of the Empress Josephine’s gardens, left Paris for South America, where he finished out his days. But for all the years that had passed, for all the honors bestowed upon him, for all the changes he had seen, Humboldt never regarded their epic journey as anything other than the central experience of his life. Once, in the last year of his life, when there appeared to be very little left of the young man who had posed for Peale so long before, Humboldt sat for still one more, final portrait. He absolutely would not wear any of his decorations, he said, but then he quietly mentioned to the artist that it would be quite all right to include Chimborazo in the background.

CHAPTER TWO

The American Adventure of Louis Agassiz

THROUGHT HIS extraordinary career Louis Agassiz was a man of large plans and boundless energy, a spirit emboldened by noble undertakings. He was a pioneer, a worker. And these, it ought to be said at the start, were not the least of the reasons why he loomed so large in the estimate of our forebears and why so much that was painful—the charge of demagoguery, the bitterness over Darwin—would be forgotten in time, or at least left unsaid.

At the age of twenty-one, writing from Munich, where he was studying to become a medical doctor, he had declared to his father, a provincial Swiss pastor: “I wish it may be said of Louis Agassiz that he was the first naturalist of his time, a good citizen, and a good son, beloved of those who knew him. I feel in myself the strength of a whole generation.” The letter was dated February 14, 1829, and that same year, still at the University of Munich, he had undertaken his first important work, a study of Brazilian fish, largely because, as he said, it was so immense a task. In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.

Cuvier, like others to come, warned against overwork. Alexander von Humboldt, who too had perceived amazing resources in the young man, cautioned against spreading oneself too thin. Having attained, with Humboldt’s help, a professorship of natural history at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Agassiz suddenly had turned his attention to Alpine glaciers.

It was Agassiz, at age thirty-three, who first presented to the world the awesome vision of an ancient age of ice. Others had noted the movement of existing glaciers and the consequent disturbances to the landscape, but Agassiz pictured a time past when all of northern Europe lay buried beneath “a colossal ice field,” and thus, he contended, numerous geologic mysteries had at last been solved. His immediate plan was for extended, orderly glacial research, something entirely new.

Everything that he undertook had to be done on a grand, heroic scale. His glacial studies included a harrowing solo descent by rope 120 feet into one of the crystal blue “wells” of the glacier of Aar and a successful ascent of the Jungfrau. His publishing projects—the pioneering, two-volume Etudes sur les Glaciers, for example, which appeared in 1840—involved the combined efforts of a dozen or more artists, lithographers, and fellow naturalists, whom he took it upon himself to feed, house, finance, and inspirit with his own particular methods of field study. When debts mounted at his headquarters-home-laboratory at Neuchâtel, when his marriage became a shambles, the solution was an overseas expedition. He would go to the United States, enlarge his horizons, meet everyone who mattered, add to his glacial studies, resolve the financial crises with a series of public lectures—all on his own and all in no more than a few months.

And thus it was in 1846 that he embarked on the very different new life which, ironically, had never been part of his plans. He was almost forty. His major contributions to science, as such things usually are judged, were also behind him. Prolific as he was to remain, nothing published afterward would come up to the earlier works; there was to be no further daring leap of the imagination to compare with his glacial vision.

Yet, as a colleague was to write years later, “A great adventure it turned out to be, lasting until death, and one that put America permanently in his debt.”

What he became in the New World was the great proselytizer of the natural sciences, a hero, possibly the most invigorating and influential voice ever heard in American education. He would be called “nature’s flaming apostle,” the man who first made science a national cause. His popularity was unprecedented, instantaneous, and it swept him off his feet. It would be thirteen years before he returned to Europe, and then only for a brief visit.

For weeks at sea, struggling to learn English, he memorized whole sentences that he repeated to anyone on board who would listen.

He reached Boston in October and spent the first three or four weeks traveling up and down the East Coast, as far south as Washington. He saw Benjamin Silliman at Yale (the “patriarch of science in America,” as he noted); James Dwight Dana, also of Yale, who was Silliman’s son-in-law and the most promising young naturalist in the country; Joseph Henry, professor of physical sciences at Princeton, who would shortly be named the first head of the new Smithsonian Institution; Dr. Samuel George Morton of Philadelphia, a physician and naturalist; Frederick Ernst Melsheimer, the entomologist, who wrote privately that Agassiz, “this big geologico-everythingo-French-Swiss gun,” was really quite a likable fellow.

In New York he conferred with William C. Redfield, the meteorologist; at Albany, with the noted geologist and paleontologist James Hall; while much of the journey he was accompanied by Asa Gray of Harvard, a botanist of “indefatigable zeal.”

But then none whom he had met was deficient in either zeal or knowledge, he wrote to his mother. “In both they seem to compete with us, and in ardor and activity they even surpass most of our savants.” At Philadelphia, Dr. Morton had assembled no less than six hundred human skulls, of Indians mostly, a collection, Agassiz declared, that alone was worth the trip to America.

What a people, he exclaimed elsewhere in the letter. “What a country is this!” The train from Boston had carried him “with the swiftness of lightning” through dazzling autumn scenery. Ancient moraines and transported boulders, all the telltale tracks of the glaciers, were everywhere to be seen, “literally covering the country.” On Long Island Sound, between New Haven and New York, the flocks of ducks and gulls rising in advance of his steamer were greater than any he had ever beheld. He had traveled the “magnificent” Hudson River, which yielded fish by the barrel for his studies.

The first public appearance, his American debut, was made back in Boston in December of 1846. Through the British geologist Charles Lyell, Agassiz’s most important convert to the glacial theory, a series of lectures had been arranged with the Lowell Institute, a liberally endowed program of “free lectures of the highest type.” As Lowell Institute speakers, Silliman, Lyell, and Gray already had distinguished themselves before large public gatherings and earned fees three times what was customary elsewhere.

He spoke “without notes and from a full brain,” as Asa Gray remarked, and he was a sensation. Silliman, until then the unchallenged popularizer of science, came on from New Haven just to hear him. Upward of three thousand people turned out, night after night, even in the most difficult weather, and sat spellbound in the huge hall. He was such a triumph that each lecture had to be given again for a second audience. “Never was Agassiz’s power as a teacher, or the charm of his personal presence more evident,” his American wife was to write.

His subject, the theme he was to expound upon again and again in times to come, was “the great plan of creation,” life on Earth from the smallest radiated animal to the ultimate vertebrate, man. He stood alone on the platform, a piece of chalk in hand, a small blackboard his only prop, talking rapidly and often drawing on the board as he talked. His English still was inadequate, but the long pauses, as he searched for the right word, seemed to add appreciably to the effect he had on the audience. The pauses, we are told, “enlisted their sympathy,” as meantime the chalk went swiftly on, producing drawings “so graphic that the spoken word was hardly missed.” He would lead his listeners through the successive phases of insect development, for example, until, with a few sudden strokes, a superb “winged creature stood forth on the blackboard, almost as if it had burst then and there from the chrysalis.” The audience would break into applause, then moan aloud as he wiped the board clean, to proceed to the next subject.

More appearances followed, in Boston and other cities. He charmed everybody, layman and scientist alike. In six months he had earned nearly $6,000 (about $60,000 in today’s money). The timing of his entrance into the mainstream of American life had been perfect. The country was in the throes of an educational awakening. It was the heyday of the lyceum, the nationwide movement to increase “the general diffusion” of learning with public lectures. In Massachusetts alone there were well over a hundred local lyceums. of which the Lowell Institute was the largest and best known. Libraries were being established in one community after another, even in factories. The first normal schools, schools for training teachers, had been founded in an effort to raise standards in education.

Popular interest in science, moreover, and especially the study of nature, was sharply on the rise, as more and more new theories and discoveries appeared to challenge Biblical versions of creation.

It was from the people of America that he drew his greatest inspiration, Agassiz said. He sensed something new beginning on this distant continent. “Naturalist that I am,” he explained in the letter to his mother, “I cannot but put the people first.” Their look, like his own, was “wholly toward the future.”

His change in plans, the decision to stay, came one year after his arrival, in September 1847, when he was offered the chair of natural history at the Lawrence Scientific School, an institution newly established at Harvard partly for the purpose of keeping him in the United States.

Harvard at this point numbered less than four hundred students. Harvard professors “drudged along in a dreary humdrum sort of way” (we read in the recollections of Charles Francis Adams II) and taught virtually everything by rote. Students had no say in the subjects they studied. The classics held the supreme place of honor; science was something to be memorized in fourteen weeks. No one was expected to enjoy any of it.

Agassiz, by dramatic contrast, was a man of insuperable good cheer and apparently boundless energy. He was open, opinionated. He was never dull. “Harvard,” he said, “is a respectable high school where they teach the dregs of education.”

In appearance, he was still very much in his prime, a physically powerful-looking, handsome man, about five feet ten inches tall, with heavy shoulders, large expressive hands, and a “superb” head that summoned euphoric postulations from the phrenologists. Longfellow, after meeting him at a dinner party, wrote of “the bright, beaming face” and later observed, “Agassiz seems to be a great favorite with the ladies.”

“His eyes were the feature of his face,” one such lady would recall. “They were of a beautiful bright brown, full of tenderness, of meaning…I think there was never but one pair of eyes such as Professor Louis Agassiz’s!”

Emerson, seeing the new professor on a train, was surprised by how much he resembled a successful politician.

Agassiz strolled through Harvard Yard enjoying a cigar when to smoke in the Yard was considered a grave offense. He refused to limit his wardrobe to the traditional professorial black. He prepared no syllabus. He required no entrance examinations. His students were accepted purely on whether he liked them, which meant that he took just about everyone who applied, including a large number who never could have qualified according to the standard Harvard requirements. Nor, unlike his contemporaries, did he see any reason for excluding young women. He “came into this puritan society like a warm glow in a chilly room,” Charles W. Eliot, Harvard’s famous president, would remember fondly. “He was a revolutionary spirit…an exception to all our rules.”

Most unorthodox of all, and crucial as time would tell, was his manner of teaching. He intended, he said, to teach students to see—to observe and compare—and he intended to put the burden of study on them. Probably he never said what he is best known for, “Study nature, not books,” or not in those exact words. But such certainly was the essence of his creed, and for his students the idea was firmly implanted by what they would afterward refer to as “the incident of the fish.”

His initial interview at an end, Agassiz would ask the student when he would like to begin. If the answer was now, the student was immediately presented with a dead fish—usually a very long dead, pickled, evil-smelling specimen—personally selected by “the master” from one of the wide-mouthed jars that lined his shelves. The fish was placed before the student in a tin pan. He was to look at the fish, the student was told, whereupon Agassiz would leave, not to return until later in the day, if at all.

Samuel Scudder, one of the many from the school who would go on to do important work of their own (his in entomology), described the experience as one of life’s turning points.

In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish…. Half an hour passed—an hour—another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face—ghastly; from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view—just as ghastly. I was in despair.

I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish, and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature.

When Agassiz returned later and listened to Scudder recount what he had observed, his only comment was that the young man must look again.

I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will, and discovered one new thing after another….The afternoon passed quickly; and when, toward its close, the professor inquired: “Do you see it yet?”

“No,” I replied, “I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before.”

The day following, having thought of the fish through most of the night, Scudder had a brainstorm. The fish, he announced to Agassiz, had symmetrical sides with paired organs.

“Of course, of course!” Agassiz said, obviously pleased. Scudder asked what he might do next, and Agassiz replied, “Oh, look at your fish!”

In Scudder’s case the lesson lasted a full three days. “Look, look, look,” was the repeated injunction and the best lesson he ever had, Scudder recalled, “a legacy the professor has left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part.”

The incident of the fish marked the end of the student’s novitiate. At once Agassiz became more communicative, his manner that of a friend or colleague, now that the real work could begin.

The way to all learning, “the backbone of education,” was to know something well. “A smattering of everything is worth little,” he would insist in the heavy French accent that he was never to lose. “Facts are stupid things, until brought into conjunction with some general law.” It was a great and common fallacy to suppose that an encyclopedic mind is desirable. The mind was made strong not through much learning but by “the thorough possession of something.” In other words, “Look at your fish.”

Most important, one must become capable of hard, continuous, original work without the support of the teacher. A year or two of natural history, studied as he understood it, would be the best kind of training for any serious career.

What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of the professor’s, which, as one student remembered, “inspired him to unusual energy and eloquence.”

The customary procedure, however, was to spend the first term in zoology (problems of classification, the basics of comparative anatomy), the second on geology (with roughly a third of the time devoted to the glacial age). The material varied little year to year, Agassiz as always “leaning over the lecture desk and hurling whole paragraphs of his lectures with great vigor full in the faces of his students in the front row.” And no matter how many years they stayed with him, he remained “the master.” To have doubted or criticized anything he said would have been, as one of them said, equivalent to heresy or high treason.

The magic of his personality appears to have mattered above and beyond everything. “His individuality was a subject of continual observation by all.…Agassiz himself was more interesting than his works,” reads one recollection. A contagious enthusiasm surrounded him like an atmosphere, reads another. The “personal quality of Agassiz was the greatest of his powers,” the geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler wrote in later life, after he too had become a Harvard luminary.

By far the greater part of the instruction I had from my master was in divers bits of talk concerning certain species and the arrangement of the specimens. He would often work with me for hours unrolling fossils, all the while keeping up a running commentary which would range this way and that, of men, of places, of Aristotle, of Oken. [Lorenz Oken, German naturalist and mystical philosopher, had been one of Agassiz’s professors at Munich.] He was a perfect narrator, and on any peg of fact would quickly hang a fascinating discourse. Often when he was at work on wet specimens while I was dealing with fossils, he would come to me with, say, a fish in each hand, that I might search in his pockets for a cigar, cut the tip, put it between his teeth, and light it for him. That would remind him of something, and he would puff and talk until the cigar was burned out, and he would have to be provided with another.

Merely to lecture and inspire was not enough, Agassiz preached fiercely: It was a professorial duty to investigate, discover—to collect. So there were summer sojourns in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, fishing expeditions off Nantucket. At government expense he went to Florida to examine coral reefs.

He led his first wilderness expedition, across Lake Superior by canoe, the summer of 1848. The party included students, naturalists, two doctors, and an artist. At evening, camped on Superior’s northern shore, they would gather to hear him elucidate on the day’s findings and observations. A portable blackboard (a piece of canvas painted black) would be unrolled and pinned to the side of his tent, and the lecture would begin, mosquitoes and black flies notwithstanding. Come morning, he would take his place in the lead canoe, which had a big frying pan lashed to the prow as a figurehead. Then once under way, the Indian guides would strike up a song, singing in French the same two or three songs over and over and with a terrible, incongruous sadness that greatly amused Agassiz. What they were singing, he explained to his companions, were in fact the lewd chansons of the ancien regime, which doubtless their ancestors had heard sung by young officers in remembrance of distant Paris.

Glacial phenomena of the kind he had encountered in New England were even more pronounced here on the Great Lakes. He saw at once the singular geographic scale of the North American ice sheet, and the expedition returned with a store of geologic samples, as well as eight enormous casks of fish.

The existing collections at Harvard when he first began teaching there were pitiful, a few minerals which never had been arranged properly, the barest beginnings of a botanical garden. Now the rock samples, fossils, the fish and plants and insect specimens began gathering everywhere and anywhere he could find storage space. An old bathhouse on the Charles River was converted into a temporary museum, his students indoctrinated with the omnivorous spirit that had propelled him since boyhood. In his own student days at Munich he had hauled a pine tree into his living quarters and kept as many as forty birds flying about.

Once, when a stable burned a mile from the Harvard campus, killing a number of prize racehorses, the professor himself rushed to the scene, took charge of tending to the surviving animals, consoled their owners, then “skillfully came to the point of his business,” which was to ask for the skeletons of all the dead horses. The incident, it would be explained, was illustrative of both his zeal and his ability to charm support from anyone, anytime, under any circumstances; he got the skeletons.

Smaller specimens, including live snakes, frequently were transported to and from class in his coat pockets, and the fenced yard behind the house he had rented contained, among other things, a live eagle, an alligator, a family of possums, and a tame bear known all over town. (One surviving story of the Agassiz household is of the night the bear got drunk at a student faculty gathering.)

Just when Agassiz began planning seriously for a great, permanent working collection—a proper zoological museum befitting a great university—is not clear. But as his fame spread, people everywhere began shipping him things they had found—some nameless fish from the ocean depths, shells unearthed in a cornfield. The zeal with which some of his minions would serve in the cause become nearly as legendary as his own. To provide Agassiz with freshly laid turtle eggs—these essential to his research in embryology—one young man, the principal of a nearby academy, hid beside a pond for hours before dawn every morning for three weeks, awaiting his chance. Then, the bucket of precious eggs finally in hand, he flagged a passing freight train so as not to delay delivery, an explanation the engineer is said to have understood perfectly.

His peers found him an unfailing inspiration, a virtuoso without equal. A dissertation on the mathematical arrangement of leaves delivered before a small gathering in Cambridge was acclaimed by the botanist Asa Gray as “most excellent and spirited.” In Philadelphia, rising to address the first meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Agassiz spoke not of glaciers or sharks or embryology, as might have been expected, but on the phonetic apparatus of the cricket.

He was coauthor of a textbook, Principles of Zoology, his first American work, which went through sixteen editions during Agassiz’s lifetime. For a second series of Lowell Institute lectures a reporter was assigned to transcribe his every word, so the full text could be carried daily in one of the Boston papers.

In 1850 an account of the Lake Superior expedition was published with wide success. Beautifully illustrated, it was at once a fascinating narrative (one of the party had kept a daily journal), a major contribution to American geology, an invaluable guide to Lake Superior birds, fish, and, to the tremendous satisfaction of countless readers as well as reviewers, it was another emphatic declaration by the master naturalist that there need be no conflict between the revelation of science and Genesis. “Agassiz belongs to that class of naturalists who see God in everything,” wrote a reviewer in the Watchman and Christian Reflector. Agassiz had described the whole of creation as an expression of “divine thought.”

He held center stage through the 1850s; he had overshadowed them all—Silliman, Dana, Henry, Hall, Gray. The voice of Charles Darwin was still to be heard.

He was beloved by the transcendentalists, both for his own adoration of nature and for his “huge good fellowship,” as Emerson said. Emerson in his private journal listed him number two among “my men,” second only to Thomas Carlyle. Henry David Thoreau gathered up turtles and a black snake for him from the shores of Walden Pond. At the Parker House in Boston, when the celebrated Saturday Club dined—Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes—it was Agassiz who sat at the head of the table. Holmes’s description, in part, was as follows:

The great professor, strong, broad-shouldered, square

In life’s rich noontide, joyous, debonair

His social hour no leaden care alloys

His laugh rings loud and mirthful as a boy’s

That lusty laugh the puritans forgot

What ear hath heard it and remembers not?

His writings and lectures on the Ice Age lent a whole new aura to the New England landscape just at the time when the New England landscape was being “discovered” by poets and painters, and White Mountain hotels had become the rage. “Connoisseurs of landscape from Boston and Hartford, parties from Worcester and Burlington, drove on the tops of stages or in private buckboards through Franconia Notch, observing Mounts Webster and Lafayette as if they were two pictures in different styles by the same master,” the historian Van Wyck Brooks would write. “They studied the slopes and the cliffs…and longed for a little talk with Agassiz. For Agassiz had made these scenes exciting.”

Professionally and personally these were the best of years. The old entourage from Neuchâtel, the artists and other assistants, came to join him in his American adventure, to enlist in his latest projects. Following the death of his first wife in Switzerland, he remarried and sent for his three children. Socially, he and the new Mrs. Agassiz—the former Elizabeth Cabot Cary, daughter of a Boston banker—became bright stars in the Cambridge firmament. She was tactful and good-humored and fifteen years younger than he. For years she would handle his correspondence in English, edit his papers and publications, and take notes on all his lectures.

They built a big, square house on Quincy Street that was the setting for famous dinner parties. Summers were spent at fashionable Nahant. Money remained a problem—the large house had a large mortgage, for example—but Agassiz was quoted as saying he had no time to waste making money (which further endeared him among his admirers), and the private school for girls that his wife opened on the top floor of the house helped not only to make ends meet but to put the Agassiz stamp on still another side of community life. “I, myself, superintend the methods of instruction,” he wrote in the brochure for the school. “I shall endeavor to prevent the necessary discipline from falling into a lifeless routine, alike deadening to the spirit of teacher and pupil.”

So, in addition to everything else, he taught at the girls’ school for the next eight years.

The most ambitious publishing effort of his career was launched, a work of ten volumes encompassing the entire natural history of the United States. It was his “endeavor to make myself understood by all.” Ten thousand circulars were issued, and twenty-five hundred subscribers enrolled. Proofs of the first two quarto volumes, including his Essay on Classification, were received by Agassiz on May 27, 1857, the day before his fiftieth birthday.

The plan for the museum was announced—the Museum of Comparative Zoology, as he wished to have it called. A benefactor, with Agassiz’s guidance, had provided in his will that Harvard should receive $50,000 toward the project, but for zoological research only. If no suitable building were provided, then the bequest would be lost. Agassiz, in a manner never dreamed of before, campaigned for additional funds among members of the Massachusetts legislature. “I don’t know much about museums,” one of them is said to have remarked, “but I, for one, will not stand by and see so brave a man struggle without aid.” The legislature voted an appropriation of $100,000. A group of local businessmen raised over $70,000. Harvard provided the site, and in June 1859 the cornerstone was laid.

Acutely aware of his own prominence, acutely conscious of “how wide an influence I already exert upon this land of the future,” Agassiz wanted the museum to stand forever as a monument to his whole vision of a true university and of what an education in natural history ought to be about. He had been offered an exalted position at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, with a salary of 50,000 francs, but he had turned it down, explaining, “I prefer to build anew here.”

It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent by the author to Asa Gray, arrived just before Christmas. Agassiz also received a copy, with a note from Darwin asking that Agassiz at least give him the credit for having “earnestly endeavored to arrive at the truth.”

He was thunderstruck by the book, as all Cambridge learned soon enough. It was “poor, very poor,” he told Gray at first chance, before, in fact, he had read all of it. If Darwin was right, others were saying, then clearly Agassiz was wrong. “Now, John, stop and think of it for a moment,” one student, still a believer in Agassiz, wrote to a friend, “and don’t you perceive that if his [Darwin’s] theory were true it would leave one without a God?”

Gray, who had been impressed at once with the “great ability of the book,” became its most outspoken champion this side of the Atlantic. Yet Gray, as everybody appreciated, was the most pious of men, a steady attendant at church. Agassiz, who seldom went to church, denounced the book and its theory as atheism.

The lines were drawn. In no time he and Gray, friends for years, were barely speaking. Among his students Agassiz talked disparagingly of Gray’s ability; Gray exploded that Agassiz was a “sort of demagogue” who “always talks to the rabble.”

For Agassiz, as for Silliman and others, to study nature was to study the works of God. He had little use for formal religion because, as he once wrote to Dana, he had seen too much in his life of overbearing clerics and religious bigotry. But there could be no evolutionary process as depicted by Darwin for the simple reason that all species were special, distinct, fixed creations. Species—caterpillars, caribou, Lake Superior pike, or Darwin’s finches—were the immutable aspects of the divine plan, which from the start had a specific final purpose, mankind. “It can be shown that in the great plan of creation…the very commencement exhibits a certain tendency toward the end…. The constantly increasing similarity to man of the creatures successively called into existence makes the final purpose obvious.”

Progress there had been, the long record of life on Earth was indeed an upward path. The changes, however, had been achieved, he insisted, in great creative stages, these divided by momentous catastrophe. His doctrine, the cataclysmic theory of his own great master, Cuvier, was that all life on the planet had been destroyed repeatedly in order to start afresh with new forms. Evidence of such destruction was abundant in the fossil record, while all present inhabitants of the planet were the latest and final stage. It was as if God, like Louis Agassiz, wiped the board clean again and again to arrive at a grand intended finale, with man the crowning creation.

Several times in his book, to substantiate one point or another, Darwin had referred to observations by Agassiz (on embryological succession, for example). But Darwin’s conclusions were “the sum of wrong-headedness,” Agassiz told his students. Darwin’s theory, Agassiz instructed the members of the Boston Society of Natural History, was “ingenious but fanciful.” “The resources of the Deity,” he wrote, “cannot be so meager that in order to create a human being endowed with reason, He must change a monkey into a man.”

John Amory Lowell, guiding spirit of the Lowell Institute, lent Agassiz his support as the battle got under way. Harvard stood behind him. When the new museum was opened in November 1860, Harvard President Cornelius Felton declared it altogether appropriate that the building stood face-to-face with the theological school, “God’s word and God’s works mutually illustrating each other.”

Agassiz produced a stream of articles for Atlantic Monthly and carried the fight to the lecture circuit, his popularity soaring to new heights. The articles, published as a book, Methods of Study in Natural History, went through nineteen editions. To know that Agassiz of Harvard decried the theories of Charles Darwin, that he, of all learned men, marched foremost in the assault on the new godless vision of life, brought solace to a degree later generations would never be able to comprehend. He was quite literally adored. He was “the prince of naturalists.”

Still, a certain uneasiness spread among his students. Colleagues had begun to question his powers of reason. Admirers were saddened to see him stumble over facts, contradict himself, or stubbornly refuse to give the other side a fair hearing. Gray, with whom he had broken completely, became convinced that the illustrious Agassiz mind was in a state of rapid deterioration. “This man,” wrote Gray, “who might have been so useful to science and promised so much here has been for years a delusion, a snare, and a humbug, and is doing us far more harm than he can ever do us good.”

To give credence and grandeur to catastrophe’s role in creation, Agassiz returned again to his glacial visions, writing now with perhaps greater power than ever before, as can be seen in these lines from still another series in the Atlantic Monthly:

The long summer was over. For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the Earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the equator roamed over the world from the Far South to the very borders of the Arctic. The gigantic quadrupeds, the mastodons, elephants, tigers, lions, hyenas, bears, whose remains are found in Europe from its southern promontories to the northern limits of Siberia and Scandinavia, and in America from the southern states to Greenland and the Melville Island, may indeed be said to have possessed the Earth in those days. But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death…If the glacial theory be true, a great mass of ice, of which the present glaciers are but the remnants, formerly spread over the whole Northern Hemisphere.

In an odd, paradoxical way he became obsessed with an apocalyptic world of ice, the entire globe frozen in death—he who had given himself so wholeheartedly to the study of life, he who was such an exuberant life force. It remained only to find the familiar traces in the Southern Hemisphere as well.

So while Darwin, gray, stooped, two years younger than Agassiz, kept to his country place in England, puttering about in a little greenhouse, Agassiz announced plans for a trip to Brazil. Another benefactor had supplied the wherewithal; the trip in theory was to provide the professor with a long-needed rest.

He sailed on April 1, 1865, at the head of a large, widely publicized expedition and returned the following year with some eighty thousand specimens and a triumphant announcement: the valley of the Amazon itself with all its fecund tropical splendors once had been obliterated beneath rivers of ice. He had found the proof.

His proof, however, turned out to be exceedingly thin and open to question. His peers were skeptical, or worse. In truth it was the end of his own “long summer.” A shadow fell over the brilliant career, for all the popular acclaim, for all the devotion he inspired. He grew increasingly dictatorial with students and with his museum assistants, unpleasantly intolerant of any divergence from his own views. He “not infrequently lost his temper.” And numbers of his brightest students revolted, or quit in despair.

A breakdown from nervous strain and overwork in 1869 left him incapacitated for nearly a year. Yet the headlong life resumed. The museum building was doubled in size. He embarked on still another venture, around Cape Horn to California with a Coast Survey expedition, and returned this time with some one hundred thousand specimens. And in the final year of his life he founded still another school of his own, a summer school of science for teachers on Penikese Island in Buzzards Bay.

The epic work Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, of which only four volumes had been produced, was never completed. The last published work, an article for the Atlantic Monthly, was one titled, “Evolution and Permanence of Type.”

He died December 14, 1873. Eight days earlier he had returned from the museum feeling tired and had lain down on the couch to rest awhile. He never spoke again.

Obituaries were carried in every paper. Learned societies held special meetings to pass memorial resolutions. No death since that of Lincoln, wrote the editors of Harper’s Weekly, had elicited such heartfelt expressions of sorrow.

The legacy was truly amazing. His work on fish, the initial research on glaciers, the impact of his writing on the Ice Age, the zest and glamour he brought to American culture at a critical moment, were all contributions of the first order. His beloved Museum of Comparative Zoology—the Agassiz Museum, or simply the Agassiz, as it came to be known in Cambridge—was without question one of the finest, most important such institutions in the world, which it remains to this day. (In the hall of North American birds, for example, is displayed every species to be found north of Mexico.)

Mistaken as he may have been about evolution, he was by no means alone. Nor do intellectual brilliance and a life in science necessarily mean that it is any easier to break from cherished convictions, not to mention the prevailing views of one’s own era. Humboldt had found it impossible to accept Agassiz’s theory of glaciers.

Agassiz, besides, had been caught up by a popular success no one in science had to cope with until then. In the eyes of his vast audience he was indeed “the first naturalist of his time, a good citizen…beloved of those who knew him,” all that he had aspired to so long before in the letter to his father. To have totally reexamined his work after 1859, to have retreated from his own strongly expressed positions on creation, to have abandoned his audience, would have been horrendously difficult. Even someone less inspirited by public acclaim, less dependent by nature on the authority and approval granted by such acclaim, might have found it impossible.

Agassiz, as numbers of students and associates observed, needed an audience. On the lecture platform or in the classroom he seemed to draw his energy, his “magic,” from the people before him. And this, in a sense, was both his greatest flaw and his greatest strength. It was what, as a scientist, made him something less than a Lyell or a Darwin, and it is what, as a teacher, made him incomparable.

His precepts on the teaching of natural history, certainly a significant part of the legacy, had far-reaching influence. “Never try to teach what you yourself do not know, and know well,” he lectured at Penikese his final summer. “Train your pupils to be observers….If you can find nothing better, take a housefly or a cricket, and let each hold a specimen and examine it as you talk…. He is lost, as an observer, who believes that he can, with impunity, affirm that for which he can adduce no evidence…. Have the courage to say I do not know…. The more I look at the great complex of the animal world, the more sure do I feel that we have not yet reached its hidden meaning.”

Like Humboldt before him, he took the greatest pride in the influence he had on the next generation of naturalists. And indeed the subsequent careers of his students and museum assistants are as strong a testament to his genius as almost anything else. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler became a popular professor of geology at Harvard (an inspiration to Theodore Roosevelt, among many others). Samuel Scudder became the country’s outstanding authority and most prolific writer on butterflies. Theodore Lyman was an accomplished zoologist who also became a congressman. There was William James, the philosopher; Albert S. Bickmore, who decided to found his own museum—the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Frederic Putnam became a Harvard professor of American anthropology and was instrumental in the growth of most of the country’s anthropological museums. Alpheus Hyatt, who is said to have learned all of Agassiz’s Essay on Classification by heart, became a professor of zoology and paleontology at M.I.T. and was one of the founders of the famous marine biological laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Alpheus S. Packard, one of Agassiz’s student-assistants and later a teacher at Penikese, wrote Guide to the Study of Insects, the first major American textbook of entomology. Edward Sylvester Morse, one of those students Harvard would never have taken under normal circumstances, introduced modern methods of classification to Japan, became a sparkling lecturer, writer, museum director, and with Putnam, Hyatt, and Packard founded the American Naturalist.

Agassiz’s son, Alexander, who was trained by his father and served as his principal museum assistant, became a leading zoologist, a pioneer in oceanography, and made a fortune in copper mining, much of which he ultimately devoted to the museum and other work begun by his father. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, in less than a decade after her husband’s death, became a founder of Radcliffe College, and was its first president.

In all the surviving accounts in which those who knew Louis Agassiz strive to describe and explain the hold he had on his time, the enthusiasm he generated, his charm and powers as expositor and leader, one theme remains constant: the quality of the man’s commitment. Silliman used the word engaged. William James told a story.

James had been a member of the expedition to Brazil and had his hammock slung next to Agassiz on the deck of the steamer that carried the party up the Amazon. Late one night, lying sleepless as the engines throbbed and the jungle slipped by under a full moon, he heard Agassiz whisper, “James, are you awake?” then continue, “I cannot sleep. I am too happy; I keep thinking of all those glorious plans.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe

SHE HAD been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.

As a child she had been known as Hattie. She had been cheerful but shy, prone to fantasies, playful, and quite pretty. After she became famous, she would describe herself this way: “To begin, then, I am a little bit of a woman—somewhat more than forty—about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used-up article now.” She wasn’t altogether serious when she wrote that, but the description was the one people would remember.

She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut—in a plain frame house that still stands—in 1811, when Lincoln was two years old and when Dolly Madison was in the White House. She was the seventh of the nine children Roxana Foote bore Lyman Beecher before being gathered to her reward, and she was such a worker, even when very small, that her preacher father liked to say he would gladly have given a hundred dollars if she could have been born a boy.

As a child she had found most of his sermons about as intelligible as Choctaw, she wrote later, and never would she be at peace with his religion. But she loved him, and for all his gloomy talk of sin and damnation it is not hard to understand why. He was a powerful, assertive figure who had an almost fiendish zest for life—for hunting and fishing with his sons, for listening to all music, and for playing the violin, which he did badly. But could he only play what he heard inside him, he told them all, he could be another Paganini. Best of all he loved to go out and “snare souls,” as he said. In a corner of the cellar he kept a pile of sand, and if his day was not enough to use him up, and stormy weather kept him from outdoor exercise, down he would go, shovel in hand, to sling sand about.

Sunday mornings he would come bounding along through the sunshine, late again for that appointed hour when weekly he brought down Calvinist thunder upon the heads of upright Litchfield people. He had a special wrath for drunkards and Unitarians, and he believed passionately in the Second Coming. But something in him made him shy away from the strictest tenet of his creed—total predestination—and its logic. Once when he had agreed to exchange pulpits with another pastor, he was told that the arrangement had been preordained. “Is that so?” he said. “Then I won’t do it!” And he didn’t.

The happiest times in her childhood, Hattie would write later, were the days spent away from him, visiting an Aunt Harriet in Nutplains, Connecticut, in a house filled with books and pictures gathered by a seafaring uncle and a wonderful old Tory grandmother, who in private still said Episcopal prayers for the king and queen.

At twelve Hattie often wandered off from the noisy parsonage to lie on a green hillside and gaze straight into a solid blue sky and dream of Byron. One month she read Ivanhoe seven times.

In 1832, when Hattie had turned twenty-one, Lyman Beecher answered the call to become the first president of the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. He packed up his children and a new wife and set off for what he called “the majestic West.” A New Jerusalem was to be established on the banks of the Ohio. The family spirits were lifted; and crossing the Alleghenies, they all sang “Jubilee.” A Philadelphia journal likened the exodus of the Reverend Mr. Beecher and his family to the migration of Jacob and his sons.

The following summer the Lane Theological Seminary’s first (and at that time, only) professor, Calvin Ellis Stowe, a Biblical scholar and Bowdoin graduate, traveled west in the Beechers’ wake. For all his learning and devotion to the Almighty, Stowe was a very homely and peculiar worker in the vineyard.

He was accompanied by a beautiful young bride, Eliza, who soon became Hattie Beecher’s best friend in Cincinnati but died not very long afterward. Apparently it was a shared grief over Eliza that brought Hattie and Calvin Stowe together. Years later, with some of the proceeds from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they would commission an artist to do a portrait of Eliza, and every year thereafter, on Eliza’s birthday, the two of them would sit before the portrait and reminisce about Eliza’s virtues.

The wedding took place in early January 1836. What exactly she saw in him is a little hard to say. The night before the ceremony, trying to describe her emotions in a letter to a school friend, she confessed she felt “nothing at all.” But Lord Byron had not appeared in Cincinnati. At twenty-four she may have felt she was getting on.

Calvin was thirty-three, but he seemed as old as her father. He was fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian, and German; he was an authority on education; he knew the Bible better than her father. Also, it is recorded, he had a grand sense of humor. But he was as fat and forgetful and fussy as an old woman. In the midst of a crisis, as she would soon discover, he had a bad habit of taking to his bed, and he had absolutely no “faculty,” that Yankee virtue she defined simply as being the opposite of shiftlessness.

He also had an eye for pretty women, as he admitted to Hattie, and a taste for spirits, but these proclivities, it seems, never got him into any particular trouble.

But there was more. Calvin, from his boyhood until his dying day, was haunted by phantoms. They visited him most any time, but favored dusk. They appeared quite effortlessly out of the woodwork, the floor, or the furniture. There was a regular cast of characters, Calvin said, as real and familiar to him as anyone else he knew. Among his favorites were a giant Indian woman and a dark dwarf who between them carried a huge bull fiddle. There was a troupe of old Puritans from his native Natick, all shadowy and dark blue in color, and one “very pleasant-looking human face” he called Harvey. They performed music for Calvin Stowe, and somehow or other they talked to him without making any sound at all, or so he said. He had no reluctance about discussing the subject, and there is no indication that any of his circle thought the less of him for it.

Still, the marriage proved difficult soon enough. Hattie became pregnant almost immediately, and just about then Calvin was asked by the state of Ohio to go to Prussia to study educational systems there. Professing a profound fear of the salt sea, he told her he would never see her again in this life. She insisted that he go, and had given birth to twin daughters by the time of his return. There was a third child two years later, then another, and another, and two more later on. A professor’s wages were never enough, even when old Lyman could pay Calvin in full, which was seldom. Hattie’s health began to fail. “She lived overmuch in her emotions,” one son would explain years later.

“It is a dark, sloppy, rainy, muddy disagreeable day,” she wrote once to Calvin when he was in Detroit attending a church convention. “…I am sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour everything, and then the clothes will not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never wanted to eat again.”

She began going off on visits to relatives, leaving Calvin and the children behind. The visits grew longer. She went to the White Mountains, then to Brattleboro, Vermont, to try the water cure. The expenses were met by gifts from distant admirers of the family: the Stowes felt that the Lord had a hand in it. Hattie stayed on for nearly a year at Brattleboro, living on brown bread and milk, enduring the interminable sitz baths of one Dr. Wesselhoeft, and writing home exuberant letters about moonlight snowball fights. And no sooner did she return to the cluttered house in Cincinnati than the professor hauled himself off to Brattleboro, there to stay even longer than she had. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Cincinnati and more than a hundred people a day were dying, she wrote to tell him to stay right where he was. She would manage.

In all they were separated a total of three years and more, and their letters back and forth speak of strong, troubled feelings. The hulking, clumsy Stowe, bearded, nearsighted, complained that she never folded his newspaper properly and that her letters of late were too uninteresting for him to read aloud to his friends. She in turn would run on about her own miseries. The house depressed her, she worried about money, she hated the climate in Cincinnati. She thought too much about death.

But she also told him, “There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than anyone else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you.”

And Calvin would write to her when she was visiting her sister in Hartford, “And now my dear wife, I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is I cannot live without you and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman like you in this wide world.”

In this same letter Calvin proclaimed to her—and apparently he was the first to do so—“My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate.” He advised her to make all her plans accordingly, as though she had little else to do. “Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind,” he declared. And he told her to drop her middle initial, E (for Elizabeth), from her name. “It only incumbers it and interferes with the flow and euphony.” Instead: “Write yourself fully and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, and full of meaning.”

She had already written quite a little—temperance tracts, articles on keeping the Sabbath, New England “sketches,” for which she drew heavily on Calvin’s seemingly inexhaustible fund of childhood reminiscences. Once she had done an article about a slave. She had been selling these pieces to Godey’s Lady’s Book and one or two other magazines. She got two dollars a page on the average, which was more profitable than taking in boarders, she decided. But no one in the family, other than Calvin, had taken her writing seriously.

She worked at the kitchen table, confusion all around, a baby in a clothes basket at her feet. She couldn’t spell very well, and her punctuation would always be a puzzle for her publishers. She dreamed, she said in a letter to Calvin, of a place to work without “the constant falling of soot and coal dust on everything in the room.”

Then in July of 1849 she was writing to tell him that their infant son Charley was dead of cholera. The summer before she had nearly died of it herself, with her father praying over her all through one terrible, sweltering night, the room alive with mosquitoes. She had been unable to do a thing for the child, she told Calvin. For almost a week she watched him die, with no way to help, she said, no way even to ease his suffering.

Calvin returned to her very soon after that, determined to leave Cincinnati for good. He had accepted a professorship at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and before he could settle up his affairs in Cincinnati, he characteristically sent Harriet and three of the children off to Maine ahead of him.

She left Cincinnati in the early spring of 1850, a shabby little figure, perfectly erect, perhaps no more than five feet tall, nearly forty, and pregnant once again. She boarded a riverboat at the foot of town, saying farewell with no misgivings. She was going home, she felt.

She was also heading for a sudden and colossal notoriety of a kind never known by any American woman before, and very few since; but of that she had no notion whatever. Nor did she or anyone else alive have any idea how important those seventeen years in Cincinnati had been to her and, as things turned out, to the course of American history.

She sailed up the Ohio to Pittsburgh, where she changed to a canal boat. Already she was feeling so good she got out and walked the towpath between locks. At Johnstown the boat and all its passengers were hoisted up and over the Allegheny Mountains by that thrilling mechanical contrivance of the nineteenth century, the Portage Railroad. East of the mountains she went by rail to New York and there crossed by ferry to Brooklyn to see her younger brother, Henry Ward, pastor of Plymouth Church. As children they had sometimes been taken for twins, only Henry Ward had been thick of speech and considered the slow one. Now she took note of his obvious success, and they went out for a drive in a spotless six-hundred-dollar carriage, a recent gift from his parishioners.

In a few days she went on to Hartford, still looking after the children and all their baggage. Her spirits were soaring. At Hartford she stayed with her sisters Mary and Isabella; in Boston with her brother Edward, who was growing ever more militant over the slavery issue. All the Beechers were growing more militant over one thing or another. For Isabella it was women’s rights; for the brilliant Catherine, education; for Charles, freedom from theological authority. From Boston, Harriet took the Bath Steamer to Maine, sailing headlong into a northeaster.

On the day they were scheduled to arrive at Brunswick, one story goes, the president of Bowdoin sent a professor named Smith down to greet the new faculty wife, but Smith returned disappointed, saying she must have been delayed. Nobody got off the boat, he said, except an old Irish woman and her brats.

Brunswick offered precious few of the Eastern civilities Mrs. Stowe had longed for, and the house Calvin had taken in advance turned out to be deserted, dreary, and damp, to use her words. She went straight to work, refinishing floors, putting up wallpaper—the pioneer again. When Calvin wrote from Cincinnati to say he was sick and plainly dying and that she and theirs would soon be plunged into everlasting debt, she read the letter with humor and stuffed it into the stove.

Calvin showed up before summer, her baby was born, she rested two weeks. When winter came, there were holes in her shoes, and the house was so cold during one long storm that the children had trouble sitting still long enough to eat their meals. It was during the following spring that she began Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

People are still trying to interpret the book and to explain just how and why she came to write it. At first she said she really didn’t write it at all. She said the book came to her in visions and all she did was write down what she saw. When someone reproached her for letting Little Eva die, she answered, “Why, I could not help it. I felt as badly as anyone could! It was like a death in my own family and it affected me so deeply that I could not write a word for two weeks after her death.” Years later she stated categorically, “God wrote it.” And a great many of her readers were quite willing to let it go at that.

The truth is, the subject of the book had been all around her for a very long time. Old Lyman had been able to make Litchfield farmers weep when he preached on slavery. In Cincinnati she had opened her own Sunday school to black children, and the Lane Seminary had been a hotbed of abolitionist fervor. The Underground Railroad, she later claimed, went directly through her Cincinnati house, which was a bit of an exaggeration; but on one occasion Calvin and her brother Charles did indeed help a black woman and her child elude a slave hunter. The only time she was in an actual slave state, during a visit across the Ohio River in Kentucky, she made no show of emotion about it. But stories she heard from the black women she knew in Cincinnati moved her enormously, particularly those told by a gentle person named Eliza Buck, who helped her with housework and whose children, Harriet Stowe discovered with incredulity, had all been fathered by the woman’s former master in Kentucky. “You know, Mrs. Stowe,” she had said, “slave women cannot help themselves.”

Eliza Buck told her of lashings and of slave families split up and “sold down the river.” Once on an Ohio River wharf Mrs. Stowe had seen with her own eyes a husband and wife torn apart by a slave trader.

By the time she came east to Maine, Henry Ward was using his Brooklyn pulpit to raise money to buy children out of slavery. In Boston she and Edward had talked long and emotionally about the Fugitive Slave Bill, then being debated in Congress, which made it a federal crime to harbor or assist the escaped “property” of a slave master. Her duty was plain. There was, she said, a standard higher than an act of Congress.

She did some research in Boston and corresponded with Frederick Douglass on certain details. But for all that, the book would be written more out of something within her, something she knew herself about bondage and the craving for liberation, than from any documentary sources or personal investigation of black slavery in the South. Indeed she really knew very little about black slavery in the South. Her critics would be vicious with her for this, of course, and she would go so far as to write a whole second book in defense of her sources. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin could never be accounted for that way.

There is probably something to the story that she began the book as a result of a letter from Edward’s wife. “Hattie,” wrote her sister-in-law from Boston, “if I could use the pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” To which Hattie answered, “As long as the baby sleeps with me nights, I can’t do much at anything, but I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I live.”

The story appeared first as a serial in the National Era, an antislavery paper, beginning in June 1851. It took her a year to write it all, and apparently she did Uncle Tom’s death scene first and at a single sitting, writing on brown wrapping paper when her writing paper ran out. The finished story was brought out in book form by the publisher, John P. Jewett, in two volumes on March 20, 1852, a month before the serialized version ended.

Calvin thought the book had little importance. He wept over it, but he wept over most of the things she wrote. Her publisher warned that her subject was unpopular and said she took too long to tell her story. On the advice of a friend who had not read the manuscript, she decided to take a 10 percent royalty on every copy sold instead of a 50-50 division of profit or losses, as had also been offered to her.

She herself expected to make no money from it; she thought it inadequate and was sure her friends would be disappointed with her. Within a week after publication ten thousand copies had been sold. The publisher had three power presses running twenty-four hours a day. In a year sales in the United States came to more than three hundred thousand. The book made publishing history right from the start. In England, where Mrs. Stowe had no copyright and therefore received no royalties, sales were even more stupendous. A million and a half copies were sold in about a year’s time. The book appeared in thirty-seven different languages. “It is no longer permissible to those who can read not to have read it,” wrote George Sand from France, who said the author had no talent, only genius, and called her a saint.

The book had a strange power over almost everyone who read it then, and for all its Victorian mannerisms and frequent patches of sentimentality much of it still does. Its characters have a vitality of a kind comparable to the most memorable figures in literature. There is sweep and power to the narrative, and there are scenes that once read are not forgotten. The book is also rather different from what most people imagine, largely because it was eventually eclipsed by the stage version, which Mrs. Stowe had nothing to do with (and from which she never received a cent), and which was probably performed more often than any play in the language, evolving after a few years into something between circus and minstrel show. One successful road company advertised “…a pack of genuine bloodhounds; two Toppsies; Two Marks, Eva and her Pony ‘Prince’; African Mandolin Players; ‘Tinker’ the famous Trick Donkey.” In the book, for example, no bloodhounds chase Eliza and her baby across the ice.

What the book did at the time was to bring slavery out into the open and show it for what it was, in human terms. No writer had done that before. Slavery had been argued over in the abstract, preached against as a moral issue, its evils whispered about in polite company. But the book made people at that time feel what slavery was about. (“The soul of eloquence is feeling,” old Lyman had written.)

Moreover, Harriet Stowe had made a black man her hero, and she took his race seriously, and no American writer had done that before.

The fundamental fault, she fervently held, was with the system. Every white American was guilty, the Northerner no less than the slaveholder, especially the churchgoing kind, her kind. Simon Legree, it should perhaps always be remembered, was a Vermonter.

That Uncle Tom would one day be used as a term of derision (“A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary) she would have found impossible to fathom, and heartbreaking. For her he was something very close to a black Christ. He is the one character in all her book who lives, quite literally, by the Christian ideal. And if one has doubts that she could see black as beautiful or that she saw emancipation for the black man as a chance for full manhood and dignity, there is her description of Eliza’s husband, George Harris, as straight-backed, confident, “his face settled and resolute.” When George and his family, having escaped into Ohio, are cornered by slave hunters, Mrs. Stowe writes a scene in which George is fully prepared to kill his tormentors and to die himself rather than permit his wife and son to be taken back into slavery. “…I am a free man, standing on God’s free soil,” George yells from the rock ledge to which he has retreated, “and my wife and my child I claim as mine…. We have arms to defend ourselves and we mean to do it. You can come up if you like; but the first one of you that comes within the range of our bullets is a dead man, and the next, and the next, and so on till the last.”

She seems to have been everywhere at once after the book was published—Hartford, New Haven, Brooklyn, Boston. Almost immediately the South began boiling with indignation. She was a radical, it was said. All the Beechers were radicals. She began receiving threatening letters from the South, and once Calvin unwrapped a small parcel addressed to her to find a human ear that had been severed from the head of a black slave. Calvin grew more and more distraught. They decided it was time to move again, now to Andover, Massachusetts, to take up a previously offered teaching job at the seminary there.

Then they were sailing to England, where huge crowds waited for her at railroad stations, hymns were composed in her honor, children came up to her carriage with flowers. She went about in a gray cloak carrying a paint box. She was a tireless tourist. And she worried. “The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected on. No one can fail to see that in our day it is becoming a very great agency.”

When war came, everyone told her it was her war, and she thought so too. In South Carolina, as the war commenced, the wife of a plantation owner wrote in her diary that naturally slavery had to go, but added, “Yes, how I envy those saintly Yankee women, in their clean cool New England homes, writing to make their fortunes and to shame us.”

Harriet Stowe never saw the Civil War as anything but a war to end slavery, and all her old Beecher pacifist principles went right out the window. “Better, a thousand times better, open, manly, energetic war, than cowardly and treacherous peace,” she proclaimed. Her oldest son, Frederick, put on a uniform and went off to fight. Impatient with Lincoln for not announcing emancipation right away, she went down to Washington when he finally proclaimed that the slaves would be free, and was received privately in the White House. The scene is part of our folklore. “So this is the little woman who made this big War,” Lincoln is supposed to have said as he shook her hand.

She was sitting in the gallery at the Boston Music Hall, attending a concert, on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation became effective. When an announcement of the historic event was made from the stage, somebody called out that she was in the gallery. In an instant the audience was on its feet cheering while she stood and bowed, her bonnet awry.

After the war she kept on writing. In fact, as is sometimes overlooked, that is what Harriet Beecher Stowe was, a writer, and one of the most industrious we have ever had. Unwittingly she had written the abolitionist manifesto, although she did not consider herself an abolitionist. She agreed with her father that abolitionists “were like men who would burn down their houses to get rid of the rats.” She was not a crusader pure and simple. She never considered herself an extremist, and she seldom took an extreme position on any issue. She was a reformer, and there was an evangelical undercurrent to just about everything she wrote. But writing was her work, her way to make herself useful.

Her life was about half over when she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but for thirty years more she wrote almost a book a year on the average, plus innumerable essays, poems, children’s stories, and magazine articles, many of which she did under the pseudonym Christopher Crowfield. Perhaps her most artful novel, The Minister’s Wooing, ran to fifty printings, and a magazine article, “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869, caused more furor than anything published in America since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

During a second visit to England she had become fast friends with the widow of Lord Byron, who confided the terrible secret that the great Byron had committed incest with his half sister and that a child had been born as a result. Mrs. Stowe kept the secret for thirteen years, but when Byron’s former mistress, Countess Guiccioli, published her memoirs and portrayed Lady Byron as a self-righteous tyrant who would drive any mortal male to excesses, Harriet Stowe decided it was time to strike a blow in her friend’s behalf, Lady Byron by this time having been dead for nearly a decade. So she told the whole story.

All kinds of accusations were hurled at her, some quite unpleasant. She rode out the storm, however, and again, as with Uncle Tom, she wrote a book to justify what she had written. But her standing with the American public would never be the same.

She could write in all kinds of places, under every kind of condition. She was always bothered by deadlines, and it seems she was always in need of money. The royalties poured in, but the more she had the more she spent—on a huge Gothic villa in Hartford that was all gables and turrets and was never finished completely; on a cotton plantation in Florida where she intended to provide blacks with a program of work and education; and later, when that failed, on an orange and lemon grove at Mandarin, Florida, “where the world is not,” she said, and where she hoped her unfortunate son Frederick might find himself.

Frederick had trouble staying sober. His problem had started before the war, but at Gettysburg he had been hit in the head by a shell fragment, and, his mother would always believe, he had never been himself again. “After that,” one of her grandsons would write, “he not only was made drunk by the slightest amount of alcohol but he could not resist taking it.”

Calvin grew enormously fat, ever more distant, and of even less use than before when it came to the everyday details of life. Moreover, Harriet found fame increasingly difficult. She had become a national institution. Her correspondence alone would have drained a less vigorous spirit.

Tragedy struck repeatedly. In 1857, upon returning from Europe, she learned that her son Henry, a student at Dartmouth, had drowned while swimming in the Connecticut River. In 1870, Frederick, unable to endure his mother’s Florida experiment any longer, wrote her a touching apology and went to sea, shipping around the Horn. It is known that he got as far as San Francisco, but after that he disappeared and was never heard from again. She would go to her grave with every confidence that he would return one day.

But it was the Brooklyn scandal that hurt her worst of all, she said. In November of 1872 a New York paper reported that her beloved brother Henry Ward, by then the most popular preacher in America, had been carrying on an adulterous affair with one of his parishioners. His enemies swept in for the kill. For all the Beechers the gossip was agonizing. A sensational trial resulted, the husband bringing suit against Beecher for alienation of his wife’s affections. It dragged on for six months and was the talk of the country. Whether Beecher was guilty or innocent was never proved one way or the other. He denied everything, the jury was unable to agree on a verdict, and as far as his sister was concerned his character was never even in question.

The whole story was a slanderous fabrication, she said, and she stood by him through the entire grisly, drawn-out business, as did all the Beechers except Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was only a half sister, it was noted, and was regarded by many as just a little unbalanced. (Isabella, who called herself “the inspired one,” wanted to take charge of a service at Plymouth Church herself and “as one commissioned from on high” declare her brother’s guilt from his own pulpit. Years later, when he was dying, she even tried to force her way into his house to get a deathbed confession.)

But it would be mistaken to suggest that Harriet’s life became increasingly burdensome. Quite the contrary. As time passed she seems to have grown ever more liberated from her past. She drew further and further from the shadow of her harsh Calvinist heritage, eventually rejecting it altogether. She had long since discarded the doctrine of original sin. Neither man nor nature was necessarily corrupt, she now held. Hers was a faith of love and Christian charity. She had a seemingly limitless love for the whole human family. Years before, Catherine, her spinster sister, had been the first of the Beechers to rebel against the traditional faith when a young man she was engaged to marry, a gifted Yale professor of philosophy, was lost at sea and Catherine had had to face the terrible Calvinist conclusion that the young man was consigned to eternal damnation because he had never repented. In time all of Lyman Beecher’s offspring would desert the faith. Henry Ward would even go so far as to preach that there is no hell.

For Harriet, Calvinism was repugnant, a “glacial” doctrine, although she admired enormously the fervor it had given the Puritan colonists of her native New England and the solid purpose and coherence of the communities they established. Like many of her time she sorely lamented the decline of Christian faith in the land. It was the root of the breakdown of the old order, she believed. Mostly, it seems, she admired the backbone the old religion gave people. “They who had faced eternal ruin with an unflinching gaze,” she wrote, “were not likely to shrink before the comparatively trivial losses and gains of any mere earthly conflict.” If she herself could not accept the articles of the Puritan faith, she seemed to wish everybody else would. And once from Florida she wrote: “…never did we have a more delicious spring. I never knew such altogether perfect weather. It is enough to make a saint out of the toughest old Calvinist that ever set his face as a flint. How do you think New England theology would have fared, if our fathers had landed here instead of on Plymouth Rock?”

Like numerous other literary figures of the day she tried spiritualism and claimed that her son Henry had returned from somewhere beyond to pluck a guitar string for her. She became an Episcopalian, and she developed an open fondness for such things as Europe (Paris and Italy especially), Rubens, elegant society, and Florida, in particular Florida (“…this wild, wonderful, bright, and vivid growth, that is all new, strange and unknown by name to me”). The theater and dancing were no longer viewed as sinful. She rejected the idea that “there was something radically corrupt and wicked in the body and in the physical system.” She took a little claret now on occasion. An account of a visit to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, suggests that once at least she may have taken a little too much claret.

She was asked to give readings, to go on the lyceum, as the contemporary lecture circuit was called, like Robert Ingersoll, P. T. Barnum, and the feminists. She needed the money, so at age sixty-one, having never made a public speech before, she embarked on a new career with its endless train rides, bad food, and dreary hotels. She was very shy at first and not much good at it. But she got over that and in time became quite accomplished. “Her performance could hardly be called a reading,” reported the Pittsburgh Gazette, “it was recitative and she seldom glanced at the book. Her voice betrayed the veritable Yankee twang…. Her voice is low, just tinged in the slightest with huskiness, but is quite musical. In manner she was vivacious and gave life to many of the pages, more by suggestive action than by utterances…. She seemed perfectly possessed on the stage, and read with easy grace.”

She found she could move her audiences to great emotional heights, but to laughter especially. And she loved the life. Her health picked up. “I never sleep better than after a long day’s ride,” she wrote.

Her appearance never changed much. She put on no new airs. Nothing, in fact, good or bad, seemed capable of changing that plain, earnest, often whimsical manner. She acquired a number of new friendships that meant a great deal to her, with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mark Twain particularly. Henry Drummond, the noted Scottish religious writer, wrote, after a visit to Hartford: “Next door to Twain I found Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a wonderfully agile old lady, as fresh as a squirrel still, but with the face and air of a lion.” And he concluded: “I have not been so taken with any one on this side of the Atlantic.”

Her affections for Calvin seem to have grown stronger, if anything. He had become absorbed in Semitic studies, let his beard grow, and took to wearing a skullcap. She began calling him “My Old Rabbi.” His apparitions took up more and more of his time, and for a while he was having nightly encounters with the Devil, who came on horseback, Calvin said. But otherwise his mind stayed quick and clear until the end, and she found him exceedingly good company.

In their last years they seem also to have had few financial worries. Among other things a book of his, The Origin and History of the Books of the Bible, had a surprisingly large sale. And their affairs in general were being capably managed by their twin daughters, Eliza and Harriet, who apparently had considerable “faculty.”

Calvin died peacefully enough, with Harriet at his bedside, on August 6, 1886. She lived on for another ten years, slipping off ever so gradually into a gentle senility.

In a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes she wrote: “I make no mental effort of any sort; my brain is tired out. It was a woman’s brain and not a man’s, and finally from sheer fatigue and exhaustion in the march and strife of life it gave out before the end was reached. And now I rest me, like a moored boat, rising and falling on the water, with loosened cordage and flapping sail.”

She was eighty-two. She spent hours looking at picture books, bothering no one, or went out gathering flowers, “a tiny withered figure in a garden hat,” as one writer described her. On occasion she took long walks beside the river, an Irish nurse generally keeping her company. Sometimes, Mark Twain would recall, she “would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.”

And every now and then, during moments of astonishing clarity, she would talk again about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that had just “come” to her in visions. Once, years earlier, when she was having trouble writing, she had said: “If there had been a grand preparatory blast of trumpets or had it been announced that Mrs. Stowe would do this or that, I think it likely I could not have written; but nobody expected anything…and so I wrote freely.”

She died near midnight on July 1, 1896.

II

THE REAL WEST

CHAPTER FOUR

Glory Days in Medora

PART OF what is enshrined in our collective memory as the “real West” had its origins in a little town in the Badlands of North Dakota—a place called Medora, which by all rights ought to be as celebrated as Dodge City or Tombstone. And the fact that Medora was founded by a “crazy Frenchman” only serves to make it quite as authentic a bit of Western Americana as does the fact that young Theodore Roosevelt once rode high, wide, and handsome down the main street. It’s the “Heart of Rough Rider Country” the truck drivers read as they roar by on 1-94, resplendent in their $150 Tony Lama boots.

The setting is best seen from Graveyard Butte, out on the windy point on the west side of the river, where they buried Riley Luffsey. The river and the railroad and the little town are spread below. There is a steep gray cliff behind the town that turns pink in the late afternoon light, and in front of town, in a grassy picnic ground, a brick smokestack, prominent as the point on a sundial, marks the spot where the packing plant stood.

The château, as everyone in Medora still calls it, is nearer at hand, on a bare, high bluff this side of the river, just back from the railroad bridge. Except for the big box elder beside the back door, the house looks no different today from the way it does in the old photographs.

Whether Theodore Roosevelt ever stood here, I can’t say. But his friends the Langs did—it was they who “planted Riley” the day after the shooting—and so doubtless did the Marquis de Mores, if only to enjoy the panorama, nearly all of which he owned.

The view has suffered scarcely at all in the intervening years. The light on the landscape is no less extraordinary, the immeasurable North Dakota sky is something to take your breath away. In early fall the cottonwoods are a blaze of gold beside the mudbrown river, and with the disappearance of the summer tourist traffic, Medora might still be the end of the world.

Come winter, it is the end of the world. Only about one hundred and thirty people, including the staff of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and their families, hang on in the town itself, while on outlying ranches, as snowbanks grow and temperatures drop to 20 below and worse, the isolation and hardships of daily life are compounded a hundredfold.

Winter is what ended the cowboy dream for Roosevelt, as for so many others along the Little Missouri River. When the thaw came in the spring of 1887, the carcasses of dead cattle surged downstream past Medora like cordwood. But I am ahead of my story, and it is the story, the odd little history that goes with the place, that makes it something considerably more than just scenery. Harold Schafer, who owns the Badlands Motel, the Rough Riders Hotel, and much else in Medora, likes to tell visitors that the charm of the Badlands is their scaled-down grandeur. “These aren’t faraway mountains you can’t get to, that you can’t feel under your own feet,” he says, pointing to the surrounding hills. “This is scenery you can reach out and touch.” And then he adds, “Teddy’s here, too, of course…and so is the Marquis.”

The beginning was in 1883, when the cattle boom had hit its peak on the Great Plains. The Northern Pacific had also pushed on through the Badlands by then, and this coming of the railroad coincided with the discovery by the Texans and the Eastern and European money people that the Badlands themselves were not all the name implied. To French-Canadian fur trappers penetrating the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel across. It is as if the rolling prairie land has suddenly given way to a weird otherworld of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned off every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri, which, unlike the big Missouri, flows north and in summer is not much more than a good-size stream.

Extending along the Little Missouri for nearly two hundred miles, the area is a kind of Grand Canyon in miniature, the work of millions of years of erosion on ancient, preglacial sediments. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, are juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous, dark seams of lignite. Some formations have the overpowering presence of ancient ruins, of things remembered from unpleasant dreams. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out. George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Badlands on his way to the Little Bighorn in 1876, called it worthless country.

The cattlemen knew differently. Unlike the other Badlands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these of the uppermost reaches of what was then the Dakota Territory were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. It was “wondrous country” for grass, wrote one veteran cattleman, remembering that summer of 1883. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottomlands and up along sweeping valleys: little bluestem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Veteran cattlemen and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The grass was all free for the taking; there was water; and the very outlandishness of the terrain promised shelter from winter storms. Possibly fifty thousand cattle were driven into the Little Missouri basin that summer alone.

The Texas outfits included the big Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand) and the Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada or Europe, young men primed on such newly published, authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza; or How to Get Rich on the Plains.

The main attraction, however—the man of the hour—was one Antoine Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who planned, he said, not just to raise cattle but to found an enterprise unlike any in the West. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” declared this altogether humorless young aristocrat in his nearly perfect English. Roosevelt’s arrival on the scene, several months later, was by contrast a minor occurrence.

De Mores was Roosevelt’s age—twenty-five—and like Roosevelt he was a passionate lover of the hunt and the kill and of the great outdoors. But beyond that, the two had little in common. About six feet tall, spare and wonderfully fit, the Marquis was inordinately handsome, with black eyes and a tremendous black mustache that he kept waxed to perfection. It was the handsomeness of a Victorian stage villain, to judge by the few photographs we have. There is something vaguely unpleasant in the face, not arrogance only, something more threatening than that—but possibly I am influenced by the knowledge of what he became later in life.

Included with his baggage as he got off the train at the Badlands was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm. One was supposed to hold the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, a trick I myself have tried unsuccessfully at the château, where the stick still stands in a corner of his bedroom.

In duels in France the Marquis had already killed two men, and on his forays along the Little Missouri he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighted down as he was with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber French rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. A Roman Catholic of vigorous piety, a royalist, and an anti-Semite, the Marquis liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would make in the Badlands were to be applied to that specific purpose.

His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Badlands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the whole costly process of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be shipped almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So why not put the packing plant where the cattle were? It would do away with the Chicago middlemen, which would mean lower prices for the consumer, which in turn would produce an ever-greater demand for beef.

On April Fools’ Day, 1883, the Marquis cracked a bottle of champagne over a tent peg to found Medora, which was to be the center of his operations. He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site. The name Medora was in honor of his American wife, the former Medora von Hoffman, whose father, a Wall Street banker, had provided her with an income of about $90,000 a year (which would be roughly a million in present-day dollars). This plus his own family backing gave the Marquis, as he said, little worry over finances. He would spend whatever was needed. He himself would be president and general manager of the new Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Louis von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.

The young Frenchman was suddenly everywhere at once, seeing to plans, hiring carpenters, masons, ordering equipment for the packing plant, issuing statements to reporters. He bought up all the land he could lay his hands on, twenty-one thousand acres before he was through. He bought cattle; he brought in twelve thousand sheep. He announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars.

There was nothing slack about his imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Badlands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York (at a profit of $1,000 a carload, he figured). As for living quarters, he had originally intended to make do with a tent, pending completion of his own Château de Mores, on the bluff across the river, and the arrival of Madame de Mores. But finding tent life a bit more inconvenient than he expected, he had a private railroad car brought in and placed on a siding. “I like this country,” he wrote to his wife, “for there is room to move about without stepping on the feet of others.”

Yet since arriving, he had done little else but step on feet and sensibilities. The West, for all its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—founded on very definite rules and regulations, most of them unwritten. If there was nothing illegal or even illogical about bringing in sheep or buying up land in country where nobody else owned any or believed in owning any, it was all contrary to local tradition and thus, by the prevailing ethic, highly dangerous. Worst of all, the Marquis began fencing his land, and when the fences were promptly cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys named O’Donnell, Wannegan, and Luffsey shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently left town for nearby Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot!” he was told.

So the next time the three cowboys went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting for them by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush, pure and simple—cold-blooded murder, as the Langs insisted—or the Marquis may have been acting in self-defense, as he said. Either way, Riley Luffsey was dead, one slug in the neck, another in the chest.

There were two formal hearings at Mandan, during which witnesses had free run of the saloons, and as things wound to a close, the prosecuting attorney let fly with a scathing burst of frontier oratory, a speech so offensive to the Marquis that he pulled a revolver on the attorney that night at the hotel, aimed, fired, and would have had another killing to answer for had not a bystander struck his arm.

The outcome was an acquittal, and so back to Medora the young Frenchman went, to resume his business in the manner of a man who considered the issue closed and who assumed others did too. Probably he never knew how close he came to being lynched—which is how things stood in early September, when Roosevelt arrived.

Roosevelt got off the train about three in the morning, when it was still cold and dark. He was alone and he looked very little like the man he was to become. At most he weighed 135 pounds, “a little feller” with a wispy mustache and large, metal-rimmed eyeglasses. That he was the classic child of privilege, the very essence of the era’s gilded youth by all appearances, escaped no one once day came and he made his presence known. There was something faintly comic about him. He talked in a thin, piping voice and with the swallowed broad a’s of an upper-class New Yorker. Later, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he would immortalize himself along the Little Missouri by calling out to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”

He had come, he said, to shoot a buffalo while there were still one or two left to shoot. He had also come for his health, but of this he said nothing. His vocation was politics. He was an assemblyman from New York’s safely Republican Twenty-first District.

He put up at the Langs’ ranch south of town, and in a matter of days—having talked to the Langs, having talked to Howard Eaton and a couple of young Canadians named Ferris and Merrifield—he decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin, also south of town, was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross ranch. What this meant for the moment was money only. He gave Ferris and Merrifield a check for $14,000 to buy some 450 head of cattle, which represented a small start (the Marquis was running something over three thousand head by then), but the direct, trusting manner in which he did it made an impression. He bought no land. Like nearly everybody except the Marquis, he would remain a squatter.

In two weeks Roosevelt was heading home again to West 57th Street and the lovely young wife who was pregnant with their first child. He had killed his buffalo, but only after seven days that had all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, brother of one of his new partners in the cattle business. The chase had carried them pell-mell over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Badlands. Twice they found a buffalo for Roosevelt to shoot, and each time Roosevelt shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace set by the little Easterner, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Roosevelt’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. Awaking one morning to find himself lying in several inches of water, Roosevelt exclaimed, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days he and Ferris had nothing to subsist on but biscuits and rainwater.

Remembering the expedition a lifetime afterward, Ferris was still incredulous. “You just couldn’t knock him out of sorts…and he had books with him and would read at odd times.” When at last Roosevelt shot his buffalo, just across the Montana line, he broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars.

He returned in June a changed man. He would stake his future on the Badlands, he said; he would become a cattle baron. There would be time as well to think and to write and to make himself whole again. For by then he had suffered the worst tragedy of his life. Three and a half months earlier, his wife had died of complications resulting from the birth of their daughter, and his mother—the same day, in the same house—had died of typhoid. He saw his political career leading nowhere. He was plagued by stomach trouble, insomnia, and asthma, the torture of his childhood. Added to that was what he called his “caged wolf” feeling. Craving change, craving release from everything in the East, everything in his past, the conventions, the confinement, he was bent on a new life in the open air. New clothes, new work, new companions. Had he been able to change his name as well, as so many others did—there were three men named Bill Jones in Medora alone—he might have done that too, one suspects, given his frame of mind.

The very haunted, often foreboding spirit of the Badlands appealed to him powerfully now. The light in his life had gone out forever, he wrote in a tribute to his dead wife. The Badlands, he said, looked like Poe sounds.

Still…something within him refused to be subdued. His depression was serious, but it was also highly sporadic and never, so far as we know, was it immobilizing. He had spent a small fortune on his cowboy getup—big sombrero, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaps, cowhide boots, silver belt buckle, fancy tooled-leather belt and holster, custom-engraved Colt revolver, fancy monogrammed silver spurs. The works. He gloried in dressing up and having his picture taken. “You would be amused to see me,” he wrote to his stuffy Boston friend Henry Cabot Lodge. Truth was, he himself was amused—and unabashedly proud. “I shall put on a thousand more cattle and make it my regular business,” he informed his sister Anna. He was in the saddle all day, “having a glorious time here.”

Spring mornings were the best, with the mist on the river. He loved the presence of so many birds and animals, the wild roses, the sweet scent of sage and ground juniper. He went off on long early-morning rides on a fiery little horse called Manitou. The dry air and open space and the speed of the horse made “a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness.”

“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he declared in one of the most self-revealing lines he ever wrote. Get action! It was the old Roosevelt family cure-all—for illness, grief, self-doubt. Seize the moment! In the agony of an asthmatic childhood, the free and open out-of-doors had meant survival, literally life itself.

With very few exceptions, the cowboys took to him from the start. They called him Mr. Roosevelt or Theodore, as he wished; or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of his hearing. So far as I know, nobody called him Teddy, a name he never cared for.

He was only an average rider and never much of a roper. He also abhorred foul language and said so, and he did not like to drink. But the cowboys judged him “game to the core.” He ate, lived, worked “the same as any man,” asking no favors. Besides, he was interesting—he had read a lot, he knew a lot. Once, in a hotel bar in present-day Wibaux, Montana, he stood up and in quiet, businesslike fashion flattened an unknown drunken cowboy who, a gun in each hand, had decided to make a laughingstock of him because of his glasses. The man had chosen to stand foolishly close to him and with his heels too close together, Roosevelt later explained.

He found a beautiful, quiet spot on the Little Missouri some thirty-five miles north of Medora and brought two Maine woodsmen named Sewall and Dow, friends from hunting trips in his college days, to help him establish another ranch, this to be called the Elkhorn. His stake in the Badlands was now up to some $40,000, a fifth of his inheritance.

Bill Sewall, a big, homespun expounder of common sense, arrived from Maine and after looking things over told Roosevelt it was no country for cattle. Roosevelt told Sewall he didn’t know what he was talking about. In the privacy of a memorable letter to his family back in Maine, Sewall said, “Tell all who wish to know that I think this a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more, but if I had enough money to start here I never would come here.”

The ranch house Sewall and Dow built is gone now. It was a long, low log cabin with a deep front porch where, in the heat of the day, Roosevelt liked to sit in a rocking chair and read poetry or just gaze at the river and the distant plateaus. But the same line of cottonwoods still shades the spot, and there is not another house or road or sign of civilization anywhere in sight.

Roosevelt thought he could write there, and it was as a writer, he had concluded, that the world would take him seriously. In his time in the Badlands, along with everything else, he produced magazine articles, a book on ranch life and hunting, a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, and notes for his epic history, The Winning of the West. Most important, he wrote from firsthand experience about the cowboy and the hard realities of the cowboy’s life, and this, with but one or two exceptions, was something no writer had done before. Owen Wister, author of the classic western The Virginian, called him “the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously”; and indeed, it was Roosevelt, Wister, and the artist Frederic Remington—three Eastern contemporaries of “good background”—who in their efforts to catch the “living breathing end” of the frontier produced what in large measure remains the popular vision of the “real West.”

For his part, Roosevelt threw a charm over the Badlands in much the way other American writers have over other specific locales. And it was the Badlands cowboy, the rough rider as Roosevelt found him in and around Medora, that he fixed in the public imagination. If he didn’t exactly invent Marlboro Country, he brought it into focus as nobody had before him, and ironically enough, a Badlands location not far from Roosevelt’s Elkhorn ranch site has on occasion served literally as Marlboro Country. The weathered Badlands rancher who can tell you from personal experience what Roosevelt and the others were up against in their time also knows the going rate for commercial modeling.

To what extent Roosevelt’s faith in his ranching ventures was buoyed by the activities of the Marquis, Roosevelt himself never divulged. But by 1884, when Roosevelt had more than doubled his investment, it was all but impossible not to be impressed. Growing by leaps and bounds, Medora had become one of the wildest cow towns anywhere in the West, the sort of place, as Roosevelt said, where vice and pleasure were considered synonymous. The packing plant was in operation; cattle were actually being slaughtered; dressed Badlands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. Most important to a young man like Roosevelt, a man with no business experience and some very hardheaded family advisers to face, the big eastern papers, and the New York Times in particular, were now paying respectful attention to the Marquis, the thought being “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, ran a “wonderful business.”

The château was completed and Madame de Mores took up residence, which to most of Medora was the surpassing event of the summer. In truth, the château was not much more than an overgrown frame farmhouse. There was nothing very fancy about it inside or out. But it was large—twenty-six rooms—and once the big, square piano arrived from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants moved in, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.

The Madame played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. She painted in watercolors. Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent horses the Marquis had shipped from the East, her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by an oversize black sombrero, she looked no bigger than a child. Her features were delicate, and beneath the hat she had a great abundance of lustrous, dark red hair. On a shooting expedition in the Big Horns in Wyoming, the delicate-appearing Madame shot and killed three bears, including a grizzly. The Marquis boasted that she was a better shot than he—the ultimate compliment—and had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks and kitchen.

It would be interesting to know Roosevelt’s impressions of her on those occasions when he dined at the château; or when they called on him in New York, for it must also be mentioned here that none of these three, not the Marquis or his Madame or Roosevelt, could ever keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch, however fervently or sincerely they espoused life on the frontier. Roosevelt was actually in New York more than half of his famous Badlands years—to be with his infant daughter, Alice, and to keep tabs on the political world he could never willingly abandon, whatever else he felt or said.

Presumably Roosevelt and the Madame found much in common, but he never said so in writing. In the dining room at the château, her patterned Minton china is set out today as though guests are expected momentarily. The little landscapes she painted hang in the parlor. Her books are there; her sheet music is piled on the piano. Years later, Roosevelt’s sister Anna would say only that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for the wife.”

That there should be an underlying tension between two such men was inevitable. Were they figures in fiction, we would know a confrontation had to come. And so it did. But what is so fascinating is the behavior of the Marquis. It was he, not Roosevelt, who played the deciding card, though not in a way that the whole violent pattern of his life would naturally suggest.

It happened this way. The summer of 1885, the Marquis was taken to court still another time on the Luffsey murder charge, and again, after another travesty of a trial, he got off. But from the time the issue was revived and splashed across the newspapers east and west, he saw it as a conspiracy by his business enemies, the beef trust, to destroy him. And in this he appears to have been partly right. Convinced also that Roosevelt had had a secret hand in his troubles—which was nonsense—he wrote a letter to Roosevelt asking him just where he stood, a letter Roosevelt took to be a challenge to a duel. Maybe the Marquis meant it as just that, but the whole tone of it suggests otherwise.

Roosevelt answered that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Roosevelt, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable.” Which made it the Marquis’s move.

There was no duel, however, because the Marquis kept his head and let the matter drop. Roosevelt was sure he had called the man’s bluff; the Marquis had “backed off,” Roosevelt would boast. Others were equally sure the Marquis had done nothing of the kind. Some were so sure, in fact, that they would insist ever after that no such showdown had ever occurred, that the story was a fiction devised by the Roosevelt cult, and one might be tempted to accept that had the actual letters not survived. The Marquis made nothing of Roosevelt’s response, it seems reasonable to conclude, because he had never challenged him in the first place.

Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Roosevelt wanted rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Roosevelt would have been killed. So if it can be said for the Marquis, as I think it can, that his charismatic presence in the Badlands was partly responsible for Roosevelt’s own continued presence—and thus for what was an immensely important experience for Roosevelt—it can also be said that his almost unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Roosevelt for other things.

The Marquis’s empire began coming apart a year before the tragic winter of 1886-1887. A stagecoach line he had started proved a failure. His sheep turned out to be the wrong breed for the climate, and more than half died. His powerful father-in-law began questioning expenditures, then withdrew his financial support.

Yet none of this seemed to faze the young entrepreneur. Like another celebrated Frenchman of the day, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was then leading a doomed attempt at a Panama canal, the Marquis talked only of success and dazzled reporters with still more innovative schemes to come. He would open his own retail stores in New York and sell his Badlands beef at three cents a pound under the going price. Good beef at a good price for the working man was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at ten dollars a share. His shareholders, he said, were to be the common working people (just as de Lesseps was counting on the common people of France to pay for his canal). The slogan for his bright red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”

But the stock didn’t sell. Pressures—from the railroad interests, the Chicago packers, the retail butchers—were too strong. Even had the Marquis been a more adroit businessman, it is very unlikely that he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply didn’t taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.

The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. Nobody knows what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also quite possible that he lost nothing at all, such was the eventual market value of his landholdings.

He and Madame de Mores were gone before winter came. The château was left exactly as it was, as though they would return any time. Roosevelt, too, had departed by then to run for mayor of New York (unsuccessfully) and to be married again. He was in Italy on his honeymoon when the disaster struck.

Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Badlands the temperatures went to 40 below. Children were lost and froze to death within a hundred yards of their own doors. Cattle, desperate for shelter, smashed their heads through ranch house windows. The snow drifted so deep in many places that cattle were buried alive. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who couldn’t wait blew their brains out.

The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anybody’s imagining. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with more than half his herd. The average loss was about 75 percent. Roosevelt, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a “perfect smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.

He kept coming back from year to year but never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or so. His cowboy time was over. In the mid-nineties, he sold off what little he had left in the Badlands, added up his losses, and arrived at a net figure of $23,556.68, or roughly a quarter of a million dollars in present-day money.

But by every measure other than financial the venture had been a huge success. Roosevelt’s physical transformation had been astonishing. He came home “bronzed,” “thirty pounds heavier,” “rugged,” as the newspapers noted. “When he got back to the world again,” wrote Bill Sewall, “he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen…clear bone, muscle and grit.”

In Medora, Roosevelt had his first direct experience with real democracy, as one Eastern friend observed. In the view of his family he never would have become president had it not been for the Badlands years. They had put him back in shape for life, for politics, for a new marriage and a new family. Out of the experience came the whole Rough Rider idea and, consequently, the TR of San Juan Hill. Of course, some were to find his Wild West enthusiasms just a little tiresome, even questionable in a grown man. On the news that William McKinley was dead, Mark Hanna is said to have exclaimed, “Now look! That damn cowboy is president!”

The subsequent career of the Marquis is appalling. The fact that nobody much likes to talk about that in Medora today is certainly understandable. It is easier to forget that the cowboy getup figured not only in the heroics in Cuba but also in the dreadful anti-Semitic craze that swept France toward the turn of the century.

The Marquis went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He, too, turned to politics. He launched his own crusade, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and paraded about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure, too, on the Jews. It was this mania that eventually led to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.

The Marquis was himself murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa, where he had set off on a lone, harebrained scheme to unite the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English. He seems to have been mourned only by his children and by Madame de Mores, who remained his stout defender until her dying day.

A statue of the Marquis stands in a little park in Medora beside Harold Schafer’s Chuck Wagon restaurant. The statue and the park were gifts of the de Mores heirs. It was they who turned the chateau over to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, complete with all its furnishings. And like some of the descendants of Theodore Roosevelt, Antoine de Vallombrosa, grandson of the marquis and present holder of the title Marquis de Mores, is a frequent summer visitor to the town.

I asked him once why he keeps coming back. We were on the road south of town, on our way to see Joe Hild, who owns Roosevelt’s old Maltese Cross ranch. Until then we had been talking about his homes in Geneva and Biarritz. Tony, as he likes to be called, picks his words carefully and speaks in perfect American English, without a trace of an accent. “Oh, I like the people here,” he said. “Where in my normal life would I meet such wonderful people, so different?” He is circumspect, graying; he wears both a belt and suspenders, a watch on each wrist, a red baseball cap and black basketball sneakers.

I stopped the car to pick up a chunk of scoria from the side of the road, a memento for my writing desk, and he asked me to get one for him also. “Are you interested in geology?” I asked as I got back behind the wheel. “Oh, no,” he said softly. “Unless perhaps in connection with oil! I am very interested in oil. Do you know anything about oil?” And we both laughed. Those small oil pumps that look like nodding grasshoppers have become a ubiquitous part of the Badlands landscape, except within the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

It is the park that remains Roosevelt’s Badlands memorial—more than a hundred square miles of natural splendor, camping and picnic areas beside the river, hiking trails, miles of scenic roads. Open year-round, it attracts some 800,000 visitors a year, about 75 percent of them during North Dakota’s brief summer.

Antelope, whitetail, and mule deer abound. So do squirrels, beaver, rabbits (eastern and mountain cottontail), skunks, prairie dogs, coyotes, and yes, rattlesnakes. The birdwatcher’s checklist issued by the Park Service lists 116 species, but if there is a Badlands bird it is the magpie, with the crow running a close second. Elk, moose, black bear, grizzlies, and the gray wolf have all vanished from the area since Roosevelt’s day, but the buffalo herd that roams the park now surpasses any he ever saw.

The great days in Medora lasted all of three years, from 1883 to 1886. Nothing much had ever happened there before and nothing much has happened since, as the world judges these things. Though some ranchers survived the Marquis’s collapse and the winter of 1886-1887, Medora did not, and were it not for the château, the park and Harold Schafer’s commercial enterprises, the place today would be a ghost town.

In 1919, the year of Roosevelt’s death, Sewall set down some of his recollections. Remembering how it had all ended, he wrote, “We were glad to get back home—gladder, I guess, than about anything that had ever happened to us, and yet we were melancholy, for with all the hardships and work it was a very happy life…the happiest time that any of us have known.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Remington

THE STORY is that young Fred Remington was standing at the corner of Ninth and Main in Kansas City one summer day in 1885 when he saw a man he knew, a housepainter named Shorty Reeson, coming along in a spring wagon pulled by an ill-kept mare that Remington liked the looks of. Remington was then twenty-four and down on his luck. He had come west to make his fortune and in two years had succeeded in losing a sizeable inheritance, about $9,000, roughly half of what it had taken his late father a lifetime to accumulate. The young man’s first Western venture was a sheep ranch in central Kansas. When that failed, he saw his future in “hardware or whiskey—or anything else,” as he said. With the money left, he bought into a Kansas City saloon as a silent partner, but within a year it too had failed. In the meantime, his new wife had left him. She was Eva Caten from back home in upstate New York, where they had been married the previous October. After three short months in Kansas City, she packed her things and headed home—once she found that Remington was not a successful iron broker, as he had led her to believe, but the keeper of a low saloon. The one note of promise since her departure was the sale, through a local art dealer, of some Western scenes he had painted.

Was the mare for sale? Remington called to Shorty Reeson, according to an old account in the Kansas City Star. She was not, said Reeson (he “being wise in the ways of horse trading”). Was she good under saddle? Remington asked. Best see for himself, Reeson said. So at the busiest intersection in Kansas City, in front of the Grand Junction Hotel, they unhitched the wagon and borrowed a saddle, and Remington swung up to give the horse a try. Satisfied, he agreed to a price of fifty dollars.

And thus the next morning, sometime in August 1885, Remington left Kansas City behind him, heading west.

The scene could hardly be more appropriate—the lone figure of a man on the move, heading into an uncertain, possibly perilous, future in the prime of youth. The background is the Old West, but the man is of greater interest than the background. And of course there is the horse. For Remington there was always the horse. If he could have but one thing written on his tombstone, he once told a drinking companion, it would be “He knew the horse.”

Besides, he had an audience for this turning point in his life, a vital element not overlooked in the old account. “They warned him of the perils. He smiled,” it says. “They coaxed him, he went.” His popularity as a “good fellow” was firmly established. Long afterward, the cashier of a billiard parlor spoke of him lovingly as “One Grand Fred.” Recalling the time, Remington said, “Now that I was poor I could gratify my inclination for an artist’s career.”

He was born on October 1, 1861, in a big frame house that still stands on Court Street in Canton, New York, on the northwest watershed of the Adirondacks, which is about as far north in New York state as it is possible to be without crossing into Canada. His full name was Frederic Sackrider Remington. His father, Seth Pierre Remington, was the proprietor of a local newspaper, a lean, active man, ardent horseman and ardent Republican, who distinguished himself as a Union cavalry officer in the Civil War. His mother was Clara Bascomb Sackrider, whose family had a hardware business in Canton. An only child, little Freddie had the run of the town, his love for which was to be lifelong, as indeed it was for all of New York’s North Country. In 1873 the family resettled in nearby Ogdensburg, overlooking Canada on the St. Lawrence River. Seth Remington, “the Colonel,” had been made collector of the port at Ogdensburg. He sold his newspaper and for both pleasure and profit began raising and racing trotting horses.

In a photograph taken at Canton shortly before the move, eleven-year-old Freddie, dressed in the visored cap and miniature uniform of a volunteer firefighter, poses with the “heroes” of Engine Company One. Twice in consecutive years Canton’s business district—and the Colonel’s printing plant—had been destroyed by fire. The Colonel rallied the town to establish three new fire companies, and Freddie was made an official mascot. On the Fourth of July he marched with his father and the other men of Engine Company One at the head of the parade.

Full grown, standing five feet nine and weighing upward of two hundred pounds, he exuded physical power. A veteran Kansas City saloon keeper who had seen plenty of rough men in his time described him as “a bull for size and strength,” and said Remington could have been a prizefighter had he chosen. A Kansas City matron called him a Greek god who fairly “shone with the light of youth.” Even as a schoolboy he cut an impressive figure. At sixteen, in a letter written from the Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, he portrayed himself as follows:

I don’t amount to anything in particular. I can spoil an immense amount of grub at any time in the day…I go a good man on muscle. My hair is short and stiff, and I am about five feet eight inches and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. There is nothing poetical about me…. They all say I am handsome. (I don’t think so.)

He had been sent to another military school, the Vermont Episcopal Institute at Burlington, where he had his first formal art lessons, then to Highland Academy, where his pen drawings of soldiers and battles were considered a wonder by his classmates. He had no aspiration to any wealth or fame that called for excessive effort, he wrote in bantering spirit to one of his Sackrider uncles. “I mean to study for an artist.” More often, he talked of pursuing a career in journalism like his father, who was now in failing health and a worry. “Do you miss my ‘gab’ on martial subjects?” the boy wrote after a visit to Canton. “Guess if I hadn’t come home you would have died.”

At Yale he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts and played football, making a name for himself as a first-string forward, or rusher, on the Yale team of 1879—the last of the fifteen-man teams, whose captain was the famous Walter Camp, the “Father of Football.” The program at the School of Fine Arts was under the direction of John Ferguson Weir, an accomplished, European-trained painter known for his dramatic portrayals of heavy industry. Instructions in drawing were under John Henry Niemeyer, “the German,” who held to the classic drill of drawing only from plaster casts and who inscribed on the blackboard a maxim of Ingres’s: “Drawing is the Probity of Art.” When asked for guidance by an aspiring young artist long afterward, Remington said his advice was never to take anyone’s advice, but then added, “Study good pictures and above all draw—draw—draw—and always from nature.”

Repeatedly over the years, he would portray himself as self-taught, and in the main this was so. Nevertheless, his Yale training, brief as it was, served him well and in some of his mannerisms—figures of speech, the clothes he wore—he was to remain unmistakably a product of Yale, more Yale than cowboy, ever after. Friends were addressed as “old boy” or “old chap,” and words like bully became habitual. Traveling to and from the West by train, he was frequently mistaken for an Englishman.

On the death of his father, in 1880, Remington dropped out of Yale after only a year and a half. He tried different jobs in Ogdensburg and Albany, stuck to none, worried about his future, proposed to Eva Caten and was turned down by her father, went west briefly—to Montana Territory, principally for the fun of it—and came home with some sketches and a pale blond mustache. Again he tried a clerk’s life in Albany, hating every moment. On coming into his inheritance at twenty-one, he took off for Kansas, the sheep farm, and his string of misadventures.

Neither his mother nor Eva Caten took an interest in his artistic efforts or held any hopes for him in that line. Only one member of the family, William Remington, a favorite uncle who owned a Canton dry-goods store, remained convinced that the boy’s future was in art. Had anyone else who knew his story been in Kansas City to see him ride away that summer of 1885, they could not possibly have envisioned all that happened so soon after.

His success was sudden and extraordinary. He became focused as he had never been. His capacity for concentrated effort, his energy and productivity were all at once boundless. In little more than a year, back from his wanderings through New Mexico and Arizona, reunited with Eva, his bank account nicely enhanced by his Uncle Bill, he had established himself as a magazine illustrator in New York. He had an apartment in Brooklyn and an entrée at Harper’s Weekly, the country’s leading magazine, where he made his first call dressed in full cowboy regalia. In short order he was discovered by St. Nicholas and Outing magazines. In 1887 Harper’s Weekly alone carried thirty-nine of Remington’s drawings and sketches. He received a commission from Century Illustrated Magazine to illustrate a new series of articles by young Theodore Roosevelt, articles that would later appear as a book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. The next year more than seventy Remington drawings and sketches appeared in Harper’s Weekly.

His annual income was a princely eight thousand dollars. He was working now in pen and ink, oil, and watercolor. In 1889, the year of his enormous oil A Dash for the Timber, he and Eva bought a large house on a hill in suburban New Rochelle, New York, with stables and a sweeping lawn. By 1890, only five years after being down and out in Kansas City, he was one of the best-known artists in America, a full-blown celebrity at age twenty-eight. In 1890 Harper’s Weekly ran more than a hundred of his illustrations, seven as double-page spreads. Furthermore, he was now writing as well as illustrating. He painted A Cavalryman’s Breakfast on the Plains, Cabin in the Woods, Aiding a Comrade, and The Scout. He had his first one-man show. Eva described him as working as if he had forty children to support. For a new illustrated edition of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, the largest commission he had yet received, Remington would produce twenty-two full-page plates and nearly four hundred drawings.

The improvement in his work, meantime, was astonishing. The first drawings for Harper’s Weekly had, as editor Henry Harper said, “all the ring of new and live material,” but they were “very crude” in execution and had to be redrawn by staff artists. An early oil Signaling the Main Command, painted in 1886, is so stiff, so awkwardly handled overall, that one wonders how possibly it could have been done by the same artist who painted Dash for the Timber just three years later.

In Signaling the Main Command everything is at a standstill, everyone rooted to the ground. Horses and men are like cutouts pasted down on a drab backdrop and on each other. There is no air between them, no life in any gesture. By contrast, A Dash for the Timber is everything suggested by its inspired title (Remington was good at titles). The massed riders charge pell-mell, nearly head on at the viewer. Their horses are flying—hardly a hoof touches the ground—and the dead weight of the one rider who has been hit makes the action of the others, and of the pursuing Indians, all the more alive. The dust flies, guns blaze away, the wind whips the big hat brims. There is no time for second thoughts. It is big action in big space. The painting is nearly the size of a mural, measuring four by seven feet. It drew immediate attention when accepted for exhibition at the National Academy of Design and remains one of the masterpieces of American painting, let alone Western art.

Some of Remington’s subject matter, like Hiawatha, had nothing to do with the West. On occasion, the magazines commissioned sporting sketches. Cabin in the Woods was a North Country scene, and there were to be more as time went on. It was the West, however, that the editors and his public wanted most, the Wild West—cowboys, horses, soldiers, renegade Indians, and action, lots of action—and at intervals during all the work, he kept going back and forth to the West to gather material. He became known as the expert on the subject. The widespread impression was that Remington’s West must be authentic, the real West, and this accounted in no small measure for his popularity. The editor of Century, the highly cultivated Richard Watson Gilder, is said to have offered Remington a box of cigars and said: “Tell me about the West.” “He draws what he knows and he knows what he draws,” the readers of Harper’s Weekly were informed in a biographical essay on the artist.

It was said repeatedly—and usually with Remington’s encouragement—that he had been a cowpuncher himself, that he had seen action with the troops, when in truth he had never done either. To be sure, he had experienced a lot of hard riding with the cavalry in New Mexico and Arizona, in Montana and the Dakota Territory. He had known and observed countless cowboys and Mexican vaqueros, Cheyenne, Apache, Sioux, and Crow Indians. He had seen nearly all the West in every season and made friends everywhere he went sketching and painting or simply using his eyes. “Without knowing exactly how to do it, I began to try to record some facts around me,” he later explained, “and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded. Youth is never appalled by the insistent demands of a great profession.”

Like so many before him and since, he found the West physically and emotionally invigorating—therapeutic. He loved the air, the clear, dazzling light, the freedom he felt in such “grand, silent country.” But it was there also that he had staked his claim professionally—“Cowboys are cash,” he told a friend—and rather than trying to dress the part, to play cowboy or soldier, he seems to have gone out of his way to be conspicuously the observer only, to be nobody but Frederic Remington. On a grueling cavalry exercise in the heat and dust of June in Arizona, an expedition that seems to have been designed in part to test his endurance, he measured up well enough to be elected an honorary member of the troop—he was made the mascot again by his uniformed heroes—but he went wearing an English safari helmet.

On another of his forays, in Montana in 1890, he arrived at an Eighth Cavalry encampment on the Tongue River sitting astride a tall horse and wearing a huge brown canvas hunting coat, yellow English riding breeches, and fancy Prussian boots set off by long-shanked English spurs. He was a memorable spectacle. On his head this time was a tiny, soft-brimmed hat, which in combination with the canvas coat made him look bigger even than he was. A man of phenomenal appetite for good food and drink, Remington had become by then “a huge specimen of humanity,” weighing perhaps 250 pounds. When he dismounted, it is said, the horse appeared glad to be rid of him.

A young officer who was present on that Montana trip, Lieutenant Alvin H. Sydenham, himself an amateur artist, described Remington as a “big, good-natured, overgrown boy” and left this intriguing account of Remington’s working methods in the field:

I watched this fat artist very closely to see “how he did it.” My stock of artistic information was as great when he went away as it was before he arrived. There was no technique, no “shop,” about anything he did. No pencils, no notebooks, no “kodak”—nothing, indeed, but his big blue eyes rolling around at everything and into all sorts of queer places. Now and then an orderly would ride by, or a scout dash up in front of the commanding officer’s tent. Then I would see him look intently for a moment with his eyes half closed—only a moment, and it gave me the impression that perhaps he was a trifle nearsighted.

One morning before dawn, Sydenham was awakened by a prolonged scratching at the flap of his tent. It was Remington asking for a “cavalryman’s breakfast.” Sydenham didn’t know the expression. “A drink of whiskey and a cigarette,” Remington said. The story quickly made the rounds, to the advantage of Remington’s already considerable popularity with the men.

To Sydenham, Remington was “a fellow you could not fail to like the first time you saw him,” and others would later say much the same. Though never a cowboy or soldier, never a good shot, often bothered by the sight of blood, he relished the comradeship of “hard-sided,” plainspoken men, “men with the bark on,” who loved the outdoors as he did and welcomed his high spirits and fund of stories. Nothing gave him such pleasure, Remington said, as sitting about with good companions “talking through my hat.” He was always just arrived from somewhere afar, always on his way somewhere else interesting. In the words of a lifelong friend, an Adirondack hunter and guide named Has Rasbeck, “Remington never stays put for long in any one place, but there’s an awful lot of him while he’s around.”

He called the soldiers of the Indian-fighting army “my tribe,” and they, more even than the cowboys and ranchers, were the “real West,” both in what he painted and what he wrote. It was a highly selective reality, to be sure, as he knew perfectly well. The real West of the sod-house homesteader, of crops and families, of small towns and railroads had no appeal for him. He never responded to any of that as did such chroniclers as Willa Cather or his friend Hamlin Garland, for whom, like Cather, the West was native ground. Remington’s Westerner is a horseman, the wild-riding soldier or cowboy, and Remington’s West is a place of endless conflict, his horsemen ever battling with the elements or the Indian, another horseman, who to Remington was a true savage and so joined with the elements. Nature in his West is never benign or sustaining. It is remorseless, a killer—and thus antithetical to civilization—to any but the brave and uncomplaining. Indeed, it was the very advance of “the derby hat, the smoking chimneys, the cordless binder” that impelled him, he said. “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish.” The whole picturesque way of life of his tribe was as doomed as that of their Indian foe.

While the rest of the country spoke of the advance of the frontier, the “taming” of the West, as a positive force in the building of American civilization, to Remington the frontier was receding and, in the end, a tragic loss. He went west to chase a disappearing past, not to find the future. To him the West was more a place in time than any part of the map or something to own. His paintings and drawings, the things he wrote, had nothing to do with dreams of a home in the West. He bought no land there. He wanted none. He never lived there, never stayed more than a month or two at a time. Some of it he thought ugly and depressing, like the Dakota Badlands that so entranced Theodore Roosevelt. What mattered were those wild riders; they were the “living breathing end” of a time that must not go unrecorded or uncelebrated.

Roosevelt, too, in books and articles, was trying to capture the open-range West before it was gone. So also was their mutual friend Owen Wister, whose stories Remington illustrated. Seeing themselves as joined in common cause, they encouraged, advised, and complimented one another. “It seems to me that you in your line, and Wister in his, are doing the best work in America today,” Roosevelt wrote to Remington. He considered Remington the country’s greatest living painter and was hardly less enthusiastic about Remington’s writing. “Are you aware…that aside from what you do with the pencil, you come closer to the real thing with the pen than any other man in the western business?” Roosevelt asked Remington in 1897, by which time Remington had published more than sixty articles. “I don’t know how you do it,” Roosevelt continued, “anymore than I know how Kipling does it.”

Wister was a Philadelphian, a Harvard graduate like Roosevelt, wealthy, citified, a little finicky, anything but a Westerner. Kidding him with advice on how to do a proper Western story, Remington wrote, “Put every person on horseback and let the blood be half a foot deep. Be, very profane and have plenty of shooting. No episodes must occur in the dark.” Wister privately thought of Remington as a “rollicking animal” and “the most uneven artist I know,” as he confided to his mother, but he provided a glowing introduction for a portfolio-sized book of Remington drawings called Done in the Open. Remington, he said, was more than an artist, he was a national treasure. It was out of the creative production of Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington—three Easterners—that a heroic vision of the Wild West emerged to claim the popular imagination as the nineteenth century was about to end; and it was in the East, in comfortable surroundings, that their important work was done. Roosevelt wrote his spirited accounts of roundups and bucking horses at a desk at Sagamore Hill, his twenty-two-room house overlooking Long Island Sound at Oyster Bay. Wister “pegged away” at The Virginian, the first true Western in American literature, while escaping a Philadelphia winter in Charleston, South Carolina. Remington produced the great body of his work in a studio built to order on his hill at New Rochelle, from where he, too, could catch a glimpse of Long Island Sound.

But of the three, Remington had, as Roosevelt admitted, the greatest talent and the greatest influence. He produced much, much more, in print and on canvas, and with greater feeling. However selective or romanticized his West may be, he loved it with a passion. His work, as he said, was always more a matter of heart than head.

His pleasures were simple. He loved horses, dogs, good cigars, snow storms, and moonlit nights; fresh vegetables, pancakes, spareribs, pigs’ knuckles, salt pork and milk gravy, roast beef—nearly everything ever put on his plate but spinach and Virginia ham, which he thought tasted like stove wood. “How that man would eat,” recalled a waitress at an Adirondacks hotel. “My, my, my, how that man would eat!” When he was drinking, which was often, he preferred Scotch or martinis, and apparently he could drink just about anyone under the table. According to his biographers, Peggy and Harold Samuels, Remington could drink a quart of liquor in an evening.

He was a warm friend, by all accounts, a generous host, and a faithful correspondent who enlivened his letters with delightful little drawings, usually as a way of poking fun at himself. His spelling was atrocious. (He spelled whom with an e on the end, humor was humer. He even had trouble getting the names of his best friends right.) Dressed for one of his expeditions into New York, he wore a silk hat, kid gloves, patent-leather shoes, and carried a walking stick with an elk-horn handle. Otherwise he was without pretense and considered the best of company by many of the prominent figures of the day. He counted among his friends General Leonard Wood, dramatist Augustus Thomas, architect Cass Gilbert, the painters Childe Hassam and John Twachtman, and his fellow illustrator Howard Pyle.

He and Eva had no children, nor does he seem ever to have shown any interest in children. His life was his work, his travels, his friends, his lunches in town at the Players Club, an occasional black-tie dinner, and Eva, for whom, it is said, he had an abiding devotion. She was small and dark-haired, with large, wistful eyes. He called her “kid,” because she was three years older. In one letter she refers to him as “my massive husband,” and in old photographs and drawings of the two together, she looks about one-third his volume.

He named their house at New Rochelle Endion, an Algonquin Indian word meaning “the place where I live.” At first he worked in the attic, then downstairs in the library. Later, he built his “Czar-sized” studio, twenty-four by forty feet and twenty feet high, with a stone floor, brick fireplace, and a big skylight such as he had never had before. He filled it with his treasured props—old rifles, revolvers, an 1840s cavalry saber, a pair of snowshoes, riding paraphernalia. There was an immense moose head over the fireplace, a human skull on the mantelpiece, Indian rugs on the floor, Indian pots and baskets scattered about—drums, tomahawks, any number of beaded shirts and moccasins hanging on the walls. It was all just as he wanted, the place where he liked most to receive friends or to be photographed. The double doors at one end were high and wide enough for him to bring a mounted horse in and out.

On a typical day he worked from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, preferably sitting down in a broad, low-slung rocking chair, so that he could tilt back to appraise his progress without getting up. He worked fast, totally absorbed and whistling some tune over and over until it drove anyone else present to distraction. After three, he went for a ride or a long walk, though as time went on and his weight increased, the walks became less appealing. Dinner finished, if there was company he would hold forth in the studio again, “talking half the night.” One year he went to Europe on assignment with Poultney Bigelow, a magazine writer and editor whom he had known at Yale. Another year, he made a hurried visit to North Africa, again with Bigelow. Summers, he headed home to the North Country, often to Cranberry Lake, his favorite lake in the Adirondacks, where he would sit in the shade of the hotel porch sketching or trying to hit a loon with his rifle. (He said he shot a ton of lead into the lake and never killed a bird.) With his Adirondack hunting companion, Has Rasbeck, he made a canoe trip down the Oswegatchie River, from Cranberry Lake to where the Oswegatchie empties into the St. Lawrence, descending 1,100 feet in about fifty-one miles, an adventure he described in his favorite of all the articles he wrote, “Black Water and Shallows.” “The zest of the whole thing,” he said, “lies in not knowing the difficulties beforehand.”

In 1895, one of the most important years of his working life, his first book was published, a collection of fifteen magazine pieces that he called Pony Tracks. He painted The Fall of the Cowboy and was working now in “mud,” as he said, sculpting, and beside himself with pleasure, despite the difficulties of the unfamiliar medium. He had found the recipe for being “Great,” he notified Wister.

The result was his first bronze, The Bronco Buster, or “Broncho Buster,” as he spelled it. “Is there anything that man can’t do?” an artist friend exclaimed, on hearing of Remington’s latest efforts. Remington was sure his sculpture would make him immortal. “My oils will all get old and watery—that is they will look like stale molasses in time—but I am to endure in bronze…. I am going to rattle down through all the ages.” He had only been fooling away his time until now, he felt certain. “Well—come on, let’s go to Florida,” he urged Wister, “you don’t have to think there. We will fish.”

Yet, for all this, the exhilaration of the work, the pleasures of home, friends, the voluminous, convivial style of the man, he was churning with anger and distress, anguish over his weight and his drinking. He was beset with fears of getting old. He abhorred the times he was living in, the “enfeebling” present, as he called it. The country was going to hell. He seethed with indignation over the ineptitude of the “peak-headed, pigeon-brained men in public life.” Europe was nothing but a “ten-cent sideshow.” Literary critics were “library upholstery.”

In one of his stories in Pony Tracks, he observed that the cowmen of the West were good friends and virulent haters. Certainly he was too, whether by nature or imitation. When his mother was remarried to a man of whom he did not approve (and for no apparent reason, save possibly that he was a mere hotel-keeper), Remington refused ever to speak to her again.

He despised much of mankind—Italians, Jews, “stinking” Russians, “Polacks,” Hungarians—virtually every one of the new Americans pouring into the country. They were the rubbish of Europe, said this most American of American artists. Once he said he liked writing for the magazines because it gave him a chance to use his right, that is, as a boxer does, to hit hardest. In an article called “Chicago Under the Mob,” an account of the Pullman Strike riots of 1894, during which twelve men were killed, he made pointed contrast between the soldiers, his favorite Tenth Cavalry, all “tall, bronzed athletes,” and the “malodorous crowd of anarchistic foreign trash” they had to face down. Yet this was mild compared to the outbursts in his private correspondence and some of his diary entries, which went beyond any visceral response to a crisis like the Pullman riots, or the kind of offhand slurs and bigotry common in that day.

“Never will be able to sell a picture to a Jew again,” he told Poultney Bigelow; “did sell one once. You can’t glorify a Jew…nasty humans.”

I’ve got some Winchesters [the letter continued] and and when the massacring begins which you speak of, I can get my share of ’em and what’s more I will. Jews—injuns—Chinamen—Italians—Huns, the rubbish of the earth I hate.

The country was flooding with trash; it was no longer the America of “our traditions,” he remarked in another letter to Bigelow who, as has been said, seemed to bring out the worst in him.

He longed for a war, “a real blood letting.” He started harping on it as early as 1891. When revolution broke out in Cuba and it looked as though the United States and Spain might go to war over Cuban freedom, he wrote to Wister as excited as a twelve-year-old. “Say old man there is bound to be a lovely scrap around Havana—a big murdering—sure.” It was his ambition, he said, “to see men do the greatest thing which men are called upon to do.” His one regret was that so many Americans would have to be killed just “to free a lot of d niggers who are better off under the yoke.” The only combat Remington had ever experienced firsthand was on the Yale football field.

On assignment from William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, he and Richard Harding Davis, the era’s most glamorous correspondent, sailed for Cuba to cover the uprising waged by the rebels, if the rebels could be found. Remington and Davis reached the island in January 1897. Reportedly, Remington soon cabled Hearst: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return.” To which Hearst is supposed to have replied: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst later denied the story. In any event, Remington came home empty-handed and sorely disappointed. But when Davis sent a dispatch about an incident in which a refined young Cuban woman, Clemencia Arango, was stripped and searched by Spanish officials on board an American ship in Havana because she was thought to be a courier for the rebels, Remington was called in immediately to do a drawing for the Journal. It ran five columns wide, its dramatic effect expertly handled by Remington, who contrasted the pale skin of the naked young woman with three hovering, heavily shadowed Spaniards who have not had the courtesy even to remove their hats. With only the Davis dispatch to go by, he had understandably assumed the Spanish officials were men. It was one of the few times Remington ever rendered the female form. “I don’t understand them, I can’t paint them,” he once said of women. But the drawing caused a sensation. That edition of the Journal sold nearly a million copies, a record number. Seeing the story and drawing for the first time, Señorita Arango was mortified. The one Spanish official who had searched her was a woman, she said. The atrocity was a fake.

The war with Cuba, when it came, was the most wrenching, disillusioning experience of Remington’s life. It was nothing like what he had expected; it bore no resemblance whatever to the high drama and heroics he had been painting and writing about for so long. There were no horses this time, no grand, silent country for background. Instead, there was smothering heat, mud, rain, yellow fever, dysentery, atrocious food or none at all, the strange jungle closing in all around. He knew he had made a mistake in returning almost from the moment he arrived. “The men were on half-rations, were out of tobacco, and it rained, rained, rained. We were very miserable,” he reported in Harper’s Monthly, writing now with no romantic illusions concerning the glories of war, writing, as it happens, one of the best of all accounts of the brief, ten-week conflict in Cuba.

Nor was he anything but honest about his own behavior under fire: “A ball struck in front of me, and filled my hair and face with sand, some of which I did not get out for days. It jolted my glass [field glasses] and my nerves and I beat a masterly retreat, crawling rapidly backwards, for a reason which I will let you guess.” He saw face wounds for the first time and trenches full of Spanish dead. “Their set teeth shone through their parted lips, and they were horrible.” It was all horrible. “All the broken spirits, bloody bodies, hopeless, helpless suffering which drags its weary length to the rear, are so much more appalling than anything else in the world that words won’t mean anything to one who has not seen it.” Worst was the specter of white bodies lying in the moonlight, with dark spots on them. According to Remington, it took him a year to get over Cuba.

Meantime, he painted Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, which makes the war look more like a football game than what he had written about, and Missing, in which he returned to “my war,” to give gallantry its due again: a stalwart cavalryman, his arms bound, a rope about his neck, walks stoically to his fate at the hands of his Indian captors, a good soldier to the last.

“I have spread myself out too thin,” Remington told Wister as the new century began. He was overworked, “crazy with work.” He vowed to do no more writing. After 1905, having published more than a hundred magazine articles and two novels, he abandoned writing altogether. If the fellows who sold groceries could take vacations, he mused, why couldn’t he?

He bought a small island, Ingleneuk, in the St. Lawrence River upstream from Ogdensburg, at Chippewa Bay. He and Eva spruced up the house on the property, built a studio and a boathouse and put in a tennis court. Nothing he had ever owned, no place he had ever seen pleased him more. All his life he had needed the outdoors, as a release and a restorative. That had been chief among the attractions of the West. But here he was home in his own part of the world. He could swim, fish, grow vegetables, or, having cautiously eased his immense bulk into place, go paddling off in one of his beautiful cedar canoes built in Canton by his old friend J. Henry Rushton, who is still remembered as the Stradivarius of canoemakers. On moonlit nights he would climb about the rocks along the shore. Some nights were so still and clear he could hear a dog bark over in Canada. It was also an excellent place for him to go on the water wagon, as he said, since Eva allowed no liquor on the island, which in all comprised about five acres.

The best part of it for Remington was that he could work there as nowhere else, “away from publishers’ telephones,” as he said, “trolleys—fuss that makes life down in the big clearing—which I hate.” He was fed up with “progress,” now more than ever. In 1885, when he set off for the West on Shorty Reeson’s horse, electric trolleys were still a thing of the future in Kansas City, telephones few, long-distance calls made possible only that same summer. The years since had seen the advent of the skyscraper, the automobile, the phonograph, and the adding machine, as well as the discovery of the X ray and the cause of yellow fever—advances in science and technology that brought unprecedented change on all sides and seemed to nearly everyone else entirely welcome, even thrilling. This, after all, was the twentieth century. His friend Theodore Roosevelt, now the president of the United States, was building the Panama Canal. Magazine publishing had been revolutionized by the invention of photogravure printing, which for Remington meant his work could now be reproduced in color. He signed an exclusive contract with Collier’s to do six paintings a year, the subjects entirely of his choosing, for $6,000, and he maintained the rights to the paintings. So because of the new technology he could paint as he pleased, knowing his work would reach an audience of a size never before granted an artist.

Still, he claimed no use or affection for modern times. He was sour on all cities. He refused to own an automobile. To any who thought differently, he said: “Go to your microbes, your statistics, your volts, and your bicycles, and leave me the truth of other days.”

His terrible problem was that the adored other days of the West were to be found no more, though he kept trying. “Shall never come west again,” he wrote to Eva during one trip. “It is all brick buildings—derby hats and blue overalls—it spoils my early illusions.” On a later expedition, a wilderness camping trip near “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s ranch in Wyoming, he barely survived a blizzard, too much whiskey, and a “d old bed which made pictures all over me.” He couldn’t wait to get home. “Cowboys! There are no cowboys anymore!” he exclaimed.

In the big studio at New Rochelle in 1905, he had begun his most ambitious project yet, an enormous statue of a cowboy on horseback for Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. It was to absorb him for several years. But at Ingleneuk he concentrated strictly on his painting.

A change had come over his painting. The brushstrokes were looser and the light in his pictures was more diffused. He concentrated more on color than on line. He was painting pure landscapes, with none of the “story” quality obligatory in so much of the illustration he had done since the beginning. He was determined to be accepted as an artist, not “just” an illustrator. Mostly, he was painting to please himself, painting the North Country with a zest.

Evening on a Canadian Lake, among the most evocative of all his works, is of two friends in one of his Rushton canoes. Other paintings from these last summers of his life are Pete’s Shanty, Ingleneuk, Chippewa Bay, and several oil sketches titled Pontiac Club, Canada. They were nearly as much a departure from his previous work as was his first venture in sculpture.

His Western scenes, too, had a different quality. More and more of them were nocturnes like Night Halt of the Cavalry. “No episodes must occur in the dark,” he had told Wister. Now he was absorbed in painting moonlight.

It was as if he wished to start all over. On Friday, February 8, 1907, he had carried seventy-five of his old Western scenes outside at New Rochelle and burned them. A year later, on January 25, 1908, “a fine winter day,” he did it again, building a big bonfire in the snow behind the house. This time he destroyed sixteen, including two of his best-known cowboy paintings, Bringing Home the New Cook and Drifting before the Storm. “They will never confront me in the future,” he noted with satisfaction. His father, too, had once stood and watched his work go up in flames.

Remington at forty-six, the age his father had been when he died, thought about death a great deal. His father, dying of tuberculosis, had wasted away to almost nothing. Remington by 1908 weighed nearly three hundred pounds.

His diary from Ingleneuk, however, is filled with exhilaration in the new work, his unabashed happiness with the life there.

That fall he would write, “I have always wanted to be able to paint running horses so you would feel the details and not see them. I am getting so I can stagger at it.” He had arrived at an outlook not unlike that described by Delacroix in his journals: “What I require is accuracy for the sake of imagination.” Remington was then at work on his Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains in 1860, a painting in concept not unlike A Dash for the Timber, but very different in execution. He was progressing with “quite good results,” Remington thought, “better tone—looser.”

With the new work under way, he craved new surroundings. For years he and Eva talked of building a house of their own design in the country. They found land in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and began construction. Everything was to be bigger than at New Rochelle. In May 1909 they moved in, and for all there was to do, Remington managed to keep painting. “I am performing miracles,” he wrote at the end of a particularly good workday in June. He was bothered by stomach troubles—he thought may be potatoes were his problem—but in of the last of the diary entries, on October 9, he writes that he had not been so happy or felt so well in many years. One of his Western nocturnes, Fired On, had been purchased for the National Gallery in Washington.

Remington died in the house at Ridgefield on the morning of December 26, 1909. He had complained of intense stomach pains a few days before when he and Eva were in New York. They made it home that night, but the following day a emergency appendectomy was performed on the kitchen table. It was to no avail. The doctors found that the appendix had ruptured and peritonitis had set in. For about forty-eight hours it seemed to others that the operation had been successful. Christmas Day there was snow-storm of the kind Remington loved. He seemed to be comfortable through the morning, even optimistic, as the family exchanged presents. But the doctors knew there was no hope, and in the afternoon Remington went into a coma from which he never recovered. He was forty-eight years old.

On the first day of that year, New Year’s day, 1909, the man who in his lifetime had produced more than three thousand works of art wrote in his diary: “Here we go again…embarked on the uncertain career of a painter.”

III

PIONEERS

CHAPTER SIX

Steam Road to El Dorado

IT WAS not long after the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855 that Bedford Clapperton Pim declared with perfect composure that of all the world’s wonders none could surpass this one as a demonstration of man’s capacity to do great things against impossible odds.

“I have seen the greatest engineering works of the day,” he wrote, “…but I must confess that when passing backwards and forwards on the Panama Railway, standing on the engine to obtain a good view, I have never been more struck than with the evidence, apparent on every side, of the wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance, which must have been exercised in its construction.”

Bedford Clapperton Pim was a British naval officer and of no particular historical significance. He had, however, seen a great deal of the world, he was a recognized authority on Central America, and his opinion was not lightly arrived at.

It should be kept in mind that the first railroads, all very primitive, had been built in Europe and the United States only some twenty years before. France was still virtually without railroads; not a rail had been put down west of the Mississippi as yet. Moreover, such awesome technological strides as the Suez Canal, the Union Pacific, and the Brooklyn Bridge were still well in the future. And so the vision of locomotives highballing through the green half-light of some distant rain forest, of the world’s two greatest oceans joined by good English-made rails, could stir the blood to an exceptional degree.

The Panama Railroad—the first steam road to El Dorado—was begun in 1850, at the height of the California gold craze. And by anyone’s standards it was a stunning demonstration of man’s “wonderful skill, endurance, and perseverance,” just as Pim said, even though its full length was only forty-seven and a half miles.

It was, for example, and as almost no one ever acknowledges, the first ocean-to-ocean railroad, its completion predating that of the Union Pacific by fourteen years. Mile for mile it also appears to have cost more in dollars and in human life than any railroad ever built. For fourteen years it was the world’s best-paying railroad.

The surveys made by its builders produced important geographic revelations that had a direct bearing on the decision to build a Panama canal along the same route. In addition, the diplomatic agreement upon which the whole venture rested, the so-called Bidlack Treaty of 1846, was the basis of all subsequent involvement of the United States in Panama.

Still, the simple fact that it was built remains the overriding wonder, given the astonishing difficulties that had to be overcome and the means at hand in the 1850s. Present-day engineers who have had experience in jungle construction wonder how in the world it was ever managed. I think in particular of David S. Parker, an eminent army engineer whom I interviewed at the time he was governor of the Canal Zone. Through a great sweep of glass behind him, as we talked, were the distant hills of Panama, no different in appearance than they ever were. It is almost inconceivable, he said, that the railroad survey—just the survey—could have been made by a comparative handful of men who had no proper equipment for topographic reconnaissance (no helicopters, no recourse to aerial photography), no modern medicines, nor the least understanding of the causes of malaria or yellow fever. There was no such thing as an insect repellent, no bulldozers, no chain saws, no canned goods, not one reliable map.

A Panama railroad still crosses from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Colón to Panama City. The trains run several times daily and on time, and much of the ride—especially if you are in one of the older cars (without air conditioning, windows open wide)—looks and feels as it must have originally. The jungle is still the jungle. The full trip takes one hour and thirty minutes. But except for a few miles at either end, the present line is altogether different from the original. It takes a different route on higher ground. The old road has vanished beneath Gatun Lake, the enormous body of fresh water that comprises most of the canal and that can be seen close by on the right much of the way as you head toward the Pacific.

The original line was a five-foot, or broad, gauge, and it was built as hurriedly and cheaply as circumstances would allow, to take advantage of the bonanza in California traffic. A minimum of grading was bothered with; bridges were all of wood and built none too substantially. The route was always along the line of least resistance. Anything formidable in the way—a hill, a bend in the Chagres River—was bypassed if possible. No tunnels were attempted (there is one on the present line), and the winding right of way chopped through the jungle was just wide enough to let a train pass. Still, this one little stretch of track took nearly five years to build and cost $8 million, which averages out to a little less than ten miles a year and a then unheard-of $168,000 per mile.

Part of the construction problem can be appreciated in a single statistic. In those forty-seven and a half miles it was necessary to build 170 bridges of more than twelve feet each in length.

Prior to the railroad there had been no regular thoroughfare across the Isthmus of Panama, and this despite the fact that Panama had been a crossroads between the Atlantic and Pacific since the time of the Spanish conquest. Except for a few isolated villages scattered along the Chagres River, the interior was an unbroken wilderness, little changed from the time Panama City was founded in the sixteenth century.

To get from one side of the isthmus to the other, starting from the Atlantic or Caribbean, travelers went up the Chagres by canoe to a point roughly twelve miles from Panama City, then crossed overland on the old Cruces Trail, a narrow, treacherous mule path that in the wet season—nine months of the year—was virtually a river of mud. At best, a crossing from ocean to ocean took four to six days, and for all who survived, it remained one of life’s memorable experiences. Letters and diaries are replete with descriptions of insects swarming in great clouds over the river, of encampments swamped by blinding rains, of pack mules sinking to their haunches in putrid muck.

The idea for a railroad to supplant all of that originated in New York in the late 1840s, shortly before the news of California gold reached the East. The founders were three unlikely, dissimilar individuals, none of whom knew anything about building a railroad, even under favorable conditions. Henry Chauncey was a Wall Street financier. William Henry Aspinwall was a well-known capitalist and member of one of New York’s leading mercantile families, long engaged in trading with Latin America. The third man, John Lloyd Stephens, might have been the creation of Jules Verne. A diplomat, lawyer, raconteur, and amateur archaeologist, he was best known as a traveler and travel writer. Indeed he was “The American Traveler,” one of the best-selling writers of the time, a red-bearded, good-natured somebody who had been everywhere and seen everything and who cut a great path in New York and Washington social circles.

Aspinwall, with the help of a generous government franchise to carry the mail to California, had established steamship lines to and from Panama on both oceans. So except for the land barrier at Panama he could provide through steamer passage from New York to San Francisco. The railroad, then, was to be the vital land link in the system—in a grand, continent-embracing system that seemed altogether in step with the manifest destiny spirit of the day but to most practical men looked like an extremely speculative affair. On Wall Street the great question was why so “sound” a man as Aspinwall should have become involved.

It was Stephens who, in the initial stages, made the difference, and in human terms his life counted for a heavy part of the price of success—for he was to die of malaria. Alone of the three partners Stephens stayed with the work in the jungle. He was the driving spirit the first two years, the most difficult and disheartening stage of the whole ordeal. He gave up every other interest to see the work succeed, and he had infinitely more to give up. Earlier, in 1841, Stephens and an English architect named Frederick Catherwood had gone into the wilds of the Mexican provinces of Chiapas and Yucatán and discovered, or rather rediscovered, the ancient cities of the Maya. His books on the Mayan ruins, with stunning illustrations by Catherwood, had caused a sensation. But his overriding interest thereafter had been Panama. He envisioned the tremendous, far-reaching impact of a railroad at that singular geographic location, and he threw himself into the task with all the determination and confidence he had shown in everything else he had ever put his hand to.

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

From the legal-diplomatic standpoint the undertaking was made possible by a treaty signed in Bogotá. Panama was still part of Colombia (or New Granada, as it was then known), and for years the government at Bogotá had been urging Great Britain and France to guarantee New Granada’s sovereignty over the isthmus as well as the neutrality of any future isthmian transit, be it railroad or canal. In return the European power was to have the exclusive right to build and operate such a transit. But then all at once, in 1846, the United States chargé d’affaires in Bogotá, a new man named Benjamin Bidlack, acting without instructions, signed just such an agreement, which was eventually sanctioned by the United States Senate. So by binding treaty the United States was to watch over the isthmus, guarantee open transit from ocean to ocean, guarantee Colombian sovereignty over Panama, and build, if it so chose, a railroad or canal. In practice, once the railroad was in operation, it was to mean the more or less permanent stationing of American gunboats in Panamanian waters and the landing of American marines and sailors during a half dozen revolutions or “disturbances,” including the disturbance of 1903, the so-called Panama Revolution, which marked the final separation of Panama from Colombia. (The Panama Revolution is another story and a complicated one, but suffice it to say here that the maintenance of open, uninterrupted traffic on the railroad was the pretext by which American military force was used to prevent the transportation of Colombian troops, thereby guaranteeing a bloodless triumph by the local junta and the creation of the new Republic of Panama.)

The first stake marking the Atlantic terminus of the line was driven into some soggy, extremely unpleasant ground in May 1850, at the onset of the rainy season. The site was little Manzanillo Island, less than a square mile in area, which stood at the opening of Limón Bay (the Atlantic entrance to the present canal) and which was separated from the mainland by only a narrow channel. Like all the low-lying shore of the bay, the island was without human habitation and just barely above tide level.

The terrain was such that the work party, some fifty men, had to live on board an old brig anchored near shore. “In the black, slimy mud of its surface,” reads an old account, “alligators and other reptiles abounded; while the air was laden with pestilential vapors, and swarming with sandflies and mosquitoes.” All clearing of trees and vines had to be done by hand with machete or axe. Everything that had to be transported clear of the projected line had to be dragged by hand, too, since no draft animals were available. Much of the time the men worked in water up to their waists, their faces covered with gauze to fend off insects, their noon meals stowed inside their hats.

The engineers in charge were Colonel George M. Totten and John Cresson Trautwine, two hard-bitten Americans in their early forties who had recently built the Canal del Dique, joining the Magdalena River to the harbor at Cartagena. Totten was to stay with the railroad through thick and thin, weathering every imaginable kind of hell, including an attack of yellow fever so nearly fatal that his companions built a coffin for him. Totten in fact would remain chief engineer of the line long after it was built, and his word would be close to law on the isthmus for twenty-five years. A small, dark-skinned, dark-haired man with spectacles who wore his whiskers like Abraham Lincoln, he was quiet, self-effacing, and exceedingly tough. Allegedly he also had a sense of humor, though a search through available sources has failed to produce a trace of it.

Trautwine was the one mainly responsible for the surveys and as such probably deserves a good share of the credit. A better survey would be difficult to produce, according to present-day authorities. What Trautwine lacked in the way of equipment he made up for with ability. His Engineer’s Pocket Book (1871) would make his name famous among a whole generation of bridge builders, railroad men, and canal builders.

Others among this advance guard were Colonel George Hughes, a West Point graduate who had charge of the overall reconnaissance; James L. Baldwin, his assistant; Edward J. Serrell, another assistant who was later to become a builder of important suspension bridges; and a young man known as J. J. Williams, who as an old man would declare that as God was his witness it was he, not Trautwine, who drove the first stake.

From Manzanillo Island the line proceeded south, along the eastern shore of Limón Bay; farther inland it picked up the valley of the Chagres River and kept to the valley, crossing the river just once at about midpoint across the isthmus. Still farther, where the landscape turned more mountainous, the route took the path of another river, the Rio Grande, which flows toward the Pacific.

Because of the curious configuration of the isthmus at Panama—with the land barrier running east—west between the oceans—the general direction of the line was north–south, a fact that countless future travelers on the road would never quite comprehend.

The major discovery produced by the survey was a gap in the mountains some thirteen miles from Panama City that was only 275 feet above sea level. This was a good two hundred feet lower than what heretofore had been the lowest known pass at Panama, and, as further explorations and further surveys would verify, it was, except for one at Nicaragua, the lowest pass anywhere along the entire Continental Divide. The gap, the summit of the railroad, was at Culebra, the place where the latter-day canal builders—first the French, then the Americans—would break through the spine of the Cordillera with the great Culebra Cut.

Another important discovery was that sea level on both sides of the isthmus was the same. Until then it had been widely thought that for some mysterious reason the Pacific was as much as twenty feet higher than the Atlantic at Panama. It was a misunderstanding that had appeared frequently in print and still does. But as was found, the difference is in the size of the tides—those on the Atlantic side being barely discernible (little more than a foot), while those on the Pacific, less than fifty miles distant, are from eighteen to twenty feet, or even more. Mean sea level, nonetheless, is the same on both sides—a revelation of extreme value to anyone contemplating a ship canal through Panama.

When actual construction of the road began, progress inland from Manzanillo Island went very, very slowly. Miles of swamp had to be bridged or filled. The effect of the climate on men and materials was devastating. Tools turned bright orange with rust. Lumber rotted. Boots and books grew mold overnight. Men began to sicken and die, mainly of Chagres fever, the common name for a particular variety of malaria. “Having neither a physician nor any comfortable place of rest, their sufferings were severe,” wrote a doctor named Fessenden N. Otis, author of the first published history of the road.

While the Gold Rush provided powerful impetus to get the road built, it also greatly compounded the problem of holding on to a labor force, and like every other essential—rails, coal, rolling stock, food, clothing, whiskey, quinine—labor had to be shipped in from somewhere else and at an exorbitant cost. Hundreds of men deserted the work at first chance—thousands as time went on.

Actual construction began in August of 1850 and with high expectations. But by October of 1851, a year and two months after the work had commenced, the line had penetrated only as far as the Chagres, a scant seven miles. The engineers had grossly miscalculated the difficulty of the task, and the company’s resources were about gone. The market value of the stock was close to nothing. Things came to a standstill in Panama, and several key people, Trautwine among them, departed to find work elsewhere. Had it not been for an especially violent tropical storm, that might have been the end of the company and the railroad.

The storm struck in November, 1851, and at the height of it two New York steamers, the Georgia and the Philadelphia, put into Limón Bay for shelter. Until then, the whole time the railroad was being built, the New York boats had been landing as usual at the mouth of the Chagres—at a native village called Chagres—roughly five miles to the west of Limón Bay. There was no proper roadstead at Chagres; landings were by small boat through the surf and at considerable risk. But that was the place where the local boatmen congregated with their canoes, and so it had been Panama’s Caribbean port of entry since the Gold Rush began. For some strange reason, no one had considered that the railroad, even if it went a mere seven miles, could be put to use and begin paying its way.

The passengers from the two ships came clamoring ashore, some thousand strong, and demanded transportation up to the Chagres. So after a string of flatcars had been assembled, off everybody went in the driving wind and rain as far as the river, to a village called Gatun, now the site of the great Gatun Locks. From there they continued upstream by canoe.

The pattern was established. Chagres was abandoned as the Atlantic portal. A new town was slapped together on Manzanillo Island with about as much commotion and along much the same lines architecturally as a Western mining town. A tremendous iron lighthouse was built—docks, warehouses, a railroad office (“a respectable fireproof two-story brick building”), hotels, saloons, and a number of other business establishments, one of which, the Maison du Vieux Carré, specialized supposedly in French girls. As time went on the town became justly famous as one of the filthiest, most miserable holes on the Caribbean. Stephens named it Aspinwall, after his partner, but from Bogotá came word that it was to be called Colon—Spanish for Columbus—as a tribute to the fact that Columbus had once anchored in Limón Bay.

Any doubts or misgivings there had been on Wall Street concerning the enterprise or the mental stability of its founders now vanished as the money steadily rolled in. By summer of 1852 the tracks were halfway across the isthmus to Barbacoa—twenty-three and a quarter miles inland from Colon—to where the line would cross the Chagres. “Push was the order,” recalled one old-time employee, Tracy Robinson, in his little memoir, Fifty Years at Panama. “Yet do what they might, strain every nerve, exhaust every resource, the difficulties to be overcome proved almost insurmountable. The climate stood like a dragon in the way. To this day it seems astonishing that any soul survived to tell the tale…. The white men withered as cut plants in the sun.”

The work force came from all parts of the world—the West Indies, Colombia, Ireland, Wales, France, Italy, China, India, the United States. The best workers were those from Colombia, men who were accustomed both to hard labor and to the climate. The Irish, tough, experienced “navvies” who had built railroads and canals in England, were brought out by Totten specifically to speed things up, at about the time the line reached Barbacoa, but they suffered intensely from the heat and humidity and were highly susceptible to disease. A newly appointed bishop of California, William Ingraham Kip, wrote of the Irish laborers he saw on his way through Panama: “They looked pale and miserable. It is almost certain death to them to be employed here….” The mortality rate was truly appalling. Malaria, the only endemic disease of the isthmus, was the worst killer among all groups of workers, just as it would be later when the canal builders arrived. But men died too of dysentery, sunstroke, cholera, and the dreaded yellow jack.

How many died all told is impossible to say. Though the Panama Railroad Company provided figures later, records of accidents and deaths among white workers were kept haphazardly at best, and virtually never among blacks or other nonwhites. And in the year 1853, as an example, of some 1,590 men on the payroll, 1,200 were black. The consistent management position was that there had been nothing like the death toll commonly spoken of, and that anyone who lived a clean, temperate life on the isthmus was as safe there as he would be anywhere in the tropics or even southern sections of the United States, which was far from true.

The worst year was 1852, the year Stephens died. Cholera swept along the line shortly after the arrival of a boat from New Orleans. That summer alone fifty-one engineers, surveyors, and draftsmen—nearly all of Totteh’s staff—died of the disease. Among those making the crossing in July was Captain Ulysses S. Grant, who, with several hundred soldiers and their wives and children, was on his way to California for garrison duty. Grant saw more than 150 of his party die at Panama—men, women, and children—and all miserably. In later years he would talk more of the horrors he had seen in Panama than of any battles he had known.

According to the company’s records there were at least 6,000 whites employed during the years of construction, and the company put the death toll among these men at 835. But Tracy Robinson, who was no enemy of the railroad, said perhaps 40 percent died, or about 2,500. And no one then even reckoned the number of deaths among the blacks. Perhaps 6,000 men died in all.

Whatever the true figure was, it was an exceedingly high price to pay for forty-seven and a half miles of track, and it was a grim forewarning of the still greater tragedy to follow. When the French attempted their Panama canal thirty years later, under the great hero of Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps, an estimated 20,000 people died of disease.

More immediately, the sheer number of bodies that had to be disposed of became something of a problem in itself and led to a macabre solution. Since a large percentage of the dead men had no known next of kin, no permanent address, often not even a known last name, it was decided to pickle their bodies in large barrels, then sell them in wholesale lots. The result was a thriving trade with medical schools around the world, the proceeds going to finance a small railroad hospital at Colon.

A huge timber bridge was completed over the Chagres at Barbacoa after enormous effort, then swept away by a flash flood. Heavy rains in the mountains, as the engineers learned, could cause the river to rise forty feet in as little as twenty-four hours. Elsewhere the landscape seemed mainly water, one creek or stream after another, swamps, foul slime-covered pools. In places the roadbed kept sinking steadily and had to be built up again and again, year after year. At the famous Black Swamp, Totten had to probe 185 feet down to find solid bottom.

Pine or spruce ties on earlier sections of the road rotted and had to be replaced with ties of lignum vitae from Cartagena—ties so hard that holes had to be bored before a spike could be driven into them. Then beyond Barbacoa, at Culebra, a substantial cut a mile long had to be dug through blue clay that in the rains turned to a thick, stubborn gum. To get the clay from their shovels the workers had to use scrapers. And here, too, at Culebra, the engineers encountered the terrible slides that were to plague the canal builders.

With all the gold being brought across from California, with so much comparatively well-heeled humanity converging from all directions, gangs of outlaws appeared and began harassing the line. Several brutal murders occurred; workers were beaten and robbed. So when the local government declared itself incapable of policing the line, the company organized its own armed guard, a ragged, barefoot band under the leadership of one Ran Runnels, a Texas Ranger who did not look the part but who did the job with cold-blooded dispatch, inspired, it seems, by profound religious visions. He was subtle; at first he did very little to check the crime wave, but suddenly, early in 1852, he and his so-called Isthmus Guard rounded up thirty-seven suspects, including several well-known Panamanian businessmen, and hanged them all on the inner side of the old Spanish seawall at Panama City. All at once there they were one bright morning. “Silently the citizens survey the appalling spectacle and then go on about their business,” wrote one aghast traveler in a letter to his wife in Boston.

To Runnels, who believed himself divinely appointed to cleanse Eden of evil and corruption, it became a holy war, and some six months later, in the fall of 1852, he struck again. This time there were forty-one victims dangling from the seawall. The crime wave abruptly ended.

The terrifying epidemics, the loss of the bridge at Barbacoa, the mud slides at Culebra, and the Ran Runnels scourge were the memorable events, and they figure prominently in most surviving accounts. The smaller, day-to-day difficulties and torments were the less colorful, less picturesque side of the story, and they can be readily imagined: the punishing heat, the torrential Panama rains, the terrible fatigue of physical labor in such a climate, clothes that never got dry, scorpions in boots in the morning, the incessant mosquitoes, sand flies, ticks, the bad food, and nothing—not a blessed thing—to do but work and survive the jungle while throngs of others, thousands upon thousands of people, passed by heading for the new El Dorado.

Severe mental depression became one of the most debilitating of all problems. The Chinese laborers suffered especially. To ease their plight the company resorted to supplying them with daily rations of opium. Of a thousand Chinese laborers brought in probably six to seven hundred died of disease, but among the survivors melancholia became so acute that scores of them committed suicide, some hanging themselves by their own pigtails, others impaling themselves on carefully sharpened sticks or bamboo poles.

In a letter to one of the stockholders Colonel Totten would write: “I am ashamed that so much has been expended in overcoming so little, and take no credit for any engineering science displayed on the work. The difficulties have been of another nature, and do not show themselves on the line.”

On November 24, 1853, a locomotive rolled across a new bridge at Barbacoa, this one a bridge of iron, twice the length of the other (625 feet) and built some forty feet above the caramel-colored Chagres. “The Rubicon is passed,” announced the Panama Star. In another year the line was at Summit Station (Culebra). Five thousand men were at work, with the construction gangs laboring from both ends.

There was no special ceremony when the last rail was put in place. No gold spike was driven, though by all rights, for this railroad especially, there should have been. The last rail went down on the wet night of January 27, 1855. Totten drove the final spike with a nine-pound maul, and at eight-thirty the next morning, a Sunday, he climbed into the cab of a small wood-burning locomotive at Colon and took it and a string of nine cars on the world’s first transcontinental run.

Totten called it “as perfect a road as can be found in the United States.” A writer for the Aspinwall Daily Courier told how the train, “a chariot of fire,” came “thundering over the summit, and down the Pacific slope.” In truth there were only twenty-eight miles of straight track. The road was so full of curves, the roadbed so tender in places, that the train had to feel its way with extreme caution. The entire first run, ocean to ocean, included twenty-six station stops and took seven hours.

Some weeks later, with the return of the dry season and the arrival of a delegation of stockholders and newspaper people from New York, something like a formal opening was staged. Quantities of champagne were consumed, quantities of roast beef and pickled oysters devoured. The visitors—not an especially distinguished lot, as one of them later conceded—went breezing gaily along through the jungle, exclaiming over the orchids and passion flowers, the multicolored birds that burst into the air, or a chance alligator picked out of the shadows along a riverbank. The ride was so smooth, we are told, that it did not disturb the ash from a cigar.

There were numerous stops en route for water and wood or at little white-frame station houses with green shutters and picket fences that might have been transplanted directly from New England. For the passengers the journey was a surpassing spectacle—as it would be for the hundreds of thousands who were to follow in the coming years, as it would be for anyone who did not have to build a railroad through such a landscape.

On we go, dry shod [reads the account of one of the newspapermen] through the forest, which shuts out with its great walls of verdure on either side, the hot sun, and darkens the road with a perpetual shade. The luxuriance of the vegetation is beyond the powers of description. Now we pass impenetrable thickets of mangroves, rising out of deep marshes, and sending from each branch down into the earth, and from each root into the air, offshoots which gather together into a matted growth, where the observer seeks in vain to unravel the mysterious involution of trunk, root, branch, and foliage. Now we come upon gigantic espaves and coratos, with girths of thirty feet, and statures of a hundred and thirty feet, out of a single trunk….

Again we cross a stream…. Then, again, the train coiling its winding way about the base of a hill, and emerging from the forest, the view opens suddenly upon an expanded savanna, where the tropical sun shines down in a flood of light upon a river bending through an undulating park of green verdure, with clumps of trees here and there, with cattle feeding in their shade, and a settlement of native, palm-thatched, bamboo huts, half hid in groves of banana and orange. So we hurry from scene to scene, pushing on through the flood of tropical vegetation, with endless vistas of beauty that come and go like the dreams of a summer’s day.

At Summit Station everyone climbed out into the blazing heat to hear the United States plenipotentiary read a speech of which few, including those who were sober, would remember a word. The lasting impressions were of the local oranges on sale (they are green in color, extremely juicy, and delicious) and the gaunt, sallow look of fever in the faces of the railroad employees—like death heads under Panama hats, wrote one man. Such “unwholesomeness,” however, was thought to be as much a part of the landscape as the oranges. The revelation that malaria and yellow fever are carried by mosquitoes was not to come for another generation and would not be accepted by the medical profession until after the turn of the century. Swamp gas, emanations from the putrid soil of the jungle floor, “noxious effluvia” hanging in the wet, heavy air—these were thought to be the sources of all fevers and miasmas, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The average time for crossing was reduced first to four, then to three hours. Steamship passengers arriving at the isthmus could disembark on one side in the morning and count on being aboard ship on the other side before dark. Business was booming. “My own private opinion is that no speculative investment I have ever known…. offers such returns,” William Aspinwall advised a kinsman. In the next ten years the railroad carried nearly four hundred thousand passengers. Annual receipts during that time, including the panic year of 1857, were never less than $600,000. For five of those years they were in excess of $1 million.

More than $500 million in gold went across the Panama Railroad in this same ten-year period; more than $140 million in silver, $5 million in jewelry, and $19 million in paper money. And the company collected a quarter of one percent of the value of all precious cargo. The variety of freight handled—besides the usual coal, baggage, and mail—was quite exceptional. One traveler who took time to examine the inside of the freight depot at Colon left this description:

Bales of quina bark from the interior were piled many tiers deep, and reached to the iron triangular-braced roof of the edifice. Ceroons of indigo and cochineal from San Salvador and Guatemala; coffee from Costa Rica, and cacao from Ecuador; sarsparilla from Nicaragua, and ivory-nuts from Porto Bello; copper ore from Bolivia; silver bars from Chili; boxes of hard dollars from Mexico, and gold ore from California; hides from the whole range of the North and South Pacific coast; hundreds of bushels of glistening pearl-oyster shells from the fisheries of Panama lay heaped along the floor, flanked by no end of North American beef, pork, flour, bread, and cheese, for the provisioning of the Pacific coast, and English and French goods for the same markets; while in a train of cattlecars that stood on one of the tracks were huddled about a hundred meek-looking lamas [sic] from Peru, on their way to the island of Cuba, among whose mountains they are used for beasts of burden as well as for their wool.

In less than six years after it was finished, having covered all costs (including five years of major improvements from one end of the line to the other—new bridges, improved embankments) the railroad cleared more than $7 million. Stock dividends for nearly twenty years averaged 15 percent and went as high as 44 percent in 1868. Once, with its price per share at $295, the Panama Railroad was the highest listed stock on the New York Exchange. There had never been a railroad to compare with it.

The explanation was obvious enough. The road had a total monopoly on the isthmian transit, and until the completion of the Union Pacific in 1869 it had no competition for the California traffic. Furthermore, the rates set for passengers and freight were, on a cost-per-mile basis, extremely high.

The story is that the original rate card was drawn up purely for fun in Colon and sent on to New York for the further entertainment of the head office. But the head office took it seriously. A one-way ticket was twenty-five dollars in gold (about three hundred dollars in today’s money), which came to fifty cents a mile and made it easily the most costly ride on earth. Anyone who objected was of course free to cross in the old manner—up the Chagres, over the Cruces Trail—or, if preferred, to walk across along the path of the railroad. But the old way generally wound up costing fifty dollars or more (for canoes, mules, guides), and just for the privilege of walking on its right of way the railroad charged ten dollars. Since few people ever wished to spend a moment more than necessary en route—because of the terror of disease—almost everyone gladly paid the twenty-five dollars, and the rate stood for years.

“And it must be recorded,” wrote Tracy Robinson, “that while there was not the least extravagance in the conduct of affairs, but on the contrary, great simplicity, the officers, clerks, and employees generally were paid generously for their services and the lives of themselves and families made as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.”

Food and housing were provided by the railroad. Headquarters was at the railroad’s hotel at Colon, the Washington House, a long, galleried frame ark facing the Caribbean. “There the officers gathered for their meals, with the chief [Totten] at the head, in true family style,” Robinson recalled. Medical and hospital care were provided free of charge. (Dr. Manuel Amador, chief surgeon for the railroad for many years, a native of Cartagena, would become the first president of Panama in 1904.) There was a library of sorts, a billiard room, and a stone church, built mostly with railroad money, that still stands.

Many Irish, French, and Italian workers stayed on, as did Jamaicans and other black West Indians, and their descendants are to be found at every level of present-day Panamanian society. A blue-eyed Panamanian with an Irish surname is not uncommon.

The beginning of the end came in 1880, with the arrival on the isthmus of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Totten, by then retired, came down from New York to join the tour. Both men were now in their seventies—two white-haired figures whose respective efforts on two strategic isthmuses had so greatly reduced the size of the world.

As early as 1849 the pioneer oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury had declared that the true value of a Panama railroad would be the precedent it would establish: “…by showing to the world how immense this business is, men will come from the four quarters to urge with purse and tongue the construction of a ship canal.” And such had been the case, except that de Lesseps was the first to arrive with anything approaching a purse (he was then in the process of organizing his Paris-based Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique).

Like de Lesseps, Totten thought a through-cut canal along the route of the railroad—that is, a sea-level passage without locks, such as the Suez Canal—was a thoroughly practicable proposition, and, like de Lesseps, Totten was gravely mistaken. The American canal builders, when their turn came, would not only know how to rid the isthmus of malaria and yellow fever, but they would wisely decide not to try a sea-level trench.

Control over the little railroad would be essential to his project, de Lesseps realized, but this was no less apparent to the Wall Street operator who had been busily buying up virtually all of the stock—Trenor W. Park, a tiny sparrow of a man who was practiced in driving extremely hard bargains. Park too readily declared de Lesseps’s plan sound and set his price at twice the market value. For about five months after construction got under way de Lesseps continued to hold out, refusing to pay Park’s price. His engineers on the isthmus tried to get by as best they could. Meanwhile, the railroad was being run as usual as a separate and very independent American enterprise. The arrangement was impossible. On June 11, 1881, the road was purchased outright by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-oceanique for $20 million. Park himself cleared about $7 million on the transaction.

Years later, in 1904, when the United States purchased all the holdings of the long-since bankrupt French canal company—its equipment, properties, the unfinished excavations—the railroad was part of the $40 million package. By then the line was in sad shape. Equipment was long out of date and in bad repair; the road itself had to be completely overhauled from end to end and double-tracked. Tonnage carried on the line during excavation of the canal was phenomenal (300 million tons in 1909-1910, for instance) as the endless dirt trains rolled across the isthmus. But it was not really the same Panama Railroad any longer. Track, rolling stock, everything was different. Then, because the roadbed lay in what was to be the canal channel, this line too was taken up—in 1912 after completion of the new Panama Railroad (strictly an adjunct to the canal), or two years before the canal was opened.

Today, in the middle of the Panama Canal—on Lake Gatun—there is an abrupt, lush little island called Barro Colorado, once the summit of a small mountain. For the past fifty years the island has been used by the Smithsonian Institution as a tropical research station. There is a small compound of laboratories and living quarters, and from the screened porch of the main building you can look out over a fair-sized sweep of lake and miles of jungle farther beyond. It is easy to forget that what you are seeing is one of the world’s great shipping lanes, for only when a huge tanker appears, its prow emerging suddenly around the distant break in the trees, is there any sign of civilization.

The Panama Railroad passed directly by here. (Traces of it can still be found some sixty or seventy feet beneath the calm, blue lake.) The surrounding wilderness could well be the same as the railroad builders faced, and especially when a rain squall sweeps over the distant jungle, blotting out the view, you try to imagine what manner of men they were, what quality of purpose spurred them on. “Here the bravest might well have faltered and even turned back from so dark a prospect as presented itself to the leaders…. but they were men whom personal perils and privations could not daunt, whose energy and determination, toil and suffering could not vanquish.” Such is the explanation offered in the old history by Dr. Otis; and, as out of fashion as that may sound, it could just be the answer.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Builders

THEY ARE all gone now—the Roeblings and the assistant engineers Collingwood, Paine, Probasco, Hildenbrand, McNulty, C. C. Martin; and the Brooklyn contractor, plain, blunt William Kingsley, who started things rolling and lined his pockets nowhere near so well as he might have; and “Boss” Tweed and “Brains” Sweeny, who had an “understanding” with Kingsley and might have made a fortune had the ring not collapsed in 1871, only two years after the work was under way; and state Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, the very essence of “Old Brooklyn,” and Abram Hewitt and Teddy Roosevelt’s black-sheep uncle, Robert Roosevelt, and the bright, scrubbed “Boy Mayor” of Brooklyn, Seth Low, all of whom served on the board; and Thomas Kinsella of the Eagle, who stood behind the work from beginning to end; and J. Lloyd Haigh, the shadowy wire manufacturer from South Brooklyn who wound up in Sing Sing.

Some are known more for what they did in later years, like Hewitt, who became mayor of New York; or Dr. Walter Reed, who was then an intern at Brooklyn City Hospital looking after the men brought in with the bends; or an English laborer named Frank Harris, who wrote a famous pornographic book, My Life and Loves. But so memorable a figure as E. F. Farrington, the “master mechanic,” the one who blew kisses to the crowds as he sailed over the East River the summer of 1876, riding the first wire strung between the towers, fades from the record from the time the work ended. We don’t know what became of him. Or of so many others: the stonemasons, carpenters, riggers, machinists, blacksmiths, riveters, and all the ordinary day laborers who went into the terrifying caissons beneath the river for the bonanza wages of two dollars a day.

Only a relative handful even have names now. Mike Lynch remains a known quantity because he is said to have been “the first Irishman” to go into the Brooklyn caisson and the last to come out; and we know of a watchman named Al Smith, because his son and namesake became governor. The other names, the few scraps of personal information available, are mainly from reports on those who were killed.

In all, several thousand people took part over fourteen years, many who were American born, including some blacks, many Germans, some Italians, some English, at least one Chinese, and a great many Irish. They worked a ten-hour day, six days a week, and they were all men—with the sole exception of Emily Roebling.

The last of them died in January 1980, in a home for the elderly in Harlem, at the age of one hundred six. He was Henry Jones; he had been a waterboy during the final part of the work in 1882 or 1883, which would have made him eight or nine at the time.

Even the spectators are gone now. Governor Al Smith, who grew up on South Street, “in the shadow of the New York tower,” loved to describe the spectacle of workers scrambling high up among the cables. When he was eight or nine, his father took him across the temporary catwalk, while his mother stayed home, sitting in her chair, saying her rosary over and over the whole time they were gone. It was his mother who told him of the horrifying work in the caissons. “Perhaps had they known,” she would say, “they never would have built it.”

But build it they did, calling it a variety of names—the East River Bridge, the New York Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Roebling Bridge, the Great Bridge, or merely the Bridge—and to anyone who knows what they went through, it can never be thought of as just an engineering marvel, or an architectural masterpiece, or the perfect expression of nineteenth-century industrialism, or a turning point in urban American history, or a nice way to go over the river. It is, besides all that, their story.

It was conceived in winter, in the mind of John Augustus Roebling, the illustrious pioneer builder of suspension bridges and wealthy wire manufacturer of Trenton, New Jersey. According to the accepted account, he was caught in the ice on a Brooklyn ferry and-“then and there,” scanning the distance between shores, envisioned his crowning work. His oldest son, Washington, age fifteen, happened to be with him at the time.

This was in 1852, thirty years before the fact. It was not until after the Civil War and after the opening of the celebrated Roebling Bridge at Cincinnati that William Kingsley went to Trenton to talk about building one at Brooklyn. Kingsley had no specific kind of bridge in mind. No one in Brooklyn did, apparently. It was the man they wanted, not a particular plan—which is fascinating, since the man was exactly what they were not to have.

John A. Roebling’s brilliance was well established. His abiding confidence in science, as all of science and technology were known, was in perfect harmony with the very Jules Verne outlook of the times. “It will no longer suit the spirit of the present age to pronounce an undertaking impracticable,” Roebling had written. A German by birth, he had been trained at the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin. He was the first to manufacture wire rope, or cable, in America; the first to perfect a suspension, or wire-hung, bridge that could carry a railroad (at Niagara Falls); the first to dare anything even approaching the size and weight of the bridge at Cincinnati. He was a technical virtuoso, designer, mathematician, inventor, industrial entrepreneur, a success at everything he put his mind to.

Further, his bridges were thrilling to see, as his Brooklyn clients found for themselves on the tour he led cross-country to Cincinnati and Niagara Falls in the spring of 1869. They could count on a triumph of art no less than advanced engineering, he assured them, and to judge by his photograph, the look in the pale, intense eyes must have been something.

In appearance, in manner, he was above the crowd and all business. Once, on a call to Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, he scrawled a note on the back of his card and sent it in to General John Charles Frémont: “Sir. You are keeping me waiting. John Roebling has not the leisure to wait on any man.”

There is more, however, and it, too, bears on the story. We don’t know everything, which is a shame, since we can never know enough about genius, but in unpublished family correspondence and his own journals, he emerges as a figure of strange, sometimes violent, lights and shadows. He was cold, vain, and suspicious, a man tormented by insomnia, bad digestion, and spells of terrible self-recrimination. He plunged into spiritualism, became a fanatic—there is no other word for it—on hydropathy, the water cure. His children, for whom he had little time, were terrified of him. Brutal is a word Washington Roebling used to describe him.

An unforgettable vignette has come down through the family. John A. Roebling stands outside the Trenton mill where a number of donkeys are used to drag heavy strands of wire through long beds of sand, as part of the finishing process. One of the animals dallies or strays from the prescribed path, and John A. Roebling walks up, takes it by the head, and breaks its neck.

When the youngest of his children, Edmund, misbehaved in some unknown fashion, Roebling nearly beat him to death. The boy ran off, disappeared, and was later found in a Philadelphia jail where, according to his brother Washington, he had had himself entered as a common vagrant “and…was enjoying life for the first time.”

“The hero is admired and proclaimed a public benefaction,” Roebling himself wrote in private. “…But nobody knows…. Who can hide me from myself?”

The heaviest blow he inflicted on Washington was his own untimely, hideous death just as the real work at Brooklyn was about to commence. There was a foolish accident. Roebling was standing beside the ferry slip, helping with the surveys with such concentration that when the boat docked he neglected to get out of the way. The boat jammed against a stringpiece, which caught and crushed his foot. Washington was with him when it happened, and later, when he had several of his toes amputated, without anesthetic at his wish, and later still through the final, gruesome, agonies of lockjaw. Roebling had dismissed the doctors, insisting that water, poured steadily on the open wound, was the only cure.

The bridge he had projected on paper was to surpass any on earth in size and “audacity.” Two stupendous gothic towers, larger than anything on either skyline, were to reach 270 feet in the air, while four great cables would carry the roadway, or deck, more than a hundred feet above the river, high enough so all but the largest of the clipper ships could pass below without trimming their top gallants. An unprecedented $7 million was at stake, Roebling had estimated, not to mention the reputations of his clients. But as of the morning of July 22, 1869, he was dead, and, Washington being the only one around who knew enough to carry on, the others—Kingsley and Murphy—saw no choice but to put him in charge at once.

The Colonel, as they called him, was then all of thirty-two years old. He had only the most preliminary plans at hand, as he later acknowledged, no working drawings, “nothing fixed or decided.” All he really had to go by were his wits, experience, and “vitality,” a favorite Roebling word. He was married and the father of one child, little John A. Roebling II. His salary was handsome, $10,000 a year, but his expenses would run beyond that, so financially the bridge was to mean no profit for him, not a dollar in fourteen years.

It was the understanding since boyhood that he must follow in his father’s path, he being the oldest son. He had been sent to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York, in 1854, then, four years later, to Pittsburgh to begin his apprenticeship working on a bridge of his father’s over the Allegheny River. After the war, he was dispatched to Cincinnati to become his father’s first assistant. With the Cincinnati Bridge completed, he was off to Europe with his bride for nearly a year to study the use of pneumatic caissons in advance of the work at Brooklyn. Other, younger sons were kept at home, meantime, consigned to the prospering family wire business.

Washington never reported to anyone but his father; he was forever being judged by his father. The war was the single interruption, but even then it was his father who, one highly unpleasant evening at the dinner table, ordered him out of the house and into the army. The father despised slavery, so the son must march with Mr. Lincoln’s army.

In some ways they were alike. The elder man played the flute and piano, the younger man the violin. Washington could “make a violin talk,” we read in a letter from a friend. He had his father’s extraordinary physical stamina, his father’s steadfastness in the face of adversity. He had been raised on an unyielding Germanic pride in one’s work, on duty and cold baths in the morning. But Washington also had a lovely, wry sense of humor. He was soft-spoken, informal, modest to a fault, some thought. He deplored vanity as the most costly of human follies. History, he had decided, favored the vain, and he had little faith in history. He was drawn to astronomy and botany, was particularly strong in geology, and had begun what would become one of the finest mineral collections in the country, if not the world. He adored Goethe (in the original German), chess, opera, roses, a good cigar, the absolute dark of night out of doors, and architecture, which, he came to believe, was the “noblest” art. He drew beautifully. His mind was not the creative engine his father’s had been, still he was exceptionally observant and retentive, and could improvise with amazing speed and ingenuity, a gift prized among American engineers of his generation.

The biggest experience of his life until Brooklyn was the war—and in many ways it is the key to the man and what he did at Brooklyn. He had been through “any quantity of hard fighting,” from Manassas Junction to Antietam to Gettysburg to the Wilderness to the siege of Petersburg. Miraculously he survived—at Antietam a cannonball came so close it sucked the air out of his lungs—and he came out a brevet colonel, having enlisted as a private the day after his father ordered him from the house. Also during the war, he built several successful bridges of his own, not his father’s, design; fell very much in love; and, from watching some of the Union Army’s most celebrated figures at close range—Hooker, Meade, Grant—formed decided views on what qualities counted most in a leader. Courage was essential. So was a level head and a reserve of strength for emergencies. So was “the intuitive faculty of being at the vital spot at the right time.”

Many people were struck by what seemed an air of imperturbable calm about him. A fellow officer observing him during the siege of Petersburg described him as “a light-haired, blue-eyed man with a countenance as if all the world were an empty show.” Washington himself said his eyes were green and confided to his future wife, Emily Warren, sister of his commanding officer, General G. K. Warren, that in truth he worried about almost everything.

He took charge at Brooklyn without hesitation, knowing as did nobody else how much his father had left unresolved, and knowing that unlike his father he had no one standing by should anything happen to him.

The able and, as it turned out, exceedingly loyal staff he assembled were nearly all younger even than he. Not the least of the arresting facts about the Brooklyn Bridge is that the average age of the engineers who undertook to build it was about thirty-one. All the magnificent drawings were executed under his direction—developed, more often than not, from his preliminary sketches, and subject always to his final approval. He ordered materials, wrote specifications. His lengthy annual reports to the trustees remain models of thoroughness and clarity, for, along with everything else, he wrote very well.

The two giant pneumatic caissons were his supreme contribution, however, and a test of everything that was in him. They were the foundations upon which the towers would stand, or to put it another way, they were the part of the bridge nobody would ever see and the part upon which everything depended. And they are still there, beneath the towers, beneath the river, exactly where he calculated they ought to be.

Readers of such publications as Harper’s Weekly or Scientific American were asked to imagine a colossal, bottomless wooden box filled with compressed air, to keep the river out, and held in position on the riverbed by the tower being built on top. Inside the box were a hundred men or more digging away with picks and shovels. As their work progressed (around the clock), and as the tremendous weight of the tower increased steadily, the box was being forced ever so slowly deeper and deeper in the riverbed until finally it would rest on bedrock. The box was equipped with air locks, iron chambers with trap doors, so the men could come and go without loss of air pressure, and a system of water shafts, the ingenious means devised by Washington Roebling for the removal of excavation. The dimensions of the Brooklyn caisson, the first to go down, were 102 by 168 feet.

Nothing came easily. Boulders jammed beneath the outer or cutting edge. The river came in. As the caisson sank deeper and air pressure within had to be increased, men started experiencing a strange ringing in the ears. Their voices had a thin, eerie sound, and the heat and humidity of the compressed air became almost intolerable. Work in such an atmosphere was exhausting beyond anyone’s experience. And scary. The only illumination was candlelight or limelight. When fire broke out in December 1870, it burned into the huge overhead timbers with such intensity, because of the compressed air, that it seemed impossible to put out. Newspapers carried headlines of “The Terrible Conflagration.” Roebling was in the caisson, directing the fight, for more than twenty hours, knowing the whole time that the fire could eat into the roof like a cancer and weaken it to the point where the tremendous weight of the tower would come crashing through.

“Colonel W. A. Roebling has given the work his unremitting attention at all times,” William Kingsley reported to the trustees, “but especially at all the critical points is he conspicuous for his presence and exertions. During the fire…when the destruction of the caisson was imminent, he remained in the caisson all night, putting forth almost superhuman efforts to extinguish it, and only came out when he supposed that the fire was extinguished, and when he felt the symptoms of paralysis…”

What he felt was the onset of the bends, or caisson disease, then still a mystery. In his determination to be always where he was needed, he customarily went in and out of the caisson more often in a day than anyone, and he was invariably, as we now know, coming out—out of the compressed air—far too rapidly. He was carried to his home on Brooklyn Heights and rubbed all over with a solution of salt and whiskey. Then, only an hour or two later, when a message arrived saying the fire had broken out again, he dressed and went back. His decision this time was to flood the caisson, something he dreaded doing. As it was, the tedious repairs of the fire set everything back three months.

They hit bedrock on the Brooklyn side at forty-four feet, six inches. On the New York side it was a different story, and the suffering from the bends there became alarming. Every two feet that the caisson descended meant another pound of pressure added to the air inside. As Roebling wrote, hardly anyone escaped without experiencing pain of the most intense kind—“like the thrust of a knife,” said one worker. In April 1872, with the caisson at a depth of seventy-odd feet and still no bedrock, two men died. The strain for Roebling was nearly unbearable, as his wife later said. On May 18, a third man died, and that same day Roebling made the most difficult and courageous decision of the project.

Staking everything—the success of the bridge, his reputation, his career—he ordered a halt. The New York tower, he had concluded, could stand where it was, at a depth of seventy-eight feet, six inches, not on bedrock, but on “hardpack”—sand. From examinations of the strata he had determined to his own satisfaction that no movement had occurred at that level since the time of deposit millions of years in the geologic past; so, he reasoned, it was “good enough to found upon.” To have driven the caisson to bedrock, he estimated, might have taken another year, and cost possibly a hundred lives.

Sometime later, while seeing to the final details inside the caisson, before it was filled in with concrete, Roebling suffered another collapse, this one far more serious, and from that point on he was to be seen no more. He became as the years passed the famous, mysterious “man in the window,” hidden away from everyone, unseen, but supposedly seeing all and running it all from his upstairs room.

Nowhere in the history of such great undertakings is there anything comparable. He directed every step of what was then the largest, most difficult engineering project ever attempted, with all its risks and complications, entirely in absentia. Nobody could see him except his doctors, a few chosen trustees, a few chosen subordinates, and his wife, and never more than one or two at a time. He was never known to go near the bridge or to set foot on it in all the ten more years that the work continued. Only when the bridge was finished would he reemerge, inconspicuously, his health then, he acknowledged, much improved.

For about a year he was not even in Brooklyn, as supposed. He was running things from a sickroom in his father’s house in Trenton. But in 1873 he returned to the house in Brooklyn, 110 Columbia Heights, with its sweeping river panorama, and from then on the popular picture of the lone figure at his window, telescope or field glasses at hand, the bridge in the distance, is accurate.

What was the matter with him? Why did he never come out of hiding? The common explanation was that he suffered complications resulting from his time in the caissons—from the bends, in other words. It was also rumored that he was out of his mind, and that if the truth were known his wife was in charge.

Those who did know never said much in explanation, but, interestingly, they also never referred to the bends or caisson disease by name. In a letter to his son years later, Roebling would recall being in such a state that he had to be fed. He was unable even to lift his arms, which may well have been a consequence of the bends. He also complained of failing vision, a symptom not associated with the disease, and for a considerable time was incapable of reading or writing anything.

Farrington, the master mechanic, a notably forthright, direct individual, said Roebling had become “a confirmed invalid…owing to exposure, overwork, and anxiety”—which is practically a textbook definition of what in that day was called neurasthenia, or nervous prostration. “He is not so sick as people imagine,” Emily Roebling would explain when, in the final days of the work, a single reporter was permitted into the house. His problem, she said, was an inability to endure people or their talk. Talk especially had a “very debilitating effect.”

From his own later correspondence, now in a collection at Rutgers University, we know that a “course of electricity,” or early, primitive electrical shock treatments, were tried, and they could only have been extremely painful. “Often the doctors said I could not live from day to day,” he would write. For the rest of his life he would remember a summer heat wave in Brooklyn when he was “in bed” and the thermometer registered a hundred degrees or worse. He suffered unendingly, that much is certain. Recalling almost anything to do with the bridge or Brooklyn, he would speak of “that fearful time,” “that terrible burden,” “the tortures I endured.” “When I think of what I endured at Brooklyn, my heart sinks within me,” he would write to his son.

It is also conceivable that he had become addicted to drugs, and this too may have had something to do with his self-imposed seclusion. We know he was given morphine during the worst agonies of the bends and that morphine addiction as a consequence of just such situations was common. We know also that in later years, suffering from a variety of ills and pains, he relied rather heavily on laudanum, the most common narcotic of the day, and so there is little reason to suppose he did not do the same at Brooklyn. The one reporter who was allowed in at the end was struck by two things when taken in to see Roebling: the first was how well he looked, the other was the “imposing array of medicine phials” on a side table. This could mean nothing at all or it could be that it was the reporter’s way of raising suspicions in the minds of readers who were far more conversant with drugs and problems of addiction than many present-day readers appreciate.

Roebling’s own explanation of his plight, expressed in a letter to one of his staff, was that he had pushed himself too far. Our imprecise contemporary term would be a nervous breakdown. The remedy for “nervous diseases,” he said, was to sit and keep quiet. Relief, if it came at all, could, he found, come “only through mental rest of all the faculties and especially the emotions.” And while it is impossible to know just what he meant by the “emotions,” it is also impossible not to wonder how much of his problem was psychosomatic in nature. He had made himself a prisoner in much the way his brother Edmund had, and perhaps for him too it meant freedom of a kind, perhaps the same freedom from his father, who could only have been an overpowering presence so long as the bridge remained unfinished and his own duty to the great man’s vision continued unfulfilled. Only in isolation could he hold on, keep his head. “I can only do my work by maintaining my independence,” he insisted to the trustees at one point.

Whatever the nature of his troubles, however mystifying his situation, his intellectual faculties seem to have suffered not at all. That he could keep everything in his head as he did is astonishing, like someone playing six games of chess at once blindfolded and winning them all. Nothing was done except as he specified. His was the single commanding intellect throughout, as his assistants were the first to acknowledge.

Also, most important, he had, as he put it, “a strong tower to lean upon, my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.” She was tall, “strikingly English in style,” with brown eyes and a cheerful, mobile expression. He wrote of how gracefully she moved, how entertaining she could be in conversation. “I think we will be a pair of lovers all our lifetime,” he had written to her during the war, and from every indication we have, they were.

She became his private secretary, his nurse, and constant companion, his means of contact with the trustees. She could talk to them, he said, as could no one else and with a conviction that carried great weight. When he was first stricken she had gone to Henry Cruse Murphy to explain the situation and was told things could continue as they were, with her husband in charge. She had expected his troubles would last only a short time.

She organized correspondence, kept his daily journal, and assisted in drafting specifications—mountainous tasks all in longhand. If the workers were his troops and he the commander on the hill, she was the trusted aide-de-camp, much as he had been for her brother in the war. If he was indispensable to the bridge, she was indispensable to him. She went to the bridge with his orders, or to be his “eyes,” often several times a day and in all kinds of weather. By the final stages she was meeting with manufacturers to explain how certain parts had to be fabricated.

In the files of the Roebling Collection at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute there is a copy of a speech given by a graduate, a contemporary of Washington Roebling’s, at a dinner in New York in 1882, the year before the bridge was completed. Emily, we read, was a “woman of unusual executive ability…. She is firm and decided, with opinions on almost every subject which opinions she expresses with great frankness. To her natural talents for organizing are found tact, energy, unselfishness and good nature…”

Progress on the bridge all the while had come steadily, but slowly, in the face of one problem or frustration after another. Work was stalled by bad weather, financial crises, and labor troubles. Trustees complained of the delays. Spinning the cables was supposed to have been the smoothest part of the process, since the system had been perfected on earlier Roebling bridges, but then, in 1878, up popped J. Lloyd Haigh, the wire manufacturer, with his neat bit of deception. Had Roebling been on the job in person, it might never have happened. As it was he had warned the trustees in writing that Haigh was nobody to do business with and, further, if they did some checking they would find that Haigh was financially beholden to Abram Hewitt, the very member of the board who was doing the most to see that Haigh, not the Roebling company, got the contract.

The deception, once discovered, was painfully simple. Some of Roebling’s own people had been stationed at the Haigh mill to inspect and certify each wagonload of wire before it went to the bridge, but between mill and bridge a switch was made. Wagon and driver pulled into a building, the approved wire was replaced with an equal quantity of rejected wire, then wagon and driver went on to the bridge, while the good wire was returned to the mill to be run past the inspectors all over again. By the time Haigh was found out a lot of bad wire had gone into the cables, a realization that raised desperate cries from the trustees.

Roebling figured that Haigh had taken them for roughly $300,000. But the bad wire could stay in the cables, he announced, since, in his original calculations, he had included the possibility of some such problem arising and had made the cables more than strong enough to compensate. Yet the thought that such corruption was literally woven into the bridge could never be forgotten, and least of all by Roebling himself.

As a consequence of “The Great Wire Fraud,” the Roebling company, from which he had severed connections, was awarded the contract, as it should have been in the first place. That Roebling wire was the finest on the market and fairly priced had never been disputed. But Hewitt, who held the mortgage on Haigh’s mill, had convinced the board that use of Roebling wire on a Roebling bridge represented a gross conflict of interest. In the large scrapbook she kept of the newspaper coverage given all things pertaining to the bridge and her husband, Emily Roebling later inserted a small item reporting that J. Lloyd Haigh was breaking rocks at Sing Sing.

She was her husband’s representative at such lavish, publicized affairs as the 1880 dinner at Delmonico’s for Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of the Suez Canal, which had opened the year work on the bridge was begun. She was her husband’s staunch defender when, in the very last part of the work, some newly appointed trustees led by Seth Low tried to fire Roebling from his job—in a “spirit of reform”—and almost succeeded. Finally, it was she, at his request, who was first to ride over the bridge by carriage, in advance of the official opening. She went in an open Victoria, carrying a rooster as a symbol of victory.

The grand opening took place on May 24, 1883, and was cause for the biggest celebration ever seen in Brooklyn or New York. The President of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, a New Yorker, led the parade over the bridge to Brooklyn, accompanied by a future President, Governor Grover Cleveland. The work had taken nearly three times as long as the five years John A. Roebling had estimated, and the cost had come to nearly $16 million, or more than twice his original figure.

The cost must also include the life of John A. Roebling and the others who followed. John French, a rigger, John McGarrity, a laborer, and Thomas Douglass, a stonemason, were killed when a derrick fell. Henry Supple, another rigger and “one of the best men upon the bridge,” had the top of his head taken off when a strand of wire snapped. Thomas Blake was killed in the same accident. Ross Harris died in a fall. August Denning died in a fall. Hensen, Read, Delaney, Collins, Noone, McCann, Elliot, Higgens, and two men named Murphy died in falls. McLaughlin, a machinist, was “killed instantly” by a falling stone. Dougherty was crushed to death by a falling derrick. So was Enright. Mullin was crushed by a stone being swung into place. Cope, a rigger, had the job of guiding a wire rope onto a hoisting drum. When he saw the rope was not running as it should, he kicked at it. His foot slipped and his leg was wound around the drum, crushing it so badly he died “almost instantly.” Brown lingered on in the hospital before he died. His back had been broken when a coal bucket fell on him.

Those known to have died of the bends include John Myer, Patrick McKay, and an Englishman named Reardon, who began work on the New York caisson on May 17, 1872, and died May 18, the day Roebling ordered the halt.

According to an interview in the Eagle with C. C. Martin of Roebling’s staff, two others named Deneiss and Gardiner also died—though Martin could not recall how—which brings the rough total to twenty-seven.

The grief and hardship experienced are of course immeasurable. In an official report of the trustees, as an example, it is recorded that the widow of Henry Supple received as compensation for her loss $250. Because the family of John McGarran, who was permanently disabled by a fall, found themselves “entirely destitute,” he was awarded $100. To what degree other victims of the bends suffered as Roebling did, or died an early death because of the ordeal, we can only imagine.

Roebling himself, incredibly, outlasted all the others on his staff. Emily, who later earned a law degree and became known for her efforts in behalf of women’s suffrage, died in 1903. He was the last leaf on the tree, as he said, absorbed in his books, his greenhouse, his minerals, the wire business, feuds with his brothers, and in writing long letters to his adored son. The few times he is known to have gone out on the bridge, with Emily and later by himself, he did so with no fanfare. Confusion over whether he or his father built the bridge dogged him until the end. “Most people think I died in 1869,” he wrote.

He died in Trenton in his own bed at age eighty-nine on July 21, 1926, almost fifty-seven years to the day after his father’s death in Brooklyn.

Interestingly, those who worked on the bridge had little or nothing to say about it once it was finished. All the speeches and poetry, the long essays, the editorials extolling its beauty and significance were provided by others. Roebling, too, said almost nothing on the subject. He—they all—seemed to prefer to let their work speak for itself.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Treasure from the Carpentry Shop

EARLY IN 1969, because a bit of hardware on the Brooklyn Bridge had begun to show signs of wear after nearly ninety years, a young civil engineer working for the City of New York’s Department of Transportation was delegated to hunt up the original drawings of the item. The “trunnion,” as it is called, is a steel joint assembly, or gudgeon, about eighty of which are used to connect the vertical cables of the Brooklyn Bridge to the roadway out at the center of the river span where the greatest movement occurs. It is not an especially complicated or interesting device and it need concern us no longer, but like every other part and piece of the bridge, it had been custom-made to begin with and so could be replaced only by remaking it from scratch. Hence the need for the drawings.

Francis P. Valentine, the man sent for the drawings, was then twenty-nine years old, large and bearded, a native New Yorker and resident of Brooklyn who has been rightly described by his friend David Hupert as “an absolutely dedicated public servant.” His instructions were to go to the department’s carpentry shop at 352 Kent Avenue, a small, nondescript brick building beneath the Brooklyn end of the Williamsburg Bridge, and to look through the files that were in storage there. Valentine was advised to wear old clothes, but he had no idea what to expect.

What he found, what he saw the morning he first walked into the shop, was one of the most remarkable treasures in the whole history of the building art, a collection totaling some ten thousand original blueprints and drawings, and what is so amazing is that for all the bewildering disorder they were in, the layers of dust and filth, he sensed almost at once the extent of their value. And in this he was the rare exception, for the drawings had been known to others in the department for years. Kept mainly for possible reference needs, for just such emergencies as the trunnion problem, they had been gone through, in part, by perhaps as many as twenty or thirty people at one time or another. Yet the idea that they might be worth something, that many were, in their way, magnificent works of art, not to mention historic documents of great consequence, had thus far failed to dawn on anyone of authority. In fact, one official, the engineer in charge of all East River bridges, previously had ordered that the drawings be thrown out because they were taking up too much space, and this would have been their fate had it not been for the carpenters who worked in the shop—William Jeblick and Joseph Vecchio, among others—who decided it might be best if they simply ignored the order. As Jeblick remarks, “It would have been a shame to see such things go to the dump, when they should have been in a museum.”

Most of the drawings were packed into huge wooden file drawers, giant chests as old as the bridge itself, but hundreds of others were piled in rolls on top of these chests, and on shelves, tables, every which way, wherever there was space. The light was poor and the dirt and dust were “unbelievable,” as Valentine remembers.

Every time I pulled open a drawer a cloud of dust came out in my face. None of it looked like much at first, mostly blueprints, what you’d expect. Then after maybe four or five drawers, I began finding wonderful hand drawings, some of them enormous. I noticed many of these had WAR written on the bottom and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to write “war” on the bottom of a drawing. I saw the drawings were dated—I realized they were a hundred years old—and I thought, “My God, what am I looking at here?”

Then it struck me, WAR, that’s Washington A. Roebling, the engineer who built the Brooklyn Bridge—these were Roebling’s own signed drawings!

After going through approximately seventy drawers, he found the trunnion drawings he had been sent for, but in the weeks following he kept insisting to his superiors that he had found—rediscovered—something of far greater importance and that steps must be taken to preserve the collection. “The people who had seen the drawings before never seemed to realize that they included Roebling originals,” he explains. “They had no idea of the extent of the collection, never knew, for instance, that it included a profile of the bridge, a drawing mind you, measuring 30 feet.”

But presently Valentine was told by his immediate boss, the late Edward Backus (“a wonderful, wonderful man”), that if the drawings meant that much to him then he might take a day or so a month to keep going through them, to determine what all was there.

This was still in 1969, the year of the landing on the moon, when a technological achievement like the Brooklyn Bridge seemed just a little quaint, a relic from a different world, let alone a different age, as I know from personal experience. For I, too, at that time, was digging my way through another long-neglected Roebling collection—letters, memoranda, personal diaries, scrapbooks, and the like, all pertaining to the bridge—that had been in storage for years, unsorted, uncatalogued, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. Still, the more Valentine worked with the drawings the more fascinated he became—and determined to get them out of the carpentry shop and into safekeeping. He called the Long Island Historical Society to see if anyone there could advise him what to do. He called the New York Historical Society and the Museum of Modern Art. He described what he had found. “Nobody seemed interested. Nobody felt it was important. They’d ask me how many drawings there were and when I said I thought maybe ten thousand, they’d right away say that was more than they could ever handle. I couldn’t get anybody even to come see what I was talking about. And back at the office a lot of people gave me the impression that I was out of my mind.”

He tried several newspapers, and at length, in 1973, the Trenton Times sent somebody over to the carpentry shop and ran an article. Still, nothing happened, not until a year or so later when Valentine discovered that David Hupert worked at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art.

Until then Hupert had been only another of Valentine’s neighbors in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a nice, friendly fellow who played on the same softball team. For some reason he can’t explain, Valentine had never known what Hupert did for a living, but once he found out, things began to happen. Hupert not only came to the carpentry shop—” I just stood there in utter amazement,” he remembers—but with Valentine’s help selected sixty-five of what he regarded as the most aesthetically striking drawings of the lot, then rounded up the necessary funds to have these properly cleaned and mounted for an exhibition at the Whitney’s downtown gallery. Most of the work on the larger drawings was done by the head “paper conservator” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Merritt Safford. A century of accumulated dirt had to be removed—mold, mildew, and thousands upon thousands of tiny, dark specks, roach feces, every one of which had to be picked off painstakingly by hand. The cost of preparing the sixty-five drawings was $15,000.

The show, when it opened in May 1976—the first public display of the drawings—was a huge success. The longer it was up, the greater the attendance, which is the reverse of the usual pattern. Remembering the response, Hupert says, “No show we ever did had such an outpouring of affection, all for that bridge.” Still, there was not money enough to do a catalogue—only a poster was published, a reproduction of the original thirteen-foot “presentation” profile—and the drawings on display represented but a tiny fraction of the whole, too tiny even to qualify as the tip of the iceberg.

Interest in the rest of the collection, all still at the carpentry shop, had meantime become most intense. The Municipal Archives and the Brooklyn Museum had gotten wind long since of what Hupert was up to and were highly displeased about it. Each commenced to lay claim to the collection. The drawings belonged to the city, insisted the Municipal Archives, and so therefore the drawings belonged in the Municipal Archives. The Brooklyn Museum argued that it was better equipped to give the drawings proper care and housing, and to put them on public view, and that after all it was Brooklyn’s bridge. More important, the Brooklyn Museum also sent an associate curator, Barbara Millstein, to appraise the situation at the carpentry shop, and if there is a point in the story at which one might say that the drawings were at last “saved,” this is it. For Millstein’s commitment to the collection was to be unrelenting. Over the next several years, assisted by a volunteer coworker, Gail Guillet, she did a thorough inventory of the entire collection, complete with descriptive data on every item, a simply staggering task. While ultimately, in 1976, her museum lost out to the Municipal Archives as the rightful proprietor of the collection, no one, not Frank Valentine or David Hupert or anyone at the Municipal Archives, would ever contest her hard-earned standing as the authority on the drawings, and it was the Brooklyn Museum that put on a mammoth exhibit of three to four hundred of them in 1983, in honor of the bridge’s one hundredth anniversary.

The Municipal Archives now has physical possession of the treasure. The drawings were finally removed from the carpentry shop in 1976, seven years after Valentine first found them. But what of the drawings themselves after all? What, finally, is the real value of this extraordinary mountain of paper?

Of particular importance, to begin with, is the fact that it is a complete record, and a complete record of almost any engineering feat of that day would be a major find. But this is the complete record of the Brooklyn Bridge, once the largest, most celebrated bridge on earth, “The Great Bridge,” the unprecedented, pioneering work that captured the heart of an entire era. It is essential to understand what a complete record in this instance actually means. Since every component was custom-made, and very often a first of its kind, there is a drawing for every component, sometimes several, from the masonry of the towers down to a manhole cover.

The bridge in the plans is infinitely more than the bridge you see. Among the most magnificent drawings in the collection, for example, are those of the giant wooden caissons. Then there are drawings by the hundreds of machines large and small, various kinds of hoisting apparatus, compressed-air pumps, cable-making equipment, every last device needed to do the work, again most of it custom-built and virtually all of it long since vanished. The huge Victorian train terminals that once stood at either end of the bridge, as well as the bridge trains that for years shunted commuters to and fro between Brooklyn and Manhattan—these also are to be found in the collection, every detail beautifully delineated.

The drawings are signed, and not by Roebling only. A grand total of sixty-four different draftsmen and assistant engineers are represented, and the names that figure most prominently are men about whom we happen to know quite a lot. These are not anonymous works in other words; nor are Wilhelm Hildenbrand or George W. McNulty, William Paine, Francis Collingwood, or C. C. Martin, to mention only a few, names without faces, personality, stories of their own, as we know from the written record. Some were among the very best in their profession, and each played a specific, identifiable part in the fourteen-year-long ordeal of building the bridge.

Wilhelm Hildenbrand, who did the major pictorial renderings, will serve as an example. Born in Germany, he was still in his twenties when work on the plans commenced in 1867, which made him one of the youngest of Washington Roebling’s amazingly young staff. Hildenbrand, who had been hired initially by old John A. Roebling, was powerfully built, clean shaven, and an intimate of the Roeblings, never people to take friendships lightly. He had even taken part in some of John A.’s spiritualist seances in the big house at Trenton. Before joining the Roeblings, Hildenbrand had designed—at all of twenty-two years of age—the great arched roof of the train shed for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s new Grand Central Depot. In the course of his first several years under Washington Roebling, he did all the detailed masonry plans, as well as the architectural designs for the New York Approach, that is, the long span leading to the New York tower. As time went on, he was responsible for most of the mathematical calculations; he worked out the details for the superstructure of the roadway. He wrote a book on cable making. In all he gave more than sixteen years of his life to the creation of the bridge, as much nearly as Washington Roebling, and in his subsequent career he built the Pike’s Peak Railway and a large suspension bridge of his own design at Mapimi, Mexico.

The drawings by Washington Roebling, the commanding intellect, number some five hundred.

But then, in the last analysis, one comes to something in these drawings impossible to catalog, that has little or nothing to do with however much biographical or technical background one might compile. It is the incredible care and concentration you feel in even the least of the drawings, the pride, the obvious love—love for materials, love for elegance in design, love of mathematics, of line, of light and shadow, of majestic scale, and, yes, love of drawing—this passion in combination with an overriding insistence on order, on quality, that we of this very different century must inevitably stand in awe before. You feel what these people felt for their work and you can’t help but be drawn to them.

Present-day engineering or architectural renderings look very little like these. If in a modern drawing, for example, rivets need be shown, a few suffice, the rest are indicated with a small x, and a marginal note specifies the number required. In these from the last century, as Frank Valentine likes to point out, “If there were 140 rivets in a connection, every rivet was drawn, and every one showing how the light would strike it.” In drawings such as those of the caissons, each bolt and brace is shown; even the grain of the wood is rendered meticulously in watercolors. In part, but only in part, this can be explained by the fact that many who worked on the bridge were illiterate, or at least so far as reading plans, but as superb craftsmen they could build just about anything if it were pictured exactly as it was meant to look, exactly as it was supposed to be put together.

They who made these drawings were a different breed from our present-day technicians, that certainly is unmistakable, and possibly the most significant difference can be seen in their regard for the total setting in which the bridge was to stand. In these drawings the bridge is never viewed as an isolated entity, the sole focus of interest. It is not the bridge alone that is portrayed in exquisite detail: it is the geological strata through which the foundations must be dug; it is all the little streetscapes over which the bridge will rise, each building done with careful attention to its actual size and character, not merely “suggested” with a perfunctory pencil flourish. One drawing is devoted solely to the mast height of the different sailing ships that will be passing beneath the bridge.

For a long time historians have looked upon the Brooklyn Bridge as a kind of grand but solitary redemptive symbol rising out of the Tweed years, the Grant years, standing alone and above it all, literally and figuratively. Now they must look also at the drawings. The easy, hackneyed labels for post–Civil War America, talk only of Gilded Age greed and frippery, won’t do in the face of such work. Had the bridge succumbed to the wrecking ball by now, and were we left with only the drawings to go by, we would still have to conclude that that was no ordinary era.

“When the perfected East River bridge shall permanently and uninterruptedly connect the two cities,” wrote the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Thomas Kinsella, in the spring of 1872, “the daily thousands who cross it will consider it a sort of natural and inevitable phenomenon, such as the rising and setting of the sun, and they will consciously overlook the preliminary difficulties surmounted before the structure spanned the stream, and will perhaps undervalue the indomitable courage, the absolute faith, the consumate genius which assured the engineer’s triumph.” With the rediscovery of the drawings of the builders, our appreciation for their “consumate genius,” for the pains they took in everything, is greater now than ever.

CHAPTER NINE

Long-Distance Vision

IN THE mid-1920s, in several parts of the world, a number of brave, skilled young men and women began taking to the air at the controls of a variety of aircraft, most of which, by today’s standards, were unenviably small, fragile, and poorly equipped. They saw themselves as a new breed of pilot, as pioneers in a new age of aviation. All in their twenties—roughly the same age as the century—they were flying in one of the new airmail services, or surveying possible routes and landing sites for commercial air travel, “seeking footholds on the future,” as one of them said.

In a brief heyday of about a dozen years, they set records for distance and speed, crossed oceans and uncharted mountain ranges, explored entire continents, flying in every kind of weather and more by instinct than by instruments. It was exciting, difficult, often dangerous work. Many of them were killed. Six were lost trying to fly the Atlantic Ocean before Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the finest pilot of the era, flew the 3,610-mile stretch from New York to Paris nonstop and alone, without radio or sextant, in a single-engine plane of only 223 horsepower. He was twenty-five years old, and the historic date was May 21, 1927.

These were no amateur pilots. They were intensely professional, intensely serious about the craft of flying and about their own role in history. They were also, on the whole, extremely good-looking, which added greatly to their glamour. Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham, and the idolized Lindbergh were as handsome as screen stars. If an exception like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry looked, as somebody remarked, more like a tall, tonsured monk, he could draw amusing pictures and do card tricks on the level of a professional magician.

But most remarkable is how many of them proved to be writers of exceptional grace and vision, authors of more than a score of books. Lindbergh wrote seven, beginning with We, a hugely popular account of his early life and the Paris flight, which was rushed into print that same year. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, her husband’s copilot and radio operator on later expeditions, was a diarist and poet who hardly ever stopped writing. Her first published work, North to the Orient, described the unprecedented survey flight the couple made in 1931 in a small seaplane from New York to China by the great circle route over northern Canada and Alaska, touching down in eastern Siberia and Japan. Sinclair Lewis called it “one of the most beautiful and great-hearted books that has ever been written.”

Like Lindbergh, the Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry began as a mail pilot, flying the Sahara and the Andes, and is known worldwide for the novel Night Flight, for his now-classic children’s fable The Little Prince and for the autobiographical Wind, Sand and Stars, which was a best seller and winner of the National Book Award in 1939. His Wartime Writings 1939-1944, a collection of his letters and articles, was published here in 1986.

Beryl Markham of Kenya, who looked a little like Greta Garbo, was the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west (in 1936). She wrote a high-spirited, often poetic “remembrance” called West with the Night that was only rediscovered and reissued a few years ago.

Others included Nevil Norway, an English pilot and aeronautical engineer who wrote novels on aviation under the name of Nevil Shute; John Grierson, another Englishman and a veteran long-distance flyer, who wrote a half dozen books about his adventures, and Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone, who wrote three books, including Last Flight, which was compiled after her death by her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam.

Though of different nationalities and differing abilities as pilots, these aviator authors were alike in their love of the freedom of the profession, their love for the still unspoiled, distant corners of the Earth and their affection for their fellow pilots. “The dignity of the craft is that it creates a fellowship,” said Saint-Exupéry.

Further, aviation was their common cause. With the advance of the airplane, they were sure, the old barriers of time and distance would give way, bringing humanity closer together. That they would share a common crisis in such faith is also part of their story. Ironically, it would be Lindbergh who later renounced with the greatest fervor the whole idea of progress through technology of any kind.

They made of their pioneering time and its aftermath a body of literature like none other. Everything seemed fresh in that time of “early morning horizons,” as Anne Lindbergh remembered.

This is how Beryl Markham in West with the Night describes her first flying lessons:

We began at the first hour of morning. We began when the sky was clean and ready for the sun and you could see your breath and smell traces of the night. We began every morning at that same hour, using what we were pleased to call the Nairobi Aerodrome, climbing away from it with derisive clamour, while the burghers of the town twitched in their beds and dreamed perhaps of all unpleasant things that drone—of wings and stings, and corridors of Bedlam.

Why should these pilots have written so much and so well? The early days of railroading produced no literary works of distinction. We have had no literary stars among race-car drivers, or among astronauts as yet. So why these aviators? And why works of such beauty and power that speak to us still after so long a time?

Part of the answer, I believe, is in their feeling for the earth and its beauties. They flew with the land, as Lindbergh described in the striking first paragraph of his Pulitzer Prize—winning The Spirit of St. Louis, a larger, more detailed and contemplative account than We of the Paris flight. It was September 1926, when he was flying the mails:

Night already shadows the eastern sky. To my left, low on the horizon, a thin line of cloud is drawing on its evening sheath of black. A moment ago, it was burning red and gold. I look down over the side of my cockpit at the farm lands of central Illinois. Wheat shocks are gone from the fields. Close, parallel lines of the seeder, across a harrowed strip, show where winter planting has begun. A threshing crew on the farm below is quitting work for the day. Several men look up and wave as my mail plane roars overhead. Trees and buildings and stacks of grain stand shadowless in the diffused light of evening. In a few minutes it will be dark, and I’m still south of Peoria.

Lindbergh is removed from the ground like a young god, his vantage point the gift of a machine, a De Havilland biplane with a 12-cylinder, 400-horsepower Liberty engine. With night coming on, he feels the earth’s curve and turning. He has the wind in his face as he looks down from his open cockpit. He is close enough to the farmland to pick out details. He marks the cycle of crops, the signs of seeding and harvest. He is in touch with the earth, and he is in touch with his fellow men who, importantly, are harvesters. He sees them; they see him and wave.

It was their practical need to fly with the land that, more than anything, distinguished these pilots from those who would follow. The sky was their frontier, their element. Something about the sky stirred them to their souls, as Melville and Conrad had been stirred by the sea. But they were never detached from the land in mind or spirit. It was of necessity, to keep their bearings, that they flew with rivers and kept eye contact with mountains and plains. Lindbergh, in his vivid, carefully composed paragraph, fixes our attention on the good earth of Illinois before saying a thing about the adventure of flight. Our true bearings, he tells us, are south of Peoria.

There is often a nearly sensual feeling for airplanes as well. The aviator writers prided themselves, found the most realistic kind of reassurance, in knowing their airplanes.

“So he had found his world again,” Saint-Exupéry wrote of his valorous pilot Fabien as he takes off in the novel Night Flight.

…A few digs of his elbow, and he was quite at home. He tapped the dashboard, touched the contacts one by one, shifting his limbs a little, and, settling himself more solidly, felt for the best position whence to gauge the faintest lurch of his five tons of metal, jostled by the heaving darkness. Groping with his fingers, he plugged in his emergency lamp, let go of it, felt for it again, made sure it held; then lightly touched each switch, to be certain of finding it later, training his hands to function in a blind man’s world. Now that his hands had learnt their role by heart, he ventured to turn on a lamp, making the cockpit bright with polished fittings and then, as on a submarine about to dive, watched his passage into night upon the dials only. Nothing shook or rattled, neither gyroscope nor altimeter flickered in the least, the engine was running smoothly; so now he relaxed his limbs a little, let his neck sink back into the leather padding and fell into the deeply meditative mood of flight, mellow with inexplicable hopes.

The airplane offered a spiritual pilgrimage in ways other machines never had. These aviators wrote of being lifted out of themselves by the very act of flight, of becoming part of something infinitely larger than themselves. This was the discovery of all discoveries in their farflung ventures that mattered foremost. He was never so aware of all existence, never less aware of himself, Lindbergh said, than when flying. The miracle of the airplane, wrote Saint-Exupéry, is that it plunges us “into the heart of the mystery.” For Anne Lindbergh, the sensation of flight was more like that of great music and art, or the brilliant, clear passages of a book. Beryl Markham used the word religion and wrote of seeing things for the first time in proper proportion: “I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.”

The only daughter of an Englishman who settled in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley to raise racehorses after the turn of the century, Markham took up aviation as a means of earning a living. From 1931 to 1936, she flew mail and supplies and occasional passengers to the distant reaches of Kenya, the Sudan, Tanganyika, and Rhodesia. Encouraged by Baron Bror von Blixen, husband of the author Isak Dinesen, she started a business spotting big game from the air, working closely with Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton, the classics-quoting white hunter portrayed by Robert Redford in the film of Dinesen’s Out of Africa.

Whether, as has been said, Markham was Dinesen’s rival for the attentions of Finch-Hatton, I don’t know. But he and Blixen figure prominently in West with the Night, while Dinesen receives no mention. Indeed, Finch-Hatton is described as the most charming of companions, “a great man who never achieved arrogance.” Markham and he flew often in the new plane, a bright yellow Gypsy Moth, that he had brought by boat from England. In one of the book’s memorable scenes, her old flying instructor, Tom Black, for reasons he can’t explain, tells her not to accompany Finch-Hatton on the flying expedition in which he was ultimately killed.

Because of her glamorous looks and several unsuccessful marriages, Markham was a popular topic of conversation in Nairobi society. When her book appeared in 1942, the gossip was that she hadn’t written it. The real author, supposedly, was her third husband, who was not a flyer but a hard-drinking American ghost-writer named Raoul Schumacher. The charge, which she denied, seems unfair and unlikely, though Schumacher’s encouragement and editorial help were undoubtedly important, as she acknowledged on the flyleaf.

For all the pilot writers, the prospect of death was something to be faced with every takeoff. “I was in sheer physical terror the whole time,” Anne Lindbergh wrote privately after one long, grueling flight with her husband. John Grierson crashed three times flying the Arctic route to Canada. Saint-Exupery—”Saint-Ex” to his friends—crashed in the Egyptian desert en route from Paris to Saigon, and for three days he and his mechanic survived on a pint of coffee, a little white wine, a few grapes and an orange, until found by passing Bedouins. But then, Anne Lindbergh noted in her diary, Saint-Ex was always crashing. He was too much the artist to be a proper pilot, she thought, and he would be killed if he kept flying.

Were they aviators who wrote or writers who took up flying? That is difficult to say, though I suspect that Saint-Exupéry and Anne Lindbergh would have written under any circumstances. The appeal of aviation as they knew it and the appeal of writing were much akin. There was a corresponding chance for independence and individuality, the exhilaration of risk, the appeal of the inevitable solitude demanded in both lines of work. On the practical side, they knew their notoriety meant a public.

They knew, too, that whether they as individuals survived the next flight, or the next, the pioneering age they were part of was certain to be short-lived, that with the steady advance of aircraft and instruments, their kind of flying would soon be a thing of the past—which only intensified both the experience and their need to record it.

“After this era of great pilots is gone,” observed Beryl Markham, “as the era of great sea captains has gone…it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it….And the days of clipper ships will be recalled again—and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air.”

In the introduction to his wife’s book Listen! The Wind, Charles Lindbergh foresaw the day when passengers flying the Atlantic would have no more contact with the elements or the water below or any of the beauties of the earth’s surface than if they were riding a train through a tunnel. For the feeling of real flying, he said, future travelers would have to turn to books like Listen! The Wind, an account of ten days during the most ambitious flight of the Lindberghs’ career together—a 30,000-mile circumnavigation of the Atlantic made in 1933, the year after the kidnapping and murder of their infant son.

What began in the mid-1920s was pretty much over by the late thirties. The end of their era should be marked in 1937, the year Hitler’s Luftwaffe practiced mass bombing on the Spanish city of Guernica, and Amelia Earhart, attempting to fly around the world, was lost in the Pacific near the Marianas. By August 1939, over supper on trays in a summer house on Long Island, Lindbergh and Saint-Exupéry were comparing notes on “that thrilling period of aviation that is past,” as if it were already ancient history. “But I never know,” said Saint-Exupéry with a laugh, “whether it is not my own youth I am regretting.” He would soon be facing the Luftwaffe over France.

Lindbergh by this time had made a widely publicized trip to Germany, where he was given the red-carpet treatment by the Nazi high command. He toured their aircraft factories, flew their latest fighter planes. His visit had the secret blessing of the American military, as a means to determine German strength. But when, at a dinner at the American Embassy in Berlin, Air Marshal Hermann Goering surprised Lindbergh with a medal, the shock and outrage at home were not to be forgotten.

On his return to New York, furthermore, Lindbergh joined the isolationist America First Committee. Believing another conflict so soon after the First World War would mean the end of Western civilization, he was convinced the United States should stay out of it. He grew increasingly strident in his public statements to the point where many thought him a traitor. Later, after Pearl Harbor, he flew combat missions in the Pacific.

In Flight to Arras, a book that had great effect in the United States, Saint-Exupéry portrayed the valor of his comrades in the French air service as they tried—with terrible losses—to hold back the Germans. When Saint-Exupéry was reported missing after a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in 1944, Anne Lindbergh, grieving over the news, wrote that there was something especially terrible about the word “lost.”

“It has a special agony of its own,” she wrote, “quite distinct from death…”

The airplane made it a war such as was never dreamed of, as Saint-Exupéry noted in 1940. Lindbergh, seeing the devastation of Europe after the German surrender, felt only revulsion for the whole of science and technology, especially aviation. The man who had been its greatest hero longed now to renounce his profession and live with nature. This was in the spring of 1945, before Hiroshima.

Beryl Markham gave up flying and went back to her father’s trade of raising horses. She never wrote anything more. Nevil Shute left England for Australia and wrote On the Beach, the most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.

“What frightens me more than the war is the world of tomorrow,” Saint-Exupéry told his mother in 1940. Central to all he wrote was the theme of responsibility. In The Little Prince, it is the fox, finally, that tells the Little Prince what really matters in life, by reminding him of the flower, the single rose, he had cared for at home on his own small planet. “Men have forgotten this truth,” says the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.”

Writing of his friend Guillaumet, an intrepid mail pilot, in Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry said that moral greatness derives more from a sense of responsibility than from courage or honesty. “To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.”

When he was eleven, Lindbergh traveled to Panama with his father to see the canal in its final stages of construction. In his lifetime the senior Lindbergh had seen the abolition of slavery, the advent of the telephone, and now the canal. “Great changes are coming,” he told the boy. Probably the change he would have least expected—or understood—was the view his son had arrived at by the time he reached his father’s age.

The evil of technology was not in technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical ingenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, our sense of personal accountability.

In the last book he wrote, his Autobiography of Values, published posthumously in 1976, he described a bombing run over the Japanese-occupied city of Rabaul in New Guinea during World War II:

When I pressed the red button on my stick, it was hard to believe I had released a high-explosive bomb. But there it was, deadly and irretrievable, apparently floating in the air. I saw it clearly for a moment as I climbed, and within seconds a pinhead puff of smoke appeared behind me in the city of Rabaul, a puff so small and far away that I could not connect it to the button on my stick, or realize the writhing hell it covered on the ground. I had carried out my mission, and felt little responsibility for what I had done.

In Africa, Beryl Markham was drawn to kinship with life’s elemental forces that she saw in the Masai people, the same people, interestingly, that Lindbergh was drawn to in the final phase of his life. “Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values,” Markham wrote.

Lindbergh was told by a Masai warrior that civilization is not progress. “We have known freedom far greater than yours,” he told Lindbergh, and Lindbergh never forgot the moment. “The primitive,” he wrote in Autobiography of Values, “teaches that life itself, unforced life, is progress, a fact our civilization tends more and more to overlook.” He became obsessed with the essence of life and concluded that we all must for the sake of the survival of humanity. He had called his first book We, because he saw the Paris flight as a victory of man and the machine. Later he wrote of the “vicious circle” of technology. He no longer trusted rationality. Quite the contrary: “I have found that the irrational gives man insight he cannot otherwise attain.”

He had come a very long distance indeed.

The most fascinating thing about the Lindbergh story is not the Paris flight, not the planes he flew or the fanfare he ignited, but Lindbergh himself. “As our civilization advances,” he said in a speech in Minnesota in 1972, “if our follies permit it to advance, I feel sure we will realize that progress can be measured only by the quality of life—all life, not human life alone.”

What he saw then, at the close of his life, was the imperative need for balance between man and nature. This was his long-distance vision.

Beryl Markham, who spent her last years in Kenya, died in 1986. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a widow since 1974, lives in Connecticut in the small house she and her husband built after their children were grown. The last of the pioneer pilots, she is still writing.

IV

FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

CHAPTER TEN

Cross the Blue Mountain

THE FICTION of Conrad Richter stands alone. His frontier stories, set East and West, have an authenticity, an unerring ring of truth that is extraordinary, and many, like The Sea of Grass, are still in print after more than a generation. Others include The Lady, The Light in the Forest, and A Country of Strangers. His great Ohio trilogy—The Trees, The Fields, and The Town—is an American masterpiece, as vivid and as moving an account as we have of pioneer life. The central character, Sayward Luckett, an illiterate Pennsylvania girl who crosses with her family into the Ohio wilderness after the Revolution and there makes her life, is among the memorable figures in American fiction. The portrayal of the primordial forest of the time is unforgettable.

But Conrad Richter was my friend, and this is a personal reminiscence, not a review or literary appraisal. It is one man’s homage to an authentic and exceedingly modest American artist about whom too little has been said.

We met for the first time in July 1963, at his home in Pine Grove, an old crossroads and market town on Swatara Creek in eastern Pennsylvania. At seventy-two, he was then working on what was to be his last published novel, The Aristocrat. I had come because I wanted to do an article about him. The article never materialized, but the friendship did, despite the considerable difference in our ages and much else.

“No doubt you will be driving over on Route 22,” he had written in advance. “If so, after you pass the junction to Route 183 and a little later the Midway Diner, you will see ahead an overpass before which there is a turnoff to Route 501 on which you cross the Blue Mountain. In town after crossing the railroad, turn right, then left, and our house will be on your right. One o’clock will be fine, a little before or after.”

The house, a white stucco on Maple Street, was the largest I had seen while driving into the town. There was a neat front walk, a small front porch with columns, a larger screened porch over to one side. Everything—house, walk, me—was bathed in cool green light under the shade trees. “The perfect house for the town doctor” was my thought, and then, when he greeted me at the door, he could have been the doctor himself.

He seemed older than in his photographs, and more impressive-looking, a straight, spare, clean-shaven man with thin white hair and fine features and marvelous crystal-blue eyes. He was about my own height, five feet eleven, and he was in his shirt sleeves, but he wore a necktie and the white shirt was spotless. Later, when we were in the dining room—his work area—I saw that he had tiny squares of adhesive tape, each very clean and clinical-looking, fixed to the tips of the fingers of his left hand. He would bite his nails otherwise, he explained. Children in town often asked about it, he said. He told them he was a bank robber.

We covered a good deal of ground before evening, and though years have passed and he is dead and buried there in Pine Grove, the memory of all he said is very clear, even without the notes I kept. The next spring I returned, and then again with my wife the year following. A correspondence began that lasted until his death.

He told me about his boyhood before the turn of the century. We went to see the brick house in Pine Grove where he was born. He spoke of his father, a Lutheran preacher who began as a storekeeper and whose life story is the subject of A Simple Honorable Man. He talked of the growing season on that side of the mountain, of the Amish and the Pennsylvania Dutch, of going to work when he was fifteen, of a job in the mines, of driving a team, of working as a timberman, farm hand, bank teller, of his first newspaper job on the old Johnstown Journal and of the hard-boiled city editor who had told him without a trace of rancor, “Boy, you’ll go far!”

When he smiled I was often struck by how much he resembled General Eisenhower, who was exactly the same age—only a day’s difference—and whose people all came from Elizabethville, only about twenty-five miles from Pine Grove.

He described the farm he had bought in a high valley in central Pennsylvania soon after he and Mrs. Richter—Harvena Achenbach of Pine Grove—were married, and he talked of their sudden, desperate move to New Mexico in 1928 when the doctors said she had tuberculosis and would not last the year. The care and attention he gave her—year in, year out—I learned of from her and from their daughter. He mentioned only the struggle to survive on his writing and, with a light in his eye, talked of the very different, raw sort of place Albuquerque had been in those days. In 1950 they had returned to Pine Grove, she still bedridden much of every day.

He had no heroes, he said, at least not historical heroes. He had been to Monticello once and was disturbed by what he saw. “He didn’t think Jefferson’s democratic principles quite matched his aristocratic way of life,” I read now in my notes. “He mentioned the long distance his slaves had to carry the food to the master’s table and the place where he chose to be buried, enclosed in a spiked iron fence, removed from the rest of mankind.”

I once asked him whose fiction he admired. He thought a moment, then said, “Turgenev.” And that seemed to be that.

Often and with great passion in his voice, he talked of the despoiling of the American land, the despoiling of the American Indian, and on one or two occasions he talked, though guardedly, of his lifelong interest in the occult, an interest he believed most writers shared. “But you have to be so careful about what you say,” he would add, meaning he might be taken for a crackpot. Once, when I went to get a drink of water from the kitchen tap, he stopped me short, warning that the water came through copper pipes. Copper poisons the water, he insisted, which at the time impressed me as extremely silly. The remark led to further talk of his belief in natural foods, his enthusiasm for organic gardening. I learned of his friendship with Louis Bromfield and his long interest in the theories and publishing enterprise of J. I. Rodale, a name I had not heard before.

One evening he put on his hat and we walked uptown to visit an aged cousin who had spent most of her life abroad and whom the townspeople called the aristocrat. His novel then in progress was her story and he was exceptionally fond of her, a painfully frail person of amazing spirit living in dim Victorian splendor on Tulpehocken Street. Her comments on life and the passing scene pleased him no end—comments such as these, from his manuscript, which, on another occasion when my wife was with me, he read aloud:

These days you’re not supposed to get mad. They say it’s murder on your blood vessels. I don’t only get mad but I kick the swinging door as I go through. It’s such a handy place to take it out on.

I hear that townspeople say I’m common. They don’t use the word like we do. They mean I don’t care what old clothes I go around in and like Mother, I speak to everybody.

Princess Vershaliv said to me, “Yes, I knew Alfred Noyes on the Isle of Wight. In fact I lived with him for three years. I suppose that isn’t exactly a nice thing to say.” “No,” I told her. “It’s a perfectly terrible thing to say. But how interesting.”

During the Depression years in New Mexico, continually in debt, he survived on short fiction—stories for The Saturday Evening Post in the main—but writing, as one critic has noted, “with typical care and integrity.” The first of the novels—and his first financial success—was The Sea of Grass, which did not appear until 1937, when he was approaching fifty. Being a late bloomer, as he said, weighed on him and had much to do, I believe, with his remarkable productivity. His writing was “slow and painful, something to be avoided.” Still, there were days “when the typewriter keys are pure velvet.” He worked every day, beginning in the early morning. Altogether, in thirty-odd years he wrote fifteen published novels, a collection of short stories, and a novel for children, in addition to keeping a daily journal (unpublished) and compiling a shelf of notes on early rural life and speech, of which more in a moment.

His shyness could be monumental. I don’t think I ever knew a more private man or one half so modest—by nature, not by design. He had no public side, no act. The man known by his comparatively few friends was the man. Beyond his small family, those who knew him best and longest were Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher, and Paul R. Reynolds, his literarv agent. A writer living in Pine Grove, Richard Wheeler, was somebody he saw often. So were a Pine Grove banker and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hikes, who lived in a beautiful old stone farmhouse outside of town.

No one was allowed to make a fuss over him. When The Town, the concluding volume of the Ohio trilogy, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951 and Mrs. Hikes and others in Pine Grove wanted to celebrate with a dinner in his honor, he would have none of it. In New York to receive the prize, he stayed in an out-of-the-way hotel and registered under an assumed name. He made no television appearances to promote his books. He made virtually no public appearances of any kind: he didn’t like it; he wouldn’t do it. In 1961, when he won the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos, he refused to mount the platform at the ceremonies, refused to make a speech, something no author had done in the history of the awards. His brief acceptance was given instead in writing, and was read aloud by Alfred Knopf.

Yet for all that he liked to work, he could only work, he said, with life stirring about him—hence the desk in the dining room, in full view of the street and anyone coming up the front walk, with double doors open to the front hall and an intolerable (to me) German cuckoo clock declaring every hour.

Troubled by restlessness, he would pack the current work in a suitcase, lock the house, and drive with his wife to the west coast of Florida, if it was winter, or, in summer, to Pawcatuck, Connecticut, or Mount Desert Island, Maine, where they would take a small house for several weeks. But if while away he saw a car with Pennsylvania plates on the street, he would at once strike up a conversation with the driver, enjoying himself as though he had discovered one of the world’s most interesting people. On the highway in his big cream-colored, secondhand Cadillac, he drove fast and extremely well. His vision was phenomenal. He would pick out a caterpillar crossing the road up ahead, then swerve just enough to miss it.

The problems of his craft, he said, were chiefly “problems of compression.” He labored for clarity and order and for power through simplicity. I don’t think anyone ever worked harder to make it all seem so effortless, as if the story were being told in the only way it could be told, easy, natural, not a word more or less. Some of the later work (I think in particular of A Country of Strangers, a brief, haunting account of a white girl raised by Indians) has an almost mythic simplicity, as if generations of telling have worn away everything extraneous, leaving only pure story.

The hard work ought never to show, he felt, never intrude. Nor should the research. Historical details—those descriptions of period costume, furniture, social customs and the like that lesser writers play on so heavily for “color”—were used but sparingly. Recognizable historical figures or events are seldom mentioned in his books. In truth, I don’t believe he much cared for history in the conventional sense. As some people are born with perfect pitch, he had a perfect sense of time past. Isaac Bashevis Singer remarked that it was as if he had actually been there and came back—a transmigrated soul—to tell his stories.

His love was for the great mainstream of early life in America, for “obscure, unremarkable men,” for “men and women whose names never figured in the history books but whose influence on their land and times was that of the people itself.” You could say, I suppose, that he was a patriot, in the largest, best meaning of the word.

There is great tenderness in his stories, much that is raw and earthy, much that is funny, and not a little cold-blooded violence. The land is never merely the setting; it is elemental to the story, vast and full of power and mystery. His characters do not merely move across a landscape; it is part of them and they are part of it. In the New Mexican books, of which The Lady is my favorite, it is the immense open grassland, “the land running on and on.” In the trilogy it is the ancient trees, “a race of giants,” that shut out the light.

There they stood [Sayward Luckett reflects] with their feet deep in the guts of the old earth and their heads in the sky, never even looking at you or letting on you were there. This was their country. Here they had lived and died since back in heathen times. Even the Lord, it seemed, couldn’t do much with them. For every one He blew down, a hundred tried to grow up in its place.

The first intimations of the Ohio story came to him in the 1930s while living in a log cabin among the big pines, up seven thousand feet in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque. Years of careful research followed in various parts of the country. He was never happier, I once heard him say, than when he was working in a good library, with a table spread with old books and rare old maps and personal journals. His search was for the “endless small authenticities, without which life would not be life.”

The spoken language of the frontier was particularly important to him and he took great pains to track it down, combing through court records, letters, interviewing old-timers in New Mexico, in rural Pennsylvania and Ohio, not just for their yarns but for their vocabulary. He compiled his own thesaurus, a collection unlike any I have ever seen, to get as close as he could to what he called “the great mother tongue of early America,” which, as he appreciated, was a very different kind of speech from the formal written language of the time. The words and expressions filled a heavy looseleaf notebook—dominie (for preacher), plunder (meaning one’s earthly possessions), on tenterhooks (uneasy), painter (panther), By the tarnal! (which was about equivalent to “Well, I’ll be damned!”), chimly for chimney, crick for creek, middle for stomach, bury hole for grave. The Great Lakes were the English seas; the devil, Old Harry.

The names for his characters were also drawn, in part or whole, from original sources—Sayward, Achsa, Solie (for Ursula), Jake Tench, Judah MacWhirter, Azariah Penny, Mathias Cottle, Buckman Tull, Will Beagle.

Interestingly, his favorite character, or at least the one he took the most obvious pleasure in, was not one of his homespun figures, but a young Massachusetts lawyer, Portius Wheeler, a very misplaced soul in Ohio by all appearances. All but useless with a rifle, “a slight, almost delicate figure,” Portius has fled from civilization because of some youthful misdeed that is never explained. It is he who marries Sayward Luckett and who becomes a leading figure, a judge ultimately, in the new civilization in Ohio—in New England transplanted. Conrad Richter in his youth had wanted repeatedly to escape from civilization. He was a “free thinker,” as is Portius. Much about Sayward, he told me, was patterned after his wife, Harvey, as he called her. So it would be easy enough to leap to a number of conclusions, which I will not, except to say that the sense of humor Portius brings to the story and that of Conrad Richter are one and the same:

“I want to ask you a very personal question, Mathias,” he said, and his face was grave as a gravestone. “Is it true you had ancestors?”

“It’s a lie!” Mathias called out, bristling. “I never did, nor my boy either. His head’s clean as yourn.”

“Well, they say that you slumber in your sleep,” Portius plagued him.

“It’s false as a gypsy!” Mathias shouted. “I never once did! Not since I was little, anyway.”

—The Fields

The underlying values expressed in the trilogy, in all the novels, are the old-fashioned primary values—courage, respect for one’s fellow man, selfreliance, courtesy, devotion to the truth, a loathing of hypocrisy, the power in simple goodness. He called them “the old verities” and he was sure they were vanishing from American life. He had no patience with such expressions as “the Puritan ethic.” He thought most of those who used that expression never bothered to understand what the Puritans were about.

His work was widely praised. In 1966, when the trilogy was reissued by Knopf as one volume under the title The Awakening Land, a critic in The New York Times hailed him as a “modest giant” among American writers. His following was an impassioned one; readers had—have—a devotion to his books of a kind rarely known. The Trees went through fourteen editions in hardcover, as well as sixty translations in some twenty languages. Yet none of his books was ever a best seller; there was no overnight fortune, no fortune anywhere along the line. He was never fashionable.

He went his own way, hard as it was, heedless of literary trends, seldom reading reviews of his own work, for example, and everything he wrote is in essence a celebration of a proud, stubborn individualistic spirit. He believed in gain from hardship, as is also implicit in his stories, what Shakespeare called “benefit of ill,” an expression he liked to quote. Human energies—love, art, perseverance, wisdom—are born of difficulty, he would say in his quiet manner, his eyes never straying from your own.

One September he came to Martha’s Vineyard, where I live. It was a beautiful cold gray day with the wind out of the north and long horizontal rain clouds hanging low over a rough dark-green sea. He was standing on the front porch when I returned from a walk with my two small sons. He had simply appeared, unannounced, not wishing, as he said, to cause us any bother. He and Mrs. Richter had already found accommodations in one of the hotels that were still open. He wanted to see the children, he said, to see where we live. But in less than a day he grew terribly concerned over the fact that the ferryboats were not running on schedule because of the weather. He had no appointments to keep on the mainland and there was so much that we wanted him to see on the island. But in another day he was gone. Perhaps he had accomplished what he had come for; perhaps his uneasiness had to do with being separated from the mainland, the literal land mass of the continent. He had never gone to Europe, I know, because he felt it would hamper him, hurt him as a writer. Mexico was all right because Mexico was part of the same land mass.

I saw him last in Pine Grove three months before his death. He had been bothered by heart trouble but looked fine. He was born on October 13, 1890, and 13 was a number he liked. The number he did not like was 30, which in newspaper work is used to mark the end of a story. He died of heart failure in 1968, on October 30.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man

AS FAR AS anyone knows, the first white man to settle in Letcher County, Kentucky, was a North Carolinian by the name of James Caudill, who came over Pine Mountain in 1792, raised a cabin near the headwaters of the Kentucky River, and became, as a state historical marker near the site proclaims, “progenitor of a large, widespread mountain family.”

Immense changes have come to eastern Kentucky in the time since, but in Letcher County, and particularly in Whitesburg, the county seat, Caudills still abound. Their names figure regularly in the columns of Whitesburg’s weekly Mountain Eagle (“It Screams!”) and take up most of one page in the phone book; they own lumberyards, run for judge, mine coal, win scholarships, get killed on the highways, get married (to one another, on occasion), bear and rear more of their line; and if they happen to be born with more than ordinary ability or ambition, chances are excellent that they will one day pack up and leave Letcher County, thereby carrying the Caudill blood ever farther afield. The reasons so many leave are plain enough to see: poverty of the kind that has become synonymous with the word Appalachia, inadequate education, few jobs, and the grim prospect that the one thing left of any real value or beauty—the land—is being rapidly ripped to shreds by what is euphemistically known as surface mining.

But there is one very able and talented Caudill—a great-great-great-grandson of the original James—who has not only elected to stay on in Letcher County but has for years been fighting to save what remains of that Cumberland Mountains domain of his forebears and to bring to national attention the plight of the people who live there. He is Harry Monroe Caudill (KAW-dle, it is pronounced), a Whitesburg man. He has taken on the strip miners, the loggers, the government dam builders, politicians, bureaucrats, the T.V.A., and several major U.S. corporations. He has written books, newspaper and magazine articles, and countless letters. He has spent hour upon hour of his own time attending local meetings, arguing before judges, appearing on television, lobbying in Washington, guiding interested visitors from “the outside” on tours of his home country, all in a single-minded and deeply felt one-man campaign to stop what he sees as the senseless mutilation of the place he knows and loves better than any other.

Testifying before a Senate committee in 1968, Caudill expressed the view that there are two great crises in America. One is a crisis of people, white and black, who are impoverished and embittered and who, in their frustration and hatred, threaten to burn everything down. The other is of the American land. And as he is quick to point out, in his part of America the two crises exist side by side and are directly related to one another.

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky author and poet and a great admirer of Caudill, says, “Harry’s interest in conservation really begins with people. He doesn’t think of conservation, or any issue, as an abstraction, the way so many do. He sees his country being destroyed every day and he sees what that does to human beings. The other thing about Harry, maybe the most important thing, is that he lives with the evil he is fighting, and that makes him a rather unique kind of crusader. He doesn’t have to read about environmental troubles in the newspapers, he just looks up at the hillsides.”

The troubles Caudill sees are gaping yellow wounds slashed sideways along the steep wooded slopes of the mountains that crowd around Whitesburg. One such cut can be seen from Caudill’s own backyard. About half a mile up the mountainside, it is an old cut, a relatively small one, and like numerous others to be seen from the roads that wind through eastern Kentucky, it does not look terribly bad from below. The trees cover much of it half the year. It might be something as commonplace as a highway cut, unless you know better. But up on the strip mines themselves the view is very different. There is a place, for example, known as Pigeon Roost, near Hazard, a town in neighboring Perry County. There the land looks as if it might have been the set for All Quiet on the Western Front. The devastation covers hundreds of acres, all of them wild and unspoiled only a few years back. Huge gashes have been ripped out of the mountainsides and lie raw and exposed, with no green cover. To judge by the vast unrelieved stretches of yellow clay, baked iron-hard, by the sun and speckled with greasy dark splotches where poisonous acid has seeped through, nothing will ever grow there again.

From the edge of the cut, enormous eroded slides of still more clay, rock, and debris spill down the mountain slope, and out of these protrude the blackened remains of great trees that have been knocked askew by the enormous weight of the slides. It is as though the entire landscape, as far as the eye can see, had gone through a hideous convulsion or been ravaged by some crazed monster. But then far below, a mile or more, in a trough of untouched green, sits a cabin with a few wrecked cars scattered about it like toys; and because the strip miners have long since gone, there is total quiet except for the sound of radio music and, now and then, a faint voice or two. Someone lives down there, you realize.

I grew up in Pennsylvania, where I lived near strip mining much of my life, but I have never seen anything like the strip mining in eastern Kentucky. It is beyond belief, and sickening.

Until the late 1950s little strip mining had been tried in Kentucky. Now the bulldozers, the scoops, the diesel shovels, the mammoth coal augers are churning away day and night. In steady procession gigantic Mack trucks creep off the mountains, their brakes crying against the weight of upward of twenty-five tons of coal each. When they roar through Whitesburg, the ground trembles. Of the one hundred million tons of coal being mined annually in Kentucky, half comes from strip mines, and in years to come that percentage is certain to increase. Moreover, much of the strip mining is done on land owned by corporations located outside Kentucky, and the major customer for the coal is the Tennessee Valley Authority, long portrayed as a model of enlightened land use.

Most of the strip mining is carried on by small, independent “operators,” nearly all of whom are also lessees of the big coal-land companies. These include such well-known giants as Occidental Petroleum, National Steel, U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and International Harvester, all of which are based outside Kentucky and all of which own, or own other companies that own, vast tracts of the state’s mineral resources. The big corporations, then, rarely do the actual strip mining themselves (a point their public relations people stress emphatically); that part of the process is left to the local operators. And thus it has been for some time, with the result that mountain people, rightly or not, believe the hidden hand of absentee corporations is behind virtually every move by the strip miners. Mountaineers have an old festering hatred of big corporations and big-city money; and increasingly among some of the young there is the more modern attitude that the “system” is rotten and ought to be destroyed.

Yet the fact remains that strip mining is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest method thus far devised to get coal; and, for the operator, it is an exceedingly profitable business. Thus not only in Kentucky but in a dozen other states strip mining continues at a brutal pace.

Further, with the nation’s need for fossil fuels increasing steadily, and with innumerable new electrical power plants buying and burning even the lowest quality coal, there seems every likelihood that things will get worse. Where once coal was a seasonal commodity, it is now in demand year-round, due in good part to the electrical power required for air conditioning. “We can sell anything that’s black,” says one operator. In the northern corner of Letcher County, the Beth-Elkhorn coal company, which has its headquarters in Pennsylvania and is owned by Bethlehem Steel, has announced plans to tear up a thousand acres of choice woodland to “recover” some seven million tons of coal. According to statements made by one company official, the strip mine cuts on the land will run a total distance of somewhere between 120 and 150 miles. (Numerous Kentuckians find a kind of gallows humor in the fact that Bethlehem is currently running a costly advertising campaign—a series of what are called “conscience ads” in the trade—to tell the American public how much it is doing in behalf of the environment.) The biggest independent operator in Perry County, Bill Sturgill, boss of a number of strip-mining companies, now has a fifteen-year contract to supply T.V.A. with two million tons of strip-mined coal per year, all for just one power plant.

For Harry Caudill the seriousness of all this goes beyond the pitiful ugliness, or the bitter irony that those who live with the ravaged land get virtually no share of the coal or the money made from it. The ecological consequences of even one small strip mine are extraordinarily varied, complex, and damaging.

In eastern Kentucky, where the mountains are as steep as any in Appalachia, strip mines are contoured around the mountainsides like gigantic snakes. The cuts are L-shaped, with the “highwall” (the vertical side) exposing raw rock to heights of thirty to fifty feet. In many cases these immense man-made cliffs completely isolate entire mountaintops.

The coal is stripped from the flat shelf, or “bench,” of the cut, and since there is no convenient place to pile the “overburden,” the topsoil, rock, and clay that cover the coal seam, it simply gets shoved over the brow of the bench, smashing or smothering every tree, or anything else, that happens to stand below. (“Spoil bank” is the strip miner’s term for the huge heap that builds up.) As a result, about three acres of mountain are “disturbed” for every acre actually mined. Then roads are needed to get at the coal, and building them tears up another eight acres or so for every mile. And since there are generally two or three seams at different elevations, little of the average mountainside is spared.

Using the conventional equipment, a crew of seven can keep a strip mine advancing along the face of a Kentucky mountain at a rate of about one hundred yards a week. The coal market being what it is, most cuts are worked by two twelve-hour shifts. At dark the big headlights go on, the violence continues.

But the real shattering of the ecology of a mountain begins after the strip miners have come and gone. The resulting troubles continue for years and at a cost no one studying the problem is as yet able to estimate. Even before the rains hit them, the spoil banks begin to move. Full of churned-up slate and mangled trees, spoil banks are highly unstable and slowly succumb to the pull of gravity with a dry, sliding sound one can actually hear. When the inevitable mountain storms strike, rushing water slices into them like a knife. Frequently, like the giant slag heap at Aberfan, in Wales, a spoil bank will let go altogether and thunder down on whatever lies below, which in several instances has been somebody’s house. Landslides block streams and highways, and in the words of a government report, “economic and esthetic values [are] seriously impaired.”

Even ordinary erosion will cause extraordinary damage in little time. Water races off the mountain loaded with silt, gravel, and the deadly sulfuric acid that drains out of exposed coal or its overlying strata. Creeks that a boy could jump over only a few years ago are now as broad as two-lane roads, blasted out in a way reminiscent of the hydraulic mines of the Old West. Other creeks are so clogged with sludge they have to be cleaned out two or three times a year at considerable cost to the state. Studies indicate that the annual sediment yield from strip-mined lands in Kentucky is as much as one thousand times that of undisturbed mountain areas.

Slimy with mustard-colored coal silt and poisoned by mine acid, thousands of Kentucky creeks and streams are quite literally “dead.” Nothing lives in them. The putrid water is good for nothing, and it stains and poisons just about anything it comes in contact with.

Every spring, farms a hundred miles or more from the mountains are flooded by rivers thick with silt from such tributaries. On the Kentucky River, on the other side of the state, annual floods have been part of its cycle for as long as anyone can recall. But fifty years ago the spring floods were rejuvenating. Like the Nile, the Kentucky bestowed on every acre it touched a fine, thin layer of silt rich with organic matter, very fertile and very welcome. Now, because of bad farming, logging, and strip mining on the upland slopes, the same river leaves a fine, thin film of yellow clay that hardens to the consistency of concrete and is, as one farmer says, about as fertile.

Less obvious but equally serious are the profound scars left on the spirits of the mountain people, who see their country, one of the most beautiful regions in America, being dismembered before their eyes. Farms that have been in the same families for generations are made worthless. Fine timber is destroyed as though it had no value. Public roads, long believed to be the salvation of so-called backward sections, are ruined by the punishing weight and wear of immense coal trucks. Surrounded by ugly abuse of the land, many people become ever more slovenly. Abandoned strip pits are used as dumping grounds for garbage and wrecked cars. Spoil heaps catch fire, often from burning rubbish, and smoulder for months, even years, casting an evil-looking, vile-smelling haze over the landscape.

As might be expected, those who suffer most from such tragic byproducts of strip mining are the poorest, least educated, least articulate, and least able to comprehend why things are happening as they are, or what, if anything, can be done about it. More than anyone, Harry Caudill speaks for them.

In 1965 he helped found the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People, the region’s first serious effort to organize public protest. He also deserves a major part of the credit for Kentucky’s various strip-mining laws, which he fought for long and hard back at a time when taking such stands in eastern Kentucky was a lonely and dangerous business. In 1954, when the state’s first attempt at a strip-mining law was up before the legislature in Frankfort, Caudill was the only representative from eastern Kentucky to vote for it. A law passed in 1966 was said to be the best in the country, though Caudill himself thinks it is nowhere near tough enough. Highly skeptical about how well it is being enforced, he likes to quote a friend who says it is a little like legalizing rape, so long as the rapist first agrees to restore his victim to her original condition. Caudill also emphasizes that nothing is being done about land strip-mined prior to 1966, which means about 100,000 acres.

The law has been revised and improved some. Among other things it prohibits strip mining on slopes steeper than 28 degrees; it requires that the operator grade back spoil banks to about the slope of the mountain and seed the mined area before moving on; and it empowers the Division of Reclamation in Frankfort to suspend an operator’s permit or fine him one thousand dollars for each day that he fails to abide by these and other regulations.

A colorful brochure issued by the state shows strip-mine benches in Letcher and adjoining counties where fruit trees have been planted and appear to be surviving, where a nitrogen-building green cover, a legume known as Sericea lespedeza, grows waist deep, and a highwall has been so effectively back-graded and replanted as to be unnoticeable. Such places do exist in eastern Kentucky and are indicative of what can be done. But they are few and far between and greatly outnumbered by places where reclamation has failed. As the reclamation people themselves readily admit, many strip mines and particularly those along Kentucky’s so-called “hot” seams (in which the acid content is extremely high) cannot be restored no matter what is done to them, short of trucking in new topsoil, which no operator is about to try and might not work anyway. Even where conditions are ideal for the prescribed reseeding program (a solution of seed, water, and fertilizer is sprayed over the exposed spoil), there is, as one reclamation official says, no hiding a strip mine.

Still less progress has been made in checking erosion and acid drainage, or in preventing spoil-bank slides. Small dams thrown up to catch silt have proved pathetically ineffective. Though the chief reclamation objective—to get a quick green cover down—is the best solution to the overall erosion problem, only a small percentage of the cover ever amounts to anything, or at least in time enough to do the job. A walk along most “reclaimed” mines is a discouraging experience. Where tiny trees have been planted, twenty are dead stubs for every one that is green. To judge by the stony, water-gullied clay all about, the heaps of rock and pools of foul water, the future for that one green survivor will be most precarious. About the best the reclamation people can say in defense of their efforts is that things are being handled better than before.

The handsome brochure, on the other hand, closes by stating, “Land is being restored to a desirable contour, water pollution is being minimized, successful planting of affected areas is being accomplished, and the strip-mining industry is enjoying a far better public image.”

The kind of reclaimed mines pictured in the brochure are known by critics of the program as “Grim’s Garden Spots,” after Elmore Grim, director of the reclamation program; the severest critics, including Caudill, say that the objective of a better image for strip miners is really what the program is about. Talking privately, Caudill takes a bleak, fatalistic view of the future in store for Kentucky, or any portion of the American land beneath which coal can be found. Indeed, he takes a dark view of the drift of American life in general and what, if anything, can be done about it.

Others, however, point to him as a shining example of just how much one man can do, and for all his private moments of despair, he “sallies forth,” as he would say, all the same, a sort of Kentucky-style combination of John Muir, Mark Twain, and Don Quixote, doing battle in his own way, on his own terms, and he is hands down the most eloquent and effective voice for conservation in all Appalachia.

Like most mountaineers, Caudill tends to be independent, obstinate, and at heart a fighter. Though a member of such conservation organizations as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, he never presents himself as, say, “a Sierra Club man.” He prefers to be his own man. Often he has no other choice, for the “conservation issues” he gets involved with in Kentucky are seldom disputed in quite the way they would be in other parts of the country. As he remarks, “It should be remembered that we have in this section a decided inclination to settle our differences with dynamite.”

Caudill makes his living as an attorney in Whitesburg (population eighteen hundred). His offices are on the ground floor of the Daniel Boone Hotel on Main Street. He is forty-seven years old, married, and the father of three children, one of whom, another James Caudill, has already made his own mark in the community by being the first boy from Letcher County ever to go to Harvard University.

Caudill himself attended the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill and received his law degree there. He is president of the Letcher County Bar Association, a former state legislator, a Democrat with grandfathers who fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. He is a tall, spare, bookish, long-legged man who dresses neatly, talks with a deep, musical mountain accent, walks with a limp caused by a German bullet in Italy, and goes about with a rather long look on his long face except when he is telling stories. Except for his time at college and the war years, he has spent his whole life in Letcher County (“dear old Letcherous County,” he calls it). His father, Cro Carr Caudill, was a coal miner who lost an arm in a mining accident and was later elected clerk of the court in Whitesburg. “Cro Caudill? Sure I remember him,” says an elderly mountaineer. “He only had the one arm, but he’d give you a good big hug with it—especially when he was lookin’ for a vote.”

Much of Harry’s boyhood was spent in and about the courthouse listening to stories told by the “eminent citizens who congregated there.” The high importance placed on the storytelling art in eastern Kentucky Caudill explains with a story (naturally) about an old friend, Judge L. Hayes, who had no regular Christian name, only the letter “L,” and who used to say, “‘Bout all we have got to do down here is chew ‘baccer, drink liquor, and tell lies.”

Caudill has collected stories of his mountain country for as long as he can remember, and he tells them magnificently, lovingly, in the rolling, rhetorical style of Kentucky’s old-time country lawyers. Many of his stories come from “old characters” he has “hunted up”. (“You know, those old people just love to talk,” he says, at the conclusion of a yarn he may have taken fifteen minutes to tell.) And many were included in his first book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, widely recognized as one of the finest studies of Appalachia and its history ever written. Published in 1963, it had a profound effect on the long-standing, popular impression of life in “hillbilly” country, and particularly in Washington during the Kennedy administration. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall compared it to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a call to the American conscience. Soon after the book appeared visitors from Washington and New York—reporters, magazine photographers, government officials, representatives of the large foundations—began arriving in Whitesburg to meet Caudill and set off on what his wife, Anne, calls “Harry’s horror tours.” Some visitors were astonished to discover that whenever Caudill spoke it was in the same cadences as the book, as though he were speaking from a prepared script. But the reverse was the case: Caudill had dictated the entire book. “He had been out walking in the woods one afternoon,” his wife says, “and when he came in he told me he had been thinking about where all these people [in and around Whitesburg] came from originally and about what had happened to their country; so I began taking down what he was saying, and when we were finished we had just this big pile of typed pages, no chapters or anything, and we weren’t at all sure anyone would want to publish it.”

Another book, Dark Hills to Westward, was published in 1969. Part fiction, part history, it is a spine-chilling tale about a young woman named Jennie Wiley, who was carried off by Indians in 1789, saw her children murdered, and later made an epic escape through the Kentucky mountains. But there are still other stories, full of hilarious episodes and characters, and it is these he tells with the greatest zest, often slapping his knee with one big hand, and at the finish tilting back his head and muttering, “Oh my, oh my!”

Caudill’s stories nearly all deal with the same themes—the harsh, uncertain life of the mountaineer from pioneer times to the present, the kind of courage engendered by such a life, and the particular variety of politician that Kentucky has home-grown down the years. In one way or another, all the stories are related to the land. For it would be hard for Caudill, as for most people from his section of Kentucky, to imagine the course of human affairs disassociated from rivers, creeks, draws, mountains, hollows, bottomlands, and all that grows or lives in, on, or near them, or that may lie buried beneath them. And it is this kind of vision, this attitude toward the place where he lives, that gives Caudill’s kind of conservation a special significance. He is not simply dedicated to saving scenery. For him the scenic wonders, the ecology, the people and their stories, are all part of the land and in total represent a heritage only a vandal would degrade or destroy. And so it is that he finds the desecration of his small portion of America an unconscionable, unacceptable outrage.

Caudill’s part of Kentucky is neither the gracious bluegrass-and-blooded-horses Kentucky of legend nor the bustling, modern, industrial Kentucky of the state’s western half. He lives in the other Kentucky, set in the rugged Cumberland uplands to the east, where steep, wrinkled mountains, lush in spring and summer, extravagantly colorful in the fall, bleak as can be in winter, cover some ten thousand square miles and are sliced into a bewildering tangle of narrow, twisting valleys that shelter something like half a million people and what appear to be at least ten thousand hulks of abandoned automobiles. “The old cars from Cincinnati and Dayton all come down here to die,” one man told me.

Until the latter part of the nineteenth century it was country that had changed little since pioneer times. Then timber buyers began arriving with what seemed fancy offers for the immense stands of trees, most of them hardwoods, to be found nearly everywhere they looked.

The eyes of the “furrin” timber hunters must have popped with amazement [Caudill writes in Night Comes to the Cumberlands]. The great poplars and white oaks grew, for the most part, near the base of the hills and in the coves, while the lesser oaks and chestnuts predominated on the sharper points and near the hilltops. Countless walnuts dotted the forest, thousands of them without blemish and a yard or more in diameter. The Goliaths were the superb, pencil-straight poplars, some of them towering 175 feet and achieving a diameter of seven or eight feet.

There were enormous hickories, maples, beeches, ashes, black gums, pines, and hemlocks, an abundance and variety of trees such as could be found in few places on earth by then. The buyer was offering cash money in amounts seldom dreamed of in the mountains; the seller usually thought he was getting the better of the bargain. The going price was fifty to seventy five cents a tree, and from about 1870 on, thousands of mountaineers were busy with cross-cut saws. By the 1930s nearly all the virgin timber was gone; another supreme natural treasure had been destroyed.

Today the hardwoods are only beginning to come back. In all Kentucky there is but one sizable stand of virgin woodland, some 550 acres in Letcher County known as Lilly’s Wood. The late Lilly Cornett, former owner of the property, loved trees and turned down all offers from the timber buyers. (Along Line Fork Creek he is remembered as “the most peculiar man you ever saw…carried his money in an old Buffalo tobacco bag and dressed all raggedy.”) For the past few years, it has appeared that Lilly’s Wood, too, was headed for the sawmill. But Caudill and others, including the Louisville Courier-Journal, mounted such a concerted drive to rescue the trees that the state, with the help of the U.S. Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and the Nature Conservancy, finally stepped in and bought the property. The last remnant of the immense forest that once covered the whole of eastern Kentucky has been saved.

But the destruction of Kentucky’s trees was a minor tragedy beside what happened after the railroads came in and made it possible to take coal out. Coal was known to exist in the mountains by the earliest white explorers. Yet it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the railroads began penetrating the Kentucky highlands and thereby put an end to the way of life that had existed so long undisturbed. Even by the turn of the century, Whitesburg had no telegraph, no telephone. Its only connection with the rest of the world was a narrow road twenty miles over the mountains. But with the arrival of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, Lexington became a “daylight ride” from Whitesburg. A Seth Thomas clock was installed in the courthouse cupola and set to standard time. Things began to change rapidly. As a little history of the town written at the time states proudly, “The Romance of these hills—heart of these noble old Mountains should be Dig, Dig, Dig—The Open Door—The Open Sesame, To Old Midas’ Mints. Here all one has to do is to tickle the sides of Old Mount with a pick and an avalanche of ‘gold’ rushes down.”

Into Kentucky, close on the heels of the timber buyers, came the mineral buyers, affable, storytelling agents representing northern bankers and businessmen. Their purpose was not to purchase land, only the rights to whatever minerals lay beneath it, and they found the pickings better even than had the timber buyers. Thousands of mountain landowners put their X to the so-called broad-form deed, the now infamous legal document that not only gave the coal companies title to whatever “mineral and metallic substances” might lie beneath the soil, but authorized the grantees to do whatever was “convenient or necessary” to extract those same substances. To insure against further troubles with the owner of the property, a final clause absolved the coal company of all liability for any damages resulting from its mining operations.

The price generally paid for such rights was fifty cents an acre. On the average, over the years, an acre would yield a minimum of five thousand tons of coal, worth today about twenty thousand dollars. But the truly tragic consequences of all this would not be felt for another generation or more. No one back then had any reason to imagine anything like strip mining.

By 1912 or so the railroads had been built, and, as Caudill has written, the vast, backward Cumberland Plateau was tied inseparably to “the colossal industrial complex centering in Pittsburgh, and a dynamic new phase in the region’s history had begun.” The coal companies put up houses, whole towns; doctors, teachers, coal miners, and their bosses began moving in. The coal began rolling out in endless carloads. A ten-hour day in the mines was routine. Men died of “black damp” (methane gas), cave-ins, explosions; or, like Caudill’s father and his older brother, they were crippled for life. Still, wages were good by standards of the day, extraordinary by Kentucky standards, and nobody complained much until the Depression struck. Then followed years of suffering in the coal towns. The dole and the first chronic despair made themselves known in the mountains, and as Caudill likes to remind people, it was then, too, that the mountaineer, traditionally clean in his personal habits, began making garbage dumps of his streams, many of which had already been ruined by silt and sulfuric acid draining out of the mines.

With the Depression also came John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers, a massive W.P.A. program, and in time, the war. Coal became a cash crop again and stayed that way until 1947 and 1948, when coal production hit its peak in Appalachia. In the 1950s came automation, more hard times in the mountains, and the start of one of the most important migrations in American history. Between 1950 and 1960 something on the order of one and a quarter million people left the mountains to find work in the cities, to become part of what would be labeled “the urban poor.”

It was at this same time that strip mining began. If anyone objected, out came the old mineral deeds. A property owner would one day be informed that the bulldozers were about to arrive to rip open the land, and there was not a thing anyone could do to stop it. The owner’s father or grandfather or someone years before had put his or her mark to a broad-form deed. When such cases were taken to court, the courts decided in favor of the coal companies.

The issue was litigated anew in 1968 in the Kentucky Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, with the judgment going again in favor of the coal industry. Until then the strip mining proceeded unchecked, quickly becoming an intensely emotional, dangerous issue, with no shortage of abusive language on either side. With feelings mounting, the bulldozers soon became targets for more than just invective. Snipers began firing from nearby wooded hills—sometimes using armor-piercing bullets. (“Where those bullets hit the steel,” Caudill says, “it looks just like somebody dragged his fingers across the butter.”) Operators and sheriffs returned the fire, and at least one man, Tom Fuson of Pineville, was killed. Then, one night in the fall of 1968, a watchman for the Round Mountain Coal Company in Cowfork was captured by four unidentified men who proceeded to blow up (with the company’s own store of explosives) nearly $750,000 worth of equipment. A giant Number 9 “dozer,” the biggest made by Caterpillar, was destroyed, as well as a truck, a jeep, a coal auger, three rubber-tired high-lifts, three generators, and a giant diesel shovel. In another such after-dark strike a bulldozer was blown completely in two, a feat that left a lasting impression on everyone who saw it, since such work, it is said in tones of great respect, could only have been handled by an expert. No one was arrested.

“And just suppose we did make an arrest,” a state police detective told Tom Bethell, a reporter for the Mountain Eagle. “Try getting a Knott County jury to convict the guy. They never would.”

With so much going against them, why, one might wonder, do the strip miners keep gouging away? The answer, aside from money, is that there are significant attractions to strip mining that must not be overlooked or underestimated if one is to understand the problem.

Importantly, with strip mining it is possible to work with much bigger equipment than with ordinary underground mining. In simplest terms, this means fewer workers can mine more coal faster. A strip miner can produce about thirty tons a day, more than twice the output of a miner below ground. In an auger strip mine, where huge boring machines with steel bits sometimes seven feet in diameter are used, production is greater still.

Strip mining is also much safer. Men do get killed in strip mines—from falling rock or overturned equipment—but the risks involved on the job are nowhere near as serious as in a conventional mine. There are no slate falls to contend with; no deadly gas; no silicosis or “black lung” caused by inhaling coal dust. Nor is there any of the psychological fear of going underground.

Perhaps the most important appeal of the whole business of strip mining is that it is so simple. One need not even be a miner to run a strip mine, a fact that scornful “true” coal miners are quick to emphasize. An ability to handle heavy earth-moving equipment is about the only expertise required. With the proper machinery—bulldozers, chiefly—the operator simply scrapes off the topsoil, then the subsoil (which generally includes a lot of rock and requires blasting) down to the coal seam. He then scoops up the coal and dumps it into trucks, which haul it away to a coal tipple. There the coal is transferred to railroad cars, which carry it out of the mountains.

And added to all that, the strip miners still have the law on their side. In June of 1968 a broad-form deed was contested before the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and the court upheld the deed. The case involved LeRoy Martin and his wife, who owned a ten-acre parcel of land in Knott County, the mineral rights for which were held by the Kentucky River Coal Corporation under a broad-form deed. It was a historic test case. No other state in the union still honored broad-form deeds for strip mining. The decision was a tremendous blow for the small landowners, for conservationists, and for Harry Caudill, who was the Martins’ counsel.

Caudill, however, hopes to contest the broad-form deed again. He would like to take it to a federal court. All that is needed, he says, is a client who is willing, and financially able, to stick with the case all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. In the meantime, court fights of other kinds continue.

There is, for example, the illustrative case of Vernon Barnett. Seven years ago Barnett bought a house on an acre of ground on Yellow Creek in Knott County. He had spent thirty-six years down in the mines, lived always in a company house, knew nothing but mining, and was now disabled by black lung. But for once he had a place of his own. In the time since, the mountainside behind his house has been strip-mined, and now a huge spoil bank hangs over his head like a volcano. At one point two men from the mine came down to advise him, “unofficially” they said, not to sleep in any room facing the mountainside. There was no telling what might let go and come crashing through his windows.

After one rainstorm the water surged through the creek beside his house with such fury that it moved a giant boulder sixty feet. His own water supply began to give out, until only a trickle came from the kitchen faucet. “Not enough even to do dishes,” his wife says. When Barnett went to see the operator, he was told the coal company would “make good” on any damages. But as Barnett says, “When you are trying to go to sleep at night and you know that spoil bank is hanging up there, you don’t think much about who will be paying for ‘damages.’ You think about getting buried alive.” Friends have urged him to move out. Barnett has decided to take his case to court and has asked Caudill to represent him. He says he “can trust Harry,” as do numerous others who have tried to fight the strip miners.

As one might suspect, Harry Caudill is not universally popular in eastern Kentucky. The state reclamation people give him ample credit for getting the law on the books in the first place. “He served his purpose,” says Elmore Grim, the tall, businesslike director of the program. But Grim and those who work for him suggest that Caudill gets the operators so furious that it sometimes seems they make trouble out of spite.

Grim insists that the best way to make progress is to work with the operators, to get them to “see the light.” His inspectors look over every strip mine in Kentucky on an average of once every two weeks, he claims. He has closed down several for failure to conform to the law, but, as he admits, he has still to enforce it to the hilt. “Why, we’ve got enough law on the books now to shut down every strip in this state. That is, if we were to nitpick. But we can’t do that. We’ve got to find out how these things can best be handled, reasonably and intelligently.

“Hell, I could be a dictator. But the federal government doesn’t even know what to do. Take acid mine drainage. Nobody knows what to do. Stop it up on one side of a mountain and it will start coming out the other side, where the streams are good. Plug it? The plug will blow, and what a mess that is…. I don’t know the answer. This isn’t like geology or agronomy, where you can go and look up the answer in a library. We’re writing the book as we go along.”

Grim, a professional forester most of his life, talks with impressive passion. “If there isn’t an answer to strip mining,” he says, his voice rising, “then I’ll be the first to say stop it.” Then he adds, “What we need is time, time to experiment.”

To which Harry Caudill says, “Oh, I suppose they will be experimenting all over these poor benighted hills for years and years to come.”

About the worst Grim and those in his camp have to say about Caudill is that he is “overemotional,” a term used frequently against conservationists. Others say Caudill is careless with facts. Even Anne Caudill allows that “research has never been our line.” But Loyal Jones, who is the executive director of the Council of the Southern Mountains at Berea, Kentucky, and who knows Appalachia and its problems as well as anyone, says, “To criticize Harry Caudill on accuracy is about like saying that Thomas Wolfe’s portrait of his mother was not precisely accurate. Harry speaks to sway people and to get at a kind of truth that is beyond facts and figures.”

Not surprisingly, it is the coal operators who have the strongest language for Caudill, whom they see as a self-serving spouter of pieties and slander. The Mountain Eagle quoted one man as saying, “When he [Caudill] gets up in the morning, he stands in front of the mirror and smiles at himself and wonders who he’s going to slander today. It must be a nice life.” When a Life writer, David Nevin, was gathering material for a strip-mining story, a coal operator told him, “I went to college with Harry Caudill. He was a sonofabitch then and he’s a sonofabitch now.” When Nevin related this to Caudill afterward, Caudill only smiled and replied softly, “Strip mining has become a very big business.”

It is not uncommon for some coal operators to suggest that Caudill, or anyone else who speaks out against them, is somehow in league with the Communists. But this seems in keeping with other public pronouncements made by some of the industry’s leaders in other parts of the country. At a convention of the American Mining Congress in Pittsburgh, James D. Reilly, vice president of the giant Consolidation Coal Company (which is owned by the Continental Oil Company), said that conservationists who demand that strip miners do a better job of restoring what they tear up are “stupid idiots, socialists, and Commies who don’t know what they’re talking about. I think it is our bounden duty to knock them down and subject them to the ridicule they deserve.”

One of Caudill’s staunchest allies is the Mountain Eagle. Tom Bethell, a Bostonian and former editor with the Houghton Mifflin Company who writes for the Eagle, came to Whitesburg largely as a result of reading Caudill’s first book, and with Tom Gish, the paper’s editor, he has been doing some exceedingly tough, crusading coverage of eastern Kentucky’s many problems. Scarcely a week goes by that Gish and Bethell are not after the strip miners in one way or other, often by running an open letter or article by Harry Caudill. “Although we do all our own editorials on the subject,” Gish says, “a lot of people say Harry really wrote them.” As a result, all the traditional devices for “bringing pressure to bear” have been used on the paper: advertising has been withheld by local tradesmen who sell products or services to the coal companies, and open support has been given to an opposition paper, The Community Press, published at nearby Cromona. At one point emotions got so strong that an arsonist was reportedly hired to burn down the cabin Bethell was living in, and three antipoverty workers (Appalachian Volunteers) who had been sympathetic with the anti-strip-mine faction were arrested on sedition charges and put in jail. Although tempers eventually quieted down, hatreds over the issue persist below the surface. One afternoon, as I was taking a photograph of Gish and Bethell in front of the paper’s office on Main Street, a burly strip-mine operator who happened to be standing nearby became so infuriated that he did all he could to ruin the picture, standing directly in the way and shouting in my face, “We don’t want any more of you goddamn outsiders coming around here giving this county a bad name.” The idea that strip mining itself might give the county a bad name, or that most strip miners are themselves “outsiders,” had apparently not crossed his mind.

To a large degree his feelings are understandable, since Letcher County has been the subject of numerous articles and television reports, including one by the BBC, and a film for the Houston Hemisfàir, during the making of which the leader of the film crew was shot and killed by an elderly local man who did not want his property photographed for such purposes.

Why so much attention has been focused on Letcher County—when there are dozens of other places in Appalachia where the same or similar problems are just as dramatically on display—is readily explained: Harry Caudill. His own magazine articles and books have been read in New York and Washington by those who make editorial or policy decisions, and from what they read it appears that in Whitesburg there is a unique man, someone who can talk intelligently about the problems, someone who belongs there and must know whereof he speaks; and so to Whitesburg they come. In July 1969, when CBS was looking for places to show what America was doing as the first men landed on the moon, one of the communities picked was Whitesburg, because a CBS producer, Bernard Birnbaum, had read Caudill’s book, and had later met Caudill and listened to him talk.

To many in Whitesburg, including its business people, drawing such attention is a grave mistake. A coal operator like Bill Sturgill, who has known Caudill since college days, cannot understand why Harry behaves as he does. When Caudill was campaigning for strip-mine legislation it was Sturgill who led the attack against him, claiming that if the law were passed it would put every strip miner out of business. Sturgill stressed the importance of strip mining to the local economy. His 287 employees were earning from $7,500 to $12,000 a year, he said. He himself was making annual purchases from some 104 different companies and individuals amounting to more than six million dollars—all this in contrast to Harry Caudill. “It is still a matter of record,” Sturgill wrote in a letter to the Courier-Journal, “that Mr. Caudill does not support the economy or provide job opportunity, but rather has made much personal gain from advertising worldwide the ills and misfortunes of his friends and neighbors.”

For Sturgill and other operators the idea that there may be something fundamentally wrong with strip mining seems almost impossible to grasp. As they see it, they are helping to serve the nation’s energy needs; they are providing jobs, making dollars move in their communities, making otherwise valueless land pay. Coal is Kentucky’s great cash crop, a point they take pride in.

To Wendell Berry such men are blinded by the jargon of free enterprise—“as if,” he says, “the freedom of free enterprise implied freedom from moral responsibility.” Loyal Jones believes the problem rests on the pernicious notion that people and the land are there to be exploited, used up, and consumed, and that the roots of such beliefs can be traced to frontier times. Harry Caudill sees strip mining as symbolic of something more serious. “I think it tells us more than anything except war about the darker side of our nature. I remember coming home from the war on a hospital ship and worrying about that. I began to think that perhaps that darker side would prevail. This devastation of the earth is a manifestation of that tragic, base side, the side that in the Bible is represented by Satan and his works.”

Caudill’s conviction is that strip mining ought to be the subject of a national policy, that federal laws must be enacted as soon as possible and strictly enforced. “The current Kentucky law and the way it is being handled is a little like attacking a crocodile with a cornstalk,” he says. He wants strip mining outlawed anywhere that the slope of a mountainside exceeds twenty degrees, and authorized only where total reclamation can be carried on promptly and effectively. He supports the system used in several European countries—in England, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, among other places—where the topsoil is carefully put aside and the subsoil and rock kept separate. Then, once the coal has been removed, rock, subsoil, and topsoil go back in their original order, the layers being compacted during the process. “There’s no reason why we can’t do that if they do.”

To pay for this, coal prices will have to be raised. “The way it is now, coal is undercutting the price of other fuels at a hidden cost to tremendous stretches of the American land.”

More must be done to enlist the interest and energies of the great corporations. In Caudill’s view the nation’s industrial centers are being fuelled by Appalachia, with coal and with low-paid workers, and Appalachia is getting little in return. “I don’t think the men at the top of those enormous corporations are wicked men. But you know there’s not a one of them that has ever been down here to see things with his own eyes, to see what is going on here. Not a one! And yet, the decisions they make have everything to do with how we live here. So we just can’t help but think they have no interest in people, or in the land. They’re just interested in coal and profits.”

Indeed, Caudill sees a prevailing lack of interest in Appalachia, despite all that he and others have had to say. “The millionaires and the celebrated politicians like to come to the Kentucky Derby, of course, and they always make a great big show of that, but just try to get them to come over here!”

What Caudill keeps calling for is an informed understanding of the Appalachian land. “This is always thought of as a bleak, poor, broken-down, God-forsaken place here. But the truth is, this mountain island has tremendous natural resources, not the least of which is its people, and if we can make changes in the ways the land is utilized, then we can become the premier part of the United States. We have plenty of green country, an abundance of water, a superb climate, minerals, strategic location, extraordinary beauty. And as the shortage of open land in this nation grows more and more serious, all this magnificent country is going to have a value far surpassing anything like coal. And we just can’t afford to sit back and watch all that be destroyed so a few people can get rich now. One of these days the dear old federal government is going to have to come in and spend billions of dollars just to repair the damage that’s already been done. And guess who will have the machines and the workmen to do the job? The same coal operators who made the mess in the first place will be hired to fix it back, and the taxpayers will bear the costs.”

The larger, desperate need, Caudill believes, is for a whole new land ethic. “Unless we change our attitudes toward the good earth of this planet, I doubt that life will last a great deal longer. Look how short a time it took us to destroy Lake Erie. And there is absolutely no evidence that the human race is learning the dire need for restoration. If you read history, you see that this has happened many times before on a smaller scale.

“Just imagine this,” he says. “If those three men who went to the moon had started to befoul their aircraft, if they had begun to tear it apart and fill it with all manner of filth, we would say they had gone mad. But here we are on this planet, this huge spaceship, befouling it, ripping it asunder, and nobody seems to say very much about that. Nobody seems to care.”

Such imagery can have a profound impact when Caudill appears before a Senate committee, or when he is writing for national publications. One article, in Audubon, did much, for example, to generate interest in saving Kentucky’s spectacular Red River Gorge from a dam to be built by the Army Corps of Engineers. The campaigning against the dam was led chiefly by the Louisville Courier-Journal and later received national publicity when Justice William O. Douglas arrived to lead a hike through the area in jeopardy. The gorge was saved.

And for every person who is against Harry Caudill, there appear to be many more who are wholeheartedly for him. “He is the one man who can speak for every one of those people who know instinctively that strip mining is wrong and that it is the ruination of their homeland,” says Wendell Berry, while another Kentucky writer, Mrs. Siller Brown, a coal miner’s widow who does a regular column in the Mountain Eagle about things her neighbors tell her over the phone, says flatly, “Harry Caudill is a good man.”

When I asked Caudill why he stays on in Letcher County, he first smiled at his wife, then told a story about one of his favorite characters, Old Claib Jones, who took part in numerous mountain feuds after the Civil War, killed twenty men, later repented his sins, and lived to a ripe old age. At one point, during the “Holbrook and Underwood War,” Claib and five other men were pinned down in a cabin, surrounded by a large Underwood force and some policemen who had been called in to help finish Claib off. The attack began before dawn and kept up until midmorning, when suddenly the shooting stopped and Alvis Underwood’s wife was sent in to ask Claib to surrender. It is at this point in the story that Harry Caudill’s eyes begin to light up.

“So you know the message Claib sent back? ‘No,’ Claib said. He said, ‘We want to fight on a while longer anyway.’ Now wasn’t that wonderful? And I guess that’s the way Anne and I feel: we want to fight on a while longer anyway.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Miriam Rothschild

MIRIAM ROTHSCHILD knows all about butterflies and fleas, birds, fish and poisons, ladybugs (“my real first love”), medieval meadow grasses, Shetland sheep dogs, photography, farming, Clark Gable, and the wild flowers of Israel. She designs her own clothes. She has an art gallery devoted to paintings by schizophrenics. She owns a pub. She has raised six children and she is one of the Rothschilds.

Of her eccentric Uncle Walter, her favorite Rothschild, who was an outstanding British naturalist, she has written a lively biography, Dear Lord Rothschild. About fleas, her specialty, she has written possibly a quarter of a million words in books and learned papers. A single cupboard at Ashton Wold, her country estate, contains sixty thousand microscopic preparations of fleas. But this, she insists, is nothing much at all compared with Uncle Walter’s operations.

“Imagine,” she says, “two and a quarter million butterflies, thirty thousand bird skins, three hundred thousand beetles, and one hundred forty-four giant tortoises!” Imagine, indeed.

In a framed photograph on her bookcase Uncle Walter, in top hat and high-button shoes, sits astride a live giant tortoise, urging it forward with a bit of lettuce on the end of his walking stick. “That,” she explains, “was Rotumah, the famous giant tortoise that died of sexual overexcitation. Walter found that tortoise in the garden of a lunatic asylum in Sydney.” Rotumah was 150 years old, the oldest, largest tortoise in the world, so Walter brought it to England. “And he got the doctor from the asylum to travel with it. That’s the best thing of all!”

She sometimes acts as though she is having too much fun with too many interests ever to be taken seriously. But she is a scientist of the first rank. Her work on fleas, her butterfly studies, and her encouragement of other scientists have brought her all sorts of awards and honors. In the citation for an honorary degree from Oxford (1968), she was lauded for contributions to anatomy, chemistry, entomology, pharmacology, neurophysiology, and zoology. “It is unusual too [the citation continued] that in natural science anyone, still less a woman, should receive an honorary degree without any degree already from any university.” In 1985, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor in British science. Yet Miriam Rothschild had little academic training of any kind—her family believed it would stifle the joy of learning.

“Brilliant is not an inappropriate word for her,” says Robert Traub, a professor of microbiology at the University of Maryland Medical School, with whom she has collaborated on two books and several papers. “People talk about genius and use the term loosely, but this is really it.”

Her latest project is with wildflowers, and seen surveying one of her experimental meadows, she makes a memorable figure. Short, sturdy, rather heavyset, she goes clomping along in large green rubber boots, gray hair tied back in a blue scarf, trailed nearly always by one or more of seven Shetland sheepdogs. Her uniform is a comfortable, loose-fitting dress and matching jacket she contrived herself and had made up in several colors. It is all she ever wears. “I’ve got a very great deal that I have to do,” she will tell you. “It’s important to cut out the trivialities.”

She needs no more than four hours’ sleep a night. She keeps a suitcase packed at all times, to avoid the fuss of packing for her frequent trips, and she has forsworn city life. “I appreciate museums. I have to go to libraries in London, but in the city it takes such a lot of energy to cut out the things you don’t want to hear and you don’t want to see.” Besides, she contends, all the “big dramas” happen in the country.

She lives year-round at Ashton Wold, in strange, overgrown English country splendor, a two hours’ drive north of London in Northamptonshire. Deep woods enclose much of the property. Overhanging trees and shrubs brush the sides of your car as you approach. Weeds grow nearly knee-high in the gravel courtyard. The grass goes uncut. Vines and creepers run wild over half the house, a big, sprawling, gray stone affair built by her father in 1900. It is where she was born in 1908 and it looks abandoned, or as though the Rothschilds have fallen on hard times, if such a thing can be imagined—a look exactly to her taste. “Very attractive,” she says with a smile, as if nothing more need be explained.

Her father, Charles Rothschild, was a gifted amateur entomologist who, on a trip to Egypt before she was born, discovered the rat flea, the one that carries bubonic plague. At the time the rat flea was a new species and he named it Xenopsylla cheopis. Charles and his older brother Walter were the sons of Nathan Mayer, or “Natty” Rothschild, head of the great merchant banking firm of N. M. Rothschild & Sons and the first Lord Rothschild. An earlier Nathan Mayer, Miriam’s great-great-grandfather, the first of the English Rothschilds, had arrived from Frankfurt-am-Main in the middle of the eighteenth century and established himself as a cloth merchant in Manchester. Nathan Mayer, as he said, was all business. In fifteen years, having switched to banking in London, he was helping finance Wellington’s armies.

After Nathan came Lionel Rothschild, a great friend of Disraeli, who made history by financing Britain’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875. But it is Lionel’s son, Natty (1840-1915), described by Miriam as gruff, sentimental, and dapper, who ranks as one of the most brilliant financiers of all time. In the popular press he was considered the real ruler of England, and was the first Jew to take a seat in the House of Lords.

Though Natty’s two sons, Walter and Charles, each conscientiously took part at N. M. Rothschild & Sons, neither cared a thing for banking. At the ripe age of seven, Walter announced he was going “to make a museum” and spent the better part of his life pursuing that ambition. In time his collection exceeded that of any private individual anywhere, ever. Housed in the Rothschild estate called Tring, it is now part of the British Museum.

Charles, though a far better banker, preferred science to finance, specializing in fleas and butterflies. It was on a butterfly hunt as a student that he first fancied a portion of wild countryside near the village of Ashton, where the house now stands, and concluded he must have it. On inquiry he learned that it already belonged to his own father.

Miriam’s memory of Charles is limited. He was ill through much of her childhood, and in 1923, when she was fifteen, he took his own life. It was thus that Uncle Walter, the second Lord Rothschild, who had no children, became such a large part of her world.

Walter is assured a place in history because he is the Lord Rothschild to whom Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, addressed the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, saying His Majesty’s Government viewed with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. It was written in the form of a letter beginning “Dear Lord Rothschild,” the title Miriam chose for her book.

Two things distinguished Walter as a naturalist, she says—unbounded enthusiasm about every conceivable kind of living creature, and near total recall of everything he ever saw, heard, read, or wrote. “He remembered every letter he’d ever written. Never kept copies of them.” To be sure, he also had financial resources beyond most people’s imagining. Still, Walter’s reach often exceeded even the Rothschild grasp. He was constantly short of money or in debt. At times he had four hundred people on his payroll collecting specimens all around the world.

Walter’s eccentricities were legendary. As an M.P. he once caused a sensation in the House of Commons by showing up in a white top hat. On other occasions, he drove down to Hyde Park with his coach drawn by a team of zebras. Because of a lifelong speech impediment—an almost crippling lack of breath control—he found normal conversation impossible. “You never knew what was going to happen,” she remembers. “Either the words came out in a bellow, which absolutely raised the rafters, or else it was a whisper. He was always embarrassed, and you were always embarrassed, and then silence fell.”

But Walter was a born naturalist, and naturalists, she is sure, are born, not made. She herself began breeding ladybugs at the age of four and remembers taking a tame quail to bed with her. “I just always loved animals and I was passionately fond of flowers. That’s the sort of thread that’s gone through my whole life.” She learned from her parents, from Walter, and from years of living at Tring with Walter’s collections.

“Collections are basic to zoology,” she stresses, recalling drawer after drawer of his butterflies. Walter had made butterflies his entomological passion beginning in 1895, having said good-bye to beetles, as she writes in her biography. The way other wealthy Victorians collected Chinese porcelains or rare gems, Walter amassed butterflies, and the rarer the better. The result was surpassing, perhaps the most valuable butterfly collection in existence. It was possible to open drawers and see spread before you an entire order in all its variety and from every quarter of the globe. “The mind just took off,” she remembers.

Her own earliest, serious work, starting in her twenties, was in marine biology. After her marriage, she concentrated on flea studies, partly because it was work she could carry on at home. With children to raise, her microscope became her escape, her marijuana, as she says.

“I had six children, so it was quite, you know, a full-time job. But at about eight o’clock in the evening, when they had all gone to bed, I used to settle down to the microscope, and there was nothing more delightful—when the evening would get quieter and quieter and even the sort of clink of cups vanished, and you could settle down and look at these marvelous colors. You could forget the world, and in fact, I used to be brought back to Earth by falling into the microscope with sleep at about one o’clock.”

She catalogued her father’s flea collection, from which she published a five-volume study. In time she became the world’s leading authority on bird fleas. With the appearance of Fleas, Flukes & Cuckoos, her sprightly book for the lay reader published in 1952, she became known as the “Queen of the Fleas.” What fascinated her especially was the acute dependence displayed by fleas and parasites, and the degree to which they gave evidence of their evolution. Her style was altogether her own.

“A parasite’s life is an impressive gamble,” begins one chapter. “Indeed it is difficult to envisage insecurity on such a scale. The chances of a grouse roundworm finding a grouse are far less than the reader’s chances of becoming the parent of quads, or a cabinet minister.”

With her son-in-law as photographer, she was the first to record the flea’s leap, one of the miracles of nature. (“If you were a flea,” she informed me, “you could jump to the height of Rockefeller Center and you could do that about thirty thousand times without stopping.”) Her most important research, however, concerned the rabbit flea, carrier of a viral disease fatal to rabbits called myxomatosis. She discovered that, unlike any other insect parasite, the rabbit flea has a reproductive cycle dependent on the hormonal state of its host. The female rabbit flea can produce offspring only while living on a pregnant female rabbit, the flea drawing on the rabbit’s estrogen supply. The flea larvae are also then in place to feed on debris in the rabbit nest.

In addition to fleas, she worked on mites and ticks (which are large mites), and a large, brown, gull-like bird called a skua, which spends most of its life at sea and gets most of its food by piracy, attacking other seabirds until they drop their catch. Research on butterflies and moths led to discoveries about the relationships between insects and plants, and particularly on the use of plant poisons by insects as a defense mechanism. Working with Tadeus Reichstein, who with two others won a Nobel Prize for his isolation of the hormone cortisone, she reported how the monarch butterfly protects itself by storing within itself poisons drawn from the milkweed plant—poisons to which the monarch has evolved an immunity—making it quite unpalatable to birds and spiders.

More recently she discovered that her beloved ladybugs—or ladybirds, as she calls them—are also extremely poisonous. A single ladybug egg, she found, can kill a cat if injected into the bloodstream. “Just one egg!” she says, her face filled with wonder.

At present she is working with caterpillars, allowing them to feed on castor-oil plants and other euphorbias with extraordinarily toxic seeds, which the caterpillars use as protection from bird predators. She grows about a half dozen such plants in the old, rather worse-for-wear greenhouses of the estate. There are worktables covered with plastic sandwich bags filled with seeds so poisonous they can’t be touched. There are tables filled with seedling wildflower plants, a cage with a veteran white rabbit from her days of rabbit-flea work, a pet magpie that she has raised by hand safe from exposure to hornets, in preparation for the day when a hornet with its stinger removed could be put into the cage.

The idea was to determine how much of a bird’s fear of hornets is inherited, how much learned from experience. If the bird were to eat the hornet, then obviously the fear was learned, which is what Miriam expected and what did not happen. She was flabbergasted, she admits, when the bird refused to go near the hornet.

She has just completed a book on insect tissues and with entomologist Traub she is producing still another flea study, this on the discovery in Utah of a flea of Latin American origin called a chigoe that burrows into the ear of a mouse and grows to the size of a pea. Until recently none was known in North America.

Wildflowers, however, are her main preoccupation, her experimental gardens and meadows her greatest pleasure. In the eyes of any conventional farmer she is busy growing weeds—wild poppies, cowslip, cornflowers, corn marigolds, harebell, wild violets—and harvesting their seeds as a cash crop, an enterprise local farmers once took to mean she was “absolutely crackers.”

Wildflowers are rapidly disappearing from the countryside, she stresses, and the loss is not just one of beauty. “You’re losing the gene pool and that’s something that, once gone, you can never get back. That’s millions of years of evolution down the drain.” Creating nature reserves as a means of protection, the scheme favored by her father, is no longer enough. Instead, she wants to reintroduce wildflowers everywhere possible—along highways, rivers, in parks, backyards, vacant city lots. She had been told that to recreate a medieval meadow—a wild hayfield with approximately the variety of grasses and flowers common to medieval England—would take about seven years. She has done it in three, recreating a meadow containing one hundred species.

“I think the flowering meadows are going to come back. They’re finished now. We just have these terrible monotonous crops of dull green grass. I mean it, it is so boring. I don’t know how the horses can stand the stuff.”

While machines can be used for harvesting some of her wildflower crop, most of it must be done by hand. It is slow, unusually tedious work, and consequently many of the seeds are extremely expensive. Two pounds of harebell seed, as an example, sell for nine hundred English pounds. But her work has stimulated enormous public interest, and harebell, as it happens, is the seed second in demand after cowslip. In time, she hopes to market more varieties, including wildflowers mentioned in the Bible.

Beyond her gardens and experimental meadows and the encroaching woods she loves as her father did, the estate opens out into broad wheatfields, rich, flat land almost like prairie that seems to go on indefinitely. The one interruption is the tiny village of Ashton, which includes the pub and art gallery. The thatched-roof pub is the Checkered Skipper, named for a rare butterfly. By her direction, the decor is all natural history exhibits, making it a pub like none other in England. The gallery includes only paintings by schizophrenics—strange, intense works, many of amazing skill and nearly all dominated by images of large, threatening eyes. The paintings are part of a collection she had assembled with an art therapist, Edward Adamson. None of it is for sale, nor is there another collection comparable to it. (Schizophrenia is an “old interest.” To help understand and treat schizophrenics, she and her family founded the Schizophrenia Research Fund in London.)

At one time, during the Second World War, there were six thousand Americans billeted in and about Ashton, and every year there are some who come back for a visit. They were part of the Eighth Air Force. The Rothschild wheatfields were once Polebrook Field. Miriam’s house was the base hospital. She remembers well the intense excitement when the American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers first arrived from the United States. No one had seen planes that flew so high or that left vapor trails.

Of the American airmen, she says, “I thought they were absolutely tremendous…they won the war for us, no doubt about it.” One of those she got to know best was Clark Gable, then an Air Force major, whom she delights in talking about, telling what a crack shot he was (they often went shooting together in the evenings, he at rooks, she at targets), and how he had almost no sense of humor.

More than three hundred missions over Germany were flown from her now tranquil fields. One colossal hangar still standing is used to store potatoes.

“You know I was the first person to install seat belts in a motorcar,” she told me as we drove out to see the site of the old airfield. “It was in 1940, when the first American aviators arrived in civilian clothes, even before you got into the war. I saw the safety belts they had in their training planes and I said we ought to have those in motorcars.” Using a girth from an old sidesaddle, she made up seat belts for her car and tried without success to have the idea patented.

It was during the war that she met and married a British commando and war hero named George Lane, a marriage that was dissolved in 1957 though he is still a good friend. To many of her scientific colleagues it also seemed that she did remarkably little with her mind all that time, little at all of consequence, which was puzzling largely because it was so out of character. Nor did she offer an explanation. Only long afterward did it become known that she had been involved with the famous Enigma project, working with the top-secret group at Bletchley Park, trying to crack the German code. Scientists from many fields were enlisted and marine biologists were known to be particularly good at such work. She got a medal from the British government for her part, yet still won’t say anything about what she did.

“I never hated anything as much as I hated the war,” she told me, recalling the airmen who did not come back. “It’s impossible to describe it. You know, for years afterward when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was, ‘Well, thank God the war’s over.’”

Her conventional farming enterprises are large-scale and serious business. “I am a farmer,” she says emphatically. Farming has supported her and all her scientific researches year after year. But farming, as she points out, is “an old story” in the family. Grandfather Natty was an avid breeder of shire horses, president of the Jersey Cattle Society, and active in developing new agricultural practices. The farms at Tring, where she spent so much of her youth, were showplaces and a favorite stop for visitors from all over the world.

Though Walter Rothschild found talk difficult, Miriam, in addition to everything else, is one of God’s great talkers and never more so than when she reflects on the changes that have come to our relations with the natural world.

“Somehow people have lost the sense of being in a landscape. There are no more figures in a landscape like there used to be. I tell my children they’re like Sputniks spinning in space with a sort of speedy background swooshing by. You just see the figure, the landscape is gone.”

I asked her if her recipe for life is different from what it was twenty-five years ago.

“No, not at all. If I had to wish one wish for my children, I would wish that they were interested in natural history, because I think there you get a spiritual well-being that you can get no other way, and what is more, life can never be long enough…. I think all naturalists retain a sort of keen interest in what’s going on in life. It’s all part of natural history. I mean Karl Jordan, curator at the Tring Museum, was ninety-six and he was just as enthusiastic as he was at nineteen and I always remember him sitting at the microscope saying, ‘I shall know it all in the next world, I shall know it all in the next world!’”

She was settled on the couch in her study, one of her dogs curled up beside her, the picture of Uncle Walter on the tortoise displayed directly behind her.

“I must say,” she said, “I find everything interesting.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

South of Kankakee: A Day with David Plowden

“I THINK THAT in many cases—as I was just saying a minute ago—I ask perhaps too much of my audience. I’m asking them to really take the time to look…. To me everything that I see is very important in those pictures, even down to the last blade of grass. And so I demand an enormous amount of myself and I’m demanding an enormous amount, I think, of my audience, maybe too much…. I gave an assignment to my students: I said, ‘Go out and photograph something that’s boring. Go out and photograph the state of being bored—to see if it’s possible.’ Some of them did it beautifully.”

“What did they photograph?”

“Almost all of them photographed something that was very still. A great many of them photographed the classrooms—which I felt made a point. And one of them photographed me!”

It is an overcast, extremely humid morning in August, and David Plowden and I are in his gray Datsun station wagon heading out of Chicago, southbound on the Dan Ryan Expressway. Traffic is heavy in every lane, the air foul with exhaust fumes. Plowden knows the road and drives fast, talking rapidly all the while.

“Every time I go to one of these places it’s as if no one else has ever been there before to photograph it. I really don’t give a damn whether anybody was there ten minutes before…. I want to discover it and work with it and explore it myself. People are always saying to me, ‘Well, where do you think you belong?’ I had an exhibition in Chicago last year. And lots of people came. And one man said, ‘Ah—do you think your work has become more formal because you’ve come to the Institute of Design?’ And I said, ‘Well, if it has, I’m not aware of it, and, moreover, I don’t want to be aware of it; I don’t want to become self-conscious.’ I suppose I always feel that to be concerned with oneself is not really an important thing. I don’t feel that photography is a means of self-analysis. You start analyzing your work and you start asking your students to get themselves on the line all the time about what they’re doing, and where do you lose the magic? And it’s so easy because you become so self-conscious and so intellectual and so analytical about it in the long run that you lose that wonderful sort of ego that you have that says, ‘Oh, goddamn it, I don’t care; I love it anyway; I’m going to do it!’”

South Side Chicago, so painfully different from the splendors of the lakeshore, so removed from suburban Winnetka, where Plowden lives, stretches on endlessly. We pass the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he teaches. It is the famous campus by Mies van der Rohe, and in the dim, colorless light it looks dreadful to me, barely distinguishable from the drab surroundings.

We are off for a day to see “real country,” as Plowden says, “south of Kankakee.” His voice is deep and melodious. He is the son of an English actor and he sounds a little like one himself. “South of Kankakee,” he says now again, happily, theatrically, giving it a ring like a refrain from Kipling.

An hour later, approximately ten miles south of Kankakee on Interstate 57, he turns off at a place called Chebanse, a drab little town on the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad. He is driving very slowly now, looking at everything. Halfway along what must be the main street, parallel to the railroad tracks, he pulls into a parking lot beside a grain elevator and lumberyard. The lot is empty except for a dump truck. He gets out and walks slowly back and forth, looking at the elevator and its attendant buildings. He stops, stands still, and, hands in pockets, studies a car parked at the curb beside the elevator, and says he wishes it weren’t there.

He is of less than medium height, about five feet seven, and a little on the stout side. He is wearing khaki work pants and a blue-checked shirt. The pants are about an inch too long and scuff the ground. The whole back of his shirt is dark with perspiration.

He is still studying the scene when the noon siren goes off at the firehouse. A man comes out of the lumberyard office—a tall, angular man in bib overalls who looks Plowden over before taking his lunch pail from the front seat of the dump truck. He and Plowden nod hello, and the man walks back into the office.

There is a nice breeze blowing now out of the north, but the sky is still overcast. “A good day for details,” Plowden assures me. He is setting up a tripod and to this mounts the Hasselblad 500-C, which is his favorite camera. “You know, the hardest thing is to get started. You can rationalize away the whole day and never take a picture.”

He trains the lens on the elevator and part of the street, his eye pressed to the viewfinder, or “chimney.” The car he didn’t like has since departed and been replaced by a dusty pickup that he thinks is just right.

As he works, I get out a notebook and begin an inventory of the street. Directly opposite, on the corner, is the former Bank of Chebanse, a neat gray sandstone building with a silvery TV antenna sprouting from its roof and a green real estate sign hanging in front. Beside it, to the right, is Hanson’s Variety Sundries, then a red-brick café with Stroh’s beer announced in red neon in one window and a small black-and-white sign over the door that says GOOD FOOD. The firehouse is beyond the café.

We are on Chestnut Street, I see by the sign at the corner by the bank. Except for the firehouse, the buildings are one story. Above the trees in the distance is the town water tower, the name Chebanse lettered large in blue.

Other cars and a pickup are pulling into the lot. There is much opening and slamming of car doors as a half dozen men pile out for their lunch break. They are in work clothes and mostly young men, some with full beards. They stop talking momentarily as they look Plowden over, then proceed across the street to the café. He appears wholly unaware of them.

On the far side of the tracks, about fifty yards off, is a line of nondescript frame houses of the kind to be seen in every railroad town across the Midwest, or, for that matter, in any number of photographs by David Plowden. I wonder aloud about what buildings might have stood there in the parking lot in days past. “Something did,” says Plowden. “You may be sure of that. There’s always the feeling that something is gone.”

A bell at the railroad crossing starts clanging, and Plowden, obviously delighted, tells me, “We’re going to have a dividend.” A northbound freight rolls through: four diesel engines pulling what seems to be an endless line of chemical tank cars, empty boxcars, and huge, cagelike cars filled with foreign-made automobiles—108 cars in total, Plowden informs me. “I always count them,” he says. The train was a “mixed consist,” he explains, the automobiles coming no doubt from the docks at New Orleans. The four diesel “units” (not engines) were GP 30’s or 35’s, built by General Motors.

In the café later, he asks a pretty waitress what beer they have on tap. She names three or four brands besides Stroh’s, and he orders a Coke and a hamburger. There is a hubbub of voices from the other tables and a clatter of dishes that he has to talk over. He has the classic long jaw and high color of an English country squire. He leans forward, elbows on the table, directly across from me, his dark eyes sparkling. “Imagine! Less than two hours from Chicago and you’re in country like this—in a town like this. You can’t do that from New York, God knows. The land here is more beautiful than anything I knew in the East. The scale is so enormous. You feel the elements here.” He pauses. “Isn’t it fascinating that the skyscraper developed not on an island, where it was needed, but out here, where there’s infinite space.”

David Plowden is past fifty and he has been on the road the better part of his life. He has traveled by rail and highway, in parlor cars and in the cabs of locomotives when the temperature outside was twenty below, in a VW microbus filled with wife and children, and, more recently, in the gray Datsun, usually alone, a tape deck playing Brahms or Fats Waller (“depending on my mood”). He has seen and photographed hundreds of little backwater places like Chebanse. He loves to talk of days spent in Davy, West Virginia, for example, or Cement, Oklahoma (“That’s Cement,” he stresses) or Eleven Mile Corner, South Dakota, recalling the names of diners and motels and people he met. (“Dalhart, Texas…the man’s name was R. W. Wilier. He said, ‘I’m a leftover of the Dust Bowl!’ He invited me to lunch at his house. We had pork chops. Everybody sat with their hats on. He introduced me to his whole family—said, ‘This fellow’s from New York.’ And that’s about all he said, and everybody sat down and ate pork chops.”) He has photographed roadways and main streets and grain elevators, gas stations, ore docks, river steamers and lake steamers, freighters, ferryboats, tugs, lighters, bridges, power lines, steel mills, coal mines, bars, parking lots, skyscrapers, subdivisions, shopping centers and graveyards, freight yards, freight trains, passenger trains, railroad crossings, railroad stations, and steam locomotives. In more than twenty years of work, he has produced some of the most powerful photographs we have of man-made America and of the Mid-western working farmland he has come to love, it would seem, above everything else.

Much of his work has appeared in magazines, often as special portfolios. Time wrote that his photographs tell more about the nation and its manifest values than reams of reports and environmental studies. He has been exhibited at galleries and universities; he is represented in private collections and museums (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress); he has been compared with Walker Evans, the brilliant chronicler of the Dust Bowl; with the painter Edward Hopper; and with Eugene Atget, the great French photographer of the last century. Like Atget, wrote Owen Edwards in American Photographer, Plowden has found “that the camera is a fine device for the remembrance of things passing.”

But the major display of his talent is in his books. They are the lifework. He has produced eight in which he did both the photographs and the text, the most recent of which, Steel, appeared in 1981, and five others for which he provided the illustrations.

A Farewell to Steam, published in 1966, was the first of those he considers entirely his own, and was followed four years later by the sumptuous Lincoln and His America, in which he also included old photographs. The Hand of Man on America, his most popular book, appeared in 1971. It was based on a major exhibition of his work at the Smithsonian and included the picture he is probably best known for—that of the Statue of Liberty rising, ghostlike, from a weedy, rubble-strewn New Jersey wasteland. (“As a photographer,” he wrote in the introduction, “I have turned to the way I know best to express my distress over our appalling indifference and misplaced priorities.”) Floor of the Sky, about the Great Plains, was published in 1972.

Bridges: The Spans of North America (1974) represented six years of photography and research, financed in part by a Guggenheim fellowship, and some twenty-nine thousand miles of travel. As a visual testimony to the grandeur of engineering and as a concise history of American bridge design and construction, it is unequaled by anything in print, a work of imagination and scholarship that would qualify him as someone of note had he done nothing else. In the most personal of his books, Commonplace, also published in 1974, he abandoned the heroic forms of engineering for ordinary side-street, back-door America, and Tugboat (1976) is an exuberant little book about the doings of the Julia C. Moran and her crew on a single day in New York Harbor.

If one is looking for a repeating theme or dominant symbol in his work, the most obvious is the railroad, and the story of his career, at a glance, would appear to be that of the small boy who loved trains and loved taking pictures of them and so grew up to be an important photographer of all that is linked to the railroad and to that distant day when the steam locomotive dominated the landscape.

In fact, his first attempt at a photograph, at the age often, was of a train. He was waiting with his mother on the platform at Putney, Vermont, but when the train came around the bend—“whistling and puffing and roaring down the river into Putney”—he was so frightened he handed the camera back to her. “You take the picture,” he said. A few weeks later, with a new Box Brownie she had given him, he had better luck.

His first published photograph appeared in Trains Magazine in 1954, when he was still in college. It was of the Great Northern Railroad’s celebrated train The Empire Buldier, and Plowden went to Pennsylvania Station in New York to pick up his first copy of the issue. “I thought everybody in the station should come up and shake my hand,” he remembers, “and I was very disappointed when they didn’t.” His first job after college, the only “regular” job he ever had, was on the Great Northern. “Then when I began studying photography seriously, at Rochester [New York] under Minor White, he told me the first thing I had to do was get my trains out of my system. ‘Go and do your engines,’ he would say. ‘You will never do anything else unless you get those engines done. Now go and leave and do them.’”

But for all he feels still about his engines, for all he knows about the whole panoply of American railroading past and present, this is no mere train buff turned photographer; these are not the photographs of some rather uncomplicated or typical American boy who, in middle age, pines for the nighttime wail of Old 97. David Plowden is a deeply thoughtful, perceptive, complex and often troubled man—also a romantic, also humorous, temperamental, stubborn and brave and contradictory. He both adores and abhors the machines and the industrial spectacle he memorializes in his work. He longs for “real country,” as he says, and yet lives in dread of being “sent off to some awful place where I’m supposed to photograph a moose.” He is a profound patriot—as deeply and sincerely patriotic as anyone I know—and at the same time feels himself an alien in most of the land he travels. He will tell you people are his real interest, yet people rarely appear in his photographs.

Even the small towns that he returns to repeatedly for his subject matter both charm and repel him. “I always feel that I love these towns and I always say, ‘What am I doing here?’ I mean, these places sort of—they give you the feeling as you pass through them—‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’…I never wanted to be in these little places. I’ve always been fascinated by them, but I’m always terribly glad when the train pulls away—I leave them there and I’m on a wonderful train, and I can go to the dining car and have a good meal or a good drink. Or I can get into my nice car and put the camera down and get the hell out of town. I just don’t want to be there—in any of them!”

The devotion and energy he gives his work are extraordinary. In private he will speak of it as a calling or mission. Yet he cares little for “camera talk” of any kind. “I think I know less about photography than I do the things I photograph. I suppose I’d like to feel that I’m a historian.”

He is propelled, driven, by a sense of time running out and the feeling that he must not just make a record, but confer a kind of immortality on certain aspects of American civilization before they vanish. “I feel it’s essential to do it. I feel somehow or other that it’s a mission…that it has nothing whatsoever to do with my own being, but that it’s something quite apart from me. Somehow or other, I happen to have this—whatever the hell you want to call it—talent or gift or obsession or fanaticism or madness or whatever to go out and do this. And, really, it has very little to do with Plowden the family man, or Plowden the friend, or Plowden anything else. I am doing this and I am absolutely consumed with the sense that it has to be done.”

Again and again he has arrived to photograph a certain boat or building or bridge when another week, or even another day, would have been too late. He has photographed the last steam-powered stern-wheel working boat on the Mississippi, the last run on the last day of the Hoboken Ferry. The Scranton railroad station, the SS Algosoo, the old Pittsburgh Point Bridge, are no more. “You know where that is?” he will say, pointing at a photograph of the beautiful Point Bridge. “That’s gone!”

He is not himself of mid-America or anything like it. Born in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, he was raised in an atmosphere of affluence and high liberal ideals in an apartment house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Plowden side of the family has its ancestral base in Plowden, England, where some nine hundred years of Plowdens are buried in the same plot, while his maternal grandfather, George P. Butler, made a fortune on Wall Street around the turn of the century, mainly by merging railroads.

A great-uncle named Reid is said to have brought golf to this country. Another uncle was the American diplomat Ellsworth Bunker, and Grandmother Plowden, a formidable, fearsome figure, spoke five languages, usually picking one you did not know if she wished to put you in your place.

Plowden was born in Boston, not New York, because his parents were on their way to France—and there was a summer place at Putney. Among his earliest memories is being on the train to Vermont and asking his mother over and over, “Are we in real country yet?”

Still, he found his vocation, found himself, in a pursuit of negligible social status and feels his best in the gritty workaday world.

“I have always lived in two worlds,” he explains, and recalls the experience, after Yale, of working on the Great Northern. He had been assigned to Wilmar, Minnesota, ninety miles west of Minneapolis–St. Paul. He was assistant trainmaster on a staff of two and boarded with a family that had a hardware store. But weekends were another matter. His mother had put him in touch with distant relatives who lived in style on Summit Avenue in St. Paul and whose house became his home away from home—“I kept my tuxedo there.” He would come in from Wilmar by freight train Friday nights, shed his work clothes in a locker room, jump in a taxi, and go off to Summit Avenue and the tuxedo and a round of parties, where, as he says, F. Scott Fitzgerald was still alive as far as everybody was concerned.

“I was born—well, not exactly in a tuxedo—but I was born there [on Summit Avenue] in a sense. I loved the parties, sure, of course I did. It was a lot of fun—but I never found the people very interesting.”

He had not found Yale very interesting either, or any of the schools he attended before Yale. In all there were eight—the Home School (“we polished candlesticks”) and the Walt Whitman School, both in Manhattan; Greenfield Hill public school in Fairfield, Connecticut; then a one-room school in Woodstock, New York, where his father was in summer stock; Collegiate, again in Manhattan; Choate, from which he ran away (“I hated it, hated Connecticut; couldn’t stand the smell of burning leaves”); Trinity in Manhattan; and finally the Putney School in Vermont. He was a good student all along, but personally indifferent. At Putney he learned how to use a darkroom.

At Yale he majored in economics, loathing every moment. “A phalanx of uncles had to be coped with. I suppose it had a lot to do with the fact that my father had not been so successful. I felt such an affinity with him—so much more than the others.”

His father, the actor, was the idolized one. Alone of the male side of the family, his father stood by him, insisting he was meant for other things. But his father was also ill much of the time.

His mother, too, Plowden says, was a never-failing source of encouragement. “I remember when I was twelve or thirteen, she would take me out to the railroad yards in Secaucus, New Jersey, and she would sit there all afternoon so I could photograph.”

It was at Yale, in freshman English, that I first met Plowden, though I saw little of him then and sometime later he dropped out, took a year at Columbia. When we ran into each other next, it was in New York nearly ten years later. He was married, living in Brooklyn, and having a difficult time trying to make his way as a photographer.

“A steel mill! There’s nothing more photographable than a steel mill…. To me, it’s the most awesome spectacle we have…. I mean, can you believe it! It’s like a miniature volcano—all contained—made by us…. There’s nothing more terrifying than being in a steel mill. You’ve been in a steel mill; you know what the hell it’s like!”

We are back in the car, continuing south on 1-57. For a while we have talked about favorite books. “Conrad,” he said at once. “All of Conrad. And Willa Cather.” And favorite photographers. He named Paul Strand and Walker Evans. I asked how he felt about Stieglitz. “Funny about Stieglitz—isn’t it awful—but I never liked Stieglitz—never, never…I’ve always felt he was terribly self-conscious. For Christ’s sake, don’t say that around anyone or I’ll be run out of my profession.”

“You’ve already run out, haven’t you?” I said. “You ran out.”

“Yes, I ran out.”

“You never got in?” We were both laughing.

“Listen, I never got in. I’m a heretic. That’s what the man who hired me said. He hired me because I’m a heretic. And he said, ‘I want you to teach your heresy down here.’”

“What’s so heretical about you?”

“Well, I guess I feel that photography is not a holy cow….”

We moved on to favorite painters. “Well—Cezanne,” he said after a pause. “And Monet.” What about the Americans, I asked. “Hopper,” he said. “Hopper, I would say definitely. I actually adore Hopper—I love him.”

Did he think Hopper had been an influence on him? I disliked the question, but felt I must ask.

“No. I have not been influenced by Hopper at all. I think Hopper and I probably love the same things. But I started photographing and doing things long before I was really aware of Hopper. It’s so hard to say whether you’re influenced by someone or not. Of course, you want to say, ‘No, certainly not; I’m my own man, and my own person, of course—I’ve never been influenced by anybody.’ Sure, I suppose I’ve been influenced by Hopper and Walker [Evans] and all those people I admire tremendously. I don’t think you can help it.”

“Are you working in their tradition?”

“I hope so.”

“Carrying the torch?”

“I hope so—in a way. It’s a hell of a torch to carry. Yeah—I hope I am.”

I wondered how much interest he has in films and if he had ever seen any that seemed to be doing what he does. He mentioned Days of Heaven and The Last Picture Show. But when I asked if he had any favorites, he all but shouted with delight, “The Marx Brothers—my favorite of all people in the world. I love the Marx Brothers. I would drive a thousand miles…. I know every piece—I know everything—A Night at the Opera—the scene in the dressing room—the stateroom—where they’re all in there….”

But now we have turned to steel mills.

“It’s like being in hell,” he says. “Absolutely terrifying place! And yet, can you believe that we’ve been able to do that? And look at the goddamn mess it makes of everything! Look what it’s done to the poor guys who work there—look at the pollution, the filth! Look at the bodies of the people who work in these places. And yet, at the same time, these men who work there are intensely proud. And I think there are some who are proud of doing it because they know how goddamn dangerous it is. They’re almost at war. It’s almost like this American thing of always being at war, always having a war to fight. We’re always fighting the frontier; we’re always fighting the mine, trying to get the coal out of the ground. We’re always beating ourselves against things, and I think that’s so much the American spirit. And you get out here and it looks beautiful now, but Jesus Christ, in an hour and a half we might have a tornado, a hailstorm. This guy’s field”—he is pointing to a cornfield to the right—will be laid flat, cut to ribbons. Now he’s pitting himself against it. Look at that water standing in that field there. See that below—he had to replant all that. That was all wasted away….

“The guys at Dessie’s Bar [a place in Virginia that he has photographed], they’re the guys who hack the coal out. There was one guy there whose son took me around, and the son said, ‘My daddy goes in that mine six miles every day and he works on his knees.’ And they all have black lung and they all live filthy, goddamn broken lives—they’re all horrible places to work in….

“There’s a picture in the book of a fellow who was slagging the steel—you know, throwing the slag off the top of the ingots with all those showers of sparks; and when he finished, he came rushing out and he ripped open his coat, and he said, ‘Look, mosquito bites, mosquito bites.’ And there were scars from all of the sparks, and he was proud of it—this great guy. These people are heroic. The locomotive engineer…the farmer who is out pitting himself against the weather and against the goddamn bugs and everything else all the time—to me they’re much more real than the guy who makes the money and sits in the office…I find myself more sympathetic to them. I always have…. I suppose it’s also because I can’t imagine anything duller than sitting in an office all day long.”

We have left 1-57 and are cutting cross-country, heading west, inland, on all but empty section roads. “One of my students, a guy from Taiwan, couldn’t believe it when he saw this. I was out here with a class and he wasn’t photographing. He said, ‘I can’t deal with this. I’ve never seen land like this.’”

The road is as straight as a landing strip and walled in on both sides by corn eight feet high, higher, mile after mile after mile. When the road rises and there is a break in the corn, we can see enormous distances—six, maybe ten miles; I can’t tell because the scale of everything is so different. I feel like the student from Taiwan. There are no fences and the few houses barely show above the corn.

“All right, David,” he explains. “This is the Corn Belt! Right in the middle of it!”

He wants to stop and get out, but he is waiting for another rise where we can see. We are doing about sixty. It is beginning to look as though the sun might break through for the first time all day. A grasshopper, or something, splatters against the windshield. A soybean field appears suddenly on the right. In the middle, maybe five hundred yards from the road, a lone, small figure of a man is working with a hoe. Then, as abruptly, he and his field are gone, and we are in corn again.

There is a lot of blue sky suddenly. And now the sun is out and brilliant beyond expectation, changing the look of everything. Plowden likes the change. “All the time, the whole thing is light,” he says. “And the light out here…well, look, from one horizon to another, it’s the sky.”

The air rushing past the window is noticeably hotter, but I am struck even more by the smell. I have smelled growing corn before but never anything like this.

“And just listen,” says Plowden, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. “It doesn’t make any noise…you’d think that anything that was in such abundance would yell.”

A sign says that what we are seeing is Lester Fister’s Hybrid Corn.

We hit a long, slow rise and at the crest, at a crossroad, he pulls off on the shoulder. We are at the junction of 400 East and 2200 North, according to an incongruous street sign.

We get out, and the wonderful smell is nearly overpowering. I hear an airplane faintly in the distance. Otherwise there is little or no sound. Again we can see for miles, the roads running off exactly to the four points of the compass. We are immersed in corn smell and silence and Illinois summer. A mile up the road the sun is hitting what must be a metal barn roof. In nature there are no straight lines, I seem to remember reading somewhere, and here everything runs straight—roads, fields, roof lines—yet you feel an elemental force in the corn itself, as if the land has never really been tamed.

I check my watch. It is two-fifteen, less than twenty-four hours since Plowden met me at O’Hare.

His face is alight with pleasure, “We’re ‘smack dab in the middle of the country,’ as Sandra says. No matter which way you look, it’s America.”

Sandra, his wife, is the former Sandra Schoellkopf of Buffalo, whom he married five years ago after an earlier marriage—to Pleasance Coggeshall—ended in divorce. Plowden has four children, two grown from his first marriage, a young son and daughter from his second marriage.

He must have a souvenir of this spot, he announces. I think he means to pilfer a green ear of Lester Fister’s Hybrid. Instead he is setting up for a picture. “You know, half the pictures are souvenirs.”

He talks now while he works, only it is talk broken by periodic pauses, sometimes in midsentence, so that it comes out like this:

“Hear the cicada?…The light…is certainly going to…be possible…in about two seconds…. Clouds are like pieces of concrete…. Is that car coming or going?…I can’t tell…. Now hear the rustle…when the wind starts. It’s almost eerie…out here…when you’re by yourself…and the wind begins to blow on the corn.”

It is an impossible picture, he concludes. There is no way to convey the sensation of such space. I am sure he is right.

Half an hour later we are in Gilman, again on the Illinois Central Gulf, and he has already made several shots from a spot beside Jed’s Yazoo Mowers (“Sales and Service”), where Main Street crosses the tracks. There is more to Gilman than Chebanse. A James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, is playing at the Palace up the block. There is a Ben Franklin, a Montgomery Ward. Plowden is concentrating on the stark, silver-gray side wall of Roeder’s Hardware, which is in the immediate foreground. I ask what he meant when he said clouds are like pieces of concrete.

“When you get that great white blob up there”—he points to what seems to be a perfectly beautiful cloud hanging over the store—“in a still black-and-white picture, it’s going to be just as important as that car that’s moved in there”—in front of the store—“and it’s going to make just as much difference as that white car”—farther off down the street—“in the whole composition.”

He likes this corner. The words Roeder’s Hardware are painted in elegant old style across the upper left-hand side of the blank wall. “It’s just fun. It’s just pure fun! I mean, it’s a wonderful sign. And a wonderful old tin building and this funny old main street…and the window makes it [a small first-floor window on the right]…. I can’t resist it. You know what I really love about doing this? In a sense I preserve this little place—I caught it, and it won’t disappear. It’s been held. There’s something about this particular moment, this particular unique little corner—and it’s not going to go. I love that feeling; I love that feeling of getting this place. You know, when you talk about everything disappearing and time going by and…it’s sort of a nice feeling to think that even if that tin place burns down like that building in front of the town up there”—he has seen something I haven’t—“maybe, maybe these pictures will be preserved just the way we have all of those pictures from other times that somebody else took the trouble to do. And to me, to be part of that tradition is very, very important.”

Several minutes pass and nothing is said. Two or three more cars have pulled in and parked near the front of the store.

“Now, you see how it works with all those cars lined up…you see, the single car there didn’t work out at all.” He makes several more shots. “I really love that feeling…to hold, to preserve some of this. You’re seeing me at home. This is my turf. This is the kind of thing I would rather do than anything else. I always just gravitate to these old sort of…always along the railroad and always out in this country. It’s home—I just poke around.”

We pay a call at the Gilman Star and introduce ourselves to the editor and publisher, George Elliott, who stands at the front counter with us chatting about crops and Gilman and his paper. He bought it soon after the Second World War and has been doing “just fine.” We buy two copies and leave, Plowden having taken no pictures of Mr. Elliott or his office and having said nothing about being a photographer.

“I always feel it’s a terrible imposition,” he says afterward in the car. “If I had taken his picture he would have become a character. We were equals at the time.”

I ask if this is the sort of day he would be having if he were alone. Yes, he says, except that about now he would find a cool spot in a graveyard somewhere and take a nap.

We continue west, never out of corn country, except in the little towns. Plowden studies the sky and predicts perfect light by evening. At Piper City he slows to a crawl—looking, looking, looking. “These towns are like postage stamps. They’re just pasted down on the land.” We pass a playground under shade trees, a nice old house with a big screened porch. “Piper City,” he says softly. “Look at this one right here…the house behind the iron fence…that’s a marvelous house. It’s after 1870…because look at the panes of glass, in fours.” A smaller house with some young girls sitting on the porch looks, he says, like the house Ronald Reagan lived in in Dixon, to the northwest. “Piper City,” he repeats again.

At Chatsworth he likes what he sees enough to get out and walk around. We go into a junk shop. He is interested in souvenir ashtrays, and he finds three he likes, as well as some postcards and a rusty outdoor thermometer with a crack in the glass. The proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. William Durante, strike up a conversation. We learn that they once owned the Biograph in Chicago, the motion picture theater where Dillinger was shot and killed. It explains, they say, the pictures they have hanging of Dillinger and FDR. A vacant movie house across the street is also theirs and also, like the pictures of Dillinger and FDR, for sale. We all study it through the window. The price is $15,000, they tell Plowden. It is his chance to make a killing in show business, says Mrs. Durante, and we all laugh, Plowden the loudest.

At Forest, where we get gas, he reports that we have driven 170 miles, and we start south on Route 47, a two-lane cement road that he considers one of the most beautiful roads in America.

“The shame is, most people never travel a road like this, never see this kind of country, or, if they do, don’t bother to look because it’s not their idea of scenery.”

In another hour we have passed through Strawn and Sibley and detoured to circle an idle line of freight cars, Plowden trying and failing to get an angle he likes. We have been off on a dirt road between empty fields, scaring up hundreds of small bright yellow butterflies—sulphur butterflies, according to Plowden—and we have swung back onto 47, heading straight through to Gibson City.

“I remember once in a dining car, the steward had all the shades pulled down, and we were going across Kansas or Oklahoma, someplace along there. And I pulled up the shade—and I was almost the only person in the car—and the fellow came by again and pulled the shade down. He said, ‘There’s nothing to see out there, son.’ He said, ‘It isn’t worth looking at.’ I was outraged. I pulled it up, figured I was a patron. But I think so many people feel that way about this country—that it isn’t worth looking at. And they’re the people who don’t know it. I think the people who live here love it. But I think people who don’t know aren’t aware of this. You know, they’re going to the Rockies or they’re going to Sun Valley, or they’re on their way to ski or to see the Grand Canyon. It’s so sad…I used to call up the AAA—used to be a member—and ask them to route me someplace, and then I would go the other way. I still feel that way.”

Gibson City disappoints him. Gibson City has dressed up its Main Street. Somebody has sold its merchants on the idea of visual uniformity. Instead of the usual chaos of signs, every shop and store is labeled in the same orange lettering on a milk-chocolate background. “Suburban. Awful,” Plowden mutters, and we swing north and east on Route 54, which will take us back to 1-57.

The light on the fields and distant farm buildings is beautiful beyond anything we have seen all day. Ahead, according to the map, is Roberts. It will be our last stop, Plowden decides.

“What are the principal aggravations of your work?”

“Aggravations? My own shyness.”

“What a wonderful answer.”

“My own feeling of reticence to go and say, ‘Here I am. I’m here to photograph your land.’ You know, ‘Taking a little bit of your home—a little bit of your soul. I want to steal a little bit.’ I feel that way. I feel a terrible imposition. I feel that it’s a tremendous privilege to go to somebody’s place and to photograph it. I don’t do it lightly…. I don’t have that thick skin that I should have as a photographer—walk right up and walk right in, you know, the old Daily News approach. Get your picture at all cost. I can’t do that…. If I’m going to photograph somebody, that to me is part of the dialogue. I mean, it’s part of having talked to that person, to have known that person for a few minutes. I’m not going to run up behind him and grab a picture with a long lens. I’m going to sit down and talk to him and say, ‘I want to photograph you. Let’s talk.’ And to me it would be dishonest to do it any other way.”

“What part of it is drudgery? Any of it?”

“Yes. A lot of it is drudgery. A hell of a lot is drudgery. The developing of the film is sheer, absolute donkey work. All of the business of after the prints are made and having to go through all of the hypo and the second hypo and the hypo eliminator and all of the washing and the drying and the spotting of the pictures to remove the dust spots that you couldn’t remove—you know, that you couldn’t get off the film. All that to me is just rote work. You know it and you do it, but it’s not interesting, except that you know you’re making something.”

“What else?”

“Driving. Long distances by yourself. And it seems as if I spend almost more time sitting behind the wheel of a car than anything else.”

“Overnight stays?”

“Oh, Jesus—in motels! That’s the worst of all…. The only thing that sustains me is to get to the motel to call Sandra. You know, ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m here.’ The first thing I give her is my phone number, just to know she knows…and to me those are desperate moments.”

Roberts is still another tiny tree-shaded country town and, by the looks of its vacant store windows, very nearly dead. But with the light the way it is now, there is something almost magical about Roberts. Main Street is short and wide. There is not a soul to be seen and no cars on the street now other than our own. A child’s wagon is standing alone on the sidewalk. It all looks like a stage set. The late evening sunshine glows on the dingy, old storefronts like theatrical lighting.

Plowden loves it and gets right to work, showing no sign of fatigue. He moves the camera and tripod from point to point up the side of the street where the wagon stands. He is shooting steadily. I walk on the other side, where I won’t be in the way. I think of the stories of Wright Morris and of Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall. I think of something Plowden himself wrote in his preface to Commonplace—that we will not find the look of America in places like Williamsburg or Virginia City, Montana. “Only actors will we find, and a set designed by wishful thinking.” And there he is across the street, the actor’s son working on what is so plainly an empty set, albeit of another kind.

Only last night, in his study at Winnetka, as we were looking through some of his prints, he was talking about the people in a photograph in which there are no people. “It speaks of people,” he said. “That street speaks of all the people who were there—always. And I want people…I want them to hear their own footsteps as they walk down that street and to occupy that particular space without my filling it with characters. Because I think you would be more interested in them—the characters—than in their space. But if the space is there…the street is there by itself…I think you will occupy it. It’s like a stage set, you become the actor.”

It is seven-fifteen. But it is another half hour before he stops and we go. The sun now is a crimson ball above the corn fields. “Oh, I love this light,” he says. “This is the time I love. You really feel the earth turning.”

I am assuming that that is it for the day, but ten miles farther along he sees a square white barn tucked among the corn to the side of the road, and he brakes and stops.

The barn won’t work for him, he decides after we are out of the car. The picture is on the other side of the road, the panorama to the west, where the sun is very nearly down. We are standing in the grass on the shoulder. Another car speeds past. He gets the camera and tripod.

The temperature has dropped and the smell of the corn in the cooler air is even more wonderful than before. Birds are flying overhead—veering specks too high for me to know what they are—and the sky is very pale, nearly colorless, turning pale pink down near the band of soft gray-green haze that marks the horizon. The trees there, on the horizon, and a scattering of farm buildings and a silo seem to float in the haze, suspended and unearthly, as if in a mirage. And it is this, the long fading horizon, that Plowden is shooting, the shutter of his camera making one slow clunk after another.

“That’s the one,” he says, back behind the wheel of the car. “That’s the photograph, the best.”

“Of the day?”

“Of the day.”

About nine, at a roadside restaurant beside 1-57, just before Kankakee, he calls Sandra to say we are on the way home.

V

ON WE GO

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Washington on the Potomac

THE ONLY one of our presidents who stayed on in Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style. Ten of his friends chipped in ten thousand dollars each to cover most of the cost of a house of twenty-two rooms on S Street, just off Embassy Row. S Street was quiet and sedate then and it remains so. But once, on Armistice Day 1923, twenty thousand people came to cheer Wilson. They filled the street for five blocks. I have seen the photographs. He came out finally, tentatively, for his last public appearance. He stood in the doorway while they cheered and sang, a pallid, frail old figure wrapped up in a heavy coat, Edith Boiling Wilson at his side, the vibrant, assertive second wife, who, many said, secretly ran the country after his stroke.

I think of her when I pass by. I wonder if, in fact, she was the first woman to be president. And I think about the crowds on that long-gone November day, in that incredibly different world of 1923. What was in their minds, I wonder, as they looked at their former commander in chief? What did they feel for that old man? Are some still alive who were there and remember?

“I am not one of those that have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for,” Wilson said in a brief speech. A headline in The New York Times the same day was spread across three columns: HITLER FORCES RALLYING NEAR MUNICH.

I pass the Wilson house only now and then. The way to see Washington is on foot, and I like to vary my route. Early mornings are the best time, before the traffic takes over. The past seems closer then. The imagination roams freer.

I try to keep a steady pace. Harry Truman said that for a walk to do you any good, you ought to move along as though you mean it. As a captain in Woodrow Wilson’s war he learned a military pace of 120 steps a minute. I try, for the exercise, but also because I am writing a book about Truman and, who can say, maybe starting my mornings as he did will help. In an hour you can cover a lot of ground.

Washington is a wonderful city. The scale seems right, more humane than other places. I like all the white marble and green trees, the ideals celebrated by the great monuments and memorials. I like the climate, the slow shift of the seasons here. Spring, so Southern in feeling, comes early and the long, sweet autumns can last into December. Summers are murder, equatorial—no question; the compensation is that Congress adjourns, the city empties out, eases off. Winter evenings in Georgetown with the snow falling and the lights coming on are as beautiful as any I’ve known.

I like the elegant old landmark hotels—the Willard, now restored to its former glory, the Mayflower, with its long, glittering, palm-lined lobby, the Hay-Adams on Lafayette Square, overlooking the White House. And Massachusetts Avenue, as you drive down past the British Embassy and over Rock Creek Park, past the Mosque and around Sheridan Circle. This is an avenue in the grand tradition, befitting a world capital.

The presence of the National Gallery, it seems to me, would be reason enough in itself to wish to live here.

In many ways it is our most civilized city. It accommodates its river, accommodates trees and grass, makes room for nature as other cities don’t. There are parks everywhere and two great, unspoiled, green corridors running beside the Potomac and out Rock Creek where Theodore Roosevelt liked to ride horseback or take his rough cross-country walks. There is no more beautiful entrance to any of our cities than the George Washington Parkway, which sweeps down the Virginia side of the Potomac. The views of the river gorge are hardly changed from Jefferson’s time. Across the river, on the towpath of the old C&O Canal, you can start at Georgetown and walk for miles with never a sense of being in a city. You can walk right out of town, ten, twenty, fifty miles if you like, more, all the way to Harpers Ferry where you can pick up the Appalachian Trail going north or south.

Some mornings along the towpath it is as if you are walking through a Monet. Blue herons stalk the water. You see deer prints. Once, in Glover Park, in the heart of the city, a red fox stopped directly in front of me, not more than thirty feet down the path, and waited a count or two before vanishing into the woods, as if giving me time to look him over, as if he wanted me never to wonder whether my eyes had played tricks.

Even the famous National Zoo is a “zoological park,” a place to walk, as specifically intended in the original plan by Frederick Law Olmsted.

It was Olmsted also who did the magnificent Capitol grounds and who had the nice idea of putting identifying tags on the trees, giving their places of origin and Latin names. I like particularly the tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera), one of the common trees of Washington, which lines the main drive to the east front of the Capitol. There are red oak, white oak, silver linden, a tremendous spreading white ash, sugar maples, five kinds of American magnolias, a huge Japanese pagoda tree. A spectacular willow oak on the west side has a trunk three men couldn’t put their arms around. In spring the dogwood in bloom all around the Capitol are enough to take your breath away.

There are trees and there is sky, the immense, overarching sky of the Mall. What American city has anything to compare to the Mall? At first light on a summer morning, before the rush hour, before the first jets come roaring out of National, the dominant sound is of crows and the crunch of your own feet along the gravel pathways. The air, still cool from the night, smells of trees and damp grass, like a country town. Floodlights are still on at the old red Smithsonian castle, bathing it in a soft theatrical glow, like the backdrop for some nineteenth-century gothic fantasy. The moon is up still, hanging in a pale sky beyond the Washington Monument, which for the moment is a very pale pink.

I am always moved by the Mall; by the Monument, our greatest work of abstract sculpture; by the Lincoln Memorial with its memories of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and by the Vietnam Memorial. I don’t like the Hirshhorn Museum. It’s ugly and out of place. And I don’t like the ring of fifty American flags around the base of the Monument, because they seem so redundant. (How much more colorful and appropriate, not to say interesting, it would be to replace them with the fifty flags of the fifty states.) But I love the steady flow of life in every season, the crowds of tourists from every part of the country, all parts of the world. One Saturday morning I stopped to watch a high school class from Massachusetts pose for a group portrait in front of the colossal equestrian statue of Grant at the east end of the Mall, the Capitol dome in the background. They looked so scrubbed and expectant, so pleased to be who they were and where they were.

I keep coming back to look at the statue and its companion groups of Union cavalry and artillery. Grant on his mighty horse, his face shadowed by a slouch hat, looks brooding and mysterious. He and the side groups are the work of a prolific sculptor who is hardly remembered, Henry Merwin Shrady, whose father, George Frederick Shrady, was Grant’s physician. Henry Merwin Shrady had no romantic misconceptions about war. He spent twenty years on his memorial to Grant—twenty years “laboring on details of action and equipment, which have passed the scrutiny of military men as well as artists,” I read in one biographical sketch—and he died of overwork before it was dedicated. To me it is the most powerful of all the statues in Washington, and I wonder that it is not better known.

Though I have lived in a number of other places, Washington has been the setting for some of the most important times of my life. I saw it first when I was about the age of those students from Massachusetts, traveling with a school friend and his family. I had seldom been away from home in Pittsburgh and could hardly believe my eyes, hardly see enough. We got about by streetcar. It was something like love at first sight for me. At the Capitol we were given passes to the Senate gallery and warned not to be disappointed if only a few senators were on the floor. There was almost no one on the floor and one man was reading a newspaper. No matter. I was overcome with a feeling I couldn’t explain, just to be in that room. I would happily have stayed all afternoon.

The next visit was about five years later, while I was in college, only this time I was head over heels in love with a girl, who, fortunately, also wanted to see the sights. We stood in line for the White House tour, drove down along the Potomac to Mount Vernon. It was March, but felt more like May. The tulips were out at Mount Vernon, and the river, I remember, looked as blue as the ocean. That night, all dressed up, we had dinner at the old Occidental Restaurant, next door to the Willard.

In 1961, after Kennedy took office, still in our twenties, we came back again. I had a new job as an editor with the U.S. Information Agency, then under the direction of Edward R. Murrow. Only now we came with three small children. On summer evenings, my office day over, we would meet to walk around the Tidal Basin, the baby riding in a carriage. One Saturday afternoon at the Library of Congress, I found my vocation.

In 1983 we returned, and found that in the intervening time, Washington had become a changed city. There was more variety, more going on besides politics and government, more music, better restaurants, more theater. The addition of Kennedy Center made a tremendous difference.

There were more resident composers, painters, filmmakers, and writers. Smithsonian magazine, The Washingtonian, and The Wilson Quarterly were being published in Washington, in addition to the National Geographic, The New Republic, and U.S. News & World Report.

All Things Considered, radio at its best to my mind, is a Washington-based production of National Public Radio, and WETA, Washington’s public television station, producer of The McNeil-Lehrer Report and Washington Week in Review, had launched Smithsonian World, the project which, with my work on Truman, had brought me back again after twenty years.

Much goes on in history and biography. The biographers Edmund and Sylvia Morris keep an apartment near the Library of Congress; he is working on volume two of his life of Theodore Roosevelt while gathering material for a biography of Ronald Reagan; she is writing the life of Clare Boothe Luce. Rudy Abramson of the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times is doing a biography of W. Averell Harriman. Albert Eisele, author of a superb study of the intertwining careers of two old Washington hands, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, called Almost to the Presidency, is writing the life of Cardinal Cushing. And Daniel J. Boorstin is finishing a sequel to The Discoverers, his opus on the human quest to understand the world.

Not everyone, I realize, cares for Washington as I do. “Neither Rome nor home,” somebody once said. New Yorkers can be particularly critical, impatient with the pace, annoyed by the limits of the morning paper. Government buildings have a way of depressing many visitors, including some of my own family. I remember a woman from the Boston Globe who wrote at length about what a huge bore it all is. A one-industry town was her theme, which wasn’t exactly new or true.

There is no local beer, no home baseball team. The tap water tastes pretty bad until you become accustomed to it. The cost of living is high, parking is a headache, the cab drivers may be the worst on earth.

And of course there is more than one Washington. There is lawyer-corporate Washington, in the sleek glass boxes along Connecticut Avenue, student Washington, journalist Washington, and black Washington, worlds I know little about. Violent crime has become a national issue. Its “inner city” ghetto, its slums, are a disgrace, like all slums, but here especially, “in view of the Capitol dome,” as is said repeatedly.

What I’m drawn to and moved by is historical Washington, or rather the presence of history almost anywhere one turns. It is hard to imagine anyone with a sense of history not being moved. No city in the country keeps and commemorates history as this one does. Washington insists we remember, with statues and plaques and memorials and words carved in stone, with libraries, archives, museums, and numerous, magnificent old houses besides the one where Woodrow Wilson lived.

Blair House, catty-corner to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, is an example. The morning of April 18, 1861, in its small front parlor, Robert E. Lee sat with Francis P. Blair, Sr., who, speaking for Abraham Lincoln, offered Lee command of the Union Army. I never walk by without thinking of this—and of the historians who dismiss the role of personality in history, the reverberations of a single yes or no.

Blair House was built in 1824 and has been owned by the government since World War II, when, the story goes, Eleanor Roosevelt found Winston Churchill pacing the upstairs hall at the White House in his nightshirt. She decided the time had come for some other kind of accommodation for presidential guests. Later, the house served as quarters for the president himself, President Harry Truman, while the White House was being restored.

One autumn afternoon, right where you walk by Blair House, the Secret Service and the White House police shot it out with two Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to storm the front door and kill Truman. Truman, who was upstairs taking a nap in his underwear, ran to the window to see what the commotion was about. One assassin was dead on the front steps, a bullet through the brain. Private Leslie Coffelt of the White House police, who had been hit several times, died later. On the little iron fence in front of the house a plaque commemorates his heroism.

Or consider the Octagon House, three blocks over at 18th and New York. The Octagon, which is actually hexagonal, is a contemporary of the White House and one of the architectural gems of Washington, in the federal style. It is occupied, appropriately, by the American Institute of Architects, and, like the Wilson House, open to the public.

In 1814, after the British burned the White House, James and Dolly Madison and their pet macaw moved into the Octagon for a stay of six months. The peace treaty officially ending the war of 1812, the Treaty of Ghent, was signed in the circular parlor over the main entrance. The house has a magnificent circular stairway, all its original mantels, most of its original woodwork, its original marble floor in the foyer. The architect was William Thornton, the first architect of the Capitol.

Reportedly there is also a secret tunnel in the basement leading to the White House. It is one of those old Washington stories you hear again and again, like the story of alligators in the sewers of New York. It is even given as gospel in the excellent American Guide Series book on Washington. But the tunnel doesn’t exist, sad to say. Nor apparently is there an Octagon ghost, as reported repeatedly. The original owner was a rich Virginia planter named John Tayloe. Supposedly he had a beautiful daughter who, thwarted in love, threw herself from the stairway to her death on that marble floor, and her ghost has haunted the house ever since. As it happens, Tayloe had fifteen children, none of whom is known to have committed suicide, and for twenty-odd years, anyway, nobody has heard or seen a sign of a ghost.

I can’t help but wonder about the spirits of Jefferson and Jackson, Lafayette, Daniel Webster, and others known to have dined or slept in the house. And what of Dolly herself, in her rose-colored Paris robe, her white turban with its tiara of ostrich plumes? An eyewitness to the signing of the Treaty of Ghent said that the “most conspicuous object in the room” was Mrs. Madison, “then in the meridian of life and queenly beauty…”

On the high rise of R Street in Georgetown is a palatial red-brick house with white trim, large as a small hotel and all very Italianate, which was once a summer residence for Ulysses S. Grant and later owned by Rear Admiral Harry H. Rousseau, one of the builders of the Panama Canal. In the 1930s it was taken over as bachelor quarters by a band of exuberant young New Dealers known as the Brain Trust, with Tom (“Tommy the Cork”) Corcoran as their leader. One of them remembers a night when a friend dropped by bringing his own grand piano. “A moving van arrived and three or four fellows got the piano up the stairs and into the living room. Tom and his friend played duets all evening. Then the boys packed up the piano and put it back into the moving van.”

There is John Kennedy’s house, also in Georgetown, at 3307 N Street, and the house on Massachusetts Avenue off Dupont Circle where for decades Alice Roosevelt Longworth held court. Across the street stands the monstrous, gabled brick pile that once belonged to Senator James G. Blaine, “Blaine of Maine,” a brilliant rascal who nearly became president in 1884. It was a puzzle to many of his time how somebody with no more than a senator’s wages could afford such a place.

The elegant headquarters of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, at 18th and Massachusetts, was once Washington’s most sumptuous apartment house. Andrew Mellon, who served three presidents as secretary of the treasury and who gave the country the National Gallery, occupied the top floor. On G Street on Capitol Hill, near the old Marine barracks, you can find the little house where John Philip Sousa was born. On the crest of the hill at Arlington, across the Potomac where the sun goes down, stands the columned Custis-Lee Mansion. From its front porch you get the best of all panoramas of the city.

Some of the history that has happened here I have seen with my own eyes. When John Kennedy’s funeral procession came up Connecticut Avenue, the foreign delegations led by Charles de Gaulle, I watched from an upstairs room at the Mayflower Hotel. It had been reserved as a vantage point by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, so that Barbara Tuchman might describe the scene much as she did the funeral of Edward VII in the opening chapter of The Guns of August. Marquis Childs of the Post-Dispatch, a friend, had been kind enough to include me. So I shared a window with Mrs. Tuchman. “Look at de Gaulle, look at de Gaulle,” she kept saying, as he came striding along in his simple khaki uniform, taller than anyone, his face a perfect mask.

On the afternoon when the Senate voted for the Panama Canal Treaties, I was watching from the gallery, and later that evening, as Washington was lashed by a regular Panama deluge, I was among the several hundred people who crowded into the State Dining Room at the White House to celebrate, to see Jimmy Carter enjoy one of the few happy moments of his administration.

Much of what I feel about the city comes from books I have loved. The story of the Brain Trusters and their piano, for example, is from a collection of reminiscences edited by Katie Louchheim called The Making of the New Deal. If the Wilson house stirs a chain of thoughts on my early morning ventures, it is mainly because of Gene Smith’s When the Cheering Stopped.

I am never in the National Portrait Gallery, once the Patent Office building, that I don’t think of Walt Whitman’s account in Specimen Days of how the wounded and dying men from the battles of Bull Run and Fredericksburg were crowded among the glass display cases for the patent models. Passing the Capitol as a new day is about to begin I think of how, in The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro describes young Lyndon Johnson arriving for work:

But when he turned the corner at the end of that street, suddenly before him, at the top of a long, gentle hill, would be not brick but marble, a great shadowy mass of marble—marble columns and marble arches and marble parapets, and a long marble balustrade high against the sky. Veering along a path to the left, he would come up on Capitol Hill and around the corner of the Capitol, and the marble of the eastern facade, already caught by the early morning sun, would be gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling…. And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning, he would be running.

Like millions of readers, my view of the Senate and its protagonists has been forever colored by Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Lafayette Square, for all its obvious charms, means even more because it is the setting for the Henry Adams novel Democracy.

Then to read Louis J. Halle, Jr.’s beautiful Spring in Washington is to have your eyes and spirit opened to a world that has nothing to do with government people or official transactions or anything much connected with the human hive of Washington. Written in the last year of World War II, when the city’s sense of its own importance had reached a new high and the author himself was serving as an official at the State Department, the book is an informal, philosophical guide to the local natural history. It is a small classic still in print after forty years. “I undertook to be monitor of the Washington seasons, when the government was not looking,” the author begins modestly.

Sometimes when I go looking for places that figure in favorite books, the effect has considerably more to do with what I have read than what remains to be seen, for, alas, much in the city has been destroyed, torn down in the name of progress. In Specimen Days Whitman writes of standing at Vermont Avenue and L Street on August mornings and seeing Lincoln ride by on his way in from Soldier’s Home, his summer quarters. Lincoln, dressed in plain black “somewhat rusty and dusty,” was on a “good-sized, easygoing gray horse” and looked “about as ordinary” as the commonest man. “I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression,” writes Whitman. “We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.” A lieutenant with yellow straps was at Lincoln’s side. The rest of the cavalry escort followed, two by two, thirty men in yellow-striped jackets, their sabers drawn, everyone moving at a slow trot.

Waiting for the light to change on the same corner, on a thoroughly present-day August morning, I look in vain for Whitman’s Washington. The early traffic grinds by toward Lafayette Square. The buildings around, all recent and nondescript, include banks and offices and something called the Yummy Yogurt Feastery. Across the street, rearing above the tops of the cars, is a huge abstract sculpture made of steel. No signs of those other times. No sign of the man on the easygoing gray horse…. And yet, it happened here. This is no ordinary corner, never can be. “The sabers and the accoutrements clank,” Whitman says, “and the entirely unornamental cortege as it trots toward Lafayette Square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes.” Maybe that’s me now, the curious stranger.

The most engaging guide to the city’s landmarks is Washington Itself by E. J. Applewhite, which is both well written and full of delightful, little-known facts. Thanks to Mr. Applewhite, a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency, I now know as I did not before that the statue of Winston Churchill in front of the British Embassy has one foot planted firmly in the extraterritoriality of the embassy’s Crown property and the other over the boundary in U.S. territory, in tribute to Churchill’s British-American parentage. I know that the Government Printing Office is the city’s largest industrial employer; that the eight glorious columns inside the old Pension Building are the tallest ever built in the Roman style, taller even than those at Baalbek; that the Mayflower Hotel is by the same architectural firm, Warren and Wetmore, that did Grand Central Terminal in New York.

If asked to name my favorite book about the city, I would have to pick Margaret Leech’s Pulitzer Prize—winning history, Reveille in Washington, first published in 1941, a book I have read and reread and pushed on friends for years.

It is Washington during the Civil War, a chronicle of all that was going on at every level of government and society. I read it initially in the 1960s, in those first years of living here, and it gave me not just a sense of that very different Washington of the 1860s, but of the possibilities for self-expression in writing narrative history. Like Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, it was one of the books that started me on the way, first reading Civil War history, then thinking more and more of daring to try something of the kind of my own—if ever I could find a subject.

The subject turned out to be the Johnstown flood of 1889, and the fact that I found it in Washington, found the work I wanted most to do, has, I’m sure, a lot to do with my affection for the city.

A number of old photographs were spread out on a big oak table in the Picture Collection of the Library of Congress at a point when my wife and I happened by one Saturday. They had been recently acquired by the library, and one of the curators, Milton Kaplan, took time to tell us about them. A Pittsburgh photographer had managed somehow to get into Johnstown with all his glass plates and heavy paraphernalia only a day or so after the disaster, when almost nobody was getting through. In one picture a whole tree was driven through a house like a javelin. I didn’t know it then, but I had begun my first book.

I had also “discovered” the Library of Congress, the greatest “treasure house” we have, and I have been drawn to it, I have been inspired and fortified by it ever since, no matter where I was living. Any city that has the Library of Congress is my capital. Some of the best, most productive days of my life have been spent in its manuscript collection or working with its newspaper files. It is one of the wonders of the world. The statistics are staggering—twenty million books, of which less than a fourth are in English, nearly six million pieces of sheet music, more than one million recordings of music and the spoken word, the papers of twenty-three presidents, the papers of Clara Barton and James G. Blaine, the Wright brothers, Clare Boothe Luce, Margaret Mead, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Sigmund Freud, Lillian Gish, and George Washington Goethals. Its Madison Building is the largest library building in the world. I prefer the old building, the Jefferson Building, as it is now known, with all its Beaux-Arts marble extravagance and beautiful workmanship. The domed Main Reading Room is one of the most spectacular interior spaces in America.

It was because he wanted to be near the Library of Congress that Woodrow Wilson chose to retire in Washington. Very understandable.

The combination of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian, all within walking distance of one another, more than justifies the city’s reputation as an unrivaled center for research. And they are only the largest and best-known of numerous libraries and research facilities within the city limits. There are a half dozen universities with excellent libraries. The Folger Shakespeare Library is here. The Columbia Historical Society, devoted to the history of the District of Columbia and housed in a splendid old brewer’s mansion, has a library of fifteen thousand volumes, collections of maps, prints, manuscripts, memorabilia, many thousands of rare old photographs. The Society of the Cincinnati has a research library devoted to the Revolutionary War that includes some twelve thousand volumes and letters from nearly all the principal figures of the war.

At the main public library, the Martin Luther King Library downtown, you can now work with the morgue file of the defunct Washington Star, long the city’s leading paper. Each of the military services has its archives. As do the government departments and agencies. A new fourteen-story National Agricultural Library at nearby Beltsville, Maryland, has become the “most extensive collection of agricultural information in the free world: more than 1.8 million volumes and growing.” Should ever you wish to know about asphalt or child care, coal, cotton, firearms, drugstores, banking, peanuts, or civil engineering, or almost anything else you can think of, there is probably a national association to provide what you need. In the Yellow Pages I also find a National Academy of Astrologers.

A further source needs to be mentioned. It is the large supply of living memory, all that is tucked away in the minds of those older Washington residents who were witness to or actually took part in the events of earlier times. They are here in amazing numbers, and it has been my experience that they like to share what they know and remember. They will give generously of their time; and you don’t have to chase across half the country to find them.

In my work on Truman I have talked with perhaps fifty men and women who knew him or worked with him (or against him in some instances), all people living in Washington—retired journalists, former White House aides, senators and Senate staff, the wife and son of a former secretary of state. And I have more to see, since each invariably tells me of others I mustn’t overlook. And how much will be lost when these people are gone.

One man knew not only Truman but Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Eisenhower as well. He is not one whose name you would recognize. Passing him on the street, you would take no notice. Part of his job was to be inconspicuous. He is a retired Secret Service agent. “You must have been asked to talk about these things many times,” I said somewhat apologetically about midpoint in our conversation. “No, Mr. McCullough,” he answered. “Nobody has ever asked me about any of this.”

Of nearly equal importance to the political historian or biographer, or anyone trying to understand the past, is what might be called the living model. People are the writer’s real subject, after all, the mystery of human behavior, and a historian needs to observe people in real life, somewhat the way a paleontologist observes the living fauna to better interpret the fossil record.

This is very important. And all varieties of the old political fauna of Washington past are around today, alive and mostly thriving—the gladhanders and nostrum sellers, the doctrinaires, the moneybags, the small people in big jobs, the gossips, the courtesans and power-moths of every kind and gender, as well as the true patriot, the devoted public servant, the good, gray functionary down in the bureaucratic ranks, who, so often, is someone of solid ability.

Harry Truman used to talk of Potomac Fever, an endemic disorder the symptoms of which were a swelled head and a general decline of common sense. Were you only to read about such cases, and not see them with your own eyes, you might not appreciate what he meant.

Ambition, the old burning need for flattery, for power, fear of public humiliation, plain high-mindedness, a sense of duty, all that has moved men and women for so long in this capital city moves them still. The same show goes on, only the names and costumes are different.

It helps to remember how much good creative work has gone on here down the years in so many fields. Washington was the home of Alexander Graham Bell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the historian Frederic Bancroft, who also developed the American Beauty Rose. Bruce Catton wrote A Stillness at Appomattox here. Rachel Carson wrote The Sea around Us and Silent Spring.

Two further observations: First, I am struck more and more by the presence of Abraham Lincoln. He is all around. It is almost as though the city should be renamed for him. Most powerful, of course, is the effect of Daniel Chester French’s majestic statue within the Memorial, our largest and, I suppose, our most beloved public sculpture. But there are three other Lincoln statues that I know of, one in Judiciary Square, another in Lincoln Park, a third in the Capitol Rotunda. Elsewhere in the Capitol are two Lincoln busts, five paintings of Lincoln, and down in the crypt a colossal marble head, an extraordinary work by Gutzon Borglum that deserves a better place where more people will see it. Lincoln is at the National Portrait Gallery—in spirit upstairs in the grand hall, scene of his first inaugural ball, and on canvas in a portrait by George P. A. Healy that dominates the hall of the presidents. There is Anderson Cottage at Soldiers’ Home on North Capitol Street, Lincoln’s summer White House, where, until the time was right, he kept the Emancipation Proclamation locked in a desk drawer; and the so-called Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, where he never slept but where he signed the Proclamation. A duplicate of the Healy portrait, Lincoln pensive, his hand on his chin, hangs over the mantel in the State Dining Room. A duplicate of the Lincoln bed in the Lincoln Bedroom is the bed Woodrow Wilson died in at the house on S Street. Pew 54 at little St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, the Church of the Presidents, is marked with a silver plate as the Lincoln pew.

There is Ford’s Theater with its flag-draped Lincoln box and, downstairs in the basement, a Lincoln museum, containing the clothes and large black boots he was wearing the night of the assassination. Across the street, in the Petersen House, is the room where he died the following morning. Maybe his presence is felt most of all in the rise and dominance of the Capitol dome, which he insisted be completed during the Civil War to show that the Union continued.

The second observation is really a question: Why do so many politicians feel obliged to get away from the city at every chance? They claim a pressing need to get back to the real America. To win votes, many of them like also to deride the city and mock its institutions. They run against Washington, in the shabby spirit made fashionable in recent presidential campaigns. It is as if they find the city alien or feel that too close an association with it might be somehow dishonorable. It is as if they want to get away from history when clearly history is what they need, they most of all, and now more than ever.

What if, instead of rushing off to wherever it is they come from, some of them were to spend a morning at the Wilson House or on the Mall with their fellow citizens touring the National Museum of American History? Or what if they took time, say fifteen minutes, at the National Gallery to enjoy and think about George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen—that one painting? Might not that too be a way of reaching the real America?

I have no sense that the people they represent fail to appreciate the city or to feel its spell. They come in ever increasing numbers, by the tens of millions. They climb the sweep of marble steps at the Supreme Court, pose for a picture by the Grant statue. They move slowly, quietly past the fifty-seven thousand names in the polished black stone wall of the Vietnam Memorial. They pour through the Air and Space Museum, the most popular museum in the world, craning their necks at the technical marvels of our rocket century. We all do. We all should. This is our capital. It speaks of who we are, what we have accomplished, what we value.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Extraordinary Times

THE SPAN of years since 1936 has been the most troubled, unsettling, costly, adventurous, and surprising time ever. There is no period to compare to it. More has changed, and faster, more has been destroyed, more accomplished than in any comparable interval in the five thousand years since recorded history began.

To a very large degree it has been a time of horror, of war after war, wars to stop war, religious wars, wars of “liberation,” many more than fifty wars in fifty years, including the worst war of all time, the shadow of which is still with us. Terror and atrocity have been made political policy and carried to hideous extremes. But it has also been a time of marvels and of unprecedented material progress for much of humanity. To many areas of the world it has brought the exhilarating awareness that change is actually possible, that things don’t have to stay the same.

These have been the years of Stravinsky and Picasso, Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill, Ella Fitzgerald and the Golden Gate Bridge. Present advances in such fields as medicine and communications seem to belong to a different century from that of 1936. Since 1980, to cite one stunning example, there has not been one case of smallpox anywhere on earth.

The colossal sums spent on research and development, the links between government and science, industry and science, the onrush of scientific discoveries have made change of all kinds accelerative, like gravity, and the effect is felt everywhere. Science has transformed the way we live, how long we live. It has meant the steady spread of improvements of a kind new to human experience, and it has brought a level of fear that is also new. Physicists, biologists, and astronomers have become shapers of great world events as much as, or more than, generals and politicians, and this too is new.

Fifty years ago the center of world power and interest was Europe. On the maps of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East there were no countries called Tanzania or Zaire. Or the People’s Republic of China. Or Vietnam. Or Israel.

Furthermore, fifty years ago the physical limits of the human adventure were still defined by the geography of the earth alone.

One simple measure of how many changes have taken place in everyday life in America is our vocabulary. A college dictionary from 1936, for example, does not contain such words as automation or antibiotics, ecosystem, Chicano, nursing home, or condominium. No one then had ever heard of a zip code or jet lag. The word gay was defined as “full of, or inclined to, mirth,” or “bright-colored.” Program was a noun, not a verb.

America then had no Pentagon. The United States Army numbered all of four hundred thirty-eight thousand men, which put it in twenty-first place, behind, among others, the armies of Argentina and Switzerland.

With the country in the grip of the Great Depression, nine million people were out of work. The poorest were desperately poor. Nearly 40 percent of American families had annual incomes of less than $1,000. In places like the coal fields of Kentucky, there was seldom enough to eat. Some families were living on weeds.

Nineteen-thirty-six was a year of ominous headlines. Hitler marched unopposed into the demilitarized Rhineland. Spain erupted in civil war. The Italian dictator Mussolini, using planes, mustard gas, and two hundred fifty thousand troops, crushed Ethiopia, while his son, Vittorio, crowed over the victory. Bombing Ethiopian cavalry was “exceptionally good fun,” he told the press.

It also was the year that Franklin Roosevelt, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, told the country, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

Two of the century’s most crucial developments were not in the headlines, however. One was entirely unknown to the public, the other beyond the comprehension of all but a very few. A future that almost no one could have imagined in 1936 was already taking form in two European settings with nothing in common except their proximity on the Baltic Sea.

The first was a highly secret research installation begun that year by the Germans at the island village of Peenemunde for the purpose of launching experimental rockets. Unlike the modestly financed pioneering work on rockets by physicist Robert Goddard in the United States, Peenemunde was a high-priority military effort—enormous, amply supported, well staffed, and with a brilliant young engineer named Wernher Von Braun newly appointed as “technical overlord.”

The second, less than 120 miles from Peenemunde, was Copenhagen’s Institute of Theoretical Physics, a center of free inquiry open to scientists from all over the world, where in 1936 the subject was nuclear fission. As those involved would remember, the institute was the place to be at one of the most exciting junctures in the history of science. As time would tell, the history of science was to be very largely the history that mattered.

The institute’s director—and its inspirational force—was the much-loved Nobel Prize—winning physicist Niels Bohr, who had once thought it pointless to expect any new source of energy from the atom. Yet, in January 1939, Bohr reported to a Washington, D.C., conference of theoretical physicists that the uranium atom, when split, would produce a power millions of times greater than anything known on earth. It was possibly the most important piece of information of the century. Bohr, however, mumbled so that nobody understood what he was saying. When his friend Enrico Fermi stood up and offered a clarification, the room suddenly emptied, scientists rushing to the nearest telephones to alert their universities and laboratories, while the few reporters present sat wondering what was going on.

In August Albert Einstein addressed a historic letter to Roosevelt warning that a terrible new kind of bomb could be made and that Germany had already stopped the sale of uranium from the mines in Czechoslovakia. He urged a speeding up of scientific research under government direction. Roosevelt, in league with the British, initiated what would become the top-secret Manhattan Project at a cost of $2 billion, a sum undoubtedly equal to all the money spent until then on scientific research. Politics and physics had been joined irrevocably.

The war began September 1, 1939, when German armored divisions smashed into Poland. By the time it was finished, it had become “total war.” It was the cataclysmic upheaval of all time and the most important event of the century.

Eventually, more than eighty million people were in uniform and possibly as many as fifty-five million people were killed. And something new had been added to the annals of organized slaughter: the dead included tens of millions of civilians.

In June 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, Hitler made the fateful decision to attack Russia. If we had only the statistics of battle losses, we would have to conclude that World War II was primarily a titanic struggle between the two totalitarian empires of Germany and Russia. Not counting an estimated seven hundred eighty thousand of their civilian dead, the Germans probably lost more than four million men—more than the battle deaths suffered by China and Japan combined. The Russians appear to have suffered as many as seven million deaths in battle. U.S. fatalities, some three hundred thousand, seem minuscule by comparison, but they were still nearly three times the American dead in World War I.

The war ended in 1945, and 1945 was the watershed year of the twentieth century. One kind of world ended, another began. Roosevelt died, Hitler committed suicide, Churchill was voted out of office. The United Nations was founded. An independent republic of Vietnam was formed with Ho Chi Minh as president. The end of the war was a time of huge celebration and thanksgiving, but it was also the point at which mankind saw as never before its own capacity for evil. It was the year the death camps were revealed, and it was the year of the bomb.

Although Hitler’s plan for the “complete elimination of Jews from European life” had been reported years earlier, only when a number of the camps—Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz—were liberated shortly before the German surrender was the truth known. Eisenhower, seeing his first “indisputable evidence” at a camp near Gotha, insisted on being shown everything, because “I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’”

Documentation came with the Nuremberg trials. Ten million human beings had been exterminated factory-fashion. Approximately six million were Jews. Another word not found in the 1936 dictionary had to be invented to label the process: genocide. Prisoners, including children, were shot, hanged, beaten to death, starved to death, buried alive, and systematically sent to gas chambers. Photographs of the survivors that appeared in magazines like Life are never to be forgotten.

Because the outcome of great events becomes so well established in our minds, there is a tendency to think things had to go as they did. But there is nothing inevitable about history. The defeat of the Nazis, the war’s overriding mission, was never a certainty. Recall the dark winter of 1941-1942, when the Germans had advanced nearly to Moscow, the British ships Repulse and Prince of Wales were at the bottom of the South China Sea, our forces on Bataan had surrendered and German U-boats were sinking ships within sight of the New Jersey shore. The importance of the defeat of the Nazis can hardly be overstated.

The date of the blinding flash at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the day the first atomic bomb was detonated, was July 16, 1945, six years and not quite six months after Niels Bohr’s announcement in Washington. Whether the use of the new weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary will never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Based on the estimate that the planned invasion of Japan would result in possibly a half million American casualties and many times that for-the Japanese, however, the decision seemed necessary at the time. The bombs were dropped to end the war, and they did.

In the last analysis, the deciding factor in the war was America’s tremendous industrial power, and at the war’s end that power was still intact. With World War II, U.S. history had become world history. Europe’s—Great Britain’s—time had passed. “America at this moment stands at the summit of the world,” Churchill told Parliament the summer of 1945. For four years, until the Russians exploded an atomic bomb in 1949, the United States was without equal or challenge.

The next decades were earthshaking: the mounting tensions of the Cold War, the rise of the Third World, the astonishing revival of West Germany and Japan and the final stage of the Chinese Revolution, which has directly affected the lives of one-fifth of the human race. Mao Tse-tung became one of the looming figures of the age.

The world grew smaller and more dangerous. Crisis and more war followed—the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Hungarian Revolution, the Suez crisis, the chilling Cuban missile crisis and the repeated bloody challenges to the existence of Israel.

Among the consequences, for better or for worse, was the steadily increasing power of the American presidency. Harry Truman, a lifelong student of history, made history as few presidents ever have—including Franklin Roosevelt, who had exercised more power than any president since Lincoln. The Truman Doctrine of 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation,” set a course that can be said to have saved Europe and to have led to Vietnam. Truman launched the Marshall Plan, established NATO, sent U.S. troops into Korea, and proceeded with the hydrogen bomb. In the years since Truman, the size, complexity, and influence of the executive branch have only expanded.

“When you’re at war you think about a better life; when you’re at peace you think about a more comfortable one,” said a character in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth. In postwar America prosperity was no longer “just around the corner,” it had arrived. The Great Depression seemed a memory of olden times. For all the energetic programs of the New Deal, it was World War II that had finally ended the Depression. Now it was the mounting cost of the Cold War arms race that helped keep the economy booming, though nobody liked to think of defense as the welfare state.

A shift of population that had begun during the war grew to surprising proportions over the next thirty-odd years, becoming one of the nation’s greatest migrations. Millions of people, black and white and mostly poor, left the rural South for the big cities of the North and West.

The GI Bill made possible a college education for millions of veterans who otherwise could never have met the cost. A federal interstate highway program—the largest construction effort on record—hastened the growth of suburbia and thus had more impact on home building than even the federal housing program. Women entered the work force in greater numbers; in time, the women’s movement took hold.

Television arrived. Television conquered. It has been said to represent an advance in communications comparable to the invention of print. We don’t know yet. But how greatly our perception of history has been affected by it! How many of the telling moments of our time are remembered because of what we saw on television: There was the point in the Army-McCarthy hearings when the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch turned and said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” There was Eisenhower’s surprising farewell address from the White House warning of the influence of the “military-industrial complex.” There were the Nixon-Kennedy debates, Watergate, the return of the hostages from Iran, the travels of Pope John Paul II and the endless Vietnam war on the nightly news. And, above all, the tragedy at Dallas, the scenes of which, like those of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial, have been replayed so often they have become part of the experience of a generation that was not alive to view them firsthand.

Television was only one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon, the advance of science and technology. Peenemunde produced the giant V-2 rocket, the first true ballistic missile, and the Manhattan Project produced the atom bomb. Importantly, World War II also produced in crude form what we call the computer. And it is the modern computer in combination with the rocket and the bomb that makes possible the intercontinental ballistic missile, and thus the threat of annihilation that hangs over us all. The rocket delivers the bomb, the computer delivers the rocket. But World War II also contributed radar and jet aircraft. In the 1950s came the polio vaccine and the Pill; afterward, microchips and lasers, all effecting enormous change. The deciphering of the genetic code in the 1960s could prove to be as important to the course of history as the splitting of the atom.

Few people picture this as an era of geographical exploration in the old sense, yet the largest topographical feature on earth was delineated and mapped in the late 1950s. The midocean ridge system is an underwater mountain range some forty thousand miles in length with valley-to-peak elevations up to two miles. From this discovery and studies of the ocean floor has emerged a revolution in the earth sciences: the new geological theory of plate tectonics that envisions the crust of the earth as composed of immense shifting sections.

Unprecedented advances have been made in astronomy, in our understanding of the architecture of the human brain. Most dramatic of all has been the venture in space. It eclipses all prior voyages of discovery. The rocket, our most terrifying tool of destruction, has taken us on the adventure of the century. The rocket is the symbol of the times.

The American space program began, literally, where German rocket development left off. Wernher Von Braun and a staff of one hundred twenty or so German rocket scientists were brought to the United States from Peenemunde after the war, and it was the V-2 that they began working with in the late 1940s. Times had changed.

The first satellite in orbit was the Russian Sputnik of October 1957. A month later a second Russian satellite carried a small black-and-white dog named Laika, demonstrating that life was possible in outer space. The first human being to go, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, orbited the world on April 12, 1961. The following year John Glenn circled the globe three times and saw four sunsets in four hours, fifty-five minutes.

“These are extraordinary times,” John Kennedy said when he went to Congress in 1961 to ask for the money to put a man on the moon. From Laika to the flight of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong’s walk of July 20, 1969, was only twelve years. The cost of the moon flight was $25 billion.

Events close at hand are hard to judge without the proportion time lends. But two stupendous failures of science and technology in 1986, the tragedy of the space shuttle Challenger and the disaster at Chernobyl, are clearly history of major consequence. If nothing else, they surely must mark an end to the hubris of those who see mankind as master of the universe. (The explanations of what happened refer often to human error, as if there were any other kind.)

Real progress there has been, in much of everyday life. Anyone who doubts this need only imagine—or recall—a visit to a 1930s dentist. The prospects for many old American cities are noticeably improved. Countless items in common use—from cameras and home computers to cars and running shoes—are far superior to what was previously available. College enrollment is up. Life expectancy keeps increasing..

Still, much of the history of recent decades has been a lesson in limitations. Vietnam painfully demonstrated the limits of American power. We have seen our environmental blunders bring appalling consequences, not just for seabirds and river systems, but for ourselves. The poisoning of the Missouri town of Times Beach with dioxin is but one example.

We have known little but disappointment and frustration in trying to solve the problems of crime and drugs. We have an educational system that produces high school graduates who have no idea where Egypt is or in which half of the century World War I occurred.

Real earnings for middle-income families, the majority of Americans, are declining. Economic gains for black Americans have fallen far short of the promise of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A census study shows that white Americans have accumulated eleven times the assets of blacks and that nearly a third of black households have no wealth at all.

In the world at large, there are now more dictators than in 1936. Nor has genocide been confined to the Nazis. In Cambodia, following the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, as many as two million people were murdered. To the long list of assassinated world leaders that began with Mohandas Gandhi in 1948 has now been added the prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme.

These are the sobering facts of our much reported, but imperfectly understood, present. What will future historians make of it all? Maybe little of this will figure as large as we might expect. Maybe the critical event of the era will be the rise of Islam or the new theory that all matter is composed of strings. Or maybe it will be something going on about which we know no more than was known of Peenemunde in 1936.

Quite possibly it will be our own flourishing numbers—the human population of the world, which in the summer of 1986 passed the five billion mark—and such consequent problems as the ravaging of irreplaceable resources. It is estimated that the tropical rain forests of the world are being destroyed (mostly to make room for agriculture) at the rate of an area the size of Nebraska every year, and since these forests are home to more species of terrestrial life than anywhere else, their destruction could in the long run be among the most tragic of mistakes.

Who and what have affirmed the human spirit in this fifty years of unprecedented change?

Roosevelt, in peace and in war; Churchill, as few leaders ever have (“The nation had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to give the roar,” he said on his eightieth birthday); Anne Frank, whose The Diary of a Young Girl, the great book of World War II, will be read as long as there are books; Rosa Parks, who refused to get up and move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955; Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa; the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II, a product of the human mind that departed earth nine years ago, traveled three billion miles, and in January 1986 succeeded in photographing the planet Uranus, in the dark, while moving at a speed of about forty thousand miles an hour; and Niels Bohr, who had a horseshoe nailed over his front door for luck and who, when questioned by a skeptical colleague on whether he believed in such superstition, responded, “Oh, no, but I am told that it works even if you don’t believe it.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Recommended Itinerary

IONCE KNEW an able and accomplished man who had been fired from his first job after college because his employer decided he was deficient in positive attitude. “You’ll never go anywhere,” he was told as he departed. Unable to find another job, he spent the next several months seeing the world and, remembering the old employer and those parting words, he took particular pleasure in sending him a postcard from each stop along the way, from one foreign capital after another, to let him know just how far he was going.

I want you of the graduating Middlebury class of 1986 all to go far.

I want you to see Italy—Florence, in particular—at least once in your lifetime. I hope you can spend an hour in front of the great, five-hundred-year-old Botticelli at the Ufizzi, The Birth of Venus. Do it for the unparalleled pleasure of it, but also so you will have the experience to draw on whenever overtaken by the common hubris of our time, which is that our time outranks all others in all attainments.

I hope by the time you are my age you will have been to Edinburgh, little Edinburgh, and walked its stone streets and read its great thinkers and considered their impact on our own Founding Fathers.

Go to Palenque—Palenque, the stupendous Mayan ruin in the beautiful Mexican province of Chiapas. Climb the long stairway of the central pyramid-tomb to the very top and, with the main palace and other monuments spread before you, try to keep in mind that what you are seeing is only a fraction of what once was and that all of it was built under the rule of one man who lived more than a thousand years ago, a king called Pacal, a name virtually unknown to North Americans, except for a handful of scholars, yet plainly one of the most remarkable leaders in the whole history of our hemisphere. He had to have been. You need only see Palenque to know that.

I hope you go to Italy and Scotland and to places like Palenque because I think you will afterward see and understand your own country more clearly. That is an old idea, I know—that the country you learn most about by traveling abroad is your own—but then some old ideas bear repeating.

But you must also go please to Monticello. Walk through the vegetable garden that Jefferson carved out of the south side of his “little mountain.” Tour his extraordinary house, see his trees, enjoy the view, so much of which still looks as he saw it. But pay particular attention to the vegetable garden and remember what it tells you about patriotism.

It is eighty feet wide and one thousand feet in length. He grew no fewer than 450 varieties of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and herbs. Four hundred and fifty varieties! The garden was begun in 1774, which makes it older than the United States. He was constantly experimenting, trying “new” vegetables like okra and eggplant and Arikara beans brought back from the Lewis and Clark expedition. He grew fifteen varieties of peas alone.

In his perfect hand in his garden diary he recorded all that he planted there, where, when, and the time it came to his table. He considered agriculture a science to be taken seriously. But his patriotism was also involved. “No greater service can be rendered any country,” he once said, “than to introduce a new plant to its culture”—that from the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence!

Patriotism in a plant. How different from what the Hollywood impresarios have in mind for their centennial tribute to the Statue of Liberty.

Your travels should take you through the great heartland of Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. And you must get off the interstates. You must ride the side roads where the small towns are, and the farmland, where main streets are boarded up and you soon grow tired of counting the abandoned farms because there are so many. What kind of people are we if we turn our backs on the land and the people who have worked it for so long in all seasons?

Go to eastern Kentucky. See with your own eyes what the strip miners are doing, still, for all the ballyhoo about reclamation. The reports you have read about reclamation are largely lies. Go see the rape of the land that continues every day, not in far-off, who-gives-a-damn-about-it, good-for-nothing, backwoods hillbilly Kentucky, but your Kentucky, your country.

Look at people when you travel. Talk to people. Listen to what they have to say.

Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along—and furthermore, doesn’t care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this country, nor are they interested. We have not had a president of the United States with a sense of history since John Kennedy—not since before most of you were born. It ought to be mandatory for the office. As we have a language requirement for the Foreign Service, so we should have a history requirement for the White House. Harry S. Truman, who never had the benefit of a college education but who read history and biography and remembered it, once said, “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.”

If nothing else, seeing the country should lead you to its past, its story, and there is no part of your education to come that can be more absorbing or inspiring or useful to your role in society, whatever that may be. How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don’t know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?

Put Antietam on your list. Go to Antietam in Maryland and stand on the hillside near the old whitewashed Dunker church and try if you possibly can to imagine what happened there that terrible day, September 17, 1862. Once, last summer, sitting in a garden restaurant in Washington with a friend from out of town, she told me how moved she had been by her visit to the Vietnam Memorial. Had I seen it? she wanted to know. I said I had. I had gone the first time late in the afternoon of a day spent at Antietam.

“What is Antietam?” she said. She is a graduate of one of our great universities. She is an editor of the op-ed page of one of our largest, most influential newspapers. It was a bright summer afternoon and people at the adjoining tables were all happily eating and chatting.

“Antietam,” I said. “Maybe you know it as Sharpsburg.” She hadn’t any idea of what I was talking about. I said there are 57,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial and the Vietnam War lasted eleven years. At the Battle of Antietam in one day there were 23,000 casualties. In one day. It was not just the worst, bloodiest day of the Civil War; its toll in human life exceeded that of any day in our history. It happened hardly more than an hour’s drive from where we were sitting, and she had never heard of it.

I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places. Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present?

For a lift of the spirits walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the surpassing masterworks from our past and as strong and enduring a symbol of affirmation as I know. There is something wonderful about a bridge, almost any bridge, but it is our greatest bridge.

Or go to a tiny graveyard on the Nebraska prairie north of the little town of Red Cloud and look about until you find a small headstone. It reads “Anna Pavelka, 1869-1955.”

By every fashionable index used to measure success and importance, Anna Pavelka was nobody. Three weeks ago my wife Rosalee and I were among several hundred visitors who arrived in a caravan of Red Cloud school buses to pay her homage. Who was she and why did we bother?

She was born Anna Sadilek in Mizzovic, Bohemia, present-day Czechoslovakia, in 1869. In 1883, at age fourteen, she sailed with her family to America to settle on the treeless Nebraska prairie in a sod hut. Some time later, in despair over the struggle and isolation of his alien new life, her father killed himself. As a suicide he was denied burial in the Catholic cemetery. They buried him instead beside the road and the road makes a little jog at the spot there still.

Annie afterward worked as a “hired girl” in Red Cloud. She fell in love. She left town with a railroad man she hoped to marry, but was deserted by him and forced to return. She bore an illegitimate child. Later, she married John Pavelka, also of Bohemia, who had been a tailor’s apprentice in New York, a city man, and who knew little of farming. She ran the farm and she bore him, I believe, eleven more children. She spent her life on the farm there on the prairie.

And that’s about all there is to the story—except that she adored her children and her farm and she was also known to a younger woman from Red Cloud named Willa Cather who transformed her life into a very great and enduring American novel called My Antonia. The Antonia of the story—the Anna Sadilek Pavelka of real life—was a figure of heroic staying power. But it is her faith and joy in life, her warmth that matter most. “At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,” says her city-man husband at the close of the novel, remembering his first years in Nebraska, “but my woman is got such a warm heart.”

Anna Pavelka reaches out to us because of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the transfiguring touch” of Willa Cather’s art, because of what she, through Willa Cather, says about the human spirit.

Take the novels of Willa Cather when you go to Nebraska. Bring Faulkner when you’re going south. Take Cather, Faulkner—take books wherever you go. Read. Read all you can. Read history, biography. Read Dumas Malone’s masterful biography of Jefferson and Paul Horgan’s epic history of the Rio Grande, Great River. Read Luigi Barzini’s books on Italy and America. Read the published journals of those who traveled the Oregon Trail. Read the novels of Maya Angelou and Robertson Davies; read Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poems of Robert Penn Warren. As much as you have read in these four years, it is only the beginning. However little television you watch, watch less. If your experience is anything like mine, the books that you read in the next ten years will be the most important books in your lives.

When to go? Always a question. I think of a comment by the late George Aiken about the pruning of trees. “Some say you shouldn’t prune except at the right time of year,” he said. “I generally do it when the saw is sharp.”

George Aiken, of Vermont, as I hope you know, was one of the best things that ever happened to the United States Senate. Wherever you go, don’t forget Vermont. Don’t forget this lovely town and these mountains and the people who live here.

Go with confidence. Prize tolerance and horse sense. And some time, somewhere along the way, do something for your country.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Simon Willard’s Clock

SIMON WILLARD was never a member of Congress in the usual sense. Simon Willard of Roxbury, Massachusetts, was a clockmaker early in the nineteenth century and he did it all by hand and by eye.

In cutting his wheel teeth [reads an old account], he did not mark out the spaces on the blank [brass] wheel and cut the teeth to measure, but he cut, rounded up and finished the teeth as he went along, using his eye only in spacing, and always came out even…

It is doubtful if such a feat in mechanics was ever done before, and certainly never since.

The exact date is uncertain, but about 1837, when he was in his eighties, Simon Willard made a most important clock. I will come back to that.

On a June afternoon in 1775, a small boy stood with his mother on a distant knoll, watching the Battle of Bunker Hill. Seven years later, at age fourteen, he was a diplomatic secretary at the court of Russia’s Catherine II; at twenty-eight, minister to the Hague. He was minister plenipotentiary to Russia at the time of Alexander I. He saw Napoleon return from Elba. He was a senator, secretary of state, and finally president. He had seen more, contributed more to the history of his time than almost anyone of his time.

But then, as no former president ever had, John Quincy Adams returned here to the hill to take a seat in the House of Representatives, in the Twenty-second Congress. Adams was thrilled at the prospect. “No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure,” he wrote in his diary. And it was here that this extraordinary American had his finest hours.

He took his seat in the old House—in what is now Statuary Hall—in 1831. Small, fragile, fearing no one, he spoke his mind and his conscience. He championed mechanical “improvements” and scientific inquiry. To no one in Congress are we so indebted for the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution. With Congressman Lincoln of Illinois and Corwin of Ohio, he cried out against the Mexican War, and for eight long years, almost alone, hooted and howled at, he battled the infamous Gag Rule imposed by Southerners to prevent any discussion of petitions against slavery. Adams hated slavery, but was fighting, he said, more for the unlimited right of all citizens to have their petitions heard, whatever their cause. It was a gallant fight and he won. The Gag Rule was permanently removed.

Earlier this year, at the time of the inaugural ceremonies, I heard a television commentator broadcasting from Statuary Hall complain of the resonance and echoes in the room. What resonance! What echoes!

John Quincy Adams is a reminder that giants come in all shapes and sizes and that, at times, they have walked these halls, their voices have been heard, their spirit felt here. Listen, please, to this from his diary, from March 29, 1841:

The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell are arrayed against any man who now in this North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade; and what can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties dropping from me one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head—what can I do for the cause of God and man…. Yet my conscience presses me on; let me but die upon the breach.

And how he loved the House of Representatives:

The forms and proceedings of the House [he writes], this call of the States for petitions, the colossal emblem of the Union over the Speaker’s chair, this historic Muse at the clock, the echoing pillars of the hall, the tripping Mercuries who bear the resolutions and amendments between the members and the chair, the calls of ayes and noes, with the different intonations of the answers, from different voices, the gobbling manner of the clerks in reading over the names, the tone of the Speaker in announcing the vote, and the varied shades of pleasure and pain in the countenances of the members on hearing it, would form a fine subject for a descriptive poem.

Some nights he returned to his lodgings so exhausted he could barely crawl up the stairs. In the winter of 1848, at age eighty, after seventeen years in Congress, Adams collapsed at his desk. A brass plate in the floor of Statuary Hall marks the place.

He was carried to the Speaker’s office and there, two days later, he died. At the end Henry Clay in tears was holding his hand. Congressman Lincoln helped with the funeral arrangements. Daniel Webster wrote the inscription for the casket….

Many splendid books have been written about Congress: Harry McPherson’s A Political Education; Allen Drury’s A Senate Journal; Alvin Josephy’s On the Hill and Kings of the Hill by Representative Richard Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney; Rayburn, a fine recent biography by D. B. Hardeman and Donald Bacon; and The Great Triumvirate, about Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, by Merrill Peterson. Now, in this bicentennial year, comes volume one of Senator Robert Byrd’s monumental history of the Senate.

But a book that does justice to the story of Adams’s years in the House, one of the vivid chapters in our political history, is still waiting to be written, as are so many others.

Our knowledge, our appreciation, of the history of Congress and those who have made history here are curiously, regrettably deficient. The truth is historians and biographers have largely neglected the subject. Two hundred years after the creation of Congress, we have only begun to tell the story of Congress—which, of course, means the opportunity for those who write and who teach could not be greater.

There are no substantial, up-to-date biographies of Justin Morrill of Vermont, author of the Land Grant College Act…or Jimmy Byrnes, considered the most skillful politician of his day…or Joe Robinson, the tenacious Democratic majority leader whose sudden death in an apartment not far from here meant defeat for Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme…or Carl Hayden of Arizona, who served longer in the Senate than anybody, forty-one years.

We have John Garraty’s life of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., but none of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Search the library shelves for a good biography of Alben Barkley or Speaker Joe Martin and you won’t find one. They don’t exist. The only biography of Senator Arthur Vandenberg ends in 1945, when his career was just taking off.

The twentieth-century senator who has been written about most is Joe McCarthy. There are a dozen books about McCarthy. Yet there is no biography of the senator who had the backbone to stand up to him first—Margaret Chase Smith.

“I speak as a Republican,” she said on that memorable day in the Senate. “I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American. I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”

We have books on people like Bilbo and Huey Long, but no real biographies of George Aiken or Frank Church.

Richard Russell of Georgia, one of the most highly regarded influential figures to serve in the Senate in this century, used to take home old bound copies of the Congressional Record, to read in the evenings for pleasure. He loved the extended debates and orations of older times and would remark to his staff how strange it made him feel to realize that those who had once counted for so much and so affected the course of American life, even American ideals, were entirely forgotten.

You wonder how many who pour in and out of the Russell Building each day, or the Cannon Building, have any notion who Richard Russell was? Or Joseph Gurney Cannon? There is no adequate biography of either man.

As Speaker of the House and head of the Rules Committee, Uncle Joe Cannon of Danville, Illinois, once wielded power here of a kind unimaginable today. He was tough, shrewd, profane, picturesque, and a terrible stumbling block. It was the new twentieth century. The country wanted change, reform. Uncle Joe did not. “Everything is all right out west and around Danville,” he would say. “The country don’t need any legislation.”

When a bill came up to add a new function to the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, making it the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries and Birds, Cannon protested. He didn’t like adding “and Birds”…“and Birds” was new and different and thus unacceptable.

The insurrection that ended Cannon’s iron rule, a revolt here in this chamber in 1910, was led by George Norris of Red Willow County, Nebraska. There have been few better men in public life than George Norris and few more important turning points in our political history. Yet how few today know anything about it.

How much more we need to know about the first Congress when everything was new and untried.

How much we could learn from a history of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Imagine the book that could be written about the Senate in the momentous years of the New Deal. Think of the changes brought about then. Think of who was in the Senate—Robert Wagner, Burton K. Wheeler, Hugo Black, Alben Barkley, Huey Long, Tom Connally, Vandenberg, Taft, George Norris, Borah of Idaho, and J. Hamilton Lewis, a politician of the old school who still wore wing collars and spats and a pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers.

It was “Ham” Lewis who advised a newly arrived freshman senator named Truman from Missouri, “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”

For some unaccountable reason, there is not even a first-rate history of the Capitol, nothing comparable, say, to William Seale’s history of the White House. This magnificent building grew in stages, as America grew. It is really an assembly of different buildings, representative of different times, different aspirations, and the story should be told that way.

We are all so accustomed to seeing our history measured and defined by the presidency that we forget how much of the story of the country happened here.

Beside Congress, the presidency seems clear, orderly, easy to understand. The protagonists are relatively few in number and they take their turns on stage one at a time.

Congress seems to roll on like a river. Someone said you can never cross the same river twice. Congress is like that—always there and always changing. Individuals come and go, terms overlap. The stage is constantly crowded. The talk and the rumpus go on and on. And there is such a lot of humbug and so much that has been so overwhelmingly boring.

But let no one misunderstand, and least of all you who serve here, we have as much reason to take pride in Congress as in any institution in our system. Congress, for all its faults, has not been the unbroken procession of clowns and thieves and posturing fools so often portrayed. We make sport of Congress, belittle it, bewail its ineptitudes and inefficiency. We have from the beginning, and probably we always will. You do it yourselves, particularly at election time. But what should be spoken of more often, and more widely understood, are the great victories that have been won here, the decisions of courage and vision achieved, the men and women of high purpose and integrity, and, yes, at times genius, who have served here.

It was Congress, after all, that provided the Homestead Act, ended slavery, ended child labor, built the railroads, built the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system. It was Congress that paid for Lewis and Clark and for our own travels to the moon. It was Congress that changed the course of history with Lend Lease and the Marshall Plan, that created Social Security, TVA, the GI Bill, fair employment laws, and the incomparable Library of Congress.

It is not by chance that we Americans have built here on our Capitol Hill, side by side, with the center of government, our greatest library, a free and open repository of all books and ideas in all languages from all parts of the world.

In two hundred years, 11,220 men and women have served in the House and Senate, and while the proportions of black Americans, of women, of Hispanic and Asian Americans, and native Americans have not, and do not now, reflect the country at large, it is nonetheless the place where all our voices are heard. Here, as they say—here as perhaps we cannot say too often—the people rule.

We need to know more about Congress. We need to know more about Congress because we need to know more about leadership. And about human nature.

We may also pick up some ideas.

Considering the way defense spending has been handled in recent years, we might, for example, think of reinstating an investigating committee like the Truman Committee of World War II, which saved billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

If we are unwilling to vote the taxes to pay for the war on drugs, to save our country, why not sell bonds as we did in two world wars?

Above all we need to know more about Congress because we are Americans. We believe in governing ourselves.

The boy should read history, the first John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, about the education of their son, John Quincy. History. History. History. We must all read history, and write and publish and teach history better.

Who were those people in the old bound volumes of the Congressional Record? What moved them? What did they know that we do not?

Our past is not only prologue, it can be bracing. In Emerson’s words, “The world is young: The former great men [and women] call to us affectionately.”

I have decided that the digital watch is the perfect symbol of an imbalance in outlook in our day. It tells us only what time it is now, at this instant, as if that were all anyone would wish or need to know….Which brings me back to Simon Willard.

In the years when the House of Representatives met in Statuary Hall, all deliberations were watched over by the Muse of History, Clio. She is there still over the north doorway. She is riding the winged Car of History, as it is called, keeping note in her book. The idea was that those who sat below would take inspiration from her. They would be reminded that they too were part of history, that their words and actions would face the judgment of history, and that they could count themselves part of an honorable heritage.

There is alas, in this chamber, no such reminder—only the television cameras.

Clio and the Car of History are by the Italian sculptor Carlo Franzoni of Carrara. The clock in the foreground is by Simon Willard. It was, as I said, installed about 1837. Its inner workings, cut freehand by Simon Willard, ticked off the minutes and hours through debate over the Gag Rule, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, tariffs, postal service, the establishment of the Naval Academy, statehood for Arkansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin, matters related to immigration, the Gold Rush, statehood for California, the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the final hours of John Quincy Adams.

It is also a clock with two hands and an old-fashioned face, the kind that shows what time it is now…what time it used to be…and what time it will become.

And it still keeps time.

On we go.

Index

Abramson, Rudy

Adams, Henry

Adams, John Quincy

Adamson, Edward

Advise and Consent (book)

Agassiz, Alexander

Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary

Agassiz, Louis

Aiken, George

Air and Space Museum

Albers, Joseph

Almost to the Presidency (book)

Amador, Dr. Manuel

America First Committee

American Mining Congress

American Museum of National History

American Naturalist magazine

Anderson Cottage, Washington, D.C.

Antietam, Md.

Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People

Applewhite

Arango, Clemencia

The Aristocrat (book)

Armstrong, Neil

Army-McCarthy hearings

Arthur, President Chester A.

Aspinwall, William Henry

Atget, Eugene

Audobon, John James

Audobon magazine

Autobiography of Values (book)

Aviators and aviation writing

The Awakening Land (book)

Bachman, John

Backus, Edward

Baldwin, James L.,

Balfour, Arthur James

Balfour Declaration of

Bancroft, Frederic

Barnett, Vernon

Barnum, P. T.

Barton, Clara

Bartram, William

Beecher, Catherine

Beecher, Henry Ward

Beecher, Lyman

The Beef Bonanza; or How to Get Rich on the Plains (book)

Bell, Alexander Graham

Benton, Thomas Hart

Berry, Wendell

Bethell, Tom

Bethlehem Steel

Bickmore, Albert S.

Bidlack, Benjamin

Bidlack Treaty of

Bigelow, Poultney

Bimbaum, Bernard

The Birth of Venus (painting)

Black, Tom

Blaine, Senator James G.

Blair, Francis P., Sr.

Blair House

Blake, Thomas

Blixen, Baron Bror von

Bohr, Niels

Bolivar, Simon

Bonpland, Aime

Boorstin, Daniel J.

Borglum, Gutzon

Botticelli

Bridges: The Spans of North America (book)

Bridgewater, Mavis

Bringing Home the New Cook (painting)

Bromfield, Louis

Brooklyn Bridge

drawings of

Brooklyn Museum

Brooks, Van Wyck

Brown, Mrs. Siller

Buck, Eliza

Bunker, Ellsworth

Burwell, William

Butler, George P.

Butterflies

Byron, Lord

Canal del Dique

Cannon, Joseph Gurney

Carlyle, Thomas

Caro, Robert A.

Carter, Jimmy

Carson, Rachel

Cary, Elizabeth Cabot

Caten, Eva

Cather, Willa

Catherwood, Frederick

Catton, Bruce

Caudill, Anne

Caudill, Cro Carr

Caudill, Harry

Caudill, James

Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains in (painting)

Century Illustrated Magazine

Century magazine

Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill (painting)

Chargres, Panama

Charles

Chauncy, Henry

Childs, Marquis

Churchill, Winston

Civil rights movement

Clark, William

Clay, Henry

Cleveland, Grover

Coffelt, Leslie

Cold War

Collier’s magazine

Collingwood, Francis

Colón, Panama

Columbia Historical Society

Columbus, Christopher

Commonplace (book)

Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique

Congress

Consolidation Coal Company

Continental Divide

Continental Oil Company

Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (book)

Corcoran, Tom

Cornett, Lilly

A Country of Strangers (book)

Courier-Journal (newspaper)

Culebra Cut

Cushing, Cardinal

Custer, George Armstrong

Custis-Lee Mansion, Washington, D.C.

Cuvier, Georges de

Dana, James Wright

Dark Hills to the Westward (book)

Darwin, Charles

Davis, Richard Harding

Dear Lord Rothschild (book)

Delacroix

Democracy (book)

Democratic National Convention

Denning, August

The Diary of a Young Girl (book)

Dillinger, John

Dinesen, Isak

The Discoverers (book)

Douglas, Justice William O.

Douglass, Frederick

Douglass, Thomas

Drifting before the Storm (painting)

Drummond, Henry

Drury, Allen

Earhart, Amelia

Edward VII

Edwards, Owen

Einstein, Albert

Eisele, Albert

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Eliot, Charles W.

Elliot, George

Emancipation Proclamation

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Engineer’s Pocket Book

Enigma project

Essay on Classification (book)

Etudes sur les Glaciers (book)

Evans, Walker

Evening on a Canadian Lake (painting)

A Farewell to Steam (book)

Farrington, E. F

Fermi, Enrico

The Fields (book)

Fifty Years at Panama (book)

Finch-Hatton, Denys

Fired On (painting)

Fleas

Fleas, Flukes & Cuckoos (book)

Floor of the Sky (book)

The Folger Shakespeare Library

Foote, Roxana

Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C.

Frank, Anne

Franzoni, Carlo

Frémont, John Charles, General

French, Daniel Chester

French, John

Freud, Sigmund

Fugitive Slave Bill

Fuson, Tom

Gable, Clark

Gag Rule

Gallatin, Albert

Gargarin, Uri

Garland, Hamlin

Gaulle, Charles de

GI Bill

Gilbert, Cass

Gilder, Richard Watson

Gish, Lillian

Gish, Tom

Glenn, John

Goddard, Robert

Goering, Hermann

Goethals, George Washington

Goethe

Grand Central Depot

Grant, Ulysses S.

The Grapes of Wrath (book)

Gray, Asa

Great Depression

“The Great Wire Fraud,”

Grierson, John

Grim, Elmore

Guernica, Spain

Guide to the Study of Insects (book)

Guillet, Gail

The Guns of August (book)

Haigh, J. Lloyd

Hall, James

Halle, Louis J., Jr.

The Hand of Man on America (book)

Hanna, Mark

Harper, Henry

Harper’s Monthly

Harper’s Weekly magazine

Harriman, W. Averell

Harris, Frank

Harris, Ross

Hassam, Childe

Hawthorne, Nathaniel,

Hayes, Judge L.

Healy, George P. A.

Hearst, William Randolph

Henry, Joseph

Hewitt, Abram

Hikes, Mr. and Mrs. Charles

Hild, Joe

Hildenbrand, Wilhelm

The History of the Conquest of Mexico (book)

Hitler, Adolph

Hoffman, Medora von

Hoffman, Louis von

“Holbrook and Underwood War,”

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr.

Hooker, Isabella Beecher

Hopper, Edward

Hudson, W. H.

Hughes, Colonel George

Humboldt, Alexander von

major contributions of

Humboldt Current

Humphrey, Hubert

Hupert, David

Hyatt, Alpheus

Ingersoll, Robert

Institute of Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen

International Harvester

James, William

Jeblick, William

Jefferson, Thomas

Jewett, John P.

Johnson, Lyndon

Jones, Henry

Jones, Loyal

Jordan, Karl

Kaplan, Milton

Keller, Dean

Kennedy, John F.

Kingsley, William

Kinsella, Thomas

Kip, William Ingraham

Knopf, Alfred A.

The Lady (book)

Land Grant College Act

Lane, George

Last Flight (book)

Lee, Robert E.

Leech, Margaret

Lesseps, Ferdinand de

Lewis, “Ham,”

Lewis, John L.

Lewis, Meriwether

Lewis, Sinclair

Library of Congress

Life magazine

The Light in the Forest (book)

Lincoln, Abraham

Lincoln and His America (book)

Lincoln Memorial

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow

Lindbergh, Charles

Listen! The Wind (book)

The Little Prince (book)

Lodge, Henry Cabot

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Long Island Historical Society

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

Louchheim, Katie

Low, Seth

Lowell Institute

Luce, Clare Booth

Lyceums

Lyell, Sir Charles

Lyman, Theodore

Lynch, Mike

Madison, Dolly

Madison, James

The Making of the New Deal (book)

Manhattan Project

Markham, Beryl

Martin, C. C.

Martin, LeRoy

Martin Luther King Library

Matterhorn

Maury, Matthew Fontaine

Mayan ruins

Mayer, Nathan

McCarthy, Eugene

McCarthy, Joe

McGarran, John

McGarrity, John

McKinley, William

McNulty, George W.

Mead, Margaret

Mellon, Andrew

Melsheimer, Frederick Ernst

Millstein, Barbara

The Minister’s Wooing (book)

Montufar, Carlos

Mores, Maria de

Mores, Marquis de

Morris, Edmund

Morris, Sylvia

Morris, Wright

Morse, Edward Sylvester

Morton, Dr. Samuel George

The Mountain Eagle (newspaper)

Murphy, Senator Henry Cruse

Murrow, Edward R.

Museum of Comparative Zoology

Mussolini, Benito

My Antonia (book)

My Life and Loves (book)

Napoleon

National Agricultural Library

National Archives

National Audobon Society

National Gallery

National Portrait Gallery

National Steel

National Trust for Historic Preservation

Nature Conservancy

Nevin, David

New Deal

New York Historical Society

New York Journal (newspaper)

Niemeyer, John Henry

Night Comes to the Cumberlands (book)

Night Flight (book)

Night Halt of the Cavalry (painting)

Norris, George

North to the Orient (book)

Norway, Nevil

Nuremberg trials

Occidental Petroleum

Octagon House, Washington, D.C.

Oken, Lorenz

Olmsted, Frederick Law

On the Beach (book)

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (book)

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

The Origin and History of the Books of the Bible (book)

Otis, Fessenden N.

Outing magazine

Out of Africa (film)

Pacal

Packard, Alpheus S.

Paine, William

Palenque

Panama Canal

Panama Canal Treaties

Panama Railroad

Panama Revolution

Park, Trenor W.

Parker, David S.

Parks, Rosa

The Path to Power (book)

Pavelka, Anna

Pavelka, John

Peale, Charles Willson

Personal Narrative (book)

Pim, Bedford Clapperton

Plowden, David

Plowden, Pleasance (Coggeshall)

Plowden, Sandra (Schoelkepf)

Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (book)

Pony Tracks (book)

Potomac Fever

Prescott, William Hickling

Principles of Zoology (book)

Putnam, Frederic

Putnam, George Palmer

Pyle, Howard

Raleigh, Sir Walter

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (book)

Rasbeck, Has

Reagan, Ronald

Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles (book)

Redfield, William C.

Redford, Robert

Reed, Dr. Walter

Reeson, Shorty

Reichstein, Tadeus

Reilly, James D.

Remington, Frederick

art of

death of

writing of

Remington, Seth Pierre

Remington, William

Reveille in Washington (book)

Reynolds, Paul R.

Richter, Conrad

Richter, Harvena (Achenbach)

Robinson, Frank

Robinson, Tracy

Rodale, J. I.

Roebling, Edmund

Roebling, Emily

Roebling, John Augustus

Roebling, John A.

Roebling, Washington

Roebling Bridge, Cincinnati

Rohe, Mies van der

Roosevelt, Anna

Roosevelt, Eleanor

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Roosevelt, Robert

Roosevelt, Theodore

Rothschild, Charles

Rothschild, Lionel

Rothschild, Miriam

Rothschild, Natty

Rothschild, Walter

Round Mountain Coal Company

Rourk, Constance Mayfield

Rousseau, Harry H.

Runnels, Ran

Rushton, J. Henry

Russell, Richard

Sackrider, Clara Bascomb

Safford, Merritt

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de

Samuels, Harold

Samuels, Peggy

Sand, George

Sargent, John Singer

Schizophrenia Research Fund, London

Schizophrenics, art of

Schumacher, Raoul

Scudder, Samuel

The Sea Around Us (book)

The Sea of Grass (book)

Serrell, Edward J.

Sewall, Bill

Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate

Shrady, George Frederick

Shrady, Henry Merwin

Shute, Nevil

Sierra Club

Silent Spring (book)

Silliman, Benjamin

A Simple Honorable Man (book)

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

The Skin of Our Teeth (play)

Smith, Al

Smith, Gene

Smith, Margaret Chase

Smithsonian Institution

Sousa, John Philip

Space program

Specimen Days (book)

The Spirit of St. Louis (book)

“Spoil bank,” as term

Spring in Washington (book)

St. John’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C.

St. Nicholas magazine

Steel (book)

Steinbeck, John

Stephens, John Lloyd

Stieglitz, Alfred

A Stillness at Appomattox (book)

Stowe, Calvin Ellis

Stowe, Eliza

Stowe, Frederick

Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Stowe, Henry

Strand, Paul

Strip mining

advantages of

broad-form deeds on

ecological consequences of

laws on

reclaimed mines

Sturgill, Bill

Suez Canal

Supple, Henry

Sweeny, “Brains,”

Sydenham, Alvin H.

Tayloe, John

Taylor, Bayard

Thomas, Augustus

Thoreau, Henry David

Thornton, William

Television

Tennessee Valley Authority

Totten, George M., Colonel

The Town (book)

Trains Magazine

Traub, Robert

Trautwine, John Cresson

Treaty of Ghent

The Trees (book)

Truman, Harry

Truman Committee of World War II

Truman Doctrine of

Tuchman, Barbara

Tugboat (book)

Twachtman, John

Twain, Mark

Tweed, “Boss,”

Two-point perspective

Udall, Stewart

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Underground Railroad

Underwood, Alvis

United Mine Workers

United Nations

United States Army

U.S. Bureau of Outdoor Recreation

U.S. Steel

Valentine, Francis P.

Valentine, Frank

Vallombrosa, Antoine de

Vanderbilt, Cornelius

Vecchio, Joseph

Vietnam Memorial

Views of Nature (book)

The Virginian (book)

Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (book)

Von Braun, Wernher

Voyages aux Regions Equinoctiales du Nouveau Continent, Fait Dans Les Années (book)

Voyage of the Beagle (book)

Voyager II

Walesa, Lech

Warren, Emily

Warren, General G. K.

Wartime Writings (book)

Washington, D.C.

Washington Itself (book)

The Waters of Kronos (book)

We (book)

Webster, Daniel

Weir, John Ferguson

Weis, Paul

Welch, Joseph

West with the Night (book)

Wheeler, Richard

When the Cheering Stopped (book)

White, Minor

Whitman, Walt

Whitney Museum of Modern Art

Whymper, Edward

Wilder, Thornton

Wildflowers

Wild West, heroic vision of

Willard, Simon

Williams, J. J.

Wilson, Alexander

Wilson, Edith Boiling

Wilson, Woodrow

Wind, Sand and Stars (book)

The Winning of the West (book)

Wister, Owen

Woiwode, Larry

Wood, Leonard

World War II

Wright brothers

Also by David McCullough

JOHN ADAMS

BRAVE COMPANIONS

TRUMAN

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS

THE GREAT BRIDGE

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1972 by David McCullough
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

The quotation from My Life and Loves, by Frank Harris, is reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.; copyright 1925 by Frank Harris, © 1953 by Nellie Harris, © 1963 by Arthur Leonard Ross as executor of the Frank Harris Estate.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

McCullough, David G.
The great bridge.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Brooklyn Bridge (New York, N.Y.)
I. Title.
TG25.N53M32   624.5’5’097471   72-081823

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1831-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN-10: 0-7432-1831-0

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com

For my mother and father

Contents

AUTHOR'S NOTE

PART ONE

1. The Plan

2. Man of Iron

3. The Genuine Language of America

4. Father and Son

5. Brooklyn

6. The Proper Person to See

7. The Chief Engineer

PART TWO

8. All According to Plan

9. Down in the Caisson

10. Fire

11. The Past Catches Up

12. How Natural, Right, and Proper

13. The Mysterious Disorder

14. The Heroic Mode

PART THREE

15. At the Halfway Mark

16. Spirits of ‘76

17. A Perfect Pandemonium

18. Number 8, Birmingham Gauge

19. The Gigantic Spinning Machine

20. Wire Fraud

21. Emily

22. The Man in the Window

23. And Yet the Bridge Is Beautiful

24. The People’s Day

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WHEN I began this book I was setting out to do something that had not been done before. I wanted to tell the story of the most famous bridge in the world and in the context of the age from which it sprang. The Brooklyn Bridge has been photographed, painted, engraved, embroidered, analyzed as a work of art and as a cultural symbol; it has been the subject of a dozen or more magazine articles and one famous epic poem; it has been talked about and praised more it would seem than anything ever built by Americans. But a book telling the full story of how it came to be, the engineering involved, the politics, the difficulties encountered, the heroism of its builders, the impact it had on the lives and imaginations of ordinary people, a book that would treat this important historical event as a rare human achievement, had not been written and such was my goal.

I was also greatly interested in the Roeblings, about whom quite a little had been written, but not for some time or from the kind of research I had in mind. Moreover, a good deal of legend about the Roeblings—father, son, and daughter-in-law—still persisted, along with considerable confusion. It seemed to me that the story of these remarkable people deserved serious study. It is an extraordinary story, to say the least, not only in human terms, but in what it reveals about America in the late nineteenth century, a time that has not been altogether appreciated for what it was.

And beyond that I had a particular interest in the city of Brooklyn itself, having spent part of my life there, when my wife and I were first married, in a house just down the street from where Washington and Emily Roebling once lived.

But early in my research another objective emerged. It became clear that this, to a large degree, was to be Washington Roebling’s book. There was, for example, that day in the library at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when I unlocked a large storage closet to see for the first time shelf after shelf of his notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, blueprints, old newspapers he had saved, even the front-door knocker to his house in Brooklyn. No one knew then what all was in the collection. There were boxes of his papers that had not been opened in years, bundles of letters that so far as I could tell had been examined by nobody. The excitement of the moment can be imagined. The contents of the collection, plus those in another large collection at Rutgers University, both of which are described in the Bibliography, were such that they often left me with the odd feeling of actually having known the Chief Engineer of the bridge. He was not only the book’s principal character, he was the author’s main personal contact with that distant day and age. So it has also been my aim to convey, with all the historical accuracy possible, just what manner of man this was who built the Brooklyn Bridge, who achieved so much against such staggering odds, and who asked so little.

I am not an engineer and the technical side of the research has often been slow going for me. But though I have written the book for the general reader, I have not bypassed the technical side. If I could make it clear enough that I could understand it, if it was interesting to me, then my hope was that it would be both clear and interesting to the reader.

During my years of research and writing I have been extremely fortunate in the assistance I have received from many people and I should like to express to them my abiding gratitude. For their kindnesses and help I wish to thank the librarians at both Rutgers and Rensselaer and in particular Miss Irene K. Lionikis of the Rutgers Library and Mrs. Orlyn LaBrake and Mrs. Adrienne Grenfell of the library at Rensselaer. Herbert R. Hands of the American Society of Civil Engineers, David Plowden, Dr. Milton Mazer, Dr. Roy Korson, Professor of Pathology at the University of Vermont, W. H. Pearson, Sidney W. Davidson, J. Robert Maguire, Charlotte La Rue of the Museum of the City of New York, Regina M. Kellerman, William S. Goodwin, Allan R. Talbot, John Talbot, and Jack Schiff, the engineer in charge of New York’s East River bridges, each contributed to the research. And Dr. Paul Gugliotta of New York, architect and engineer, said some things over lunch one day years ago that started me thinking about doing such a book and later very kindly walked the bridge with me and answered many questions.

I am especially indebted to Robert M. Vogel, Curator, Division of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at the Smithsonian Institution, to John A. Kouwenhoven, authority on New York City history and on James B. Eads, to Nomer Gray, bridge engineer, who has made his own extensive technical studies of the bridge, and to Charlton Ogburn, author and friend. Each of them read the manuscript and offered numerous critical suggestions, but any errors in fact or judgment that may appear in the book are entirely my own.

I would like to acknowledge, too, the contribution of three members of the Roebling family: Mr. Joseph M. Roebling of Trenton and Mr. F. W. Roebling, also of Trenton, who gave of their time to talk with me about their forebears, and Mrs. James L. Elston of Fayetteville, Arkansas, who let me borrow an old family scrapbook.

I am grateful for the research facilities and assistance offered by the staffs of the following: the Trenton Free Public Library; the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh; the Brooklyn Public Library; the Long Island Historical Society, Brooklyn, and particularly to Mr. John H. Lindenbusch, its executive director; the Newport Historical Society, Newport, Rhode Island; the Library of Congress; the New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Engineering Societies Library, New York; the Middlebury College Library, Middlebury, Vermont; the Baker Library, Dartmouth College; the Putnam County Historical Society and the Julia Butterfield Memorial Library at Cold Spring, New York; and the Butler County Library, Butler, Pennsylvania.

I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness to two valued friends who are no longer living—to Conrad Richter, for his encouragement and example, and to Clarence A. Barnes, my father-in-law, who was born on Willow Street on Brooklyn Heights, when the bridge was still unfinished, and who could talk better than anyone I knew about times gone by.

Lastly I would like to express my thanks to Paul R. Reynolds, who provides steady encouragement and sound advice; to Peter Schwed, Publisher of Simon and Schuster, who had faith in the idea from the start; to Jo Anne Lessard, who typed the manuscript; to my children, for their confidence and optimism; and to my wife, Rosalee, who helped more than anyone.

—DAVID MCCULLOUGH

PART ONE

1

The Plan

The shapes arise!

—Walt Whitman

THEY MET at his request on at least six different occasions, beginning in February 1869. With everyone present, there were just nine in all—the seven distinguished consultants he had selected; his oldest son, Colonel Washington Roebling, who kept the minutes; and himself, the intense, enigmatic John Augustus Roebling, wealthy wire rope manufacturer of Trenton, New Jersey, and builder of unprecedented suspension bridges.

They met at the Brooklyn Gas Light Company on Fulton Street, where the new Bridge Company had been conducting its affairs until regular offices could be arranged for. They gathered about the big plans and drawings he had on display, listening attentively as he talked and asking a great many questions. They studied his preliminary surveys and the map upon which he had drawn a strong red line cutting across the East River, indicating exactly where he intended to put the crowning work of his career.

The consultants were his idea. In view of “the magnitude of the undertaking and the large interests connected therewith,” he had written, it was “only right” that his plans be “subjected to the careful scrutiny” of a board of experts. He did not want their advice or opinions, only their sanction. If everything went as he wanted and expected, they would approve his plan without reservation. They would announce that in their considered professional opinion his bridge was perfectly possible. They would put an end to the rumors, silence the critics, satisfy every last stockholder that he knew what he was about, and he could at last get on with his work.

To achieve his purpose, to wind up with an endorsement no one could challenge, or at least no one who counted for anything professionally, he had picked men of impeccable reputation. None had a failure or black mark to his name. All were sound, practical builders themselves, men not given to offhand endorsements or to overstatement. With few exceptions, each had done his own share of pioneering at one time or other, and so theoretically ought still to be sympathetic to the untried. They were, in fact, about as eminent a body of civil engineers as could have been assembled then, and seen all together, with their display of white whiskers, their expansive shirt fronts and firm handshakes, they must have appeared amply qualified to pass judgment on just about anything. The fee for their services was to be a thousand dollars each, which was exactly a thousand dollars more than Roebling himself had received for all his own efforts thus far.

Chairman of the group was the sociable Horatio Allen, whose great girth, gleaming bald head, and Benjamin Franklin spectacles gave him the look of a character from Dickens. He fancied capes and silver-handled walking sticks and probably considered his professional standing second only to that of Roebling, which was hardly so. But like Roebling he had done well in manufacturing—in his case, with New York’s Novelty Iron Works—and forty years before he had made some history driving the first locomotive in America, the Stourbridge Lion, all alone and before a big crowd, on a test run at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. He had also, in the time since, been one of the principal engineers for New York’s Croton Aqueduct and so was sometimes referred to in biographical sketches as “the man who turned the water on.”

Then there was Colonel Julius Adams of Brooklyn, a former Army engineer, who was usually described as an expert on sewer construction, and who, in truth, was not quite in the same league as the others. He had, however, a number of influential friends in Brooklyn and for years he had been dabbling with designs for an East River bridge of his own. For a while it had even looked as though he might be given the chance to build it. When Roebling’s proposal was first made public, he had been among those to voice sharp skepticism. That he had been included as a consultant at this stage was taken by some as a sign that Roebling was not entirely the political innocent he was reputed to be.

William Jarvis McAlpine, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Kindly, genial, widely respected, he had built the enormous dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Albany Water Works, and a fair number of bridges. He was also the proud possessor of what must have been the most elaborate jowl whiskers in the profession and he was the one man in the group, the two Roeblings included, who had had any firsthand experience working with compressed-air foundations, or caissons, as they were called, which, in this particular case, was regarded as an attribute of major proportions.

Probably the best-known figure among them, however, was Benjamin Henry Latrobe of Baltimore, who had the face of a bank clerk, but whose endorsement alone would perhaps have been enough to settle the whole issue. He was the son and namesake of the famous English-born architect picked by Jefferson to design or remodel much of Washington, and who rebuilt the Capitol after it was burned by the British during the War of 1812. He had laid out most of the B&O Railroad and had been in charge of building a number of exceptional bridges in Maryland and Virginia.

And finally there was John J. Serrell, the only builder of suspension bridges in the group except for the Roeblings; J. Dutton Steele, chief engineer of the Reading Railroad; and James Pugh Kirkwood, a rather mournful-looking Scotsman who was an authority on hydraulics, among other things, and who, in 1848, in northeastern Pennsylvania, had built the beautiful stone-arched Starrucca Viaduct, then the most costly railroad bridge in the world.

There is no way of knowing what thoughts passed through the minds of such men as they first looked over Roebling’s drawings and listened to him talk. But it is also hard to imagine any of them remaining unimpressed for very long, for all their collective experience or their own considerable accomplishments or any professional jealousies there may have been. Nor does it seem likely that any of them failed to sense the historic nature of the moment. Roebling was the recognized giant of their profession, a lesser-Leonardo he would be called, and even on paper his bridge was clearly one of the monumental works of the age. To an engineer especially that would have been obvious.

A bridge over the East River, joining the cities of New York and Brooklyn, had been talked about for nearly as long as anyone could recall. According to the best history of Brooklyn ever written, a three-volume work by a medical doctor named Henry R. Stiles, Volume II of which appeared that same year of 1869, the idea for a bridge was exactly as old as the century, the first serious proposal having been recorded in Brooklyn in 1800. Stiles wrote that an old notation, found in a scrapbook, referred to an unnamed “gentleman of acknowledged abilities and good sense” who had a plan for a bridge that would take just two years to build. Probably the gentleman was Thomas Pope of New York, an altogether fascinating character, a carpenter and landscape gardener by trade, who had designed what he called his “Flying Pendent Lever Bridge,” an invention, as he saw it, available in all sizes and suitable for any site. His bridge to Brooklyn was to soar some two hundred feet over the water, with a tremendous cantilever fashioned entirely of wood, like “a rainbow rising on the shore,” he said in the little book he published in 1811. Thomas Pope’s “Rainbow Bridge” was never attempted, however, and fortunately so, for it would not have worked. But his vision of a heroic, monumental East River bridge persisted. Year after year others were proposed. Chain bridges, wire bridges, a bridge a hundred feet wide, were recommended by one engineer or another. “New York and Brooklyn must be united,” Horace Greeley declared in the Tribune in 1849, while in Brooklyn a street running down to the river was confidently christened Bridge Street.

But nothing was done. The chief problem always was the East River, which is no river at all technically speaking, but a tidal strait and one of the most turbulent and in that day, especially, one of the busiest stretches of navigable salt water anywhere on earth. “If there is to be a bridge,” wrote one man, “it must take one grand flying leap from shore to shore over the masts of the ships. There can be no piers or drawbridge. There must be only one great arch all the way across. Surely this must be a wonderful bridge.”

In April 1867 a charter authorizing a private company to build and operate an East River bridge had been voted through at Albany. The charter was a most interesting and important document, for several different reasons, as time would tell. But in the things it said and left unsaid concerning the actual structure to be built, it was notable at a glance. Not a word was mentioned, for example, about the sort of bridge it was to be or to suggest that its construction might involve any significant or foreseeable problems. The cities were not required to approve the plans or the location. The charter said only that it be a toll bridge. It was important that it have a “substantial railing” and that it be “kept fully lighted through all hours of the night.” It was also to be completed by January 1, 1870.

A month after the charter became law, Roebling had been named engineer of the work. By whom or by what criteria remained a puzzle for anyone trying to follow the story in the papers. In September, that same year, 1867, at a private meeting held in Brooklyn, he presented his master plan in a long formal report. But such was “the anxiety manifested on the part of the press of the two cities to present his report to the public, that it was taken and published, as an entirety…” The bridge had no official name at this point, and in the time since, nobody seemed able to settle on one.

At an earlier stage it had been referred to occasionally as the Empire Bridge, but the organization incorporated to build it was called the New York Bridge Company, because the Brooklyn people behind the idea saw it as just that—a bridge to New York. Roebling, on the other hand, had referred to it as the East River Bridge in his proposal and the newspapers and magazines had picked up the name. But it was also commonly called the Roebling Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge or simply the Great Bridge, which looked the most impressive in print and to many seemed the most fitting name of all, once they grasped what exactly Roebling was planning to do.

But it was the possible future impact of such a structure on their own lives that interested people most, naturally enough, and that the press in both cities devoted the most attention to. The Times, for example, described the bridge as a sort of grand long-needed pressure valve that would do much to alleviate New York’s two most serious problems, crime and overcrowding.

In Brooklyn, where interest was the keenest, it was said the bridge would make Brooklyn important, that it would make Brooklyn prosper. Property values would soar. Roebling the alchemist would turn vacant lots and corn patches into pure gold. Everybody would benefit. Brooklyn was already expanding like a boomtown, and the bridge was going to double the pace, the way steam ferries had. Merchants could expect untold numbers of new customers as disaffected New Yorkers flocked across the river to make Brooklyn their home. Manufacturers would have closer ties with New York markets. Long Island farmers and Brooklyn brewers could get their wares over the river more readily. The mail would move faster. Roebling had even told his eager clients how, in the event of an enemy invasion of Long Island, troops could be rushed over the bridge from New York in unprecedented numbers. In such an emergency, the old Prussian had calculated, nearly half a million men, together with artillery and baggage trains, could go over the bridge in twenty-four hours.

Most appealing of all for the Brooklyn people who went to New York to earn a living every day was the prospect of a safe, reliable alternative to the East River ferries. Winds, storms, tides, blizzards, ice jams, fog, none of these, they were told, would have the slightest effect on Mr. Roebling’s bridge. There would be no more shoving crowds at the ferryhouse loading gates. There would be no more endless delays. One Christmas night a gale had caused the river to be so low the ferries ran aground and thousands of people spent the night in the Fulton Ferry house. Many winters when the river froze solid, there had been no service at all for days on end.

Some of the Brooklyn business people and Kings County politicians were even claiming that the bridge would make Brooklyn the biggest city in America, a most heady prospect indeed and not an unreasonable one either. Congressman Demas Barnes contended Brooklyn would be the biggest city in the world, once New York was “full.” New York, that “human hive” John Roebling called it, was running out of space, its boundaries being forever fixed by nature. Roebling and others envisioned a day when all Manhattan Island would be built over, leaving “no decent place” to make a home, neither he nor anyone else thus far having imagined a city growing vertically. “Brooklyn happens to be one of those things that can expand,” wrote the editors of the new Brooklyn Monthly. “The more you put into it, the more it will hold.”

And such highly regarded Brooklyn residents as Walt Whitman and James S. T. Stranahan, the man behind Brooklyn’s new Prospect Park, looked to the day when the bridge would make Brooklyn and New York “emphatically one,” which was also generally taken to be a very good thing, since the new Union Pacific Railroad was going to make New York “the commercial emporium of the world.” This was no idle speculation, “but the natural and legitimate result of natural causes,” according to John Roebling. His bridge was part of a larger mission. “As the great flow of civilization has ever been from East towards the West, with the same certainty will the greatest commercial emporium be located on this continent, which links East to the West, and whose mission it is in the history of mankind to blend the most ancient civilization with the most modern.” The famous engineer, it had been noticed in Brooklyn, tended to cosmic concepts, but so much the better. If there were now forty million people crossing the East River every year, as was the claim, then, he said, in ten years’ time there would be a hundred million.

“Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before, are now plowing the Atlantic in regular straight line furrows,” he had written in his proposal. “The same means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent to the eastern coast of Asia. New York will remain the center where these lines meet.”

This, in other words, was to be something much more than a large bridge over an important river. It was to be one of history’s great connecting works, symbolic of the new age, like the Atlantic cable, the Suez Canal, and the transcontinental railroad. “Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?” wrote Walt Whitman at about this time. “The earth be spann’d, connected by network…The lands welded together.” “The shapes arise!” wrote the Brooklyn poet.

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present

Singing the strong, light works of engineers…

But it was Roebling himself, never one to be overly modest, who had set forth the most emphatic claim for the bridge itself and the one that would be quoted most often in time to come:

The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age. Its most conspicuous features, the great towers, will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, and as a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering, this structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection.

Roebling had written that in 1867, at the very start of his formal proposal, but in all the time since, for some mysterious reason, not a spade of dirt had been turned and numbers of people, some claiming to be experts, had begun saying they were not so sure about Roebling’s “advanced engineering,” or whether it was worth the six to seven million dollars he had said it would cost, an estimate that did not include the price of the land required. Even if his figures were realistic, the bridge would also be about the most expensive ever built.

The editors of Scientific American said a tunnel would serve the purpose as well and cost less. A Navy engineer presented an alternative plan. He wanted to block off “the vexatious East River” with a dam several hundred feet wide on which he would build highways, stores, docks, and warehouses. By early 1869, when it looked as though the bridge might actually be started, the critics were sounding forth as never before. Warehouse owners along the river and others in the shipping business were calling it an obstruction to navigation and a public nuisance. The New York Polytechnic Society put on a series of lectures at Cooper Union devoted exclusively to the supposed engineering fallacies of the Roebling plan. Engineers expressed “grave apprehension.” The bridge, it was stated on the best professional authority, was a monumental extravagance, “a wild experiment,” nothing but an exercise in vanity. Even in Brooklyn the Union said another bridge and a tunnel besides would probably be built by the time everyone finished wrangling over details and questioned why, for so momentous a public work, only one engineer had been called on and no other plans ever considered.

So it had been to still such talk that Roebling had assembled his seven consultants and with total patience and candor went over everything with them point by point.

To begin with it was to be the largest suspension bridge in the world. It was to be half again the size of his bridge over the Ohio at Cincinnati, for example, and nearly twice the length of Telford’s famous bridge over the Menai Strait, in Wales, the first suspension bridge of any real importance. It was to cross the East River with one uninterrupted central span, held aloft by huge cables slung from the tops of two colossal stone towers and secured on either shore to massive masonry piles called anchorages. These last structures alone, he said, would be a good seven stories tall, or taller than most buildings in New York at the time. They would each take up the better part of a city block and would be heavy enough to offset the immense pull of the cables, but hollow inside, to provide, Roebling suggested, room for cavernous treasury vaults, which he claimed would be the safest in America and ample enough to house three-quarters of all the investments and securities in the country.

The towers, the “most conspicuous features,” would be identical and 268 feet high. They would stand on either side of the river, in the water but close to shore, their foundations out of sight beneath the riverbed. Their most distinguishing features would be twin Gothic arches—two in each tower—through which the roadways were to pass. These arches would rise more than a hundred feet, like majestic cathedral windows, or the portals of triumphal gateways. “In a work of such magnitude, and located as it is between two great cities, good architectural proportions should be observed,” wrote the engineer. “…The impression of the whole will be that of massiveness and strength.”

His towers would dwarf everything else in view. They would reign over the landscape like St. Peters in Rome or the Capitol dome in Washington, as one newspaper said. In fact, the towers would be higher than the Capitol dome if the dome’s crowning statue of Freedom was not taken into account. So this in the year 1869—when the Washington Monument was still an ugly stone stump—meant they would be about the largest, most massive things ever built on the entire North American continent. On the New York skyline only the slim spire of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street reached higher.

The towers were to serve two very fundamental purposes. They would bear the weight of four enormous cables and they would hold both the cables and the roadway of the bridge high enough so they would not interfere with traffic on the river. Were the two cities at higher elevations, were they set on cliffs, or palisades, such as those along the New Jersey side of the Hudson, for example, such lofty stonework would not be necessary. As it was, however, only very tall towers could make up for what nature had failed to provide, if there was to be the desired clearance for sailing ships. And as the mass of the anchorages had to be sufficient to offset the pull of the cables, where they were secured on land, so the mass of the towers, whatever their height, had to be sufficient to withstand the colossal downward pressure of the cables as they passed over the tops of the towers.

Below the water the towers were to be of limestone and each was to be set on a tremendous wooden foundation, but from the water-line up they were to be of granite. In plan each tower was essentially three shafts of solid masonry, connected below the roadway, or bridge floor, by hollow masonry walls, but left unconnected above the bridge floor until they joined high overhead to form the great Gothic arches, which, in turn, were to be topped by a heavy cornice and three huge capstones. The total weight of each tower, Roebling estimated, would be 67,850 tons, but with the weight of the roadway and its iron superstructure added on they would each weigh 72,603 tons.

The suspended roadway’s great “river span” was to be held between the towers by the four immense cables, two outer ones and two near the middle of the bridge floor. These cables would be as much as fifteen inches in diameter and each would hang over the river in what is known as a catenary curve, that perfect natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points, which in this case were the summits of the two stone towers. At the bottom of the curve each cable would join with the river span, at the center of the span. But all along the cables, vertical “suspenders,” wire ropes about as thick as a pick handle, would be strung like harp strings down to the bridge floor. And across those would run a pattern of diagonal, or inclined, stays, hundreds of heavy wire ropes that would radiate down from the towers and secure at various points along the bridge floor, both in the direction of the land and toward the center of the river span.

The wire rope for the suspenders and stays was to be of the kind manufactured by Roebling at his Trenton works. It was to be made in the same way as ordinary hemp rope, that is, with hundreds of fine wires twisted to form a rope. The cables, however, would be made of wire about as thick as a lead pencil, with thousands of wires to a cable, all “laid up” straight, parallel to one another, and then wrapped with an outer skin of soft wire, the way the base strings of a piano are wrapped.

But most important of all, Roebling was talking about making the cables of steel, “the metal of the future,” instead of using iron wire, as had always been done before. There was not a bridge in the country then, not a building in New York or in any city as yet, built of steel, but Roebling was seriously considering its use and the idea was regarded by many engineers as among the most revolutionary and therefore questionable features of his entire plan.

The way he had designed it, the enormous structure was to be a grand harmony of opposite forces—the steel of the cables in tension, the granite of the towers in compression. “A force at rest is at rest because it is balanced by some other force or by its own reaction,” he had once written in the pages of Scientific American. He considered mathematics a spiritual perception, as well as the highest science, and since all engineering questions were governed by “simple mathematical considerations,” the suspension bridge was “a spiritual or ideal conception.”

His new bridge was to be “a great avenue” between the cities, he said. Its over-all width was to be eighty feet, making it as spacious as Broadway itself, as he liked to tell people, and the river span would measure sixteen hundred feet, from tower to tower, making it the longest single span in the world. But of even greater import than length was the unprecedented load the bridge was designed to bear—18,700 tons.

The long river span was not to be perfectly horizontal, but would bow gracefully, gently upward. It would pass through the tower arches at an elevation of 119 feet, but at the center it would be 130 feet over the water. This, as Roebling pointed out, was thirty feet higher than the elevation fixed by the British Admiralty for Robert Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, built nearly twenty years earlier. Before long, sailing ships would be things of the past, he declared. His bridge therefore would be no obstruction to navigation, only possibly “an impediment to sailing.” As it was, only the very largest sailing ships afloat would have to trim their topmasts to pass beneath the bridge.

But because of the great elevation of the river span and the relatively low-lying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, would have to extend quite far inland on both sides to provide an easy grade. The bridge would have to descend back to earth rather gradually, as it were, and thus the better part of it would be over land, not water. Those inland sections of the bridge between the towers and the two anchorages were known as the land spans, and were also supported by the cables, by suspenders and diagonal stays. The ends of the bridge, from the anchorages down to ground level, were known as the approaches. In all, from one end to the other, the Great Bridge was to measure 5,862 feet, or more than a mile.

The red line Roebling had drawn on the map ran southeast from City Hall Park, in New York, crossing the river not quite at right angles, at that point where the river was returning to its essentially north-south course. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—over to the right of the red line—the river turned sharply to the left, heading nearly due west, but then it quickly turned down the map again to merge with the harbor. And it was right there, where the river turned the second time, right about where the Fulton Ferry crossed, that Roebling had put his “Park Line” connecting New York, on the upper left of the map, with Brooklyn, on the lower right.

The precise terminating point on the New York side was at Chatham Street, opposite the park. This was the place for the bridge to come in, he said. For the next fifty years the park would remain “the great focus of travel, from which speedy communications will ramify in all directions.” From there his red line crossed over North William Street, William, Rose, Vandewater, and half a dozen more streets, to the end of Pier 29, then over the river, straight through one of the Fulton Ferry slips, and into Brooklyn. Running parallel with Fulton Street, Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare, the line cut across a patchwork of narrow cross streets—Water, Dock, Front, James—to Prospect, where it bent slightly toward Fulton, terminating finally in the block bounded by Prospect, Washington, Sands, and Fulton, or right about where St. Ann’s Church stood.

Down the center of the bridge Roebling planned to run a double pair of tracks to carry specially built trains pulled by an endless cable, which would be powered by a giant stationary steam engine housed out of sight on the Brooklyn side. In time these trains would connect with a system of elevated railroads in both cities and become a lucrative source of revenue. He had worked it all out. His bridge trains would travel at speeds up to forty miles an hour. A one-way trip would take no more than five minutes. It was certain, he said, that forty million passengers a year could be accommodated by such a system, “without confusion and without crowding.”

Carriages, riders on horseback, drays, farm wagons, commercial traffic of every kind, would cross on either side of the bridge trains, while directly overhead, eighteen feet above the tracks, he would build an elevated boardwalk for pedestrians, providing an uninterrupted view in every direction. This unique feature, he said, would become one of New York’s most popular attractions. “This part I call the elevated promenade, because its principal use will be to allow people of leisure, and old and young invalids, to promenade over the bridge on fine days, in order to enjoy the beautiful views and the pure air.” There was no bridge in the world with anything like it. And he added, “I need not state that in a crowded commercial city, such a promenade will be of incalculable value.”

So the roadways and tracks at one level were for the everyday traffic of life, while the walkway above was for the spirit. The bridge, he had promised, was to serve the interests of the community as well as those of the New York Bridge Company. Receipts on all tolls and train fares would, he asserted, pay for the entire bridge in less than three years. To build such a bridge, he said, would take five years.

Horatio Allen and William McAlpine asked the most questions during the sessions Roebling held with the consultants. The length of the central span and the tower foundations were the chief concerns.

It had been said repeatedly by critics of the plan that a single span of such length was impossible, that the bridge trains would shake the structure to pieces and, more frequently, that no amount of calculations on paper could guarantee how it might hold up in heavy winds, but the odds were that the great river span would thrash and twist until it snapped in two and fell, the way the Wheeling Bridge had done (a spectacle some of his critics hoped to be on hand for, to judge by the tone of their attacks).

Roebling told his consultants that a span of sixteen hundred feet was not only possible with a suspension bridge, but if engineered properly, it could be double that. A big span was not a question of practicability, but cost. It was quite correct that wind could play havoc with suspension bridges of “ordinary design.” But he had solved that problem long since, he assured them, in his earlier bridges, and this bridge, big as it was, would be quite as stable as the others. Like his earlier works, this was to be no “ordinary” bridge. For one thing it would be built six times as strong as it need be. The inclined stays, for example, would have a total strength of fifteen thousand tons, enough to hold up the floor by themselves. If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall. His listeners were very much impressed.

There were questions about his intended use of steel and about the extraordinary weight of the bridge. Then at one long session they had discussed the foundations.

Roebling planned to sink two tremendous timber caissons deep into the riverbed and to construct his towers upon these. It was a technique with which he had had no previous experience, but the engineering had been worked out quite thoroughly, he said, in conjunction with his son, Colonel Roebling, who had spent nearly a year in Europe studying the successful use of similar foundations. McAlpine could vouch for the basic concept, since he had used it himself successfully, although on a vastly smaller scale, to sink one of the piers and the abutment for a drawbridge across the Harlem River. His caisson for the pier had been of iron and just six feet in diameter. Those Roebling was talking about would be of pine timbers and each one would cover an area of some seventeen thousand square feet, or an area big enough to accommodate four tennis courts with lots of room to spare. Nothing of the kind had ever been attempted before.

How deep did he think he would have to go to reach a firm footing, the engineers wished to know. Would he go to bedrock? And did he have any idea how far down that might be?

During the test borings on the Brooklyn side, the material encountered had been composed chiefly of compact sand and gravel, mixed with clay and interspersed with boulders of traprock, the latter of which, he allowed, had “detained this operation considerably.” Gneiss had been struck at ninety-six feet. But below a depth of fifty to sixty feet, the material had been so very compact that the borehole had remained open for weeks without the customary tubing. So it was his judgment that there would be no need to go all the way to rock. A depth of fifty feet on the Brooklyn side ought to suffice and the whole operation would probably take a year.

About the prospects on the New York side, he was rather vague—but it looked, he said, as though bedrock was at 106 feet and there was a great deal of sand on the way down. Still there was a chance that rock might be found closer to the surface. An old well near Trinity Church showed gneiss at twenty-six feet, he noted, and in the well at City Hall the same rock was found at ninety feet. “The whole of Manhattan Island appears to rest upon a gneiss and granite formation,” he said. The greatest depth to which similar caissons had been sunk before this was eighty-five feet. But he was willing to take his to a depth of 110 feet if that was what had to be done. His consultants said they did not think he would find that necessary.

Presently they took up the question of the timber foundations and their fate, once he left them buried forever beneath the towers, beneath the river, the rock, sand and muck of the riverbed. In his report, Roebling had explained at some length how the caissons would be packed with concrete once they were sunk to the desired position, and why, in their final resting place, well below the level where water or sea worms could reach them, they would last forever. But there were some among the consultants who wished to hear more on the subject and who had a number of questions.

That particular session on the foundations had taken place on March 9. Two days later, on the 11th, it was announced that the renowned engineers had approved the Roebling plan, “in every important particular.” Their official report would come later, but in the meantime the public could rest assured that the plan was “entirely practicable.”

Only Congressional authorization was needed now, since Congress had jurisdiction over all navigable waters and the bridge was to be a post road. Unlike the government in Albany, or those in either city, the government in Washington had some regulations it wished to see adhered to. Congressional legislation already drawn up stipulated that the bridge must in no way “obstruct, impair, or injuriously modify” navigation on the river. In particular, there was concern in Washington that it might interfere with traffic to and from the Navy Yard, and to be certain that every detail of the plan was fully understood, General A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, decided to appoint his own review panel to give an opinion on it, irrespective of the conclusions reached by Roebling’s consultants (This was to be the only public scrutiny of the design or the location.) So at about that point it had seemed the most sensible next step would be for everyone to go take a look at some of Roebling’s existing works to see how he had previously handled somewhat analogous situations. Let his work speak for itself, he had decided.

The tour was arranged almost overnight and if there was any initial intention to restrict it to a relatively small body of professionals that idea was speedily overruled. A total of twenty-one gentlemen and one lady made up the “Bridge Party,” as it was referred to in subsequent accounts. In addition to the two Roeblings, the seven consultants, and three Army engineers—General Horatio Wright, General John Newton, and Major W. R. King—several prominent Brooklyn businessmen were invited, most of whom were or were about to become stockholders in the New York Bridge Company. A Brooklyn Congressman named Slocum—General Henry W. Slocum—was included, as were Hugh McLaughlin, the Democratic “Boss” of Brooklyn, and William C. Kingsley, Brooklyn’s leading contractor, who was known to be the driving political force behind the bridge and the largest individual stockholder. How many of the party were aware that the tall, powerful Kingsley would also be personally covering all expenses for the tour, in addition to the seven thousand dollars in consultants’ fees, is not known.

Two young engineers, C. C. Martin and Samuel Probasco, both of whom had worked for Kingsley on different Brooklyn projects, were also to go, as was the wife of one of the consultants, Mrs. Julius Adams, who is described only as an “amiable lady” in existing accounts. Why she consented to join the group, or why she was invited in the first place, no one ever explained.

Nor is there anything in the record to indicate who determined the make-up of the group. Presumably it was taken to be a representative body, having an even balance of engineering talent, business acumen, and public spirit. In any event, the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Thomas Kinsella, was also included, so that in Brooklyn at least the expedition would receive proper notice, and young Colonel Roebling appears to have been the one delegated to make the necessary arrangements.

There were, however, two very important public figures who did not make the trip, both of whom had done much to bring the project along as far as it had come and who ought to be mentioned at this point in the story.

The first was State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, lawyer, scholar, the most respected and respectable Democrat in Brooklyn, and in Albany the leading spokesman for Brooklyn’s interests. Murphy had worked harder for the bridge than anyone in Brooklyn except Kingsley, the contractor. He was the one who had written the charter for the New York Bridge Company. He had seen it through the legislature and was currently serving as the company’s president. Why he failed to make the trip is not known and probably not important. But he would have added a certain tone to the group certainly and John A. Roebling, in particular, would doubtless have enjoyed his company. (The idea of Roebling keeping company with the likes of Boss McLaughlin must have raised many an eyebrow on Brooklyn Heights.)

But the absence of the second missing party was quite intentional, one can be sure; it raised no questions and required no explanation, since there had been no mention as yet, scarcely even a whisper, that he had had anything whatever to do with the bridge. He was William Marcy Tweed of New York.

The itinerary called for stops at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls, and the announced official purpose of the expedition was to inspect four of Roebling’s bridges, each of which, in one way or other, illustrated how he intended to span the East River. But a week of traveling together was also supposed to give everybody a chance to get to know one another—nothing could so cement friendships as a long train ride, Thomas Kinsella would write—and particularly, it was presumed, everyone would get to know the key man in all this, John A. Roebling.

The great engineer was still largely a mystery to the people who had hired him. Except for the times when he had expounded on his plan at the meeting in 1867, his Brooklyn clients had seen very little of him. Their ordinary day-to-day dealings had been with his son. It had been young Roebling, not his father, who had set up the makings of an office and who had taken a house on the Heights. He had been the one on hand to answer their questions and keep things moving.

The father had wanted it that way. He had remained in Trenton, showing up in Brooklyn only now and then, and staying no longer than necessary. His time was always short it seemed and even when meeting with his board of consultants he had kept each session quite formal and to the point. He had no time for anything but business, and no small talk whatever.

On occasion the two of them, father and son, would be seen walking on Hicks Street, talking intently, or down by the slate-gray river pacing about the spot where the tower was to rise, the father pointing this way and that with his good hand. They resembled each other in height and build, even trimmed their whiskers the same way. But while the son was quite handsome in the conventional sense, with strong regular features, the father’s face was a composite of hard angles and deep creases, of large ears and nose and deep-sunken eyes, all of which gave the appearance of having been hewn from some substance of greater durability than mortal flesh.

Most people, later, would talk about his eyes, his fierce pale-blue eyes. But just what sort of human being there might be behind them was a puzzle. He was a man of enormous dignity, plainly enough, full of purpose and iron determination, but accustomed to deference just as plainly, somebody to be admired from a distance. His look was all-knowing and not in the least friendly. Among those who were about to stake so very much on him and his bridge, or who already had, there was not one who could honestly say he knew the man.

And so on the evening of April 14, 1869, when General Grant and his Julia were just taking up residence in the White House and the dogwood were beginning to bloom across the lowlands of New Jersey, the Bridge Party boarded a private palace car in Jersey City and started west. The only one missing from the group was the elder Roebling, who was to get on at Trenton.

2

Man of Iron

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

—G. W. F. HEGEL

ANYONE from Trenton who happened to be standing nearby on the depot platform that lovely April evening would have known who he was, and very possibly why he was waiting there. Trenton was still a small town, for all the changes there had been, and Old Man Roebling, as the men at the mill called him, was Trenton’s first citizen. The whole town looked up to him and took pride in his accomplishments.

It was commonly said that he had done more in one life than any ten men. The town had seen him build the wire business from nothing, raise seven children, bury two others and one wife, then marry again when he was past sixty. He had survived hard times, fires, cholera epidemics, the hazards of bridgebuilding, accidents at the mill, and his own particular notions about maintaining good health, which to some may have seemed the surest sign of all that the man was indestructible.

John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water. Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub for hours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheets and stay that way for another hour or two. He took Turkish baths, mineral baths. He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, and there were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come striding through his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water “copiously”—gallons it seemed—from the old fountain beside the state prison. (“This water I relish much…” he would write in his notebook.) “A wet bandage around the neck every night, for years, will prevent colds he preached to his family. “A full cold bath every day is indispensable…” Illness he regarded as a moral offense and he fought it with the same severe intensity he directed to everything else he did in life.

The town knew all about him, or thought so. It was common knowledge, for example, that he was an inventor as well as an engineer, that he had designed every piece of machinery in the mill, that he was an artist, that he wrote prolifically for scientific periodicals, that he read Emerson and Channing and other freethinkers. At home he was writing his own “Theory of the Universe.”

When he first came to Trenton, he had played both the piano and the flute, but then he caught his left hand in a rope machine and was left with three immovable fingers. Not long after his first wife died, he had taken up spiritualism. There had been talk ever since of after-dark gatherings, of table rappings and the like, inside the big Roebling house. The old man, on top of his other achievements, was now said to be on speaking terms with the dead.

The bridges were what he was best known for, of course, but only a few people in Trenton had actually seen any of them, except perhaps for a view in Harper’s Weekly or one of the other picture magazines. Roebling the industrialist was the man Trenton people knew.

He was called a man of iron. Poised…confident…unyielding…imperious…severe…proud…are other words that would be used in Trenton to describe him. There had always been something distant about him; he kept apart and had no real friends in Trenton, but he had also been accepted on those terms long since and he in turn was always extremely courteous to everyone. “He was always the first to say good morning,” a man from the mill would tell a reporter after Roebling’s death. When he spoke they listened.

Roebling was sixty-three in 1869, but even when he was years younger, he had a special hold on men, it seems, with his commanding stares and wintry scowls, like an Old Testament prophet. His success in everything he turned his hand to was generally attributed to an inflexible will and extraordinary resourcefulness. “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” one of his employees would recall and another would quote a saying of his they all knew by heart, “If one plan won’t do, then another must.” Charles B. Stuart, an engineer and author who knew Roebling, would later write: “One of his strongest moral traits was his power of will, not a will that was stubborn, but a certain spirit, tenacity of purpose, and confident reliance upon self instinctive faith in the resources of his art that no force of circumstance could divert him from carrying into effect a project once matured in his mind….” It was a quality he had worked hard to instill in his children as well.

Time was something never to be squandered. If a man was five minutes late for an appointment with him, the appointment was canceled. Once, during the war, so the story went, he had been called to Washington by the War Department to give advice on something or other and was asked to wait outside the office of General John Charles Frémont, the illustrious “Pathfinder.” Roebling took out a pencil, wrote a note on the back of his card, and had it sent in to the general. “Sir,” the note said, “you are keeping me waiting. John Roebling has not the leisure to wait upon any man.”

In all his working life John Roebling had never been known to take a day off.

He had settled in Trenton twenty years before, in 1849, when he was forty-three, or past the age, he knew, when most brilliant men do their best work. He had had no money to speak of then and not much of a reputation. All that had come in the years since. How much was generally known in Trenton of his life prior to that time can only be guessed at, but the story was well known among his family certainly, and, for the most part, in the engineering profession.

He had been born on June 12, 1806, in Germany, in the province of Saxony, in the ancient walled town of Mühlhausen, where for about a thousand years more or less not very much had ever happened. Bach had once played the organ in the church where he was baptized and in the spring of 1815, when Roebling was nine, five hundred of his townsmen had marched off to fight Napoleon at Waterloo, but other than that no one in Mühlhausen had ever done much out of the ordinary.

His father, Christoph Polycarpus Roebling, had a tobacco shop and the accepted picture of him is of an unassuming, rather comfortably fixed burgher of good family, who had no desire to be anything more than what he was and who smoked up about as much tobacco as he sold. Roebling’s mother, however, was a fiercely energetic sort, with a mind of her own and some very fixed ideas about getting on in the world. It was their proud, determined, long-departed grandmother, Friederike Dorothea, John Roebling’s children were raised to understand, who scraped and saved to send their father to the famous Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, and who later was the first to support his decision to leave Mühlhausen, something no Roebling had done before.

In Berlin, he had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics. He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographical memoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renowned philosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and the supremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by an autocratic Prussian regime. The effect was pronounced, and not the least on Roebling. The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling, according to an old family friend in Trenton. Hegel had taught Roebling to think independently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but the experience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinion and a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into cold storage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the young man thinking about America. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught. There the future would be built. There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.

For three years after leaving Berlin, Roebling worked in an obligatory job building roads for the Prussian government. Once during a holiday in Bavaria, he had hiked to the old cathedral town of Bamberg, where he saw his first suspension bridge, a new iron chain bridge over the Regnitz and known locally as the “miracle bridge.” He walked about it, made a number of sketches, and it is the traditional story that he decided then and there on his life’s career.

In any event, not long afterward, in the spring of 1831, the year Hegel would die of cholera, Roebling returned to Mühlhausen and began organizing a party of pilgrims to leave for America, something that had to be done with caution just then since the government frowned on the immigration of anyone with technical training.

Talk of immigration was a common thing in Germany. Ever since the July Revolution of the previous year, there had been increasingly less personal freedom, less opportunity for anyone with ambition. Nothing could be accomplished, Roebling would write, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”

In the first week of May there had been the farewell visits with school friends and aged aunts, the last Sunday at church, the final evening walks through the ancient cobblestone streets. Then on the morning of the 11th, with his older brother Karl and a number of others, he had set off. His determination now was to become…an American farmer! Having had no previous experience in agriculture, having nothing in his background, training, or temperament that would indicate any interest in or bent for such work, he would become a man of the soil, in a distant land he knew only by reputation. The architect, the scholar, the musician, the philosopher, the engineer, the burning liberal idealist, the twenty-four-year-old bachelor, would now plant himself, willfully, somewhere in the American wilderness. His ambition was to establish his own community, which if not utopian in the religious sense—like Harmony, Pennsylvania, or some of the other earlier settlements founded by zealous Germans—would at least provide the honest German farmer, tradesman, or mechanic, men good with their hands and accustomed to work, a place where they could make the most of themselves, which to Roebling’s particular way of thinking would be about the nearest thing possible to heaven on earth.

He never saw Mühlhausen or Germany again. In 1867, to prepare for the bridge at Brooklyn, he had sent his son Washington and his pretty, pregnant daughter-in-law back across the Atlantic. It was a journey he would have liked to have made himself no doubt. He could have returned in triumph. As it was, the young couple arrived at Mühlhausen to a rousing welcome, and in a small inn across the street from the old family home, his first grandson and namesake had been born. Later, he had sent the town a sizable gift of cash in gratitude.

In a bookshop in Mühlhausen in 1867, Washington Roebling found a rare printed edition of the journal his father had kept on route to America, which Washington carried with him on his own return voyage. Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831 it is titled. It is an extraordinary little document, a recognized classic of its kind, describing days of howling winds and high seas, and a steamboat—the first Roebling had been—laboring mightily by, and later, like a specter, a derelict hulk of an abandoned sailing ship, a huge brig with all sails gone, drifting on the horizon; then days of no wind and bad drinking water, the burial at sea of a child, and at last, on a night in July, the smell of land in a warm westerly wind. “The odor was strikingly distant and…would also indicate that the entire American mainland is covered with an almost uninterrupted forest and a great abundance of plants, whereby the atmosphere is saturated with aromatic particles, which the winds blowing away from land carry away to a great distance. This scent of land produced a beneficial effect upon all the passengers.”

His band of pilgrims consisted of fifty-three men, women, and children, most of whom had never laid eyes on salt water. Their ship was the August Eduard, a 230-ton American packet bound for Philadelphia, which, in all, took eleven weeks to make port, or longer than it had taken Columbus to make his first crossing.

Roebling himself was an immigrant of a kind the history books would pay little attention to, chiefly because they were so relatively few in number. He was seeking neither religious freedom nor release from the bondage of poverty. His quest was for something else. He came equipped with the finest education Europe could offer, he had a profession, and he was traveling first class, which meant he had one bed among four in a cabin he described as “very roomy” and “excellently lighted.” Between them, he and his brother were also carrying something in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars in cash, a princely sum, and he had come on board with a whole trunkful of books—thick geographies, works of physics and chemistry, a German-French dictionary, Euclid’s Elements, volumes of English literature and poetry, and one of English essays that opened with a favorite quote from Johnson: “No man was ever great by imitation.”

What the American captain and his crew thought of this spare, incredibly energetic young German can be imagined. He started right off, for example, by instructing them on how to build a proper privy for the passengers in steerage, whose only facility was the usual sailor’s seat perched precariously outside the stem of the ship, beside the bowsprit. Such an arrangement, Roebling announced, was altogether unacceptable for the women and children, or for anyone who might become sick or weakened by the voyage. He and the other cabin passengers, like the ship’s officers, were entitled to use a relatively comfortable, enclosed affair that protected its occupant from sudden waves washing across the deck. The same or better should be made available for all on board, Roebling declared. He explained how it could be done and it was done. “If one earnestly desires it,” he wrote, “everything will be brought to pass, even on board a ship…” The great thing, he believed, was getting people “to leave the accustomed rut.”

His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents, rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member of the crew seemed inexhaustible. He wanted to know the name of every sail, every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and he made diagrams to be sure he understood. He talked to the captain (“a very just, straightforward, and sober man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system. He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

For his son there must have been places in the old diary where the youthful and impressionable narrator seemed a little difficult to identify with the father he had known. One entry, for example, was taken up almost entirely with a long, vivid description of waves. Apparently his father had stood at the bowsprit watching them for hours on end and to no particular purpose. In the account of phosphorescence after dark, as the sea rebounded from the sides of the ship, it was as though the writer had been caught up in a spell:

…then one perceives in the foam brightly shining stars, which appear as large as the fixed stars in the heavens. Along the entire side of the ship the foam has turned into fiery streaks. The spots of foam in the ocean, distant from the ship, which arise from the dashing together of the waves, appear in the dark night to the astonished eye as just so many fiery masses. In front of the bowsprit, where the friction is greatest, the scintillation is often so bright, that the entire fore part of the ship is illuminated by it.

For the moment—except possibly for the word “friction”—it was as if nature was not something to be explained endlessly or to be “rendered subservient,” as John Roebling would say in another time and place. And again, as the ship headed into Delaware Bay, there is a moment when the gifted young graduate of Berlin’s Polytechnic Institute reflects with sadness on the Indians who once lived on shore—“quietly on the property inherited from their ancestors,” long before “the sheltered loneliness of these wild surroundings was interrupted by the all-disturbing European.”

From Philadelphia, Roebling and his followers headed west across Pennsylvania, having decided to settle on the other side of the Alleghenies. At Pittsburgh he and Karl purchased some seven thousand acres located to the north, in Butler County, not far from Harmony (the price was $1.37 an acre, with a thousand dollars down and the balance to be paid in two equal yearly installments “without interest,” as he wrote home). And there he established his town, first laying out one broad Main Street exactly east-west, in the German fashion. He called the town Germania for a while, but then changed it to Saxonburg.

Roebling had concluded, his son Washington would write in jest, that western Pennsylvania was destined to be “the future center of the universe with the future Saxonburg as the head center, which then was a primeval forest where wild pigeons would not even light.”

“My father would have made a good advertising agent,” Washington would remark at another time. “He wrote at least a hundred letters to friends in and about Mühlhausen, extolling the virtues of the place—its fine climate—the freedom from restraint—the certainty of employment, etc. Many accepted and came. To each one was sent exact directions how to come, what to take—what to bring along, and what to leave behind. Most tools were to be left behind, because American tools were so much better, such as axes, hatchets, saws, grubbing hoes—nodody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

The beginning is hard, Roebling had warned. But there were “no unbearable taxes,” no police commissioners. And finally: “If this region is built up by industrious Germans, then it can become an earthly paradise.” But the soil turned out to be mostly clay, the winters were bleak and bitterly cold, and the roads to Pittsburgh or to Freeport, the nearest point on the Allegheny River, were “atrocious.”

Among the early arrivals there were only two who knew a thing about farming. But according to one of the old histories of the town, they all “possessed to a remarkable degree the valuable attribute of industry, and, though many of their first attempts were ludicrous and miserable failures, they yet persevered until they became adepts at handling the ax and agricultural implements.” Every newcomer was heartily welcomed and encouraged to stay. Presently more and more did come and settle and the surrounding country, only sparsely settled earlier by Scotch-Irish, began filling up with Germans. “They have made good farmers,” an old Butler County history concludes, “succeeding, by patient industry and close economy, in gaining an independent condition where the people of almost any other nationality would have failed, in a majority of instances, to have secured more than a mere living.”

The first building to go up in Saxonburg was a plain two-story house built by Roebling at the head of Main Street. It was clapboard on the outside, but brick behind that, and like everything he ever built, it was built to last. Five years later Saxonburg, if not exactly paradise, was at least a going concern, populated by a weaver, a grocer, a blacksmith, a cabinetmaker, about six carpenters, a tanner, a miller, a baker, a shoemaker, a Mecklenburg tailor, a Mühlhausen tailor, one artist, one brewer, a veteran of Waterloo, and an increasing number of plain farmers with names like Emmerich, Rudert, Goelbel, Heckert, Graff, Schwietering, Nagler, and Helmhold. And in May 1836, in his own front parlor, Roebling married Johanna Herting, the oldest daughter of the Mühlhausen tailor.

But in less than a year, with everything going about as well as he could have hoped, Roebling seems to have run up against the one problem he had not figured on. He had become bored. When he heard the state was in need of surveyors, he immediately wrote to Harrisburg. That was in 1837, the year he became a citizen, the year Karl died of sunstroke while working in a wheat field, the year Roebling became a father for the first time. In a letter to the chief engineer of the Sandy and Beaver Canal, he wrote, “I cannot reconcile myself to be altogether destitute of practical occupation…”

“So he took to engineering again, his true vocation,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and let my mother do the farming again, which she did very well when he would let her.” By the time the son was old enough to understand such things, the father’s agrarian dream, if indeed that is what it was, was long since over.

Roebling built dams and locks on the Sandy and Beaver, between the Ohio and the lakes, then on the Allegheny feeder of the Pennsylvania Canal near Freeport. In 1839 he began surveying a prospective railroad route east of Pittsburgh that would later be adopted, in part, by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Living in tents, working in all kinds of weather through the roughest kind of wilderness, he and a few assistants covered more than 150 miles, plotting a line through the Alleghenies. His work was such that he was made Principal Assistant to the Chief Engineer of the state, a man named Charles L. Schlatter, and his report to Schlatter included not only full details on the grades, embankments, bridges, and tunnels required, but a number of prophetic observations about the locale around the village of Johnstown, where one of the nation’s principal iron and steel industries would one day rise. “The iron ore on the Laurel Hill is only waiting for means of transportation to be conveyed to the rich coal basins below, where also limestone is to be had in quantity and, moreover, where an abundance of water power can be furnished by the never-failing waters of the beautiful mountain stream…and certainly capitalists could hardly find a more eligible situation for starting mammoth furnaces on the largest scale…”

At Johnstown he also became familiar with the workings of the newly built Portage Railroad, a system of long, inclined planes devised to haul canalboats up and over the Alleghenies, between Hollidaysburg at the foot of the eastern slope and Johnstown at the foot of the western slope. It was popularly thought to be one of the engineering marvels of the age and Roebling was fascinated by it. He also decided, after a good deal of study, that it could be greatly improved by dispensing with the immense hemp hawsers then in use. These were about nine inches around, more than a mile long in some cases and cost nearly three thousand dollars. They also wore out in relatively short time and had to be replaced or, as happened more than once, they snapped in two, sending their loads crashing down the mountainside. In one such accident two men had been crushed to death.

Roebling proposed to replace the hawsers with an iron rope just an inch thick, a product not made in the United States then, but which he had read about in a German periodical. Such a rope, he said, would be stronger, last longer, and be much easier to handle. Apparently he was the only one who took the idea seriously, but he was told to go ahead and try if he had such confidence in it—at his own risk and expense.

He began fashioning his new product at Saxonburg some time in the summer of 1841, using the old ropewalk system on a long level meadow behind the church he had built soon after finishing his house. The wire, purchased from a mill at Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh, was spliced inside a small building and wound onto reels for “running out.” Separate strands of wire were laid up first, then twisted into the larger rope by means of a crude machine he had devised, which, like everything else in the process, was powered by hand.

A six-hundred-foot rope finished “in the best style,” as he said, was tried out at Johnstown in September and it was a failure. Someone hired by the hemp rope interests had secretly cut it at a splice, with the result that it broke during the test. But the sabotage was discovered, Roebling was given a second chance, and his rope worked with such success that it was soon adopted for the entire Portage system. Orders began coming in from other canals with similar inclined planes. The rope was wanted for dredging equipment, for pile drivers, for use in coal mines. Roebling published an article on it in the Railroad Journal. “His ambition now became boundless,” his son would write. Production in Saxonburg picked up sharply, as “farmers were metamorphosed into mechanics and an unlooked-for era of prosperity dawned.”

“About eight men were needed for strand making,” according to Washington Roebling, “but sixteen or eighteen were required for laying up the rope. These were recruited for a day or two from the village and adjacent farm—quite a task—in which I took my full share. The men were always glad to see me because it meant good pay and free meals for days. Work was from sunrise to sunset—three meals, with a snack of bread and butter in between—including whiskey. Meals were served at the house. My poor, overworked mother did the cooking—all done on an open hearth.”

John Roebling could be sure, he was told in an admiring letter from Charles Schlatter, that before long he would be “at the head of the list of those benefactors to mankind who employ science to useful purpose.”

In 1844, at age thirty-eight, he got his first real commission as an engineer. A prize of one hundred dollars had been offered in a notice in the Pittsburgh papers for “the best plan for a wooden or suspension aqueduct” to carry the Pennsylvania Canal across the Allegheny River in place of a ponderous, inadequate structure built years earlier by the state. Roebling worked out a plan for the world’s first suspension aqueduct. He made a model and went to Pittsburgh to enter the competition, which he won, mainly because his bid was the lowest. He built the aqueduct in record time. He worked nine months nonstop and when he was finished, Pittsburgh, at a cost of $62,000, had a structure unlike any in existence.

From two iron cables seven inches in diameter, he had suspended a big timber flume, crossing the river with seven spans of about 160 feet each. The flume was sixteen and a half feet wide and eight and a half feet deep. It carried something over two thousand tons of water and a steady procession of canal barges that floated across high over the Allegheny, hauled by mules that walked a narrow plank towpath. * “As this work is the first of the kind ever attempted,” wrote the Railroad Journal, “its construction speaks well for the enterprise of the city of Pittsburgh.” But in 1861, after the canal had been put out of business by the Pennsylvania Railroad that Roebling had helped to lay out, the aqueduct was pulled down.

The winter he built the aqueduct had been the most trying, strenuous period in his life. Not only had he designed it himself, but he had directed and participated in every step in its construction, in freezing winds, sleet, snow, going back and forth over the spindly catwalk or swinging along one of the cable strands in a little boatswain’s chair. The cables had been strung in place, wire by wire, in much the way his subsequent bridges would be. He had also devised a novel technique for anchoring the cables, attaching them to great chains of iron eyebars embedded in masonry, a plan not used in any prior suspension bridge and the one he would use on every bridge he built thereafter.

He had finished in exactly the time he had said he would and no one was more keenly aware of the real importance of what he had done than he. Judged against his later work, the bridge was crude, small, and uninspiring. And probably he knew the day it was finished that its life-span would be brief. The significant thing was that he had demonstrated the immense weight that could be borne by a suspension bridge, not to mention his own skill and integrity as a builder.

In April of 1845, a month before the aqueduct was opened, more than half of Pittsburgh burned to the ground. “The progress of the fire as it lanced and leaped with its forked tongue from house to house, from block to block, and from square to square was awfully magnificent,” wrote one observer. Among the victims was an old covered bridge over the Monongahela at Smithfield Street and as a result Roebling got the chance to build his first real bridge, which was also to be the first bridge on the tour he was about to lead.

In 1848 he began four more suspension aqueducts, these on the Delaware and Hudson Canal, linking the hard-coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania with the tidewater of the Hudson. In the meantime he wrote articles on his theories and in 1847 presented a twelve-thousand-word paper before the Pittsburgh Board of Trade (it was read at two sittings) calling for the immediate establishment of “The Great Central Railroad from Philadelphia to St. Louis.” Like a magic wand, he said, the railroads were going to work a transformation over the land. A new nation was about to emerge and this would be the greatest of all railroads, “a future highway of immense traffic.” It was another of his visionary proclamations. As it was, the Pennsylvania would not be completed to Pittsburgh for five more years, which was longer than John Roebling could wait.

It is not known when he first began thinking seriously about leaving Saxonburg, but by 1848, the year after his “Great Central Railroad” speech, with no such railroad in sight, he had concluded that Saxonburg would not become the center of the universe in all likelihood, and that in any event it was no location for a wire business. Having analyzed the problem as thoroughly as he was able, he decided to relocate in the old colonial town of Trenton, New Jersey, which then had a total population of perhaps six thousand people.

So he had departed from Saxonburg, leaving friends, relatives, everything they had struggled for so many years to build, and went east, against the human tide then pouring across Pennsylvania bound for the still-empty country beyond Ohio. His wife and children were to follow on their own. “He was disgusted with Saxonburg,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and never revisited it. He was seized with a horror of everything Dutch and never alluded to it.” In Saxonburg it would be said, “The dumb Dutch stayed behind.”

It was a very changed man who was about to return now over that same route to Pittsburgh, to retrace his footsteps as it were, and review the best of his life’s work. The bridges had made him famous in the time since, world-famous, and the wire business had made him rich. The John A. Roebling who stood on the station platform that April evening in 1869 was worth more than a million dollars, as his will would subsequently reveal. But other things had happened, private things, of which only his immediate family and one or two others knew anything, and these had affected him more than either notoriety or wealth, both of which, one would gather, he always had every expectation of attaining.

In the decade before the war, his most productive time as an engineer, he had grown increasingly distant and impersonal in manner whenever he was home, which was seldom. One April, while writing to tell him how green and lovely everything looked about the house, his young daughter Elvira suddenly realized that never in her memory had he been home during the springtime. The day-to-day running of the mill he had left largely to Charles Swan, a German from Pittsburgh who had worked on the Allegheny aqueduct and who had shown such promise that Roebling brought him to Trenton. Swan had the “happy faculty” of being able to get along with Roebling, “an important matter,” as Washington commented knowingly. Swan also appears to have had no end of patience with his employer’s mania for detail and his essential distrust of anyone’s judgment other than his own. Time and again the two of them would ride down to the Trenton depot together, Roebling on his way to Niagara Falls or Cincinnati or some such place, and telling Swan as they went along how he was to have full authority to decide things. But it had never worked out that way. Swan heard regularly, almost daily, about what he was to do or not to do, and was expected to keep Roebling fully informed by return mail. Everything had to be done to the most exacting standards. If Roebling was dissatisfied with a clerk’s handwriting, Swan would hear about it (“He must take pains to improve and examine attentively well written letters which you receive and which may serve him as patterns…”) and a demonstration of the proper way to address a letter would be included. (“The direction should never be put up high in the upper part of the envelope, but rather below the center, else it looks uncommercial-like.”) Appearances were exceedingly important.

The letters to Swan numbered in the hundreds as time passed and were always strictly business communications. Despite all the years Swan had been with him and all that Swan had come to mean to the family, never once did John Roebling write a line to suggest there could possibly be a bond of friendship between them. If he was meeting interesting people in his travels, there is no mention of it. If he had feelings for the places he went, he said nothing of them. If ever he had a sense of humor, there is not a trace of it.

His preoccupation with work became almost beyond reckoning. He was living in a time characterized by extraordinarily industrious men, when hard work took up most of everyone’s life and was regarded as a matter of course; but even so, his immense reserves of nervous energy, his total devotion to the job at hand, whatever it might be, seemed superhuman to all who came in contact with him. If metaphysics was his only dissipation, as was said in Trenton, work seemed his one and only passion. Once, quite unwittingly, he revealed the extraordinary and rather ludicrous limits such preoccupation could reach. On New Year’s Day, 1855, his wife had been delivered of still another child, but this apparently came as a great surprise to the bridgebuilder when the news reached him at Niagara Falls. “Your letters of the 2nd and 3rd came to hand,” he wrote quite formally to Swan. “You say in your last that Mrs. Roebling and the child are pretty well. This takes me by surprise, not having been informed at all of the delivery of Mrs. R. Or what do you mean? Please answer by return mail.” Swan was to waste no money on a telegram, in other words.

The war and Lincoln’s murder had been terribly hard on Roebling. “I for my part wished the blacks all good fortune in their endeavors to be free,” he had written when he first arrived in America. Slavery was “the greatest cancerous affliction” in an otherwise ideal land. When Lincoln called for volunteers after the attack on Sumter, Roebling had sat gravely silent at his end of the dinner table, then turned abruptly to his son Washington, “Don’t you think you have stretched your legs under my mahogany long enough?” And the young man had enlisted the very next morning. “When a whole nation had been steeped for a whole century in sins of inequity, it may require a political tornado to purify its atmosphere,” he wrote in his private notes. But as the years of the war dragged on he had worried incessantly about his son and the news of Lincoln’s death fell on him like a massive personal tragedy. Bitterly he wrote, “We cannot close our eyes to the appalling fact that the prominent events of history are made up of a long series of individual and national crimes of all sorts, on enmity, cruelty, oppression, massacres, persecution, wars without end.”

But the most shattering blow had been the death of Johanna Roebling in the final year of the war. In the years since Saxonburg they had seemed ill-matched. From her wedding day until the day she died, she served him faithfully and with love, but he had become increasingly preoccupied with his studies, his books, his work. She had had almost no education and understood very little about the things he considered so important. He was away most of the time, traveling always “in the first society.” She went nowhere. Her world was scarcely broader than what she could see from her doorstep. Only in her last years would she feel enough at ease in English to get along in the most ordinary daily conversation.

“A purer-hearted woman or one gifted with warmer affections than my mother you will seldom meet,” Washington Roebling had written in a letter to Emily Warren, who was shortly to become his wife. “It is therefore plain to you that before long my father outstripped Mother in the social race and she was no longer a companion to him in a certain sense of the word. A gifted woman like yourself would no doubt have suited him better from 40 to 50, but upon the whole he could not have had a better or truer helpmate for life. A man of strong passions and impulses he could only get along with a yielding and confiding woman.”

That Johanna Roebling never understood, and therefore never fully appreciated, the range and fertility of her husband’s mind or the extraordinary beauty of what he built seemed self-evident to almost everyone who did have a feeling for such things. But as his children knew full well, the failure of appreciation worked both ways, until it was too late. He was in Cincinnati when she died, but after the funeral the Man of Iron had taken down the family Bible and on a single blank page wrote the following:

My dearly beloved wife, Johanna, after a protracted illness of 9 months, died in peace with herself and all the world, on Tuesday the 22nd November, 1864, at 12:30 P.M.

Of those angels in human form, who are blessing the Earth by their unselfish love and devotion, this dear departed wife was one.—She never thought of herself, she only thought of others. No trace of ill will toward any person ever entered her unselfish bosom. And O! what a treasure of love she was towards her own children! No faults were ever discovered.—She only knew forbearance, patience and kindness. My only regret is that such a pure unselfishness was not sufficiently appreciated by myself.—

In a higher sphere of life I hope I meet you again my Dear Johanna! And I also hope that my own love and devotion will then be more deserving of yours.

Always intensely philosophical, he now began filling hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of lined blue paper with his own private visions and speculations on man, matter, truth, and the nature of the universe. The words slanted across the paper as though in a tremendous hurry, heavy on the downstrokes, leaving no margin at all. Truth, he said, was “harmony between object and subject” and “the final idea, the absolute idea, which includes all other ideas.” Truth was something that should appeal to every man “whose inner Self-consciousness is not yet worked out, whose spiritual manhood and mental integrity are yet asserting supremacy.” He declared, “Existence has a cause.” Life itself he saw in terms of a torrential, twisting stream “rolling along, ever driven by its own gravitating tendency towards the great Ocean of Universality.”

The words sounded most impressive, but what he was getting at was sometimes very hard to tell, and apparently the few people he permitted to read his “Truth of Nature” and other essays found them extremely rough going. The afterhours philosopher seemed such a far cry from the clear, precise, no-nonsense person they knew. It was as though some impenetrable Teutonic mysticism had surfaced from a deep recess in his past. One friend of the family said he had never been invited to read any of John Roebling’s philosophy, but from what he had heard, he prayed he never would be.

Still there were moments of great clarity. “We are born to work and study,” he wrote at one point, which fitted him perfectly. “True life is not only active, but also creative,” he asserted. And another time: “It is a want of my intellectual nature to bring in harmony all that surrounds me. Every new harmony is to me another messenger of peace, another pledge of my redemption.”

Not for years had he taken an active interest in organized religion. Raised a Lutheran, he had joined the Presbyterians after arriving in Trenton, but for some time now the Roebling pew had been used as the visitors’ pew. He made an appearance every so often, accompanied by one or more of his sons, and all eyes would be on them as they came down the aisle. But he held that spiritual communion with the Creator was more likely to be achieved through a vigorous life of the mind. “Human reason,” he wrote, “is the work of God, and He gave it to us so that we can recognize Him.”

He had been swept up by the teachings of Swedenborg, the brilliant Swedish physicist of the previous century, who rejected the dogma of original sin and eternal damnation and wrote of a spiritual evolution for the individual. And like Swedenborg he had embraced spiritualism.

For some twenty years and more, spiritualism had been gaining converts among educated people on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fox Sisters and their much-publicized “Rochester Rappings” had marked the start of it in America. And in the time since, it had become an intensely serious body of beliefs that had a strange, powerful appeal to a surprising number of intensely serious people. For those of a doubting analytical turn of mind, it seemed to offer proof of the existence of a spiritual realm. To practical men of learning, whose faith in traditional doctrine had been shaken by the revelations of science, it seemed at least an alternative. Why Roebling turned to it he never explained. But in the final years of his life he believed devoutly in a “Spirit Land” and in the possibility of mortal communication with its inhabitants. Specifically, he believed in the afterworld described by Andrew Jackson Davis, “The Poughkeepsie Seer,” a pale, nearsighted son of an alcoholic shoemaker, who in Roebling’s estimate was one of the great men of all time.

Davis had become a clairvoyant, healer, and overnight sensation in 1844, at age seventeen, when he took his first “psychic flight through space” while under hypnosis in Poughkeepsie, New York. For the next several years he traveled up and down the East delivering hundreds of lectures, taking his own attendant hypnotist along with him—to “magnetize” him for each performance—as well as a New Haven preacher who took down everything he uttered while under the spell, all of which was turned into books. (One such book ran to thirty-four editions.) His preachments were a strange mixture of occult mystery, science, or what passed for science, progressive social reform, intellectual skepticism, and a vaulting imagination. For Roebling the impact of all this was momentous. It was as though he had been struck by divine revelation. He wrote at length to Horace Greeley, proposing the establishment of an orphanage in which a thousand children would be “perfectly educated, physically and mentally” according to the Davis vision of the good life. An “earthly paradise” was still possible after all.

The hereafter as pictured by Davis was a complicated hierarchy of life spheres, successive states of consciousness, all worked out geometrically, that existed above, and concentric with, the earth’s surface. Apparently, in terms of what Roebling knew of physics and astronomy, this made more sense than anything else he had heard of, and besides, there was the rich mystical language of Davis, which for Roebling seems to have reached farther even than reason could take him.

For the benefit of his family Roebling would expound on such things endlessly at the dinner table, using Davis or some philosophical discourse he had read as his text, his voice gaining strength as he went on and on, with no concern whatever that his small, respectful audience understood almost nothing he was saying, but just sat there, blinking like young owls in the sunshine, as Washington Roebling would say. Washington was old enough to remember when that “life force” his father liked to talk of had surged through the man with such vitality and there were scenes that would live on with the young man as long as he would: father at his drawing table at Saxonburg, before he needed spectacles to read, working long into the night, his books and things all about him; father in Pittsburgh before the war livid over some latest piece of political news and vowing to go straight home and fire every Democrat in the mill; father up and out of the house before breakfast, an old fur cap on his head, walking the fields with a stick and a dog, getting up an appetite as he said; father with strap in hand about to lay on terrible retribution for some childish misdeed, a burning, unforgettable fury in his eyes.

But in the years since Johanna’s death he had seemed ever more engrossed in the spirit world and talk of sickness and death. His back bothered him. He suffered from indigestion. For those of his children still living at home it had been a disturbing, unpleasant time, and particularly for Edmund, the youngest, who had been his mother’s favorite. When she was gone, his father, as always, had been too busy to give him any time. When his father married again, in 1867, the boy had been packed off to a boarding school, where, Washington would write, “he was subjected to evil influences of so galling and insidious a nature that he ran away—was caught, brought back, and nearly beaten to death by a brutal father, and sent back.” The boy escaped a second time and vanished. For nearly a year the family agonized over his whereabouts. But then he was found, quite by accident, by a Trenton man who happened to be inspecting a prison in Philadelphia. “He had had himself entered as a common vagrant,” Washington would explain, “to get away from his father, and was enjoying life for the first time.”

The whole affair was kept very quiet. None of the family would ever speak of it. There was nothing said in the papers. Except for a private memorandum written by Washington years later, there would be no record of the incident. But in his philosophical notes, under the heading “Man. Conscience,” John A. Roebling wrote the following at about the time Edmund was back home again.

A man may be content with the success of an enterprise; he may have succeeded in overcoming obstacles; in vanquishing his adversaries and enemies; in achieving a great task; solving a great mental problem, or accomplishing work, which was previously pronounced impossible and impracticable. The hero is admired and proclaimed a public benefaction; observed of all observers, he feels himself elated, and in his own estimation a great man. Retiring for one calm moment within the recesses of his own inner self, he reviews his past deeds, his thoughts and motives of action. And before the stern judgment of his own conscience, he stands condemned, an untruth, a lie to himself. But nobody knows! Does he himself now know? Who can hide me from myself?…

Had their mother lived, Washington believed, none of this would have happened. And then one night she returned.

“The latest sensation we have had here are spiritual communications from Mother,” Ferdinand Roebling, John Roebling’s second son, wrote on November 12, 1867, to his brother Washington, then in Europe. A cousin, Edward Riedel, was the medium. He and Roebling’s draftsman, young Wilhelm Hildenbrand, had been sitting in their room on a Saturday night when they heard three knocks under Riedel’s chair. “He did not know what to make of it,” Ferdinand said, “so they examined the room and the next room and porch and all around, the knocks still followed Ed, always under him, they then asked some questions.” Was it a bad spirit? No answer. Was it a good spirit? Three knocks. After repeating these same two questions several times, they asked if perhaps they ought to give up and go to bed, and the response was three sharp knocks.

Roebling was told the next morning. That night they formed up in a circle in his office but got no response until Riedel, having lost hope apparently, went to his room and pulled off his boots. Suddenly he heard the knocks, coming from the kitchen. Roebling was called and they all quickly gathered there. “They then used the Alphabet and found out whose spirit it was. No answer could be given to anyone but Ed.” Everyone was extremely excited, it seems, and Roebling especially, one would imagine. He suggested a few questions, but “none of any account,” according to Ferdinand, and about the only important piece of information communicated by the spirit was that she would return two weeks hence—which she did, and this time Roebling was ready with a long list of questions carefully thought out in advance. If this was to be his first real chance to converse with “the other side,” he would come to it as he had tried to come to every turning point in life, thoroughly prepared.

Having determined at the start of the séance that the spirit was indeed that of his wife, Roebling asked for Willie and Mary, their two dead children, for his own mother and father, and for Frederick Overman, a renowned German metallurgist from Philadelphia who appears to have been the one real friend he had ever had time for since leaving Saxonburg. Overman, dead for fifteen years by this time, once told Roebling that life was a result of movement and death only a change of movement and it had made a lasting impression on the bridgebuilder.

Then Roebling started down his prepared list.

“Do you remember, my dearest, the conversations I have had with you about the Spirit Land and Spheres? You remember the opinions and view taught by Andrew Davis on the subject?” Having been convinced he could talk again to his beloved wife after three years, his whole line of questioning was designed strictly to verify his own set of beliefs. Was Davis correct on the whole, he wanted to know. Yes. In detail? Yes. And so it went, through the rest of that session and in the eleven others that were to follow. On the night of January 25, 1868, for instance, the conversation had run this way:

“After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being, young, energetic and full of life?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find that all disease had left you, and that your new spiritual body was free from pains, rejoicing in youth and vigor?”

No answer.

“Do you attend public lectures?”

“Yes.”

“Who is your favorite lecturer? Will you spell out his name?”

“C-H-A-N-N-I-N-G.”

“Are you taught religion?”

“No.”

“Have you got a Bible there?”

“No.”

“You are taught without books?”

“Yes.”

“Is it taught by your teachers that inspired truth and the truth of nature cannot be at variance?”

“Yes.”

“The Christian Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, the Turkish Koran, and all the other books, which lay claim to divine origin and divine inspiration, are all human compositions, therefore liable to error. Is this view correct?”

“Yes.”

“Every man has a spark of divine principle within himself, which alone can save him and elevate him, is this so?”

“Yes.”

He was getting all the answers he wanted. On the night of March 22, he had a total of sixty-one questions prepared for her. Their discourse should always be “serious,” he said at the start; he should not waste time on trivial talk. Yes, she answered. It was truth he should be in search of, he said. Yes, she answered again.

Soon she was bringing a number of other spirits along with her, at his request. On the night of June 14, Willie and Mary, Grandmother Herting, Overman, Roebling’s brother Karl, another brother, and three others besides Mrs. Roebling were present, making ten in all. Still Roebling took no time for personal exchanges with any of them, the line of questioning continued exactly as before. But the atmosphere in the dark room remained highly charged. At one point young Edmund exclaimed that he could see Grandmother Herting’s face and that she was reaching out to touch him. Whether or not the new flesh-and-blood Mrs. Roebling was invited to sit in on any of these sessions is not known.

Had it not been for the bridge, such gatherings with the dead might have gotten to everyone in the household. But by this time the bridge had become the overriding passion of Roebling’s life. It was the summer of 1867, the summer before the séances began, that he had drawn up his plans. In just three months, working at a fever pitch, he had produced the drawings, location plans, preliminary surveys, taken soundings, worked out his cost estimates, and written his proposal, nearly fourteen thousand words in all. Some would say later that it had been as though he knew how little time he had left, which seems unlikely, even though the subject of death, his own included, remained very much on his mind, as his oldest son would disclose.

Washington had been the one member of the family ever to go off and work with John Roebling at bridgebuilding. He knew the different man his father became then, out in the open air, a hundred men or more at his command, his bridge the talk of everyone who came to watch. More than anyone he could appreciate how long a shadow the old man cast. Moreover, he appears to have been the one person Roebling confided in, telling him things he had not said to anyone. He had unlimited confidence and pride in the young man and had agreed to begin the new bridge only with the understanding that the two of them would be working together.

And it would be Washington, later, in things he said and wrote, who would describe another change that had come over his father, something more than his remoteness or the ill temper of advancing age or his forays into the spirit world. It was a deep melancholic disillusionment growing out of what John Roebling thought he saw happening to the country since the war. The great dynamic of America, he had always said, was that every man had the opportunity to better himself, to fulfill himself. Now the great dynamic seemed more like common greed. It was not so much contempt for Germany that had brought him to America, he had told his children, but that in this new country a man was free to make the most of his abilities. If he had “personal energy and power of will,” there were few limits to what a man might attain. Moreover, like numerous others of his day he had long equated works of monumental engineering—and his own work especially—with national grandeur. “The idea of an epoch always finds its appropriate and adequate form,” his teacher Hegel had written. The steamboats, canals, highways, railroads, and bridges he himself had seen on first arriving in America were, he had written, the direct result of the “concerted action of an enlightened, self-governing people.”

But now he had his doubts. Now he had seen men making the most of abilities he had no stomach for and self-government made a mockery. And lately he had seen his own work contribute to that kind of degradation. It had troubled him so deeply that he had talked seriously with his son of washing his hands of the entire affair in Brooklyn.

But now, dressed in a light topcoat and a soft felt hat, he stood waiting to join the Bridge Party. Whether any of his other sons, his wife, or perhaps the faithful Charles Swan had come to the depot with him, to keep him company or to listen to any last-minute instructions, is not known. Washington, however, had left Brooklyn with the others and would be at the door of the parlor car to greet him when the train stopped.

3

The Genuine Language of America

He spoke our language imperfectly, because he had not the advantage of being born on our soil, but he spoke the genuine language of America at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Niagara…

—THOMAS KINSELLA, in
The Brooklyn Eagle

CHAMPAGNE and sandwiches were served soon after Roebling came aboard. How late the little celebration lasted after that nobody said later. But at five the next morning, when he roused them all, there was no little grumbling. He was anxious, Roebling said, that nobody miss the sunrise over the Alleghenies.

By breakfast they were passing through Johnstown and he had everyone peering out at the steep, thickly wooded sides of Conemaugh Gap, a deep cleft in Laurel Hill that he and his railroad surveying party had first seen from a distant hill thirty years before. “There was our course!” he had written enthusiastically at the time.

The next town of any size was Greensburg, where the very first suspension bridge there is a record of was built over Jacobs Creek by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His “chain bridge” had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. Perhaps Roebling told his traveling companions something about this, thereby getting a head start on their instructions in the history and theory of suspension bridges.

When the train pulled into Pittsburgh less than an hour later, he took them directly to their quarters at the Monongahela House, which stood at the end of his Smithfield Street Bridge. From the front door of the hotel, or possibly from their rooms, if they were on the river side, they had a perfect view of the pioneering work, now nearly twenty-five years old, that had started Roebling on his way. It had been built at a time when every floor beam had to be cut with a hand-pulled whipsaw, when screws were still turned on a lathe by hand, and steel, practically speaking, even in Pittsburgh, was regarded as a semiprecious metal. One of the Pittsburgh papers in 1846, the year the bridge was finished, had claimed “this admirable species” was “destined to supersede all others.” For Roebling, from then on, it had been the only type he would care anything about building, and in its rather antique fashion, the bridge still illustrated several fundamental points about his own particular manner of building—all of which he no doubt explained as he and his entourage went out for a first look.

Here again, as at the aqueduct, he had fixed his cables to a chain of iron eyebars buried in masonry anchorages. Here, for the first time, he had used his system of inclined stays to add strength and rigidity. Only here, he explained, he had used iron rods rather than the iron rope used on all his later bridges. The bridge was fifteen hundred feet long (or not quite as long as the river span alone of the bridge he had drawn up for Brooklyn). It had eight spans of about 188 feet each and short cast-iron towers. The wind had no effect on it, he said, and the vibrations produced by seven-ton coal wagons and their teams were no greater than on a wooden truss bridge with spans the same length. The total cost had been $55,000—“a very small sum indeed for such an extensive work,” according to the engineer.

But the real Roebling showpiece in Pittsburgh was across town at Sixth Street and there they all went first thing that afternoon. He had built the Smithfield Street Bridge largely to prove his engineering skill and the soundness of the suspension technique. He had been concerned with building an efficient structure at the least possible cost. But his Allegheny River Bridge, begun eleven years later, had been built with an ample budget. It had been his first real opportunity to display his gift for architectural design and he had had a splendid time with it. Among people who knew bridges, it was considered one of the handsomest in the country.

It stood downstream from where his aqueduct had been and connected Pittsburgh with the small neighboring city of Allegheny. Its total length (1,030 feet) was less than the bridge over the Monongahela. It had four spans and was supported by four cables hung from six highly ornamental iron towers, each with iron latticework for bracing and iron spires for decoration on top. “The bridge will be beautiful,” he had written when the towers were nearly finished. In truth it looked a little as though it had been designed to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of a Turkish sultan. This was also the first bridge he and his son had built together. “I am getting along well here,” he had written home to Trenton in the spring of 1858. “Washington is about the work.” As a matter of fact it was Washington who supervised most of the job thereafter and for whom numerous Pittsburghers had the most affectionate memories.

Once finished the Allegheny River Bridge was so sound that the owners—a private company—had not even bothered to take out insurance on it, and as a toll road, it had made money from the start—both points that must have been noted with interest by the delegation from the East. For about an hour they examined the bridge. There is no record of what was discussed during this time, but probably the cables were the main topic. These had been laid up, or “spun,” in place, unlike those on the bridge just visited, where the cables were smaller and the spans between towers were much shorter. There the iron wires had been spun on land first, to form individual cable sections that were then hoisted into position. But here, one can picture him explaining, the cables had been spun on the bridge itself by a traveling wheel that went back and forth, stringing the wire over the towers, from shore to shore, making fourteen hundred trips in all, and this was the way that he meant to build his cables over the East River.

Thomas Kinsella, the editor of the Eagle, would report in an article written afterward that the floor trembled very little as trolleys to and from Allegheny went clattering by and everyone in the party thought Roebling’s ornamental ironwork a feast for the eye. The remainder of the day was spent touring the ironworks of the young Carnegie brothers, where the manufacture and virtues of Bessemer steel were explained. Whether or not the wire in the new bridge would be of steel had still to be decided.

The itinerary called for a stay of several days in Pittsburgh, but so unpleasant was the air, in the opinion of several in the group, and so unsatisfactory the accommodations at the Monongahela House, that a decision was made to leave the next day. “If you ever visit Pittsburgh,” wrote Thomas Kinsella for his Brooklyn readers, “and desire to stop at the best hotel…don’t.”

On the morning of April 16 they were again settled in their private car, “leaving Pittsburgh like a great sooty blotch behind.” The sun out, they “swept across into Ohio” at the grand speed of fifty-four miles per hour, an experience everyone would have enjoyed had not the parlor car started rocking so that it greatly interfered with a poker game. At Cincinnati some time after dark they checked into the Burnet House, where they enjoyed a “very fair supper,” after which, over cigars, the next morning’s schedule was discussed. “Slocum, never lacking pluck, had the courage,” Kinsella wrote, “to suggest that nine o’clock was, under the circumstances, a barbarous hour. He quickly won the majority over to his way of thinking, and the Untiring Old Man, Roebling, yielded an hour’s grace, and it was tacitly accepted that no one would be greatly disappointed if the party should not leave the hotel before ten o’clock. As we retired the blessed spring rain was falling against the windowpanes, and after the day’s fatigue sleep came as gentle as the dew.” (All this still being written for home consumption, in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle.)

The following morning one of the party, a man named Cary, reported sick. He had made the mistake, he said, of drinking some of the local water, a glass of which was described as eating and drinking combined. But the rest were in excellent spirits and the day was spectacular. It was Saturday and the streets were already crowded with people enjoying the sunshine as Roebling led his group out of the hotel.

The first view of the bridge proved to be a far more stirring experience than anyone from Brooklyn had been prepared for. It was built on a line running due south, reaching over the Ohio to Covington, Kentucky. But because of the way the streets were laid out along the river front, there was no way to see the bridge until nearly upon it. “It then broke upon us all at once,” Kinsella wrote, “the stateliest and most splendid evidence of genius, enterprise and skill it has ever been my lot to see.”

Eleven thousand people a day were crossing it, he and the others were told, as they stood gazing at the long, graceful arc of its river span (“…it was indeed a work to excite amazement and wonder.”). For the next hour or more they walked back and forth from one end to the other (“…it seemed as solid and as stable beneath our feet as the earth on either side of the river.”).

This, they realized, was the nearest thing in existence to what Roebling planned to build over the East River. And if any of them was having trouble picturing the new bridge, he had now only to imagine something very like this one—only much bigger. * Here were the twin towers of stone standing foursquare and solid, a slender line of roadway stretched between them, slung on great cables and arcing the river with a single span. Here, as on the Pittsburgh bridges, were the inclined stays, slanting down from the towers like iron rays, angling across the suspenders that connected the cables to the roadway. The stays were the mark of a Roebling bridge, the traveling delegation had come to realize. But here the scale of the bridge was such that the combination of stays and suspenders looked like a gigantic web, or net, and the same effect at Brooklyn, it was understood, would be even greater.

Every diagonal stay, Roebling explained, formed the hypotenuse of a right triangle (the bridge floor and the tower forming the shorter sides) and thus provided tremendous stability, since, as he said, “The triangle is the only unchangeable figure known in geometry…” Altogether, cables, suspenders, stays, and bridge floor formed a kind of truss. The great horizontal stability of the bridge was due in large measure, he said, to such “bracing” of the cables. This was a proposition “readily comprehended by sailors, who are accustomed to stays on board ships.”

The “Biggest Bridge in the World” had been opened to the public on December 1, 1866, to the tune of a thundering cannonade. By sundown 46,000 people had crossed it, with no ill effects to the bridge or to any of them. But the following day, an uncommonly mild winter Sunday, 120,000 people had turned out to personally examine the wondrous work. Then, on New Year’s Day, 1867, the official opening, a big parade had marched over from the Covington side, led by Roebling and Amos Shinkle, the Cincinnati coal dealer who had been the principal organizer of the project, and who that sparkling spring morning in 1869 had come down to the bridge to greet Roebling and his new clients, some of whom had matters other than engineering on their minds. “Does the bridge pay, sir?” he was asked. “Yes, sir,” answered Shinkle, “handsomely.”

Roebling had first come to Cincinnati with plans for a bridge more than twenty years before, in 1846, and had felt very much at home in the brick city on the river, with its German theaters, its beer gardens and German newspapers. The Ohio was still the great dividing line between North and South then, between plantation slavery on the Kentucky side and in Cincinnati some of the strongest abolitionist sentiment in the country. (It was in Cincinnati then that stories told by slaves who had escaped over the river were making a deep impression on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the young wife of a local professor.) So there were reasons other than the mighty Ohio or the strenuous opposition of the steamboat interests for not building a bridge and it was nearly a decade later, and only when Amos Shinkle came on the scene, that anything began to happen.

But after Roebling had the work under way, he was hit by one of the worst winters on record in Ohio, the winter of 1856-57. In spring, when the ice broke up, the river flooded his foundations so badly that little could be accomplished for another six months. Roebling kept coming from Trenton to look things over, then headed home again. But it was a time of great productivity for him.

The year before, he had done a sketch for a bridge to Brooklyn, a multispan bridge to cross by way of Blackwell’s Island, where the prison and poor asylum stood. In March of 1857 he wrote to Horace Greeley to propose “a wire suspension bridge crossing the East River by one single span at such an elevation as will not impede the navigation.” His Cincinnati Bridge, scarcely even under way, was only a preliminary work, as he saw it. This East River bridge would be “without rival,” its towers three hundred feet high. The letter appeared in the New York Tribune on March 27, 1857, and was Roebling’s first public declaration of his plan.

That same March, in his Trenton study, he produced drawings for three different kinds of towers for the East River bridge—one an elaborate Egyptian doorway with a spread-eagle gargoyle for a corbel; another a notably plain Roman arch; the third, again a Roman arch but drawn with a bolder, heavier pediment and then a Gothic arch, a second thought apparently, sketched in tentatively in pencil, very lightly, like a ghost of things to come. None of these suited him, but still enormously excited about the idea, he wrote to Abram Hewitt, head of Peter Cooper’s Trenton Iron Works. It was Peter Cooper who had first urged Roebling to locate in Trenton and helped him pick a site for his wire mill, probably figuring the engineer to be a fine prospective customer. In the time since, Hewitt had become Cooper’s son-in-law as well as his business partner. An energetic, self-assured young man, he was said to have a great future. Hewitt had Roebling’s letter printed in the Journal of Commerce, but did no more than that, which must have been disappointing to Roebling. Indeed Hewitt’s response would be barely worth mentioning were it not for the part he was subsequently to play.

The terrible Panic of 1857 burst upon the country that summer and Roebling had all he could do managing things in Trenton and at Cincinnati, where work on the bridge was shut down altogether, not to begin again until the early part of the Civil War, when a Confederate force under Kirby Smith, advancing into the Blue Grass Country to the south, threw all Cincinnati into a state of panic. Soldiers and citizens alike rushed to fortify the hills on the Covington side, discovering in the process how very advantageous a bridge would be, had there only been one. And beside the pontoon affair that was hastily assembled stood Roebling’s half-finished towers to remind everyone what might have been.

There never was a siege of Cincinnati, but once the threat of one had passed, the fortunes of Roebling’s troubled Cincinnati Bridge took an immediate turn for the better. Subscriptions to new stock poured into Amos Shinkle’s office, the work commenced once more and with no opposition. For Roebling the bridge was a symbol of confidence rising above the “general national gloom.” It proved, he said, that there were still men about “with unshaken moral courage and implicit trust in the future political integrity of the nation.” When his Irish laborers, who shared no such feelings for the bridge or for the Union cause, walked off the job demanding higher pay, Roebling fired every man and hired only Germans as replacements. “The Germans about here are mostly loyal, the Irish alone are disloyal,” he wrote. “No Democrat can be trusted, they are all disloyal and treacherous, more or less.”

Two years later, the war nearly over, Washington Roebling was released from the Army and went almost directly to Cincinnati, where, by then, there was no longer any question about the relative importance of his father’s bridge. “The size and magnitude of this work far surpass any expectations I had formed of it,” the young man wrote to the rest of the family back in Trenton. “It is the highest thing in this country; the towers are so high a person’s neck aches looking up at them. It will take me a week to get used to the dimensions of everything around here.” From that point on, though his official title was Assistant Engineer, he had been in complete charge of the work. All the cable spinning, the most exciting, difficult part of the work, was done under his direction, his father having concluded that he would henceforth “leave bridgebuilding to younger folks.”

The Cincinnati Bridge wound up taking a total of ten years to build and it cost just about twice what John Roebling had said it would. But no one had any complaints. It was unquestionably the finest as well as the largest bridge of its kind built until that time. Both structurally and architecturally it was a triumph.

Talking in retrospect, Amos Shinkle had nothing but praise for the manner in which it had been built. From an engineering standpoint everything had gone very smoothly. Only two lives had been lost during the entire time of its construction, a remarkable safety record, as the gentlemen from the East agreed. For the Roeblings, he had only the highest admiration, and especially for the redoubtable father, about whom, apparently, a few of the Brooklyn men had expressed some uneasiness. Getting along with him should prove no problem, Shinkle assured them. His advice was simple: “He is an extraordinary man and if you people in Brooklyn are wise you will interfere with his views just as little as possible. Give the old man his way and trust him.”

At eight that evening the Bridge Party departed for Niagara Falls, by way of Cleveland, where they stopped for the night and where several of them decided things could be livened up a bit if the word was spread that they were a group of wealthy lunatics being conducted on an outing. The joke worked quite well, it seems, causing a considerable stir in the hotel dining room. But when Thomas Kinsella’s account of such goings on appeared in the paper back in Brooklyn, it served mainly to substantiate what a number of people there had been saying right along, that the bridge was the scheme of madmen.

Spring was late arriving at Niagara Falls. The snowbanks had nearly all disappeared but the weather was sharp still and gigantic slabs of ice could be seen plunging down the river as Roebling led his group out to inspect what was generally conceded to be his masterpiece, a two-level suspension bridge over the great gorge.

This tour could have been arranged in the reverse order just as easily, with Niagara the first stop instead of the last, which would have made better sense in some ways, in that the Niagara Bridge was an earlier work than either the Cincinnati or Allegheny River bridges. But Roebling had saved Niagara for the last for good reasons.

At Pittsburgh he had been able to show as solid, dependable, and handsome a piece of workmanship as he had ever built. The Allegheny River Bridge was a bridge everyone liked. It had caused nobody any headaches when it was being put up or in the time since. At Cincinnati, the unprecedented length of the single river span was the most important thing on display, from the technical point of view. But the bridge had also a grandeur of a kind rarely seen and his new clients had come away from it with a keener appreciation of monumental scale as well as engineering genius.

But the Niagara Bridge, or International Suspension Bridge, or just Suspension Bridge as it was called locally, was neither terribly solid-appearing nor especially large. Indeed, every bridge they had inspected so far was longer. Also, unlike any of the others, it had been built with two levels—carriages and pedestrians traveled the lower level, while the Great Western Canada Railroad crossed on the one above—and the whole thing trembled quite noticeably when traffic was heavy. For some people the experience of crossing by carriage was positively terrifying. “You drive over to Suspension Bridge,” wrote Mark Twain, “and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.”

Its single span was 825 feet, which was nothing exceptional any longer. Its four stone towers stood only about half as high as those at Cincinnati. It had not been the first suspension bridge over the gorge and it did not stand alone, unrivaled, the way the Cincinnati Bridge did.

The first bridge had been built downstream at Lewiston, New York, in 1851, by Edward Serrell, brother of the Serrell traveling with the Bridge Party. It had been a very light suspension bridge and was badly shaken by a storm in 1855, after which, at Roebling’s suggestion, it had been refitted with guy wires. But later when these wires were loosened by an ice jam, somebody neglected to tighten them. A spring storm tore the bridge floor to pieces and left the cables and suspenders dangling uselessly in mid-air. And there they were still, about as dramatic an example of what could happen to a poorly engineered suspension bridge as could be seen, short of an actual collapse.

The other bridge over the gorge was very much in view from where they stood, about two miles upstream, near the falls. It was a brand-new suspension span designed by a Canadian, Samuel Keefer. It had been opened just that January and was already an extremely popular attraction, being near the best hotels. But since it was only ten feet wide, or too narrow for carriages to pass one another, traffic had to cross it in turns, first one way, then the other, and long waiting lines built up. In years to come it would be remodeled extensively and become famous as the Honeymoon Bridge. But at this stage it was being publicized only as a greater span than the one at Cincinnati, which indeed it was in terms of length. It was more than two hundred feet longer, which meant it now held the world’s record.

It would appear then that the gentlemen from Brooklyn might have been somewhat disappointed with this, the final Roebling bridge on the tour. But not so. Like nearly everyone who ever stood there at the brink of the gorge, with the bridge before them, they looked upon it with nothing less than awe.

The site alone was enough to take a person’s breath away. Upstream were the falls, while directly beneath the bridge, deep in the abyss, was the first of a series of savage rapids that swept on downstream for a mile or better, ending in a tremendous whirlpool held in a looming rock basin. Past there the current veered to the right and disappeared through a narrow channel overhung by sharp cliffs and trees. It was an absolute no man’s land below, but here above it had been conquered, bridged, beautifully.

Once, not many years before, an excursion boat, the Maid of the Mist, had gone shooting by below to the utter astonishment of those who happened to be on the bridge at the time. The boat had been built upstream, between the rapids and the falls, to take sight-seers for a rather terrifying close-up view of the falls. But the boat had never been a financial success. The owner, a Captain Joel Robinson, got into debt and when he heard that the sheriff was on his way to confiscate the boat, he decided his only chance was to escape down the rapids, something nobody had ever done before and lived to tell the story. Two men volunteered to go with him. The people on the bridge saw the boat make one long leap down the rapids. Her funnel was knocked flat by the blow, the whole boat was underwater from stem to stern. Then she was up again and skimming into the whirlpool, where “she rode with comparative ease upon the water, and took the sharp turn around into the river below without a struggle.” Captain Robinson’s wife later said her husband looked approximately twenty years older when he came in the door that evening.

But the bridge seemed to make the whole breath-taking panorama all the more terrifying, all the more magnificent. It was one of those occasions when the hand of man had enhanced that already wrought by the hand of God.

To begin with, the bridge seemed so serene and refined against such tumultuous doings of nature. Its essential components were four plain towers sixty feet high, four cables ten inches in diameter, their suspenders and stays, and a straightforward timber truss joining the two levels of the one span, which over such a gaping cavity in the earth looked ever so much longer than 820 feet. The bridge looked to be exactly what was called for, no more, no less. It was as though it was the only possible bridge for the place.

Actually, of course, one uninterrupted span was the only kind that would have worked there, since supporting piers in the gorge itself would have been out of the question. But this bridge was not simply for carriages and pedestrians, like the one upstream, indeed, like every other suspension bridge in the world at the time. It carried a railroad. That thought alone was enough to command the respect of anyone who knew a little about bridge engineering or recalled when it had been built. But even if a person were ignorant of such things, the sight of a moving train held aloft above the great gorge at Niagara by so delicate a contrivance was, in the 1860’s, nothing short of miraculous. The bridge seemed to defy the most fundamental laws of nature. Something so slight just naturally ought to give way beneath anything so heavy. That it did not seemed pure magic. The reasons it did not were the very foundation of all Roebling’s work. And if his band of clients, consultants, and other interested parties could return to Brooklyn understanding this bridge, they would understand what his work was all about.

In time to come, suspension bridges would not be used much for railroads, as Roebling expected they would. The Niagara Bridge was, in fact, the only noteworthy railroad bridge of its type ever built. The important thing, however, was that Roebling had demonstrated, at one of the most spectacular locations on earth, that the principles of suspension could be applied with perfect safety even to something so heavy as a locomotive and railroad cars, and this in turn had a profound effect on the whole evolution of bridge design, not to mention the acceptance of his own theories. At Niagara he had built the first truly modern suspension bridge.

The great appeal of the suspension bridge, apart from its beauty, was its economy. It required considerably less material than other kinds of bridges. But prior to the completion of Roebling’s Niagara Bridge in 1855, suspension bridges had a dubious reputation. In all America then there were only two engineers who had any firm belief in them or who had built any of consequence. Roebling was one. The other was Charles Ellet, Jr.

The reason for so much distrust of suspension bridges was simply that so many of them had come crashing down over the years, and frequently with tragic consequences. In England in 1831 a suspension bridge had collapsed under the feet of marching troops. (The bridge was the work of Sir Samuel Brown, whose suspension bridges came down about as fast as he put them up, one after another—at Berwick, Brighton, Montrose, and Durham.) In France in 1850 another wire bridge had failed under almost identical circumstances, killing two hundred men. In America a number of small suspension bridges had collapsed under droves of cattle, including one at Covington, Kentucky, over the Licking River, just a few years before Roebling commenced his Cincinnati Bridge.

Nobody understood quite why these things happened. In actual fact the bridges had either been inadequately built to begin with or badly maintained, but whichever the cause, it had generally gone undetected and a large body of distrust had built up about the suspension method in general. In Europe especially, few engineers had confidence in such bridges for spans of any appreciable length or for heavy traffic, and this despite the fact that the earliest suspension bridges approaching the size of those by Roebling or Ellet were built in Europe from about 1820 on.

The basic idea was of course nearly as old as man. In China, South America, and other parts of the world, crude bridges had been slung from vines over rivers and ravines since before recorded history. There was, however, an obvious and important difference between such bridges and those that began to appear in the early part of the nineteenth century. The latter-day variety had a stiff, level floor that did not curve or sway with the ropes that held it, but was—or was supposed to be—as stable as any other kind of bridge floor. Moreover, these were no longer simple footbridges, but big enough to handle carriages and wagons.

A wire suspension bridge was built over the Schuylkill at Philadelphia as early as 1816, or fifteen years after the Reverend James Finley put his historic little chain bridge over Jacobs Creek. But it was the brilliant Scottish engineer Thomas Telford who completed the world’s first great suspension bridge nine years later, in 1825, in Wales. It had two massive masonry towers and was hung on immense iron chains and it crossed the Menai Strait to the island of Anglesey, with a main span of nearly six hundred feet. It was the most famous bridge of its day and the prototype of all the great suspension bridges to came after it, including those by John A. Roebling.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the improbable little genius who would one day build the Great Eastern, the most colossal iron ship in history, also began building suspension bridges about this same time, as did the Swiss, the Germans, and the French. The Grand Pont, a suspension bridge built at Fribourg, Switzerland, in the 1830’s, was not only very large for its time (more than eight hundred feet), but it would stand for a hundred years.

But in 1845, when a proposal was made to use a suspension bridge to carry a railroad over the Niagara Gorge, most of the experts declared the scheme quite impossible. Vibrations set up by so heavy a moving load as a train would, it was said, quickly destroy any wire-hung bridge. Still, the idea of a railroad crossing at Niagara made a great deal of sense to the American and Canadian railroad people and they were encouraged by four engineers who not only thought the thing could be done but were anxious for the chance to do it. Of the four, interestingly, three would eventually span the gorge with bridges of their own design—Serrell, Roebling, and Keefer. But as fate would have it, none of them got the first chance.

The man who did was Charles Ellet, who in 1845 was the best-known bridgebuilder in America. He was also the most flamboyant, the most interesting, and Roebling’s one serious rival. Except for Roebling, he knew the most about suspension bridges and could turn on more fancy talk about them than anyone in the profession. Of all the American engineers of his time, Charles Ellet was the most impetuous and colorful, a genuine character of the sort who came and went with the nineteenth century.

Born in 1810, which made him four years younger than Roebling, Ellet had grown up in Pennsylvania, the son of a Quaker farmer. At seventeen he left home, worked on various canal jobs near home, taught himself French, and saved enough money to go to Paris to study at the Ecole Polytechnique. When he returned home after a year, he was the first native American with a European education in engineering. Almost immediately, he presented Congress with a plan for a thousand-foot suspension bridge over the Potomac at Washington and talked grandly of another over the Mississippi at St. Louis. Then he actually built one over the Schuylkill near Philadelphia in 1842, which was several years before Roebling had built anything. (Roebling had applied to build the same bridge himself, and when Ellet was chosen, Roebling wrote to commend him for so bold a plan. Thinking Ellet an older, more experienced man, Roebling applied for a job as his assistant. Ellet’s reply was quite formal and vague, so Roebling wrote again, this time generously including drawings and notes on his own ideas; but nothing more ever came of it.) Five years after that Ellet had begun his greatest work, over the Ohio River at Wheeling, the first really long suspension bridge on earth. With a center span of 1,010 feet, it was only forty-seven feet shorter than Roebling’s own bridge over the Ohio would be and Roebling’s bridge would not be completed for another twenty years.

Ellet looked like an actor, with dark, brooding eyes and a lithe, athletic build. And all of his other talents aside, nobody made a better show of bridgebuilding. At Niagara he had a stage magnificently suited for the most thrilling performance of his career, and the last one, as it happens.

One of the first problems to be faced at Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first American boy to fly a kite over to the Canadian side. The prize was won by young Homer Walsh, who would tell the story for the rest of his days. Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way. After that, when the initial cable had been completed, Ellet decided to demonstrate his faith in it in a fashion people would not forget. He had an iron basket made up big enough to hold him and attached it to the cable with pulleys. Then stepping inside, on a morning in March 1848, he pulled himself over the gorge and back again, all in no more than fifteen minutes’ time, and to the great excitement of crowds gathered along both rims.

“The wind was high and the weather cold,” he wrote, “but yet the trip was a very interesting one to me—perched up as I was two hundred and forty feet above the Rapids, and viewing from the center of the river one of the sublimest prospects which nature had prepared on this globe of ours.”

Ellet appreciated the historic significance of his feat—he was the first man to cross the gorge—but he was not quite through. Several weeks later, after a plank catwalk had been strung across, he chose to demonstrate its strength in an even more memorable fashion. He leaped into a small carriage, gave his horse a slap of the reins, and went rolling headlong out onto the little bridge, which as yet had no guardrails and which swayed fearfully beneath horse, carriage, and Ellet, who drove standing up, like a charioteer. Everyone watched aghast, women fainted it is said, and Ellet and his bravado became a legend that would last longer at Niagara Falls than anything he built there.

In less than a year he had an angry falling out with the men who were paying for the job. He had finished the catwalk the summer of 1848 and opened it to the public. Very quickly it became a surprisingly lucrative property. Tolls collected came to five thousand dollars before a year had passed and a dispute arose as to whom the money belonged. Feelings between Ellet and his clients got so bad that Ellet drew up cannon at both ends of the bridge, proclaimed it was his, not theirs, and threatened to flatten anybody who came near. There had followed a few tense days at Niagara. Then, inexplicably, Ellet walked away from the greatest opportunity of his career, never to come back, leaving everything he had accomplished swinging uncertainly in the winds of the gorge.

Two years later Roebling commenced his own bridge at the same spot. In temperament and behavior he and Ellet were about as different as two men passionately committed to the same idea could possibly be. Where Ellet talked like a rain maker, Roebling was eloquent but precise, never promising more than he could deliver. Where Ellet was bold, impulsive, dramatic, Roebling was painstaking, methodical, working out every detail in advance. And once he had settled in his mind that he could do a thing, Roebling stuck to it. “Before entering upon any important work, he always demonstrated to the most minute detail its practicability…and when his own judgment was assured, no opposition, sarcasm, or pretended experience could divert him from consummating his designs, and in his own way.”

Roebling started his bridge in 1851 and it took him four years. He worked carefully, steadily, and there were no hair-raising escapades anyone would remember later. For Roebling the excitement of the work, the drama of building a bridge, were chiefly matters of the intellect and spirit. Physical dangers were part of the job, inevitably, but to be taken as they came, or, better still, avoided entirely if a safer way could be figured. The bridge he built was a thorough demonstration of theories he had been perfecting and preaching for a decade and more. “The only real difficulty of the task,” he wrote, “appears to be its novelty.”

Put in its simplest form, Roebling’s fundamental belief about suspension bridges was that the stiffer and heavier the roadway could be made, the more stable the bridge. To many this seemed contrary to common sense, since the weight of the roadway and its superstructure would seem to jeopardize those very elements that made a suspension bridge a suspension bridge—the cables.

Roebling was not the first to recognize the importance of a heavy, stiff roadway, just as he was not the first to use anchor stays or to spin his cables in place, all things he would be credited with initiating and reverently praised for by some of his more ardent admirers. James Finley had used stiffening beams and railings before Roebling was born and he knew the purpose they served. The scowling little Brunel, trudging about his bridges in a stovepipe hat, had directed that tension cables be attached to counteract the action of the wind. The French engineer Seguin wrote in 1824 that rigidity of the bridge floor was the surest means to prevent the “vacillations arising from moving loads of any considerable mass” and said the best way to achieve that rigidity was an arrangement of strong trusses.

There were others, too, including an English engineer named Rendel, who wrote the following before John A. Roebling had built a bridge:

In the anxiety to obtain a light roadway, mathematicians, and even practical engineers, had overlooked the fact that when lightness induced flexibility and consequently motion, the force of the momentum was brought into action and its amount defied calculation. The author has long been convinced of the importance of giving to the roadway of suspension bridges the greatest possible amount of stiffness…

But unlike most every builder of suspension bridges then, and some much later, Roebling not only understood these ideas, he applied them, his system of inclined, or diagonal, stays being an excellent case in point. “I have always insisted that a suspension bridge built without stays is planned without any regard to stiffness, and consequently is defective in a most important point.” And equally important, he did not apply some of the other theories in circulation at the time, many of them very bad theories, that were often taken seriously by the supposed experts. So if he cannot be honestly credited with originating all he preached, he at least was the one engineer who was practicing it properly.

In his original letter of proposal to the railroad men, Roebling had written that his bridge over the Niagara Gorge would stand up under a moving train because he would make it stiff enough to do so. He designed the two floors of the bridge and the open timber trusswork that was to bind them together as one enormous “hollow straight beam.” The timber would be well seasoned, well painted, and the upper floor, where the trains would cross, would be caulked and painted as thoroughly as a ship’s deck, and serve thereby, like the roof of an old-fashioned covered bridge, as a protective shelter for the lower floor and the trusswork.

To make the wire cables sufficiently strong to carry such a structure, as well as the trains, was, he said, “a matter of unerring calculation.” So he had calculated (unerringly, he knew) and he had proceeded to build. Few other engineers gave him any hope of success. The most frequently quoted remark was one made by the great English engineer Robert Stephenson, builder of the famous Britannia railroad bridge, a tubular iron bridge, over the Menai Strait (the trains ran through a succession of enormous iron boxes set on stone piers). Stephenson wrote to Roebling from England: “If your bridge succeeds, then mine have been magnificent blunders.”

Roebling had not a doubt in the world that Stephenson was wrong and said so. As far as he was concerned no Englishman, not even Telford, had ever built a suspension bridge worthy of the name; and to his way of thinking there was only one individual who had, or who really understood the subject, and that of course was John A. Roebling.

Then in May 1854 came the news from Wheeling that Ellet’s Ohio River bridge had gone down. It had lasted just five years. As might be expected, the news created a great stir at Niagara Falls. Roebling especially was anxious to know exactly what had happened.

The details were provided in this vivid account published in the Wheeling Intelligencer:

About 3 o’clock yesterday we walked toward the Suspension Bridge and went upon it, as we have frequently done, enjoying the cool breeze and the undulating motion of the bridge…We had been off the flooring only two minutes, and were on Main Street when we saw persons running toward the river bank; we followed just in time to see the whole structure heaving and dashing with tremendous force.

For a few minutes we watched it with breathless anxiety, lunging like a ship in a storm; at one time it rose to nearly the height of the tower, then fell, and twisted and writhed, and was dashed almost bottom upward. At last there seemed to be a determined twist along the entire span, about one half of the flooring being nearly reversed, and down went the immense structure from its dizzy height to the stream below, with an appalling crash and roar.

For a mechanical solution of the unexpected fall of this stupendous structure, we must await further developments. We witnessed the terrific scene. The great body of the flooring and the suspenders, forming something like a basket swung between the towers, was swayed to and fro like the motion of a pendulum. Each vibration giving it increased momentum, the cables, which sustained the whole structure, were unable to resist a force operating on them in so many different directions, and were literally twisted and wrenched from their fastenings…

From the description Roebling understood perfectly what had gone wrong. In a letter to the railroad officials describing his plans for the Niagara Bridge, Ellet had written “…there are no safer bridges than those on the suspension principle, if built understandingly, and none more dangerous if constructed with an imperfect knowledge of the principles of their equilibrium.” Ellet’s own knowledge had turned out to be imperfect, plainly enough. What Ellet had underestimated, Roebling knew, was the importance of building great rigidity into the bridge floor. A heavy floor would be less likely to move in a high wind, but weight alone was not enough. In fact, it was the weight of Ellet’s bridge that had destroyed it, which Roebling later explained in his final report on the Niagara Bridge.

The Wheeling Bridge “…was destroyed by the momentum acquired by its own dead weight, when swayed up and down by the wind…A high wind, acting upon a suspended floor, devoid of inherent stiffness, will produce a series of undulations…[which] will increase to a certain extent by their own effect, until by a steady blow a momentum of force may be produced, that may prove stronger than the cables. * And although the weight of the floor is a very essential element of resistance to high winds, it should not be left to itself to work its own destruction. Weight should be simply an attending element to a still more important condition, viz: stiffness.”

The best way to achieve such stiffness was with a strong truss, in this case of timber, composed of a combination of triangles. After the Wheeling news reached Niagara, Roebling straightaway reviewed all his plans and decided to build his trusswork stronger still. (To attain the necessary stability for his bridge over the East River, he had designed iron trusses twelve feet high to run the entire length of the suspended floor, from anchorage to anchorage.)

No lives were lost in the Wheeling catastrophe, but it aroused again all the old fears of suspension bridges, fears that would be a very long time dying. Later it would be said that Roebling went to Wheeling to rebuild the bridge properly. That was not what happened, however. Ellet rebuilt the bridge himself, just prior to the Civil War, using inclined stays the way Roebling would have. The bridge still stands.

When the war came, Ellet took command of a fleet of steam rams of his own design, on the Mississippi. Badly wounded at the battle of Memphis, he lingered on in great pain for several weeks, then died in June of 1862.

At Niagara, in June of 1854, Roebling had his cables finished and work had begun on the deck structure. “My bridge is the admiration of everybody,” he wrote; “the directors are delighted. The woodwork goes together in the best manner. The suspenders require scarcely any adjustment at all.” In January, in a letter to Trenton, he said, “We had a tremendous gale for the last 12 hours; my bridge didn’t move a muscle.”

The bridge was completed in March 1855. Its span was nearly twice that of Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge and was able to carry even heavier loading, and yet it had taken only one-sixth as much material in proportion to length. On Friday the 16th the first train rolled over. It was a triumphant moment for Roebling. The train, made up specially for the purpose, was as heavy a freight as could be assembled. The engine weighed twenty-eight tons and it pushed twenty double-loaded cars. As it started over from the Canadian side, it soon covered nearly the whole length of the upper floor. “No vibrations whatever,” Roebling noted. “Less noise and movement than in a common truss bridge.”

A few days later a passenger train made the crossing, going the other way. It was only three cars long, but people were packed into every available bit of space and some were perched on top as well. They went over in “fine style,” Roebling wrote. After that, trains kept crossing at a rate of about one every hour, and to get an idea of the vibrations such traffic might be causing, he climbed to the top of one tower and sat there for some time. It shook less, he said, than his own house at Trenton whenever an express went by. “No one is afraid to cross,” he wrote his family. “The passage of trains is a great sight, worth seeing it.”

For those who stood with him now, the sight must have been no less stirring, even for the engineers—perhaps especially for the engineers. There was, after all, something quite special about a bridge, almost any bridge. Very few were ever outright ugly, and when built right, with everything in harmony, with everything superfluous done away with, with all elements doing exactly what they were supposed to, then a bridge was a thrilling thing to see, with its own kind of graceful majesty, something quite apart from the practicalities of engineering. This was that sort of bridge.

Of course for a nation so recently torn apart by civil war, a bridge was a particularly appealing symbol. But beyond that a bridge seemed such a magnificent example of man’s capacity to master the forces of nature, and that, according to the preponderant wisdom of the day, was what the whole age was about. Building a bridge seemed such a clean, heroic thing for a man to do.

At a dinner given in Roebling’s honor on the last night at Niagara Falls, General Henry Slocum was asked to give a toast, which he did, saying to great applause that he would gladly forfeit his war record for the bridge at Niagara—“to have been the engineer of that bridge.” The general, whose political ambition was very large, sometimes said things he did not quite mean, but his toast would be repeated widely in Brooklyn, and it struck everyone present as a fitting tribute to end the tour on—his impressive war record being the most publicized in Brooklyn. (A general at thirty-three, he had commanded a wing of Sherman’s army on the march through Georgia.) The war was past; the time had come to concentrate on “legitimate enterprise”—that seemed the true spirit of the day. A momentous new Age of Progress was dawning and for most of those who raised their glasses to toast John Roebling, as for most Americans, nothing was taken as such proof of that spirit as the works of engineers—”…the great achievements of the present…the strong, light works of engineers…”

In Egypt the French had nearly finished the Suez Canal. In Europe the Mont Cenis Tunnel, then the longest on earth, was being blasted beneath the Alps. But nowhere was there so much happening as on the continent of North America. The Union Pacific was laying track at a rate of eight miles a day by this time. In Massachusetts a hole was being bored nearly five miles through the solid rock of Hoosac Mountain, just to slice a little time off the railroad run from Boston to Albany. Boston itself was being doubled in size by filling in Back Bay swamp. In New York Cornelius Vanderbilt was erecting a very grand new Grand Central Depot, the train-shed roof of which, an immense vault of glass and iron, would contain the largest interior space in the country. There was a new tunnel under the Chicago River, a first bridge over the Missouri at Kansas City, and at St. Louis a river captain named Eads had begun building a railroad bridge over the Mississippi.

That such outsize, unprecedented efforts frequently involved watered stock, political jobbery, kickbacks for contractors, and not a little human suffering was either not altogether apparent as yet or of minor concern. So much good was going to come out of so comparatively little evil, it was generally felt, that the evil seemed a reasonable price to pay, and probably inevitable in any event. What really counted was that things were being accomplished at last on a scale in keeping with the commonly held vision of the future. Man the killer, man the destroyer, would be man the builder for now—now and here, on the infinite, seemingly inexhaustible landscape of America. It was the time and place to be intensely, boldly constructive.

In less than a month, when a much publicized golden spike would be driven with humorous difficulty at Promontory, Utah, the completion of the transcontinental railroad would be hailed as “one of the victories of peace.” In his way Slocum was saying the same thing. The real glory of American achievement lay ahead, as always. But the true heroes now would be those who made possible such victories of peace—the builders. One of the greatest of them, the architect Louis Sullivan, would later write of his own feelings as a boy at about this same time: “The chief engineers became his heroes; they loomed above other men…he dreamed to be a great engineer. The idea of spanning a void appealed to him as masterful in thought and deed. For he had begun to discern that among men of the past and of his day, there were those that stood forth solitary, each in a world of his own.”

4

Father and Son

Nothing lasts forever. The most unforeseen circumstances will swamp you and baffle the wisest calculations. Only vitality and plenty of it helps you.

—WASHINGTON A. ROBELING

THE BRIDGE tour ended on April 20. “The parties left for the east,” reported the Niagara Falls Gazette, “…traveling in a special car well furnished with refreshments.” All, apparently, were still on the friendliest of terms.

In the temporary offices overlooking Fulton Street, work picked up about where it had left off, and with renewed vigor. Directors and stockholders came and went. Orders were placed for drawing tables and filing cabinets and there was a steady tramp of feet on the stairs as inventors came to show patents of tools and machinery, as salesmen arrived with samples of granite or promises of speedy delivery and the best possible price for coal, lumber, sand, or nails. And whenever the senior Roebling was in town and conducting interviews for jobs, the applicants could be seen in the outer office, waiting their turn to go in and sit before the old Prussian and tell him about their special attributes.

A man named William Lane, carpenter, mason, and all-around mechanic, came highly recommended by the Army engineers, Generals Wright and Newton. (“Looks like an energetic good man,” Roebling noted.) Charles Kinkel was a German who told Roebling he had had experience with foundations. John Morgan, an English draftsman, wanted employment badly, he said, while William McNamee looked like a “tolerably good man.”

And so it went. J. W. Jenkins, a diver, said that if he was hired by the month he would work for twenty-five dollars a day, do whatever blasting was wanted, and provide his own tools. Otherwise his regular day rate was a hundred dollars. Two experienced surveyors, Rudolph Rosa and Colonel William Paine, each wanted ten dollars a day and both were hired on the spot.

Paine in particular seemed exactly the sort of man Roebling was looking for. Self-taught in engineering, he had surveyed the so-called Johnson Route of the Union Pacific, across the Sierra Nevada. During the war, wearing civilian clothes, he had slipped through Confederate lines and worked his way from Washington to Richmond, mapping the location of every destroyed bridge along the way. Lincoln had personally made him a captain of engineers for this and Paine was put on the staff of a major general, a position customarily held only by a West Pointer. By the time the war had ended, he was reputedly the leading topographical engineer in the Union Army. It was said he could prop a drawing board on the pommel of his saddle and as he rode along sketch a map of the surrounding terrain that would be accurate enough to go right to the engraver. He was also well read in chemistry, geology, the natural sciences, and he enjoyed literature, he told Roebling. He was from New Hampshire originally, and he was modest, but very firm and sure of himself. His most notable physical feature was a great sweeping handle-bar mustache. Finding him so early was taken as a good sign.

The one technical chore to be finished up before actual construction could begin was the final survey. A center line had to be located and the responsibility for this Roebling had turned over to his son, to whom Paine was assigned forthwith.

The two worked extremely well together and became a familiar sight in Brooklyn that spring. They took their sightings, hammered down their little iron pins, and worked their way steadily inland from the river, through a neighborhood of narrow shops and warehouses and a terrible tangle of waterfront traffic. As each iron pin went in, young Roebling recorded its location, making a small diagram in the black leather notebook he carried. To show where the center line crossed through the juncture of Fulton, Dock, and James Streets, for instance, he drew the basic outline of the intersection—no easy thing, since the streets, like most in the vicinity, did not join at right angles—then the center line, cutting across the intersection at its own angle. Along this he marked points A, B, C, and D. Point A was a notch he and Paine had cut into the belt course of a yellow house on the corner of Dock Street; B was a crow’s-foot chiseled into the curbstone just up from the yellow house; C was an iron pin driven into the crosswalk on Fulton; D was another pin in the middle of the crosswalk, on the opposite side of the street.

St. Ann’s Church was their most conspicuous landmark. The historic old building would have to come down eventually. It was one of those numerous pieces of property the value of which had not been included in the engineer’s original cost estimate and there were those among its parishioners, as there were elsewhere in Brooklyn, who did not view the two intent surveyors with their brass instruments as necessarily the harbingers of progress.

Through most of this time John Roebling remained in Trenton. He would make an occasional visit of a few days, stopping at the Mansion House on Hicks Street, but the rest of the time he was content to leave things to his son, who by this time had apparently become greatly concerned over the possible verdict of the consultants, and who, like Charles Swan, was expected to keep Roebling regularly posted…

Brooklyn, May 21, 1869

DEAR FATHER,

Your Turkish Bath tickets came today.

Maj. King arrived yesterday. The Commission have made their report and sent it to Washington today. I think that if their report was at all favorable, they would not be so quiet about it.

Kingsley proposes to send Genl. Slocum to Washington next week in order to hurry up Humphreys…

Yours, Aff.
WASH.

Genl. Wright sent back the map for correction, to have the span put back to 1600 which I did.

Also to cables whether of steel and what diameter.

I said steel with 15” diam.

WASH.

That he could write so matter-of-factly of Kingsley, the contractor, proposing to “send” Slocum, the United States Congressman, on such an errand suggests that the engineering department had no doubts about how things stood among the Kings County Democrats and that possibly the bridge tour had been something of an education for the Roeblings as well. The P.S. concerning steel for the cables also suggests that Roebling senior had at last made up his mind on this crucial matter and, moreover, that the son felt at perfect liberty to speak for the father on just about everything concerning the bridge.

In any event Slocum did go to Washington and was doubtless a good choice for the mission, since both A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, and John A. Rawlins, the Secretary of War, happened also to be prominent Civil War figures and were both well known by Slocum. Rawlins was the one who counted. Grant’s right-hand man through the war, he was generally respected in Washington for being both candid and decisive. That he was also dying of tuberculosis that spring was not generally known. Rawlins told Slocum not to concern himself, he could expect to see everything approved within a week. Kingsley was elated when Slocum returned with the news, as Washington Roebling dutifully informed his father. But by the end of the week nothing more had happened.

On June 12 John Roebling came on from Trenton to meet with his consultants still one final time, to receive their formal approval in writing. Washington Roebling ordered five hundred copies printed, then wrote to his father, who had immediately returned to Trenton, that General G. K. Warren, his wife Emily’s famous brother, was going to Washington and would report back privately “how the matter stands down there.”

On June 15 Slocum again saw Rawlins, this time at the sumptuous Brooklyn home of J. Carson Brevoort, where Rawlins was a guest briefly. Rawlins said Grant had told him to do whatever he liked about the bridge—the subject did not much interest the President, one would gather—and Rawlins guaranteed the whole business would be settled as soon as he got back to Washington. Taking no chances, Slocum once more was on his way to the capital, accompanied this time by Henry Murphy. “When Mr. Murphy returns we will have an authentic report,” Washington Roebling wrote to his father, which might be taken to mean there was some skepticism between them concerning Henry Slocum or that they simply thought very well of Henry Murphy.

Rawlins was as good as his word. On June 21 General Humphreys informed Murphy by letter that Rawlins had approved both the plan and the location of the bridge so long as it conformed to certain basic conditions stipulated by the Army Engineers.

The center of the river span was “under no conditions of temperature or load” to be less than 135 feet “in the clear above the mean high water of spring tides.” Nothing could be added that might project out from the towers and no guy wires were to be attached that might hang below the river span. (At both Niagara and Cincinnati Roebling had strung such wires below the bridge floor.) The river was to be kept perfectly clear, in other words, and the roadway of the bridge would have to be raised five feet higher than Roebling had intended.

Such seemingly small changes called for some rather serious revisions, however. The increased elevation would mean an increase in the grade of the approaches and land spans, which right away meant an additional cost of some $300,000, as near as the Roeblings could figure. To avoid all this it was decided to change the iron superstructure of the bridge floor. The stiffening trusswork would be built entirely above the roadway, instead of partly above and partly below as in the original design. And just to be certain that nothing projected beyond the pier lines, the length of the river span was extended from 1,600 to 1,616 feet. It was also decided to widen the bridge floor by five feet, to make room for two double roadways for vehicles, instead of single roadways as the elder Roebling had originally planned.

Such alterations were of little or no interest to the general public, but they were no trifling matter for the engineers and they would alter the looks of the finished structure.

Humphreys’ letter was not a very long or impressive document, but it signaled the conclusion of bureaucratic red tape and was big news in Brooklyn. “THE ROBELING PLANS FULLY ENDROSED” ran the headline in the Eagle the evening of June 25. The paper carried the complete text of the final report by the consulting engineers and concluded that now, with all obstacles at last out of the way, the work could commence.

Three nights later, at the Brooklyn Athenaeum, Congressman Demas Barnes delivered a lecture on the bridge before an audience “notable for its large representation of solid businessmen,” who listened “with the most evident interest and attention.” Barnes, who had made a fortune in patent medicines, had been the strongest voice for the bridge on the floor of the House. This night he began his talk with an impassioned description of Brooklyn and its future, from which he moved to the bridge itself, speaking with equal ardor. Then, for his grand finale, he proclaimed the following, summing up, it would seem, all that was so fervently felt, all the common expectations, concerning the Great Bridge:

This bridge is to be built, appealing as it does to our pride, our gratitude and prosperity. When complete, let it illustrate the grandeur of our age; let it be the Mecca to which foreign peoples shall come. Let Brooklyn now take up the pen of progress. Babylon had her hanging gardens, Nineveh her towers, and Rome her Coliseum; let us have this great monument to progress.

But that same day, Monday, June 28, 1869, beside the Fulton Ferry slip, John A. Roebling had been involved in an accident, which, though extremely painful, seemed of no serious consequence.

The mental torture after the accident had been nearly as severe as the physical, according to his son, who had been with him almost constantly. “He felt at his age he could ill afford to lose any time: this circumstance, combined with the prospect of being crippled to some extent, had a most depressing influence on his spirits.”

To have been struck down by such a foolish mishap did his spirits no good either. It was the sort of slip a new man might make, or one of the politicians or moneymen who invariably had to be conducted about bridge jobs. When he thought of the risks he had taken, the countless dangers he had exposed himself to over the years, to be felled this way was positively infuriating.

The afternoon of the accident had been clear and pleasantly warm in Brooklyn. He and Washington had been working since morning at the foot of Fulton Street, beside the ferry slip, where the Brooklyn tower was to go. He had come down to the waterfront to assist Washington and Colonel Paine in fixing the precise location of the tower. Paine had been over on the other side of the river, signaling to them.

At one point Roebling was standing as far out on the ferry slip as he could get, atop a cluster of piles. Seeing one of the boats approaching, he stepped back off the piles and onto a stringpiece, or beam, that was wide enough to get a footing and where, he supposed, he would be clear of the piles should they be forced against the beam by the docking boat. But there had been a knot—or something he had not noticed—sticking out from one of the piles and it had caught his right foot as the boat ground against the rack, crushing the tip of his boot and his toes.

The pain must have been excruciating, but he gave no sign of it. He went right on shouting directions until he toppled over, unable to stand any longer.

Washington rushed him to a doctor’s office close by, where his father was no sooner in the door than he was telling the doctor what to do. He demanded a tub of cold water and plunged his foot into it to staunch the flow of blood. Other doctors were called in for an opinion and it was agreed that his toes would have to be amputated. To this Roebling promptly consented and requested that the operation be performed without anesthetic. When it was over, he insisted on binding the wound himself and in his own fashion. Then he was taken to his son’s house on Hicks Street.

For several days there were no public announcements as to how he was getting along. But on July 8 the Brooklyn Eagle reported that he was busily engaged on his plans and drawings for the bridge, and that the injured foot had been so placed that a steady stream of cold water poured over it night and day. “The distinguished engineer has his notions about surgical treatment, and seems to be very stoic in regard to physical pain,” the article said. “He thinks and talks of the bridge as incessantly as ever, and seems unwilling to have the conversation of his professional assistants diverted for a moment to his own accident.” In another ten days, it was claimed, he would be out surveying again.

Dr. Brinkman, the family physician, came up from Philadelphia, and a Reverend John C. Brown from Trenton made a special trip. It seemed strange luck, the preacher told Roebling, that he should be laid up at the start of so great a work. “There is no such thing as chance,” Roebling is supposed to have replied. “All is wisely ordered.”

But in another week reports were he had taken a turn for the worse, though there was no mention of what was by then known inside the Hicks Street house.

Roebling, predictably, perhaps inevitably, had taken charge of his own case. He had fired one Brooklyn doctor, then another, much against his son’s wishes, and though he seems to have tolerated the presence of Brinkman, he never paid any attention to him. Now things were not going at all well. Signs of tetanus had been detected. It would be commonly said later that had he obeyed the doctors, he would have recovered. “But Mr. Roebling was a man of indomitable will and perseverance,” the Eagle would explain, “and the counsels of his friends were as naught.”

For eight days, from July 13 on, Roebling suffered intensely. Medical experts would agree when it was all over that only a very tough and determined man could have endured what he did that long.

At first he had become extremely restless, complaining of savage headaches. But presently he began having trouble swallowing. After that there was no mistaking what was wrong with him. The muscles around his face, neck, and jaws grew rigid as iron. Within a day or so his eyebrows were permanently fixed in a raised position and his mouth was pulled back in a terrible grimace, the teeth all showing and locked tight. He was unable to eat anything solid, or to talk, but he kept scribbling notes to Washington and the others attending him, instructing them on his proper care.

Then the hideous seizures began, set off by the slightest disturbance. His room was kept dark, the long shades drawn against the July sun, and everyone who had reason to go in or out did so as softly as humanly possible. But then a window shade would rattle in the breeze or someone would inadvertently brush against the side of his bed, a door would squeak or there would be a noise from the street below, and he would go into a convulsion, the sight of which was something they would all live with the rest of their lives. All at once his whole body would lift off the bed and double backward with a fierce, awful jerk, his every muscle clenched in violent contraction. Sweat streamed from his body, but he made no sound, not even a groan, because during the spasm his whole chest wall was frozen hard.

He was being horribly destroyed before their eyes and there was not a thing any of them could do about it. Moreover, as nearly always happens with lockjaw, his mind remained as clear as ever, and this made the sight of his suffering all the more unbearable. They all knew the terrible, titanic battle going on behind those blazing eyes and the ghastly smile that stayed fixed like concrete on his ashen face throughout everything that was happening to him.

When the seizures passed, he generally slipped into a coma. But even toward the end, there were hours when he would lie there perfectly still in the darkened room staring straight up at the ceiling, one of his family sitting motionless beside him. During the final few days there were tears streaking down his face.

The watch went on hour upon hour. Downstairs, visitors came and went, talking in whispers. They were told their concern was deeply appreciated, that there was nothing they could do but pray, and they went away to tell others what they had heard about the particulars of his condition, which was very little.

But on the evening of July 21, quite contrary to all the professional forecasts, the patient took a turn for the better. With paper and pencil he began giving instructions to his nephew, Ed Riedel, on a special contrivance he wanted built to lift him up and move him about his bed. He made a sketch, explained how it should be done, and told the young man to get at it immediately. Through the rest of the night he kept issuing orders on a variety of matters, including the bridge, and a wave of hope swept through the house, until sometime after midnight, when it became clear from the things he was scribbling down that his mind was going. He thought he was back at the bridge office.

About three in the morning he had a convulsion so violent that he leaped clear from the bed and was caught in the arms of C. C. Martin, the assistant engineer, who with Washington and one or two others was standing watch at the time. Within minutes Roeblling was dead.

Then in the gray light before dawn, Thursday, July 22, the undertaker arrived and an artist who had known Roebling in Cincinnati was called in to take a death mask.

The afternoon edition of the Eagle had the full story. Roebling was called a martyr, while in virtually the same breath the editors assured their readers that there was still great hope for the bridge. The implication was that the success of the bridge had been more or less assured now that it had claimed a life, like the bell in the old story that would not ring true until it had been cast of molten iron into which a man had fallen. Some people were saying the only safe bridge was one that had taken a life and stories were told of the lives sacrificed in the building of famous bridges of ancient times. The Eagle, for its part, said this:

He who loses his life from injuries received in the pursuit of science or of duty, in acquiring engineering information or carrying out engineering details, is as truly and usefully a martyr as he who sacrifices his life for a theological opinion, and no less honor should be paid to his memory. Henceforth we look on the great project of the Brooklyn Bridge as being baptized and hallowed by the life blood of its distinguished and lamented author.

Flags were flown at half-staff all over Brooklyn, and when it came time to take the body down to the ferry, to start the trip to Trenton, there was slow going in the streets because of the crowds. As a subject of popular interest, Roebling seemed a more notable success dead than alive. His training, all his ambition and ability, his entire life’s work had been building toward this greatest of bridges and he had not lived to do it—that was a tragedy people could readily understand regardless of how little previous interest they may have had in either the man or his work.

Word of Roebling’s death reached Trenton early the same morning he died. Within hours the whole town knew about it, and though there had been ominous talk of his condition for days, no one seemed quite ready to accept the fact that the worst had happened. Talk of Roebling dead was one thing, but the idea of him laid out in a black suit of clothes like any other man, those pale eyes shut forever, was something else. Somehow, it was felt, he would figure a way.

But by nightfall Saturday, when the body arrived, the truth had long since sunk in. Nobody had any doubts that the extraordinary life of John A. Roebling was over and plans had been laid for the biggest funeral in Trenton’s history.

The eulogies began that night at a special town meeting. Judge Scudder, General Rushing, and Charles Hewitt spoke, as did Reverend John Brown, who said that though Roebling was known the world over as a man of science, he ought to be remembered as a gentleman all the same. Then early the following morning, in twos and threes, some leading children, people began gathering outside the Roebling house.

Separated from the wireworks by a narrow strip of lawn, the house was a tall spacious affair, with some twenty-seven rooms, walls two feet thick, and few frills. Roebling had designed it himself before the war, in the Italian style and more for comfort than show, except for the glassy cupola on top. It had stood raw and pink-looking when it was first finished, taller even than the mill in those days, with nothing but bare fields to either side. But in the time since, Roebling had had it stuccoed over, the mill had more than doubled in size, and the trees he planted had closed in most of the property. In summer, only the windows of the cupola could be seen riding high above the treetops. They were the first windows in town to catch the morning sun.

The grounds themselves were neatly set off from the street by a tall iron fence. Flowers bloomed through the whole summer. Grapes hung from elaborate trellises. There were boxwood hedges, a handsome barn, an icehouse, and an especially fine orchard that he had been extremely proud of, adding to it year by year. As might be expected, everything was kept just so.

The house faced onto the street, a railroad track, and the old Delaware and Raritan Canal, which all ran side by side, parallel to the river. Past the canal and the state prison, the land sloped away toward the ironworks and the river. That part of town was all built up now, but behind the house, on the other side of the orchard, was a broad, flat wheat field that was just beginning to turn color.

By ten o’clock the small cluster of onlookers had grown big enough to fill the front lawn and most of the street. Carriages approaching the house had trouble getting through. But there was little commotion. The time passed about as quietly as on any Sunday morning, broken only by the sound of church bells from across town. Already the temperature was near eighty as the sun climbed into a cloudless bowl of summer sky. Nothing like this had ever happened in Trenton. Estimates were that perhaps two thousand people were gathered on the front lawn.

Inside the house the entire family was assembled—a rare thing for the Roeblings—surrounded by the books and paintings he had collected, the marble statuary and the steel engravings of his bridges. At eleven the doors were to be opened to the crowd outside, but for the time being, except for the servants, they had the house and its memories all to themselves.

With Washington Roebling, now head of the family, was his pretty and alert-looking wife, Emily, who had been a special favorite of her father-in-law’s. He had admired her for her energy and intelligence, often showing her a degree of kindness seldom granted his own children. After her son had been born, she had written to Roebling in an affectionate letter from Germany, “The name of John A. Roebling must ever be identified with you and your works, but with a mother’s pride and fond hopes for her first-born I trust my boy may not prove unworthy of the name…”

Then there was Ferdinand Roebling, slight, fine-featured, bespectacled, and now twenty-seven. This was the only one of his sons, John Roebling used to say, who had the makings of a merchant. His oldest boy, the bridgebuilder, he had ordered off to war, but Ferdinand had been kept at home, Ferdinand’s services to the wire business being too valuable to spare, according to John Roebling.

Charles, younger still by seven years, was a strangely silent, thoughtful young man, whose chief interest was flower gardening and who was home for the summer from Troy, where he was a student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, like his oldest brother before him, and not particularly happy about it.

Edmund, or Eddie as he seems to have been called by most of them, was fifteen, very shy and uncertain-looking, and still a great worry apparently.

The sisters were Laura, Josephine, and Elvira. Laura was the oldest after Washington. She had dutifully played the organ at the German church every Sunday and married a “good German,” a Mühlhausen man at that, her Mr. Methfessel, as she called him. They had a number of children and lived on Staten Island, where Mr. Methfessel had started a school and where they would have failed to make ends meet by this time had it not been for the checks she received regularly in the mail from her father.

Josephine was now the wife of Charles H. Jarvis, one of the finest American pianists of the time, and Elvira, the last of the three to be married, was Mrs. John Stewart. Elvira had always been the most playful and high-spirited member of the family, the least like her father in this respect and the one whose company he most enjoyed. Her wedding had taken place only a few weeks before, in the same large front parlor where his corpse was now on display. All that spring, as he went back and forth to Brooklyn, he kept bringing home expensive gifts for her, dresses he had picked out at A. T. Stewart’s, hundreds of dollars’ worth of silks, fancy carpets, Tiffany silver. A few days before the wedding he had insisted that she take a hundred dollars in cash, to have with her on her wedding trip. Then he had given her away to young Stewart in a room full of guests, several of whom would comment at the funeral on how exceptionally genial and good-spirited he had seemed then.

Very little is known about the new Mrs. Roebling, except that she was the former Lucia Cooper of Trenton and that their wedding had taken place in February of 1867. He had presented her with two gold bracelets and a painting by Rembrandt Peale and in his cashbook he entered $125 as the cost of the wedding trip, about which he made no other notation that is known of. Two years later she had still not been fully accepted by the family, nor would she be. Washington Roebling would write that after the summer of his father’s death, he never saw her again.

And finally, there was Charles Swan, who, in a photograph taken some years later, sits in a stiff, upholstered chair, looking quite well upholstered himself as he focuses directly and amiably on the camera, every inch the solid, kindly, dependable man, it would appear, John Roebling’s sons would say he was. That Roebling also appreciated Swan for what he was and all he had done seems clear, despite the cold formality of their working relationship. For when he sat down to write a new will in 1867, after he remarried, he included twenty thousand dollars for Swan and the clearly stated wish that his sons take Swan into the business as a full partner.

The contents of the will would not be made public for several days, but for the family its general outline had been known for some time. In addition to the money for Swan, Roebling had left some eighty thousand dollars for distant relatives and several charities. The bulk of his estate he had split eight ways, between his new wife and his seven children—except that he deducted from each child whatever money had been advanced to him during his lifetime. Year by year, in a private ledger, he had carefully itemized his expenditures for his children, down to the penny, and now in his last summing up he docked them each accordingly.

The wire business he left to his four sons, requesting that they keep the name John A. Roebling’s Sons.

At eleven sharp the house was opened to the public and the crowd started moving for the front door. For the next two hours the town was permitted to pay its respects. The people passed through the dim front parlor in slow single file, in dark Sunday dress and funeral veils, the men with hats in hand, moving with almost no sound at all up to the rosewood casket with its huge silver handles, then on out through the back way, most of them glancing this way and that, trying to see as much as possible without appearing disrespectful.

Nearly everyone thought the Brooklyn undertaker had done extremely well. The body did look emaciated, it was agreed, and the massive brow stood out more even than in life, but when they considered the horrible way the old man had died, and the July heat, most of those who filed by thought he looked quite himself, perhaps even at peace, which was what seemed most unlike him of anything. For the majority of the people in line, it was a chance for a first real look at the man close up.

At one o’clock the front door was closed again. Then shortly after one, as the crowd regathered under the shade trees, the quiet was suddenly shattered by the shriek of a train whistle. People later described it as the most dramatic moment of the day.

Up the tracks crept a special train from Jersey City, five cars long. Like the one the night before that had brought Roebling’s body home, it steamed slowly to the front gate and stopped. Then down stepped the delegation from Brooklyn and New York, some fifty or sixty men, most of them in high, shiny silk hats. They stood about in a cluster beside the train, squinting against the sunshine, until the last of them had gotten down. Then they started up the front walk in a body, the crowd making way for them. At the front door Washington Roebling stood waiting to usher them inside.

The services began at two, on schedule, the family sitting in the upstairs hallways, the guests crowded into neat rows of chairs set before the casket. The heat was terrific, fans were going at a great speed in gloved hands as four ministers—one Presbyterian, one Lutheran, two Episcopal—took turns with the services at the foot of the stairs. There was little out of the ordinary said. The Lutheran spoke in German.

Of the eight pallbearers who took the casket out the front door, four were Trenton men; the others were all associated with the New York Bridge Company—Julius Adams, Horatio Allen, Andrew H. Green, and Henry Cruse Murphy. That a large part of the funeral expenses would also be met by the New York Bridge Company, or more specifically by William Kingsley on behalf of the New York Bridge Company, was privileged information at this point.

The clergy and immediate family led the procession to Mercer Cemetery, riding in special carriages. The Brooklyn delegation came rolling along after, followed by the Board of Trade in still more carriages. Two hundred men from the Roeblings’ rolling mill had marched up from South Trenton and they fell in behind, while the men from the wire mill walked two by two alongside the carriages. Estimates were that fifteen hundred people joined in the march, counting all the professional and trade associations, the orphans, and the singing societies. With everyone under way the whole procession stretched out more than a mile and a half and along the entire line of march—out Green Street, East Street, State and Clinton—sidewalks and doorsteps were thick with silent onlookers.

By four it was all over. John Augustus Roebling had been committed to eternity, beside Johanna Roebling and two of their children. Again the distinguished visitors from Brooklyn and New York were gathered beside their train, all looking a little worse for the dust and heat, each offering his own polite, soft-spoken farewell to the Roebling family, and to Colonel Roebling in particular. One by one they stepped forward to shake his hand and to wish him well—Henry Murphy, Henry Slocum, Horatio Allen, Julius Adams, Thomas Kinsella, Demas Barnes, Colonel Paine, C. C. Martin, William Kingsley. Then as he and the rest of the family turned and walked back through the gate and up the path to the big house, the Jersey City train rolled out of Trenton, gradually gathering speed as it broke into open country.

There is no record of what was talked about during the return trip to Jersey City and that is a great shame. There was quite a lot to be discussed, obviously enough, and nearly everyone who should have a say was present, and with nothing better to do. It was the sort of opportunity a politician seldom lets pass, and since the majority of them were politicians in one way or other, it is hard to imagine the time being wasted.

They had all been together on the ride down that morning, of course, but then, with Roebling not yet in his grave, any open talk about getting on with his work would have been considered out of line. Now the atmosphere was quite different, no doubt, and it seems reasonable to assume that as their train went steaming along through the late summer afternoon a number of highly interesting conversations were being conducted.

Years later it would be said that Roebling’s death left everyone in a terrible quandary over who should take his place and that there were grave doubts about going ahead with the idea. “With its inspiration gone, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed impossible to build,” one biographer would claim. But the truth is there was never any doubt at all.

As William Kingsley would reveal, Roebling had long since talked to him and to Henry Murphy about his son replacing him eventually. Kingsley even said Roebling had wanted his son in charge from the start, but that he, Kingsley, and the others would have none of that. Be that as it may, the very day of Roebling’s death, Thomas Kinsella had stated in no uncertain terms on the editorial page of the Eagle that Washington Roebling would take up right where his father left off and that no man was better equipped for the job.

Not long since, before the accident, which led to his death, Mr. Roebling remarked to us that he had enough of money and reputation. And he scarce knew why, at his age, he was undertaking to build another and still greater bridge. His son, he added, ought to build this Brooklyn bridge—was as competent as himself in all respects to design and supervise it; had thought and worked with him, and in short was as good an engineer as his father.

As a matter of plain fact those numerous different parties who wanted the bridge built for their numerous different reasons had been left with little choice but to go ahead with the young engineer. Moreover, to their way of thinking there was no good reason why they should not, and he himself, years afterward, would say there were three very good reasons why they should:

First—I was the only living man who had the practical experience to build those great cables, far exceeding anything previously attempted, and make every wire bear its share.

Second—Two years previous I had spent a year in Europe studying pneumatic foundations and the sinking of caissons under compressed air. When the borings on the N.Y. tower site developed the appalling depth of 106 feet below the water level all other engineers shrank back…

Third—I had assisted my father in the preparation of the first designs—he of course being the mastermind. I was therefore familiar with his ideas and with the whole project—and no one else was.

He was also a very young man, which perhaps he ought to have added as reason four. He had that vitality his father prized so and that in his last years had come to be a thing only to hope for in the next life. “After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being,” he had asked the spirit of his dead wife, “young, energetic and full of life?”

And beyond that it seems Washington Roebling had struck just about everyone with a say in the decision as quite a solid individual in his own right. The consulting engineers could vouch for his professional abilities. He had been a soldier and an exceptionally good one, which was also taken to be much in his favor. And on a strictly personal level he was simply a whole lot easier to talk to than his father had been and would probably be a whole lot easier to work with.

Indeed, the gentlemen from Brooklyn must have been most favorably impressed with Washington Roebling, considering what they were about to risk on him. It was true, just as he said, that he was the one man—the one and only man—in the country capable of building the unprecedented bridge his father had designed, but that of course meant that everything depended on him alone. It meant that unlike his father, he had no one standing by ready to take his place should anything happen to him, or between him and his employers.

Still, if the matter of a successor was self-evident and already settled, the death of John A. Roebling had raised other complications that remained quite unresolved. There was, for example, the vital question of public confidence in the work. The older Roebling’s word had counted for something, among his peers as well as the general public, but even he had had to face a storm of protest. It had been necessary for him to resort to a committee of experts to testify to his judgment. How many more critics might surface now, now that he was no longer available to answer for his radical schemes? Public works of such magnitude demanded the smooth turning of many wheels, and wheels within wheels, a number of which were often carefully, cleverly concealed, and a collapse of public confidence could lead to all sorts of difficult, embarrassing complications.

John Roebling had known a great deal about the genesis of the bridge idea, about Brooklyn history and Brooklyn politics and who had the power. He also knew the role money played in getting things accomplished. Money had always been a secondary interest to him personally. He had made quite a lot of it, to be sure, but it had never been life’s chief objective and he had little time for anyone who thought it was. Nonetheless, he knew the lengths some men would go for it and he himself had never been adverse to playing to that side of human nature if it suited his purposes. When he called for the building of the Great Central Railroad in Pittsburgh, for example, he described how the West was “ready to pour rich treasure into our laps,” just as in Brooklyn he had pictured a toll bridge so lucrative that it would pay for itself—all six to seven million dollars—in just three years, which even some of his most ardent admirers in the Bridge Company recognized as foolishness. The bridge, after all, was to be built by a private corporation; it was a business proposition, just as the Allegheny River and Cincinnati bridges had been, and he took that as a matter of course.

But somewhere along the line he had found out more than he had known at the start, more perhaps than he had wanted to know about the ideas a few of his clients and their friends had for making money with his bridge—or at least so it appears from comments made considerably later by his son Washington. “…At the time of his death he was already arranging to retire and relinquish the work to me,” Washington Roebling would write privately to a correspondent. “…You may not be aware that this bridge was started by the infamous ‘Boss Tweed Ring’ for the sole purpose of using it as a means to rob the cities. When this fact began to dawn on my father’s mind he made up his mind to get out.”

The statement is not quite accurate—the bridge had not been “started” by the Tweed Ring, nor is there any indication that either Washington Roebling or his father ever wrote or said anything to the same effect back at the beginning of the work. Nor is it known how much Washington Roebling himself knew at the time of his father’s death, at the time he stepped into his father’s place.

But for a number of those who were speeding toward Jersey City that late July afternoon in 1869, the full story was very clearly known; Brooklyn and its dreams of a bridge were essential elements in their own life stories and dreams.

It is intriguing to note what Thomas Kinsella said in the Eagle the day after the funeral. Possibly his remarks had nothing to do with his feelings about things said on the ride to Jersey City, but then again, possibly, that may have been exactly what he had in mind.

“The great boast of this land,” he wrote, “is twofold—the political works of the [Founding] Fathers, and the material triumphs of science, of which Roebling was, with scarcely any exception, the greatest hero.” But the politician of the present, he went on, was nothing more than “a thing of tricks and dodges.” About all the modern-day politician could do was to undo “the grand creation of former days.” The politician’s words and deeds were as nothing, he said, when compared to the works of a man like John A. Roebling.

“One such life as Roebling’s was worth more than those of a whole convention full of jabbering and wrangling politicians.” Concerning politicians, Kinsella could speak with some authority, his Brooklyn readers knew, for he was one himself.

5

Brooklyn

A great future is opening before our city.

—From The Brooklyn Eagle, 1869

BROOKLYN in that high summer of 1869 was still a city quite unto itself, with its own paid fire department, police, schools, and a fierce local pride of a kind usually associated with smaller, less worldly places. It had sprung forth all at once, as suddenly as a mining town, on the western tip of Long Island, in King’s County, New York, its population increasing a hundredfold in less than a lifetime. A man like Henry Cruse Murphy could readily recall when Fulton Street was lined with giant elms and an eccentric Hessian gunsmith named John Valentine Swertcope was free to go prowling about Washington’s old fort on the Heights, popping away at songbirds. For nearly two hundred years, from the time it was first settled by Dutch farmers in the early seventeenth century, Brooklyn had changed hardly at all. At the start of the nineteenth century, when talk of a bridge first began, there had been fewer than five thousand people in the entire county, more than a thousand of whom were not there out of choice, being black slaves. Now there were close to 400,000 people who called Brooklyn home. In the words of one little guidebook, Brooklyn had been “transformed” in a generation “from insignificance into metropolitan importance.”

Brooklyn’s population was still less than half that of New York and among a good many New Yorkers it was regarded as a backwater, a familiar enough neighboring horizon, with its ships and church steeples, a place to go hear Beecher or to be buried at Greenwood perhaps, but a hinterland and scarcely worth mentioning in the same breath with New York. But Brooklyn, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and had been for some time. It was a major manufacturing center—for glass, steel, tinware, marble mantels, hats, buggy whips, chemicals, cordage, whiskey, beer, glue. It was a larger seaport than New York, a larger city than Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and growing faster than any of them—faster even than New York, according to the Eagle—even without a bridge.

Already Brooklyn covered an area of twenty-five square miles, which made it larger than the island of Manhattan.

City Hall, with its attendant law offices and chophouses, was the political center of town. The white marble building with Greek columns and new cupola stood on a pie-shaped plot at the juncture of Court, Joralemon, and Fulton Streets, and there, most any day, could be found Brooklyn’s own Commissioners of Water and Sewerage, the Street Commissioner, the City Auditor, the Comptroller, the Keeper of the City Hall, numerous frock-coated aldermen, and the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch, Mayor, a vain, hard-drinking, foulmouthed little Democrat who would go down in history as “an enigma to the respectable and a delight to the reporter.”

From City Hall, Brooklyn, to City Hall, New York, was less than two miles, but the pulsing salt river between them was a dividing line in more ways than one. The Brooklyn side was still strictly the domain of the Kings County Democrats.

Fulton Street, Old Ferry Road in earlier days, was the business district, Brooklyn’s Broadway, it was said, but really more like its Main Street. From City Hall, Fulton Street sloped off a mile or so to the river, where it ended abruptly and its horsecars made their turnaround in front of the ferryhouse. The Eagle had its offices at the foot of Fulton Street, just up from the ferryhouse, as did the Union, the Republican paper. The banks and insurance offices were there, along with such up-to-date stores as Ovington Brothers China House or Frederick Loeser’s (ladies’ wear and “trimmings”).

Unless a person lived on Long Island there was only one way to get to Brooklyn in 1869 and that was by ferry. Fulton Ferry was the one people meant when they talked of the Brooklyn ferry; it was the “Gateway to Brooklyn” and the one Whitman immortalized in his poem. But it was only one of five different lines, all operated by the Union Ferry Company, each of which had its own slips and ferryhouse and was named after its destination on the New York side. (South Ferry ran from the foot of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to South Street at the tip of Manhattan, for example. The Wall Street Ferry departed at the foot of Montague Street and Fulton Ferry ran from Fulton Street, Brooklyn, to Fulton Street, New York.) In all, thirteen boats were kept steaming back and forth, night and day, making something over a thousand crossings in twenty-four hours. They had names like Mineola, Montauk, Clinton, and Winona and were 150 and 170 feet or more in length, double-ended, and about six hundred tons on the average.

“What are these huge castles rushing madly across the East River?” wrote a visiting Englishman. “Let us cross in the Montauk from Fulton Ferry [to Brooklyn] and survey the freight. There are fourteen carriages, and the passengers are countless—at least 600. Onward she darts at headlong speed, until, apparently in perilous proximity to her wharf, a frightful collision appears inevitable. The impatient Yankees press—each to be the first to jump ashore. The loud ‘twong’ of a bell is suddenly heard; the powerful engine is quickly reversed, and the way of the vessel is so instantaneously stopped that the dense mass of passengers insensibly leans forward from the sudden check.”

Once a ferry had landed and its passengers were ashore, the loading gates at the ferryhouse swung open and the waiting room emptied with a sudden rush of clerks and shop girls, day laborers with dinner pails, butchers, storekeepers, delivery boys, bankers, and business people. Outside, the street swarmed with more crowds coming and going, with vendors, dock workers, carriages, carts, farm wagons, and the clanging Fulton Street horsecars. It had been a long time now since the ferry captains and ticket boys knew their regular passengers by sight. One New Yorker who visited Brooklyn and went away quite impressed by the place also commented that he would just as soon stay in New York if living in Brooklyn meant riding on an East River ferry.

Upstream from the ferry slip and the spot where the colossal bridge tower was to rise were the Catherine Street Ferry; the Navy Yard, at Wallabout Bay; the Havemeyers and Elders sugar refinery, which on foggy mornings looked like a great Rhenish castle at the water’s edge; the Roosevelt Street Ferry; and Brooklyn’s famous old shipyards. Henry Steer’s and Webb & Bell were builders of clipper ships before the war. At Samuel Sneeden’s the Swedish genius Ericsson had built the Monitor.

Generally speaking, the East River was considered the best part of the harbor of New York. It had deeper water for wharves than along the Hudson, or North River, as it was also known; it was less affected by prevailing winds, a little less troubled by ice. It was also the safest, most desirable place to build or repair ships and for this reason the Roebling bridge was still a bone of contention along the river. With the yards on the New York side taken into account, the shores of the East River represented one of the greatest concentrations of shipbuilding anywhere on earth.

Downstream from the ferry the waterfront ran beneath the brow of the Heights, on past Red Hook Point, clear around to Gowanus Bay. All told Brooklyn had nearly eight miles of piers, dry docks, grain elevators, and warehouses. The new Atlantic Basin, on Buttermilk Channel, was forty acres in area. More ships tied up in Brooklyn now than in New York and Hoboken combined. From the river the city looked as though it were enclosed behind a protective screen of ship masts and rigging. The sea lanes of the world ended at Brooklyn, an admirer of the city would write years later, but it was as true in 1869, and it was the sea, as much as anything, that gave the place its tone and distinction. Gulls wheeled and cried over the housetops. Sailors mingled with the evening crowds along Fulton Street. The salt air, reputedly, was “pure and bracing…wafted from a thousand miles seaward.”

From half a dozen different high points, from Prospect Park, for example, or from Greenwood Cemetery, the world opened up in all directions and to the south was the Atlantic breaking on the shores of Coney Island. Brooklyn, it was claimed, offered “the most majestic views of land and ocean, with panoramic changes more varied and beautiful than any to be found within the boundaries of any city on this continent,” and apparently that was no exaggeration.

Certainly the view from the Heights was as fine as anything on the eastern seaboard—a sparkling blue and green sweep of 180 degrees, taking in river, bay, Manhattan, the Jersey hills, Staten Island. There were ships everywhere one looked, making for port, heading out to sea. On any summer day in 1869, when the age of sail and the age of steam still overlapped, river and harbor were a ceaseless pageant. New York was the principal reason for most all of it, of course, but Brooklyn had the view.

Old engravings of New York harbor generally show the boats all out of scale, too big, that is, but the shape and nature of the various species represented are a great deal clearer that way and the over-all effect considerably more enjoyable. To judge from such views, there must have been few places on earth where a city dweller could drink in quite so much space and sky or see so much going on that was so everlastingly interesting to watch. The water is filled with schooners, packets, pleasure yachts, gleaming white excursion steamers the size of hotels, and giant iron-hulled, ocean-going sailer-steamers like the new City of Brooklyn, the latest and largest ship on the Inman Line. (At a banquet served on board the City of Brooklyn that spring, at the end of her maiden voyage, the spirit of good fellowship was such, reportedly, that Beecher broke bread with the Democrats.) Freight-car lighters, hay barges, sand barges, countless steam tugs move back and forth, up and down the river, and everywhere, cutting between them, sidling off crab fashion against the tide, are the Brooklyn ferries.

It was a prospect to cleanse the spirit, no doubt, to put things back in proper balance at the end of a long business day. From such a vantage point, New York was clearly not all there was to life on earth. Even the ferries looked like nothing more than clever toys, perfect in every detail, down to the feathers of coal smoke trailing from each funnel. After dark, with their colored lights, they gave the river “a gala appearance.”

A perfectly healthful place in all seasons and in all respects, Hezekiah Pierrepont had said of these gentle bluffs on the river, the heaped-up leavings of the last of the glaciers. The salt air filled the lungs, and to the rear stretched Long Island, a hundred miles of open country. An enterprising brewer with large cedar-dotted holdings on the Heights, Pierrepont, fifty years before, had advertised lots “for families who may desire to associate in forming a select neighborhood and circle of society, for a summer’s residence, or a whole year…” Gentlemen whose business or profession required “their daily attendance in the city” could not do better, he said. His lots were 25 by 100 feet, many fronting on the river, others on “spacious streets 60 feet wide.” By 1869 shade trees made green canopies over red brick sidewalks, upon which fronted some of the stateliest houses in America. As neighborhoods went, there was nothing in New York to compare to it. The Heights had become everything the brewer promised, all that the name implied.

Few in Manhattan could match Willow, Pierrepont, or Clinton Streets, or Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river. Built of brick or brownstone, with rows of tall windows, the houses ran “plump out” to the sidewalk, almost without exception. Most of them were quite grand in dimension, beautifully detailed, with marble sills and cast-iron stair rails. Some, such as the Low place on Columbia Heights, were mansions by any man’s standards. But there was little of the flamboyant display soon to characterize Fifth Avenue. No one house seemed designed for the express purpose of upstaging its neighbor. As the Eagle observed, “Almost everybody appears to have built his house like somebody else.”

The Heights was the unchallenged social, cultural, and moral center of Brooklyn life, with the social and moral part of things taken the most seriously. It was also, one would gather, about as pleasant and lovely a place to live as there was to be found in urban America, then or since. It was not Brooklyn, but it was very often taken to be.

There on the Heights lived the oldest, wealthiest Brooklyn families—the Pierreponts, the Brevoorts, the Lows; A. S. Barnes, the book and hymnal publisher, with his family of ten children; Simeon Baldwin Chittenden, Moses Beach, Gordon Ford. They were second-generation New Englanders, in the main. They were the people who gave habitually to charity drives and figured on the boards of various Brooklyn institutions. Their names on a directors’ list or an incorporating charter meant eminent respectability. They employed the best cooks, sent their sons to Yale or Columbia. On spring evenings along the shore drive to Fort Hamilton, they could be seen riding with “elegant equipages, well-dressed grooms, and spanking teams.” As it happens, most of them were not around that summer of 1869. They had packed off weeks earlier, as was their custom, moving out en masse nearly—children, servants, steamer trunks, picnic hampers—to Oak Bluffs, Newport, Saratoga, or the White Mountains. All through July and August the Eagle carried regular columns to report their doings.

The heads of such families generally worked in New York, in banking, dry goods, “the China trade.” Some owned the ships that tied up beneath their windows. A few were also men of learning. J. Carson Brevoort, to give just one example, had been educated in Europe and served for a time as private secretary to Washington Irving. He was a recognized authority on American history and entomology. “His knowledge of fish,” it is reported on good authority, “was hardly exceeded by any naturalist and his collection of books and specimens was magnificent and valuable.”

Among such men and in such a setting, New Yorkers of comparable station might well wish to make their home once the bridge was built and the inconvenience of the ferries was no longer an issue.

At Clinton and Pierrepont stood the Brooklyn Club, where, as one visitor noted happily, the members not only referred to one another’s wives on a first-name basis, but their servants as well. Close by were the Mercantile Library, the Long Island Historical Society, and the Music Academy, where the Heights gathered for “uplifting” lectures, amateur theatrical productions and musicals, Johann Strauss on one occasion, and yearly charity balls. In the grand ballroom “one could not move a foot without appearing in mirrors.”

And there, too, on the Heights, stood what was held to be not only the moral and spiritual center of Brooklyn and New York, but of all America. Brooklyn was “The City of Churches,” Talmage and Storrs were among its pastors. But Plymouth Church, a big brick barn of a building on Orange Street, was its foremost institution, bar none, the thing Brooklyn was famous for from one end of the land to the other. For it was there, on an open platform, before a congregation of two thousand or more, that Beecher preached, weekly—except summers—taking the Rocky Mountains as his sounding board, as one man said.

From the photographs there are of Henry Ward Beecher and the volumes of printed sermons, it is a little hard to understand just what all the excitement was about. One eye droops quite noticeably, giving him an unbalanced, slightly unpleasant look. He wore his hair long and loose, as was the custom with many platform spellbinders of the time, and by 1869, at age fifty-six, he was beginning to look a little gray and too well fed. Still, by all accounts, he had a physical vitality, an exuberance that appealed enormously to both men and women. In an age that adored both oratory and showmanship, he was the supreme orator and apparently one of the great performers of all time.

A brilliant pantomimist and mimic, he could turn in an instant from radiant joy to real tears to thundering, righteous anger—whichever was called for. He used no notes and began his sermons very softly, as though holding a private conversation with the front pews. But then all at once the “full, round, sonorous” voice would fill the church. Mark Twain, who watched in awe from the gallery one Sunday, wrote, “He went marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”

America had never produced anything quite like this man. Except possibly for Grant, no one alive was so highly regarded. His sermons were read avidly in the newspapers, and gotten up in book form they outsold the most popular fiction. Sunday-morning ferries to Brooklyn were known as “Beecher boats.” The easiest way to find Plymouth Church from the ferry landing was to follow the crowd.

One could look through the hundreds, the thousands, of speeches and sermons delivered by Beecher during the years the bridge was being planned and built and doubtless find a Beecher quote on the subject. There was little in life he did not have something to say about, and particularly if it was a matter of popular interest. Perhaps, like the merchants on Fulton Street, he envisioned whole new elements of New York society suddenly discovering Brooklyn once the great span arched the river. On Sundays it might even become “Beecher’s Bridge.” Of greater interest, however, is what Brooklyn thought of him, what he meant to Brooklyn.

His name was in the papers almost daily, which suggests people never tired of reading about him—what he had to say on free trade or growing onions or the vagaries of the weather. He was regarded as a master of conversation, when in truth he seems to have been more a master of the monologue. His entrance into any Brooklyn auditorium or public gathering was the immediate signal for an ovation, and the plot he had picked out at Greenwood for himself and his stiff, severe-looking wife was a tourist attraction.

The rich and the famous paid him all kinds of homage—Lincoln once said he was the greatest man in America—and Plymouth Church paid him twenty thousand dollars a year, or the same as the President of the United States received. And nobody thought that out of line. It is perhaps impossible to imagine the hold he had on his time.

“Our institutions live in him,” said the Eagle, “our thoughts as a nation breathe in him, our muscular Christianity finds in him the most vigorous champion. He is the Hercules of American Protestantism…”

The presence of such an individual would give a place a certain aura, needless to say, and was certainly a factor in determining the kind of people who had been choosing the Heights as a place to live over the twenty-odd years since Beecher first arrived there—not all of whom, it ought to be said, were excessively wealthy or prominent socially. Perhaps the most fitting description of people on the Heights at the time the bridge was about to be built is one written of the Plymouth Church congregation by a visiting reporter from Massachusetts. “A more intelligent body of people one would rarely find,” he said. “A phrenologist would praise their intellectual developments, while there is a look of cheerful hearty satisfaction on most of their faces, as if they relished life and were seldom troubled with the blues…It is a well-to-do body also; not aristocratic or fashionable, though a score or more came in their carriages, but prudent and prosperous, as if they lived in good houses and both earned and enjoyed worldly comforts.”

There was more to be said for Brooklyn. Gas rates were reasonable. Taxes were still lower than in New York. The schools were far superior. Local government was reputed to be honest, which it was not, but in contrast to the way things were done on the other side of the river, it looked pretty good. Streets were reasonably well lighted after dark and for a city of its size there was little crime. The drinking water was delicious.

The Eagle, Brooklyn’s leading daily, was certainly another amenity, and Thomas Kinsella, its editor, who was soon to become a Congressman as well, was regarded as a perfect example of how far a deserving immigrant boy could rise in America.

Jobs happened also to be plentiful in Brooklyn just then. Charles Dickens, after a recent visit, dismissed Brooklyn as “a sort of sleeping place” for New York. But from the statistics available, it appears New York employed considerably less than half of Brooklyn’s wage earners, perhaps even as few as one in three.

In any event, theirs was the fit place to live, most Brooklyn people felt. It was the more truly American city. New York, for all its enticements, was regarded as a monstrous, cold place, overcrowded, overpriced, bewildering—unwholesome. In Brooklyn a clerk could own a home. Of the five hundred miles of streets Brooklyn land speculators liked to exclaim over (“five miles for every one in New York”) only half had anything built on them as yet.

Brooklyn had its shortcomings, of course. Even the best restaurants and shops were second-rate compared to those in New York. The air in the neighborhood of Peter Cooper’s glue factory was not exactly that of the open sea and the average Brooklyn saloon, according to one source, smelled like a kennel. Nor was Brooklyn innocent of the filth and squalor so commonly attributed to “the modern Babel” across the way. The tenements on the “flats,” south of the Navy Yard, where a large part of Brooklyn’s Irish lived, were as foul as any in New York.

But Delmonico’s, Barnum’s museum, evenings at the theater, Wall Street, adventure, all the “delights” of New York were readily available over the river. That, after all, was one of the most appealing things about Brooklyn—it had New York at such easy reach, it offered the best of both worlds.

As for those unpleasant neighborhoods by the Navy Yard, well, most people never ventured down such streets or had any real idea of the life that went on there; and, naturally, what most people believed to be the truth was more important at the time than any latter-day objective appraisal of how things were. People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information and it was the experience of most Brooklyn people that between their city and the other one, there was no comparison.

Moreover, the bridge was going to make things better still. Like most of their countrymen, Brooklyn people, the newcomers especially, were essentially expectant at heart, optimistic, looking forward, believing fervently in the future. How much was already known of the politics the bridge involved, one wonders, or of the various bargains that had been struck? How much was even suspected? How many people had speculated seriously on what the real cost of the bridge might be?

There is a story about where and when the bridge scheme was hatched in Brooklyn and a plaque that commemorates the event, in Owl’s Head Park, near the place where Henry Cruse Murphy’s house once stood.

The winter of 1866-67 was as severe as any on record. Ice conditions on the river were so bad on several occasions that a traveler by train from Albany could reach New York in less time than a commuter from Brooklyn could. Roebling’s bridge had opened in Cincinnati with national acclaim and every Brooklyn paper was demanding a bridge to New York.

Then, on the night of December 21, 1866, young William Kingsley, convinced the time was ripe to get a bridge bill before the Albany legislature, decided to ride down to Bay Ridge to call on Henry Murphy. The night was bitterly cold, no night to be out, according to the story, and Bay Ridge was a good four-mile drive. Kingsley was accompanied by Judge Alexander McCue, a close friend of Murphy’s, who went along, he said later, merely to give Kingsley what support he could, for Murphy then was known to be “far from persuaded of the practicability of the enterprise.”

Kingsley had been conferring since summer with Julius Adams on the engineering involved, and in the library of Murphy’s palatial home, beside a log fire, the conversation went on until past midnight. Murphy is said to have been highly skeptical at first, even hostile to the whole idea of a bridge. Kingsley is supposed to have responded with mounting enthusiasm for his subject, meeting Murphy’s every argument with sharp, convincing rejoinders. Describing the scene later, McCue said of Kingsley, “His unexhausting and unresting mind, matchless in its clarity and invincible in its force, was my wonder and admiration.” After a time Murphy was listening as though under a spell.

By the time they were at the door saying good night, Murphy had been converted. What exactly Kingsley said to him during the course of the evening was never revealed, however. All McCue said was that nobody could have withstood Kingsley’s onslaught of facts and figures.

Possibly the story is true. Possibly Henry Murphy, like earlier patrician figures in Brooklyn, saw the bridge as a threat to a whole way of life. Old General Johnson, Brooklyn’s “first and foremost citizen” when Murphy was a young man, had declared during his campaign for mayor in 1833 that Brooklyn and New York had nothing whatever in common, in “object, interest, or feeling,” and that the river dividing them was a wonderful thing for Brooklyn. During the War of 1812 the general had been put in charge of Fort Greene, to stand in wait for an invasion of Long Island that never materialized. Later he had grown gravely concerned about an invasion of another kind. He liked Brooklyn the way it was, and said so. There were still people who felt that way, not many, but some, and perhaps Murphy was of the same mind.

But it does not seem very likely—if only in light of Murphy’s total, unwavering devotion to the bridge from that night on. Furthermore, nearly ten years before, in 1857, the year of Roebling’s letters in the Tribune and Journal of Commerce, Murphy said most emphatically that the East River would soon cease to divide Brooklyn and New York. Speaking at a farewell dinner in his honor at the Mansion House, just before leaving for the Netherlands, he had hailed the “spirit of advancement” stirring in Brooklyn and suggested that the new water works was only a sample of the monumental enterprise such a community was capable of. Even the Tammany guests had applauded.

But be that as it may, Kingsley was unquestionably the spearhead of the bridge idea in 1867, and he would have more at stake in the venture ahead than any other one man, with the single, notable exception of Washington Roebling. Kingsley and Murphy were the two most powerful, influential Democrats in Brooklyn—Boss McLaughlin not included—and the Brooklyn Democrats had just about all the political power and influence there was to have in Brooklyn. So whether it was that particular night by the log fire that the two of them struck their bargain is nowhere near so important to the story of the bridge as are the men themselves.

Had a political cartoonist of the time decided to do a simplified illustrated key to Kings County politics, circa 1867, he might have drawn a bird’s-eye view of Brooklyn with Beecher commanding the Heights—just to orient people—and behind Beecher’s back, Boss McLaughlin, looking a little dull-witted, holding City Hall in the palm of his hand. At the foot of Fulton Street, beside an office labeled KINGSLEY & KEENEY, CONTRACTORS, would be the strapping young Kingsley, energetically cranking a cement mixer that spews out something marked $$$. And down the bay, off to himself, gazing from a tower window at his “villa,” his eyes on some distant horizon and looking very senatorial, would be Henry Murphy, noble as a Roman.

In their different ways both Kingsley and Murphy were very impressive men. Kingsley was all of thirty-four in 1867, which made him young enough to be Henry Murphy’s son. Hard, resourceful, ambitious, he had established himself in business in Brooklyn the same year Murphy went to The Hague, 1857, a depression year. He came to town not knowing a soul, apparently. He had been a school teacher and also a construction boss on canals in Pennsylvania and on railroads in the Midwest. For a brief time he had worked on the Portage Railroad at Johnstown (where perhaps he heard tales of Roebling installing his iron rope a decade before). His prime attribute in that earlier time appears to have been an ability for snuffing out strikes.

Now he was Brooklyn’s most prosperous contractor. He had paved streets, put down sewers, built the big storage reservoir at Hempstead, built much of Prospect Park, some of Central Park, branched out into the lumber business, the granite business, bought up real estate, and became “identified” with Brooklyn’s gas company and banking interests. Just ten years after stepping off the Fulton Ferry, a total stranger, and with no money to speak of, he was worth close to a million dollars and was one of the best-known men in Brooklyn.

Boss McLaughlin had taken an almost immediate liking to him. McLaughlin himself had been nothing more than a waterfront gang leader until 1856, when, as a reward for services rendered locally in the campaign to put Buchanan in the White House, he had been appointed “Boss Laborer” at the Navy Yard. It was not long before he was “Boss” of all Brooklyn. He was, in fact, the first political manipulator to be called “Boss,” a name he never cared for. Soft-spoken, dingy-looking, a man who played dominoes for off-hours excitement, he walked about Brooklyn with his shoulders thrown back, his great stomach thrust forward. His silk hat was always last year’s and brushed the wrong way. And yet there was something “about the bearing of his round head, and the quiet keen look of his small blue eyes that betrays the leader.” It must have been something of the same look that he himself spotted in Kingsley the first time the two laid eyes on one another.

McLaughlin had just begun to organize “The Brooklyn Ring.” With Henry Murphy out of the country, he was moving fast. Kingsley got a few paving contracts to start, then work on the water works. Kingsley’s interests in politics became very great. In no time the young man was reputed to be the most effective money raiser in the party and nobody, it was said, was closer to the Boss. For McLaughlin, plainly, he was a valuable find.

Well over six feet tall, powerfully built, with broad shoulders and a deep chest, Kingsley “cut a striking figure in the street.” His face, smooth and honest-looking, was set off by a fine head of wavy dark-red hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He looked people right in the eye and was obviously many cuts above Boss Hugh McLaughlin. Even the New York World, which normally had no use for Kings County Democrats, credited him with “plausible” manners.

Kingsley was Irish, but like Tweed, he was a Protestant. He was also a natural politician but, having no gift for public speaking and no apparent yearning for public office, preferred working behind the scenes. Like McLaughlin he gave no signs of aspiring to more power than could be had right at home in Brooklyn. Between them—the boss politician and the boss contractor—they had worked out a very pleasant, profitable partnership. But unlike McLaughlin, Kingsley had what another generation would call “upward mobility.” He had the potential of going very far.

Murphy was quite a different sort. He was Old Brooklyn, he was grace and learning. For a long time he had been considered the handsomest man in town. Where Kingsley and McLaughlin were men of great physical bulk and had made their way up in the world in part because of that, Murphy was small, spare, well knit, and clean-shaven, a refined-looking man with gray hair and sharp, intelligent eyes. Judge McCue called him “cautious and subtle.” Henry Stiles, the Brooklyn historian, described him as “very earnest in manner, a little severe even.” Everybody respected him, it appears, and it is not hard to see why. According to Stiles, “no public man has, probably, passed thus far through the trying ordeal of a legislative career, so entirely free from the taint of corruption.” Once upon a time, as some of his other admirers liked to tell, Henry Murphy had nearly become President of the United States.

John Murphy, his father, a “thorough Jefferson Democrat,” had been a Brooklyn judge, a man of some renown in his own time, who did well enough with one thing and another to send Henry to Columbia, where he was graduated in 1830. In the next few years, while reading law—at the same time young John Roebling was struggling to become a Pennsylvania farmer—Murphy made quite a name for himself. “His pen embellished and enriched” the pages of the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. He edited the old Brooklyn Advocate and helped organize the Young Men’s Literary Association of Brooklyn. In 1835 he went into partnership with an attorney named John A. Lott and was soon joined by another named John Vanderbilt, both older men and already prominent in Brooklyn. “From the first his firm was in high favor with Brooklyn people,” reads one biographical sketch, “especially wealthy and conservative old property-holders of Brooklyn, and it soon built up an extensive and lucrative practice.” It also ran the Democratic Party on the Brooklyn side of the river.

In 1841 Murphy founded the Eagle, then more explicitly named the Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat. The next year he was elected mayor at age thirty-one and commenced his administration by cutting his own salary. He went to Congress presently, served there twice, and distinguished himself by sounding forth against slavery and fostering McAlpine’s dry dock at the Navy Yard. By the time his political career had run its course, he would also serve six terms in the State Senate, try three times for the United States Senate, once for the governorship, and fail every time mainly because of the opposition of one man, William Tweed.

But his closest brush with real glory had come in 1852 at the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. The convention had been deadlocked after forty-eight ballots, when the Virginia delegation put up a compromise candidate, an old-fashioned party regular from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce. But the Virginians’ support for Pierce had been anything but unanimous. Murphy had been the other choice and had lost by a single vote. Pierce had a military record, Murphy did not, and apparently that had been the deciding factor. Had Murphy been put up instead, his admirers held, he would have been nominated, elected, and done better as President than did the colorless New Hampshire man. (For one thing, coming as he did from Beecher’s home town, it is doubtful Murphy would have underestimated the abolitionists.)

It was five years after that when Murphy was named the American Minister to The Hague, by Buchanan, and no sooner was he out of the country than Boss McLaughlin swung into action, taking complete control in Brooklyn at the same time Tweed was taking over in New York. “It was not a change for the better,” the Eagle would write in retrospect, many years later, after Murphy was dead. “Deftness in speech was supplanted by deftness in manipulation of votes; dexterity in argument made way for the dexterity which makes one count for two for your side. The deterioration of our political methods began then…”

Recalled from The Hague by Lincoln in 1861, Murphy returned to face other problems as well. A man taken into his law firm had squandered money and left the firm unable to pay its bills. Murphy, who had been planning to retire once he was home again, made good on all the firm’s commitments out of his own savings, which nearly ruined him. As a result he had not only gone back to practicing law, but began taking an interest in various local business propositions, such as the development of Coney Island, which was something he had not done before.

In the years since, it was commonly remarked, there had been a certain air of disappointment about Henry Murphy. Albany was now his only field of political influence and there he appears to have been a rather lonely, incongruous figure, with his literary tastes and perfect manners. But he was immensely influential all the same, and for Brooklyn, a most valuable asset.

Privately he turned more and more to his family, his books, his scholarly interest in Brooklyn history. At the moment, he was finishing up a translation of a journal kept by two Dutchmen during a trip to New Netherlands in 1679, something he had found in an Amsterdam bookshop. * This was his third such translation and the library where he, Kingsley, and McCue held their historic conversation housed what would one day be evaluated as among the two or three finest collections of early Americana in the entire country. “Mr. Murphy only failed as a politician,” said one Brooklyn observer of the time; “in all else his life was a grand success.”

In talent, disposition, age, background, physique, in just about every way, Kingsley and Murphy were as different as they could be, opposite and complementary, and they worked superbly together.

Murphy “threw himself” into the bridge enterprise. He drafted an incorporating charter and “with great energy…enlisted the interest of his friends,” his prominent, respectable friends, to be more exact. The thirty-eight directors he rounded up included the mayors of both cities, such presentable Brooklyn Democrats as McCue and Isaac van Anden, owner of the Eagle, and for the Republicans and old Brooklyn, Simeon Chittenden, J. Carson Brevoort, and Henry E. Pierrepont (son of Hezekiah). He also talked up the bridge at every opportunity and took framed copies of a bridge Julius Adams had designed with him to Albany to pass about among his fellow legislators. To no one’s surprise, the Eagle gave him full support. “Every Brooklynite, resident or capitalist, is interested in bridging the East River,” wrote Thomas Kinsella.

The bill was submitted on January 25, 1867, and passed on April 16. Neither Murphy nor Kingsley, nor the name of any engineer, was listed as having any association with the proposed project.

The New York Bridge Company, a private corporation, was to have the power to purchase any real estate needed for the bridge and its approaches and to fix tolls. The legislation fixed the capital stock at five million dollars, with power to increase it, and gave the cities of Brooklyn and New York authority to subscribe to as much of the stock as determined by their respective Common Councils. The stock was to be valued at a hundred dollars a share. The company was to be run by a president who would be elected annually. In time this document of Henry Murphy’s creation would be looked upon as little better than a license to steal, but at this stage, for some reason, nobody seems to have regarded it that way.

Kingsley was to line up private money and see about the engineer. Perhaps his initial impulse had been to go along with Julius Adams, as he had led Adams to believe he would. But that seems doubtful. Adams would have been a bad choice and it is known that Murphy never entertained the idea for a minute. Adams had no reputation and had never built a bridge of any consequence. Indeed, one might well wonder why Adams was ever brought into the picture in the first place were it not for some comments made later by Washington Roebling in his private notebooks, where, it happens, a very great deal about the bridge would be said that does not appear in the official records or the various old “histories.”

Adams had been nothing more than a straw man all along, according to the young engineer. His role had been not so much to design a bridge as to concoct the lowest possible estimate for a bridge. That way the real engineer, if he seriously wanted the job, would have to pare his figures to the bone, which in turn would give the promoters of the scheme a more attractive price tag to talk about. The point was to work a little businesslike deception right at the start, before any real plans had even been drawn up. “Adams surpassed himself by an estimate of $2,000,000,” Washington Roebling wrote. As a result John A. Roebling was forced to trim his own estimate by more than one million dollars, knowing perfectly well what was going on and that his figure was ridiculous.

Then Kingsley and Murphy did some more cutting of their own to arrive at the five-million-dollar figure used in the Albany bill.

In May 1867, a month after the bill was passed, a meeting of the New York Bridge Company was held in the Supreme Court chambers at the County Courthouse in Brooklyn. Henry Murphy was appointed to fill a vacancy caused by the death of one of the directors. At a meeting three days later, Henry Murphy was elected president, and a week after that John A. Roebling was appointed Chief Engineer with full authority to design any sort of bridge he wished. A man had been selected, rather than a particular plan—Roebling had no real plan at that point. Kingsley said later the very nature of the enterprise demanded someone of towering reputation. The name Roebling was “invaluable to this enterprise in its infancy,” Kingsley would explain. There could not be a breath of doubt or suspicion concerning the integrity of the builder.

The explanation of the choice of Chief Engineer was worded thusly in the official company records: “Confidence on the part of the public and of those whose money was to be invested in the undertaking would best be insured by employing the Engineer who had achieved the most successful results, and who was thus most likely to accomplish this great enterprise.” No other engineer was ever considered.

Roebling’s salary was to be eight thousand dollars a year, but any work he did until the bridge actually got under way was strictly on speculation.

Things were moving very fast that spring of 1867. Roebling was told to proceed at once with his surveys and come up with a proposal. He was also led to understand that Kingsley, who was neither a director nor officer of the new company, would personally cover any expenses involved, although nothing was put in writing about it. Test borings were made and in two months’ time, having scrapped all his earlier sketches, Roebling was back in Brooklyn with his plan. At the first meeting of the Bridge Company’s newly formed Board of Directors, a Committee on Plans and Surveys recommended “the immediate commencement of the work.”

That was in October. But more than a year would pass before another meeting was held. Nor would there be any noticeable progress made on even the most preliminary construction. Three thousand new buildings went up in Brooklyn in 1868—churches, stores, banks, more factories, an ice-skating rink, row on row of plain-fronted brick and brownstone houses that sold about as fast as they were finished—but to judge by actions, not words, the Great Bridge was no more than a great figment of the imagination, nothing but a lot of politicians’ talk, by all appearances. The New York Bridge Company was nothing more than a name on paper as far as most people could tell. The famous engineer from Trenton was nowhere to be seen.

The delay, however, was not due to any indifference or lack of sincerity on the part of Kingsley or Murphy, or of Roebling certainly. The problem was in New York City. Back at the start of the century, when Thomas Pope’s “Rainbow Bridge” had been a favorite topic of conversation in Brooklyn, it was said that the only thing needed to bring a bridge about was “a combination of opinion.” Thus was the case now. Now especially that it had become something more than just a Brooklyn dream, the bridge could no longer be considered wholly a Brooklyn enterprise.

So it would be 1869 before the bridge was at last under way. And it would be the end of that summer of 1869, a full two years later, before things were finally settled behind the scenes. By then, of course, Roebling was dead. And only then did William Tweed emerge publicly as one of the leading spirits behind Brooklyn’s bridge.

6

The Proper Person to See

Who owns the City of New York today? The Devil!

—HENRY WARD BEECHER

ON THE MORNING of September 17, 1869, William Tweed took the Fulton Ferry to Brooklyn. The day was fine, the sun shining, a light, cool breeze blowing over the water. Tweed had a strong attachment to the river. Its sounds and smells, South Street and the ships docking there, were part of the New York he had known since childhood. Twice, when he was an alderman, he had voted to establish additional ferry lines to Brooklyn, in return for which he had been nicely reimbursed with several thousand dollars in cash. He was much younger then and that had seemed a handsome sum. But for his vote for the ferry to Brooklyn’s predominantly Irish Williamsburg section, he had also received a promise of support for his Congressional ambitions. The Williamsburg people had proved as good as their word and in 1853 he had gone off to Washington, a Congressman at age twenty-nine. The life on the Potomac had had no appeal for him, however, and he gladly gave it up after a single term. There were better things to be doing at home.

Now, as the big boat swept out into the river, its bell clanging, there stretched behind him the largest, richest, noisiest city in America, over which he and a few indispensable associates ruled supreme.

New York then, as later, was the country’s financial capital. It was the seat of mighty newspapers—Greeley’s Tribune, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, the Sun, the World, the Evening Post, the Times. It was the place where fashions were decided on and the center of fashionable society. It was home for the Astors, and it was home for P. T. Barnum, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Herman Melville. New York set the example, as somebody said. It had power, style, more Jews, more Irish, more priests and pickpockets and private art collections, more of just about everything than any city in the country. There were hotels with French waiters and five hundred rooms, theaters numbered in the twenties. As a contemporary book on the city stated on its opening page, Broadway, the principal street, was “paved, policed, and lighted for fifteen miles.” Pretty girls and rich men were too plentiful to count.

From the Battery northward for five miles or so, nearly every last piece of available space had been built up, and on toward the outskirts, near the new park, which had been so optimistically named Central Park, the city had a “straggling, unfinished look.” Downtown the noise was fearsome most of the day, the traffic terrible, the air thick with the smell of horse manure. Along Broadway the fast-moving throngs were more than the average person could take for very long and most women would have agreed with the Reverend Mr. Beecher’s famous sister, Mrs. Stowe, never a timid spirit, who wrote a friend that New York “always kills me—dazzles, dizzies—astonishes, confounds, and overpowers poor little me.”

Strangers to the city sensed an uncommon and offensive preoccupation with self-interest and the almighty dollar. “The light of Mammon gleams on nearly every face in Broadway and Wall Street,” wrote a visitor from England. And two years earlier, after arriving from California, Mark Twain said of New York, “Every man seems to feel he has got the duties of two lifetimes to accomplish in one, and so rushes, rushes, and never has time to be companionable—never has time at his disposal to fool away on matters which do not involve dollars and duty and business.”

Contrasts were everywhere, sharp and frequently appalling. The glistening new carriages that streamed through Central Park on Sundays reminded one French traveler of filigreed jewelry, but of the domain of the Irish and the Negro, between Broadway and the Hudson, the same man wrote, “Nothing could be more depressingly miserable than these wooden hovels, these long muddy streets, and this impoverished population.” An English writer said the whole city, generally speaking, was “one of the worst lighted, worst paved, worst kept cities in the world.”

Homeless children loose in the streets numbered in the thousands. The permanent floating population of homeless children, beggars, drifters, petty thieves, and prostitutes was said to be perhaps 100,000. Bawdyhouses advertised openly in the newspapers. Prostitutes were said to be “more numerous, more dangerous and more shameful than anywhere else on the continent.” Probably that was so. The most influential woman in town was an abortionist, Madame Restell, who lived in a big showy house on Fifth Avenue, across from where the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral was being built.

But nowhere else was quite so much happening every day or was there so much opportunity for the young, the talented, the ambitious, not to mention the lucky or the unscrupulous. Yesterday’s ragpicker or coal heaver was today’s millionaire (a new word). It not only happened in stories, it happened. A. T. Stewart had once been an ordinary shopkeeper, living over a store with his wife in a single room. Cornelius Vanderbilt began penniless, everyone knew.

The city was the undisputed center of the new America that had been emerging since the war. It was a place of a thousand and one overnight schemes, some brilliant, some preposterous, some plain evil, and all, it seemed, calling for enormous outlays of capital and pure nerve. It was the great gathering place for every imaginable kind of promoter, inventor, pitchman, entrepreneur, self-proclaimed visionary or ordinary crook, and nobody, it seemed, could remain bored there for too terribly long, whatever his condition.

Moreover, if only New York could have produced a Jim Fisk or a Tweed, as its critics liked to say, perhaps only New York could have produced a Peter Cooper or a Thomas Nast. And while the opening of the West was the great, popular human drama of the time, New York was the central attraction of a smaller, less celebrated, and colorful, but no less important and purposeful, migration in the opposite direction—eastward to the big cities. “The West is best for the person who is seeking a home,” wrote a young Swedish immigrant upon arriving in Kansas in June of 1869, but added, “The East’s large cities offer a rich field for clever money lovers,” thereby crystallizing what to him and countless others like him seemed the two most compelling and divergent choices in American life. And as he and his kind streamed out onto the American plains, it was to New York that a Mark Twain headed from the gold fields of California or an only moderately rich young Andrew Carnegie moved from Pittsburgh, or that an even younger and penniless Thomas Edison of Ohio would set himself up in business that same June.

Tweed, as it happens, had been called upon to journey all of a few city blocks to find his promised land. He had been born just to the east of City Hall, toward the river, at No. 1 Cherry Street, a squat red brick house that stood beside No. 1 Cherry Street, which, ironically enough, had once, briefly, been the nation’s first Presidential mansion, the home of George Washington when he took office for the first time and New York was the capital. Both of the houses, Tweed knew, would have to be demolished to make way for the anchorage of the new bridge.

Tweed’s people were hard-working Scotch Protestants, and Cherry Street when he was a boy was still considered a respectable neighborhood. It was said he had been a good student, at mathematics especially, and he had started off quite conscientiously, bookkeeping in a mercantile store. But about the time he reached his full growth, he joined up with a volunteer fire company and discovered politics.

In 1851 the fireman became an alderman, being elected to that Common Council of New York destined to be known as “The Forty Thieves.” From that time on, he would find honest work no longer necessary.

By 1869 Tweed was nearing his zenith. Like Beecher across the way, he was right in his prime. He was School Commissioner, Assistant Street Commissioner, President of the Board of Supervisors of the County of New York, Senator of the State of New York, Chairman of the Democratic Central Committee of New York County, and Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, the title that pleased him most.

But Tweed was also one of New York’s principal landowners. He was on speaking terms with the rich and powerful, some of whom he also did business with, and he was an extremely generous advertiser in the newspapers. He was in the printing business. One way or another, thousands were in his employ, including several hundred prominent Republicans. Judges rendered decisions according to his requests. Legislators passed or defeated laws as he determined. The Mayor, the charming A. Oakey Hall, did as Tweed wanted and the same could be said of the Governor, John T. Hoffman, who if not an outright stooge was at least “pliable.” As Samuel Tilden would write, it was the first day of January 1869, when Oakey Hall took office, that the Tweed Ring “became completely organized and matured.”

It was also in 1869 that Thomas Nast began his brave, brilliant attack on the Tweed Ring in the pages of Harper’s Weekly, so vividly characterizing Tweed that the true shape and nature of the man would seem to recede and the cartoon figure would become the real Tweed in people’s minds, then and in generations to come. He would be seen as a gross, half-comic character done in quick, sure black line, a figure of corruption incarnate, leering, lecherous, Falstaff with a stickpin.

The portrayal was deadly, as no one knew better than Tweed himself. “I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles,” he is said to have exclaimed when under attack from the press, “my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.” But it was caricature, for all that; the man was something else again. He was no less corrupt certainly, but he was very much of flesh and blood, and apart from everything else that was said about him, it seems he was both extremely bright and enormously likable.

The Tweed on board the ferry to Brooklyn that September morning was in his mid-forties, married, the father of eight children. What hair he had left was a dark reddish-brown, which he wore in thick clumps about his ears. His mustache was approximately the same color, as was his short, stiff beard. The eyes were bright blue.

But it was the fantastic physical size of the man that set him off in any gathering. He stood five feet eleven, yet he seemed much bigger than that. He had an abnormally big head, big hands, big neck, great, thick sloping shoulders, and a vast, belligerent stomach across which was draped a heavy length of gold watch chain, a gift from his old fire-fighting pals of the Americus Engine Company Number 6. Estimates are that Tweed weighed somewhere near three hundred pounds.

James Bryce, the English historian, who watched Tweed in action with total fascination, considering him one of the phenomena of the American political system, wrote that Tweed’s size was an important part of his professional equipment, since it made the role of “the genial good fellow” that much easier. And by almost every account, Tweed was a most amiable fellow indeed, buoyant, booming, with a fund of stories and a gift for making friends quickly and easily. “Tweed had an abounding vitality,” Bryce wrote, echoing John Roebling’s view of what counted for success, “free and easy manners, plenty of humor, though of a coarse kind, and a jovial swaggering way which won popularity for him among the lower and rougher sort of people.”

Like numerous other swindlers in high places, before and since, Tweed was known to have his “good side”—a combination of small but popular virtues that were taken by thousands upon thousands of loyal followers as obvious proof that he could not possibly be the monster his enemies described. He drank but sparingly. He smoked not at all. He was a devoted, generous father. He was exceptionally charitable. (Come a hard winter, no family in his district went without coal.) And although he kept at least two mistresses, one of whom, a tiny blonde, did not reach his shoulder, he was considered quite charming in his way by the ladies. He loved to dance. He was never ever arrogant. And perhaps most important of all, as Bryce said, he was always loyal to his friends.

But all that aside, Tweed had a genius for organizing things, and more than any other man of his time, he knew how to make politics pay. Precisely how much he and his cohorts managed to steal from the people of New York will never be known for certain, but responsible estimates range from $75 million to $200 million. Tweed himself, personally, probably made off with $30 million before he was deposed.

When the ferry docked at Brooklyn, Tweed went up Fulton Street to the Gas Light Company offices. He had come to attend the very first meeting of the new Executive Committee of the Bridge Company, of which he was one of just six members.

The full committee was present according to the official synopsis of the meeting: “Messrs. H. C. Murphy, S. L. Husted, Wm. M. Tweed, J. S. T. Stranahan, Hugh Smith and H. W. Slocum.” The committee had been formed at a directors’ meeting the week before. From here on, it had been agreed, the committee was to make all arrangements for the work and have full control over the business of the company. It was to decide on all appointments, purchase all lands required, decide on all contracts for supplies, audit its own accounts, appoint its own attorney (Alexander McCue), and determine all salaries and all other “compensations.”

Tweed’s interest in the bridge was not new, but only on August 3, following the Roebling funeral, had his name been associated with the great work in any public way. An important directors’ meeting had been held at the Gas Light Company. Colonel Roebling was officially appointed Chief Engineer and six new directors were named to fill the vacancies caused by one death and a total of eight resignations, all quite sudden it seems. Three of the new directors were Brooklyn men—Stranahan, General Slocum, and John W. Lewis. The three others were from New York—Tweed and two of his closest associates, Hugh Smith and Peter Sweeny.

Smith was a Republican, a bank president, and a dear friend of Boss Tweed’s, who had made Smith Police Commissioner. Sweeny, also known as Peter “Brains” Sweeny, was a pudgy, black-haired, sinister-looking man who had been called the sneak thief of Tweed’s entourage, but who preferred to describe himself humbly as “a sort of adviser” to the Boss. Like Tweed, Smith had been named a member of the powerful new Executive Committee and so had the pleasure of watching Tweed perform his first recorded service on behalf of the bridge.

As was frequently his way when commencing an association with a grand public endeavor, Tweed wanted an eminently respectable name also associated with it from the start. So as the Executive Committee got down to business, he urged that Horatio Allen be appointed consulting engineer at an annual salary the same as young Roebling was to get, eight thousand dollars, and that the appointment date from August 1, even though Allen had had no hand in any of the work during that time. A formal motion to that effect was presented, passed, and the genial Allen, who was present, immediately accepted. Then, after a few brief formalities were seen to, the meeting broke up and Tweed went back across the river.

There had been no fanfare of any kind and on the surface it might appear that little of importance had been accomplished. But Tweed doubtless felt he had put in quite a good morning.

The sudden death of the elder Roebling had created the single possible flaw in the venture, as Tweed saw it; so he had moved to solve that—or to appear to solve it, which was more important. Irrespective of the skills possessed by the young engineer, without the father in command, a failure of public confidence might develop and bring the bridge to a halt, something Tweed did not want. Tweed was anxious that this project continue for quite some time to come. But now young Roebling was backed up by an engineer of his father’s vintage, whose professional standing was well known, whose character was unimpeachable, who was a founding member of the Union League Club, and so forth. If anyone should one day care to check the record to see who had put him there to safeguard this vast and important undertaking, he would find the name “Wm. M. Tweed.” (Horatio Allen’s professional contribution to the work in the next few years would add up to just about nothing.)

The Tammany chieftain had also made his first entrance onto the Brooklyn scene and not a stir had resulted. He had gone to Brooklyn in good faith and in broad daylight, he had been seen on Fulton Street, he had taken a place among such upright gentlemen as General Slocum and Henry Murphy, he had fixed his name to the greatest municipal enterprise of the day, and no one had raised a hand or a voice to stop him.

For nearly two years more Tweed would play a decisive part in the business of the Bridge Company, traveling to Brooklyn to attend stockholders’ meetings or to serve on the Executive Committee when it served his purpose. He would make no secret of his interest in the bridge, nor did anyone else try to hide, or gloss over, the obvious fact that his was a very powerful voice in bridge affairs. But when it came time for Tweed to explain the earlier stages of organizing the Bridge Company—that business transacted prior to his open association with the project—everything he said would be angrily denounced by the two principals in his version of the story, William Kingsley and Henry Murphy.

Murphy stated there was no truth whatever in anything Tweed said. He denied absolutely playing the role Tweed credited him with, claiming he and Tweed had had no dealings concerning the bridge. And he stuck to that until his dying day. Which one of them, if either, was telling the whole truth will never be known.

But according to Tweed’s version of the story, Murphy was a very different sort of man from the one Henry Stiles depicted and perfectly capable of Tweed’s brand of politics if that was the only way to get what he was after. In late 1867 or early 1868 Murphy had been after a pledge from the City of New York to subscribe to a million and a half dollars’ worth of bridge stock. (Brooklyn’s subscription, exactly twice that amount, had been arranged quite smoothly. The three million dollars from Brooklyn was all set. The remaining shares, a half million dollars’ worth, were to be sold to private citizens.)

Tweed’s account of what went on behind the scenes is the only one available. It was presented a number of years later and is rather vague on such important details as to just when Murphy came to him for help—whether, for instance, it was before or after Murphy made his bitter fight for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1868, a fight Murphy lost to Tweed’s hand-picked candidate, John Hoffman. The timing, needless to say, would be an interesting part of the story. In any event, it was Murphy, according to Tweed, and Murphy alone, who came to him in Albany to say the Bridge Company needed money from New York, which, as Murphy said, was a matter to be decided by the Common Council.

Tweed, at that time, was newly arrived at Albany, having recently become “a brother Senator” of Murphy’s, as Tweed put it, representing New York’s Fourth District. He had hired a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Delevan House, where amid potted plants and gleaming sideboards loaded with decanters of whiskey and Holland gin, and with the steady trill of his beloved canaries filling the air, Tweed transacted the people’s business. If one wished something done at the old stone Capitol up the street, one went first to the Delevan House, to the second floor. Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Vanderbilt, they all made an appearance sooner or later, as did countless lesser “lobbyists,” one of whom later testified that the going price of a vote ranged anywhere from fifty to five hundred dollars. For Vanderbilt alone Tweed is said to have distributed $180,000.

If Tweed and Murphy did meet in private, as Tweed said they did—to reach an “understanding” about the bridge—it was doubtless there in Tweed’s chambers and it must have been a memorable confrontation. The two of them were like the opposing sides of the same political coin, the one a great, florid mountain done up in a loud suit, the other small, neat, dignified, but tough as a nut and doubtless detesting every minute of the transaction. There they must have sat, face to face, a pair of Tweed’s favorite enameled cuspidors, decorated with rosebuds, stationed conveniently close by.

According to Tweed he immediately reminded Murphy that he was no longer a member of the Common Council and therefore had nothing to do with its decisions. “But,” said Murphy, “can’t you influence them?” (Tweed, it seems, described this little exchange with a perfectly straight face.)

“I told him I hadn’t done any lobbying business there, but might if necessary,” Tweed continued.

“Shortly after he called again. In the meantime I had conversed with a gentleman occupying a position in the Board of Aldermen which entitled him to credence, and he told me the appropriation could be passed by paying for it.” Tweed had asked how much it would cost, but when he tried to recall the answer after so many years, he was unable to say whether it had been $55,000 or $65,000. (Considering the number of “understandings” Tweed took part in, his slip of memory is not surprising.) But a price was agreed on. “I informed Mr. Murphy of that fact. He told me to go ahead and make the negotiation. I did so, and the money was authorized to be appropriated or the bonds issued. I can’t tell the manner in which it was done, but that was the result.”

Tweed had no trouble recalling the gentleman of “credence” to whom the money was delivered, or who acted as the go-between.

“With whom did you have dealings?” he was asked during the subsequent investigations.

“Mr. Thomas Coman,” Tweed answered. (Alderman Coman was a Tammany hack of long standing.)

“You gave him the sum of money to be paid in bulk to the members of the Board of Aldermen?”

“Yes, sir.”

Just how the money was actually delivered to him, Tweed never said, but according to a story told later, one fine day all $55,000 or $65,000, whichever it was, came across from Brooklyn in a carpetbag, and there is reason to believe that the man carrying the bag was William C. Kingsley. For even if everything Tweed said was true, Murphy would never have involved himself directly in that part of the transaction; while Kingsley, on the other hand, was not unaccustomed to handling large sums in the line of duty; and it seems most unlikely that either of them would have entrusted such a mission to anybody else. The only thing of interest Kingsley seems to have put in writing on the subject back at the time was a comment to John A. Roebling in a letter dated April 16, 1868. There was among the New York aldermen, he told the engineer, “a strong combination made against the measure [the bridge] by a ring that want to be bought.”

But however Tweed got the money, he did not turn it over to Alderman Coman until after he, Murphy, and Kingsley had reached still one further “understanding.” Tweed was always very agreeable about passing money along to his political associates and generally he liked to take a little of it for himself, as he probably did in this case. But Tweed by now was no petty grafter. He too was a visionary, with his eye on the future, and bribing a few aldermen was simply not his line any longer, except as a necessary first step in a larger, grander scheme. Tweed was working up an arrangement whereby he and his Ring could get control of the entire bridge.

First of all Tweed wanted stock in the bridge and he wanted it at a bargain price, he wanted it as a gift actually. It was a courtesy he was accustomed to in such affairs. In his testimony he said Murphy told him there had been some difficulties selling bridge stock in Brooklyn, which was the case, and that additional private investors would be most welcome; whereupon Tweed had immediately suggested that he, Smith, and “Brains” Sweeny might like “to go in the direction of the bridge,” as Tweed phrased it.

“What inducement was held out to you to become a stockholder in the Brooklyn Bridge?” Tweed would be asked during his soul-baring testimony.

“As the law then read,” he answered, “five hundred thousand dollars subscribed by individual stockholders would control the entire bridge, the appropriations, expenditures of money and supplies, and everything.”

Tweed was very familiar with the legislation Murphy had drawn up. According to the law the entire corporation, though representing four and a half million dollars of the people’s money (from the two cities), was actually controlled by the private stockholders. So just as Tweed explained in his testimony, the man with ten shares of stock (a thousand dollars’ worth) had as much say as the City of New York or the City of Brooklyn, with all their millions tied up in the venture.

“Now, how did you expect to be benefited by becoming one of the subscribers to this bridge?” Tweed’s interrogator asked. Tweed answered with two sentences, the second of which is a classic sample of his gift for understatement.

“I expected,” Tweed said, “that when the bridge was built by the citizens of New York and Brooklyn, and with their money, it would be a well-paying dividend stock. Then we expected to get employment for a great many laborers and an expenditure of the money for the different articles required to build the bridge.”

It would not be until after the Tweed Ring collapsed and its incredible thievery was exposed that anyone would be able to appreciate just what Tweed might have in mind when he spoke lightly of “employment for a great many laborers” or “an expenditure of the money for the different articles required.” The truth of the matter was that no politician alive had so keen or cultivated an appreciation for a large, costly, time-consuming public work.

For example, several years prior to the time Tweed developed an interest in bridgebuilding, he had commenced a new County Courthouse on Chambers Street, just across the park from City Hall, or almost directly in line with where the New York entrance to the bridge was to be. The architect’s plans called for a three-story building, of iron and marble, in the style of a Palladian country house, and it was to cost, according to law, no more than a quarter of a million dollars. At the outset it had looked like a straightforward, relatively modest piece of business. But by 1868 it was still being built and rebuilt—and ever so slowly. The “city fathers” (Tweed’s people) had authorized some additional three million dollars to keep the job going (such an edifice certainly ought to be in keeping with the greatness of New York itself, Tweed would say), and there seemed no end to the number of people needed to work on the structure, or to keep it running smoothly. It took, for example, thirty-two full-time employees just to maintain the heating apparatus. By the time it would be finished, in 1871, Tweed’s courthouse would cost more than thirteen million dollars, or nearly twice the price paid for Alaska.

The act incorporating the New York Bridge Company had not stipulated a specific ceiling on how much could be spent on the bridge, or even a rough estimate of the ultimate cost, only what the capital stock would be. Roebling’s estimate was a matter of public record, of course, but engineers’ estimates seldom turned out to be accurate, and even so, as round numbers to work with, six to seven million must have struck Tweed as a much better start than he had had with the courthouse.

But what surely must have set Tweed and his closest associates to doing some very fancy reckoning was the prospect of such an immense, unprecedented piece of construction, where all manner of unexpected developments could call for vast outlays of public money. Three chairs and forty tables for the Chambers Street courthouse had been bought by the City of New York for $179,792. Windows had cost $8,000 apiece. One friend of the Ring, a man named Garvey who would become known as “The Prince of Plasterers,” had been paid by 1869 half a million dollars for his plastering work inside the courthouse, plus a million more to repair what he had done. (That July Garvey’s bill for plastering came to $153,755, and his total bill, for work that should have cost about $20,000, would be nearly three million.) Among the many checks made out for “articles required” for the courthouse, to cite one more example, was one for $41,190.95—for “Brooms, etc.”

So for Tweed and his friends the bridge must have appeared as the most spectacular of dreams come true.

“You mean to say you expected to get a percentage out of the materials and labor upon the bridge?” Tweed was asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Was there an understanding with anybody that you should do so?”

“There was no direct understanding,” Tweed said, only “a kind of implied understanding.”

Tweed then went on to explain how William Kingsley, too, was to get a percentage of the money spent for materials, according to the arrangement, and that Kingsley was to be the general superintendent of the construction work, with a large say in contracts. A formal confirmation of this part of the bargain would not, however, be agreed to until after the bridge was under way, and Kingsley, in due time, would have a great deal more explaining to do than would Murphy.

Tweed said the only “understanding” he personally had with Kingsley was that “he was to pay the balance of my stock after I paid the installments of twenty per cent of my stock.”

“Oh! He was?” exclaimed Tweed’s interrogator. “After you paid the twenty per cent of your stock Mr. Kingsley was to pay the balance of it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was he to do that for the others?”

“I think he was, but I don’t know.”

So the agreement reached was this: Tweed, Smith, and Sweeny were to receive a total of 1,260 shares in the bridge, valued at a hundred dollars a share. The split between them was to be even, 420 shares per man, or $42,000 worth of stock, for which they each were supposed to pay 20 per cent, or $8,400. But the way it finally worked out, they each got 560 shares, so that at a future date they could each turn 140 shares over to another of Tweed’s confederates, who, Tweed decided, had to be in on the arrangement. He was Richard B. Connolly, “Slippery Dick” Connolly, as he was known, Comptroller of the City of New York and therefore a very useful man in any scheme involving the expenditure of public funds. This way all four of them, Tweed, Smith, Sweeny, and Connolly, would wind up with 420 shares, which meant that individually they would be among the largest private stockholders in the East River bridge. Kingsley would be the largest by far. He had arranged to have his construction firm, Kingsley & Keeney, purchase 1,600 shares. Murphy, by contrast, was in for only 100 shares. But in combination Tweed and his friends controlled a grand total of 1,680 shares—or $168,000 in stock. So, right at the start, they had almost as much stock as Murphy and Kingsley combined and Kingsley had paid for the lion’s share and given it to them.

And that was about the size of the bargain, if Tweed’s story is to be believed, which probably it should be, considering the circumstances under which it was presented.

His testimony was delivered under oath on September 18, 1877, exactly eight years and a day after his appearance at the first meeting of the Executive Committee. By then he was a very changed man. He was in jail, sick, disheartened, deserted by his friends. Furthermore, he had been led to believe that if he made a clean breast of things he would not only be released, but would be granted immunity from any further prosecution. With no one left of the old crowd to protect, with his own name long since synonymous with villainy, there was really very little reason for him to tell anything but the truth. He had nothing to lose and, it appeared to him, quite a lot to gain. So it seems reasonable that his account, except for incidental details, was close to what happened.

The stock arrangement was, of course, all in the records and quite as Tweed described it. The recorded breakdown on stock ownership, as of the autumn of 1869, as the bridge got under way, reads as follows:

Kingsley & Keeney . . . . . . . . . . 1,600 shares

J. S. T. Stranahan. . . . . . . . . . 100   "

H. W. Slocum. . . . . . . . . . 500   "

Hugh Smith. . . . . . . . . . 560   "

W. M. Tweed. . . . . . . . . . 560   "

P. B. Sweeny. . . . . . . . . . 560   "

W. Hunter, Jr.. . . . . . . . . . 50   "

J. H. Prentice. . . . . . . . . . 50   "

J. W. Lewis. . . . . . . . . . 50   "

G. T. Jenks. . . . . . . . . . 50   "

H. C. Murphy. . . . . . . . . . 100   "

Alexander McCue. . . . . . . . . . 100   "

Martin Kalbfleisch. . . . . . . . . . 200   "

S. L. Husted. . . . . . . . . . 200   "

Isaac Van Anden. . . . . . . . . . 200   "

Samuel McLean. . . . . . . . . . 50   "

William Marshall. . . . . . . . . . 50   "

Arthur W. Benson. . . . . . . . . . 20   "

It is a list that reveals several very interesting points that Tweed neglected to raise in his testimony. It shows, for example, that of the thirty-eight directors listed in the incorporating charter of 1867, only nine (Prentice, Jenks, McCue, Husted, Kalbfleisch, Van Anden, McLean, Marshall, and Benson) thought enough of the venture or the people now involved with it to put any money into it, and all together they held fewer shares than Kingsley’s construction company. There were, to be sure, several of the original directors who were not stockholders but who were serving still as directors, including some with the impressive Brooklyn names, such as Simeon Chittenden. But a number of other esteemed figures had departed entirely—Andrew H. Green of New York, as a notable example—and the control now, very obviously, rested with the gentlemen named in the top third of the list.

But the list showed something more as well. The only New York people on it were Tweed, Smith, and Sweeny. Not a single resident of New York listed in the original charter had subscribed for any stock. So if Tweed did not control a majority of all the stock, he was at least in absolute control of both the private and public commitment from the City of New York.

The part of Tweed’s story that remains open to question, and must ever remain so, is the role he attributed to Murphy. By the time Tweed’s disclosures were made, a sizable segment of the press, not to mention the public, was ready to believe every last word he said, both the press and the public having by then concluded that all public works, however noble, were rife with corruption, and that virtually every last politician, and Democrats in particular, were guilty until proved otherwise. Murphy and Kingsley both were very quick to deny playing any such part as Tweed described, although Murphy, during a rare interview in his Bay Ridge home, would admit to having at least heard of such dealings. He told reporters that after the bridge was under way he had heard rumors of money having changed hands and that he had been “greatly surprised” by the news. He also admitted that possibly Tweed could have been paid off by somebody without his, Murphy’s, knowing about it (which would seem to leave Kingsley in a rather bad light), and in conclusion he offered the following thought on why somebody—in theory at any rate—might have struck such a bargain with the Tammany devil across the water:

“Mr. Tweed was a power in New York then,” Murphy said, “and nothing could be done in the Common Council and hardly in Albany without his help. You know how he controlled everything at that time, and therefore he was the proper person to see, when anything was wanted in the way of legislation, to secure his influence for any measures that were to be passed.”

And this, in retrospect, seems the most charitable and very likely the most plausible explanation for the entire arrangement with Tweed. It also suggests that just maybe Tweed was also in on passing the original charter, Chapter 399 of the Laws of 1867, and the wording of it as well (“…when anything was wanted in the way of legislation…for any measures that were to be passed,” Murphy said).

It is always possible, of course, that to settle some old score Tweed decided he would just smear Henry Murphy before his time in court was over. It is possible, but not likely. Tweed was not that sort, for one thing. And the hard truth seems to be that if a bridge was to be built, Tweed had to have a hand in it, a large hand. Otherwise there would be no bridge. It was that simple.

Judged by the standards of his day, Henry Cruse Murphy was a politician of exceptional quality, as straight as a string, as the saying went. He was also, plainly, an extremely attractive, accomplished human being. But if the only choice came down to compromising his principles or giving up all hope for a bridge in his lifetime, Murphy apparently was not about to let a squeamish conscience stand in the way.

Or possibly he may have figured that the Tweed Ring could not last the five years Roebling had said it would take to build the bridge. That way Tweed would not be around to collect, so to speak, and therefore any pact made with him now was far less chancy and, somehow, less corrupt. Or perhaps Murphy gave no time to any such thoughts. Perhaps, knowing what he did about the financial terms Tweed was accustomed to in his Albany transactions, Murphy concluded that he and the other Brooklyn people were getting off easy. Considering what Tweed might have held them up for, considering what this particular enterprise might be worth to the few who were in on it at the beginning—not to mention its immeasurable value to both communities and the prestige that would be attached to it—$55,000 or $65,000 for some alderman was a bargain price.

The true value of the stock was, of course, another matter and open to question. Its potential value was enormous, just as Tweed said and just as Kingsley, Murphy, Stranahan, Slocum, and the other Brooklyn stockholders fervently believed it would be. The potential power that went with it was also quite enormous obviously. So in this respect Tweed was being handed a very great deal indeed. But the out-of-pocket cost of the gift, for the time being, was relatively little. The real cost would be the size of Tweed’s grip on the work, not the cash in the carpetbag, and only time would tell about that.

As it was, Kingsley & Keeney purchased almost three-quarters of all the private stock (that in their name, plus what Tweed’s stock cost). With the respectable Brooklyn sources for capital that had been counted on suddenly dried up, there was really no choice for Kingsley.

Kingsley’s role in all this would be disclosed soon enough, long before Tweed went on the stand, and it would be said then, in his defense, that his willingness to put up such vast sums to get the bridge started was the most impressive demonstration possible of his unshakable faith in it. The same, of course, could be said for his willingness to do business with Tweed; but of that his admirers would have nothing to say.

That Tweed had the final say on whether a bridge could be started and so had to be dealt with, there is no question. Moreover, there is, as it happens, a memorable example from this very time of the lengths a thoroughly honorable man would have to go if he wished to circumvent Tweed on such matters.

As Murphy and Tweed were making their arrangements in Albany, the editor and publisher of Scientific American, Alfred Ely Beach, was setting out to dig New York’s first subway and without Tweed or anyone else knowing about it.

Beach was a most unusual character. At twenty-one he had invented a typewriter, at twenty-two he had become publisher of the New York Sun, the first penny paper, which his father, himself an inventor of sorts, had purchased some years earlier. But Beach had grown bored with popular journalism and turned the paper over to his older brother, Moses, soon to take up residence on the Heights and become a pillar at Plymouth Church. (It was Moses Beach who brought to Beecher an olive tree from the Mount of Olives, after a visit to Palestine with Mark Twain and others in 1867, a tour Twain would recount in The Innocents Abroad.) Alfred had more interest in the Scientific American, which he had acquired at age nineteen, as well as several other schemes, the most important of which was a pneumatic train.

The idea had occurred to him some ten years before. New Yorkers needed a better way to get about their city he was convinced. To go from his office near City Hall to his house on East 20th Street, for instance, took more than an hour during the evening rush hour. His solution was a whole system of high-speed, air-propelled trains underground.

Tweed, however, had already made public his intention of bestowing upon the city an elevated railroad, a grand, costly affair to be built on a great viaduct of stone. So any alternative means of rapid transportation was bound to be either killed off by Tweed or cost its proponents dearly in Tammany blackmail. Beach recognized all this and decided therefore to do what he wanted secretly.

In 1868 he managed to get past Tweed an inconsequential-appearing bill permitting him to establish an experimental pneumatic tube for moving mail. Then, toward the end of the year, with no more legal right than that, he went to work. He had rented Devlin’s clothing store at Broadway and Murray, and there, in the cellar, he began digging a tunnel, nine feet in diameter, that was to run a block uptown, to Warren Street, directly beneath Broadway. The digging went on within a special device he had invented for the purpose, the Beach shield, as it would become known, which was shaped like a huge hogshead, open at both ends, and powered by hydraulic rams. The men doing the digging stood inside the shield, and as they progressed, the rams shoved the shield forward, like a gigantic cooky cutter. This way the workers were completely safe from cave-ins and there was no need to disturb any of the surface above ground. The only excavation necessary was for the tunnel itself. The dirt Beach had smuggled out in sacks after dark.

It was all quite ingenious and slightly fantastic, as was the vehicle he intended to put inside the tunnel. It would be a cylindrical car, large enough to carry twenty-two people, and it would be sent plummeting back and forth along its track by an enormous, reversible fan mounted at one end of the tunnel.

Beach put his son in charge of the actual construction, and the work proceeded with little difficulty, despite all the time and care taken to avoid any discovery or suspicion of what they were up to. The Broadway crowds that hurried by overhead had no notion of such industry beneath their feet. Nor did any of Tweed’s people find Beach out until he intended them to. The complete project, which Beach considered nothing more than a demonstration model, would take a little more than a year to finish, largely because Beach took such pains with refinements. The one way to overcome Tweed’s certain wrath, Beach reasoned, was to win instant popular acclaim. So his pneumatic tunnel would have to be more than just an engineering success. The car itself would have to be plushly upholstered, as elegant as a drawing room, and he made up plans for an elaborate entranceway and platform, with frescoed walls, a fountain, a tankful of goldfish, and a grand piano. In all he would spend $350,000, which was more even than William Kingsley did for his bridge.

When the time came to unveil it, in February of 1870, the tunnel would be an immediate sensation, but Tweed, in a towering rage over the deception, would have his governor, John T. Hoffman, veto Beach’s charter and thereby bring down the curtain on the famous pneumatic tunnel, the first New York subway.

But if Beach had gotten as far as he had with his dream undetected and consequently unimpeded by pacts with Tweed, there was obviously no possibility of doing any such thing with a bridge over the East River.

The fall of 1869, when the real work on the bridge began, was an unsettling time. Much in American life was turning out to be something other than what it seemed and that left a lot of people wondering just what to believe in.

In early September, at Avondale, Pennsylvania, fire and explosions ripped through a coal mine killing more than a hundred men. Accounts of the suffering and the obvious deficiencies in the engineering of the mine shocked the entire country. “It is impossible to censure too severely the culpable carelessness of the mining company,” wrote Harper’s Weekly.

Then on the 24th of September, in New York, something close to a national disaster occurred when two notorious young stock gamblers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, both frequent companions of Boss Tweed, brought on a sudden financial panic, Wall Street’s first “Black Friday.”

Gould was rumored to have White House connections. He had assured Fisk that Grant would not sell government gold, so if the two of them were to work together, they could squeeze up the price of gold. They began buying that summer, nearly all on margin. By September 22 gold had risen to 137. On the morning of Friday the 24th, at ten o’clock, when trading opened, the price was 150. Word swept through the financial district that Gould and Fisk, with Grant somehow in league, had nearly succeeded in organizing a corner on gold and could thereby fix whatever price they wished.

The frenzy on the floor of the exchange was of a kind never seen before. In Brooklyn a National Guard detachment received orders to stand by ready “to quell the riot in Wall Street.” About eleven the price was 155, then 160. Scores of brokers were being ruined. One man went home and shot himself. When the government decided to do something at last and dumped four million dollars in gold on the market, it was early afternoon and the quotation was nearing 165. Within half an hour the price fell to 135.

The effect on the country was terrible, apart even from the financial misery brought on. For it appeared that a couple of cheap New York gamblers could very nearly bring the whole financial system to its knees, and that the President himself had been mixed up in it, which was not the case, but which a great many people believed to be the case all the same. And even if Grant had not been involved, he had certainly been made to look a fool, the dupe of the most transparent kind of crooked maneuvering. The whole affair was a mystery, even to people who understood how such things worked.

Back in March, when Grant took office, the editors of Harper’s Weekly, the first in their trade to see the Tweed Ring for what it was and to say so in print, were pointing to Grant as the towering symbol of political virtue. Now, only a little more than six months later, Grant’s character was in question and that did not sit well with anyone.

Then in mid-October occurred one of those curious half-comic, slightly unbelievable and unexplainable little episodes that sometimes characterize an age as much as or more than the usual events of conventional history. A ten-and-a-half-foot stone giant had been unearthed on a farm outside the village of Cardiff, in upstate New York. It was described immediately as one of the major scientific discoveries of all time, but soon turned out to be one of the great hoaxes.

The Cardiff Giant, so called, was the creation of a Binghamton cigar manufacturer named Hull, who had gone to Iowa some time before, purchased a twelve-foot block of gypsum, shipped it to Chicago, and there, with the help of some hired sculptors, carved out what he hoped would be taken for the petrified remains of an earlier race of supermen. He had gone about his business with exceptional care. To achieve something that looked like the pores of human skin, he hammered the figure all over with darning needles. To get the aged skin tone he wanted, he drenched the whole thing in sulfuric acid.

The figure was shipped east in a crate marked “Unfinished Marble” and buried behind Stub Newell’s barn in November 1868. But not until the following October, and exactly according to plan, was the giant “discovered” by men hired to dig a well. A tent was quickly erected over the site and a ticket booth was set up. The admission charge was fifty cents. People came by the hundreds at first, then by the thousands.

Some Syracuse businessmen soon paid Hull thirty thousand dollars for part interest in the giant and moved it to their city, where popular interest showed no decline even after the giant had been examined by scientists and declared “of very recent origin and a decided humbug.” The scientists could say what they wanted. In New York, humbug capital of the world, P. T. Barnum, who had tried without success to buy the giant, had a copy made up and put on display with great success. Later on, when the “real” giant was brought to town and exhibited only a few blocks from Barnum’s museum, both of them drew enormous crowds.

The giant also played a part in the elections that November. It was a small part, but not without interest to those amused by or gravely concerned over the extent to which sham and nonsense were taking over in American life. It was said the giant was causing such a fuss upstate that people were not taking the elections seriously, or that so much talk of giants and of hills haunted by “lost” races had clouded popular judgment in some counties.

In any event, when the votes were all in, the beefy colossus of Tammany Hall was bestriding the state as never before. The Democrats gained control of both branches of the state legislature for the first time in more than twenty years. Tweed was having things all his way.

Commenting on the mood of the American people at this time, Henry Adams wrote, “all were disgusted; but they had to content themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on their railroads and foundries.” He might have added, their bridges.

7

The Chief Engineer

On motion of Mr. Jenks, it was resolved that Col. Washington A. Roebling be appointed Chief Engineer; that the Executive Committee have power to fix his compensation, and that he have power to employ such assistance as he may deem proper, subject to the approval of the Executive Committee.

—From the minutes of a
meeting of the Directors of the
New York Bridge Company,
August 3, 1869

HE HAD KNOWN times like this during the war, when nothing much appeared to be happening, but every day counted, when a dozen plans had to be gotten up and decided on without delay, contingencies considered, countless little details seen to and orders given, any one of which might determine the whole course of events to follow. “There must be someone at hand to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” he liked to comment, “and it often makes a great difference which word they use.”

Until the first of the year, when the site for the Brooklyn tower would finally become the legal property of the Bridge Company, no work could be started of the sort the public had been anticipating. But behind the scenes innumerable matters had to be settled. And from early August, when he was named Chief Engineer, until March of 1870, when he would launch the first of the great caissons, Washington Roebling was an exceedingly busy young man.

Specifications had to be drawn up and agreed on—for such basic supplies as piling, lumber, cement, coal tar, blasting powder. All kinds of special equipment and machinery had to be ordered—air compressors, hoisting engines, stone derricks, clamshell scoops, rock drills, air locks for the caissons—most of which had to be designed from scratch and custom-built. The production capacities and workmanship of various manufacturers had to be evaluated, usually by personal inspection. Job applicants had to be interviewed, the beginnings of a labor force assembled.

Roebling had had a good deal of experience in this sort of planning, working with his father and in the Army, and the business of organizing big construction projects was William Kingsley’s specialty. At a meeting of the Executive Committee on October 14, Kingsley would be appointed General Superintendent. Kingsley also, along with the Executive Committee, was to decide on the awarding of contracts. Roebling had been instructed by Henry Murphy that he was to have nothing to do with that. How Kingsley was to be reimbursed for his services was something of a mystery.

Roebling’s own staff, as of the end of August, consisted of six: Colonel Paine; C. C. Martin, who had been Kingsley’s choice; Sam Probasco, another Kingsley man; and three new men, all quite young, whom Roebling had hired soon after his father’s death. They were Francis Collingwood, Jr., George McNulty, and Wilhelm Hildenbrand.

Collingwood had been a friend at Troy. He had been two years ahead of Roebling and finished first in his class, but in the time since, he had been working in the family jewelry business in Elmira and had not had much engineering experience. Had it been up to John A. Roebling, Collingwood probably would not have been hired, but the new Chief Engineer knew his man, he thought, and had written to Elmira to ask Collingwood to join him in Brooklyn. Collingwood agreed, on the condition that he would serve one month only (the jewelry business was prospering it seems). When he arrived in Brooklyn in mid-August, Roebling put him to work helping Paine with plans for the Brooklyn caisson.

McNulty, the youngest of them, was barely twenty, a New Yorker and a graduate of the University of Virginia. He had done a little surveying, but that was about the sum of his experience and he had been turned down when he first applied for a position. Then he offered to serve without pay and Roebling had been so impressed by his manner that he took him on, with pay, as an assistant to Martin.

Of the three new men, Hildenbrand was the only proved quantity. A strapping, smooth-faced young German who had arrived in the United States only a few years before, he was a draftsman of exceptional talent. Earlier he had done a number of finished drawings of the bridge for John A. Roebling, including a big panoramic rendering with clouds sweeping above the towers, which was the one three-dimensional view the engineers had to show how the finished bridge would look. More recently he had worked for Vanderbilt’s architects on the new Grand Central Depot and was in fact the man who had designed, at age twenty-two, the great arched roof over the train shed. Hildenbrand would spend most of his time in the office, computing stresses in various parts of the bridge, and producing the finished drawings. But he would also go to Maine to supervise the cutting of the granite and his primary responsibility would be to keep the plans well in advance of the work. He was to be a most valuable man.

Charles Cyril Martin, C. C. Martin as he was known, was second-in-command after Roebling, with a salary of five thousand dollars a year. Older than Roebling by six years, he had a big, plain, manly face, handsome except for the ears, which were extremely large, and he wore his whiskers clipped trim, in the manner made popular by Grant—as Roebling would too now, after his father’s death. Martin was another Rensselaer graduate. He had been a class ahead of Roebling, but already twenty-three when he first arrived at Troy, he had been regarded as an old-timer even then. By this time he had been married ten years, was the father of four children, and had worked for William Kingsley on three different reservoirs. He had put down Brooklyn’s new water main and was head engineer in charge of building Prospect Park. (The actual design of the park had been worked out by the noted landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had done Central Park, which they considered the lesser work of the two.) Martin had even named one of his sons Kingsley Martin. So if experience dealing with Kingsley or a knowledge of Brooklyn politics were to count for anything, Martin had added qualifications.

Martin was to concentrate on supplies and the hiring of the work force, Kingsley’s chief interests. He was, for all practical purposes, to be the executive officer for the bridge. For help he had Probasco and young McNulty.

The average age of the engineering staff, Roebling included, was about thirty-one. Paine, who was forty-one, was the senior member.

The men were all new to the job and to one another. The job itself, they all recognized, was going to be unlike anything attempted before. A little later, a salty and resourceful character named E. F. Farrington, who had worked on the Cincinnati Bridge, would be named master mechanic. But for now the only one who had had any previous experience building a Roebling bridge—or a suspension bridge of any kind—was the Chief Engineer and not even he had had working experience with some of the problems presented by this particular bridge.

Still he would be the one with the final say. And however much staff help he got, every important decision would be his in the end, and at this stage there was seldom any sure way to know which decisions, of all that had to be made, might turn out to be the important ones in the long run. Roebling, too, would be the one to deal with the Board of Directors and the all-powerful Executive Committee, with public officials from both cities, with old Horatio Allen, the high-paid consultant who had never built a suspension bridge, who knew little about the subject, but who had a reputation to throw about if he chose to.

Roebling would be the one to answer the sort of criticism from other overnight experts that the newspapers and a few of the professional journals liked to give space to. His father had been dead only a short time when a crackpot named Samuel Barnes B. Nolan was crying out in the pages of Scientific American that the grade of the bridge was too steep for wagons in slippery weather, that the central span was going to sag, that the whole work would be a “dead failure.” The claims were absurd, Roebling knew, but one such article could mean hours lost explaining why to some influential politician or overly conscientious board member.

To get what he wanted, and particularly if it was a departure from the original plan—or seemed to be—he would have to present his recommendations formally, in writing. As the work progressed, he would have to account for each and every step along the way, explaining his every decision in lengthy reports addressed to the Executive Committee. These would have to be quite explicate, thorough, candid, yet in language his nontechnical peers could understand. Every report would also become a public document, he knew, and so, come what may, each would also have to be convincing enough to maintain public confidence not only in the work itself but in the man in charge of it. If things went wrong, if materials proved shoddy, if equipment broke down, if the work fell behind schedule, if some part of the structure itself failed, if accounts were juggled or costs got out of hand, if there were mistakes in judgment by any of his subordinates, if there were accidents, he would be the one held accountable. In time, there would be nearly a thousand men under his command.

Most important of all, the plans he had to work with at this point were only of the most general sort, “the details not having been considered” by his father.

It was a responsibility of monumental proportions and there were older men in the profession, men with proved abilities, who might not have felt up to it. But there is nothing to indicate that Washington Roebling had even a moment’s hesitation. He had never had the full charge of a bridge before, the absolute final say, that is, except for two military bridges.

As yet he had done nothing to earn the confidence of his subordinates or any of the private parties connected with the enterprise. He was where he was strictly on his father’s say-so and because the men who wanted the bridge built had been left with no other choice. Moreover, as he doubtless sensed from the start, anything he did would be measured against what his father might have done. He would be forever compared to the old man and held accountable for things said or promised by him. And however well he might succeed, however much of himself he might put into the work, the odds were it would always be John A. Roebling’s bridge. If there were failures, they would be all his.

The great question now, of course, was whether he would prove to be the man his father had been.

Washington Augustus Roebling, at age thirty-two, was much like his father in a great many ways, but also quite different. John Roebling was a European, a European intellectual to be more exact, a perfectionist at heart and by training, and an aristocrat if one accepts his own belief in an aristocracy of ability. He was painfully proper, vile-tempered, and widely regarded a genius.

His eldest son was an even-mannered, informal, kindly man and, as he himself would say, just a little lazy by his father’s standards. Others in the family would say he was more like his mother. He had her patience with people, her calm, as they said. He was extremely bright, but not brilliant. He was not a genius. Nor did he have his father’s creative vision, which was among the main differences between them. Still, as his wife, Emily, would write, he was a man of “very versatile attainments.” He was a first-rate classical scholar, a good linguist, and a fine musician. He was also quite articulate when need be and a great deal more open-minded than his father had been. He was considerably more interested in his fellow man, in the flesh rather than the abstract, and though he never managed his father’s commanding presence, he was really far better at working with people. He was, everything considered, much more of a human being.

Professionally, he was as good as they came. Quick at mathematics, a superb draftsman, extremely thorough about details, he had his father’s passion for perfection and, like his father, he had a very great deal of physical courage. But he never considered himself a creative genius and nowhere along the line did he have any airs that might have given anyone that impression. His wife called him “rather indifferent to matters of courtesy.” And while he had the Roebling pride, he had inherited almost none of his father’s vanity, and this, in his view, greatly reduced his chances of ever attaining comparable fame. “History,” he would write, “teaches us that no man can be great unless a certain amount of vanity enters into his composition…For a man to be important it is also necessary to have a good opinion of one’s self, even if for no other purpose than to impress others.”

At first glance he seemed a rather silent but pleasant person, relaxed, unassuming, attractively modest. Indeed, apart from his name, there appeared, on first meeting, to be nothing much out of the ordinary about him. He was not impressive, the way his father had been. His father, on top of everything else, looked like a great man.

But in this they were quite the same: they had an absolute, total confidence in their ability to do the job at hand.

Washington Roebling was a great believer in heredity and the part it played in determining one’s “composition.” He would write of what he called “a peculiarity of the Roebling mind,” which he saw as a fixed determination to do things as one thought they ought to be done, no other way, asking little advice of anybody, and generally refusing it when offered. This “overweening self-reliance” was a family streak, he held, something much more serious than ordinary “Dutch” stubbornness and as much a handicap as a virtue. But he also wrote, “It might be argued if a man inherits everything he deserves no credit for it. That would be so in a life of universal monotony, but with each generation in turn totally different conditions and environments arise. These have to be met by the new individual who must develop his powers to adapt himself to them; to overcome them and use them as his tools.”

As a “new individual,” starting, say, from about age six on, he had neither grown up in an ancient walled city nor filled himself with philosophy nor dreamed of future liberation in some distant utopia. He had grown up an American and perhaps the most obvious, important difference between Washington Roebling and his famous father was just that. Furthermore, he had been through those two most characteristic and influential experiences for American men of his generation: he had spent his boyhood in the rural backwaters, where the frontier was recent history and there were still comparable privations; and he had been through the war. Unlike his father he had been both an American farm boy and a soldier and those two experiences had played a profound part in determining his own “composition,” as he called it.

And there was something else: he had grown up with John A. Roebling as his father.

Washington Roebling’s passport, dated May 27, 1867, and signed by William H. Seward, offers the following physical description. “Age, 30 years; Stature, 5 feet 9 inches; Forehead, broad; Eyes, light grey; Nose, short; Mouth, small; Chin, square; Hair, light; Complexion, fair.”

A passport issued some years later has him an inch taller and according to some accounts his eyes were blue, but in any case a more memorable picture was put down in one of the wartime letters of a Union Army colonel named Theodore Lyman, who served on the staff of General George Meade.

Roebling is a character…He is a light-haired, blue-eyed man, with a countenance as if all the world were an empty show. He stoops a good deal, when riding has the stirrups so long that the tips of his toes can just touch them; and, as he wears no boots, the bottoms of his pantaloons are always torn and ragged. He goes poking about in the most dangerous places, looking for the position of the enemy, and always with an air of entire indifference. His conversation is curt and not garnished, with polite turnings.

What’s that redoubt doing there? cries General Meade. “Don’t know; didn’t put it there,” replies the laconic one.

Contrary to general belief, he had not been named for George Washington. It would be said that as an idealistic young immigrant John Roebling “reverently chose” for his first-born son “the name that had most inspired him in the history of the young republic.” But the son himself told a different story. He had been named for Washington Gill from Richmond, Virginia, a surveyor his father had hired to help lay the railroad line over the Allegheny Mountain. “They were sitting on top of the mountain when the news of my arrival came,” Roebling wrote, “and Mr. Gill begged that I be named after him. The Gill was dropped but Washington I have struggled with ever since.”

He was born on May 26, 1837. If ever he considered his father’s absence at the time a slight or a prophecy in any sense, he never said so. Nor was he troubled by the absence of clergy at his christening. “I was…baptized by the postmaster, Mr. Shilly, there being no preacher as yet—have received no ill effects therefrom.” When he was six, his father would describe him as a “well-built, sturdy, quiet boy.”

Across the street, catty-corner from the house, was the church his father had built, and beyond that were orchards planted by the first settlers, great stretches of open farmland, but still, also, big stands of virgin forest—black oak in the main—and woods of smaller second growth that were full of game. “As late as 1845 a black bear walked down Main Street,” he wrote, adding, “he got away.”

The social life was decidedly German and Monongahela rye was considered the staff of life. For entertainment, people put on plays or small parties and dances, at home. “Bernigau played the violin; Wickenhagen the violincello; Neher the cornet; Roebling the flute and clavier.”

The native Pennsylvanians called them Latin farmers, meaning they knew more of Latin than farming. There had never been a dearth of interesting conversation, Roebling would recall. Next door lived Ferdinand Baehr, a wool carder from Mühlhausen, who had a splendid library and a brother-in-law named Eisenhardt who had been at Waterloo, in the regiment that held the Château Hougoumont against the French attack. Baehr took a great interest in Washington Roebling and the little boy became a daily visitor, listening to Eisenhardt tell over and over how the French bullets had rattled like hail against big oak doors that never failed.

A year or so before the Civil War, when he was living in Pittsburgh, working with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge, Roebling had gone back to Saxonburg to visit his grandmother Herting. His father had refused to go. For Washington it had been a terribly disappointing experience and he wished with all his heart he too had never returned. As a child, he said, it had seemed the finest place in the world.

Being the “Roebling boy” I had the entree to all houses, to wonder over the many heirlooms the people had brought over—curious old clocks, old Bibles and books, quaint pictures, novel utensils of copper, brass or china, long German pipes. My grandmother Herting had a wooden travelling-box with a carved top inside of which a picture of the battle of Navarino was glued, showing the burning of the Turkish fleet; that was a treat. A similar picture depicted Marshal Blücher driving the French over the Katzbach.

There were farms not very distant where the old Indian trail to Venango could be plainly seen. Delawares, Shawnees, Senecas, and Muncies had used it for nobody knew how long. George Washington himself had traveled it by foot. An old blacksmith named Glover, the first known settler in Butler County, was still alive then and a subject of immense respect. He had been at Valley Forge. And probably the most famous person in the whole county was an old woman over in Buffalo township whose story was part of the pioneer folklore Washington Roebling had grown up with. Her name was Massy Harbison. In 1792 she had been captured by Senecas and Muncies, who murdered two of her children before her eyes, then set off on a terrifying forced march through the forest, driving her and her one remaining child, an infant, before them. But she had managed to escape and made an unbelievable run for her life, traveling for four days through the wilderness, still carrying her baby. When she reached Pittsburgh, scarcely half alive, it was recorded on good authority that more than 150 thorns were extracted from her feet.

Saxonburg was on the route of the annual flight of the passenger pigeons to Canada every spring, and the sight of them filling the sky was something he would talk about all his life. Fearful thunderstorms shook the little town, and once, in 1843, everyone poured out into the night to see the great comet, “with its head at the foot of Main Street and tail above the church.”

Roebling was twelve when his mother, who was again pregnant, moved the family to Trenton, traveling without her husband, who was “tied down” to work in the East. The boy was put into the Trenton Academy, along with his brother Ferdinand, and seems to have gotten by well enough for the next five years. He took up the violin, developed an interest in astronomy and mineralogy, and decided on an engineering career, although it seems unlikely that he ever had much choice in the matter.

Once, in the winter of 1853, he went up to New York with his father. Work on the Niagara Bridge had closed down until spring and his father was seeing to other business. They went over to Brooklyn for some unknown reason and in the process spent several miserable hours on board an icebound ferry. For a man of his father’s temperament, it was doubtless an infuriating experience, to be so at the mercy of such elementary forces. But as a result, the story goes, John A. Roebling, his son at his side, “then and there saw a bridge in his mind’s eye.”

At seventeen Washington Roebling was sent off to Troy to get his training, his father having concluded Troy was the place for him.

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy was a new kind of school, the first in America established for the specific purpose of providing an education in “Theoretical and Practical Science.” It had been started some twenty years before by Stephen Van Rensselaer, the Hudson River patroon and politician, who held that the “aspiring energies of youth” had for too long been “chained down to a kind of literary bondage,” and who made Amos Eaton, the distinguished geologist, its first head. By the time Washington Roebling came along, it was a small assembly of brick buildings set on a steep hill overlooking Troy and the Hudson River and one of the very few institutions in the country offering courses in civil engineering. There were just over a hundred students in all and the prescribed attire was a dark-green cloth cap and a velvet-collared frock coat to match.

There is a picture of Roebling taken at Troy. He was nineteen at the time, a very handsome, sturdy-looking youth, with his father’s jaw and a rather intense stare. He himself thought he looked altogether too boyish and tried without success to grow a mustache.

“In regard to the mustache you covet so,” wrote his sister Laura from Trenton, “I can only recommend something which will favor the growth of the desired article, namely, shave every day, and apply some Guano on the desired place and no doubt soon a luxuriant crop will spring up.”

The work itself was extremely difficult. Once in a letter to Charles Swan he mentioned swimming the Hudson, but otherwise he seems to have done little else but study, which is not surprising, considering what was expected of him at home and what was required by the institution. His senior thesis was to be on “Design for a Suspension Aqueduct,” but in three years’ time he had also to master nearly a hundred different courses, including, among others, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Differential and Integral Calculus, Calculus of Variations, Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, Determinative Mineralogy, Higher Geodesy (the mathematical science of the size and shape of the earth), Logical and Rhetorical Criticism, French Composition and Literature, Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Acoustics, Optics, Thermotics, Geology of Mining, Paleontology, Rational Mechanics of Solids and Fluids, Spherical Astronomy, Kinematics (the study of motion exclusive of the influences of mass and force), Machine Design, Hydraulic Motors, Steam Engines, Stability of Structures, Engineering and Architectural Design and Construction, and Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy.

A century later, D. B. Steinman, a noted bridgebuilder and professor of civil engineering, would write, “Under such a curriculum the average college boy of today would be left reeling and staggering. In that earlier era, before colleges embarked upon mass production, engineering education was a real test and training, an intensive intellectual discipline and professional equipment for a most exacting life work. Only the ablest and the most ambitious could stand the pace and survive the ordeal.”

Roebling, however, would take a different view when he came to appraise the system long afterward. He saw no virtue whatever in what he called “that terrible treadmill of forcing an avalanche of figures and facts into young brains not qualified to assimilate them as yet.” “I am still busy,” he said, “trying to forget the heterogeneous mass of unusable knowledge that I could only memorize, not really digest.” The strain was terrific. Of the sixty-five students who started out in his class, only twelve finished. And among those who did not finish there had been some rather severe breakdowns, it appears, and one suicide.

The suicide was Roebling’s first real experience with tragedy. It is not entirely clear what happened, but in the late fall of 1856, during his final year at Troy, a classmate killed himself and apparently it was because of his feelings for Roebling. All there is of the incident in the written record is a letter Roebling wrote to Emily during the war, and two desperate notes written by the unfortunate young man shortly before he did away with himself, all three of which Emily saved.

“My candle is certainly bewitched,” he wrote to her from Virginia, nearly ten years after the incident, “every five minutes it goes out, there must be something in the wick, unless it be the spirit of some just man made perfect, come to torment me while I am writing to my love. Are any of your old beaus dead? If I wasn’t out of practice with spiritual writing I would soon find out.

“There is only one friend whose spirit I want to communicate with,” he continued, “you have his picture with mine; he committed suicide because he loved me and I didn’t sufficiently reciprocate his affection; I advised him to find someone like you for instance, but he always said no woman had sense enough to understand his love.”

And that is all Roebling seems to have written on the subject, just one small paragraph in his neat copperplate hand that leaps out of the last page of a love letter written late at night in Virginia, after he had been “building bridges and swearing all day.”

The first of the other two letters was in German and written on the evening of October 5, 1856, which was apparently after Roebling had rejected his friend’s proposal for some sort of formally declared bond between them. The writer pleads for Roebling to understand the nature of his affections and his misery, and asked Roebling to “make allowances.” “Our temperaments are so very different, that something which appears only natural to me may perhaps appear incomprehensible or ridiculous to you.” And again he begged Roebling to declare his own affections for him, and for him alone. The letter is signed “Your friend,” but the name has been erased, whether by Roebling or the young man who wrote it is not known. Roebling was still quite unwilling to agree to what was being asked of him.

The next letter was written on Thanksgiving Day. There is only a copy of the first part of it, written from memory by Roebling later that day. The young man, it seems, had taken to using chloroform as a narcotic and explained to Roebling how to bring him out of an overdose, should Roebling find him in that condition (“…pour cold water over my head, then breath air from your mouth into my lungs and if there is no success get Dr. Bonetecon and tell him to cup me in the neck; as ultima ratio you may try Electro-Magnetism….”). Then he wrote, “If your efforts should prove fruitless do this: Keep of my things whatever you like, it is all yours!”

Roebling noted on the letter, “At this moment he suddenly staggered in, asking why I did not stay with him. Accordingly I went to his room—he took the letter afterwards so that I had no opportunity to copy it. The rest was merely an inventory of his property, together with some parting words of love.”

Just when the young man died, or how, remains unknown. But the whole pitiful affair was a dreadful experience for Roebling, an unpleasant memory ever after. It may also account in large measure for the bitter feelings he later expressed about the prescribed regimen at Rensselaer. Even the few who did graduate, he wrote, “left the school as mental wrecks,” which was an exaggeration clearly, his own case being the most obvious evidence to the contrary.

It was the summer of 1857, the time of the great panic, the year his father first proposed an East River bridge, the same year William Kingsley moved to Brooklyn, and the same summer Henry Murphy sailed for the Netherlands, that Roebling finished college and returned home to Trenton, his boyhood over.

His first job was in the mill, and it seems he was actually running things there, entirely on his own, almost immediately, his father and Charles Swan both being away on other business. Then in the spring of 1858, he was on his way to Pittsburgh to work with his father on the Allegheny River Bridge. His salary was eight hundred dollars a year.

Pittsburgh was home for the next two years and he developed a great attachment to the place, writing his family that he regretted the day when he would have to leave. “Pittsburgh is getting along quite smart now,” he informed Charles Swan. “I doubt if there is a lazy man in it, your humble servant perhaps excepted.” Already he had ten times as many friends as in Trenton, he said. He kept a small notebook that he titled “Lists of Persons I have been introduced to in Pittsburgh, Pa.” and scattered among the names of contractors and ironmongers were a Miss McClure, Miss Carr, Miss Mendenhall, Miss Blake, and a Miss Molly Smith of Chambersburg.

He lived in a boardinghouse on Penn Street, worked hard, played chess with the other boarders, went to the opera, argued with his father about invariably starting the work day at six thirty in the morning, recovered from a series of severe abdominal attacks (the cure was his father’s vile concoction of raw eggs, warm water, and turpentine), and he wrote home at length, describing with spirit and humor, as his father never would, what was happening in the world about him, apart from work.

He had been to hear Edward Everett at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the taking of Fort Duquesne. He described the iron buildings going up everywhere (“There is a perfect mania here for improvements…”), a storm that nearly took part of the bridge away, and “dark, cloudy, smoky afternoons, when the sun doesn’t shine and the gas is lit at 4¼.” One letter he began this way:

This is my first letter to you in 1860 and consequently I shall make it very short, because it is always a good rule to make a small beginning, but a big ending, and since I don’t expect to be here towards the end of the year, you may always expect small letters. Cousin Henry from Cincinnati was here yesterday; he is a very fine young man now, a perfect beauty; he was raising a goatee, containing 11½ hairs, just about as I would have if I were to attempt it.

That fall of 1860 he finished up on the Allegheny River Bridge and returned to the wire mill. The following spring he was in uniform, marching up and down a dusty drill field in Trenton.

“My enlistment was rather sudden,” he said later, recalling the night his father had driven him from the house. It would be said by others that the break with his father was so angry and unpleasant that the two neither saw each other nor communicated in any fashion for the next four years. But there is nothing to this. Roebling returned to Trenton several times during the war, and while his letters to his father were customarily quite formal, and answered in kind, he had more to say to him than to anyone else, until he met Emily.

He enlisted on April 16, 1861, as a private in the New Jersey State Militia. Two months later, fed up with garrison duty, he resigned to enlist in New York, again as a private. In January of 1865, the war nearly over, he resigned from the Army, a lieutenant colonel, age twenty-seven, and a veteran of Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the Crater at Petersburg.

The letters he wrote during the war years number in the hundreds and provide not only an extraordinary personal footnote to the history of the Campaign in Virginia, but reveal much about the young man himself. During the years of the bridge, with Emily with him constantly, with his father dead, his brothers and sisters scattered and living their own adult lives, there would be little call for personal letter writing.

Except for promotions and some moving about, his first year at war had been uneventful and disappointing. “Loafing in the camp seems to be the principal occupation,” he wrote from Washington. Later, from Harpers Ferry, he told Elvira, “This is a mean little town about the size of Morrisville, presenting a deserted, sleepy appearance, like most Virginia towns. John Brown was hung in a cornfield next to us. The site of the gallows are marked by a cornstalk and pieces of the gallows sell at $1 per lb.”

But even when the fighting began, he would have little to say about that side of soldiering. “This artillery business is very hard work,” he wrote, and that was about as far as he would ever go.

He was made a sergeant after four months and spent his first winter at Budd’s Ferry, Maryland, on the lower Potomac, where his battery was supposed to protect shipping from Confederate batteries over on the Virginia shore, but where nothing much happened. He was billeted in a tent housing “ten choice sports” and about the only memorable event had been “a musical soiree at the widow Mason’s house, down on the river bank.” The music consisted of singing, piano, guitar, and Roebling on the violin. A supper was served (“Very creditable for this part of Maryland”) and a couple of Confederate shells landed in the yard but failed to go off. Years later one of the other musicians wrote that Roebling “could make a violin talk.”

He was elected a lieutenant in February and the next month he was at Hampton Roads in time to witness the battle of the Brooklyn-built Monitor and the Confederate counterpart, the Merrimac. Then he was designing and building his own first bridge—substituting for his father. He had been transferred to McDowell’s staff and was ordered to put a suspension bridge across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg. “My father being too old to rough it, I was selected.” He had no experienced help to work with, no proper tools, no material except for some reels of Roebling cable that had been sent down from Trenton. At times the enemy was only five miles away.

The bridge he designed was more than a thousand feet long, longer than the Niagara Bridge, in other words, but broken up into some fourteen short spans. He hired contraband Negroes, trained them as they went along, had his lumber sent on from Alexandria, smoked up a box of Plantation cigars, and had the bridge built in a month.

Almost immediately he was ordered to Front Royal to build another one, over the Shenandoah. With no boats available to cross the river to make his measurements, he jumped in and swam over with the tape in his mouth. But when he and his work party had the bridge about halfway up, the Confederates under Jackson drove them off. Another bridge at Waterloo shared the same fate, and in the meantime General Burnside, retreating from Fredericksburg, blew up Roebling’s bridge there. It had lasted about as long as it had taken to build.

That had ended his bridge engineering for the time being. He was assigned next to a cavalry expedition, spent some ten days on the move, scarcely ever out of the saddle, and once, at about five in the morning, surprised Jeb Stuart at his breakfast and very nearly captured him.

Second Bull Run followed after that and Roebling was with McDowell, as a staff aide, through all of it. Less than a month later he came very close to being killed at the hideous bloodbath at Antietam. Then he was back at Harpers Ferry, building another suspension bridge and writing to tell his father how young General Slocum had come along and taken away fifty of his best men. But by December he had it finished. “The bridge has turned out more solid and substantial than I at first anticipated,” he told Charles Swan; “it is very stiff, even without a truss railing, and has been pretty severely tested by cavalry and by heavy winds.” It was the last bridge he would do on his own until he got to Brooklyn, but as he wrote later, “The Harpers Ferry bridge met the same fate as the others. When Lee came up for Gettysburg the suspenders were cut and [the] floor dropped into the river, but I rebuilt it completely and the army in parts marched over it. The following year [General Jubal] Early destroyed it absolutely.”

Roebling rejoined the Army of the Potomac in February 1863 back at Fredericksburg, where he was quartered late one night in an old stone jail, from which he would emerge the following morning with a story that would be told in the family for years and years to come. The place had little or no light, it seems, and Roebling, all alone, groping his way about, discovered an old chest that aroused his curiosity. He lifted the lid and reaching inside, his hand touched a stone-cold face. The lid came back down with a bang. Deciding to investigate no further, he cleared a place on the floor, stretched out, and went to sleep. At daybreak he opened the chest to see what sort of corpse had been keeping him company through the night and found instead a stone statue of George Washington’s mother that had been stored away for safekeeping.

It was shortly after that when he was reassigned to the staff of General G. K. Warren. Then came Chancellorsville, where Hooker was facing Lee with more than twice the men Lee had and seemed to have forgotten anything he ever knew about commanding an army. At one point Roebling found himself leaning against the same post as Hooker, just as it was about to be split in two by a cannon ball. For years afterward, he would speculate on how history might have been altered had he not shouted a warning when he did. “Fighting Joe” Hooker would have been fighting no more, Roebling reasoned, and with another man in charge his army might have won the battle.

In the weeks after Chancellorsville, Roebling began going up in a reconnaissance balloon every morning at daybreak to see what the enemy might be up to and it was he, on one such flight, who first discovered that Lee had started to move again, toward Pennsylvania and Gettysburg.

That was in early June. On the 24th he was handed orders from Warren to proceed at once to Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia if necessary, to find the best available maps of Maryland and the southern border of Pennsylvania. Warren happened also to be on his way to Baltimore to get married, so Roebling accompanied him that far, the two of them riding all night. Then he went on to Philadelphia and to Trenton, where his father, he knew, had one of the best and latest maps of Pennsylvania.

He startled everyone in the big house with his sudden appearance there after dark. His father especially was very much alarmed. He stayed all of an hour. By the evening of June 29 he was back in Baltimore with the maps, only to find that Warren had already left to rejoin his army. The whole city was in a state of panic. The following morning, every bell was ringing an alarm as he headed west on horseback, toward Frederick.

He did not find Warren until he reached Gettysburg, on the second day of the battle. After that, events followed swiftly.

Through the whole war Roebling said very little about battles in his letters and next to nothing about his own exploits. But he seems to have had a great gift for being on the spot when needed. Long after the war, at the request of a friend who was also at Gettysburg, he gave this account of what happened:

At Meade’s headquarters I found General Warren. After making myself familiar with the situation and looking around, Meade suddenly spoke up, and said Warren! I hear a little peppering going on in the direction of that little hill yonder. I wish you would ride over and see if anything serious is going on, and attend to it. (This is verbatim.)

So we rode over…Arriving at the foot of the rugged little knob, I ran up to the top while Warren stopped to speak to General Weed. One glance sufficed to note the head of Hood’s Texans coming up the rocky ravine which separates little and big Round Tops. I ran down, told General Warren, he came up with me and saw the necessity of immediate action.

…waiting for General Sykes’ approval, who was some distance ahead, Warren ordered these troops to face about and get into line, covering little Round Top and the adjacent ground. Firing began at once. It was deemed very important to get a section of artillery up there [on Little Round Top].

Hazzlitt’s battery was nearby, it started up the hill, but the horses could not pull it up, so all hands took hold of the wheels and tugged away. I strained at one hind wheel, and you, my dear Sir, at the other hind wheel, until we reached the summit, and some shots were fired. They had a great moral effect, as the enemy supposed the hill to be unoccupied.

The safeguarding of Little Round Top would be viewed by many historians as the turning point of the war. Warren, understandably enough, got nearly all the credit and would be remembered as one of the heroes of Gettysburg. But later on, speaking generally of his young aide-de-camp, Warren said, “Roebling was on my staff and I think performed more able and brave service than anyone I knew.” Roebling himself would be characteristically laconic and self-effacing. “I was the first man on Little Round Top. There is no special credit attached to running up that little hill, but there was some in staying there without getting killed.”

Roebling’s morning on Little Round Top would be the thing people would talk most about when describing his war record. But he had also been near Sickles when that flamboyant figure lost his leg. He helped engineer the tunnel under the Confederate lines at Petersburg, the daring scheme that so very nearly worked, but resulted in the disastrous Battle of the Crater. Once, before the great blast went off, before dawn, with the moon still up, he and Warren had crawled on their stomachs to the very edge of Lee’s works.

Later, he would also write this memorable description of Abraham Lincoln:

…I was in the Civil War for four years and saw Lincoln on two occasions—the first in May 1861, when he spoke a few words of welcome from the rear portico of the White House to the newly arriving soldiers, one of whom I was, and secondly about April 1, 1864, when he came down to Culpeper County to review the army previous to the Battle of the Wilderness. I was at that time major and aide-de-camp to General Warren, commanding the 5th Corps, and joined the cavalcade.

The President was mounted on a hard-mouthed, fractious horse, and was evidently not a skilled horseman.

Soon after the march began his stovepipe hat fell off; next his pantaloons, which were not fastened on the bottom, slipped up to his knees, showing his white homemade drawers, secured below with some strings of white tape, which presently unraveled and slipped up also, revealing a long hairy leg.

While we were inclined to smile, we were at the same time very much chagrined to see our poor President compelled to endure such unmerited and humiliating torture. After repairs were made the review continued…

As the war dragged on, Roebling, like thousands of others on both sides, grew increasingly despondent, wondering if ever there would be an end to the killing days, as he said. “They must put fresh steam on the man factories up North,” he told Emily, “the demand down here for killing purposes is far ahead of the supply; thank God however for this consolation that when the last man is killed the war will be over.”

The real heroes, he said, were the privates in the line, but then added bitterly, “When I think sometimes what those men all do and endure day after day, with their lives constantly in danger, I can’t but wonder that there should be men who are such fools, I can’t call them anything else. And that is just the trouble we are laboring under now—the fools have all been killed and the rest think it is about played out to stand up and get shot.” It was only a matter of time, he believed, before he too would be dead.

Off duty he played cards, picked fleas, smoked cigars, drank whiskey whenever he could get it, cursed the heat and tried to think of Troy, New York, in the winter of 1856, when the thermometer outside his bedroom window had marked 20 below. Like others about him, he developed increasing sympathy for the people he was working so hard to defeat. He wrote again to Emily, “…the conduct of the Southern people appears many times truly noble as exemplified for instance in the defense of Petersburg; old men with silver locks lay dead in the trenches side by side with mere boys of 13 and 14; it almost makes me sorry to have to fight against people who show such devotion for their homes and country.”

Emily had come into his life on the evening of February 22, 1864, at the Second Corps Officers Ball, which had been held in a huge wooden hall especially built for the occasion under his supervision. “In point of attendance,” he had written to Elvira, “nothing better could have been desired; at least 150 ladies graced the assemblage, from all quarters of the Union, and at least 300 gentlemen from General Meade down to myself.” The occasion was a grand success.

Our supper cost 1500 dollars and was furnished by parties in Washington. The most prominent ladies of Washington were present from Miss Hamlin, Kate Chase and the Misses Hale down. Last but not least was Miss Emily Warren, sister of the General, who came specially from West Point to attend the ball; it was the first time I ever saw her and I am very much of the opinion that she has captured your brother Washy’s heart at last. It was a real attack in force. It came without warning or any previous realization on my part of such an occurrence taking place and it was therefore all the more successful and I assure you that it gives me the greatest pleasure to say that I have succumbed…

They wrote to each other almost daily after that and met again, two or three times, at General Warren’s wife’s home in Baltimore, and at camp, when Emily and young Mrs. Warren came to visit the general. At about the time Lincoln made his visit, Roebling was writing to his father to tell him he planned to be married, expecting all kinds of arguments in return. But the letter from Cincinnati was not what he expected and represents one of those rare instances when John A. Roebling revealed his affection for his oldest son, as well as his total confidence in his judgment.

MY DEAR WASHINGTON,

Your communication of the 25th came to hand last night, and I hasten to reply. The news of your engagement has not taken me by surprise, because I had previously received a hint from Elvira in that direction. I take it for granted, that love is the motive, which actuates you, because a matrimonial union without love is no better than suicide. I also take it for granted, that the lady of your choice is deserving of your attachment. These two points being settled, there stands nothing more in your way except the rebellion and the chances of war. These contingencies having all passed away, you and your young bride, as you know beforehand, will be welcome at the paternal house in Trenton. Our house will always be open to you and yours, and if there is not room enough, a new one can be built on the adjoining ground, or one can be rented.

As to your future support, you are fully aware, that the business at Trenton is now suffering for want of superintendence, and that no increase or enlargement can be thought of without additional help. Of course I do not want to engage strangers, and it is you therefore, who is expected to step in and help forwarding the interests of the family as well as yourself individually…

Should you be in want of money at any time, let me know.

I conclude with the request that you will assure your young bride of my most affectionate regards beforehand, and before I shall have the pleasure of making her personal acquaintance.

Your affectionate father,

She had gone to Trenton herself after that. His father had met her in New York and they had taken the train to Trenton together. “I like her very much and have not the least doubt that your union with her will be a happy one,” John Roebling informed his son. And Washington wrote to her at Trenton, “I dare say you could not sleep the first night on account of the water in the raceway making such a terrific noise…. Be sure and tell me all about your impressions…what do you think of Tilton the Bridgetender or Mitchell the lockkeeper or Mrs. Reilly that keeps the Irish tavern across the canal?”

Thereafter his days seemed endless. Little was happening and the boredom was unlike anything he had ever known, as he tried to describe for her:

This day might be signalized as one of the most uneventful ones I ever passed. I wrote perhaps two hours, fooled around for two more, walked for one, and that besides eating and drinking was the end of it. The programme at night is still more stupid, as it is chiefly spent shivering, turning over fifty times and occasionally dreaming of you. My mind is no longer as imaginative as it was 10 years ago, many of my dreams at that period are still vivid in my recollection. Had a great time hunting for a button tonight, finding none after all my search, and as I write the string at the bottom of my drawers comes off; that will be another sewing job before I go to bed.

He worried about his mother, who was failing rapidly, and not the least of her troubles, his father wrote, was concern over his safety. He thought about the future, worried that he had forgotten everything he ever knew about engineering, puzzled over where he and Emily might settle once the war was over. He pondered the possibility of not following in his father’s footsteps. Trenton had no appeal, despite his father’s generous proposals. “The town is horribly dull,” he told her, “and I always get tired of it after being there a week.” When he daydreamed of home, it was nearly always of Saxonburg. “I have now more lasting memories of the first eight years of my life there, than I have of the intervening twenty,” he wrote. But there could be no going back to Saxonburg.

He grew a beard, changed the way he combed his hair to suit her, adopted two stray dogs, a family of kittens, a lizard, and took to sleeping with the blanket pulled over his face to keep off the flies, his feet sticking out at the bottom, a pose that inspired a fellow officer to do a pencil sketch, which Roebling included in one of his letters to Emily. In another letter, he told her, “I have been solacing myself all evening by playing on a fiddle, had a great time getting it, borrowed a bow from another man and stole the rosin from a sick horse; it did me good and so I played until the tips of my fingers began to ache…”

In November of 1864 his mother died and he hurried back to Trenton for the funeral; “…the greatest giver of us all [is] gone,” he told Emily. Then, at the end of the year, the war, for him, was over. He was commissioned lieutenant colonel, by brevet, as of December 6, for gallant conduct during the campaign before Richmond. By Christmas he was home to stay. In January, at Cold Spring, New York, he and Emily were married.

They lived in Trenton at first and he went back to the wire mill. But that lasted only a few months. In the early spring of 1865, just before the war ended, he left for Cincinnati to join his father on the Ohio River bridge and once he found a place to live, she came on. By the time the bridge was completely finished, they had spent nearly two years in Cincinnati, and his father had been back in Trenton the better part of that time.

In early 1867, when it appeared that the East River bridge at last had some serious support, his father had written to say he wanted him to go to Europe the following summer to make a study of pneumatic caissons, that Emily ought to go too, and that he would pay all their expenses. “Your kind offer…I accept with pleasure,” Washington Roebling wrote in answer; “Emily is especially delighted, to her the idea of going to Europe is something exceedingly grand.”

They sailed at the end of June, when Emily was a few months’ pregnant. They were in England for a number of weeks, then France later, and Germany, where the baby was born. In London they visited St. Paul’s, Parliament, Westminster, the Zoological Gardens. From their window at the Royal Hotel, he had watched construction of the Blackfriars Bridge and made a drawing of it to send his father.

He made flying visits to Telford’s bridge over the Menai Strait and Brunel’s bridge at Clifton, for a long time considered the most beautiful suspension bridge in the world. He did not think Telford’s towers very handsome, he wrote to John Roebling. The floor, very light in weight, had no strengthening truss. There was a stiff breeze blowing as he walked out on it and the vibrations were very strongly felt, he said. The towers for the Clifton Bridge he called remarkably ugly.

They visited Manchester and he spent several days looking over the noted steelworks of Richard Johnson & Nephew, where the wire for the Cincinnati Bridge had been made. They went to Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, then on to Paris to see the Exposition, but left after a week because they were running low on money. One lady costs twice as much in Paris as two men, he explained to his father. The fair was considered the greatest international exhibition ever and among the American Commissioners was his Trenton neighbor and competitor in the wire business, Abram Hewitt. But Roebling thought little of the fair, nothing but “a great advertising show,” he said.

At Essen, Germany, to his astonishment, he was given the grand tour of the Krupp works, as though he were visiting nobility. On first arriving in Essen he had been told by several townspeople that an outsider had virtually no chance of visiting the works. He had spent one long night drinking wine with some of the young engineers employed there, hoping to win a friend who would open a few doors, but he had received only long faces whenever he mentioned the subject. Finally, figuring he had nothing to lose, he went directly to the main office, expecting to get nowhere and finding instead that they were eagerly awaiting his arrival. The management, he discovered, was well aware of the forthcoming East River bridge, knew all about his trip to Europe, and had already made up a sample eyebar for his personal inspection.

In all three countries he talked to bridgebuilders, wire manufacturers, visited iron works, filled his notebooks and letters with tens of thousands of words and hundreds of tiny freehand drawings and diagrams. He had an almost uncanny gift for observation and could commit vast quantities of information to memory, yet he never gave any sign of making a special effort along those lines. He would walk about a construction site or through a mill listening politely to his host, paying, it would appear, only the most casual attention to what he was being shown. Then he would return to a hotel room and write down a full description of what he had seen, with the most extraordinary memory for detail and great critical analysis.

After his return from Europe, for instance, while stopping over in Pittsburgh, he was invited to take a walk through Andrew Carnegie’s new Keystone Bridge works and that night, in private, at the Monongahela House, he had written his father a complete report of the entire Keystone operation, describing the different machines in use and how they worked, the production patterns followed, the personnel involved, the various products turned out and his opinion on their relative merits. The letter went on for pages, even in his minute hand, and it was all put down directly, with no apparent hesitation, no erasures or editing, and, apparently, with no special effort. At the close, after remarking that he found Carnegie and his brother “very pleasant people,” he told his father, “I could fill another letter of 20 pages to describe all I saw—still I keep it all in mind.”

The value of such a son was not lost on the father, and as the young man made his way across Europe, he sent off one letter after another, each taken up almost entirely with technical matters—on wiremaking, on the latest developments in metallurgy, Bessemer steel making in particular, and on caissons, which he spelled “cassoons” for some reason—and everything was set forth with the sort of clarity and thoroughness demanded by the exacting mind back in Trenton. By the time he and Emily and the baby were on their way home across the Atlantic in March of 1868, he knew more on the subject of pneumatic caissons than any American engineer.

The success of the bridge at Brooklyn, he and his father knew, would depend on the caissons. Everything hung on their success. If they could be sunk beneath the river properly and to the required depths—and they would have to be bigger by far than any caissons ever constructed before—then there seemed little doubt that the bridge could be built. If not, there would be no bridge, or at least not the one John Roebling had described with such persuasive language in the fall of 1867, when, as it happens, his son was still in Europe trying to determine just how the thing could best be done.

After returning home, Roebling busied himself at the Trenton mill, waiting for the New York politicians to settle their affairs. In 1868 his father finished the basic plans for the caisson, while he made another long tour at his father’s request, this time through the hard-coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania to see how wire rope could be used in mining operations. He and Emily were staying in the big house temporarily. His father had remarried. Ferdinand too was married by this time. Laura came visiting from Staten Island with her children. By fall the baby was walking.

When the word came from Brooklyn that the bridge was all set to go, he and Emily packed up and moved to the house on Hicks Street.

In the months immediately following his father’s death, Roebling spent much of his time away from Brooklyn. He made repeated trips to Trenton, where he had his father’s estate to settle, as well as the wire business to look after. There were long family gatherings in the big house. It was agreed that Ferdinand would take charge of the business eventually and that Charles would come in with him as soon as he finished at Troy. But for the time being Washington would make the major decisions. Nobody foresaw any problems with that, but not very long afterward, at a time when Washington was having troubles enough in Brooklyn, a full-scale family fight developed over what to do about Charles Swan. Ferdinand did not want Swan made a partner, as his father had requested in his will. Washington said he should be. Swan quit and went off somewhere, leaving no word behind; plainly furious. But things were patched up eventually and Swan returned to work, on generous financial terms, but not as a partner.

It was also agreed, after some difference of opinion, that Washington was to be Eddie’s guardian. Roebling felt he had more than enough to cope with as things were, building his father’s bridge and looking after his own small family, without trying to be the father his father had never been to his troubled little brother. But the others felt differently, it appears, and so Eddie was packed off to Brooklyn, where Emily had a room prepared for him.

For Roebling, there was still more traveling to be done. He spent a day with Horatio Allen in Port Chester looking at dredging gear. He went to Albany to look at the black limestone and granite going into the foundations of the new state capitol, which had been engineered by William Jarvis McAlpine. He stopped at Kingston to visit a limestone quarry and to talk to the people there. He filled his small black leather notebook with pages of names, addresses, and reminders. “Find out where they get the broken stone at the Post Office…. Find out all about calcium light…. Find out who makes derrick forgings.” He went to Niantic, Connecticut, to look at granite and to Hallowell, Maine, to inspect the quarries of J. R. Bodwell. The infamous Tombs prison had been built of Bodwell’s stone, as had the coping of the huge new reservoir in Central Park, some of which had been built by William C. Kingsley. The quality of the granite, Roebling wrote in his notebook, was “very fine, very durable…the whitest granite known.”

His most vital concern, however, was the first giant caisson. In mid-August, immediately after Collingwood reported for work, Roebling had handed him rough drawings and a long written account of what was wanted, and Collingwood, Paine, and Hildenbrand had set to work on final plans, figured down to the last inch. The only one who could handle such an order, it was decided, was a shipbuilder, and on October 25, 1869, the contract was awarded to the firm of Webb & Bell, whose yards were up the river at Green-point. And if a date were to be picked to mark the beginning of the building of the bridge, it probably ought to be that one.

The caissons were the foundations of the great work, quite literally and figuratively, as everyone working with Roebling in Brooklyn was aware. There were also some among them who appreciated something that would be overlooked by most everyone as time passed—that it was Washington Roebling, more than his father, who was the closest thing to an expert on caissons and who had concentrated on how that part of the job ought to be handled. And perhaps this helped compensate some for the very obvious fact that he had never actually worked with a caisson before and that there were only two or three American engineers who had, McAlpine being one of them. In St. Louis Captain James B. Eads had just completed the first caisson for his bridge over the Mississippi. Still, to all but a handful of engineers, even the word “caisson” was unfamiliar.

With absolute, unqualified conviction John A. Roebling had proclaimed that his bridge would be the greatest in existence, the greatest engineering work of the age. All his son had to do now was build it.

PART TWO

8

All According to Plan

The foundations for the support of these large masses of masonry must be unyielding.

—JOHN A. ROBELING

THE EASIEST way to explain how the caisson would work, Roebling and his assistants found, was to describe it as a huge diving bell that would be built of wood and iron, shaped like a gigantic box, with a heavy roof, strong sides, and no bottom. Filled with compressed air, it would be sent to the bottom of the river by building up layers of stone on its roof. The compressed air would keep the river out, help support the box against the pressure of water and mud, and make it possible for men to go down inside to dig out the riverbed. As they progressed and as more stone was added, the box would sink slowly, steadily, deeper and deeper, until it hit a firm footing. Then the excavation could stop, the interior of the box would be filled in solid with concrete, and that would be the foundation for the bridge tower.

The idea was quite simple really. Furthermore, it had been used successfully in Europe for more than a generation, first in France, where the word “caisson,” meaning “chest,” had originated, then later in England and Germany. An air lock that enabled workers to get in and out of a sealed chamber filled with compressed air had been devised as early as 1831 by Lord Thomas Cochrane, the controversial British admiral, and in 1851 a pneumatic caisson had been used on a bridge foundation for the first time, for piers in the Medway River at Rochester, England. Seven years after that Brunel had taken a caisson down more than seventy feet to build a pier for his last and greatest railroad bridge, the Royal Albert over the Tamar at Saltash, Cornwall.

But the caisson Roebling intended to sink beneath the East River on the Brooklyn side would be bigger by far than anything used in Europe or the few that had been used in the United States, and the one for the New York tower, it was then thought, would have to go thirty to forty feet deeper than even Brunel had gone.

The caisson the Roeblings had designed, and which in the late fall of 1869 began slowly to take shape at the Webb & Bell yards, was to be built like a fort and launched like a ship. A gigantic rectangular box, 168 feet long and 102 feet wide, it was to have nine and a half feet of headroom inside and overhead a roof of solid timbers five feet thick, bringing the total height of the box to fourteen and a half feet. In area it would be more than half the size of a city block, more than half the size of the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral, for example. The sides of the box were to be V-shaped, being nine feet thick where they joined the roof and tapering to a bottom cutting edge of just eight inches. The inside slope of the V would be at an angle of about forty-five degrees and the entire cutting edge, or “shoe,” would be shod with a heavy iron casting and sheathed the whole way around with boiler plate extending up three feet, inside and out. A heavy oak sill two feet square would rest on the casting.

Driftbolts, screw bolts, and wood-screw bolts would be used to secure the whole immense mass. The V-shaped sides would be fixed to the roof with heavy angle irons. At the corners, timber courses would be halved into each other and strapped together. The roof itself would be built of five solid courses of yellow pine “sticks”—timbers a foot square—laid up side by side and bolted both sideways and vertically.

To make the box airtight the seams would be caulked with oakum to a depth of six inches, inside and out, and between the fourth and fifth courses of roof timber, across the entire top of the structure and extending down all four sides, a vast sheet of tin would be put down. The tin on the outside would be further protected by a sheathing of yellow pine and the spaces between timbers would be filled with hot pitch.

Since Roebling had learned that air under pressure of forty or fifty pounds (or about what would be needed inside the work chamber) will readily penetrate ordinary wood, he had selected a yellow pine from Georgia and Florida that was so pitchy that the 12-by-12 sticks would not even float. And finally, just to be sure, he planned to coat the whole inside with a specially concocted, supposedly airtight varnish.

Once the caisson was launched, ten additional courses of timber would be added to the roof, thereby making it a solid timber platform fifteen feet thick, which would act like a colossal wooden beam for carrying and distributing the load of the tower.

As the work at Webb & Bell progressed on the raw and ungainlylooking structure, two air locks, two so-called supply shafts, and two water shafts were being built into the timber roof.

The air locks were made of half-inch boiler plate. They were cylindrical in shape, seven feet high by six and a half feet in diameter, or big enough to pack in about a dozen men, who would enter from the top, through an iron hatch about the size of a manhole cover. The hatch closed, an attendant stationed inside would open a valve near his feet, releasing compressed air from the work chamber below into the lock. As soon as a gauge on the wall of the lock showed the pressure there equal to that below, another hatch in the floor would be opened and the men, one by one, would climb down a ladder through an iron shaft, three a half feet in diameter, into the caisson itself.

When it was time to come out, the process would be reversed. They would climb up the shaft and into the air lock, the floor hatch would be secured, and another valve would be opened to release the air from the lock. When pressure in the lock decreased to normal atmospheric pressure, or 14.7 pounds per square inch, then the top hatch would be opened and the men would climb out. This way the loss of compressed air from the caisson each time a gang of men went in or out was no more than the volume of the lock.

The water shafts were a very simple but ingenious means by which the mud and rock excavated inside the work chamber could be hauled out with no loss of compressed air whatsoever, and with none of the time required to move through an air lock.

The water shafts were seven feet square, open at top and bottom, and they extended like twin wells through the roof of the caisson straight down into the work chamber to a depth nearly two feet below that of the caisson’s bottom edge. These shafts were also built of boiler plate and once the caisson was in operation they would be filled with water to a level sufficient to “lock in” the compressed air below.

At the base of the shafts, at the two points where they extended deeper than the caisson itself, open pits would be dug in the river bottom, which would also fill with water. These would be the delivery ends of the shafts and the columns of water within the shafts would be kept suspended (kept from flooding in on the workers) by the pressure of the air within the chamber.

The water shafts, as one magazine of the time explained for its readers, were essentially huge barometers that measured the pressure of the air inside the caisson. The shaft itself was the barometer tube, filled with water instead of mercury, and the pool at the bottom was the cistern. Every pound of pressure in the caisson above normal atmospheric pressure (which of course was bearing down on top of the column of water) forced the water a little more than two feet higher in the shaft.

To get rid of the material they excavated, the men would shovel it into the pits, or pools, at the base of the shafts, where it would be hauled up and out by big clamshell dredge buckets dropped down from above, directly through the shafts of water. The theory was the buckets could work as fast as the men could feed them. It was a neat, efficient system, so long as the water in the shafts stayed at the proper level. But if the volume of water in one shaft became too great—too heavy, that is, for the compressed air below to support it—then the water in the pit would flood out into the work area. Or, if for some reason, the volume of water decreased to the point where its weight was no longer enough to counteract the pressure in the chamber, then there would be a terrific release of air, or blowout, from below.

The supply shafts were only twenty-one inches in diameter and simply the means by which Roebling intended to get the necessary cement, sand, and gravel into the caisson once the excavation was finished.

John Roebling’s thought had been to make the interior of the caisson one big open space, with no divisions or supports to get in the way of the excavation work. But his son had to abandon that idea for several reasons. First of all, since the caisson would have to be launched like a ship—only in this case a ship built upside down—there would have to be supports of some kind between the launchways and the roof. Washington Roebling also anticipated that the cutting edge of the caisson would be striking on boulders on its way into the riverbed and when that happened he did not want the entire weight resting solely on those few points. But it was chiefly because of the particular nature of the East River that he decided to divide up the work chamber with a number of supporting walls.

The East River connects the Upper Bay of New York with Long Island Sound, and because it has two entrances—at the tip of Manhattan and at Hell Gate, the opening to Long Island Sound—and two distinct tidal movements arriving at these points at different times of the day, its currents are quite unlike those of any ordinary river. The water is full of whirlpools and eddies caused by a bottom of jagged peaks and huge potholes, some as much as fifty feet deep. And with the tides surging in and out of the narrow openings, the currents are swift, turbulent, and something very serious to contend with. Even with a favorable wind the great sailing ships of the day could make little headway against an outgoing East River tide and would often stand in considerable numbers in the bay, like small armadas, waiting for the tide to change.

“The extreme rise and fall,” Roebling explained, “is seven and a half feet. If the inflated caisson is just barely touching the ground at high water, it will press upon the base with a force of 4,000 tons at low tide, all of which has to be met by the strength of the shoe and the frames.” Not until the caisson was permanently “righted down” under several hundred tons of tower stone would this powerful, potentially destructive up-and-down action stop.

So he had Webb & Bell build in heavy truss frames of pine posts and stringers, with three-inch sheathing on each side and side braces to the roof every six feet. There were five of these inside partitions, each running the width of the caisson and dividing the interior into six separate chambers, each 28 by 102 feet. Once the caisson was in the water and resting on the bottom, doors would be cut in the partitions so the men could go back and forth from one chamber to another.

As the mammoth timber box grew on the ways, it looked like nothing ever seen before in an East River yard. Seven launchways were required (one for each of the outer edges, five under the interior partitions), and the total weight of the structure, by the time it was ready for launching, would be six million pounds, or three thousand tons, which was, for example, a thousand tons more than the Challenge, leviathan of the clipper ships built in East River yards. The caisson would contain some 110,000 cubic feet of timber and 230 tons of iron and it was being built to go down the ways in the usual fashion of a great ship, its long side toward the water. For the time being it stood fifty feet back from the ends of the ways, and as everyone who had had any experience with shipbuilding knew, the great danger of launching so large a mass was the chance that one end might get going faster than the other and the whole gigantic affair would wedge tight on the ways. It was also necessary of course that the caisson get up enough momentum coming down the ways to overcome the immense resistance offered by the water. So just getting the thing launched was an engineering problem of very major proportions. Indeed, Roebling said later that the problems of launching the caisson and of protecting it against sea worms caused him more anxiety than the prospect of sinking it.

As might be expected, all such questions and the steady progress of construction were of enormous interest to innumerable bystanders. Day after day people came down to the yards at the foot of Noble Street to take a look for themselves, even after the first snows arrived. Newspapermen and some of Tweed’s people came over from New York, as well as a number of engineers, not the least of whom was Captain Eads from St. Louis, whose own caisson was being sunk beneath the Mississippi by this time and who happened to be in New York on some other matter.

So concerned were the Webb & Bell people over the problems involved, so different was this job from any they had ever handled in all their previous experience, that they had insisted on being paid in advance—$100,274.51.

Once the caisson was in the water, the plan was to tow it downriver. How seaworthy it would prove to be in the turbulent current was another open question. After giving the caisson a thorough inspection, James B. Eads told Roebling he could expect trouble and said it might topple over if he inflated it during the trip downstream, which was exactly Roebling’s intention.

In the meantime, however, the waterfront had to be cleared at the point where the caisson would be docked and the riverbed had to be dredged deep enough for the huge structure to be floated into place. The clearing of the site began on Monday, January 3, 1870, and because the winter turned out to be abnormally mild, the work there, like the work at the shipyard, moved along faster than expected. Any other winter it would have been impossible to do much of anything.

Clearing the site took about a month. For daily commuters on the Fulton Ferry it all provided an interesting show and the first real sign they had had that the bridge was actually under way. About half of one big ferry pier had to be dismantled, fender sheathing torn out, massive stone-filled cribbing removed, and all without disrupting ferry service. An enormous steam crane, called the “Ox,” was brought in on a barge to pull out the old piles, and as they came up one after another, there was much amazement over the toll the East River had exacted. Each one was infested with thousands of sea worms in the area between the low-water mark and the mud line. As Roebling noted, “A pile which was sixteen inches in diameter below the mud, perfectly sound and free from worms, would be found eaten away to a thin stem of three inches just above the mud, and all timber was affected alike.” Then so that no one missed the point, he added, “This shows the necessity of going below the top of the riverbed with our timber foundation, and also proves its entire safety in that position.”

Once the old dockwork was out of the way, a large basin was to be built to contain the caisson, open toward the river but bounded on three sides with new piling. Within this area the riverbed was to be dredged to a uniform depth of eighteen feet at high tide, or deep enough to keep the caisson afloat at all stages of the tide. The dredges made great headway at first, as long as there was only surface mud to contend with, but then they hit hardpan and boulders. “The character of this material was next to solid rock,” Roebling wrote. The dredges could make but the slightest impression upon it. “Recourse was necessarily had to powder,” and the blasting commenced at night, from about seven in the evening until daylight, when traffic was light on the river and few people were about the ferry slip. Holes were driven into the river bottom with steel-headed iron piles. Then blasting charges were packed into iron canisters and dropped into the holes by professional divers. When the divers were out of the way and the pile drivers hauled back to a safe distance, the charges were set off by electricity.

Three pile drivers were kept in action, and with a little practice the men had the work down to a neat system, setting off some thirty-five blasts every ten-hour shift. During the day the dredges moved in and cleared out the results of the night’s work.

A number of the boulders encountered were too large to be picked up by a dredge and had to be dragged clear—the divers assisting underwater. The whole process was about six times as expensive as normal dredging, but still quite effective, and it provided valuable knowledge of the ground the caisson would have to penetrate. On one side, for example, near the new piling, a dozen blows of the pile driver would sink an iron pile forty feet through soft clay, but in the center area it took a hundred blows to go three feet. Toward the ferry the clay gave way to boulders of all sizes, closely packed, with coarse sand in between, and at the open end of the basin, on the river side, all soft strata had been washed away, leaving hardpan.

As time passed, Roebling decided to concentrate the dredging along the lines of the caisson’s edges and frames; the parts in between could be removed later, he said, from inside the caisson. He also had two holes blasted to an extra depth to accommodate the water shafts.

The work went slowly now, and while the blasting and dredging provided valuable knowledge of the riverbed, that knowledge itself was a most sobering reminder of the magnitude of what they were undertaking. To sink a wooden box as big as a fair-sized railroad station straight down through such material, and underwater, keeping the thing absolutely level the whole time, and bringing it to rest finally—perhaps fifty feet down—and at the exact spot it was meant to be, was a very tall order indeed. And added to that, along toward the end of January, reports began coming in from St. Louis of a strange malady among the men working inside the Eads caisson.

James Buchanan Eads was an authentic American genius and one of the looming figures of the nineteenth century. Slim, leathery, highly opinionated, disliked by many, he had survived an extraordinary life on the Mississippi that had included a lucrative underwater salvage business, a financially disastrous attempt at glass manufacturing, and the building of a fleet of ironclad gunboats during the Civil War. These slow, squat, ugly warships, built before the Monitor or the Merrimac and nicknamed “the Turtles,” had played a decisive part in defeating the Confederates on the Mississippi, along with the rams built by Charles Ellet. Eads had not designed the ships himself, nor had he gone into battle with them as Ellet had with his rams, but he had organized everything, having timber cut in Minnesota and Michigan, iron armor rolled at St. Louis and Louisville, keeping four thousand men at work on a night-and-day basis, and financing much of the operation out of his own pocket. At the time Washington Roebling was distinguishing himself on Little Round Top, Eads’s gunboats were assisting Grant in the successful siege of Vicksburg.

In early 1870 Eads was approaching fifty. He was the sort of person who liked to play chess with two or three others at a time, and in a recent weight-lifting contest among some of his blacksmiths, he had come in second.

During his years in the salvage business Eads had worked with diving bells up and down the Mississippi and was said to know more than any man alive about the river’s treacherous currents and the character of its bottom. This had been an important factor when he presented St. Louis and New York financial backers with his radical proposal for a bridge over the Mississippi. But it was his unbridled self-confidence and his reputation as a man who could get things done that mattered most in the end. He managed to convince men who had worked with the country’s foremost engineers that he, James B. Eads, was the one man fit to bridge the Mississippi at St. Louis, that the bridge he wanted to build was the only answer, and this despite the very well-known facts that he had had no formal training as an engineer and that he had never once built a bridge before. Both Charles Ellet and John A. Roebling had prepared plans for suspension bridges at St. Louis back in the 1850’s. Later, the year before he died, Roebling had done an entirely new set of plans, combining both suspension cables and parabolic arches. But Ellet’s and Roebling’s ideas had been turned down. (The St. Louis people were fools, John Roebling wrote to his son.) Now Eads and his bridge were the talk of St. Louis.

The great need was for a bridge to carry a railroad and highway over the river without interfering with steamboat traffic. The Mississippi at St. Louis is about the same width as the East River. Instead of a heavy iron truss, the customary thing then for railroad crossings, or a suspension bridge, Eads had conceived a mammoth arched bridge, with arches of steel set on stone piers. He intended to span the river with just three of his steel arches, the biggest of which, the center span, would be longer than any arch of the time by several hundred feet. To avoid interfering with river traffic during construction, his assistant, an engineer named Henry Flad, had devised a cantilever system nobody had tried before. The halves of each arch would be built out toward one another from their respective stone foundations, like great jaws slowly closing over the river, which was the conventional way, except that here the temporary supports needed (until the jaws joined) would be supplied from above. The usual practice was to prop such arches up from below with temporary timber “falsework” that could be torn out once the bridge was finished. But since this would be impossible, obviously, if the river was to be kept clear, Eads would hang the arches from overhead cables attached to temporary wooden towers built above each of his stone piers.

So the design of the bridge, the material he intended to build it with, the way he planned to build it, just about everything about the bridge, was unorthodox and untried. And when he had first proposed it, Andrew Carnegie had decided that somebody who knew about things mechanical, as he said, had better look over the plans.

Carnegie’s interest in the bridge was twofold. He had been approached by Eads’s St. Louis backers to see if he might be interested in selling some of their bridge bonds. Also, it was a few years before this that he had organized his Keystone Bridge Company, one of the first to specialize in manufacturing iron railroad bridges. Carnegie enjoyed talking about his love of bridges. Like Thomas Pope and John Roebling he saw them, he said, as testimonials to the national spirit and professed great personal satisfaction in the part he played in building them.

The Keystone company was now being invited to come in on the St. Louis job as consultants and to handle the superstructure. So Carnegie, quite sensibly, asked for an opinion on the bridge from Keystone’s chief engineer and president, J. H. Linville, whom Carnegie described with customary enthusiasm as “the one man in the United States who knew the subject best.” This was an overstatement, but Linville was certainly among the finest men in engineering. He had been bridge engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad before Carnegie hired him and the huge iron truss he had built over the Ohio at Steubenville in 1864 was considered the outstanding structure of its kind.

Linville asked that a set of Eads’s plans be sent to him. He examined them carefully, then, a little like the paleontologists who had been asked to give an opinion on the Cardiff Giant, he solemnly declared the subject preposterous. “The bridge if built upon these plans will not stand up; it will not carry its own weight,” he told Carnegie in private, and presently, in a formal statement, he called the bridge “entirely unsafe and impracticable” and said any association with it on his own part would imperil his reputation and was therefore out of the question.

Linville was quite wrong and Carnegie, who knew nothing about engineering, urged Linville to lead Eads “into the straight path.” Eads, however, was not about to be dissuaded or to have any outsider, regardless of reputation or connections, begin doctoring his bridge. In the end he would convince even Linville that he knew what he was doing. The Keystone company went to work on the bridge; Carnegie went off to London to sell a block of bonds to the American financier Junius Morgan, father of J. P. Morgan; and by the summer of 1867 Eads was confidently proceeding with the preparatory work for the first abutment beside the St. Louis waterfront. In neighboring saloons it was said that the bridge would take seven million dollars to build—and seven million years.

As things turned out the final cost would come to something near ten million, and seven years would go by before the job was completed. Once in use the bridge would be acclaimed by everyone, and by engineers especially. As one engineering historian would write, the bridge was “an achievement out of all proportion to its size,” something Washington Roebling thoroughly appreciated at the time Eads came over to visit the Webb & Bell yards.

Like every bridge engineer and every railroad official in the country, Roebling was keenly interested in the St. Louis bridge, but since Eads, along with everything else in his radical scheme, also planned to sink his piers by means of pneumatic caissons, Roebling perhaps more than anyone appreciated the full daring of the man and the tremendous importance of what he was attempting, not just to his own work at Brooklyn but to the whole future of bridge engineering.

When he first envisioned his bridge, Eads had originally planned to use coffer-dams to sink the two midriver stone piers upon which his great steel arches were to rest. But in April of 1869, he had returned from a trip to Europe, convinced he had a better answer. He had seen the French engineer Moreaux use a pneumatic caisson to sink piers for a bridge over the Allier River at Vichy and he came home full of faith in the technique and sure he could make it work at St. Louis, even though the Mississippi, as he knew better than anyone, was not the gentle Allier.

So through that summer of 1869 Eads and Roebling had been devising their own separate plans for the foundations of the two biggest, most important bridges of the age, each man working quite independently and with only his own judgment to go by. Eads, however, had his caisson in the water by mid-October, before the contract with Webb & Bell had even been signed, and by the time Eads arrived in Brooklyn, his caisson was already well on its way into the sandy bed of the Missssippi.

Of the two, Roebling was unquestionably the better educated on the development of caissons in Europe and the various ways they had been used. Eads had happened onto the technique almost by chance and took about the least time possible to educate himself. Roebling’s father had incorporated caissons in his plans from the start, knew much on the subject, and Roebling himself had taken great pains in his studies, spending close to a year in Europe for that specific purpose. Furthermore, unlike Eads, Roebling was a trained, experienced bridge engineer and was fluent in both French and German. Eads, who spoke only English, had had a difficult time conversing with some of the European engineers he met.

Still and all, Roebling doubtless appreciated that Eads was a man with a most uncommon gift for solving problems, a man of extraordinary originality and determination, a man, in fact, very much like his own father. Roebling also knew that what Eads was up against at St. Louis was far closer to his own situation in Brooklyn than anything the Europeans or McAlpine or anyone else had ever had to cope with. And most important, Eads, unlike Roebling, now had some working experience with caissons.

The caisson Eads had in operation was only about one-third the size of what Roebling was having built in Brooklyn, still it was bigger than any used by the Europeans. More significantly, by January 1870, the Eads caisson was already as deep as Roebling expected he would have to go on the Brooklyn side, and it was still descending steadily through Mississippi sand and mud that offered almost no resistance. By the end of January the trouble had begun.

From the very first Eads’s men had noticed certain peculiarities about working in the heavy atmosphere of the caisson. The most manly voices had a thin girlish sound, for example. It was impossible to whistle or to blow out a candle, as the men gladly demonstrated for the many visitors Eads liked to bring down. Some of the men mentioned a notable increase in their appetites. Others talked of trouble breathing or of a painful ringing in the ears. But by the time they were down forty feet there had been several clear cases of the mysterious sickness, a subject Eads and Roebling had both heard something about in Europe.

As early as 1664 an English doctor named Henshaw had published an essay proposing, ironically enough, that compressed air be used as a method of treating a variety of common disorders. In France and Germany, institutions sprang up offering the latest facilities for just such atmospheric treatment. Compressed-air “baths” were claimed to work miraculous cures and became something of a fashion, and particularly for curing indigestion. But the pressure in such baths was never much greater than normal.

The first civil engineer to work with compressed air of any substantial magnitude, however, was a Frenchman named Triger, who in 1839, or thirty years before Eads and Roebling built their caissons, used compressed air inside an iron tube to hold back water while sinking a mine shaft through quicksand. The technique had worked quite successfully, but before the job was completed, Triger observed a number of unexplainable reactions among his men and put down in his notes what are thought to be the earliest recorded cases of caisson disease, or “the bends.” Two of his men, Triger wrote, had been hit quite mysteriously by sudden sharp pains in the arms and knees about half an hour after coming out into the open air.

Later in France there would be more serious cases. Men would be seized at home, long after coming out of compression. Sometimes the pain was accompanied by chills and vomiting. Other symptoms were recorded: a great dullness of mind, an incoherence of speech or stammering, nosebleeds, a distressing itching of the skin, tottering gait, an increased flow of urine, even pain in the teeth. One supposedly scientific study noted that Hungarians and French suffered least, while Italians, Germans, and Slavonians were said to have had by far the worst time. It was also known for a fact that one or two men had died of the experience.

The first signs among Eads’s men had been occasional muscular paralysis in the legs. But there was no pain connected with it, the men said, and the sensation passed off in a day or so. But as the caisson went deeper more and more of them began having trouble. In some cases now the arms were affected, as well as the bowels and sphincter muscles. Men complained of severely painful joints and sudden, excruciating stomach cramps. Still, nine out of ten of those affected felt no pain whatever, they said, and so long as the phenomenon remained painless, it would not be taken very seriously. Indeed, according to one account, “A workman walking about with difficult step and a slight stoop was at first regarded as a fit object for jokes, and cases of paralysis and cramp soon became known popularly by the name of ‘Grecian Bend.’”

To ward off trouble the men rubbed themselves with an “Abolition Oil” that was said to work like a charm. Some of them began wearing bands of zinc and silver about their wrists, arms, and ankles, and such were the claims of success that Eads decided to thus outfit every man on the force at the company’s expense, only now the protective armor, as the men called it, was worn about the waist as well, and even under the soles of the feet. Still instances of the unaccountable malady continued to increase.

When one of his foremen got sick, Eads decided to shorten the shifts inside the caisson. The men would stay down for four hours only, then rest for eight hours before going back for another four. The caisson was at forty-two feet by then. By February 5, when it was at sixty-five feet, Eads again altered the schedule, to three two-hour shifts, with rests of two hours in between, none of which was very popular with the men, since with every change of the shift they had to make a long climb out of the caisson, up a spiral stairway. For those who felt no adverse reaction from the compressed air, the new routine was just one more big inconvenience, while for those who did, the climb was only added torture. As the official history of the bridge states dryly, “The fatigue of ascent added not a little to the distress and prostration of those affected with cramp.” At seventy feet, on February 15, with the air pressure in the chamber at thirty-two pounds per square inch, or more than double that of normal atmospheric pressure, one man was in such pain that he was sent to the hospital.

Severe cases grew a lot more common after that. One man became unconscious and did not speak for three hours. Nobody considered the thing a joke any longer. But even so, as Eads would tell visitors, many of his men, the majority in fact, had been affected in no way at all. He had taken hundreds of visitors down into the caisson, even “delicate ladies,” he said, without any of them experiencing ill effects. There was no doctor who could explain it satisfactorily for him. Some doctors said a slower transition from the abnormal to natural pressure would prove less injurious; others claimed the contrary, that the trouble came from passing too rapidly from natural into compressed air. But Eads argued that neither could be correct since none of his air-lock attendants had been hit. It was the amount of time spent under compression that caused the trouble, he maintained, plus the general physical condition of the individual.

He pointed out that most of the men who had been struck down were new hands, unaccustomed to the work, that they had been thinly clothed and poorly fed to begin with, or, in some cases, alcoholic. So as the caisson continued its descent, Eads ordered that only men in prime physical shape be hired for the work.

Then on Saturday, March 19, which happened to be the same morning the Brooklyn caisson was launched, Eads reported the first death. The man’s name was James Riley. He had worked the first shift, just two hours in the chamber, came up feeling fine so far as anyone knew, then fifteen minutes later gasped for breath and fell over on his face. He was the first American to die of the mysterious disease. But at least fifteen more would die at St. Louis before Eads finished his bridge, and more would be crippled for life.

About three thousand people turned out to watch the launching of the Brooklyn caisson. The Kings County Democrats, to no one’s surprise, took the opportunity to make it a day of speeches and band music. People had trouble thinking of a suitable way to describe the main attraction, but most eventually concurred that it looked “more like a huge war leviathan or battery for harbor defense than any other thing.” And as the Eagle observed, a very large number of them had turned out chiefly because they doubted it could ever be launched.

The top, or deck, of the caisson was strewed with tackle and various odd-looking pieces of machinery. A number of lines were connected to a steamboat standing by in case of trouble going down the ways, and at the rear of each way, heavy wooden rams had been rigged, to be worked simultaneously, to get the huge structure started. Inside, a temporary airtight compartment had been built on the forward wall to buoy up that side as it hit the water, and a full complement of crabs, winches, and 150 wheelbarrows had been stowed away, battened down with strips of wood.

The launch took place at ten thirty and was in every respect a great success. As soon as the last block was split out, the giant mass began to move. It went down straight and even, with no need of assistance. It struck the river with just enough speed to overcome the resistance of the water and the air chamber worked to perfection, keeping the front side from sinking. The deck never even got wet.

A great roar went up from the crowd. An air pump on the deck was at once set in motion and in a few hours the water was all out of the work chambers, thus proving to Roebling’s satisfaction that the thing was airtight. Later on the air inside was allowed to escape and the top of the caisson settled to within seventeen inches of the water, which, Roebling noted with pleasure, happened to agree exactly with his previous calculations.

But the difficult work of dredging the site for the caisson was running far behind schedule. It would be another month before everything was ready there and nothing much could be done to speed things up. So apparently Roebling decided this would be an excellent time for him to go to St. Louis and see how Eads was progressing. The Bridge Company agreed and funds were provided for Horatio Allen to go along too.

Eads had a regular routine for handling visitors and it appears that Roebling and Allen received the same treatment when they arrived in St. Louis in early April. Eads would go over the plans first, explaining things, then set out in a tender to the spot mid-river where a flotilla of barges and derricks hovered over his submerged caisson. The functions of the various workboats would be described, after which Eads would lead his guests down the narrow spiral stairway, through the air lock, and into the caisson proper.

Roebling, as he would write later, had the highest admiration and respect for Eads and “his remarkable inventive talent.” Roebling also said later that Eads was extremely courteous to him during his two days in St. Louis and one man who was on hand at the time, a friend of Eads’s, said Eads took special pains to explain each and every detail to the younger engineer. So if there was any friction between them at this point in the story, there is no evidence of it.

Roebling appears to have returned to Brooklyn confident he was proceeding along the best possible course, and although he must have heard a great deal about the caisson sickness in St. Louis, most of those he talked to, including Eads, were convinced that whether a man got hit or not was largely a matter of luck and to judge from things he said later Roebling had arrived at about the same conclusion. Certainly Eads then knew no more than Roebling did about how to prevent the trouble, or how to cure it, as must have been obvious to both of them. Men were still suffering, more of them were dying.

Eads would keep plunging ahead with his work, sure that solutions could be improvised somehow should the problem grow still worse. In his place Roebling probably would have done the same. The great tragedy was that both of them were almost totally ignorant of what others had already learned about the effects of compressed air. They were both unaware, for example, that the surest, fastest remedy for caisson sickness was already known.

Possibly things might have gone differently for each of them had they compared notes as time went on, or had they been in touch with the few others there were working on similar problems. But they were living in an age when communication among professional colleagues was, by later standards, frequently at the most superficial level. Engineering then, like nearly every other line of work, was intensely competitive. An organization such as the American Society of Civil Engineers was striving with some success to encourage an open exchange of professional information and there were several reputable journals publishing valuable technical material. Still there was as yet no strong tradition along these lines and in some quarters not even an inclination. The railroads, the biggest clients for engineering talent, as well as the training ground for a very large number of engineers, were not the sort of institutions to foster an open exchange of valuable ideas. Minding one’s own business was considered among the basic rules of business. There were trade secrets in other words, and the sharp rivalry men had to live with frequently gave rise to the worst kinds of professional jealousies and animosity. Roebling’s own father, for example, had once written to Charles Swan to warn him not to hire a certain man simply because he had once worked for Ellet. “I do not want any news carried between myself and Mr. Ellet,” John Roebling had said.

There were exceptions, to be sure, but even then, often as not, it was because the party sharing his special knowledge stood to gain financially thereby. Carnegie had so agreeably granted Eads the benefit of Linville’s experience only when a large contract for the Keystone Bridge Company was involved. Eads’s own first instructions on caissons had been given by the French bridgebuilder Moreaux largely because Moreaux happened to be chief engineer for a leading French ironworks that, like the Keystone company, wanted to do the superstructure for Eads’s bridge.

Perhaps, after Roebling returned to Brooklyn, he and Eads simply felt they had little more to say to each other, or little to gain by saying more than they already had. Or possibly for all their courtesies, things did indeed go sour at the start, simply on personal grounds. Eads, after all, was an exceedingly proud person who knew most all the answers always and was forever on his guard with anyone who might try to prove otherwise. He viewed his bridge, and none other, as the single most important engineering event of the century. Roebling almost certainly felt the same about the bridge he was about to build but, unlike his father, never once would he say so. Quite possibly Eads considered Roebling a threat and he was not about to stand in the shadow of any man. Maybe he simply saw Roebling as a nuisance.

It is also understandable that a man who had achieved so much on his own, against all odds and despite the doubters, might be reluctant to go out of his way to help a young man who appeared to have been handed quite enough already, and who so far had done little to prove himself particularly worthy of all that. Furthermore, Eads at best was a difficult person. *

But on top of everything else there was the prevailing belief of the time that a stiff spirit of independence was in itself a very good thing. And both Eads and Roebling were exactly the sort of men others would have pointed to as shining examples.

So they would each go their own way, alone, set apart by half a continent and, in time, open hostility.

On May 3, in the early afternoon, the Brooklyn caisson made its maiden voyage, which, of course, was also its final voyage—four miles down the East River to the site beside the Fulton Ferry slip. The chambers were again fully inflated, the air pumps were kept running, and the gigantic box was now riding with its deck a full nine feet above the water. (This inflation was essential, since in one part of the river there would be only a foot of space between the river bottom and the lower edge of the caisson.) Half a dozen tugboats took it in tow and proceeded out into the current at about quarter to two, “creating a great sensation among all whose good fortune led them to view one of the wonders of the nineteenth century,” which was so soon to be “hidden from the gaze of mortal eyes.”

Roebling, Kingsley, Horatio Allen, Bell of Webb & Bell, and three or four others went along for the ride, standing forward on the long, flat deck. And any doubts Eads may have planted about the caisson staying afloat were quickly forgotten. In the words of one witness, it came down the river “as placidly as a swan upon the bosom of an inland lake.”

They tied up a block above Fulton Street, and by the time the sun went down, several thousand people had given it their personal inspection. “Of course, everyone was anxious to be able to say in future years that they had been upon the monster,” wrote the Eagle. The monster, it seems, appeared even more formidable than anyone had expected and especially on toward dusk.

The following morning, at the turn of the tide, the caisson was shifted into position inside the new basin, the whole operation taking little more than an hour. As the crowded ferries churned in and out of the slip next door, young men were seen climbing to the tops of the cabins for a better look.

For the next several weeks additional courses of timber were built on the roof, each course at right angles to the other, with spaces left between the timbers, which were filled in with concrete to add weight and to help preserve the wood. Additional sections for the water shafts, air locks, and supply shafts were also installed as the roof grew in size. And on May 10, Roebling, Colonel Paine, and Francis Collingwood made the first inspection below. The temporary air compartment put in for the launching was removed, two doorways were cut through each of the interior walls, and any loose rock or mud under the edges was shoved out. A few men complained of trouble breathing the heavy air and apparently there was a sharp change in temperature inside the air lock every time the pressure changed, about which something would have to be done. The heat was up over 100 degrees. But otherwise everything was going as expected.

In his report to the directors of the Bridge Company, signed June 12, Roebling wrote:

For three weeks past a gang of forty men have been at work in the caisson for eight hours every day, under the charge of Mr. Young, principally in leveling off and removing boulders which happened to lie under the frames and the edges. A deposit of dock mud, from two to three feet deep, has made this work exceptionally unpleasant. The dredges, which are now beginning to work, will remove it in short time. The removal of large stones from under the shoe, some of them 100 cubic feet, is a matter requiring considerable skill and perseverance.

During all this time the caisson was rising with every high tide, then resting on the bottom again at low tide, which, of course, meant that work within could be carried on only during the low-tide time of day, when the chambers were comparatively free from water.

As more timber courses were added on top and the over-all height of the caisson was increased by a full ten feet, its center of gravity was raised considerably, causing a condition of “unstable equilibrium”—that is, the caisson would no longer rise uniformly with the rise of the tide. One end would come up ahead of the other and this would cause what was known as a blowout, a phenomenon of imposing appearance, as Roebling said, and the subject of much excited talk in Brooklyn.

As the tide was rising, and the downward weight of the caisson was being overcome by the increased tension of the air inside, along with the buoyancy of the river outside, one end of the caisson would suddenly tip up six inches or more. For an instant the tension of the air inside exceeded the head of water outside, and there would be a huge rush of air from beneath the shoe, carrying with it a column of water weighing hundreds of tons to a height of maybe sixty feet. Fish would fall all over the top of the caisson and the men working there would scramble to gather them up.

For the men inside the caisson such occurrences were quite terrifying at first, but of little serious consequence. There would be a terrific roaring noise and a sudden blast of air, both of which were decidedly unsettling, but after it had happened two or three times the men grew accustomed to it and the loss of a few hundred tons of air from a volume so large (163,000 cubic feet) was nothing to worry about especially.

Seen from the shore or the ferry, however, the sudden appearance of a waterspout on the East River was a spectacle that would be talked about for years by all who saw it.

It took three courses of stone and most of June before the vast wooden box was bobbing up and down no longer and was grounded on the bottom to stay. The first stone to be placed on top, the cornerstone as it were, was a block of blue limestone from the Kingston quarry, three feet by eight, weighing 5,800 pounds. There was no particular ceremony that went with it and so far as is known nothing was carved on it.

A stoneyard, as it was called, had been established downriver, below the Atlantic Docks, near Red Hook, and four huge scows had been especially built to bring the stone up to the site. McNulty had been put in charge of laying the first courses and the work had gone much slower than normal since portable derricks had to be used to move massive blocks, weighing anywhere from two thousand to three thousand pounds apiece. But once the caisson was righted down, three permanent derricks were mounted directly on top of it. They had great wooden masts fifty feet high, like the masts of a ship, and booms that were capable of swinging to any point on the deck.

By now, too, six big air compressors, built by the Burleigh Rock Drill Company, of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, were in operation inside a long shed nearby in the yard. Each had a twenty-horsepower steam engine driving two single-acting air cylinders of fourteen-inch stroke and fifteen-inch diameter. Each engine had its own boiler and they were all so connected that the stopping or breaking down of one boiler or engine would not affect the others. All piping and connections were in good order and working properly. (A ten-inch main took the compressed air underground some 150 feet to the caisson, where two six-inch rubber hoses carried the air down the supply shafts to the work chambers.) Thomas Douglas, a mason who had done the finest stonework in Prospect Park, had been put in charge of the labor outside the caisson, while the foreman inside was a strapping man named Charles Young.

To date everything had gone exactly as planned. There had been no serious interruptions. Material had arrived on time. All necessary machinery had been purchased and installed. Proper offices had by now been established for the Bridge Company in the Union Building on Fulton Street, which was only a short walk from the Fulton Ferry. Everyone involved was to be congratulated, wrote General Superintendent William Kingsley in his own first official report.

The great caisson could now begin its descent.

9

Down in the Caisson

We have no precedent just like this bridge.

—WASHINGTON ROEBLING

IN ALL the thousands of years men had been building things, no one had ever attempted to sink into the earth so large a structure as the Brooklyn caisson and there were not very many places where the job would have been more difficult than the Brooklyn side of the East River.

Roebling and his assistants thought they had learned quite a lot about the ground they had to penetrate while dredging the site, but as he commented with his usual dispassion, “The material now became sufficiently exposed to enable us to arrive at the conclusion that it was of a very formidable nature, and could only be removed by slow, tedious, and persistent efforts.” Compared to this everything before had been child’s play. Now that which had looked so reasonable on paper was turning out to be quite a different matter in practice. Indeed, so bad was the first month of excavation inside the caisson, so painfully slow and discouraging, that it began to look as though the whole idea for the foundations had been a terrible mistake, that they would have to give up and try again some other way or some other place.

There was never any public awareness of such feelings, which was just as well. There was, for that matter, very little real awareness on the part of the public of what actually went on inside the caisson, the work being entirely concealed.

The best over-all view of the site was still from the deck of the ferry. So every day thousands of people on their way to and from New York got a splendid, close-up look at the three towering boom derricks swinging blocks of limestone into place and at the squads of men swarming about the masonry work or through the adjacent yards, every last man appearing to know just what was expected of him. There were half a dozen different steam engines sending up columns of black smoke and everywhere a bewildering clutter of tackle, hand tools, nail kegs, and tar barrels, stacks of lumber and great heaps of coal, sand, and stone. How anything orderly or rational might emerge from such seeming chaos was something for ordinary men to ponder in dismay.

Still, seen from above, the work did not appear all that different from other big construction projects. The activity around the gigantic new Post Office being built in New York, for example, was every bit as confusing and impressive to watch. All this was lit by the same light of day and the men appeared no different from other mortals, breathing the same good air. But down in the caisson, everyone had heard, things were different. That was the part of the work that had the most fascination and of course the fact that it was hidden away where no one could see it, except for a relative few, made the fascination that much greater.

The newspapers sent reporters down soon enough. By July better than two hundred workers were going down every day and naturally they had their own stories to tell. So as a result a picture began to emerge, of a strange and terrifying nether world at Brooklyn’s doorstep, entered only by men of superhuman courage, or by fools, and as sometimes happens with ideas that grow in the imagination, it was not so very far from the truth.

Probably the most vivid description was one given by E. F. Farrington, Roebling’s master mechanic, a plain, blunt, practical man ordinarily. There would be rumors later about who actually was doing Farrington’s writing for him, or at least dressing up his literary style, but there is no doubting the authenticity of the image.

Inside the caisson everything wore an unreal, weird appearance. There was a confused sensation in the head, like “the rush of many waters.” The pulse was at first accelerated, then sometimes fell below the normal rate. The voice sounded faint unnatural, and it became a great effort to speak. What with the flaming lights, the deep shadows, the confusing noise of hammers, drills, and chains, the half-naked forms flitting about, with here and there a Sisyphus rolling his stone, one might, if of a poetic temperament, get a realizing sense of Dante’s inferno. One thing to me was noticeable—time passed quickly in the caisson.

Even the air lock was an unnerving experience for most men the first time they went down. For some it was also an extremely painful experience. The little iron room was abundantly lighted by daylight through glass set in the ironwork overhead. But once the attendant had secured the hatch with a few turns of a windlass, the common sensation was that of being enclosed in an iron coffin. Then a brass valve was opened. “An unearthly and deafening screech, as from a steam whistle, is the immediate result,” wrote one man, “and we instinctively stop our ears with our fingers to defend them from the terrible sound. As the sound diminished we are sensible of an oppressive fullness about the head, not unaccompanied with pain, somewhat such as might be expected were our heads about to explode.” (For many the sensation did not pass and they were said to be “caught in the lock.”) Then the sound stopped altogether, the floor hatch fell open by itself, and the attendant pointed to an iron ladder leading into the caisson. The immediate wish of most men at this point, whether they showed it or not, was to get back out into the open air just as fast as humanly possible. But once the ladder had been negotiated and three or four minutes had passed, most men also found they felt reasonably steady.

The initial view of the caisson interior was generally something of a shock, once the eyes had adjusted to the light. The six big chambers looked something like vast cellars from which a flood had only recently receded. Every post and partition, every outside wall, and the entire ceiling were covered with a slimy skim of mud. Every man in the place wore rubber boots and got about on planks laid from one section to another and between the planks the muck and water were sometimes a foot deep or more. Most days the work force would be concentrated in a few locations, leaving some of the huge chambers as dark and silent as subterranean caves.

Where there was light it came from calcium lamps, limelights as they were also called, which threw steaming, blue-white, luminous jets into the corners where the men worked, or from squat sperm candles that blazed like torches at the end of iron rods planted alongside the plank walkways. “The subject of illuminating a caisson in a satisfactory manner is rather a difficult problem to solve,” Roebling remarked in his report to the directors of the Bridge Company. At first the candles had burned with such vigor in the compressed air and sent up such clouds of smoke that the air had become intolerable. This had been overcome somewhat by reducing the size of the wick and of the candle and by mixing alum with the tallow and drenching the wicks in vinegar. Even so Roebling worried about the quantities of floating carbon the men were breathing into their lungs.

Kerosene lamps had to be ruled out from the start. They smoked even worse than candles, and with fire a constant hazard in such a charged atmosphere, Roebling did not want the risk of spilled oil. So he had hit upon the idea of limelights, of the kind ordinarily used for stage lighting or nighttime political rallies. He had the gas—a combination of compressed oxygen and coal gas—piped into the caisson, put burners in every chamber, and found two lamps per chamber would do the job. One small explosion had singed the beard off an attendant, but other than that the system had worked most satisfactorily. Ordinary street gas would have been about five times less expensive, but when that had been tried, the heat inside the caisson had built up to the point where no one was able to take it.

The air as it was, besides being heavy and dank, was uncomfortably warm. On the way from the compressors it passed through a cooling spray of water. Even so, winter or summer, regardless of the time of day or the weather outside, the temperature inside stayed at 80 degrees or more and the air was so saturated with water that under the best conditions the chambers seemed continuously shrouded in mist. Visitors who did not have to exert themselves in any way soon found they were wringing-wet with perspiration.

Most of the people who visited the caisson—newspapermen, local politicians, an artist from Harper’s Weekly, editors from some of the professional journals—came out with their clothes thoroughly mud spattered and quite relieved to have the experience behind them. Many of them also expressed open amazement that men could actually work in such a place day after day.

The first load of rock and mud was hauled out of the caisson by clamshell dredge buckets on July 5. Most of the effort inside was spent removing the sharp-edged boulders that threatened to damage the frames and shoe as the caisson began to come down on them with crushing force. Boulders under the water shafts were the most serious initial problem, for if the caisson were to settle suddenly, the shafts might be blocked shut or badly damaged. And there was no way to get the boulders out of there except to chip away laboriously hour by hour, by hand, with long steel bars and sledge hammers.

In the middle chambers the ground was nearly all traprock, packed like gravel and joined by what Roebling described as a natural cement made of decomposed fragments of green serpentine rock. Every boulder was coated with this unyielding substance, upon which a steel-pointed pick had virtually no effect. Only by driving in steel-pointed crowbars with heavy sledges were the men able to make the slightest headway.

In chambers No. 1 and 2, those nearest the ferry slip, there was clay and gravel between the rocks, which made the going easier, while in Nos. 5 and 6, those at the upstream end of the caisson, there was a gummy blue clay that extended down forty feet, just as indicated by earlier soundings. This made the digging there relatively easy, of course, but it also meant that the caisson would have to go down at least forty feet—or beyond the clay. As Roebling said, no better foundation could have been wished for than what they were finding in chambers No. 3 and 4, but only if it had extended all over. And with the nature of the material so vastly irregular from one chamber to the other, lowering the caisson uniformly seemed practically an impossibility.

Roebling kept careful track of the rock uncovered. Nine-tenths of it, he found, was of Hudson River Palisades origin, transported, like all of Long Island, millions of years before by the glaciers. This traprock, as it was commonly called, was basalt, an igneous rock, like granite, and nearly as hard. As the men dug into the caisson floor, the traprock emerged in chunks the size of paving blocks or in monstrous boulders, but when a shovel or pick first struck one of them, with a sharp metallic clink, there was no telling which size it would turn out to be.

Boulders of quartz and gneiss occurred here and there, but rarely. Two big boulders of red sandstone were also found. But a collection made by Roebling of all the different varieties of smaller rocks uncovered, most of which had been worn down to pebble size, presented a complete series of the rocks to be found for a hundred miles to the north and northeast of Brooklyn.

The idea of driving the cutting edge of the caisson through such material by building weight overhead had to be abandoned at the start. The pressure needed to do that would crush the cast-iron shoe and smash the bearing frames. So the cutting edge would simply not cut. Instead, every boulder, every rock of any size, had to be removed before the shoe or frames began bearing down on them. And all such work had to be done by probing underwater since there were trenches along the inside edge of the shoe, clear around, and these were nearly always brimful of water that seeped in from the outside. (This water flowed in turn into cross trenches at the foot of the frames, which supplied the big pools under the water shafts.)

Just finding the boulders under the shoe, let alone removing them, was an unbelievably tough and disagreeable task. The full perimeter of the cutting edge was 540 feet. This added to the five frames, each 102 feet long, brought the caisson’s full bearing surface to 1,050 lineal feet, or a distance greater than the length of three football fields, every inch of which had to be probed beneath with a steel sounding bar twice daily with each shift. Whenever a new shift came down, the work accomplished in the preceding eight hours had to be carefully explained; and since most of the trouble spots discovered would be underwater, there was no way simply to point them out—the information had to be written down or memorized. “Moreover,” as Roebling wrote, “a settling of the caisson of six inches or a foot would bring to light an entirely fresh crop of boulders in new positions, and very often half without and half within the caisson.”

To keep weight off the shoe, and so off any such boulders protruding under the shoe, it was necessary that the frames, or chamber partitions, take up that part of the load not balanced off by the compressed air. And with the frames thus the prime structural supports of the whole enormous burden, there had to be a way to lower them as the caisson descended.

The system used at first seemed the simplest solution, but it did not work well at all. Small pillars of earth were left under the frames, each one about three feet square and from six to eight feet apart. These pillars were then to be dug away systematically and the caisson lowered in that fashion. But the earth pillars often concealed a boulder that had to be removed, or they would be eroded away by water, or still more often, the workers in adjacent chambers, not working in unison, would undermine them and destroy their usefulness.

The system next adopted worked extremely well and was used until the end. Beneath each partition, every eight feet or so, two wooden blocks, a foot square and two feet long, were placed, one on top of the other, with oak wedges jammed between them and the bottom edge of the partition. Whenever the shoe had been cleared of all obstructions to a depth of several inches the entire way around the caisson, the wedges were knocked loose with sledge hammers, one by one, frame by frame, until the whole caisson settled. New blocks were then put in beside the old ones, which, if the descent of the caisson had been sudden, were split in two or crushed to a pulp. “The noise made by splitting blocks and posts was rather ominous,” Roebling commented dryly, “and inclined to make the reflecting mind nervous in view of the impending mass of thirty thousand tons overhead.”

Collingwood and Paine were in charge of clearing boulders from beneath the shoe and seeing that the caisson settled properly. “Levels were taken every morning on the masonry above,” Collingwood wrote later, “and a copy furnished the general foreman…. If the caisson were level, the usual method followed in lowering was to begin at the central frame, and loosen the wedges regularly from the center towards the ends. The two frames next to these were then treated in like manner, and finally the outer two. When no obstructions occurred, the blocks would all be gone over several times in the course of a day, and the caisson would settle easily, at the rate of three or four inches in 24 hours.”

At first, however, things had not gone that way at all. Through July and on into early August, the rate of descent had been less than six inches a week, and the boulders, instead of diminishing in number, as had been expected, became more plentiful. It was a hopeless rate of progress Roebling reported to his directors. At this rate it would take nearly two years to sink just the one caisson.

Boulders within the work chambers were the lesser evil. Before they could be hauled up the water shaft, they had to be split into manageable pieces, never an easy job, but at least they could be dealt with under comparatively reasonable conditions. Boulders under the shoe, however, or those found beneath the frames, were each a major undertaking. The removal of a boulder from under the shoe, for example, went as follows.

The ground around the inner side of the boulder had to be dug away with pick and shovel, with the excavation filling with water as fast as the men worked. Then the boulder had to be drilled by hand, underwater, and a lewis inserted, a dovetailed iron eyebolt to which a hoisting rig of some kind could be attached. In the early days of the work, double sets of block and tackle were tried, with a gang of thirty or forty men hauling at the ropes, while others worked furiously with winches and crowbars. But very often the boulder refused to budge. So Roebling had hydraulic jacks lowered through the supply shafts. These were of a kind designed for pulling instead of lifting and had a capacity of two to three tons. The water chamber on such a jack was above, not below, the piston, and the piston rod had a big hook at the end instead of a lifting shoulder. This hook was attached to the iron eye in the boulder, while the opposite end of the jack was chained fast to the nearest substantial timber or, better still, to the ceiling. The jack pump was then set in motion and, as Roebling said, it would prove itself a “very effective instrument.” There would be an immense momentary strain, then the boulder would give way and come sliding into the caisson, where it would be broken up..

When a boulder appeared to extend several feet outside the caisson, no attempt was made to haul it in. Rather the part inside was slowly split up until enough had been removed for the caisson edge to clear.

But whichever way they were handled, a few good-sized boulders beneath the shoe could hold up everything for three or four days. Such delays were maddening, and there were more and more of them as time passed and equipment began to break down or the water shafts failed to function as they were supposed to. The big clamshell buckets, armed with seven-inch teeth, were formidable-looking affairs and under normal conditions one of them could dredge up more than a thousand yards a day. This, in theory at least, meant that the equipment in use should have been able to haul out the whole volume of material that had to be removed for the tower foundation in about a month’s time. But the buckets kept breaking down or getting caught under the bottom edges of the water shafts. As it was, the job would take five months, and these, as Roebling wrote, were “five months of incessant toil and worry, everlasting breaking down and repairing, and constant study to make improvements wherever possible.” Bucket teeth that worked well for scooping would not last a day at grappling with stones. For every two buckets in working order, three were being repaired. “There was, indeed, one period,” Roebling said, “when we were almost tempted to throw the buckets overboard…”

One of the greatest early disappointments was to find that the buckets were unable even to dig their own hole under the water shafts, as they were supposed to. Much of the time the buckets failed even to bite into the material dumped into the hole unless a couple of men were kept constantly stirring the pool, “to keep the stuff alive,” as Roebling said. But even then the bottom of the pool kept filling in and had to be dug out by hand repeatedly.

Stone and clay would pack solid and actually fill the hole in a few hours, such was the incredible nature of the material being excavated. So it became necessary to feed all the stones into the pool at one time, separately, then the clay by itself. The kind of bucket in use could lift any stone it could catch hold of, but such a stone, or a chunk of split boulder, had to be placed just so in the hole for the bucket to get a proper hold, and the stones could only be taken out one at a time. Whenever a badly placed stone got wedged under a shaft, which happened fairly regularly, somebody had to dive under to see what could be done. “When the lungs are filled with compressed air,” Roebling wrote, “a person can remain under water from three to four minutes.” He knew this, it seems, from personal experience.

Any material fed into the pools from other parts of the caisson could be properly prepared, as it were, for the dredges to handle, but when the trouble was inside the water-shaft pools, as often happened, or when the pool had filled in, one to two days would be lost while the shaft was sealed off on top, with an iron cap, the water forced out by compressed air, the pool pumped dry, and the pit dug out by hand to a depth of six to eight feet. And the whole time this was going on (about two days on the average), the other shaft had to handle all the work. There were, in fact, so many occasions when the pools had to be cleared in just this fashion, so many repairs needed on the buckets, that most of the time only one water shaft was in operation.

Furthermore, whenever the work was held up a day or two, and the caisson stopped settling, its movement immediately afterward could be quite erratic, coming in sudden, unpredictable, uncontrollable starts. This, Collingwood explained, was due to the earth compacting around the caisson, as it does around a pile when driven slowly. “At such times it would seem impossible to get it started, and when once movement began, it was almost sure to split a set of blocks before it was arrested.”

Once, after the caisson had been at rest for several days because of breakdowns in equipment, all the usual steps were taken to get it started again, but to no avail. The blocking was eased, the shoe was cleared of obstructions, and still the caisson just hung there, motionless, with nothing holding it. The men did not know quite what to make of this. The only real significance of the episode, however, was that it gave the engineers a chance to compute roughly how much side friction the caisson had to overcome during its descent. As Collingwood figured it and reported later to a meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the average pressure in the chamber at the time was seventeen pounds per square inch, giving a lifting force from the compressed air only of 20,400 tons. The bearing surface (posts and frames) was carrying about 625 tons and estimates were that the whole outer edge was probably carrying about that much again, which gave a total upholding force of somewhere near 21,650 tons. But the total weight of the caisson then, including the stonework on top, was judged to be 27,500 tons. Therefore, when it failed to move, the weight being carried by side friction alone was 5,850 tons. So this meant that along with everything else that had to be overcome to get the caisson down even a single inch, there was about 900 pounds of friction working against every square foot of the exterior surface.

To add to the over-all physical discomfort of everyone involved, blowouts continued and with greater frequency than Roebling had figured on. After each initial rush of air out one side or other, a returning wave would follow, inflowing river water that would stand knee-deep over the work surface until the air pressure eventually forced it out. Blowouts were usually caused by changes in the tide, which in the early stages affected the balance of pressures inside and out and which apparently Roebling had anticipated. But even the wake of a passing steamer could cause enough of a change in the water level to bring on a blowout, and this came as quite a surprise.

To build up additional weight on the caisson, some of the excavated material was dumped on top, in the spaces not taken up by the masonry. The rest of the material was dumped into carts that ran on inclined tracks down to big scows tied up on the riverside. (Once the caisson was in position this side had been closed in with a cofferdam, as the others were, and docks and tracks and turnarounds for the stone carts had been built.)

Eventually, when the caisson got down about ten feet below the river bottom, water ceased to come in at all, so tightly was the ground packed about the outer sides. Now, much to their amazement, the boulder crews encountered a new phenomenon. As Collingwood wrote, “It was not an uncommon occurrence in removing a large boulder, that an opening would be made entirely outside the caisson, for three or four feet.” Sometimes when this happened a man might crawl inside, beyond the limits of the caisson, that is, to dramatize the uncanny nature of such a space, not to mention his own nerve.

To step up the pace, Roebling organized a special force of forty men who worked at boulders exclusively, from eleven at night until six in the morning, when the regular shift came on. In time everybody grew more accustomed to the work. Roebling, in the words of William Kingsley, gave “the work his unremitting attention at all times,” but especially at critical points was he “conspicuous for his presence and exertions.” Like his father, he demanded much of every man under him, and even more of himself.

As the weeks passed he found that a slight lowering of the air pressure inside the chamber could work wonders whenever added weight was advantageous. The compressors would be slowed a little and the caisson would immediately bear down harder. It was a ready, effortless way to apply an additional twelve hundred tons or so any time that was needed, and for only as long as needed.

But when the caisson had reached a depth of some twenty feet, or approximately half the distance Roebling intended to sink it, the boulders became so large and numerous that there was no choice left but to begin blasting.

The idea of using powder on the boulders had, of course, been considered from the start. It would have saved all kinds of time and effort obviously, and as things grew increasingly difficult and frustrating inside the caisson, the men were more than ready to give it a try, whatever the supposed risks involved. But Roebling had held off. In such a dense atmosphere, he reasoned, a violent concussion might rupture the eardrums of every man inside. Smoke from the explosions might make the air even more noxious and certainly more unpleasant than it already was. The doors and valves of the air locks might be damaged.

His greatest fear, however, was the possible effect on the water shafts. The two immense columns of water that stood above the work chambers and every man in the caisson were held there in a critical balance only by the pressure inside the chambers. The margin of safety was just two feet of water—the distance from the surface of each pool and the bottom edge of each shaft. An explosion inside the caisson, Roebling explained, might suddenly depress the level of the pool and allow the air to escape underneath. A water shaft might blow out, in other words. All the compressed air would escape in one sudden blast and almost certainly with the following immediate consequences: with the work chambers instantly deflated, so to speak, the full weight of the caisson would come down all at once, smashing blocks and frames and outer edges. The impact might be so great as to crush every interior support and everyone inside; and in the early stages of the work, the river would have rushed in and drowned everyone. What the effect might be on top was anybody’s guess, but it was realistic to assume that all that water bursting out of a shaft would be about the same as a major explosion.

Still, Roebling knew, such prospects, however sobering, were all hypothetical. There was no past experience to go by. So whether he was right or not remained to be seen. With luck, he might be wrong. He decided to find out.

He began by firing a revolver with successively heavier charges in various parts of the caisson. When it was clear this was perfectly safe and causing no adverse effects, he set off small charges of blasting powder, fired by a fuse, gradually working these up in magnitude until they were on the order of what was needed to get on with the work. The concussions bothered no one especially, nor did they have any noticeable effect on the air locks or water shafts. “The powder smoke was a decided nuisance,” Roebling said. “It would fill the chambers for half an hour or more with a thick cloud, obscuring all the lights.” But this he alleviated greatly by switching to fine rifle powder.

The results were spectacular. With a little practice the work moved ahead as never before. A long steel drill would be hammered into the rock to make a hole for the blasting charge and the charge would be tamped in and set off. * “As many as twenty blasts were fired in one watch,” Roebling reported, “the men merely stepping into an adjacent chamber to escape the flying fragments.” The hard crystalline traprock split more easily than the tough gneiss or rotten quartz boulders. Invariably the traprock broke neatly into three equal-sized boulders. The caisson now began descending twelve to eighteen inches a week, instead of six.

Care was taken to guard against fires igniting in the yellow-pine roof and the men did their best not to injure the shoe with the charges they set off beneath it. But the shoe by this time was in such shape that a little more damage hardly mattered. The armor plating was bent and torn, the shoe itself cracked or badly crushed in dozens of places.

One convenient method for disposing of a boulder lodged beneath the shoe was to drill straight through to the other side, plant a charge at the far end, then shoot the boulder bodily into the caisson. Some boulders encountered now were up to fourteen feet in length and five feet in diameter.

For the people of New York and Brooklyn all such activity was considered somehow removed from reality. The whole concept of an enormous wooden chamber descending below the river was a little difficult for many to understand and the men who went in and out of it seemed a breed apart. There was simply something quite unnatural about all this. “For night is turned into day and day into night in one of these bridge caissons,” wrote the Herald; “and when the steam tugs, with their red and blue lights burning from their wooden turrets go creeping along the bosom of the river like monstrous fireflies, then do these submarine giants delve and dig and ditch and drill and blast…The work of the buried bridgebuilder is like the onward flow of eternity; it does not cease for the sun at noonday or the silent stars at night. Gangs are relieved and replaced, and swart, perspiring companies of men follow each other up and down the iron locks, with a dim quiet purpose…”

The sheer physical exertion inside the caisson was as great as ever, the work every bit as unnerving as it had been. And the deeper they went, the more the men felt the discomforts of the compressed air.

The work went on around the clock, except for Sundays, with three shifts of eight hours each. The first shift went down at six in the morning, the second shift at three in the afternoon, the third, the special night gang, went down about eleven. Most men stayed in the caisson the full eight hours, taking their dinner pails down with them. Work in such an atmosphere brought on an uncommonly fierce appetite, they said, and the standard meal consisted of great slabs of bread and cheese or beef, washed down with beer.

The two day shifts were composed of 112 men each, while the night shift Roebling kept to roughly forty picked men. So the full force working inside the caisson came to about 264. Up on the surface there were two shifts to operate the dredging gear and two shifts to dispose of the material brought up from below. In addition, there were people to run the compressors and hoisting engines, blacksmiths, mechanics, men to look after the gas for the lighting below, a carpenter’s force of some twenty-five men, and thirty men working on the masonry, bringing the total force aboveground to something like a hundred.

But the number of those inside the caisson who had been with the work from the start was quite small comparatively. According to the time books, a total of 2,500 different individuals worked in the Brooklyn caisson from start to finish. This means then that men were quitting in droves—at a rate of about a hundred a week on the average, or, to put it another way, every week about one man in three decided he had had enough of building the Great Bridge and walked off the job, never to return again..

There were notable exceptions, of course. One man named Mike Lynch went down with the very first shift to go into the caisson and would be the last man to come out. He not only never lost an hour’s time during the ten months he worked in the caisson, but he made a day’s extra pay in overtime. “He is strictly temperate and regular in all his habits,” William Kingsley noted, “and is none the worse for his long service in compressed air.”

That the turnover was so great is not surprising.

Amenities provided by the management were very few—about what was customary. Two unpainted frame sheds had been put up in the yard, with rows of pegs and hooks inside for the men to hang their clothes. (The temperature inside the caisson was such that most men went down wearing nothing but pants and a pair of company boots.) In front of the sheds were sets of washtubs, with hot and cold water. And that was about the sum of the comforts provided aboveground.

Inside the caisson itself there were generally a few dry spots where a man could eat his midday meal. And against one wall stood what was considered by all the world’s most extraordinary toilet. It was described in one of Roebling’s official reports as a pneumatic water closet and consisted of a wooden box with a lid and a large iron pipe that passed up through the timber roof. The box was kept about half full of water, and whenever its contents were to be discharged, a valve was opened and the pressure from within the caisson would blast everything instantly overhead in the form of a fine mist. This particular device was not installed until the work had progressed some little time, however, and until then the pools beneath the water shafts, or any convenient corner, had sufficed for the same purpose. When he came to describe the general working conditions, Roebling would note that the sense of smell was almost entirely lost in the “made air,” as he called it. “This,” he said, “is a wise provision of nature, because foul odors certainly have their home in a caisson.”

For an ordinary laborer the pay was two dollars a day. But after the caisson reached a depth of twenty-eight feet, it was decided to revise that. The bad air, the increased unpleasantness over all, and the widespread feeling that the deeper down they went the more hazardous the work, all called for a commensurate hike in wages, the management decided. So from that point on the pay was $2.25 a day.

Men kept quitting just the same, but for every one who did, there were at least a dozen anxious to take his place, most of them Irish, German, or Italian immigrants who were desperate for work of any kind, and many of them, like those who had gone into the Eads caisson, were thinly clothed and undernourished.

But for all the talk and worry there had been over caisson sickness, and for all the growing fear of it as pressure inside the caisson increased steadily, only a few so far had experienced any ill effects.

One pound of air pressure equals two feet of tidewater, so for every two feet the caisson was lowered, one pound had to be added to the pressure. Gauges in the engine room indicated the height of the tide and the pressure of the air. The greatest the pressure would ever be in the Brooklyn caisson was twenty-three pounds per square inch above normal atmospheric pressure, or nearly ten pounds less than it had been inside the Eads caisson the day James Riley fell dead. In St. Louis several more had died miserably, but there had been only mild symptoms in Brooklyn. A little paralysis in the legs was all. Only three or four men had been bothered in the slightest and none of the engineering staff so far.

Like Eads, Roebling noted that the ones who did have trouble were all new to the job. His way of alleviating their discomfort was to send them right out of the caisson. Now that he had seen something of the problem first hand and had spent as much time under compression as anyone on the job, Roebling was convinced that Eads’s system of shortening the hours was the best possible prevention and said he would follow that same system in the New York caisson. The thing to do, he said, was to “reduce the period that the human system is in contact with the exciting cause.” The increased quantity of oxygen inhaled under pressure was what did the damage, he thought. “That the system struggles against this abnormal state of affairs,” he said, “is shown by the fact that the number of inhalations per minute is involuntarily reduced from thirty to fifty per cent. It follows, therefore, that the shorter the period of exposure to compressed air the less the risk.”

But any change in the schedule would wait until the New York side, since the Brooklyn caisson was not going deep enough to produce anything like what was happening in St. Louis, where Eads had had a special hospital ship fitted up and had hired a full-time physician who prescribed special diets and set down strict rules about rest. Eads’s men by this time were permitted to work in the caisson only an hour at a time.

But the men in the Brooklyn caisson were having their troubles all the same. The work was a hazard to the health, it was agreed, and far more exhausting than anything any of them had ever done before. Collingwood said a full day inside would leave him feeling worn-out and in ill temper for days. And when the weather turned cold in the late fall, dozens of men began coming down with severe colds and bronchitis, caused by the abrupt drop in temperature inside the air lock. Every time they “locked out” at the end of the day, hot, tired, and dripping wet, the men would experience a sudden temperature drop, from at least 80 to 40 degrees. Roebling had steam coils installed in the air locks to keep the temperature the same as in the chambers below, but the men still had to face the chill open air once they emerged from the locks.

A hacking cough also became common among those who had been on the job any time. Candle smoke and the blasting were said to be the cause. Those who had been going down the longest could spit black and would still be able to do so several months after the work was finished.

But what plagued everyone most was the thought of all that weight bearing down overhead and the river outside and the unspoken fear that sometime, sooner or later, something was going to go wrong and they would all be drowned like rats or suffocate or be crushed to death. And then just to confirm how very tenuous was the balance upon which they were all trusting their lives, there occurred what would afterward be called “The Great Blowout.”

It happened at about six in the morning and on a Sunday, when only a few men were about, a fact the pious took to be more than a matter of coincidence. Eads had his men working seven days a week, it was noted, while Roebling kept the Sabbath. This was a sign, it was said, and thanks were given through Brooklyn and nowhere more fervently than in the Irish neighborhoods near the Navy Yard. Heaven only knew how many would have been left widows, people were saying, had it happened any other day of the week.

All at once in the very still early morning there had been a terrific roar. The few who actually saw the thing go off said it looked more like a volcano than anything else. It was as though the river had exploded, sending a column of water, mud, and stones five hundred feet into the air and showering yellow water and mud over ships and wharves and houses for blocks around. The column was seen from a mile off and the noise was so frightful that people began pouring out of their front doors and rushing pell-mell up Fulton Street. The whole neighborhood was on the run. Roebling described it as a stampede. “Even the toll-collectors at the ferry abandoned their tills,” he said.

Nobody was inside the caisson at the time and only three men were on top of it. One of them, a yard watchman, said later that the current of air rushing toward the blowing water shaft was so powerful it knocked him off his feet, ruining his Sunday suit. He had been struck by a stone after that and could remember no more. One of the other men leaped into the river, while the third tried to bury himself in a coal pile.

Then in an instant it was all over and everything was as silent as before. Both doors of the air locks fell open and for the first and only time the submerged caisson was flooded with daylight. The quiet lasted but briefly. Within minutes there was another rush of people heading down Fulton to see what had happened.

Roebling, Collingwood, and one or two of the others from the work force were on the scene almost immediately. They turned hoses into the open water shaft, closed the air locks, and in about an hour had a head thirty-one feet high back in the shaft and fifteen pounds of pressure back in the shaft and fifteen pounds of pressure back in the work chambers. When it was time to go down to take a look at the damage, Roebling led the way. “The first entry into the caisson was made with considerable misgiving,” he wrote. But incredibly none of the disastrous consequences he had feared had occured, as he reported later to the Board of Directors:

The total settling that took place amount to ten inches in all. Every block under the frames and posts was absolutely crushed, the ground being too compact to yield; none of the frames, however, were injured or out of line. The brunt of the blow was, of course, taken by the shoe and sides of the caisson. One sharp boulder in No. 2 chamber had cut the armor plate, crushed through the shoe casting, and buried itself a foot deep into the heavy oak sill, at the same time forcing in the sides some six inches. In a number of places the sides were forced outward. The marvel is that the airtightness was not impaired in the least.

His caisson had withstood the staggering blow of 17,675 tones dropped ten inches. By the way certain boltheads were sheared off, he could tell that the sides of the caisson—nine solid courses of timber—had been compressed two inches, such had been the impact. In the roof, however, there was not a sign of damage except for the slightest sag near the water shaft, where the support from the frames was the least.

With a little figuring Roebling concluded that once all the settling had stopped and before the compressed air was build up again inside the chambers, the caisson was carrying a total weight of twenty-three tons per square foot. This was an astonishing revelation. As never-racking as the whole episode had been, it had demonstrated just how large a margin of safety Roebling had built into the structure, since its ultimate load, once the bridge was built, would be only five tones per square foot. So he had built the caisson at least four times as strong as it needed to be.

Why the water shaft blew out was, needless, to say, a question of the gravest concern and the answer takes a little explaining.

The problem was that the weight of the columns of water in the shafts was not always the same. Particles of rock and earth were constantly washing out of the clamshell buckets as they were hauled up through the water shafts, and as a result a fine silt was held in suspension and this, in a column of water seven feet square by, say, thirty-five feet high, could and did increase the specific gravity of that column to a remarkable degree. But when the shaft was not in use for some reason or other, the silt would settle, the water would become less thick and weight less. So great would be the difference in the weight between a nearly cleared column of water and one still in use that the difference in the levels of the two (both of which were, of course, being supported by the same air pressure) would be about ten feet.

Outside, on the top of the caisson, such a disparity, in the level of the water in the shafts could be an alarming sight for anyone on duty who did not understand the reason for it. The impression would be that the lower of the two shafts was getting close to the danger level-that it might may blow out at any instant-and the immediate response would be to feed more water into the shaft as quickly as possible.

This is precisely what happened on more than one occasion and effect inside, naturally, was that the pool beneath one shaft would begin overflowing rapidly, which led those in charge below to assume the air pressure in the chamber was giving out. And since there was no direct communication between those above and those below, somebody had to scramble up through the air lock and find out what had gone wrong. On one such occasion it was discovered that the water in one shaft was above twelve feet from the top while the water in the other shaft was twenty-one feet from the top and despite the fact that a heavy stream of the water was pouring into the shallower shaft. The water was immediately shut off when it was known what was happening below and samples of water were taken from each shaft. Water from lower shaft was found to weight eighty-five pounds per cubic foot, which was twenty-one pounds more than the water from the other shaft.

On the Sunday of the blowout, apparently the sediment in one shaft had settled to such an extent that the water no longer weighed enough to contain the pressure inside. The normal precaution had been to keep a small stream of the water playing into the shaft to make up for just a likelihood during the days when the work was halted and no dredging was going on. But this time had not been done. Sounding very much like his father, Roebling said “To say that his occurrence was an accident would certainly be wrong, because not one accident in a hundred deserves the name. In this case it was simply the legitimate result of carelessness, brought about by an overconfidence in supposing matters would take care of themselves”

Trusting matters to take care of themselves was something this extremely competent young man had seldom done in his life. He had had the contrary attitude drummed into him since childhood and from here on more than ever, he would insist on the strictest attention to every detail and to safety precautions especially, and he would come down hard on anyone caught taking such matters lightly. The thing to fight against, he told the men, was the kind of carelessness that comes from familiarity with the job.

10

Fire

When the perfected East River bridge shall permanently and uninterruptedly connect the two cities, the daily thousands who cross it will consider it a sort of natural and inevitable phenomenon, such as the rising and setting of the sun, and they will unconsciously overlook the preliminary difficulties surmounted before the structure spanned the stream, and will perhaps undervalue the indomitable courage, the absolute faith, the consummate genius which assured the engineer’s triumph.

—THOMAS KINSELLA, in
The Brooklyn Eagle

A SECOND contract was signed that October with Webb & Bell to build the New York caisson, according to plans drawn up during the summer. This time the caisson would be slightly larger and there were to be a number of important modifications. Roebling had decided to make the water shafts round instead of square, for example; he wanted the air locks positioned differently; and the entire interior would be lined with boiler plate, as fire protection, Roebling having realized by this time how very inadequate were the preventive measures he had specified in the Brooklyn caisson. With a caisson that might have to go twice the depth of the Brooklyn caisson, he wanted none of the anxieties there had been over fire.

In November actual construction of the New York caisson got under way at Webb & Bell yards on the other side of the river, while the Brooklyn caisson continued steadily downward. Things were proceeding very nicely now. In the middle of the month Harper’s Weekly published a spectacular double-page view of lower New York and Brooklyn, as though seen from the air (“an unprecedented piece of engraving”), and there, bestriding the East River, bigger and grander by far than anything in sight, was the finished bridge. “This bold and peculiarly American design is not yet wholly beyond the scope of debate,” wrote the editors, whose offices on Pearl Street looked out on the spot where the New York tower would stand. But the beautiful engraved view, placed in the magazine so it could be easily removed and saved by the reader, suggested quite clearly, if their words did not, that they had every confidence in successful results. And for the technical community, Scientific American announced about the same time that “the rapidity with which the work has proceeded is evidence that it is conducted by a man who is fully competent to conduct this greatest engineering feat of modern times,” implying, it would seem, that there had been some doubts about that.

By the end of the month the Brooklyn caisson had reached a depth of almost forty-three feet, or very nearly as far as it would have to go. Another two feet, maybe even less, another ten days would do it, Roebling told the others. In the drafting room, plans were being drawn up for brick piers, ten feet square, that he had decided to build throughout the interior of the caisson, once it was at rest, to provide absolutely solid support for the mounting load overhead during the time it would take to fill the vast chambers with concrete. An order had already been placed for a quarter of a million bricks.

So the end of this first momentous step seemed very near indeed, when, on the morning of Friday, December 2, about the time most people were on their way to work, the news swept through Brooklyn that the caisson was on fire.

The fire had been discovered about nine thirty the previous evening. It had started several hours before that, as near as anyone could judge, in a seam where the frame between chambers No. 1 and No. 2 joined the roof. Every other seam in the roof had long since been pointed with cement, but this one for some unknown reason had been overlooked and the highly inflammable oakum caulking put in when the caisson was being built had been left exposed. In chamber No. 2, just below the place where the fire was discovered, a workman named McDonald had nailed a wooden box about head high, where he evidently stored his dinner pail, and during the change of shifts at three, in order to see into the box, he must have held his candle against the seam just long enough to start the oakum burning.

There had been four or five fires in the caisson before this one, in the summer when the men were still unfamiliar with working in compressed air. But none of those early fires had amounted to very much. They had been put out quickly by the men themselves, without any help from the fire department, or any public knowledge that they had ever happened. The pressure then was still comparatively mild and there was still plenty of river water in the chambers to drown fires with. But the need for extreme caution in such an oxygen-charged atmosphere had been pretty clearly demonstrated, and particularly if one imagined the same thing happening when the caisson got down to a depth where the river would be sealed out. Roebling wanted no chances taken. In the time since, he had had steam pipes introduced, as well as fire extinguishers and a couple of hoses that could throw an inch-and-a-half stream at sixty-five pounds of pressure. Two men had also been assigned to do nothing but watch over all the lights.

Because the fire began directly above the frame, it had remained undetected until the frame itself had burned through near the roof. But once it was discovered, there was a sudden, loud panic among the eighty men inside the caisson at the time. Tools were thrown down, wheelbarrows were overturned in a rush for the ladders. But that had ended quickly enough. Charles Young, the foreman, got the men under control. Nobody left the caisson and Young ordered some of the men to start packing wet clothes, rags, and mud into the cavity where the fire was burning to shut off the draft of compressed air as much as possible.

The charred opening of the cavity was only about as big as a fist, but inside it looked to be about seven feet long and maybe a foot or more wide and it was all a mass of flame. Men tried throwing buckets of water up into it. Then steam was turned into it for fifteen or twenty minutes. The fire extinguishers were tried after that: two big cylinders of carbon dioxide under several hundred pounds of pressure were discharged into the fire in an effort to smother it. But none of this had any noticeable effect. The instant the steam or the fire extinguishers were turned off the timbers would ignite again.

About ten o’clock, or half an hour after the fire was discovered, Roebling was sent for, and by the time he had come down through the air lock, the hoses had been put into service and were enough to extinguish all the fire, or at least all anyone was able to see. Still, as Roebling noticed immediately, a violent draft of compressed air was rushing through the aperture. He had most of it stopped with cement, but kept the water steadily playing into it for the next two hours, the force of the water being greatly enhanced by the draft.

In the meantime, Farrington, the master mechanic, had also been sent for and Roebling put him to work drilling holes into the roof to see how far the fire had penetrated. Several holes bored up to two feet showed no signs of fire. Others were then bored a foot deeper and they too showed nothing. But this work went terribly slowly and the tension for everyone was agonizing. Time was lost lengthening out augers, as Roebling told the story later, and the draft carried the chips up into each hole as it was being drilled. There was also the anxiety of knowing that every new hole meant the introduction of another draft of compressed air into the yellow pine and even a small draft of such air, they all realized, would have about the same effect on smoldering wood as a huge bellows.

It was a strange, unnatural kind of fire they were fighting. There was no flame to be seen now and in the dense atmosphere of the caisson, charged already with lamp smoke and blasting powder, it was impossible to see or to smell whether the cavity was smoking. There was no telling either what damage was being done out of sight, or to what depths the compressed air might force the fire into the fifteen layers of timber overhead, in just the way a great weight might force a spike into wood.

Roebling worked feverishly with a few hand-picked men; the rest he had get back to their regular duties. He did not intend to lose a night’s work unless he absolutely had to. His own efforts for the next several hours would be described as “almost superhuman” by those who were there.

The question of flooding the caisson came up. To put the fire out some less drastic, simpler way would be immensely preferable, Roebling said, but if they were to find that the fire was not out, as it appeared to be, then, he said, it was only a matter of time until the entire foundation would be destroyed. The fire would eat through the immense pine roof like a hidden cancer, destroying one course of timber after another, until the structure was so weakened that the vast weight overhead (now about 28,000 tons, Roebling calculated) would come crashing through.

The problem with flooding, however, was comparable to that of a blowout. Even if water could be substituted for the compressed air as rapidly as the compressed air was allowed to escape, the caisson would lose a considerable, perhaps vital, part of its support. During one of the earlier fires the river had been allowed to rush under the shoe as air was released and a uniform pressure had been maintained until the fire was out. Moreover, the load being borne then was quite light, comparatively speaking. But now the water would have to be poured down the water shafts from above. The supply might be limited, more than likely it would be variable, and so there was a chance the air might get out before the water reached the roof. In that event, of course, the caisson and all it carried would drop suddenly and the blow would probably be enough to destroy all supports.

To compound the problem, one water shaft was resting on several boulders at that particular moment. It had been capped above earlier, drained, and a gang of men were busy that same night digging the boulders out. But if the caisson were to be flooded immediately and settled abruptly as a result, even if only a foot or so, the water shaft would smash down on the boulders with such force as to wrench it permanently out of kilter. And this, quite likely, would leave the caisson leaking so badly that it could never be inflated again.

About three in the morning, water began to drip from the charred seam for the first time, suggesting that the compressed air had driven water into every possible crevice above, that the timber was now totally saturated for fifteen feet up, and that the fire was at last out.

Roebling was so exhausted he could barely stand. He had been in the caisson much of the previous day and had gone home that evening completely played out. The air was also bothering him a good deal. The men now urged him to leave. Then, about five o’clock in the morning, having decided that the fire was out, he had what appears to have been an almost total physical collapse. The accounts there are do not say exactly what his condition was, only that he had to be helped up through the air lock.

Apparently the sharp night air revived him some at first, but then suddenly he felt the beginnings of paralysis. In a matter of minutes he was unable to stand or walk. Nearby, Charles Young, the foreman, who had also been carried up through the lock about the same time, was in an equally bad state.

Roebling was driven directly home in a carriage just as it was turning light. For the next three hours he was rubbed vigorously all over with a solution of salt and whiskey. It was the best way to restore circulation they believed. He was conscious the whole time and he was in no pain apparently. After a bit, with a little help, he was able to get up and walk about, but he was very weak.

At eight, or thereabouts, a man was at the front door with a message. Fire had been discovered again deep in the caisson roof. Roebling dressed and returned immediately to the caisson.

He was down only a few minutes this time. The carpenters had drilled four feet into the overhead timbers and discovered that the whole fourth course of pine was a mass of living coals. The caisson would have to be flooded, Roebling said. It was a last-ditch decision and he made it on the spot, without any hesitation.

In his absence the men working on the boulders beneath the water shaft had succeeded in removing them, so that at least was one worry he could forget about. He ordered the men all up to the surface. An alarm was sounded in the yard and it was only a matter of minutes after he himself had come up out of the air lock that fire engines were clanging through Brooklyn toward the river with hundreds of people chasing after them.

The time was just about nine. Rumors were everywhere. People were saying there had been a terrible explosion beneath the river, that the caisson had been ripped apart, that half the men had been killed and the rest were still trapped below. At the ferry slip, along Fulton Street, Water and Dock, noisy crowds gathered, everybody trying to find out what was happening and nobody able to see very much. The best view, as usual, was from one of the ferries. But hundreds of people worked their way right into the bridge yards, mingling among swarms of firemen who were rolling out hoses from what appeared to be every last fire engine in Brooklyn. On the river, a New York fireboat and two tugs were being brought up alongside the caisson.

“The crowd dispersed, re-gathered, looked here and peered down there to discover the dread destroyer,” the Eagle reported later in the day, “but to the general eye no fire was seen.”

Men, muddied by splashing liquid clay, dampened by the streams of bursting hose, made their difficult way over all obstacles, climbed upon the elevation whence the water shaft is accessible, and looked down, only to see the unrevealing surface of the column of muddy water, with which the shaft is filled. Others again, climbed upon the platform about the air lock, up and down in which the huge rubber pipes go, and in pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, climbed down as far as they might.

Before the morning was out it seemed the whole of Brooklyn had been down to the river’s edge. A double line of police was needed to keep back the crowd. “Everybody was there,” the Eagle said, “and there was considerable lively calculations going on. Persons in every walk of life wandered about the spot, Senators, merchants, laborers. To most of them the whole thing was a mystery.”

It was in truth the damnedest fire anyone could remember seeing. There was no flame, nothing to be seen burning, not even much smoke. In some respects the scene was more like that following a mine disaster, the trouble all concealed below, unexplained and out of reach, except here there was no anguish over human suffering, not even much indication that things were serious. Were it not for rumors and the anxious looks of a few officials, no one would know there was any particular trouble below. The idea that there was even a fire had to be taken pretty much on faith.

About the closest thing to real excitement the whole morning was the bursting of a hose that sent up a spectacular plume of spray “upon which the sunlight played,” said the Eagle, “forming a beautiful, clearly marked rainbow, with a fainter one reflected on the mist and spray from the streams.”

A grand total of thirty-eight streams were pouring into the water shafts by ten o’clock, eight from the fireboat, five from the tugs, the rest from fire engines, including two or three brought over on the ferry from New York. One tug alone was pumping eight thousand gallons a minute and estimates were that inside the caisson the water was rising across the entire interior about eighteen inches an hour. But even at this rate it would be another five hours anyway before the chambers were flooded to the top, and therefore it would be that long or longer until the water did any good, since the fire was all in the roof. So fire, fed by compressed air, would be eating through the timberwork with nothing to restrain it until at least three in the afternoon, which accounted for the “degree of anxiety” noted “on the faces of those familiar with the character of the works.”

This same reporter singled out William Kingsley standing “conspicuously above all the others” and wrote, “He appeared calm and collected and preserved well his equanimity, but a few words of conversation with him showed him to be anxious for the work.” Collingwood, who had not been in the caisson since the day before, was also interviewed and talked of the grave dangers involved with flooding it. Roebling, who remained on hand through the whole morning, would say only that he thought everything would turn out satisfactorily, but that naturally the work would now be delayed some.

By half past three the caisson was entirely filled with water. The compressed air had been replaced without any sudden loss of support. The total quantity of water required was 1,350,000 gallons, which if not quite enough to float a battleship of the day was fairly close to it.

A careful watch had been kept on the pressure gauges during the whole operation; when it appeared that the air was escaping too rapidly, the compressors were started up again. When the water got to within two feet of the roof, the valves used for releasing air were closed off and the balance of the air escaped slowly through leaks and two small pipes. At one point during this stage, pressure dropped suddenly and inexplicably from nineteen to ten pounds.

After the caisson was flooded, the water in the shafts was kept ten feet above tide level, where it stayed with only a little feeding, indicating how very watertight the caisson had become at forty-odd feet below the river.

Still, the prospects looked dim. That night George Templeton Strong, the noted diarist of the time, wrote, “Caisson of the East River bridge was severely damaged by fire yesterday. I don’t believe any man now living will cross that bridge.”

The caisson remained flooded for the next two days, during which time there was an inquiry conducted by the Brooklyn fire marshal. Some of the New York papers, on their editorial pages, questioned what sort of management had allowed such an accident to occur. The Herald said the damage done would cost $250,000. Incredibly, the World implied the fire had been an act of sabotage, that directly or indirectly, it had been the doing of someone connected with the ferry company. The Eagle ridiculed such speculation and worried about what effect the whole incident might have on the morale of the men who had to carry on with the work. But after the fire marshal’s hearing on Saturday, everyone calmed down considerably and it was pretty well concluded that much too much had been made of very little. Collingwood and Farrington both said they did not think the damage would run to more than five hundred dollars. Collingwood thought they had been set back two days at most. C. C. Martin said, “All that the fire has done is to burn little spaces between the beams, very probably very small ones which will not in that mass of timber affect the stability of the structure in the slightest.”

It was also reported by one of the assistant foremen that the man named McDonald, who supposedly started the whole thing, had not been seen or heard from since.

Roebling had testified separately earlier in the day. He was still feeling some paralysis, he said. He too thought the damage had been minor and reported that the caisson had settled only two inches during the flooding, which he said was less than the average daily rate of descent. He left no doubt at all that this highly precarious operation had been very successfully executed and would perhaps prove even beneficial to the caisson in the long run, since the timbers had been getting too dry.

Monday morning the air pressure was restored, the water pushed out in about six hours. It all ran out over the tops of the water shafts. When Roebling and the others went down inside, everything seemed to be in good order, beyond a few blocks crushed and some posts thrown over. The structure itself appeared tighter than before due to the swelling of the timbers.

The fire marshal went into the caisson a little later with C. C. Martin and reported that he watched Roebling and the others at work, checked things over, and said that if he had not been told differently, he would never have known there was any fire at all. There was not the least sign of fire below, he said, except through one small opening and he concurred that the damage had been very slight.

Work was resumed immediately. The brick piers, about a third of the way built by then, were finished in another two weeks and the caisson was lowered the final two feet to rest upon them.

The day before Christmas the men began filling the work chambers with concrete. To save time and cut the quantity of concrete needed by a third, the shoe of the caisson was allowed to sink into the ground three feet deeper than the average level of the caisson floor, which meant that headroom inside was reduced from nine and a half feet to six and a half feet.

The concrete consisted of one part Rosendale cement, two of sand, and four of a fine gravel from the Long Island beaches, where it had been washed perfectly clean by the surf. Outside the caisson the weather by now had turned so cold that the concrete had to be mixed below. So like the bricks for the piers, cement, sand, and gravel were all brought down through the supply shafts, which for some several weeks had been functioning quite flawlessly.

The shafts were iron tubes forty-five feet long and twenty-one inches in diameter, with doors at top and bottom. When the upper door was open, the lower door would be held shut by the pressure in the caisson and locked by two iron clamps worked by levers. Any material needed below would simply be dumped down the shaft and the upper door, which closed up, not down, would be pulled shut. Then compressed air would be allowed to enter the shaft from below, closing the upper door tighter still. As soon as the shaft was filled with compressed air, the lugs on the lower door would be removed, the door would fall open, the contents in the shaft would drop into the chamber. The system was fast, uncomplicated, and quite safe so long as the attendants responsible for it used their heads.

But it was only two weeks after the fire that again something went wrong. Every so often a load of bricks would get jammed in a supply shaft and the usual method of breaking the jam was to drop a weight down on a rope. But this time the men above decided instead to dump in a second load, then signaled for the men below to open the lower door while they neglected to close the upper door. The second load loosened the first, the two together landed on the lower door with a force greater than the air pressure against it from inside, and since the lugs on the door had been opened as directed from above, the door fell open.

Instantly there was an enormous, earsplitting rush of air out of the caisson. Stone and gravel shot from the shaft as if from a cannon. The men on the top dove for cover or fled as fast as their legs would carry them. Had any one of them had the least presence of mind, he could have closed the shaft instantly and had everything locked up tight quite simply by just reaching over and pulling at the rope connected to the upper door. It would have taken no effort whatever. The explosion of air from below would have slammed the door shut. But nobody did that.

Roebling was one of those trapped inside the caisson at the time. The noise, he said, was so deafening that no voice could be heard. Water was pouring in from the water shafts. The lights went out. The air, he said, was full of a dense, impenetrable mist. Men were stumbling all over one another, running in terror, smashing into pillars, tripping and falling in the pitch-darkness, nobody sure where he was going.

In an instant the water was up to their knees. The river had broken in, they all thought.

“I was in a remote part of the caisson at the time,” Roebling wrote, “half a minute elapsed before I realized what was occurring and had groped my way to the supply shaft, where the air was blowing out. Here I joined several firemen in scraping away the heaps of gravel and large stones lying under the shaft, which prevented the lower door from being closed.” It took from two to three minutes for them to clear the door. Then they had it shut and everything was all over. Fifteen minutes later the pressure was restored.

Roebling had kept his head under the most nightmarish conditions, and when nobody else had. He had analyzed the situation in an instant and moved swiftly to put a stop to it. In the eyes of many, it was as commendable a demonstration of cool command as anything he had done on a Civil War battlefield.

Later, in his formal report to the directors, he wrote:

The question naturally arises, what would have been the result if water had entered the caisson as rapidly as the air escaped? The experience here showed that the confusion, the darkness and other obstacles were sufficient to prevent the majority of the men from making their escape by the air-locks…Now it so happens that the supply shafts project two feet below the roof into the air chamber; as soon, therefore, as the water reaches the bottom of the shaft it will instantly rise in it, forming a column of balance and checking the further escape of air. The remaining two feet would form a breathing space sufficient for the men to live, and even if the rush of water were to reduce this space to one foot, there would be enough left to save all hands who retained sufficient presence of mind.

It is not known whether he had realized this before the supply shaft blew out.

Again, as after the “Great Blowout,” an examination was made to determine what effect the impact of sudden weight had had upon various internal supports and particularly on the new brick pillars. By the time Roebling and the others got the supply shaft door closed, pressure in the chamber had dropped from seventeen to four pounds. He reckoned, therefore, that for several minutes the weight on the pillars was twelve tons to the square foot. Still, they showed no signs of strain, which was the clearest demonstration possible of their capacity to bear up under the load they were designed for and proof certainly that Roebling had been right to put them in. More important, the subsoil beneath the pillars, on which the bridge was to bear, had also withstood this same tremendous pressure.

But Roebling would be granted precious little time to take pride in the way things were being handled. Work on the masonry above had stopped because of the weather. Eleven courses of stone had been laid up within a wooden cofferdam, the top of the stonework being about even with the river at high tide. But the people manning the dump carts were still about, along with a number of others who looked after this or that piece of equipment, and they had begun noticing a strong smell of turpentine that seemed to be coming from air bubbles being forced up through the caisson. Large deposits of frothy reddish-brown pyrolignic acid, or “wood vinegar,” as the men called it, had also been found, indicating, as Roebling said, “that a destructive distillation of wood had been going on.”

Acting on what he called very unpleasant suspicions, Roebling quietly ordered Farrington to start drilling into the roof again. About two hundred borings were made to determine for everyone’s satisfaction just how extensive was the internal damage from the fire.

Most of it seemed to be confined to the third and fourth courses of timber, as had been expected, but as nobody had imagined, it also extended out laterally in every direction, in some places as much as fifty feet, or about five times farther than anyone had judged earlier. Equally disturbing was the discovery that the compressed air was rushing out of every bore hole, which meant that any attempt to cut into the roof to make repairs would result in an enormous drain on pressure.

Roebling decided, however, that if the air chamber were filled in with concrete around the edges, the pressure might now be released entirely with no harm. He had decided, in other words, that he could trust the brick pillars to support everything. So if maintaining pressure was no longer the vital concern, then holes as large as need be could be cut overhead and the damaged areas seen to properly.

Still, as he wrote, “It was very desirable…to gain time and do as much as possible at once, while air pressure was yet on.” It would be necessary therefore to plug the boreholes and at the same time compensate somehow for the honeycomb of charred pine they all pictured overhead.

Accordingly cement grout was injected into all two hundred boreholes. It was no easy task and it took quite some time. Roebling had a cylinder and piston fixed to a quarter-inch pipe. The cylinder was filled with liquid cement, placed under a borehole, the pipe inserted, then the cement forced up the hole by a screw jack. The technique worked well for the most part. The cement could be forced a good ten feet into the timber and appeared to spread out laterally to some distance. But the moment it met any resistance, all the water would be squeezed out, and to budge the charge another inch became impossible. So a thinner mixture was tried and it was found that the suction of compressed air alone, through the holes, was enough to draw this up the pipe and into the timberwork.

By the time they were finished, six hundred cubic feet of cement had been pumped into the caisson roof. The leaks had been stopped and a number of new boreholes in the area of the trouble failed to reveal a single place without its own vein of hardened cement. “We already flattered ourselves that this filling might answer every purpose…” Roebling wrote.

But just to be sure, he had a great hole, six feet across, cut into the roof through five layers of timber, directly over the spot where the fire had originated. And by opening up the roof this way they discovered that they had been exceedingly proficient in their work and that it had been a great mistake. The cement had indeed filled every crack and crevice, but most of the timber beneath the cement was covered with a layer of soft, brittle charcoal, anywhere from one to three inches thick.

It was a crushing revelation. It meant that every last bit of the cement put in so laboriously would have to come out, and any charcoal there was would have to be found and scraped away. There was no other alternative Roebling said. The caisson roof, the timber platform upon which the bridge tower would stand, had to be absolutely, permanently solid. He could take no chances on that. He could no more let it go this way then he could launch a ship with rotten timbers.

The immense, painstaking job of restoration that followed took a force of eighteen carpenters three full months to complete, working night and day. It was like gigantic dentistry, as someone said. To say that the work was extremely disagreeable, as Roebling did in his report to the Board of Directors, was to greatly understate the situation.

Not until the cement was all chopped out did anyone realize the full extent of the fire. Instead of one opening into the roof, five had to be cut, slowly, laboriously, each one three to four feet square and five feet deep or more. Above the original opening it was found that the fire had not only turned the third and fourth courses of timber to charcoal, but it had burned right through the sheet tin between courses four and five, destroyed the fifth course and made a start on the sixth. To judge by the traces it left, the fire had advanced mainly as a slow, intense charring that expanded equally in all directions. But in numerous places it had been strangely erratic, due no doubt to the multitude of leaks that fanned it. Roebling noted, for example, that a single 12-by-12 timber would be burned away for thirty feet, while one just like it directly alongside would be untouched. And since the courses had been laid up at right angles to one another, the fire had had opportunity to branch off in a zigzag pattern, jumping from one timber to another, heading off left or right, up or down.

Damaged timbers were carefully scraped clean and all jagged edges were squared off with chisels. Every foot of burned wood was cut out. New cement was rammed into the smaller places, while new timber was cut to size (in lengths of eight to ten feet usually), rammed into all the larger openings with a screw jack, and securely bolted.

The burned channels that wandered laterally between the big vertical openings were generally about two by three feet in dimension. All such channels had to be gouged out by hand, then filled in in the same manner. The men worked like coal miners along such veins, inching forward on their backs or sides, with barely enough room to move, digging out charcoal instead of coal, imprisoned in a mountain of wood instead of earth. For hours at a time a man would be confined to a single spot, unable to turn around, his only light a little bull’s-eye lantern, and breathing candle smoke, cement dust, and powdered charcoal. Because the air pressure had been greatly reduced by the openings that had been cut, the ventilation was dreadful and the heat remained near 90 degrees.

“After everything was filled up solid,” Roebling wrote, “a number of five-foot bolts were driven up from below so as to unite both the old and new timber into a compact body.” He also had forty iron straps bolted against the roof from below, and inside the air chamber, directly under the line of the fire, he had great square blocks of traprock set in the concrete that was being put down over the rest of the chamber floor.

When the repairs were at last completed Roebling reminded everyone that there were still eleven perfectly sound layers of timber above the first four. And in his final report he stated, “From the faithful manner in which the work was done it is certain that the burnt district is fully as strong, if not stronger than the rest of the caisson.” Most people believed him.

The fire and its aftermath had been a sobering experience. It had delayed the work two, possibly three months. With the payroll running about eleven thousand dollars every two weeks, this meant a loss of some fifty thousand dollars at least, on that score alone. The fire had done much to reinforce the arguments of the skeptics, of whom there were still plenty on both sides of the river. This said one New York paper was the “main mischief” of the whole unhappy affair. But it had also been a brutal physical and mental ordeal for many of the men, and for Roebling in particular, whose strength had never quite returned since the night he collapsed in the caisson. He was a changed man after that, his assistants would say later.

Had he decided early that night to flood the caisson, in spite of the boulders beneath the water shaft, then things might have gone differently. But if he ever speculated about that, it was only in private.

The last repairs were completed on March 6, 1871. Five days later the air chamber was completely filled with concrete. During the final few weeks of sinking the caisson, several fresh-water springs had been encountered, and now, much to everyone’s astonishment, the water came right up through six feet of concrete in such quantity that it filled the water shafts clear to the top. The water was perfectly fresh, without a trace of salt, so it was all coming from directly beneath the caisson. The shafts were drained, therefore, and they too were filled with concrete. The air locks were removed and these empty spaces were also filled with concrete.

So by mid-March the Brooklyn caisson was permanently in place. The hardest, most treacherous and uncertain part of the work, the sinking of the caissons, was half done. No lives had been lost, no one had been seriously injured. Every man on the engineering staff had proved himself worthy of the faith Roebling had in him, and none had quit.

Work on the Brooklyn side from here on would be of the sort everyone had been anticipating. There would be something actually to see now, to watch grow and change from one day to another. The Brooklyn tower, it was commonly said, would be the greatest structure in the world except for the Pyramids. “America has seen nothing like it,” Thomas Kinsella wrote on the editorial page of the Eagle. “Even Europe has no structure of such magnitude as this will be. The most famous cathedrals and castles of the historic Old World are but pygmies by the side of this great Brooklyn tower. And it is our own city which is to be forever famous for possessing this greatest architectural and engineering work of the continent, and of the age.”

Such grandeur was still several years off, everyone knew, but it was not so very difficult to picture. “Think of Trinity Church as big at the top of the steeple as at the ground,” said Kinsella, “and one solid mass all the way up, and we get some idea of what this great Brooklyn tower is to be…the fame of the Roeblings and the boast of Brooklyn forever will be that, where Nature gave no facilities for a suspension bridge, and seemed indeed to place a veto upon the idea in these low and shelving shores, the genius of the father designed, and the consummate inherited and acquired ability of the son executed, in spite of all obstacles, this most novel and unparalleled masterpiece….”

But not until June 5, when the Eagle published Washington Roebling’s annual report to the directors of the Bridge Company, did the people of Brooklyn and New York get a fair idea of what exactly had been accomplished to make the tower possible. Except for the flurry of excitement when the fire was discovered, almost nothing about the details of the work or the setbacks experienced inside the caisson had appeared in the newspapers. Roebling’s report filled seven and a half columns. It was straightforward, unadorned, and it was read with enormous interest. People were utterly astonished to learn all that had taken place beneath their very noses. “We are not partial to long official reports,” the Eagle said by way of introduction, “but this one is exceptional in the thrilling interest of the story.” Roebling was praised for his modesty by the editors and lauded for his own personal heroism in such a way that it seemed they too were realizing for the very first time the extent of what had happened down at the end of Fulton Street. In 1870, when the caisson was making its slow, tedious descent, the English translation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea had appeared in America, with its adventures of the strange genius Captain Nemo. Now the Eagle wrote: “The adventures of Colonel Roebling and his twenty-five hundred men under the bed of the East River are as readable, as he tells them, as any story of romance which has issued from the imagination of the novelist.”

What Colonel Roebling and his men might run up against on their next descent was now, naturally, a matter of much popular interest. On one side of the river a tower of imperishable granite would be rising straight into the sunlight, while on the other side, mortal men would be descending beneath the tides and into the earth. It was quite a picture to keep in mind for anyone crossing the river to clerk in a countinghouse or sit the long day at a sewing machine.

11

The Past Catches Up

The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.

—WALT WHITMAN,
Democratic Vistas

WHEN the New York caisson hit the water it made such a wave that several tugs standing close by were tossed about in a “very sportive manner” and two men in a rowboat, who had come in close for a better view, were immediately swamped and had to be rescued. Because of the comparatively shallow water in front of the Sixth Street launchways, the caisson had been built with a temporary floor, which was the reason for the wave. Otherwise the launching had gone off perfectly, as expected. Indeed, the engineers had been so confident of success that Emily Roebling and Mrs. William Kingsley had gone along with their husbands and several others on top of the caisson as it was sent hurtling down the ways.

At a large luncheon served in the Webb & Bell offices afterward everybody had been in high spirits. “We are now on foreign soil!” proclaimed John W. Hunter of Brooklyn, one of the stockholders. Everyone cheered. Then Henry Slocum got up and said he and Kinsella had agreed that Kinsella would do the speaking, while he did the thinking. But Kinsella interrupted immediately. Slocum was to do the drinking not the thinking, the editor said, and the laughter was very great according to later accounts.

After that Kinsella reminisced about the days when the bridge was no more than “the shadow in the brain of one man,” as he put it. “When William C. Kingsley [loud applause] was the founder, he put up more of fortune and reputation than any man I ever knew to do in an enterprise at the time so shadowy.” Then Slocum was on his feet again to propose a toast to Kingsley “as the man to whom we are more indebted than to all others.” There was a standing ovation for Kingsley, who said only that he had never made a speech in his life and asked instead that everyone drink to the health of Colonel Roebling. According to one version of the scene, Roebling was “subsequently introduced and loudly cheered, but not threats nor blandishments could coerce a speech out of him.”

The launching of the caisson and the celebrative luncheon afterward took place on May 8, 1871. There was still a great deal to be done, however, before the caisson would be ready for use. By the time it was completely fitted out, towed to position, and sufficiently loaded down so that the men could begin work inside, seven more months would have passed, the year would be nearly over, and by then if anyone were to use the word “shadowy” to describe the early business of building the bridge, it would be for quite different reasons. For by the time the New York caisson would start its descent, the Tweed Ring would have collapsed, something no one would have believed possible in May of 1871.

The year had begun splendidly for Tweed. On New Year’s Day Oakey Hall was again sworn in as mayor of New York and John T. Hoffman as governor. If everything went according to Tweed’s plan, 1872 would see Hoffman elected President of the United States, Hall governor, and Tweed a United States Senator, or at least so it seemed to a number of political observers.

The annual Americus Club Ball in early January had been a triumph. The club stood on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, at Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from Tweed’s own summer place. It was as sumptuous as any club in the country and the pinnacle of Tammany social life. On the night of the ball the great halls of the clubhouse were described as “a labyrinth of festoons, flowers, fountains, flags, and fir trees.” To the obvious delight of the club president, Tweed, a thousand canaries chirped in gilded cages hung everywhere about the hall, while on the stage before the dance floor there blazed an immense gaslight rendition of the Tammany banner, the familiar snarling tiger’s head of Tweed’s old Americus Six fire company. Vases of cut flowers lined the walls, and fronting the main entrance was a life-sized photograph of the great man himself, hand-colored with crayons. Some six thousand people were there, the papers said, making it “a gala pageant such as is rarely witnessed anywhere in the world.”

But later in the month, on the night of the 24th, a sleighing accident had occurred north of Central Park, in which a man named James Watson had been badly injured. Twenty years before, Watson had been behind bars in the Ludlow Street Jail when the warden put him in charge of the prison records because of his exquisite penmanship. But Watson had advanced rapidly in the time since and was now County Auditor and trusted bookkeeper for the Tweed Ring. A week after the accident Watson was dead and so began the fall of the house of Tweed.

The newspapers made little of Watson’s demise and no one thought much more about it. Such momentous events were taking place elsewhere in the world that public interest in the Ring and its doings had greatly subsided. The Franco-Prussian War, which had begun the summer before in Europe, was coming to a thunderous conclusion. On January 18, in a solemn ceremony at Versailles, the German Empire had been born. Incredibly, France was about to be overthrown. Popular support for the Germans was enormous in the United States and in New York especially. King William I of Germany was described by the papers as an affable, courteous old gentleman and a special favorite of children. Heroic Prussian infantry charged across the illustrated pages of Harper’s Weekly. On January 27, newsboys in the streets were hollering the surrender of Paris. But the bloodshed had continued for months afterward, as civil war broke out within the city, and the New York papers were filled with grisly accounts of hostages murdered by the Communards.

Not until the last of May was Tweed back in the news to any great degree and even then the occasion was a happy one, the publicity just what Tweed wanted. One of Tweed’s daughters, Miss Mary Amelia Tweed, was being married to Mr. Arthur Ambrose Maginnis of New Orleans and the father of the bride and his friends put on quite a show.

The wedding took place at seven o’clock on the evening of May 31, 1871, in Trinity Chapel, where, at the appointed hour, “a richly attired audience” watched Tweed, daughter on arm, come slowly, grandly down the aisle to the tune of Mendelssohn’s march. The bride wore white corded silk, “décolleté, with demi-sleeves, and immense court train.” There were orange blossoms in her hair and she carried a huge white bridal bouquet. But the diamonds were what everyone talked about later. “On the bride’s bosom flashed a brooch of immense diamonds,” said the Sun, “and long pendants, set with large solitaire diamonds, sparkled in her ears.” On the white satin shoes she wore there glittered tiny diamond buttons.

The mother of the bride, attired in salmon-colored silk, also wore “splendid diamonds,” and it was noted that “Mr. Tweed himself wore black evening dress, and a magnificent diamond flashed on his bosom.”

After the service Tweed put on a reception at his Fifth Avenue mansion, where a blue silk awning and a Brussels carpet had been run out to the curbstone and a huge crowd had gathered in the street. The house was ablaze with lights. A fountain played at one corner. Inside, the rooms were a mass of flowers. “Imagine all this,” one dazzled reporter wrote, “lighted up with the utmost brilliancy, and hundreds of ladies and gentlemen in all the gorgeousness of full dress and flashing with diamonds, listen to the delicious strains of the band and inhale in spirit the sweet perfume which filled the atmosphere, and some inadequate notion can be formed of the magnificence of the scene.”

The dinner was catered by Delmonico’s, but the main attraction was a display of wedding presents in a big room upstairs. The gifts lined all four walls and were said to surpass anything seen since the marriage of the daughter of the Khedive of Egypt two years before. There were forty sets of sterling silver. One piece of jewelry alone was known to have cost $45,000. Peter “Brains” Sweeny gave diamond bracelets “of fabulous magnificence,” and Tweed’s two other fellow stockholders in the Bridge Company, Smith and Connolly, proved equally generous. The Herald came up with an estimated cash value of everything on display: “Seven hundred thousand dollars!”

The wedding was the high-water mark of the Ring’s opulence and for Tweed it was a great blunder. The public, dazzled and delighted at first, began to ask questions afterward. How could a man who had spent his whole life working in moderately paid positions with the city live in such style? Where did the likes of Police Superintendent Kelso get money enough to buy a wedding gift that, as the papers reported, was the “exact duplicate” of the one presented by Jim Fisk? People said the wedding was proof positive of the corruption the Times had been making such a commotion over and papers other than the Times took up the cry.

“What a testimony of the loyalty, the royalty, and the abounding East Indian resources of Tammany Hall,” wrote the Herald with bitter sarcasm two days after the wedding. “Was there any Democracy to compare with thy Democracy, in glory, power, and equal rights, under the sun? Never! And it is just the beginning of the good time coming. Don’t talk of Jeff Davis and his absurd Democracy; don’t mention the Democracy of the Paris Commune, as representing true Democratic principles; but come to the fountainhead of Democracy, the old Wigwam, and you will get it there—if you get within the lucky circle of the ‘magic’ Ring.”

So with summer coming on, the public was ripe for disclosures and as chance would have it things had been happening inside the “lucky circle” that would reveal for the first time and in plain figures examples of such outrageous plunder that Tweed’s wedding expenditures would look rather modest by contrast. The pattern of events was like something from one of the popular melodramas of the time, for it was on the very day of the wedding that a man named Matthew J. O’Rourke quit his job as County Bookkeeper, taking with him a package of documents he had been quietly assembling.

O’Rourke was a newspaperman who had been hired two months earlier when the County Bookkeeper of longstanding was moved into the late James Watson’s place as County Auditor. For some strange reason Tweed’s people had not bothered to take O’Rourke into their confidence. Moreover, O’Rourke had long had a claim against the city which the Ring had ignored. So he had very carefully copied down a number of choice samples from the ill-fated Watson’s old account books and these he delivered to the offices of The New York Times.

Watson had been at the nerve center of the Ring. Indeed, if there was “magic” to the Ring, Watson was the unseen assistant who made it work, and as with most grand deceptions the secret was extremely simple.

Watson merely required everyone who received a contract from the city to increase his bills before submitting them by 50 to 65 per cent. Watson paid the face amount of the bill, then the contractor returned the overcharge in cash, and Watson, like a dutiful paymaster, handed it out within the Ring. Among New York contractors it was commonly said, “You must do just as Jimmy tells you, and you will get your money.”

Anyone who knew a little bookkeeping could look at Watson’s voucher records and see what was going on. O’Rourke, for example, judged from what he saw that the Ring had made off with $75 million since 1869.

Watson had worked directly for Comptroller Connolly. Why Connolly had been so careless about whom he let see Watson’s books is hard to fathom. But the books were left so unguarded that the Times soon received a second bundle of figures from a man named William Copeland, who had copied down still further revelations. *

Tweed found out that the Times had the material before any of it appeared in print and he reacted predictably. Figuring that George Jones, publisher of the Times, had his price, like any man, Tweed told Connolly to go see him. Connolly offered Jones five million dollars to kill the story. Jones declined, reportedly saying to Connolly, “I don’t think the devil will ever make a higher bid for me than that.” Connolly persisted. “Why with that sum you could go to Europe and live like a prince,” he said. “Yes,” answered Jones, “but I should know that I was a rascal.”

To Tweed the time seemed also right for silencing Thomas Nast. A well-known banker was selected to call on Nast. The banker told Nast that his artistic talents were much admired by certain gentlemen, that these same gentlemen thought so highly of Nast that they would be willing to put up $100,000 to help him further develop his genius in Europe. Nast asked if he might get $500,000 to make the trip. “You can,” the banker is supposed to have answered most enthusiastically. “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it,” Nast said. “I made up my mind not long ago to put some of those fellows behind bars, and I am going to put them there.” Whereupon Nast was told to be careful lest he put himself in a coffin first. (Later, after the Times opened fire on him, Tweed said that were he a younger man he would have gone and killed Jones personally.)

The Times began running transcripts from Watson’s account books in early July, starting with some armory frauds O’Rourke had copied down. (Ten old stables rented by the Ring for practically nothing had been sublet to the county as armories for $85,000 a year; the buildings had not been used at all, still the county had paid out nearly half a million dollars just for repairs on them.) Later in the month a special supplement was gotten out by the Times documenting the outlandish courthouse swindles, among other things. Two hundred thousand copies were sold out at once. Horace Greeley wrote in the Tribune that if the Times had its facts straight, then Mayor Oakey Hall and Connolly ought to be breaking rocks in a state prison. In the meantime, however, on July 12, the Ring had been dealt still another blow and, quite unintentionally, by some of its most ardent supporters.

July 12 was the day for the annual Orangemen’s Parade, in honor of the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The event had caused a serious riot the year before, in Elm Park. Some two thousand Protestant Irish Orangemen gathered for a picnic had been set upon by about three times as many Irish Catholics armed with clubs and pistols. The police had arrived eventually, but not before several people had been killed on both sides and scores severely wounded. This year, fearing the same would happen again, Mayor Hall had forbidden the Orangemen to hold their parade. (Though himself a Protestant and of English ancestry, the Elegant Oakey was accustomed to reviewing St. Patrick’s Day parades dressed in a green cassimere suit with shamrock buttons, a bright-green cravat, and green kid gloves.) Hall’s decision provoked a storm of protest. The Ring was pandering to the Catholic rabble it was said. New York had come to a terrible pass if decent people were no longer able to parade peaceably without fear of mob violence.

As a result Governor Hoffman, probably acting with Tweed’s consent, if not at his direction, came rushing down from Albany to issue a proclamation saying that anyone who wished to “assemble and march in peaceable procession” was at liberty to do so and would get full protection from the police and the military. It was an immensely popular move. Some 160 Orangemen decided to go ahead with their parade. Four regiments of National Guard were ordered to stand by, including the Ninth, in which Tweed’s bosom friend Fisk was a colonel. Catholic priests called for peace and understanding, while it was rumored that in Brooklyn trained gangs of Irish thugs were getting ready for action.

The line of march was from the Gideon Lodge of Orangemen in Lamartine’s Hall, at Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, downtown to Cooper Union, at Eighth Street and the Bowery. Nothing much happened until the Orangemen reached 26th Street, where the police, marching on either side, had to force a path through a crowd blocking the way. At 25th Street the police were ordered to charge. By then stones and bricks were coming down from housetops. Near the corner of 24th Street a shot was fired. The police said later it came from an upstairs window, but others claimed a rifle went off accidentally among the Ninth Regiment, which had been drawn up at 25th Street, with the comic-looking Fisk prancing about on horseback.

Whichever the case, the bullet took off part of the head of a private in Company K, of the Ninth. Instantly, without orders, the soldiers opened fire into the crowds. The fusillade was very brief. When it was over, two soldiers, one policeman, and a total of forty-six bystanders, including a number of women and children, were dead.

(Fisk had dismounted in the midst of all this and disappeared into a saloon, where, it was later learned, he escaped out a back door, scaled several fences, got rid of his uniform in a house on 23rd Street, then fled as swiftly as possible to Long Branch, New Jersey, the fashionable seashore resort.)

Everyone was furious at the Ring, including most of the Irish Catholics who had long been the very lifeblood of Tammany. Among the Protestants there was angry talk of Irish despotism. “Write on the tombstone of Wednesday’s victims: ‘Murdered by the criminal management of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’” one man commented. Others felt the riot was symptomatic of a larger tragedy. “Behind the folly and wickedness of the Irish,” said The Nation, “there lie American shortcoming, corruption, and indifference.”

The problem was, however, that most of the people who could have organized any sort of movement against Tweed were out of town for the summer. The Times continued its assault day after day, but nothing happened. When Tweed was pressed to comment on what the Times was printing about him, he exclaimed defiantly, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

As it was, nothing would be done about it until the end of the summer, when a mass meeting was called at Cooper Union on the night of Monday, September 4. Former Mayor William Havemeyer presided, thousands attended. In no time the rather refined and reserved-looking crowd was in a fine frenzy. “There is no power like the power of the people armed, aroused, and kindled with the enthusiasm of a righteous wrath!” said Judge James Emott from the speaker’s platform. No more could there be any denying the frauds of the Ring, he said, and in obvious answer to Tweed’s now famous retort, he asked, “Now, what are you going to do about these men?” “Hang them!” shouted voices from the audience.

A so-called Committee of Seventy was organized that night, and included among its membership some of the most distinguished names in New York—Judge Emott, Robert Roosevelt, Andrew Green, who had been a pallbearer at John A. Roebling’s funeral, and Abram Hewitt. Also among them was Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy friend and New York neighbor of Hewitt’s. Tilden was a rather cold, calculating corporation lawyer and a Tammany Democrat of great ambition, who had had little derogatory to say about Tweed prior to this, but who now took charge of the committee and shortly became known as the leader of the entire reform movement.

The campaign to destroy the Ring was on in earnest. On September 12 someone broke into Comptroller Connolly’s offices and stole all the vouchers for the year 1870. The theft was a great mystery according to city officials. But in Harper’s Weekly Nast pictured Connolly, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall looking highly ridiculous as they proclaimed their innocence and a few weeks later Nast had the same group cowering in the shadow of a gallows.

Secretly, Tweed began transferring all his real estate holdings to his son. Hall tried to get Connolly to resign, while Connolly, terrified the others were about to throw him to the lions, consulted with Tilden, who told him to take a leave of absence and appoint the upright Andrew Green as Acting Comptroller. This was done. Armed guards were stationed in the Comptroller’s office to watch over what remained of the records. The reformers had achieved a beachhead.

Tweed, however, was anything but placid through all this. He had power aplenty still and he had no intention of giving up without a fight. The real test, he knew, the only one that mattered, would be in November, at the polls. His own term as State Senator would expire on December 31.

First he had himself unanimously re-elected chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall. Then he went off to the Democratic state convention at Rochester, taking along a gang of New York thugs to remind any wavering delegates where their sympathies lay. Bribes were handed out liberally. Tilden and some other reform delegates put up a fight of sorts, but Tweed was in control the whole time and everyone knew it. He got the nominations he wanted, including his own.

Back on the Lower East Side of New York the day after the convention ended, Tweed stood before some twenty thousand cheering followers, in Tweed Plaza, doffed a little Scotch cap, bowed low, and said the following:

At home again amidst the haunts of my childhood and scenes where I had been always surrounded by friends, I feel I can safely place myself and my record, all I have performed as a public official plainly before your gaze. The manner in which I have been received tonight has sent a throb to my heart, but I would be unjust to myself and unjust to those who have seen fit to entrust me with office if at times like these, when to be a Democrat, when to hold a public office is to be aspersed and condemned without trial, traduced without stint, there was not felt to be engraven on my heart the proud satisfaction that as a public officer, I can go to the friends of my childhood, take them by the hand, take them in a friendly manner, and saying to them, “There is my record,” and finding that it meets with their approval.

For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities. New York being the biggest of big cities, it would quite naturally produce a Tweed. New York simply got what New York deserved was the feeling. The city was mostly foreign-born after all, better than half Roman Catholic. The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed. “Perhaps the title ‘Boss of New York’ will grow into permanence and figure in history like that of the doge of Venice,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. Even Walt Whitman of Brooklyn, who celebrated the “power, fullness, and motion” of New York in his Democratic Vistas published that year, wrote savagely of the “deep disease” of America, which he diagnosed as “hollowness at heart.

But if in New York—even in New York—men of principle, men of integrity, education, and property, could rise up and triumph over a Tweed, then perhaps there was hope for the Republic. The idea was a tonic. Numerous other cities had their “mute, inglorious Tweeds,” as E. L. Godkin wrote in The Nation, and other cities would have their own spirited crusades for the restoration of political virtue. Reform groups became the fashion. Committees were formed. Silent indifference to political immorality was no longer acceptable in polite society and Brooklyn was no exception.

As might be expected the impact of things happening so close by in New York was especially pronounced in Brooklyn. The talk that October was nearly all politics. The editors of the Union, in their offices directly below the Bridge Company, wrote that Brooklyn could well use the services of New York’s Committee of Seventy and that there had been “fear and trembling” among certain Brooklyn officials ever since the assault on Tweed began.

That election frauds had made the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn two years before was common knowledge. That there would be more of the same this time seemed inevitable. But even Kalbfleisch appeared to be caught up with reform spirit. He had denounced the Democrats and was running for re-election as an independent. So it was a three-way race. The Republicans had a candidate and Boss McLaughlin had put up a former mayor named Powell, a decent enough man, as were most McLaughlin mayors, with the notable exception of Kalbfleisch.

The Democrats appeared to be in trouble for the first time in years. The opposition was calling for the downfall of the Brooklyn Ring along with the Tweed Ring. Kalbfleisch would assuredly take away more Democratic votes than Republican. For McLaughlin, for Murphy, Kingsley, and Thomas Kinsella, these were exceedingly busy times, with much at stake, not the least of which was the total say on how the Bridge Company ought to be run. Nobody who understood the realities of Brooklyn politics seriously thought the Democrats might lose, but at the same time the Democrats were taking no chances.

Then on the 23rd of October there was a horrible accident at the bridge. Two men had been killed, both married men with families. A third was so dreadfully mangled that little hope was held out for him, and five others were badly injured. Until now the bridge had had a perfect safety record. In the two years since construction began there had not been a single serious accident, no injuries to speak of, no loss of life. This was extraordinary, in view of the known hazards, and it was generally taken as a sign of conscientious management.

The Brooklyn tower by then had reached a height of about seventy feet. The day of the accident an eight-ton block of granite was being hauled to the top of the tower by one of the three huge boom derricks mounted there, which were all held in position by wire rigging, like the masts of a ship. Suddenly a socket in one of the guy wires broke and two derricks fell from the tower.

One man, a rigger on the derricks, was struck by a great wooden boom that sheared off half his skull. He was thrown down on the top of the tower, stone dead. “If he had stood still he would not have been injured,” C. C. Martin said later; “but when he heard everything crackling and crashing, he lost his presence of mind and ran out where the derrick was coming down just in time to be struck.”

Another man had been standing on an elevated railroad track that ran along the side of the tower facing the river, about fifty feet above the dock where the stone scows tied up. His job was to shove a little flatcar under the stones as they were hoisted by an engine on the dock, then move them into position to be picked up by one of the derricks on the tower. When the derricks fell, the stone suspended from one of them crashed through the track about twenty feet from the spot where he was standing. It would have missed him, in other words. But seeing it coming, he had fled to the end of the track and leaped off. The fall broke both of his legs and no one knew how much else internally. He died later.

The other man killed instantly was also on top of the tower. He too saw the derricks falling and tried to get out of the way by jumping over a granite block sitting on the masonry. Just as he jumped, the mast of one derrick fell on him, crushing him, face downward, into a crevice in the masonry no more than eight inches deep.

Roebling, Paine, and Collingwood were over on the New York side at the time, but C. C. Martin, who was in his office in the yard below, heard the crash and rushed up the narrow flight of stairs built at one corner of the tower. Martin found several men trying frantically and futilely to move the fallen derrick. The man caught beneath was unconscious but still alive. Martin sent for jacks and levers and in another fifteen minutes had the derrick up and off. The man was pulled out from under; he breathed a few times, as though his awful agony had been eased, then died.

The man’s name was Daugherty and he had been working near Thomas Douglas, the stonemason, who was foreman on the tower. Douglas had started off running in the same direction as Daugherty, but instead of trying to jump the stone block in the way, he had crouched down beside it. As a result the stone saved him. But when Daugherty was struck, his knees came down on Douglas’ back, pinning Douglas so he could not move. In his agony Daugherty kicked Douglas in the kidneys so severely that Douglas would never recover. He lived on for nearly two years after that, working part of the time, but troubled terribly by the injury and gradually growing worse. The story goes that he wanted to live only long enough to know that the Brooklyn tower was finished. When he was told that it had been, he died almost immediately afterward. “He was a splendid man,” Martin told reporters.

But the accident also left a lot of people wondering how well things were being managed by the Bridge Company and at a time when what the Bridge Company needed most was public confidence. The guy wire on the derrick broke because of a defective weld in one socket, as would be learned. The accident had not been caused by mismanagement or the use of shoddy equipment, but a great many people did not know that, or believe it if they did.

An investigation was called for and was conducted by the coroner, with the result that the Bridge Company was entirely exonerated and credited publicly with using the best-quality material and taking every precaution to guard against accidents. “This has been the case from the first and will continue to be,” William Kingsley stated; “no labor or expense will be spared to insure the safety of the employees.” The day before elections the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased payments of $250, or a little better than three months’s wages.

But a few days after the accident and two weeks before the elections several hundred reform-minded Brooklynites met inside the Brooklyn Skating Rink to organize their own Committee of Fifty, as they called it, or the Rink Committee, as it would become popularly known—“to investigate charges of fraud, extravagance, and corruption in several departments of the city government.” Also included for investigation was the New York Bridge Company.

As expected, the Democrats won in Brooklyn, but by only a slim margin. They were immediately charged with bringing hired goons over from New York, with buying votes, with using repeaters, fictitious names, all the customary devices. Most of the charges were probably true. That there was fraud at the polls there is no doubt whatever. Later examinations would show that a minimum of six thousand illegal votes were cast. But only five men would be convicted in subsequent trials, all of them quite unknown and unimportant, largely because the Democrats had in their possession some damaging information concerning the prosecuting district attorney.

Powell was mayor now. McLaughlin, Kingsley, and the rest were all still in power. But across the river the election had destroyed the Tweed Ring.

The reformers had gone to work in New York as never before, and they had worked together, Republicans and Democrats. It was their one best and last chance, they believed. Young Men’s Reform Associations were organized. Clergymen called upon their congregations to do their duty. Newspapers and picture magazines described it as probably the most important election ever. On Election Day A. T. Stewart closed his store so every clerk could vote. Four regiments of militia backed up the police to see that everything was conducted properly at the polls and for the most part it was. Among many older, wealthier citizens, however, it was thought that very little would come of all this.

The reform ticket won by an overwhelming majority. Only two Tammany aldermen managed to survive. Tilden was elected to the State Assembly. Of the five Senatorial districts in the city, candidates put up by the Committee of Seventy were victorious in all but one—Tweed’s. But Tweed’s majority was less than half what it had been two years earlier and it had cost quite a sum of cash distributed about the ward. A few days after the votes were counted it was announced that the annual Americus Club Ball would be postponed.

Almost immediately the New York World sent a reporter across the river to interview the man thought to be the brains of the Kings County machine, William C. Kingsley. The World had been notably patient with Tweed all these years and now seemed eager to demonstrate that New York had no franchise on corruption. Kingsley stated categorically that there was no such thing as a Brooklyn Ring. Hugh McLaughlin, he said, lived in the plainest fashion. Why McLaughlin did not even keep a horse, Kingsley said with emphasis, and was probably not worth $100,000. The contrast with Tweed went without saying.

Kingsley conceded that the Kings County Democrats had taken something of a beating at the polls largely because of Tweed’s troubles. “That great tidal wave of corruption in sweeping over the land has damaged us here to a certain extent,” he remarked. But just so nobody misjudged his own motives, he concluded the interview by saying that he would be richer by $250,000 had he never had anything to do with politics.

Sometime soon after that the Committee of Fifty began looking into the management of the Bridge Company. The committee had already searched first for foul play in the management of Prospect Park and failed to turn up much. One or two other investigations were proving equally inconsequential, and among Brooklyn Democrats, the very conscientious chairman of the committee, a man named Backhouse, became the butt of innumerable bad jokes. But with the bridge the investigators believed they were on to something, and chiefly as a result of their curiosity a number of matters that had only been talked about privately before got into print a good deal sooner than they would have otherwise.

Tweed’s prominent role in the business of the bridge, not to mention that of his three Tammany compatriots, Smith, Connolly, and Sweeny, was, of course, an obvious embarrassment to the Bridge Company at this particular time and many Brooklyn people thought that role and its origins needed explaining. But it was Kingsley’s rather ill-defined position in the management of bridge business and how precisely he was being rewarded for his “services” that now became subjects of the keenest interest.

Kingsley was a difficult man to figure. His name was a football in Brooklyn, as Beecher would say. On the one hand he was a force for progress, industrious, respected by the respectable (Murphy and Stranahan, most notably), a good citizen if ever there was one. His firm of Kingsley & Keeney was building the Brooklyn Theater, lately the most talked about new building in town. He was one of the commissioners for the new capitol in Albany. His personal success was obvious. He was a kind and devoted family man. He attended church regularly. He was generous with his money, openly compassionate in times of trouble. When news of the Chicago Fire reached Brooklyn that October, he had been among the very first to do something. Along with Kalbfleisch, Judge McCue, and Isaac Van Anden, he had donated $100,000 to aid the stricken city. This “princely contribution” was announced as only the prelude to Brooklyn’s bounty (which it was) and the Eagle, of which Kingsley was part owner, led the campaign to raise more funds.

Still, there was the political side of the man, as everyone knew, and it was never quite clear just where his business interests stopped and his political interests began. When the Rink Committee people started poking into the financial side of the bridge, it began to look as though his ability to work with machine politicians and to profit thereby was not necessarily limited to the Brooklyn side of the river.

As it happens neither Tweed nor any of the three other directors from New York had been seen in Brooklyn since Tweed’s “troubles” began in early summer. Only that June, Tweed and Hugh Smith had been appointed once more to the Executive Committee and nobody had raised any objections. But neither man, nor Connolly, nor Sweeny, had had a thing to do with the bridge, or a word to say about it, since then, a decision doubtless strongly encouraged in the offices of the Bridge Company.

But as the company’s records would show, Tweed had actually appeared at only a very few committee sessions even before his troubles. Of some fifty-eight committee meetings held between September of 1869, when Tweed came over for the opening session, and July of 1871, when the Times opened its attack on him, Tweed had bothered to show up for just six meetings, including the first one—so very few, as a matter of fact, that anyone examining the records afterward would naturally take a special interest in those he did attend. Tweed’s time was exceedingly valuable after all, as everyone could now appreciate, so whenever he did make the effort to come to Brooklyn he must have had some definite purpose in mind.

The records were only a “synopsis,” the business of each meeting being described in about the briefest, most general language possible, but even so, by looking at those meetings that Tweed attended a pattern emerges. Nearly always some particularly interesting motion was taken up, put forward, often as not, by Tweed himself and, as would be noted, these same motions almost always appeared to be directly beneficial to William Kingsley.

It was on a motion from Tweed, for example, at the Executive Committee meeting of October 27, 1869, when the bridge was just getting under way, that the members resolved to pay Kingsley & Keeney $46,915.56 for lumber. Kingsley would later explain that the lumber had been bought from a Georgia dealer at the request of John A. Roebling, before the bridge began, in order to take advantage of an especially good price. Since the Bridge Company had no money then, Kingsley said, he had made the purchase in advance. So the committee was merely paying back what he had coming to him. Be that as it may, the record showed that Tweed was the one who urged that Kingsley get his money, plus interest, and naturally that left some people wondering.

Much more important, however, was the motion passed at the meeting held on July 5, 1870, a meeting at which Tweed appeared after a notable absence of more than six months. This was the day the commission arrangement that Tweed would later divulge was made official policy by the Bridge Company. The resolution, as recorded then, reads as follows:

Resolved, That fifteen per centum on the amount of expenditure for the construction of the foundation of the towers of the-Bridge on both sides of the river, up to high-water mark, including payments for land, be paid to William C. Kingsley, the General Superintendent, for his services and advances on behalf of this Company, up to the completion of such foundations.

It was customary always to include in the record the name of the member who put forward a motion, but in this case that was not done. The arrangement was not announced in the papers, moreover, the business of the committee still being conducted in private. It had not been discussed at the annual Board of Directors’ meeting a few weeks before or even mentioned, nor would it be when the directors convened again.

Also, quite interestingly, Tweed was back again at the bridge offices in early September to move that “such amounts as due Wm. C. Kingsley up to the present time…be paid, and that hereafter the amounts, becoming due under said resolution be paid monthly.” By the end of the year, expenditures on the bridge totaled $1,179,-521.40. This meant that a 15 per cent payment to Kingsley came to roughly $175,000. A check for this amount was made out to Kingsley January 3, 1871. If Kingsley’s official connection with the bridge was to be dated from the time he was formally appointed General Superintendent in October 1869, slightly more than a year earlier, then his compensation to date worked out to be a very handsome salary—about seven times that of the President of the United States, as would be noted in the papers.

Why Tweed took Kingsley’s interests so much to heart is not known for sure. Perhaps, as was speculated, the early “understanding” with the Ring people also included an agreement that Kingsley would turn over part of the 15 per cent in return for Tweed’s support in the Executive Committee or that Kingsley would merely apply part of the 15 per cent to what the four Tammany men owed him for the bridge stock he had handed over. That way nobody would suffer. Tweed, however, would testify that he himself had made no deals at all with Kingsley.

“Was he to divide the fifteen per cent with you?” Tweed would be asked.

“I had no understanding with him, sir,” Tweed answered, but then added, “I don’t know anything about the rest.” The rest meaning Smith, Sweeny, and Connolly. What they may have worked out with Kingsley on their own, Tweed could not say.

But since such arrangements had been shown to be the common practice of the Tweed Ring, a great many people, rightly or not, would conclude that that was just what Kingsley had agreed to. Moreover, it would also be pointed out that buying bridge stock by installments, 10 per cent at a time, which was all that was required and what Kingsley and most stockholders were doing, then drawing 15 per cent on several million dollars in expenditures, was a most attractive proposition from a business point of view.

Kingsley’s explanation of all this would present a different picture, understandably, but before he felt compelled to speak out publicly in his own defense, some noteworthy changes were made in the arrangement he had with the Bridge Company.

On November 13, just five days after the Brooklyn and New York elections—when it was very clear that Tweed was finished—the Executive Committee resolved that “the claim of William C. Kingsley under the resolution of July 5, 1870” was “hereby liquidated, with his consent.” For his services in behalf of the bridge the General Superintendent was now to receive “an amount not exceeding $125,000, in full.” No explanation for the change was included in the record and again nothing was said of it in the papers.

At the end of November Kingsley returned to the Bridge Company the fifty thousand dollars he had been overpaid, according to this new rule—returned it voluntarily, as his admirers would later stress, since there was nothing in the rule saying he had to do so. Again the record contains no explanation. The “construction” account is simply credited with fifty thousand dollars from Mr. Kingsley.

Presently, sometime in early December 1871, somebody went to the record book containing the old July 5 resolution and made an erasure, changing the “fifteen per centum” Kingsley was to get to read “five per centum.” No mention was made of this in the records. Nothing was said to explain why it was done or by whom.

Kingsley’s compensation as General Superintendent was to be the central issue to come out of the investigation, but serious questions would also arise concerning the company’s methods for purchasing materials. Who exactly decided what was to be bought from whom? Kingsley’s recommendations, so it appeared, always received the unqualified approval of the Executive Committee. Why were no bids advertised for? And more specifically, why had the Bridge Company in the past two years purchased more than $140,000 worth of lumber from the New York & Brooklyn Saw Mill & Lumber Company, or from that firm’s treasurer, a Mr. Ammerman, when, as was no secret, the General Superintendent was part owner of the firm? With how many other firms doing business with the bridge did Mr. Kingsley have “connections”? The impression was that the General Superintendent was deciding what to buy to build this bridge he had so eagerly wanted the two cities to pay for and that he was deciding to buy quite a lot from himself.

The Rink Committee would not be ready to report its conclusions until early spring the following year, 1872. By then Tweed had fallen on terrible times.

The elections had been over only a few days when Peter “Brains” Sweeny resigned his office as President of the Park Board and departed as swiftly as possible for France. Hugh Smith also fled the country, while Connolly by now was doing all he could to ingratiate himself with the New York Committee of Seventy. Only Tweed remained and his arrest seemed a matter of days.

Then it happened. On December 15 Tweed had been indicted by a Grand Jury on 120 counts. The following evening he was arrested by an old confederate, Sheriff Matthew T. Brennan, who came personally to Tweed’s office to conduct the historic ceremony. Touching Tweed lightly on the shoulder, Brennan said, giggling, “You’re the man I’m after, I guess.”

To nobody’s surprise Tweed got out on bail almost immediately. His first night as a “prisoner” he spent in the Metropolitan Hotel, which he owned. But he was forced to resign from the Public Works Department and on December 29 at Tammany Hall he was voted out of power as Grand Sachem.

Because the courts seemed unable to decide whether the county or the state had the right to bring Tweed to justice, it would be another year before he would go on trial. But his world was crumbling all around. On January 6 Jim Fisk was shot down in the Grand Central Hotel by Edward Stokes. Fisk had once swindled the wealthy Stokes out of the ownership of a Brooklyn oil refinery and Stokes for his part had been pursuing Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield, with considerable success.

Tweed was among those at Fisk’s bedside as he lay dying. When Fisk expired at last, Tweed was beside himself. Of all the innumerable characters he had been in league with over the years, Fisk had been the most fun. The papers made much of the broken Tweed and his grief. Ten thousand people turned out to view the last remains of Fisk, lying in state, as it were, in his Erie Railroad office, but none would be so overcome as the former strong man of Tammany. The Eagle described the scene:

Most of all affected was William M. Tweed. He cried like a child. His sobs were heard all over the house and while his hand, trembling as if with ague, continually stroked the broad and placid forehead of his dear friend, his hot tears dropped like a rain shower into the coffin.

For a very large part of the public, Fisk’s murder seemed the just vengeance of the Almighty. From Plymouth Church came the voice of Beecher describing Fisk as “that supreme mountebank of fortune,” “absolutely without moral sense,” “absolutely devoid of shame,” “abominable in his lusts” and proclaiming that “by the hand of a fellow culprit, God’s providence struck him to the ground.”

Tweed’s arrest, the Fisk murder, Stokes on trial, smallpox in Brooklyn, the annual Assembly Ball at the Music Academy (“In the United States there is no pleasanter place than is our city socially…” said the Union); Talmage preaching out against Fielding and Dumas as obscene literature, Bill Cody playing in Brooklyn, the new Metropolitan Museum of Art opening in New York; talk of the upcoming Presidential elections, two thousand skaters on the lake in Prospect Park, and the East River spanned by gigantic cakes of ice—there was ever so much to read and talk about through that winter of 1871-72. But only rarely would there be anything in the papers about the actual building of the bridge. There was plenty of talk certainly about what the Rink Committee might turn up. But when Roebling announced in mid-December that the New York caisson was ready to begin its descent, only a line or two appeared in the papers. Not until later would it be considered a matter of the greatest interest, or would some observers find a certain irony in the idea that the New York foundation for the bridge was being sunk in a sewer.

12

How Natural, Right, and Proper

Although the bridge from every element of its use and from the source of its finances, is considered a public enterprise, yet it is entirely a private corporation in which the public has no voice…

—DEMAS BARNES

THE SENSATIONAL Stokes trial dragged on for months in early 1872, keeping the excesses of Fisk’s (and Tweed’s) unsavory world very much in the public mind at the time when the Rink Committee began presenting its findings. Predictably, Tweed’s former association with the bridge was made much of. But Kingsley’s “compensation,” the possible reasons for it, and his relationship to the Saw Mill & Lumber Company were the heart of the committee’s case.

The Eagle immediately jumped to the defense of the Bridge Company. “It is true that Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny are among the subscribers to this stock…but what corporation would have refused the cooperation of these men one year ago?” Kingsley was the man who got the bridge going, assumed the responsibility, and so “would have been justified in asking for any contracts the Bridge Company had to give, on the condition that he would do as well by the Company as any other contractor.” Furthermore, if the people of Brooklyn were not able to trust the likes of Murphy, Stranahan, Demas Barnes, or Henry Slocum to see that an enterprise was run legitimately, then whom were they to trust?

Kingsley himself replied right after that, by letter to the Eagle and the Union, rather than through an interview, since, he said, he wanted his answer worded properly.

The letter, however, was an angry tirade and raised new doubts about the man. The Bridge Company was composed of Brooklyn’s first citizens, all men to be trusted, he said, echoing the Eagle’s theme and citing the same names over again. To suggest that the company was being mismanaged, to malign the reputation of anyone connected with the bridge, was to be against the bridge, and to be against the bridge was to be against Brooklyn and against progress. The Committee of Fifty was made up of “vagabonds and scoundrels,” plus “a parcel of old fogies, who have accumulated wealth, though by their connection with the old farm titles of Brooklyn…and who have been made rich by the very progress they have persistently resisted.” These were the people, he said, who had been against the water works, the park, “every railroad track.” The landed gentry were out to block the people’s bridge was the theme.

As for his dealings with Tweed, Kingsley answered with a question of his own, again sounding quite a lot like Thomas Kinsella or whoever wrote the Eagle editorial, except that Kingsley was perfectly frank about how far back that relationship actually dated. “Will any man whose memory goes back five years dare hazard his veracity by saying that the Company were unwise at that time in soliciting the co-operation of Tweed, Sweeny, and Connolly…?” Besides, Kingsley said that in his dealings with Tweed and the other Tammany people, he had found “their characters were then at least infinitely better” than those of the men on the Committee of Fifty.

Then he said something he regretted later. He said he had paid for everything in getting the bridge under way and was “out of pocket more than a quarter of a million before a blow was struck.” (It was the same figure, interestingly, he had said he would be richer by had he avoided politics.) And as a kind of blanket justification for all those things he had done that seemed even the slightest bit suspect, he said, “I wanted to build the bridge.”

“Every man must have somewhere an objective in life with which a greater [good] than money allies him,” he said. “My objective is to build the bridge.”

The committee quickly responded with its own letter to the Eagle, saying it was ridiculous to tell the public to relax and be confident just because men of money and position were in charge. The committee also wanted to know, if the Bridge Company was employing a Chief Engineer, not to mention a consulting engineer and four assistant engineers, why William Kingsley’s services were so all-important and what exactly was he doing? In addition, the committee was now most interested to know how Kingsley had managed to spend a quarter of a million dollars. This new figure of Kingsley’s was exactly twice as much as anyone had ever implied he had spent. Moreover, the committee had been led to understand, by officials at the bridge offices, that the $125,000 Kingsley received from the company was mainly to cover those earlier expenses, all of which could be itemized supposedly. If that was so, then for what purposes had the rest of the money been used? And did not the people of Brooklyn deserve an honest accounting of such transactions? Perhaps he had been extremely liberal in Albany to get the sort of legislation that would allow private stockholders such free rein with the people’s money?

Kingsley answered with a second letter, but briefly this time and not at all belligerently. He said the money had been spent on lumber, for office rent and office equipment, for the bridge tour to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls, for consultants’ fees, for printing documents. But he neither retracted the quarter of a million figure nor attempted to explain it. The issue was left hanging and the Committee of Fifty, which had never managed to deliver the sort of sensational scandal the public had grown accustomed to, gradually faded from the picture leaving a number of questions unanswered.

The directors of the Bridge Company were not, however, about to let matters go at that. Nor was the public or the New York press. Irate letters to the editor demanded further investigation. Why, it was asked, had Roebling taken no stock? Why had so many of the prominent people listed as directors in the original charter withdrawn from the whole scheme, purchasing no stock? The World took to calling Kingsley a “cormorant,” said he was shrewder even than Tweed, and claimed to have solid proof that Kingsley had once received several hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks from a Brooklyn paving company. The Tribune, meanwhile, reported that there were at least eight different factories, stone quarries, and lumber mills furnishing materials for the bridge in which Kingsley had a direct interest.

Something would have to be done, it was pretty generally agreed among the directors, and it was now that James Stranahan moved swiftly to restore public confidence.

The directors met next on June 4, 1872. Murphy was again elected president (nothing derogatory had been said about him as yet) and Andrew Green, the Comptroller of New York, was named to the Finance Committee. Stranahan then had four other esteemed New Yorkers appointed directors, as replacements for the old Tammany quartet. The new men were William H. Vanderbilt, Lloyd Aspinwall, William H. Appleton, and most important, Abram S. Hewitt.

Hewitt by this time had a great reputation as a reformer. He had been asked by William Havemeyer, soon to become mayor again, to become a director of the bridge, in order, as Hewitt explained it, “to investigate the expenditures, and to report as to the propriety of going on with the work.” Havemeyer, who had never much cared for the bridge, saw it as a perfect “illustration of the dishonesty which enters into public undertakings.” He thought a city government ought to be conducted with all the efficiency of a business, so he had sent an efficient, successful industrialist to clear things up in Brooklyn. Stranahan welcomed the idea, or so he said, and Hewitt was promptly named to fill Tweed’s vacancy on the Executive Committee. It was a little like putting the teacher’s pet in the seat long occupied by the class troublemaker, now expelled, as a way of restoring order in that corner of the classroom.

Hewitt meant business it seemed. At his first Executive Committee meeting less than a week later, with Stranahan and Murphy present, he personally approved the payment of bills amounting to some $71,000. At a meeting a week later he moved that the Chief Engineer “be requested to examine and report, at the earliest possible date, whether the prices paid for stone, lumber and other materials, and for labor have been reasonable and just.” He also wanted Roebling to report whether the cost of the bridge thus far exceeded what his father had estimated, and if so why. His motions were immediately agreed to, as was a suggestion from Henry Murphy that for the next order of granite the Chief Engineer be directed to advertise for sealed bids.

On July 1, the Board of Directors, which had met only nine times since the bridge began, convened once more to hear the special report of the Chief Engineer, which had been turned in on June 28, or just four days after it was requested. Murphy was out of town for some reason, so Abram Hewitt was called to the chair. To begin with, the records of the three Executive Committee meetings held in June—the three Hewitt had attended—were read before the board, something that had never been done before. That over and the real business about to start, Demas Barnes proposed another radical departure, that the reporters waiting downstairs be allowed to come up and sit in on the meeting. But Henry Slocum moved as a substitute that after adjournment all the papers be provided copies of the proceedings by the secretary, a full-bearded, pious-looking gentleman with the memorable name of Orestes Penthilus Quintard. Slocum’s motion carried. Then Roebling’s report was read.

The opening statement probably left everyone breathing a little easier. Roebling began by saying that at the very start of the work he had been told explicitly by Henry Murphy that he was to have nothing whatever to do with making contracts or purchasing supplies. Still he was “personally cognizant,” Roebling said, of nearly every such transaction that had taken place. “I know that all contracts have been made in a judicious manner, and have resulted in the best interests of the Company. They have, in most instances, been given to the lowest bidder, and where they have been awarded to another bidder, it has been at a figure as low as the lowest bidder.”

“It has been alleged,” he said, “that supplies have been furnished by members of the Company, at prices prejudicial to the interests of the Bridge. In all such cases I know that the supplies have been furnished after a reasonable competition, and at rates lower than those of any other bidder.

“I can further say that every dollar’s worth purchased for the Bridge has been expended in a legitimate manner, and for the proper purpose for which it was designed, and nothing whatever has, to my knowledge, been diverted into any outside channel. I am in daily attendance at the Bridge, give it my whole time and constant superintendence, and am therefore in a position to give an honest judgment on this question.”

Nobody, Roebling said, had been employed because of political influence. Wages were about what was customary. Wages might properly be higher considering the danger of the work. There was not a man on the job, he said, “who does not earn every cent he gets.” How much Kingsley was on the job, he did not say.

Roebling did not deliver the report himself, he was not even present. The New York caisson had been sunk by this time and as was known by most of those in the room, the work had not gone at all well. The Chief Engineer was worn out and had worries enough of his own.

Attached to this initial statement was a long accounting of expenses to date and a detailed explanation of why the bridge was costing more than had been anticipated—and could not therefore be completed for the sum John Roebling had set. The presentation was so very thorough, so concise and solid, that it was obvious that more than four days had gone into its preparation. Clearly Roebling had been ready in advance for just such an accounting. Quite likely he had even welcomed the opportunity.

So far costs were running more than a million dollars above the original estimate. This, he explained, was due primarily to several large items that had not been taken into account by his father—the increased size and elevation of the bridge (the changes would cost about $113,000), the land that had to be purchased for the approaches (for which some $330,000 had already been spent), the troubles with the New York caisson (about $375,000, everything considered), and then a number of other expenditures that he lumped together, describing them as “outside of ordinary construction contingencies.” These included the following: $20,000 for a consulting engineer for two and a half years (Horatio Allen); $7,000 for the board of consulting engineers (the original seven); $8,000 for his father’s funeral expenses, travel, legal fees, donations, doctors, etc.; nearly $6,000 for taxes and interest; and lastly $125,000 for the General Superintendent. All told they came to $165,771.65. Such items could not have been anticipated, Roebling said, making it clear, in a respectful way, that neither he nor his father had been prepared for how much William Kingsley was to cost.

The way things were going, Roebling concluded, the bridge would wind up costing $9.5 million, or nearly $3 million more than his father’s original figure.

The “integrity and fidelity” of the Chief Engineer had never been questioned by any of the stockholders, as Hewitt would write later, and so the report was taken as a most encouraging document, as far as it went. But in the opinion of several of the directors it did not go far enough. It was agreed, therefore, that a special Committee of Investigation be formed. Demas Barnes was the one who put forward the idea. When Hewitt asked him who would be acceptable to serve on such a committee, Barnes said he, Hewitt, would be, and F. A. Schroeder; “whereupon the Chair appointed as said committee Messrs. Barnes, Hewitt and Schroeder.” Barnes was to be the chairman.

The Eagle angrily charged Barnes with concocting a political scheme, the purpose of which was to check Brooklyn’s growth and prosperity. The editorial read as though it had been written by none other than William Kingsley.

In Congress three years before, Barnes had worked harder than anyone for the bridge. He had been among its most rhapsodic spokesmen and the one who called it a monument to progress. But Barnes had made trouble before. Ostensibly a Democrat, he had an unorthodox and aggravating habit of siding with the Republicans whenever he thought they were on the right side of an issue. He had never been one to “go along.” Now the Eagle was calling him a notorious demagogue, an ass, and a quack. Defeat the bridge, the paper warned ominously, and watch what happens to the value of Brooklyn property.

Accusations of a bridge scandal were thus written off by Brooklyn’s most influential paper as purely politics, nothing more than the work of destructive little men of mean ambition. At the same time, by way of contrast Thomas Kinsella began giving more space to the bridge itself and to its Chief Engineer. Kinsella was a tough, expansive, and undisciplined man who had had his own personal experience with scandal. The father of ten children, he had been serving on the Brooklyn school board when it became public knowledge that he was having an affair with the wife of the superintendent of schools. Another man might have packed up and left Brooklyn under the circumstances, but Kinsella had stayed on, faced down his accusers, and despite the gossip maintained his grip on the Eagle. Kinsella was, of course, one of the earliest, most enthusiastic backers of the bridge. A number of New York editors considered him little better than a paid propagandist for the project, diligently serving the interests of the Kingsley-McLaughlin machine. But for all his obvious partisan feelings politically, Kinsella, as he would prove later, was no mere stooge, and beyond that, he had an unshakable belief in the great work itself and did not intend to see it destroyed by scandal any more than he had been.

Moreover, it seems Kinsella had a very genuine, unbounded admiration for Washington Roebling, just as he had had for Roebling’s father. Another of Roebling’s reports on the progress of construction had been released earlier that same June of 1872 and Kinsella had published the entire thing, saying it set the kind of confident tone everyone ought to use when talking of the bridge. Most of the report concerned the sinking of the New York caisson. It told quite a different story from that of the Brooklyn caisson and it did not tell the whole story, as Kinsella was quite aware, but the spirit of its plain, confident language and the extraordinary achievements described were about as sharply contrasted with the other things being said about the bridge as could possibly be—as Kinsella fully appreciated. The strongest possible defense for the bridge, he had decided apparently, was just such a factual, unadorned accounting of what was being accomplished by brave men every day. And no more exemplary specimen of such men could be found than young Roebling. So while Demas Barnes was lumped with that “class of croakers that exist in every community,” the loyal readers of the Eagle were asked to consider “The Engineer”:

…He is the thinker who acts. He contributes to his country’s sum of achievements as much as and less expensively than the soldier. His ends, in the elevation of the race and in increasing the aggregate of its capacity and performance, are kindred to the statesman’s. And if there be those who think that the work of the Engineer is only hard and material, that there is no charm of art in its processes, let them read the story of the building of the Bridge.

The Bridge Company’s new Committee of Investigation would spend six months at its studies, submitting its conclusions more than a year after Kingsley had first come under fire.

In the months following that July directors’ meeting, however, the heat was on as never before, with the New York papers making much of a bridge scandal. The bridge was entirely the doing of the Brooklyn Ring, it was charged, none of whom had paid a cent for their stock. The stock was merely a sham to hide “the too palpable intention of defrauding the corporations of New York and Brooklyn.” The superintendent of the work was himself “The Monarch of the Ring.” His duties appeared only to be selling material from his own mills to the Bridge Company at an enormous profit and then pocketing a percentage of the expenditures. If a superintendent was really necessary, then any one of the finest men in the business could be employed for no more than ten thousand dollars a year.

Not even the word of the Chief Engineer was above suspicion. It was charged that he too might have his motives for concealing the truth and that he was, in any case, scarcely more than a hired hand who stood to lose his job if he said anything other than what he was supposed to say. “He is too good a son of his father not to wish to identify his own name and fame with the building of the structure his sire designed,” wrote the World; “and he could hardly be blamed for not quarreling with the powerful superintendent and Executive Committee of the company by which he was employed.”

Scientific American commented that the bridge would end up costing forty million dollars unless something were done. A bridge over the river was a bad idea anyway, said the editors, who claimed they had been for a tunnel all along.

Early in November, Abram Hewitt announced that “the agreement with Mr. Kingsley, General Superintendent, was at an end.” Kingsley still had his job, but his pay had been stopped.

But by then, all of a sudden the ins and outs of bridge business, talk of kickbacks, investigations, and the rest, had become very bland fare in Brooklyn. For it was in early November that the Henry Ward Beecher scandal broke wide open. Victoria Woodhull, a notorious lady stockbroker and publisher, spiritualist, feminist, magnetic healer, free lover, and all-around adventuress, had branded Beecher an adulterer in the pages of her newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.* She had said as much about Beecher earlier that fall, speaking in a trance, as was her platform style, before a convention of spiritualists in Boston. But when no respectable paper had been willing to print the story, she had decided to publish it herself.

The charge was not new. There had been whispered stories about Beecher for some little time in Brooklyn. Now, however, it was in print. It was said he had been carrying on an affair with one of his young parishioners, Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Theodore Tilton, a prominent liberal editor and poet and a former protégé of Beecher’s on the Independent, a religious paper. Mrs. Woodhull said she thought Beecher perfectly within his rights to have done what she accused him of. Beecher’s “immense physical potency,” as she called it, was, in her view, “one of the grandest and noblest of the endowments of this great and representative man.” Beecher’s only sins, she held, were concealing his acts and not joining her to expound the glories of free love. Her fervent hope was that her article would “burst like a bombshell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” That it did.

More than a hundred thousand copies of her paper were sold out immediately. Secondhand copies were soon selling for as much as forty dollars. The story was a sensation on both sides of the river, with people talking of little else.

In no time Mrs. Woodhull and her sister were arrested on charges of sending obscene literature through the mails and were locked up in the Ludlow Street Jail, where they would be held for six months. The Sunday crowds at Plymouth Church grew steadily larger. Beecher, against the advice of family and friends, refused to say anything one way or the other on the subject. Mrs. Woodhull was known as a habitual liar, among other things. His best policy, he believed, was to hold his tongue and wait for the storm to pass. But it was not to be that way. And Brooklyn was never to be quite the same again.

The majority report of the Committee of Investigation was presented December 16. It ran to six printed pages and was signed by Hewitt and Schroeder. Its conclusions, in brief, were that everything was on the up-and-up inside the Bridge Company except for the expenditure of $125,000 for the superintendent’s services, which was politely termed a “misapplication of money.”

After examining the purchases made under Kingsley’s supervision, and particularly those from his Saw Mill & Lumber Company, Hewitt and Schroeder concluded that though public competition was not in all cases required (“as is customary in enterprises where public moneys are disbursed”), the Bridge Company did not appear to have suffered any thereby. But they added:

Your Committee believe, however, that this practice is objectionable, and that no purchase should ever be made, except upon public tender, with adequate notice, nor from parties who may be in any wise associated in the management of the work, unless such parties should be the lowest bidders upon fair and open competition, and under no conditions should contracts be given to parties identified in interest with the officers of the Company, who after first making or approving specifications are called upon to judge and certify as to compliance with such specifications in the execution of the contract.

All of which was a long way of saying that Kingsley would have to mind his ways from here on out, but which also suggested, as doubtless several people immediately realized, that another major conflict of interest lay directly ahead, when the bridge would be further along. For it was common knowledge that the foremost manufacturer of steel wire was John A. Roebling’s Sons of Trenton.

The two investigators said they did not know “how far in reality Mr. Kingsley was interested in any stock besides that which appears in his name,” but their impression was pretty far. This, they agreed, was not as it should be and they said that “a mere partnership between the public and private individuals who have the expenditure of the money is not sufficient to protect the public interests.” So they concluded with two specific proposals.

First, that Alexander McCue, as counsel for the Bridge Company, draw up for approval by the Board of Directors an amendment to the original charter authorizing the cities of Brooklyn and New York a vote on their stock. The cities would also decide on the choice of directors, “taking care, so far as may be practicable, that the private stockholders are represented in the Board in proportion to the stock held by them.” In short, the two cities would henceforth control the bridge and the power enjoyed by the private stockholders—as granted by Murphy’s charter—would no longer be absolute.

The second proposal was to continue to employ a General Superintendent (no name specified), but at an annual salary not to exceed that paid the Chief Engineer, which by this time had been raised from eight to ten thousand dollars.

Demas Barnes, however, insisted on submitting his views separately. The criticism in the majority report he found too mild and generalized; the recommendations made fell far short of the mark, he said. So as a minority of one Chairman Barnes presented his own report, which was twice the length of the other one and infuriated nearly everybody who had had anything to do with the business management of the bridge. It was a remarkable document.

Barnes’s basic contention was that since the bridge was being built with public money, its managers ought to be accountable to the public, which they were not. He said that the original charter provided the people of Brooklyn and New York with no adequate protection against fraud; that the business side of the bridge had been carried on in much too much secrecy; and that certain members of the company were benefiting personally more than was proper. He reported that the Finance Committee kept no records, that there was no record of a minority motion ever voiced at a meeting of the Executive Committee, or of any substantive debate on any question. He noted that Kingsley, the largest stockholder, was not a director or on any of the committees, so he could not be held responsible for anything decided on by the board or by the committees. And yet: “While no restriction appears limiting his discretion, there is no act or recommendation of his which has not the unqualified approval of the Committee.” No part of the material purchased thus far had been advertised for. There was no indication of who opened bids, if indeed any of them had ever been submitted sealed.

Kingsley’s arrangement for a percentage of expenditures Barnes found to be the most reprehensible irregularity and he was puzzled why the various alterations in the agreement made the previous November had been done without any explanation. And it was Barnes who totaled up all the money paid out to Kingsley’s Saw Mill & Lumber Company or to its treasurer, A. Ammerman.

Barnes also reported that checks seemed to be handled in a rather peculiar fashion. When most organizations deposited checks in the bank, he said, it was customary to record the name of the drawer on the check in the margin of the checkbook. But, he went on, “The following credits are given for money received April 12th, 1870: Five parties, $23,000. The amount did not reach the bank until June 3rd, and only one check was deposited instead of five. The name of the drawer of the check deposited has been erased and the word ‘check’ inserted. The same circumstances (erasures, etc.) occur several times.” The procedure struck Barnes as most mysterious.

But this and one or two other things in his report struck some of the other directors as nit-picking, and for all the rather fishy-looking inconsistencies in the record books, Barnes had in fact found precious little proof of foul play except, again, for Kingsley’s $125,000.

Still the report wound up as a rigorous indictment of the private corporation as a means of building such an important public work and a strong endorsement for an immediate change in that policy:

The Company is under no financial restriction, and is accountable to no authority. It may do its business in private; its members may furnish any part of the supplies; it may pay such prices for the supplies, labor, superintendence, etc., as it chooses. The company violated no law in agreeing to pay fifteen percent on its total disbursements…Neither would it have done so had it paid fifty per cent or one hundred per cent. There are men in this city who will pay for all the private stock, and give one million dollars for the privilege of completing the Bridge under the existing charter.

Kingsley, he said, might even be commended for taking only what he did, considering the opportunities available. The miracle was, in Barnes’s view, that more money had not been stolen. He left little doubt that he thought Kingsley was profiting handsomely, but he had no solid facts and figures and so never condemned the man outright. All Barnes could conclude in print was that Kingsley was doing no more, in fact a good deal less, than the law permitted him or any other big stockholder to do. The man was not crooked, or at least Barnes could not prove him so, but the law was and something could be done about that.

Unlike Hewitt and Schroeder, Barnes was not willing to leave any changes in the charter to the Board of Directors. He wanted such changes agreed to and approved by an impartial conference of responsible citizens, none of whom had had any previous connection with the bridge.

He also wanted further investigations conducted and he made no mention of keeping Kingsley on. “The people need the Bridge,” he concluded; “make them realize that when they have expended ten or fifteen million dollars on a bridge [he was not ready to accept Roebling’s latest figure apparently] that they will have ten or fifteen million dollars’ worth of bridge, and they will be ready to furnish the money.”

In the months to come, Barnes would argue for a long list of commendable amendments to the charter. He wanted all meetings of the board open to the public, all supplies in amounts over a thousand dollars advertised for, all bids to be opened by the secretary of the company and in the presence of the board. He wanted the records of all committees open for inspection by any director at all times.

When the Executive Committee filed its report, in answer to the Committee of Investigation, its defense would be that the stockholders were doing only what was within their rights. Barnes would be chastised for quoting from the records only those references that supported his own arguments and for filling his report with “disingenuous insinuations against the Executive Committee.” The arrangement with Kingsley was defended on the grounds that it covered only the building of the foundations, that such work was highly precarious, and as a man to take charge of such an unprecedented effort Kingsley had been the ideal choice. That Kingsley expected to make money out of the arrangement was not denied. “It is, no doubt, true that Mr. Kingsley, in connecting himself with this great work, looked to some pecuniary advantage. It is hardly to be supposed that anyone would spend so much time and labor and incur such pecuniary liability as he had done without some expectation of remuneration.” The Executive Committee claimed Kingsley’s 15 per cent was no more than the federal government allowed contractors furnishing stone for the new Post Office in New York. (The situation was not quite the same clearly, but that was overlooked.) And finally, argued the committee, if Kingsley had not put up the money he did, when he did, the bridge would not have been built, and nobody could say the job had not been handled superbly in all the time he had had anything to do with it.

What exactly his duties were, how much of his time he was giving to the bridge and how much to his other business and political interests, were never explained.

Why he had agreed to the ceiling of $125,000 and had returned the $50,000 when he did was explained, however. He had agreed “on the condition that he should be relieved of a certain portion of the stock of the company he was carrying, which we agreed to do in our individual capacities, with the assistance of two other members of the Board, at our request, by purchasing from him and paying him for $130,000 of the stock at its par value, taking the consequences of our act upon ourselves.”

In other words, by returning $50,000, Kingsley got back $130,-000 that he was in the hole for. So, in actual fact, instead of returning $50,000, he was really having $80,000 returned to him, and if that plus $125,000 he had been paid for his services did not add up to the $250,000 he claimed to have spent—but was never able to itemize to anyone’s satisfaction—it was a tidy sum nonetheless.

As for the purchases made from his Saw Mill & Lumber Company, the defense was that since the Bridge Company got everything at a good price, then no damage had been done. That the Saw Mill & Lumber Company and Kingsley may also have benefited by the business was apparently not considered a pertinent issue.

The Executive Committee was able to report, however, that the money paid to Mr. Ammerman, treasurer of the Saw Mill & Lumber Company, should not be viewed as payments to that firm. Mr. Ammerman, it was explained patiently, had been paid some $84,000 not as a representative of the Saw Mill & Lumber Company, but as the representative of mill owners in Georgia (the same Georgia firm perhaps from which Kingsley had bought the $46,-000 worth of lumber back in 1869).

But the real issue, in the view of the Executive Committee (then composed of Murphy, Slocum, Stranahan, and Husted), was not Kingsley’s innocence, but whether or not the Bridge Company had been run according to the accepted practices and ethical standards of a private corporation, and in their unanimous opinion it most certainly had. The purchasing of materials, for example, was, they said, conducted as it would be by the officials of a railroad company or a private citizen building a house; such people, it was reasoned, ask bids for the work from whichever builders and dealers they choose, whichever “they think best for their interest, without deeming it necessary or advisable to make public advertisement of them.”

“This Company was chartered as a private company,” they reminded everyone, “and although the cities of New York and Brooklyn subscribed to its capital stock, that fact did not change its character. There were scores of railroad corporations in this State to whose stock towns and cities have subscribed under authority of law, and which retain their private character. We refer to this fact merely for the purpose of showing how natural, right and proper in itself it was for the Executive Committee, in the absence of all legal provisions to the contrary, to exercise their discretion in this respect in the same manner as other private corporations.”

So for all the talk of the bridge as a noble public work, the men who had the power saw it as a business proposition.

This particular document was signed on the last day of December 1872. On January 11, 1873, the Board of Directors convened. A committee of five was named to consider how the charter ought to be amended. The five were Hewitt and Schroeder, William Marshall, Judge McCue, and James Stranahan. Murphy, the man who wrote the original document, was not chosen to participate, nor was Demas Barnes, its severest, most conscientious critic.

Then it was resolved by the board that the Executive Committee be directed to appoint “Mr. Wm. C. Kingsley…General Superintendent at a salary of $10,000.” This was done by the Executive Committee later the same day on a motion by Hewitt, which included the provision that Kingsley’s pay be effective as of the previous July 12, when his “former appointment” had terminated with the completion of the tower foundations up to high-water mark. The motion was carried. The management would remain precisely the same as it had been all along.

Kingsley, who was present for this little ceremony, accepted his “new” appointment gratefully, then remarked that his physician had advised “some recreation from his labors was absolutely necessary” and with that in view he was forced to ask for a six-week leave of absence. This request was granted unanimously.

Hewitt had been convinced somehow. He was the key man now, clearly enough, the one known voice of reform on the Executive Committee, the one new face, the one and only representative for the city of New York. And apparently his own examination of the Bridge Company, plus explanations offered by the others on the Executive Committee—not just in their formal rebuttal to Barnes, but in personal conversation—had been enough to satisfy Hewitt that there need be no shake-up in the over-all method of operation or in the principal members of the cast.

Hewitt still wanted the charter changed, but he was in no hurry about it and he had concluded that for the time being there was no reason why things could not continue as before. So as far as the bridge management was concerned the crisis had passed, the case was closed. Nothing was ever said to that effect, but that was the situation. No one on the Executive Committee would oppose changing the charter, then or later, but there would be no great rush to see it done either.

For anyone else who had troubled to follow the situation as it had evolved over the past year and a half, and who had been able to keep it all straight, things did not seem all that tidy, however. Quite a little had been left unsaid, several very important questions had been left unanswered.

Kingsley had still not explained how he spent a quarter of a million dollars prior to the start of construction. (Barnes had been able to justify slightly over $59,000, but that included the early lumber purchase of $46,000, for which Kingsley & Keeney had already been reimbursed. The Executive Committee in its answer to Barnes had not bothered with an estimate of Kingsley’s early expenses or even a suggestion of what they might have involved. Kingsley was simply credited with putting up a large sum of money “at risk,” for which he rightfully deserved to make a profit.)

Nobody said why Kingsley’s agreement had been changed so suddenly after the Tweed Ring’s defeat at the polls or why an erasure had been made in the records instead of simply amending the agreement in the usual fashion.

Kingsley’s duties were still unexplained. In all that had been said in the man’s defense or to justify the peculiar privileges he enjoyed, no one had bothered to mention what his responsibilities were or how much of his time he was expected, or requested, to devote to them. His presence was vital according to the members of the Executive Committee, but just why that was so none of them ever said. Moreover, it seemed curious that whenever the management of the Bridge Company wished to present an authoritative, reliable opinion on the status of the work, Kingsley was never quoted—it was always Roebling. The bridge was always progressing under Roebling’s direction, never under Kingsley’s, according to Bridge Company pronouncements. Unfortunately Roebling himself had not been very clear about what Kingsley contributed to the job; in the two annual reports he had prepared thus far, Roebling cited various members of his staff by name, going out of his way to credit them for this accomplishment or that, which, as he said, often involved “a certain amount of risk to life and health.” But Kingsley he mentioned only in passing—as having made some contracts.

If Kingsley had spent $100,000, $200,000, $250,000, whatever, before the bridge began, then where did he spend it? In Washington? Albany? Or if he had spent no such sums, but more like the sixty thousand that seemed a reasonable figure for the sort of initial expenses such a work customarily entailed, then why was he entitled to such a disproportionately high compensation for his services?

How much had his Saw Mill & Lumber Company profited from the bridge business he had arranged for it? In how many other firms doing business with the bridge did he have an interest? How much of the stock owned by the members of the Executive Committee had he made it possible for them to own? Why had he been so very eager for this bridge in the first place and how many other bargains had been agreed to privately with politicians and contractors? These were the obvious questions and there were still no answers for them. Nor would there ever be from those in a position to know.

Hewitt would staunchly contend that nothing improper had occurred. The others would simply not say anything more, except to deny the charges that came along. How much Roebling knew of what went on behind the closed doors of the Bridge Company was very hard to surmise. But the impression was that anything undeniably dishonest could have been kept from him and would not have been an especially difficult thing to do. Roebling was not a stockholder and so was not eligible to attend directors’ meetings or meetings of the all-powerful Executive Committee, except when specifically invited. And the record revealed that he had been invited very seldom and only when engineering matters were to be discussed.

Why he owned no stock was never explained. It had been his father’s practice to invest in the bridges he built, whenever possible. And surely if Kingsley and the other Brooklyn people were as anxious for private capital as it appeared they were in the earlier days, then the wealthy John Roebling should have been a prime prospect. But the elder Roebling had not invested in the bridge, nor would his son.

Perhaps Kingsley and the others discouraged John Roebling from coming in with them, preferring to keep the imperious old man and his unbendable integrity at a safe distance. More likely, both Roeblings, knowing something of the other stockholders, and suspecting more, decided they wanted nothing to do with that side of the bridge. The answer will never be known.

Washington Roebling was a very sick man by the time the reports from the Committee of Investigation were issued. One day he would say something of what he knew about the alleged bridge scandals, but that would be many years later.

For the moment, even to those willing to give Kingsley the benefit of the doubt, it seemed obvious that if he had not gotten rich on the bridge, he certainly had been nicely set up to do so. Furthermore, he had managed it all in such a way that it had cost him virtually nothing. Neither he nor any of the others had lost a cent for their efforts.

Indeed, it seemed terribly naïve, quite unrealistic really, considering Kingsley’s basic nature and the ground rules of the political and business circles he customarily operated within, to conclude anything other than this: Kingsley had passed out money liberally in New York, perhaps in Washington, but most certainly in Albany. In Washington there had been comparatively little resistance and Demas Barnes, never a friend of the Brooklyn Ring, was probably not a likely candidate for bribery in any event, nor a safe confederate in any such dealings. But in Albany, support could be extremely dear, as everyone who read a newspaper knew perfectly well by this time, and especially for a charter that was virtually a license to steal, if anyone wanted to view it that way. It was even suggested by one New York paper that if Henry Murphy was the man doing all the work in Albany, writing the legislation, “lobbying” with Tweed, and so forth, then just maybe Henry Murphy had exacted his own large fee for services rendered, and that that had accounted for a substantial part of the money Kingsley “invested” earlier on. If this were so, then perhaps some of the “facts and figures” put forth by Kingsley beside Murphy’s fireplace that fateful winter night in 1866 were not quite what Alexander McCue implied in his account of the scene.

Kingsley had indeed purchased most of the stock and he had obviously handed it out where it would do the most good. He had every expectation of profiting from contracts with the Bridge Company, as the directors made no effort to deny, and it seemed pretty plain that he figured to recover what he had spent for political favors and for stock by the 15 per cent arrangement and quite possibly make a lot more on top of that. Had things continued as they were prior to the fall of 1871, there would have been no sudden unexplained changes in the 15 per cent arrangement and the bridge could have made him a very rich man. But the unexpected had happened. The Tweed Ring had crumbled like papier-mâché. Bargains with Tweed were no longer acceptable. Politically active building contractors were subjects of automatic suspicion. The whole bridge project was suddenly very suspect. Kingsley, just as suddenly, not to mention the whole Brooklyn Ring, was extremely vulnerable. His arrangement with the Bridge Company would not look good at all if it were to come to public attention. The management of bridge business might be put into other hands. The arrangement had to be changed, which it was, most hurriedly and clumsily.

So the rug had been pulled out from under him before he had a chance to do much. But as a result no one was able to pin anything on him either. And besides, since the bridge was being built by a private company, there was, as no one could dispute, little he or any major stockholder could not do, perfectly legally.

The importance of all this was not, however, the degree of Kingsley’s greed or guilt. What mattered in the long run was that largely by a quirk of fate—Tweed’s fall—the greatest municipal work of the age, the most inspired structure Americans had yet attempted, had been rescued from certain disgrace, and probable disaster, at the hands of the Tweed and Tammany rings. Moreover, the movement to make the bridge truly a public enterprise can be dated from this point. Two more years would go by before the old 1867 charter would be changed in Albany, but even so, the days when the Bridge Company could do entirely as it pleased were all over. No more could the Executive Committee and William Kingsley disregard public opinion or conduct their affairs with total immunity and no higher ethical standards to go by than those of a railroad.

At the same time, those people who were actually building the bridge now had to face up to the idea that the work was no longer viewed as an altogether noble and heroic endeavor. Too many seeds of doubt had been sown and the fact that Tweed was out or that a man like Hewitt was in and testifying to the conduct of bridge business certainly did not put an end to the rumors. Papers such as the World remained openly hostile to the bridge and by no means satisfied that its management was henceforth above suspicion.

One paper would list it as one of the “seven fraudulent wonders of the New World,” along with Tweed’s courthouse and the Northern Pacific Railroad. The bridge had been a subject of controversy since the beginning, of course, but always on technical grounds—i.e., was the engineering sound, would the finished structure stand or fall? Now there were other reasons to be skeptical and the bridge, as a result, became a subject of special fascination to a wholly different variety of skeptic, of whom there were a very large number.

The same rich opportunities for dishonesty were still there, it was agreed, the same people had the power, and the void created by Tweed’s departure could well provide lesser scoundrels that much more room to maneuver in. A cloud of suspicion remained about the whole endeavor, in short, and come what may the bridge itself would be viewed by many as the very thing John Roebling had feared it might become when he contemplated its social and political setting ten years earlier: a grand and conspicuous aggravation to the general state of venality on both sides of the river. Despite anything said to the contrary, a good part of the public would remain convinced that every day the work continued some crooked somebody behind the scenes was getting rich on it.

13

The Mysterious Disorder

Knowing from the reports of other similar works that compressed air was liable to affect some men unfavorably, every known precaution was taken to guard against this danger.

—WILLIAM C. KINGSLEY

BY THE FIRST of June, 1872, when the Chief Engineer and the General Superintendent issued their annual reports, the Brooklyn tower stood one hundred feet above the East River at high tide, while on the opposite shore the lower edge of the New York caisson rested seventy-eight feet six inches below the same tidal mark. The General Superintendent in his report stated that 14,500 cubic yards of masonry had been laid on the Brooklyn tower in the year past and 13,075 cubic yards on the New York tower. The Chief Engineer, however, wrote as follows:

To such of the general public as might imagine that no work had been done on the New York tower, because they see no evidence of it above water, I should simply remark that the amount of the masonry and concrete laid on that foundation during the past winter, under water, is equal in quantity to the entire masonry of the Brooklyn tower visible today above the water line.

It was an impressive way to picture what had been accomplished, if not quite accurate, according to Kingsley’s figures. To be informed that something of comparable magnitude to the Brooklyn tower had been built unseen below the river was for most people to have all the abstract explanations of counteracting pressures and penciled diagrams of timber caissons replaced in an instant with a single vivid image that anyone could appreciate.

The massive, freestanding masonry tower rising at the edge of Brooklyn was still the only part of the bridge conspicuously on display. Through the whole of that spring, as charges of fraud and jobbery filled the papers and Brooklyn gossiped of bridge scandals, work on the tower had proceeded exactly according to schedule and the immense granite shaft was looked upon popularly as an irrefutable affirmation of all that had been promised and anticipated over the past several years. One look at something like this was enough to restore a person’s faith in what man could do and to make crooked bookkeeping and the like seem both terribly petty and no more than a temporary nuisance.

In plan the tower was an irregular rectangle, its outside surfaces being broken up by heavy buttresses. It stood lengthwise against the shore, 140 feet long, 59 feet wide. So at a height of one hundred feet, it was still broader than it was high, still only a little more than a third as high as it would eventually go, and only nineteen feet short of the height of the roadway. But already it was considerably higher than anything else around it.

Moreover, the tower kept gaining all the time, as though it were coming up out of the river, growing organically, instead of being slowly, methodically added to stone by stone. The change was never enough to notice from one day to another. Like the movement of an hour hand its progress was best seen at intervals. A Brooklyn dock worker on Furman Street might one morning notice that the stonework had gotten up above every ship mast since the last time he looked that way or a homebound commuter at the rail of a ferry pulling away from New York might realize one evening for the first time that this great blunt shaft with its feet in the water now topped the rise of the Brooklyn skyline.

The intended purpose of the structure would have been rather hard to figure at this stage if one did not already know. In the very early morning, when the ferries still had their running lights on and before anyone was at work on the tower, it might have been taken for an ancient harbor defense, a gray solitary battlement standing guard over the swarm of ships to either side of it. And when the sun began coming up and lit the top of the tower, the derricks bristling there looked for all the world like medieval war machines, the trajectory of which, from such a height, would surely be enough to hit New York. But in the full light of day, with the sun glaring on its clean buff-colored granite, the tower looked very new indeed, and more like the beginnings of a gigantic astronomical observatory perhaps, or the pedestal for some breath-taking triumphal monument.

But everyone did know its real purpose, of course, and could do little but marvel at its growth and at the way it seemed to diminish the size of everything else nearby. The ferryhouse, the most imposing Fulton Street stores, the newest business blocks, did not look so grand any longer. At the end of day, when the sun was a red ball hanging low over New Jersey and the west face of the tower seemed to be glowing from within, the granite pink nearly, everything in back of the tower stood in shadow for a block and more.

When the Eagle claimed there was nothing on earth, save the Pyramids, to rival “this Brooklyn tower of ours,” nobody thought that especially high-blown. And now Roebling had introduced a new vision to stir the public imagination. Now, one need only look at the Brooklyn tower and picture the same thing concealed below water directly across the river. As far as this tower reached above the river, the other one reached below, like a gigantic rock taproot. (Roebling undoubtedly wrote what he did a number of weeks before it was published, at the time when the Brooklyn tower was indeed at about seventy-eight feet.) For every stone the crowds on the ferry had seen hauled up the face of the Brooklyn tower, another had been added to the burden of the New York caisson. And those seemingly fearless figures working along the uppermost rim of the tower were no farther above the surface of the East River than the men in the caisson were below it.

Work inside the caisson was to be finished in another month. So it was the end of the first great stage in the building of the bridge, a clear dividing place. From here on the problems to be overcome, the work to be done, would be of an entirely different nature. Roebling made quite a point of this in his report, expressing congratulations to the Board of Directors “on the success which has attended the last of the two great tower foundations.” At the start of the work, he said, the foundations had been the principal engineering problem. The work to come—the building of the towers, the cable spinning, building the superstructure—was all work that had been done before on other bridges, on a smaller scale, “but upon the tower foundations rests the stability of the entire work.” Then he remarked almost as an afterthought, “Considerable risk and some degree of uncertainty was necessarily involved in their construction.”

All the extensive preparations for receiving the caisson had been completed by the end of the first week in September 1871. The tower was to fill a space formerly occupied by two ferry slips, between Piers 29 and 30. The riverbed had been dredged out to a depth of thirty-seven feet, or a little more than twice as deep as at the Brooklyn site. A hundred feet of Pier 29 had been torn away, and a huge pile dock had been built, itself a bridge more than a hundred yards long between the new foundation and the shore. At the end of the dock a square enclosure for the caisson had been built of six-inch pine planks—this to break the force of the tidal current, which was decidedly stronger on the New York side.

Borings made from the end of Pier 29 indicated bedrock anywhere from seventy-seven to ninety-two feet down. How far the caisson would have to go or whether even it was essential that it go clear to bedrock were questions that had still to be decided. But in any case the strata appeared to be chiefly gravel and sand, with layers of quicksand from fifteen to twenty feet thick. It was very different terrain from that at Brooklyn.

The machinery needed was all standing by on the dock: three huge boom derricks similar to those used in Brooklyn, the same clamshell dredging equipment as before, hoists, steam engines, and pile-driving gear. Workshops and offices had been built, a blacksmiths’ shed, sheds for cement, tools, general stores, a compressor house (the largest building) with its air-pumping machinery set up inside—thirteen Burleigh compressors ranged in a single row, each with its own steam boiler, as compared to the six compressors used for the Brooklyn caisson.

On September 11 the colossal wooden box was towed up from the Atlantic Basin, where in the four months since it was launched seven additional courses of timber, all laid with cement between, had been built on top. Once the pile enclosure was completed on the river side and the caisson confined to its permanent position, a final ten courses of timber were added, bringing the total height of the structure to just over thirty-one feet.

Particular care had been taken this time to guard against sea worms. The protection was needed only during the time the caisson was afloat and before it was entirely submerged below the riverbed, where the sea worm, the teredo, never penetrates. But this microscopic animal, less than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, can bore into any crevice water can get through, so the precautions had to be quite substantial. Every outside seam was caulked. The entire outside surface was heavily coated with a composition of coal tar, rosin, and a hydraulic cement, which, all by itself, was supposed to have enough body and grit to dull the teredo’s boring apparatus. Then this had been finished off with a sheet of tin covering all four sides and the top of the sixth timber course. All seams in the tin had been soldered airtight and layers of tar paper had been put in both above and below the entire sheet. Finally, the whole caisson had been sheathed in four-inch yellow pine saturated with creosote.

“The great timber foundation was now complete!” Roebling wrote. “It contains 22 feet of solid timber above the roof of the air chamber, seven courses more than the Brooklyn caisson, and since the strength of such structures varies as the square of the depth, we may consider it to be nearly twice as strong as its Brooklyn brother.”

In their general features the two caissons were almost identical. The sides of the New York caisson were again of yellow pine and tapered from nine feet thick on top to an iron cutting edge eight inches wide. The timbers used in the roof were again a foot square. Headroom inside the work chamber was nine and a half feet as before. The base dimensions were 102 by 172 feet, making the new caisson just four feet longer than the one in Brooklyn. The heavier roof had been built to carry what Roebling figured would be a significantly greater load, since this caisson would have to go much deeper and therefore carry far more stone. But there were several other differences as well.

The light skin of iron boiler plate that lined the interior would not only provide fire protection, but make the caisson more airtight; and to improve visibility the whole inside had been given a heavy coat of whitewash. The water shafts this time, instead of being square, were round (they would be stronger this way Roebling had decided). In addition, some fifty iron pipes, four inches in diameter, had been installed throughout the work chamber as a way of removing sand.

In the Brooklyn caisson there had been no means of communication between the men below and those working up on the surface. But here Colonel Paine had devised a simple, ingenious mechanical signaling system. One of the sand pipes was capped below and an inch tube was passed through the cap with index pointers attached above and below. Underneath each pointer was placed a small plan of the caisson, showing the position of every pipe and shaft. By rotating this tube immediate attention could be called to any of the points. In addition, a small rod was passed down through the pipe and its weight offset by a weight above that was attached to a cord that passed over a pulley. Small indexes were then fixed above and below. These moved up or down on vertical boards on which were printed such messages as “stop,” “start,” “bucket is caught,” and so forth.

The arrangement of air locks was also quite different. This time there were two double locks, each large enough to accommodate thirty men, which meant that a full shift of 120 could enter or leave at one locking. And instead of being mounted on top of the caisson, as had been done in Brooklyn, the locks were built into the roof of the work chamber, so they actually projected down into the chamber about four feet. Each set of locks was connected to the top of the caisson by a spiral stairway enclosed in an iron shaft.

The arrangement was essentially the same as Eads had used in St. Louis and it was over this particular feature that Eads and Roebling were to have their bitter falling out. The advantages to be gained were these, supposedly: the men could now step directly from the air lock into the work chamber, and at the end of the day they would not have to make the climb to the top while still under pressure.

On October 31 the last timber course was finished, the first stone of the new tower laid. By December 12 enough stone was in place to hold the caisson on the river bottom at high tide. The compressed air was turned on and Roebling, Paine, Collingwood, and a complement of some thirty men went down inside. (Since the water was thirty-seven feet deep and the caisson with all its timber courses stood thirty-one feet high, this left the top of the caisson just six feet below water at high tide and about two feet below at low tide.)

Tearing out the temporary floor took another two weeks. When the digging began, the work proved nowhere near so difficult as it had been in Brooklyn, but much more disagreeable, for the caisson was standing in the middle of what for years had been New York’s principal dumping ground. Moreover, a street sewer was still emptying into the river close by.

The ground itself was a clay silt turned black by sewage and thick, with the putrid remains of animals, garbage, and what Farrington called “sewage abominations.” All this had been odorless so long as it was embedded below salt water, but once the black muck was turned over inside the caisson, the smell, even in the compressed air, came forth in all its original strength, as Roebling wrote. The stench was such that several men were actually overcome and had to be helped back up to the surface. Only by keeping a skim of water over the entire caisson floor could the men keep on working.

But beneath this foul dock mud, which was only a few feet deep, they hit clean river sand and gravel, and things took an immediate turn for the better. The skim of water was expelled by compressed air, leaving a perfectly dry footing, and by now, too, the lights inside were fully operating and in combination with the white roof and walls they lit up the entire chamber as bright as day. From then on the great timber box descended into the earth extremely rapidly.

Above ground the scene was one of great energy and purpose. A reporter described it this way:

At the foot of Roosevelt Street, where the New York tower is being erected, one of the busiest scenes in the city is met with and has been for months—dozens of workmen hurrying hither and thither with wheelbarrows and hods and spikes and shovels; engines puffing away, lifting huge blocks of stone with huge derricks from the barge at the side of the dock, drawing lumber from the foot of the pier, driving the piles of the cofferdam, and condensing and compressing the air to be used by the submarine workmen; men chopping and planing and sawing the immense timbers used in constructing the enormous derricks; others shoveling gravel and sifting sand for the cement; little knots of threes driving immense piles through the heavy timbers of the caisson with their sledges and kept steadily at work by an overseer who evidently enjoys his employment; some wheeling cement for others to lay between the large granite blocks, boring and hammering and cutting stone and carrying iron rails, everything indicating that the work is being pushed rapidly forward.

There were almost no boulders to contend with this time, indeed little else but sand. The average rate of descent would work out to about two feet a week, but at one stage, for several weeks, the caisson was sinking six to eleven inches a day. In the Brooklyn caisson, during the first discouraging month of excavation, the rate of descent had not averaged six inches a week. Now everything was working to perfection. The dredges had no trouble digging the pools below the water shafts and the sand pipes worked like a charm.

How the pipes were to be used exactly had been left undecided until it came time to give them a try. Either the sand could be forced out with water, using a new kind of sand pump devised by Eads, or it could be blown out by compressed air. The latter would be the simpler, less costly way, of course, if it worked. It would also greatly aid ventilation. An air chamber with an iron skin such as this one had inside would be practically airtight, but a certain quantity of new air had to be fed into the work area at all times to keep the atmosphere fresh enough to live in. In the Brooklyn caisson this had been no problem since air kept escaping under the shoe or into the timber roof. But compressed air lost that way did little work. Roebling’s thought, therefore, was that with all the compressors he had at hand, why not allow air to escape through the pipes and take sand out with it?

So the air system had been tried and after that there was no more talk of sand pumps. For everyone who remembered how it had been in Brooklyn this was the smoothest sailing imaginable. Morale could not have been better.

The sand pipes extended down through the roof and into the chamber to within a foot or so of the work surface. Sand, loose earth, and fine gravel were shoveled around the pipe in a cone-shaped pile two to three feet high. When the pipe was opened, the pile vanished up the pipe. It was as neat and uncomplicated as could be, and the deeper the caisson went—the greater the pressure in the chamber became—the better the system worked. When the caisson was down about sixty feet, for example, the air was blasting out of the sand pipes with such force that fourteen men could stand in a circle around one pipe and shovel sand under it with all their strength and the sand would disappear as fast as they could shovel. At least three sand pipes were kept going all the time and some sixty men did nothing but feed these pipes, which was about the most tiring work imaginable. Time and time again the pipes had to be shut off to give the men a rest.

Up on top the sand blasted out with such velocity that it became a serious problem. At first, when there were only vertical discharge pipes, the sand was shooting four hundred feet in the air. To deflect this great geyser off at right angles, so it would feed into big scows tied up beside the caisson, iron elbows were fixed to the tops of the pipes. But the furious blast of sand would cut right through these, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Iron an inch thick would not last a regular workday. When elbows fixed with thick caps or patches of a special chilled iron were tried, they lasted only two days. Toward the end of the work the elbows would be dispensed with altogether and heavy granite blocks would be placed on supports directly above the mouths of the pipes. The sand would strike the blocks, then fall back. But the sharp, abrasive force of the sand was such that in three or four days’ time it would cut a hole through the granite block.

Once, a man passing by in a rowboat, with one hand resting on the gunwale, had the end of a finger shot off by a pebble fired from a sand pipe. Another time a workman was drilled through the arm in the same way. And down inside the caisson Farrington at one point thoughtlessly placed his hand over the open end of a sand pipe and found he was unable to remove it. Only with several others pulling on his arm was he able to get his hand free and then found that his whole palm had been drawn up into the pipe like a stopper.

Boulders were encountered only on occasion and slowed things down but a little, except when one appeared directly below a water shaft. The shaft had to be capped then, the water removed, the boulder excavated out of the dry hole, the same as had been done so many times in Brooklyn. But relatively little time was lost that way. Paine’s “mechanical telegraph” between the men on top and those below worked amazingly well. “The downward movement of the caisson has been under perfect control,” Roebling wrote. Indeed, the work went smoother, faster than anyone could have hoped for. Everything functioned as it was supposed to in theory and as it seldom had in practice over in Brooklyn. Nothing very unexpected happened. The heavy, tiresome digging by the men inside and the noisy work of dredges and stone derricks up above continued day after day, six days a week, and on into winter. The caisson, itself as high as a four-story building, kept descending steadily, evenly, uneventfully, the lights inside burning twenty-four hours a day, and all the while an enormous load of limestone blocks piling up on its back just as steadily, evenly, and uneventfully.

As far as Roebling and his staff were concerned, there were only two problems to be considered—the effects of the compressed air on the men and the depth to which they might have to go before stopping. In Brooklyn every foot of ground gained had to be fought for and the physical discomfort of working under pressure had been but part of the problem. But here the mercury gauges on the big Burleigh compressors kept inching up just as steadily as the caisson was descending.

Every two feet gained meant a pound more of pressure. On December 18, when the caisson was grounded on the river bottom in thirty-seven feet of water, the pressure was at seventeen pounds. In Brooklyn the pressure had gotten up to only twenty-one pounds when that caisson was halted at a depth of forty-five feet. But here, where the water was so much deeper to begin with and the going so much easier, it took only about a month to reach forty-five feet. Even at that the bottom of the caisson was only eight feet into the river bed, which left twenty-three feet more, or the whole of the enormous timber roof, still surrounded by water. And bedrock was still a long way off. But at forty-five feet, just as at Brooklyn, some of the men began feeling a good deal of discomfort, and, in a few cases, severe pain.

The number of men employed at any one time in the caisson varied from fifty to 125 in the daytime and from fifteen to thirty during the night. At first the workday was divided into two shifts of four hours each, separated by an interval of two hours. But at forty-five feet Roebling ordered the workday for caisson men shortened slightly, to seven and a half hours, in two shifts. At fifty feet, with the pressure increased another two and a half pounds, the day was again cut by half an hour. The majority of men were having trouble by now. The climb up to the surface after each shift, for example, had become so terribly fatiguing that Roebling had one spiral stairway pulled out and a steam elevator installed, as Eads had also done in St. Louis.

It was not until late January, however, when the caisson reached a depth of fifty-one feet, that any serious effect among the men was observed. And it was at this point, when pressure in the chamber stood at twenty-four pounds, that Roebling decided there ought to be a doctor on hand.

His name was Andrew H. Smith. He was a New Yorker, a former Army doctor, a surgeon, and a throat specialist at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. He was a man about the age of Roebling. Nine years later he would achieve national prominence by performing the autopsy on President Garfield that revealed the much-debated location of the assassin’s fatal bullet. Smith’s pioneer work on the bends, however, would be of far greater importance. His title was Surgeon to the New York Bridge Company and, except for Dr. Jaminet, Eads’s medical adviser, and some other St. Louis doctors, he was the only man in the country with any medical background to try to figure out what was causing the mysterious malady brought on by compressed air.

Smith took his assignment very seriously and went right to work. His first step was to prepare a set of rules, just as Jaminet had done two years earlier in St. Louis. These he had posted conspicuously about the dock and inside the caisson. They read as follows:

Never enter the caisson with an empty stomach.

Use as far as possible a meat diet, and take warm coffee freely.

Always put on extra clothing on coming out, and avoid exposure to cold.

Exercise as little as may be during the first hour coming out, and lie down if possible.

Use intoxicating liquors sparingly; better not at all.

Take at least eight hours’ sleep every night.

See that the bowels are open every day.

Never enter the caisson if at all sick.

Report at once at the office all cases of illness, even if they occur after going home.

He next subjected every man to a physical examination, the idea being to exclude anyone suffering from heart or lung disease, anyone who struck him as too old for such work, and all obvious drinkers. Every new caisson man thereafter was required to have a work permit signed by him; and though only a few were actually rejected, the knowledge that an examination and a doctor’s permit were required doubtless discouraged many who were unfit from applying.

In any case, Smith was convinced that the men he cleared were in the best possible physical condition. He also saw to it that each man got a strong cup of coffee every time he came up out of pressure. “It appeared to relieve, in a measure, the nervous prostration which marked the return to open air,” Smith wrote. He did his best, too, to get the men to stay quiet a while after each shift, in a special resting room he had fitted out. But once out of the caisson, the next stop for most men was the handiest saloon. There the terrible, numb fatigue or the outright pain the work left them with could be cured considerably faster, they believed, than taking the doctor’s coffee or spending time on a company bunk.

The young doctor had no misconceptions about the off-hours recreation of the men or the living conditions most of them put up with. Many, he knew, slept in “lodginghouses,” as they were called, a damp cellar likely as not or one of the 14,872 tenements described in the 1870 census, where thirty people to a room was not uncommon, where the only light and ventilation came from a single passageway up to the street or to an ill-smelling common hall or kitchen. The ages of the men, as Smith noted, ranged from eighteen to fifty. They were of all nationalities, he found, but mostly Irish, immigrants who had known nothing else in New York but tenement life. The neighborhoods they went home to after a day in the caisson were famous as breeding grounds for measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, the grippe. And in the teeming streets the one note of cheer was the saloon. “The habits of many of the men were doubtless not favorable to health,” Smith wrote, “but everything which admonition could do, was done to restrain them from excesses.”

Smith had been down in the Brooklyn caisson once or twice at Roebling’s request. And now again, as at Brooklyn, he noted with much interest that when the men spoke to one another in the heavy air it was with strange shrill treble voices and that it was physically impossible to whistle. (“The utmost efforts of the expiratory muscles is not sufficient to increase materially the density of the air in the cavity of the mouth, hence on its escape there is not sufficient expansion to produce a musical note.”) He noticed, too, that the men were breathing faster under pressure, and suspecting they were breathing harder as well, he wrapped a steel tape about his own chest, then compared the measurements he got when breathing inside the caisson and up on the surface. Under pressure, he found, his chest expansion was nearly twice what it was normally.

He studied the effect on circulation and discovered that while the normal pulse might rise sharply upon entering the caisson, after an hour or so it would drop back to normal or even below normal. The effect on the volume of the pulse was to diminish it. This, he thought, was caused by the pressure exerted on the artery. “Hence, the pulse is small, hard, and wiry.”

He observed that the men coming out of the caisson all had a marked pallor that lasted twenty minutes or so and that their hands were slightly shrunken and the tips of the fingers shriveled, as if they had been in water for a long time. Inside the caisson he took the temperatures of several workers and found they were one, even two, degrees above normal. The whole force was running a fever, he concluded, and told them this was caused by the heavy, saturated air, which kept their bodies from cooling by evaporation as they would normally. It was the reason they were always wringing-wet with perspiration, he explained. It was not that they were perspiring so much more, but that the air was not drying them in the least.

Like others before him, Smith was also impressed by the way the work seemed to increase the appetite. This he believed was caused by a generally increased waste of tissue, which was the result of an increased absorption of oxygen. But he was not absolutely sure about that—or much of anything else. He had no reliable data to go by, as he said, nor were the men particularly cooperative. His means of testing his theories were quite crude at best. To find out what effect the heavy atmosphere had on the metamorphosis of tissue, for example, he took four healthy pigeons, cut a wound under the wing of each, took two down into the caisson and kept the other two in the temporary hospital he had established on the dock. But at the end of six days he could find no discernible difference in any of them. The wounds all had healed about the same; the birds appeared to be in comparable health.

A little later on he had a dog taken into the caisson and kept there for seven hours. Then he went down himself, killed the animal with prussic acid, opened its neck, took a blood sample, and carried that back to the surface to see what if anything had happened to its oxygen content. Small quantities of air injected into the blood stream of a dog would, he knew, normally escape through the lungs. But perhaps time under pressure produced air in the blood that could not be expelled in the normal fashion. His sample from the dead dog, however, indicated no such thing, so he abandoned that approach, little realizing how close he was to the truth.

But it was the suffering of the men that concerned him more than anything, and as the caisson continued downward, their suffering increased many times over. Smith was in daily attendance. He studied every symptom, kept careful notes, and though he was unable to put his finger on the exact chemical or physiological cause of the trouble, he began to have some ideas of his own about what the men were doing wrong and what might be done to help those suddenly “taken” by the effects of compressed air—“as if struck by a bullet” was the way they commonly described it.

One of the workers in the caisson about this time may have been an undersized Irish boy named Frank Harris, later to become a man of letters in England and author of the sensational autobiography My Life and Loves. Harris said he went to work in the caisson a few days after landing in America and was only sixteen at the time. He never wrote anything about the experience until years afterward, which may explain the inaccuracies in his account. But he was also known his whole life for his inability to separate fact from fancy, so what he says may or may not be the way things happened. * Still, it is among the very few accounts written from the point of view of the men themselves and vividly conveys the terrible fear they had of contracting the bends:

In the bare shed where we got ready, the men told me no one could do the work for long without getting the “bends”; the “bends” were a sort of convulsive fit that twisted one’s body like a knot and often made you an invalid for life. They soon explained the whole procedure to me…. When we went into the “air-lock” and they turned on one air-cock after another of compressed air, the men put their hands to their ears and I soon imitated them, for the pain was acute. Indeed, the drums of the ears are often driven in and burst if the compressed air is brought in too quickly. I found that the best way of meeting the pressure was to keep swallowing…

When the air was fully compressed, the door of the air-lock opened at a touch and we all went down to work with pick and shovel on the gravelly bottom. My headaches soon became acute. The six of us were working naked to the waist in a small iron chamber with a temperature of about 80 degrees Fahrenheit: in five minutes the sweat was pouring from us, and all the while we were standing in icy water that was only kept from rising by the terrific pressure. No wonder the headaches were blinding. The men didn’t work for more than ten minutes at a time, but I plugged on steadily, resolved to prove myself and get constant employment; only one man, a Swede named Anderson, worked at all as hard…. Anderson was known to the contractor and received half a wage extra as head of our gang. He assured me I could stay as long as I liked, but he advised me to leave at the end of a month: it was too unhealthy: above all, I mustn’t drink and should spend all my spare time in the open. After two hours’ work down below we went up into the air-lock room to get gradually “decompressed,” the pressure of the air in our veins having to be brought down gradually to the usual air pressure. The men began to put on their clothes and passed around a bottle of schnapps; but that I was soon as cold as a wet rat and felt depressed and weak to boot, I would not touch the liquor. In the shed above I took a cupful of hot cocoa with Anderson, which stopped the shivering, and I was soon able to face the afternoon’s ordeal.

Still, he could make two weeks’ wages in a day, he said. If he could last a month, he would have enough to live on for a year. But by the fifth or sixth day, he had terrible shooting pains in his ears and he was told he might be going deaf. An Irishwoman he was boarding with in a shanty beside Central Park fixed up a remedy—“a roasted onion cut in two and clapped tight on each ear with a flannel bandage.” Harris said it worked like magic, relieving his pain in minutes. But not many days later he saw one of the men fall and writhe on the ground, blood spurting from his nose and mouth, and that was enough to decide young Harris, who quit soon after and who later took the literary license to say that the man’s legs were “twisted like plaited hair.”

Smith assumed medical charge of the caisson workers on January 25, 1872, and was on duty until May 31, when he resigned. During that time there were 110 cases of sickness that he could attribute directly to compressed air and that were severe enough to require treatment. Not by any means, however, did every man suffering pain or discomfort report to him—as he was well aware. The feeling was that a man might not get hired again at some future time if it was known he had had a dose of the Grecian Bends. (It was a feeling that would also persist among future and supposedly more enlightened generations of “sand hogs,” a term not yet in use in the 1870’s.) As Roebling would write in his own report, scarcely any man escaped without being affected by intense pain in one form or other. Martin and Collingwood both suffered attacks. Charles Young, the foreman who had collapsed in the Brooklyn caisson the same time Roebling did, had again become so much affected by the compressed air that on the advice of his own doctor he resigned, taking a job overseeing work on the dock instead.

But those cases Smith was able to treat and study, he described at some length in his notebooks:

Case 11—E. Riley. Taken sick Feb. 16th, one hour after leaving the caisson. Pressure 26 lbs. Epigastric pain and pain in the legs. No loss of sensibility. Profuse cold perspiration. Pulse, when I saw him, two hours after the commencement of the attack, was 96. The pain, which at first was very severe, had by this time become much less. Gave him an ounce of brandy and a teaspoonful of fluid extract of ergot. In 10 minutes the pulse had fallen to 82. Was able to resume work the next day.

Case 12—Joseph Brown, foreman, American, aged about 28. Taken on the 28th of February, about an hour after coming up from a three hours’ watch. Excessive pain in left shoulder and arm, coming on suddenly, “like the thrust of a knife.” Pain continued until he went down again for the afternoon watch, when it ceased immediately….

Case 13—Henry Stroud, a diver by occupation, began work on the morning of April 2d. Half an hour after coming up from the first watch, was taken with numbness and loss of power in the right side, also dizziness and vomiting. This was followed by severe pain over the whole body. Excessive perspiration. Was treated with stimulants and ergot, and in five hours was well enough to return home.

Case 14—John Barnabo, Italy, 42, reports on the 13th of March, while in a car returning home, he was taken with severe pain in both arms. This was followed by dimness of sight and partial unconsciousness. Extremities very cold. Remained in this condition for two hours. Was obliged to keep to his bed for three days. For a week afterward was unable to work, feeling very much oppressed about the chest. Had no medical attendance. Had a similar but less severe attack about a month previously.

Savage cramps in the legs were the most common first sign. Sometimes the pain lasted all night, in the knees mostly, and it felt as though the joint was being violently twisted apart and every muscle torn away from the bones—or worse. There was really no way to describe the pain, most men said. A modern medical textbook describes the pain as deep and relentless, and not throbbing. “When it is severe, local numbness, weakness, and faintness resemble the sickening pain of a blow on the testicle.”

In one out of four cases the attack was accompanied by dizziness, double vision, and repeated vomiting. All of a sudden a man would begin to stagger, bend double, retch horribly, and fall. Sometimes there was no pain at all, just a massive numb feeling and an inability to walk or to stand upright.

The victim of an attack always looked the same, whether there was pain or not, the face a leaden color with cold beads of sweat standing out all over, which were probably signs of impending shock. Men complained, too, of excruciating pains in the chest and bowels. Some had their speech affected, as though they had had a stroke. In numerous cases the joints—knees, wrists, elbows—were swollen all out of shape, burning hot to the touch, badly discolored, and extremely tender.

By the first week of April the caisson was down past sixty feet, still descending steadily, and conditions had grown very serious indeed. The remedies Smith employed were all very simple. To alleviate pain he promptly administered ergot and often in quantity. Or he doled out whiskey and ginger. Or he gave injections of atropine, a poisonous alkaloid used as an antispasmodic. When nothing else worked, he used morphine. Since the average attack generally lasted only a few hours, his solution for severe cases was simply to drug the patient so heavily that he felt little or nothing.

He applied hot poultices to swollen joints. Paralyzed legs were soaked in hot baths, arms were packed in ice, spines were doused with ice water. Men with heaving stomachs were spoon-fed bits of ice or “a scruple of calomel,” i.e., twenty grains of a white tasteless purgative. Sometimes these things worked, or seemed to. But the prevailing attitude among the workers and the engineers in charge was that it did not matter much what Smith did. As Collingwood noted at a gathering of the American Society of Civil Engineers later that spring, almost every man recovered eventually anyway, regardless, it seemed, of how much or how little was done for him.

In a few instances, when a man reported back to the job after recovering from an attack, Smith told him to find other work. Patrick Rogers, for example, a forty-year-old Irishman from Brooklyn, was on his way home on the ferry one night when all at once he had no feeling at all in his right side and very quickly after that was unable to stand up or move a muscle. When the boat docked, he was placed in a horse cab and taken home. As with most of the cases Smith recorded, the pain Rogers was in, terrible as it was, lasted less than twelve hours. But when he returned to the caisson, ready to go down again, he told Smith of a continued “trembling” in his chest and Smith advised him to go away and not come back.

A number of other Brooklyn men were sent by Smith to the Brooklyn City Hospital, where, interestingly, the cases became the special fascination of a young intern there, Dr. Walter Reed, later to be one of the best-known physicians in the world as a result of his research on yellow fever. Like Smith, Reed also kept extensive notes on each caisson victim to come under his care and these he subsequently turned over to Smith. As Roebling would write, it was hoped that Smith’s efforts and conclusions would be made public eventually “for the benefit of future works.”

Smith never used the term “bends.” He called it the caisson disease, a name he was the first to employ and that is still used as the formal designation. He did a commendable amount of original research into the history of the subject and was thoroughly familiar with what Jaminet had written in a lengthy report published in St. Louis the previous year. * Smith described Jaminet’s observations as “exceedingly valuable,” but found it “especially to be regretted” that Jaminet’s basic remedial routine had been merely to keep the patient lying on his back with his feet elevated slightly and to administer whiskey or beef broth.

From what he read and from his own observations Smith put together a number of theories, several of which were the same as conclusions reached in France some twenty-five years earlier. The disease, he decided, depended upon increased atmospheric pressure, but always developed after the pressure was removed. Attacks never occurred while the men were still under pressure, only afterward—as had become obvious to almost everyone. So there was a very good chance, he decided, that the principal cause of the trouble was “locking out” too rapidly. “Indeed,” he wrote, “it is altogether probable that if sufficient time were allowed for passing through the lock, the disease would never occur.” This, he knew, jibed with what the French mining engineer M. B. Pol had concluded in 1845 and later expanded on in a most interesting memoir published in 1854. “Experience teaches,” Pol wrote, “that the ill effects are in proportion to the rapidity with which the transition is made from the compressed air to the normal atmosphere.” In St. Louis Jaminet too had hit upon the same idea after being taken by a terrible seizure himself, but Jaminet thought it even more important to increase the pressure slowly when the men were going in. Smith it seems never suffered any discomfort from his time in the caisson.

To make things easier for the men after they emerged from the lock, Smith recommended that no climb up a long flight of stairs be necessary at that point. To have put the locks at the bottom of the shaft as Eads had was a serious mistake, he said. The arrangement in Brooklyn had been better. That way the climb was made “in the compressed air, instead of immediately after leaving the lock, when the system is more or less prostrated.” The elevator Roebling installed had been a wise measure, but it had not wholly alleviated the problem.

But Smith did not see how, in all practicality, the locking-out procedure could be changed much. What might be sufficient time in the lock for one man, he reasoned, would be too short for another, and far less work would be accomplished if the time in the lock were prolonged greatly. Delays would be very expensive for the Bridge Company. Besides, the men themselves would want no part of it. About all that could be done, he concluded, was to make the time required in the lock proportionate to the pressure. But even that time could only be “as great as is consistent with the circumstances.” For the New York caisson Smith established a regulation that at least five minutes more in the lock would be allowed for each additional “atmosphere,” or for every additional 14.7 pounds of pressure, which meant that for every three pounds of pressure added inside the caisson, Smith wanted the men to take a minute longer coming out. So at a depth of, say, sixty-five feet, with the pressure at thirty pounds, the men should spend five minutes in the lock on their way out; at seventy-five feet, with the pressure at thirty-three pounds, they would spend perhaps six minutes. Smith was not asking for very much, in other words. Even so, the regulation was followed only infrequently. “The natural impatience of the men to reach their homes,” he wrote in a tone of despair, “makes the delay in the lock irksome, and great firmness is required on the part of the lock tender to prevent the escape cocks being opened more widely than is consistent with safety.” One of the first steps in such work, he said, ought to be the employment of reliable lock tenders.

But despite his recognition of rapid decompression as the chief cause of the mysterious sickness, Smith remained convinced that susceptibility was still largely a matter of “special predisposition,” as he called it. Some people, he said, were simply more susceptible than others. It was commonly known, he said, that certain people had a predisposition to pains in the joints just prior to a thunderstorm. These pains, as he said, were generally considered to be of rheumatic character and caused by dampness, but Smith now thought differently. The pains suffered by his caisson workers were precisely the same, he said, only, of course, immensely intensified. So very likely anyone who could feel weather in his bones was actually feeling shifts in atmospheric pressure, and just as some people could feel such things and others could not, so some people would fall victim to the caisson disease while others would not.

Fat people and heavy drinkers, he was convinced, were more susceptible than anyone else. Men new to the work also stood a greater chance of being hit by an attack than those who had been going into the caisson for a length of time and so had had the pressure build up on them slowly. New hands suffered worst during the first week he noted. The ideal caisson worker in his view was a spare man of medium height in his twenties or thirties, a description that would have applied to Washington Roebling, among others.

But of more importance was Smith’s contention that the amount of pressure a man was exposed to and length of time spent in the caisson were as much a part of the problem as rapid decompression. So in this he agreed completely with Eads, Jaminet, and Roebling. “The testimony of all observers,” he wrote, “is that the liability to attack is directly as the duration of the stay in the caisson.” The common explanation given for Roebling’s collapse in the Brooklyn caisson the night of the fire was not that he had been coming up too fast, but that he had been staying down too long. Smith concurred with the explanation. In fact, the explanation followed perfectly out of the conclusion he had come to concerning the real root of the problem.

14

The Heroic Mode

As it is now demonstrated that the method of compressed air is applicable to a great range of engineering operations, and offers many peculiar advantages, it is extremely desirable that the principal objection to its employment, viz., the discomfort and danger to the workmen, should be reduced to a minimum. To this end I offer the following suggestions…

—ANDREW H. SMITH, M.D.,
The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, Including the Caisson Disease

SMITH said the caisson disease could be explained on mechanical principles. He said it was caused by the effect of abnormally high atmospheric pressure on the circulatory system. Under pressure, the blood was not distributed according to the normal physiological demands of the body, “but in obedience to overpowering physical force.” As he saw it the envelope of heavy air in the caisson pressed against the surface of the body forcing the blood into the center of the body. The blood “retreats,” he wrote, “from the surface to the center, and accumulates there until an equilibrium of pressure is produced.”

Smith held, however, that a man’s circulation could adjust somewhat to such unnatural conditions if the conditions were experienced by degrees. And the longer a man stayed down in the heavy air, and the heavier the air, the more the circulatory system would be affected. But when the pressure was removed suddenly—if a man were to waste no time getting through the air lock—then the blood vessels would fail to assume their natural condition in an instant, proper circulation would not be restored quickly enough, and “disturbance of function will result.”

Smith was quite right that rapid decompression was the secret to the mystery, but his explanation of why was wrong. His call for slower decompression was a commendable step in the right direction certainly, and seemed radically cautious at the time. (In St. Louis, for example, Dr. Jaminet wanted his men to spend an extra minute in the lock for every six new pounds of pressure, indicating that perhaps Smith’s convictions on the matter were twice as strong.) But even so, as a preventive measure, Smith’s new locking-out procedure, even when it was followed, was so inadequate as to be of little real consequence.

The mystifying disease was, in fact, caused by the effect of too rapid decompression on circulation, but for reasons other than Smith had arrived at. The leg pains, the paralysis, the swollen joints, the agonizing stomach cramps, were caused by the liberation of nitrogen bubbles from solution in the blood stream and in the tissues of the body upon the sharp reduction of atmospheric pressure.

Under pressure the normal nitrogen gas in the blood dissolves to a high degree, then returns to a gaseous state—in the form of bubbles—when and if the pressure is suddenly relieved. Set free in the body fluids such bubbles can cause great damage. If liberated in the spinal cord, for example, they can cause total paralysis. But if pressure is relieved gradually, the gas comes out of solution slowly and is removed by the lungs.

The savage pains of the bends are caused by a stoppage of the oxygen supply in the blood stream. The nitrogen bubbles released by too rapid decompression create blocks in the blood stream—the same as mechanical blocks—that keep the oxygen in the red blood cells from reaching the tissue. The red cells fail to get past the nitrogen bubble, the tissue is denied the oxygen it must have, and the result is dreadful pain. This denial of oxygen-bearing blood—called ischemia—is much the same as what happens in a heart attack. So an attack of the bends might be likened to a heart attack in different parts of the body, most often the limbs and joints.

The level of pressure in the caisson and the time spent by an individual in the caisson do have a direct bearing on the problem and so Smith was right to keep the work shifts as short as possible, a policy that is still adhered to in caisson and tunnel work when pressures are extreme. Smith’s nine rules were also sound policy, in that they contributed to the over-all fitness and health of the men and fit, healthy men are less likely to be victims of the bends than those who are not. Fat men are also more prone to attacks, as Smith surmised, since the nitrogen bubbles tend to collect and dissolve in fat tissue. And from all that is now known about the bends—from subsequent experience in construction work, from underwater research and the space program—it appears that some people are indeed more susceptible to the disease than others, just as Smith declared.

Smith was, in fact, a keen and intelligent observer and deserves great credit for his work. His thesis of slower decompression was the key to the puzzle. The only problem was he did not carry it anywhere near far enough.

A man’s health did depend mainly on how sudden and great a change he was subjected to on coming out of the caisson back to normal pressure. If there was to be damage done it happened then. Time in the caisson, the amount of pressure the men were working under, their individual physical make-up and condition, even the temperature both in and outside the caisson, were all important contributing factors. But it was the speed of the exit that really mattered. And by modern standards the men in the New York caisson were making their exits disastrously fast—even when doing as Smith wanted and taking a few extra minutes in the lock. Today the accepted safe rate of decompression is no less than twenty minutes for each atmosphere, or more than a minute for every pound of pressure. So by that standard, at a depth of sixty-five feet in April of 1872, every man coming up from the New York caisson should have spent at least twenty minutes in the lock, instead of two or three as was the average, or five or six as Smith urged.

That bubbles of nitrogen were the true cause of the dreaded disorder had already been discovered in France by a professor named Paul Bert, and at about the same time Smith was conducting his research. But the discovery would not be published until August of that year, and although Smith would read what Bert had concluded before formally presenting his own conclusions, he would decide that Bert was mistaken.

Smith was quite right about one other very crucial matter: how to relieve the agony of the disease. Just when the answer dawned on him is not clear, but it appears quite noticeably twice in his case notes.

The first time was in February, in the case of the foreman Joseph Brown, already quoted. “Pain continued until he went down again for the afternoon watch, when it ceased immediately.” Then in April, Smith described the case of another foreman named Card, who was hit by an attack of extreme trembling, followed by paralysis in the legs and bladder. Smith writes that the man remained in this state for two full days, but then adds, “After the paralysis had passed off in a measure, he went down again into the caisson and remained for a short time with decided benefit.”

The quickest, surest way to relieve the pain was to send the patient right back into compression and when it came time for Smith to present his final report the next year he would write this:

It frequently happened under my observation that pains not sufficiently severe to deter men from returning to work were promptly dissipated on entering the caisson, to return again on coming into the open air. Indeed, I do not remember a single exception to the rule, that any pain which may have been felt before, disappeared almost immediately on going down.

Smith was aware, too, that Pol had prescribed returning the patient at once to the compressed air and that Dr. Antoine Foley, also of France, had said the same thing in a paper published in 1863. Later that same spring of 1872, in his own annual report, Roebling would write that most men got over their troubles either by suffering for a time or “by applying the heroic mode of returning into the caisson at once as soon as pains manifested themselves.”

But the puzzling thing is that Smith never seems to have actually prescribed this “heroic mode.” Not once, according to the records, was a man suffering from a violent attack of the bends taken back down into the caisson. It was only the man who felt fit enough to go down on his own, to work, who ever benefited from this simplest and most effective of all remedies. Smith’s explanation was that the means of access to the caisson were such that to take any but a comparatively healthy patient down inside would have been too difficult—“even if he could be comfortably cared for while there, or if his presence would not interfere with the work.” The remedy was just too much bother, he seems to be saying. It would have deterred progress the same as would more time taken in locking out.

But equally important, it seems, was the fixed idea most of the men had that the pressure itself was the cause of the trouble. They could not get rid of that idea. The thought of going back for more pressure when they were in their agony—of getting back on the horse, so to speak—was more than any of them were up to and particularly if neither the doctor nor the engineers in charge ever insisted on it. The less risky course seemed simply to hold on and suffer it out.

At a depth of sixty-eight feet the caisson’s steady plunge into the earth slowed abruptly. The men were into quicksand now and the going became extremely tedious. The big clamshell dredge buckets dropping down the water shafts were almost useless against the fine sand that, in combination with small stones and boulders, had compacted into a substance about as hard as rock. The teeth of the buckets made hardly any headway at all. The point of a crowbar could be hammered into the material, but just barely. And though the sand pipes still “answered admirably,” as Roebling put it, even they were constantly clogging with coarse gravel and stones. The speed of descent was now perhaps a foot a week.

At a depth of seventy feet Roebling ordered that daily soundings be taken for bedrock. So a couple of men with sledge hammers and a ten-foot iron rod began probing the work surface and among the others there was talk of the caisson going twenty or thirty feet more before Roebling would call a halt. Then at a depth of seventy-one feet the first death occurred.

On the morning of April 22, a heavy-set German, a common laborer, went down through one of the air locks and into the caisson for the first time. Two days before, when he applied for work, the man had given the name of John Myers. Dr. Smith had judged him to be about forty and in good health. The pressure by this time was thirty-four pounds, and the workday, shortened once again, was five hours.

According to Smith’s subsequent account of the case, Myers worked the morning shift, just two and a half hours, without any discomfort, and hung about the yard for nearly an hour after coming up, apparently heeding the doctor’s rules about rest. But then he had complained of not feeling well and started for his boardinghouse, which was quite close by. “As he passed through the lower story of the house,” Smith wrote, “on his way to his room, which was on the second floor, he complained of pain in the abdomen. While ascending the stairs, and when nearly at the top, he sank down insensible, and was dead before he could be laid upon his bed.” An autopsy at the city morgue showed that brain, heart, and kidneys were perfectly normal. The lungs, however, as Smith reported, were “congested to a very remarkable degree.”

On April 30, just eight days later, with the pressure still at thirty-four pounds, Patrick McKay, of Ireland, age fifty, was listed as the second fatality attributable to the caisson disease. McKay had been working in the caisson for four months with no ill effect. On the afternoon of the 30th he had stayed down a half hour longer than usual, and on his way out through the lock, the others in the lock saw him suddenly slump to the floor, his back against the iron wall, quite insensible. He was at once carried into the open air and taken to Park Hospital, where Smith looked in on him some time later that evening. “He was there in an unconscious condition,” Smith wrote in his notebook; “face pale and dusky; lips blue; pulse irregular and feeble. Under the administration of stimulants, he recovered some degree of consciousness, and begged incessantly for water.” But only a little later the man went into convulsions and died. This time, however, the autopsy indicated Bright’s disease in the kidneys and Smith would conclude that “the effect of the compressed air was merely to hasten an event which, at best, could not have been very long delayed.”

Be that as it may, the word was out—not just among the work crew, but everywhere in the neighborhood of the bridge—that men were dropping dead of caisson sickness. A third man who had died some time earlier of spinal meningitis was also said to have been a victim, “if the truth were known.” The stories became greatly exaggerated and spread like wildfire through the crowded tenements near the site of the New York tower.

One of the children to grow up on South Street in the 1870’s was Al Smith, who would one day be almost as much a symbol of New York as the bridge itself. In later years he would describe his mother talking in tones of awe about the many workers who had died while struggling to sink the great caissons. “Perhaps if they had known,” she had said, “they would never have built it.”

On May 2 a man named Heffner began vomiting and despite everything done for him he was still vomiting twenty-four hours later. On May 8 the entire force of caisson men went out on strike. They stood about in the street nearby, talking to newspaper reporters and anyone else who would listen. Conditions below had become so dangerous, so terrifying, they said, that they wanted three dollars for a four-hour day. By noon or thereabouts the Bridge Company had agreed to $2.75, but the men turned that down angrily and a man who tried to break through their lines was badly beaten. Negotiations dragged on for another three days. But then William Kingsley announced that if the men did not all go back to work immediately he would fire every last one of them and with that the strike ended.

There were more attacks of the bends during the next week and the caisson kept descending little by little. From the soundings Roebling had ordered, a picture of the underlying bedrock had begun to emerge.

“The surface was evidently very irregular,” he wrote, “composed of alternate projections and depressions, the extreme difference in elevations encountered being 16 feet, and occurring chiefly along the water edge.” Throughout the central section, however, and covering at least two-thirds of the entire area, the irregularities were much less, amounting to maybe no more than three or four feet. As near as he could tell, the caisson was about to settle on a broken ridge of rock running diagonally from one corner of the caisson to the other and having a dip of perhaps five feet in a hundred toward the land, but falling off rapidly toward the east.

Roebling now faced what would be the most difficult decision of his career. He himself was very near to a physical collapse. He had been spending as much time in the caisson as anyone, but going up and down through the locks, to check on this or that below, many times more often than the average laborer. He was on the job constantly, working twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, frequently making three and four trips a day on the ferry, going back and forth from the Brooklyn offices. Most of his time was spent on the site itself. But it was the only way he could have worked. He was not an office engineer and had little regard for those who were.

At this point he could either keep the caisson descending until he had level rock on which to leave it or he could stop about where he was, before reaching rock. To continue deeper would mean enormous expense and time lost blasting the irregular rock ridge down to a comparatively even surface. It might also mean more lives lost. Already Smith had recorded more cases of the bends than Jaminet had in St. Louis. And whereas Eads had not suffered a single fatality until his first caisson was down ninety-four feet and the pressure was at forty-four pounds, Roebling, for some unknown reason, had already lost two men. So at this rate the New York caisson might take even more lives than the thirteen the St. Louis foundations had cost by the time they were in place.

Emily Roebling would remark later that her husband estimated it would take another year to go to bedrock and that it would cost another half a million dollars and possibly a hundred lives.

To leave the tower standing on anything other than bedrock, however, would seem to put the stability of the entire bridge in jeopardy. Yet Roebling, to the surprise of many, was now not so sure about that. The sand and gravel covering the rock was so compact, so very hard, he said, that it might provide as solid a footing as rock itself. Earlier, when they were down sixty feet or so, the men had uncovered the bones of a domestic sheep, and just below that fragments of brick and pottery, indicating that the strata at that level had changed within the time man had been around. But in the last ten feet and more, no such evidence had been unearthed; the strata showed no signs of having been disturbed since the time of deposit several millions of years in the geologic past and so in all likelihood it would remain perfectly stable. As Roebling noted, it was now nearly impossible to drive in an iron rod without battering it to pieces. The material, he would write in his forthcoming report, was “good enough to found upon, or at any rate nearly as good as any concrete that could be put in place of it.”

If he was right about this, then the enormous stone tower could rest there as well as anywhere and his problems would be solved. But if he was wrong, then there was the chance that the tower might begin to lean or slip and the bridge would be a disastrous failure. Possibly, others noted, the tower might even slide into the river.

“The period of time at the end of the sinking of the New York caisson was,” his wife would say, “one of intense anxiety for Colonel Roebling.”

But the decision could wait a little.

At a depth of seventy-five feet the first spur of bedrock, the ordinary gneiss of Manhattan Island, was encountered under the shoe on the river side. “No part of its surface shows the rounding action of water or ice,” Roebling reported. “On the contrary, the outcrop is in the form of sharp thin ridges, with steep vertical sides occurring in parallel ranges.”

On May 17 one man became paralyzed in the legs and arms; another complained of savage pains in his legs; a third, an Englishman named Reardon, began retching violently after coming up from the afternoon shift. In minutes he was seized by excruciating leg cramps and pitched forward, unable to walk or stand. The vomiting continued all night and Dr. Smith had him taken to the Center Street Hospital, where he grew steadily worse. The following morning he died. Smith wrote in his notebook that Reardon had been “corpulent” and that the autopsy showed his spinal cord to be “intensely congested.”

That same day, May 18, 1872, with the caisson at a depth of seventy-eight feet six inches, Roebling ordered that the digging stop. He had decided not to go to bedrock, staking his reputation and career on the decision. The New York tower would rest on sand.

The second and last great caisson was therefore in position, and as Collingwood noted, the differences of level at the extreme corners, as measured on the masonry above, was only three-fourths of an inch. It had been a spectacular feat of engineering.

The work of filling the air chamber began at once and Roebling finished his report to the directors. If anyone was upset about the incidence of caisson sickness, Roebling said only that the trouble had not been so serious as he had anticipated. He made no mention of the number of cases there had been and claimed that just two deaths could be charged directly to the effects of pressure. As for the unsung individual suffering there had been, he said only this: “The labor below is always attended with a certain amount of risk to life and health, and those who face it daily are therefore deserving of more than ordinary credit.”

At the end of May, Dr. Smith resigned his position and went back to the Eye and Ear Hospital, satisfied his work was complete, his services no longer needed now that the caisson was at rest. But work inside the caisson continued right along, the concrete for filling it in being mixed above, then let down through the supply shafts. No brick piers were built this time; the caisson was quite strong enough on its own. (With 53,000 tons on its back, it showed not the slightest sign of deflection in the roof.) But about a third of the space was filled with stones, earth, and sand left inside during the sinking. With the concrete going in at the rate of one hundred cubic yards a day, Roebling figured to have the entire job done by early July. The saying was that the concrete would keep pouring into the caisson until there was room enough left for one last Irishman, who would make his final exit by one of the water shafts.

But some time before that happened, Roebling suffered another attack of the bends. There is nothing in the official record to indicate just when it happened, only that it was late spring, while the concrete work was going on. Apparently he collapsed again, as he had the night of the Brooklyn caisson fire, and he was immediately taken back to Brooklyn on the ferry.

Who was on hand to help him is not known. There would be nothing said of the incident in the papers, suggesting that perhaps he and the others wanted no more adverse publicity than they already had or that they thought the seizure would soon pass. He himself made only the briefest mention of what happened in a report published later that fall. The attack, he said, resulted from a stay of several hours in the caisson, suggesting that he still believed the time spent below was the determining factor and had never accepted Smith’s theory on speed of decompression. “Relief from the excruciating pain,” Roebling wrote, “was afforded in his [the writer’s] case by a hypodermic injection of morphine in the arm, where the pain was most intense, and a further stupefaction by morphine, taken for twenty-four hours internally until the pains abated.” According to Emily Roebling, however, in an account written a few years later, his condition was so serious the night of the attack that he was expected to die before morning.

There is no telling whether Smith was called back, whether the idea of returning to pressure (“the heroic mode”) was even considered, or if so, why it was rejected in favor of drugging the patient into a stupor.

For several days more Roebling lay near death in the same Hicks Street house where his father had died. His assistants came and went. Somebody was with him at all times. Little hope was held out for him. In some of the things written about him a generation later, it would be said that Roebling remained painfully paralyzed, a total invalid from this point on. But the record shows this was not the case. In another few days, much to everyone’s amazement, he went back to work.

Once when he was seventeen, his father had been faced with a cholera epidemic at Niagara Falls. More than sixty people had died in the first week and the doctors seemed incapable of doing anything to help. “The great secret,” his father had written to Charles Swan, was to “keep off fear.” His father, too, would have succumbed with the rest, according to one man who was there, had it not been for his uncommon powers of concentration. “He determined not to have it,” the man wrote. John Roebling had spent one whole night walking up and down his room, fighting to rid his mind of the very thought of cholera. The incident made an enormous impression on the gentleman who witnessed it and on everyone back in Trenton when the story was told there. Now it seems Washington Roebling too had “determined not to have it.” Other men might resign themselves to their fate, he could not.

Through the first weeks of summer the attacks kept recurring, however, and he suffered intensely. He made no public mention of this, nor did anybody else. It is only from comments made in private correspondence years afterward that anything is known of his extreme physical suffering. To judge by the Bridge Company’s record books and occasional items in the papers, he was carrying on as though nothing were the matter. It was during this time, for instance, that his report exonerating the management of Bridge Company purchases was read before the board, and knowing this, one cannot but wonder if his physical and emotional torment, the anxiety Emily described, did not have something to do with the discrepancies between that report and some of the things he would say privately much later on.

On July 12 the filling in of the New York caisson was completed and apparently under the personal supervision of the Chief Engineer. The whole task of sinking the caisson had taken 221 days.

He took two weeks off and went with Emily to Saratoga. He was somewhat improved when they returned but that lasted only briefly. By September he was staying home two and three days a week. Still his condition remained a private matter. To judge by the official records and items in the papers the Chief Engineer was very much on the job.

On September 3 bills amounting to $50,000 were ordered paid, on being certified by the Chief Engineer. On September 17 the Chief Engineer was directed to solicit bids for the anchor bars for the New York anchorage and the Chief Engineer and the General Superintendent were authorized to award the contract to the lowest bidder. On October 8 the Executive Committee authorized the president of the Bridge Company to execute a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company of Maine, according to specifications prepared by the Chief Engineer. An agreement made by the Chief Engineer with Louis Osborne of East Boston, for building an expensive double hoisting engine, was also approved, and a number of substantial bills were ordered paid, after being certified by the Chief Engineer.

In late November it was Roebling who ordered that work on the Brooklyn tower be suspended for the winter. The tower by then had reached a height of about 145 feet, or well beyond the level where the bridge deck would be. It was no longer a solid flat-topped shaft. Now the beginning of the great archways could be seen thrusting upward like three immense teeth separated by the two gaping spaces left for the roadways.

It was in December, the same month the Committee of Investigation presented its findings, that work on the New York tower was halted, on account of the weather, at a height of nearly sixty feet. And it was in December that Washington Roebling found he was unable to go down to the bridge anymore. His condition was very serious now, extremely puzzling, and a closely guarded secret among the relative handful of men who were running things inside the bridge offices.

The sudden, violent cramps, the awful dizziness and vomiting had ended after the first horrible days in early summer, just as had been the experience of every other victim from the caisson, indeed as had been his own experience the time before. But the pains and the numbness had continued, coming and going, in his arms and legs primarily. He tired rapidly. He was sick at his stomach much of the time. He became extremely irritable and distraught over the slightest problems or inconveniences and slipped into moods of profound gloom that lasted for days. By December he was a very sick man. Still, he refused to give up. “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” the men at the mill had said of his father.

Emily Roebling went to see Henry Murphy, to talk privately about the situation. Her husband was determined to continue as Chief Engineer, she said. Murphy told her that that would be agreeable with him, just so long as nothing went wrong at the bridge. She expected his troubles would last but a short time.

Total rest was the only cure prescribed for him through that winter, and Emily was apparently about the only person he wanted anywhere near him for any length of time. The doctors kept telling her that he had little chance of recovery, that she should be prepared for the worst, while he himself had become obsessed with the idea that he would not live to see the bridge finished. And knowing better than anyone how incomplete the plans and instructions for the remaining work still were, he spent that entire winter writing down, in his minute, meticulous hand, all that had to be done, filling page after page with the most exacting, painstaking directions for making the cables, for assembling the complicated components of the superstructure, and illustrating these with detailed freehand drawings and diagrams.

There was no work going on at the bridge all this time, other than paper work at the Fulton Street offices. Snow piled up in the yards. The two towers stood idle on either side of the ice-choked river. But Roebling in his bedroom on Hicks Street labored on, fighting with everything he had. In his condition writing for even half an hour was a terrible strain. He became extremely nervous and found he could no longer carry on an extended conversation with his assistants, who had been reporting regularly for instructions. His eyes began to fail. He thought he was going blind.

By early spring, when the weather was such that the men could return to the towers, it was common knowledge among the bridge workers that the Chief Engineer would not be resuming his command for some time, if ever. It had been decided that C. C. Martin would be authorized to certify bills and the masonry work would proceed as before. In April Roebling formally requested a leave of absence. His doctors had told him his only chance to live was to get away from his work. He and Emily had decided to go to Europe, to the health baths at Wiesbaden. The trip would be a frightful ordeal for him, but in this the darkest time he had ever known, he would turn for relief to Germany and the water cure. His feelings at the time can only be guessed at. But possibly in quiet desperation, everything else having failed, he had concluded that if the ways of his father had put him in this corner, then perhaps they might get him out as well.

Later that same spring of 1873, Dr. Andrew H. Smith presented the formal report on his experience as Surgeon to the New York Bridge Company, in which he included certain suggestions for future projects of a similar nature. The most important thing to do, he said, was to have some sort of facilities by which compressed air could be readily accessible above ground.

My plan would be as follows: Let there be constructed of iron of sufficient thickness, a tube 9 feet long and 3½ feet in diameter, having one end permanently closed, and the other provided with a door opening inward, and closing airtight. This tube to be placed horizontally, and provided with ways upon which a bed could be slid into it. Very strong plates of glass set in the door and in the opposite end would admit the light of candles or gas jets placed immediately outside. This apparatus should be connected by means of a suitable tube with the pipe which conveys the air from the condensers to the caisson. An escape cock properly regulated would allow the constant escape of sufficient air to preserve the necessary purity of the atmosphere within.

The bed containing the patient having been slid into the chamber, the door is to be closed, and the pressure admitted gradually until it nearly or quite equals that in the caisson. This should be continued until the patient indicates by signal, previously concerted, that the pain is relieved. The pressure should then be reduced by degrees, carefully adjusted to the effect produced, until at last the normal standard is reached. By occupying several hours, if necessary, in the reduction of pressure, it is probable that a return of the pain could be avoided.

The concept of the apparatus described by Smith in this proposal is precisely the same as the so-called “hospital lock” used for modern bridge and tunnel construction, whenever men are working in compressed air. Had Smith installed such a device at the New York caisson, and had it been used in the way he describes, there would have been little or no suffering from the bends by anyone, there would have been no deaths, and the subsequent life of Washington Roebling and the story of the bridge would have been very different.

PART THREE

15

At the Halfway Mark

Everything has been built to endure.

—FRANCIS COLLINGWOOD

IT TOOK three more years to complete the towers. The Brooklyn tower, started a year earlier than the other one, was finished a year before, in June 1875. And the last stone on the New York tower was set in July 1876, right when the country, with surprising exuberance and a seemingly insatiable delight in fireworks, was celebrating its one hundredth birthday.

Times had changed considerably. The terrible panic of 1873 had struck, worse than any ever before. The country had still not recovered from it and would not for some time. Incredibly, Jay Cooke & Company, the most famous banking firm of the day, had gone bankrupt. In no time one Wall Street firm after another had gone under. Thousands of businesses, mostly small ones, had been wiped out and thousands upon thousands of working people lost their jobs. The streets of New York had been filled with drifters and unemployed ever since.

But for all that the country kept growing, moving ahead. The poor and the hopeful kept streaming in from Europe, landing in New York, passing by the hundreds of thousands through the shabby, makeshift clearing point at Castle Garden.

Most Americans were anything but dissatisfied with the times. Simple, ingenious devices were coming along one after another, changing the way people lived and the look of the land in the most astonishing fashion—barbed wire and ready-made windmills for settlers on the Great Plains, to name but two.

In Hartford, Connecticut, Mark Twain was busy working on Huckleberry Finn. Edison was working on electric light at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Carnegie had built the Edgar Thomson works, the biggest steel mill on earth, at Braddock, Pennsylvania, and was producing Bessemer steel in quantities unheard of at the start of the decade. Big corporations were growing bigger, and though some railroads were going bankrupt, other lines kept right on expanding. More and more railroad tunnels and railroad bridges were built, including the nation’s most celebrated new bridge and its longest tunnel.

In St. Louis, Eads had finished his work. The bridge was hailed as an engineering marvel, which it was. A placard over one arch read: “The Mississippi discovered by Marquette, 1673; spanned by Captain Eads, 1874.” “The love of praise is, I believe, common to all men,” Eads had said in a speech that day, “and whether it be a frailty or a virtue, I plead no exception from its fascination.”

Then in Massachusetts, later that same year, on Thanksgiving Day, the record-breaking Hoosac Tunnel had been completed, nearly twenty-six years after it was first begun, and at a cost of ten million dollars and an appalling 195 lives, most of them lost because of inexperience in using nitroglycerin.

In New York the nation’s tallest office building had been completed, the ten-story Western Union Telegraph Building, designed by the architect George B. Post. With its tower rising 230 feet above Dey Street, it was still nearly 50 feet less than the top of the New York tower of the great bridge.

Mayor Havemeyer was dead and Tweed was out of jail and on the loose somewhere. One morning in December 1875, Tweed had left the Ludlow Street Jail, with his son and two guards, to take a carriage ride. Tweed had wanted some fresh air. On the way back, they had stopped off at his house and were sitting in the parlor when he asked if he might go upstairs to see his wife. The guards had agreed and that had been the last anyone had seen of Tweed.

Across the river, beside the Brooklyn tower, a new ferryhouse had been built, a costly expression of confidence in the future of the ferry system, bridge or no bridge. The building stood where the old one had, at the foot of Fulton Street, but it was a much more elaborate affair, with tall mansard roofs, a particularly elegant cupola, and in a niche over the main entranceway, a life-sized statue of Robert Fulton now gazed impassively over the throngs of commuters that swarmed in and out below. New business buildings had gone up in Brooklyn. New industries had been started, whole new residential sections had been built. The sound of hammer and nails was still one of the characteristics of the place.

But the event that had stirred people up more than any other, more really than anything that had happened in Brooklyn since the war, was the Beecher-Tilton Trial, which began in the City Courthouse in January 1875. Theodore Tilton had decided to bring suit against Beecher for alienation of his wife’s affections. The show lasted six months and was the talk of the country. Beecher denied every charge against him. Not until late June, when the Brooklyn tower was being finished, did the jury retire. Then eight seemingly interminable days went by—the summer heat stupendous—before the jury returned to report no decision. Immediate tumult had broken out in the courtroom, with Beecher’s parishioners rejoicing as though he had been completely vindicated.

Whether Beecher was guilty of adultery with Theodore Tilton’s shy and decidedly neurotic little wife would never be proved. Beecher had turned out to be an inconsistent, fumbling witness. His testimony, like nearly everything said at the trial, had been treated by the papers as news of the highest importance, and a large part of the American public, not to mention the populace of Brooklyn and New York, had concluded he was just as guilty as could be.

Writers of later generations would decide that Beecher was absolutely guilty and, in general, a posturing fraud. He would be portrayed as the prime example of Victorian hypocrisy and his trial described as a watershed in the nation’s social history. But it does not appear as though the people of the time saw it quite that way. For the millions of Americans who had read the word from Plymouth Church, week after week, for nearly thirty years, taking it as very nearly the word of the Almighty, Beecher’s fall was assuredly a shattering blow. Still, nobody seems to have discarded his religion overnight, or his notions of right and wrong, because of what the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher allegedly did with Mrs. Tilton. Moreover, a great many people who thought Beecher might be guilty after all would continue to regard him as an extraordinary human being and felt he had suffered more than enough. And a very great many more people would believe in his innocence until their dying day. As a matter of fact, it is altogether possible that Beecher was innocent.

But apart from all that, something had very definitely happened in Brooklyn to the way people regarded the place. Brooklyn’s cherished reputation for respectability had suffered irreparable damage. The name Beecher could be an emblem no more. Rightly or not, the man had been pulled down by a running tide of public sensation over what a pamphlet of the day called “Wickedness in High Places.” No longer could the East River be viewed, as it had by many on the Heights, as the great dividing line between good and evil. No longer could Plymouth Church be regarded as the symbolic center of Protestant American virtue or as Brooklyn’s answer to Tammany Hall. So by the time the talk had turned to other momentous events of the day, to the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, for example, Brooklyn had but one monument to take pride in. Brooklyn now had its bridge. The plain, barnlike church, never much of an architectural beauty, had been replaced by the immense Gothic bridge, which had been under way for seven years now, but still had a long way to go.

Building the bridge without the Chief Engineer on hand to direct things had posed no serious problems. The plans were very clear, his written instructions quite thorough, to say the least. Nor was there anything especially novel or complicated about the work. Most of it was straightforward masonry construction, the only significant difference being the immense size and height of the towers. (The towers were actually eight and a half feet higher even than John Roebling had initially said they would be. This was one of several changes that had been made as the work progressed. The height of the completed towers above the water was 276 feet 6 inches.)

But Roebling, it must also be remembered, was served by an exceedingly able staff of assistants, all of whom had been on the job since the beginning and each of whom had developed an uncommon loyalty both to the work and to the Chief Engineer.

“…probably no great work was ever conducted by a man who had to work under so many disadvantages,” Emily Roebling would write in time to come, when her own role in the engineering of the bridge had become the talk of Brooklyn. “It could never have been accomplished but for the unselfish devotion of his assistant engineers. Each man had a certain department in charge and they worked with all their energies to have the work properly done according to Colonel Roebling’s plans and wishes and not to carry out any pet theories of their own or for their own self-glorification.”

Martin, the senior man among them, efficient, pleasant, colorless, was still serving as Roebling’s stand-in, supervising the work over-all. Collingwood, the Elmira jeweler whose initial intention had been to stay with the job only a month, was now assigned to completing the Brooklyn tower, while the inventive and reliable Paine had charge of the New York tower.

Once the Brooklyn tower was finished, Collingwood went across the river to take charge of the New York anchorage, that foursquare masonry pile, which, with its pair of deep arches, looked like the beginnings of a Roman bath. The anchorage was already as high as an eight-story building. It stood nine hundred feet inland from the New York tower and filled most of the block between Cherry and Water Streets. Four great cables descending from the tower would be secured to this mass on top, up near the end closest to the tower. The cables from the tower to the anchorage would carry what would be known as the land span of the bridge. They would be fixed to chains of huge iron bars that disappeared into the anchorage and were, in turn, tied to four great cast-iron anchor plates embedded deep within the granite, in the heel of the anchorage, as it were, down near the level of the street.

The dimensions of the New York anchorage and that of the one in Brooklyn were 119 by 129 feet at the base and 104 by 117 feet on top. For the time being the two structures stood just over eighty feet high, bristling on top with the same sort of timber derricks and other stone-hoisting apparatus used on the towers. Once the cables were finished, more stone would be added, taking the level up to that of the roadway, or to nearly ninety feet. The final total weight of each anchorage would be 120 million pounds, or sixty thousand tons.

Had either one of them been built someplace elsewhere, it would have been regarded as most imposing and awe-inspiring, in the way the Brooklyn tower had been when it loomed up all alone at a height of eighty feet. But standing in line with one of the towers, an anchorage did not look like much. The towers attracted all the attention, understandably. Still, in terms of the engineering involved, the anchorages were extremely interesting and their importance to the bridge was very great indeed.

Roebling wrote that there were but two factors to deal with in the anchorages—granite and gravity. The first he described as “a material whose very existence is a defiance to the ‘gnawing tooth of time’”; the second he called the only immutable law in nature; “hence, when I place a certain amount of dead weight, in the shape of granite, on the anchor plates, I know it will remain there beyond all contingencies.”*

The anchor plates—four to an anchorage, one for each cable—had been set in position during the early stages of the stonework. Their general shape, as Roebling said in his specifications, was that of an immense oval spider, 16 by 17.5 feet and 2.5 feet thick. They weighed 46,000 pounds, or twenty-three tons, apiece and just getting them into position properly had taken some doing.

The plates rested flat at the bottom of the stone mass, like mushroom-style ship anchors standing upright. Each of them had been cast with two parallel rows of nine oblong apertures into which eighteen of the iron eyebars were placed, set perfectly erect, making thereby two identical upright rows of nine bars each. The anchor bars, as they were called, stood twice as tall as a man and had an eye at each end. They had each been forged in a single piece, smooth, flat, and exactly like the others to be used in the same position—no easy trick at the time.

(Roebling had had to decide whether to use iron or steel for anchor bars. During his visit to the Krupp works at Essen, in 1867, the managers had forged an all-steel prototype for his inspection but could not guarantee the quality he wanted. So he settled on wrought iron. Several different mills produced the bars—the Keystone Bridge Company, the Edge Moor Iron Company, the Phoenix Iron Company—and as William Kingsley wrote, the finished products were considered “splendid specimens of what American manufacturers can do.”)

Below the underside of the anchor plate, through the nine eyes of each row, all matched in position as one, big steel pins were inserted and drawn up against the plate, fitting into semicylindrical grooves, and thereby forming the first link, a double-tiered link, of a gigantic double-tiered eyebar chain that extended up through the masonry in a gradual arc until it surfaced on top.

The anchor bars were of slightly different sizes, depending on their position in the chain, but they averaged twelve and a half feet in length, and in the first three links—those nearest the anchor plates, where the pull from the cables would be felt the least—they were seven inches wide and three inches thick, swelling enough toward the ends to compensate for eyeholes five to six inches in diameter. The bars of the fourth, fifth, and sixth “links,” however, were increased in thickness, to eight by three inches, and from there to the top, as the bars became horizontal and so came directly in line with the pull of the cable, they measured nine by three, except for the last link, where the number of bars was doubled and their width was halved. The last link had in all thirty-eight bars, in four tiers, to catch hold of the cable wires. Washington Roebling had spent months working out the entire arrangement.

The anchor bar chains had grown apace with the masonry. Once the anchor plates were fixed in position, the stone was built over them and close about the first set of anchor bars in each chain. Then the second set of bars was put in place, the eyes of the new eighteen fitting into those of the first eighteen, and heavy pins were put through all of them, making joints like two parallel door hinges. Each new set of bars after the first two was then made to incline forward, toward the tower, a little more than its predecessor, forming a steady curve, or arc, so adjusted as to bring the end of the chain out on top of the anchorage at exactly that point where the end of the cable would be coming in—which was about twenty-five feet back from the edge facing the tower. By the summer of 1876 the huge iron bars, painted with red lead to guard against rust, were protruding out of the upper surface of each anchorage, ready to take hold of the immense load of the cables and looking, as someone said, like the clutching fingers of a giant imprisoned within the stone.

Wilhelm Hildenbrand was to design the approaches leading to the two anchorages. This assignment in itself involved a series of structures nearly half a mile long, all told, and a total of nine different stone or iron girder bridges to span the intervening streets. The amount of work required for these structures alone was enormous, as Roebling explained to the Board of Trustees. *

The Brooklyn anchorage, begun in 1873 and finished two years later, was the responsibility of George McNulty, who by this time had also managed to grow an imposing handle-bar mustache. Though not yet thirty, McNulty was unquestionably one of the ablest men on the job. Roebling had assigned him to preparing hoists, drums, wheels, and other mechanical paraphernalia needed for cable making, all of which had to be made up exactly as Roebling wanted and mounted on top of the Brooklyn anchorage. As with nearly everything else about this bridge, the cables would originate in Brooklyn.

Since McNulty, along with each of the other assistant engineers, had had no previous experience building suspension bridges, every step after the stonework was a new one and there might have been costly delays or mistakes had it not been for Roebling’s extraordinary written communications and for Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington, the one and only man among them who had ever worked with wire before.

The cable-making machinery was to be essentially the same as what had been used at Cincinnati, which Farrington had helped set up under Roebling’s direction. Farrington was the one now who could train the men to do the all-important wire work out over the river, ship riggers many of them, but few of whom had ever before seen anything of this kind. Farrington had helped Hildenbrand do up a set of finished plans for the footbridge that was to swing from tower to tower and had built an amazing scale model according to Roebling’s directions. The model was set up in a big room at the Bridge Company, where the men could gather about it. The towers were of wood and stood about five feet high and fifteen feet apart and from them were suspended small steel wires, miniature wheels, “cradles,” the footbridge, everything exactly as it would be. Each part of the model was marked with a tag, explaining its function, and everything worked as it would once the cable spinning began.

Farrington was, in fact, the single person on the job who could speak from experience about the work that lay ahead and who had the clearest idea of the problems there could be.

In the time since Roebling’s departure for Europe, the stonework had proceeded more or less as expected—slowly, gradually, stopping altogether during the winters. There had been a few brief, unexpected delays—because quarries failed to deliver on schedule and once because funds ran low—and there had been more accidents. But generally speaking the towers had gone up about as smoothly and efficiently as could have been hoped.

The stone came from some twenty different quarries and of the thousands of shiploads sent only one was lost. The stone was unloaded at the yard at Red Hook and from there came up to the bridge on big scows that tied up at the tower docks. Then one by one, as needed, individual blocks were picked out of the scows by derricks and placed on small flatcars that ran on rails laid in various directions around the foot of the tower. A couple of men would roll the block around to the back of the tower and from there it would be hoisted up onto the tower, but no longer by the fifty-foot boom derricks mounted on top. The elevation was too great for that now. Instead the system worked this way:

On top of each tower, in the center and projecting over the edge, were two huge iron pulleys, in line with which, and running the full height of the masonry, were heavy timbers, laid up like tracks, to take the chafe of the block as it made its ascent. A steel wire rope, an inch and a half in diameter, attached to the drum of a powerful steam hoisting engine on the ground, passed first through one pulley, then down to the ground, then up again, through the other pulley, and down to the drum of a second engine. To both of the vertical sections of this continuous rope, running up and down the side of the tower, were attached big hooks that engaged the iron eyebolts inserted in the ends of each granite block. The hooks were fastened, in other words, so that one set was coming down while the other went up, or so that raising one block lowered the hooks needed to lift the next block in line.

Sometimes, when a particularly heavy block was being hoisted, the vibrations on the ropes, caused by the straining pulsations of the engine, became so violent that the block would have to be lowered again and extra rigging attached to it. Only once, however, did a block shake loose and fall, from two hundred feet up, demolishing the tracks below and burying itself halfway in the ground.

As each stone got to the top of the tower, it passed between the rails of a track laid lengthwise along the edge on a timber superstructure. When the stone cleared the track, another flatcar was shoved under it and the stone was unhooked and moved quickly to where a boom derrick could pick it up and swing it into place. On the arches of the Brooklyn tower, the keystones, huge blocks weighing eleven tons, were fitted in without any trimming, just as they came from the quarry.

The top of a tower was an extremely busy, crowded place, with perhaps eighty men at a time working up there. Every man had to know just what he was about. A stiff breeze blew nearly all the time, it seemed, and in late fall or early spring it blew bitterly cold. One November a magazine editor who ventured no farther up the Brooklyn tower than the base of the great arches wrote that from the finished span “a prospect will be afforded which, for grandeur, will have no rival in the world,” but doubted there would ever be many sight-seers in wintertime.

Master Mechanic Farrington later wrote this memorable description of an early morning on top of the Brooklyn tower:

There are times when standing alone on this spot, one feels as completely isolated as if in a dungeon. Some three years ago I had an experience of this kind by daylight. It was in the early morning, when a dense fog covered the whole region, that having occasion to examine some machinery, I went on the tower before the time for commencing work. I shall never forget that morning. I found the fog had risen to within twenty feet of the top of the tower, and there it hung, dense, opaque, tangible. It was what you might seem to cut with a knife. It seemed that I might jump down and walk upon it unharmed. It looked like a dull ocean of lead-colored little billows; vast, dead, immovable.

The fog seemed to follow the conformation of the ground, rising to a certain height above it in all directions, and obscuring all below that line. The spires of Trinity in New York, and in Brooklyn, and the tops of the masts of a ship in one of the dry docks, with the roof of the bridge towers, were all that were visible of the world below. Here and there where the heat from the furnace chimneys rarefied the air, white cones would rise like boiling springs, and I could in one direction trace the cautious movement of a steamer by the same means. Rising through this misty veil was the confused crash and roar of busy life below.

By and by the heads of the workmen began to appear, as they clambered up the stairway…The fog lost its density. A thin vapor seemed to rise from it—a fog upon a fog—like a mist from the ocean, and the whole began to settle and to melt away. Spires, masts and chimneys began to appear; boats were seen dodging about like porpoises, just below the surface of the mist. By 10 o’clock the fog had disappeared, and travel, which had been seriously interrupted, was resumed.

Perhaps the biggest problem on top was making signals to the engineers in the yard below to prevent overwinding of the hoisting engines. Shouting seldom worked because of the wind. At times fog made flag signals impossible, and a system of signal bells that had been rigged up was constantly breaking down. Men looking out over the edge had to be prepared always for sudden gusts of wind that could throw them off balance.

Thus far three men had been killed in falls from the towers. The engineers told reporters later that every precaution had been taken against such accidents. Anyone who experienced the slightest giddiness on top was immediately ordered down again and assigned to ground work. But a protective railing of the sort critics of the work had been calling for would have been more trouble than it was worth, the engineers said.

In 1875 a man named Reed and another named McCann fell from the Brooklyn tower and were killed instantly. Reed, it appears, had been subject to epileptic fits, a fact he had concealed when he applied for a job. A man who had been working nearby claimed he heard Reed groan just before he fell.

McCann had been standing at the edge, on the corner of one of the buttresses, as a box of mortar was about to be raised by a derrick. Instead of walking around the right angle of the corner, he jumped across it. But at the same instant, the mortar box swung into the air and hit him, knocking him beyond the edge of the tower. He fell the distance.

And it had been just that May of 1876 that John Elliot fell from the New York tower. His job had been to shove the flatcar under the blocks as they arrived on top. His foot slipped and he went through the opening in the track. He struck a projecting beam on the way down and landed inside one of the arches.

But these had not been the only horrible deaths. A man named Cope, who had the duty of guiding the rope onto the drum of a hoisting engine, tried to kick the rope into place when it was not winding to suit him. He had been shown how to do the job properly, where to stand and so forth, but ignored what he had been told. He kicked and he missed his mark. The rope caught his foot and wound his leg around the drum. His leg was crushed so badly that he died almost immediately.

Another man was crushed by a block of granite that struck him in the stomach. One of the carpenters was killed by a falling stone. And a man at work somewhere near the base of the Brooklyn tower was rolling a wheelbarrow loaded with dirt across a plank at a fairly considerable elevation, when, by accident, the barrow ran off the edge of the plank. Instead of letting go, he held tight to the barrow handles, falling to his death.

But there had been numerous narrow escapes as well, and one in particular would be talked about for years to come. Near the completion of the Brooklyn tower a man named Frank Harris (not the one who attained literary notoriety) fell head over heels down into one of the hollow spaces between the three main shafts of the tower—a drop of 186 feet, according to later accounts. His companions, assuming he was dead, started down for the body. But then they heard Harris calling for somebody to lower a rope. He had landed on an empty cement barrel floating in about three feet of rain water that had collected in the pitch-dark stone well and he had received only minor injuries. Eight days later he was back at work on top of the tower.

By the time the towers were finished, the bridge had already taken the lives of a dozen men, but in the early summer of 1876, the engineers were telling reporters that from then on the work would get even more dangerous. It was the sort of statement to double public interest overnight.

Since the summer the bridge began, there had never been a time when the public was not interested in it. But things were different now, with the two gigantic towers facing each other from opposite shores. There was no longer any problem picturing the immense scale of the highway to be slung between them. Nor did it seem very likely now that anything could bring the work to a halt. In the spring of 1876 there had been a much publicized hue and cry from some of the shipping interests. It was claimed the bridge would obstruct traffic on the river. Public hearings had been held; several warehouse owners had spoken out vehemently, calling the bridge a “nuisance” and claiming it would “cramp the commerce” of the river port. But a shipmaster named Leavy had argued for the bridge with great effect. It was too late in the day to start objecting to the bridge, he said. He said he never had had any trouble striking top spars on a ship; indeed, to those shipowners who were claiming it would cost five hundred dollars to strip a ship to pass under the bridge, he said it would be a pleasure to do the job for them at that price. Then he finished his speech by asking, if the bridge were not finished now, “What were they to do with the towers?” It was a question that appeared to dismiss the whole issue, which it did not, as things turned out, but for the moment the bridge had passed through one more trial, intact and in good part because the colossal twin towers seemed to provide a certain psychological momentum it had not had before.

To have the towers completed the summer of the Centennial also seemed especially appropriate, and particularly since the bridge now belonged to the people, quite literally.

On June 5, 1874, nearly two years after Demas Barnes first proposed changes in the original charter, the state legislature in Albany passed an amendment requiring that the cities of Brooklyn and New York be given increased representation among the directors of the Bridge Company. The mayor and the comptroller of each city were to pick eight directors and the mayor and the comptroller of each city were themselves to be directors. The bridge was formally declared a public highway and given a legal name at long last, The New York and Brooklyn Bridge. Then in May of the following year an act was put through dissolving the New York Bridge Company entirely and redefining the bridge as “a public work, to be constructed by the two cities for the accommodation, convenience and safe travel of the inhabitants…” Two-thirds of the cost was to be met by the city of Brooklyn, the remaining third by the city of New York. Private stockholders were reimbursed for their previous payments, with interest, and their title was extinguished.

But once again the old management survived—Murphy as president of the trustees (instead of the old Board of Directors), Kingsley now a member of the Executive Committee instead of superintendent. There was no change either in the engineering staff. So except for Roebling’s physical absence from the scene, the cast of characters was no different from what it had been at the start.

Most of the business of the company was still being conducted behind closed doors. But like the immense, irrefutable presence of the granite towers, a law on the books making the bridge the possession of the people did something important to the way the people felt about the bridge.

Early in July of 1876 the New York papers carried accounts of a new apparatus constructed by Colonel Paine at the New York tower by which he could test the strength of steel wire. In Brooklyn the Eagle ran long, optimistic articles titled “The Present Condition of the Work.” “Before winter shall drive the workmen from their positions,” the editors wrote, “we shall see the first strands of the great cable stretching aloft, spanning the river.” A contract for 120 tons of steel wire (“best quality”) was being filled by the Chrome Steel Company of Brooklyn. The bridge, the Eagle reported, would be finished in three more years and added that the engineers in charge were the very best in the business. “One thing is certain, the Bridge Company have been exceedingly fortunate in securing the services of professional gentlemen who are without peer in their respective fields and whose talent and genius have enabled them to surmount every obstacle…” The leadership was all in the plural now. There was no mention of Washington Roebling.

Presently, about the middle of July, Paine reported that the gigantic saddle plates were in position, each weighing 26,000 pounds, or thirteen tons. There were eight of them, four mounted on top of each tower. They were the bases for the big iron saddles, so called, on which the cables would ride. The saddles went up soon after that. They stood about four feet high, rested on rollers, and were elliptical in shape, with a groove on top, about the size of a barrelhead, in which the cable would sit. Each saddle could work to and fro on the rollers, according to the pull of its cable, and thereby alleviate any lateral strain on the tower.

The movable saddles, like the big expansion joints that were to be built into the actual roadway, were essential to the stability of the bridge. Its capacity to move, the fact that it would not be perfectly rigid like a stone bridge, was the thing that would keep it alive, as the engineers said.

Then in early August, when everything seemed to be in order, it was announced that the first wire would be taken across. The bridge was half built.

16

Spirits of ‘76

DUTY—That which a person owes to another; that which a person is bound, by any natural, moral, or legal obligation, to pay, do, or perform.

—As defined in an 1856 edition of
Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language
belonging to Washington Roebling

FOR THE public the exact whereabouts of the Chief Engineer was a matter of considerable mystery. It was known that he was in a bad way, but nobody seemed sure just where he was or what was wrong with him or how much say he had in the bridge anymore. The papers did nothing to clear up the rumors.

Much nonsense would be written about Roebling in time to come. The impression given would be that he was still in Brooklyn all the while, living in a house overlooking the river, where, from an upstairs window, he kept watch over every move made at the bridge, sending his wife back and forth to tell the men what to do. But this was not the case, not during this particular stage in the story.

Roebling’s original intention, it seems, had been to stay in Wiesbaden only a month or two. But he and Emily had stayed on in the old resort on the Rhine for nearly six months, hoping against hope that the warm alkaline springs would work a transformation for him. Not until late in 1873 did they return to Brooklyn and then they stayed only long enough to purchase a new house on Columbia Heights, on the river side of the street, with rear windows overlooking the bridge, which was about half a mile away.

The journey to Wiesbaden had been to no avail and early in 1874, with the work at the bridge shut down for the winter, his doctors were urging still another change of scene. Roebling left Brooklyn for Trenton this time and there he stayed for nearly three more years.

So the entire time the towers were being finished, the anchorages built, the cable-making machinery assembled and set in position, the Chief Engineer was nowhere near the bridge and could see nothing of it. And in light of this fact his achievements seem all the more phenomenal, for a vigilance from Trenton was an even more extraordinary feat than it would have been from a bay window on Brooklyn Heights.

As it was, the day-by-day progress of the work, the changes in procedure and equipment, the advance preparations for the very different kind of work to come, all went on in his mind, supported only by letters from his assistants, or from Henry Murphy on occasion. His own orders and instructions had to be issued by return mail. The elaborate, formal specifications now required for all materials purchased he also drew up himself—an enormous task.

It was well after he left Brooklyn, for example, that he did the specifications for the granite for the New York tower, for the face stone, arch stone, and spandrel courses.

…Above the arch is the spandrel-filling of varying thickness of courses, and covered by a broad band-course at the line of the keystone. The space between the keystone and the cornice is occupied by a recessed panel…The interior space above the spandrel-filling is not all solid, but consists of three parallel walls, separated by two hollow spaces. The middle wall is 4 feet 2 inches thick, the outer ones vary from 4 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 3 inches in thickness, and the width of the hollow spaces varies from 4 feet 3 inches to 4 feet 9 inches…

He described precisely how the stone should be cut and joined, how it should be unloaded at the dock, the requirements for delivery. This particular set of specifications was prepared in the fall and the winter of 1874, but at about the same time and shortly thereafter, he also drew up complete specifications for the granite and the limestone backing for the New York anchorage, for the anchor bars and anchor plates, the saddles and saddle plates, and for the several varieties of wire rope needed (steel footbridge rope, iron handrail rope, iron ropes for guy wires under the footbridge).

He had help with all this, of course, from whichever assistant he had assigned to that particular part of the work in question. Still, he had to provide general guidelines for them, evaluate everything they provided in return, make refinements, and make the final decisions on every item.

Inevitably certain details had to be discussed at length with the other engineers, or explained to various members of the Board of Trustees, and all this required voluminous, tiresome correspondence. But always, when it came to making his views known, his language was patient, plain, and to the point. There was never any doubt as to what he wanted done or why he wanted it done that way.

His knowledge of everything happening at the bridge, his total confidence about how each successive step ought to be taken, the infinite, painstaking care he took, seemed absolutely uncanny to the others back in Brooklyn. Had his communications on technical matters alone been written by a healthy man who was regularly on the scene, they would have been regarded as exceptional. But the idea that they were emanating from a sickroom sixty miles away seemed almost beyond belief.

He was attentive to more personal matters as well. He wrote to Collingwood to suggest remedies for a kidney ailment. He requested salary increases for Martin, from $5,000 to $6,000 a year; for Collingwood, from $3,000 to $3,600; and for Farrington, from day wages to “$3,000 per annum.” (The raises went through.) He approved the hiring of an assistant for Hildenbrand, an RPI man named Theodore Cooper, who had worked for Eads in St. Louis. Cooper was to be an inspector of iron for the superstructure. *When the work stopped in winter and Murphy, to save money, began letting men go, Roebling urged that the best of them be kept on. How could they ever replace a man like Hildenbrand, he asked. And in early 1875, when it had looked as though the work might have to stop altogether because money was running short, his seemed the one last voice of confidence. At the close of a long, persuasive letter to Murphy, he wrote:

I would further add, now is the time to build the Bridge. At no period within fourteen years have the prices of labor and material been as low as at present. A rise of 10 per cent in these items during the year is within the experience of all, and is but little thought of; but a rise of ten per cent means a million in the cost of the Bridge. To build now is to save money!

His own condition was much more serious and complicated than generally realized at the time, or than would be said in print later. He was worse even than when he left for Europe. He was in pain much of the time, in his stomach, in his joints and limbs. He suffered from savage headaches. Some days he was so weak he could scarcely hold up his head. Still, miserable as he was physically, he was not so bad off as he would be portrayed. “There is a popular impression that Colonel Roebling has been for years a helpless paralytic,” Emily Roebling would write in some private notes put down later. “This is a mistake as he has never been paralyzed for even one moment and there never has been a time when he has not had the full use of every member of his body.”

The major problem was that his nervous system was shattered. The slightest noise upset him terribly. He was still hounded by visions of his own death before the work could be finished, of disastrous incompetence on the part of some subordinate, of precious days lost at the bridge over some technical problem he could solve in a minute were he there. He felt imprisoned within his own body. He grew extremely short-tempered. When visitors were with him he suffered the whole while. Talk of any kind tired him more than anything else. His eyesight had grown so dim he could neither read nor write nor sign his own name.

His troubles were not solely the bends anymore. That was clear to those who had any regular contact with him. The standard explanation then, and later, was that he was suffering still from the bends. While residual pains and discomforts of the bends can persist, occasionally over a lifetime, the bends were only part of his problem. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that the bends could, at this stage, have had anything to do with his failing eyesight or the terrible discomfort he suffered whenever people were around.

When describing his own condition in private correspondence, Roebling himself does not seem to have used the words “bends” or “caisson sickness.” He spoke only of a nervous disorder and of his crippled physical condition. Farrington would later describe him as being a “confirmed invalid…owing to exposure, overwork and anxiety.” There is, indeed, every indication that the strain he was under, the limits he had pushed himself to during the winter of 1872-73 to get everything down on paper, the anguish and massive frustration of knowing so much about what ought to be done but able to do so very little—all that on top of the physical torment of the caisson sickness, had brought on what in that day was called “nervous prostration.”

He always told others his agony was his own doing. He had pushed himself too far he said. He longed for rest. It was the one and only cure he had faith in, but he simply had no time for that.

Collingwood, it seems, was also nearing a collapse of some sort and Roebling, gravely concerned about his old college friend, offered some revealing advice:

Regarding your health my council would be sit down and keep quiet…. Above all don’t let a fake ambition lead you on to undertaking tasks that will only break you down all the more. You are no doubt beginning to find out, as I have found out long ago, that nervous diseases are as intractable as they are incurable and only through mental rest of all the faculties and especially the emotions can they even be palliated in the slightest degree.

This letter, like all his correspondence with Brooklyn, the specifications and the rest, was dictated to Emily, who was in constant attendance as both nurse and private secretary. Gray-faced, he would lie propped up in bed or sit like an old man with a blanket over him in a chair by the window. She would sit close by taking down what he said in a letter book. When he had finished, she would read it back to him. He would make a few corrections, then she would do a final draft, in longhand, and read that back to him once more. As a result, week by week, month by month, she was learning quite a lot about the engineering of a wire suspension bridge.

The physical pain came and went. Frequently there were whole days when he felt well enough to be up and about the house. But everyone had to take extreme care not to upset him in any way. Since childhood he had been interested in geology and in collecting minerals. Now they became a passion. He began sending to one place and another around the country for different specimens. How he was able to take any enjoyment from them, with his sight so impaired, is a puzzle. But he did. Once, with a check for some new specimens, he had Emily include a note of explanation. “I am an invalid confined to the house and minerals are the only things that do not tire or excite me.”

A few incidents concerning the bridge upset him no end. Somebody in Brooklyn had suggested there was a secret connection between the Roebling wire works and Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company, implying that had been the reason why Keystone, not the lowest bidder, got a contract for anchor bars. Livid, deeply insulted, Roebling had sent off an icy reply to Murphy, saying he had no interest in the Keystone company, financially, politically, socially, or any other way, and further stated that if the policy henceforth was to give “contracts for supplies to the lowest bidders, irrespective of all other considerations, I hereby absolve myself from all responsibility connected with the successful carrying on of this work.” It sounded perilously like a letter of resignation.

The Eads lawsuit had also been a continuing aggravation for years now. In 1871 Eads had put in a claim for five thousand dollars, saying that Roebling, in the New York caisson, had infringed on the design he had used in St. Louis. Roebling called the charge absurd. But presently, after Roebling was stricken with the bends, Eads had angrily attacked him in the pages of Engineering, the esteemed English journal. The thing that had set Eads off was a harmless paper by Roebling published in Engineering in which Roebling had not, in Eads’s opinion, credited Eads properly for placing his air locks at the bottom of the shafts, part way inside the air chamber, instead of on top. Eads claimed he had been the first to do it that way and said Roebling should have said as much. He accused Roebling of stealing the idea and in a rather snide, roundabout fashion dismissed the younger man for having no creative talents of his own.

Eads’s letter was written in April 1873, but it did not appear in the magazine until later in the spring, when Roebling had just arrived at Wiesbaden, in no shape for any more emotional strain than he was already under. In a fury he wrote in answer to Eads’s letter: “Its perusal has left only the one prominent impression on my mind, that his skill in blowing his own trumpet is only surpassed by his art in writing abusive and unjust articles about other people.” Roebling said he had always had the greatest respect for Eads until then. He said he had designed his New York caisson before he ever saw anything of Eads’s plans or went out to St. Louis. “My actual experience in the St. Louis caisson,” he wrote, “consisted in nearly breaking my neck, and being half drowned in the bottom of a pitch-dark hole—certainly a forcible way of reminding one where the lock was located.” He said, furthermore, that Eads had ridiculed his idea of using timber for the caissons, that Eads’s prior interest in caissons had been scant and superficial, and that it was ridiculous to think that the position of an air lock was something that could be patented. “You might as well patent contrivances in a ship’s rigging if she were loaded with grain or cotton, or entirely empty.”

Then he wrote: “In conclusion I beg to assure Captain Eads that I feel perfectly competent to take care of the East River Bridge, and to overcome dangers and difficulties of which he has but little conception…. all of the St. Louis caissons together can find room in one of the East River caissons, with space enough left for several more like them…. And where would you go to find an easier material to sink through than at St. Louis, or a more difficult one than in the East River?”

It was an exchange of a sort not often witnessed in the profession, on the printed page at least, and might have been enjoyed as a memorable good fight had it not been known by many readers why Roebling was writing from Wiesbaden. Eads had never had any particular trouble with the bends himself, none personally that is, and this seemed hardly the time for him to be going after Roebling for what appeared to be a minor infraction, assuming even that Eads was within his rights. But Eads apparently was not to be put off by reports of Roebling’s condition and refused to let Roebling have the last word, writing still one more letter to the editors of Engineering.

His time was too valuable, Eads said, to take part in petty arguments, but he spent several columns of small print picking apart the things Roebling had said, and to prove his point about the position of the air lock, he included drawings of both his and Roebling’s designs, which, to be sure, looked remarkably alike.

Who was right in all this is difficult to say and not especially important. But the dispute deepened the division between the two men and caused them both considerable anxiety at a time when each had troubles enough to contend with. Each man believed his good name had been stained by the other. Neither was about to stand by and let that happen, or to have his bridge denigrated. The anger on both sides was all out of proportion to the issue. For Roebling, who let the matter drop, Eads’s accusations were the cause of lasting mental torment, but for Eads, Roebling’s amenity appears to have had some rather different consequences.

Eads needed every friend he could get just then, for it was in that summer of 1873, the summer of the exchange of letters in Engineering, that Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, convened a board of Army engineers to decide whether Eads’s bridge was a hazard to navigation on the Mississippi and ought to be stopped. And it was in September, soon after Eads’s last letter attacking Roebling, that the Army board issued its report calling the St. Louis Bridge “a very serious obstruction” to river traffic. By January the Army engineers were saying that probably the bridge ought to be torn down and what is so extremely interesting about all this is that the most outspoken member of the board was G. K. Warren, Washington Roebling’s brother-in-law.

Very possibly Warren’s opinion was a purely professional judgment. Had there been no bad blood between Roebling and Eads, Warren might have arrived at exactly the same conclusions. But the wording of his opinion suggests otherwise.

“I am convinced,” he wrote in summary, “that a bridge suited to this great want [spanning the Mississippi], at an expense much less than has already been made, almost if not entirely unobstructing navigation, could years ago have been completed, upon designs well-known and tried in this country, had not the authors of the present monster stood in the way.”

Since neither the construction cost nor the aesthetic merits of the St. Louis Bridge were at issue, Warren’s comments on both were uncalled for, as well as quite debatable. The “monster,” as he called it, happened, for example, to be regarded by many as one of the handsomest bridges in the world. Moreover, it is pretty obvious that the “well-known and tried” designs referred to were those by John A. Roebling.

But fortunately for Eads and his bridge, Secretary Belknap, General Warren, and the other Army engineers were overridden when Eads, as a last resort, went to the White House to see his old friend Grant. Congress had authorized the building of the bridge, Grant told Belknap, so only Congress could decide to pull it down, which Congress did not do.

In another couple of years, with his bridge completed and being talked about everywhere, Eads had become a great popular hero. He was “the noble engineer.” Early in 1876, a Presidential election year, it was discovered that Secretary Belknap had been getting kickbacks from the sale of Indian trading posts in the West. This on top of the sensational disclosure of a “Whiskey Ring” operating in St. Louis under the direction of Grant’s supervisor of internal revenue had the whole country wondering where, from what walk of life, an honest leader might be found. The editors of Scientific American decided they had the answer. “In war and peace his commanding talents and remarkable sagacity have been devoted to patriotic labors…We nominate for the Presidency Captain James B. Eads of St. Louis. The man of genius, of industry, and of incorruptible honor.”

Eads kept on pressing his claim against Roebling and Roebling got so he could not bear even the mention of the man’s name. Finally, in May, Roebling gave in. “I am willing to accede to the proposition of Captain Eads in order to settle this matter,” he wrote to Paine. “I give my consent more as a matter of expediency than from conviction. I am not in a frame of mind to stand any further worry about a lawsuit.”

The issue was thereupon settled out of court and that at least was one less worry for Roebling to dwell on.

The previous winter had been a particularly bad time for Roebling. At one point, his nervous state had become so unsettled, his physical discomfort so acute, that in a moment of total despair he decided to give up on the bridge.

“My health has become of late so precarious a nature,” he wrote to Henry Murphy, “that I find myself less and less able to do any work of any kind. I am therefore reluctantly compelled to offer my resignation as Engineer of the East River Bridge. The hopes that time and rest would effect a change have been in vain, rest being simply impossible.”

The letter must have been ignored in Brooklyn, or perhaps it was never even sent. The one and only copy of it is in Emily Roebling’s cardboard-backed letter book, written in pencil, in December 1875. Maybe, just possibly, she wrote it herself, without his knowing it, at a moment when her own endurance failed, but then the moment passed. In any case, nothing came of the letter.

The extraordinary thing is that Roeblmg’s mind through all this time seems not to have been affected in the slightest. If anything, his powers of concentration, his remarkable gift for recalling in every detail things he had seen, seemed greater. No longer able to work problems out on paper, as he always had, he did everything in his head, and when his younger brothers came to call on him, as they did from time to time, to inquire about his health or to discuss problems at the mill, it was he who seemed able to sort things out quickest and come up with solutions. In fact, his ability to direct the family business, in absentia, seemed no less than his ability to direct the bridge, and nearly as vital.

His brother Charles, who had come into the business in 1871, after finishing at Troy, had grown into a fastidious, intelligentlooking young man who wore a stovepipe hat and whose primary interest now was his work, which was the production side of the business. Ferdinand, who with his rimless spectacles and mustache appeared older than his age (thirty-four by 1876), was supposed to see to commercial matters.

Roebling thought highly of Charles. He admired his unfailing industry and his technical competence. “He was his father over again, to a far greater degree than any of the other children,” Roebling wrote. “He inherited his temperament, his constitution, the concentrated energy which drives one to work and be doing something all the time.” Charles, at twenty-seven, was still a bachelor.

When Charles had returned from college in 1871, everything had been prepared for him to take his place in the mill, and since Ferdinand knew comparatively little engineering, Charles had been more or less his own master from the start and old Charles Swan, his guardian, had turned over to him something like $300,000 “in good securities.”

“Charles had one very strong point,” his oldest brother would write admiringly, “he never copied; [he] tried to solve every problem according to the best of his ability. Every task was an education to him.”

Roebling’s relationship with his brother Ferdinand, the one John Roebling kept home during the war, had grown rather strained, however. Charles Swan, who had always looked after things at the mill whenever a bridge was being built, was not the man he had been, and in the time Roebling had been away from Trenton, Ferdinand, or “F.W.” as he was called, had more or less taken charge. “He lost no opportunity to make me painfully aware of it,” Roebling would write.

Now for the first time in his life, Roebling had become bitter over what he considered an unjust disparity between his own fate and that of his brothers. It was not at all like him. But his physical suffering, the endless confinement, the strain of everything he had on his mind, had begun to tell. And besides, his feelings were not without justification.

He had been the only one of them ready and able to carry on what his father had left undone at Brooklyn and he had been paying a terrible price for it. His brothers, both in perfect health, had had everything handed to them, as he saw it; they were getting rich speedily and effortlessly in a business that had been all set up for them in advance and that he felt he understood better than either one of them. He, on the other hand, and on top of all his other anxieties, was convinced he was nearly ruined financially. He never said a word about this publicly. The only record of his feelings is in private correspondence written years afterward. Nor is it possible to know whether his financial plight was quite so serious as he pictured it. His salary on the bridge remained at ten thousand dollars a year, but his expenses, he estimated later, were twice that. The medical expenses were the worst. The six months in Europe had been particularly costly. There had been Eddie’s private schooling to pay for, as well as that of his own young son. The house in Brooklyn had cost him forty thousand dollars. Moreover, he saw his expenses growing greater in time to come. But realistic or not, his concern was still another severe strain, and his unspoken feeling of indignation was deep-rooted enough to last a lifetime.

Nobody outside the family would ever know anything of this. What is more, the respect he commanded inside the family appears not to have been diminished in the slightest, either by the rise of his brothers’ fortunes or by the tragic turn his own life had taken. When it came time to incorporate John A. Roebling’s Sons, in 1876—when Charles Swan was finally persuaded to retire—Ferdinand was made secretary and treasurer, Washington was made president.

The identification of the name Roebling with the bridge at Brooklyn was, of course, quite a good thing for the family business. Unquestionably the firm’s reputation had already benefited. When a reporter came down from Brooklyn to tour the mill, Ferdinand showed him about.

“Their grounds cover fourteen acres,” the visitor wrote afterward, “and within the walls are five wire rolling mills, and all the buildings needed for their three hundred and fifty workmen and office purposes…Their products amount to three-fourths of all the wire rope made in this country. It was a rare sight to watch these busy workmen taking blocks of red-hot steel in their tongs from white-heat furnaces, passing them through rolling mills which stretched them until they lay upon the iron floor like interlacing snakes in bizarre shapes, ready to be carried by other hands to annealing furnaces, and thence through other draw plates until the wire was prepared to bind together either the delicate handiwork of the jeweler or the two cities of New York and Brooklyn with their millions of inhabitants.” The mill was then producing something like 450 miles of wire a day.

Once the cable spinning commenced over the East River the public would be treated to the most spectacular demonstration imaginable of the Roebling product—or so it was naturally assumed in Trenton—and during the last part of Washington Roebling’s confinement there, he had the pleasant task of helping to plan a display for Machinery Hall at the Centennial Exhibition.

A variety of Roebling wire and cable, some of it on big spools, would be set out within a display area framed with iron rope draped as velvet rope would be customarily. But the centerpiece of the arrangement would be a sample section, or model, of the cable for the East River bridge, mounted on a little pedestal, like a piece of sculpture, and having as its backdrop an enormous drawing of the bridge by Hildenbrand that measured seven by twelve feet and presented “the noble proportions of the structure to great advantage.”

The section was made up at the mill especially for the occasion and exactly as Roebling had decided the real thing would be put together. When finished, it looked like a metal drum about three feet long and fifteen and a half inches in diameter and bound with brass bands. The upper end was cut off and planed smooth so the position of the wires could be seen. In all it contained 5,282 steel wires, each a little over an eighth of an inch thick, and it weighed 1,200 pounds. The wires had been laid as they would be in the cables—parallel and in distinct stages: 278 wires bound together formed a strand, as it was called; 19 strands in one great bundle, all tightly wrapped in protective skin of soft iron wire, formed a cable.

Roebling had worked out the entire arrangement and in the early part of 1876 completed his final specifications. Each of the nineteen strands in a finished cable would be continuous wire some 185 miles in length, drawn from one anchorage to the other, up and over the towers, back and forth, back and forth, above the river. Each cable would contain just over 3,515 miles of wire and the wire in all four cables would come to more than 14,000 miles.

The whole process would begin with a single wire taken across by boat, then lifted up over the towers. After that a heavier steel rope would be pulled over, the “traveler” or “working rope” as it was known, which would do the job of hauling the cable wire itself back and forth. The trick would be getting the wires in each strand in exactly the right position..

Roebling’s specifications called for 6.8 million pounds, or 3,400 tons of wire “of superior quality steel.” The wire was to have a tested strength of not less than 160,000 pounds per square inch, which meant it would have nearly double the strength of the iron wire used at Niagara and Cincinnati. In addition, to guard against the corrosive salt air over the East River, the wire would be galvanized—coated with zinc—something that had not been done before and that a few later-day suspension-bridge builders would neglect to do to their regret. *

Sealed bids, the specifications stated, would be “received by the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, up to the 1st day of December, 1876.” But it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Roebling company would get the contract, and when the Centennial Exhibition opened in May, the prototype slice of bridge cable set up in the Roebling display turned out to be one of the most popular items in Machinery Hall, along with Ben Franklin’s old hand press, a first typewriter, and a telephone displayed by a courtly Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell. One day in Machinery Hall the fair’s most popular visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, put his ear to Bell’s device, then dropped the receiver, exclaiming, “My God, it talks!” The fair was a success from that moment on.

Machinery Hall was also the place to see the favorite attraction of the entire fair, the gigantic Corliss stationary steam engine. It stood just down the way from the Roebling display, taller than most houses, with two tremendous walking beams, a gigantic flywheel, several flights of stairs and little platforms for the mechanics and oilers. It had been erected in the central transept of the hall and provided the driving power for some thirteen acres of machinery displayed throughout the building.

On the opening day, the hall filled with spectators, every machine had stood motionless as President Grant, dressed all in black and looking pale and tired, stepped to the controls of the giant engine, along with Dom Pedro and George H. Corliss, its creator. Grant and the little Emperor each took hold of a lever. Then Corliss waved his hand, a signal to admit steam into the cylinders (the boilers were located outside of the building). “It was a scene to be remembered,” wrote one reporter, almost overcome with excitement, “…perhaps for the first time in the history of mankind, two of the greatest rulers in the world obeyed the order of an inventor citizen.” When the two men swung their levers, the engine hissed loudly, the enormous walking beams began moving, ever so slowly, the floor trembled. Then the walking beams were going up and down. The flywheel gathered momentum, belts moved, shafts and pulleys turned, and machines everywhere came to life—sewing cloth, printing newspapers (the New York Herald, the Sun, the Times), printing wallpaper, sawing logs, grinding out plug tobacco. The Pyramid Pin Company had a machine attended by a little girl that turned out 180,000 pins stuck in paper in a single day.

The giant Corliss itself required only one attendant, which greatly impressed most observers, including William Dean Howells, who wrote: “The engineer sits reading his newspaper, as in a peaceful bower. Now and then he lays down his paper and clambers up one of the stairways…and touches some irritated spot on the giant’s body with a drop of oil, and goes down again and takes up his newspaper; he is like some potent enchanter there…” Americans liked their mechanical marvels done up on a grand scale, the bigger the better, and it was an age that adored pageantry. So a combination of the two was bound to please. But it was the contrast between man and machine that made the machine seem so monstrous big, the man so touched by some blessed new power, and the whole hall so enormously popular.

There were some, of course, who saw the Corliss engine as a menace, “ready at the touch of a man’s fingers to show its awful power”; but most people went back to the cornfields of Indiana or the dry goods store in Fall River or wherever it was they came from filled with pride and admiration for all they had seen.

Two of the Roebling brothers went over to Philadelphia to attend the opening ceremonies. Charles probably considered the Corliss engine overly large for its purpose and inefficient, which it was, and Ferdinand must have been extremely pleased by the attention paid the section of bridge cable. The fair would be attended by eight million citizens by the time it ended in the fall, or about one American out of every five, a very large percentage of whom took some time to look over the Roebling display.

For Washington Roebling news of all this, like news of everything else happening beyond his walls, came to him second or third hand. The fair was an easy morning’s train ride from Trenton, but for him it could as well have been on the other side of the world. The opening ceremonies in Machinery Hall and all the other attractions were described at great length in the papers. There was Old Abe, the famous eagle mascot of the Civil War, which, for fifty cents, could be seen dining on live chickens; or the gigantic hand and torch of the great statue Liberty Lighting the World, a one hundredth birthday gift from the people of France. These he could readily picture as Emily read aloud for him, just as later the following month he could see the gruesome scene on the high plains of Montana when she read about the slaughter of 264 federal cavalrymen and their commanding officer, George Armstrong Custer. Roebling and Custer were of about the same age. That the Little Big Horn and Machinery Hall were part of the same America said perhaps as much as anything about the sort of country it was after a hundred years if one stopped to think about it, which doubtless Roebling did.

And then, very gradually, he began to show signs of improvement. In July he was talking to Emily of returning to the bridge and he dictated a letter to Paine to tell him as much. The work he liked best, the work he knew best, was about to begin. When he had first arrived in Cincinnati after the war, the cable spinning had only just begun and he had been the one in charge from then on, not his father, as most people failed to appreciate. Now he grew keenly interested in everything to do with the footbridge. Farrington was the man to build it, he wrote Henry Murphy. Farrington had been through all this before at Cincinnati and knew just what do to. “He is a man of great resource when unforeseen troubles arise,” Roebling told Murphy, who already knew all about Farrington and his abilities, “and he has the necessary coolness and perseverance and does not easily get frightened in time of danger…” It was what someone else might have said about Roebling.

Then on the afternoon of August 14, shortly past one o’clock, a telegram was sent up to the Roebling house from the Trenton depot. It was from Paine: THE FIRST WIRE ROPE REACHED ITS POSITION AT ELEVEN AND ONE HALF O’CLOCK. WAS RAISED IN SIX MINUTES.

Two other telegrams followed, one from John Prentice, treasurer of the Bridge Company, and one from Farrington late in the day. They reported what he hoped they would: after the first rope was in position, a second had gone across, the two to form an endless cable stretching from anchorage to anchorage. The whole operation had gone off without a hitch, exactly as planned. It was a moment Roebling had been anticipating for seven years and he had missed seeing it.

17

A Perfect Pandemonium

With its princes of the lofty wire the Brooklyn Bridge is now the cheapest, the most entertaining, and the best-attended circus in the world.

—New York Tribune

THEY all stood waiting for the river to clear—Martin and McNulty under the arches on the New York tower; Farrington and a carpenter named Brown out on a hoisting frame at the top of the tower, where they could signal to the engineman in the yard; foreman Dempsey and several workmen close by on the tower itself; and on the wharves below and across the river, in the rigging of ships tied up on both shores, perhaps six thousand spectators, many of whom had been waiting for several hours.

The idea at first had been to take the rope across on a Sunday or at night, when there would be little traffic on the water. On the average day as many as a hundred craft passed the line of the bridge in an hour’s time. But Farrington had noted that frequently there would be clear water between the towers for stretches of four to eight minutes, even on the busiest days of the week, so the decision had been to go ahead just as soon as everything was ready.

A few days earlier the ends of two working ropes had been hauled up and over the top of the Brooklyn tower. Made of twisted chrome steel strands, these ropes were three-quarters of an inch in diameter, more than three thousand feet long, and were wound on a big wooden drum set at the base of the tower on the river side. To get the ropes over the top had been relatively simple. A heavy hemp rope had been put over first, then tied to the eyelet at the end of the wire rope. That done, the hoisting engine in the yard was started up. The wire rope was pulled to the top, where it passed through a set of pulleys, then down the other side.

From the yard the ropes were then hauled inland to the summit of the Brooklyn anchorage in much the same way, except that fenders and trestles had to be erected and men stationed on all intervening housetops to prevent any accidental damage. At the anchorage the two wire ropes were joined and passed around several oak wheels, the main one of which, the driving wheel, as it was called, was mounted horizontally in a massive timber framework and was a good twelve feet in diameter. Back at the base of the tower one of the reels was then put on board a stone scow and hung on a wooden axle, so when the scow started for New York the rope would be unwound by the strain from the Brooklyn shore, where the rope was temporarily lashed tight.

By nine that morning, Monday the 14th, everything was in order. Huge American flags had been raised on top of both towers and there was much excitement among the spectators. Slack water, the relatively calm interval between tides, would occur in the next hour. Martin, McNulty, and Farrington had gone on board the scow to supervise things, along with the white-bearded O. P. Quintard and two or three young ladies, the identities of whom were never given in later accounts.

Shortly past nine two steam tugs pulled alongside. One made fast to the starboard side of the scow; the other stood off slightly, ready to keep other craft at a distance during the trip across. At nine thirty the tugs sounded their bells, moorings were cast off, tugs and scow swung slowly out into the river. At the stern of the scow the wire rope trailed off into the water. The tide was still running out, and as the boats pulled away, the current carried them downstream some but not enough to matter. Slowly, steadily, they pushed for the opposite shore, the rope paying out and sinking to the bottom as fast as it unwound. Two-thirds of the way across the tugs had to stop to allow an English bark to pass upriver across their bows. “She came so close,” wrote a reporter on the lead tug, “that a pebble could have been tossed upon her deck with the most perfect ease.”

But that had been the single interruption. The whole trip took less than ten minutes and the arrival at the New York tower had been greeted by loud applause. The scow made fast in a very businesslike fashion; the balance of the rope was unwound and laid on the dock.

The next thing had been to get the rope over the New York tower. A hemp rope had been passed over the tower previously and was now attached to the end of the wire. But nothing more was done until Farrington had climbed to the top of the tower to make a few final checks. At ten twenty he signaled from above. The hoisting engine was thrown into gear and in a matter of minutes the wire was over the top and reeled part way onto the yard engine’s big drum. The main body of the rope, however, still lay at the bottom of the river and there it remained as everyone stood watching for a moment with no boats in the way, or none about to be, when it could be pulled out of the water.

The waiting seemed interminable. Half an hour went by, three-quarters of an hour, and still there was no break in the traffic. Two barges and an excursion steamer moving out into the stream from Jewell’s dock took forever getting under way. The excursion boat was bound for Oriental Grove, on the Sound, with a picnic party, and everyone on board appeared delighted by the grandstand view of the doings at the bridge.

At about half past ten, as a precautionary warning to passing ships, a little howitzer had been fired at the foot of the New York tower but that seemed to have no effect. It began to look, in fact, as though several hours would pass before the river would be clear enough to get on with the work. But as some of the subsequent newspaper accounts noted, the long wait did nothing to dampen anyone’s spirits and the delay added considerably to the size of the crowd.

Then the break came. The river was perfectly empty from tower to tower. At twenty-five past eleven, from the archway on the New York tower, Martin shouted up to Farrington, “Go ahead!” Farrington had Brown signal to the hoisting engine. The cannon was fired a second time—to signal the men on the Brooklyn side to cut loose their lashings and as a warning to approaching ships.

“In a few seconds the rope began to move,” Farrington wrote later; “there was a ripple around it in the water; it began to draw away from the dock toward Brooklyn, and soon we could see the other part coming from Brooklyn towards us. Faster and faster the space of clear water between the two parts narrowed, and in four minutes from the time of starting, it swung clear of the surface of the water, with a sparkling swish, amid the cheers of spectators, on the wharves and ferryboats, and the shouts of our own workmen.”

This time the drum in the yard was wound by a thirty-horsepower engine that made 150 revolutions per minute (the engine used to pull the wire over the tower had been only half as powerful). As a result it took just two and a half minutes to pull the wire free from the water, and five minutes, all told, to get it into proper position for the time being, stretched from tower to tower at an elevation above the water of two hundred feet more or less. Almost immediately a boat passed by below, a lighter called Comet carrying a load of pig iron, and at least one reporter took the opportunity to go up on the Brooklyn tower to take a look at the view.

“When it is considered that one has to climb upward of thirty flights of winding stairway, the toil of the ascent on a close August day can be readily imagined,” wrote the young man from the Herald, “but all this is instantly forgotten when the picture from the summit spreads out at one’s feet.” The buildings of both cities, he said, looked dwarfed beneath the overtopping height of the tower; the streets seemed narrowed down to lanes in Brooklyn and to mere pathways in New York. The view of the river and the bay, with their islands and with tiny ships moving restlessly this way and that, all looked extremely fine, he said. “What a splendid set of photographs could be obtained from this point!…Doubtless some enterprising photographer will seize the chance.”*

With the first half of the working rope thus in place, the drum and hoisting engine in the New York yard had to be freed to haul over the second half. So a huge iron clamp was bolted to the end, near the enginehouse, about ten feet from the ground. A pulley block was made fast to the wharf close to the drum, another to the clamp, and a rope passed between them several times made a lashing strong enough to withstand the pull of the wire rope, the end of which was immediately cast loose from the drum.

The tugs and the scow, in the meantime, had returned to the Brooklyn tower and about noon they started back with the second rope. By half past three it too had been hoisted out of the river, everything going even more smoothly than the first time. The next step would be to take the ends of the two ropes back to the New York anchorage, splice them, and thereby form one immense loop, or endless “traveler,” over the towers, reaching all the way from anchorage to anchorage. The entire length of the traveler when completed would be 6,800 feet, or considerably more than a mile, making it easily the longest belt connecting machinery anywhere on earth.

“WEDDED” was the one-word headline in the evening edition of the Eagle. “The thing is done,” the article began. New York and Brooklyn had been joined at last. But no New York paper was willing to go quite that far. The Herald, for example, described the great endless rope draped over the river as only “the engagement ring in the marriage preparations of the two cities.” All the same the event was an enormous popular success and talk of the bridge was everywhere as the papers reported that the next step would be to send a man across on the rope.

More than a hundred people appeared at the bridge offices to apply for the job, including a twelve-year-old boy who wanted to go hand over hand and a Long Island acrobat who considered it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Nearly all of them volunteered to make the trip without pay and C. C. Martin told reporters there were at least a dozen of his own men who would give a month’s wages to be the first one to cross the river.

To quiet things down some it was announced that the man picked to make the trip would be one of the most trusted employees and probably one of the engineers. The rope would first be run back and forth a number of times. Then the man would go over in a boatswain’s chair, a seat and a sling made fast to the rope. He would start from the Brooklyn anchorage, the announcement said. (Henry Murphy wanted the historic journey to originate in Brooklyn.) He would ride up to the tower, climb out, cross over to the other edge, get back in his seat, and start across the river. “The object of this journey will be to see how the thing works.”

All the machinery for running the rope was at the Brooklyn anchorage. At the foot of the great stone mass stood a thirty-horsepower steam hoisting engine that would drive the wheels. It was completely enclosed, as was its boiler nearby. Up above, across the face of the anchorage, secured just over the arches, was a line of shafting with several pulleys. A sixteen-inch-wide belt, ninety feet long, connected the pulleys on the shafting with the gears and cogwheels that turned the enormous twelve-foot wheel that carried the working rope. The arrangement of cogwheels was such that the direction of the rope could be reversed without reversing the engine, an important feature since the rope was not to be revolved continuously, but worked back and forth.

On the New York anchorage the framework of the main pulley was adjustable, so it could be moved forward or back in order to give the rope the prescribed deflection, or sag. (At one deflection the rope would bear greater weight than at another, and thus adjusting the deflection just so would be a vital part of the work to come.) Had there not been some trouble with the delivery of one or two essential belts, the much heralded first crossing would have taken place almost immediately after the traveler was in place, but there were numerous other matters to attend to in any event, and the Eagle, ever the ardent champion of the bridge, wrote, “It is refreshing to see how the work is pushed forward, and yet the thoroughness with which everything is done, in these days of slighted work and ill-performed operations…”

To the surprise of almost no one who had had anything to do with building the bridge, the man chosen to make the first trip over the river was Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington.

Farrington, who would so soon become a subject of great public interest, was nearing sixty in 1876, but still agile, tough, and, of course, exceedingly knowledgeable about working with wire rope. Subsequent newspaper articles would reveal also that he came from Massachusetts originally, where he had been put to work in a woolen mill at age nine, that he had been a farmer, a carpenter, a machinist in England, a seaman, a gasworks superintendent, and was considered the best bridge mechanic in the country. On the morning of Friday, August 25, when he arrived at the Brooklyn anchorage ready to make his historic journey, he appeared “perfectly cool and collected”—a spare man of medium height, with gray beard and blue eyes, turned out quite formally for the occasion in a fresh suit of unbleached linen and a new straw hat.

An announcement that a man was to make the crossing that day had been published in the Eagle the previous afternoon. As a result the crowds had begun gathering since well before nine in the morning. Seen from Brooklyn, the piers adjacent to the New York tower looked black with people, and the gates to the Brooklyn anchorage and tower yard were jammed with spectators.

Up on the anchorage itself workmen were busy adjusting belts and pulleys, with Martin, McNulty, and Farrington supervising everything. By eleven all looked in order. The machinery was set in motion and the rope began moving across the river. To get every twist and kink out, it had to be worked back and forth several times. Otherwise anything attached to it, including a human passenger, would have been turned over and over. A stick tied to the rope as a marker and sent from the Brooklyn anchorage up to the Brooklyn tower twisted completely around several times while making its slow ascent. But after half an hour of working the rope to and fro, it moved along perfectly.

There was a break for the noon meal. The day was bright and very hot by then. Up on the Brooklyn tower, a small crowd of privileged spectators had gathered, including Senator Murphy and several ladies. The sun beat down on the exposed stonework and at one point some of the reporters in the group sent a note over the rope to their compatriots on the opposite tower asking for cold beer and sandwiches. An answer was returned by the same route, “Send the money and we will send the beer,” but no money was sent.

Presently, about twenty past one, the huge American flag was again unfurled from the Brooklyn tower and minutes later another went up the flagstaff on the New York tower. Then two men with red signal flags were seen to wave to each other from the tops of either tower. Everything was set to go. Estimates were that more than ten thousand people were watching.

Farrington, all this time, had been supervising the preparation of his boatswain’s chair, a simple board seat, two feet long and two inches thick, with rope holes drilled in each corner, like an ordinary swing, and with four ropes drawn through and tied to the wire rope just as they might be for a swing. The board itself had been placed so that only one end rested on the rim of the anchorage, while most of it hung out over the edge, eighty feet above the street. So when Farrington proceeded to take his seat, it was, in the words of one bystander, a somewhat delicate operation.

The men assisting him next passed a rope across his back, to form a rest of sorts, then brought it around, across his chest, and tied it securely to one of the corner ropes. All these precautions, however, appeared to make “the daring voyager” feel only more uncomfortable.

At thirty-two minutes past one o’clock, Farrington said he was ready. “Timothy McCarthy ran the engine,” Farrington would write later, “and John D. Smallfield handled the starting lever most carefully, according to a system of signals previously agreed upon.” Martin, who was standing close by, dipped a signal flag, John D. Smallfield in the yard below shifted his lever, and in an instant the master mechanic was on his way.

There was great shouting from down below, and up ahead, on top of the tower, people were waving hats and handkerchiefs. Then all at once, as he went swinging out over the housetops between the anchorage and the tower, Farrington freed himself from the rope about his chest and stood up on the seat. Holding on first with one hand, then the other, he lifted his hat in response to the continuing ovation. Then he sat down again. People were running through the streets beneath him now, shouting and cheering as they ran. He waved, he blew them kisses. Sailing steadily along all the while, his course was nearly horizontal at first, like that of a heavy bird taking flight, because of the sag in the rope. His light coat blew open and began fluttering in the wind. And then he was beyond the sag and climbing sharply, almost straight up, a coat-flapping, gently twirling form that looked very small, fragile, and very birdlike now against the granite face of the tower.

The rope had to be operated with the greatest of care at this stage, as Farrington neared the top of the tower, for if he were drawn suddenly against the coping, he might be knocked right out of his seat. A reporter described the moment this way:

One of the most experienced engineers in the place held the lever [McNulty most likely], and as Mr. Farrington was seen to approach the top of the tower the engine was slowed. All eyes were now strained to discern the movements of the voyager. That he appreciated the danger was evident, as was also the reason for freeing himself from the restraints of the encircling rope, for he stood upright again with his feet upon the board and his hands ready to save himself by grasping the coping of the tower in case the wire was not stopped in time. The red flag was seen to drop, and simultaneously the wire was stopped. Two men stood by ready to help Mr. Farrington upon the tower, but he was still a little too low down to be reached. The red flag was held aloft, and the engineer, interpreting that signal to mean “go ahead,” started the wire again very cautiously. It had moved but a few feet when the flag dropped again, and the engine was stopped instantaneously. Mr. Farrington was now nearly level with the top of the tower, and strong hands grasping his, he was upon his feet and surrounded by an excited crowd of friends in a second.

A tremendous cheer went up from the streets and rooftops, followed quickly by a salute from the little cannon across the river. His time from anchorage to tower was three and three-quarter minutes. (Quite a number of those gentlemen with privileged vantage points on the towers and anchorages had their watches out through the whole of Farrington’s aerial journey and the time he took from point to point would be a subject of the greatest interest among them and duly noted for the historical record.)

Farrington told those clustered about him on the Brooklyn tower that the trip thus far had been nothing at all. Murphy shook him heartily by the hand and asked how he felt. It was an exhilarating moment for the Senator. Farrington said he felt just fine.

The little sling seat was then carried across to the opposite rim and Farrington climbed down and seated himself once again for the long ride over the river. The rope he was traveling on did not look very big even up close. It was about as thick as a man’s thumb. But to those who stood with him at the tower’s edge, the rope appeared to trail off to no more than a thread, then to vanish altogether somewhere out beyond the middle of the river. It was all very well to know its tensile strength and the rest (it could carry the weight of ten men and more). Every instinct was still to pull back and shudder at the prospect of stepping off into such a void.

Again the signal flag waved and the rope started and the minute he swung away from the tower there was another outburst of cheering. This time all those crowded along the wharves were joined by thousands more on board the innumerable boats and ferries that had gathered for the occasion. All normal traffic on the river had stopped. From the towers it looked almost as though one could walk across just by stepping from boat to boat.

Farrington went sailing over the river, waving, lifting his hat, very obviously having a glorious time, but he stayed seated. Then a steam tug directly beneath him let loose with its shrill whistle. Instantly a dozen others joined in. In seconds every boat on the river was sounding its approval as the tiny figure of a man went soaring overhead, “to all appearances self-propelled,” spinning around every now and then, the rope he dangled from all but invisible against the sky.

As he passed the center of the river and began his ascent to the New York tower, the reception from shore was louder even than his Brooklyn send-off had been. And a little less than seven minutes after leaving the Brooklyn tower, he made a flawless landing on top of the New York tower. Then with no delay whatever he was across the summit of the tower, back in his seat again, and on his way on the last leg of the trip, down to the New York anchorage.

Now the great mass of spectators along the river front surged inland toward the anchorage. Church bells were ringing, factory whistles screaming, along with all the boat horns, bells, and whistles that were still sounding forth from the water—“a perfect pandemonium” the Times called it. Indeed, Master Mechanic Farrington seemed the only one not carried away by the moment. It was as though he might be having second thoughts about the commotion he was causing, or that he was sorry the ride was over. “Despite the shouting and confusion that went on beneath him,” wrote one onlooker, “he sat quiet with his hands folded, save when he waved them in response and showed every sign of perfect self-possession.”

Then Farrington stepped lightly onto the New York anchorage, the first passenger to cross over from Brooklyn by way of the Great Bridge. The entire trip had taken twenty-two minutes.

After that, when Farrington climbed down from the anchorage, something close to a riot broke out. The crowd wanted to carry him through the streets in triumph. At first he had tried to make his way through, thinking naïvely that he could walk over to the ferry back to Brooklyn, but people were pressing about him so, reaching out to touch him with such fervor, that he was “obliged to seek refuge from their attentions” in an office in the bridge yard. The hope was that things might settle down if he kept out of sight. But an hour later the crowds had grown greater if anything. A rowboat was brought to the wharf under the tower. Farrington slipped out a back door and was rowed to the other side.

Farrington declared afterward, “The ride gave me a magnificent view, and such pleasing sensations as probably I shall never experience again. But he thought much too much fuss had been made over the episode and told Roebling he was quite put out by the publicity he had received. He had had a natural desire to be the first man over, he said, but his real objective had been to demonstrate to his workmen, who would be doing the same thing under more hazardous conditions, his own complete confidence in the safety of the rope. He would ask no man to do anything he would not do himself.

Moreover, he allowed that he and the assistant engineers had been getting too much praise lately. Roebling was the hardest worker of them all, he told one reporter. “He does most of the brain work,” Farrington said.

Be that as it may, Farrington had done something neither Roebling nor anyone else had. In the eyes of the public, for the very first time, he had transformed years of talk and expense and several million tons of granite into a bridge over the East River. He had shown the thing could work. And like it or not, he himself had been transformed by the act.

He said he had simply gone along for the ride. Anyone could have done it was what he told people; the only thing necessary was to sit there, all of which was perfectly true to a very large extent. But the more he went on that way, deprecating his own part in the spectacle, the more he seemed to be saying something else—that this bridge was a more miraculous affair than one might imagine. It had not only taken him over the river with perfect safety, it had transformed him into a hero. And, of course, the fact that he was a plain mechanic, but a man of natural good sense and courage, did nothing to diminish his popular appeal.

His crossing, very simply, had been a “public triumph,” as Harper’s Monthly said. Nobody who saw it would ever forget it. He could say whatever he liked.

The work to be done now, briefly stated, was this:

Two more three-quarter-inch wire ropes would have to be taken across and spliced to form a second endless traveler. Then a heavier rope, called the “carrier,” would follow, this one to hold the weight of several still heavier ropes to be hauled over. These would be the two-and-a-quarter-inch ropes to hold the light frame platforms, or “cradles,” upon which the men would stand when binding the wires for the great cables. Then supporting ropes for the footbridge would have to be laid up, the footbridge built, ropes for handrails strung, and two storm cables attached from tower to tower beneath the footbridge, in inverted arcs, to keep the footbridge from being carried off by the wind. All that accomplished, the real work of spinning the cables could begin and it would be then that the travelers would perform their vital role.

Work on the second traveler rope began the very next day, a Saturday. But this time the rope was hauled over by the first traveler, rather than going by water, and before the day was over, bystanders along the river front were treated to still one more memorable, but entirely unexpected, high-wire performance.

At eight that morning, first thing, a big reel of wire had been rolled into position on top of the Brooklyn anchorage. One end was lashed to the traveler. The traveler was started up. Slowly the reel unwound and the new rope started toward the Brooklyn tower, seeming to creep out over the other rope, but really moving with it.

When about fifty feet had run out, signal flags waved, the traveler was stopped momentarily, the two ropes were lashed together with heavy twine by men stationed next to the reel—to keep the new rope from sagging—and then the rope was started up again. After that similar lashings were made every fifty feet.

As the new rope crept out over the housetops, the news spread through the whole neighborhood and across the river by ferry, in advance of the rope. In no time the streets and wharves were once more jammed with spectators. Once the rope had crossed the river, passed over the New York tower and reached the anchorage beyond, it was secured at each end in a sort of monster vise. But then the lashings had to be cut loose from end to end and the one way to do that was by hand.

Accordingly, after the noontime break, two riggers began swinging themselves simultaneously from each tower, down the land spans, toward the two anchorages. From the New York tower came a former sailor with the appropriate name of Harry Supple, who had been working on the bridge for six years and had been among those injured when the derricks fell. He used a boatswain’s chair, like the one Farrington had crossed on, which was hung to the traveler by a big iron shackle. Seating himself as Farrington had, only without any restraining ropes about his chest, Supple took two half hitches around the traveler with a short length of rope that he would use to check his speed on the way down. Then he pushed off into mid-air, kicked his feet to get the shackle started, and with sudden speed slid down to the first lashing, where he pulled hard on his rope and stopped.

A few fast slashes with a sheath knife and he had the knot severed. Instantly, bits of twine flew into the air, the wire ropes sprang apart with a terrific force, causing the new one to drop down in a big loop and the old one, which Supple was riding on, to vibrate violently along its whole length. Supple himself was seen to drop six feet in his frail-looking seat and bounce about wildly, but he appeared not in the least bothered by that and immediately cast off his gauntlet (as the stay rope was called) and continued on. He sliced open the next lashing, the next and the next, proceeding with incredible speed, a noisy crowd urging him on all the way to the bottom. To separate the two ropes from tower to anchorage, a distance of one thousand feet bound by twenty lashings, took him ten minutes. When his feet landed on the anchorage, the ovation was such that he ought to have taken a long bow.

In the meantime, however, spectators in Brooklyn had not fared so well. The other rigger, a German named William Kohrner, had been terribly nervous before stepping off from the tower and once under way he had been both awkward and maddeningly cautious. He held on to the wire rope with both hands, letting himself down ever so slowly and only short distances at a time. He took so long with each knot that there was some speculation on top of the tower as to whether he might finish the job that week. As it was, he took nearly an hour to do the same thing Supple had done in ten minutes. So when the time came to start on the main span, Patrick Timbs, the man picked to leave from the Brooklyn tower, was told by the others in no uncertain terms “to do better by them.”

The plan was for Timbs and Thomas Carroll to slide down from the two towers and meet in the middle over the river, cutting the lashings in just the way the other two had. That done, they were to hitch themselves to the traveler, which would then be entirely free, and be hauled back up to the Brooklyn tower.

Timbs and Carroll were both Englishmen. Timbs was lithe and powerfully built. Carroll, a huge, portly man, would be testing the wire, it was said, with well over two hundred pounds. Timbs had come darting down his side at a great clip, recovering for Brooklyn whatever glory had been lost by the awkward Kohrner. But Carroll had run into trouble almost right away.

For some reason, probably to gain speed going down the rope, Carroll had hung his seat by a pulley, instead of the iron shackle used by the others. The pulley had worked fine at first. He shot away from the tower faster than any of them. But as he approached the second lashing, the pulley jammed between the two traveler ropes and try as he would he was unable to budge it loose or to reach far enough ahead to get at the next lashing.

It was at this point that young Supple, who had by now returned to the top of the New York tower, decided to go to the rescue. He swung himself out over the river, sailor-style, hand over hand, with his legs wrapped around the traveler rope. He reached Carroll quickly enough, passed him by, and cut the next lashing, which instantly freed the pulley. Then back he went, up to the tower, in the same way he had come down and carrying on an easy conversation with those on the tower all the while. The crowd below was ecstatic.

Carroll, meanwhile, slid on, only to get caught the same as before, again and again, and freeing himself only after the greatest effort. His progress was so slow, in fact, that he was no more than halfway down his side of the rope when Timbs, having passed the center of the sag, had started to haul himself by hand up the steep incline toward Carroll, cutting the lashings as he went.

Once they met and all the lashings were free, there was a new problem. The traveler would not move. Somehow the two ropes had gotten twisted around each other, with the result that it was impossible to haul the men in. So something had to be improvised.

A ring was put over the traveler and a heavy weight and one end of a hemp rope were attached to it. The weight, it was hoped, would be enough to carry the ring and the rope down from the New York tower to the stranded pair, who were perhaps four hundred feet distant. But the ring slid only a quarter of the distance, then stopped for good.

Once more Harry Supple went into action. Fixing a loop in the same hemp rope, he wrapped it about one leg and worked his way out toward Timbs and Carroll, both of whom, to the amazement of everyone, seemed quite nonchalant about the whole business. Timbs, swinging in his perch, his arms resting on the upper wire, looked as though he might be about to fall asleep.

Supple reached them with no trouble, tied the end of the rope he carried to Carroll’s chair, climbed onto the chair with Carroll, and the two of them were pulled back to the tower, leaving Timbs hanging out there by himself.

The traveler was tried again then and this time it worked. Timbs began moving along back toward Brooklyn, whence he came, swinging his legs, as though on a joy ride, looking all about up and down the river. But before he was a third of the way to Brooklyn there was a sudden frightful jerk in the wire, as though something had snapped, and it was noted by those watching through glasses that Timbs suddenly changed his expression. A belt on the engine had broken and it took twenty minutes to fix it, which were twenty minutes during which Timbs had no way of knowing what the trouble was. Gradually regaining his composure, he just sat very still, watching the boats below and waving his hand in answer to cheers from passengers gazing up from passing ferries. Presently he was pulled to the tower and the rest of the day was devoted to getting the new rope into proper position.

The papers made much of all this. Even the World, which had seldom ever had a good word for the bridge, ran a long account, calling it, in a big headline, a “Stupendous Tight-Rope Performance.” And later, in a formal report to the Chief Engineer, Paine would write, “Mr. Harry Supple was all that could be desired as foreman of riggers…”

When another rope was taken over on Monday (the second half of the new traveler), the crowds were there again and the event was treated by the press as a major theatrical opening might be, or a new circus in town. People knew more what to expect this time. And this time the new men being given a chance at the work were out to break Harry Supple’s record of one thousand feet in ten minutes, which one of them, William Miller, managed to do, going the same route Supple had from the New York tower to the New York anchorage in seven and a half minutes. “As he neared the anchorage,” wrote a reporter, “the order was given, ‘Stand by, men, to snatch him.’ His face was firmly set, and his eyes had a queer light in them, his face shining with the galvanized iron dust that the iron shackle of his chair had ground from the wires, and his hands were in active use on the rope. When he came within reach the men caught him, and with a rousing cheer landed him on the stonework.”

Two others, Frederick Arnold and James O’Neil, had also, by now, taken off from the towers and could be seen plummeting pell-mell down the extreme ends of the main span over the river. O’Neil, the man from the New York tower, appeared to be making the best time. But then he stopped abruptly, as though his chair had jammed the way Carroll’s had. But when the engineers, Martin, McNulty, Paine, turned their glasses on him, they saw he was getting out of his chair and climbing up onto the wire above. Next thing, he slung himself by a strap—his belt apparently—to the wire he had not been riding on and it was then that everyone on the tower realized what had happened. Some way or other the two ropes had crossed and O’Neil had jumped off from the tower with his chair slung to the wrong one, to the new rope rather than to the traveler. O’Neil had discovered this in time, obviously, and with great nerve decided to make the change immediately.

Sitting there on the traveler, a good 185 feet over the river, he cut his chair clear from the shackle and tied the chair ropes to the proper wire. It took him about fifteen minutes to make the switch, “the hearts of many spectators beating fast and hard on witnessing his cool daring.”

O’Neil had moved on again eventually and reached the middle of the river, where Arnold, meantime, had been sitting waiting patiently. Then, after dangling out there for a time, the two of them were towed back to the New York tower.

But the greatest excitement of the day had occurred a little earlier over on the Brooklyn side, where the descent from tower to anchorage was made by none other than E. F. Farrington, who apparently wanted to make up for Kohrner’s poor showing on Saturday and to demonstrate to his men (and just possibly to the Brooklyn spectators as well) how the job ought to be handled.

On the Brooklyn side, also, quite a number of people had been admitted within the enclosure surrounding the tower yard and among them were several seemingly fearless young women who wanted the best view possible of the high-wire performers, and of the fatherly Farrington in particular. One pretty brunette in a pink summer dress, a girl of about eighteen, led the way. Followed by the others, she had climbed to the top of the tower and there, with a pair of opera glasses, waiting for the master mechanic to make his appearance, she was seen to study the vast panorama spread out below.

Farrington, it was understood, would commence his descent at two o’clock and at two o’clock he appeared, dressed like a doctor this time, in suit and tie and a white linen duster and carrying a large knife.

He took his seat, stepped off, and was on his way with no to-do. And he was making swift progress, with all the dispatch of a surgeon, when quite by accident he dropped his knife. It fell some two hundred feet, harming nobody, but it also left Farrington in a rather impossible predicament, or so it would seem from the ground. Farrington, however, proceeded right along as though nothing had happened. When he reached the next lashing, he simply went at it with his hands and to the delight of everyone had it untied in a matter of seconds. Though it took him quite a little while to get down, the crowd stayed with him the whole time and he still managed to do the job faster than had poor Kohrner.

And then the circus acts were over. Both travelers were in position, ready for business, mounted in such a way that the space between the sides of each enormous loop was about twenty-seven feet, or so wide apart that when they were seen from the waterfront or from out on the river, it looked as though four separate ropes had been strung over the towers, placed about where the four great cables were to hang.

“I have carried out your instructions to the letter,” Farrington wrote to Roebling, “…and from my perfect familiarity with your plans, and my own experience, I shall expect the cables of this bridge to equal, if they do not excel, the best that ever were made.”

18

Number 8,
Birmingham Gauge

Sealed proposals will be received by the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, up to the 1st day of December, 1876, for the manufacture and delivery in Brooklyn, N.Y., of 3,400 net tons or 6,800,000 lbs. of Steel Cable Wire…

—From specifications issued over the signature of W. A. Roebling, Chief Engineer

EVEN among his political opponents Abram Hewitt was considered an honorable man. There was nothing very engaging about him. A nervous, brusque little person with an authoritative manner, he was anything but the ingratiating good fellow. But he was hard-working, not a politician by trade, and reputedly both intelligent and honest, all qualities that counted high with the electorate in the year 1876.

Hewitt had come quite a way since the late Mayor Havemeyer had asked him to take a look into the bridge management. He was a Congressman now, and more. His friend Tilden, who had become governor of New York chiefly because of his reputation as a standard bearer against Tweed, was the Democratic candidate for President. Hewitt was his campaign manager, and with the depression still gripping the nation, the Republicans divided, and ever more scandal in Washington, it looked as if Tilden might be in the White House come spring. Tilden’s opponent was the mild, modest, and largely unknown Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, who had been picked that June at a convention in Cincinnati, where the Roebling bridge had been a way for delegates “to take some air” as the balloting dragged on, and where the nominee himself had begun his law career about the time that bridge was being started.

Tilden, however, was not much as a candidate. Cold and secretive by nature, not in the least eloquent, he was also in poor health and rather reluctant to spend any of his sizable personal fortune on behalf of his own cause. As a result Hewitt had become more than just his manager. He was the driving force of the Tilden campaign and, with his brother-in-law, Edward Cooper, the biggest financial contributor. Hewitt also happened to be running for Congress again, but his reputation was so high and his Republican opponent so weak that his election seemed certain, despite the little time he could give to it.

“Hewitt was as true a patriot, as pure a man, as ever lived, in my opinion,” wrote one admiring young campaign worker. Henry Adams, historian and man of letters, whose vision of his times would count so with future historians, wrote that Hewitt was among that New York school of politicians “who played the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work.” Everything considered, Adams judged Hewitt “the best-equipped, the most active-minded, the most industrious…the most useful public man in Washington.”

Hewitt was known for his liberalism and sense of responsibility. He was the wealthy ironmonger who believed in labor unions. He was the Congressman who had the intelligence to appreciate scientific research, ardently supporting the geologic surveys in the West, for example. He was not simply a reform Democrat, he was what all respectable people longed for: a decisive gentleman in public life.

So it is not surprising that when Hewitt introduced a resolution at a meeting of the bridge trustees the first week in September, it was considered an exemplary piece of foresight and was adopted immediately and unanimously.

The principal piece of business to be attended to next was the awarding of the wire contract. It was plain a lot would be riding on the decision. Estimates were that the order for wire would come to somewhere near a million dollars.

Hewitt had arrived at the meeting a little late, just as the president of the board, Henry Murphy, was recounting the progress made since the previous meeting in July and predicting no more problems henceforth. The contractors for the stone had all been paid and the Chief Engineer’s specifications for cabled wire had been approved by the Executive Committee. There was no reason, Murphy said, why the bridge could not be completed in a short time.

But then Hewitt, who was vice-president of the board, said that while he had read the wire specifications and found them to be “eminently wise,” he had not found any provisions concerning those who should be allowed to bid for the contract. Hewitt expressed some surprise about this.

The Chief Engineer was also a manufacturer of cable wire, Hewitt reminded Murphy and the others. He himself was a wire dealer, but he did not consider it just that he should become a bidder, and would not, therefore. Bids from any firm, company, or individual interested in the bridge in any way should not be accepted, he said. The Chief Engineer especially should not be allowed to become a bidder. Hewitt said further that if Colonel Roebling was permitted to compete for the contract, he, Hewitt, would resign from the board and have nothing more to do with the bridge. It was quite a little speech. It made an issue of something that had never been considered an issue in all the years since John A. Roebling was first asked to build the bridge and apparently it made a great impression, for when Hewitt offered the following resolution, it was adopted without any further discussion:

Resolved, That bids from any firm or company in which any officer or engineer of the Bridge has an interest will not be received or considered; nor will the successful bidder be allowed to sublet any part of the contract to any such person or company.

There was no specific mention of Roebling or the Roebling company, but just so nobody mistook his intentions, Hewitt later repeated what he had said for the benefit of the press. “I am very strongly opposed to the Roeblings having anything to do with the filling of contracts for the bridge,” he was quoted as saying.

But before the meeting adjourned another man present stood up and asked to be heard. His name was John Riley and he too wanted to say something concerning the Chief Engineer. He said he had understood that Roebling was very ill and unable to attend to his duties, but now he had heard that Roebling’s wife was doing his work for him. Clearly the time had come to give somebody else the job, Riley said. If there were mistakes in the construction of the bridge, the trustees would become liable, and he for one did not intend to be responsible for any such mistakes.

Murphy immediately answered that in the event of Roebling’s death, Martin, Collingwood, or McNulty could take charge of the work (nobody had said anything about Roebling dying) and Kinsella commented that there were no more efficient engineers. That seemed to satisfy Riley and everyone else and the meeting broke up.

That was on September 7, the day after William Tweed, who had disappeared from his house on Madison Avenue nine months before, stepped off a ship at Vigo, Spain, and was immediately arrested. After hiding out in a farmhouse in New Jersey for three months, Tweed had moved to Staten Island and from there went by schooner to Florida, where he lived in the Everglades until he was able to sail for Cuba. In Havana he had booked passage for Spain on a bark called Carmen. On the trip across he had been so seasick that he arrived in Spain weighing a scant 160 pounds. Still, incredibly, the Spanish authorities, with only a Nast caricature to go by, had recognized him. The news of his arrest caused a sensation in New York, about the time Hewitt, the man who had taken Tweed’s place in the running of the Bridge Company, was making news with his latest service in behalf of the great public work. His resolution was widely praised. And even though it was an intensely political season, and the pronouncements of candidates were pretty generally viewed with that in mind, Hewitt was taken at his word. Whether he or any of the other trustees anticipated the reaction in Trenton is impossible to say.

The New York and Brooklyn papers carried Hewitt’s resolution and his remarks about the Roeblings on the morning of September 8. In Trenton, later that same day, Washington Roebling dictated a letter of resignation.

His health, he wrote to Henry Murphy, was such that he could no longer continue as Chief Engineer. His doctors had been urging him to give up for the past two years, but he had not, he said, because his personal direction seemed to be absolutely necessary to the success of the bridge. Now things were different. “All plans down to the smallest detail have been prepared by me for several years to come,” he said; so the work would not suffer any if he were no longer in charge. He had been neglecting his private business. (“I have not been inside our mill for four years,” he added, but then thought better of that and had Emily cross it out.) “My health has been undermined by my faithful attention to these duties [as Chief Engineer] and the extra expenses I have been subjected to during these years have far exceeded the recompense I have received and I therefore feel I have earned a rest.”

Then he got to the heart of the matter. He had taken the full burden of responsibility for the engineering of the bridge, he had given the work his every energy, he had made financial sacrifices, he had endured years of physical suffering, but now his own honesty and integrity, and that of his family, had been questioned publicly and this he would not endure, and particularly at the hands of Abram Hewitt. For Roebling, as he would make abundantly clear in time, in his private correspondence, did not share the conventional view of Abram Hewitt.

Although devotion to the success of the work has been my ambition throughout, it is only by strict adherence to this principle that I have been able to steer clear of the entanglement connected with the general management of the work and maintain the impartial position on which alone an engineer should stand. It is therefore with regret at the close of our pleasant relations I am obliged to resent the gratuitous insult offered to me by the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees…a man whose designs upon the cable wire and ironwork of the superstructure are only too transparent and whose nominal connection with the Board of Management has had from the first no object but his own personal advantage.

According to Emily Roebling’s letter book the letter ended there. But a day or so later, still in a rage, Roebling wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle, explaining a little further what he meant by Hewitt’s “nominal connection.” Hewitt, Roebling charged, could resign his place as trustee anytime so as to evade his own resolution. The bridge itself meant nothing to Hewitt. But the letter never appeared in the Eagle. Either Roebling decided not to send it or Thomas Kinsella decided not to publish it.

Murphy did not keep Roebling waiting long for an answer. He said he could not accept Roebling’s resignation, only the trustees could do that at their next meeting. In the meantime, he urged Roebling to reconsider, assuring him that his services were vital, and that Hewitt was motivated by only the noblest intentions. Roebling was anything but pacified by this. Still hurt and angry, he was even more outspoken in his reply.

I was publicly and specifically singled out by name by Mr. Hewitt, as if I had spent my whole life in concocting a specification which I alone could fill or as if I were a thief trying to rob the bridge in some underhanded manner and against whom every precaution should be taken. Coming from such a source this is an insult I cannot overlook and I am compelled to resent it by declining to remain in a position where I am at any moment liable to a repetition of such acts on his part.

In light of later events, however, the most interesting part of the letter, none of which was ever made public, was this single sentence:

As you seem to be deeply impressed with Mr. Hewitt’s action in declining to become a competitor for this wire, I desire to say that his magnanimity is all a show, as the firm of Cooper and Hewitt have no facilities whatever for making the steel wire, and if you receive a bid from a Mr. Haigh of South Brooklyn, it will be well for you to investigate a little.

What Henry Murphy thought of this is not known and there is nothing in the record to indicate that he followed up Roebling’s suggestion. So presumably Murphy either knew more than he was ever willing to admit or he figured Roebling’s accusations to be those of a man under a great deal of strain. Roebling and Hewitt had long been rivals in business after all and the Roebling brothers were all known to be staunch partisan Republicans just like their father.

How much Murphy knew about Haigh’s business reputation one can only guess. It is possible that he and the other trustees had no suspicions about the man, but it is not very likely, for J. Lloyd Haigh had certainly not gone unnoticed during his time in Brooklyn.

Haigh had arrived in town some twenty years before. He took up residence on Columbia Heights, joined Plymouth Church, and commenced his social life as “a single gentleman.” He was quite suave and handsome apparently, a fine vocalist and considered “a great catch.” At Plymouth Church he “not only became an enthusiastic attendant, but was noted for his intense admiration for the pretty girls of the Bible class. His captivating manners and his personal attractions made him a welcome guest in many households, and his triumphs in winning hearts soon assured as great a success in that direction as his subsequent career in his business operations.” In a short time he was courting the daughter of a prominent Willow Street family. An engagement was announced and the fashionable part of Brooklyn was “agog with the gossip of the approaching nuptials,” until the father of the bride-to-be did a little checking into Haigh and found the man already had a wife and two children living “in rural retirement.” The wife was brought to Brooklyn to confront Haigh and the whole affair was hushed up as quickly as possible by the Willow Street family.

Haigh, however, waited only long enough for the rumors to die down before setting off on another round of courtship, devoting his attentions this time to a young lady who lived only a few blocks from Willow Street, and again presenting himself as a bachelor. Again he was found out and again he became a suitor, on Henry Street this time, only now he was saying he had obtained a divorce. There was a wedding shortly, with Haigh’s first wife again in Brooklyn claiming he was still her husband. Eventually there was a third wife and some question whether there had ever been a second divorce.

That there was a single Brooklyn man on the Board of Trustees who had not heard something of all this seems very doubtful. It is also doubtful that none of them knew, as Roebling did, that in the wire business Haigh was considered little better than a crook.

When the trustees met a month later, there was no talk of Roebling resigning. No business at all was taken up since the turnout was not enough for a quorum. The crisis had passed apparently, the rift had been patched up some way or other. Perhaps Roebling’s assistants persuaded him to change his mind, or his brothers did, or Emily, or all of them together. Or perhaps he himself, with time to think things over, decided he had come too far, sacrificed too much, to quit over injured pride, that there was another honorable alternative, and that in truth the bridge really could not be built without him. Perhaps he was just incapable of giving up.

Whatever his reasons, he made two decisive moves in quick succession that October, both of which were taken as sure signs of his renewed determination to stay with the bridge.

About the middle of the month he left Trenton for New York. He was still in a very bad way, physically and emotionally. His condition, in fact, was so precarious that he was unable to make the trip by train, his nervous state being such that he could not endure that much speed or vibration or the crowds of people. So it was arranged for him to go the whole way by canalboat and tug, instead, and as he came up the bay and into the East River, he saw the bridge for the first time in three years.

It looked to him, he is reported to have said, exactly as he expected it would. The carrier rope was up by then, as well as the first of the cradle ropes. A newspaper item from about this time was clipped out and saved by Emily Roebling:

There is something colossal in the look of the East River piers as they show in the morning sunlight; the ropes already connecting the two piers seem like slender threads, and as the vessels pass and repass under them some idea may be formed of what may be the effect when the graceful upper wire structure is completed, with the roadway crowded with passengers and vehicles of all descriptions and the high-masted clippers and coasting traders passing underneath.

He and Emily moved in with her brother, General Warren, and his wife, who were then living on West 50th Street. The intention, it seems, was to stay there just temporarily, before completing the return to the house on the Heights.

Then, only a short time later, Roebling notified Henry Murphy that he had sold his stock in John A. Roebling’s Sons, three hundred shares, worth $300,000, thereby eliminating any possible conflict of interest. “Please acknowledge receipt of this letter,” he wrote, “and oblige me by making the above fact known to the Board of Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge at their next meeting.” This Murphy did, on November 6. According to the requirements of the Hewitt amendment, the Roebling company, the major wire manufacturer in the world, and the only one Roebling had total confidence in, could now stay in the bidding.

But the question of the Chief Engineer’s health had not been resolved in the view of several trustees, including General Lloyd Aspinwall of New York, a most piously civic-minded figure, who urged that “some competent engineer be associated with him [Roebling] at once, in order to protect the future interests of the public.”

Murphy replied that Roebling was greatly improved and able to see his assistants on a regular basis now that he was living in New York. Stranahan, too, rose to Roebling’s defense. But Aspinwall wanted a consultant just the same. There was a good deal more discussion, with much emphasis on the idea that nothing personal was intended toward Roebling, and in the end it was agreed that a committee be formed to select suitable candidates for the job.

Abram Hewitt did not attend this session, nor would he appear again for some time. The little Congressman had much else on his mind. The elections were over, and while he himself had won handily enough, there was some question about who had been elected President. Tilden, as the official returns later showed, had a plurality of more than a quarter of a million votes and was the rightful winner, but at that point the outcome in three southern states—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—was still undetermined, and if they were to go for Hayes, then Hayes would have the electoral votes needed to win—which was what the Republicans were claiming. Hewitt, still the moving spirit of the Tilden camp, was doing all he could to rescue his man, writing speeches, sending prominent citizens off to the disputed states to see that a fair count was made (Grant, meanwhile, was sending his own set of “visiting statesmen”), and rallying his fellow Democrats to “boldly denounce all…fraudulent contrivances for the destruction of self-government.” But in the year of the centennial of American democracy, the Presidency was about to be stolen by the Republicans, who were quicker and more efficient with their bribes than the other party. Hayes would win in the Electoral College by a majority of one. But it would be March before that happened, and until then Hewitt was spending most of his time in Washington. How he felt about Roebling’s recent moves he did not say.

In the meantime there was work to be done and Roebling applied himself to it.

Still in confinement in New York, he was kept constantly informed by his assistants as the footbridge cables and the second cradle cable went up and he himself kept after Murphy not to let things slide while waiting for a decision on the wire contract. A whole force of men had to be trained for spinning the cables, he explained. It was work in which all would be novices, which would be immensely difficult at best and seem terribly dangerous to anyone not accustomed to it. Men would have to be taught the crucial techniques of regulating the deflection of individual strands. Others would have to be taught to oil and splice the wire. He would need good men to operate the various machinery to be used. “Our previous bridges,” he said, “always came near enough together so that many of the old and experienced hands were to be found to initiate the new ones, but they are entirely wanting for this work.”

Only a small amount of wire ordered now would be enough for the men to work with and would make a great difference he said. So Murphy ordered thirty tons of wire—ten tons each from John A. Roebling’s Sons and two other firms, one of which was J. Lloyd Haigh of South Brooklyn.

Roebling sent off a steady stream of dispatches to his assistants—to specify how he wanted the oil kettles housed, to say that a sample ferrule joint sent over for his inspection looked a little short, to explain the differences in working with iron and steel wire (steel wire may crack, he warned). In a long letter to Murphy and Stranahan on the matter of a consultant, he expressed himself with customary bluntness. Any consultant would either be his superior, in which case he would resign, or his equal, in which case he would resign, or his inferior, in which case the man ought to take his place in the ranks. It was understandable that Aspinwall and some of the other New York trustees were concerned lest he die before the bridge was built. But there were things they ought to understand: “Man is after all a very finite being in his capacities and powers of doing actual work,” Roebling wrote, “but when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years…. Continuing to work has been with me a matter of pride and honor! You must however trust me in so far that the moment I am unable to do full justice to my duties as chief engineer, I shall give you ample warning…” He really did not want to be troubled by any more talk of consultants.

To better familiarize himself with what the Europeans were doing with steel, he had begun learning Danish and Swedish. He sent Ferdinand lengthy, highly technical instructions on steel-wire extrusion, and in one such letter, commenting on the deficiency of a Roebling product already in service, there appears what may possibly be a touch of his old humor: “Everybody is getting afraid of the carrier rope, so many wires are breaking in it and when they break they make such a noise you can hear it all over. It hangs right over the Trustees’ office and if it breaks it might kill a dozen of them.”

Sealed bids for the cable wire were to be received at the bridge offices in Brooklyn up until the first of December. In the meantime, on Pier 29, beside the New York tower, wire samples sent with each bid were being tested on various machines in the presence of the bidders or their agents, all of whom thus far had expressed total satisfaction with the procedure.

The specifications called for steel wire of what was known as Number 8, Birmingham Gauge (this was a diameter designation), with a breaking strength of not less than 3,400 pounds. The steel was to be of medium quality, neither too hard nor too soft, and the wire had to be “straight” wire, that is to say, when a ring of it was unrolled on the floor, the wire had to lie perfectly straight, without any tendency to spring back into coils.

The specifications called for 6.8 million pounds of wire. During the tests, the wire would be required to bear a certain amount of strain before it broke, and to stretch a certain number of feet, then recover a certain portion of the stretch when the strain was removed. “In the case of any dispute arising between the inspector and the manufacturer,” the specifications stated, “the Engineer is to be the sole arbiter.” But the way things were, with Roebling bedridden, the tests were actually being conducted, the records kept, by Paine, with Martin in over-all charge.

On Monday, December 4, the trustees gathered for the formal opening of the bids. There were nine bids in all, including three from European manufacturers. The highest bid, from a wiremaker in Worcester, Massachusetts, came to nearly fourteen cents a pound, which would bring the aggregate cost close to a million dollars. The lowest bid, from John A. Roebling’s Sons, was for less than half that, at six and three-quarter cents per pound for Bessemer steel. The Roebling company had also submitted a bid for crucible steel, but it was higher than the one other bid submitted for crucible steel, that from J. Lloyd Haigh of South Brooklyn. *

None of the bids were released for publication when the trustees ended their meeting. All further consideration of the subject was to be deferred, reporters were told, until the tests were completed. Just the same, the rumor got about that the Roeblings were the low bidder and everyone assumed that was that.

But on December 13 the New York Herald published an interview with a man named Albert Hill, who was described as a consulting engineer with offices on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and who had a number of very unflattering things to say about the wire specifications Roebling had drawn up and about the tests by which the wire was being judged. Nobody connected with the bridge would have believed that cable wire and its technical characteristics could ever become subjects of public interest, but that is just what was about to happen.

Hill considered the specifications very poorly written (“complex,” “onerous,” and “vague” were some of his adjectives). He thought there was too much emphasis on the manufacture of the wire and too little about the type of steel to be used. He objected strongly to the fact that Roebling had not specified what kind of steel he wanted. Hill’s view was that crucible steel was the only acceptable thing for such a bridge and he said it was what Roebling himself had required in his earlier specifications for the different steel ropes already in use—which was quite true. What possible reason Roebling had for not demanding crucible steel this time was a great mystery to Hill.

Finally, Hill was not in the least happy that the Chief Engineer, the man with the final say on the tests, was a member of the famous Trenton wire family. Hill wanted the tests conducted by an impartial board of engineers, so as to place the awarding of the contract beyond all suspicion of favoritism.

The reporter who interviewed Hill went over to Pier 29 the next day to see how the tests were being conducted and to talk to C. C. Martin. But Martin sent him back to Brooklyn to see Murphy, who chose to make no comment.

Murphy wasted no time contacting Roebling. What was he supposed to say, Murphy wanted to know. Roebling answered that he attached nowhere near the importance to the tests that everyone else seemed to. There was nothing to guarantee that a bidder would supply wire of the kind submitted for the tests. “If one man’s samples were too good he would be sure to reduce his standards, provided he got the contract, and another man, whose wire fell short of the standard, would have to make his wire come up to the mark before any could be accepted.” The point of the tests, Roebling said, was to satisfy him that each bidder could produce the kind of wire called for and to satisfy the bidder that making such wire involved no impossible demands. When he drafted the specifications, Roebling said, he knew the contract was to go to the lowest bidder and he had considered it his duty to include the tests as a simple protective measure. “Of all known materials, wire possesses a shape most susceptible of being tested in every direction. If necessary, a whole mile of it could be tested for its elasticity, throughout every foot of its length, without injuring it in the slightest degree. It is not like a huge casting, which may be full of hidden flaws, or like a big gun which bursts at the first discharge.”

Were he asked point-blank which were the finest samples tested to date, he told Murphy, it would be those from Richard Johnson & Nephew of Manchester, England. As far as the bids themselves were concerned, he remained “in total ignorance.”

Hill, however, had still more to say. The mathematics in the specifications were not up to snuff, he next claimed, and the Herald presented his own computations, in several long, dense paragraphs, full of wire weights and measurements, diameters and principles of physics, very little of which anyone other than a professional engineer could or would wish to struggle through. But seeing it all set forth in print in one of New York’s most powerful papers had a profound effect on the nervous system of those trustees who had had any prior misgivings about Roebling’s ability to handle the job, most of whom knew next to nothing about engineering.

“Of course this is only a theoretical demonstration,” Hill remarked in conclusion. Just how the Herald happened to come upon Hill or why the editors chose to give his opinions such a play was not made clear. He had never built a suspension bridge, as he admitted. None of the assistant engineers had ever heard of him, including Martin, who had been a Brooklyn man for more than twenty years. But the Herald called Hill’s argument clear and lucid and claimed the errors in Roebling’s calculations were so glaring that the specifications were worthless and no contracts should be made on them. Herald reporters looked up another engineer who agreed with Hill, a General Francis Vinton, professor of civil engineering at Columbia, who was interviewed at his bachelor quarters at the Racquet Club. Herald editorials demanded that the bridge trustees answer the charges and every one connected with the management of the bridge began getting extremely edgy.

The gist of all Hill’s arithmetic was that the Number 8 wire being specified had a breaking strength of 3,600 pounds instead of 3,400 as Roebling had it.

In actual fact, there was nothing at all to Hill’s charges, as anyone working on the wire tests could have shown, and as would be explained by Paine very shortly. But before that happened three badly informed trustees agreed to be interviewed on the subject. General Aspinwall made the silly comment that with 6,300 wires in each cable he did not see how a difference of two hundred pounds one way or the other mattered much; Thomas Kinsella said simply that he was going along with Hewitt on all this and that Hewitt, who was a wire manufacturer himself, had found nothing wrong with the specifications. And the third man, who refused to be named, said he could understand why Roebling might want his brother to get the contract. If he were Roebling, he said, he would want his brother to get the contract.

Hill fired back that a difference of 200 pounds per wire among 6,300 wires added up to a 1,260,000-pound difference and that he was not out to prove Roebling was no engineer. In conclusion he added a last gratuitous comment, which Roebling doubtless found about as revolting as anything said about him to date:

I fully appreciate that Colonel Roebling would, to a certain extent, be liable to criticism for these errors, but, taking into consideration the facts that Colonel Roebling is only following out the work commenced by his father, and had also impaired his health…there are extenuating circumstances that the trustees should bear in mind. The errors that I have pointed out might have been made by some subordinate in whom Colonel Roebling had confidence, and were thus printed without his having really supervised the work. As for the gentleman saying that were he chief engineer he also would desire his brother to obtain the contract under him, that is a matter of taste.

To a great many people it probably seemed that an absurdly big fuss was being made over very little. But the effect on several trustees was quite serious just the same. Hastily it was decided that the specifications and tests were “worthy of investigation” and Murphy told Paine to come up with an answer to Hill’s charges at once.

Ferdinand Roebling came on from Trenton to tell Henry Murphy that the Roebling family had had about enough of all this and to simplify things would just as soon withdraw their bid. But Murphy, who seems to have maintained his composure, talked him out of it.

Two days before Christmas Murphy called a private meeting of the Executive Committee to consider the bids and make a recommendation. The tests, he announced, were now completed and he had a report on the results from the Chief Engineer. He also had Paine’s reply.

Hill’s theoretical mathematics, Paine explained, were based on Hill’s own figures for the specific gravity and diameter of Number 8, Birmingham gauge. These were different from the ones the bridge engineers were going by, which, he acknowledged, were round figures. “These specifications were intended for the guidance of practical wiremakers,” Paine said, “and are written in plain language, easily understood by practical men, and are not incumbered by the formula employed, or the details of calculations necessarily used in their construction.” He proceeded then to disprove each of Hill’s charges, point by point, confirming the accuracy of the specifications to the satisfaction of everyone at the meeting. Paine did not, however, attempt any answer to the question Hill had raised about the quality of steel to be used.

Murphy next read Roebling’s report on the tests.

The letter was dated December 18. Roebling still had not been told which firm was lowest bidder or what any of the bids were. He said that nearly every bidder had been able to meet the standards required. Except for a few cases, he had no information concerning the variety of steel used in the numerous samples submitted. Nor did he know whether the manufacturers had provided that information with their bids. Regardless, he said, “It would be very unwise to accept two special prepared rings, as an absolute guarantee of the perfection of 6,000,000 pounds.” He then gave a brief account of each manufacturer’s samples, describing the first on his list this way:

Mr. J. Lloyd Haigh presented several samples of very good wire, apparently cast-steel, of three different stocks. The tensile strength exceeding the requirements, the elongation very good, the elastic limit up to the mark, the modulus of elasticity admissible. This wire is very straight, galvanizing smooth, the polish, though of no advantage, adds to the appearance of the wire….

The best wire was from the English firm Richard Johnson & Nephew. The rings from the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company were quite good, but not well galvanized. A German wire was also rated as excellent, and one ring of Bessemer steel wire from John A. Roebling’s Sons was designated very good, but two other Roebling rings, of cast steel, had not stood up to the bending tests satisfactorily.

Once Murphy had finished Roebling’s report, the committee unanimously recommended that the contract be awarded to John A. Roebling’s Sons and Murphy was requested to convene a special meeting of the board the following week.

But now things began changing swiftly behind the scenes. Several trustees, and most notably Thomas Kinsella, began playing for time. When the board met next, two days after Christmas, it was decided, on a motion from Kinsella, to postpone the final vote on the contract for two more weeks. The newspapers were informed that the results of the tests were still under consideration. Only the bids were released for publication, which made headlines but left the story still very much in the air.

These latest delays were the direct result of the Hill disclosures, the Herald quickly claimed, commending the “honorable members” of the board for their discretion. A little later, under an article headed “CHEAP STEEL INSURES A WEAK BRIDGE,” the paper insisted that the whole issue at stake was the one Hill raised at the start: why Roebling had not specified crucible steel.

Then the night before the trustees were to meet to vote, the Eagle, after first demolishing Hill’s attack (Hill was actually a Hungarian, the Eagle had earlier claimed, by way of a disclosure), suggested that perhaps Bessemer steel was not after all the best answer. “Unquestionably Bessemer steel wire is the cheapest,” wrote Kinsella in a three-column editorial, “but whether the trustees should get the cheapest wire, or the best at the cheapest rate, is the question which they will be called upon tomorrow to consider.”

Kinsella also pointedly raised the issue of Roebling’s connection to his family’s business, and even implied that perhaps Roebling’s break with the business was not altogether certain or done for the most commendable reason. “He had recently, it appears, sold out his interest in the Trenton works, so as not to embarrass his brothers…There is no disguising the fact, however, that the whole subject is complicated by this consideration.”

For anyone who had been following the story closely, it was clear the tables were turning. Never once before had the Eagle had a critical word for Roebling. Indeed it was Kinsella, more than anyone, who had made such a popular figure of the man. Moreover, Kinsella’s call for the best steel at the cheapest price was clearly another way of saying that the contract ought to go to the lowest bidder for crucible steel, who, of course, was J. Lloyd Haigh of Brooklyn. But no one knew which of the other trustees Kinsella was speaking for or how many of them there were.

The meeting of the trustees on the afternoon of January 11, 1877, was held as usual in the board room of the bridge offices, where now the model of Roebling cable exhibited at the Centennial was prominently on display, along with Hildenbrand’s mural-sized drawing in a mammoth frame. The meeting was the largest ever held. Nineteen were present, which was the entire board save one—Abram Hewitt, who was “unavoidably detained” in Washington, but whose presence would be very much felt all the same. Also in the room, sitting unobtrusively in the back and saying nothing, were a few privileged visitors, one of whom was J. Lloyd Haigh.

First on the agenda was the annual report from the Chief Engineer covering the year 1876, which was presented by Henry Murphy. The document included, among other things, Roebling’s explanation of how and why the wire had been tested, and emphasized, as Roebling had to Murphy, that the tests should not be taken as a hard-and-fast guarantee. “The assurance of the correct performance of these tests must remain a matter of confidence and trust,” said the Chief Engineer. “The building of the whole bridge is a matter of trust.”

The board then proceeded to consider the resolution from the Executive Committee recommending that the contract be awarded to the Roebling company. General Slocum wanted Army engineers appointed to inspect the wire before it left the Roebling works. This he said would entirely remove all public suspicion about the Chief Engineer. Action on the resolution was deferred.

Then the chair was asked to read a letter from Abram Hewitt, dated Washington, January 8. The letter was addressed to Murphy and was quite long. Hewitt was still extremely concerned about who was to get the wire contract.

He began by saying that if the trustees were willing to rely on the specifications and on the kind of inspection called for in the specifications, then he did not see how the trustees could do anything but award the contract to the lowest bidder, the Roeblings.

In this event, however, in view of the personal relation of the chief engineer to the stockholders of that company, and for the protection of the honorable reputation which he deservedly enjoys, it seems to me that it will be the imperative duty of the trustees to provide for the inspection of the wire entirely independent of the supervision and control of the chief engineer. In this particular I have no doubt I only anticipate a request delicacy and a sense of propriety would have led him to make to the trustees.

But, said Hewitt, there remained the very big question of whether the specifications guaranteed a suitable quality of wire, provided it were of Bessemer steel, and in his opinion they did not. He did not consider Bessemer steel of sufficient quality. He had had a great deal of experience in these matters, he said, and the kind of tests Roebling had designated were not enough to prove or disprove the quality of Bessemer wire.

So far as I can see, therefore, a proper regard for the public safety requires that the trustees should either stipulate on the contract that Bessemer steel should not be employed for the manufacture of the wire, or if it be employed the wire should be subjected to different and more ample tests than are provided for in the existing specifications. Those tests should be made by engineers having no relations to the contractors…

…I confess that I have such grave doubts that I would not venture to record my vote in favor of Bessemer steel upon the tests now provided for in the specifications, and I am convinced that the apparent economy involved in the use of wire made from this material should not weigh against the risk involved in its use, unless it can be more carefully guarded than it now appears to be…

The letter was a bombshell. This was the same Hewitt who, four months earlier, sitting in this same room, had called the specifications “eminently wise” and whose own much publicized resolution had supposedly resolved all ethical questions raised by Roebling’s ties to the wire business. Moreover, Hewitt happened also to be the very one who had urged Roebling not to specify crucible steel this time, but to leave the bidding open for Bessemer steel as well.

Still, Hewitt was the expert, supposedly, and a looming figure these days, particularly among Democrats. And irrespective of politics or personalities, grave suspicions had been raised by the Hill attack and even the fairest, most impartial men in the room were quite honestly at a loss to know just whom to go along with: Hewitt or Roebling?

Furthermore, in the back of everyone’s mind were two very recent sensational tragedies. On the night of December 5, the Brooklyn Theater, built by William Kingsley’s construction company and owned by his partner, Abner Keeney, had caught fire and 295 people had lost their lives, many of them because the balcony had collapsed. It was the worst disaster in the city’s history. Then on the night of December 29, one of the worst railroad disasters of the nineteenth century occurred when a bridge failed at Ashtabula, Ohio. The bridge was just eleven years old, a wrought-iron truss over a seventy-five-foot gorge. When a train pulled by two locomotives started across it in the middle of a snowstorm, the center span gave way. It was thought that the metal had failed somehow. Eighty lives were lost.

The newspapers were angrily crying for an explanation. Harper’s Weekly in its latest issue asked:

Was it improperly constructed? Was the iron of inferior quality? After eleven years of service, had it suddenly lost its strength?…Was the bridge, when made, the best of its kind, or the cheapest of its kind?

The chief engineer of the railroad, a man named Charles Collins, who had had nothing to do with the design of the bridge, but had examined it frequently and conscientiously, tendered his resignation, then committed suicide.

The Ashtabula bridge had not been cheaply built and the iron had not suddenly lost its strength in some mysterious fashion. As subsequent investigations would show, the bridge probably went down because the derailed wheels of several cars ripped the bridge floor, causing a violent pull of a kind the truss had not been built to withstand. But the idea of bad (cheap) metal failing had been planted in the public mind. *

After Hewitt’s letter was read the bids were reviewed still one more time, at the request of “Honest John” Kelly, Comptroller of the City of New York, who had replaced Tweed as the head of Tammany Hall. General Aspinwall said the history of crucible steel was too well known to need further consideration. The whole matter resolved itself, he said, into the question of whether they would put into the cables of the bridge a wire made from steel, the strength of which might be in doubt, as was the case with Bessemer steel, or use crucible steel, about which there could be no doubts whatever. Emphatically he was in favor of using crucible steel and nothing else.

Mayor Ely of New York said this was the most important question put before the trustees in the entire history of the bridge and he personally wanted more time to familiarize himself with the subject. He therefore moved for adjournment. But Stranahan said now was the time to discuss the issue, while there were so many of them present, and the meeting continued.

At about that point a trustee named William Marshall, who was a wealthy cordage manufacturer and one of Brooklyn’s most prominent citizens, recalled a conversation he had once had with John A. Roebling, during which Roebling talked about a testing strain for the wire that was half what his son had specified. So it did not seem to Marshall that anyone ought to get very worried about the standards called for in the specifications. The important thing, he said, was to buy wire that came up to standards. Thomas Kinsella, who had kept very quiet so far, said he thought no undue weight should be attached to the informal remarks of the elder Roebling. Kinsella did not think the lowest-price steel would be the cheapest. “It was the duty of the trustees to do for the bridge, as they would do for themselves,” he said. He was not interested in any special kind of steel, he wished them to understand. However, he did have an interest and pride in his own city and said he had a natural wish that the contract might come there. (There were two Brooklyn firms in the bidding, J. Lloyd Haigh and the Chrome Steel Company, but the Chrome Steel bid worked out to more than $200,000 higher than the Haigh bid and so was, for all intents and purposes, quite out of the running.) He would vote, Kinsella said, for using crucible steel.

Henry Murphy read some extracts from engineering papers, extolling the superiority of steel made by the Bessemer process. Then there was a long discussion about what crucible steel was or was not, how Roebling’s earlier specifications called for crucible steel and why that was. William Marshall reminded everyone that the change had been made at Hewitt’s urging. “Mr. Hewitt was something of an expert and ought to know something about steel,” Marshall said. The problem seemed to be that Hewitt could be quoted to substantiate either side of the argument.

Comptroller Kelly said he wanted the bids for Bessemer steel referred back to the Executive Committee, Kelly wanted the other manufacturers to have the chance to bid on the lower quality of steel (as though they had not in the first place) and he moved the Executive Committee open up the bids again. Aspinwall seconded the idea. The motion carried and that might have ended things for the time being had Kinsella not said that they ought to test the prevailing mood of the meeting on the question of which kind of steel to use. He would offer a motion, he said, to make the contract with the lowest bidder for crucible steel.

Kelly said he hoped the resolution would not pass. Aspinwall said he did not want to be trapped into committing himself. Kinsella answered that he had no desire to trap anybody. The only object was to call a test vote. Stranahan said the motion, if carried, would pledge them to use crucible steel.

The vote was taken and the motion lost, 8 to 7, with four abstaining. After a few further comments, the meeting broke up. By that time it was nearing five in the afternoon. But then the Executive Committee met, privately, and instead of reopening the bids as directed by the board, the contract was immediately awarded to J. Lloyd Haigh.

There is no way of knowing what happened, since everything said in the meeting was kept secret. All Murphy said later in a letter to the board was that the committee’s decision had been the direct result of Kinsella’s test vote. “They [the committee] regard that vote, although wanting one of a majority, still as decisive against the use of Bessemer steel; for in so important a matter as the main cables, it would, in their opinion, be unwise to adopt a material which is distrusted by any considerable portion of the trustees. The question of cost is an important one, but it is subordinate to that of safety, and the difference of expense between the two is comparatively too small to permit such difference to prevent unanimity and entire confidence.” (The difference between the Haigh bid and that of the Roeblings for Bessemer steel came to $132,600.) The official record of the committee meeting states there were seven men present—Murphy, Stranahan, Slocum, Van Schaick, Motley, Marshall, and Kingsley.

How close was the vote? Who voted which way? The record provides no answers.

Since its meeting of December 23, the committee had done a complete about-face. But because everything was done in private, the public, to whom the bridge supposedly belonged, would never know anything about that. Four days later, on Monday, January 15, another special meeting of the board was called. Murphy announced that J. Lloyd Haigh would post $50,000, or about 10 per cent of the contract, as surety, and he read a letter in which Haigh promised to supply crucible steel of the same quality as his samples. Then a resolution giving Haigh the contract was adopted by a vote of 16 to 1, the one dissenting vote being cast by William Marshall.

So the wire in the bridge would not be Roebling wire. It would be made in Brooklyn by the one man Roebling had specifically warned Murphy not to trust.

The news was warmly received in Brooklyn. Thomas Kinsella called the decision “most satisfactory” and said it was a “matter for congratulation” that a Brooklyn manufacturer had won out over the leading wiremakers of America and Europe (he did not specify which he meant). The resolution of this whole wire controversy was a great triumph the Eagle contended. “It is, we suppose, admitted on all hands that the cables which are to sustain the bridge structure are the most important features of this great undertaking. These failing, all fails.”

The Union wrote that the bridge trustees had honored themselves and said, “We shall try to forget as soon as possible that they were ever brought to discuss so absurd a proposition as the use of Bessemer steel.” The impression left was that a catastrophic blunder had been narrowly averted. Someone had not known what he was doing and that someone had to be Roebling. The Union wanted prompt action taken.

…They.. They [the trustees] can help us and the public to forget this by taking the next most necessary step in their great undertaking, the selection at once of a suitable and eminent consulting engineer. We know the exceeding delicacy of this point. No one, and not we, certainly, desires to be unconcerned or lacking in sympathy with the physical troubles and disabilities of the present Chief Engineer…But we must deal with things as they are; the subject is too important for sentiment, and the bridge needs the live attention of a man in his best powers. It is almost such a case as that where General Winfield Scott used to sit in lethargy over the early business of the war, when the great rebellion at its outbreak found him with his great powers masked and half useless by the infirmities of age. It seemed to be unkind and treasonable to say of this old hero, and in his presence, that the duties of the Commander-in-Chief must be done by someone who could take the field, endure the hardship, and live in the saddle…. So now the great bridge enterprise needs an active consulting engineer, bringing to his duties the best qualities of natural fitness and training, with physical powers equal to every emergency. It is loading a great and difficult undertaking to an unnecessary strain, this carrying with it its disabled chief engineer, and keeping down its discussions to the atmosphere and the hush of his sick room…

There had been no comment from Roebling since the wire decision was announced, nor any from either of his brothers in Trenton. But a few days later, the following letter appeared in the Eagle. It was signed “Tripod.” Quite possibly it was written by Washington Roebling.

My attention has been called to an article in the Union, relating to the appointment of a consulting engineer for the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. I know not what power behind the throne dictates the spirit of this, and similar articles, though I am forced to the conclusion that there is one as there was in the case of Mr. Hill, who professed to expose inaccuracies in the specifications for the wire, a matter by the way, in which he has finally failed…

The Union calls for a consulting engineer who will “endure great hardship” and practically “live in the saddle.” If the writer understood whereof he wrote, he never would have used those expressions in that connection.

Consulting engineers seldom seat themselves in any other saddle than a cushioned office chair, or expose themselves to any greater hardships than a few hours’ quiet office chat, per day, and the labor of signing a monthly receipt for their salary.

The hardships of a campaign usually fall on the subordinate officers, as they have in the construction of the Bridge, since the illness of Colonel Roebling commenced. If Colonel Roebling had thrown more of the details of the work on his subordinates, in its earlier stages, he would not now be taunted by the Union, with breathing the air of a sick room, nor insulted by comparison with a superannuated general of armies.

Neither would the present Assistant Engineers, who under the immediate direction of the “invalid,” have successfully brought this great work thus far on its way toward completion, with unsurpassed skill, fidelity and endurance, be told that they were of no account, and that they must give way to a consulting engineer whose “natural fitness, training and endurance” qualify him to lead “in the saddle.”

Will the Union kindly tell me where such a one is to be found? Can it point to any living engineer outside of the “sick room” who has had sufficient training in this specialty of suspension bridge work to guarantee to the trustees and the taxpayers that he could do the work as well as the “invalid” assisted by those who may be said to have grown up with the work, under Colonel Roebling’s own eye, who are familiar with his plans, and devoted to their success?

…The fact is, there is no better talent in the country in this specialty than is now engaged in the construction of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. It is ample for all its needs, present and to come. And if chronic grumblers and those who have private “axes to grind” would let the work alone, they might wake up some morning and find it completed, and be ready to take part in the opening ceremonies.

If the letter was indeed from Roebling, then it is the one and only time his feelings ever appeared in print. But by then there were people in Brooklyn talking about more than just a consulting engineer. The move had begun to get rid of Roebling entirely. On January 18 another editorial appeared in the Union.

THE CHIEF ENGINEER

It has become the deepest of mysteries in the Board of Bridge Trustees, too solemn for the keenest reporter to penetrate, and far too solemn for gossip, where the chief engineer is, and what is his condition. For aught any public act or appearance of his may indicate, he may have been dead or buried for six months. He is surrounded by clouds impenetrable…. We declare the great East River Bridge in peril, because it has no head, because its wires of control run into somebody’s closely guarded sickroom, because it is certain that a sick depressed tone runs through all its engineering discussions, from this cause…. The sooner we have a live, active chief engineer in full powers on the bridge work, the better the public of two cities will be pleased with the prospect.

When Henry Murphy read this, he must have figured, knowing Roebling’s sensitivity to such charges, that another letter of resignation would be in his hands the next day. But no such letter arrived and there would be no more talk of resignation from Roebling. He had decided he would stay with the job, and fight for it, if need be.

Some time in 1877, when things had quieted down a bit, Washington Roebling made some extraordinary private notes in his letter book.

The whole maneuver to take the wire contract away from the Roeblings and give it to J. Lloyd Haigh had been the work of Abram Hewitt, he said, just as he had warned Murphy. Haigh, a known scoundrel, was in fact Hewitt’s man. Hewitt, Roebling noted, held a mortgage on Haigh’s wireworks and he had made a deal with Haigh not to foreclose so long as Haigh turned over 10 per cent of what he made from the bridge contract. When his first attempt at exempting the Roeblings from the bidding had failed (because Roebling sold his stock), Hewitt had then manufactured the crucible steel issue. Roebling never said Albert Hill was working for Hewitt or for Haigh, but that would seem to be the case and what is implied by “the power behind the throne” reference in the letter signed “Tripod.” Hill did not interest Roebling much, but Hewitt did: “In laying this plan, he [Hewitt] well took the calibre of the men in the board, for when a demagogue wants to effect an object he always raises the cup of public virtue—and under cover of the smoke he raises, slips in himself. It is on such low and crafty tricks that the honor of a Hewitt rests,” wrote the engineer.

Roebling never bothered to speculate in his notes on why Kinsella turned on him and worked so hard in Haigh’s behalf. Maybe the editor was sincerely convinced crucible steel was the superior product. He also very much favored the idea of the contract going to a Brooklyn firm, as he said. But there is a further point to consider. No paper in the East had so strongly supported Samuel Tilden for President that fall as had the Brooklyn Eagle. Kinsella’s efforts in behalf of Abram Hewitt’s candidate had been extremely helpful and much valued by Abram Hewitt. And that January of 1877, with Tilden very likely about to become President, the times were ripe with possibilities for a brilliant, politically ambitious and cooperative editor.

19

The Gigantic Spinning Machine

I never saw better days for bridge work.

—C. C. Martin

THERE was now one continuous path from Brooklyn to New York. The temporary footbridge, finished in early February 1877, was a sort of hanging catwalk strung from city to city, draped above the river at an elevation sixty feet higher than the actual roadway would be. Farrington had been in charge of the work and it was carried out with the greatest dispatch, even during days of extremely cold weather. No sooner was the footbridge in operation than the newspapers sent reporters to make the crossing, which a few of them managed to do, with Farrington going along each time as an escort. His own men were never bothered by great heights, he was quoted as saying. “No sir, no man can be a bridgebuilder who must educate his nerves. It must be a constitutional gift. He cannot when 200 feet in the air, use his brain to keep his hand steady. He needs it all to make his delicate and difficult work secure. They must plant their feet by instinct…and be able to look sheer down hundreds of feet without a muscle trembling. It is a rare thing for a man to lose his life in our business for loss of nerve.”

But few of Farrington’s first visitors were so constituted. One reporter described proceeding along, step by step, nearly frozen with terror, as though his feet were fixed to the slat floor by Peter Cooper’s glue, as he put it. Another wrote, “The undulating of the bridge caused by the wind, which was blowing a gale, the gradually increasing distance between the apparently frail support and the ground, the houses beneath bristling all over with chimneys, looking small enough to impale a falling man, the necessity of holding securely to the handrail, to prevent being blown off, produced sensations in the reporter’s head—and stomach—never experienced before. In vain he glanced furtively into his companion’s face to detect any signs of flinching on his part. Stolidly the master mechanic kept on, and the reporter fancied once that he caught a backward glance of enjoyment at his discomposure.”

The customary visitor’s entrance to the footbridge was from the top of the Brooklyn anchorage. Beside the short flight of steps leading up to the footbridge, a big sign had been posted.

SAFE ONLY 25 MEN AT ONE TIME.

DO NOT WALK CLOSE TOGETHER. NOR RUN, JUMP, OR TROT. BREAK STEP!

W. A. Roebling, Engr. in Chief

From there the footbridge swept upward to the tower, at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. The width of the bridge was just four feet. There were wire rope handrails on either side, at hip level, but there was nothing to prevent a person from tripping and falling under the handrail and there were spaces between the slats, big enough to look through, put there intentionally to give the wind less hold. Actually with its guy wires and storm cables, the bridge was amazingly solid. Though men walking on it experienced a slight rocking motion, in ordinary weather there was very little horizontal swing. Still Thomas Kinsella was telling people that old John Roebling had said the thing would probably be blown down a dozen times and to judge by the looks of it nobody found that hard to believe.

Halfway up the walk, between the anchorage and the tower, was the first cradle, a narrow platform, a hundred feet long, with wooden handrails, that was hung on cables, like a slender scaffold, at right angles to the cables. Five such cradles had been put up, one between each anchorage and its companion tower and three over the river, at equal distances. By all reports they were a good deal more stable underfoot than the sensitive” footpath, the main purpose of which was, in fact, to provide access to the cradles, where men would be stationed to see that the wires were hung precisely right and to bind them into strands.

Once when Farrington and a reporter from the Tribune reached the top of the Brooklyn tower, the reporter sat down to rest and to take in the view. But it was then his troubles began.

Trinity Church steeple was fencing with Grace Church, the City Hall was bumping into the [Central] Park lake, Governor’s Island, guns and all, was playing shuttlecock and battledore with Harlem, Beecher’s Church shook its windows on the top of St. Paul’s, the top of the Tribune tower had fastened itself somewhere and was swinging the building pendulum fashion, and the reporter leaned against the solid tower in dread lest his weight would push it over. *

On Washington’s Birthday, about nine in the morning, passengers leaving from Brooklyn on the Fulton Ferry suddenly spotted two young ladies out on the footbridge. “There was no hesitation or misgiving in the demeanor of the ladies,” according to one account. “On the contrary, they stepped out boldly…without the use of the handrail.” Everyone on the boat began waving and calling, as the girls, accompanied by a man and two boys, headed for New York. As was learned later, the girls were the daughters of C. C. Martin, who was the man seen accompanying them (the boys were his sons). They were, as the papers all noted, the first women to make the crossing, but the fact that they had been allowed to do so struck many people as utter lunacy.

“While Revs. Drs. Storrs and Buddington and several excellent ladies are moving in the matter of providing a new insane asylum for this city,” wrote the Eagle, “a considerable number of our people are providing the necessity for such an institution and their own fitness to be life occupants of it…by crossing the footbridge…without call, without necessity, out of no business or artistic impulse, and from sheer foolhardy and peripatetic ‘cussedness.’”

Something like a hundred people crossed the footbridge that same day. They were able to go right up onto the anchorage and out onto the footbridge. There were no gates to stop them, no guards on duty. But Martin’s daughters were the only ones to cause any kind of popular stir, “BEAUTY ON THE BRIDGE” ran one headline the next morning and the New York Illustrated Times published a panoramic engraving of the two, their silk scarves and heavy skirts whipping in the wind, stepping nimbly out from the tower, as high as the clouds, a gentleman in a derby showing them the way.

Enough of a fuss was made over the incident that Henry Murphy decided all visitors would henceforth be required to apply for a pass. This was supposed to put a stop to the traffic, and it did, temporarily.

For now there was too much going on in preparation for the cable spinning for there to be room for anyone on the catwalk who did not belong there. Outside the Brooklyn anchorage yard, in the vicinity of James and Front Streets, workmen were tearing down old houses to make room for an expanded storage yard for the wire. The air was filled with dust and noise. Rubble was piled in immense heaps, enough brick it seemed to build twice the number of houses being torn down. Old women in shawls and street urchins came daily to gather whatever firewood they were able to carry off.

Inside the anchorage yard, both back and front, every foot of space was taken up with heavy timber frames, about six feet high, where the wire coils were hung out to dry after being coated with oil. The wire came from the factory galvanized but not oiled. This was done inside a low shed on the Front Street side of the yard. The coils were simply dipped into a trough of linseed oil—a two-man job.

On top of the anchorage, inside an enormous covered shed, was a wilderness of big wooden drums mounted upright in vertical timber frames, like a convention of water wheels, as someone remarked. Each drum was about two feet in width and eight feet in diameter, but mounted as they were, clear of the floor, they stood nearly twice as high as a man and they had handles all around their outer rims, exactly like a ship’s wheel. Also, standing to the rear of the drums, on the floor, in a horizontal position, were a number of smaller reels, built along the same lines, but only half the diameter.

Once a coil of wire had been dried out sufficiently in the yard, it would be hoisted to the top of the anchorage, where it would be wound first onto one of the small horizontal reels, then onto one of the big upright drums, the wire going on as smoothly as thread around a spool. It was from the big drums that the wire would play out over the bridge, in much the way a fishing line goes from the reel at the handle out along the rod.

Since a coil from the factory constituted only a few hundred feet of wire, innumerable splices had to be made before the wire was wound onto the drums. It was essential, of course, that every splice be as strong and weather-tight as the wire itself. It had taken two years of experimenting and testing to develop the system settled on. A galvanized steel ferrule two inches long and about as thick as a lead pencil was double-threaded inside, at both ends, one thread to the right, the other to the left, and corresponding threads were cut on the ends of the wires to be joined so that the same turn of the ferrule would screw both ends at once. The ends of the wires were also mitered, so that once the wires had been screwed tightly they could not twist. With the help of a small viselike apparatus, the wires were held together and the ferrule was put on, great care taken to screw it straight. The sharp edges of the ferrule were then beveled, the joint was cleaned of dirt and oil and dunked into a small ladle full of melted zinc to give it an all-over galvanizing. That done, the joint was coated with red paint.

In this way coil after coil was spliced and run onto the big drums as a single continuous wire. On each drum there were fifty-two coils, or nearly ten miles of wire. Once things really got going, it was expected that the cable-making machinery would consume some forty miles of wire a day, or about four drums a day. So for months the work crews were kept constantly busy “drumming up” wire.

On Tuesday, May 29, things were far enough along to send a first experimental wire across the river. (Just to see that everything was in proper order, and that the wire was strung at exactly the right deflection, Farrington, for one, crossed over the footbridge a total of fourteen times in that one day.) On June 11, 1877, the spinning of the great cables was begun. The way the system worked, two cables, those on the downstream side, were built simultaneously.

The impression among most people was that the wires were to be twisted, like the fibers in an ordinary rope or like the wires in the different steel ropes already in use on the bridge. But this, of course, was not the case.

In the first place it would have been impossible to twist such a mass of steel over such a distance, and even had it been possible, twisted strands would have less strength than those laid up parallel, all in line, as these were, like a bundle of rods, and compacted into what would, in the end, be essentially a great curved bar of solid steel.

The traveler rope was now working back and forth across the river day in, day out, the big horizontal wheel upon which it revolved turning overhead on the Brooklyn anchorage, first this way, then that, and all the other smaller pulleys and belts and innumerable cogs keeping up a low, steady rumble.

The wires were taken across the river by what was known as a “carrier,” a big iron wheel that looked like an oversize bicycle wheel with six spokes. Its axle was fastened to the working rope by an iron arm, or gooseneck, and was weighted to make it stand out perpendicular from the rope so as to clear the cradles and supports on the towers. At the Brooklyn anchorage, the end of a wire would be drawn off one of the big drums and a loop of it slipped over the carrier wheel; the end of the wire would be drawn back taut and secured around a hefty iron brace, or “shoe,” that was shaped roughly like a horseshoe magnet, about two feet long and little more than a foot across with a groove around the periphery for the wire to ride in—as a skein of yarn is held on one’s thumbs. The shoe was secured flat on the back end of the anchor bars, or at the end opposite from where the strands would be finally attached. The engineer would then start up the working rope and away would go the carrier, trundling off toward the Brooklyn tower, then over the tower and out across the water, towing the loop of wire behind, which meant that two wires were being strung at once.

In the meantime another carrier wheel would be coming back from New York, riding on the other half of the endless working rope. So by the time the first carrier was approaching New York with its load of wire, the empty carrier would be arriving in Brooklyn to pick up another loop in exactly the way the first one had. When the outgoing carrier reached the New York anchorage, the engine would be stopped at a signal from flagmen and the loop would be slipped off and drawn taut around a shoe there. Then the engine would be reversed, the empty carrier would start its return trip, while the other one would be starting out from Brooklyn with two more wires. And so it went, always with one carrier going out as the other came back, the two of them in turn constantly towing over big loops of the same unbroken wire that kept playing off an enormous upright drum, until a whole strand was built up—hundreds of wires in unbroken continuity, with uniform tension and with exact parallelism between all of them.

With everything working right, it took the carrier about ten minutes to make the full trip from anchorage to anchorage. Along the way men were stationed on the towers and cradles to watch the progress of the traveling wire and to see that each wire was positioned with the proper sag and tension. As the running wire went over the tower, pulled by the carrier, a man would lightly guide it with his hand to keep it from chafing against timbers or masonry. Another man would catch it with a great pair of clamps that were attached to a block and tackle and with this he would draw up the slack until the wires from the tower back to the anchorage hung with exactly the same sag, or deflection, as the others. From the cradle halfway between the anchorage and the tower, men called “regulators” would signal just when to stop, then fit the new wires up against the others, signal again, and one of the towermen would immediately mark the wire with red paint where it passed a similar mark on the other wires, exactly at the point of crossing the axis of support. Similar marks would also be made at the cradle.

Then the towermen would turn their attention to the river side, where the same system would be repeated, with the regulators on the three river cradles going through the same motions as their turns came up. So by the time a loop of wire reached the New York anchorage, it would be thoroughly “regulated”—its sag properly adjusted all along the line—and the paint marks provided a ready index of any slip or strain that might need correcting.

Once a strand had been completed, pairs of workmen would go riding down from the towers in “buggies,” compressing the wires into a cylindrical form with big clamp tongs and applying temporary “seizings,” bindings of soft wire, every fifteen inches or so, to hold the strand together until all nineteen strands of the cable had been strung and could be clamped into one compact unit. The buggy was nothing more than a pine wood trough, about 10 by 6 feet, with a side rail, and was suspended from overhead trolley wheels that rolled nicely along the bundled wires on which the work was being done. The men would merely let themselves down from the towers by letting out a long rope.

During the time a strand was being made, it hung higher than the ultimate position of the cable it was to be part of. At mid-span over the river the difference in elevation was sixty feet. This not only kept the wires well above the topmasts of passing ships, but nearly doubled the tension the wires would have at the lower level—the deeper sag—and that helped straighten any crooks, or kinks, there might be and further tested the strength of the wire. Once the seizings were completed, the strand would be unhitched from the temporary fastening at the anchorage by a powerful block and tackle, let forward carefully into permanent fastenings at the end of the anchor chains and also lowered into the saddles on the tops of the towers.

It was basically the same system used at both the Niagara and Cincinnati bridges, only here, as with everything else, the work was on a far bigger scale. Judging by previous experience, Roebling estimated that the time needed to make the four cables would be about two and a half years, taking into account that much would depend on the weather.

Sometimes wires would break when part way over the river. The loose end would have to be hauled in and a splice made. Sometimes the delay would be only a matter of minutes. Other times, when the break occurred on the New York side, more than an hour might be lost. “These delays often occurred in the midst of a promising day’s work,” Farrington wrote, “and were very vexatious.”

High winds and fog could make the delicate business of aligning the wires virtually impossible. Extreme temperature changes would cause significant expansion or contraction in the wires that would have a pronounced effect on their deflection and in the early stages this could complicate things enormously.

Before the first wires went across, the engineers had four guide wires strung for the men in the cradles to go by when adjusting the deflection of the first wires. To everybody’s surprise the two land spans had not hung the same. The difference in the deflections could be readily seen just by looking at them. But only after considerable trouble was the cause found. There was a slight difference in the diameter of various lengths of wire and to solve the problem hundreds of coils had to be stretched out, measured, and enough wire selected of uniform size and weight to make up the required lengths. After that the weather had to be watched for periods of perfect calm, during which time the necessary adjustments could be made, to a hairsbreadth. As a result of all this, about six weeks were used up.

But the wire stringing, once it got going, went faster than had been anticipated. The weather was just about ideal. With a little practice the men were laying up fifty wires a day, which was not bad for a start and would have been better had the wire manufacturer been delivering on schedule. The Eagle was now calling the bridge “The Gigantic Spinning Machine.”

By July 2 the first of two strands was completed for the two cables on the downstream side of the bridge. The work of lowering the strands into position then began. At the anchorages the strands were drawn back by a hoisting engine until the shoe was released from its fastening. Then shoe and strand were lowered slowly, carefully forward, twelve feet, the hoisting engine and a block and tackle holding the immense pull of the strand. Because there was a twist in the tackle, the shoe turned up on edge as it came forward and slipped neatly in between the eyelets of the anchor bars. The forward motion was stopped then and a seven-inch steel pin was passed through the eyelets and the shoe.

On the towers, too, the strands had to be lowered into the groove of the saddle, a distance of about three feet. This was done by eight or ten men working a capstan on a platform built over the saddle. The capstan turned a nut on a screw that lowered the strand. Once the strand was properly attached at the anchorages, and at rest in the tower saddles, then it was also at the desired altitude over the water. The whole operation was “difficult and delicate,” as the newspapers reported, requiring “nice calculations.” The great danger, of course, being that the strand might get away. The strain exerted by each strand at the anchorages was about seventy tons.

In the meantime, the first two strands for the two upstream cables were begun. So by the end of the first week in July all four cables were being strung simultaneously; all four carriers were shuttling back and forth high over the river, as regular as clockwork. Paine and Farrington had been assigned by Roebling to be certain everything was done just so. Collingwood and McNulty had been put to work on the approaches. And Roebling, too, was now watching the work himself once again, for at the start of the month he and Emily had returned to Brooklyn, to the brick house on Columbia Heights. With a pair of field glasses, from a bay window overlooking the river, he could at last follow the day-by-day progress being made.

That was the summer of the Great Railroad Strike and for much of the country it was a dark, discouraging time. Half a dozen cities were hit by walkouts and violence. In Baltimore twelve people were shot down by militia. Pittsburgh was in the grip of a mob for two straight days. Millions of dollars’ worth of railroad equipment was destroyed in Pittsburgh alone. The Union Depot was burned, stores were looted, and a pitched battle between rioters and soldiers took the lives of fifty-seven. It was the bloodiest labor uprising the country had ever known and it left much of the populace wondering what in the world was happening to life in America.

But at the bridge things had never gone better. Not in eight long years had the work advanced so smoothly. Even the newspapers seemed satisfied with the way things were being handled and could find fault with no one. “The network of wires across the East River is rapidly beginning to look something like a bridge,” commented the Herald in mid-August. By then four strands had been completed and a new feature added, “regulation cradles,” as they were known, long, narrow, flimsy-looking scaffolds suspended fifty feet below the regular cradles, which put them in line with the lowered strands and made possible a closer surveillance of the strands as they lined up alongside one another.

Somber-looking trustees in stovepipe hats climbed the stairs on the James Street side of the Brooklyn anchorage to pose for group portraits at the start of the footbridge, or they went off to Saratoga or the White Mountains with their families, confident the bridge was in good hands. And for thousands of New Yorkers and visitors, the footbridge had become one of the city’s greatest summertime attractions. Virtually anyone could go up and sample the view and test his nerve if he cared to. In fact, so many people were now applying for passes to take the walk that Henry Murphy was spending an hour every morning just listening to what the applicants had to say.

“People from every corner of the globe have crossed the bridge,” he said, “Australians, New Zealanders, a man from the Cape of Good Hope, and persons from every country in Europe and Asia, from every state in the Union, from Canada and South America. The Governor of Bermuda went across the other day, and the officers of the Russian man-of-war gave us a visit. Captains of steamships and merchantmen are frequent applicants, and we like to pass them, because they will have to sail under the bridge, and we desire their friendship.” As a general rule, five classes of applicants were granted every courtesy—foreign visitors (“They may never come again, and it is natural they should desire to cross the bridge while they have the opportunity,” Murphy explained), newspapermen, engineers, and all politicians and preachers.

Daily at the Bridge Company’s Brooklyn offices the crowds jammed the hallways and lobby waiting to see Murphy. Everyone had his particular reason for wanting permission to make the walk.

“I am a stranger here,” explained one applicant.

“Where are you from?” asked Murphy.

“From New York,” the man replied gravely, and the story was soon all over Brooklyn.

A Connecticut couple, both in their seventies, had walked over. Murphy even allowed a doctor and his wife to carry their newborn baby across. But when a Miss Mazeppa Buckingham requested permission to ride over on horseback, he said no. (Her agent proposed to hoist the horse up onto the Brooklyn anchorage with a sling.) “It would have made a great sensation,” Murphy told reporters, “but you see that’s just what we want to avoid. We don’t want to turn the bridge into a show.”

By the middle of August two or three thousand people had made the crossing, and most all of them went home to tell how he or she had been “one of the very first” to cross the Brooklyn Bridge and thus the claim would be passed along proudly to many thousands of grandchildren and to their progeny.

Amazingly, there were no accidents. Several men became so dizzy that they got down on their hands and knees and crawled back, hugging the slat floor for dear life. At least one woman fainted and had to be carried off; many started out, then turned back. Several people had gotten about halfway out over the river with no trouble but then suddenly froze with fear, unable to move one way or the other. One of these was a Brooklyn hatter who figured such a conspicuous display of daring would be good for his business.

Among the children to cross was Al Smith, whose father had been employed as a sort of guard to keep unauthorized people off the bridge and who “gave himself permission to take Alfred across,” as Smith’s sister told the story years later. Smith himself would often describe the hazardous journey over the footbridge as the most thrilling experience of his boyhood, while his sister would remark, “I remember Mother sitting at home, saying ten rosaries all the time they were gone! But my father was determined to take the boy across the bridge so he could say he crossed it before it was built.”

Murphy saw no reason why anyone should not be allowed to travel the footbridge, providing he had a comparatively valid reason and looked as though he would not do anything foolish out there. He was annoyed by the way people were cutting the wires and taking off pieces for souvenirs, but then it was the people’s bridge. None of the workmen seemed bothered by the sight-seers traipsing along. The thing they found most interesting was the number of women who passed by and how fearless they appeared. Murphy admitted to one reporter that he himself had not been across as yet. “I started to go once,” he said, “and while I looked upward or ahead I was all right; but I chanced to look down, and…and I determined that I couldn’t afford to lose the President of the company just then, and so I went back.”

And then it was September and a broken and aged-looking Tweed was standing before the New York Board of Aldermen telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, on the understanding that if he did, “Honest John” Kelly would see that he was set loose from prison and be henceforth immune from further prosecution. It was at this time that Tweed described in his own words the part he had played in getting the bridge started and Henry Murphy and William Kingsley spent the better part of several days denying everything Tweed had to say about as fast as he said it.

And before the month was out an English seaman walking the footbridge was seized by an epileptic fit and it was all several workmen could do to hold on to him as he writhed in convulsions. In desperation they finally tied him to the narrow floor of the bridge, with his arms and legs hanging over the side. The man recovered shortly and was helped back to the ground, but the story was made so much of by the papers that Murphy promptly stopped issuing any more passes. The fun was over.

In early October workmen digging foundations for the Brooklyn approach turned up some old Spanish coins worth about sixteen cents at most and the story spread through town that Captain Kidd’s treasure had been discovered. One paper commented that if they kept digging they might find enough to finish the bridge. Another expressed great pleasure that the New York approach required the demolition of one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, and the Eagle, with nothing better to say apparently, ran a long macabre essay on the bridge as the coming place for the truly artistic suicide. “It is hardly necessary to point out to thoughtful men the splendor of a suicide committed from this virgin height.” Hanging, poison, blowing one’s “vulgar brains out” with a pistol, were all condemned for their “despicable lack of originality.” The river below is swift and treacherous, the editors wrote, and there would always be a good-sized audience on board the ferries. If jumping did not appeal, there were other choices. “Let us imagine a man addicted to hanging and think of the unique picture which early passengers would behold should they turn up their eyes in the ghostly dawn and see a man hanging by his neck fifty feet from the water’s edge! A little ingenuity would enable him to so affix one end of his rope that he could not be cut down for hours and could oscillate before the eyes of an admiring though horror-stricken crowd of thousands.” Even poison, shooting, and stabbing would have some style, the editors concluded, if done from the Great Bridge.

In October a well-to-do New Yorker named Henry Beers, a spokesman for the so-called Council of Political Reform, announced that he was joining the cause to have the bridge stopped. It was nothing but a flagrant waste of public money, he contended, and a serious hazard to navigation, which was the same claim being made by a warehouse owner named Abraham Miller, who had decided to sue the Bridge Company. English law, said Beers, who was assisting Miller, always held rivers and oceans sacred to seamen.

But the old buildings kept coming down inland from the New York anchorage as the path for the approach pressed toward City Hall Park. And out over the river the carrier wheels, glistening in the sunshine, kept spinning along, faster than ever. Never had he seen such weather for bridgebuilding, C. C. Martin said. By November, twenty-two strands were in place. On the cradles, little sentry boxes had been built where the men could get out of the cold while waiting for the carriers to come by. In the sheds over the saddles, wood stoves had been installed and the men were wearing heavy mittens and shoes of buffalo hide.

On Thanksgiving Day one of the wires snapped. It was considered a small matter. Nobody was injured and the newspapers heard nothing of it, but Paine decided to send a section of the wire over to Roebling for him to take a look. “It is as brittle as glass,” Roebling wrote back to Paine. “…The first question arises is how much of this same brittle wire has been going into the cable without our knowledge and secondly what steps must be taken to prevent its reoccurrence. Is it due to a wrong system of inspection or what is the reason in your opinion?”

Roebling also broke off several pieces of the wire and put them in with a letter to Henry Murphy.

“This is what Mr. Kinsella is pleased to call the best,” he wrote angrily. “In reality it is worthless…and the most dangerous material that could be employed. How much of this poor wire has been going into the cables I do not know. Can I be held responsible for that? It is scarcely right that the engineers should have to be acting as detectives. I see but one way of preventing such wire being run out and that is to double the number of inspectors at the contractor’s works.”

If Murphy read Roebling’s letter to the members of the Executive Committee at their next meeting, or to the trustees, there is no mention of it in the official records.

Kinsella and Roebling were running head on once more.

Bessemer steel had become a bone of contention again, exasperating the engineers no end. No issue it seemed ever stayed resolved for very long. This time the argument was over the suspenders, the wire ropes that would hang down from the cables to the roadway. Roebling had decided that Bessemer wire would do perfectly well and that was what he specified, but at the last minute, at Murphy’s urging, he had had the word “Bessemer” scratched out of the printed specifications. Again “steel wire” was all that was called for. Kinsella had been furious, exclaiming in the editorial columns of the Eagle that cost was no factor here, that no chain was stronger than its weakest link, etc., etc. The engineers had no business deciding such matters alone, he said. And when John A. Roebling’s Sons, the lowest bidder for the suspenders, was awarded the contract, Kinsella wrote that it was solely because Washington Roebling wanted it that way and that the contract should have gone to a Brooklyn firm (unnamed).

Henry Murphy was quoted as saying that Roebling had nearly died when the earlier contract was awarded to Haigh and that he, Murphy, had no wish to see that happen again. “All of which is bosh,” responded the Brooklyn Union and Argus. “We have as much sympathy for Mr. Roebling as other people…But, we submit, that this work is entirely superior to any man or all of the men concerned in its construction, and it cannot, nor any part of it, be subordinated to the whims, fancies, or caprices of a sick man.”

The paper refused to let the matter drop, writing scornfully of Roebling’s power and of the stupidity of the “stupendous enterprise being wholly committed to a single brain, which is extremely liable at any moment to be stilled forever.”

The sick man, meanwhile, had had a powerful telescope mounted at his window and trained on the bridge. As for the things being said about him in the papers, he had no comment. He would not see reporters.

Late one Saturday afternoon, shortly before Christmas, there was a bad accident behind the Brooklyn anchorage. Masons were finishing up a series of arches, set on big, square brick piers, that would support the roadway of the approach inland from the anchorage. The foreman noticed a great crack in one arch, about twenty-five feet above the street, and immediately ordered the men down off the work. But one man standing below never heard the warning and when the arch gave way he was buried.

The men started digging frantically through the rubble and in about ten minutes they found him, so badly crushed that he would have been difficult to identify had they not known who it was. The body was covered with a sheet of canvas and carried to a tool house. A big crowd had gathered around by then. The area was one of seeming chaos even under normal conditions, with heaps of brick and stone all about, swinging derricks, and their countless ropes, cement machines, scaffolds, great half-dug pits, and sixty or seventy men busy at one task or another. But now things were out of hand. Somebody began saying the other arches were coming down. There was a panic and the crowd went surging in every different direction and nobody seemed to know what was happening. Then somebody was saying something about one more man trapped under the debris. So half a dozen volunteers started digging again and the crowd rushed back to watch, fully expecting to see the rescue workers buried next.

By this time, too, the news had spread over to Fulton Street that a lot of men had been killed and a crowd coming from that direction was so big that the police had trouble holding them back.

No more arches fell and no other bodies were found, but an investigation was immediately called for and there was great public sympathy for the victim and his family. He was Neil Mullen, a Brooklyn man and a widower with six children.

A coroner’s inquest established that the centering, the temporary wooden supports used under the arches, had been removed before the mortar had set properly. The Brooklyn approach was McNulty’s domain and McNulty, who testified at the inquest, looked to be pretty much at fault. Roebling was infuriated by the whole affair. It was exactly the sort of thing he might have prevented had he been on the job. “The brick arch fell because it had a right to fall,” he wrote bitterly to Henry Murphy, who felt, understandably enough, that he ought to have an explanation on hand from the Chief Engineer. “Every arch, be it round or flat, must fall if its thrust is not met by an adequate lateral support,” Roebling lectured. “…The real accident was not so much that this arch fell, as that the other one stood.”

As to the matter of responsibility I am primarily responsible because it is my business to see that everything goes along right. Mr. McNulty is secondarily responsible because he was the engineer directly in charge of the construction and because he did not sufficiently heed the special warning I gave him about this very thing some weeks before its occurrence.

McNulty had told Roebling he did not know why he had removed the centering. “Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,” Roebling wrote Murphy. “Time and age cures all this.” But then he added that the real explanation might be simply that McNulty was overworked.

Roebling could appreciate the problem. He himself was doing more now than he had since the long, difficult winter before the Centennial. For a great many people it might have appeared that his real work was nearly done. The engineering involved, the planning, and the decision making ought to be all but over, it would seem, now that the towers were up and the wire was going across. But it was not that way. Nor did Roebling by any means have everything all figured out.

In the public mind he had become a thorough mystery, the tragic victim of his own wondrous creation, cursed perhaps, like his father before him, remote, hidden, maybe a little mad, seeing everything and yet never seen. It was said he was so crippled that his wife had to feed him, which was true partly. It was said the disease had affected his mind, which was not true. And still, from a chair behind a distant window he could raise towers of granite and spin steel through the sky.

But for the man himself every detail was a personal concern and no answers came easily, despite the things said about his genius. Nothing could be taken for granted, especially now after the accident. Nobody could be trusted, completely. Anybody might let him down, including his father.

At the moment he was wrestling with the design of the enormous truss that would stiffen the roadway and wondering whether to make it of steel, instead of iron as his father had specified. He was not sure either if his father had made the truss big enough. He delegated Paine to find out all he could on the latest advances in steel-making. He wrote to Hildenbrand, day after day, pouring out his own thoughts, his doubts and questions, for pages.

There are so many points to be considered, so many conflicting interests to be reconciled on the parts of the truss that it is perfectly bewildering to pick out the best thing. For example, I want to reduce the aggregate weight so as to keep down the pressure on the masonry. I want to simplify the superstructure so as to make work in the shop easy and erection easy and safe and I also want to keep down the wind surface as much as possible. On the other hand I want the truss sufficiently strong to resist a reasonable amount of bending, and this goes against the other points. But the only possible way in which I can reduce pressure on masonry and wind surface is by reducing the height and weight of the trusses and increasing the strain per square inch on the iron. I do not see that any reduction of weight is possible in any other parts of the structure. By making the truss rods as far as possible of steel we make some reduction in weight but it is only in the low truss that the rod section is great enough to enable us to attain any appreciable advantage by the substitution of steel for iron. In the high truss with rods through two panels the section is hardly sufficient to make it worth while to change. This therefore would be one argument in favor of again reducing the weight of the intermediate truss and leaving the rods in all the trusses within one panel. This includes the two central trusses even if they are arranged with a square bar in the middle of two flat ones outside.

He was working toward another momentous decision. And he was feeling his way. But days like this were what he enjoyed most.

His concern for incidentals was perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all. For him there were no incidentals. Everything counted. Nothing could be left to chance or for someone else to decide. Hildenbrand, Martin, Paine, Farrington, all heard from him daily now. It seemed he wanted them to know his every thought.

The following is only an excerpt of just one of the letters Roebling wrote to his assistants during this time. It was to Farrington.

I want you to help me get out a specification for all the timber planking for our bridge floor, and it must be done by the first of April or sooner. There is a tremendous quantity of it to be got out, and most of it has to be planed, all of which takes time. It should also season for a while. You know we cannot hang up any of the ironwork unless we have planking to follow right along, so there is no time to lose.

The bulk of it is yellow pine. First: There is the planking for the promenade; next, the planking on the wagon tracks; then the longitudinal stringpieces under the tramway, and also under the regular rails on the Rail Road track. Then a lot of short pieces of bridgings of yellow pine between the floor beams and lastly short oak planking laid crossways where the horses walk, of different thickness, and also some spreaders between the safety rails on the railroad track. Our flooring here differs from the Cincinnati flooring in having only one thickness of plank. I don’t propose to treat or preserve or tar this lumber in any way, because I am pretty well convinced, judging from past attempts on previous bridges have cost more than they are worth and have often done positive harm. And as our planking is of but one thickness it can season from above and below. By the introduction of the light intermediate floor beam I have been able to reduce the thickness of the floor beam such that is from 6 to 5 inches.

First of all I want you to go down to the back office and consult with Hildenbrand and Paine about the best means of fastening down this planking and securing the ends to the floor beams. As there is but one thickness generally it is more difficult to do. The track stringers should all be spliced by halving them at the ends. They can be [illegible] down to the top chord of the floor beam by either one or two light bolts and a cross plate underneath. I want your opinion as to whether it will pay to splice the 5” planks or only butt them. The promenade plank will be too thin for splicing. I think the Cincinnati plan of fastening will answer best. That is a little round-headed bolt having on one side a square washer underneath which catches under the flange of the 6” channel. The head of the bolt can be sunk in pretty well and the hole filled with hard cement. This will answer very well on the wagon tracks where much is covered. But it will make a nasty-looking promenade. Yet I hardly see how I can help it. You know we have on the promenade alternately a double channel and an I beam for floor beams. Now it occurs to me that we could fill in between the double channels with a pine filling piece and fasten the planking into that with wooden nails. To the I beam we fasten with little bolts.

I believe yellow pine won’t warp as badly as oak. The promenade planking must be very long and very narrow—nothing over 4” wide. The other planking can be 5 x 5 or 5 x 6 as the space demands. (Would it pay to caulk it? Hardly I guess?) The ends must butt over the center of the floor beam. Shall we therefore order them exact lengths or make allowances and saw the butts here? How much allowance for waste? Must everything be planed? These stringers could be let in 3/8” on the floor beams. The bridging can be ordered in long lengths and then cut to suit. The promenade suspenders run through the floor. Here we must have two 5” streaks of plank because 4” would be too narrow.

In regard to length of planking, stringers and so on, it must run from 3 panels to 5 panels in length…The timber must be good sound clear stock free from sap, cracks, splits, shakes, wind shakes, slivers and wavy edges, knots, black-knots, work holes. No bush timber or dry-rotted timber or dead timber, etc., etc. The timber must be planed up true, full and square with sharp edges…

And the letter continues on in the same fashion for pages. Twice Emily, who was taking it down, had to sharpen or change her pencil. The letter must have taken a good hour to dictate, perhaps longer considering his condition. Only three words in the whole thing were crossed out. The rest was put down with total certainty and no second thoughts.

On January 8 the Executive Committee held its first meeting of the new year, during which a request from J. Lloyd Haigh was considered. According to the record of the meeting, “Mr. Haigh, the contractor for furnishing the steel wire for the cables, applied to be allowed to substitute the personal obligation of Messrs. Cooper and Hewitt in place of the percentage retained under his contract, amounting now to $29,277, in order to save himself interest upon it.” Mr. Haigh’s proposition was declined. This bit of information appeared in several newspapers the next day, along with a report on various other items taken up at the meeting.

If any of the bridge officials or trustees had been ignorant of Abram Hewitt’s interests in the fortunes of J. Lloyd Haigh and his wireworks, they were no longer. But yet there is nothing in the record to indicate that any of them thought this the least bit out of the ordinary, nor did the papers in either city make any editorial comment on it. Nothing was said either of Haigh’s generally unsavory personal reputation. Abram Hewitt made no comment.

The Union and Argus did, however, pick up another item concerning certain legal fees authorized by the committee. “Of course more or less legal information is required by the bridge trustees,” wrote the paper, “It does seem as if there might be something more than coincidence in the twin facts that law costs the bridge $7,500 a month, and that the cheapest establishments at which the article is purveyed are those of E. M. Cullen and H. C. and G. I. Murphy. Inasmuch as H. C. Murphy is the President of the Board, the effect of the figures is an impression that the gentleman in question is overduly given to taking counsel of himself and pays a little highly for his soliloquies.”

H. C. and G. I. Murphy were Henry Murphy’s sons. They were doing as competent a job as could be done and were charging no more for their services than would any other reputable firm, or so said Henry Murphy by way of explanation.

20

Wire Fraud

Yet the existence of evil in human life is a fact too patent to be ignored or to be denied. There is evil and plenty of it, the world over…

—JOHN A. ROEBLING

FROM his window the Chief Engineer watched the wind gather force through the early morning, driving snow almost horizontally and whipping up whitecaps on the river. New York was barely visible. By ten a regular gale was blowing and the effect on the bridge was tremendous. The wind, as he noted in a subsequent report, was up to sixty-five miles per hour. He could see the half-finished cables tossing about wildly, like a child’s skipping rope.

Roebling could pick out tiny dark figures moving up the footbridge from the Brooklyn anchorage and he knew what they were setting out to do, but from where he was he could not hear the sharp clashing of the strands striking against one another or the eerie moaning and whistling of the wires. Down by the bridge the noise was loud enough to be heard for blocks, and the cradle inland from the tower was slamming about so violently that people in houses below were terrified it might snap its lashing and come plunging down on them.

Farrington had detailed a force of men to go out and secure the wires as best as possible. “It was not a pleasant thing for them to contemplate,” according to one account, “and yet there was not a murmur of dissatisfaction.” Carrying the little boatswain’s chairs, they started up the footbridge, moving very slowly, almost bent double against the wind and snow. The bridge was swinging like a pendulum and the slats were sheathed in ice. But by hanging on to the handrail, they were able to keep their feet and eventually reached the tower.

For the next two hours they worked their way up and down the cable strands, lashing them together every fifty feet or so. The wind never let up during that time, and when two or three of them reached the middle of the river span, and caught the full brunt of the wind, it looked as though they might be carried off at any instant, their frail swings tossing about even more than the cable strands.

But they all came back and none of them complained. “Our men deserve credit for the way they do their duty on such occasions as this,” Farrington told a reporter. The bridge itself, he also pointed out, had held up just fine. The footbridge had not lost a single slat.

The storm struck on the last day of January and for the rest of the winter and on into spring the work proceeded without a hitch. The wire spinning was going faster than it had at Cincinnati, as Henry Murphy announced with pleasure, predicting the entire bridge would be finished by 1880.

In February Roebling reported to the trustees on plans for the bridge trains. Everything would be as his father had described it he said. The trains would be hauled by an endless cable, powered by a gigantic steam engine located on the Brooklyn side. “These two tracks, therefore, will be treated exactly like an inclined plane, an operation perfectly simple and perfectly well understood,” his father had written. “There is no novel feature and no experiment involved in its arrangement.” The elder Roebling had proposed an effective running speed of twenty miles per hour, but said that could be stepped up to thirty in the center of the bridge, or even forty, with absolute safety. Each train could have as many as ten cars, with each car fifty feet long and having seats enough for a hundred people. There were to be suspended sliding doors on opposite sides of the cars, one for coming in, the other for going out. These would be worked by conductors. As one train went over to New York, the other would be coming back, just as the carrier wheels worked.

It was possible too that the rope might revolve constantly, and to start or stop, the cars would simply catch on or let go of the rope. “An ingenious arrangement for attaching cars to a moving rope, devised by Col. W. H. Paine, has been successfully at work for more than a year on the Sutter Street Railways in San Francisco,” Roebling informed the trustees. The great virtue of Paine’s grip was that it took hold of the cable in such a way that the car did not start off with a violent jerk. The San Francisco cable car operated with perfect ease, and certainly, as Roebling said, the grades were considerably steeper than those of the East River bridge.

His father’s plans still appeared to be the best possible solution, Roebling said; “and I am now making every arrangement to carry them out substantially as indicated.” This he knew was in direct opposition to what Stranahan and some of the others had been talking about in recent months, and what Kinsella had begun hinting at in the Eagle. The scheme was for regular passenger trains on the bridge, linking up with Vanderbilt’s New York Central—so it would be possible to go to sleep in Brooklyn and wake up in Buffalo, as they put it. That Henry Murphy’s Coney Island line might also benefit from such an arrangement had also become a topic of conversation among Brooklyn businessmen.

Roebling explained that the grade of the bridge would be too great for any but heavy locomotives. The bridge had not been designed for such loads, he said. Possibly a narrow-gauge locomotive could be used, drawing a few light cars, but that would cut passenger loads to a sixth of what the cable system could handle. Moreover, according to his calculations, in a storm such as the one of January 31, narrow-gauge cars would blow right over. “Neither, must we overlook the effect of a puffing, snorting locomotive on horses already sufficiently startled by the novelty of a very elevated position,” wrote the engineer.

Kinsella seemed to take all this very graciously. If they had reached the point where all there was to argue about was the size of the doors on the passenger cars, then they had come a long way indeed. That was not the issue, of course, and the issue was still very much alive behind the scenes; but for now an atmosphere of peace settled over the bridge offices and morale among the men actually building the bridge was very high.

Early in March the full-rigged ship U.S.S. Minnesota, passing under the center of the bridge, clipped one of the cables with the tip of her topmast. The mast went down with a crash, taking flag and halyards along with it, but the bridge suffered no damage at all. Workmen on the footbridge cheered and waved their hats.

Ever since he returned from Spain Tweed had been telling people he wanted to die. On the morning of April 12, 1878, his wish began to come true.

A few weeks before, on his way from court back to the Ludlow Street Jail, he had caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, complicated by heart disease. “They will be preaching sermons about me,” he had said. Gray, sunken-cheeked, actually gaunt now, he grew steadily weaker, virtually all alone. According to those few who were at his bedside, he died just as the Essex Market clock struck noon.

There would be some dispute later over just what his last words were. A lawyer who was there claimed Tweed said faintly, “I hope Tilden and Fairchild are satisfied now.” (Charles Fairchild was then the Attorney General of New York.) Some of the newspapers said Tweed had died talking of angels. But a man named S. Foster Dewey, who was Tweed’s secretary and at his bedside, denied this vehemently. “He never thought of angels in his life.” Dewey asserted that Tweed’s final words were these: “I have tried to right some great wrongs. I have been forbearing with those who did not deserve it. I forgive all those who have ever done evil to me, and I want all those whom I have harmed to forgive me.”

It was decided by the family that Tweed would be buried in Brooklyn, at Greenwood Cemetery. “If he had died in 1870,” said one old crony, “Broadway would have been festooned with black, and every military and civil organization in the City would have followed him to Greenwood.” As it was, the funeral was extremely modest indeed, attended by the family, a few friends, and maybe twenty politicians, among whom there was no one of consequence except “Honest John” Kelly. A procession of just eight carriages followed the hearse down Fifth Avenue and then Broadway, to the tip of Manhattan, where they took the Hamilton Avenue Ferry to Brooklyn.

At Greenwood, Tweed was laid to rest by twenty Freemasons, as he had requested, and wearing a white apron of lambskin—“the emblem of innocence.”

“Alas! Alas! young men,” cried the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage from his Brooklyn pulpit the following Sunday, “look at the contrast—in an elegant compartment of a Wagner palace car, surrounded by wine, cards and obsequious attendants, going to his Senatorial place at Albany; then look again at the plain box…behold the low-studded room, looking out upon a mean little dingy court where, a prisoner, exhausted, forsaken, miserable, betrayed, sick, William M. Tweed lies a-dying. From how high up to how low down! Never was such an illustration of the truth that dishonesty will not pay!”

But Godkin in The Nation commented, “A villain of more brains would have had a modest dwelling and would have guzzled in secret.” And young Chris Magee, Republican Boss of Pittsburgh, made a special trip to New York to spend several months studying the reasons for Tweed’s downfall and returned home to tell his associates that a ring could be made as safe as a bank, and he would do just that.

Asked by a New York reporter what he thought of Tweed and the part he had played launching Brooklyn’s bridge, the distinguished editor of the Eagle said, “Well, the Brooklyn people have no right to find fault with the Tammany Ring, so far as we are concerned…they favored the bridge project, and always acted fairly and liberally with us.”

On June 14, at about five minutes past twelve noon, people in Tweed’s old neighborhood surrounding the New York anchorage were suddenly startled by what many thought to be the report of a cannon, followed by a loud scraping, hissing noise that sounded, one man said, more like a skyrocket taking off than anything else he had ever heard. A candy vendor on South Street was nearly struck by stones falling about him. A telegraph pole was snapped in two and a chimney was clipped off a nearby house as something went caroming overhead and crashed out of sight over near the bridge tower. People rushed into the streets, including, it was noted in one account, “several harlots” from the Water Street dance halls who supposedly got down on their knees and commenced praying. A bridge cable had snapped, it was said, something had happened to the tower, the whole bridge was coming down, nobody knew what to believe.

Below the north side of the anchorage lay the body of a man, his chest torn open, his back, arms, and legs broken. He was unconscious but still alive. On top of the anchorage a dead man lay sprawled on the stone and two others were lying nearby, groaning pitifully. The only man on the anchorage who had not been hurt, except for a small scratch on one hand, was Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington.

Farrington had been supervising the “easing off” of the sixtieth strand, which had been finished a day or two before. Some thirty men had been working on the anchorage during the morning, but when the noon break came, he had kept only a few of them on to help lower the strand into position. Thomas Blake had been standing where the strand tied onto the shoe, near the pulleys, so he could see that everything went right at that end. Harry Supple and Farrington had been about four paces forward, on either side of the front ends of the anchor bars, at the point where the finished strands for the upstream cable were attached and where the new strand was to take its place. Two other men named McGrath and Arberg were just opposite Blake.

When everything was ready Farrington told Blake to remove the fastenings and the order was passed back to the hoisting engine to begin lowering away. The steel “fall rope” that held the strand began moving through the pulleys and the strand started forward. It had moved about four feet when one of the men cried out that a segment of the fall rope had parted. But the words were no sooner out of his mouth when the whole thing let go. The fall rope had snapped with a deafening report.

It was all over in an instant. Farrington, who had been knocked down by something, but not hurt, looked about to find that only the jagged ends of the fall rope remained. Blake was dead. McGrath and Arberg were bleeding badly and clearly in terrible pain. The remainder of the rope, the pulleys, and the strand had disappeared. And so had Harry Supple.

Blake, it seems, had been killed instantly, struck by the flying shoe more than likely. Supple had been hit by the rope and knocked off the anchorage, falling eighty feet into the yard. The rope had knocked Arberg down and it had caught McGrath by the feet, ripping open the soles of both his shoes, and throwing him as it had Supple, but in the other direction, twenty feet across the top of the stonework.

The strand, and everything it was dragging behind it, had shot away into the air. With one enormous leap it had landed in the bridge yard behind the tower, a good five hundred feet away. Except for the coping on one house, the telephone pole, and the chimney, it had struck nothing in its violent flight and harmed no one. At the bridge yard it had come down on top of a stone pile, shattering some rowboats lying there and barely missing a group of men who were sitting out in the sunshine enjoying their noontime meal. Instantly the great weight of the strand midstream had sent the free end shooting up over the top of the tower. And when the whole strand had gone plummeting into the river, the splash had shot fifty feet in the air and stretched from shore to shore, like a wall suddenly raised up. Passengers on the Fulton Ferry had been drenched, the strand had hit so close by, but nobody was hurt and no boats had been hit.

By the time all the excitement cooled off and it was clear what had happened, everyone realized what a miraculously close call it had been.

Harry Supple, the one who had performed such heroic high-wire feats two summers before, never regained consciousness and died in less than twenty-four hours. Several papers immediately charged that the rope that failed was made of Bessemer steel and that it had been manufactured by the Roeblings. Both claims were true.

There was no explaining what happened, Martin and Paine told reporters as they walked about the anchorage yard where Supple fell. Henry Murphy had rushed over from Brooklyn at first word of the accident and told the reporters they could go up on top of the anchorage to look about for themselves if they wished. The Bridge Company had nothing to conceal. But he refused to offer any possible explanations. The rope had been used maybe fifteen times before this for the exact same purpose and had been tested for a strength six times the load it had been carrying.

In another couple of days the engineers had completed their investigation and solved the mystery, to their satisfaction at least. The rope, they said, had somehow slipped out of place as it was running through one of the pulleys and the sharp edge of the pulley had cut into it, damaging it badly enough to cause the break. Blake, the dead man, should have seen this, but obviously he had not. The steel rope was not to blame, perhaps even Blake was not wholly to blame. The consensus was that it was one of those chance things that happen.

Still the episode had put a scare into people that they would not soon forget and made a number of those who had some say in bridge matters even more skeptical than they had been before. The work went right on. Farrington was back seeing to other things that same afternoon. But the critics would grow increasingly louder now, and more numerous, and Roebling’s burden of worry, which was supposed to be lessening as the final phases of the work grew nearer, became greater than ever.

Only a week or so before, the New York World had questioned in big headlines whether the bridge was a failure. For some nine millions of dollars, the paper claimed, the people of New York and Brooklyn had acquired nothing but a lot of disgusting scandal and two stone towers with a few wires dangling between. The Times had joined in saying that for all the money poured into the bridge, the ferries could have been offered free to the people for a lifetime.

But of far greater seriousness was the hostility growing in that old seedbed of bridge enthusiasm, Tammany Hall. Anxious to disown any previous connection with Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny, and reportedly exercised over how much the bridge was costing, the new boss of the Tammany, “Honest John” Kelly, was letting it be known that the city of New York just might refuse to spend anymore money on the bridge. The move was seen by many as nothing more than a political maneuver to replace some of the bridge trustees with Tammany men and to subjugate Boss McLaughlin. No one had taken Kelly very seriously at first. But an installment from New York of half a million dollars was already three months overdue. (Brooklyn had met its obligation of one million dollars right on schedule.) Kelly, regarded as “a warm advocate” of the bridge only a few years before, was now making public remarks about withholding New York’s payment until he was sure the bridge was being managed competently, and sensational accidents killing innocent laborers only aggravated his “grave concern.”

Kingsley, Stranahan, and Henry Murphy claimed no knowledge of Kelly’s motives, nor did they care even to speculate on the subject. But if he persisted, Henry Murphy said, they would take him to court, since the law required that New York meet its financial obligations. Part of the problem, Murphy said, was that too many people still failed to comprehend the sort of bridge this was going to be and were listening to a lot of baseless nonsense from second-rate engineers whose only motivation was publicity. “It will not sway from side to side nor rock up and down,” he said. It was to be “a great street,” he said, solid and stationary. Kelly claimed to have heard from reliable sources that another immense pier would soon be needed to prop up the center span of the bridge. Besides, Kelly said, he was listening with increased interest to the arguments of Abraham Miller and others who were predicting that the bridge would destroy commerce on the East River.

Perhaps in his quiet room overlooking the river, Washington Roebling recalled something his father had written when the same issue was raised at Cincinnati. “I have no fears of those who honestly believe the bridge to be injurious to the navigation,” John Roebling had said, “the opposition of cavilers I most dread.”

By the end of June, New York had still not met its payment. July came and went and still there was no money from New York. By the first week in August, when the trustees convened for their monthly meeting, it was obvious that something would have to be done soon. There was virtually no cash on hand.

At the close of the workday, Saturday, August 10, Murphy took what he viewed as his only course of action. He shut the work down except for the strand making. Approximately a hundred men were kept on. Some six hundred were laid off.

Times were still hard, jobs scarce, and the idea of six hundred men suddenly idle and a great and costly public work standing unfinished was not going to be very well received by the public, as Murphy fully appreciated. The decision, he said, was entirely his own. He did not want to bankrupt the Bridge Company by carrying on, and he did not wish to see Brooklyn spend any more of its money until this trouble with New York was straightened out once and for all.

Kelly said he was now convinced the bridge would do New York little good anyway and that it had been a great mistake for the city to get so financially involved in the first place. And since the costs were running ahead of what had been projected in the original agreements, then New York was no longer legally bound to its side of the bargain. As far as he was concerned, he would be very happy to settle the issue in court. So he held out, as tempers in Brooklyn kept mounting.

With another accident to explain away and “Honest John” Kelly testing his newly gained power, Henry Murphy appeared to be coping with about all the trouble one man could handle during that summer of 1878. And yet this was but part of the story. For on July 22 he had been presented, privately, with what must have appeared to be the most devastating piece of news in all his nine years of administering the business affairs of the bridge.

He was informed by the Chief Engineer that J. Lloyd Haigh, contractor for the cable wire, had been perpetrating a colossal fraud.

The deception had been suspected by the engineers as early as mid-June, but they had had no real proof until July 5. Four days later, when the whole pattern was clear, Roebling had written a long letter to Murphy disclosing what had been going on, but then put off sending it for two weeks, to be absolutely certain his case was solid. So the letter Murphy received on the 22nd was dated July 9 and it told the following story.

“From the known reputation of this man [Haigh], I deemed it necessary from the first to test every ring of wire made by him…” (instead of every tenth ring or so, as had been planned). Roebling had also warned Paine and the others that Haigh would probably try to bribe the inspectors, which was exactly what Haigh had done, without success.

But as Roebling expected he might, Haigh then tried another maneuver. Inspection of the wire was carried on by Paine and his assistants at Haigh’s big brick mill at Red Hook, near the Atlantic Docks. Once the wire was passed, it was loaded onto wagons and hauled up to the bridge. But in June it was found that rejected wire was also getting to the bridge. Wire that had been accepted, but held in the mill overnight, would be replaced before morning by rejected wire, which then went off to the bridge. The trick was discovered by secretly marking the good wire. Haigh was informed of the discovery and given a strong warning. Paine was assured there would be no more of that, but he remained suspicious. The rule from then on was that no more wire was to be inspected than could be delivered on that same day.

But a little later it was noticed that the great pile of rejected wire, instead of increasing as it should have, with rings failing to pass inspection every day, was growing steadily smaller. The bad wire was going somewhere obviously and the assumption was that it was going to the bridge. But how, since all departing wagonloads were being carefully watched to see that they carried good wire only? The solution, the engineers decided, had to be that wagonloads were being switched on route, somewhere between Red Hook and the bridge.

“A watch was therefore set on the morning of the 5th of July,” Roebling wrote, “and the trick discovered. The wagonload of wire as it left the inspector’s room, with his certificate, in place of being driven off to the bridge, was driven to another building, where it was rapidly unloaded and replaced with a load of rejected wire, which then went to the bridge with the same certificate of inspection.”

When these rings reached the bridge—eighty in all—they were immediately tested. Only five out of the total were up to standard.

Two days later the Haigh people were caught trying the same thing again. This time Paine and three others, concealed behind a fence, had watched a wagonload of good wire being unloaded, then replaced with rejected wire, which was all very carefully weighed to be sure the weight of the shipment tallied exactly with what it had been when it left the mill. The good wire was then returned to the mill, where it was submitted to an inspector once more, who, supposing it to be new wire, tested it all over again, gave it another certificate of approval, and sent it on its way, only to go through the same routine.

“The distressing point of this affair,” Roebling told Murphy, “is that all the rejected wire which has come to the Bridge has been worked into the cables, and cannot be removed.” How long Haigh had been practicing his little scheme, Roebling could not say. “We know that it has been going on for two months, and the probability is that it extends as far back as last January.” According to the inspectors’ books, nearly five hundred tons of wire had been rejected to date. Most of this, Roebling suspected, had gone into the cables. To determine the precise quantity would be extremely difficult he said. “An engineer who has not been educated as a spy or detective is no match for a rascal.”

For the time being he had ordered that a man on horseback accompany each load of wire from Haigh’s mill to the bridge and he had instructed Paine to withhold his signature to Haigh’s monthly estimates and thereby prevent Haigh from receiving any more money until the extent of the fraud had been more thoroughly investigated.

This, Roebling said, was the first instance of deliberate, incontrovertible fraud that had come to his notice in the nine years he had been Chief Engineer and he urged the trustees to make it known publicly without delay. But in the brief covering note to Murphy that he included with the letter, Roebling made a rather different point: “…in case a want of strength shall in the future be found in the cables I wish the responsibility to rest where it belongs, with the Board of Trustees.” And this appears to have troubled Murphy about as deeply as the fraud itself.

Murphy took three days to answer Roebling. His concern was very great, clearly enough, but so too was his instinctive caution. No action ought to be taken he said until they had a better notion of the real damage done and until he was clear on the technical remedies Roebling might have in mind. It was a lawyer’s letter. “I have waited with much anxiety for the report of Col. Paine,” he wrote, in regard to the wire on hand and not used, which he has been engaged in retesting, since the suspicions arose in regard to the action of Mr. Haigh, and to the possible extent to which any rejected wire has been foisted upon us in the cables…. It is manifestly proper, before any definite course be taken by us, that we should know the nature and extent of the injury, and that so far as the work itself is concerned, we should have your distinct recommendation in the premises.” In the meantime, he wanted to know what possible responsibility Roebling could conceive of resting with the trustees.

“The responsibility of any weakness that may be found in the cables,” Roebling answered, “rests with the old board of trustees, because they awarded so important a contract as the cable wire to a man who had no standing, commercially or otherwise, and the same responsibility must be assumed by the present board if they fail to at once put an end to Mr. Haigh’s contract…” Out of tact, perhaps, or out of sympathy for the position Murphy was in, Roebling did not remind Murphy that he had warned him about Haigh, quite explicitly, well before the wire contract was awarded.

Given a week’s notice, the Cleveland Rolling Mill or Washburn’s of Worcester could supply all the wire needed to finish the cables, Roebling assured Murphy. The price would be about the same and the quality could be relied upon. As for Haigh, a committee of trustees and an engineer should be appointed to assess the damage to the cables and fix the value of the condemned wire. That sum should then be deducted from the money currently being withheld from Haigh as security. “This,” said the engineer, “is a straightforward way of dealing with a dishonest contractor.”

But the trustees chose not to do that. The trustees, in fact, decided not to do anything at all about Mr. Haigh. The whole unfortunate affair would be very neatly and quietly swept beneath the carpet.

…They gathered for their regular monthly meeting on the afternoon of August 5, and the record states that the president read letters from Engineer Roebling “relating to alleged frauds practiced by the contractor for cable wire”—no more. And nothing on the matter was released to the press. Several years later, however, William Marshall, the one trustee who had voted against granting Haigh the contract in the first place, said Paine appeared before the board that afternoon and told the entire story of what Haigh had been up to. “I was in favor at the time,” Marshall said, “and so said in the Board, of giving the whole history of the matter to the public, but was overruled.”

According to an item in the Eagle, there was a meeting of the Executive Committee immediately following the board meeting. “The executive session lasted until 6 o’clock, but the subject matter under discussion was not divulged by the members,” the paper reported. But Marshall said Haigh himself appeared at this session and that Haigh denied any intention of trying to deceive the bridge people, professing to be wholly uninterested in any money that might be in question. “All I am anxious about,” he said, “is lest the trustees may entertain a poor opinion of me.” That they certainly did, responded several men in the room. “I am sorry for that,” declared Haigh. “Do you know that is what I was afraid of? Indeed, it was the only thing I was afraid of.” Haigh spoke the whole time, Marshall said, “with imperturbable coolness.”

Interestingly, the record kept by the Bridge Company carries no mention of an executive session being held that afternoon.

The following morning Roebling wrote once again to Murphy to answer several questions Murphy had sent along. Most of the letter was taken up with technical explanations of current cable strength, assuming, as Roebling now did, that some 221 tons of rejected wire had actually been laid up. But in closing, Roebling reminded Murphy that the cables had been designed to have a margin of safety of six, that is, they were six times as strong as they had to be. And he recalled for Murphy that his report of January 1877 had stated specifically that such allowances would have to be made “for any possible imperfection in the manufacture of the cables.” So even with Haigh’s bad wire hanging up there, the cables had a safety margin of at least five, Roebling concluded, and that he regarded as perfectly safe, provided no more bad wire was used.

Roebling’s say on the matter was quite comforting for Murphy and for the other trustees apparently. The whole unpleasant business could now be very conveniently forgotten. Wasting no time, they reconvened the next day, August 7. When the meeting adjourned, the president had been directed “to continue the contract with Mr. Haigh for the wire required to complete the large cables, on such conditions and terms as he deems proper under the circumstances.”

It was just as though nothing had happened. The papers carried no mention of any of this. The public remained ignorant of the entire affair.

The Chief Engineer, however, after a great deal more thought on the problem, ruled that the contractor would have to supply additional good wire for the cables, at his own expense, to make up for the calculated deficiency of the bad wire already in place. As a result each of the cables would contain some 150 more wires than originally planned.

From Washington Roebling’s private day journals, kept by his wife, a few further pieces of information emerge to complete the picture. Haigh’s original samples of crucible steel wire were made by somebody else, while a good percentage of the wire he delivered was of Bessemer steel after all, but sold to the Bridge Company at the crucible price. Roebling estimated that Haigh netted $60,000 on this bit of deception alone and that he had also cheated his supplier out of several hundred thousand dollars. In all Haigh’s illegitimate profits came to $300,000.

Some years later, after the bridge was finished and the story of Haigh’s swindle had leaked out, the radical economic theorist Henry George, who had set out to resolve the paradox of progress and poverty, wrote of the bridge as a prime example of the good and evil of the age.

We have brought machinery to a pitch of perfection that fifty years ago could not have been imagined; but in the presence of political corruption, we seem as helpless as idiots. The East River Bridge is a crowning triumph of mechanical skill; but to get it built a leading citizen of Brooklyn had to carry to New York sixty thousand dollars in a carpet bag to bribe a New York alderman. The human soul that thought out the great bridge is prisoned in a crazed and broken body that lies bed-fast, and could only watch it grow by peering through a telescope. Nevertheless, the weight of the immense mass is estimated and adjusted for every inch. But the skill of the engineer could not prevent condemned wire from being smuggled into the cable.

Come what may the Brooklyn Eagle would not be diverted from its main theme—accomplishment.

The thousands who daily cross the ferries and look up to the lofty towers that rise on either hand above the water, and note the strands that stretch across the intervening space, hardly realize that the cable making of the great structure is nearing its completion. But such is the fact, and with a fair degree of success, by the time the cold weather sets in we shall see the four great cables completed and ready for the superstructure or roadway of the bridge. It has been steady and patient work—wire upon wire and strand upon strand—through heat and cold and storm and calm, and now this branch of the great enterprise nears the end, and another department of the work of construction appears in the near future.

Nothing belied talk of political scheming, bankruptcy, labor unrest, vicious rumor, or plain despair quite so much as the great work itself.

Progress on the cables was in truth very far along. Seventy strands had been completed, which meant there were only six more to go.

An explanation offered at the time to show the interested layman how the strands were arranged to form a cable was to take seven nickels, place one at the center with six around it, all touching, and then twelve more around the outside of the six. This illustrated the pattern quite rightly, but it was somewhat misleading in that it implied that the first strand put into position was the center one—the middle nickel—then six more were compacted about it, and twelve more around that. The system did not work that way, however. The strands were being laid up in four different tiers and these were arranged in a most ingenious pattern, so that they stacked one on top of the other, like building blocks, rather than being built outward from a center strand, and still they wound up forming the cylindrical shape wanted for the cable. The first tier, consisting of five strands, had three strands forming a bottom row (the middle strand of these three was the first strand put in place) and two put on top, forming half of the next row. The next tier, of five more strands, placed one at each end of the second row (making four strands to that row) and three more on top. Then tier three, also five strands, added one more strand to each end of the third row, two more on top in the middle, and one on top of those. The fourth and final tier consisted of the last four strands stacked two to each side of the three upper strands of tier three.

The arrangement was quite ingenious and it was entirely Roebling’s doing. “It has pleased the average penny-a-liner,” his wife would write, “to remark that there is nothing new in the East River Bridge and that Colonel Roebling only copied his father’s plans. The fact is there is scarcely a feature in the whole work that did not present new and untried problems.” His arrangement for the strands was a perfect example, she said, comparable to the water-shaft system he had worked out for the caisson, or his use of double tiers of anchor bars, which had been necessary to handle the number of strands required for such large cables (the earlier bridges had had only seven strands to a cable, not nineteen).

Regulating the strands was found to be the most tedious and time-consuming task of all. The strength of the finished cable would depend on getting each strand into its exact, particular position, and since those positions were at different heights within the cable (there was a difference of about fifteen inches between the first strands, say, and those in the top tier), the length of the strands therefore had to vary. “Each must hang in its own peculiar length and curve to a mathematical nicety,” as one magazine article explained; “for if left but half an inch too long or too short for its true position, it will be too slack or too taut for its fellows, and it will be impossible to bind them solidly in one mass, and make them pull equally together.”

In the abstract this was simply a matter of mathematics. But in practice there were a number of variables to contend with, just as there had been when stringing the individual wires. Temperature was again a prime factor. Even ordinary temperature changes during a day were such that the length of a strand was seldom the same from one hour to another. And to further complicate the problem, one span could be affected more than another, depending on how the sun was striking it. One strand might be in shadow, while another was taking the full glare; one might be exposed vertically to the sun, while the other was at a more oblique angle. So periods of strong sunshine, like days when the wind was up, were not the easiest times to regulate strands. The best progress was made when the weather was calm and a little overcast or between the first light of day and sunrise.

Studies made by the engineers showed that the deflection of the cable strands from the towers at a temperature of 50 degrees was 127.64 feet, while at 90 degrees it was 128.64 feet—which was a variation of nearly a third of an inch for every degree of temperature. So it was not uncommon to find the cable strands varying as much as half a foot in height in the course of a single day.

The way things were going, the two downstream cables would be laid up several weeks before the other two in order to give the men some practice with the wrapping machinery. To bind the strands of each cable into one compact unit required that the cable be tightly wrapped from end to end with iron wire. The work would begin at the towers, with wrapping machines proceeding down the cables toward the center of the river span and toward each anchorage. So ultimately there would be sixteen machines in operation.

First a powerful iron clamp would be used to bring the strands into an exactly cylindrical shape. This was composed of two semi-circles that placed together formed a ring the prescribed diameter of the cable. The clamp would be screwed up tightly to compress the strands and directly behind it would come the wrapping machine, an iron cylinder—about sixteen inches long and cast in halves that were bolted together about the cable—encircled by a reel of wire that wound off the drum through a hole in the rear end of the cylinder where it passed with one turn around a small roller attached to a disk and then to the cable. The reel had handles around it, like a ship’s wheel. Men riding on a “buggy,” a small platform hung to the cable by big trolley wheels, would turn these handles, thereby revolving the reel and winding the wire onto the cable as tight and close as thread on a spool. Once the wrapping machine reached the clamp, the clamp was moved forward and the machine then advanced again, and the process would be repeated until the entire cable was clamped and wrapped. After that the cables would be oiled and a coat of white paint would be applied.

The system worked well and without mishap except for one close call when the captain of an outward-bound full-rigged ship neglected to trim his top masts. The men in one of the buggies, working over the center of the river, did not see the ship until she was nearly upon them. Then they scrambled out onto the great cable above them and the ship clipped the buggy an instant later, sending it spinning and knocking a shower of tools into the air.

Now there was a great push on to get the cables finished and wrapped before winter. It was expected that the job would take three months. The next step would be to hang the suspender cables from which the roadway was to be hung.

In September, as directed by Henry Murphy, the contract for the wrapping wire, awarded to J. Lloyd Haigh at the start of the summer, was quietly changed and awarded to John A. Roebling’s Sons. No explanation was given for the change. No voices were raised about the Chief Engineer having a conflict of interest. The Eagle remained silent. Abram Hewitt remained silent.

On October 5, 1878, at 4:45 P.M. by the clock on City Hall, the last wire went over, one year and about four months after the cable spinning had begun, or eight months sooner than Roebling had expected. “This desirable event,” wrote E. F. Farrington, “was marked by no demonstrations, save the sounding of a steam whistle, and the raising of a United States flag on the Brooklyn tower.” The greatest length of wire laid up in one day had been eighty-eight miles. The white carrier wheel, which had crossed the river some twenty-three thousand times, would be crossing no more. “The end, then, is near at hand,” announced the Eagle. But a month later, the cable wrapping not half finished, Henry Murphy declared that the work would have to be shut down entirely. “Honest John” Kelly was still holding out on New York’s quota and the money was all gone.

21

Emily

At first I thought I would succumb, but I had a strong tower to lean upon, my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.

—WASHINGTON ROEBLING

SHE HAD been born and raised in a house much like this one and her whole life, until she married, had been spent in the upper Hudson Valley, where the river was not only a major event in the landscape, but a central part of everyone’s way of life. Talk of tides, of winter freeze-overs and the spring breakup, had been part of ordinary conversation for as long as she could remember.

The town dock at Cold Spring stood at the foot of Main Street. In summer when the “up” boats from New York stopped—the Mary Powell, the Emeline—it was always a grand occasion. And at night, from her bedroom as a child, she could hear the steam whistles of the great side-wheelers trailing off through the Highlands.

She had grown up on that part of the Hudson where, for some fifteen miles, it cuts a deep narrow channel through thickly wooded mountains, the most picturesque and fabled part of the whole valley. She could still see part of the river now, just the very broad leadgray final end of it, emptying into the Upper Bay, beyond the tip of Manhattan. And now, as then, she could stand at her window and watch the afternoon sun go down and the lights come on across the water. The sun set earlier in Cold Spring than it did here, and with the mountains crowding all around, the evening skies had never been so spectacular as these. Then, the lights had been few, from West Point only. Still and all there was enough that was the same to make her feel very much at home here.

The house stood at a prime spot on the Heights. It was tall, stately, spacious, built before the war in the Greek Revival style, and it was located at the northern end of Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river, about half a mile from the bridge. The address was 110 Columbia Heights, in the block between Pineapple and Orange Streets, on the west side of the street, the side with the view. Like nearly every house on that side, it had a deep garden in back, extending out over the top of a carriage house and stable built below the brink of the bluff, fronting on Furman Street beside the wharves. Moses Beach, the publisher and a pillar of Plymouth Church, lived next door. Henry Bowen, who had done much to stir up the Beecher scandal and whose deceased wife was said to have been another paramour of the famous divine, lived just up the street in a colossal white mansion with a two-story Corinthian portico, and Beecher himself lived in the next block.

From her front windows, overlooking the street, she could see the old Turkish baths that John Roebling had patronized and directly across the street stood a row of three-storied brick houses with beautifully arched doorways and long, polished plate-glass windows, much like her own. The houses fronted directly on to the brick sidewalk, as hers did, giving the street a nicely balanced, orderly look. With the sun casting tree shadows on the pink brick walls, everything looked secure and private, as in a courtyard. But from the back of the house, from the big bay windows on every floor, the whole of the harbor, the river, the bridge, and the city beyond were spread before her.

For six years in all, this would be the center of her universe. She was anything but a recluse by temperament, and unlike her husband she could come and go at will, but when she did it would be for his sake nearly always and for his sake she would do everything in her power to keep this place of theirs both private and utterly tranquil, like the eye of a storm.

She was thirty-five years old now. She had been married for fourteen years. For nearly ten of those years her husband had been working on the bridge and for more than half that time he had been an invalid, for a long while very close to death and always greatly dependent on her.

Their son now was nearly an adolescent and apparently she had known for some time that there would be no more children. She had had a bad fall in Germany shortly before he was born, and afterward had bled for nearly a month in the little inn in Mühlhausen, her husband calling in one German doctor after another. The trip home across the Atlantic had been an agony. But she seems to have kept in almost perfect health thereafter, despite everything she had on her shoulders. And she seems to have made an enormous impression on everyone she met.

One newspaper article said, “Mrs. Roebling is a tall and handsome woman, strikingly English in style and shows not only in her face, but in her graceful carriage, an aristocratic ancestry.” She was considered an exceptional horsewoman and known for both her “scientific bent of mind” and decided opinions on many subjects.

Among the best physical descriptions of her is one Washington Roebling wrote during the war, in a letter to his sister Elvira:

I would send you a little tintype [of Emily] if it didn’t happen to be a horrid picture, not doing a particle of justness to the subject. Some people’s beauty lies not in the features but in the varied expression that the countenance will assume under various emotions, etc., etc…. She is dark-brown eyed, slightly pug-nosed, lovely mouth and teeth, no dimples in her cheeks, like Laura the corners of the mouth supply that, and a most entertaining talker, which is a mighty good thing you know, I myself being so stupid. She is a little above medium size and has a most lovely complexion…

He would never be satisfied with any photograph of her no matter how many times she tried. They gave no idea of her “peculiar grace of carriage,” he said.

Six weeks after he had met her he had bought a diamond ring and gone off on a flying visit to Baltimore, where she was staying with her sister-in-law, the general’s wife. He had never had any second thoughts about her and apparently her feelings were the same. By April he was addressing his letters, “My good Mrs. Wash,” and telling her, “You know, darling, that your presence always made me feel so good, a kind of contented feeling pervaded me if you were only near. It was not necessary to say anything, perfect silence was as much companionship as the liveliest chatter.”

She had written him steadily through the rest of the war, long, affectionate letters full of the everyday details of her life. But he had destroyed them all, almost as soon as he read them, telling her they made the separation that much more difficult for him. She, however, had saved everything he wrote, more than a hundred letters from the front in less than a year’s time.

“This full moon evening would be delightful if I only had someone to enjoy it with,” she read in a letter from Virginia, shortly before the Battle of the Wilderness. “In fact I would not care how the evening was if I only had you with me. I do wonder which of us two can be called the most lovesick; I am disposed to yield the palm to you because you used to consider such a thing so utterly impossible in your case. How long will it be before we shall get tired of each other, in other words what is the length of the honeymoon among people raised around Cold Spring, just ask your friends about it and tell me dearest.”

He told her about the things he loved, dogs, astronomy, Thackeray. He told her about a Trenton girl named Gussie Laveille, who, he warned, was coming down to visit his camp if she did not. He told her about the boredom and futility of war, and it seemed he had an infinite number of names for her. “Dearest Emmie,” he called her, or “Sweet Em” or “My good Emily” or “Dearest Girl,” “My dear old woman,” “My charming Miss Warren,” “My loved one,” “My Darling,” “My darling Emmie,” “My Lazy Darling,” “My own particular Darling,” “My own Emily,” “Sweetest Love.”

“After all, dear Emmie, pray tell me what is love,” he asked. “Is it kissing each other, is it tickling, hugging, etc. one another? Is it writing billy duxes, kicking each other’s shins under the table? That must be it I think—the shins!”

“Look for a big thief next winter,” he wrote in July, “he proposes to steal the only valuable thing in Cold Spring and intends to escape detection by changing the name of the stolen article which will render identification impossible.”

“Does the Mary Powellrun when the river is frozen?” he asked later. “When I visit you at Cold Spring I am supposed to fly on wings of love so anything short of the railroad will be too slow. Isn’t it curious that although I was nearly four years at Troy and traveled ever so many times up and down by rail and boat I should recollect every place except Cold Spring. I dare say I must have seen you often when the train passed, rolling a hoop along the street in short frocks.”

She had gone down to Staten Island soon after that to meet some of his family for the first time—his sister Laura, her Mr. Methfessel from Mühlhausen, and their children. Apparently the experience was something of a cold bath for her, as he learned soon enough, to his great pleasure.

Your letter describing the visit to all the Dutch uncles and cousins, etc., was very amusing to me; your heart must have sunk within you as you seem to take it for granted that your life henceforth was to be spent in a Dutch atmosphere. The tone of your letter is one of sad resignation and even your Wash seems of scarcely sufficient weight to counter-balance the scale. And well might it be so if your life were doomed to be spent among that Dutch crowd on Staten Island…. However you must take heart my dear; all of our family is as much American as you could wish with the exception of Mother and she never had the opportunity. And again my dear you must remember that in course of time you will be the one to take the lead and be at the head of the home circle.

It was after that that she made her first trip to Trenton to see the “home circle” where she was expected to “take the lead.” Then his two brothers had gone to Cold Spring before he did, at her invitation. They were all looking each other over. Ferdinand especially had taken a great liking to her, a little too great, Roebling wrote to her, and only partly in jest one suspects.

“When the two hopefuls of the house of Roebling come I hope you will take good care of them and keep them out of temptation and danger,” Washington kidded her. “Their youthful minds are just at that stage now that their visit to you at Cold Spring will never be effaced from their minds as long as they live.” How many days would he be expected to stay at her house before the wedding took place he wanted to know. He hoped one would do.

“I still entertain a lively remembrance of the promise you exacted of me to stay in my own room the first night, but I forget whether I assented or not—how was that?”

He had come to Cold Spring on leave, in the fall, when the weather had turned suddenly sharp and raw. She had met him at the depot, just back from the boat wharf, and they had driven up Main Street, a straight steep climb back from the river. He was in uniform and if there had ever been a handsomer couple seen in Cold Spring nobody could remember when.

Everybody in the little town knew her. The Warrens were one of the prominent families in the county. Her grandfather was John Warren, who, according to one of the old Putnam County histories, “aspired to no higher distinction than that of a plain, practical farmer, which he was. The purity of his motives, and the honesty of his heart, were never questioned; and in all the relations of life he never gave just cause of offense to his neighbor…. His children, so far as we know them, inherit his virtues.” Her father, Sylvanus Warren, had been the youngest of old John’s seven children, a distinguished, learned man and a close personal friend of Washington Irving’s. Her mother had been Phebe Lickley before she married.

Old John had kept a well-known tavern that was still standing on the Albany Post Road and he had prospered until steamboats began plying the river and the Post Road was no longer the fastest route north and south. Her own father had also provided well for his big family, having invested in the famous West Point Foundry, an ordnance works and Cold Spring’s sole industry, which stood by the river’s edge. With the foundry testing its Parrott guns, and officers coming and going from West Point, the war had never seemed quite so far removed to Cold Spring people as it had to most Northerners. Often as she sat at her desk writing to Washington, she could hear the big guns pounding away. In a yard beside the foundry they were loaded to full capacity, then fired at the rocky face of Storm King Mountain on the far side of the river, upstream. The shells, when they hit, threw up enormous masses of earth and stone and the impressions made in the side of the mountain would be plainly visible for years to come.

The most notable member of the family, however, was her brother, the general, G.K. as he was called, who had been named after Gouverneur Kemble, an erudite, convivial Cold Spring man who had started the foundry. There had been twelve Warren children, but only six had survived beyond childhood, of whom G.K. was the oldest. He was nearly fourteen years older than Emily, who was next to the youngest, and for her there was no more dashing heroic figure. Except for Hamilton Fish, Grant’s aristocratic Secretry of State, who kept a country estate in nearby Garrison, General Gouverneur Kemble Warren was Putnam County’s most famous citizen.

His graduation from West Point had been a momentous event in the Warren family, but Emily had been too young to remember much of it. When he had entered the Academy at sixteen, he had gone with a lofty admonition from Gouverneur Kemble: “We expect you to rank, at graduation, not lower than second.” And he had done just that, finishing number two in a class of forty-four. For the next ten years or so he had returned home only rarely. He had been assigned to the Mississippi Delta first, to work on flood control projects, then to the West. He fought the Sioux under General Harney and mapped Nebraska and the Dakotas. When he came home again, in 1859, to become an assistant professor of mathematics at West Point, he was known as the first explorer of the Black Hills, a slim, black-haired, deeply tanned young man, who, except for his mustache, looked remarkably like an Indian himself, and who to his younger brothers and sisters seemed to have stepped from some exotic other world.

It would be said of him later, by numerous people who knew him, that he was notably gentle and kindhearted for a soldier. The distressing thing about Indian fighting, he had said, was that quite often one shot women and children and when it came time to tend to their wounds one found them to be not at all unlike other women and children. In the West he had been known as “the good Lieutenant.”

When his father died, the year he began teaching at the Academy, G.K. assumed most of the responsibility for his younger brothers and sisters, looking after their interests and health with uncommon care and faithfulness. For Emily, then just sixteen, he was much more than a brother only, and it seems his influence had much to do with her orderly ways and subsequent interest in science, and in botany in particular. Like a number of other celebrated soldiers before and after, he was passionately fond of flowers.

He was also an engineer with a particular interest in bridges, he seemed to have no fear of physical danger, and he had an obvious contempt for pretense of any kind, all qualities he valued in his young aide, Roebling, and which she too must have recognized soon enough after their first meeting at the Second Corps Officers Ball.

The Warrens were not wealthy people by Hudson River standards, but were considered gentry. Cold Spring had become a gathering place for a small but distinguished group of artists and literary people and the young Warrens were part of that society. Once, during the war, the artist Thomas R. Rossiter painted a hypothetical Picnic on the Hudson, which would one day be considered among the finest works of the Hudson River school. It is supposedly a representative portrait of Cold Spring elite, twenty ladies and gentlemen gathered with picnic hampers on Constitution Island, just down from Cold Spring. Dressed in elegant summer attire, bathed in sunlight, they pose formally beside the great river, sailboats and Storm King in the distance. Among the group are Gouverneur Kemble, looking very robust for his years; Julia Fish, daughter of Hamilton Fish; Robert Parrott, inventor of the gun; Robert Weir, the painter; and old white-bearded George Pope Morris, editor of the New York Mirror and author of Woodman, Spare That Tree. In the center foreground, looking rather stiff and self-conscious in a half-reclining pose, is G. K. Warren, the trousers of his uniform providing the only splash of bright red in the composition. But in the background, on the left, there is a young woman in a big flowered straw hat who has never been identified for certain, but who is probably Emily Warren.

Roebling’s first encounter with Cold Spring and her family was brief and apparently went very well. “I think we will be a pair of lovers all our lifetime,” he wrote to her soon after returning to Virginia.

They were married on January 18, 1865, in a little brick church on Main Street. It was a double ceremony, with her brother Edgar Washburn Warren, a major in the cavalry, marrying Cornelia Barrows of Cold Spring. There was a good-sized crowd gathered in the cold outside her house when she and Washington came out the door at the end of the reception, and years later old women in Cold Spring would tell how as children they had seen Emily Warren come down the steps on her wedding day, as though they had witnessed an occasion of state.

But even in January of 1879, for Emily all that seemed a long time back. Her stricken husband was in constant torment, his work a nightmare instead of the inspiration and source of pride it had once been for them both. Any chance for a normal life together was now beyond recall if she was to believe what the doctors were saying.

She had seen her husband all but destroyed before her eyes, his spirit as well as his body. And by uncanny coincidence, she had seen much the same thing happen to her beloved brother.

Only a few months after she was married, Gouverneur K. Warren’s brilliant career had run into a puzzling, tragic snag at Five Forks, the last decisive battle of the Civil War. The strain of war had begun to tell on the young general. Always fussy about details, he had grown increasingly engrossed in things he should have left to subordinates. He was taking a little longer with everything, and quite a little longer than Grant, for one, thought acceptable at this stage. Grant was in a great hurry. Warren was then commanding the V Corps, one of the most famous infantry units of the Federal Army, and Grant had put the V Corps and Warren entirely under the flamboyant Phil Sheridan, a cavalryman. Grant also told Sheridan to remove Warren if he saw fit. Grant never quite explained his reasons for this and historians still differ on who was right or wrong or to blame for the outcome.

After receiving conflicting orders on which route to take, Warren had marched his men all night through pitch-black, rain-flooded country to give Sheridan the support he needed, but he had arrived a little late. An attack planned for that morning had to be called off until afternoon. When the fighting started, Warren was again not where Sheridan wanted him. Warren had done his best, but that had not been good enough for Sheridan, who in a violent rage suddenly ordered that Warren be relieved of his command.

Warren’s subordinate officers were incredulous, furious, and would defend his reputation for the rest of their days. Roebling, who was out of the Army by then, would always feel things would have gone differently for Warren had he been there. He and Emily were both people of “decided temper,” as they said, but on this particular subject they were quite decided indeed, never seeing but one side of the argument.

“Just imagine Sheridan sitting on a fence, sending a staff officer every five minutes to Warren to hurry up and save him and his cavalry from being captured by Lee’s troops,” Roebling would write indignantly. “And when Warren does come (after wading through an icy creek up to their middle), saves Sheridan and wins the battle, then Sheridan turns on him and cashiers him.”

After Five Forks, Warren was put in command of defenses at Petersburg. Later he went to Memphis to command the Department of Mississippi. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Army, serving as an engineer on the upper Mississippi and as a member of the commission assigned to examine the Union Pacific Railroad. He was also in charge of the survey of the Gettysburg battlefield, where he and his young brother-in-law had had their day of glory.

But in 1869, when Roebling was getting started on the Brooklyn caisson, Warren had been put in charge of building a bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois, where before the war an earlier railroad bridge had been the issue in a historic lawsuit involving Abraham Lincoln. In 1856 a new steamboat called the Effie Afton rammed into a pier of the Rock Island Bridge, caught fire, went down, and left part of the bridge burning. The bridge, a big timber truss belonging to the Rock Island Railroad, was repaired quickly enough, but the steamboat people decided they had a case and went to court. Lincoln represented the railroad, arguing that the east-west “current of travel has its rights as well as that of the north and south.” The fact that the jury failed to make up its mind on the matter was taken as a signal victory for railroads, for bridges, and for the notion that the manifest pattern of American commerce and growth was to be east-west.

But the new Rock Island Bridge was meant to satisfy the river interests as well, and Warren had labored so hard over it, between 1869 and 1870, that his health broke and in all the time since he had never quite recovered. Moreover, he kept struggling to clear his name of the Five Forks incident, repeatedly and futilely requesting a board of inquiry to examine the case. His duties never lessened; he continued with river and harbor work, on the upper Mississippi, along the Atlantic coast, on the Great Lakes. He served on Humphreys’ review board during the Eads bridge controversy, and just that October of 1878, he had been put on the advisory council of the Harbor Commission of Rhode Island. But overwork and exposure at Rock Island and the refusal of official Washington to grant him a hearing had all but broken him physically and drained his spirits. Pale, hollow-eyed, he looked more like sixty than forty-eight.

His problem was that in Washington the men implicated in his version of Five Forks were the ones in power now, and apparently he wanted more than just his name cleared.

“I have heard men like Humphreys and others say that Grant was inclined to give Warren an investigation,” Roebling wrote, “but that Warren demanded that Sheridan should be publicly reprimanded for having done a cowardly and unsoldierlike act—and in choosing between the two he finally shielded Sheridan. Grant was then at the height of his popularity and could do what he liked.”

The restoration of his honor had become an obsession with Warren. He refused steadfastly to admit defeat, and the effort was costing him dearly, financially as well as in other ways. Never a man of wealth, he had come out of the war all but penniless. Quietly, on occasion, his sister and brother-in-law were providing financial help as well as moral support.

For Emily it was a heartbreaking thing to see the men who mattered most in her life victims of such dreadful misfortune. It must have seemed as though the two of them, with their pride and decency, their old-fashioned sense of duty, were somehow out of step with the times and paying an awful price for it. Everywhere about her, lesser men, witless, vulgar, corrupt, men of narrow ambition and the cheapest of values, were prospering as never before, grabbing up power, money, or just about anything else they hungered for. This Gilded Age, as Mark Twain had named it, seemed to be tailor-made for that sort. It was the grand and glorious heyday of the political bribe, the crooked contract, the double standard at every level. It seemed the old verities simply were not negotiable any longer. Good and brave men who had a legitimate claim to honor, respect, position—at least according to every standard she had been raised by—were somehow in the way now and so got swept aside.

But if ever she let such thoughts plague her for long, or get her down, there is no suggestion of it in the record. And like the men she so loved and admired, she quite bluntly refused to give in. More, she seemed to gather strength as time passed and gradually she began exerting a profound and interesting influence in bridge matters.

There would be all kinds of stories told about her later and the part she played, and quite a number of them were perfectly true. She did not, however, secretly take over as engineer of the bridge, as some accounts suggest and as was the gossip at the time.

But it is not at all surprising that the stories spread. As was apparent to everyone who met her, Emily Warren Roebling was a remarkable person. And since every piece of written communication from the house on Columbia Heights to the bridge offices was in her hand, there was, understandably, a strong suspicion that she was doing more than merely taking down what her husband dictated. At first she was credited only with brushing up his English, which may have been the case. But by and by it was common gossip that hers was the real mind behind the great work and that this the most monumental engineering triumph of the age was actually the doing of a woman, which as a general proposition was taken in some quarters to be both preposterous and calamitous. In truth she had by then a thorough grasp of the engineering involved. She had a quick and retentive mind, a natural gift for mathematics, and she had been a diligent student during the long years he had been incapacitated.

Trustees grumbled over her reputed influence. Newspapers made oblique references to it. And the fact that she had assumed such importance was often used as a basic premise for the argument that Roebling was not right in the head.

Even Farrington was said to be partly her creation. Farrington had been giving a number of highly popular lantern-slide lectures on the bridge at the Brooklyn Music Hall and at Cooper Union (several thousand people had turned out to see and hear the illustrious master mechanic) and the New York Star remarked, “It is whispered among the knowing ones over the river that Mr. F’s manuscript is in the handwriting of a clever lady, whose style and calligraphy are already familiar in the office of the Brooklyn Bridge.” Maybe this was so. In any case a very great many people took it to be the truth and that was the important thing.

She had also become so adept at shielding her husband from visitors that many of them went away convinced she knew as much about the technical side of the bridge as any of the assistant engineers. When bridge officials or representatives for various contractors were told it would be acceptable for them to call at the Roebling house in Brooklyn, it was seldom if ever the Chief Engineer who received them. She would carry on the interview in his behalf, asking questions and answering theirs with perfect confidence and command of the facts. Most of them left quite satisfied that her husband would be correctly apprised of everything said. But so impressed were some that they went out the door convinced they had met with the Chief Engineer after all and their future correspondence would be addressed directly to her.

At one point in 1879, for example, a controversy developed over the honesty of an important contractor, the Edge Moor Iron Company. Ugly insinuations were traded back and forth in the papers and it began to look as though there might be still another drawn-out investigation. To assure the engineering department of their honesty and good intentions, the firm addressed a formal written statement to that effect, not to the Chief Engineer, but to Mrs. Washington A. Roebling. And there was no mention in the letter of conveying any of its contents to her husband, or to ask for his health or to solicit his response or opinions.

Her services as his “amanuensis,” as he called her, were enormously important, as he said later. She kept all his records, answered much of his mail, delivered various messages or requests to the bridge offices, went to the bridge itself to check on things for him, and was his representative at occasional social functions. She was quite literally his eyes, his legs, his good right arm. And the more she did, the more the gossips talked.

Half a dozen New York and Brooklyn papers were delivered to the big brick house regularly each day. For Roebling they were still the only access to the world beyond the bridge and his own four walls. They still had to be read aloud to him. His eyes were greatly improved, but he had trouble reading for more than a few minutes at a time. So the two of them would sit together in the room on the second floor that was his office, sickroom, command post, where the days dragged by, one by one, ever so slowly for him, and where week by week, month by month, year after year, as he talked, she saw the bridge take form and grow on paper just as clearly as its progress could be seen from the window.

A day rarely passed during that winter of 1878-79 when the newspapers did not carry something about the bridge, and after she had finished reading them to him, she would clip out whatever there was on the bridge and paste the articles in a big scrapbook, just as neatly and methodically as her brother had done with items on his campaigns all through the war.

But the clippings must have seemed the top of the iceberg only, knowing what they did, feeling as they did about certain people. Never during this time was anything written about the anguish of their years in that room. No journalist or magazine writer was permitted to interview them there. Nor did either of them write anything about the experience, beyond the briefest, most factual statements. There would be no soul-baring memoirs. Their privacy was total and strictly enforced.

Only in the letter books that have survived are there any chinks in the wall of privacy they built about themselves—brief, sudden bursts of emotion sandwiched in with page upon page of technical detail—and even these are frequently illegible, her penciled lines having become badly smeared after so many years. The frustration, the sharp, bitter indignation, the rage expressed are always his, however. What she felt, what she said or did to keep him in balance, to be ballast for them both, can only be guessed at.

His worst time since leaving Trenton had come in the spring of 1879, in early May. For nearly a month it had looked as though everything was back on course again. Comptroller John Kelly, for all his Tammany bluster, had been put in his place by the courts. Murphy had hired William M. Evarts as counsel for the Bridge Company. He was the celebrated and expensive New York attorney who defended Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial and Beecher in the adultery case and who had just been made Secretary of State. The central issue, Evarts argued, was whether a great public work was to be pulled down because it did not quite conform to some early bookkeeping or in order to save a few ships from making minor adjustments to pass beneath it. Henry Murphy had been a persuasive witness, to no one’s surprise, and the judges, first in the Supreme Court of New York, then in the Court of Appeals, decided in favor of the bridge. The city of New York which meant Comptroller Kelly—was ordered to continue its payments without further delay. “There is, of course, great rejoicing in Brooklyn,” the New York Herald said. “The success of the bridge is assured, and the work upon it which has been interrupted for more than six months, will be resumed within a few days.” And that was what had happened. Six hundred men went back to building the approaches and the cable wrapping was resumed at once.

The so-called Miller suit, to remove the bridge altogether, had also been settled at long last and again largely as a result of the tireless, determined efforts of Henry Murphy. The State Committee on Commerce and Navigation had held hearings in the Metropolitan Hotel in New York and one by one Murphy, Stranahan, old Julius Adams, C. C. Martin, Paine, McNulty and Collingwood had all gone over to appear as witnesses for the bridge. The opposition had rounded up a number of harbor pilots, shipmasters, shipbuilders, warehouse owners, and a few engineers to testify against the bridge. Abraham Miller, the warehouse owner who was the plaintiff, said he had not brought suit until as late as he did because he never expected the bridge would be finished. He was convinced the cities would fail to get up the money it would take. A representative from Standard Oil warned that the bridge would divert trade to Philadelphia; some harbor pilots complained that the cables were already hazard enough, as did several ship captains. The total testimony taken, the exhibits presented, the charts, tables, statistics, and the like, all printed up and bound together eventually made one great doorstop of a volume weighing a full five pounds. But the opponents of the bridge achieved nothing. As with Lincoln’s Effie Afton case or Eads’s victory over the Corps of Engineers review board, the pattern of east-west travel prevailed, the bridge was the victor.

But in May came what for Roebling was the lowest blow to date. He had decided on another major change in the bridge. After receiving Paine’s report on the ability of various manufacturers to produce steel in certain desired shapes and quality, he had decided to substitute steel for iron in the trusswork. This meant that it was to be virtually an all-steel bridge now, and with the approval of the trustees he had called for new bids. General Slocum announced at a meeting of the trustees that the assistant engineers (and Paine in particular, it was understood) had been taking bribes from steel manufacturers, which at different times, Slocum said, amounted to sums of as much as ten thousand dollars. Except for Roebling’s assistants, just about everyone who had had any real say in bridge matters had been accused of something or other by this time. Now it was their turn. Slocum’s charges were omitted from the official record, but two days later the papers had the story, with the result that the trustees met again in secret session on May 5 to discuss the matter and this time their comments were released to the press.

Slocum said he had been told of the bribes by a man named Marshall P. Davidson of the Chrome Steel Company in Brooklyn. Slocum said he wanted it understood that these were distinct charges, not more idle rumors. He also said there was some question about certain transactions of the Roebling company. “And I want to say right here that I think it is indelicate that the brothers of the Chief Engineer should be engaged in furnishing us materials.”

It was William Kingsley, interestingly, who stood up at this point and, looking Slocum in the eye, said he regretted to hear such statements made about “gentlemen who were not present to defend themselves.” Furthermore, Kingsley said, no firm in the country had a reputation for honor and business integrity exceeding that of John A. Roebling’s Sons.

All the same a special committee was formed to investigate the charges and this committee met the following morning to hear Davidson speak for himself and to listen to Ferdinand Roebling, who had come on from Trenton. Davidson said Slocum had misquoted him. He had made no such remarks about the engineers. What he had said, he believed, was that there were rumors of bribes but that he himself did not believe them.

Ferdinand Roebling, for his part, said he thought the time had come for him to put the matter in the hands of a lawyer and begin suit against “somebody” for libel. He said the end had been reached so far as the abuse the Roebling company was willing to endure. His family’s connection with the bridge had been anything but advantageous, he reminded the trustees. His father had lost his life, his brother had sacrificed his health, the family reputation had been assailed. And so far as making money from their contracts was concerned, his company would be perfectly satisfied to produce the rest of the wire at cost.

Ferdinand almost certainly spent some time at his brother’s house while he was in Brooklyn and it seems Henry Murphy was going and coming from the Roebling front door rather frequently. The level of emotions Emily Roebling had to contend with can be gauged from this letter from her husband to General Slocum, dictated the same day Ferdinand appeared before the committee:

I hope I have heard for the last time your oft repeated remark that you think it indelicate in me that I should allow my brothers to do any work for the bridge while I am the Chief Engineer. Did it ever occur to you that my brothers act independently of me without consulting me and that I have no control over them even if I wished to prevent them bidding on any contract for the bridge? Or did you ever consider that the John A. Roebling’s Sons Company hold the first rank in this country as manufacturers of wire rope—and the word “fraud” has never been coupled with their name save in your board? Would it not be at least probable that my reputation as an engineer is as dear to them as it is to me and that I should feel better satisfied to have work that I know requires care and skill entrusted to them rather than to some rascally contractor without capital or reputation who after he has been again and again detected in fraud is allowed to go on with his contract.

You should have been very sure of Mr. Davidson’s meaning before you brought the subject up in the way you did, and you should not, if you really had any desire to know the truth, have been contented with his simple assertion that you misunderstood him.

The course of a true gentleman would have been to come to me first with a lie that had been whispered behind my back and at least heard what I had to say, whether you believed me or not…. I have the right to think Mr. Davidson never said anything to you, but you merely gave the board the benefit of your own opinions….

The investigation committee presented its findings at the end of the month and the engineers were completely exonerated, as was the Roebling company. It had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding, it was explained. On Roebling’s orders, Colonel Paine had spent some time in Pittsburgh with Andrew Kloman, Carnegie’s former metallurgist, who was now in business for himself, and had rolled the steel for General William Sooy Smith’s new railroad bridge at Glasgow, Missouri, the first bridge in America built exclusively of steel. Kloman had a new way of making steel eyebars and Paine had gone to Pittsburgh to study the process. This, apparently, was what gave rise to the bribery stories, since it appeared that Paine was giving Kloman preferential treatment.

The newspapers assured the public that all was fair and square inside the engineering department. The work went right ahead. But Slocum never apologized to Roebling or to Paine or to any of Roebling’s staff or to his brothers. Roebling never would forgive him for what he had done and the deep-seated animosity between the two former war heroes would prove to be no minor issue.

Then, almost immediately, there was a change-over in the bridge trustees, the first real realignment since the bridge began. Thomas Kinsella declined to serve again because of “pressing business engagements” and several new faces were to be seen now in the board room, most of them quite young faces by Bridge Company standards. It was also quickly noted that there was a decidedly dubious look in their eyes whenever some of the more notable older members commenced to talk.

Among the new men were William G. Steinmetz, who automatically became a member of the board when he became Comptroller of the City of Brooklyn. He was an engineer by profession and a German by birth, with a thick head of wild black hair and one wooden leg. Alfred C. Barnes of Brooklyn, the oldest son and business partner of A. S. Barnes, the book publisher, was “one of the most cultured and affable gentlemen in the city,” according to one account. Edward Cooper, son of Peter Cooper and brother-in-law of Abram Hewitt, was mayor of New York. And Robert B. Roosevelt, wealthy New York lawyer, was an energetic politicial crusader and noted sportsman, whose favorite nephew Theodore was then in his last year at Harvard.

All four had come in as a result of the elections of 1878. The two Brooklyn men, Steinmetz and Barnes, were Republicans, while Cooper and Roosevelt were Democrats. But they were all reputed champions of reform, and with the exception of Steinmetz, they were the gentlemen sons of wealthy, prominent fathers—city-born, expensively educated, urbane, public-spirited, and politically ambitious. Despite the party labels they had much more in common with one another than they did with a Kingsley or a Stranahan, the self-made men of another generation, who, with their back-country origins had grown up with the city, as it were, and had acquired, somewhere along the way, what the younger men found to be a reprehensible degree of patience with what the older men would call human failings.

The new men were determined to set things in order. But from the start it was Steinmetz who made the biggest fuss. Right off he wanted Kingsley removed, for one thing, and he made no bones about it. Kingsley was the keystone of the old regime, as the Brooklyn Comptroller saw it, and the reason the bridge had taken so uncommonly long to build was because the old regime either wanted it so or because they did not know how to run things. Either way Kingsley could no longer remain a trustee.

But Steinmetz grossly underestimated the power the contractor had. The mayor of Brooklyn, a man named Howell, who was a Democrat and doubtless beholden to Kingsley in innumerable ways, said Kingsley would stay. So Henry Murphy was removed instead—temporarily. No sooner was Murphy out, taking the blow very graciously, chatting affably with reporters as he packed his things, than another trustee resigned so Murphy could be reappointed in his place. That done, the others promptly voted Murphy president again and made Kingsley his vice-president. All of which left Comptroller Steinmetz, a testy, excitable man at best, so furious he was barely able to speak when the reporters came around to get his views.

But Steinmetz kept pressing the attack through that summer and into fall, opposing the use of Bessemer steel for the superstructure, opposing the awarding of the contract to the Edge Moor Iron Company, the lowest bidder, trotting out every old argument for crucible steel, and being so silly and tiresome about it much of the time that the other young men who had come in with him were left with no choice but to side with the opposition. They were just as eager as ever to clean house but they were looking for something more important to battle over.

But in December, just as had happened three years before, a sensational bridge disaster seemed to add credence to every rumor of shoddy steel and poor engineering. The new Tay Bridge over the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, one of the biggest, most famous bridges in the world, gave way in a gale and collapsed into the sea, taking with it a train carrying seventy-five people, all of whom were killed. The bridge was the work of Britain’s leading engineer and a disciple of the great Stephenson, Sir Thomas Bouch, who, along with Henry Bessemer, had been knighted by Queen Victoria that June. His bridge, a series of trusses, had been built mostly of wrought iron, however, not steel, and subsequent investigations of the disaster indicated that he had not calculated his wind loads accurately. The conclusion was that the engineer was mainly to blame. (His health and mind broken by the ordeal, Bouch died in less than a year.)

As might be expected, the news of the disaster caused a great stir in New York and Brooklyn. McNulty and Paine, interviewed at length in the papers, did their best to assure the reading public that the East River bridge was an entirely different kind of structure. But who was to say? Had not the word of the ill-fated Bouch been as respected as any in the profession?

By curious coincidence, the same papers that carried the Tay Bridge story also reported that J. Lloyd Haigh, “the well-known wire manufacturer” who had supplied the wire for the great cables, had just gone bankrupt. And to add one further note of doom, still another “noted engineer” was claiming the East River bridge would not hold a fifth of the weight that was liable to be put upon it. “WILL THE TAY DISASTER BE REPEATED BETWEEN NEW YORK AND BROOKLYN?” asked one big headline as the new year 1880, and the new decade, began.

There must have been moments in those early weeks of the new year when Emily Roebling stood alone at a window thinking of the Tay tragedy as she watched the tiny doll-like figures working up among the cables and suspenders. She knew enough now to appreciate the countless number of things that had to be taken into consideration and the immense weight of responsibility every calculation entailed. She knew enough to know how very many things could go wrong. The East River was not the stormy Firth of Tay, standing wide open to the sea, as some were saying, still it was salt water, and for all the shelter Long Island provided, winds on the river could be savage. When the Tay Bridge went, the papers said, the train had dropped nearly ninety feet.

But there must also have been moments during those same weeks when she went about the house or drove along the snow-covered streets of the Heights with her heart lifted as it had not in years. In December, G.K.’s request for a board of inquiry had at last been granted, fourteen years and eight months after Five Forks.

In late February she pasted into her scrapbook a large illustration of Ferdinand de Lesseps, in top hat and overcoat, standing with a group on the summit of the New York anchorage, “inspecting” the bridge, according to the caption. “The Great Engineer” (who was no engineer at all, but a diplomat) had arrived from France to promote what he intended to be the triumph of his career, a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. In another week or so he would deliver an impassioned speech before the American Society of Civil Engineers (Collingwood and McNulty would be in the audience) and be lionized at a sumptuous banquet at Delmonico’s at which Richard Storrs, the Brooklyn pastor, would deliver the welcoming address and she herself would be among the ladies accompanying De Lesseps when he made his grand entrance into the dining room. The grandfatherly Frenchman was greatly impressed by the bridge, he told reporters, but in the illustration Emily saved, he appears more interested in an unidentified young lady in the foreground.

A full page from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper went into the scrapbook, a close-up view of workmen out on one of the cables attaching iron suspender bands and to these the wire rope suspenders that would hold the steel floor beams of the roadway. The cables by this time had been thoroughly wrapped from end to end. Once the suspenders were in place, the men could start laying up the crossbeams of the deck, beginning with those closest to the anchorages and towers and working out. The nearest suspenders had only to be pulled back, the beam attached and swung out into place. Planks would be put down over the beam then for the men to stand on as they launched the next beam, and so on out over the water. Once the steel deck began to take form, she would be able to walk out on it herself to look things over as her husband directed.

In April she cut out two articles about St. Ann’s Church, which eleven years before Roebling and Paine had used to sight the center line. The historic old building was about to be demolished—to be “swept away by the march of modern improvement,” said the Eagle.

Her scrapbook tells the full story of the bridge that year as the public saw it. There was the usual wrangling over finances, a minor accident or two, a great deal of complaining and explaining about the steel contract (the Edge Moor Iron Company was maddeningly slow on delivery), periodic reports on the progress of the work (about the building of a big skew arch over William and North William Streets in New York, for example, and the steady advance of the bridge deck). One tiny item, a clipping not much bigger than a postage stamp, reports that J. Lloyd Haigh of Brooklyn was breaking rocks at Sing Sing. He had been convicted of passing bad checks.

In June Henry Murphy said it would be all right for two Plymouth Church musicians to take their coronets out to the center cradle on the bridge, and there “to the delight of hundreds of upturned faces from the ferryboats and the Fall River boat Newport,” they played “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Old Hundred.”

Summer and fall were uneventful on the whole except for one incredible scene that took place at a trustees’ meeting in October, and which had all Brooklyn talking.

The meeting, involving only routine matters, had been about to adjourn when Comptroller Steinmetz announced that he had a communication for the president, whereupon he handed Henry Murphy an unusually lengthy printed document and a messenger burst into the room and distributed additional copies to everyone present. Willam Kingsley slowly got to his feet, unfolded his copy, and moved to have it tabled.

“It is an insult to the dignity of the board that this man should present any communication in this way,” he said.

“Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” exclaimed Steinmetz excitedly in broken English. “I demand my communication shall be read.” Kingsley said he had the floor and Steinmetz was out of order.

“Ever since this individual has been a member of this board,” Kingsley said, “he has never suggested a single practical or intelligent idea, but has continually been bringing before the board such claptrap stuff as has just been presented.”

“But the communication has not yet been read,” protested Steinmetz.

Kingsley, “glaring at the Comptroller,” exclaimed, “You must realize, sir, that you are not in the slums of politics.”

The motion to table the document was then quickly carried, while Steinmetz kept protesting. “I represent the citizens of Brooklyn,” he shouted. “I would not be here if I was a private citizen…. Mr. Kingsley’s suggestions have always been heard and accepted, while mine have not.”

“This is all buncombe,” Kingsley snapped back, shaking Steinmetz’ printed letter. “It’s ward politics brought into the board.”

Murphy promptly shut off any further discussion of the subject and took up another matter. But when the meeting adjourned, Kingsley marched over to Steinmetz, who was standing among some of the others in an adjoining office.

“You are acting the part of a demagogue,” Kingsley said to Steinmetz, who was nearly a head shorter. “What or whom do you represent?”

“Mr. Kingsley’s manner was determined,” according to one man in the group, “and as he stood facing Mr. Steinmetz, he looked steadily at him. The latter turned pale, and the other members of the board crowded into the room.”

“I represent the people of Brooklyn,” Steinmetz answered.

“You represent nobody,” said Kingsley.

“You are no gentleman,” said Steinmetz.

“You are a blackguard,” responded Kingsley.

“I am Comptroller and I represent the citizens of Brooklyn.”

“I say you represent nobody—nobody at all.”

“Well, Mr. Kingsley,” said Steinmetz backing off, “I can afford to take that from you.”

“Of course you will,” said Kingsley.

Steinmetz then turned his back on Kingsley and left the room, but Kingsley followed after, “continuing to express his indignation.”

The story was all over town by nightfall. Steinmetz said later that Kingsley had threatened to strike him, but nobody else who had been in the room agreed with that. But neither could any of the trustees justify Kingsley’s behavior, and the papers made a point of the fact that Steinmetz was a cripple. Even Kingsley’s own Eagle allowed it would have been better had the Steinmetz letter been read. As it was, the whole thing had taken on much more importance than it deserved. Every afternoon paper carried the Steinmetz letter in full and there was hardly enough in it to have attracted any but passing interest under normal circumstances. Steinmetz made a number of wild accusations—about the steel contract chiefly—none of which could be supported, and although a few editorial writers took them at face value and made some foolish charges as a result, the whole issue blew over in a matter of days.

Nonetheless, the confrontation in the board room was indicative of the strong feelings developing between various personalities on the board, and half a lifetime later, when Roebling would be asked what part his wife had played in building the bridge, it would be “her remarkable talent as a peacemaker” among these gentlemen and during these particular years that he would praise highest, telling people with customary deadpan understatement how she had a way of “obviating personal friction with her tact” and could smooth over difficulties that were “naturally inherent in a work somewhat political in its conduct.”

Apparently just about everyone involved with the work liked her enormously and held her in great respect, regardless of his politics, profession, age, or particular feelings about her husband. That she was welcome among them, her opinions regarded seriously, was considerable testimony in itself, in a day and age when a woman’s presence in or about a construction job except as a spectator on special occasions was absolutely unheard of.

How many ruffled feathers she smoothed, how many times she sat patiently listening first to one side of an argument, then another, how many tactful words of caution she offered a Henry Murphy or a Ferdinand Roebling or a C. C. Martin before they entered her husband’s sickroom, how frequently she herself dealt directly with a Steinmetz or a Kingsley, is not indicated in the record. But the impression is that she was very busy indeed at just such tasks. Roebling would describe her role as “invaluable.”

In February Henry Murphy, James Stranahan, and the Reverend Dr. Storrs put on formal attire and went over to New York with Martin, Collingwood, and three younger Rennselaer graduates recently hired as assistants to attend a gathering of the alumni of the famous Polytechnic Institute. Collingwood was to be the main speaker of the evening and his subject was the bridge. Murphy and Stranahan had been invited as representatives of the Bridge Company, and Storrs, it seems, was becoming something of a fixture at such occasions, a sort of unofficial chaplain to the somber-looking technical men who talked so matter-of-factly of improving on God’s handiwork and who, since the war, had already changed the look of the country more than any army ever had.

A great deal was said during the course of the evening about what had been accomplished by the 739 engineers the Institute had sent into the world in its fifty-five years, about the countless dams, canals, bridges, railroads, and water works they had built. The strongest testimony of all, however, according to a Professor Greene from Troy, was to say simply that the East River bridge was the work of RPI men—which was not altogether the case but which pleased the professor’s audience no end.

Collingwood spoke a little too long about the staggering quantities of brick, stone, steel, and iron that had gone into the bridge and then announced to great applause that the work was nearly done. The real hero, he said, was Roebling, who had never lost his hold on the bridge. “The men who have come from the Institute to the bridge had come to stay,” he said, “they seem to have a wonderful sticking power.”

There was much conversation about the Chief Engineer during the dinner that followed, almost as much apparently as there was about his wife, who by this time had become an idolized figure among the assistant engineers. *

In the spring the steel floor beams started going up and the great structure began to look like a bridge. By summer, even with the contractor behind on deliveries, the superstructure had advanced well over the river, coming from both directions. After studying the work from a boat out on the river, one admiring engineer told reporters that the way the bridge was being built it would be as immovable as an enormous crowbar and would last a thousand years. That was the summer Garfield was shot and Chester A. Arthur, who had been collector of customs for the Port of New York back in the early years of the bridge, became President of the United States.

The dome on the Custom House was one of those New York landmarks Washington Roebling could pick out quite easily from his second-floor window. His vista on the world was the same as it had been since the summer of 1877, when he returned to the house on the Heights. It was the only way he had seen the city or the bridge in four years.

From the Battery to the New York tower, all the best-known landmarks stood out like points along a ruler. The steeple on old Trinity Church was the highest point downtown. Then over to the right, farther uptown, was the tower on the Western Union Building, which was almost on a line with the New York landing of the Fulton Ferry and with his own house. Then came the Post Office, with its flags and heavy mansard roofs, the shot tower built thirty years before by James Bogardus, pioneer in the use of cast iron. Just to the right of that, before the bridge tower, was the Tribune Building, with its long spike of a clock tower. With his field glasses or telescope, it was possible to read the time on the Tribune clock.

There were any number of things to read through the telescope, written large in different colors on the sides of New York buildings—THE EVENING POST…ABENDROTH BROTHERS, PLUMBERS IRON ENAMELED WARE…HOME FOR NEWSBOYS…Roebling had seen the skyline steadily changing year by year, reaching a little higher always. Still the granite towers remained in full command. Trinity Church and the Tribune tower were actually taller, in measured feet and inches, but they did not look it, being farther in the distance, and by comparison they were mere needles against the sky.

From Roebling’s window both of the bridge towers stood out plainly. Indeed, very nearly the entire structure could be seen, silhouetted against that segment of sky that seemed to dome Harlem and Blackwell’s Island. It would be said that his telescope was so powerful he could examine the very rivets being put into the superstructure, which was nonsense. But the bridge was certainly close enough for him to see a great deal of what was going on. Interestingly, his wife would remark later that he actually spent little time peering through his telescope. One glance of his “practiced eye,” she said, was enough to tell him if things were being handled properly. His troubles with his vision, it seems, were confined to things close up.

In the fall C. C. Martin was saying the bridge would be finished by the next summer. By the time the first snow was flying, steel beams and suspenders had been strung all the way from tower to tower, and in early December Emily had her own first moment of triumph in a very long time. Presumably, from his window, the Chief Engineer watched the entire ceremony.

She had left the house in the early afternoon and was driven directly to the foot of the Brooklyn tower, where, accompanied by Farrington, she climbed the spiral staircase as far as the roadway. A gentle wind was blowing as she waited. The air was as mild as April nearly, with a smell of rain.

Presently a delegation of trustees arrived in the yard below, climbed the stairs, and were next tipping their silk hats, shaking her hand, commenting on the abnormal weather, and saying nothing of the meeting they had come from. It had been, she knew, one of the most crucial sessions since the bridge began. But neither she nor they made any mention of it.

Then they had set off, strolling along on the plank walk that had been put down on the steel superstructure, a plank walk no more than five feet wide that now stretched the whole way over the river. The sensation was apparently only a little less nerve-racking than on the footbridge.

She walked out in front, leading the way, escorted by Mayor Howell of Brooklyn and the new mayor of New York, William R. Grace, the wealthy steamship owner. The others, about a dozen in all counting the assistant engineers and two or three reporters, followed behind. The views were exclaimed over. A strong wind was blowing and one reporter noted how it played with the long white locks on the head of the venerable James S. T. Stranahan. Sea gulls were everywhere, gliding past cables and stays in big arcs, swooping beneath the bridge, tiny flashes of white far down below against the deep gray-green of the water. Boats passed beneath, white sails close-hauled. The water swirled and turned with great turbulence, from the wind, from the boats plowing through in both directions, from the churning tide. There was much animated conversation within the little procession. Everyone was having a fine time on this first crossing of the bridge by the actual roadway.

On their arrival at the New York tower several bottles of champagne were uncorked and the trustees drank to the health of Mrs. Roebling and “to the success of things in general.”

22

The Man in the Window

The best way to secure rapid and effective work is to get a new Chief Engineer.

—New York Star

NOBODY would say who made the decision and that greatly aggravated the gentlemen from New York, and the mayor in particular. There was no possible way, they said, by which their city could benefit from Pullman cars and freight trains crossing the bridge and they wanted to know by whose authority the engineer’s plans had been suddenly and secretly changed to accommodate such traffic. But none of the other trustees would give a direct answer. There was mounting tension in the board room, whereupon James Stranahan, addressing himself to William R. Grace, said, “There has been authority for everything that has been done…No personal considerations and no personal feelings have entered into the matter in any way, and I say distinctly there has been nothing done on which a charge can be made that it was invested with secrecy or in any way outside the legitimate duty of the members of the board.”

Stranahan, obviously angry, was resorting to a defense he seldom used. His customary method was to assume his opponent was perhaps half right, well intentioned beyond question, but still, on the whole, altogether mistaken in the premises from which he started. He was always willing to rely upon “the more mature judgment” of his opponent, and to give him opportunity for maturing his judgment, he was generally willing to accept a delay. But there was no easy way to delay the direct question and so the usually amiable Stranahan, who reminded people of an English statesman and who was looking more dignified than ever now that he was in his seventies, had been filled with great righteous indignation, basing his case, as it were, on the excellence of his personal character and past services.

The tactic worked. Mayor Grace said he meant no harm and asked no further questions. Stranahan said there was really no reason for the gentlemen from New York to be apprehensive. He told them how ten years earlier he had talked with Cornelius Vanderbilt about linking up with the New York Central and how Colonel Roebling had met with Vanderbilt’s engineer to figure a way to handle the problem. It was thought that a sunken line could be run from Grand Central Depot south to the bridge, then the trains could be raised by hydraulic lifts to cross over the bridge. After all, Stranahan asked, was it so unnatural for Brooklyn to want a depot of her own? Consider what is happening all around, he said. “Already there are three trunk lines to the West terminating in Jersey, and more lines will be completed in twelve months. In New York the only trunk line going west is the New York Central. New Jersey sends Annex boats for passengers, and floats carry the freight past your shores, and of what benefit is that to you gentlemen of New York? Sooner or later, gentlemen, you will consider this matter, and when that time comes I trust you will see that we have not labored in vain, either for our own benefit or that of the City of New York.”

And then it had been remembered that Mrs. Roebling was up on the Brooklyn tower by this time, waiting to make the walk over the bridge, and the meeting had adjourned, the question still hanging.

As things turned out, there never would be an official answer. Those responsible for the decision preferred to remain anonymous, and so the one person left to account for the change was Roebling.

Had it not been so near the end of the work, had there been less talk in the papers about the ever-mounting cost of the bridge, the change would probably not have mattered a great deal. But in October of 1881 when Roebling submitted his request for an additional one thousand tons of steel to put into the trusses to make the floor rigid enough to carry heavy locomotives and cars, several individuals saw it as the moment they had been waiting for.

Why the sudden concern about the strength of the bridge, they wanted to know. Who decided on railroad trains? How was such an immensely important decision arrived at and why was there no explanation of this in the record? And always, between the lines, was the larger question: Did the Chief Engineer know what he was doing?

The trouble was, mainly, that everyone was getting extremely anxious to see the work completed, and to know exactly, once and for all, just how much the whole thing was going to cost.

As of the start of the new year, 1882, total expenditures on the bridge would come to $13,377,055.67. But as several editorial writers noted habitually, the original estimate had been for about half that, and although Henry Murphy said he thought another $600,000 should be enough to finish with, even he was unwilling to be held to that figure. The old memory of Tweed’s courthouse was returning to haunt honest men on the board, the cost of the bridge now being up to what had been spent on the courthouse.

In addition, only a small minority of the trustees understood very much about the engineering of the bridge, or its history, and fewer still had ever had any personal dealings with the Chief Engineer. In fact, more than half the men now charged with managing the great enterprise had never even seen Washington Roebling. And there was no way to communicate with him except in writing, which few wanted to do, which was a nuisance for those who did, and which occasionally led to misunderstandings.

Robert Roosevelt, the most outspoken of them, asserted foolishly at the trustees’ meeting of October 13 that the added weight of the extra steel would weaken the bridge. Exactly how much more weight could the cables carry, he demanded to know. He wanted Roebling to present a complete report promptly. His motion had carried and Roebling had done as directed, explaining in a letter dated January 9, 1882, why the added weight meant added stiffness in the deck and so even greater strength, not less. Roebling did not say who had directed him to revise his plans, he said only that it had become “incumbent” upon him to do so. He had been against the idea of conventional trains on the bridge, as they knew, but he had gone along with it. “When I consented to make this change,” he said, “it was not so much owing to personal solicitation as to the reflection ‘of what benefit had it been to erect this bridge at a vast expense unless we use it for every possible purpose to which the structure will lend itself.’” They were now to have a bridge so rigid that ordinary traffic would have no visible effect on it. And to settle the nerves of anyone concerned about the cables, he concluded by stating rather dramatically that the cables were strong enough to uproot the anchorages.

The original plan for a cable-drawn bridge train had not been abandoned. It was just that the bridge would now have enough added strength to accommodate the future, which, it was quite naturally presumed, would involve some sort of railroad. The presumption was mistaken; but for different reasons nobody could have guessed at then—the advent of the internal combustion engine and the automobile, mainly—the decision would turn out to be the right one. As a result, the bridge would remain in service for another fifty years before any major alterations in the superstructure became necessary.

It was an extremely important and fortunate decision, in other words, and from some things said later Stranahan appears to be the one who made it, with Kingsley, Murphy, and, ultimately, Roebling backing him up. Perhaps Stranahan had reached an “understanding” with old Commodore Vanderbilt, who was dead by this time, and the New York Central was still serious about the idea. Perhaps Stranahan and the others simply figured the decision was in the best long-range interest of Brooklyn, that a bridge could not be too strong after all, and rather than risk a noisy fight over the thing—a fight they might very well lose—they just went ahead and did it.

The decision was made in Brooklyn, that much is certain, and whatever the explanation, they were pressing their luck. Delivery of steel already on order was way behind schedule; any additional steel would mean further delays, as well as greater cost. So the immediate result of the announced change in plans was a clamor to find out who was mismanaging things in this the final stage of the work.

Ironically, the bridge was all but built. Certainly the difficult and demanding work was done with. It was largely a matter of finishing things up now—the final masonry on the approaches, the last of the trusswork, the plank flooring for the roadways and promenade, and a lot of painting. Already the men had begun taking down the footbridge.

For the first time since his father’s death in the summer of 1869, Roebling could relax a little. For the first time in thirteen years his services were no longer vital. For the first time he was not really needed any longer.

Like Roebling, those trustees who had been in on the work since the beginning were all thirteen years older. A few, like Henry Murphy, were showing their age. But now, with the completion of the work at last almost within reach, it was the newcomers on the board who were the most impatient and the most frustrated by delays. As before, Robert Roosevelt made the greatest noise, claiming with some justification that nobody ever gave him a straight answer to his questions. But he also had an important new ally, the very young new Republican mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low.

Seth Low said hardly anything at the first trustees’ meeting he attended in January 1882. He simply sat and listened, an alert, serious expression on his boyish face. Only toward the end did he inquire of Henry Murphy when the bridge would be finished.

Murphy answered the question as directly as it had been asked. The bridge would be finished in the fall, he said, providing there were no further complications about money.

At age thirty-two, Seth Low was young enough to be Henry Murphy’s grandson, but still not quite so young as Murphy had been when he was elected mayor of Brooklyn. Low was the son of A. A. Low, the wealthy silk merchant, whose clipper ships had once lined the Brooklyn wharves, and he had grown up with “all the advantages,” in the Low mansion down the street from the Roebling house on Columbia Heights. Perhaps Henry Murphy saw something of himself in the young man. Without question he understood the background Low came from.

Like Murphy, Low had done extremely well at Columbia College. President Barnard had called him “the first scholar in college and the most manly young fellow we have had here in many a year.” Since then he had taken his place in the silk business, married the daughter of a United States Supreme Court Justice, and organized a Young Republican Club in Brooklyn to help elect Garfield and Arthur. As political clubs went, it was quite a departure, there being no smoking or billiard rooms, no bar, no social occasions, nothing but hard work.

When Seth Low ran for mayor it was as “the people’s candidate” and the overriding issue had been home rule for Brooklyn. His well-scrubbed, well-brushed good looks and “tender” age had been in his favor. Politicians did not much care for him, but the people responded in no uncertain terms. He roundly trounced Boss McLaughlin’s candidate, winning with a majority of four thousand votes, and without using his own money. Out-of-state papers were already calling him a figure of national importance and there was talk he would be governor before long.

But by spring the completion of the bridge looked no nearer, Murphy’s assurances were no longer good enough, and Low had joined forces with A. C. Barnes and the New York contingent—Mayor Grace, Roosevelt, and the Comptroller of New York, a man named Campbell—“to clean the stables,” as the papers put it. The young men were all in a very great hurry now and the papers and the public seemed very pleased with that.

Low made his first move on June 12. He asked that the Chief Engineer be required to submit a regular monthly report on the work accomplished and that he include an opinion on when the bridge would be completed. Then a motion was made that the Chief Engineer be requested to appear in person before the trustees at a special meeting two weeks hence, “to consult on matters appertaining to the bridge.”

But later that very day Robert Roosevelt had thrown up his hands and in a great pique announced his resignation. If his purpose, in part, was to draw attention to the mounting animosity within the board, he succeeded. The problem with the bridge was lack of leadership, Roosevelt declared in a long open letter to William Grace. A conscientious trustee could never get straight answers on anything. The management of the bridge, he said, was in the grip of a solid phalanx that “even death itself could not break in upon.” The delays in steel delivery were scandalous and left little doubt that things never would have come to such a pass had there been a full-time Chief Engineer on duty, not just to supervise the work but to meet with the trustees whenever they needed explicit information.

The papers made much of what Roosevelt had to say. Henry Murphy immediately called in the reporters to present the other side of the story. If Roosevelt felt in the dark on bridge matters, the elderly lawyer said, it might be because he had attended less than half the meetings there had been in the time since he became a trustee. Nor had he ever once taken his technical questions to the assistant engineers, who were always available for just that purpose. As for Roebling, his place could not be filled by any twenty engineers.

Another trustee who was with Murphy at the time, John T. Agnew, interrupted to make the point that Roebling’s mind was as clear as ever. From his window Roebling could see everything going on at the bridge, Agnew said. Why, with a glass he was even able to distinguish the faces of the different men at work. “His plans and diagrams are all about him, and nothing is done in the work until it has first been submitted to him. He cannot walk about the streets as you and I can, but he moves about his room, and on some days can go out. He has promised to be present at a future meeting of the Board.”

Roebling had made no such promise. It was true he had improved somewhat. His eyesight, in particular, was much improved. He could write again, in a dreadful, childish scrawl that was just barely legible, but he could do it. And by this time he had gone out of doors once or twice. But irrespective of its accuracy, Agnew’s statement put a very different light on things.

Seth Low had also by this time accepted the chairmanship of a committee to investigate the failure of the Edge Moor Iron Company to deliver according to contract. When the head of the company appeared before Low’s committee to explain himself, he said the fault lay not with his firm but with the Cambria Iron Company at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, suppliers of the steel blooms Edge Moor rolled into eyebars and other pieces for the bridge. To the delight of the newspaper editors the man’s name was Sellers, the same as the central character in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, which had become a hit play in New York. The editors had a fine time with this right away, sarcastically emphasizing that the Sellers in question was a Pennsylvania gentleman and not, of course, Twain’s archetype Southern promoter whose stock expression was “there’s millions in it.”

Sellers’ contract was the issue to be taken up in the presence of the Chief Engineer at the special meeting scheduled for June 26. But when the appointed hour arrived and everyone was gathered, the Chief Engineer did not appear. Not only that, as the reporters and most of the trustees suddenly learned for the first time, to their extreme surprise, the Chief Engineer was not even in Brooklyn any longer. He was in Newport, Rhode Island.

“Cannot meet the trustees today” was all Roebling said in the telegram that arrived that morning, which Henry Murphy read as soon as everyone was seated.

The meeting continued as planned, but not before a good deal had been said about Roebling’s lack of manners. Slocum remarked acidly that Roebling was an employee of the board, that he should therefore appear before it when so directed, and that he could have at least sent a letter of explanation. Mayor Low commented ominously how much better it would have been had Roebling simply attended.

More than a few people were exceedingly upset now.

“The curt indifference displayed in sending such a message is not excusable by reason of any illness,…” wrote the New York Sun. “It is natural to sympathize with a distinguished engineer who has sustained severe physical injuries while engaged upon a great public work; but he should not rely upon this kindly sentiment to excuse conduct on his part that is unbecoming and hardly civil.” The civic-minded Seth Low, too, was leaving no doubts as to his feelings on the subject. He criticized Roebling whenever he got the chance and called the bridge nothing more than the “unsubstantial fabric of a dream.”

All kinds of intriguing stories were going about. It was said Roebling had been shipped off to Newport against his will, that he himself had nothing to hide but that Stranahan, Murphy, and Kingsley dared not let him be questioned by the others. Roebling knew too much about the original contracts, it was said. He was the one man who could tell the story from beginning to end.

There was another rumor that he had become hopelessly paralyzed by this time and that the trustees certainly did not want this known. It was said that he lost all control over his mind, that he was raving mad, that he was “really as one dead,” that his wife, without anybody knowing it, had been deciding everything, directing the entire work for months. Soon most of the papers were saying as much.

Roebling was again requested to appear before the board. But again when the day came around, he failed to appear. However, this time he did send a letter of explanation. He was too ill to come he said. He could only talk for a few minutes at most and could not listen to conversation if it continued very long. He had gone to Newport on the advice of his doctors, who hoped, he said, that being out of doors some and away from the noise of the city might lessen “the irritation of the nerves of my face and head.” He was now able to be out of his room occasionally.

He had not explained his absence from the previous meeting because he had assumed everyone knew he was sick and he figured the trustees must be getting as tired as he was of seeing his health discussed in the papers.

Not a day went by that he did not do some work on the bridge. His assistants could refer to him for advice at any time. The work to be done that summer was “very plain routine.” If the contractor, Sellers, would supply the steel as fast as it was needed, the work would proceed with no delays whatever.

But then he wrote to Henry Murphy to say he was powerless to speed Sellers up. Making the various shapes required was a difficult job, Roebling stressed, but even more to the point, since Sellers was making no profit out of the contract, he was in no particular rush about it. If all the steel needed were at hand, the superstructure could go up in three months. As it was, there was no chance of the bridge being finished that year, as Murphy had been saying it would. A more realistic date would be late in 1883. For Murphy and those others on the board still loyal to the Chief Engineer, this was extremely discouraging news.

“Newport has never looked more attractive than it does at present,” reported the Brooklyn Eagle in early July. “A large number of summer residents have already arrived. The business people seem to be satisfied with the outlook, and the hotel proprietors anticipate a bigger season than they have had for years.” The National Lawn Tennis Association was to hold its tournament there by invitation of the governors of the Cassino, and the meets of the Queens County Hunt, yachting, shooting and horse races were also to be included in the program of outdoor sports.

Newport had its reputation, of course, and when it was reported that Colonel Washington A. Roebling had taken “the Meyer Cottage” for the summer, people quite naturally had a definite picture in mind of the life he was leading.

The picture was decidedly mistaken, however. The house Emily had rented was not the sort of “cottage” Newport was famous for. It was large and comfortable, but located in what was known as “the other Newport,” the older, less fashionable section of the old sea-port, out near the end of Washington Street, which runs parallel with the shore of the bay and which was described in the Newport Guide of the time as “shady, quiet, and a favorite resort of persons of literary character.” The house suited their needs perfectly. The air came right off the bay, there was little noise or distraction and a good deal of privacy. The broad front porch and the front bedrooms upstairs offered a spacious view of the water and the Newport Harbor Light. Most important, the house was an easy, level, ten-minute ride from the New York steamboat landing, so bringing him up from the boat had been about as uncomplicated and painless as possible.

The yachting, tennis-playing, lawn-party side of Newport was not only out of sight several miles away, but was an entirely different and separate world from the one they experienced that summer, quite as distant in spirit as it had been when they were still in Brooklyn.

They had picked Newport because G. K. Warren was now stationed there. He had been put in charge of all Corps of Engineers activities in New England, the principal work at the moment being the construction of the breakwater at Block Island. Whether Emily was aware of how much her brother’s health had failed by this time is not clear, but more than likely that too was on her mind when she arranged for the house.

It was the first time she and her husband had been away from Brooklyn in five years. And it might have been a first real vacation since the trip to Europe in ‘67 had it not been for the clamor for him to return to face the trustees. As he saw it, there was little cause to have remained in Brooklyn. His instructions had all been prepared long since, the work was quite routine, as he said; there was really nothing more to be decided of any major consequence. Indeed it must have begun as about the most hopeful summer they had seen in a very long time. By now it was clear to both of them that he was going to pull through. The bridge was all but built, and except for an unfortunate falling out between Martin and Farrington, the work was going perfectly smoothly. (What the fight was about is not known. But Farrington was so angry he quit, much to Roebling’s regret, and there is no record of what became of him afterward.)

A sudden return to Brooklyn would have been a tremendous strain for Roebling, physically and emotionally, but he would have done so immediately, without reservation, had anything serious gone wrong at the bridge. But at this late date he did not propose “to dance attendance on the Trustees,” as he said in the private notes he dictated to his wife. “I never did it when I was well and I can only do my work by maintaining my independence.” If the trustees were angry and irritated with him, the feeling was mutual. He saw their request for him to appear before them as no more than a political ploy at his expense. Important elections were coming up in the fall and there were ambitious men of both parties on the board. The bridge might well decide who would be the next governor. How seriously Seth Low was taking the talk about his becoming governor was anyone’s guess. But there was no doubt at all about Slocum. He was a prime contender for the Democratic nomination. It was a long-awaited opportunity for Slocum, and for William Kingsley, his great benefactor, the time was ripe to become something more than the man to see in Kings County.

Roebling refused to be “dragged into the board and put on exhibition,” as he said, simply to serve the purposes of political ambition. He had had his fill of politicians. “I am not a politician and I have never tried to conceal the contempt I have always felt for men who devoted their lives to politics,” he wrote privately. At another point he said there was not a self-respecting engineer in the country who would have put up with what he had over the years. He was seething with indignation, and when the Sun editorial appeared, charging him with irresponsibility, his patience ran out. He drafted a long letter in response, a letter he never sent. The one copy is in pencil, in Emily Roebling’s handwriting, in one of her letter books, and it is the single piece of evidence that perhaps there was, after all, a grain of truth to the whispered story that he was staying away because he knew too much.

Roebling said in the letter that over the years he had had to deal with “no less than one hundred and twenty politicians” on the board. But now he found it particularly infuriating that the “virtuous Slocum” had been among those demanding that he appear in person before the board and that the “virtuous Slocum” had been seconded by “the still more virtuous Kingsley.”

“This is the same General Slocum,” he wrote, “who joined with the request that I absent myself from any meeting of the board because my presence may embarrass Mr. Kingsley’s proposed operations of putting a couple of millions in his pocket, millions which have not yet reached their destination.” His “patience at an end,” Roebling said flatly that General Superintendent William Kingsley had been paid $175,000 for work he had never done—for work that he, Roebling, had in fact done—and that it had been Henry Slocum who stood up in the conference room years back and exclaimed that no man could name a sum that would compensate so eminent a man as Mr. Kingsley for the services he had rendered.

In another note he commented that Kingsley had also been in line to get a granite contract, but the fall of the Tweed Ring had put an end to that. Which of the granite quarries Kingsley had an interest in, the note does not say.

So the Chief Engineer had been aware of what had been going on. Had he not been there, he seems to say in his notes for another letter, this one to Comptroller Campbell, things might have been worse. (“I have always had bitter enemies in the Board for no reason except that I was in the way of any schemes for robbery.”) But so far Roebling had held his tongue.

Farther along in his notes for the Campbell letter, Roebling wrote, “I have over and over again been interviewed by trustees who when they found themselves face to face with me and found me a live man and not the driveling idiot they had expected, had very few questions to ask and scarcely anything to say about the bridge in any way.”

Toward the end of July, Seth Low decided that if Roebling would not come to Brooklyn, then he, the mayor of Brooklyn, would go to Newport and see for himself. Low was one of those trustees who had never laid eyes on the fabled Chief Engineer.

It is only from comments Low and Roebling made later that anything can be deduced about Low’s flying visit and the confrontation. The papers said merely that the mayor of Brooklyn would be out of town briefly.

Low arrived by boat, took a carriage down Washington Street, and apparently was ushered directly into Roebling’s room. Few words were wasted. Low told Roebling that it was time for him to step aside, which would be a perfectly honorable move for him to make. History would still remember him as the builder of the bridge, Low said. He could remain on as a consulting engineer and his salary would stay the same. C. C. Martin would be made Chief Engineer.

Roebling flatly refused to do any such thing. If Low and the others wanted him out, he said, they would have to fire him out right. He would not step aside of his own accord and his decision on that was final. Low answered that if Roebling insisted on being stubborn then fire him they would. Why, Roebling wanted to know. Low tried to explain, but according to Roebling’s notes on the interview, the young mayor’s reasons “were so weak and childish he finally abandoned all attempt at argument and said, ‘Mr. Roebling, I am going to remove you because it pleases me.’” Whereupon Low walked out of the house and was back in Brooklyn in less than twenty-four hours.

A few days later Emily and Washington Roebling were struck still another crushing blow. On August 8, after a sudden, severe illness, G. K. Warren died at his Newport home at the age of fifty-two. The military court appointed to examine his ignominious relief at Five Forks had by this time reached its decision, not only exonerating Warren fully and applauding him, but casting serious doubts as to the manner in which he had been treated. But tragically, for him and his family, the findings of the court would not be published for another three months. He had not lived to see his name cleared.

On the afternoon of August 17 Mayor Low sent each of the Brooklyn trustees a note saying there would be a meeting of the board on Tuesday the 22nd. “Please make it convenient to be present, as business of importance is to be considered,” the mayor wrote. Right away reporters at the Brooklyn City Hall wanted to know what this meant, but Low replied that there was nothing more to be said in advance. In another couple of days, however, before the meeting, it was reported on good authority that Low planned to move for the dismissal of the Chief Engineer.

The trustees met as planned promptly at three in the afternoon. It was noted by one reporter that Henry Murphy “did not look nearly so eager to proceed as did the youthful, bright-faced Mayor Low of Brooklyn…Nor did the venerable member of the Board, Mr. James S. T. Stranahan…appear as thirsty for information as did the affable business-intending Mayor Grace of New York.”

Low made a little speech. “I am convinced,” he said, “that at every possible point there is a weakness in the management of the Brooklyn Bridge. The engineering part of the structure—the most important—is in the hands of a sick man.” He went on to say what a serious handicap this was and told how he had gone to Newport to reason with Roebling but had failed. He had made an eminently fair proposition to Roebling “in order to facilitate the completion of the work,” but the man “would not accede.” Therefore action had to be taken. So Low said he had held a private conference on the issue with two other ex officio members of the board (the mayor and comptroller of New York) and they were “of the opinion that the change ought to be made, notwithstanding Mr. Roebling’s unwillingness.” He had, therefore, Low said, prepared certain resolutions, which he immediately presented:

WHEREAS, The Chief Engineer of this Bridge, Mr. W. A. Roebling, has been for many years, and still is, an invalid; and,

WHEREAS, In the judgment of this Board the absence of the Chief Engineer from the post of active supervision is necessarily, in many ways, a source of delay; therefore,

Resolved, That this Board does hereby appoint Mr. Roebling Consulting Engineer, and Mr. C. C. Martin, the present First Assistant Engineer, to be the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge; and,

Resolved, That in doing so, this Board desires to bear most cordial testimony to the services hitherto rendered by Mr. Roebling, and to express its regret at the necessity of making such a change at this time.

Mayor William Grace rose to his feet and said he “heartily seconded” the resolutions of Mayor Low. “It is our duty to set aside all other considerations in seeing that nothing shall interfere with the progress of this work.” The elected heads of the two cities building the bridge and paying for it had decided the time had come to dispense with Washington Roebling.

But at that point the Comptroller of Brooklyn, Ludwig Semler, a new man on the board, asked for the floor. “I also think the work should be pushed,” he said, “but I do not think it would be using Mr. Roebling justly to oust him from his position now that he is about to reap the full benefit of his labors. If he had been in any way guilty of delaying the bridge, I should be in favor of retiring him, but there is not a shadow of a charge upon which to base such action. In fact, Mr. Roebling has done much toward pushing the bridge along. Let us not act summarily toward him after his thirteen years of service. If someone will tell me how an engineer is going to build a bridge without material I shall be pleased. Mr. Roebling did not have the material and so he is made a scapegoat for others’ sins.”

Semler, who had had almost nothing to say at the few previous meetings he attended, spoke with great feeling and was strongly commended for it by Stranahan, who had gotten up from his customary seat on a sofa that stood against the wall and began addressing the group, as one man said later, “with the manner and voice of a speaker at a funeral.”

“I cannot but remember at such time as this,” Stranahan said, “the eminent abilities of the elder and younger Roebling. When I think that that ability has given us the finest bridge in the world I cannot help but feel that there is something yet due to the Chief Engineer. True, his health is not as sound as we could wish, but it is as good as it has been for many years past—years wherein we could not dispense with his services because of the accurate knowledge of the enterprise which he alone possessed. The older trustees will comprehend the truth of what I say. If this matter is to be referred to another meeting I should be much obliged, so far as I am personally concerned, to have it come up at the next regular meeting. I have traveled one hundred and eighty miles to attend this one, and I must travel one hundred and eighty miles tomorrow to join my family.”

Stranahan, who had returned to Brooklyn from Saratoga, where he customarily spent part of the summer, was, in his usual fashion, stalling for time, banking on a “maturing of judgment” among those trustees who had not as yet made up their minds about what to do.

It was then moved that the subject be “laid over” until September 11 and the motion carried.

All Brooklyn was talking about it by the time the sun went down and in the next several days virtually every newspaper on both sides of the river began taking sides. The New York Tribune said the bridge had been “tainted at the start” and linked Roebling with Murphy, Kingsley, and Stranahan as the proper parties to blame. Things would have been far better, the paper said, had they all been pensioned off years before. “This is the day for sharp decision and vigorous action.”

The Star said it was obviously time to get a new Chief Engineer. “Had Mr. Roebling done his duty instead of becoming the cat’s-paw of the Bridge Ring, he might have saved millions of dollars to the two cities, and his zeal would not have gone unrewarded.”

The New York Evening Post said Mayor Low’s resolutions had been made not a moment too soon. The Daily Graphic reasoned that since Roebling’s special knowledge of suspension bridge construction was no longer essential to the work, and the bridge was too far along for anyone to mistakenly alter the plan, there was no real reason to keep him on. “That a man has been supervising a structure like this from its beginning gives him no right to delay the completion, as Mr. Roebling is now delaying this bridge,” concluded the editorial writer of the Daily Graphic.

The Iron Age said the only thing wrong with Low’s action was the idea of replacing Roebling with C. C. Martin. “If new life is to be infused in that comatose engineers corps, it must come from the outside—for inside it there is no leaven of redemption left. No wonderful or even exceptional engineering talent is required to bring the work to completion; but what is required is some man with good executive ability, of great force of character, and complete independence of all possible future political preferment.”

Even the Newport Daily News felt obliged to report on the situation. “Mayors Grace, of New York, and Low, of Brooklyn, are getting tired of waiting for the completion of the celebrated East River Bridge,” the little paper announced the morning of August 24. “The monster connecting link between the two cities has already cost them too much and it is about time that something was done to prevent anymore such delays as have hindered its completion.”

Only the Trenton Daily State Gazette and the Brooklyn Eagle rose immediately and angrily to Roebling’s defense. “His spotless integrity and high sense of honor are unquestionable,” wrote the Daily State Gazette, “his great skill as an engineer is established, and his devotion to this work has been attended by the sacrifice of his health.”

The Eagle, not surprisingly, had more to say. How, asked Thomas Kinsella in a two-column editorial, could Low present a proposal to appoint Roebling the consulting engineer, when Roebling, as Low himself reported to the trustees, had said explicitly he would not accept the job? And what earthly good would such a change accomplish? “Is it possible that the existence of Mr. Martin himself is now in the nature of a discovery, while the fact is that he has had practical executive control of the work for many years past? If he is not a ‘natural channel’ of information, who is?”

As for Roebling’s competence, that was not even an issue, Kinsella asserted. His past contributions to the work were enormous. There had not been a single failure on any part of the work that could be chargeable to the engineers. Furthermore it would be a rotten thing to degrade the man and deny him his rightful honors on the very eve of his triumph.

And that pretty much summed up the case for Roebling as it was being presented in Brooklyn—except for the strongly and privately expressed opinion of several on the board who claimed to know Roebling personally that he had been kept alive all these years only by his intense interest in the work and the desire to see it finished properly. The implication was that a vote to discharge him would be as good as a death sentence.

A very important question, of course, was whether the voice of Kinsella was the voice of William Kingsley. A few years before, the immediate assumption would have been that it was, but not so now, for the influential editor had grown increasingly independent. Not long before, when he felt there was too much interference in editorial matters on the part of the owners, Kinsella had threatened to resign and start a rival paper and ever since he had been left to decide things pretty much on his own.

The one other argument in Roebling’s behalf was, of course, the actual progress still being made on the bridge itself, progress that Henry Murphy kept presenting in formal reports to the two mayors. A hundred and fourteen intermediate chords had been put up in a week, 72 diagonal stays, 60 posts, 21 intermediate floor beams, 21 bridging trusses, 16 intermediate promenade floor beams, 12 lower chord sections, 2 upper floor stay bars. At the end of the Brooklyn approach, work had begun on the foundations for the iron viaduct and terminal station building.

But the question of Roebling’s mental and physical health had not been put to rest. If anything, rumors and innuendo on the subject were more plentiful than ever before. The three most prominent trustees of long standing—Murphy, Stranahan, and Kingsley—said they could vouch for Roebling’s state of mind, but their word was not only not enough any longer, it was outright suspect among the younger trustees. The only one of the younger men who had seen Roebling and talked to him in person was Seth Low and he would make no comment on Roebling’s condition one way or the other.

Toward the end of the month of August Comptroller Ludwig Semler received the following letter from Newport, from Mrs. Washington Roebling:

I take the liberty of writing to express to you my heartfelt gratitude for your generous defense of Mr. Roebling at the last meeting of the Board of Trustees. Your words were a most agreeable surprise to us as we had understood you were working in full sympathy with the Mayors of the two cities and the Comptroller of New York. Mr. Roebling is very anxious for me to go to Brooklyn to convey to you…a few messages from him. Can you see me at your office some morning…? I will go to Brooklyn any day you can give me a little of your time and see you at your own house or your office just as you may prefer….

As you are a stranger to Mr. Roebling all that you said was doubly appreciated. There are some few old friends in the Board of Trustees who know him well and who have always stood by him in the many attacks that have been made on him in the past ten years, but we never expect such consideration and kindness from those who have never seen him.

On Tuesday, September 5, a week before the trustees were to meet to vote, Comptroller Semler suddenly announced he was leaving for Newport that evening to see Roebling and judge for himself.

“Nobody should be convicted before he is tried,” Semler said. “As I have undertaken to defend Mr. Roebling to a certain extent against the attempt to remove him, I want to make his personal acquaintance and see what impression he makes on me. It seems from certain statements made in connection with this matter that an impression has gone abroad that he was not only suffering physically but that his mental faculties were also impaired. Of course, if this were so, his plans should not be relied upon, and the work should be suspended until an investigation could be had; but physicians tell me his intellect is all right. I am today more convinced than ever of the great injustice of displacing a man of his merit and standing without giving him an opportunity to defend himself. The idea that he could not do his duty without being at the bridge office is preposterous.”

De Lesseps had been in Paris while the Suez Canal was being built, Semler said, and so why was it so unreasonable for Roebling to remain in a house a few blocks from the bridge. “There is nothing sentimental in my feelings in this matter. The question is simply one of justice.” Semler told reporters he would be back in his office Thursday morning.

All at once Semler had become a most important figure. And a great deal seemed to hang on what kind of report he would come home with. As things looked now, Roebling had at least four sure votes against him and four for him. Low, Grace, Campbell (the New York Comptroller), and A. C. Barnes were clearly committed to ousting him, while Murphy, Stranahan, Marshall, and John T. Agnew could be counted on to vote the other way. But the rest were undecided, or appeared to be, and Semler’s evaluation might therefore be the deciding factor, at least among the younger men.

But there was also by now very particular interest in which way William Kingsley and General Slocum might go, for there was no longer any doubt that Slocum was the front-running contender for the Democratic nomination for governor and the convention was only two weeks off. On the surface it would appear both men would naturally go along with Murphy—to stand solidly behind the Chief Engineer. But Slocum had attacked Roebling on too many occasions and with no little public fanfare about it and to side with the old regime and vote against such known champions of reform as Low and Grace, to vote for what might appear to be further delays on the bridge and greater expense (greater graft and corruption was the implied idea), could be extremely foolish politics for a serious candidate at this particular moment and very hard to explain to the electorate later on. Still Slocum was Kingsley’s man, it was pretty generally believed. Kingsley had the power, Kingsley would be the one to decide. Kingsley was the man to watch.

In a note to Paine written about this time, Roebling remarked that if his position as Chief Engineer depended on Kingsley’s vote, then he would just as soon “be out of the bridge.”

On Thursday morning, as good as his word, Ludwig Semler was back at his desk in City Hall, just a few doors down from Mayor Low. The reporters were called in and the interview commenced.

Semler said he had been very kindly received by Roebling, whose acquaintance he had not made previously, and that a full, frank talk had ensued between them. He said he found the engineer suffering from a severe nervous affection, but his intellect was perfectly clear and strong. “If his intellect has been impaired,” he said, “I should consider myself a happy man if I had what he lost. He spoke to me with clearness, and exhibited a memory which was something astonishing.”

Semler was asked what Roebling had said about the proposition to supersede him.

“He said that under no circumstances should he take any other position than Chief Engineer,” Semler replied, and quoted Roebling as saying, “‘If they want to remove me, let them do it absolutely. They know I will not take any other position. Why don’t they say they do not want me anymore. That would be the straightforward way to do.’”

“Did you ask him his opinion as to the motives which prompted the opposition?”

“I asked him if he had any cause to believe that there was unfriendly feeling toward him. He said he did not like to say anything upon that point.”

“Now, to do away with the driver who has brought us very nearly to shore, I think would be shameful,” Semler continued. “Suppose that the resolution offered by Mayor Low should be adopted and Mr. Martin should not accept the position of Chief Engineer?” (It was commonly being said by this time that none of Roebling’s staff would assume his title, if offered, but this was the first time anybody in a position of authority had said so publicly.) “Suppose it should be offered to Mr. Paine? He will not take it. We should then have to have another man. That will cause further delays in the work…. He might commence to meddle with the work and defer the completion of the bridge ten years.”

A reporter for the Eagle then asked whether Mr. Roebling had said anything about what passed between him and Mayor Low during Low’s flying visit to Newport? Semler answered that Roebling had indeed quoted from his conversation with Low, but Semler said he did not think he ought to repeat Roebling’s remarks for publication.

As it was, very little more would be said for publication by anyone until the trustees gathered to cast their votes the following Monday, September 11.

But between Semler’s return and the crucial meeting of the board, Roebling had still one more visitor at Newport—a reporter for the New York World who somehow talked his way into the house and managed to get an interview with Roebling, something no other newspaperman had been able to do in ten years. The agreement was that no direct quotes would be used. Roebling apparently trusted the man and in the course of the conversation made some bitter remarks about the Board of Trustees being full of candidates for governor. On his way out the front door the reporter had again promised Emily Roebling that he would not print a line of what had been said. But the man had not kept his word and when the article appeared it did little to further Roebling’s cause in Brooklyn. His loyal backers on the board felt he had dealt himself the worst blow possible.

Emily was shattered by what had happened, felt she was to blame, and wrote a long letter of apology to William Marshall, the one man who had voted against the J. Lloyd Haigh contract and one of those few long-time trustees who was not a politician. Now she too was full of despair. There was no doubt, she said, of her husband’s “perfect sanity and ability as an engineer, but he certainly is unfit to be on the work where so many political interests are involved.” He had, she said, no capacity for doing anything for the sake of politics. “I thank you very much for all your efforts and do not think I shall be greatly disappointed when the bridge controversies are ended, even against us. It has been a long hard fight since Mr. Roebling first took sick and if this chance reporter’s visit changes everything I shall see in it the hand of God, that all my care could not direct or change.”

Seventeen were present, the entire board but three—John G. Davis, Henry Clausen, and H. K. Thurber—all of whom were in Europe. Henry Murphy sat in the president’s chair, as usual, and ranged in a semicircle before him were Mayors Grace and Low, Comptrollers Campbell and Semler, General Slocum, A. C. Barnes, Kingsley, Stranahan, Agnew, J. Adriance Bush, Thomas C. Clarke, Jr., William Marshall, Charles McDonald, Jenkins Van Schaick, Alden S. Swan, and Otto Witte, the secretary. A half-dozen representatives of the press had also been admitted.

The first ten minutes were spent on routine matters. Minutes from the preceding meeting were read, C. C. Martin made some comments on the delays on the two terminal stations being built at either end of the bridge, and it was announced that several hundred tons of steel still remained to be delivered by the Edge Moor Iron Company. Mayor Low requested that the president inform the company that the trustees were “in a hurry,” to which there was great laughter.

Then C. C. Martin left the room, the doors were closed, and Seth Low, having risen from his chair, began speaking in a very deliberate manner.

“If there is no other business before the meeting I will call up the resolution which I presented last month, and in doing so there is very little which I wish to add to what I said then. As I said at that time the resolutions bring the Board of Trustees face to face with the question as to whether the existing engineering arrangements of the bridge are the best that are within reach for the work that lies before us. If the majority of the board will take the responsibility of saying they are I shall feel that I have done my duty in bringing the matter to this issue, and no one will be more glad than myself—if the majority does decide that way—to find the facts justifying the judgment.

“On the other hand I have presented the resolutions which suggest making Colonel Roebling consulting engineer because I believe sincerely that that would be the best pledge we can give the public that nothing whatever shall be allowed to interfere with the speedy completion of this work. I think the effect would be instantaneous not only upon the employees of the trustees, but upon all the people with whom they are dealing. It would convince them that from this time, whatever may have been the case in the past, these trustees must be dealt with upon the theory that they mean business. I do not mean by my wording to reflect upon the trustees in their intentions in the past…. For myself, I repudiate entirely the idea that there is anything in this proposition that reflects upon Mr. Roebling either directly or indirectly. I—”

Henry Murphy interrupted. “Will you allow me to say that I have here a communication from Colonel Roebling, which perhaps ought to be read before you proceed with your remarks. In all events, it is on this question and—”

“I think it would be better if I finished now,” Low snapped back, “if you will allow me.

“I wish to say,” he went on, “that I repudiate the idea that there is anything in the proposition that reflects on the engineer, either directly or indirectly. I offered it believing that it was a proposition which he could honorably accept. I think it is one which he ought to accept. More than that I think it is one which, in its essence, is kind, because in my judgment it would take him out of a false position and place him in a true one with reference to this work, and by so doing we will relieve him of the criticism to which he has been subject.

“One other thing I will say is that I offered the resolutions which I presented last week without consulting Mr. Martin. I felt that if that question could not be settled by me without consulting a subordinate I had better not offer the resolutions. He was entirely unaware, so far as I know, of any such resolution being thought of, and in all of his utterances he has acted the part of the loyal friend of the Chief Engineer.

“But the real question is not that which concerns the engineer as much as it does the trustees and the people. By our action today we say: ‘We have nine months before us. We have charge of the expenditure of a million and a quarter of dollars and an interest and expense account of about three thousand dollars a day. The question is, shall we have a sick man or a live man—a man who is responsible and with whom we can come into contact day after day?’ I say this without any reference to what has been done in the past—which has no further claim to my attention than that of historical interest.”

Here, according to one of the reporters present, Mayor Grace broke into a broad grin, as if Low had just said something extremely funny.

“I have only to say,” Low continued, “that if the majority will take the responsibility of leaving things as they are it will give me the greatest pleasure to work with them in justifying their judgment and in bringing about the result we all want—the finishing of the bridge.”

With that Seth Low sat down and Henry Murphy handed Roebling’s letter to the secretary, Otto Witte, who read it aloud.

The letter was brief and said pretty much what was already known—that he would not accept a position as consulting engineer, that his absence from active supervision had in no way hindered progress on the bridge, and that it was his personal wish that the vote be taken simply as to whether or not he was to remain in command.

Mayor Grace was immediately on his feet. “At the last meeting I seconded the resolution offered by Mayor Low, and I have since found no reason to change my mind and I again second it now.”

Then William Marshall spoke. He had never had a great deal to say at board meetings before, the way most of the others had, and he was not known as a speaker. So it is doubtful anyone in the room was quite prepared for the speech he gave.

“Mr. President,” he began, “I am sorry this resolution has been introduced here. I see no reason why Mr. Roebling should be removed. I know that this bridge has been kept back time and time again by many, but I never knew that Mr. Roebling had kept it back one day or one hour. The very gentleman that you propose to put in his place is honorable and honest enough to say he doesn’t believe the bridge has been kept back by the engineer who is his chief. Furthermore, he says that to his knowledge the engineer and his assistants have not made a mistake upon the bridge.”

Then turning to Seth Low, he said, “You want to remove him; to drive him out. For what? Why? As a bridgebuilder he has not had his equal on the face of the earth. I defy contradiction!

“There are two bridges across Niagara. He built the largest of them and it stands there today—a perfect success. When I say ‘he’ I mean his father and himself—the father who sacrificed on this bridge. There are two bridges across the Ohio, one built by Mr. Roebling and one by a man who is ashamed of his name. The one at Wheeling fell into the river; the other, at Cincinnati, is an honor to the man who built it. I never heard he made a mistake and kept the bridge back, and he must be sacrificed. For one I would take the arm off my shoulder before I would permit myself to vote against a man standing here without a blemish upon his character or ability. If you search back to the time of the sinking of the caisson to the present moment you will find that he has not kept the bridge back a moment.”

Again he turned to the Mayor of Brooklyn and this time angrily. “But our friend Mr. Low goes down to Newport and demands his resignation! By what authority?” There was absolute silence in the room. “Have you any law for it? If you have I should like to see it. I should like to know by what parliamentary usages three or four trustees, meeting in the Comptroller’s office in New York, claim to represent the wishes of this board?” The two mayors and Comptroller Campbell kept looking right at Marshall, smiling all the while.

“I consider you are bringing an innocent man and holding him responsible for the delay and losses we have gone through here. I know this board, I know there is too much honor on this floor to enable you to remove the Chief Engineer. If there is any fault to be found we should begin where the fault belongs. If there has been any fault in the board for the last ten years, for one I am willing to assume the responsibility for it, but I don’t want to sneak out and place it on the shoulders of the Chief Engineer. It would be mean and contemptible for me to do that, and I don’t propose to do it.”

There was a long silence when he sat down again. Then Secretary Witte read a short prepared statement supporting the Chief Engineer and J. Adriance Bush said he also would vote to keep Roebling. Martin was not the only member of the engineering staff to speak up in Roebling’s defense, Bush said, they all had. The core of the issue was the change in the plans and that had not been Roebling’s doing and they all knew it. “I think,” he said, “the question is one that we ought to approach…with just the same solemnity as we would approach the trial of a man accused of high crimes and misdemeanors. We ought to look at it in the same light that you and I would regard the impeachment of a judge or anyone in authority. We ought to look at it free from public clamor on the one hand and free from any personal feeling on the other.”

A. C. Barnes said he had a very sincere admiration for Colonel Roebling, but that he did not think Roebling ought to feel wounded if he were to be retired with every honor and his present pay. “Why, sir, if Mr. Roebling were a regular Army officer he would have been retired long ago, with half pay and nothing to do, and nothing would be thought of it.” Barnes said he was simply unable to understand why Roebling did not accept Mayor Low’s resolutions “in the same kindly and considerate spirit which I am sure animates every one of us who would vote for it.”

Ludwig Semler, who apparently had decided that the meeting was running against Roebling, moved the vote be postponed and the whole issue referred to special committee. But William Kingsley, who like Murphy, Stranahan, and Slocum had said nothing thus far, had done some figuring it seems and decided that this was exactly the time to vote.

“I feel the same way,” Mayor Low said instantly.

A few others asked to be heard and were, briefly, including Stranahan, who said simply and rather weakly that Roebling was needed still. Then a voice vote was taken on the Low resolutions, with the following result:

Yeas—Mayors Grace and Low, Comptroller Campbell, and Messrs. Van Schaick, Clarke, McDonald, and Barnes.

Nays—Comptroller Semler and Messrs. Murphy, Bush, Witte, Marshall, Stranahan, Agnew, Swan, Kingsley, and Slocum.

The count was 10 to 7. The resolutions had lost; Roebling had won by a majority of three, including William Kingsley and Henry Slocum. But had the two of them, or any other two, voted differently, Roebling would have been out.

“ENGINEER ROEBLING RETAINED,” “A MAJORITY FOR ROEBLING,” “ROEBLING NOT TO RETIRE,” were some of the headlines the following day.

Mayor Low told reporters that he was quite content with the decision of the board and he told several others on the board who had backed Roebling that he had secretly been hoping Roebling would win all along. He would rather see the bridge finished under Roebling, Seth Low told Ludwig Semler, than any other engineer. Semler repeated this in an interview, thinking apparently that it would put the mayor in a more flattering light, and he offered his own personal diagnosis of Roebling’s mysterious malady, something he had not done before the voting began. “I actually believe that all that ails him is a nervous affection which prevents him from mingling with numbers of people.”

23

And Yet the Bridge Is Beautiful

And yet the bridge is beautiful in itself.

—Scientific American

IN THE early spring of 1883, about the time the weather had turned warm enough for the Chief Engineer to spend some time outdoors in the garden, the bridge was finished. There was no one moment, no particular day, when he could have said as much, nor would there be. Bridges did not end that way. There was always something more to finish up, some last detail to attend to. The final touches at Cincinnati, for example, had dragged on for nearly six months after the opening ceremonies and it looked as though the same might happen here. But the bridge he saw standing now against the sky half a mile in the distance was the finished bridge for all intents and purposes. In another few weeks it would be open and in use.

It had taken fourteen years. In another few weeks he would be forty-six years old. He had spent nearly a third of his life on this one bridge, nearly as much time as his father had given to all his major bridges combined.

His health was much improved. The nearer the end came the better he felt. He could get about the house much more easily than before or go out into the garden. His eyesight had returned. It was a little as though he himself had returned from a long absence. He could read the papers again, for one thing—about General George Crook chasing Apaches across the border into Mexico that spring or about the housewarming party given by Mrs. William Vanderbilt at her limestone palace on Fifth Avenue, the most lavish and costly fancy-dress ball ever put on in the United States (an estimated $250,000) and reputedly the greatest social event of the age. According to the Times the costume problem alone “disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.” Abram Hewitt came as King Lear, “while yet in his right mind,” the paper noted, a remark that doubtless cheered Washington Roebling.

In the time he had spent on the bridge, the telephone and the electric light had been introduced. (What a difference they would have made during the work inside the caissons.) Now at night he could see hundreds of electric lights burning over in New York, directly across the river, in the blocks Edison had first lit the summer before, when Roebling was at Newport.

Instead of one transcontinental railroad, there were now four and a fifth was under construction. There were ten million more people in the country than there had been in 1869. (Brooklyn had grown by 180,000; New York by more than 200,000.) The buffalo had been all but exterminated on the Great Plains and Chester A. Arthur had installed modern plumbing in the White House. Robert E. Lee was dead. Horace Greeley, Jesse James, Brigham Young, Emerson, Crazy Horse, Peter Cooper, they were all dead now. A whole era had passed. His own son would be entering RPI in the fall.

The bridge had taken nearly three times as long as his father had said it would and it had cost $15 million, which was more than twice what his father had estimated. It had taken the lives of twenty men, not including his own father. * The price he himself had paid was long since past reckoning.

Henry Slocum had failed to become governor, because of the bridge mainly. Now Henry Murphy, too, was under the ground at Greenwood.

Would they all have gone ahead with it anyway back in 1869 had they known what was involved? It was a question neither Washington Roebling nor anyone else would ever be able to answer.

When the Democratic state convention opened in Syracuse late the previous September, it had been obvious that the nomination for governor was going to be worth a very great deal. A few days before, in Saratoga, the Republicans had picked a lackluster candidate named Charles Folger, who was generally taken to be what he was—a stooge for President Arthur and the infamous Jay Gould. Not even the Republican faithful had been able to get very enthusiastic about Folger. So in Syracuse, as the Democrats gathered inside the Grand Opera House, spirits were running high and especially among the Kings County delegation, for it had looked even to impartial observers as though General Henry Slocum would be the party’s choice. But instead the convention had picked an unknown upstate lawyer, the reform mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland, who had been considered strictly a local candidate before the balloting began.

Slocum’s only serious rival had been Roswell P. Flower, a debonair Congressman from Watertown who had made a fortune on Wall Street and who, like Folger, was handicapped by his friendship with Jay Gould, as well as by a bad lisp that was sometimes linked unkindly with his name. But just as the convention was about to open, the World, then owned by Gould, began a series of sensational articles on the “Bridge Frauds.” The Tweed disclosures were published in full still one more time, as though they were all new history. Every prior example of corruption within the Bridge Company, documented or alleged, was assembled into a massive attack on the Brooklyn men who had been behind the project. It was charged that three million dollars had been stolen outright during the early years of the work, that Kingsley and Stranahan were little better than common crooks, but, unlike Tweed, so skillful at covering their tracks that proof of their guilt would be next to impossible to come by. Once again Henry Murphy was asked for a statement and once again he denied the charges, as did Stranahan. Kingsley refused to see reporters. Only Thomas Kinsella was willing to talk and he said the fanfare was nothing more than politics.

“I consider it a very bold movement on the part of Jay Gould to get control of the Democratic party, just as he has already got control of the Republican party,” Kinsella said. “In my opinion it is all politics and very bad politics, too. It is as transparent as glass, and anybody can easily see through it. Kingsley, one of the men attacked, is quite likely to appear as a delegate to the Syracuse convention, while General Slocum, one of the trustees, is the man who will undoubtedly be placed in antagonism with Congressman Flower for the nomination for governor. The object, it appears to me, is to cast odium on these men, and break them down in advance of the convention.” Kingsley was not only a delegate, he led the Kings County delegation, solidly committed to Slocum, and Kinsella would be the one to deliver the speech putting Slocum’s name before the convention.

The great issue at first had been the seating of the Tammany delegates, supposedly representing 45,000 voters and headed by that old enemy of the bridge, “Honest John” Kelly. Until late the night before the balloting was to begin, it had looked as though the Tammany delegates would not be let in. But then some of Kelly’s people came calling on the Kings County Democrats to beg for their support. The meeting lasted far into the night, when Kingsley at last agreed to go to work for Kelly. As a result the Tammany delegates were seated and Slocum’s backers went into the convention confident Slocum would get the nomination on the second ballot.

But a man named Ira Shafer, a Flower supporter, gave a speech referring at some length to Slocum’s connection with the bridge and its “gross frauds,” and this, on top of the World “disclosures,” was, as the Times reported, “the means of frightening many of the country delegates who were friendly to General Slocum, but feared the effect his association with the original promoters of the bridge enterprise might have…”

Slocum was also strongly opposed by an influential reform faction from New York City known as the County Democracy, the head of which was none other than Abram S. Hewitt.

As a result Slocum and Flower were deadlocked on the first ballot. Kelly had not delivered for Slocum, but split his votes, biding his time. The Brooklyn men felt they had been double-crossed. There was a fierce scramble to pick up votes but on the second ballot Slocum and Flower were deadlocked again. But this time Hewitt and Kelly had both gone for Cleveland and that decided it. The Flower delegates immediately abandoned their man and Cleveland won on the third ballot. As a consolation prize, Slocum was later nominated for Congressman-at-Large.

William Kingsley and his delegation returned to Brooklyn bitterly disappointed and talking freely with reporters of their disgust with Kelly, who, as they said, would never have been seated in the first place had it not been for their help. Kelly answered later that he himself had never said a word about supporting Slocum, which was quite true.

In November Cleveland defeated the Republican Folger by the largest majority ever given a candidate for governor. Slocum was elected to Congress, but among Brooklyn Democrats there were wistful reflections on what might have been. In an inverse way the bridge had made the Buffalo man governor.

Once the elections were over, the papers had little more to say about bridge frauds. The clamor over corruption ceased instantly. But on November 20, determined to settle the issue once and for all, Mayors Low and Grace, with the approval of the trustees, appointed two accountants to examine fully all receipts, vouchers, papers, payrolls, and all other documents connected with the bridge, “and especially to investigate the books and papers of the Bridge as they bear upon the charges made by the New York World and others against the Trustees.” It would be a year before their findings would be made public, and they would cause no stir whatever. There were vouchers on file, the accountants reported, for total expenditures of $15,211,982.92. Due to certain clerical errors overpayments to contractors came to $9,578.67 and those were the only discrepancies found in the company’s books, all of which had been “honestly and neatly kept.”

As it happened, and as no one realized at the time, November 20 was also Henry Murphy’s last day at the Bridge Company. That night he came down with a bad cold. On Friday, December 1, 1882, he was dead.

As the papers reported, Murphy, at age seventy-two, had been in good health up until the night he took sick. As regular as clockwork he had left his house each morning at nine and walked to his law offices on Court Street, where he and his two old partners, Lott and Vanderbilt, both dead now, had long been such fixtures. Later in the morning he would go over to Montague Street to the Coney Island Railroad offices, stay perhaps an hour, then walk down to the Bridge Company, where he generally spent the remainder of the day. On the 20th he had gone home about five.

His cold had turned to pneumonia a day or so later, but it was his heart that killed him, according to the papers, and from what his son said in an interview, it seems he died in terrible agony. The time of death was six in the morning.

“At the clubs and other places where men gathered, the deceased was the general topic of conversation,” wrote the Eagle, the paper he had founded. The feeling was that the day marked the end of an era. Murphy had been a historic figure, everyone felt. He was the closest thing to a Founding Father Brooklyn ever had, both in his personal grace and in the things he had accomplished. To many he had seemed a last holdover from a vanished golden age. His passing was like the tolling of a bell, as almost everyone who wrote about it tried to express in one way or other.

The bridge trustees called a special meeting and with Kingsley presiding, sitting in Murphy’s old chair, a long formal statement of grief was drawn up, saying, among other things, that the bridge would remain a memorial to Henry Cruse Murphy.

The major things still to be seen to by mid-May were these: the electric lights were not yet fully installed; the big iron terminal buildings at either end of the bridge were nowhere near ready; and it would be September at least before the bridge trains would begin running between the terminals. But there were no more specifications to get up, no more contracts to sign, and everything was being handled with the greatest dispatch by Roebling’s immensely capable assistants. Amazingly, they were all still on the job, after fourteen years, even Collingwood, who had signed up originally for a month only. Except for Farrington, not one, in all that time, had quit out of discouragement or frustration or to take a better-paying position, several of which had been offered. Not one had been relieved of his job. Roebling’s own sense of duty and determination had been matched in kind. Every man he had hired had proved up to the work. For some, such as McNulty, it was the only work they had ever known.

The bridge itself looked now about as it did in the drawing Hildenbrand had done for the Centennial Exhibition, except that there were no crowning capstones on the towers, as John Roebling had wanted, and there never would be because of cost. The towers, of course, had been standing there for nearly seven years now and were an accepted part of the landscape. But with the last of the timber falsework removed from inside the archways, they looked now as they were supposed to, like colossal Gothic gateways to the two cities.

But it was the finished span between them that made the towers seem so much more important and purposeful than ever before. It was the finished roadway, arching slowly, gracefully upward over the river to meet at the center with the great downward swoop of the cables, that made it a suspension bridge at last—and the greatest on earth. And finally, now, the diagonal stays were in place, hundreds of them, radiating down from the tower tops, angling across the vertical harp-string pattern of the suspenders, and forming what, at close range, looked like a powerful steel net, or, from a distance, as Roebling saw it, like a vast, finespun web. The bridge now, as never before, was a thrilling thing to see.

More even than the other modern structures people flocked to gape at in New York, the bridge could look extremely different at different times of day, and depending on one’s vantage point. From the narrow, low-lying streets on the New York side, for example, one got relatively little sense of its long reach over the river, or what it might be reaching out to. The impression, instead, was one of fantastic upward magnitude, of breath-taking elevation, the tower in the foreground and the roadway it carried within its arches upstaging whatever else the bridge might be achieving beyond the tower.

The very shabbiness and stunted scale of the old neighborhood beneath the tower worked to the advantage of the bridge, which by contrast seemed an embodiment of the noblest aspirations, majestic, heaven-directed, lifting into the light above the racket, the shabbiness, and the confusion of the waterfront, the way a great cathedral rises over the hovels of the faithful. And the twin archways in the tower, seen from street level, looked like vast vacant windows to the sky. For a child seeing it at night, the tower could have been the dark and mighty work of medieval giants. Where on earth could one see so many stars framed in granite?

The roadway to the tower was finished now but was still closed off at Chatham Street by a high board fence plastered thick with theater posters and handbills. And along the roadway unsightly heaps of rubbish stood waiting to be carted off. Even so, there was nothing in the average person’s experience to compare to this spacious, beckoning, empty thoroughfare. It climbed up and out of the city like something seen in dreams. It was a highway people just naturally wanted to travel, even if they had no interest in the smaller, more sedate city they knew to be at the other end. To the New Yorker who lived within its shadow, it was not just a bridge to Brooklyn—few New Yorkers had any special desire to go to Brooklyn—it was a highway into the open air. When the day came when everyone could go out on it, when people by the tens of thousands could go up that road and through those colossal arches, they would go, they knew, not to Brooklyn, but to a place where sailing ships would glide like toys beneath their feet, where they could look down on the tallest buildings and their own mean, narrow streets and the people in them, where they could gaze out over land and water and everything man-made. “What a relief it will be from the ill-smelling streets and stuffy shops,” one man wrote. “What a happy escape from those dreadful cabins on the ferryboats! What a grand place to stretch your legs of a bright winter’s day after toiling through the streets! To go from shore to shore in one straight and jolly tramp, with the sky for a roof and the breeze for good company.”

Even before the bridge was opened it had become a symbol of something impossible to define that made New York different from every other city on earth. The bridge dominated the imagination the way it dominated the skyline, as Al Smith would say when reminiscing about his boyhood.

The view from the water, from the deck of a passing ferry or excursion steamer, a view being enjoyed daily by many thousands, was, of course, very different still. From there the elaborate and extremely interesting steel understructure was plainly visible overhead. From there, for example, one could see the wind braces Roebling had put in, something that would be hidden from the view of travelers on the bridge itself. These were cable stays designed to prevent horizontal vibrations. They were anchored to the corners of the towers, beneath the deck of the bridge, and extended diagonally under the deck to attach to the opposite side. The longest of them reached a third of the way across the central span and there were similar braces on the land spans.

But it was the over-all arc of the entire bridge that impressed people most when they saw it from the river, and again it seemed somehow above and beyond ordinary experience. Even the most so-phisticated and analytical observers felt this. An editor from Scientific American wrote, “…the bridge is a marvel of beauty viewed from the level of the river. In looking at its vast stretch, not only over the river between the towers, but over the inhabited, busy city shore, it appears to have a character of its own far above the drudgeries and exactions of the lower business levels.”

Still, the finest view of all, perhaps, was from Brooklyn Heights. Visually the bridge belonged to the Heights as it did to no other point on land.

The bridge was just far enough distant and the elevation of the Heights such that the scale of everything seemed more manageable. The towers did not loom up all out of proportion as they did from the streets of New York. There was little foreshortening of the great span. Moreover, the other essential components—the cables, suspenders, trusswork along the deck, the anchorages—could be plainly seen and in proper perspective, their function and relationship to the rest of the bridge being neither concealed nor distorted. Were one to draw a picture to explain how the bridge worked, about the easiest, clearest way would be to show it as it looked from the rear window of a house on Columbia Heights in the spring of 1883, when there was nothing on the Brooklyn side blocking the view and the skyline of Manhattan was, by later standards, quite restrained.

From the Heights it was perfectly clear why the bridge had been built. Its practicality, no less than its grandeur, was unmistakable. There below was the sparkling river and there beyond was New York, stretched out before the eye like an enormous scale model. The bridge was the way to get there. It was the great highway to New York, just as had been intended from the start. And while Brooklyn in the mind of the average New Yorker might remain an indeterminable, even dubious, destination, for everyone living in Brooklyn, New York was a known quantity and the reasons for wishing to get there—and to get back again—were quite clear.

The river now looked very different than it had in the early days of the work. Traffic was heavier, it moved faster, and there was a good deal more coal smoke trailing in the wind. The river was change itself—ships coming and going, sails turning in the sun, cloud shadows crossing over from New Jersey, gulls circling and diving, the water changing color with the sky, the other shore now very near, now distant, depending on the light or atmospheric conditions, the tides running. But over it all, triumphant and immovable, stood the bridge, seeming to hold the land in place against all change. On the one hand it was a vaulting avenue over the river, defying space and gravity like some weightless natural phenomenon (“…high over all the Great Bridge swept across the sky,” a novelist would write), but it was also fixed, deep-rooted. It was as though the two cities might drift apart were the bridge not there. The bridge kept things in place. It belonged.

There were some, of course, who for the rest of their lives would see the bridge in other ways. For them it would be an emblem of colossal greed and deception, of hideous physical torture and unbearable grief. There were people on both sides of the river who would look at its commanding silhouette and see the faces of Tweed, “Brains” Sweeny, and the rest, leering, with black eyes full of sly deception, as Nast had drawn them. There were those who would follow with their eye the path of the great cables in the sunshine (“…the arching path/ Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings of wires,…telepathy,” the poet Hart Crane would write) and think only of the bad steel woven into them forever. And there were those, in tenements back from the river, for whom the lofty towers would remain a day in summer when the broken corpse of a husband or father was brought to the door in a spring wagon.

The only major parts of the bridge that Roebling could not see from his house were the two terminal buildings and once, in late April, he had been taken by carriage to have a first look at the one in Brooklyn that McNulty had designed. The big, curved two-story building, which was to be twice the size of the station at the other end, was little more than half built then. Still it had looked most impressive, even on dingy Sands Street, where the main entrance was to be and where Roebling’s carriage stopped. A reporter who visited the New York terminal about the same time wrote of “an almost deafening din of a hundred workmen hammering away for dear life.” In Brooklyn the noise must have been twice as bad.

From here, on the upper level, the bridge trains would leave for New York. The commuter would pay his fare at one of several ornamental iron toll booths (“pretty enough for opera boxes”), then climb a broad iron stairway to the waiting platforms. The cavernous building itself, as was already apparent, was to be an extremely ornate affair, like the elevated railroad stations in New York, with all kinds of fancy ironwork, panels, pillars, molding, and row on row of plate-glass windows. Once finished, the whole building was to be painted a dark red.

The bridge trains would be much like the newest cars on New York’s elevated trains. They would have large windows, double sliding doors, open platforms in front and back, and they would appear to be self-propelled, unless one were to look between the tracks and see the steel traction cable they hooked on to. (At the time Roebling paid his visit to Sands Street, workmen were installing the two 300-horsepower horizontal steam engines that would supply the power for the cable. The engines were located beneath the Brooklyn approach, but their boilerhouse, at Washington and Prospect, with its very conspicuous smokestack, was one of the other changes brought to the neighborhood by the bridge.)

The trip across on the bridge train was to take five minutes, as John Roebling had said it would, and the fare would be five cents. A horse and rider using the roadway would also pay five cents, a horse and vehicle ten cents. The charge for cattle would be five cents each, sheep and hogs two cents. Anyone wishing to walk over by the elevated promenade would have to pay a penny, although there was a movement in Albany, started by William Kingsley, to make the bridge free to pedestrians.

Roebling did not get out of his carriage the day he came to inspect the Brooklyn terminal. After he had seen enough he was driven home again. So not once in all fourteen years did he ever set foot on the bridge.

The terminal buildings were among the several things he had had to occupy his mind during these final months, and like the electric lights or the iron railings for the promenade or the plans for the opening celebration—all things that would have seemed very much after the fact, trivial even, in times past—he gave them his full attention, concerned over every last detail, as always, the totally disciplined professional to the very end.

A contract for lighting the bridge with seventy electric arc lamps had been awarded to the United States Illuminating Company, as he had recommended. The cost was to be eighteen thousand dollars, which was several thousand less than what the Edison Company had bid for doing the job with incandescent lamps. But cost had not been the deciding factor. Roebling had concluded that the sputtering blue-white arc lamps would be superior to the Edison type for lighting large areas. *

The dynamos to furnish power for the lamps were set up in the engine room of the Brooklyn terminal. A reporter who visited this generating station as it was about to be put into service gave the following description:

The scene suggested the subterranean laboratory of a magician. Blue lights burned, invisible engines shook the ground with ponderous stroke, and a dozen grim and anxious men toiled in the ghastly glare. Around these perspiring men stood two or three directors, giving orders and hastening the work. Great belts, a yard wide, ran over dynamo pulleys at a frightful speed, and eight or ten other pulleys were awaiting new belts which were hanging slack over their shafting.

It was as though the monstrous bridge was about to be jolted to life by a sudden massive charge from this eerie laboratory, like the creature in Mrs. Shelley’s story of Dr. Frankenstein.

The lamps themselves were being mounted on posts set on top of the steel trusswork, beside the promenade, at intervals of about one hundred feet. When the night came to turn them on, it would mark the first use of electric light over a river.

As before, Emily was serving as her husband’s principal contact with the work. She was still going to the bridge regularly, and some days two and three times. There were the usual messages to deliver, answers to bring back, and things he had asked her to keep an eye out for. Once when a manufacturer had been puzzled as to how a particular part of the superstructure should be formed and had come to the Roebling house to get some questions answered, she had made a drawing to show how it could be done, carefully explaining each step. Now she could see to its proper installation as well, and any doubts there may have been among the men about her ability to pass judgment on such matters had long since vanished.

Then in early May, when the last of the superstructure was in place, the roadway at last completed, and the time had come to send a carriage across—to test the effect of a trotting horse—Roebling had asked that she be the first person to ride over. The others on the staff and in the bridge offices agreed wholeheartedly. So one fine morning she and a coachman had crossed over from Brooklyn in a new victoria, its varnish gleaming in the sunshine. She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a symbol of victory, and from one end of the bridge to the other, the men had stopped their work to cheer and lift their hats as she came riding by.

Now, the week before the bridge was to be opened, Roebling had agreed to another interview. Apparently he and Emily had decided there was little damage that could be done at this late date, provided they kept the conversation brief and pleasant, and that is the way it went.

The man was from the Union, Brooklyn’s Republican paper, which had recently made the bridge the dominant pictorial element in its logotype. His name is not known, but he wrote later that this was the first time he had seen Roebling in eleven years.

Emily received him in the library. Colonel Roebling was resting in his room upstairs, she said. He had spent the morning sitting for a sculptor who was doing a bust for the opening ceremonies and he was feeling a little tired just now.

When the reporter inquired for the Colonel’s health, she told him not to be surprised if he found her husband looking a good deal healthier than he might expect. “He is not so sick as people imagine,” she said. “The difficulty with him is that it wearies him to talk for any extended time. Any unusual exertion is sure to be followed by prostration, and the effort of talking or listening for any extended time has a very debilitating effect.”

The reporter wanted to know if Colonel Roebling would be taking part in the grand opening. No, he would not, she said. The excitement would be too much for him. “After the ceremonial at Sands Street and the procession are over, we will receive our friends here,” she continued. “Colonel Roebling will take part in the reception as long as he can stand the strain…”

She handed him an engraved invitation, a large white card from Tiffany & Co. In the upper left-hand corner was a small portrait of Roebling, resting on a laurel branch. His name and professional title were on a scroll underneath. To the right of the portrait, extending across the top of the card, as though seen in the distance, was the bridge, “in perfect detail,” as the reporter noted. The invitation itself read as follows:

THE EAST RIVER BRIDGE
will be opened to the public
Thursday, May twenty-fourth, at 2 o’clock.

Col. & Mrs. Washington A. Roebling
request the honor of your company
after the opening ceremony until seven o’clock.

110 Columbia Heights
Brooklyn

R.s.v.p.

The reporter asked if Colonel Roebling was likely to undertake any other great work, now that the bridge was finished. According to the article he wrote later, “Mrs. Roebling elevated her brows and said decisively, ‘Oh, no. This is his last as well as his greatest work. He will need a long rest after this is over. He needs it and he has certainly earned it.’”

Then she excused herself to go upstairs to see if her husband was ready to receive him. When she returned, she asked if he would please follow her.

“The writer found the Chief Engineer of the greatest suspension bridge in the world walking about his room and wearing a light spring overcoat and a soft felt hat,” he wrote. On a side table he noted “an imposing array of medicine phials.” But Roebling did indeed look better than he had expected—much better. He had put on weight and was noticeably fuller in the face and his hair and beard were streaked with gray. He was much paler, too, than he had been, and when he came forward to shake hands, his step appeared “short and a little uncertain.” But to judge by appearances, time had not been altogether unkind to Roebling, the reporter decided. “Seen at a standstill or sitting in an easy chair, with one leg thrown over the back of another, no one would suppose that this robust-looking gentleman, with massive forehead, without a wrinkle, and keen gray eye that lights up wonderfully in conversation, was a victim to one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science.” It was only in the lines around the eyes, the reporter said, that Roebling’s face revealed any traces of past suffering.

The three of them sat down and the only thing serious touched on in the conversation that followed was the question of locomotives on the bridge, a subject about which there was still some curiosity in Brooklyn but little reliable information to go by.

“There will be no difficulty about running such locomotives as they use on the elevated railroad in New York across the bridge,” said Roebling, who seemed to be having no difficulty speaking. “It was built to sustain them, and there would not be a particle of risk in it.” If anyone wanted to transfer two or three passenger cars from a railroad in Brooklyn to one in New York, using a small locomotive, that too would be possible. The bridge had been built to sustain such weight. But he was still “unalterably opposed” to full-sized locomotives. The reporter wanted to know about Pullman cars.

“Oh, don’t say that you would not consent to Pullman cars,” Emily Roebling said. “You know you promised Mr. Stranahan that Pullman cars could go across.”

At which, according to the reporter, Roebling laughed and replied, “Do you know what Mr. Stranahan wants? He wants a Pullman car to go right up to his back yard. He wants to be able to step into it at his house, ride across the bridge and up to Saratoga without changing his seat. That’s what he wants.”

Then, according to the reporter’s account, Roebling suddenly began to look very tired. Perhaps he had said too much. “I congratulate you on the successful termination of your great work,” the reporter said, standing up to leave. “I suppose this will be the last of the kind you will undertake.”

“I don’t know,” Roebling answered. “If I get well there is lots of big work in the world to do yet.” And with that the interview ended.

Plans for the great occasion were now complete. According to all accounts it was to be the biggest celebration in New York since the opening of the Erie Canal. For Brooklyn, said the Times, it was certain to be “the greatest gala day in the history of that moral suburb.” It was to be known as “The People’s Day.”

Mayor Seth Low was the one chiefly behind the idea. He had proclaimed it an official holiday in Brooklyn. He would decorate and illuminate his own home, he said, and urged all his neighbors to do the same. He called on Brooklyn business establishments to close for the day and already most of them had sent out neatly printed cards saying they would. Schools would be out, most stores would be closed.

About thirteen thousand tickets from Tiffany had been issued by the trustees. Seven thousand of them, a pale-blue color and the size of a theater thicket, were good for admittance to the bridge on the opening day. The rest, large, stiff white cards with an engraved view of the bridge, were for the ceremonies to be held inside the Brooklyn terminal.

President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and their parties were to walk over the bridge from New York, escorted by Mayor Franklin Edson, the Seventh Regiment, and a seventy-five piece band. They would be met on the bridge by an official delegation from Brooklyn and proceed to the Sands Street terminal for the formal ceremonies. James Stranahan would preside. William Kingsley, as acting president of the bridge trustees, would formally present the bridge to Mayors Edson and Low, each of whom was expected to make a few brief remarks. Then the “principal orations” of the day were to be delivered by two gentlemen selected as fitting representatives of their home cities, Abram Hewitt for New York and for Brooklyn the Reverend Dr. Storrs. After a private reception at the home of the Chief Engineer, there was to be a dinner for the President and the Governor down the street at the home of Mayor Low. A fireworks display at the bridge would begin at eight and would be followed by a public reception for the President at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The North Atlantic Squadron—the Tennessee, Kearsarge, Saratoga, Yantic, and Vandalia—had been ordered to Brooklyn to take part in the celebration. The Minnesota had already arrived and was anchored off the Battery. Guns would be fired from the Navy Yard, from Governors Island, from the warships. A theatrical promoter, Commodore Joe Tooker, had chartered the mammoth excursion steamer Grand Republic and planned to steam up and down beneath the bridge and fire guns from his deck as well. “Bell-ringing, steam-whistling, and band-playing are among the incidental attractions offered the patrons of this boat,” the papers reported.

Brooklyn wharf owners were inviting select friends to spend the evening with them on their piers. Innumerable New York business firms with offices overlooking the river were inviting favorite customers to watch from their windows. Janitors in the tallest buildings on Printing House Square were overrun by applicants for admission to their roofs. All tenants in the Morse Building, at Nassau and Beekman Streets, had been told they could watch from the roof. The tops of the Temple Court Building on the opposite corner and the Mills Building nearby were also to be open. Richard K. Fox, the flamboyant proprietor of the Police Gazette, had sent out ten thousand invitations to watch the show from his new building on Franklin Square, thinking possibly several hundred recipients might appear.

Popular interest in all this was considerable, to say the least, and the press made much of it, including the New York World, which had changed hands just the month before. Jay Gould had sold the paper to young Joseph Pulitzer of St. Louis, and the new owner not only considered the Brooklyn Bridge a historic event, in the way the Eads bridge had been, but thought the World’s previous hostility to the mammoth new structure was just plain bad publishing. The World now loved the bridge.

Indeed, the only people who seemed displeased with the arrangements being made were some of the more militant Irish, who in mid-April had suddenly realized that the 24th happened also to be Queen Victoria’s birthday and so began angrily protesting the date selected. The Central Labor Union issued a statement calling on “all good men and women in both cities to remember this latest insult of the would-be aristocratic element in our midst.” The Tribune answered that “it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to fix upon a day that did not commemorate something or other unpleasant for Ireland,” and as the appointed day drew nearer, there was talk of Irish fanatics, “Dynamite Patriots,” attempting to blow up the bridge.

The idea of a grand celebration did not much appeal to Washington Roebling either. Kingsley, too, Roebling understood, was of a like mind and had suggested to the trustees that once everything was in order they simply put up a sign saying “The Bridge Is Open.” But the other trustees had been against that, and Seth Low especially. As early as March a committee had been formed to make the arrangements.

When he heard later what was being planned, Roebling had grown extremely uneasy. If there were to be fireworks, he wrote to the trustees, then the bridge must be cleared of all spectators. If there were to be soldiers participating in parades on the main span, then they must not march in step. He was also concerned about how many people might be permitted onto the bridge once the ceremonies were over, and what the consequences might be if a mob ever got out of control.

People had been getting onto the bridge for several months now, despite the precautions taken to stop them. One evening in April a mob of boys from New York had broken through the barriers at Chatham Street, crossed over the bridge, and started hurling rocks down on the houses near the Brooklyn tower. Police converged on them from both ends of the bridge and the boys had shinnied up the suspenders and climbed down under the flooring. “The officers used their clubs in an effective manner,” according to a newspaper account the following morning, “and soon cleared the structure of the roughs.” But the whole incident was a very dangerous sign Roebling said.

There were other things he found annoying. He had been receiving inquiries, for example, from Abram Hewitt, who wanted help with his speech. In a letter written in early May (a letter in which Hewitt, or his secretary, misspelled Roebling’s name), Hewitt said he intended to take up “the social and political considerations involved in the creation of new avenues of transportation.” He wanted the engineer to send him “comparative examples of great engineering works, which would show that by scientific appliances the cost of the bridge is very much below what would be possible in any preceding age.” He wanted a table of wages from Roebling and other technical information. Hewitt planned to present the bridge as a symbol of progress.

But the builder of the bridge did not see it that way. Or perhaps he was in no mood to be of any assistance to Abram Hewitt. In any event, Roebling’s answer went as follows:

To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites. We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force. But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice. We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.

It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time. The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.

It was the sort of thing he had doubtless wished to say to Hewitt for quite some time and that he had somehow refrained from saying to the Union reporter. His concept of energy consumption was also well in advance of his time.

A week or so later Hewitt wrote again to ask for the names of all those men he ought to “particularize” in his oration and for a brief explanation of what their individual contributions had been. This request Roebling willingly answered.

For Emily it was as busy as any time since the bridge began. The reception would be all her doing. She had drawn up the guest list, decided on the design and wording of the invitation, commissioned the bust of her husband as well as an oil portrait, ordered flowers and bunting to decorate the house, planned her own entourage to attend the ceremonies, and did the best she could to protect her husband from any more last-minute nervous strain than was absolutely necessary. She was also making arrangements to vacate the house almost immediately after the reception. She had rented the house, starting in June. She, her son, and husband would return to Newport for the summer.

The reception had been her idea. If her husband could not participate in the day Seth Low and the others were planning, then she would bring them to him—the trustees, the mayors, the Governor, the President of the United States.

Her own party would ride in twenty-five carriages. She would be in the first of them, in the same victoria in which she had crossed the bridge. She would ride with her son, John A. Roebling, II. Following would be Ferdinand Roebling and his wife, Charles Roebling and his wife, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Emily’s brother William Warren from Washington, her sister-in-law Elvira Stewart, her sister, Mrs. Hook, and Eddie Roebling, now a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor living in New York. The rest were mostly personal friends.

“I wish you would make one of my party of ladies to attend the public ceremony of opening the big bridge,” she wrote to a Mrs. William G. Wilson of New York. “I want the ladies to meet at my house at one o’clock on Thursday and go in a procession down to the bridge—sort of opposition to the Presidential procession on the New York side you know!

“Wear short dresses and bonnet—as I shall even at the reception. I want you to help me receive after the public performance is over.”

The mail arriving at the house was full of notes of congratulations and grateful acceptances for the reception. On May 18 came still one more letter to Roebling from Abram Hewitt. To the Chief Engineer it must have seemed one last absurd insult to end on. Hewitt had hoped to be able to pay his respects following the ceremony, he said. “But as I am to dine with the Mayor it is barely possible that the interval will not be sufficient, in which case I pray you and Mrs. Roebling to accept the will for the deed.” Then he said, “Will you kindly give me the full name of Mrs. Roebling…”

On Saturday night, May 19, to test the lights before the opening day, the hidden dynamos were turned on, and people returning to Brooklyn by ferry between eleven and midnight were suddenly astonished to behold overhead a great display of light across the bridge from city to city. Whether they knew it or not, they were looking up at the future—steel and electricity.

24

The People’s Day

A festival so unique New York has seldom seen…

—Harper’s Weekly

ESTIMATES were that fully fifty thousand people from out of town came into the city that morning by train But probably that many again were arriving by boat. The Mary Powell had all she could carry. A Fall River steamer that docked at eleven had six hundred passengers on board and the boat from Stonington had that number or more. One iron steamer from New Haven carried a thousand people. How many private boats and “special excursions” came into the harbor was anyone’s guess. By midday all the major hotels were sold out.

The weather was perfect. “A fairer day for the ceremony could not have been chosen. The sky was cloudless, and the heat from the brightly shining sun was tempered by a cool breeze.” Countless flags snapped overhead all up and down Fifth Avenue and along Broadway, where the President was to pass. Buildings were draped in red, white, and blue, with banners and bunting floating from rooftops and window ledges, and most stores had some sort of display in their windows. In Madison Square, across from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where the President and several of his Cabinet had spent the night, thousands of people were waiting, milling about under the trees or walking round and round the enormous torch and hand of the Statue of Liberty, which had been brought up from Philadelphia after the close of the Centennial.

At nine the fence across the Chatham Street entrance to the bridge had been torn down by workmen and replaced by a solid line of police. In another hour it was almost impossible to get within two blocks of the bridge. The streets leading to the river were packed solid with people. City Hall Park and Printing House Square were overrun. Every available rooftop and window was filled and along the river front there was scarcely a place left to stand.

The huge wagons that hauled milk and produce into the city had arrived as usual during the night, but loaded instead with country people, as many as twenty to a wagon, and now with their sunburned faces and bewildered looks they stood out plainly in the sea of people. “One moment they were clambering clumsily up the sides of stoops or balancing themselves insecurely on fences, and next they were pushing their way, with half awe-struck faces, through the crowds in the gutter out into the street itself,” wrote a reporter. “The crowd impressed them with awe, the buildings and flags with admiration, but the consuming desire of their heart was to see the President, the Governor, and other political magnates.”

There were as well, it seems, an abnormally large number of “symmetrical, shapely, graceful, elegant, neat, bright-eyed and comely women in brilliant costumes and resplendent colors,” and these remarkable creatures were “pushed, jostled, and inextricably mixed with ungainly, uncouth, and ill-favored women.” And in turn, they were all swayed back and forth and “jumbled up” with ragged men, with “rural swains” in frock coats and green ties, and with the unperturbed, self-contained New Yorker in dark suit and derby. “Embroidery, lace, fringe, trimmings and skirts were rent and torn by the friction of the crowd,” and the large corsages, which many of the women wore when they started out that morning, were, after a half hour’s experience in the crowd, crushed and torn to pieces. And everywhere, with or without adults in attendance, were “myriads of all sorts of children,” none of whom, for some miraculous reason or other, was trampled to death.

Vendors hawked gumdrops, bananas, flags, pictures of John A. and Washington Roebling, bridge buttons and commemorative medals that sold for fifteen cents. It was a great day too for circulating all kinds of advertisements. Thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, fans, and handbills having the bridge as a decorative element or part of the text were handed out and tucked away in dresser drawers later on as mementos of the historic occasion. By noon, down by the bridge itself, the blue tickets issued by the Bridge Company were selling for five dollars apiece. Liquor stores and saloons were doing three times their normal business. And at the Police Gazette building a riot was under way. Better than a thousand “sporting men” having responded to publisher Richard Fox’s invitation, the place was packed to the rooftop. Already the “guests” had consumed several hundred bottles of champagne and whiskey, devoured a barbecued ox, and were busily smashing up the furniture for fun when the police arrived to clear the building.

Schools were officially open in New York that day, but it would have been difficult to find a classroom that was not empty. And although the Stock Exchange too was open, the half-dozen brokers still on duty there had little to do but watch the visitors in the galleries. Elsewhere any business not closed by noon had been left in the charge of a few lonely clerks.

At the Custom House, Chester A. Arthur’s old domain, things were extremely quiet. The Post Office was open, but it too was as still as Sunday. Federal courts were closed and the only people inside the County Courthouse on Chambers Street were twelve jurors who had been locked up all night trying to agree on a verdict. At noon, gongs clanged on the floors of the Produce, the Cotton, the Maritime, the Mercantile, and the Coffee exchanges and all business promptly ceased. In less than an hour these buildings were empty, their doors locked. About the only place in town where business continued as usual was Castle Garden. It was remarked that only a storm on the North Atlantic ever stemmed the tide of immigration.

Why there was quite so much excitement in New York, some observers were at a loss to explain. For Brooklyn people the bridge had a great deal of importance obviously enough, but for these throngs, the Times noted, “there could have been no special cause of congratulation, since not one in one thousand of them will be likely to have occasion to use the new structure except for curiosity.”

No one will ever know when or how the story started. But possibly it was that morning, while the city waited for Chester A. Arthur to emerge from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, that one or more of those numberless countrymen in the crowd “purchased” the Brooklyn Bridge from some new-found city friend and thereby made an everlasting contribution to American folklore. Or perhaps it was one of the dark-eyed, mustachioed men being processed at Castle Garden, some brand-new aspiring American with his belongings tied up in string, who at the end of his very first walk in the New World that bright morning arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of the bridge in time to be taken. Or maybe the story simply started in the imagination of some contemplative onlooker who, after studying the people pressing by, concluded the large part of them would believe anything, buy anything, even the Brooklyn Bridge itself.

The sun was barely up in Brooklyn before the streets were swarming with people. Virtually every single house and building downtown had a flag flying from its rooftop or hung from a window. Or if not a flag then a string of Chinese lanterns. Along Fulton Street and on the Heights most buildings were covered with streamers and bunting. There were flags in all 120 windows of City Hall. The dome of the courthouse was “gorgeous in its dress of flying colors.” In City Hall Square the decoration that attracted the most attention was one in front of the Park Theater showing a straggling village of Brooklyn in 1746, the primitive ferry of 1814, then the completed bridge of 1883, and after that a view of the East River as it would look in 1983 with a hundred bridges spanning it. Joralemon Street on the Heights, Remsen, Montague, and Pierrepont, the streets running toward the river, were banked with flags and bunting. And in the little parks at the ends of these streets, at Columbia Heights, the trees were filled with Chinese lanterns and most of the biggest houses had lanterns strung all the way from basement to roof.

Every store window along Fulton, from the ferry to City Hall, on both sides of the street, and every doorway were decorated. A jeweler had made a miniature bridge with gold chain for the cables. A florist had made a bridge eight feet long, complete with bridge trains and boats passing below, all of flowers. Store windows carried framed portraits of the Chief Engineer and his father, Henry Cruse Murphy, Mayor Low, and General Slocum. And a sign in one window recalled something said a long time before: “Babylon had her hanging garden, Egypt her pyramid, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Athenaeum; so Brooklyn has her Bridge.”

On the Heights the two most elaborately decorated private homes were those of Seth Low and Washington Roebling, the two places where the President was to be a guest. Clusters of silk flags were in the mayor’s windows and over his spacious doorway hung the flag of Brooklyn. Down the street, toward the bridge, the entire front of the Chief Engineer’s house was covered with flags, shields, flowers, and the coat of arms of New York and Brooklyn. Over the street, suspended high enough for carriages to pass beneath, was one immense American flag.

The river in the distance below was probably the most arresting spectacle of all. The water was actually a bright blue and it looked that morning as though every variety of ship afloat had gathered in a great, elongated flotilla that extended from the bay to somewhere upstream beyond the bridge. Flags were flying from the masts of ships tied up at the wharves below and along the opposite shore. “It was as if the forest of masts had blossomed beneath the influence of the young spring sunshine into a thousand gorgeous dyes. Everywhere the eye glanced there floated from, and almost concealed the network of rigging, flags and banners and signals and streamers…. All the vessels anchored in the stream were likewise a mass of fluttering color above their dark hulls.”

Sometime before noon the Atlantic Squadron came steaming up from the bay and into the river below the bridge, with the flagship, the Tennessee, anchoring about on a line with the Wall Street ferry. The others were strung out behind in a line reaching nearly as far as Governors Island and they too were covered with bunting and their crews of bluejackets could be seen quite plainly from the Brooklyn shore. One man later described how the gold trimmings on the officers’ uniforms flashed in the sun.

The ferries kept churning back and forth to New York the whole morning and were packed with people. On the Fulton Ferry it was just about impossible to move an arm or leg. Hundreds of people, it seems, had decided that the best possible way to witness the day’s events was to stick right on board and keep riding back and forth.

About noon there was a great surge toward Sands Street. Within half an hour at least ten thousand people had crammed into the narrow streets near the Brooklyn terminal, and a force of several hundred police, formed in a hollow square in front of the building, had all it could do to hold back the crowd. As in New York, vendors were everywhere, only here there seemed more of them, and along with pictures and commemorative medals, they were selling sheet music about the bridge and a variety of little facsimiles done in metal, wax, or confection. “On the whole it was a good-natured crowd,” wrote one observer.

Brooklyn’s part of the actual ceremonies got under way from City Hall at forty minutes past noon. The Twenty-third Regiment band in bright-red coats, followed by the Twenty-third Regiment in white helmets and blue coats, followed by a detachment of Fifth Artillery from Fort Hamilton and Marines from the Navy Yard, who in turn were followed by two hundred and some city officials, bridge trustees, and special guests, all in a body, led by the young mayor in a tall silk hat and followed by Mrs. Washington Roebling and her party in carriages, headed off down Remsen Street in the direction of the river, crossed Clinton, turned right at the next corner, onto Henry, and marched to the bridge. Their entire route was lined with crowds four and five deep. There were people looking down from rooftops and packed onto door stoops as mounted officers went clattering by and as one by one a great many familiar Brooklyn faces passed in review—ex-Comptroller Ludwig Semler…Judge McCue…Alfred Barnes…James Stranahan…William Kingsley…At Sands Street, where the police had cleared a path for them, all but a few of the civilians went directly into the station building, while the Twenty-third Regiment, Seth Low, William Kingsley, and a dozen others, at the command of “Route Step,” marched out onto the bridge.

When the Erie Canal was opened in the autumn of 1825, there were four former Presidents of the United States present in New York City for the occasion—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—as well as John Quincy Adams, then occupying the White House, and General Andrew Jackson, who would take his place. When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened on May 24, 1883, the main attraction was Chester A. Arthur.

Grover Cleveland, the portly new governor, was also there, and he, of course, would be the next President, but nobody knew that then and few even speculated on the prospect. In fact, if there was excitement about Cleveland’s presence that May morning, it was mostly because people were anxious to see what the man looked like. The only other noteworthy figure to look for was Abram Hewitt, who was never exactly a crowd-pleaser.

But the strapping Arthur was considered a New Yorker and he looked like a President if any man ever did. When he stepped into the sunshine from the main entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel at twelve forty, the response from the crowd was overwhelming. On his arm was Mayor Edson, an erect, gray, scholarly-looking man in gold-rimmed spectacles. A few steps behind were Grover Cleveland and Henry Slocum, all smiles and arm in arm now.

Arthur was dressed in black frock coat, white tie, and a flat-brimmed black beaver hat that he kept taking off in response to the ovation. “The women in the crowd raised their hands above the heads of the men and waved their handkerchiefs,” wrote one of the dozens of reporters covering the event, “and from the swarming windows on either hand similar feminine signals of hearty welcome met the Chief Magistrate’s eye as he stepped into his open carriage.” Cleveland went unrecognized for several minutes, but then he stood up in his carriage and lifted his hat, and the people, having concluded who he was, responded wholeheartedly.

The procession moved off, the “Dandy” Seventh Regiment and its band and a mounted police escort leading the way. Twenty-five carriages went rolling down Fifth to 14th Street, then east on 14th as far as Union Square, where they turned south again, down Broadway to City Hall. The greatest crowds anyone could remember seeing in New York lined the sidewalks and Chester A. Arthur, it would appear, was beloved by one and all. If he was not exactly a Jefferson or a Jackson nobody seemed to mind in the least.

It was one thirty when the procession wheeled into City Hall Park, where the press of people was almost beyond control. In another ten minutes Arthur and Cleveland had stepped down from their carriages and participated in a review of sorts. Then everyone formed up behind the Seventh Regiment, and with the band playing for all it was worth, everybody set off for the bridge on foot.

The historic ceremonial march to Brooklyn was made on the elevated promenade, but the roadways to either side of the promenade had already been opened to ticket holders and so thousands upon thousands of people lined the way. The band and soldiers went first, in route step as specified. Bayonets glinted in the sunshine and the music, whatever it was, had a decided effect on the dark-suited civilians. “It was a cheerful, jingling air which seemed to put life into the feet,” wrote a spectator.

Up on the New York tower a lone photographer was busily at work under a black hood.

Arthur, it was said, “trod the pathway with an elastic step” and “looked with evident admiration at the structure opening up to view.” (The next day a Broadway shoe merchant took space in the papers to announce that his “easy walking” shoes, made on patented lasts, had been “tested” at the opening of the bridge by President Arthur.) Cleveland was described as having a “wobbling gait,” like a London alderman.

Just before the New York tower the Seventh Regiment halted, formed into two lines at the right of the promenade, and presented arms as the President passed by. William Kingsley, who had been waiting with a delegation of trustees in the shadow of the arches, removed his hat and stepped forward to grasp the President’s hand. There was then a lively exchange of greetings and introductions, while the band played “Hail to the Chief” four times.

Guns were booming at Fort Hamilton and the Navy Yard as they all started out onto the main span. For Mayor Low and his Brooklyn reception committee, waiting beneath the opposite tower, only the heads of the lead men in the band could be seen as the procession approached—because of the gentle upward bow of the bridge. But as they came on, the heads gained shoulders and brass instruments. The oncoming figures not only grew larger as the distance narrowed, but more of each figure came steadily into view. They seemed to be coming up out of the planking of the promenade, the way approaching ships rise out of the horizon. Soon they had legs and feet and were on the downhill side of the span. Behind them, meanwhile, the solitary photographer on the New York tower had wheeled about 180 degrees and was back at work under his hood again. The band was playing full blast and the crowds on the carriageways to either side were cheering and waving as Arthur, “an Apollo in form,” trod by overhead. “The President ran his eye around the horizon with the air of one appreciating the happy combination of the works of God and man. He filled his lungs with the refreshing breeze…”

Just before the Brooklyn tower the soldiers again parted ranks for the others to pass through. Seth Low made the official greeting for the City of Brooklyn, the Marines presented arms, a signal flag was dropped nearby and instantly there was a crash of a gun from the Tennessee. Then the whole fleet commenced firing. Steam whistles on every tug, steamboat, ferry, every factory along the river, began to scream. More cannon boomed. Bells rang, people were cheering wildly on every side. The band played “Hail to the Chief” maybe six or seven more times, and as the New York Sun reported, “the climax of fourteen years’ suspense seemed to have been reached, since the President of the United States of America had walked dry shod to Brooklyn from New York.”

Under the arched roof of the great iron terminal some six thousand people were waiting. Enormous American flags hanging overhead were the only decorations but shafts of sunshine slanted through the long banks of windows and fell on the crowd like floodlights. The President and the Governor were to sit on a raised platform along the west side of the building, while directly opposite was a section for the trustees, city officials, clergy, and speakers of the day. Everyone else was packed onto a temporary wooden floor between these sections.

At the sight of Arthur “the great multitude in the station arose and gave vent to the wildest enthusiasm.” Handkerchiefs, parasols, and hats were waved in the air. The shouting even drowned out the band.

Presently James S. T. Stranahan began rapping for order with his cane and Bishop A. N. Littlejohn of Long Island stood up to offer a prayer.

All afternoon, as the speeches dragged on, thousands of men, women, and children went walking back and forth across the bridge, stopping now and then to exchange greetings with friends on neighboring housetops or to gaze down the smokestacks of the excursion steamers that floated slowly under the bridge with the outgoing tide. People were saying the ferries looked like water bugs from such a height. They waved to the crowds on the ferries and the crowds on the ferries waved back. Everybody seemed on a holiday. They joined arms. Some sang. Rooftops all along the river had been converted into “summer gardens,” in the expression of the day, where thousands more spent the afternoon drinking beer, singing, and enjoying the glorious sunshine.

What was it all about? What was everyone celebrating? The speakers of the day had a number of ideas. The bridge was a “wonder of Science,” an “astounding exhibition of the power of man to change the face of nature.” It was a monument to “enterprise, skill, faith, endurance.” It was also a monument to “public spirit,” “the moral qualities of the human soul,” and a great, everlasting symbol of “Peace.” The words used most often were “Science,” “Commerce,” and “Courage,” and some of the ideas expressed had the familiar ring of a Fourth of July oration. Still, everything considered, the speeches were quite appropriate on the whole and revealed much about the way people felt about the day and the bridge. The only real problem was that most of the audience never heard a word that was said, the big open-ended terminal being about the worst imaginable place to hold such a ceremony. There was no way to close off the din from outside and even under the best of circumstances the acoustics would have been miserable. For anybody sitting more than fifty feet from the speakers’ stand, which meant nearly everyone, it was more like watching men go through the motions of making a speech.

Kingsley, the first speaker, got up very slowly, his long, rigid figure seeming to unfold like a telescope, as someone remarked. He looked deadly serious the whole time and kept his head down as he read his speech. But the audience had its attention fixed on the ceiling to his right, where a flagstaff had come loose at one end and was swinging to and fro, its shiny brass spear aimed straight down. The people directly below were packed in so tightly that nobody could move out of the way and it was impossible to reach the spear. So there it stayed swinging ever so gently and silently as one by one the speakers went through their pantomime orations.

Mayor Low was next after Kingsley and as he stepped to the rostrum one well-dressed woman sitting nearby was heard to exclaim, “Why he is no more than a boy!” The Eagle said later he was more like the valedictorian of the day and complimented him on his excellent voice, which apparently some people could actually hear. True or not, President Arthur was seen to yawn behind his fan, then whisper something to Secretary of State Frelinghuysen, which made them both laugh, and farther down the line, Secretary of the Treasury Folger appeared to be taking a nap.

Mayor Low was not very long about what he had to say and Mayor Edson, who held his speech in kid gloves, took even less time, which may have accounted for the enormous cheer when he sat down. At that point Stranahan was about to introduce Hewitt, the main speaker, apparently having forgotten that Jules Levy, a cornet player, was supposed to be next on the program. But the smiling Levy stepped forward all the same and as the Times reported “put the great multitude in a good humor” by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Secretary Folger was seen to wake up and on the last note the crowd cheered so mightily that Levy did “Hail Columbia” as an encore. Again there was an ovation, but when Levy looked as though he was going to play still one more time, Stranahan seized him by the arm and led him off the platform. The audience was greatly disappointed by this and Levy looked furious. When Stranahan started to introduce Hewitt, Levy, from off stage, began playing “Yankee-Doodle.” There was a roar of laughter and Chester A. Arthur appeared to be more pleased by this part of the program than any other. Levy took his time on the last notes, while Stranahan, a man with no music in his soul, according to one account, just stood glumly waiting.

About the time Stranahan finished introducing Hewitt, a shaft of sunlight had fallen on the Presidential head and neck, whereupon an Army officer appeared from somewhere with a lady’s parasol, which he held over the portly Arthur until the close of the exercises. The World, now a Democratic paper, said he looked like an Asiatic potentate under the parasol.

It was also remarked that Abram Hewitt looked pale and rather “delicate” when he got up to speak, and by the time he finished, the audience had grown tired and extremely restless. But then the final speaker, the Reverend Dr. Storrs, was standing where Hewitt had been, a handsome, vibrant figure with flowing gray locks, who obviously felt at home before such a vast assembly and who punctuated every sentence with a nod, from the waist up, as if driving home each statement with his forehead. Storrs spoke for nearly an hour.

All told, the speeches, prayers, and cornet solos ran to nearly three hours and the Bridge Company’s gold-embossed commemorative booklet containing the full text of everything said runs to 122 pages. Neither Chester Arthur nor Grover Cleveland said a word from the rostrum; they had not been asked to speak nor did anyone expect them to. They were there as honored guests only, to watch and listen and enjoy themselves. Nor did anyone make any public mention of the Queen’s birthday.

Hewitt’s address would be generally regarded in retrospect as the most successful of the day and was probably the finest he ever gave. He himself liked it so much that he had it published as a pamphlet three years later for his mayoralty campaign against Henry George and Theodore Roosevelt. But every speaker that afternoon seemed to be saying that the opening of the bridge was a national event, that it was a triumph of human effort, and that it somehow marked a turning point. It was the beginning of something new, and although none of them appeared very sure what was going to be, they were confident it would be an improvement over the past and present.

Henry Murphy, the assistant engineers, “the humblest workman,” were all praised by one speaker or another and Kingsley, Seth Low, and Hewitt each in his way extolled the genius of the Roeblings. Hewitt compared John A. Roebling to Leonardo da Vinci but said Colonel Roebling was an even greater engineer than his father. Then he solemnly declared that the name of Emily Warren Roebling, a name he had not been quite sure of the week before, would be forever “inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature, and with all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.”

Hewitt said, too, that he could vouch for the manner in which all bridge business had been conducted, that no money had been stolen by Tweed, that the whole money raised had been “honestly expended,” which was the part of his speech that drew the warmest response from those up front and on the platform. And disregarding, or perhaps misunderstanding, Roebling’s skeptical remarks about progress since the Pyramids, he compared the $2.50 day’s pay of the average bridge worker with the wage scale of ancient Egypt, which he figured at two cents a day in 1883 money. That in Hewitt’s view was real progress. The bridge was a vindication, a heroic and monumental end result of modern industrialism, of labor and capital, of democracy, of new “methods, tools and laws of force”—of the nineteenth century. Even the Times, never an admirer of Abraham Hewitt, liked this part of his speech.

But it was the neatly combed little valedictorian, Seth Low, who came closer than anyone that day to expressing what was probably everyone’s most deeply felt response to the bridge. “The beautiful and stately structure fulfills the fondest hope,” he said. “…The impression upon the visitor is one of astonishment that grows with every visit. No one who has been upon it can ever forget it…. Not one shall see it and not feel prouder to be a man.”

The Chief Engineer had sat alone at his window, his field glasses trained on the bridge, watching the procession until the last top-hatted figures at the tag end passed beneath the arches of the Brooklyn tower. Then he had stretched out on his bed for a rest. Sometime near four Emily had returned, having left the Sands Street terminal midway through the speeches. He put on a Prince Albert coat and went downstairs on her arm, to the front parlor, where they took a seat on the sofa and waited for the first guests to arrive. But it was nearly five thirty before President Arthur alighted from a carriage at the canvas canopy outside. The crowd in the street by then was such that the police were just able to keep a narrow path open to the door.

The house was decorated as if for a wedding. Both mantels in the drawing room were banked with red and white roses, wisteria, white lilacs, and in the center were clusters of calla lilies. On either side of the folding doors was a huge shield of roses. There were more roses and lilacs in gilt baskets and vases of cut flowers distributed through every room. And the balustrade on the stairway was trimmed with smilax all the way to the top floor.

There were busts of both the Chief Engineer and his father standing on one drawing-room mantel. On the elder Roebling’s white marble head Emily had placed a wreath of immortelles, while the one of her husband wore a laurel wreath decorated with tiny American flags and a white satin ribbon on which she had had printed in red and blue: “Chief Engineer Washington A. Roebling, May 24, 1883. Brooklyn Bridge. Let him who has won it bear the palm.”

A band was playing on a balcony above the drawing room, on the river side of the house, and through the doors beneath the balcony, out in the garden overlooking the river, stood a grand marquee and long tables of food and refreshments.

Emily and Washington Roebling stood side by side, just inside the parlor door, as the President and Seth Low entered the room together. “The engineer was pale, but he showed no excitement,” one observer noted. She was dressed in heavy black silk, trimmed in crepe, with a knot of violets in her belt. She was described by the papers as beautiful and vivacious.

It was said the President warmly congratulated the engineer as they shook hands. After that people kept pressing through the door in great numbers. In all there were more than a thousand guests, including Grover Cleveland, the two mayors, all the speakers of the day (Abram Hewitt did make an appearance, after all), Mr. and Mrs. William C. Kingsley, General and Mrs. Henry Slocum, Stranahan and his wife, all the other trustees and wives, the assistant engineers, Ferdinand and Charles Roebling and their wives, Elvira Stewart, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Moses Beach from next door, Simeon Chittenden, Henry Pierrepont, A. S. Barnes, William Sellers of the Edge Moor Iron Company, Ludwig Semler, former Mayor Grace, Judge McCue, Hamilton Fish, William Evarts, Congressman Flower, and the Reverend and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher.

Roebling remained standing only ten minutes or so, then went back to the sofa, where he sat, not saying much, Emily beside him. The President meanwhile gave all the appearance of having a splendid time. He tapped his foot to the band music, admired the flowers, went out into the garden, shook a great many hands, and stayed perhaps an hour in all. Once he was gone, Roebling excused himself and there was a burst of applause as he went slowly back up the stairs. The reception lasted another hour or more after that, but for Roebling his first and last ceremonial duty as Chief Engineer was over.

Everyone on both sides of the river was waiting for dark. Those whose job it was to describe the scene in words went to great lengths to do it justice. One reporter who was out on the bridge wrote that the innumerable boats and ships on the river looked like a sleeping city. Another man who was also on the bridge wrote this:

As the sun went down the scene from the bridge was beautiful. It had been a perfect day. Up and down on either side of New York the bright blue water lay gently rippling, while to the south it merged into the great bay and disappeared toward the sea. The vast cities spread away on both sides. Beyond rolled the hilly country until it was lost in the mists of the sky. All up and down the harbor the shipping, piers, and buildings were still gaily decorated. On the housetops of both Brooklyn and New York were multitudes of people…

The great buildings in New York loomed up black as ink against the brilliant background of the sky. The New York bridge pier looked somber and gloomy as night. But in Brooklyn the blaze of the dying sun bathed everything gold. The great building looked like burnished brass…the west the sun sent its last tribute to the bridge in a series of great bars of golden light that shot up fanlike into the blue sky. Gradually the gold melted away, leaving the heavens cloudless. The sky was a light blue in the west, but grew darker as it rose, until it sank behind Brooklyn in a deep-sea blue.

Slowly the extremities of the twin cities began to grow indistinct…. The towers of Brooklyn lost their golden hue. They seemed to sink slowly into the city itself. In New York the outlines of the huge buildings became wavering and indistinct.

Then one by one the series of electric lights on the bridge leaped up until the chain was made from Brooklyn to New York. Dot by dot flashes of electric lights sprang up in the upper part of New York. The two great burners at Madison and Union Squares flared up, and the dome of the Post Office in New York set a circlet of diamonds out against the relief of the sky. The streets of the two cities sparkled into life like the jets on a limitless theatrical chandelier, and the windows of the houses popped into notice hundreds at a time. Long strings of lanterns were run over the rigging of the shipping in the harbor, and red and green port and starboard lights seemed numberless. The steamers sped to and fro on the water, leaving long ripples of white foam, which glistened in the light like silver.

In Brooklyn every public building was ablaze with gaslight. The Music Academy had a gas-jet rendition of the bridge out front. Houses draped with Chinese lanterns looked like Christmas trees. There were strings of lanterns over Montague Street and a block over, on Pierrepont, the Historical Society windows were lighted with hundreds of candles. Columbia Heights was nearly as bright as day with gaslights, lanterns, candles. Simeon Chittenden had a big sign in front of his house done in gas jets—“Welcome to Brooklyn’s Guests”—but as the President was driven past later in the evening, a gust of wind blew out half the letters.

Every street on the Heights looked like a carnival. Indeed the crowds in both cities were far greater now than at any time earlier in the day. No traffic was moving anywhere near the river. Uptown New York and the inland sections of Brooklyn were all but deserted. Where there had been a hundred people watching by the river during the day, now there were a thousand, or at least so it seemed. The Times estimated there were 150,000 people just in the neighborhood of City Hall.

Suddenly a solitary rocket shot into the sky over Columbia Heights and burst into a spray of blue stars. It had come from the mayor’s house, where the dinner for the President had been going on.

Almost instantly the lights on the bridge went out. For a moment not a thing could be seen of it. Then there was a long, distant hissing sound, a sudden roar, and fifty rockets exploded simultaneously high over the main span of the bridge, while at least twenty bombs burst higher still, from above the towers, and poured down great showers of gold and silver. “From an elevated point the city seemed to be in volcanic action, with the spouting crater on the suspension bridge.”

At its final meeting on May 14, as its last official act, the Executive Committee of the Bridge Company had contracted with the New York firm of Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, to put on a display of fireworks “worthy of the place and the occasion.” In all, fourteen tons of fireworks—more than ten thousand pieces—were set off from the bridge.

It lasted a solid hour. There was not a moment’s letup. One meteoric burst followed another. Rockets went off hundreds at a time and were seen from as far away as Montclair, New Jersey. Bombs exploded incessantly above the towers, bathing the bridge in red. In the strange light, firemen on the bridge could be seen in strong silhouette and the water from their hoses looked like molten silver. Meantime, innumerable gas balloons were being sent aloft. They were fifty feet in circumference and loaded with fireworks and as they swung into the sky, one by one, they scattered balls of colored fire over the river.

At each burst of a rocket a huge roar went up from the shores. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching—probably the biggest crowd ever gathered in New York until that time—and nobody, in all his days, had ever seen anything like this.

Nearly every boat on the water was making some sort of noise or display. Rockets and fireworks were shooting up from the middle of the river and down the bay. On one big excursion steamer, ablaze with lights, a calliope was shrieking out “America.” Bands were playing on board other boats.

Rockets were going up all over New York meantime—and in Brooklyn. From the middle of the bridge now came great thunderclap reports as zinc balls, fired from mortars, burst five hundred feet up, fairly illuminating the two cities, like sustained lightning.

And finally, at nine, as the display on the bridge ended with one incredible barrage—five hundred rockets fired all at once—every whistle and horn on the river joined in. The rockets “broke into millions of stars and a shower of golden rain which descended upon the bridge and the river.” Bells were rung, gongs were beaten, men and women yelled themselves hoarse, musicians blew themselves red in the face. And then when it was all over and nearly quiet again and the boats on the river were beginning to untangle themselves, there was one last memorable touch that not even Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, could have arranged. “Hardly had the last falling spark died out,” wrote an editor who had been watching from the top of the Tribune Building, “when the moon rose slowly over the further tower and sent a broad beam like a benediction across the river.”

The grand reception for the President at the Music Academy, which began almost immediately after the fireworks, was considered a great success. The President, Grover Cleveland, William Kingsley, General Slocum, and twenty or thirty others stood on the stage, surrounded by a small forest of potted palms, while the people of Brooklyn were permitted to pass by and pay their respects. The procession lasted until ten. Arthur was in fine humor still, bowing, smiling, playing his part exactly as everybody would have wanted him to. And one member of his Cabinet was heard to remark, “Why I thought that Brooklyn had one hotel and a shipyard or two, but it’s quite a town.”

It had been announced in advance that the bridge would be thrown open to the public at the stroke of midnight and that anyone might cross upon payment of one cent. Enormous crowds had gathered at both ends.

At eleven twenty two young men with blond mustaches raised the windows of the Brooklyn toll booths and H. R. Van Keuren—a good Brooklyn name, reporters decided—was the first to put his money in the box. The first lady to cross was a Mrs. C. G. Peck of Baltic Street. The first vehicle from the Brooklyn side was an old-fashioned top-wagon drawn by a bony white horse whose large white hooves came down on the bridge floor with a noise like the discharge of musketry. The driver was a Charles Overton from Coney Island, who had been waiting at the gate for two hours and who also managed to make the first trip across from the New York side, since the gates there opened ten to fifteen minutes later than those in Brooklyn.

A fierce struggle ensued at the New York gates, characteristically, and perhaps it was altogether appropriate that the first man through was the Keeper of the City Hall. Once he was beyond the gate, there was an even more violent rush from behind. Police began swinging their clubs and several people had been rather roughly treated by the time the whole crowd—perhaps three thousand people—was strung out in along orderly line.

People poured across the bridge through the entire night and were still coming with the first light in the sky. According to a count kept by the Times, the first beggar to cross came over from Brooklyn, as did the first drunk, the first policeman, the first hearse (which was empty), the first “dude,” the first Negro, and the first musician, a Scottish bagpiper who marched over playing “The Campbells Are Coming.”

How late the Chief Engineer and his wife stayed up watching from their window, who may have been with them during the evening, what they said to each other, or what reflections went unsaid as bombs and rockets burst over the bridge, can only be guessed at.

In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Epilogue

FOR NEARLY fifty years after it was completed the Brooklyn Bridge reigned supreme as the most magnificent, if not technically the largest, suspension bridge on earth.

In its initial days as a public thoroughfare it was commonly referred to as “The Eighth Wonder of the World” and it was an even greater sensation than anyone had expected. On its first full day, May 25, 1883, a total of 150,300 people crossed on foot and 1,800 vehicles went over carrying an unknown number of others. The following day, a Saturday, the count was down. But on Sunday, May 27, a spectacular spring day, 163,500 people went “strolling” on the Great Bridge. One veteran New York policeman said he had never in all his experience seen such crowds. “It seems to me as if the people have got the bridge craze,” he said.

And then, tragically, on Thursday, May 31, a week to the day after the bridge was opened, the very thing Roebling had warned against happened.

It was Memorial Day, a holiday in both cities, and the weather was ideal. There had been thousands on the bridge all morning. But C. C. Martin had allowed pedestrian traffic on both carriageways and that had taken pressure off the promenade until some time near three thirty when the crowds began to build rapidly. Probably twenty thousand people were on the bridge by four, or the approximate time of the panic. When it was all over, twelve people had been trampled to death.

The trouble began at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading to the promenade at the end of the New York approach. A crowd pressing up the stairs was running head on into another crowd coming in the opposite direction, from the New York tower. There were fifteen steps in all, broken into two flights by a landing just seven feet wide. When the two oncoming throngs met there, it was virtually impossible for anyone to move either way and people approaching from behind, in both directions, kept trying to shove their way forward.

But from what several eyewitnesses said later, it seems some sort of order might have been restored had not a woman coming down the stairway lost her footing. Another woman began to scream at the top of her lungs and there was an immediate rush to see what was happening. Those who were packed onto the stairway tried desperately to hold back the crowd but it was impossible. In an instant three or four more lost their balance and fell. Meanwhile, the crowds farther back on the promenade kept advancing, nobody knowing what was going on up ahead, and in a moment the whole stairway was packed with dead and dying men, women, and children. People were shrieking and screaming and those who suddenly found themselves at the brink of the stairway and saw what was happening turned to shout for those behind to move back, but then they too lost their step and went over on top of the trampled bodies below. The most terrifying crush was on the promenade just back from the top of the stairs. Numerous people had their clothes torn off. In places, it was reported, people were jammed so tight that blood oozed from their noses and ears.

Hats, umbrellas, gloves, shoes, loose change, fell between the bridge train tracks and rained down on the housetops and streets below. Among a group of boys playing in the streets was Al Smith. “That was my first view of a great calamity,” he said later. “I did not sleep for nights.”

Other explanations would be given later. It would be said that somebody out in the middle of the bridge began to scream that it was falling. It would be said a gang of “roughs” from New York had started pushing and shoving people. Probably there is some truth to both accounts.

Lawsuits as a result of the accident added up to half a million dollars, but no negligence was proved. A coroner’s jury reprimanded the Bridge Company for the narrowness of the stairway and for employing too few police. The Bridge Company blamed the newspapers for having created an “undefined feeling of insecurity” about the bridge, but promptly doubled the number of police on the promenade.

C. C. Martin remained in charge. He was officially named Chief Engineer on July 9, 1883, after Roebling had submitted his formal resignation, and he would hold that job until 1902, devoting, in all, thirty-three years of his life to the bridge.

Martin’s full force for operating and maintaining the bridge was comparable in size to that needed for a large ship or fair-sized factory of the day. He had one assistant engineer, a chief mechanical engineer, who had charge of the steam engines and rope traction, three assistant mechanical engineers, three oilers, and three firemen. There were six locomotive engineers, six locomotive firemen, one master of transportation, forty-five conductors, a superintendent of tolls, nineteen collectors, one trainmaster, four train dispatchers, four yardmen, and five switchmen. A master machinist had charge of the machine shop and locomotives. There were two blacksmiths, a foreman of carpenters with “a force of men changing with the exigencies of the work,” a foreman of car repairs and inspector of grips, a foreman of labor and general work, one captain of police, one sergeant, three roundsmen, and eighty-six policemen. Counting Martin, the grand total came to 201 full-time employees.

The bridge trains began running in September and worked to perfection. By the time it was a year old 37,000 people a day were using the bridge, or very nearly as many people as fourteen ferries were handling the year it was begun. In their first full year of service the bridge trains carried 9,234,690 passengers, but then the completion of the Brooklyn Elevated to Fulton Ferry more than doubled the patronage. In 1885 the bridge trains handled nearly twenty million passengers. The trains ran twenty-four hours a day and by 1888, just five years after the bridge was built, they were handling more than thirty million passengers a year. The terminals were expanded, more cars were put into service. Furthermore, the ferries were still in business, to the surprise of people, and would be for a long time to come. The last Brooklyn ferry, between Hamilton Avenue and the Battery, stopped running on June 30, 1942.

In May of 1884, P. T. Barnum, “in the interest of the dear public,” took a herd of twenty-one elephants, including the famous “Jumbo,” over the bridge to Brooklyn and thereupon declared that he, too, was now perfectly satisfied as to the solidity of the masterpiece.

And inevitably, perhaps, there were certain individuals who would see the bridge as a challenge to their manhood or as a means of doing away with themselves. The bridge was scarcely in full operating order before they began leaping from it, for glory or oblivion, and frequently with the unintended result.

The first to try for glory was Robert E. Odium, a brawny swimming instructor from Washington, D.C. On May 19, 1885, to divert the bridge police who were waiting to stop him, Odium sent a friend onto the bridge to go through the motions of jumping. Then he came riding up in a closed carriage, stepped out, climbed onto the railing, and, dressed in trunks and a bright-red swimming shirt, jumped to his death, with one arm thrust straight over his head, the other clamped firmly to his side.

Steve Brodie, the only man ever to become famous for jumping from the bridge, probably never did. He was a personable, unemployed Irishman in his early twenties, who, not long after Odlum’s much publicized failure, began boasting that he would be the next to jump. Bets were made along the Bowery, but just when Brodie intended to jump remained a mystery. Then on July 23, 1886, it was announced he had done it and lived to tell the tale. Several friends said they had been witnesses, that they had watched him plummet straight into the river, where he was picked up by a passing barge. But nobody else had seen his jump and it was commonly said among the skeptics, of whom there were a great many, that a dummy had been dropped from the bridge and that Brodie merely swam out from shore in time to surface beside the passing barge.

Brodie was put in jail briefly for his supposed feat, then opened a saloon that became a favorite Bowery stop for sight-seers and slumming parties. In the main barroom hung a large oil painting of the bridge and there for all to see was Brodie plunging toward the water. For further historical documentation, there was a framed affidavit from the barge captain who claimed to have rescued the hero.

But Steve Brodie’s jump from the Brooklyn Bridge would be fixed forever in the public imagination by a play called On the Bowery, which opened in 1894. Brodie was the star and his big scene was a leap from the bridge, done with all sorts of elaborate special effects, only this time it was to save the girl, who had been thrown off by the villain. The play was a smash hit and eventually toured the country. A bridge sweeper sang a moral ballad, Brodie sang “My Pearl’s a Bowery Girl!” (“My Poil’s a Bowery Goil!”) and, for encores, a song called “The Bowery,” written for an earlier production, which became a standard part of every performance.

Brodie became rich and famous, but died of diabetes at age thirty-six or thereabouts, in 1901. For years after his celebrated jump people kept asking him why he did not do it again, only this time with reliable witnesses. His answer was always the same: “I done it oncet.”

Others kept on trying. Larry Donovan, a pressman at the Police Gazette, was the first to jump successfully. He went over the side wearing a red shirt like Odlum and a pair of baseball shoes. In 1887 James Martin, a painter’s assistant on the bridge, fell off and lived and the following year a young man named Byrnes jumped to impress his girl friend and he too lived. In 1892 Francis McCarey jumped and was killed, but it seems that was what he wanted, so probably he ought to be considered the first suicide.

Then there was a man who jumped wearing a derby hat and was still wearing it when he surfaced in the river quite unharmed and another man who went off wearing immense canvas wings. He sailed a thousand feet upstream before landing safely on the water. But by the turn of the century the jumping craze had ended.

The bridge remained a subject of endless fascination for almost everybody who saw it. For the millions of immigrants arriving in New York through the 1880’s and 1890’s and on into the new century, it was one of the first things to be seen of the New World as they came up the bay. It was one of the landmarks they all looked for, the great world-famous symbol of the faith that was literally moving mountains. And the fact that it had been designed by an immigrant and built largely by immigrant workers did much naturally to enhance its appeal.

In truth there is really no end to the number of things the bridge meant to people. For whole generations growing up in New York and Brooklyn it was simply a large, dominant, and generally beloved part of the natural order of things. The river without the bridge or Brooklyn without the bridge would have been unthinkable and year after year people went to it on especially fine days, or at moments of personal stress or joy, the way people go to a mountain or walk beside the sea.

For countless people their first walk on the bridge would remain one of childhood’s earliest memories. Countless others would tell how it was the place where they fell in love. No doubt it very often was. Al Smith was among those who loved to sing “Danny by My Side,” the opening line of which runs “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers’ lane.”

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the most popular of the many novels to be written with a Brooklyn setting, a young World War I soldier from Pennsylvania says, “I thought if ever I got to New York, I’d like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.” It was something felt by whole generations of Americans before and since. They would come from every part of the country, take photographs of it and from it with one of the new Kodak cameras introduced not long after the bridge was finished, or buy some of the stereopticon views that sold by the millions. They would ride bicycles across, take honeymoon strolls by moonlight, carry newborn babies proudly down the promenade, or scatter the ashes of the dearly departed from the middle of the main span.

It was a place to go on stifling summer evenings, to take some exercise to and from work, to walk the baby, to watch the gulls, to find relief from the city. Its promenade was and would remain one of the most exhilarating walks on the continent. To be on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine day, about halfway between the two towers, looking over the harbor and the city skyline, was to be at one of the two or three most soul-stirring spots in America, like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Just why this bridge, more than all others, has had such a hold on people is very hard to pin down. But in the years since it opened it has been the subject of more paintings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and photographs than any man-made structure in America. There are probably a thousand paintings and lithographs of the bridge by well-known artists alone. * It has been the setting for scenes in films, for Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, and for all kinds of advertising. (It would seem that a whole chronological display of female fashions in America, since the advent of photography, could be assembled just from pictures posed on the bridge year after year.) It has been used repeatedly on postcards, Christmas cards, book jackets, posters, record jackets. It has been the symbol for a New York television network and for a popular Italian chewing gum.

There have been songs about the bridge, besides the one Al Smith liked, and a great many poems, nearly all of which have been less than memorable. The one notable exception is The Bridge by Hart Crane, who, in the 1920’s, to identify as closely as possible with his subject, moved into Washington Roebling’s old house at 110 Columbia Heights. In Crane’s powerful but not altogether coherent masterpiece, the bridge is seen as a shining symbol of affirmation at the end of an epic search through the American past. It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming.

The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

The towers, he believed, would outlast everything else on either shore, and he asked his readers to imagine some future archaeologist surveying the ruins of New York, “a mastless river and a dispeopled land.” The cables and roadway would have long since disintegrated, he said. The Roeblings would be as forgotten as the builders of the Pyramids. Only the towers of the Great Bridge would remain standing and the archaeologist would have “no other means of reconstructing our civilization.” “What will his judgment of us be?”

Henry James, writing soon after the turn of the century, would see something darkly ominous in the looming silhouette of the bridge and its shuttling trains. New York for him had become a “steel-souled machine room,” the end product of which was “merciless multiplications” and the bridge was a “monstrous organism,” marking the beginning of a new age. For James the prospect was chilling.

By the 1920’s, however, the bridge was a unique source of “joy and inspiration” for the critic Lewis Mumford.

The stone plays against the steel; the heavy granite in compression, the spidery steel in tension. In this structure, the architecture of the past, massive and protective, meets the architecture of the future, light, aerial, open to sunlight, an architecture of voids rather than solids.

The bridge proved, he said, that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness. It was something done exceedingly well by Victorian America. “All that the age had just cause for pride in—its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible—came to a head in Brooklyn Bridge.”

Others, later, would see it as a symbol of liberation, of release from the “howling chaos” on either shore. It would be said that at heart it was a monumental embodiment of the open road, the highway call, the abiding rootlessness that runs in the American grain—“not so much linking places as leaving them and shooting untrammeled across the sky.” And an age that can no longer regard it as an engineering marvel has declared it a work of art. One prominent contemporary American architect has gone so far as to say it is one of the two works of architecture in New York of any real importance, the other one being Central Park.

It has also, of course, been taken quite for granted by millions who use it regularly and quite sentimentally by some. It can be seen as merely one of a number of different ways to get to or from Brooklyn or as the grandest sort of memento of a New York that was, a serene, aspiring emblem rising out of an exhilarating and confident age too often remembered solely for its corruption and gimcrackery. It can be seen as the beginning of modern New York—of monumental scale, of structural steel—or the end of old Brooklyn. It is all these. And possibly its enduring appeal may rest on its physical solidity and permanence, the very reverse of rootlessness. It says, perhaps, as does nothing else built by Americans before or since, that we had come to stay.

For Brooklyn, on a more practical level, it did everything its proponents had promised. It stimulated growth, raised property values, and provided a safe, reliable alternative to the ferries. It put Brooklyn on the map.

Rush hours at the terminals were like nothing ever witnessed before, not even at the old Fulton Ferry slip in Brooklyn, not even on the uptown platforms of New York’s elevated trains. Certainly there was little semblance of the smooth, efficient transfer of humanity that John A. Roebling had pictured. But the bridge also withstood the Blizzard of 1888; it carried trolley cars, along with everything else, when they were installed on the carriageways and elevated trains when they replaced the cable cars. It accommodated ever greater numbers of people year by year. But it was not enough.

In 1903 the Williamsburg Bridge was completed upstream from the Navy Yard, from designs by an RPI man with the old Brooklyn name of Leffert Lefferts Buck. Heavy, ungainly-looking, built entirely of steel with a stiffening truss no less than forty feet deep, it was four and a half feet longer than the Brooklyn Bridge, which meant it was now the world’s largest suspension bridge. One of the assistant engineers was C. C. Martin’s son, Kingsley Martin, and the cables were of Roebling wire. Wilhelm Hildenbrand and Charles Roebling were in charge of the cable making.

Six years later, when the Brooklyn Bridge was handling half a million people a day, two more bridges were finished. The Manhattan, another suspension bridge, was built almost side by side with the Brooklyn Bridge, just upstream. The Queensboro Bridge, a cantilever, took a route John A. Roebling once considered, over Blackwell’s (now Welfare) Island.

More than a dozen tunnels were built beneath the river for subways, railroads, water lines, and automobiles. * And for these reasons primarily Brooklyn changed beyond anyone’s imagining.

In 1898 with a population of nearly a million people and still the third-largest city in the United States, Brooklyn had relinquished its independence to become a borough of New York. By 1930 Brooklyn’s population was greater than that of Manhattan. Old Brooklyn families had become an infinitesimal minority, the Heights a tiny picturesque but inconsequential segment of a Brooklyn that spread over eighty-nine square miles, or four times the area of Manhattan. Even the name Brooklyn became synonymous with things never heard of before the turn of the century—the Dodgers, Murder Incorporated—and the butt of innumerable jokes. One favorite vaudeville remark about the bridge went, “All that trouble, just to get to Brooklyn.”

In 1931 the George Washington Bridge was completed over the Hudson with a span more than twice that of the Brooklyn Bridge and six years later the Golden Gate Bridge, larger and still more awesome, was built at the opposite end of the continent. By contrast to such gleaming creations, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed an antique and there was even talk of tearing it down.

In 1944 the elevated trains stopped running over the bridge and the old iron terminal buildings were dismantled. A team of engineers began a painstaking examination of the entire structure to see what ought to be done about it. When they had concluded their studies two years later, it was announced that all the bridge needed was a new coat of paint.

Washington Roebling did not live to see the bridge eclipsed by the George Washington or Golden Gate Bridges, both of which were built with Roebling wire, but he came very close to it. Ironically—incredibly—the crippled, tormented legendary Chief Engineer lived on until 1926. He outlasted them all—Hewitt and Seth Low, each of whom became mayor of New York; Stranahan, who lived to be ninety and to see a statue of himself put up in Prospect Park; Kingsley, who died only a few years after the bridge was built, of a nervous stomach at age fifty-two; Eads, who died in 1887, while trying to enlist support for a fantastic ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; Slocum, whose name would be remembered for one of the worst disasters in American history, the burning, in 1904, of the General Slocum, a New York excursion steamer; and every one of the assistant engineers, each of whom, except for Martin, went his own separate way professionally once the bridge was finished.

On the night Seth Low was defeated for re-election as mayor of New York, Roebling came up from Trenton to watch the returns in front of the Herald building and was very pleased by the results. But all he ever said for attribution concerning the old management of the bridge was that so far as he knew no money had ever been stolen—a decidedly different conclusion, of course, from what he said in his private notes years before. His exact statement, written at age seventy-eight, in a letter to an old friend then compiling a Trenton history, was this: “So far as I know not a dollar was stolen politically or otherwise. There was no thievery—no political robbery or peculation. In spite of the assertions of all the newspapers to the contrary. It is the unscrupulous press that makes most of the trouble.”

He seems to have kept in touch with his former assistants over the years. McNulty named a son after him and Hildenbrand did a good deal of engineering work for John A. Roebling’s Sons. Hildenbrand, in fact, had quite a life after he left Brooklyn. He built the Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado, directed the complete renovation of the Ohio River bridge at Cincinnati, and built a suspension bridge of his own, of about the same span as the Ohio River bridge, at Mapimi, Mexico. Not long after Hildenbrand died, in 1908, Roebling wrote, “Soon I will be the last leaf on the tree.”

For four years after the completion of the bridge, he and Emily lived in Troy, in order to be near their son, who was then at Rensselaer. Roebling spent his time quietly. Often the old pains and cramps returned with a vengeance and he felt himself a “used-up man.” Still the sustained separation from both the bridge and the wire business seemed to be what was needed. His health improved gradually but steadily.

In the spring of 1888, when his son was graduated, the three of them moved back to Trenton. John went to work at the mill and was married the following year. In the meantime, plans were drawn up, to Emily’s specifications, for a “commodious mansion in the Tudor style,” which Roebling had built for her on West State Street, on grounds sloping down to the Delaware River. The house took several years to finish. It was a great baronial affair of huge gables and towering brick chimneys, and on the street side there was a big stained-glass rendition of the Brooklyn Bridge, complete with clouds sailing by and ships passing below. At night, all lit up, this window was considered one of Trenton’s “sights” and for years people went out of their way to see it.

They moved in in 1892. She bought the most expensive carriages and the finest horses, which she insisted always on driving herself, her coachman seated behind her. For a number of years she seems to have had quite a good time. She entertained often and beautifully to judge by some old clippings from the Trenton society columns. She became active in women’s clubs. She studied law at New York University and received her degree. She worked on a book about Cold Spring. * She went to Europe twice. The first time they went together, but the second time, in 1896, she went without him and to Russia as well, where she was one of the few Americans present at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra. A formal photograph of Emily Roebling in the dress she wore to the coronation shows an erect, confident-looking woman in her early fifties, a little stout but rather regal herself in silvery white satin.

From Roebling’s correspondence during these years, one gets a picture of him living in semiseclusion, privately very proud of her accomplishments, absorbed in all manner of interests—his mineral collection, his greenhouse, bird-watching, astronomy, the paleontological history of New Jersey. He also wrote a two-hundred-page biography of his father, which he misplaced and which was never found, most unfortunately. His one recreation was riding the trolleys, which he seems to have enjoyed enormously, riding out into the nearby countryside to look for wild flowers. And these he could identify and refer to by their Latin names as readily as a trained botanist.

When he felt well enough, he traveled with her—to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not, and to New York, where they went out on the bridge together unnoticed.

He read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle’s six-volume Frederick the Great, which he had read before as a young man, and Tolstoy, his favorite. He followed the stock market and made a very great deal of money at it.

He also kept an attentive eye on the wire business, in which he was again a major stockholder, but drew no salary. He liked to take his lunch at the office, which was the old family home long since so built over and swallowed up by the mills that it was barely identifiable. He was always available for his opinion and his opinion carried some weight apparently. Once when his brothers were all for selling out to U. S. Steel, he said no and that was that. But his relations with his brothers were always strained. Ferdinand was so bothered by the grand new house when it was first finished that he refused to enter it. For two years Ferdinand and he did not speak.

His one male confidant was his son, but communication with him had to be carried on by mail. John had lasted only a short time in the wire business. It is impossible to tell just what went wrong. The official explanation was that John had retired because of his health. But it was commonly said in Trenton that family affections and loyalties (if there were any) stopped at the door of the Roebling works. If a young man did not measure up inside, or if there were personality conflicts, then he departed rapidly, even if his name was Roebling.

Years before, Edmund Roebling, youngest of old John’s sons, had been unable to get along with Ferdinand and was “kicked out,” according to Washington Roebling. “He was now adrift with too much money, became a globe-trotter, and was somewhat dissipated.” Edmund never returned to Trenton, never married, lived on in seclusion on the Upper West Side of New York.

Emily’s health began to fail about the time the new century began. It would be said later that the strain of her experiences in Brooklyn was the principal cause. Her eyes gave her trouble at first and she took to wearing dark glasses. In the fall of 1902 Roebling went into Roosevelt Hospital in New York for some intestinal surgery and in early December, in Trenton, while he was still recuperating, she had a collapse of some sort. The doctors said she had stomach ulcers and were not encouraging. He kept going back and forth to Trenton from the hospital, a torturous trip for him, to be with her for a day or two at a time.

An additional night nurse was hired in early February. He was home to stay by then and joked with her about renaming the house Roebling Hospital. Though pitifully weak, she refused to give up and announced she would go to the mineral baths at Sharon Springs, New York. But she never did. She died of cancer of the stomach on February 28, 1903, and was buried at Cold Spring. He was too weak to make the trip.

In the file of Roebling’s letters kept by his son there is an envelope marked “Undated notes, clippings, etc, found among W.A.R.’s papers after his death.” Among the items in the envelope is a much-worn paper on which Roebling had copied in pencil an epitaph Mark Twain inscribed on the grave of his daughter:

Warm Summer Sun shine kindly here

Warm Summer Wind blow softly here

Green Sod above, lie light, lie light

Good night, Dear heart, good night, good night.

For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.

The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject. Time was cheating him out of everything, he lamented, even his identity. When the family decided to erect a larger-than-life-size statue of the old man and the sculptor said the few photographs on hand were not suitable, Roebling agreed to pose. He sat several times, his head turned as though studying some distant horizon, a sheaf of plans on one knee. When the finished bronze was unveiled with much to-do in Trenton’s Cadwalader Park in 1908, a great many people came up to tell him how much it looked like him.

To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again, that same year. She was a widow of about his own son’s age, Mrs. Cornelia Witsell Farrow of Charleston, South Carolina. How they happened to meet, when, or how long he had been contemplating marriage are all unclear. “…these relationships are those of the heart, not governed by reason or judgment,” he had written to John. “A second marriage late in life cannot be judged by the standard of the first because its motives are usually quite different.” John and the rest of the family heartily approved of the decision once he announced it, and of Mrs. Farrow, who, it was said, helped him “take a less gloomy view of things.” The Colonel even “became at times almost jovial.”

He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said. His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his letters to John he complained repeatedly of physical torment and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw. He was seized with a terror of contracting tetanus and dying like his father. “And yet people say how well you look,” he wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again. An editor of the New York Times wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”

When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams. “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.” When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind. “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him. We can all play at that game. It means perpetual universal war.”

And still he carried on, writing long, affectionate letters to John, taking solitary walks down West State Street. “War in the kitchen as usual,” he reported to John in August of 1916. “The cook touched the laundress’s smoothing iron. War to the Knife, peace impossible—damages 5 strands of hair, 4 aprons torn, 2 scratches. Starvation threatens!” Somebody was watering his whiskey.

His “oddities” became a favorite topic of conversation in Trenton. When he and Cornelia dined out at the homes of friends or one of his brothers, he would frequently proceed, without a word of explanation, to make himself comfortable on the nearest sofa and go fast asleep. He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.

He wrote his correspondence on anything at hand—a scrap of cheap note paper, the back of an old invitation, some stray bit of Emily’s stationery found in a bottom drawer. His handwriting, again as perfect as copperplate, was so small that most of his aged friends were unable to read it without a magnifying glass.

When out on his walks he was known to step into a gateway or to appear suddenly fascinated by the contents of a store window if he thought he could avoid a conversation. The standard explanation locally was that the Roeblings were all a little odd that way, but the fact was that talking was often physically painful for him. Strangers were constantly stopping him on the street. Often a mother or father with a small boy in tow would ask if the boy might shake his hand and years later these same boys would remember him as “a nice, courteous old gentleman.” Among beggars and other Trenton people interested in charity he was known as a soft touch.

There seems to have never been a day of his life in all the years following the bridge when he did not know some kind of physical discomfort or outright pain. Privately, like old men everywhere, he was preoccupied with his health, as well as material possessions he no longer had any use for.

Nature remained his solace. He had planted a grove of Siberian crab apples behind the house. “Four have agreed to bloom one year,” he wrote, “and four the next year. How good they are.” He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.

Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after. Karl G. Roebling, Ferdinand’s oldest son, was named head of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But three years later Karl dropped dead on a golf course. Within days it was decided that there was only one person left who could possibly take charge of the vast industrial empire.

The New York and Brooklyn papers made much of the announcement. “A little old soldier of eighty-four, Col. Washington A. Roebling, the man who built Brooklyn Bridge and the son of the man who planned it, is fighting today his last fight,” wrote the New York World, “is fighting to get his work done in spite of all his enemies—illness, debility, pain, loneliness, bereavement, the terrible depression of the man who has outlived his generation.”

Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. “I claim a small part of this as the result of my management,” he confided to his son. Others credited him with more than a small part.

He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog. His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone. He had no secretary, preferring to handle his correspondence himself, which he wrote always in longhand. He was all but blind in one eye, almost totally deaf, and weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He looked so frail, so very old, like Lee in his final photographs, with the same snow-white beard and sunken eyes, that people wondered how in the world he could possibly manage, knowing, as most everybody did, what he had been through in his life. But the extraordinary thing is he did not simply manage. He was highly innovative, forceful, and seemed to know absolutely all there was to know about every facet of the business. He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move. An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River—among other bridges—was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.

In one interview he was asked how he was able to carry on. “Because it’s all in my head,” he answered. “…It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job. You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”

In 1924 at the request of the Butler County Historical Association he sat down and wrote a detailed account of the early days of Saxonburg, and to a correspondent he wrote, “Long ago I ceased my endeavor to clear up the respective identities of myself and my father. Many people think I died in 1869.”

The house next door was sold and torn down. Electric street lights were installed along West State Street. “The Great White Way in Trenton has come our way,” he wrote in despair. “Every 50 ft. will be installed a huge arc lamp to light up the front of the house and keep us from sleeping.” His own downward progress he described as accelerative, like gravity.

In the spring of 1926 it was obvious to every one that he was failing rapidly. By May he was down to less than a hundred pounds. “Think not that I am improving—growing weaker daily—body racks with pain—head bowed down in sheer apathy—bones crack when rolled over—fall down when I try to stand. Please leave me alone—and in peace,” he wrote to John’s wife. But then he added a P.S.: “A surprise: for several years—ten—a night-blooming cereus stalk has been knocked about in the greenhouse. Last night it suddenly bloomed, was brought to my bedside at 10 P.M. A delicate odor filled the room—a wonderful flower—much larger than a rose. A calyx filled with snow-white petals curved outward and oval-pointed. This morning it is gone—to sleep the sleep of ages again.”

He lingered on for two more months. The only thing he had left, he said, was his brain and for that, he added, he was extremely grateful.

He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside. There is no record of any last words being said. The end came at three thirty in the afternoon.

All of the bridges built by John A. Roebling are gone now except two—the Cincinnati Bridge and an aqueduct over the Delaware built in 1848 above Port Jervis, New York, which has been converted into an automobile bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge in America. His house at Saxonburg still stands, however, as does the church he built there and a small shed in which the first reels of iron wire were stored. John A. Roebling’s Sons has since been sold to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

Washington Roebling’s house on West State Street was offered to the state of New Jersey to be used as the governor’s mansion, but the offer was declined because it was felt that the upkeep would be too costly. The house was torn down in 1946 to make room for a parking lot. The house at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn has also been torn down. His mineral collection, which numbered some sixteen thousand pieces and included all but four of the known minerals on earth, was given by his son to the Smithsonian Institution.

As he had requested, Roebling was buried at Cold Spring, beside Emily. No statues were put up in his honor. The graves were very plainly marked.

In 1948 D. B. Steinman and his New York engineering firm were retained by the city to prepare plans to increase the highway capacity of the Brooklyn Bridge. With some fifty men assigned to the project, an extensive remodeling was carried out over a number of years. The trolley and el tracks were removed, the roadways were widened to three lanes in each direction, and additional trusswork was built. The changes, which cost more than nine million dollars, altered the over-all appearance of the bridge very little.

In 1964 the bridge was officially declared a National Historic Landmark. It now carries more than 121,000 trucks and automobiles a day and on the average Sunday, in good weather, more than a thousand people go walking or bicycling on the promenade, which is still the only one of its kind. There are bronze plaques on both towers, beside the promenade, listing the names of John A. and Washington A. Roebling, the trustees, the assistant engineers, and the master mechanic. The plaques were put up when the bridge was first completed. In the time since, two more plaques, one for each tower, have been added to honor Emily Roebling.

The towers themselves, though long since dwarfed by the skyline of downtown Manhattan, remain unique. Nothing to compare to them has been built in America. Since the towers of the mammoth suspension bridges built in the twentieth century are of steel, the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are both the first and the last monumental stone gateways on the North American continent.

A combined force of some thirty men looks after the bridge. It gets a new coat of paint every five years or so and according to the engineers at the New York Department of Public Works, of all the bridges on the East River, it is the one that gives them the least trouble. With normal maintenance, say the engineers, the bridge will last another hundred years. If parts are replaced from time to time—even entire cables if necessary, which would be perfectly possible—then, “As far as we are concerned, it will last forever.” Perhaps it will.

Epilogue

FOR NEARLY fifty years after it was completed the Brooklyn Bridge reigned supreme as the most magnificent, if not technically the largest, suspension bridge on earth.

In its initial days as a public thoroughfare it was commonly referred to as “The Eighth Wonder of the World” and it was an even greater sensation than anyone had expected. On its first full day, May 25, 1883, a total of 150,300 people crossed on foot and 1,800 vehicles went over carrying an unknown number of others. The following day, a Saturday, the count was down. But on Sunday, May 27, a spectacular spring day, 163,500 people went “strolling” on the Great Bridge. One veteran New York policeman said he had never in all his experience seen such crowds. “It seems to me as if the people have got the bridge craze,” he said.

And then, tragically, on Thursday, May 31, a week to the day after the bridge was opened, the very thing Roebling had warned against happened.

It was Memorial Day, a holiday in both cities, and the weather was ideal. There had been thousands on the bridge all morning. But C. C. Martin had allowed pedestrian traffic on both carriageways and that had taken pressure off the promenade until some time near three thirty when the crowds began to build rapidly. Probably twenty thousand people were on the bridge by four, or the approximate time of the panic. When it was all over, twelve people had been trampled to death.

The trouble began at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading to the promenade at the end of the New York approach. A crowd pressing up the stairs was running head on into another crowd coming in the opposite direction, from the New York tower. There were fifteen steps in all, broken into two flights by a landing just seven feet wide. When the two oncoming throngs met there, it was virtually impossible for anyone to move either way and people approaching from behind, in both directions, kept trying to shove their way forward.

But from what several eyewitnesses said later, it seems some sort of order might have been restored had not a woman coming down the stairway lost her footing. Another woman began to scream at the top of her lungs and there was an immediate rush to see what was happening. Those who were packed onto the stairway tried desperately to hold back the crowd but it was impossible. In an instant three or four more lost their balance and fell. Meanwhile, the crowds farther back on the promenade kept advancing, nobody knowing what was going on up ahead, and in a moment the whole stairway was packed with dead and dying men, women, and children. People were shrieking and screaming and those who suddenly found themselves at the brink of the stairway and saw what was happening turned to shout for those behind to move back, but then they too lost their step and went over on top of the trampled bodies below. The most terrifying crush was on the promenade just back from the top of the stairs. Numerous people had their clothes torn off. In places, it was reported, people were jammed so tight that blood oozed from their noses and ears.

Hats, umbrellas, gloves, shoes, loose change, fell between the bridge train tracks and rained down on the housetops and streets below. Among a group of boys playing in the streets was Al Smith. “That was my first view of a great calamity,” he said later. “I did not sleep for nights.”

Other explanations would be given later. It would be said that somebody out in the middle of the bridge began to scream that it was falling. It would be said a gang of “roughs” from New York had started pushing and shoving people. Probably there is some truth to both accounts.

Lawsuits as a result of the accident added up to half a million dollars, but no negligence was proved. A coroner’s jury reprimanded the Bridge Company for the narrowness of the stairway and for employing too few police. The Bridge Company blamed the newspapers for having created an “undefined feeling of insecurity” about the bridge, but promptly doubled the number of police on the promenade.

C. C. Martin remained in charge. He was officially named Chief Engineer on July 9, 1883, after Roebling had submitted his formal resignation, and he would hold that job until 1902, devoting, in all, thirty-three years of his life to the bridge.

Martin’s full force for operating and maintaining the bridge was comparable in size to that needed for a large ship or fair-sized factory of the day. He had one assistant engineer, a chief mechanical engineer, who had charge of the steam engines and rope traction, three assistant mechanical engineers, three oilers, and three firemen. There were six locomotive engineers, six locomotive firemen, one master of transportation, forty-five conductors, a superintendent of tolls, nineteen collectors, one trainmaster, four train dispatchers, four yardmen, and five switchmen. A master machinist had charge of the machine shop and locomotives. There were two blacksmiths, a foreman of carpenters with “a force of men changing with the exigencies of the work,” a foreman of car repairs and inspector of grips, a foreman of labor and general work, one captain of police, one sergeant, three roundsmen, and eighty-six policemen. Counting Martin, the grand total came to 201 full-time employees.

The bridge trains began running in September and worked to perfection. By the time it was a year old 37,000 people a day were using the bridge, or very nearly as many people as fourteen ferries were handling the year it was begun. In their first full year of service the bridge trains carried 9,234,690 passengers, but then the completion of the Brooklyn Elevated to Fulton Ferry more than doubled the patronage. In 1885 the bridge trains handled nearly twenty million passengers. The trains ran twenty-four hours a day and by 1888, just five years after the bridge was built, they were handling more than thirty million passengers a year. The terminals were expanded, more cars were put into service. Furthermore, the ferries were still in business, to the surprise of people, and would be for a long time to come. The last Brooklyn ferry, between Hamilton Avenue and the Battery, stopped running on June 30, 1942.

In May of 1884, P. T. Barnum, “in the interest of the dear public,” took a herd of twenty-one elephants, including the famous “Jumbo,” over the bridge to Brooklyn and thereupon declared that he, too, was now perfectly satisfied as to the solidity of the masterpiece.

And inevitably, perhaps, there were certain individuals who would see the bridge as a challenge to their manhood or as a means of doing away with themselves. The bridge was scarcely in full operating order before they began leaping from it, for glory or oblivion, and frequently with the unintended result.

The first to try for glory was Robert E. Odium, a brawny swimming instructor from Washington, D.C. On May 19, 1885, to divert the bridge police who were waiting to stop him, Odium sent a friend onto the bridge to go through the motions of jumping. Then he came riding up in a closed carriage, stepped out, climbed onto the railing, and, dressed in trunks and a bright-red swimming shirt, jumped to his death, with one arm thrust straight over his head, the other clamped firmly to his side.

Steve Brodie, the only man ever to become famous for jumping from the bridge, probably never did. He was a personable, unemployed Irishman in his early twenties, who, not long after Odlum’s much publicized failure, began boasting that he would be the next to jump. Bets were made along the Bowery, but just when Brodie intended to jump remained a mystery. Then on July 23, 1886, it was announced he had done it and lived to tell the tale. Several friends said they had been witnesses, that they had watched him plummet straight into the river, where he was picked up by a passing barge. But nobody else had seen his jump and it was commonly said among the skeptics, of whom there were a great many, that a dummy had been dropped from the bridge and that Brodie merely swam out from shore in time to surface beside the passing barge.

Brodie was put in jail briefly for his supposed feat, then opened a saloon that became a favorite Bowery stop for sight-seers and slumming parties. In the main barroom hung a large oil painting of the bridge and there for all to see was Brodie plunging toward the water. For further historical documentation, there was a framed affidavit from the barge captain who claimed to have rescued the hero.

But Steve Brodie’s jump from the Brooklyn Bridge would be fixed forever in the public imagination by a play called On the Bowery, which opened in 1894. Brodie was the star and his big scene was a leap from the bridge, done with all sorts of elaborate special effects, only this time it was to save the girl, who had been thrown off by the villain. The play was a smash hit and eventually toured the country. A bridge sweeper sang a moral ballad, Brodie sang “My Pearl’s a Bowery Girl!” (“My Poil’s a Bowery Goil!”) and, for encores, a song called “The Bowery,” written for an earlier production, which became a standard part of every performance.

Brodie became rich and famous, but died of diabetes at age thirty-six or thereabouts, in 1901. For years after his celebrated jump people kept asking him why he did not do it again, only this time with reliable witnesses. His answer was always the same: “I done it oncet.”

Others kept on trying. Larry Donovan, a pressman at the Police Gazette, was the first to jump successfully. He went over the side wearing a red shirt like Odlum and a pair of baseball shoes. In 1887 James Martin, a painter’s assistant on the bridge, fell off and lived and the following year a young man named Byrnes jumped to impress his girl friend and he too lived. In 1892 Francis McCarey jumped and was killed, but it seems that was what he wanted, so probably he ought to be considered the first suicide.

Then there was a man who jumped wearing a derby hat and was still wearing it when he surfaced in the river quite unharmed and another man who went off wearing immense canvas wings. He sailed a thousand feet upstream before landing safely on the water. But by the turn of the century the jumping craze had ended.

The bridge remained a subject of endless fascination for almost everybody who saw it. For the millions of immigrants arriving in New York through the 1880’s and 1890’s and on into the new century, it was one of the first things to be seen of the New World as they came up the bay. It was one of the landmarks they all looked for, the great world-famous symbol of the faith that was literally moving mountains. And the fact that it had been designed by an immigrant and built largely by immigrant workers did much naturally to enhance its appeal.

In truth there is really no end to the number of things the bridge meant to people. For whole generations growing up in New York and Brooklyn it was simply a large, dominant, and generally beloved part of the natural order of things. The river without the bridge or Brooklyn without the bridge would have been unthinkable and year after year people went to it on especially fine days, or at moments of personal stress or joy, the way people go to a mountain or walk beside the sea.

For countless people their first walk on the bridge would remain one of childhood’s earliest memories. Countless others would tell how it was the place where they fell in love. No doubt it very often was. Al Smith was among those who loved to sing “Danny by My Side,” the opening line of which runs “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers’ lane.”

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the most popular of the many novels to be written with a Brooklyn setting, a young World War I soldier from Pennsylvania says, “I thought if ever I got to New York, I’d like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.” It was something felt by whole generations of Americans before and since. They would come from every part of the country, take photographs of it and from it with one of the new Kodak cameras introduced not long after the bridge was finished, or buy some of the stereopticon views that sold by the millions. They would ride bicycles across, take honeymoon strolls by moonlight, carry newborn babies proudly down the promenade, or scatter the ashes of the dearly departed from the middle of the main span.

It was a place to go on stifling summer evenings, to take some exercise to and from work, to walk the baby, to watch the gulls, to find relief from the city. Its promenade was and would remain one of the most exhilarating walks on the continent. To be on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine day, about halfway between the two towers, looking over the harbor and the city skyline, was to be at one of the two or three most soul-stirring spots in America, like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Just why this bridge, more than all others, has had such a hold on people is very hard to pin down. But in the years since it opened it has been the subject of more paintings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and photographs than any man-made structure in America. There are probably a thousand paintings and lithographs of the bridge by well-known artists alone. * It has been the setting for scenes in films, for Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, and for all kinds of advertising. (It would seem that a whole chronological display of female fashions in America, since the advent of photography, could be assembled just from pictures posed on the bridge year after year.) It has been used repeatedly on postcards, Christmas cards, book jackets, posters, record jackets. It has been the symbol for a New York television network and for a popular Italian chewing gum.

There have been songs about the bridge, besides the one Al Smith liked, and a great many poems, nearly all of which have been less than memorable. The one notable exception is The Bridge by Hart Crane, who, in the 1920’s, to identify as closely as possible with his subject, moved into Washington Roebling’s old house at 110 Columbia Heights. In Crane’s powerful but not altogether coherent masterpiece, the bridge is seen as a shining symbol of affirmation at the end of an epic search through the American past. It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming.

The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

The towers, he believed, would outlast everything else on either shore, and he asked his readers to imagine some future archaeologist surveying the ruins of New York, “a mastless river and a dispeopled land.” The cables and roadway would have long since disintegrated, he said. The Roeblings would be as forgotten as the builders of the Pyramids. Only the towers of the Great Bridge would remain standing and the archaeologist would have “no other means of reconstructing our civilization.” “What will his judgment of us be?”

Henry James, writing soon after the turn of the century, would see something darkly ominous in the looming silhouette of the bridge and its shuttling trains. New York for him had become a “steel-souled machine room,” the end product of which was “merciless multiplications” and the bridge was a “monstrous organism,” marking the beginning of a new age. For James the prospect was chilling.

By the 1920’s, however, the bridge was a unique source of “joy and inspiration” for the critic Lewis Mumford.

The stone plays against the steel; the heavy granite in compression, the spidery steel in tension. In this structure, the architecture of the past, massive and protective, meets the architecture of the future, light, aerial, open to sunlight, an architecture of voids rather than solids.

The bridge proved, he said, that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness. It was something done exceedingly well by Victorian America. “All that the age had just cause for pride in—its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible—came to a head in Brooklyn Bridge.”

Others, later, would see it as a symbol of liberation, of release from the “howling chaos” on either shore. It would be said that at heart it was a monumental embodiment of the open road, the highway call, the abiding rootlessness that runs in the American grain—“not so much linking places as leaving them and shooting untrammeled across the sky.” And an age that can no longer regard it as an engineering marvel has declared it a work of art. One prominent contemporary American architect has gone so far as to say it is one of the two works of architecture in New York of any real importance, the other one being Central Park.

It has also, of course, been taken quite for granted by millions who use it regularly and quite sentimentally by some. It can be seen as merely one of a number of different ways to get to or from Brooklyn or as the grandest sort of memento of a New York that was, a serene, aspiring emblem rising out of an exhilarating and confident age too often remembered solely for its corruption and gimcrackery. It can be seen as the beginning of modern New York—of monumental scale, of structural steel—or the end of old Brooklyn. It is all these. And possibly its enduring appeal may rest on its physical solidity and permanence, the very reverse of rootlessness. It says, perhaps, as does nothing else built by Americans before or since, that we had come to stay.

For Brooklyn, on a more practical level, it did everything its proponents had promised. It stimulated growth, raised property values, and provided a safe, reliable alternative to the ferries. It put Brooklyn on the map.

Rush hours at the terminals were like nothing ever witnessed before, not even at the old Fulton Ferry slip in Brooklyn, not even on the uptown platforms of New York’s elevated trains. Certainly there was little semblance of the smooth, efficient transfer of humanity that John A. Roebling had pictured. But the bridge also withstood the Blizzard of 1888; it carried trolley cars, along with everything else, when they were installed on the carriageways and elevated trains when they replaced the cable cars. It accommodated ever greater numbers of people year by year. But it was not enough.

In 1903 the Williamsburg Bridge was completed upstream from the Navy Yard, from designs by an RPI man with the old Brooklyn name of Leffert Lefferts Buck. Heavy, ungainly-looking, built entirely of steel with a stiffening truss no less than forty feet deep, it was four and a half feet longer than the Brooklyn Bridge, which meant it was now the world’s largest suspension bridge. One of the assistant engineers was C. C. Martin’s son, Kingsley Martin, and the cables were of Roebling wire. Wilhelm Hildenbrand and Charles Roebling were in charge of the cable making.

Six years later, when the Brooklyn Bridge was handling half a million people a day, two more bridges were finished. The Manhattan, another suspension bridge, was built almost side by side with the Brooklyn Bridge, just upstream. The Queensboro Bridge, a cantilever, took a route John A. Roebling once considered, over Blackwell’s (now Welfare) Island.

More than a dozen tunnels were built beneath the river for subways, railroads, water lines, and automobiles. * And for these reasons primarily Brooklyn changed beyond anyone’s imagining.

In 1898 with a population of nearly a million people and still the third-largest city in the United States, Brooklyn had relinquished its independence to become a borough of New York. By 1930 Brooklyn’s population was greater than that of Manhattan. Old Brooklyn families had become an infinitesimal minority, the Heights a tiny picturesque but inconsequential segment of a Brooklyn that spread over eighty-nine square miles, or four times the area of Manhattan. Even the name Brooklyn became synonymous with things never heard of before the turn of the century—the Dodgers, Murder Incorporated—and the butt of innumerable jokes. One favorite vaudeville remark about the bridge went, “All that trouble, just to get to Brooklyn.”

In 1931 the George Washington Bridge was completed over the Hudson with a span more than twice that of the Brooklyn Bridge and six years later the Golden Gate Bridge, larger and still more awesome, was built at the opposite end of the continent. By contrast to such gleaming creations, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed an antique and there was even talk of tearing it down.

In 1944 the elevated trains stopped running over the bridge and the old iron terminal buildings were dismantled. A team of engineers began a painstaking examination of the entire structure to see what ought to be done about it. When they had concluded their studies two years later, it was announced that all the bridge needed was a new coat of paint.

Washington Roebling did not live to see the bridge eclipsed by the George Washington or Golden Gate Bridges, both of which were built with Roebling wire, but he came very close to it. Ironically—incredibly—the crippled, tormented legendary Chief Engineer lived on until 1926. He outlasted them all—Hewitt and Seth Low, each of whom became mayor of New York; Stranahan, who lived to be ninety and to see a statue of himself put up in Prospect Park; Kingsley, who died only a few years after the bridge was built, of a nervous stomach at age fifty-two; Eads, who died in 1887, while trying to enlist support for a fantastic ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; Slocum, whose name would be remembered for one of the worst disasters in American history, the burning, in 1904, of the General Slocum, a New York excursion steamer; and every one of the assistant engineers, each of whom, except for Martin, went his own separate way professionally once the bridge was finished.

On the night Seth Low was defeated for re-election as mayor of New York, Roebling came up from Trenton to watch the returns in front of the Herald building and was very pleased by the results. But all he ever said for attribution concerning the old management of the bridge was that so far as he knew no money had ever been stolen—a decidedly different conclusion, of course, from what he said in his private notes years before. His exact statement, written at age seventy-eight, in a letter to an old friend then compiling a Trenton history, was this: “So far as I know not a dollar was stolen politically or otherwise. There was no thievery—no political robbery or peculation. In spite of the assertions of all the newspapers to the contrary. It is the unscrupulous press that makes most of the trouble.”

He seems to have kept in touch with his former assistants over the years. McNulty named a son after him and Hildenbrand did a good deal of engineering work for John A. Roebling’s Sons. Hildenbrand, in fact, had quite a life after he left Brooklyn. He built the Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado, directed the complete renovation of the Ohio River bridge at Cincinnati, and built a suspension bridge of his own, of about the same span as the Ohio River bridge, at Mapimi, Mexico. Not long after Hildenbrand died, in 1908, Roebling wrote, “Soon I will be the last leaf on the tree.”

For four years after the completion of the bridge, he and Emily lived in Troy, in order to be near their son, who was then at Rensselaer. Roebling spent his time quietly. Often the old pains and cramps returned with a vengeance and he felt himself a “used-up man.” Still the sustained separation from both the bridge and the wire business seemed to be what was needed. His health improved gradually but steadily.

In the spring of 1888, when his son was graduated, the three of them moved back to Trenton. John went to work at the mill and was married the following year. In the meantime, plans were drawn up, to Emily’s specifications, for a “commodious mansion in the Tudor style,” which Roebling had built for her on West State Street, on grounds sloping down to the Delaware River. The house took several years to finish. It was a great baronial affair of huge gables and towering brick chimneys, and on the street side there was a big stained-glass rendition of the Brooklyn Bridge, complete with clouds sailing by and ships passing below. At night, all lit up, this window was considered one of Trenton’s “sights” and for years people went out of their way to see it.

They moved in in 1892. She bought the most expensive carriages and the finest horses, which she insisted always on driving herself, her coachman seated behind her. For a number of years she seems to have had quite a good time. She entertained often and beautifully to judge by some old clippings from the Trenton society columns. She became active in women’s clubs. She studied law at New York University and received her degree. She worked on a book about Cold Spring. * She went to Europe twice. The first time they went together, but the second time, in 1896, she went without him and to Russia as well, where she was one of the few Americans present at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra. A formal photograph of Emily Roebling in the dress she wore to the coronation shows an erect, confident-looking woman in her early fifties, a little stout but rather regal herself in silvery white satin.

From Roebling’s correspondence during these years, one gets a picture of him living in semiseclusion, privately very proud of her accomplishments, absorbed in all manner of interests—his mineral collection, his greenhouse, bird-watching, astronomy, the paleontological history of New Jersey. He also wrote a two-hundred-page biography of his father, which he misplaced and which was never found, most unfortunately. His one recreation was riding the trolleys, which he seems to have enjoyed enormously, riding out into the nearby countryside to look for wild flowers. And these he could identify and refer to by their Latin names as readily as a trained botanist.

When he felt well enough, he traveled with her—to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not, and to New York, where they went out on the bridge together unnoticed.

He read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle’s six-volume Frederick the Great, which he had read before as a young man, and Tolstoy, his favorite. He followed the stock market and made a very great deal of money at it.

He also kept an attentive eye on the wire business, in which he was again a major stockholder, but drew no salary. He liked to take his lunch at the office, which was the old family home long since so built over and swallowed up by the mills that it was barely identifiable. He was always available for his opinion and his opinion carried some weight apparently. Once when his brothers were all for selling out to U. S. Steel, he said no and that was that. But his relations with his brothers were always strained. Ferdinand was so bothered by the grand new house when it was first finished that he refused to enter it. For two years Ferdinand and he did not speak.

His one male confidant was his son, but communication with him had to be carried on by mail. John had lasted only a short time in the wire business. It is impossible to tell just what went wrong. The official explanation was that John had retired because of his health. But it was commonly said in Trenton that family affections and loyalties (if there were any) stopped at the door of the Roebling works. If a young man did not measure up inside, or if there were personality conflicts, then he departed rapidly, even if his name was Roebling.

Years before, Edmund Roebling, youngest of old John’s sons, had been unable to get along with Ferdinand and was “kicked out,” according to Washington Roebling. “He was now adrift with too much money, became a globe-trotter, and was somewhat dissipated.” Edmund never returned to Trenton, never married, lived on in seclusion on the Upper West Side of New York.

Emily’s health began to fail about the time the new century began. It would be said later that the strain of her experiences in Brooklyn was the principal cause. Her eyes gave her trouble at first and she took to wearing dark glasses. In the fall of 1902 Roebling went into Roosevelt Hospital in New York for some intestinal surgery and in early December, in Trenton, while he was still recuperating, she had a collapse of some sort. The doctors said she had stomach ulcers and were not encouraging. He kept going back and forth to Trenton from the hospital, a torturous trip for him, to be with her for a day or two at a time.

An additional night nurse was hired in early February. He was home to stay by then and joked with her about renaming the house Roebling Hospital. Though pitifully weak, she refused to give up and announced she would go to the mineral baths at Sharon Springs, New York. But she never did. She died of cancer of the stomach on February 28, 1903, and was buried at Cold Spring. He was too weak to make the trip.

In the file of Roebling’s letters kept by his son there is an envelope marked “Undated notes, clippings, etc, found among W.A.R.’s papers after his death.” Among the items in the envelope is a much-worn paper on which Roebling had copied in pencil an epitaph Mark Twain inscribed on the grave of his daughter:

Warm Summer Sun shine kindly here

Warm Summer Wind blow softly here

Green Sod above, lie light, lie light

Good night, Dear heart, good night, good night.

For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.

The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject. Time was cheating him out of everything, he lamented, even his identity. When the family decided to erect a larger-than-life-size statue of the old man and the sculptor said the few photographs on hand were not suitable, Roebling agreed to pose. He sat several times, his head turned as though studying some distant horizon, a sheaf of plans on one knee. When the finished bronze was unveiled with much to-do in Trenton’s Cadwalader Park in 1908, a great many people came up to tell him how much it looked like him.

To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again, that same year. She was a widow of about his own son’s age, Mrs. Cornelia Witsell Farrow of Charleston, South Carolina. How they happened to meet, when, or how long he had been contemplating marriage are all unclear. “…these relationships are those of the heart, not governed by reason or judgment,” he had written to John. “A second marriage late in life cannot be judged by the standard of the first because its motives are usually quite different.” John and the rest of the family heartily approved of the decision once he announced it, and of Mrs. Farrow, who, it was said, helped him “take a less gloomy view of things.” The Colonel even “became at times almost jovial.”

He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said. His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his letters to John he complained repeatedly of physical torment and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw. He was seized with a terror of contracting tetanus and dying like his father. “And yet people say how well you look,” he wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again. An editor of the New York Times wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”

When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams. “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.” When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind. “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him. We can all play at that game. It means perpetual universal war.”

And still he carried on, writing long, affectionate letters to John, taking solitary walks down West State Street. “War in the kitchen as usual,” he reported to John in August of 1916. “The cook touched the laundress’s smoothing iron. War to the Knife, peace impossible—damages 5 strands of hair, 4 aprons torn, 2 scratches. Starvation threatens!” Somebody was watering his whiskey.

His “oddities” became a favorite topic of conversation in Trenton. When he and Cornelia dined out at the homes of friends or one of his brothers, he would frequently proceed, without a word of explanation, to make himself comfortable on the nearest sofa and go fast asleep. He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.

He wrote his correspondence on anything at hand—a scrap of cheap note paper, the back of an old invitation, some stray bit of Emily’s stationery found in a bottom drawer. His handwriting, again as perfect as copperplate, was so small that most of his aged friends were unable to read it without a magnifying glass.

When out on his walks he was known to step into a gateway or to appear suddenly fascinated by the contents of a store window if he thought he could avoid a conversation. The standard explanation locally was that the Roeblings were all a little odd that way, but the fact was that talking was often physically painful for him. Strangers were constantly stopping him on the street. Often a mother or father with a small boy in tow would ask if the boy might shake his hand and years later these same boys would remember him as “a nice, courteous old gentleman.” Among beggars and other Trenton people interested in charity he was known as a soft touch.

There seems to have never been a day of his life in all the years following the bridge when he did not know some kind of physical discomfort or outright pain. Privately, like old men everywhere, he was preoccupied with his health, as well as material possessions he no longer had any use for.

Nature remained his solace. He had planted a grove of Siberian crab apples behind the house. “Four have agreed to bloom one year,” he wrote, “and four the next year. How good they are.” He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.

Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after. Karl G. Roebling, Ferdinand’s oldest son, was named head of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But three years later Karl dropped dead on a golf course. Within days it was decided that there was only one person left who could possibly take charge of the vast industrial empire.

The New York and Brooklyn papers made much of the announcement. “A little old soldier of eighty-four, Col. Washington A. Roebling, the man who built Brooklyn Bridge and the son of the man who planned it, is fighting today his last fight,” wrote the New York World, “is fighting to get his work done in spite of all his enemies—illness, debility, pain, loneliness, bereavement, the terrible depression of the man who has outlived his generation.”

Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. “I claim a small part of this as the result of my management,” he confided to his son. Others credited him with more than a small part.

He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog. His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone. He had no secretary, preferring to handle his correspondence himself, which he wrote always in longhand. He was all but blind in one eye, almost totally deaf, and weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He looked so frail, so very old, like Lee in his final photographs, with the same snow-white beard and sunken eyes, that people wondered how in the world he could possibly manage, knowing, as most everybody did, what he had been through in his life. But the extraordinary thing is he did not simply manage. He was highly innovative, forceful, and seemed to know absolutely all there was to know about every facet of the business. He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move. An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River—among other bridges—was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.

In one interview he was asked how he was able to carry on. “Because it’s all in my head,” he answered. “…It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job. You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”

In 1924 at the request of the Butler County Historical Association he sat down and wrote a detailed account of the early days of Saxonburg, and to a correspondent he wrote, “Long ago I ceased my endeavor to clear up the respective identities of myself and my father. Many people think I died in 1869.”

The house next door was sold and torn down. Electric street lights were installed along West State Street. “The Great White Way in Trenton has come our way,” he wrote in despair. “Every 50 ft. will be installed a huge arc lamp to light up the front of the house and keep us from sleeping.” His own downward progress he described as accelerative, like gravity.

In the spring of 1926 it was obvious to every one that he was failing rapidly. By May he was down to less than a hundred pounds. “Think not that I am improving—growing weaker daily—body racks with pain—head bowed down in sheer apathy—bones crack when rolled over—fall down when I try to stand. Please leave me alone—and in peace,” he wrote to John’s wife. But then he added a P.S.: “A surprise: for several years—ten—a night-blooming cereus stalk has been knocked about in the greenhouse. Last night it suddenly bloomed, was brought to my bedside at 10 P.M. A delicate odor filled the room—a wonderful flower—much larger than a rose. A calyx filled with snow-white petals curved outward and oval-pointed. This morning it is gone—to sleep the sleep of ages again.”

He lingered on for two more months. The only thing he had left, he said, was his brain and for that, he added, he was extremely grateful.

He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside. There is no record of any last words being said. The end came at three thirty in the afternoon.

All of the bridges built by John A. Roebling are gone now except two—the Cincinnati Bridge and an aqueduct over the Delaware built in 1848 above Port Jervis, New York, which has been converted into an automobile bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge in America. His house at Saxonburg still stands, however, as does the church he built there and a small shed in which the first reels of iron wire were stored. John A. Roebling’s Sons has since been sold to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

Washington Roebling’s house on West State Street was offered to the state of New Jersey to be used as the governor’s mansion, but the offer was declined because it was felt that the upkeep would be too costly. The house was torn down in 1946 to make room for a parking lot. The house at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn has also been torn down. His mineral collection, which numbered some sixteen thousand pieces and included all but four of the known minerals on earth, was given by his son to the Smithsonian Institution.

As he had requested, Roebling was buried at Cold Spring, beside Emily. No statues were put up in his honor. The graves were very plainly marked.

In 1948 D. B. Steinman and his New York engineering firm were retained by the city to prepare plans to increase the highway capacity of the Brooklyn Bridge. With some fifty men assigned to the project, an extensive remodeling was carried out over a number of years. The trolley and el tracks were removed, the roadways were widened to three lanes in each direction, and additional trusswork was built. The changes, which cost more than nine million dollars, altered the over-all appearance of the bridge very little.

In 1964 the bridge was officially declared a National Historic Landmark. It now carries more than 121,000 trucks and automobiles a day and on the average Sunday, in good weather, more than a thousand people go walking or bicycling on the promenade, which is still the only one of its kind. There are bronze plaques on both towers, beside the promenade, listing the names of John A. and Washington A. Roebling, the trustees, the assistant engineers, and the master mechanic. The plaques were put up when the bridge was first completed. In the time since, two more plaques, one for each tower, have been added to honor Emily Roebling.

The towers themselves, though long since dwarfed by the skyline of downtown Manhattan, remain unique. Nothing to compare to them has been built in America. Since the towers of the mammoth suspension bridges built in the twentieth century are of steel, the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are both the first and the last monumental stone gateways on the North American continent.

A combined force of some thirty men looks after the bridge. It gets a new coat of paint every five years or so and according to the engineers at the New York Department of Public Works, of all the bridges on the East River, it is the one that gives them the least trouble. With normal maintenance, say the engineers, the bridge will last another hundred years. If parts are replaced from time to time—even entire cables if necessary, which would be perfectly possible—then, “As far as we are concerned, it will last forever.” Perhaps it will.

Appendix

Brooklyn Bridge Vital Statistics*

Chronology of Construction

Notes

The following abbreviations have been used throughout these notes:

JAR:   John A. Roebling

WAR:   Washington A. Roebling

EWR:   Emily Warren Roebling

JAR II:   John A. Roebling II

HCM:   Henry Cruse Murphy

LER:   Laws and Engineer’s Reports

RUL:   Rutgers University Library

RPI:   Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

LIH:   Long Island Historical Society

ASCE:   American Society of Civil Engineers

For further details on the books cited, the reader is referred to the Bibliography.

PART ONE

1 The Plan

“The shapes arise!”: Whitman, Sound of the Broad-Axe.

Meetings with the consultants: Minutes kept by WAR. RPI.

Biographical sketches of the consultants: National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Dictionary of American Biography, and memorial tributes published by the ASCE.

“If there is to be a bridge”: Barnard, “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

1867 charter: An Act to incorporate the New York Bridge Company. Chapter 399. Passed April 16, 1867. LER, pp. 3-7.

JAR’s formal proposal of 1867 was officially titled Report of John A. Roebling, C.E., to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, on the Proposed East River Bridge. LER. Most of the descriptive material concerning the proposed bridge has been drawn from this report, which was published in 1870 but which appeared first in the Eagle, September 10, 1867.

Brooklyn interest in the bridge: Virtually every Brooklyn publication had something good to say for the bridge. The new and short-lived Brooklyn Monthly, for example, was nearly as enthusiastic as Roebling, saying in its issue for May 1869, “When it is finished, the East River Bridge will, without comparison, be the grandest monument of its kind on this continent, if not in the world…”

“As the great flow of civilization”: JAR, Report of John A. Roebling, C.E. LER.

“Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before”: Ibid.

“Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose”: Whitman, Passage to India.

“Singing my days”: Ibid.

“The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs”: JAR in a covering letter for his report, addressed to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, September 1, 1867. LER.

Navy engineer’s plan for East River dam: Brooklyn Union, January 7, 1869.

New York Polytechnic Society sessions: Reported in various issues of the Eagle, February 1869.

Another bridge and a tunnel besides: Brooklyn Union, December 22, 1869.

“A force at rest”: Scientific American, Vol. XII, 1865.

Congressional legislation: An Act to establish a bridge across the East River. Public, No. 53. Approved by Congress March 3, 1869. LER.

The make-up of the Bridge Party: Thomas Kinsella in the Eagle, April 16, 1869; also a reminder book kept by WAR, RUL.

2 Man of Iron

“We may affirm absolutely…without passion”: Bartlett, Familiar Quotations.

“A wet bandage around the neck”; “A full cold bath every day”: Two small JAR notebooks on the water cure, dated 1852. RPI.

Man of iron…poised…confident: Various obituaries and contemporary biographical sketches; also a speech delivered by Henry D. Estabrook at the unveiling of JAR’s statue, June 30, 1908, RUL.

“…Never known to give in”: Eagle, July 26, 1869.

“One of his strongest moral traits”: Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America, p. 325.

“Sir, you are keeping me waiting”: Ibid., p. 81.

Christoph Polycarpus and Friederike Dorothea Roebling: Ibid., p. 9.

Hegel’s favorite pupil: Ibid., p. 12.

“It is a land of hope”: Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, London, 1890.

“…the heart of him into cold storage”: Henry D. Estabrook at the unveiling of JAR’s statue, June 30, 1908. RUL. Estabrook was uncommonly candid about his long-deceased subject. His source appears to have been WAR.

Nothing could be accomplished without an army of functionaries: JAR, Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of America in the Year 1831, p. 113.

Cash gift for Mühlhausen: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 15.

The description for JAR’s voyage to America is drawn entirely from his Diary of My Journey.

Six thousand dollars in cash: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 7.

Trunkful of books: Most of these volumes are in the RPI collection.

“If one earnestly desires it”: JAR, Diary of My Journey, pp. 18—19.

“…a cheerful carefree disposition”: Ibid., p. 54.

“…the one perceives in the foam”: Ibid., p. 57.

The founding of Saxonburg: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg; JAR, “Letters to Ferdinand Baehr, 1831.”

Saxonburg as “the future center of the universe”: WAR to JAR II, winter 1893-94. RUL.

“My father would have made a good advertising agent”: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 11.

“…no unbearable taxes”: JAR “Letters to Ferdinand Baehr, 1831.”

“…valuable attribute of industry…They have made good farmers”: History of Butler County, Pennsylvania, p. 289.

“I cannot reconcile myself”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 44.

“So he took to engineering again”: WAR to JAR II, winter 1893-94. RUL.

“The iron ore on Laurel Hill”: JAR, RUL; also quoted in Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 53.

German periodical the source of the wire rope idea: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 50.

“His ambition now became boundless”: WAR to JAR II, winter 1893-94. RUL.

“…farmers were metamorphosed into mechanics”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 60.

WAR’s description of wire rope making: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, pp. 13—14.

“…benefactors to mankind who employ science”: Quoted in Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 73.

“As this work is the first of the kind”: Craig, The Olden Time, Vol. 1, pp. 45-48.

“The progress of the fire”: Pittsburgh Gazette reporter quoted in Lorant, Pittsburgh; The Story of an American City, p. 110.

“Great Central Railroad” speech: American Railroad Journal, Special Edition, 1847; also quoted in part in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 65-71.

Never home in springtime: Elvira Roebling to JAR, March 14, 1860. RUL.

JAR’s letters to Charles Swan are in the RUL; also quoted at length in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 93-114.

“I for my part wish the blacks all good fortune”: JAR, Diary of My Journey, p. 118.

“…legs under my mahogany long enough”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 189.

“When a whole nation…steeped for a whole century in sins”; “We cannot close our eyes to the appalling fact”: JAR philosophical papers. RUL.

“A pure-hearted woman or one gifted with warmer affections”: WAR to EWR, August 2, 1864. RUL.

“My dearly beloved wife, Johanna”: Bible page reproduced in Schuyler, The Roeblings, opposite p. 99.

Prayed he would never have to read Roebling’s philosophy: Ibid., p. 13.

“We are born to work and study”; “True life is not only active”; “It is a want of my intellectual nature”; “Human reason is the work of God”: JAR philosophical papers. RUL.

Davis plan proposed to Horace Greeley: The letter in the RUL collection is undated but refers to the “recent foreign war,” meaning the war with Mexico no doubt, so it was probably written between 1848 and 1850. There is no indication whether the letter ever appeared in the Tribune.

The incident involving young Edmund Roebling, as well as Edmund’s subsequent life, is described by WAR in a private memorandum written March 16, 1922. RUL.

“A man may be content with the success of an enterprise”: JAR philsophical papers. RUL.

“The latest sensation we have had here are spiritual communications”: Ferdinand Roebling to WAR, November 12, 1867. RUL.

Seances: From original questions and notes made by JAR. RPI.

Light topcoat and soft felt hat: A rare photograph taken at Niagara of the engineers in the Bridge Party shows both JAR and WAR. It is the only known photograph of father and son together and reveals how remarkably alike they looked. RPI.

3 The Genuine Language of America

The description of the Bridge Party’s tour has been drawn almost entirely from three long articles by Thomas Kinsella that appeared in the Eagle, April 16, 17, and 26. Interestingly, the local papers in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls did little more than mention the arrival of the “visitors from the East.”

James Finley is a fascinating but somewhat shadowy figure. He is given only passing mention in most histories of civil engineering and is referred to as a justice of the peace or judge, but in the classic work The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania by Solon J. and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, Finley is an itinerant preacher, who earlier in his career had been sent into the wilderness of western Pennsylvania to put down a burgeoning new-state movement—a mission he accomplished with amazing skill and speed. His patented chain bridge was first described by Thomas Pope in A Treatise on Bridge Architecture, published in 1811.

Smithfield Street Bridge: American Railroad Journal, February 21, 1846; also in Craig, The Olden Time, Vol. I, pp. 286-288.

Allegheny River Bridge: White and von Bernewitz, The Bridges of Pittsburgh.

“The bridge will be beautiful”: JAR to Charles Swan, June 21, 1859, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 108.

“Washington is about the work”: JAR to Charles Swan, RUL; also quoted in Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 206.

Cincinnati Bridge: JAR, “The Cincinnati Suspension Bridge,” Engineering (London), Vol. 40, pp. 22-23, 49, 74-76, 98-99, 140-141; JAR, Report of John A. Roebling, C.E., to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, on the Proposed East River Bridge, LER; Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 125-128; Farrington, A Full and Complete Description of the Covington and Cincinnati Suspension Bridge with Dimensions and Details of Construction.

“The Germans about here are mostly loyal”: JAR to Charles Swan, spring of 1863, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 110.

“The size and magnitude of this work far surpass any expectations”: WAR to Charles Swan, March 16, 1865, RUL; also in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 234.

“Leave bridgebuilding to younger folks”: JAR to Charles Swan, April 1865, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 114.

“You drive over to Suspension Bridge”: Quoted in Gies, Bridges and Men, p. 188.

Niagara Bridge: Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 118—124; Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, pp. 157-193; Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America; Kirby and Laurson, The Early Tears of Modern Civil Engineering, pp. 155—156. There is also a superb scale model of the bridge on display in the Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution.

Maid of the Mist shoots the rapids: The best description is in Anthony Trollope’s North America.

Early suspension bridges: Of the numerous histories of bridges the most readable and reliable is Bridges and Men by Joseph Gies. See also Bridges and Their Builders by David B. Steinman and Sara Ruth Watson.

Charles Ellet: Stuart’s biographical sketch in Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America, pp. 257-285, miscellaneous newspaper clippings, RPI.

Roebling aspires to be Ellet’s assistant: Letter quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 54—55.

Homer Walsh: Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 163.

Ellet drew up cannon: WAR to F. M. Colby of Dodd, Mead & Co., February 1907. RUL.

“Before entering upon any important work”: Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America, p. 325.

“The only real difficulty of the task”: JAR, Report on the Niagara Bridge, Buffalo, 1852. RUL.

JAR not the innovator of stiff roadway, anchor stays, or the first to spin cables in place: Steinman mistakenly credits Roebling with all three, either directly or by implication, in The Builders of the Bridge, pp. 81, 172.

“In the anxiety to obtain a light roadway”: ASCE, Transactions, 1868-71, a paper by Edward P. North, March 4, 1868, which contains one of the very best accounts of the evolution of the suspension bridge and its refinements.

JAR’s disdain for English bridgebuilders: JAR letter quoted by Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America, pp. 306-308.

Eyewitness account of Wheeling Bridge failure: Wheeling Intelligencer, May 18, 1854; also quoted in Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 171.

“…there are no safer bridges”: Steinman and Watson, Bridges and Their Builders, p. 209.

JAR’s explanation of the Wheeling failure: Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, pp. 182-183.

Ellet rebuilt the bridge himself: Research by C. M. Lewis, S.J., of Wheeling College, West Virginia, reported in ASCE, Civil Engineering, September 1969.

“My bridge is the admiration of everybody”; “We had a tremendous gale”; “No one is afraid to cross”: JAR to Charles Swan. RUL.

Slocum toast: Eagle, July 26, 1869.

“…the great achievements of the present”: Whitman, Passage to India.

“one of the victories of peace”: Harper’s Weekly, May 29, 1869.

“The chief engineers became his heroes”: Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea, pp. 247—249.

4 Father and Son

“Nothing lasts forever”: WAR to JAR II, March 6, 1894. RUL.

Job applicants and JAR’s comments: JAR’s address book, 1869. RUL.

WAR’s notes and diagrams for the center line: Black leather notebook kept by WAR, 1869. RPI.

“Your Turkish Bath tickets came today”: WAR to JAR, May 21, 1869. RUL.

Meetings with Rawlins: Described by WAR in several letters to JAR, June 1869. RUL.

Consultants’ approval published: Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers to the Directors of the New York Bridge Company.

Revisions in design as a result of War Department directive: WAR.

“Introductory Remarks,” Pneumatic Tower Foundations of the East River Suspension Bridge. LER.

“This bridge is to be built”: The New York Times, July 23, 1869.

“He felt at his age he could ill afford to lose any time”: WAR in an “Introduction” to JAR’s Long and Short Span Railway Bridges.

This description of the accident is drawn largely from an account in the Eagle, July 22, 1869.

“There is no such thing as chance”: Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 320.

Death of JAR: Various items in the Eagle in the days that followed; later remarks made by WAR (RUL and RPI); Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 139—140; description of tetanus in The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy.

Instructions to Ed Riedel: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 140.

“He who loses his life from injuries”: Eagle, July 22, 1869.

“The name of John A. Roebling”: EWR to JAR, January 6, 1868. RUL.

Gifts for Elvira: From purchases listed in JAR’s Private Cash Account, 1867-69. RPI.

Wedding gifts for the second Mrs. JAR: Ibid.

Contents of will: JAR will dated September 14, 1867, RUL; also covered in some detail in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 145-146.

Funeral: Both the Eagle and the Trenton Daily State Gazette for July 26, 1869, carried long descriptive accounts.

“With its inspiration gone”: Steinman and Watson, Bridges and Their Builders, p. 236; Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 323.

“Not long since, before the accident”: Eagle, July 22, 1869.

“First—I was the only living man”: WAR to James Rusling, January 23, 1916. RUL.

“…At the time of his death he was already arranging”: WAR to William Couper, July 26, 1907. RUL.

“The great boast of this land…jabbering and wrangling politicians”: Eagle, July 27, 1869.

5 Brooklyn

“transformed…from insignificance”: The City of Brooklyn, a guidebook.

Third-largest city: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898, p. 12.

Types of manufacturing: Ibid., pp. 14—15.

“an enigma to the respectable”: Ibid., p. 29.

East River shipyards and virtues as a harbor: Albion, The Rise of New York Port (1815-1860).

More ships than New York and Hoboken combined: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, p. 139.

Salt air “pure and bracing…”: Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn, Vol. II, p. 504.

“the most majestic views of land and ocean”: Attributed to James S. T. Stranahan in The City of Brooklyn.

Banquet on board City of Brooklyn: Eagle, April 15, 1869.

Hezekiah Pierrepont and the development of Brooklyn Heights: Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn.

“Almost everybody appears to have built his house”: Eagle, June 22, 1872.

“elegant equipages, well-dressed grooms”: Old Brooklyn Heights, pp. 33-34.

“His knowledge of fish”: National Cyclopedia of American Biography.

Henry Ward Beecher: Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, pp. 86-100; McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, pp. 655-657; Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee; a long profile in the Eagle, March 10, 1869.

“He went marching up and down the stage”: Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, pp. 23—24.

“Our institutions live in him”: Eagle, March 10, 1869.

“A more intelligent body”: From the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, quoted in the Eagle, January 1872.

Charles Dickens on Brooklyn: Quoted in Still, Mirror for Gotham, p. 204.

Brooklyn slums: According to The New York Times, June 30, 1866, “dirt and filth and poverty reign triumphant…Here homeless and vagabond children, ragged and dirty, wander about…decaying garbage, dead animals, filth and unclean privies, with crowds of unwashed human beings [are] packed together…”

The Kingsley-McCue-Murphy meeting is reported in the Eagle, May 24, 1883; also in Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, pp. 302-303.

General Johnson’s opposition to a bridge: Long Island Star, February 13, 1834; Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge; Fact and Symbol, pp. 35-36.

HCM’s Mansion House speech: A commemorative booklet on the farewell dinner, LIH; also quoted in the Eagle, December 2, 1882.

William C. Kingsley: Obituaries in The New York Times, New York World, and Eagle, February 21, 1885; in memoriam booklet, W. C. Kingsley, LIH; Green, A Complete History of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge from its Conception in 1866 to its Completion in 1883; Stiles, The Civil, Political, Professional and Ecclesiastical History of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, Vol I, pp. 463—464; Eagle History of Brooklyn, Eagle, May 24, 1883; scrapbooks in LIH collection; Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, pp. 74-76.

Henry C. Murphy: Obituaries in The New York Times, New York World, and Eagle, December 2, 1882; scrapbooks in LIH collection; Green, A Complete History of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge; Stiles, The Civil, Political, Professional and Ecclesiastical History of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, Vol. I, pp. 360—366; Eagle, May 24, 1883; Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn, Vol. II, pp. 266-270.

McLaughlin the first to be called “Boss”: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, p. 71.

“very earnest in manner”: Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn, p. 269.

“It was not a change for the better”: Eagle, December 2, 1882.

“Mr. Murphy only failed as a politician”: Stiles, The Civil, Political, Professional and Ecclesiastical History of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, Vol. I, p. 364.

WAR’s private remarks on the role played by Julius Adams: Personal notebook, entry dated January 6, 1880. RPI.

HCM named president: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, p. 319.

The name Roebling “invaluable”: Kingsley, in a speech given on the opening of the bridge, May 24, 1883.

“Confidence on the part of the public”: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 320.

6 The Proper Person to See

“Who owns the City of New York today?”: Quoted in Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898, p. 19.

Tweed’s prior interest in the Brooklyn ferry lines: Lynch, “Boss” Tweed, pp. 70-75.

New York in 1869: Still, Mirror for Gotham; McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life; Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York; Harper’s Weekly for 1869; Crapsey, The Nether Side of New York.

“…a rich field for clever money lovers”: Olof Olson to his brother, September 11, 1869, quoted in Land That Our Fathers Plowed, David Greenberg, ed., University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.

William M. Tweed and his cohorts: Werner, Tammany Hall; Lynch, “Boss” Tweed; Callow, The Tweed Ring; Harper’s Weekly; Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. II; McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life; Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York; Dictionary of American Biography.

“I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles”: Callow, The Tweed Ring, p. 254.

“Tweed had an abounding vitality”: Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 383.

Tweed and the first session of the Executive Committee: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, p. 526.

Tweed’s testimony: As recorded before a committee of the Common Council of the City of New York, September 18, 1877; quoted also in Testimony in the Miller Suit to Remove the East River Bridge, “Exhibit A,” pp. 58-63.

“a strong combination made against the measure”: Kingsley to JAR, April 16, 1868. RUL.

Chambers Street courthouse: The best account of this incredible story is in Callow, The Tweed Ring, the chapter titled “The House That Tweed Built,” pp. 198-206, which also appeared in American Heritage, October 1965.

Bridge Company stockholders as of autumn 1869: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, “Exhibit C,” Part I, p. 167.

“…therefore he was the proper person to see”: Eagle, September 19, 1877.

Beach tunnel: Scientific American, February 19, 1870; “Alfred Ely Beach and His Wonderful Pneumatic Underground Railway” by Robert Daley, American Heritage, June 1961.

Black Friday: Swanberg, Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal, pp. 149-153.

Cardiff Giant: Harper’s Weekly, October 1869; Franco, “The Cardiff Giant: A Hundred-Year-Old Hoax.” The Giant itself is still drawing crowds at the Farmers’ Museum, Cooperstown, New York. Once having seen the Giant, most twentieth-century onlookers find it hard to believe anyone ever took it seriously.

“all were disgusted”: Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, p. 273.

7 The Chief Engineer

Assistant engineers: Various memoirs published by the ASCE; National Cyclopedia of American Biography; biographical sketches in the Eagle, May 24, 1883; odd notes made by WAR, RPI.

Claims of Samuel Barnes B. Nolan: Scientific American, August 7, 1869.

“the details not having been considered”: New York Tribune, May 23, 1883.

“very versatile attainments”: From an unpublished biographical sketch of WAR by EWR. RPI.

“rather indifferent to matters of courtesy”: EWR to JAR, January 6, 1868. RUL.

“History teaches us that no man can be great unless a certain amount of vanity enters into his composition”: WAR considered his brother Ferdinand the perfect example of such vanity. The quote is from WAR’s draft of an obituary for Ferdinand, April 15, 1917, RUL; also quoted somewhat differently in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 307.

“a peculiarity of the Roebling mind”: WAR to JAR II, May 24, 1896. RUL.

“It might be argued if a man inherits everything”: WAR’s obituary for his brother Charles, October 1918, RUL; also in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 324-325.

WAR’s passport: RUL.

“Roebling is a character”: Lyman, Meade’s Headquarters, p. 240; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 195.

“reverently chose…the name that most inspired him”: Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 41.

WAR named for Washington Gill: WAR to JAR II, July 4, 1904. RUL.

Baptized by postmaster Shilly: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 12.

“well-built, sturdy, quiet boy”: JAR to his brother Christel, undated. RUL.

“…a black bear walked down Main Street”: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 9.

Saxonburg social life: Ibid., p. 17.

Ferdinand Baehr and Waterloo stories: Ibid., p. 18.

WAR’s love of Saxonburg and disappointing return visit: WAR to JAR II, January 5, 1926. RUL.

“Being the ‘Roebling boy’”: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 20.

Story of Massy Harbison: “The Touching Narrative of Massy Harbison,” from Our Western Border, Charles McKnight, Philadelphia, 1875, pp. 685-695.

Pigeons, thunderstorms, and the great comet of 1843: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 21.

“In regard to the mustache you covet so”: Laura Roebling to WAR, December 7, 1856. RUL.

Courses at RPI: Greene, The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; also Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, pp. 196-197.

“Under such a curriculum the average college boy of today”: Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge, p. 197.

“that terrible treadmill of forcing an avalanche of figures…unusable knowledge that I could only memorize, not really digest”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 173-174.

“My candle is certainly bewitched…no woman had sense enough to understand his love”: WAR to EWR, about April 14, 1864. RUL.

“Our temperaments are so very different”: RUL.

Letter written Thanksgiving Day: Ibid.

“left the school as mental wrecks”: Quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 174.

“Pittsburgh is getting along quite smart”: WAR to Charles Swan, April 11, 1859, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 182.

Penn Street boardinghouse: WAR to Charles Swan, May 2, 1858. RUL.

“There is a perfect mania here for improvements”: WAR to Charles Swan, April 11, 1859, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 182.

“dark, cloudy, smoky afternoons”: WAR to Charles Swan, November 13, 1858, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 179.

“This is my first letter to you in 1860”: WAR to Charles Swan, January 23, 1860, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 184-185.

“My enlistment was rather sudden”: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

“Loafing in the camp”: Undated letter. RUL.

“This is a mean little town”: WAR to Elvira Roebling, July 19, 1861. RUL.

“This artillery business”: WAR to Charles Swan, July 31, 1861. RUL.

“could make a violin talk”: Letter of condolence written to the second Mrs. WAR by George R. Brown, president of the Eastchester Savings Bank, Mount Vernon, New York, August 2, 1926. RUL.

“My father being too old to rough it”: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

Swims the Shenandoah with tape in his mouth: WAR to Ferdinand, June 8, 1892. RUL.

Surprised Jeb Stuart at his breakfast: WAR to JAR, August 24, 1862. RUL.

Describes bridge: WAR to Charles Swan, August 3, 1862. RUL.

Fate of Harpers Ferry bridge: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

Incident with the statue of Washington’s mother: Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 193-194.

With Hooker at Chancellorsville: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

Reconnaissance from a balloon: Ibid.; also Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 191.

Trip home for maps: WAR to Oliver W. Norton, July 13, 1915. RUL.

WAR’s account of his day on Little Round Top: Letter to a Colonel Smith of New York, July 5, 1913. RUL.

“Roebling was on my staff”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 193.

“I was the first man on Little Round Top”: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

WAR and Warren before the Battle of the Crater: Ibid.

“…I was in the Civil War for four years and saw Lincoln on two occasions”: WAR to I. E. Boos, June 19, 1921, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 196—197.

“They must put fresh steam on the man factories…the rest think it is about played out to stand up and get shot”: WAR to EWR, June 23, 1864. RUL.

“…the conduct of the Southern people”: WAR to EWR, July 7, 1864. RUL.

Description of meeting Emily: WAR to Elvira Roebling, February 26, 1863. RUL.

JAR’s letter on the engagement: JAR to WAR, March 30, 1864. RUL.

“I like her very much”: JAR to WAR, November 17, 1864. RUL.

“I dare say you could not sleep”: WAR to EWR, August 14, 1864. RUL.

“This day might be signalized”: WAR to EWR, November 16, 1864. RUL.

“The town is horribly dull”: WAR to EWR, August 6, 1864. RUL.

“I have now more lasting memories”: WAR to EWR, September 10, 1864. RUL.

“I have been solacing myself”: WAR to EWR, April 11, 1864. RUL.

“…the greatest giver of us all [is] gone”: WAR to EWR, December 25, 1864. RUL.

Trip to Europe: Described in numerous lengthy letters from WAR to JAR, in both the RPI and RUL collections.

Letter to JAR describing Keystone Bridge works: WAR to JAR, October 11, 1868. RUL.

Family differences over Edmund: WAR, private memorandums dated July 20, 1898, and March 16, 1922. RUL.

Reminders and comments on stone: WAR’s personal notebook, 1869. RPI.

PART TWO

8 All According to Plan

“The foundations for the support”: JAR, Report of John A. Roebling, C.E., to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, on the Proposed East River Bridge, p. 20. LER.

Dimensions of the Brooklyn caisson, as well as all other descriptive data: WAR, First Annual Report of the Chief Engineer of the East River Bridge, LER; WAR, Pneumatic Tower Foundations of the East River Suspension Bridge, LER.

Barometer analogy: Harper’s Weekly, December 17, 1870.

“The extreme rise and fall”: WAR, First Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, pp. 8-9. LER.

Webb & Bell contract: Kingsley, First Annual Report of the General Superintendent of the East River Bridge, p. 23. LER.

“A pile which was sixteen inches in diameter”: WAR, First Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, p. 11. LER.

“The character of this material”: Ibid., pp. 11-12.

James B. Eads: There is no real biography of the remarkable Eads. The following have been used as general biographical background: Dorsey, Road to the Sea; Woodward, A History of the St. Louis Bridge; Gies, Bridges and Men; Dictionary of American Biography.

“Eads’s Turtles”: Catton, Grant Moves South, pp. 102-103.

JAR calls St. Louis people fools: JAR to WAR, November 10, 1867. RUL.

Carnegie, Linville, and the Keystone Bridge Company: Carnegie, Autobiography, pp. 119-121.

“an achievement out of all proportion”: Kirby and Laurson, The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineering, p. 162.

Material on early use of compressed air and resulting cases of caisson sickness is from The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, Including the Caisson Disease by Andrew H. Smith, M.D., pp. 4—10. LER.

“A workman walking about with difficult step”: Woodward, A History of the St. Louis Bridge.

“The fatigue of ascent added not a little”: Ibid.

Eads’s views on the problem of caisson sickness are contained in a long article in Scientific American, December 24, 1870.

The launching of the Brooklyn caisson was described in considerable detail by all of the following: Eagle, March 19, 1870; Engineering (London), June 10, 1870; Scientific American, July 9, 1870; Collingwood, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge, LER.

“more like a huge war leviathan”: Eagle, March 19, 1870.

The only known reference to Roebling’s visit to St. Louis and his sessions with Eads is an exchange of letters in Engineering (London) in the issues for May 16, June 27, and September 5, 1873.

“I do not want any news carried between myself and Mr. Ellet”: JAR to Charles Swan, April 21, 1849, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 82.

“…one of the wonders of the nineteenth century”; “hidden from the gaze of mortal eyes”; “as placidly as a swan”: Eagle, May 3, 1870.

“…they had been upon the monster”: Ibid., May 4, 1870.

Roebling, Paine, and Collingwood go down for first time on May 10: WAR, Pneumatic Tower Foundations of the East River Suspension Bridge, p. 24. LER.

9 Down in the Caisson

The descent of the Brooklyn caisson and the work that went on inside it were the subjects of many articles in newspapers and technical publications in the year 1870. Of particular interest were those in the following: Eagle, June 20; Scientific American, July 9; Van Nostrand’s Eclectic Engineering Magazine, October; Journal of the Franklin Institute, October; and Harper’s Weekly, December 17. But nearly all of this chapter has been drawn from a paper read before the ASCE by Francis Collingwood on June 21, from Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington’s Concise Description of the East River Bridge, and from WAR’s own annual report to the directors of the Bridge Company. An excellent scale model of the caisson can be seen on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

“We have no precedent just like this bridge”: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, January 1, 1877, p. 5. LER.

“The material now became sufficiently exposed”: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer to the Board of Directors of the New York Bridge Company, June 5, 1871, p. 4. LER.

“Inside the caisson everything wore an unreal, weird appearance”: Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 27-28.

“An unearthly and deafening screech”: Scientific American, July 9, 1870.

Use of limelights: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 35-37. LER.

Varieties of rock uncovered: Ibid., pp. 4—5.

“Moreover, a settling of the caisson of six inches”: Ibid., p. 6.

“The noise made by splitting blocks”: Ibid., p. 23.

“Levels were taken every morning”: Collingwood, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

Techniques for removing boulders from under the shoe: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 8-10. LER.

“five months of incessant toil…were almost tempted to throw the buckets overboard”: Ibid., pp. 15—17.

“When the lungs are filled with compressed air”: Ibid., p. 15.

Side friction: Collingwood, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

WAR “conspicuous for his presence and exertions”: Kingsley, Report of the General Superintendent, New York Bridge Company, p. 54. LER.

Lowering of air pressure gives added twelve hundred tons: Collingwood, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

Apprehensions about blasting: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 11-12. LER.

WAR uses revolver: Ibid., p. 12.

“For night is turned into day”: New York Herald, December 3, 1870.

Work schedule and work force: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 38—39; Kingsley, Report of the General Superintendent, New York Bridge Company, p. 52. LER.

Pneumatic water closet: Collingwood, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

Roebling follows Eads’s system, convinced increased oxygen intake is the heart of the problem: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 39-40. LER.

Steam coils in air locks: Ibid., p. 40.

Great Blowout: Ibid., pp. 20-21; Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 20-21.

Weight variation in columns of water: Collingwood, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

“To say that this occurrence was an accident”: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, p. 20. LER.

10 Fire

“When the perfected East River bridge”: Eagle, June 22, 1872.

Modifications in New York caisson: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer to the Board of Directors of the New York Bridge Company, June 5, 1871, pp. 45-49. LER.

“This bold and peculiarly American design”: Harper’s Weekly, November 19, 1870.

“the rapidity with which the work has proceeded”: Scientific American, November 12, 1870.

Cause of the fire and description of the fire itself have been drawn from the following: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 29-35, LER; Eagle, December 2, December 3, December 5, 1870; Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 22-24; Engineering (London), December 30, 1870; Journal of the Franklin Institute, February 1871.

Attempts to extinguish fire: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5,1871, pp. 29-30. LER.

Boring into the roof: Ibid., p. 31.

WAR’s efforts “almost superhuman”: Kingsley, Report of the General Superintendent, New York Bridge Company, p. 54. LER.

Discover mass of living coals: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, p. 31. LER.

“He appeared calm and collected”: Eagle, December 2, 1870.

Damage estimated at $250,000: New York Herald, December 3, 1870.

World charges sabotage: December 2, 1870.

Fire marshal’s hearing: Eagle, December 5, 1870.

Begin filling work chambers with concrete: Eagle, December 23, 1870.

Blowout of supply shaft: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, pp. 24-27. LER.

Repairing the fire damage: Ibid., pp. 32—35; Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 22—24.

Fresh-water springs: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, June 5, 1871, p. 28. LER.

11 The Past Catches Up

Launching of the New York caisson: Eagle, May 8-9, 1871.

Tweed’s daughter’s wedding: Werner, Tammany Hall, pp. 190-193; Lynch, “Boss” Tweed, pp. 359-360; New York Sun, June 1, 1871.

Activities of Matthew J. O’Rourke: Lynch, “Boss” Tweed, pp. 354, 361.

Watson the nerve center of the Ring: Werner, Tammany Hall, p. 209.

“You must do just as Jimmy tells you”: Ibid., p. 161.

O’Rourke’s estimate of Ring thefts: Ibid., p. 160.

Attempt to bribe Jones: Ibid., p. 210.

Attempt to bribe Nast: Ibid., pp. 211-212.

Times attack: Callow, The Tweed Ring, pp. 256—261.

Orange riot: Lynch, “Boss” Tweed, pp. 367-369; Swanberg, Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal, pp. 234—240; Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, entries for July 1871.

Cooper Union meeting of September 4: Lynch, “Boss” Tweed, pp. 370-371; Werner, Tammany Hall, pp. 217-218.

Cartoon of Tweed in the shadow of the gallows: Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1871.

“At home again amidst the haunts of my childhood”: Lynch, “Boss” Tweed, pp. 377-378.

George Templeton Strong on the “Boss of New York”: Strong, Diary, entry for January 27, 1871.

Elections in Brooklyn: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898, pp. 56-60.

Accident: C. C. Martin interview published in the Eagle, May 24, 1883.

“This has been the case from the first”: Kingsley, Report of the General Superintendent of the New York Bridge Company, p. 32. LER.

Six thousand illegal votes: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, p. 59.

Kingsley interview in the World: Quoted in the Eagle, December 15, 1871.

Kingsley’s name a football: Beecher at Kingsley’s funeral, published in memorial book, W. C. Kingsley. LIH.

Tweed’s appearances at the meetings of the Executive Committee: “Exhibit J; A Full Synopsis of the Minutes of the Respective Executive Committees Thereof, From September 1869 to June 1st, 1883,” New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, pp. 526-566.

“Resolved, That fifteen per centum on the amount of expenditure”: Ibid., p. 552.

“I had no understanding with him, sir”: Testimony in the Miller Suit to Remove the East River Bridge, “Exhibit A,” February 15, 1879, p. 62.

Kingsley’s “claim…liquidated”: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 572.

Erasure made in the records: “Exhibit No. 4,” Minority Report by Demas Barnes, December 16, 1872, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 96.

Tweed indicted and arrested: Werner, Tammany Hall, p. 233.

Death of Fisk: Swanberg, Jim Fisk, pp. 271-278.

12 How Natural, Right, and Proper

“Although the bridge from every element of its use”: “Exhibit No. 4,” Minority Report by Demas Barnes, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 100.

“It is true that Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny are among the subscribers”: Eagle, April 10, 1872.

Kingsley’s letter to the Eagle and Union appeared April 17, 1872.

Committee of Fifty’s letter in answer to Kingsley: Eagle, April 22, 1872.

Kingsley’s second letter: Eagle, April 29, 1872.

Replacements for Tammany quartet: “Synopsis of the Minutes of Proceedings of the Corporators, Directors, and Stockholders of the New York Bridge Company and Also of the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, Comprehending a Period of 16 Years, Viz.; From May 13th, 1867, to June 1st, 1883” (“Exhibit I”), New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 332.

Hewitt swings into action: “The New York Bridge Company and the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, A Full Synopsis of the Meetings of the Executive Committees Thereof, From September 17th, 1869, to June 1st, 1883” (“Exhibit J”), New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 575—577.

WAR’s report: Report of the Chief Engineer on Prices of Materials, and Estimated Cost of the Structure, East River Bridge, June 28, 1872 (“Exhibit No. 2”), New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 74—83.

Barnes called an ass and a quack: Eagle, June 22, 1872.

Kinsella faces down scandal: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898, p. 95.

“…He is the thinker who acts”: Eagle, June 22, 1872.

Predict bridge to cost forty million dollars: Scientific American, July 15, 1872.

Kingsley’s “agreement” at an end: Directors’ Meeting, November 4, 1872, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 334.

Beecher scandal breaks: Johnston, Mrs. Satan, pp. 159-178; Shaplen, “The Beecher-Tilton Case,” Part II.

Majority report: “Exhibit No. 3,” New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 84—89.

Barnes’s minority report: “Exhibit No. 4,” Ibid., pp. 90-101.

Executive Committee report: “Exhibit No. 5,” Ibid., pp. 102-131

“This Company was chartered as a private company”: Ibid., p. 109

Kingsley back at ten-thousand-dollar salary: Ibid., p. 336.

Kingsley takes leave of absence: Ibid., p. 586.

13 The Mysterious Disorder

“Knowing from the reports of other similar works”: Kingsley, Report of the General Superintendent of the New York Bridge Company, p. 33. LER.

“To such of the general public”: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, June 1, 1872, p. 7. LER.

“Considerable risk and some degree of uncertainty”: Ibid., p. 8.

Depth of bedrock: Ibid., p. 9.

“The great timber foundation was now complete!”: Ibid., p. 13.

Paine’s mechanical signaling system: Collingwood, Further Notes on the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

Caisson sinking six to eleven inches a day: Ibid.

Sand pipes: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, pp. 18-20, LER; Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 25-26; Collingwood, Further Notes on the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

“The downward movement of the caisson”: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, p. 26. LER.

Change of work shifts: Collingwood, Further Notes on the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

Dr. Smith’s nine rules: Smith, The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, Including the Caisson Disease, p. 13. LER.

“The habits of many of the men”: Ibid., p. 14.

“The utmost efforts of the expiratory muscles”: Ibid., p. 15.

“Hence, the pulse is small”: Ibid., p. 16.

Experiment with pigeons: Ibid., p. 20.

Experiment with dog: Ibid., p. 28.

Sample case histories: Ibid., pp. 35—37.

“When it is severe, local numbness”: Sodeman, Pathologic Physiology, p. 238.

Remedies employed: Ibid., pp. 32—33.

Walter Reed at Brooklyn City Hospital: Ibid., p. 39.

“Indeed, it is altogether probable”: Ibid., p. 30.

“Experience teaches”: Ibid., p. 7.

Smith rules more time in the lock: Ibid., p. 30.

“The natural impatience of the men”: Ibid., p. 30.

Theory of “special predisposition”: Ibid., p. 29.

“The testimony of all observers”: Ibid., p. 27.

14 The Heroic Mode

Smith’s explanation, “overpowering physical force,” blood “retreats,” etc.: Smith, The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, Including the Caisson Disease, pp. 25—26. LER.

Prior discovery by Paul Bert: Ibid., p. 27.

“It frequently happened under my observation”: Ibid., p. 34.

“by applying the heroic mode”: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, June 1, 1872, p. 24. LER.

Difficulty of taking patient into the caisson: Smith, The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, p. 34. LER.

Death of John Myers: Ibid., p. 41.

Death of Patrick McKay: Ibid., p. 40.

“Perhaps if they had known”: Josephson, Al Smith, Hero of the Cities, p. 20.

Caisson workers strike: Kingsley, Report of the General Superintendent of the New York Bridge Company, pp. 34-35, LER; Eagle, May 8, 1872.

“The surface was evidently very irregular”: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, p. 21. LER.

WAR estimates a hundred lives to go to bedrock: EWR, unpublished biographical sketch of WAR. RPI.

Strata undisturbed since time of deposit: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, p. 22. LER.

A time of “intense anxiety”: EWR, unpublished biographical sketch of WAR. RPI.

First spur of bedrock described: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, p. 23. LER.

Death of Reardon: Smith, The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, p. 40. LER.

Differences of level at the extreme corners: Collingwood, Further Notes on the Caissons of the East River Bridge. LER.

“The labor below is always attended with a certain amount of risk”: WAR, Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, p. 29. LER.

“Relief from the excruciating pain”: WAR, Pneumatic Tower Foundations of the East River Suspension Bridge, p. 88, fn. LER.

Cholera epidemic at Niagara Falls: JAR to Charles Swan, July 29, 1854, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 95.

“He determined not to have it”: Beecher’s Magazine, January, 1871; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 96.

Business carried on by WAR in the fall of 1872: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, pp. 579-583.

WAR’s efforts the winter of 1872-73; EWR, unpublished biographical sketch of WAR, RPI; also WAR notes, letters, specifications, etc., RPI.

Requests leave of absence: Meeting of the Board of Directors, April 21, 1873, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 339.

“My plan would be as follows”: Smith, The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, p. 34. LER.

PART THREE

15 At the Halfway Mark

“Everything has been built to endure”: Francis Collingwood in a speech before the First Annual Meeting of the Alumni of RPI, New York, February 18, 1881.

“The love of praise is, I believe,”: Dorsey, Road to the Sea, p. 163

Tweed escapes: Werner, Tammany Hall, p. 244.

Beecher on trial: Shaplen, “The Beecher-Tilton Case,” Part II.

“…probably no great work was ever conducted”: EWR, unpublished biographical sketch of WAR. RPI.

Granite and gravity: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, January 1, 1877, p. 6. LER.

Limestone in anchorages: Collingwood, Notes on the Masonry of the East River Bridge. LER.

Arrangement of the anchor plates and anchor bars: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, January 1, 1877, pp. 6-8, LER; Specifications for Anchor Plates, New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, 1875, LER; Specifications for Iron Anchor Bars, New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, April, 1875, LER; “Up Among the Spiders; or How the Great Bridge Is Built,” Appleton’s Journal, January 1878; Conant, “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

Work on the approaches: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, January 1, 1877, pp. 23-32. LER.

Model of the bridge: Brooklyn Union, May 25, 1878.

Tower work: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer, January 1, 1877, pp. 4-5, LER; Scientific American, August 10, 1872; Collingwood, Notes on the Masonry of the East River Bridge, LER.

“There are times when standing alone on this spot”: Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 57—59.

Deaths from tower and freak accidents: Eagle, May 18, 1876; interview with C. C. Martin, Eagle, May 24, 1883.

The bridge as an obstruction to navigation: Iron Age, April 27, 1876; Scientific American, May 6, 1876. The hearings were reported in detail in the Eagle, April 24 and May 21, 1876.

Charter amended: An Act to amend an act…Chapter 601. Passed June 5, 1874. LER.

New York Bridge Company dissolved: An Act providing that the bridge in the course of construction over the East River…Chapter 300: Passed May 14, 1875. LER.

“Before winter shall drive the workmen”: Eagle, July 11, 1876.

“One thing is certain”: Ibid.

16 Spirits of ‘76

Specifications: Specifications for Granite Face-stone and Archstone, Required for the New York Tower, East River Bridge, April, 1875, LER; original copy, RPI.

Correspondence with Brooklyn: WAR and EWR, letter books. RPI.

“It is one thing to sit in your office”: WAR to JAR II, August 20, 1907. RUL.

“I would further add, now is the time”: WAR to HCM, February 25, 1875. LER.

Physical discomforts: WAR to JAR II, May 5, 1894.

“There is a popular impression”: EWR, unpublished biographical sketch of WAR. RPI.

Could neither read nor write: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

“Regarding your health”: WAR to Francis Collingwood, undated. RPI.

Note with check for minerals: RPI.

WAR to HCM concerning Keystone Bridge rumor: December 6, 1875. RPI.

Eads lawsuit: Papers on file at RPI; exchange of letters between Eads and WAR, Engineering (London), May 16, June 27, September 5, 1873.

“Its perusal has left only the one prominent impression”; “My actual experience in the St. Louis caisson”; “You might as well patent contrivances in a ship’s rigging”; “In conclusion I beg to assure Captain Eads”: Engineering (London), June 27, 1873.

G. K. Warren and the St. Louis Bridge: Gilbert and Billington, “The Eads Bridge and Nineteenth-Century River Politics.”

“I am willing to accede to the proposition”: WAR to William Paine, May 10, 1876. RPI.

“My health has become of late so precarious”: WAR to HCM, December 1875. RPI.

WAR on his brother Charles: WAR, “Memorial to Charles Roebling,” October 1918, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 324-326.

“He lost no opportunity”: WAR, notes for what was apparently to be an autobiographical sketch, written July 1898. RUL.

Feelings of indignation: Ibid.

Personal expenses: WAR, notebooks. RPI.

“Their grounds cover fourteen acres”: Eagle, August 8, 1876.

Roebling Centennial display: Ibid.; photograph, RPI. The section of cable made up for the Centennial Exhibition is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution, in the Museum of History and Technology.

Wire: Specifications for Steel Cable Wire, for the East River Suspension Bridge—1876, original copy, RPI; also LER.

Machinery Hall: Brown, The Year of the Century: 1876, pp. 112-137.

Starting of the Corliss engine: Scientific American, May 20, 1876.

“It was a scene to be remembered”: Ibid.

“The engineer sits reading his newspaper”: The Atlantic Monthly, July 1876.

WAR to return to Brooklyn: WAR to William Paine, undated. RPI.

“He is a man of great resource”: WAR to HCM, May 6, 1876. RPI.

Telegrams: Originals in scrapbook kept by EWR. RPI.

17 A Perfect Pandemonium

The description of hanging the first rope is drawn from the following: Eagle, August 14 and 15, 1876; New York Herald, August 15, 1876; New York Tribune, August 15, 1876; Scientific American, September 2, 1876; Van Nostrand’s Eclectic Engineering Magazine, October 1876; Farrington to WAR, December 30, 1876, LER; Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, pp. 28—30.

“In a few seconds the rope began to move”: Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, p. 30.

“When it is considered that one has to climb”: New York Herald, August 15, 1876.

Farrington’s ride: Eagle, August 25, 1876; New York Herald, New York Tribune, New York Times, Brooklyn Argus, August 26, 1876; Farrington to WAR, December 30, 1876, LER; Conant, “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

Ten thousand spectators: New York Tribune, August 26, 1876.

“The ride gave me a magnificent view”: Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge, p. 36.

Farrington complains of notoriety: Farrington to WAR, December 30, 1876. LER.

“He does most of the brain work”: Unidentified clipping in a scrapbook kept by EWR. RPI.

High-wire acrobatics on Saturday, August 26: Eagle, same day; New York Herald, Tribune, Sun, and World for August 28.

“Mr. Harry Supple was all that could be desired”: William Paine to WAR, December 31, 1876. LER.

Second day of acrobatics, Monday, August 28: Eagle, same day; New York Herald, Tribune, Sun, and World for August 29.

“I have carried out your instructions”: Farrington to WAR, December 30, 1876. LER.

18 Number 8, Birmingham Gauge

Hewitt and Tilden: Nevins, Abram S. Hewitt, pp. 305-310.

“Hewitt was as true a patriot”: Ibid., p. 317.

“who played the game for ambition”: Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, p. 373.

“the best-equipped, the most active-minded”: Ibid., pp. 295.

Hewitt resolution: Meeting of the Trustees, New York and Brooklyn Bridge, September 7, 1876, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, pp. 383-384; Eagle, September 7 and 8; New York Tribune, September 8, 1876.

“I am very strongly opposed”: Tribune, September 8, 1876.

Tweed arrested in Spain: Werner, Tammany Hall, pp. 247-251.

Letter of resignation: WAR to HCM, September 8, 1876. RPI.

WAR to the Eagle: Undated. RPI.

“I was publicly and specifically singled out”: WAR to HCM, September 11, 1876. RPI.

Haigh’s matrimonial adventures: Eagle, January 6, 1880.

WAR returns to New York City by barge: Unidentified clipping in a scrapbook kept by EWR. RPI.

“There is something colossal in the look of the East River piers”: Ibid.

HCM notified of stock sale: WAR to HCM, November 2, 1876. RPI.

Aspinwall proposal: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 384-386; Eagle, November 14, 1876.

Presidency stolen: Nevins, Abram S. Hewitt, p. 320 ff.

Men to be trained: WAR to HCM, November 6, 1876. RPI.

Oil kettles, sample ferrule, iron and steel rope: WAR to Farrington, November 16, 1876. RPI.

“Man is after all a very finite being”: WAR to James S. T. Stranahan, November 20, 1876. RPI.

Technical instructions to Trenton: WAR to Ferdinand Roebling, undated. RPI.

Requirements for Number 8, Birmingham Gauge: Specifications for Steel Cable Wire, for the East River Suspension Bridge—1876, original copy, RPI; also LER.

Opening and contents of the bids: Meeting of the Trustees, November 4, 1876, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 387—389; also, Meeting of the Executive Committee, December 6, 1876, Proceedings, pp. 643-645.

Reporter sees Martin and HCM: New York Herald, December 16, 1876.

“If one man’s samples”: WAR to HCM, December 15, 1876. LER.

Hill’s computations: New York Herald, December 16, 1876.

Aspinwall and Kinsella comment: New York Herald, December 20, 1876.

Hill’s answer: New York Herald, December 21, 1876.

Executive Committee Meeting of December 23, 1876: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 645—646.

WAR’s report on tests: WAR to HCM, December 18, 1876. LER

Board of Directors’ Meeting of December 28, 1876: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 389.

“Unquestionably Bessemer steel wire is the cheapest”: Eagle, January 10, 1877.

Model of cable and Hildenbrand drawing: Eagle, December 26, 1876.

Trustees’ Meeting of January 11, 1877: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 389-391.

“The assurance of the correct performance”: WAR, Report of the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, January 1, 1877, p. 18. LER.

Slocum requests Army engineers: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 389-391.

Hewitt letter: Eagle, January 12, 1877.

Brooklyn Theater fire: New York Times, December 6, 1876.

Ashtabula disaster: Gies, Bridges and Men, pp. 125—130. Footnote: Ibid., p. 130.

Trustees’ response to Hewitt’s letter: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 389-391; Eagle, January 12, 1877.

Kinsella’s comments on decision: Eagle, January 16, 1877.

“They can help us and the public”: Union, January 16, 1877.

“My attention has been called”: Eagle, January 23, 1877.

“It has become the deepest of mysteries”: Union, January 18, 1877.

“In laying this plan”: WAR, private notes, undated. RPI.

19 The Gigantic Spinning Machine

“I never saw better days for bridge work”: Eagle, clipping in a scrapbook kept by EWR, no date. RPI.

“…no man can be a bridge builder”: Unidentified clipping, dated February 12, 1877, in a scrapbook kept by EWR. RPI.

“The undulating of the bridge”: New York Tribune, February 19, 1877.

WAR’s sign at the footbridge entrance: From a photograph.

“Trinity Church steeple was fencing”: New York Tribune, February 12, 1877.

Farrington discloses imagined report of crossing (fn.): Farrington, Concise Description of the East River Bridge.

“While Revs. Drs. Storrs and Buddington”: Eagle, February 22, 1877.

Lengthy descriptions of the wire spinning and of the array of apparatus involved were published in the Eagle, June 1 and July 7, 1877, and in Appleton’s Journal, January 1878; “The Gigantic Spinning Machine”: Eagle, July 6, 1877.

Report of WAR’s return to Brooklyn: Eagle, May 20, 1877.

HCM and the footbridge craze: New York Illustrated Times, August 18, 1877.

“I started to go once”: Ibid.

Seaman’s epileptic fit: The New York Times, September 20, 1877.

Eagle’s comments on suicide: October 19, 1877.

“It is as brittle as glass”: WAR to Paine, December 3, 1877. RPI.

“This is what Mr. Kinsella is pleased to call the best”: WAR to HCM, December 3, 1877. RPI.

Kinsella says cost no issue: Eagle, December 4, 1877.

“All of which is bosh”: Union and Argus, December 4, 1877.

Accident at the Brooklyn anchorage: Eagle, December 23, 1877; Union and Argus, December 24.

“The brick arch fell because it had a right to fall”: WAR to HCM, December 31, 1877. RPI.

“There are so many points to be considered”: WAR to Hildenbrand, January 9, 1878. RPI.

“I want you to help me get out a specification”: WAR to Farrington, February 9, 1878. RPI.

January 8 meeting of the Executive Committee: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 667—668.

“Of course more or less legal information is required”: Union and Argus, January 8, 1878.

20 Wire Fraud

“Yet the existence of evil in human life”: JAR, “Life and Creation,” 1864. RUL.

Storm of January 31, 1878: WAR, Communication from Chief Engineer W. A. Roebling, In Regard to the Method of Steam Transit Over the East River Bridge, p. 8, LER; Eagle, January 31, 1878.

Murphy predicts 1880 completion: Eagle, February 5, 1878.

WAR plans for bridge trains: Eagle, March 4, 1878.

“An ingenious arrangement”: WAR, Communication from Chief Engineer W. A. Roebling, p. 6, fn.

“Neither, must we overlook the effect”: Ibid., p. 5.

Minnesota clips a cable: Eagle, March 4, 1878.

Death of Tweed: Werner, Tammany Hall, pp. 257-258.

“He never thought of angels”: Ibid.

“If he had died in 1870”: Callow, The Tweed Ring, p. 298.

“Alas! Alas! young men”: Ibid., quoted, p. 297.

“A villain of more brains”: Quoted in Werner, Tammany Hall, p. 263.

“Well, the Brooklyn people have no right”: New York Sun, clipping in a scrapbook kept by EWR. RPI.

Virtually every paper on both sides of the river carried a long account of the breaking of the cable. This description has been drawn chiefly from the following: Brooklyn Union and Argus, June 14 and 15, 1878; New York Herald, June 15, 1878; Eagle, June 14 and 15, 1878; New York Times, June 15 and 16, 1878; New York World, June 16.

“It will not sway from side to side”: New York World, June 30, 1878.

HCM cuts back the work: Eagle, August 12, 1878.

The exchange of letters between WAR and HCM concerning the Haigh wire deception is contained in “Exhibit No. 6,” New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 132-138. They include: WAR to HCM, July 9 and 22, 1878; HCM to WAR, July 25, 1878; WAR to HCM, July 28 and August 6, 1878.

Trustees’ meeting of August 5, 1878: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 441.

Trustees’ meeting of August 7, 1878: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 441.

WAR’s private notes on Haigh: RPI.

“We have brought machinery to a pitch”: George, Social Problems, p. 19.

“The thousands who daily cross”: Eagle, August 8, 1878.

“It has pleased the average penny-a-liner”: EWR, unpublished biographical sketch of WAR. RPI.

“Each must hang in its own peculiar length”: Appleton’s Journal, January 1878.

Close call on the buggy: Eagle, January 5, 1879.

Wrapping wire contract changed: Meeting of the Executive Committee, September 12, 1878, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 682.

“The end, then, is near”: Eagle, October 5, 1878.

21 Emily

“At first I thought I would succumb”: WAR, sometime in the spring of 1903. RUL.

“Mrs. Roebling is a tall and handsome woman”: Trenton Gazette, April 15, 1894.

“I would send you a little tintype”: WAR to Elvira Roebling, March 5, 1864. RUL.

“You know, darling, that your presence”: WAR to EWR, April 1, 1864. RUL.

“This full moon evening”: WAR to EWR, April 15, 1864. RUL.

“After all, dear Emmie”: WAR to EWR, April 4, 1864. RUL.

“Look for a big thief next winter”: WAR to EWR, July 4, 1864. RUL.

“Does the Mary Powell run”: WAR to EWR, August 1, 1864. RUL.

“Your letter describing the visit”: WAR to EWR, June 19, 1864. RUL.

Ferdinand’s reaction to EWR: WAR to EWR, September 1, 1864. RUL.

“When the two hopefuls”: WAR to EWR, September 25, 1864. RUL.

“I still entertain a lively remembrance”: Ibid.

“aspired to no higher distinction”: Blake, History of Putnam County, New York.

Parrott guns bombard Storm King: Pelletreau, History of Putnam County, New York.

Career of G. K. Warren prior to the Civil War: Taylor, Gouverneur Kemble Warren.

The distressing thing about Indian fighting: Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, pp. 51—52.

Picnic on the Hudson: The painting hangs in the Julia Butterfield Memorial Library, Cold Spring, New York.

“I think we will be a pair of lovers”: WAR to EWR, November 18, 1864. RUL.

Warren and Sheridan at Five Forks: Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, pp. 348-357.

WAR’s view of Five Forks: WAR to James Rusling, February 18, 1916. RUL.

Effie Afton case: Gies, Bridges and Men, p. 151; Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 124—125.

“I have heard men like Humphreys”: WAR, private memorandum, written sometime in 1914. RUL.

“It is whispered among the knowing ones”: New York Star, December 17, 1879.

Edge Moor Iron official writes directly to EWR: W. H. Francis to WAR, October 28, 1879. The letter is contained in the scrapbook kept by EWR from May 1878 to October 1882. RPI.

Secretary of State Evarts retained as council: Eagle, January 16, 1879.

Decision of Supreme Court of New York: Ibid.

Decision of Court of Appeals: Eagle, March 25, 1879.

Miller suit: New York Herald and Eagle, February 28, 1879; Eagle, March 7; New York Herald and Eagle, March 31; Eagle, March 23, 1879; Testimony in the Miller Suit to Remove the East River Bridge.

Slocum charges that the engineers are taking bribes: Union and Argus, May 3, 1879; New York World and New York Sun, May 4, 1879.

“And I want to say right here”: Eagle, May 6, 1879.

Davidson and Ferdinand Roebling testify: New York Sun, New York Star, New York World, May 7, 1879; Union and Argus and Eagle, May 8, 1879.

“I hope I have heard for the last time”: WAR to Slocum, May 6, 1879. RPI.

Engineers exonerated: Eagle, New York Sun, New York Herald, May 28, 1879.

Kinsella declines to serve again, new faces on the board: Eagle and Union and Argus, June 9, 1879.

Steinmetz attacks Kingsley: Eagle, June 10, 1879.

Murphy appears to be out: Ibid.

Murphy in again: Eagle, June 25, 1879.

Tay Bridge disaster: Gies, Bridges and Men, pp. 134—146.

“WILL THE TAY DISASTER BE REPEATED”: New York Herald, January 11, 1880.

De Lesseps illustration: EWR’s scrapbook for May 1878 to October 1882, RPI; the illustration is from New York Daily Graphic, February 28, 1880.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper’s view of cable work: November 15, 1879.

J. Lloyd Haigh at Sing Sing: Unidentified clipping in EWR’s scrapbook. RPI.

Kingsley-Steinmetz scene: The incident was widely reported and the dialogue differs somewhat from one account to another. This version is a composite from what appeared in the Eagle, the New York Star, the Sun, the Heraldand the Tribune on October 12, 1880, all of which were carefully entered in EWR’s scrapbook.

RPI alumni dinner: Eagle, February 19, 1881; Engineering News, February 26, 1881.

“The men who have come from the Institute”: Engineering News, February 26, 1881.

Rossiter Raymond at the RPI dinner for 1882 (fn.): Unidentified clippings. RPI.

There is no known description of the view from WAR’s window written at the time. This one has been derived from contemporary photographs of New York taken from the Brooklyn side of the river.

EWR leads the first walk over the bridge: New York Star, Eagle, and the Union and Argus, December 13, 1881.

22 The Man in the Window

“The best way to secure rapid and effective work”: New York Star, August 23, 1882.

Trustees’ meeting of December 12, 1881: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, pp. 461-462; also New York Star, Brooklyn Union and Argus, and the Eagle, for December 13, 1881.

Stranahan’s customary method: Eagle, December 13, 1881.

Total expenditures January 1, 1882; also HCM’s estimate: Eagle, January 10, 1882.

Meeting of the trustees, October 13, 1881: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 457-458.

“When I consented to make this change”: WAR to HCM, January 9, 1882, p. 11. LER.

Cables could uproot the anchorages: Ibid., p. 12.

Seth Low at his first trustees’ meeting: Eagle, January 10, 1882.

“the first scholar in college”: Dictionary of American Biography.

Low’s campaign for mayor: Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898.

Meeting of the trustees, June 12, 1882: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, p. 468.

Robert Roosevelt’s letter to Mayor Grace: New York Herald, June 14, 1882.

HCM talks to the press: New York Sun, June 16, 1882.

“His plans and diagrams are all about him”: Ibid.

Sellers of Edge Moor ridiculed: Eagle, New York Sun, New York Herald, June 27, 1882.

Meeting of the trustees, June 26, 1882: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 469-470.

Slocum’s remarks: Eagle, New York Sun, June 27, 1882.

“unsubstantial fabric of a dream”: Quoted in Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, p. 153.

The best roundup of rumors concerning the health and mental decline of WAR: New York Sun, July 31, 1882.

WAR’s letter of explanation: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 473—474.

WAR claims he is powerless to push Sellers: WAR to HCM, July 19, 1882, RPI; also New York Sun, August 17, 1882.

“Newport has never looked more attractive”: Eagle, July 3, 1882.

WAR’s “cottage” at Newport: The house still stands; it is now a Catholic convalescent home and is located, ironically, beside the Newport end of the gigantic new suspension bridge over Narragansett Bay.

WAR will not “dance attendance on the Trustees”: Draft of a long letter to Comptroller Campbell, undated. RPI. It is not known whether the letter was sent.

WAR will not be “dragged into the board and put on exhibition”: Draft of a letter to the New York Sun, probably written in July 1882; probably never sent. RPI.

“no less than one hundred and twenty politicians”: Ibid.

“This is the same General Slocum”: Ibid.

Kingsley overpaid by $175,000: Ibid.

“I have always had bitter enemies in the Board”: Draft of letter, WAR to Comptroller Campbell, undated. RPI.

“I have over and over again been interviewed”: Ibid.

Low reported to be out of town briefly: New York Herald, August 3, 1882.

“Mr. Roebling, I am going to remove you because it pleases me”: WAR, undated notes, written sometime in late August 1882. RPI.

Death of G. K. Warren and decision of the military court: Taylor, Gouverneur Kemble Warren.

“Please make it convenient to be present”: Eagle, August 17, 1882.

Trustees’ meeting of August 22: Eagle, New York Sun, New York Star, New York Evening Post, New York World, New York Herald, New York Tribune, August 23, 1882.

Low’s comments on WAR at the meeting of the trustees, August 22, 1882: Eagle, same date; New York World, New York Sun, New York Star, New York Herald, August 23.

“WHEREAS, The Chief Engineer of this Bridge”: New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 477—478.

Editorial comments in New York papers: All for issues of August 23, 1882.

Iron Age comment: Issue of August 31, 1882; Newport Daily News: August 24, 1883; Trenton Daily State Gazette and the Eagle: August 23, 1882.

“I take the liberty of writing to express to you my heartfelt gratitude”: EWR to Ludwig Semler, undated. RPI.

“Nobody should be convicted before he is tried”: Eagle, September 5, 1882.

WAR would as soon “be out of the bridge” if Kingsley is to decide his fate: Letter to William Paine, September 10, 1882. RPI.

Semler reports on visit to WAR: Eagle, September 7, 1882.

Visit of the World reporter to Newport: Described by EWR in her letter to William Marshall, undated. RPI.

Meeting of the trustees, September 11, 1882: The entire session was heavily reported by all of the following, from which this account has been drawn, New York Evening Post, New York Sun, New York Times, New York Star, New York Herald, New York World, New York Tribune, Brooklyn Union and Argus, and the Eagle, all for September 12, 1882; also New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 478-481.

Low tells reporters he is pleased with outcome: Eagle, September 12, 1882.

“I actually believe that all that ails him”: Ibid.

23 And Yet the Bridge Is Beautiful

“And yet the bridge is beautiful in itself”: Scientific American, September 22, 1883.

The Times on Mrs. Vanderbilt’s party: March 27, 1883.

The World on the “Bridge Frauds”: The first of a long series of articles appeared on September 18, 1882, under a headline, “THE BRIDGE RING, OVERWHELMING PROOFS OF SYSTEMATIC JOBBERY AND OFFICIAL CORRUPTION.”

Kinsella interview: World, September 19, 1882.

The seating of the Tammany delegates: The best account of the Syracuse convention is in Nevins, Grover Cleveland; A Study in Courage.

The Times pinpoints Slocum’s association with the bridge as the chief cause of his failure to get the nomination: September 22, 1882.

Mayors Low and Grace appoint accountants to examine the Bridge Company’s books: “Report of the Committee Appointed by the Board of Trustees,” New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884, pp. 1-6.

Report of the accountants: Ibid., pp. 7—64.

The bridge as a memorial to HCM: Special meeting of the trustees, December 2, 1882, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 483-484.

“What a relief it will be”: Barnard, “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

Scientific American editor describes the bridge as seen from the river: Issue of September 22, 1883.

United States Illuminating Company gets contract for arc lamps: Meeting of the Executive Committee, February 12, 1883, New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, pp. 745—747; “Report of the Committee on Lighting the Bridge, April 9, 1883,” Proceedings, pp. 161-164.

“The scene suggested the subterranean laboratory of a magician”: Quoted in Frederick L. Collins, Consolidated Gas Company of New York, 1934, pp. 268-270.

EWR explains how superstructure should be made: Times, May 23, 1883.

EWR’s ride over the bridge: Only passing mention of the event was made in the papers and then weeks after it happened (Times, May 23, 1883).

The fact that the rooster went along turns up only in the Trenton papers many years later, when the bird, stuffed and mounted, was a conversation piece in the Roebling home.

The interview with the Union reporter appeared May 16, 1883.

Full accounts of the preparations for “The People’s Day” appeared in just about every paper, off and on, throughout the preceding week.

The World now favors the bridge: Swanberg, Pulitzer, p. 74.

WAR’s concern about fireworks display: Letter to Stranahan, dated May 5, 1883. RPI.

Hewitt writes for wages of bridge workers, etc.: May 3, 1883, RPI; WAR’s answer to Hewitt, RPI.

“I wish you would make one of my party of ladies”: EWR to Mrs. William G. Wilson, May 17, 1883. New York Historical Society.

Hewitt letter of May 18, 1883: RPI.

24 The People’s Day

Every newspaper on both sides of the East River went to great lengths to describe the opening of the Great Bridge. The sources used most here were the Eagle, the Union, New York Times, Sun, World, and Tribune, all for May 25, 1883.

Estimates on crowds pouring into New York: Times.

“One moment they were clambering clumsily”: Sun.

“It was as if the forest of masts had blossomed”: Tribune.

“The women in the crowd raised their hands”: Sun.

Arthur trods the bridge “with an elastic step”: Sun.

Arthur “an Apollo in form”: Ibid.

Large portions of the Opening Day addresses were carried in the papers of May 25, but the complete text is contained in a commemorative book, Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, published by the Bridge Company.

WAR’s day and the reception at 110 Columbia Heights were also covered in most newspaper accounts of the day’s events. See in particular the Tribune and the Sun.

“As the sun went down the scene from the bridge was beautiful”: Sun.

“Why I thought Brooklyn had one hotel”: Ibid.

The most interesting account of the first crowds to cross the bridge was provided by the Times.

Epilogue

Attendance figures for first three days: New York Tribune, May 26, 28, 1883.

The Memorial Day tragedy: New York Times and Tribune, June 1, 1883.

“That was my first view of a great calamity”: Josephson, Al Smith, Hero of the Cities, p. 24.

Martin’s force: Martin, Report of the Chief Engineer and Superintendent of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, June 1, 1884. LER.

Barnum’s elephants: Times, May 17, 1884.

Brodie: Times, July 23, 24, 1886; Botkin, New York City Folklore, pp. 218-223.

Other jumpers: “This Alluring Roadway,” The New Yorker, May 17, 1952.

Montgomery Schuyler’s article appeared in Harper’s Weekly, the issue of May 26, 1883; also included in Mumford, Roots of American Architecture, pp. 159—168.

James: See his American Scene; for the best analysis of how he and other American intellectuals and artists responded to the bridge, see Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge; Fact and Symbol, pp. 129-165.

“The stone plays against the steel” plus other Mumford comments on the bridge: Sticks and Stones, pp. 114-117; The Brown Decades, pp. 96-106.

“not so much linking places as leaving them”: Scully, Modern Architecture, p. 17.

The prominent American architect is Philip Johnson.

All that was needed was a new coat of paint: “This Alluring Roadway,” The New Yorker, May 17, 1952.

Roebling’s pleasure over Low’s defeat: WAR to JAR II, November 3-6, 1903. RUL.

“So far as I know not a dollar was stolen”: WAR to James Rusling, January 23, 1916. RUL.

Hildenbrand’s post-Brooklyn career: ASCE, Transactions, Vol. 77, 1914.

“Soon I will be the last leaf on the tree”: WAR to JAR II, April 26, 1909. RUL.

EWR at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas: WAR to JAR II, May 24, 1896. RUL.

WAR blocks sale to U.S. Steel: Ibid., p. 352.

“He was now adrift”: WAR in a private memorandum dated March 16, 1922. RUL.

The founding of Roebling, New Jersey: Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 359-361, 367-373.

Size of WAR’s estate: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 278.

“…these relationships are those of the heart”: WAR to JAR II, March 21, 1908. RUL.

WAR becomes “almost jovial”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 269.

“And yet people say how well you look”: WAR to JAR II, October 19, 1893. RUL.

Times letter: RUL.

“It means 100,000 spies”: WAR to JAR II, September 15, 1913. RUL.

“It has come to this pass”: WAR to JAR II, October 9, 1914. RUL.

“War in the kitchen”: WAR to JAR II, August 11, 1916. RUL.

WAR’s “oddities”: Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 263, 274.

“a nice, courteous old gentleman”: Author’s interview with W. H. Pearson, formerly of Trenton.

WAR known as a soft touch: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 262.

“Billy Sunday”: Ibid., p. 274.

“I claim a small part of this”: WAR to JAR II, June 10, 1922. RUL.

“It’s my job to carry the responsibility”: New York World interview quoted in the Trenton Times, June 13, 1921.

“Think not that I am improving”: WAR to Mrs. JAR II, May 14, 1926. RUL.

“As far as we are concerned, it will last forever”: Jack Schiff, city engineer in charge of all East River bridges, in an interview with the author, March 16, 1971.

Bibliography

Manuscript Sources

There are two collections of Roebling manuscript papers: the Roebling Collections in the Library of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, and in the Special Collections of the Library of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Both are of vast scope and value and have been almost totally ignored by all but two or three scholars.

The latter collection contains numerous notebooks, ledgers, diaries, and other documents belonging to John A. Roebling, in addition to his philosophical papers, patents, numerous drawings, sketches, and the early papers and records of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But the most important part of the collection, so far as the telling of this story, is the file of Washington Roebling’s correspondence. The letters cover a span of nearly seventy years and include, for example, all of his war letters to Emily, plus those written to his son in the years after the completion of the bridge. This correspondence has been carefully arranged by the late Clarence E. Case, a prominent New Jersey attorney and friend of the Roebling family. Like everything else in the collection the letters are readily accessible. Interested scholars ought to be warned, however, that in editing the letters for a typed transcription, Mr. Case cut a great deal that he considered of too personal or too technical a nature.

The RPI collection is the larger of the two and contains far more concerning the Brooklyn Bridge. It includes hundreds of letters, notebooks, reports, cashbooks, and personal memorandums relating to the careers of both John A. and Washington Roebling. It includes drawings of all of John A. Roebling’s bridges, his various preparatory schemes for the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, numerous plans and blueprints of the bridge, photographs, and his private library. It includes the notes he kept during the spiritualist séances of 1867, Washington Roebling’s letters from Europe that same year, and two large scrapbooks kept by Emily Roebling from April 1876 to October 1882. Most important of all, it includes the letter books and private notes kept by Washington and Emily Roebling during the years the bridge was being built. Recently the entire collection was classified and catalogued for the first time by Robert M. Vogel of the Smithsonian Institution, with a grant from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Newspapers, Magazines, and Technical Journals

Use was made of numerous newspapers, magazines, and technical journals. Many of these were in the form of clippings included in the scrapbooks kept by Emily Roebling; the rest were consulted in various libraries. Of the papers consulted the most valuable by far was the Brooklyn Eagle.

Newspapers: Boston Post, Brooklyn Argus, Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn Leader, Brooklyn Union, Brooklyn Union and Argus, Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Cold Spring Recorder, Coney Island Sun, Long Island Star, New York Commercial Advertiser, New York Daily Graphic, New York Daily Witness, New York Evening Express, New York Evening Mail, New York Evening Post, New York Evening Telegram, New York Herald, New York Independent, New York Mail and Express, New York Mercury, New York Star, New York Sun, New York Times, New York Tribune, New York World, Newport Daily News, Niagara Falls Gazette, Pittsburgh Gazette, Trenton Daily State Gazette, Troy Record.

Magazines and technical journals: American Heritage, American Railroad Journal, Appletons Journal, Architects and Mechanics’ Journal, Beecher’s Magazine, Brooklyn Monthly, Civil Engineering, Engineering (London), Engineering News, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Harper’s Weekly, The Iron Age, Journal of the Franklin Institute, Mechanics (New York), The New Yorker, Puck, The Railroad Gazette, St. Nicholas Magazine, Scientific American, Transactions (American Society of Civil Engineers), Van Nostrand’s Eclectic Engineering Magazine, Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine.

Works Relating Directly to the Brooklyn Bridge

Barnard, Charles, “The Brooklyn Bridge.” St. Nicholas Magazine, July 1883.

Barnes, A. C., The New York and Brooklyn Bridge. (Pamphlet) Brooklyn, 1883.

Brooklyn Bridge: 1883-1933. Published by the City of New York Department of Plant and Structures, 1933.

Conant, William C., “The Brooklyn Bridge.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1883.

East River Bridge, Laws and Engineer’s Reports, 1868-1884. Brooklyn, 1885. (This very rare volume contains all of the following, most of which were published separately during the time the bridge was being built.)

An Act to amend an act entitled “An Act to incorporate the New York Bridge Company, for the purpose of constructing and maintaining a bridge over the East River, between the cities of New York and Brooklyn,” passed April sixteenth, eighteen hundred and sixty-seven, and to provide for the speedy construction of said bridge. Chapter 601. Passed June 5, 1874.

An Act to establish a bridge across the East River, between the cities of Brooklyn and New York, in the State of New York, a post road. Public, No. 53. Approved by Congress March 3, 1869.

An Act to incorporate the New York Bridge Company, for the purpose of constructing and maintaining a bridge over the East River, between the cities of New York and Brooklyn. Chapter 399. Passed April 16, 1867.

An Act providing that the bridge in the course of construction over the East River, between the cities of New York and Brooklyn, by the New York Bridge Company, shall be a public work of the cities of New York and Brooklyn, and for the dissolution of said Company, and the completion and management of the said bridge by the said cities. Chapter 300. Passed May 14, 1875.

Collingwood, Francis, A Few Facts about the Caissons of the East River Bridge. Paper read at the third annual convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers, June 21, 1871; printed originally in ASCE Transactions; also Engineering (London), February 16 and 23, 1872.

_____ The Foundations for the Brooklyn Anchorage of the East River Bridge. Paper read before the American Society of Civil Engineers, June 10, 1874; in Transactions.

_____ Further Notes on the Caissons of the East River Bridge. Paper read at the fourth annual convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers, June 5-6, 1872; in Transactions; also Engineering (London), October 18 and 25, 1872.

_____ Notes on the Masonry of the East River Bridge. Paper read before the American Society of Civil Engineers, November 1, 1876; in Transactions.

_____ Progress of Work at the East River Bridge. Paper read before the American Society of Civil Engineers, June 17, 1879; in Transactions.

Kingsley, William C., First Annual Report of the General Superintendent of the East River Bridge. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1870.

_____ Report of the General Superintendent, New York Bridge Company. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1871.

_____ Report of the General Superintendent of the New York Bridge Company. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1872.

Martin, C. C., Report of the Chief Engineer and Superintendent of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, June 1, 1884. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1884.

Report of the Executive Committee of the New York Bridge Company, June 1, 1872. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1872.

Report of the Officers of the New York Bridge Company to the Board of Directors, February, 1875. Eagle Print, Brooklyn, 1875.

Reports of Assistant Engineers and Master Mechanic, 1875-1876.

Roebling, John A., Report of John A. Roebling, C.E., to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, on the Proposed East River Bridge. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1870.

Roebling, Washington A., Communication from Chief Engineer W. A. Roebling, In Regard to the Method of Steam Transit Over the East River Bridge. March 4, 1878.

_____ First Annual Report of the Chief Engineer of The East River Bridge. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1870.

_____ Pneumatic Tower Foundations of the East River Suspension Bridge. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1872.

_____ Report of the Chief Engineer to the Board of Directors of the New York Bridge Company, June 5, 1871. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1871.

_____ Report of the Chief Engineer of the East River Bridge on Prices of Materials and Estimated Cost of the Structure. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, June 28, 1872.

_____ Report of the Chief Engineer of the New York Bridge Company, 1874. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1874.

_____ Report of the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, January 1, 1877. Eagle Print, Brooklyn, 1877.

_____ Report of the Chief Engineer on the Strength of the Cables and Suspended Superstructure of the Bridge, Made to the Board of Trustees, January 9, 1882.

_____ Report of the Chief Engineer on the Tests of the Samples of Wire, 1876.

_____ Third Annual Report of the Chief Engineer, June 1, 1872. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1872.

Smith, Andrew H., M.D., The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, Including the Caisson Disease. Eagle Book and Job Printing Department, Brooklyn, 1873.

Specifications for Anchor Plates, New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, 1875.

Specifications for Corners, Facing and Archstone, of Granite, Required for the New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, 1875.

Specifications for Cut Face-stone, Backing and Archstone of Limestone, Required for the New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, 1875.

Specifications for Cut Face-stone and Backing, Limestone and Granite, Required for the New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, 1875.

Specifications for Granite Cut Stone, Required for the Parapets at the roadway, Brooklyn and New York Towers, East River Bridge, 1876.

Specifications for Granite Face-stone and Archstone, Required for the New York Tower, East River Bridge, April, 1875.

Specifications for Iron Anchor Bars, New York Anchorage, East River Bridge, April, 1875.

Specifications for Saddles and Saddle-Plates for the Brooklyn and New York Towers, East River Bridge, 1874.

Specifications for Steel Cable Wire, for the East River Suspension Bridge—1876.

Specifications for Wire Ropes for the East River Bridge.

Farrington, E. F., Concise Description of the East River Bridge, with Full Details of the Construction. (Pamphlet) C. D. Wynkoop, New York, 1881. Republished in 1969 by Boro Book Store, Brooklyn.

Green, S. W., A Complete History of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge from its Conception in 1866 to its Completion in 1883, with Sketches of the Lives of J. A. Roebling, W. A. Roebling, and H. C. Murphy. (Pamphlet) New York, 1883.

An Illustrated Description of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. (Pamphlet) Published by John A. Roebling’s Sons, Trenton, no date.

New York and Brooklyn Bridge Proceedings, 1867-1884. Brooklyn, 1885. (This thick invaluable volume contains the only records kept of the meetings of the directors—later the trustees—of the Bridge Company, the meetings of the Executive Committee, lists of the stockholders at various periods during the construction of the bridge, lists of real estate purchased, plus all other reports, letters, etc., emanating from the Bridge Company during the time from May 1867 to June 1884.)

Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn, 1883.

Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers to the Directors of the New York Bridge Company. The Standard Press Print, Brooklyn, 1869.

Schuyler, Montgomery, “The Bridge as a Monument.” Harper’s Weekly, May 24, 1883. Also included in Lewis Mumford’s Roots of Contemporary American Architecture, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, New York, 1952; paperback edition, Grove Press, New York, 1959.

Testimony in the Miller Suit to Remove the East River Bridge. Albany, 1879.

Trachtenberg, Alan, Brooklyn Bridge; Fact and Symbol. (An excellent analysis of the bridge as a cultural symbol in America.) Oxford University Press, New York, 1965.

Works Relating to John A. and Washington A. Roebling

There is no first-rate biography of either John A. or Washington A. Roebling. The closest thing to it and the one reliable source of family history is The Roeblings; A Century of Engineers, Bridgebuilders and Industrialists by Hamilton Schuyler, Princeton University Press, 1931. Other works consulted were these:

Farrington, E. F., A Full and Complete Description of the Covington and Cincinnati Suspension Bridge with Dimensions and Details of Construction. Cincinnati, 1867.

John A. Roebling. An Account of the Ceremonies at the Unveiling of a Monument to His Memory; Address by H. Estabrook. Roebling Press, Trenton, 1908.

Roebling, John A., Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831, trans. by Edward Underwood. Roebling Press, Trenton, 1931.

_____ Final Report of John A. Roebling, Civil Engineer, to the President and Directors of the Niagara Falls Suspension and Niagara Falls International Bridge Companies. Rochester, N. Y., 1855

_____ “The Great Central Railroad from Philadelphia to St. Louis.” American Railroad Journal, Special Edition, 1847.

_____ “Letters to Ferdinand Baehr, 1831.” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, June 1935.

_____ Long and Short Span Railway Bridges. (Includes an introduction by Washington Roebling.) D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1869.

_____ Report to the President and Board of Directors of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company. Trenton, 1867.

Roebling, Washington A., Early History of Saxonburg. Trenton, 1924.

Steinman, D. B., The Builders of the Bridge. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1945. (The author was a famous bridgebuilder himself and was long considered the authority on John A. Roebling. His book, however, was based on superficial research and contains many inaccuracies.)

Vogel, Robert M., Roebling’s Delaware and Hudson Canal Aqueducts. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D. C., 1971.

Books on Bridges and Bridgebuilders

Dorsey, Florence L., Road to the Sea. Rinehart & Company, New York, 1947.

Gies, Joseph, Bridges and Men. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, N. Y., 1963.

Gilbert, Ralph W., Jr., and Billington, David P., “The Eads Bridge and Nineteenth-Century River Politics.” Paper read at the First National Conference on Civil Engineering: History, Heritage and the Humanities, Princeton University, 1970.

Jacobs, David, and Neville, Anthony E., Bridges, Canals and Tunnels. American Heritage Publishing Company, New York, 1968.

Jakkula, A. A., A History of Suspension Bridges in Bibliographical Form. Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, College Station, Texas, 1941.

Kirby, Richard Shelton, and Laurson, Philip Gustave, The Early Years of Modern Civil Engineering. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1932.

Pope, Thomas, A Treatise on Bridge Architecture, in which the Superior Advantages of the Flying Pendent Lever Bridge are Fully Proved. New York, 1811.

Steinman, David B., and Watson, Sara Ruth, Bridges and Their Builders, 2nd rev. ed. Dover Publications, New York, 1957.

Stuart, C. B., Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America. D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1871.

Vose, George L., Bridge Disasters in America. Boston, 1887.

White, Joseph, and Von Bernewitz, M. W., The Bridges of Pittsburgh. Cramer Printing and Publishing Company, Pittsburgh, 1928.

Woodward, C. M., A History of the St. Louis Bridge. G. I. Jones and Company, St. Louis, 1881.

General Works

An Account of the Dinner by the Hamilton Club to Honor James S. T. Stranahan, December 13, 1888. Brooklyn, 1889. Collection of the Long Island Historical Society.

Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams. Houghton Miffin Company, Sentry Edition, Boston, 1961.

Albion, Robert Greenhalgh, The Rise of New York Port (1815-1860). Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1939.

Andrist, Ralph K., ed., The Confident Years. American Heritage Publishing Company, New York, 1969.

Blake, William, History of Putnam County, New York. New York, 1849.

Botkin, B. A., ed., New York City Folklore. Random House, New York, 1956.

The Brooklyn City and Business Directory, 1869, 1870.

Brown, Dee, The Year of the Century: 1876. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1966.

Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth. Macmillan and Company, New York and London, 1895.

Buck, Solon J. and Elizabeth Hawthorn, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1939.

Butterfield, Roger, The American Past. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.

Callender, James H., Yesterdays on Brooklyn Heights. The Dorland Press, New York, 1927.

Callow, Alexander B., Jr., The Tweed Ring. Oxford University Press, New York, 1966.

Carnegie, Andrew, Autobiography. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1920.

Catton, Bruce, Grant Moves South. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1960.

_____ A Stillness at Appomattox. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, N. Y., 1954.

The City of Brooklyn. (A guidebook, probably written by Henry R. Stiles.) New York, 1871.

Condit, Carl W., American Building. University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Craig, Neville B., The Olden Time, Vol. I. Pittsburgh, 1846.

Davis, Andrew Jackson, Free Thoughts Concerning Religion. Boston, 1854.

_____ The Magic Staff, An Autobiography. New York, 1857.

Ellis, Edward Robb, The Epic of New York. Coward-McCann, New York, 1966.

Fiftieth Anniversary Program. Putnam County Historical Society.

Fiske, Stephen, Off-Hand Portraits of Prominent New Yorkers. George R. Lockwood and Son, New York, 1884.

Foster, L. H., Newport Guide. 1876.

Franco, Barbara, “The Cardiff Giant: A Hundred-Year-Old Hoax.” New York History, October 1969.

Genung, Abram, The Frauds of the N.Y.C. Government Exposed. New York, 1871.

George, Henry, Social Problems. New York, 1883.

Hansen, Marcus Lee, The Immigrant in American History. Harvard University Press, 1940.

Historical Sketch of the Fulton Ferry. Brooklyn, 1879.

History of Butler County, Pennsylvania. Waterman, Watkins and Company, Chicago, 1883.

Howard, Henry W. B., ed., History of The City of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, 1893.

Johnston, Johanna, Mrs. Satan. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1967.

Josephson, Matthew, Edison. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1959.

Josephson, Matthew and Hannah, Al Smith, Hero of the Cities. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1969.

Kaplan, Justin, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.

Keller, Morton, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast. Oxford University Press, New York, 1968.

W. C. Kingsley. Privately published, Brooklyn, 1885. Collection of the Long Island Historical Society.

Kouwenhoven, John A., The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, N. Y., 1953.

Lancaster, Clay, Old Brooklyn Heights. Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vt., 1961.

Lorant, Stefan, ed., Pittsburgh; The Story of an American City. Doubleday and Company, Garden City, N. Y., 1964.

Lyman, Colonel Theodore, Meade’s Headquarters. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1922.

Lynch, Denis Tilden, “Boss” Tweed. Boni and Liveright, New York, 1927.

McCabe, James B., Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life, National Publishing Company, Philadelphia, 1872.

Mumford, John Kimberly, Outspinning the Spider. New York, 1921.

Mumford, Lewis, Sticks and Stones. Boni and Liveright, New York, 1924.

_____ The Brown Decades. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1931.

Murphy, Mary Ellen, and others, eds., A Treasury of Brooklyn. William Sloane Associates, New York, 1949.

Nevins, Allan, Abram S. Hewitt. Harper and Brothers, New York, 1935.

_____ Grover Cleveland; A Study in Courage. Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1932.

New York at Gettysburg, Vol. III. J. B. Lyon Company, Albany, 1900.

The Newport Directory, 1882.

Old Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Savings Bank, 1927.

Overton, Jacqueline, Long Island’s Story. Doubleday, Doran and Company, Garden City, N. Y., 1929.

Pelletreau, William S., History of Putnam County, New York. Philadelphia, 1886.

Roebling, Emily Warren, The Journal of the Reverend Silas Constant. J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1903.

Rourke, Constance Mayfield, Trumpets of Jubilee. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1927.

Sandburg, Carl, Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years and The War Years. 1-vol. ed. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1954.

Scully, Vincent, Jr., Modern Architecture. George Braziller, New York, 1961.

Shaplen, Robert, “The Beecher-Tilton Case.” The New Yorker, June 5 and 12, 1954.

Smith, Matthew Hale, Sunshine and Shadow in New York, J. B. Burr and Company, Hartford, 1868.

Stiles, Henry R., The Civil, Political, Professional and Ecclesiastical History and Commercial and Industrial Record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, N. Y., from 1683 to 1884. Munsell and Company, New York, 1884.

_____ A History of the City of Brooklyn: Including the Old Town and Village of Brooklyn, the Town of Bushwick, and the Village and City of Williamsburg. 3 vols. Brooklyn, 1867-1870.

Still, Bayrd, Mirror for Gotham. New York University Press, 1956.

Strong, George Templeton, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1952.

Stryker, Roy, and Seidenberg, Mel, A Pittsburgh Album, 1758-1958. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, 1959.

Sullivan, Louis, The Autobiography of an Idea. Dover Publications, New York, 1956.

Swanberg, W. A., Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1959.

_____ Pulitzer. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1967.

Syrett, Harold Coffin, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898. Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, No. 512, New York, 1944.

Taylor, Emerson Gifford, Gouverneur Kemble Warren. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1932.

Trollope, Anthony, North America. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1951.

Twain, Mark, and Warner, Charles Dudley, The Gilded Age. American Publishing Company, Hartford, 1873.

The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, Emory Holloway, ed. New York, 1932.

Wall, Joseph Frazier, Andrew Carnegie. Oxford University Press, New York, 1970.

Weld, Ralph Foster, Brooklyn Village, 1816-1834. Columbia University Press, New York, 1938.

Werner, M. R., Tammany Hall. Doubleday, Doran and Company, Garden City, N. Y., 1928.

Whitman, Walt, The Portable Walt Whitman. The Viking Press, New York, 1945.

Reference Works

Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography. New York, 1888.

Bartlett, John, Familiar Quotations. Thirteenth and Centennial Edition, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1955.

Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1961. U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1961.

Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1937.

Encyclopedia Americana.

Keller, Helen Rex, The Dictionary of Dates. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1934.

The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. Merck, Sharp, and Dohme Research Laboratories, 1966.

National Cyclopedia of American Biography.

Sodeman, William A., M.D., and Sodeman, William A., Jr., M.D., Pathologic Physiology. W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1967.

White, Norval, and Willensky, Elliot, eds., AIA Guide to New York City. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1968.

Index

Accidents

Brooklyn Bridge on Brooklyn tower

on Brooklyn anchorage

during cable positioning

Great Blowout.

on promenade

coal mine (1869)

of J. Roebling,

See also Bends; Blowouts;

Casualties; Collapsed bridges

Fires

Adams, Col. Julius

Adams, Mrs. Julius

Adams, Henry

Adams, John,

Adams, John Quincy

Advocate (magazine)

Agnew, John T.

Air compressors

for Brooklyn caisson

for New York caisson

See also Compressed air

Air locks

bends and time spent in

“hospital lock,”

colds and bronchitis in

described

in Great Blowout

placement of

Air pressure, required

Albany Water Works

Alexandra (Empress of Russia)

Allegheny River Bridge (Pa.)

Allen, Horatio

maiden voyage of Brooklyn caisson

planning of Brooklyn Bridge and

Rink Committee investigation and

at J. Roebling’s funeral

tours St. Louis Bridge

Tweed and

American Society of Civil Engineers

Ammerman, Mr.

Anchor bars

contracts for

described

specifications for

Anchor plates

dimensions of

eyebar chains in

specifications for

Anchorages

approaches to

building time of Brooklyn

completed

design of

diagonal stays

dimensions of New York and Brooklyn

limestone in

masonry break in

W. Roebling on

specifications for New York

size of

technique for

See also Anchor bars; Anchor plates

Anderson, Maxwell

Appleton, Abram

Approaches

defined

foundations for

leading to anchorages

Arberg (worker)

Arc of Brooklyn Bridge

Arches, W. Roebling on

Arnold, Frederick.

Art, Brooklyn Bridge in

Arthur, Chester A.

at Brooklyn Bridge inauguration

Ashtabula bridge

Aspinwall, Gen. Lloyd

award of cable wire contracts and

Atlantic Monthly (magazine)

August Eduard (ship)

Bach, Johann Sebastian

Backhouse (committee chairman)

Baehr, Ferdinand

Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O Railroad

Barnabo, John

Barnard, Frederick A

Barnes, Alfred C

Barnes, A. S

Barnes, Demas

building of Brooklyn Bridge sup

Committee of Investigation and

planning of Brooklyn Bridge and

reputation of

Rink Committee investigation and

at J. Roebling’s funeral

Barnum, P. T

Beach, Alfred E

Beach, Moses

Beals, J. H.

Beecher, Henry Ward

Beecher-Tilton Trial

at Brooklyn Bridge inauguration

fame of

on Fisk’s death

scandal involving

Beecher, Mrs. Henry Ward

Beecher-Tilton Trial

Beers, Henry

Bell, Alexander Graham

Bell (of Webb & Bell shipyards)

Bellknap, William

Bemelmans, Ludwig

Bends

from Brooklyn caisson

crippling

deaths

first cases

men most susceptible to

symptoms

“hospital lock” for treating

from New York caisson

case histories

effects first felt.

fear of

first deaths

return to compression

rules for avoiding

study of conditions and symptoms

time in air locks

nitrogen in blood and

Bends

of St. Louis Bridge men

W. Roebling gets, see Roebling, Washington A.—health of

Bennett, James Gordon

Benson, Arthur W.

Bert, Paul

Bessemer, Henry

Bessemer steel

conflict over use of

production of

Big Bend Tunnel

Billy Sunday (dog)

Black Friday (1869)

Blake, Thomas

Blasting for caisson placement

Blowouts

frequency of

Great Blowout

of supply shaft

Boardwalks, projected

Bodwell, J. R.

Bodwell Granite Company

Bogardus, James

Bonetecon (doctor)

Bossism, see Kings County Democrats; McLaughlin, Hugh; Tweed, William M.

Bouch, Sir Thomas

Bowen, Henry

Brennan, Matthew T.

Brevoort, J. Carson

Bridge, The (poem by Crane)

Bridge, The (painting by Stella)

Bridge Party

members of

paying for

purpose of

J. Roebling joins

tours J. Roebling’s works

Brinkman (doctor)

Britannia Bridge (Wales)

Brodie, Steve

Brooklyn (“City of Churches”)

becomes a borough of New York City

bridge scheme to benefit

Brooklyn

Brooklyn Heights, see Brooklyn Heights

ferries of

New York compared with (1869)

political corruption in

see also Rink Committee

political structure of

population of

social and economic conditions in

topography of

transformed

Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (N.Y.C.)

Brooklyn Bridge (East River Bridge; Empire Bridge; Great Bridge The New York and Brooklyn Bridge; Roebling Bridge)

completed

construction begun on

declared historic landmark (1964)

importance of

jumps from

first suicide

location of

inauguration of, see Inauguration

men killed building

official name of (The New York and Brooklyn Bridge)

vital statistics on

See also other specific topics

Brooklyn City Hall

Brooklyn Club

Brooklyn Eagle (Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat; news paper)

award of cable wire contracts and

on Beecher

on Bridge Party

on Brooklyn

bridge train plans and

on cable positioning

on contemplated suicides from

Bridge

on inauguration

Brooklyn Eagle

on progress of construction

on Brooklyn caisson

on Brooklyn tower

death of Fisk and

footbridge work and

fundraising for Chicago Fire and

Kingsley-Steinmetz brawl and

removal of W. Roebling and

on J. Roebling’s accident

wire fraud and

Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn Bridge viewed from.

churches of

panorama from

residents of

as socio-cultural center

Brooklyn Monthly (magazine)

Brooklyn Ring

see also Rink Committee (Committee of Fifty)

Brooklyn Theater

Brown (worker)

Brown, John

Brown, John C.

Brown, Joseph

Brown, Sir Samuel

Brunel, Isambard K.

Bryce, James Lord

Buchanan, James

Buck, Leffert L.

Burleigh Rock Drill Company

Burnside, Gen. Ambrose

Bush, J. Adriance

Cable cars, 436; see also Trains

Cable-making machinery

built

described

Cable stays, anchored

Cables

of Allegheny River Bridge

of Brooklyn Bridge

break in fall rope

brittleness of wire

cable wire contracts

carriers and carrier wheels

catenary curve of

completed

cradle cable

deaths due to

first crossing on

hoisting first

how strands form cables

material composing

offsetting pull and downward pressure of

saddle plates and saddles

see Saddle plates; Saddles

seizing of

size of

specifications for

spinning of

splicing of

stringing of

technique for anchoring

see also Anchorage travelers

wire fraud

of Cincinnati Bridge

of Niagara Bridge

of Pittsburgh aqueduct

Caissons

bridge success dependent on

Brooklyn

bearing surface of

bends from, see Bends—from Brooklyn caisson

blowout in supply shaft

building

clearing site for

excavating within

fire in

friction overcome

Great Blowout in

grounding of

launching of

life span of timber

New York caisson compared with

plans

set

sinking as hazard of job

size of

soil composition

timber and iron in

weight of

work crews of

New York

begins descent

bends from, see Bends—from

New York caisson

communication system in

Eads and

equipment for

launching of

ordered

protecting against worms

set

soil composition

strike over

work crews of

payroll tor digging

pneumatic

first used

as new technique

professional secrets

of St. Louis Bridge

W. Roebling as expert on

Cambria Iron Company

Campbell (comptroller of Brooklyn)

Cantilever system for St. Louis Bridge

Card (foreman)

Cardiff Giant (hoax)

Carlyle, Thomas

Carmen (ship)

Carnegie, Andrew

Eads and

production of Bessemer steel and

residence of

W. Roebling on

St. Louis Bridge and

Carnegie (brother of Andrew)

Carroll, Thomas

Cary (member of Bridge Party)

Casualties

Brooklyn Bridge

from bends in Brooklyn caisson

from bends in New York caisson

Brooklyn anchorage accident

Brooklyn tower accident

promenade accident

snapped cable

total

Brooklyn Theater

from collapsed bridges

Ashtabula bridge

Queen bridge

Tay Bridge

Wheeling Bridge

See also Accidents

Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia Pa

Center span, see River span

Central Park (N.Y.C.)

Chain bridges

Challenge (ship)

Chambers Street courthouse (N.Y.C.)

Channing, William Ellery

Chicago Fire (1871)

Chittenden, Simeon B

Chrome Steel Company

Cincinnati Bridge (Ohio)

extant

footbridge of

inaugurated

renovated

river span and width of

size of

wires of

City of Brooklyn (ship)

Civil War

building of Cincinnati Bridge during

W. Roebling in

battles taken part in

bridges built during

correspondence with his wife

tunnel at Petersburg and

on the war

social effects of

“Turtles” used in

Gen. Warren in

Clarke, Thomas C., Jr

Clausen, Henry

Cleveland, Grover

at Brooklyn Bridge inauguration

Cleveland Rolling Mill

Clifton Bridge (England)

Clinton (ferry)

Coal mine accidents

Cochrane, Admiral Lord Thomas

Collapsed bridges, casualties from

Ashtabula bridge

Quebec bridge

Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Tay Bridge

Wheeling Bridge

Collingwood, Francis, Jr

Brooklyn caisson and

Brooklyn tower accident and

footbridge work and

New York caisson and

New York tower and

W. Roebling’s correspondence with

at RPI alumni gathering

testifies in Miller suit

Collins, Charles

Colorado Fuel & Iron Company

Coman, Thomas

Comet (ship)

Committee of Investigation (of New York Bridge Company)

Competition among engineers

Compressed air

air system described

compressors

escape of, while pouring concrete

fire in Brooklyn caisson

increasing depth and air problems

physical derangements caused by

pressure required

See also Air locks

Compressed air “baths” against bends

Concrete

for Brooklyn caisson

compressed air escape while pouring

for New York caisson

for repairing fire damage

Coney Island (Brooklyn)

Coney Island Railroad

Connolly, Richard B., “Slippery Dick,”

breakup of Tweed Ring and

Rink Committee investigation and

at marriage of Tweed’s daughter

Cooper, Edward

Cooper, Lucia, see Roebling, Lucia

Cooper, Peter

Cooper, Theodore

Cooperation among engineers

Cope (worker)

Copeland, William

Corliss, George H.

Corliss steam engine

Corporations, growth of

Corruption, as product of city environment

see also Brooklyn Ring; Tweed Ring; Whis key Ring; Wire fraud

Cost

of Brooklyn Bridge

of caissons

estimated

fare

of fire in Brooklyn caisson

of terminal buildings

of Cincinnati Bridge

of first suspension bridge

of Hoosac Tunnel

of Pittsburgh aqueduct

of St. Louis Bridge

of Smithfield Street Bridge

Crane, Hart

Crazy Horse (Sioux chief)

Crook, Gen. George

Crossings

boatswain

of completed bridge

first pedestrian

number on opening day

by E. Roebling

of footbridge

of roadway

Crucible steel

conflict over use of

described

Cullen, E. M.

Custer, Gen. George A

Custom House (N.Y.C.)

Daily Graphic (newspaper)

Dams built by J. Roebling

Daugherty (worker)

Davidson, Marshall P

Davis, Andrew

Davis, John G

Deaths, see Casualties

Deck, steel

Democratic National Convention (1852)

Democratic state convention (1882)

Democratic Vistas (Whitman)

Dempsey (foreman)

Detwiller & Street

Dewey, S. Foster

Diagonal stays

of Brooklyn Bridge

of Cincinnati Bridge

first use of

of Wheeling Bridge

Diary of My Journey from Muehlausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831 (J. Roebling)

Dickens, Charles

Donovan, Larry

Douglas, Thomas

Dredge buckets

Dredging

for Brooklyn caisson

for New York caisson

Dredging equipment

breakdown of

crews to operate

Dufy, Raoul

Eads, Capt. James B.

caisson sickness (bends) and

death of

W. Roebling on

St. Louis Bridge built by, see St. Louis Bridge

sues W. Roebling

Early, Gen. Jubal

East River

currents of

problems presented by

shipbuilding along

East River Bridge, see Brooklyn Bridge

East River ferries

Edgar Thomson works

Edge Moor Iron Company

Edison, Thomas

Edison Company

Edson, Franklin

Effie Afton (ship)

Eisenhardt (ex-soldier)

Elections, fraudulent

in Brooklyn

Presidential

Elements (Euclid)

Ellet, Charles, Jr.

collapse of Wheeling Bridge and

plans for St. Louis Bridge and

rams built by

Ely, Smith

Emeline (ship)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Emott, James

Empire Bridge, see Brooklyn Bridge

Engineering (magazine)

Engineering staff of New York Bridge

Company

Collingwood, Francis, Jr.; Farrington, E. F.; Hildenbrand, Wilhelm; Martin, C. C.; McNulty, George; Paine, Col. William H.; Probasco, Samuel; Roebling, John A.; Roebling, Washington A.

Ericsson, John

Erie Canal

Erie Railroad

Evarts, William M.

Everett, Edward

Fairchild, Charles

Fare, bridge train

Farrington, E. F.

Brooklyn caisson and

Brooklyn tower and

cable positioning and

cable snaps

crossing over cables

Emily Roebling and

floor planking and

footbridge work and

in charge of work

resigns

salary of

Farrow, Cornelia Witsell

Ferries

Feininger, Lyonel

Fifty, Committee of, see Rink Committee

Films, Brooklyn Bridge in

Finley, James

Fires

in Brooklyn caisson

damage

in Brooklyn Theater

Chicago

Rock Island Bridge

on General Slocum

Pittsburgh aqueduct destroyed by

Fish, Hamilton

Fish, Julia

Fisk, Jim

Black Friday and

killed

at marriage of Tweed’s daughter

Tweed and

Flad, Henry

Floor

planking for

widening

See also Roadway

Floor beams, steel

Flower, Roswell P.

Flume of Pittsburgh aqueduct

“Flying Pendent Lever Bridge” (Rainbow Bridge)

Foley, Antoine

Folger, Charles J.

Footbridges

of Brooklyn Bridge

of Cincinnati Bridge

Farrington and

of Niagara Bridge

Ford, Gordon

Foundations

of Brooklyn Bridge

for approaches

going below riverbed with

projected depth of

J. Roebling on

wooden (for towers)

of Cincinnati Bridge

for St. Louis Bridge

See also Anchorages; Caissons

Fox, Richard K.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,

Franklin, Benjamin

Frederick the Great (Carlyle)

Frelinghuysen, Theodore

Frémont, Gen. John (Pathfinder)

Fulton, Robert

Fulton Street (Brooklyn)

Garfield, James A.

Garvey (Prince of Plasterers)

General Slocum (ship)

George, Henry

George Washington Bridge

Gilded Age, The (Twain)

Gill, Washington

Gleizes, Albert

Godkin, E. L.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

Golden Gate Bridge (Calif.)

Gould, Jay

Grace, William R.

audit of New York Bridge Company and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

removal of W. Roebling and, 491

Grand Central Depot

Grand Pont (Switzerland)

Granite, use of

Grant, Julia

Grant, Ulysses S

Beecher compared with

Brooklyn Bridge and

at Centennial Exhibition

in Civil War

St. Louis Bridge safety and

Tweed Ring and

Warren and

Great Blowout

Great Bridge, see Brooklyn Bridge

Great Central Railroad

Great Eastern (ship)

Great Railroad Strike

Great Western Canada Railroad

Grecian Bend

see also Bends

Greeley, Horace

Green, Andrew H

Greene (professor)

Greenwood Cemetery (Brooklyn)

Guglielmi, O. Louis

Haigh, J. Lloyd

bankruptcy of

cable contract award and

jailed

wire fraud of

Hall, A. Oakey

Harbison, Massy

Harney, Gen. William S.

Harper’s Monthly (magazine)

Harper’s Weekly (magazine)

on Avondale coal mine accident

award of cable wire contracts and

breakup of Tweed Ring and

on Brooklyn caisson

Harpers Ferry bridge (Va.)

Harris, Frank (worker)

Harris, Frank (writer)

Hassam, Childe

Havemeyer, William

Hayes, Rutherford B.

Heffner (worker)

Hegel, G. W. F.

Hemp hawsings, iron rope replacing

Henry, John

Henshaw (doctor)

Herting (grandmother of John Roebling)

Hewitt, Abram

award of cable wire contracts and

breakup of Tweed Ring and

at Brooklyn Bridge

inauguration

at 1882 Democratic state convention

Rink Committee investigation and

as Tilden’s campaign manager

Hewitt, Charles

Hildenbrand, Wilhelm

designs of New York anchorage and

trusswork and

Williamsburg Bridge built by

Hill, Albert

Hoffman, John T.

Hoisting engines

double

for positioning cables

to raise stone blocks of towers

Honeymoon Bridge (Niagara Falls)

Hook, Mrs. (sister of Emily Roebling)

Hooker, Gen. Joseph (Fighting Joe)

Hoosac Tunnel (Mass.)

“Hospital lock,”

Houses built by J. Roebling

Howell, James

Howells, William Dean

Huckleberry Finn (Twain)

Hull (manufacturer)

Humphreys, Gen. A. A.

Hunter, John W.

Hunter, W., Jr.

Husted, S. L.

Hydraulic jacks for excavating for caissons

Immigration, German (1831)

Inauguration (Brooklyn Bridge)

Brooklyn prepares for

ceremonies described

electric lights turned on

excitement in New York

invitations to

planning of

reception following

speeches made at

Inclined stays, see Diagonal stays

Income tax, introduced

Independent (newspaper)

Injuries, see Casualties

Inman Line (ship line)

Innocents Abroad, The (Twain)

Intelligencer (newspaper)

International Suspension Bridge, see Niagara Bridge

Investigating committees, see Investigation, Committee of; Rink Committee; Seventy, Committee of

Investigation, Committee of (New York Bridge Company)

Iron Age, The (magazine)

Iron buildings

Iron ropes, first manufactured

Iron superstructure, weight of see also Superstructure

Irving, Washington

Jacobs Creek chain bridge (La.)

Jacobson, Andrew

Jackson, Gen. T. J. “Stonewall,”

James, Henry

James, Jesse

Jaminet (doctor)

Jarvis, Charles H. (husband of Josephine Roebling)

Jarvis, Josephine (daughter of John Roebling)

Jay Cooke & Company

Jefferson, Thomas

Jenkins, J. W.

Jenks, G. T.

John A. Roebling’s Sons

award of cable contract and

bought out

Hildenbrand’s work for

incorporates

W. Roebling in charge of

size of

wire fraud and

Johnson, Andrew

Johnson, Gen. Jeremiah

Johnson, Samuel

Jones, George

Journal of Commerce (newspaper)

July Revolution (German; 1830)

Jumps from Brooklyn Bridge

see also Suicides

Kalbfleisch, Martin

Kearsarge (ship)

Keefer, Samuel

Kenney, Abner

Kelly, “Honest John,”

at 1882 Democratic state convention

withholding of funds for Brooklyn Bridge by

Kelso (New York Police superintendent)

Keystone Bridge Company

Keystones of Brooklyn tower arch

King, Major W. R.

Kings County Democrats

breakup of Tweed Ring and

at Brooklyn caisson launching

at Democratic state convention

Kingsley, William C.

breakup of Tweed Ring and

Committee of Investigation

New York World investigates

Rink Committee investigates

Brooklyn Bridge and

award of cable wire contracts

bridge plans

bridge trains

bridge idea spearheaded by

cost estimates

fare cost

at inauguration ceremony

money furnished by

trusswork

Brooklyn caisson and

Brooklyn Theater fire and

Brooklyn tower and

building of Central Park and

death of Murphy and

at launching of New York caisson

political ambitions of

1882 state Democratic convention

on quality of American manufacturing

J. Roebling’s funeral and

W. Roebling and

removal of Roebling

Roebling’s staff

sale of bridge stock

Steinmetz’s hostility to

Tweed denounced by

wire fraud

Kingsley, Mrs. William

Kingsley & Keeney (contractors)

Kimbel, Charles

Kinsella, Thomas

award of cable wire contracts and

breakup of Tweed Ring and

in Bridge Party

bridge plans and

bridge trains and

on Brooklyn caisson

1882 Democratic state convention and

footbridge work and

at launching of New York caisson

leaves New York Bridge Company

on politicians

removal of W. Roebling and

Rink Committee investigation and

on J. Roebling

at Roebling’s funeral

Kirkwood, James Pugh

Kloman, Andrew

Kohrner, William

Krupp works (Essen, Germany)

Land spans, defined

Lane, William

Latrobe, Benjamin Henry

Laveille, Gussie

Lawsuits

against J. Kelly

against New York Bridge Company

against W. Roebling

involving Lincoln

started by Miller

Leavy (shipmaster)

Lee, Gen. Robert E.

Lesseps, Ferdinand de

Levy, Jules

Lewis, John W.

Lewiston suspension bridge (N.Y.)

Liberty, Statue of (N.Y.C.)

Lickey, Phebe (mother of Emily Roebling)

Lights

for Brooklyn caisson

at inauguration

for terminal buildings

turned on

Limelights (calcium lamps) in Brooklyn caisson

Limestone

in anchorages

first block of

selecting

specifications for

Lincoln, Abraham

assassination of

on Beecher

lawsuit involving

H.C. Murphy and

Paine promoted by

W. Roebling on

Linville, J. H., 1

Literature, Brooklyn Bridge in

Littlejohn, A. N.

Long Island Historical Society (Brooklyn)

Lott, John A.

Low, A. A.

Low, Seth

auditing New York Bridge Company and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

removal of W. Roebling and

Lyman, Col. Theodore

Lynch, Mike

McAlpine, William J.

McCann (worker)

McCarey, Francis

McCarthy, Timothy

McCue, Alexander

as attorney for New York Bridge Company

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

Committee of Investigation and

McDonald (worker)

McDonald, Charles

McDowell, Gen. Irvin

McGrath (worker)

McKay, Patrick

McLaughlin, Hugh (Boss)

breakup of Tweed Ring and

bridge plans and

Brooklyn Ring and

corruption of

Kingsley and

Low and

wire fraud and

McLean, Samuel

McNulty, George

Brooklyn anchorage accident and

Brooklyn caisson and

Brooklyn terminal building designed

cable positioning and

design of Brooklyn tower and

footbridge work and

Tay Bridge collapse and

testifies in Miller suit

Madison, James

Maginnis, Arthur Ambrose

Maginnis, Mary (Mary A. Tweed)

Maid of Mist (ship)

Maintenance of Brooklyn Bridge

“Man. Conscience” (J. Roebling)

Manhattan, see New York

Manhattan Bridge (N.Y.C.)

Mansfield, Josie

Marin, John

Marshall, William

removal of W. Roebling and

wire fraud and

Martin

accidents at Brooklyn tower and

award of cable wire contracts and

Bridge plans and

cable installation and

Farrington’s quarrel with

fire in Brooklyn caisson and

footbridge work and

maintenance work and

promenade accident and

at J. Roebling’s funeral

W. Roebling and

removal of Roebling and

replaces Roebling

Roebling’s bends attacks and

suffers bends attack

testifies in Miller suit

trusswork and

wire fraud and

Martin, James

Martin, Kingsley

Mary Powell (ship)

Meade, Gen. George

Melville, Herman

Menai Strait bridge (Wales)

Mercantile Library (Brooklyn)

Merrimac (ship)

Methfessel, Laura (daughter of John Roebling)

children of

death of her father and

Methfessel, Mr. (husband of Laura)

Miller, Abraham

Miller, William

Mills Building (N.Y.C.)

Mineola (ferry)

Minnesota (ship)

Monitor (ship)

Monroe, James

Mont Cenis Tunnel

Montauk (ferry)

Morgan, J. P.

Morgan, John

Morgan, Junius

Moreaux (French engineer)

Morris, George Pope

Morse, Samuel F. B.

Morse Building (N.Y.C.)

Motley (board member)

Mullen, Neil

Mumford, Lewis

Murphy, G. I.

Murphy, Henry C.

award of cable contracts and

breakup of Tweed Ring and

Brooklyn Bridge and bridge idea spearheaded by

bridge plans and

bridge trains and

Brooklyn anchorage accident and

cable positioning and

cost of bridge

footbridge work and

Kelly’s decision to withhold funds and

Committee of Investigation report and

death of

Kingsley compared with

New York Bridge Company and

as president

progress reports submitted

reorganization of board of trustees and

New York World attacks

Rink Committee investigation and

at J. Roebling’s funeral

W. Roebling and Roebling’s bends attacks and

Roebling’s correspondence with

Roebling’s removal and

at RPI alumni gathering

sale of bridge stock and

wire fraud and

Murphy, John

Music Academy (Brooklyn)

My Life and Loves (Harris)

Myers, John

Napoleon I (Emperor of France)

Nast, Thomas

Nation, The (magazine)

National Historic Landmark, Brooklyn Bridge as

New York (N.Y.) Brooklyn compared with (1869)

effects of bridge building on

first subway in

impressions of

population of

1869: 104

1883: 506

1930: 551

social life of

New York Bridge Company (Brooklyn)

accident at tower site and

audited

Board of Directors of

Chief Engineer of, see Roebling, John A.; Roebling, Washington A.

Committee of Investigation of

changes following report

report of

engineering staff of

see also Collingwood, Francis, Jr.; Farrington, E. F.; Hildenbrand, Wilhelm; McNulty, George; Martin, C. C.; Paine, Col. William; Probasco, Samuel; Roebling, John A.; Roebling, Washington A.

Kinsella leaves

Murphy and

see also Murphy, Henry C.

New York World attacks

offices of

original charter of, modified

powers of

Rink Committee investigates

stock of

graft and

ownership of

scandal over

selling

Tweed Ring control of

value of

sued,

wire fraud and

New York and Brooklyn Bridge, (official name of Brooklyn Bridge), see also Brooklyn Bridge

New York & Brooklyn Saw Mill and Lumber Company

New York Central Railroad

New York City (N.Y.), see also Brooklyn; New York

New York Evening Post (newspaper)

New York Herald (newspaper)

award of cable wire contracts and

Centennial Exhibition and

footbridge work and

marriage of Tweed’s daughter and

positioning of cables and

New York Illustrated Times (newspaper)

New York Mirror (newspaper)

New York Polytechnic Society

New York Star (newspaper)

New York Sun (newspaper)

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

Centennial Exhibition and

on W. Roebling

New York Times (newspaper)

breakup of Tweed Ring and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

cable wire positioning and

1882 Democratic state convention and

on Vanderbilt fancy-dress ball

wire fraud and

New York Tribune (newspaper)

breakup of Tweed Ring and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

footbridge work and

removal of W. Roebling and

Rink Committee investigation and

New York World (newspaper)

attacks New York Bridge Company

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

on cable positioning

on Committee of Investigation

Kingsley interviewed by

Rink Committee investigation and

New York’s Novelty Iron Works

Newell, Stub

Newport Daily News (newspaper)

Newport Guide,

Newton, Sir Isaac

Newton, Gen. John

Niagara Bridge (International Suspension Bridge)

Ellet and

footbridge of

plans for

Niagara Falls Gazette (newspaper)

Nicholas II (Czar of Russia)

Nitrogen, effects of sudden release of, in bloodstream

Nolan, Samuel Barnes B.

North American Review (magazine)

Northern Pacific Railroad

O’Brien, Jimmy

Occupational hazards, see Accidents; Bends; Casualties

Odium, Robert E.

O’Keeffe, Georgia

Olmsted, Frederick Law

On the Bowery (play)

O’Neil, James

Orangemen’s Parade riots (1870, 1871)

O’Rourke, Matthew J.

Osborne, Louis

Otis Elevator Company

Overman, Frederick

Overton, Charles

Owl’s Head Park (Brooklyn)

Paine, Col. William

award of cable wire contracts and

Brooklyn caisson and

Brooklyn tower accident and

cable positioning and

footbridge work and

inventions of

New York caisson and

New York tower and

at J. Roebling’s funeral

removal of W. Roebling and

Tay Bridge collapse and

trusswork and

wire fraud and

Panama Canal

Panics

1857:

1869:

1873:

Paralysis caused by compressed air, see also Bends

Parrott, Robert

Peale, Rembrandt

Peck, C. G.

Pedro, Dom (Emperor of Brazil)

Pennell, Joseph

Pennsylvania Canal

Pennsylvania Railroad

People’s Day, see Inauguration

Phoenix Iron Company

Picnic on the Hudson (Rossiter)

Pierce, Franklin

Pierrepont, Henry E.

Pierrepont, Hezekiah

Piers of Brooklyn

Pikes Peak Railway

Pile drivers for blasting

Pittsburgh aqueduct (Pa.)

Plymouth Church (Brooklyn)

pastor of, see Beecher, Henry Ward

Pneumatic caissons, see Caissons, pneumatic

Pneumatic trains

Pneumatic tunnels

Pneumatic water closet

Poems on Brooklyn Bridge

Pol M. B.

Police Gazette (newspaper)

Pope, Thomas

Population of Brooklyn and New York

1869:

1883:

1930:

Portage Railroad

Post, George B.

Powell, Samuel S.

Prentice, John H.

Probasco, Samuel

Promenade

accident on

projected elevated

Prospect Park (Brooklyn)

Prototype of suspension bridges

Pulitzer, Joseph

Pyramid Pin Company

Quebec bridge (Canada), collapse of

Queensboro Bridge (N.Y.C.)

Quintard, Orestes P.

Railroad Journal (magazine)

Railroads

accident in

bridges crossed by

Niagara Bridge and

first locomotive, see also Trains growth of

J. Roebling and

See also specific railroads

Rainbow Bridge (projected bridge)

Rappahannock suspension bridge (Md.)

Rawlins, John A.

Raymond, Rossiter W.

Reading Railroad

Reardon (worker)

Reed (worker)

Reed, Walter

Rendel (British engineer)

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

Restell, Madame

Revenues

from Allegheny River Bridge

from Cincinnati Bridge

expected from Brooklyn Bridge

Richard Johnson & Nephew

Riedel, Edward

Riley, E.

Riley, James

Riley, John

Rink Committee (Committee of Fifty)

investigates New York Bridge Company

organized

River span

of Brooklyn Bridge

criticized

elevation of

elevation raised

length extended

of Cincinnati Bridge

of Jacob’s Creek suspension bridge

of Niagara Bridge

of Smithfield Street Bridge

of Wheeling Bridge

Roadway

of Brooklyn Bridge

completed

first crossing on

specifications of

of Cincinnati Bridge

Robinson, Capt. Joel

Rock Island Bridge (Ill.)

Rock Island Railroad

Rocks

in excavating for Brooklyn caisson

in excavating for New York caisson

Roebling, Charles (son of John Roebling)

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

son of

in wire business

cable making for Williamsburg Bridge

display for Machinery Hall

Roebling, Christoph Polycarpus (father of John Roebling)

Roebling, Cornelia (second wife of Washington Roebling)

Roebling, Edmund (son of John Roebling)

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

W. Roebling on

W. Roebling as guardian of

visitation from relatives and

Roebling, Elvira (daughter of John Roebling), see Stewart, Elvira

Roebling, Emily (first wife of Washington Roebling)

in Brooklyn Bridge building activity on assistant engineers

attempts to remove Washington

Brooklyn Bridge opening

crosses completed bridge

influence and importance of Emily

interviewed

New York caisson positioning

plaques honoring

steel deck

strands for cables

Tay Bridge tragedy

visit to bridge in progress

visits Europe (1867)

wire fraud

child of

last years of

Roebling family and

John’s death

John meets

Washington on his father

G. K. Warren’s fate and

Washington’s health and Emily’s growing influence and importance

his death expected

on his health

newspaper reading sessions

as nurse and secretary

recuperation in Europe

rest in Newport and

Washington’s marriage with as constant companions

correspondence during Civil War

courtship

Emily on her husband

joins Washington in Cincinnati

Washington as Edmund’s guardian

Washington on his wife

Washington’s resignation from bridge work

Washington’s return to bridge work

Roebling, Ferdinand (son of John Roebling)

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

Emily and

his father on

relationship between Washington and

in wire business

cable wire bids

display for Machinery Hall

Edmund in wire business

steel wire and

suit envisaged by

takes charge of wire business

Roebling, Friederike Dorothea (mother of John Roebling)

Roebling, Johanna (first wife of John Roebling)

characteristics of

death of

John buried next to

moves to Trenton

visitation from

Roebling, John A.

birth of

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

Brooklyn Bridge plans of

appointed Chief Engineer

approval for plans

benefits to be derived from building

bridge specifications

cable strength and

caissons and

critics of proposed bridge and

estimated building time

estimated cost

finding center line and

on foundations

graft involved

height of towers

investment in bridge

location of bridge

lumber purchased

personnel

political background

presenting plans

producing the plans

public scrutiny of plans

supplies

tower capstones

trains in

venality

characteristics of

admired

believer in hydropathy

cholera fought off by

disillusionment of

intellect

as inventor

philosophical speculations

preoccupation with work

range of interests

requirements for success

will and determination of

childhood of

Civil War and

death of

accident

continuing work on bridge

funeral

Washington assumes charge of building bridge after John’s death

education of

as engineer decision to become

return to engineering

his family and Edmund and

his will and

impersonal relations with

wealth of family and

wives and children of

immigrates to U.S.

agrarian dream of

founds Saxonburg

Hegel

trans-Atlantic voyage

on life

religion and church attendance

spiritualism

visitation from Johanna

Washington Roebling and, see Roebling, Washington A.—John Roebling and

works of

Allegheny River Bridge, see Allegheny River Bridge

Cincinnati Bridge, see Cincinnati Bridge

dams and locks

extant

first bridge

first commission

iron rope for canal system

Niagara Bridge, see Niagara Bridge

on opposition to his bridges

plans for St. Louis bridge

as pioneer

professional secrets and

railroad route and

Saxonburg house

Smithfield Street Bridge

as testimonials of national spirit

tour of works, see Bridge Party

Roebling, John A., II (son of Washington Roebling)

as child

his father and

Roebling, Josephine (daughter of John Roebling)

Roebling, Karl (brother of John Roebling)

Roebling, Karl G. (son of Ferdinand Roebling)

Roebling, Laura (daughter of John Roebling), see Methfessel, Laura

Roebling, Lucia (second wife of John Roebling)

Roebling, Mary (daughter of John Roebling)

Roebling, Washington A. (son of John Roebling)

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

building the Brooklyn Bridge approval of plans and

on bridge building

cables for, see Cables caissons for, see Caissons completion of

federal government approval of bridge

finding center line for

foundations for, see Foundations

towers for, see Towers

trains and, see Trains

characteristics of

admired

compared with John Roebling

competence of

gift of observation and memory

modesty and personal heroism

physical description

as Chief Engineer appointed

assumes charge after John’s death

attempts to remove

bribes for use of inferior steel

comes under suspicion

display for Machinery Hall

engineering staff under

see also Collingwood, Francis, Jr.; Farrington, E. F.; Hildenbrand, Wilhelm; Martin, C. C.; McNulty, George; Paine, Col. William H.; Probasco, Samuel final responsibility and

“histories” of bridge

reports by

reporters interview

resigns

salaries for personnel

salary of

stake in bridge

stock in bridge

suits brought against

supplies for bridge

childhood of

in Civil War

battles taken part in

bridges built during

correspondence with Emily during

enlistment

off-duty activities

tunnel at Petersburg

on the war

education of

Emily’s marriage with as constant companions

correspondence during the Civil War

courtship

Emily on her husband

joins Washington in Cincinnati

Washington as Edmund’s guardian

Washington on his wife

Washington’s resignation from bridge work

Washington’s return to bridge work

on greatness

health of

on the bends

bends from Brooklyn caisson

bends from New York caisson

Emily and, see Roebling, Emily—Washington’s health and exhaustion

his condition worsens

improvement in

recuperates in Europe

rest in Newport

“water cure,”

last years of

John Roebling and bridge building together

bridge building turned over to son

bridge study by Washington

Brooklyn Bridge and

compared

death of John

disillusionment of John

on his father and mother

on John’s accident

John’s affection for

John’s confiding in

on John’s leaving Saxonburg

John’s second wife

on John’s spiritualism

John’s view of Saxonburg

on John’s vocation

map of Pennsylvania during Civil War

memory of John and

naming of Washington

Washington on Cincinnati Bridge

Washington on vitality

Washington’s return to Saxonburg

work day

on Roebling mind

second marriage of

sells his interest in John A. Roebling’s Sons

visitation of his mother and

visits Germany (1867)

Roebling, Washington A., III (son of Charles Roebling)

Roebling, Willie (son of John Roebling)

Roebling (Pa.), building

Roebling Bridge, see Brooklyn Bridge

Rogers, Patrick

Roosevelt, Robert

Roosevelt, Theodore

Rosa, Rudolph

Rossiter, Thomas R.

Royal Albert (bridge in Cornwall)

RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Rushing, General

Saddle plates

Saddles, specifications for

St. Louis Bridge (Mo.)

air locks of

bends and building of

caissons for

cantilever system for

completed

safety of

steam elevator in

St. Patrick’s Cathedral (N.Y.C.)

Sand hogs

Sandy and Beaver Canal

Saratoga (ship)

Saxonburg (Pa.), as German settlement

Saw Mill & Lumber Company

Schiller, J. C. F. von

Schlatter, Charles L.

Schroeder, F. A.

Schuyler, Montgomery

Schuylkill suspension bridges (Pa.)

Scientific American (magazine)

Scudder (judge)

Sea worms, protecting caissons from

Seances

Seguin (French engineer)

Sellers, William

Semler, Ludwig Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

removal of W. Roebling and

Serrell, Edward

Serrell, John L.

Seventy, Committee of, breakup of Tweed Ring by

Committee of Investigation and

effects on Kings County Democrats

1871 elections and

New York Times publishes documents

New York World investigates

Rink Committee investigates

Shafer, Ira

Shenandoah suspension bridge

Sheridan, Gen. Philip

Sherman, Gen. William T.

Shinkle, Amos

Shipyards of Brooklyn

Sickles, Gen. Daniel E..

Sickness, cold and bronchitis

see also Bends

Slocum, Gen. Henry

accusation against Paine and

award of cable wire contracts and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

in Civil War

Committee of Investigation report and

at launching of New York caisson

mission assigned to

political ambitions of

removal of W. Roebling and

Rink Committee investigation and

at J. Roebling’s funeral

sale of bridge stock and

stock ownership of

Slocum, Mrs. Henry

Smallfield, John D.

Smith, Al

Smith, Andrew H., bends studies of

findings on

theories of

Smith, Hugh

breakup of Tweed Ring and

bridge stock and

at marriage of Tweed’s daughter

Rink Committee investigation and

Smith, Gen. Kirby

Smith, Gen. William

Smithfield Street Bridge (Pa.)

Songs on Brooklyn Bridge

Squat sperm candles for lighting caissons

Standard Oil Company

Starruca Viaduct (Pa.)

State legislature (N.Y.), approves bill for building Brooklyn Bridge

Steam drills

Steel

brittleness of

conflict over type to use

contract for

deck

diameter of

floor beams of

fraud involving quality of

manufacturing of

specifications for

superstructure of

use of

first planned

questioned

See also Bessemer steel; Crucible steel

Steele, J. Dutton

Steer, Henry

Steinman

Steinmetz, William G..

Stella, Joseph

Stephenson, Robert

Stewart, A. T.

Stewart, Elvira (daughter of John Roebling)

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

characteristics of

Washington Roebling’s meeting with Emily and

Stewart, John (husband of Elvira)

Stiles, Henry

Stock of New York Bridge Company graft and

ownership of

scandal over

selling

Tweed Ring control of

value of

Stokes, Edward

Storrs, Richard

Stourbridge Lion (first U.S. locomotive)

Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Stranahan, James S. T.

award of cable wire contracts and

breakup of Tweed Ring and

bridge trains and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

Committee of Investigation report and

crosses roadway

death of

New York World attacks

removal of W. Roebling and

Rink Committee investigation and

stock ownership of

testifies in Miller suit, 4

Stranahan, Mrs. James S. T.

Strauss, Johann

Strikes

attacks of bends and

Great Railroad Strike

Strong, George Templeton

Stroud, Henry

Stuart, Gen. J. E. B. (Jeb)

Subways, opening of first

Suez Canal

Suicides

from Brooklyn Bridge contemplated

first

friend of W. Roebling commits

Sullivan, Louis

Superstructure alterations in

completed

steel for

weight of iron

Supple, Harry

Supply shafts

blowout in

New York caisson

Suspenders

function of

in place

specifications for

Suspension bridges

built by W. Roebling during Civil War

“chain bridge,”

first suspension aqueduct

poorly built

primitive

as spiritual or ideal conception

very first

See also specific bridges

Sutter Street Railways

Swan, Alden S.

Swan, Charles

as member of Bridge Party

retires

J. Roebling and

death of Roebling and

W. Roebling and

Swedenborg, Emanuel

Sweeny, Peter (Brains)

and breakup of Tweed Ring flees the country

Rink Committee investigation and

bridge stock and

at marriage of Tweed’s daughter

Swertcope, John Valentine

Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Wash.)

Talmage, T. DeWitt

Tay Bridge (Scotland)

Telford, Thomas

Tennessee (ship)

Terminals

Thurber, H. K.

Tilden, Samuel

Tilton, Elizabeth

scandal involving

Tilton, Theodore

Timbs, Patrick

Titanic (ship)

Tombs (N.Y.C. prison), materials used for building

Tooker, Commodore Joe

Towers

Allegheny River Bridge

Brooklyn

accidents and deaths

completing

description from top of

granite for

height of

keystone of arch

masonry on

roadway to tower finished

work suspended for winter (1872)

working on top

years taken to complete

Brooklyn Bridge

architectural features of.

capstones for

completing

drawings for

height of

cable positioning between, see Cables

of Cincinnati Bridge

of Clifton Bridge

New York

accidents and deaths

completing

masonry on

specifications for granite for

testing steel wire on

work suspended for winter (1872)

of Niagara Bridge

“righted down” caisson and

see also Caissons

roadway to finished

stores for

wooden foundations for

Trains

Brooklyn Bridge

begin runs

cable car

for center of bridge

device invented for

fare

passengers handled (by 1888)

plans for

Pullman and freight

first locomotive

pneumatic

Travelers

Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A (film)

Trenton Daily State Gazette (newspaper)

Trenton Iron Works

Tribune Building (N.Y.C.)

Triger (French engineer)

Trusswork

plans for

steel used for

to allow train travel

to widen roadways (1948)

Tunnels

advantages of

Big Bend Tunnel

Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel

built under Confederate lines

under Chicago River

Mont Cenis

pneumatic

“Turtles” used in Civil War

Twain, Mark

Tweed, Mary

Tweed, William M. (Boss)

arrested

A. Beach and

Bridge plans and

bridge stock and

death of

downfall of

as executive member of New York Bridge Company

influence of

marriage of daughter of

Murphy opposed by

political ascension of

Rink Committee investigation and

testimonies of

See also Tweed Ring

Tweed Ring

attempts to control Bridge

bookkeeper of

breakup of

Committee of Investigation

effects on Kings County Democrats

1871 elections

New York Times publishes documents

New York World investigates

Rink Committee investigates

caricatured

Grant and

as product of urban environment

system of operation of

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne)

Union (newspaper)

award of cable wire contract and

breakup of Tweed Ring and

Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and

Union and Argus (newspaper)

Union Ferry Company

Union Pacific Railroad

United States Illuminating Company

Van Anden, Isaac

Vandalia (ship)

Vanderbilt, Cornelius

Vanderbilt, John

Vanderbilt, William H..

Vanderbilt, Mrs. William

Van Keuren, H. R.

Van Rensselaer, Stephen

Van Schaick, Jenkins

Vaux, Calvert

Vehicle crossings, first

Verne, Jules

Vibrations

of Allegheny River Bridge

of Niagara Bridge.

of Smithfield Street Bridge

Victoria (Queen of England)

Vinton, Gen. Francis

Warren, Edgar

Warren, Emily, see Roebling, Emily

Warren, Gen. G. K.

W. Roebling on

Warren, John

Warren, Sylvanus

Warren, William

Washburn’s (wire manufacturer)

Washington, George

Water closet, pneumatic

Water shafts

blasting and

blowouts of

frequency of

Great Blowout

boulders and

described

failure of

Watson, James

Webb & Bell (shipyards)

Brooklyn caisson built by

Eads visits

location of

New York caisson built by

Weber, Max

Weir, Robert

West, the, opening (1869)

Western Union Telegraph Building (N.Y.C.)

Wheeling Bridge (W.Va.)

collapse of

river span of

Whiskey Ring

Whitman, Walt

Williamsburg Bridge (N.Y.C.)

Wilson, Mrs. William G.

Winona (ferry)

Winterset (film)

Wire fraud.

Wire suspension bridges

first built (1816)

Witte, Otto

Woodhull, Victoria

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly (magazine)

“Woodman, Spare That Tree” (Morris)

Working conditions inside Brooklyn caisson, see also Bends

Work crews

Brooklyn caisson

Brooklyn Bridge

for building bridge

maintenance of

New York caisson

strike of

Wright, Gen. Horatio

Yantic (ship)

Young, Brigham

Young, Charles

Young Men’s Literary Association of Brooklyn

Young Men’s Reform Association

*The Pittsburgh Gazette made much of the fact that the structure was strong enough to carry the water plus six heavily loaded barges all at the same time, the editors being unaware apparently that the boats merely displaced their own weight and so the total load remained the same, whether boats were crossing or not.

* Eads had completed the east abutment of his bridge in early April of 1871, with his caisson an incredible 136 feet below the Mississippi. Eads too was having trouble with advancing expenses, with construction costing about double his original estimate, but in October 1871, before work had even begun inside the New York caisson, Eads had written that all the most formidable difficulties had now been surmounted.

* The anchorages were in fact built entirely of limestone, with the exception of the corners, front arches, and the cornice. There was also about 650 cubic yards of granite placed directly over the anchor plates.

* In 1877 a group of architects would be called in as consultants on Hildenbrand’s plans. The best known of them was George B. Post, who was then designing a lofty new Queen Anne-style home for the Long Island Historical Society, at Pierrepont and Clinton Streets, and who would later do the New York Stock Exchange (1903).

* Years later, at Quebec, a huge bridge partly designed by Cooper, by then an engineer of national prominence, would collapse during construction, killing seventy-five men. On hearing the news Roebling would write scathingly of engineers who design bridges but do not give the actual construction their personal attention. “It is one thing to sit in your office and split hairs,” he would write, “but a different thing to get out and command men and meet the realities of great construction.” Ironically, Roebling was unaware, it seems, that Cooper had not been at Quebec because of his health.

* Prior to this time, cables were made of “bright” wire, which was oiled, greased, or painted for protection against the elements.

* At least one photographer had already been to the top of the Brooklyn tower, J. H. Beals, who earlier in the year had made the first great panoramic photograph of lower Manhattan, from the Battery to Rutgers Street, by taking five different views that he later spliced together into one panorama more than seven feet long.

* Crucible steel, steel made in comparatively small quantities in crucibles, or casts, was considered the finest-grade steel and was used principally for tools. Bessemer steel, made in a “converter” according to a process developed by the Englishman Henry Bessemer twenty years earlier, was the least expensive steel on the market, the kind used in the greatest quantity in the 1870’s and for rails chiefly. Between the two, crucible steel was thought to be markedly superior but the quality control of Bessemer steel had, in fact, been perfected to a remarkable degree by Carnegie and others. It could be produced in far greater quantity and was without question a perfectly respectable product.

* The Ashtabula disaster was only the worst of hundreds of bridge failures of the time. Something like forty bridges a year fell in the 1870’s—or about one out of every four built. In the 1880’s some two hundred more fell. Highway bridge failures were the most common, but the railroad bridge failures received the greatest publicity and cost the most lives.

* One of these firsthand accounts of crossing the footbridge was an entire fabrication, Farrington said later, but he never indicated which one it was. The day the reporter appeared at the bridge, Farrington had told him it was too windy for an inexperienced man to go out. Immensely relieved the reporter had returned to his paper, only to be told by the editor that he was to get the story wind or no wind. So he had retired to a quiet place, sat down, and drawn on his imagination.

* There was so much talk about her, in fact, that at the next alumni gathering, a year later, a Brooklyn engineer named Rossiter W. Raymond, who was not an RPI graduate, but was widely known as an afterdinner speaker, was asked to come and give a special toast. (Raymond had such a grandiloquent platform manner that he would one day be invited to succeed Beecher at Plymouth Church, an invitation he declined.) “Gentlemen, I know that the name of a woman should not be lightly spoken in a public place,” he said to his hushed audience, “…but I believe you will acquit me any lack of delicacy or of reverence when I utter what lies at this moment half articulate upon all your lips, the name of Mrs. Washington Roebling.”

* The East River bridge was to be larger in every way. The river span of the Cincinnati Bridge was 1,057 feet, or 543 feet less than what Roebling had projected for the East River. The over-all length of the Cincinnati Bridge, 2,252 feet, was less than half the length, and its width, 36 feet, was also less than half that of the new bridge Roebling had planned.

* There is no official figure for the number of men killed building the bridge. The Bridge Company compiled no list, kept no precise records on the subject, which is characteristic of the age. In a booklet made up from his Cooper Union talks and published after the bridge was built, Farrington says between thirty and forty men died in the work, which is especially interesting if it is remembered that Emily Roebling may have done Farrington’s writing for him. The Chief Engineer and William Kingsley, however, both said twenty had died and from the deaths reported in the papers and mentioned here and there in the minutes of Bridge Company meetings that seems to be a realistic figure.

* Apart from any interest he had in the lighting contract, Thomas Edison was enormously fascinated by the bridge and spent hours watching its progress. He also took some extraordinary movies, among the earliest he made, of the final weeks of construction.

* Joseph Pennell, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Childe Hassam, Georgia O’Keeffe, O. Louis Guglielmi, Raoul Dufy, Ludwig Bemelmans, Lyonel Feininger, Albert Gleizes, and Max Weber are some of the artists who have taken the bridge as their subject. Several, such as Marin and Stella, have gone back to it many times. Stella’s powerful abstraction The Bridge (1918) is probably the best known of all the paintings.

* The first subway, between Bowling Green, in Manhattan, and Joralemon Street, was completed in 1908; and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, opened in 1950, is one of the longest underwater tunnels in the world.

* With careful editing and numerous annotations she managed to turn a rather dry, colorless diary kept by a Putnam County preacher into an engaging chronicle. She also included an additional chapter on the Warren family. Titled The Journal of the Reverend Silas Constant, it was published in 1903.

* All figures are based on the bridge as it was when completed in 1883.

* The most famous latter-day example of this same phenomenon was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, over Puget Sound, in the state of Washington. On November 7, 1940, in a high wind, “Galloping Gertie,” as the bridge became known, began heaving up and down so violently that it soon shook itself to pieces. The bridge lacked “aerodynamic stability” the experts concluded, for the simple reason that the necessary stiffness preached by Roebling had been overlooked by the designer. Eyewitness accounts of the disaster are strikingly reminiscent of the one from the Wheeling Intelligencer, written nearly ninety years before.

* The full title of the translated work, published in 1867, was as follows: A Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies, in 1679—80. By Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, of Wiewerd, in Friesland. Murphy’s other translations include: The Representation of New Netherland (1849), from the Dutch of Adriaen van der Donck, and Voyages from Holland to America (1853), from the Dutch of D. P. deVries. He also wrote Henry Hudson in Holland (1859) and Voyage of Verrazzano (1875), in which he took the mistaken view that Verrazzano’s claims of discovery were unfounded.

* In his Autobiography, Carnegie would tell the story of a personable mechanic named Piper who was sent by the Keystone company to help on the St. Louis bridge. “At first he was so delighted with having received the largest contract that had yet been let, that he was all graciousness to Captain Eads. It was not even ‘Captain’ at first, but ‘Colonel Eads, how do you do? Delighted to see you.’” But presently feelings between them became a little complicated. “We noticed the greeting became less cordial.” Colonel Eads became Captain Eads, then Mr. Eads. “Before the troubles were over, the ‘Colonel’ had fallen to ‘Jim Eads’ and to tell the truth, long before the work was out of the shops, ‘Jim’ was now and then preceded with a big ‘D’.”

* It was about this same time, during construction of the Big Bend Tunnel, in West Virginia, that a Negro railroad worker named John Henry drove just such steel drills faster, it was said, than any man, for which he would be immortalized in what has been called America’s greatest ballad. Henry supposedly met his death competing with a steam drill about 1870. No such steam drills were used in the bridge caissons.

* Copeland, unlike O’Rourke, had not been acting alone, but was a spy for Sheriff Jimmy O’Brien, a political enemy of Tweed’s, who got Copeland a job in Connolly’s office and intended to use the material to blackmail Tweed. Tweed offered O’Brien $20,000 to keep him quiet and promised more. O’Brien, who wanted $350,000, took the money, then took Copeland’s “research” to the Times.

* Claflin was Tennessee Claflin—sometimes spelled Tennie C.—Mrs. Woodhull’s younger sister and the consort to old Commodore Vanderbilt.

* Harris thought the caisson was made of iron. He describes the work chambers as small, when in fact they were quite large, and his figures for the wages paid, the hours kept, the time spent in the lock, etc., do not jibe with the records.

ALSO BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

Truman

Brave Companions

Mornings on Horseback

The Path Between the Seas

The Great Bridge

The Johnstown Flood

SIMON & SCHUSTER

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Copyright ©2001 by David McCullough

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For our sons

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We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not.

~John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1774

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

THE ROAD TO PHILADELPHIA

You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator. . . . We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

~Abigail Adams

I

IN THE COLD, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the riders, mindful of the horses, kept at a walk.

Nothing about the harsh landscape differed from other winters. Nor was there anything to distinguish the two riders, no signs of rank or title, no liveried retinue bringing up the rear. It might have been any year and they could have been anybody braving the weather for any number of reasons. Dressed as they were in heavy cloaks, their hats pulled low against the wind, they were barely distinguishable even from each other, except that the older, stouter of the two did most of the talking.

He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk. He was a known talker. There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance.

John Adams was a lawyer and a farmer, a graduate of Harvard College, the husband of Abigail Smith Adams, the father of four children. He was forty years old and he was a revolutionary.

Dismounted, he stood five feet seven or eight inches tall — about “middle size” in that day — and though verging on portly, he had a straight-up, square-shouldered stance and was, in fact, surprisingly fit and solid. His hands were the hands of a man accustomed to pruning his own trees, cutting his own hay, and splitting his own firewood.

In such bitter cold of winter, the pink of his round, clean-shaven, very English face would all but glow, and if he were hatless or without a wig, his high forehead and thinning hairline made the whole of the face look rounder still. The hair, light brown in color, was full about the ears. The chin was firm, the nose sharp, almost birdlike. But it was the dark, perfectly arched brows and keen blue eyes that gave the face its vitality. Years afterward, recalling this juncture in his life, he would describe himself as looking rather like a short, thick Archbishop of Canterbury.

As befitting a studious lawyer from Braintree, Adams was a “plain dressing” man. His oft-stated pleasures were his family, his farm, his books and writing table, a convivial pipe and cup of coffee (now that tea was no longer acceptable), or preferably a glass of good Madeira.

In the warm seasons he relished long walks and time alone on horseback. Such exercise, he believed, roused “the animal spirits” and “dispersed melancholy.” He loved the open meadows of home, the “old acquaintances” of rock ledges and breezes from the sea. From his doorstep to the water’s edge was approximately a mile.

He was a man who cared deeply for his friends, who, with few exceptions, were to be his friends for life, and in some instances despite severe strains. And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his “Dearest Friend,” as he addressed her in letters — his “best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world” — while to her he was “the tenderest of husbands,” her “good man.”

John Adams was also, as many could attest, a great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force. He had a brilliant mind. He was honest and everyone knew it. Emphatically independent by nature, hardworking, frugal — all traits in the New England tradition — he was anything but cold or laconic as supposedly New Englanders were. He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger, and all-forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair, and especially when separated from his family or during periods of prolonged inactivity.

Ambitious to excel — to make himself known — he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, “and all such things,” but from “an habitual contempt of them,” as he wrote. He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame without honor, in her view, would be “like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.”

As his family and friends knew, Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that. He was hard-headed and a man of “sensibility,” a close observer of human folly as displayed in everyday life and fired by an inexhaustible love of books and scholarly reflection. He read Cicero, Tacitus, and others of his Roman heroes in Latin, and Plato and Thucydides in the original Greek, which he considered the supreme language. But in his need to fathom the “labyrinth” of human nature, as he said, he was drawn to Shakespeare and Swift, and likely to carry Cervantes or a volume of English poetry with him on his journeys. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket,” he would tell his son Johnny.

John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter. He owned no ships or glass factory as did Colonel Josiah Quincy, Braintree’s leading citizen. There was no money in his background, no Adams fortune or elegant Adams homestead like the Boston mansion of John Hancock.

It was in the courtrooms of Massachusetts and on the printed page, principally in the newspapers of Boston, that Adams had distinguished himself. Years of riding the court circuit and his brilliance before the bar had brought him wide recognition and respect. And of greater consequence in recent years had been his spirited determination and eloquence in the cause of American rights and liberties.

That he relished the sharp conflict and theater of the courtroom, that he loved the esteem that came with public life, no less than he loved “my farm, my family and goose quill,” there is no doubt, however frequently he protested to the contrary. His desire for “distinction” was too great. Patriotism burned in him like a blue flame. “I have a zeal at my heart for my country and her friends which I cannot smother or conceal,” he told Abigail, warning that it could mean privation and unhappiness for his family unless regulated by cooler judgment than his own.

In less than a year’s time, as a delegate to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, he had emerged as one of the most “sensible and forcible” figures in the whole patriot cause, the “Great and Common Cause,” his influence exceeding even that of his better-known kinsman, the ardent Boston patriot Samuel Adams.

He was a second cousin of Samuel Adams, but “possessed of another species of character,” as his Philadelphia friend Benjamin Rush would explain. “He saw the whole of a subject at a glance, and . . . was equally fearless of men and of the consequences of a bold assertion of his opinion. . . . He was a stranger to dissimulation.”

It had been John Adams, in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, who rose in the Congress to speak of the urgent need to save the New England army facing the British at Boston and in the same speech called on Congress to put the Virginian George Washington at the head of the army. That was now six months past. The general had since established a command at Cambridge, and it was there that Adams was headed. It was his third trip in a week to Cambridge, and the beginning of a much longer undertaking by horseback. He would ride on to Philadelphia, a journey of nearly 400 miles that he had made before, though never in such punishing weather or at so perilous an hour for his country.

The man riding with him was Joseph Bass, a young shoemaker and Braintree neighbor hired temporarily as servant and traveling companion.

The day was Wednesday, January 24, 1776. The temperature, according to records kept by Adams’s former professor of science at Harvard, John Winthrop, was in the low twenties. At the least, the trip would take two weeks, given the condition of the roads and Adams’s reluctance to travel on the Sabbath.

TO ABIGAIL ADAMS, who had never been out of Massachusetts, the province of Pennsylvania was “that far country,” unimaginably distant, and their separations, lasting months at a time, had become extremely difficult for her.

“Winter makes its approaches fast,” she had written to John in November. “I hope I shall not be obliged to spend it without my dearest friend. . . . I have been like a nun in a cloister ever since you went away.”

He would never return to Philadelphia without her, he had vowed in a letter from his lodgings there. But they each knew better, just as each understood the importance of having Joseph Bass go with him. The young man was a tie with home, a familiar home-face. Once Adams had resettled in Philadelphia, Bass would return home with the horses, and bring also whatever could be found of the “common small” necessities impossible to obtain now, with war at the doorstep.

Could Bass bring her a bundle of pins? Abigail had requested earlier, in the bloody spring of 1775. She was entirely understanding of John’s “arduous task.” Her determination that he play his part was quite as strong as his own. They were of one and the same spirit. “You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator,” she wrote at her kitchen table. “We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” Unlike the delegates at Philadelphia, she and the children were confronted with the reality of war every waking hour. For though British troops were bottled up in Boston, the British fleet commanded the harbor and the sea and thus no town by the shore was safe from attack. Those Braintree families who were able to leave had already packed and moved inland, out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, shortages of sugar, coffee, pepper, shoes, and ordinary pins were worse than he had any idea.

“The cry for pins is so great that what we used to buy for 7 shillings and six pence are now 20 shillings and not to be had for that.” A bundle of pins contained six thousand, she explained. These she could sell for hard money or use for barter.

There had been a rush of excitement when the British sent an expedition to seize hay and livestock on one of the islands offshore. “The alarm flew [like] lightning,” Abigail reported, “men from all parts came flocking down till 2,000 were collected.” The crisis had passed, but not her state of nerves, with the house so close to the road and the comings and goings of soldiers. They stopped at her door for food and slept on her kitchen floor. Pewter spoons were melted for bullets in her fireplace. “Sometimes refugees from Boston tired and fatigued, seek an asylum for a day or night, a week,” she wrote to John. “You can hardly imagine how we live.”

“Pray don’t let Bass forget my pins,” she reminded him again. “I endeavor to live in the most frugal manner possible, but I am many times distressed.”

The day of the battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, the thunder of the bombardment had been terrifying, even at the distance of Braintree. Earlier, in April, when news came of Lexington and Concord, John, who was at home at the time, had saddled his horse and gone to see for himself, riding for miles along the route of the British march, past burned-out houses and scenes of extreme distress. He knew then what war meant, what the British meant, and warned Abigail that in case of danger she and the children must “fly to the woods.” But she was as intent to see for herself as he, and with the bombardment at Bunker Hill ringing in her ears, she had taken seven-year-old Johnny by the hand and hurried up the road to the top of nearby Penn’s Hill. From a granite outcropping that breached the summit like the hump of a whale, they could see the smoke of battle rising beyond Boston, ten miles up the bay.

It was the first all-out battle of the war. “How many have fallen we know not,” she wrote that night. “The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep.”

Their friend Joseph Warren had been killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail reported in another letter. A handsome young physician and leading patriot allied with Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, Warren had been one of the worthiest men of the province. John had known him since the smallpox epidemic of 1764, when John had gone to Boston to be inoculated. Now Joseph Warren was dead at age thirty-four, shot through the face, his body horribly mutilated by British bayonets.

“My bursting heart must find vent at my pen,” Abigail told her absent husband.

THE ROUTE JOHN ADAMS and his young companion would take to Philadelphia that January of 1776 was the same as he had traveled to the First Continental Congress in the summer of 1774. They would travel the Post Road west across Massachusetts as far as Springfield on the Connecticut River, there cross by ferry and swing south along the west bank, down the valley into Connecticut. At Wethersfield they would leave the river for the road to New Haven, and from New Haven on, along the Connecticut shore — through Fairfield, Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich — they would be riding the New York Post Road. At New York, horses and riders would be ferried over the Hudson River to New Jersey, where they would travel “as fine a road as ever trod,” in the opinion of John Adams, whose first official position in Braintree had been surveyor of roads. Three more ferry crossings, at Hackensack, Newark, and New Brunswick, would put them on a straightaway ride to the little college town of Princeton. Then came Trenton and a final ferry crossing over the Delaware to Pennsylvania. In another twenty miles they would be in sight of Philadelphia.

All told, they would pass through more than fifty towns in five provinces — some twenty towns in Massachusetts alone — stopping several times a day to eat, sleep, or tend the horses. With ice clogging the rivers, there was no estimating how long delays might be at ferry crossings.

Making the journey in 1774, Adams had traveled in style, with the full Massachusetts delegation, everyone in a state of high expectation. He had been a different man then, torn between elation and despair over what might be expected of him. It had been his first chance to see something of the world. His father had lived his entire life in Braintree, and no Adams had ever taken part in public life beyond Braintree. He himself had never set foot out of New England, and many days he suffered intense torment over his ability to meet the demands of the new role to be played. Politics did not come easily to him. He was too independent by nature and his political experience amounted to less than a year’s service in the Massachusetts legislature. But was there anyone of sufficient experience or ability to meet the demands of the moment?

“I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate,” he wrote in the seclusion of his diary. “We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune — in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.”

He must prepare for “a long journey indeed,” he had told Abigail. “But if the length of the journey was all, it would be no burden. . . . things are wanted to be done.”

He had worried over how he might look in such company and what clothes to take.

I think it will be necessary to make me up a couple of pieces of new linen. I am told they wash miserably at N[ew] York, the Jerseys, and Philadelphia, too, in comparison of Boston, and am advised to carry a great deal of linen.

Whether to make me a suit of new clothes at Boston or to make them at Philadelphia, and what to make I know not.

Still, the prospect of a gathering of such historic portent stirred him as nothing ever had. “It is to be a school of political prophets I suppose — a nursery of American statesmen,” he wrote to a friend, James Warren of Plymouth. “May it thrive and prosper and flourish and from this fountain may there issue streams, which shall gladden all the cities and towns in North America, forever.”

There had been a rousing send-off in Boston, on August 10, 1774, and in full view of British troops. Samuel Adams, never a fancy dresser, had appeared in a stunning new red coat, new wig, silver-buckled shoes, gold knee buckles, the best silk hose, a spotless new cocked hat on his massive head, and carrying a gold-headed cane, all gifts from the Sons of Liberty. It was thought that as leader of the delegation he should look the part. In addition, they had provided “a little purse” for expenses.

It had been a triumphal, leisurely journey of nearly three weeks, with welcoming parties riding out to greet them at town after town. They were feted and toasted, prayers were said, church bells rang. Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate who joined the procession, assured John Adams that the Congress was to be the grandest, most important assembly ever held in America. At New Haven “every bell was clanging,” people were crowding at doors and windows “as if to see a coronation.”

In New York they were shown the sights — City Hall, the college, and at Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, the gilded equestrian statue of King George III, which had yet to be pulled from its pedestal by an angry mob. The grand houses and hospitality were such as Adams had never known, even if, as a self-respecting New Englander, he thought New Yorkers lacking in decorum. “They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether,” he observed. “If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again — and talk away.”

Truly he was seeing the large world, he assured Abigail in a letter from the tavern at Princeton, a day’s ride from Philadelphia. “Tomorrow we reach the theater of action. God Almighty grant us wisdom and virtue sufficient for the high trust that is devolved upon us.”

But that had been nearly two years past. It had been high summer, green and baking hot under summer skies, an entirely different time that now seemed far past, so much had happened since. There had been no war then, no blood had been spilled at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Now fully twenty regiments of red-coated British regulars occupied Boston under General William Howe. British warships, some of 50 guns, lay at anchor in Boston Harbor, while American forces outside the city had become perilously thin.

In the late summer and fall of 1775, the “bloody flux,” epidemic dysentery, had ripped through their ranks. Adams’s youngest brother, Elihu, a captain of militia, camped beside the Charles River at Cambridge, was stricken and died, leaving a wife and three children. Nor was Braintree spared the violent epidemic. For Abigail, then thirty years old, it had been the worst ordeal of her life.

“Such is the distress of the neighborhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick . . . so mortal a time the oldest man does not remember,” she had lamented in a letter to John. “As to politics I know nothing about them. I have wrote as much as I am able to, being very weak.”

“Mrs. Randall has lost her daughter, Mrs. Bracket hers, Mr. Thomas Thayer his wife,” she reported. “I know of eight this week who have been buried in this town.” Parson Wibird was so ill he could scarcely take a step. “We have been four sabbaths without any meeting.” Their three-year-old Tommy was so wretchedly sick that “[were] you to look upon him you would not know him.” She was constantly scrubbing the house with hot vinegar.

“Woe follows woe, one affliction treads upon the heel of another,” she wrote. Some families had lost three, four, and five children. Some families were entirely gone.

The strong clarity of her handwriting, the unhesitating flow of her pen across the paper, line after line, seemed at odds with her circumstances. Rarely was a word crossed out or changed. It was as if she knew exactly what was in her heart and how she wished to express it — as if the very act of writing, of forming letters, in her distinctive angular fashion, keeping every line straight, would somehow help maintain her balance, validate her own being in such times.

She had begun signing herself “Portia,” after the long-suffering, virtuous wife of the Roman statesman Brutus. If her “dearest friend” was to play the part of a Roman hero, so would she.

Her mother lay mortally ill in neighboring Weymouth. When, on October 1, 1775, her mother died, Abigail wrote to John, “You often expressed your anxiety over me when you left me before, surrounded with terrors, but my trouble then was as the small dust in the balance compared to what I have since endured.”

In addition to tending her children, she was nursing a desperately ill servant named Patty. The girl had become “the most shocking object my eyes ever beheld . . . [and] continuously desirous of my being with her the little while she expects to live.” It was all Abigail could do to remain in the same house. When Patty died on October 9, she “made the fourth corpse that was this day committed to the ground.”

Correspondence was maddeningly slow and unreliable. In late October she wrote to say she had not had a line from John in a month and that in his last letter he had made no mention of the six she had written to him. “’Tis only in my night visions that I know anything about you.” Yet in that time he had written seven letters to her, including one mourning the loss of her mother and asking for news of “poor, distressed” Patty.

Heartsick, searching for an answer to why such evil should “befall a city and a people,” Abigail had pondered whether it could be God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.

AT CAMBRIDGE THE MORNING of the bitterly cold first day of the new year, 1776, George Washington had raised the new Continental flag with thirteen stripes before his headquarters and announced that the new army was now “entirely continental.” But for days afterward, their enlistments up, hundreds, thousands of troops, New England militia, started for home. Replacements had to be found, an immensely difficult and potentially perilous changing of the guard had to be carried off, one army moving out, another moving in, all in the bitter winds and snow of winter and in such fashion as the enemy would never know.

“It is not in the pages of history, perhaps, to furnish a case like ours,” Washington informed John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress. Hardly 5,000 colonial troops were fit for duty. Promises of men, muskets, powder, and urgently needed supplies never materialized. Blankets and linen for bandages were “greatly wanted.” Firewood was in short supply. With smallpox spreading in Boston, the British command had allowed pathetic columns of the ill-clad, starving poor of Boston to come pouring out of town and into the American lines, many of them sick, and all in desperate need of food and shelter.

“The reflection on my situation and that of this army produces many an unhappy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep,” wrote Washington, who had never before commanded anything larger than a regiment.

The night of January 8, Washington had ordered a brief American assault on Charlestown, largely to keep the British guessing. Adams, at home at his desk writing a letter, was brought to his feet by the sudden crash of the guns, “a very hot fire” of artillery that lasted half an hour and lit the sky over Braintree’s north common. Whether American forces were on the attack or defense, he could not tell. “But in either case, I rejoice,” he wrote, taking up his pen again, “for defeat appears to me preferable to total inaction.”

As it was, Washington saw his situation to be so precarious that the only choice was an all-out attack on Boston, and he wrote to tell Adams, “I am exceedingly desirous of consulting you.” As a former delegate to Philadelphia, Washington understood the need to keep Congress informed. Earlier, concerned whether his authority reached beyond Boston to the defense of New York, he had asked Adams for an opinion, and Adams’s reply had been characteristically unhesitating and unambiguous: “Your commission constitutes you commander of all the forces . . . and you are vested with full power and authority to act as you think for the good and welfare of the service.”

No one in Congress had impressed Adams more. On the day he had called on his fellow delegates to put their colleague, “the gentleman from Virginia,” in command at Boston, Washington, out of modesty, had left the chamber, while a look of mortification, as Adams would tell the story, filled the face of John Hancock, who had hoped he would be chosen. Washington was virtuous, brave, and in his new responsibilities, “one of the most important characters in the world,” Adams had informed Abigail. “The liberties of America depend upon him in great degree.” Later, when she met Washington at a Cambridge reception, Abigail thought John had not said half enough in praise of him.

A council of war with the commander and his generals convened January 16 in the parlor of the large house on Brattle Street, Cambridge, that served as Washington’s headquarters. With others of the Massachusetts congressional delegation still at Philadelphia, Adams was the only member of Congress present as Washington made the case for an attack on Boston, by sending his troops across the frozen bay. But the generals flatly rejected the plan and it was put aside.

Two days later, Adams was summoned again. Devastating news had arrived by dispatch rider. An American assault on Quebec led by Colonels Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold had failed. The “gallant Montgomery” was dead, “brave Arnold” was wounded. It was a crushing moment for Washington and for John Adams. Congress had ordered the invasion of Canada, the plan was Washington’s own, and the troops were mostly New Englanders.

As a young man, struggling over what to make of his life, Adams had often pictured himself as a soldier. Only the previous spring, when Washington appeared in Congress resplendent in the blue-and-buff uniform of a Virginia militia officer, Adams had written to Abigail, “Oh that I was a soldier!” He was reading military books. “Everybody must and will be a soldier,” he told her. On the morning Washington departed Philadelphia to assume command at Boston, he and others of the Massachusetts delegation had traveled a short way with the general and his entourage, to a rousing accompaniment of fifes and drums, Adams feeling extremely sorry for himself for having to stay behind to tend what had become the unglamorous labors of Congress. “I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels.”

But such waves of self-pity came and went, as Abigail knew, and when in need of sympathy, it was to her alone that he would appeal. He was not a man to back down or give up, not one to do anything other than what he saw to be his duty. What in another time and society might be taken as platitudes about public service were to both John and Abigail Adams a lifelong creed. And in this bleakest of hours, heading for Cambridge, and on to Philadelphia, Adams saw his way clearer and with greater resolve than ever in his life. It was a road he had been traveling for a long time.

II

AT THE CENTER OF BRAINTREE, Massachusetts, and central to the town’s way of life, was the meetinghouse, the First Church, with its bell tower and graveyard on the opposite side of the road. From the door of the house where John Adams had said goodbye to wife and children that morning, to the church, was less than a mile. Riding north out of town, he passed the snow-covered graveyard on the left, the church on the right.

He had been born in the house immediately adjacent to his own, a nearly duplicate farmer’s cottage belonging to his father. He had been baptized in the church where his father was a deacon, and he had every expectation that when his time came he would go to his final rest in the same ground where his father and mother lay, indeed where leaning headstones marked the graves of the Adams line going back four generations. When he referred to himself as John Adams of Braintree, it was not in a manner of speaking.

The first of the line, Henry Adams of Barton St. David in Somersetshire, England, with his wife Edith Squire and nine children — eight sons and a daughter — had arrived in Braintree in the year 1638, in the reign of King Charles I, nearly a century before John Adams was born. They were part of the great Puritan migration, Dissenters from the Church of England who, in the decade following the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, crossed the North Atlantic intent on making a new City of God, some twenty thousand people, most of whom came as families. Only one, the seventh and youngest of Henry Adams’s eight sons remained in Braintree. He was Joseph, and he was succeeded by a second Joseph — one of Henry’s eighty-nine grandchildren! — who married Hannah Bass, a granddaughter of John and Priscilla Alden, and they had eleven children, of whom one was another John, born in 1691.

They were people who earned their daily bread by the work of their hands. The men were all farmers who, through the long winters, in New England fashion, worked at other trades for “hard money,” which was always scarce. The first Henry Adams and several of his descendants were maltsters, makers of malt from barley for use in baking or brewing beer, a trade carried over from England. The first John Adams, remembered as Deacon John, was a farmer and shoemaker, a man of “sturdy, unostentatious demeanor,” who, like his father, “played the part of a solid citizen,” as tithing man, constable, lieutenant in the militia, selectman, and ultimately church deacon, taking his place on the deacon’s bench before the pulpit.

In 1734, in October, the golden time of year on the Massachusetts shore, Deacon John Adams, at age forty-three, married Susanna Boylston of Brookline. She was twenty-five, and from a family considered of higher social standing than that of her husband. Nothing written in her own hand would survive — no letters, diaries, or legal papers with her signature — nor any correspondence addressed to her by any of her family, and so, since it is also known that letters were frequently read aloud to her, there is reason to believe that Susanna Boylston Adams was illiterate.

One year later, on October 19, 1735, by the Old Style calendar, their first child, a son, was born and given his father’s name. When England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, October 19 became October 30.

“What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications in such numbers, health, peace, comfort, and mediocrity?” this firstborn son of Deacon John would one day write to Benjamin Rush. “I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, or frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, etc., etc., etc., been melted away and disappeared. . . .” In truth, he was extremely proud of his descent from “a line of virtuous, independent New England farmers.” That virtue and independence were among the highest of mortal attainments, John Adams never doubted. The New England farmer was his own man who owned his own land, a freeholder, and thus the equal of anyone.

The Braintree of Adams’s boyhood was a quiet village of scattered houses and small neighboring farmsteads strung along the old coast road, the winding main thoroughfare from Boston to Plymouth, just back from the very irregular south shore of Massachusetts Bay. The setting was particularly picturesque, with orchards, stone walls, meadows of salt hay, and broad marshlands through which meandered numerous brooks and the Neponset River. From the shoreline the land sloped gently upward to granite outcroppings and hills, including Penn’s Hill, the highest promontory, close by the Adams farm. Offshore the bay was dotted with small islands, some wooded, some used for grazing sheep. Recalling his childhood in later life, Adams wrote of the unparalleled bliss of roaming the open fields and woodlands of the town, of exploring the creeks, hiking the beaches, “of making and sailing boats . . . swimming, skating, flying kites and shooting marbles, bat and ball, football . . . wrestling and sometimes boxing,” shooting at crows and ducks, and “running about to quiltings and frolics and dances among the boys and girls.” The first fifteen years of his life, he said, “went off like a fairytale.”

The community numbered perhaps 2,000 people. There was one other meetinghouse — a much smaller, more recent Anglican church — a schoolhouse, gristmill, village store, blacksmith shop, granite quarry, a half dozen or more taverns and, in a section called Germantown, Colonel Quincy’s glass factory. With no newspaper in town, news from Boston and the world beyond came from travelers on the coast road, no communication moving faster than a horse and rider. But within the community itself, news of nearly any kind, good or bad, traveled rapidly. People saw each other at church, town meeting, in the mill, or at the taverns. Independent as a Braintree farmer and his family may have been, they were not isolated.

The Adams homestead, the farmhouse at the foot of Penn’s Hill where young John was born and raised, was a five-room New England saltbox, the simplest, most commonplace kind of dwelling. It had been built in 1681, and built strongly around a massive brick chimney. Its timbers were of hand-hewn oak, its inner walls of brick, these finished on the inside with lath and plaster and faced on the exterior with pine clapboard. There were three rooms and two great fireplaces at ground level, and two rooms above. A narrow stairway tucked against the chimney, immediately inside the front door, led to the second floor. The windows had twenty-four panes (“12-over-12”) and wooden shutters. There were outbuildings and a good-sized barn to the rear, fields and orchard, and through a broad meadow flowed “beautiful, winding” Fresh Brook, as Adams affectionately described it. The well, for household use, was just out the front door. And though situated “as near as might be” to the road, the house was “fenced” by a stone wall, as was the somewhat older companion house that stood forty paces apart on the property, the house John and Abigail moved into after they were married and from which he departed on the winter morning in 1776. The one major difference between the two buildings was that the house of Adams’s boyhood sat at an angle to the road, while the other faced it squarely. Across the road, in the direction of the sea, lay open fields.

In the dry spells of summer, dust from the road blew in the open windows of both houses with every passing horse or wagon. From June to September, the heat in the upstairs bedrooms could be murderous. In winter, even with logs blazing in huge kitchen fireplaces, women wore heavy shawls and men sat in overcoats, while upstairs any water left in the unheated rooms turned to ice.

In most of the essentials of daily life, as in their way of life, Adams’s father and mother lived no differently than had their fathers and mothers, or those who preceded them. The furnishings Adams grew up with were of the plainest kind — a half dozen ordinary wooden chairs, a table, several beds, a looking glass or two. There was a Bible, possibly a few other books on religious subjects. Three silver spoons — one large, two small — counted prominently as family valuables. Clothes and other personal possessions were modest and time-worn. As one of the Adams line would write, “A hat would descend from father to son, and for fifty years make its regular appearance at meeting.”

Small as the house was, its occupancy was seldom limited to the immediate family. Besides father and mother, three sons, and a hired girl, there was nearly always an Adams or Boylston cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent, or friend staying the night. Men from town would stop in after dark to talk town business or church matters with Deacon John.

With the short growing season, the severe winters and stony fields, the immemorial uncertainties of farming, life was not easy and survival never taken for granted. One learned early in New England about the battle of life. Father and mother were hardworking and frugal of necessity, as well as by principle. “Let frugality and industry be our virtues,” John Adams advised Abigail concerning the raising of their own children. “Fire them with ambition to be useful,” he wrote, echoing what had been learned at home.

About his mother, Adams would have comparatively little to say, beyond that he loved her deeply — she was his “honored and beloved mother” — and that she was a highly principled woman of strong will, strong temper, and exceptional energy, all traits he shared though this he did not say. Of his father, however, he could hardly say enough. There were scarcely words to express the depth of his gratitude for the kindnesses his father had shown him, the admiration he felt for his father’s integrity. His father was “the honestest man” John Adams ever knew. “In wisdom, piety, benevolence and charity in proportion to his education and sphere of life, I have never known his superior,” Adams would write long afterward, by which time he had come to know the most prominent men of the age on two sides of the Atlantic. His father was his idol. It was his father’s honesty, his father’s independent spirit and love of country, Adams said, that were his lifelong inspiration.

A good-looking, active boy, if small for his age, he was unusually sensitive to criticism but also quickly responsive to praise, as well as being extremely bright, which his father saw early, and decided he must go to Harvard to become a minister. An elder brother of Deacon John, Joseph Adams, who graduated from Harvard in 1710, had become a minister with a church in New Hampshire. Further, Deacon John himself, for as little education as he had had, wrote in a clear hand and had, as he said, “an admiration of learning.”

Taught to read at home, the boy went first and happily to a dame school — lessons for a handful of children in the kitchen of a neighbor, with heavy reliance on The New England Primer. (“He who ne’er learns his ABC, forever will a blockhead be.”) But later at the tiny local schoolhouse, subjected to a lackluster “churl” of a teacher who paid him no attention, he lost all interest. He cared not for books or study, and saw no sense in talk of college. He wished only to be a farmer, he informed his father.

That being so, said Deacon John not unkindly, the boy could come along to the creek with him and help cut thatch. Accordingly, as Adams would tell the story, father and son set off the next morning and “with great humor” his father kept him working through the day.

At night at home, he said, “Well, John, are you satisfied with being a farmer?” Though the labor had been very hard and very muddy, I answered, “I like it very well, sir.”

“Aya, but I don’t like it so well: so you will go back to school today.” I went but was not so happy as among the creek thatch.

Later, when he told his father it was his teacher he disliked, not the books, and that he wished to go to another school, his father immediately took his side and wasted no time with further talk. John was enrolled the next day in a private school down the road where, kindly treated by a schoolmaster named Joseph Marsh, he made a dramatic turn and began studying in earnest.

A small textbook edition of Cicero’s Orations became one of his earliest, proudest possessions, as he affirmed with the note “John Adams Book 1749/50” written a half dozen times on the title page.

In little more than a year, at age fifteen, he was pronounced “fitted for college,” which meant Harvard, it being the only choice. Marsh, himself a Harvard graduate, agreed to accompany John to Cambridge to appear for the usual examination before the president and masters of the college. But on the appointed morning Marsh pleaded ill and told John he must go alone. The boy was thunderstruck, terrified; but picturing his father’s grief and the disappointment of both father and teacher, he “collected resolution enough to proceed,” and on his father’s horse rode off down the road alone, suffering “a very melancholy journey.”

Writing years later, he remembered the day as grey and somber. Threatening clouds hung over Cambridge, and for a fifteen-year-old farm boy to stand before the grand monarchs of learning in their wigs and robes, with so much riding on the outcome, was itself as severe a test as could be imagined. His tutor, however, had assured him he was ready, which turned out to be so. He was admitted to Harvard and granted a partial scholarship.

“I was as light when I came home, as I had been heavy when I went,” Adams wrote.

It had long been an article of faith among the Adamses that land was the only sound investment and, once purchased, was never to be sold. Only once is Deacon John known to have made an exception to the rule, when he sold ten acres to help send his son John to college.

THE HARVARD OF JOHN ADAMS’S undergraduate days was an institution of four red-brick buildings, a small chapel, a faculty of seven, and an enrollment of approximately one hundred scholars. His own class of 1755, numbering twenty-seven, was put under the tutorship of Joseph Mayhew, who taught Latin, and for Adams the four years were a time out of time that passed all too swiftly. When it was over and he abruptly found himself playing the part of village schoolmaster in remote Worcester, he would write woefully to a college friend, “Total and complete misery has succeeded so suddenly to total and complete happiness, that all the philosophy I can muster can scarce support me under the amazing shock.”

He worked hard and did well at Harvard, and was attracted particularly to mathematics and science, as taught by his favorite professor, John Winthrop, the most distinguished member of the faculty and the leading American astronomer of the time. Among Adams’s cherished Harvard memories was of a crystal night when, from the roof of Old Harvard Hall, he gazed through Professor Winthrop’s telescope at the satellites of Jupiter.

He enjoyed his classmates and made several close friends. To his surprise, he also discovered a love of study and books such as he had never imagined. “I read forever,” he would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any. Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.

He lived in the “lowermost northwest chamber” of Massachusetts Hall, sharing quarters with Thomas Sparhawk, whose chief distinction at college appears to have come from breaking windows, and Joseph Stockbridge, notable for his wealth and his refusal to eat meat.

The regimen was strict and demanding, the day starting with morning prayers in Holden Chapel at six and ending with evening prayers at five. The entire college dined at Commons, on the ground floor of Old Harvard, each scholar bringing his own knife and fork which, when the meal ended, would be wiped clean on the table cloth. By most accounts, the food was wretched. Adams not only never complained, but attributed his own and the overall good health of the others to the daily fare — beef, mutton, Indian pudding, salt fish on Saturday — and an ever abundant supply of hard cider. “I shall never forget, how refreshing and salubrious we found it, hard as it often was.” Indeed, for the rest of his life, a morning “gill” of hard cider was to be John Adams’s preferred drink before breakfast.

“All scholars,” it was stated in the college rules, were to “behave themselves blamelessly, leading sober, righteous, and godly lives.” There was to be no “leaning” at prayers, no lying, blasphemy, fornication, drunkenness, or picking locks. Once, the records show, Adams was fined three shillings, nine pence for absence from college longer than the time allowed for vacation or by permission. Otherwise, he had not a mark against him. As the dutiful son of Deacon John, he appears neither to have succumbed to gambling, “riotous living,” nor to “wenching” in taverns on the road to Charlestown.

But the appeal of young women was exceedingly strong, for as an elderly John Adams would one day write, he was “of an amorous disposition” and from as early as ten or eleven years of age had been “very fond of the society of females.” Yet he kept himself in rein, he later insisted.

I had my favorites among the young women and spent many of my evenings in their company and this disposition although controlled for seven years after my entrance into college, returned and engaged me too much ‘til I was married. I shall draw no characters nor give any enumeration of my youthful flames. It would be considered as no compliment to the dead or the living. This I will say — they were all modest and virtuous girls and always maintained that character through life. No virgin or matron ever had cause to blush at the sight of me, or to regret her acquaintance with me. No father, brother, son, or friend ever had cause of grief or resentment for any intercourse between me and any daughter, sister, mother or any other relation of the female sex. My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother or sister exists or ever existed.

A student’s place in his class being determined on entrance to Harvard by the “dignity of family,” rather than alphabetically or by academic performance, Adams was listed fourteenth of the twenty-five who received degrees, his placement due to the fact that his mother was a Boylston and his father a deacon. Otherwise, he would have been among the last on the list. At commencement ceremonies, as one of the first three academically, he argued the affirmative to the question “Is civil government absolutely necessary for men?” It was to be a lifelong theme.

HOW CLOSE ADAMS CAME to becoming a minister he never exactly said, but most likely it was not close at all. His mother, though a pious woman, thought him unsuited for the life, for all that Deacon John wished it for him. Adams would recall only that in his last years at Harvard, having joined a debating and discussion club, he was told he had “some faculty” for public speaking and would make a better lawyer than preacher, a prospect, he said, that he readily understood and embraced. He knew from experience under his father’s roof, when “ecclesiastical councils” gathered there, the kind of contention that could surround a preacher, whatever he might or might not say from the pulpit. “I saw such a spirit of dogmatism and bigotry in clergy and laity, that if I should be a priest I must take my side, and pronounce as positively as any of them, or never get a parish, or getting it must soon leave it.” He had no heart for such a life and his father, he felt certain, would understand, his father being “a man of so thoughtful and considerate a turn of mind,” even if the profession of law was not one generally held in high esteem.

He judged his father correctly, it seems, but to become a lawyer required that he be taken into the office of a practicing attorney who would charge a fee, which the young man himself would have to earn, and it was this necessity, with his Harvard years ended, that led to the schoolmaster’s desk at Worcester late in the summer of 1755.

He made the sixty-mile journey from Braintree to Worcester by horseback in a single day and, though untried and untrained as a teacher, immediately assumed his new role in a one-room schoolhouse at the center of town. To compensate for his obvious youth, he would explain to a friend, he had to maintain a stiff, frowning attitude.

His small charges, both boys and girls numbering about a dozen, responded, he found, as he had at their age, more to encouragement and praise than to scolding or “thwacking.” A teacher ought to be an encourager, Adams decided. “But we must be cautious and sparing of our praise, lest it become too familiar.” Yet for the day-to-day routine of the classroom, he thought himself poorly suited and dreamed of more glorious pursuits, almost anything other than what he was doing. One student remembered Master Adams spending most of the day at his desk absorbed in his own thoughts or busily writing — sermons presumably. But Adams did like the children and hugely enjoyed observing them:

I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep-projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society. . . . At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adam’s fall in which we sinned, all as his primer has it.

He perceived life as a stirring drama like that of the theater, but with significant differences, as he wrote to a classmate, Charles Cushing:

Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

He boarded with a local physician whose collection of medical books helped satisfy his insatiable appetite for reading. For a time, interest in the law seemed to fade and Adams thought of becoming a doctor. But after attending several sessions of the local court, he felt himself “irresistibly impelled” to the law. In the meantime, he was reading Milton, Virgil, Voltaire, Viscount Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History, and copying long extracts in a literary commonplace book.

From his reading and from all he heard of the common talk in town, he found himself meditating more and more about politics and history. It was the time of the French and Indian War, when Americans had begun calling themselves Americans rather than colonists. Excitement was high, animosity toward the French intense. In one of his solitary “reveries,” Adams poured out his thoughts in an amazing letter for anyone so young to have written, and for all it foresaw and said about him. Dated October 12, 1755, the letter was to another of his classmates and his cousin Nathan Webb.

“All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change,” Adams began.

Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should have established it in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians.

England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe.

Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe, will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others’ influence and keep the country in equilibrio.

Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

At Harvard he had tried keeping a journal. In Worcester he began again in a paper booklet no bigger than the palm of his hand, writing in a minute, almost microscopic script, numbering the days down the left hand margin, his entries at first given to spare, matter-of-fact notations on the weather and what little passed for social events in his new life:

January23 [1756]. Friday.

A fair and agreeable day. Kept school. Drank tea at Col. Chandler’s, and spent the evening at Major Gardiner’s.

January 24. Saturday.

A very high west wind. Warm and cloudy. P.M. Warm and fair.

January 25. Sunday.

A cold weather. Heard friend Thayer preach two ingenious discourses from Jeremy [Jeremiah] 10th, 6, and 7. Supped at Col. Chandler’s.

Soon he was filling pages with observations like those on his small scholars and on the arrival of spring, with frequently sensuous responses to nature — to “soft vernal showers,” atmosphere full of “ravishing fragrance,” air “soft and yielding.”

Increasingly, however, the subject uppermost in mind was himself, as waves of loneliness, feelings of abject discontent over his circumstances, dissatisfaction with his own nature, seemed at times nearly to overwhelm him. Something of the spirit of the old Puritan diarists took hold. By writing only to himself, for himself, by dutifully reckoning day by day his moral assets and liabilities, and particularly the liabilities, he could thus improve himself.

“Oh! that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation, conquer my natural pride and conceit.”

Why was he constantly forming yet never executing good resolutions? Why was he so absent-minded, so lazy, so prone to daydreaming his life away? He vowed to read more seriously. He vowed to quit chewing tobacco.

On July 21, 1756, he wrote:

I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors. . . . I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.

But the next morning he slept until seven and a one-line entry the following week read, “A very rainy day. Dreamed away the time.”

There was so much he wanted to know and do, but life was passing him by. He was twenty years old. “I have no books, no time, no friends. I must therefore be contented to live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow.”

That such spells of gloom were failings in themselves, he was painfully aware, yet he was at a loss to know what to do about it. “I can as easily still the fierce tempests or stop the rapid thunderbolt, as command the motions and operations of my own mind,” he lamented. Actual thunderstorms left him feeling nervous and unstrung.

By turns he worried over never having any bright or original ideas, or being too bright for his own good, too ready to show off and especially in the company of the older men in the community who befriended him.

“Honesty, sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he concluded after one evening’s gathering. He was therefore of the opinion that men ought “to avow their opinions and defend them with boldness.”

Vanity, he saw, was his chief failing. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly,” he wrote, vowing to reform himself.

By “vanity” he did not mean he had an excessive pride in appearance. Adams was never one to spend much time in front of a mirror. Rather, in the eighteenth-century use of the word, he was berating himself for being overly proud, conceited.

“A puffy, vain, conceited conversation never fails to bring a man into contempt, although his natural endowments be ever so great, and his application and industry ever so intense. . . . [And] I must own myself to have been, to a very heinous degree, guilty in this respect.”

By late summer of 1756 Adams had made up his mind about the future. On August 21, he signed a contract with a young Worcester attorney, James Putnam, to study “under his inspection” for two years. The day after, a Sunday, inspired by a sermon he had heard — and also, it would seem, by a feeling of relief that his decision not to become a minister was at last resolved — he wrote of the “glorious shows” of nature and the intense sensation of pleasure they evoked. Beholding the night sky, “the amazing concave of Heaven sprinkled and glittering with stars,” he was “thrown into a kind of transport” and knew such wonders to be the gifts of God, expressions of God’s love. But greatest of all, he wrote, was the gift of an inquiring mind.

But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses . . . are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.

To a friend Adams wrote, “It will be hard work, but the more difficult and dangerous the enterprise, a higher crown of laurel is bestowed on the conqueror. . . . But the point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

He changed lodgings, moving in with lawyer Putnam, and while continuing his daytime duties at the Worcester schoolhouse, he read law at night moving fast (too fast, he later thought) through Wood’s four-volume Institute of the Laws of England, Hawkins’s Abridgment of Coke’s Institutes, Salkeld’s hefty Reports, Coke’s Entries, and Hawkins’s massive two-volume Pleas of the Crown in a single volume that weighed fully eight pounds. “Can you imagine any drier reading?” he would one day write to Benjamin Rush, heavily underscoring the question.

Putnam’s fee was $100, when Adams could “find it convenient.”

With the war continuing, much the greatest excitement in Worcester was the arrival of Lord Jeffrey Amherst and 4,000 of the King’s troops on their way west to Fort William Henry on Lake George. They camped on a nearby hill and for several days and nights life in the town was transformed. Writing more than half a century later, Adams could still warm to the memory.

The officers were very social, spent their evenings and took their suppers with such of the inhabitants as were able to invite, and entertained us with their music and their dances. Many of them were Scotchmen in their plaids and their music was delightful. Even the bagpipe was not disagreeable.

“I then rejoiced that I was an Englishman, and gloried in the name of Britain,” he would recall to a friend. How he might fare in the law was another matter. As he wrote at the time, “I am not without apprehensions.”

IN THE FALL OF 1758, his studies with Putnam completed, Adams returned to Braintree to move in with his father and mother again after an absence of eight years. “I am beginning life anew,” he jubilantly informed a Harvard classmate.

He was busy catching up with old friends, busy with his share of the farm work and preparing for admittance to the bar. For the first time, he was on his own with his studies, and he bent to them with the spirit of independence and intense determination that were to characterize much of his whole approach to life. In his diary he wrote of chopping wood and translating Justinian, with equal resolution.

“I have read Gilbert’s first section, of feuds, this evening but I am not a master of it,” he recorded October 5, referring to Sir Geoffrey Gilbert’s Treatise of Feudal Tenures. “Rose about sun rise. Unpitched a load of hay. Translated two leaves more of Justinian . . . and am now reading over again Gilbert’s section of feudal tenures,” he wrote the day following, October 6. October 7: “Read in Gilbert. . . .” October 9: “I must and will make that book familiar to me.” October 10: “Read in Gilbert. I read him slowly, but I gain ideas and knowledge as I go along.” October 12: “This small volume will take me a fortnight, but I will be master of it.”

Though full of opinions, he often found himself reluctant to express them. “I was young, and then very bashful, however saucy I may have sometimes been since,” he would recall long afterward to Thomas Jefferson.

Feeling miserably unsure of himself, he attended court in Boston, where, awestruck, he listened to the leading attorneys of the day, Jeremiah Gridley and James Otis, argue cases. But, as he explained to a friend in Worcester, the appeal of Boston was threefold.

I had the pleasure to sit and hear the greatest lawyers, orators, in short the greatest men in America, haranguing at the bar, and on the bench. I had the pleasure of spending my evenings with my Harvard friends in the joys of serene, sedate conversation, and perhaps it is worth my while to add, I had the pleasure of seeing a great many and of feeling some very [pretty] girls.

On the morning he found his way through the crooked streets of Boston to Jeremiah Gridley’s office for the requisite interview for admission to the bar, Gridley, much to Adams’s surprise, gave him not a few cursory minutes but several hours, questioning him closely on his reading. With a kindly, paternal air, Gridley also counseled him to “pursue the study of the law itself, rather than the gain of it,” and not to marry early.

Adams was admitted to the bar in a ceremony before the Superior Court at Boston on November 6, 1759, and in a matter of weeks, at age twenty-four, he had taken his first case, which he lost.

In Braintree, as elsewhere in New England, much of town business was taken up with the commonplace problem of keeping one man’s livestock out of another man’s fields, and by long-standing custom most legal matters were handled by town clerks and officials who, though without legal training, were thoroughly schooled in procedure, knowing to the last detail all that was required for writs and warrants, matters about which, for all his reading, Adams knew little. The case Lambert v. Field involved two horses belonging to Luke Lambert, a coarse, cocksure man whom Adams did not like. Lambert’s horses had broken into the enclosure of a neighbor, Joseph Field, and trampled some crops. When Lambert crossed onto Field’s land to retrieve them, Field called for him to stop, but Lambert, as Adams noted, “waved his hat and screamed at the horses and drove away, without tendering Field his damages.”

As counsel for Field, the plaintiff, Adams felt confident in his understanding of the principles of law involved, but worried that the writ he prepared was “unclerklike” and thus he would fail. He had had no experience in preparing such a document. His anguish was acute. He blamed Putnam for insufficient training. He blamed his mother for insisting he take the case lest it be thought he was incapable of drawing a writ. Nothing, he decided, would ever come easily to him. “But it is my destiny to dig treasures with my own fingers,” he wrote woefully.

To gather strength, he read aloud from Cicero’s Orations. The “sweetness and grandeur” of just the sounds of Cicero were sufficient reward, even if one understood none of the meaning. “Besides . . . it exercises my lungs, raises my spirits, opens my pores, quickens the circulation, and so contributes much to health.”

The case was the talk of the village. Everybody knew everybody involved. The justice of the peace, before whom Adams would appear, and the lawyer for Lambert were father and son — Colonel Josiah Quincy and young Samuel Quincy — a circumstance that obviously did not bode well for Adams and his client.

Just as he feared, Adams lost on a technicality. He had neglected to include the words “the county in the direction to the constables of Braintree.”

“Field’s wrath waxed hot,” he recorded, and his own misery was extreme. In his first appearance as a lawyer he had been bested by a crude countryman like Lambert. He had been made to look a fool in the eyes of the whole town, and the humiliation and anger he felt appear to have affected the atmosphere at home. The night following, a terrible family row broke out. Susanna Adams flew into a rage over the fact that Deacon John, in answer to his own conscience and feelings of responsibility as selectman, had brought a destitute young woman to live in the crowded household, the town having no means to provide for her. How was the girl to pay for her board, Susanna demanded of her husband, who responded by asserting his right to govern in his own home. “I won’t have the town’s poor brought here, stark naked for me to clothe for nothing,” she stormed. He should resign as selectman.

When the young woman, whose name was Judah, burst into tears and John’s brother Peter pointed this out, Adams told him to hold his tongue, which touched Peter off and “all was breaking into flame.” Adams was so shaken, he had to leave the room and take up his Cicero again in order to compose himself.

His mother’s uncontrolled responses, her “scolds, rages,” were a grievous flaw, he felt. He knew the sudden, uncontrollable rush of his own anger, almost to the point of bursting. He must observe more closely the effects of reason and rage, just as he must never again undertake a case without command of the details. “Let me never undertake to draw a writ without sufficient time to examine and digest in my mind all the doubts, queries, objections that may arise,” he wrote. And he never did. The painful lesson had been learned.

Henceforth, he vowed, he would bend his whole soul to the law. He would let nothing distract him. He drew inspiration from his Roman heroes. “The first way for a young man to set himself on the road towards glorious reputation,” he read in Cicero, “is to win renown.” “Reputation,” wrote Adams, “ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior.”

Should he confine himself to the small stage of Braintree? Or would he be better off in Boston? But how possibly could anyone with an interest in life keep a clear head in Boston?

My eyes are so diverted with chimney sweeps, carriers of wood, merchants, ladies, priests, carts, horses, oxen, coaches, market men and women, soldiers, sailors, and my ears with the rattle gabble of them all that I can’t think long enough in the street upon any one thing to start and pursue a thought.

He felt “anxious, eager after something,” but what it was he did not know. “I feel my own ignorance. I feel concern for knowledge. I have . . . a strong desire for distinction.”

“I never shall shine, ‘til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers.” It was 1760, the year twenty-two-year-old George III was crowned king and Adams turned twenty-five.

But if self-absorbed and ambitious, he was hardly more so than a number of other young men of ability of his time. The difference was that Adams wrote about it and was perfectly honest with himself.

“Why have I not genius to start some new thought?” he asked at another point in his diary. “Some thing that will surprise the world?” Why could he not bring order to his life? Why could he not clear his table of its clutter of books and papers and concentrate on just one book, one subject? Why did imagination so often intervene? Why did thoughts of girls keep intruding?

“Ballast is what I want. I totter with every breeze.”

Chide himself as he would about time spent to little purpose, his appetite for life, for the pleasures of society was too central to his nature to be denied. Further, he had a talent for friendship. To many he seemed prickly, intractable, and often he was, but as his friend Jonathan Sewall would write, Adams had “a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to the finest feelings.” He needed friends, prized old friendships. He kept in touch with his Harvard classmates, and for several in particular maintained boundless admiration. Moses Hemmenway, who had become a Congregational minister known for his interminable sermons, would remain, in Adams’s estimate, one of the first scholars of their generation. Samuel Locke, another from the class, was not only the youngest man ever chosen for the presidency of Harvard, but to Adams one of the best men ever chosen, irrespective of the fact that Locke had had to resign after only a few years in office, when his housemaid became pregnant. With his departure, in the words of one Harvard history, Locke was “promptly forgotten,” but not by John Adams.

“Friendship,” Adams had written to his classmate and cousin, Nathan Webb, “is one of the distinguishing glorys of man. . . . From this I expect to receive the chief happiness of my future life.” When, a few years later, Webb became mortally ill, Adams was at his bedside keeping watch through several nights before his death.

His current friends — Sewall, Richard Cranch, Parson Anthony Wibird — were to be his friends to the last, despite drastic changes in circumstance, differing temperaments, eccentricities, or politics. When in time Adams became Richard Cranch’s brother-in-law, he would sign his letters “as ever your faithful friend and affectionate brother, John Adams,” meaning every word.

There was little he enjoyed more than an evening of spontaneous “chatter,” of stories by candlelight in congenial surroundings, of political and philosophic discourse, “intimate, unreserved conversation,” as he put it. And flirting, “gallanting,” with the girls.

He was lively, pungent, and naturally amiable — so amiable, as Thomas Jefferson would later write, that it was impossible not to warm to him. He was so widely read, he could talk on almost any subject, sail off in almost any direction. What he knew he knew well.

Jonathan Sewall had already concluded that Adams was destined for greatness, telling him, only partly in jest, that “in future ages, when New England shall have risen to its intended grandeur, it shall be as carefully recorded among the registers of the literati that Adams flourished in the second century after the exode of its first settlers from Great Britain, as it is now that Cicero was born in the six-hundred-and-forty-seventh year after the building of Rome.”

Yet Adams often felt ill at ease, hopelessly awkward. He sensed people were laughing at him, as sometimes they were, and this was especially hurtful. He had a way of shrugging his shoulders and distorting his face that must be corrected, he knew. He berated himself for being too shy. “I should look bold, speak with more spirit.” In the presence of women — those he wished to impress above all — he was too susceptible to the least sign of approval. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved. . . . So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain, conceited, ostentatious.”

Determined to understand human nature, fascinated by nearly everyone he encountered, he devoted large portions of his diary to recording their stories, their views on life, how they stood, talked, their facial expressions, how their minds worked. In the way that his literary commonplace book served as a notebook on his reading, the diary became his notebook on people. “Let me search for the clue which led great Shakespeare into the labyrinth of human nature. Let me examine how men think.”

He made close study of the attorneys he most admired, the Boston giants of the profession, searching for clues to their success. Jeremiah Gridley’s “grandeur” emanated from his great learning, his “lordly” manner. The strength of James Otis was his fiery eloquence. “I find myself imitating Otis,” wrote Adams.

His portraits of “original characters” in and about Braintree were extraordinary, detailed, full of life and color, and written obviously, like so much of the diary, out of the pure joy of writing. Possibly he knew what a gift he had as an observer of human nature. In another time, under different circumstances, he might have become a great novelist.

That so many disparate qualities could exist in one person was of never-ending fascination to him. He longed to understand this in others, as in himself. The good-natured, obliging landlady of a friend was also a “squaddy, masculine creature” with “a great staring, rolling eye,” “a rare collection of disagreeable qualities.” A tavern loafer of “low and ignoble countenance,” one Zab Hayward of Braintree, who had no conception of conventional grace in dancing or anything else, was nonetheless regarded as the best dancer in town. Adams sat one night in a local tavern observing from the sidelines. “Every room . . . crowded with people,” he recorded. “Negroes with a fiddle. Young fellows and girls dancing in the chamber as if they would kick the floor through.” When at first Zab “gathered a circle around him . . . his behavior and speeches were softly silly, but as his blood grew warm by motion and liquor, he grew droll.

He caught a girl and danced a jig with her, and then led her to one side of the ring and said, “Stand there, I call for you by and by.” This was spoken comically enough, and raised a loud laugh. He caught another girl with light hair and a patch on her chin, and held her by the hand while he sung a song. . . . This tickled the girl’s vanity, for the song which he applied to her described a very fine girl indeed.

Adams’s new friend, Pastor Anthony Wibird, who had assumed the pulpit of Braintree’s First Church during the time Adams was away at Worcester, also became the subject of some of his most vivid sketches. Older than Adams by several years, Wibird was, as would be said in understatement, “somewhat eccentric,” yet warmly esteemed. His pastorate would be the longest in the annals of the parish, lasting forty-five years, and the friendship between Adams and Wibird, equally enduring. Privately, Adams wrote of him with the delight of a naturalist taking notes on some rare and exotic specimen:

P[arson] W[ibird] is crooked, his head bends forward. . . . His nose is a large Roman nose with a prodigious bunch protuberance upon the upper part of it. His mouth is large and irregular, his teeth black and foul and craggy. . . . His eyes are a little squinted, his visage is long and lank, his complexion wan, his cheeks are fallen, his chin is long, large, and lean. . . . When he prays at home, he raises one knee upon the chair, and throws one hand over the back of it. With the other he scratches his neck, pulls the hair of his wig. . . . When he walks, he heaves away, and swags one side, and steps almost twice as far with one foot as the other. . . . When he speaks, he cocks and rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and jerks his body about.

Wibird was “slovenly and lazy,” yet — and here was the wonder — he had great “delicacy” of mind, judgment, and humor. He was superb in the pulpit. “He is a genius,” Adams declared in summation.

Parson Wibird was one of the half dozen or so bachelors in Adams’s social circle. The two closest friends were Jonathan Sewall, a bright, witty fellow Harvard man and struggling attorney from Middlesex County, and Richard Cranch, a good-natured, English-born clockmaker who knew French, loved poetry, and delighted in discussing theological questions with Adams. Bela Lincoln was a physician from nearby Hingham. Robert Treat Paine was another lawyer and Harvard graduate, whom Adams thought conceited but who, like Wibird and Sewall, had a quick wit, which for Adams was usually enough to justify nearly any failing.

The preferred gathering place was the large, bustling Josiah Quincy household at the center of town, where a great part of the appeal was the Quincy family. Colonel Quincy, as an officer in the militia and possibly the wealthiest man in Braintree, was its leading citizen, but also someone Adams greatly admired for his polish and eloquence. (Nothing so helped one gain command of the language, Quincy advised the young man, as the frequent reading and imitation of Swift and Pope.) In addition to the lawyer son Samuel, there were sons Edmund and Josiah, who was also a lawyer, as well as a daughter, Hannah, and a cousin, Esther, who, for Adams and his friends, were the prime attractions. Esther was “pert, sprightly, and gay.” Hannah was all of that and an outrageous flirt besides.

While Jonathan Sewall fell almost immediately in love with Esther, whom he would eventually marry, Adams, Richard Cranch, and Bela Lincoln were all in eager pursuit of the high-spirited Hannah. Sensing he was the favorite, Adams was soon devoting every possible hour to her, and when not, dreaming of her. Nothing like this had happened to him before. His pleasure and distress were extreme, as he confided to his friend and rival Cranch:

If I look upon a law book my eyes it is true are on the book, but imagination is at a tea table seeing that hair, those eyes, that shape, that familiar friendly look. . . . I go to bed and ruminate half the night, then fall asleep and dream the same enchanting scenes.

All this was transpiring when the amorous spirits of the whole group appear to have been at a pitch. Adams recorded how one evening several couples slipped off to a side room and “there laughed and screamed and kissed and hussled,” and afterward emerged “glowing like furnaces.”

After an evening stroll with Hannah through Braintree — through “Cupid’s Grove” — Adams spent a long night and most of the next day with Parson Wibird, talking and reading aloud from Benjamin Franklin’s Reflections on Courtship and Marriage.

“Let no trifling diversion or amusement or company decoy you from your books,” he lectured himself in his diary, “i.e., let no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness decoy you from your books.” Besides, he had moments of doubt when he thought Hannah less than sincere. “Her face and heart have no correspondence,” he wrote.

Then came the spring night he would remember ever after. Alone with Hannah at the Quincy house, he was about to propose when cousin Esther and Jonathan Sewall suddenly burst into the room and the moment passed, never to be recovered. As it was, Bela Lincoln, the Hingham physician, increased his attentions and in a year he and Hannah Quincy would marry.

Seeing what a narrow escape he had had, Adams solemnly determined to rededicate himself. Only by a turn of fate had he been delivered from “dangerous shackles.” “Let love and vanity be extinguished and the great passions of ambition, patriotism, break out and burn,” he wrote.

Yet, when he met Abigail Smith for the first time later that same summer of 1759, he would not be greatly impressed, not when he compared her to Hannah. Abigail and her sisters Mary and Elizabeth were the daughters of Reverend William Smith of Weymouth, the small seaport town farther along the coast road. Adams’s friend Cranch had lately begun calling on Mary, the oldest and prettiest of the three. On the evening he invited Adams to go along with him to meet Abigail, the middle sister, it was for Adams anything but love at first sight. In contrast to his loving, tender Hannah, these Smith sisters were, he wrote, neither “fond, nor frank, nor candid.” Nor did Adams much like the father, who seemed a “crafty, designing man.” Adams’s first impressions were almost entirely bad and, as he would come to realize, quite mistaken.

THE HEAVIEST BLOW of his young life befell John Adams on May 25, 1761, when his father, Deacon John, died at age seventy, the victim of epidemic influenza that took a heavy toll in eastern Massachusetts and on older people especially. In Braintree, seventeen elderly men and women died. Adams’s mother was also stricken, and though she survived — as she was to survive one epidemic after another down the years — she was too ill to leave her bed when her husband was buried.

On the back of the office copy of his father’s will, Adams wrote in his own hand the only known obituary of Deacon John:

The testator had a good education, though not at college, and was a very capable and useful man. In his early life he was an officer of the militia, afterwards a deacon of the church, and a selectman of the town; almost all the business of the town being managed by him in that department for twenty years together; a man of strict piety, and great integrity; much esteemed and beloved wherever he was known, which was not far, his sphere of life being not extensive.

With his father gone, Adams experienced a “want of strength [and] courage” such as he had never known. Still, as expected of him, he stepped in as head of the family, and as time passed, those expressions of self-doubt, the fits of despair and self-consciousness that had so characterized the outpourings in his diary, grew fewer.

With his inheritance, he became a man of substantial property by the measure of Braintree. He received the house immediately beside that of his father’s, as well as forty acres — ten of adjoining land, plus thirty of orchard, pasture, woodland, and swamp — and slightly less than a third of his father’s personal estate, since alone of the three sons he had been provided a college education.

Adams was a freeholder now and his thoughts took a decided “turn to husbandry.” He was soon absorbed in all manner of projects and improvements, working with several hired men — “the help,” as New Englanders said — building stone walls, digging up stumps, carting manure, plowing with six yoke of oxen, planting corn and potatoes. He loved the farm as never before, even the swamp, “my swamp,” as he wrote.

His love of the law, too, grew greater. He felt privileged, blessed in his profession, he told Jonathan Sewall:

Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice?

In the house that was now his own, in what had once been the kitchen, before a lean-to enlargement was added at back, he established his first proper law office. The room was bright and sunny and in winter warmed by what had been the old kitchen fireplace. In the corner nearest the road, he had an outside door cut so that clients might directly come and go.

His practice picked up. He was going to Boston now once or twice a week. Soon he was riding the circuit with the royal judges. “I grow more expert . . . I feel my own strength.”

In November 1762 his friend Richard Cranch and Mary Smith were married, a high occasion for Adams that he hugely enjoyed, including the customary round of “matrimonial stories” shared among the men “to raise the spirits,” one of which he happily included in his journal:

The story of B. Bicknal’s wife is a very clever one. She said, when she was married she was very anxious, she feared, she trembled, she could not go to bed. But she recollected she had put her hand to the plow and could not look back, so she mustered up her spirits, committed her soul to God and her body to B. Bicknal and into bed she leaped — and in the morning she was amazed, she could not think for her life what it was that had so scared her.

In the company of Richard Cranch, Adams had been seeing more and more of the Smith family, about whom he had had a change of heart. That his interest, at first informal, then ardent, was centered on Abigail was obvious to all. As an aspiring lawyer, he must not marry early, Jeremiah Gridley had warned. So it was not until October 25, 1764, after a courtship of nearly five years and just short of his twenty-ninth birthday, that John Adams’s life changed as never before, when at the Weymouth parsonage, in a small service conducted by her father, he and Abigail Smith became husband and wife.

OF THE COURTSHIP Adams had said not a word in his diary. Indeed, for the entire year of 1764 there were no diary entries, a sure sign of how preoccupied he was.

At their first meeting, in the summer of 1759, Abigail had been a shy, frail fifteen-year-old. Often ill during childhood and still subject to recurring headaches and insomnia, she appeared more delicate and vulnerable than her sisters. By the time of her wedding, she was not quite twenty, little more than five feet tall, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a fine, pale complexion. For a rather stiff pastel portrait, one of a pair that she and John sat for in Salem a few years after their marriage, she posed with just a hint of a smile, three strands of pearls at the neck, her hair pulled back with a blue ribbon. But where the flat, oval face in her husband’s portrait conveyed nothing of his bristling intelligence and appetite for life, in hers there was a strong, unmistakable look of good sense and character. He could have been almost any well-fed, untested young man with dark, arched brows and a grey wig, while she was distinctly attractive, readily identifiable, her intent dark eyes clearly focused on the world.

One wonders how a more gifted artist might have rendered Abigail. Long years afterward, Gilbert Stuart, while working on her portrait, would exclaim to a friend that he wished to God he could have painted Mrs. Adams when she was young; she would have made “a perfect Venus,” to which her husband, on hearing the story, expressed emphatic agreement.

Year after year through the long courtship John trotted his horse up and over Penn’s Hill by the coast road five miles to Weymouth at every chance and in all seasons. She was his Diana, after the Roman goddess of the moon. He was her Lysander, the Spartan hero. In the privacy of correspondence, he would address her as “Ever Dear Diana” or “Miss Adorable.” She nearly always began her letters then, as later, “My Dearest Friend.” She saw what latent abilities and strengths were in her ardent suitor and was deeply in love. Where others might see a stout, bluff little man, she saw a giant of great heart, and so it was ever to be.

Only once before their marriage, when the diary was still active, did Adams dare mention her in its pages, and then almost in code:

Di was a constant feast. Tender, feeling, sensible, friendly. A friend. Not an imprudent, not an indelicate, not a disagreeable word of action. Prudent, soft, sensible, obliging, active.

She, too, was an avid reader and attributed her “taste for letters” to Richard Cranch, who, she later wrote, “taught me to love the poets and put into my hands, Milton, Pope, and Thompson, and Shakespeare.” She could quote poetry more readily than could John Adams, and over a lifetime would quote her favorites again and again in correspondence, often making small, inconsequential mistakes, an indication that rather than looking passages up, she was quoting from memory.

Intelligence and wit shined in her. She was consistently cheerful. She, too, loved to talk quite as much as her suitor, and as time would tell, she was no less strong-minded.

Considered too frail for school, she had been taught at home by her mother and had access to the library of several hundred books accumulated by her father. A graduate of Harvard, the Reverend Smith was adoring of all his children, who, in addition to the three daughters, included one son, William. They must never speak unkindly of anyone, Abigail remembered her father saying repeatedly. They must say only “handsome things,” and make topics rather than persons their subjects — sensible policy for a parson’s family. But Abigail had views on nearly everything and persons no less than topics. Nor was she ever to be particularly hesitant about expressing what she thought.

Open in their affections for one another, she and John were also open in their criticisms. “Candor is my characteristic,” he told her, as though she might not have noticed. He thought she could improve her singing voice. He faulted her for her “parrot-toed” way of walking and for sitting cross-legged. She told him he was too severe in his judgments of people and that to others often appeared haughty. Besides, she chided him, “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.”

During the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1764, when Boston became “one great hospital,” he went to the city to be inoculated, an often harrowing, potentially fatal ordeal extending over many days. Though he sailed through with little discomfort, she worried excessively and they corresponded nearly every day, Adams reminding her to be sure to have his letters “smoked,” on the chance they carried contamination.

The rambling, old-fashioned parsonage at Weymouth and its furnishings were a step removed from the plain farmer’s cottage of John’s boyhood or the house Abigail would move to once they were married. Also, two black slaves were part of the Smith household.

According to traditional family accounts, the match was strongly opposed by Abigail’s mother. She was a Quincy, the daughter of old John Quincy, whose big hilltop homestead, known as Mount Wollaston, was a Braintree landmark. Abigail, it was thought, would be marrying beneath her. But the determination of both Abigail and John, in combination with their obvious attraction to each other — like steel to a magnet, John said — were more than enough to carry the day.

A month before the wedding, during a spell of several weeks when they were unable to see one another because of illness, Adams wrote to her:

Oh, my dear girl, I thank heaven that another fortnight will restore you to me — after so long a separation. My soul and body have both been thrown into disorder by your absence, and a month or two more would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world. I see nothing but faults, follies, frailties and defects in anybody lately. People have lost all their good properties or I my justice or discernment.

But you who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind. You shall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill natured particles in my composition, and form me to that happy temper that can reconcile a quick discernment with a perfect candor.

Believe me, now and ever your faithful

Lysander

HIS MARRIAGE to Abigail Smith was the most important decision of John Adams’s life, as would become apparent with time. She was in all respects his equal and the part she was to play would be greater than he could possibly have imagined, for all his love for her and what appreciation he already had of her beneficial, steadying influence.

Bride and groom moved to Braintree the evening of the wedding. There was a servant to wait on them — the same Judah who had been the cause of the family row years before — who was temporarily on loan from John’s mother. But as the days and weeks passed, Abigail did her own cooking by the open hearth, and while John busied himself with his law books and the farm, she spun and wove clothes for their everyday use.

Her more sheltered, bookish upbringing notwithstanding, she was to prove every bit as hardworking as he and no less conscientious about whatever she undertook. She was and would remain a thoroughgoing New England woman who rose at five in the morning and was seldom idle. She did everything that needed doing. All her life she would do her own sewing, baking, feed her own ducks and chickens, churn her own butter (both because that was what was expected, and because she knew her butter to be superior). And for all her reading, her remarkable knowledge of English poetry and literature, she was never to lose certain countrified Yankee patterns of speech, saying “Canady” for Canada, as an example, using “set” for sit, or the old New England “aya,” for yes.

To John’s great satisfaction, Abigail also got along splendidly with his very unbookish mother. For a year or more, until Susanna Adams was remarried to an older Braintree man named John Hall, she continued to live with her son Peter in the family homestead next door, and the two women grew extremely fond of one another. To Abigail her mother-in-law was a cheerful, open-minded person of “exemplary benevolence,” dedicated heart and soul to the welfare of her family, which was more than her eldest son ever committed to paper, even if he concurred.

John and Abigail’s own first child followed not quite nine months after their marriage, a baby girl, Abigail or “Nabby,” who arrived July 14, 1765, and was, her mother recorded, “the dear image of her still dearer Papa.”

A second baby, John Quincy, was born two years later, and again in mid-July, 1767, and Adams began worrying about college for Johnny, fine clothes for Nabby, dancing schools, “and all that.” To Abigail, after nearly three years of marriage, her John was still “the tenderest of husbands,” his affections “unabated.”

For Adams, life had been made infinitely fuller. All the ties he felt to the old farm were stronger now with Abigail in partnership. She was the ballast he had wanted, the vital center of a new and better life. The time he spent away from home, riding the court circuit, apart from her and the “little ones,” became increasingly difficult. “God preserve you and all our family,” he would write.

But in 1765, the same year little Abigail was born and Adams found himself chosen surveyor of highways in Braintree, he was swept by events into sudden public prominence. His marriage and family life were barely under way when he began the rise to the fame he had so long desired. “I never shall shine ‘til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers,” he had written, and here now was the moment.

“I am . . . under all obligations of interest and ambition, as well as honor, gratitude and duty, to exert the utmost of abilities in this important cause,” he wrote, and with characteristic honesty he had not left ambition out.

THE FIRST NEWS of the Stamp Act reached the American colonies during the last week of May 1765 and produced an immediate uproar, and in Massachusetts especially. Starting in November, nearly everything written or printed on paper other than private correspondence and books — all pamphlets, newspapers, advertisements, deeds, diplomas, bills, bonds, all legal documents, ship’s papers, even playing cards — were required to carry revenue stamps, some costing as much as ten pounds. The new law, the first British attempt to tax Americans directly, had been passed by Parliament to help pay for the cost of the French and Indian War and to meet the expense of maintaining a colonial military force to prevent Indian wars. Everyone was affected. The Boston Gazette reported Virginia in a state of “utmost consternation.” In August, Boston mobs, “like devils let loose,” stoned the residence of Andrew Oliver, secretary of the province, who had been appointed distributor of the stamps, then attacked and destroyed the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, wrongly suspecting him of having sponsored the detested tax.

Adams, who had earlier joined a new law club in Boston started by Jeremiah Gridley, had, at Gridley’s suggestion, been working on an essay that would become A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law. It was his first extended political work and one of the most salient of his life, written at the age of thirty. Now, at the height of the furor, he arranged for its publication as an unsigned, untitled essay in the Gazette. (It would be published in England later, in a volume titled The True Sentiments of America.) It was not a call to arms or mob action — with his countryman’s dislike of the Boston “rabble,” Adams was repelled by such an “atrocious violation of the peace.” The Stamp Act was hardly mentioned. Rather, it was a statement of his own fervent patriotism and the taproot conviction that American freedoms were not ideals still to be obtained, but rights long and firmly established by British law and by the courage and sacrifices of generations of Americans. Years later Adams would say the Revolution began in the minds of Americans long before any shots were fired or blood shed.

“Be it remembered,” he wrote in his Dissertation, “that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we have not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

He was calling on his readers for independence of thought, to use their own minds. It was the same theme he had struck in his diary at Worcester a decade before, in his turmoil over what to do with his life, writing, “The point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

Government is a plain, simple, intelligent thing, founded in nature and reason, quite comprehensible by common sense [the Dissertation continued]. . . . The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think. . . . Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. . . . Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments . . . that many of our rights are inherent and essential, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed. . . . Let us read and recollect and impress upon our souls the views and ends of our more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness. . . . Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings — the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured — the severe labors of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time or money or materials for commerce. Recollect the civil and religious principles and hopes and expectations which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships with patience and resignation. Let us recollect it was liberty, the hope of liberty, for themselves and us and ours, which conquered all discouragements, dangers, and trials.

The essay began appearing in the Gazette on August 12, 1765, and it struck an immediate chord. “The author is a young man, not above 33 or 34, but of incomparable sense,” wrote Boston’s senior pastor, Charles Chauncey, to the learned Rhode Island clergyman and future president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles. “I esteem that piece one of the best that has been written. It has done honor to its author; and it is a pity but he should be known.”

Soon afterward Adams drafted what became known as the Braintree Instructions — instructions from the freeholders of the town to their delegate to the General Court, the legislative body of Massachusetts — which, when printed in October in the Gazette, “rang” through the colony. “We have always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the [English] constitution that no freeman should be subject to any tax to which he has not given his own consent.” There must be “no taxation without representation” — a phrase that had been used in Ireland for more than a generation. And in rejecting the rule of the juryless Admiralty Court in enforcing this law, the instructions declared that there must be a trial by jury and an independent judiciary.

In amazingly little time the document was adopted by forty towns, something that had never happened before.

Now fully joined in Boston’s political ferment, Adams was meeting with Gridley, James Otis, Samuel Adams, and others. Observing them closely, he concluded that it was his older, second cousin, Samuel Adams who had “the most thorough understanding of liberty.” Samuel Adams was “zealous and keen in the cause,” of “steadfast integrity,” a “universal good character.” The esteemed Otis, however, had begun to act strangely. He was “liable to great inequities of temper, sometimes in despondency, sometimes in rage,” Adams recorded in dismay.

Otis, a protégé of Gridley, had been for Adams the shining example of the lawyer-scholar, learned yet powerful in argument. Now he became Adams’s political hero, just as Thomas Hutchinson became Adams’s chief villain. A lifetime later, Adams would vividly describe Otis as he had been in his surpassing moment, in the winter of 1761, in argument against writs of assistance, search warrants that permitted customs officers to enter and search any premises whenever they wished. Before the bench in the second-floor Council Chamber of the Province House in Boston, Otis had declared such writs — which were perfectly valid in English law and commonly issued in England — null and void because they violated the natural rights of Englishmen. Adams, who had been present as an observer only, would remember it as one of the inspiring moments of his life, a turning point for him as for history. The five judges, with Hutchinson at their head as chief justice, sat in comfort near blazing fireplaces, Adams recalled, “all in their new fresh robes of scarlet English cloth, in their broad hats, and immense judicial wigs.” But Otis, in opposition, was a “flame” unto himself. “With the promptitude of classical illusions, a depth of research . . . and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, hurried away all before him.” By Adams’s account, every one of the immense crowded audience went away, as he did, ready to take up arms against writs of assistance. “Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain,” Adams would claim. “Then and there the child independence was born.”

But by 1765 it was the tragic decline of James Otis that gripped Adams. At meetings now, Otis talked on endlessly and to no point. No one could get a word in. “Otis is in confusion yet,” Adams noted a year or so later. “He rambles and wanders like a ship without a helm.” Adams began to doubt Otis’s sanity, and as time passed, it became clear that Otis, his hero, was indeed going mad, a dreadful spectacle.

“The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary that December. “The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor, with all future generations.”

“At home with my family. Thinking,” reads the entry of a few nights later.

“At home. Thinking,” he wrote Christmas Day.

WITH THE REPEAL of the Stamp Act by Parliament in the spring of 1766, and the easing of tensions that followed in the next two years, until the arrival of British troops at Boston, Adams put politics aside to concentrate on earning a living. He was thinking of politics not at all, he insisted.

He was back on the road, riding the circuit, the reach of his travels extending more than two hundred miles, from the island of Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod, north to Maine, which was then part of the Massachusetts Bay Province, to as far west as Worcester. As recalled in the family years later, he was endowed for the profession of law with the natural gifts of “a clear and sonorous voice,” a “ready elocution,” stubbornness, but with the “counter-check” of self-control, and a strong moral sense. He handled every kind of case — land transfers, trespass, admiralty, marine insurance, murder, adultery, rape, bastardy, buggery, assault and battery, tarring and feathering. He defended, not always successfully, poor debtors, horse thieves, and smugglers. He saw every side of life, learned to see things as they were, and was considered, as Jonathan Sewall would write, as “honest [a] lawyer as ever broke bread.”

In 1766, like his father before him, Adams was elected selectman in Braintree. But so active had his Boston practice become by 1768 that he moved the family to a rented house in the city, a decision he did not like, fearing the effect on their health. He established a Boston office and presently admitted two young men, Jonathan Austin and William Tudor, to read law with him, in return for fees of 10 pounds sterling. “What shall I do with two clerks at a time?” Adams speculated in his diary, adding that he would do all he could “for their education and advancement in the world,” a pledge he was to keep faithfully. When Billy Tudor was admitted to the bar three years later, Adams took time to write to Tudor’s wealthy father to praise the young man for his clear head and honest heart, but also to prod the father into giving his son some help getting started in his practice. Adams had seen too often the ill effect of fathers who ignored their sons when a little help could have made all the difference.

With the death of Jeremiah Gridley the year before and the mental collapse of James Otis, John Adams, still in his thirties, had become Boston’s busiest attorney. He was “under full sail,” prospering at last, and in the Adams tradition, he began buying more land, seldom more than five or ten acres of salt marsh or woodland at a time, but steadily, year after year. (Among his father’s memorable observations was that he never knew a piece of land to run away or break.) Eventually, after his brother Peter married and moved to his wife’s house, John would purchase all of the old homestead, with its barn and fifty-three acres, which included Fresh Brook, to Adams a prime asset. In one pasture, he reckoned, there were a thousand red cedars, which in twenty years, “if properly pruned,” might be worth a shilling each. And with an appreciative Yankee eye, he noted “a quantity of good stone in it, too.”

He was becoming more substantial in other ways. “My good man is so very fat that I am lean as a rail,” Abigail bemoaned to her sister Mary. He acquired more and more books, books being an acknowledged extravagance he could seldom curb. (With one London bookseller he had placed a standing order for “every book and pamphlet, of reputation, upon the subjects of law and government as soon as it comes out.”) “I want to see my wife and children every day,” he would write while away on the court circuit. “I want to see my grass and blossoms and corn. . . . But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.”

In the privacy of his journal, he could also admit now, if obliquely, to seeing himself as a figure of some larger importance. After noting in one entry that his horse had overfed on grass and water, Adams speculated wryly, “My biographer will scarcely introduce my little mare and her adventures.”

He could still search his soul over which path to follow. “To what object are my views directed?” he asked. “Am I grasping at money, or scheming for power?” Yes, he was amassing a library, but to what purpose? “Fame, fortune, power say some, are the ends intended by a library. The service of God, country, clients, fellow men, say others. Which of these lie nearest my heart?

What plan of reading or reflection or business can be pursued by a man who is now at Pownalborough [Maine], then at Martha’s Vineyard, next at Boston, then at Taunton, presently at Barnstable, then at Concord, now at Salem, then at Cambridge, and afterward Worcester. Now at Sessions, then at Pleas, now in Admiralty, now at Superior Court, then in the gallery of the House. . . . Here and there and everywhere, a rambling, roving, vagrant, vagabond life.

Yet when Jonathan Sewall, who had become attorney general of the province, called on Adams at the request of governor Francis Bernard to offer him the office of advocate general in the Court of Admiralty, a plum for an ambitious lawyer, Adams had no difficulty saying no.

Politically he and Sewall were on opposing sides, Sewall having become an avowed Tory. Yet they tried to remain friends. “He always called me John and I him Jonathan,” remembered Adams, “and I often said to him, I wish my name were David.” Both understood that the office, lucrative in itself, was, in Adams’s words, a “sure introduction to the most profitable business in the province.” Sewall, with his large Brattle Street house in Cambridge, was himself an example of how high one could rise. Yet so open a door to prosperity, not to say the gratification to one’s vanity, that a royal appointment might offer tempted Adams not at all.

With Boston full of red-coated British troops — sent in 1768 to keep order, as another round of taxes was imposed by Parliament, this time on paper, tea, paint, and glass — the atmosphere in the city turned incendiary. Incidents of violence broke out between townsmen and soldiers, the hated “Lobsterbacks.”

The crisis came in March of 1770, a year already shadowed for John and Abigail by the loss of a child. A baby girl, Susanna, born since the move to Boston and named for John’s mother, had died in February at a little more than a year old. Adams was so upset by the loss that he could not speak of it for years.

ON THE COLD MOONLIT EVENING of March 5, 1770, the streets of Boston were covered by nearly a foot of snow. On the icy, cobbled square where the Province House stood, a lone British sentry, posted in front of the nearby Custom House, was being taunted by a small band of men and boys. The time was shortly after nine. Somewhere a church bell began to toll, the alarm for fire, and almost at once crowds came pouring into the streets, many men, up from the waterfront, brandishing sticks and clubs. As a throng of several hundred converged at the Custom House, the lone guard was reinforced by eight British soldiers with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, their captain with drawn sword. Shouting, cursing, the crowd pelted the despised redcoats with snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, and stones. In the melee the soldiers suddenly opened fire, killing five men. Samuel Adams was quick to call the killings a “bloody butchery” and to distribute a print published by Paul Revere vividly portraying the scene as a slaughter of the innocent, an image of British tyranny, the Boston Massacre, that would become fixed in the public mind.

The following day thirty-four-year-old John Adams was asked to defend the soldiers and their captain, when they came to trial. No one else would take the case, he was informed. Hesitating no more than he had over Jonathan Sewall’s offer of royal appointment, Adams accepted, firm in the belief, as he said, that no man in a free country should be denied the right to counsel and a fair trial, and convinced, on principle, that the case was of utmost importance. As a lawyer, his duty was clear. That he would be hazarding his hard-earned reputation and, in his words, “incurring a clamor and popular suspicions and prejudices” against him, was obvious, and if some of what he later said on the subject would sound a little self-righteous, he was also being entirely honest.

Only the year before, in 1769, Adams had defended four American sailors charged with killing a British naval officer who had boarded their ship with a press gang to grab them for the British navy. The sailors were acquitted on grounds of acting in self-defense, but public opinion had been vehement against the heinous practice of impressment. Adams had been in step with the popular outrage, exactly as he was out of step now. He worried for Abigail, who was pregnant again, and feared he was risking his family’s safety as well as his own, such was the state of emotions in Boston. It was rumored he had been bribed to take the case. In reality, a retainer of eighteen guineas was the only payment he would receive.

Criticism of almost any kind was nearly always painful for Adams, but public scorn was painful in the extreme.

“The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts,” he wrote in his diary, “is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand. This apparatus takes off my attention from other objects. Pen, ink, and paper and a sitting posture are great helps to attention and thinking.”

From a treatise by the eminent Italian penologist and opponent of capital punishment Cesare, Marchese di Beccaria, he carefully copied the following:

If, by supporting the rights of mankind, and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or of ignorance, equally fatal, his blessings and years of transport will be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.

There were to be two conspicuously fair trials held in the new courthouse on Queen Street. The first was of the British captain, Thomas Preston, the opening of the trial being delayed until October when passions had cooled. The second was of the soldiers. In the first trial Adams was assisted by young Josiah Quincy, Jr., while the court-appointed lawyer trying the case was Josiah’s brother, Samuel, assisted by Robert Treat Paine. Whether Captain Preston had given an order to fire, as was charged, could never be proven. Adams’s argument for the defense, though unrecorded, was considered a virtuoso performance. Captain Preston was found not guilty.

Adams’s closing for the second and longer trial, which was recorded, did not come until December 3, and lasted two days. The effect on the crowded courtroom was described as “electrical.” “I am for the prisoners at bar,” he began, then invoked the line from the Marchese di Beccaria. Close study of the facts had convinced Adams of the innocence of the soldiers. The tragedy was not brought on by the soldiers, but by the mob, and the mob, it must be understood, was the inevitable result of the flawed policy of quartering troops in a city on the pretext of keeping the peace:

We have entertained a great variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, [it was] most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And why should we scruple to call such a people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers. . . . Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.

He described how the shrieking “rabble” pelted the soldiers with snowballs, oyster shells, sticks, “every species of rubbish,” as a cry went up to “Kill them! Kill them!” One soldier had been knocked down with a club, then hit again as soon as he could rise. “Do you expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?” Adams asked. Self-defense was the primary canon of the law of nature. Better that many guilty persons escape unpunished than one innocent person should be punished. “The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” he told the jury, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The jury remained out two and a half hours. Of the eight soldiers, six were acquitted and two found guilty of manslaughter, for which they were branded on their thumbs.

There were angry reactions to the decision. Adams was taken to task in the Gazette and claimed later to have suffered the loss of more than half his practice. But there were no riots, and Samuel Adams appears never to have objected to the part he played. Possibly Samuel Adams had privately approved, even encouraged it behind the scenes, out of respect for John’s fierce integrity, and on the theory that so staunch a show of fairness would be good politics.

As time would show, John Adams’s part in the drama did increase his public standing, making him in the long run more respected than ever. Years later, reflecting from the perspective of old age, he himself would call it the most exhausting case he ever undertook, but conclude with pardonable pride that his part in the defense was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”

A SECOND SON, Charles, was born that summer of 1770, and for all the criticism to which he was being subjected, Adams was elected by the Boston Town Meeting as a representative to the Massachusetts legislature. It was his first real commitment to politics. Inevitably it would mean more time away from his practice, and still further reduction in income. When, the night of the meeting, he told Abigail of his apprehensions, she burst into tears, but then, as Adams would relate, said “she thought I had done as I ought, she was very willing to share in all that was to come.”

But the complications and demands of both the law and politics became too much and Adams suffered what appears to have been a physical breakdown. “Especially the constant obligation to speak in public almost every day for many hours had exhausted my health, brought on pain in my breast and complaint in my lungs, which seriously threatened my life,” he would later write. In the spring of 1771, he and the family moved back to Braintree, to “the air of my native spot, and the fine breezes from the sea,” which “together with daily rides on horseback,” gradually restored him.

Another child, Thomas Boylston, was born in September of 1772, and again Adams was off on the “vagabond life” of the circuit, carrying a copy of Don Quixote in his saddlebag and writing Abigail sometimes as many as three letters a day.

Business was good in Massachusetts in the calm of 1772 and Adams prospered once again. He appeared in more than two hundred Superior Court cases. Among his clients were many of the richest men in the colony, including John Hancock. At the conclusion of one morning in court, Adams was told people were calling him the finest speaker they had ever heard, “the equal to the greatest orator that ever spoke in Greece or Rome.”

He could speak extemporaneously and, if need be, almost without limit. Once, to give a client time to retrieve a necessary record, Adams spoke for five hours, through which the court and jury sat with perfect patience. At the end he was roundly applauded because, as he related the story, he had spoken “in favor of justice.”

At home, he filled pages of his journal with observations on government and freedom, “notes for an oration at Braintree,” as he labeled them, though the oration appears never to have been delivered.

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people. . . . There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike. . . .

The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. . . .

Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable. . . .

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

At the same time, he was vowing, at least in the privacy of his diary, to devote himself wholly to his private business and providing for his family. “Above all things I must avoid politics. . . .” But as tensions in the colony mounted, so did his pent-up rage and longing for action. On an evening with the Cranches, when a visiting Englishman began extolling the English sense of justice, Adams exploded, taking everyone by surprise, and Adams as much as any. “I cannot but reflect upon myself with the severity of these rash, inexperienced, boyish, raw and awkward expressions,” he wrote afterward. “A man who has not better government of his tongue, no more command of his temper, is unfit for everything but children’s play and the company of boys.” There was no more justice in Britain than in hell, he had told the Englishman.

By the time of the destruction of the tea, what was later to become known as the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, he had again moved the family to Boston. His hatred of mob action notwithstanding, Adams was exuberant over the event. In less than six months, in May 1774, in reprisal, the British closed the port of Boston, the worst blow to the city in its history. “We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial,” he told Abigail. Shut off from the sea, Boston was doomed. It must suffer martyrdom and expire in a noble cause. For himself, he saw “no prospect of any business in my way this whole summer. I don’t receive a shilling a week.”

Yet she must not assume he was “in the dumps.” Quite the contrary: he felt better than he had in years.

IN 1774, Adams was chosen by the legislature as one of five delegates to the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, and with all Massachusetts on the verge of rebellion, he removed Abigail and the children again to Braintree, where they would remain.

In July he traveled to Maine, for what was to be his last turn on the circuit before leaving for Philadelphia. During a break from the court at Falmouth (later Portland), he and Jonathan Sewall, who was still attorney general, climbed a hill overlooking the blue sweep of Casco Bay, where they could talk privately.

Their friendship had cooled in recent years, as had been inevitable under the circumstances. In his diary Adams had grieved that his best friend in the world had become his implacable enemy. “God forgive him for the part he has acted,” Adams had written, adding, “It is not impossible that he may make the same prayer for me.” Now Sewall pleaded with Adams not to attend the Congress. The power of Great Britain was “irresistible” and would destroy all who stood in the way, Sewall warned.

As long as they lived, neither man would forget the moment. Adams told Sewall he knew Great Britain was “determined on her system,” but “that very determination, determined me on mine.” The die was cast, Adams said. “Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, [I am] with my country . . . You may depend upon it.”

Less than a year later, after the battle of Bunker Hill, Sewall would choose to “quit America.” With his wife and family he sailed for London, never to return. “It is not despair which drives me away,” he wrote before departure. “I have faith . . . that rebellion will shrink back to its native hell, and that Great Britain will rise superior to all the gasconade of the little, wicked American politicians.”

Not long afterward, in a series of letters to the Boston Gazette that he signed “Novangelus” — the New Englander — Adams argued that Americans had every right to determine their own destiny and charged the Foreign Ministry in London with corruption and venal intent. America, Adams warned, could face subjugation of the kind inflicted on Ireland. Unless America took action, and at once, Adams wrote, they faced the prospect of living like the Irish on potatoes and water.

III

WITH JOSEPH BASS AT HIS SIDE, Adams crossed Long Bridge over the frozen Charles River and rode into Cambridge in the early afternoon of January 24, 1776, in time to dine with General Washington at the temporary quarters of Colonel Thomas Mifflin near Harvard Yard. Mifflin, a wealthy young Philadelphia merchant who served with Adams in the Continental Congress, had been one of the first to welcome Adams on his arrival in Philadelphia. As a “fighting Quaker,” he had since become Washington’s aide-de-camp.

Martha Washington was present with her husband, as were General Horatio Gates and his lady. When Martha Washington and Elizabeth Gates arrived in Cambridge by coach in December, it was remarked that they would surely be a welcome addition “in country where [fire] wood was scarce.” Gates, a former British officer, was an affable, plain-faced man who, like Washington, had served during the French and Indian War on the disastrous Braddock expedition. As adjutant general he was Washington’s right hand at Cambridge.

Washington and Adams were nearly the same age, Washington, at forty-three, being just three years older. Powerfully built, he stood nearly a head taller than Adams — six feet four in his boots, taller than almost anyone of the day — and loomed over his short, plump wife. The three officers, in their beautiful buff and blue uniforms, were all that Adams might imagine when picturing himself as a soldier.

Yet even they were upstaged by the main attractions of the gathering, a dozen or more sachems and warriors of the Caughnawaga Indians in full regalia who had been invited to dine, together with their wives and children. Adams had been fascinated by Indians since boyhood, when the aged leaders of the Punkapaug and Neponset tribes had called on his father. But he shared with Washington and Gates a dread fear of the British unleashing Indian war parties on the frontiers, as had the French twenty years before. Recalling what he had read and heard, Adams had earlier written to a friend, “The Indians are known to conduct their wars so entirely without faith and humanity that it would bring eternal infamy on the Ministry throughout all Europe if they should excite those savages to war. . . . To let loose these blood hounds to scalp men and to butcher women and children is horrid.” Yet finding himself now unexpectedly in the actual presence of Indians was another matter, and he had a very different reaction.

The dinner, starting at two o’clock, was a diplomatic occasion. The Caughnawagas had come to offer their services to the Americans, and, gathered all about him, they presented a spectacle that Adams, to his surprise, hugely enjoyed. “It was a savage feast, carnivorous animals devouring their prey,” he wrote in his diary. “Yet they were wondrous polite. The general introduced me to them as one of the Grand Council Fire at Philadelphia, upon which they made me many bows and cordial reception.” To Abigail he reported himself decidedly pleased by the whole occasion.

What he could not risk telling her by letter was that the command at Cambridge had received the most heartening news, indeed the only good news, of the long, grim winter. An expedition led by young Henry Knox, a former Boston bookseller and colonel in Washington’s army, had been sent to Lake Champlain to retrieve the artillery captured by Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga and haul the great guns back over the snow-covered Berkshire Mountains all the way to Boston, a task many had thought impossible. Now the “noble train” was at Framingham, twenty miles to the west. It was a feat of almost unimaginable daring and difficulty and, ironically, only made possible by the severity of the winter, as the guns had been dragged over the snow on sleds.

Mounted and on their way again the next morning, with the temperature still in the twenties, Adams and Bass were joined by a newly elected Massachusetts delegate to Congress, young Elbridge Gerry. They rode out past the pickets and campfires of Cambridge and at Framingham stopped to see for themselves the guns from Ticonderoga, Adams making careful note of the inventory — 58 cannon ranging in size from 3- and 4-pounders to one giant 24-pounder that weighed more than two tons. Clearly, with such artillery, Washington could change the whole picture at Boston.

The three riders pressed on through the grey and white landscape, making twenty to twenty-five miles a day. A “cold journey,” Adams wrote. The weather was persistently wretched. There was more snow, wind, and freezing rain.

With dusk coming on by four in the afternoon and the bitter cold turning colder still, the glow and warmth of familiar wayside taverns was more welcome than ever. Under normal circumstances, Adams nearly always enjoyed such stops. He loved the food — wild goose on a spit, punch, wine, bread and cheese, apples — and a leisurely pipe afterward, while toasting himself by the fire. He picked up news, delighted in “scenes and characters,” as he said, enough “for the amusement of Swift or even Shakespeare.”

It was in such places that he had first sensed the rising tide of revolution. A year before the first meeting of Congress in 1774, riding the court circuit, he had stopped one winter night at a tavern at Shrewsbury, about forty miles from Boston, and as he would recall for Benjamin Rush years afterward, the scene left a vivid impression.

. . . as I was cold and wet I sat down at a good fire in the bar room dry my great coat and saddlebags, till a fire could be made in my chamber. There presently came in, one after another half a dozen or half a score substantial yeomen of the neighborhood, who, sitting down to the fire after lighting their pipes, began a lively conversation upon politics. As I believed I was unknown to all of them, I sat in total silence to hear them. One said, “The people of Boston are distracted.” Another answered, “No wonder the people of Boston are distracted; oppression will make wise men mad.” A third said, “What would you say, if a fellow should come to your house and tell you he was come to take a list of your cattle that Parliament might tax you for them at so much a head? And how should you feel if he should go out and break open your barn, to take down your oxen, cows, horses and sheep?” “What would I say,” replied the first, “I would knock him in the head.” “Well,” said a fourth, “if Parliament can take away Mr. Hancock’s wharf and Mr. Row’s wharf, they can take away your barn and my house.” After much more reasoning in this style, a fifth who had as yet been silent, broke out, “Well it is high time for us to rebel. We must rebel sometime or other: and we had better rebel now than at any time to come: if we put it off for ten or twenty years, and let them go on as they have begun, they will get a strong party among us, and plague us a great deal more than they can now. As yet they have but a small party on their side.”

But now, at town after town, the atmosphere was edged with melancholy, the talk was of defeat at Quebec and the dire situation at Boston.

Snow lay deep most of the way. With drifts banked against buildings and stone walls, trees bare against the sky, the wind seldom still, no part of the journey was easy or uplifting to the spirits. Instead of welcoming committees and church bells, there was only the frozen road ahead.

The one bright note was young Gerry, who belonged to the so-called “codfish aristocracy” of Marblehead, his father having made a fortune shipping dried cod to Spain and the West Indies. Like Adams, indeed like every member of the Massachusetts delegation, Gerry was a Harvard graduate, a slight, birdlike man, age thirty-one, who spoke with a stammer and had an odd way of contorting his face, squinting and enlarging his eyes. But he was good company. Because of the family business, he had traveled extensively and was an ardent patriot. He and Adams talked all the way, making the journey, as Adams related to Abigail, considerably less tedious than it might have been. Their days together on the wintry road marked the start of what was to be a long, eventful friendship.

Like Adams, Gerry viewed mankind as capable of both great good and great evil. Importantly now, they were also of the same heart concerning what had to be done at Philadelphia.

Abigail had already said what John knew needed saying when, in November, a petition was circulated at home calling for reconciliation with Britain. “I could not join today in the petitions . . . for a reconciliation between our no longer parent state, by a tyrant state and these colonies,” she wrote. Then, making a slight but definite dash mark with her pen before continuing, as if to signify her own break from the past, she said, “Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our brethren.”

Passing through New York, Adams bought two copies of a small anonymous pamphlet, newly published under the title Common Sense. Keeping one, he sent the other on to her.

• • •

ADAMS AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS arrived at Philadelphia on Thursday, February 8, 1776, fifteen days after leaving Braintree.

His first letters from Abigail did not reach him until more than a month later and were filled with accounts of thrilling events. The American bombardment of Boston had begun March 2 and 3. “No sleep for me tonight,” she wrote, as the house trembled about her. On March 5 she described a more thunderous barrage: “the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continuous roar of the 24-pounders.”

The night before, working at great speed, Washington’s men had moved the guns from Ticonderoga to commanding positions on the high ground of the Dorchester Peninsula, south of Boston, looking over Boston Harbor and the British fleet. With hundreds of ox teams and more than a thousand American troops at work, breastworks had been set up and cannon hauled into place, all in a night and to the complete surprise of the British. Abigail was told that the British commander, on seeing what they had accomplished, remarked, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”

Days of fearful tension followed until Sunday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, when she went again to the top of Penn’s Hill to see a spectacle such as no one could ever have imagined — the British were abandoning Boston. General William Howe had struck an agreement with Washington. If allowed to depart in peace, the army would not leave Boston in flames.

The entire fleet, “the largest fleet ever seen in America,” was lifting canvas in a fair breeze and turning to the open sea. “You may count upwards of one hundred and seventy-sail,” she wrote. “They look like a forest.”

The British had been outwitted, humiliated. The greatest military power on earth had been forced to retreat by an army of amateurs; it was a heady realization. As would be said by the Duke of Manchester before the House of Lords, “The fact remains, that the army which was sent to reduce the province of Massachusetts Bay has been driven from the capital, and the standard of the provincial army now waves in triumph over the walls of Boston.”

With the departing fleet sailed a thousand Loyalists, many well known to John and Abigail Adams, including John’s first mentor in the law, James Putnam of Worcester, and Samuel Quincy, brother of Hannah and Josiah, and Adams’s opposing counsel in the Boston Massacre trials.

That such had come to pass, wrote Abigail, was surely the work of the Lord and “marvelous in our eyes.”

CHAPTER TWO

TRUE BLUE

We were about one third Tories, and [one] third timid, and one third true blue.

~John Adams

I

PHILADELPHIA, the provincial capital of Pennsylvania on the western bank of the Delaware River, was a true eighteenth-century metropolis, the largest, wealthiest city in British America, and the most beautiful. Visitors wrote in praise of its “very exactly straight streets,” its “many fair houses and public edifices,” and of the broad, tidal Delaware, alive in every season but winter with a continuous traffic of ships great and small.

Though more than a hundred miles from the open sea, it was America’s busiest port, with wharves stretching nearly two miles along the river. The topgallants of huge merchantmen loomed over busy Water Street and Front Street. Cutters, shad boats, and two-masted shallops tied up, moved in and out, in company with the great, flat-bottomed Durham boats built to carry pig iron from the Durham Works upstream. Shipbuilding was a thriving industry; seagoing trade, the city’s lifeblood. Ships outbound carried lumber and wheat, Pennsylvania’s chief exports. Inbound ships brought European trade goods and from the West Indies, sugar, molasses, spices, and, increasingly now, European armaments and supplies for war. With no means for producing arms or gunpowder, the colonies were dependent on clandestine shipments from Europe by way of the Caribbean, and particularly the tiny Dutch island of St. Eustatius. One vessel reportedly docked at Philadelphia with 49,000 pounds of gunpowder.

Because of Pennsylvania’s reputation for religious tolerance, and an abundance of good land available to the west, Philadelphia was the principal port of entry to America. The incoming tide of English, Welsh, Scotch-Irish, and Palatine Germans had been growing steadily. In numbers, if not in influence, Presbyterians and Baptists had long since surpassed the Quakers of the Quaker City.

Fifty years earlier, when young Benjamin Franklin arrived from Boston with a single “Dutch” (German) dollar in his pocket, Philadelphia had been a town of 10,000 people. By 1776 its population was approaching 30,000. Larger than New York, nearly twice the size of Boston, it was growing faster than either.

As conceived by its English Quaker founder, William Penn, in 1682, the plan of Philadelphia was a spacious grid, which to a man like John Adams, accustomed to the tangle of Boston’s narrow streets, seemed a sensible arrangement. “I like it,” Adams had declared in his journal at the time of the First Congress, when, newly arrived and filled with curiosity, he set off with his walking stick, resolved to learn his way about.

Front Street is near the river, then 2nd Street, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th [he recorded]. The cross streets which intersect these are all equally wide, straight and parallel to each other, and are named for forest and fruit trees, Pear Street, Apple Street, Walnut Street, Chestnut Street, etc.

The main thoroughfare was High Street, commonly called Market Street, as it was the location of the immense public market. Most streets near the waterfront had brick footwalks and gutters and were lit at night by whale oil lamps, except when the moon was full. Many of the principal streets were lined with trees. “This is the most regular, neat, and convenient city I ever was in and has made the most rapid progress to its present greatness,” declared an English visitor. But it was the public buildings and churches that made the greatest impression. The State House, where Congress met; and nearby Carpenters’ Hall, which had been the setting for the First Congress; “noble” Christ Church, as Adams called it, with its magnificent Palladian window and landmark spire; the new hospital; the new poorhouse; the new Walnut Street Prison, were all unusually handsome and substantial. Silas Deane of Connecticut thought the poorhouse, or “Bettering House,” equal to anything of its kind anywhere. “All this is done by private donation and chiefly by the people called Quakers,” he informed his wife. To another Connecticut delegate, Oliver Wolcott, the massive new jail more resembled a prince’s palace than a house of confinement.

Public-spirited Philadelphians inspired by Benjamin Franklin had established the first volunteer fire company in the colonies, the first medical school, and a library. Franklin himself, Philadelphia’s first citizen, was the most famous American alive — printer, publisher, philosopher, scientist, and, as inventor of the lightning rod, “the man who tamed the lightning.” It was Franklin also who had led the way in establishing the American Philosophical Society, “for the promoting of useful knowledge,” with the result that Philadelphia had become the recognized center of American thought and ideas. Other eminent members of the Philosophical Society included John Bartram, who west of town, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, had created the first botanical garden in America; Dr. Benjamin Rush, an enterprising young physician and champion of humanitarian reform; and David Rittenhouse, clockmaker, optician, instrument-maker and self-taught astronomer who, to study the transit of Venus in 1769, had erected an incongruous-looking observation platform that still stood on the grounds of the State House.

Topics of “consideration” at the Philosophical Society, as set forth in Franklin’s initial proposal were, in the spirit of the age, all-embracing:

all philosophical [scientific] experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasure of life . . . all new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, roots, and methods of propagating them. . . . New methods of curing or preventing diseases. . . . New mechanical inventions for saving labor. . . . All new arts, trades, manufacturers, etc. that may be proposed or thought of.

As it was, Philadelphia manufacturers and artisans produced more goods than in any city in America — boots, wigs, hardware, fancy carriages, Franklin stoves, mirror glass, and no end of bricks for a city where nearly everything was built of brick. Thomas Affleck produced furniture as fine as any made in the colonies, all in the fashionable style of the English cabinetmaker Chippendale. John Behrent on Third Street advertised what may have been the first piano made in America, “a just finished extraordinary instrument by the name of a pianoforte, made of mahogany, being of the nature of a harpsichord.”

With twenty-three printing establishments and, by 1776, seven newspapers — more newspapers even than in London — Philadelphia was the publishing capital of the colonies. It was not only that Franklin’s immensely popular Poor Richard’s Almanack emanated from Philadelphia, but political pamphlets of such far-reaching influence as John Dickinson’s Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, Thomas Jefferson’s spirited Summary View of the Rights of British America, and now, Common Sense, which was selling faster than anything ever published in America.

Shops in nearly every street offered an array of goods and enticements such as most delegates to Congress could never find at home, everything from French brandy and Strasburg snuff to fancy chamber pots, artificial teeth, or ordinary pins of the kind John Adams purchased in “great heaps” to send home to Abigail. John Sparhawk, proprietor of the London Bookstore on Second Street, in addition to volumes on medicine and law, sold scientific instruments, swords, spurs, and backgammon tables.

There were as many as thirty bookshops and twice the number of taverns and coffeehouses, with names like Blue Anchor, Bunch of Grapes, Tun Tavern, Conestoga Wagon, Rising Sun, Half Moon, and each had its own clientele. The Free Masons convened at the staid old Indian King on Market Street. The London Coffee House, at the southwest corner of Front and Market, in the commercial center, was the favorite of the leading merchants and sea captains, indeed the place where much of the city’s business was transacted, while the new, larger City Tavern on the west side of Second Street, between Walnut and Chestnut, had become the great gathering place for members of Congress. Adams, recording his first arrival in Philadelphia in August 1774, had written that “dirty, dusty, and fatigued as we were, we could not resist the importunity to go to the [City] Tavern,” which, he decided, must be the most genteel place of its kind in all the colonies. It was there, at the City Tavern, a few days later, that Adams had first met George Washington.

Distilleries and breweries were thriving. Adams found the local beer so much to his liking that he temporarily abandoned his usual hard cider. “I drink no cider, but feast on Philadelphia beer,” he acknowledged to Abigail.

To anyone unaccustomed to city life, the crowds and noise seemed overwhelming, and worst were market days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, when German-speaking country people came rolling into town in huge farm wagons loaded with produce, live chickens, pigs, and cattle. The “thundering of coaches, chariots, chaises, wagons, drays and the whole fraternity of noise almost continually assails our ears,” complained a visiting physician. Delegate Stephen Hopkins from Rhode Island one day counted seventy farm wagons on Market Street.

Swarms of people moved up and down the sidewalks and spilled into the streets. At no point on the American continent could so many human beings be seen in such close proximity or in such variety. Sailors, tradesmen, mechanics in long leather aprons, journeymen printers, house-painters, sail-makers, indentured servants, black slave women, their heads wrapped in bright bandannas, free black stevedores and draymen, mixed together with Quaker merchants and the elegants of the city in their finery, everyone busy about something, and everyone, it seemed to visitors, unexpectedly friendly and polite.

Few delegates to Congress ever became accustomed to the bustle and noise; or to the suffocating heat of a Philadelphia summer; or to the clouds of mosquitoes and horseflies that with the onset of summer rose like a biblical scourge. Prices were high. Lodgings of even a modest sort were difficult to find. Conditions for the poor appeared little better than in other American cities. Misery, too, was on display. Delegates to Congress were frequently approached by beggars and, as in every city of the time, the scars and mutilations of disease and war were not uncommon among the passing crowds. Further, Philadelphia was notorious for its deadly epidemics of smallpox. During the most recent outbreak, in 1773, more than 300 people had died.

In his initial eagerness to see everything, Adams had made a tour of the new hospital. Led below ground to view the “lunaticks” locked in their cells, he saw to his horror that one was a former client from Massachusetts, a man he had once saved from being whipped for horse stealing. Afterward, upstairs, Adams walked between long rows of beds filled with the sick and lame, a scene of “human wretchedness” that tore at his heart. But if bothered by pigs loose in the streets, or the stench of rotting garbage and horse manure, he wrote nothing of it. Besides, like others, he found that to the west, toward the Schuylkill River, the city rapidly thinned out, beginning at about Sixth Street. By Eighth, beyond the hospital and the potter’s burial ground, one was in open country. To a man who thought nothing of walking five to ten miles to “rouse the spirits,” it was a welcome prospect. There were fields with wild strawberries in summer and scattered ponds, which in winter were filled with skaters, the most accomplished of whom, doffing their hats, performed something called the “Philadelphia Salute,” a bow much like in a minuet.

One fair afternoon, as if to clear their heads, Adams and two or three others climbed the bell tower of Christ Church, up a series of dimly lit, narrow ladders, past the great bells in their yokes, to a point a hundred feet aboveground, where a trap door led to the open air of the arched lantern, above which rose the church spire. Steadying themselves on a slightly canted roof, they looked over the whole of the city, the long sweep of the river, and the farmland of New Jersey to the east. The breeze at that height was like nothing to be felt in the streets below.

With the rest of the Massachusetts delegation, Adams had moved into a lodging house kept by a Mrs. Sarah Yard on the east side of Second Street, across from City Tavern. A tally of his expenses shows charges for room and board of 30 shillings a week in Pennsylvania currency, not including firewood and candles, which were extra.

“My time is too totally filled from the moment I get out of bed until I return to it, [with] visits, ceremonies, company, business, newspapers, pamphlets, etc., etc., etc.,” he had reported excitedly to Abigail.

On Sundays, the one day of respite from Congress, he was at church most of the day, attending services twice, even three times. With numerous denominations to choose from (everything except Congregational), he tried nearly all — the Anglican Christ Church, the meetinghouses of the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, the German Moravians — and passed judgment on them all, both their music and the comparative quality of their preaching. The Reverend Thomas Coombe of Christ Church was “sprightly” and distinct. “But I am not charmed,” wrote Adams. “His style was indifferent.” Indifference was a quality Adams found difficult to tolerate. The Methodist preacher was another matter. “He reaches the imagination and touches the passions very well.”

One Sunday, “led by curiosity and good company,” which included George Washington, Adams crossed a “Romish” threshold, to attend afternoon mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Fifth Street, an experience so singular that he reflected on it at length both in his journal and in a letter to Abigail. Everything about the service was the antithesis of a lifetime of Sabbaths at Braintree’s plain First Church, where unfettered daylight through clear window glass allowed for no dark or shadowed corners, or suggestion of mystery. For the first time, Adams was confronted with so much that generations of his people had abhorred and rebelled against, and he found himself both distressed and strangely moved. The music, bells, candles, gold, and silver were “so calculated to take in mankind,” that he wondered the Reformation had ever succeeded. He felt pity for “the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood,” he told Abigail.

The dress of the priest was rich with lace — his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich — little images and crucifixes about — wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Savior in a frame of marble over the altar at full length upon the Cross, in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds?

Yet Adams stayed through all of the long service. The music and chanting of the assembly continued through the afternoon, “most sweetly and exquisitely,” and he quite approved of the priest’s “good, short, moral essay” on the duty of parents to see to their children’s temporal and spiritual interests. The whole experience, Adams concluded, was “awful and affecting” — the word “awful” then meaning full of awe, or “that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence.”

For one accustomed also to the plainest of domestic comforts and daily fare — and who loved to eat — the scale of Philadelphia hospitality in the opening weeks of the First Congress had been memorable. Not even in New York had he seen such display of private wealth, or dined and imbibed so grandly. At a great dinner for Congress in the banqueting hall at the State House, on September 16, 1774, a total of thirty-one toasts had been raised before the affair ended. There were further elegant receptions and dinners at the homes of the Mifflins, the Shippens, the Powels, Cadwalladers, and Dickinsons, extended gatherings presided over and attended by many of the most beautiful, fashionably dressed women of Philadelphia.

“I shall be killed with kindness in this place,” he told Abigail. “We go to Congress at nine and there we stay, most earnestly engaged until three in the afternoon, then we adjourn and go to dinner with some of the nobles of Pennsylvania at four o’clock and feast on ten thousand delicacies, and sit drinking Madeira, claret and burgundy ‘til six or seven.” Even plain Quakers, he reported, served ducks, hams, chickens, beef, creams, and custards.

“A most sinful feast again,” he recorded after another occasion, this in the splendor of a great four-story mansion on Third Street, the home of Mayor Samuel Powel, whose wealth and taste could be measured in richly carved paneling, magnificent paintings, a tea service in solid silver that would have fetched considerably more than the entire contents of the Adams household at Braintree.

“Dined with Mr. [Benjamin] Chew, Chief Justice of the Province,” he began still another diary entry.

Turtle and every other thing. Flummery, jellies, sweet meats of twenty sorts. Trifles, whipped syllabubs, floating islands . . . and then a dessert of fruits, raisins, almonds, pears, peaches — wines most excellent and admirable. I drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it.

Within the walls of Congress, he was at first dazzled by the other delegates, who, he decided, comprised an assembly surpassing any in history. Of the fifty-four in attendance, nearly half were lawyers and most had received a college education. Several, like Washington, were known to be men of great wealth, but others, like Roger Sherman of Connecticut, had humbler origins. He had begun as a shoemaker.

As observant of people as ever, Adams recorded his impressions in vivid, fragmentary notes of a kind kept by no other member of Congress. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was a “tall, spare . . . masterly man”; Roger Sherman spoke “often and long, but very heavily”; James Duane of New York had a “sly, surveying eye,” but appeared “very sensible.” Joseph Galloway, a leading Philadelphia attorney and speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly who would later resign from Congress and ultimately seek refuge with the British army, struck Adams at first meeting as having an air of “design and cunning.”

John Dickinson, another prominent Philadelphian, was “a shadow . . . pale as ashes”; Adams doubted he would live a month. Caesar Rodney of Delaware was “the oddest looking man in the world . . . slender as a reed — pale — his face is not bigger than a large apple. Yet there is sense and fire, spirit, wit, and humor in his countenance.”

Adams was amazed by the range and variety of talents. “The art and address of ambassadors from a dozen belligerent powers of Europe, nay, of a conclave of cardinals at the election of a Pope . . . would not exceed the specimens we have seen.” Here were “fortunes, abilities, learning, eloquence, acuteness” equal to any. “Every question is discussed with moderation, and an acuteness and minuteness equal to that of Queen Elizabeth’s privy council.”

But after a month of such “acuteness and minuteness” over every issue at hand, irrespective of importance, Adams was “wearied to death.” The business of Congress had become tedious beyond expression, he told Abigail.

This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man — an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.

The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.

Certain members began to irritate him. The perpetual round of feasting became only another burden of his “pilgrimage.” Even Philadelphia lost its charm. For all its “wealth and regularity,” Adams decided, Philadelphia was no Boston. Yet on departure from the First Congress in late October of 1774, after a stay of two months, he had written wistfully of the “happy, peaceful, the elegant, the hospitable, and polite city of Philadelphia,” wondering if he would ever be back.

By the time he returned for the Second Continental Congress, in late spring 1775, a month after Lexington and Concord, Philadelphia had become the capital of a revolution. Troops were drilling; lavish entertaining was out of fashion. Congress was in the throes of creating an army, appointing a commander-in-chief, issuing the first Continental money. With several other delegates, Adams spent a day inspecting defenses on the Delaware.

“There are in this city three large regiments raised, formed, armed, trained, and uniformed under officers consisting of gentlemen of the very first fortune and best character in the place,” Adams reported to Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, a prosperous Boston merchant whom Adams greatly admired. “All this started up since [the] 19th [of] April [since Lexington and Concord]. They cover the common every day of the week, Sundays not excepted.”

The deliberations of Congress, meantime, had been moved from Carpenters’ Hall to the larger, grander State House on the south side of Chestnut Street, between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Built some forty years before, it comprised a handsome main edifice, two stories tall with a bell tower and arcaded wings joining smaller “offices” at either end, all of it done in red brick. High on the exterior west wall of the main building, a large clock proclaimed the hour.

Congress convened in the Assembly Room on the first floor, to the left of the Chestnut Street entrance. An ample chamber, measuring forty by forty feet, it was notably devoid of decoration, “neat but not elegant,” with whitewashed walls and flooded with daylight from high windows on both the north and south sides. On a low platform at the east end of the room stood a single, tall-backed chair for the president. There were two woodstoves and on the east wall, twin fireplaces, one on either side of the president’s chair. Seats for the delegates, fifty or so Windsor chairs, were arranged in a semicircle facing the president’s chair, these interspersed with work tables covered with green baize cloths and clustered according to region: New England on the left, middle colonies in the center, southern colonies on the right.

The Pennsylvania Assembly, having given up its space, had moved across the hall to the more elaborate Supreme Court Room, where the royal coat-of-arms hung. At the rear of the hall, a broad stairway led to the banqueting room that extended a hundred feet, the full length of the building.

Outside to the rear was the State House Yard, an open public green the size of a city block and enclosed the whole way around by a seven-foot brick wall. The Rittenhouse observation platform stood off to one side, and at the center of the far wall a huge single-arched wooden gate, twice the height of the wall, opened onto Walnut Street. In good weather, as a place for the delegates to stretch their legs and talk privately, the yard was ideal. Many days more business was transacted there than inside. And with the yard serving also now as a place to store cannon and barrels of gunpowder, the war was never far from consciousness.

All sessions of Congress were conducted in strictest secrecy behind closed doors because of the number of British agents in and about Philadelphia and the need to convey an impression of unity, that all members were perfectly agreed on the results of their deliberations. Consequently, like others, Adams could report comparatively little in his letters home, except that the hours were longer than ever, the issues of greater urgency, the strain worse on everybody.

His health suffered. His eyes bothered him to the point that he had difficulty reading. He wrote of the frustrations of “wasting, exhausting” debates. America was “a great, unwieldy body,” he decided. “Its progress must be slow. It is like a large fleet sailing under convoy. The fleetest sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”

Yet he would not give up or let down. “I will not despond.”

A sweltering, fly-infested summer of 1775 was followed by an autumn of almost unceasing rains. Dysentery broke out in the military camps. Adams, though suffering from rheumatism and a violent cold, worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, in committee meetings from seven to ten in the morning, then to the full Congress till late afternoon, then back to committees from six to ten at night.

Politics were no less perplexing than ever. “Politics are a labyrinth without a clue,” he wrote, but he had come to understand the makeup of Congress. He knew the delegates now as he had not before, and they had come to know him. That he was repeatedly chosen for the most important committees was a measure of his influence and of the respect others had for his integrity, his intellect, and exceptional capacity for hard work. He was the leading committeeman of the Massachusetts delegation, perhaps indeed of the whole Congress.

By October, at the time of Abigail’s shattering ordeal with sickness and death at home, Adams was writing to say they must prepare themselves, “minds and hearts for every event, even the worst.” Since his first involvement in the “Cause of America,” he had known the crisis would never be settled peaceably and this, he told her in confidence, had been a source of much “disquietude.”

The thought that we might be driven to the sad necessity of breaking our connection with G[reat] B[ritain], exclusive of the carnage and destruction which it was easy to see must attend the separation, always gave me a great deal of grief.

II

POSSIBLY IT WAS HIS FIRST or second day back in Philadelphia, in early February 1776, after the long wintry journey from home, that Adams, in his room at Mrs. Yard’s, drew up a list of what he was determined to see accomplished. Or as appears more likely, from its placement in his diary, the list had been composed earlier, somewhere en route. Undated, it included, “An alliance to be formed with France and Spain”; “Government to be assumed by every colony”; “Powder mills to be built in every colony and fresh efforts to make saltpetre [for the making of gunpowder].” And, on the second of the two small opposing pages in the diary, he wrote, a “Declaration of Independency.”

Independence had been talked about privately and alluded to in correspondence, but rarely spoken of directly in public declamation, or in print. To Adams independence was the only guarantee of American liberty, and he was determined that the great step be taken. The only question was when to make the move. If a decision were forced on Congress too soon, the result could be disastrous; independence would be voted down. But every day that independence was put off would mean added difficulties in the course of the larger struggle. Abigail, in one of her letters, aptly offered some favorite lines from Shakespeare:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in the shallows and in miseries . . .

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

But just when to catch the tide was the question. By Adams’s estimate, Congress was about equally divided three ways — those opposed to independence who were Tories at heart if not openly, those too cautious or timid to take a position one way or the other, and the “true blue,” as he said, who wanted to declare independence with all possible speed. So as yet the voices for independence were decidedly in the minority. Indeed, the delegates of six colonies — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina — were under specific instructions not to vote for independence.

The opposing argument hung on the lingering possibility of a last-minute reconciliation with Britain. Were not the likes of Edmund Burke speaking out in Parliament for American rights, it was said. Supposedly a peace commission was on the way from London. To Adams such talk was a phantom. “The Ministry,” he wrote, “have caught the colonies as I have often caught a horse, by holding an empty hat, as if it was full of corn. . . .” But throughout the middle colonies, as in parts of the South, great numbers of people had no wish to separate from the mother country. In Philadelphia such sentiment ran strong, and not just among the city’s numerous Tories. “The plot thickens. . . . Thinking people uneasy,” observed a local attorney. “The Congress in equilibrio on the question of independence or no. . . . I love the cause of liberty, but cannot heartily join in the presentation of measures totally foreign to the original plan of resistance.”

To many staunchly pacifist Quakers any step that led nearer to all-out war was anathema. To them George III was “the best of kings,” and they spoke of those who called themselves patriots as “the violent people.”

The mood of the city had become extremely contentious. “The malignant air of calumny has taken possession of almost all ranks and societies of people in this place,” wrote Christopher Marshall, an apothecary and committed patriot (though a Quaker) who had become one of Adams’s circle of Philadelphia friends.

The rich, the poor, the high professor and the prophane, seem all to be infected with this grievous disorder, so that the love of our neighbor seems to be quite banished, the love of self and opinions so far prevails. . . . The [Tory] enemies of our present struggle . . . are grown even scurrilous to individuals, and treat all characters who differ from them with the most opprobrious language.

In Congress the strain was showing. From Virginia had come word that the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, having escaped to the safety of a British man-of-war, had called on all slaves to rebel, promising them their freedom if they joined the King’s forces. On New Year’s Day he had ordered the bombardment of Norfolk. Southern delegates were outraged. At the same time the bad news from Canada had had much the same effect witnessed by Adams in the wayside taverns en route from Massachusetts. “There is a deep anxiety, a kind of thoughtful melancholy,” he reported to Abigail. Writing again, he stressed that the events of war were always uncertain. Then, paraphrasing a favorite line from the popular play Cato by Joseph Addison — a line that General Washington, too, would often call upon — Adams told her, “We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.”

With sickness widespread in Philadelphia there was much hacking and coughing in Congress and many a long, sallow look. When some of the delegates protested that smoke from the wood stoves in the chamber was the cause of such poor health, the stoves were removed. Other ailments struck. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina suffered a stroke from which he would not recover. Smallpox reappeared in the city, putting everyone further on edge. In March one of New England’s most prominent delegates, Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, would die of the disease.

On February 27, word arrived that Parliament, in December, had prohibited all trade with the colonies and denounced as traitors all Americans who did not make an unconditional submission. The punishment for treason, as every member of Congress knew, was death by hanging.

A vast British armada was reported under way across the Atlantic and there were ominous rumors of the King hiring an army of German mercenaries. It was the New Englanders who held firm for independence, though two of the Massachusetts delegation, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine, exhibited nothing like the zeal of either Samuel Adams or Elbridge Gerry. There were many, too, among the other delegations, who could be counted on, though unfortunately several of the most important were absent. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia would not appear at Philadelphia until the middle of March. Caesar Rodney of Delaware would be away until April. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia would not arrive for another three months, not until the middle of May. Meanwhile, time was wasting and a great deal needed doing.

Present nearly every day, notwithstanding his years and infirmities, was Benjamin Franklin, who, at age seventy, was popularly perceived to be the oldest, wisest head in the Congress, which he was, and the most influential, which he was not. Franklin wanted independence and considered Congress lamentably irresolute on the matter, as he told Adams. Franklin had no expectation of new terms from Britain and from long experience in London, as an agent for Pennsylvania, he knew the King and the Foreign Ministry as did no one else in Congress. But Franklin had no liking for floor debate. He was patient, imperturbable, and at times sound asleep in his chair. Never would he argue a point. Indeed, it was rare that he spoke at all or ventured an opinion except in private conversation, which to Adams, who was almost incapable of staying out of an argument, was extremely difficult to comprehend. “He has not assumed anything,” Adams wrote in frustration, “nor affected to take the lead; but has seemed to choose that the Congress pursue their own sentiments, and adopt their own plans.” That Franklin was quietly proposing to equip the Continental Army with bows and arrows must have left Adams still more puzzled.

For Adams any sustained equivalent of Franklin’s benign calm would have been impossible. Knowing his hour had come and that he must rise to the occasion and play a leading part, he would play it with all that was in him.

Among the opposition there were only two whom he disliked, Benjamin Harrison and Edward Rutledge. Harrison, an outspoken Virginia planter, six feet four inches tall and immensely fat, was a fervent champion of American rights who liked to say he would have come to Philadelphia on foot had it been necessary. To Adams, nonetheless, he was a profane and impious fool. Rutledge, the youngest member, was dandified, twenty-six years old, and overflowing with self-confidence. At first, Adams judged him “smart” if not “deep,” but the more Rutledge talked, the more he expressed disagreement with Adams, the more scathing Adams’s assessment became, to the point where, in his diary, he appeared nearly to run out of words. “Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln, a swallow, a sparrow, a peacock, excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady — jejune, inane, and puerile.”

Yet Adams remained pointedly courteous to both men, as to others of the anti-independence faction. Among the surprises of the unfolding drama, as tensions increased, was the extent to which the ardent, disputatious John Adams held himself in rein, proving when need be a model of civility and self-restraint, even of patience.

In later years Adams would recall the warning advice given the Massachusetts delegation the day of their arrival for the First Congress. Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and two or three other Philadelphia patriots had ridden out to welcome the Massachusetts men, and at a tavern in the village of Frankford, in the seclusion of a private room, they told the New Englanders they were “suspected of having independence in view.” They were perceived to be “too zealous” and must not presume to take the lead. Virginia, they were reminded, was the largest, richest, and most populous of the colonies, and the “very proud” Virginians felt they had the right to lead.

According to Adams, the advice made a deep impression, and among the consequences was the choice of George Washington to head the army. But Adams also wrote that he had “not in my nature prudence and caution enough” always to stand back. Years before, at age twenty, he had set down in his diary that men ought to “avow their opinions and defend them with boldness,” and he was of the same mettle still.

THE BULWARK OF THE OPPOSITION, of the “cool faction,” was the Pennsylvania delegation, and the greatly respected John Dickinson was its eloquent floor leader. Cautious, conservative by nature, Dickinson was, as Adams had noted, a distinctive figure, tall and exceptionally slender, with almost no color in his face. Because of his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, an early pamphlet on the evils of British policy, Dickinson had become a hero. He was “the Farmer,” his name spoken everywhere, though he was hardly the plain man of the soil many imagined. Born to wealth and raised on an estate in Delaware, he had trained in the law at London and made his career in Philadelphia, where he had risen rapidly to the top of his profession. Married to a Quaker heiress, he lived in grand style, riding through the city in a magnificent coach-and-four attended by liveried black slaves. His town house, catercornered to the State House on Chestnut Street, was then undergoing extensive alterations and thought to be too large and showy even by his wife, who preferred their nearby country seat, Fairhill.

Dickinson had wished to make a good first impression on Adams, and he succeeded. As a dinner guest at Fairhill during the First Congress, Adams was charmed. Dickinson “has an excellent heart, and the cause of his country lies near it,” Adams had written. As for his initial concern that the rigors of Congress might be too much for someone of such delicate appearance, Adams had learned better. Though afflicted with the gout, Dickinson had since assumed command of a Philadelphia battalion with the rank of colonel. He had become the politician-soldier of the sort Adams so often imagined himself, yet it was with a determination no less than Adams’s own that Dickinson kept telling Congress that peaceful methods for resolving the current crisis were still possible and greatly preferable. He was not a Tory. He was not opposed to independence in principle. Rather, he insisted, now was not the time for so dangerous and irrevocable a decision.

Adams had come to believe that Dickinson’s real struggle was with his mother and his wife, both devout Quakers who bedeviled him with their pacifist views. “If I had such a mother and such a wife,” Adams would reflect years later, recalling Dickinson’s predicament, “I believe I should have shot myself.”

Outraged by Dickinson’s insistence on petitions to the King as essential to restoring peace, even after Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, Adams had strongly denounced any such step. Like many other delegates, he had been infuriated by Congress’s humble petition of July 8, 1775, the so-called Olive Branch Petition, that had been Dickinson’s major contribution. From the day he saw with his own eyes what the British had done at Lexington and Concord, Adams failed to understand how anyone could have any misconception or naïve hope about what to expect from the British. “Powder and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt,” Adams wrote privately.

In a speech on the floor of Congress, Dickinson warned the New England delegates that they would have “blood . . . on their heads” if they excluded the possibility of peace. Adams, springing to his feet, responded so vehemently that when he left the chamber Dickinson came rushing after, to confront him outside.

“What is the reason, Mr. Adams, that you New England men oppose our measures of reconciliation?” Dickinson angrily demanded, according to Adams’s later account of the scene. “Look, ye! If you don’t concur with us in our pacific system, I, and a number of us, will break off from you in New England and we will carry on the opposition by ourselves in our own way.”

Though infuriated by Dickinson’s “magisterial” tone, Adams replied calmly that there were many accommodations he would make in the cause of harmony and unanimity. He would not, however, be threatened.

Venting his “fire” in a private letter, Adams portrayed Dickinson as a “piddling genius” who lent a “silly cast” to deliberations. The letter was intercepted by British agents and widely published in Tory newspapers, with the result that Dickinson refused to speak when, one morning on their way to the State House, he and Adams passed “near enough to touch elbows,” as Adams recorded that day.

He passed without moving his hat or head or hand. I bowed and pulled off my hat. He passed haughtily by. . . . But I was determined to make my bow, that I might know his temper.

We are not to be on speaking terms, nor bowing terms, for the time to come.

Others refused to speak to Adams, so great was the respect for Dickinson in Congress and in the city. A British spy in Philadelphia named Gilbert Barkley reported to his contact in London, “The Quakers and many others look on him [Adams], and others of his way of thinking, as the greatest enemies of this country.” For weeks Adams was ostracized, “avoided like a man infected with leprosy,” he would remember. He felt as he had after the Boston Massacre trials, “borne down” by the weight of unpopularity. Benjamin Rush would write sympathetically of Adams walking the streets of Philadelphia alone, “an object of nearly universal scorn and detestation.”

Such was the support for Dickinson and the Olive Branch Petition that Adams and his colleagues were left no choice but to acquiesce. The petition was agreed to — only to be summarily dismissed by George III, who refused even to look at it and proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion.

Still, Dickinson and the anti-independents clung to the hope of a resolution to the crisis, insisting reconciliation was still possible, and so the wait for the peace commissioners had continued.

WHAT NEITHER JOHN DICKINSON nor John Adams nor anyone could have anticipated was the stunning effect of Common Sense. The little pamphlet had become a clarion call, rousing spirits within Congress and without as nothing else had. The first edition, attributed to an unnamed “Englishman” and published by Robert Bell in a print shop on Third Street, appeared January 9, 1776. By the time Adams had resumed his place in Congress a month later, Common Sense had gone into a third edition and was sweeping the colonies. In little time more than 100,000 copies were in circulation. “Who is the author of Common Sense?” asked a correspondent from South Carolina in the Philadelphia Evening Post. “He deserves a statue of gold.”

Written to be understood by everyone, Common Sense attacked the very idea of hereditary monarchy as absurd and evil, and named the “royal brute” George III as the cause of every woe in America. It was a call to arms, an unabashed argument for war, and a call for American independence, something that had never been said so boldly before in print. “Why is it that we hesitate? . . . The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth . . . for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

The British spy, Barkley, reported its publication as he did such other vital news items as the arrival of shipments of gunpowder from the West Indies, or the sailing from Philadelphia of armed sloops and brigantines flying “what they call the American flag.”

The anonymous author was revealed to be a down-at-the-heels English immigrant, Thomas Paine, who had landed at Philadelphia a year earlier with little more than a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Paine had been encouraged in his efforts by Benjamin Rush, who was himself the author of a pamphlet on the evils of slavery, and it was Rush who provided the title.

Friends in Massachusetts reported to Adams that because of Common Sense the clamor for a declaration of independence was never greater. “This is the time . . . we have never had such a favorable moment,” wrote one. In a letter to Abigail, referring to the copy he had sent her, Adams said he expected Common Sense to become the “common faith,” and on learning that in Boston, he, Adams, was presumed to be the author, he felt flattered. Writing to a former law clerk, he declared himself innocent, saying he could never have achieved a style of such “strength and brevity.” But Adams was not without misgivings. The more he thought about it, the less he admired Common Sense. The writer, he told Abigail, “has a better hand at pulling down than building.”

That Paine had attempted to prove the unlawfulness of monarchy with analogies from the Bible, declaring monarchy to be “one of the sins of the Jews,” struck Adams as ridiculous. Paine had assured his readers that in a war with Britain, Americans, being such experienced seamen and willing soldiers and having such an abundance of war matériel at hand, would readily triumph. Adams had no illusions about the prospect of war with Britain. Almost alone among the members of Congress, he saw no quick victory, but a long, painful struggle. The war, he warned prophetically in a speech on February 22, could last ten years. What was more, as he confided to Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, he thought “this American contest will light up a general war” in Europe.

But it was Paine’s “feeble” understanding of constitutional government, his outline of a unicameral legislature to be established once independence was achieved, that disturbed Adams most. In response, he began setting down his own thoughts on government, resolved, as he later wrote, “to do all in my power to counteract the effect” on the popular mind of so foolish a plan.

Meanwhile, for all the gloom and discord at the State House, Congress was making decisions. On February 26 there was enacted an embargo on exports to Britain. On March 2, Silas Deane was appointed a secret envoy to France to go “in the character of a merchant” to buy clothing and arms, and to appraise the “disposition” of France should the colonies declare independence. Oliver Wolcott, Deane’s fellow delegate from Connecticut, sensed the approach of a moment that could “decide the fate of this country.” Adams busily jotted notes:

Is any assistance attainable from F[rance]? What connection may we safely form with her. 1st. No political connection. Submit to none of her authority. . . . 2nd. No military connection. Receive no troops from her. 3rd. Only a commercial connection.

In the hope that the Canadians could be persuaded to join the American cause as “the 14th colony,” Congress organized a diplomatic expedition to Montreal with Benjamin Franklin at its head, and despite his age and poor health, Franklin departed on what was to be an exceedingly arduous and futile mission.

Adams joined in floor debate day after day, arguing a point, pleading, persuading, and nearly always with effect. No one spoke more often or with greater force. “Every important step was opposed, and carried by bare majorities, which obliged me to be almost constantly engaged in debate,” he would recall.

But I was not content with all that was done, and almost every day, I had something to say about advising the states to institute governments, to express my total despair of any good coming from the petition or of those things which were called conciliatory measures. I constantly insisted that all such measures, instead of having any tendency to produce a reconciliation, would only be considered as proofs of our timidity and want of confidence in the ground we stood on, and would only encourage our enemies to greater exertions against us.

Rarely did he prepare his remarks in advance other than in his mind, so that once on his feet he could speak from what he knew and what he strongly felt. He had tried writing his speeches but found it impossible. “I understand it not,” he would tell Benjamin Rush. “I never could write declamations, orations, or popular addresses.”

He had no liking for grand oratorical flourishes. “Affectation is as disagreeable in a letter as in conversation,” he once told Abigail, in explanation of his views on “epistolary style,” and the same principle applied to making a speech. The art of persuasion, he held, depended mainly on a marshaling of facts, clarity, conviction, and the ability to think on one’s feet. True eloquence consisted of truth and “rapid reason.” As a British spy was later to write astutely of Adams, he also had a particular gift for seeing “large subjects largely”

He would stand at his place, back straight, walking stick in hand, at times letting the stick slip between thumb and forefinger to make a quick tap on the floor, as if to punctuate a point. The “clear and sonorous” voice would fill the room. No one ever had trouble hearing what Adams had to say, nor was there ever the least ambiguity about what he meant. Nothing of what he or anyone said in the course of debate was officially recorded. But in later writings Adams recalled stressing certain points repeatedly:

We shall be driven to the necessity of declaring ourselves independent and we ought now to be employed in preparing a plan for confederation of the colonies, [here might come the sharp tap of the stick] and treaties to be proposed to foreign power [tap] . . . together with a declaration of independence [tap]. . . .

Foreign powers can not be expected to acknowledge us, till we have acknowledged ourselves and taken our station among them as a sovereign power [tap], an independent nation [tap].

On March 14, Congress voted to disarm all Tories. On March 23, in a momentous step, the delegates resolved to permit the outfitting of privateers, “armed vessels,” to prey on “the enemies of the United Colonies,” a move Adams roundly supported. In the advocacy of sea defenses he stood second to none. The previous fall he had urged the creation of an American fleet, which to some, like Samuel Chase of Maryland, had seemed “the maddest idea in the world.” The fight began on the floor, and on October 13, to the extent of authorizing funds for two small swift-sailing ships, Congress founded a navy. By the end of the year Congress had directed that thirteen frigates be built. Adams was appointed to a naval committee that met in a rented room at Tun Tavern, and it was Adams who drafted the first set of rules and regulations for the new navy, a point of pride with him for as long as he lived.

Knowing nothing of armed ships, he made himself expert, and would call his work on the naval committee the pleasantest part of his labors, in part because it brought him in contact with one of the singular figures in Congress, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who was nearly as old as Franklin and always wore his broad-brimmed Quaker hat in the chamber. Adams found most Quakers to be “dull as beetles,” but Hopkins was an exception. A lively, learned man, he had seen a great deal of life, suffered the loss of three sons at sea, and served in one public office or other continuously from the time he was twenty-five. The old gentleman loved to drink rum and expound on his favorite writers. The experience and judgment he brought to the business of Congress were of great use, as Adams wrote, but it was in after-hours that he “kept us alive.”

His custom was to drink nothing all day, nor ‘til eight o’clock in the evening, and then his beverage was Jamaica spirits and water . . . . He read Greek, Roman, and British history, and was familiar with English poetry. . . . And the flow of his soul made his reading our own, and seemed to bring to recollection in all of us all we had ever read.

Hopkins never drank to excess, according to Adams, but all he drank was promptly “converted into wit, sense, knowledge, and good humor.”

There was more to be done by sea and land than anyone knew, Adams kept saying. When on March 25 word arrived that the British had abandoned Boston, setting off jubilant celebration in Philadelphia, he lost no time in advocating the immediate fortification of Boston Harbor. “Fortify, fortify, and never let them in again,” he urged a friend at home. On April 6, in another decisive step, Congress opened American ports to the trade of all nations except Britain.

Half measures would not answer, Adams knew. The tentative attitude of Dickinson and the “Quaker interests” was becoming more and more difficult to tolerate. Adams’s sense of urgency grew greater by the day. “The middle way is no way at all,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates. “If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way.”

“This story of [peace] commissioners is as arrant an illusion as ever hatched in the brain of an enthusiast, a politician, or a maniac,” he told Abigail in a letter in which he confided that he had been busy at something, “about ten sheets of paper with my own hand,” that he would have to tell her about later.

Adams’s Thoughts on Government, as it would be known, was first set forth in a letter to a fellow congressman, William Hooper, who, before returning home to help write a new constitution for North Carolina, had asked Adams for a “sketch” of his views. When another of the North Carolinians, John Penn, requested a copy, this, too, Adams provided, in addition to three more copies, all written out by hand, for Jonathan Sergeant of New Jersey and Virginians George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee, who with Adams’s consent, had the letter published as a pamphlet by the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap.

For Adams the structure of government was a subject of passionate interest that raised fundamental questions about the realities of human nature, political power, and the good society. It was a concern that for years had propelled much of his reading and the exchange of ideas with those whose judgment he most respected, including Abigail, who had written to him the year before, “I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping. . . .

The great fish swallow up the small [she had continued] and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

Adams had accused Thomas Paine of being better at tearing down than building. In what he wrote in response, he was being the builder, as best he knew. To do this he had had “to borrow a little time from my sleep.” He was exhausted, he acknowledged, but he seems also to have sensed the importance of what he had done.

“It has been the will of Heaven,” the essay began, “that we should be thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live . . . .

a period when a coincidence of circumstances without example has afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation and building as they choose. How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?

He was looking beyond independence, beyond the outcome of the war, to what would be established once independence and victory were achieved. Much as he foresaw the hard truth about the war to be waged, Adams had the clearest idea of anyone in Congress of what independence would actually entail, the great difficulties and risks, no less than the opportunities. When arguing cases in court, he liked to draw on the fables of La Fontaine and to quote the line “in every thing one must consider the end.”

The happiness of the people was the purpose of government, he wrote, and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number. And since all “sober inquirers after truth” agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.

The greatest minds agreed, Adams continued, that all good government was republican, and the “true idea” of a republic was “an empire of laws and not of men,” a phrase not original with Adams but that he had borrowed from the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher James Harrington. A government with a single legislative body would never do. There should be a representative assembly, “an exact portrait in miniature of the people at large,” but it must not have the whole legislative power, for the reason that like an individual with unchecked power, it could be subject to “fits of humor, transports of passion, partialities of prejudice.” A single assembly could “grow avaricious . . . exempt itself from burdens . . . become ambitious and after some time vote itself perpetual.” Balance would come from the creation of a second, smaller legislative body, a “distinct assembly” of perhaps twenty or thirty, chosen by the larger legislature. This “Council,” as Adams called it, would be given “free and independent judgment upon all acts of legislation that it may be able to check and correct the errors of the others.”

The executive, the governor, should, Adams thought, be chosen by the two houses of the legislature, and for not more than a year at a time. Executive power would include the veto and the appointment of all judges and justices, as well as militia officers, thus making the executive the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Essential to the stability of government and to an “able and impartial administration of justice,” Adams stressed, was separation of judicial power from both the legislative and executive. There must be an independent judiciary. “Men of experience on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible patience, unruffled calmness and indefatigable application” should be “subservient to none” and appointed for life.

Finally and emphatically, he urged the widest possible support for education. “Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

Little that Adams ever wrote had such effect as his Thoughts on Government. Yet he felt it was too rough, “crude” in execution. He regretted insufficient time to write “more correctly.”

FROM ABIGAILCAME LONG LETTERS FILLED with news from home — of family, of politics, of her day-to-day struggle to manage expenses, cope with shortages, and keep the farm going, a responsibility for which little in her background had prepared her. “Frugality, industry, and economy are the lessons of the day,” she confided to a friend, “at least they must be so for me or my small boat will suffer shipwreck.” To John she pleaded repeatedly for more news of his health and his outlook, and filled pages with her own feelings for all that was transpiring at Philadelphia.

She was particularly curious about the Virginians, wondering if, as slaveholders, they had the necessary commitment to the cause of freedom. “I have,” she wrote, “sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creature of theirs.” What she felt about those in Massachusetts who owned slaves, including her own father, she did not say, but she need not have — John knew her mind on the subject. Writing to him during the First Congress, she had been unmistakably clear: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me — [to] fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

It had been two weeks now since she had seen the British fleet sail out of Boston, and she viewed the approach of spring very differently than she had only a month before. Her world had been transformed. She was experiencing an uncommon ”gaiety de coeur,” she wrote. “I think the sun shines brighter, the birds sing more melodiously.” She longed to hear word of independence declared. Her spirit took flight at the thought:

— and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.

Borrowing a line from a poem by Daniel Defoe that she knew he would recognize (for he had used it, too), she wrote, “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of yours as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as vassals of your sex. Regard us then as being placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

She was not being entirely serious. In part, in her moment of springtime gaiety, she was teasing him. But only in part.

Adams responded in a light spirit. “I cannot but laugh,” he began.

We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

Depend on it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and in practice you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.

Others wrote from Massachusetts to question why it was taking so long to accomplish what everyone at home was demanding. “People can’t account for the hesitancy they observe,” said James Warren, while his wife, Mercy Otis Warren, who was a playwright and a woman Adams particularly admired, lectured him on the ideal republican government she foresaw for the future union of the colonies.

Replying to James Warren on April 16, Adams could hardly control his anger. “Have you seen the privateering resolves? Are not those independence enough for my beloved constituents? Have you seen the resolves opening our ports to all nations? Are these independence enough? What more would you have?”

But writing again to Warren, Adams tried to explain the concern and hesitation over independence. “All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great dangers and uncertain effects. No man living can foresee the consequences of such a measure.”

The future was exceedingly dangerous, Adams felt certain. His mind was much on eventualities, given what he knew of human nature.

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls. . . .

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect, and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way.

To Mercy Warren, Adams counseled, “Patience! Patience! Patience!”

A week or so after denouncing the tyranny of men, Abigail wrote to say that in her loneliness and with so much riding on her shoulders, she scarcely knew which way to turn. “I miss my partner and find myself unequal to the cares which fall upon me. . . . I want to say many things I must omit. It is not fit to wake the soul by tender strokes of art, or to ruminate upon happiness we might enjoy, lest absences become intolerable.”

She wished he would burn her letters, she said in postscript.

Sometimes he wrote to her from Congress itself. (“When a man is seated in the midst of forty people, some of whom are talking, and others whispering, it is not easy to think what is proper to write,” he would tell her.) On April 18 she asked if he would be home in May or June, and to say she thought of him only “with the tenderest affection.” He, on April 23, went on about his Philadelphia barber who more than anyone helped him maintain a sense of proportion. “He is a little dapper fellow . . . a tongue as fluent and voluble as you please, wit at will, and . . . never . . . at a loss for a story to tell . . . while he is shaving and combing me . . . he contributes more than I could have imagined to my comfort in this life.”

But having received her letter, Adams became about as tender as he would allow on paper.

Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together, although the bodies are 400 miles off. Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think, or to see your thoughts.

The conclusion of your letter makes my heart throb more than a cannonade would. You bid me burn your letters. But I must forget you first.

She followed at length, this time with thoughts on his concerns, writing that “a people may let a King fall, yet still remain a people, but if a King let his people slip from him, he is no longer a King. And as this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the world in decisive terms our own importance?”

“I think you shine as a stateswoman,” he responded exuberantly, and in another letter wrote:

Your sentiments of the duties we owe to our country are such as become the best of women and the best of men. Among all the disappointments and perplexities which have fallen my share in life, nothing has contributed so much to support my mind as the choice blessing of a wife . . . .

I want to take a walk with you in the garden — to go over to the common, the plain, the meadow. I want to take Charles in one hand and Tom in the other, and walk with you, Nabby on your right hand and John on my left, to view the corn fields, the orchards . . .

Alas, poor imagination! How faintly and imperfectly do you supply the want of [the] original and reality!

SPRING HAD ARRIVED. Days of warm April rain and intermittent sunshine followed one after another. Trees were leafing out. In the enclosed backyards of the city, cherry blossoms burst into flower, followed by a profusion of lilacs in bloom.

Behind the closed doors of Congress the current of events seemed also to turn with the season as the delegates of three southern colonies, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, received instructions freeing them to vote for independence. Even among the opposition, there was growing agreement on the need for unanimity, “harmony,” a healing of disputes. “It is a true saying of a wit,” wrote Carter Braxton of Virginia, referring possibly to Benjamin Franklin, “we must hang together or separately.”

Then, on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 8, Philadelphia heard the muffled but unmistakable thunder of cannon from thirty miles down the Delaware, as two heavily armed British ships, the frigate Roebuck and sloop-of-war Liverpool, tried to run the river defenses, a blockade of armed gondolas. The crash of cannon went on for two days before the ships turned back. No great damage was done, and to many it all seemed, as said in the Pennsylvania Gazette, “a most interesting spectacle.” Thousands rushed by carriage and horseback to watch from the shoreline. But it had also been vivid proof that the war was no abstraction and could in fact come to Philadelphia in all its fury, a thought many had preferred not to face. The British fleet that evacuated Boston, it was now known, had sailed to Halifax, where presumably it was waiting for reinforcements before returning to attack New York.

By sundown May 9, the excitement down the river had ended. On the day after, Friday, May 10, came what many in Congress knew to be a critical juncture. Adams had decided the time was ripe to make his move.

With Richard Henry Lee, he put forth a resolution recommending that the individual colonies assume all powers of government — to secure “the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and Amer-ica in general.” Not only was it passed, but with surprising unanimity. It awaited only a preamble which, as drafted by Adams, was a still more radical statement. This brought on three days of fierce debate, during which Adams repeatedly took the floor, supported by Richard Henry Lee, while James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued in opposition. A decision that could clear the way to independence had at last arrived.

In contrast to the resolution, Adams’s preamble put aside any possibility of reconciliation and all but declared the colonies immediately independent:

Whereas his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the lords and commons of Great Britain, has, by a late act of Parliament, excluded the inhabitants of these United Colonies from the protection of his crown; and whereas, no answer whatever to the humble petitions of the colonies for redress of grievances and reconciliation with Great Britain has been or is likely to be given; but the whole force of that kingdom, aided by foreign mercenaries, is to be exerted for the destruction of the good people of these colonies; and whereas it appears absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good conscience, for people of these colonies to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain . . . it is [therefore] necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed, and all the powers of government exerted under the authority of the people of the colonies, for the preservation of internal peace, virtue, and good order, as well as the defense of their lives, liberties, and properties, against hostile invasions and cruel depredations of their enemies.

“Why all this haste?” James Duane demanded, according to notes that Adams kept. “Why all this driving?’

Samuel Adams, who rarely spoke in Congress, rose from his place. “I wonder the people have conducted so well as they have,” he said.

James Wilson responded, “Before we are prepared to build a new house, why should we pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the inclemencies of the season?”

John Dickinson was absent, apparently indisposed, a victim of exhaustion.

What John Adams said was not recorded. But as the constant battler on the floor, with all that he had written, his work on committees, his relentless energy, industry, and unyielding determination, he had emerged a leader like no other, and when the breakthrough came at last on Wednesday, May 15, it was his victory more than anyone’s in Congress.

The preamble was approved. When an exasperated James Duane told Adams it seemed “a machine for the fabrication of independence,” Adams replied that he thought it “independence itself.” He was elated. Congress, he wrote, had that day “passed the most important resolution that was ever taken in America.”

Others agreed. Even “the cool considerate men think it amounts to a declaration of independence,” wrote Caesar Rodney enthusiastically. Most telling was the immediate effect in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia itself, where popular opinion took a dramatic turn in support of independence.

At his lodgings two days later, Adams sat quietly writing to Abigail:

When I consider the great events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental of touching some springs, and turning some wheels, which have had and will have such effects, I feel an awe upon my mind which is not easily described.

“I have reasons to believe,” he added, “that no colony which shall assume a government under the people, will give it up.”

III

THE DAYS HAD become as warm as summer. “Fine sunshine,” recorded Adams’s Philadelphia friend Christopher Marshall one day after another. “Uncommonly hot . . . uncomfortable both to horse and man,” registered Josiah Bartlett, who, returning to Congress from the cool of New Hampshire, was astonished to see fields of winter rye in New Jersey already full grown by the middle of May.

Thomas Jefferson, on reaching Philadelphia, decided, “as the excessive heats of the city are coming fast,” to find lodgings “on the skirts of town where I may have the benefit of circulating air.” He moved to spacious quarters in a new brick house at the southwest corner of Seventh and Market, in what was nearly open country. They were larger, more expensive accommodations than most delegates had — a suite of two rooms, bedroom and parlor on the second floor, with ample windows for “circulating air” — and unlike most delegates, he would reside alone, separate from the rest.

Jefferson had arrived on May 14 after a pleasant week’s journey by horseback from the Piedmont of Virginia, accompanied by a single servant, a fourteen-year-old slave named Bob Hemings. Jefferson’s road to Philadelphia, the reverse of Adams’s, had been north by northeast, through the red-clay countryside of Virginia to Noland’s Ferry on the Potomac, then on into Maryland, winding past miles of prosperous-looking farms that became still more prosperous-looking as he crossed into Pennsylvania.

On resuming his seat in Congress, at the climax of debate over Adams’s preamble, Jefferson had felt as nearly unsuited for the business at hand as for the stifling city climate. “I’ve been so long out of the political world that I am almost a new man in it,” he wrote his college friend and confidant John Page. He worried about his ill wife at home. Given the choice, he would have preferred to be at Williamsburg, where a new Virginia constitution was being drafted. Of more immediate concern than the doings of Congress, it would appear from what he wrote Page, were some books, a two-volume French history of the Celts and a book on English gardens that he hoped Page would purchase for him from an estate sale.

At thirty-three Thomas Jefferson was the youngest of the Virginia delegates. He had not attended the First Congress, when Washington and Patrick Henry had been part of the delegation, and the Virginians with their liveried servants and splendid horses had ridden into the city like princelings. His role in the Second Congress had been on the whole modest. If he was conspicuous, it was mainly because of his height. At six feet two-and-a-half inches, he stood taller than all but a few and towered over someone like John Hancock, who at five feet four was perhaps the shortest man in the assembly. Standing beside John Adams, Jefferson looked like a lanky, freckled youth.

With eight years difference in their age, Adams was Jefferson’s senior, both in years and political experience. The differences in physique, background, manner, and temperament could hardly have been more contrasting. Where Adams was stout, Jefferson was lean and long-limbed, almost bony. Where Adams stood foursquare to the world, shoulders back, Jefferson customarily stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest. When taking his seat, it was as if he folded into a chair, all knees and elbows and abnormally large hands and feet. Where Adams was nearly bald, Jefferson had a full head of thick coppery hair. His freckled face was lean like his body, the eyes hazel, the mouth a thin line, the chin sharp.

Jefferson was a superb horseman, beautiful to see. He sang, he played the violin. He was as accomplished in the classics as Adams, but also in mathematics, horticulture, architecture, and in his interest in and knowledge of science he far exceeded Adams. Jefferson dabbled in “improvements” in agriculture and mechanical devices. His was the more inventive mind. He adored designing and redesigning things of all kinds. Jefferson, who may never have actually put his own hand to a plow, as Adams had, would devise an improved plow based on mathematical principles, “a moldboard of least resistance,” and find equal satisfaction in arriving at the perfect shape for a stone column or silver goblet.

Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular. Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.

In contrast to Adams’s need to fill pages of his diaries with his innermost thoughts and feelings, Jefferson kept neat account books. In an invariably precise hand, he recorded every purchase, every payment for meals, wines, books, violin strings, the least item of clothing. Unlike Adams, who, except for books, indulged himself in no expenditures beyond what were necessary, Jefferson was continually in and out of Philadelphia shops, buying whatever struck his fancy.

In the spirit of science, Jefferson maintained letter-perfect records of weights, measurements, and daily temperature readings. (Adams is not known even to have owned a thermometer.) “Nothing was too small for him to keep account of,” one of his plantation overseers would remember of Jefferson. Yet he kept no personal diary, and for all the hours given to what he called “pen and ink work,” Jefferson rarely ever revealed his inner feelings in what he wrote. He had nothing like Adams’s fascination with human nature and, quite unlike Adams, little sense of humor. “He is a man of science,” a close observer would later write of Jefferson. “But . . . he knows little of the nature of man — very little indeed.”

It was Jefferson’s graciousness that was so appealing. He was never blunt or assertive as Adams could be, but subtle, serene by all appearances, always polite, soft-spoken, and diplomatic, if somewhat remote. With Adams there was seldom a doubt about what he meant by what he said. With Jefferson there was nearly always a slight air of ambiguity. In private conversation Jefferson “sparkled.” But in Congress, like Franklin, he scarcely said a word, and if he did, it was in a voice so weak as to be almost inaudible. Rarely would he object to a point or disagree with anyone to his face. “Never contradict anybody,” he was advised by Franklin, whom he admired above all men, though it was advice he hardly needed. He “abhorred dispute,” as he said, shrank from the contentiousness of politics, and instinctively avoided confrontation of any kind. It was as if he were trying to proceed through life as he had designed his moldboard plow to go through the red clay of Virginia, with the least resistance possible.

Years later, still puzzling over Jefferson’s passivity at Philadelphia, Adams would claim that “during the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”

Jefferson himself would one day advise a grandson, “When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine.

Why should I question it. His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion? . . . Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.

Jefferson wished to avoid the rough and tumble of life whenever possible. John Adams’s irrepressible desire was to seize hold of it, and at times his was to be the path of Don Quixote.

A departure from Jefferson’s prevailing silence in Congress came late that summer when he stood in opposition to a proposal for a fast day, and in so doing appeared to cast aspersions on Christianity, to which Adams reacted sharply. Benjamin Rush reminded Adams of the incident in a letter written years later.

You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy to Christianity. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.

In one regard only did Jefferson’s behavior seem at odds with his usual placid way. If unwilling or unable to express anger, or passion, in his dealings with other men, he could be very different with his horse. As would be said within his own family, “The only impatience of temper he ever exhibited was with his horse, which he subdued to his will by a fearless application of the whip on the slightest manifestation of restiveness.”

As the author of the Summary View, the young Virginian had, as Adams said, achieved “the reputation of a masterly pen,” and however reticent in Congress, he proved “prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation. . . .” That Jefferson, after attending the College of William and Mary, had read law at Williamsburg for five years with the eminent George Wythe, gave him still greater standing with Adams, who considered Wythe one of the ablest men in Congress. In his journal, Adams recorded a remark made by the New Yorker James Duane to the effect that Jefferson was “the greatest rubber off of dust” that Duane had ever met, and that he spoke French, Italian, and Spanish, and was working on German. The journal entry, dated October 25, 1775, was Adams’s first recorded mention of Jefferson.

Sensitive to Adams’s seniority and his importance in Congress — and possibly to Adams’s vanity — Jefferson was consistently deferential to him. Clearly, too, for all their differences, they had much in common, not the least of which was their love of words, of books, and serious scholarship. They were as widely read, as learned as any two men in Congress. A list of the favorite authors of either could have served for the other. They had read the same law, distinguished themselves at an early age in the same profession, though Jefferson had never relished the practice of law as Adams had, nor felt the financial need to keep at it.

They were men who loved noble endeavor, who shared a disdain for indolence, and hated wasting time. Jefferson’s devotion to home, to family, and his own native ground was quite as strong as Adams’s. When Jefferson spoke of “my country,” he usually meant Virginia, as Adams referred to Massachusetts as “my country.” The one was as proudly a Virginian as the other a Yankee. The stamp of their origins was strong on both, and neither would have acknowledged any better place on earth than his “country,” though neither, it is true, had yet seen much else. As Adams had never been farther south than Philadelphia, Jefferson had been no farther north than New York.

But in this, too, was the root of differences that ran deep and would prove long-lasting, for the reason that Massachusetts and Virginia were truly different countries. Indeed, it would be difficult for future generations to comprehend how much separated a man raised on a freeholder’s farm in coastal New England from a son of Virginia such as Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had been born to respectable wealth achieved by his father, Peter Jefferson, a man of rugged vitality, tobacco planter and surveyor, and to an unassailable place in the Virginia aristocracy through his mother, Jane, who was a Randolph. His landholdings in Albemarle County, mostly inherited from his father, exceeded 5,000 acres. But where Adams, at his farm by Penn’s Hill, lived very much like his father, and among the people of the town, Jefferson, very unlike his father or other Virginia planters, had removed to a mountaintop, removed from contact with everyday life, to create a palatial country seat of his own design in the manner of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

It was a bold undertaking that spoke of unusually cultivated taste and high ambition, and was made possible by the added wealth that came with his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow.

He had started the project at the age of twenty-five, in 1768. Still only partly built, it had the high, columned porticoes of a classic Italian villa and carried a name, Monticello, meaning “little mountain” in old Italian. He had contracted for 100,000 bricks, ordered specially made window frames from London, and in Philadelphia purchased the unexpired servitude of an indentured servant, a stonecutter, to do the columns. It was a house and setting such as John Adams had never seen or could ever have imagined as his own, any more than he could have imagined the scale of Jefferson’s domain. On his daily rounds by horseback, surveying his crops and fields, where as many as a hundred black slaves labored, Jefferson would commonly ride ten miles, as far as from Braintree to Boston, without ever leaving his own land. Further, he owned another 5,000-acre plantation to the southwest in Bedford County, an inheritance from his wife’s father.

Jefferson had been raised and educated as the perfect landed gentleman of Virginia. He knew no other way. His earliest childhood memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave and in countless ways he had been carried ever since by slaves, though they were never called that, but rather “servants” or “laborers.” It was not just that slaves worked his fields; they cut his firewood, cooked and served his meals, washed and ironed his linen, brushed his suits, nursed his children, cleaned, scrubbed, polished, opened and closed doors for him, saddled his horse, turned down his bed, waited on him hand and foot from dawn to dusk.

By 1776, with the addition of the land inherited from his father-in-law, Jefferson reckoned himself a wealthy man and lived like one. With the inheritance also came substantial debts and still more slaves, but then in Virginia this was seen as a matter of course. The whole economy and way of life were built on slaves and debt, with tobacco planters in particular dependent on slave labor and money borrowed from English creditors against future crops. John Adams, by contrast, had neither debts nor slaves and all his life abhorred the idea of either.

In keeping with his background, Adams was less than dazzled by the Virginia grandees. In Virginia, he would say, “all geese are swans.” Jefferson, for his part, knew little or nothing of New Englanders and counted none as friends. A man of cultivated, even fastidious tastes, Jefferson was later to tell his Virginia neighbor James Madison that he had observed in Adams a certain “want of taste,” this apparently in reference to the fact that Adams was known on occasion to chew tobacco and take his rum more or less straight.

Jefferson had been slower, more cautious and ambivalent than Adams about resolving his views on independence. As recently as August 1775, less than a year past, Jefferson had written to a Tory kinsman, John Randolph, of “looking with fondness towards a reconciliation with Great Britain.” He longed for the “return of the happy period when, consistently with duty, I may withdraw myself totally from the public stage, and pass the rest of my days in domestic ease and tranquillity, banishing every desire of afterwards even hearing what passes in the world.” But in the same letter he declared that “rather than submit to the right of legislating for us assumed by the British parliament and which late experience has shown they will so cruelly exercise, [I] would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.” His commitment now in the spring of 1776 was no less than Adams’s own. And it was because of their common zeal for independence, their wholehearted, mutual devotion to the common cause of America, and the certainty that they were taking part in one of history’s turning points, that the two were able to concentrate on the common purpose in a spirit of respect and cooperation, putting aside obvious differences, as well as others not so obvious and more serious than they could then have known.

Adams considered Jefferson his protégé at Philadelphia; Jefferson, impressed by Adams’s clarity and vigor in argument, his “sound head,” looked upon him as a mentor. They served on committees together, and as the pace quickened in the weeks after Jefferson’s arrival, they were together much of the time. As would be said, each felt the value of the other in the common task.

IF THERE WAS “a tide in the affairs of men,” as Abigail had reminded John, now was “the flood.” “Every post and every day rolls in upon us independence like a torrent,” he wrote on May 20.

Despite drenching rain, an open-air public meeting that day at the State House Yard drew a throng of thousands who listened as the May 15 resolve was read aloud, then voiced a demand vote for a new Pennsylvania constitution and a new legislature.

At week’s end, on Friday, May 24, General Washington arrived for two days of meetings with Congress to report his heightened concern for the situation at New York, where a British attack was expected any time. The King, it was now known, had hired some 17,000 German troops to fight in America. At New York, Washington had at most 7,000 men fit for duty.

Three days later came word that on May 15, the Virginia convention at Williamsburg had resolved unanimously to instruct the Virginia delegation at Philadelphia “to declare the United Colonies free and independent states.” An exultant John Adams wrote to Patrick Henry that the “natural course and order of things” was coming to pass at last. “The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than had prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.”

On Friday, June 7, at the State House, Richard Henry Lee rose to speak. Sunshine streamed through the high windows. Lee, slim and elegant, was a spirited orator who was said to practice his gestures before a mirror. In a hunting accident years before, he had lost the fingers of his left hand, which he kept wrapped in a black handkerchief, and this, with his lithe figure and aquiline nose, gave him a decidedly theatrical presence. The importance of the moment was understood by everyone in the room.

Resolved [Lee began]: . . . That these United Colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Adams immediately seconded the motion and the day following, Saturday, June 8, the debate began. Speaking in opposition, John Dickinson, James Wilson, Robert Livingston, and Edward Rutledge declared, according to notes kept by Jefferson, that while “friends of the measure,” they opposed any declaration of independence until “the voice of the people” drove them to it. Further, should Congress proceed before hearing the “voice,” then certain colonies “might secede from the union. . . .” It was the threat Dickinson in his anger had used earlier against Adams, but whether it was Dickinson speaking now, Jefferson did not record. Nor did he record what Adams, Lee, and George Wythe said, only that they declared public opinion to be ahead of Congress: that “the people wait for us to lead the way,” that the European powers would neither trade nor treat with the colonies until they established independence, that “the present [military] campaign may be unsuccessful, and therefore we had better propose an alliance while our affairs wear a hopeful aspect.” And that it was essential “to lose no time.”

Intense debate continued past dark. Candles were brought in. “The sensible part of the house opposed the motion,” wrote an irate Edward Rutledge. “No reason could be assigned for pressing into this measure, but the reason of every madman.”

On Monday, June 10, after President John Hancock reconvened the assembly, Rutledge and the “cool party” succeeded in having the final vote delayed for twenty days, until July 1, to allow delegates from the middle colonies time to send for new instructions. Nonetheless, it was agreed that no time be lost in preparing a declaration of independence. A committee was appointed, the Committee of Five, as it became known, consisting of Jefferson, Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin, who had by now returned from his expedition to Canada but was ill and exhausted and rarely seen.

On the floor above, meantime, in the Banqueting Hall of the State House, another revolution was transpiring as the Pennsylvania Assembly struggled over what instructions to give its delegation.

Adams, who had not written a word to Abigail in nearly two weeks, dashed off a letter saying, “Great things are on the tapis.”

JEFFERSON WAS TO DRAFT the declaration. But how this was agreed to was never made altogether clear. He and Adams would have differing explanations, each writing long after the fact.

According to Adams, Jefferson proposed that he, Adams, do the writing, but that he declined, telling Jefferson he must do it.

“Why?” Jefferson asked, as Adams would recount.

“Reasons enough,” Adams said.

“What can be your reasons?”

“Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.”

Jefferson would recall no such exchange. As Jefferson remembered, the committee simply met and unanimously chose him to undertake the draft. “I consented: I drew it [up].”

Possibly neither of their memories served, and possibly both were correct. Jefferson may well have been the choice of the committee and out of deference or natural courtesy, he may well have offered Adams the honor. If there is anything that seems not in keeping, it is the tone of Adams’s self-deprecation, which is more that of the old man he became than the Adams of 1776, who was anything but inadequate as a writer and who was by no means as unpopular as he later said. If he was thought “obnoxious,” it would have been only by a few, and only he himself is known to have used the word. In all the surviving record of official and private papers pertaining to the Continental Congress, there is only one member or eyewitness to events in Philadelphia in 1776 who wrote dis-paragingly of John Adams, and that was Adams writing long years afterward. As critical as he could be in his assessment of others, the man he was inclined to criticize most severely was himself. In fact, the respect he commanded at Philadelphia that spring appears to have been second to none.

Unquestionably, Adams did value Jefferson’s literary talents, but he knew also how much else he must attend to in the little time available, and the outcome of the “great question” was by no means certain. Already Adams was serving on twenty-three committees, and that same week was assigned to three more, including an all-important new Continental Board of War and Ordnance, of which he was to be the president.

That there would be political advantage in having the declaration written by a Virginian was clear, for the same reason there had been political advantage in having the Virginian Washington in command of the army. But be that as it may, Jefferson, with his “peculiar felicity of expression,” as Adams said, was the best choice for the task, just as Washington had been the best choice to command the Continental Army, and again Adams had played a key part. Had his contribution as a member of Congress been only that of casting the two Virginians in their respective, fateful roles, his service to the American cause would have been very great.

ALONE IN HIS UPSTAIRS PARLOR at Seventh and Market, Jefferson went to work, seated in an unusual revolving Windsor chair and holding on his lap a portable writing box, a small folding desk of his own design which, like the chair, he had had specially made for him by a Philadelphia cabinetmaker. Traffic rattled by below the open windows. The June days and nights turned increasingly warm.

He worked rapidly and, to judge by surviving drafts, with a sure command of his material. He had none of his books with him, nor needed any, he later claimed. It was not his objective to be original, he would explain, only “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft for a new Virginia constitution, but also from a declaration of rights for Virginia, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on June 12. It had been drawn up by George Mason, who wrote that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty.” And there was a pamphlet written by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, published in Philadelphia in 1774, that declared, “All men are, by nature equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.”

But then Mason, Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writers John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, or such English poets as Defoe (“When kings the sword of justice first lay down,/They are no kings, though they possess the crown./Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,/The good of subjects is the end of kings”). Or, for that matter, Cicero. (“The people’s good is the highest law.”)

Adams, in his earlier notes for an oration at Braintree, had written, “Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike. . . . The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man [kings included] to endanger public liberty.” The purpose of government, he had said in his recent Thoughts on Government, was the “greatest quantity of human happiness.”

What made Jefferson’s work surpassing was the grace and eloquence of expression. Jefferson had done superbly and in minimum time.

I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory with which it abounded [Adams would recall], especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant. . . . I thought the expression too passionate; and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.

A number of alterations were made, however, when Jefferson reviewed it with the committee, and several were by Adams. Possibly it was Franklin, or Jefferson himself, who made the small but inspired change in the second paragraph. Where, in the initial draft, certain “truths” were described as “sacred and undeniable,” a simpler, stronger “self-evident” was substituted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .

Adams had no doubt that there would be further changes called for and considerable debate over details and language once the declaration was submitted to Congress for approval. Still, he was confident enough about the draft that he laboriously transcribed the full text in his own hand, and later sent the copy to Abigail, who, understandably, thought he had written the Declaration.

THE PRESSURES OF RESPONSIBILITY grew greater for Adams almost by the hour. As head of the new Board of War, meeting every morning and evening, he was acutely aware of Washington’s distress at New York. Dispatch riders from the general’s headquarters brought repeated warnings that arms, lead, flints, medicines, and entrenching tools were all urgently needed. At Boston the troops were “almost mutinous in want of pay.” In Canada, where the remnants of an American army were still holding out, the situation was gravely compounded by the ravages of smallpox.

On June 15, the provincial legislature of New Jersey had ordered the arrest of its royal governor, William Franklin, the estranged, illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, and authorized its delegates in Congress to vote for independence. To see that this was done, five new New Jersey delegates had been appointed.

In Maryland, delegate Samuel Chase, who had earlier gone to Canada with Benjamin Franklin, was rounding up support for independence, as perhaps no one else could have. A huge, red-faced young man of inexhaustible energy, Chase refused to accept the dictum that Maryland’s delegates must vote down independence. “I have not been idle,” he reported to Adams.

As he had for months now, Adams struggled to keep a balance with the need, on one hand, for all possible haste, and the need, on the other, to keep from pushing too fast, forcing events too soon. Some things, some people, must not be hurried. Time and timing were both of the essence, now more than ever. Reminders of time passing were everywhere about him: the great clock ticking away on the outside wall of the State House; bells at night striking the hour; the “clarions” of a hundred roosters calling across town as he began his day at first light.

“What in the name of Common Sense are you gentlemen of the Continental Congress about?” demanded a constituent writing from Massachusetts. “Is it dozing?”

“The only question is concerning the proper time for making a specific declaration in words,” Adams replied.

Some people must have time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, and on the left, and then to think, and after all this to resolve. Others see at one intuitive glance into the past and the future, and judge with precision at once. But remember you can’t make thirteen clocks strike precisely alike at the same second.

No one in Congress had worked harder or done more to bring about a break with Britain. But it was the fact of independence more than the words on paper that concerned Adams, and especially for what it would do to unify the colonies and bring “spirit” to American military operations. Facts were “stubborn things,” he had once argued in defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, and as stubborn as any of the large facts bearing heavily on his mind now was “the bloody conflict we are destined to endure.”

On June 23 a conference of committees from every county in Pennsylvania declared that the delegates of Pennsylvania in Congress should vote for independence. “You see therefore,” Adams wrote to Samuel Chase, “that there is such a universal expectation that the great question will be decided the first of July. . . . to postpone it again would hazard convulsions and dangerous conspiracies.”

The birth of a new nation was at hand, perhaps truly, as Thomas Paine had written, a new world. “Solemn” was Adams’s word for the atmosphere in Congress.

CHAPTER THREE

COLOSSUS OF INDEPENDENCE

[His] power of thought and expression . . . moved us from our seats.

~Thomas Jefferson

I

MONDAY, JULY 1, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break. Adams, as usual, was out of bed before dawn. He dressed, wrote a long letter to a former delegate, Archibald Bulloch, who was the new president of Georgia, and following breakfast, walked to the State House, knowing what was in store. “This morning is assigned the greatest debate of all,” he had said in the letter. “A declaration, that these colonies are free and independent states, has been reported by a committee some weeks ago for that purpose, and this day or tomorrow is to determine its fate. May heaven prosper the newborn republic.”

He had wished Bulloch to know also that constant vigil was being kept for the arrival of the British at New York. “We are in daily expectation of an armament before New York, where, if it comes, the conflict may be bloody,” he warned. Words in debate were one thing, the war quite another, but to Adams independence and the war were never disjunctive.

The object is great which we have in view, and we must expect a great expense of blood to obtain it. But we should always remember that a free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate, as there is nothing on this side of Jerusalem of equal importance to mankind.

Presumably everything that could or need be said on the question of independence had been exhausted in Congress. Presumably, the question could be put and decided with little further ado. But it was not to be. John Dickinson had resolved to make one last appeal and Adams would be obliged to answer. They would rise to make their cases like the great lawyers they were, each summoning all his powers of reason and persuasion.

At ten o’clock, with the doors closed, John Hancock sounded the gavel. Richard Henry Lee’s prior motion calling for independence was again read aloud; the Congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole and “resumed consideration.” Immediately, Dickinson, gaunt and deathly pale, stood to be heard. With marked earnestness, he marshaled all past argument and reasoning against “premature” separation from Britain. “He had prepared himself apparently with great labor and ardent zeal,” Adams would recall admiringly. “He conducted the debate not only with great ingenuity and eloquence, but with equal politeness and candor.”

Though no one transcribed the speech, Dickinson’s extensive notes would survive. He knew how unpopular he had become, Dickinson began. He knew that by standing firm, as a matter of principle, he was almost certainly ending his career. “My conduct this day, I expect, will give the finishing blow to my once great . . . and now too diminished popularity. . . . But thinking as I do on the subject of debate, silence would be guilt.”

To proceed now with a declaration of independence, he said, would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”

When he sat down, all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the windows. No one spoke, no one rose to answer him, until Adams at last “determined to speak.”

He wished now as never in his life, Adams began, that he had the gifts of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, for he was certain none of them ever had before him a question of greater importance. Outside, the wind picked up. The storm struck with thunder, lightning, and pelting rain. In his schoolmaster days at Worcester, Adams had recorded how such storms “unstrung” him. Now he spoke on steadily, making the case for independence as he had so often before. He was logical, positive, sensitive to the historic importance of the moment, and, looking into the future, saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend.

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

No transcription was made, no notes were kept. There would be only Adams’s own recollections, plus those of several others who would remember more the force of Adams himself than any particular thing he said. That it was the most powerful and important speech heard in the Congress since it first convened, and the greatest speech of Adams’s life, there is no question.

To Jefferson, Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Recalling the moment long afterward, Adams would say he had been carried out of himself, “’carried out in spirit,’ as enthusiastic preachers sometimes express themselves.” To Richard Stockton, one of the new delegates from New Jersey, Adams was “the Atlas” of the hour, “the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency. . . . He it was who sustained the debate, and by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.”

Stockton and two other new delegates from New Jersey, Francis Hopkinson and the Reverend John Witherspoon, famous Presbyterian preacher and president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, had come into the chamber an hour or so after Adams had taken the floor and was nearly finished speaking. When they asked that Adams repeat what they had missed, he objected. He was not an actor there to entertain an audience, he said good-naturedly. But at the urging of Edward Rutledge, who told Adams that only he had the facts at his command, Adams relinquished and gave the speech a second time “in as concise a manner as I could, ‘til at length the New Jersey gentlemen said they were fully satisfied and ready for the question.” By then he had been on his feet for two hours.

Others spoke, including Witherspoon, the first clergyman to serve in Congress, whose manner of speech made plain his Scottish origins. In all, the debate lasted nine hours. At one point, according to Adams, Hewes of North Carolina, who had long opposed separation from Britain, “started suddenly upright, and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’”

But when later that evening a preliminary vote was taken, four colonies unexpectedly held back, refusing to proclaim independence. The all-important Pennsylvania delegation, despite popular opinion in Pennsylvania, stood with John Dickinson and voted no. The New York delegates abstained, saying they favored the motion but lacked specific instructions. South Carolina, too, surprisingly, voted no, while Delaware, with only two delegates present, was divided. The missing Delaware delegate was Caesar Rodney, one of the most ardent of the independence faction. Where he was or when he might reappear was unclear, but a rider had been sent racing off to find him.

When Edward Rutledge rescued the moment by moving that a final vote be postponed until the next day, implying that for the sake of unanimity South Carolina might change its mind, Adams and the others immediately agreed. For while the nine colonies supporting independence made a clear majority, it was hardly the show of solidarity that such a step ought to have.

The atmosphere that night at City Tavern and in the lodging houses of the delegates was extremely tense. The crux of the matter was the Pennsylvania delegation, for in the preliminary vote three of the seven Pennsylvania delegates had gone against John Dickinson and declared in the affirmative, and it was of utmost interest that one of the three, along with Franklin and John Morton, was James Wilson, who, though a friend and ally of Dickinson, had switched sides to vote for independence. The question now was how many of the rest who were in league with Dickinson would on the morrow continue, in Adams’s words, to “vote point blank against the known and declared sense of their constituents.”

To compound the tension that night, word reached Philadelphia of the sighting off New York of a hundred British ships, the first arrivals of a fleet that would number over four hundred.

THOUGH THE RECORD of all that happened the following day, Tuesday, July 2, is regrettably sparse, it appears that just as the doors to Congress were about to be closed at the usual hour of nine o’clock, Caesar Rodney, mud-spattered, “booted and spurred,” made his dramatic entrance. The tall, thin Rodney — the “oddest-looking man in the world,” Adams once described him — had been made to appear stranger still, and more to be pitied, by a skin cancer on one side of his face that he kept hidden behind a scarf of green silk. But, as Adams had also recognized, Rodney was a man of spirit, of “fire.” Almost unimaginably, he had ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote.

Yet more important even than the arrival of Rodney were two empty chairs among the Pennsylvania delegation. Refusing to vote for independence but understanding the need for Congress to speak with one voice, John Dickinson and Robert Morris had voluntarily absented themselves from the proceedings, thus swinging Pennsylvania behind independence by a vote of three to two. What private agreements had been made the night before, if any, who or how many had come to the State House that morning knowing what was afoot, no one recorded.

Outside, more rain threatened, and at about ten came another cloudburst like the day before. New York continued to abstain, but South Carolina, as hinted by Edward Rutledge, joined the majority to make the decision unanimous in the sense that no colony stood opposed. The vote went rapidly.

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same.

It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

Lest she judge him overly “transported,” he said he was well aware of the “toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration.” Still, the end was more than worth all the means. “You will see in a few days,” he wrote in the second letter, “a Declaration setting forth the causes, which have impelled us to this mighty revolution, and the reasons that will justify it in the sight of God and man.”

That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt. “It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever.” If the people now were to have “unbounded power,” and as the people were quite as capable of corruption as “the great,” and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, “in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.”

THE “BAR OF SECRECY” notwithstanding, the news spread rapidly through the city. “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States,” recorded a young artist newly established in Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale, exuberant over the news. The facts, wrote Elbridge Gerry, were as well known in the taverns and coffeehouses of the city as in Congress itself.

But there could be no pause. There was too much still to be done. Congress had to review and approve the language of the drafted declaration before it could be made official. Deliberations of a different kind commenced at once, continuing through the next morning, July 3, when mercifully the temperature had dropped ten degrees, broken by the storm of the previous day.

For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely. Seated beside Benjamin Franklin, the young Virginian looked on in silence. He is not known to have uttered a word in protest, or in defense of what he had written. Later he would describe the opposition to his draft as being like “the ceaseless action of gravity weighing upon us night and day.” At one point Franklin leaned over to tell him a story that, as a printer and publisher over so many years, he must have offered before as comfort to a wounded author. He had once known a hatter who wished to have a sign made saying, JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER, MAKES AND SELLS HATS FOR READY MONEY, this to be accompanied by a picture of a hat. But the man had chosen first to ask the opinion of friends, with the result that one word after another was removed as superfluous or redundant, until at last the sign was reduced to Thompson’s name and the picture of the hat.

Beyond its stirring preamble, most of the document before Congress was taken up with a list of grievances, specific charges against the King — “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. . . . He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny. . . .” And it was the King, “the Christian King of Great Britain,” Jefferson had emphasized, who was responsible for the horrors of the slave trade. As emphatic a passage as any, this on the slave trade was to have been the ringing climax of all the charges. Now it was removed in its entirety because, said Jefferson later, South Carolina and Georgia objected. Some northern delegates, too, were a “little tender” on the subject, “for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers. . . .”

In truth, black slavery had long since become an accepted part of life in all of the thirteen colonies. Of a total population in the colonies of nearly 2,500,000 people in 1776, approximately one in five were slaves, some 500,000 men, women, and children. In Virginia alone, which had the most slaves by far, they numbered more than 200,000. There was no member of the Virginia delegation who did not own slaves, and of all members of Congress at least a third owned or had owned slaves. The total of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves in 1776, as near as can be determined from his personal records, was about 200, which was also the approximate number owned by George Washington.

John Dickinson, who owned eleven African men and women, was understood to be Philadelphia’s second-largest slaveholder. Even Benjamin Franklin, who adamantly opposed slavery, had once owned two black house servants and had personally traded in slaves, buying and selling from his Market Street print shop. And though in recent years the Quakers of the city had been freeing more and more of their slaves, such notices as Franklin once published, offering “a likely wench about fifteen years old,” were still to be seen in Philadelphia newspapers. One appearing that July in the Pennsylvania Journal read:

TO BE SOLD: A large quantity of pine boards that are well seasoned. Likewise a Negro wench; she is to be disposed of for no fault, but only that she is present with child, she is about 20 years old . . . and is fit for either town or country business.

The president of Congress, John Hancock, had only in recent years freed the last of the slaves who were part of his lavish Boston household, and it was well known, as Jefferson said, that New Englanders had been “considerable carriers” in the lucrative slave trade. At one point, earlier in the century, approximately half the tonnage of New England shipping had been in transporting slaves, and the port of Boston prospered from the trade.

But it was also New Englanders who had assailed slavery in the most vehement terms. As early as 1700, before Jefferson or anyone in Congress was born, Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston, an eminent Puritan known for his role as a judge in the Salem witch trials, had declared in a tract called The Selling of Joseph, that “all men, as they are sons of Adam . . . have equal right unto liberty,” and saw no justification, moral or economic, for making property of human beings. Slavery was evil. Of the slave trade, he wrote: “How horrible is the uncleanness, immorality, if not murder, that the ships are guilty of that bring crowds of these miserable men and women.”

James Otis, in his famous speech on writs of assistance in 1761, had called for the immediate liberation of the slaves. “The colonists [of Massachusetts] are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are white and black. . . . Does it follow that it is the right to enslave a man because he is black?” When Samuel Adams and his wife were presented with a black slave girl as a gift in 1765, they had immediately set her free.

Of John Adams’s circle in Philadelphia, the one to have taken the most assertive stand against slavery was the young physician Benjamin Rush, who from the time of the First Congress had been as close to all that went on as anyone not a delegate could have been and who, in another few weeks, would himself be elected to Congress, as one of the new Pennsylvania delegation. Rush — high-spirited, handsome, and all of thirty — had studied medicine in Edinburgh and in London, where he came to know Benjamin Franklin and once dined with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Overflowing with energy and goodwill, he was ardent for reform of all kinds: smallpox inoculation for the poor, humane care for the insane, reform of the penal code, but especially for the abolition of slavery. In 1773, Rush had published a pamphlet attacking slavery, and in 1774, the year the First Congress convened, he had helped organize the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He had appealed to the clergy to recognize slavery as a sin, and urged all legislators, “ye advocates for American liberty,” to work for the liberty of blacks as well. The eyes of the world were watching, Rush charged. Yet he himself owned a slave.

On first meeting, Adams and Rush had misjudged each other. Adams thought Rush “a sprightly, pretty fellow,” but “too much a talker to be a deep thinker,” while Rush found Adams “cold and reserved.” But they had quickly changed their minds, discovering much in common besides the love of talk. Like Adams, Rush was without affectation and unafraid to speak his mind, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. (Prudence, he was fond of saying, “is a rascally virtue.”) Like Jefferson, the young physician seemed to take limitless interest in nearly everything under the sun.

Adams and Rush were of the same mind on slavery. Adams was utterly opposed to slavery and the slave trade and, like Rush, favored a gradual emancipation of all slaves. That it was, at the least, inconsistent for slave owners to be espousing freedom and equality was not lost on Adams, any more than on others on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In London, Samuel Johnson, who had no sympathy for the American cause, had asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Abigail, in her letters that spring, had questioned whether the passion for liberty could be “equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs,” and had earlier pondered whether the agonies of pestilence and war could be God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.

In time, Adams and Jefferson would each denounce slavery. Jefferson was to write of the degrading effects of the institution on both slave and master. Adams would call slavery a “foul contagion in the human character.” In years past, as an attorney, Adams had appeared in several slave cases for the owner, never the slave, but he had no use for slavery. He never owned a slave as a matter of principle, nor hired the slaves of others to work on his farm, as was sometimes done in New England. He was to declare unequivocally in later years that “Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude,” and like Abigail, he felt this at the time.

But neither he nor any other delegate in Congress would have let the issue jeopardize a declaration of independence, however strong their feelings. If Adams was disappointed or downcast over the removal of Jefferson’s indictment of the slave trade, he seems to have said nothing at the time. Nor is it possible to know the extent of Jefferson’s disappointment, or if the opposition of South Carolina and Georgia was truly as decisive as he later claimed. Very possibly there were many delegates, from North and South, happy to see the passage omitted for the reason that it was so patently absurd to hold the King responsible for horrors that, everyone knew, Americans — and Christians no less than the King — had brought on themselves. Slavery and the slave trade were hardly the fault of George III, however ardently Jefferson wished to fix the blame on the distant monarch.

Of more than eighty changes made in Jefferson’s draft during the time Congress deliberated, most were minor and served to improve it. The King’s conduct was called one of “repeated” rather than “unremitting” injuries. The accusation that the King had “suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states” was edited to a simpler “He has obstructed the administration of justice.”

But one final cut toward the conclusion was as substantial nearly as the excise of the passage on the slave trade, and it appears to have wounded Jefferson deeply.

To the long list of indictments against the King, he had added one assailing the English people, “our British brethren,” as a further oppressor, for allowing their Parliament and their King “to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” And therein, Jefferson charged, was the heart of the tragedy, the feeling of betrayal, the “common blood” cause of American outrage. “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever these unfeeling brethren,” he had written. “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.”

This most emotional passage of all was too much for many in Congress, and to it Jefferson had added a final poignant note: “We might have been a free and great people together.” Nearly all of this was removed. There was to be no mention of a “last stab,” or “love,” or of the “free and great people” that might have been. Nor was there to be any mention of Scottish mercenaries, James Wilson and John Witherspoon both being Scots.

To no one’s surprise, Adams did not sit silently by. He was present every hour, “fighting fearlessly for every word,” as Jefferson would write.

No man better merited than Mr. John Adams to hold a most conspicuous place in the design. He was the pillar of its support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults encountered.

Finally, to Jefferson’s concluding line was added the phrase “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” an addition that Adams assuredly welcomed. Thus it would read:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

But it was to be the eloquent lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration that would stand down the years, affecting the human spirit as neither Jefferson nor anyone could have foreseen. And however much was owed to the writings of others, as Jefferson acknowledged, or to such editorial refinements as those contributed by Franklin or Adams, they were, when all was said and done, his lines. It was Jefferson who had written them for all time:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

IN LATER YEARS the excessive summer heat of Philadelphia would frequently figure in accounts of Thursday, July 4, 1776. In fact, the day, like the one before, was pleasantly cool and comfortable. In Congress, discussion of the Declaration appears to have continued through the morning until about eleven o’clock, when debate was closed and the vote taken. Again, as on July 2, twelve colonies voted in the affirmative, while New York abstained. Again, John Dickinson was absent. It all went very smoothly.

Congress ordered that the document be authenticated and printed. But it would be another month before the engrossed copy was signed by the delegates. For now, only the President, John Hancock, and the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, fixed their signatures.

With passage of the Declaration of Independence thus completed, and having thereby renounced allegiance to the King and proclaimed the birth of a new United States of America, the Congress proceeded directly to other business. Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776. Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer that he purchased at John Sparhawk’s London Bookshop for a handsome 3 pounds, 15 shillings.

But by the following morning, the fifth, printer John Dunlap had broadside editions available and the delegates were busy sending copies to friends. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the full text on its first page.

The great day of celebration came Monday, July 8, at noon in the State House Yard, when the Declaration was read aloud before an exuberant crowd. With drums pounding, five battalions paraded through the city and “on the common, gave us the feu de joie [thirteen cannon blasts], notwithstanding the scarcity of powder,” as Adams recorded. Bells rang through the day and into the night. There were bonfires at street corners. Houses were illuminated with candles in their windows. In the Supreme Court Room at the State House, as planned, a half dozen Philadelphians chosen for the honor took the King’s Arms down from the wall and carried it off to be thrown on top of a huge fire and consumed in an instant, the blaze lighting the scene for blocks around.

“Fine starlight, pleasant evening,” recorded Adams’s friend Christopher Marshall. “There were bonfires, ringing bells, with other great demonstrations of joy upon the unanimity and agreement of the Declaration.” Another Philadelphia patriot, Charles Biddle, a wealthy merchant who had joined the crowd in the State House Yard to hear the Declaration read, recorded only that he had seen “very few respectable people present.”

As mounted messengers carried the news beyond Philadelphia, celebrations broke out everywhere. In New York the next day, the Declaration was read aloud to Washington’s assembled troops, and it was that night, at the foot of Broadway, that a roaring crowd pulled down the larger-than-life equestrian statue of George III. As in Philadelphia, drums rolled, bonfires burned, prayers were said, and toasts raised in town after town, North and South. When the news finally reached Savannah, Georgia, in August, it set off a day-long celebration during which the Declaration was read four times in four different public places and the largest crowd in the history of the province gathered for a mock burial of King George III. The feeling was that the air had been cleared at last. “The Declaration,” said the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, “must give new spring to all our affairs.”

The actual signing of the document would not take place until Friday, August 2, after a fair copy had been elegantly engrossed on a single, giant sheet of parchment by Timothy Matlack, assistant to the secretary of Congress. Nothing was reported of the historic event. As with everything transacted within Congress, secrecy prevailed. To judge by what was in the newspapers and the correspondence of the delegates, the signing never took place.

In later years, Jefferson would entertain guests at Monticello with descriptions of black flies that so tormented the delegates, biting through their silk hose, that they had hurried the signing along as swiftly as possible. But at the time Jefferson wrote nothing of the occasion, nor did John Adams. In old age, trying to reconstruct events of that crowded summer, both men would stubbornly and incorrectly insist that the signing took place July 4.

Apparently there was no fuss or ceremony on August 2. The delegates simply came forward in turn and fixed their signatures. Also, a number of the most important figures in Congress were absent — Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, Oliver Wolcott, Elbridge Gerry — and would sign later. A new representative from New Hampshire, Matthew Thornton, who had not been a member when the Declaration was passed, would add his name in November, and Thomas McKean of Delaware appears not to have signed until January 1777, which made him the last.

Like the others, Adams and Jefferson each signed with his own delegation, Adams on the right, in a clear and firm, plain hand, Jefferson at lower center with a signature more precise and elegant, but equally legible.

The fact that a signed document now existed, as well as the names of the signatories, was kept secret for the time being, as all were acutely aware that by taking up the pen and writing their names, they had committed treason, a point of considerably greater immediacy now, with the British army so near at hand.

Whether Benjamin Franklin quipped “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately” is impossible to know, just as there is no way to confirm the much-repeated story that the diminutive John Hancock wrote his name large so the King might read it without his spectacles. But the stories endured because they were in character, like the remark attributed to Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island. Hopkins, who suffered from palsy, is said to have observed, on completing his spidery signature, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

The most encouraging result of the decision for independence was its almost immediate effect on “spirit,” within Congress and among the people, but also among the rank-and-file militia. “The Declaration of Independence has produced a new era in this part of America,” wrote Benjamin Rush, who had since taken his place in Congress in time to be a “signer.” “The militia of Pennsylvania seem to be actuated with a spirit more than Roman. Near 2,000 citizens of Philadelphia have lately marched to New York.” Such influence as the Declaration had had would have been “inconceivable” earlier. To Abigail, Adams wrote of the “gallant spirit prevailing in these middle colonies,” and described the militia turning out in “great numbers and in high spirits.” Samuel Adams, to whom the Declaration was “the decisive measure,” wished only that it had come sooner.

Even those in Congress who had been so ardently opposed, now, by word or deed, committed themselves to the “Glorious Revolution.” Robert Morris continued in his duties without pause, working as strenuously as anyone. “I think an individual that declines the service of his country because its councils are not comfortable to his ideas makes a bad subject,” he wrote, still unable to see himself as other than a “subject.” John Dickinson, though ill and exhausted from the strain of the past weeks, departed at the head of the first troops to march out of the city to join in the defense of New Jersey, a scene that made a deep impression on many, including John Adams. “Mr. Dickinson’s alacrity and spirit,” he told Abigail, “certainly becomes his character and sets a fine example.”

II

THE SHIPS FLYING the Union Jack that arrived off New York at the end of June 1776 — the fleet from Halifax that one eyewitness described as looking like “all London afloat” — had been only the start of an overwhelming show of British might come to settle the fate of the new United States of America.

By July 3, 9,000 troops led by General William Howe had landed on Staten Island, where hundreds of Tories were on hand to welcome them. Howe himself had gone ashore on July 2, the very day that Congress had voted for independence, and in the days following, up the Narrows between Staten Island and Long Island, came ever more British sails, including an armada of 130 warships and transports from England under command of the general’s brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe. By mid-August, 32,000 fully equipped, highly trained, thoroughly professional British and German (Hessian) soldiers — more than the entire population of Philadelphia — were ashore on Staten Island, supported by ten ships-of-the-line and twenty frigates, making in all the largest, most costly British overseas deployment ever until that time.

By contrast, the American army gathered in defense of New York, digging in on Manhattan and Long Island, was optimistically thought to number 20,000 troops, these nearly all poorly equipped amateurs led by Washington, who in his year as commander-in-chief had yet to fight a battle. From Long Island, one of Washington’s ablest divisional commanders, Nathanael Greene, wrote to tell John Adams that in reality the American force might number 9,000; and as Adams knew, they had no naval support — not a single available warship or transport. When, on July 12, with the wind and tide in their favor, the British sent two men-of-war up the Hudson River to demonstrate who had control, there was nothing to stop them. As the huge ships passed upstream, American militia stood gawking onshore, which evoked an angry general order from Washington declaring such “unsoldierly conduct” could only give the enemy a low opinion of the American army.

From the flow of dispatches arriving at the War Office in Philadelphia, Adams was more aware of the situation than anyone in Congress and he was miserable, thinking about the consequences of a defeat at New York. He had not wanted the responsibility of heading the Board of War and felt “vastly unequal” to the multitude of problems and decisions to be grappled with. But it was also clear that they were all unequal to the task. No one in Congress was qualified. “We are all inexperienced in this business,” he emphasized to Nathanael Greene.

The War Office consisted of rented space two blocks from the State House on Market Street. To a board of five members of Congress — Adams, Harrison, Rutledge, Sherman, and Wilson — fell the burden of virtually running the war. They were responsible for ordnance and fortifications, for appointing and promoting officers, for recruitment of enlisted men and raising rifle companies, for pay, provisions, and for somehow resolving the constant demand for flints, saltpeter and gunpowder, horses, wagons, tents, shoes, soap, and blankets. They dispatched ship carpenters where needed, appointed chaplains, and faced the incessant day-to-day frustrations of bickering, jealousies, and corruption. It was arduous, thankless work. He must be “very exactly and minutely acquainted with the state of every regiment,” Adams was lectured by General Horatio Gates. And as all decisions required the approval of Congress, it was for the Board to prepare the reports on which to vote. It would be resolved that five tons of powder be sent to Williamsburg; or that British prisoners be moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania; or that new positions of drum major and fife major be created; or that special commissioners be appointed to audit the accounts of the army of New York.

There were the ever-vexing complications of dealing in various colonial currencies of differing value, and the increasing worry over inflation and the fate of the new Continental money, the unbacked paper currency being produced in Philadelphia in steadily greater quantity. (One Nathan Sellers, a scrivener whose job it was to sign every bill by hand, recorded signing 4,800 bills in a single day that July.) “If that [the Continental currency] suffers in its credit, the Cause must suffer,” Adams warned. “If that fails, the Cause must fail.”

One of the committee assignments he shared with Jefferson was the Committee on Spies, charged with, among other things, drawing up a set of Articles of War — regulations and rules of discipline for the army. Knowing discipline to be a difficult and unpopular subject, Adams had recommended that they present a complete system at once and “let it meet its fate.” And since, in his view, there was but one system of merit, that which had “carried two empires to the head of mankind,” the Roman and the British (the second being drawn directly from the first), he recommended a straight-on borrowing of the British Articles of War, with only a few modifications. According to Adams, writing years later, “Jefferson in those days never failed to agree with me in everything of a political nature, and he very cordially concurred in this.” But by midsummer the matter of the Articles of War had been passed over to the Board of War and had still to be considered by Congress.

Strongly opposed to the existing policy of short-term enlistments, Adams declared himself adamantly in favor of a regular army. But of his many worries the greatest was disease. Responding to the medical theories of young Dr. Rush, he pleaded for greater cleanliness among the troops. Smallpox worried him most of all. Smallpox was the “King of Terrors,” the enemy to be feared more than any other. “Smallpox! Smallpox! What shall we do with it?” he asked Abigail. In a dispatch of July 11, Washington reported that an outbreak of smallpox in Boston had infected some of the troops and that every precaution was being taken to prevent the spread of infection to New York.

Adams’s labors on the Board of War began usually at six in the morning and continued until nine, then resumed again in the evening. Between times, he was in the thick of debate in Congress over the Articles of Confederation. He knew it to be work of the greatest importance, but the strain was beginning to take a toll. He needed rest and for the first time hinted to Abigail the possibility of a “furlow.”

Then, on July 16, came a letter from Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, reporting that Abigail, acting on her own, had decided that she and the children must be inoculated for smallpox. They had come to Boston to undergo the treatment, Smith himself having provided his large house on Court Street for their time of isolation.

Adams was beside himself. “Never — never in my life, had I so many cares upon my mind at once,” he wrote to her. Under any other circumstances he would leave for Boston at once. As it was, he had no choice — he could only pray for their health. “I cannot leave this place, without more injury to the public now, than I ever could at any other time, being in the midst of scenes of business, which must not stop for anything.”

Her letter of explanation, written July 13, did not reach Philadelphia for another week. Because of the outbreak of smallpox in Boston, thousands of people had come in from the surrounding countryside to be inoculated. It was there, in Boston, that smallpox inoculation had been introduced in America more than half a century earlier, and by a kinsman of Adams, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, Adams’s great uncle on his mother’s side. The idea had come from a slave belonging to Cotton Mather, an African named Onesimus, who had said the practice was long established in Africa, where those with the courage to use it were made immune, and he had his own scar on his arm to show. The technique, the same as still practiced by Dr. Boylston, was to make a small incision, then with a quill scoop the “pus from the ripe pustules” of a smallpox patient into the open cut. A generally mild case of smallpox would result, yet the risk of death was relatively slight. The ordeal of the patient, however, could be considerable, as Adams knew from all he had seen at the time he was inoculated, and largely because of various purges that were thought essential to recovery.

“Such a spirit of inoculation” had never been known, Abigail reported. “The town and every house in it are as full as they can hold.”

She and the children were part of a family contingent numbering seventeen that included the Cranches and their three children, Abigail’s sister Elizabeth, a three-year-old daughter of brother William Smith, named Louisa, whom Abigail had taken under her wing, three servants, and two cousins — Cotton Tufts, Jr., and John Thaxter, Jr., a former law clerk of Adams’s who had lately become the tutor for the Adams children.

We had our bedding, etc. to bring [Abigail wrote]. A cow we have driven down from B[raintree] and some hay I have had put into the stable, wood, etc., and we have really commenced housekeepers here. . . . Our little one [three-year-old Thomas] stood the operation manfully. . . . I wish it was so you could have been with us, but I submit.

“The little folks are very sick then and puke every morning, but after that they are comfortable,” she continued. Now especially, he must keep writing to her. “Every expression of tenderness is a cordial to my heart. Unimportant as they are to the rest of the world, to me they are everything.”

Though she herself was well enough to turn out on July 18 for Boston’s celebration for the Declaration of Independence, the children’s ordeal went on. The stay in her uncle’s house would last nearly two months. “Nabby has enough of the smallpox for all the family beside,” Abigail would report. “She is pretty well covered, not a spot of what is so sore that she can neither walk, sit, stand, or lay with any comfort.” The pustules were the size of a large pea. Another time she would write of six-year-old Charles burning with fever and going into a delirium that lasted forty-eight hours.

In a letter to Isaac Smith, expressing his gratitude for all Smith was doing for his family, Adams said he would leave for Boston immediately if he could, but could not “in honor and duty to the public stir from this place. . . . We are in hourly expectation of some important event at New York.” Writing to Abigail, he told her how proud he was of her for what she had done. He wished the whole populace could be inoculated. Yet he could not help being on “tenterhooks.” It had taken ten days for her letter to reach him and heaven only knew what might have transpired in the interval.

It was the paradox of their lives that, as much as his public role kept them apart, he always needed to be with Abigail and she with him. They would never become accustomed to being separated. “I can do nothing without you,” he was to tell her one way or another, time and again, and always from the heart. She would have him no other way than he was; she believed fervently in what he was doing, encouraged him in the role, and wished no other for him; she wanted him to be where he was doing his utmost for the country. And still she desperately wanted him with her. Each worried incessantly about the other’s health and well-being, at times to the point of making themselves ill.

With sickness all about her now, Abigail sensed from John’s letters that something was amiss with him. “Not one word respecting yourself,” she wrote. “My anxiety for your welfare will never leave me but with my parting breath, ‘tis of more importance to me than all this world contains besides.”

Her suspicions were justified. By late July it had been six months since he and Joseph Bass had set off in the snow from Braintree, and the effect of the work, and unrelieved pressure, of too little sleep, no exercise, and increasing worries over her, had caught up with him. In fact, the whole Massachusetts delegation was in a bad way. Elbridge Gerry, sick and exhausted, had already departed for home. John Hancock was beset by gout. Robert Treat Paine, racked by a cough, seldom appeared in Congress. Samuel Adams was “completely worn out.”

On July 25, having received no further news from Boston, Adams addressed a letter to the General Court of Massachusetts requesting a leave of absence, and to James Warren, who as Speaker of the General Court could help arrange such a leave, he declared, “My face is grown pale, my eyes weak and inflamed, my nerves tremulous, my mind as weak as water.” He suffered “feverous heats by day and sweats by night,” an infallible symptom, he was sure, of an approaching collapse. “I know better than anybody what my constitution will bear and what it will not,” he told Warren, “and you may depend upon it, I have already tempted it beyond prudence and safety.”

Philadelphia’s customary steamy summer had returned in force. On a particularly sweltering Sunday, July 28, during which he appears never to have left his Market Street lodgings, Thomas Jefferson checked his thermometer no less than fourteen times, dutifully recording every reading, from a low of 76¾ at six-twenty in the morning to a high of 85 by midafternoon. At ten that night it was still 79¼.

Jefferson, too, was desperate to be gone. He was concerned about his wife and, like many in Congress, he continued to believe the war would be of short duration. The following day he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, who had been absent since mid-June, pleading for Lee to return and relieve him.

“For God’s sake, for your country’s sake, and for my sake, come,” he implored. “I receive by every post such accounts of the state of Mrs. Jefferson’s health that it will be impossible for me to disappoint her expectation of seeing me at the time promised.”

Jefferson hoped to be home by mid-August, and had no intention of returning to Congress. The nature of his wife’s ailment, however, was never explained. What expressions of worry or affection or frustration, what details of his own health he confided in the privacy of his letters to Martha Jefferson, or she to him, were not to be known, as he would one day, for reasons he never expressed, burn all their correspondence.

Earlier that spring in Virginia, Jefferson had himself suffered a severe breakdown following the sudden death of his mother. Excruciating headaches had kept him bedridden for weeks. Jefferson’s feelings for his mother are difficult to gauge. He is not known to have ever expressed affection for her, and of her death he wrote all of one sentence, notable for its brevity and absence of the least sentiment. “My mother died at 8 o’clock this morning in the 57th year of her age,” was all he chose to record. Possibly it was a deeply private love for his mother and the shock of her death coming so suddenly that explained his collapse. Or possibly it was worry over his wife’s illness, or the stress of revolutionary politics. But there was no mistaking the intensity of his suffering. It had been necessary to delay his return to Congress for nearly six weeks.

Now, to his friend John Page, Jefferson wrote that it was only with “great pain” that he remained in Philadelphia.

• • •

WWHILE THE BOARD OF WAR consumed much of Adams’s time and energy, he was nonetheless in the thick of discussion and debate over the most pressing issue before Congress, the proposed “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” With independence proclaimed, confederation — a working union of the colonies — had become the focus of “spirit” animating the delegates. Union was as essential as independence, nearly all contended — indeed, more important in the view of many — and the issues to be resolved were formidable.

Strict secrecy prevailed, much to Adams’s disapproval. There was theory and there was practice in government, and Adams, the delegate who, as Rush said, could see “the whole subject at a glance,” was determined that with theory now so eloquently proclaimed, practice be attended with equal diligence, and he wanted nothing about the deliberations to be concealed. In Massachusetts the idea of galleries for the public to watch the legislature was the custom. When Wilson of Pennsylvania, who agreed with him, moved that the doors be opened, galleries erected, or that Congress adjourn to some public building where the people might be accommodated, Adams enthusiastically seconded the motion, but to no avail.

As things were, Congress had no real legal authority. It could only pass resolutions, not laws. Having thus far dealt primarily with the “minutiae” of a plan for confederation, the delegates, by late July, had gotten down to the “great points of representation, boundaries, and taxation,” in Jefferson’s words; and as Josiah Bartlett wrote with New Hampshire understatement, “the sentiments of the members [were] very different on many of the articles.” Nor was progress ever easy. “I find,” wrote Rush, who had been in Congress all of a few weeks, “there is a great deal of difference between sporting a sentiment in a letter, or over a glass of wine upon politics, and discharging properly the duties of a senator.”

To Adams, as he explained to Abigail, there were two especially knotty problems:

If a confederation should take place, one great question is how shall we vote? Whether each colony shall count one? Or whether each shall have a weight in proportion to its numbers, or wealth, or exports or imports, or a compound ratio of all?

Another is whether Congress shall have authority to limit the dimensions of each colony, to prevent those which claim, by charter, or proclamation, or commission to the South Sea [the Pacific Ocean], from growing too great and powerful, so as to be dangerous to the rest.

More than that he felt he could not tell her, and for three days, July 30, 31, and August 1, Adams was engaged in passionate debate over the first of these problems.

As it stood, according to Article 17 of the proposed plan, each colony, irrespective of population or wealth, was to have one vote in deciding all questions concerning the confederation. Thirteen separate states would have thirteen equal votes, a concept Adams strongly opposed. He advocated voting in proportion to population, which was not surprising for someone from Massachusetts, one of the most populated and wealthy states. But he spoke more as an American than a New Englander. The individuality of the colonies was “a mere sound,” he said, according to Jefferson’s notes. “The confederacy is to make us one individual only; it is to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass. We shall no longer retain our separate individuality, but become a single individual as to all questions submitted to the confederacy.”

Speaking for the small colonies, Hopkins of Rhode Island pointed out that the four largest would contain more than half the inhabitants of the confederacy and would thus govern the others as they pleased. But Benjamin Rush, in an eloquent first speech in Congress, declared, “The more a man aims at serving America the more he serves his colony.” “We have been too free with the word independence. We are dependent on each other — not totally independent states. . . . When I entered that door, I considered myself a citizen of America.”

With Franklin and Wilson, Rush moved that the vote be in proportion to numbers, insisting further that only freemen should be counted and that this would have the “excellent effect” of inducing the colonies to discourage slavery.

Jefferson was among those who remained silent, and the issue was not to be resolved then or for a long time to come. But on the second knotty problem, that concerning Virginia’s claim that her boundaries extended to “the South Sea,” which was debated August 2, the same day as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson did speak up to say he protested the right of Congress to decide upon the right of Virginia.

• • •

THE TENSION GREW EXTREME. John wrote to Abigail of being in constant “suspense, uncertainty, and anxiety” about the army at New York, and about “my best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in this world and all my children.”

Even if he were granted a leave of absence, it would not come soon. Things being what they were, perhaps it would be better if she came to Philadelphia. If she were beside him, Adams wrote, he could stay on indefinitely, “proud and happy as a bridegroom.” But thinking better of it, he decided she should inquire about horses to bring him home. “If Bass is in the land of the living, and is willing to take one more ride with his old friend, let him come.”

Low in spirits, feeling misjudged and unappreciated by others in Congress, some of whom, he was sure, mistook his ardor for ambition, he succumbed to brooding and self-pity. Nobody understood him. “I have a very tender feeling heart,” he wrote. “This country knows not, and never can know the torments I have endured for its sake.” He would rather build stone walls upon Penn’s Hill than hold the highest office in government, he told her, as though he believed every word.

His view of the prospects at New York grew steadily darker. “May Heaven grant us victory, if we deserve it,” he prayed, “if not, patience, humility, and persistence under defeat.”

But sensitive to Abigail’s own anxiety and the long days of her confinement in Boston, he began writing at greater length and more frequently than he had, filling pages with his thoughts on a great variety of subjects, conscious that the mixture was often quite odd. Her pleasure in such letters was boundless. “I know not how you find the time amidst such a multitude of cares as surround you,” she wrote. “I am really astonished at looking over the number [of letters] I have received during this month. . . . I hope ‘tis your amusement and relaxation from care to be thus employed. It has been a feast to me.”

A large wall map at the State House inspired a letter given over entirely to geography. (The Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto, by Henry Popple, measured nearly eight by eight feet, and was so detailed it even marked Braintree, spelled “Bantry.”) As a branch of knowledge, geography was “absolutely necessary to every person of public character,” and to every child, Adams declared. “Really there ought not to be a state, a city, a promontory, a river, a harbor, an inlet or a mountain in all America, but what should be intimately known to every youth who has any pretensions to liberal education.”

A sermon preached one Sunday by an unknown southern Baptist minister led to an extended essay on New England and southern preachers, the benefits of travel and education, Adams’s own ambition to establish a Boston Philosophical Society, and concluded with a consideration of the shortcomings of his fellow New Englanders, in which he was also writing about himself.

My countrymen want art and address. They want knowledge of the world. They want the exterior and superficial accomplishments of gentlemen upon which the world has foolishly set so high a value. In solid abilities and real virtues they vastly excel in general any people upon this continent. Our N[ew] England people are awkward and bashful; yet they are pert, ostentatious and vain, a mixture which excites ridicule and gives disgust. They have not the faculty of showing themselves to best advantage, nor the act of concealment of this faculty. An art and faculty which some people possess in the highest degree. Our deficiencies in these respects are owing wholly to the little intercourse we have had with strangers, and to our inexperience in the world. These imperfections must be remedied, for New England must produce the heroes, the statesmen, the philosophers, or America will be no great figure for some time.

He wrote of Benjamin Rush as the very model of a member of the American Philosophical Society, and described a rare moment away from the cares of Congress, a visit he had made to the studio of Charles Willson Peale on Arch Street, where he had had the pleasure of seeing portraits by Peale of Washington, Franklin, the young wife of Benjamin Rush, and various members of Peale’s large family. Peale, a new star in the Philadelphia firmament, young, gifted, gregarious, was also a wholehearted patriot who only days earlier had signed on as a common soldier in a company of local militia. “He is ingenious,” Adams wrote. “He has vanity, loves finery, wears a sword, gold lace, speaks French, is capable of friendship, and strong family attachments, and natural affections.”

Adams was drawn particularly to a painting Peale had begun several years earlier following the death of a daughter who, like Adams’s own Susanna, had died in infancy. “He showed me one moving picture. His wife, all bathed in tears, with a child about six months old, laid out upon her lap. This picture struck me prodigiously.”

Encouraged by Adams’s interest, Peale brought out books for him to see, showed him his sketches of Virginia plantation houses where he had stayed, including Washington’s Mount Vernon. “He showed me several imitations of heads, which he had made in clay, as large as life, with his hands only. Among the rest, one of his own head and face, which was a very great likeness.” Adams was delighted. How he wished he had the time and “tranquility of mind” for “these elegant and ingenious arts of painting, sculpture, statuary, architecture, and music.”

But if Peale’s portraits were all “very well done,” he told Abigail, they were not so accomplished as those by John Singleton Copley, a view he knew would please her, since two particularly fine examples of Copley’s work, companion portraits of Isaac Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, hung in the house where she was confined. “Copley,” Adams assured her, “is the greatest master that ever was in America.”

Writing of her days in the Smith house, Abigail told him she had discovered the joy of a room of her own. She had never coveted anything until now. It was a small room of her aunt’s with a “pretty desk,” bookshelves, and a window overlooking a garden. She wrote all her letters there, she explained, and kept his letters to her “unmolested” by anyone.

Here, I say, I have amused myself in reading and thinking of my absent friend, sometimes with a mixture of pain, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes anticipating a joyful and happy meeting, whilst my heart would bound and palpitate with the pleasing idea, and with the purest affection I have held you to my bosom ‘til my whole soul has dissolved in tenderness and my pen fallen from my hand.

How often do I reflect with pleasure that I hold in possession a heart equally warm with my own, and fully as susceptible of the tenderest impressions, and who even now whilst he is reading here, feels all I describe.

“I must leave my pen to recover myself and write in another strain,” she went on. “I wish for peace and tranquility. All my desires and all my ambition is to be esteemed and loved by my partner, to join with him in the education and instruction of our little ones, to set under our own vines in peace, liberty, and safety.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, she said there was an odd report circulating in Braintree that he had been poisoned.

EARLY ON THURSDAY, August 22, an exceptionally clear, bright day in New York, the British commenced their invasion of Long Island. In wave after wave, first in small boats, then transports, 15,000 English, Scottish, and Hessian troops were rowed across the Narrows from Staten Island to land without opposition on the broad shoreline near Gravesend, eight miles to the rear of the American stronghold on Brooklyn Heights.

A violent storm the night before had cleared the air. The wind was out of the north. Everything sparkled in sunlight. An aide to Admiral Richard Lord Howe described the spectacle of a fleet “of above 300 ships and vessels with their sails open to dry, the sun shining clear upon them,” of the green, wooded hills and meadows of Long Island, and the calm surface of the water as “one of the finest and most picturesque scenes that imagination can fancy”; and to this was added “the vast importance of the business and of the motions of the day.”

Contrary to basic military doctrine, Washington had divided his forces between Manhattan and Long Island. Expecting a second, larger British landing on Manhattan, he remained there, while on Long Island his battalions braced themselves for the assault. But for days the British command under General William Howe made no move in force, not until August 27, when a furious battle was fought to the southwest of Brooklyn Heights. Washington was by then on the scene with reinforcements from Manhattan. Exhorting his men to conduct themselves like soldiers, he told them everything worth living for was at stake.

But the inexperienced Americans were outnumbered, outflanked, and overwhelmed in only a few hours. Most had never been in battle, and while many fought hard and courageously, many did not. Conceivably, as Adams speculated, had General Nathanael Greene remained one of their commanders, things would have gone differently. Ill of fever, Greene had been replaced by General John Sullivan, a former member of Congress from New Hampshire who knew nothing of the terrain and had little of Greene’s ability. More than 1,000 Americans were captured, wounded, or killed, and among the prisoners were several generals, including Sullivan. British losses were perhaps 400.

Howe’s forces had gone into action filled with contempt for the traitorous American rabble, and numbers of Americans were slaughtered after surrendering. One British officer happily reported, “The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarter; and it was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrendered them so that they could not resist. . . . You know all stratagems are lawful in war, especially against such vile enemies to their King and country.”

From a hill where with a telescope he watched a Maryland regiment fight its way back to the American lines against terrible odds, Washington was heard to say, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”

When the remaining American army fell back to the defenses on Brooklyn Heights, General Howe, remembering the cost of his assault on Bunker Hill, chose not to press the attack, then or the following day.

Meantime, the wind held north, preventing any movement of British warships up the East River to cut off escape by the Americans, and on August 29 another storm blew in. A cold, drenching rain continued through the day and into the night. Before morning, a “peculiar providential” fog set in. When daylight came and the fog began to thin, the British discovered that the Americans had vanished.

Through the night, under the cover of darkness, rain, and fog, Washington’s army had been ferried across the mile-wide East River, through powerful currents, in every conceivable kind of small boat, most of them manned by Massachusetts fishermen — some 9,000 to 10,000 troops with baggage and equipment, all moving with utmost silence.

The risks involved in so difficult a withdrawal had been extreme. Much had depended on those troops that remained behind, holding the lines until the last possible moment, an assignment given to two Pennsylvania battalions under Thomas Mifflin, who was by now a major general. “Our situation was very dangerous,” an unnamed officer would write in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. “The retreat was conducted in the greatest secrecy, and by six o’clock in the morning we had everything embarked.” But the hero was Washington. “There never was a man that behaved better upon the occasion than General Washington; he was on horseback the whole night, and never left the ferry stairs ‘til he had seen the whole of his troops embarked.”

NEWS OF WHAT HAPPENED did not reach Philadelphia until days later. It was only on August 27, the day of the battle of Long Island, that Congress even learned that the British had landed at Gravesend. The wait for further word seemed interminable and in such “strange uncertainty,” John Adams sensed disaster. “Have we not put too much to the hazard in sending the greatest part of the army over to Long Island from whence there is no retreat?” he pondered.

It was not until August 31 that Congress learned of the battle and of Washington’s withdrawal. And though the escape had been brilliantly executed and Washington was justly praised for saving his army, the defeat on the battlefield had been overwhelming, and the effect on Congress and on people everywhere as the news spread was devastating. “In general, our generals were outgeneralled,” Adams would conclude.

Newspapers were filled with eyewitness accounts of the suffering and defeat. For days in Philadelphia the talk was of little else. Then, to compound the atmosphere of uncertainty, the captured General Sullivan appeared in the city. He had been paroled by the British to report to Congress that Admiral Lord Howe wished to confer privately about an accommodation.

Sullivan arrived on September 2, and it was on the following day, Tuesday, September 3, with the outlook as dark as it had ever been, that Jefferson decided to delay his departure no more. As it was, he had stayed three weeks longer than he had intended. Having settled his accounts, he mounted his horse, and with his young servant following behind, started for Virginia.

Adams, too, had reached a decision, as he explained to Abigail in a letter of September 4. Events having taken such a turn at Long Island, he would remain in Philadelphia. When Joseph Bass arrived the next day with the horses to take him home, it made no difference. “The panic may seize whom it will,” Adams wrote, “it will not seize me.”

WHEN JOHN SULLIVAN, a swarthy, arrogant man, appeared in Congress on September 3 to deliver Lord Howe’s request for a conference, Adams was incensed. As Sullivan began his speech, Adams remarked under his breath to Benjamin Rush how much better it would have been had a musket ball at Long Island gone through Sullivan’s head.

Taking the floor in protest, Adams called Sullivan a decoy duck sent to seduce Congress into renunciation of independence. But after four days of debate it was decided that a committee be sent to meet with Howe, a decision, said Caesar Rodney, made more to “satisfy some disturbed minds out of doors,” than from any expectation of bringing about peace.

Adams remained adamantly opposed, convinced Howe was up to “Machiavellian maneuvers.” But when unanimously chosen as one of a committee of three to go on the mission, he consented. “The staunch and intrepid, such as were enemies as much as myself to the measure, pushed for me, I suppose that as little evil might come of it, as possible,” he wrote almost apologetically. The other two were Franklin and Edward Rutledge. Thus, New England, the middle states, and the South were to be represented, or, as also noted, it could be seen as a trio of the oldest, the youngest, and the most stouthearted of the members of Congress.

They were to meet His Lordship on Staten Island, and on the morning of September 9, in “fine sunshine,” they set off, the whole city aware of what was happening. Franklin and Rutledge each rode in a high, two-wheeled chaise, accompanied by a servant. Adams went on horseback, accompanied by Joseph Bass. Congress, in the meanwhile, could only sit and wait, while in New York the admiral’s brother, General Howe, temporarily suspended operations against the rebels.

Free of the city, out of doors and riding again, Adams felt a wave of relief from his cares and woes, even to the point of finding Edward Rutledge an acceptable companion. The road across New Jersey was filled with soldiers marching to join Washington, mostly Pennsylvania men in long brown coats. But for the “straggling and loitering” to be seen, it would have been an encouraging spectacle.

The journey consumed two days. With the road crowded, progress was slow and dusty. At New Brunswick the inn was so full, Adams and Franklin had to share the same bed in a tiny room with only one small window. Before turning in, when Adams moved to close the window against the night air, Franklin objected, declaring they would suffocate. Contrary to convention, Franklin believed in the benefits of fresh air at night and had published his theories on the question. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in small close rooms,” he had written, stressing “it is the frowzy corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which, being long confined in beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn . . . obtains that kind of putridity which infects us, and occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, or turning over, such beds [and] clothes.” He wished to have the window remain open, Franklin informed Adams.

“I answered that I was afraid of the evening air,” Adams would write, recounting the memorable scene. “Dr. Franklin replied, ‘The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without doors. Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.’” Adams assured Franklin he had read his theories; they did not match his own experience, Adams said, but he would be glad to hear them again.

So the two eminent bedfellows lay side-by-side in the dark, the window open, Franklin expounding, as Adams remembered, “upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”

At Perth Amboy the morning of September 11, the three Americans were met by one of Lord Howe’s officers who had crossed the narrow channel from Staten Island on the admiral’s red-and-gilt barge and presented himself as a volunteer hostage. He would remain in Perth Amboy, he explained, as a guarantee that they would not be seized as prisoners. Adams told Franklin he thought the idea absurd. Franklin agreed and they insisted the officer go back with them on the barge.

Lord Howe was waiting as they came ashore at what was called Billopp’s Point, at the southwestern tip of Staten Island. He was an impressive sight, spotless in the superbly tailored uniform of a Royal Navy flag officer — knee-length navy blue coat of fine wool with white lapels, white cuffs, white lace below the cuffs, gleaming gold buttons and buttonholes edged with gold, gold-hilted dress sword at his side and on his head a magnificent black cocked hat with gold edging and a black silk cockade. To the rear stood a line of Hessian Guards with fixed bayonets — German fusiliers of the Lieb Regiment with striking uniforms of blue, yellow, and red — men chosen for their height and bravery, whose tall polished silver caps made them appear taller still.

Seeing his returned officer, Howe remarked, “Gentlemen, you make me a very high compliment, and you may depend upon it, I will consider it as the most sacred of things.”

Franklin, who had known Howe in England, introduced Adams and Rutledge. There were the customary bows, after which they proceeded up a path to a large stone manor house, walking between the Hessian guards who looked, Adams remembered, “fierce as ten furies,” as they presented arms, “making all the grimaces and gestures and motions of their muskets with bayonets fixed, which I suppose etiquette requires but which we neither understood nor regarded.”

Considering the kind of military display the admiral might have provided — given the number of troops encamped still on Staten Island — or the impression he could have made had they met on board his flagship, this was an exceedingly modest show, suggesting both that the meeting was hastily arranged and that Howe, in the role of messenger of peace, felt any attempt at intimidation would be inappropriate.

The Billopp House belonged to a Tory, Christopher Billopp, and had been badly used by the Hessian Guard who were quartered there. Inside, it looked no better than a stable, except for the large parlor, where in a last-minute effort to decorate for the occasion — and dampen the smell — the floor had been spread with moss and green branches. A table was set and following a cold meal of “good claret,” ham, and mutton, the admiral commenced the meeting.

A proud, stolid man with a prominent nose and large, sad eyes, Lord Richard Howe was fifty-five years old, older than Adams judged him. He had served in His Majesty’s navy since the age of fourteen. He was considered an exceptionally able officer and, by reputation, had an exceptional gift for persuasion. Like his brother, the general, he was also known to be well disposed toward Americans. He was convinced, like most Englishmen, that the great majority of Americans remained loyal to George III and that such men as the three seated before him at the table were an insignificant minority. It was with expressions of affection for America that he chose to open the discussion, stressing in particular his regard for Massachusetts.

Eighteen years earlier, during the French and Indian War, an older brother, Brigadier George Augustus, Viscount Howe, one of the outstanding British soldiers of the time, had been killed at Ticonderoga. The great William Pitt, then Britain’s Secretary of State, had called him “a complete model of military virtue,” and the Massachusetts Assembly had provided funds for a marble memorial in Westminster Abbey, an honor that Admiral Lord Howe said he esteemed “above all.” He felt for America, said the admiral, as he did for a brother. “If America should fail, I should feel and lament it like the loss of a brother.”

With a smile, Franklin replied, “My Lord, we will do our utmost endeavors to save your Lordship that mortification.”

But the admiral did not smile. All would have been better, he observed, had he only arrived before the Declaration of Independence was signed. The Declaration had “changed the ground.” Were it given up, however, he might possibly “effect the King’s purposes . . . to restore peace and grant pardons,” and thus such discussions as they were having could lead to a “re-union upon terms honorable and advantageous to the colonies as well as to Great Britain.” Was there “no way of treading back this step of independency?”

It must be understood, he continued, that he could not confer with them as members of Congress — that he “could not acknowledge that body which was not acknowledged by the King, whose delegate he was,” as his secretary recorded in the notes of the meeting — and that he therefore could only consider them “merely as gentlemen of great ability and influence,” private persons and British subjects.

To this Adams immediately responded: “Your Lordship may consider me in what light you please,” Adams said, “and indeed, I should be willing to consider myself, for a few moments, in any character which would be agreeable to your Lordship, except that of a British subject.”

Further, as Howe’s secretary, Henry Strachey, noted, Adams expressed “warmly” his determination “not to depart from the idea of independency.” Turning to Franklin and Rutledge, Howe remarked gravely, “Mr. Adams is a decided character,” the emphasis apparently on the word “decided.”

Years afterward Adams would better understand the gloomy look on Howe’s face, when he learned that before leaving London, Howe had been given a list of those American rebels who were to be granted pardons. John Adams was not on the list. He was to hang.

In the course of nearly three hours, Howe did most of the talking. But, as the committee would report to Congress, it had soon become obvious that Howe had no authority other than to grant pardons should America submit, which, as Franklin told him, meant he had nothing really to offer.

He was sorry that the gentlemen had had “the trouble of coming so far to so little purpose,” Howe said at last. If the colonies could not give up “independency,” negotiation was impossible.

“They met, they talked, they parted,” wrote one of Howe’s staff, “and now nothing remains but to fight it out against a set of the most determined hypocrites and demagogues, compiled of the refuse of the colonies, that ever were permitted by Providence to be the scourge of a country.”

The Declaration of Independence had passed a first test. The war would go on.

THE BRITISH MOVED at once. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, with favorable winds and tide this time, five British warships sailed into the East River and commenced a thunderous, point-blank bombardment of American shore defenses on Manhattan. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” wrote the admiral’s secretary.

In a letter to Congress, Washington had earlier explained his intention of abandoning New York, and his larger conclusion that he and his army must avoid pitched battles with such a disciplined and numerous enemy, but rather fight a defensive war. But what happened when bargeloads of British and Hessian infantry began crossing from Long Island, coming through the smoke of the cannonade to land at Kips Bay, was no orderly evacuation of the kind Washington intended. Since the escape from Brooklyn Heights, militia had been deserting in droves. Now those who remained abandoned their entrenchments and fled, never firing a shot. Entire units turned and ran. Galloping to the scene on horseback, Washington charged up and down among the fleeing men, trying to rally them to stand and fight. Outraged, Washington lost his celebrated self-control and began cursing and striking at officers with his riding crop.

Muskets, knapsacks, wagons, and cannon were left behind in the pell-mell rush to get away. Washington could only move with the troops, retreating rapidly northward, up the island of Manhattan to the rocky defenses of Harlem Heights.

For Washington and the American army it was a disastrous, shameful day, and when the news reached Philadelphia, the effect on Congress was decided. As Samuel Chase wrote, “Our affairs here wear a very unfavorable aspect.”

His army was falling apart, Washington informed John Hancock in a bleak letter from Harlem Heights on September 25. For the moment, the British were again doing nothing, but unless “some speedy and effectual measures” were adopted by Congress, “our cause will be lost.” The war, it was clear, was not to be “the work of a day.” Short enlistments would no longer answer. There must be an army built on “a permanent footing,” a standing army.

To place any dependence upon militia is, assuredly, resting on a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves, when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge, and superior in arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows.

Love of country and belief in the cause were noble sentiments, Washington continued, but even among the officers, those who acted “upon principles of disinterestedness” were “no more than a drop in the ocean.” There must be good pay for officers. For the men, nothing would satisfy but a bounty and an offer of free land.

Stealing by his troops was rampant. If ever he was to bring discipline to bear, check this “lust for plunder,” and stop wholesale desertions and widespread drunkenness, he must have new rules and regulations authorizing harsher punishments.

But Congress was ahead of him. It had already moved to make the changes Washington called for, and again it was Adams — Adams who had never thought it would be anything other than a long, difficult war — who had taken the lead, both as head of the Board of War and in floor debate.

On September 16, Congress adopted a new plan issued by the Board of War whereby every soldier who signed on for the duration was to be offered $20 and 100 acres of land. On September 20, a set of Articles of War — Adams’s rendering of the British Articles of War — was agreed upon. The severity of punishments was increased, as Washington wished. Washington thought the maximum number of lashes allowed hitherto was hardly sufficient. For such crimes as drunkenness or sleeping on guard duty, Congress increased the punishment from thirty-nine to a hundred lashes, and increased as well the number of crimes for which the penalty was death. On October 1, Adams proposed the creation of a military academy. Although nothing would come of the motion until after the war, it was the first such proposal made.

Little that had happened through the summer had distressed Adams quite so much as the behavior of American troops, and especially reports that Massachusetts men had “behaved ill.” “Unfaithfulness” was something he could not abide, and in his spells of gloom he pondered whether the fault was in the times.

Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal [he wrote to Abigail]. But there is no encouragement to be faithful. Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is acquired by faithfulness. . . . There is too much corruption, even in this infant age of our Republic. Virtue is not in fashion. Vice is not infamous.

One day, as he and Benjamin Rush sat together in Congress, Rush asked Adams in a whisper if he thought America would succeed in the struggle. “Yes,” Adams replied, “if we fear God and repent our sins.”

But the most direct and obvious response to the perilous state of Washington and his army, was the attention Congress turned to France. Regrettable as it may have seemed to many, a large majority in Congress now saw that independence could not be won without something more than a people’s army, or without help from the outside.

“We look only to heaven and France for succour,” Rush wrote. At City Tavern and the London Coffee House toasts were now commonly raised to His Most Christian Majesty, young King Louis XVI of France, and to “a speedy alliance” between France and the United States.

Months before, in February, listing all that he was determined to see accomplished along with “independency,” Adams had put an alliance with France at the head of the list. But in notes made in early March, at the time Silas Deane was appointed as a secret envoy, Adams had stressed that there must be no political or military connection with France, only a commercial connection. Later, in July, as head of the Committee of Treaties, he had written into the proposed Plan of Treaties an article that in quite blunt, undiplomatic language made clear his deep-seated distrust of France. Designed to safeguard the territorial integrity of the new United States, it stated that in case of any war “between the Most Christian King and the King of Great Britain, the Most Christian King shall never invade, nor under any pretense attempt to possess himself of” Canada, Florida, nor any city or town on the continent of North America, nor any island “lying near to the said continent.”

By September, given the realities of the war, Adams had relinquished his earlier misgivings over a military connection with France, but when the Plan of Treaties was taken up in debate on the floor and motions were made to insert what he called “articles of entangling alliance,” he fought them tooth and nail, and with success. As he wrote, the plan passed “without one particle” of such stipulations and, in fact, would remain the model for nearly all treaties of the United States for the next twenty-five years.

On September 26, Congress took the momentous step of appointing Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as commissioners to the Court of France, to serve with Silas Deane.

In a letter to Jefferson, who had earlier requested just such an assignment, Richard Henry Lee stressed that it was the “great abilities and unshaken virtue” needed in carrying out such a mission that had directed Congress in its choice. In effect, Lee was telling Jefferson that Congress was counting on him and that there was no assignment more crucial to the fate of the country. “In my judgment, the most eminent services that the greatest of her sons can do America will not more essentially serve her and honor themselves than a successful negotiation with France.”

When Jefferson wrote from Virginia to say that after days of deliberation he had decided he could not accept — because of “circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my family,” which was understood to mean the health of his wife — Congress named, in his place, Arthur Lee, a brother of Richard Henry Lee, which was to prove an unfortunate choice.

AUTUMN BROUGHT CLEAR, cool days, with starlit nights cold enough for log fires at City Tavern, where Adams customarily dined. People were putting on flannels again. Wild geese were flying, their honking heard as they beat their way over the city in great V formations. Numbers of the staunchest members of Congress were departing for home, claiming the need for rest. Samuel Chase, Stephen Hopkins, and Joseph Hewes, like Thomas Jefferson, had left in September. In early October, Caesar Rodney and Roger Sherman took their leave. Franklin, who would sail for France on October 26, was already packing.

From Abigail came word that she and the children, having survived the long ordeal of inoculation in Boston, were at last home again in Braintree. Little Charles was still weak and having a “tedious time of it,” but young Johnny, “Master John,” as she now referred to him, had become her post rider, carrying the family mail to and from Boston.

“I have been here until I am stupefied,” Adams told her in a gloomy letter of October 7. The suspense of what was to happen next in New York continued. Turning the situation over and over in his mind, Adams only grew more downcast.

But then four days later, as if a different man, he made his decision. “I suppose your Ladyship has been in the twitters for some time past, because you have not received a letter by every post as you used to,” he wrote in high spirits. “But I’m coming home to make my apology in person.” On Sunday, October 13, he and Bass saddled their horses and started for Braintree.

• • •

IT HAD BEEN a little more than eight months since Adams arrived in Philadelphia in February, and except for the few days taken up with the expedition to meet with Lord Howe, he had never strayed out of the city. True to his parting words to Jonathan Sewall on the hill above Casco Bay two summers before, he had shown unflinching devotion to the cause of his country, “swim or sink, live or die.” He had never walked away from work that needed doing. He had never failed to speak his mind when it counted, to take a stand and fight for what he believed. Yet remarkably, he had never lost his temper or attacked anyone in a personal way, no matter the bitterness or inner fury to be found in some of his private writings.

For eight difficult, wearisome months, working under the greatest imaginable stress and with the full realization of all that was riding on what transpired in Congress, he had kept his head, kept driving toward the single surpassing objective of independence. The timing, the wording, the spirit of the Declaration, the plan of confederation, the approach to treaties, the winning of the war, were all, he saw, essential to achieving the large, overriding goal of an independent America. And beyond independence, as he consistently emphasized, was the ultimate need for a republican form of government built on a foundation of checks and balances.

Writing of Adams that September, Benjamin Rush told a friend, “This illustrious patriot has not his superior, scarcely his equal for abilities and virtue on the whole of the continent of America.” Later, Rush would say of Adams, “Every member of Congress in 1776 acknowledged him to be the first man in the House.” Jefferson was to remember Adams as “the colossus of independence.”

Few Americans ever achieved so much of such value and consequence to their country in so little time. Above all, with his sense of urgency and unrelenting drive, Adams made the Declaration of Independence happen when it did. Had it come later, the course of events could have gone very differently.

PART II

Distant Shores

Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you, and they who lose today may win tomorrow.

~Cervantes

CHAPTER FOUR

APPOINTMENT TO FRANCE

I cannot but wish I were better qualified.

~John Adams

I

“WHEN DO YOU EXPECT TO SEE MR. ADAMS?” inquired Mercy Otis Warren in a hurried note from Plymouth.

Surely it must be a “great trial of patience and philosophy” to be so long separated from “the companion of your heart and from the father of your little flock,” continued the older woman, whose tone in correspondence with Abigail Adams was customarily that of the wiser, slightly superior adviser.

Patience, fortitude, public spirit, magnanimity, and self-denial were called for, though she herself, wrote Mercy in candor, could not claim these “sublime” qualities. As Abigail knew, it had been only a short time past when Mercy urged her own husband to resign his commission as a general rather than serve outside New England, and James Warren had complied.

“But oh! the dread of losing all that this world can bestow by one costly sacrifice keeps my mind in continual alarms.”

The note was dated October 15, 1776. By the time Abigail found a moment to reply, a new year had begun and John Adams had come and gone, riding away on still another winter day to still another session of Congress, heading for Baltimore accompanied by a new Massachusetts congressman, James Lovell.

“I had it in my heart to dissuade him from going and I know I could have prevailed,” Abigail wrote to Mercy, “but our public affairs at the time wore so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time. I therefore resigned myself to suffer some anxiety and many melancholy hours for this year to come.”

Their separation was more grievous than any, for as she confided discreetly “circumstances” conspired. She was pregnant again. But she took heart, she said, from the late successes of General Washington, an affirming figure for a dark passage. “I am apt to think that our late misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief. ‘Affliction is a good man’s shining time,’” she wrote, quoting a favorite line from the English poet Edward Young.

In the aftermath of still further defeat in New York — at White Plains, and Fort Washington — the general had beat an inglorious retreat south through New Jersey to the Delaware, his army dwindling to less than 4,000 men, many of whom were without shoes and so thinly clad as to be unfit for service. With the onset of winter, the weather turned bitterly cold. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine, who was with the retreating army. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”

On December 7, Washington escaped to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, putting the river between his force and the enemy. Only days later, Congress evacuated Philadelphia and moved south to Baltimore, bag and baggage. The prospect for the American cause had never looked so bleak.

But when the British commander, General Howe, called a halt to the campaign on December 14, ordering his troops into winter quarters in New York and leaving New Jersey in the hands of small holding forces, Washington, to the astonishment of everyone, counterattacked. On Christmas night, in driving sleet and snow, he and his ragged army recrossed the Delaware and struck at Trenton the next morning, taking a drowsy Hessian guardpost completely by surprise. On January 2, he struck again, at Princeton, and again with stunning success. Measured by the numbers of troops involved, these were small engagements, but the effect on American spirits could hardly have been greater, and just when all seemed lost.

By mid-January 1777, Washington’s army, too, was settled in winter quarters, miserably, at Morristown, New Jersey, while along the coast of Massachusetts, heavy snow fell in weather as severe as any in memory. In the wake of one February storm, howling winds piled drifts higher than a man’s head. From her window beside the coast road, Abigail looked out at a world of white desolation, a small, slight figure, snow-bound with five children, including her niece, Louisa, and determined to be no summer soldier or sunshine patriot. She had never seen the road so obstructed, she informed John. For days not a soul passed her door.

“I want a bird of passage,” she declared in early March, still having heard nothing from him. “Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

When a first letter from Baltimore arrived on March 9, filled with his distress over no word from her, she replied at once. Her health was as good as to be expected in her condition. Moreover, “’Tis a constant remembrancer of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.”

By spring she had grown uncomfortably large and clumsy — young Johnny told her he never saw anyone grow so fat — but she was also uncommonly pale. She could never put the “cruel war” out of her mind. Her only brother, William Smith, had gone to sea, as a captain of marines on a privateer. Troops passed continually up and down the coast road — “not an hour in the day but what we see soldiers marching.”

Adams, who by then had returned with the Congress to Philadelphia, wrote every week. He was homesick, weary with work. Attendance in Congress was down to a mere twenty. When Jefferson, claiming personal reasons, failed to return, Adams was especially disappointed. “We want your industry and abilities here extremely,” he wrote to Jefferson. “Your country is not quite secure enough to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life.” But Adams was not unsympathetic. “Yet for the soul of me, when I attend on my own feelings, I cannot blame you.”

The Board of War was examining reports of atrocities committed by Hessian troops in New Jersey; Adams was sickened by what he heard. He was exasperated, too, by the constant squabbles of American officers. “They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts,” he told Abigail.

I believe there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life, from the cradle to the grave, in males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this passion for superiority.

He wondered if he was sadly miscast in his public role. “I begin to suspect that I have not much grand in my composition. The pride and pomp of war, the continual sound of drums and fifeshave no charms for me.” He would prefer the delights of a garden to dominion of a world. “I have nothing of Caesar’s greatness in my soul. Power has not my wishes in her train.”

He urged Abigail to keep up her cheer. Wondering what was in store for their children, he poured out heartfelt advice and admonitions to each of them.

You have discovered in your childhood a remarkable modesty, discretion, and reserve [he told Nabby]. You are now, I think, far advanced in your twelfth year — a time when the understanding opens, and the youth begin to look abroad into the world among whom they are to live. To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

“A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man,” he counseled Johnny, while to Charles he expressed the hope that with the war over by and by he would have only to study “the arts of peace.” To Thomas he offered the prospect of a career in medicine, warming so to the subject that he seemed to forget the boy was only five years old. “Would it not please you to study nature on all her wonderful operations, and to relieve your fellow creatures under the severest pains and distress to which human nature is liable?”

“I love to receive letters very much better than I love to write them,” replied Johnny, who reported proudly that he was embarked on the third volume of Tobias Smollett’s History of England.

History was the true source of “solid instruction,” Adams wrote to the boy encouragingly. He must read Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. There was no better preparation, whatever part he was called to play on “the stage of life.” It was best read in the original Greek, of course, but he could find a reliable translation among his father’s books. (Long afterward, writing of this time in his boyhood, John Quincy Adams would recall secreting himself in a closet to smoke tobacco and read Milton’s Paradise Lost, trying without success to determine what “recondite charm” in them gave his father so much pleasure.)

RAMPANT INFLATION, shortages of nearly every necessity made the day-to-day struggle at home increasingly difficult. A dollar was not worth what a quarter had been, Abigail reported. “Our money will soon be as useless as blank paper.” Bread, salt, sugar, meat and molasses, cotton and wool, had become dear beyond measure. Farm help, help of any sort, was impossible to find. Yet she managed — scrimped, saved, wove her own wool, made the family’s clothes — determined not only to stay free of debt, but to make improvements. She would do her part in her way, as a patriotic duty but also because it was expected of her in his absence. “I believe nature has assigned each sex its particular duties and sphere of action,” she would write, “and to act well your part, ‘there all the honor lies.’”

“What will become of you, I know not,” John wrote in anguish. “How you will be able to live is past my comprehension.”

That spring James Warren reported to Adams that the farm never looked better and that Abigail was “like to outshine all farmers.” But then Adams had never doubted that she could run things as well as he, or better.

She wanted him home by July in time for her delivery. Even the brutes of creation had the consoling company of their mates at such times, she reminded him. Beset by morbid premonitions, she imagined their separation as prelude to the “still more painful one” of his death, or her own. She longed for his soothing tenderness. “Is this weakness or is it not?”

His affection for her was of a kind that neither time nor place could abate, he insisted, knowing, as she did, that he could not abandon his duties.

On a night in early July, taken with a “shaking fit,” she feared the life within was lost. Two weeks later, after an ordeal of several days, she wrote to tell him their baby, a daughter, had been stillborn. “It appeared to be a very fine babe, and as it never opened its eyes in this world, it looked as though they were only closed for sleep.”

“The corn looks well, and [the] English grain promising,” she bravely reported the week following. “We cannot be sufficiently thankful to a bountiful Providence that the horrors of famine are not added to those of war.”

They had both wanted another child and hoped it would be another daughter. “The loss of this sweet little girl,” wrote Adams after receiving her letter, “has most tenderly and sensibly affected me.”

“’Tis almost 14 years since we were united, but not more than half that time we had the happiness of living together,” she wrote plaintively. “The unfeeling world may consider it in what light they please, I consider it a sacrifice to my country and one of my greatest misfortunes.”

Remembering these years long afterward, Adams would tell Benjamin Rush they were “times that tried women’s souls as well as men’s.”

THROUGH THE REST of the eventful summer of 1777, they exchanged news of the war. An immense enemy force under General John Burgoyne had started south from Canada, down the valley of Lake Champlain, in an audacious move to separate New England from the rest of the country. Fort Ticonderoga had fallen, abandoned by its American garrison, and enemy troops were pressing steadily on, hacking their way through the wilderness to reach the Hudson River. On July 22, Sir William Howe had sailed out of New York Harbor with a fleet of 267 ships carrying 18,000 soldiers, and vanished over the horizon, bound, it was thought, for Philadelphia. A week later the ships appeared in Delaware Bay, only to disappear again, which led to days of tension and speculation as to Howe’s intentions. Adams interpreted such feints and maneuvers to mean the real objective was the Hudson, where Howe would join forces with Burgoyne, but then Adams decided an invasion of Philadelphia must be the plan after all. If Howe’s army was at sea all this time, he speculated to Abigail, the men between decks must be suffering beyond expression.

Howe’s fleet was sighted in Chesapeake Bay on August 21. Three days later, in a show of resolve, Washington paraded his troops through Philadelphia, every man wearing a sprig of green as an emblem of hope. Adams felt a lift of heart at the sight. His hard work with the Board of War had had some effect. They looked well armed and tolerably well clothed, he thought, if a bit out of step.

Sixty miles below Philadelphia, the next day, August 25, Howe’s army began coming ashore. On September 11, in a fierce, confused fight at Brandywine Creek, only twenty-five miles south of Philadelphia, Washington tried without success to check the advance of a superior enemy force. The battle, one of the largest of the war, raged until dark. The roar of cannon and of volleys of musketry could be heard plainly in Philadelphia. Washington lost more than 1,500 men killed, wounded, and taken prisoner. In no time the British were on the outskirts of the city, and before dawn on September 19, in response to urgent warning messages from a young officer on Washington’s staff, Alexander Hamilton, Congress began departing with all possible speed — “chased like a covey of partridges,” as Adams would say — to resettle in the little market town of York to the west. On September 26, Howe’s columns marched in to occupy Philadelphia.

Privately, Adams questioned Washington’s leadership. The Virginian had been “out-generaled” once again. “Oh, Heaven! grant us one great soul!” Adams wrote in his diary. “One leading mind would extricate the best cause from that ruin which seems to await it. . . . One active, masterly capacity would bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”

But writing to Abigail, he showed no despair. The army had survived, the loss of Philadelphia did not matter, he assured her. She longed for “spirited exertions everywhere,” for “some grand important actions to take place.”

In October, as if in answer, came the stupendous news of the surrender of Burgoyne and his entire army at Saratoga to an American force commanded by Horatio Gates. In another few weeks, like most delegates to Congress, Adams was heading home.

Yet his stay this time was to be more abbreviated even than that of the year past, and Mercy Otis Warren would once more summon Abigail to noble sacrifice. “Great advantages are often attended with great inconveniences, and great minds called to severe trials,” she wrote. “If your dearest friend had not abilities to render such important services to his country, he would not be called. . . . I know your public spirit and fortitude to be such that you will throw no impediment in his way.”

ADAMS REACHED MASSACHUSETTS by horseback in the last days of November 1777 and for two weeks did little but relish the comforts of his own fireside. He was home to stay, by preference and of necessity, he said.

It was my intention to decline the next elections, and return to my practise at the bar. I had been four years in Congress, left my accounts in very loose condition. My debtors were failing, the paper money was depreciating. I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years’ industry. My family was living on my past acquisitions which were very moderate. . . . My children were growing up without my care in their education, and all my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years had not been sufficient to pay a laboring man on a farm.

But before leaving York, Adams had been told by Elbridge Gerry that he was to be appointed a commissioner to France, in place of Silas Deane, who was being recalled to answer charges of questionable conduct. According to Adams’s later recollection, he said nothing to Gerry about accepting the post, only that he felt unqualified. Gerry, too, would describe Adams as “silent” on the matter, though Gerry would tell the Congress that knowing Adams as he did, he was sure Adams would not decline the duty. On November 27, Congress named Adams a commissioner to work with Franklin and Arthur Lee in negotiating a French alliance.

A packet of letters and Adams’s official commission to the Court of France went off to Braintree by post rider. There was a formal letter of notification from the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, and another from Richard Henry Lee and James Lovell on behalf of the Committee for Foreign Affairs. (“We are by no means willing to indulge a thought of your declining this important service.”) In a separate letter, Lovell, the new Massachusetts representative, said that all in Congress who understood the importance of the negotiations with France were counting on Adams’s acceptance, and that those sacrifices Adams had already made of private happiness gave them confidence he would undertake “this new business.” There was alarm over Franklin’s age, Lovell said, adding, “We want one man of inflexible integrity on the embassy.”

Lovell, the most active member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs and a dedicated patriot, was a shrewd, industrious man who loved intrigue and would make himself Congress’s expert on cryptology. He and Adams had known each other for years, and Lovell professed only the warmest regard for Adams, as well as for Abigail. But Lovell was a practiced flatterer, sometimes to the point of impropriety. In a note to Abigail the summer before, accompanying some information on the war he thought she would want to see, Lovell had declared, “This knowledge is only part of the foundation of my affectionate esteem for you. Nor will I mention the whole.” So an appeal to Adams’s self-regard, by extolling his integrity to the point of implying that Franklin and Arthur Lee had none, was quite in the Lovell mode.

The official packet reached Braintree in mid-December, at about the time Washington’s army was on the march west from Philadelphia to take up winter quarters at Valley Forge. Adams was away at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, representing a client in what was to be his last appearance ever in court as a private attorney. Thinking the packet must be urgent business, Abigail opened it and was stunned by what she read. Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.

And can I, sir, consent to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things, and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demand of my country?

The thought of John braving the North Atlantic in winter, and the very real possibility of his capture at sea, horrified her. No one put to sea from Boston in winter if it could possibly be avoided, even in peacetime.

News of the appointment had already reached Adams in New Hampshire. Thus, the day he dismounted from his horse at Braintree, December 22, he and Abigail knew they had reached one of the turning points of their lives. What was said between them, neither divulged. But the decision, difficult as it was, Adams made at once. There was no hesitation, no playing out the ordeal of deciding. If nothing else, he was decisive — they both were. Within twenty-four hours he had written his letter of acceptance to Henry Laurens. To James Lovell he wrote, “I should have wanted no motives or arguments to induce me to accept of this momentous trust, if I could be sure that the public would be benefited by it.

But when I see my brothers at the bar here so easily making fortunes for themselves and their families . . . and when I see my own children growing up in something very like real want, because I have taken no care of them, it requires as much philosophy as I am master of, to determine to persevere in public life, and engage in a new scene for which I fear I am very ill qualified.

The question of whether Abigail should accompany him was discussed, and for a few days it appeared she might go, great as her fear was of crossing the water. It was the risk of capture by the enemy that weighed heaviest in the balance. But also the expense of living in Paris was bound to be more than they could afford, and clearly things at home would fall to ruin without her.

“My desire was, you know, to have run all hazards and accompanied him,” Abigail would tell a friend, “but I could not prevail upon him to consent.”

She would remain at home, but ten-year-old Johnny was to go with his father, as the boy ardently wished. It was the chance of a lifetime for him, an experience of inestimable value, Abigail recognized, her “thousand fears” notwithstanding. Assuredly he would encounter temptation, she wrote, but to exclude him from temptation would be to exclude him from the world in which he was to live. Later, in a long letter written after he had gone, she would assure him he was ever in her heart, but tell him also what was expected of him in his obligations to society, his country, and to his family:

You are in possession of a natural good understanding and of spirits unbroken by adversity, and untamed with care. Improve your understanding for acquiring useful knowledge and virtue, such as will render you an ornament to society, an honor to your country, and a blessing to your parents . . . and remember you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.

He was to “attend” the advantages of such an experience and “attend constantly and steadfastly to the precepts and instructions of your father as you value the happiness of your mother and your own welfare.”

THEY WERE TO SAIL on the new 24-gun frigate Boston, under the command of Captain Samuel Tucker of Marblehead. For weeks there was much scurrying to get ready, much ado over packing and estimating the food and supplies to be sent on board — for Adams, John Quincy, and a Braintree man named Joseph Stephens, who would be going as Adams’s servant. The completed list included such immediate necessities for Adams as ink, paper, account books, twenty-five quill pens, a dozen clay pipes, tobacco, and a pocket-size pistol; but also two hogs, two “fat sheep,” six dozen chickens and five bushels of corn, fourteen dozen eggs, a keg of rum, a barrel of madeira, four dozen bottles of port wine, tea, chocolate, brown sugar, mustard, pepper, a box of wafers, a bag of Indian meal, and a barrel of apples.

In view of the number of spies in and about Boston and the certainty of British cruisers in New England waters, departure was to be managed with all possible secrecy. Adams was not to go aboard at Boston. He would be picked up near dark, at a rendezvous on the Braintree shore known as Hough’s Neck. As little as possible was to be said of the plan. Adams would leave pressing legal matters unattended and without explanation to his clients. Numbers of friends, even members of the family, never knew of his appointment to France until after he had gone.

One of the last letters he received before departure was from his admiring friend Benjamin Rush, who in his usual flowing, assured hand wrote that though he hated to see Adams go, he had every confidence in him:

I am aware that your abilities and firmness are much wanted at the Court of France, and after all that has been said of the advantages of dressing, powdering, and bowing well as necessary accomplishments for an ambassador, I maintain that knowledge and integrity with a common share of prudence will outweigh them all. . . . I am willing to risk the safety of our country upon this single proposition, that you will effectually “baffle and deceive them all by being perfectly honest.”

On a blustery morning in February, the Boston dropped anchor off Nantasket Roads. But with snow squalls and winds gathering to gale force, it was not until two days later that a barge was lowered.

Abigail did not go down to the shore to see her husband and son depart. The goodbyes were said at home.

THEY CROSSED THROUGH GREY TWILIGHT and blowing snow to a house by the shore, where sailors from the Boston were waiting out of the bitter wind. It was the home of a distant cousin whose wife, afflicted by “hysterical complaints,” accosted Adams with a warning. He was embarking under bad signs. “The heavens frown, the clouds roll, the waves roar upon the beach,” she declaimed. He was not enough of a Roman, Adams later said, to take this as an ill omen, but then neither was he a New Englander of the kind bred to the sea, for all that he loved its proximity and bracing air. He had never in his life sailed on a ship. His one venture had been by small boat in boyhood, and then only to go fishing at nearby Cohasset Rocks.

Now he was embarking on a 3,000-mile voyage on the North Atlantic in its most treacherous season, the risks far greater than he knew. The difference between what he understood of the perils to be faced and what the captain understood was hardly less than the difference between his understanding and that of his small son. A hardened seaman like Captain Tucker knew what the Atlantic could deliver up in February: the chances of being hit by a northeaster and driven onto the shoals of Cape Cod, graveyard of ships; the sheer terror of winter storms at sea when freezing spray aloft could turn to ice so heavy as to cause a ship to capsize. Navigation, never a simple matter, became difficult in the extreme from a violently pitching deck and with a horizon distorted by breaking seas, or, in the absence of sun and stars, quite impossible.

Adams was leaving his wife, children, friends, his home, his livelihood, everything he loved. He was risking his life and that of his small son, risking capture and who knew what horrors and indignities as a prisoner, all to begin “new business” for which he felt ill suited, knowing nothing of European politics or diplomacy and unable to speak French, the language of diplomacy. He had never in his life laid eyes on a King or Queen, or the Foreign Minister of a great power, never set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people. At age forty-two he was bound for an unimaginably distant world apart, with very little idea of what was in store and every cause to be extremely apprehensive.

But with his overriding sense of duty, his need to serve, his ambition, and as a patriot fiercely committed to the fight for independence, he could not have done otherwise. There was never really a doubt about his going.

If he was untrained and inexperienced in diplomacy, so was every American. If unable to speak French, he could learn. Fearsome as the winter seas might be, he was not lacking in courage, and besides, the voyage would provide opportunity to appraise the Continental Navy at first hand, a subject he believed of highest importance. And for all he may have strayed from the hidebound preachments of his forebears, Adams remained enough of a Puritan to believe anything worthy must carry a measure of pain.

“The wind was very high, and the sea very rough,” he would record in his diary, “but by means of a quantity of hay in the bottom of the boat, and good watch coats with which we were covered, we arrived on board the Boston about five o’clock, tolerably warm and dry.”

Continuing high winds and steep seas kept the ship at anchor in the roadstead another thirty-six hours. Then once under way, on a morning with the temperature at 14 degrees, the ship went only as far as Marble-head, where a sudden snowstorm blotted out all visibility, and nearly two days passed before Captain Tucker could put to sea. The weather was no warmer but fair at last, and the wind out of the northwest, exactly what was needed to clear Cape Cod on a broad reach.

The date was Tuesday, February 17, 1778, and, as Adams had no way of knowing, it marked the beginning of what would become a singular odyssey, in which he would journey farther in all, both by sea and land, than any other leader of the American cause.

“This morning weighed the last anchor and came under sail before breakfast,” he recorded. “A fine wind and a pleasant sun, but sharp cold air. Thus I bid farewell to my native shore.”

II

BY THOSE WHO KNEW, the Boston was judged a pretty ship. One of the smaller of the thirteen frigates commissioned by Congress, she had been built and launched at Newburyport in 1776. One hundred and fourteen feet on deck, and 514 tons, she had a theoretical complement of 200 men. As it was, there were 172 crowded on board, counting officers, crew, and 36 passengers, mostly French officers returning after service in the Continental Army. Of this French contingent, Adams took an immediate liking to an army surgeon named Nicholas Noel, who spoke English and thought well enough of John Quincy to begin schooling him in French.

As for Captain Tucker, Adams considered him able and attentive, though, to judge by the few books in his cabin, no doubt lacking in erudition. The son of a Marblehead sea captain, Tucker was thirty years old, a square, solid looking man with a booming voice who had been at sea since the age of eleven. But the Boston was a new command with a green crew, and the official instructions Tucker had received concerning his highly important passenger were unlike any in his experience. He had not only the responsibility of ensuring safe passage to France, but he was to consult with the Honorable John Adams on all important decisions.

You are to afford him on his passage every accommodation in your power, and to consult him on all occasions, with respect to your passage and general conduct, and the port you shall endeavor to get into, and on all occasions have great regard to the importance of his security and safe arrival.

Adams showed an immediate interest in seeing everything about the ship and how it was run and, except for the tiny snug cabin that he and Johnny shared, little met his approval. Nor, characteristically, had he the least hesitation about letting Tucker know.

There was too much informality, too little discipline, and a “detestable” use of profanity that should never be tolerated. The men were insufficiently practiced in use of the guns; many hardly knew the ropes. Most disturbing was the same appalling indifference to sanitation that Adams knew from Dr. Rush to be the scourge of the Continental Army. Once walking through Potter’s Field in Philadelphia the previous April, Adams had been overcome by the thought that more than 2,000 American soldiers had already been buried there, nearly all victims of smallpox and camp diseases. Dirty frying pans slayed more than swords, he had told Abigail. “Discipline, discipline is the great thing wanted.” There could be no cleanliness without discipline, and death from disease among seamen was, he knew, exceedingly high. (For every sailor in the British navy killed in action or who died of wounds in the era of the American Revolution, seventeen died of disease.)

Meals on the Boston were wretched and served at the cook’s pleasure. The reek of burning sea coal and the stench of stagnant water below-decks were dreadful, and contributed to everyone’s misery when, after the first full day of “rolling and rocking” at sea, every passenger and half the crew became seasick.

Under ideal circumstances a crossing to France could be accomplished in about three weeks. As it was, the voyage would take six weeks and four days, excellent time, given that eight to ten weeks were the usual run in winter, and quite remarkable given all that happened.

IN THE FIRST FAINT LIGHT of morning, the second day at sea, with wind and weather holding fair, from the masthead came a call of three ships bearing east on the northward horizon — three British frigates, as another hour would tell — that soon gave chase. After consultation with Adams, Captain Tucker determined to stand away from them. Two of the three ships eventually fell off, but one, the best sailor, kept in pursuit. “Sometimes we gained upon her, sometimes she upon us,” Adams recorded. The chase went on all day and for two days following, when they crossed into the Gulf Stream.

When night approached, the wind died away [Adams would write at the close of the third day], and we were left rolling and pitching in a calm, with our guns all out, our courses all drawn up, and every way prepared for battle; the officers and men were in good spirits, and Captain Tucker said his orders were to carry me to France . . . he thought it his duty, therefore, to avoid fighting, especially with an unequal force, if he could, but if he could not avoid an engagement, he would give them something that should make them remember him.

In the night a sudden, violent storm struck with a blinding cannonade of thunder and lightning. The ship “shuddered . . . darted from side to side . . . all hands were called, and with much difficulty the guns were all got in and secured. It was with the utmost difficulty that my little son and I could hold ourselves in bed with both our hands, and bracing ourselves against the boards, planks, and timbers with our feet.” There was a horrendous, terrifying crash as a bolt of lightning hit the main mast, very near the powder room. Twenty seamen were injured. One man, a hole burned in the top of his head, would die “raving mad.”

The storm raged on. “The sea being very cross and high, forced me to scud before the wind under my foresail,” recorded Captain Tucker. “Heavy gales and a dangerous sea running,” he wrote the next day; “one thing and another continually giving way on board. . . . Pray God protect us.”

Adams wanted to keep a running account of all that was happening but found it impossible. He was so drenched, everything was so soaking wet, that pen and paper were useless.

The ship was a wreck, its main mast split above and below the deck. No man could keep upon his legs, and nothing could be kept in its place [he later wrote]. The wind blowing against the current [of the Gulf Stream], not directly, but in various angles, produced a tumbling sea, vast mountains, sometimes dashing against each other . . . and not infrequently breaking on the ship, threatened to bury us all at once in the deep. The sails were all hauled down but a foresail . . . and we were left with bare poles entirely at the mercy of wind and water. The noises were such that we could not hear each other speak at any distance. The shrouds and every other rope in the ship exposed to the wind became a chord of very harsh music. Their vibrations produced a constant and a hideous howl.

In his diary later, Adams would confess to moments of severe regret that he had ever brought his son, but he wrote also of his extreme pride in the boy:

[His] behavior gave me a satisfaction that I cannot express. Fully sensible of our danger, he was constantly endeavoring to bear up under it with manly courage and patience, very attentive to me, and his thoughts always running in a serious strain. In this he was not singular. . . . I believe there was not a soul on board who was wholly thoughtless of a Divinity.

Appraising his own performance, Adams felt more than a little pleased, even some surprise, it would appear, that he had remained “perfectly calm.”

The storm had driven the ship several hundred miles off course. But days of smooth sailing followed, and with the crew busy with repairs, Adams resumed lecturing the captain on order and improvements.

Tucker appears to have taken all that the insistent landsman had to say in remarkably good spirits and acted upon it as best he could, to Adams’s considerable satisfaction. “I am constantly giving hints to the captain concerning order, economy and regularity,” he wrote, “and he seems to be sensible of the necessity of them, and exerts himself to introduce them.” As great a nuisance as Adams may have been, he got results; the ship took on a new look.

[Tucker] has cleared out between decks, ordered up the hammocks to be aired, and ordered up the sick, such as could bear it, upon deck for sweet air. This ship would have bred the plague or jail fever, if there had not been great exertions since the storm to wash, sweep, air and purify clothes, cots, cabins, hammocks and all other things, places, and persons.

Adams quite liked the salty, booming Tucker, and Tucker had come to appreciate Adams’s company. Indeed, in remarks made later before the Navy Board, he would pay Adams as high a compliment as he knew. “I did not say much to him at first, but damn and bugger my eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marblehead man.”

On February 28, Adams could happily record in his diary that with smooth seas and a fine breeze the Boston had hardly any motion but forward. He was sleeping as soundly as in his bed at home.

The color of the ocean changed from blue to green as the Gulf Stream was left behind. “What is this Gulf Stream?” he pondered. “What is the course of it? From what point and to what point does it flow?” Flocks of gulls appeared astern, trailing the ship. “The wind is fresh, the ship sails at a great rate.”

One fine day followed another. Life on board settled into a routine. With the captain’s help, John Quincy had undertaken to learn the name of every sail and master the use of a mariner’s compass. Father and son both worked on their French, Adams reading a bilingual edition of Molière’s Amphitryon, one of several books he had brought from home.

He discussed medicine with the French surgeon Dr. Noel and encouraged the ship’s first lieutenant, William Barron, to talk about his career and all that he had seen of the world. Barron, a Virginian, impressed Adams as exactly the kind of officer “much wanted in our infant navy.”

One spectacular day, with all sails spread, the ship made an average of ten knots. Yet whatever the romance of the sea might be, it eluded Adams. “We see nothing but sky, clouds, and sea, and then seas, clouds, and sky.”

“Oh that we might make [a] prize today of an English vessel lately from London with all the newspapers and magazines on board,” he mused another morning.

“Nothing very remarkable this day,” Captain Tucker wrote in his log. It had become a familiar entry. Once, after recording that the preceding twenty-four hours had both begun and ended with pleasant weather, he added, “Nothing more remarkable to my sorrow.”

But suddenly life picked up again. “We spied a sail and gave her chase,” a delighted Adams recorded. A ship hull-down on the southeastern horizon was thought to be a British cruiser. Tucker ordered the Boston cleared for action. Seeing Adams on the quarterdeck, he quickly explained the situation and, with Adams in agreement on a decision to attack, respectfully suggested that Adams go below, as “hot work” was to ensue.

The ship was a heavily armed merchantman flying the British flag, and in an hour or more they had all but closed on one another. The Boston, coming up bow-on, fired one shot, the merchantman fired three, one ball splitting the Boston’s mizzen yard directly over the head of John Adams, who, as Tucker now saw, had taken a place in the heart of the action, musket in hand. When the Boston swung broadside, revealing for the first time her more formidable array of cannon, the British ship struck her colors.

It was a fine prize, the Martha, out of London and bound for British-held New York with a cargo valued at 70,000 pounds. The British captain and crew, prisoners now, were brought on board. Tucker assigned a picked crew to sail the prize to Boston, ordered a 7-gun salute, and proceeded on course. For Tucker especially, it was a moment of sweet triumph. The Martha, however, would soon be retaken by the British and delivered to Halifax.

Of the part Adams had played in the action, Tucker was to speak warmly, and later confirm how, at the height of the fray, he had discovered Adams “among my marines accoutered as one of them and in the act of defense.

I then went unto him and said, “My dear sir, how came you here,” and with a smile he replied, “I ought to do my share of the fighting.” This was sufficient for me to judge of the bravery of my venerable and patriotic Adams.

Days later, approaching a French brig, Tucker ordered a signal shot fired. The gun blew to pieces, felling several sailors and shattering the leg of Lieutenant Barron, the officer Adams so admired. And it was Adams and Tucker who gripped young Barron in their arms as Dr. Noel amputated the limb. Barron died more than a week later, after “enduring the greatest pain,” according to the captain’s log, and was committed to the deep from the quarterdeck. “He was put into a chest,” wrote Adams, “and ten or twelve pounds of shot put in with him, and then nailed up. The fragment of the gun which destroyed him was lashed to the chest, and the whole launched overboard through one of the ports in the presence of all the ship’s crew.”

ON MARCH24 , in the Bay of Biscay, Adams could see by telescope the snow-capped mountains of Spain. At the week’s end, as the Boston at last entered the busy thoroughfare of Bordeaux, an Irish passenger from the Martha broke out a fiddle and played all afternoon as the sailors danced.

On Monday, March 30, with a French pilot aboard, the Boston moved up the Gironde, where the whole landscape struck Adams as extraordinarily beautiful. “Europe, thou great theater of arts, sciences, commerce, war, am I at last permitted to visit thy territories,” he wrote that night in his diary, allowing that the sight of France at last gave him a kind of “pleasing melancholy.”

When the Boston anchored at Bordeaux, he and Dr. Noel were invited to dine on a French warship lying close by. It was Adams’s first exposure to French hospitality — in effect his first time in France — and he could not have been more pleased or impressed by the gentility of his hosts, the elegant cabin where the meal was served, the white stone plates, napkins, everything “as clean as in any gentleman’s house,” and food and wine, which, after the Boston, seemed heaven-sent.

His hosts spoke no English. But with the doctor serving as interpreter, Adams learned to his astonishment that as a consequence of the American triumph at Saratoga, France and the United States had already agreed to an alliance.

Thus, before he had even set foot on French soil, he found that the very purpose of his mission, to assist in negotiations for such an alliance, had been accomplished. The agreement, one of the most fateful in history, had been signed on February 6, 1778, or before Adams had even left home.

It was shortly after daybreak the next morning, April 1, All Fools’ Day, when Adams, his son, and servant took leave of Captain Tucker and were rowed ashore. The relief felt by Tucker, his mission accomplished, may be imagined.

ADAMS WAS TO CROSS the Atlantic three more times, and John Quincy, too, in years to come would sail several times to and from Europe. But for neither was there ever to be an ocean voyage comparable to this, their first. Both would allude to it frequently — the novelty and high adventure, the savage storm, the battle at sea, the misery and terror and exhilaration of it all.

In a first letter from France to his “Hon[ore]d Mamma,” the lines of his pen running up and down in waves, as though he were still on board ship, John Quincy would express what was felt deeply by both father and son: “I hope I shall never forget the goodness of God in preserving us through all the dangers we have been exposed to.”

Years later, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams would describe the voyage on the Boston as symbolic of his whole life. The raging seas he had passed through, he seemed to be saying, were like the times they lived in, and he was at the mercy of the times no less than the seas. Possibly he saw, too, in the presence of John Quincy, how directly his determination to dare such seas affected his family and how much, with his devotion to the cause of America, he had put at risk beyond his own life. Besides, as he may also have seen, the voyage had demonstrated how better suited he was for action than for smooth sailing with little to do.

III

1778 April 4, Saturday

About ten o’clock we commenced our journey [by post chaise] to Paris and went about 50 miles.

April 5, Sunday

Proceeded on our journey, more than 100 miles.

April 6, Monday

Fields of grain, the vineyards, the castles, the cities, the gardens, everything is beautiful. Yet every place swarms with beggars.

April 8, Wednesday

Rode through Orleans and arrived in Paris about nine o’clock. For thirty miles from Paris or more the road was paved, and the scenes were extremely beautiful.

But for the beggars, France was nearly all beautiful in Adams’s eyes, everything greatly to his liking. In Bordeaux he had been welcomed as a hero, cheered by crowds in the streets, embraced, escorted on a tour of the city, taken to his first opera ever, which he hugely enjoyed. With France and America now joined in common cause, he was no longer the envoy of a friendly nation but of an ally. “God save the Congress, Liberty, and Adams,” an illuminated inscription proclaimed.

An American merchant in Bordeaux warned Adams of bad blood within the American commission at Paris, and some of the local citizenry had seemed disappointed to learn he was not Samuel Adams, ”le fameux Adams.” At a dinner in his honor a beautiful young woman seated beside him had opened the conversation with a question Adams found shocking. But though initially befuddled — “I believe at first I blushed” — he recovered and came off rather well, he thought.

“Mr. Adams,” she had said, “by your name I conclude you are descended from the first man and woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found out the art of lying together?”

Assisted by an interpreter, Adams replied that his family resembled the first couple both in name and in their frailties and that no doubt “instinct” was the answer to her question. “For there was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet, by which when a pair approached within striking distance they flew together . . . like two objects in an electrical experiment.”

“Well,” she retorted. “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy shock.”

Rolling through the tollgates of Paris the night of April 8, crossing the Seine by the Pont Neuf, passing the Palace of the Louvre, Adams was astonished at the crowds, the numbers of carriages in the streets, the “glittering clatter” of Paris he had read of in books. Toward morning, awake in his hotel room on the Rue de Richelieu, he wondered at the stillness of so great a city — until first light when the clamor of bells and street cries and iron-rimmed carriage wheels on cobblestones was such as he had never heard.

The first call of the day was on Benjamin Franklin, and from that point on Adams was kept steadily on the move, with sights to see, social engagements, dinners, teas, the theater. There were important people he must meet, new faces, names to remember — endless, multitudinous French names — and in nearly every setting, awash in the rapid-fire conversation of what were, he was certain, the most polished people on earth, including a great number of exceedingly fashionable and opinionated women, he understood almost nothing.

It was Franklin who orchestrated the social rounds, insisting the first morning that they dine at the usual French hour of two o’clock with Jacques Turgot (Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne), the distinguished economist and, until recently, Minister of Finance. Adams had felt himself unsuitably “accoutered” to appear in such company, he told Franklin, but off they went.

Franklin lived in the gracious splendor of a garden pavilion, part of the magnificent Hôtel de Valentinois, a columned château on the heights of the village of Passy, overlooking the Seine, half an hour’s ride from the city on the road to Versailles. It was the estate of a wealthy government contractor, former slave trader and generous friend of the American cause, Jacques Donatien Le Ray, the Comte de Chaumont, whose admiration for Franklin appeared boundless and who, with his stout figure and bald head, somewhat resembled him. As the guest of Chaumont, Franklin enjoyed the attention of nine liveried servants, a wine cellar of more than a thousand bottles, and virtually every comfort.

Receiving Adams with all customary cordiality, Franklin insisted that he move in with him to quarters previously occupied by Silas Deane. Arrangements were made for John Quincy to attend a nearby boarding school also attended by one of Franklin’s grandsons, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache.

Franklin’s friends, the “first people” of Paris as he spoke of them, must become Adams’s friends, too, Franklin insisted. In addition to Chaumont and Turgot, there was the stately, white-haired Duchesse d’Enville (Marie-Louise-Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld), one of the recognized “great ladies” of Paris, whom Adams liked at once, finding her observations, when translated, full of “bold, masculine and original sense.” She was to be their hostess on several occasions. Her son, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, grandson of the great French moralist of the previous century, François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was a scholar in his own right who, to Adams’s relief, spoke perfect English. It was he who had done one of the earliest French translations of the Declaration of Independence.

Particularly appealing to the eye was Madame Brillon (Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy), who was much spoiled by a wealthy, elderly husband and made an open show of her affection for Franklin, flirtatiously calling him “Cher Papa” while perched on his lap. Adams would later learn that another woman who appeared to be part of the Brillon family, a “very plain” person whom he presumed to be a companion of Madame Brillon, was in fact the mistress of Monsieur Brillon. “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats,” Adams would write. “But I did not know the world.”

There was also Franklin’s particular friend and near neighbor at Passy, the flamboyant, once-beautiful Madame Helvétius, widow of the acclaimed philosophe Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who lived amid a menagerie of chickens, ducks, birds in aviaries, dogs, cats, and pet deer. There was the brilliant mathematician and political theorist Marie-Jean A. N. Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, another of the philosophes of the French enlightenment, whose strange pallor Adams took to be the result of “hard study.” And of supreme importance was the King’s Foreign Minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most polished of all, a fleshy, majestic career diplomat who, during Adams’s initial courtesy call at Versailles, expressed dismay that Adams understood nothing he said, but politely remarked that he hoped Adams would remain long enough in France to learn French perfectly.

Adams had never beheld such opulence — no American had — the exquisite dress, the diamonds on display, the bright rouge worn by the women, the time and money devoted to the elaborate coiffures of women and men alike. (Every morning in Paris some 7,000 barbers rushed through the streets to attend their customers.) Nor had he ever encountered such exquisite manners. Everyone was so exceedingly polite to everyone, and to foreigners most of all.

“The reception I have met in this kingdom has been as friendly, as polite, and as respectful as was possible,” Adams assured Abigail in the first of his letters to reach her.

It is the universal opinion of the people here, of all ranks, that a friendship between France and America is in the interest of both countries and the late alliance, so happily formed, is universally popular; so much so that I have been told by persons of good judgment that the government here would have been under a sort of necessity of agreeing to it even if it have not been agreeable to themselves.

The delights of France are innumerable. The politeness, the elegance, the softness, the delicacy is extreme.

In short, stern and haughty republican that I am, I cannot help loving these people for their earnest desire and assiduity to please. . . . The richness, the magnificence, and splendor is beyond all description.

But thinking perhaps he had strayed from his own true republican self a bit more than was seemly — and than Abigail would wish — he assured her that all such “bagatelles” meant nothing to him. “I cannot help suspecting that the more elegance, the less virtue in all times and countries.”

In later years much would be written and said of John Adams’s dislike of France, his puritanical disapproval of the French and their ways. But while, to be sure, there was much he disapproved of, and even disliked, much that he found shocking, such as the forwardness of the women, so also did most Americans of the day. Adams’s objections stemmed not so much from a Puritan background — as often said — but from the ideal of republican virtue, the classic Roman stoic emphasis on simplicity and the view that decadence inevitably followed luxury, age-old themes replete in the writings of his favorite Romans. Like so many of his countrymen, then and later, Adams both loved and disapproved of France, depending in large degree on circumstances or his mood of the moment. What, in fact, was most interesting, as expressed repeatedly in his diary and private correspondence — and what seems to have struck him as most unexpected — was how very much about France he found appealing, how much he did truly love about the French and their approach to life. “If human nature could be made happy by anything that can please the eye, the ear, the taste or any other sense, or passion or fancy, this country would be the region for happiness,” he wrote.

On an evening when the Comte de Chaumont took him in his carriage to a concert in the Royal Gardens of the Tuileries — the Concert Spirituel, which Adams was to attend many times — he was delighted to find that both men and women singers performed, and that the gardens were full of “company of both sexes walking,” as he wrote in his diary. He did not, however, record the numbers of prostitutes that gathered regularly in the gardens, some standing on chairs to attract attention, even as decorous family parties strolled past.

He enjoyed particularly the company of women of fashion whose animated opinions were as much a part of every social occasion as those of the men. In such company no gentlemen would be tolerated in monopolizing a conversation. Adams thought women superior to men overall, as Abigail knew, and he was sure she would wish to know his views on the educated women of France.

To tell you the truth, I admire the ladies here. Don’t be jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant. And their knowledge of letters and arts, exceeds that of the English ladies, I believe.

His “venerable colleague” Franklin, he noted, had the enviable privilege, because of his advanced age, to embrace the ladies as much as he pleased and to be “perpetually” embraced by them in return. But then the adoration of Franklin to be found in all quarters was extraordinary, as Adams would later recount:

His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend of humankind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.

Crowds in the streets cheered the “good doctor.” Fashionable women had taken to wearing a variation of his familiar bearskin hat. His likeness appeared everywhere — in prints, on medallions, on the lids of snuff boxes, making his face, as Franklin himself said, as well known as that of the man in the moon. Possibly the likeness of no one human face had been so widely reproduced in so many forms. Reputedly, the King himself, in a rare show of humor, arranged for it to be hand-painted on the bottom of a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot, as a New Year’s day surprise for one of Franklin’s adoring ladies at Court.

Franklin was loved for his sober, homespun look — the fur hat, the uncurled, unpowdered hair, the spectacles on the end of his nose — and widely believed to be a Quaker, a misunderstanding he made no effort to correct. He was seen as the representative American, the rustic sage from the wilds of Pennsylvania (quite apart from the fact that he had lived sixteen years in London), and he agreeably played the part. Everything about him announced his “simplicity and innocence,” observed an adoring French historian of the day.

But it was as a man of science that Franklin was most adored. It was the fame of his electrical experiments and overall inventiveness that made him one of the paragons of the age. Except for the aged Voltaire, who had only recently returned to Paris after years of exile and who had only a few months to live, there was in the eyes of the French no greater mortal.

It was that year, 1778, that Franklin sat for the celebrated sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, and that Franklin’s host at the Hôtel de Valentinois, Le Ray de Chaumont, commissioned the painter Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, a favorite at the court, to do Franklin’s portrait. For the Duplessis painting, which was to be a greater triumph at the Salon of 1779 than even Houdon’s bust, Franklin wore his customary fur-collared russet coat and appeared perfectly at peace with himself and the world. Admirers saw strength of mind in the high, bald forehead, strength of character in the “robust” neck, unshakable serenity in the slight smile. But the lift of the brows lent a certain sardonic expression and the large, brown eyes looked sad and weary. No name was provided at the bottom of the elaborate frame, only a single-word inscription writ large in Latin, “VIR,” meaning “man of character.”

Whenever possible, Adams worked on his French, preferring the quiet of early morning, before Franklin was stirring. With lists of recommended books — French dictionaries, grammars, works of literature, histories of diplomacy — he went to one Paris bookseller after another until he had them all, and more. And as often as he could, he attended the theater, usually taking John Quincy with him. (For the boy it was the beginning of a lifelong love of the theater.) Adams would bring the text of the play in hand, so they could follow the lines as spoken. But as he would tell Nabby in a letter, it was really the ladies “who are always to me the most pleasing ornaments of such spectacles.”

At a performance of Voltaire’s Alzire, at the Comédie Française, Voltaire himself was seated in a nearby box. Between acts, as the audience called his name, the eighty-three-year-old hero would rise and bow. “Although he was very advanced in age, had the paleness of death and deep lines and wrinkles in his face,” Adams noted, there was “sparkling vitality” in his eyes. “They were still the poet’s eyes with a fine frenzy rolling,” Adams wrote, borrowing an expression from Shakespeare.

A few days later, Adams was present for what was felt to be one of the high moments in the Age of Enlightenment when, at the Academy of Sciences, Voltaire and Franklin, like two aged actors, as Adams described them, embraced each other in the French manner, “hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other’s cheeks.”

ON FINE SPRING DAYS Adams could walk among the lilacs and allées of linden trees in the formal gardens of the Hôtel de Valentinois. The whole of France was one great garden, it seemed. “Nature and art have conspired to render everything here delightful,” he wrote to Abigail. His health was good. He was extremely pleased with John Quincy’s progress in French.

But he was also deeply troubled by the rancor within the American commission. Franklin had wasted no time confirming what Adams had heard at Bordeaux. It had been Adams’s second day at Passy, during a moment of privacy, when Franklin spoke of the “coolness” between him and Arthur Lee, whom Franklin described as bad-tempered and extremely difficult to work with. Lee, said Franklin, was one of those “who went through life quarrelling with one person or another ‘til they commonly ended in the loss of their reason.” Lee was in league with another American, Ralph Izard, who, though appointed minister to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, remained in Paris and only caused trouble. Franklin called Izard a man of violent passions and assured Adams that neither Lee nor Izard was liked by the French.

For their part, Lee and Izard were quick to assure Adams that Franklin was beneath contempt, expressing their views with a vehemence that astonished Adams as much as their choice of words.

Izard, a wealthy South Carolinian, was a devotee of the arts who with his wife had been living in Europe for several years. He was handsome, much infatuated with his own opinions, and an honest man, Adams believed.

Arthur Lee was known for his “mercurial temperament.” As a commissioner to the court of France, Lee’s importance, theoretically, was equal to that of Franklin and Adams. Also, with two brothers in Congress — Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee — he had more than a little political influence. Tall, erect, with a prominent Lee nose, he was as proud as any of his proud Virginia line, and spoke a passable French. He had trained in medicine at Edinburgh, where he was first in his class, then changed professions, taking up the law in London, where he became an agent for Massachusetts, first as an associate of Franklin, then succeeding him after Franklin’s return to Philadelphia in 1775. It was in London that Lee had learned to dislike Franklin, and from the time he arrived in Paris, he had found it nearly unbearable to serve again in Franklin’s shadow. Refusing to live with Franklin at Passy, Lee had arranged his own accommodations in the neighboring village of Chaillot.

Suspicious by nature, Lee had been the first to raise questions about Silas Deane’s dealings as a commissioner. Lee was convinced that Deane, in buying supplies for the American army, had pocketed a fortune, and his letters to his brothers in Congress, charging Deane with corruption, had played a part in the decision of Congress to recall Deane. And, by the evidence, it appears that Deane had, indeed, let himself be bought. But Lee had suspected Franklin as well and was certain that Franklin was out to ruin him. (The thought that it might have been Jefferson, with his aversion to controversy, Jefferson who idolized Franklin, serving on the commission instead of Arthur Lee, was never lost on Franklin or Adams.) Indignant over Franklin’s unwillingness to share confidences with him, Lee wrote an angry letter that Franklin left unanswered. “I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation,” Franklin at last wrote to Lee in reply, but then never sent the letter. Writing to Samuel Adams, Lee described Franklin as “the most corrupt of all corrupt men.”

John Adams had been predisposed to like Lee, largely out of admiration for Richard Henry Lee. But Adams was soon writing in his diary that Lee had confidence in no one. “He believes all men selfish, and no man honest or sincere.” Still, Adams was never to doubt Lee’s integrity or faithfulness to the American cause.

As for Franklin, Adams had come to France with few if any doubts or misgivings, fully expecting that he and Franklin could work as effectively together as at Philadelphia. That he greatly respected Franklin, there is no doubt. In private correspondence with James Warren, at the time of Franklin’s arduous mission to Montreal in 1776, Adams had written:

Franklin’s character you know. His masterly acquaintance with the French language, his extensive correspondence in France, his great experience in life, his wisdom, his prudence, caution; his engaging addresses, united to his unshaken firmness in the present American system of politics and war, point him out as the fittest character for this momentous undertaking.

Their own expedition together to see Admiral Lord Howe at Staten Island had provided further opportunity for both men to know and appreciate one another. And though of different generations — and differing views on the effects of night air — they had in common, along with their Massachusetts origins, a lifelong love of the printed word, delight in amusing stories and turns of phrase. They were two staunch patriots who hated the British and shared the absolute conviction that for all the hazards and trials of the present, America was destined to be a “mighty empire.”

From his student days at Harvard under John Winthrop, Adams had acquired an early admiration for Franklin as a man of science. Had Franklin done no more than devise the lightning rod, Adams liked to say, it would have been sufficient reason for the world to honor his name.

Franklin was a “great and good man,” Adams had once assured Abigail in a letter from Philadelphia. Even in later years, when his opinion of Franklin had radically changed, Adams could still praise him for his genius and talents:

He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured and caustic. Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais at his pleasure. He had talents of irony, allegory, and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth.

But after several weeks at Passy, living together in close quarters, accompanying Franklin on his social rounds, observing the daily routine and how things were being run, Adams began to see another man than the idolized sage who, if not the villain portrayed by Lee and Izard, nonetheless gave Adams pause.

He found Franklin cordial but aloof, easygoing to the point of indolence, distressingly slipshod about details and about money. It was obvious time had taken its toll. Franklin was fat and stooped, his sloping girth larger than ever. Suffering terribly from the gout and from boils, he moved slowly and with difficulty, often with obvious pain. Some days he could barely get about.

The man who, as Poor Richard, had preached “Early to bed, early to rise,” seldom rose before ten o’clock. (Adams found that by the time Franklin had finished breakfast he was able to receive only a few callers before it was time to depart for his midday dinner. Dinner over, Franklin often napped.) The man who had admonished generations of aspiring Americans to “Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee” seemed but vaguely interested in the day-to-day operations of the commission. “A little neglect may breed great mischief,” Poor Richard had warned; Adams found more than a little neglect everywhere he turned. Public money was being spent, as Arthur Lee said, “without economy and without account.” Adams would recall, “It was impossible for me to enter into any examination of what had passed before my arrival, because I could find no books, letters, or documents of any kind to inform or guide me.”

“A thousand times I have desired that the public accounts might from time to time be made up, to which I have as constantly received evasive or affrontive answers,” complained Arthur Lee. “So that now Mr. Adams and myself find that after the expenditure of more than five million livres, we are involved in confusion and debt.”

Franklin acknowledged that frugality was a virtue he never acquired. As a wealthy man, he had no personal worries about money, and for all his supposed simplicity, he loved his pleasures and ease, as Adams noted. He rode in an elegant carriage, entertained handsomely. Adams worried about not only the cost but the appropriateness of such extravagance. He imagined the rent for their accommodations at the Hôtel de Valentinois to be exorbitant. When Franklin informed him that the Comte de Chaumont was charging nothing, that they were living there at no cost, Adams worried that that, too, was inappropriate, since, as everyone knew, Chaumont was one of the largest contractors furnishing supplies for the American army.

As time passed and his French improved, Adams further realized that Franklin spoke the language poorly and understood considerably less than he let on. Never verbose in social gatherings even in his own language, “the good doctor” sat in the salons of Paris, looking on benevolently, a glass of champagne in hand, rarely saying anything. When he did speak in French, he was, one official told Adams, almost impossible to understand. He refused to bother his head with French grammar, Franklin admitted to Adams, and to his French admirers this, with his odd pronunciation, were but another part of his charm, which only added to Adams’s annoyance. Try as he might, Adams could never feel at ease in French society. Franklin, always at ease, never gave the appearance of trying at all.

From the time that news of the surrender at Saratoga first reached Paris, in December 1777, Franklin had found himself the center of attentions not just from the Court of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI, but from the British as well. Lord North, the Prime Minister, had delivered a conciliatory speech to Parliament; George III even recommended opening a channel of communication with “that insidious man” Franklin, with the result that a host of British agents began beating a path to Paris to ascertain what peace terms the Americans might consider.

Less than a mile from Passy, in the village of Auteuil, a cordial, well-to-do Scot named William Alexander established residence in order to be close to his dear old friend Dr. Franklin. Alexander was in and out of the Hôtel de Valentinois like one of the family, sometimes rousing Franklin from his bed before the usual hour to converse on the latest theory of latent heat or the increasing consumption of sugar in Britain. Alexander was outspoken in his contempt for British policy toward America. He thought the war an appalling blunder and favored unlimited independence for the United States.

Alexander, who was also a British spy, felt he could read Franklin’s mind perfectly. However, the new resident commissioner at Passy, John Adams, required closer study, and in an effort to inform London, Alexander provided an especially perceptive appraisal:

John Adams is a man of the shortest of what is called middle size in England, strong and tight-made, rather inclining to fat, of a complexion that bespeaks a warmer climate than Massachusetts is supposed, a countenance which bespeaks rather reflection than imagination. His learning I suspect is pretty much confined to the classics and law. His knowledge of England and its constitution is [a] matter of real amazement to me. The most trite and common things as well as the more nice relative either to customs, manners, arts, policy, or constitution are equally known to him. He is an enthusiast, however, with regard to everything in this country [France] but the constitution and can conceive no country superior to it. I think he would be esteemed a bad politician in Europe in everything but discretion. He has, I believe, a keen temper which if he can command thoroughly, will be a great merit. His understanding lies, I think, rather in seeing large things largely than correctly. . . . In the conduct of affairs he may perhaps be able to take so comprehensive a view as to render invention and expedient unnecessary, but were they to become necessary, I think he would fail in these — and I am not clear as to the first, or whether much of his reputation may not arise from a very firm and decisive tone suited to the times, with a clear and perspicuous elocution.

Another frequent visitor, David Hartley, member of Parliament, old friend of Franklin’s and an emissary from Lord North, struck Adams as a conceited dandy and almost certainly a spy. “I suppose as I did not flatter Mr. Hartley with professions of confidence which I did not feel,” Adams would write, “and of so much admiration of his great genius and talents as he felt himself, he conceived a disgust at me.” Hartley, as Adams himself would later relate, described Adams as “the most ungracious man” he ever met.

Warned repeatedly that he was surrounded by spies both French and British, the imperturbable Franklin declared he had no worry, since he had nothing to hide.

I have long observed one rule [he wrote to a friend] . . . to be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have made in public, and to do nothing but what spies may see. . . . If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.

Of the Americans around Franklin, the closest and most trusted was Dr. Edward Bancroft, a New England physician in his mid-thirties and another warm friend from Franklin’s London years. Bancroft was employed as secretary for the commission. An affable and unusually accomplished man of many interests — writer, inventor, member of the Royal Society, avid experimenter with inks and dyes — he was the ideal companion for Franklin. He was consistently hardworking, fluent in French, and had made himself all but indispensable to Franklin.

But what neither Franklin nor Adams was ever to know was that Bancroft, too, was a British spy, his “emoluments” from the Crown amounting to 500 pounds per year. Anything of importance that transpired within the American commission, or between Franklin and the French Foreign Minister, all instructions received from Congress, any confidences shared, were known by the British cabinet in London within days. Bancroft’s dispatches, written in invisible ink, were placed in a sealed bottle that was deposited in a hole in a tree on the south terrace of the Tuileries Gardens regularly every Tuesday evening after nine-thirty. The system worked to perfection for several years.

Adams instinctively disliked Bancroft, thought him a gossip, found his habitual mocking of Christianity offensive, thought him dishonest and rightly suspected him of using inside information to profit on the London stock market. Indeed, the mix of private and public business beneath the roof of the Hôtel de Valentinois was considerable, with Bancroft, the Comte de Chaumont, and possibly even Franklin, all capitalizing on secret French support for the American war and a steady flow of inside information. Bancroft’s larger treachery, however, went unsuspected by Adams. Only Arthur Lee suspected that Bancroft was a spy, but then Lee imagined spies everywhere.

Adams was concerned that Franklin, out of laziness, was leaving too many decisions to Chaumont or Bancroft. But if Adams was disillusioned by the Franklin he came to know at Passy, he also recognized that Franklin had the confidence of Vergennes and the French Court as did no other American, and it was therefore the duty of all to treat him with respect. In all that he wrote in correspondence in his first nine months in France, Adams never criticized Franklin; and inclined as he may have been at times to side with Arthur Lee, he steadfastly refused to do so. Lee may have been justified in some of his anger at Franklin, Adams felt, but Lee was badly cast in his role, a dreadful aggravation to Franklin and also to the French, who not only disliked him but distrusted him, which was more serious.

As time passed, Adams’s appreciation of the importance of France to America’s future only increased. “The longer I live in Europe and the more I consider our affairs,” he wrote, “the more important our alliance with France appears to me.” Yet he felt he himself was in an impossible role. He saw the futility and unnecessary expense of having three commissioners, and after six weeks in Paris, as early as May 21, he was writing to Samuel Adams to say that one commissioner, Franklin, would be quite enough. As it was, he and Arthur Lee were superfluous.

ONE OF THE RARE OCCASIONS when the three American commissioners did anything together was the day of Adams’s presentation to Louis XVI, on May 8, 1778. Accompanied by both Franklin and Lee, Adams arrived at Versailles in all-new French clothes, his wig dressed, and wearing a dress sword, as required at the palace.

They were received in the King’s sumptuous, gilded bedchamber, as the King went through the elaborate morning ceremony of being dressed by officers of the state. In a brief, pleasant, inconsequential exchange, the Comte de Vergennes explained that the new American commissioner spoke no French, to which the young monarch responded, ”Pas un mot!” (“Not a word!”), before passing into another room.

Adams detected “goodness and innocence” in the King’s face. “He had the appearance of a strong constitution,” Adams would write of the twenty-four-year-old Louis XVI, who was indeed kindhearted and robust, if painfully nearsighted and awkward, and who had it in his power to determine the fate of the United States of America.

In June at the public supper of the royal family, le grand couvert, Adams was turned out again in attire “becoming the station I held, but not to be compared with the gold and diamonds and embroidery about me.” Seated in close view, among ladies of “the first rank and fashion,” he felt himself being gazed at in the way he and others had once gazed at the Indian chiefs who came to address Congress, except that he found it difficult to command such “power of the face” as the chiefs had.

The King, “the royal carver” at the table, “ate like a king and made a royal supper of solid beef and other things in proportion.” But in the account Adams gave years afterward, it was the graceful Marie Antoinette, agleam in diamonds and finery, who remained most vivid in memory:

She was an object too sublime and beautiful for my dull pen to describe. . . . Her dress was everything art and wealth could make it. One of the maids of honor told me she had diamonds upon her person to the value of eighteen million livres, and I always thought her majesty much beholden to her dress. . . . Shehad a fine complexion indicating her perfect health, and was a handsome woman in her face and figure. . . . The Queen took a large spoonful of soup and displayed her fine person and graceful manner, in alternately looking at the company in various parts of the hall and ordering several kinds of seasoning to be brought to her, by which she fitted her supper to her taste. When this was accomplished, her Majesty exhibited to the admiring spectators the magnificent spectacle of a great queen swallowing her royal supper in a single spoonful, all at once. This was all performed like perfect clockwork, not a feature of her face, nor a motion of any part of her person, especially her arm and her hand could be criticized as out of order.

THAT JUNE, 1778, Great Britain attacked French ships at sea. The war for American independence had set off a struggle for power in Europe. Britain and France were again at each other’s throats. There was no declaration of war, nor would there be one. “Yet,” Adams would rightly inform Samuel Adams, “there is in fact as complete a war as ever existed, and it will continue.”

With little to do of a diplomatic nature, he took hold of administrative duties, striving to straighten out accounts and expedite correspondence, no less determined than he had been on board the Boston to see a badly run ship put in order. His long experience on the Board of War stood him in good stead. He drafted reports to Congress, sent off letters to various agents of Congress in France who had been drawing exorbitant bills on the commission, directing them to start providing regular account of their disbursements, and warning that they could be running up debts beyond available funds. He addressed the matter of prizes taken at sea by American privateers, and gave all possible attention to the vexing issue of what to do about American prisoners of war held by the British and those British prisoners taken on the high seas who were being held in France. The commissioners hoped for an exchange but were frustrated by British insistence that captive Americans were traitors and thus not conventional prisoners of war.

“I found that the business of our commission would never be done unless I did it,” Adams wrote. “My two colleagues would agree on nothing . . . and often when I had drawn the papers and had them fairly copied for signature, and Mr. Lee and I had signed them, I was frequently obliged to wait several days before I could procure the signature of Dr. Franklin on them.”

If Franklin was slow to get under way in the morning, Arthur Lee found it impossible to arrive from Chaillot, only ten minutes away, earlier than eleven o’clock, by which time Adams, who rose at five, had been at his desk for hours.

Privately, he was distraught and painfully lonely. It had been more than three months since he left home and still there was no word from Abigail. He worried about her, longed for her, and in this felt still further removed from Lee, who had never married, and Franklin, whose wife was dead and who, when she was alive, had spent years apart from her with no apparent regret.

Franklin amused himself playing chess with his fashionable friends (including Madame Brillon while she bathed in her tub); Adams did not know chess. Franklin had his Masonic meetings; Adams was not a Mason. As at Philadelphia after his first weeks there, he began to tire of lavish hospitality, the “profusion of unmeaning wealth and magnificence.” Such “incessant dinners and dissipations” were not the objects of his mission to France. “My countrymen were suffering in America and their affairs were in great confusion in Europe.”

“Dined at home,” became a frequent note in his diary. Through June there were few entries at all, so concerned had he become about “a house full of spies.”

When a first letter from Abigail arrived on June 16, he wrote to her at once, but it would be midsummer before he heard from her again, and numerous letters that he wrote in the intervening time were either stolen, lost, or captured at sea — he would never know. Nor would it be known how many of her letters disappeared en route.

As once he had sent Abigail pins from Philadelphia, so now at her request he shipped off packages of European trade goods — handkerchiefs, ribbon, bolts of calico — which could “fetch hard money” at home and mean the difference to her financial survival. But, as with all correspondence, months must pass before he knew if any of the shipments were reaching her.

There was no news from Congress, no news of the war at home, which was as formidable a problem as any. Dispatches from Philadelphia that evaded capture at sea took at least six weeks to reach Paris under ideal sailing conditions. The great distance separating America from Europe, the inevitable long delay in any communication with Congress, or worse, the complete lack of communication for months at a stretch, would plague both Franklin and Adams their whole time in Europe, and put them at a decided disadvantage in dealing with European ministers, who maintained far closer, more efficient contact. Ships that were supposed to sail for America in a week or two, often lay in port for months, letters on board. By contrast, there was no European court to which an express could not be sent from Paris in ten or fifteen days, and an answer could be expected within approximately the same time. “There is, I imagine, no minister who would not think it safer to act by orders than from his own discretion,” wrote Franklin in a letter explaining why he and the other Americans in Paris had to decide matters on their own most all of the time. To receive an answer from an inquiry to Philadelphia could take six months.

Relations between Franklin and Lee grew steadily more unpleasant, and Adams’s role consequently became ever more frustrating, to the point where he felt he must unburden himself again to Samuel Adams, providing what was, in all, a very fair assessment:

Between you and me, I have a difficult task [Adams wrote on August 7]. I am between two gentlemen of opposite tempers. The one may be too easy and good natured upon some occasions, the other too rigid and severe upon some occasions. The one may perhaps overlook an instance of roguery, from inadvertance and too much confidence. The other may mistake an instance of integrity for its opposite. . . . Yet both may be and I believe are honest men, and devoted friends to their country. But this is an ugly situation for me who does not abound in philosophy and who cannot and will not trim. The consequence of it may very probably be that I may have the entire confidence of neither. Yet I have hitherto lived in friendship with both.

With the passing of summer, Adams grew extremely disheartened. His one unfailing source of pleasure, “the joy of my heart,” was John Quincy, who, he told Abigail proudly, was “esteemed” by all. A prominent figure in Franklin’s circle, Marie Grand, wife of Ferdinand Grand, the French banker for American funds, was so impressed by the boy — indeed by both father and son — that she wrote Abigail to tell her so. In a conversation with Adams at a dinner, she recounted, he had remarked that in some cases it was the duty of a good citizen to sacrifice his all for the good of the country. She had found such a sentiment worthy of a Roman, yet rather hard to believe. Surely “nature,” love of one’s wife and children, would “operate more powerfully” than love of one’s country. In reply, Adams said his wife felt as he did. And young John Quincy, too, Madame Grand told Abigail, “inherits the spirit of his father, and bids fair to be a Roman like him.”

Adams had never had more to do in his life, he wrote, or so little to show for his efforts. Maintaining a position of impartiality between Franklin and Arthur Lee, playing mediator, had become a dreadful strain. In October, determined to improve the situation, Adams urged Lee to give up living at Chaillot and move in with them at the Hôtel de Valentinois.

“I am very sincere,” he wrote. “There is room enough in this house to accommodate us all.” He offered Lee his own quarters, saying he would move into the library.

This arrangement will save a large sum of money to the public, and . . . give us a thousand opportunities of conversing together, which now we have not. . . . It would remove the reproach we now lie under, of which I confess myself very much ashamed, of not being able to agree together. . . . I am, dear sir, with an earnest desire and a settled determination to cultivate a harmony, nay more a friendship with both my colleagues.

When Lee declined, strife within the commission grew worse. “The uncandor, the prejudices, the rage among several persons here, make me sick as death,” Adams wrote in his diary. His two compatriots were men of honor and integrity, he still believed, but the one grew increasingly cunning and dissipated, the other sour, secretive, and no less cunning. “Virtue is not always amiable,” Adams concluded.

Feeling his role was little better than that of a clerk, feeling forgotten by Congress, he labored on intensely, writing letters, struggling with accounts, trying to keep abreast of events through the London newspapers and magazines, where he now saw himself derided as pathetically out of place. “The English have got at me,” he reported to Abigail. “They make fine work of me — fanatic, bigot, perfect cypher, not one word of the language, awkward figure, uncouth dress, no address, no character, cunning hardheaded attorney. But the falsest of it all is that I am disgusted with the Parisians.” He hated playing second fiddle to Franklin, and by the year’s end, to judge by a letter written to James Warren, Franklin’s self-indulgent, self-serving ways had become nearly more than Adams could bear, for though he mentioned no name, it was obvious whom he meant.

The longer I live and the more I see of public men, the more I wish to be a private one. Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public. Modest merit! Is there such a thing remaining in public life? It is now become a maxim with some, who are even men of merit, that the world esteems a man in proportion as he esteems himself. . . . I am often astonished at the boldness with which persons make their pretensions. A man must be his own trumpeter — he must write or dictate paragraphs of praise in the newspapers; he must dress, have a retinue and equipage; he must ostentatiously publish to the world his own writings with his name. . . . He must get his picture drawn, his statue made, and must hire all the artists in his turn to set about works to spread his name, make the mob stare and gape, and perpetuate his fame.

Yet the mood that poured from Adams’s pen did not always match the spirit with which he went about his daily business; and the gloom or vitriol of one letter might be nowhere apparent in others written at the same time, even the same day. He wrote little or nothing, for example, of how he and Franklin worked together, yet live and work together they did in close proximity for months on end while accomplishing much.

Once, several years earlier, in one of the many passages in his diary in which he worked out his thoughts, Adams had written that concealment of one’s dislike for another was not a form of dishonesty or deception, but an acceptable, even wise way of conducting the business of life.

There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation . . . is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral . . . that it is a duty and a virtue.

But this, he was quick to add, was a rule with definite limitations, “for there are times when the cause of religion, of government, of liberty, the interest of the present age of posterity, render it a necessary duty to make known his sentiments and intentions boldly and publicly.”

Whatever Franklin’s failings and flaws, Adams never discounted the value of his popularity and prestige. French esteem for the “good doctor” remained of immense importance to the American cause, as Adams knew. Arthur Lee, by contrast, was seldom anything but a handicap. His dislike of the French was obvious. “His countenance is disgusting,” Adams was to write. “His air is not pleasing . . . his temper is harsh, sour . . . his judgment of men and things is often wrong.”

What most distressed Adams about Franklin was his approach with Vergennes. He “hates to offend and seldom gives any opinion ‘til obliged,” Adams noted. It was what had troubled Adams about Franklin in Congress. “Although he has as determined a soul as any man, yet it is his constant policy never to say yes or no decidedly but when he cannot avoid it.” Franklin’s concept of diplomacy was to ask for nothing that Vergennes would not give, be grateful for whatever help the French provided, and remain ever accommodating and patient. As Franklin’s friend Condorcet would remark approvingly, Franklin as a diplomat “observed much and acted little.”

Adams, no less than Franklin, felt the French alliance must be “cultivated with perfect faith and tenderness.” But he was apprehensive of too much diffidence. He worried about the effect in the long run, as he explained to Roger Sherman in a letter he appears never to have sent. “There is [a] danger that the [American] people and their representatives [in Congress] may have too much timidity in their conduct towards this power, and that your ministers here may have too much diffidence of themselves and too much complaisance for the Court.” Specifically, he warned of excessive attention to what the French thought, what France wanted, and “too much [French] influence in our deliberations.”

In 1776, Adams had argued in Congress that any alliance with France must be commercial only. To James Warren, he had expressed his shame at the “whining” he heard that all was lost unless France stepped in. “Are we to be beholden to France for our liberties?” But now, with the end of the struggle no nearer in view, and with his newfound regard for the French, Adams saw things differently. France was “a rock upon which we may safely build,” he told Warren. Like George Washington, Adams saw that sea power could decide the outcome of the war. Specifically he saw French naval support as the crucial necessity and felt duty-bound not just to voice his opinion to Vergennes, but to press for a greater commitment of French naval power, even at the risk of annoying the proud foreign minister.

Earlier in the summer, a French naval expedition under Admiral Charles-Henri Théodat d’Estaing, combined with an American land assault against the British at Newport, Rhode Island, had failed — news that didn’t reach Paris until late in the year. Thus, to Adams, it was clear that more French ships were needed and no time was to be lost.

Franklin agreed, but counseled moderation. In December, Adams drafted a letter to Vergennes, which Franklin toned down. It was their most important undertaking together.

Signed by all three commissioners and submitted in the first week of January 1779, the letter stated that nothing would bring the war to a “speedy conclusion” more effectively than “sending a powerful fleet sufficient to secure naval superiority” in American waters. “Such a naval force, acting in concert with the armies of the United States, would in all probability take and destroy the whole British power in that part of the world.”

Vergennes, however, chose to ignore the letter. His thoughts for the time being — and as probably the commissioners did not know — were taken up with the prospect of a French invasion of England.

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1778, at Philadelphia, Congress named Benjamin Franklin minister plenipotentiary to the Court of Louis XVI. The three-man American commission was dispensed with. It was midwinter, however, before word reached Paris; the official dispatches did not arrive until February 12, 1779.

The new arrangement was exactly what Adams had recommended and the news was to leave him feeling more miserable than ever. He had been ill for the first time since coming to France, suffering from a violent cold and trying to cure himself in characteristic fashion by walking ten miles a day. Though he had clearly indicated that Franklin should be the one chosen, there had always been the possibility that Congress might pick him. Arthur Lee was dispatched to Madrid. But Congress had neglected to provide any instruction for what he, Adams, was to do, neither recalling him nor assigning him to a new post, which was both mystifying and insulting. Adams was not even mentioned in the communiqué.

Such being the case, he made the decision on his own, informing Vergennes that as he had been “restored to the character of a private citizen,” he would depart. He submitted a request for passage on the next available ship bound for America, and to Congress addressed a long letter saying that since no notice appeared to have been taken of him, he could only assume that Congress “has no further service for me on this side of the water, and that all my duties are on the other.”

“I shall therefore soon present before you your own good man. Happy — happy indeed — shall I be,” he announced to Abigail, trying to see the bright side. To Richard Henry Lee, he claimed his new status as a private citizen “best becomes me, and is most agreeable to me.” In truth, he was hurt and angry, and justifiably. He had been badly served by a Congress that told him nothing and showed no gratitude for all he had done. He felt himself strangely adrift, less able than ever in his life to sense what lay in store for him. In a letter to James Warren, he vowed never again to allow himself to be made the sport of wise men or fools.

His moods swung from high to low, then lower still with the arrival of a packet of letters from Abigail filled with abject loneliness and accusing him of neglecting her. “All things look gloomy and melancholy around me,” she wrote. “You could not have suffered more upon your voyage than I have felt cut off from all communication with you.” Adams claimed to have written nearly fifty letters to her between April and September, which was almost certainly an exaggeration, but whatever the number, she had received only two. “Let me entreat you to write me more letters at a time, surely you cannot want subjects.” What he wrote, she said, was always too brief, cold, and impersonal. It was as if he had “changed hearts with some frozen Laplander.”

Trying to respond as calmly as possible, Adams wrote and burned three letters in succession. One was too sad, the next too angry, a third too cheerful to reflect the truth, as he explained in a fourth and final version. Was it possible that “some infernal has whispered in your ear insinuations?” Had she forgotten the “unalterable tenderness of my heart?” he asked.

“For God’s sake, never reproach me again with not writing or with writing scrips. Your wounds are too deep.

You know not — you feel not — the dangers that surround me, nor those that may be brought upon our country.

Millions would not tempt me to write you as I used [to]. I have no security that every letter I write will not be broken open and copied and transmitted to Congress and the English newspapers. They would find no treason or deceit in them, it is true, but they would find weakness and indiscretion, which they would make as ill use of.

In another letter, written after receiving three from him, Abigail said she had no doubt of his affection. “But my soul is wounded at a separation from you, and my fortitude is all dissolved in frailty and weakness.” She could not understand his reluctance to express his love. “The affection I feel for my friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choice and approved by Heaven. Angels can witness its purity, what care I then for the ridicule of Britain should this testimony of it fall into their hands?”

Adams enlisted support from John Quincy, who told his mother that Papa could “write but very little because he had so many other things to think of, but he can not let slip one opportunity without writing a few lines and when you receive them you complain as bad or worse than if he had not wrote at all and it really hurts him to receive such letters.”

“If I were to tell you all the tenderness of my heart,” Adams confided, “I should do nothing but write to you. I beg you not to be uneasy.”

As the time to leave drew nearer, he grew increasingly woeful. What had he accomplished after all? Did anyone care?

“I am left kicking and sprawling in the mire. . . . It is hardly a state of disgrace that I am in but rather of total neglect and contempt.” What was to become of him? He had never been in such a situation. “My present feelings are new to me.”

Not since the most anguished diary entries of his youth had he declared himself so overburdened with woe. “If ever I had any wit, it is all evaporated. If ever I had any imagination, it is all quenched. . . . I believe I am grown more austere, severe, rigid, and miserable than I ever was.”

As ardently as he longed for home, he hated to leave Paris, hated to leave France, and expected he would never return. “The climate is more favorable to my constitution than ours,” he acknowledged to Abigail. He loved the food, the civility of everyday life. The French were “the happiest people in the world . . . and have the best disposition to make others so.

There is such a choice of elegant entertainments in the theatric way, of good company and excellent books that nothing would be wanting to me in this country but my family and peace to my country to make me one of the happiest of men.

The one tribute he received was a letter from Versailles, a letter Adams treasured. Vergennes, speaking for the King, offered praise for “the wise conduct that you have held to throughout the tenure of your commission,” as well as “the zeal with which you have constantly furthered the cause of your nation, while strengthening the alliance that ties it to his Majesty.”

What appears to have pleased Adams no less was the discovery during his parting call at Versailles that his French had so improved he could manage an extended conversation and speak as rapidly as he pleased.

THE TWO ADAMSES took their leave of Benjamin Franklin and others at Passy on March 8, 1779, and, with the servant Stephens, departed by post chaise for the coast of Brittany. At the bustling port of Nantes on the lower Loire, they settled into a hotel to wait for passage on the American frigate Alliance. Days passed, eventually weeks, during which father and son were together steadily. Biding their time, they walked about the town and along the river. Through long afternoons, Adams helped the boy in translating Cicero.

In late April, they moved on board the Alliance, only to learn later still, in a letter from Franklin, that orders had been changed and the ship was not to sail for America after all. However, a French frigate, La Sensible, was due to sail from Lorient, with a new French minister to the United States, Chevalier Anne-César de La Luzerne. Franklin gave instructions that the Alliance carry Adams to Lorient, but on arrival Adams found that Minister La Luzerne had been delayed. And so the wait went on, father and son remaining on board the Alliance.

In the days that followed, Adams spent considerable time with the daring young Scottish-American naval officer, John Paul Jones, who was fitting out an old French merchantman that he had renamed the Bonhomme Richard. They had met earlier at Passy, corresponded over naval matters, and Jones, quite unjustly, had decided that Adams, in his role as commissioner, was conspiring against him. Privately, Jones referred to Adams as a “wicked and conceited upstart,” and expressed the wish that “Mr. Roundface” were at home minding his own business.

Having no part to play, no say in anything, no useful work, and no choice but to wait, was more nearly than Adams could bear. He began brooding. Imagining himself the victim of more than mere chance, he saw Jones and “the old conjurer” Franklin at the bottom of his troubles. He was being kept waiting, being humiliated, intentionally. “I may be mistaken in these conjectures, they may be injurious to J. and F., and therefore I shall not talk about them, but I am determined to put down my thoughts and see which turns out,” Adams wrote in his diary.

Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me? Can I bear contempt — to know that I am despised? It is my duty to bear everything that I cannot help.

From time spent with Jones, Adams decided he was the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American navy.

Eccentricities and irregularities are to be expected from him. They are in his character, they are visible in his eyes. His voice is soft and small; his eye has keenness, and wildness and softness in it.

Adams never doubted that faces carried clues to character: the white-as-paper pallor of Condorcet bespoke dedication to hard study; the eyes of Voltaire with their “fine frenzy rolling” were the eyes of a poet; in the face of Louis XVI, Adams had seen “goodness and innocence” as clearly as he saw “keenness, and wildness and softness” in the eyes of young Jones.

But then studying his own face in the mirror, Adams did not like what he saw. There was nothing exceptional about him, he concluded, writing in his diary. “By my physical constitution, I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” There was too much weakness and languor in his nature. “When I look in the glass, my eye, my forehead, my brow, my cheeks, my lips all betray this relaxation.” Yet he could be roused, he knew. “Yet some greatevents, some cutting expressions, some mean scandals, hypocrisies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into a rage a little like a lion.”

Most days, however, passed pleasantly enough. It was by his own choice that he dined often with Jones, spent hours in conversation with him and his officers, and as always, Adams was buoyed by talk. He and the surgeon of the Bonhomme Richard, an especially companionable man named Bourke, discussed everything from mathematics to rheumatism, Paris, London, the war at home, the war at sea, medicine at sea, the absence of profanity on French ships, and the nuances of the French language. At a dinner hosted by Jones at L’Épée Royale in town, the talk turned to the two ways most recommended for learning French, to take a mistress and to attend the Comédie-Française. When in good humor Dr. Bourke asked Adams which he preferred, Adams responded in like spirit, “Perhaps both would teach it soonest, to be sure sooner than either.” But in his diary, he felt obliged to add, “The language is nowhere better spoken than at the Comédie.”

“On board all day, reading Don Quixote,” was the single entry for May 18.

It was June by the time the French minister, La Luzerne, arrived at Lorient. On June 17, Adams and John Quincy went aboard the Sensible, and that afternoon they were finally under way from France, Adams having no idea how very soon he would be returning.

IV

THERE WAS NO ADVANCE WORD of the arrival of the Sensible. The latest information Abigail had received, at the end of June in a letter written the first week of April, was that Adams was waiting to sail on the Alliance. But then in mid-July, Mercy Warren had passed along information received through James Lovell to the effect that Congress had in mind a new appointment for Adams, and that “Nobody seems to have an expectation of his return at present.”

In the year and a half of her husband’s absence, Abigail’s distress had been worse than she had ever anticipated or, she was certain, than anyone could ever realize. “Known only to my own heart is the sacrifice I have made, and the conflict it has cost me,” she had confided to her sister Elizabeth in the first weeks of his absence. “I wish a thousand times I had gone with him,” she later told John Thaxter. For the first time in fourteen years of marriage she had had to face an entire winter on her own.

“How lonely are my days. How solitary are my nights,” she had written to Adams in a letter that would not reach Passy until after he had departed.

Her sister Mary Cranch, of whom Abigail was extremely fond, continued to reside nearby in Braintree with her husband and family. But sister Elizabeth had married and moved away to Haverhill near the New Hampshire border. (Unimpressed by Elizabeth’s choice in a husband, the young Reverend John Shaw, Abigail had tried to dissuade her, but without success. “Men are very scarce to be sure,” Abigail had written by way of explanation to her own John.) And now Nabby, too, had gone off for an extended stay with the Warrens, leaving Abigail feeling more solitary than ever.

Earlier in the fall, when the French fleet put in at Boston, she had had her own encounter with French hospitality. A delegation of French officers, resplendent in royal blue and scarlet uniforms, had appeared in Braintree to pay their respects to the wife of the American commissioner. She was invited to dine on board one of their ships, which she did, twice, delighting in the perfect manners of the officers and the sense of being at the center of things. On another occasion, accompanied by Colonel Quincy, she dined with Admiral d’Estaing on board his magnificent flagship, Languedoc, possibly the finest warship in the world. “If I ever had any national prejudices [against the French] they are done away,” she wrote, “and I am ashamed to own I was ever possessed of so narrow a spirit.”

But in winter, surrounded by mountains of snow, secluded from all society, she could as well have been in Greenland, she said. In other times of separation, times of horrible duress with war at her doorstep and epidemic disease raging, she had somehow borne up, with so much to contend with, so little time to dwell on her own loneliness. “This is a painful situation,” she wrote to James Lovell, “and my patience is nearly exhausted.”

But there was a further, complicating element and that was Lovell himself. When Adams had wondered, from the tone of her letters, if some “infernal” might be whispering insinuations in her ear, he was not far from the truth.

In the first weeks after Adams’s departure for France, Abigail had confided her state of mind to Lovell, who in response had written that her alarms and distress only afforded him “delight.” More letters followed in which Lovell addressed her as Portia, presuming to use Adams’s pet name for her, and inquiring whether he must limit himself to language devoid of sentiment. She replied saying, “I begin to look upon you as a very dangerous man . . . a most ingenious and agreeable flatterer.” Yet she signed her letter “Portia.”

Writing again, he appealed to her with a line from the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay, declaring if “ye were mine . . . how dearly I would love thee,” and underscored the word love. When at the start of a new year she wrote to say Adams had been absent for a full eleven months, the reply from Lovell was closer to the raw double entendres of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a book Abigail had never read: he expressed relief that her husband’s “rigid patriotism” (again underscored) had not left her pregnant again.

Telling her not to imagine Adams doing anything in his private hours in Paris other than attending museums, Lovell, by insinuation, raised the question of what else Adams might be doing.

Lovell was a married man who, in five years in Congress, never once returned to Boston to see his wife and children. That he enjoyed the company of several women in Philadelphia was no secret there, but whether Abigail knew of this is not clear.

In Lovell’s defense, it could be said that other men, too, would, as time went on, find Abigail Adams an irresistible correspondent — young John Thaxter, as an example, and most notably Thomas Jefferson. Her spirit and intelligence, her interest in their lives, her fund of opinions, seemed to elicit confidences such as they shared with few others, though none in the salacious manner of Lovell.

Abigail could have called a halt to the exchange with Lovell at any time, had she wished. But she did not. Clearly she enjoyed his flirtatious attention, but primarily she craved information — “intelligence” — and more than anyone in Congress, Lovell had shown himself willing and able to keep her supplied with news. He reported to her on the war, sent copies of the weekly Journals of Congress. As the most active member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, he was also in the best possible position to keep her posted on anything pertaining to her husband.

At no time was she indiscreet in what she wrote, and if he was, she refused to be intimidated. She needed him. That her affections rested entirely with her “dearest friend,” and that she longed only for his return, she left no doubt. “I love everyone who manifests a regard or shows an attachment to my absent friend,” she told Lovell, and however infrequently she heard from her absent friend, she kept writing to him at length with never a letup.

ON AUGUST 2, 1779, a clear summer day with the blue waters of Boston sparkling in sunshine, the two Adamses and their servant were rowed from the Sensible to a point on the Braintree shore not far from where, under such different conditions, their adventures had begun. With no one expecting them, the shore was empty. Their arrival at home was a total surprise.

Try as he would through life, John Adams was never able to express adequately his attachment to home, his adoration of his wife and children. And the effect of his long absences since the onset of the war had only intensified these feelings. “I am, with an ardor that words have not power to express, yours,” he had closed a letter to Abigail, and though her wish that he be less stringent in his expressions of affection was entirely understandable, there was never a question about the depth of his feelings or his devotion to her.

But at last there was no need for either to write anything. They were together again and their happiness — the happiness of the entire family — could not have been greater.

The farm would have been at its summer peak, and one may imagine John and Abigail walking their fields together, John glad for home ground beneath his feet again and delighting in the look of things under her management. There would be hard cider again, to start the day, fresh vegetables from the kitchen garden. There were relatives and old friends to see — his mother, the Cranches, Colonel Quincy, Parson Wibird. Neighbors stopped to bid him welcome. Together he and Abigail rode over Penn’s Hill to visit with her father at the Weymouth parsonage. But mainly, it appears, Adams kept close to home, within familiar walls and the embrace of his family. The three children who had remained with their mother had all grown and changed. All had stories to tell him and hung on his own telling of his travels, the sights he had seen. The talk went on day and night, and doubtless John Quincy demonstrated his French to the amazement of all.

Time and again when away, Adams would profess preference for the simple domestic life by Penn’s Hill above anything he knew; time and again, on reaching home, he would say that there and there only was everything he desired. It was a lifelong refrain, and his enjoyment now seemed to bear him out.

Sweet though it was, the interval was no time out of time. The war weighed too heavily on everyone’s mind. The scarcities, inflation, taxes, and profiteering, the incessant worries and enmities of war, were all ever-present. Adams experienced firsthand the “amazing depreciation” of the currency, of prices so high as to be laughable under any other circumstances. Abigail and friends spoke bitterly of a selfish, avaricious spirit that had taken hold to a degree unthinkable earlier. A highly indignant James Warren told how “fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago” had “amassed fortunes and are riding in chariots.”

The news of the war was not encouraging. In the spring of 1778, Washington’s army had emerged from the ordeal of winter at Valley Forge a stronger, more disciplined force. That June, when the British chose to evacuate Philadelphia and march back to New York, Washington had hit them at Monmouth, New Jersey, in a major battle which, though indecisive, had proven that his so-called “rabble” were well able to hold their own against the vaunted enemy. But then both armies were back where they had been before, with the British holding New York, the Americans outside keeping watch, and in the aftermath of the failed French and American effort at Newport that summer, the war appeared at a stalemate. Attention shifted to naval engagements between the French and British in the West Indies and to British forays into the South, where, in the spring of 1779, the Americans were defeated at Briar Creek, Georgia. There were British raids along the coast of Connecticut that summer, shortly before Adams returned, and apprehension along coastal Massachusetts that a major British strike there might be in the offing. But no one knew and nothing seemed to portend a resolution of the struggle.

• • •

ADAMS HAD BEEN HOME hardly a week when the town of Braintree chose him as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Adams accepted and immediately began preparing himself.

There being as yet no national constitution, the form of government chosen by each of the states was a matter of utmost gravity. The constitution of an independent sovereign state had to stand on its own merits, not serve merely as a secondary component of a larger, overarching structure.

On September 1, Adams was off to Cambridge, to the First Church at the corner of Harvard Yard, where some 250 delegates gathered. In another few days he was chosen as one of a drafting committee of thirty who met in Boston on September 13 and in turn picked a subcommittee of three — Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin, who was president of the convention — whereupon the other two picked Adams to draw up the state’s constitution. He had become, as he later said, a sub-sub committee of one.

The work was to be his alone, and if ever he had a chance to rise to an occasion for which he was ideally suited, this was it. So many of his salient strengths — the acute legal mind, his command of the English language, his devotion to the ideals of the good society — so much that he knew of government, so much that he had read and written, could now be brought to bear on one noble task.

Nor could circumstances have been much more in his favor. He was rested, refreshed, inspired by the welcome home and by the honor his town and fellow delegates had bestowed on him. He could work at home in familiar surroundings, his books and papers about him, and with Abigail’s steadying presence, which was always to his advantage. That his efforts were for his own Massachusetts was also of very great importance. After the frustrations and disappointments of France, such a chance to shine again must have seemed a godsend. Possibly, had there been no difficult time in France, no feelings of failure, his performance now would have been something less. In any event, the result was to be one of the most admirable, long-lasting achievements of John Adams’s life.

To prepare, he had reviewed in detail those constitutions already framed by other states, and reread his own Thoughts on Government. He worked through the still-warm days of late September in his office just off the front hall. He worked at a plain, tall desk at which he wrote standing up or perched on a high stool, and he appears to have completed the draft sometime in early October. Printed copies, for the consideration of the convention, were ready at the end of the month, on or about October 30, 1779, his forty-fourth birthday.

It was titled “A Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Adams having chosen to use the word “commonwealth” rather than “state,” as had Virginia, a decision he made on his own and that no one was to question. A tone of absolute clarity and elevated thought was established in the opening lines, in a Preamble, a new feature in constitutions, affirming the old ideal of the common good founded on a social compact:

The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government is to secure the existence of the body politic; to protect it; and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, their natural rights and the blessings of life; and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, happiness, and prosperity.

The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals. It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

A Declaration of Rights, following the Preamble and preceding the Constitution itself, stated unequivocally that all men were “born equally free and independent” — words Adams had taken from the Virginia Declaration of Rights as written by George Mason — and that they had certain “natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” It guaranteed free elections, and in one of a number of articles borrowed from the constitution of Pennsylvania, guaranteed “freedom of speaking” and “liberty of the press.” It provided against unreasonable searches and seizures, and trial by jury. While it did not guarantee freedom of religion, it affirmed the “duty” of all people to worship “The Supreme Being, the great creator and preserver of the universe,” and that no one was to be “hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate for worshipping God in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience,” provided he did not disturb the public peace.

The people of Massachusetts were to have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves, and in an article intended to prevent the formation of a hereditary monarchy, an expanded version of a similar article in the Virginia constitution, Adams wrote:

No man, nor corporation or association of men have any other title to obtain advantages or particular and exclusive privileges distinct from those of the community, than what arises from the consideration of services rendered to the public . . . the idea of a man born a magistrate, lawgiver, or judge is absurd and unnatural.

In fundamental ways, the form of government was very like what Adams had proposed in his Thoughts on Government, and again, as in Thoughts on Government, he called for a “government of laws, and not of men.” Founded on the principle of the separation and balance of powers, the Constitution declared in a single sentence that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “the legislative, executive and judicial power shall be placed in separate departments, to the end that it might be a government of laws, and not of men.”

There would be two branches of the legislature, a Senate and a House of Representatives, an executive, the governor, who was to be elected at large annually and have veto power over the acts of the legislature. But it was the establishment of an independent judiciary, with judges of the Supreme Court appointed, not elected, and for life (“as long as they behave themselves well”), that Adams made one of his greatest contributions not only to Massachusetts but to the country, as time would tell.

In addition, notably, there was Section II of Chapter 6, a paragraph headed “The Encouragement of Literature, Etc.,” which was like no other declaration to be found in any constitution ever written until then, or since. It was entirely Adams’s creation, his original contribution to the constitution of Massachusetts, and he rightly took great pride in it.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

It was, in all, a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears. The survival of the rights and liberties of the people depended on the spread of wisdom, knowledge, and virtue among all the people, the common people, of whom he, as a farmer’s son, was one. “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading,” Adams had written in his diary at age twenty-five, while still living under his father’s roof.

As had no constitution before, Adams was declaring it the “duty” of government not only to provide education but to “cherish” the interests of literature and science — indeed, the full range of the arts, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history.

In the last week of August, Adams had attended a dinner at Harvard in honor of the new French minister, the Chevalier de La Luzerne. The setting was the Philosophy Room of Harvard Hall, the old laboratory of Adams’s favorite professor, Winthrop. There, among the “philosophical apparatus,” Adams had offered to some of his dinner companions his dream of establishing a Society of Arts and Sciences at Boston, as a counterpart to the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. The idea was to be enthusiastically taken up; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences would be founded in less than a year. But the dinner and the conversation were also an inspiration for what he wrote in the paragraph on education, and particularly the inclusion of natural history.

Because wisdom and education were not sufficient of themselves, he had added the further “duty” of government to “countenance and inculcate” the principles of humanity, charity, industry, frugality, honesty, sincerity — virtue, in sum. And amiability as well — “good humor,” as he called it — counted for the common good, the Constitution of Massachusetts was to proclaim, suggesting that such delight in life as Adams had found in the amiable outlook of the French had had a decided influence.

He had written Section II of Chapter 6, in a burst of inspiration, the words “flowing” from his pen, but expected the convention to “show it no mercy,” as he later said. “I was somewhat apprehensive that criticism and objections would be made to the section, and particularly that the ‘natural history’ and ‘good humor’ would be stricken out.” To his surprise and delight, the whole of the paragraph passed intact, and, as he also noted, “unanimously without amendment!”

In the end, the convention approved nearly all of his draft, with only a few notable changes. Preferring what Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence, the convention revised the first article of the Declaration of Rights, that all men were “born equally free and independent,” to read that all men were “born free and equal,” a change Adams did not like and would like even less as time went on. He did not believe all men were created equal, except in the eyes of God, but that all men, for all their many obvious differences, were born to equal rights.

The reference to freedom of speech was removed, not to be reinstated until much later, and the worship of God was declared a right of all men, as well as a duty. The legislature was also given power to override the governor’s veto, another change Adams regretted, as it was contrary to his belief in a strong, popularly elected executive.

None of the alterations, however, diminished his overall pride in what he and the convention had achieved, and the acclaim it brought. “I take vast satisfaction in the general approbation of the Massachusetts Constitution,” he would tell a friend. “If the people are as wise and honest in the choice of their rulers, as they have been in framing a government, they will be happy, and I shall die content with the prospect for my children.”

As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

ADAMS HAD PICKED UP on other business in the meantime, attending to some of his old law practice, and responding to those friends in Congress who wrote to welcome him home. Still wounded by the way Congress had treated him, he imagined that in the rancorous atmosphere of Philadelphia, with controversy swirling about the Deane affair and the hatred between Franklin and Arthur Lee, his own reputation was suffering. To his credit he had not rushed off to Philadelphia to see for himself, as someone less wise and less proud might have. If he had cause for complaint in such times of stress and uncertainty, so too, he knew, did others. “None of us have anything to boast of in these times, in respect to the happiness of life,” he observed in one letter.

“We stand in greater need than ever of men of your principles,” wrote his ever-devoted friend Benjamin Rush, who, like many, assumed that Adams would soon be reelected to Congress.

“Be assured you have not an enemy among us,” declared James Lovell, who also made light of his prior “scrawls” to “lovely Portia.” How much, if anything, Adams ever learned of Lovell’s letters to Abigail is unknown.

Then, in October, out of the blue, came word from Philadelphia that Adams had been chosen by Congress to return to France as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate treaties of peace and commerce with Great Britain, a position he had neither solicited nor expected. The decision had been virtually unanimous. “Upon the whole I am of the opinion that in the esteem of Congress, your character is as high as any gentleman’s in America,” wrote Elbridge Gerry, knowing nothing would please Adams more.

Congress had voted him a salary of 2,500 pounds sterling. In addition, he was to have his own official secretary, Francis Dana, a Boston lawyer and member of Congress whom Adams knew and respected.

Henry Laurens, in a letter of congratulations, went out of his way to apologize for the fact that Adams had been so shabbily treated by Congress in his recent assignment, “dismissed without censure or applause,” as Laurens said, but implored him, for the sake of the country, to accept the appointment.

From the Chevalier de La Luzerne came an offer of return passage on the Sensible, which was being refitted in Boston Harbor and soon to sail.

ADAMS DECIDED TO GO after even less discussion with Abigail than in 1779. That the same perils pertained went without saying.

Again Abigail was to remain behind, but this time nine-year-old Charles would also accompany his father, along with John Quincy. At first, John Quincy objected, saying he preferred to remain at home and prepare for Harvard, but his mother convinced him of the great opportunity inherent in such an experience.

In a heartfelt letter of farewell, she would liken the judicious traveler to a river that increases its volume the farther it flows from its source. “It will be expected of you, my son, that as you are favored with superior advantages under the instructive eye of a tender parent, that your improvements should bear some proportion to your advantages.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

In addition to Francis Dana, John Thaxter would go as Adams’s own private secretary and tutor for the boys. So including two servants, Stephens and another for Francis Dana, they made a company of seven.

There was no part he would rather play than that of peacemaker, Adams wrote to La Luzerne, but with a cautionary note: “Alas! When I reflect upon the importance, delicacy, intricacy and danger of the service, I feel a great deal of diffidence in myself.”

Adams had no illusions of peace near at hand or of an easy path for himself. As he wrote forthrightly to Samuel Huntington, the new president of Congress, with so much at stake, his distress now was greater even than when he had last sailed for France.

Thus, a little more than three months after he had arrived home, Adams was again on his way across the ocean. The wind was favorable, he noted aboard the Sensible, November 15, under way past Cape Ann.

“My habitation, how disconsolate it looks!” Abigail wrote. “My table I sit down to it. But I cannot swallow my food. . . . My hopes and fears rise alternately. I cannot resign more than I do, unless life is called for.”

CHAPTER FIVE

UNALTERABLY DETERMINED

[His] obstinacy . . . will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents . . .

~The Comte de Vergennes

Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.

~John Adams

I

TWO DAYS OUT FROM BOSTON, in a stiff northeast wind, the Sensible, with 350 people on board, sprang a leak. A pump was put immediately in service, yet the leak grew worse day by day.

There was no sign of British cruisers, which to Adams were the worst of evils; but then the second week, off the Grand Banks, the wind began blowing from the northwest, the sea to run high. For one endless, miserable day, in howling winds, the old frigate labored under foresail only. A “very violent gale,” recorded Adams, who, in order to write, had to get down on his cabin floor on hands and knees.

By the time the storm passed, the ship was leaking so badly that two pumps had to be manned day and night, unrelenting work in which all hands took part, passengers as well, including John Quincy. The situation was alarming. In the event of another storm or an encounter with the enemy, the captain explained, they would have no chance. The only choice was to make for the nearest friendly port, for Spain, “with all the sail the ship could prudently bear.”

The Sensible labored slowly across the ocean, until finally, on the morning of December 8, 1779, running with the wind, she reached El Ferrol, on Spain’s rocky northwestern tip. It had been a closer call than anyone liked to think. In less than an hour at anchor at El Ferrol, with the pumps stopped, there were seven feet of water in the hold.

“We have had an escape again,” Adams began in a letter to Abigail from shore. “One more storm would very probably [have] carried us to the bottom of the sea,” added John Quincy in his report to his mother.

Faced with the prospect of being marooned for weeks while repairs were made, Adams inquired about proceeding overland. The distance to Paris was 1,000 miles. The journey, east across Spain and over the Pyrenees to the French border, was one of extreme difficulty, he was warned, and never more so than in winter. But to sit still and wait again as he had in France, to let circumstance rule, or the whims or priorities of others, were not in his nature. He was determined to go, and talk of difficulties had little effect. Indeed, for a man so constituted as Adams, such talk could well have been the deciding factor. “The season, the roads, the accommodations for traveling are so unfavorable that it is not expected I can get to Paris in less than thirty days,” he wrote in explanation to the president of Congress, Samuel Huntington. “But if I were to wait for the frigate, it would probably be much longer. I am determined, therefore, to make the best of way by land.”

At first light, December 15, Adams, his sons, Francis Dana, John Thaxter, servants, Spanish guides and muleteers, and two additional Americans who had been aboard the Sensible, set off mounted on scrawny mules and looking, as John Thaxter noted, very like a scene from Don Quixote, and quixotic the whole undertaking turned out to be. Adams was exhausted before the journey began. In the week since landing he had hardly slept a night, so horrific was the torment of fleas and bedbugs, Spain’s “enemies of all repose,” as he said.

At the old city of La Coruña provisions were gathered. Three ancient calashes — clumsy, brightly painted two-wheeled carriages — were also added to the caravan, these remarkable for their cracked leather seats and broken harness patched together with rope and twine and pulled by mules with tiny, tinkling bells tied about their necks. As the calashes proved more uncomfortable than the mules, Adams, Dana, and Thaxter chose to go by mule most of the way.

We carried bread and cheese, meat, knives and forks, spoons, apples and nuts [Adams would write]. Indeed, we were obliged to carry . . . our own beds, blankets . . . everything that we wanted. . . . We got nothing at the taverns but fire, water . . . and sometimes the wine of the country.

From La Coruña, their route passed through Betanzos, once the capital of the kingdom of Galicia, then Lugo, Astorga, Burgos, and Bilbao. “There is the grandest profusion of wild irregular mountains I ever saw,” Adams wrote. But the roads proved worse even than he had imagined, so rocky and treacherous it was necessary to go by foot a great part of the journey.

“We had nothing worth remarking today except we kept ascending,” wrote John Quincy on December 31. Another day’s journey was “almost perpendicular.” With encouragement from his father, the boy had started a diary, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong enterprise lasting sixty-eight years.

To the Americans the wretchedness of the Spanish people, the squalor of the wayside taverns, were appalling. “Smoke filled every part of the kitchen, stable, and other part[s] of the house, as thick as possible so that it was . . . very difficult to see and breathe,” Adams recorded at one tavern. “The mules, hogs, fowls and human inhabitants live . . . all together,” he wrote of another overnight accommodation. Everywhere he saw poverty and misery, people in rags. “Nothing appeared rich but the churches, nobody fat but the clergy,” he noted sadly.

There were days of rain, fog, and snow, mountains that went endlessly on and on, mountains like “a tumbling sea.” The boys were sick with colds. Francis Dana became so ill there was a question whether he could continue. “We go along barking and sneezing and coughing as if we were fitter for a hospital than for travelers on the road,” wrote Adams, whose own strength and spirits began to give out. He had never known a worse undertaking, he fumed in his diary. Given the choice of his first crossing on the Boston, or this, he would prefer the former with all its horrors. But only to Abigail, in a letter written at Bilbao, did he concede that he had made a mistake coming overland.

The one compensation of the journey was the warmth of the welcome they received along the route. Spain by now had entered the war, but as an ally of France only. John Jay of New York, the American minister to Spain, had been in Madrid for a year, and his mission had proven hopeless, as the Spanish Court had no interest in recognizing the independence of the United States. Still, no representative of any government would have been treated with more courtesy and friendship than were Adams and his party in town after town, as he was to report proudly.

At last in January, two weeks into the new year 1780, the travelers crossed the frontier at St.-Jean-de-Luz and by nightfall arrived at Bayonne. Leaving Spain, Adams regretted only that he had had no time for a detour to see the famous pilgrimage cathedral of Santiago de Compestela, and that he had to part with his mule, “as he was an excellent animal and had served me well.”

Heading on by post chaise, he and his party were in Bordeaux in another few days, and despite fog and icy roads reached Paris on February 9, travel-worn but in “tolerable” health, nearly two months after departing from El Ferrol, three months after setting sail from Boston. A letter from Abigail filled with worry was waiting for him at the Hôtel de Valois on the Rue de Richelieu, which he planned to make his address this time.

LOSING NO TIME, Adams enrolled the boys the next morning in the boarding school at Passy, then called on Franklin. At Versailles the day after, accompanied by Franklin and Francis Dana, Adams “had the honor to wait on” the aged Prime Minister of France, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas, who was as old nearly as the century, older even than Franklin; as well as the Minister of Marine, Gabriel Sartine; and the all-important Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes.

In Franklin’s estimate, the “disposition” of the Court to the American cause was as favorable as it had ever been, and Adams came away from these initial discussions feeling even more sanguine. He had never heard the French Foreign Ministry “so frank, explicit, and decided,” he stressed in a letter to Congress. Most encouraging was the talk of French naval support, and from all that he heard, he grew increasingly optimistic. The largest French fleet yet was preparing to sail. Four thousand troops under General Rochambeau were soon to depart.

“The French Court seemed to be now every day more and more convinced of the good policy, and indeed the necessity, of prosecuting the war with vigor in America,” Adams informed James Warren. “They have been making great preparations accordingly, and are determined to maintain a clear superiority.”

The one annoyance was Vergennes’s apparent displeasure over Adams’s mission. Adams offered a letter of explanation, saying he had been chosen by Congress as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace with Great Britain, as well as a treaty of commerce. It was the wish of Congress, as a way to save time, that an authorized American envoy be present in Europe to treat with the ministers of the other powers the moment peace became possible. Further, it was the wish of Congress — as well as his own — to take no steps without consulting the ministers of his Most Christian Majesty.

Adams asked whether, “in the present circumstances of things,” the British should be made aware of the purpose of his mission, and suggested that an official announcement be published such as had already appeared in the Journals of Congress.

His letter was written on February 12. In reply, February 15, Vergennes insisted that nothing be said of the matter until Conrad Gérard, the French minister to America who had been replaced by La Luzerne, arrived back in Paris, and explained Adams’s instructions from Congress. In the meantime, Adams was told, “It is the part of prudence to conceal your eventual character [as peacemaker] and, above all, to take the necessary precautions that the object of your commission remain unknown to the Court of London.”

Adams was astonished and deeply insulted. It was no affair of Gérard’s to explain his instructions. It was also inconceivable that the British did not already know the nature of his business. The London papers had already carried news of his arrival in Europe and that he had come to “hear and receive any proposals of peace” from Great Britain. And as Vergennes was known to employ a veritable army of spies, he was hardly groping in the dark on such matters.

The proud, immensely shrewd French Foreign Minister had become one of the great figures of eighteenth-century Europe by dint of exceedingly hard work and by making himself a consummate man of the world. French support for the American war was his policy and he its champion from the start, despite the fearful drain it imposed on the treasury of France. There was thus no one more deserving of American gratitude. But it was because of no abiding fervor for American liberty that he had persuaded his young king to come to America’s aid. France was an absolute monarchy and Vergennes as stout a monarchist as could be found. His purpose, first, last, and always, was to weaken and humble Britain and, at the same time, expand French trade in America.

“Always keep in mind,” Vergennes would tell the Minister of Finance, “that in separating the United States from Great Britain, it was above all their commerce we wanted.”

Adams had no illusions about what determined the actions of nations. “It is interest alone which does it,” he had once told Congress, “and it is interest alone which can be trusted.” For Vergennes’s American policy he had a vivid image: “He means . . . to keep his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”

As polite as Adams remained, Vergennes neither liked nor trusted him. He found Adams’s manifest integrity unsettling; Adams’s emphatic patriotism appealed not at all. The Foreign Minister was a man accustomed to deference, and exceedingly fond of having his way. Preferring to deal only with the ever obliging Franklin, he dreaded the prospect of Adams meddling in what he, Vergennes, regarded as his exclusive domain, the power politics of Europe. While all Paris might see Franklin as the authentic, homespun “natural” American, Vergennes knew better. It was precisely Franklin’s subtlety, his worldliness, that made him invaluable as a diplomat. Adams, on the other hand, was truly a provincial. Worse, he was a novice; and there was no telling the damage such a man might do.

Vergennes’s professed need to see the instructions Gérard was bringing was disingenuous, since Gérard had long since sent Vergennes a summary of Adams’s instructions, in a dispatch from Philadelphia the very day they were adopted by Congress.

“The delicacies of the Comte de Vergennes about communicating my powers [to Britain] are not perfectly consonant to my manner of thinking,” Adams wrote to Congress. Were he free to follow his own judgment, he would pursue a “bolder plan.” But in the face of the Foreign Minister’s directive there seemed little he could do. Franklin volunteered no support, nor did Adams ask for it.

At loose ends once again in Europe, and with no word from Congress, Adams was nonetheless determined to make himself useful. If nothing else, he could write — Adams would always write. Another man might have relaxed and bided his time, just as another man might have waited at El Ferrol for his ship to be repaired, rather than striking out over the mountains of Spain.

Through that spring in Paris and on into summer, with able assistance from Francis Dana and John Thaxter, Adams produced letters by the score, reports, newspaper articles — a great outpouring of “intelligence” surpassing in quantity even his most ambitious literary efforts of other years. Determined to improve European understanding of the American cause, he became, with Vergennes’s sanction, his own office of information and propaganda, supplying anonymous articles to the Mercure de France, a weekly journal edited by Edmé-Jacques Genêt of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “I can assure you of his [Vergennes’s] pleasure in giving his approval to publish in the Mercure everything that shall come from such a good pen,” wrote Genêt, who tried tactfully to convince Adams he would do better with his French readers if he were not quite so long-winded.

In addition, Adams turned out articles tailored for publication in the British press, these to be placed by an American in London named Edmund Jenings. Another American agent in London, Thomas Digges, was recruited to keep Adams supplied with items gleaned from the London papers. Jenings and Digges were somewhat shadowy figures who may have been double agents like Edward Bancroft, but Adams trusted both, relied heavily on them, and the system worked with great efficiency. Digges’s reporting especially was fast and accurate. His dispatches, sent to C. F. Hoochera, a favorite bookseller of Adams’s on the Pont Neuf, were addressed to Ferdinando Ramón San, a name Adams borrowed from one of the muleteers on the trek across Spain.

Adams and Dana got along well. In accepting the appointment as secretary, Dana had insisted that he be considered Adams’s equal, a colleague, not an employee, and Adams, who had agreed, proved as good as his word. No less the New Englander than Adams, Dana was equally ill suited to trifling away his time. They were of like mind on most matters, including the underlying motives of the Comte de Vergennes.

Between times, on his own, Adams maintained correspondence with James Warren, James Lovell, Elbridge Gerry, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Rush. And he wrote periodically to Vergennes, affirming his faith in the French-American alliance and passing along what little news from America came his way.

But much the greatest part of the outpouring was to Congress. From his rooms on the Rue de Richelieu, Adams issued almost daily correspondence, writing at times two and three letters a day, these addressed to President Samuel Huntington and filled with reports on British politics, British and French naval activities, or his own considered views on European affairs. In a letter dated April 18, he gave as clear-headed an appraisal as Congress was to receive from anyone in Europe.

Although I am convinced by everything I see, and read and hear, that all the powers of Europe . . . rejoice in the American Revolution and consider the independence of America in their interest and happiness . . . yet I have many reasons to think that not one of them, not even Spain or France, wishes to see America rise very fast to power. We ought therefore to be cautious how we magnify our ideas and exaggerate our expressions of the generosity and magnanimity of any of these powers. Let us treat them with gratitude, but with dignity. Let us remember what is due to ourselves and our posterity as well as to them. Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their wars and politics . . . America has been the sport of European wars and politics long enough.

With still no response from Congress, after some forty-six letters, he kept steadily on. “I have written more to Congress since my arrival in Paris than they ever received from Europe put it all together since the revolution [began],” he told Elbridge Gerry without exaggeration. Franklin by contrast rarely wrote a word to Congress. By late July, Adams had produced no less than ninety-five letters — more than Congress wanted, he imagined — and never knowing whether anything had been received.

“I am so taken up with writing to Phil[adelphia] that I don’t write to you as often as I wish,” he told Abigail, to whom he had already written twenty times or more.

He saw his sons as often as he could and tried to keep watch on their progress at school. “Can’t you keep a steadier hand?” he admonished John Quincy in response to a hurried scrawl from the boy listing his course of study. It was essential to learn to write well, Adams lectured. When another letter from John Quincy arrived, this beautifully executed on lightly penciled guide lines, Adams wrote at once to praise him and say how pleased he was. But unable to resist giving further advice, he told him to waste no time learning to do flourishes with his pen. “Ornaments of this kind, if not done with great skill, are worse than none,” declared Adams in his notably plain hand.

Living at the center of Paris, he was able to see more of the city than ever before. The busy Rue de Richelieu was one of the most fashionable streets and the Hôtel de Valois, at 17 Rue de Richelieu, a premier residence. John Quincy would remember it as “magnificent.” Close by were the gardens of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries, which, with their statuary, Adams thought beautiful beyond compare. On days when the boys could be with him, they walked the gardens and much of the city. He took them on his rounds of the bookshops on the Left Bank. They toured the Jardin du Roi, with its celebrated natural history displays. How long would it be, Adams wondered, before America had such collections.

“There is everything here that can inform understanding, or refine the taste, and indeed one would think that could purify the heart,” he wrote of Paris to Abigail. Yet there were temptations. “Yet it must be remembered there is everything here, too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, corrupt and debauch,” and in order to see to his duties, he must steel himself.

The conflict between the appeal of the arts and the sense that they were the product of a luxury-loving (and thus corrupt) foreign society played heavily on his mind. Delightful as it was to stroll the gardens of Paris, enticing as were science and the arts, he, John Adams, had work to do, a public trust to uphold. The science of government was his duty; the art of negotiation must take precedence.

Then, in a prophetic paragraph that would be quoted for generations within the Adams family and beyond, he wrote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

How Americans deported themselves in Europe was a serious matter, Adams’s convictions stemming more from patriotism than prudishness. So much more was at stake than one’s own pleasure.

When a young New England merchant named Elkanah Watson, the son of a friend, wrote to inquire what sort of manners he should cultivate in anticipation of touring Europe, Adams’s answer went far to explain his own conduct under the circumstances and the kind of guidance he was giving his sons.

You tell me, sir, you wish to cultivate your manners before you begin your travels . . . permit me to take the liberty of advising you to cultivate the manners of your own country, not those of Europe. I don’t mean by this that you should put on a long face, never dance with the ladies, go to a play, or take a game of cards. But you may depend upon this, that the more decisively you adhere to a manly simplicity in your dress, equipage, and behavior, the more you devote yourself to business and study, and the less to dissipation and pleasure, the more you will recommend yourself to every man and woman in this country whose friendship or acquaintance is worth your having or wishing. There is an urbanity without ostentation or extravagance which will succeed everywhere and at all times. You will excuse this freedom, on account of my friendship for your father and consequently for you, and because I know that some young gentlemen have come to Europe with different sentiments and have consequently injured the character of their country as well as their own both here [and at home].

The boys were getting on splendidly, he assured their mother. Her “delicate” Charles was “hardy as flint,” “speaks French like a hero.” “He is a delightful little fellow. I love him too much.”

Yet as before, Adams remained reluctant to profess his love for her, though it was from the heart that he wrote:

May Heaven permit you and me to enjoy the cool of the evening of life in tranquility, undisturbed by the cares of politics and war — and above all with the sweetest of all reflections that neither ambition, nor vanity, nor any base motive, or sordid passion through the whole course of great and terrible events that have attended it, have drawn us aside from the line of duty and the dictates of our consciences. Let us have ambition enough to keep our simplicity, our frugality, and our integrity, and transmit these virtues as the fairest of inheritance to our children.

Peace was his dearest wish. But when ever would they see it? “The events of politics are not less uncertain than those of war.”

JOHN ADAMS WAS NOT UNSYMPATHETIC to the concerns of the Comte de Vergennes and the Foreign Ministry. Nor was he ever so obtuse about French sensibilities and the importance of maintaining good relations with France as his detractors would later charge. “The Court here have many differences to manage as well as we,” he wrote understandingly to Samuel Adams, “and it is a delicate thing to push things in this country.” While he believed candor essential in dealing with the French, “harshness,” he knew, was sure to ruin even the fairest negotiations with them.

His great worry, as he reported to Congress, was that the French were growing tired of the war. In fact, as Adams was unaware, Vergennes had privately informed his king of a “need” for peace, while to a friend he expressed but “feeble confidence” in the Americans. Further, Adams correctly suspected it was the French intention, once the war was ended, to keep America poor and dependent — “Keep us weak. Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude.” He saw acutely and painfully the dilemma of the French Alliance. Without French help, the United States could not win the war, yet it was purely for their own purposes that the French were involved.

Still, he felt no difficulty in dealing with Vergennes. Nor, interestingly, was he distressed with Franklin. In voluminous correspondence with members of Congress and in his private writings, Adams had not a complaining or disrespectful word to say about Franklin, nothing of the bitter disdain expressed in letters the year before.

But there now followed a chain of events that were to culminate in a serious rift with both Vergennes and Franklin. Probably it was inevitable.

On June 16, as had become routine, Adams sent Vergennes some latest items of news from America, these concerning the American currency. Three months before, on March 18, 1780, desperate to curb rampant inflation, Congress had resolved to devalue the dollar. It was a matter about which Vergennes already knew and, in passing along the information, Adams volunteered no opinion of Congress’s policy. A few days later, however, Adams was summoned to Versailles for a discussion of the issue, during which he candidly voiced his approval of what Congress had done. Vergennes was as polite as always. “The conversation was long . . . very decent and civil on both sides,” Adams would recall. But again Adams was telling the Foreign Minister what he already knew, since Adams had earlier expressed his views to Chaumont, who lost no time reporting the conversation to Vergennes.

Vergennes’s situation was more complicated than Adams knew. There was dissension within the Foreign Ministry. The aged Prime Minister, Maurepas, was secretly making peace gestures to the British, and implying that the French might give way on support for American independence.

The easiest, most prudent step for Vergennes would have been to let the matter of the dollar cool for a while. Normally he would have taken it up with Franklin, the properly accredited minister to the Court, with whom he had never known the least discord. But it appears that he saw his chance. Having found no way to control Adams, he could now at last be rid of him.

In an official letter of June 21, Vergennes informed Adams that France opposed any revaluation of the American currency unless an exception were made for French merchants. He portrayed the measure as an act of bad faith on the part of America, implying it could have serious consequences to the alliance, and he called on Adams to request Congress to “retrace its steps and do justice to the subjects of the King.”

If Vergennes was setting a trap — as it seems he was — Adams obliged by stepping into it, and perhaps knowingly. In a characteristically spirited, unambiguous letter, Adams made the case for revaluation and for no preferred treatment for French merchants, his purpose being to make clear his own views and those, he was sure, of Congress and the American people. “I thought it my indispensable duty to my country and to Congress, to France and the Count himself, to be explicit,” he would say.

Revaluation was a necessity, he wrote. Congress had no other choice. And since most French merchants who dealt in armaments and military supplies had been paid in European currencies, they had little cause for complaint. Besides, their profits had been substantial. But the crux of the matter was that, in justice, no foreign merchant could possibly be granted better treatment than American merchants. It was that simple. “Foreigners, when they come to trade with a nation, make themselves temporary citizens, and tacitly consent to be bound by the same laws.”

The letter was undoubtedly what Vergennes expected from Adams, and all that he needed — a written statement from Adams showing him to be in direct opposition to French policy and thus a threat to relations between France and America.

Adams, however, took this first real exchange of views with the aloof Foreign Minister as a long-awaited opportunity to broaden discussions on matters of more importance. The prospect of greater French military involvement in the war in America that had looked so promising earlier, appeared to have faded. While the army of Rochambeau had been sent to aid Washington, French warships had sailed not for the United States, as expected, but for the West Indies. Whatever the size of the armies of Washington and Rochambeau, Adams wrote emphatically, victory in America and an end to the war there would never come so long as the British were masters of the sea. The critical need was for a grand strategy whereby a French fleet would be deployed along the coast of the United States, to bottle up the British armies in the port cities where they were concentrated. Further, Adams argued, to keep a superior naval force on the coast of North America was “the best policy” for France, even were France to consider her own interests alone.

In another letter, raising again the naval question, Adams said he was “determined to omit no opportunity of communicating my sentiments to your excellency, upon everything that appears to me to be of importance to the common cause.”

But Vergennes had had enough. On July 29, in a crushing reply, he ended any further communication with Adams. He would henceforth deal only with Franklin, he announced, and in a pointedly undiplomatic conclusion, informed Adams, “Le Roi n’a pas eu besoin de vos sollicitations pour s’occuper des intérêts des États-Unis.” “The King did not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attention to the interests of the United States.”

A full set of Adams’s letters were then delivered to Franklin, with an accompanying note from Vergennes saying, “The King expects that you will lay the whole before Congress.” At the same time, a dispatch from the Foreign Minister went off to Philadelphia directing La Luzerne to see what could be done to have Adams recalled.

Franklin wrote a letter of his own to Congress, which he need not have. He could have merely forwarded the Adams letters as Vergennes requested and said little or nothing. But Franklin, too, it seemed had had enough of Adams. His letter was dated August 9, 1780, and while mild in tone and not entirely unfair in judgment, it was, as Franklin knew perfectly, a devastating indictment. Vergennes could not have wished for more, which may well have been Franklin’s intent. “Mr. Adams has given extreme offense to the court here,” it began.

. . . having nothing else wherewith to employ himself, he seems to have endeavored to supply what he may suppose my negotiations defective in. He thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; for that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should show spirit in our applications. I apprehend that he mistakes his ground, and that this court is to be treated with decency and delicacy. The King, a young and virtuous prince, has, I am persuaded, a pleasure in reflecting on the generous benevolence of the action in assisting an oppressed people, and proposes it as a part of the glory of his reign. I think it right to increase this pleasure by our thankful acknowledgements, and that such an expression of gratitude is not only our duty, but our interest. A different conduct seems to me what is not only improper and unbecoming, but what may be hurtful to us. Mr. Adams, on the other hand, who at the same time means our welfare and interest as much as I do or any man can do, seems to think a little apparent stoutness and greater air of independence and boldness in our demands will produce us more ample assistance. . . .

Mr. Vergennes, who appears much offended, told me yesterday that he would enter into no further discussions with Mr. Adams, nor answer any more of his letters. . . . It is my intention, while I stay here, to procure what advantages I can for our country by endeavoring to please this court.

Not for months was Adams to learn what Franklin had done. Nor was he to see Franklin or Vergennes again for an even longer time. For as Franklin also reported to Congress, Adams had by then departed Paris for Holland to see, as he told Franklin, “whether something might be done to render us less dependent on France.”

II

IT WAS NOT HIS IDEA ALONE, or contrary to American intent. The prospect of securing financial help from the Dutch Republic had been talked about in Congress and at Paris for some time. The Dutch had been smuggling arms to America in quantity since before the French had become involved. More even than their French counterparts, Dutch merchants had grown rich in the trade, and so it seemed a reasonable prospect that Dutch money might also be available. Congress had considered sending a minister to Holland even before Adams left on his initial mission to France, and in his first months at Paris, he had reported that there was more friendship for America in Holland than generally understood. In advance of his second mission to Europe as peacemaker, Congress debated assigning Adams the additional task of negotiating a Dutch loan, but after concluding that a “distinct appointment” made better sense, named its former president, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, to seek a loan of $10 million. But Laurens was unable to depart for months to come, not until the summer of 1780.

Franklin, for his part, expressed strong disapproval of any such overt “suitoring” for alliances, preferring, as he said, that America, “a virgin state, should preserve the virgin character” and “wait with decent dignity for the applications of others.” Apparently he saw no contradiction with his own “suitoring” at the Court of Versailles, or the irony that he, of all people, would preach the preservation of a “virgin character.”

Adams, who had never lost interest in Holland, strongly disagreed, and from reports gathered since his return to Paris, he surmised that the chances for financial help from the Dutch were better than ever. He tried to convince Franklin and Vergennes of the need for a reconnaissance of the Low Countries, but without success. It was only when the strain of relations with Vergennes reached the breaking point that Vergennes acquiesced and provided Adams with the necessary passports, relieved to be rid of him.

With no support or consideration from either Vergennes or Franklin, Adams’s position in Paris had become untenable. He longed for a change of scene. Above all, he longed to accomplish something, and was very quickly on his way to Amsterdam.

The venture was entirely of his own making. He went as a private citizen only, without authority, and, as it happened, wholly unaware that in June Congress had decided he should pursue exactly such a survey until Henry Laurens arrived. Optimism in Congress on the subject was as great as Adams’s own.

For Adams, ever the independent man, it was a role of the kind he most loved — setting forth on his own against the odds in the service of the greatest of causes. For he genuinely believed the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance.

He removed his sons from the school at Passy and on July 27, accompanied by the servant Stephens, they were on their way north by coach, traveling fast over good roads to Compiègne and Valenciennes, through the finest farmland Adams had ever seen, at the height of one of the most abundant summers France had known. “The wheat, rye, barley, oats, peas, beans, and several other grains, the hemp, flax, grass, clover . . . the vines, the cattle, the sheep, in short everything upon this road is beautiful,” observed the farmer from Braintree happily.

The boys, free from school and again in their father’s company, felt a lift of spirits to match his own. “We passed by Mons, which is a city and a very pretty one,” wrote thirteen-year-old John Quincy. “I never saw a more beautiful one in my life.”

They rolled through Brussels and Antwerp. At Rotterdam, on a Sunday, attending services at an English church, they listened as the English preacher prayed that “a certain king” might have “health and long life and that his enemies might not prevail against him.” Praying silently on his own, Adams asked that George III “be brought to consideration and repentance and to do justice to his enemies and to all the world.”

From Rotterdam they continued by horse-drawn canal boat to Delft, then The Hague, the Dutch seat of government. On the approach to Amsterdam that evening the giant canvas sails of immense windmills turned ceaselessly on all sides, a spectacle such as they had never seen.

Holland was as far north as Adams had ever been in his travels and about as different from France as a place could be. Holland, the name commonly used for the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands (of which Holland was the richest and most populated province), had particular appeal to Americans. It was the tiny, indomitable republic which, in 1648, had formally won its independence from Spain, the mightiest empire of the time, after a war and truce that stretched over some eighty years. Like the United States, the Dutch Republic was born of war, and for more than a century had survived and prospered between two of the great, interminably warring powers of Europe, France and England. Adams would liken it to a frog hopping about between the legs of two battling bulls.

As America faced the challenge of a continental wilderness, Holland faced the North Sea. The extraordinary ingenuity and industry of the Dutch in wresting land from the sea were legendary. Still the actual spectacle of all that had been contrived and built, the innumerable canals, bridges, dams, dikes, sluices, and windmills needed to cope with water, to drain land, and hold back the sea — and that all had to be kept in working order so that life could go on — made first-time visitors stand back in awe, and New Englanders especially, knowing what they did of inhospitable climate and limited space. Francis Dana, when he arrived later, wrote of the Dutch living in a world made by hand. “The whole is an astonishing machinery, created, connected, constantly preserved by the labor, industry, and unremitting attention of its inhabitants at an expense beyond calculation.”

Amsterdam alone had more than 500 bridges arching its web of canals. The pride of the city, its Town Hall, a massive structure of cut stone, stood, as almost every visitor was informed, on 13,659 wooden piles.

Predominantly Protestant, Holland was known for its tolerance, for allowing religious freedom to thousands of European Jews, French Huguenots, and other Christian sects. To New Englanders it was very nearly sacred ground, as the place where the English separatists known as the Pilgrims had found refuge in the seventeenth century, settling at Leyden for twelve years before embarking for Massachusetts.

The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch. In one of the most astonishing upsurges of commercial vitality in all history, they had become the greatest trading nation in the world, the leading shipbuilders and mapmakers. Amsterdam, the busiest port in Europe, became the richest city in the world, and with their vast wealth, the Dutch became Europe’s money lenders.

In the arts and letters, it was the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and van Ruysdael; of the poet Joost van den Vondel, of Grotius in theology and maritime law, Spinoza in philosophy. In the liberal atmosphere of seventeenth-century Holland, the French philosopher René Descartes found refuge and freedom to publish. John Locke, from whom Adams, Jefferson, and other American patriots drew inspiration, had published some of his earliest works while a political refugee in Amsterdam.

The Golden Age was long past by the time Adams arrived — Dutch maritime power and Dutch prestige were acknowledged to be “in decline” — yet business was thriving and visitors were struck by signs of Dutch prosperity on all sides. Amsterdam remained the commercial center of Europe. Its immense harbor thronged with shipping. “Wherever the eye ranges, masts and sails appear,” wrote an English traveler. “Bells are sounding and vessels departing at all hours.”

Beside the city’s broad, tree-lined main canals, row upon row of elegant brick grachtenhuizen (canal houses) proclaimed the wealth of its merchant citizenry as did nothing else. Four and five stories tall, they were much alike in the Dutch manner, with stepped or bell-shaped gables and tall, sparkling windows of Dutch plate glass, which was considered something quite special. “The verdure of the trees reflecting strongly upon large windows which are kept bright and free of dust, add infinitely to their luster and magnificence,” wrote a visiting American. The homes of the wealthiest families, the grandest houses of all, numbering in the hundreds along the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht (the Gentlemen’s Canal and the Emperor’s Canal), were as fine as any of the great city houses of Europe. And more even than the elegant façades, the interiors and furnishings of such houses — the marble floors, chinaware, leather-bound books, maps, and huge ebony-framed portraits of the merchants themselves or of their Golden Age patriarchs — bespoke generations of accumulated wealth and unrivaled position.

Commonly described as a kind of northern Venice, Amsterdam had none of the architectural grandeur of Venice and was subject to long, dank North Sea winters. Also, by late summer, the season when Adams arrived, many of the canals turned putrid-smelling, and “so laden with filth,” an English woman wrote, “that on a hot day the feculence seems pestilential.” Indeed, the Dutch climate was widely understood to be dangerous to the health. “Amsterdam fever” was a well-known and dreaded malady. Visitors who stayed too long could expect to be ill, it was said, though young James Boswell of London had written that one ought to experience no difficulty if one ate well, drank well, dressed properly, and took exercise. Of Amsterdam, however, Boswell had little to say beyond that it was a place where he could patronize brothels unobserved.

Adams found the city densely crowded and teeming with foreigners — French, English, and Americans, commercial agents, sea captains, journalists, tourists, and spies. In smoky cafés Dutch merchants and bankers drank coffee, pulled at clay pipes, and talked incessantly to all hours. The talk was open, spirited — an atmosphere made to order for Adams — and rife with high-blown speculation, most of which struck him as amusing, as he told Franklin in a friendly letter written soon after his arrival.

One says America will give France the go by. Another that France and Spain will abandon America. A third that Spain will forsake France and America. A fourth that America has the interest of all Europe against her. A fifth that she will become the greatest manufacturing country and thus ruin Europe. A sixth that she will become a great and ambitious military and naval power, and consequently terrible to Europe.

Suspicious that there were too many Englishmen, and thus too many possible spies, in the hotel where he and the boys were staying, Adams found modest lodgings with an elderly widow, a “Madame La Veuve du Henry Schorn, of de Achterburgwal by de Hoogstrat,” as he would give the new address.

To get his bearings he was out and about, walking the canals, studying the buildings, circumventing the entire city by foot, meeting people, glad to return to useful work. Through all his life Adams would be happiest when there was clear purpose to his days.

“Papa went out”; “Papa went out to dinner”; “Papa went out to take a walk,” recorded John Quincy.

Adams knew no one, but from all that he saw and heard, and after meetings with a number of prominent Amsterdam bankers — Henrik Hooft, Jan de Neufville and son, Jacob and Nicholas van Staphorst — he grew highly optimistic. A “considerable” loan was entirely possible, he reported to Congress. Moreover, there was no better place in Europe in which to gather information or from which to circulate it.

In an exuberant letter to Abigail, he called Holland “the greatest curiosity in the world.” He doubted there was any nation of Europe “more estimable than the Dutch, in proportion.

Their industry and economy ought to be examples to the world. They have less ambition, I mean that of conquest and military glory, than their neighbors, but I don’t perceive that they have more avarice. And they carry learning and the arts, I think, to a greater extent.

His only concerns were that the air was “not so salubrious” as that of France, and that the Dutch knew little at all about America, which he found astonishing.

When on September 16, Francis Dana turned up from Paris with the news that Congress had given Adams authority to work on securing a Dutch loan until Henry Laurens appeared, Adams notified John Thaxter to pack everything at the hotel in Paris and come at once. John Quincy and Charles were enrolled in Amsterdam’s renowned Latin School, and Adams set to work. All his energy, zeal, stubborn determination, and his idealism, qualities that had seemed ill-suited at Versailles, were now to be brought to bear. In little time he cultivated an amazing range of friends among the press and in intellectual and financial circles, a number of whom were Jews who, Adams later said, were among the most liberal and accommodating of all.

He made a study of Dutch ways and temperament, read deeply in Dutch history, searching out ever more volumes in Amsterdam’s numerous well-stocked bookshops. He struggled to learn the language, and in what seemed an equally daunting task, to fathom the complexities of the Dutch system of government.

Between times, he kept campaigning by mail for an American navy, his determination perhaps reinforced by a new appreciation of all that commerce at sea had meant to the Dutch. “If I could have my will, there should not be the least obstruction of navigation, commerce, or privateering,” Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush, “because I firmly believe that one sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.” To Congress he declared emphatically, “A navy is our natural and only defense.”

In October, events took an unexpected turn, when word came from London that Henry Laurens, on his way to Amsterdam, had been captured at sea by a British man-of-war. Charged with high treason, Laurens was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, with “orders that no person whatever speaks to him,” as Adams’s London contact Thomas Digges reported. A sack containing Laurens’s confidential papers had been thrown overboard from his ship too late and the British had hooked it from the sea. Among the papers was the draft of a proposed secret treaty between America and the Netherlands, a document of no real significance, but one the British were happy to use as a pretext for a show of angry indignation and threats of war, a possibility the Dutch dreaded as they did no other.

With the responsibility of securing a loan now squarely on his shoulders, and the likelihood of peace no nearer than before, Adams settled in for the long haul.

At home the war in the South was going badly. Charleston had fallen to the British. At Camden, South Carolina, General Horatio Gates had suffered a devastating defeat in a battle in which American soldiers had fled like sheep. Nearly 1,000 Americans had been killed and a thousand more captured. Gates had been a favorite general officer of the Congress and of Adams, and it had been one of the most disastrous defeats of the war.

But there must be no softening of resolve, Adams declared. “I think I see very clearly that America must grow up in war,” he wrote to Congress. His own central task was to convince the Dutch that America would accept no outcome short of complete, irrevocable independence. Without that insurance, there would be no Dutch loan. Of this Adams was now absolutely certain.

This country had been grossly deceived. It has little knowledge of the numbers, wealth, and resources of the United States, and less faith in their finally supporting independence, upon which alone a credit depends. They also have an opinion of the power of England vastly higher than the truth. Measures must be taken with great caution and delicacy to undeceive them.

With his phenomenal capacity for work — an attribute not lost on the industrious Dutch — he produced materials of every kind in an all-out effort to “undeceive” them, while at the same time providing Congress with some of the most astute political reporting of his diplomatic career. Help came from a number of his new Dutch friends, “people of the first character,” as he said, who saw in the American struggle for independence hope for all humanity, and who, as Adams would long contend, never received the recognition they deserved.

Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters. Older than Adams by nearly fifteen years, he served faithfully as a translator and expert source of information.

John Luzac of Leyden, a lawyer, scholar, and editor, published in his Gazette de Leyde a steady variety of material supplied by Adams, including the first European translation of the new Massachusetts Constitution, which was to have an important effect in the Netherlands. In little time Luzac and Adams became the closest of friends.

Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, a Dutch nobleman, had been the first and most prominent figure in the country to champion the American cause, and he greatly admired Adams’s determination. Van der Capellen knew the majority of the Dutch sympathized with the American Revolution, but astutely he advised Adams that only American success in the war would enlist Dutch credit, for all the expressions of good will and interest he would hear.

At The Hague, as Adams came to understand, there was little sympathy for the American cause, nor much hope for decisive action. The government of the country, maddeningly complicated to anyone unfamiliar with it, seemed devised intentionally to foster inertia. It was a republic, but with no real executive power, only a symbolic head of state, the hereditary Stadholder, William V, Prince of Orange, who was related to the British royal family and personally devoted to the status quo. As Adams explained to Congress, sovereignty resided in the national assembly, Their High Mightinesses, the States-General. Yet even they were but the deputies of the “regents” in the cities, a very select group of great influence. Thus, as Adams wrote, the true power lay in the cities and in Amsterdam in particular. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam . . . who are called the regency, are one integral branch of the sovereignty of the seven United Provinces, and the most material branch of all because the city of Amsterdam is one quarter of the whole Republic, at least in taxes.”

Not until the government at The Hague took it upon itself to recognize the United States would anyone in the government be permitted to receive Adams officially. In actual practice nearly all would shun him. This being the case, it seemed only sensible to concentrate his efforts in Amsterdam, as both the money and the real political power were there.

But as Adams found, Dutch talk of financial support and an actual Dutch loan were decidedly different matters, his initial high expectations to the contrary. “No [banking] house that I have as yet thought it prudent to apply to dares to undertake the trust,” he told Congress. The Netherlands had been too long allied with Britain, as a matter of commercial advantage. Dutch prosperity depended in large measure on British support for Dutch trade on the high seas. Dutch banks, moreover, held substantial loans to Britain. Hence, there was extreme reluctance to take any step, do anything rash, that might upset the British.

That November of 1780 the situation was further compounded by more dispiriting news from America. In September General Benedict Arnold had conspired to commit treason, to turn over the fortress at West Point to the British, and when found out, defected to the enemy. As Baron van der Capellen reported to Adams, Arnold’s treachery, on top of the loss of Charleston and Gates’s defeat at Camden, left Dutch confidence shattered. “Never has the credit of America stood so low,” he told Adams, who advised Congress to “depend upon no money from hence.”

All professions of Dutch friendship for America were but “little adulations to procure a share of our trade,” and now even they had vanished like a vapor, as had his own prior exuberance and admiration for the Dutch.

A HARD NORTH SEA WINTER set in to match Adams’s mood. Days were bitterly cold and raw, with darkness descending at four in the afternoon and the air of Amsterdam thick with chimney smoke. With the canals frozen, thousands of skaters took to the ice, a spectacle that provided what little cheer Adams found in life.

His health was suffering. He worried about his sons. At the Latin School, because he spoke no Dutch, John Quincy had been placed with elementary students. The boy grew restless and disheartened. The rector of the school thought him impertinent and merited a thrashing, as he informed his father. Adams’s response was exactly what his own father’s would have been. “Send the boys to me this evening,” he answered. He had no wish to see his children subjected to such “littleness of soul,” he explained to Abigail in a letter in which he gave vent not only to his indignation at the schoolmaster, but at what he had come to see as a decidedly unattractive side to the Dutch character that he had no desire to see rub off on his sons. “The masters are mean-spirited wretches, punching, kicking, and boxing the children upon every turn,” he wrote.

No longer did he see the Dutch as “examples to the world,” but perceived now, bitterly, “a general littleness arising from the incessant contemplation of stivers and doits [pennies and nickels], which pervades the whole people.” Frugality and industry were virtues everywhere, but avarice and stinginess were not frugality.

The Dutch say that without a habit of thinking of every doit before you spend it, no man can be a good merchant or conduct trade with success. This I believe is a just maxim in general. But I would never wish to see a son of mine govern himself by it. It is the sure and certain way for an industrious man to be rich. It is the only possible way for a merchant to become the first merchant or the richest man in the place. But this is an object that I hope none of my children will ever aim at.

Through a young American named Benjamin Waterhouse, a student of medicine at the University of Leyden, Adams arranged for tutors for the two boys, and the opportunity for them to attend lectures at the university.

Such was the turmoil of Amsterdam that Adams now found it impossible even to arrange meetings. “Very few dare to see me,” he reported. Searching desperately for a sign that all was not lost, the best he could come up with was the popularity of new songs full of patriotic resentment toward the English. A woman who sang one such song on an Amsterdam street corner sold six hundred copies in an hour, he informed Congress. But the hard truth was that after five months in the Dutch Republic, Adams had yet to meet a single government official of any importance.

In December, the veteran British ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir Joseph Yorke, began openly threatening the Dutch, setting off something very like panic. “War is to a Dutchman the greatest of evils,” Adams wrote. “Yorke is so sensible of this that he keeps alive a continual fear of it.” At year’s end, “the high and mighty” Yorke abruptly departed and Britain commenced an undeclared war on Dutch shipping.

Convinced he must now gain recognition of American independence and arrange a Dutch-American alliance — and thus only, he had concluded, could he obtain a loan — Adams pressed Congress for greater authority. As winter progressed, his new commission arrived; Congress had designated him minister plenipotentiary to the Dutch Republic, which provided all the authority to be wished for.

Through February and March, despite the weather, Adams kept on the move, traveling back and forth between Amsterdam, Leyden, and The Hague, conferring with as many of his Dutch friends and contacts as possible. Again, as at Paris, the question was the timing of a formal announcement of his new powers.

Advised that his Amsterdam lodgings were too “obscure” for his new position, and that his effectiveness was being hurt by talk of this, Adams arranged for an American firm in Amsterdam to “hire” a suitable house — “the best house that is to be had at as cheap a rate as may be,” he wrote — and to have it furnished “decent enough for any character in Europe to dine in with a republican citizen.” In lengthy correspondence on the matter, he specified that the house be “large, roomy, and handsome, fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d’Amérique.” He would need two manservants and a “good cook” (whether male or female he did not care). A “genteel carriage” would be required, as well as a coachman, and Adams was particular that the livery be in the Paris mode: deep blue coat and breeches, scarlet cape and waistcoats. (He also wanted the clothes returned when the time came for the servants to leave.) This was “new work” for him, he added, having never set up housekeeping before.

At Versailles, meanwhile, the Comte de Vergennes was writing to his ambassador at Philadelphia to say that Adams, in his role in the Netherlands, had become an embarrassment, an observation that La Luzerne was expected to pass along to his numerous friends in Congress. Especially distressing to Vergennes was the thought of Adams ever having any say in a peace settlement. “[He] has a rigidity, an arrogance, and an obstinacy that will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents . . .”

BY ESTABLISHED DIPLOMATIC FORM, no emissary ever proclaimed his mission — his “public character” — until the government to which he was accredited was ready to receive him. To do otherwise was deemed not only appallingly bad form but altogether impractical.

By the time spring came, Adams had decided what he must do, no matter the diplomatic niceties. “America . . . has been too long silent in Europe,” he wrote to Francis Dana. “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained to be approved.”

Adams was by then at Leyden, settled temporarily with his sons, John Thaxter, and Benjamin Waterhouse, the medical student, in a house on a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, the city’s famous cathedral on the opposite side of the Rapenburg Canal from the university. It was the old quarter where the Pilgrims had lived during their years at Leyden, a connection deeply felt by Adams. A deacon at the cathedral would later relate, “Mr. Adams could not refrain from tears in contemplating this great structure.”

On April 19, 1781, six years to the day from the battle of Lexington and Concord, Adams completed and signed a sixteen-page memorial, addressed to “Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries.” A strong, even passionate appeal for cooperation, it began by affirming that the American people were “unalterably determined” to maintain their independence and that if ever there was a “natural alliance,” it would be between the two republics of the Netherlands and the United States. He recalled the years of asylum that the Pilgrims had found among the Dutch. He recounted how New York and New Jersey had been first settled by the Dutch, whose descendants and customs remained. Indeed, so close were the two republics in history, religion, and government, Adams declared, “that every Dutchman instructed on the subject must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary or pass a censure upon the greatest actions of his immortal ancestors.” And if such noble sentiments were not reason enough for a Dutch-American bond, there was “the great and growing interest of commerce,” the “circumstance which perhaps in this age has stronger influence than any other in the formation of friendships between nations.

It may not . . . be amiss to hint that the central situation of this country, her extensive navigation, her possessions in the East and West Indies, the intelligence of her merchants, the number of her capitalists, and the riches of her funds, render a connection with her very desirable to America; and, on the other hand, the abundance and variety of the productions of America, the materials of manufacturers, navigation, and commerce, the vast demand and consumption in America of the manufactures of Europe . . . cannot admit of a doubt that a connection with the United States would be useful to this republic.

Adams was acutely aware of the magnitude of the step he was taking. By breaking the rules of diplomatic convention — by embarking on his own on what he called “militia diplomacy” — he was, he knew, risking ridicule and enmity, and, in the event that things went sour, disgrace. His entire mission was at stake, and who could say what the consequences would be at home if it were to fail. “But wise men know,” he would write, “that militia sometimes gain victories over regular troops, even by departing from the rules.” It was the militia, after all, who had humiliated the British regulars at Lexington and Concord, on that earlier April 19.

For a man of such strong feelings and great inner tensions, these were days of extreme stress, during which he remained uncharacteristically silent, as Benjamin Waterhouse would recall in a telling description of Adams the morning he set off for The Hague, nine miles distant.

I never shall forget the day and the circumstances of Mr. Adams’s going from Leyden to The Hague with the memorial to their High Mightinesses, the States-General. . . . He came down into the front room where we were — his secretary, two sons, and myself — his coach and four at the door, and he, full-dressed, even to his sword, when with energetic countenance and protuberant eyes, and holding his memorial in his hand, said to us in a solemn tone, “Young men! Remember this day, for this day I go to The Hague to put seed in the ground that may produce good or evil — God knows which” — and putting the papers in his side pocket, he stepped into his coach and drove off alone, leaving us, his juniors, solemnized in thought and anxious, for he had hardly spoken to us for several days before — such was his inexpressible solitude.

At The Hague, Adams called first on the French ambassador, the young Duc de La Vauguyon, to inform him of his plan to present the memorial as soon as possible. La Vauguyon, a plump and personable young man whom Adams genuinely liked, spent the next several hours trying to dissuade him, urging that at the least he wait for an opinion from Vergennes. Adams refused. When, the following morning, La Vauguyon appeared at Adams’s hotel to renew his plea, Adams again refused. He knew perfectly well that Vergennes would decide against him, Adams said, and there was no time to be lost.

“What!” said the Duke [according to Adams’s later rendition of the scene]. “Will you take responsibility of it upon yourself?” “Indeed, monsieur le Duc, I will; and I think I alone ought to be responsible, and that no other ambassador, minister, council, or court ought to be answerable for anything concerning it. . . .” “Are you then determined?” “Determined, and unalterably determined, I am.”

On Friday, May 4, 1781, at the Binnenhof, the Inner Courts, at The Hague, Adams called on the Baron van Lynden van Hemmen, president of the States-General for that week, and presented his memorial. And with the energetic help of Dumas and Luzac, Adams had already arranged for its publication in English, French, and Dutch, which was no less important. Thousands of printed copies were made immediately available. Newspapers were provided with the full text. In little time it appeared throughout Europe.

That accomplished, Adams could do no more but wait for a reaction from the Dutch government. They “will deliberate and deliberate and deliberate,” he wrote in despair, little imagining how right he was.

HE HAD BEEN AWAY from home now for more than a year, leaving Abigail to face two winters without him, the first of which had been the most severe in forty years.

Her letters had never stopped, one season to another, though they arrived sporadically and were nearly always five or six months out of date. She wrote to him about the war and the severe weather. Sadly she related the deaths of his brother Peter’s wife, Mary, and of his mother’s husband, John Hall. His mother, she wrote, “desires her tenderest regards to you, though she fears she shall not live to see your return.”

Other letters were taken up with businesslike requests for trade goods, as Adams was again supplying her with regular shipments. She ordered silk gloves, ribbon, thread, fans, common calico, and handkerchiefs. “Handkerchiefs will turn to good account for hard money,” she reminded him. Only once did she request something for herself, a green umbrella from Paris.

As she herself acknowledged, she found it impossible to write a short letter, and to John Quincy and Charles came pages dispensing vigorous, motherly exhortations. Strive to excel, she urged Charles. Anything worth doing was worth doing well, she reminded them. Learning was not attained by chance, but “must be sought for with ardor.” She missed her boys more than she could express, and worried more than ever once she learned of the move to Holland, “a country so damp, abounding in stagnant water, the air of which is said to be very unfriendly to foreigners.”

She tried to keep an even balance in her outlook, she told John. “I am not suddenly elated or depressed. I know America capable of anything she undertakes with spirit and vigor.” No effort was too great for peace, no cost too dear, she wrote, and he must never doubt that his own part in serving that end meant everything to her.

My whole soul is absorbed in the idea. The honor of my dearest friend, the welfare and happiness of this wide, extended country, ages yet unknown, depend for their happiness and security upon the able and skillful, the honest and upright discharge of the important trust committed to him. It would not become me to write the full flow of my heart upon this occasion.

Of the ordeal of separation, she said in closing, “I am inured, but not hardened to the painful portion. Shall I live to see it otherwise?”

Her letters were his great delight, he had assured her, so long as she did not complain, and she was determined to oblige. “I am wholly unconscious of giving you pain in this way since your late absence,” she wrote as the second winter approached. “If I complained [before], it was from the ardor of affection which could not endure the least apprehension of neglect. . . . Sure I am that not a syllable of complaint has ever stained my paper in any letter I have ever written since you left me.”

On Christmas Day, 1780, longing for him, she had written a letter he would not receive until nearly summer:

My dearest friend,

How much is comprised in that short sentence? How fondly can I call you mine, bound by every tie which consecrates the most inviolable friendship, yet separated by a cruel destiny, I feel the pangs of absence sometimes too sensibly for my own repose.

There are times when the heart is peculiarly awake to tender impressions, when philosophy slumbers, or is over-powered by sentiments more conformable to nature. It is then that I feel myself alone in the wide world, without any one to tenderly care for me, or lend me an assisting hand through the difficulties that surround me. Yet my cooler reason disapproves the ripening thought, and bids me bless the hand from which my comforts flow.

”Man active resolute and bold

Is fashioned in a different mold.”

More independent by nature, he can scarcely realize all those ties which bind our sex to his. Is it not natural to suppose that as our dependence is greater, our attachment is stronger? I find in my own breast a sympathetic power always operating upon the near approach of letters from my dearest friend. I cannot determine the exact distance when this secret charm begins to operate. The time is sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. The busy sylphs are ever at my ear, no sooner does Morpheus close my eyes, than “my whole soul, unbounded flies to thee.” Am I superstitious enough for a good Catholic?

A Mr. Ross [John Ross, a merchant from Nantes] arrived lately at Philadelphia and punctually delivered your letters. At the same time a vessel arrived from Holland and brought me yours from Amsterdam of the 25th of Sept[ember], which Mr. Lovell was kind enough to forward to me. I have written to you largely since Davis [Captain Edward Davis of the Dolphin] arrived here, though not in reply to the letters brought by him, for old Neptune alone had the handling of them. He was chased [by British cruisers] and foolishly threw over all his letters into the sea, to my no small mortification.

How many of Adams’s letters had indeed been lost to Neptune, there was no reckoning. But for reasons unknown — and perhaps unknown even to him — Adams appears to have been writing to her hardly at all. In the first half of 1781, to judge by the letters she received, he wrote only once in the first three months and briefly, then briefly again in April, to say he had taken a house in Amsterdam beside the Keizersgracht. Another letter followed in May, another in June, which made four letters in six months and all mostly matter of fact, except that once he wrote, “Oh! Oh! Oh! that you were here.”

He told her little of his work or about the boys — nothing, for example, of the fact that Charles had been severely ill at Leyden. It was as if all his concentration and energy were taken up by his dogged struggle. In the grip of constant uncertainty and stress — and having no successes to report — he preferred to keep silent. He was as preoccupied as he had ever been, and miserably unhappy; and in such a state of mind, as time would show, he was often disinclined to write to her. He abandoned his diary. Only to John Quincy, interestingly, did he pour forth in customary fashion, in letters filled with advice and affection.

IN THE TIME HE HAD SPENT with his eldest son since the voyage of the Boston, it had become clear to Adams that the boy was not only exceptionally bright, but capable of concentrated work to a degree well beyond his years, a judgment confirmed by Benjamin Waterhouse, who wrote of John Quincy bearing down on his lessons “with a constancy rarely seen at that age.” (There was no longer a problem of language for the boy, since university lectures were conducted in Latin.)

“You are now at a university where many of the greatest men have received their education,” Adams reminded him. He must attend all the lectures possible, in law, medicine, chemistry, and philosophy. He must make a study of all the departments and regulations of the celebrated university, “everything in it that may be initiated in the universities of your own country.” Yet when John Quincy asked if he might buy ice skates that winter, Adams consented without hesitation, explaining that skating should be considered a fine art. “It is not simple velocity or agility that constitutes the perfection of it, but grace.” Of riding, fencing, and dancing, he also approved, adding, “Everything in life should be done with reflection.”

He sent a gift of several volumes of Pope, and a fine edition of a favorite Roman author, Terence, in both Latin and French. “Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin,” Adams advised. “His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model.” On hearing that John Quincy’s course of studies did not include Cicero and Demosthenes, Adams could hardly contain his indignation. John Quincy must begin upon them at once, he declared, “I absolutely insist upon it.” If forced to it, he would bring John Quincy back from Leyden and teach him himself.

Adams was writing about what he so dearly loved to the son he so dearly loved. That he was raising the boy to serve his country one day, there was never a question.

Latin and Greek were not all that mattered. John Quincy must neither forget nor fail to enjoy the great works of his own “mother tongue,” and especially those of the poets. It was his happiness, too, that mattered.

Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining, and constructive companions through your whole life. In all the disquisitions you have heard concerning the happiness of life, has it ever been recommended to you to read poetry?

. . . You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.

“You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen,” Adams said at the close of a letter in May. “This will ever be the sum total of the advice of your affectionate father.”

AT PARIS AND PHILADELPHIA all the while, movements were under way to dislodge John Adams as sole American peacemaker in Europe. Distressed by the mounting cost of the war, Vergennes was ready to see it concluded, and, if need be, to compromise with Britain on the question of American independence. Since he could not have the intractable Adams standing in the way, the French Foreign Minister sent specific instructions to La Luzerne to do whatever necessary to have Adams removed. La Luzerne, who had become a figure of conspicuous importance in Philadelphia, his influence with Congress as great as that of anyone, worked assiduously. With money to spend, he bribed at least one member of Congress, General John Sullivan, and possibly others besides.

Benjamin Franklin’s letter of August 9, describing Vergennes’s displeasure with Adams, had only recently arrived in Philadelphia and ignited sharp debate. On one side were those like Samuel Adams and James Lovell, who strongly supported John Adams’s independent spirit and were unwilling that the United States give way always to the wishes of the French. On the other side stood those like John Witherspoon and young James Madison of Virginia, who trusted the French and believed French friendship and support of such critical importance that nothing should be allowed to put the alliance at risk, and who had little faith in John Adams’s “stiffness and tenaciousness of temper,” as Witherspoon said in his clipped Scottish way.

Appearing before a congressional committee considering the “conduct of Mr. Adams,” La Luzerne stated the need for an American plenipotentiary who would “take no step without the approbation of his Majesty,” and who, furthermore, would “receive his directions from the Comte de Vergennes.”

On June 15, 1781, after hours of argument, Congress agreed to be governed by the dictates of the French Court. John Adams’s powers as sole peacemaker with Britain were revoked. He was not to be recalled, as Vergennes wished and as La Luzerne had nearly succeeded in bringing about. Instead, he was to be one of five commissioners, each representing a major section of the country — Adams for New England, Franklin for Pennsylvania, John Jay for New York, Jefferson for Virginia, and Henry Laurens for the Deep South. But with Jay in Spain, Henry Laurens locked up in the Tower of London, Jefferson unlikely to leave Virginia, and Adams tied down with his assignment in Holland, there remained only Franklin to serve as the American negotiator at Paris, exactly as Vergennes desired.

Further, it was determined in a secret session of Congress that the commissioners were to do nothing in the negotiations for peace “without [the] knowledge and concurrence” of the ministers of their “generous ally, the King of France.” Thus all decisions were subject to the approval of Foreign Minister Vergennes. In treating with the British, France was to have the final say, again exactly as Vergennes wished.

Congressman Thomas Rodney of Delaware, who had fought the measure, wrote that night to his older brother, Caesar. “I think it must convince even the French Court that we are reduced to a weak and abject state and that we have lost all that spirit and dignity which once appeared in the proceedings of Congress.”

A few weeks later, and again in secret session, on a motion from James Madison, Adams’s second prior commission, to negotiate a treaty of commerce with Britain, was also revoked.

At Braintree, Abigail had picked up word that Franklin was “blacking” the character of John Adams. “You will send me by first opportunity the whole of this dark process,” she wrote straight away to James Lovell, and then let fly in a fury with her pen. Seldom in history has a wife so stoutly risen in defense of her “good man.”

Was the man [Adams] a gallant, I should think he had been monopolizing the women of the enchanter [Franklin]. Was he a modern courtier, I should think he had outwitted him in court intrigue. Was he a selfish, avaricious, designing, deceitful villain, I should think he had encroached upon the old gentleman’s prerogatives.

“It needs great courage, sir, to engage in the cause of America,” she added, fiercely proud of her “Mr. A.”

He is a good man. Would to heaven we had none but such in office. You know, my friend, that he is a man of principle, and that he will not violate the dictates of his conscience to ingratiate himself with a minister, or with your more respected body.

Yet it wounds me, sir. When he is wounded, I bleed.

IN EARLY SUMMER 1781, Francis Dana received notification from Congress that he was to proceed from Holland to St. Petersburg to seek recognition of the United States by the government of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. As Dana spoke little French and would need secretarial help, he asked Adams if John Quincy might accompany him. It would be an expedition of nearly 1,200 miles to a capital city few Americans had ever seen. But Adams thought highly of Dana, the boy excelled at French, and the experience, Adams felt, would stand him well for the future.

At the same time, Adams decided that young Charles, whose health remained uneven and who had become desperately homesick for his mother, should return to her in the care of Benjamin Waterhouse, who was on his way back to Boston.

“I consented [to the departure of both boys] . . . and thus deprived myself of the greatest pleasure I had in life,” Adams later wrote. But before either departed, Adams himself was off to Paris, summoned by Vergennes to take part in discussions of a possible mediation of the war by Russia and Austria. Nothing was more abhorrent to Adams than the prospect of a truce determined by France and other European powers and he headed south gravely worried.

John Quincy was gone on a “long journey with Mr. Dana . . . as an interpreter,” was as much as he reported to Abigail in a letter from Paris dated July 11, John Quincy’s fourteenth birthday. Charles was coming home, he also told her, but how or when he did not say, as probably he dared not for the boy’s safety. “He is a delightful child, but has too exquisite sensibility for Europe.” He himself was “distracted with more cares than ever,” he wrote, “yet I grow fat. Anxiety is good for my health, I believe.”

To Adams’s immense relief, the discussions at Paris came to nothing, and by the month’s end he was back in Holland in time to spend a few weeks with Charles. In mid-August, the eleven-year-old boy sailed on the South Carolina, which, after a troubled voyage, put in at La Coruña, Spain, where eventually he sailed on another American ship, Cicero, a privateer, and after more delays and adventures reached home at the end of January 1782, more than five months after leaving Amsterdam.

Adams was by then established in his commodious new residence in Amsterdam on the Keizersgracht. While not so grand as the houses along the Herengracht, the next canal nearer the center of the city, it was, as he had requested, perfectly “fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d’Amérique” — a fine, red-brick canal house five stories tall, with a handsome front door at the top of a short flight of stone steps. There was a deep garden to the rear and the view from the large front windows included a pretty little arched bridge that crossed the Keizersgracht at the nearby corner, at Spiegelstraat, or Looking Glass Street. In the sunshine of summer, the trees bordering the canal cast lovely shadows on the water and on the façades of houses on the opposite side.

But to Adams, absorbed in his work, the outlook was bleak. Try as he could, the Dutch seemed to care only for their own commercial self-interests. He wondered if they were a people deficient in heart.

On August 24, with the arrival of a packet of letters from Congress sent on by Franklin from Paris, Adams learned that his commission as peacemaker had been revoked and a new commission established. He tried to maintain a good front. “Congress may have done very well to join others in the commission for peace who have some faculties for it,” he wrote to Franklin. “My talent, if I have one, lies in making war.”

Exhausted, his sons gone, Francis Dana gone, and with no reason to think his mission to Holland anything but a failure, Adams fell ill. Nothing more was heard from him for six weeks.

THE ILLNESS, mild at first, grew steadily worse to the point that he lay near death in the house by the canal. Several leading physicians came and went. For several days he lost consciousness. Not until October was he able to draft a letter, to say he had fallen victim to a “nervous fever,” the common, if imprecise, term used by the attending physicians. His fullest description of what happened would be to Abigail, in a letter of October 9, when he was just barely able to hold a pen.

Soon after my return from Paris, I was seized with a fever, of which, as the weather was and had long been uncommonly warm, I took little notice, but it increased very slowly and regularly, until it was found to be a nervous fever of a dangerous kind, bordering on putrid. It seized upon my head in such a manner that for five or six days I was lost, and so insensible to the operations of the physicians and surgeons as to have lost the memory of them. My friends were so good as to send me an excellent physician and surgeon whose skill and faithful attention, with the blessing of Heaven, saved my life. . . . I am, however, still weak, and whether I shall be able to recover my health among the pestilential vapors from these stagnant waters, I know not.

Writing a week later to the new president of Congress, Thomas McKean, Adams added that the doctors had administered the “all powerful [Peruvian] bark” — quinine — and that this, too, had helped to save him from a “nervous fever of a very malignant kind.” To his Dutch colleague Charles Dumas, Adams wrote that “my feet had well nigh stumbled on dark mountains,” and that he had recovered only through the “wondrous virtue” of Peruvian bark.

In medical texts of the time, “nervous fever,” or “slow nervous fever,” was defined as an “insidious and dangerous” malady that began with listlessness, followed by chills, flushes of heat, “and a kind of weariness all over, like what is felt after a great fatigue. “

This is always attended with a sort of heaviness and dejection of spirit [wrote Dr. John Huxham, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh, in a treatise published in 1779] . . . the head grows more heavy, or giddy . . . the pulse quicker. . . .

In this condition the patient often continues for five or six days. . . . About the seventh or eighth day the giddiness, pain, or heaviness of the head become much greater . . . and [this] frequently brings on delirium . . . Now nature sinks apace.

Most susceptible to the disease, it was thought, were those of “weak nerves,” or who had experienced a “long dejection of spirits,” or who had been “confined long in damp and foul air.”

Quite possibly Adams had fallen victim to malaria, which in the heat of summer could be rampant in European seaports. Later, he would tell Abigail that the fever had “burnt up” half his memory and half his spirits. Like headache, fatigue, chills, and hot flashes, a subsequent depression or “melancholia” is also characteristic of the disease, which was thought then to emanate from stagnant water or foul air, “miasma,” but, in fact, as would be learned a century later, is transmitted by mosquitoes.

But his “nervous fever” could also have been typhus, a disease characterized by high fever and delirium, and transmitted by lice.

That Adams’s fatigue and “dejection of spirits” of that summer could have made him vulnerable to such a collapse is certainly possible. Notwithstanding his claim to Abigail to the contrary, anxiety was not at all good for his health. He himself would later say that excessive fatigue and anxiety concerning the state of his affairs in Holland, as well as the “unwholesome damps of the night,” had brought him as “near to death as any man ever approached without being grasped in his arms.”

More than a month would pass before Adams felt reasonably well again, and some symptoms of the fever would drag on, or recur long afterward, another characteristic of malaria. Six months later he would write of his “fever” and “feeble knees”; a year and a half later, he would tell Abigail the consequences of”Amsterdam fever” were still plaguing him.

In addition, others in the house — Thaxter, Stephens, and another of the servants — were stricken in the same way, which did little to improve the atmosphere. Adams would describe Stephens, a robust man who had never been ill, as “almost shaken to pieces” by fever, “reduced almost to a shadow.” In all, it was as low a time as Adams ever knew.

His first letter to anyone, even before his letter to Abigail, was to Franklin on October 4, and in John Thaxter’s hand. Only Adams’s signature was his own. Having explained his long silence, he again stressed his acceptance of the new five-man peace commission, claiming he had actually been consoled by the change during the weeks when it appeared he might have nothing more ever to do with commissions of any sort. Particularly, he had been thinking about Jefferson and was eager to know if Franklin had any further word.

Have you any information concerning Mr. Jefferson, whether he had accepted the trust? Whether he has embarked, or proposes to embark? I saw a paragraph in a Maryland paper which expressed apprehension that he was taken prisoner by a party of horse [cavalry] in Virginia?

In reply, Franklin expressed sincere concern for Adams’s health, and said that while he had no further information on Jefferson, he very much doubted the truth of the story of his having been taken prisoner.

In mid-October, so low he could see no hope or purpose in anything, Adams wrote as downhearted a letter as any he ever sent to Congress. His efforts to raise money were “useless,” his health wretched, his life in Europe so “gloomy and melancholy” and of such little use to the public “that I cannot but wish it may suit with the views of Congress to recall me.” It was, as he doubtless knew, a request Congress would ignore.

Gradually his strength returned, his outlook improved. If nothing else, he could take his new reduced status as peace commissioner gallantly, put a good face on the matter, show no anger or disappointment, no animosity toward Congress or toward Franklin, and he urged Abigail to do the same. “Don’t distress yourself . . . about any malicious attempts to injure me in the estimation of my countrymen. Let them take their course and go the length of their tether,” he wrote. “The contemptible essays made by you-know-whom will only tend to their own confusion. . . . Say as little about it as I do.”

He longed for his “dearest friend.” “What a fine affair it would be if we could flit across the Atlantic as they say the angels do from planet to planet. I would dart to Penn’s Hill and bring you over on my wings.”

“Ah my dear John, where are you?” she was writing at home at almost the same time. “Two years, my dearest friend, have passed away since you left your native land.” She was buying land in the new state of Vermont, she told him, a retreat in the woods where they could retire from the vexations and hazards of public life. In fact, she was well on the way to accumulating more than 1,000 acres in Vermont. “Do you not sometimes sigh for such a seclusion?” she asked.

There was talk of a future role for him in Massachusetts politics, but she had no such ambition. “I know the voice of fame to be a mere weathercock, unstable as water and fleeting as a shadow.” Yet she did have pride, she conceded. “I know I have a large portion of it.”

Her Vermont plans interested him not at all. “God willing I will not go to Vermont,” he would write. “I must be within the scent of the sea.”

AT THE END OF NOVEMBER came sensational news. On Friday, October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, by Chesapeake Bay, the British General Cornwallis had surrendered his army to a combined American and French force under Washington and Rochambeau.

It was as decisive a defeat of the British as Saratoga and made possible by the arrival of Admiral de Grasse with the French West Indies fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The British had been trapped, just as Washington would have been on Long Island early in the war had the British fleet been able to close off the East River. More than 7,000 British troops had put down their arms, more even than at Saratoga.

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it presaged a quick end to the war. In America, in the first flush of victory, Washington was hailed as “the deliverer” of his country; in London the British Prime Minister, Lord North, exclaimed, “Oh, God! It’s all over.”

Adams received “the glorious news” at Amsterdam the night of November 23. He was elated and took untold satisfaction from the knowledge that French sea power after all had proved decisive. It had been nearly three years since he told Vergennes that nothing would so guarantee a “speedy conclusion” to the war as a powerful French fleet in American waters, and now it had come to pass exactly as he had said.

Adams did not see Yorktown as the end of the struggle, however. The British still occupied major ports, including New York, and there would be no peace, he was sure, as long as a single company of British soldiers were at liberty anywhere in the United States. But if Yorktown did not mean an end to the war, it changed everything in Holland, as Adams saw at once. The chance to achieve his goal of Dutch recognition and financial support would never be better — Dutch merchants had no wish to be on the losing side.

Still “feebled” in health, he immediately met with the Duc de La Vauguyon and by mid-December could happily report to Congress that the French ambassador himself had said it was time Adams “demanded” an answer to his memorial of April, and do all in his power to secure a Dutch loan. “He thinks that I may now assume a higher tone, which the late Cornwallization will well warrant.”

As the new year commenced, Adams was at The Hague audaciously demanding a “categorical answer.” The president of the week, Bartholomeus van den Santheuvel, reported Adams’s inquiry to Their High Mightinesses, the States-General, and so the question of American independence and Dutch-American relations became a matter of political debate throughout the country.

Adams then, in effect, took his case to the people of the Netherlands, calling for citizen petitions to the government for the recognition of the United States, and at the moment when popular sentiment against Britain was strongly on the rise. He went personally to the individual residences at The Hague for the delegations of eighteen cities in the province of Holland, each of which, as he explained to Congress, could be considered an independent republic. At every house, the reception was the same — approval, affection, esteem for the United States. Clearly, the campaign that he and his collaborators — Luzac, Dumas, van der Capellen — had launched to educate the Dutch people about the United States and its cause had not been in vain.

Nor did the collaborators cease to press for action. Van der Capellen in particular warned that alienating the Americans could damage trade with them and that it would be quite unwise to offend any further someone of such rectitude and importance as John Adams. “I know the unflinching character of Mr. Adams,” he wrote. “I know that it has been a sore point, and I shudder for the consequences if we embitter a man of his influence, one of the principal founders of American freedom.”

With the outlook brighter than it had ever been, Adams began receiving communications from Robert R. Livingston, who had been newly elected by Congress as the first Foreign Secretary — a choice the French ambassador, La Luzerne, boasted with some exaggeration to the Comte de Vergennes that he himself had arranged. Strongly allied with those in Congress who were well disposed toward the French, Livingston regarded Adams as imprudent and considered his April 19 memorial to the Dutch Court “a ridiculous display.” In November he demanded that Adams explain his actions, and in a tone bound to infuriate Adams.

We learned from Mr. Dumas that you have presented your credentials to the States-General. We are astonished that you have not written on so important a subject and developed the principles that induced you to declare your public character before the States were disposed to acknowledge it.

In a vigorous response, dated February 26, Adams recounted and explained his conduct in detail. The memorial had been exactly what the situation called for. The opposition of the Duc de La Vauguyon at the time had only confirmed the necessity of it. As for criticism of his own vanity or of his “militia diplomacy,” he wrote: “The charge of vanity is the last resort of little wits and mercenary quacks, the vainest men alive, against me and measures that they can find no other objection to. . . . I have long since learned that a man may give offense and yet succeed.”

It was a remarkable letter — lucid, knowledgeable, and candid, if flagrantly self-congratulatory. Warming to the subject of his memorial, he portrayed it as the great catalyst for turning the entire point of view of the Dutch and thus affecting all Europe. But then he recovered himself, and with appealing self-deprecation evoked a favorite image from Aesop: “’What dust we raise,’ said the fly upon the chariot wheel. It is impossible not to prove that this whole letter is not a similar delusion to that of the fly.”

On February 26, 1782, the northern province of Friesland voted to instruct its delegates in the States-General to move formally to receive John Adams as minister from the United States. “Friesland is said to be a sure index of national sense,” Adams reported to Robert Livingston. “I am told that the Friesians never undertake anything but they carry it through.”

Certain that full Dutch recognition was at hand, Adams and Charles Dumas purchased what they anticipated would be the American embassy at The Hague, a “large elegant” house on the Fluwelen Burgwal — Street of the Velvet Makers — beside one of the city’s most beautiful canals.

“Your humble servant has lately grown much into fashion in this country,” Adams reported to Abigail, having at last genuinely good news for her. “Some folks will think your husband a negotiator, but it is not to be, it is General Washington at Yorktown who did the substance of the work, the form only belongs to me.”

ON MARCH 20 IN LONDON, in a dramatic appearance in the House of Commons, Lord North resigned, to be succeeded by Lord Rockingham, a friend of America whose earlier Ministry had repealed the Stamp Act. In a great shift of government, Charles James Fox, who was known to favor immediate recognition of American independence, became Foreign Secretary and to the post of Secretary of Colonial Affairs was named Lord William Shelburne, who, though he opposed American independence, sent a retired Scottish merchant named Richard Oswald to Paris to sound out Benjamin Franklin on the prospect of negotiations.

In the Netherlands the tide turned on March 28, when the Province of Holland recognized American independence. In rapid order the other provinces followed suit.

On Friday, April 19, a year to the day since Adams presented his memorial, the States-General resolved that “Mr. Adams shall be admitted and acknowledged in the quality of ambassador of the United States to Their High Mightinesses.” When, the following day, Adams came to the assembly to present his letter of credence, it was as sweet a moment of triumph and vindication as he had ever known.

On Monday, April 22, at the Huis ten Bosch Palace at The Hague, Adams was received by His Most Serene Highness the Prince of Orange, William V, and his wife Princess Wilhelmina in a ceremony of formal recognition. The day after, as Adams took particular pleasure in informing Robert Livingston, the French ambasador “made an entertainment for the corps diplomatique in honor of the United States, at which he introduced their minister to all the foreign ministers of this Court . . . and the Duc de La Vauguyon more than compensated for the stiffness of some of the others by paying more attention to the new brother than to the old fraternity.”

All but speechless with pleasure, Adams heard the Spanish ambassador praise him for his determination and spirit, saying he had “struck the greatest blow that has been struck in the American cause, and the most decisive. It is you who have filled this nation with enthusiasm. It is you who have turned all on their heads.” The tribute was one Adams would quote repeatedly in letters, and understandably, given his elation and the spirit of the moment.

The American minister became the toast of the Dutch Republic. Poems and songs were written in celebration of American independence; engraved portraits were published of the American heroes Washington and Adams. La Vauguyon, in a letter to Vergennes, reported that everywhere the recognition of America and the reception of Adams as envoy “arouses the liveliest transports of joy.”

In May, Adams took up residence and put out a flag at the United States House, as he called it, the first American embassy anywhere in the world.

Yet for all this, his efforts to obtain Dutch financial help became no easier; and for all his own abundant self-satisfaction in the part he had played, he appreciated how much else had influenced the outcome. “The resolution which has taken place in this nation,” he told Edmund Jenings, “is the result of a vast number and variety of events, comprising the great scheme of Providence. . . . When I recollect the circumstances, I am amazed, and feel that it is no work of mine.”

AT LAST, on June 11, 1782, Adams negotiated with a syndicate of three Amsterdam banking houses — Willink, Van Staphorst, and De la Lande & Fynje — a loan of 5 million guilders, or $2 million at 5 percent interest. It was not the $10 million Congress had expected Henry Laurens to secure, but it was an all-important beginning. It was money desperately needed at home and a foundation for American credit in Europe.

“If this had been the only action of my life, it would have been well spent,” Adams wrote to Abigail, hoping she would “Pardon the vanity.”

He was writing to her again and at length. He thought it unlikely that anyone would understand or appreciate the struggle and aggravation he had been through, the doubts, timidity, and hostilities he had had to contend with. “I have rendered a most important and essential service to my country here, which I verily believe no other man in the world would have done,” he confided. “I don’t mean by this that I have exerted any abilities here, or any action, that are not very common, but I don’t believe that any other man in the world would have had the patience and perseverance to do and to suffer what was absolutely necessary.”

Untrained in diplomacy and by temperament seemingly so unsuited for it, he had indeed succeeded brilliantly, as others and history would attest. He thought it no life for him — “I must be an independent man,” he reminded her — and possibly he was as ready to give it up as he claimed. (“A child was never more weary of a whistle than I am of embassies.”) But nothing he had done in the service of his country had given such satisfaction. No matter that the Dutch Republic was one of the “lesser theaters” of Europe, or that other events in which he had played a decisive part would rank higher in the balance. It had been his own path that he had taken, alone and in his own way. He had been ignored, ridiculed; he had very nearly died in the process. Yet he had persisted and succeeded.

Sometimes it was necessary to be “assuming,” he observed in a letter to Edmund Jenings. Had he followed the advice and exhortations he was subjected to, and suspended operations to request instructions, he would have been forbidden to proceed as he had and most likely Holland would have signed a separate peace with England. “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

Ironically, a letter was en route that June from Robert Livingston demanding to know why in his reports to Congress Adams had included nothing about the dockyards and arsenals of Holland, or the ships preparing for sea, or anything about the leading members of the Dutch government. “You have not repeated your private conversations with them, from which infinitely more is to be collected than from all the pamphlets scattered about the streets,” lectured Livingston, who had never set foot in Europe or served in a diplomatic role.

If they avoid your company and conversation it is a more unfavorable symptom than any you have mentioned, and shows clearly that your public character should have been concealed ‘til your address had paved the way for its being acknowledged. . . . None of your letters take the least notice of the French ambassador at The Hague. Is there no intercourse between you? If not, to what is it to be attributed?

The news that the Dutch Republic had recognized the United States did not reach Philadelphia until September, arriving by a Dutch ship named Heer Adams.

At noon, Tuesday, October 8, 1782, Adams arrived at the State House at The Hague to sign a treaty of commerce with the Dutch Republic. Deputies from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland stood waiting at the top of the stairs to escort him to the gilded Trèveszaal, or Truce Hall. With its elaborate frescoed ceiling and tall French doors overlooking a small lake and fountain, it could have been a chamber at Versailles, and as the ceremony proceeded ever so slowly, Adams had ample time to look about.

Finally, it was his turn, the treaty was signed and sealed, his work accomplished.

III

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, John Jay dispatched an urgent note to John Adams from Paris to report that the British emissary Richard Oswald had received a formal commission to treat with the United States on the matter of peace. Jay pressed Adams to come to Paris as soon as possible and cautioned that he “say nothing of this ‘til you see me.”

It was only with his treaty of commerce with the Dutch completed that Adams felt free to leave, but even then he seems to have been in no hurry to get to Paris. He hardly knew what to think about the prospect of making peace, he told Abigail. It could be “troublesome business,” “another furnace of affliction,” yet his spirits were high. “Yet I am very gay, more so than usual. I fear nothing. Why should I?”

The third week of October he started for Paris by carriage and six horses. With him were John Thaxter and an additional new secretary for the work at Paris, Charles Storer, a recent graduate of Harvard. Miserable weather slowed their progress. Unrelenting rain turned the road to a river of mud. The carriage broke down. But it was of Adams’s own choice that he lingered over a private collection of Rubens altarpiece at Antwerp, and an altarpiece by Rubens that he thought “beautiful beyond description.” Twenty-five miles north of Paris, he stopped again to tour the famous château at Chantilly, its stables and gardens, as though time were of no concern. It was a perfect autumn day that he would mark with a particularly lovely passage in his diary, revealing in a few lines the degree to which the hard-headed, intractable New Englander was, in the expression of the time, a man of”sensibility.”

While we were viewing the statue of Montmorency, Mademoiselle de Bourbon came out into the round house at the corner of the castle dressed in beautiful white, her hair uncombed, hanging and flowing about her shoulders, with a book in her hand, and leaned over the bar of iron, but soon perceiving that she had caught my eye and that I viewed her more attentively than she fancied, she rose up with that majesty and grace which persons of her birth affect if they are not taught, turned her hair off of both her shoulders with her hands in a manner that I could not comprehend, and decently stepped back into the chamber and was seen no more.

He reached Paris and the Hôtel de Valois that night. The following day, October 27, having bathed in a public bathhouse by the Seine and called for the services of a Parisian tailor and wigmaker, he was ready to take up his part in the negotiations.

Much had already transpired, as Adams learned from meetings with John Jay and a young American merchant named Matthew Ridley, whom Adams had met earlier in Holland and who, though he had no official role, seemed to know all that was going on.

Jay had arrived in Paris from Spain in June, and through most of the summer he and the British representative Richard Oswald had been in discussions centered on the recognition of American independence as a mandatory precursor to any talk of peace. Franklin had been absent from the talks, ill with the gout and bladder stones, and little progress was made. But in the last days of September, Oswald received word from London empowering him to treat with the ministers of the United States of America, not the American colonies, and at once the discussions took on a new air.

From their first meeting Jay and Adams found they were of like mind on most matters. “[Mr. Adams] is much pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley wrote in his diary. “Mr. Adams is exceedingly pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley added after several more meetings. Jay, in his diary, recorded only of Adams that he “spoke freely what he thought.”

Jay was younger than Adams by ten years. Born to wealth and position in New York, tall, slim, and pale, he appeared somewhat haughty, carrying himself with a lift of the chin that made his hawk nose an even more pronounced feature. Like Adams, he had distinguished himself in the law and in Congress, where the two men had gotten along well enough, if frequently at cross purposes on issues. Jay, too, could be combative and stubborn, and as the descendant of French Huguenots, he had little liking for the Bourbon Court.

Jay refused to negotiate with the British until recognition of American independence was settled, and in so doing deliberately ignored the instructions of Congress to abide by the wishes of the French. Vergennes had wanted the discussions to proceed irrespective of the “point of independence.” Let independence wait upon the treaty, he had told Franklin. In fact, Vergennes had sent a secret envoy to London to hint to Lord Shelburne that France did not support all the demands of the Americans.

Apparently it was not until he reached Paris, not until his initial meetings with Jay, that Adams learned for the first time of the commission’s instructions from Congress to abide by the guidance of the French Foreign Ministry. Adams was outraged. America was not fighting a war for independence to be told what to do by the French. He wrote immediately to Robert Livingston to say he would rather resign than follow such instructions, and that he and Jay were “perfectly agreed” in their approach to the French.

I cannot express it better than in his own words: “to be honest and grateful to our allies, but to think for ourselves.” I find a construction put upon one article in our instructions by some persons which, I confess, I never put upon it myself. It is represented by some as subjecting us to the French ministry, as taking away from us all right of judging for ourselves, and obliging us to agree to whatever the French ministers should advise us to do, and to do nothing without their consent. I never supposed this to be the intention of Congress. If I had, I never would have accepted the commission, and if I now thought it their intention, I could not continue in it. I cannot think it possible to be the design of Congress. If it is I hereby resign my place in the commission and request that another person may be immediately appointed in my stead.

Disappointed with the cramped accommodations available to him this time at the Hôtel de Valois, Adams changed lodgings, moving to the Hôtel du Roi on the Place du Carrousel, between the Palais Royal and the Quai du Louvre, which was to remain his headquarters.

Through most of the fall Paris had been shrouded with dark skies, cold rain and fog, and the same grim weather continued, adding nothing to anyone’s spirits. For days Adams put off making contact with Franklin. After what Franklin had done to him, he told Matthew Ridley, he could hardly face the thought of going to Passy. When Ridley insisted he must, Adams agreed, but then, putting on his coat to leave, seemed to change his mind. It was only “with much persuasion [that] I got him at length to go,” Ridley wrote.

It would be the first time Adams had seen Franklin since Franklin had written his devastating letter to Congress on August 9, 1780. Exactly when Adams found out about the letter, or read its content, are not clear, but once, and apparently only once, he unburdened his pent-up fury, in a letter written earlier that summer to Edmund Jenings. At the root of Franklin’s behavior, Adams had convinced himself, was “base jealousy.” The possibility that his own feelings toward Franklin could have the same root cause seems not to have entered his mind.

His base jealousy of me, and his sordid envy of my commission for making a treaty of commerce with Great Britain have stimulated him to attempt an assassination upon my character at Philadelphia, of which the world has not yet heard, and of which it cannot hear until the time shall come when many voluminous state papers may be laid before the public, which ought not to be until we are all dead.

Still, Adams was determined not to let personal ire stand in the way of his duty regarding the work at hand.

That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow. That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral sentiments I avow. As far as fate shall compel me to sit with him in public affairs, I shall treat him with decency and perfect impartiality.

To Abigail he boasted that he and Jay had held the line on the point of independence, refusing to “speak or hear before we were put on an equal foot.” Franklin, he told her, “as usual would have taken the advice of the C[omte] de V[ergennes] and treated without, but nobody would join him.” But in this Adams was both overstating his own part and being blatantly unfair to Franklin, who had supported the recognition of American independence since the beginning, before Adams ever arrived on the scene.

Adams called on Franklin at Passy the same evening that Ridley talked him out the door. He stayed several hours and seized the opportunity to speak frankly of his opinion of the French Court, as well as to praise Jay for his “firmness.” Franklin, wrote Adams afterward, “heard me patiently but said nothing.”

However deep-seated his animosity toward Franklin, Adams did truly treat him with decency and managed to work effectively with him as he had in times past. Adams, Franklin, and Jay met and dined in Paris the next day and would repeatedly again in the weeks to come. As days passed, Adams found himself even admiring the “old conjurer.”

The turning point came early, at one of the meetings prior to sitting down with the British negotiators, when Franklin, knowing the importance of a united front, told Jay and Adams, “I am of your opinion and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting this [the French] Court.”

It was a brave decision. In direct conflict with their instructions from Congress, and at risk of alienating the French, they would ignore Vergennes. In his diary Adams described Franklin as “with us in entire harmony.”

FORMAL SESSIONS WITH THE BRITISH NEGOTIATORS began the morning of October 30 — Adams’s forty-seventh birthday — and continued into the last week of November, as snow fell on the city day after day, only to melt as fog set in. Starting at eleven each morning, the meetings took place at Jay’s lodgings at the Hôtel d’Orléans on the Rue des Petits-Augustins on the Left Bank; or at Adams’s Hôtel du Roi; or the Hôtel de Valentinois at Passy, to spare Franklin the ride into Paris in such weather; or at Richard Oswald’s quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite, also on the Rue des Petits-Augustins.

Henry Laurens, who had been released from the Tower of London in exchange for General Cornwallis, was suffering poor health from his captivity and would not appear for the negotiations until the very end. As secretary for the American commissioners, Franklin had selected his grandson, William Temple Franklin, a decision that did not please Adams, who thought John Thaxter better qualified. (Temple Franklin was twenty-two, the illegitimate son of Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, the former Tory governor of New Jersey who was living in London.) Also, among a half dozen other Americans who, like Matthew Ridley, were in and about the discussions, or dined with the negotiators as confidential matters were taken up, was Franklin’s friend and associate, the spy Bancroft, as well as the young hero the Marquis de Lafayette, who was home from the war in America.

Richard Oswald continued as chief negotiator for the British. Oswald, a Scot, was a merchant who had made a fortune in government contracts and the slave trade. Elderly, blind in one eye, he was favorably inclined toward the American point of view, and agreeable to the point of being unsuited for politics. But he was joined now by Henry Strachey, the undersecretary of state, sent by Lord Shelburne to stiffen Oswald’s resolve. Adams and Franklin had encountered Strachey once before, at Staten Island in 1776, at their meeting with Admiral Lord Howe, when Strachey, serving as Howe’s secretary, had kept notes. Adams, who spelled the name “Stretchey,” described him as an artful, insinuating man who “pushed and pressed every point,” while a young British career diplomat, Alleyne Fitzherbert, who served as an assistant, struck Adams as refreshingly without airs.

In fact, the British envoys were not particularly impressive. In ability, experience, and resolve they were hardly a match for Adams, Franklin, and Jay, who, having started from scratch as diplomats, had come a long way in their time in Europe.

In his diary Adams compared the situation between Britain and America to that of an eagle and a cat. The eagle, soaring over a farmer’s yard, sweeped and pounced on the cat, thinking it a rabbit. “In the air the cat seized her by the neck with her teeth and round her body with her fore and hind claws. The eagle finding herself scratched and pressed, bids the cat let go and fall down. ‘No,’ says the cat. ‘I won’t let go and fall. You shall stoop and set me down.’” The British, it appeared, were more ready to stoop and set America down than ever expected.

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS to be dealt with, after acknowledgment of independence, were the boundaries of the United States, the right of navigation on the Mississippi River, debts, the interests of American Tories or Loyalists, and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, a main point with Adams.

The Americans insisted that Britain cede all territory between the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the Mississippi on the west, and to this the British agreed, thus at a stroke doubling the size of the new nation. The all-important right of the United States to navigation on the Mississippi was also settled.

On the question of private debts incurred by Americans to British merchants before the war, Franklin and Jay felt these had been counterbalanced by the American property confiscated or destroyed by the British army. But Adams strongly objected. Debts contracted in good faith should be paid, he insisted, and such a clause was included, though it would ultimately prove ineffective.

The British wanted compensation for the Loyalists. To Henry Strachey it was essential that such an article be included as proof to the thousands of American refugees that the British government, to which they had remained faithful, had not forgotten them. It was a point of view difficult for the Americans to accept, having, as they made clear, no sympathy for such people.

Strachey departed for London, taking the proposed articles for approval, and in the lull, Adams made his first visit to Versailles since his return to Paris. Vergennes, he had been informed by Lafayette, “took it amiss” that Adams had not been to see him.

Acutely sensitive to all that Vergennes had done to destroy his reputation with Congress, including enlisting Franklin to help make the case against him, Adams was no more eager to see Vergennes than he had been to see Franklin. He traveled the road to Versailles in a state of extreme apprehension, wondering, as he later wrote, whether he was to “hear an expostulation? a reproof? an admonition? or in plain vulgar English, a scolding? or was there any disposition to forget and forgive? and say all malice depart?”

What followed came as a total surprise. Invited to dine, Adams was made much of by both the Comte and Madame la Comtesse, who insisted he sit at her right hand and was “remarkably attentive” to him. Vergennes was overflowing with friendship. “The Comte, who sat opposite, was constantly calling out to me to know what I would eat and offer me petits gateaux, claret and Madeira, etc., etc.,” Adams recorded. Never had he been treated with such respect at Versailles, and he was pleased beyond measure. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved. . . . So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain,” he had once written in his youth, in the throes of painful self-evaluation. Now he was in the full embrace of people who, as he said, made compliments a form of art. “French gentlemen. . . . said that I had shown in Holland that Americans understand negotiation as well as war. . . . Another said, ‘Monsieur, vous êtes le Washington de la négociation.’”

“It is impossible to exceed this,” Adams continued in an effusive account in his diary that he was to regret having written. Somehow, perhaps by his own error, these pages from the diary, or “Peace Journal,” as he called it, would be included with a report that went off to Philadelphia and were later read aloud in Congress to mock Adams for his abject vanity.

But what he wrote in the diary and how he responded to the moment were different matters. In the midst of such attentions, he kept his head. When Vergennes pressed for inside information on the course of the negotiations, Adams told him nothing. Nor did the pleasure he found in being so welcomed and fussed over by those who for so long had treated him with condescension or contempt, divert him even a little from the conviction that the way of the European powers and their leaders had never been and never would be to the benefit of the United States. When, another day, Richard Oswald charged Adams with being afraid of becoming the tool of the powers of Europe, Adams replied, “Indeed, I am.”

“What powers?” says he. “All of them,” says I. “It is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually maneuvering with us, to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power. . . . I think it ought to be our rule not to meddle, and that of all the powers of Europe not to desire us, or perhaps even to permit us, to interfere, if they can help it.”

In the meantime, the Comte de Vergennes, through an emissary, had been letting the government in London know confidentially of his opposition to most of the American claims, and to his ambassador in Philadelphia he had written that France does not feel obliged to “sustain the pretentious ambitions” of the United States concerning either boundaries or fisheries.

ADAMS WAS AT HIS BEST in the final days of negotiations.

On November 25, Henry Strachey returned from London and the talks resumed at Oswald’s lodgings at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite. Only two points remained to be settled: recompense for the Loyalists and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Adams preferred that nothing be said of the Loyalists. Franklin was especially vehement in insisting that they receive no special treatment. In the end, after a “vast deal of conversation,” the United States promised the Loyalists nothing. It was left that the individual states be requested to provide some form of compensation for property they had confiscated, a gesture that would prove largely meaningless.

Another day Henry Laurens appeared, like a stark reminder of the pain inflicted by a war that had still to end. To the lingering torments of his time in the Tower had been added the news that his son, Colonel John Laurens, had been killed in an unimportant action on a nameless battlefield in South Carolina almost a year after Yorktown. Laurens’s one contribution to the proceedings was to provide a line to prevent the British army from “carrying away any Negroes or other property” when withdrawing from America. Oswald, who had done business with Laurens in former years, when they were both in the slave trade, readily agreed.

It was the argument over the fisheries that nearly brought negotiations to a halt when Adams, once again “unalterably determined,” refused to accept any compromise that would impair New England’s ancient stake in the sacred codfish. With the same vitality he had once brought to the courtrooms of Massachusetts and the floor of Congress, he championed the right of American fishermen, citing articles from treaties past and explaining in detail the migratory patterns of the cod, not to say the temperament of seafaring New Englanders. “How could we restrain our fishermen, the boldest men alive, from fishing in prohibited places?” he asked.

Then, just as agreement seemed near, Henry Strachey proposed to amend the line specifying the American “right” of fishing to read “liberty” of fishing, to which young Fitzherbert declared the word “right” to be “an obnoxious expression.”

The moment was one made for Adams. Rising from his chair, smoldering with indignation, he addressed the British:

Gentlemen, is there or can there be a clearer right? In former treaties, that of Utrecht and that of Paris, France and England have claimed the right and used the word. When God Almighty made the Banks of Newfoundland at 300 leagues distant from the people of America and at 600 leagues distance from those of France and England, did he not give as food a right to the former as to the latter. If Heaven in the Creation have a right, it is ours at least as much as yours. If occupation, use, and possession have a right, we have it as clearly as you. If war and blood and treasure give a right, ours is as good as yours. We have been constantly fighting in Canada, Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia for the defense of the fishery, and have expanded beyond all proportion more than you. If then the right cannot be denied, why then should it not be acknowledged? And put out of dispute?

It was settled — almost. Article III of the treaty would read, “It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank.” However, on the matter of taking fish along the coast of Newfoundland and “all other of his Britannic Majesty’s Dominions in America,” the people of the United States were to have the “liberty,” which, insisted the British negotiators, amounted to the same thing.

“We did not think it necessary to contend for a word,” wrote a more mellow John Adams years afterward.

By the end of the day there was agreement on everything. Dining that evening at his hotel with Matthew Ridley, Adams was in high spirits. Asked if he would have fish, he laughed and declined, saying he had had “a pretty good meal of them” already that day.

Adams generously praised his fellow negotiators. Franklin, he told Ridley, had performed “nobly.” But to Jay belonged the greatest credit, Adams said. Jay had played the leading part, Adams felt then and later, never failing to give Jay credit.

The following day, Saturday, November 30, 1782, all parties made their way through still another damp Paris snowfall, again to Oswald’s quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite for the signing of the preliminary treaty. Oswald was first to fix his name, followed by the four Americans in alphabetical order.

In effect, the Americans had signed a separate peace with the British. They had acted in direct violation of both the French-American alliance and their specific instructions from Congress to abide by the advice of the French foreign minister. To Adams there was no conflict in what they had done. The decision to break with the orders from Congress, and thus break faith with the French, had been clear-cut, the only honorable course. Congress had left them no choice. Congress had “prostituted” its own honor by surrendering its sovereignty to the French Foreign Minister. “It is glory to have broken such infamous orders,” Adams wrote in his diary. “Infamous I say, for so they will be to all posterity.”

To Franklin fell the unpleasant duty of breaking the news to Vergennes, and fortunately so, as in the parlance of diplomacy, it was a “delicate” moment.

As expected, Vergennes was extremely displeased, though “surprised” was the word he chose. “I am at a loss, sir, to explain your conduct, and that of your colleagues in this occasion,” he wrote formally to Franklin. What had been signed, Franklin emphasized, were preliminary articles only. Nothing had been agreed to that ran contrary to French interests, and, of course, no peace could take place until the French and British concluded their talks and the definitive treaty was signed by all parties. Franklin apologized if he and his colleagues had been guilty of neglecting a point of “bienséance” (propriety), but this was from no want of respect for the King, “whom we all love and honor.”

Then, with a cleverness of the kind he excelled in, Franklin included an afterthought. The English, he said, were now flattering themselves that they had divided the Americans from the French. So it were best that this “little misunderstanding” be forgotten and thereby prove the English mistaken.

Further, with amazing bravado, Franklin asked Vergennes for a loan of 6 million livres.

In truth, Vergennes thought well of the work done by the Americans at the negotiating table. He had no serious objections to the preliminary articles. Indeed, he thought Franklin, Jay, and Adams had obtained considerably more from the British than he had thought possible. “The English buy peace rather than make it,” he remarked contemptuously to a French colleague. The “little misunderstanding” was “got over” in a matter of days and Vergennes agreed to the loan.

In a letter to Livingston that he never sent, Adams would later contend that Franklin would not have signed the treaty without the knowledge of Vergennes — that Vergennes, in fact, had been in on the whole thing. But Adams, exhausted in “strength and spirits,” had by then succumbed to one of his spells of gloom during which he was incapable of seeing either Franklin or Vergennes in any but the darkest light.

It was not until late the following summer that the final, or definitive, Treaty of Paris was signed, and in the intervening time Adams fell once again into a black mood. Again, and with good cause, he felt Congress had forgotten him. He had received no expressions of gratitude or praise for what he had done, nor any sign of what, if anything, Congress had in mind for the future. To Abigail he described the “sharp fiery humors which break out in the back of my neck and other parts of me and plague me as much as the uncertainty in which I am in my own future destiny.”

It was that summer, in a letter of July 22, 1783, to Robert Livingston, that Franklin described Adams in words that were never to be forgotten: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

In the first week of September the peacemakers convened to sign the definitive treaty. Henry Laurens was absent. Thus it was Adams, Franklin, and Jay who represented the United States at the ceremony at the Hôtel d’York on the Rue Jacob, and who signed their names in that order, along with a new representative of King George III, David Hartley.

In fixing his signature to the document, Adams, as he often did, put a little dash or period after his name, as if to say “John Adams, period.”

The all-important first sentence of Article I declared, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States . . . to be free, sovereign and independent states. . . .”

“Done at Paris,” read the final line, “this third day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty three.”

The mighty Revolution had ended. The new nation was born.

IT HAD BEEN NINE YEARS since the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, eight years since Lexington and Concord, seven since the Declaration of Independence, and more than three years since John Adams had last left home in the role of peacemaker.

To Thomas Jefferson, Adams would one day write, “My friend, you and I have lived in serious times.” And of all the serious events of the exceedingly eventful eighteenth century, none compared to the arrival upon the world stage of the new, independent United States of America. Adams’s part in Holland and at Paris had been profound. As time would tell, the treaty that he, Franklin, and Jay had made was as advantageous to their country as any in history. It would be said they had won the greatest victory in the annals of American diplomacy.

• • •

FOR HIS OWN PART, for the time being, Adams knew for certain only that he was exhausted and intended never again to be separated from Abigail for any extended period for as long as he lived. “You may depend upon a good domestic husband for the remainder of my life, if it is the will of Heaven that I should once more meet you,” he wrote. And this, he told her, was a promise not lightly made. Whether he should come to her, or she to him, or how soon that could be, remained to be seen.

CHAPTER SIX

ABIGAIL IN PARIS

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

~Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

I

AS GREATLY AS SHE WISHED it were not so, Abigail Adams was terrified of the sea. She who had held her ground against war, plague, and abject loneliness, who had faced one dread uncertainty after another through the worst of times, steadfastly, never flinching by all appearances, looked upon “hazarding” a voyage over the North Atlantic with nothing less than horror. The very thought, she told her husband, made a coward of her. It was not something she could change, he must understand, and as a measure of his love, he must come home to her with all possible speed. “I know not whether I shall believe myself how well you love me, unless I can prevail upon you to return.”

Her mind was much on mortality. The same September of the Paris Peace Treaty, her adored father, the Reverend William Smith, had died in the Weymouth parsonage where she had been born and raised. The last of her “parental props” had fallen; one of the strongest of her ties to home was “dissolved.” Her father had been among the reasons she had never felt free to leave for Europe. “I cannot consent to your going, child, whilst I live,” he had told her. Still, though free now, she could not bring herself to go.

In the years when John served in Congress, Pennsylvania had seemed “that far country.” Now her firstborn had seen Russia and returned to Europe on his own by way of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, as she knew from John’s letters, though from the boy himself she had not had a line in two years. Her two youngest, Charles and Thomas, were away at Haverhill, boarding with her sister Elizabeth and the Reverend John Shaw, who was preparing them for college, Abigail having had a change of mind about John Shaw and his abilities. When she made the fifty-mile ride to Haverhill for a visit, it was the farthest from Braintree she had ever traveled.

Of her children, only Nabby remained at home, but at seventeen Nabby’s life, too, was moving on. Fair-haired, pleasing in appearance, she was taller than her mother, more circumspect, less inclined to voice an opinion, a “fine majestic girl who has as much dignity as a princess,” in Abigail’s description, though she wondered if Nabby was too reserved, too prudent.

She has stateliness in her manners which some misconstrue into pride and a haughtiness, but which rather results from too great reserve; she wants more affability, but she has prudence and discretion beyond her years. She is in her person tall, large, and majestic; Mamma’s partiality allows her to be a good figure. Her sensibility is not yet which attracts whilst it is attracted. Her manners rather forbid all kinds of intimacy and awe whilst they command.

“Indeed, she is not like her Mamma,” Abigail confided to John at last. “Had not her Mamma at her age too much sensibility to be very prudent.”

A young lawyer named Royall Tyler had moved to town, boarding with the Cranches, and was showing interest in Nabby. Nor did he neglect to shower attention on Abigail, who thought highly of him. The son of a wealthy father, valedictorian of his class at Harvard, Tyler was handsome, witty, and well read. “If he is steady he will shine in his profession,” she wrote. “His disposition appears extremely amiable.” She seemed nearly as charmed by him as was Nabby.

But there was gossip of “dissipation” in the young man’s past — that he had fathered an illegitimate child by a housemaid at Harvard and had, besides, squandered his inheritance. Abigail began having second thoughts, and wrote at length on the matter to her distant husband. A Odq>growing attachment” between the two young people was plain to see. Tyler was spending more and more evenings by their fire, she reported. What should she do? “What ought I to say? I feel a powerful pleader within my own heart and well recollect the love I bore to the object of my early affections to forbid him to have hope.” She wondered if perhaps a tender passion might be “just the thing for Nabby,” to bring her out of herself.

Earlier, in a long, affectionate letter to his daughter, John had offered memorable advice on choosing a husband that, in sum, expressed what he valued most in a man and what he so struggled to be himself so much of his life:

Daughter! Get you an honest man for a husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the honor and moral character of the man more than all other circumstances. Think of no other greatness but that of the soul, no other riches but those of the heart. An honest, sensible, humane man, above all the littleness of vanity and extravagances of imagination, laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity clearly within his means and free from debts and obligations, is really the most respectable man in society, makes himself and all about him most happy.

On the matter of Royall Tyler he had shown little patience. “I don’t like the subject at all,” he told Abigail. The girl was too young for such thoughts. Nor did he like Tyler’s method of “courting mothers.” Abigail and Tyler both had “advanced too fast, and I should advise both to retreat.

I don’t like your word “dissipation” at all. I don’t know what it means. . . . My child is a model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the prize, I hope, of any reformed rake. . . . In the name of all that is tender don’t criticize your daughter for those qualities which are her greatest glory, her reserve and her prudence.

By the autumn of 1783, the romance had been suspended, though as Abigail reported, the young man’s “attachment” had not lessened. As for Nabby, she would do nothing without her father’s approval. It was another reason why John was needed at home, to appraise the situation for himself.

Abigail had a melancholy sense of life slipping away before she and John had had a chance to enjoy it. She had turned thirty-nine; the face in the mirror was a young woman no longer. And where, she asked in one especially plaintive letter, was that young “untitled” John Adams she had fallen in love with.

I recollect the untitled man to whom I gave my heart and in the agony of recollection, when time and distance present themselves together, wish he had never been any other. Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall? How dearly have I paid for a titled husband.

Hearing he might be appointed ambassador to the British Court, she begged him to refuse. She had no desire to live in England, no wish for the “parade and nonsense” of a public role. She was too inclined to wear her heart on her countenance, she reminded him. “I am sure I would make an awkward figure. And then it would mortify my pride if I should be thought to disgrace you.” Her health was poor. She tired easily and suffered from headaches. “Neither of us appear built for duration,” she wrote. “Would to heaven the few remaining days allotted to us might be enjoyed together.”

His letters from Paris, written in September, pressed her to sail as soon as possible. Congress had appointed him to a new commission to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain. She must come. She could sail for London, Amsterdam, or any port in France. The moment he heard of her arrival, he would fly to her — even by balloon if such travel were perfected in time, he added lightheartedly.

But it was only on hearing that he had suffered another serious illness that she changed her mind and resolved to go to him. Except for her marriage itself, it was the most important decision she had ever had to make.

A fever like that at Amsterdam had laid him low, she read in a letter written October 14, one of the last she was to receive before Boston’s harbor was closed by winter ice. He was leaving for London for his health, and taking John Quincy with him. She must come soon. Concerning the courtship, the “family affair” on her mind, that could be managed quite well, Adams wrote. “The lady comes to Europe with you. If the parties preserve their regard until they meet again and continue to behave as they ought, they will still be young enough.”

She began making plans, though not without dire apprehensions:

You invite me to you. You call me to follow you. The most earnest wish of my soul is to be with you — but you can scarcely form an idea of the conflict in my mind. It appears to me such an enterprise, the ocean so formidable, the quitting of my habitation and my country, leaving my children, my friends, with the idea that perhaps I may never see them again, without my husband to console and comfort me under these apprehensions — indeed, my dear friend, there are hours when I feel unequal to the trial.

In January, after further consideration, John wrote again to say that if she thought it inadvisable to come to Europe, he would come to her. As for Nabby, he continued, “I can scarcely think it possible for me to disapprove of her final judgment formed with deliberation upon anything which so deeply concerns her whole happiness.”

Then, having looked into the young man’s background and reputation for himself, as much as that was possible at such a distance, Adams sent another letter, this to Tyler himself. “Sir, you and the young lady have my consent to arrange your plans according to your own judgment,” Adams wrote, “and I pray God to bless and prosper you both whether together or asunder.”

But neither letter would arrive in time.

SEEING TO THE NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS kept Abigail occupied well into spring. As John had advised, she and Nabby were to be accompanied by two servants, Esther Field and John Briesler, both of Braintree. Uncle Isaac Smith, the Boston merchant, was to look into proper passage, while another uncle, Dr. Cotton Tufts of Weymouth, who had been advising Abigail on land investments, was to manage the family’s financial affairs in her absence.

The farm was leased. But the house and all their possessions Abigail decided to leave in the care of a former slave of her father’s named Phoebe, who had been freed by his will and was newly married to a free black man, William Abdee. “As there was no settled minister in Weymouth,” Abigail told John, “I gave them the liberty of celebrating their nuptials here, which they did much to their satisfaction.” That the couple would remain in her house in her absence, however long that might be, gave her particular peace of mind. “I have no doubt of their care and faithfulness, and prefer them to any other family.”

In characteristic fashion she specified exactly how things were to be. “They are during the present year to have the use of the garden east of the house and that part of the great garden next to the road [and] all the fruit which grows in the garden,” she instructed Cotton Tufts.

Phoebe is to be allowed a pint of milk a day. . . . I give her also a pig seven weeks old, 3 pounds [of] hog’s lard, and what salt beef there is in the house. . . . The house and furniture are to be taken care of by opening and airing, rubbing, and cleaning it. . . . They are to be allowed use of the team in the fall to bring up a load of sea weed. . . . The library is to be under the care of Mr. Cranch. No books to be lent out unless to him and Mr. Tyler. . . . In November you will be so good as to give on my account the sum of 2 dollars to widow Abigail Field, 2 dollars to the widow Sarah Owen, who lives in the same house with her sister Field, 1 dollar to Mrs. Fuller and 1 dollar to the widow Mary Howard and 1 dollar to the wife of John Hayden, who is an aged woman and one of my pensioners — 1 dollar to the widow Mary Green.

By the end of May, all was arranged. She had passage to England on the merchant ship Active, which was expected to sail within a few weeks. She had hoped to embark with friends. As it was, she knew none of the other passengers or the captain. She would not be sailing in winter, nor in the midst of war. Still, it was a venture that she had once thought nothing could ever tempt her to undertake. “But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act,” she wrote to John on May 25, in her last letter before leaving.

Day by day, she had looked for some word from him, but there was none. “My thoughts are fixed, my latest wish depends on thee, guide, guardian, husband, lover, friend,” she wrote, borrowing from one of her poets.

Abigail said her farewells in her front parlor on the morning of June 18, the house filled with neighbors, “not of unmeaning complimenters,” she wrote, “but the honest yeomanry, their wives and daughters like a funeral procession, all come to wish me well and to pray for a speedy return.” She had tried to prepare for the moment. “Knowing I had to act my little part alone, I had possessed myself with calmness, but this was too much for me. . . .” She and everyone around her were weeping as she shook hands one by one.

In Boston, at Isaac Smith’s house the following day, Thomas Jefferson appeared out of the blue, to introduce himself and say that he, too, was soon to sail with his daughter, Martha, and a young mulatto slave, James Hemings. He had been appointed by Congress to join the commissioners, Franklin and Adams, in Paris. Thinking it important that he know more of the commercial interests of New England, he had been making a quick tour of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and had only just arrived in Boston. What Abigail’s first impressions of Jefferson were during this encounter, or what he thought of her, neither recorded.

Jefferson intended to depart from New York in July and urged her to go with him. But her plans were made, her passage paid for. “I thanked him for his politeness,” she reported to John, “but having taken my measures, I was determined to abide by them.”

Like Abigail, Jefferson had never been to sea. As it turned out, he would sail from Boston after all, and only weeks later, crossing under sunny skies, the sea, as his daughter said, as calm as a river.

ABIGAIL SAILED on June 20, 1784. At age thirty-nine, having never been away from either her home or those of close relatives for more than a night or two in all her life, she, Nabby, their two servants, and a cow went on board the Active at Rowe’s Wharf, and with a “fine wind” were quickly under way.

Among the few other passengers, as Abigail recorded, were a Colonel Norton from Martha’s Vineyard, a Dr. Clark, a Mr. Foster, a Mr. Spear, a “haughty Scotchman” named Green, and one other woman whose name happened also to be Adams. No sooner had the ship passed the Boston lighthouse into rougher water than they were all horribly seasick. And so it was to be for days, everyone tossed about in cramped, “excessive disagreeable” quarters together.

“We crawled upon [the] deck whenever we were able, but it was so cold and damp that we could not remain long,” Abigail wrote. The ship was filthy and carrying a cargo of whale oil and potash. With every roll of the waves the whale oil leaked, the potash “smoked and fermented,” contributing further to the “flavor” below.

The staterooms for the women comprised two tiny, airless cabins opening onto the main cabin where meals were served and the men slept. Nabby and the other Mrs. Adams were in one cabin, while Abigail and Esther Field shared the other. At night, to keep from suffocating, they had to leave the doors open onto the main cabin. “We can only live with our door shut whilst we dress and undress,” Abigail wrote in a journal she began for her sister Mary Cranch.

Necessity has no law, but what should I have thought on shore to have layed myself down to sleep in common with a half dozen gentlemen. We have curtains it is true, and we only partly undress . . . but we have the satisfaction of falling in with a set of well behaved, decent gentlemen.

In a storm off the Grand Banks, with bottles and plates crashing to pieces all about them, the women had to be held fast in their chairs, “as some gentleman sat by us with his arm fastened in ours and his feet braced against a table or chair that was lashed down.”

Afterward, the sailors assured her it had been only a breeze. Yet the hard rocking of the ship had so badly injured her cow that the animal had to be killed and cast overboard.

In the unrelieved dampness belowdecks Abigail suffered severely from rheumatism. The food was inedible. The cook she described as a “lazy, dirty Negro with no more knowledge of his business than a savage.” But with a favorable turn in the weather, finding she could get about, her usual spirit returned, and very like John Adams on board the Boston, she proceeded to “make a bustle,” in her expression. “And as I found I might reign mistress on board without any offense, I soon exerted my authority with scrapers, mops, brushes, infusions of vinegar, etc., and in a few hours you would have thought yourself in a different ship.”

She “took up the direction of our cabin,” as she wrote in another account for her sister Elizabeth, “taught the cook to dress his victuals, and have made several puddings with my own hands.” When she mastered the names of all the masts and sails, the captain said he was sure she could take over at the helm as well.

Unlike John, she loved watching the sea. Wrapped in an old camblet cloak, she spent hours on deck, her soul filled with feelings of the sublime. After a night of brilliant phosphorescence in the water, a phenomenon she had longed to witness, she wrote in ecstasy of a “blazing ocean” as far as she could see. “’Great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty,’” she recorded reverently.

With Nabby she passed the time in the main cabin reading, writing, chatting, or playing cards with the other passengers, whose company she enjoyed. The doctor, John Clark, her favorite, was consistently cheerful, while Mr. Spear’s “drollery” kept everyone in high spirits. From a book she was reading on medicine, she copied a passage about association with cheerful people being good for the health, and speculated whether her husband might not benefit from a little unbending of the mind.

There was only one of the group whom they would all have been happy to do without, the “haughty Scotchman,” Mr. Green, who harped incessantly on the importance of rank and social position and who himself, Abigail concluded, had neither. He paid attention to her only because she was the wife of John Adams, she saw with distaste. “I know his politeness to me is not personally upon my own account, but because of my connection which gives me importance sufficient to entitle me to his notice.

He is always inquiring who was such [and such] a general? I have felt a disposition to quarrel with him several times, but have restrained myself, and only observed mildly that merit, not titles gave a man preeminence in our country, that I did not doubt it was a mortifying circumstance to the British nobility to find themselves so often conquered by mechanics and mere husbandmen — but that we esteemed it our glory to draw characters not only into the field, but into the senate, and believed no one would deny but what they had shone in both. All our passengers enjoyed this conversation.

One of the crew came to her with a story he felt he must tell her. He had been taken prisoner during the war and held in a jail in England. When he and several others escaped to Holland, the only help they were able to get was from John Adams, who gave them money from his own pocket.

What was ahead for her, she pondered in a diary she kept for herself only. Where would she be living? “No matter where,” she wrote, “so that it only be in the arms of my dearest, best of friends. I hardly dare trust my imagination or anticipate the day. Cruel sleep how you have tormented me.”

When, after a month at sea and the voyage nearly over, the ship lay becalmed, she found the wait intolerable. Motion, she decided, was the most desirable state. “Man was made for action. . . . I am quite out of conceit with calm.”

Heading up the English Channel, the ship was caught in gale winds and for three days there was little sleep for anyone. At last, orders were given to drop anchor in the Downs, the roadstead of the Channel, within sight of the little town of Deal. The passengers were lowered over the side into an open pilot boat and in squally rain and the roar of heaving waves, with everyone soaked to the skin, they made for shore.

We set off from the vessel now mounting upon the top of a wave as high as a steeple [Abigail would write], and then so low that the boat was not to be seen. I could keep myself up no other way than as one of the gentlemen stood braced up against the boat, fast hold of me and I with both arms around him. The other ladies were held in the same manner whilst every wave gave us a broadside.

Then with a sudden rush and a sound like thunder, an immense wave swept the boat broadside high up onto the beach. And thus it was, on Tuesday, July 20, 1784, that Abigail and Nabby were “safely landed upon the British coast.”

UNDER WAY BY POST CHAISE the next morning, they traveled hill and dale to Canterbury, then Chatham, then on to London, seventy-two miles all in a day. Beyond Chatham, they rolled with all possible speed to pass before dark the Black Heath, dreaded for its lurking highwaymen. Fear of the road, the threat of robbery or worse at the hands of highwaymen, was something foreign to Americans. At home it was not uncommon even for women to travel alone feeling perfectly safe. “Every place we passed, and every post chaise we met were crying out a robbery,” Abigail later recounted. “The robber was pursued and taken in about two miles, and we saw the poor wretch, ghastly and horrible, brought along on foot.” She judged him to be no more than twenty years old. Hearing that “the lad” was certain “to swing,” she shuddered. “Though every robber may deserve death, yet to exult over the wretched is what our country is not accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a commiseration for the wretched.”

Though a “monstrous great” city, London struck Abigail as more pleasant than ever she imagined. There was even sunshine, and the small, elegant Adelphi Hotel, on a narrow street just off the Strand, near the Thames, was “as quiet as at any place in Boston.” That John and John Quincy had stayed there during their visit to London gave it further appeal.

She immediately dispatched a letter to John at The Hague reporting her arrival and her extreme desire to see him. “Heaven give us a happy meeting,” she wrote.

Adams replied at once. Her letter had made him “the happiest man on earth,” he said. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” Because of the press of business, he was unable to “fly” to her just yet, but John Quincy was proceeding at once.

Hearing that John, while in London the previous fall, had had a full-length portrait done by Copley, and that the painting was on view at the artist’s studio in Haymarket, she hurried off to see it. Adams, in court dress of brown velvet, stood holding a scroll in one hand — his memorial to the Dutch Republic, perhaps, or the Treaty of Paris — while with the other hand he pointed to a map of America spread on a table. Beside the table, a globe figured prominently. He was the picture of a statesman — firm of stance, his expression one of grave resolve. He wore lace at his sleeve and a gold-handled sword. If he looked a little older and stouter than when Abigail had last seen him, she thought it “a very good likeness . . . a most beautiful picture.” She was delighted.

A steady stream of visitors left her little time to herself. They came every day, Americans in London who wished to pay their respects, including a number of Loyalists. She was told how young she looked, offered assistance, invited to tea. When not receiving visitors, she and Nabby went sightseeing (to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum) or shopping for new clothes, but astounded by the prices, they bought little. She was surprised at how familiar the faces of the English looked, so like Americans, that it was as if she had seen them before. “The London ladies,” she also noted, “walk a vast deal and very fast.”

On Friday, July 30, a servant came “puffing” up the stairs at the hotel to announce, “Young Mr. Adams.” When John Quincy entered, Abigail hardly knew him. As tall as his father, he looked older than seventeen — a man nearly. The resemblance to his father was striking. Seeing him with Nabby made her feel very much the matron, she confided to her sister Mary, but “were I not their mother, I would say a likelier pair you will seldom see in a summer’s day.”

Nabby judged her brother a “sober lad,” but one she was sure she would like once they were reacquainted. To a cousin at home John Quincy wrote, quite properly, “You can imagine what an addition has been made to my happiness by the arrival of a kind and tender mother, and a sister who fulfills my most sanguine expectations.”

From The Hague, John Adams promised to be with them in a matter of days, but warned that there could be no lingering in London. He must join his colleagues in Paris.

ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, August 7, Nabby had been out for a walk. When she returned, she noticed a man’s hat on the table with two books in it.

Everything around appeared altered, without my knowing in what particular [she wrote that night in her diary]. I went into my room, the things were moved; I looked around. . . .” Why are these things moved?” — All [this] in a breath to Esther. . . .

“Why is all this appearance of strangeness? Whose hat is that in the other room?” . . . “’Tis my father’s!” I said, “Where is he?”

“In the room above.”

Up I flew, and to his chamber, where he was lying down, and received me with all the tenderness of an affectionate parent after so long an absence. Sure I am, I never felt more agitation of spirits in my life; it will not do to describe.

Abigail’s only reference to the reunion with John was in passing in a letter to Mary Cranch: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one or the pencil of the other; we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years.”

Early the following day they were all off for Paris.

II

THE JOURNEY WAS MADE in record time. They went by fast coach from London to the Channel, and by boat to Calais, landing on the shores of France at dawn the next morning, then sped on by coach-and-six. If Abigail felt still, as on shipboard, that motion was the preferred state, she must have been ecstatic.

The whole route from Calais to Paris, she and Nabby felt they were riding through scenes from a favorite novel, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. There were all kinds of travelers, Sterne had written — inquisitive travelers, idle travelers, vain travelers — but the true value of travel was not in strenuous sight-seeing. It was in opening one’s heart to feeling.

Adams had been away from Paris for nearly a year. In an effort to regain his strength after the illness that struck him down in the late summer of 1783, he had moved to a large house with a garden on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Passy in the still-rural village of Auteuil.

Long a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise, he had become still more adamant on the subject during his years in Europe. If the dank atmosphere of Amsterdam had been the cause of his first terrible collapse, so the noisome air of Paris had laid him low the second time.

Like Passy, Auteuil was set on an airy hill above the Seine, and adjoined the beautiful Bois de Boulogne, where he could take his daily walks or ride horseback. But when his American doctor, James Jay, the brother of John Jay, had suggested a sojourn in England, he had gone off to London with John Quincy and later to Bath, to take the waters, an experience Adams had found little to his liking and that was cut short by a summons to return to Holland to secure still another desperately needed loan.

Adams again succeeded with the Dutch bankers, but only after one of the most horrendous episodes in all his earthly pilgrimage. Crossing a wintry North Sea, he and John Quincy had been caught in a storm. Landing on a desolate Dutch island, they had had to press on the rest of the way by foot and iceboat. “The weather was cold, we were all frequently wet,” he wrote. “I was chilled to the heart, and looked I suppose, as I felt, like a withered old worn out carcass. Our polite skipper frequently eyed me and said he pitied the old man.” Adams, by then forty-eight, felt that during the ordeal he had left one stage of life and entered another.

The four Adamses and their two American servants reached Paris on August 13, stopping at the Hôtel d’York on the Left Bank, where the Peace Treaty had been signed. Jefferson and his daughter had already arrived in the city the week before.

While Adams conferred with Jefferson and Franklin, Abigail and Nabby toured the city, John Quincy serving as their guide and interpreter. Then, after several days, the family moved to the rented house at Auteuil, where they were to remain for no one knew how long.

In Paris there had been talk of Jefferson succeeding Franklin as minister to France, a prospect that Adams rejoiced in. Whether Adams would be appointed to the British Court, as was also expected, remained unresolved, and though it was a position he longed for, as a capstone to his diplomatic service, he could not say so outright, and imagined quite correctly that there was stiff opposition in Congress.

Yet Adams was pleased beyond measure. “The house, the garden, the situation near the Bois de Boulogne, elevated above the river Seine and the low grounds, and distant from the putrid streets of Paris, is the best I could wish for,” he recorded the day they moved in. It had been a long time since he had felt so well disposed. “I make a little America of my own family,” he wrote to Arthur Lee. “I feel more at home than I have ever done in Europe,” he told Cotton Tufts. He thought himself better off even than Franklin; besides, his rent was lower.

The house was enormous, three stories of trimmed limestone, and plainly in need of attention. It had once been the country villa of two extravagant, scandalous sisters, the Demoiselles Verrières — Marie and Claudine-Geneviève de Verrières. Depending on how one counted, there were forty or fifty rooms, including a small theater “gone to decay.” Abigail, accustomed to a cottage of seven rooms, was nonplussed. Weeks later she would still be finding rooms she had not seen.

Reception salon, dining room, and kitchen were on the first floor, as well as quarters for the servants. The family “apartments” were above, where every room had French doors looking over the garden. The mirrors alone were said to have cost 30,000 livres. One octagonal room on the second floor was paneled entirely with mirrors.

“Why, my dear,” wrote Abigail to her niece, Betsy Cranch, “you cannot turn yourself in it without being multiplied twenty times . . . [and] that I do not like, for being rather clumsy, and by no means an elegant figure, I hate to have it so repeated to me.”

The furnishings were sparse; there were no carpets. The whole place could do with a good scrubbing, she saw, and wondered how cold it might be in winter.

The garden, however, was “delightful,” very romantic in its neglect, and it was the garden she would come to love most. There were fully five acres with rows of orange trees, stone walks overhung with grapevines, circles and octagons of flowers in bloom, pots of flowers, a Chinese fence, a fish pond, a fountain that no longer worked, and a little summerhouse, “beautiful in ruins.”

The weather, like the garden, enchanted her. The days and nights of late summer were ideal, “beautiful, soft, serene.” And as time passed, her affection for the place grew appreciably. She would rent furniture, purchase new table linen, china, and glassware, hire servants, acquire a songbird in a cage, and see the garden fountain restored to running order. She felt “so happy” at Auteuil, “so pleasingly situated.”

THE FRENCH AND THEIR WAYS were another matter, however. The shock experienced by John Adams on his first arrival in France was tepid compared to that of his wife.

From the morning of their landing at Calais, Abigail had been convinced that every coachman, porter, and servant was somehow trying to cheat her, an anxiety not helped by the fact that she understood nothing they said. Now the number of servants she was expected to employ and the division of labor insisted upon by them left her bewildered and exasperated. “One [servant] will not touch what belongs to the business of the other, though he or she has time enough to perform the whole,” she wrote, in an effort to explain the system to her sister Mary. The coachman would do nothing but attend the carriage and horses. The cook would only cook, never wash a dish. Then there was the maître d’hôtel whose “business is to purchase articles into the family and oversee that nobody cheats but himself.” Counting Esther Field and John Briesler, she eventually had eight in service, but that, she was told, was hardly what was expected.

She and John both worried about running into debt, given his salary from Congress of $9,000. While such a sum might be a great deal in Brain-tree, John wrote to Cotton Tufts, at Court it was but “a sprat in a whale’s belly.” “

We spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers . . . avoid every expense that is not held indispensable,” Abigail reported to Mary.

The shock was not so much the exorbitant expense of public life in Europe, but that extravagance was taken as the measure of one’s importance. “The inquiry is not whether a person is qualified for his office,” she wrote to Uncle Isaac Smith, “but how many domestics and horses does he keep.” The British ambassador had fifty servants, the Spanish ambassador, seventy-five.

Fashion ruled and fashion decreed that she and Nabby have their own hairdresser in residence, a young woman named Pauline, who, as a matter of pride, refused to dust or sweep. Both the sweeping and waxing of floors was reserved for a manservant called the frotteur who went tearing about from room to room with brushes strapped to his feet, “dancing here and there like a merry Andrew,” and to whom was also assigned the unenviable task of emptying the chamber pots. Why, with so much land available, there was no proper privy, Abigail could not understand.

Even her two servants from home, Esther and John, felt obliged to have their hair dressed, such was the ridicule they were subjected to by the other servants. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”

She thought Paris far from appealing, for all the splendor of its public buildings. And if she had not seen all of it, she had “smelt it.” Given its state of sanitation, the stench was more than she could bear. With new construction under way everywhere, the narrow streets were cluttered with piles of lumber and stone, great mounds of rubble. Everything looked filthy to her. Even the handsomest buildings were black with soot. The people themselves were the “dirtiest creatures” she had ever laid eyes on, and the number of prostitutes was appalling. That any nation would condone, let alone license, such traffic, she found vile, just as she found abhorrent the French practice of arranged marriages among the rich and titled of society.

“What idea, my dear madame, can you form of the manners of a nation, one city of which furnishes (blush oh, my sex, when I name it) 52,000 unmarried females so lost to a sense of honor and shame as publicly to enroll their names in a notary office for the most abandoned purposes and to commit iniquity with impunity,” she wrote in outrage to Mercy Warren. “Thousands of these miserable wretches perish annually with disease and poverty, whilst the most sacred of institutions is prostituted to unite titles and estates.”

On a visit later to a Paris orphanage run by Catholic Sisters of Charity, she was shown a large room with a hundred cribs and perhaps as many infants. It was a sight both pleasing and painful — pleasing because all was so admirably clean, and the nuns especially attentive and kind, but painful because of the numbers of abandoned babies, “numbers in the arms, great numbers asleep . . . several crying.” In an average year 6,000 children were delivered to the orphanage, she was told by the head nun. Even as they talked, one was brought in that appeared to be three months old. In various parts of the city, it was explained, there were designated places with small boxes in which a baby could be “deposited.” In winter one child in three died of exposure.

Can we draw a veil over the guilty cause [Abigail wrote], or refrain from comparing a country grown old in debauchery and lewdness with the wise laws and institutions of one wherein marriage is considered as holy and honorable, wherein industry and sobriety enable parents to rear numerous offspring, and where the laws provide resource for illegitimacy by obliging the parents to maintenance, and if not to be obtained there, they become the charge of the town or parish where they are born?

The whole French way of life seemed devoted to little else but appearances and frivolity, everybody bent on a good time, going to the theater, to concerts, public shows and spectacles. She wondered when anyone ever did any work. In London she had seen streets swarming with people, but there they appeared to have business in mind. Here pleasure alone seemed to be the business of life and no one ever to tire of it. Not even on the Sabbath was there pause. Sundays were more like election days at home, as all of Paris “poured forth” into the Bois de Boulogne, where the woods resounded with “music and dancing, jollity and mirth of every kind.”

The few resident Americans she met, like the famously beautiful Anne Bingham of Philadelphia and the naval hero John Paul Jones, did not greatly impress her. Young Anne Bingham, who was married to the immensely wealthy William Bingham, was, Abigail agreed, “very handsome,” but “rather too much given to the foibles” of France. “Less money and more years may make her wiser,” Abigail wrote. And John Paul Jones was a decided disappointment. She had pictured him a “rough, stout, war-like Roman.” Instead, he was tiny, soft-spoken, and a favorite with the French ladies, whom he flattered excessively. “I should sooner think of wrapping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with cannon ball.”

But most memorable was her first encounter with a “great lady” of France. The occasion was a dinner given by Franklin at his house in Passy, shortly after the Adams family arrived. In recent years Franklin had become increasingly attached to the “sweet society” of the celebrated Madame Helvétius, whose own small estate was close by in Auteuil. Franklin had even proposed marriage to Madame Helvétius, who declined, saying they were past the age for romance. Yet she remained prominent in his life and always the center of attention at his social gatherings. Franklin told Abigail she was to meet one of the best women in the world, and Abigail, curious to see what so charmed “the good Doctor,” rode to Passy full of anticipation, only to be appalled by the woman from the moment she appeared.

She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air [Abigail began in a vivid sketch, in a letter to her niece, Lucy Cranch]. Upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu! where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How do I look?” said she, taking hold of a dressing chemise made of tiffany which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman.

Her hair was fangled [done in the latest style]; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty half gauze handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was sewed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders.

She ran out of the room. When she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other, upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Hélas, Franklin!” then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands in the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck.

I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free of affectation or stiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word, but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although 60 years of age and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.

After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor, she wiped it up with her chemise.

To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society. Abigail hoped there might be other French ladies whose manners were more consistent with her own ideas of decency; otherwise she would wind up a recluse in France.

YET THESE WERE only early impressions, she conceded. “I have been here so little while that it would be improper for me to pass sentence, or form judgments of people,” she told Mercy Warren, implying that with time she might come to see things differently. And change — or at least soften — she did, and especially as she discovered the pleasures and glamour of the Paris theater.

Abigail had always loved to read plays, but with no theaters in Boston, she had never actually seen one performed on stage until arriving in London. Now she could go as often as she wished and in the French manner, with or without the company of her husband. She quickly became a devotee of both the new Comédie-Française and the Opéra. As little as she understood the language, she loved the actors who were “beyond the reach of my pen.” The performances were far superior to what she had seen in London, the crowds considerably more polite. If only the cleanliness of the British could be joined with the civility of the French, she told Mercy, it would be a “most agreeable assemblage.”

For her sister, Elizabeth, Abigail described in loving detail the Comédie-Française, with its great Doric columns, its magnificent chandeliers, one of which, in the sky-blue theater itself, had two hundred candles ablaze.

Fancy, my dear Betsy, this house filled with 2,000 well dressed gentlemen and ladies! . . . Suppose some tragedy represented which requires the grandest scenery, and the most superb habits of kings and queens, the parts well performed, and the passions all excited, until you imagine yourself living at the very period.

One evening the four Adamses went by carriage to the Comédie-Française to see The Marriage of Figaro, then a sensation in Paris. The work of the dashing Beaumarchais — who had been an early supporter of the American Revolution and thickly in league with Silas Deane, shipping supplies to America — the play was a satire about the triumph of virtuous servants over their aristocratic employers. In the fifth act came the famous denunciation of his master by the valet, Figaro, that invariably brought an outburst of approval from the audience.

Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointments to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born — nothing more.

Some weeks later, when her own servants, Esther and Pauline, came home from a performance thrilled by what they had seen, Abigail was delighted.

The opera was more enthralling still, the dancing such as she had never imagined, “the highest degree of perfection.” At first, she was shocked, but not for long. As she wrote to sister Mary, “I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions which at first disgusted me.

The dresses and beauty of the performers were enchanting, but no sooner did the dance commence that I felt my delicacy wounded, and I was shamed to be seen looking at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with their petticoats short, springing two feet from the floor, poising themselves in the air, with their feet flying, and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers, as though no petticoats had been worn, was a sight altogether new to me. Their motions are as light as air and as quick as lightning.

While the opera house was not as impressive a building as the French theater, it was more lavishly decorated, and the costumes on stage more extravagant. “And oh! the music, vocal and instrumental, it has a soft persuasive power and a dying, dying sound.”

She was changing in outlook, she knew. The more she saw of Paris and French society, the more entranced she was with the “performance” of French life, and especially the women of fashion, most of whom, she was relieved to find, were nothing like Madame Helvétius. It was as if the whole of society were a stage. Life itself was a theatrical production and Frenchwomen, raised on theater, had achieved as perfect a command of the art as anyone actually on stage. Abigail could hardly take her eyes off them, studying their every expression and gesture, charmed by the sound of their voices and by their intelligence.

They are easy in their deportment, eloquent in their speech, their voices soft and musical, and their attitude pleasing. Habituated to frequent theaters from their earliest age, they became perfect mistresses of the art of insinuation and the powers of persuasion. Intelligence is communicated to every feature of the face, and to every limb of the body; so that it may be in truth said, every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.

However greatly she deplored the dictates of fashion, on principle, she was utterly fascinated by the dress of the French ladies, which she described as being like their manners, “light, airy, and genteel.” She had made clothes for herself and her family for years, and little about the design and exquisite workmanship of what passed before her now escaped her eye. The fashionable shape for women was that of the wasp, “very small at the bottom of the waist and very large round the shoulders,” she reported to a cousin at home, adding ruefully, “You and I, madam, must despair of being in the mode.”

With her limited French and limited means, she found her social circle inevitably limited as well. But of the Frenchwomen she came to know, by far the most engaging, and the one whose company she greatly preferred, was the “sprightly” young wife of the Marquis de Lafayette — Adrienne Françoise de Noailles — whose family, the Noailles, was among the wealthiest, most distinguished of France. In years past, after dining at their Paris mansion, Adams had written at length of all he had seen, the gardens, walks, pictures, and furniture, “all in the highest style of magnificence,” and family portraits “ancient and numerous.” Adrienne was one of five daughters of Jean de Noailles, Duc d’Ayen, and Henriette d’Arguesseau, and to Adams they constituted the most “exemplary” family he had met since arriving in Paris. Adrienne, who was still in her twenties when she and Abigail met, had been married to Lafayette in 1774 when she was fourteen and he sixteen. In contrast to most French-women, and very like Abigail, she remained openly devoted to her husband and children. Importantly, she spoke English and despite her wealth and position dressed simply and disliked pretentious display quite as much as did Abigail. Lafayette, a hero in Paris no less than in America, and himself one of the richest men in France, had recently acquired a palatial house on the Rue de Bourbon, which he made a center of hospitality for Americans in Paris.

“You would have supposed I had been some long absent friend who she dearly loved,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch of the greeting she had received the day of her first call on Madame Lafayette, and for the rest of her stay she would never fail to enjoy the young woman’s company. “She is a good and amiable lady, exceedingly fond of her children . . . passionately attached to her husband!!! A French lady and fond of her husband!!!” How aware Abigail may have been of the husband’s frequent infidelities is not known.

Nabby, who felt she, too, had found a compatible soul in Madame Lafayette, began to see sides to French life that her own country might take lessons from. “I have often complained of a stiffness and reserve in our circles in America that was disagreeable,” wrote the daughter whose mother worried that she was too stiff and reserved. “A little French ease adopted would be an improvement.”

HOW WERE HER TWO “dear lads” at home, Abigail asked in a letter to Elizabeth Shaw. “I have got their profiles [silhouettes] stuck up which I look at every morning with pleasure and sometimes speak to as I pass, telling Charles to hold up his head.”

But in time came letters from sisters Elizabeth and Mary both, assuring her that all was well at home, the boys well behaved and enjoying perfect health. Braintree had become a dull place without her, wrote Mary, who faithfully reported all that Abigail would wish to know about her house, farm, the doings of the town — who had been married, who had been born in her absence, who had taken ill, and who had died — and the health of John’s mother, who at seventy-five still walked to meeting each Sunday. Her house, Abigail was told, was just as she would wish. “Phoebe keeps it in perfect order. It is swept and everything that wants it, rubbed once a week.” Her every letter was treasured and read aloud to the delight of all. When Mary called on John’s mother, to say she had come to read Abigail’s letters to her, the old lady replied, “Aya, I had rather hear that she is coming home.”

Abigail was to have no worries over her boys, wrote Elizabeth. “I shall always take unspeakable pleasure in serving them.” The Reverend John Shaw reported the progress being made under his tutelage and offered a benediction for John Adams: “May Heaven reward him for the sacrifices he has made, and for the extensive good he has done to his country.”

It still took two to three months for letters to cross the ocean, sometimes longer, but the three sisters kept up their correspondence without cease. In her letters to Mary Cranch, Abigail was more inclined to share the details of her life and her innermost feelings, while with sister Elizabeth — and perhaps because the Reverend Shaw, too, would be reading what she wrote — she was often moved to evoke the creed they had been raised on in the Weymouth parsonage. “I am rejoiced to find my sons have been blessed with so large a share of health since my absence,” she told Elizabeth.

If they are wise they will improve . . . the bloom of their health in acquiring such a fund of learning and knowledge as may render them useful to themselves, and beneficial to society, the great purpose for which they were sent into the world. . . . To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.

“I wish I could give you some idea of the French ladies,” Nabby wrote to Elizabeth another time. “But it is impossible to do it by letter, I should absolutely be ashamed to write what I must if I tell you truths. There is not a subject in nature that they will not talk upon. . . . I sometimes think myself fortunate in not understanding the language.”

III

FOR ABIGAIL AND JOHN it was the long-dreamed-of chance to enjoy life together again, as husband and wife in a world at peace, and removed from the contentiousness and stress of politics at home, that made the time in France an interlude such as they had never known. No more wars and no more separations became their common creed. With Nabby and John full-grown and the best of companions, they could all four come and go together, do so much that had never been possible before, delighting in each other’s company, indeed preferring it.

To compound the pleasure and stimulation of the new life, there was the bonus of Jefferson and the flourishing of a friendship that under normal circumstances at home would most likely never have happened. The vast differences between Jefferson and Adams, in nature and outlook, were as great as ever; and much had happened in Jefferson’s life since 1776 to change him. But brought together as they were in Paris, in just these years between one revolution and another, none of them knowing what was over the horizon for France or their own country, or for any of them individually, the bonds that grew were exceptional. None of them would think of Paris ever again without thoughts of the other.

In addition to the time he spent working with Adams, Jefferson dined at Auteuil repeatedly, almost from the day the family moved in, and they in turn with him in Paris, once he was settled in a rented house in what was called the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout, near the Opéra. John Quincy, with Jefferson’s encouragement, came to regard Jefferson’s quarters as his own private refuge when in the city, and struck up friendships with Jefferson’s two young aides, Colonel David Humphreys and William Short. The interest Jefferson showed in John Quincy pleased the young man exceedingly and was not lost on his parents. “He appeared to me as much your boy as mine,” Adams would remind Jefferson fondly in later years.

“Dined at Mr. Jefferson’s” became a familiar entry in John Quincy’s diary. “In afternoon, went . . . to Paris, Mr. Jefferson’s.” “Spent evening with Mr. Jefferson, whom I love to be with.”

One afternoon in September the Adams family, Jefferson, and “eight or ten thousand” others attended one of the celebrated Paris spectacles of the time, a balloon ascension from the Tuileries Gardens. “Came home and found Mr. Jefferson again,” Nabby would record another day. “He is an agreeable man.”

When Arthur Lee wrote to tell John Adams that Jefferson’s supposed genius was in fact mediocre, his affectation great, his vanity greater, and warned Adams to judge carefully how much he confided in Jefferson, Adams would have none of it, replying, “My new partner is an old friend . . . whose character I studied nine or ten years ago, and which I do not perceive to be altered. . . . I am very happy with him.”

For Adams so much had changed about the atmosphere in which he lived and worked that it was as if Paris had become an entirely different place, and he, a different man. There were none of the intense pressures and uncertainties of his previous years in Europe. With his family about him, with John Quincy serving as his secretary, he was perfectly at ease, never lonely. “If you and your daughter were with me,” he had once written to Abigail from Paris, “I could keep up my spirits.” And he was as good as his word: his pleasure in her company was palpable to all. “He professes himself so much happier having his family with him, that I feel amply gratified in having ventured across the ocean,” Abigail wrote to her sister Elizabeth. Nothing, it seems, upset him. Not even Franklin bothered him anymore. The old man had become too afflicted with age and the agonies of his ailments, “too much an object of compassion, to be one of resentment,” Adams noted. And the pleasure of working with Jefferson stood in such vivid contrast to the ill will and dark suspicions Adams had had to contend with when dealing with Arthur Lee. As Abigail would confide to Jefferson, there had seldom been anyone in her husband’s life with whom he could associate with such “perfect freedom and unreserve,” and this meant the world to her. Jefferson, she wrote, was “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

She was charmed by his perfect manners, his manifold interests and breadth of reading, and, though she did not say it in so many words, by the attention he paid to her. Knowledge of the repeated tragedies that had befallen him also strongly affected her, as others. That Jefferson had vowed, as he told his family, to “keep what I feel to myself,” only made him a more interesting and sympathetic figure, and particularly to those, like Abigail and John, who had known heartbreak themselves.

IN THE YEARS SINCE JEFFERSON and John Adams had last seen one another in Philadelphia, Jefferson had suffered the loss of two children — an unnamed infant son who died two weeks after his birth, and a baby girl, Lucy Elizabeth, who died in 1781, at age four-and-a-half months. Then, on September 6, 1782, at Monticello, the worst day of Jefferson’s life, his wife Martha had died at age thirty-three, apparently from complications following the birth in the previous spring of still another child, a second Lucy Elizabeth.

As the story was related to the Adamses, Jefferson had been led from his wife’s deathbed all but insensible with grief and for weeks kept to his room, pacing back and forth, seeing no one but his daughter Patsy. He “confined himself from the world,” Nabby wrote in her journal, and then for weeks afterward, as Patsy herself would relate, he “rode out . . . incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountains,” she still his constant companion and “solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”

At thirty-nine, Jefferson had been left a widower with three young children, his political career over, he thought, his political ambitions dissolved.

In the years immediately after his return from Philadelphia, his influence and accomplishments as a member of the Virginia General Assembly had been second to none. He had labored steadily, revising laws, writing legislation to eliminate injustices and set the foundation for a “well-ordered” republican government. And to a degree he had succeeded, although one of his proudest achievements, a bill for the establishment of religious freedom, a subject of extreme controversy, was not passed by the legislature until several years hence, after he departed for France.

Jefferson was infrequently at Williamsburg, however. His principal work, the revising and writing of laws, was carried on at Monticello, where he remained more or less in isolation, absorbed in his “darling pleasures,” as his friend John Page said — with continuing work on his house, gardens, and orchards, his scholarly pursuits, management of the plantation, and the interests of his family. In February 1778, when Adams and John Quincy were bound for France aboard the Boston, Jefferson was placing orders for another 90,000 bricks, and overseeing the first planting of peas for the year and several varieties of fruit trees.

He had seen nothing of the war. Its principal adverse effects on his way of life were spiraling inflation, and the loss of twenty-two of his slaves who ran off in the hope of joining the British side and gaining their freedom. Any connection he had with the larger struggle was through correspondence. His only contact with the enemy was with prisoners. When 4,000 British and Hessian troops who had surrendered at Saratoga were marched to Charlottesville to be quartered outside of the town, Jefferson arranged for proper housing for the officers on neighboring plantations and saw no reason not to offer his friendship and hospitality. Indeed, he took delight in having such welcome additions to his social circle. One Hessian officer would write warmly that while all Virginians were apparently fond of music, Jefferson and his wife were particularly so. “You will find in his house an elegant harpsichord, pianoforte, and some violins. The latter he performs well upon himself. . . .” Possibly, John and Abigail Adams learned of this while in Paris. In any event, for them to have entertained the enemy under their own roof while war raged would have been unthinkable.

But the detachment Jefferson enjoyed from the war had ended abruptly in the spring of 1779 when the Virginia Assembly chose him to succeed Patrick Henry as the wartime governor, a role he disliked and that was to prove the low point of his public career, as probably he foresaw. Only weeks later he was writing that the day of his retirement could not come soon enough. He had no background or interest in military matters. Furthermore, the real political power was not in the office of the governor, but in the Assembly, as Jefferson himself, distrusting executive authority, had helped to establish. After the rarefied life at Monticello, the everyday confusion, endless paperwork and frustrations of administering a state at war — trying to cope with inflation, taxes, allocations of money and supplies — was torturous and only grew worse.

In the first of two one-year terms, he and his family lived as had his colonial counterparts in the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg, a stone’s throw from the home of George Wythe, where Jefferson had once boarded and read law. In the second term, when the capital was moved further inland to the struggling hamlet of Richmond, he, Martha, and the children occupied a rented house there and again lived in style. But it was his bad luck to be governor in one of the darkest times of the war, as the British shifted their campaign South. Word that Charleston had fallen reached him only days after his reelection. During that summer of 1780 came the humiliating rout at Camden. Virginia troops performed badly, but the defeat meant also the loss of precious cannon, wagons, tents, and muskets. Called on for reinforcements, Virginia could only send unarmed men. Enlistments were down, the state treasury empty.

Jefferson did what he could, and, by his own assessment, was ineffectual. By September he found his duties “so excessive,” his execution of them “so imperfect,” he would have retired but for the urging of friends. Then early in 1781 the British invaded Virginia. The traitor Benedict Arnold led a sudden, daring raid on Richmond, and with the advance of spring, the British under Cornwallis swept through the state almost at will, scattering the legislature to the hills and very nearly capturing the governor.

The Assembly had withdrawn to Charlottesville, theoretically safe from Cornwallis. Jefferson was at Monticello once more, his long-desired retirement scheduled to begin in a few days, as he informed George Washington in a letter of May 28. His term as governor expired on Saturday, June 2.

At sunrise, Monday, June 4, a lone horseman came pounding up the mountain to warn Jefferson that British cavalry were on the way to capture him and the legislature. Captain Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia had made a wild, forty-mile ride through the night. His face was cut and streaked with blood, where it had been lashed by low-hanging branches. Had it not been for a nearly full moon, he might not have arrived in time.

Reportedly, a calm, cheerfully hospitable Jefferson insisted that Jouett have a glass of his best Madeira before continuing on to Charlottesville. “I ordered a carriage to be readied to carry off my family,” Jefferson would write in his account of the morning. Remaining behind, he spent another several hours gathering up papers and making sure the silver and china were hidden away. It was only when he saw by telescope that the streets of Charlottesville in the valley below were filled with British soldiers that he at last mounted his horse and took off through the woods, narrowly escaping the detachment of cavalry that arrived on the mountaintop only minutes later.

The British left Monticello untouched, but at another of Jefferson’s farms, known as Elk Hill, where Cornwallis made his headquarters, they burned barns, crops, and fences, slaughtered sheep and hogs, carried off horses, cut the throats of horses too young for service, and took away with them some thirty slaves.

To have fled as he did had been Jefferson’s only realistic recourse, but it had cost him in reputation. He was accused by political enemies of having taken flight in panic, of abandoning his duties in the face of the British — as if by allowing himself to be captured, he would have somehow better served his country.

The Assembly had also fled west over the Blue Ridge to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley, but when the House of Delegates reconvened in Staunton on June 12, a young member named George Nicholas called for an inquiry into the conduct of Thomas Jefferson. No specific charge was made, and by the year’s end, after Jefferson appeared before the House to defend his actions, he was officially cleared of any blame.

For someone of his extreme sensitivity, it was a painful ordeal. As he told his friend James Monroe, he had suffered “a wound in my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”

Word that Jefferson had been taken captive by the British spread rapidly and as far as Europe, where it had so distressed John Adams. In fact, Jefferson and his family had headed south to the seclusion of Poplar Forest, his other, more remote plantation in Bedford County. There they remained for six weeks, during which Jefferson, in a fall from his horse, shattered his left wrist. To occupy himself, through what had become as low a time as he had known, he began making notes in answer to a series of questions sent by a French aristocrat, the Barté-Martois, on the state of Virginia, notes that would one day be published as a book, Jefferson’s first and only book.

When at summer’s end he was asked to become one of the peace commissioners in Europe, he declined, telling friend and kinsman Edmund Randolph in a letter from Monticello, “[I] have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.” A month later, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to the combined American and French forces under Washington and Rochambeau.

Approaching Monticello by horseback afterward, an officer from Rochambeau’s army, the Marquis de Chastellux, saw the great house “shining alone” on its summit, and described how, arriving on top, he found the “Sage” of Monticello wholly “retired from the world and public business.”

Several days in Jefferson’s company disappeared like minutes, Chastellux later wrote. They talked of art, literature, and natural history, as work on the house continued about them. The clutter and racket of construction were hardly the tranquil setting one would imagine for a sage, but Chastellux thought the house admirably unlike anything he had seen in his American travels. Of Martha Jefferson, then in the ninth month of pregnancy, he wrote only that she was “mild and amiable,” which, regrettably, was no more than conventional compliments for the woman about whom so very little was ever recorded.

With the death of Martha less than five months later, everything changed. In a letter to Chastellux, Jefferson described himself as emerging from a “stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she. . . .” He had lost all interest in Monticello, believing he could never be happy there again. But before the year was out, Congress again called for him to go to France — an idea set in motion by his close political ally, James Madison — and this time Jefferson accepted at once. When the assignment was postponed and the Virginia General Assembly (again at Madison’s request) chose him as a delegate to Congress, he readily accepted that, too, and served six months, though always with an eye on France and what was happening there.

Madison, who had never met John Adams, reported to Jefferson that Adams’s letters to Congress from France revealed nothing so much as his vanity, his prejudice against the French Court, and “venom” against Franklin. When Jefferson learned that Adams was again to collaborate with Franklin at Paris, he was incredulous and in a coded letter to Madison offered a private view of Adams that was anything but an unqualified endorsement. He was at a loss even to imagine how Adams might behave in any negotiation, Jefferson wrote, and likened Adams to a poisonous weed.

He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere? His vanity is a lineament in his character which had entirely escaped me. His want of taste I had observed. Notwithstanding all this he has a sound head on substantial points, and I think he has integrity. I am glad therefore that he is of the commission and expect he will be useful in it. His dislike of all parties, and all men, by balancing his prejudices, may give the same fair play to his reason as would a general benevolence of temper. At any rate honesty may be expected even from poisonous weeds.

No sooner was Jefferson named by Congress, in May 1784, to replace John Jay at Paris, than he was ready to go. Talk of retirement to Monticello was heard no more. He had not time even to return to Virginia to say goodbye to his two small children, six-year-old Polly and Lucy Elizabeth, now two, who had been left in the care of his wife’s sister, Elizabeth Eppes. He gathered up Patsy, who had been living and studying in Philadelphia and, with the young servant James Hemings, was on his way to Boston and ultimately to Paris.

To John Adams, Jefferson’s presence in Paris was a godsend. The Virginian seemed entirely his old self, in ability and in his devotion to their common tasks as commissioners. “Jefferson is an excellent hand. You could not have sent a better,” Adams wrote in December to Elbridge Gerry, the spirit of his observations markedly different from what Jefferson had written privately of him.

He appears to me to be infected with no party passions or national prejudices, or any partialities, but for his own country. . . . Since our meeting upon our new commissions, our affairs have gone on with utmost harmony and nothing has happened to disturb our peace. I wish this calm will continue and believe it will.

In a letter to Henry Knox, Adams wrote proudly, “You can scarcely have heard a character[ization] too high of my friend and colleague, Mr. Jefferson, either in point of power or virtues. . . . I only fear that his unquenchable thirst for knowledge may injure his health.”

• • •

THAT JEFFERSON WAS OFTEN ILL during their time with him in France was of great concern to the Adamses, though Jefferson himself gamely dismissed it as no more than the “seasoning” required of all newly arrived strangers to the country. But privately, Jefferson, now forty-one, told Abigail he did not expect to live more than a dozen years longer.

When feeling fit, which was much of the time, he was out and about, and as before in Philadelphia, proved an irrepressible shopper. At first chance he bought a new dress sword, silver forks and spoons, candlesticks, wine, violin strings, the model of a hydraulic engine, every purchase recorded in his tidy accounts. He bought new French clothes for himself — French lace cuffs, French shirts and lace ruffles, French gloves — new clothes for Patsy, new clothes for James Hemings, whom he put on regular wages.

The young man had been Jefferson’s personal servant from the time Jefferson was governor of Virginia. He was nineteen years old, the son of a slave named Betty Hemings, who had belonged previously to Jefferson’s late father-in-law, John Wayles, who reportedly was James’s father — which, if true, meant that James was Jefferson’s own half-brother-in-law. Since slavery was forbidden in France, James was to be quietly considered a free man for the time being. He would be apprenticed to one of the finest chefs in Paris, that he might one day bring the haute cuisine of France home to Monticello.

Jefferson was still in arrears — the income from his operations at Monticello and his other farms failed to cover his debts — and, like the Adamses, he fretted that his salary was insufficient for the manner in which he was expected to live, and to which, unlike the Adamses, he was long accustomed.

In matters of economy, as in other aspects of his life, Jefferson did not practice what he preached. He would insist to his daughter Patsy that she keep to the rule of “never buying anything which you have not the money in your pocket to pay for,” and warned that “pain to the mind” of debt was greater by far than having to do without “any article whatever which we may seem to want.” Yet this was hardly how he lived. A chronic acquirer, Jefferson is not known to have ever denied himself anything he wished in the way of material possessions or comforts. Once settled in Paris, he never held back, spending for example, more than 200 francs for an initial stock of fifty-nine bottles of Bordeaux — 200 francs being the equivalent of three months’ wages for the average French worker.

The rented house on the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout was smaller than he liked and would not long satisfy, as he already foresaw; all the same, he proceeded to remodel two rooms and spent half his salary buying more and finer furniture than needed. He rented a pianoforte, hired six additional servants. A chariot he fancied wound up costing 15,000 francs by the time repairs were made and it had been fitted out as he wished with green morocco leather.

With the United States behind on payments on its loans, Jefferson found Paris bankers reluctant to advance him sufficient sums to cover his expenses. In distress, he turned to Adams, who arranged a loan with banks in Amsterdam, as Adams had on occasion for his own expenses. Later, unable to repay the advance, Jefferson would turn to private creditors and go still deeper in debt.

Like Adams, Jefferson wrote repeatedly to friends at home and in Congress, urging that the commissioners’ salaries be raised to a realistic level. That the Adamses were able to make ends meet as they did, Jefferson attributed to what he regarded as an extremely “plain” style of life, and even more to Abigail’s management of expenses. As Jefferson would explain in a letter to George Washington, John Adams had the advantage of being “under the direction of Mrs. Adams, one of the most estimable characters on earth, and the most attentive and honorable economists.”

Yet at no point did Jefferson’s financial plight slow his spendthrift ways. Faithfully, almost obsessively, he kept recording every purchase and expenditure, but it was as if somehow he could never bring himself to add up the columns. At home, in his voluminous farm records, he never in his life added up the profit and loss for any year, and perhaps for the reason that there was almost never any profit.

On principle, Jefferson abhorred cities and their teeming throngs, quite as much as he abhorred debt. The mobs of great cities were like cancerous sores, he had written in his book on Virginia, a state entirely without cities. Nonetheless, he showed no interest now to live as Franklin and Adams did in semirural retreat outside Paris, where the panoramic views over the Seine were more like what he was accustomed to at home, and where the rent was appreciably less. He would reside by choice in the heart of the city his entire time in France, openly delighting in so much that was not to be found in Virginia. He relished all that Paris offered in the way of luxurious shopping, architecture, painting, music, theater, the finest food, the best wine, and the most cultivated society in his experience — never mind what he may have written about cities or the expenses he incurred.

Paris booksellers soon found they had an American patron like no other. In the bookshops and stalls along the Seine were volumes in numbers and variety such as Jefferson had never seen, and his pleasure was boundless. To Madison he would describe the surpassing pleasure of “examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science.” There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs. Nor was the book-buying spree to end. The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2,000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin, and James Madison.

With the purchase of works of art, he was tentative at first, buying only two “small laughing busts,” as he recorded, then a plaster statue of Hercules and two portraits that he itemized only as “heads.” Then, in a spasm of bidding at an estate auction, he bought five mostly religious paintings, including a large Herodias Bearing the Head of Saint John, which, like some of the others, was a copy, in this case of a popular work by Guido Reni. Before he was finished, Jefferson would buy sixty-three paintings in France as well as seven terra-cotta busts for 1,100 livres by the greatest sculptor of the day, Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom, at the request of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson also commissioned to do a life-size statue of George Washington.

Devoted to chess, eager to try his skill with some of the expert players of Paris, Jefferson found his way to a chess club, but was so decisively beaten in several games that he never went back.

Though he could read French well enough, Jefferson was never to speak the language with the fluency Adams attained. Further, he was considerably more disapproving of the outspokenness and apparent promiscuity of French women than ever Adams had been. While Adams, on first arriving in Paris, had reported to Abigail how much he admired the Frenchwomen he met — for their accomplishments, education, their views on serious matters — Jefferson felt that the decadent state of government in France was owing in good part to the influence of such women.

He had at once placed twelve-year-old Patsy in the most fashionable and most expensive convent school in Paris, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont on the Left Bank, where to Protestant students, he was assured, no word was ever spoken of religion, but where presumably she would be safe from social influences he thought wholly unsuitable for her.

She wore a crimson uniform and was soon speaking French better than her father, who visited her frequently, enjoying the walk over the Seine by the Pont Neuf. One morning in October, Jefferson, Adams, Abigail, John Quincy, and Nabby went together to the convent to see two young nuns take the veil in a ceremony that Nabby would describe in her diary as an “affecting sight” for all. “I could not refrain from tears; everyone seemed affected.”

Jefferson’s devotion to his daughter, his obvious pleasure in her company and her equally obvious devotion to him, were to the Adamses greatly to his credit. “She is a sweet girl, delicacy and sensibility are read in every feature,” Nabby wrote of Patsy, “and her manners are in unison with all that is amiable and lovely; she is very young.” Tall for her age and freckled, she was commonly said to resemble her father.

With the onset of winter, Jefferson took ill again. He was confined to the house for six weeks. Sunshine was his great physician, he liked to say, and there was too little of it in Paris.

Then, in the last week of January, came crushing news from Virginia. His two-year-old daughter, Lucy, had died of whooping cough. Of six children, now only two remained alive. The shadow of his unspeakable sorrow fell on everyone around him. The whole Adams household was in mourning. Jefferson, as so often in his life, retreated into silence and went on with his work.

IV

TO THE DIPLOMATIC TASKS at hand, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, the old Revolutionary trio, gave due attention, working steadily and in easy accord. “We proceed with wonderful harmony, in good humor, and unanimity,” acknowledged Adams, whose sole complaint was a gnawing feeling of “inutility.” The issues before them were commercial treaties with the nations of Europe, but it was extremely slow, unexciting work and with no notable progress. The new independent United States faced commercial barriers everywhere, while desperately in need of markets for American surpluses. The American position was free trade, but very little interest was shown.

With Franklin confined to his quarters at Passy, most of the commissioners’ working sessions were held there. They carried on correspondence, drew up reports, and, as obliged, appeared each Tuesday at the King’s levee at Versailles, where afterward they dined with the Comte de Vergennes and the rest of the diplomatic corps. “It is curious to see forty or fifty ambassadors, ministers or other strangers of the first fashion from all the nations of Europe, assembling in the most amicable manner and conversing in the same language,” wrote Jefferson’s aide, Colonel Humphreys. “What heightens the pleasure is their being universally men of unaffected manners and good dispositions.”

The three American commissioners tried not to get discouraged. But as Jefferson observed, “There is a want of confidence in us.” Ultimately, for all their efforts, only one commercial treaty would be negotiated, that with Prussia.

Writing to a correspondent at home, Adams said philosophically, “Public life is like a long journey, in which we have immense tracks of waste countries to pass through for a very few grand and beautiful prospects. At present, I scarcely see a possibility of doing anything for the public worth the expense of maintaining me in Europe.”

An equitable trade agreement with Britain was much the most important and pressing objective. But British-American relations had been strained since the Paris Peace Treaty, and the British remained maddeningly obdurate until that winter, when the commissioners were informed that His Majesty’s government would welcome an American minister to “reside constantly” at the Court of St. James’s. It seemed a hopeful shift in tide, but as such a matter could be decided only by Congress, the inevitable wait began.

In letters to Congress stressing the need for an envoy to Britain, Adams neither offered recommendations nor said anything of his own feelings, as ardently as he wanted the assignment. To Abigail there was no question that he would be chosen — it was his “destiny,” she told Mary Cranch — and she was equally unambiguous about Jefferson’s fitness for his role in France. Jefferson, she assured Cotton Tufts, was “an excellent man . . . and will do honor to his country.”

In marked contrast to both Franklin and Jefferson, Adams remained the picture of health. He had rarely ever looked or felt better. And indeed, life for the Adams family had settled into a routine which, if unspectacular, seemed to agree with all of them. Together almost constantly, they enjoyed a contentment such as they had seldom known.

Their days began early. With breakfast finished, weather permitting, John and John Quincy customarily set off for a five- or six-mile walk in the Bois de Boulogne before getting down to work. At two in the afternoon the family gathered for dinner. Most afternoons Adams was at Passy with Franklin and Jefferson. Tea was usually at five, by which time it was dark. In the evenings the family convened in the second-floor sitting room, to read or play cards, except for John Quincy, who was at his studies again, it having been agreed that he would return home soon to enter Harvard. Many nights Adams worked with him, happily playing the schoolmaster again and with his star pupil.

At seventeen the boy was extraordinarily accomplished. In his seven years away from home and from conventional schooling, he had benefited immeasurably from his father’s interest and encouragement. His travels, his reading, the time spent in the company of men like Francis Dana and Thomas Jefferson had given him a maturity, made him conversant on a breadth of subjects that people found astonishing. He had already seen more of Europe and Russia than any American of his generation. His French was virtually perfect. He was broadly read in English and Roman history. “If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior,” wrote Adams proudly to the boy’s former tutor and guardian at Leyden, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse.

He has translated Virgil’s Aeneid . . . the whole of Sallust and Tacitus’ Agricola . . . a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar’s Commentaries . . . besides Tully’s [Cicero’s] Orations. . . .

In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet he has studied morsels of Aristotle’s Politics, in Plutarch’s Lives, and Lucian’s Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer’s Iliad.

In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year . . . I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry in the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson’s Euclid in Latin. . . . We went through plane geometry . . . algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions. . . . I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations . . . [and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.

The picture of father and son, heads together at a table, absorbed in their work, brought Abigail satisfaction of a kind she had been long denied. “The table is covered with mathematical instruments and books, and you hear nothing ‘til nine o’clock but of theorem and problems bisecting and dissecting tangents and se[quents],” she recorded one evening at Auteuil, “after which we are often called upon to relieve their brains by a game of whist.”

By Nabby’s account, “Pappa’s hour” for bed was ten o’clock, after which she and John Quincy would have “a little conversation among themselves.” “We see but little company, and visit much less,” wrote Nabby, who found Auteuil less sociable than she desired. Still in a quandary over Royall Tyler, she had had almost no word from him, and while John Quincy’s plans seemed neatly resolved, hers were not.

No one liked the thought of John Quincy leaving. “I feel very loath to part with my son and shall miss him more than I can express,” Abigail wrote to her sister Mary. But “Master John” was now also “a man in most respects, all I may say but age,” and it was his wish to go home.

She herself felt waves of extreme homesickness. A heavy snow falling over Paris filled her with emotion because it “looked so American.” “What a sad misfortune it is to have the body in one place and the soul in another,” she told Mary. The time in France had made her love her own country more than ever. And from the little experience she had had making the adjustment to foreign ways, and foreign speech, from what she knew now that she had not before of the intricacies and difficulties of diplomacy, she wondered how in the world “Mr. Adams” had ever “lived through the perplexing scenes he has had to encounter.” Her regard for her country and for her husband had never been greater.

But of all that Abigail wrote of life en famille in the house at Auteuil, perhaps the most memorable vignette was in a letter to her niece Lucy Cranch, dated January 5, 1785. Describing a festive scene at the dinner table, she managed to capture much that was essential about each of them, including herself, but of her Mr. Adams in particular.

You must know that the religion of this country requires [an] abundance of feasting and fasting, and each person has his particular saint, as well as each calling and occupation. Tomorrow is to be celebrated le jour des rois. The day before this feast it is customary to make a large paste pie, into which one bean is put. Each person cuts his slice, and the one who is so lucky as to obtain the bean is dubbed king or queen. Accordingly, today, when I went in to dinner, I found one upon our table.

Your cousin Nabby began by taking the first slice; but alas! poor girl, no bean and no queen. In the next place, your cousin John seconded her by taking a larger cut, and as cautious as cousin T__ when he inspects merchandise, bisected his paste with mathematical circumspection; but to him it pertained not. By this time I was ready for my part; but first I declared that I had no cravings for royalty. I accordingly separated my piece with much firmness, nowise disappointed that it fell not to me.

Your uncle, who was all this time picking his chicken bone, saw us divert ourselves without saying anything. But presently he seized the remaining half, and to crumbs went the poor paste, cut here and slash there; when behold, the bean! “And thus,” said he, “are kingdoms obtained!” But the servant who stood by and saw the havoc, declared solemnly that he could not retain the title, as the laws decreed it to chance, and not to force.

WHEN DURING THAT SPRING of 1785 Queen Marie Antoinette gave birth to a son, the Duke of Normandy, a Te Deum was sung in thanks at Notre Dame, with the King himself taking part. As intended, it was one of the grandest occasions of the reign of Louis XVI and his Queen, and the four Adamses and Thomas Jefferson, along with everyone of fashion in Paris, were in attendance. Of the spectacles the Americans beheld in Paris, this was surpassing and would be recalled for years afterward, when such memories of France had become part of a vanished world.

The crowds en route to the cathedral were greater than any they had ever seen in their lives. Jefferson speculated to Nabby that there were as many people in the streets as in all of Massachusetts.

“There was but just space sufficient for the carriages to pass along,” wrote John Quincy, “and had there not been guards placed on both sides at a distance not greater than ten yards from one another, there would have been no passage at all for the coaches. For as it was, the troops had the utmost difficulty to restrain the mob.”

Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.

. . . and as soon as his Majesty had got to his place and fallen upon his knees, they began to sing the Te Deum, which lasted half an hour, and in which we heard some exceeding fine music.

. . . What a charming sight: an absolute king of one of the most powerful empires on earth, and perhaps a thousand of the first personages of that empire, adoring the divinity who created them, and acknowledging that He can in a moment reduce them to the dust from which they spring.

Another day he wrote of the show of fashion and wealth at Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne during the week before Easter.

There are perhaps each of these days a thousand carriages that come out of Paris to go round and round one of the roads in the wood one after another. There are two rows of carriages, one goes up and the other down so that the people in every carriage can see all the others. Everybody that has got a splendid carriage, a fine set of horses, or an elegant mistress, send them out on these days to make a show at Longchamps.

After so many years of living and traveling in Europe, the prospect of returning to “the pale of college” was more than a little discouraging to the boy. But like his father, he was “determined that as long as I shall be able to get my own living in an honorable manner, I will depend on no one.

My father has been so much taken up all his lifetime with the interests of the public that his own fortune has suffered by it. So that his children will have to provide for themselves, which I will never be able to do if I loiter away my precious time in Europe.

With the return of fair weather in April, life picked up. Jefferson, his health recovered, became notably sociable and by choice spent part of nearly every day with some or all of the Adamses. For all that would be said later of Jefferson’s love of the French and regard for the philosophes, he clearly preferred to be with the Adamses whenever possible. His pleasure in Abigail’s company was overflowing and delighted her, while Franklin, as she wrote, was “vastly social and civil.” She loved the feeling of being included at the center of things, in much the way she had felt while dining on board the French warships in Boston Harbor.

ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 26, Jefferson rode out from Paris to deliver a letter that had just arrived from Elbridge Gerry informing Adams that he had been named minister to the Court of St. James’s. It was requested that he be in London no later than the King’s birthday on June 4.

Within days Jefferson learned that he was indeed to replace Franklin as minister to France, and it was with considerable sadness that Jefferson and the Adamses realized the end was at hand to a time like none other they had known. Nobody said goodbye to Paris without some sadness, Abigail was told. Gone from her writing were accounts of the dirt and dissipations of the French. Instead, she regretted leaving for the harsher climate of London, regretted leaving her garden, regretted especially the loss of Jefferson’s society.

John Adams, too, for all his ambition to serve in London, seemed anything but eager to leave the setting of such sustained contentment. “I shall find nowhere so fine a little hill, so pleasant a garden, so noble a forest and such pure air and tranquil walks, as at Auteuil,” he wrote to Richard Cranch. “I shall part with Mr. Jefferson with great regret.”

Adams took his new assignment with utmost seriousness, rightly confident that he had given as much thought to British-American relations, and issues of war and peace, as had any American. What “friendly and decent terms” could be achieved in the next few years would be crucial for both nations.

Concerned about protocol in London, worried how he might be received, dreading the thought of people staring at him, he turned for advice to the British ambassador to France, the Duke of Dorset, whom he liked and trusted. In his diary afterward Adams recorded the essence of the conversation:

He said that Lord Carmarthen was their Minister of Foreign Affairs, that I must first wait on him, and he would introduce me to his Majesty. . . . I asked Lord Carmarthen’s age. He said 33. He said I should be stared at a great deal. I told him I trembled at the thought of going there. I was afraid they would gaze with evil eyes.

When another diplomat, assuming that Adams welcomed the change in assignment, remarked that no doubt Adams had a number of relatives in England, Adams took offense. No, he declared, he had no relatives there. “I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.” Writing to Mercy Warren earlier, Adams had said emphatically that he was no John Bull, he was John Yankee, “and such shall I live and die.”

At Versailles, in parting conversation with the Comte de Vergennes, Adams listened as Vergennes grandly told him that it was, of course, a step down to go from the Court of France to any other court, even if a “great thing to be the first ambassador from your country to the country you sprang from!”

When Jefferson called on the aging Foreign Minister, he demonstrated perfectly why he would be so welcome at the French Court.

“You replace Mr. Franklin, I hear,” said Vergennes.

“I succeed,” said Jefferson. “No one can replace him.”

What passed between Adams and Franklin at their final parting was not recorded. Doubtless both were perfectly cordial. There would be further work to transact between them, further correspondence to maintain. But it was the last time they were ever to see one another.

At the house at Auteuil, everyone began packing. In the second week of May, John Quincy set off for Lorient, on the first leg of the long journey home to America. He would sail on a French packet and, as part of his passage, was to look after a gift from Lafayette to George Washington of seven hunting dogs.

THE FINAL DEPARTURE OF JOHN, Abigail, and Nabby from the house at Auteuil, the afternoon of May 20, 1785, was wrenching for everyone present. The servants whom Abigail had once found such a trial clustered about the carriage in tears. When she requested that her songbird be put inside the carriage with her, it fluttered so frantically in its cage that she had to give it up to her chambermaid, and it was on that melancholy note the family departed for Calais.

“We journeyed slowly and sometimes silently,” Abigail wrote to Jefferson. John passed the time en route to the Channel reading the book Jefferson had presented as a parting gift, his own Notes on the State of Virginia, one of two hundred copies he had had privately printed in Paris. The book, Adams would write to Jefferson, was “our meditation all the day long,” implying that he had been reading it aloud to Abigail and Nabby as they rolled toward Calais. The passages on slavery, said Adams, were “worth diamonds.”

Alone at his desk at Poplar Forest, where more than a hundred slaves labored in the fields beyond his window, Jefferson had written one of the most impassioned denunciations of his life, decrying slavery as an extreme depravity:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions [Jefferson had written], the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . . if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another . . . or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. . . . Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Continuing, Jefferson offered as “a suspicion only” that blacks were inferior to whites in both mind and body. “Their inferiority,” he wrote, “is not the effect merely of their condition of life. . . . It is not their condition . . . but nature, which has produced the distinction.” Besides their differences in color and hair, he noted, black people secreted less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, “which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.” They were “more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than whites. . . . more ardent after their female,” but love seemed with them “to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient . . . their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

What John and Abigail Adams may have thought of this from the man who had professed to believe that all men are created equal is not known.

“The departure of your family has left me in the dumps,” Jefferson wrote to Adams from Paris. “My afternoons hang heavily on me.”

Crossing the Channel on board the Dover packet days later, Abigail offered to share the family’s cabin with a desperately seasick young man who, in gratitude for her kindness, gave her two songbirds of his own. “As they were quite accustomed to traveling, I brought them here in safety, for which they happily repay me by their melodious notes,” she would write to Jefferson in her first letter from London, knowing his love of music.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LONDON

An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!

~ London Public Advertiser

I

HIS MAJESTY THE KING of England and the new American minister to the Court of St. James’s were not without common interests and notable similarities. Like John Adams, King George III was devoted to farming. Seldom was His Majesty happier than when inspecting his farms, or talking crops and Merino sheep with his farm workers at Windsor. Like Adams, the King had a passion for books. The difference, as with the farming, was mainly a matter of scale. His private library was one of the treasures of Britain. During Adams’s earlier stay in London, the American painter Benjamin West had arranged a tour of the royal quarters at Buckingham House, and for Adams the high point had been seeing the King’s library. He wished he could stay a week, Adams had said.

George III was to turn forty-seven on June 4, which made him two years younger than Adams, and though taller, he had a comparable “inclination to corpulence.” Like Adams, he was an early riser, often out of bed before five. He, too, kept to a rigorous schedule and was an exuberant talker. Adams would later say George III was the greatest talker he had ever known. He was obstinate, affectionate, devoted to his wife and children, who numbered fifteen — again it was a matter of scale. He was deeply religious and, like Adams, sincerely patriotic.

Yet for all they had in common, the principal difference between the two was vast and paramount. One was the King of England, the other a Yankee farmer’s son — John Yankee — who spoke now for an upstart nation the survival of which was anything but assured. Indeed, in England as in Europe it was generally thought that the experiment in democracy across the water had little chance of success.

With his appointment to the Court, Adams felt he had attained the pinnacle of his career, and, with the retirement of Franklin, he was now America’s most experienced diplomat. But from Elbridge Gerry he had learned that the appointment had come only after rancorous dispute in Congress, and that the central issue, as Gerry reported with blunt candor, was Adams’s vanity, his “weak passion.”

Gerry’s letter had arrived in the last days at Auteuil. Deeply hurt, Adams had written an extraordinary reply, a dissertation on the subject of vanity set forth in his clearest, plainest hand, as if intended for posterity as much as for Gerry. There were all kinds of vanity, Adams wrote — of material possessions, of physical appearance, of ribbons and titles — but there was also that which came from years spent in the service of other men, without attention to oneself, in the face of exhausting toil and at risk of life. This latter kind was a vanity, a pride, he knew. He had experienced that “joy,” and for him to deny it or try to conceal it would be rank hypocrisy:

If at times I have betrayed in word or writing such a sentiment, I have only to say in excuse for it that I am not a hypocrite, nor a cunning man, nor at all times wise, and that although I may be more cautious for the future, I will never be so merely to obtain the reputation of a cunning politician, a character I neither admire nor esteem.

Apologizing for the length of the letter, Adams added finally in a small hand at the bottom of the page, “When a man is hurt he loves to talk of his wounds.” But after further thought — and possibly on the advice of Abigail — he put the letter aside. It was never sent.

The old charge of vanity, the character flaw that Adams so often chastised himself for, had been made again, and on the floor of Congress, just as he was to assume his most important role. So now more than ever he felt bound to do all in his power to serve honorably, succumbing neither to vanity nor political craftiness.

On arrival in London, he went promptly as instructed to confer with young Lord Carmarthen. Informed that his private audience with the King was arranged for June 1, he began preparing himself for what he knew would be an occasion of historic importance for his country and one of the great events of his life. Told that he must deliver a brief speech before the King, and that it be as complimentary as possible, he worked and reworked what he would say until he knew it by heart.

OF THE TIMES when Adams felt himself uncomfortably alone at center stage, there were few to compare to the afternoon in London, when at the end of a short ride through the rain with Lord Carmarthen in his carriage, they approached the arched gatehouse at St. James’s Palace. Doors opened for them, Adams was led up a flight of stairs and down a hall to a room crowded with ministers of state, lords, bishops, and courtiers, all eyes on him as he and Carmarthen stood waiting outside the King’s bedchamber, which was not where the King slept, but a formal reception room.

When the door opened, they proceeded, Adams, as instructed, making three bows, or “reverences,” one on entering, another halfway, a third before “the presence.”

“The United States of America have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty,” Adams began, nearly overcome by emotion.

“I felt more than I did or could express,” he later wrote. Before him, in the flesh, was the “tyrant” who, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, had plundered American seas and burned American towns, the monarch “unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” while to the King, he himself, Adams knew, could only be a despised traitor fit for the hangman’s noose.

“The appointment of a minister from the United States to Your Majesty’s Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America,” he continued.

I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow-citizens, in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem my self the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.

I beg your Majesty’s permission to add that although I have some time before been intrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself.

Brief as it was, he got through the speech only with difficulty, his voice at times quaking, and the King, too, was greatly moved. “The King listened to every word I said, with dignity but with apparent emotion,” Adams would report to Foreign Secretary John Jay. “Whether it was in the nature of the interview, or whether it was my visible agitation, for I felt more than I did or could express, that touched him, I cannot say. But he was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with.

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

He could not vouch that these were the exact words, Adams cautioned in his letter to Jay, for the King’s manner of speaking had been so odd and strained. (It was Adams’s first encounter with the famous stutter of George III.) “He hesitated some time between his periods, and between the members of the same period. He was indeed much affected.”

Smiling, the King changed the subject. “There is an opinion among some people that you are not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France,” he said.

Adams, embarrassed, replied, “I must avow to your Majesty, I have no attachment but to my own country.”

“An honest man will never have any other,” the King said approvingly, and with a bow signaled that the interview was ended.

I retreated [Adams wrote], stepping backwards, as is the etiquette, and, making my last reverence at the door of the chamber, I went my way. The Master of Ceremonies joined me . . . and accompanied me through the apartments down to my carriage, several stages of servants, gentlemen-porters, and under-porters roaring out like thunder as I went along, “Mr. Adams’ servants, Mr. Adams’ carriage.”

It had all gone superbly. Adams’s remarks had been graceful, dignified, appropriate, and, with the possible exception of his reference to “kindred blood,” altogether sincere. He had proven a diplomat of first rank, almost in spite of himself.

The King, too, had been the essence of courtesy and poise, as Adams later acknowledged. But any thought that the interview presaged an overall cordial welcome for the new minister was dashed soon enough by the London press, which dismissed the meeting as nothing more than a curious anecdote for future historians. “An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!” scoffed the Public Advertiser. The London Gazette expressed rank indignation at the very appointment of such a “character” as Adams to the Court. To the Daily Universal Register it had been a notably cool reception, while the Morning and Daily Advertiser described Adams as so pitifully embarrassed as to be tongue-tied.

Beneath the polite English surface lay burning animosity, surmised Abigail, who, like John, felt she was taking part in an elaborate stage play.

UNTIL A SUITABLE HOUSE could be found, the three Adamses were residing in the Bath Hotel in Piccadilly, where, after the quiet of Auteuil, the noise of the streets seemed horrendous. Abigail hated the thought of having to hire servants again and making the necessary domestic arrangements on her own. “I cannot bear to trouble Mr. Adams with anything of a domestic kind, who from morning until evening has sufficient to occupy all his time,” she wrote to her sister Mary. Still, she delighted in being once more where her own language was spoken. A performance of Handel’s Messiah at Westminster Abbey was “sublime beyond description,” she wrote to Jefferson. “I most sincerely wished for your presence, as your favorite passion would have received the highest gratification. I should have sometimes fancied myself amongst the higher order of beings.”

Three weeks after Adams’s private audience with the King came the Queen’s circle, or “drawing room.” This time all three of the family were to attend, as well as Colonel William Stephens Smith of New York, who had been appointed by Congress as secretary of the American legation and was also newly arrived in London. Smith had served with distinction in the Continental Army. At the battle of Long Island he had made the night withdrawal across the East River and later served on Washington’s staff. He was a graduate of the college at Princeton and, with his soldierly carriage and dark good looks, made a handsome addition to the group.

Days were consumed in preparation. She must look “elegant but plain as I could possibly appear with decency,” Abigail instructed her dressmaker. The dress she wore was of white silk trimmed with white crepe and lilac ribbon, over an enormous hoop. “A very dress cap with long lace lappets, two white plumes and a blonde lace handkerchief; this is my rigging,” she informed Mary in high spirits. “I should have mentioned two pearl pins in my hair, earrings and necklace of the same kind.” Nabby’s attire, too, was in white, only with a petticoat, “the most showy part,” and included a cap with three immense feathers.

Mother and daughter had seldom if ever looked so glorious. “Thus equipped we go in our own carriage,” wrote Abigail. “But I must quit my pen to put myself in order for the ceremony which begins at two o’clock.”

“Congratulate me, my dear sister, it is over,” she commenced the next installment, settling in to describe in detail and with wry humor all that had transpired, and leaving little doubt as to what she thought of such business overall, or whether she was capable of meeting the test, even if it meant four hours on her feet.

Of the English novelists, Abigail was especially fond of Samuel Richardson, whose popular works, Pamela and Clarissa, were tales told through the device of extended letters. Richardson, “master of the human heart,” had “done more towards embellishing the present age, and teaching them the talent of letter-writing, than any other modern I can name.” That her own outpouring of letters was influenced by Richardson, Abigail would have readily agreed. In Richardson’s hands events unfolded in letters written “to the moment,” as things happened. “My letters to you,” she would tell Mary, “are first thoughts, without correction.”

At the palace the Adamses were escorted to a large drawing room, where two hundred selected guests, including foreign diplomats and their wives, were arranged in a large circle. “The King enters the room and goes round to the right, the Queen and princesses to the left,” Abigail began her account for Mary.

Only think of the task the royal family have, to go round to every person and find small talk enough to speak to all of them. Though they very prudently speak in a whisper, so that only the person who stands next can hear what is said. . . . The Lord in Waiting presents you to the King and the Lady in Waiting does the same to Her Majesty. The King is a personable man, but my dear sister, he has a certain countenance which you and I have often remarked, a red face and white eyebrows. . . . When he came to me, Lord Onslow [Arthur Onslow, lord of the royal bedchamber] said, “Mrs. Adams,” upon which I drew off my right glove and His Majesty saluted my left cheek, then asked me if I had taken a walk today. I could have told His Majesty that I had been all morning preparing to wait upon him, but I replied, “No, Sire.” “Why don’t you love walking?” says he. I answered that I was rather indolent in that respect. He then bowed and passed on. It was more than two hours after this before it came my turn to be presented to the Queen. The circle was so large that the company were four hours standing. The Queen was evidently embarrassed when I was presented to her. I had disagreeable feelings, too. She, however, said, “Mrs. Adams, have you got your house? Pray how do you like the situation of it?” Whilst the Princess Royal [Charlotte Augusta Matilda, the oldest daughter of George III and Queen Charlotte] looked compassionate, and asked me if I was much fatigued, and observed that it was a very full drawing room. Her sister who came next, Princess Augusta, after having asked your niece if she was ever in England before, and her answering, “Yes,” inquired me how long ago, and supposed it was when she was very young. And all this is said with much affability and ease and freedom of old acquaintance.

The two princesses were quite pretty, “well shaped,” “heads full of diamonds.” Queen Charlotte, however, was neither pretty nor well shaped, and on the whole, Abigail told Mary, the ladies of the Court were “very plain, ill-shaped, and ugly, but don’t tell anybody that I say so.”

All things considered, the royal family was surprisingly affable, but certainly the life they led was not to be envied. Nor should anyone imagine that Abigail remained anything other than herself: “I could not help reflecting with myself during the ceremony, what a fool I do look like to be thus accoutered and stand for four hours together, only to be spoken to by ‘royalty.’”

THE SUITABLE HOUSE was found and, their furniture having arrived from France, the family moved to the quiet of Grosvenor Square in the West End. The tree-shaded square with its neat gravel walks covered five acres — exactly the size of the garden at Auteuil — and was framed by elegant town houses belonging to a number of London’s most eminent citizens, including Lord Carmarthen.

The house the Adamses rented — what became the first American legation in London — was No. 8, at the northeast corner. The front entrance opened onto a large hall. There was a dining room spacious enough for entertaining on the first floor and another ample room that Adams made his office for public business. Drawing room and library were on the floor above, bedrooms on the third floor. The kitchen was in the English basement, and a stable was to the rear. Once the servants were hired and in place “below stairs,” the staff consisted of Esther Field, now elevated to lady’s maid, a butler, a housemaid, a cook, a kitchen maid, two footmen (one of whom was John Briesler), and a coachman. This made a total of eight, as at Auteuil, and again Abigail would have preferred fewer who worked harder. Adams, after several weeks in residence, allowed that after so long in France he was “not so pleased” with English cookery.

But these were quibbles. The house suited perfectly. For Adams the location was ideal. Abigail had a small room of her own with a view of the square, a place to write and be alone with her thoughts, and to Nabby, it was all a decided improvement over Auteuil. “We shall live more as if we were part of the world,” she wrote to John Quincy.

That “world” — London of the 1780s — was a city grown all out of proportion, with nearly a million souls. Though a city still of “smoke and damp,” in Adams’s words, it was an appreciably cleaner, healthier, less violent place than it had been earlier in the century. It was both the political capital of Britain and the center of manufacturing, finance, and trade. The Thames, its foul, mud-colored main artery and portal to the world, carried more traffic than any river in Europe. One had only to stand on any London bridge, said a guidebook, to see fleets of ships “carrying away the manufactures of Britain and bringing back the produce of the whole earth,” a spectacle illustrating Adams’s chief concern as ambassador, since none was American.

The great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rose high above what seemed a forest of towers, turrets, and church spires, very unlike the skyline of Paris. A thousand hackneys plied the streets, and innumerable sedan chairs, each propelled by four strong men, usually Irish, who could shout and muscle their way through traffic faster than the hackneys. All was “tumult and hurry,” just as portrayed in English novels. Bond Street shops were thought superior to those of Paris. London coffeehouses, taverns, theaters, and concert halls surpassed anything of the kind elsewhere in the British empire, and for the young and aspiring, London remained the great magnet. Exhilaration of the kind voiced by young James Boswell of Edinburgh upon seeing the city for the first time in 1762 was felt still by thousands who kept coming from the hinterlands. In London was to be found the full tide of human existence, Boswell’s hero, Samuel Johnson, had said, declaring famously, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

The extravagance of the ruling class was notorious. At such exclusive clubs as Brooks or Boodles on St. James’s Street, fortunes were reputedly gambled away at the turn of a card, and, nightly, young men drank themselves into a stupor. This was not quite true, but the stories would never die, and the clothes, carriages, the sheer weight of gold braid on the livery of servants, left little doubt as to how vast was the wealth of the wealthiest. Yet, as the Adamses found, one could hardly go anywhere without encountering such spectacles of poverty and misery as to tear at the heart — people in tatters, hunger and suffering in their faces, as Abigail wrote. And who was to answer for the wretched victims “who are weekly sacrificed upon the gallows in numbers sufficient to astonish a civilized people?” Compounding her sorrow was the realization that every night and in all weather abandoned children by the hundreds slept beneath the bushes and trees of nearby Hyde Park.

The English historian and novelist Tobias Smollett had written of the inevitable distrust felt by every visitor to London, the underlying fear of being taken. For his part, Adams was determined to be neither stingy nor a fool. Approached by the representative of a group known as His Majesty’s Royal Bell Ringers, who asked that he share some of his “honorable bounty” and said two guineas were customary, Adams gave the man one guinea and said he would look into what was customary.

James Boswell could still be seen on occasion holding forth at the Globe Tavern on Fleet Street; the novelist Fanny Burney was soon to become a lady in waiting to Queen Charlotte; Richard Brinsley Sheridan was still part owner and manager of the famous Drury Lane Theater. But the giants of London’s literary world, authors to whom the Adamses were devoted — Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Samuel Johnson — were all dead and gone. And so, too, was Hogarth. The reigning artists were the rivals Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and the American Benjamin West, who did elegant portraits and historical scenes, rather than graphic renditions of the dark side of London life.

As much as anything, it was a city of entertainments, and this to Abigail was its saving grace. She joked about seeing a “learned pig, dancing dogs, and a little hare that beats a drum,” amusements fit for children; but she openly enjoyed them and with Nabby went more than once to Sadler’s Wells music hall, to delight in the “wonderful feats” of a troupe of tumblers.

The three Adamses went often to the theater, and to Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea, where, in company with fashionable London society, they strolled garden paths, sipped imperial tea, listened to music, or gazed at paintings within an immense gilded rotunda. Smollett had described Ranelagh as looking like “the enchanted palace of a genie . . . crowded with the great, the rich, the gay, the happy and the fair.” To Abigail, the “fair” on display were more stunning by far than any to be seen at Court.

Pleased to be in a Protestant country once more, the family attended church regularly, riding to the village of Hackney to hear the celebrated liberal preacher and champion of America, Richard Price, who was to become a valued friend. Once, for no reason other than intellectual curiosity, Adams rode to Windsor to call on the famous English astronomer Sir William Herschel, whose crowning achievement had been the discovery of the planet Uranus. Greeting Adams affably, Herschel was delighted to talk of his work, and Adams returned to Grosvenor Square elated. Nabby recorded that she had never known her father so gratified by a visit of any kind.

But neither the Reverend Price’s friendship nor William Herschel’s reception was representative. With the exception of tradesmen and a few officials of the government, the British overall were decidedly cool toward the new American minister and his family — perfunctory, but no more. And they did stare as Adams had worried they would, and not in a friendly way. “The English may call the French starers,” wrote Nabby to John Quincy, “but I never saw so little civility and politeness in a stare in France as I have here.” To Jefferson, with whom she had commenced regular correspondence, Abigail described the atmosphere as “not the pleasantest in the world.” In truth, the American minister and his family were being pointedly ignored.

Their “society” was confined almost entirely to other Americans living in London, or to such openly avowed friends of America as Richard Price. A few of the Americans were acquaintances from Boston, like the aspiring young architect Charles Bulfinch. Jefferson’s aide, William Short, came on errands from Paris, and the duplicitous Dr. Edward Bancroft showed up, affable as always. Whether Bancroft was serving still as a spy for the British government is not known, though in all likelihood he was.

Friendliest and most helpful were the American painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who introduced the family to their protégés, young Mather Brown of Boston and John Trumbull of Connecticut, a veteran of the Revolution. A rage for painters and painting had seized the household, Nabby reported excitedly to John Quincy, after Mather Brown set up his easel at Grosvenor Square to do portraits of all three of the Adamses. Her delight was extreme. (The young man was so striking-looking as to be commonly spoken of as “handsome young Brown,” as though that were his name.) Brown’s portrait of her was quite “tasty,” she thought. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons and feather, she sat with her hands in her lap, looking directly ahead, a lovely, poised, somewhat wistful young woman at the threshold of adulthood. Her father was charmed, it was “her exactly,” he said.

For his own portrait Adams posed at his writing desk, with quill and paper in hand, and Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia prominently displayed to one side. Adams believed his strongest attributes were, as he said, “candor, probity, and decision,” but these he failed to find in the face that looked back from the finished canvas, and he expressed disappointment. In Brown’s portrait, he appeared composed, leaner than Copley had portrayed him, and reflective. It was a fine study of an eighteenth-century gentleman of consequence, but nothing about the pose or the expression gave any suggestion of his characteristic alertness and vitality, or sense of humor — let alone “candor, probity, and decision.”

Brown’s rendering of Abigail was thought “a good likeness,” but the painting would ultimately disappear.

Meantime, West and Copley in particular opened doors for Adams in London as did no one else. “I did not ask favors or receive anything but cold formalities from ministers of state or ambassadors,” he would explain. “I found that our American painters had more influence at Court to produce all the favors I wanted.”

“Economies” remained a constant concern. The cost of living in London was higher even than in Paris, and to make matters worse, Congress had cut Adams’s salary by a fifth, from 2,500 to 2,000 pounds. A dinner guest from Scotland would describe a meal with the Adamses as “good” but “plain,” while Jefferson, visiting later, would be astonished by how “very plain” they lived. Writing to Mercy Warren after the first year in London, Adams would confide, “I am driven to my wits’ end for means.”

Lavish entertainment of the kind expected of an ambassador to the Court was out of the question. But then neither did the Adamses have any great desire for London society. She was too old-fashioned, Abigail said, for keeping company with “midnight gamblers and titled gamesters,” whose way of life she had seen something of and may have enjoyed more than she was willing to admit. At a party given by the Swedish ambassador, pressed to fill an empty place at one of the card tables, she won four games straight.

Worst of all was being patronized by the British. One of the few British women to call on Abigail since the move to Grosvenor Square, the wife of a member of Parliament remarked, in an effort to make conversation, “But surely you prefer this country to America?” British prejudice toward the French struck Abigail as ludicrous, now that she had lived in France, and made her realize how greatly she disliked prejudice in any form. But then unexpectedly, she was brought up short to find it in herself.

Having read and loved the plays of Shakespeare since childhood, she was thrilled by the chance to see an actual stage production. The great English tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who had come out of retirement the year before, appeared in Macbeth for the first time and was acclaimed a triumph. That Mrs. Siddons then appeared in Othello, making the transition from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona, was declared the mark of genius, and the Adamses were among the glittering audiences that filled the Drury Lane for both productions. To Abigail, Mrs. Siddons was brilliant but miscast as Lady Macbeth. It was in Othello, as Desdemona, that she was “interesting beyond any actress I had ever seen.”

Yet to read of Desdemona in the arms of a black man was, Abigail found, not the same as seeing it before her eyes. “Othello [played by John Kemble] was represented blacker than any African,” she wrote. Whether it was from “the prejudices of education” or from a “natural antipathy,” she knew not, “but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.” Othello was “manly, generous, noble” in character, so much that was admirable. Still she could not separate the color from the man. Filled with self-reproach, she affirmed that there was “something estimable” in everyone, “and the liberal mind regards not what nation or climate it springs up in, nor what color or complexion the man is of.”

Attacks on Adams in the press continued. He was called a nobody, ridiculed for having insufficient means to conduct himself in proper fashion. The Public Advertiser reminded its readers that all so-called American patriots were cowards, murderers, and traitors, and described Adams as looking “pretty fat and flourishing” considering “the low estate he is reduced to.” In letters to the editor he was decried as a “pharisee of liberty,” an “imposter.” Every hireling scribbler was set to vilify them, wrote Abigail, who in her time in London acquired a dislike of the press that would last a lifetime.

From Paris, where he was well supplied with London papers, Jefferson expressed astonishment at such slanders, as well as admiration for Adams’s fortitude. “Indeed a man must be of rock who can stand all this,” he wrote to Abigail. “To Mr. Adams it will be but one victory the more.” Then, in a rare revelation of inner feeling, a confession of weakness such as he seldom made to anyone, Jefferson told her:

It would have ill suited me. I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but [made] irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post. These are weaknesses from which reason and your counsels will preserve Mr. Adams.

Possibly, he postulated, it was “the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character unsusceptible of civilization.”

He had been taken up by the Paris “literati,” he reported happily, and acquired a larger, more expensive house for himself. Located at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and the Rue de Berri, the newly built Hôtel de Langeac had twenty-four rooms, an indoor toilet, and a “clever garden.” Not satisfied with it as it was, Jefferson proceeded to redesign and reconstruct much of the house to suit his fancy, thus adding further to the expense and despite grave concern over his own private finances.

To his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, who was managing his affairs at home, Jefferson wrote, “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.” But what could he do? He could not sell any more of his land, he wrote: he had sold too much as it was, and land was his only provision for his children. “Nor,” he added, “would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labors.”

Had Jefferson been as forthcoming with Adams as with his brother-in-law, Adams, the farmer’s son, would have had no argument with Jefferson’s faith in land as the only true wealth. But that Jefferson could so matter-of-factly consider selling off his slaves — not freeing them — and so readily transfer the burdens of his own extravagances to the backs of those he held in bondage, would have struck Adams as unconscionable, and would no doubt have been a serious test of his respect, if not affection, for the man. But such matters as these Jefferson never mentioned or discussed with Adams.

Meanwhile, he and Abigail exchanged shopping requests. Jefferson purchased French shoes and lace for her, and hunted down French dessert platters of a kind she had her heart set on for her dining table. For her part, Abigail was to pick out a dozen English shirts for him, a tablecloth and napkins sufficient for a seating of twenty. “But when writing to you,” he declared at the close of one letter, “I fancy myself at Auteuil and chatter on till the last page of my paper awakes me from my reverie.”

OCCASIONS AT COURT grew increasingly tedious and strained for Adams and his family. “Do you go out much for a walk,” the King kept inquiring of Abigail and Nabby at each and every reception, though the King, they thought, at least dissembled better than the Queen, whose countenance, said Nabby, was “as hard and unfeeling as if carved out of an oak knot.”

Particularly grating to Adams was the oft-spoken assumption among many of the British that sooner or later America would “of course” return to the British fold.

There is a strong propensity in this people [he wrote to Richard Henry Lee] to believe that America is weary of her independence; that she wishes to come back; that the states are in confusion; Congress has lost its authority; the governments of the states have no influence; no laws, no order, poverty, distress, ruin, and wretchedness; that no navigation acts we can make will be obeyed; no duties we lay on can be collected . . . that smuggling will defeat all our prohibitions, imposts and revenues. . . . This they love to believe.

There was indeed “a new order of things arisen in the world,” Adams emphasized to another correspondent at home, but British statesmen refused to comprehend this. Overall, the attitude toward America, he had come to realize, was hardly less hostile than it had been during the war. “They hate us,” he wrote to a friend. One Englishman had declared in his presence, “I had rather America had been annihilated, than that she should have carried her point.”

Much of this he and Abigail attributed to “venom” spread by American Loyalists in London. One vehement figure, Harrison Gray, once the treasurer of Massachusetts, said in a letter to the press that if it were left to him, he would have John Adams hanged.

Adams remained remarkably calm, nonetheless, conducting himself with model composure, and refusing to have any contact with Loyalists, with one exception. Taking the initiative, he hunted up his old friend Jonathan Sewall, whom he had not seen since the day they bid farewell at Casco Bay in what seemed a lifetime before. Adams rode to Sewall’s London lodgings, and as Sewall wrote afterward, it was a memorable reunion. “When Mr. Adams came in, he took my hand in both his, and with a hearty squeeze, accosted me in these words, ‘How do you do, my dear old friend!’ Our conversation was just such as might be expected at the meeting of two old sincere friends after a long separation.”

They talked for two hours. Neither had changed his views on the Revolution, nor his enmity for the side the other had chosen, though apparently nothing of this was said. Through the years of the war Sewall had taken heart from every American defeat, every report of dissension in the American army, and from the news of Benedict Arnold’s return to his proper allegiances. Like many Loyalists living in exile in England, Sewall had had a difficult time getting by. Exiled from their homeland, unappreciated in their adopted country, most Loyalists had a hard life.

Sewall had grown bitter and resentful. His hatred of New England patriots was worse than ever: “those sanctified hypocrites,” he called them, those “rebellious, ungenerous, ungrateful sons of bitches.” Suffering bouts of melancholia, he had largely withdrawn from life, seldom leaving his rooms. Noticeably aged, he lived only for his two sons, he confessed to Adams, and for their sakes planned to remove to Canada.

Adams urged Sewall and his wife, Esther Quincy, to come and take a family dinner at Grosvenor Square, and “in a way so friendly and hearty,” wrote Sewall, that he almost complied, but could not, would not.

“Adams has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to its finest feelings,” Sewall continued in his account of the reunion. “He is humane, generous and open, warm in his friendly attachments, though perhaps rather implacable to those he thinks his enemies.” Clearly, Adams did not regard Sewall as his enemy.

Each felt he knew the other as well as he knew any man, and privately Adams thought Sewall, in 1774, had tragically sacrificed principle for position, while Sewall, as he wrote, thought Adams’s own “unbounded ambition” was at fault; this and “an enthusiastic zeal for the imagined or real glory and welfare of his country” had overcome Adams’s better self, “his every good and virtuous social and friendly principle.” With some understandable resentment perhaps, Sewall concluded that Adams had gone as far as his ambition would take him, and further that he was ill suited for his present role.

He is not qualified by nature or education to shine in courts. His abilities are undoubtedly equal to the mechanical parts of his business as ambassador; but this is not enough. He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and small talk and flirt with the ladies; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier. There are thousands who, with a tenth of his understanding and without a spark of his honesty, would distance him infinitely in any court in Europe.

For all the warmth of the reunion, the expressions of brotherhood, the two hours were difficult. Adams came away deeply saddened. He would forever think of Sewall as one of the casualties of the war. According to Adams, when Sewall died in New Brunswick a number of years later, it was of a broken heart.

II

OF THE MULTIPLE ISSUES in contention between Britain and the new United States of America, and that John Adams had to address as minister, nearly all were holdovers from the Treaty of Paris, agreements made but not resolved, concerning debts, the treatment of Loyalists, compensation for slaves and property confiscated by the British, and the continued presence of British troops in America. All seemed insoluble. With its paper money nearly worthless, its economy in shambles, the United States was desperate for trade, yet without the power or prestige to make demands, or even, it seemed, to qualify for respect. British complacency was massive. The British saw no cause for haste in fulfilling any of the agreements with their poor, weak, former adversary. Nor were they the least inclined to lessen or jeopardize in any way their primacy at sea. British reluctance to be accommodating was quite as great as the American need for equitable resolutions. The British continued to exclude American vessels from both Canada and the West Indies, as well as from Britain. Further, no American products could be shipped anywhere within the British Empire except in British vessels.

To Adams the first priority must be to open British ports to American ships. But his efforts came to nothing, while at home, under the Articles of Confederation enacted in 1781, Congress was without power to regulate commerce. It was thus a sad and humiliating situation.

Adams went repeatedly to Whitehall to meet with Lord Carmarthen. He called at 10 Downing Street for an exchange with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the younger, who was all of twenty-four years old, who never stopped talking and impressed Adams not at all. Whatever Adams proposed, whatever inquiries he made to the Ministry, he received no answers. Long days and nights were spent reporting to Foreign Secretary Jay and composing memorials to Carmarthen. One particularly important memorial, calling for the withdrawal of British garrisons from the Northwest, as agreed in the Treaty of Paris, went unanswered for three months. When at last Carmarthen replied, it was to say only that this violation of the treaty was no different from the failure of Americans to pay the debts due British creditors.

Adams was hardly surprised. From his first meeting with Pitt, he had been convinced that Britain would never willingly give up the forts, any more than they would open the way to American trade with the West Indies.

When Adams talked of “commercial reciprocity,” the British thought him naïve. Like Jefferson, Adams believed in free trade in theory, but faced with British intransigence, he began losing hope of ever attaining such an agreement and cautioned Jefferson, “We must not, my friend, be the bubbles of our own liberal sentiments.” Presently, the picture no brighter, he told Jefferson that if the British Court refused to act a reasonable and equitable part, the United States should enter into “still closer and stronger connections with France.”

Commercial relations with France, however, were no more promising than with Britain. Jefferson, who was as dedicated to close ties with the French as ever Franklin had been, had thus far succeeded in attaining a single agreement, one whereby American whale oil would be admitted to French markets, and this for a limited time only. Since the end of the war, the French, for their part, had attained nothing like the flourishing American trade that Vergennes had imagined. The demand for French goods in America was low and not likely to improve. When in a meeting with Lord Carmarthen, Adams summoned all his old intensity to warn that the attitude of the British, if continued, would inevitably strengthen commercial ties between the United States and France, it had no effect whatever. He saw no hope, Adams reported to Jefferson.

Correspondence between Grosvenor Square and Paris remained steady and candid. In eight months’ time, from late May 1785, when Adams first assumed his post in London, until February 1786, he wrote twenty-eight letters to Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote a nearly equal number in return. Entirely trusting of one another, the two ministers exchanged news, opinions on issues, speculations on potential markets for American tobacco in Europe. One long letter from Adams was devoted to Portugal’s need for American timber, tar, turpentine, and salt fish, as well as the corresponding future market in America for Portuguese wine and olive oil. When Jefferson asked Adams to inquire about insuring the life of the sculptor Houdon, who was sailing for America to do the statue of Washington, discussion of the matter went back and forth in several letters before Adams had things arranged.

A small but noteworthy difference in the letters was that Jefferson regularly signed himself in conventional fashion, “Your obedient and humble servant,” or “Your friend and servant,” while Adams wrote, “Yours most affectionately,” or “With great and sincere esteem,” or “My dear friend adieu.”

Increasingly their time and correspondence was taken up by concerns over American shipping in the Mediterranean and demands for tribute made by the Barbary States of North Africa — Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. To insure their Mediterranean trade against attacks by the “Barbary pirates,” the nations of Europe customarily made huge cash payments. It was extortion and an accepted part of the cost of commerce in that part of the world. France paid $200,000 a year to Algiers alone; Britain paid even more, as much as $280,000 annually. In past years, before the war, when American trade in the Mediterranean flourished, American ships had come under the protection paid for by the British. But after 1776, such protection no longer pertained. Nor would France now foot the cost of guaranteeing respect for the American flag off the shores of North Africa. Tribute (bribes) would have to be paid and it would cost the United States dearly, Vergennes had advised Adams earlier; otherwise, there would be no peace with the Barbary States.

Just weeks after Adams arrived in London, in July 1785, two American ships were seized by Algerian pirates. Twenty-one American sailors were taken captive and forced into slave labor. News spread that Benjamin Franklin, en route from France to Philadelphia, had been captured by Barbary pirates, and though untrue, the story caused a sensation.

From Philadelphia, John Jay sent instructions to negotiate with the Barbary States. Funds were made available by Congress up to $80,000. But Adams and Jefferson had no money at hand. When Jefferson inquired whether Adams might borrow again from the Dutch, and reported that French officers in Paris were angry over not having been paid what they were due for services in the Revolution, Adams was helpless to do anything. It was not at all certain, he answered, that there would be funds sufficient even to cover “your subsistence and mine.”

On a chill evening in February came what Adams took to be an opening. At the end of a round of ambassadorial “visits,” he stopped to pay his respects to a new member of the diplomatic corps in London, His Excellency Abdrahaman, envoy of the Sultan of Tripoli. It was apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision on Adams’s part and resulted in an amazing, smoke-filled exchange that Adams, delighted by the humor of the scene, happily recounted for Jefferson.

Adams and his host settled into two large chairs before a great fire, while a pair of factotums stood by at attention. As His Excellency Abdrahaman spoke no English, they got by on scraps of Italian and French. His Excellency wished to know about American tobacco. That grown in Tripoli was far too strong, the American much better, he said, as two immensely long pipes were brought in, ceremoniously filled, and lighted.

It is long since I took a pipe, but [Adams wrote] . . . with great complacency, [I] placed the bowl upon the carpet . . . and smoked in awful pomp, reciprocating whiff for whiff . . . until coffee was brought in. His Excellency took a cup, after I had taken one, and alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco . . . and I followed the example with such exactness and solemnity that [one of] the two secretaries . . . cried out in ecstasy, “Monsieur, vous êtes un Turk!”

The conversation turned to business. America was a great nation, declared His Excellency, but unfortunately a state of war existed between America and Tripoli. Adams questioned how that could be, given there had been no injury, insult, or provocation on either side. The Barbary States were the sovereigns of the Mediterranean all the same, he was told, and without a treaty of peace there could be no peace between Tripoli and America. His Excellency was prepared to arrange such a treaty.

Two days later, at the stroke of noon, His Excellency appeared at Grosvenor Square, flanked by servants in orange robes and turbans. Time was critical, Adams was informed. The sooner peace was made between America and the Barbary States the better. Were a treaty delayed, it would be more difficult to make. A war between Christian and Christian was mild, prisoners were treated with humanity; but, warned His Excellency, a war between Muslim and Christian could be horrible.

The man was either a consummate politician or truly benevolent and wise — Adams could not tell which — and though apprehensive that the sums demanded would be exorbitant, he felt there was no time to lose. He dispatched Colonel Smith to Paris with a letter urging Jefferson to come as quickly as possible. His visit, Adams suggested, could be attributed to his desire to see England and pay his respects at Court.

JEFFERSON ARRIVED on March 11, 1786, to find London brightened by a light dusting of snow. He settled into rooms on Golden Square for a stay, as it turned out, of nearly two months, during which the ties of friendship with John and Abigail became stronger than ever.

Since they had last seen him, Jefferson had become noticeably more elegant in attire. He had taken to powdering his hair and acquired a French valet de chambre, Adrien Petit, who had earlier worked for the Adamses. He looked every inch the polished courtier and, with his height and slim good looks, drew attention everywhere they went.

At a meeting with Ambassador Abdrahaman, Adams and Jefferson were told that peace with Tripoli would cost 30,000 guineas for his employers, as His Excellency put it, plus 3,000 pounds sterling for himself. Payments were to be in cash on delivery of the treaty signed by his sovereign. The two Americans protested that the figure was too high. His Excellency assured them it was his lowest price and allowed that peace with all Barbary states might cost from 200,000 to 300,000 guineas. They could only refer the matter to Congress, Adams and Jefferson replied, and the meeting ended.

Compared to such demands, the sum Congress had authorized them to spend was, as they reported to John Jay, “but a drop in the bucket.”

Several meetings with Lord Carmarthen were no more encouraging with Jefferson present than they had been for Adams for months past. Jefferson felt insulted by Carmarthen’s seeming “aversion to have anything to do with us.”

When Adams presented Jefferson at the King’s levee at St. James’s on March 15, George III could not have been “more ungracious” in his “notice of Mr. Adams and myself,” according to an account later provided by Jefferson. Later still a grandson of Adams’s would take this to mean the King had turned his back on them, and the story would become rooted in history. But almost certainly no such incident occurred. Jefferson said nothing to the effect at the time. Nor did any of the numerous ministers, courtiers, members of Parliament, and other diplomats present who were ever watchful for the slightest sign of royal disapproval or anything the least out of the ordinary. Nothing untoward was reported or hinted at in the newspapers, and importantly, nothing was ever said or written by John Adams, who, of all men, would have been enraged by any disrespect shown a minister of the United States being presented under his sponsorship.

Whatever the truth of the situation, Jefferson’s sensitivity to British hauteur was real, his dislike of the British sufficient to last a lifetime. “They require to be kicked into common good manners,” he told Colonel Smith. The fact that his debts were largely to English creditors may well have had something to do with such feelings.

Of London, he thought only the shops worthy of attention, and devoted ample time to them, spending lavishly on shoes, boots, a flint-lock rifle, a reading lamp, plated harness and stirrups, and a set of chessmen. His major, most costly purchases were British-made scientific instruments, which, he conceded, were the finest available. Possibly at the urging of Abigail, he also paid a shilling to see the “learned pig.”

As at Auteuil, Jefferson was a frequent presence at the house on Grosvenor Square, delighting all with his sparkling conversation and fund of information. Abigail gave several dinners in his honor. John arranged a tour of the King’s library. There were repeated evenings at the theater — Jefferson would see three performances by Mrs. Siddons in three different roles — and a late night at the French ambassador’s ball, in the splendorous Hôtel de France on Hyde Park, an occasion marked by the presence of many “very brilliant ladies of the first distinction,” as Abigail noted.

Appraising the figure she herself cut in such gatherings, Abigail was good-naturedly realistic. She had grown as large as her two sisters combined, she claimed to Mary Cranch, and John was keeping pace with her. Pity the poor horse that would ever have to carry both of them, she wrote.

Recording in his diary the names of the few specimens of the British aristocracy who “ventured” conversation with him at the French ambassador’s ball, Adams noted, “This people cannot look me in the face: there is a conscious guilt and shame in their countenances when they look at me. They feel they have behaved ill, and that I am sensible of it.”

When, after weeks of waiting, there was still no more word from Lord Carmarthen, and the ambassador from Portugal, the one European minister to have shown any interest in opening trade negotiations, was reported too ill to see them, Adams and Jefferson decided to take a break from London and go off on a tour of English gardens, what Abigail called “their little journey into the country.”

She and John had not been apart since they were reunited in London the summer of 1784, not for a year and eight months, which, she noted, was the longest time they had had together since they were married. Time away in Jefferson’s company would, she was sure, do John great good.

THEY SET OFF on April 4, traveling by hired coach, sharing expenses, and accompanied by their two servants, John Briesler and Adrien Petit. They moved rapidly and covered a great deal of ground in just six days, relying on Jefferson’s copy of Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately as their guide, the last word on English gardens.

Their direction was west along the Thames where the English countryside was in its April glory. Mornings were often cool, but with hazy sunshine breaking through by midday. Willow trees were in leaf. There were cherry blossoms and an abundance of daffodils in bloom, and the more miles that passed, the more the landscape opened up, with broad green hillsides covered with sheep and scampering newborn lambs by the hundreds.

In the long, eventful lives of Adams and Jefferson, it was an excursion of no importance to history. But it was the one and only time they ever spent off on their own together, free of work and responsibility, and at heart both were countrymen, farmers, with an avid interest in soils, tillage, climate, and “improvements.” “There is not a sprig of grass that grows uninteresting to me,” Jefferson was fond of saying, and Adams, in the spirit of eighteenth-century hyperbole, might well have agreed. Each kept occasional notes on the journey, and while Jefferson showed more interest in “practical things,” where Adams was inclined to remark on the historical or literary associations of the places they saw, this does not necessarily preclude a comparable interest in most everything encountered. Adams was quite as interested in proper land management as Jefferson; Jefferson possibly cared as much for Shakespeare as did Adams.

The first stops were two that Jefferson had already made a few days earlier on his own, but was happy to repeat. Both — Alexander Pope’s garden beside the Thames at Twickenham and Woburn Farm — were prime examples of the “modern,” or “new-style” English landscape gardening that was so radically different from the highly symmetrical gardens made fashionable by the French, and particularly by the work of André LaNôtre at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV. In the new style, there was no “regularity.” Instead, a seemingly natural arrangement of open grasslands, winding paths, clumps and groves of trees, in combination with an abundant presence of water in the form of serpentine lakes, streams, and artificial cataracts, was intended to evoke the look of an idealized English landscape. It was all to appear to be the work of the hand of God, but was in fact the doing of the “master-hand” of the landscape gardener or architect. Everything was chosen for effect. The “disposition” of trees was of particular importance, and among the trees and lakes were nearly always arranged a variety of classic temples or pavilions, a faux ruin or grotto, all very romantic in spirit, their size and number depending on the wealth or fancy of the client.

Such gardens could extend over hundreds of acres. They were not flower gardens, but private parks. Architects, gardeners, and clients thought of themselves as working like landscape painters, only on a vast scale and with scores of laborers at their bidding. Whole valleys were carved out, hilltops removed, streams rerouted, thousands of trees planted to achieve the desired look. The colossal expense seemed of no concern.

“Gardening, in the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England, is entitled to a place of considerable rank among the liberal arts,” declared the ultimate authority, Thomas Whately. While Adams noted Woburn’s beauty, Jefferson concentrated on the distribution of labor. “Four people to the farm, four to the pleasure garden, four to the kitchen garden,” he recorded.

Another day, April 6, they toured the ultimate expression of the new style. Stowe, a true eighteenth-century marvel, was the largest, grandest, most famous landscape garden in England. It had been praised in poetry by Pope, acclaimed by Rousseau, and was the work, in part, of the most famous English landscape gardener of the day, Lancelot Brown, “Capability” Brown, as he was known, for his habit of extolling to clients the “capabilities” of their property. But it was also the design of architect William Kent and of its late owner and guiding spirit, Richard Grenville-Temple, Lord Cobham.

Set in a rolling sweep of land that lent a feeling of even grander scale, the estate comprised approximately 400 acres and was approached through a tremendous Corinthian arch. In addition to a columned manor house commanding one ridge, there were all the requisite lakes and waterfalls, bridges and architectural niceties — a Temple of Victory, Temple of Venus, Temple of Bacchus, a faux Gothic temple — everything romantic in spirit. For a panoramic view, said to take in five counties, Adams climbed a circular stairway to the top of a 115-foot observation tower built in His Lordship’s memory. “I mounted . . . with pleasure,” Adams wrote, “as Lord Cobham’s name was familiar to me from Pope’s works.”

Whether Jefferson made the climb is not clear, as he recorded nothing of it, but then neither did he say a word in his notes about a beautiful bridge done in the manner of his adored Palladio, or the Temple of Victory, the honey-colored showpiece of the garden, which was very like the Maison Carrée, the Roman temple at Nîmes, which Jefferson was later to see on his travels in southern France and take as the model for his design for the capitol of Virginia. What he did record was that thirty-three men and boys were required to tend the grounds, and that he considered the huge Corinthian arch useless, inasmuch as it had “no pretension to direction.”

Adams found the total effect greatly to his liking, but thought temples to Venus and Bacchus unnecessary, as mankind had “no need of artificial incitements to such amusements.”

If Stowe was the ultimate in fashionable private splendor, the Shakespeare house in Stratford-on-Avon, the next stop, was as humble as could be imagined. Told that an old wooden chair in a corner by the chimney was where the bard himself had sat, the two American tourists cut off souvenir chips, this “according to the custom,” as Adams was quick to note. But he was distressed by how little evidence remained of Shakespeare, either of the man or the miracle of his mind. “There is nothing preserved of this great genius . . . which might inform us what education, what company, what accident turned his mind to letters and drama,” Adams lamented. Jefferson noted only that he paid a shilling to see the house and Shakespeare’s grave. But years afterward Adams would claim that Jefferson, on arriving at Stratford-on-Avon, had actually gotten down on his knees and kissed the ground.

At Edgehill, scene of the first great battle of the English civil war, and later at Worcester, the setting of Cromwell’s final victory over Charles II in the year 1651, it was Adams’s turn to be deeply moved. This was history he knew in detail. Here were “scenes where freemen had fought for their rights,” he wrote in his diary. Finding some of the local residents sadly ignorant of the subject, he gave them an impromptu lecture.

“And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?” he asked. “Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground, . . . All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.”

To Adams it appeared his exhortation had “animated” and “pleased” his audience. What the expression may have been on Jefferson’s face, there is no telling. Nor regrettably did either man write of what passed between them along the way — what they talked about mile after mile in their rocking coach, or in the evenings as they dined together, what questions were asked, what observations made on life, politics, the law, the books they loved, their families, the future of their country. It was the closest time they ever spent in each other’s company and neither recorded a word about the other. But then neither wrote very much about anything, as if they had both declared a holiday from “pen work,” in Jefferson’s expression.

Birmingham, where they stopped at the Swann Inn, was the most distant point of the excursion, and the famous nearby farm known as Leasowes, once the home of the poet William Shenstone, was for Jefferson the most anticipated stop of the entire journey. Jefferson had long admired Shenstone’s pastoral verse, but of greater importance had been the influence of Shenstone’s own highly romantic description of Leasowes on Jefferson’s plans for Monticello.

Leasowes, one of the earliest of all the new-style gardens, was considerably smaller than the others, set in gentle farmland, with a view of low hills to the south and west. But Leasowes had fallen into neglect since the poet’s death, and Jefferson was greatly saddened and disappointed. It was nothing like what he had imagined. “This is not even an ornamental farm,” he wrote. “It is only a grazing farm with a path around it, here and there a seat of a board, rarely anything better. Architecture has contributed nothing.” Let Leasowes be an object lesson, he concluded. Shenstone had ruined himself financially with all he had spent on the farm, and so “died of the heartaches which debt occasioned him.” It was a lesson that Jefferson, alas, would not heed.

To Adams, on the other hand, Leasowes was preferable to anything they had seen. The small scale of the place was more to a New Englander’s liking. It was “the simplest and plainest,” the “most rural of all,” and thus particularly appealing, Adams thought. “I saw no spot so small that exhibited such a variety of beauties.”

From Leasowes the travelers turned and headed south again, in the direction of London, stopping in the course of the next few days at Hagley Hall, a Palladian great house on a hill with a sweeping view somewhat like that of Monticello, Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, and then nearby Oxford, where they visited the university’s botanical garden beside the river Cherwell. By nightfall, April 9, they were back in London.

According to Adams’s count, they had toured twenty country places in all and he thought them high entertainment. Later, after a visit with Abigail to Pains Hill on the outskirts of London, at Surrey, where an immense ornamental park with lakes, grottoes, hermit’s hut, even a facsimile tent of an Arab prince, had been created from a “heap of sand,” Adams declared it “the most striking piece of art” of any. Yet he hoped it would be a long time before such gardens ever became the fashion at home, where nature had done greater things on a nobler scale. How anyone could improve on Penn’s Hill, Adams could not imagine.

• • •

IN LONDON, Jefferson resumed his shopping spree, buying, among other things, another microscope and a pair of satin “Florentine” breeches. With the three Adamses and Colonel Smith, he toured the British Museum and, at Adams’s urging, sat for Mather Brown.

Commissioned by Adams, it was Jefferson’s first portrait and quite unlike anything done of him thereafter. A bust by Houdon, for example, sculpted in Paris a few years later, would be Jefferson in the heroic mode, chin lifted, eyes on a distant horizon — Jefferson as frontiersman. In this by Brown he might have been the perfect European dandy, magnificent in ruffled shirt, hair dressed and powdered. He had a wistful, almost mournful expression and there were dark circles under his eyes. It was Jefferson as courtier and romantic, and while some who saw it thought it a poor likeness, the Adamses appear to have been quite pleased.

As requested, Brown would do a copy of the Jefferson portrait for them, as well as a copy of the Adams portrait for Jefferson. The original painting of Jefferson would ultimately disappear. The copy, which was hung prominently in the house on Grosvenor Square, would remain a proud possession in the Adams family for generations.

On April 26, he and Adams having accomplished nothing in the way of diplomatic progress, and with no reason to expect a change in their prospects, Jefferson said his goodbyes and departed for Paris. Officially his mission had been “fruitless.” But of Adams, Jefferson had more to say, writing from Paris to his friend Madison as he had before on the subject. The difference this time was that Jefferson seemed to go out of his way, almost apologetically, to explain how Adams, with all his faults, had won his heart.

You know the opinion I formerly entertained of my friend Mr. Adams. Yourself and the governor were the first who shook that opinion. I afterwards saw proofs which convicted him of a degree of vanity and of blindness to it, of which no germ had appeared in Congress. A 7-months’ intimacy with him here and as many weeks in London have given me opportunities of studying him closely. He is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being which made him: he is profound in his views, and accurate in his judgment except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.

III

FROM THE TIME of his arrival in their lives the previous year, Colonel William Smith had impressed John and Abigail as entirely deserving of his reputation as an admirable young man of great promise. “He possesses a high sense of honor and as independent a spirit as any man I ever knew, and . . . we have every reason to believe that his character will bear the strictest scrutiny,” Abigail had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “His character is not only fair and unblemished,” she informed John Quincy, “[but] at age 21 he commanded a regiment, and through the whole war conducted with prudence and bravery and intrepidity, when armed against the foe.” She wished John Quincy to know this, because Colonel Smith was “like to become your brother.”

William Smith’s interest in Nabby, and hers in him, had been apparent for months, but only after Nabby had formally broken her engagement to Royall Tyler would Abigail permit any mention of the new “connection.”

The contrast between the character of Smith and Tyler was clear enough, she stressed to John Quincy, in an effort to explain his sister’s decision. Besides, had not Shakespeare observed that “a heart agitated with the remains of a former passion is most susceptible to a new one”?

Having concluded from day-to-day observation that his young secretary possessed all the qualifications necessary to make a “faithful and agreeable” companion for Nabby, John Adams left it to her to determine her own future. But Abigail spent hours with Nabby in close conversation. “I begged her to satisfy herself that she had no prepossession left in her mind and heart, and she answered me she never could be more determined!”

Abigail, however, as she confided to her sister Mary, had begun to find life increasingly empty and pointless. Her health was uneven; she was bothered by recurring rheumatism and severe headaches. She was tired of London and longed for home. When Mary apologized for filling her letters with too many Braintree “particulars,” Abigail replied, “Everything however trivial on that side of water interests me. Nothing here.” “Can there be any pleasure in mixing company where you care for no one and nobody cares for you?”

She dwelled increasingly on the fate of their brother, William, whose drinking and errant ways had been a secret worry for years and who by now, after abandoning his wife and children, had more or less disappeared. In correspondence among themselves the three sisters never referred to William by name, only as “this unhappy connection,” the “poor man,” or “our dearest relative.”

Who was looking after him, Abigail wondered. What had been different about his childhood in the Weymouth parsonage? What might be in store for her own children?

“I cannot, however, upon a retrospect of his education, refrain from thinking that some very capital mistakes were very indesignedly made,” she would tell Mary. “I say this to you who will not consider it as any reflection upon the memory of our dear parents, but only as a proof how much of the best and worthiest may err, and as some mitigation for the conduct of our deceased relatives.”

IN THE FINAL DAYS of May 1786, John Adams was called on to hurry to Amsterdam once again, to secure still another desperately needed Dutch loan for the United States.

On June 12, Adams having returned, Nabby and Colonel William Smith were married in the house on Grosvenor Square, in a small ceremony with only a few friends present — the Copleys, among others. In another few weeks bride and groom moved to a new address on Wimpole Street.

“The young couple appear to be very happy,” was all that Adams had to say, in a letter to James Warren, while to Mary Cranch, Abigail described the ceremony as too solemn and important an event for her not to have experienced “an agitation” equal to what she had felt at her own wedding. The night before the wedding, she further confided, she had dreamed of Royall Tyler, and strangely found herself feeling sorry for him.

Abigail and Nabby had been faithful companions for years, through all of John’s endless absences. They had been virtually inseparable and the change now was difficult for Abigail. She had made the young couple promise to dine at Grosvenor Square every day; still, she was as “lonesome” as she had ever been. To boost her spirits she imagined a marriage between John Quincy and Patsy Jefferson, and to Jefferson playfully proposed the idea. While it was true, she wrote, that in losing her daughter she had gained a son, she already had three sons. What she needed was another daughter. “Suppose you give me Miss Jefferson and in some [fu]ture day take a son in lieu of her. I am for strengthening [the] federal union.”

At home in Massachusetts, meantime, John Quincy had been denied admission to Harvard until he completed several months of tutoring in Greek with the Reverend Shaw at Haverhill. But then in March 1786, John Quincy, too, had become a “son of Harvard.”

He must not study too hard, Adams cautioned kindly. “The smell of the midnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraud yourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not now be in a hurry.” What was essential, Adams advised, was an inquisitive mind. John Quincy must get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. “Ask them about their tutors; manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables. . . . Ask them about the late war . . . or fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.”

The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent,

a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

That his own exceptional, eldest son, with the advantages he had, could one day play a part in bringing about such a “memorable change,” he had every confidence.

When Elizabeth Shaw wrote that as agreeable as John Quincy might be in company, he could be in private conversation “a little too decisive and tenacious” in his opinions, Abigail responded with a strong letter of motherly advice to the young man. “Watchfulness over yourself” was called for, lest his knowledge make him arrogant.

If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book but it has been supplied to you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have been a blockhead.

By now Charles, too, had entered Harvard, at age fifteen. More outgoing than his older brother, Charles was thought to be too easily distracted from his studies. Where John Quincy required a warning against the perils of the midnight lamp, Charles needed reminding that such a lamp existed.

Remembering so much that went on in his own days at Harvard other than classwork and studies, Adams wrote affectionately to his second son, “You have in your nature a sociability, Charles, which is amiable, but may mislead you. A scholar is always made alone. Studies can only be pursued to good purpose by yourself. Don’t let your companions then, nor your amusements, take up too much of your time.”

ADAMS WAS HIMSELF spending increasing amounts of time alone, working intently and seldom to good purpose, he felt. The impasse over the withdrawal of British troops from the American Northwest and the payment of American debts to British creditors continued. Lord Carmarthen readily agreed that by the Paris Treaty His Majesty’s armed forces were to depart from the United States “with all convenient speed,” but, as he liked also to point out, the same treaty stipulated that creditors on either side “shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value in sterling of all bona fide debts.” “I flatter myself, however, sir,” Carmarthen told Adams, “that whenever America shall manifest a real determination to fulfill her part of the treaty, Great Britain will not hesitate to prove her sincerity.”

For Adams, who had argued emphatically at Paris for full repayment of American debt and had never deviated from that view, American reluctance, or inability, to make good on its obligations was a disgrace and politically a great mistake. When word reached London that some states, including Massachusetts, had passed laws against compliance with the treaty, Adams was appalled. Any such suspension of British debts, however colored or disguised, was a direct breach of the treaty, he wrote in a fury to Cotton Tufts, who had become a member of the Massachusetts Senate. “Our countrymen have too long trifled with public and private credit.” He would make good on all outstanding debt to British creditors, and if the British posts in America were not then immediately evacuated, he would declare war.

But he had written this when “wroth and fretted.” War was the last thing he wanted. Any war now would be calamitous for the United States and must be avoided at almost any cost, he wrote another day.

What was implicit in all “oratorical utterance” from Whitehall, Adams knew, was that to the British there was as yet no proper American government and so it would be pointless to undertake serious transactions until such existed. To Adams it was particularly offensive that the British thus far had not thought it necessary even to appoint an ambassador to the United States.

In an exchange of letters between London and Paris, meantime, he and Jefferson considered the question of whether to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates or wage war with them. Jefferson recommended war as more honorable and proposed that an American fleet be built. Adams agreed in principle and promised, “I will go all lengths with you in promoting a navy.” Like Jefferson, he detested the prospect of paying bribes. But given that there was no American navy at present and that it would be years most likely before Congress voted such a resolution, Adams thought it sensible to pay the money. “We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever,” he told Jefferson, who willingly deferred to Adams’s judgment. Later in January 1787, they would sign a pact with Morocco, whereby the United States, like France and Britain, agreed to pay for protection.

• • •

EAGER FOR A BREAK from the doldrums of summer in London, with Parliament in recess and “everyone fled from the city,” the Adamses decided to see some of the English countryside. With Nabby and Colonel Smith, they set off for a weeklong excursion to Essex. Adams had expressed interest in visiting the village of Braintree, expecting they might find some connection with their own Braintree, but poking about in the village graveyard, he found no familiar names and the village itself was sadly disappointing, poor and “miserable.” Still, the trip was a welcome departure — and for Abigail especially — and even more welcome was the wholly unexpected journey that followed immediately afterward.

Adams was needed at The Hague to exchange ratification of the treaty with Prussia, the one European trade agreement that he and Jefferson, for all their efforts, had succeeded in accomplishing. The treaty, signed in July 1785, had been ratified only that May of 1786, so late that unless it were signed within a matter of weeks, it would expire. Since Prussia had no minister in London or Paris, but only at The Hague, Adams was needed there without delay or the treaty would come to nothing. Jefferson excused himself from attending, saying it was on too short notice.

“As this presents a good opportunity for seeing the country [Holland],” Abigail wrote happily, “I shall accompany him.” In fact, they were both extremely pleased to be going. Little could have delighted Adams more than the chance to show her the country that meant so much to him, where success had been his, where, as they both appreciated, he had helped change the course of history, and where he was still the accredited American minister, Congress having never bothered to replace him.

They were gone five weeks, stopping first at The Hague for the signing ceremony on August 8, then moving on at a pace sufficient to see just about everything — Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht — with Abigail supplying colorful comment in her letters. “Not a hill to be seen,” she wrote, incredulous. The people were “well-fed, well-clothed, contented,” the women notable for their beautiful complexions. (“Rouge is confined to the stage here,” she reported approvingly to Nabby.) She saw no poverty such as in Paris and London. The cities were amazingly clean and orderly. “It is very unusual to see a single square of glass broken, or a brick out of place.” Leyden was the cleanest city she had ever seen in her life; and if Braintree in Essex had failed to evoke feelings of ancestral ties, the church of the Pilgrims at Leyden more than made up for it. In its stillness, she felt the same wave of emotion that had moved Adams to tears on his first visit. At the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, by contrast, the “buzz” of business being transacted reminded her of nothing so much as “the swarming of bees.”

The reception they were given by the Dutch was warm and heartening, “striking proof, not only of their personal esteem,” Abigail wrote, “but of the ideas they entertain with respect to the Revolution which gave birth to their connection with us. . . . The spirit of liberty appears to be all alive with them.”

At Utrecht they witnessed the swearing in of new magistrates of the city, as a result of major constitutional reforms enacted by the Patriot party. It was a ceremony conducted, as Adams wrote, “in the presence of the whole city,” and it moved him profoundly. To John Jay he would claim it to be the first bearing of fruit of the American Revolution in Europe.

THE AUTUMN OF 1786 produced no improvement in relations with the British, whose icy civility Adams found all the more galling after the respect and affection he had been shown in Holland. Yet his spirits were high, his health excellent. Besides, he and Abigail knew by then that they were to become grandparents. Nabby was pregnant, her baby expected in April. Not even the news from home of an uprising of aggrieved farmers in western Massachusetts seemed to distress Adams.

Shays’s Rebellion, as it would come to be known, after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army, was in protest of rising taxes and court action against indebted farmers who, in many cases, were losing their land in the midst of hard times. The insurgents had prevented the sitting of the state supreme court at Springfield. But thus far there had been no violence.

“Don’t be alarmed at the late turbulence in New England,” Adams counseled Jefferson. “The Massachusetts Assembly had, in its zeal to get the better of their debt, laid on a tax rather heavier than the people could bear.” He was confident all would be well and concluded prophetically, “This commotion will terminate in additional strength to the government.”

Inexplicably, correspondence from Jefferson had dwindled to a standstill. On returning from Holland, Abigail had found but one letter waiting, this only to say he did not understand her proposed trade of her son for his daughter, and to relate again his delight in the French. (“They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.”) After that there had been no further word. A letter to Adams concerning whale oil, sent in late September, was written and signed for Jefferson by his aide, William Short. Then at the end of October came a brief note to Adams, awkwardly written by Jefferson with his left hand.

“An unfortunate dislocation of my right wrist has for three months deprived me of the honor of writing to you,” he at last explained to Abigail before Christmas. But his reason for writing was to tell her that his eight-year-old daughter Polly was on her way to London by ship from Virginia, in the care of a nurse, and that he had taken the liberty to tell those who arranged the voyage “that you will be so good as to take her under your wing till I can have notice to send for her.”

What Jefferson said nothing of was that he had been spending as much time as possible through August and September with a beautiful young woman named Maria Cosway. Born of English parents but raised in Italy, she was the wife of a wealthy, dandified English artist, Richard Cosway, and was herself an artist. She was fluent in several languages, musical, slim and delicate, with sparkling blue eyes and a mountain of fashionably dressed blond hair that made her several inches taller than her tiny, almost dwarf-like husband. The Cosways were a bright fixture in London society, and Abigail and Nabby are known to have met her on at least one social occasion.

Maria was twenty-six years old, Jefferson forty-three, and the attraction of each to the other was instantaneous. If not in love, Jefferson was wholly infatuated. Wishing only to be with her, he canceled every social engagement he could. As he would tell her, “Lying messengers were dispatched into every corner of the city with apologies.” He bought tickets to the theater, the opera; they rode through Paris in Jefferson’s carriage behind a pair of fine new horses, and strolled the gardens at Marley, near Versailles. Sometimes, Richard Cosway was with them, more often they were alone.

Whether it was on a walk in the Cours-la-Reine, as commonly said later, that Jefferson dislocated his wrist, attempting to impress her by vaulting a fence, is not certain. But the accident put an end to their outings, and the pain of the injury was excruciating. For a month Jefferson was virtually confined to his house, and by early October the Cosways had returned to London.

Struggling to write with his left hand, he labored over a carefully composed letter to her in which he described a debate between “Head” and “Heart,” a conventional literary device of the day, and by the end of twelve pages it appeared “Head” was the winner. In any case, when Maria Cosway returned to Paris the next summer, Jefferson showed noticeably less interest in her.

To his friends the Adamses, he said nothing of any of this and possibly they never knew. But then, as the news of Shays’s Rebellion grew more alarming, an exchange of views on the subject set Abigail and Jefferson sharply in opposition for the first time.

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed from reports of the “tumults” in Massachusetts that the new nation was already breaking apart. To the British, accounts in the newspapers only confirmed what they had been predicting all along, while to many Americans who little understood the suffering of the Massachusetts farmers, and this included Abigail, the situation was an outrage, intolerable. “For what have we been contending against the tyranny of Britain,” she asked, writing to Mary Cranch, “to become the sacrifice of a lawless banditti? . . . Will my countrymen justify the maxim of tyrants, that mankind is not made for freedom?”

With the arrival of the new year, and still more sensational reports of mob violence in Massachusetts, she let Jefferson know her opinion in no uncertain terms. “Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations.” She had no patience with mobs crying out for paper money or the equal distribution of wealth. She saw only the need for “the wisest and most vigorous measures to quell and suppress” the revolt.

It was almost as an afterthought that she told him she would be pleased to look after his daughter as requested.

When Jefferson wrote to say he hoped the captured rebels would be pardoned, Abigail was appalled. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive,” he lectured. “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

How sincerely Jefferson meant what he had written, how much was hyperbole among friends, is difficult to gauge. He had a fondness for the imagery of storms. To Maria Cosway he had described how “sublime” it was high on his mountaintop at Monticello “to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!” Moreover, in the same letter to Abigail, he offered the thought that the only hope for change among the ever lighthearted French was not rebellion but to pray for good kings.

Abigail took his wish for “a little rebellion now and then” quite to heart and was not pleased. When Jefferson left Paris at the end of February for a long, leisurely tour of southern France and Italy, ostensibly to see if the mineral springs at Aix-en-Provence might help his still-painful wrist, John Adams kept on writing to him. But Abigail did not. It was the end of June before she could bring herself to write again, and then only to tell Jefferson his daughter had safely arrived.

Interestingly, only months afterward, Jefferson would write a letter to her new son-in-law, Colonel Smith, to say he hated the thought of America not having a rebellion such as had occurred in Massachusetts, every twenty years or so. What were a few lives lost? Jefferson asked. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is a natural manure.” But of this letter, Abigail apparently knew nothing.

ON APRIL 2, 1787, Nabby gave birth to “a fine boy,” William Steuben Smith, who was declared to have “the brow of his grandpapa.” “I feel already as fond of him as if he was my own son, nay, I can hardly persuade myself that he is not,” Abigail wrote to Lucy Cranch.

On June 26, life picked up still more with the arrival of little Polly Jefferson. She was escorted by the captain of the ship she had sailed on, Andrew Ramsay, to whom she had become so attached that his parting was extremely upsetting for her.

“I show her your picture [the Mather Brown portrait],” Abigail wrote to Jefferson. “She says she cannot know it, how should she when she should not know you.”

The one surprise, she informed Jefferson, was the nurse who had accompanied the child. “The old nurse who you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come. Instead she has a girl about 15 or 16 with her, the sister of the servant you have with you,” she said, tactfully avoiding the word slave.

For Abigail and John Adams it was their one encounter with Sally Hemings, who was actually fourteen, younger even than Abigail supposed, and who was to figure years afterward in a sensational scandal surrounding Jefferson’s private life. She was also the only slave known ever to have lived under the Adamses’ roof.

To Abigail, Sally seemed nearly as much a child as Polly. In the opinion of Captain Ramsay, as Abigail also related, she would be of “so little service” that he recommended taking her back to Virginia. Abigail told Jefferson he would have to be the judge. “She seems fond of the child and appears good natured.” On further acquaintance, however, Abigail concluded that the nurse might need more care than the child and that without supervision would be incapable of her responsibilities.

At first, Polly seemed a handful for anyone. Her weeks on board ship had made her “as rough as a little sailor.” Abigail warmed to her at once. She took her shopping for new clothes and books, kept her at her side as if she were her own. She was a “lovely child,” the favorite of everyone in the household, Abigail wrote. Adams, as he himself said, was entirely won over.

From Polly they learned her pitiful story. Having no memory of her mother, she had been living with an aunt, Jefferson’s sister Elizabeth Eppes, whom she adored and had refused to leave when Jefferson sent for her. Deceived into believing that a visit with her cousins on board Captain Ramsay’s ship in a Virginia harbor was only for a day or two, she had awakened to find her cousins gone, the ship under way. The deception had made her angry and suspicious, as was still readily evident.

Jefferson was at last heard from. Rather than come himself to fetch the child, he was sending his valet, Petit. Having only just returned to Paris from his travels in the South, Jefferson explained, he had “the arrearages of three or four months all crowded on me at once.” To the Adamses it must have seemed a lame excuse, knowing as they did how little there could be of a truly pressing nature to keep Jefferson in Paris and how competent William Short was to handle what business there was for a week or so, just as he had been doing for months.

Abigail was crestfallen. She and the child had both been expecting Jefferson to appear any day. She was distraught, too, at the prospect of sending Polly off with someone who spoke no English. “I am really loath to part with her,” she wrote to Jefferson on July 6, “and she, last evening upon Petit’s arrival, was thrown into all her former distresses, and bursting into tears told me it would be as hard to leave me as it was her Aunt Eppes.”

The day of her departure, Polly clung to Abigail’s neck weeping, “almost in a frenzy.” Abigail, too, was crying. To no one, she said, had she ever become so attached in so few days as this little girl, and as time would show, the love she felt for the child was to be her one enduring tie to Jefferson.

IV

“POPULARITY WAS NEVER my mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular man,” Adams had written to James Warren at the start of the year, 1787, to say he had just completed a book that was almost certain to make him unpopular. “But one thing I know, a man must be sensible of the errors of the people, and upon his guard against them, and must run the risk of their displeasure sometimes, or he will never do them any good in the long run.”

It was, as Warren doubtless appreciated, about as concise a synopsis of Adams’s course through public life as could be found.

Once, in 1776, writing to Abigail about Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Adams had said of Paine that he was “a better hand at pulling down than building.” Now again he observed to Warren, “It is much easier to pull down a government, in such a conjuncture of affairs as we have seen, than to build up at such season as present.” It was Adams’s intention to turn to building again.

For months after the journey to Holland he had remained in “a state of philosophic solitude,” at work in his library on a consideration of comparative government based on “reading and reason.” When, the week of Christmas, Abigail went off with the Smiths for a sojourn at Bath, Adams kept steadily at his labors. “Don’t be solicitous of me. I shall do very well,” he wrote to her Christmas Day. If cold in the night, he would take a “Virgin” to bed — that, he explained, being the English term for a hot water bottle.

He felt an urgency like that of 1776. Great events were taking place at home. Support for a stronger central government was gaining ground — and largely in reaction to Shays’s Rebellion, as Adams had foreseen. A constitutional convention was in the offing, and as he had been impelled in 1776 to write his Thoughts on Government, so Adams plunged ahead now, books piled about him, his pen scratching away until all hours. “He is so much swallowed up in the pursuit of his subject that you must not wonder if you do not receive a line from him,” Abigail explained to John Quincy. But having read what he was writing, she worried. “I tell him they will think in America that he is setting up a king.”

By early January, 1787, Adams had rushed the first installment of his effort to a London printer. Titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, it was, in finished production, more a pamphlet than a book, in octavo form, and included on the title page a line from Pope: “All nature’s difference keeps all nature’s peace.” Copies were sent off at once to the United States and to Jefferson in Paris.

Adams conceded that the writing suffered from too great haste. He called it a “strange book,” which in many ways it was, much of it a hodgepodge overloaded with historical references and extended borrowings from other writers and usually without benefit of quotation marks. Yet in all he had achieved something quite out of the ordinary, thoughtful, high-minded, and timely. To a considerable extent the book was an expanded, more erudite rendition of the case for checks and balances in government that he had championed in his Thoughts on Government, and later put into operation in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution.

The people of America now had “the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands” that Providence ever ordained to so small a number since Adam and Eve. There must be three parts to government — executive, legislative, and judicial — and to achieve balance it was essential that it be a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. On the role of the executive Adams was emphatic:

If there is one central truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive, or, in other words, without separating the executive from the legislative power. If the executive power, or any considerable part of it, is left in the hands of an aristocratical or democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.

Nonetheless, the legislative power was “naturally and necessarily sovereign and supreme” over the executive.

In all history, he declared, there was no greater statesman and philosopher than Cicero, whose authority should ever carry great weight, and Cicero’s decided opinion in favor of the three branches of government was founded on a reason that was timeless, unchangeable. Were Cicero to return to earth, he would see that the English nation had brought “the great idea” nearly to perfection. The English constitution, Adams declared — and knowing he would be taken to task for it — was the ideal. Indeed, “both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations,” it was “the most stupendous fabric of human invention” in all history. Americans should be applauded for imitating it as far as had been done, but also, he stressed, for making certain improvements in the original, especially in rejecting all hereditary positions.

A hereditary monarchy could be a republic, Adams held, as England demonstrated, and hereditary aristocracies could be usefully employed in balanced governments, as in the House of Lords. But Adams adamantly opposed hereditary monarchy and hereditary aristocracy in America, as well as all hereditary titles, honors, or distinctions of any kind — it was why he, like Jefferson and Franklin, strongly opposed the Society of the Cincinnati, the association restricted to Continental Army officers, which had a hereditary clause in its rules whereby membership was passed on to eldest sons.

As he explained to Jefferson, much of what he wrote was in response to the dangers of radical French thought. Specifically he had written in defence (hence the title) against the theories of the philosophe Turgot, who espoused perfect democracy and a single legislature, or as he wrote, “collecting all authority into one center, that of the nation.” To Adams this was patent nonsense. A simple, perfect democracy had never yet existed. The whole people were incapable of deciding much of anything, even on the small scale of a village. He had had enough experience with town meetings at home to know that in order for anything to be done certain powers and responsibilities had to be delegated to a moderator, a town clerk, a constable, and, at times, to special committees.

Reliance on a single legislature was a certain road to disaster, for the same reason reliance on a single executive — king, potentate, president — was bound to bring ruin and despotism. As the planets were held in their orbits by centripetal and centrifugal forces, “instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents” among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces. Balance, counterpoise, and equilibrium were ideals that he turned to repeatedly. If all power were to be vested in a single legislature, “What was there to restrain it from making tyrannical laws, in order to execute them in a tyrannical manner?”

At home every state but Pennsylvania and Georgia had a bicameral legislature, and because of the obvious shortcomings of the one-house Congress under the Articles of Confederation, agreement on the need for a bicameral Congress was widespread. So to a considerable degree Adams was preaching what had become accepted doctrine at home.

Drawing on history and literature, some fifty books altogether, he examined what he called the modern democratic republics (the little Italian commonwealth of San Marino, Biscay in the Basque region of Spain, the Swiss cantons), modern aristocratic republics (Venice, the Netherlands), and the modern monarchical and regal republics (England, Poland); as well as the ancient democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical republics including Carthage, Athens, Sparta, and Rome. There were frequent citations in Latin, Greek, and French, extended use of Swift, Franklin, Dr. Price, Machiavelli, Guicciardini’s Historia d’Italia, Montesquieu, Plato, Milton, and Hume, in addition to scattered mentions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and Rousseau, as well as Joseph Priestley, whom Adams had lately come to know in London.

But for all this it remained at heart a lawyer’s brief for what he had said in his Thoughts on Government, and what he had helped establish in practice in the Massachusetts constitution. Where it departed most notably from what he had written before was in its pronouncements on human nature.

To Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time of the ancients. Inequities within society were inevitable, no matter the political order. Human beings were capable of great good, but also great evil. Thus it had always been and thus it would ever be. He quoted Rousseau’s description of “that hideous sight, the human heart,” and recounted that even Dr. Priestley had said that such were the weaknesses and folly of men, “their love of domination, selfishness, and depravity,” that none could be elevated above others without risk of danger.

How he wished it were not so, Adams wrote. Thucydides had said the source of all evils was “a thirst of power, from rapacious and ambitious passions,” and Adams agreed. “Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.”

As to the ideal of a nation of equals, such was impossible. “Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer in all mankind must be in the negative.”

Even in America where there was “a moral and political equality of rights and duties,” there were nonetheless inequalities of wealth, education, family position, and such differences were true of all people in all times. There was inevitably a “natural aristocracy among mankind,” those people of virtue and ability who were “the brightest ornaments and the glory” of a nation, “and may always be made the greatest blessing of society, if it be judiciously managed in the constitution.” These were the people who had the capacity to acquire great wealth and make use of political power, and for all they contributed to society, they could thus become the most dangerous element in society, unless they and their interests were consigned to one branch of the legislature, the Senate, and given no executive power. Above all, the executive magistrate must have sufficient power to defend himself, and thus the people, from all the “enterprises” of the natural aristocracy.

Adams believed in a “government of laws not of men,” as he had written in his Thoughts on Government and in the Massachusetts constitution but, as he stressed now in conclusion, “The executive power is properly the government; the laws are a dead letter until an administration begins to carry them into execution.”

Through the months of work on the Defence, Adams knew it was time to wind things up in London. He had achieved nothing in his diplomatic role and could expect no improvement in his prospects. Within weeks after the first copies of his Defence were ready at the printer, he had written to John Jay to ask that he be recalled. So while noble in intent, the Defence may also have been partly intended as a way of reintroducing himself to his countrymen and influencing the debate on the Constitution. And however apprehensive he may have been over what the reaction might be, he moved ahead without pause, working on two more installments.

In February came warm praise from Paris. “I have read your book with infinite satisfaction and improvement,” wrote Jefferson. It would do “great good,” he predicted. “Its learning and its good sense will I hope make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young.”

Such approbation was “vast consolation,” Adams responded, conceding that it had been a “hazardous” and “hasty” enterprise, and that he was pursuing it further. There were just two aspects of life in Europe that he regretted leaving. One was access to books, the other was “intimate correspondence with you, which is one of the most agreeable events in my life.”

In time came more praise and approval. From Philadelphia, where the Constitutional Convention had assembled, Benjamin Rush, a member of the Convention, wrote that the Defence had “diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compound federal legislature.” James Madison, who had taken the lead in drafting the so-called Virginia Plan, providing for three equal branches in the new government, and who had seldom ever had anything complimentary to say about Adams, declared in a letter to Jefferson that while men of learning would find nothing new in the book, it was certain to be “a powerful engine in forming public opinion,” and, in fact, had “merit.”

But as both John and Abigail had anticipated, there were others who perceived dark intent in what he had written. Cotton Tufts warned that there were people sowing discord, claiming Adams was all for monarchy and planned to put an English prince on a throne in America. In Virginia, the president of the College of William and Mary, a cousin of Madison’s, the Reverend James Madison, saw a “secret design” in the book — that Adams, under the influence of a foreign Court, was “plotting” to overturn the American government.

LATE THAT SUMMER of 1787, in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention was nearing the completion of its efforts. In Paris parading mobs and incidents of public disrespect for the royal family had caught many by surprise, including the American ambassador. Suddenly all tongues had been let loose in Paris, Jefferson reported excitedly to Adams. There were placards all over the city, and though the mobs had ceased, the Queen had received a “general hiss” while attending the theater. “The King, long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the Queen cries out, but sins on.”

WHEN COPIES of the new Constitution of the United States, signed at Philadelphia on September 17, reached London that autumn, Adams read it “with great satisfaction.” He would have preferred more power in the presidency than provided — particularly the authority to make presidential appointments without Senate approval. But of greater concern was the absence of a bill of rights, in the spirit of what he had written for the constitution of Massachusetts.

“What think you of a Declaration of Rights? Should not such a thing have preceded the model?” Adams wrote straight off to Jefferson.

Writing from Paris a few days later, before receiving Adams’s letter, Jefferson said nothing about a bill of rights, only that there were “things” in the Constitution that “stagger all my dispositions to subscribe” to it. His great concern was the office of the President, which, as conceived, struck him as “a bad edition of a Polish king.

He may be reelected from four years to four years for life. . . . Once in office, and possessing themilitary force of the union, without either the aid or check of a council, he would not be easily dethroned, even if the people could be induced to withdraw their votes from him. I wish that at the end of the four years, they made him ever ineligible a second time.

Here was the difference between them, Adams replied prophetically. “You are afraid of the one, I, the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have full, fair, and perfect representation [in the House]. You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.”

He was not so concerned about a President staying long in office, Adams said, as he was about too frequent elections, which often brought out the worst in people and increased the chances of foreign influence.

While Jefferson would have much to say about the Constitution and the need for a bill of rights in subsequent private correspondence with Madison, he made no public statement for the time being, whereas Adams sent off a strong endorsement to John Jay that was to be widely quoted at home. As once he had seen the Declaration of Independence uniting the different and often disputatious states in common cause, Adams now saw the Constitution as the best means possible “to cement all America in affection and interest as one great nation.” Indeed, if there was a consistent theme in all that Adams wrote and strived for, it was the need for a binding American union.

The public mind cannot be occupied about a nobler object than the proposed plan of government. It appears to be admirably calculated to cement all America in affection and interest as one great nation. A result of accommodation and compromise cannot be supposed perfectly to coincide with any one’s ideas of perfection. But as all the great principles necessary to order, liberty, and safety are respected in it, and provision is made for corrections and amendments as they may be found necessary, I confess I hope to hear of its adoption by all the states.

On December 6, writing to Jefferson, Adams reported that at last his recall had been approved by Congress, “and how we say at sea, ‘Huzza for the new world and farewell to the old one.’”

FOR THE SECOND and, she hoped, the last time in her life, Abigail was making arrangements to cross the North Atlantic, and with hardly less apprehension than the time before.

There was a great accumulation of clothes, books, china, and furniture to pack, a York rosebush she was determined to take. The furniture included pieces purchased originally for the houses at Amsterdam and The Hague. There was a four-post Dutch bed, a great Dutch chest with heavy brass pulls and claw feet, tables of different sizes, a set of six cushioned Louis XV chairs and a settee, these with delicate floral carvings. Adams’s desk, a beautiful French escritoire of veneered satinwood and ebony, which he had bought in Paris after the war, was his particular pride and joy.

All were considerably finer, more elegant pieces than the Adamses had ever owned in years past and would have looked quite out of place in the farmhouse at Braintree. But, as they now knew, they were not to reside in the old homestead. Through Cotton Tufts, Adams had arranged the purchase of what was known as “the Vassall-Borland place,” which Adams had had his eye on for years and which, in memory, seemed quite grand. Built more than fifty years before, about 1731, as the summer villa of a wealthy sugar planter from the West Indies, Leonard Vassall, the house had stood empty through much of the war, after Vassall’s daughter, the widow Borland, a Loyalist, fled to England. When Adams heard the place was available, he made his decision. Located on the coast road, on the north side of town, the property included house, farm buildings, and some eighty acres at a purchase price of 600 pounds. Adams envisioned it as the ideal setting for his retirement.

There were friends in London for Abigail to say goodbye to, last letters to get off to her sisters, and to John Quincy, who, having finished Harvard, was now studying law and not very pleased about it. When Mary Cranch wrote to report that their brother William had died, Abigail was devastated.

Reflection on such bad news was too painful for her, she wrote in reply. Nor was there time for reflection. Her maid, Esther Field, had discovered with an astonishment equal nearly to Abigail’s own, that she was pregnant with the child of the ever-faithful footman, John Briesler, and both wished to be married before sailing for home.

The first week in February, Adams paid a final call at Whitehall. On February 20, he had his “audience of leave” with George III, who in parting said, “Mr. Adams, you may with great truth, assure the United States that whenever they shall fulfill the treaty on their part, I, on my part, will fulfill it in all its particulars.” More than this, however, Adams was to remember the King’s graciousness toward him.

Then, out of the blue and to his utter dismay, Adams was called on to make one last emergency trip to Holland, and in the worst possible season to cross the North Sea. It was essential that he take formal leave of his ambassadorial post there, he was informed, and to secure yet another loan, this to enable the United States to make its payments on earlier loans from the Dutch.

To Adams the journey was punishment for sins unknown. The single consolation was that Jefferson was to meet him at Amsterdam. Together they succeeded with the Dutch bankers and in high spirits agreed that when the time came that Adams was at last on his way to heaven, he would surely have first to negotiate another Dutch loan. It was the last time they ever collaborated in a public matter.

To Abigail, Jefferson had written, “I have considered you while in London as my neighbor, and look forward to the moment of your departure from thence as to an epoch of much regret and concern to me. . . . My daughters join me in affectionate adieus. Polly does not cease to speak of you with warmth and gratitude. Heaven send you, Madam, a pleasant and safe passage.”

It was a charming letter of the kind at which Jefferson excelled and that by now he was writing to a number of women within his Paris circle who, in addition to Maria Cosway, included Anne Bingham and another equally striking American, Angelica Church, as well as several Frenchwomen of note, all of whom, interestingly, were married.

Writing to Jefferson “in the midst of the bustle and fatigue of packing,” Abigail said simply and sincerely that she could not leave without sending “a few lines to my much esteemed friend, to thank him for all his kindness and friendship towards myself and family.”

THE AMERICAN MINISTER, his wife, and two American servants departed London for the last time on Sunday, March 30, 1788, by coach for Portsmouth, where they were to sail on the American ship Lucretia, bound for Boston. The Smiths, with their infant son, were to sail on another ship for New York, the temporary federal capital, where Colonel Smith planned to pursue his career.

“Mr. Adams, the late envoy from the American states, set off for Portsmouth on Sunday last, to embark for his return,” read a small item in the Whitehall Evening Post. “That gentleman settled all his concerns with great honor; and whatever his political tenets may have been, he was much respected and esteemed in this country.”

Because of bad weather, it was another three weeks before the Adamses were truly under way.

As Abigail fervently wished, she and John were never to see England or Europe again. Henceforth, she wrote on board in her diary, she would be quite content to learn what more there was to know of the world from the pages of books.

Adams is not known to have recorded any of his thoughts during the voyage home, but earlier he had said his great desire was “to lay fast of the town of Braintree and embrace it with both arms and all my might. There live, there to die, there to lay my bones, and there to plant one of my sons in the profession of law and the practices of agriculture, like his father.”

Only Nabby, it seems, strongly objected. Their father had still more to do for his country, she had written to John Quincy.

By his opinions, advice, and recommendations, he has, I believe, in his power to do as much, perhaps the most, towards establishing her character as a respectable nation of any man in America — and shall he retire from the world and bury himself amongst his books, and live only for himself? No — I wish it not. . . . The Americans in Europe say he will be elected Vice President. Besides, my brother, independent of other considerations, he would not, I am well convinced, be happy in private life.

John Adams was fifty-two. Except for the few months he had spent in Massachusetts in 1778, he had been away for ten years. In that time he had traveled thousands of miles in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and England; he had repeatedly crossed the English Channel and the North Sea; and his voyage home now marked his fourth crossing of the Atlantic. Altogether by land and sea he journeyed more than 29,000 miles, farther than any leading American of his time in the service of his country, never once refusing to go because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.

He had first sailed for Europe in the midst of war. He was returning now after more than five years of peace. For him personally, the homeward passage marked as clear an end to one chapter of his life, and the beginning of another, as had his initial voyage out. The intervening years in Europe had been as memorable and important, he felt, as any in his life.

Through the first years in France, for all his troubles with Franklin, he had worked steadily with the old patriot and often with telling effect. That he had pressed doggedly for a greater part in the war by the French navy would stand as one of his own proudest efforts, and with reason, given what happened at Yorktown.

With his success obtaining Dutch loans at the critical hour of the Revolution, he felt, as did others, that he had truly saved his country. That he had embarked on such an unprecedented mission on his own initiative, that he had undertaken his own one-man diplomatic campaign knowing nothing initially of the country, its language, and with no prior contacts or friendships to call upon, and yet carried through to his goal, were simply extraordinary and a measure of his almost superhuman devotion to the American cause.

His part in the Paris Peace Treaty would stand the test of time, Adams believed, as much as anything he had ever done. If the years and effort at London had come to naught, he at least knew he had given devoted service, conducting himself with consistent aplomb and dedication. No one could fault him for a false step. Nor could it be imagined that another of his countrymen in the same role could have done better.

Of the overwhelming convulsion soon to come in France, of the violent end in the offing for the whole European world Adams had come to know, he appears to have had few if any premonitions, no more than anyone else.

What changes had taken place at home in his absence he could only imagine, but clearly, with the advent of the new Constitution, a new epoch had opened in the history of his country.

For her part, Abigail speculated privately that any further role in politics might be “a little like getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

PART III

Independence Forever

Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.

~John Adams

CHAPTER EIGHT

HEIR APPARENT

Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act. I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.

~John Adams

I

ON THE CRYSTAL-CLEAR MORNING of Tuesday, June 17, 1788, the keeper of the Boston lighthouse, Thomas Knox, sighted the Lucretia making good speed on the northeast horizon, and by prearranged plan he set in motion a welcome home such as John Adams had never imagined.

The landmark lighthouse, the first built in America, stood ten miles out from Boston on a tiny rock island at the head of the harbor. For more than half a century, since before Adams was born, it had taken the brunt of the open Atlantic, only to be blown up by the British in 1776. Rebuilt since the war, it stood again as before, and for those on board the inbound ship, after a rough crossing of fifty-eight days, its granite tower gleaming in the sunshine of a perfect morning was a thrilling sight.

At the signal from lightkeeper Knox, cannon boomed at the fort on Castle Island, to alert the town. Losing no time, Knox then set sail by pilot boat to meet the Lucretia and deliver an official welcome to Minister Adams and his lady from Governor John Hancock.

“My coach will be at the end of Long Wharf,” Hancock had written. The Adamses were to proceed to a reception in their honor at his Beacon Hill home, where he hoped they would “tarry till you have fixed upon your place of abode.”

As the ship cleared the lighthouse and swept into the harbor, the green hills of Braintree stood forth on the port side, while ahead rose Boston’s multiple church steeples. Again cannon thundered from Castle Island, in official salute, and in little time the ship was tying up at dockside, where a crowd of several thousand was gathered.

People were cheering, church bells ringing, as the Adamses came ashore. Along the route to Beacon Hill, more throngs lined the streets. “The bells in the several churches rang during the remainder of the day — every countenance wore the expressions of joy,” reported the Massachusetts Centinel.

For John and Abigail, who in their long absence had often felt unappreciated or forgotten, such an outpouring was inexpressibly gratifying, but also difficult to take in. Hancock, who adored ceremony and show, was so delighted by the excitement, he insisted the next day that he escort them to Braintree in his coach, and that they go accompanied by cavalry. But the Adamses had had enough fanfare and departed Boston on their own. At Braintree they moved in quietly with the Cranches until their furniture could be delivered from the ship.

THE FIRST DAYS at Braintree were a continuing round of emotional reunions — with the Cranches, sons Charles and Thomas, and John’s astonishingly spry mother, now seventy-nine; John’s brother Peter, Cotton Tufts, and Parson Wibird; plus a score of Quincys, Basses, and other old friends and neighbors. John Quincy arrived by horseback from Newburyport, where he was reading law.

Adams rejoiced in the sight of his sons. Charles, eighteen, and Thomas, fifteen, both Harvard scholars now and inches taller than their mother, had been small boys when he last saw them. John Quincy, soon to turn twenty-one, was clearly a grown man, and his father’s pride and joy were no less than ever.

The oldest has given decided proofs of great talents, and there is not a youth his age whose reputation is higher for abilities, or whose character is fairer in point of morals of conduct [he wrote to Nabby]. The youngest is as fine a youth as either of the three, if a spice of fun in his composition should not lead him astray. Charles wins the heart, as usual, and is the most a gentleman of them all.

“Busy unpacking during the whole day,” recorded John Quincy, once the furniture and belongings arrived and the move to the new house began. Another day was devoted to unpacking his father’s books, “yet [we] did not get half enough.”

The Shaws arrived from Haverhill. There were teas and dinners at the Cranches. At church on Sunday the combined family filled several pews. “Parson Wibird preached in his usual dull, unanimated strain,” fumed John Quincy, who had never understood his father’s admiration for the eccentric preacher.

To Abigail’s great disappointment, the new house, the “old Vassall-Borland place,” once thought an elegant country seat, was found to be in poor repair and distressingly small and cramped after what she had known in Europe. Her sense of scale had changed more than she knew. The white clapboard house was handsome enough and stood by itself, uncrowded by the side of a main road, with farmland stretching before and behind. But there were just six rooms and ceilings were low. “In height and breadth, it feels like a wren’s house,” she wrote.

For days house and grounds were overrun with carpenters, masons, and farmhands. Some of her furniture had been badly damaged at sea. “But you know there is no saying nay,” she added gamely.

Adams could not have been more pleased with his new “estate,” as he wrote to an English friend. “It is not large, in the first place. It is but the farm of a patriot.”

Spirits high, he plunged into the farmer’s life, tramping his fields and pastures, inspecting walls, appraising livestock, hiring help, discussing weather and crops, and delegating projects. A French writer, J. P. Brissot de Warville, stopping at Braintree on a tour of America “to examine the effects of liberty upon men, society, and government,” described farmer Adams as “like one of the generals and ambassadors of the golden ages of Rome and Greece . . . forgetful of his books and royal courts.” (After a visit to Mount Vernon, Brissot would write much the same of George Washington.)

But another French traveler would be astonished to find a man of such consequence as Adams living in a house so small that, as he wrote, “no Paris lawyer of the lowest rank would choose [it] for a country seat.”

Speculation on Adams’s political future was rampant. He was talked of as governor, senator, Vice President, everything but President. According to the Centinel, it was already certain he would become Vice President, and if not that, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. “And who can object to Mr. Adams?” asked the paper which, after enumerating his many abilities and attainments, observed that he happened also to be “providentially” unemployed.

Henry Knox and Benjamin Lincoln, two stalwarts of 1776 and now of formidable political importance, came to talk. Benjamin Rush wrote from Philadelphia, warmly endorsing the prospect of his old friend as Vice President. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, in a letter informing Adams that he had received an honorary degree from Yale, said he rejoiced at the thought of Adams for Vice President.

In keeping with the unwritten rule of the time that any display of ambition would be unseemly, Adams kept silent. But, in fact, he had decided from the time he arrived home that he would accept the vice presidency, and that role only, any other being “beneath him,” as Abigail put it confidentially in a letter to Nabby.

The makeup of political leadership in the country had greatly changed in Adams’s absence. Many with whom he had served in the Continental Congress had passed from the scene — some, like Benjamin Rush, were retired from public life; others deceased. Fourteen of those who had signed the Declaration of Independence were dead, including Stephen Hopkins and Caesar Rodney, and much about politics was now in the hands of “new men,” “smart young men,” known to Adams only by reputation. Madison of Virginia was still in his thirties. Hamilton of New York and Fisher Ames of Massachusetts were younger still.

Because Washington, a Virginian, was certain to become President, it was widely agreed that the vice presidency should go to a northerner, and Adams was the leading choice. That Adams could be blunt, stubborn, opinionated, vain, and given to jealousy was understood. Further, some of the “new men,” notably Hamilton and Madison, questioned how willingly and loyally Adams might serve in second place to Washington, in view of the difficulties he was said to have had with Franklin in Paris.

The one visitor known to have recorded a firsthand impression of Adams that fall of 1788 found him quite at peace with life and surprisingly approachable. Judith Sargent Murray, a young woman from Gloucester traveling with her husband on their honeymoon, stopped at Braintree in October and saw in “the countenance of Mr. Adams” a “most pleasing benevolence” she had not anticipated, as well as the marks of “deep thinking” customarily associated with “the sage, the philosopher,” and “unbending integrity.” Here was a man who had “stood before kings upon an equal level,” she wrote. “I expected to be inspired with a painful awe, but strange to tell, every idea of distance was immediately banished.” Of Abigail she observed: “It is evident the domestic as well as the more brilliant virtues are all her own. We were soon grouped in familiar chat. It was with [difficulty] I remembered they were not friends of ancient date.”

Winter approached, and still Adams remained silent on politics. Abigail left for New York to be with Nabby for the arrival of another baby, a second son, John Adams Smith, leaving Adams alone with his ruminations. “I think of my poor dear and pity him,” Abigail wrote from New York to Mary Cranch. But Adams wanted no one to feel sorry for him. Whatever the outcome — whether he was denied the vice presidency or whether the honor was to be his — he would be the winner either way, he insisted. “If they mortify my vanity, they give me comfort. They cannot deprive me of comfort without gratifying my vanity.”

To Jefferson in Paris he wrote, “The new government has my best wishes and most fervent prayers for its success and prosperity; but whether I shall have anything more to do with it, besides praying for it, depends on the future suffrage of freemen.”

BY PROCEDURE established in the new Constitution, the President was to be chosen by “electors” named by the state legislatures. Each elector was to cast one ballot with the names of two choices for President. The person with the most votes in the final tally was to become President, the runner-up, Vice President. In the event of a tie, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, a prospect so disturbing to Alexander Hamilton that he “deemed [it] an essential point of caution” to see that John Adams did not wind up with such a strong showing in the electoral count as to embarrass Washington. He was not against Adams, Hamilton explained privately. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding, has always appeared to me to add an ardent love for the public good.” But Hamilton was taking no chances. Working quietly through the winter, he did what he could to convince leading politicians in several states to withhold votes from Adams.

The scheme succeeded. When the electors met in February 1789, Washington was chosen President unanimously with 69 votes, while Adams, though well ahead of ten others, had 34 votes, or less than half. Adams was humiliated by the news, his pride deeply hurt, but of Hamilton’s part, he knew nothing.

Yet the fact remained that at age fifty-three, he, John Adams, the farmer’s son from Braintree, had been chosen to serve as the first Vice President of the United States, the second-highest office in the land.

Abigail was to remain at home until he found a suitable place for them to live in New York. And thus the morning of his departure there was much that was reminiscent of other days as he bid goodbye, heading off again with a single servant, John Briesler. The difference this time was that Adams went accompanied by cavalry, a sight such as had never been seen in Braintree. It was April 13, 1789, one of the signal days of Adams’s life and also, as it happened, Thomas Jefferson’s forty-sixth birthday.

Boston provided a hero’s send-off, with cannon salutes and exuberant crowds. The grand cavalcade that escorted Adams out of the city included more than forty carriages.

Merit must be conspicuously great when it can thus call forth the voluntary honors of a free and enlightened people [wrote the Massachusetts Centinel]. But the attentions shown on this occasion were not merely honorary — they were the tribute of gratitude due to a man who after retirement from trials and services which were of 18 years unremitted continuance, hath again stepped forth to endeavor to establish and perpetuate that independence . . . and which his exertions have so greatly contributed to produce.

All through Massachusetts and Connecticut people lined the road to cheer Adams as one of their own, a New England man. At Hartford he was presented a bolt of locally manufactured brown broadcloth considered worthy for an inaugural suit. New Haven gave him the “Freedom of the City.” That ideal weather accompanied the procession day after day was taken as auspicious.

At four o’clock the afternoon of April 20, after a week on the road, Adams arrived at the bridge at Spuyten Duyvil Creek, at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. A troop of New York cavalry and a “numerous concourse of citizens” led by John Jay and several members of Congress were waiting to escort him south to the city and Jay’s palatial home on Broadway.

ONCE, IN THE MIDST of negotiations for the Paris Peace Treaty, John Adams had predicted that thirteen United States would one day “form the greatest empire in the world.” It was a faith he had first expressed at age nineteen, when a fledgling schoolmaster at Worcester, writing to his kinsman Nathan Webb; and it remained a faith no less in 1789, for all the skepticism and derision he had heard expressed abroad, and despite the many obstacles confronting the new nation.

Much about the state of things, much that Adams had seen or heard since his return, was heartening. On a visit to Harvard, he had crossed a magnificent new bridge over the Charles River, said to be the finest bridge in America. New England shipping and ocean trade were reviving after a slump that followed the war. A Salem vessel, Grand Turk, had been to China and back and was the talk of Massachusetts.

There was a rise in demand for American farm products. In Virginia, work had started on canals for both the James and Potomac Rivers. At Philadelphia an inventor named John Fitch had demonstrated a steamboat on the Delaware River. But as striking as any sign of the country’s burgeoning energy and productivity was the “Grand Federal Procession” held in Philadelphia that July 4 of 1788, in which many hundreds of tradesmen marched, grouped by guilds: shipbuilders, rope-makers, instrument-makers, blacksmiths, tin-plate workers, cabinetmakers, printers, bookbinders, coppersmiths, gunsmiths, saddlers, and stonecutters, some fifty different groups carrying banners and the tools of their trade.

As a result of the Paris Peace Treaty, the size of the nation was double what it had been, greater in area than the British Isles, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined, and if the American population was small by the standards of Europe, it was expanding rapidly, which to Adams was the most promising sign of all. From 2 million or so in 1776, the population had grown to nearly 4 million by 1789, and this despite seven years of violent war, the departure of perhaps 100,000 Loyalists, and comparatively little immigration during the war years. Philadelphia, still the largest city, had increased to a population of 40,000. New York counted 18,000 and, like Philadelphia, surged with growth. Of the thirteen states, Virginia remained the richest and most populous, and thereby maintained the greatest political influence.

But wages were still low everywhere, and money was scarce. There was no standard American coinage or currency. British, Spanish, French, and German coins were all still in use, along with the coins of the different states, their value varying appreciably from one state to another. In New England, for example, six shillings made a dollar, while in New York eight shillings made a dollar. In the entire country there were only three banks.

Travel was slow and arduous everywhere, the roads appallingly bad and worst in the South. Largely because of bad roads, the new Congress, scheduled to convene in New York on the first Wednesday in March 1789, would not have a sufficient number present to make a quorum in either house until weeks afterward.

The nation had no army to speak of — about 700 officers and men. The Continental Navy had disappeared. The sea power that Adams had envisioned and worked so hard to attain was nonexistent.

The great majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, and fully two-thirds of the population was concentrated in a narrow band along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Spanish Florida. Nearly everything else was wilderness. The whole country, concluded one visitor, was “a vast wood.” In Massachusetts it was thought that less than a third of the land had been cleared, and it was the same in New York and Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, at the end of the rough-hewn wagon road over the Allegheny Mountains, was the westernmost town of any consequence in the country and had fewer than 500 souls.

Approximately half the territory of the United States in 1789 was still occupied by American Indians, most of whom lived west of the Appalachians, and though no one knew how many there were, they probably numbered 100,000.

That a new America was steadily taking form beyond the Appalachians was one of the clearest signs of the times. Down the same road Adams traveled that spring to New York came small caravans from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut — families with children and household belongings piled onto heavy wagons, bound for Ohio, a journey of more than 700 miles. At the same time, settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas were crossing into Kentucky and Tennessee. George Washington himself, known to have great confidence in the future of the West, had landholdings in the Ohio River country of more than 20,000 acres.

But to many the immense size of the country and the shift of population westward were serious concerns. With people spread so far and communication so slow and unreliable, what was to hold the nation together? Such republics of the past as Adams had written about in his Defence of the Constitutions were small in scale — so what hope was there for one so inconceivably large? “What would Aristotle and Plato have said, if anyone had talked to them, of a federative republic of thirteen states, inhabiting a country of five hundred leagues in extent?” Adams pondered.

Besides, the country had no tradition of union. Indeed, Americans were long accustomed to putting the interests of region or state ahead of those of the nation, except during war, and not always then. Following the Revolution, General Nathanael Greene had written to Washington from South Carolina that “many people secretly wish that every state be completely independent and that as soon as our public debts are liquidated that Congress should be no more.”

North and South, the new Constitution had been vehemently opposed as a threat to the rights of the states and thus to individual liberty. Two sides had formed, the Federalists, who wanted a strong federal government, and the Anti-Federalists, who held to the sentiment of Thomas Paine, “That government is best which governs least.” And the outcome had been anything but certain. Not until June 1788, the week the Adamses were unpacking at Braintree, had the Constitution been finally secured, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify.

“The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us,” young schoolmaster Adams had written in his percipient letter to Nathan Webb, and to Adams now, as to others, dissolution remained the greatest single threat to the American experiment. “The fate of this government,” he would write from New York to his former law clerk, William Tudor, “depends absolutely upon raising it above the state goverments.” The first line of the Constitution made the point, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Of the potentially divisive threats to “the more perfect union,” none surpassed slavery. The slave population, too, had burgeoned to nearly 700,000 men, women, and children who had no freedom whatever. There were slaves still in every state but one — only Massachusetts had eliminated slavery thus far — but with the overwhelming majority of slaves, fully 500,000 or more, centered in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the difference between North and South was if anything greater than ever.

For Adams, who had seen far more of Europe than of his own country, the different Americas of the West and the South could only be imagined. But more disturbing to him than almost anything was the view heard in many circles that the old ideal of devotion to the public good had been supplanted by rampant avarice; the love of country, by a love of luxury. Mercy Warren had written to the Adamses while they were still in London that the current “avidity for pleasure” in America was certain to lead to trouble. Money, wrote James Warren bitterly, was all that mattered anymore. “Patriotism is ridiculed,” he had warned Adams. “Integrity and ability are of little consequence.”

The Warrens were among those who had adamantly opposed the Constitution, convinced it would only encourage speculation and vice. Certain that America was going the way of imperial Rome, James Warren had turned tiresomely sour and querulous. And though saddened by the change in his friend, Adams sensed he was right, that a moral shift had taken place. Nabby, appraising the politicians she encountered in New York, including Governor George Clinton, surmised there were few for whom personal aggrandizement was not the guiding motivation. She felt herself “in a land of strangers.” It was a feeling not unknown to her father.

“I find men and manners, principles and opinions, much altered in this country since I left it,” he confided to her. But this only made his dedication to union all the stronger.

II

AT THE START of every new venture of importance in his life, John Adams was invariably assailed by grave doubts. It was a life pattern as distinct as any. The boy of fifteen, riding away from home to be examined for admission to Harvard, suffered a foreboding as bleak as the rain clouds overhead. The delegate to the first Continental Congress, preparing to depart for Philadelphia, felt “unalterable anxiety”; the envoy sailing for France wrote of “great diffidence in myself.” That he always succeeded in conquering these doubts did not seem to matter. In advance of each large, new challenge, the painful waves rolled in upon him once again.

Part of this was stage fright, part the consequence of an honest reckoning of his own inadequacies. Mainly it was the burden of an inordinate ability to perceive things as they were: he was apprehensive because he saw clearly how much there was to be apprehensive about. And so it was as he approached the untried office of Vice President.

With issues of such immense national consequence to be addressed, policies to be considered and resolved, precedents to establish, laws to enact, an entire new structure for the governance of the nation to be brought into being, could he, given his nature, do justice to the essentially passive, ceremonial role he had been chosen to fill? Action had been his metier, advocacy his strength, and the vice presidency offered opportunity for neither. “The Vice President of the United States,” stipulated Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution, “shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” So could he with his passion, his fund of opinion, his love of debate, possibly keep from speaking his mind? “I am but an ordinary man,” he had once written. “The times alone have destined me to fame.” But had “the times” now cast him in a role for which he was wholly unsuited?

Such worries weighed heavily through the journey to New York, for all the “parade and show” in his honor, and in advance of his first appearance in the Senate, he prepared a brief speech in which, with marked understatement and honesty, he identified the problem: “Not wholly without experience in public assemblies, I have been more accustomed to take a share in their debates than to preside in their deliberations.” Some months later, after one of the most unfortunate passages in a long public life, he would acknowledge succinctly to John Quincy that, in truth, the office he held was “not quite adapted to my character,” that it was too inactive, too “mechanical,” and that mistakenly he was inclined to think he must “throw a little light on the subject” when need be.

He had left home not knowing where he and Abigail might live, not knowing what salary Congress would provide, and worries over money troubled him exceedingly. Adams had strong views on the matter of recompense for officeholders. He was adamantly opposed to the notion espoused by some that in the ideal republican government public officials should serve without pay — an idea that had been supported by both Franklin and Washington, two of the wealthiest men in the nation. Were a law to be made “that no man should hold an office who had not a private income sufficient for the subsistence and prospects of himself and family,” Adams had written earlier while in London, then the consequence would be that “all offices would be monopolized by the rich; the poor and the middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.” He thought public officials should not only be paid, but that their salaries should be commensurate with their responsibilities and necessary expenses. And as one of the “middling ranks” himself, he viewed with great concern the expenses of living in New York.

Having had no word from Washington, he knew nothing of what might be on the General’s mind, and one wonders how much worse he might have felt had he known. “May Heaven assist me,” Washington had written privately, “for at present I see nothing but clouds and darkness before me.” If Adams was concerned about making ends meet, Washington had had to arrange a loan to cover personal debts and the expense of moving to New York. Greatest was his worry that the country would expect too much of him.

FEDERAL HALL, where Congress met, was a handsomely proportioned stone building at the junction of Broad and Wall Streets distinguished by its glassy cupola and colonnaded front balcony. Formerly City Hall, it had been transformed according to designs by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a young French engineer and architect who had served as a volunteer in the Revolution. Local citizens had provided the funds in the hope that an edifice worthy of the new republic would inspire Congress to make New York the permanent capital. When costs ran to twice the initial estimates, few complained, so appealing were the results.

It was the first building in America designed to exalt the national spirit, in what would come to be known as the Federal style. Emblazoned in the pediment of the front portico was an immense American eagle. Stars and laurel wreaths were a decorative motif inside and out, and all greatly admired. The meeting room of the House of Representatives, on the ground floor, had “spacious galleries open to all,” so that visitors could observe the proceedings. The Senate Chamber, on the floor above, was a handsome room with high windows, fireplaces of fine American marble, and a ceiling patterned with thirteen stars and suns. Like the building, the Senate Chamber was neither overly grand nor imposing, but stately and filled with light. But there were no galleries for visitors, as the Senate was to meet behind closed doors.

Senator Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, on first seeing the building, said it surpassed any in the country. “I wish the business expected to be transacted in it may be as well done and as universally admired as the house is.”

Adams was formally received at the door of Federal Hall and escorted upstairs to the Senate on the morning of Tuesday, April 21, two days before George Washington arrived in New York, crossing the harbor in a velvet-lined barge and landing to a stupendous ovation. There was no swearing-in ceremony for Adams — the wording of an oath for the Senate was among the host of matters still to be resolved. He was simply greeted by the president pro tempore of the Senate, John Langdon of New Hampshire, and conducted to his chair at the head of the chamber.

Unfolding two sheets of paper, Adams proceeded with his prepared remarks, “cheerfully and readily” accepting the duties of Vice President. Before him, seated in a semicircle, were most of the newly elected members of the Senate, a number of whom he knew from times past, including Langdon, Ellsworth, Richard Henry Lee, Ralph Izard of South Carolina, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, and Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts, who had been a classmate at Harvard.

Adams said how moved he was to be once again among old friends, so many “defenders of the liberties” of the country. He offered congratulations to the American people on the formation of the Constitution and spoke warmly of the “commanding talents and virtues” of Washington. The part played by the hand of God in the choice of such a man to head the nation, said Adams, was so clear as to be apparent to all.

Having acknowledged the concern he felt over his ability to sit silently by during the debate and preside only, he said it would be his “constant endeavor” to behave toward all members with the consideration and decorum befitting their station and character.

But if from inexperience or inadvertency, anything should ever escape me inconsistent with propriety, I must entreat you, by putting it to its true cause and not to any want of respect, to pardon and excuse me.

“A trust of the greatest magnitude is committed to this legislature,” he said in conclusion, “and the eyes of the world are upon you.”

Questions of ceremony and etiquette, such matters as how properly to address the President, required prompt attention, and to Adams these were no small concerns. If it was largely a ceremonial role he was to play, then best to get it right, he felt, and starting with his own place in the scheme of things, should the President choose to address the Senate. “Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act,” he said. “I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything. But I am President also of the Senate. When the President comes into the Senate, what shall I be?”

There was silence from the floor, until Oliver Ellsworth, considered an authority on the Constitution, rose to his feet. “I find, sir,” he said, “it is evident and clear, sir, that whenever the Senate are to be there, sir, you must be at the head of them. But further, sir, I shall not pretend to say.”

Later, when Adams raised the question of whether the Senate should be seated or standing when the President addressed them, Richard Henry Lee offered that in England when the King spoke before a combined session of Parliament, members of the House of Lords sat and those of the House of Commons stood. Lee was followed by Ralph Izard, who said he could attest from personal observation of such occasions at Parliament that members of the House of Commons stood because in the House of Lords there were no seats for them.

On the day of his inauguration, Thursday, April 30, Washington rode to Federal Hall in a canary-yellow carriage pulled by six white horses and followed by a long column of New York militia in full dress. The air was sharp, the sun shone brightly, and with all work stopped in the city, the crowds along his route were the largest ever seen. It was as if all New York had turned out and more besides. “Many persons in the crowd,” reported the Gazette of the United States, “were heard to say they should now die contented — nothing being wanted to complete their happiness . . . but the sight of the savior of his country.”

In the Senate Chamber were gathered the members of both houses of Congress, the Vice President, and sundry officials and diplomatic agents, all of whom rose when Washington made his entrance, looking solemn and stately. His hair powdered, he wore a dress sword, white silk stockings, shoes with silver buckles, and a suit of the same brown Hartford broadcloth that Adams, too, was wearing for the occasion. They might have been dressed as twins, except that Washington’s metal buttons had eagles on them.

It was Adams who formally welcomed the General and escorted him to the dais. For an awkward moment Adams appeared to be in some difficulty, as though he had forgotten what he was supposed to say. Then, addressing Washington, he declared that the Senate and House of Representatives were ready to attend him for the oath of office as required by the Constitution. Washington said he was ready. Adams bowed and led the way to the outer balcony, in full view of the throng in the streets. People were cheering and waving from below, and from windows and rooftops as far as the eye could see. Washington bowed once, then a second time.

Fourteen years earlier, it had been Adams who called on the Continental Congress to make the tall Virginian commander-in-chief of the army. Now he stood at Washington’s side as Washington, his right hand on the Bible, repeated the oath of office as read by Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, who had also been a member of the Continental Congress.

In a low voice Washington solemnly swore to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Then, as not specified in the Constitution, he added, “So help me God,” and kissed the Bible, thereby establishing his own first presidential tradition.

“It is done,” Livingston said, and turning to the crowd, cried out, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States.”

With the crowd in raptures, cannon pounding, church bells clanging, Washington bowed still again and then, Adams at his side, moved back to deliver his inaugural address to a seated Congress.

If the Vice President had seemed hesitant or nervous performing his small part earlier, the President was no better. Washington’s hands trembled holding his speech, which he read in a voice so low that many in the room had difficulty hearing what he said. No part of the address was particularly distinguished or memorable and the delivery was monotonous throughout. Several times his voice quavered. Yet none of this seemed to matter. He was Washington and many in the room had tears in their eyes. Representative Fisher Ames of Massachusetts later wrote of sitting “entranced,” as though he were witnessing “an allegory on which virtue was personified.” A French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, wrote with amazement at the effect Washington had. Never had “a citizen of a free country enjoyed among his compatriots a confidence as pure and as universal . . . a real merit and a faithful virtue must be the basis of it.”

Adams provided no comment on the day’s events. Writing to Abigail late the following day, he reported only that at a reception at the President’s house, Washington had greeted him “with great cordiality . . . affection, and confidence,” and that all had gone “very agreeably.”

Days later, in Paris, where he had only just learned of Adams’s election, Jefferson wrote warmly, “No man on earth pays more cordial homage to your worth or wishes more fervently your happiness.” Having requested temporary leave from his duties in France to settle private affairs at home, Jefferson hoped to reach Virginia by late summer.

But little at all went agreeably for Adams in the weeks to follow. In the Senate, the issue of titles, and particularly the question of how the President was to be addressed, superceded all other business. In the House a move to consider titles met with quick defeat. The House voted that the chief executive should be addressed simply as “George Washington, President of the United States.” But in the Senate the discussions became heated, with Adams taking part more than the members deemed appropriate.

According to some accounts it was the Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, who raised the issue, saying that titles were in use everywhere in the world, that there was something in the human makeup that responded to them, and that they were perfectly appropriate. Senator Izard, expressing agreement, moved that “Excellency” be the President’s title. When Senator Ellsworth observed how very ordinary the mere appellation of President sounded, Adams immediately concurred from the Chair. There were presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs, Adams observed.

A committee appointed to consider the issue reported back with the suggested title “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” But it was Adams who took the lead in advocating titles, voicing his views in direct opposition to a strong-willed senator from Pennsylvania, William Maclay. Indeed, had it not been for Adams and Maclay the issue might have come to little more than it did in the House. Instead, it occupied the Senate for nearly a month.

Only Maclay was keeping a private journal of what transpired, and being the only account, it would be quoted repeatedly by latter-day historians. Maclay’s rendition of Adams was devastating. Adams’s version of what happened, written a few years later, would be quite different. According to Adams, his supposed passion for titles amounted merely to a reasonable request for advice from the Senate on how to address Washington:

Whether I should say, “Mr. Washington,” “Mr. President,” “Sir,” “may it please your Excellency,” or what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the army to call him “His Excellency,” but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but “Sir” or “Mr. President,” than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda.

Adams believed everything possible should be done to bring dignity and respect to the central government and thus strengthen the union. If the central government was to have greater authority and importance than the state governments, then the titles of federal office ought to reflect that. It was thus essential to adorn the office of the President, the highest office, with commensurate “dignity and splendor.” Titles were symbols, just as impressive buildings were symbols, except that titles, unlike buildings, cost nothing.

Like Richard Henry Lee, Adams believed the need for “distinctions” ran deep in human nature and that to deny this was unrealistic. The love of titles was like the love of parades and pageantry. The title did not make the man, of course, but it enhanced the standing of the man in the eyes of others. Rank and distinction were essential to any social organization, be it a family, a parish, or a ship, Adams would say. He cared intensely about the future of the republic and, as he had tried to explain in his Defence of the Constitutions, he saw men of education, ability, and wealth as “the natural aristocracy,” the great strength and blessing of society, but potentially also a great threat to liberty, if their power and energies were misdirected. These were not hereditary titles he was proposing, but titles conferred by society for merit and that went only with positions of high federal responsibility. He was convinced that the modest compensation and heavy burdens of public service — the disruption of family life, the criticism and insults one was subjected to — must be compensated for, if ever people of ability were to take part. He believed that honorable titles of a kind not to be acquired in any other line of work could make a difference. To him personally, he insisted, they mattered not at all. It was his thought that Washington should be called “His Majesty the President,” or something of the sort.

But there was no popular support for grand titles. Adams was woefully out of step with the country. Had he been in New York two years earlier, almost certainly he would have seen a play called The Contrast, if for no other reason than it was written by Nabby’s former suitor, Royall Tyler. The first American play to be produced on stage, it opened with the lines:

Exult each patriot heart! This night is shown

A piece which we may fairly call our own:

Where the proud titles of “My Lord!” “Your Grace!”

To humble “Mr.” and plain “Sir” give place.

One wonders, too, what effect Abigail might have had on her husband had she been with him during his first weeks as Vice President. It was not titles that gave men preeminence in America, she had lectured the “haughty Scotchman” on her voyage to England and to the solid approval of her shipmates.

James Madison, in an address to the House, had expressed the conviction of most Americans when he said, “The more simple, the more republican we are in our manners, the more national dignity we shall acquire.”

But Adams would not be stilled. It was almost as if he had to go against the current, lest anyone doubt his independence. He repeatedly intruded on the Senate’s time to voice his views, even lecturing the Senate, as if back at his schoolmaster’s desk. “For forty minutes he harangued us from the chair,” wrote Senator Maclay of one such disquisition.

Maclay, the most radical and outspoken Anti-Federalist in the Senate, was a rough-hewn lawyer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who stood six feet three and believed he was serving among a “set of vipers.” Caustic, opinionated, he disliked just about everyone. In the privacy of his journal he called Alexander Hamilton “a damnable villain”; Robert Morris, “the greatest blackguard”; and referred to James Madison as “His Littleness.” For Adams he felt only contempt. Earlier Benjamin Rush had encouraged Maclay to support Adams for Vice President and to be friendly to him after Adams took office, with a view to the help Adams might provide in making Philadelphia the capital. “We knew his vanity,” Maclay wrote, “and hoped by laying hold of it to render him useful among the New England men in our scheme of bringing Congress to Pennsylvania.” Accordingly, Maclay treated Adams with feigned deference, hating every moment of it, as he wrote in his journal. He thought Adams “silly,” said he had “the face of folly.” Whenever he looked at the Vice President presiding in his chair, wrote Maclay, “I cannot help thinking of a monkey just put into breeches.”

It was the spirit of the Constitution that most Americans wanted, Maclay insisted, rising repeatedly to address the Senate. “Let us read the Constitution,” he declared. “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Any such attributes were “contraband language” in America.

To judge by what Maclay recorded, Adams made a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth, while he, Maclay, remained the voice of reason and the people’s will. Possibly, Adams was as ludicrous as Maclay portrayed him. But given Maclay’s contempt for Adams — a contempt so blatant that some in the Senate urged him to exercise some self-restraint — it is hard to imagine that what he wrote was not highly colored by bias.

Persisting in his futile effort, Adams made himself a mockery, even among some who were on his side. When Ralph Izard suggested that Adams himself be bestowed with a title, “His Rotundity,” the joke rapidly spread. In the House, Representatives John Page of Virginia, Jefferson’s lifelong friend, and Thomas Tucker of South Carolina relieved the tedium of extended debates by penning and exchanging doggerel at the Vice President’s expense. “In gravity clad, He has nought in his head, But visions of Nobels and Kings,” wrote Tucker, as a poetic query, to which Page responded:

I’ll tell in a trice —

’Tis old Daddy Vice

Who carries of pride an ass-load;

Who turns up his nose,

Wherever he goes,

With vanity swelled like a toad.

On May 14, exactly as the House had done, the Senate voted that Washington’s title be simply and only “The President of the United States.”

Clearly the issue had been blown out of proportion. As even Madison admitted on the floor of the House, it was not a question of vital importance. Nor had Adams proven himself a monarchist, as some like Maclay kept insisting. Privately, Adams knew what a bad start he had made, and to be the butt of jokes, after all he had been through, was hurtful. But as any adverse or critical comment on Washington, any ridicule at all, would have been considered unacceptable at this stage, Adams served as a convenient target for mockery and humor, and would again, just as he would be subject to the easiest, most damaging of smear words: monarchist. He was the first, but by no means the last, Vice President to take abuse in the President’s place, though much of it, to be sure, he brought on himself.

Most serious perhaps was the damage he had done to his standing with Washington, who was privately advised that the fuss over titles had made Adams not just unpopular in Virginia but “odious.” Washington was thereafter to maintain an appreciable distance from Adams, thus diminishing still more the importance of the vice presidency and Adams’s part in the scheme of things.

Yet through it all, true to his promise, Adams had shown no anger or acted discourteously to anyone. At one point he also conceded from the chair that perhaps he had been out of the country too long and failed to know the temper of the people.

To compound his troubles, word had been passed to him for the first time explaining the “dark and dirty intrigue” used to deny him votes for Vice President, and it sickened him. “Is not my election to this office in the scurvy manner in which it was done a curse rather than a blessing?” he asked Benjamin Rush in a letter charged with disgust. He had not yet learned who was behind the scheme, only that it had originated in New York, and the more he observed of life in New York, the more disconsolate he grew. To William Tudor, he railed against the “corruption of ambition,” the “ungovernable rage” for money and luxury he saw on all sides. Later, Adams would attribute such “scrawls” to “gloomy times and desperate circumstances.” He felt miserably alone. His accommodations with John Jay were the finest possible, and occasional Sundays with Nabby and her family helped greatly. But his need for Abigail, his ballast, was acute.

By mid-May he had located a house and posted an urgent plea for her to come at once. From her letters he knew the trouble she was having finding someone to lease the farm, and that she was short of funds. He told her to borrow whatever she needed, or sell off some of the livestock, “anything at any rate” rather than delay a day longer. If no one would take the place, she should “leave it to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field,” he told her. In the meantime, he was desperate for books to be sent — Hume, Johnson, Priestley, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, “and a Plutarch in French or English.”

As to the nature of his “difficulties,” he gave no explanation. Of all that had been going on in the Senate and his part in it, he said only that he had survived largely through prayer.

“My sincere thanks to Mr. Wibird for his remembrance of me in his prayers,” he told Abigail. “It is to me a most affecting thing to hear myself prayed for, in particular as I do every day in the week, and disposes me to bear with more composure, some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.”

The suspicion that Adams was a monarchist at heart grew stronger, and understandably, as in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government he did seem to lean in that direction. Distraught over what he had heard, Benjamin Rush wrote to caution his “dear friend” to think again and remember all he had espoused at the start of the Revolution.

In fact, Adams had done serious damage to his reputation and among others besides Rush whose opinions he most valued. It appeared that the man who put such stress on balance in government was himself a little unbalanced. Writing Madison from Paris, Jefferson dismissed the Senate’s proposed title for Washington as “the most superlatively ridiculous thing” he had ever heard of, and called Adams’s part in such business “proof” that Franklin’s characterization of Adams as “sometimes absolutely mad” was the right one.

As so often before when feeling battered and unappreciated, Adams poured out his fury and frustration on paper. To Rush he insisted he was as much a republican as ever. Still, he did not see hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as necessarily contrary to human nature. Nor was it beyond reason to imagine that the time could come when America, of necessity, might have to resort to something of the kind — as “an asylum against discord, seditions, and civil war” — in order to preserve the laws and liberties of the people. He did not expect to see anything like this happen in his lifetime. He was only saying it was conceivable.

“I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy,” he would later tell Rush, after Rush expressed worry that Adams had abandoned the ideals of 1776. “I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America,” Adams wrote explicitly. “Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.

I deny an “attachment to monarchy,” and I deny that I have “changed my principles since 1776.” . . . The continent is a kind of whispering gallery and acts and speeches are reverberated around from New York in all directions. The report is very loud at a distance when the whisper is very gentle in the center.

But this was written later, when the new government, as well as Adams’s own role in it, had become more stable. In the meanwhile, even Rush conceded that he was equally distraught over the moral temper of the times and the long-range prospects for America. “A hundred years hence, absolute monarchy will probably be rendered necessary in our country by the corruption of our people,” wrote the usually optimistic physician. He asked only that the republican ideal be given a fair chance, which Adams was not only willing, but determined, to do.

Many years afterward, reflecting on his friend Adams and the charge that he had been corrupted by his years in Europe, Rush wrote that, in fact, there had been no change at all. Adams was as “familiar and unaffected” as ever, “strictly upright,” and “a real American in principle and conduct.”

As distressing as almost anything for Adams was the flood of requests for his help in securing government jobs. His response was to refuse them all on the grounds that only the President had the power to make appointments. He himself, he insisted, had no say on patronage. Even appeals from deserving friends were denied. When Mercy Warren asked him to arrange a suitable position for her husband James, Adams replied huffily that he had no such influence and that even if he did he could not possibly allow the authority entrusted to him to become “subservient to my private views, or those of my family or friends.”

Adams detested the idea of friends trying to use him, but he could readily have done something for the Warrens, and with perfect propriety.

One further aggravation were the reports from home about young Charles, who had gotten into a scrape at Harvard. Abigail wrote of suffering “anxious hours” over what she had heard, though given the company Charles had been keeping, she was not surprised. She thought the boy belonged with his father. To Cotton Tufts, who apparently supplied more details on the matter, Adams wrote helplessly, “What shall I do with that tender-hearted fool?”

The exact nature of Charles’s difficulties was never defined in the correspondence, but from fragmentary Harvard records it appears that one student was expelled, others reprimanded, when the one, or all, ran naked through Harvard Yard, and the implications are that there had been drinking involved. In any event, Charles was with Abigail when she arrived by packet boat in New York at the start of summer, and life for the Vice President took a decided turn for the better.

ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS and feelings of stagnation that went with the vice presidency, all that so many others who followed in the office were to bemoan down the years, were felt intensely by the first Vice President. Yet for Adams it was by no means a time of unrelieved misery. Indeed, in their private lives, it was as happy a stretch of years as he and Abigail knew, beginning from the day of her arrival, June 24, 1789. “We are all very happy,” wrote Adams to Cotton Tufts. And so they were.

He had rented a proper country seat, Richmond Hill, a mile north of town on a high promontory beside the Hudson, with sweeping views and nearly always a breeze. Adams loved the location and that the rent was considerably less than for a comparable house in town. His salary as Vice President, a subject of much debate in Congress, would be set at $5,000, a figure lower than previously understood, and whether he could thus afford to live in a style befitting the office remained a worry.

“We are delightfully situated,” Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “The prospect all around is beautiful to the highest degree.” Sailing ships of every kind were constantly in view, passing up and down the wide tidal river.

On one side we see a view of the city and of Long Island. The river [is] in front, [New] Jersey and the adjacent country on the other side. You turn a little from the road and enter a gate. A winding road with trees in clumps leads to the house, and all around the house it looks wild and rural as uncultivated nature. . . . You enter under a piazza into a hall and turning to the right hand ascend a staircase which lands you in another [hall] of equal dimensions of which I make a drawing room. It has a glass door which opens into a gallery the whole front of the house which is exceeding pleasant. . . . There is upon the back of the house a garden of much greater extent than our Braintree garden, but it is wholly for a walk and flowers. It has hawthorne hedge and rows of trees with a broad gravel walk.

She had her usual complaints — repairs were needed, good servants impossible to find, the local prices outrageous — but the longer she stayed at Richmond Hill, the more attached she became, and Adams concurred. “Never,” he wrote, “did I live in so delightful a spot.”

They were both happy to be near Nabby and the grandchildren, and Abigail unhesitatingly assumed her social obligations as the wife of the Vice President, making and receiving calls. “At Richmond Hill it is expected that I am at home both to gentlemen and ladies whenever they come out, which is almost every day . . . besides it is a sweet morning ride.” After she and Nabby paid a first call on Mrs. Washington, Abigail expressed complete approval. “She is plain in dress, but that plainness is the best of every article. . . . Her hair is white, her teeth beautiful.” Having attended several of the President’s levees, Abigail could attest that the “court” of the Washingtons was as crowded, the company as brilliantly dressed as at St. James’s, with the difference that here she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Her “station” at levees, she explained to Mary, was to the right of Mrs. Washington — though this Mary must keep to herself, “as all distinction you know is unpopular.” If someone mistakenly stood in her place, the President never failed to see the situation corrected without anyone being offended. He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point that if he was not really one of the best intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.

He is polite with dignity, affable without formality, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. These are traits in his character which peculiarly fit him for the exalted station he holds, and God grant that he may hold it with the same applause and universal satisfaction for many, many years, as it is my firm opinion that no other man could rule over this great people and consolidate them into one mighty empire but he who is set over us.

After Paris and London, however, she found New York extremely dull. There was but one theater and the local preachers were unbearably ponderous. Still being at the center of politics more than made up for it. “I am fearful of touching upon political subjects,” she wrote. “Yet perhaps there is no person who feels more interested in them.”

Through the sweltering summer, Adams never missed a day in the Senate, rolling in each morning from Richmond Hill in a one-horse chaise, not the fine carriage portrayed in hostile newspaper accounts. A Judiciary Act was deliberated and passed, establishing a federal court system, and set the size of the Supreme Court. Then a proposal that the Senate have a say in the removal of cabinet officers — a proposal put forth by Senator Maclay — set off fierce debate. To the Federalists, the bill was a flagrant attempt to diminish the power of the President to the benefit of the Senate, and they adamantly objected, arguing that the removal of ranking officials in the executive branch must be at the sole discretion of the President. Adams met with several senators — he was “busy indeed, running to everyone,” according to Maclay’s journal. Most important, he convinced Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts to withdraw his support for Maclay’s bill. Then, when the vote proved a tie, Adams performed his only legislative function and cast his vote against the measure.

Afterward, James Lovell wrote from Massachusetts to tell Adams people were saying he had cast his vote with the President only because he “looked up to that goal.” Of course he looked up to it, Adams answered. How could it be otherwise? “I am forced to look up to it, and bound by duty to do so, because there is only one breath of one mortal between me and it.”

Another confidant, the Connecticut jurist John Trumbull, who had once clerked in Adams’s law office, told Adams the southern aristocrats naturally held him in contempt and remained his enemies because he was a New Englander without “advantages from pride and family.” They “suppose themselves born to greatness and cannot bear to be eclipsed by merit only.”

“You talk of my enemies, but I assure you I have none,” Adams said in spirited reply. That he was a New Englander, there was no denying. As for having no pride of family, there was little he was more proud of.

My father was an honest man, a lover of his country, and an independent spirit and the example of that father inspired me with the greatest pride of my life. . . . My father, grandfather, great grandfather, and great, great grandfather were all inhabitants of Braintree and all independent country gentlemen. I mean officers in the militia and deacons in the church. . . . The line I have just described makes about 160 years in which no bankruptcy was ever committed, no widow or orphan was ever defrauded, no redemptor intervened and no debt was contracted with England.

The old, stubborn independence of his forebears kept playing on his thoughts. It had been the bedrock of their integrity, and he was resolved to see it sustained. When his son Thomas wrote, expressing an interest in public life, Adams felt he was answering for generations of their line:

Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not. A young man should weigh well his plans. Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles. My advice to my children is to maintain an independent character.

OTHER THAN A FEW stiff social occasions, Adams had little contact with the President and no influence, but as yet it seemed no one had any influence with Washington. “He seeks information from all quarters and judges more independently than any man I ever saw,” Adams wrote approvingly. In the choice of the cabinet, Adams is not known to have been asked an opinion, or to have offered any.

It was to be a geographically balanced cabinet, with New England, the Middle States, and the South represented, and all four positions were promptly confirmed by the Senate: Hamilton of New York as Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson, Secretary of State; Edmund Randolph of Virginia, Attorney General; and Henry Knox of Massachusetts as Secretary of War. (If not the most intellectually outstanding of the four, Knox was certainly the most physically noticeable, having acquired over the years an immense girth, to the point of weighing nearly three hundred pounds.) For Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Washington chose John Jay.

It was thus to be a government led by revolutionaries, all men who had taken part in the Revolution. Washington, by common agreement, was the greatest man in the world, and in Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Jay, the American people could fairly claim to have the best minds in the country. And however striking their differences in temperament or political philosophy, they were, without exception, men dedicated primarily to seeing the American experiment succeed.

Adams approved of all the choices for the cabinet. Such was his regard for Hamilton at this point, he arranged for young Charles to clerk in Hamilton’s Wall Street law office until Hamilton commenced his duties as Secretary of the Treasury, when Charles moved on to another firm. So through late summer father and son could be seen riding off to work together each morning in the one-horse chaise.

III

IN SEPTEMBER, as Congress took up the question of where to locate the permanent capital, and the President prepared for a tour of New England, news came of revolution in France. It was a bolt out of the blue, catching everyone by surprise, and the event that was to make the already difficult business of founding the new American government still more complicated and contentious. In the life of John Adams the old issue of America’s relations with France was to bear heavily and fatefully yet again.

On July 14 an enraged mob had stormed and captured the Bastille, the ancient Paris prison that had come to symbolize an intolerable regime. All its prisoners, numbering just seven and none of them political, had been set free. Its commander had been beaten to death and decapitated, his dripping head then carried through the streets on a pike. In the days that followed, as rampaging mobs took over the city, one elderly Paris official was hanged from a lamppost, another cut to pieces, his heart torn from his body and brandished from a window of the Hôtel de Ville.

The headline of the New York Daily Gazette, September 19, 1789, announced, A COMPLETE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. The National Assembly was proceeding to form a new constitution. France, friend and ally in America’s struggle for freedom, was now herself taking up the cause, and nearly everywhere in America the news was greeted with enthusiasm.

France seems travailing in the birth of freedom [wrote William Maclay]. Her throes and pangs of labor are violent. God give her a happy delivery! Royalty, nobility, and vile pageantry, by which a few of the human race lord it over and tread on the necks of their fellow mortals, seem like to be demolished with their kindred Bastille, which is said to be laid in ashes. Ye gods, with what indignation do I review the late attempt of some creatures among us to revive the vile machinery. Oh Adams, Adams what a wretch thou art!

For Adams the news from France had the effect of an alarm bell. Heedless of the troubles he had already brought on himself with his Defence of the Constitutions, he took up his pen and launched into a series of newspaper essays, determined to show again the evil effects of unbalanced governments. He consulted no one, asked for no advice or opinion from others. Working under intense, self-imposed pressure, he wrote straight out, on and on, never pausing to rewrite or edit himself, which would have helped and for which he later apologized.

He labored at these essays for months, during which Congress adjourned and he returned to Massachusetts to join Washington for part of his visit there, proudly escorting the President on a tour of Harvard. But even before the first of the essays appeared, he let it be known that while he understood the reasons for the revolution in France — the oppressive abuses of the government, the overbearing and costly “armies of monks, soldiers, and courtiers” — and though he strongly supported the ideals espoused by French patriots, he viewed the situation with dire misgivings. “The French Revolution,” he wrote to a Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, “will, I hope, produce effects in favor of liberty, equity, and humanity as extensive as this whole globe and as lasting as all time.” Yet, he could not help foresee a tragic outcome, in that a single legislative assembly, as chosen by the French, could only mean “great and lasting calamities.”

To the Reverend Richard Price in London, who had preached a widely publicized sermon in support of what was happening in France, Adams acknowledged feeling a sense of satisfaction and triumph in the revolution. Nor did he doubt its immense historic importance: “It appears to me that most of the events in the annals of the world are but childish tales compared to it,” Adams declared. Later, having read Price’s sermon, he said such principles and sentiments as Price expressed had been “from the year 1760 to this hour, the whole scope of my life.” But he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling.” He could not accept the idea of enshrining reason as a religion, as desired by the philosophes. “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.”

From experience he knew the kinds of men such upheavals could give rise to, Adams told another correspondent. In revolutions, he warned, “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.” France was “in great danger.” Ahead of anyone in the government, and more clearly than any, Adams foresaw the French Revolution leading to chaos, horror, and ultimate tyranny.

In London, meanwhile, the fiery Irish-born statesman Edmund Burke, who had once been the American Revolution’s strongest friend in Parliament, declared in a speech that the French were proving themselves the ablest architects of ruin who ever existed. “In one summer they have done their business . . . they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufacturers.” The French, said Burke, sounding very like Adams, had “destroyed all balances and counterpoises which serve to fix a state and give it steady direction, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous mass of mob and democracy.”

Burke adamantly opposed such English enthusiasm for the revolution in France as espoused by Richard Price, which he thought woefully irresponsible, and the speech, which was published in full in New York in the Gazette of the United States, was but a prelude to what would be Burke’s most famous book, Reflections on the French Revolution, published late in 1790.

Adams, too, took up the architectural theme, in a letter to his old fellow revolutionary Samuel Adams. “Everything will be pulled down. So much seems certain,” he wrote. “But what will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? . . . Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in impostors?”

• • •

THAT SEPTEMBER, Jefferson with his daughters Patsy and Polly, and slaves James and Sally Hemings, landed at Norfolk, Virginia, where he learned for the first time that he had been named Secretary of State.

He had left Paris well after the fall of the Bastille, and though he had witnessed none of the bloodshed of the summer, he had known what was happening and approved, convinced the violence would soon end and that for France, a glorious new day had dawned.

When Jefferson arrived at Monticello, according to traditional family accounts, his slaves were so overjoyed to see him they unhitched his horses and pulled his carriage up the last ridge of the mountain, then carried “Master” in their arms into his house. “It seemed impossible to satisfy their anxiety to touch and kiss the very earth which bore him,” Patsy Jefferson would write.

Jefferson remained at Monticello through the winter, for nearly three months, during which Patsy, at seventeen, was married to a cousin, Thomas Randolph, Jr., after little or no courtship. As a wedding present, Jefferson gave the young couple 1,000 acres and twelve families of slaves, and helped in the eventual purchase of a nearby plantation for them called Edgehill — all of which necessitated an additional loan of several thousand dollars, this time from bankers in Amsterdam.

In early March, Jefferson started for New York, stopping briefly at Philadelphia to pay a last visit to Benjamin Franklin, who was mortally ill. Calling on Benjamin Rush shortly afterward, Jefferson assured his old friend he was as faithful a republican as ever and “deplored” the change in John Adams. He regarded Adams “with respect and affection as a great and upright man,” Jefferson said, but “the greatest man in the world,” he had lately concluded, was Madison.

At New York, Jefferson took a lease on a house on Maiden Lane, and immediately — inevitably — ordered that extensive alterations be made inside and out, despite the fact that New York was not expected to remain the capital much longer. James Hemings, now accomplished in the art of French cookery, was installed in the kitchen, and a letter went off to Paris telling Adrien Petit to come as soon as possible.

With the death of Franklin on April 17, Philadelphia staged the greatest public homage that had ever been given a deceased American. In New York, the House of Representatives voted to put on mourning, but the Senate declined. When Jefferson proposed to Washington that the executive department follow the example of the House, Washington, too, declined, saying he would not know where to draw the line if he once began such a ceremony.

Adams’s only known response to the news of Franklin’s demise was in a letter to Rush in which he lamented the lies history would tell of “our revolution.” “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war.”

The reunion of the Adamses and Jefferson in New York was appropriately amicable. They saw each other socially at dinners and presidential levees, and on more than one occasion, Jefferson rode out to Richmond Hill. “Jefferson is here and adds much to the social circle,” Abigail noted, but that was all. Jefferson in his letters home to Patsy (whom he addressed as Martha, now that she was a married woman) made no mention of the Adamses.

The Gazette of the United States had by now carried the text of a formal reply by Jefferson to the welcome he had received from his Virginia neighbors. It was a declaration of his faith in reason and democracy that he had taken great pains over.

It rests now with ourselves to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government so long denied to mankind: to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest, solitary and short-lived. Let us then, my dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

But to Adams the “sufficiency” of reason alone for the care of human affairs was by no means clear, and it was exactly the will of the majority, particularly as being exercised in France, that so gravely concerned him. He was certain France had “severe trials” to endure, as he wrote to a friend. The will of the majority, if out of hand, could lead to “horrible ravages,” he was sure. “My fundamental maxim of government is never to trust the lamb to the wolf,” and in France, he feared, the wolf was now the majority.

Adams’s series of articles also commenced in the Gazette of the United States that spring of 1790, on April 27, and would continue for a year, endlessly, it seemed to many. Though they were unsigned, the identity of the author was common knowledge. Titled “Discourses on Davila,” and ultimately published as a book, they were largely a translation of a history of the French civil wars of the sixteenth century, a once-popular work, Historia delle guerre civili di Francia, by the Italian Enrico Caterino Davila, published first in 1630. More than he had in his Defence of the Constitutions, Adams stressed the perils of unbridled, unbalanced democracy, and in what he called “useful reflections” he dealt with human nature, drawing heavily on the works of Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, and on Pope’s Essay on Man.

In the initial installments, he wrote again, as he had as far back as his teaching days at Worcester, of the natural ”passion for distinction” in all men and women — “whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected.”

“To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable,” wrote the man who, as Vice President, felt himself so consistently overlooked.

He ruminated on avarice, poverty, fame, and honor. No one, he wrote, better understood the human heart than the Romans, who “considered that as reason is the guide of life, the senses, the imagination and affections are the springs of activity.” Unlike Jefferson, Adams was not only fascinated by “the passions,” but certain they ruled more often than others were willing to concede. “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.”

The world was growing more enlightened, Adams conceded. “Knowledge is more diffused. . . . Man, as man, becomes an object of respect.” But, he insisted, there was “great reason to pause and preserve our sobriety.

Amidst all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.

Between Jefferson and Adams there was no discussion of their diverging views. To Jefferson, Adams had become an embarrassment, and while always pleasant in social encounters, Jefferson had as little as possible to do with him. On matters of foreign relations, where Adams’s judgment could have been of value, Jefferson would never seek his counsel or include him in deliberations. Washington seldom asked Adams for views, but Jefferson, who in Europe had deferred repeatedly to Adams, asked for them not at all.

Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions. That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine he, with others, had long accepted and espoused. “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,” Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened. The “turbulent maneuvers” of factions, he now wrote privately, could “tie the hands and destroy the influence” of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good. There was “division of sentiments over everything,” he told his son-in-law William Smith. “How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts!”

Then, in May, with the weather unseasonably wet and cold and influenza rampant in the city, Washington was suddenly taken so ill it appeared the one unifying force respected by all was in mortal jeopardy.

In the first six months of his presidency, Washington had lived in a comparatively modest house on Cherry Street, but had since moved to grander quarters, a mansion on Broadway, where now the street was cordoned off to give him some quiet. One doctor after another came and went at the front door. For several days, until the fever broke, it appeared the President was dying. Senator Maclay, on a call at the house, found “every eye full of tears.” When the President’s presiding physician allowed that death was all but certain, alarm swept through the city. Calamity faced the country.

For the Adamses, they were days of extreme anxiety. When the crisis passed, Abigail tried to convey to Mary Cranch the degree to which the union and permanency of the government depended on Washington’s life. “At this early day when neither our finances are arranged, nor our government sufficiently cemented to promise duration, his death would, I fear, have had most disastrous consequences.” The prospect of anyone succeeding to Washington’s place was unthinkable, but the realization that there was indeed “only one breath,” as John had put it, between him and the presidency, and that it would be he who would have to face the “disastrous consequences,” had struck her full force as it had not before. “I feared a thousand things which I pray I never may be called to experience,” she continued. “Most assuredly I do not wish for the highest spot. I never before realized what I might be called to do, and the apprehension of it only for a few days greatly distressed me.”

Meantime, the entire household at Richmond Hill was stricken with influenza, with the exception of the Vice President. James Madison had been laid up. One congressman died. Jefferson was out of circulation for a month, confined to his house in the grip of excruciating headaches.

That one had to keep “a good heart,” come what may, was Abigail’s lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.”

That June of 1790, with the President recovered, the French diplomat, Louis-Guillaume Otto, summing up the situation in New York for his government, reported that the influence and importance of the Vice President were “nil.” If Washington had an heir apparent, by all rights it was Jefferson.

It appears certain at present that he [Adams] will never be President and that he will have a very formidable competitor in Mr. Jefferson, who, with more talents and knowledge than he, has infinitely more the principles and manners of a republican.

THAT SUMMER Congress worked itself to a fever pitch over two issues certain to be of long-lasting consequence. The question of where to locate the national capital had been a topic of rancorous discussion since the summer before, and was again at the forefront, along with a proposal for the federal government to assume some $25 million in debts incurred by the states during the Revolution. The “assumption” plan was the work of the youthful Hamilton, who, since his appointment, had swiftly made the Treasury the most creative department in the government, and was commonly recognized as having extraordinary ability.

An immigrant of illegitimate birth, Hamilton had arrived in New York from the West Indies at age fifteen. In less than ten years he had distinguished himself as a scholar at King’s (later Columbia) College, served as Washington’s aide in the war, led an assault at Yorktown, and married into the wealthy, influential Schuyler family of New York, which did him no harm when, after the war, he turned his energies to the law and politics. Brilliant to the point of genius, he exuded vitality and could turn on great charm when needed. His capacity for hard work was almost superhuman. Though somewhat shorter than Adams — about five feet seven — he was attractively slender, handsome, with clear blue eyes and sandy red hair, and dressed so as never to be lost in a crowd, in perfectly tailored coats, waistcoats, and breeches in a rainbow of colors. Even his ambition seemed to become him — Adams wrote of Hamilton’s “high-minded ambition” — and his incurable love of intrigue had thus far alienated no one.

As one of the principal authors, along with Madison, of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton ranked as a leading proponent of a strong central government, and his name was commonly linked with that of Madison, with whom he remained on friendly terms. Further, both were highly esteemed by the President, which was of considerable importance.

Madison, a tiny, sickly-looking man who weighed little more than a hundred pounds and dressed always in black, had emerged as the most formidable figure in the House, largely on the strength of a penetrating intelligence and a shrewd political sense. Adams thought him overrated, but in time Adams would change his mind.

Hamilton’s assumption plan had first been laid before Congress the previous January, 1790, as part of a large report in which he argued that a sound public credit was essential to economic growth and national unity. He had called for the central government to pay off all federal debt and to assume the debt of the states as well, on the grounds that they had been incurred in the common cause of independence. Boldly, Hamilton argued that such an increase in the national debt would be a blessing, for the greater the responsibility of the central government, the greater its authority.

He was vehemently opposed, however, by those who saw it as an overreaching and very unrepublican move to concentrate power in the central government to the detriment of the states. To southerners in the Congress the scheme would not only reduce the importance of the states, but would lead to a dangerous, ultimately corrupting concentration of wealth and power in the North. And it was Madison now, breaking with Hamilton, who led the opposition in the House, where assumption was put to the vote on April 12 and narrowly defeated.

Still, the battle continued, and at the same time that the location of the capital — the “residence” issue — had become a subject of equal rancor. New Yorkers, eager to keep the capital where it was, had begun building an executive mansion for Washington by the Battery, with a grand panorama of the harbor. New Englanders also favored New York, it being much the easiest location for them to reach, though Philadelphia, adamantly espoused by the Pennsylvanians, was considered an acceptable alternative.

The Virginians wanted no part of either of the northern cities and were strongly committed to bringing the capital south to a site on the Potomac River not far from Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. Those “most adjacent to the seat of legislation will always possess advantages over others,” said Madison, who feared that the South and its agrarian way of life would suffer were the capital to remain in the North.

In the Senate, charges and countercharges were voiced with increasing vehemence. Adams struggled to keep order and apparently with little effect. “John Adams has neither judgment, firmness of mind, nor respectability of deportment to fill the chair of such an assembly,” scoffed the ever-splenetic William Maclay.

Then, on a morning in June, the historic “compromise of 1790” began to take form, when Hamilton and Jefferson met outside the President’s house and Hamilton, taking Jefferson by the arm, walked him up and down for half an hour, urging him, for the sake of the union, to join in “common cause” and resolve acceptance of the assumption bill. Professing that reasonable men ought to be able to reach a compromise, Jefferson invited Hamilton and Madison to dine at his house the next day. And there, over a bottle of Jefferson’s best wine, the bargain was struck. In return for southern support for the assumption bill, Hamilton agreed to do all he could to persuade the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capital by the Potomac, if it were agreed to move the capital temporarily to Philadelphia. Madison said he would not vote for assumption, but then neither would he be “strenuous” in opposition.

Whether, in fact, the outcome was resolved in this fashion is not altogether clear, but certainly Jefferson believed the bargain had been settled, for on July 1 he wrote William Short in Paris to have his furniture and paintings shipped to Philadelphia.

The crucial vote on residence, however, was made not in the House but in the Senate, where apparently an agreement had already been reached between the Pennsylvanians and the Virginians. When a last-minute motion to keep the capital in New York for two more years resulted in a thirteen-to-thirteen tie, Adams cast a nay vote.

By July 12 both houses of Congress had voted to relocate the capital in Philadelphia for ten years — until the turn of the century — after which it would move to a permanent site on the Potomac. The Pennsylvanians went along with the agreement, convinced that once the capital was located in Philadelphia it would never move. Adams was inclined to agree. A capital, he said, ought to be in a great city, an idea no Virginian would ever have entertained.

With the passage of the assumption bill at the end of the month came cries of “intrigues, cabals, and combinations.” New Yorkers were outraged. Senator Maclay speculated that, if the truth were known, Washington was behind the whole arrangement, which indeed he was, and in the first public criticism of the President, the New York Advertiser charged him with gross ingratitude to the city of New York.

AS SOON AS CONGRESS ADJOURNED on August 12, the government began packing for the move. The President and Mrs. Washington departed for Mount Vernon, while the Vice President set off for Philadelphia to find a house, leaving Abigail in despair over the thought of leaving Richmond Hill, and particularly as Nabby gave birth to a third child that summer, another boy, named Thomas.

By late fall the Adamses were resettled in a substantial brick house two miles west of Philadelphia overlooking the Schuylkill. Called Bush Hill, it was another setting of idyllic charm, except that the British army, during the occupation, had left hardly a tree or bush standing.

Washington arrived and moved into the Robert Morris house on Market Street, considered the grandest residence in Philadelphia. (General Sir William Howe had made it his headquarters during the occupation.) Jefferson, too, took a house on Market, just blocks away, where his additions this time included a library, stable, and garden house. He had furniture sent on from Monticello and eventually his treasures from France arrived in no less than eighty packing cases, a quantity of purchases such as no one American had ever brought back from Europe.

On Monday, December 6, Congress reconvened in Congress Hall, formerly the Philadelphia County Courthouse, a two-story red-brick building erected since the war on the west side of the State House. As at Federal Hall in New York, the House of Representatives met on the first floor, the Senate on the floor above. The Supreme Court would sit in what had been City Hall, a corresponding brick building on the east side of the State House.

For all that Philadelphia had grown and changed, it was familiar territory for Adams, filled with memories. He was happy to be back, and once she had overcome another spell of poor health, Abigail was writing of her delight in seeing “the dazzling Mrs. Bingham again,” and of Mrs. Washington’s Friday evenings, where “fine ladies show themselves, and as candlelight is a great improver of beauty, they appear to great advantage.” The President was as fond of theater as were the Adamses, and invited them to accompany him and Mrs. Washington to performances at the Southwark Theater. They dined several times at the presidential mansion, and the President and his lady, in a rare exception to his rule of accepting no invitations, came to dine at Bush Hill.

So bone-chilling was the cold of that winter, every fireplace at Bush Hill had to be kept blazing and Abigail’s principal problem with new servants this time was that they were so frequently drunk. But her house was full of life, as she wrote. Son Thomas, having finished at Harvard, came to live with his mother and father. Charles rode down from New York for periodic visits, bringing his customary good cheer. When John Quincy traveled from Boston for a stay in February, Abigail was able to report to sister Mary that for the first time in years she had all three sons together under her roof.

Like her husband, Abigail had the highest hopes for their eldest son. The time would come, she said, when “this young man will be sought as a jewel of great price.” But John Quincy did not look well and seemed to have lost “much of his sprightliness and vivacity.” The year before, while still at Newburyport, he had fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, Mary Frazier, and was strongly advised by his parents that both he and the girl were too young for a serious “attachment.” By autumn the romance was broken off. Now, Abigail reported to Mary Cranch, the young man fretted that his Boston law practice was so slow taking hold. “We all preach patience to him.”

But her greater worry was Nabby, whose husband, with a growing family and no profession, had suddenly gone off to England on some kind of speculative venture.

Happily, America was prospering, commerce and agriculture both flourishing, and there was increasing confidence everywhere. Secretary Hamilton’s proposed national bank, the centerpiece of his plan and now before Congress, had the support of nearly everyone, Abigail reported to Cotton Tufts. There was not a doubt that the bill would pass and by a considerable majority, she assured the trusted family adviser.

As she predicted, the bill for the Bank of the United States passed by a sizable majority, despite opposition from Madison and Jefferson, who urged the President to exercise a veto on constitutional grounds. But Hamilton’s views carried greater weight with Washington, who signed the bill on February 25.

Better versed on financial matters than her husband, Abigail wanted to invest immediately in government securities, but as she told Cotton Tufts, “Mr. Adams held to his faith in land as true wealth.”

Indeed, Adams not only put his trust in land as the safest of investments, but agreed in theory with Jefferson and Madison that an agricultural society was inherently more stable than any other — not to say more virtuous. Like most farmers, he had strong misgivings about banks, and candidly admitted his ignorance of “coin and commerce.” Yet he was as pleased by the rise of enterprise and prosperity as anyone, and in moments of discouragement over public life, even contemplated going into the China trade! As strong as his attachment to life lived close to the land may have been, Adams liked what he saw happening. “Never since I was born was America so happy as at this time.”

Had the Adamses invested in government securities as Abigail wished, they would, almost certainly, have wound up quite wealthy.

NOWHERE IN THE DOZENS of personal letters they had written in more than a year had either John or Abigail made mention of Jefferson. To judge by their correspondence he might still have been in France. It was not that they never saw him. Rather, it seems that if they had nothing good to say, they said nothing. But then that spring of 1791, Adams and Jefferson were caught up in a public controversy that neither anticipated or wanted and that put the first severe strain on their already cooling friendship. The effect on national politics would be profound, and as was perhaps inevitable, the root cause was the revolution in France.

In furious response to Edmund Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine, who was then in England, had produced a pamphlet, The Rights of Man, that attacked Burke and set forth an impassioned defense of human rights, liberties, and equality. Jefferson, on receiving an early copy, promptly passed it on to a Philadelphia printer with a note warmly endorsing it as the answer to “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” When the printer published a first American edition, Jefferson’s endorsement appeared prominently on the title page and was attributed to the Secretary of State.

The endorsement caused a sensation. Jefferson claimed to be astonished but privately confirmed that by “political heresies” he meant the writings of John Adams. In a letter of explanation to Washington, he said he was “mortified” to be “thus brought forward on the public stage . . . against my love of silence and quiet, and my abhorrence of dispute.” He greatly regretted that “the indiscretion of a printer” had doubtless offended his “friend Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have cordial esteem,” despite “his apostasy to hereditary monarchy.” But to Adams, Jefferson said nothing. Weeks passed, during which Adams, deeply offended, kept silent, then returned to Braintree for a brief visit.

Presently, when a series of spirited letters signed “Publicola” began appearing in Boston’s Columbian Centinel, attacking The Rights of Man and its sponsor, Jefferson, like many readers, assumed “Publicola” was Adams. In fact, it was John Quincy, who, rising to the defense of his father, took Jefferson to task for claiming that a difference in political opinion might be declared “heresy,” and those who differed in view from the Secretary of State were therefore heretics.

I am somewhat at a loss to determine [he wrote] what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point? . . . I have always understood, sir, that the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state . . . and the only political tenet which they could stigmatize with the name of heresy would be that which should attempt to impose an opinion upon their understandings, upon the single principle of authority.

Jefferson let three months pass before sending Adams a rather stiff letter of apology and explanation, which, though well intentioned, hardly sufficed. Written at Philadelphia, the letter was dated July 17, 1791. He had taken up his pen a dozen times and as often put it down, “suspended between opposing considerations,” Jefferson began. “I determine, however, to write from a conviction that truth between candid minds can never do harm.” He had written what he had about “heresies,” he said, only “to take off a little of the dryness of the note.” He had been “thunderstruck” by the printer’s use of the note. He had hoped it would attract no attention and implied it might not have but for the fuss over the “Publicola” series. It was because of “Publicola” that “our names [were] thrown on the public stage as public antagonists.

That you and I differ in our idea of the best form of government is well known to us both, but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confiding our differences of opinion to private conversation. And I can declare with truth in the presence of the Almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion. The friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us required this explanation from me, and I know you too well to fear any misconstruction of the motives of it.

Never in his life, Jefferson added, had he written anything for newspapers anonymously or under a pseudonym, and he never intended to.

He did not tell Adams, as he had Washington, that he had Adams specifically in mind as the perpetrator of “heresies.” Nor did he say that he knew by then that “Publicola” was John Quincy. Jefferson’s source was Madison, who had also observed that the young man’s style was notably less clumsy than that of the father.

Adams answered Jefferson at once and with obvious feeling. He accepted Jefferson’s account of what had happened, but allowed that the printer had “sown the seeds of more evils” than he could ever atone for. He, Adams, had been held up to ridicule in one newspaper after another for his meanness (the New Haven Gazette had called him an “unprincipled libeler”), his love of monarchy, his antipathy to freedom. Adams vehemently denied that he favored monarchy. “If you suppose that I have or ever had a design or desire of attempting to introduce a government of Kings, Lords, and Commons, or in other words a hereditary executive, or a hereditary senate, either into the government of the United States or that of any individual state in this country, you are wholly mistaken. . . . If you have ever put such a construction on anything of mine, I beg you would mention it to me, and I will undertake to convince you that it has no such meaning.”

The problem was that so many who criticized his writings had never bothered to read them, Adams said. Some misunderstood them, others willfully misrepresented them. Either way, he had been made the victim of “tempestuous abuse.” That Jefferson himself had once praised his Defence of the Constitutions, apparently finding no heresies therein, Adams, to his credit, made no mention.

He took issue only with Jefferson’s claim that their differences on the best form of government were well known to both of them. This was simply not so, Adams wrote. “You and I have never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government.”

He was not “Publicola,” and he had had no hand in writing the essays, Adams assured Jefferson, but refrained from identifying the author. What troubled him most, he said, was the mounting enmity between public men. “I must own to you that the daring traits of ambition and intrigue, and those unbridled rivalries which have already appeared, are the most melancholy and alarming systems that I have ever seen in this country.” If this was what politics came to, then the sooner he was out of it, the happier he would be.

At the last, Adams left no doubt of how much Jefferson and his friendship meant to him.

I thank you, sir, very seriously for writing to me. It is high time that you and I should come to an explanation with each other. The friendship that has subsisted for fifteen years between us without the smallest interruption, and until this occasion without the slightest suspicion, ever has been and still is very dear to my heart. There is no office which I would not resign, rather than give a just occasion to one friend to foresake me. Your motives for writing to me, I have not a doubt, were the most pure and the most friendly; and I have no suspicion that you will not receive this explanation from me in the same candid light.

Jefferson would have been better off had he let the matter drop. Instead, he wrote again, speciously insisting that blame for the controversy rested with “Publicola.” Then, in what must have been an effort to spare Adams’s feelings, he went further. In direct contradiction to what he told Washington, Jefferson denied to Adams that he ever had him in mind when he wrote to the printer: “Indeed, it was impossible that my note should occasion your name to be brought into question; for as far from naming you, I had not even in view any writing which I might suppose to be yours. . . . Thus I hope, my dear sir, that you will see me to have been innocent in effect as I was in intention.”

In sum, Jefferson refused to take any responsibility for what had happened. To Washington he cited the “indiscretion of a printer”; to Adams he said John Quincy was the cause of the trouble, and that he himself was innocent of ever even thinking of Adams in the first place.

But it was not Jefferson who had suffered abuse and ridicule in the press. It was Adams, and the damage done was extreme, given the overwhelming popularity of both Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.

From this point on, Adams and Jefferson were seldom to be perceived as anything other than archrivals. The public stage that Jefferson said he wished to avoid, the growing enmity between public men that Adams abhorred, had made them in the public mind symbols of the emerging divisions in national politics. Further, in what he had written to Madison, and in what he had said in his note to the printer, Jefferson had tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist, the two charges most commonly and unjustly made against him for the rest of his life.

Adams let the matter drop. He made no reply to Jefferson’s last letter, and there would be no further correspondence between them for several years. The “explanation with each other” that Adams hoped for would have to wait for more than two decades.

IN THE AUTUMN of 1791, alarmed to find they were living beyond their means, Abigail and John moved from Bush Hill to a modest dwelling in town at Fourth and Arch Streets. Servants were let go, except for Briesler and a cook, “a clever, sober, honest,” free black woman, as Abigail reported to Mary Cranch. “We live sociably and friendly together,” she wrote, and in many ways felt they were all better off living in town.

But with winter came the inevitable siege of illnesses, and for Abigail, beset mainly by rheumatism “attended with a violent fever,” it was as miserable a time as she had known. Her eyes became so inflamed she could not bear any light in her room, “not even the fire to blaze.” After six weeks in bed she was still too feeble to go downstairs without being carried. “I have scarcely any flesh left in comparison to what I was.” Dr. Rush came several times to draw blood, and, in the mistaken belief that the human body contained more blood than it actually does, it was his practice to bleed patients far more than customary. At times he was known to remove as much as eighty ounces, which could well explain Abigail’s feeble state.

The news that Colonel Smith, newly returned from London, was to sail again on the next packet, and would be taking Nabby and the children with him, left her feeling still more dreadful. The “everlasting fever” hung on, she wrote weeks later, confiding also that the “critical period” of midlife compounded her troubles. She brooded over the brevity of life. “How soon may our fairest prospects be leveled with the dust and show us that man in his best estate is but vanity and dust?” she wrote on March 21, 1792, after a particularly bad night of “nerves.” It was already another election year, the end of the President’s and the Vice President’s terms of office. Who knew what was to come? Southern members of the House seemed determined not just to oppose the Secretary of the Treasury but to destroy him, while much of the press joined in the assault. Not even the President escaped their venom any longer. Oddly it was only the Vice President now who was allowed to “sleep in peace,” though this hardly compensated for Abigail’s worry for the country.

“I firmly believe,” she darkly forecast to Mary, “if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hopes, should prevail.”

Adams was more sanguine. If frequently exhausted by his labors and distressed over her ailments, he appears to have come to terms with his marginal role in the order of things. It had been a painful process, but he had at last learned the part he was supposed to play and to a large degree accepted its limitations. Rarely did he speak in the Senate anymore. Rarely if ever did he intrude on Senate business. If the role of Vice President made him a political cipher — as it would anyone — he could at least serve faithfully.

He was in the chair every day, all day, without fail, which was a point of pride with him, but also of some worry, since he knew such sedentary confinement to be good neither for the body nor the spirit of “a man habituated for a long course of years to long voyages and immense journeys.”

Though loyal to Washington and the administration, Adams was but nominally a Federalist, refusing steadfastly to be, or to be perceived as, a party man. That he had allowed “no party virulence or personal reflections” to escape him was also a matter of pride and consolation. If called upon to maintain order in the Senate now, he apparently had only to tap gently with his silver pencil case on the small mahogany table before him.

In mid-April, her health sufficiently restored for her to travel, Abigail returned to Massachusetts. Adams followed in May, once Congress adjourned, and the long summer at home, far removed from the hornets’ nest of election-year politics at the capital, did much to restore them both.

The one big change at home was that their part of town, the old, first-settled North Precinct, had been broken off from the rest of Braintree and renamed Quincy. Otherwise, town life and days on the farm went on refreshingly the same as always.

AMONG CLOSE ASSOCIATES the President had been expressing a strong desire to return to private life. He was weary of the demands of office, weary and disheartened, Washington said, by party rancor and a severely partisan press that had taken to calling him the American Caesar.

Many of the harshest attacks on Hamilton’s economic policies — and some of the more biting comments on Washington himself — came from the National Gazette, a newspaper newly established in Philadelphia as an antidote to the partisan Federalist views of the Gazette of the United States, to which Alexander Hamilton was a regular contributor of essays and money. But when it became known that the editor of the new National Gazette, Philip Freneau, had been encouraged to establish the paper by Madison and Jefferson, and that he was also employed by Jefferson as a translator in the Department of State, it appeared Jefferson himself had a hand in the attacks on the President and the administration. The most vicious assaults, however, were aimed at Hamilton, whom Freneau delighted in vilifying, and to add to the insults, such diatribes were nearly always accompanied by lavish praise for Jefferson.

Washington claimed to disregard newspaper abuse but privately asked Jefferson to intercede with Freneau and remove him from the State Department. Jefferson insisted that Freneau and his paper were saving the country from monarchy and persuaded Washington that it would be a grave misstep to impede on freedom of the press.

Even more aggravating for the President was the unrelenting feud between Jefferson and Hamilton, the two highest officers in his cabinet, and the most gifted. Animosity between them had reached the point where they could hardly bear to be in the same room. Each was certain the other was a dangerous man intent on dominating the government; and each privately complained of the other to the President.

The one, Hamilton, disliked and distrusted the French, while, for the good of the American economy, strongly favoring better relations with Britain. The other, Jefferson, disliked and distrusted the British, while seeing in France and the French Revolution the embodiment of the highest ideals of the American Revolution. To Jefferson, Hamilton was “not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” To Hamilton, Jefferson belonged among those “pretenders to profound knowledge” who were “ignorant of the most useful of all sciences — the science of human nature.” The day would come, Hamilton warned, when Jefferson would be revealed as a voluptuary and an “intriguing incendiary.”

Washington urged “mutual forebearances, and temporizing yieldings on all sides.” To Hamilton, he expressed a deep melancholy that “a fabric so goodly, erected under so many providential circumstances,” should be “wracked by controversy and brought to the edge of collapse.”

On one issue only were Hamilton and Jefferson in agreement — that for the sake of the country, Washington must serve a second term, as he alone could hold the union together. “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told Washington. There were very few such uniquely eminent individuals upon whom society had peculiar claims, Jefferson insisted. Among that indispensable few, however, Jefferson did not count himself. His own intention was to retire.

In the National Gazette, Freneau warned that “plain American republicans” stood to “be overwhelmed by those monarchical writers on Davila, etc.,” who were spreading “their poisoned doctrines throughout this blessed continent.” To commemorate July 4, the paper declared, “Another revolution must and will be brought about in favor of the people.”

Seeing themselves as representing the true spirit of republican ideals, Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, and others allied with them had begun calling themselves Republicans, thus implying that the Federalists were not, but rather monarchists, or monocrats, as Jefferson preferred to say. And while there was as yet some question whether it was Jefferson or Madison who led the Republicans, there was no doubt about who led the Federalists. It was Hamilton, who was more than a match for anyone.

Hamilton, for his part, had no intention of diverting votes from Adams this time around. Aaron Burr, a New York Republican and Hamilton’s nemesis, was in the running for Vice President and so Hamilton was happy now to laud Adams as “a real friend to genuine liberty, order and stable government.”

Early in September, Hamilton sent an urgent letter to Quincy telling Adams he must return to Philadelphia with all possible speed. Adams’s absence from the scene, Hamilton warned, was benefiting the candidacy of yet another, more serious rival for the vice presidency, the popular governor of New York, George Clinton, a long-time Anti-Federalist now in the Republican camp. “I am persuaded you are very indifferent personally to the event of a certain election, yet I hope you are not so as to the cause of good government,” Hamilton wrote.

But with Congress not due to reconvene for another two months and the President still declining to say whether he would serve again, Adams saw no need for hurry and remained where he was. What annoyed him exceedingly, he confided to Abigail, was the idea that George Clinton could ever be regarded as a serious rival, given the immense difference in their sacrifices for the country, differences in experience and knowledge. To Adams this was not a question of vanity but of plain fact.

THE NEWSPAPERS, meanwhile, were filled with increasingly lurid news from Paris. With the whole country beset by chaos and violence, France by now was also at war with much of Europe. The King was being held a virtual prisoner in the Palace of the Tuileries, while the extreme radicals of the revolution, the Jacobins — Marat, Danton, Robespierre — were riding high.

The Massachusetts Centinel carried a report from London dated August 14, describing how, on August 10, a riotous mob of thousands had marched on the Tuileries to proclaim the King a traitor and call for his head. The paper reported that 130 of the King’s Swiss guards were cut down, countless others murdered, and “numerous heads, stuck on poles, were carried about the streets.” Actually more than 500 Swiss guards had been slaughtered, and at least 400 of the besiegers.

An October edition of the Boston paper carried a report of massacres in September in which 6,000 to 7,000 people had been slain, which was an exaggeration. Yet the truth of the September Massacres was hardly less appalling. Some 1,400 political prisoners — including more than 200 priests — were butchered in the name of the revolution. “Let the blood of traitors flow. That is the only way to save the country,” cried Marat, who had once been a physician pledged to save lives.

From London, Nabby wrote to her mother of reports from Paris “too dreadful to relate.” “Ship loads of poor, distressed, penniless priests and others are daily landing upon this island.” The Marquis de Lafayette had fled France and was being “kept a close prisoner by the Austrians.” Madame de Lafayette had escaped to Holland. That the French King and Queen would soon “fall sacrifice to the fury of the mobites,” Nabby had no doubt. “I wonder what Mr. Jefferson says to all these things?”

As it happened, William Short was writing to Jefferson from The Hague at the same time, and his descriptions of events greatly distressed Jefferson. In a stinging confidential reply of January 1793, Jefferson called them “blasphemies.” “The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain,” he informed Short, “on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France.” Jefferson would hear no more of it. “I consider that sect as the same with the Republican patriots (of America). . . .” He deplored the loss of life, Jefferson said, but only as he would deplore the loss of life in battle. Then Jefferson, whose personal philosophy was to get through life with the least pain possible, who shunned even verbal conflict, made as extreme a claim as any of the time.

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest . . . rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every continent, and left free, it would be better than it now is.

He warned Short to take care in the future how he reported events in France. “You have been wounded by the sufferings of your friends, and have by this circumstance been hurried into a temper of mind which would be extremely disrelished if known to your countrymen.”

• • •

NOT UNTIL NOVEMBER did Washington announce that he would accept a second term, and only then did Adams conclude it was time to return to Philadelphia, setting off by public coach in heavy winter weather. Her health again a concern, Abigail remained at home, a temporary measure as they both supposed.

Snowbound in a tavern at Hartford, Adams fell into conversation with another traveler who happened not to recognize him. Knowing how greatly it would amuse Abigail, he described how the man had launched into a harangue on the state of national politics, declaring that the trouble with John Adams was that “he had been long in Europe and got tainted.”

I told him that it was hard if a man could not go to Europe without being tainted, that if Mr. Adams had been sent to Europe upon their business by the people, and had done it, and in doing it had necessarily got tainted, I thought the people ought to pay him for the damage the taint had done him.

Though the electoral vote would not be known until February, it was clear by Christmas that Washington was again the unanimous choice for President, and that Adams, for all that had been said against him, had won a clear second place, far ahead of George Clinton. In the final count Adams received 77 votes; Clinton, 50; Jefferson, 4; Aaron Burr, 1.

IV

“MONDAY AFTERNOON and all Tuesday it rained, then cleared up, very cold and blustering,” Abigail began a Sunday evening letter to her “Dearest Friend.”

On Friday came a snow storm, wind very violent, at North East. It continued so through Friday night and Saturday, even until Sunday morning, when the snow was over the tops of the stone wall and so banked that no wheel[ed] carriage can stir. We had not any meeting today, and some person[s] had their sheep to dig out from under the snow banks.

Separation had become a burden they must bear once again, and again an extended correspondence resumed, after a hiatus of nearly nine years, one letter following another, back and forth between Quincy and Philadelphia, week upon week. Abigail’s intention to remain at home only temporarily proved wishful thinking. Traveling had become too difficult for her. Since Congress was only in session approximately six months of the year, and John could be at home the rest of the time, she chose to stay in Quincy through the whole of his second term as Vice President.

The state of her health was a prime consideration, but so also was economic necessity, as she would confide to Nabby. “A powerful motive for me to remain here during the absence of your father is the necessity there is that such care and attention should be paid to our affairs at home as will enable us to live in a humble state of independence whenever your father quits public life, which he daily becomes more and more anxious to do.” “He has ever sustained the character of the independent freeman of America,” she added modestly, neglecting to mention the part she had played in making that possible.

For both Abigail and John the stress of separation now was no less severe than in times past, for all the changes in their station in life.

My days of anxiety have indeed been many and painful in years past, when I had many terrors that encompassed me around [Abigail wrote on January 7, 1793, after John had been gone little more than a month]. I have happily surmounted them, but I do not find that I am less solicitous to hear constantly from you than in times of more danger. . . . Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists.

For his part, Adams assured her, “I am with all the ardor of youth, yours.” “To a heart that loves praise so well, and received so little of it,” he told her another day, “your letter is like laudanum,” which someone had told him was “the Divinity itself.”

“I want to sit down and converse with you, every evening,” she would write. “I sit here alone and brood over possibilities and conjectures.”

“You apologize for the length of your letters,” he told her in a long letter of his own. “[They] give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week.”

To further reduce expenses, Adams had given up the small house in Philadelphia and taken a room with the secretary of the Senate, Samuel Otis, and his wife, who did not normally accommodate boarders but felt the Vice President of the United States should have something better than the usual lodging house. Never again would he spend money he did not have just to keep up appearances, Adams vowed. “I am so well satisfied with my present simplicity that I am determined never to depart from it.” He had a sunny room with a southern exposure and a fireplace that he kept going most of the time. “I am warm enough at night, but cannot sleep since I left you.”

They exchanged views on politics, events in France, family finances, reported on the weather and the doings of their scattered family. They wrote on everything from the price of clover seed to the meetings of the American Philosophical Society, where Adams had been asked to be a member. Reflecting on the outcome of the election, Abigail saw it as proof not only of the wisdom of the people, but their faith in the administration. The “newspaper warfare” had only strengthened support for the government, she felt certain.

“There must be, however,” Adams responded, “more employment for the press in favor of the government than there has been, or the sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs which assail it on every side will make an impression on many weak and ignorant people.”

Almost from the moment the election was decided — and the Republican campaign to unseat Adams had failed — the Republican press shifted its attacks almost entirely to the President, striking the sharpest blows Washington had yet known. Now it was he who had the deplorable inclination to monarchy. The “hell hounds” were in full cry, wrote Adams, who wondered how well Washington might bear up under the abuse. “His skin is thinner than mine.”

For himself it appeared he had been granted temporary immunity. He was even warmly received on his return to the Senate, where, for the moment, a mood of “tranquility” had settled. He felt, Adams wrote, as though he were receding slowly into the background, yet professed to mind not at all.

The Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of State, meanwhile, were under constant fire from one side or the other. Jefferson was busy behind the scenes in a campaign to drive Hamilton from office. If unwilling to attack Hamilton directly himself, or to write under an assumed name, he was not above urging others to do so. “For God’s sake, my dear sir,” Jefferson would admonish Madison, “take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”

Jefferson’s certainty that monarchists were poised to destroy the republic had become an obsession. Yet with Adams he remained on speaking terms — in part because he knew Adams to be too independent ever to be in league with Hamilton, and because he sincerely wished for no further rupture in their friendship. When Adams attended his first meeting of the Philosophical Society, Jefferson was “polite enough to accompany me,” as Adams reported to Abigail.

It was Adams’s impression that Jefferson was pulling back from his habitual extravagances. To cut costs, the Secretary of State had sold a horse and some of his furniture. Jefferson’s debt to his British creditors was a colossal 7,000 pounds, Adams had learned, which led him to ponder whether this might account for Jefferson’s antipathy to the central government. If only someone could pay off Jefferson’s debt, indeed pay off the personal debt of all Virginians, Adams speculated, then perhaps Jefferson’s reason might return, “and the whole man and his whole state would become good friends of the Union.”

What vexed Adams most was Jefferson’s “blind spirit of party.” In theory, Jefferson deplored parties or faction no less than did Adams or anyone. In practice, however, he was proving remarkably adept at party politics. As always, he avoided open dispute, debate, controversy, or any kind of confrontation, but behind the scenes he was unrelenting and extremely effective. To Jefferson it was a matter of necessity, given his hatred of Hamilton and all that was riding on what he called the “beautiful” revolution in France. To Adams, Jefferson had become a fanatic. There was not a Jacobin in France more devoted to faction, he told Abigail.

Continuing accounts of the chaos and bloodshed in France left both Adamses filled with pity and contempt. The French government was by now fully in the grip of the extreme radicals, and Adams shuddered at the thought. “Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and co[mpany] are furies,” he wrote. “Dragon’s teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters.”

It was known that the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, philosopher and lover of liberty, one of the first in France to translate the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first, with his mother, to befriend Adams in Paris, had been stoned to death by a mob before his mother’s eyes. Louis XVI, stripped of all power, was to go on trial for treason. But Adams was incapable of exulting as others were over the plight of the French monarch. He had no heart for “king-killing,” Adams said. Indeed, he was tired of reading all newspapers, he told Abigail on the eve of Washington’s second inauguration. “The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.”

ON MONDAY, March 4, 1793, in an inaugural ceremony of record brevity, Adams looked on respectfully as Washington took the oath of office. The event, held in the Senate, was simple and dignified. Washington’s address, all of two paragraphs, lasted but minutes, and Adams, like others present, was soon on his way home, Congress having adjourned until December.

The prospect of months on his farm doing as he pleased gave Adams a lift of heart as little else could have. But the tragic drama that he had grown so weary of only worsened. No sooner was he home than the news arrived that on January 21, Louis XVI had been beheaded. The papers described the King’s last ride, the scaffold where “his head was severed from his body in one stroke” by the guillotine, the cries of ”Vive la Nation!” from the crowds, then hats thrown in the air.

Like Washington, Adams could not bring himself to say anything publicly. But to a correspondent in England, he warned, “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots,” and he lamented that so much more blood would have to flow before the lesson was learned.

Jefferson, who had once called Louis XVI “a good man,” “an honest man,” observed privately that monarchs were “amenable to punishment like other criminals.” It was the view expressed in a letter in the New York Journal signed “A Republican”:

Mankind is now enlightened. They can discover that kings are like other men, especially with respect to the commission of crimes and an inordinate thirst for power. Reason and liberty are overspreading the world, nor will progress be impeded until the towering crown shall fall, and the spectre of royalty be broken in pieces, in every part of the globe. Monarchy and aristocracy must be annihilated, and the rights of the people firmly established.

Great Britain and Spain, too, had by now declared war on France. Britain’s declaration came on February 1, 1793, and as no one could then have foreseen, Britain and France would be at war for another twenty-two years, well into the next century.

In early April, “Citizen” Genêt landed at Charleston, South Carolina, causing a sensation. Edmund Charles Genêt, the audacious new envoy from Jacobin France, was the son of Edmé Genêt, the French foreign office translator, with whom Adams had once worked in Paris, turning out propaganda for the American Revolution. Young Genêt had been dispatched to America with instructions to rouse American support for France, spread the principles of the French Revolution, and encourage privateering against British shipping by American seamen. From the welcome he received at Charleston and along his whole four-week journey north to Philadelphia, he concluded all Americans were in sympathy with the French radicals and would, in keeping with the French-American alliance of 1778, gladly join France again in common cause. Jacobin clubs — pro-French democratic societies — sprung up along his route, and Genêt liberally dispensed money to outfit American privateers.

But on April 22 in Philadelphia, before Genêt arrived, Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, a decision Adams had no part in but affirmed what he had long said about keeping free from the affairs of Europe. “Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their ways and politics,” he had written from France fourteen years earlier.

The welcome for Genêt at Philadelphia was rapturous. Jefferson estimated that the crowd the night of Genêt’s arrival, May 16, numbered 1,000. Genêt said 6,000, and gloried in the “perpetual fetes” that followed in the next several weeks. To the thrill of hundreds of dinner guests Genêt sang the “Marseillaise” and rendered rousing new lines to a tune from a French operetta:

Liberty! Liberty, be thy name adored forever,

Tyrants beware! Your tott’ring thrones must fall;

Our int’rest links the free together,

And Freedom’s sons are Frenchmen all.

“All the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling,” exuded Jefferson, who saw in Genêt’s popularity eloquent testimony by the people against “the cold caution” of their own government.

Washington decided to receive the young emissary, and in a manner which, if not cold, was strictly formal. American neutrality remained firm, which led Genêt, who knew nothing of American politics, to conclude he must rally the American people against the President. Only later would he admit his mistake, and blame Jefferson and the Republicans for deceiving him for their own purposes.

Many years afterward Adams would wildly exaggerate the tumult caused by Genêt, claiming that 10,000 people had roamed the streets threatening “to drag Washington out of his house” and compel the government to declare war on Britain. Adams’s alarm at the time was extreme, but he was by no means alone in wondering if a revolution were hatching. The flourishing pro-French democratic societies were secret political clubs verging on vigilante groups and seemed truly bent on gaining French control over American politics.

Then, with summer, came the two calamities for which the year 1793 would be forever remembered. In France the Reign of Terror commenced, a siege of vicious retribution that would send nearly 3,000 men and women to the guillotine in Paris alone, while in the provinces the slaughter was even more savage. At Lyon, where the guillotine was thought too slow a means of dispensing with antirevolutionaries, hundreds were mown down by cannon fire. At Nantes, 2,000 people were herded onto barges, tied together, taken to the middle of the Loire and drowned.

In Philadelphia, beginning in August, yellow fever raged in the worst epidemic ever to strike an American city. Reports of what was happening in Paris would not reach America for months, but accounts of the “pestilence” in Philadelphia filled the newspapers soon enough. At Quincy the Adamses were in anguish over the welfare of young Thomas, from whom there was no word.

By the last weeks of August people were dying in Philadelphia at a rate of more than twenty a day. In September, as the death toll rose rapidly, Benjamin Rush and other physicians, helpless to stop the plague, advised all who could leave the city to do so without delay. The federal government and most businesses shut down. Bush Hill, where the Adamses had lived, was converted to an emergency hospital. To avoid contamination people stopped shaking hands and walked in the middle of the streets.

According to common understanding, the cause of yellow fever was the foul, steaming air of late summer in cities like Philadelphia — “a putrid state of air occasioned by a collection of filth, heat, and moisture,” as Abigail explained to her sister Elizabeth — and the “proof” was that the disease always vanished with the return of cold weather. That yellow fever, like malaria, is transmitted by mosquitoes (which also vanish with cold weather) would not be understood for another hundred years.

Hamilton and his wife became dangerously ill but would recover. Jefferson, who had earlier given up living in town and moved to a house beside the Schuylkill, wrote of the crowds fleeing to the countryside, and allowed that he, too, would leave except that he did not wish to give the appearance of panic. When the President and Mrs. Washington departed for Mount Vernon, Jefferson was soon on his way to Monticello.

By October the death rate reached more than a hundred a day. People were dying faster than they could be buried. Numbers of physicians and ordinary citizens performed heroically, doing all they could for the stricken, and no one more so than Rush, though whether his ministrations — his insistence on “mercurial purges” and “heroic bloodletting” — did more good than harm became a subject of fierce controversy. Eventually Rush, too, fell ill, but survived.

At Quincy worry over Thomas did not end until mid-October, when the young man wrote to say he had fled to New Jersey and, though perfectly well, was “pretty short of cash.”

The epidemic ended with the first hard frost in November. In all, more than 5,000 had perished and Philadelphia would be a long time recovering from the fearful loss.

In France, however, there was no cease to the slaughter. That October, Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, as did Brissot de Warville, who had visited the Adamses in Quincy. “Would to Heaven that the destroying angel would put up his sword,” wrote Abigail, who seems to have felt the horror of what was happening more even than her husband.

But the Terror only accelerated, eventually consuming those who set it in motion. Marat was murdered; Danton and Robespierre went to the guillotine. The final toll would eventually reach 14,000 lives. Among those executed in the last few days of the Terror, as Abigail would later learn, to her horror, were the grandmother, mother, and sister of her friend Madame Adrienne Lafayette.

ARRIVING AT PHILADELPHIA in late November, Adams was pleased to find the President reinstated and most of Congress back to business. Moving in with the Otises again, Adams resumed his thoroughly unspectacular, rather solitary routine: “I go to the Senate every day, read the newspapers before I go and the public papers afterward, see a few friends once a week, go to church on Sundays; write now and then a line to you and Nabby, and oftener to Charles than to his brothers to see if I can fix his attention and excite some ambition.”

Adams harbored no illusions about his importance, any more than during his first term. “My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” he told Abigail. The measure of his insignificance was that all parties could afford to treat him with some respect. “They all know that I can do them neither much good nor much harm.”

It was not just that the vice presidency offered so little chance to say or do anything of consequence, but that at a time when party politics were becoming increasingly potent and pervasive, he would not, could not, be a party man. And so, for both reasons, he was becoming more and more a man apart.

Genêt was still stirring up trouble, but then, to Adams, Genêt was a fool whose head had been turned by too much popular attention, and there was far more harmony over the issue of neutrality than Adams had expected. Even Jefferson, who had so warmly welcomed Genêt at first, now professed strong agreement with the President’s stand.

Jefferson’s conflict with Hamilton, however, had become intolerable. As Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha, he was “under such agitation of mind” as he had never known. On December 31, 1793, Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State, news that led Adams to write at length on the subject of his friend, saying things in several family letters he had not said before and that he wished to remain confidential. He had admired Jefferson’s abilities and disposition for so long, Adams told Abigail, that he could not help feel some regret at his leaving. “But his want of candor, his obstinate prejudices of both aversion and attachment, his real partiality in spite of all his pretensions, his low notions about many things, have so utterly reconciled me to [his departure] . . . that I will not weep.” On January 6, he reported, “Jefferson went off yesterday, and a good riddance of bad ware.”

What might be in store for Jefferson in Virginia politics, Adams had no way of knowing, but of this he was certain: if Jefferson were to retire to his “rural amusements and philosophical meditations” at Monticello, he would soon wither away. For instead of being “the ardent pursuer of science” that some imagined, Jefferson was the captive of ambition, and ambition, Adams told John Quincy, was “the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field . . . [and] wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.

Jefferson thinks he shall by this step get a reputation of a humble modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity. He may even have deceived himself into this belief. But if the prospect opens, the world will see . . . he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell. . . . Though his desertion may be a loss to us of some talent, I am not sorry for it on the whole, because his soul is poisoned with ambition.

Ambition was something he knew about, Adams acknowledged, for he himself had been struggling for thirty years to conquer “the foul fiend.”

Jefferson had once described Adams as a poor judge of human nature — “a bad calculator of the force and probably the effect of the motives which govern men,” Jefferson had said in a letter to Madison. But with the exception of Madison, Adams understood Jefferson as well as anyone did, or perhaps ever could. And as exasperated as Adams was with him, as critical as he sounded, he refused to let the friendship slip away.

In April he sent Jefferson the gift of a book, with a note of congratulations on the arrival of spring at Monticello, far from the “din of politics and the rumors of war.” It was the first letter Adams had written to Jefferson in more than two years. Jefferson replied at once, saying he had returned to farming “with an ardor which I scarcely knew in my youth,” and in answer Adams said he knew the very same ardor every summer on his own farm.

Rural life was a topic on which they could readily agree, just as they could on the increasing threat of war. The British had begun stopping American ships and taking off sailors, claiming they were British citizens. In the West Indies they captured American trading vessels. War fever swept the country. When a bill that would have suspended all trade with Britain resulted in a tie vote in the Senate, the Vice President “determined the question in the negative.”

He had had enough of one war to wish ever to see another, Jefferson wrote, and to this Adams concurred wholeheartedly. The President, he reported to Jefferson, was sending Chief Justice John Jay as a special envoy to London to “find a way to reconcile our honor with peace.” He had “no great faith in any very brilliant success,” Adams said, “but [I] hope he may keep us out of war.”

A modest correspondence would continue for two years. At the end of another long stretch at Quincy, Adams would write of a summer spent “so deliciously in farming that I return to the old story of politics with great reluctance,” and Jefferson would profess that “tranquility becomes daily more and more the object of my life, and of this I certainly find more in my present pursuits than those of any other part of my life.” Jefferson portrayed himself as living plainly, “farmerlike,” as though he had little more on his mind than crops and weather. “We have had a hard winter and backward spring,” he would report to Adams from his mountaintop the following May.

This has injured our wheat so much that it cannot be made a good crop by all the showers of heaven which are now falling down on us exactly as we want them. Our first cutting of clover is not yet begun. Strawberries not ripe till within this fortnight, and everything backward in proportion. . . . I am trying potatoes on a large scale, as a substitute for Indian corn for feeding the animals.

Once, briefly, a difference in philosophy was touched upon, when Jefferson observed that the “paper transactions” of one generation should “scarcely be considered by succeeding generations,” a principle he had earlier stated to Madison as “self-evident,” that “’the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither the power or rights over it.” Adams, however, refused to accept the idea that each new generation could simply put aside the past, sweep clean the slate, to suit its own desires. Life was not like that, and if Jefferson thought so, it represented a fundamental difference in outlook.

“The rights of one generation of men must depend, in some degree, on the paper transactions of another,” Adams wrote. “The social compact and the laws must be reduced to writing. Obedience to them becomes a national habit and they cannot be changed by revolutions that are costly things. Men will be too economical of their blood and property to have recourse to them very frequently.” Jefferson’s wish for “a little rebellion now and then to clear the atmosphere,” as he had once put it to Abigail, did not stand to reason, Adams was telling him. Nor did reason have any bearing on what was happening in France, Adams insisted in another letter:

Reasoning has been all lost. Passion, prejudice, interest, necessity have governed and will govern; and a century must roll away before any permanent and quiet system will be established. . . . You and I must look down from the battlements of Heaven if we ever have the pleasure of seeing it.

Politics, Jefferson answered, was “a subject I never loved, and now hate.”

Nowhere in his correspondence with Adams did Jefferson suggest he was suffering anything like what Adams had predicted retirement to Monticello would do to him. Only to Madison did he reveal in a letter of April 1795, “My health is entirely broken down within the last eight months.” And only years later, in a letter to his daughter Polly, warning her against a life of seclusion, would Jefferson acknowledge that in fact he had suffered a breakdown very like what Adams had foreseen.

I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it. . . . I can speak from experience on the subject. From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it; and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

Adams’s supposition that Jefferson was cutting back on his extravagant ways was, however, mistaken. To the contrary, the Virginian had resolved to live in grander style than ever, and plunged into the largest, most costly project of his life. He had decided to transform Monticello — to tear off the entire second floor and more than double the size of the house — along the lines of an elegant new residence he had seen in Paris, a palatial house with a dome called the Hôtel de Salm, on the Left Bank of the Seine. All the building and remodeling he had done thus far — the renovation of rented houses in Paris, New York, and Philadelphia, even the initial construction of Monticello itself — had been but prelude to what was now under way.

It was as if he were helpless to do otherwise. He must draw up plans, design and redesign everything down to the smallest detail, build, rebuild, take apart, take down, and put up again, no matter the cost or impracticality of it all.

The existing eight-room Palladian country house was to become a great domed villa with twenty-one rooms. It was designed to accommodate lavish hospitality and to answer all his own private needs and comforts. His mind brimmed with French ideas and niceties. There were to be beds in alcoves as in France, elongated windows and French doors, a magnificent parquet floor replicated from one he had seen in the country estate of a French friend, as well as ample space to display the paintings and busts, the gilded pier mirrors, clocks, and furniture he had shipped home from France.

He had already begun ordering window sash from Philadelphia, and set his slaves to quarrying limestone and making bricks. To Adams he mentioned his new “nail manufactory” and the time devoted to counting and measuring nails, but of the larger project he said nothing, knowing what the frugal New Englander would think of it.

FOR RELIEF from the tedium of his “insignificant” labors, Adams took long walks through Philadelphia as he often had in years past, his pace only somewhat slower. Exercise was indispensable, he explained to Charles, who had complained of feeling lethargic. “Move or die is the language of our Maker in the constitution of our bodies.” One must rouse oneself from lethargy. “When you cannot walk abroad, walk in your room. . . . Rise up and then open your windows and walk about your room a few times, then sit down again to your books or your pen.”

To many in Congress, Adams was an old man, an assessment he thought perfectly valid. His teeth tormented him — it had been necessary to have several pulled — and he worried over a tremble in his hands. In keeping with the changes of fashion, he had given up wearing a wig and was by now quite grey and bald. He was overweight; his eyes were often red and watery from too much reading.

It was “painful to the vanity of an old man to acknowledge the decays of nature,” he wrote. So weak were his eyes, such was the trembling of his hand, he told John Quincy, that “a pen is as terrible to me as a sword to a coward.” He wondered how much longer he could continue in public life. Yet he devoted hours each day to writing letters, and often at great length. On his walks he generally covered three to five miles, thinking little of it. Nor does there appear to have been any appreciable slowing down on the quantity of books he read.

He had much to be grateful for — “good parents, an excellent wife, and promising children, tolerable health on the whole and competent fortune,” as he told Abigail. With Thomas recently admitted to the Philadelphia bar, he could now claim three lawyer sons. Increasingly his thoughts turned to their careers and their future, more than to his own.

“Much more depends on little things than is commonly imagined,” he cautioned John Quincy. “An erect figure, a steady countenance, a neat dress, a genteel air, an oratorical period, a resolute, determined spirit, often do more than deep erudition or indefatigable application.”

With Charles he shared his private views on the current clamor over the subject of equality. “How the present age can boast of this principle as a discovery, as new light and modern knowledge, I know not.” The root of equality, Adams said, was the Golden Rule — “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Equality was at the heart of Christianity. When he had written in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights that “all men are by nature free and equal,” he meant “not a physical but a moral equality.”

Common sense was sufficient to determine that it could not mean that all men were equal in fact, but in right, not all equally tall, strong, wise, handsome, active, but equally men . . . the work of the same Artist, children in the same cases entitled to the same justice.

Nabby and her family had returned from England, where William Smith’s financial ventures appeared to have brought them a measure of welcome prosperity. Adams was pleased for Nabby, but worried over what his son-in-law would ultimately make of himself. “I know not what he is in pursuit of,” he told Abigail.

John Quincy had lately distinguished himself with a series of newspaper essays denouncing Citizen Genêt and seemed well launched as an attorney in Boston, if still unresolved about aspiring to a public career. When Washington requested of France that Genêt be recalled, Adams, with a father’s pride, was certain that John Quincy’s essays had played a decisive part. Yet he could not help feeling sympathy for Genêt, his old friend’s son. Ordered home to Paris, to face charges of misconduct, which meant almost certain death by guillotine, Genêt chose to stay on in New York, where eventually he married the daughter of George Clinton and settled down to the life of a country gentleman on the Hudson.

From the tone of the letters that arrived week after week from Philadelphia, Abigail sensed a change in her husband. There seemed to be little or none of the old anger, but far more acceptance of life. “I am happy to learn,” she wrote, “that the only fault in your political character, and one which has always given me uneasiness, is wearing away. I mean a certain irritability which has sometimes thrown you off your guard.”

When reports reached him that his mother was gravely ill, Adams, assuming the worst, was saddened almost beyond words. “My aged and venerable mother is drawing near the close of a virtuous and industrious life,” he wrote to Nabby. “May her example be ever present with me! May I be able to fulfill the duties of life as well as she has done.” But the old lady’s resilience was astounding. She revived, to his great relief, and his thoughts returned to his children.

To Abigail, late in the spring of 1794, he wrote of John Quincy’s rising reputation, implying he knew more than he was saying. “I have often thought he has more prudence at 27 than his father at 58.” “All my hopes are in him,” he said in another letter, “both for my family and my country.”

At last, on May 26, Adams sent off a confidential letter to John Quincy with the biggest news he had been able to report in years. He had been informed that day that the President would nominate John Quincy to be minister to the Netherlands. If Adams had played a part in the decision, as possibly he could have, he never said so. To his mind there was not a shadow of doubt that John Quincy was the ideal choice, as he told him. Annoyed that he had not been consulted on the appointment, John Quincy replied, “I rather wish it had not been made at all.” But as an Adams, he had little choice, and so began another long career in public service. His father was presiding as usual the day the Senate confirmed the appointment.

Slightly taller than his father, John Quincy had become notably handsome, his youthful face lean and finely chiseled. In a magnificent portrait by Copley done in London a year later, he might be the beau ideal of the time. He was also more widely traveled and more conversant with French and Dutch than any American diplomat yet dispatched across the Atlantic. He sailed from Boston that September of 1794, taking his brother Thomas along with him to serve as his private secretary.

THE ATTENTION OF THE COUNTRY, meanwhile, had shifted to western Pennsylvania where an insurrection had broken out over a federal excise tax on distilleries, the only internal tax thus far imposed by the federal government. At home at Quincy through the summer, Adams had kept abreast of the crisis in the newspapers. An army of fully 12,000 volunteers marched over the Alleghenies in an unprecedented show of force, Washington himself riding at the head part of the way, with Hamilton second in command. By the time Adams returned to Philadelphia in December and established himself in different lodgings, at the Francis Hotel, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion had ended. It was a victory the Federalists were happy to drink to, but the Republicans soon had their own cause to celebrate, when Alexander Hamilton announced he would retire. Convinced he had accomplished all he could, the brilliant, headstrong Secretary of the Treasury returned to his lucrative New York law practice. No one, however, expected him to abandon politics.

With the retirement also of Secretary of War Henry Knox in December, the sense of an administration in ebb was strongly felt. Only Edmund Randolph, now Secretary of State, remained of Washington’s original cabinet.

The threat of embroilment in the European war continued, America at the “precipice,” as Adams said, and still there was no word from John Jay in London. Adams’s days went on much as before, the greater part of his time given to his duties in the Senate. At the Francis Hotel he occupied a small but comfortable room looking onto Franklin Court, and at meals he appears to have enjoyed the company of the other guests, most of whom were members of Congress. A young English visitor staying at the hotel, Thomas Twining, was delighted to find the Vice President “superior to all sense of superiority” and in appearance more like “an English country gentleman who had seen little of the world, than a statesman who had seen so much of public life.”

I was always glad [he wrote years later] when I saw Mr. Adams enter the room and take his place at our table. Indeed, to behold this distinguished man . . . occupying the chair of the Senate in the morning, and afterwards walking home through the streets and taking his seat among his fellow citizens as their equal, conversing amicably with men over whom he had just presided . . . was a singular spectacle, and a striking exemplification of the state of society in America at this period.

By the time the Jay Treaty at last reached the President in the spring of 1795, Philadelphia was in a frenzy of speculation over what it might contain. On June 8, the day Washington called a special session of the Senate to consider the treaty, he invited Adams to dine alone with him. The meeting was confidential, and Adams said nothing about it, except to caution Abigail that “mum-mum-mum” was the word.

That the terms of Jay’s treaty would ignite a storm of protest was plain at once. Jay had given up virtually every point to the British, in return for very little. Conspicuously absent was any guaranteed protection of American seamen from British seizure. Further, the British had refused to open their ports to American trade, except in the West Indies, but there only to ships of less than seventy tons. The one important British concession was to remove the last of their troops from forts in the northwest by the end of the year.

But Jay had gained peace with Britain — “To do more was impossible,” he told the President — and Washington, though disappointed, concluded it was enough. The treaty, with his prestige behind it, went to the Senate for approval. Through thirteen days of furious debate behind closed doors, Adams could only watch and listen. What felt like a tropical heat wave descended on the city, making the cooped-up chamber all but unbearable. Finally, on June 24, by exactly the required two-thirds margin, the Senate consented to ratification.

Senators were enjoined to disclose nothing until the treaty was signed by the President. But in a matter of days the full text was published by the Philadelphia Aurora, which had replaced Freneau’s National Gazette as the leading Republican newspaper. It was the first scoop in American newspaper history and a “battle royal” commenced at once. Mobs in the streets declared Jay a traitor and burned him in effigy. There were riots in New York and Boston. The President was assailed in print as never before, and nowhere more than in the Aurora, which was edited by young Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Franklin who had once been John Quincy’s schoolmate in France.

From the distance of Monticello, Jefferson saw what Jay had wrought as a “monument of venality” and sent a letter to the new French ambassador at Philadelphia to assure him of his own continuing enthusiasm for France.

Adams, who knew from experience — knew better than anyone — what Jay had been up against in dealing with the British, never doubted that a flawed treaty was far preferable to war with Britain. He stood by the President, unwavering in his support.

The common accusations notwithstanding, Adams was no Anglophile. As greatly as he admired the British constitution and the British structure of government, he considered the British as insolent as ever, and the unfortunate “mad” George III (by now the victim of porphyria), a hopeless blunderer. The day might come when America would have to “beat down” the “insolence of John Bull,” Adams told Abigail, but he prayed it would not be soon.

The furor over the treaty would continue until the House took up the necessary appropriations the following year. But that summer Washington’s troubles grew still worse, when Edmund Randolph resigned as Secretary of State after being accused of taking money from France to influence the administration against Britain — a charge never proven.

With the departure of Randolph the brilliant cabinet that Washington had started with was entirely gone, replaced by men who were by and large mediocrities. Whether, in view of the charges and the abuse he was subjected to, Washington would agree to stand for election again, no one could say, but in his usual fashion, he would keep his thoughts to himself for as long as possible.

For the Adamses the summer at Quincy passed uneventfully. Their one private worry was over Charles, who, just as his law career was getting under way, had fallen in love with Sally Smith, the pretty younger sister of Nabby’s husband. Abigail and John both objected to the romance, and with the same line of reasoning they had used earlier with John Quincy. Charles agreed to a moratorium, but after several months candidly told his father, “Were I to declare that I did not entertain the same opinion of Sally Smith that I ever did, I should declare a falsehood.”

When the news reached Quincy early that fall that Charles and Sally had been married in New York, his parents were devastated. But Charles assured them he was never happier, and Nabby affirmed it to have been the best possible step for him. “After all the hairbreadth scrapes and imminent dangers he has run, he is at last safe landed,” she reported.

Stopping at New York en route to Philadelphia in December, Adams was delighted to find Charles well established in a “commodious” home and office on Front Street, and pleased, too, with Sally, who “behaved prettily in her new sphere.” “My love to Daughter Adams, the first I have had since your sister changed her name,” he later wrote affectionately to Charles.

V

“I AM HEIR APPARENT, you know,” Adams reminded Abigail after arriving in Philadelphia for the opening of the Fourth Congress.

The prospect of Adams succeeding Washington had been ever-present for seven years, but now, separated again by hundreds of miles, they addressed themselves to the growing likelihood of his actually becoming President, exchanged thoughts and feelings on the challenge in a way that apparently they never had before, and that perhaps they would have found impossible except at a distance. As Abigail had said herself in a letter years before, “My pen is always freer than my tongue.” Were it for her alone to decide, were personal considerations all that mattered, she wrote, she would unhesitatingly tell him to retire. But with a decision of “such momentous concern,” she dared not try to influence him. “I can say only that circumstances must govern you . . . [and] pray that you have superior direction.” If, however, he entertained any thought of continuing as Vice President under someone other than Washington, he must forget it. “I will be second under no man but Washington,” she declared.

Adams expressed concern over the toll the presidency could take on his health. He felt perfectly strong, he assured her, but twice mentioned the tremble in his hands, and remarked that he could see the President rapidly aging before his eyes.

Early in February 1796, on the same day Benjamin Franklin Bache declared in the Aurora that “good patriot” Jefferson was the inevitable and ideal choice to replace Washington, Adams professed to be tired of politics. “I am weary of the game,” he told Abigail, then added with characteristic honesty what she had long understood, “Yet I don’t know how I would live out of it.”

No successor to Washington could expect such support as Washington had, she warned. “You know what is before you — the whips, the scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, the weight of empire.” Still, the presidency would be a “glorious reward” for all his service to the country, should Providence allot him the task.

“I have looked into myself,” he wrote in another letter, “and see no dishonesty there. I see weakness enough. But no timidity. I have no concern on your account but for your health.”

I hate speeches [he continued], messages, addresses, proclamations and such affected, constrained things. I hate levees and drawing rooms. I hate to speak to 1,000 people to whom I have nothing to say. Yet all this I can do.

When she reminded him that he was sixty years old, he replied, “If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty.”

IN MARCH, when the House of Representatives took up the Jay Treaty, it appeared a constitutional crisis was in the offing. The Republicans had pounced on the treaty with all their “teeth and . . . nails,” as Adams reported. “The business of the country . . . stands still . . . all is absorbed by the debates. . . . Many persons are very anxious and forebode a majority unfavorable, and the most pernicious and destructive results.” It was hard to imagine the Republicans being that “desperate and unreasonable,” but should they be, he told Abigail, “this Constitution cannot stand. . . . I see nothing but a dissolution of government and immediate war.”

He was again invited to dine alone with the President, who in the course of the evening mentioned three times that he would likely retire. “He detained me there ‘til nine o’clock,” Adams wrote, “and was never more frank and open about politics. I find his opinions and sentiments are more like mine than I ever knew before, respecting England and France and our American parties.”

To Adams, time was moving all too fast. (“Long! Nothing is long! The time will soon be gone and we shall be surprised to know what has become of it.”) Then, the first week in May, he could happily send Abigail word that the Jay Treaty bills had passed both Houses, “and good humor seems to be returning.” The constitutional crisis had passed, the threat of war was greatly diminished.

Requesting a leave of absence, he was on his way home by May 6. His time as Vice President was virtually over. He had served longer than in any other post in his career, and in all he had served extremely well — dutifully as president of the Senate and with unfailing loyalty to Washington. He had cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate of historic importance — in protecting the President’s sole authority over the removal of appointees, for example, and in the several stages leading to the location of the national capital. In all, Adams cast thirty-one deciding votes, always in support of the administration and more than by any vice president in history.

AT QUINCY he threw himself into his other life as farmer Adams with greater zest than ever, as though determined to make the most of what might be his last extended stay for a long while.

It had been a particularly fine spring along the coast of Massachusetts, with warm days and ample rain. The farm “shines very bright,” he wrote. For the first time in years he revived his diary, keeping note of all daily activity and progress. He decided to build a substantial new barn, the first such project he had ever undertaken. “This day my new barn was raised near the spot where . . . my father . . . raised his new barn in 1737,” he recorded on July 13. He thought it looked “very stately and strong.”

He kept three to ten men at work through the summer, including John Briesler, another of the numerous Bass family, Seth Bass, and a hard-drinking neighbor named Billings, who was an especially hard worker. After the sedentary life of the Senate, Adams relished the days out of doors. He loved the work, the tangible results, the feeling that he had not only returned home, but returned, if only for a while, to the ways of his father and generations of Adamses.

July 15, Friday

. . . Went with three hands . . . [to] cut between 40 and 50 red cedars, and with a team of five cattle brought home 22 of them at a load. We have opened the prospect so that the meadows and western mountain may be distinctly seen. . . .

July 16

. . . We got in two loads of English hay. . . .

July 20

. . . Walked in the afternoon over the hills and across the fields and meadows, up to the old plain. The corn is as good there as any I’ve seen. . . .

August 2

. . . finished the great wall on Penn’s Hill.

August 5

. . . Sullivan and Mr. Sam Hayward threshing — Billings and Bass carting earth and seaweed and liming the compost.

He was up each morning with the birds, drank his usual gill of hard cider, and with Abigail passed quiet evenings reading, writing letters, or keeping up with his diary, where along with the chronicle of daily enterprises, he wrote of clear summer skies and described a morning shower as “a soft, fine rain in a clock calm . . . falling as sweetly as I ever saw in April . . .” Ever the realist, he wrote, too, of rattlesnakes and corn worms, Hessian flies and “mosquitoes numerous.”

Though Abigail’s health remained a worry, she apparently felt well enough to entertain Parson Wibird at dinner and to ride to Weymouth to dine with Cotton Tufts, whose salted beef, shell beans, and whortleberry pudding Adams proclaimed “luxurious.”

“Of all the summers of my life,” he recorded, “this has been the freest from care, anxiety, and vexation to me. The sickness of Mrs. A. excepted.”

“Billings and Prince laying wall,” he wrote September 8. “Briesler and James picking apples and making cider. Stetson widening the brook.

I think to christen my place Peacefield, in commemoration of the peace which I assisted in making in 1783, of the thirteen years peace and neutrality which I have contributed to preserve, and of the constant peace and tranquility which I have enjoyed in this residence.

THOUGH POLITICS through the summer of 1796 had been in “a perfect calm,” as Abigail noted, neither she nor John had any illusions about what was to come. Mischief was surely brewing in “the Jacobin caldron,” she wrote, as “venomous as Macbeth’s hell broth.” When the Boston papers carried news of Washington’s retirement and the text of his “Farewell Address” of September 17, it was, as said, as if a hat had been dropped to start the race.

Adams and Jefferson were the leading candidates in what was the first presidential election with two parties in opposition, an entirely new experience for the country. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at Peacefield, neither taking any part in what quickly became a vicious, all-out battle.

Adams was pilloried in the Republican press as a gross and shameless monarchist — “His Rotundity,” whose majestic appearance was so much “sesquipedality of belly,” as said Bache’s Aurora. Adams, declared the widely read paper, was unfit to lead the country, and beneath a headline declaring an alarm, Bache warned that unless by their votes the people were to call forth Thomas Jefferson, “the friend of the people,” Adams, the “champion of kings, ranks, and titles,” would be their President. Were Adams to be elected, warned the Boston Chronicle, the principle of hereditary succession would be imposed on America, to make way for John Quincy. With Jefferson, said the paper, no one need worry since Jefferson had only daughters.

To add further fuel to the fire, Thomas Paine, in a fury over the Jay Treaty, unleashed an unprecedented attack on George Washington in the pages of the Aurora. Writing from Paris, Paine called Washington a creature of “grossest adulation,” a man incapable of friendship, “a hypocrite in public life,” apostate and impostor.

For their part, the Federalists were hardly less abusive. Jefferson was decried as a Jacobin, an atheist, and charged with cowardice for having fled Monticello from the British cavalry in 1781. “Poor Jefferson is tortured as much as your better acquaintance,” Adams wrote to John Quincy.

The candidates for Vice President were Aaron Burr of New York for the Republicans, and for the Federalists, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, thus providing regional balance on both sides. Adams was expected to carry New England, Jefferson, the South, while the Middle States could go either way.

To add to Adams’s troubles, Alexander Hamilton was up to his old tricks behind the scenes, urging the strongest possible support for Thomas Pinckney, ostensibly as a way to keep Jefferson from becoming Vice President, but also, it was suspected, to defeat Adams as well and make Pinckney president — Pinckney being someone Hamilton could more readily control.

The rumors of this that reached Adams at Quincy would be confirmed before the year was out by his old friend Elbridge Gerry, who was a presidential elector for Massachusetts and, like Adams, an ardent antiparty man. For both John and Abigail, Gerry’s report marked the end of whatever remaining trust or respect they had for Hamilton. Abigail henceforth referred to him privately as Cassius. John called him “as great a hypocrite as any in the U.S. His intrigues in the election I despise.”

For all the clamor over politics, the country was still at peace and more prosperous than ever. If there was a prevailing sentiment overall concerning national politics, it was one of regret, even sadness, that Washington would soon be stepping down. Abigail expressed what most Americans felt when, quoting Shakespeare, she wrote of Washington, “Take his character all together, and we shall not look upon his like again.”

On November 23, Adams bid her goodbye and started for Philadelphia, and again by public conveyance, John Briesler his sole companion. “Fear takes no hold of me,” he assured Abigail, as if to boost both their spirits. He reached Philadelphia on December 4, and the night of December 7, struggling with the prospect of defeat, he wrote again:

I laugh at myself twenty times a day, for my feelings, and [the] meditations and speculations in which I find myself engaged: Vanity suffers. Cold feelings of unpopularity. Humble reflections. Mortifications. Humiliation. Plans of future life. Economy. Retrenching expenses. Farming. Returning to the bar, drawing writs, arguing causes, taking clerks.

I can pronounce Thomas Jefferson to be chosen P[resident] of [the] U[nited] S[tates] with firmness and a good grace that I don’t fear. But here alone abed, by my fireside, nobody to speak to, pouring upon my disgrace and future prospects — this is ugly.

But in a week or so, in an entirely different mood, he was writing to tell her it appeared he would be elected President. Though the final count would not be known until February, when the electors met, it was being said openly in and out of Congress that he had won, and that Jefferson was to be Vice President.

Overnight, Adams was being treated as though suddenly he had become a different man, and this he found most remarkable. Even Bache’s Aurora seemed to experience a miraculous change of heart. John Adams, the paper now declared, was clearly preferable to Washington.

There can be no doubt that Adams would not be a puppet — that having an opinion and judgment of his own, he would act from his own impulses rather than the impulses of others — that possessing great integrity he would not sacrifice his country’s interests at the shrine of party. . . . In addition . . . it is well known that Adams is an aristocrat only in theory, but that Washington is one in practice — that Adams has the simplicity of a republican but that Washington has the ostentation of an eastern bashaw — that Adams holds none of his fellow men in slavery, but Washington does. . . . The difference is immense.

To Adams’s particular delight, one of the most partisan of all the young Republicans, Representative William Branch Giles of Virginia, had been heard to say of him, “The old man will make a good President, too.”

AT MONTICELLO, Jefferson received word from Madison that he should be prepared for the likelihood of finishing second, and that for the good of the country and the “valuable effect” of his influence on Adams, he must accept the vice presidency. In reply, Jefferson expressed no reluctance to serve under Adams, since “he had always been my senior, from the commencement of my public life.” Then, three days after Christmas, Jefferson took up his pen to write an extraordinary letter to Adams.

From his latest information, Jefferson said, it appeared Adams’s election to the “first magistracy” was an established fact. But to Jefferson this had never been in doubt. “I have never one single moment expected a different issue.” And though he knew he would not be believed, it was true nonetheless that he never wished it otherwise. He warned that Hamilton had been up to some of his usual schemes, but doubted it would change the outcome.

I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep and a warm berth below, with the society of neighbors, friends and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants. No one then will congratulate you with purer disinterestedness than myself. . . . I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office. . . . I devoutly wish you may be able to shun for us this war by which our agriculture, commerce, and credit will be destroyed. If you are, the glory will be all your own; and that your administration may be filled with glory and happiness to yourself and advantage to us is the sincere wish of one who though, in the course of our voyage through life, various little incidents have happened or been contrived to separate us, retains still for you the solid esteem of the moments when we were working for our independence, and sentiments of respect and affectionate attachment.

It was a fine show of magnanimity in defeat, as well as one of the warmest expressions of friendship Jefferson ever wrote or that anyone had ever addressed to Adams. But after finishing the letter, Jefferson had second thoughts and sent it on to Madison in Philadelphia — “open for your perusal” — so that if anything he had written “should render the delivery of it ineligible in your opinion, you may return it to me.”

Madison was appalled. He saw the letter as a dreadful mistake, and decided it must go no further. As he explained delicately to Jefferson, friendship was one thing, politics another. Adams already knew of his friendship, Madison advised, and were Adams to prove a failure as President, such compliments and confidence in him as Jefferson had put in writing could prove politically embarrassing.

The letter was never sent. It remained in Madison’s possession, in a file only a few blocks from where Adams resided.

For Adams it could have been one of the most important letters he ever received. Jefferson’s praise, his implicit confidence in him, his rededication to their old friendship would have meant the world to Adams, and never more than now, affecting his entire outlook and possibly with consequent effect on the course of events to follow.

Not long after, however, Adams did receive a letter from Abigail, written at Quincy on January 15, 1797:

The cold has been more severe than I can ever before recollect. It has frozen the ink in my pen, and chilled the blood in my veins, but not the warmth of my affection for him for whom my heart beats with unabated ardor through all the changes and vicissitudes of life, in the still calm of Peacefield, and the turbulent scenes in which he is about to engage.

CHAPTER NINE

OLD OAK

The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place.

~Abigail Adams

I

THE INAUGURATION of the second President of the United States commenced in the first-floor House Chamber of Congress Hall in Philadelphia just before noon, Saturday, March 4, 1797.

The room was filled to overflowing, every seat taken by members of the House and Senate, justices of the Supreme Court, heads of departments, the diplomatic corps, and many ladies said to have added a welcome note of “brilliancy” to the otherwise solemn occasion.

There was a burst of applause when George Washington entered and walked to the dais. More applause followed on the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who had been inaugurated Vice President upstairs in the Senate earlier that morning, and “like marks of approbation” greeted John Adams, who on his entrance in the wake of the two tall Virginians seemed shorter and more bulky even than usual.

It was a scene few who were present would ever forget. Here were the three who, more than any others, had made the Revolution, and as many in the audience supposed, it was to be the last time they would ever appear on the same platform. Adams felt as he had when he first appeared before George III — as if he were on stage playing a part. It was, he later told Abigail, “the most affecting and overpowering scene I ever acted in.”

Jefferson’s height was accentuated by a long blue frock coat. Washington was in a dress suit of black velvet. Adams, the plainest of the three, wore a suit of grey broadcloth intentionally devoid of fancy buttons and knee buckles.

Resolved to keep things as understated as possible, he had ridden to Congress Hall from his lodgings at the Francis Hotel in a “simple but elegant enough” carriage drawn by just two horses. The grand carriage and six white horses of Washington’s first inauguration had been dispensed with. Nor would Adams allow an official retinue to march in procession with him. As he confided to Abigail, he wanted few if any of the “court” trappings of his predecessor. On learning that she had had the Quincy coat-of-arms painted on her carriage at home, he told her to have it painted out. “They shall have a republican President in earnest,” he wrote.

Overcast skies had cleared by noon. The day turned bright and cloudless. But for Adams there was little cheer. With none of his family present, he felt miserably alone. He had been unable to sleep the night before, sick with worry that he might not make it through the ceremony without fainting. But he succeeded with flying colors, delivering an address that left little doubt as to where he stood on the Constitution, partisan politics, domestic concerns, France, and the pressing issue of peace or war.

Though in print the speech would seem a bit stilted, it was delivered with great force and effect. Stirred by emotion, and in a strong voice, Adams recalled the old ardor of the American Revolution and spoke of the “present happy Constitution” as the creation of “good heads prompted by good hearts.” In answer to concerns about his political creed, he expressed total attachment to and veneration for the present system of a free republican government. “What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?” He spoke of his respect for the rights of all states, and of his belief in expanded education for all the people, both to enlarge the happiness of life and as essential to the preservation of freedom. The great threats to the nation, Adams warned, were sophistry, the spirit of party, and “the pestilence of foreign influence.”

He paid gracious tribute to Washington’s leadership. He lauded American agriculture and manufacturing, pledged himself to a spirit of “equity and humanity” toward the American Indian, “to meliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them.”

To Abigail he would later write, “I have been so strangely used in this country, so belied and so undefended that I was determined to say some things as an appeal to posterity.” But the strongest lines, those underscoring his determination to maintain American neutrality, were delivered directly for the benefit of Congress and the foreign diplomats present, not to say the opposition press. It was his “inflexible determination” to maintain peace with all nations, Adams declared, then expressed a personal esteem for France, stemming from a residence of nearly seven years there. Finally he affirmed an “unshaken confidence” in the spirit of the American people, “on which I have often hazarded my all.”

Then, having issued a solemn invocation of the Supreme Being, he stepped down from the platform to a table at the front of the chamber, where Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth administered the oath of office, Adams energetically repeating the words.

And so Adams became President of the nation that now — with the additions of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee — numbered sixteen states. Having never in his public life held an administrative position, having never played any but a marginal role in the previous administration, having never served in the military, or campaigned for a single vote, or claimed anything like a political bent, he was now chief executive and commander-in-chief.

Many in the chamber were weeping, moved by his words, but still more, it seems, by the prospect of Washington’s exit from the national stage. “A solemn scene it was indeed,” Adams wrote, noting that Washington’s face remained as serene and unclouded as the day. “Me thought I heard him think, ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!’”

Approval came from all sides. Federalist Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts called it “the most august and sublime” occasion he ever attended. Praise in the Federalist press, too, was not so much for Adams as for the occasion — “Thus ended a scene the parallel of which was never before witnessed in any country. . . .” But Republicans openly extolled what the new President had said. In the pages of the Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache proclaimed John Adams a hero in a way inconceivable before, lauding the “Republican plainness” of Adams’s appearance, his “true dignity,” his “incorruptible integrity.” In all, it was one of the handsomest tributes ever paid to Adams.

It is universally admitted that Mr. Adams is a man of incorruptible integrity, and that theresources of his own mind are equal to the duties of his station; we may flatter ourselves that his measures will be taken with prudence, that he will not become the head of a party, and that he will not be the tool of any man or set of men. His speech on the inauguration augers well to our country. . . . He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party, and he vows his determination to let no political creed interfere in his appointments. How honorable are these sentiments; how characteristic of a patriot!

It was praise Adams took with a large grain of salt, suspecting Bache of wanting only to create a “coolness between me and Mr. Washington.” More to his liking was an item in a Baltimore paper describing him as “an old fielder,” which as he explained to Abigail, “is a tough, hardy, laborious little horse that works very hard and lives upon very little, very useful to his master at small expense.”

BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER his inauguration dozens of old friends, including some like Benjamin Rush who had supported Jefferson in the election, made a point of expressing confidence in Adams. Elbridge Gerry likened him to a ship ballasted with iron, capable of riding out any storm. Cotton Tufts, in a letter lamenting the “vexation” Adams was bound to encounter, wrote, “I will not, however, admit this to be of weight sufficient to deter or prevent a great and good man.” A letter from Samuel Adams, then in his seventy-fifth year, may have meant the most of all. “I congratulate you as the first citizen of the United States — I may add the world. I am, my dear sir, notwithstanding I have been otherwise represented in party papers, your old and unvaried friend.”

Except for his siege of anxiety the night before the inauguration, Adams’s state of mind had remained quite steady. He had never felt “easier,” he assured Abigail, and a diary entry of the wife of the British ambassador seems to bear him out. At a dinner given by Washington in mid-January, Henrietta Liston found herself seated between the President and the Vice President — “between the rising and setting suns” — and though she found Washington as noble as expected, Adams proved surprisingly entertaining. “There is a good deal of amusement in the conversation of Adams, a considerable degree of wit and humor,” she recorded happily.

While he knew much patience would be called for in time to come, Adams reminded Abigail that he had had a “good education” in patience in his years in public life, and could “look at a storm with some composure.” Constituted as he was, he may even have welcomed a storm. When in the predawn hours of January 27, a terrible fire ripped through the home and shop of the Philadelphia printer and publisher of the Federal Gazette, Andrew Brown, taking the lives of his wife and children, Adams was conspicuous among the men handing up buckets to fight the blaze. Brown, as all knew, had for some time been excoriating the Vice President at every chance.

In February, when the outcome of the election became official, it had been Adams’s role, as president of the Senate, to open and read the final votes in the electoral college. He had won by only a narrow margin, with 71 votes to Jefferson’s 68. (Pinckney had 59, Burr, 30, Samuel Adams, II.) As Adams himself observed, he was President by three votes. Yet he appears to have taken it in stride. “I am not alarmed,” he told Nabby, who had written to express her concern. “If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage.” To Abigail he wrote simply, “The die is cast.”

With the inauguration still to come, he had taken one of the most fateful steps of his presidency. Rather than choosing a new cabinet of his own, Adams asked Washington’s four department heads to stay on, convinced this was the surest way to preserve Federalist harmony. “Washington had appointed them and I knew it would turn the world upside down if I removed any one of them,” he later wrote. “I had then no particular objection to any of them.” Also, there was no tradition of cabinet members resigning their positions at the end of a President’s term. Washington himself had encouraged them to remain; nor did any express a wish to leave.

They were Secretary of State Timothy Pickering of Salem, Massachusetts; Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of Connecticut; Secretary of War James McHenry of Maryland; and Charles Lee of Virginia, the Attorney General. All were younger men than Adams. Wolcott, the youngest at thirty-seven, was the son of the Oliver Wolcott with whom Adams had served in the Continental Congress. A plump, rather pleasant-looking lawyer who had been educated at Yale, he was thought trustworthy and affable. McHenry, an even friendlier and more likable man, had been born and raised in County Antrim, Ireland, and spoke with a trace of an Irish accent. Charles Lee, like Wolcott, was still in his thirties, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton and, while perfectly competent, was distinguished primarily for being a Lee of Virginia.

None were of oustanding ability, but all were Federalists, and Wolcott and McHenry, like Secretary of State Pickering, were extreme Federalists, or High Federalists. They belonged to the ardently anti-French, pro-British wing of the party who considered Alexander Hamilton their leader, and because of this, and the fact that they had served in the Washington cabinet, they were inclined to look down on John Adams.

But of the four it was Timothy Pickering who held the strongest views and, as Secretary of State, was the most important, given the precarious nature of a world at war, as well as his own obdurate personality. Pickering was not an easy man to like or get along with even under normal circumstances, as Adams knew. In many ways Pickering might have served as the model New Englander for those who disliked the type. Tall, lean, and severe-looking, with a lantern jaw and hard blue eyes, he was Salem-born-and-bred, a Harvard graduate, proud, opinionated, self-righteous, and utterly humorless. After brief service on Washington’s staff during the war, he had been promoted to adjutant general. Later he became the first Postmaster General, and from there moved over to replace Henry Knox as Secretary of War. When Secretary of State Edmund Randolph was forced to resign under a cloud of suspicion — a cloud largely of Pickering’s making — Pickering was named to succeed him, but only after Washington had been turned down by five others to whom he offered the position.

To his credit, Pickering was energetic and conscientious. He was fond of music and enjoyed a happy marriage that had produced ten children. Adams, who had known him for years, though not well, was willing to give him — indeed all of his cabinet — the benefit of the doubt. “Pickering and all his colleagues are as much attached to me as I desire,” he told Elbridge Gerry.

To many the great question was the part Jefferson might play concerning relations with France — the Republicans hoping it would be considerable, the Federalists determined he should have no say whatever. Privately, Adams was ambivalent on the subject. While he had forgiven Jefferson most of his past trespasses, he had by no means forgotten them. “I may say to you that his patronage of Paine and Freneau and his entanglements with characters and politics which have been pernicious are and have been a source of inquietude and anxiety to me,” Adams confided to Tristram Dalton. “He will have too many French about him to flatter him, but I hope we can keep him steady.”

To Elbridge Gerry, however, Adams expressed greater confidence. In view of Jefferson’s good sense and long friendship, Adams thought he could expect from his Vice President support of the kind he himself had given Washington, “which is and shall be the pride and boast of my life.” Benjamin Rush, meantime, had written to Jefferson to say what a lift it gave him to hear Adams “speak with pleasure of the prospect of administering the government in a connection with you. He does justice to you upon all occasions . . .”

Arriving in Philadelphia just days before the inauguration, Jefferson had called on Adams at the Francis Hotel, where Jefferson, too, was to stay. They had not seen one another for three years, and apparently the reunion went well. As a matter of courtesy, one such visit between the President and Vice President would have sufficed, but the fact that Adams promptly returned the call the next morning was taken as a clear signal that Adams meant truly to pursue a policy above party divisions.

According to Jefferson’s account of the meeting, written years later, Adams “entered immediately” into discussion of the crisis at hand and his wish for Jefferson to play a lead part in resolving it. Faced with the prospect of war with France, Adams was determined to make a fresh effort at negotiations in Paris, to bring about a reconciliation, which he believed possible and desirable. “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war,” he had written to Abigail.

The government of France, led since 1795 by a five-headed executive commission known as the Directory, had chosen to interpret the Jay Treaty as an Anglo-American alliance. In an effort to improve relations with France, Washington had recalled the American minister, James Monroe, and sent in his place a staunch Federalist, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. But as yet there was no word from Pinckney.

It was the “first wish of his heart,” Adams told Jefferson, to send him to Paris, though he supposed this would be out of the question. “It did not seem justifiable for him to send away the person destined to take his place in case of an accident to himself,” Jefferson would recall; “nor decent to remove from consideration one who was a rival for public favor.”

Jefferson agreed with Adams’s reasoning. Irrespective of whether the Constitution would allow it, he was sick of residing in Europe, Jefferson said, and hoped never to cross the Atlantic again as long as he lived.

That being so, Adams continued, it was his plan to send two emissaries to join Pinckney, making it a bipartisan three-man commission, which by its “dignity” ought to satisfy France, and by its geographical and political balance satisfy both parties and all parts of the country. He had in mind Elbridge Gerry and James Madison, who had recently retired from Congress. Jefferson said he was certain Madison would not accept, but at Adams’s request agreed to inquire.

This was on March 3, the day before the inauguration. The next morning, in his own brief inaugural remarks before the Senate, Jefferson made a point of commending Adams as that “eminent character,” and spoke of their “uninterrupted friendship.” For a fleeting interlude the prospect of truly nonpartisan cooperation between them appeared attainable. “I am much pleased,” one Supreme Court justice wrote, “that Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson lodge together. The thing looks well; it carries conciliation and healing with it, and may have a happy effect on parties.”

The day following the inauguration, however, when President Adams asked others, including Washington, for their opinion on sending Madison to Paris, he heard only stiff objections. To such High Federalists as Timothy Pickering and Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott, Madison was as unacceptable as Jefferson would have been. Wolcott told the President that sending Madison would “make dire work among the passions of our parties in Congress.” When Adams said he refused to be intimidated by party passions, Wolcott threatened to resign.

As Jefferson would recall, it was that evening while walking down Market Street with Adams, after a farewell dinner given by Washington, that he informed Adams of Madison’s refusal to go to France. Adams indicated that in any event the issue was now academic. There had been a change of mind due to objections raised. To Jefferson it was clear that Adams, who imagined he might “steer impartially between the parties,” had been brought abruptly back into the Federalist fold. But it was also clear to Adams that neither Jefferson nor Madison had the least desire to work with the administration, and thus he could expect no help from any of the Republicans.

It was there on Market Street, according to Jefferson, that he and Adams reached the breaking point. Adams never again mentioned a word to him on the subject of France, “or ever consulted me as to any measures of the government.”

Whether the parting was quite so clear-cut as Jefferson remembered is uncertain. But as Adams, too, later acknowledged, they “consulted very little together afterward.” Adams was to call on his Vice President for advice no more than Washington had called on him. The great difference, however, was that Jefferson was of the opposing party, with differing objectives and principles, and Adams consequently could never count on such loyalty from Jefferson as he had given Washington. Adams never knew when Jefferson might be working secretly to undercut or thwart him, for Jefferson’s abiding flaw, Adams had concluded, was “want of sincerity.”

In his Farewell Address, Washington had warned against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Particularly in governments of “popular form,” he had said, “it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.” Yet party spirit and animosities were as alive as ever, as Adams had been shown in the bluntest of terms in little more than twenty-four hours since taking office.

On March 8, Washington called at the Francis Hotel to say goodbye to Adams and wish him well. They were parting on good terms. For all his long coolness toward Adams, Washington before leaving office had written an unsolicited letter expressing the ”strong hope” that as President, Adams would not withhold “merited promotion” from John Quincy. “I give it as my decided opinion,” Washington wrote, “that Mr. [John Quincy] Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and there remains no doubt in my mind that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps if he is now to be brought into that line, or into any other public work.” Little that Washington might have said or done could have meant more to Adams.

“The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag,” Jefferson wrote to Madison. “Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see, that they will be ascribed to the new administration.”

Jefferson, too, would depart shortly, after a quick farewell to Adams. “He is as he was,” Adams noted cryptically.

SO MUCH HAD HAPPENED in John Adams’s life — he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country — that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a “kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry,” as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

In this sense the presidency was but another episode in the long journey, and, as fate would have it, he was left little time to dwell overly on anything but the rush of events and the increasingly dangerous road ahead.

“My entrance into office is marked by a misunderstanding with France, which I shall endeavor to reconcile,” he wrote to John Quincy, “provided that no violation of faith, no stain upon honor is exacted. . . . America is not scared.”

On the evening of March 13, or possibly the next morning, Adams was hit with stunning news. The French Directory had refused to receive General Pinckney. Forced to leave Paris as though he were an undesirable alien, Pinckney had withdrawn to Amsterdam and was awaiting instructions.

To make matters worse, Adams learned of further French seizures of American ships in the Caribbean and that by decrees issued in Paris, the Directory had, in effect, launched an undeclared war on American shipping everywhere. The crisis had come to a head. Adams faced the threat of all-out war.

Days were consumed by tedious meetings. The weather was miserable, he reported to Abigail. “I have a great cold. The news is not pleasant.” Such confidence in his cabinet as he had expressed to Elbridge Gerry was badly shaken. From what he wrote privately to Abigail, it appears he already sensed what trouble was in store from that quarter. “From the situation where I now am, I see a scene of ambition beyond all my former suspicions or imagination. . . . Jealousies and rivalries . . . never stared me in the face in such horrid forms as in the present.”

On March 21 he moved into the President’s House vacated by Washington, but what should rightfully have been a fulfilling moment proved only more demoralizing.

The furniture belonging to the public is in the most deplorable condition [he reported to Abigail]. There is not a chair to sit in. The beds and bedding are in a woeful pickle. This house has been a scene of the most scandalous drinking and disorder among the servants that I ever heard of. I would not have one of them for any consideration. There is not a carpet nor a curtain, nor a glass [mirror], nor linen, nor china, nor anything.

Rent for the house was an exorbitant $2,700 a year, plus another $2,500 for carriages and horses. Though Congress would allot $14,000 to purchase furniture, Adams worried that on his salary of $25,000, it would be impossible to make ends meet. They would be more “pinched” than ever in their lives, he warned Abigail. “All the glasses, ornaments, kitchen furniture . . . all to purchase. All the china . . . glass and crockery. . . .

All the linen besides. . . . Secretaries, servants, wood, charities . . . the million dittoes.” Yet not a word could they say. “We must stand our ground as long as we can.” To no one but her could he ever complain.

The work was more taxing than he had been prepared for, “very dry, dull,” “perplexing,” and “incessant.” But again nothing could be said. “Don’t expose this croaking and groaning. . . . I should lose all my character [reputation] for firmness. . . . Indeed, I sometimes suspect that I deserve a character of peevishness and fretfulness, rather than firmness.”

But more was happening than he let on. On Saturday, March 25, he called for Congress to reconvene in special session on May 15, “to consult and determine on such measures as their wisdom shall be deemed meet for the safety and welfare of the United States.” War clouds gathered over the capital — to the angry indignation of the Republicans. The Federalist press declared the United States had been grievously insulted by France; the Republican press affirmed American friendship with the French and, while expressing the hope that the President would remain true to his inaugural pledge to seek peace, reported that a “certain ex-Secretary” (Hamilton) was secretly preaching war to further his political ambitions.

A lively new newspaper had begun publication in Philadelphia, in answer to Bache’s Aurora. Porcupine’s Gazette was the work of an English printer and bookseller, William Cobbett, who wrote under the pen name “Peter Porcupine” and immediately demonstrated that he could be as biased, sarcastic, and full of invective as Bache, and attract no less attention. Headlines in Porcupine’s Gazette announced that war with France was all but certain:

MR. PINCKNEY, THE AMERICAN MINISTER AT PARIS, HAVING RECEIVED ORDERS TO QUIT THE TERRITORIES OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, HAS ACTUALLY TAKEN HIS DEPARTURE ACCORDINGLY. WAR BETWEEN THESE TWO POWERS MAY THEREFORE BE CONSIDERED INEVITABLE.

Cobbett not only expected and wanted war with France, but favored the alliance with Britain that was bound to result — an increasingly popular view in many quarters.

It is manifestly the design of the French party to lull the people into a fatal security, to deaden their national energy and to defeat in this way those measures of defense which would secure to us our independence. With this view they will fabricate reports of accommodation with France — for this end they are constantly preaching up the improbability of a war with that nation, and some of the base traitors have even declared that in the event of war they will join France.

Adams remained silent, but in letters to Henry Knox and John Quincy said he would do everything possible to settle all disputes with France. To Abigail he confessed to being totally exhausted and begged her to come to his rescue. The more at odds he felt with his cabinet, the less he trusted their judgment, the greater his need for her insight and common sense, her presence in his life. His pleas for her to come grew more urgent even than those he had sent during his difficult debut as Vice President.

“I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you,” he wrote. And again: “I must entreat you to lose not a moment’s time in preparing to come on, that you may take off from me every care of life but that of my public duty, assist me with your councils, and console me with your conversation.”

“The times are critical and dangerous, and I must have you here to assist me,” he told her. “I must now repeat this with zeal and earnestness. I can do nothing without you.”

ABIGAIL HAD BEEN corresponding faithfully the whole time, offering advice, opinions on people, often saying more than she knew she should as the wife of a president. “My pen runs riot,” she allowed. “I forget that it must grow cautious and prudent.” She had encouraged his confidence in Jefferson. Like others, she had thought the odd circumstance of having a President and Vice President of “differing sentiments” could prove a blessing were both to “aim at the same end, the good of their country.” Conceivably the combination of two well-meaning men could serve to continue the Union as Washington had managed all alone.

When Adams confided that he hoped to keep Hamilton at a safe distance, she provided a withering farsighted assessment. “Beware that spare Cassius has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” she wrote. “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”

She prayed that “’things which made for peace may not be hid from your eyes.’” Her feelings were not those of pride or ostentation, but “solemnized” by the knowledge of the obligations and duties he had assumed. “That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with the satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your A.A.”

Her own days were taken up with all that would have preoccupied him had he been home, and more. She kept house, ran the farm, settled issues among the hired men, managed the family finances, and tried not to complain about her health or loneliness.

In a particularly memorable letter, she recounted a crisis that arose when the youngest of her hired hands, James Prince, a free black boy she had taken under her wing in Philadelphia, came to ask if he might attend evening classes in town at a new school for apprentices. Abigail, who had taught him herself to read and write, warmly approved, but was soon asked by a neighbor to withdraw James. If she did not, she was told, the other boys would refuse to attend and the school would close. Had James misbehaved, Abigail asked. No, she was informed, it was because he was black. Did these other boys object when he attended church? No, they did not.

“The boy is a freeman as much as any of the young men, and merely because his face is black is he to be denied instruction?” she asked. “How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood? Is this the Christian principle of doing unto others as we would have others to do to us?”

She requested that the boys be sent to her. “Tell them . . . that I hope we shall all go to Heaven together.” And this, she was pleased to report to Adams, ended the crisis. She heard no more on the subject; James continued in the school.

As ever, a very considerable part of her time was devoted to correspondence with the rest of the family, about whom she reported to John, seldom withholding her own opinions.

John Quincy was in love again, this time with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of the American consul in London whom the Adamses knew. Though John Quincy assured his mother that his “matrimonial prospects” were still uncertain, she could not help worrying, as she told him, whether the young woman was right for him, whether she might be too young, too accustomed to the splendors and attractions of Europe — meaning her expensive tastes might be more than he could afford.

“All your observations on the subject are received by me with gratitude, as I knew them to proceed from serious concern and purest parental affection,” answered the young diplomat. The lady in question had “goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition, as well as spirit and discretion,” and would “prove such a daughter as you would wish for your son.”

“My fear arose from the youth and inexperience of the lady,” Abigail wrote in reply, and asked John Quincy to please tell Louisa that “I consider her already my daughter.”

Her greater concern was still over Nabby, whose husband, Colonel Smith, Abigail had sadly concluded, was “a man wholly devoid of judgment.” He had deceived himself with his visionary schemes and “led his family into a state of living which I fear his means will not bear him out.”

In April, as Abigail was preparing to leave for Philadelphia, the weather turned unseasonably hot. Then as suddenly the temperature plunged and John’s aged mother went into a sharp decline. “The good old lady is sure she shall die now [that] her physician and nurse are about to leave her, but she judges with me that all ought to be forsaken for the husband,” Abigail informed John.

Refusing to leave, she was with his mother until the end came on April 21, and it was she who made arrangements for the funeral in her front parlor.

“I prepare to set out on the morrow,” she wrote to John on April 26. “Our aged parent has gone to rest. . . . She fell asleep, and is happy. . . . I am ready and willing to follow my husband wherever he chooses.”

The obituary that appeared in the Boston papers, noted that Susanna Boylston Adams Hall, mother of the President of the United States, who died in the eighty-ninth year of her life, had “afforded the present generation a living example of that simplicity of manners and godly sincerity for which the venerable settlers of this country were so justly esteemed.”

From Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Abigail to express his grief and the wish that he had been at Quincy to give her help and comfort.

Our ancestors are now all gone, and we are to follow them very soon to a country where there will be no war or rumor of war, no envy, no jealousy, rivalry or party.

You and I are entering on a new scene, which will be the most difficult and least agreeable of any in our lives. I hope the burden will be lighter to both of us when we come together.

Her journey south was extremely difficult, because of heavy rains and washed-out roads. She felt like Noah’s dove, Abigail wrote, her thoughts always returning to the ark she had left. The part she must play now, as wife of the President, though “enviable no doubt in the eyes of some,” was one she had never envied or wanted. “That I may discharge my part with honor and give satisfaction is my most earnest wish.”

Stopping to see Nabby at East Chester, she was stunned to find that Colonel Smith was off again on another of his uncertain ventures, and Nabby too upset even to talk about it, except to say she had no idea where he was. “My reflections upon prospects there took from me all appetite for food,” Abigail confided to her sister Mary, “and depressed my spirits, before too low.”

Expecting her to arrive at Philadelphia on May 10, Adams set off that morning by carriage and met her about twenty-five miles outside the city.

I quitted my own carriage, and took my seat by his side [she wrote]. We rode on to Bristol, where I had previously engaged a dinner, and there upon the banks of the Delaware, we spent the day, getting into the city at sunset.

It took several days for her to recover from the trip. But in little time she, too, was caught up in the tumult of events.

ONE DAY LATER, ON MAY 11, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia from Monticello to find the city astir over a private letter he had written more than a year before that had just appeared in print in the New York Minerva, a strongly Federalist paper, edited by Noah Webster. Writing to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, during the debate over the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had described America as a country taken over by “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty,” and by leaders who were assimilating “the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.” Then, in the line that caused the stir, Jefferson wrote:

It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to those heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.

Successive translations of the letter from English to Italian to French, then back to English again had changed and intensified some of the wording by the time it appeared in the Minerva — “harlot” had become “whore,” for example — but the meaning was essentially unchanged and the letter was taken by many as an unconscionable attack on Washington.

Jefferson said nothing in his defense, and Washington, too, remained silent. But great damage had been done to Jefferson by the “Mazzei Letter,” notwithstanding the many prominent Republicans who claimed he had only been telling the unvarnished truth.

II

THE PRESIDENT entered Congress Hall at midday, May 16, 1797, absolutely clear in his mind about his intentions and walked to the dais knowing he had the support of his cabinet in what he was about to say. Indeed, some of the language in the speech he carried was their own, arrived at after he had asked for their answers to a list of specific questions, a technique employed by his predecessor. Long a man of decided temperament, Adams was as determined as he had ever been to maintain the policy of neutrality established by Washington, while refusing to submit to any indignities or to sacrifice American honor — he was determined, in essence, to fulfill his own inaugural promises.

But as an old realist, and one who had read more of history and experienced more of it than any of those in his audience, he also knew how extremely difficult, if not impossible, neutrality would be to achieve and maintain in a world at war. He knew how much could happen in France or Britain or on the high seas, or within his own country, over which he had no control. Regional and party differences had made a tinderbox of American politics. It was not only that Republicans were divided from Federalists, but Federalists were sharply at odds with themselves, and the roll of the strident, often vicious press was changing the whole political atmosphere.

Nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had, no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea. With authorization from the Republic of France, French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.

In a calm, steady voice, Adams said the French had “inflicted a wound in the American breast,” but that it was his sincere desire to see it healed, and to preserve peace and friendship with all nations. He was therefore calling for both “a fresh attempt” at negotiation with France, and a buildup of American military strength.

While we are endeavoring to adjust all our differences with France by amicable negotiation, with the progress of the war in Europe, the depredations on our commerce, the personal injuries to our citizens, and the general complexion of our affairs, render it my duty to recommend your consideration of effectual measures of defense.

This was not an act of belligerence, but a measure to give added weight and respect to the mission he planned to send to Paris.

As was remarked at the time, the speech bore a strong resemblance to the American eagle, an olive branch in one talon, and in the other the “emblems of defense.” Federalist papers hailed Adams’s patriotic fire. He had “shone forth” as in times of old, exciting “the liveliest approbation of all real Americans.”

It may be justly called a true American speech [said the Gazette of the United States]. It breathes in every line true American patriotism. It came from the heart of a tried patriot, and was addressed to the hearts of patriots alone. There was nothing wavering in it; no little trick to catch a transitory approbation from the discontented, or to soothe the fractious. It was the explicit language of the first magistrate of the nation, disclosing to his fellow citizens the honest sentiments of his heart, expressing with proper feeling and sensibility the wrongs done to his injured country, and his determination to attempt to obtain redress; while at the same time it manifested humane anxiety to avert the calamities of war by temperance and negotiations.

Federalist approval was emphatic and widespread. From Mount Vernon, Washington wrote that the President had “placed matters upon their true ground.”

Republicans were enraged. Adams had not only failed to express sufficient sympathy for the French but had sounded a “war-whoop.” How, if he wanted to avoid war, could he press Congress to build up the navy?

Benjamin Bache turned with a fury on the President he had so recently lauded as a prudent, high-minded man of integrity. In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as “The President by Three Votes,” mocked again as “His Rotundity,” excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, “a man divested of his senses.” He was charged again and again as a creature of Hamilton and the Federalist war hawks.

In fact, most Federalists at this point, including Hamilton, recognized the need for a renewed effort to treat with France, and as Adams did not know, it was largely because of Hamilton’s influence that the cabinet had given their full support to the peace mission.

Within days Adams appointed two special envoys who, with General Pinckney, would comprise a new commission to proceed to Paris. He chose John Marshall of Virginia, whom he did not know, and his own former aide in Paris, Francis Dana. But when Dana declined because of poor health, Adams named Elbridge Gerry.

Marshall, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, was an ardent champion of George Washington under whom he had served gallantly in the war. A cousin of Jefferson’s, but not an admirer of the Vice President, he was known to be able, skilled in the law, and, as mattered greatly, he was one of Virginia’s few Federalists. Secretary of State Pickering and others in the cabinet strongly approved the choice.

Elbridge Gerry, however, was unacceptable to Pickering and the cabinet, who thought him too independent and unreliable. “It is ten to one against his agreeing with his colleagues,” Secretary of War McHenry warned the President. Even Abigail questioned the choice. But Adams insisted. He needed someone on the commission whose friendship and loyalty were beyond doubt. He knew Gerry — “I knew Gerry infinitely better than any of them,” he later said. The old bond of 1776 was still a tie that held Adams to Rush and even to Jefferson, for all the strains of politics. From the time of their ride to Philadelphia by horseback in the crisis winter of 1776, Adams had felt Gerry was someone to count on, and he was prepared to do just that in the present crisis. With the exception of his own son, John Quincy, there was perhaps no man in whom Adams placed more trust. Also, importantly, of the three envoys Gerry was the most sympathetic to France and, with his open admiration of Jefferson, came the closest to making it a bipartisan commission.

Later, when Marshall arrived in Philadelphia, Adams felt still better about the makeup of the commission. He and Marshall liked each other at once, even used virtually the same words to describe one another. Marshall judged Adams a “sensible, plain, candid, good tempered man,” while Adams wrote of Marshall, “he is a plain man, very sensible, cautious, and learned in the law of nations.”

In Paris the three American envoys would be dealing with the extremely wily and charming new French Foreign Minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had only recently returned to France after more than two years in exile in Philadelphia, where he had been well treated. Adams had known him but only slightly, not enough to have a sense of what to expect.

THE UNDECLARED WAR at sea continued. That spring Adams was informed that already the French had taken more than 300 trading vessels. American seamen had been wounded. In March the French captors of a ship out of Baltimore, the Cincinnatus, had tortured the American captain with thumbscrews in an unsuccessful attempt to make him say he was carrying British cargo.

“The task of the President is very arduous, very perplexing, and very hazardous. I do not wonder Washington wished to retire from it, or rejoiced in seeing an old oak in his place,” observed Abigail, who in her letters to her sister Mary was to provide an inside look at the Adams presidency like no other, much as she had in portraying their life in France and London years before, writing always to the moment and with untrammeled candor.

Adams was in his office in the President’s House most of every day and from “such close application” looked exhausted. She took charge of the large house, supervised the staff, and sent off orders to Mary for shipments of the President’s favorite New England cheese, bacon, white potatoes, and cider. In keeping with “old habit,” she told Mary, their day began at five in the morning. Breakfast was at eight, and they saw each other again at dinner, customarily served at three. “I begin to feel a little more at home, and less anxiety about the ceremonious part of my duty,” Abigail allowed. “I am obliged every day to devote two hours for the purpose of seeing company.”

The day is past, and a fatiguing one it has been [she closed another letter at eight o’clock in the evening]. The ladies of Foreign Ministers and the Ministers, with our own secretaries and ladies have visited me today, and add to them, the whole levee today of Senate and House. Strangers, etc. making near one hundred asked permission to visit me, so that from past 12 till near 4:00, I was rising up and sitting down.

She was both involved and vitally interested in her husband’s world. She read all the newspapers, and in time came to know the names and faces of everyone in Congress, their background and political views. Little transpired in the capital that she did not know about. Yet her interest in matters at home never flagged. She kept contact with nieces and nephews, inquired regularly about the welfare of her pensioners: Parson Wibird, who had grown old and infirm, and her aged former servant Phoebe, to whom she sent money and made sure she had sufficient fire-wood and whatever other necessities were wanting.

The President’s worries and burdens were never out of mind. “Mrs. Tufts once styled my situation ‘splendid misery,’” Abigail reminded Mary. Interestingly, it was a phrase Vice President Jefferson also used to describe the presidency.

When Adams named John Quincy to be minister to Prussia, more Republican protest erupted. Washington had never appointed relatives to office, it was said, not even distant relatives. The President must resign, charged the Aurora, “before it is too late to retrieve our deranged affairs.” When Congress chose to leave some matters to the “discretion” of the President, the Aurora attacked Adams for his excessive vanity.

“We may truly say we know not what a day will bring forth,” Abigail observed in her running account. “From every side we are in danger. We are in perils by land, and we are in perils by sea, and in perils by false brethren.” Whom she meant by false brethren, she did not say. But the Vice President all the while did nothing whatever to help his former friend the President. Further, he made no secret of his belief that Adams was leading the nation straight to war.

After years of seclusion at Monticello, Jefferson had, with amazing agility, stepped back into the kind of party politics he professed to abhor, and in no time emerged as leader of the opposition. With Madison in retirement, and the vice presidency providing ample free time, Jefferson kept extremely busy as a “closet politician,” in one man’s expression, writing letters and lending support — ideas, information, and money — to the Republican press, including such “gladiators of the quill” as a dissolute Scottish pamphleteer and scandalmonger named James T. Callender, who wrote for the Aurora and specialized in attacks on John Adams.

The Francis Hotel, where Jefferson continued to lodge, became headquarters for the Republican inner circle. Any pretense of harmony between the President and Vice President was dispensed with. Like other Republicans, Jefferson failed to understand how Adams could reconcile negotiation for peace with measures of defense, and in private correspondence accused Adams of willfully endangering the peace. When some of this got back to Adams, he angrily declared it bespoke a mind “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.”

Yet given all that Jefferson was doing, and the combustible atmosphere of the moment, Adams’s rancorous comments were remarkably few and mild. Many in the Federalist party suspected Jefferson of outright treachery against his own country.

Convinced that the best hope for the world was the defeat of Britain by France, and that such an outcome was imminent, Jefferson privately advised the French chargé d’affaires in Philadelphia, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de Letombe, that the Directory should show the three American envoys all proper courtesy but “then drag out the negotiations at length.”

Letombe wrote of the meeting with “the wise Jefferson,” in a report to his Foreign Minister, dated June 7, 1797. America, Jefferson had impressed upon Letombe, was “penetrated with gratitude to France” and would “never forget that it owes its liberation to France.” The new President of the United States was another matter, however. Jefferson was unsparing: “Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preference accorded Franklin over him in Paris.” But Adams’s term of office was only four years, Jefferson reminded Letombe. Besides, Adams did not have popular support. “He only became President by three votes, and the system of the United States will change along with him.”

Possibly these were not Jefferson’s exact words; possibly his assessment of Adams was not as harsh and patently disloyal as Letombe’s account would make it appear. But if what Letombe recorded was all that Jefferson had to say for Adams, this would seem to have proved the end of a long friendship. And whatever Jefferson’s exact words may have been, clearly the chargé d’affaires was led to conclude that the difficulties of the moment were not a question of American regard for France, but of the difficult, unpopular, aberrant old man who temporarily held office as President.

The truth, it happens, was that Adams and Jefferson both wanted peace with France and each was working to attain that objective, though in their decidedly different ways.

SUMMER MARKED the departure of the envoys, Gerry sailing from Boston, Marshall from Philadelphia, where Congress sweltered and fumed trying to wind up business, before “the sick season” came on.

She could not wait to start for home, Abigail wrote. She longed for a sea breeze and her rose bush. “The President really suffers for want of a journey, or rather for want of some relaxation,” she told Mary Cranch.

Today will be the fifth great dinner I have had, about 36 gentlemen today, as many more next week, and I shall have to get through the whole of Congress, with their appendages. Then comes the 4th of July, which is a still more tedious day, as we must then have not only all Congress, but all the gentlemen of the city, the Governor and officers and companies. . . . I hope the day will not be hot.

The Fourth turned out to be a “fine, cool day,” and her reception a great success.

. . . my fatigue arose chiefly from being dressed at an early hour, and receiving the very numerous sets of company who were so polite as to pay their compliments to me in succession in my drawing room after visiting the President below, and partaking of cake, wine, and punch with him. To my company were added the ladies of foreign ministers and Home Secretaries with a few others. The parade lasted from 12 until four o’clock.

To at least one of those present, she and the President seemed the picture of calm good cheer. Henrietta Liston, the British ambassador’s wife, described Adams as “steady and resolute,” while “Mrs. Adams . . . has spirit enough to laugh at Bache’s abuse of her husband, which poor Mrs. Washington could not do.”

In days the city had become a bake house again, as Abigail wrote. “The hot weather of July has weakened us all. Complaints of the bowels are very frequent and troublesome.” Strangely, cats were dying all over the city. The streets were filled with dead cats. No one had an explanation, and no one in Congress wished to delay departure an hour longer than necessary.

On July 10, exhausted, irritable members of both houses started for home convinced the special session had only aggravated party divisions. Adams had hoped it would help unite the country, and in this plainly he had failed.

There was some consolation, however. After a good deal of fuss and bickering, Congress had at last approved an Act Providing a Naval Armament. It was hardly what Adams had called for, but it was a start, providing funds to equip and man three frigates, the Constitution, the United States, and the Constellation, which had been built during the Washington administration but remained unequipped for service.

With a cooling rain falling, the Adamses started for home on July 19. Why, asked the Aurora, had the President of the United States “absconded” from the seat of government at a time when the public mind was “exceedingly agitated”?

III

IT WAS A SUMMER without incident. There was no news from France, no worsening or lessening of the crisis. For Adams the pleasures of August and September at Peacefield had all the desired effect. By the time they were heading back to Philadelphia, he and Abigail were both rested and revived. Abigail wrote of feeling better than she had in years.

Also, one news item appears to have added considerably to their outlook. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Johnson had been married, as the Adamses learned just before leaving home. The small announcement in a Boston paper, like the first word from John Quincy himself, appeared two months after the fact. The young couple were married on July 26 in the ancient Anglican church known as All Hallows Barking by the Tower of London.

“I have now the happiness of presenting to you another daughter,” read John Quincy’s letter to his “Dear and Honored Parents,” each of whom responded with an appropriately warm letter of congratulations. “And may the blessing of God Almighty be bestowed on this marriage and all its connections and effects,” wrote Adams in benediction.

The departure from Quincy took place in the first week of October, but the Adamses were not to reach the capital for more than a month. Yellow fever again raged in Philadelphia, as they learned en route, and so it was necessary to stop and wait at East Chester with Nabby. Adams was kept apprised by daily reports. Two-thirds of the population of Philadelphia had fled the city. The government had scattered to various outlying towns. He imagined members of Congress stranded along the way all up and down the country, all waiting as he was, “in a very disagreeable, awkward, and uncertain situation.” Told there had been an attempt to break into the President’s House and asked if a guard should be posted, Adams said no, lest a sentinel at the door lead people to think the situation worse than they knew.

The wait at East Chester was not easy, as much as he and Abigail adored Nabby and the four grandchildren. The house was small, and the continued absence of Colonel Smith cast a shadow. Abigail found East Chester itself unbearably dull. She worried about Nabby living there, and urged her to come with the children to Philadelphia. “I cannot leave her here this winter with not a single creature within 20 miles of her to speak a word to, or shorten the long solitary winter evening,” she told Mary. But Nabby refused. “I cannot say as much as is in my mind,” wrote Abigail, “the subject being a very delicate one.”

Adams went to New York for a dinner in his honor. Otherwise, to fill the time there was little but the newspapers and talk of a sensational scandal involving Alexander Hamilton. Possibly for Abigail, who claimed to have seen “the very devil” in Hamilton’s eyes, the story came as no surprise.

The “Reynolds Affair” was a complicated tangle of financial dealings, adultery, blackmail, and alleged corruption in the Department of the Treasury, all dating back five years. In 1792, while his wife and children were away, Hamilton had become involved in an “improper connection” with a young woman named Maria Reynolds. Her husband, James Reynolds, a speculator with an unsavory reputation, commenced to blackmail Hamilton, until the point when he, Reynolds, went to prison for an earlier swindle. It was then, while in prison, that Reynolds, in an effort to ease his case, got word to three Republican members of Congress, including Senator James Monroe, that Hamilton was not only an adulterer, but, as Secretary of the Treasury, secretly profiteering with government funds. When the three confronted Hamilton with the charges, he denied any corrupt act as a public official, but acknowledged the affair with Mrs. Reynolds and the blackmail plot, with the understanding that they, as gentlemen, would keep silent, which they did to a degree. A few more were let in on the secret, including the Republican clerk of the House, John Beckley, and Thomas Jefferson.

But it was not until that summer of 1797 that the story broke in a series of unsigned pamphlets produced by James Callender, the unscrupulous writer for the Aurora, whose source apparently was Beckley.

Callender dismissed the adulterous affair as a cover story and accused Hamilton of being a partner with Reynolds in corrupt financial dealings. In response, Hamilton published his own pamphlet, Observations on Certain Documents . . . in which . . . the Charge of Speculation against Alexander Hamilton . . . is Fully Refuted. He denied any improper speculation with James Reynolds, but confessed to the adulterous affair. “My real crime,” Hamilton wrote, “is an amorous connection with his wife.”

Hamilton’s disgrace was a windfall for the Republicans and all who had long thought him corrupt. Presumably the scandal would put a finish to his public career.

Jefferson appears to have made no comment on the Reynolds Affair. Nor did Adams, though it is certain he and Abigail heard plenty, such was the mood in Philadelphia when in November they arrived back at the President’s House, after an absence of fully four months. “Alas, alas, how weak is human nature,” wrote Abigail to her son Thomas.

There was still no report from the three envoys to France. Speaking before Congress on November 23, Adams could acknowledge only that the “unpleasant state of things” continued. The wait would go on, and the lack of information, plus the suspicion that some people knew more than they were saying, only put nerves further on edge.

Feelings ran deep, dividing the parties, dividing old friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” wrote Jefferson, “cross the streets to avoid meeting and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.”

IN EUROPE, French armies had been sweeping across Italy and Austria, in a campaign of French aggrandizement led by young General Napoleon Bonaparte, who appeared invincible. Now, with the start of a new year, 1798, Bonaparte had been given command of all forces on land and sea to carry the war across the Channel to Britain, and as John Quincy reported to his father, the expedition was “in great forwardness.” Bonaparte shortly was to change his mind and lead his forces to Egypt instead, as John Quincy would also report. The French had become formidable as never before.

January 1798 in Congress Hall in Philadelphia, by contrast, was marked by a battle royal on the floor of the House. Vicious animosity of a kind previously confined to newspaper attacks broke out in the first physical assault to occur in Congress. In the midst of debate, when Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut insulted Republican Matthew Lyon of Vermont, Lyon crossed the chamber and spat in Griswold’s face. Soon after, Griswold retaliated with a cane. Lyon grabbed fire tongs from the fireplace, and the two went at each other until, kicking and rolling on the floor, they were pulled apart.

To some the scene provided comic relief. To others it was sad testimony to how very far the republican ideal had descended. It was also apt prelude to much that would follow.

Step by step, events were moving toward the precipice, as Adams said. The first hint of trouble with the mission to France had been in a letter to Adams from General Pinckney in November, but it was a hint only, nothing to go on. In January, again in a private letter, came word from John Marshall by way of The Hague warning that the mission might not be received by the French Directory. In February, to make the tension still worse, Adams had to inform Congress that a French privateer had actually attacked a British merchant ship inside Charleston Harbor.

“We are yet all in the dark respecting our envoys,” Abigail wrote on February 16; and again in another week: “Our envoys have been near six months in Paris but to this hour not a line has been received.”

In the meanwhile, as the President was unaware, his cabinet — Wolcott and McHenry in particular — were receiving continued advice and directions from Alexander Hamilton, who had supposedly retired from public life.

Hamilton was still opposed to war with France. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general and strong aversion to war in the minds of the people of the country,” he wrote to McHenry. “It is an undoubted fact that there is a very general indisposition toward the war in the minds of the people of the United States,” McHenry dutifully advised the President four days later. But should the present attempt to negotiate fail, then the President must address the Congress in a style “cautious, solemn, grave, and void of asperity,” declared McHenry — Hamilton also having told him this was what he was to say.

At last, late the evening of March 4, a year to the day since Adams became President, official dispatches arrived in Philadelphia and were delivered immediately to Timothy Pickering’s desk at the Department of State at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. Four of the dispatches were in cipher and it would be several days before they were decoded. But the message of the fifth dispatch was clear. Seething with indignation, Pickering pulled on a coat and hurried three blocks to the President’s House.

What Adams read was extremely unsettling. The government of France had refused to see the envoys. The mission had failed. Furthermore, the Directory had decreed all French ports closed to neutral shipping and declared that any ship carrying anything produced in England was subject to French capture.

Promptly the next morning, Monday, March 5, Adams sent the uncoded dispatch to Congress. But there was more to the story, as he soon learned with the decoding of the other dispatches.

After arriving in Paris in the first week of October, the three American envoys were kept waiting for several days and then were granted a meeting with Foreign Minister Talleyrand for all of fifteen minutes. More days of silence followed. Then began a series of visits from three secret agents representing Talleyrand — Jean Conrad Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval — who were referred to by the Americans in their dispatches as X, Y, and Z. The Foreign Minister was favorably disposed toward the United States, the American envoys were informed, but in order for negotiations to proceed, a douceur (a sweetener) would be necessary, a bribe of some $250,000 for Talleyrand personally. In addition, a loan of $10,000,000 for the Republic of France was required as compensation for President Adams’s “insults” in his speech before Congress the previous May.

Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry refused to negotiate on such terms. M. Hottinguer, the X of X, Y, and Z, reminded them of the “power and violence of France,” as Marshall recorded, but the Americans held their ground. “Gentlemen,” said Hottinguer, “you do not speak to the point. It is money. It is expected that you will offer the money. . . . What is your answer?” to which General Pinckney emphatically replied, “No! No! Not a sixpence.”

The last of the dispatches was not entirely decoded until March 12, and for several days Adams struggled over what to do, listening to advice and scribbling his thoughts on paper as his mood swung one way then another. He wrote of the “continued violences” of the French at sea, of their “unexampled arrogance” in refusing to receive the envoys, and declared such “injury, outrage, and insult” more than a self-respecting nation should ever have to submit to. But he also noted that peace might still be attainable, and, in fact, peace with honor was still his determined objective.

Wild rumors swept the city. It was said France had already declared war on the United States, that the French were moving to take possession of Florida and Louisiana.

Adams’s message to Congress on March 19 revealed only that the diplomatic mission had failed, and thus he must call again for the measures necessary to defend the nation in the event of attack. It was as mild a statement as he could have made under the circumstances. There was not a word about war, nor anything said of the contents of the dispatches, except that they had been examined and “maturely considered.”

The Republicans immediately decried the message as a declaration of war. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson called it “insane” and commenced lobbying for ways to delay action and allow time for Bonaparte to invade Britain. Jefferson proposed that members of Congress adjourn at once and go home to consult their constituents on the great crisis. “The present period . . . of two or three weeks,” he told Madison in a burst of hyperbole, “is the most eventful ever known since that of 1775, and will decide whether the principles established by that contest are to prevail, or give way to those they subverted.”

Convinced that Adams was deliberately withholding information favorable to the French, Republicans in and out of Congress began insisting that the documents be made available at once. Any delay would be a sign of further duplicity. The Aurora taunted Adams for being “afraid to tell.”

“Beds of roses have never been his destiny,” Abigail wrote of her husband. Whether he would reveal more of the dispatches was something only he could determine, she told Mary; but “clamor who will,” great care must be taken that nothing endanger the lives of the envoys who were still in Paris. The Republicans, French agents, and the “lying wretch” Bache intended to abuse and misrepresent the President until they forced him to resign, “and then they will reign triumphant, headed by the man of the people,” Jefferson.

The respect she had expressed for Jefferson the year before had vanished. How different was the President’s situation from that of Washington, whose Vice President had “never combined with a party against him . . . never intrigued with foreign ministers or foreign courts against his own government . . . never made Bache his companion and counsellor.” John Adams was no warmonger. In self-defense the country might become involved in a war, and for that the country should be prepared, which was the President’s intent. Of what possible benefit could a war be to him? she asked. “He has no ambition for military glory. He cannot add by war to his peace, comfort, or happiness. It must accumulate upon him an additional load of care, toil, trouble, malice, hatred, and I dare say, revenge.”

On Monday, April 2, on the floor of the House, Representative Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania, who had replaced Madison in the leadership of the Republicans, stood to propose that the President be requested to turn over the text of the dispatches. Republicans who had been clamoring for disclosure were now joined by a number of High Federalists who had gotten wind of the damaging content of the dispatches and were happy to help the Republicans step into a trap of their own making. By a vote of 65 to 27 the House demanded that the full text be delivered at once.

Adams, who had apparently concluded that the envoys were by now safely out of France, released the documents the next day, and with the galleries cleared of visitors and the doors secured, the House went into executive session.

The revelation that the crisis was not less than the administration implied, but far worse, hit the Republicans like a hammer. They were “struck dumb, and opened not their mouths,” wrote Abigail. Many representatives privately voiced outrage over the effrontery of Talleyrand and his agents. Some offered lame new arguments. It was said that the whole XYZ story was a contrivance of the Federalist warmongers, that the breakdown of negotiations was the fault of the American envoys. Jefferson, while refusing to comment publicly, privately blamed Adams for past insults to the French, and insisted that Talleyrand and his agents were not, after all, the French government, which was “above suspicion.”

Once the Senate voted to have copies of the documents printed for use within Congress only, it was only a matter of days before they were public knowledge.

In the House, Gallatin had urged that the dispatches not be published, certain that they would dash any surviving hope of a settlement with France — which, it appears, was exactly the fear that troubled the President. And, indeed, High Federalists were claiming it was too late for preaching peace any longer. The Federalist press protested the “damnable outrages” of the French, and a wave of patriotic anti-French anger swept the city and the country with unexpected passion. As Abigail reported to Mary Cranch and John Quincy, public opinion in the capital changed overnight. The tricolor cockade of France that Republicans had been wearing in their hats all but disappeared from sight. No one was heard singing French patriotic songs in public as before, or espousing the cause of France.

The Aurora, in turn, lashed out at the President as a man “unhinged” by the “delirium of vanity.” Had Adams refrained from insulting the French, had he chosen more suitable envoys, the country would never have been brought to such a pass. But in a matter of days subscriptions and advertising fell off so drastically that it appeared the paper might fail. Anger at Bache and Callender was as intense nearly as at the French. John Fenno, editor of the rival Gazette of the United States, asked, “In the name of justice and honor, how long are we to tolerate this scum of party filth and beggerly corruption . . . to go thus with impunity?” In the heat of the moment, it was a question many were asking, including the wife of the President. Bache and his kind had the “malice and falsehood of Satan,” wrote Abigail, whose dislike of the press, dating from the attacks on Adams by London newspapers a decade before, had nearly reached the breaking point.

For the first time, she began to fear for her husband. “Such lies and falsehoods were continually circulated,” she wrote to Mary, “and base and incendiary letters sent to the house addressed to him, that I really have been alarmed for his personal safety. . . . With this temper in a city like this, materials for a mob might be brought together in ten minutes.”

THE COUNTRY BEGAN to prepare for war. On April 8, 1798, Representative Samuel Sewall, a Federalist from Marblehead, Massachusetts, called on Congress to give the President all he had asked for and slowly, somewhat reluctantly, Congress swung into action. Measures were passed for arming merchant ships. Substantial funds — nearly $1 million — were voted for harbor fortifications and cannon foundries. In May a bill passed empowering United States warships to capture any French privateer or cruiser found in American waters.

“The merchant vessels along the wharf in this city begin to wear a warlike appearance,” reported Porcupine’s Gazette. “I dare say the French spies have been writing many, many a melancholy letter on the subject to their partisans who are laying off the coast.”

Led by Gallatin, the Republicans mounted vigorous resistance, and nothing passed by large majorities. The “Executive Party,” Gallatin argued, was creating the crisis only to “increase their power and to bind us by the treble chain of fiscal, legal and military despotism.”

A bill for a “provisional army” was passed, but not before it was cut from 25,000 men to 10,000, which was still more than Adams had asked for or wanted. For though he was the greatest advocate of the navy of any American statesman of his generation, Adams deplored the idea of a standing army.

The rebirth of the navy — the “wooden walls” he wanted above all for defense of the country — and a new Department of the Navy, separate from the War Department, were his pride and joy. Little that he achieved as President would give him greater satisfaction, and with his choice of the first Secretary of the Navy, the able, energetic Benjamin Stoddert of Maryland, he brought into his administration the one truly loyal ally he had close at hand.

From every part of the country came hundreds of patriotic “addresses” to the President — expressions of loyalty and “readiness” from state legislatures, merchant groups, fraternal orders, college students, small towns and cities. Suddenly, Adams was awash in a great upswelling of patriotism. His popularity soared. Never had he known such attention and acclaim, which some thought surpassed even what Washington had known while in office.

Abigail, making her social calls about the city, found people stopping on the street to bow to her or lift their hats, something she had not experienced before. “People begin to see who have been their firm unshaken friends, steady to their interests and defenders of their rights and liberties,” she wrote. “In short, we are now wonderfully popular except with Bache & Co., who in his paper calls the President, old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.”

At the New Theater on Chestnut Street a young performer named Gilbert Fox was stopping the show each night singing “Hail Columbia,” which was “The President’s March” with new lyrics composed by Joseph Hopkinson of Philadelphia, son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Francis Hopkinson. Abigail was part of the full house the night of its premiere, April 25, when Fox was called back to sing it three more times and cheers from the audience, according to Abigail, might have been heard a mile away. “The theater, you know,” she reminded Thomas, “has been called the pulse of the people.”

A few nights later, with the President in the audience as Fox sang “Hail Columbia,” the response was still more stupendous. The song was called for “over and over.” The audience joined in the singing, danced in the aisles.

Firm, united let us be. Rallying ‘round our liberty.

As a band of brothers joined,

Peace and safety we shall find.

When a lone man tried to sing “Ciera,” the marching song of the French Revolution, there were shouts to throw him out.

Even the High Federalists heartily approved of John Adams as they never had. The President, it was said, had awakened the nation from its “fatal stupor.”

Adams himself, exhilarated by such unprecedented popularity, appeared to be as caught up in the spirit of the moment as anyone. Deeply touched by the patriotic addresses that kept pouring in, he spent hours laboring to answer them, as if obliged to respond to each and every one, and in some of what he wrote, he appeared ready to declare war anytime. “To arms then, my young friends,” he said in reply to the youth of Boston, “to arms, especially by sea.”

One May afternoon crowds lined Market Street as a thousand young men of Philadelphia marched two-by-two to the President’s House, wearing in their hats, as a sign of their support, black cockades like those worn by Washington’s troops in the Revolution, Adams received a delegation of them in the Levee Room wearing a dress uniform and sword.

Yet here and there in his replies to the patriotic addresses were to be found clear signs that peace, not war, remained his objective. “I should be happy in the friendship of France upon honorable conditions, under any government she may choose to assume,” he said in a letter to the citizens of Hartford, Connecticut.

When he called for a day of fasting and prayer, he was roundly mocked in the Republican press, but on the day itself the churches were filled. To Vice President Jefferson, it was as though an evil spell had been cast over the capital. He called it a “reign of witches,” and saw no difference between Adams and the “war party.” The new navy, in Jefferson’s view, was a colossal waste of money.

When a fight broke out between two street gangs wearing the black and tricolor cockades, the cavalry was called in. It had become dangerous to set foot outside the door at night, Jefferson wrote. “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he told his daughter Martha. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.” One French emigré would remember people acting as though a French army might land at any moment. “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else; everywhere one saw murderous glances.”

Benjamin Bache’s house was assaulted, his windows smashed. It was rumored that French agents were plotting to burn the city. At the presidential mansion, Adams finally consented to have a sentry posted at the door.

What Adams’s thoughts were through all this he did not record. His personal correspondence had dried up. He wrote almost no letters at all of the kind in which he customarily unburdened himself — in large part because Abigail was with him, but also because he had almost no time to himself.

By all signs, however, he was still of two minds in addressing the crisis. In the image of the American eagle, he still clutched both olive branch and arrows, even if, on occasion in his public poses, his head, unlike the eagle’s, was turned to the arrows.

In his physical appearance, Adams was noticeably changed. He was uncharacteristically pale and had lost weight — “he falls away,” Abigail noted. If not exactly toothless, as Bache said, he had suffered the loss of several more teeth, about which he was quite self-conscious. Abigail worried that he was smoking too many cigars and working to the point of collapse.

Some afternoons he is called from his room twenty times in the course of it, to different persons, besides the hours devoted to the ministers of the different departments, the investigation necessary to be made of those persons who apply for offices or are recommended, the weighing the merits, and pretentions of different candidates for the same office, etc., etc., etc.

“I dare not say how really unwell he looks,” she told Cotton Tufts. To Mary Cranch she confided, “I think sometimes that if the [Congress] does not rise and give the President respite, they will have Jefferson sooner than they wish.”

Yet his spirits were fine, his resolve unwavering in the face of Talleyrand and the Directory. “Poor wretches,” she wrote, “I suppose they want him to cringe, but he is made of oak instead of willow. He may be torn up by the roots, or break, but he will never bend.”

ON JUNE 12, Adams received news that rocked him more than he dared show. A letter arrived from William Vans Murray, who had replaced John Quincy as minister at The Hague. Dated April 12, two months past, it revealed that while envoys Pinckney and Marshall had left Paris, Elbridge Gerry had remained behind. It seemed France wished to treat with Gerry alone.

For Adams, who had banked so much on Gerry against the advice of nearly everyone, it was a painful, infuriating turn of events, as once again Abigail reported to Mary.

Can it be possible, can it be believed that Talleyrand has thus declared and fascinated Mr. Gerry, that he should dare to take upon him such a responsibility? I cannot credit it, yet I know the sin which most easily besets him is obstinacy, and a mistaken policy. You may easily suppose how distressed the President is at this conduct, and the more so because he thought Gerry would certainly not go wrong, and he acted [on] his own judgment, against his counsellors, “who have been truer prophets than they wish themselves.” Gerry means the good of his country, he means the peace of it, but he should consider it must not be purchased by national disgrace and dishonor. If he stays behind he is a ruined man in the estimation of his countrymen. This is all between ourselves.

How could Gerry possibly stay “among the wolves?” Mary would ask in response. She felt great distress for the President, she said, but then “he ought not have infallibility demanded of him.”

On June 17, John Marshall arrived by ship in New York, and in another two days received a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia. Marshall said nothing about going to war with France, however. Indeed, for all he had been through, Marshall was confident, he told Adams, that the French did not want a war with the United States.

Marshall was an impressive man, tall, solidly handsome, unmistakably intelligent, and without airs. Further, unlike all the others advising Adams, he had met with the French and strongly advocated caution and moderation. In effect, Marshall told Adams that there need not be a war, which had been Adams’s instinctive sense all along. Marshall also informed him that Elbridge Gerry had remained behind in Paris because he had been told by Talleyrand that if he left, war would follow. Gerry had made his decision for the good of the country, aware of the scorn he would be subjected to at home.

If Adams had had any thought of asking for a declaration of war before Congress adjourned, he changed his mind. Instead, he sent a message of all of four sentences, the fourth and most important of which was: “I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”

But with the war clamor at a pitch, all talk of an alternative solution was limited to private discussion. More common was the opinion that a formal declaration of war could not come too soon, a view most strongly held by those nearest Adams, including his wife. In a letter to John Quincy, Abigail described how the town of Newburyport had taken upon itself to build a 20-gun warship to loan to the government, and that all down the coast other cities were following the example. A few weeks later she would write to him again of further progress with the “subscription” ships, her enthusiasm for the burgeoning navy clearly as great as that of her husband. Philadelphia had raised $80,000 to build a 36-gun frigate. New York had subscribed a nearly equal sum for a comparable ship. Baltimore had done the same. “Boston outstrips them all,” she wrote.

Just months earlier Abigail had questioned the very idea of war. Now, one senses, had she been called upon to serve, she would have signed up and marched off without hesitation. “This city, which was formally torpid with indolence and fettered with Quakerism,” she reported proudly, “has become one military school, and every morning the sound of the drum and fife lead forth, ‘A Band of Brothers Joined.’” Writing to Mary Cranch, Abigail berated Congress for being so slow to vote a declaration of war. “Why, when we have the thing, should we boggle at the name?”

CONTRARY TO THE expectations of nearly everyone, Adams did not ask for a declaration of war against France. Had he done so, the Congress would assuredly have obliged. Instead, they turned their attention to the enemies at home.

Another Philadelphia summer had arrived. The temperature in the last week of June was in the 90s, “the weather so hot and close, the flies so tormenting,” Abigail wrote, she hardly had energy to move. “Not a leaf stirs till nine or ten o’clock . . . It grows sickly, the city noisome.” In two sweltering weeks, their popularity and confidence never higher, the Federalist majority in Congress passed into law extreme measures that Adams had not asked for or encouraged. But then neither did he oppose them, and their passage and his signature on them were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency. Still, the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 must be seen in the context of the time, and the context was tumult and fear.

Adams later spoke of the Alien and Sedition Acts as war measures. It was how he saw them then, and how he chose to remember them. “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them,” he would write in explanation long afterward, and at the time, the majority of Congress and most of the country were in agreement.

There was rampant fear of the enemy within. French emigrés in America, according to the French consul in Philadelphia, by now numbered 25,000 or more. Many were aristocrats who had fled the Terror; but the majority were refugees from the slave uprisings on the Caribbean island of San Domingo. In Philadelphia a number of French newspapers had been established. There were French booksellers, French schools, French boardinghouses, and French restaurants. The French, it seemed, were everywhere, and who was to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?

In addition to the French there were the “wild Irish,” refugees from the Irish Rebellion of 1798 who were thought to include dangerous radicals and in any case, because of their anti-British sentiment, gladly joined ranks with the Republicans. James Callender was sometimes cited as a prime example of this type, apart from the fact that Callender was a Scot.

Beyond that, the United States was at war — declared or not — and there were in fact numbers of enemy agents operating in the country.

The Alien Acts included a Naturalization Act, which increased the required period of residence to qualify for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and the Alien Act, which granted the President the legal right to expel any foreigner he considered “dangerous.” In the view of the Vice President, the Alien Act was something worthy of the ninth century. Jefferson and others imagined a tempestuous John Adams expelling foreigners by the shipload. As it was, they need not have worried. Adams never invoked the law and this despite the urging of Secretary of State Pickering, who did indeed favor massive deportations.

Of greater consequence was the Sedition Act, which made any “False, scandalous, and malicious” writing against the government, Congress, or the President, or any attempt “to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition,” crimes punishable by fine and imprisonment. Though it was clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, its Federalist proponents in Congress insisted, like Adams, that it was a war measure, and an improvement on the existing common law in that proof of the truth of the libel could be used as a legitimate defense. Still, the real and obvious intent was to stifle the Republican press, and of those arrested and convicted under the law, nearly all were Republican editors.

Such stalwart, respected Federalists as Senators Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts and James Lloyd of Maryland were strongly in support of the Sedition Act. Noah Webster, editor, author, lexicographer, and staunch Federalist, declared it time to stop newspaper editors from libeling those with whom they disagreed, and to his friend Timothy Pickering wrote to urge that the new law be strictly enforced.

Even George Washington privately expressed the view that some publications were long overdue punishment for their lies and unprovoked attacks on the leaders of the union.

Vice President Jefferson, having no wish to be present for the inevitable passage of the Sedition Act, or anything more that might take place in such an atmosphere, quietly packed and went home to Monticello.

There were some Federalists who had mixed feelings about the Sedition Act, and John Marshall was openly opposed. Were he in Congress, Marshall said, he would have voted against it.

Though Adams appears to have said nothing on the subject at the time, it is hard to imagine him not taking a measure of satisfaction from the prospect of the tables turned on those who had tormented him for so long. And if Adams was reluctant to express his views, Abigail was not. Bache and his kind would inevitably provoke measures to silence them, she had predicted to Mary Cranch. They were “so criminal” that they ought to be brought to court. “Yet daringly do the vile incendiaries keep up in Bache’s paper the most wicked and base, violent and culminating abuse,” she wrote another day, sure that “nothing will have effect until Congress passes a Sedition Bill.”

It was not uncommon in Philadelphia — or in Massachusetts — to hear talk of the unrivaled influence Abigail Adams had on her husband and of her political sense overall. Fisher Ames once observed that she was “as complete a politician as any lady in the old French Court.” That Adams valued and trusted her judgment ahead of that of any of his department heads there is no question, and she could well have been decisive in persuading Adams to support the Sedition Act. “Bearing neither malice or ill will towards anyone, not even the most deluded . . . I wish the laws of our country were competent to punish the stirrer up of sedition, the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny,” she wrote, and the key word to her was “unfounded.” She wanted proven lies to be judged unacceptable. This, she was sure, would “contribute as much to the peace and harmony of our country as any measure, and in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”

But it was also possible that Adams needed no persuading, and that in what she wrote to Mary Cranch, Abigail was speaking for both of them. Nor, importantly, was her influence always decisive, as shown by his choice of Elbridge Gerry as an envoy to France and, most importantly, his continued reluctance to declare war.

ON JULY 2, to meet the cost of the military buildup, the House voted a first direct tax on the people, a tax on land. Also, on July 2, to the surprise of many, Adams nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief of the new provisional army. “It was one of those strokes which the prospect and exigency of the times required,” wrote Abigail, “and which the President determined upon without consultation.” In addition, Adams submitted a list of proposed general officers that included Alexander Hamilton, but also several Republicans, most notably Aaron Burr, as well as his own son-in-law, Colonel Smith.

In a matter of days, Congress abrogated the French-American treaties of 1778, created a permanent Marine Corps, passed the Sedition Act, and approved the nomination of Washington as supreme commander. War fever was at a pitch.

On July 9, Secretary McHenry left for Mount Vernon by the express mail stage carrying Washington’s commission and a letter from Adams saying that were it in his power to appoint Washington President, he would gladly do so.

On July 16, Congress adjourned and departed the city with a rush. By July 25, when the Adamses set off, people were already dying in what would become the worst yellow fever epidemic since 1793.

IV

THE YEAR 1798, the most difficult and consequential year of John Adams’s presidency, was to provide him no respite. His stay at Quincy would be longer even than the year before, but the stress of the undeclared war — the Quasi-War, as it came to be known, or Half-War, as he called it — combined with the threatening ambitions of Alexander Hamilton and growing dissension within Adams’s own cabinet, filled his days with frustration and worry. There was precious little peace to be found at Peacefield in the summer of 1798, and especially as Abigail fell so ill that she very nearly died.

The first days at home were supposed to have been an even greater delight than usual, for unbeknown to Adams, a huge improvement to the house had taken place in their absence. An entire wing with a spacious parlor and a library above, had been added to the east end, and the whole house “new painted” inside and out. Abigail had secretly arranged it all that spring through Cotton Tufts, as a surprise for Adams. It was a “wren’s house” no more. She had doubled its size, much as Jefferson had done at Monticello, except on a considerably smaller scale and with the difference that she did it entirely to her own wishes, paying for it out of money she saved from household expenses at Philadelphia, and never asking for Adams’s permission or opinion. “I meant to have it all done snug . . . before I come,” she had told Mary Cranch in April. “I know the President will be glad when it is done, but he can never bear to trouble himself about anything of the kind, and he has not the taste for it. . . .”

The parlor was for Abigail, the second-floor library, or “Book room,” for Adams, and like the parlor, it was to have a handsome fireplace and windows on three sides. It must accommodate all his books “in regular order and be a pleasant room for the President to do business in,” Abigail had directed.

But in late June, just as the project was nearly finished, a Quincy neighbor on his way through Philadelphia stopped to pay his respects and revealed the whole secret to Adams, who, Abigail was happy to report, responded with a hearty laugh.

Whatever pleasure they might have found in their expanded quarters was foreclosed before they ever reached home. Abigail was taken ill on the journey and confined to her bed from the day they arrived, August 8. She was “very weak,” Adams wrote to Oliver Wolcott. Some days later he reported to Timothy Pickering, “Mrs. Adams is extremely low and in great danger.” In fact, she was as sick as she had ever been and it was with difficulty that Adams was able to concentrate on anything else.

Nabby, who with her daughter Caroline had come for an extended visit, hoping to be of help, wrote to John Quincy that it had become a different house. “The illness of our dear mother has cast a gloom over the face of everything here, and it scarce seems like home without her enlivening cheerfulness.”

To Secretary of War McHenry, Adams would describe it as “the most gloomy summer” he had known, but he could as easily have called it one of the most gloomy passages of his life, second only to his own siege of illness and despair in Amsterdam. Writing to George Washington later, after two months at home, Adams would say that Abigail’s fate was still very precarious “and mine in consequence of it.”

Yet to judge from the volume of correspondence, the number and variety of issues he dealt with, he worked no less diligently than usual, spending long hours at his desk in the new library across the hall from Abigail’s sickroom. Official reports from Philadelphia, dispatches from department heads, documents requiring his signature, requests for pardons, applications for jobs, reports of all kinds, arrived in assorted bundles, daily by post rider. Decisions were called for on matters large and small. Benjamin Rush asked that his brother be considered for the Supreme Court. There was a request for the President’s approval to build a lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, a request from Secretary Wolcott for authority to borrow up to $5,000,000 on behalf of the United States, reports from Wolcott on the yellow fever epidemic. Secretary McHenry sent an extended review, numbing in detail, of expenditures required for the Department of War. (“I have supposed that the items in the table of the Quarter Master’s supplies and contingent expenses for the eight additional companies and privates to the old establishment and for the six additional companies of dragoons may be covered by the appropriations for the original army and that the 600 thousand dollars stated by the Quarter Master’s Department for the 12 regiments will procure all the camp equipage not provided for by the table.”) Nor was there any letup in the stream of patriotic addresses.

Adams struggled to read it all and respond. “Wooden walls have been my favorite system of warfare and defense for three and twenty years,” he wrote in reply to an address from the Boston Marine Society. “Americans in general, cultivators as well as merchants and marines, begin to look to that source of security and protection.” After reading Wolcott’s report on the ravages of yellow fever at the capital, Adams sent an anonymous contribution of $500.

Most pressing was an unfortunate dispute that developed between Adams and Washington. At the heart of the issue was whether Alexander Hamilton should be made the second-highest-ranking officer in the new army, as Washington preferred and as Hamilton desperately desired.

When McHenry had gone off by express stage to Mount Vernon in early July, he had carried, in addition to Washington’s commission from the President, a letter from Hamilton about which Adams was told nothing. “The arrangement of the army may demand your particular attention,” Hamilton wrote, referring to Washington’s choice of a general staff. In this regard Washington was advised that the judgment of the President ought not to be a consideration. “The President,” Hamilton wrote, “has no relative ideas, and his prepossessions on military subjects in reference to such a point are of the wrong sort,” meaning, presumably, that Adams cared more for the navy than the army.

The view that Adams was unsuited to prepare the nation for war and that Hamilton, by contrast, was the ideal choice for second-in-command was shared by McHenry and Secretary Pickering alike. Indeed, Pickering had already said as much in a letter to Washington.

Thus, both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of State were secretly campaigning for Hamilton, supplying him with inside information, and undermining the intentions of their President, whom they saw riding for a fall. Sending Hamilton copies of secret government documents that summer, McHenry attached a note saying, “Do not, I pray you, in writing or otherwise betray the confidence which has induced me to deal thus with you or make extracts or copies. . . . Return the papers immediately.”

Washington had accepted his commission in an entirely cordial letter to Adams, but with the understanding that as head of the new army he could choose his own principal officers. Then he made known his intention to name Hamilton as second-in-command, with the rank of major general. Since no one expected Washington to take the field at his age, or to command except in name, the proposed arrangement meant, in effect, that Hamilton was to be in command — it was to be Hamilton’s army.

In a letter that went off from Quincy to McHenry on August 29, Adams wrote that Washington had conducted himself with “perfect honor and consistency.” But the “power and authority are in the President,” Adams reminded his Secretary of War. “There has been too much intrigue in this business,” he added, suggesting he knew more, or suspected more, than he appeared to. In a letter to Oliver Wolcott that he most likely never sent, Adams said angrily that were he to consent to the appointment of Hamilton to second rank under Washington, he would consider it the most reprehensible action of his life. “His talents I respect. His character — I leave . . .”

But Washington had left Adams no way out. To raise the new army Washington’s prestige was essential, as Hamilton, McHenry, Pickering, and Wolcott all understood. On September 30, Adams relinquished the final say to Washington.

September 30 was a Sunday, which makes it unlikely that the letter went off until the following day, October 1, the same day Elbridge Gerry arrived home from France, bringing news that gave a very different cast to the whole picture. Gerry’s ship appeared off Boston that morning. Losing no time, he dispatched a letter to Adams before the ship docked. But whether Gerry’s letter reached Adams before Adams’s letter went off to McHenry with the morning post is not known.

The French wanted peace, Gerry reported.

Three days later, on Thursday, October 4, Gerry presented himself at Quincy, and he and Adams settled in for a long private talk.

In his few days ashore Gerry had been thoroughly ostracized in Boston. “Not a hat was moved” as he walked up State Street, according to one account from the time. Angry crowds shouted insults outside his Cambridge home. But the welcome from Adams was warm, and the more Gerry talked, the more Adams must have realized that the current had turned his way at last. Talleyrand, Gerry assured him, was ready to treat seriously with the United States.

It was a critical moment in Adams’s presidency. Among other things, Gerry had more than justified Adams’s confidence in him. What he was telling Adams, to be sure, was what Adams desperately wanted to hear. The last thing in the world Adams wished to do was to lead the country into a needless war. But more to the point, he judged quite correctly that Gerry was telling the truth.

John Marshall had said much the same thing, and so had John Quincy in some of his correspondence with his father, but as Adams was to write, the assurances of Gerry — “my own ambassador” — were “more positive, more explicit, and decisive.”

Gerry’s letter of October 1, Adams later said, “confirmed these [earlier] assurances beyond all doubt in my mind, and his conversations with me at my own house in Quincy, if anything further had been wanting, would have corroborated the whole.”

It was the week after Gerry’s return when a letter arrived from Washington. Written on September 25, it did not reach Adams until October 8. Were he to be denied the deciding voice in the selection of his general staff, Washington informed the President, he would resign his commission.

Adams sent off an immediate reply, agreeing to Washington’s wishes. As he had accepted Washington’s cabinet in the interest of unanimity, so he now accepted Washington’s choice of Hamilton. But he also had reason to believe now that Hamilton and the army might not be needed at all.

As a matter of form, he reminded Washington a bit lamely that by the Constitution it was the President who had the authority to determine the rank of officers. Washington promoted Hamilton to be inspector general.

In the contest of who was in charge, Adams, it seemed, had been put in his place, outflanked not so much by Washington as by his own cabinet, and ultimately Hamilton, which left Adams feeling bruised and resentful. But at the same time, it gave Hamilton, and those in Adams’s cabinet whose first loyalty was to Hamilton, an inflated sense of their own importance and authority.

From continued discussion with Gerry at Quincy and from new dispatches from William Vans Murray at The Hague, Adams became convinced that Gerry’s conduct in Paris had not only been proper, but courageous. On October 20, writing to Pickering to ask for suggestions on the content of his forthcoming message to Congress, Adams made it plain that he was thinking of sending a new minister to France “who may be ready to embark . . . as soon as . . . the President shall receive from the Directory satisfactory assurance that he shall be received and entitled to all the prerogatives and privileges of the general laws of nations.” Further, he offered a list of those he had in mind for the assignment that included Patrick Henry and William Vans Murray.

Then, in a letter to his Secretary of War expressing his full support for Washington’s judgment, Adams added two pointed observations. Maintaining armies was costly business and could become quite unpopular in the absence of an enemy to fight, he reminded McHenry. Of what possible use could a large army be, Adams was saying, if a French invasion never took place? In closing, he observed, “At present there is no more prospect of seeing a French army here than there is in heaven.”

ABIGAIL’S ILLNESS dragged on. She never left her sickbed, her “dying bed,” as she said. Talk of sickness and death — of insomnia, melancholy, her persistent, baffling fevers — dominated the domestic scene, just as sickness and death filled the newspapers, week after week, as yellow fever spread in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and worst of all in Philadelphia.

By September nearly 40,000 people had evacuated Philadelphia. Yet the newspapers continued to report more than a hundred new cases a day. “The best skill of our physicians . . . have proved unequal to the contest of this devouring poison,” reported the Aurora. By the time the plague ran its course in Philadelphia, more than 3,000 lost their lives, including, as the Adamses were stunned to read, the mayor of the city and both Bache of the Aurora, who had died on September 10 at age twenty-nine, and his arch nemesis, Fenno of the Gazette of the United States, who died just days before. The list of victims also included four of the servants at the President’s House, as Abigail was duly informed.

The melancholy that beset her was unrelenting, suggesting the fever she suffered may have been malaria, but she was also distressed over further troubles within the family.

Before leaving on his diplomatic assignment abroad, John Quincy had left his savings, some $2,000, in the trust of his brother Charles. In the time since, however, Charles had managed to lose nearly all of it through bad investments, and then kept silent about what had happened, refusing to answer John Quincy’s queries, in the hope that, with a little more time, he might somehow recover at least part of the money. Only that summer had the truth become known within the family, and it was devastating to both parents, but especially to Abigail, who had so long and so diligently managed the family affairs.

“I have not enjoyed one moment’s comfort for upwards of two years on this account,” Charles wrote to his mother in midsummer. “My sleep has been disturbed, and my waking hours embittered.” “

He is not at peace with himself,” she would write later to John Quincy, during her convalescence, “and his conduct does not meet my wishes.”

He has an amiable wife . . . two lovely children. I hope my letters will in time have their effect. I have discharged my duty I hope faithfully, but my dying bed was embittered . . . with distress for the only child whose conduct ever gave me pain.

Abigail was bedridden at Quincy altogether for eleven weeks. It was early November before she was well enough to come downstairs, and it was early November before Philadelphia was declared once more free of yellow fever.

On November 12, leaving Abigail behind, Adams headed off in the presidential coach behind two spirited horses and accompanied by his young nephew William Shaw — Billy Shaw, as he was known — a recent graduate of Harvard who had been lame since birth and had lately become the President’s secretary.

“I strive to divert the melancholy thoughts of our separation, and pray you do the same,” Adams wrote to Abigail at the end of his first day on the road.

CHAPTER TEN

STATESMAN

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

~John Adams

I

ADAMS WAS ON THE MOVE AGAIN, gobbling up the miles. The weather was clear and cool, the road dry. “Our horses go like birds,” he wrote. Some days they made thirty miles. “We glided along unforeseen, unexpected, and have avoided all noise, show, pomp, and parade,” he reported to Abigail from Connecticut.

He wrote nearly a letter a day. His teeth and gums ached; one side of his face was badly swollen. Yet, he assured her, he was neither “fretful nor peevish.” Indeed, the speed at which he moved, his joy in horses that could fly like birds, suggest he was heading for the capital knowing there was a way out of the impasse he had faced since taking office — that out of the gloomiest of times at home had come a first real sense that he might succeed after all in his main objective.

A recurring rumor did much for his spirits. It was said a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson had overwhelmed the French off the coast of Egypt. “Nelson’s victory is mightily believed along the road,” Adams wrote. If true, the chance of a French invasion of America had all but vanished.

There was snow in New York and the horses required a day’s rest. Adams stopped to see his son Charles, but of this he wrote nothing.

Crossing New Jersey, the horses flying again, they made forty-five miles in a day, to arrive on November 24 in Philadelphia, where it was known for certain that Nelson had destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, four months earlier on August 1.

The city was in a bustle. Throngs of people were returning to resume daily life, opening boarded-up shops, airing out houses, scrubbing everything with a will, now that the epidemic had passed. The weather was brisk. Congress was back, and to the delight of the city, George Washington had returned and could be seen coming and going from temporary headquarters at a boarding house on Eighth Street.

The general had entered Philadelphia on November 10 with full military flare, on horseback and in uniform, and accompanied by cavalry. “Almost the whole of the military corps were drawn up on the commons to receive him,” reported the Aurora, which had suspended publication following the death of Benjamin Bache, but was back in business under Bache’s wife, Margaret. “This morning arrived in town the Chief who unites all hearts,” exclaimed another paper, the American Daily Advertiser.

While the war fever of summer had by no means vanished like the yellow fever, the spirit of opinion heard in the shops and taverns, and within the councils of government, was noticeably more moderate, and in large part because of the British victory at the Nile. Albert Gallatin wrote to his wife that he felt an honorable accommodation with France was now within the power of the administration, perhaps even “certain.”

Soon after his arrival, Adams met with a Philadelphia physician named George Logan, who had recently returned from France. As a Quaker and ardent Republican, Logan was not the sort of man Adams was known to favor. To Federalist war hawks he was contemptible, since he had presumed to conduct his own peace mission to France. Roundly castigated as a dangerous, possibly disloyal meddler, Logan found it impossible to get a fair hearing within the administration. When he called on the Secretary of State, to say he had been told by high officials in the French government that France was ready to make peace, Pickering gave him short shrift and showed him to the door. To see George Washington, Logan had accompanied a Philadelphia clergyman when he called at the house on Eighth Street. But Washington had refused to speak to Logan, directing what few comments he had to the clergyman only.

Adams, however, received Logan courteously, and tea was served. He had conversed directly with Talleyrand and a principal member of the Directory, Logan said, and they had expressed the wish to settle all disputes with America.

Adams showed displeasure only once, when Logan insisted that the Directory was ready to receive a new American minister. According to Logan, Adams leaped from his chair, saying that only if a Republican were sent would the French receive him. “But I’ll do no such thing,” Adams said. “I’ll send whom I please.”

“And whomever you do please to send will be received,” Logan assured him.

Whether he knew it at the time, Logan had made a strong impression. “I had no reason to believe him a corrupt character, or deficient in memory or veracity,” Adams later wrote.

Secretaries Pickering and McHenry remained certain that war was inevitable. Nonetheless, they joined the consensus among the President’s advisers that, given the mood of the country and the Congress, a declaration of war at this point would be “inexpedient.” But it was also the unanimous conclusion of the cabinet that another mission to France would be an act of humiliation and was therefore unacceptable. If there were to be peace overtures, they must come from France. Let a French mission cross the ocean this time.

On December 7, 1798, Adams walked to Congress Hall, and in the presence of Generals Washington and Hamilton, Secretary of State Pickering, and both houses of Congress, he affirmed again America’s need for defensive strength and America’s desire for peace. The speech had been written by Pickering and Wolcott, and except for the addition of one phrase, Adams had made few changes. It must, he said, be “left with France . . . to take the requisite step” of assuring that any American mission sent to Paris would be properly received. So while preparation for war would continue, Adams had signaled that the door to peace remained ajar. It was only a question of French intent and sincerity.

The speech infuriated the Republicans and the Vice President, and no less was the anger of the High Federalists in Congress, who had expected a declaration of war. If Adams lacked the fortitude to take the step, then Congress would, they declared. But their efforts failed. Congress was not inclined to declare war.

The martial ambitions of the inspector general were undampened, however. With his new command, Hamilton dreamed now of grand conquest with himself riding at the head of a new American army.

The idea was to “liberate” Spanish Florida and Louisiana, possibly all of Spanish America, in a bold campaign combining a British fleet and American troops. First proposed by an impassioned apostle of Spanish-American freedom, Francesco de Miranda of Venezuela, the scheme had been around for years. Adams had learned of it and dismissed it out of hand. “We are friends with Spain,” he had told Pickering. But the British had shown interest, and in secret Hamilton had lately become involved, seeing possibilities for national empire and personal glory beyond the vision of lesser men. In a letter to one of his generals in Georgia, Hamilton stressed the need for a buildup of military supplies. “This you perceive, looks to offensive operations,” he wrote. “If we are to engage in war, our game will be to attack where we can. France is not to be considered as separate from her ally [Spain]. Tempting objects will be within our grasp.”

Adams knew in general, if not in detail, what Hamilton, Pickering, and others were up to and would later speak of it as a colossal absurdity. “The man is stark mad or I am,” he would remember thinking of Hamilton. But at the time, he kept his own counsel, waiting to make his move. He wanted all “to be still and calm,” and told his department heads no more than they needed to know. For he understood now that their first loyalty was not to him.

For someone supposedly suspicious by nature, Adams had been inordinately slow to suspect the worst of his closest advisers, and to face the obvious truth that keeping Washington’s cabinet had been a mistake. Still, somehow, he must avoid a war and keep Hamilton from gaining the upper hand with his “mad” schemes. As Abigail had warned the summer before, “That man would . . . become a second Bonaparte.”

AT THE NAVY DEPARTMENT and the President’s House that December, with a foot of snow in the streets outside and sleigh bells sounding, Adams, Gerry, McHenry, Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, and others gathered about large maps of the West Indies. Four squadrons, twenty-one ships in total, virtually the whole of the American naval force, were now assigned to the Caribbean. The largest squadron, which included the heavy frigates United States and Constitution, was under Commodore John Barry, who was admonished in his orders that “a spirit of enterprise and adventure cannot be too much encouraged in the officers under your command. . . . We have nothing to dread but unactivity.”

The fleet was to cruise the Lesser Antilles, from St. Christopher (St. Kitts) to Tobago. San Domingo (Haiti) was to have increasing importance. Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion on San Domingo, had written to Adams to suggest they become allies. Desperate for food for his starving troops, Toussaint wanted the American embargo lifted from the former French colony. In effect, he wanted recognition of the black republic, and Adams was interested. Thus, in December, a representative from Toussaint, Joseph Bunel, dined with Adams, marking the first time a man of African descent was the dinner guest of an American President.

American ships would be welcome and protected in all San Domingo ports, Adams was told. John Quincy had earlier written his father to say he hoped something could be done for Toussaint, that he wished to see San Domingo “free and independent.” And with Secretary Pickering strongly of the same mind, Adams responded promptly. Commodore Barry was instructed to show himself “with the greatest part of the fleet at Cape François, to Genl. Toussaint, who has a great desire to see some ships of war belonging to America.” And the issue of de facto recognition, “Toussaint’s clause,” would go before Congress.

General Washington was rarely seen. He was working seven days a week with Hamilton drawing up plans for the army, reviewing applications, and choosing qualified officers for twelve new regiments that were all still largely on paper. Satisfied with what had been accomplished, Washington departed the city for the last time on December 14.

MUCH HAD BEEN SAID of Washington’s cheerful demeanor. Even the Aurora commented on his “good health and spirits,” while Adams, by contrast, looked drawn and weary and was seldom cheerful. The old streak of irritability, his single flaw, according to Abigail, had been made worse by the presidency, as he himself acknowledged. He was weary from work, “weary of conjectures,” as he said. “If you come on, you must expect to find me cross,” he had written to her in fair warning. It was not just that the work was unending, but that it was so tiresome. “A peck of troubles in a large bundle of papers often in a handwriting almost illegible comes every day . . . thousands of sea letters . . . commissions and patents to sign. No company. No society. Idle, unmeaning ceremony.”

Adams’s earlier proposal of Colonel Smith for the general staff had been turned down by the Senate (as had his proposed commission for Aaron Burr). Smith was unacceptable, Adams was told, because he was a bankrupt. This Adams had not denied, but praised his son-in-law as a brave and able soldier who had more than proven himself in the Revolution. Against his better judgment, Adams agreed to try again, this time nominating Smith for a colonel’s commission, which in spite of “warm opposition,” the Senate approved.

In a letter to Smith, telling him the news, Adams made clear what an embarrassment the whole business had been for him, and warned Smith bluntly that, if unchecked, his pride and extravagances would bring ruin.

His own children would be his undoing, Adams complained to Abigail. “My daughter and son [Charles] bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, if I don’t arouse my philosophy. The daughter, too, without a fault. Unfortunate daughter! Unhappy child!”

Snow fell again for several days. Christmas morning dawned clear and bright, and Adams succeeded in rousing his philosophy to a considerable degree. There was no mistaking his age or the burdens of the presidency, he wrote to Abigail. “I am old, old, very old and never shall be very well — certainly while in this office, for the drudgery of it is too much for my years and strength.” But he took joy in the day. “It is Christmas and a fine day,” he wrote. He had a cold, but was over it now. “I sleep well, appetite is good, work hard, conscience is neat and easy. Content to live and willing to die. . . . Hoping to do a little good.”

THE VICE PRESIDENT, having departed Monticello on December 18 and traveled “dreadful” winter roads north by public coach, arrived at Philadelphia that same Christmas morning in time for breakfast at the Francis Hotel. Jefferson had been absent for six months, during which he had raised no voice as head of the Republican party, but had kept extremely busy, writing letters and secretly drafting a set of resolutions to be introduced in the legislature of Kentucky. Written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions declared that each state had a “natural right” to nullify federal actions it deemed unconstitutional. The states were thus to be the arbiters of federal authority. At the same time, James Madison undertook a version of his own resolutions for Virginia.

The Kentucky Resolutions, which had passed in November, were an open challenge to the authority of the central government and a measure both of Jefferson’s revulsion over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the seriousness with which he regarded states’ rights. Possibly he failed to see the dire threat to the union embodied in what he had written, but a letter he wrote to Madison strongly suggests otherwise. He was confident, Jefferson said, that the American people with their “good sense” would “rally with us round the true principles of the federal compact,” but, he wrote in chilling conclusion, he was “determined, were we to be disappointed in this, to sever ourselves from the union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government.”

Tormented by the thought of his old enemy Hamilton riding high as inspector general and federal power in the grip of a “military enclave,” Jefferson saw the country on the verge of civil war. He feared a federal army under Hamilton might march on the South at any time. His advice to Madison and other close associates was to stay calm and quiet. “Firmness on our part, but passive firmness, is the true course,” Jefferson cautioned after returning to Philadelphia.

He was distressed also about the bill before Congress to lift the embargo on San Domingo and commence trade with the “rebellious Negroes under Toussaint.” When “Toussaint’s clause” was passed, Jefferson noted bleakly, “We may expect therefore black crews and . . . missionaries” pouring “into the Southern states. . . . If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it.”

It had been more than a year since the President and Vice President had spoken to each other. Except for passing pleasantries at a few ceremonial occasions, conversation and correspondence between them had ceased. Had they been able to compare notes, they would have discovered how much more they shared in common than met the eye or than either had any idea.

Both complained privately of poor health. They were each extremely lonely and longed for home. Much of what Jefferson wrote to his daughters from Philadelphia in the opening weeks of the New Year, 1799, might have been taken from Adams’s letters to Abigail. Jefferson battled a head cold and suffered from inflammation of the eyes. “The circle of our nearest connections is the only one in which a faithful and lasting affection can be found,” he wrote to Polly. And in a letter to Martha he could hardly have sounded more like Adams in his own days as Vice President: “Environed here in scenes of constant torment, malice, and obliquy, worn down in a station where no effort to render service can avail anything, I feel not that existence is a blessing, but when something recalls my mind to my family or farm.”

Had Jefferson known Adams’s mind at this juncture, he would have been quite surprised. Most striking was their common dislike and fear of Hamilton. The worries Jefferson had about Hamilton’s threat to the nation were more than matched by Adams’s, as Adams revealed in private conversation with Elbridge Gerry at the President’s House. “[Adams] thought Hamilton and a party were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it, and thus to proclaim a regal government and place Hamilton as the head of it, and prepare the way for a province of Great Britain,” wrote Gerry. Plainly, Adams feared a military coup by the second “Bonaparte,” which goes far to explain what was soon to take place.

Closing his Christmas letter to Abigail, Adams said, “I write to you nothing about public affairs because it would be useless to copy the newspapers which you read. And I can say nothing more.”

How much was implied by this, she could only try to imagine.

Three weeks later, in mid-January, to Adams’s utmost joy, his son Thomas, now twenty-seven, arrived in Philadelphia after four years abroad. “Thomas is my delight,” he wrote. It was also of no small consequence that Thomas carried word from John Quincy assuring his father that the French were ready to negotiate.

II

ON MONDAY, February 18, 1799, Adams made his move. Having consulted no one, and without advice from Abigail, he took the most decisive action of his presidency. Indeed, of all the brave acts of his career — his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, his crossing the Atlantic on the Boston in the winter of 1778, the high risks of his mission to Holland — one brief message sent to the United States Senate was perhaps the bravest.

It was carried by a courier to the second-floor Senate Chamber, where an astonished Vice President interrupted the business on the floor to read it aloud:

Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at The Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.

If the Senate shall advise and consent to his appointment, effectual care shall be taken in his instructions that he shall not go to France without direct and unequivocal assurances from the French government, signified by their Minister of Foreign Relations, that he shall be received in character, shall enjoy the privileges attached to his character by the law of nations, and that a minister of equal rank, title, and powers shall be appointed to treat with him, to discuss and conclude all controversies between the two Republics by a new treaty.

The “war-monger” who the summer before had refused to declare war had declared, if not peace, then, at least, that the door to peace was now wide open.

Republicans were astounded. Federalists were momentarily speechless, then filled with “surprise, indignation, grief, and disgust.” Particularly galling to them was the fact that it was Jefferson who read the message.

The Secretary of State was enraged. The “honor of the country is prostrated in the dust — God grant that its safety may not be in jeopardy,” Timothy Pickering wrote to George Washington. In a letter to William Vans Murray, Pickering would declare “every real patriot . . . was thunderstruck.” Adams, he said, was “suffering the torments of the damned.” “I beg you to be assured that it is wholly his own act,” Pickering reported to Hamilton.

Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, who had greatly admired Adams, worked for his election, and thought he had thus far played “a noble part” as President, felt personally betrayed. Barely able to contain his fury, he wrote of the “vain, jealous, and half frantic mind” of John Adams, a man ruled “by caprice alone.” “Had the foulest heart and the basest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.”

Another riled Federalist, Robert G. Harper of South Carolina, Hamilton’s chief spokesman in the House, privately expressed the hope that on Adams’s way home to Quincy, his horses might run away with him and break his neck.

Hamilton himself allowed that if anything coming from John Adams could astonish, certainly this had.

To Thomas Jefferson it was the “event of events,” but strangely — regrettably — he was unable to accept what Adams had done at face value, or to give him any credit. Rather, Jefferson took pleasure in the “mortification” of the Federalists, which proved, he said, that war was always their intent. To Madison he wrote that Adams had only made the nomination “hoping that his friends in the Senate would take on their own shoulders the odium of rejecting it.”

In the Aurora, Margaret Bache and her new editor, William Duane, would concede only that Adams deserved “fair applause” for prudence.

But for all the indignant fuming of the High Federalists, no motions were made in the Senate for a resolution opposing a new mission to France. When a Senate committee led by Sedgwick came to see Adams a few days later, it was to object only to the choice of Murray, who was thought too young, not “strong enough,” for an assignment of such importance. They wished to have the nomination retracted, which Adams refused to do. Murray was a man of experience and ability through whom communications with Talleyrand were already established, Adams answered. Further, Murray had the advantage of being on the scene.

Accounts differ whether the meeting was amicable or acrimonious, but a compromise resulted in any event. Instead of Murray alone serving as minister plenipotentiary, Adams nominated Patrick Henry and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth to join Murray as envoys to France, making a commission of three. The Senate immediately confirmed the appointments and a day later, March 4, Congress adjourned. Afterward, when Patrick Henry declined for reasons of health, Adams chose another southerner, the Federalist governor of North Carolina, William Davie.

In Massachusetts, infuriated Federalists were saying that had the President’s “old woman” been with him in Philadelphia none of this would have happened — she being the more stouthearted of the two. “This was pretty saucy,” Abigail wrote to John of the gossip, “but the old woman can tell them they are mistaken.” She considered his decision a “master stroke.”

By the second week of March, as Adams was preparing to leave for Quincy, word reached Philadelphia that the American frigate Constellation, under Captain Thomas Truxtun, had captured the French frigate L’Insurgent, after a battle near the island of Nevis in the Leewards, the first major engagement of the undeclared war at sea. Where would it all end, people were asking in Philadelphia. But Adams was anything but alarmed or displeased. Of Captain Truxtun he wrote, “I wish all other officers had as much zeal.”

While his entire political standing, his reputation as President, were riding on his willingness to make peace, Adams was no less ardent for defense. In fact, he was convinced that peace was attainable only as a consequence of America’s growing naval strength. To Secretary Stoddert he even proposed that some of the fast new ships might be used to cruise the coast of France.

Nor do I think we ought to wait a moment to know whether the French mean to give us any proofs of their desire to conciliate with us. I am for pursuing all the measure of defense which the laws authorize us to adopt, especially at sea.

• • •

CONVINCED he could run the government as well from Quincy as at Philadelphia, Adams stretched his stay at home from late March to September, fully seven months. From the views expressed by his vociferous critics, it was hard to say which annoyed them more, his presence at the capital or his absence. At worst, his absence seemed an arrogant abdication of responsibility. At best, it seemed a kind of eccentric scholarly detachment.

Some moderate Federalists and old friends warned Adams he could be doing himself and the country great harm by remaining too long in seclusion. “The public sentiment is very much against your being so much away from the seat of government. They did not elect your officers, nor do they . . . think them equal to govern without your presence and control,” wrote a correspondent who feared a plot against Adams could be hatching in his absence. “I speak the truth when I say that your real friends wish you to be with your officers, because the public impression is that the government will be better conducted.”

There had been criticism of his long absence the year before, irrespective of Abigail’s illness, but the criticism now was greater, and with reason. Adams’s presence at the center of things was what the country rightfully expected, and could indeed have made a difference.

But stay he did at Peacefield, and to his mind with more than sufficient justification. Washington, too, had spent long sessions at Mount Vernon (though never for seven months), and with Philadelphia hit by yellow fever every summer and fall, the government barely functioned there for several months. He could accomplish his work quite as readily at home as at the capital, so long as Congress was not in session. Were he ever unable to appear when Congress was sitting, Adams said, he would resign.

He worked dutifully. He read everything that was sent to him, read several newspapers assiduously, wrote some seventy letters to his department heads during the time he was absent, twenty-eight of which were to his Secretary of State. If there were delays in the system, they were nearly always at Philadelphia, not at his end.

Beyond all that, Adams recognized there was only so much he could do, that he could effect the roll of events only to a point. Writing to Washington earlier, he had expressed much of his philosophy as President in two sentences: “My administration will not certainly be easy to myself. It will be happy, however, if it is honorable. The prosperity of it to the country will depend upon Heaven, and very little on anything in my power.”

Frequently he would interject a similar refrain in thoughtful letters to his department heads when passing down decisions or judgments on matters of government business. For Adams the ultimate command rested always beyond the reach of mortal men, just as the very natures and actions of men themselves were often determined by their Maker. In an official letter to Secretary of the Navy Stoddert written the summer of 1799, Adams began, “It always gives me pain when I find myself obliged to differ in opinion from any of the heads of departments; but, as our understandings are not always in our own power, every man must judge for himself.” When Secretary of War McHenry stressed the importance to the nation of a substantial army and of “genius in the command of it,” Adams responded that “Genius in a general is oftener an instrument of divine vengeance than a guardian angel.”

In health and outlook he always benefited from time on his farm, and Abigail’s health, too, was soon greatly improved. Given his nature and so much that burdened his mind, he undoubtedly had moments of despair and anger. Once when General Knox and Adams’s old friend from the years in Holland, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, came to call, Adams sat the whole time reading a newspaper. Still, he attended the Harvard commencement, a Fourth of July celebration in Boston, and the launching of the frigate Boston.

On July 23, Adams watched from an upstairs window as the Constitution headed out to sea from Boston under full sail. “After a detention of nine days by contrary winds,” he wrote, “the Constitution took advantage of a brisk breeze, and went out of the harbor and out of sight this afternoon, making a beautiful and noble figure.”

According to Abigail, in a midsummer report to John Quincy, the President was in “very good humor.”

LATE IN THE DAY, August 5, Adams received a dispatch from Pickering containing a letter from Talleyrand dated May 12, assuring that the American envoys would be received with all appropriate respect.

It was the word Adams had been waiting for. At his desk at Peacefield the next morning, he wrote a letter to Pickering leaving no doubt of his intentions, his sense of urgency, or who was the senior diplomat between them, and that he expected immediate action taken. It was in all a strong summary of what had been his policy from the start. It also included a flash of Adams’s temper — in what he said in response to Pickering’s umbrage over the impatience Talleyrand had expressed about the time the Americans were taking to get things moving.

“It is far below the dignity of the President of the United States to take any notice of Talleyrand’s impertinent regrets, and insinuations of superfluities,” Adams lectured. “You or Mr. Murray may answer them as you please.”

That said, Adams got to the essential point, lest Pickering have any misconceptions:

I will say to you, however, that I consider this letter as the most authentic intelligence yet received in America of the successes of the coalition. That the design is insidious and hostile at heart, I will not say. Time will tell the truth. Meantime, I dread no longer their diplomatic skill. I have seen it, and felt it, and been the victim of it these twenty-one years. But the charm is dissolved. Their magic is at an end in America. Still, they shall find, as long as I am in office, candor, integrity, and, as far as there can be any confidence and safety, a pacific and friendly disposition. If the spirit of exterminating vengeance ever arises, it shall be conjured up by them, not me. In this spirit I shall pursue the negotiation, and I expect the cooperation of the heads of departments.

American defenses by sea and land were not to be relaxed. As to the mission, he wished “to delay nothing.”

My opinions and determinations in these subjects are so well made up, at least to my satisfaction, that not many hours will be necessary for me to give you my ultimate sentiments concerning the matter or form of the instructions to be given to the envoys.

But just as it seemed Adams had set his course, news came from Paris of a breakup of the Directory — “chaos,” according to reports. To his cabinet it brought a surge of hope that peace could be postponed, a view strongly reinforced by Inspector General Hamilton.

Secretary of the Navy Stoddert, Adams’s consistently loyal supporter, urged him to come at once to Trenton, New Jersey, where the government had set up emergency quarters until the yellow fever epidemic passed in Philadelphia. Although not inclined to go just yet, Adams told Stoddert that should “considerable difference” arise between the heads of departments, he would come at all events.

On September 13, Stoddert wrote again, filled with apprehension “that artful designing men might make such use of your absence” as to disrupt the peace initiative and “make your next election less honorable than it would otherwise be.” This and a letter from Pickering proposing suspension of the peace mission were all Adams needed to hear. Abigail would follow once she had things in order at home.

He would be in Trenton by October 15 at the latest, Adams wrote Stoddert. “I have only one favor to beg, and that is that a certain election may be wholly laid out of this question and all others.”

Adams left Peacefield on the last day of September, ready for what he had to face. But stopping at East Chester to see Nabby, he was struck a blow for which he was wholly unprepared. While the details are sparse, it could only have been one of the most dreadful moments of his life. To make matters worse, he had begun to feel ill en route and so arrived at East Chester already in a low state.

From his distraught daughter-in-law, Charles’s wife, Sally, who with her two small daughters was staying with Nabby, Adams learned for the first time that Charles, who had disappeared, was bankrupt, faithless, and an alcoholic.

“I pitied her, I grieved, I mourned,” Adams wrote to Abigail in anguish, “but could do no more.” David’s son Absalom at least had enterprise, he said. “Mine is a mere rake, buck, blood, and beast.” If he felt pity for Charles, he did not express it.

“I love him too much,” Adams had once written of his small second son when they were in Paris. “Charles wins the heart as usual, and is the most gentleman of them all,” he had said upon seeing him again, after the return from England. Now Charles had become “a madman possessed of the devil.” And, declared Adams, “I renounce him.”

As time passed, the Adamses would say comparatively little about Charles. It was as though the downfall of Abigail’s brother William were repeating itself, and the family returned to the old ways of keeping “calamity” private. Only now and then would Abigail make mention of it, usually in letters to Mary Cranch, and almost never referring to Charles by name. “Any calamity inflicted by the hand of Providence, it would become me in silence to submit to,” she wrote some weeks later, “but when I behold misery and distress, disgrace and poverty brought upon a family by intemperance, my heart bleeds at every pore.” A “graceless child,” he was, but she did not renounce him.

To push on to Trenton, “loaded with sorrow,” was almost more than Adams was up to. He felt wretchedly ill with a cold so severe that he thought he might have yellow fever, which he did not.

Trenton, a village no larger than Quincy under normal conditions, was overflowing with refugees from Philadelphia, in addition to several hundred government officials and military officers. The best that could be arranged for the President were a small bedroom and sitting room in a boardinghouse kept by two maiden sisters named Barnes, one of whom provided the ailing Adams with a down comforter, while the other dosed him with a purgative of rhubarb and calomel.

Adams arrived expecting to meet directly with his cabinet to straighten out the impasse on the mission to France, and as miserable as he felt, he was ready to summon them without delay. What he had not expected was the presence in Trenton of General Hamilton, who had come to make a personal appeal to Adams to suspend the mission.

Hamilton had ridden over from Newark, where his troops were encamped and where by protocol he ought to have remained until called for, should the President wish to see him. That he had chosen to come to Trenton uninvited was taken by some as the kind of bold move Hamilton was known and admired for, but it also strongly suggested an element of desperation.

Hamilton called on Adams at the Barnes boardinghouse, where presumably they drew up chairs in Adams’s tiny sitting room — two proud, pertinacious men who by now hated each other, one ambitious for war, the other peace, and each determined to have his way.

According to Adams, who provided several accounts of the confrontation, then and later, he received the general with appropriate civility, saying nothing of politics. But at first chance Hamilton commenced to “remonstrate” against the mission to France. “His eloquence and vehemence wrought the little man up to a degree of heat and effervescence. . . . He repeated over and over again . . . [his] unbounded confidence in the British empire . . . with such agitation and violent action that I really pitied him, instead of being displeased.” The British had the upper hand in the war, Hamilton insisted, and would soon help restore the Bourbons to power in France. America must join with the British and have no dealings whatever with the present French government.

Adams was astonished by Hamilton’s “total ignorance” of the situation in Europe. He would as soon expect the sun, moon, and stars to fall from their orbits as to see the Bourbons restored, he told Hamilton. But even were that to happen, what injury could it mean for the United States to have envoys there?

The meeting lasted several hours, through which, by his account, Adams sat patiently listening as Hamilton with his famous powers of persuasion talked steadily on. “I heard him with perfect good humor, though never in my life did I hear a man talk more like a fool.”

On October 15, Adams summoned the cabinet to a session that lasted until eleven o’clock that night. Pickering, Wolcott, and McHenry, like Hamilton, adamantly opposed the mission. Secretary of the Navy Stoddert supported it, as did Attorney General Lee, the only member of the cabinet not present at Trenton, but who had expressed his views in a letter.

Adams’s decision was given the next morning, Wednesday, October 16, 1799. “The President has resolved to send the commissioners to France,” wrote a thoroughly dispirited Hamilton to George Washington. “All my calculations lead me to regret the measure.” The commission sailed for France on November 15.

If Hamilton and his admirers in the cabinet had outmaneuvered Adams in the contest over command of the army, Adams had now cut the ground out from under Hamilton. Whatever dreams Hamilton entertained of military glory and empire, America was to have no need of either a standing army or a Bonaparte, which, it is fair to say, was as clear an objective in Adams’s mind as was peace with France.

III

“I ENCLOSE THE SPEECH,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch. “It has been received here with more applause and approbation than any speech which the President has ever delivered.”

She was reinstated in the President’s House and in the President’s life, resuming her role where she had left off, despite all she had been through, and all, Mary knew, she suffered because of Charles. There would be grumbling over the speech, Abigail wrote. There would always be grumbling, she had come to understand.

Addressing a joint session of the new Congress, at the usual noon hour, December 3, 1799, Adams had delivered the most moderate, peaceable speech since his inaugural message, stressing a “pacific and humane” American stance before the world. Gone were calls for a new navy or a new army. Though the “measures adopted to secure our country against foreign attacks,” must not be renounced, the national defense must be “commensurate with our resources and the situation of our country.” War drums were out of season. Adams evoked instead “prospects of abundance,” “the return of health, industry, and trade, to those cities which have lately been afflicted with disease.”

Let the grumblers wake up to the “brightest, best and most peaceful days they now see,” declared Abigail. Her old delight in being at the center of things had returned in full flower. In unseasonably mild weather, she was out and about taking walks, making calls, receiving visitors, and enjoying the current spectacle of Philadelphia society. For in its last winter as the nation’s capital, the city “intended to shine.” “I have heard of ‘Once a man and twice a child’ and the ladies’ caps are an exact copy of baby’s caps,” Abigail began her report to Mary on “gay attire,” showing no less delight in details — sleeves, buttons, petticoats, hairstyles — than once she had when writing from Paris.

Then, in an instant, the entire mood of the city changed. On December 14, 1799, as if to give period to the passing of the century and the Federal era, George Washington died at Mount Vernon. The cause of death was a heavy cold — a streptococcus infection. He had been sixty-seven, and until a few days before, in good health. The news reached Philadelphia the night of the seventeenth. In the morning the muffled bells of Christ Church commenced to toll and Congress adjourned.

The Adamses were stunned. The nation, said the President in a formal message to the Senate, had lost “her most esteemed, beloved, and admired citizen. . . . I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother.” No man was more deservedly beloved and respected, wrote Abigail. A “universal melancholy has pervaded all classes of people.”

The door of the presidential mansion, Congress Hall, Washington’s pew at Christ Church, were draped in black. In Boston Harbor every ship displayed “the melancholy signal of mortality.” “Our pulpit is hung with black,” Mary Cranch reported from Quincy.

The day after Christmas, the official day of mourning in the capital, troops of light infantry and cavalry passed through the city to the slow military beat of muffled drums, in a grand solemn procession that began at Congress Hall and included a host of federal and state leaders, city magistrates, Masons, and a riderless white horse with reversed boots in the stirrups. Washington had been interred in the family vault at Mount Vernon, but this was the nation’s funeral for its first President and greatest hero. The line of march was south on Fifth Street, east on Walnut, then north on Fourth, crossing Chestnut, Market, and Arch Streets to the German Lutheran Church at Fourth and Cherry, which had the largest seating capacity of any church in the city.

“The President of the United States and his Lady . . . and a vast concourse of other citizens,” were present for services led by Bishop William White of Christ Church, with an oration by Representative Henry Lee of Virginia — General “Light-Horse Harry” Lee — who extolled Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

When the service ended after four and a half hours, several hundred people crowded into the President’s House. “The gentlemen all in black,” Abigail noted, while the ladies had not let their grief “deprive them in their taste for ornamenting.” They wore black military sashes, “epaulets of black silk . . . black plumes . . . black gloves and fans.”

But as the encomiums to Washington continued, in speeches, sermons, and editorials — tributes that seemed often as contrived for show as the black plumes and fans — Abigail grew extremely impatient. When a minister at Newburyport, in a rapturous eulogy spoke of Washington as the “savior” of the country, she turned indignant. At no time, she wrote, had the fate of the country rested on the breath of one man, not even Washington. “Wise and judicious observations about his character are those only which will outlive the badges of mourning,” she told Mary. “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”

For the time being, the President said no more than he already had. But the Vice President was not known to have said anything about Washington. In some quarters it was being observed that because of his shame over the “Mazzei Letter,” Jefferson had deliberately delayed his departure from Monticello to avoid the ceremonies in Washington’s memory. Jefferson, who could have been in Philadelphia in time, did not arrive until two days later, on December 28, after an absence of ten months.

“I CONGRATULATE YOU on the New Year and the New Century,” Adams wrote to his old friend Cotton Tufts on January 1, 1800, adding a line from Virgil, “Aspice venturo laetentur ut omnia! [Look how they are full of joy at the age to come!].”

If Adams had any thoughts or feelings about the passing of the epochal eighteenth century — any observations on the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Johnson, Voltaire, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Pitt and Washington, the advent of the United States of America — or if he had any premonitions or words to the wise about the future of his country or of humankind, he committed none to paper. His thoughts, to judge by what he said to Cotton Tufts, were on home and some marshland he wished to buy, overpriced though it might be.

Across the water, events had moved on dramatically. In February came the news from France of a coup on November 9 — 18 Brumaire, by the French revolutionary calendar. General Bonaparte had taken power as First Consul, which made him, at age thirty-three, sovereign ruler of France and much of Europe. The French Revolution was over, as declared Bonaparte himself.

Jefferson, who had pinned his highest hopes on the revolution, commented only that the situation was “painfully interesting.” Clearly, American enchantment with France and the revolution were also at an end. Washington’s death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another. Adams, who like Edmund Burke had predicted dictatorship as the inevitable outcome for the revolution, wisely kept silent.

“ELECTIONEERING” had already begun. A “stormy session” was forecast, and from the tone of their letters home — to Mary Cranch, Cotton Tufts, and others — both the Adamses seem to have concluded that there was to be no second term for them. That Jefferson would be the Republican choice to oppose him in the election was a foregone conclusion.

Congress was doing little. From the Vice President’s chair upstairs at Congress Hall, Jefferson lamented the overbearing “dreariness” of the scene. As much as possible, he was associating with the “class of science,” as he said, his friends and fellow members of the Philosophical Society, of which he had become president. He took time to have his portrait painted by young Rembrandt Peale, the gifted son of Charles Willson Peale, and of all the portraits done of him, it was perhaps the strongest — Jefferson in his prime at age fifty-seven, grey-haired, handsome, and confident.

Acutely conscious of the mistakes Adams had made as Vice President, Jefferson, when presiding in the Senate, never talked out of turn, or tried to impose his own opinion from the chair, conduct all in keeping with his nature. Moreover, he saw no necessity to be constantly present, as Adams had. There were better ways to spend his time, Jefferson felt. Seeing the need for a manual of parliamentary rules for the Senate, he wrote one, distinguished by its clarity, emphasis on decorum, and the degree to which he had drawn on the British model. Had it been Adams paying such tribute to English foundations and traditions, the uproar would have been immediate; he would have been denounced still again as “tainted” by his years in London and love for all things British. But among Jefferson’s many contributions to the new republic, his Senate Manual would stand as one of the most useful and enduring.

In writing one rule, No. 17.9, under “Order in Debate,” it was almost as though he had his predecessor as Vice President specifically in mind.

No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously.

If Adams found any relief or pleasure in his duties, it was approving, on April 24, legislation that appropriated $5,900 to “purchase such books as may be necessary” for a new Library of Congress. It was one of the few measures upon which he and the Vice President could have heartily agreed.

IV

THAT THE CONTEST for the presidency in 1800 was to be unlike any of the three preceding presidential elections was clear at once. For the first (and last) time in history, the President was running against the Vice President. The two political parties had also come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country’s experience.

Further, under the Sedition Act anyone openly criticizing the President ran the risk of being fined or sent to prison. Since the first sensational case against Congressman Matthew (“Spitting”) Lyon of Vermont, eleven others had been charged and convicted under the law. In one instance, a New Jersey tavern loafer who had done no more than cast aspersions on the President’s posterior was arrested, prosecuted, and fined $150.

That spring of 1800, the notorious James Callender reemerged, determined to defeat “the wretch” Adams, elect his patron Jefferson, and make himself a martyr. Matthew Lyon, after being sentenced to four months in a foul Vermont jail, had become a national hero and was overwhelmingly reelected to Congress.

Callender, who had quit Philadelphia, was now working as a Republican propagandist in Richmond, Virginia, with the encouragement and financial support of Jefferson, who, at the same time, was actively distributing a variety of campaign propaganda throughout the country, always careful to conceal his involvement. “Do not let my name be connected with the business,” he advised James Monroe. That Adams was never known to be involved in such activity struck some as a sign of how naïve and behind the times he was.

In the Richmond Examiner, where he praised Jefferson as “an ornament to human nature,” Callender assaulted Adams in a series of essays that would soon appear as a book titled The Prospect Before Us. It was the first salvo of the election and a clear sign of the sort of contest it would become.

Not satisfied that the old charges of monarchist and warmonger were sufficient, Callender called Adams a “repulsive pedant,” a “gross hypocrite,” and “in his private life, one of the most egregious fools upon the continent.” Adams was “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

“The reign of Mr. Adams,” said Callender, “has hitherto been one continued tempest of malignant passions.” Once, according to Callender, Adams had become so enraged, he tore his wig off, threw it to the floor, and stomped on it. By what “species of madness” had America submitted to accept such a man as president?

The historian will search for those occult causes that induced her to exalt an individual who has neither that innocence of sensibility which incites it to love, nor that omnipotence of intellect which commands us to admire. He will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature, of a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man?

Adams’s sole objective was to make war on France, Callender asserted. The choice was clear — Adams and war, or Jefferson and peace.

To all this Jefferson gave his approval. Having seen the proof sheets of the new volume, he assured Callender, “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effects.”

To no one’s surprise Callender was promptly arrested for inciting the American people against their President. In May he went on trial in a federal court in Richmond where the jury returned a verdict of guilty and he was sentenced to nine months in jail. But as he and Jefferson expected, it was another victory for the Republicans, just as Matthew Lyon’s conviction had been.

Adams’s far greater concern, meanwhile, was his cabinet. Particularly in his dealings with Pickering and McHenry, tension had been building for months, Adams feeling ever more isolated and certain that their first loyalty was to Hamilton, not him. Reports of ill will within the executive departments appeared in the papers. Adams and Pickering were said to “hate each other with the utmost cordiality.”

The long-overdue showdown came after the Republicans defeated the Federalists in the election of the New York legislature, a crucial election in that it would determine New York’s electoral vote for President. It was as if all Adams’s troubles, all the pent-up anger and frustration he had had in his dealings with the cabinet, let go in a furious outburst at James McHenry, an incompetent but affable man whom Adams rather liked.

On the evening of May 5, Adams summoned McHenry to the presidential mansion to discuss the appointment of a minor federal official. The discussion was quickly concluded and McHenry was about to leave when something he said, or the way he said it, started Adams on the subject of Hamilton and the loss of the New York election. Adams charged McHenry with working secretly with Hamilton to undercut the administration. When McHenry protested, Adams cut him off, saying, “I know it, sir, to be so.” Hamilton, said Adams, seething with anger, was an “intrigant . . . a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard . . . a foreigner.” Then Adams let fly with what to any faithful Hamiltonian was the ultimate insult. Jefferson, Adams declared, was a better man, “a wiser one,” than Hamilton, and, furthermore, Jefferson would make a better president.

How could McHenry and Pickering presume to know what to do in matters of foreign affairs, Adams went on. How dare they try to suspend the mission to France! And why had he been given no warning that Hamilton would turn up at Trenton? Adams charged McHenry with inept management, of failing to clothe the troops adequately. “You cannot, sir, remain longer in office,” Adams declared at last.

But then, when McHenry agreed to resign, Adams, his fury spent, said almost in apology he had always considered McHenry a man of understanding and integrity.

McHenry immediately wrote his own account of the scene, copies of which he sent to both Adams and Hamilton. Writing to explain his dismissal to a nephew, McHenry portrayed Adams as “actually insane.”

While Adams’s outbursts of temper could be explosive, they never happened in public, always in private confrontations. It was then that “he would give to his language the full impress of his vehement will.” But never until now was he known to have berated a subordinate, and his regret over the outburst was considerable.

Still, nothing he had said was untrue, nor was his anger without justification. In firing McHenry he had done what he should have done well before this. After a pause of a few days — possibly to cool down — he fired Pickering.

This time there was no unpleasant confrontation. On May 10, in customary fashion, Adams asked for Pickering’s resignation by letter. Almost inconceivably, Pickering refused to comply. In a written response of May 12, he said he did not feel it his duty to resign, and implied that he needed the government salary to subsist. Adams discharged him at once and the same day named as his new Secretary of War, Senator Samuel Dexter of Massachusetts, and as Secretary of State, John Marshall, who was now a member of the House of Representatives.

Why Adams failed to discharge Oliver Wolcott while cleaning house was never adequately explained. Though Wolcott had been quite as duplicitous and disloyal to Adams as either McHenry or Pickering, he somehow succeeded in winning Adams’s trust and would continue as Secretary of the Treasury.

Hearing of the dismissals, Alexander Hamilton quickly asked Pickering to search the files at the Department of State for “copies of extracts of all such documents as will enable you to explain both Jefferson and Adams.” The time had come, Hamilton said, when “men of real integrity” must unite against all charlatans.

THE REMOVAL of the government from Philadelphia to the new Federal City by the Potomac was scheduled to take place in June. The President was to go there himself for a first look as soon as he could get away. But two critical issues required decisions in the weeks that remained — what to do about the temporary army and what to do about three Pennsylvania German farmers who had been sentenced to hang for treason.

The fate of the now useless and unpopular army was settled with remarkably little fuss, showing how greatly times had changed. Adams declared that were it left to him the army “should not exist a fortnight.” Both Federalists and Republicans in Congress, seeing no reason why Adams should get the credit, voted to disband the army by summer. Had Hamilton been given free reign with the army, Adams would remark, it would have required a second army to disband the first one.

The fate of the condemned men, however, was left to Adams alone.

In southeastern Pennsylvania the previous year there had been an armed uprising by German (Pennsylvania Dutch) farmers angry over the federal tax on land and the high-handed ways of the federal tax collectors. The “rebellion” had died down by the time state and federal troops arrived, but its leader, John Fries, and two others were taken captive and tried in federal court. Found guilty of treason and sentenced to hang, they had appealed to the President for a pardon.

Adams had been initially incensed at the news of the rebellion — it was he who had ordered the federal troops to the scene — but had since insisted on making his own study of the case. “The issue of this investigation,” he wrote, “has opened a train of very serious contemplations to me, which will require the closest attention of my best understanding, and will prove a severe trial to my heart.” Again he asked for the opinions of his cabinet officers, all of whom recommended that, to set an example, the sentence should be carried out.

Capital punishment was part of life. Nor was Adams opposed to it. As President, he had signed death warrants for military deserters. Secretary of State Pickering, in giving his opinion, was, like the others, only expressing what he viewed as a duty of office. “Painful as is the idea of taking the life of a man,” Pickering wrote, “I feel a calm and solid satisfaction that an opportunity is now presented in executing the justice of the law, to crush that spirit, which, if not overthrown and destroyed, may proceed in its career and overturn the government.”

It was what Adams himself might have written earlier. But with his review completed, Adams saw that he had been mistaken. Fries, it was his judgment, had led a riot, not an insurrection, and was therefore not guilty of treason. Rejecting the verdict of the jury and the unanimous opinion of his cabinet, Adams pardoned Fries and the two others, never doubting he had done the right thing. And though the decision aggravated still further the already infuriated Hamiltonians, who saw it as still one more example of Adams’s weakness and capriciousness, much of the electorate approved, and especially in Pennsylvania.

IF THE PRESIDENT and his wife had misgivings about vacating Philadelphia and the great brick mansion on Market Street, if they were at all saddened by the prospect, such feelings went unrecorded. In her last letters to Mary Cranch before leaving, Abigail wrote mainly of the lovely spring weather — “as luxuriant a season as I ever knew” — and the arrangements to be made for a final dinner party.

She started for Quincy on May 19. The President departed for Washington on May 27, heading southwest in his coach-and-four accompanied by Billy Shaw, and escorted by the ever-faithful John Briesler on horseback. For miles through Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where well-tended farms were burgeoning with crops in the “luxuriant” season, Adams delighted in the scenery. At Lancaster and later at Frederick, Maryland, he spoke before public gatherings, and was warmly received, as he was at other towns along the way, enjoying what, in that day and age, passed for campaigning. Such were the tributes and entertainments in his honor en route, it was not until June 3 that he reached the boundary line of the ten-mile square of the District of Columbia.

GIVEN WHAT there was to see, Adams might have been terribly disappointed by the Federal City. He could rightfully have fumed over the heat, the mosquitoes, the squalid shacks of the work crews; or the projected cost of the project; or the questionable real estate ventures that had failed year after year, despite so many grand promises. Another nephew, William Cranch, had become involved in one such scheme and gone bankrupt. Being that it was his first foray into the South, Adams might have been disturbed by the sight of slaves at work.

For all the talk, there was no city as yet, only a rather shabby village and great stretches of tree stumps, stubble, and swamp. There were no schools, not a single church. Capitol Hill comprised a few stores, a few nondescript hotels and boardinghouses clustered near a half-finished sandstone Capitol. To accommodate the different departments of the government, only one structure had been completed, the Treasury, a plain two-story brick building a mile to the west of the Capitol, next door to the new President’s House, which was still a long way from being ready.

Oliver Wolcott, in a letter to his wife, described the Capitol and the President’s House as “magnificent,” yet was astounded at how much had still to be done.

I cannot but consider our Presidents as very unfortunate men if they must live in this dwelling. It must be cold and damp in winter. . . . It was built to be looked at by visitors and strangers, and will render its occupants an object of ridicule with some and pity with others.

Dr. William Thornton, a commissioner of the District and architect of the Capitol, spoke confidently of a population in Washington of 160,000 people within a few years. To Wolcott, as to many, it seemed no one in Washington knew what he was talking about. In fact, it would be nearly eighty years before the city had such a population.

Adams, with his memories of Paris and London, with his fondness for Philadelphia and his belief that the capital of a great nation ought to be a great city, could have been appalled by the whole place and seen it as a colossal blunder. He could have dismissed it as Jefferson’s city, Jefferson having devoted more time and thought to the project than anyone in government. Everything considered, there was almost no reason for Adams to have liked anything about it.

Yet by all signs he was quite pleased. “I like the seat of government very well,” he wrote Abigail. He stayed ten days, lodging at Tunnicliffe’s City Hotel, near the Capitol. He was joined by his new appointments, Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of War Dexter, who with the rest of the executive branch had made the move from Philadelphia, along with the complete files of the President and the departments shipped in eight packing cases.

Adams made a brief inspection of the new President’s House. Once, when asked by Washington how he thought a President ought to live — in what manner and style — Adams had said it should be in a fairly grand way. And though he had said nothing specific about the sort of house a President should have, this under construction seems to have met his approval. He imagined himself asleep there, or lying awake, he told Abigail, but referred only to the coming winter, not the next four years.

He enjoyed most of all his visits to Mount Vernon to call on Martha Washington, and to Alexandria, where he was acclaimed by the townspeople and given a dinner in his honor at the home of Attorney General Lee, the net effect of which was to make him extremely homesick.

“Oh! That I could have a home!” He felt he had been forever on the move, on the road. “Rolling, rolling, rolling, till I am very nearly rolling into the bosom of Mother Earth.”

By first light, June 14, he was rolling north to Quincy, leaving John Marshall to manage in his absence.

V

IN THE SUMMER and fall of 1800 the question of who was to lead the nation rapidly became a contest of personal vilification surpassing any presidential election in American history. The spirit of party had taken hold with a vengeance, and whether Adams or Jefferson was the most abused would be hard to say. In Federalist pamphlets and newspapers, Jefferson was decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man. He was accused of favoring states’ rights over the Union, charged with infidelity to the Constitution, called a spendthrift and libertine.

One New York paper assured its readers that a Jefferson victory would mean civil war. Hordes of Frenchmen and Irishmen, “the refuse of Europe,” would flood the country and threaten the life of “all who love order, peace, virtue, and religion.” It was said Jefferson had swindled clients as a young lawyer. The old smear of cowardice during his time as governor of Virginia was revived. But most amplified were charges of atheism. Not only was Jefferson a godless man, but one who mocked the Christian faith. In New England word went out that family Bibles would have to be hidden away for safekeeping, were he elected. So widespread and pervasive was such propaganda that even Martha Washington, who may have been smarting still from the “Mazzei Letter,” remarked to a visiting clergyman that she thought Jefferson “one of the most detestable of mankind.”

Stories were spread of personal immorality. It was now that a whispering campaign began to the effect that all southern slave masters were known to cohabit with slave women and that the Sage of Monticello was no exception.

Adams was inevitably excoriated as a monarchist, more British than American, and therefore a bad man. He was ridiculed as old, addled, and toothless. Timothy Pickering spread the rumor that to secure his reelection Adams had struck a corrupt bargain with the Republicans. According to another story, this secret arrangement was with Jefferson himself — Adams was to throw the election Jefferson’s way and serve as Jefferson’s vice president.

If Jefferson carried on with slave women, Adams, according to one story in circulation, had ordered Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to London to procure four pretty mistresses to divide between them. When the story reached Adams, he was highly amused. “I do declare upon my honor,” he wrote William Tudor, “if this is true General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two.”

Most vicious were the charges that Adams was insane. Thus, if Jefferson was a Jacobin, a shameless southern libertine, and a “howling” atheist, Adams was a Tory, a vain Yankee scold, and, if truth be known, “quite mad.”

But the great difference in the attacks on Adams in this election was that they came from Republicans and High Federalists alike. While the Republicans assaulted him as a warmonger, he was berated by the High Federalists as fainthearted in the face of the French. While one side belittled him as a creature of the Hamiltonians, the other scorned him as a friend of Elbridge Gerry.

Jefferson in his four years as Vice President had so effectively separated himself from Adams and the administration that he could be held accountable for nothing that had disappointed, displeased, or infuriated anyone, whereas Adams was held forever accountable for the new taxes, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the standing army, and a host of other “menaces,” as said Philadelphia’s Aurora.

There were, as well, striking ironies. Jefferson, the Virginia aristocrat and slave master who lived in a style fit for a prince, as removed from his fellow citizens and their lives as it was possible to be, was hailed as the apostle of liberty, the “Man of the People.” Adams, the farmer’s son who despised slavery and practiced the kind of personal economy and plain living commonly upheld as the American way, was scorned as an aristocrat who, if he could, would enslave the common people. “My countrymen!” exclaimed William Duane in the Aurora in his crusade for Jefferson, “If you have not virtue enough to stem the current, determine to be slaves at once.”

For Adams, abuse from the Jefferson Republicans was an old story. It was to be expected. Far more hurtful were the personal attacks from the Hamilton Federalists.

When Oliver Wolcott wrote from his office in Washington to tell Fisher Ames of Massachusetts that he would work to defeat Adams and that between Adams and Jefferson there was scarcely a difference, that one would be as disastrous as the other, he was only expressing what many Hamilton Federalists had concluded, taking their cue from their leader. For again as in 1788 and 1796, Hamilton was throwing his weight into the contest to tip the balance against Adams, except this time there was no pretense of secrecy.

As early as May, Hamilton had launched a letter campaign to his High Federalist coterie declaring Adams unfit and incapable as President, a man whose defects of character were guaranteed to bring certain ruin to the party. “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose . . . who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

On a tour of New England, ostensibly to bid farewell to his army before it disbanded, Hamilton spent as much time as possible among local Federalist leaders to whom he spread the same charge against Adams. Hamilton’s scheme was to make Charles Cotesworth Pinckney President.

Reports of Hamilton’s activities inevitably reached Quincy. “It was soon understood that . . . his visit was merely an electioneering business, to feel the pulse of the New England states, and impress those upon whom he could have any influence to vote for Pinckney,” Abigail wrote. But by such intrigues, she was sure, “the little cock sparrow general” would lose more votes for Pinckney than he would gain.

When such an old friend as Francis Dana turned his back on Adams, it was extremely painful for him. Yet he himself and his efforts for peace were widely approved in New England, as Hamilton discovered to his dismay. While “strong-minded men” stood ready to support Pinckney, Hamilton wrote in his analysis of the political climate, there was still “in the body of that people . . . a strong attachment” to Adams.

As Abigail observed in mid-August, not a public event or levee took place “without being attended by many persons who never before came and never were they so full, and so crowded as they have been this season.” Meanwhile, local Republicans were noticeably uncritical.

As handsome a tribute as any to Adams appeared in the Washington Federalist. In answer to “late attempts to undervalue” the President, readers were reminded that Adams stood “among the few surviving, steady, tried patriots” whose services to the country were of a kind almost beyond compare:

Bred in the old school of politics, his principles are founded on the experience of ages, and bid defiance to French flippancies and modern crudities. . . . Always great, and though sometimes alone, all weak and personal motives were forgotten in public energy and the security of the sacred liberties of his country. . . . Deeply versed in legal lore, profoundly skilled in political science; joined to the advantage of forty years’ unceasing engagement in the turbulent and triumphant scenes, both at home and in Europe, which have marked our history; learned in the language and arts of diplomacy; more conversant with the views, jealousies, resources, and intrigues of Great Britain, France and Holland than any other American; alike aloof to flattery and vulgar ambition, as above all undue control [he has as] . . . his sole object . . . the present freedom and independence of his country and its future glory. On this solid basis he has attempted to raise a monument of his honest fame.

With reports from the peace commission maddeningly thin and long delayed, the issue of peace and war remained foremost, almost to the end. What the Aurora would proclaim at the close of the campaign was no different from what James Callender had written in early spring. “With Jefferson we shall have peace . . . the friends of war will vote for Adams.”

The two candidates conveyed the customary air of indifference, neither saying anything publicly or appearing to lift a finger in his own behalf. Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at his farm, which he had lately taken to calling Stoneyfield, instead of Peacefield, perhaps feeling the new name was more in keeping with New England candor, or that it better defined the look of the political landscape at the moment.

He devoted himself almost entirely to official duties, maintaining steady correspondence with Secretary Marshall in particular. Nothing mattered more — over nothing did Adams fret more — than the state of negotiations in France. And still there was no word.

The great imponderable was Napoleon Bonaparte. “I cannot account for the long delay of our envoys,” wrote Marshall, who had begun to have doubts and reminded the President that there must be no sacrifice of American honor to please the First Consul. “We ought not be surprised if we see our envoys without a treaty,” he warned, and this could produce “a critical state of things.”

But Adams needed no reminding. In reply, he advised prudent preparations for war, in the event of another rebuff. “I am much of your opinion that we ought not to be surprised,” he told Marshall on September 4.

. . . the government ought to be prepared to take a decided part. Questions of consequence will arise, and among others, whether the President ought not at the opening session to recommend an immediate and general declaration of war against the French Republic. . . . We have had wonderful proofs that the public mind cannot be held in a state of suspense. The public opinion, it seems, must always be a decided one, whether in the right or not. . . . I wish the heads of departments to turn their thoughts to the subject, and view it in all its lights.

For his part, Jefferson appeared to be devoting his time at Monticello to rural interests only.

BOTH ABIGAIL and John enjoyed comparatively good health, and Adams’s love of home, his everyday delight in his farm, were as constant as ever — no less than what Washington had felt for Mount Vernon or Jefferson for Monticello.

But as Abigail confided in family correspondence, her own and the President’s private days and frequent sleepless nights were deeply troubled by the sad fate of their alcoholic son. On her way home from Philadelphia in early November, Abigail had stopped again at East Chester, where this time she saw Charles himself. “The whole man [is] so changed that ruin and destruction have swallowed him up,” Abigail confided to John Quincy. “Poor, poor unhappy, wretched man,” she wrote, her heart breaking. Charles’s wife had gone with her younger child to stay with her mother, while Abigail had brought the other child, four-year-old Susanna, home to Quincy. So with Nabby and her daughter Caroline again spending the summer, it was a full house.

Nothing she had been able to say to Charles had had any effect, Abigail wrote. She had tried “remonstrances.” She had reminded him of all that was dear in life — honor, reputation, family, friends. “But all is lost on him.”

She and the President would provide for his family. “Yet I am wounded to the soul by the consideration of what is to become of him. What will be his fate embitters every moment of my life.” At age thirty, Charles seemed beyond saving.

ON MONDAY, October 13, Adams set off by coach from Quincy on the journey back to Washington. His own heartbreak over Charles was no less than what Abigail suffered, as his later writings disclose, but he had not softened in his decision to renounce his son. Passing through East Chester, Adams did not stop to see him, as Abigail would, he knew, when she followed later, resolved to be with John in Washington whatever lay in store.

The greetings he received along the way were of a kind to help his sagging spirits. Clearly he stood well with the large majority of the Federalist party and a great many more besides who saw him as a staunch, old patriot carrying on in the tradition of Washington. John Adams, it was said, was “a good husband, a good father, a good citizen, and a good man.” He was a peacemaker, whatever the Hamiltonians might say, and the American people did not hold that against him.

Republicans, too, were expressing new regard, even affection for Adams. “The Jacobins profess to admire and respect the independence of Mr. Adams’s character,” Thomas reported from Philadelphia to his mother, “and several of them have told me that next to their idol Jefferson they would definitely prefer him to any man in the country.” But this did not mean they would vote for him, and Thomas was pessimistic. “I am glad you are to be with my father this winter,” he told her. “The prospect is dreary enough, not for him, but for the country.”

Then, without warning, while Adams was on the road to Washington, a “thunderbolt” struck.

Since summer Alexander Hamilton had been working on a “letter” intended initially for a select few Federalists in several states. Timothy Pickering, James McHenry, and Oliver Wolcott had all been recruited to help. Pickering and McHenry had supplied what confidential information they could from past experience in Adams’s cabinet, while Wolcott, still a member of the cabinet, continued to have access to confidential files. But when asked for their views on Hamilton’s initial draft of the letter, most of them were astonished, and urged Hamilton not to put his name on it. Wolcott suggested that it not be released at all, because, he wrote, “the poor old man” was quite capable of doing himself in without help from anyone else. But Hamilton paid no attention.

Not long past, Abigail had warned Adams to “beware of that spare Cassius.” Now, in the eleventh hour of the election, Hamilton lashed out in a desperate effort to destroy Adams, the leading candidate of his own party.

A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States, a fifty-four-page pamphlet, was published in New York at the end of October. Nothing that Hamilton ever wrote about Jefferson was half so contemptuous. He berated Adams in nearly every way possible — for his “great intrinsic defects of character,” his “disgusting egotism,” weaknesses, vacillation, his “eccentric tendencies,” his “bitter animosity” toward his own cabinet. He deplored Adams’s handling of relations with France, the “precipitate nomination” of William Vans Murray, the firing of Timothy Pickering, the pardoning of John Fries. Though Hamilton did not go so far as to call Adams insane, he cited his “ungovernable temper” as evidence of a man out of control. “It is a fact that he is often liable to paroxisms of anger which deprive him of self-command and produce very outrageous behavior.”

Yet Hamilton made no charges of corruption or misconduct on Adams’s part. He even acknowledged Adams’s patriotism and integrity, and conceded, without getting specific, that Adams had “talents of a certain kind.” And finally, most strangely, having spent fifty pages tearing Adams to pieces, Hamilton concluded by saying Adams must be supported equally with General Pinckney in the election.

Republicans were euphoric. Whatever crazed notions had taken hold of Hamilton, he had surely dealt Adams a blow and “rent the Federal party in twain.” In a high-spirited letter to Jefferson, James Madison said Hamilton’s “thunderbolt” meant certain victory for Jefferson. “I rejoice with you that Republicanism is likely to be so completely triumphant.”

Federalists everywhere were aghast, disbelieving, or seething with anger. In Connecticut, Noah Webster produced a pamphlet accusing Hamilton of extreme disloyalty and ambition to become the American Caesar. By contrast to Hamilton, Webster wrote, Adams was “a man of pure morals, of firm attachment to republican government, of sound and inflexible patriotism.” Were Jefferson to be elected, Webster wrote to Hamilton, “the fault will lie at your door and . . . your conduct on this occasion will be discerned little short of insanity.”

In fact, Hamilton had amply demonstrated that it was he who had become a burden to the party, he, if anyone, who seemed to have departed from his senses.

Speculation as to why he had done it, what possible purpose he might have had, would go on for years. Possibly, as John Quincy surmised, it was because Adams had denied him his chance for military glory, humiliated him at Trenton, and made his army superfluous. Perhaps he believed he was improving Pinckney’s chances. Or he wanted to bring down the Federalist party, so that in the aftermath of a Jefferson victory he could raise it up again as his own creation.

Probably not even Hamilton knew the answer. But by his own hand he had ruined whatever chance he ever had for the power and glory he so desperately desired.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS toward the end of October, plasterers and painters at work on the President’s House in Washington, as well as the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, had been keeping an eye out for the President, not knowing just when he might appear. With the imponderables of travel, no one’s arrival could be predetermined or planned for precisely, not even a President’s.

The immense house was still unfinished. It reeked of wet plaster and wet paint. Fires had to be kept blazing in every fireplace on the main floor to speed up the drying process. Only a twisting back stair had been built between floors. Closet doors were missing. There were no bells to ring for service. And though the furniture had arrived from Philadelphia, it looked lost in such enormous rooms. Just one painting had been hung, a full-length portrait of Washington in his black velvet suit, by Gilbert Stuart, which had also been sent from Philadelphia.

The house stood in a weedy, wagon-rutted field with piles of stone and rubble about. It all looked very raw and unkempt. Yet the great whitewashed stone building, the largest house in America — as large as the half of the Capitol that had been erected — was truly a grand edifice, noble even in its present state.

At midday, Saturday, November 1, Commissioners William Thornton and Alexander White were inspecting the main floor, when, at one o’clock, the President was seen rolling up to the south entrance in his coach-and-four. He was accompanied still by Billy Shaw and Briesler following on horseback. There was no one else, no honor guard, no band playing, no entourage of any kind.

The two commissioners and a few workers at hand comprised the welcoming committee for the arrival of John Adams, the first President to occupy what only much later would become known as the White House.

An office was made ready in an ample room with a southern exposure on the second floor, next door to what was to be Adams’s bedroom. Secretaries Marshall and Stoddert, the two in the cabinet Adams counted on, came to pay their respects. Later, supper finished, he climbed the back stairs candle in hand and retired for the night.

At his desk the next morning, on a plain sheet of paper, which he headed, “President’s House, Washington City, Nov. 2, 1800,” he wrote to Abigail a letter in which he offered a simple benediction:

I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.

But for Adams the house was to be the setting of great disappointment and much sorrow. By the time he wrote to Abigail again, he had seen the Hamilton pamphlet and concluded as Madison had that it meant his certain defeat. “The ancients thought a great book a great evil,” he told her. “Mr. H. will find a little book an evil great enough for him . . . for [it] will insure the choice of the man he dreads or pretends to dread more than me.”

To judge by what he said privately in a letter to a friend, he took the blow with notable equanimity. Like others, he thought Hamilton had succeeded mainly in damaging himself. He was not Hamilton’s enemy, Adams wrote, and Hamilton was not without talent. “There is more burnish, however, on the outside than sterling silver in substance.” But this was as much as he would say, at least while President.

AT THE END of the first week in November, Adams’s long wait for news from France ended. The mission had succeeded. A treaty with France, the Convention of Mortefontaine, had been signed on October 3, 1800, at a château north of Paris. At a grand fete celebrating the event, Bonaparte declared that the differences between France and the United States had been no more than a family quarrel. Gifts were presented to the American envoys, toasts raised to perpetual peace between the two nations.

The first report appeared in a Baltimore paper on November 7. Another month would pass before the official copy of the Convention arrived in Washington, at which point it would be submitted to the Senate for approval.

The news had come too late to affect the election, but peace had truly been achieved. Though Adams could say nothing of it yet, the Quasi-War was over, and for Adams it was an immense victory.

ABIGAIL REACHED Washington on November 16, at the end of an extremely arduous journey. Stopping to see Charles at East Chester, she was stunned to find him desperately ill in the care of Nabby. Abigail had had no forewarning; no one had been told, because his condition had come on so rapidly. Sitting by his bedside, she sensed she was seeing him for the last time. When she left, she again took Susanna with her for the rest of the journey.

In Maryland, as she later described it to Mary Cranch, there was only forest, the roads so rough and uncertain that she and her party were lost for two hours. “But woods are all you see from Baltimore until you reach the city, which is only so in name.” She thought the President’s House beautifully situated by the Potomac, the country around “romantic but wild.” Nearby Georgetown, however, was “the very dirtiest hole I ever saw.”

The house, she told Mary in a letter of November 21, was twice as large as the meetinghouse at home. “It is habitable by fires in every part, thirteen of which we are obliged to keep daily, or sleep in wet and damp places.” The great, unplastered “audience room” at the east end of the main floor, she made her “drying room” to hang out the laundry.

There were many who would have refused to live in the house in the state it was in, but the Adamses made do without complaint. The “great castle,” Abigail knew, had been built for ages to come. She judged it would require thirty servants to run it properly. As it was, she had six, including John and Mary Briesler.

She had not liked what little she had seen of the South thus far. The presence of slaves working about the house left her feeling depressed. The whole system struck her as woefully slow and wasteful, not to say morally wrong. She watched twelve slaves clothed in rags at work outside her window, hauling away dirt and rubble with horses and wagons, while their owners stood by doing nothing. “Two of our hardy New England men would do as much work in a day as the whole 12,” she told Cotton Tufts. “But it is true Republicanism that drive the slaves half fed, and destitute of clothing . . . whilst an owner walks about idle, though one slave is all the property he can boast.”

With the weather turning colder, she found it maddening that with woods everywhere it was impossible to find a woodcutter to keep the fires going. She despaired that anything could ever be accomplished in such a society. “The lower class of whites,” she wrote, “are a grade below the Negroes in point of intelligence, and ten below them in point of civility.” But she wrote, “I shall bear and forebear.”

• • •

ON SATURDAY, November 22, Congress convened for the first time in joint session in the unfinished Capitol, and John Adams delivered what he knew to be his last speech as President.

“I congratulate the people of the United States on the assembling of Congress at the permanent seat of their government,” he began, “and I congratulate you, gentlemen, on the prospect of a residence not to be changed.” As he had privately for the President’s House, he now publicly offered a benediction for the Capitol, the Federal District, and the City of Washington:

It would be unbecoming the representatives of this nation to assemble for the first time in this solemn temple without looking up to the Supreme Ruler of the universe, and imploring his blessing.

May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness! In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government, which adorned the great character whose name it bears, be forever held in veneration! Here, and throughout our country, may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion flourish forever!

The speech that followed was a brief, gracious summation of the state of the union, notable for its clarity and absence of exaggeration. He praised the officers and men of the discharged temporary army, both for their patriotism and their readiness to return to the “station of private citizens.” He praised the navy and recommended further measures for a defensive naval force.

While our best endeavors for the preservation of harmony with all nations will continue to be used, the experience of the world and our own experience admonish us of the insecurity of trusting too confidently to their success. We cannot, without committing a dangerous imprudence, abandon those measures of self-protection which are adapted to our situation, and to which, notwithstanding our pacific policy, the violence of injustice of others may again compel us to resort.

Because he had still to receive official word of the negotiations with France, he said only that it was hoped that American efforts for an accommodation would “meet with a success proportioned to the sincerity with which they have so often been repeated” — which was as close as he came to speaking of his own persistent efforts.

He spoke of the need for amending the judiciary system, and congratulated the Congress for the revenue that year, the largest of any year thus far.

“We find reason to rejoice at the prospect which presents itself,” he said at the last. The country was “prosperous, free, and happy, . . . thanks to the protection of laws emanating only from the general will,” and “the fruits of our own labor.”

Shortly after, in reply to the then customary answer to his speech from the Senate, Adams said of the new Capitol, “Here may the youth of this extensive country forever look up without disappointment, not only to the monuments and memorials of the dead, but to the examples of the living.”

LESS THAN two weeks later, on or about December 3, the same day the electors convened, a postrider arrived at the President’s House with a letter from East Chester. Charles was dead. He had died on November 30 — of dropsy, it was said, but most likely of cirrhosis as well.

His constitution was so shaken [Abigail wrote to her sister Mary], that his disease was rapid, and through the last part of his life, dreadfully painful and distressing. He bore with patience and submission his sufferings and heard the prayers for him with composure. His mind at times was much deranged. . . . He was no man’s enemy but his own. He was beloved in spite of his errors.

To Charles’s widow, Abigail wrote, “[I] would to God I could administer to you that comfort which [I] stand in need of myself.” In his early life, she recalled, no child was ever so tender and amiable. “The President sends his love to you and mourns, as he has for a long time, with you.”

In another few days the outcome of the election was known. Adams had lost. “My little bark has been overset in a squall of thunder and lightning and hail attended by a strong smell of sulfur,” he wrote to Thomas. However crushed, disappointed, saddened, however difficult it was for him to bear up, he expressed no bitterness or envy, and no anger. Nor was anyone to feel sorry for him. “Be not concerned about me,” he told Thomas. “I feel my shoulders relieved from the burden.”

As always, both Adamses were entirely candid with their children. To Thomas, Abigail wrote, “For myself and family I have few regrets . . . I shall be happier at Quincy.” Only her private grief and public ingratitude could at times bear her down. “I lose my sleep often, and I find my spirits flag,” she wrote to Cotton Tufts. “My mind and heart have been severely tried.”

The election had been closer than expected. Adams carried all of New England, but lost in New York, the South, and the West. The Republican victory in New York had been all-important and was due largely to extraordinary efforts by Aaron Burr in New York City. But it was not until Federalist strength in South Carolina proved insufficient to carry the state, and its 8 electoral votes, that the outcome was settled.

In the final electoral count of all sixteen states, Jefferson had 73 votes to Adams’s 65; Pinckney had 63. But Burr had also wound up with 73 votes, and so was tied with Jefferson. The outcome, according to the Constitution, would have to be decided in the House of Representatives.

What was surprising — and would largely be forgotten as time went on — was how well Adams had done. Despite the malicious attacks on him, the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts, unpopular taxes, betrayals by his own cabinet, the disarray of the Federalists, and the final treachery of Hamilton, he had, in fact, come very close to winning in the electoral count. With a difference of only 250 votes in New York City, Adams would have won with an electoral count of 71 to 61. So another of the ironies of 1800 was that Jefferson, the apostle of agrarian America who loathed cities, owed his ultimate political triumph to New York.

Had the news of the peace agreement at Mortefontaine arrived a few weeks sooner, it, too, could very well have been decisive for Adams. Also, were it not for the fact that in the South three-fifths of the slaves were counted in apportioning the electoral votes, Adams would have been reelected.

To Adams the outcome was proof of how potent party spirit and party organization had become, and the most prominent was Burr’s campaign in New York. Washington, in his Farewell Address, had warned against disunion, permanent alliances with other nations, and “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” Adams could rightly claim to have held to the ideals of union and neutrality, but his unrelenting independence — his desire to be a President above party — had cost him dearly.

“How mighty is the spirit of party,” he wrote to Elbridge Gerry. There was nothing unexpected about Jefferson’s success, Adams thought, but Burr’s good fortunes surpassed “all ordinary rules.” All too plainly, times had changed:

All the old patriots, all the splendid talents, the long experience, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists must be subjected to the humiliation of seeing this dextrous gentleman [Burr] rise like a balloon, filled with uninflammable air over the heads. . . . What an encouragement to party intrigue and corruption!

In the last analysis, however, it was not Jefferson or the “dextrous” Burr who defeated Adams so much as the Federalist war faction and the rampaging Hamilton. And none of this would have happened but for Adams’s decision to send the second peace mission to France. It was his determination to find peace and check Hamilton that cost him the full support of the party and thus the election.

VI

TENSION AND UNCERTAINTY over the Jefferson-Burr deadlock increased by the day. Burr refused to step aside in deference to Jefferson and was said to be secretly bargaining with the Federalists in return for support when the issue went to the House. Hamilton, in an effort to play kingmaker at the last, was again in the thick of things. Given his intense dislike and distrust of both men, the choice was painful, but after consideration he had decided on Jefferson.

Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly government [Hamilton wrote in explanation]. Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself; thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement. . . . In the choice of evils, let them [the Federalists in Congress] take the least. Jefferson is in my view less dangerous than Burr.

Adams, who could have applied influence behind the scenes, refused to say or do anything. Firm in his belief in the separation of powers, he saw it as a question for the legislature in which he, as President, had no business and he would stay far from it.

It was said Adams so bitterly resented that Jefferson had bested him in the election that he refused to come to his aid, and that if the truth were known he preferred Burr. But Adams expressed no enmity toward Jefferson; and in private correspondence, he and Abigail both said they preferred — and expected — Jefferson to be the one chosen. It was not that they had recovered their former affection for Jefferson, but they knew his ability, “all the splendid talents, the long experience,” in Adams’s words. Like Hamilton, they saw Jefferson as the less “dangerous” man. To Abigail, Burr was a figure “risen upon stilts,” with no thought to the good of the country.

If there was a gleam of justice to the crisis, it was the dreadful pass Hamilton had come to. “Mr. Hamilton has carried his eggs to a fine market,” Adams told William Tudor, using the old farmer’s expression. “The very man — the very two men of all [in] the world that he was most jealous of are now placed above him.”

On January 1, 1801, the Adamses held the first New Year’s Day reception at the President’s House. Several days later, they invited Jefferson to dine, one of several events that belie claims made then and later that Adams and Jefferson refused to speak. “Mr. Jefferson dines with us and in a card reply to the President’s invitation, he begs him to be assured of his homage and his high consideration,” Abigail wrote Thomas in a letter dated January 3, 1801. Adams having made the overture, Jefferson had responded graciously. Whatever private feelings either harbored, civility prevailed.

Other guests were included and Abigail left an undated account of a conversation with Jefferson, who was seated beside her and professed not to know several members of Congress at the table. She said she knew them all. When he asked what she thought “they mean to do” about the election in the House, she said she did not know, that it was a subject she did not “choose to converse upon,” and then demonstrated that she could make him laugh.

I replied . . . I have heard of a clergyman who upon some difficulty amongst his people, took a text from these words: “And they knew not what to do,” from whence he drew this inference, that when a people were in such a situation, they do not know what to do, they should take great care that they do not do they know not what.

At this he laughed out, and here ended the conversation.

A month later, shortly before she planned to leave for Quincy ahead of the President, Jefferson would come to tea. He “made me a visit . . . in order to take leave and wish me a good journey. It was more than I expected,” she wrote. Were it ever in his power to serve her or her family, he said, nothing would give him more pleasure.

Abigail had come to Washington with a “heavy heart,” as she told John Quincy in a long letter, and events since had provided little relief. “My residence in this city has not served to endear the world to me. To private and domestic sorrow is added a prospect of public calamity for our country. . . . What is before us Heaven only knows.”

“The President,” she was pleased to report, “retains his health and his spirits beyond what you could imagine.”

They had no plans for the future, except to return to Quincy and take up the life they had both professed so often to want more than anything else, except that this time it would be to stay. To a suggestion from William Tudor that he and Tudor reunite as law partners, Adams replied in a letter of January 20, “I must be farmer John of Stoneyfield and nothing more (I hope nothing less) for the rest of my life.”

That evening, when fire broke out next door in the Treasury Building, Adams was immediately out the door and across the way to lend a hand. A newspaper described the event the next day: “The fire for some time threatened the most destructive effects — but through the exertions of the citizens, animated by the example of the President of the United States (who on this occasion fell into the ranks and aided in passing the buckets) was at length subdued.”

• • •

WITH LITTLE MORE than a month left to his term in office, Adams made one of the most important decisions of his presidency. Oliver Ellsworth had resigned as Chief Justice. To replace him Adams first turned to his old friend John Jay, but when Jay declined, he chose John Marshall.

According to Marshall’s account, Adams and he were conversing in Adams’s office at the President’s House. “Who shall I nominate now?” Adams asked. When Marshall said he did not know, Adams turned and declared, “I believe I must nominate you.”

But it is probable that Adams knew exactly whom he would choose before Marshall ever entered the room. In many ways the nomination was inevitable. Few men had so impressed Adams as Marshall, with his good sense and ability. Nor had anyone shown greater loyalty. He was Adams’s kind of Federalist and one who at forty-five — “in the full vigor of middle age,” as Adams said — could be expected to serve on the Court for years to come. On January 31, 1801, at the President’s House, Adams signed Marshall’s commission as Chief Justice, which the Senate confirmed without delay. In its far-reaching importance to the country, Adams’s appointment of Marshall was second only to his nomination of George Washington to command the Continental Army twenty-five years before. Possibly the greatest Chief Justice in history, Marshall would serve on the Court for another thirty-four years.

As time ticked away in the “castle house,” as he called it, Adams kept steadily at work, awaiting decisions in Congress on a judiciary bill that mattered greatly to him, the fate of the peace treaty, which mattered above all, and ultimately February 11, when the electoral vote would be officially declared and the House would go into special session to resolve the Jefferson-Burr tie.

On February 3, the Senate at last approved the Convention of Mortefontaine. No one was overly enthusiastic. As was once said of the Jay Treaty, it was thought to be about as good as could be expected under the circumstances. What was not known, or even suspected, was that Bonaparte, at the very time he had been dealing with the American commission, was secretly negotiating a transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France.

Dreading her long trip home, with “so many horrid rivers to cross and such roads to traverse,” Abigail put off her departure until after February 11. “Today,” she recorded on February 7, “the judges and many others with the heads of departments dine with me for the last time.”

At the Capitol, Wednesday, February 11, the Congress met in joint session. The certificates of the electors were duly opened by the Vice President, who declared the result, and the House went immediately into session to start balloting. But days passed with the House deadlocked, unable to reach a decision. As crowds gathered outside the Capitol, the tension grew extreme. “The crisis is momentous,” reported the Washington Federalist. There was talk of desperate schemes to prevent the election, talk of civil war.

Abigail decided she should wait no longer. Early in the morning of Friday, February 13, she bid Adams goodbye and with her granddaughter, Susanna, set off by public stage through the “wilderness” to Baltimore, the first leg of the journey home. Her stay in the President’s House was over, and she was to have little to say about it ever again.

YEARS LATER, recalling the suspense of waiting for the House decision on the election, Jefferson would describe meeting with Adams on or about February 12 or 14.

“When the election between Burr and myself was kept in suspense by the Federalists,” Jefferson would write to Benjamin Rush, “and they were mediating to place the President [pro tempore] of the Senate at the head of government, I called on Mr. Adams with a view to have this desperate measure prevented by his negative.” According to Jefferson, Adams acted extremely displeased.

He grew warm in an instant, and said with a vehemence he had not used towards me before, “Sir, the event of the election is within your own power. You have only to say you will do justice to the public creditors, maintain the navy, and not disturb those holding office, and the government will instantly be put into your hands. We know it is the wish of the people it should be so.”

“Mr. Adams,” said I, “I know not what part of my conduct, in either public or private life, can have authorized a doubt of my fidelity to the public engagements. I say, however, I will not come into the government by capitulation. I will not enter on it, but in perfect freedom to follow the dictates of my own judgment.”

“Then,” said he, “things must take their course.” I turned the conversation to something else, and soon took my leave. It was the first time in our lives we had ever parted with anything like dissatisfaction.

There is nothing to contradict Jefferson’s account, or anything to verify it. Neither Adams nor his secretary Billy Shaw made note of a visit by Jefferson, or said anything of such an exchange in later years. Nor is there evidence that Adams ever discussed such terms with the Federalists in the House or took an interest in Federalist strategy. But it was also understandable that the Federalists wanted some assurance on where Jefferson stood, since he had made no statements on public issues.

The suspense ended on Tuesday, February 17, when, on the thirty-sixth ballot in the House, Jefferson was chosen President. One Federalist representative, James A. Bayard of Delaware, decided at last to switch his vote.

Later, Bayard would say Jefferson had agreed to the three Federalist terms, but this Jefferson vehemently denied. The question of what actually happened would remain unresolved.

“The Revolution of 1776 is now, and for the first time, arrived at its completion,” proclaimed the Aurora.

Till now the Republicans have indeed beaten the slaves of monarchy in the field of battle, and driven the troops of the King of Great Britain from the shores of our country; but the secret enemies of the American Revolution — her internal, insidious, and indefatigable foes, have never till now been completely discomfitted. This is the true period of the triumph of Republican principle.

IN THE LAME-DUCK Federalist Senate, meanwhile, an act expanding the Federal judiciary, something that Adams had proposed more than a year earlier, was passed into law. The number of circuit courts was doubled to six. Twenty-three new judges were added. For Adams, who had so long championed a strong, independent judiciary as proper balance to the other two branches, it was a major improvement and he proceeded at once to fill the new positions.

For weeks Adams had been exercising his presidential prerogative to fill government positions of all kinds, including some for friends and needy relatives. Scruples of the kind he had once preached to Mercy Warren concerning such appointments were considered no more. Colonel Smith was named surveyor of the Port of New York. Joshua Johnson, the father-in-law of John Quincy, who had fled England to avoid his creditors, after his reputed wealth turned out to be a fiction, was made postmaster of the District of Columbia.

But Adams’s court appointments particularly were given careful consideration. There was no frenzied rush to name “midnight judges,” as portrayed by Jefferson and the Republican press. Most of the nominations for judges were made on February 20, the rest completed by February 24, more than a week in advance of the inauguration. That nearly all those selected were Federalists was no more surprising than the indignation of the President-elect. In fact, most all of the nominees were perfectly good choices and the Republicans opposed hardly any of them. Abigail’s nephew, William Cranch, who was nominated and approved for the circuit court of the District of Columbia, went on to have a distinguished fifty-year career, both as a judge and a court reporter.

Without any prompting or pressure, Adams also named Oliver Wolcott for the Second Circuit Court. Incredibly, Adams still trusted and liked Wolcott, never suspecting him of the treachery of others in the cabinet. (Wolcott, for his part, often privately ridiculed the President for being abnormally suspicious.) “I wish you much pleasure and more honor . . . and I doubt not you will contribute your full share to make justice run down our streets as a stream,” Adams wrote. “My family joins in friendly regards to you and yours.” Wolcott, for all he had done secretly to destroy Adams, was happy to accept the appointment.

Abigail was not to expect much in the way of correspondence from him, Adams told her. “My time will be all taken up. I pray you to continue to write me.” He would be entertaining a delegation of Indians that evening, February 16, 1801, his last official dinner — and was glad to say he was sleeping better “for having the shutters open.”

Among Adams’s final acts as President, and undoubtedly with strong encouragement from Abigail, was to recall John Quincy from his diplomatic service abroad.

Among the last letters he wrote as time ran out was a considerate reminder to Jefferson that he need not purchase horses or carriages, since those in the stable at the President’s House were the property of the United States and would therefore remain behind.

ON INAUGURATION DAY, Wednesday, March 4, John Adams made his exit from the President’s House and the capital at four in the morning, traveling by public stage under clear skies lit by a quarter moon. He departed eight hours before Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office at the Capitol, and even more inconspicuously than he had arrived, rolling through empty streets past darkened houses, and again with Billy Shaw and John Briesler as his companions.

To his political rivals and enemies Adams’s predawn departure was another ill-advised act of a petulant old man. But admirers, too, expressed disappointment. A correspondent for the Massachusetts Spy observed in a letter from Washington that numbers of Adams’s friends wished he had not departed so abruptly. “Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor. It certainly would have had good effect.”

By his presence at the ceremony Adams could have set an example of grace in defeat, while at the same time paying homage to a system whereby power, according to a written constitution, is transferred peacefully. After so vicious a contest for the highest office, with party hatreds so near to igniting in violence, a peaceful transfer of power seemed little short of a miracle. If ever a system was proven to work under extremely adverse circumstances, it was at this inauguration of 1801, and it is regrettable that Adams was not present.

It would also have been more politic to have expressed confidence in his successor, but, such expressions were not Adams’s way if he did not mean them.

No President having ever been defeated for reelection until then, there was no tradition of a defeated president appearing at the installation of the winner. It is also quite possible that Adams was not invited to attend, or made to feel he would be welcome. When it was rumored, for example, that Adams might deliver a valedictory to Congress, the Aurora had questioned how possibly the “Duke of Braintree” could ever consider appearing before “a body in which his former friends are his enemies, and his former opponents the only persons who pity him.” Adams, said the Aurora, was a man who had been cast out by God like “polluted water out at the back door.” “May he return in safety to Braintree, that Mrs. Adams may wash his befuddled brains clear.”

Perhaps, given what Adams had been through at the hands of the Republicans and a number of Federalists still in Congress, those who had done all they could to overthrow him, he simply could not face being made a spectacle of their triumph.

Also, Adams’s departure was no sudden, dark-of-the-night impulse. It had been planned more than a week in advance, as is clear from the correspondence of Billy Shaw, and there was no secret about it. To get to Baltimore in a day, one had to take the early stage, and the early stage departed at four in the morning.

Adams himself never explained why he did not stay for Jefferson’s inauguration, but then it seems he was never asked.

“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Jefferson said famously in his inaugural address before a full Senate Chamber, his voice so soft many had difficulty hearing him. A passing tribute to Washington was made before he finished, but of Adams he said nothing.

To the victorious Republicans, and to generations of historians, the thought of the tall Jefferson, with his air of youth at fifty-seven, assuming the presidency in the new Capitol at the start of a new century, his eye on the future, would stand in vivid contrast to a downcast, bitter John Adams, old and “toothless” at sixty-five, on his “morning flight” to Baltimore.

Downcast, bitter, Adams may have been, but there is no evidence to support such a description. Adams loved the start of a new day, loved being on the move. Conceivably he felt immense relief to be homeward-bound, free finally of his burdens, his conscience “neat and easy,” as he would say. No one will ever know, but it is perfectly possible that as the sun rose higher that cloudless morning, Adams felt contentment of a kind he had not known for years — once he got over the fact that traveling with him on the same stage, as chance would have it, was Theodore Sedgwick. Like two warring boys who are made to sit in the same room until they get along, they would ride together all the way to Massachusetts.

VII

WHATEVER ADAMS’S state of mind, he was leaving his successor a nation “with its coffers full,” as he wrote, and with “fair prospects of peace with all the world smiling in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative.”

In turbulent, dangerous times he had held to a remarkably steady course. He had shown that a strong defense and a desire for peace were not mutually exclusive, but compatible and greatly in the national interest. The new navy was an outstanding achievement. In less than two years, it had grown from almost nothing to 50 ships, including the frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation, and over 5,000 officers and seamen, and this bore heavily on the outcome of the negotiations with France. Indeed, Adams’s insistence on American naval strength proved decisive in achieving peace with France in 1800. Further, by undercutting Hamilton and making his army useless, he may have saved the country from militarism.

In his four years as President, there had been no scandal or corruption. If he was less than outstanding as an administrator, if he had too readily gone along with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was slow to see deceit within his own cabinet, he had managed nonetheless to cope with a divided country and a divided party, and in the end achieved a rare level of statesmanship. To his everlasting credit, at the risk of his career, reputation, and his hold on the presidency, he chose not to go to war when that would have been highly popular and politically advantageous in the short run. As a result, the country was spared what would almost certainly have been a disastrous mistake.

In much the way he had rushed out in the night to help fight fires in Philadelphia and Washington, he had done his all to put out the fire of war — to the immeasurable benefit of the American people, and with no loss of honor or prestige to the nation. It was a brave, heroic performance.

Adams understood clearly the importance of what he had accomplished. To his dying day he would be proudest of all of having achieved peace. As he would write to a friend, “I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.’”

In the brief spell of goodwill that followed Adams’s inaugural address in 1797, Benjamin Bache had reminded the country that the new President was a “man of incorruptible integrity,” “dignity,” exceptional “resources of mind,” and high purpose. “He declares himself the friend of France and of peace, the admirer of republicanism, the enemy of party. . . . How characteristic of a patriot.” The same could have been said at the conclusion of Adams’s presidency no less than at the beginning.

Subjected to some of the most malicious attacks ever endured by a president, beset by personal disloyalty and political betrayal, suffering the loss of his mother, the near death of his wife, the death of a son, tormented by physical ailments, he had more than weathered the storm. His bedrock integrity, his spirit of independence, his devotion to country, his marriage, his humor, and a great underlying love of life were all still very much intact.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

REJOICE EVER MORE

This phrase “rejoice ever more” shall never be out of my heart, memory, or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it.

~John Adams

I

“THE ONLY QUESTION remaining with me is what shall I do with myself?” Adams had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “Something I must do, or ennui will rain upon me in buckets.”

He could go each morning and evening to fodder his cattle, he supposed. Or take noontime walks to Penn’s Hill. Or “potter” among his fruit trees and cucumbers. But what then? If he had money enough to spend on his farms, he might keep busier. But where was the money to come from? Talk of himself as Farmer John of Stoneyfield came easily. The reality would require adjustments.

He worried about the effect on mind and body of slowing to a standstill. His constitution, he was sure, would be put to a severe test after “a life of journeys and distant voyages.” Stillness “may shake my old frame,” he observed to another friend. “Rapid motion ought not be succeeded by sudden rest.”

He sensed he had little time left. “The day is far spent with us all,” he would tell Mercy Warren. “It cannot be long before we must exchange this theater for some other.” He only hoped it would be one with no politics. He and Abigail both had had enough of politics. “No more elective office for me,” she had written with absolute certainty. But neither would ever lose interest in politics.

For Abigail it was not just that the long journey of public life was ended, but that their capacity to “do good” was to be “so greatly curtailed,” as she had written before leaving Washington.

As it was, she and Adams had ten days of forced seclusion in which to ponder such concerns, starting almost the moment Adams arrived at Quincy on the evening of March 18, 1801. He was no sooner in the door than a wild northeaster struck, a storm of a kind such as they had not seen in years. Black skies, violent winds, and a flood of rain kept on day after day, no one budging from the house.

Somehow the mail got through, bringing a pointedly formal note of one sentence from the President dated March 8:

Th. Jefferson presents his respects to Mr. Adams and incloses him a letter which came to his hands last night; on reading what is written within the cover, he concluded it to be a private letter, and without opening a single paper within it, folded it up and now has the honor to inclose it to Mr. Adams, with the homage of his high consideration and respect.

Adams’s reply, written on March 24, the fifth day of the storm, was one of the few times he ever acknowledged his suffering over the death of Charles, but suggests also that Jefferson may never have offered a word of sympathy to him.

Had you read the papers inclosed [Adams wrote] they might have given you a moment of melancholy or at least of sympathy with a mourning father. They relate wholly to the funeral of a son who was once the delight of my eyes and a darling of my heart, cut off in the flower of his days, amidst very flattering prospects by causes which have been the greatest grief of my heart and the deepest affliction of my life.

In closing, Adams said he saw “nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.”

Jefferson did not respond, however. Adams’s letter was the last there would be between them for eleven years.

The violence and duration of the storm appears to have left Adams in better spirits once it passed. It was, he wrote to Benjamin Stoddert, “so old fashioned a storm that I begin to hope that nature is returning to her old good nature and good humor, and is substituting fermentations in the elements for revolutions in the moral, intellectual, and political world.”

Complaining was not the Adamses’ mode. The adjustments were more difficult than they would concede. The humiliation that defeat and popular rejection had inflicted on them, the death of Charles, and now sudden, total seclusion took a heavy toll. In some circles, they knew, they were openly despised. In others they were now considered irrelevant. Worst perhaps was the sense that no one any longer cared about them one way or the other.

In the year prior to March 4, letters to President Adams numbered in the thousands; in the year that followed, citizen Adams received fewer than a hundred. Once, while president, he had written to Abigail, “We cannot go back. We must stand our ground as long as we can.” In the years following the presidency, it was resolve of a kind they had to summon more often than they admitted.

When members of the Massachusetts legislature came to Quincy to present Adams with a tribute to his devoted service to his country, he was moved to tears.

Feelings of dejection and bitterness would come and go for a long time. Nearly six months after the return to Quincy, in a letter to Billy Shaw, Adams would allow that if he had it to do over again he would have been a shoemaker. His own father, the man he admired above all, had been a shoemaker. Joseph Bass, the young neighbor who had ridden with Adams to Philadelphia the winter of 1776, was a shoemaker and a familiar figure still in Quincy, as well liked and respected as ever.

Long before, on his rounds of Boston as a young lawyer, Adams had often heard a man with a fine voice singing behind the door of an obscure house. One day, curious to know who “this cheerful mortal” might be, he had knocked at the door, to find a poor shoemaker with a large family living in a single room. Did he find it hard getting by, Adams had asked. “Sometimes,” the man said. Adams ordered a pair of shoes. “I had scarcely got out the door before he began to sing again like a nightingale,” Adams remembered. “Which was the greatest philosopher? Epictetus or this shoemaker?” he would ask when telling the story.

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, had said, among other things, “It is difficulties that show what men are.”

WITH THE REVIVAL of spring on the farm, with fruit trees in flower and warmer days steadily lengthening, familiar roles and routines resumed. Abigail, in a letter to Colonel Smith, asked that he tell Nabby, “I have commenced my operation of dairy woman, and she might see me at five o’clock in the morning skimming my milk.” To Catherine Johnson, John Quincy’s mother-in-law, she described how the beauties of her garden, “from the window at which I write . . . the full bloom of the pear, the apple, the plum and peach,” helped her forget the past and rejoice. “Envy nips not their buds, calumny destroys not their fruits, nor does ingratitude tarnish their colors.”

“Your father,” she told Thomas, “appears to enjoy tranquility and a freedom of care which he has never before experienced. His books and farm occupy his attention.”

Adams professed to be perfectly content in his new “employment,” but how long this tranquility would continue, he could not honestly say. “Men are weak,” he added in a letter to William Cranch. “No man can answer for himself.”

He wrote but few letters, and these mostly to friends who had written to wish him well in retirement. But then, as he said, he did not have a great deal to write about, except for how his corn was growing or “how much wall I lay up every day.”

Only occasionally in what he wrote did he reflect on the national or world scene. There was no use trying to predict what Bonaparte might do, because Bonaparte was not like any conqueror of the past, he offered at one point in a letter to Thomas. “Everything I read only serves to confirm me in the opinion of the absolute necessity of our keeping aloof from all European powers and influences, and that a navy is the only arm by which it can be accomplished.” Jefferson, he noted, had lately said some “very strong things” about the navy and Adams felt “irresistibly inclined to agree with him.” But there was a problem with Jefferson, he told Thomas.

The only misfortune of it is that Mr. Jefferson’s sayings are never well digested, often extravagant, and never consistently pursued. He has not a clear head, and never pursues any question through. His ambition and his cunning are the only steady qualities in him. His imagination and ambition are too strong for his reason.

In mid-June came welcome news from John Quincy. After several miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, Louisa Catherine had given birth to a baby boy on April 12 in Berlin. They would be departing for home as soon as mother and child were strong enough.

Abigail worried about how well John Quincy might cope with his added burdens. “I pray God send him a safe and fortunate passage to his native land, with his poor, weak and feeble wife and baby,” she wrote to Thomas. When, a few weeks later, she learned that the baby had been named George Washington Adams, rather than John, she was not pleased. “I am sure your brother had not any intention of wounding the feelings of his father, but I see he has done it.”

After seven years abroad, John Quincy would have to begin all over again in the law in Boston, in “a profession he never loved, in a place which promises him no great harvest,” Abigail wrote sympathetically. It was “a humiliating prospect.” Yet she saw no other choice for him. So long as the Republicans were in power, “the post of honor” would be in private pursuits.

Adams, meantime, was busy in his hayfields, bringing in the biggest crop ever. Where once the yield had been six tons on the same acreage, it was now thirty, to his immense delight.

The Adams domain comprised in all three farms. In addition to the main house, there were the two old houses by Penn’s Hill where Adams had been born and where he and Abigail had raised their family. In total, by now, there were more than 600 acres of fields, woods, and salt marsh, and as usual in summer the work required hired help.

Adams loved joining in the work as much as ever — for the exercise and “pure air,” the companionship of men he had known and worked with for years, and the pride he took in seeing things done just so. But it all had to be taken with utmost seriousness. Stoneyfield was no gentleman’s farm and he no gentleman farmer. The farm that had sustained the Adamses and their family through the lean years of the Revolution would have to sustain them again. They could expect no additional income. And while the farm had expanded over the years, so had the family. The Adams household was more crowded now than it had ever been and would remain so.

John and Abigail had taken Charles’s wife Sally and her two daughters in to live with them, and this, in addition to Louisa Smith, made six. Nabby and her four children also moved in for the summer, which brought the total to eleven, not counting servants or visiting cousins or friends, of which there were often two or three. At times, there were twenty people or more beneath their roof. In addition, since the return from Washington, Abigail had acquired a Newfoundland puppy, which she named Juno.

JOHN QUINCY, Louisa Catherine, and their infant son arrived at Philadelphia on the ship America on September 4, 1801. “Her health, though yet very infirm, is better than we could have expected,” John Quincy said of Louisa Catherine in a letter to his father, “and your grandson is as hearty as any sailor of his age that ever crossed the ocean.” They were staying with Thomas and had so much to talk about, there was little time for anything else.

The day the letter reached Quincy, Adams wrote, was one of the happiest of his life.

I hope you will consider my house as your home, for yourself, your lady, and son, as well as your servants. . . . We can accommodate you all as well as destiny intends that you and I ought to be accommodated, at least until you have time to deliberate on your future arrangements.

After a rest in Philadelphia, Louisa Catherine and the baby traveled to Washington to see her parents, while John Quincy set off for Massachusetts. The only difference he saw in his brother, Thomas reported to his parents, was a “sort of fatherly look.” Also, Thomas informed them, “He has no propensity to engage in a political career.”

John Quincy wrote of his reunion with his parents as a moment of “inexpressible delight.” Arriving on September 21, he found his father in “good health and spirits.” His mother, though “very ill,” was fast on the mend. Both mother and father, he assured Louisa Catherine, were waiting to receive her with “most cordial affection.” In a few weeks, having purchased a house in Boston, he left for Washington to bring her and the baby home. Any apprehensions he may have had about Louisa Catherine’s first meeting with his family, he kept to himself.

According to what she wrote long afterward, Louisa Catherine arrived at Quincy and almost immediately decided she liked nothing about it or its quaint ways. It was the Thanksgiving season, the days chill, and she was feeling miserably ill and depressed. Family and friends were gathered to look her over.

Raised in France and London, well read, well mannered, and well spoken with an English accent, she found herself being “gazed” at as a curiosity, “a fine lady.” Only “the old gentleman took a fancy to me,” she would write, remembering Adams’s warmth and interest in her. Otherwise, she felt hopelessly out of place.

Quincy! What shall I say of my impressions of Quincy! Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished — Dr Tufts! . . . Mr Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! . . . It was lucky for me that I was so much depressed, and so ill, or I should certainly have given mortal offense. Even the church, its form, its snuffling through the nose, the singers, the dressing and dinner hours, were all novelties to me; and the ceremonious parties, the manners, and the hours of meeting half past four were equally astonishing to me.

Thomas, who had been quite taken with Louisa Catherine, wrote to his mother of her “sprightliness and vivacity.” Even when “in only tolerable health,” Thomas said, “her spirits are abundant.” But she was not in tolerable health at Quincy, and her spirits were far from abundant. As she herself recalled, she was “cold and reserved, and seldom spoke which was deemed pride.” Everyone wanted to please her and at meals particularly, but the more she was fussed over, the more she resented it.

I had a separate dish set by me of which no one was to partake; and every delicate preserve was brought out to treat me with in the kindest manner . . . and though I felt very grateful, it appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness that often I would not eat my delicacy, and thus gave offense. Mrs. Adams was too kind. . . . Louisa Smith was jealous to excess, and the first day that I arrived, left the table crying and sobbing, and could not be induced to eat any dinner.

Abigail’s impressions, written at the time, express concern rather than disapproval. The young woman seemed so terribly frail and suffered such a racking cough that Abigail feared for her life. “Her frame is so slender and her constitution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration.”

Except for “the old gentleman’s” obvious approval of Louisa Catherine, it was not an auspicious beginning. Abigail found it impossible to ignore the “weight of worry” that had been added to John Quincy’s brow.

Louisa Catherine was twenty-six years old, John Quincy thirty-four. In the time he had been away, his hair had greatly thinned, which made him look older, and he did indeed have a serious expression most of the time. With age he was looking more like his father than he had, and there was no mistaking his extraordinary intelligence. But he was less ardent, less spontaneous than his father. He had little of Adams’s passion for life or his humor.

By Christmas the young family had moved into their new home in Boston. John Quincy worried over expenses, worried that his parents might find themselves with too little money. Finding it difficult to get started again in the law, feeling like a stranger, and bored with what work he had, he toyed with the thought of giving it up and striking out for a life of “rustic independence” in the wilds of upstate New York, an idea encouraged by his brother-in-law Colonel Smith and that appealed at once to brother Thomas. “I am your man for a new country,” Thomas affirmed, convinced that his own legal career in Philadelphia was going nowhere. That neither of them was the least prepared or suited for such a venture seems not to have occurred to them.

But the impulse passed as John Quincy began to feel more at home in Boston and acquired a circle of friends. And whatever prior aversion to politics he had had, or that his parents may have expressed, he was very soon involved. “Walked in the mall just before night,” he recorded in his diary on January 28, 1802. “I feel a strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy.” Then he wrote, “A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”

In April 1802, less than four months after settling in the city, John Quincy was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. The following November, he ran as a Federalist candidate for Congress and lost, but by less than 100 votes. He had become a rising star. In February 1803, at age thirty-five, John Quincy Adams was elected a United States senator, a victory made all the sweeter by the fact that his opponent was Timothy Pickering.

In the meantime, he could not have been a more dutiful son, riding out to Quincy to be with his parents nearly every weekend. He kept his father supplied with books and encouraged him to undertake an autobiography, which Adams, with some reluctance, began in October 1802, with Part I, titled “John Adams.”

But it was the following spring, in 1803, just after he had been elected to the Senate, that John Quincy came to the rescue of his father and mother as no one else could have.

Partly on his advice, most of what John and Abigail had managed to save over the years — some $13,000 — had been invested with the London banking house of Bird, Savage & Bird, bankers for the United States Treasury. It had seemed an entirely prudent step. But in 1803, the house of Bird, Savage & Bird collapsed, leaving the Adamses on the brink of ruin.

At once, John Quincy stepped in to save them. “The error of judgment was mine,” he wrote, “and therefore I shall not refuse to share in the suffering.” By selling his house in Boston, drawing on his own savings, and borrowing, he was able to proceed slowly to buy up his parents’ property, ultimately paying them what they had lost, while they retained title to the land for life.

To their joy, he also announced that he would move to Quincy with his family, which by the summer of 1803 included a newborn second son, this one named John Adams. The plan was to live in the house where John Quincy had been born. But by September he and his family were off to Washington.

II

TO THE GREAT SURPRISE of those who had predicted nothing but dire consequences should Thomas Jefferson ever rise to the presidency, the advent of Jefferson in the President’s House turned out to be far from a radical upheaval, or a second Revolution, as he claimed.

Not surprisingly, Jefferson made Madison the Secretary of State and chose Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury. He did away with presidential levees, something Adams had wanted to do but felt obliged to continue. Under the new system, Jefferson received the public only twice a year at the President’s House, New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July. He entertained frequently, but preferred small, elegant dinners, which were part of his way of carrying on the process of government. Rather than going to the Capitol to speak before Congress, he submitted his annual message in writing.

Among his first decisions after taking office was to release from jail those sentenced for violating the Sedition Act, and with the avid support of the Republican majority in Congress, he did away with Adams’s Judiciary Act and the new circuit courts. Further, Jefferson abolished the old whiskey tax and began cutting back on the navy, halting shipbuilding and selling off ships already built, while at the same time, ironically, starting to deal effectively with the Barbary pirates.

Yet the first year and more passed with surprisingly little commotion or sensation, until the first weeks of September 1802, shortly before John Quincy declared himself a candidate for Congress. It was then, in the second year of Jefferson’s new administration, that the rumor hitherto only whispered, of a liaison between Jefferson and a slave woman, broke into print. What made it especially sensational was that the source of the allegation was his own former ally and unrelenting scourge of John Adams, the notorious James Callender. As Abigail would later tell Jefferson bluntly, it was as though the serpent he had “cherished and warmed” had turned and “bit the hand that nourished him.”

The slave woman, as the Adamses and the country learned, was Sally Hemings, who fifteen years before, at age fourteen, had arrived with little Polly Jefferson at the house on Grosvenor Square in London, and Abigail had judged her too immature to look after the child.

Callender, having served his sentence for violating the Sedition Act, was out of jail by the time Jefferson took office. But unable to pay the fine imposed by the court, he had appealed to Jefferson for help, asking also that he be made postmaster in Richmond. Feeling that Jefferson owed him as much and more, Callender went to Washington to see Madison and in the course of the meeting implied that if denied his requests he might have things to say. Madison warned Jefferson, who immediately, on May 28, 1801, had his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, give Callender $50.

Furious at Jefferson’s parsimony, Callender switched sides to become the editor of a new Federalist paper, in Richmond, the Recorder. In the summer that followed, writing in the Recorder, Callender revealed that Jefferson, while Vice President, had secretly subsidized and encouraged him as he broke the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal and did all he could to defame John Adams. For proof Callender quoted several of Jefferson’s letters to him.

“I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe on July 14. His concern, Jefferson said, was that his own “mere motives of charity” might be misunderstood.

When the Republican press attacked Callender for his “apostasy, ingratitude, cowardice, lies, venality, and constitutional malignity,” Callender struck back in the Recorder on September 1, 1802, under the title “The President Again”:

It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, a concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . .

By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it. . . . The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.

In subsequent articles Callender reported that Sally Hemings had five children, that she had been in France with Jefferson, and claimed that now, with the truth out, Jefferson could expect certain defeat in the next election. The stories spread rapidly, appearing in the Federalist press — the New York Evening Post, the Washington Federalist, the Gazette of the United States, and in Boston in the Gazette and the Columbian Centinel, papers read by the Adamses. A cartoon published at Newburyport, titled “A Philosophic Cock,” pictured Jefferson as a rooster strutting with his dark hen Sally. In October the Boston Gazette ran the words to a song of several stanzas, supposed to have been written by the sage of Monticello to be sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:

Of all the damsels on the green

On mountain, or in valley

A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,

As Monticellian Sally.

Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?

What wife were half so handy?

To breed a flock of slaves for stock,

A blackamoor’s a dandy.

The Aurora and the rest of the Republican press remained conspicuously silent on the subject, taking their lead from the President. Jefferson, who made it a “rule of life” not to respond to newspaper attacks, neither denounced Callender nor denied or admitted a connection with Sally Hemings.

That Callender was a malicious scoundrel was undeniable and more than enough for many people to dismiss his charges out of hand. There was no evidence, and further, the story seemed preposterously out of character for a man of such refinement and intellect, not to say for the President of the United States. To Republicans it was but one more act of Federalist villainy.

What was actually known of “Monticellian Sally” amounted to little, and for all the rumors, all that was written then and later, relatively little would ever be known. She was the daughter of a slave woman named Betty Hemings, who had belonged to Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, who reputedly was Sally’s father. If true, this made her the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha, and it was said that she resembled Martha Jefferson and was fair-skinned and “decidedly good looking.” An aged former Monticello slave, Isaac Jefferson, would later remember Sally as “very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” To what degree she had benefited from her years in France, whether she could read or write, or anything about her disposition or abilities are matters of speculation.

It was true, as Callender reported, that by 1802 Sally had given birth to five children, but two had died in infancy. According to surviving records, she had seven children, all born at Monticello, two of whom came later, Madison in 1805 and Easton in 1808. From Jefferson’s own records, it is clear that he was at home at Monticello at least nine months before the birth of each of her children, and that she never conceived when he was not there. Her children were all light-skinned and several, as gossiped then, looked astonishingly like Jefferson.

More than half a century later, Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the son of Jefferson’s daughter Martha, would declare that the real father of Sally Hemings’s children was Jefferson’s nephew, Peter Carr, which was said to explain the striking Jefferson resemblance in the Hemings children.

Sally Hemings’s son Madison would say his mother told him that his father was Jefferson. According to Madison’s account, given long afterward, her relationship with Jefferson began in Paris, and she was pregnant with her first child when she returned to Monticello.

How the Adamses felt about the Callender accusations would not come to light until much later and in private correspondence only. Of the two, Adams would have less to say, and unlike Abigail, he did not confront Jefferson with his ire.

Considering all that Adams had suffered at the hand of Callender, it would have been quite understandable had he lashed out at Jefferson for his hypocrisy and immorality. Adams could well have gloated over the spectacle of Jefferson under fire. But he did not.

It was not until 1810 — not until Jefferson’s presidency was over — that Adams, in a letter to a friend, took up the subject of Callender, Jefferson, and Sally Hemings, privately offering several opinions and suggesting at the close of the letter, “You may burn it if you please.”

For Callender, Adams had no use whatever. “I believe nothing that Callender said any more than if it had been said by an infernal spirit. I would not convict a dog of killing a sheep upon the testimony of two such witnesses,” Adams wrote with characteristic verve, indicating that he did not believe Callender’s accusations about Jefferson. Jefferson’s “charities” to Callender, however, were a “disgrace.” “I give him up to censure for this and I have a better right to do so, because my conscience bears me witness that I never wrote a line against my enemies nor contributed one farthing to any writer for vindicating me or accusing my enemies.” But continuing on, Adams clearly implied that, in fact, he did believe Callender. An unnamed “great lady” who knew the South, he wrote, had said “she did not believe there was a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of children.”

Then Adams put the issue squarely where it belonged, saying, in essence, that all such stories of slave masters and their slave women were metaphors for the overriding sin of slavery itself.

Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character. The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.

ABIGAIL, to judge by her correspondence, had no wish to say anything on the subject, or to have any contact with Jefferson. She did not consider him a great man, she had told Thomas earlier. She pitied his “weakness” and took much that he professed to be “hollow.” Still, she wrote, there was “a little corner of my heart where once he sat . . . [and] from whence I find it hard wholly to discard him.”

But in the spring of 1804, nearly two years after the Callender accusations, Abigail learned of the death of Jefferson’s daughter, Mary Jefferson Eppes, the Polly for whom she had felt such affection during the child’s stay with her in London. Deeply touched, Abigail wrote Jefferson to express her heartache and sympathy. Until then, she had not written a word to him in seventeen years, not since London. Reasons of “various kinds” had withheld her pen, she explained, “until the powerful feelings of my heart have burst through the restraint. . . . The attachment which I formed for her, when you committed her to my care, has remained with me to this hour.” Yet she signed herself not in friendship, or as his friend, but as one “who once took pleasure in subscribing herself your friend.”

Her letter profoundly moved him, Jefferson wrote from the President’s House. He would ever remember her kindness to Polly, he said, at the same time expressing regret that “circumstances should have arisen which seemed to draw a line between us.” He wished to be friends still:

The friendship with which you honored me has ever been valued and fully reciprocated; and although events have been passing which might be trying to some minds, I never believed yours to be of that kind, nor felt that my own was. Neither my estimate of your character, nor the esteem founded in that, have ever been lessened for a single moment.

Reflecting on his friendship with Adams, he recalled how it had accompanied them “through long and important scenes,” and that while their differences of opinion, resulting from “honest conviction,” might make them seem rivals in the minds of their fellow citizens, they were not in their own minds. “We never stood in one another’s way.”

There Jefferson might well have ended the letter, and the extraordinary exchange that followed with Abigail would never have happened. But he had a wound to air.

I can say with truth that one act of Mr. Adams’s life, and only one ever gave me a moment’s personal displeasure. I did consider his last appointments to office as personally unkind. . . . It seemed but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice.

Affirming his “high respect” for her husband, he closed saying, “I have thus, my dear madam, opened myself to you without reserve, which I have long wished an opportunity of doing; and, without knowing how it will be received, I feel relief from being unbosomed.”

Abigail left little doubt of her anger in what she wrote in reply. He had no right to complain of his predecessor’s appointments, she lectured Jefferson. The Constitution empowered the president to fill offices when they were vacant and “Mr. Adams” had chosen well. Besides, she argued inaccurately, he made his choices before it was known whether he, Jefferson, or Burr would be President, and so Jefferson had no cause to take personal offense.

Then, mincing no words, she got to what for her was the heart of the matter. However smoothly he wrote of past differences being only those resulting from “honest conviction,” she refused to let him slide by. “And now, sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in.”

She was outraged by his dealings with Callender, and particularly as revealed in the letters Callender had published. Of the accusations concerning Sally Hemings she said nothing. The issue to her was Callender, who by then was dead. He had been found on a Sunday in June 1803, in Richmond, floating by the shore of the James River in three feet of water. He had been seen earlier wandering the town in a drunken state, but the circumstances of his death were unknown.

Abigail mistakenly understood that Jefferson had liberated the “wretch” Callender from jail, and this to her was totally unacceptable, after the attacks Callender had made on Adams, a man, she reminded Jefferson, “for whom you professed the highest esteem and friendship.” Was he not, as President, she asked, answerable for the influence of his example upon the manners and morals of the nation? She had tried, she said, to believe him innocent of any part in Callender’s slanderous attacks.

Until I read Callender’s seventh letter, containing your compliment to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe that such measures could have been resorted to: to stab the fair fame and upright intentions of one who, to use your language, “was acting from an honest conviction in his own mind that he was right.” This, sir, I considered as a personal injury. This was the sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot which could not be untied by all the efforts of party spirit, by rivalship, by jealousy, or any other malignant fiend.

The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth. When such vipers are let loose upon society, all distinction between virtue and vice are leveled, all respect for character is lost.

Her letter, she assured him, was written in confidence. She had shown it to no one. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” she concluded, quoting Proverbs. “I bear no malice, I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if I could — nay more in the true spirit of Christian charity, I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.”

Jefferson protested. He was being falsely accused. “My charities to him [Callender] were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life, and to make them chargeable to myself.” He had never suspected Adams of being party to the “atrocities” committed against him by Fenno and Porcupine, so why should he be suspected? He himself had “ever borne testimony to Mr. Adams’s personal wrath,” he assured her.

It was all quite disingenuous, as doubtless Abigail knew. Jefferson had indeed encouraged and paid Callender for his efforts, and he had spoken of Adams in quite unflattering terms on a number of occasions.

Altogether seven letters passed between Abigail and the President, in the course of which she brought up one further matter that, to her mind, had put great strain on the past friendship. A district judge had earlier appointed John Quincy a commissioner of bankruptcy in Boston, a petty federal office involving petty fees, but that had made a difference to him in his first lean year in Boston. When, under Jefferson, John Quincy was suddenly replaced, Abigail had taken it as an act of personal reprisal by Jefferson himself, which it was not, as he managed now to convince her.

“I conclude with sincere prayers for your health and happiness, that yourself and Mr. Adams may long enjoy the tranquility you desire and merit,” Jefferson wrote, bringing to a conclusion his part in the exchange.

Abigail wished him well in his responsibilities and promised to intrude on his time no more. But his part as a “rewarder and encourager” of Callender, “a libeler whom you could not but detest and despise,” she could not and would not forget. Once she had felt both affection and esteem for him, she wrote. “Affection still lingers in the bosom, even after esteem has taken flight.”

This, her last letter, was written on October 25, 1804. On November 19, Adams wrote the following at the bottom of her letter-book copy:

The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my knowledge or suspicion. Last evening and this morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams, I read them whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.

III

THE PROSPECT OF WRITING an autobiography had never really appealed to Adams. Writing history was difficult at best, he knew, and if personal history, it could be most discomforting. “It is a delicate thing to write from memory,” he told John Quincy. “To me the undertaking would be too painful. I cannot but reflect upon scenes I have beheld.” So having barely begun his projected memoir in the fall of 1802, he let it drop.

For more than a year he wrote little at all, devoting the greater part of his time to the farm. As always, he read much of every day — old favorites in Latin, Greek, and French, English poetry and history, journals such as the Edinburgh Review, and newspapers to the point he feared he might become a newspaper (as “button-maker becomes button at last”). He saw a few old friends, went on long walks with Richard Cranch, attended church, and hugely enjoyed the company of his grandchildren.

But his days on the move, on the road, were truly over. Only on rare occasions did he go even to Boston or Cambridge, to attend a Harvard commencement or a dinner of the American Academy of Sciences. At Fourth of July celebrations in Boston he would join Robert Treat Paine and Elbridge Gerry “in the place of honor” as surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence. But at the most now, the radius of his world was about fifteen miles.

Like Abigail, he worried about Thomas, who seemed incapable of taking hold in Philadelphia and suffered spells of gloom and loneliness, his “blue devils,” and with Abigail he rejoiced when Thomas quit Philadelphia and moved back to Quincy to try a fresh start. Thomas’s presence, the pleasure of his company in the evenings, helped compensate for the large vacant place in the Adamses’ life since the departure of John Quincy for Washington. For her part, Abigail told John Quincy to eat well, not work too hard, and mind his appearance.

I do not wish a Senator to dress like a beau, but I want him to conform so far as to the fashion as not to incur the character of singularity, nor give occasion to the world to ask what kind of mother he had or to charge upon a wife negligence and inattention when she is guiltless. The neatest man, observed a lady the other day, wants his wife to pull up his collar and mind that his coat is brushed.

John Quincy took his seat in the Senate in time to give Jefferson support in the biggest accomplishment of his presidency, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. With the acquisition of Louisiana from Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte had begun planning a French empire in North America. But when the army he sent to crush the slave revolt in San Domingo was wiped out by war and yellow fever, Bonaparte abandoned his plans and suddenly, in 1803, offered to sell the United States all of the vast, unexplored territory of Louisiana. It was an astounding turn of events and one that probably would not have come to pass had the Quasi-War burst into something larger. Were it not for John Adams making peace with France, there might never have been a Louisiana Purchase.

Federalists in Congress argued that under the Constitution the powers of the President did not include buying foreign territory. Jefferson, who had for so long advocated less, not more, power in the executive, chose to take a larger view now, given the opportunity he had to double the size of the nation at a stroke. John Quincy crossed party lines to support the purchase, which his father, too, strongly favored. “’Curse the stripling, how he apes his sire,’” declared one irate Massachusetts Federalist.

When John Quincy joined in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the spread of slavery into Louisiana, he found it harder than pulling a “jaw tooth,” he told his father. “This is now in general the great art of legislation at this place,” he continued, venting his frustration. “To do a thing by assuming the appearance of preventing it. To prevent a thing by assuming that of doing it.”

In the summer of 1804, on the banks of the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey, Alexander Hamilton was fatally wounded in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Carried back across the river to New York, Hamilton died the next day, July 12.

When the Vice President returned to Washington to preside over the Senate, he was looked upon by many, including young Senator Adams, as no better than a murderer. John Adams would write that though he had forgiven his “arch enemy,” Hamilton, Hamilton’s “villainy” was not forgotten. Nor did he feel obliged “to suffer my character to lie under infamous calumnies because the author of them with a pistol bullet in his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

In the election of 1804, Jefferson and George Clinton of New York, the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans, won by an overwhelming margin. Even Massachusetts went for Jefferson.

Much that John Quincy wrote to his parents from the Capitol had a familiar ring. “Hitherto my conduct has given satisfaction to neither side,” he observed, “and both are offended at what they consider a vain and foolish presumption of singularity, or an ambition of taking a lead different from the views of either. All this I cannot help.”

John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had dined at the President’s House, and would again several times, finding Jefferson no less engaging than ever, but overly fond of extravagant claims and “large stories.” One evening, John Quincy listened in amazement as Jefferson described how, during one of his winters in Paris, the temperature had dropped to twenty below zero for six weeks. It was a preposterous claim. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, as John Quincy knew from having been there. “He knows better than all this, but loves to excite wonder.” At another point, commenting on the French Revolution, Jefferson said it seemed all to have been a dream. John Quincy, as he reported to his father, could hardly believe his ears.

Jefferson had installed a French chef in the presidential mansion. His wine bill alone exceeded $2,500 a year. “There was, as usual, the dissertation upon wines, not very edifying,” John Quincy recorded after another dinner. “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy.”

In addition to serving in the Senate, John Quincy also accepted a new professorial chair of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard. Adams’s pride in his brilliant son could not have been greater, as he let him know when at times John Quincy grew discouraged with the pettiness and hypocrisies of politics.

Patience and perseverance will carry you with honor through all difficulties. Virtuous and studious from your youth, beyond any other instance I know, I have great confidence in your success in the service of your country, however dark your prospects may be at present. Such talents and such learning as you possess, with a character so perfectly fair and a good humor so universally acknowledged, it is impossible for you to fail.

Reminding him of their ordeal on the Boston, when “you and I . . . clasped each other together in our arms, and braced our feet against the bedboards and bedsteads to prevent us from having our brains dashed out,” Adams said he himself had since weathered worse political storms, “and here I am alive and hearty yet.”

Alive and hearty he was, and remarkably so, all things considered. He was a picture of health, as visitors and family members would attest. He still nursed wounds of defeat; he could brood over past insults; he longed for vindication, and for gratitude for so much that he had done and the sacrifices he had made. And he dwelled often on death. Dear old friends were passing from the scene — Parson Wibird, Samuel Adams. He was “never more to see anything but my plow between me and the grave,” Adams told a correspondent, sounding more than a little sorry for himself. Yet in the same letter he claimed to be happier than he had ever been, which if said partly for effect — as a matter of pride — was also fundamentally true, once the initial years of retirement had passed and particularly after he began writing again.

IN EARLY 1805, after four years at Quincy, during which he had made little effort to contact others, Adams decided to send a letter of greetings to his old friend Benjamin Rush.

“Dear Sir,” Adams began on February 6, “It seemed to me that you and I ought not to die without saying goodbye, or bidding each other adieu. Pray how do you do? How does that excellent lady, Mrs. R?

Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?

“My much respected and dear friend,” Rush answered. “Your letter of the 6th instant revived a great many pleasant ideas in my mind. I have not forgotten — I cannot forget you.”

You and your excellent Mrs. Adams often compose a conversation by my fireside. We now and then meet with a traveler who has been at Quincy, from whom we hear with great pleasure not only that you enjoy good health, but retain your usual good spirits.

And so began an extended, vivid correspondence between the two men that was to occupy much of their time and bring each continuing enjoyment. For Adams it was as if he had found a vocation again. His letters to Rush became a great outpouring of ideas, innermost feelings, pungent asides, and opinions on all manner of things and mutual acquaintances — so much that he had kept within for too long. He wrote of his worries about the future and the sham of the political scene. “My friend! Our country is a masquerade! No party, no man dares to avow his real sentiments. All is disguise, vizard, cloak.”

Much of his strength and capacity for study were gone, Adams professed. “But such is the constitution of my mind that I cannot avoid forming an opinion.”

[Samuel] Johnson said when he sat upon his throne in a tavern, there he dogmatized and was contradicted, and in this he found delight. My throne is not in a tavern but at my fireside. There I dogmatize, there I laugh and there the newspapers sometimes make me scold; and in dogmatizing, laughing, and scolding I find delight, and why should not I enjoy it, since no one is the worse for it and I am the better.

He had by now resumed work on his autobiography as well, Part II, “Travels and Negotiations,” though it was still labor he did not relish. “To rummage trunks, letter books, bits of journals and great heaps of bundles of old papers is a dreadful bondage to old age, and an extinguisher of old eyes.” And how, after all, did one write about one’s self, he asked Rush. What must he say of his own vanity and levity? How was he to account for so many impulsive, tactless, ill-considered things he had said down the years?

There have been very many times when I have been so agitated in my own mind as to have no consideration at all of the light in which my words, actions, and even writings would be considered by others. Indeed, I never could bring myself seriously to consider that I was a great man, or of much importance or consideration in the world. The few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has passed. Enough surely of egotism!

He wrote of how greatly friendship mattered to him. “There is something in my composition which restrains me from rancour against any man with whom I have once lived in friendship.” He wrote of his sense of duty to his country. “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” And the threats he saw to the country: “The internal intrigues of our monied and landed and slaved aristocracies are and will be our ruin.” He reported to the learned physician of his own health and disposition, assuring him “my spirits have been as cheerful as they ever were since some sin, to me unknown, involved me in politics.” And he described his physical activities, which began at five or six in the morning with work on his stone walls.

I call for my leavers and iron bars, for my chisels, drills, and wedges to split rocks, and for my wagons to cart seaweed for manure upon my farm. I mount my horse and ride on the seashore, and I walk upon Mount Wollaston and Stonyfield Hill.

For a healthful diet, he told the abstemious Rush, he believed, like the doctors of his youth, in milk and vegetables, “with very little animal food and still less spiritous liquors.” In his autobiography, however, Adams told how his “excellent father” had encouraged him to partake of more meat as well as more “comforting” drink than milk.

He wrote of his renewed enjoyment of Shakespeare — Adams would read Shakespeare twice through again in 1805 — and in his continued devotion to Cicero and the Bible. And he dwelt much on ideas. The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers — perfectibility “abstracted from all divine authority” — was unacceptable, he declared.

It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery. . . . I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.

He had himself, he told Rush, “an immense load of errors, weaknesses, follies and sins to mourn over and repent of.” These were “the only affliction” of his present life. But St. Paul had taught him to rejoice ever more and be content. “This phrase ’rejoice ever more’ shall never be out of my heart, memory or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it. This is my perfectibility of man.”

The letters sparkled with aphorisms — on the virtue of America standing free from binding involvement with other nations: “We stand well, let us stand still”; on the perils of majority rule: “Absolute power in a majority is as drunk as it is in one”; on lawyers: “No civilized society can do without lawyers.” Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men. “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” In a spirited appraisal of the overall folderol of an election year, he wrote:

Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. Such a whipping and spurring and huzzaing! Oh what rare sport it will be! Through thick and thin, through mire and dirt, through bogs and fens and sloughs, dashing and splashing and crying out, the devil take the hindmost.

How long will it be possible that honor, truth or virtue should be respected among a people who are engaged in such a quick and perpetual succession of such profligate collisions and conflicts?

Rush, a champion of reform in education, thought Greek and Latin were outmoded and should be replaced with the study of modern languages, which Adams considered thoroughly wrongheaded. “Your labors will be as useless as those of Tom Paine against the Bible,” Adams declared, but wrote also, “Mrs. Adams says she is willing [for] you [to] discredit Greek and Latin, because it will destroy the foundation of all pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies, and restore liberty, equality, and fraternity between the sexes.”

Adams made frequent mention of his high regard for physicians as professional men and as friends. Benjamin Waterhouse was “a jewel of a man”; Cotton Tufts was “one of the best men in the world.” And the respect and affection he felt for Rush were abundantly apparent, even in the ways Adams would address him: “Honored and Learned Sir,” “My dear Philosopher and Friend,” “My Sensible and Humorous Friend,” “Learned, Ingenious, Benevolent, Beneficient Old Friend of 1774,” “My Dear Old Friend.” “I am not subject to low spirits,” Adams would tell Rush, “but if I was, one of your letters would cure me at any time for a month.”

For all their differences in political views, neither man had ever abandoned the other. When, in the aftermath of the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1797, Rush had been publicly attacked for his bloodletting treatment, both by Philadelphia physicians and the press, and his practice dwindled to the point that he could barely survive, Adams, who was then President and struggling with troubles of his own, had appointed him treasurer of the United States Mint. It had been a generous act of friendship that Rush and his family never forgot. Though bound by political philosophy to Jefferson, Rush felt a closer personal tie to Adams.

Rush proved an eager and engaging correspondent, his letters brimming with opinion and vitality, and quite as candid as Adams’s own. “You see,” Rush wrote, “I think aloud in my letters to you as I did in those written near 30 years ago, and as I have often done in your company.”

But then they were both thinking aloud, both writing the way they spoke, each keeping the other company with common interest and shared miseries. If Adams had been rejected by the vote of the people, Rush had been made an outcast by much of his own profession. Each was lonely except for friends and family. “I live like a stranger in my native state,” Rush confided. “My patients are my only acquaintances, my books my only companions, and the members of my family nearly my only friends.” If Adams thought he might have been better off as a shoemaker, Rush would tell him, “I often look back upon the hours I spent serving my country (so unproductive of the objects to which they were devoted) with deep regret.” But much that Rush wrote was exactly the medicine Adams needed, as if the old physician in Philadelphia understood his distant patient perfectly.

Mr. Madison and his lady are now in our city [he reported to Adams]. It gave me great pleasure to hear him mention your name in the most respectful terms a few days ago. He dwelt upon your “genius and integrity,” and acquitted you of ever having had the least friendly designs in your administration upon the present forms of our American governments. [Madison did not consider Adams a monarchist, in other words.] He gave you credit likewise for your correct opinion of banks and standing armies in our country.

To Adams, Rush was a true cohort, in the original meaning of the word — one belonging to the same division of a Roman legion and united in the same struggle. With Rush, Adams felt free to say things not possible with just anyone, as for example in appraising those they had known in the struggle.

When considering George Washington, said Adams, one must always bear in mind that he was a Virginian, which was worth at least five talents, in that “Virginian geese are all swans.” Washington, furthermore, was a great actor who had “the gift of silence,” which, wrote Adams, “I esteem as one of the most precious talents.” Washington was too “unlearned” and had seen too little of the world for someone in his “station.” Still, Washington was a “thoughtful man,” and had great self-command, a quality Adams admired in the extreme.

Dabbling in medical theory, Adams suggested that all Hamilton’s overheated ambitions and impulses might be attributed to “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off!” and that “the same vapors produced his lies and slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his life in the field of honor.”

Knowing how much Rush admired Jefferson, Adams was nonetheless equally candid on the subject. Hamilton was a great “intriguer,” but so, too, was Jefferson, Adams wrote. “Jefferson has succeeded, and multitudes are made to believe that he is pure benevolence. . . . But you and I know him to be an intriguer.”

He held no resentment against Jefferson, “though he has honored and salaried almost every villain he could find who had been an enemy to me.” Nor would he publicly criticize Jefferson’s handling of the presidency. “I think instead of opposing systematically any administration, running down their characters and opposing all their measures, right or wrong, we ought to support every administration as far as we can in justice.”

THE RESUMPTION of correspondence with Benjamin Rush was one of the happiest events of Adams’s life in retirement. Rush’s wife remarked that the two elderly gentlemen were behaving like a couple of schoolgirls. And though they were never to see one another, the friendship grew stronger than ever.

But while Rush substantiated so much that Adams liked to believe about the meaning of friendship, another old friend, Mercy Otis Warren, hurt and provoked him as no one had in years, and without warning.

In 1806, Mercy Warren published her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in which she singled out Adams as one of those who had betrayed the Revolution. Adams, she declared, reviving the old charge, had been “corrupted” by his time in England. The man who had “appeared to be actuated by the principles of integrity” became “beclouded by a partiality for monarchy . . . by living long near the splendor of courts and courtiers,” and came home enamored by rank, titles, and “all the insignia of arbitrary sway.” The most prominent features of his character, she further charged, were “pride of talents and much ambition.” “Mr. Adams’s passions and prejudices were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgment,” she observed.

With Bache, Callender, and Alexander Hamilton all in their graves, Adams could only have assumed that such accusations were things of the past. Like nearly everyone who ever played a large part in public life and helped make history, Adams wondered how history would portray him, and worried not a little that he might be unfairly treated, misunderstood, or his contributions made to look insignificant compared to those of others. He had no great expectation of being celebrated. No statues or monuments would be erected in his memory, he told Rush, adding, “I wish them not,” which was hardly so. It was an understandable desire to make his own case before the bar of history that propelled him in his labors at autobiography. But to have such a blow as this fall now in his old age, and inflicted by a friend, was infuriating.

In his years in office Adams had felt obliged to say nothing when subjected to ridicule and abuse. But now he felt no such restraint, and in a series of letters he unleashed his wrath as he seldom had, demonstrating, just as Mercy Warren had said, that his passions could at times overcome his sagacity, but also how deeply she had hurt him.

“What have I done, Mrs. Warren,” he wrote, “to merit so much malevolence from a lady concerning whom I never in my life uttered an unkind word or disrespectful insinuation?”

“Corrupted!” he exploded. “Madam! . . . Corruption is a charge that I cannot and will not bear. I challenge the whole human race, and angels and devils, too, to produce an instance of it from my cradle to this hour!”

He denied still again any “partiality for monarchy” and implied that she was getting even with him for once refusing to give her husband a federal job.

To be charged with a surfeit of ambition cut deepest, it would appear. An overweening ambition was the flaw Adams so often attributed to others, that he warned his sons against, and that privately he recognized in himself. But to see it brought against him in print was another matter. “Ambition . . . is the most lively in the most intelligent and most generous minds,” he asserted. However:

If by ambition you mean love of power or a desire of public offices, I answer I never solicited a vote in my life for any public office. I never swerved from any principle, I never professed any opinion — I never concealed even any speculative opinion — to obtain a vote. I never sacrificed a friend or betrayed a trust. I never hired scribblers to defame my rivals. I never wrote a line of slander against my bitterest enemy, nor encouraged it in any other.

In reply, Mercy Warren protested the “rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written.” When the letters kept coming, she accused him of “vulgarisms” and worse: “There is a meanness as well as malignancy in striving to blast a work that many of the best judges of literary merit . . . have spoken of [as] very flattering to the author.”

The letters finally stopped, and by all signs the lifelong friendship between the Adamses and the Warrens had ended, which was deeply troubling on both sides. In time, however, the break would heal, and correspondence between them would resume.

In the meanwhile, the episode had shown that Adams was quite as capable as ever of furious indignation. The old lion could still roar.

Never wholeheartedly devoted to the task of writing his autobiography, he now abandoned the project altogether and launched into a lengthy — some thought interminable — spate of letters to the Boston Patriot, his last passionate exercise in self-justification. At the start he concentrated on answering the charges leveled by Hamilton in the heat of the 1800 election, then continued on to review his role in foreign affairs, from his difficulties with Franklin in Paris to the dismissal of Timothy Pickering to the XYZ Affair and the missions to France. He became the attorney for the accused — fierce and vivid in defense, writing with exceptional vigor and not a little self-admiration, even occasional wonderment at his own virtuous tenacity in the face of opposition and intrigue.

The letters appeared almost weekly for three years, until Adams, too, it appears, realized how tiresome he had become and called a halt. “Voltaire boasted that he made four presses groan for sixty years, but I have to repent that I made the Patriot groan for three,” he later wrote to a friend, aware that his efforts had been largely in vain.

THE DAILY ROUNDS and established patterns of domestic life continued within the Adams homestead, which had come to be called the Big House — to distinguish it from the other houses by Penn’s Hill — and an eyewitness account written years afterward by a kinsman is notable not only for its portraits of the elderly Abigail and John at home in or about the year 1808, but as evidence that “domestic economy,” too, pertained no less than ever.

Josiah Quincy, a cousin of Abigail’s, was six or seven years old when he began attending Sunday dinners at the Big House, which would have been an ordeal for a boy, he wrote, except for “the genuine kindness of the President, who had not a chip of an iceberg in his composition.”

With Mrs. Adams there was a shade more formality. A consciousness of age and dignity, which was often somewhat oppressive, was customary with old people of that day in the presence of the young. Something of this Mrs. Adams certainly had, though it wore off or came to be disregarded by me, for in the end I was strongly attached to her.

It was with certain pride, too, that he, as a Quincy, saw her as one of the last of the true, old-style New England ladies of another era:

She was always dressed handsomely, and her rich silks and laces seemed appropriate to a lady of her dignified position in the town. If there was a little savor of patronage in the generous hospitality she exercised among her simple neighbors, it was never regarded as more than a natural emphasis of her undoubted claims to precedence. The aristocratic colonial families were still recognized, for the tide of democracy had not risen high enough to cover all its distinctions. The parentage and descent of Mrs. Adams were undoubtedly of weight establishing her position; though, as we now look at things, the strong personal claims of herself and husband would seem to have been all sufficient.

Sunday dinners, served at one o’clock, he remembered as sufficiently plentiful but modest, and beginning invariably with a pudding of cornmeal, molasses, and butter.

This was the custom of the time — it being thought desirable to take the edge off of one’s hunger before reaching the joint [of veal or mutton]. Indeed, it was considered wise to stimulate the young to fill themselves with pudding, by the assurance that the boys who managed to eat the most of it should be helped most abundantly to the meat, which was to follow. It need not be said that neither the winner nor his competitors found much room for meat at the close of their contest; and so the domestic economy of the arrangement was very apparent.

When the time came for the meat course, Louisa Smith did the carving while the President made his contribution in the form of “good-humored, easy banter.” What Adams talked about, his young guest was unable to recall in later years, though he remembered distinctly “a certain iron spoon which the old gentleman once fished up from the depths of a pudding in which it had been unwittingly cooked.”

With dinner ended, nearly all at the table went a second time to church. At tea following church, another guest would recount, topics of conversation could range from religion, politics, and literature, to Mrs. Siddons, Shakespeare, and Benedict Arnold.

Like countless grandparents in all times, Abigail worried that she might be spoiling the grandchildren under her charge. “I begin to think grandparents not so well qualified to educate grandchildren as parents,” she wrote to Nabby. “They are apt to relax in their spirit of government, and be too indulgent.” It was a thought that appears never to have concerned John Adams.

BY THE TIME Jefferson’s second term was under way, Bonaparte had crowned himself the Emperor Napoleon and with his victorious armies had become master of Europe. France and Britain were still at war, and on the high seas both the French and the British were again attacking American commerce, seizing American ships, and impressing American seamen. More than a thousand ships and millions of dollars in goods had been lost, and everywhere in the country debate raged over what to do.

Determined to avoid war, Jefferson called for an embargo on all American shipping, which John Adams, like most New Englanders, saw as a catastrophe for New England, if not the nation. But alone of the Federalists in Congress, John Quincy supported and voted for the embargo as a worthy “experiment,” the same term used by Jefferson.

“If ever a nation was guilty of imprudence, ours has been so in making a naval force and marine preparations unpopular,” Adams wrote to Rush. He thought the embargo “a cowardly measure.” He had always been against embargoes, but he would “raise no clamor” now, “being determined to support the government in whatever hands as far as I can in conscience and honor.”

When Massachusetts Federalists denounced John Quincy as no longer one of the party, Adams wrote to him to say he wished they would denounce him the same way, for he had long since “abdicated and disclaimed the name and character and attributes of that sect, as it now appears.”

The embargo proved a colossal mistake for the country, and a catastrophe for New England. For John Quincy, it meant the end of his Senate career. In 1808 the Massachusetts legislature elected a successor even earlier than they had to, which prompted John Quincy to resign before his term ended. If he or his father ever entertained any thought that Jefferson, before leaving office, might reward John Quincy for the support he had given, they were greatly disappointed, for this was not to happen. It was Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, who after taking office as President, rescued John Quincy from practicing law in Boston by appointing him minister to Russia.

Abigail was crestfallen. She thought the appointment unsuitable and urged John Quincy not to accept. “The period is not yet arrived when your country demands you,” she wrote. Adams differed, as much as he dreaded the thought of John Quincy in St. Petersburg. “As to my son, I would not advise him to refuse to serve his country when fairly called to it,” he told Rush, “but as to myself, I would not exchange the pleasure I have in his society once a week for any office in or under the United States.”

By midsummer of 1809, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Russia, taking with them the most recent addition to their family, two-year-old Charles Francis Adams, while eight-year-old George and five-year-old John remained behind in Quincy.

“It was like taking our last leave,” Abigail wrote. The separation, Adams told Rush, tore him to pieces. How long it might be until they saw them again, if ever, there was no telling.

TWO MONTHS LATER, feeling the time was ripe, Rush sent Adams a memorable letter, dated October 17, 1809. With Jefferson also in retirement now, Rush thought it time for a renewal of the old friendship between Adams and Jefferson, and that he, Rush, as the friend of both, could help bring it about. He had been corresponding with Jefferson all along, and thus felt he knew the hearts of both men.

As part of his medical investigations, Rush had a long-standing interest in dreams. Dreams, he told his students, should be allowed to “sport themselves idly” in their brains. Observed, dreams could provide useful inferences. In the course of his correspondence with Adams, Rush had already related several dreams of his own. Now he had another to report. He had a dream of reading a history of America written at some point in the future, and of a particular page saying that among the “most extraordinary events” of the year 1809 was the renewal of friendship and correspondence between the two former presidents, Mr. John Adams and Mr. Thomas Jefferson. And it was Adams, according to Rush’s dream history, who rekindled the old friendship.

Mr. Adams addressed a short letter to his friend Mr. Jefferson in which he congratulated him upon his escape to the shades of retirement and domestic happiness, and concluded it with assurances of his regard and good wishes for his welfare. This letter did great honor to Mr. Adams. It discovered a magnanimity known only to great minds. Mr. Jefferson replied to this letter and reciprocated expressions of regard and esteem. These letters were followed by a correspondence of several years.

Delighted by Rush’s good-natured performance, Adams replied: “A dream again! I wish you would dream all day and all night, for one of your dreams puts me in spirits for a month. I have no other objections to your dream, but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.”

But then Adams did nothing, and no more was said of the matter. Silence between Stoneyfield and Monticello continued.

“OUR READING has been all about Russia,” Adams wrote to John Quincy that winter, when it looked for all the world like Russia outside Adams’s window and the palsy in his hands was “rather increased” by the severe cold. He wrote of the pleasure he was taking in John Quincy’s two sons and of their progress in their studies. He reported on his own son Thomas, who was by now married to Ann Harrod of Haverhill and with his growing family had settled in the old house by Penn’s Hill where Adams had been born; and on Elbridge Gerry, who had lately been elected governor of Massachusetts. In October of 1810, Adams celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday.

He had taken up reading modern epic poems and novels, “romances,” he reported to Rush — Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs — and was finding great enjoyment in them.

“My days glide smoothly away,” he wrote early in the new year of 1811. Snow fell for twelve consecutive days, leaving drifts ten feet high.

“I am well, my appetite as good as ever,” he reported after another six months had passed. “I sleep well nights. My natural vision is not bad, but I use glasses for ease to my eyes. . . . My hearing . . . is as good as ever.” His only difficulties were the “quiveration” in his hands and a loss of voice. “It would divert you to witness conversation between my ancient friend and colleague Robert T. Paine and me. He is above eighty. I cannot speak and he cannot hear. Yet we converse.”

But 1811 was to be an almost unbearably difficult and painful year for the Adamses, indeed, “the most afflictive” year they had known. In April, when his horse reared and threw him, Thomas was so badly injured it was feared he would be crippled for life. By early summer Mary Cranch, who suffered from what was probably tuberculosis, appeared to be dying. Then, Sally, Charles’s widow, began spitting up blood, which as Adams later reported to Benjamin Rush, confined her under the constant care of physicians for three or four months.

One night in September, going out in the dark to view a comet, Adams tripped over a stake in the ground and ripped his leg open to the bone, so that for months he too was confined to the house, a doctor “daily hovering” to bathe and dress the wound.

Abigail, who almost alone of the household remained on her feet, went back and forth across town to the Cranches, nursing her sister as well as those at home. “Neither the morals of Epictetus or the stoic philosophy of the ancients could avail to allay the tumult of grief excited by such a succession of distress,” she wrote to John Quincy.

But greatest was the anguish over Nabby, about whom Abigail said nothing yet to John Quincy, probably to spare him the worry.

Nabby had discovered a “hardness” in her right breast, and had come on to Quincy from the farm in upstate New York where she and Colonel Smith had been living for some while in near poverty. She consulted with Cotton Tufts and several physicians in Boston and wrote to Benjamin Rush for his advice. The Boston doctors all advised the surgical removal of her breast, as did Rush in a thoughtful letter to her father. He preferred giving his opinion this way, Rush told Adams, so that he and Abigail could “communicate it gradually.”

From the experience of more than fifty years in such cases, Rush said, he knew but one remedy, “the knife.” “From her account of the moving state of the tumor, it is now in a proper situation for the operation. Should she wait till it superates or even inflames much, it may be too late. . . . I repeat again, let there be no delay. . . . Her time of life calls for expedition in this business, for tumors such as hers tend much more rapidly to cancer after 45 than in more early life.” Nabby was forty-six.

A mastectomy was performed on Nabby in the bedroom beside that of her mother and father on October 8. As Adams wrote to Rush, the operation took twenty-five minutes, the dressing an hour longer. The agony she endured in that day before anesthetics is unimaginable. The four surgeons who performed the operation told Adams afterward that they had never known a patient to show such fortitude.

Two days later, on October 10, the beloved Richard Cranch died of heart failure at age eighty-five, and the day following, Mary Cranch died at age seventy. For Abigail it was the greatest loss since the death of Charles.

The horror of Nabby’s ordeal brought a marked change in Adams. The old shows of temper were not to be seen again. He became more mellow, more accepting of life, and forgiving. He had felt during Nabby’s agony, he said, as if he were living in the Book of Job.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Adams heard again from Benjamin Rush, who wished to remind him of a visit Adams had had the summer before from two young men from Virginia. They were brothers named Coles, Albemarle County neighbors of Jefferson’s, and in the course of conversation Adams had at length exclaimed, “I always loved Jefferson and I still love him.” This had been carried back to Monticello, and was all Jefferson needed to hear. To Rush he wrote, “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.”

“And now, my dear friend,” declared Rush to Adams “permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive branch offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you.”

On New Year’s Day 1812, seated at his desk in the second-floor library, Adams took up his pen to write a short letter to Jefferson very like the one Rush had prophesied in his dream.

IV

IT WAS A BRIEF, cordial note to wish Jefferson many happy new years, and to say he could expect to receive a bit of “homespun lately produced in this quarter by one who was honored in his youth with some of your attention and much of your kindness.” Posted separately, the “homespun” was a copy of John Quincy’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, but before it could arrive, Jefferson had concluded that it must be some article of home-produced clothing, and so in reply to Adams wrote at length about the virtues of the spinning jenny and loom, and of the thriftiness of household manufactures.

If, as stage-managed by Rush, it had been left to Adams to make the first move, Jefferson more than fulfilled his part. “A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he continued. “It carried me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”

Jefferson was fond of images of storm-tossed seas and employed them often, as he did now, though in his own travels at sea he himself had known only smooth sailing.

Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.

Like Adams, he claimed to be out of touch with politics, which was hardly so. He was kept abreast regularly by Madison and Monroe, among others. “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” he wrote, which was also an overstatement, but one certain to please his fellow classical scholar at Quincy.

Adams answered in high spirits and at greater length than Jefferson had written to him. “What an exchange have you made? Of newspapers for Newton!” he wrote. “Rising from the lower deep of the lowest deep of dullness and bathos to the contemplation of the heavens and the heavens of the heavens.” Responding to Jefferson’s figurative storm at sea, Adams recalled again his own real voyage on the Boston, chased by British frigates, struck by “a hideous tempest of thunder and lightning,” the mainmast split, twenty men down, one dead. It was the story of his life, he said.

“I walk every fair day,” he told Jefferson, “sometimes three and four miles. Ride now and then, but very rarely more than ten or fifteen miles.” The tremble in his hands made it difficult to write at all and impossible to write well, as Jefferson could readily see.

Adams wrote to Rush to report the new state of affairs. “Your dream is out. . . . You have wrought wonders! You have made peace between powers that never were at war,” he said, happy about the news but choosing to make light of it, as if no one was supposed ever to think there had been any serious differences between him and the man he had earlier told Rush was a consummate intriguer. Apparently, Adams was ready now both to forgive and to forget.

Rush was exultant. Nothing could have pleased him more, as he wrote immediately to Adams.

I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson. I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all. . . .

I admire, as do all my family, the wonderful vivacity and imagery of your letters. Some men’s minds wear well, but yours doesn’t appear to wear at all! “Oh! King, live forever,” said the eastern nations to their monarchs! Live — live, my venerable friend.

Rush wrote to Jefferson to assure him that posterity would acclaim the reconciliation and that Jefferson was certain to find Adams a refreshing correspondent. “I view him as a mountain with its head clear and reflecting beams of the sun, while below it is frost and snow.”

Within months a half dozen letters had traveled the roads between Quincy and Monticello, and one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history — indeed, in the English language — was under way. In two years’ time fifty letters went back and forth, and this was but the beginning. They wrote of old friends and their own friendship, of great causes past, common memories, books, politics, education, philosophy, religion, the French, the British, the French Revolution, American Indians, the American navy, their families, their health, slavery — eventually — and their considered views on life, society, and always, repeatedly, the American Revolution.

“Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?” Adams asked. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?”

“Nobody,” Jefferson answered, “except perhaps its external facts.”

The level and range of their discourse were always above and beyond the ordinary. At times memory failed; often hyperbole entered in. Often each was writing as much for posterity as for the other. They were two of the leading statesmen of their time, but also two of the finest writers, and they were showing what they could do.

In fundamental ways each proved consistently true to his nature — they were in what they wrote as they had been through life. Jefferson was far more guarded and circumspect, better organized, dispassionate, more mannered, and refused ever to argue. Adams was warm, loquacious, more personal and opinionated, often humorous and willing to poke fun at himself. When Jefferson wrote of various self-appointed seers and mystics who had taken up his time as president, Adams claimed to have had no problem with such people. “They all assumed the character of ambassadors extraordinary from the Almighty, but as I required miracles in proof of their credentials, and they did not perform any, I never gave public audience to any of them.”

Jefferson wrote as an elegant stylist performing for a select audience, as Adams fully appreciated, telling him his letters should be published for the delight of future generations. Adams wrote as he talked, bouncing subjects about with no thought to organization. Adams later told a friend he had no more thought of publishing a letter as he wrote it than he had of giving an account to the press of his going to bed that night. “I considered when I wrote to Mr. J. that I was not writing psalms . . . nor sermons, nor prayers. It was only, as if one sailor had met a brother sailor, after 25 years absence, and had accosted him, ‘How fare you, Jack?’”

By late spring of 1812, the year the correspondence began, the country was again at war with Great Britain, twenty-nine years after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783. Continuing British impressment of American seamen was the principal issue — “injuries and indignities heaped upon our country,” in the words of President Madison. And though the country was ill prepared to fight, war was declared on June 19. Five days later Napoleon and his Grande Armée invaded Russia, which, with John Quincy and his family in St. Petersburg, was to the Adamses a matter of extreme interest.

If only a few more frigates had been built,Adams wrote to Jefferson, who had cut the navy drastically. “Without this our Union will be a brittle china vase.” But then in August the Constitution defeated the British ship Guerriere off Nova Scotia, and later sank the British frigate Java, near Brazil. The Wasp, an American sloop of war, defeated the Frolic, the Hornet sank the Peacock, and in a letter to Adams, Jefferson generously gave credit where credit was due. “I sincerely congratulate you on the success of our little navy, which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.”

As the War of 1812 went on, as Madison was elected for a second term with Elbridge Gerry his Vice President, as the seasons came and went at Quincy and Monticello, the letters continued on. It was not an even exchange. Adams wrote at greater length than Jefferson, and he wrote more often. On average Adams wrote two letters for every one from Jefferson, but this was of no matter to him. During one stretch of several months, Adams wrote twelve times before he had an answer from Jefferson. “Never mind . . . if I write four letters to your one,” Adams told him, “your one is worth more than my four.”

For a while, when addressing letters to Jefferson, Adams would even refer to his farm as “Montezillo.” “Mr. Jefferson lives at Monticello, the lofty mountain. I live at Montezillo, a little hill,” Adams would explain, apparently unaware that both words mean “little mountain.”

At first, Adams tried to draw Jefferson out on a variety of matters important to him. “Whether you or I were right posterity must judge,” Adams would observe equably, then launch headlong into what he thought. “I never have approved and never can approve the repeal of taxes, the repeal of the judiciary system, or the neglect of the navy.” He brought up the Alien Law, claiming absurdly that since Jefferson had signed it, too, as Vice President, he therefore shared in the responsibility for it. “Checks and balances, Jefferson, however you and your party may have ridiculed them, are our only security,” he wrote in another letter.

The patriots of the French Revolution, Adams declared, knowing perfectly well how it would provoke Jefferson, were like drunken sailors on wild horses, “lashing and speering till they would kill the horses and break their own necks.” Recalling the Jacobin threat to America, he accused Jefferson of having been “fast asleep in philosophical tranquility.” “What think you of terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?” Adams demanded, as if he were back in court and Jefferson on the witness stand.

“My friend! You and I have passed our lives in serious times,” he reminded Jefferson, and, as an example, pointed to the all-too-serious perils of sedition contained in the Kentucky Resolutions, unaware that Jefferson had been their author.

“You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote, still trying to draw Jefferson out.

But Jefferson, who must have wondered what he had gotten himself into, refused to engage in wrangling or dispute. “The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind,” he wrote, “and to these I wish to consign my remaining days.”

My mind has been long fixed to bow to the judgment of the world, who will judge me by my acts and will never take counsel from me as to what the judgment will be. If your objects and opinions have been misunderstood, if the measures and principles of others have wrongly been imputed to you, as I believe thay have been, that you should leave an explanation of them would be an act of justice to yourself. I will add that it has been hoped you would leave such explanations as would place every saddle on its right horse, and replace on the shoulders of others the burdens they shifted on yours.

But all this, my friend, is offered merely for your consideration and judgment, without presuming to anticipate what you alone are qualified to decide for yourself. I mean to express my own purpose only, and the reflections which have led to it. To me then it appears that there have been differences of opinion, and party differences, from the establishment of governments to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our country, that these will continue through all future times: that everyone takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution and the circumstances in which he is placed, that opinions, which are equally honest on both sides, should not effect personal esteem or social intercourse . . . nothing new can be added by you or me to what has been said by others, and will be said in every age.

Jefferson refused to be drawn out, refused to explain himself, and Adams, accepting this, shifted his focus to other matters much on his mind or dear to his heart.

HAD ADAMS at this time in his life done nothing else but produce the letters he wrote to Jefferson, it would have been remarkable. But he was also actively corresponding with others, including an old Dutch friend from the years in Amsterdam, the Reverend Francis van der Kemp, who had lately settled in upstate New York, and Benjamin Waterhouse, who had become a leading figure at the Harvard Medical School. If a grandchild wrote to him, Adams responded at once, always affectionately and very often with a measure of guiding philosophy drawn from experience.

“Your letter touches my heart,” he wrote to Nabby’s second son, John, who was by now in his twenties. “Oh, that I may always be able to say to my grandsons, ‘You have learned much and behave well, my lads. Go on and improve in everything worthy.’

Have you considered the meaning of that word “worthy”? Weigh it well. . . . I had rather you should be worthy possessors of one thousand pounds honestly acquired by your own labor and industry, than of ten millions by banks and tricks. I should rather you be worthy shoemakers than secretaries of states or treasury acquired by libels in newspapers. I had rather you should be worthy makers of brooms and baskets than unworthy presidents of the United States procured by intrigue, factious slander and corruption.

Nor was there any easing off in the exchange with Rush.

Why was it that a nation without wars to fight seemed to lose its honor and integrity, Adams pondered in one letter to Rush. “War necessarily brings with it some virtues, and great and heroic virtues, too,” he wrote. “What horrid creatures we men are, that we cannot be virtuous without murdering one another?”

Thousands upon thousands were being killed at sea and on the steppes of Russia. An infant grandchild, a son of Thomas, died. “I have been called lately to weep in the chamber of my birth over the remains of a beautiful babe of your brother’s, less than a year old,” he wrote to John Quincy. “Why have I been preserved at more than three quarters of a century, and why was that fair flower blasted so soon, are questions we are not permitted to ask.”

In November of 1812, Rush sent Adams a first copy of what he considered his most important work, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind. For years Rush had been investigating the causes of and remedies for madness and other “diseases” of the mind. “The subjects of them have hitherto been enveloped in mystery,” he wrote to Adams. “I have endeavored to bring them down to the level of all other diseases of the human body, and to show that the mind and body are moved by the same causes and subject to the same laws.” He expected to be chastised by his fellow physicians. “But time I hope will do my opinions justice. I believe them to be true and calculated to lessen some of the greatest evils of human life. If they are not, I shall console myself of having aimed well and erred honestly.”

The book was to become the standard American guide for mental illnesses, and in later years Rush would become known as the father of American psychiatry.

Writing to thank Rush for the volume, Adams assured him it would put mankind still deeper in his debt. “You apprehend ‘attacks.’ I say, the more the better,” Adams declared, speculating that what Rush had written would surpass the writings of Franklin in the good it would do.

Shortly after, in another letter to Rush, Adams described a dreamlike incident in his life, the chance purchase of a young horse that reminded him of America. Lest Rush take it to be the account of a dream, Adams assured him it was the literal truth.

“On horseback on my way to Weymouth on a visit to my friend Dr. Tufts, I met a man leading a horse, who asked if I wanted to buy a horse.

Examining the animal in the eyes, ears, head, neck, shoulders, legs, feet and tail, and inquiring of his master, his age, his history, temper, habits, etc., I found he was a colt of three years old that month of November. His sucking teeth were not shed, he was seventeen or eighteen hands high, bones like massy timbers, ribbed quite to his hips, every way broad, strong, and well filled in proportion; as tame, gentle, good natured and good humored as a cosset lamb. Thinks I to my self, this noble creature is the exact emblem of my dear country. I will have him and call him Hobby. He may carry me five-and-twenty or thirty years if I should live. I ride him every day when the weather suits, but I should shudder if he should ever discover or feel his own power.

Rush was delighted by the story, and in his next letter addressed himself to the horse:

Tread gently and safely, high favored beast, while your master bestrides your back. Shake well every blood vessel of his body, and gently agitate every portion of his brain. Keep up the circulation of his blood for years to come, and excite aphorism and anecdotes and dreams for the instruction and amusements by the action of his brain upon his mind.

But confined to the house in the bitter cold of January 1813, Adams portrayed himself as a case study worthy of Rush’s attention and pity. How much longer could an ancient specimen of seventy-seven years be expected to continue? How many aches and pains and low spirits had he still to endure? How many more of his family must he lose? How many friends must disappear?

The mystery to this ancient creature, Adams continued, was where his life had all gone — stage-by-stage, “away like the morning cloud.” The last twelve years “in solitude” had been the pleasantest of all. “Yet where are they?”

Picturing the “withered, faded, wrinkled, tottering, trembling” stage to come, Adams wrote, “Oh! I have some scruples of conscience whether I ought to preserve him, whether it would not be charity to stumble, and relieve him from such a futurity.”

Weeks later the Adamses learned of the death of another grandchild, Louisa Catherine Adams, who had been born in Russia little more than a year before. Trying to console John Quincy and Louisa Catherine, not to say himself, Adams wrote one letter after another at his desk by the library fire. The universe, he told John Quincy, was “inscrutable and incomprehensible.”

While you and I believe that the whole system is under the constant and vigilant direction of a wisdom infinitely more discerning than ours and a benevolence to the whole and to us in particular greater even than our own self love, we have the highest consolation that reason can suggest or imagination conceive. The same general laws that at times afflict us are in your neighborhood bereaving millions of their fathers, brothers, and sons and millions more of their food and their shelter. In our own country of how many deprivations do we read, and how many savage cruelties. What grounds have we to expect or to hope to be excepted from the general lot. . . . Sorrow can make no alternative, afford no relief to the departed, to survivors or to ourselves.

Another evening, watching granddaughters Susanna and Abigail blowing soap bubbles with one of his clay pipes, he wondered about the “allegorical lesson” of the scene.

They fill the air of the room with their bubbles, their air balloons, which roll and shine reflecting the light of the fire and candles, and are very beautiful. There can be no more perfect emblem of the physical and political and theological scenes of human life.

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

John Quincy wrote from St. Petersburg that on the day his child had died, Moscow was in flames set by its inhabitants as the city was surrendered to Napoleon, and that within less than three months Napoleon’s disastrous retreat had begun — “the invader himself was a wretched fugitive and his numberless host was perishing by frosts, famine, and sword.” Yet none of this, John Quincy told his father, could comfort him in the loss of his own child. “I mourned over the fallen city, and even its fallen conquerors, because I was a man and a Christian, but their fate would neither sharpen nor mitigate my private woe.”

A MONTH into that spring of 1813, word reached Quincy from Philadelphia that Benjamin Rush had died suddenly on April 19, apparently from typhus. “Another of our friends of ‘76 is gone, my dear sir, another of the cosigners of the Independence of our country,” Jefferson wrote to Adams.

“I know of no character living or dead who has done more real good for his country,” Adams answered, borne down with grief. To Rush’s widow he wrote that there was no one outside his own family whose friendship was so essential to his happiness. At sixty-eight Rush had still been seeing patients until a few days before his death. Adams’s last letter to him was written only the day before Rush died. The loss of such a friend, Abigail told Nabby, was a “heavy stroke to your father.”

THE FULL GLORY of spring comes late along coastal Massachusetts, but by the last week of May, Quincy was green and blooming, the air fragrant, and Adams’s outlook greatly revived. In a letter to Francis van der Kemp, urging him to come for a visit, Adams promised to show him “a pretty hill” and “a friendly heart.”

I damn nobody [he wrote]. I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel.

Callers came and went, one of whom warmed his “friendly heart” as perhaps no one else could have — Captain Samuel Tucker of Marblehead, commander of the Boston on the voyage of 1778, who was now in his sixties and retired from the sea, but robust still and as salty a talker as ever.

Earlier, Adams had vowed to Rush that the admonition “rejoice ever more” would “never be out of my heart, memory, or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it.” This, he had said, was his “perfectibility of man.” Now to John Quincy he wrote, “Rejoice always in all events, be thankful always for all things is a hard precept for human nature, though in my philosophy and in my religion a perfect duty.” In the ensuing months his philosophy and religion were, as Adams said, “brought to trial.”

On July 26, after a journey of fifteen days and three hundred miles from upstate New York, Nabby arrived at Quincy in such weakened condition that she had to be carried inside the house. Her cancer had returned and was spreading, but despite terrible pain, she had insisted on coming home, accompanied by her son John and daughter Caroline, to be with her mother and father in the little time left to her. Colonel Smith was in Washington. Having failed at nearly everything he ever tried, he had lately been elected to Congress.

Upstairs in the house, Sally Adams was critically ill with tuberculosis. Abigail was suffering from rheumatism and physical and emotional exhaustion. “My dear, my only daughter lies in the next chamber, consumed with cancer,” Adams wrote to Francis van der Kemp, “my daughter-in-law, Charles’s widow, lies in the next chamber extremely weak and low. . . . My wife, a valetudinarian through a whole life of 69 years, is worn down with care. In the midst of all this my own eyes are awakened by a venom that threatens to put them out.” Nabby was so emaciated as to be almost unrecognizable; her suffering was extreme. Opium provided her only relief.

The family gathered. Colonel Smith arrived from Washington. “She told her physician that she was perfectly sensible of her situation and reconciled to it,” Abigail later wrote. “Although she was bolstered up in her bed and could neither walk or stand, she was always calm.”

Nabby died before dawn on Sunday, August 15, 1813. She was forty-nine and for most of her life, as Adams would tell Jefferson, she had enjoyed the best health of anyone in the family.

Abigail was shattered. It would be a month before she could write to anyone. “The loss is irreparable,” she said at last in a letter to John Quincy. “Heaven be praised your father and I have been supported through all this solemn scene with fortitude and I hope Christian resignation.”

Death was no stranger to him, Adams wrote. He had lost children and grandchildren and could never think of any of them without pain. His dear Nabby had shown extraordinary courage, he told John Quincy. Her death was a release, the most “magnanimous” he ever witnessed. “I am grateful and resigned.”

Jefferson had earlier sent Adams a “Syllabus” he had prepared on the merit of the doctrines of Jesus, and a discussion of religion had since filled much of their correspondence. Now Adams wrote to Jefferson, “The love of God and His creation, delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence . . . are my religion.”

By October, emerging from her grief, Abigail was writing to John Quincy of the blessings still left to her. High on the list, she said, was “the life, health and cheerfulness of your father. Bowed down as he has been . . . he has not sunk under it.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

JOURNEY’S END

But weak as was his material frame, his mind was still enthroned.

~Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse

I

CONCERNING SUCH MATTERS as who was to be the next governor of Massachusetts or the next President of the United States, Adams professed to take increasingly less interest. Adverse comments about his own role in public life that appeared occasionally in print, or the “strange” letters he occasionally received, were no longer of any matter to him. They were like insects buzzing about, he told John Quincy. “Their bite in former times tingled, but I am grown almost as insensible as a Boston dray horse in September.”

“I assure you in the sincerity of a father,” he wrote to John Quincy in 1815, “the last fourteen years have been the happiest of my life.” The noticeable improvements he had brought to the farm were highly gratifying. The small, everyday pleasures, the calm, the reassuring sameness of life in and about Quincy had proven as beneficial as the pastoral ideal portrayed by the poets he loved and that he himself had so long pictured as his salvation.

But there was no indifference to the larger world. In a time of tumultuous history unfolding, as war raged at home and abroad and Napoleon’s armies suffered continuing defeat, little escaped Adams’s attention or a goodly measure of his opinion. Reading all they could lay hands on, he and Abigail remained informed as always, and not the least of their reasons was the part John Quincy had been delegated to play in events.

On April 1, 1814, at St. Petersburg, John Quincy received word that he had been appointed a peace envoy to negotiate an end to the War of 1812, and was to proceed at once to Ghent in Flanders (Belgium). It seemed as though history was repeating itself, with John Quincy taking up the same role his father had played at Paris in 1782.

Events were moving fast. On April 11, after further defeat on the battlefield, Napoleon abdicated his throne and went into exile on the island of Elba. The French monarchy was restored under the Comte de Provence, Louis XVIII. In America, on August 24, British troops made a successful assault on Washington, scattered the government, and set fire to the Capitol and the President’s House. American warships had been driven from the sea. The Treasury was empty, the outlook grim.

In December, Federalists from the five New England States, led by Timothy Pickering, met at Hartford to denounce the “ruinous war.” There was even talk of New England seceding from the union. At Ghent the same month, the American commissioners led by John Quincy Adams signed a peace treaty with Britain, news that would not reach the United States until February, by which time Americans under General Andrew Jackson had won a decisive victory, on January 15, at the battle of New Orleans.

Then, on March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba, landed at Cannes, and with 1,500 men marched on Paris, thus beginning the fateful “100 days” that ended with Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo on June 18. Within days he was on his way to the British island of St. Helena for the remainder of his life.

The Napoleonic Wars were over, and John Quincy, after a brief sojourn in Paris, moved on to London to serve, again like his father, as minister to the Court of St. James’s.

As dark as prospects had appeared during the war at home, Adams never lost confidence, even as the British advanced on Washington. He had known worse times, he said. He had seen Congress “chased like a covey of partridges” from Philadelphia, and “we had ropes about our necks then.” The very thought of New England leaving the Union, he found outrageous. As always, he took a national, not sectional, view of the country, and strongly supported President Madison.

That the likes of Napoleon came to bad ends was among the lessons of history. Concerning America’s place in the world, Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush’s son Richard, who had lately become Attorney General of the United States, “We must learn to know ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to respect ourselves.”

“At this time we are very anxious to hear every day, if we could, what is passing abroad,” Abigail wrote John Quincy, still having no idea where he was. “Never was there a period when curiosity was more alive, or expectation more eager, or anxiety more active.”

Letters from John Quincy written in Paris months before began arriving at last on May 6, one of the most joyful days of her life, Abigail exclaimed. And more followed through the summer, recounting the ups and downs of Napoleon and the changing moods of Paris. “I seem to be rambling with you to the Hôtel de Valois, the Hôtel du Roi,” Adams wrote in reply. Had John Quincy been to Passy yet? Or Auteuil or Versailles?

As requested, the Adamses parted with grandsons George and John, who sailed for London to join their parents and brother Charles Francis, from whom they had been separated for nearly six years. The departure of the two boys left both grandparents feeling desolate. They must keep diaries, Adams told them as once he had told their father. Without a diary, their travels would “be no better than a flight of birds through the air,” leaving no trace.

To John Quincy he kept up a steady flow of private ruminations, advice, and the suggestion that he take time for a tour of the English country gardens. He must purchase Whatley’s book on modern gardening, bring his sons “and your lady, too, if she chooses,” Adams wrote, “and visit the gentlemen’s country seats.”

Abigail sent John Quincy her own approving evaluation of each of the “dear boys,” and the wish that his and Louisa Catherine’s joy in seeing them again would equal the pain she felt at parting with them.

“DEATH IS SWEEPING his scythe all around us, cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us,” Adams wrote a year later, in the summer of 1816. Abigail’s sister Elizabeth, the last of her family, had died. Robert Treat Paine and Vice President Elbridge Gerry were gone, Gerry dying of a heart attack while riding in his carriage to the Senate. The death of Cotton Tufts, in December 1815, was another heavy blow. “Winter in this country is still winter, and carries off a few hundred of our oldest people,” observed Adams, who had turned eighty.

Abigail prepared her will, parceling out among children, grandchildren, and her niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns and jewelry, a white lace shawl, beds, blankets, and some $4,000. In addition, to her two sons she left two equal parcels of land she had inherited.

Six months later, in June of 1816, came word that Colonel Smith, too, was no longer among the living.

Jefferson, in his continuing correspondence with Adams, had observed that old and worn as they were they must expect that “here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way.” There was nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, he wrote, “I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.”

Their exchange of views remained a sustaining exercise for both men. Whatever the state of their physical “pinions and springs,” there was nothing whatever wrong with their minds, nor any decline in the respect each had for the other’s talents and learning. Having run on for several pages about Cicero, Socrates, and the contradictions in Plato, Jefferson asked, “But why am I dosing you with these antediluvian topics? Because I am glad to have someone to whom they are familiar, and who will not receive them as if dropped from the moon.”

Jefferson had offered to sell his private library to the government in Washington to replace the collection of the Library of Congress destroyed by the British when they burned the Capitol. It was both a magnanimous gesture and something of a necessity, as he was hard-pressed to meet his mounting debts. After prolonged debate in Congress, a figure of $23,950 was agreed to, and in April 1815 ten wagons carrying 6,707 volumes packed in pine cases departed from Monticello. When Adams learned what Jefferson had done, he wrote, “I envy you that immortal honor.”

Jefferson immediately commenced to collect anew. He could “not live without books,” he told Adams, who understood perfectly. They remained two of the greatest book lovers of their bookish generation. Adams’s library numbered 3,200 volumes. People sent him books, “overwhelm me with books from all quarters,” as he wrote to Jefferson. Yet he wished he had 100,000. He longed particularly, he said, for a work in Latin available only in Europe, titled Acta Sanctorum, in forty-seven volumes, on the lives of the saints compiled in the sixteenth century. “What would I give to possess in one immense mass, one stupendous draught, all the legends, true and false.”

Unable to sleep as long as Abigail, he would be out of bed and reading by candlelight at five in the morning, and later would read well into the night. When his eyes grew weary, she would read aloud to him.

Unlike Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley. “There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them . . .,” Adams read in Rousseau. “The government ought to be what the people make it,” he wrote in response.

At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said. To her claim that government must be simple, for example, he answered, “The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels . . . but it would not tell the time of day.” On a blank page beside the contents, he wrote, in part:

If [the] empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained? The doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same Father, all accountable to Him for our conduct to one another, all equally bound to respect each other’s self love.

In all, in this one book, Adams’s marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words.

To the pronouncements of the French philosophes in particular, he would respond with an indignant “Nonsense” or “Fool! Fool!” But he could also scratch in an approving “Good” or “Very Good” or an emphatic “Excellent!”

“Your father’s zeal for books will be one of the last desires which will quit him,” Abigail observed to John Quincy in the spring of 1816, as Adams eagerly embarked on a sixteen-volume French history.

TWO PORTRAITS of the Adamses by Gilbert Stuart, painted when Adams was President but never delivered, were added to the walls at Quincy after Adams decided to go himself to Stuart’s Boston studio and bring them home. The portrait of Adams, Abigail thought quite admirable. But hers, she told John Quincy, would be recognizable only to those who had known her twenty years before. Her hair had since turned entirely white and she had so “fallen away” as to be “but a spectre” of what she once was.

At the July 4 celebration in Boston that summer of 1816, Adams looked about and realized he was nearly the last of the generation of 1776, and the only “signer” present.

He and Abigail lived for John Quincy’s return, as they made plain. When during that autumn of 1816 it appeared that James Monroe was to be the next President and newspapers were reporting John Quincy the choice for Secretary of State, Adams sent off a letter to London saying he hoped it was true and that John Quincy would accept the office and come home. If not true, Adams hoped he would come home anyway. Later, with still no word from London, Abigail was more emphatic. “The voice of the nation calls you home,” she wrote. “The government calls you home — and your parents unite in the call. To this summons you must not, you cannot, refuse your assent.”

By the summer of 1817, when President Monroe, on a tour of New England, came to Quincy to dine with the Adamses on the evening of July 7, they entertained forty guests for dinner but could report nothing of their son’s intentions, as there was still no word from him. It was not until July 15 that they learned from Richard Rush that the appointment had been accepted, and not until the second week of August that a letter arrived from John Quincy himself, saying he and his family were safely landed at New York.

“Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole long life,” Adams wrote his son. “A thousand occasions exalted delight . . . a succession of warm showers all day, my threshers, my gardeners, and my farmers all behaved better than usual, and altogether kept me in a kind of trance of delight the whole day.”

“God be thanked,” Abigail wrote. “Come then all of you.”

IN THE HISTORY of the Adams family there was probably no more joyous homecoming than took place in the heat of midmorning on August 18, 1817, when John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three sons came over the hill from Milton in a coach-and-four trailing a cloud of dust.

As Abigail recorded, Louisa Smith was the first to see them coming and begin shouting. Abigail hurried to the door. First out of the coach was young John, who ran to her, followed by George calling, “Oh, Grandmother, oh, Grandmother.” Ten-year-old Charles Francis, with no memory of his grandparents, approached with caution. “By this time father and mother were both out, and mutually rejoicing with us,” Abigail wrote. John Quincy had been away for eight years.

At a party given by Abigail that evening, her long drawing room was crowded with neighbors and relatives, one of whom, young Eliza Susan Quincy, described John Quincy as the focus of attention, seated at the end of the room, everyone “rather in awe of him.” At age fifty, he had already served as minister to the Netherlands and Prussia, as United States senator, Harvard professor, minister to Russia and Great Britain, and was soon to assume the second-most-important office in the government. In view of the fact that the past three Presidents in a row — Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — had earlier served as Secretary of State, it was already being said that the presidency was his destiny, too.

II

THE MONTHS that followed, despite another severe winter and the increasing aggravations of old age, were as happy a time for the Adamses as any in their years of retirement. While John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Washington, the three grandsons remained nearby — George at Harvard, John and Charles Francis in school in Boston. After dining at Quincy in mid-January 1818, Benjamin Waterhouse reported to John Quincy that his parents seemed in splendid health, but his father in particular. “I never saw your father in better spirits. I really believe that your return to America with all its honorable consequences has not only brightened his chain of life, but added links to it.”

It was “very cold and the snow falling fast,” Abigail wrote to Louisa Catherine, delighted by the spectacle. “It is now a foot or more deep. Winter appears to have set in, with all its beauties.” No President, she was sure, had ever had such a fine or harder-working Secretary of State as her son, Abigail continued in another letter to Louisa Catherine, written in May as her plum trees were blooming and the first peas “looking up newly arrived to daylight.” His father lived for John Quincy’s letters and to write to him in return, difficult as that had become for him.

Through the summer Abigail maintained strength and pleasure in life, by all accounts. John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned for a much-needed vacation, and several of those who came to call at about this time would remember Abigail seated on a couch sorting a basket of laundry or shelling beans as she talked. “I found a freedom in conversation [with her]. . . . She was possessed of the history of our country and the great occurrences in it,” wrote the noted Salem clergyman William Bently. “She had a distinct view of our public men and measures and had her own opinions.”

But in October, Abigail was taken seriously ill. The diagnosis was typhoid fever, and she was told to remain perfectly still and try not to speak.

“The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years as a wife, and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to,” Adams wrote in anguish to Jefferson on October 20. The day following, Benjamin Waterhouse sent off a letter to John Quincy advising him to be prepared for the worst. “She has recovered from a similar state once before, and she may again, but typhoid . . . at 74 years of age is enough to create alarm.”

Friends and neighbors took turns with Adams, son Thomas, and niece Louisa Smith at Abigail’s bedside. She was dosed with quinine and Madeira by her physician, Amos Holbrook, and for a day or so she seemed to improve. “Your mother was pronounced so much better this morning that your father has resumed his book,” wrote a friend, Harriet Welsh, to John Quincy and Louisa Catherine. But in another day Abigail had taken a turn for the worse.

On Monday morning, October 26, as Adams sat with her, she spoke for the first time. She told him she was dying and that if it was the will of Heaven, she was ready. She had no wish to live except for his sake.

“He came down,” wrote Harriet Welsh, who was waiting on the first floor, “and said in his energetic manner, ‘I wish I could lie down beside her and die, too.’” “The whole of her life has been filled up doing good,” Adams told the others who were gathered. “I cannot bear to see her in this state.”

Returning to her room later, Adams was trembling so much that he could not stand and had to take a chair, but then seeing that Louisa Smith was in worse distress, he got up and went to her side to tell her they must be strong.

Abigail died at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, October 28, 1818. She was, according to her son Thomas, “seemingly conscious until her last breath.”

She was buried on November 1. Adams insisted on walking in the procession to the meetinghouse, and except for a momentary dizziness due to the unseasonable heat of the day, he went through “all the rest,” as Thomas wrote, “with great composure and serenity.”

BENJAMIN WATERHOUSE’S letter warning John Quincy to be prepared for the worst had not reached Washington until the day before his mother’s death, and it was not until the day after her funeral that he learned she was gone, “the tenderest and most affectionate of mothers,” as he wrote to his father. “How shall I offer consolation for your loss, when I feel that my own is irreparable?”

“Gracious God! Support my father in this deep and irreparable affliction!” he wrote in his diary.

My mother . . . was a minister of blessing to all human beings within her sphere of action. . . . She had no feelings but of kindness and beneficence. Yet her mind was as firm as her temper was mild and gentle. She . . . has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life. . . . Never have I known another human being, the perpetual object of whose life, was so unremittingly to do good.

“My ever dear, ever affectionate, ever dutiful and deserving son,” Adams wrote, in the first letter he could manage:

The bitterness of death is past. The grim spider so terrible to human nature has no sting left for me.

My consolations are more than I can number. The separation cannot be so long as twenty separations heretofore. The pangs and the anguish have not been so great as when you and I embarked for France in 1778.

All Quincy was in mourning. “The tidings of her illness were heard with grief in every house, and her death is felt as a common loss,” the Reverend Peter Whitney had said without exaggeration at the funeral service.

Madame Adams possessed a mind elevated in its views and capable of attainments above the common order of intellects. . . . But though her attainments were great, and she had lived in the highest walks of society and was fitted for the lofty departments in which she acted, her elevation had never filled her soul with pride, or led her for a moment to forget the feelings and the claims of others.

The obituary notice in Boston’s Columbian Centinel emphasized her importance to her husband’s career in public service and thus to the nation:

Possessing at every period of life, the unlimited confidence, as well as affection of her husband, she was admitted at all times to share largely of his thoughts. While, on the one hand, the activity of her mind, and its thorough knowledge of all branches of domestic economy, enabled her almost wholly to relieve him from the cares incident to the concerns of private life; on the other, she was a friend whom it was his delight to consult in every perplexity of public affairs; and whose counsels never failed to partake of that happy harmony which prevailed in her character; in which intuitive judgment was blended with consummate prudence; the spirit of conciliation, with the spirit of her station, and the refinement of her sex. In the storm, as well as the smooth sea of life, her virtues were ever the object of his trust and veneration.

Letters of condolence arrived for Adams, including one from Jefferson, who had himself been gravely ill. Time and silence were the only medicines, he counseled Adams. “God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.”

“While you live,” Adams answered, “I seem to have a bank at Monticello on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment when I please.

I believe in God and in his wisdom and benevolence [he continued], and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God. This universe, this all, this John Adams[”totality”] would appear with all its swelling pomp, a boyish firework.

That he had been blessed in a partnership with one of the most exceptional women of her time, Adams never doubted. Her letters, he was sure, would be read for generations to come, and with this others strongly agreed. Years later Louisa Catherine, who had not always enjoyed a close or easy relationship with her mother-in-law, would say that it was especially in the letters of Abigail Adams that “the full benevolence of an exceptional heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity” were to be found. “We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.”

To his granddaughter Caroline, Adams would write of Abigail’s “virtues of the heart.” Never “by word or look” had she discouraged him from “running all hazards” for their country’s liberties. Willingly, bravely, she had shared with him “in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard.”

For years afterward, whenever complimented about John Quincy and his role in national life, and the part he had played as father, Adams would say with emphasis, “My son had a mother!”

III

TWO WEEKS after Abigail’s death, the painter John Trumbull, as well as several of the Quincy family, insisted that Adams go with them to Boston — “carried me off by storm,” he reported to John Quincy — to view Trumbull’s enormous new painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Commissioned by Congress for the rotunda at the Capitol, it was on tour through several cities and was now on display at Faneuil Hall.

In preparation for an earlier, much smaller version of the scene, Trumbull had painted studies from life of thirty-six of the signers, including Adams, whom Trumbull sketched in London. If there was anyone who ought to see the colossal new rendition, measuring twelve by eighteen feet, it was surely Adams. Also, it was hoped the excursion to town would do him good.

The arrival of Adams at Faneuil Hall was described that night in her journal by Eliza Susan Quincy, herself an artist, who was among those riding with him. “Colonel Trumbull came to the carriage door . . . assisted Mr. Adams to alight and offered his arm to descend the steps. But Mr. Adams pushed him aside and insisted in handing Mrs. Quincy up the stairs and into Faneuil Hall, in which many persons had assembled.” The aged Adams standing before the painting, gazing silently at “the great scene in which he had borne a conspicuous place,” was a sight long remembered.

In composing the picture, Trumbull had placed Adams at the exact center foreground, as if to leave no doubt about his importance. Hand on hip, Adams looked stout but erect, the expression on his face, one of bold confidence and determination. Beside him, facing the desk where John Hancock sat in the president’s chair, were Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Jefferson, and Franklin, all dead now except Jefferson, who in the painting held the Declaration in his hands.

Ranged behind were forty-seven of the fifty-six delegates who had signed the Declaration, each quite recognizable, including Adams’s favorite, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, standing at the rear with his Quaker hat on.

What Adams thought as he looked at the painting will never be known. A few years earlier, hearing that Trumbull was to undertake such a commission, Adams had lectured him on the importance of accuracy. “Truth, nature, fact, should be your sole guide,” Adams had said. “Let not our posterity be deluded with fictions under the pretense of poetical or graphical license.” Further, he had expressed concern over the projected size of the painting. “The dimensions, 18 by 12, appear vast. . . . I have been informed that one of the greatest talents of a painter is a capacity to comprehend a large space, and to proportion all his figures in it.” During his years in Europe, Adams recalled, he had never passed through Antwerp without stopping to see the paintings of Rubens. “I cannot depend upon my memory to say that even his Descent from the Cross or his Apotheosis of the Virgin exceeded these measures.”

Clearly, Trumbull was no Rubens, and concern for accuracy had not been a major consideration. No such scene, with all the delegates present, had ever occurred at Philadelphia.

His audience in Faneuil Hall waited for Adams’s response. Then, pointing to a door in the background, on the right side of the painting, he said only, “When I nominated George Washington of Virginia for Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, he took his hat and rushed out that door.”

Possibly it was Adams’s old vanity that prompted the remark — to remind those gathered of how much else he had done of importance in that room in Philadelphia — or perhaps, confronted all at once with so many faces from the past, he was reminded of the all-important man whose face was not to be seen. Afterward, in a note to John Quincy, Adams remarked only on how cold it had been in the hall and that he had “caught the pip [a sore throat] as a result.”

John Quincy was vexed — “forgive me my dear father for saying it” — that Adams had not paid greater homage to the “mighty consequences” of July 4, 1776. “It was not merely the birthday of a powerful nation. It was the opening of a new era in the history of mankind.” As for the painting, which he had already seen, John Quincy thought it highly disappointing, no more than a collection of interesting portraits, “cold and unmeaning.” But then in capturing so sublime a scene, even a Raphael or a Michelangelo would have been inadequate, he was sure.

“All is now still and tranquil,” Adams wrote to Jefferson as the year ended. “There is nothing to try men’s souls. . . . And I say, God speed the plough, and prosper stone wall.”

TO THE GREAT DELIGHT of everyone around him, Adams remained remarkably healthy and good-spirited. In the exchange of correspondence with Jefferson he continued to be by far the more productive, sending off thirteen letters to Monticello in the year 1819, for example, or more than two for every one from Jefferson.

To his immense pleasure, his Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, came for a visit of several days. Writing to Jefferson, Adams described Van der Kemp as “a mountain of salt of the earth.”

With Nabby and Abigail gone, Louisa Catherine filled a great need in his life, writing to him steadily and with affection, and welcoming what he wrote in return. Concerned about the trials she would face as the wife of so prominent a public man, Adams cautioned her to study stoicism. But who was he to preach stoicism, she responded warmly. “You, my dear sir, have ever possessed a nature too ardent, too full of benevolent feelings . . . to sink into the cold and thankless state of stoicism. Your heart is too full of all the generous and kindly affections for you ever to acquire such a cold and selfish doctrine.”

John Quincy’s achievements as Secretary of State were proving all that a proud father could hope for. When the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 added Spanish Florida to the United States, the old President in Quincy proclaimed it a blessing “beyond all calculation,” largely for the ways it might serve American naval operations.

His enjoyment of his family never diminished. He kept close watch on how George, John, and Charles Francis were progressing in their education. To help his son Thomas, who was having a difficult time supporting his wife and five children — but also for his own pleasure — Adams insisted they move in with him. When it was said he deserved to be known as the father of the American navy, Adams answered that he was father of enough as it was, with two sons, fourteen grandchildren, and five great grandchildren, all of whom required his attention and support.

He loved company, the house full. He was rarely without aches and pains and suffered spells of poor health. Some days were extremely difficult. But he could still ride horseback, at nearly eighty-five, and on “rambles” over the farm or his walks about town he sometimes covered three miles.

He never tired of the farm. He loved every wall and field, loved its order and productiveness, the very look of it. “My crops are more abundant than I expected,” he would write one September. “I have the most beautiful cornfield I ever saw. It is drawn up like an army in array, in a long line before my house.”

His appetite strong, he delighted in the plain, substantial fare of the family table. As he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “We go on . . . eating fat turkeys, roast beef — and Indian pudding — and more than that, mince pies and plum pudding in abundance, besides cranberry tarts.”

In the hours he spent alone, reading, thinking, or just looking out the window by his desk, he found an inner peace, even a sense of exhilaration such as he had seldom known. Old poems, ballads, books he had read many times over, gave greater pleasure than ever. “The Psalms of David, in sublimity, beauty, pathos, and originality, or in one word poetry, are superior to all the odes, hymns, and songs in any language,” he told Jefferson. He had read Cicero’s essay on growing old gracefully, De Senectute, for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart, but never had it given such joy as on his most recent reading, he told another correspondent.

For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old [ran a famous passage], so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.

The simplest, most ordinary things, that in other times had seemed incidentals, could lift his heart and set his mind soaring. The philosophy that with sufficient knowledge all could be explained held no appeal. All could not be explained, Adams had come to understand. Mystery was essential. “Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good,” he wrote in the margin of one of his books, “but never assume to comprehend.”

Even the punctuation of a page, or the spelling of an individual word, could seem infinitely beautiful to him as part of what he had come to see as “this wonderful whole.

I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables; but now . . . if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets, which compose the incomprehensible universe; and if I do not sink into nothing in my own estimation, I feel an irresistible impulse to fall on my knees, in adoration of the power that moves, the wisdom that directs, and the benevolence that sanctifies this wonderful whole.

The view from his window the morning after one of the worst March storms on record filled him with ecstasy, despite the damage done to his trees. It was “the most splendid winter scene ever beheld,” Adams wrote.

A rain had fallen from some warmer region in the skies when the cold here below was intense to an extreme. Every drop was frozen wherever it fell in the trees, and clung to the limbs and sprigs as if it had been fastened by hooks of steel. The earth was never more universally covered with snow, and the rain had frozen upon a crust on the surface which shone with the brightness of burnished silver. The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.

• • •

IN LATE 1820, at age eighty-five, Adams found himself chosen as a delegate to a state convention called to revise the Massachusetts constitution that he had drafted some forty years before.

“The town of Quincy has been pleased to elect me a member of the Convention — and wonderful to relate — the election is said to be unanimous. . . . I am sufficiently advanced in my dotage to have accepted the choice,” he reported to Louisa Catherine. “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions, in my present state of imbecility. . . . But I presume we shall not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.” But in what was to be his last public effort, in a speech considered “very remarkable” for its energy and conviction, Adams boldly offered an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth. As he believed that all were equal before God, so he believed that all should be free to worship God as they pleased. In particular, he wanted religious freedom for Jews, as he had written earlier to a noted New York editor, Mordecai Noah, who had sent him a discourse delivered at the consecration of a synagogue in New York.

“You have not extended your ideas of the right of private judgment and the liberty of conscience both in religion and philosophy farther than I do,” Adams wrote in appreciation.

I have had occasion to be acquainted with several gentlemen of your nation and to transact business with some of them, whom I found to be men of as liberal minds, as much as honor, probity, generosity, and good breeding as any I have known in any seat of religion or philosophy.

I wish your nation to be admitted to all the privileges of citizens in every country in the world. This country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, government, and commerce.

Jefferson wrote to tell Adams he “rejoiced” at the news that Adams had “health and spirits enough” to take part in such an effort in the “advance of liberalism.” On arrival at the convention, Adams had received a standing ovation. But his amendment failed to pass. Blaming himself, he told Jefferson, “I boggled and blundered more than a young fellow just rising to speak at the bar.” But to young Josiah Quincy, who came by frequently to visit, Adams spoke with regret of the intolerance of Christians.

Josiah, a student at Harvard, was to keep Adams company over several years, spending summers as Adams’s secretary, and in his diary he devoted frequent entries to “the President” and his observations on life. “Visited the President as usual,” he wrote at the end of one session. “He was quite amusing, and gave us anecdotes of his life. He was particularly funny in an account of an interview he had with the Turkish ambassador [the envoy from Tripoli] in England. . . .” Another time Adams stressed the need for “commotion” in life, to keep it from going stagnant. “For my own part,” he exclaimed, “I should not like to live to the Millennium. It would be the most sickish life imaginable.”

One June evening, when Adams came to call on the Quincys and brought along a letter from Jefferson to read aloud, he was asked to explain how he could possibly be on such good terms with Jefferson, after all the abuse he had suffered from him. According to Josiah’s diary, Adams replied as follows:

I do not believe that Mr. Jefferson ever hated me. On the contrary, I believe he always liked me: but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration. Then he wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way. So he did everything that he could to pull me down. But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had anything to do with in life. This is human nature. . . . I forgive all my enemies and hope they may find mercy in Heaven. Mr. Jefferson and I have grown old and retired from public life. So we are upon our ancient terms of goodwill.

Indeed, Adams had become sufficiently confident in their “ancient goodwill” to broach the subject of slavery. In 1819, with Congress in debate over whether to admit Missouri into the union as a slave state, Adams had expressed the hope to Jefferson that the issue might “follow the other waves under the ship and do no harm.” Yet he worried. “I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American empire,” but a struggle between the states over slavery “might rend this mighty fabric in twain.”

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 — whereby Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine (until then part of Massachusetts) as a free state, and slavery excluded in the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36°30’ — left Adams in torment over the future. She would think him mad were he to describe “the calamities that slavery was likely to produce in the country,” he wrote to Louisa Catherine. He imagined horrible massacres of blacks killing whites, and in their turn, whites slaughtering blacks until “at last the whites exasperated to madness shall be wicked enough to exterminate the Negroes.”

All possible humanity should be shown the blacks, he told another correspondent. And while he did not know what the solution to the presence of slavery should be, he was certain it should not be allowed to expand. He was “utterly adverse” to the admission of slavery into Missouri, which was in exact opposition to Jefferson, who favored it. Slavery, he now told Jefferson, was the black cloud over the nation. He had a vision of “armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in armor.” Yet he knew not what to do.

I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the southern gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments. What we are to see God knows, and I leave it to him and his agents in posterity. I have none of the genius of Franklin, to invent a rod to draw from the cloud its thunder and lightning.

Jefferson, who believed that slavery was a “moral and political depravity,” nonetheless refused to free his own slaves and gave no public support to emancipation. “This enterprise is for the young,” he wrote to a young Albemarle County neighbor who was freeing his slaves and urged Jefferson to “become a Hercules against slavery.”

In response to Adams’s impassioned letter of foreboding, Jefferson said nothing. To others, however, he wrote privately at some length. He favored gradual emancipation and eventual colonization for the slaves. Should they ever be set free all at once, Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, “all whites south of the Potomac and the Ohio must evacuate their states, and most fortunate those who can do it first.” But with Adams he avoided any discussion of the subject.

When, in his next letter, Adams suggested that in addition to the military academy at West Point, which had been established during Jefferson’s presidency, there ought to be a naval academy, Jefferson replied at once in agreement.

Jefferson’s own great preoccupation, his all-consuming interest for several years now, was the establishment of a new university for Virginia at Charlottesville. It was one of the proudest efforts of his life, and he was involved in every aspect, organizing the curriculum, choosing the site, and designing the buildings. Once construction was under way, he kept watch from his mountaintop by telescope. The full complex, when finished, would be his architectural masterpiece. The faculty, as he told Adams proudly, would be drawn from the great seats of learning in Europe.

Adams, who had no project to keep him occupied, said Jefferson’s university was surely “noble employment.” He did not, however, approve of sending abroad for professors when, as he told Jefferson, there were a sufficient number of American scholars with more active, independent minds than to be found in Europe.

The two old correspondents continued to write of their declining health and persistent ailments, of old memories and the death of friends, but the letters grew fewer in number, and there was much about each of their lives that they kept to themselves.

Jefferson told Adams nothing of the new house he had built at his other plantation, Poplar Forest, or that Monticello, as visitors noted, was going to decay. He made no mention of his worsening financial straits and said not a word ever on the subject of Sally Hemings and her children. Indeed, he never referred to his slaves or the fact that his entire way of life was no less dependent on them than ever. Nor did he say anything of the dreadful turmoil within his own household — of the erratic behavior of his son-in-law, Martha’s husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, or of the grandson-in-law, Charles Bankhead, who was subject to violent alcoholic rages.

But then neither did Adams write of his own increasing worry and sorrow over his son Thomas, who, having failed in the law, was drinking heavily and employed now primarily as a caretaker for his father and the farm. John Quincy’s son Charles Francis, writing of his uncle Thomas, described him as “one of the most unpleasant characters in this world . . . a brute in manners and a bully in his family.”

The question of how two of his sons, Charles and Thomas, could have so sadly fallen by the wayside, while John Quincy so conspicuously excelled could only have weighed heavily on Adams’s mind. But of this, for all that he wrote on nearly everything else, he wrote nothing. The closest he seems to have come in blaming himself was in a letter to John Quincy admonishing him that “children must not be wholly forgotten in the midst of public duties.”

VISITORS CONTINUED to call out of curiosity or genuine friendship, and Adams took pleasure in nearly all. Only occasionally would some leave him feeling low and more alone than before. Of one couple he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “They had eyes and ears to perceive the external person, but not feelings to sympathize with the internal griefs, pains, anxieties, solitudes, and inquietudes within.” But he refused to complain.

The morning of August 14, 1821, 200 West Point cadets, an entire corps, who were touring New England, marched out from Boston to parade past the Adams house, colors flying and band playing. Half the town turned out for the excitement. Adams, who stood watching from the porch, had provided breakfast for the cadets at his own expense. Tables were set up under an open tent. When they had stacked their arms and lined up before him, Adams made a brief speech, his voice faint at first but growing stronger as he went on. It was the example of the character of George Washington that they should keep before them, he said.

His remarks finished, the band played a tune called “Adams and Liberty,” while he beat time to the music. At the last, when all 200 cadets came up onto the porch one by one, Adams shook hands with each. “President Adams seemed highly gratified,” recorded Eliza Susan Quincy.

IV

IF ADAMS’S LIFE — indeed, Adams himself — could be defined by what was left to him that he loved, there was still a great deal to the life and to the man, and he was extremely grateful. “No man has more cause for gratitude,” he assured Louisa Catherine.

He had his library room, where he slept now among his treasured books. On the table beside his reading chair were the latest novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, the sermons of Bishop Joseph Butler, along with Pascal’s Provincial Letters.

He had almost continuous company and thrived on it. “In the evening I . . . [went] to the President’s and found the old gentleman well and lively,” reads one entry in Josiah Quincy’s diary. “I scarcely ever saw him look better or converse with more spirit,” reads another. One June evening at the Quincys’, having talked more than anyone, Adams declared happily, “If I was to come here once a day, I should live half a year longer,” to which the family said he must therefore come twice a day and live a year longer. The next day he was back again.

His pride in John Quincy knew no bounds. If he was writing to him less frequently, Adams explained, it was for good reason. “I know that you would answer every scratch of a pen from me, but I know the importance of your occupations and your indefatigable attentions to them, and no trifling letter from me should divert your mind. . . .” The weeks in summer when John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned home were invariably the summit of the year for the old man.

He wrote regularly to his grandsons on all manner of subjects, from books to the therapeutic benefits of riding horseback to the importance of maintaining one’s independence through life. To Charles Francis he issued a summons to make of himself all that was possible. “Arouse your courage, be determined to be something in the world,” Adams wrote. “You have a fine capacity, my dear boy, if you will exert it. You are responsible to God and man for a fine genius, a talent which is not to be buried in the earth.”

In the spring of 1823, when John was expelled from Harvard, along with fifty others of the senior class for taking part in a student riot, Adams, in an effort to intercede in his behalf, explained to his mother that he could not find it in his own heart to reproach the boy, since he “did no more than all the rest, nor so much as many,” and urged Louisa Catherine to “receive him tenderly, and forgive him kindly.”

The affection Adams felt for Jefferson was expressed repeatedly and often with touching candor. When an old private letter of Adams’s attacking Jefferson turned up in print, to Adams’s extreme embarrassment, Jefferson proved that the friendship meant no less to him. “It would be strange indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary, or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives.”

Physically, Adams was declining rapidly. He suffered severe pains in his back. In cold weather his rheumatism was such that he could get about only with a cane. His teeth were gone. His hearing was going. Sadly, he had to admit he could mount a horse no longer. Yet he insisted, “I am not weary of life. I still enjoy it.”

IN 1824, with James Monroe due to retire from the presidency, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was nominated as a candidate to replace him, exactly as long predicted. With three others also nominated, and all, like John Quincy, avowed Republicans — William Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee — it became a crowded contest of “increasing heat.” John Adams was a great admirer of Andrew Jackson, but the prospect of his adored son winning the highest office was thrilling and a strong reason to stay alive.

To compound the excitement of the summer of 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned for a triumphal tour of America, causing a sensation. Landing at New York, he proceeded northward to Boston, accompanied by his son George Washington Lafayette, and on August 29 arrived at Quincy to pay an afternoon call on Adams.

As a crowd gathered outside the Adams house, numbers of the family filled the room where the two old heroes sat reminiscing, Adams hugely enjoying the occasion. “Grandfather exerted himself more than usual, and as to conversation, appeared exactly as he ever was,” recorded Charles Francis. “I think he is rather more striking now than ever, certainly more agreeable, as his asperity of temper is worn away.”

Afterward, Adams is said to have remarked, “That was not the Lafayette I knew,” while Lafayette, saddened by the visit, reportedly remarked, “That was not the John Adams I knew.”

John Quincy, when he arrived in September for a holiday of several weeks, was shocked by his father’s drastically deteriorating condition.

His sight is so dim that he can neither write nor read. He cannot walk without aid. . . . He bears his condition with fortitude, but is sensible to all its helplessness. . . . He receives some letters, and dictates answers to them. In general the most remarkable circumstance of his present state is the total prostration of his physical powers, leaving his mental faculties scarcely impaired at all.

Such was the change in his father that John Quincy decided that one last portrait must be done and persuaded Gilbert Stuart, who was himself nearly seventy and seriously ill, “to paint a picture of affection, and of curiosity for future times.”

Adams agreed to sit, but only because of his regard for Stuart. Adams had little faith in portraits of himself. “Speaking generally,” he said, “no penance is like having one’s picture done.” When a French sculptor, J. B. Binon, had been commissioned a few years earlier to render a marble bust for Faneuil Hall, Adams had posed most reluctantly — “I let them do what they please with my old head,” he had told Jefferson. Stuart, however, was a famously entertaining talker, and thus another matter. “I should like to sit to Stuart from the first of January to the thirty-first of December,” Adams said, “for he lets me do just as I please, and keeps me constantly amused by his conversation.”

Wearing a best black suit, Adams posed on a red velvet settee in the parlor. As anticipated, he and Stuart had a thoroughly fine time during several sittings, and the finished portrait was one of Stuart’s finest. Had it been done by an inferior hand, as Josiah Quincy observed, it might have been painful to look at. But Stuart had caught “a glimpse of the living spirit shining through the feeble and decrepit body. He saw the old man at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope.”

EVER SINCE Abigail’s death, the last days of October had become the most difficult time of the year for Adams. As his grandson George reminded Louisa Catherine, “He was married on the 27th, Grandmother died on the 28th, his birthday [was] the 30th, her funeral, the 31st.” These days, and their memories, as Adams had told George, brought overwhelming sorrow. The “encroaching melancholy” made everything else seem uninteresting and insignificant.

But among the family and friends who gathered at the Big House on October 30, 1824, to celebrate Adams’s eighty-ninth birthday, it was thought that because of the forthcoming election he looked better and “conversed with more spirit” than he had in years. When, after election day, it became known that in Quincy, Braintree, and Weymouth, John Quincy had received every vote cast for the presidency, Adams declared it one of the most gratifying events of his life.

The outcome of the contest nationally, however, was not to be resolved until February. For though Andrew Jackson received more popular votes, no candidate had a majority in the electoral count. So again the decision was left to the House of Representatives, where Speaker of the House Henry Clay used his influence to make John Quincy Adams president. The deciding vote took place in Washington on February 9, 1825. Five days later the news reached Quincy, and again family and friends crowded about “the old President” to wish him congratulations.

He . . . was considerably affected by the fulfillment of his highest wishes [wrote Josiah Quincy]. In the course of conversation, my mother compared him to that old man who was pronounced by Solon to be the highest of mortals when he expired on hearing of his son’s success at the Olympic games. The similarity of their situations visibly moved the old gentleman, and tears of joy rolled down his cheek.

Later, however, Adams told those gathered, “No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”

From Monticello came warm congratulations. “It must excite ineffable feelings in the breast of a father to have lived to see a son to whose educ[atio]n and happiness his life has been so devoted so eminently distinguished by the voice of his country,” Jefferson wrote. Nor should Adams worry about how the country would respond to the outcome.

So deeply are the principles of order, and of obedience to law impressed on the minds of our citizens generally, that I am persuaded there will be an immediate acquiescence in the will of the majority as if Mr. Adams had been the choice of every man.

“Every line from you exhilarates my spirits and gives me a glow of pleasure, but your kind congratulations are solid comfort to my heart,” Adams wrote. “The little strength of mind and the considerable strength of body that I once possessed appear to be all gone, but while I breathe I shall be your friend.”

ON FRIDAY, March 4, 1825, inside the Hall of the House of Representatives at the Capitol in Washington, John Quincy Adams took the oath of office as the sixth President of the United States, administered by Chief Justice John Marshall; and as the year proceeded in Quincy, Massachusetts, the health and physical strength of his aged father, the second President of the United States, seemed to improve rather than decline. Benjamin Waterhouse, who had thought Adams very near death, was amazed by the change, as he wrote to the President. “But physicians do not always consider how much the powers of the mind, and what is called good spirits, can recover the lost energies of the body. I really believe that your father’s revival is mainly owing to the demonstration that his son has not served an ungrateful public.”

Adams, reported Waterhouse, could still tell stories and laugh heartily, “and what is more, eats heartily, more than any other at table. We stayed until he smoked out his cigar after dinner.”

A stream of visitors continued through the seasons and among them was young Ralph Waldo Emerson, who a few years earlier had graduated from Harvard as class poet. He found Adams upstairs in his library seated in a large overstuffed armchair, dressed in a blue coat, a cotton cap covering his bald head. Recounting the interview, Emerson wrote, “He talks very distinctly for so old a man — enters bravely into long sentences which are interrupted by want of breath but carries them invariably to a conclusion without ever correcting a word.”

Speaking of the mood of the times, Adams exclaimed with vehemence, “I would to God there were more ambition in the country,” by which he meant, “ambition of that laudable kind, to excel.”

Asked when he expected to see his son the President, he said, “Never,” meaning presumably that the press of John Quincy’s duties would keep him in Washington. But John Quincy did return, in the early fall of 1825, and spent several days with his father, though what conversation passed between them is unknown. Probably they both knew it was the last time they would spend with one another, and possibly they reviewed the will Adams had drawn up some years before, whereby he left to John Quincy the house, an estimated 103 acres, his French writing desk, “all my manuscript letter-books and account books, letters, journals, and manuscript books, together with the trunks in which they are contained,” as well as his library, on “the condition that he pays to my son, Thomas Boylston Adams, the value of one half of the said library.” The remainder of the estate was to be divided among his two sons, grandchildren, and Louisa Smith.

“My debts, which I hope will not be large,” Adams had stipulated, “and my funeral charges, which I hope will be very small, must be paid by my executors.”

On the day of his departure, Monday, October 13, John Quincy wrote only, “Took leave of my father.”

ANOTHER OF THE visitors who climbed the stairs to the library, a writer named Anne Royall, found Adams nearly blind, his hair “perfectly white,” but was struck by the “sunshine of his countenance,” which, when he spoke, became “extremely animated.”

As Emerson had been told, Adams was always better for having visitors from morning until night, and never was this quite so evident as an evening in the fall of 1825, when Josiah Quincy was assigned to escort his great-aunt Hannah on a visit to the old President.

Hannah Quincy Lincoln Storer was the flirtatious “Orlinda” of Adams’s early diaries, to whom he had once nearly proposed. She had since buried two husbands — Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham and Ebenezer Storer, the treasurer of Harvard — and as Josiah noted, she and Adams were now both verging on their ninety-first year.

As his visitor entered, Adams’s face lighted up. “What! Madam,” he greeted her, “shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?” “Ah, sir,” she said after an embarrassed pause, “it would not be the first time we have walked there!”

Perhaps the incident is not worth recording [Josiah wrote], as there is really no way of getting upon paper the suggestiveness it had to a witness. . . . The flash of old sentiment was startling from its utter unexpectedness. It is the sort of thing which sets a young fellow to thinking. It is a surprise to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human.

Late in November, Adams submitted to one further ordeal for the sake of posterity, when an itinerant sculptor named John Henry Browere appeared at Quincy to make a life mask by a secret process of his own invention. It was known that the experience could be extremely disagreeable for the subject, as the entire head had to be covered with successive layers of thin grout and these given time to dry. When, earlier in October, Browere had gone to Monticello to do Jefferson, the mask had dried so hard it had to be chopped off with a mallet, Jefferson suffering, as he said, a “severe trial.” But John Quincy and young Charles Francis had also been done by Browere, and so Adams consented, even though Charles Francis, worried about his grandfather, warned how unpleasant, even dangerous, the experience could be.

The life mask that resulted was not the aged John Adams of the Gilbert Stuart portrait, with a “glimpse of the living spirit shining through.” It was instead the face of a glowering old man at odds with life and the world. But then the expression was doubtless greatly affected by the ordeal he had been put through. “He did not tear my face to pieces,” Adams wrote good-naturedly to Charles Francis afterward, “though I sometimes thought he would beat my brains out with his hammer.”

Then, at the year’s end, a granddaughter of Jefferson’s, Ellen Wayles Randolph, who had recently married a Massachusetts man, Joseph Coolidge, Jr., came to call accompanied by her husband. Adams was extremely pleased. All the high praises he had heard about her were true, he told Jefferson, aware no doubt that she was Jefferson’s favorite.

“She entertained me with accounts of your sentiments of human life, which accorded so perfectly with mine that it gave me great delight.” Only on one point did he differ, Adams said. She had told him that Jefferson would like to repeat his life over again. “In this I could not agree; I had rather go forward and meet whatever is to come.”

• • •

WITH 1826 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it was not long into the new year when Adams and Jefferson were being asked to attend a variety of celebrations planned to commemorate the historic event on the Fourth of July. Invitations poured into Quincy and Charlottesville from Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The two former presidents were, with eighty-eight-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland, the last signers of the Declaration still alive. Further, as everyone knew, Jefferson was its author and Adams had been its chief advocate on the floor of Congress. One was “the pen,” the other “the voice,” of independence, and the presence of either at any Independence Day celebration, large or small, would give it significance as nothing else could.

But the time was past when either Adams or Jefferson could leave home. Adams was ninety, Jefferson would be eighty-three in April, and each grew steadily more feeble. After calling on Adams that spring, Benjamin Waterhouse wrote to John Quincy, “To the eyes of a physician your father appeared to me much nearer to the bottom of the hill.”

Still, the old mind prevailed, the brave old heart hung on. As once he had been determined to drive a declaration of independence through Congress, or to cross the Pyrenees in winter, so Adams was determined now to live to see one last Fourth of July.

In March, knowing he had little time left, Jefferson drew his last will. Suffering from bouts of diarrhea and a chronic disorder of the urinary tract, caused apparently by an enlargement of the prostate gland, he depended for relief on large doses of laudanum. Besides, he was beset by troubles at his university — disappointing enrollment, unruly students — and by now suffered such personal financial distress that, in desperation, he had agreed to a proposal that the Virginia legislature create a special lottery to save him from ruin.

But then Jefferson, too, was resolved to hang on until the Fourth.

Jefferson’s last letter to Adams, dated Monticello, March 25, 1826, was written at the desk in his office, or “cabinet,” where a recently acquired plaster copy of the Adams bust by Binon, a gift of a friend, looked on from a near shelf. He was writing to say that his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, was on his way to New England, and that if the young man did not see Adams, it would be as though he had “seen nothing.”

Like other young people [Jefferson wrote] he wished to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has heard and learned of the heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.

Thus, it was the future generation and the Revolution that occupied Jefferson’s thoughts at the last. The world their grandchildren knew could give no adequate idea of the times he and Adams had known. “Theirs are the halcyon calms succeeding the storm which our argosy had so stoutly weathered,” Jefferson reminded his old friend in Massachusetts.

Adams, in the letter that would close their long correspondence, wrote on April 17, 1826, to remark on how tall young Randolph was, and how greatly he enjoyed his visit. Also, characteristically Adams was thinking of his son John Quincy, and the rough treatment he was receiving from an uncivil Congress. “Our American chivalry is the worst in all the world. It has no laws, no bounds, no definitions; it seems to be a caprice.”

Several days later the young Reverend George Whitney, son of the Reverend Peter Whitney, who had preached at Abigail’s funeral, called on Adams and came away doubtful that he could last much longer.

ON JUNE 24 at Monticello, after considerable labor, Jefferson completed a letter to the mayor of Washington declining an invitation to the Fourth of July celebration at Washington. It was his farewell public offering and one of his most eloquent, a tribute to the “worthies” of 1776 and the jubilee that was to take place in their honor. Within days it was reprinted all over the country.

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return to this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

As he had often before — and as was considered perfectly acceptable — Jefferson had done some borrowing for effect. In this case it was imagery from a famous speech of the seventeenth century by one of Cromwell’s soldiers, Richard Rumbold, who, from the scaffold as he was about to be executed, declared, “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”

Adams attempted to write nothing so ambitious, and probably, given his condition, it would have proved impossible for him. “The old man fails fast,” the Reverend George Whitney recorded after another visit on June 27.

But when on Friday, June 30, Whitney and a small delegation of town leaders made a formal call on Adams, he received them in his upstairs library seated in his favorite armchair. They had come, they told the old patriot, to ask for a toast that they might read aloud at Quincy’s celebration on the Fourth.

“I will give you,” Adams said, “Independence forever!” Asked if he would like to add something more, he replied, “Not a word.”

The day following, July 1, Adams was so weak he could barely speak. The family physician, Amos Holbrook, the ever faithful Louisa Smith, and one or another of the family remained at his bedside around the clock.

When a townsman and frequent visitor named John Marston called at the house on the afternoon of July 3, Adams was able to utter only a few words. “When I parted from him, he pressed my hand, and said something which was inaudible,” Marston wrote, “but his countenance expressed all that I could desire.”

Early on the morning of Tuesday, July 4, as the first cannon of the day commenced firing in the distance, the Reverend George Whitney arrived at the house to find “the old gentleman was drawing to his end. Dr. Holbrook was there and declared to us that he could not live more than through the day.” Adams lay in bed with his eyes closed, breathing with great difficulty. Thomas sent off an urgent letter to John Quincy to say their father was “sinking rapidly.”

As efforts were made to give Adams more comfort, by changing his position, he awakened. Told that it was the Fourth, he answered clearly, “It is a great day. It is a good day.”

AT MONTICELLO, Thomas Jefferson had been unconscious since the night of July 2, his daughter Martha, his physician Robley Dunglison, and others keeping watch. At about seven o’clock the evening of July 3, Jefferson awakened and uttered a declaration, “This is the Fourth,” or, “This is the Fourth of July.” Told that it would be soon, he slept again. Two hours later, at about nine, he was roused to be given a dose of laudanum, which he refused, saying, “No, doctor, nothing more.”

Sometime near four in the morning Jefferson spoke his last words, calling in the servants “with a strong clear voice,” according to the account of his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, but which servants he called or what he said to them are unknown.

Jefferson died at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon on July 4, as bells in Charlottesville could be faintly heard ringing in celebration in the valley below.

AT QUINCY the roar of cannon grew louder as the hours passed, and in midafternoon a thunderstorm struck — “The artillery of Heaven,” as would be said — to be followed by a gentle rain.

Adams lay peacefully, his mind clear, by all signs. Then late in the afternoon, according to several who were present in the room, he stirred and whispered clearly enough to be understood, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Somewhat later, struggling for breath, he whispered to his granddaughter Susanna, “Help me, child! Help me!” then lapsed into a final silence.

At about six-twenty his heart stopped. John Adams was dead.

As those present would remember ever after, there was a final clap of thunder that shook the house; the rain stopped and the last sun of the day broke through dark, low hanging clouds — “bursting forth . . . with uncommon splendor at the moment of his exit . . . with a sky beautiful and grand beyond description,” John Marston would write to John Quincy.

By nightfall the whole town knew.

V

AN ESTIMATED 4,000 people crowded silently about the First Congregational Church on July 7. A suggestion that the funeral of John Adams be held at public expense at the State House in Boston had been rejected by the family, who wished no appearance of “forcing” public tribute and asked that the service be kept as simple as possible, as Adams had wanted. But throngs came from Boston and surrounding towns. Cannon boomed from Mount Wollaston, bells rang, and the procession that carried the casket from the Adams house to the church included the governor, the president of Harvard, members of the state legislature, and Congressman Daniel Webster. Pastor Peter Whitney officiated, taking his text from 1Chronicles: “He died in good old age, full of days . . . and honor.” With the service ended, the body of John Adams was laid to rest beside that of his wife, in the graveyard across the road from the church.

The funeral could not have been “conducted in a more solemn or affecting manner,” Josiah Quincy wrote to President Adams, who still did not know of his father’s death.

The news of Jefferson’s death on July 4 had only reached Washington from Charlottesville on July 6. Not until Sunday, July 9, after receiving several urgent messages from home, did John Quincy start north by coach, accompanied by young John, and it was later that day, near Baltimore, that he learned of his father’s death.

That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day, and that it was, of all days, the Fourth of July, could not be seen as a mere coincidence: it was a “visible and palpable” manifestation of “Divine favor,” wrote John Quincy in his diary that night, expressing what was felt and would be said again and again everywhere the news spread.

Arriving at Quincy on July 13, the President went directly to his father’s house, where suddenly the gravity of his loss hit him for the first time.

Everything about the house is the same [he wrote]. I was not fully sensible of the change till I entered his bedchamber. . . . That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart. My father and mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it, and to the whole region around, is stronger than I ever felt it before.

In the weeks and months that followed, eulogies to Adams and Jefferson were delivered in all parts of the country, and largely in the spirit that their departure should not be seen as a mournful event. They had lived to see “the expanded greatness and consolidated strength of a pure republic.” They had died “amid the hosannas and grateful benedictions of a numerous, happy, and joyful people,” and on the nation’s fiftieth birthday, which, said Daniel Webster in a speech in Boston, was “proof” from on high “that our country, and its benefactors, are objects of His care.” Webster’s eulogy, delivered at Faneuil Hall on August 2, lasted two hours.

Never a rich man, always worried about making ends meet, John Adams in his long life had accumulated comparatively little in the way of material wealth. Still, as he had hoped, he died considerably more than just solvent. The household possessions, put on auction in September, and largely bought by John Quincy, brought $28,000. Several parcels of land and Adams’s pew at the meetinghouse — these also purchased by John Quincy — added another $31,000. All told, once the estate was settled, John Adams’s net worth at death was approximately $100,000.

John Quincy would insist on keeping the house, and thus it was to remain in the family for another century.

Jefferson, by sad contrast, had died with debts exceeding $100,000, more than the value of Monticello, its land, and all his possessions, including his slaves. He apparently went to his grave believing the state lottery established in his behalf would resolve his financial crisis and provide for his family, but the lottery proved unsuccessful.

By his will Jefferson had freed just five of his slaves, all of whom were members of the Hemings family, but Sally Hemings was not one of them. She was given “her time,” unofficial freedom, by his daughter Martha Randolph after his death.

In January 1827 on the front lawn of Monticello, 130 of Jefferson’s slaves were sold at auction, along with furniture and farm equipment. Finally, in 1831, after years of standing idle, Monticello, too, was sold for a fraction of what it had cost.

Unlike Jefferson, Adams had not composed his own epitaph. Jefferson, characteristically, had both designed the stone obelisk that was to mark his grave at Monticello and specified what was to be inscribed upon it, conspicuously making no mention of the fact that he had been governor of Virginia, minister to France, Secretary of State, Vice President of the United States, or President of the United States. It was his creative work that he wished most to be remembered for:

Here Was Buried

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Author of the Declaration of American Independence,

Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,

And Father of the University of Virginia

Adams had, however, composed an inscription to be carved into the sarcophagus lid of Henry Adams, the first Adams to arrive in Massachusetts, in 1638.

This stone and several others [it read] have been placed in this yard by a great, great, grandson from a veneration of the piety, humility, simplicity, prudence, frugality, industry and perseverance of his ancestors in hopes of recommending an affirmation of their virtues to their posterity.

Adams had chosen to say nothing of any of his own attainments, but rather to place himself as part of a continuum, and to evoke those qualities of character that he had been raised on and that he had strived for so long to uphold.

The last of the ringing eulogies to Adams and Jefferson was not delivered until October of 1826, when Attorney General William Wirt addressed Congress in Washington, speaking longer even than Webster had. Recounting Adams’s career, he cited Adams’s defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, his break with his old friend Jonathan Sewall, the crucial role he had played at Philadelphia in 1776 and Jefferson’s line “he moved his hearers from their seats.” Describing the friendly correspondence between the two old patriots in their last years, Wirt said that “it reads a lesson of wisdom on the bitterness of party spirit, by which the wise and the good will not fail to profit.”

But the accomplished orators who celebrated the two “idols of the hour” had all drawn on the historic record, or what could be gathered from secondhand accounts. They had not known Adams or Jefferson, or their “heroic times,” from firsthand experience. Those who had were all but vanished.

It was among the children of his children that Adams and his words to the wise would live longest in memory. “The Lord deliver us from all family pride,” he had written to John Quincy’s son John, for example. “No pride, John, no pride.”

“You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough. . . . So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”

Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.

He felt he had lived in the greatest of times, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices “the most honorable” to human nature. “Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts, sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any period.”

His faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: “He who loves the Workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.”

His confidence in the future of the country he had served so long and dutifully was, in the final years of his life, greater than ever.

Human nature had not changed, however, for all the improvements. Nor would it, he was sure. Nor did he love life any the less for its pain and terrible uncertainties. He remained as he had been, clear-eyed about the paradoxes of life and in his own nature. Once, in a letter to his old friend Francis van der Kemp, he had written, “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

It could have been his epitaph.

Acknowledgments

The Adams Papers, from which much of this book has been drawn, may be rightly described as a national treasure. There is no comparable written record of a prominent American family. Housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the full collection of letters, diaries, and family papers of all kinds, ranges from the year 1639 to 1889 and in volume alone is surpassing. On microfilm it takes up 608 reels, or more than five miles of microfilm. The letters of John and Abigail Adams number in the thousands, and because they both wrote with such consistent candor and in such vivid detail, it is possible to know them — to go beneath the surface of their lives — to an extent not possible with other protagonists of the time. Not Washington, not Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton, not even Franklin for all that he wrote, was so forthcoming on paper as was John Adams over a lifetime of writing about himself and his world. When his private correspondence and diaries are combined with the letters penned by Abigail, the value of the written record is compounded by geometric proportions. Their letters to each other number more than a thousand, and only about half have ever been published. But then the letters of Adams to Jefferson and Benjamin Rush number in the hundreds, as do those by Abigail to her sisters. And beyond all that is the remarkable body of correspondence between the Adamses and their offspring.

Publication of the Adams Papers began in 1961, with the first volume of the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, under the editorial direction of Lyman Butterfield, to whom all Adams biographers and students of the Adams family are indebted. Mr. Butterfield brought to the immense project the high scholarly and literary standards that have distinguished it to this day, as publication of the Papers continues in one splendid volume after another.

For the help they have been in my work with the Papers, I wish to express my thanks to each of the present editorial staff, Richard Ryerson, Anne Decker Cecere, Jennifer A. Shea, and Gregg L. Lint, but especially to the gracious, dedicated Celeste Walker, whose knowledge of the subject, whose answers to innumerable questions, and whose suggestions and thoughtfulness have been invaluable.

Notes on the sources and a full bibliography follow. However, certain works have been mainstays. Of the few biographies ever written of John Adams, those by Gilbert Chinard, Page Smith, and John Ferling are first-rate, fair in judgment, and well written. Other particularly valuable studies are Zoltan Haraszti’s John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, and two works on the Adams presidency by Ralph A. Brown and Stephen G. Kurtz. And to Joseph Ellis I owe a special word of gratitude, for it was his excellent Passionate Sage, on Adams in his last years, that started me on the path that led to this book.

I am greatly indebted also to three major works upon which I have relied: Dumas Malone’s distinguished six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Adams-Jefferson Letters in two volumes edited by Lester J. Cappon, and The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, a landmark work in American history if ever there was.

But how does one properly acknowledge the pleasure one finds in such books? Or in the works of those front-rank historians who have written with such extraordinary insight on the nation’s founding time — Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Richard Ketchum, David Hackett Fischer, to name only a few? Or how to describe adequately the delight of immersing oneself, as I have tried to do, in the writing of the eighteenth century — to read again after long years, or for the first time, the writers John Adams read and loved — Swift, Pope, Defoe, Addison, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Johnson, and Voltaire? I so enjoyed Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, a book I knew little about, that I read it twice.

The research has been done in libraries, archives, museums, and historic sites in Massachusetts, Virginia, Philadelphia, Washington, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, and I thank all those who were so very helpful: Len Tucker, William Fowler, Nicholas Graham, Anne Bentley, Brenda Lawson, Oona E. Beauchard, Jennifer Smith, and the remarkably knowledgeable Peter Drummey of the Massachusetts Historical Society; the staff of the Boston Athenaeum; Brian Sullivan of the Harvard University Archives; Ellen Dunlap, Georgia Barnhill, Joanne Chaison, and Russell Martin of the American Antiquarian Society; Susan Godlewski, Gunars Rutkovskis, and Jamie McGlone of the Boston Public Library, repository of John Adams’s own library; Marianne Peake, Caroline Keinath, Kelly Cobble, and John Stanwich of the National Park Service staff at the Adams National Historical Park, Quincy; Will LaMoy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; Paula Faust Newcomb, Peter J. Hatch, Lucia Stanton, Susan Stein, William L. Beiswanger, Ann Lucas, Fraser Neiman, Zanne MacDonald, Rebecca Bowman, Michael B. Merriam, and my friend and wise counselor Daniel P. Jordan of the Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Charlottesville; Karin Wittenborg, Michael Plunkett, Bryson Clevenger Jr., Margaret Hrabe, Christina Deane, Alice Parra, Irene Norvelle, Anne Benham, Terry Belanger, Kendon Stubbs, and Roger Munsick of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia; Dorothy Twohig and Philander Chase of the Washington Papers, also at the University of Virginia; Roy Strohl, Jack Bales, Douglas Sanford, and Beth Perkins of the Simpson Library at Mary Washington College; Charles Bryan and the staff of the Virginia Historical Society; Robert C. Wilburn of Colonial Williamsburg; Edward C. Carter III, Bruce Laverty, and Roy Goodman of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Martha Wolfe of Bartram’s Garden; Jennifer Esler of “Clivedon”; Martha Aikens, Ann Coxe Toogood, and Frances Delmar of the National Park Service staff at Independence Park; John Carter and Michael Angelo of the Independence Seaport Museum; the staff of the Pennsylvania Historical Society; the staff of the Free Library of Philadelphia; James Billington, Jeffrey Flannery, David Wigdor, Gerald Gawalt, James Hutson, Staley Hitchcock, Larry E. Sullivan, and Mary Wolfskill of the Library of Congress; the staff of the White House Historical Association; Wagner Loderwyck of the Amsterdam Historical Museum; the staffs of the Rijksmuseum, the Van Loon Museum, and the Maritime Museum, Amsterdam; Michael Crump of the British Museum; and the staffs of Blenheim Palace and the Stowe Landscape Gardens.

In Philadelphia Bruce Gill helped me duplicate John Adams’s climb up the bell tower of historic Christ’s Church. With the help of Captain Samuel Tucker’s log of the 1778 voyage of the Boston, Nat Benjamin of Martha’s Vineyard plotted the ship’s exact course across the North Atlantic to Bordeaux and explained the perils of a winter voyage on the North Atlantic; and Daniel and Alice Jouve were expert guides to the eighteenth-century American landmarks of Paris.

For their favors, interest, advice, and encouragement, I thank Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Adams, Merrill D. Peterson, Lee and George Cochran, Sandy Fisher, Jane and David Acton, Anne Sibbald, John Gable, Dr. C. A. Van Minnen, Douglas L. Wilson, Charles Fagan III, Daniel J. Boorstin, Theodore K. Rabb, Richard D. Brown, Ian Macpherson, Vincent Scully, Suzy Valentine, Ann Nelson, Noel Bagnall, Deborah DeBettencourt, Chip Stokes and Bud Leeds, Curtis Tucker, Rebecca Purdy, Michelle Krowl, Richard Moe, Arthur Sack, Josiah Bunting III, Steve Spear, Bonnie Hurd Smith, Royall D. O’Brien, Mary Beth Norton, Paul and Cathy Rancourt, Robert Wilson, Roger Kennedy, Richard Gilder, the Reverend Sheldon W. Bennett, Joan Paterson Kerr, and Margaret Goodhue.

Richard Ketchum, Susan Stein, Celeste Walker, William Fowler, Richard Ryerson, Daniel P. Jordan, Lucia Stanton, Dorie McCullough Lawson, John Zentay, Nat Benjamin, Richard Craven, Patrick J. Walsh, Richard A. Baker, Donald Ritchie, and Thomas J. McGuire each read parts or all of the manuscript, and for their thoughtful comments and criticism I am very grateful. They have made it a better book than it would have been without their contributions. Any errors of fact or interpretation it may contain are mine alone.

Patrick J. Walsh and Thomas J. McGuire also contributed to the research. But I am indebted above all to the tireless, ever resourceful efforts of my research assistant Michael Hill, who has been unfailingly involved from start to finish.

My friend and literary agent Morton L. Janklow has been an enthusiastic believer in the book all along. My editor, Michael Korda, has provided encouragement and expert guidance, as well as frequent kindnesses. Nor can I say enough for copy editors Gypsy da Silva and Fred Wiemer; the gifted designer of the book, Amy Hill; Wendell Minor, who designed the jacket; Sydney Wolfe Cohen, who did the index; and my son William B. McCullough, who took the jacket photograph.

For her help in dozens of ways, I thank my daughter Dorie Lawson, and for their sustained interest in my work, their patience and good cheer, I thank all of my family — children and spouses, grandchildren numerous and spirited, and foremost and always, my wife Rosalee.

— David McCullough

West Tisbury, Massachusetts

January 10, 2001

Source Notes

ABBREVIATIONS USED

AFC Adams Family Correspondence, L. H. Butterfield, ed.

AP Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). Numbers correspond to MHS microfilm reel number.

DJA Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, L. H. Butterfield, ed.

DJQA Diary of John Quincy Adams, David Grayson Allen, Allan Nevins, eds.

EDJA Earliest Diary of John Adams, L. H. Butterfield, ed.

LOC Library of Congress

LOD Letters of Delegates to Congress, Paul H. Smith, ed.

MHS Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts

PBF The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Labaree, Claude A. Lopez, Barbara B. Oberg, eds.

PGW The Papers of George Washington, W. W. Abbott, Philander D. Chase, Dorothy Twohig, eds.

PJA Papers of John Adams, Robert J. Taylor, ed.

PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

PTJ The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, John Catanzariti, Charles Cullen, eds.

Works The Works of John Adams, Charles Francis Adams, ed.

I. THE ROAD TO PHILADELPHIA

1. a New England winter: Meteorological Journal of Professor John Winthrop, January 1776, HUG 1879.207.5 mfp, Harvard University Archives.

2. five feet seven: Works, IX, 612

3. Archbishop of Canterbury: JA to Benjamin Waterhouse, AP, #436, MHS March 19, 1817,

4. “the animal spirits”: DJA, I, 27

5. “old acquaintances”: Ibid., II, 9.

6. “an habitual contempt”: AFC, I, 317

7. “like a faint meteor”:

8. the “labyrinth” of human nature: DJA, I 61

9. “You will never be alone”: AFC, IV, 114

10. “my farm, my family”: Ibid., II, 100

11. “I have a zeal”: Ibid., I, 135.

12. “possessed of another species”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 140.

13. “He saw the whole of a subject”: Ibid., 140–42.

14. “Winter makes its approaches”: AFC, I, 324

15. “like a nun”: Ibid., 325.

16. “arduous task”: Ibid., 222.

17. “You cannot be”: Ibid., 172.

18. “The cry for pins”: Ibid., 219

19. “The alarm flew”: Ibid., 204

20. “Sometimes refugees”: Ibid., 205.

21. “Pray don’t let Bass”: Ibid., 240.

22. “How many have fallen Ibid., 222

23. I wander alone”: DJA, II, 97.

24. I think it will be necessary: AFC, I, 129.

25. “It is to be a school”: PJA, II, 99–100.

26. grandest, most important assembly: DJA, II, 98.

27. “as if to see a coronation”: Ibid., 100.

28. “They talk very loud”: Ibid., 109

29. “theater of action”: AFC, I, 144.

30. “Such is the distress”: Ibid., 277

31. “Mrs. Randall has lost”: Ibid., 278.

32. “Woe follows woe”: Ibid., 284.

33. “You often expressed”: Ibid., 289.

34. “the most shocking”: Ibid., 296.

35. “’Tis only in my night visions”: Ibid., 305.

36. “befall a city”: Ibid., 313.

37. “entirely continental”: Twohig, ed., PGW, Revolutionary War Series, III, I.

38. “It is not in the pages”: Ibid., 19.

39. “The reflection on”: Ibid., 89.

40. “I am exceedingly desirous”: Ibid., 93.

41. “Your commission constitutes”: Ibid., 37.

42. “the gentleman from Virginia”: DJA, III, 323.

43. “one of the most”: AFC, I, 216.

44. enough in praise: Ibid., 246.

45. “Oh that I was a soldier!”: Ibid., 207.

46. Henry Adams of Barton St. David: DJA, III, 254, n. 4.

47. second Joseph: Ibid., 255, n. 6.

48. first Henry Adams: Ibid., 254, n. 4.

49. “What has preserved”: JA to Benjamin Rush, July 19, 1812, AP, MHS.

50. “of making and sailing boats”: DJA, III, 257.

51. “Let frugality”: AFC, I, 114.

52. “the honestest man”: DJA, III, 256.

53. Joseph Adams: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, V, 502.

54. Taught to read at home: DJA, III, 257.

55. “churl”: Works, IX, 613.

56. He cared not for books: DJA, III, 257.

57. to be a farmer: Ibid., 257.

58. which meant Harvard: Ibid., 259; EDJA, 43.

59. admitted to Harvard: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 513

60. class 1755 of: Ibid., XIII, 512.

61. “Total and complete misery”: Ibid., XIII, 514.

62. “I read forever”: DJA, III, 262.

63. “lowermost northwest chamber”: EDJA, 43, n. 2.

64. Thomas Sparhawk: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 647.

65. Joseph Stockbridge: Ibid., XIII, 647.

66. evening prayers: Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 27–28.

67. wiped clean on the table cloth: Timothy Pickering Papers, Reel #53. MHS.

68. “I shall never forget”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,III, 514

69. “All scholars”: Pierce, History of Harvard,169.

70. Adams was fined: March 15, 1775 Harvard Archives.

71. “amorous disposition”: DJA, III, 260.

72. I shall draw no characters: DJA, III, 260, 261.

73. Adams was listed fourteenth: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,XIII, 512

74. “Is civil government”: Ibid., 515

75. unsuited for the life: DJA, III, 263

76. “I saw such a spirit”: Ibid., 262.

77. “But we must be cautious”: Ibid., I, 9

78. One student remembered: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 514.

79. I sometimes: DJA, I, 13.

80. Upon common theaters: PJA, I, 12

81. becoming a doctor: DJA, III, 264.

82. “reveries”: PJA, I, 5

83. “All that part of Creation”: Ibid., 4–6

84. “soft vernal showers”: DJA, I, 27

85. “Oh! that I could”: Ibid., 7.

86. “I have no books”: Ibid., 22

87. “I can as easily”: Ibid., 21.

88. Actual thunderstorms: Ibid., 136.

89. “Honesty, sincerity”: Ibid., 12.

90. “Vanity, I am sensible”: JA to Christopher Gadsen, April 16, 1801. AP, MHS.

91. “A puffy, vain”: DJA, I, 37.

92. “glorious shows”: Ibid., 43.

93. “the amazing concave”: PJA, I, 15.

94. But all the provisions: DJA, I, 43.

95. “It will be hard work”: PJA, I, 17.

96. “Can you imagine”: JA to Richard Rush, February 16, 1814, #95. MHS.

97. King’s troops: DJA, III, 266.

98. “I am not without”: DJA, III, 266.

99. “I am beginning”: EDJA, 65.

100. “I have read Gilbert’s”: DJA, I, 45.

101. “Rose about sun rise”: Ibid., 46.

102. I had the pleasure: EDJA, 99.

103. “pursue the study of the law”: DJA, I, 55.

104. Lambert v. Field: See editorial note in EDJA beginning on p. 82.

105. He blamed his mother: DJA, I, 64.

106. terrible family row: Ibid., 65.

107. soul to the law: Ibid., 72.

108. “Reputation”: Ibid., 78

109. My eyes are so diverted: Ibid., 80–81.

110. “I never shall shine”: Ibid., 133.

111. “Why have I not genius”: Ibid., 95.

112. “Ballast is what I want”: EDJA, 73.

113. “a heart formed”: Ellis, Passionate Sage, 182.

114. not by John Adams: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XIII, 627.

115. “distinguishing glorys”: PJA, I, 5.

116. “gallanting”: DJA, I, 57.

117. “in future ages”: PJA, I, 40.

118. “Let me search”: DJA, I, 61.

119. “grandeur”: Ibid., 83.

120. “imitating Otis”: Ibid., 84.

121. “squaddy, masculine creature”: Ibid., 75.

122. Zab Hayward: Ibid., 172.

123. P[arson] W[ibird]: Ibid., 92–93.

124. If I look: EDJA, 70.

125. “there laughed and screamed”: DJA, I, 77.

126. “Let no trifling diversion”: Ibid., 72.

127. “Let love and vanity”: Ibid., 87.

128. “fond, nor frank”: Ibid., 109.

129. “crafty, designing man”: Ibid., 108.

130. The testator: PJA, I, 35.

131. forty acres: DJA, III, 277.

132. Now to what: Ibid., I, 124.

133. “I grow more expert”: Ibid., 193.

134. The story of B. Biknal’s wife: Ibid., 231–32.

135. Di was a constant: Ibid., 234.

136. “Candor is my characteristic”: AFC, I, 49.

137. “a gentleman has no business”: Ibid., 47.

138. “smoked”: Ibid., 29.

139. Also, two black slaves: Withey, Dearest Friend, 6; Akers, Abigail Adams, 3.

140. Oh, my dear girl: AFC, I, 49.

141. “I never shall shine”: DJA, I, 133.

142. news of the Stamp Act: Boston Gazette, May 27, 1765.

143. immediate uproar: Ibid., June 24, 1765.

144. “utmost consternation”: Ibid., July 22, 1765.

145. “like devils let loose”: Ibid., Sept. 2, 1765.

146. A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law: See the Boston Gazette, Aug. 12, 1765; Aug. 19, 1765; Sept. 30, 1765; Oct. 2, 1765.

147. “the most thorough understanding”: DJA, I, 271.

148. “liable to great inequities”: Ibid., 271.

149. “The year 1765”: Ibid., 263.

150. He handled every kind of case: See, generally, Wroth and Zobel, Legal Papers of John Adams, , I, xxv–lx.

151. as “honest [a] lawyer”: Works, , I, 58.

152. “What shall I do”: DJA, I, 338.

153. “My good man”: AFC, I, 56.

154. “I want to see my wife”: Ibid., 83.

155. “My biographer”: DJA, I, 355.

156. “To what object”: Ibid., 337.

157. no difficulty saying no: Ibid., III, 288.

158. “He always called me John”: Peabody, ed., John Adams, 130.

159. soldiers suddenly opened fire: Zobel, Boston Massacre, 198–99.

160. John Adams was asked to defend: DJA, III, 292.

161. “incurring a clamor”: Ibid., 294.

162. a retainer of eighteen guineas: Ibid., 293.

163. “The only way to compose myself”: Ibid., I, 352.

164. If, by supporting the rights: Legal Papers of John Adams, III, 242.

165. two conspicuously fair trials: See ibid., Cases 63# and #64, 266.

166. “electrical”: Legal Papers of John Adams, III, 28. Comment of John Quincy Adams.

167. “I am for the prisoners”: Ibid., III, 242.

168. We have entertained: Ibid., 266.

169. “Do you expect”: Ibid., 268.

170. “The reason is”: Ibid., 242.

171. “Facts are stubborn”: Ibid., 269.

172. branded on their thumbs: Ibid., 31.

173. “one of the most gallant”: Ibid., 33.

174. “she thought I had done”: DJA, III, 294.

175. “Especially the constant”: Ibid., 296.

176. five hours: JA to John Adams Smith, June 15, 1812, 118#. MHS.

177. Government is nothing: DJA, II, 57.

178. “Above all things”: Ibid., 67

179. “I cannot but reflect”: Ibid., 76

180. the destruction of the tea: Ibid., 86.

181. “We live, my dear soul”: AFC, I, 107.

182. “in the dumps”: Ibid.

183. During a break: Peabody, ed., John Adams, 133-34.

184. “Swim or sink”:Works, IV. 8.

185. “It is not despair”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, XII, 317.

186. “Novangelus”: See, generally. PJA, II, 216-387.

187. dine with General Washington: AFC, I, 343.

188. Caughnawaga Indians: Ibid., 343.

189. “It was a savage feast”: DJA, II, 227.

190. decidedly pleased: AFC, I, 343.

191. Henry Knox: DJA, II, 227.

192. Diary of Henry Knox. MHS.

193. Fort Ticonderoga: DJA, II, 227.

194. making careful note of the inventory: Ibid., 227.

195. “cold journey”: AFC, I, 345.

196. “for the amusement of Swift”: DJA, III, 268.

197. ...as I was cold: Old Family Letters. 140.

198. “I could not join”: AFC, I, 324.

199. the title Common Sense: Ibid., 348.

200. “My God, these fellows”: Ibid., 358.

201. “marvelous in our eyes”: Ibid., 360.

2. TRUE BLUE

1. largest, wealthiest city: See, generally, Weigley, Philadelphia: A 300 Year History. 109-54.

2. Shipbuilding was a: Cresswell, Journal of Nicholas Cresswell. 156.

3. Franklin arrived from Boston: LeMay and Zall, eds., Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. 24.

4. population was approaching ,: Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt. 216.

5. “I like it”: DJA, II, 136.

6. Front Street is near: Ibid., 116.

7. “All this is done”: LOD, I, 56.

8. prince’s palace: Ibid., III, 360.

9. “for the promoting of useful knowledge”: Pennsylvania Gazette, May 20, 1776.

10. all philosophical: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin. 139.

11. twenty-three printing establishments: Stevens, Birthplace of a Nation. 95.

12. John Sparhawk: Pennsylvania Gazette, April 29, 1776.

13. thirty bookshops: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Press and the Book in the Century Philadelphia,” PMHB, LXV (Jan. 1941): 13.

14. “dirty, dusty, and fatigued”: DJA, II, 114.

15. Adams had first met George Washington: Ibid., 141.

16. “I drink no cider”: AFC, I, 164.

17. “thundering of coaches”: PMHB, XLVIII (1924): 237.

18. most recent outbreak, 1773: Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 243.

19. new hospital: DJA, II, 116.

20. “Philadelphia Salute”: Albertz, Benjamin West, 22-23.

21. Christ Church: DJA, II, 127.

22. “My time is too totally”: AFC, I, 155.

23. The Reverend Thomas Coombe: DJA, II, 122.

24. “He reaches the imagination”: Ibid., 156.

25. mass at St. Mary’s: Ibid., 150.

26. “awful”: AFC, I, 167.

27. at the State House: DJA, II, 134.

28. “I shall be killed”: AFC, I, 164.

29. “A most sinful feast”: DJA, II, 127.

30. “Dined with Mr. [Benjamin] Chew”: Ibid., 136.

31. “tall, spare”: Ibid., 120.

32. Roger Sherman: Ibid., 150.

33. “sly, surveying eye”: Ibid., 106.

34. “design and cunning”: Ibid., 121.

35. John Dickinson: Ibid., 117.

36. Caesar Rodney: Ibid., 121.

37. “The art and address”: AFC, I, 163.

38. This assembly: Ibid., 166.

39. “happy, peaceful”: DJA, II, 157.

40. “There are in this city”: AFC, I, 212.

41. in strictest secrecy: Ibid., 157.

42. “wasting, exhausting”: Ibid., 251.

43. “a great, unwieldy body”: Ibid., 216.

44. “I will not despond”: Ibid., 213.

45. “minds and hearts”: Ibid., 295.

46. “An alliance”: DJA, II, 231.

47. There is a tide: Quote from Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3.

48. “The plot thickens”: “Diary of James Allen,” PMHB, IX (1895): 186.

49. “The malignant air”: Christopher Marshall diary, February 15, 1776, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

50. “There is a deep anxiety”: AFC, I, 345.

51. the stoves were removed: LOD, III, 299.

52. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina: Ibid., 292.

53. Samuel Ward of Rhode Island: Ibid., 460.

54. “He has not assumed”: AFC, I, 252–53.

55. profane and pious: DJA, III, 371.

56. “Young Ned Rutledge”: Ibid., II, 156.

57. warning advice: Works, II, 512.

58. “avow their opinions”: DJA, I, 12.

59. “has an excellent heart”: Ibid., II, 133.

60. Olive Branch Petition: Ibid., 162.

61. “Powder and artillery”: JA to John Gill, June 10, 1775. AP, MHS.

62. “blood...on their heads”: LOD, I, 373.

63. “What is the reason”: DJA, III, 318.

64. “piddling genius”: JA to James Warren, July 24, 1775, AP, MHS.

65. He passed without moving: DJA, II, 173.

66. “The Quakers and many others”: Seed, “A British Spy in Philadelphia,” PMHB, LXXXV (Jan. 1961): 22.

67. “an object of nearly universal”: Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 142.

68. “Who is the author”: Philadelphia Evening Post, March 26, 1776.

69. “what they call the American flag”: Seed, “A British Spy in Philadelphia,” PMHB, LXXXV (Jan. 1961): 28-29.

70. “common faith”: AFC, I, 348.

71. “has a better hand”: Ibid., 363.

72. “this American contest”: Ibid., II, 2.

73. On February: 26: LOD, III, 306.

74. Silas Deane: Ibid., 320.

75. “decide the fate”: Ibid., 325.

76. Adams busily jotted notes: DJA, II, 236.

77. “clear and sonorous”: Works. , I, 31.

78. On March 14: DJA, III, 370.

79. On March 23: Ibid., 374.

80. “the maddest idea”: Calkins, “The American Navy and the Opinions of One of its Founders,” 457.

81. the pleasantest part of his labors: DJA, III, 350.

82. “dull as beetles”: ”: AFC, II, 170.

83. His custom: DJA, III, 350.

84. “Fortify, fortify”: LOD, III, 473.

85. “The middle way”: Ibid., 429.

86. “This story of [peace]”: AFC, I, 383.

87. “I am more and more”: Ibid., IV, 329.

88. “It has been the will of Heaven”: Thoughts on Government, in Works IV, 203ff.

89. “‘an empire of laws’”: Credited by Adams to James Harrington.

90. “Men of experience”: Works IV, 207.

91. “Frugality, industry”: AFC, I, 377.

92. “I have,” she wrote: Ibid., 369.

93. “I wish most sincerely”: Ibid., 162.

94. “I think the sun”: ”: Ibid., 370.

95. “Remember all men”: Ibid., 329. Quote from Daniel Defoe, The Kentish Petition, in Bartlett’s Quotations.

96. “I cannot but laugh”: Ibid., 382.

97. “People can’t account”: PJA, IV, 45.

98. “Have you seen the privateering”: LOD, III, 536.

99. “All great changes”: Ibid., 570.

100. “I miss my partner”: AFC, I, 375.

101. On April 18 Ibid., 387

102. on April 23: Ibid., 392.

103. Is there no way: Ibid., 400.

104. “a people may let a King”: Ibid., 402.

105. “I think you shine”: Ibid., 420.

106. “true saying of a wit”: LOD, III, 523.

107. “a most interesting spectacle”: Pennsylvania Gazette, May 15, 1776.

108. “the happiness and safety”: DJA, III, 383.

109. “Why all this haste?”: Ibid., II, 238.

110. “I wonder the people”: Ibid., 239.

111. “Before we are prepared”: Ibid., 240.

112. “a machine for the fabrication of”: Ibid., III, 386.

113. “passed the most important”: LOD, III, 676.

114. “the cool considerate men”: Ibid., IV, 30.

115. When I consider the great events: AFC, I, 410.

116. “Fine sunshine”: Christopher Marshall diary, May 23, 1776, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

117. “Uncommonly hot”: LOD, III, 33.

118. “as the excessive heats”: Boyd, ed. PTJ, I, 292.

119. Bob Hemings: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, , 216.

120. “I’ve been so long”: Boyd, ed. PTJ, I, 293.

121. “Nothing was too small”: Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, 78.

122. “man of science”: William Plumer, Memorandum, 454.

123. “Never contradict”: Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 318.

124. “utter three sentences”: DJA, III, 335–36.

125. shall I become a Don Quixote: Ibid.

126. You rose: Schutz and Adair, eds., Spur of Fame, 227.

127. “only impatience of temper”: Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, , I, 78.

128. “rubber off of dust”: DJA, II, 218.

129. 5,000 acres: Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, xv.

130. window frames: McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 163.

131. indentured servant: Ibid., 69.

132. a hundred black slaves: Monticello Research Center, Charlottesville, Virginia.

133. earliest childhood memory: Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, I ii.

134. substantial debts: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 162.

135. “all geese are swans”: JA to Frances Vanderkemp, November 24, 1814, AP, MHS

136. “looking with fondness”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, I, 241.

137. “return of the happy period”: Ibid., 241.

138. “rather than submit”: Ibid., 242.

139. “Every post”: LOD, IV, 40.

140. “natural course”: Ibid., 122.

141. Richard Henry Lee: Fehrenbach, Greatness to Spare, 201.

142. That these United Colonies: Boyd, ed., PTJ, I, 298.

143. notes kept by Jefferson:Ibid., 309.

144. “The sensible part”: LOD, IV, 174.

145. “Great things”: AFC, II, 13.

146. According to Adams: Works, II, 514.

147. “I consented”: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, XV, 461.

148. wrote disparagingly of John Adams: DJA, III, 396.

149. Windsor chair: See Bedini, Declaration of Independence Desk,6–7.

150. “to place before mankind”: TJ to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, VII, 407.

151. I was delighted: Works, II, 514.

152. transcribed the full text: AFC, II, 35, n. 3.

153. copy to Abigail: Ibid., 48–49, n. 8.

154. ravages of smallpox: Shurkin, Invisible Fire, 173–77.

155. “I have not been idle”: LOD, IV, 304, n. 1.

156. “What in the name”: Works, II, 291.

157. “The only question”: LOD, IV, 290.

158. “the bloody conflict”: Commager, Spirit of Seventy-six, 308.

159. “You see therefore”: LOD, IV, 304.

3. COLOSSUS OF INDEPENDENCE

1. “This morning is assigned”: LOD, IV, 345.

2. The object is great: Ibid., 345–46.

3. John Dickinson had resolved: DJA, III, 396.

4. “He had prepared himself”: Ibid., 396.

5. “My conduct this day”: LOD, IV, 352.

6. “determined to speak”: DJA, III, 396.

7. Objects of the most stupendous: LOD, IV, 178.

8. “not graceful”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence, 162.

9. “‘carried out in spirit’”: Shaw, Character of John Adams, 99.

10. “the Atlas”: Works, III, 56.

11. not an actor: DJA, III, 397.

12. “started suddenly”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence, 119.

13. Caesar Rodney: Ibid., 193.

14. another cloudburst: P. H. Smith, Time and Temperature, 4. 130

15. The second day of July 1776: AFC, II, 30.

16. “transported”: Ibid., 31.

17. “You will see in a few days”: Ibid., 28.

18. “This day”: Miller, ed., Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale. , I, 189.

19. well known in the taverns: LOD, IV, 370.

20. mercifully the temperature: See P. H. Smith, Time and Temperature, 4.

21. “the ceaseless action”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence.145.

22. JOHN THOMPSON:

23. nearly 2,500,000: Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution. 125.

24. some 5,000 men: Harley, Timetables of African-American History. 42.

25. more than 200,000 slaves: John Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 2

26. was about 200: Estimate by Lucia Stanton of the Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Charlottesville, Virginia.

27. John Dickinson: Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia.” 250.

28. Even Benjamin Franklin: Campbell, Recovering Franklin. 243.

29. buying and selling: Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin. 129.

30. “a likely wench”: Ibid.

31. When Samuel Adams: Lewis, Grand Incendiary. 150.

32. pamphlet attacking slavery: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 83.

33. Yet he himself: Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly, 84.

34. “a sprightly, pretty fellow”: DJA, II, 182.

35. “equally strong”: AFC, I, 369.

36. “foul contagion”: JA to Colonel Ward, January 8, 1810, AP, #118, MHS.

37. several slave cases: See Wroth and Zobel, Legal Papers of John Adams, II, 48–52.

38. “repeated” rather than “unremitting”: LOD, IV, 360.

39. “suffered the administration”: Ibid., 361.

40. “our British brethren”: Ibid., 363.

41. “fighting fearlessly”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence. 145.

42. for the support of this Declaration: LOD, IV, 364.

43. pleasantly cool: P. H. Smith, Time and Temperature. 3.

44. Of Jefferson’s Day: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian. 229.

45. “on the common”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence. 242.

46. “Fine starlight”: Christopher Marshall diary, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

47. “very few respectable”: Hazelton, Declaration of Independence, 555

48. Savannah:Ibid., 280.

49. black flies: Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 49.

50. “We must all hang together”: Fehrenbach, Greatness to Spare, 19.

51. “My hand trembles”: Ibid.

52. produced a new era: LOD, IV, 527.

53. “gallant spirit”: AFC, II, 49. 139 “I think an individual”: LOD, IV, 512.

54. “Mr. Dickinson’s alacrity”: AFC, I, 347.

55. Nathanael Greene: PJA, IV, 382.

56. “unsoldierly conduct”: Twohig, ed., PGW, Revolutionary War Series, V, 290.

57. “vastly unequal”: AFC, II, 24.

58. “We are all inexperienced”: PJA, IV, 325.

59. “very exactly and minutely”: Ibid., 388.

60. Continental currency: Ibid., 375.

61. “Jefferson in those days”: Works, III, 68–69.

62. “Smallpox!”: AFC, II, 24.

63. dispatch of July 11: Twohig, ed., PGW, Revolutionary War Series, V, 277.

64. “Never — never”: AFC, II, 50.

65. Her letter of explanation: Ibid., 45.

66. Dr. Zabdiel Boylston: Shurkin, Invisible Fire, 152.

67. Onesimus: Ibid., 155.

68. “pus from the ripe pustules”: Ibid., 162.

69. “Such a spirit of inoculation”: AFC, II, 45.

70. “Nabby has enough of the smallpox”: Ibid., 93.

71. “in honor and duty”: Ibid., 52.

72. “Not one word”: Ibid., 56.

73. Jefferson checked his thermometer: Bear and Stanton, eds. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, I, 433.

74. “For God’s sake”: Boyd, ed, PTJ, I, 482–83.

75. “My mother”: Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 30. 145

76. “great pain”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, I, 483.

77. “the whole subject”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 140. 146

78. “minutia”: Boyd, ed, PTJ, I, 477.

79. “a great deal of difference”: LOD, IV, 527. 146

80. If a confederation, AFC, II, 68.

81. “a mere sound”: Boyd, ed, PTJ, I, 325. 147

82. Hopkins of Rhode Island: Ibid., 326. 147

83. “The more a man”: DJA, II, 247–48. 147

84. Jefferson did speak up: LOD, IV, 603–4. 148

85. “suspense, uncertainty”: AFC, II, 83. 148

86. “as a bridegroom”: Ibid., 76.

87. “If Bass is in the land”: Ibid., 84. 148

88. “This country knows not”: Ibid., 99. 148

89. “I know not how”: AFC, II, 73. 148

90. “I am really astonished”: Ibid., 78. 148

91. Henry Popple: Ibid., 91–92. 149

92. My countrymen want art: Ibid., 76.

93. Benjamin Rush: : Ibid., 59.

94. Charles Willson Peale: Ibid., 112.

95. Here, I say:

96. “of above ships”: Tatum, ed., American Journal of Ambrose Serle. 72.

97. “The Hessians”: Commager, Spirit of Seventy-six. 443.

98. “Good God!”: Flexner, George Washington, II, 111.

99. “peculiar providential”: Commager, Spirit of Seventy-six, 445.

100. “Our situation”: Sept. 3,1776.

101. “Have we not”: ”: PJA, V, 3.

102. “In general”: AFC, II, 140. 153

103. letter of September 4: Ibid., 117.

104. “The panic may seize”: Ibid., 120.

105. Adams remarked under his breath: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 140.

106. “satisfy some disturbed minds”: LOD, V, 120.

107. “Machiavellian maneuvers”: DJA, III, 430.

108. “The staunch and intrepid”: Ibid., 425.

109. His Lordship on Staten Island: : Ibid., 417.

110. The Billopp House: AFC, II, viii.

111. “good claret”: DJA, III, 420.

112. Lord Richard Howe: Ibid., 422.

113. “changed the ground”: LOD, V, 138.

114. “Your Lordship”:

115. “warmly”: LOD, V, 140.

116. “Mr. Adams is a decided character”: DJA, III, 423.

117. He was to hang:Ibid., 423.

118. Howe had no authority: AFC, II, 124.

119. “They met, they talked”: Tatum, American Journal of Ambrose Serle. 101.

120. “So terrible”: Ibid., 104.

121. began cursing: See account in Freeman, Leader of the Revolution. 153–75.

122. “Our affairs”: LOD, V, 212.

123. September 25: Twohig, ed. PGW, Revolutionary War Series. VI, 394.

124. To place any dependence: Ibid., 396.

125. $20 and 100 acres of land: AFC, II, 131.

126. Articles of War: DJA, III, 434.

127. a military academy: Ibid., 437.

128. “Unfaithfulness”: AFC, II, 131.

129. “if we fear God”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 142.

130. “great abilities”: Boyd, ed. PTJ, I, 522.

131. “circumstances very peculiar”: Ibid., 524.

132. “tedious time of it”: AFC, II, 107.

133. “I am stupefied”: Ibid., 139.

134. “your Ladyship”: ”: Ibid., 141.

135. “This illustrious patriot”: LOD, V, 183.

136. “Every member of Congress”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. 140.

4. APPOINTMENT TO FRANCE

1. “When do you expect”: AFC, II, 142

2. “I had it in my heart”: Ibid., 150

3. “I am apt to think”: Ibid., 151

4. From her window: Ibid., 171

5. “I want a bird of passage”: Ibid.

6. “’Tis a constant remembrancer”: Ibid., 173

7. “not an hour in the day”: Ibid., 241

8. “We want your industry”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters. 6.

9. “They worry one another”: AFC, II, 245.

10. “I begin to suspect”: Ibid., 176

11. You have discovered: Ibid., 179.

12. “A taste for literature”: Ibid., 177.

13. “the arts of peace”: Ibid., 180.

14. Smollet’s History of England: Ibid., 254

15. “solid instruction”: Ibid., 307.

16. “Our money”: Ibid., 340.

17. “like to outshine”: Ibid., 238.

18. “still more painful one”: Ibid., 258

19. “shaking fit”: Ibid., 277

20. “It appeared to be a very fine babe”: Ibid., 282

21. “The corn looks well”: Ibid., 288

22. “The loss of this sweet little girl”: Ibid., 292

23. “’Tis almost 14 years”: Ibid., 301

24. “Oh, Heaven!”: DFA, II, 265

25. “spirited exertions”: AFC, II, 351

26. “Great advantages”: Ibid., 376

27. It was my intention: DFA, IV, 1.

28. told by Elbridge Gerry: Ibid., 3.

29. named Adams a commissioner: LOD, VIII, 335

30. a formal letter of notification: PFA, V, 333.

31. “We are by no means”: LOD, VIII, 372

32. “one man of inflexible integrity”: Ibid., 338

33. expert on cryptology: See Kahn, Codebreakers. 181ff

34. “This knowledge is only part”: AFC, II, 333

35. And can I, sir: Ibid., 371

36. acceptance to Henry Laurens: PFA, V, 367

37. “I should have wanted”: Ibid., 369

38. “My desire was”: AFC, II, 390

39. You are in possession: Ibid., III, 37

40. They were to sail: DFA, II, 269

41. I am aware: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush. I, 190-92

42. “The heavens frown”: DFA, IV, 7

43. “The wind was very high”: Ibid., 7

44. 14 degrees: Journal of Professor John Winthrop, Feb.15, 1778, Harvard University Archives.

45. “This morning weighed the last anchor”: DFA, II, 271

46. Nicholas Noel: Ibid., IV, 7

47. lacking in erudition: Ibid., 10

48 . You are to afford: Tucker Papers. I 26-27

49. “detestable”: DFA, IV 17

50. Potter’s Field: AFC, II, 209

51. “rolling and rocking”: DFA, II, 274

52. When night approached: Ibid., 274

53. ship “shuddered”: Ibid., IV, 12

54. “raving mad”: Ibid., II, 276 see n. I.

55. “The sea being very cross”: Sheppard, Life of Samuel Tucker. 266

56. No man could keep: DFA, II, 275-76.

57. [His] behavior: Ibid., 15-16

58. “perfectly calm”: Ibid., II, 276

59. “I am constantly”: Ibid., 278

60. “I did not say”: Ibid., 368

61. “What is this Gulf Stream?”: Ibid., 279

62. “The wind is fresh”: Ibid., 280

63. John Quincy had undertaken: Ibid., IV, 21.

64. “our infant navy”: Ibid., 25

65. “We see nothing”: Ibid., II, 281

66. “Nothing very remarkable”: Sheppard, Life of Samuel Tucker. 269

67. “We spied a sail”: DFA, IV, 24

68. over the head of John Adams: Ibid., II, 285.

69. “among my marines”: Ibid., 286-87

70. Lieutenant Barron: Ibid., 288

71. “Europe, thou great theater”: Ibid., 292

72. “as clean as in any gentleman’s”: Ibid.

73. “I hope I shall never forget”: AFC, III, 11

74. symbolic of his whole life: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, II, 294, Feb.3, 1812.

75. warned Adams of bad blood: DFA, IV, 39.

76. “le fameux Adams”: Ibid., II, 351

77. “I believe at first”: DFA, IV, 37.

78. “accoutered”: Ibid., 41

79. “bold, masculine”: Ibid., 42

80. “I was astonished”: Ibid., 47

81. “hard study”: Ibid., 67

82. “The reception I have met”: AFC, III, 9.

83. “I cannot help suspecting”: Ibid., 10.

84. “If human nature”: Ibid., 17

85. To tell you the truth: Ibid.

86. His name was familiar: Works. I, 660.

87. “Although he was very advanced”: DJA, IV, 78.

88. Voltaire and Franklin: Ibid., 80–81.

89. “Nature and art”: AFC, III, 31–32.

90. “coolness”: DJA, IV, 43.

91. “mercurial temperament”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates. XIII, 245.

92. “I am old”: Lopez, ed. PBF, XXVI, 223.

93. “the most corrupt”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates. XIII, 252

94. “He believes all men selfish”: DJA, II, 347

95. Franklin’s character: PJA, IV, 26–27.

96. “great and good man”: AFC, I, 253.

97. He had wit at will: Works. I, 663.

98. “It was impossible”: DJA, IV, 87.

99. Franklin spoke the language poorly: Ibid., II, 302.

100. John Adams is a man: Tolles, “Franklin and the Pulteney Mission,” 54.

101. “I suppose”: DJA, IV, 65.

102. I have long observed: Lopez, ed., PBF, XXIII, 211.

103. Dr. Edward Bancroft: A. R. Riggs, The Nine Lives of Arthur Lee, Virginia Patriot (Williamsburg, Va.: Virginia Independence Bicentennial Commission, 1976). 52.

104. “The longer I live”: PJA, VI, 348.

105. writing to Samuel Adams: DJA, IV, 106–8.

106. “Pas un mot!”: Ibid., 92.

107. “becoming the station I held”: Ibid., 132.

108. “a royal supper”: Ibid., 133.

109. “I found that the business”: Ibid., 118–19

110. “My countrymen”: Ibid., 67–68.

111. Between you and me: PJA, VI, 354.

112. “joy of my heart”: AFC, III, 125.

113. Marie Grand: Ibid., 91.

114. “I am very sincere”:PJA, Ibid., 126–27.

115. The longer I live: Ibid., 244.

116. “observed much”: Hale, Benjamin Franklin in France, 141.

117. “There is [a] danger”: PJA, VI, 254.

118. “Are we to be beholden”: Ibid., V, 174

119. Adams drafted a letter: See ibid., VI, 294–304.

120. all three commissioners: Works, VII, 72–77.

121. “restored to the character”:PJA, VI, 416.

122. “I shall therefore”: AFC, III, 169.

123. “best becomes me”: PJA, VI, 407. 211 he vowed never again: Ibid., 429.

124. “All things look gloomy”: AFC, III, 95.

125. “changed hearts”: Ibid., 111.

126. “some infernal”: Ibid., 173.

127. “You know not”:AFC, III, 174.

128. “But my soul is wounded”: Ibid., 119.

129. “write but very little”: Ibid., 176.

130. “If ever I had any wit”: Ibid., 182.

131. “The climate is more favorable”: Ibid., 178.

132. “the wise conduct”: PJA, VI, 424.

133. translating Cicero: DJA, II, 362.

134. Franklin gave instructions: Oberg, ed., PBF, XXIX, 370.

135. John Paul Jones: DJA, II, 370.

136. “the old conjurer”: Ibid., 369.

137. Do I see that these people: Ibid., 369.

138. Eccentricities: Ibid., 371.

139. “By my physical constitution”: Ibid., 362.

140. “The language is nowhere”: Ibid., 370.

141. “Nobody seems to have”: AFC, III, 209.

142. “Known only to my own heart”: Ibid., II, 407. 216 “If I ever had any”: Ibid., III, 120.

143. “This is a painful”: Ibid., 148. 217 “delight”: Ibid., 1. 217 “a very dangerous man”: Ibid., 48.

144. if “ye were mine”: Ibid., 83.

145. chose him as a delegate: Ibid., 226.

146. a sub-sub committee of one: Ibid., 228.

147. “A Constitution or Form of Government”: See, generally, Works, IV, 219–67.

148. a dinner at Harvard: AFC, III, 225.

149. “flowing” from his pen: Ibid., 226.

150. “I take vast satisfaction”: Works, IX, 509.

151. “None of us”: Ibid., 484.

152. “Be assured you have”: Hutson, John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution, 44.

153. “Upon the whole”: Works, IX, 493.

154. “dismissed without censure”: Ibid., 497.

155. an offer of return passage: DJA, IV, 174.

156. “It will be expected”: AFC, III, 268.

157. “Alas! When I reflect”: DJA, IV, 175.

158. The wind was favorable: Ibid., 235.

159. “My habitation”: AFC, III, 233.

5. UNALTERABLY DETERMINED

1. the Sensible: DJA, IV, 192, AFC III, 237.

2. “We have had”: AFC, III, 243.

3. proceeding overland: DJA, IV, 193.

4. “The season”: Ibid., 205.

5. a scene from Don Quixote: AFC, III, 251.

6. “enemies of all repose”: DFA, IV, 213.

7. We carried: Ibid., 217.

8. “There is the grandest profusion”: Ibid., II, 419.

9. “We had nothing”: D. G. Allen, ed., DFQA, I, 21.

10. “almost perpendicular”: Ibid., 30.

11. “Smoke filled every part”: DFA, II, 416.

12. “We go along barking”: Ibid., 426-27.

13. a mistake coming overland: AFC, III, 258.

14. part with his mule: DFA, IV, 238.

15. “had the honor”: Ibid., 241.

16. “so frank”: Works, VII, 121.

17. a letter of explanation: DFA, IV, 244.

18. “It is the part of prudence”: Ibid., 245.

19. “Always keep in mind”: Shepherd, Adams Chronicles, 92.

20. “The delicacies”: Works, VII, 138.

21. Although I am convinced: Ibid., 151.

22. “I have written more”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, May 23, 1780, AP, MHS.

23. “I am so taken up”: AFC, III, 320.

24. “Can’t you keep”: Ibid., 309.

25. “Ornaments of this kind”: Ibid., 316.

26. How long would it be: Ibid., 332.

27. “There is everything here”: Ibid., 333.

28. I must study politics: Ibid., 342.

29. You tell me, sir: PFA, IX, 256-57.

30. “delicate” Charles: Ibid., 305.

31. May Heaven permit you: Ibid., 367.

32. “Keep us weak”: DFA, II, 446.

33. official letter of June 21: Works, VII, 190-92.

34. “retrace its steps”: Ibid., 192.

35. “Foreigners, when they come”: Ibid., 198.

36. Whatever the size: Ibid., 220.

37. “the best policy”: Ibid., 226.

38. “determined to omit”: Ibid., 241-42.

39. But Vergennes had had enough: Ibid., 243.

40. “The King expects”: Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 117.

41. August 9, 1780: Lopez, ed., PBF, XXIII, 160-66.

42. “a virgin state”: Ibid., 511.

43. “The wheat”: DFA, II, 442.

44. “We passed by Mons”: D. G. Allen, ed., DFQA, I, 37.

45. “a certain king”: Nordholt, Dutch Republic and American Independence, 107.

46. “The whole is an astonishing”: Francis Dana Journal, MHS.

47. liberal atmosphere: Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, xxvi.

48. “Wherever the eye ranges”: Owen, Travels into Different Parts of Europe in the Years 1791-1792, I, 90-91.

49. “The verdure”: Nordholt, Dutch Republic and American Independence, 5.

50. “so laden with filth”: Radcliffe, Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, 106.

51. James Boswell of London: Pottle, ed., Boswell in Holland, 236.

52. One says America: Works, VII, 247.

53. “Madame La Veuve du Henry”: DFA, II, 451.

54. “Papa went out to dinner”: D. G. Allen, ed., DFQA, I, 53.

55. A “considerable” loan: Works, VII, 245.

56. “the greatest curiosity”: AFC, III, 413-14.

57. Adams notified John Thaxter: Ibid., 424.

58. enrolled in Amsterdam’s: Ibid., 424.

59. “If I could have my will”: Ryerson, ed., PFA, X, 165.

6 0. “A navy is our natural”: Ibid., 270.

61. “I think I see very clearly”: Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, IV, 97.

62. This country: Ibid., 98.

63. “people of the first character”: Works, VIII, 342.

64. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam”: Works, VIII, 329.

65. “littleness of soul”: AFC, IV, 35.

66. A woman who sang: Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, IV, 197.

67. “War is to a Dutchman”: Ibid., 209.

68. “obscure”: John Adams,Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Letter XLIII.

69. “the best house”: JA to Messrs. Sigourney, Ingraham & Bromfield, April 9, 1781, AP, #102 MHS.

70. In lengthy correspondence: JA to Messrs. Sigourney, Ingraham & Bromfield, April 11 and 13, 1781, AP, #102 MHS.

71. “a thousand unfortunate incidents”: Gianta, ed., The Emerging Nation, I, 152.

72. “America . . . has been too long”: Works, VIII, 393.

73. “Mr. Adams could not refrain”: Watson, Tour in Holland, 104.

74. On April 19, 1781: Works, vii, 396-404.

75. I never shall forget: Benjamin Waterhouse to Levi Woodbury, February 20, 1835, Levi Woodbury Papers, DLG, vol. XVI, MHS.

76. “What!” said the Duke: John Adams, Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Letter LI.

77. On Friday, May 4, 1781: Works, VII, 413.

78. “desires her tenderest”: AFC, IV, 3.

79. “Handkerchiefs will turn”: Ibid., III, 321.

80. “a country so damp”: Ibid., 14.

81. “I am wholly unconscious”: Ibid., 13.

82. On Christmas Day, 1780: Ibid., 50-52.

83. Keizersgracht: Ibid., 108.

84 . “Oh! Oh!”: Ibid., 116.

85. “with a constancy”: Ibid., 121.

86. “You are now at a university”: Ibid., 38.

87. “It is not simple velocity”: Ibid., 55.

88. “Terence is remarkable”: Ibid., 80.

89. “I absolutely”: Ibid., 144.

90. Read somewhat in the English poets: Ibid., 114.

91. “You will ever remember”: Ibid., 117.

92. “without [the] knowledge”: Richard Morris, Peacemakers, 215.

93. “I think it must convince”. LOD, XVII, 325.

94. “You will send me”: AFC, IV, 165.

95. “I consented [to the departure]”: John Adams, Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Letter LXIII.

96. “long journey”: AFC, IV, 170.

97. “fit for the Hôtel”: JA to Messrs. Sigourney, Ingraham & Bromfield, April 13,1781, AP, #102 MHS.

98. “Congress may have done”: Works, VII, 460.

99. Adams fell ill: AFC, IV, 224.

100. “all powerful [Peruvian] bark”: JA to Thomas McKean, October 15, 1781, AP, #104 MHS.

101. “wondrous virtue”: JA to M. Dumas, October 15, 1781, AP, #102 MHS.

102. This is always: Huxham, Essay on Fevers, 62-63.

103. typhus: editorial note, Greg L. Lint, AP, MHS.

104. “unwholesome damps”: AFC, IV, 225, n. 3.

105. his “fever”: JA to Edmund Jenings, April 28,1782, AP, #356, MHS.

106. on October 4: Works. VII, 465-66.

107. In reply, Franklin: Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 317.

108. In mid-October: Works, VII, 471-75.

109. “Don’t distress yourself”: AFC, IV, 249-51.

110. “Ah my dear John”: Ibid., 256.

111. “God willing”: Works, IX, 513.

112. “Oh, God!”: Richard Morris, Peacemakers, 251.

113. “the glorious news”: Works, VII, 481.

114 . “Cornwallization”: Ibid., 498.

115. “categorical answer”: Ibid., 515.

116. “The charge of vanity”: Ibid., 528.

117. “‘What dust we raise’”: Ibid., 527.

118. “Friesland is said to be”: Ibid., 539.

119. “Your humble servant”: AFC, IV, 300.

120. On Monday, April 22: Works, VII, 571.

121. “made an entertainment”: Ibid., 573-74.

122. “liveliest transports”: Nordholt, Dutch Republic and American Independence, 218.

123. “The resolution”: JA to Edmund Jenings, April 28,1782, AP, #356 MHS.

124. “If this had been”: AFC, IV, 338-39.

125. “I have rendered”: Ibid., 370.

126. “I must be an independent man”: Ibid., 337.

127. a letter to Edmund Jenings: JA to Edmund Jenings, September 27,1782, AP, #358, MHS.

128. If they avoid: Robert Livingston to JA, March 5, 1782, AP, #356, MHS.

129. Heer Adams: Pennsylvania Journal, Sept. 14, 1782.

130. a treaty of commerce: AFC, V, 15.

131. “say nothing of this”: Works, VII, 641.

132. “troublesome business”: AFC, V, 15.

133. he started for Paris: DFA, III, 29, 30.

134. Rubens altarpiece at Antwerp: Ibid., 31.

135. While we were viewing: Ibid., 35-36.

136. “[Mr. Adams] is much pleased”: Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,”

137. William and Mary Quarterly, XX, Jan. 1963.

138. I cannot express: Works, VII, 652-54.

139. After what Franklin: Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,” William and Mary Quarterly, XX, Jan., 1963.

140. “with much persuasion”: Ibid.

141. His base jealousy: JA to Edmund Jenings, July 20, 1782, AP, #107, MHS.

142. to “speak or hear”: AFC, V, 28.

143. to praise Jay: DFA, III, 38.

144. “In the air”: Ibid., 45.

145. “took it amiss”: Ibid., 47.

146. “hear an expostulation?”: Ibid., 47, n. 2.

147. “The Comte”: Ibid., 49.

148. “French gentlemen”: Ibid., 50.

149. included with a report: Ibid., 50, n. 2.

150. “What powers?”: Ibid., 61.

151. France does not feel obliged: Morris, The Peacemakers, 330.

152. “vast deal”: Ibid., 75.

153. “carrying away any Negroes”: Ibid., 82.

154. Gentlemen, is there: Ibid., 79.

155. “a pretty good meal”: Klingelhofer, “Matthew Ridley’s Diary,” William and Mary Quarterly, XX, Jan., 1963, 132.

156. performed “nobly”: DFA, III, 81.

157. “I am at a loss”: Smyth, ed., Writings of Benjamin Franklin, VIII, 641.

158. “English buy peace”: Morris, The Peacemakers, 383.

159. “Sharp fiery humors”: AFC, V, 170.

160. “My friend, you and I”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 349.

161. “You may depend”: AFC, V, 60.

6. ABIGAIL IN PARIS

1. terrified of the sea: AFC, V, 271.

2. “I know not”: Ibid., 277.

3. Reverend William Smith, had died: Ibid., 253.

4. “I cannot consent”: Ibid, 271.

5. “fine majestic girl”: Ibid., 57.

6. She has stateliness: Ibid., 7.

7. “If he is steady”: Ibid., 62.

8. “dissipation”: EDJA, 23 n. 50.

9. Daughter!: JA to AA, April 8,1783, Shaw Family Papers, LOC.

10. “courting mothers”: AFC, V, 74-75.

11. “attachment”: Ibid., 260.

12. I recollect the untitled: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, I, 169.

13. “parade and nonsense”: AFC, V, 259.

14. Her health was poor: Ibid., 270.

15. even by balloon: Ibid., 236.

16. “The lady comes”: Ibid., 256.

17. You invite me: Ibid., 303.

18. “I can scarcely think it”: Ibid., 302.

19. “Sir, you and the”: Ibid., 317.

20. by two servants: Ibid., 305, n. 4.

21. named Phoebe: Ibid., 303.

22. Phoebe is to be allowed: Ibid., 345.

23. “But let no”: Ibid., 331.

24. “not of unmeaning complimenters”: DJA, III, 154.

25. “I thanked him for his politeness”: AFC, V, 398.

26. the Active: DJA, III, 155.

27. “We crawled”: AFC, V, 359.

28. “We can only live”: Ibid., 361.

29. “as some gentlemen sat”: Ibid.

30. rheumatism: Ibid., 365.

31. “lazy, dirty”: Ibid., 364.

32. “make a bustle”: Ibid., 359.

33. she mastered the names: Ibid., 364.

34. “Great and marvelous”: Ibid.

35. reading on medicine: DJA, III, 158.

36. “haughty Scotchman”: AFC, V, 366.

37. One of the crew: DJA, III, 162.

38. “No matter where”: Ibid., 162.

39. “Man was made”: AFC, V, 365.

40. We set off from the vessel: Ibid., 368.

41. seventy-two miles: Ibid., 369.

42.Black Heath: Ibid., 370.

43. “as quiet as at any place”: Ibid., 373.

44. “Heaven give us”: Ibid., 399.

45. portrait done by Copley: DJA, III, 31.

46. “walk a vast deal”: Ibid., 40.

47. “Young Mr. Adams”: Ibid., 43.

48. “You can imagine”: AFC, VI, 32.

49. Everything around appeared: Butterfield et al., ed., Book of Abigail and John, 397-98.

50. “You know my dear sister”: AFC, VI, 17.

51.“I was chilled to the heart”: DJA, III, 153.

52.“The house, the garden”: Ibid., 171.

53.“I make a little America”: Shaw, Character of John Adams, 195.

54.“Why, my dear”: AFC, V, 434.

55.“delightful”: Ibid., 433.

56.“One [servant]”: Ibid., 441.

57.“business is to purchase”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 49.

58.“a sprat in a whale’s belly”: JA to Cotton Tufts, Dec. 15, 1784, AP, #363, MHS.

59.“We spend no evenings”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 50.

60.“The inquiry is not whether”: AFC, VI, 136.

61.“dancing here and there”: Ibid., V, 440.

62. “To be out of fashion”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 69.

63.“smelt it”: Ibid., 54.

64. “What idea, my dear madame”: AFC, V, 447.

65. a Paris orphanage: Ibid., VI, 57.

66. John Paul Jones: Ibid., 5.

67. “Less money”: Ibid, 6.

68. She entered the room: Ibid., V, 436-37.

69. “I have been here”: Ibid., 446.

70. Fancy, my dear Betsy: Ibid., 39.

71. The dresses: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 82.

72. “And oh!”: Ibid., 83.

73.They are easy: Ibid., 76.

74. Adrienne François de Noailles: AFC, VI, 15-16.

75. “You would have supposed”: Ibid., 16.

76.“I have often complained”: Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 34.

77. “I have got their profiles”: Ibid., 30.

78.“Aya, I had rather”: Ibid., V, 468.

79. “I shall always”: Ibid., VI, 102.

80. “May Heaven reward him”: 310 Ibid., V, 471.

81. “I wish I could give you”: Ibid., V, 465.

82.“Dined at Mr. Jefferson’s”: D. G. Allen, ed. DJQA, I, 216.

83.“eight or ten thousand”: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, II, 18.

84. “My new partner”: JA to Arthur Lee, Jan. 31,1785, AP, #364, MHS.

85. “He professes”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 68.

86. “perfect freedom and unreserve”: AFC, VI, 169.

87. “one of the choice ones”: Ibid., 119.

88. Martha had died: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 396.

89. “confined himself from the world”: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, II, 45.

90. “rode out”: Randolph, Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 63.

91. 90,000 bricks: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 287.

92. “You will find”: Ibid., 296.

93. “so excessive”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, III, 643.

94. Captain Jack Jouett: See Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 355-58.

95. “I ordered a carriage”: Mayo, ed. Jefferson Himself, 104.

96.thirty slaves: Ibid., 105.

97. George Nicholas called: Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 361.

98. “a wound in my spirit”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VI, 185.

99. “[I] have retired”: Ibid., 118.

100. “stupor of mind”: Ibid., 235.

101. “venom”: Ibid., 235.

102. He hates Franklin: Ibid., 241.

103. “Jefferson is an excellent hand”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, April 25,1785, AP, #107, MHS.

104. “You can scarcely”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VII, 393.

105. “seasoning”: Ibid., VIII, 43.

106. he did not expect to live: AFC, V, 458.

107. “never buying anything”: Betts and Bear, eds., Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, 43. 1

108. fifty-nine bottles of Bordeaux: Bear and Stanton, eds. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, I, 564.

109. he turned to Adams: AFC, VI, 43.

110. “small laughing busts”: Bear and Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, I, 565. 1

111. Devoted to chess: Ellen Coolidge Correspondence, University of Virginia Special Collections.

112. “affecting sight”: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, II, 25.

113. “She is a sweet girl”: Ibid., 45.

114. Lucy, had died: Ibid.

115. “an excellent man”: AFC, VI, 78.

116. “If you were to examine him”: Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend, 6.

117. “The table is covered”: AFC, VI, 47.

118. “We see but little”: Ibid., 25.

119. “I feel very loath”: Ibid., 20.

120. You must know: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 78.

121. a Te Deum was sung: D. G. Allen, ed., DJQA, I, 242.

122. There are perhaps: Ibid., 239.

123. My father: Ibid., 256.

124. Elbridge Gerry: AFC, VI, 109.

125. “I shall find”: Ibid., 111.

126. He said that Lord Carmarthen: DJA, III, 176.

127. “I have not one”: Ibid.

128. “and such shall I live”: MHS, Warren-Adams Letters, II, 40.

129. “great thing”: DJA, III, 176.

130. “We journeyed”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 178.

131. “our meditation”: Ibid., 160.

132. The whole commerce: Peden, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia, 162, 139, 141, 143.

133. “The departure”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VI, 164.

7. LONDON

1. the greatest talker: JA to John Langdon, February 28, 1812, AP, #118, MHS.

2. If at times: JA to Elbridge Gerry, May 2, 1785, AP, #364, MHS.

3. as instructed: May 27, 1785, AP, #111, MHS.

4. audience with the King: JA to John Jay, May 29, 1785, AP, #111, MHS.

5. a brief speech before the King: Works, VIII, 255.

6. “I felt more”: Ibid., 257.

7 The circumstances: Ibid., 257.

8. I retreated: Ibid., 258.

9. “character”: AFC, VI, 17.

10. “I cannot bear”: Ibid., 187.

11. Handel’s Messiah: Ibid., 329.

12. “elegant but plain”: Ibid., 189.

13. “A very dress cap”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 101.

14 “Thus equipped”: Ibid.

15. “master of the human heart”: AFC, VI, 313.

16. Only think of the task: Ibid., 102-4.

17. “well shaped”: C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 104.

18. northeast corner: Memorandum of JA’s rental agreement for the house on Grosvenor Square, AP, June 19, 1785, MHS.

19. “We shall live”: AFC, VI, 205.

20. “tumult and hurry”: Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 88.

21. “sacrificed upon the gallows”: Ibid., 329.

22. Royal Bell Ringers: June 1785, AP, #364, MHS.

23. “learned pig”: AFC, VI, 331.

24. “enchanted palace”: Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, 92.

25. Sir William Herschel: A. A. Smith, Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, I, 84.

26. “The English may call”: AFC, VI, 213.

27. “not the pleasantest”: Ibid., 347.

28. “tasty”: Ibid., xiii.

29. “candor, probity”: Ibid., xiv. 344 “a good likeness”: Ibid., 216.

30. cut Adams’s salary: JA to William Tudor, Sept. 18, 1785, AP, #115, MHS.

31. “I am driven”: JA to Mercy Warren, May 24, 1785, AP, MHS.

32. she won four games: AA to Mrs. Cranch, April 6, 1786, in C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 135.

33. “Othello [played by John Kemble]”: AFC, VI, 366. 346 “a man must be of rock”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 548. 346 It would have: Ibid.

34. French dessert: AFC, VI, 264–65.

35. “But when writing”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 549.

36. There is a strong: JA to President Lee, Aug. 26, 1785, AP, #111, MHS.

37. “a new order of things”: JA to Matthew Robinson, March 4, 1786, AP, #113, MHS.

38 “They hate us”: JA to Charles Storer, May 22, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

39. “I had rather”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, July 15, 1785, AP, #107, MHS.

40. John Adams hanged: AFC, VI, 196.

41 “When Mr. Adams came in”: Ibid., I, 136.

42 “those sanctified hypocrites”: Berkin, Jonathan Sewall, 124. 350 a broken heart: Peabody, ed., John Adams, 134.

43. “We must not”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 61. 351 Portugal’s need: Ibid., 90.

44. sculptor Houdon: Boyd, ed., PTJ, VIII, 267, 302, 340, 577, 663. 353 It is long since: Ibid., IX, 285.

45. His Excellency appeared: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Feb. 8–27, 1786, AP, #367, MHS.

46. “aversion to have anything”: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, I, 95.

47. “They require”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XII, 193.

48. “This people”: Works, III, 393.

50. “their little journey”: AA to Cotton Tufts, April 8, 1786, AP, #367, MHS.

51. the longest time they had had: AA to Mrs. Cranch, in C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, II, 135–36.

52. Observations on Modern Gardening: Boyd, ed., PTJ, IX, 374. 358 “Four people”: Ibid., 370.

53. “I mounted”: DJA, III, 186.

54. “no pretension”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, IX, 371.

55. Venus and Bacchus unnecessary: DJA, III, 184.

56. “according to the custom”: Ibid., 185.

57. “There is nothing”: Ibid.

58. “kissed the ground”: AA to George Adams, Aug. 7, 1815, AP, #426, MHS.

59. “ground where liberty was fought for”: DJA, III, 185.

60. farm known as Leasowes: Boyd, ed., PTJ, IX, 371.

61. “the simplest and plainest”: DJA, III, 186.

62. You know the opinion: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XI, 94.

63. “He possesses”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Jan. 10, 1786, AP, #367, MHS. 362 “like to become your brother”: AA to JQA, Feb. 16, 1786, AP, #367, MHS.

64. “this unhappy connection”: AFC, VI, 486.

65. “I cannot, however”: AA to Mary Cranch, Feb. 10, 1788, AP, MHS. 363 “The young couple”: JA to James Warren, July 4, 1786, AP, MHS. 363 dreamed of Royall Tyler: AA to Mary Cranch, June 13, 1786, AP, MHS.

66. “Suppose you give”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 162.

67. “smell of the midnight lamp”: JA to JQA, April 2, 1786, AP, #367, MHS. 364 a “memorable change”: JA to Matthew Robinson, March 23, 1786, AP, MHS.

68. “Watchfulness over yourself”: AA to JQA, July 21, 1786, AP, #368, MHS. 365 “You have in your nature”: JA to Charles Adams, June 2, 1786, AP, #113, MHS.

69. “I flatter myself”: Lord Carmarthen to JA, Feb. 28, 1786, AP, #367, MHS. 366 “too long trifled”: JA to Cotton Tufts, May 26, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

70. “I will go”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 177.

71. “everyone fled”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Aug. 1, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

72 “miserable”: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, July 27–Aug. 22, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

73. “As this presents”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Aug. 1, 1786, AP, #368, MHS.

74. “Not a hill to be seen”: AA to Mrs. Cranch, in C. F. Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams,

II, 146.

75. “Don’t be alarmed”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 557.

76. proposed trade of her son: Ibid., 202.

77. “An unfortunate dislocation”: Ibid., 621.

78. Maria Cosway: See, generally, Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, II, chap. 5. AA and Cosways: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Jan. 22, 1786, AP, MHS.

79. “Head” and “Heart”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 443–53.

80. “tyranny of Britain”: AA to Mary Cranch, Feb. 25, 1787, AAS.

81. “Ignorant, restless”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 168.

82. he hoped the captured rebels: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XI, 174.

83. “a little rebellion”: Ibid.

84. “workhouse of nature”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, X, 447. 371 daughter had safely arrived: Ibid., II, 50.

85. “The tree of liberty”: Ibid., XII, 356.

86. “a fine boy”: AA to Lucy Cranch, April 26, 1787, American Antiquarian Society.

87. “I show her your picture”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 178.

88. “The old nurse”: Ibid.

89. “as rough as a little sailor”: Ibid., 183.

90. “Popularity”: JA to James Warren, Jan. 9, 1787, AP, MHS.

91. “philosophic solitude”: JA to AA, Dec. 25, 1786, AP, #369, MHS. 374 “He is so much swallowed”: AA to JQA, Nov. 22, 1786, AP, #369, MHS.

92. “setting up a king”: AA to JQA, March 20, 1787, AP, #369, MHS. 374 A Defence of the Constitutions: See, generally, Works, IV–VI.

93. “I have read”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XI, 177.

94. “a powerful engine”: Ibid., 402.

95. “secret design”: Rutland, ed., Papers of James Madison, X, 44. 379 “What think you”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 210. 379 “things” in the Constitution: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XII, 350.

96. “You are afraid”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 213. 380 The public mind: Works, VIII, 467.

97. “and how we say at sea”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 214.

98. “the Vassall-Borland place”: AA to Mary Cranch, Oct. 1787, American Antiquarian Society.

99. William had died: AA to Mary Cranch, Feb. 10, 1788, American Antiquarian Society.

100. Esther Field: Ibid.

101. emergency trip: AA to Cotton Tufts, Feb. 20, 1788, AP, #371, MHS.

102. “I have considered”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XII, 553.

103. “in the midst of the bustle”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 226.

104. By his opinions: Nabby to JQA, Feb. 10, 1788, AP, #371, MHS.

8. HEIR APPARENT

1. Boston lighthouse: Two-Hundredth Anniversary of Boston Light, 70–71.

2. “My coach”: John Hancock to JA, May 7, 1788, AP, MHS.

3. “The bells in the several churches”: Massachusetts Centinel, June 18, 1788.

4. The oldest has given: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, July 16, 1788, AP, MHS.

5. “Busy unpacking”: DJQA, II, 420.

6. “Parson Wibird”: Ibid., 419.

7. “In height and breadth”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, July 7, 1788, AP, MHS.

8. “It is not large”: Works, IX, 557.

9. Brissot de Warville: Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788, 102.

10. “no Paris lawyer”: La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, François. Travels Through the United States of North America, I, 407–8.

11. “And who can object”: Massachusetts Centinel, June 25, 1788.

12. Benjamin Rush wrote: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 469.

13. “I think of my poor”: AA to Mary Cranch, Dec. 15, 1788, AP, MHS.

14. “The new government”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 234.

15. “Mr. A, to a sound understanding”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, V, 231.

16. Merit must be: Massachusetts Centinel, April 15, 1789. 394 “Freedom of the City”: Ibid., May 2, 1789.

17. 4 million by 1789: See population figures in New York Daily Gazette, July 9, 1789.

18. Virginia was still: See population figures ibid.

19. American Indians: See, Purvis, Revolutionary America, 1763–1800, 24.

20. “Aristotle and Plato”: JA to Arthur Lee, July 18, 1788, Princeton University.

21. “people secretly wish”: Abbot, ed., PGW, II, 59–60.

22. “fate of this government”: JA to William Tudor, May 9, 1789, Tudor Papers, MHS.

23. nearly 700,000 men, women: See population figures in New York Daily Gazette, July 9, 1789.

24. fully 500,000: See population figures ibid.

25. “Patriotism is ridiculed”: MHS, Warren-Adams Letters, II, 249.

26. “in a land of strangers”: Abigail Adams Smith to AA, Sept. 7, 1788, AP, MHS.

27. “I find men and manners”: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, Nov. 11, 1788, AP, MHS.

28. “Not wholly without experience”: Works, VIII, 487.

29. “not quite adapted”: JA to JQA, July 9, 1789, AP, MHS.

30. recompense for office holders: Works, IX, 533.

31. “May Heaven assist me”: Freeman, George Washington. Vol. VI, 155.

32. Federal Hall: See, generally, Christman, First Federal Congress, 104–10.

33. “I wish the business”: Ibid., 108.

34. “cheerfully and readily”: Works, VIII, 486.

35. But if from inexperience: Ibid., 487.

36. “Gentlemen, I feel”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 2.

37. “I find, sir”: Ibid., 3.

38. Richard Henry Lee offered: Ibid., 7.

39. “Many persons in the crowd”: Gazette of the United States, April 25, 1789.

40. “Long live George Washington”: New York Gazette, May 1, 1789.

41. With the crowd in raptures: Gazette of the United States, May 2, 1789.

42. “a confidence as pure”: O’Dwyer, “A French Diplomat’s View of Congress, 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, July 1964.

43. “with great cordiality”: JA to AA, May 1, 1789, AP, MHS.

44. “No man on earth”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 238.

45. There were presidents of fire companies: Maclay, Journal of William McClay, 23.

46. how to address Washington: Works, VIII, 513.

47. The Contrast: Tyler, The Contrast, 20.

48. “The more simple”: Hobson, ed., Papers of James Madison, XII, 155.

49. “For forty minutes”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 26.

50. “I cannot help thinking”: Ibid., 29.

51. “His Rotundity”: Ibid.

52. “Is not my election”: Old Family Letters, 36.

53. “corruption of ambition”: JA to William Tudor, June 14, 1789, AP, #115, MHS.

54. “anything at any rate”: JA to AA, May 14, 1789, AP, MHS.

55. Hume, Johnson: JA to AA, May 24, 1789, AP, MHS.

56. “My sincere thanks”: JA to AA, May 19, 1789, AP, MHS.

57. “dear friend”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, I, 522–23.

58. “the most superlatively”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XV, 315.

59. preserve the laws: Old Family Letters, 37.

60. “I am a mortal”: Ibid., 60.

61. I deny an “attachment”: Ibid.

62. “A hundred years hence”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, I, 522.

63. “familiar and unaffected”: Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 143.

64. “anxious hours”: AA to JA, May 30, 1789, AP, MHS.

65. “What shall I do”: JA to Cotton Tufts, June 12, 1789, AP, MHS.

66. Charles’s difficulties: Harvard Archives, Faculty Records, 5: 272; 6: 29–30.

67. “We are all very happy”: JA to Cotton Tufts, June 28, 1789, AP, MHS.

68. “We are delightfully situated”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 28, 1789, AP, MHS.

69. “At Richmond Hill”: AA to Mary Cranch, Aug. 9, 1789, AP, MHS.

70. “She is plain in dress”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 28, 1789, AP, MHS.

71. He is polite: AA to Mary Cranch, Jan. 5, 1790, AP, MHS.

72. “busy indeed”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 112.

73. “advantages from pride”: John Trumbull to JA, Feb. 6, 1790, AP, #373, MHS.

74. “You talk of my enemies”: JA to John Trumbull, March 9, 1790, AP, #115, MHS.

75. Public business, my son: JA to Thomas Boylston Adams, Sept. 2, 1789, AP, MHS.

76. young Charles to clerk: Hecht, Odd Destiny, 176.

77. dripping head: New York Daily Gazette, Sept. 23, 1789.

78. a complete revolution: New York Daily Gazette, Sept. 23, 1789.

79. France seems travailing: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 151.

80. “It seemed impossible”: Gardner, ed., Thomas Jefferson, 210.

81. “The essence of the whole”: Old Family Letters, 55.

82. “Jefferson is here”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 3, 1790, AP, MHS.

83. It rests now with ourselves: Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 247.

84. “Discourses on Davila”: See Works, VI, 227–403.

85. “division of sentiments”: JA to William Smith, May 20, 1790, AP, MHS.

86. Washington was suddenly taken so ill: See, generally, Gazette of the United States, May 8 and May 19, 1790.

87. “every eye full of tears”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 259.

88. “At this early day”: AA to Mary Cranch, May 30, 1790, AP, MHS.

89. “I hate to complain”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 21, 1790, AP, MHS.

90. “most adjacent”: Hobson, ed., Papers of James Madison, XII, 375.

91. “John Adams has neither judgment”: Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, 278.

92. New Yorkers were outraged: See New York Journal and Patriotic Register, July 2, July 9, July 20, 1790; New York Daily Gazette, July 3, 1790.

93. “the dazzling Mrs. Bingham”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, Dec. 26, 1790, AP, MHS.

94. “fine ladies show”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Feb. 6, 1791, AP, MHS.

95. “this young man”: AA to JA, Jan. 5, 1794, AP, MHS.

96. “We all preach patience”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 12, 1791, AP, MHS.

97. her greater worry: AA to Mary Cranch, Dec. 12, 1790, AP, MHS.

98. “the political heresies”: Boyd, ed., PTJ, XX, 290.

99. “mortified”: Ibid., 292.

100. Adams answered Jefferson: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 247–50.

101. “Indeed, it was impossible”: Ibid., 250–52.

103. “a clever, sober”: AA to Mary Cranch, Dec. 18, 1791, AP, MHS.

104. “I firmly believe”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 20, 1792, AP, MHS.

105. “not only a monarchist”: J. C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton, 317.

106. “pretenders to profound knowledge”: Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 459.

107. “mutual forebearances”: Catanzariti, ed., PTJ, XXIV, 317.

108. “North and South”: Ibid., XXIII, 538–39.

109. “a real friend”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XII, 568.

110. “I am persuaded”: Ibid., 342.

111. 6,000 to 7000 people: Massachusetts Centinel, Oct. 3, 1792.

112. “too dreadful to relate”: Abigail Adams Smith to AA, Sept. 13, 1792, AP, MHS.

113. a stinging confidential reply: Catanzariti, ed., PTJ, XXV, 14.

114. “he had been long”: JA to AA, Nov. 24, 1792, AP, MHS.

115. “I am with all the ardor”: JA to AA, Jan. 27, 1793, AP, MHS.

116. “You apologize for the length”: JA to AA, Feb. 4, 1794, AP, MHS.

117. “newspaper warfare”: AA to JA, Dec. 23, 1792, AP, MHS.

118. “hell hounds”: JA to AA, Jan. 24, 1793, AP, MHS.

119. “His skin is thinner”: JA to AA, Jan. 31, 1793, AP, MHS.

120. “For God’s sake”: Mason, ed., Papers of James Madison, XV, 43.

121. “polite enough to accompany”: JA to AA, Feb. 3, 1793, AP, MHS.

122. “the whole man”: Ibid.

123. “blind spirit of party”: JA to AA, Dec. 28, 1792, AP, MHS.

124. “Danton, Robespierre”: JA to AA, Jan. 14, 1793, AP, MHS.

125. “The whole drama”: JA to AA, Feb. 27, 1793, AP, MHS.

126. “his head was severed”: New York Daily Gazette, April 3, 1789.

127. Mankind are now enlightened: New York Journal and Patriotic Register, April 6, 1793.

128. “All the old spirit”: Catanzariti, ed., PTJ, XXV, 661.

129. “pretty short of cash”: Thomas Adams to JA, Oct. 9, 1793, AP, MHS.

130. “Would to Heaven”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, Feb. 3, 1794, AP, MHS.

131. “I go to the Senate”: JA to AA, Jan. 21, 1794, AP, MHS.

132. “My country in its wisdom”: JA to AA, Dec. 19, 1793, AP, MHS.

133. “But his want of candor”: JA to AA, Dec. 26, 1793, AP, MHS.

134. “Jefferson went off”: JA to AA, Jan. 6, 1794, AP, MHS.

135. Jefferson thinks he shall: JA to JQA, Jan. 3, 1793, AP, MHS.

136. “din of politics”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 253–54.

137. “find a way to reconcile”: Ibid., 255.

138. “tranquility becomes daily”: Ibid., 257.

139. This has injured: Ibid., 258.

140. “paper transactions”: Ibid., 254.

141. “The rights of one generation”: Ibid., 255.

142. Reasoning has been all lost: Ibid., 259.

143. “My health is entirely”: Stagg, ed., Papers of James Madison, XVI, I.

144. “nail manufactory”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 258.

145. “Move or die”: JA to Charles Adams, Feb. 7, 1795, AP, MHS.

146. red, watery eyes: Adams’s eye troubles through much of his life may have been caused by a disease known as thyrotoxicosis. See John Ferling and Lewis E. Braverman, “John Adams’s Health Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, Jan. 1998.

147. “painful to the vanity”: JA to JQA, April 26, 1795, AP, MHS.

148. “Much more depends”: JA to JQA, April 3, 1794, AP, MHS.

149. “How the present age”: JA to Charles Adams, Jan. 9, 1794, AP, MHS.

150. “I know not what”: JA to AA, Jan. 21, 1794, AP, MHS.

151. “My aged and venerable mother”: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, Jan. 7, 1794, AP, MHS.

152. “I have often thought”: JA to AA, May 19, 1794, AP, MHS.

153. “superior to all sense”: Twining, Travels in America a Hundred Years Ago, 37–39.

154. “Were I to declare”: Charles Adams to JA, March 12, 1794, AP, MHS.

155. “After all the hairbreadth”: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Oct. 26, 1795, AP, MHS.

156. “I am heir apparent”: JA to AA, Jan. 20, 1796, AP, MHS.

157. “I will be second”: AA to JA, Jan. 21, 1796, AP, MHS.

158. “I am weary”: JA to AA, Feb. 10, 1796, AP, MHS.

159. “You know what is before you”: AA to JA, Feb. 20, 1796, AP, MHS.

160. “I have looked into myself”: JA to AA, March 1, 1796, AP, MHS.

161. “If I were near”: JA to AA, March 11, 1796, AP, MHS.

162. “teeth and . . . nails”: Ibid.

163. “He detained me there”: JA to AA, March 25, 1796, AP, MHS.

164. “and good humor”: JA to AA, May 5, 1796, AP, MHS.

165. “This day my new barn”: DJA, III, 227.

166. “a soft, fine”: Ibid., 228.

167. “mosquitoes numerous”: Ibid., 238.

168. “Of all the summers”: Ibid., 238.

169. “venomous as Macbeth’s”: AA to TA, Aug. 16, 1796, AP, MHS.

170. an alarm: Aurora, Oct. 29, 1796.

171. “Poor Jefferson”: JA to JQA, Nov. 11, 1796, AP, MHS.

172. “as great a hypocrite”: Smith, John Adams, II, 908.

173. “Take his character”: AA to JA, Nov. 8, 1796, AP, MHS.

177. “The old man”: Works, I, 495.

178. “he had always been”: Lipscomb, ed.,Writings of Thomas Jefferson, IX, 351.

179. “open for your perusal”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 262.

180. The letter was never sent: Ibid., n. 254.

9. OLD OAK

1. “like marks of approbation”: Boston Gazette, March 16, 1797.

2. “the most affecting”: JA to AA, March 17, 1797, AP, MHS.

3. “simple but elegant”: JA to AA, March 5, 1797, AP, MHS.

4. Quincy coat of arms: JA to AA, Feb. 2, 1797. AP, MHS

5. “They shall have a republican”: JA to AA, Jan. 31, 1797. AP, MHS

6. “I have been so strangely”: JA to AA, March 9, 1797. AP, MHS

7. Adams energetically repeating: Washington (D.C.) Gazette, March 8–11, 1797.

8. “A solemn scene”: JA to AA, March 5, 1797. AP, MHS

9. “Thus ended”: Boston Gazette, March 16, 1797.

10. “Republican plainness”: Aurora, March 20, 1797.

11. It is universally admitted: March 15, 1797.

12. “an old fielder”: JA to AA, Jan. 16, 1797. AP, MHS

13. a ship ballasted with iron: Elbridge Gerry to AA, Jan. 7, 1797. AP, MHS

14. “I will not”: Cotton Tufts to JA, Jan. 23, 1797. AP, MHS

15. “I congratulate you”: Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams. IV, 408

16. “between the rising”: William and Mary Quarterly

17. Andrew Brown fire: Gazette of the United States, Jan. 30, 1797.

18. “I am not alarmed”: JA to Abigail Adams Smith, Feb. 21, 1797. AP, MHS

19. “The die is cast”: JA to AA, Feb. 9, 1797. AP, MHS

20. “Pickering and all his colleagues”: Works. VIII, 523.

21. “I may say”: JA to Tristram Dalton, Jan. 19, 1797. AP, MHS

22. “which is and shall be”: JA to Elbridge Gerry, Feb. 20, 1797. AP,#117,MHS.

23. “speak with pleasure”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 785.

24. “entered immediately”: “The Anas,” Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. I, 414.

25. “first wish of his heart”: Ibid

26. certain Madison would not accept: Ibid

27. “eminent character”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty. 297.

28. “steer impartially”: “The Anas,” Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. I, 415.

29. “I give it as my decided opinion”: Works, VIII, 530.

30. “The President”: Stagg, ed., Papers of James Madison, XVI, 448.

31. “He is as he was”: JA to AA, March 13, 1797. AP, MHS.

32. “My entrance into office”: JA to JQA, March 31, 1797, AP, MHS.

33. “I have a great cold”: JA to AA, March 13, 1797, AP, MHS.

34. “From the situation”: JA to AA, March 17, 1797. AP, MHS.

35. The furniture: JA to AA, March 22, 1797. AP, MHS.

36. “very dry, dull”: JA to AA, April 13, 1797. AP, MHS.

37. “certain ex-Secretary”: Aurora, April 15, 1797.

38. mr pinnckney Porcupine’s Gazette, April 4, 1797.

39. It is manifestly: April 25, 1797.

40. “I must entreat you”: JA to AA, April 11, 1797. AP, MHS.

41. “The times are critical”: JA to AA, April 6, 1797. AP, MHS.

42. “My pen runs riot”: AA to JA, Jan. 29, 1797. AP, MHS.

43. “Beware that spare Cassius”: AA to JA, Jan. 28, 1797, AP, MHS.

44. James Prince: AA to JA, Feb. 13, 1797, AP, MHS.

45. “matrimonial prospects”: JQA to AA, Feb. 18, 1797, AP, MHS.

46. “a man wholly devoid”: AA to JA, Jan. 28, 1797, AP, MHS.

47. “The good old lady”: AA to JA, April 17, 1797, AP, MHS.

48. “My reflections”: AA to Mary Cranch, May 16, 1797, AP, MHS.

49. I quitted my own carriage: AA to Mary Cranch, May 16, 1797, AP, MHS.

50. “inflicted a wound”: Works, IX, 114-15.

51. “emblems of defense”: Columbian Centinel, May 24, 1797.

52. It may be justly called: Gazette of the United States, May 20, 1797.

53. “placed matters upon their true ground”: Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of George Washington, XXXV, 456.

54. “The President by Three Votes”: Aurora, May 19, 1797.

55. “he is a plain man”: Works, VIII, 549.

56. “The task of the President”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 23, 1797, AP, MHS.

57. “such close application”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 96.

58. The day is past: Ibid., 91.

59. “Mrs. Tufts”: Ibid., 90.

60. “closet politician”: William Plummer, Memorandum, 454.

61. “The President really suffers”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams. 98.

62. “steady and resolute”: William and Mary Quarterly,

63. “The hot weather”: AA to Mary Cranch, July 19, 1797, AP, MHS.

64. “absconded”: Aurora, July 28, 1797.

65. “I have now the happiness”: JQA and Louisa Catherine Adams to AA and JA, July 28, 1797, AP, MHS.

66. “I cannot leave her”: AA to Mary Cranch, Oct. 22, 1797, AP, MHS.

67. “My real crime”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton. XXI, 122.

68. “Alas, alas”: AA to Thomas Adams, Jan. 3, 1798, AP, MHS.

69. “We are yet all”: AA to William Smith, Feb. 22, 1798, AP, MHS.

70. “It is an undoubted”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton. XXI, 342.

71. “you do not speak to the point”: DeConde, Quasi-War, 49.

72. “insane”: Mattern, ed., Papers of James Madison, XVII, 99.

73. “Beds of roses”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 20, 1798, AP, MHS.

74. “He has no ambition”: AA to Mary Cranch, March 27, 1798, AP, MHS.

75. “Gallatin ... stood to propose”: Walters, Albert Gallatin, 106.

76. “struck dumb”: AA to Cotton Tufts, May 25, 1798, AP, MHS.

77. “unhinged”: Aurora, May ,23 .1798.

78. “malice and falsehood”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 21, 1798, AP, MHS.

79. “Such lies”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 154.

80. “In short, we are now”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 28, 1798, AP, MHS.

81. “The theater”: AA to Thomas Adams, May 1, 1798, AP, MHS.

82. “reign of witches”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, 382.

83. “Politics and party hatreds”: Betts and Bear, Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. 162.

84. “he falls away”: AA to Mary Cranch, May 20, 1798, AP, MHS.

85. “I dare not say”: AA to Cotton Tufts, June 8, 1798, AP, MHS.

86. “I think sometimes”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams. 178.

87. “Poor wretches”: ibid., 190.

88. Can it be possible: Ibid., 192.

89. “among the wolves”: Mary Cranch to AA, June 22, 1798, AP, MHS.

90. “I will never send”: R. A. Brown, Presidency of John Adams, 57.

91. “This city”: AA to JQA, June 12, 1798, AP, MHS.

92. “Why, when we have”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 9, 1798, AP, MHS.

93. “the weather so hot”: AA to Mary Cranch, June 15, 1798, AP, MHS.

94. “I wish the laws”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 179.

95. “It was one of those strokes”: AA to Mary Cranch, July 9, 1798, AP, MHS.

96. “I meant to have it”: AA to Mary Cranch, April 28, 1798, AP, MHS.

97. “The illness”: Abigail Adams Smith to JQA, Sept. 28, 1798, AP, MHS.

98. “the most gloomy’’: Works, VIII, 613.

99. “and mine in consequence”: Ibid., 601.

100. lighthouse at Cape Hatteras:Oliver Wolcott to JA, Sept. 21, 1798, AP, #931, MHS.

101. $5,000,000: JA to Oliver Wolcott, Oct. 1, 1798, AP, #931. MHS.

102. “I have supposed”: James McHenry to JA, Sept. 3, 1798, AP, #931. MHS.

103. “Wooden walls”: JA to Boston Marine Society, Sept. 7, 1798, AP, #931, MHS.

104. “The arrangement”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXI, 535.

105. “Do not, I pray”: Ibid., XXII, 176.

106. letter to Oliver Wolcott: JA to Oliver Wolcott, Sept. 24, 1798, AP, #931, MHS.

107. “dying bed”: AA to JQA, Nov. 15, 1798 AP, MHS.

108. “The best skill”: Aurora, Sept. 6, 1798.

109. “I have not enjoyed”: AA to JQA, Dec. 2, 1798, AP, MHS.

110. “He is not at peace”: AA to JQA, Nov. 15, 1798, AP, MHS.

10. STATESMAN

1. “Our horses”: JA to AA, Nov. 14, 1798, AP, MHS.

2. “We glided along”: JA to AA, Nov. 15, 1798, AP, MHS.

3. “fretful nor peevish”: JA to AA, Nov. 13, 1798, AP, MHS.

4. “Nelson’s victory”: JA to AA, Nov. 13, 1798, AP, MHS.

5. “Almost the whole”: Aurora, Nov. 12, 1798.

6. received Logan: Works, IX, 244.

7. “But I’ll do no such thing”: DeConde, Quasi-War, 166

8. “I had no reason”: Works., IX, 244.

9. “We are friends”: Works, I, 532.

10. “This you perceive”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXII, 389.

11. “The man is stark mad”: DeConde, Quasi-War, .171.

12. “That man would ... become”: Ibid., 97.

13. Joseph Bunel: Ibid., 97.

14. “with the greatest part”: Ibid., 135.

15. “Toussaint’s clause”: Ibid., 136.

16. “good health and spirits”: Aurora, Nov. 12, 1798.

17. “If you come”: JA to AA, Dec. 4, 1798, AP, MHS.

18. “A peck of troubles”: JA to AA, Dec. 13, 1798, AP, MHS.

19. “warm opposition”: JA to AA, Jan. 5, 1799, AP, MHS.

20. “My daughter and son”: JA to AA, Dec. 17, 1798, AP, MHS.

21. “I am old”: JA to AA, Dec. 25, 1798, AP, MHS.

22. “natural right”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, 405.

23. “Firmness on our part”: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. X, 94.

24. “We may expect”: Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. VII, 349.

25. “The circle of our nearest”: Betts and Bear, Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. 170.

26. “[Adams] thought Hamilton”: “Meeting of March 26, 1799 with John Adams.” Papers of Elbridge Gerry, LOC.

27. “I write to you nothing”: JA to AA, Dec. 25, 1798, AP, MHS.

28. “Thomas is my delight”: JA to AA, Jan. 25, 1799, AP, MHS.

29. February 18, 1799: DeConde, Quasi-War, 178.

30. “honor of the country”: Twohig, ed., PGW, III, 389.

31. “I beg you”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton. XXII, 500.

32. “event of events”: Mattern, ed., Papers of James Madison. XVII, 233.

33. “hoping that his friends”: Ibid., 244.

34. “fair applause”: Aurora, Feb. 27, 1799.

35. “This was pretty saucy”: AA to JA, Feb. 27, 1799, AP, MHS.

36. “I wish all other officers”: Works, XVII, 636.

37. Nor do I think: Ibid., 651.

38. “The public sentiment”: Ibid., 637-38.

39. “It always gives me pain”: Ibid., 662.

40. “genius in the command”: Ibid., 662.

41. “Genius in a general”: Ibid.

42. “It is far below”: Ibid., IX, IO.

43. “considerable difference”: Ibid., 20.

44. “that artful designing”: Ibid., 28.

45. “I have only one favor”: Ibid., 34.

46. “I pitied her”: JA to AA, Oct. 12, 1799, AP, MHS.

47. “I renounce him”: JA to AA, Oct. 12, 1799, AP, MHS.

48. “Any calamity”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 211.

49. “loaded with sorrow”: JA to AA, Oct. 12, 1799, AP, MHS.

50. “His eloquence and vehemence”: Works, IX, 255.

51. “The President has resolved”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXIII, 545.

52. “It has been received”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 220.

53. “brightest, best and most peaceful” Ibid., 218.

54. “I have heard of” Ibid., 215.

54. “Wise and judicious”: Ibid., 229.

55. “I congratulate you”: JA to Cotton Tufts, Jan. 1, 1800, AP, MHS.

56. “Electioneering”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 217.

57. “in his private life”: Walt Brown, John Adams and the American Press, 126.

58. “Such papers cannot”: Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, 470.

59. “hate each other”: Aurora, March 6, 1800.

60. “I know it”: Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 555.

61. “You cannot, sir” : Ibid., 564.

62. “copies of extracts”: Ibid., XXIV, 487.

63. “The issue of this investigation”: Works, I, 572.

64. “as luxuriant”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 250.

65. nearly eighty years: Waring, Report of the Social Statistics of Cities, 27.

66. “I like the seat”: JA to AA, June 13, 1800, AP, MHS.

67. “Oh! That I could”: JA to AA, June 13, 1800, AP, MHS.

68. “most detestable”: Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 325.

69. “I do declare”: JA to William Tudor, Dec. 13, 1800, AP, #399, MHS.

70. “menaces”: Aurora, March 29, 1800.

71. “My countrymen!”: Ibid.

72. “without being attended”: AA to Thomas Adams, Aug. 15, 1800, AP, MHS.

73. Bred in the old school: Washington Federalist, Oct. 7, 1800.

74. “I cannot account”: Cullen, ed., Papers of John Marshall, IV, 240.

75. ... the government: Ibid., 256.

76. “The whole man”: AA to JA, Sept. 1, 1800, AP, MHS.

77. “But all is lost”: AA to William Smith, Sept. 6, 1800, AP, MHS.

78. “I am glad you are”: Thomas Adams to AA, Oct. 19, 1800, AP, MHS.

79. A Letter from Alexander Hamilton: See Syrett, ed., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, XXV, 169–234.

80. “But woods are all”: AA to Abigail Adams Smith, Nov. 21, 1800, AP, MHS.

81. “very dirtiest hole”: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 257.

82. “Two of our hardy”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Nov. 28, 1800, AP, MHS.

83. “The lower class of whites”: Ibid.

84. His constitution: Stewart Mitchell, New Letters of Abigail Adams, 261.

85. “[I] would to God”: AA to Sarah Smith Adams, Dec. 8, 1800, AP, MHS.

86. “My little bark”: JA to Thomas Adams, Dec. 17, 1800, AP, MHS.

87. “For myself and family”: AA to Thomas Adams, Dec. 13, 1800, AP, MHS.

88. “I lose my sleep”: AA to Cotton Tufts, Jan. 15, 1800, AP, MHS.

89. “How mighty”: Works, IX, 577.

90. “carried his eggs”: JA to William Tudor, Dec. 13, 1800, #399, MHS.

91. undated account: Notes of Conversation Between AA and Thomas Jefferson, January, 1801. Note handwritten comment: “This conversation must have taken place in last days of January,1801 . CSA,” AP, #400, MHS.

92. “made me a visit”: AA to Thomas Adams, Feb. 3, 1801, AP, MHS.

93. “heavy heart”: AA to JQA, Jan. 29, 1801, AP, MHS.

94. “The President”: AA to JQA, Jan. 29, 1801, AP, MHS.

95. “farmer John of Stoneyfield”: JA to William Tudor, Jan, 20, 1801, AP, #400, MHS.

96. “The fire for some time”: Washington Federalist, Jan. 21, 1801.

97. “Who shall I nominate now?”: J. E. Smith, John Marshall, 14.

98. “The crisis is momentous”: Washington Federalist, Feb. 12, 1801.

99. “When the election”: Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, IX, 297.

100. “The Revolution of 1776”: Aurora, Feb. 20, 1801.

101. “Sensible, moderate men”: Massachusetts Spy, March 18, 1801.

102. “Duke of Braintree”: Aurora, March 11, 1801.

103. The new navy: Hagan, This People’s Navy, 39, 43.

104. “I desire no other”: R.A. brown, Presidency of John Adams, 174.

11. REJOICE EVER MORE

1. “The only question”: JA to Cotton Tufts, Dec. 26, 1801, AP, MHS.

2. “a life of journeys”: JA to Colonel Joseph Ward, Feb. 4, 1801, AP, #120, MHS.

3. “The day is far spent”: MHS, Warren-Adams Letters, II, 344.

4. “No more elective office”: AA to JA, Jan. 25, 1801, AP, MHS.

5. “so old fashioned”: Works, IX, 582.

6. Massachusetts legislature: Works, I, 601.

7. been a shoemaker: JA to Thomas Adams, Sept. 9, 1801, AP, MHS.

8. “this cheerful mortal”: JA to Francis van der Kemp, Feb. 23, 1815, AP, MHS.

9. “I have commenced”: AA to William Smith, May 3, 1801, AP, MHS.

10. “from the window”: AA to Catherine Johnson, May 8, 1801, AP, MHS.

11. “Your father”: AA to Thomas Adams, June 12, 1801, AP, MHS.

12. “Men are weak”: JA to William Cranch, May 23, 1801, AP, MHS.

13. “how much wall”: JA to Thomas Adams, June 29, 1801, AP, MHS.

14. “Everything I read”: JA to Thomas Adams, July 11, 1801, AP, MHS.

15. “very strong things”: Ibid.

16. The only misfortune: Ibid.

17. “I pray God”: AA to Thomas Adams, July 5, 1801, AP, MHS.

18. “I am sure your brother”: AA to Thomas Adams, July 12, 1801, AP, MHS.

19. “a profession he never loved”: AA to Thomas Adams, July 5, 1801, AP, MHS.

20. “Her health”: JQA to JA, Sept. 4, 1801, AP, MHS.

21. I hope you will consider: JA to JQA, Sept. 12, 1801, AP, MHS.

22. “sort of fatherly look”: Thomas Adams to AA, Sept. 20, 1801. , AP, MHS.

23. “He has no propensity”: Ibid.

24. “very ill”: JQA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Sept. 23, 1801, AP, MHS.

25. Quincy!: “Adventures of a Nobody,” AP, #269, MHS.

26. “Her frame is so slender”: AA to Thomas Adams, Dec. 27, 1801, AP, MHS.

27. “weight of worry”: Ibid.

28. “I am your man”: Thomas Adams to JQA, Dec. 7, 1801, AP, MHS.

29. Bird, Savage: AA to Thomas Adams, April 26, 1803, AP, MHS.

30. selling his house: AA to Thomas Adams, May 8, 1803, AP, MHS.

31. release from jail: Malone, Jefferson the President, 35.

32. “cherished and warmed”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 271.

33. Sally Hemings: See Malone, Jefferson the President, 206–23; Lewis and Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

34. Meriwether Lewis: Malone, Jefferson the President, 210.

35. Federalist press: See New York Evening Post, Sept. 2, 7, 10, 13, 1802; Boston Gazette, Sept. 16, 1802; Gazette of the United States, Sept. 22, 1802; Columbian Cen-tinel, Oct. 9, 1802.

36. “decidedly good looking”: Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals, 23.

37. “very handsome”: Ibid.

38. Jefferson paternity of Hemings children: The results of a DNA study released in November 1998, together with other available evidence, indicate a high probability that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’s children, Eas-ton Hemings, and was most likely the father of all her children. See Eugene A. Foster, et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” Nature, November 15, 1998; also, “Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, January 2000.

39. “I believe nothing”: JA to Colonel Joseph Ward, Jan. 8, 1810, AP, #118, MHS.

40. “I give him up”: Ibid.

41. Callender and Sally: Ibid.

42. “a little corner of my heart”: AA to Thomas Adams, May 23, 1802, AP, MHS.

43. Mary Jefferson Eppes: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 268.

44. The friendship with which you honored: Ibid., 270.

45. “And now, sir”: Ibid., 273.

46. Until I read Callender’s: Ibid.

47. “My charities”: Ibid., 274.

48. John Quincy was suddenly replaced: Ibid., 277.

49. “I conclude with sincere prayers”: Ibid., 280.

50. “It is a delicate”: JA to Thomas Adams, April 2, 1803, AP, MHS.

51. “blue devils”: Thomas Adams to JQA, Dec. 15, 1803, AP, MHS.

52. “This is now in general”: JQA to JA, Jan. 31, 1804, AP, MHS.

53. “arch enemy”: DJA, III, 434.

54. “Hitherto my conduct”: JQA to AA, Dec. 22, 1803, AP, MHS.

55. Patience and perseverance: JA to JQA, Nov. 9, 1804, AP, MHS.

56. Is the present state: Old Family Letters, 62.

57. You and your excellent: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 890.

58. “My friend!”: Old Family Letters, 185.

59. [Samuel] Johnson: Ibid., 99.

60. “To rummage trunks”: Ibid., 106.

61. What must he say: Ibid.

62. There have been very many times: Ibid.

63. “There is something in my composition”: Ibid., 69.

64. “Our obligations”: Ibid., 182.

65. “The internal intrigues”: Ibid.

66. I call for my leavers: Ibid., 64.

67. “with very little animal food”: Ibid., 341.

68. It is an idea: Ibid., 111.

69. “an immense load”: Ibid., 137.

70. “This phrase ‘rejoice’”: Ibid.

71. “We stand well”: Ibid., 103.

72. “No civilized society”: Ibid., 63.

73. “If worthless men”: Ibid., 108.

74. “a jewel of a man”: Ibid., 294.

75. “one of the best men”: Ibid., 276.

76. “I am not subject”: Ibid., 235.

77. “I think aloud”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush. , II, 903.

78. “I live like a stranger”: Ibid., 891.

79. Mr. Madison and his lady: Ibid., 903.

80. “a superabundance”: Old Family Letters, 118.

81. “intriguer”: Ibid., 163.

82. “Jefferson has succeeded”: Ibid.

83. “Mr. Adams’s passions”: Warren, History, II, 675.

84. “I wish them not”: Old Family Letters, 226.

85. Josiah Quincy: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 61–62.

86. “If ever a nation”: Old Family Letters, 175.

87. “The period is not yet arrived”: AA to JQA, Feb. 1809, AP, #407, MHS.

88. “As to my son”: Old Family Letters, 225.

89. tore him to pieces: Ibid., 237.

90. “My days glide smoothly away”: JA to JQA, Jan. 15, 1811, AP, #411, MHS.

91. “I am well”: Old Family Letters, 285.

92. “It would divert”: Ibid., 285.

93. “the most afflictive”: Ibid., 288.

94. confined her under: Ibid., 289.

95. dark to view a comet: AA to JQA, Sept. 24, 1811, AP, #412, MHS.

96. “Neither the morals”: AA to JQA, Dec. 8, 1811, AP, #412, MHS.

97. “communicate it gradually”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1104.

98. “the knife”: Ibid.

99. “From her account”: Ibid.

100. brothers named Coles: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 284.

101. “I always loved Jefferson”: Ibid.

102. “I only needed this knowledge”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1110.

103. “And now, my dear friend”: Ibid.

104. “A letter from you calls up”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 291.

105. Laboring always at the same oar: Ibid., 291.

106. “I have given up newspapers”: Ibid.

107. “What an exchange”: Ibid., 294.

108. “a hideous tempest”: Ibid.

109. “I walk every fair day”: Ibid., 199.

110. “Your dream is out”: Old Family Letters, 453.

111. I rejoice in the correspondence: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush , II, 1127.

112. “Who shall write”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 451.

113. “Nobody, except perhaps”: Ibid., 452.

114. “not writing psalms”: John Pierce Memoirs, MHS.

115. “Without this our Union”: Cappon, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 311.

116. “I sincerely congratulate”: Ibid., 324.

117. “Never mind”: Ibid., 357.

118. “Montezillo”: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, Sept. 23, 1814, AP, #122, MHS.

119. “Whether you or I”: Ibid., 301.

120. “Checks and balances”: Ibid., 334.

121. “lashing and speering”: Ibid., 358.

122. “fast asleep”: Ibid., 347.

123. “You and I have passed”: Ibid., 358.

124. “You and I ought”: Ibid.

125. “The summum bonum”: Ibid., 335.

126. My mind: Ibid., 337.

127. “Your letter touches”: JA to John Adams (grandson), Feb. 2, 1812, AP, #413, MHS.

128. “War necessarily”:Old Family Letters, 224.

129. “I have been called”: JA to JQA, April 7, 1812, AP, #413, MHS.

130. The subjects of them: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1164.

131. “But time I hope”: Ibid.

132. “You apprehend ‘attacks’”: Old Family Letters, 317.

133. Examining the animal: Ibid., 322.

134. Tread gently: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1171.

135. “away like the morning cloud”: Old Family Letters, 332.

136. “withered, faded”: Ibid., 333.

137. “inscrutable and incomprehensible”: JA to JQA, March 11, 1813, AP, #415, MHS.

138. They fill the air: JA to JQA, March 13, 1813, AP, #415, MHS.

139. “the invader himself”: JQA to JA, Aug. 10, 1813, AP, #416, MHS.

140. “I mourned over the fallen”: Ibid.

141. “Another of our friends”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 323.

142. “I know of no character”: Ibid., 328.

143. I damn nobody: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, May 28, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

144. Samuel Tucker: JA to Matthew Carey, June 1, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

145. “rejoice ever more”: Old Family Letters, 137.

146. “Rejoice always”: JA to JQA, June 18, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

147. “My dear, my only daughter”: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, Aug. 9, 1813, AP, #95, MHS.

148. “She told her physician”: AA to JQA, Aug. 30, 1813, AP, MHS.

149. “The loss is irreparable”: AA to JQA, Sept. 13, 1813, AP, #416, MHS.

150. “Syllabus”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 369.

151. “The love of God”: Ibid., 374.

12. JOURNEY’S END

1. “I assure you”: JA to JQA, March 18, 1815, AP, #422, MHS.

2. “We must learn to know”: JA to Richard Rush, May 30, 1814, AP, #122, MHS.

3. “very anxious”: AA to JQA, May 30, AP, 1815, AP, #423, MHS.

4. “I seem to be rambling”: JA to JQA, May 14, 1815, AP, #423, MHS.

5. “be no better”: JA to George Adams and John Adams, Jr., May 3, 1815, AP, MHS.

6. “and your lady, too”: Ibid.

7. “dear boys”: AA to JQA, April 11, 1816, AP, #423, MHS.

8. “Death is sweeping”: JA to JQA, June 10, 1816, AP, #432, MHS.

9. “Winter in this country”: JA to JQA, Feb. 22, 1816, AP, #429, MHS.

10. Abigail prepared her will: Will of Abigail Adams, Jan. 18, 1816, AP, #429, MHS.

11. Colonel Smith: AA to JQA, June 10, 1816, AP, #432, MHS.

12. “here a pivot”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 43.

13. “I steer my bark”: Ibid., 467.

14. “But why am I dosing”: Ibid., 434.

15. $23,950 was agreed to: Malone, The Sage of Monticello, 176.

16. “I envy you”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 440.

17. He could “not live without books”: Ibid., 443.

18. “overwhelm me with books”: Ibid., 515.

19. “What would I give”: Ibid., 429.

20. “There is no doubt”: Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, 94.

21. “The clock would be simple”: Ibid., 214.

22. “Fool! Fool!”: Ibid., 263.

23. “Your father’s zeal”: AA to JQA, March 22, 1816, AP, #430, MHS.

24. “The voice of the nation”: AA to JQA, March 12, 1817, AP, #436, MHS.

25. “Yesterday was one of the most uniformly”: JA to JQA, Aug. 10, 1817, AP, #438, MHS.

26. “Oh, Grandmother”: AA to Harriet Welsh, Aug. 18, 1817, AP, #438, MHS.

27. “rather in awe”: Eliza Susan Quincy Journal, MHS.

28. “I never saw your father”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, Jan. 12, 1818, AP, #442, MHS.

29. “very cold and the snow falling”: AA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Jan. 24, 1818, AP, #442, MHS.

30. “looking up newly”: AA to Louisa Catherine Adams, May 20, 1818, AP, #443, MHS.

31. “The dear partner”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 529.

32. “She has recovered”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, Oct. 21, 1818, AP, #444, MHS.

33. “Your mother was pronounced”: Note of Harriet Welsh, Oct. 23, 1818, AP, #444, MHS.

34. “He came down”: Harriet Welsh to Louisa C. A. DeWint, ca. Nov. 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

35. “I cannot bear”: Ibid.

36. “seemingly conscious”: Thomas Adams to JQA, Nov. 1, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

37. “with great composure”: Ibid.

38. “the tenderest and most affectionate”: JQA to JA, Nov. 2, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

39. “My ever dear”: JA to JQA, Nov. 10, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

40. “The tidings of her illness”: Funeral Sermon for AA, Nov. 1, 1817, AP, #445, MHS.

41. Possessing at every period of life: Whitney, Sermon, 16.

42. “God bless you”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 529.

43. “While you live”: Ibid., 530.

44. to view Trumbull’s painting: JA to JQA, Dec. 7, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

45. “Colonel Trumbull came”: Eliza Susan Quincy Journal, Dec. 5, 1818, MHS.

46. “Truth, nature”: JA to John Trumbull, March 13, 1817, AP, #123, MHS.

47. “When I nominated”: Elza Susan Quincy, Dec. 5, 1818, MHS.

48. “caught the pip”: JA to JQA, Dec. 7, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

49. “It was not merely”: JQA to JA, Dec. 14, 1818, AP, #445, MHS.

50. “All is now still”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 531.

51. “You, my dear sir”: Louisa Catherine Adams to JA, April 16, 1819, AP, #447, MHS.

52. “I have the most”: JA to Ward Nicholas Boylston, Sept. 2, 1820, AP, #124, MHS.

53. “We go on”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Jan. 1, 1820, AP, #449, MHS.

54. “The Psalms of David”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 394.

55. A rain had fallen: JA to Mr. DeWint, March 3, 1820, AP, #124, MHS.

56. “The town of Quincy”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Oct. 21, 1820, AP, #450, MHS.

57. “You have not extended”: JA to Mordecai Noah, July 31, 1818, AP, #123, MHS.

58. “health and spirits”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 569.

59. “I boggled”: Ibid., 571.

60. “Visited the President”: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 69.

61. I do not believe: Ibid., 80.

62. “I know it is high treason”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 551.

63. “at last the whites”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, Jan. 13, 1820, AP, #449, MHS.

64. black cloud: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 571.

65. “armies of Negroes”: Ibid.

66. I have been so terrified: Ibid.

67. “This enterprise”: Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 999.

68. “become a Hercules”: Ibid.

69. “all whites south of the Potomac”: Malone, Sage of Monticello, 340.

70. military academy: Ibid., 573-74.

71. “noble employment”: Ibid., 607.

72. “one of the most unpleasant”: Donald and Donald, eds., Diary of Charles Francis Adams, I, 64..

73. “They had eyes”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, June 3, 1821, AP, #452, MHS.

74. “President Adams seemed”: Eliza Susan Quincy Journal, MHS.

75. “No man has more cause”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, June 3, 1821, AP, #452, MHS.

76. “In the evening”: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 73.

77. “You have a fine capacity”: JA to Charles Francis Adams, Dec. 19, 1825, AP, #473, MHS.

78. “did no more than all the rest”: JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, May 10, 1823, AP, #460, MHS.

79. “It would be strange indeed”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 601.

80. “not the Lafayette I knew”: Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy, 406-7.

81. His sight is so dim: Nevins, ed., Diary of John Quincy Adams, 329.

82. “I let them do what they please”: Cappon. ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 526.

83. “He was married”: George Washington Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, Nov.20, 1824, AP, #466, MHS.

84. He ... was considerably: Quincy, Figures of the Past, 74.

85. “It must excite”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 609.

86. So deeply are the principles: Ibid.

87. “Every line from you”: Ibid.

88. “But physicians do not”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, July 4, 1825, AP, #471, MHS.

89. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Adamses at Home, 29-32.

90. Anne Royall: Ibid., 32-34.

91. “He did not tear my face”: JA to Charles Francis Adams, Dec. 3, 1825, AP, #473, MHS.

92. “She entertained me”: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 611.

93. “In this I could not”: Ibid.

94. “To the eyes of a physician”: Benjamin Waterhouse to JQA, May 12, 1826, AP, #475, MHS.

95. Like other young people: Cappon, ed., Adams-Jefferson Letters, 614.

96. “Theirs are the halcyon”: Ibid.

97. May it be to the world: Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson. XVI, 181–82.

98. “The old man fails fast”: “The Diary of George Whitney,” #475, MHS.

99. “I will give you”: Ibid.

100. “When I parted from him”: John Marston to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

101. “the old gentleman”: “The Diary of George Whitney,” AP, #475, MHS.

102. “This is the Fourth”: Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 428.

103. “The artillery of Heaven”: John Marston to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

104. “Thomas Jefferson survives”: Susan Boylston Adams Clark to Abigail Louisa Smith Adams Johnson, July 9,1826 , AP, A. B. Johnson Papers, MHS.

105. “Help me, child!”: Ibid.

106. “bursting forth”: John Marston to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

107. 4,000 people: Josiah Quincy to JQA, July 8, 1826, AP, #476, MHS.

108. held at public expense: Ibid.

109. “conducted in a more solemn”: Ibid.

110. “visible and palpable”: Nevins, ed., Diary of John Quincy Adams, 360.

111. “expanded greatness”:Selection of Eulogies, 156.

112. Webster speech: Ibid.

113. “Griefs upon griefs!”: JA to Francis Van der Kemp, Aug. 14, 1816, AP, #122, MHS.

Bibliography

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

Abigail Adams Papers, American Antiquarian Society

Abigail Adams Papers, Carl Roach Library, Cornell University

Abigail Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

John Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

John Quincy Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Ellen Randolph Coolidge Papers, University of Virginia, Alderman Library, Special Collections

Cranch Family Papers, Library of Congress

William Cushing Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society

Francis Dana Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Papers of Elbridge Gerry, Library of Congress

Lafayette Papers, Library of Congress

Robert Treat Paine Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Timothy Pickering Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Shaw Family Papers, Library of Congress

Margaret Bayard Smith Papers, Library of Congress

Ezra Stiles Papers, Yale University

Samuel Tucker Papers, Harvard University

John Winthrop Papers, Harvard University

Levi Woodbury Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

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ARTICLES

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Wilson, Douglas L. “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue.” Atlantic 27, no. 5 (November 1992).

— . “Thomas Jefferson’s Early Notebooks.” William and Mary Quarterly XLII, 3rd series, no. 4 (Oct. 1985).

REFERENCE SOURCES

American Guide Series: Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937.

Baedeker’s France. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1986.

Boatner, Mark Mayo, III. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. New York: David McKay, 1966.

Branyon, Richard A. Latin Phrases and Quotations. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994.

Byrd, Robert C. The Senate, 1789-1989: Historical Statistics, 1789-1992. Vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993.

Commager, Henry Steele. Documents of American History. 5th ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949.

Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner, 1932. France: Eyewitness Travel Guides. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1994.

Harley, Sharon. Timetables of African-American History. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

Kennedy, Lawrence F. Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774-1971. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971.

London Michelin Guide. 1st ed. London, 1977.

Morison, Samuel Eliot; Henry Steele Commager; and William Leuchtenburg, eds. A Concise History of the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the African American. 5th ed. Edited by Harry A. Ploski and James Williams. New York: Gale Research, 1989.

Olmert, Michael. Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985.

Paris Michelin Guide. 6th ed. London, 1986.

Purvis, Thomas L. Almanacs of American Life: Revolutionary America, 1763-1800. New York: Facts on File, 1995.

Scott, Samuel F., and Barry Rothaus, eds. Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789-1799. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert, eds. The London Encyclopedia. London: Macmillan, 1993.

Wren, R. C. Potter’s New Cyclopaedia of Botanical Drugs and Preparations. Holsworthy, England: Health Science Press, 1975.

NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALS

Amherst (Massachusetts) Farmers’ Cabinet

Boston Evening Post

Boston Gazette Boston Independent Chronicle

Charleston (South Carolina) City Gazette and Daily Advertiser

Claypoole’s America Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Columbian Centinel (Boston, Massachusetts)

Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser

Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia)

Gentleman’s Magazine (London, England)

Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette and Essex Patriot

Le Journal des Scavans (Paris, France)

London Chronicle

London Gazette

London General Evening Post

London Public Advertiser

Massachusetts Centinel (Boston)

Massachusetts Spy (Worcester)

New England Palladium

New York Commercial Advertiser

New York Daily Advertiser

New York Evening Post

Newburyport (Massachusetts) Herald

Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia)

Philadelphia Aurora

Philadelphia General Advertiser

Philadelphia Journal

Philadelphia Ledger

Porcupine’s Gazette and United States Daily Advertiser

Savannah (Georgia) Republican

St. James’s Chronicle (London, England)

Vermont Gazette (Bennington)

Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg)

Washington (D.C.) Federalist

Washington (D.C.) Gazette

Washington (D.C.) National Intelligencer

Index

Abdee, Phoebe,

Abdee, William,

Abdrahaman,

Active (U.S. ship),

Act Providing a Naval Armament (1797),

Adams, Abigail (JA’s granddaughter),

Adams, Abigail (Nabby) (JA’s daughter), see Smith, Abigail Adams

Adams, Abigail Smith (JA’s wife),

Atlantic crossings of,

in Boston,

child rearing of,

correspondence of, see Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of; specific individuals

courtship of,

death of,

determination of,

diary of,

domestic activities of,

in East Chester,

and election of,

in England,

family background of,

in France,

French hospitality and,

as grandmother,

health problems of,

in Holland,

homesickness of,

inoculation of,

investment in government securities recommended by,

JA compared with,

JA’s devotion to,

JA’s first meeting with,

JA’s increasing political role as viewed by,

JA’s vice presidency and,

loneliness of,

marriage of,

nursing of,

opera, concert, and theater attendance of,

part in JA’s life played by,

patriotism of,

in Philadelphia,

physical appearance of,

as “Portia,”

portraits of,

power as viewed by,

pregnancies and childbirths of,

in Quincy,

reading of,

sea voyage feared by,

speech patterns of,

Tyler as viewed by,

in Washington, D.C.,

Washington’s death and,

Adams, Ann Harrod,

Adams, Charles (JA’s son),

Abigail’s correspondence with,

at Bush Hill,

death of,

Adams, Charles (JA’s son) (cont.)

education of,

Europe visited by,

health problems of,

inoculation of,

irresponsible and dissolute behavior of,

JA’s advice to,

JA’s correspondence with, romance and marriage of,

Adams, Charles Francis (JA’s grandson),

Adams, Edith Squire,

Adams, Elihu,

Adams, George Washington,

Adams, Hannah Bass,

Adams, Henry,

Adams, John:

Alien and Sedition Acts and,

ambition of,

in American Philosophical Society,

anxiety and doubts of,

Atlantic crossings of,

autobiography of,

birth of,

on Board of War,

book collecting of,

brilliant mind of,

British agents’ interception of letter of,

British soldiers defended by,

British views of,

cabinet of, see also specific individuals

on checks and balances in government,

childhood of,

as Christian,

as close observer,

clothes of,

in commercial treaty negotiations with England,

as commissioner to France,

on Committee of Five,

as Continental Congress delegate,

correspondence of, see Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of; specific individuals

courage of,

death as preoccupation of,

death of,

decision not to become a minister made by,

despair of, diary of, see Adams, John,

diary of diplomatic convention broken by,

drinking of,

education of,

elected Vice President,

in election of

in election of,

emotional and mental instability attributed to,

entertaining side of,

fame and recognition of,

family background of,

as farmer,

as father,

feelings of failure in,

as Ferdinando Ramón San,

final acts in presidency of,

finances of,

first legal case of,

flirtatiousness and amorous disposition of,

French language skills of,

French Revolution and, frugality of,

garden tour of,

generosity and great-heartedness of,

as grandfather,

greatness predicted for,

hardworking nature of,

health problems of,

in Holland,

honesty and candor of,

honorary degree of,

horseback riding of,

humor of,

inauguration of,

independence of,

inheritance of,

inoculation of,

integrity of,

irritability of,

as lawyer,

legal studies of,

loneliness of,

as “Lysander,”

man-of-the-world skills lacking in,

manual labor of,

margin notes of,

marriage of,

at Massachusetts constitutional convention,

in Massachusetts legislature,

in meeting with Lord Howe,

as minister plenipotentiary to England,

as minister plenipotentiary to France,

monarchist tendencies ascribed to,

as New Englander,

newspaper writing of,

opera, concert, and theater attendance of,

party politics disliked by,

passion of,

patriotism of,

as peace commissioner,

perseverance and stubbornness of,

physical appearance of,

popularity of,

portraits of,

as President,

property purchased by,

prophecy of,

in Quincy,

reading of,

received as ambassador to the Netherlands,

as reluctant politician,

as revolutionary,

royal appointment declined by,

as schoolmaster,

sea power as viewed by,

social standing of,

sole peacemaker commission revoked for,

in Spain,

speeches of,

as surveyor of roads,

as talker,

temper of,

titles issue and,

turning point in life of,

vanity of,

vice presidency predicted for,

as Vice President,

virtue of,

walking of,

will of,

writing style of,

Adams, John, diary of,

Arthur Lee in,

Atlantic crossings in,

British and England in,

France in,

government and politics in,

Jefferson in,

observations on human nature in,

peace negotiations in,

Philadelphia in,

revival of,

women in,

Worchester period in,

Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of,

Abigail’s complaints about,

Abigail’s handwriting in,

American Revolution and,

children in,

Continental Congress in,

during courtship,

criticism in,

forms of address in,

France and,

Franklin in,

geography in,

health problems in,

Holland and,

patriotism in,

peace negotiations in,

Philadelphia in,

power in,

presidency and,

slowness and unreliability of mail and,

smallpox in,

tenderness and affection expressed in,

trade goods in,

Washington in,

Adams, John (Deacon John) (JA’s father),

death of,

JA influenced by,

marriage of,

as selectman,

Adams, John (JA’s grandson),

education of,

Adams, John Quincy,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Abigail’s proposed marriage for,

Atlantic crossings of,

birth of,

Charles’s badly invested savings of,

diary of,

education of,

in election of

in England,

finances of,

France visited by,

French language skills of,

on Hamilton,

hereditary succession fears and,

in Holland,

inoculation of,

JA compared with,

JA’s advice to,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s death and,

JA’s trust in,

Jefferson’s interest in,

as lawyer,

marriage of,

as minister to Prussia,

as minister to Russia,

as minister to the Netherlands,

Nabby’s correspondence with,

party crossing of,

as peace envoy to Ghent,

physical appearance of,

as post rider,

as President,

as “Publicola,”

Quincy visited by,

returns of, to U.S.,

romances of,

Russia first visited by,

as Secretary of State,

as Senator,

in Spain,

Washington’s views on,

Adams, Joseph (JA’s grandfather),

Adams, Joseph (JA’s great-grandfather),

Adams, Joseph (JA’s uncle),

Adams, Louisa Catherine (JA’s granddaughter),

Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson (JA’s daughter-in-law),

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

pregnancies and childbirth of,

in Quincy,

Adams, Mary,

Adams, Mrs. (Abigail’s fellow passenger),

Adams, Peter,

Adams, Sally Smith,

Adams, Samuel,

in American Revolution,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

slavery opposed by,

Adams, Mrs. Samuel,

Adams, Susanna (JA’s daughter),

Adams, Susanna Boylston (JA’s granddaughter),

Adams, Susanna Boylston (JA’s mother),

Abigail’s relationship with,

death of,

health problems of,

illiteracy of,

marriages of,

social standing of,

Adams, Thomas Boylston,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

at Bush Hill,

disappearance of,

education of,

failure of,

health problems of,

inoculation of,

JA’s advice to,

JA’s correspondence with,

as lawyer,

marriage of,

in Quincy,

Adams-Onis Treaty (1819),

Addison, Joseph,

Admiralty Court,

Aesop,

Affleck, Thomas,

Alden, John,

Alden, Priscilla,

Alexander, William,

Alexandria, Va.,

Algiers, Alien Act (1798),

Allen, Ethan,

Alliance (U.S. frigate),

American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

American Daily Advertiser,

American Indians,

American Philosophical Society,

American Revolution,

Dutch role in,

events leading to,

French role in,

German mercenaries in,

independence and, see Declaration of Independence, U.S.; independence

Indians in,

JA’s participation in,

Mercy Warren on,

pamphlets and,

peace negotiations in,

prisoners of war in,

shortages in,

see also Paris, Treaty of; specific battles

Ames, Fisher,

Amherst, Lord Jeffrey,

Amsterdam,

banks in,

Anglican Christ Church,

Anti-Federalists,

Antwerp, art in,

Arguesseau, Henriette d,’

aristocracy,

hereditary,

natural,

Aristotle,

Army, British,

in Boston,

see alsospecific battles and generals

Army, U.S.,

disbanding of,

Hamilton’s role in,

Jefferson’s fears about,

Washington as commander-in-chief of,

Arnold, Benedict,

art, artists

gardening as,

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s purchase of,

in London,

see also portraits; sculpture

Articles of Confederation,

Articles of War, British,

Articles of War, U.S.,

assumption plan,

astronomy,

Augusta, Princess of England,

Austin, Jonathan,

Austria,

Auteuil,

Bache, Benjamin Franklin,

death of,

JA as viewed by,

Bache, Margaret,

Baltimore, Md.,

Continental Congress in,

Bancroft, Edward,

Bankhead, Charles,

Bank of the United States,

banks:

Dutch,

London,

Paris,

in U.S.,

Baptists,

Barbary States,

Barkley, Gilbert,

Barnes sisters,

Barron, William,

Barry, John,

Bartlett, Josiah,

Bartram, John,

Bass, Joseph,

as JA’s traveling companion,

Bass, Seth,

Bath,

Bayard, James A.,

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de,

Beccaria, Cesare, Marchese di,

Beckley, John,

Behrent, John,

Bell, Robert,

Bellamy, Pierre,

Bently, William,

Bernard, Francis,

Biddle, Charles,

Bill of Rights, U.S.,

Billopp, Christopher,

Billopp House,

Bingham, Anne,

Bingham, William,

Binon, J. B.,

Bird, Savage & Bird,

Birmingham,

blacks,

free,

Jefferson’s views on,

in Shakespeare,

“Toussaint’s clause” and,

see also slaves, slavery

Board of War, see Continental Board of War and Ordnance

Bois de Boulogne,

Longchamps in,

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John,

Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I, Emperor of France

Bonhomme Richard (U.S. ship),

Bordeaux,

Borland, Widow,

Boston, Mass.,

American Revolution in,

British abandonment of,

British in,

Continental Army in,

JA in,

JA’s hero’s send-off in,

JA’s homecoming in,

JA’s views on,

John Quincy in,

Philadelphia compared with,

protests in,

refugees from,

smallpox in,

Boston (U.S. frigate),

Boston Chronicle,

Boston Gazette,

Boston Harbor,

British warships in,

fortification of,

French fleet in,

lighthouse in,

Boston Massacre,

Boston Patriot,

Boston Tea Party,

Boston Town Meeting,

Boswell, James,

Bourbon, Mademoiselle de,

Bourke, Dr.,

Bowdoin, James,

Boylston, Susanna, see Adams, Susanna Boylston

Boylston, Zabdiel,

Braintree, Mass.,

Adams homestead in,

in American Revolution,

dysentery epidemic in,

First Church in,

legal cases in,

social life in,

Vassall-Borland place in,

see also Quincy, Mass.

Braintree (England),

Braintree Instructions,

Brandywine Creek, battle of (1777),

Braxton, Carter,

Briar Creek, battle of (1779),

bribery,

Briesler, John,

in England,

in France,

in Quincy,

Briesler, Mary,

Brillon, Madame (Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy),

Brillon, Monsieur,

Brissot de Warville, J. P.,

Brooklyn Heights,

Browere, John Henry,

Brown, Andrew,

Brown, Lancelot (Capability),

Brown, Mather,

Bulfinch, Charles,

Bulloch, Archibald,

Bunel, Joseph,

Bunker Hill, battle of (1775), Burgoyne, John,

Burke, Edmund,

Burney, Fanny,

Burr, Aaron,

in election of

Hamilton’s duel with,

Bush Hill,

Calais,

Callender, James T.,

death of,

JA attacked by,

Jefferson-Hemings liaison reported by,

Jefferson’s payment to,

Reynolds Affair and,

Cambridge, Mass.,

Washington in,

see also Harvard College

Camden, battle of (1780), Canada,

in American Revolution,

Caribbean Sea,

Carmarthen, Lord,

Carr, Peter,

Carroll, Charles,

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia,

Catholic Sisters of Charity,

Cato (Addison),

Caughnawaga Indians,

Cervantes, Miguel de,

Chaillot,

Champlain, Lake,

Chantilly, château at,

Charles I, King of England,

Charles II, King of England,

Charleston, S.C.,

battle of (1776),

fall to British of (1780),

Charlotte, Queen of England,

Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Princess of England,

Charlottesville, Va.,

Chase, Samuel,

Chastellux, Marquis de,

Chaumont, Comte de (Jacques Donatien Le Ray),

Chauncey, Charles,

Chew, Benjamin,

Christianity,

Jefferson’s reputed objections to,

Church, Angelica,

Church of England,

Cicero,

Cicero (U.S. ship),

Cincinnatus (U.S. ship),

civil war, predictions of,

Clarissa (Richardson),

Clark, John,

Clay, Henry,

Clinton, George,

Cobbett, William (Peter Porcupine),

Coles brothers,

Columbian Centinel,

Abigail’s obituary in,

“Publicola” series in,

Comédie Française,

Committee of Five,

Common Sense (Paine),

compromise of

Concord, battle of (1775),

Condorcet, Marquis de (Marie-Jean A. N. Caritat),

Congregational Church,

Congress, U.S.:

Alien and Sedition Acts and,

JA’s messages to,

JA’s speeches to,

Jefferson’s messages to,

in New York,

in Philadelphia,

Reynolds Affair and,

special session of (1797),

“Toussaint’s clause” and,

in Washington D.C.,

see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

Connecticut,

Continental Congress delegates from,

Constellation (U.S. frigate),

Constitution, U.S.,

presidency in,

ratification of,

vice presidency in,

Constitution (U.S. frigate),

Constitutional Convention,

Continental Army,

in Boston,

French in,

in New Jersey,

and Society of Cincinnati,

in South Carolina, supply problems of,

troop problems of,

Washington as head of,

see alsospecific battles

Continental Board of War and Ordnance (War Office; Board of War),

Continental Congress,

and Articles of Confederation,

Barbary States and,

Committee for Foreign Affairs of,

Committee of Five and,

Committee of Treaties of,

Committee on Spies of,

Common Sense and,

communication problems of,

debate over JA in,

dollar devalued by,

five-man peace commission established by,

Franklin’s correspondence with,

Holland and,

independence issue and,

JA as delegate to,

JA ostracized in,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s preamble and,

JA’s request for leave of absence from,

JA’s sense of abuse from,

JA’s trip to,

Jefferson at,

naval issues and,

peace commission’s break with orders of,

petition of,

ports opened to foreign trade by,

secrecy of,

State House yard and,

Continental Congress, first (1774),

background of delegates to,

Massachusetts delegation to,

Contrast, The (Tyler),

Convention of Mortefontaine (1800),

Coolidge, Joseph, Jr.,

Coombe, Rev. Thomas,

Cooper, Rev. Samuel,

Copley, John Singleton,

Cornwallis, Charles, Lord,

correspondence of John and Abigail Adams, see Adams, John and Abigail, correspondence of

Cosway, Maria,

Cosway, Richard,

Court of Admiralty,

Cranch, Betsy, Abigail’s correspondence with,

Cranch, Lucy, Abigail’s correspondence with,

Cranch, Mary Smith,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

death of,

Cranch, Richard,

Abigail influenced by,

death of,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s friendship with,

marriage of,

Cranch, William,

Crawford, William,

Cromwell, Oliver,

currencies:

colonial,

Continental,

lack of standardization of,

Cushing, Charles, JA’s correspondence with,

Dalton, Tristram,

Dana, Francis,

in election of

in Europe,

Danton, Georges-Jacques,

Davie, William,

Davila, Enrico Caterino,

Davis, Edward,

Deane, Silas,

Declaration of Independence, U.S.,

debate over,

effects on “spirit” of,

fiftieth anniversary of,

French translation of,

Jefferson’s drafting of,

planning of,

revision of,

signing of,

slavery and,

voting on,

Declaration of Rights, Massachusetts,

Declaration of Rights, Virginia,

Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, A (Adams),

Defoe, Daniel,

Delaware,

Continental Congress delegates from,

Delaware Bay,

Delaware River,

democracy,

Demosthenes,

Descartes, René,

De Senectute (Cicero),

d’Estaing, Charles-Henri Théodat,

Dexter, Samuel,

diary of John Adams, see Adams, John, diary of

Dickinson, John,

absences from Congress of,

independence opposed by,

pamphlet writing of,

Dickinson, Mrs. John,

Digges, Thomas,

“Discourses on Davila,”

Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, A (Adams),

Don Quixote (Cervantes),

Dorchester Peninsula,

Dorset, Duke of,

Duane, James,

Duane, William,

Dumas, Charles W. F.,

Dunglison, Robley,

Dunlap, John,

Dunmore, Lord,

Duplessis, Joseph-Siffred,

Dutch Republic, see Holland

dysentery epidemic (1775),

East Chester, N.Y.,

East River,

education,

JA’s views on,

see alsospecific schools and individuals

Egypt,

elections:

of 1788

of 1792

of 1796

of 1800

of 1803

of 1804

of 1824

electoral college,

Elk Hill,

Ellsworth, Oliver,

embargoes,

Emerson, Ralph Waldo,

England, English,

Abigail’s views on petition of reconciliation with,

American colonies taxed by,

in American Revolution,

Barbary States and,

in Boston,

Boston abandoned by,

constitution of,

Dutch relations with,

embargo on exports to,

fear of highwaymen in,

in French and Indian War,

French relations with,

French Revolution and,

gardens in,

JA as minister plenipotentiary to,

in JA’s preamble,

JA’s work published in,

John Quincy as minister to,

natural rights of,

navy of,

in peace talks,

property confiscated by,

Sewall’s views on,

Spanish America and,

U.S. relations with,

in War of

English Channel,

Enville, Duchesse d’ (Marie-Louise-Elisabeth de la Rochefoucauld),

Epictetus,

Eppes, Elizabeth,

Eppes, Francis,

Eppes, Mary Jefferson (Polly),

death of,

in London,

equality, JA’s views on,

Essay on Man Pope),

executive branch:

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s views on,

Fairhill,

Farewell Address,

Federalist Papers,

Federalists,

Alien and Sedition Acts and,

in Callender’s attack on Jefferson,

in election of

French policy and,

High,

JA’s cabinet and,

JA supported by,

John Quincy as,

Louisiana Purchase opposed by,

Fenno, John,

Field, Esther,

in England,

in France,

Field, Joseph,

first Continental Congress, see Continental Congress,

first fishing rights,

Fitch, John,

Fitzherbert, Alleyne,

Florida,

food and diet,

French,

in Philadelphia,

in Quincy,

on ships,

Foreign Ministry, British,

Fort Ticonderoga,

artillery captured at,

Fort Washington, battle of (1776),

Fox, Charles James,

Fox, Gilbert,

France,

Abigail’s shock in,

in American Revolution,

Barbary States and,

British relations with,

JA as commissioner to,

JA influenced by,

JA’s approval of,

JA’s disapproval of,

JA’s feelings of failure in,

Logan’s views on,

monarchy restored in,

naval power of,

politeness in,

Spain as ally of,

spies in,

U.S. alliance with,

U.S. loan from,

see also French Revolution; Quasi-War; specific places

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld,

Franklin, Benjamin,

Abigail’s views on,

in art,

Arthur Lee’s conflicts with,

Barbary pirates and,

as commissioner to France,

on Committee of Five,

in Continental Congress,

death of,

French adoration for,

illegitimate son of,

JA compared with,

JA’s change in opinion of,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s parting with,

JA’s reputation blackened by,

JA’s respect for,

Jefferson’s advice from,

London years of,

Madame Helvétius’s relationship with,

as man of science,

in meeting with Lord Howe,

as minister plenipotentiary to France,

Montreal mission of,

as peace commissioner,

retirement of,

slavery and,

writings of,

Franklin, William,

Franklin, William Temple,

Frazier, Mary,

Free Masons,

French and Indian War,

French Huguenots,

French language,

Franklin’s knowledge of,

JA’s knowledge of,

John Quincy’s knowledge of,

French Revolution,

Directory in,

end of,

Jacobins in,

Reign of Terror in,

French Revolution (Wollstonecraft),

Freneau, Philip,

Fresh Brook,

Fries, John,

Friesland,

Gainsborough, Thomas,

Gallatin, Albert,

Galloway, Joseph,

gardens:

English,

in France,

Gates, Elizabeth,

Gates, Horatio,

in South Carolina defeat,

Gazette de Leyde,

Gazette of the United States,

Genêt, Edmé-Jacques,

Genêt, Edmund Charles,

geography, JA’s views on,

George III, King of England,

Declaration of Independence and,

JA compared with,

JA’s audiences with,

Jefferson presented to,

library of,

petitions to,

statue of,

Georgia:

Continental Congress delegates from,

legislature of,

Gérard, Conrad,

German (Pennsylvania Dutch) farmers,

German Moravians,

Germans, as mercenaries,

see also Hessians, in American Revolution

Gerry, Elbridge,

as Continental Congress delegate,

death of,

election of and,

as envoy to France,

JA’s correspondence with,

Ghent, Treaty of (1814),

Gilbert, Sir Geoffrey,

Giles, William Branch,

government:

happiness as aim of,

JA’s views on,

state,

see also republican government; specific branches

Grand, Ferdinand,

Grand, Marie,

Grand Banks,

Grand Hôtel Muscovite,

Grand Turk (U.S. ship),

Grasse, Admiral de,

Gravesend,

Gray, Harrison,

Greek,

Green, Mr.,

Greene, Nathanael,

Grenville-Temple, Richard, Lord Cobham,

Gridley, Jeremiah,

JA’s advice from,

Griswold, Roger,

gunpowder,

Hackney, village of,

Hague, The,

“Hail Columbia” (song),

Halifax,

Hall, John,

Hamilton, Alexander,

Abigail’s distrust of,

in Army,

assumption plan of,

background of,

death of,

election of and,

electoral college manipulated by,

as Federalist,

JA’s cabinet manipulated by,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s fears about,

Jefferson vs., retirement of,

Reynolds Affair and,

as Secretary of the Treasury,

Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler,

Hancock, John,

in Continental Congress,

as governor of Massachusetts,

as slave owner,

happiness:

JA’s views on,

virtue and,

Harlem Heights,

Harper, Robert G.,

Harrington, James,

Harrison, Benjamin,

Harrod, Ann, see Adams, Ann Harrod

Hartford, Conn.,

Hartley, David,

Harvard College,

Charles at,

description of,

JA at,

JA’s standing at,

JA’s visits to,

John Quincy at,

Hauteval, Lucien,

Haverhill, Mass.,

Hayward, Zab,

Heer Adams (Dutch ship),

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien,

Helvétius, Madame,

Hemings, Betty,

Hemings, Bob,

Hemings, James,

Hemings, Madison,

Hemings, Sally,

Hemmenway, Moses,

Henry, Patrick,

Herschel, Sir William,

Hessians, in American Revolution,

Hewes, Joseph,

highwaymen,

His Majesty’s Royal Bell Ringers,

Historia delle guerre civili di Francia (Davila),

history,

JA’s meditations on,

natural, JA’s advocacy of,

History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (Warren),

Hogarth, William,

Holbrook, Amos,

Holland, Province of,

Holland (Netherlands),

British relations with,

Golden Age of,

JA’s “militia diplomacy” in,

John Quincy as minister to,

U.S. embassy in,

U.S. financial aid from,

U.S. independence recognized by,

honor, Roman ideal of,

Hoochera, C. F.,

Hooper, William,

Hopkins, Stephen,

Hopkinson, Francis,

Hopkinson, Joseph,

Hôtel de Langeac,

Hôtel de Valois,

Hôtel du Roi,

Hôtel d’York,

Hôtel Valentinois,

Hottinguer, Jean Conrad,

Houdon, Jean-Antoine,

Hough’s Neck,

House of Commons, British,

House of Lords, British,

House of Representatives, Massachusetts,

House of Representatives, U.S.,

assumption plan and,

election of 1800 and,

election of 1824 and,

Franklin’s death and,

Jay Treaty and,

physical assault in,

titles issue in,

X, Y, and Z Affair and,

Howe, George Augustus, Lord,

Howe, Richard, Lord,

Congress’s meeting with,

Howe, Sir William,

Hudson River,

human nature:

JA’s study of,

Jefferson’s lack of interest in,

titles issue and,

Hume, David,

Humphreys, David,

Huntington, Samuel, JA’s correspondence with,

Hutcheson, Francis,

Hutchinson, Thomas,

Huxham, John,

immigration,

impressment,

independence,

Abigail’s views on,

British recognition of,

Common Sense and,

Dutch recognition of,

Jefferson’s views on,

opposition to,

see also Declaration of Independence, U.S.

Indian wars,

inflation,

influenza epidemics,

Ireland, Irish,

Irish Rebellion (1798),

Italy,

Izard, Ralph,

in Senate,

Jackson, Andrew,

Jacobin clubs,

Jay, James,

Jay, John,

as Chief Justice,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

as peace negotiator,

as special envoy to London,

Jay Treaty (1795),

Jefferson, Isaac,

Jefferson, Jane Randolph,

Jefferson, Lucy Elizabeth (Jefferson’s daughter, d. age four),

Jefferson, Lucy Elizabeth (Jefferson’s daughter, d. age two),

Jefferson, Martha (Patsy), see Randolph, Martha Jefferson

Jefferson, Martha Wayles Skelton,

death of,

Jefferson, Mary (Polly), see Eppes, Mary Jefferson

Jefferson, Peter,

Jefferson, Thomas,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Abigail’s first meeting with,

Abigail’s views on,

account books of,

American Revolution and,

in Amsterdam,

appearance of, in art,

atheistic views ascribed to,

cabinet of,

as commissioner in France,

Constitution as viewed by,

in Continental Congress,

death of, Declaration of Independence and,

in departure from Philadelphia,

in election of 1792,

in election of 1796, i

n election of 1800,

in election of 1804,

in England,

extravagant claims and “large stories” of,

family background of, finances of,

in France, French assignment turned down by,

French Revolution and,

as governor of Virginia,

Hamilton vs.,

health problems of,

as horseman,

inaugurations of,

instinctive silence of,

on JA,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

at JA’s inauguration,

JA’s public controversy with,

JA’s renewed friendship with,

JA’s views on,

Kentucky Resolutions and,

Madison’s correspondence with, see Madison, James, Jefferson’s correspondence with

Maria Cosway’s relationship with,

“Mazzei Letter” and,

as minister to France,

personal tragedies of,

as President,

purchases of,

as Republican,

Reynolds Affair and,

in rumored cohabitation with slave women,

Rush as supporter of,

as Secretary of State,

slaves of,

as Vice President,

Washington’s death and,

will of,

writings of,

Jenings, Edmund,

Jews,

Johnson, Catherine,

Johnson, Joshua,

Johnson, Louisa Catherine, see Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson

Johnson, Samuel,

Jones, John Paul,

Jouett, Jack,

Journals of Congress,

Judah (servant),

Judiciary Act (1789),

judiciary branch, JA’s views on,

Kemble, John,

Kent, William,

Kentucky,

Kentucky Resolutions,

Knox, Henry,

Knox, Thomas,

Lafayette, George Washington,

Lafayette, Madame de (Adrienne Françoise de Noailles),

Lafayette, Marquis de,

La Fontaine, Jean de,

La Luzerne, Chevalier Anne-César de,

JA’s removal sought by,

Lambert, Luke,

Lambert v. Field,

Langdon, John,

Languedoc (French ship),

La Rochefoucauld, Duc de,

La Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de,

Latin,

Laurens, Henry,

British capture of,

in peace negotiations,

Laurens, John,

La Vauguyon, Duc de,

Leasowes,

Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (John Quincy Adams),

Lee, Arthur,

as commissioner to France,

JA’s correspondence with,

Lee, Charles,

Lee, Francis Lightfoot,

Lee, Henry (Light-Horse Harry),

Lee, Richard Henry:

in Continental Congress,

JA’s correspondence with,

in Senate,

legislative branch, JA’s views on,

see also Congress, U.S.; House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

L’Enfant, Pierre Charles,

Lenôtre, André,

Letombe, Philippe-Henry-Joseph de,

Letter from Alexander Hamilton, A (Hamilton),

Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (Dickinson),

Lewis, Meriwether,

Lexington, battle of (1775),

Leyden,

Leyden, University of,

Library of Congress,

life masks,

Lincoln, Bela,

Lincoln, Benjamin,

L’Insurgent (French frigate),

Liston, Henrietta,

Liverpool (British sloop-of-war),

Livingston, Robert R.,

Franklin’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Lloyd, James,

Locke, John,

Locke, Samuel,

Logan, George,

London,

Abigail’s views on,

Adams family houses in,

description of, Franklin in,

French ambassador’s ball in,

JA in, Jefferson’s visit to,

newspapers in,

Philadelphia compared with,

theater and concerts in,

Tories in,

London Daily Universal Register,

London Gazette,

London Morning and Daily Advertiser,

London Public Advertiser,

Long Island,

battle of (1776),

Louis XVI, King of France,

French Revolution and,

JA’s meetings with,

Louis XVIII, King of France,

Louisiana,

Louisiana Purchase,

Lovell, James,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Loyalists, see Tories

Lucretia (U.S. ship),

Luzac, John,

Lynch, Thomas,

Lyon,

Lyon, Matthew,

Macbeth (Shakespeare),

McHenry, James,

election of and,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s outburst at,

McKean, Thomas,

Maclay, William,

on French Revolution,

Madison, James,

election of 1800 and,

French post considered for,

in House of Representatives,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s views on,

as President,

as Republican,

retirement of,

as Secretary of State,

Madison, Rev. James,

Maine,

malaria,

Manchester, Duke of,

Marat, Jean Paul,

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France,

Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais),

marriages, arranged,

Marsh, Joseph,

Marshall, Christopher,

Marshall, John,

as Chief Justice,

as envoy to, France,

JA’s correspondence with,

as Secretary of State,

Marston, John,

Martha (British ship),

Maryland, Continental Congress delegates from,

Mason, George,

Massachusetts,

constitution of,

debt and,

delegation to Continental Congress from,

General Court of,

legislature of,

Shays’s Rebellion in,

Massachusetts Bay,

Massachusetts Bay Colony, arrival of Adams family in,

Massachusetts Bay Province,

Massachusetts Centinel,

Massachusetts Spy,

Massachusetts Supreme Court,

Mather, Cotton,

Matlack, Timothy,

matrimonial stories,

Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de,

Mayhew, Joseph,

Mazzei, Philip,

“Mazzei Letter,”

Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (Rush),

Mediterranean, Barbary States and,

mental illness,

Mercure de France,

Methodists, Methodism,

Mifflin, Thomas,

Milton, John,

Miranda, Francesco de,

Mississippi River,

Missouri,

Missouri Compromise (1820),

monarchy, monarchists,

absolute,

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s views on,

Monmouth, battle of (1778),

Monroe, James,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

as President,

Reynolds Affair and,

Montgomery, Richard,

Monticello,

renovation of,

Morocco,

Morris, Robert,

Morristown, N.J.,

Morton, John,

Mount Vernon,

Mount Wollaston,

Murray, Judith Sargent,

Murray, William Vans,

Nantes,

Napoleon I, Emperor of France,

American commission and, crowning of,

North American empire plans of,

Napoleonic Wars,

end of,

Russia invaded in,

National Gazette,

Naturalization Act (1798),

Navy, British, see England, English, navy of

Navy, Continental,

Navy, French,

Navy, U.S.,

in Caribbean,

JA’s advocacy for,

Jefferson’s cutback of,

“subscription” ships for,

Nelson, Horatio, Netherlands, see Holland

neutrality policy,

Newburyport, Mass.,

New England, New Englanders,

British attempt at separation of,

effects of shipping embargo on,

grandeur predicted for,

Holland as viewed by,

JA’s views on,

in slave trade,

see also specific places

Newfoundland, U.S. fishing rights off,

New Hampshire,

New Haven, Conn.,

New Haven Gazette,

New Jersey,

Continental Congress delegates from,

defense of,

New Orleans, battle of (1815),

Newport, battle of (1778),

New York,

Continental Congress delegates from,

legislature of,

New York Advertiser,

New York City,

in American Revolution,

as capital,

election of 1800 and,

JA’s views on,

Philadelphia compared with,

New York Daily Gazette,

New York Journal,

New York Minerva,

Nicholas, George,

Nîmes, Maison Carrée in,

Noah, Mordecai,

Noailles, Adrienne Françoise de, see Lafayette, Madame de

Noailles, Jean de, Duc d’Ayen,

Noel, Nicholas,

Norfolk, Va.,

Normandy, Duke of,

North, Lord,

North Carolina,

North Sea,

Northwest, American,

Notes on the States of Virginia (Jefferson),

“Observations on Certain Documents . . .” (Hamilton),

Observations on Modern Gardening (Whately),

Ohio,

Olive Branch Petition,

Oliver, Andrew,

Onesimus,

Onslow, Lord Arthur,

opera,

Orations (Cicero),

Oswald, Richard,

Othello (Shakespeare),

Otis, James,

Otis, Samuel,

Otis, Mrs. Samuel,

Otto, Louis-Guillaume,

Oxford,

Page, John,

Paine, Robert Treat,

Paine, Thomas,

see also Common Sense

Palladio, Andrea,

Pamela (Richardson),

pamphlets, political,

Paradise Lost (Milton),

pardons,

Paris,

Abigail’s views on,

French Revolution in,

JA’s first visit to,

JA’s second visit to,

Jefferson’s houses in,

London compared with,

peace talks in,

theater in,

Paris, Treaty of (1783),

signing of,

violations of,

Parliament, British,

Stamp Act and,

Passy,

Patriot party, Dutch,

patronage,

Patty (servant),

Paul, Saint,

Pauline (hairdresser),

Peale, Charles Willson,

Peale, Rembrandt,

Penn, John,

Penn, William,

Penn’s Hill,

Pennsylvania, Pennsylvanians,

constitution of,

Continental Congress delegates from,

legislature of,

militia of,

religious tolerance in,

site of capital and,

Whiskey Rebellion in,

Pennsylvania Evening Post,

Pennsylvania Gazette,

Pennsylvania Journal,

Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery,

Perth Amboy, N.J.,

Petit, Adrien,

petitions, to King George,

Philadelphia, Pa.,

British agents in,

British evacuation of,

British occupation of,

as capital,

Christ Church in,

City Tavern in,

Constitutional Convention in,

description of,

disease in,

evacuated by Congress,

Francis Hotel in,

Franklin’s death and,

French presence in,

Genêt in,

“Grand Federal Procession” in,

JA in, JA’s route to,

JA’s views on,

mourning for Washington in,

New York compared with,

port of,

President’s House in,

return of Congress to,

Thomas in,

Tories in,

Philadelphia Aurora,

election of 1800 and,

Philadelphia Evening Post,

Pickering, Timothy,

election of 1800 and,

firing of,

JA’s correspondence with,

as Secretary of State,

Pilgrims,

Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth,

in election of 1800

Pinckney, Thomas,

pins, Abigail’s request for,

pirates, Barbary,

Pitt, William, the elder,

Pitt, William, the younger,

Pittsburgh, Pa.,

Plan of Treaties,

Plato,

Poor Richard’s Almanack (Franklin),

Pope, Alexander,

Poplar Forest,

Popple, Henry,

population growth,

Porcupine’s Gazette,

portraits,

of Abigail,

of JA,

Portsmouth, N.H.,

Portugal,

Potomac River,

poverty, the poor,

in Europe,

in Philadelphia,

Powel, Samuel, power:

Abigail’s views on,

JA’s views on,

Presbyterians,

press, freedom of the,

press gangs,

Preston, Thomas,

Price, Rev. Richard,

Priestley, Joseph,

Prince, James,

Princeton, N.J.,

battle of (1777),

privateers,

French,

Proclamation of Neutrality (1793),

Prospect Before Us, The (Callender),

prostitutes,

Protestant Reformation,

Protestants,

Prussia,

“Publicola,”

Puritans,

Putnam, James,

Quakers,

American Revolution supported by,

pacifism of,

slavery and,

Quasi-War (Half-War),

end of,

peace efforts in,

as undeclared sea war,

U.S. preparations in,

X, Y, and Z Affair and,

Quebec, battle of (1775-76),

Quincy, Edmund,

Quincy, Eliza Susan,

Quincy, Esther, see Sewall, Esther Quincy

Quincy, Hannah, see Storer, Hannah

Quincy Lincoln

Quincy, John,

Quincy, Josiah, Jr.,

Quincy, Josiah, Sr.,

Quincy, Josiah (Abigail’s cousin),

Quincy, Mass.,

Big House in,

Emerson’s visit to,

John Quincy’s visits to,

Josiah Quincy’s visits to,

Lafayette’s visit to,

Louisa Catherine’s visits to,

Monroe’s visit to,

Nabby’s visits to,

Peacefield (later Stoneyfield) in,

Thomas in,

Quincy, Samuel,

Ramsay, Allan,

Ramsay, Andrew,

Randolph, Edmund,

Randolph, Ellen Wayles,

Randolph, John,

Randolph, Martha Jefferson (Patsy),

Abigail’s proposed marriage for,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

marriage of,

Randolph, Thomas Jefferson,

Randolph, Thomas Mann, Jr.,

Ranelagh Gardens,

reason:

JA’s views on,

Jefferson’s views on,

Reflections on Courtship and Marriage (Franklin),

Reflections on the French Revolution (Burke),

religion,

freedom of, in

Massachusetts constitution,

see also specific churches and sects

Reni, Guido,

republican government,

JA’s views on,

Republicans, Republican party,

Callender as propagandist for,

and Callender’s attack on Jefferson,

in election of

in election of

in election of

French policy and,

JA’s inauguration and,

JA’s lack of cooperation from,

Jay Treaty and,

Reynolds Affair and,

Sedition Act and,

Washington criticized by,

Revere, Paul,

Revolutionary War, see American Revolution

Reynolds, James,

Reynolds, Joshua,

Reynolds, Maria,

Reynolds Affair,

Rhode Island,

Continental Congress delegates from,

Richardson, Samuel,

Richmond, Va.,

Richmond Examiner,

Richmond Hill,

Richmond Recorder,

Ridley, Matthew,

Rights of Man, The (Paine),

Rittenhouse, David,

Robespierre, Maximilien de,

Rochambeau, Comte de,

Rockingham, Lord,

Rodney, Caesar,

Rodney, Thomas,

Roebuck (British frigate),

Roman Catholic Church,

Roman Empire, Roman values,

Ross, John,

Rotterdam,

Rousseau, Jean Jacques,

Royall, Anne,

Rubens, Peter Paul,

Rumbold, Richard,

Rush, Benjamin,

in Continental Congress,

death of,

on JA,

JA’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s friendship with JA renewed by,

Jefferson supported by,

sanitary concerns of,

slavery opposed by,

in yellow fever epidemics,

Rush, Mrs. Benjamin,

Rush, Richard,

Russia:

John Quincy as minister to,

John Quincy’s first visit to,

Napoleon’s invasion of,

Rutledge, Edward,

in meeting with Lord Howe,

St. Eustatius,

San Domingo (Haiti),

Saratoga, battle of (1777),

Sartine, Gabriel,

Scottish mercenaries,

sculpture,

Sedgwick, Theodore,

Sedition Act (1798),

Sellers, Nathan,

Selling of Joseph, The (Sewall),

Senate, Massachusetts,

Senate, U.S.,

and envoys to France,

JA’s tie-breaking votes in,

Jay Treaty and,

John Quincy in,

in New York,

removal of cabinet officers by,

titles issue in,

Senate Manual (Jefferson),

Sensible, La (French frigate),

Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne),

September Massacres,

Sergeant, Jonathan,

servants,

in England,

in France,

Sewall, Esther Quincy,

Sewall, Jonathan,

as attorney general,

JA offered royal appointment by,

JA’s friendship with,

JA’s reunion with,

marriage of,

Sewall, Samuel,

Shakespeare, William,

Shaw, Elizabeth Smith,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

death of,

Nabby’s correspondence with,

Shaw, Rev. John,

Shaw, William,

Shays, Daniel,

Shays’s Rebellion (1786),

Shelburne, Lord William,

Shenstone, William,

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley,

Sherman, Roger,

Short, William,

Siddons, Sarah,

slaves, slavery,

Abigail’s views on,

American Revolution and,

Declaration of Independence and,

of Jefferson,

Jefferson’s denunciation of,

Jefferson’s reputed cohabitation with,

opposition to,

in Philadelphia,

rebellions of,

smallpox inoculation and,

of Smith family,

smallpox,

inoculation for,

Smith, Abigail (JA’s wife), see Adams, Abigail Smith

Smith, Abigail Adams (Nabby) (JA’s daughter),

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Atlantic crossing of,

birth of,

cancer of,

death of,

diary of,

in East Chester,

in England,

in France,

inoculation of,

JA’s correspondence with,

John Quincy’s correspondence with,

marriage of,

in New York,

physical appearance of,

portrait of,

pregnancies and childbirths of,

in Quincy,

reserve of,

Tyler’s romance with,

Smith, Adam,

Smith, Caroline,

Smith, Elizabeth (Abigail’s aunt),

Smith, Elizabeth (Abigail’s sister), see Shaw, Elizabeth Smith

Smith, Isaac,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Smith, John Adams,

Smith, Louisa,

Abigail’s death and,

Smith, Mary, see Cranch, Mary Smith

Smith, Rev. William, Sr.,

death of,

slaves of,

Smith, Mrs. William, Sr.,

Smith, Sally, see Adams, Sally Smith

Smith, Thomas,

Smith, William, Jr.,

death of,

Smith, William Stephens,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

Abigail’s fears about,

death of,

in England,

JA’s correspondence with,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

marriage of,

proposed for Army,

speculative activities of,

Smith, William Steuben,

Smollett, Tobias,

Society of the Cincinnati,

South Carolina,

American Revolution in,

Continental Congress delegates from,

South Carolina (U.S. ship),

Spain,

in American Revolution,

U.S. relations with,

Spanish America,

Sparhawk, John,

Sparhawk, Thomas,

Stamp Act (1765),

State Department, U.S.,

see also specific secretaries

Staten Island,

States-General, Dutch,

states’ rights,

Stephens, Joseph,

Sterne, Laurence,

Stiles, Ezra,

Stockbridge, Joseph,

Stockton, Richard,

Stoddert, Benjamin,

JA’s correspondence with,

Storer, Charles,

Storer, Ebenezer,

Storer, Hannah Quincy Lincoln,

Strachey, Henry,

Stratford-on-Avon,

Stuart, Gilbert,

Sullivan, John,

Summary View of the Rights of British America (Jefferson),

Supreme Court, Massachusetts,

Supreme Court, U.S.,

Swift, Jonathan,

Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de,

taverns:

JA’s stops in,

in London,

in Philadelphia,

taxation,

of American colonies,

of land,

Shays’s Rebellion and,

Whiskey Rebellion and,

Tennessee,

Thaxter, John, Jr.,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

in Europe,

“Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries” (Adams),

Thomson, Charles,

Thornton, Matthew,

Thornton, William,

Thoughts on Government (Adams),

Thucydides,

titles issue,

Tories (Loyalists),

disarming of,

in London,

peace negotiations and,

on Staten Island,

Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre Dominique,

trade:

of American colonies,

of British,

of Dutch,

of France,

of U.S.,

treason,

of Arnold,

Treasury Department, U.S.:

Hamilton as Secretary of,

Reynolds Affair and,

treaties,

U.S.-British, ; see also Jay Treaty; Paris, Treaty of

U.S.-Dutch,

U.S.-French,

U.S.-Prussian,

Treatise of Feudal Tenures (Gilbert),

Trenton, N.J.,

battle of (1776),

Tripoli,

Tristram Shandy (Sterne),

True Sentiments of America, The,

Trumbull, John,

Truxtun, Thomas,

Tucker, Samuel,

Tucker, Thomas,

Tudor, William,

Tufts, Cotton, Jr.,

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA’s correspondence with,

Tunis,

Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, Baron de l’Aulne,

Twining, Thomas,

Tyler, Royall,

United States:

Barbary States and,

boundaries of,

British recognition of,

British troops in,

debts of,

Dutch recognition of,

economy of,

empire predicted for,

English relations with, see England, English, U.S. relations with

French relations with, see France, in American Revolution; France, U.S. alliance with; Quasi-War

moral shift in,

in peace talks,

of 1789

territory acquired by,

threats to union in,

unity of,

in War of 1812

westward expansion in,

United States (U.S. frigate),

Utrecht,

Valley Forge, Pa.,

van den Santheuvel, Bartholomeus,

van der Capellen tot den Pol, Baron Joan Derk,

van der Kemp, Francis,

JA’s correspondence with,

van Lynden van Hemmen, Baron,

Vassall, Leonard,

Vassall-Borland place, JA’s purchase of,

Vergennes, Comte de (Charles Gravier),

Franklin’s relationship with,

JA’s initial courtesy call with,

JA’s parting conversations with,

and JA’s second visit to France,

Jefferson’s relationship with,

La Vauguyon’s correspondence with,

peace negotiations and,

Vermont,

Verrières, Claudine-Geneviève,

Verrières, Marie,

Versailles,

veto power,

vice president:

diminishment of importance of,

election of,

frustrations of,

Virgil,

Virginia, University of,

Virginia, Virginians,

boundaries of,

capitol of,

constitution of,

Continental Congress delegates from,

debt of,

Dunmore’s escape from,

plantation houses in,

in 1789

and site of capital,

slavery in,

Virginia General Assembly,

Virginia Plan,

virtue,

government and,

of JA,

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet),

Ward, Samuel,

War Department, U.S.,

War of War Office, U.S., see Continental Board of War and Ordnance

Warren, James,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s denial of federal job to,

Warren, Joseph, death of,

Warren, Mercy Otis:

Abigail’s correspondence with,

JA hurt and provoked by,

JA’s correspondence with,

Washington, D.C.,

burning of,

Capitol in,

JA’s first visit to,

John Quincy in,

President’s House in,

Washington, George,

Abigail’s views on,

as Army commander-in-chief,

in art,

cabinet appointed by,

as Continental Army head,

as Continental Congress delegate,

death of,

elected President,

Farewell Address of,

finances of,

French Revolution and,

health problems of,

Howe’s agreement with,

inaugurations of,

at JA’s inauguration,

JA compared with,

JA’s correspondence with,

JA’s damaged relationship with,

JA’s farewell visit with,

JA’s first meeting with,

JA’s regard for,

Jefferson’s correspondence with,

modesty and reserve of,

New England tour of,

as President,

retirement of,

as slave owner,

Washington, Martha,

Washington Federalist,

Waterhouse, Benjamin,

JA’s correspondence with,

John Quincy’s correspondence with,

Watson, Elkanah,

Wayles, John,

Webb, Nathan,

JA’s correspondence with,

Webster, Daniel,

Webster, Noah,

Welsh, Harriet,

West, Benjamin,

West Indies,

Westminster Abbey,

West Point,

Weymouth, Mass.,

whale oil,

Whately, Thomas,

Whiskey Rebellion (1794),

White, Alexander,

White, William,

Whitehall Evening Post,

White Plains, battle of (1776),

Whitney, Rev. George,

Whitney, Rev. Peter,

Wibird, Parson Anthony,

Wilhelmina, Princess,

Williamsburg, Va.,

convention in (1776),

William V, Prince of Orange,

Wilson, James,

independence opposed by,

Winthrop, John,

Wirt, William,

Witherspoon, Rev. John,

Woburn Farm,

Wolcott, Oliver, Jr.,

and election of 1800

JA’s correspondence with,

Wolcott, Oliver, Sr.,

Wollstonecraft, Mary,

women:

Abigail’s views on,

French,

Worcester, Mass., JA in,

writs of assistance,

Wythe, George,

X, Y, and Z Affair,

Yale University,

Yard, Mrs. Sarah,

yellow fever,

York, Pa., Continental Congress in,

Yorke, Sir Joseph,

Yorktown, battle of (1781),

Young, Edward,

ALSO BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

The Great Bridge

The Path Between the Seats

Mornings on Horseback

Truman

Brave Companions

John Adams

Simon & Schuster
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1968 by David McCullough
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Touchstone edition as follows:
McCullough, David G.
The Johnstown flood.
(A Touchstone book)
Bibliography: p.
1. Floods—Pennsylvania—Johnstown.   2. Johnstown (Pa.)—History.   I. Title.
[F159.J7M16   1987]   974.877   86-26056

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN 10: 1-4165-6122-6

For Rosalee

Acknowledgments

The material for this book was gathered from the files of newspapers, from unpublished reminiscences, from letters and diaries, from Johnstown Flood “histories” that were best sellers in their day and from books and pamphlets that were privately printed, from court records, engineering reports, local histories, and rare old maps, from old photographs, and from hours of taped conversations with survivors of the Johnstown Flood.

A bibliography is included at the back of the book, but I want to acknowledge my indebtedness to four works in particular: J. J. McLaurin’s The Story of Johnstown, which for all its Victorian embellishments and inaccuracies is the finest by far of the books “gotten up” by journalists in 1889; The Reverend David J. Beale’s Through the Johnstown Flood, in many ways the best book on the flood and unquestionably the best-written and most reliable of accounts by survivors; A History of Johnstown and the Great Flood of 1889: A Study of Disaster and Rehabilitation, which is a doctoral thesis written by the late Nathan D. Shappee and the only scholarly study of the disaster; and a recently discovered transcription of testimony taken by the Pennsylvania Railroad during the summer of 1889, which has been invaluable. (Most of the dialogue in Chapters 3 and 4, for example, has been taken directly from this transcription, which, in all, runs to nearly 500 typewritten pages, and no part of which has been previously published.)

I very gratefully acknowledge my debt to the following flood survivors who kindly gave me so much of their time to talk about their experiences, some of whom have since passed on: Mrs. Kate Miltenberger, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Hesselbein, and David Fetterman, all of Johnstown; U. Ed Schwartzentruver of South Fork; Mrs. Gertrude Quinn Slattery of Wilkes-Barre, who also read the manuscript; and Dr. Victor Heiser of New York, who, in addition to vivid descriptions of his own experiences, supplied wonderful insights into the Johnstown of the 1880’s, and who read the manuscript.

I am grateful also to the two Johnstown ladies, both survivors, who shared memories of their illustrious family, but who asked that I not mention their names.

I wish to thank too the many others in Johnstown who were helpful, and especially the following: Irving London, who led me to the Pennsylvania Railroad testimony and who made available his extraordinary collection of flood photographs; Harold Strayer; Gustaf Hultman of the National Park Service; Elit Felix; Walter Krebs, president of the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, who made available the paper’s reference library and files; Don Matthews, Jr., also of the Tribune-Democrat, who made numerous helpful suggestions; Frank Dell and Ron Stephenson of Station WJAC; the City Clerk’s office; and the staff of the Cambria Public Library.

In addition, I am much indebted to Edna Lehman, who made available important documentary material at the Cambria County Historical Society at Ebensburg; to the late Robert Heppenstall of Pittsburgh, for information on his father’s heroic action; to Mrs. John E. Hannon, Sr., of Detroit, who wrote to me at length about her grandfather, W. Horace Rose; to Mrs. Bernard McGuire of Cresson, who let me borrow a diary kept by her grandfather, Isador Lilly of Ebensburg; to Dr. Philip Bishop, Dr. John White, and Donald Berkebile of the Smithsonian Institution; to Mr. and Mrs. Fred Livengood, Sr., of Somerset; to the late Mrs. O. C. Gaub of Pittsburgh; to Evan Stineman of South Fork; and to Al Danel of St. Michael, Pennsylvania.

Also I wish to express my gratitude for the facilities offered by the staff of the Pennsylvania Room at the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh; the Allegheny County Court of Claims, Pittsburgh; the Local History and Genealogy Room at the New York Public Library; the New York Historical Society; the Library of Congress; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Pittsburgh; the Yale University Library; the White Plains Public Library; and the Boston Public Library.

And for their suggestions and encouragement I wish finally to thank Walter McQuade, Walter Lord, Roger Butterfield, David Plowden, Heywood Broun, Jr., David Allison, Frank Fogarty, James Morrison, Royall O’Brien, Charles T. Siebert, Jr.; Audre Proctor, who typed the manuscript; my mother and father; and my wife, Rosalee.

D. McC.

Contents

I: The sky was red

II: Sailboats on the mountain

III: “There’s a man came from the lake.”

IV: Rush of the torrent

Photo Insert

V: “Run for your lives!”

VI: message from Mr. Pitcairn

VII: In the valley of death

VIII: “No pen can describe…”

IX: “Our misery is the work of man.”

List of Victims

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Map of Johnstown at time of Civil War

View of South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club Moorhead house

John G. Parke, Jr.

Remains of South Fork dam

Andrew Carnegie

Henry Clay Frick

Philander C. Knox

Robert Pitcairn

Daniel J. Morrell

John Fulton Tom L. Johnson

Captain Bill Jones

Two views of Johnstown-before and after the flood

Wreckage near the Methodist church

Schultz house Debris and “corpse”

Devastation in lower Johnstown

Pennsylvania Railroad bridge

View of the Point

Gertrude Quinn

Victor Heiser

Richard Harding Davis

Clara Barton

Survivors of the flood

Relief rations

Adams Street schoolhouse-temporary morgue The broken dam

Relief commissary

Searching among the dead

Happy reunions

Lynch law

Grandview Cemetery

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD

“We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these.”

—William Dean Howells
in A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1889.

I

The sky was red

–1–

Again that morning there had been a bright frost in the hollow below the dam, and the sun was not up long before storm clouds rolled in from the southeast.

By late afternoon a sharp, gusty wind was blowing down from the mountains, flattening the long grass along the lakeshore and kicking up tiny whitecaps out in the center of the lake. The big oaks and giant hemlocks, the hickories and black birch and sugar maples that crowded the hillside behind the summer colony began tossing back and forth, creaking and groaning. Broken branches and young leaves whipped through the air, and at the immense frame clubhouse that stood at the water’s edge, halfway among the cottages, blue wood smoke trailed from great brick chimneys and vanished in fast swirls, almost as though the whole building, like a splendid yellow ark, were under steam, heading into the wind.

The colony was known as the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. It was a private summer resort located on the western shore of a mountain lake in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, about halfway between the crest of the Allegheny range and the city of Johnstown. On the afternoon of Thursday, May 30, Memorial Day, 1889, the club was not quite ten years old, but with its gaily painted buildings, its neat lawns and well-tended flower beds, it looked spanking new and, in the gray, stormy half-light, slightly out of season.

In three weeks, when the summer season was to start, something like 200 guests were expected. Now the place looked practically deserted. The only people about were a few employees who lived at the clubhouse and some half dozen members who had come up from Pittsburgh for the holiday. D. W. C. Bidwell was there; so were the young Clarke brothers, J. J. Lawrence, and several of the Sheas and Irwins. Every now and then a cottage door slammed, voices called back and forth from the boathouses. Then there would be silence again, except for the sound of the wind.

Sometime not long after dark, it may have been about eight thirty, a young man stepped out onto the long front porch at the clubhouse and walked to the railing to take a look at the weather. His name was John G. Parke, Jr. He was clean-shaven, slight of build, and rather aristocratic-looking. He was the nephew and namesake of General John G. Parke, then superintendent of West Point. But young Parke was a rare item in his own right for that part of the country; he was a college man, having finished three years of civil engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. For the present he was employed by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club as the so-called “resident engineer.” He had been on the job just short of three months, seeing to general repairs, looking after the dam, and supervising a crew of some twenty Italian laborers who had been hired to install a new indoor plumbing system, and who were now camped out of sight, back in the woods.

In the pitch dark he could hardly see a thing, so he stepped down the porch stairs and went a short distance along the boardwalk that led through the trees to the cottages. The walk, he noticed, was slightly damp. Apparently, a fine rain had fallen sometime while he was inside having his supper. He also noticed that though the wind was still up, the sky overhead was not so dark as before; indeed, it seemed to be clearing off some. This was not what he had expected. Windstorms on the mountain nearly always meant a heavy downpour almost immediately after—“thunder-gusts” the local men called them. Parke had been through several already in the time he had been at the lake and knew what to expect.

It would be as though the whole sky were laying siege to the burly landscape. The rain would drum down like an unyielding river. Lightning would flash blue-white, again and again across the sky, and thunderclaps would boom back and forth down the valley like a cannonade, rattling every window along the lakeshore.

Then, almost as suddenly as it had started, the siege would lift, and silent, milky steam would rise from the surface of the water and the rank smell of the sodden forest floor would hang on in the air for hours.

Tonight, however, it appeared there was to be no storm. Parke turned and walked back inside. About nine-thirty he went upstairs, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.

About an hour and a half later, very near eleven, the rain began. It came slamming through the blackness in huge wind-driven sheets, beating against the clubhouse, the tossing trees, the lake, and the dark, untamed country that stretched off in every direction for miles and miles.

The storm had started out of Kansas and Nebraska, two days before, on May 28. The following day there had been hard rains in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Trains had been delayed, roads washed out. In Kansas, along the Cottonwood River, a dozen farms had been flattened by tornado-force winds and several people had been killed. In northern Michigan and parts of Indiana there had been sudden snow squalls. Warnings had been telegraphed east. On the night of the 29th the U.S. Signal Service issued notices that the Middle Atlantic states were in for severe local storms. On the morning of May 30 all stations in the area reported “threatening weather.”

When the storm struck western Pennsylvania it was the worst downpour that had ever been recorded for that section of the country. The Signal Service called it the most extensive rainfall of the century for so large an area and estimated that from six to eight inches of rain fell in twenty-four hours over nearly the entire central section. On the mountains there were places where the fall was ten inches.

But, at the same time, there were astonishing disparities between the amount of rainfall at places within less than a hundred-mile radius. At the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, for example, a pail left outside overnight would have five inches of water in it the next morning when the rain was still coming down. The total rainfall at the clubhouse would be somewhere near seven inches. In Pittsburgh, just sixty-five miles to the west as the crow flies, the total rainfall would be only one and a half inches.

But as the storm beat down on the mountain that night, John G. Parke, Jr., who would turn twenty-three in less than a month, slept on, never hearing a thing.

–2–

Most of the holiday crowds were back from the cemetery by the time the rain began Thursday afternoon. It had been the customary sort of Memorial Day in Johnstown, despite the weather.

People had been gathering along Main Street since noon. With the stores closed until six, with school out, and the men off from the mills, it looked as though the whole town was turning out. Visitors were everywhere, in by special trains from Somerset, Altoona, and other neighboring towns. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, “a stalwart, vigorous looking body of men,” as the Johnstown Tribune described them, was stopping over for its annual state convention. Hotels were full and the forty-odd saloons in Johnstown proper were doing a brisk business.

The Reverend H. L. Chapman, who lived two doors off Main, in the new Methodist parsonage facing the park, later wrote, “The morning was delightful, the city was in its gayest mood, with flags, banners and flowers everywhere…we could see almost everything of interest from our porch. The streets were more crowded than we had ever seen before.”

The parade, late starting as always, got under way about two-thirty, marched up Main, past the Morrell place, on by the Presbyterian Church and the park, clear to Bedford Street. There it turned south and headed out along the river to Sandy Vale, where the war dead were buried. The fire department marched, the Morrellville Odd Fellows, the Austrian Music Society, the Horners-town Drum Corps, the Grand Army Veterans, and the Sons of Veterans, and half a dozen or more other groups of various shapes and sizes, every one of them getting a big cheer, and especially the Grand Army men, several of whom were beginning to look as though the three-mile tramp was a little more than they were up to.

How much things had changed since they had marched off to save the Union! It had been nearly thirty years since Lincoln had first called for volunteers. Grant and Lee were both dead, and there were strapping steelworkers with thick, black mustaches standing among the crowds along Main Street who had been born since Appomattox.

At the start of the war Johnstown had been no more than a third the size it was now; and ten years before that, it had been nothing but a sleepy little canal town with elderbushes growing high along Main, and so quiet you could hear the boat horns before the barges cleared the bend below town.

But ever since the war, with the west opening up, the Cambria Iron Company had had its giant three-ton converters going night and day making steel for rails and barbed wire, plowshares, track bolts, and spring teeth for harrows. The valley was full of smoke, and the city clanked and whistled and rumbled loud enough to be heard from miles off. At night the sky gleamed so red it looked as though the whole valley were on fire. James Quinn, one of Johns-town’s most distinguished-looking Grand Army veterans and its leading dry-goods merchant, enjoyed few sights more. “The sure sign of prosperity,” he called it.

Years after, Charlie Schwab, the most flamboyant of Carnegie’s men, described the view of Johnstown from his boyhood home in the mountain town of Loretto, nearly twenty miles to the northeast.

“Along toward dusk tongues of flame would shoot up in the pall around Johnstown. When some furnace door was opened the evening turned red. A boy watching from the rim of hills had a vast arena before him, a place of vague forms, great labors, and dancing fires. And the murk always present, the smell of the foundry. It gets into your hair, your clothes, even your blood.”

Most of the men watching the parade that Memorial Day would have taken a somewhat less romantic view. In the rolling mills they worked under intense heat on slippery iron floors where molten metal went tearing by and one false step or slow reaction could mean horrible accidents. Most of them worked a ten-or even twelve-hour day, six days a week, and many weeks they worked the hated “long turn,” which meant all day Sunday and on into Monday. If they got ten dollars for a week’s work they were doing well.

A visiting journalist in 1885 described Johnstown as “new, rough, and busy, with the rush of huge mills and factories and the throb of perpetually passing trains.” The mills were set just below town in the gap in the mountains where the Conemaugh River flows westward. On the hillside close to the mills the trees had turned an evil-looking black and grew no leaves.

Johnstown of 1889 was not a pretty place. But the land around it was magnificent. From Main Street, a man standing among the holiday crowds could see green hills, small mountains, really, hunching in close on every side, dwarfing the tops of the houses and smokestacks.

The city was built on a nearly level flood plain at the confluence of two rivers, down at the bottom of an enormous hole in the Alleghenies. A visitor from the Middle West once commented, “Your sun rises at ten and sets at two,” and it was not too great an exaggeration.

The rivers, except in spring, appeared to be of little consequence. The Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek, or the Stony Creek, as everyone in Johnstown has always said (since it is the Stony Creek River), are both more like rocky, oversized mountain streams than rivers. They are about sixty to eighty yards wide. Normally their current is very fast; in spring they run wild. But on toward August, as one writer of the 1880’s said, there are places on either river where a good jumper could cross on dry stones.

The Little Conemaugh, which is much the swifter of the two, rushes in from the east, from the Allegheny Mountain. It begins near the very top of the mountain, about eighteen miles from Johnstown, at a coal town called Lilly. Its sources are Bear Rock Run and Bear Creek, Trout Run, Bens Creek, Laurel Run, South Fork Creek, Clapboard Run and Saltlick Creek. From an elevation of 2,300 feet at Lilly, the Little Conemaugh drops 1,147 feet to Johnstown.

The Stony Creek flows in from the south. It is a broader, deeper river than the other and is fed by streams with names like Beaver Dam Run, Fallen Timber Run, Shade Creek, and Paint Creek. Its total drainage is considerably more than that of the Little Conemaugh, and until 1889 it had always been thought to be the more dangerous of the two.

When they meet at Johnstown, the rivers form the Conemaugh, which, farther west, joins the Loyalhanna to form the Kiskiminetas, which in turn flows into the Allegheny about eighteen miles above Pittsburgh.

At Johnstown it was as though the bottom had dropped out of the old earth and left it angry and smoldering, while all around, the long, densely forested ridges, “hogbacks” they were called, rolled off in every direction like a turbulent green sea. The climb up out of the city took the breath right out of you. But on top it was as though you had entered another world, clean, open, and sweet-smelling.

In 1889 there were still black bear and wildcats on Laurel Hill to the west of town. Though the loggers had long since stripped the near hills, there were still places within an hour’s walk from Main Street where the forest was not much different than it had been a hundred years before.

Now and then an eagle could still be spotted high overhead. There were pheasants, ruffed grouse, geese, loons, and wild turkeys that weighed as much as twenty pounds. Plenty of men marching in the parade could remember the time before the war when there had been panthers in the mountains big enough to carry off a whole sheep. And it had been only a few years earlier when passenger pigeons came across the valley in numbers beyond belief. One January the Tribune wrote: “On Saturday there were immense flocks of wild pigeons flying over town, but yesterday it seemed as if all the birds of this kind at present in existence throughout the entire country were engaged in gyrating around overhead. One flock was declared to be at least three miles in length by half a mile wide.”

Still, many days there were in the valley itself when the wind swept away the smoke and the acrid smell of the mills and the air was as good as a man could ask for. Many nights, and especially in winter, were the way mountain nights were meant to be, with millions of big stars hanging overhead in a sky the color of coal.

Looking back, most of the people who would remember Johnstown as it was on that Memorial Day claimed it was not as unpleasant a place as one might imagine. “People were poor, very poor by later standards,” one man said, “but they didn’t know it.” And there was an energy, a vitality to life that they would miss in later years.

Many of the millworkers lived in cheap, pine-board company houses along the riverbanks, where, as the Tribune put it, “Loud and pestiferous stinks prevail.” But there were no hideous slums, such as had spread across the Lower East Side of New York or in Chicago and Pittsburgh. The kind of appalling conditions that would be described the next year by Jacob Riis in his How the Other Half Lives did not exist then in Johnstown. No one went hungry, or begging, though there were always tramps about, drifters, who came with the railroad, heading west nearly always, knocking at back doors for something to eat.

They were part of the landscape and people took them for granted, except when they started coming through in big numbers and there were alarming stories in the papers about crowds of them hanging around the depot.

One diary, kept by a man who lived outside of town, includes a day-by-day tramp count. “Wednesday, May 1, 1889, Two Tramps…Thursday, May 2, Two Tramps,” and so on, with nearly a tramp or two every day, week after week.

New people came to town, found a job or, if not, moved on again, toward Pittsburgh. But for most everyone who decided to stay there was work. Although lately, Johnstown men, too, had been picking up and going west to try their luck at the mills in St. Louis or the mines in Colorado. And lately the jobs they left behind were being filled by “hunkies” brought in to “work cheap.”

The idea did not please people much. Nor did it matter whether the contract workers were Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, or Swedes; they were all called Hungarians, “bohunks” or “hunkies.” But so far, and again unlike the big cities, Johnstown had only a few such men, and most of them lived in Cambria City, just down the river, beyond the new stone bridge that carried the main line of the Pennsylvania across the Conemaugh.

The vast majority of the people who lined Main Street watching the parade were either Irish, Scotch-Irish, or Cornish (Cousin Jacks, they were called), German or Welsh, with the Germans and the Welsh greatly outnumbering all the rest. There were some Negroes, but not many, and a few of the leading merchants were Jews.

The Germans and the Welsh had been the first settlers. More of them, plus the Scotch-Irish, had come along soon after to work in the mines and first forges. Quite a few of the big Irishmen in the crowd had come in originally to build the railroad, then stayed on. Johnstown had been an active stop along the Underground Railroad, and a few of the Negroes had come in that way. Others of them came later to work in the tannery.

There were German and Welsh churches in town, a German newspaper, and several Irish fortunetellers. Welsh and German were spoken everywhere, along with enough other brogues, burrs, and twangs to make a “plain American” feel he was in a country of “feriners,” or so it often seemed.

The first white settlers in the valley had been Solomon and Samuel Adams and their sister Rachael, who came over the Allegheny Mountains from Bedford about 1771 and cleared a patch of land near the Stony Creek. Until then the place had been known as Conemack Old Town, after a Delaware Indian village that stood about where the Memorial Day parade had gathered that noon at the foot of Main.

Samuel Adams and an Indian killed each other in a knife fight, and the traditional story is that Rachael was also killed by Indians soon after. Solomon made a fast retreat back to the stockade at Bedford, and it was not for another twenty years or thereabouts that the first permanent settler arrived. In 1794, about the time President Washington was sending an army over the mountains to put down the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in Pittsburgh, Joseph Schantz, or Johns, an Amish farmer from Switzerland, came into the valley with his wife and four children. He cleared off thirty acres between the rivers, raised a cabin, planted an orchard, and laid out a village which he called Conemaugh Old Town—or just Conemaugh—and which he had every hope for becoming the county seat.

When the county was established in 1804 and given the old Latin name for Wales—Cambria—Ebensburg, a mountain village fifteen miles to the north, was picked as county seat. Three years later Joseph Johns sold his village and moved on.

The next proprietor was a long-haired “York County Dutchman” (a Pennsylvania German) named Peter Levergood, and from then until the canal came through, the town remained no more than a backwoods trading center. But with the arrival of the canal it became the busiest place in the county. By 1835 Johnstown, as it was by then known, had a drugstore, a newspaper, a Presbyterian church, and a distillery. By 1840 its population, if the nearby settlements were counted, had probably passed 3,000. Then, in the 1850’s, the Pennsylvania Railroad came through, the Cambria Iron Company was established, and everything changed.

By the start of the 1880’s Johnstown and its neighboring boroughs had a total population of about 15,000. Within the next nine years the population doubled. On the afternoon of May 30, 1889, there were nearly 30,000 people living in the valley.

Properly speaking Johnstown was only one of several boroughs—East Conemaugh, Woodvale, Conemaugh, Cambria City, Prospect, Millville, Morrellville, Grubbtown, Moxham, Johnstown—which were clustered between the hills, packed in so tight that there was scarcely room to build anything more.

Petty political jealousies and differences over taxes had kept them from uniting. As it was there was no telling where one began or the other ended unless you knew, which, of course, everyone who lived there did. Millville, Prospect, and Cambria City, it was said, lived on the pay roll of the Cambria mills; Conemaugh lived on the Gautier wire works, Woodvale on the woolen mills there, and Johnstown, in turn, lived on all the rest of them. Johnstown was the center of the lot, geographically and in every other way. It was far and away the largest, with a population of its own of perhaps 10,000 by 1889, which was four times greater than even the biggest of the others. The banks were there, the hotels, the jail, and a full-time police force of nine.

There were five-story office buildings on Main and up-to-date stores. The town had an opera house, a night school, a library, a remarkable number of churches, and several large, handsome houses, most of which were owned by men high up in the Iron Company.

Much would be written later on how the wealthy men of Johnstown lived on the high ground, while the poor were crowded into the lowlands. The fact was that the most imposing houses in town were all on Main Street, and one of the largest clusters of company houses was up on Prospect Hill.

The rest of the people lived in two-and three-story frame houses which, often as not, had a small porch in front and a yard with shade trees and a few outbuildings in back. Nearly everyone had a picket fence around his property, and in spite of its frenzied growth, the city still had more than a few signs of its recent village past.

On the 22nd of May, for example, the town fathers had gathered at the City Council chambers to settle various matters of the moment, the most pressing of which was to amend Section 12 of Chapter XVI of the Codified Ordinance of the Borough of Johnstown. The word “cow” was to be inserted after “goat” in the third line, so that it would from then on read: “Section 12. Any person who shall willfully suffer his horse, mare, gelding, mule, hog, goat, cow, or geese to run at large within the Borough shall for each offense forfeit and pay for each of said animals so running at large the sum of one dollar…”

Life was comparatively simple, pleasures few. There were Saturday night band concerts in the park, and lectures at the library. Sundays half the town put on its best and went walking. Families would pick one of the neighboring boroughs and walk out and back, seeing much and, naturally, being seen all along the way.

There was a new show at the Washington Street Opera House every other night or so. Thus far in 1889 it had been an especially good season, with such favorites as Zozo the Magic Queen (which brought its “splendid production” in “OUR OWN SPECIAL SCENERY CAR”) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin appearing in a single week. (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s little drama had also changed considerably since the years before the war. The Johnstown performance, for example, featured “a pack of genuine bloodhounds; two Topsies; Two Marks, Eva and her Pony ‘Prince’; African Mandolin Players; ‘Tinker’ the famous Trick Donkey.”)

There was also the Unique Rink for roller skating, a fad which seemed to be tapering off some that spring. There was superb fishing along the Conemaugh and the Stony Creek in spring and summer. Downstream from town the river was stained by waste dumped from the mills, but above town the water still ran clear between sun-bleached boulders and was full of catfish, sunfish, mullet, walleyed pike that everyone mistakenly called salmon, trout, eels, and speedy, mud-colored crawfish.

In spring, too, there was nearly always a good brawl when the circus came to town. In the fall, when the sour gums turned blood-red against the pines, there was wonderful hunting on the mountains, and fresh deer hanging from butcher shop meathooks was one of the signs of the season. In winter there were sleigh rides to Ebensburg, tobogganing parties, and ice skating at the Von Lunen pond across from the new Johnson Street Rail works up the Stony Creek at Moxham.

And year round there was a grand total of 123 saloons to choose from in the greater Johnstown area, ranging from California Tom’s on Market Street to the foul-smelling holes along the back alleys of Cambria City. California Tom Davis had been a forty-niner. He was one of the colorful characters of Johnstown and the back room of his saloon was the favorite gathering place for those professional men and Cambria Iron officials who liked to take a sociable drink now and then.

But the average saloon was simply a place where a working-man could stop off at the end of the day to settle the fierce thirst the heat of the furnaces left him with, or to clear the coal dust from his throat. He was always welcome there, without a shave or a change of clothes. It was his club. He had a schooner of beer or a shot; most of the time he spent talking.

Like any steel town Johnstown had a better than average number of hard-line drinking men. On payday Saturdays the bartenders were the busiest people in town. And week after week Monday’s paper carried an item or two about a “disturbance” Saturday night on Washington Street or in Cambria City, and published the names of two or three citizens who had spent the night in the lockup for behaving in “frontier fashion.”

For those of still earthier appetite there was Lizzie Thompson’s place on Frankstown Hill, at the end of Locust Street. It was the best-known of the sporting houses, but there were others too, close by, and on Prospect Hill. And one spring a similar enterprise had flourished for weeks in the woods outside of town, when several itinerant “soiled doves,” as the Tribune called them, set up business in an abandoned coal mine.

But primarily, life in Johnstown meant a great deal of hard work for just about everybody. Not only because that was how life was then, but because people had the feeling they were getting somewhere. The country seemed hell-bent for a glorious new age, and Johnstown, clearly, was right up there booming along with the best of them. Pittsburgh and Chicago were a whole lot bigger, to be sure, and taking a far bigger part of the business. But that was all right. For Johnstown these were the best years ever.

Progress was being made, and it was not just something people were reading about. It was happening all around them, touching their lives.

Streets were bright at night now with sputtering white arc lights. There was a new railroad station with bright-colored awnings. The hospital was new; two new business blocks had been finished on Main. A telephone exchange had begun service that very year, in January, and already there were more than seventy phones in town. Quite a few houses had new bathrooms. The Hulbert House, the new hotel on Clinton Street, had an elevator and steam heat.

There was a street railway out to Woodvale and another up to Moxham. Almost everyone had electricity or natural gas in his home. There were typewriters in most offices, and several people had already bought one of the new Kodak “detective” cameras. “Anybody can use the Kodak,” the advertisements said.

Inventions and changes were coming along so fast that it was hard to keep up with them all. The town had no debts, taxes were low, and the cost of things was coming down little by little.

Of course, there were some who looked askance at so much change and liked to talk about the old days when they said there had never been so much drinking, no prostitution, and men could still do a day’s work without complaining. There was also strong resentment against the company, and quiet talk of trouble to come, though it would have been very hard for most men among those Memorial Day crowds to have imagined there ever being an actual strike in the mills. The miners had tried it, twice, and both times the company had clamped down with such speed and decisiveness that the strikes had been broken in no time.

And there were floods and fires and, worst of all, epidemics that hit so swiftly and unexpectedly, terrifying everyone, and killing so many children. The last bad time had been in 1879, when diphtheria killed 132 children within a few months. Death was always near, and there was never any telling when it would strike again.

Year in, year out men were killed in the mills, or maimed for life. Small boys playing around the railroad tracks that cut in and out of the town would jump too late or too soon and lose a leg or an arm, or lie in a coma for weeks with the whole town talking about them until they stopped breathing forever.

But had not life always been so? Was not hard work the will of the Lord? (“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground…”) And yes, death too? (“…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”)

And besides, was it not a fine thing to be where there was so much going on, so much to keep a man busy and his family eating regularly?

So far it had been a good year. Except for measles the town seemed pretty healthy. Talk was that it would be a good summer for steel. Prices might well improve, and perhaps wages with them, and there would be no labor trouble to complicate things, as there would probably be in Pittsburgh.

The Quicksteps, Johnstown’s beloved baseball team, had made a rather poor showing so far, losing to Braddock, Greensburg, and McKeesport in a row; but they had beaten Altoona once, and most people felt that about made up for it. The newspapers were full of stories about the World’s Fair opening in Paris, and its Eiffel Tower, and about the Oklahoma Territory opening up out west. Towers of structural steel could reach nearly to the heavens, and Americans could turn a dusty prairie into farms and whole new cities overnight. It was some time to be alive.

But perhaps best of all there seemed such a strong spirit of national unity everywhere. The Constitutional government those Grand Army veterans had fought for had just celebrated its one hundredth birthday that spring and there had been quite a to-do about it in the newspapers and picture magazines. “A nation in its high hour of imperial power and prosperity looks back a hundred years to its obscure and doubtful beginning…” one article began. That the next one hundred years would be better still, bringing wondrous advantages and rewards to millions of people who had also come from “obscure and doubtful” beginnings, seemed about as certain as anything could be; and especially in a place like Johnstown, on a day when flags were flying from one end of town to the other, and the “Boys in Blue” were marching again.

When the rain started coming down about four o’clock, it was very fine and gentle, little more than a cold mist. Even so, no one welcomed it. There had already been more than a hundred days of rain that year, and the rivers were running high as it was. The first signs of trouble had been a heavy snow in April, which had melted almost as soon as it came down. Then in May there had been eleven days of rain.

The rivers ran high every spring. That was to be expected. Some springs they ran so high they filled the lower half of town to the top doorstep. A few times the water had been level with first-floor windows along several streets. Floods had become part of the season, like the dogwood blooming on the mountain. Yet, each year, there was the hope that perhaps this time the rivers might behave themselves.

It had already been such a curious year for weather. A tornado in February had killed seventeen people in Pittsburgh. Not much had happened in Johnstown, but the wind carried off a tin church roof at Loretto. The April snow had been the heaviest of the whole year, with fourteen inches or more in the mountains. And all through May, temperatures had been bouncing every which way, up in the eighties one day, down below freezing two nights later, then back to the eighties again. Now it felt more like March than May.

About five the rain stopped and left everything freshly rinsed looking. The Reverend Chapman, back on his front porch after participating at the graveside ceremonies, sat gazing at the park with its big elms and draped chain fence, and thought to himself that he had seldom looked upon a lovelier scene. Or at least so he wrote later on.

The Reverend had been in Johnstown only a few years, and it had been just the month before that he and his wife, Agnes, had moved into the new parsonage. He had grown up along the canal to the west of Johnstown, at Blairsville, where his father had eked out a living painting decorative scenes and designs on packet boats. His first church had been in Ligonier, on the other side of Laurel Hill. Later there had been churches in New Florence and Bolivar, down the Conemaugh, and half a dozen other places between Johnstown and Pittsburgh. He liked every one of them, he said, but Johnstown was something special. His stone church next door was the largest in town, a landmark, and except for St. Joseph’s, the German Catholic church over in Conemaugh borough, no church had a larger membership. His neighbors across the park, Dr. Lowman and John Fulton, were the finest sort of Christian gentlemen, and their homes were as elegantly furnished as any in town. The Dibert bank, Griffith’s drugstore, the post office and the Tribune offices on the floor above it, were all but a few steps from the Reverend’s front door. The parsonage faced on to Franklin Street, at almost the exact dead center of Johnstown.

Night settled in and the lights came on along Franklin and Main. A few blocks away William Kuhn and Daisy Horner were being married in a small ceremony at the bride’s home. At the Opera House Mr. Augustin Daly’s New York production of A Night Off, “The comedy success of two continents,” was playing to a small house. Daly was the foremost theatrical producer of the day, and A Night Off had been his biggest hit for several years. Like some of his other productions, it was an adaptation from a German comedy, a fact which the Johnstown audience undoubtedly appreciated.

Other than that not much else was going on. Because of the holiday there had been no paper that morning, but according to Wednesday’s Tribune, rainstorms were expected late that Thursday; tomorrow, Friday, was to be slightly warmer. The barometric pressure was reported at thirty, temperature from forty-six to sixty-five, humidity at sixty-nine per cent.

About nine the rain began again, gentle and quiet as earlier. But an hour or so later it started pouring and there seemed no end to it. “Sometime in the night,” according to Chapman, “my wife asked if it were not raining very hard, and I being very sleepy, barely conscious of the extraordinary downpour simply answered, ‘Yes,’ and went to sleep, thinking no more of it until morning.”

–3–

George Heiser’s day did not end until after ten. It was his practice to keep the store open until then. With the saloons along Washington Street doing business on into the night, there were generally people about and he could pick up a little more trade. Either he or his wife Mathilde would be looking after things behind the counter, in among the queen’s ware and the barrels of sugar and crackers, the cases of Ewarts tobacco and yellow laundry soap, needles, spools, pins, and Clark’s “O-N-T” (Our New Thread).

George and Mathilde Heiser, and their sixteen-year-old son, Victor, lived upstairs over the store. They had been at the same location, 224 Washington, for several years now and, at long last, business was looking up. At fifty-two, for the first time in his life, George Heiser was getting on in the world.

Washington Street ran parallel to Main, two blocks to the north. From the Stony Creek over to the Little Conemaugh, the east-west streets—the “up” streets they were called—ran Vine, Lincoln, Main, Locust, Washington. Then came the B & O tracks and the B & O depot which was directly across the street from the Heiser store. Beyond the tracks were two more streets, Broad and Pearl, then the Little Conemaugh, and on the other side of that rose Prospect Hill, steep as a roof. With the town growing the way it had been, the Baltimore & Ohio had brought in a spur from Somerset eight years before to try to take away some of the freight business from the Pennsylvania. An old schoolhouse had been converted into a depot, and the steady night and day racket of the trains right by their window had made quite a difference to the Heisers. But with the store doing as well as it was, George Heiser had few complaints.

George had been troubled by bad luck much of his life. During the war, at Fredericksburg, when his unit had been making a rapid withdrawal, his companion in the ranks, a fellow named Pike, got hit and went down grabbing on to George’s leg and pleading for George not to leave him. As a result they were both captured and George spent the rest of the war in Libby Prison. Then, years later, at a time when he seemed to be getting nowhere in Johnstown, George had gone off north to Oil City hoping to strike it rich. He wound up running a butcher shop instead and in no time was back in Johnstown, flat broke, wiped out by fire and his own lack of business sense.

George had not marched in the parade that afternoon. His blue uniform seldom ever came out of the big wardrobe upstairs. He was not much for parades and the like. He seldom mixed in politics, never became an enthusiastic church man. He neither smoked nor chewed, though he would take a beer every so often and once a year he liked to make wine down in the cellar. He did enjoy the Grand Army meetings, but that was largely because he enjoyed being with his friends. People liked him. He was a good storyteller, easygoing. He was also about as physically powerful as any man in town, and he was a very soft touch. He could lift a barrel full of sugar, which was considered quite a feat; but turning away a friend whose credit might not be the best seemed more than he was up to.

Twice in his life he had let friends have money when they came to him; twice he had suffered heavily from the loss. Fortunately for the Heisers, Mathilde was a determined and sensible wife. She was the manager of the two, and after George came back from Oil City she took charge. She kept the books, saw that he did not let much go on credit. Nor would she allow him to set any chairs out on the bare wooden floor. Otherwise, she said, his cronies would be sitting about half the day giving the place the wrong sort of appearance. They had at last been able to add a new window to the store front and appearances would be maintained so long as Mathilde had her say.

Mathilde’s appearance was straightforward and intelligent. She had a fine head of dark-brown hair, a high forehead, and a set to her mouth that suggested she knew where she was going and that chances were good she would get there. She had had a considerable amount of education for a woman of that time and continued to keep up with her reading. Education was the thing, a proper education and hard work. It had been her way of life since childhood in Germany, and she intended to pass it on to the pride of her life, her son.

Victor was her second child. The first, a girl, had died of diphtheria. Victor had been struck down with it too, but he had been stronger. He looked much like his father now, only a ganglier, rawboned version. He was a serious, pink-faced boy, with big feet and blond hair, taller already than most men and far better educated. At sixteen he knew several languages, was well along in advanced mathematics, and had read about as widely as any boy in Johnstown. At his mother’s insistence, his life was a steady round of school, homework, and being tutored in one extra course or another. If George Heiser had had his troubles making his way, that was one thing; Victor, Mathilde Heiser was determined, would not just get on, he would excel. There would be no going off to the Cambria works or coal mines for this young man, and no clerking behind a store counter either.

Now and again Victor had his moments away from all that. His father would step in and see that he got some time off. George Heiser had a wonderful way with children. He was forever telling them stories and listening to theirs. He took a great interest in his son and his schemes, one of which was to build a raft and float down the Conemaugh to the Allegheny, then on to the Ohio and Mississippi. Victor had taken some night classes in mechanical drawing at the library and had worked up plans on how the raft should be built. His idea was to catch the Conemaugh when it was high, otherwise he knew he would run aground.

In summer he would bring home accounts of his long rides out of town to the open country above the valley. Once he and one of his friends had gone all the way to the South Fork dam to take a look at the lake and the summer colony, but they had been sent on their way by the grounds keeper and never got to see much.

Other nights Victor talked about walking to the edge of town to watch the big summer revival meeting. He loved the powerful singing and the whooping and hollering of people “getting religion.” On the way home he and his friends would try to imitate what they had seen, laughing and pounding each other on the back as they came along the streets. This was the kind of education George Heiser understood. He had grown up in Johnstown himself. His people had been among the Pennsylvania Germans who first settled the valley.

After ten the Heiser store was closed for the day, the lights out downstairs. When the downpour began, George and Mathilde did not think much of it, except that there would almost certainly be high water in the morning. But the thought bothered them very little, except for the inconveniences there might be. They listened to the rain drum on the roof and were glad to be inside.

If there was such a thing as a typical married couple in Johnstown on the night of May 30, 1889, George and Mathilde Heiser would come about as close as any to qualifying. Together, like Johnstown itself, they combined an Old World will to make good in the New with a sort of earlier-American, cracker-barrel willingness to take life pretty much as it came. Unlike a large number of Johnstown people, they were not directly beholden to the Cambria Iron Company, but their fortunes, like those of the entire valley, depended nonetheless on how red those skies glowed at night.

They had suffered the death of a child; they had tried their luck elsewhere and had lost. They fought dirt daily, saved every spare nickel, and took tremendous pride in the progress they were making. All things considered, Johnstown seemed a good place to be. It was their home.

II

Sailboats on the mountain

–1–

The lake had several different names. On old state maps it was the Western Reservoir, the name it had been given more than forty years earlier when the dam was first built. It was also known as the Old Reservoir and Three Mile Dam, which was the most descriptive name of the lot, if somewhat misleading, since the lake was closer to two than three miles long. The Pittsburgh people who had owned it now for ten years, and who had made a number of changes, called it Lake Conemaugh. But in Johnstown, and in the little coal towns and railroad stops along the way to Johnstown, it was generally known as South Fork dam.

South Fork was the nearest place to it of any size. Something like 1,500 people lived there in gaunt little frame houses perched on a hill just back from the tracks and the place where South Fork Creek flows into the Little Conemaugh River. Green hills closed in on every side; the air smelled of coal dust and pine trees. It was a town like any one of a half dozen along the main line of the Pennsylvania between Altoona and Johnstown; except for July and August, when things picked up considerably in South Fork.

The Pittsburgh people were coming and going then, and they were something to see with their troops of beautiful children, their parasols, and servants. Two or three spring wagons and buggies were usually waiting at the depot to take them to the lake. On Saturdays and Sundays the drivers were going back and forth several times a day.

The ride to the lake was two miles along a dusty country road that ran through the woods beside South Fork Creek, past Lamb’s Bridge, then on up the valley almost to the base of the dam.

Seen from down below, the dam looked like a tremendous mound of overgrown rubble, the work of a glacier perhaps. It reared up 72 feet above the valley floor and was more than 900 feet long. Its face was very steep and covered with loose rocks. There were deep crevices between the rocks where, as late as May, you could still find winter ice hiding; but wild grass, bushes, and saplings had long since taken root across nearly all of the face and pushed up vigorously from between the rocks, adding to the over-all impression that the whole huge affair somehow actually belonged to the natural landscape. There was hardly any indication that the thing was the work of man and no suggestion at all of what lay on the other side, except over at the far left, at the eastern end of the dam, where a spillway had been cut through the solid rock of the hillside and a wide sheet of water came crashing down over dark boulders. It was a most picturesque spot, and a favorite for picnics. Long shafts of sunlight slanted through a leafy gloom where the mountain laurel grew higher than a man could reach. And at the base of the falls a wooden bridge crossed the loud water and sent the road climbing straight to a clump of trees at the top of the dam, just to the right of the spillway.

There the road divided, with the left-hand fork crossing another long wooden bridge which went directly over the spillway. But carriages heading for the club took the road to the right, which turned sharply out of the trees into the sunshine and ran straight across the breast of the dam where, about a hundred yards out, the drivers customarily stopped long enough for everyone to take in the view.

To the right the dam dropped off a great deal more abruptly even than it had looked from below, and South Fork Creek could be seen glittering through the trees as it wound toward Lamb’s Bridge.

On the other side of the road the bank sloped sharply to the water’s edge, which was usually no more than six or seven feet below the top of the dam. From there the broad surface of the lake, gleaming in the sunlight, swept off down the valley until it disappeared behind a wooded ridge in the distance.

Along the eastern shore, to the left, were the hayfields and orchards of the Unger farm, neatly framed with split-rail fences. Beyond that was what was known as Sheep’s Head Point, a grassy knoll that jutted out into the lake. Then there were one, two, three ridges, and the water turned in behind them, out of sight, running, so it seemed, clear to the hazy blue horizon off to the south.

At the western end of the dam the road swung on through the woods, never far from the water, for another mile or so, to the main grounds of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which, seen from the dam, looked like a colorful string of doll houses against the distant shore line.

From the dam to the club, across the water, was about a mile. Except for a few small coves, the narrowest part of the lake was at the dam, but there was one spot, on down past the club, where an east-west line across the water was nearly a mile. A hike the whole way around the shore was five miles.

When the water was up in the spring, the lake covered about 450 acres and was close to seventy feet deep in places. The claim, in 1889, was that it was the largest man-made lake in the country, which it was not. But even so, as one man in Johnstown often told his children, it was “a mighty body of water to be up there on the mountain.”

The difference in elevation between the top of the dam and the city of Johnstown at the stone bridge was about 450 feet, and the distance from the dam to that point, by way of the river valley, was just under fifteen miles. Estimates are that the water of Lake Conemaugh weighed about 20 million tons.

The water came from half a dozen streams and little creeks that rushed down from Blue Knob and Allegheny Mountain, draining some sixty square miles. There was Rorabaugh Creek, Toppers Run, Yellow Run, Bottle Run, Muddy Run, South Fork Creek, and one or two others which seem never to have been named officially. South Fork Creek and Muddy Run were the biggest of them, but South Fork Creek was at least twice the size of the others. Even in midsummer it was a good twenty feet across. Like the others it was shallow, ice-cold, very swift, and just about a perfect place for trout fishing.

In South Fork there were scores of people who had been out on the dam and had seen the view. There were others who knew even more about the club and the goings on there because they worked on the grounds, tending lawns or waiting on tables at the clubhouse. But for everyone else the place was largely a mystery. It was all private property, and as the club managers had made quite clear on more than one occasion, uninvited guests were definitely not welcome.

The club had been organized in Pittsburgh in 1879. It owned the dam, the lake, and about 160 acres besides. By 1889 sixteen cottages had been built along the lake, as well as boathouses and stables. The cottages were set out in an orderly line among the trees, not very far apart, and only a short way back from the water. They looked far too substantial really to be called “cottages.” Nearly every one of them was three stories tall, with high ceilings, long windows, a deep porch downstairs, and, often as not, another little porch or two upstairs tucked under sharp-peaked roofs. The Lippincott house with its two sweeping front porches, one set on top of the other, and its fancy jigsaw trim, looked like a Mississippi riverboat. The Moorhead house was Queen Anne style, which was “all the rage” then; it had seventeen rooms and a round tower at one end with tinted glass windows. And the Philander Knox house, next door, was not much smaller.

But even the largest of them was dwarfed by the clubhouse. It had enough windows and more than enough porch for ten houses. There were forty-seven rooms inside. During the season most of the club members and their guests stayed there, and the rule was that everyone had to take his meals there in the main dining room, where 150 could sit down at one time.

In the “front rooms” there were huge brick fireplaces for chilly summer nights, billiard tables, and heavy furniture against the walls. In summer, after the midday dinner, the long front porch was crowded with cigar-smoking industrialists taking the air off the water. String hammocks swung under the trees. Young women in long white dresses, their faces shaded under big summer hats, strolled the boardwalks in twos and threes, or on the arms of very proper-looking young men in dark suits and derbies. Cottages were noisy with big families, and on moonlight nights there were boating parties on the lake and the sound of singing and banjos across the black water.

In all the talk there would be about the lake in the years after it had vanished, the boats, perhaps more than anything else, would keep coming up over and over again. Boats of any kind were a rare sight in the mountains. There were rowboats on the old Suppes ice pond at the edge of Johnstown, and a few men had canoes along the river below the city. But that was about it. Not since the time when Johnstown had been the start of the canal route west had there been boats in any number, and then they had been only ungainly canal barges.

The club fleet included fifty rowboats and canoes, sailboats, and two little steam yachts that went puttering about flying bright pennants and trailing feathers of smoke from their tall funnels. There was even an electric catamaran, a weird-looking craft with a searchlight mounted up front, which had been built by a young member, Louis Clarke, who liked to put on a blue sailor’s outfit for his cruises around the lake.

But it was the sailboats that made the greatest impression. Sailboats on the mountain! It seemed almost impossible in a country where water was always a tree-crowded creek or stream, wild and dangerous in the spring, not much better than ankle-deep in the hottest months. Yet there they were: white sails moving against the dark forest across a great green mirror of a lake so big that you could see miles and miles of sky in it.

Some of the people in Johnstown who were, as they said, “privileged” to visit the club on August Sundays brought home vivid descriptions of young people gliding over the water under full sail. It was a picture of a life so removed from Johnstown that it seemed almost like a fantasy, ever so much farther away than fifteen miles, and wholly untouchable. It was a picture that would live on for a long time after.

That the Pittsburgh people also took enormous pleasure in the sight seems certain. There was no body of water such as this anywhere near Pittsburgh. There were, of course, the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, but they were not exactly clean any longer, and with the mills going full blast, which they had been for some time now, the air around them was getting a little more unpleasant each year. It was a curious paradox; the more the city prospered, the more uncomfortable it became living there. Progress could be downright repressive. But fortunately for the Pittsburgh people, it was very much within their power to create and maintain a place so blessed with all of nature’s virtues.

This water was pure and teeming with fish, and the air tasted like wine after Pittsburgh. The woods were full of songbirds and deer that came down to drink from the mist-hung lake at dawn. There were wild strawberries everywhere, and even on the very hottest days it was comfortable under the big trees.

In fact, with its bracing air, its lovely lake, and the intense quiet of its cool nights, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club must have seemed like paradise after Pittsburgh. Under such a spell even a Presbyterian steel master might wish to unbend a little.

The summer resort idea was something new for that part of the country. And only the favored few had the time or the money to experiment with it. But so far every indication was that the club was a great success. There had been problems from time to time. Poachers had been a continuing nuisance. The summer of 1888 had been cut short when a scarlet-fever scare sent everyone packing off home to Pittsburgh. Still, everything considered, in 1889 it looked as though the men who had bought the old dam ten years earlier knew what they were doing.

–2–

The first member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to take an interest in the regenerative powers of the Alleghenies was Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie had been going to what he called “The Glorious Mountain” long before the South Fork organization was put together. He had his own modest frame house at Cresson, which was one of the first summer resorts in Pennsylvania and the only one of any consequence in the western part of the state. It was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad and was located fourteen miles up the line from South Fork at the crest of the Allegheny range.

Cresson, or Cresson Springs as it was also known, had been started before the Civil War by a doctor named Robert Montgomery Smith Jackson. The main attractions at Cresson, aside from the mountain air and scenery, were the “iron springs,” the best-known of which was the Ignatius Spring, named after “the venerable huntsman” Ignatius Adams, who first discovered its life-preserving powers and whose ghost was said still to haunt the place. According to Jackson, “by drinking this water, dwelling in the woods and eating venison,” Ignatius had “lived near the good old age of one hundred years.” Jackson was against whiskey, slavery, and what he called the “present tendency to agglomerate in swarms, or accumulate in masses and mobs.” Those “gregarious instincts [which] now impel this race to fix its hopes of earthly happiness on city life alone” would, he was convinced, be the undoing of the race. Life in the country was the answer to practically every one of man’s ills, and particularly life on the Allegheny Mountain.

Jackson’s ambition (“a mission, solemn as a command from Heaven,” he called it) was to make Cresson “the place of restoration for all forms of human suffering.” He got his friend J. Edgar Thomson, president of the Pennsylvania, interested, and the railroad built a hotel and developed the place, though, as things turned out, along rather different lines. Carnegie, B. F. Jones, and a few other Pittsburgh businessmen, none of whom seems to have been suffering very much, built cottages and the summer trade flourished. Every passenger train bound east or west stopped there. Well-to-do families from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia arrived for summer stays of several weeks.

Jackson meanwhile had set down the fundamentals of his philosophy along with a detailed natural history of the Allegheny highlands in a book called The Mountain. He borrowed heavily from Wordsworth and Thoreau, and, in his own way, did about as much as anyone to sum up the wild beauty of the area. Also, in his spare time, he tended bar at the hotel and would be remembered for years after for the two jars he kept prominently displayed on one shelf, flanked on either side by whiskey bottles. In each jar, preserved in alcohol, was a human stomach. One had belonged to a man who had died a natural death, and was, according to all who saw it, an exceedingly unappetizing sight. But it was, nonetheless, an improvement over its companion piece, which, according to its label, had belonged to a man who had died of delirium tremens. When setting out drinks, the doctor seldom failed to call attention to his display. The result was that his bar became the best patronized of any for miles about. Regular customers grew quite attached to the jars; word of them spread far, and along with the iron springs, they appear to have been a major attraction at Cresson for several years.

Jackson served in the war; then, in 1865, despite all his good life on the mountain, he died at the age of fifty.

By 1881, to accommodate the growing trade, the railroad cleared space in a maple grove and built another hotel, The Mountain House, which, with its endless thick-carpeted halls, its many towers and flowing stairways, was easily the grandest piece of architecture in Cambria County.

Carnegie’s house, only a short distance from the hotel, was his only real home in Pennsylvania by that time. Though no one held more sway in Pittsburgh, he had not lived there for nearly twenty years. He visited often, and was front-page news when he did, but the rest of the time he was either in New York, Scotland, or at Cresson. He loved Cresson and talked up its charms with great vigor, which is perhaps not surprising for a Scot who had been brought up on Burns and had learned to quote him before he had learned to read. (“My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;/ My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.”) He courted his young wife there in the summer of 1886. (“A.C. walked home with me in the starlight…” she wrote in her diary at Cresson. “Such wonderful happiness…the happiest day of my life.”) He also very nearly died there of typhoid later that fall; and his mother, who took sick at the same time and lay in the next room down the hall, did die there on November 10. He entertained his distinguished friends at Cresson (Matthew Arnold had stopped over in 1883), and he managed, as was his pleasure, to keep his mind free and above the petty preoccupations of the steel business.

As one admiring writer of the period explained it: “All other iron and steel magnates, with the exception of Carnegie, lived in Pittsburgh and were swayed constantly by the local gossip, by the labour troubles, and by the rumours of competition and low prices that floated from office to office. To-day they were elated; tomorrow they were depressed. To-day they bought; to-morrow they sold. Carnegie, on the other hand, deliberately placed himself where these little ups and downs were unnoticed…. the news that Coleman had quarrelled with Shinn, or that coke-drawers wanted five cents a day more, was of small consequence. One thing he knew—that civilisation needed steel and was able to pay for it. All else was not worth troubling about.”

The place had its hold on him. He went on bird walks; he read; he talked and talked and talked. And if the views and good company were not enough, there were the “curative powers,” as the guidebook described them, of the iron springs. And who might more readily endorse such a tonic than the bouncy little ironmaster himself?

But Cresson had its drawbacks. It was a public place for one, sitting almost on top of the railroad. For another, there was no water. The story goes that there was (and still is) a house at Cresson where the rain water off of one roof eventually ends up in the Atlantic Ocean, while the rain water off the other finds its way to the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. The resort was at the very crest of the Allegheny divide, and though springs were plentiful, every bit of water there was drained off in both directions.

As a result, except for drives and walks, there was really not much to do at Cresson. Tennis had not yet caught on there. Golf, which was to one day be the great passion of Carnegie and his kind, would not even be attempted in the United States until 1888. But boating was already distinctly fashionable, and fishing had been coming more and more into its own as a gentleman’s sport.

Part of the increasing appeal of fishing seemed to be the multitude of trappings it called for. Where once the well-equipped angler needed only the simplest and most inexpensive sort of gear, now in the late 1880’s a whole line of elaborate and expensive paraphernalia was said to be necessary. Bait boxes, boots, collapsible nets, cookstoves, silk line, creels, reels and casting rods that cost as much as twenty dollars, even costly books on the subject, were the sign of the true sportsman. All of which seemed to make fishing, and particularly trout and bass fishing, which were generally referred to as a “science,” that much more attractive to the man of means. His interest in the sport not only showed his love of the great outdoors, but also that he had both the money and the brains to participate.

Of course, too, few pastimes there were which would take a man so far, in spirit at least, from the rude industrial grind. “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling,” were the words of Izaak Walton in the newly reissued, and quite costly, two-volume edition of his great work on the subject. One Walton disciple of the 1880’s, who as it happens was a Vermonter, wrote about this time, “I take my rod this fair June morning and go forth to be alone with nature. No business cares, no roar of the city, no recitals of others troubles…no doubts, no fears to disturb me as, drinking in the clear, sweet air with blissful anticipation I saunter through the wood path toward the mountain lake.” Had he been a Pittsburgh steel man he need only have added “no competitors, no labor agitators.”

So all that was needed to improve on Cresson was enough water for boating and fishing. A mountain lake, in short; plus some privacy. It would also be well to be back a way from the railroad, though not too far back, as the railroad was the one and only way to make the trip from Pittsburgh. As it was, the ride took about an hour and fifteen minutes to Johnstown, then another twenty minutes to come on up the mountain. That was about long enough. It would be best, therefore, to be somewhere in the same general area.

The old reservoir above South Fork certainly must have seemed a perfect solution. It answered every need: It was well back from the railroad; it was only a matter of miles from Cresson; and South Fork Creek was well known as one of the best trout streams in the state. True, the dam needed a great deal of repair work after so many years of neglect, but that could be handled all right, and especially since the property could be had for such a good price. Or so must have run the reasoning of the Pittsburgh men who bought it in 1879. Carnegie was not among them at this particular stage, but no doubt his presence so nearby on the mountain added still another enticing attraction to the scheme.

The prime promoter behind the move was a onetime railroad tunnel contractor and now-and-then coke salesman and real-estate broker by the name of Benjamin F. Ruff.

Ruff bought the dam and the lake from John Reilly, an Altoona Democratic politician and former Pennsylvania Railroad official who was then serving what would be his only term in Congress. Ruff paid $2,000 for the property, which was $500 less than Congressman Reilly had paid for it four years earlier when he had bought it from the Pennsylvania.

Ruff then rounded up fifteen other Pittsburgh gentlemen who each, with one exception, bought a single share in the operation for $200. The exception was one of the most interesting young men in Pittsburgh.

In the spring of 1879, when all this was going on, Henry Clay Frick was only twenty-nine years old, solemn, enigmatic, strikingly handsome, and already worth an even million. The grandson of wealthy, old Abraham Overholt, the Mennonite whiskey maker, Frick had made his own fortune in the coke business, and largely through his dealings with Pittsburgh’s number-one coke consumer, Andrew Carnegie.

Frick bought three shares. Ruff kept four for himself. A charter was drawn up stating that the name of the organization was to be the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club of Pittsburgh, that its “object” was to be “the protection and propagation of game and game fish, and the enforcement of all laws of this state against the unlawful killing or wounding of the same.” It was also stated that the club’s place of business was to be Pittsburgh, in Allegheny County, not in Cambria County where the property was located.

On November 15, 1879, the charter was approved and signed in the Court of Common Pleas in Allegheny County by Judge Edwin H. Stowe, who for some unknown reason ignored the provision in the law which called for the registration of a charter in the “office for recording in and for the county where the chief operations are to be carried on.” Nor did the sportsmen make any effort to conform to the law. Perhaps it seemed a minor point and was overlooked by mistake. In any case, the charter was secured without the knowledge of the authorities in Cambria County, and there would be speculation for years to come as to what might have happened right then and there had they and Judge Stowe gone about their business in strict accordance with the rules.

Ruff was to be the president of the new club. The capital stock was to be $10,000, but that was soon increased to $35,000 when it became known how much work was needed to get the dam in shape. For in 1879 the South Fork dam was getting on in years, and the years had been hard on it.

Forty-three years earlier, in 1836, the legislature of the state of Pennsylvania had approved funds for the building of a reservoir on the western slope of Allegheny Mountain to supply extra water during dry months for the new canal system from Johnstown to Pittsburgh. The first appropriation was for $30,000, but before the project was finished nearly $240,000 would be put into the dam; and two years after it was finished the whole thing would be obsolete and of no use whatsoever.

The canal from Johnstown to Pittsburgh was known as the Western Division of the state’s “Main Line” canal, which had been built to compete with New York’s thriving, new Erie Canal. The Western Division officially opened for business in May 1831, when a Johnstown barge pulled into Pittsburgh after traveling 104 miles in less than forty-eight hours.

The Eastern Division, running from Philadelphia to Hollidaysburg, at the foot of the eastern slope of Allegheny Mountain, was opened the next year. The only thing that then remained to be finished was an ingenious system of railroads and steam-powered hoists designed to get the boats up and over the mountain. But by spring of 1834 that too had been built and was open to traffic. For the first time the wharves of Philadelphia had a direct, nonstop link with the headwaters of the Ohio. It had cost a staggering sum; the state was nearly bankrupt; but that old, formidable barrier to the Pennsylvania route west, Allegheny Mountain, had been bested, and the general course of the country’s epic push to the Mississippi and beyond had been set for years to come.

The system devised for crossing the mountain was widely hailed as one of the engineering wonders of the age. Within a distance of thirty-six miles it overcame an increase in elevation of nearly 1,400 feet, or about twice the elevation the Erie Canal had to overcome along its entire length of 352 miles. Known as the Portage Railroad, it included a series of five inclined planes on each side of the mountain, ten in all, connected with a narrow-gauge railroad. Barges, passengers, freight, everything was hauled up one side and let down the other with hemp ropes thick as a man’s leg. It was a thrilling experience for travelers, a goodly number of whom chose to go by way of the Pennsylvania, rather than the Erie Canal, for that very reason.

Charles Dickens, one such traveler, described the ride in his American Notes:

It was very pretty travelling thus, at a rapid pace along the heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness: catching glimpses, through the treetops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out tomorrow’s work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind.

The adventurous journey also included, just to the east of Johnstown, a ride through the first railroad tunnel in the country and, in Pittsburgh, a ride across the first suspension bridge, an aqueduct over the Allegheny River designed by German-born John Augustus Roebling, who would later conjure up that wonder of wonders of the 1880’s, the Brooklyn Bridge.

But from Johnstown west the canal was troubled by water shortages nearly every summer. Operations were interrupted. Business suffered at a time when business had to be especially good to make up for winter, when virtually every moving thing stopped in the mountains for weeks on end, and spring, when the floods came. Particularly troublesome was the canal basin in Johnstown. Despite all the water that rushed into the valley in springtime, along toward mid-July the basin came close to running dry.

The solution seemed obvious enough. Put a dam in the mountains where it could hold a sufficient supply of water to keep the basin working and the canals open, even during those summers when creeks vanished and only weeds grew.

Work began on the Western Reservoir above South Fork in 1838, after some 400 acres had been cleared of timber. The site had been selected and surveyed by Sylvester Welsh, head engineer for the canal. He proposed an earth dam of 850 feet in length, with a spillway at one or both ends “of sufficient size to discharge the waste water during freshets, and sluices to regulate the supply for the canal.” It was also important, he said, that the bed of the spillway be solid rock and that no water be permitted to pass over the top of the dam. The design of the dam was worked out by a young state engineer named William E. Morris, who approved the location because, as he stated in a report made in 1839, it was in an area where there was enough drainage to provide a “certain” supply of water. He too proposed an earth dam 850 feet across the top and 62 feet high. He estimated that it would take a year to do the job.

The contractors chosen were James N. Moorhead of Pittsburgh and Hezekiah Packer of Williamsport. According to lengthy studies made by civil engineering experts years later, they did a competent job. Certainly they went about it with considerable care and patience and despite continuing delays. For, as it turned out, fifteen years passed before the dam was finished.

In 1842 work was halted because the state’s finances were in such bad shape that there was simply no more money to continue the job. For the next four years nothing was done. Then when the work did start again, it was only for another two years. A local cholera epidemic caused “a general derangement in the business,” until 1850, when the project again resumed, and for the final time.

The construction technique was the accepted one for earth dams, and, it should be said, earth dams have been accepted for thousands of years as a perfectly fine way to hold back water. They were in fact the most common kind of dam at the time the South Fork work began and they were the most economical. The basic construction material was readily available at almost any site, it was cheap, and it required a minimum of skilled labor. Virtually any gang of day laborers, and particularly any who had had some experience working on railroad embankments, was suitable. But since the basic raw material, earth, is also highly subject to erosion and scour, it is absolutely essential that a dam built of earth, no matter how thick, be engineered so that the water never goes over the top and so that no internal seepage develops. Otherwise, if properly built and maintained, an earth dam can safely contain tremendous bodies of water.

The South Fork embankment was built of successive horizontal layers of clay. They were laid up one on top of the other after each layer had been packed down, or “puddled,” by allowing it to sit under a skim of water for a period of time, so as to be watertight. It was a slow process. And as the earth wall grew increasingly higher, it was coated, or riprapped, on its outer face with loose rocks, some so huge that it took three teams of horses to move them in place. On the inner face, which had a gentler slope, the same thing was done, only with smaller stones.

The spillway, as Welsh had stipulated, was not cut through the dam itself, but through the rock of the hillside to which the eastern end of the dam was “anchored.” The spillway was about 72 feet wide. The over-all length of the breast was just over 930 feet. The width on top was about 20 feet. The thickness at the base was some 270 feet.

At about the exact center of the base, there were five cast-iron pipes, each two feet in diameter, set in a stone culvert. They were to release the water down to South Fork, where it would flow on to the Johnstown basin by way of the Little Conemaugh. The pipes were controlled from a wooden tower nearby. On June 10, 1852, the work on the dam was at last completed; the sluice pipes were closed and the lake began to fill in. By the end of August the water was 40 feet deep.

But about the time the dam was being finished, J. Edgar Thomson, who was then chief engineer for the up-and-coming Pennsylvania Railroad, was making rapid progress with his daring rail route over the mountains, which included what was to become famous as the Horseshoe Curve. The canal was about to be put out of business.

The Pennsylvania was racing to complete a route west to compete with the New York Central, the Erie, and the B & O, which were each pushing in the same direction. The last part of the run, from Johnstown to Pittsburgh, was ready in late 1852. On December 10, six months after the South Fork dam had been finished, a steam engine made an all-rail run from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. J. Edgar Thomson became president of the road about the same time, and the company was on its way to becoming within a very few years the biggest and far and above the most powerful single force in the state (and in the Statehouse); the biggest customer for nearly everything, but especially coal, iron, and steel; the biggest employer; and the biggest influence on the way people lived from one end of Pennsylvania to the other. By the end of the ’80’s it would be the mightiest of the nation’s many mighty railroads.

The effect of the new railroad on the state’s troublesome, costly, and beloved canal system was disastrous—almost immediately. Within two years after the railroad opened, the legislature voted to put the “Main Line” up for sale for not less than $10 million. Understandably there were no takers. The one likely prospect was the Pennsylvania itself, which could readily use the right of ways. Three years later the sale was made, with the Pennsylvania paying $7.5 million for the system, which included the Main Line, the Portage Railroad, and, as it happened, the South Fork dam.

Having no use for the dam, the railroad simply let it sit. Nothing whatsoever was done to maintain it. In fact, from 1857, the year the railroad took possession, until 1879, twenty-two years later when the Pittsburgh men took over, the dam remained more or less quietly unattended, moldering away in the woods, visited only once in a while by fishermen or an occasional deer hunter.

And it was only five years after the state sold it to the Pennsylvania that the dam broke for the first time.

In the late spring of 1862, about the time the Union Army under McClellan was sweating its way up the blazing Virginia peninsula, for a first big and unsuccessful drive on Richmond, the mountains of Pennsylvania were hit by heavy thunderstorms. Hundreds of tiny creeks and runs and small rivers went roaring over their banks, and in Johnstown the Tribune ran the first of its musings on what might be the consequences should, by chance, the dam at South Fork happen to let go. Eight days later, on June 10, the dam broke.

The break was caused by a defect in the foundation near the stone culvert. The accepted theory locally was that various residents had been stealing lead from the pipe joints during the years the dam had been abandoned, that serious leaks had been the result, and that the break had come not long after. Exactly how big the break was is not known, as no records were made and no photographs were taken. The important fact was that though there was much alarm in the valley below the dam, the break caused little damage since the lake was less than half full, the creeks were low, and a watchman at the dam, just before the break, had released much of the pressure by opening the valves. (It was also somewhere along about this time that the wooden tower for controlling the discharge pipes caught fire and burned to the ground.)

From then on until the Pittsburgh sportsmen appeared on the scene seventeen years later the lake was no lake at all, but little more than an outsize pond, ten feet deep at its deepest point. At the southern end, grass quickly sprouted across acres and acres of dried-up lake bed and neighboring farmers began grazing their sheep and cattle there.

In 1875 Congressman Reilly, who had spent most of his working life with the Pennsylvania in nearby Altoona, and who must have thereby known about the dam for some time, bought the property and, like the Pennsylvania, did nothing with it. He just held on to it, apparently on the look for another buyer, which he found four years later in Benjamin Ruff. But before selling at a slight loss to Ruff, he removed the old cast-iron discharge pipes and sold them for scrap.

Ruff’s idea of what to do about the dam was relatively simple and seemed realistic enough at first. He would rebuild it to a height of only forty feet or so and cut the spillway down some twenty feet deeper to handle the overflow. But when he found that this would cost considerably more than repairing the old break and restoring the dam to somewhere near its original height, he chose the latter course.

The first indication in Johnstown and thereabouts that a change was in the offing above South Fork was an item in the Tribune on October 14, 1879. “Rumors” were reported that a summer resort was to be built by a Western Game and Fish Association. The next day there was a notice calling for fifty men to work, but no name of the organization was given.

For some reason or other, intentionally or otherwise, the Pittsburgh men kept the correct name of their organization from receiving any kind of public notice. It was a course of action which would later be interpreted as evidence that they had had no desire for anyone to come looking into their business in general, or their charter in particular.

Ruff set about repairing the dam by boarding up the stone culvert and dumping in every manner of local rock, mud, brush, hemlock boughs, hay, just about everything at hand. Even horse manure was used in some quantity. The discharge pipes were not replaced, and the “engineering” techniques employed made a profound impression on the local bystanders.

The man immediately in charge of this mammoth face-lifting was one Edward Pearson, about whom little is known except that he seems to have been an employee of a Pittsburgh freight-hauling company that did business with the railroad and that he had no engineering credentials at all.

The entire rebuilding of the dam ended up costing the club about $17,000, and there was trouble from the start. On Christmas Day, 1879, only a month or so after work had begun, a downpour carried away most of the repairs. Work was discontinued until the following summer. Then, less than a year later, in February of 1881, once again heavy rains caused serious damages.

No one seems to have been particularly discouraged by all this, however. Along toward the end of March the lake was deep enough for the clubmen to go ahead with their plan to stock it. The first of the small steamboats was being assembled and the clubhouse was close to being readied for the grand opening. In early June the fish arrived by special tank car from Lake Erie, 1,000 black bass, which ended up costing the club about a dollar apiece by the time the last expenses were paid. According to the Tribune, which noted these and all other bits of news it could uncover concerning the club, only three of the fish died, “one of which was a huge old chap, weighing over three pounds.”

The Tribune had also reported earlier that the Pennsylvania was planning to build a narrow-gauge spur from South Fork to the lake and that the clubmen were shopping about for land downriver from Johnstown where they intended to establish a private deer park of 1,500 acres. Neither claim was true, but both seemed perfectly reasonable and fitted in with the picture most Johnstown people had of the club and its members. Would not even the high and mighty Pennsylvania Railroad gladly provide any number of special conveniences for the likes of such men? Was not a deer park a fitting aristocratic touch for their new mountain domain? Certainly money was no problem. Were not the members of the club millionaires to the man?

The plain truth was that a goodly number of them were; quite a few of them, however, were not, and two or three of them were a great deal better than millionaires. But by the standards of most men, they were, every last one of them, extraordinarily rich and influential. Yet, one of the curious things about the club is that the make-up of its membership, exactly who was who at the lake, was not generally known around Johnstown. If the club appears to have been rather cozy about its name, it was even more so about publicizing who belonged to it. Not until well after the events of May 31, 1889, was a full list of the membership published publicly. And quite a list it was.

The membership of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, according to its initial plans, was never to exceed one hundred sportsmen and their families. The membership fee was $800. There was to be no shooting on Sundays; and those members who did not have cottages of their own were limited to a two-week stay at the clubhouse. As the summer season of 1889 was approaching, there was a total of sixty-one names on the membership roster.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, it should be kept in mind, was a most unostentatious affair by contrast to such watering spots of the time as Newport, Cape May, or the lavish new lakeside resort in New York, Tuxedo Park. There was no opulence. There were no liveried footmen, no Tirolean-hatted gamekeepers such as at Tuxedo, no “cottage” architecture to approach the likes of Newport. There was not even a comparison to be made, unless the South Fork group was to be measured by the per capita worth of its members—or the industrial and financial power they wielded—which, everything considered, was often the way such things were measured. On that basis the little resort on Lake Conemaugh was right in the same league.

One Pittsburgh newspaper called it the “Bosses Club,” and aptly so. Carnegie’s name by itself on the membership list would have been reason enough. And the same holds for Henry Clay Frick, for much had happened to the young “Coke King” since he had first joined with Benjamin Ruff to launch the club.

In 1881, while in New York, Frick had stopped by the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue to pay a call on Carnegie and his mother and to talk a little business. (Frick happened to be on his honeymoon at the time, but he was not the man to let that, or anything else, stand in the way of progress.) When the meeting was over, he and Carnegie were partners in the coke trade, and from then on it did even better than before. By 1889 the H. C. Frick Coke Company was capitalized at $5 million; it owned or controlled 35,000 acres of coal land and employed some 11,000 men. Moreover, in January of that year, Frick had been made Chairman of Carnegie, Phipps & Company, which meant that he was commander in chief of the whole of the Carnegie iron and steel enterprises, which were by then the biggest in the world.

Carnegie by this time had said something to the effect that he was not much interested in making more money and was spending no more than six months a year at his business. He wanted someone who could manage things. In Frick, whom he did not especially like and whom no one seemed quite able to fathom, he found exactly the right man. By 1889 this humorless, solitary, complex son of a German farmer, who was then still six months from turning forty, was the most important man in Pittsburgh.

Along with Frick, the club roster included Henry Phipps, Jr., Carnegie’s partner since the earliest days of the business, before the Civil War. A pale, painstaking man who stood no more than an inch taller than the five-foot-two Carnegie, Phipps was the financial wizard of Carnegie, Phipps & Company. In the early days he had won certain acclaim for his ability to borrow money for the struggling ironworks and for an old horse he owned, which, according to Pittsburgh legend, was capable of taking him on his rounds of the banks without any guidance whatsoever. By 1889, however, Phipps was one of the three or four top men in the steel business and one of the wealthy men of the country.

Besides the big three—Carnegie, Frick, and Phipps—the Carnegie empire was also represented at South Fork by John G. A. Leishman, the vice-chairman of the firm, and by Philander Chase Knox, a bright little sparrow of a man, who was the company’s number-one lawyer as well as the personal counsel for both Carnegie and Frick.

Then there were Robert Pitcairn and Andrew Mellon, two excellent friends to have if you were doing business in Pittsburgh. Pitcairn ran the Pittsburgh Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which, as jobs went in those days, was a most lofty position indeed. In terms of pure power and prestige, few men outranked him.

Mellon was a shy, frail-looking young man, still in his thirties, and exceedingly quick-witted. Along with his father, old Judge Mellor, he was in the banking business, T. Mellon & Sons, and up to his elbows in the financial doings behind much of Pittsburgh’s furious industrial growth. It had been the Mellons who lent Henry Frick the money to buy his first coal land, and who backed him again (with something like $100,000) during the panic of 1873 when he wanted to buy up still more. (One story has it that Judge Mellon, who was a staunch Methodist, made the loan only after Frick implied that he would use his influence to have the Overholt distillery shut down.) Frick and young Andrew were not far apart in age and became fast friends, traveling to Europe together, dealing in business for years, but never calling each other anything but Mister Frick and Mister Mellon.

James Chambers and H. Sellers McKee ran what they claimed was the largest window-glass works on earth. Durbin Home and C. B. Shea ran Pittsburgh’s leading department store, Joseph Home and Company. D. W. C. Bidwell sold DuPont blasting powder for coal mining. Calvin Wells, A. French, James Lippincott, and John W. Chalf ant were in the steel business in one way or other.

And so the list went. It included names from the Pittsburgh “Blue Book” (Thaw, Laughlin, McClintock, Scaife) and from the lists of directors of several Pittsburgh banks (Schoonmaker, Moorhead, Caldwell). There were among them the founders of the city’s new business club, the Duquesne Club, and the new preparatory school for young men, Shady Side Academy.

There were also among them, it is interesting to note, a future Secretary of the Treasury (Mellon, who would serve under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover) and a future Secretary of State (Knox, who would be Attorney General under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt before taking over the State Department under Taft). There was one future Congressman (George F. Huff, who was a banker and coal operator), a future diplomat (John G. A. Leishman, who would be America’s first Ambassador to Turkey), and a future President of the Pennsylvania Railroad (Samuel Rea).

Frick and Mellon would not only go on to amass fortunes of spectacular proportions, but would also demonstrate surprisingly good taste in putting together two of the world’s finest private art collections. Carnegie, who was already worth many millions, would wind up with more money than any other American except old John D. Rockefeller and would give away well over $300 million of it with no little fanfare.

In 1889, however, all that was still a good way off. The Carnegie whiskers had not as yet turned their glistening white. No palaces had been built for Carnegie or Frick on New York’s Fifth Avenue. No Rembrandt’s had been bought, no daughters married off to titled Europeans, no parks donated, no foundations established. Carnegie thus far had built only one of his free libraries, in Braddock, near Pittsburgh and the site of his gigantic Edgar Thomson works, which he had named after his old friend Thomson, who also happened to be his best customer. At the dedication of the Braddock library in March of 1889, Carnegie used the opportunity to say that he would certainly like to build another one in Homestead someday, but that there had been really far too much labor trouble over there. The implication was pretty obvious and suggested that the purpose behind these earliest benefactions at least may not have been altogether altruistic.

Good works, public service, and any ideas about giving away surplus money were all still things of the future.

It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At this stage the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were attending strictly to the first part. Business was the overriding preoccupation for now, and business in Pittsburgh, either directly or indirectly, meant the steel business, which in 1889 was doing just fine.

True, orders for steel rails had tapered off some. Breakneck railroad building in the west had meant palmy days in the accounting offices along the Allegheny and Monongahela. Seventy-three thousand miles of track had been put down in the 1880’s, or more than twice as much track as there had been in the whole country when the war ended at Appomattox. Steel production had more than tripled during those ten years. But now there were also orders for all sorts of architectural steel, huge beams and girders for totally new kinds of buildings called “skyscrapers” which were going up in Chicago. In 1887 the Government had made its first order for American steel for ship armor. A new kind of Navy was being built, a steel Navy, including, in 1889, a battleship called the Maine, the biggest thing ever built by the Navy, for which Carnegie, Phipps & Company was making the steel plates.

And if the rail business was not quite as good as it had been, the United States was, nonetheless, producing about two tons of rails for every one made in England. As a matter of fact, for three years now, the United States had been the leading steel producer in the world. Pittsburgh, which before the war had not had a single mill as big as those in Johnstown, was now throbbing like no other industrial center in the land. The sprawling complex of mills in Chicago had been providing serious competition of late. Prices were not as high as the steel men would have liked to see them (they never were), and there was more talk among them every week about cutting wages. But if the labor leaders could be dealt with (and there was no reason to think they could not be), then there was every reason to believe that Pittsburgh would keep booming for years.

As far as the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were concerned no better life could be asked for. They were an early-rising, healthy, hard-working, no-nonsense lot, Scotch-Irish most of them, Freemasons, tough, canny, and, without question, extremely fortunate to have been in Pittsburgh at that particular moment in history.

They were men who put on few airs. They believed in the sanctity of private property and the protective tariff. They voted the straight Republican ticket and had only recently, in the fall of 1888, contributed heavily to reinstate a Republican, the aloof little Harrison, in the White House. They trooped off with their large families regularly Sunday mornings to one of the more fashionable of Pittsburgh’s many Presbyterian churches. They saw themselves as God-fearing, steady, solid people, and, for all their new fortunes, most of them were.

Quite a few had come from backgrounds as humble as Carnegie’s. Phipps and Pitcairn were Scotch immigrants who had been boyhood pals with Carnegie in what was known as Slabtown, one of the roughest sections of Allegheny, across the river from Pittsburgh. Leishman grew up in an orphanage. Frick, despite the wealth of grandfather Overholt, had started out in business with little more than a burning desire to get rich.

They and the others were now living in cavernous, marble-floored houses in the new East End section of Pittsburgh. Several made regular trips to Europe, and those who did not always stopped at the finest hotels in New York or wherever else they went. They now considered themselves, each and all, as among the “best people” in Pittsburgh. They pretty well ran the city. They were living the good life as they thought the good life ought to be lived. But never for very long did they take their eye off the real business of the human condition as they saw it—which was business. That they should spend some time together in the summer months, away from Pittsburgh, but not too far away, mind you, seemed, no doubt, a perfectly natural extension of the whole process.

The reaction in Johnstown to their doings on the mountain was mixed. That the Pittsburghers with all their money should think enough of the country around Johnstown to want to summer there was, of course, terribly flattering. As far back as the 1850’s there had been some discussion in Johnstown about the area’s potential as a summer resort. One Tribune editor decided to set forth Johnstown’s charms in no uncertain terms. “Our scenery is grand beyond description,” he wrote, “the atmosphere cool, and invigorating; trout in the neighboring streams large and numerous; drives good; women beautiful and accomplished; men all gentlemen and scholars, hotels as good as the best.” For all anyone knew, the South Fork venture might lead to other resort developments in the area. The valley might become famous; property values would mount. It was not an unpleasant thought.

The club had already provided a lot of work in the South Fork area, and much to the irritation of the club’s management it had also provided some excellent sport for local anglers. Slipping onto the property in the early morning or toward sundown was no problem for a local man or boy. The well-stocked lake and streams provided any number of suppers in the neighborhood from the time the dam was first restored. The grounds were well posted, but that discouraged nobody especially. If anything, it only added to the fun.

When the club responded by putting in fences over the best trout streams, the fences mysteriously disappeared. Relations then deteriorated fast, with the club authorities threatening to shoot any invaders caught on the grounds after dark. During a flood in 1885, one farmer named Leahy, whose property adjoined the lake, decided to rent out fishing space on some of his submerged acreage. The clubmen said he ought not to do that and threatened to take him to court. This had no effect on Leahy, so they tried to buy him out, but he said he was not interested in selling. It was only after an intermediary was brought in, and lengthy negotiations transacted, that the farm was purchased for $4,000 and the fish thereby further protected.

Any love lost locally by such tactics apparently bothered the club management not in the least. A classic undeclared war between poacher and country squire went on for years. It never became a shooting war, despite the threats, but it did leave widespread resentment in the area around the lake that would one day come back to haunt the clubmen.

Far more important, however, was the way people felt about the dam.

Even before the first full season at South Fork got under way in 1881, the dam threw a terrific scare into the people in the valley. On the morning of June 10, during a flash flood, a rumor spread through Johnstown that the dam was about to break. This was the first spring in years that there was a head of water of any size behind the mammoth earth embankment, and it was the first of the many springs from then until 1889 that just such rumors would fly from door to door, across back alleys, up and down Main Street, and all along the line between Johnstown and South Fork.

This time the Cambria Iron Company sent two of its men to the lake with instructions to make a critical examination. The dam looked perfectly solid to the Johnstown men, and they returned home with their report in time to make the evening edition of the paper. The fact that they had found the water only two feet from the breast of the dam did not seem to disturb them especially, or the editors of the Tribune.

The paper summed up its story as follows: “Several of our citizens who have recently examined the dam state it as their opinion that the embankment is perfectly safe to stand all the pressure that can be brought to bear on it, while others are a little dubious in the matter. We do not consider there is much cause for alarm, as even in the event of the dyke breaking there is plenty of room for the water to spread out before reaching here, and no damage of moment would result.”

There it was, in one sentence. In the first place, the dam was probably sound, and even if it did fail not a great deal would happen since the dam was so far away. It was a strange piece of reasoning to say the least, but there it was in the evening paper for everyone, including the alarmists, to read and talk about.

Still, that very night, panic swept through the west end of town, which was the lowest end of town and that part which would have been hardest hit by anything coming down the valley of the Little Conemaugh. People were up through the night “in mortal dread for fear the old Reservoir near South Fork might break,” the Tribune reported the next day. So apparently the paper could say what it might about “no damage of moment”; people were still unsettled, and especially on nights when the dark and the drenching rain blotted out the landscape and imaginations filled with an ancient terror of death raging out of the mountains.

But nothing happened. Dawn rolled around as usual; the day began. The long shadow of Green Hill slipped back from mid-town as the sun climbed into the sky; life went on. And it looked as though the paper and everyone who thought along the same lines were right after all. There was really no cause to get excited.

From then on, practically every time there was high water in Johnstown there would be talk about the dam breaking. One longtime resident was later quoted at length in the newspapers in New York and elsewhere: “We were afraid of that lake…. No one could see the immense height to which that artificial dam had been built without fearing the tremendous power of the water behind it…doubt if there is a man or a woman in Johnstown who at sometime or other had not feared and spoken of the terrible disaster that might ensue. People wondered and asked why the dam was not strengthened, as it certainly had become weak; but nothing was done, and by and by they talked less and less about it…” He also evidently had misgivings about the “tremendous power” of the men who had owned the dam, for he chose to withhold his name.

Others came forth at the same time, that is, after May 31, 1889, claiming to have long held doubts about the engineering of the dam, and premonitions of doom for the whole valley of the Conemaugh. Assuredly most of them spoke from deep conviction; but exactly how much widespread, serious, public concern there was, and particularly in the years of the late ’80’s, is very hard to say.

Certainly there was every reason to have been concerned. The valley from the lake down to Johnstown had sides as steep as a sluice, and there was only one way the water could go if the dam failed. Floods hit the area almost as regularly as spring itself. Johnstown rarely got through a year without water in the streets at least once, and often for several days at a time.

Floods had been a problem from the time of the very earliest settlements in the valley. Lately, for the past ten years or so, they had been getting worse.

The very first flood anyone had bothered to make a record of in Johnstown destroyed a dam. That was in 1808, and it had been only a small dam across the Stony Creek which had been put in as a millrace for one of the first forges. Then there were the so-called Pumpkin Floods of a dozen years later. They hit in the fall and had swept what looked like every pumpkin in Cambria County down into town. In 1847 another little dam on the Stony Creek broke. During the flood of 1875 the Conemaugh rose two feet in a single hour. In 1880 again another dam broke; it had been built by Cambria Iron as a feeder for the mills and was about sixteen feet high, but it was located below town, so no damage was caused. During the next eight years there were seven floods, including three bad ones in 1885, ‘87, and ‘88.

The reasons were obvious enough to anyone who took the time to think about the problem, which quite a few were doing by 1889. With the valley crowding up the way it was, the need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were being narrowed to make room for new buildings and, in several places, to make it easier to put bridges across.

Forests not only retain enormous amounts of water in the soil (about 800 tons per acre), but in mountainous country especially, they hold the soil itself, and in winter they hold snow. Where the forests were destroyed, spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send torrents racing down the mountainsides; and each year the torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at the soil and what little ground cover there was left. Then, in the valley, where the water was being dumped ever more suddenly, the size of rivers which had to carry it all was being steadily whittled away at by industry and the growing population. So there was always a little less river to handle more runoff, and flash floods were the inevitable result.

Some men in Johnstown, curiously enough, thought that encroaching on the river channels would simply force the water to dig deeper channels. But this was impossible because the river beds were nearly all rock. When the volume of water increased, the rivers only came up, and often very fast. In the 1885 flood the Stony Creek rose three feet in forty-five minutes.

The dam was going to break that year, too, and every year, except one or two, up until 1889. At George Heiser’s store, people would come in out of the rain to buy something or just to pass the time in a dry, warm place and nearly always someone said, “Well, this is the day the old dam is going to break.” It was becoming something of a local joke. Many years later Victor Heiser would recall, “The townspeople, like those who live in the shadow of Vesuvius, grew calloused to the possibility of danger. ‘Sometime,’ they thought, ‘that dam will give way, but it won’t ever happen to us!’”

When there were warnings of trouble up the mountain, very few took them to heart. The dam always held despite the warnings. People got tired of hearing about a disaster that never happened. And after all, was not the dam owned by some of the most awesome men in the country? If there was anything to worry about certainly they would know about it.

The Tribune continued to imply that there was no cause for alarm. In 1887 the editors again allowed that a break at South Fork would not greatly affect Johnstown, unless it “occurred in conjunction with a great flood in the Conemaugh Valley which is one of the possibilities not worth worrying about.” Readers all through town nodded in agreement. On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, shortly before four, one leading citizen was asked how much higher he thought the water would rise in the valley if the dam let go. His answer was “About two feet.”

–3–

It would appear, in fact, that Johnstown’s leading citizens had taken little or no intelligent account of the threat the dam posed, were it not for some highly interesting letters that changed hands during the year 1880.

When Benjamin Ruff first began his restoration of the old dam in the fall of ’79, the management of the Cambria Iron Company, in the words of its solicitor, Cyrus Elder, became “extremely exercised” over the news. The management at that time was a man by the name of Daniel Johnson Morrell.

Morrell was one of the foremost ironmasters of the age, a ruddy-faced Quaker with gray eyes, who wore his whiskers beneath his jowls, so it appeared he was forever sporting a hair scarf. He looked upon the likes of Carnegie as parvenus in the business, brash, unprincipled upstarts who were not real ironmen at all, but harum-scarum drummers who had jumped into something they knew nothing about just to make a quick fortune. Beside the almost elflike Carnegie or Frick, he looked as though he were of another species. He was under six feet tall, but with his massive, thick shoulders and ample girth (he weighed well over 200 pounds), coming along Main Street he looked every bit the most powerful man in town.

But according to one of his contemporaries, “With all the responsibilities of his position, with all the care and concern of the great works on his hands, he never seemed worried or out of humor. When he left his desk at the close of the day he seemed to be able to shut off all thought of work; and in the midst of other persons’ worry and nervousness in the most distressing times, he would lie down and sleep as contentedly as a child.”

Aside from running the Iron Company, Morrell presided at most town meetings and was President of the Savings Bank and the First National Bank, the water company and the gas company. He had served two terms in Congress and was still a powerful voice in the Republican Party. For many years he was the President of the American Iron and Steel Association, an organization which did as much as any to protect the protective tariff.

He lived on Main Street in the finest house in Johnstown, a tall brick house with a mansard roof, painted white and set among gardens and shade trees on a lawn that took up a full city block. He had the only greenhouses in town, a full-time gardener, and all his property was enclosed with an ornamental iron fence. Children used to gather by the fence after school, hoping for a chance to look at him. “Whatever Mr. Morrell wants, well that’s it,” they heard at home. He was the king of Johnstown.

Morrell had been born in Maine, in 1821 (which made him fourteen years senior to Carnegie), but grew up in Philadelphia and started out clerking in a mercantile store. He had moved to Johnstown in the 1850’s when the Philadelphia financial backers of the then floundering Cambria Iron Company sent him to see what might be done to keep the works from going bankrupt.

Backwoods iron forges had been in operation in Cambria County for fifty years and more. With plenty of ore, limestone, and coal in the locale, the prospects for turning the Conemaugh Valley into an iron center of some real consequence looked extremely bright. But until Morrell came to town the industry had been beset by repeated failures. Morrell, however, succeeded handsomely. Knowing nothing about the iron business, he reorganized the company, and despite fires and financial panic, he kept his nerve, maintaining to the Philadelphia money men that the works would one day prosper.

By the start of the Civil War the Cambria Iron Company was the biggest iron-producing center in the country. In addition, Morrell had encouraged some rather primitive and haphazard research into a new pneumatic process for making steel which contributed substantially to dramatic changes in the iron business and, for that matter, in the whole character and growth of the country.

In 1856 a man named William Kelly, a Pittsburgher by birth, moved from Eddyville, Kentucky, to Johnstown to set up in one corner of the Cambria yard some experimental apparatus which he assembled from scrap-heap parts and pieces. Kelly was in Johnstown off and on for the next three years. He became known among the millworkers as “The Irish Crank,” and not without justification. His attempts to “refine” molten iron for the rolling mill by blowing air into it had resulted in repeated failures and at least one serious fire, which became known as “Kelly’s Fireworks.” But later on, in 1862, he came back to try again, this time with an egg-shaped “converter” made abroad, and the accepted story is that he had better luck. Kelly would later be credited with having built the converter himself and with developing at Johnstown something very close to what became known as the Bessemer process, a technique for converting iron into steel at far less cost and in considerably larger quantities than had been possible before.

Henry Bessemer, a brilliant English chemist, had devised just such a process at about the time Kelly first arrived at the Cambria works, and, deservedly enough, got nearly all of the credit. The Bessemer converter used a blast of air directed through molten iron to oxidize, or burn off, most of the carbon impurities in the metal to make steel. Previous steelmaking techniques required weeks, even months. The Bessemer process could produce good-quality steel in less than one hour.

It was one of the important technological innovations of all time, and Morrell was among the first to recognize just what its impact might be. He financed Kelly’s erratic pioneering in the technique for close to five years and after the war invested heavily in new Bessemer equipment. In the late ’60’s and ’70’s Johnstown was the liveliest steel center in the country, with the most inventive minds in the industry gathering there—the Fritz brothers, George and John, Bill Jones, and the brilliant and energetic Alexander Holley.

Moreover, Morrell had Cambria Iron do something no other steel company experimenting with the Bessemer process dared try, and something that was to prove immensely beneficial to Andrew Carnegie. He used only American workers, training Pennsylvania farm boys to understand and master the new technology, while everyone else in the business was importing English workers already familiar with it. At first there were months of costly setbacks and disappointments in Johnstown, but the results in the long run proved Morrell right.

In 1867, from ingots made at Steelton, the first Bessemer rails to be rolled on order in the United States came out of the Cambria mill. By 1871 Morrell had one of the first really big Bessemer plants in operation, and for the next five years Cambria would be the largest producer in the country, if not the world.

The war had brought flush times and dazzling increases in iron production capacities. But now the age of cheap steel was on. By the time of the late 1880’s, Cambria Iron had some 7,000 men on the payroll. The works consisted of the Johnstown furnaces Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 in one plant, with stacks seventy-five feet high and sixteen feet in diameter at the base. Blast furnaces Numbers 5 and 6 were in a second plant. The hulking Bessemer plant was the main building. Then there was a huge open-hearth building, a rolling mill that was nearly 2,000 feet long, a bolt-and-nut works, and an axle shop.

Added to that the company owned and operated its own coal mines, coke ovens, and railroads. It was the largest landowner by far in the county, having bought up thousands of acres around Johnstown, coal holdings primarily, which were, in many places, used as tremendous farms where nothing but hay was grown to feed the animals used in the mills and mines. The company also owned some 700 frame houses which it rented to its workers, a big department store, and the Gautier Steel Company, a subsidiary, where Cambria Link Barbed Wire was made.

To all intents and purposes, Johnstown, in other words, was a company town and an important one at that. And appropriately enough the company ran the place with an iron hand. Labor unions were not to be tolerated, nor were employees who dared even to talk such treason.

For example, Rule Number 9 of the plant regulations published in 1874 stated: “Any person or persons known to belong to any secret association or open combination whose aim is to control wages or stop the works or any part thereof shall be promptly and finally discharged. Persons not satisfied with their work or their wages can leave honorably by giving the required notice…”

The Cambria Iron Company, which meant Mr. Daniel J. Morrell, left no doubts as to where it stood on such matters. So there were no unions in the mill, and inside the high, green fence that surrounded it, work went on around the clock, around the calendar, without any trouble from the help.

It would be mistaken, however, to imagine Cambria Iron as an entirely overbearing or inhuman organization, grinding down its employees. By the standards of the day, it was quite progressive and looked out for the welfare of its people and the town with uncommon paternalism.

In his first speech in Congress, Morrell had said, “The American must live in a house, not a hut; he must wear decent clothes and eat wholesome and nourishing food. He is an integral part of the municipality, the State, and the Nation; subject to no fetters of class or caste; neither pauper, nor peasant, nor serf, but a free American citizen.” Judged by the standards of his time, he was almost as good as his word.

In one of its plants the Iron Company maintained the eight-hour day, a practice that had been tried and abandoned by every other steel company, which meant, as one of the trade-union newspapers pointed out, that the only eight-hour mill left in the country was a nonunion mill.

The town hospital was built by the company and anyone injured on the job received free treatment there. It was the company also which had established the library and a night school where its employees could learn elementary science, mechanical drawing, and engineering. At the company store, Wood, Morrell & Company, which advertised itself as “The Most Extensive and Best Appointed Establishment in its Class in the United States,” prices were quite reasonable. At the time the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was organized, Cambria Iron had somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million invested in Johnstown and along the valley. So Morrell, very understandably, had special interest in what the Pittsburgh men were up to. That he held no special good feelings toward some of the clubmen also seems likely.

When Carnegie, who had once stoutly proclaimed that “pioneering don’t pay,” decided the time was right to get into the Bessemer steel business and Carnegie, Phipps & Company built the Edgar Thomson works at Braddock in the early 1870’s, he had raided Cambria Iron of its best workers. Among these men, most of whom had been working with pneumatic conversion techniques since Kelly’s days in Johnstown, was the tough, gifted little Welshman, Bill Jones.

Captain Bill Jones, as he was known, had been with Morrell for sixteen years. He had acquired a vast knowledge of the new process and had built a tremendous following among the men at Cambria Iron, largely for his robust, freewheeling willingness not to do things according to the rules if the rules did not suit him. It was the sort of reputation Carnegie took a special interest in. Carnegie never did learn much about steelmaking, but he had a gift for finding men who did, and if they were somewhat unorthodox, so much the better.

When the manager of the Cambria works, George Fritz, died and Morrell had to pick a man to replace him, he turned Jones down for the job, giving it instead to another Jones who seemed a steadier sort. At which point Carnegie immediately moved in and offered Bill Jones a two-dollar-a-day job at Braddock. Jones not only accepted but took a number of his “high-class graduates” along with him. Within one year, by 1876, the Edgar Thomson mill moved ahead of Cambria in production. Carnegie, on a mountaintop in Italy, literally danced with joy on hearing the news. And as Edgar Thomson continued to break every other production record, it was Bill Jones, not Carnegie or his associates, who got the credit from anyone who knew anything about steelmaking. Jones’s papers on production techniques were read before learned societies in Europe. In Pittsburgh he became so important to the Carnegie empire that Carnegie decided to make him a partner, an offer which Jones flatly refused, feeling that he would lose his influence with the men if he ever so openly joined forces with management.

“Just pay me one hell of a salary,” Jones said to Carnegie.

To which Carnegie shot back, “All right, Captain, the salary of the President of the United States is yours.”

“That’s the talk,” said Jones. The salary was $25,000 a year.

So now, if the Pittsburgh crowd was about to go tampering with the South Fork dam, Daniel J. Morrell wanted to know more about their doings than could be gained from mere hearsay. There was too much at stake to go on their word alone. He had no intention of stopping them, as he made clear later on. He had never been one to stand in the way of progress. He had welcomed innovations throughout his working life, and it seems he never objected to this one on principle. He only wanted to be satisfied that the work was being properly managed. He had seen enough explosions and fires at the mill to have a fair idea of the violent consequences of bungled innovation. He had also had some experience with dams, having personally supervised the installation of several small ones put in near town by the water company.

In November of 1880 he sent John Fulton to look over the job. Fulton was an engineer by training and profession, but he was also the next in line to succeed Morrell as head of the works. Morrell, in other words, was not just sending any ordinary employee to South Fork.

A lean Ulster County Irishman, Fulton wore his beard close-cropped and had a fix to his mouth like General Grant’s. He had wonderfully heavy eyebrows and a resolute gaze that gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. He was a man to reckon with, one of Johnstown’s most ardent temperance leaders and a pillar at the Presbyterian Church, where he taught Sunday school and would be long remembered for closing his Bible classes with the most interminable prayers ever uttered by man.

Fulton had made his reputation as a mining engineer and geologist before joining Morrell at Cambria Iron. That there was anyone in Johnstown better qualified to pass judgment on the dam is doubtful. Nor was there any man, save Morrell himself, who was less likely to be dazzled or cowed in any way by the representatives of the club, a factor which Morrell must have taken into account.

Fulton was met at South Fork by two club members, Colonel E. J. Unger and C. A. Carpenter, as well as some of the contractors who had worked on the dam. His report was filed in a letter to Morrell dated November 26. The letter began by stating that he had gone as requested to inspect the dam now owned by the “Sportsmen’s Association of Western Pennsylvania.” (The correct name of the club was evidently still unknown to the Cambria management.) He then said that he did not think the repairs were done in “a careful and substantial manner, or with the care demanded in a large structure of this kind.” He stated that he believed the dam’s weight was sufficient to hold back the water, but that he had grave misgivings about other aspects of the dam:

There appear to me two serious elements of danger in this dam. First, the want of a discharge pipe to reduce or take the water out of the dam for needed repairs. Second, the unsubstantial method of repair, leaving a large leak, which appears to be cutting the new embankment.

As the water cannot be lowered, the difficulty arises of reaching the source of the present destructive leaks. At present there is forty feet of water in the dam, when the full head of 60 feet is reached, it appears to me to be only a question of time until the former cutting is repeated. Should this break be made during a season of flood, it is evident that considerable damage would ensue along the line of the Conemaugh.

It is impossible to estimate how disastrous this flood would be, as its force would depend on the size of the breach in the dam with proportional rapidity of discharge.

The stability of the dam can only be assured by a thorough overhauling of the present lining on the upper slopes, and the construction of an ample discharge pipe to reduce or remove the water to make necessary repairs.

Morrell promptly sent the report to Ruff, who responded on December 2.

Ruff was not much impressed by Fulton’s findings. He pointed out to Morrell that Fulton did not have the correct name of the club, and told Morrell what that name was. He said there was no leak such as Fulton claimed and that Fulton’s figures on the comparative weights of the water and the dam were off, since Fulton had overestimated how much water was in the lake. The tone was one of obvious impatience and suggested not very subtly that Morrell would do well to hire himself a more competent man. He ended the letter by saying:

We consider his conclusions as to our only safe course of no more value than his other assertions…you and your people are in no danger from our enterprise.

Very respectfully,
B. F. Ruff, President

Ruff, quite clearly, was not in the least interested in continuing the discussion. The club had managed nicely to keep its affairs private until then, and the idea of any prolonged or possibly complicated negotiations with the Cambria Iron Company had small appeal.

Morrell, however, was unwilling to let it go at that. On December 22 he answered Ruff’s letter. After a few opening courtesies, he got to the heart of the issue:

…I note your criticism of Mr. Fulton’s former report, and judge that in some of his statements he may have been in error, but think that his conclusions in the main were correct.

We do not wish to put any obstruction in the way of your accomplishing your object in the reconstruction of this dam; but we must protest against the erection of a dam at that place, that will be a perpetual menace to the lives and property of those residing in this upper valley of the Conemaugh, from its insecure construction. In my judgment there should have been provided some means by which the water would be let out of the dam in case of trouble, and I think you will find it necessary to provide an outlet pipe or gate before any engineer could pronounce the job a safe one. If this dam could be securely reconstructed with a safe means of driving off the water in case any weakness manifests itself, I would regard the accomplishment of this work as a very desirable one, and if some arrangement could be made with your association by which the store of water in this reservoir could be used in time of drouth in the mountains, this Company would be willing to cooperate with you in the work, and would contribute liberally toward making the dam absolutely safe.

Morrell, in short, was suggesting exactly what Fulton had urged: give the dam a major overhaul and install a discharge system of some sort. At the same time, he was making it plain that Cambria Iron considered the present job shoddy enough, the situation critical enough, to be willing to help foot the bill to set things right.

The offer was declined. The matter was dropped—almost.

Morrell felt that just to be on the safe side it might be a good idea to have an inside view of doings at the lake. So he decided to join the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, and evidently the Pittsburgh men had no objections. Morrell therefore purchased two memberships in his own name.

It was not for another nine years that engineers from many parts of the country came to the site of the dam to study what had gone wrong. Fulton’s findings appeared to have been correct. But there were four other changes in the dam which Ruff and his men had made which Fulton had not noticed, and these were as crucial to what finally happened as the faults Fulton cited.

To begin with, in order to provide room for a road across the breast, the height of the dam had been lowered from one to three feet. This would give enough width for two carriages crossing the dam to pass each other comfortably. But it also meant that the capacity of the spillway had been reduced, for now the bottom of the spillway was not ten or eleven feet lower than the crest of the dam, but perhaps only seven or eight feet. This was a very significant change, since it meant that a rising lake would start to go over the top of the dam that much sooner.

Then, too, a screen of iron rods, each about half an inch in diameter, had been put across the spillway to prevent the fish from going over and down into South Fork Creek. The screen was set between the heavy posts which supported the wooden bridge over the spillway. Under normal conditions the combination of posts and screens decreased the spillway capacity only slightly, but they had the potential of decreasing it a great deal should the screens become clogged with debris.

The third change was probably the most important of all. The dam sagged slightly in the middle, where the old break had been. Exactly how bad the sag was no one was able to say later for certain. It may have been only a foot or two, but according to one study, the crest at the center may have been as much as four feet lower than the ends. The center was where the dam should have been highest and strongest, so in the event that water ever did start over the top, the pressure would be at the ends rather than at the middle. Now the reverse was the case.

To have seen the sag with a naked eye, and particularly an untrained eye, would have been next to impossible. It is conceivable therefore that it went unnoticed by Ruff and the men who did the reconstruction work. Fulton took no note of it apparently; whether it would have been observed and corrected had experienced engineers been responsible for the reconstruction is a question no one can answer.

What it meant in practical terms was that the depth of the spillway was now only about four feet lower than the top of the dam at its center. In other words, if more than four feet of water were going over the spillway, then the lake would start running over the top of the dam at the center where the pressure against it was the greatest.

The fourth change was unnoticed by Fulton because it had not as yet taken place when he made his inspection. The water then, as he says, was only forty feet deep, which is about the depth it had been kept at during the old days before the first break in 1862. The club, however, brought the level of the lake up to where it was nearly brim full, meaning that the depth ran to sixty-five feet or thereabouts. In spring it sometimes rose even higher. With the lake that full, it was not beyond reason to imagine serious trouble in the event of a severe storm.

But, as both Fulton and Morrell had made abundantly clear, with the discharge pipes gone, the club was faced with the unfortunate position of not being able to lower the level of the lake, ever, at any time, even if that were its expressed wish.

The water that high at the dam also meant that the over-all size of the lake was increased. The lake backed up well beyond where it had been in the old days, which lead to the widespread misconception, still current today in and around Johnstown, that the club had actually raised the height of the dam from what it had been.

How satisfied Morrell was after the business of the letters was over and done with is not known. For when the sun went down behind Laurel Hill on Monday, August 24, 1885, Daniel J. Morrell was in his grave at Sandy Vale. He had been ill for several years, having suffered what appears to have been an advanced case of arteriosclerosis. He had gone into a steady mental decline not long after he took out his membership in the South Fork fishing club. In 1884 he had given up all his various civic responsibilities and retired from business. After that, it seems, senility closed in hard and fast. He was seen almost never, “lost in mental darkness,” as one account put it years later. When he died, “calmly and peacefully” at eight in the morning on Thursday, August 20, 1885, he was sixty-four years old.

On Sunday thousands of mourners queued up along the south side of Main Street to go through the iron gates, up the long front walk, and into the big house to view the remains. For three hours the doors were open and a steady procession filed through.

The next day, from noon until five, the whole town was shut down. The procession that marched out to the cemetery was as fine a display of the town’s manhood as anyone had ever seen. Ahead of the hearse tramped men from the Cambria mines and railroads, the rolling mills and blast furnaces, row on row, like an army, followed by the merchants and professional men, the police, the city fathers, men of every sort who worked for or did business with or depended on the Cambria Iron Company, which meant just about everybody. The only sound was the steady beat of their heavy boots and shoes on the cobblestones.

After the hearse came the special carriages for the mourners. Bill Kelly and his wife were there; so was Captain Bill Jones, and a Cleveland steel man and family friend named Marcus Alonzo Hanna.

There never was a bigger or better funeral in Johnstown.

Two years later, on March 29, 1887, the day a wagonload of fruit trees arrived at his cottage on Lake Conemaugh, Benjamin F. Ruff died suddenly in a hotel in Pittsburgh. The cause of death according to the papers was a carbuncle on the neck.

III

“There’s a man came from the lake.”

–1–

The hard, cold rain that had started coming down the night before had eased off considerably by the morning of Friday, May 31. But a thick mist hung in the valley like brushwood smoke and overhead the sky was very dark.

Even before night had ended there had been signs of trouble. At five o’clock a landslide had caved in the stable at Kress’s brewery, and anyone who was awake then could hear the rivers. By six everyone who was up and about knew that Johnstown was in for a bad time. The rivers were rising at better than a foot an hour. They were a threatening yellow-brown color and already full of logs and big pieces of lumber that went bounding along as though competing in some sort of frantic race.

When the seven o’clock shift arrived at the Cambria mills, the men were soon told to go home and look after their families. By ten there was water in most cellars in the lower part of town. School had been let out, and children were splashing about in the streets with wooden boxes, boards, anything that would make a boat.

One of the most distinguished residents of the lower part of town was the Honorable W. Horace Rose, Esquire, former cavalry officer, former state legislator, former district attorney of Cambria County, a founder of Johnstown’s Literary Society, father of five, respected and successful attorney at law. Rose was a Democrat with a large following among Republicans as well as his own party, and including those Republicans who ran the town and Cambria Iron. He was an expert horseman, slender, erect, and full-bearded, with strong blue eyes and a soft voice which he seldom ever raised.

He had been born in a log house that had stood at the corner of Vine and Market. At thirteen he had been orphaned when both parents died of cholera within the same hour and had been on his own ever since, first as a bound boy in a tannery, later as a carpenter. When he was nineteen, John Linton, Johnstown’s leading lawyer, took him into his office to “read law.” Not long after he opened his own office, which he built himself, and got married to Maggie Ramsey of Johnstown. Then came the war, during which he was wounded, captured, and released in time to take part in General Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign.

The house Horace Rose and his family lived in was downtown, on lower Main Street. He had witnessed nearly every one of Johnstown’s floods over the years, and when he heard that the rivers this particular morning were both coming up rapidly at the same time, something they had not done before, he decided to go out after breakfast and see how things were going.

By the time he and his two youngest sons, Forest and Percy, had finished hitching the team, there was water on the stable floor. Rose took care to use his second-best harness and had one of the boys drive their cow to the hillside, expecting to bring her back down again in a few hours, when the water subsided. Then they climbed into an open wagon and headed down Main, with Rose driving.

His intention was to pick up anyone toward the river who wished to be evacuated. But by now, which was somewhere near nine, the water that far downtown was too deep to get through safely. So he wheeled around and headed back up Main, going as far as Bedford, where he paused to pass the time with his old friend Charles Zimmerman, the livery-stable owner. For a few moments they watched another cow being led to higher ground.

“Charlie,” Rose said, “you and I have scored fifty years, and this is the first time we ever saw a cow drink Stony Creek river water on Main Street.”

“That’s so,” Zimmerman agreed. “But the water two years ago was higher.”

About then the rain started coming down again as hard as it had during the night, heavy and wind-driven. Rose stopped off long enough to buy his sons rubber raincoats, then proceeded over to the end of Franklin to his office, which was less than a hundred feet from the roaring Stony Creek. For another half-hour he and the boys set about placing his papers and other things well above the flood line of 1887, which was about a foot from the floor. Then they started for home, stopping once more on the way to talk to another old friend, John Dibert, the banker, who was also their next-door neighbor.

The situation for property holders in the lower part of town was growing serious, Rose and Dibert agreed. This business of flooded cellars every spring had to be corrected. The solution, as they saw it, was to call a meeting to protest the way the Cambria Iron Company had been filling in the riverbanks next to the mills below town. They recalled that town ordinances had fixed the width of the Stony Creek at 175 feet and the Little Conemaugh at 110 feet. This meant that the combined width of the two was 285 feet; but the Conemaugh, which had to carry all the water from both of them, was now less than 200 feet wide near the mills. Obviously, the rivers were bound to back up when flash floods hit, and obviously the Cambria Iron Company would have to restore the riverbed to its original width. With that settled, the two friends parted.

Rose went directly home, where he found the water now so deep that he was unable to get near his front door. He sent young Forest with the team to a nearby hillside while he and Percy assembled a makeshift raft and floated over to the back porch. Once inside, like nearly everyone else in town, they busied themselves taking up carpets and furniture. Rose also “marked with sadness” that the slowly rising water “with its muddy freight” had already ruined his new wallpaper.

Then everyone moved upstairs where the morning took on the air of a family picnic. Forest had been unable to get back to the house after leaving the horses but had signaled from a window across the street that he was high and dry with the Fishers.

Horace Rose called back and forth to Squire Fisher and joked about their troubles while his wife and the others got a fire going in the grate and made some coffee. After a bit Rose got his rifle, went up to the attic, propped himself in a window, and whiled away the time shooting at rats struggling along the wall of a stable in the adjoining lot.

And so the morning passed on into afternoon; there was nothing much to do but wait it out and make the best of what, after all, was not such an unpleasant situation.

There were hundreds of other families, however, who had seen enough. They began moving out, wading through the streets with bundles of clothing and food precariously balanced on rude rafts, or jammed into half-submerged spring wagons. Here and there a lone rowboat pushed up to a front porch or window ledge to make a clumsy, noisy rescue of women and grandfathers, dogs, cats, and children.

Some people were simply heading for higher ground, without any particular place in mind; others were going to the homes of friends or relatives where they hoped there might not be quite so much water, and where, come nightfall, there might be electricity and a dry kitchen.

A few families went over to the big hotels in the center of town, thinking they would be the safest places of all to ride out the storm. Quite a good many, wherever their destination, went a little sheepishly, dreading the looks and the kidding they would get when they came back home again.

The water by now, from one end of town to the other, was anywhere from two to ten feet deep. It was already higher than the ‘87 flood, making it, by noon at least, Johnstown’s worst flood on record. The Gautier works had closed down at ten, when Fred Krebs, the manager, was reminded by one of the men that the huge barbed-wire plant stood on fill that had been dumped into the old canal basin, and that once upon a time there had been four feet of water right where they were standing. At eleven, or soon after, a log boom burst up the Stony Creek and sent a wild rush of logs stampeding through the valley until they crashed into the stone bridge below town and jammed in among the massive arches.

Not very long after that the Stony Creek ripped out the Poplar Street Bridge; then, within the hour, the Cambria City Bridge went. At St. John’s Catholic Church, which stood far uptown at Jackson and Locust, and so, presumably, well beyond reach of spring floods, the water was so deep that the funeral of Mrs. Mary McNally had to be postponed midway through the service and the casket left in the church.

Worst of all, and unlike any other flood in Johnstown’s history, there had been a tragic death. A teamster named Joseph Ross, a father of four children, had been drowned when he fell into a flooded excavation while helping evacuate a stranded family.

Along Main Street, shopkeepers were working feverishly to move their goods out of reach of the water. In his second-floor office overlooking Franklin and Main, George T. Swank, the cantankerous editor and proprietor of the Tribune, began working on what he planned to be a running log of the day’s events, with the intention of publishing it in the next edition, whenever that might be.

“As we write at noon,” he put down, “Johnstown is again under water, and all about us the tide is rising. Wagons for hours have been passing along the streets carrying people from submerged points to places of safety…From seven o’clock on the water rose. People who were glad they ‘didn’t live downtown’ began to wish they didn’t live in town at all. On the water crept, and on, up one street and out the other…Eighteen inches an hour the Stony Creek rose for a time, and the Conemaugh about as rapidly.”

On the street below his window the current, coming across from the Stony Creek, was rushing by at an estimated six miles an hour.

Across Main, and three doors down Franklin, the Reverend H. L. Chapman was having a slightly unnerving day.

After an early breakfast he had retired to his study to work on his sermon for Sunday. The text he had selected was “But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?” He had barely begun when he was interrupted by the door-bell. Opening the front door, he found his wife’s cousin, Mrs. A. D. Brinker, standing on the porch looking terribly frightened.

She had crossed the park from her home on the other side. She asked Chapman if he had heard about the high water downtown. He said he had not and that he did not think there would be much of a flood.

“Johnstown is going to be destroyed today,” she said, and then told him that the reservoir would break and all would be swept away.

Chapman was so incredulous he almost laughed in her face, and would have had she not looked so pitifully terror-stricken. It was also not the first time Mrs. Brinker had made just such a forecast.

“Well, Sister Brinker, you have been fearing this for years,” Chapman said with patience, “and it has never yet happened, and I don’t think there is much danger.”

He invited her to step in and stay with them until after the flood had passed, an invitation she gladly accepted, saying that her husband had insisted on staying home, to “hold the fort” as he had put it.

Later, a young student friend named Parker dropped by to see if the Chapmans needed help moving their furniture, but the Reverend told him he expected no trouble, as the new parsonage had a higher foundation than other houses. But the young man stayed on nonetheless.

About noon Chapman happened to look out the window long enough to see one of the town’s most dignified figures standing in the street in water up to his waist. It was Cyrus Elder, who along with being chief counsel for the Iron Company was now Johnstown’s one and only member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, having acquired the Morrell memberships at the time of the old Quaker’s death.

Chapman was puzzled by the whole thing and hurried onto the porch to see what he could do. Elder, though a most solid citizen, seems also to have had a sense of humor.

“Doctor,” he called, “have you any fishing tackle?”

Chapman answered that he thought he had.

“Well,” said Elder, “I was in a skiff and it upset and left me here, and I am waiting for a man who has gone after a horse, to take me out, and I might put in my time fishing.”

When the man and horse returned, the hefty Elder, try as he would, was unable to get up on the animal’s slippery back. So the rider went off again and returned next with a wagon. This time they had better luck and started off down Main toward Elder’s home on Walnut Street but had to turn back and head uptown for Elder’s brother’s house; all of which was duly noted with amusement from the window of the Tribune by George Swank, who was also Elder’s brother-in-law.

Elder had arrived back in Johnstown from Chicago just that morning and had been trying for hours to get home to his wife and daughter. From the station platform he had been able to look right across at his house, where, on the front porch, the two women were waving their handkerchiefs at him. They had gestured back and forth about the water and how he might get home, but from then on he had made little progress.

At midday the Chapmans and their guests sat down to dinner, but Mrs. Brinker was still too unstrung to eat anything. Dinner over, they moved to the study, where they sat quietly chatting beside the gas fire. But the Reverend soon grew impatient with the comings and goings of Lizzie Swing, the Chapmans German servant girl, who kept tramping past the study door on her way from the cellar to the attic with armloads of food.

“Why does she do that?” Chapman asked. He was genuinely puzzled by the girl’s obvious state of nerves, since she understood almost no English. The Reverend was having trouble maintaining an intelligent sense of domestic calm.

The train which returned Cyrus Elder to Johnstown had left Chicago the day before at three in the afternoon. It was one of two sections of the Day Express, which had pulled out of Pittsburgh that morning, on time, at 8:10. The two trains arrived at Johnstown about 10:15, and again on time, but were held there for a half-hour or so. The eastbound track on up the valley had washed out. Not until a local mail train came through were the two sections given orders to follow it to East Conemaugh, running east on the westbound track.

During the wait at Johnstown, passengers on board watched in fascination the struggles of the flooded city. They waved back and forth to families hanging out of upstairs windows. Some got out for a few minutes and joined the crowds on the station platform and along the near enbankment to watch the railroad crew that was trying to dislodge the logs and drift from the stone bridge. When the trains began moving again, very slowly, around the blind corner of Prospect Hill and on to the East Conemaugh yards two miles ahead, the passengers could see the ugly yellow-brown surge of the Little Conemaugh to their right, now very near their rain-streaked windows. More and more debris swept by and telegraph poles swayed precariously in the strong wind.

The run to East Conemaugh took about ten minutes, with the mail train in the lead, followed by the first and second Day Express, in that order. At East Conemaugh all trains were stopped and held for further orders. There was trouble up the line at Lilly. Bear Run had risen more than six feet, burst over its banks, and washed out a quarter of a mile of track. Nothing could move east or west. Two earlier eastbound trains, the Chicago Limited and a freight from Derry, had gotten as far as South Fork, where now they too were being held.

The first section of the Day Express was made up of seven cars—five coaches, a baggage car, and one Pullman. On board were some 90 passengers plus crew. The second section had three sleepers, one baggage and two mail cars, and perhaps 50 passengers and crew. The mail train had only three cars, one for the mail, plus two coaches. Most of its passengers were members of the Night Off company, who were on their way to Altoona for their next performance.

East Conemaugh was the main marshaling yard for Johnstown. Eastbound trains picked up their “helpers” there, the extra engines for the climb over the mountain. There was a huge sixteen-stall roundhouse, water towers, four main tracks, sidings, sheds, repair shops, coal tipples, dozens of locomotives, rolling stock of every description. So that the trains now detained there in the driving rain were only part of a whole concentration of equipment set along a broad flat where the Little Conemaugh makes a sweeping curve between the hills.

For the people of the little town set just back from the yards, the morning was turning into a fine show. The river was still within its banks but rising fast. There was every sign that the wooden bridge above the station was about to wash out, and rain or no rain, most of the town had gathered along the riverbank to see it happen.

Sometime between noon and one o’clock a telegraph message came into the East Conemaugh dispatcher’s tower from the next tower up the valley to the east. The message was directed to the yardmaster at East Conemaugh, J. C. Walkinshaw, and to the head of the entire division, Mr. Robert Pitcairn, at Pittsburgh. No one would later recall at exactly what moment the message arrived, and numerous people who should have seen it later claimed that they never did. Nor was there ever agreement on its precise wording, but the consensus was that the message said something close to this:

SOUTH FORK DAM IS LIABLE TO BREAK: NOTIFY THE

PEOPLE OF JOHNSTOWN TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST.

It was signed simply “Operator.”

At Johnstown the message was received at the telegraph office at the depot only a few minutes later. The freight agent, Frank Deckert, was told it had come in; he glanced at it, but he did not stop to read it. As he said later, he knew that “it was in regard to the dam; that there was some danger of it breaking.” But it created no alarm in his mind. He had heard such warnings before. When he passed the word along to the few people who happened to be about the station, their response was the same as his, with only one or two exceptions. Two men who were shown the message by Charles Moore, the assistant ticket agent, read it and laughed out loud.

Deckert made no further effort to spread the warning. He did not move his family from their home just down from the station, nor did he bother to send the message over to the central part of town.

–2–

No one on the mountain could remember there ever being a night like it.

John Lovett, who was seventy-one and had a sawmill on South Fork Creek a quarter of a mile from the head of Lake Conemaugh, said it was the hardest rain he had ever heard. He could not see it, he said, but he could hear it all right, and the creeks got so vicious they carried off logs that had been on his place for forty years. William Hank and Sam Peblin, who had farms farther up the mountain, at the headwaters of South Fork Creek, said much the same thing. Sylvester Reynolds, another farmer, reported that Otto Run, which feeds into Yellow Run, was running four feet deep, compared to its normal depth of two inches. F. N. George, Justice of the Peace at Lilly, said he had never known a cloudburst like it in fifty years. At Wilmore, H. W. Plotner, a druggist who was nearly seventy, said he could recall no worse storm. Dan Sipe, who owned the flour mill on the Little Conemaugh at Summerhill, Sheriff George Stineman, the coal operator at South Fork, and Mrs. Leap, who kept the general store at Bens Creek, all agreed it was the mightiest downpour and the highest water ever in their memories.

There were also “weird and unnatural occurrences” reported. One family by the name of Heidenfelter later described how they had been suddenly awakened and badly frightened by a “rumbling, roaring sound” that seemed to come from some indefinable object not far from their house. It was then followed by a terrific downpour, which, according to Mrs. Heidenfelter, sounded as if a gigantic tank had opened at the bottom and all the water dumped out at once.

“Indeed I thought the last day had come,” she later told a newspaper reporter. “I never heard anything like it in my life. I wanted my husband to get up and see what the matter was, but it was dark and he could have done no good. In the morning, as soon as we could see, the fields were covered with water four or five feet deep…. People say the noise we heard was a waterspout, but I’ve never seen one and don’t know how they act.”

Apparently the storm did tear big holes in the ground near the Heidenfelter farm, and other families close by the lake reported hearing sounds much like thunder but which they were certain were not thunder.

In any case it was a wild night on the mountain, and when morning came virtually every farm in the area had swamped cellars and pastures. Freshly plowed fields were sliced through with gullies that carried water as much as three feet deep. Acres of winter wheat and corn planted a few weeks earlier had been washed away. Every backwoods road had turned into a creek; every little mountain spring, run, creek, and stream was on a rampage. The earth could not absorb any more water.

It was about six thirty that morning when young John Parke awoke in his high-ceilinged room upstairs at the clubhouse on the shore of Lake Conemaugh. He had awakened once before, about an hour earlier, and had heard the rain hammering against the big frame building, but thinking nothing of it, had dropped off to sleep again. Now, outside his window, there was little to be seen but a heavy, white mist that had closed down over the trees and water.

Parke dressed quickly, went downstairs, crossed through the main living room, out the porch door into the cold morning, where, for the first time, he heard what he would later describe as a “terrible roaring as of a cataract” coming from the head of the lake to the south. He also noticed that during the night the lake had risen what looked to be perhaps two feet. Yesterday the water had been at its usual level, which, he reckoned, was about four to six feet below the crest of the dam. Now, it might be no more than two or three feet from the crest. What he could not tell was how much water was still coming in, and that he knew would be the crucial factor for the next several hours. But the sound from the head of the lake was far from encouraging.

He went inside again, had breakfast, then, along with a young workman who had been helping on the sewer project, he got hold of a rowboat and started off to have a look at the incoming creeks.

“I found that the upper one-quarter of the lake was thickly covered with debris, logs, slabs from sawmill, plank, etc.,” he wrote afterward, “but this matter was scarcely moving on the lake, and what movement there was, carried it into an arm or eddy in the lake, caused by the force of the two streams flowing in and forming a stream for a long distance out into the lake.”

As he and his companion neared the far end, he was astonished to discover that they were rowing over the top of a four-strand barbed-wire fence which stood well back from the normal shore line. Then, rowing against the strong current, they proceeded to cover another hundred yards or more across what was normally a cow pasture. They passed by the place where Muddy Run emptied into the lake and went on to South Fork Creek, which Parke described as “a perfect torrent, sweeping through the woods in the most direct course, scarcely following its natural bed, and stripping branches and leaves from the trees five and six feet from the ground.”

The two of them pulled their boat onto what seemed the driest spot in sight and started up along the creek by foot. For half a mile the woods boiled with water. The trees dripped water, their drenched trunks black against the mist. The very air itself seemed better than half water.

When they returned for their boat, they found that the lake had come up enough in that short time to set it slightly adrift. From there they struck out straight for the clubhouse. From what he had seen, Parke knew that the situation at the dam must be growing very serious and that an appreciable letup in the volume of water pouring into the lake was most unlikely.

As near as he could tell, the lake was rising about an inch every ten minutes. If this were so, it would be only a matter of hours until the water started over the top of the dam, unless something could be done to release more water than the spillway was handling.

At the clubhouse Parke was told that he was needed at the dam immediately. He went to the stable for his horse and within minutes was galloping off through the cold rain.

There were close to fifty people at the dam when he came riding out of the woods. There was a clump of bystanders, South Fork men and boys mostly, under the trees over at the far side, next to the spillway. Along the road that crossed over the dam itself, a dozen or so of the Italian sewer diggers were working with picks and shovels, trying, without much success, to throw up a small ridge of earth to heighten the dam. Bill Showers, Colonel Unger’s hired man, was also making little progress with a horse and plow. Despite all the rain, the road was so hard packed that thus far they had managed to make only a slight strip of loose earth across the center of the dam hardly more than a foot high.

At the center of the dam the water level was only two feet or so from the top.

At the west end another ten or twelve men were trying to cut a new spillway through the tough shale of the hillside but were able to dig down no more than about knee-deep, and the width of their trench was only two feet or so.

Also among the onlookers were several of the clubmen who had come up from Pittsburgh for the Memorial Day weekend. But the man who was directing things, and deciding what ought to be done as the water advanced steadily toward the crest, was Colonel Elias J. Unger, who had retired from business in Pittsburgh the year before and had only recently been named the club’s president and over-all manager. He was living at the lake the year around now, in a modest farmhouse just beyond the spillway.

The Colonel had started life on another farm in Dauphin County, in the eastern part of the state. His father was a Pennsylvania German, as was his mother, who came from the big and well-known Eisenhower family. At twenty he got a job on the railroad and managed to work himself up from brakeman to conductor to superintendent of the Pennsylvania’s hotels, from Pittsburgh to Jersey City, including the one at Cresson, where he was manager for a time and so got to know Carnegie and the others.

About the time the South Fork club was being organized, he had gone into the hotel business on his own in Pittsburgh and made even more of a name for himself. By 1888 he was well enough situated to buy the place on Lake Conemaugh and settle down to a quiet retirement in a glorious setting where there was also the added interest of a not very taxing job to keep him occupied, plus, in the summer months at least, the chance to keep up with his Pittsburgh friendships.

Unger had come a long way from Dauphin County. But even so, socially and financially, he was a noticeable cut below the other members of the South Fork fishing and hunting organization. His experience in hotel management, it would appear, had something to do with his position in the club.

The Colonel had returned home only the night before, after visiting friends in Harrisburg. When he got out of bed that morning at six, it looked to him, he later said, as though the whole valley below was under water, and he was baffled as to what it all meant. He put on his gum coat and boots and walked down the hill in front of the house, crossed the wooden bridge over the spillway and walked out onto the dam, where he began taking measurements of the rising water.

About eight thirty Unger’s caretaker over at the club grounds, a man by the name of Boyer, came by in a spring wagon with D. W. C. Bidwell, who was on his way to South Fork intending to catch the 9:15 train to Pittsburgh. Bidwell, who evidently had had enough of the soaking weekend at the lake, stopped to ask Unger how things were going.

“Serious,” answered Unger, who later that morning was heard to say that if the dam survived the day, he would see that major changes were made to insure that this sort of thing never happened again.

When Boyer got back from South Fork, which was sometime near ten, Unger sent him off to bring the Italian work crew down to the dam. He had decided to try digging another spillway at the western end, where he thought the hillside would be solid enough to keep the water from cutting through it too rapidly. There was brief disagreement over the idea, with some of the men protesting that the water would rip through any new wasteway so fast that the dam would quickly fail.

“It won’t matter much,” Unger said, “it will be ruined anyhow if I can’t get rid of this water.”

When it became clear that even the shallowest sort of ditch could barely be cut through the rocky hillside, Unger then set several of his men to work trying to clear away the debris which by now was clogging the iron fish screens in the main spillway and seriously reducing its capacity.

Among the bystanders taking all this in was a small fourteen-year-old boy with the big name of U. Ed Schwartzentruver, who, with some of his friends, had been there all morning in the rain watching the excitement. Seventy-six years later, sitting on his porch on Grant Street in South Fork, not quite ninety and nearly blind, he would talk about what he had seen that morning as though it had happened the day before.

“When this high water come down, there was all kinds of debris, stumps, pieces of logs, and underbrush and it started to jam up those screens under the bridge. The bridge was well constructed of heavy timber. There was a man named Bucannon up there, John Bucannon, who lived in South Fork. Well he kept telling Colonel Unger to tear out that bridge and pull out that big iron screen.

“But Colonel Unger wouldn’t do it. And then when he said he would do it, it was too late. The screens wouldn’t budge, they were so jammed in by all that debris.”

When John Parke came up onto the dam on horseback, he did what he could to exhort Unger’s men to dig harder and faster, riding back and forth along the breast, shouting orders and moving men from one place to another when he thought it would do some good. But by eleven o’clock it was apparent to everyone that the lake was still advancing as fast as ever before. In fact, by eleven, the water was about level with the top of the dam and had already started to eat into what little had been thrown up by the plow and shovels. On the outer face, near the base of the dam, it looked as though several serious leaks had developed.

At this point, Colonel Unger decided that perhaps something ought to be done to warn the people in the valley below. The only way was to send a man down. There was a telephone line from the clubhouse to South Fork, but it was used only during the summer season and had not as yet been put in working order.

With all the rain there had been, the road to South Fork was in very bad shape, but John Parke made the ride in about ten minutes. Parke’s relative youth, and the fact that he was not well known in the area, may account for the marginal success of his mission.

Furthermore, the first people to come from the dam to South Fork that morning, Boyer and Bidwell, had already told everyone that there was no danger of the water running over the top. So when Parke came splashing up Railroad Street with his warning, the news was both unexpected and perhaps seemed somewhat questionable. According to testimony made later by Bidwell, Parke stopped in front of George Stineman’s supply store, which was across the street from the depot, and where a small crowd had gathered.

“I saw him come down there,” Bidwell said, “and make a statement to the people standing about that the water was then running over the top of the dam, and there was very great danger of it giving way.” Parke also told two men to go to the railroad’s telegraph tower next to the depot and tell the operator to alert Johnstown. But soon after they left, Bidwell, according to one witness, began telling everyone that there was really nothing to get excited about.

The operator at South Fork that Friday morning was Miss Emma Ehrenfeld. She had come on duty at seven o’clock. It was about noon, she would later estimate, that a man came up into the tower “very much excited.”

“Notify Johnstown right away about the dam,” he said. “It’s raising very fast and there’s danger of the reservoir breaking.”

“Who told you all this?” she asked.

“There’s a man came from the lake,” he said.

Emma was not quite sure how much to believe of his story. She had seen the man around town and thought his name was Wertzengreist, though she was uncertain about that too. But she said later, “He is a man that people generally don’t have much confidence in, and for that reason, I scarcely knew what to do under the circumstances.”

She was also hampered by the fact that her lines west were open only as far as the next tower, four miles down the river at Mineral Point. Beyond Mineral Point there seemed to be a break somewhere and so she had no direct contact with Johnstown.

The operator at Mineral Point, W. H. Pickerell, was an old hand along the Little Conemaugh, having been there at that same tower for some fifteen years. Emma decided to “talk” it over with him on the one good wire she had. She tapped out her problem and waited for an answer. Pickerell told her that the break to the west was caused by the poles falling into the river, and that though he had no way of getting Johnstown, he thought “it was a thing that there oughtn’t to be any risks taken on.” He said he would take the message and send it on to East Conemaugh by foot if someone should happen along the tracks below his tower.

So the two of them worked out a message addressed to the yardmaster at Conemaugh and to Robert Pitcairn in Pittsburgh.

“I wrote the message up,” Pickerell declared weeks after, “and repeated it to her and asked her if that would do, and she said that was splendid—to send it that way. I doubled the message and waited and waited.”

After a while a trackman came by. He had been sent from East Conemaugh to flag a landslide at Buttermilk Falls, to the west of Pickerell’s tower. Pickerell gave him the folded message and sent him on his way back down the tracks. At Buttermilk Falls, the man, whose name was William Reichard, turned the message over to his boss, the foreman of the division, L. L. Rusher, who set out for East Conemaugh after telling Reichard to go on back up to Mineral Point, in case there should be any more messages.

As it turned out, Rusher had only to go as far as what was known as “AO” tower, which was about a mile and half from Mineral Point and better than a mile upriver from East Conemaugh. From “AO” tower west the lines were still clear. Rusher gave the message to operator R. W, Shade, who sent it on immediately. And it was his message which was received by J. C. Walkinshaw at East Conemaugh and by agent Deckert in Johnstown sometime between noon and one o’clock.

In Pittsburgh, operator Charles Culp, at the Union depot later said he was the one who had received the message there and that he took it right over “and laid it on Mr. Pitcairn’s table in front of him.” Within an hour Robert Pitcairn, who had a special interest in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad, was sitting in his private railroad car on his way to Johnstown.

But the telegram drafted by operator Pickerell and Emma Ehrenfeld was only the first of three warnings sent down the valley by way of the Pennsylvania’s telegraph system.

About twelve thirty, or sometime very shortly after John Parke reined up in front of Stineman’s store, another rider was sent from South Fork to check the condition of the dam. His name was Dan Siebert. He worked for J. P. Wilson, who was superintendent of the Argyle Coal Company in South Fork and an old friend of Robert Pitcairn’s. Wilson had been asked by Pitcairn some three years earlier to notify him at once if ever he saw any signs of danger at the dam.

Siebert borrowed Wilson’s horse and was up and back from the dam inside of twenty-five minutes. He had stayed only long enough to see that near the center of the dam a glassy sheet of water, fifty to sixty feet wide, had started over the top. But Siebert did not seem especially concerned over what he had seen. He was, in fact, according to one witness, “perfectly cool about it.”

Wilson, however, on hearing Siebert’s report, turned to C. P. Dougherty, the Pennsylvania’s ticket agent in South Fork, and asked him if he did not think that Mr. Pitcairn should be notified. When Dougherty hesitated, saying there was trouble with the wires downriver, Wilson took it to mean that Dougherty was reluctant to assume the responsibility of such a message and told him to sign his, Wilson’s, name.

Whereupon Dougherty went over to the tower, taking along another operator, Elmer Paul, who was more experienced than Miss Ehrenfeld and who Dougherty thought might have better luck getting a circuit. Paul tried the wire for a few minutes but without success.

So again a message was sent as far as Mineral Point, where it was received at 1:52 by operator Pickerell, who gave it to William Reichard, who walked it down the tracks to “AO” tower. From there it was put on the wire to East Conemaugh, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. The message read:

SOUTH FORK, MAY 31, 1889

R.P. O.D. VIA MP & AO

THE WATER IS RUNNING OVER THE BREAST OF LAKE DAM, IN CENTER AND WEST SIDE AND IS BECOMING DANGEROUS.

C. P. DOUGHERTY

It was no more than thirty minutes later that J. P. Wilson came up to the tower himself to have Emma Ehrenfeld send still another warning. The rain was beating down terribly hard by then, and outside they could see the water of the Little Conemaugh and South Fork Creek raging across the flats just below the station. Over near Lake Street, South Fork Creek had flooded the first floors of several houses and the aspens along the banks were whipping about wildly in the wind.

Wilson had just heard that a young South Fork boy named John Baker had ridden down from the lake and said that the water had now cut a notch in the center of the dam. Without taking time to write anything down, Wilson dictated a message to Pitcairn which Emma Ehrenfeld put right on the wire.

SOUTH FORK, MAY 31, 1889

R.P.
OD

THE DAM IS BECOMING DANGEROUS AND MAY POSSIBLY GO.

J. P. WILSON

Wilson waited in the tower long enough to be sure the message had gotten at least as far as Mineral Point; then he warned Miss Ehrenfeld to be on the lookout up South Fork Creek and went out the door

The time was 2:25. By 2:33 the message had reached East Conemaugh. For some unknown reason, Pickerell this time had been able to get a circuit. Apparently, a wire that had fallen into the river lifted out somehow, and as Pickerell said, “All at once the wire came all right.”

The message was through to East Conemaugh in a matter of minutes, and on to Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Agent Deckert in Johnstown would later state that he had received this particular message sometime near 2:45. He also concluded upon reading it that this time he had best telephone its contents across the way to Hettie Ogle, who ran the central telephone switchboard and Western Union office, just across the river at the corner of Washington and Walnut.

Mrs. Hettie Ogle was a Civil War widow who had been with Western Union for some twenty-eight years. At one o’clock the rising water had forced her to move, with her daughter, Minnie, to the second floor of the two-story frame building. Sometime near three she notified her Pittsburgh office of the condition of the dam as reported by Deckert and said that that would be her last message, meaning that the rising water was about to ground her wires. Then she put through a call to the Tribune, where editor Swank was still keeping up his running account of the day’s events.

“At three o’clock,” he wrote, “the town sat down with its hands in its pockets to make the best of a very dreary situation. All that had got out of reach of the flood that could, and there was nothing to do but wait; and what impatient waiting it was anyone who has ever been penned in by a flood and has watched the water rising, and night coming on, can imagine….”

He described how the Stony Creek carried a live cow down from some point above Moxham and how she struck against a pier of the dislodged Poplar Street Bridge, where she managed to get a foothold for a while but finally, making a misstep, fell into the current and was carried off.

“At 3:15 the Central Telephone office called the Tribune up to say it had been informed by Agent Deckert, of the Pennsylvania Railroad freight station, that the South Fork Reservoir was getting worse all the time and that the danger of its breaking was increasing momentarily. It is idle to speculate what would be the result if this tremendous body of water—three miles long, a mile wide in places, and sixty feet deep at the breast at its normal stage—should be thrown into the already submerged Valley of the Conemaugh.”

But by 3:15 Lake Conemaugh was already on its way to Johnstown.

–3–

When John Parke had arrived back at the dam from his dash to South Fork, he was confident that his warning had been sent on down the valley. Along the way from South Fork he had passed two men struggling through the mud with a sewing machine, and one of them shouted to him, “We got the sewing machine out, if nothing else,” which Parke took to be a very good sign. At the dam he found the water had already started sliding over the top, at the center, right above where the old culvert had been. It had taken no time for the water to wash across the little earth ridge that had been thrown up. Now, as he rode his horse out along the breast, the water crossing over the road there was a good six inches deep and getting stronger every minute. Within minutes the sheet of water was a hundred yards wide. But it was all concentrated at the center, clearly illustrating, Parke noted, that the dam dished a little.

It was now shortly after noon. At the western end the emergency spillway was running about twenty-five feet wide, but only slightly deeper than before. At the main spillway, where the water was roaring through six feet deep or more, the men had started to tear up the floor boards of the bridge and were attempting to remove a V-shaped floating drift made of logs with nails sticking out of them, which had been set out in the water twenty feet or so before the spillway to deter the fish even from venturing toward the screens.

The men were afraid to go out on the dam now, and so Parke rode across the breast alone, studying the effects of the overflowing water on the face of the dam. He saw that little gullies had already been cut between the riprap, but the damage was not as bad as he thought it would be.

For a brief moment he gave serious thought to the possibility of cutting another spillway through the dam proper, where there would be no problem digging deep and where the water would do quite a lot of the digging for them. It would have meant the end of the dam, of course; the water, he knew, would bore through any such cut, ripping the dam in two in no time. But by making such a cut near one of the ends, where the pressure was far less than at the center, the water, as fast as it might escape, would still go out a far sight slower than if the whole dam gave way all at once at the middle. It would have meant the certain destruction of the dam, but also far less damage below, he figured.

It would have been a terribly bold decision, and one which Parke alone would have been in no position to make. It would also be, he concluded, a foolhardy decision. Frightful damage would be caused for certain, and they would be responsible; furthermore, there would then be no way to prove that the dam had been about to break and that they had been left with no other choice. Indeed, Parke decided, there was no certainty at all that the dam was going to break. At which point he hurried to the clubhouse for his dinner.

When he returned to the dam, Parke found things had taken a decided turn for the worse.

Several big rocks on the outer face had washed away, and the water pouring across the top had cut a hole into the face about ten feet wide and four feet deep. As the water kept pounding down into this hole, he could see it slicing away at the face, a little more every minute, so that the hole began to take the form of a huge step.

There was absolutely nothing anyone could do now but watch and wait and hope. Parke, Unger, all of them, just stood there looking at the water and the valley stretching away below.

The rain-drenched crowd gathered on both hillsides had grown considerably since early morning. The news of trouble had spread fast and wide.

Some men had more or less smelled trouble hours before. George Gramling, who had a sawmill on Sandy Run, started off for the dam about eight in the morning, along with Jacob Baumgardner and Sam Helman. The Gramling mill was operated by a small dam which had broken about seven. If a small dam washed out that early, the men reasoned, what might a big dam do later on? But mostly people were just curious. The Reverend G. W. Brown, pastor of the South Fork United Brethren Church, for example, like nearly everyone else in the neighborhood, had heard rumors of trouble all day and decided finally to go up to see for himself. When he arrived at the dam it was about ten minutes to three. There was no one actually out on the dam then, just at the ends, and the water was pouring over the breast.

Minutes later he saw the first break. He said it was “about large enough to admit the passage of a train of cars.”

John Parke said that the break came after the huge “step” had been gouged back into the face so near to the water that the pressure caved in the wall.

Ed Schwartzentruver called the first break “a big notch.”

“It run over a short spell,” he said, “and then about half of the roadway just fell down over the dam.

“And then it just cut through like a knife.”

Colonel Unger said the water worked its way down “little by little, until it got a headway, and when it got cut through, it just went like a flash.”

Unger’s man Boyer said, “It run over the top until it cut a channel, and then it ran out as fast as it could get out. It went out very fast, but it didn’t burst out.”

John Parke said, “It is an erroneous opinion that the dam burst. It simply moved away.”

According to Ed Schwartzentruver, “The whole dam seemed to push out all at once. No, not a break, just one big push.”

The time was ten after three.

IV

Rush of the torrent

–1–

There were men on the hillsides near the dam who had seen what the force of water could accomplish in mining operations, how a narrow sluice could scour and dig with the strength of a hundred men. Actually anyone who had lived in the area long enough to have seen even the spindliest of the local creeks in April had a fair idea of hydraulics at work. But no one who was on hand that afternoon was prepared for what happened when Lake Conemaugh started for South Fork.

“Oh, it seemed to me as if all the destructive elements of the Creator had been turned loose at once in that awful current of water,” Colonel Unger said.

When the dam let go, the lake seemed to leap into the valley like a living thing, “roaring like a mighty battle,” one eyewitness would say. The water struck the valley treetop high and rushed out through the breach in the dam so fast that, as John Parke noted, “there was a depression of at least ten feet in the surface of the water flowing out, on a line with the inner face of the breast and sloping back to the level of the lake about 150 feet from the breast.”

Parke estimated that it took forty-five minutes for the entire lake to empty, but others said it took less, more in the neighborhood of thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes. In any case, later studies by civil engineers indicated that the water charged into the valley at a velocity and depth comparable to that of the Niagara River as it reaches Niagara Falls. Or to put it another way, the bursting of the South Fork dam was about like turning Niagara Falls into the valley for thirty-six minutes.

A short distance below the dam stood a farmhouse belonging to George Fisher. Fisher, who had been warned that the dam was about to go and had managed to escape from the house with his family only minutes before, saw everything he owned vanish in an instant.

Huge trees were snapped off or uprooted one after another and went plunging off in the torrent. When the flood had passed and the hollow was still again, the hill opposite the dam had been scraped bare for fifty feet up. Every bush, vine, every tree, every blade of grass, had been torn out. All that remained was bare rock and mud.

The water advanced like a tremendous wall. Giant chunks of the dam, fence posts, logs, boulders, whole trees, and the wreckage of the Fisher place were swept before it, driven along like an ugly grinder that kept building higher and higher.

At Lamb’s Bridge, the little bridge itself as well as George Lamb’s home were destroyed as swiftly as everything else. Lamb had been afraid of the dam but had not fled to higher ground until he heard the roar of the flood bearing down on him. He made a frantic effort to save two pigs but gave it up and got to the hillside with his family in time to see his house climb the face of the water, which, because of the narrowness of the valley at that point, was about sixty feet high. He watched the house roll and toss momentarily; then it was flung against the near hill and smashed to splinters.

From where they were the men at the dam could see all this happening as the water raged through the immense gash below them. But just beyond Lamb’s Bridge the valley turns sharply to the right and disappears. So now they could only stand there, the rain beating down, and imagine, as much as that was possible, the things taking place beyond that turn.

The road to South Fork had disappeared, and with most of the dam gone, there was no way back to the clubhouse except the long way, clear around the lake, through flooded woods and fields where the mud would be impossible. So they stayed on, watching the level of the lake sink rapidly down and down, until there was nothing to see but hundreds of acres of dark ooze cut through by a violent yellow stream.

Colonel Unger lasted only a short time after the dam failed. He collapsed and had to be carried to his house and put to bed. His work crew, which had been hanging back nearby, waiting for his next orders, then climbed down to where the lake had been and with blankets and baskets and cold bare hands began scooping up the fish that were flopping about in the muck.

–2–

Emma Ehrenfeld was sitting with her back to the window in the telegraph tower just down from the South Fork depot. She was talking to H. M. Bennett, engineer of the 1165 freight from Derry, and S. W. Keltz, the conductor. The men had left Derry, halfway to Pittsburgh on the main line, the evening before and had been up all night, delayed first at East Conemaugh until five that morning, then held at South Fork since eight.

Tired, cold, rain-soaked trainmen had been coming in and out of the tower most of the day, climbing the stairs to ask about news from up the line or just warming themselves by the coal stove on the first floor.

Miss Ehrenfeld had held the Chicago Limited west of the bridge, on the other side of the Little Conemaugh, according to the orders she had received that morning; but with all the talk going around about trouble at the dam, the engineer had grown uneasy about his train standing over there, right where the flood might come. There had been a number of opinions on what to do, and then, after noon, the engineer got up and said he was going to bring the Limited across, orders or no orders.

After that there had been more speculating about the bridge. The conductor on the Limited had noticed cracks in one of the piers. The division foreman had been sent for, and when he came down from his house up the tracks and said the piers had looked that way for some time, they cut the Limited’s helper loose and ran it across first, very slowly, just to be sure. The Limited followed after and pulled up past the tower and the depot, a half mile or so. By the time that was done with, it was shortly before three.

Very soon after, Emma Ehrenfeld went downstairs to see about the stove. The men had been firing it up so that her little room upstairs was growing uncomfortably warm. The Limited’s engineer had come in again and was sitting there having a smoke, trying to dry off some. She passed the time with him for a few minutes, banged shut the door, and went back up the stairs to her desk.

From where he was sitting beside her, H. M. Bennett could see the northeastern corner of town neatly framed by the rain-spattered window. In the immediate foreground were the Pennsylvania tracks; just beyond them was Railroad Street, with Stineman’s store to the left and the big Stineman house and Pringle’s drugstore on either side of it. To the right was the turn where Railroad became Lake Street and headed uptown and out of sight, toward the road to the dam. And way over to the right, on the other side of the coal tipple and the planing mill, he could see South Fork Creek, flooding across the lowlands, through the trees, and reaching among the houses nearest its banks.

Suddenly Bennett noticed distant figures racing toward the hill. He jumped up and rushed to the window.

“Look at the people running!” he said. “I wonder what’s wrong?”

The other two went immediately to the window and noticed that several people going by in the street below seemed to be shouting something.

As Miss Ehrenfeld later recalled, Bennett said something about the reservoir and that they ought to get out. Then they saw it coming, spread across the full width of the valley.

Situated as they were, only a few hundred feet from where the creek emptied into the Little Conemaugh, they were in about as good a place as any to see up the valley; but even so, they could not see very far because the abrupt hillside to which the town clung blocked off most of their view. When the water came into sight, it looked very close and enormous.

“It just seemed like a mountain coming,” Emma Ehrenfeld said.

Conductor Keltz described it as more like a large hill rolling over and over. He judged it was about a hundred feet high.

The two men turned and dashed down out of the tower. Miss Ehrenfeld was right behind them (“without waiting to get my hat or anything”). She raced down the tracks, crossed over to the stairs that led to the coal tipple, ran to the top, and from there followed the crowd running toward the back alleys that led to higher ground.

Bennett and Keltz had started for the hill with her, but remembering the fireman and brakeman, who were asleep in the engine of their train on a siding on the other side of the river, they turned and ran for the bridge.

They made it to the engine, cut it loose, and with the little steam they had, came rolling out of the siding and back across the bridge, heading directly toward the oncoming flood with what looked like no better than an even chance of making safe ground only a few hundred yards away where the tracks swung hard to the left past the station.

Contrary to Keltz’s estimate, the wall of water closing down on them was probably no more than forty feet high. It was moving straight for the bridge at a rate of perhaps ten to fifteen miles an hour and was driving before it a mass of debris that now included acres of trees, two or three small bridges, numerous mangled houses, dead animals, and rubbish beyond description.

About 200 yards from the bridge the water claimed its first human life. Michael Mann, an English coal miner and self-styled preacher who was known in South Fork as “The Reverend,” had ignored every warning to leave the shanty he lived in on the banks of South Fork Creek. His body was found a week later, a mile and a half downstream. It was half-buried in mud, stripped of all clothing, and so badly decomposed that it could not be moved. As a result the last remains of the man who would be remembered in the valley as “The First Victim” were put into a hole nearby, covered over, and left unmarked.

The flood crushed right through the planing mill, wrenched the bridge from its piers, bent it as though it had been built with an elbow in the center, and then plowed head on into the mountain on the north side of the Little Conemaugh.

Engineer Bennett’s locomotive meanwhile had escaped just about untouched. It had gotten almost to the station when another escaping freight pulled out of a coal siding and blocked the way. The next thing Bennett knew, a huge tree, evidently an advance fragment of the debris, smashed into his locomotive and pitched it halfway off the track. With the water almost on top of them, Bennett, Keltz, and the two others (they were both very much awake by now) jumped to the ground and scrambled onto the other train just as it started pulling away. Seconds later the full brunt of the flood roared past behind them.

But when it was all over remarkably little damage had been done in South Fork. Stacked on the hillside as it was, the town was almost entirely out of reach of the onslaught. Along with the bridge and the planing mill, some twenty other buildings and houses were destroyed. The bridge, which had been thirty-five feet above the normal water level, was dumped 200 yards up the Little Conemaugh, carried there by the violent backwash created when the water hit the mountainside. There were a few pieces of machinery to be found where the planing mill had been, but that was about all. There was a stone foundation marking where one store had been. A grocery and barbershop went sailing off. J. P. Wilson’s stable containing two mules, a horse, and a cow landed behind the depot with the animals unhurt.

Station agent Dougherty’s house was tossed into a gully, a total wreck. The depot itself had bobbed up several feet and swirled out over the tracks a ways. Then when the water rushed off downstream, it drifted back again and settled down almost precisely where it had been before, secured by a tangle of telegraph wires and only a little out of plumb.

The coal tipple was destroyed and so was the telegraph tower. And that was about the size of it, except that there had been three other deaths.

A young man named Howard Shafer had been helping clear the jam of rubbish that had collected under a small bridge on South Fork Creek. When the water came he was unable to climb the steep bank fast enough.

The other two lost were Thomas Kehoe and Thomas Henderson, another fireman and a brakeman on Bennett’s 1165 Derry freight. They had been asleep in the caboose when Bennett and Keltz had cut the engine loose to make their dash over the bridge. The caboose along with four other freight cars was carried away.

Past South Fork the water raged along the valley of the Little Conemaugh, between sharp, wooded bluffs that sent the riverbed swerving back and forth on its way west. A straight line from South Fork to Johnstown would be nine miles, but by the river route the distance was about four miles farther.

For the first mile or so beyond South Fork the valley runs on a comparatively even line and is nearly 1,000 feet deep. There were no houses, only the railroad, which skirted along the northern banks of the river about forty feet above the normal water level.

The flood ripped the railroad to shreds, tore out ties, twisted steel rails into incredible shapes, and swallowed up whatever equipment happened to be standing along the way.

A mile down from South Fork the valley narrows abruptly. There the rough hillsides squeezed the great mass of water so that its front wall grew to perhaps seventy to seventy-five feet high. Then, a half mile farther still, the river turns sharply south, traveling nearly two miles out of its way to form an oxbow which is only a matter of yards across. It was here, at the end of the oxbow, that the water smashed into its first major obstacle, a tremendous stone viaduct which had been built more than fifty years earlier to take the old Portage Railroad across the Little Conemaugh and which was still used for the main line of the Pennsylvania.

The viaduct was one of the landmarks of the country. It stood seventy-five feet high and bridged the river gap with one single eighty-foot arch. Even the biggest locomotives looked tiny by contrast as they chugged across it on their way up the mountain. Faced with a tawny-colored local sandstone, it was, as one engineer said, “a substantial and imposing piece of masonry,” which had been built by “an honest Scotch stonemason” named John Durno from a design worked out by the same Sylvester Welsh who had picked the site for the reservoir.

The bridge had been built to save running the railroad clear around the oxbow. A cut had been made across the oxbow, a distance of less than a hundred feet, and the tracks had been run through it to the bridge. At the eastern end of the cut, where the river bends off to the south, the tracks were about twenty feet above the normal water level. But at the western end, where the tracks started over the bridge, they were seventy feet above the river. Thus the river’s big two-mile loop to the south accomplished a drop of some fifty feet in elevation, which could have been achieved in less than a hundred feet, if the water were to take the path of the railroad cut.

When the flood hit this dividing point, part of the giant wave rushed through the cut at a depth of about twenty feet and plunged down over the top of the viaduct and into the deep river gully below, sweeping with it tons of debris which piled on top of the bridge or wedged between its huge arch.

Meanwhile, the rest of the water, and by far the greater proportion of it, crashed along the longer and more tortuous course of the river bed, heaped up to a height of perhaps seventy feet by the narrow channel and gathering before it the shredded refuse of two miles’ worth of heavy timber, rock, and mud. Perhaps six or seven minutes passed before it swung around the last big bend before the bridge. When it struck, it was almost as high as the bridge itself.

The bridge held momentarily. There was an awful booming crunch as debris piled against stone and virtually sealed off the already clogged arch, and the water surged back and forth, seething with yellow foam, mounting up and up until it was nearly eighty feet high. And then it started spurting over the top of the bridge, gushing between the boulders and mangled railroad cars, the broken planks, ties, and tree stumps that had been dumped there.

Now, for a brief instant (no one knows exactly how long it lasted), Lake Conemaugh formed again some five and a half miles downstream from its original resting place. It gathered itself together, held now by another dam, which however temporary was nonetheless as high as the first one; and when this second dam let go, it did so even more suddenly and with greater violence than the first one. The bridge collapsed all at once, and the water exploded into the valley with its maximum power now concentrated again by the momentary delay.

A mile or so beyond the bridge was the white frame village of Mineral Point, consisting of some thirty houses set in a row along a single street, Front Street, which ran parallel with the river on the north side of the river. It was a pretty little place, quiet, clean, tucked at the foot of the mountainside.

The river there was quite shallow and filled with rocks. The water was quick and bright, and its steady rushing among the rocks was the first sound people heard when they woke up in the morning and the last they heard as they dropped off to sleep at night. Except for the railroad, which ran along the opposite side of the river well above the roof line of the houses, Mineral Point looked as though it might have been a thousand miles from civilization. The air smelled of the river and of sweet, fresh-cut timber at the sawmill and furniture factory, the town’s sole supporting industry, which stood at the far end of Front Street.

The people who lived in Mineral Point had names like Reighard, Page, Sensebaugh, Gromley, Byers, and Burkhart, and there were perhaps 200 of them, if you counted some of the outlying families that picked up their mail there. The houses all faced the river and had deep lots, running back to where the woods started at the base of the hill. Fruit trees and truck gardens grew wonderfully in the moist soil put down by the river over long geologic ages.

Nothing much out of the ordinary had ever happened in Mineral Point. There had been a murder there once. A woman who was new to town and lived off to herself was killed by another stranger, a miner from over in the hard-coal country named Mickey Moore. The accepted story was that he was one of the Molly Maguires and that was the reason behind the killing. He had to carry out some dark oath. But that had been several years back. Mickey Moore had disappeared and life had gone on about as it always had, except that no child liked to stay out in the woods very long after dark. “Mickey Moore will get you,” they said to each other, “sure as anything.”

Beyond the last house, past the sawmill and around another bend or two in the river, and up on the opposite bank beside the railroad, was Mineral Point tower.

“I was sitting in the tower, and all at once, I heard a roar,” W. H. Pickerell testified later. “I looked up the track, and I seen the trees and water coming. I jumped up and throwed the window up, and climbed out on a tin roof around our office and walked around on it, and I saw the driftwood coming around the curve, and the channel filling up and running over the bank, and I heard voices; I could hear somebody hollowing, but I couldn’t see them, and I walked around until the drift came down, and looked out, and perhaps one third of the distance in the river, I saw a man standing on a house roof. He looked over and seen me and recognized me.

“He says, ‘Mineral Point is all swept away, and the people swept away, and my whole family is gone.’ I says, ‘Is that so?’ and I says, ‘Do you know anything of my family?’, and he says, ‘No, I don’t; I think they were all drowned.’

“Christ Montgomery was his name, and I says, ‘Cheer up, Christ, don’t give up; as long as you’re on top, there’s hope!’

“I didn’t more than have the words out of my mouth until the drift he was riding made a straight shoot for the shore, and struck one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards west of my office where the river made a short turn, and went all to pieces; shingles flew right up in the air.

“He got out all right. He grabbed into the bushes just about the time it struck and I didn’t see anything of him for a breath, and then he crawled up out of the bushes. After I cheered him up, and told him not to give up, that there was hope for him as long as he was on top; I turned around to walk into my office on this tin roof. I didn’t have more than fifteen feet to walk, but I almost fainted when he told me my whole family was drowned. I turned right around to come in the office, and as I climbed toward the window, I looked and saw the house roof striking shore and seen him light, and saw him crawl up on his hands and knees, and saw he was saved, and when I looked above, there was a regular mountain of water coming. He was probably ahead of the main body of water a little.

“I started without coat or hat, and as it was pouring down raining at the time, I turned around to get my coat and hat, and ran with them in my hand onto the opposite side of the track onto a high bank, and when I looked up the track, the wave wasn’t more than a hundred yards off, and I beckoned for this man to get off the track. He wasn’t looking for it to come down the track, and he got out on the track ahead of it, and came pretty near getting caught the second time.”

Pickerell did not get caught at all nor, as things turned out, did any of his family, which was true of almost everyone else in Mineral Point.

The water had been coming up so fast that morning and during the early afternoon that most families had long since pulled out to higher ground by the time the flood fell on Front Street. First floors had been part way under water from about noon on, and there was no seeing the street or the riverbank. Picket fences, chicken coops, and backhouses had been drowned or had floated away as early as dinnertime.

But when the flood came, the wall of water swept through in such a way that it left almost nothing to suggest that there had ever been such a place as Mineral Point. The town was simply shaved off, right down to the bare rock.

The number of deaths came to sixteen, and quite a few people, like Christ Montgomery, went racing off on wild downstream rides astride their own rooftops. Christopher Gromley and his son traveled four miles before they were able to leap safely to shore; and three hours later, when they finally made it back to where Mineral Point had been, they found that all the other members of their family, Mrs. Gromley and six more children, were dead.

The water moved straight on down the valley, picking up a little speed wherever there were fewer turns to eat up its momentum and slowing down wherever the course began twisting again.

Estimates are that, in some places, it may have been moving as much as forty miles an hour. Theoretically, if its weight and the average decline in elevation (thirty-three feet per mile) are taken into account, it had a speed of nearly ninety miles per hour. But the friction created by the rough terrain and the rubbish it pushed before it cut that speed drastically. What is more, its over-all rate of advance was extremely fitful. The wall of debris and water came on not steadily but in an irregular series of thunderous cheks and rushes.

At times, eyewitnesses said later, the debris would even clog the path enough to bring the whole thing to a mementary standstill. All the crushed and tangled sweepings from the dam down would lock clear across the valley, seeming almost more than the millions of tons of pressure from behind could budge.

But then the whole seething mass would burst apart, with trees and telegraph poles flying into the air, as though blasted by dynamite, and the water would rush forward again, even faster. And as it moved on, the water kept on tossing logs and roots above its surface, as though the whole mass were full of life.

The friction set up by the terrain and the debris also caused the bottom of the mass of water to move much slower than the top. As a result the top was continually sliding over the bottom and down the front of the advancing wall, like a cake of ice across a slick board. The water, in other words, was rolling over itself all the time it was passing forward, and this caused a violent downward smashing, like a monstrous surf falling on a beach, that could crush almost anything in its path. A man caught under it had no chance at all. In fact, one of the major problems later on would be finding the bodies that had been pounded deep down into the mud.

Work train Number Two out of East Conemaugh was standing on the track nearest the hillside about a half mile upstream from the Conemaugh yards, at a place called Buttermilk Falls. The engineer sitting inside the rain-soaked cab was a friendly looking man with a round face and a dashing set of muttonchop whiskers. His name was John Hess.

Normally he never worked east of the yards. His division ran west from Conemaugh, as far as Sang Hollow, which was three miles below Johnstown. But today, with trouble almost everywhere along the line, help was being sent wherever it was needed.

Hess had gone to his regular engine as usual that morning and had been told to take a work crew down to Cambria City to clear a slide. His conductor was R. C. Liggett, his fireman, J. B. Plummer.

They had gotten through to Cambria City without any problems and worked there until nearly eleven, when an order came through to go clear up the valley to a landslide at Wilmore, on the far side of south Fork. At Johnstown and East Conemaugh there had been delays of twenty minutes and more, but sometime between noon and one they had started out of the yards, running east along the Little Conemaugh on the track farthest back from the water against the hillside. Less than a mile out they passed a place where a good hundred feet of track on the right had fallen off into the river. Beyond “AO” tower they came up on a flagman.

“I stopped to let him on,” Hess recalled later, “and he says, ‘You can’t go any further.’ And I asked him why, and he says, ‘The north track is in the river and I don’t believe the one you’re on is safe,’ and I says, ‘Whereabouts? and he says, ‘Right through the big cut.’ We went through the big cut to where the washout was, and seen it was badly washed, and I says to the conductor, ‘I guess we’ll have to take it afoot from here, and see where it is safe.’ The conductor is an old experienced man, and he looked at the track we were on, and he says, ‘It isn’t safe, I won’t run over that.’ It was washed up to the ends of the ties and underneath the track, and undermined it; the ballast was still sticking to the ties; the ties seemed to be holding it up. He says, ‘That isn’t safe at all,’ and we walked on up to Mineral Point, the next tower, and were going to report there but the operator told us he had no communication except with South Fork.”

The operator, W. H. Pickerell, also told them about the messages which had been coming through from South Fork concerning the dam.

The men tramped back down the tracks to “AO” tower, where they took time out to eat. When the finished, it was about two o’clock and there was another message from East Conemaugh about a slide at Buttermilk Falls.

“We came down there,” Hess said, “and found the track that we had went up on. The conductor thought at first it was unsafe, and we walked down over it and left the engine above it, and he suggested to cut couple cars off—we had seven empty flats and the cabin ahead of our engine, and he suggested to cut off a couple cars and run them over to see whether it was safe, and probably we could bring the rest over. So we sent a man with two cars down over this dangerous place, and the bank didn’t appear to slip much, and I brought the engine and rest of the train over. That left us on the Conemaugh side of this washout. I went down and the brakeman coupled up those cars that they had sent down ahead, and the conductor took the men with their shovels and went back to the slide about one hundred yards back of where we were laying.

“I don’t suppose we had laid there more than twenty minutes until we heard the flood coming. We didn’t see it but we heard the noise of it coming. It was like a hurricane through wooded country.”

Conductor Liggett heard the sound and thought he saw the tops of the trees bend on the flat upstream between the railroad and the river.

“And I says to the men, ‘We’ll get away from here,’ and I still looked, and then I was satisfied there was something coming. I couldn’t see any rubbish or drift, but I saw there was a commotion among the green timber.”

He shouted at the men to run. They dropped their tools and started down the tracks looking for a place where they could climb out of the way. But the rocks were too steep. They had to keep running, 200, 300, nearly 400 yards before they found a path.

Hess and Plummer still could see nothing, but according to Plummer, Hess said, “The lake’s broke,” and with that he put on steam, tied down the whistle, and with their gravel cars clattering along in front, they went shrieking toward East Conemaugh and the railroad yards where the two sections of the Day Express stood waiting.

The Hess ride into Conemaugh would be talked about and described in books and magazine articles for years to come, with Hess in his engine (Number 1124), blazing down the valley, the water practically on top of him, in an incredibly heroic dash to sound the alarm.

Hess himself said afterward, “I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t see what else I could do.”

He also said that he never did see any water, never waited around that long. Moreover, Plummer estimated that their top speed as they rounded the bend into the yards was no more than twelve miles an hour, which, he said, was the best they could do considering the load they were pushing, the condition of the tracks, and the fact that they had no idea which way the waiting trains on the other side of the blind turn might have been rearranged in their absence.

It was Hess’s intention to keep right on going through the yards, clear to Johnstown, if the track was clear. But it was not. Plummer’s guess was that no more than two minutes passed after they had pulled to a stop until the flood came.

“My brother was up on the bank and saw it coming,” Plummer said. “I didn’t see it coming at all; he saw it coming though and saw where it was, and he ran down and grabbed hold of me and gouged Hess with his umbrella, and told us to run.”

With their whistle still screaming the two men jumped from the cab and started for the hillside.

A locomotive whistle was a matter of some personal importance to a railroad engineer. It was tuned and worked (even “played”) according to his own particular choosing. The whistle was part of the make-up of the man; he was known for it as much as he was known for the engine he drove. And aside from its utilitarian functions, it could also be an instrument of no little amusement. Many an engineer could get a simple tune out of his whistle, and for those less musical it could be used to aggravate a cranky preacher in the middle of his Sunday sermon or to signal hello through the night to a wife or lady friend. But there was no horseplay about tying down the cord. A locomotive whistle going without letup meant one thing on the railroad, and to everyone who lived near the railroad. It meant there was something very wrong.

The whistle of John Hess’s engine had been going now for maybe five minutes at most. It was not on long, but it was the only warning anyone was to hear, and nearly everyone in East Conemaugh heard it and understood almost instantly what it meant.

–3–

For the passengers on board the eastbound sections of the Day Express, the delay in East Conemaugh had been a dreary, monotonous affair. It was going on five hours now since the two trains had pulled to a stop between the river and the little town.

The first few hours had not been entirely uninteresting. A number of passengers had gone out to look things over. They went walking about in the rain, up and down the tracks, over to the depot or the telegraph tower to see if there was any word on how long they would be held there. Or they picked their way across the tracks to the riverbank where the crowds were gathered and several local men were making great sport of spearing things of interest out of the racing current. And on the other side of the tower, the township bridge looked as though it would go almost any time.

But when dinnertime had passed and there still seemed no end to the rain and any chance of moving on seemed even less likely, whatever spirit of adventure there had been faded rapidly. The passengers had nearly all returned to the trains. They passed the time as best they could in the dim afternoon light, with the sound of the pelting rain all around them.

Elizabeth Bryan of Philadelphia sat looking out the window, while beside her, her friend Jennie Paulson of Pittsburgh read a novel titled Miss Lou. The girls had been to a wedding in Pittsburgh the day before and were on their way to New York, each wearing a small corsage of roses. Another passenger, the Reverend T. H. Robinson, a professor at the Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, was busy writing a diary of the day’s events for his wife.

Others were doing what they could to amuse their children. Some slept. One elderly gentleman, feeling slightly ill, had had his berth made up and retired for the day. Still others gathered in small clusters along the aisles to talk about the storm and the rising river, service on the Pennsylvania, the dismal prospect of the night ahead, or the possibility of getting a decent meal somewhere.

There was talk too about the dam farther up the mountain that everyone had been hearing about. But there was not much concern about it.

“The possibility of the dam giving way had been often discussed by passengers in my presence,” one man, a bank teller from New Jersey, was later quoted, “and everybody supposed that the utmost danger it would do when it broke, as everybody believed it sometime would, would be to swell a little higher the current that tore down through Conemaugh Valley. Such a possibility as the carrying away of a train of cars on the great Pennsylvania Railroad was never seriously entertained by anybody.”

Another passenger said that though many people may have been uneasy and were keeping “a pretty good lookout for information,” the porters comforted them “with the assurance that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company always took care of its patrons.”

So far whoever was directing things in the yard had chosen to move them twice. Twice they had watched the river working in on the tracks where the two trains stood, twice they had been moved forward and toward the hill, to be farther away from the river, and both times they had seen the tracks fall off into the water very soon after.

Now they were on the last sidings next to town, as far from the river as it was possible to be. The second section was on the track beside the depot and closest to town. Then came the first section, on the next track toward the river; and on the other side of it, four tracks over, was the local mail train. The Day Express engines were standing about even with the depot, with Section Two a few cars farther forward. The last cars were nearly on line with the telegraph tower, which stood on the river side of the tracks.

In the caboose of the mail train, which was nearest of the three to the tower, a fire was going in the stove and the conductors and others of the train crews were sitting about keeping warm between turns at checking in at the tower.

Messages had been coming in and going out of the tower steadily since early morning, and included those from South Fork. One operator, D. M. Montgomery, was later quoted as saying that the South Fork warning was generally well known. “But of course,” he added, “nobody paid any more attention to it than if there hadn’t been one at all. I know I didn’t for one. It seemed like a rumor and they didn’t take any belief in it.”

Charles Haak, another operator in the tower, and the one who had passed along the first message from South Fork to the yardmaster’s office downstairs, said he did not pay much attention to the warnings either.

“I was a stranger there,” Haak said. “I had only been there but eight months, and of course, I listened to other people around there, residents there, and there was talk about the dam breaking, and they said there had been rumors but it never came, and so I thought that was how it would be this time.”

As for the decisions on which trains to put where, they were being made by J. C. Walkinshaw, the yardmaster, who had been on duty since six that morning.

Walkinshaw was forty-nine years old, a widower with five children. He had worked for the Pennsylvania since he was seventeen and had been in charge of the East Conemaugh yards for twenty-three years. In a book of short biographical sketches of long-time company employees published later by the railroad, Walkinshaw peers out of a small photograph with wide eyes framed by white hair and whiskers, looking rather astonished and not especially bright. Robert Pitcairn later said that though Walkinshaw suffered from consumption, and so was “not very efficient” as yardmaster and “not very able to stand the physical strain,” he, Pitcairn, nonetheless considered him amply qualified to look after the company’s interest.

With circumstances as they were, Walkinshaw was left with little choice on what to do with the trains. He could not send them to the east, up the valley, because of the washouts at Buttermilk Falls and farther on. Nor could he send them back down the line toward Johnstown, as there were now reports of washouts in that direction as well.

About all he could do was to keep moving them back from the river, which is what he did. But once he had them on the northernmost siding, he concluded that he had taken “every reasonable precaution” under the circumstances.

One other very possible choice, of course, was to move the passengers out of the trains to higher ground. But to ask that many people to go out into the cold wind and rain, into the muddy little town where there might well be problems finding enough shelter for everyone, seemed more than Walkinshaw was willing to do, even though he had full knowledge of the trouble at Lake Conemaugh and was heard by at least one witness to say that if the dam ever broke it would “sweep the valley.”

Walkinshaw had been out several times, checking equipment, giving orders, looking at the river. From two o’clock to three there seemed to be no change in the water level. Apparently the worst was over. But then about 3:15 the bridge below the telegraph tower went, causing a great stir among the crowd. Hour by hour the current had eaten away at its foundations, until they let go and the whole thing just dropped down into the water. Sometime shortly after, Walkinshaw went into his office where his son handed him another message about the dam. Then, about a quarter to four, Walkinshaw decided to take a brief rest.

“I sat down and wasn’t in the chair more than a minute until I heard a whistle blow,” he recalled later.

“I jumped off my chair, and ran out and hollowed for every person to go away off the road and get on high ground, and I started up the track.

“Just as I left the office, I saw the rear end of this work train backing around the curve. I started up toward the train, and the minute I saw the train stop, I saw the engineer jump off and run for the hill. Just that minute, I saw a large wave come around the hill.”

Inside the trains there was considerable commotion when the whistle started blasting. People stood up and began asking what the trouble was. Two Negro porters came through, both looking very excited and when asked if this meant that the dam had broken, the first one said he did not know, and the second said he thought it had. Outside, a conductor ran along between the trains shouting, “Get to the hill! Get to the hill!”

The Reverend Robinson said that no one knew what was going on, but that he remembered telling a woman next to him that he thought there was no danger. Then he looked out of the window and saw the wave coming. It appeared to be about 300 yards away, but there was no water to be seen. As one man said, it looked more like a hill of rubbish than anything else. Some people said it looked to be fifty feet high and it was taking everything in front of it. Everyone started for the door.

On Section One, the train standing between the mail train and Section Two, nearly every passenger got through the doors as fast as possible, but several of them, seeing the mud and rain, turned back. Jennie Paulson and her friend Elizabeth Bryan decided to go back for their overshoes. An old minister from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and his wife saw the flood bearing down and returned to their seats inside. But most people jumped and ran.

“It was every man for himself and God for us all,” a New Haven, Connecticut, man named Wilmot said later.

Once they had clambered out into the rain, the passengers from Section One were faced with an immediate problem. On the next track, directly between them and high ground, stood Section Two.

“I saw three ways before me,” the Reverend Robinson wrote afterward, “climb over section No. 2 or crawl under it, or run down the track with the flood four car lengths and around the train. I instantly chose the latter. No one else followed me so far as I saw, but all attempted the other courses.”

Robinson made it safely around the train, but between him and the town and the streets which climbed to high ground was a ditch running parallel with the last track. It was about ten feet wide and perhaps five feet deep and rushing with water the color of heavily creamed coffee. Fortunately for him, Robinson arrived at the ditch at a place where a big plank had been laid across it. He was over in seconds and on his way up a steep, mud-slick embankment toward the town.

But others hesitated at the ditch, or leaped, or fell in and floundered about desperately, panicked. A number of men stopped, then moved back several steps, got a start, and jumped across. George Graham, a doctor from Port Royal, Pennsylvania, made it over this way; then, feeling that he still had time to spare, turned back to see if he could help some of the others.

“Just to my left, into the ditch, armpit deep, I saw nine women and girls tumble. I instantly grabbed the hand of the first and quickly pulled her out; the meanwhile all the others reached for me at once. I succeeded in saving them all except one old lady.” Wilmot, the New Haven man, also cleared the ditch, carrying his child in his arms. When he looked back to find out what had become of his wife, he saw her hesitating on the other side, while a man beside her shouted, “Jump, jump!” She jumped and made it, and they ran on.

Cyrus Schick, a prominent Reading businessman who, with his wife and her sister, had been on his way home from a long health tour in the west, fell headlong into the ditch, as did his sister-in-law, Eliza Stinson. Schick’s wife saw him bob up out of the water but then lost sight of him in all the confusion. His body and that of Miss Stinson were not found for ten days.

On the other side of the ditch the streets were full of running, shouting people. One local girl, a pretty young schoolteacher named Kate Giffen, who lived with her family on Front Street, would later describe racing to her house to pick up a child and seeing the woman who lived next door standing out on her porch screaming. She was the wife of John Hess, and she was screaming that the locomotive whistle still blasting away in the yards below was her husband’s.

The Reverend Robinson found himself all alone, pressing up a back alley.

“I ran to the second street, and, hoping I might be safe, I turned and looked. The houses were floating away behind me, and the flood was getting round above me. I ran on to the third street and turned again; the water was close behind me, houses were toppling over, and the torrent again pushing round as if to head me off.”

He kept on running, and when he turned again, he was high enough to see most of the town and the river valley. He watched a railroad car break loose and bound off in the plunging water, with two men on top trying desperately to keep their balance, moving first to one side then to another, as they headed toward Johnstown. How many passengers there might have been inside he could not tell. Everywhere people were rushing this way and that, some ducking inside doorways, some going for higher ground, stumbling and falling in the muddy streets. As the wave hit Front Street, buildings began falling, one on top of another; some seemed to bounce and roll before they were swept downstream. Locomotives from the roundhouse went swirling about like logs in a millrace.

The big, brick roundhouse had some nine engines in it when the flood struck. There were also another nineteen or twenty engines elsewhere in the yards, machine shops, a lot of rolling stock, a coal shed, and the three passenger trains. When the wave struck, it was probably about twenty-eight to thirty feet high, though, understandably, it looked a great deal higher to anyone caught in its path. The roundhouse was crushed, as one onlooker said, “like a toy in the hands of a giant.” The passenger trains were swamped in an instant. Section One was ripped apart and the baggage car and one coach were flung downstream and its Pullman coach caught fire. Yard engines went spinning off, one after another.

Section Two and the mail train both miraculously survived. Section Two had been standing on an embankment five to six feet high, which certainly had something to do with its good fortune. There were also some freight cars in front of it and a coal shed that toppled across the tracks and helped deflect some of the onrush. But it was the roundhouse which almost certainly did most of the deflecting, and the fact that the valley both curves sharply and broadens out at that particular point along the river undoubtedly contributed to the inconsistent behavior of the oncoming wave.

The destruction all around the trains was fearful. Forty houses along Front Street were taken away. The Eagle Hotel, the Central Hotel, the post office, the railroad station, several stores, at least half the town was destroyed. The only railroad track left was that under Section Two, the mail train, and a few other pieces of equipment that, for one quirk of fate or another, happened to survive.

Thirty locomotives, some weighing as much as eighty tons, were scattered anywhere from a hundred yards to a mile from where they had been standing. One locomotive boiler would be carried all the way to Johnstown. How many lives were lost was never determined exactly. But at least twenty-two passengers from the Day Express sections were killed, including Cyrus Shick and his sister-in-law, Jennie Paulson and Elizabeth Bryan, the minister’s wife from Kalamazoo, and F. Phillips, one of the Negro porters.

In East Conemaugh and Franklin, which was the name of the cluster of houses across the river from the yards, the known death toll came to twenty-eight.

But when the flood had passed, the engine and tender and six cars of the second section were almost at the exact same place they had been since before noon. They had been shoved along the track some, maybe twenty yards downstream. There was debris jammed in around them; but the sixteen people inside, who out of fear or indecision or dumb luck had stayed on board, were as safe and sound as though virtually nothing had happened. The water had come up over the seats in several cars and the passengers were soaked to the skin and badly shaken by the experience, but the only fatalities from their cars were among those who had tried to make a run for it.

One such passenger was John Ross of New Jersey, who, it was said later, was about thirty-three years old and a cripple. He had been traveling in one of the sleepers of Section Two, a car in which no one had chosen to hang back. Ross struggled out with the rest and was having a terribly difficult time until one of the train crew, a brakeman named J. G. Miller, came running along, picked him up, and managed to carry Ross some fifty yards or more before he dropped him.

“I had to drop him,” Miller said later, “to save myself. I saw it was either life or death with me, and I dropped him, and went for the hill.”

The mail train, which had been standing on an even lower track and within no more than a hundred yards from the river, was also still intact, though it too had been shoved downstream quite a way. Like Section Two, the mail train had been partly sheltered by the roundhouse, but what seems to have saved it was the telegraph tower which fell right onto the engine just as it was being pushed past underneath, and pinned it down there until the water had passed. But unlike any of the other trains, there were no fatalities among its passengers. Everyone got off and onto the hill in time, thanks to the good sense of the crew and, perhaps in part, to the particular nature of the passengers themselves.

Like all the others milling about the yards that morning, the eighteen or so passengers on board the mail train had heard mixed reports about the dam. They were told that if it ever broke it would drown the valley, and they were told that it would raise the level of the river maybe a foot or two. They were told it would take the water one hour to get from the lake to East Conemaugh, and they were told that it would take three hours. But mostly they were told that the dam was an old chestnut and not to think any more of it.

But their conductor, Charles Warthen, decided to tell them everything he knew, which was not a whole lot more, but he at least made it sound serious. He also told them to get ready to move out at the slightest notice, which was something neither of the conductors of the other trains had chosen to do.

The trainmen had been sitting in the last car of the mail train, talking about the situation, but for some reason or other, S. E. Bell, who was conductor on Section One, and Levi Easton, conductor on Section Two, made no effort to warn their passengers. The likeliest explanation seems to be that they, like so many others, had no real fear of anything happening.

All but one or two of Warthen’s passengers were from the Night Off company. When they were told what might be expected of them, they quietly went to work rounding up their belongings, and the women began pinning up their skirts.

About two o’clock C. J. McGuigan, brakeman on the mail train, had gone to the tower to ask if there was any further news, and the operator (which one it was he did not recall) said, “Nothing, only another message that the dam is in a very dangerous condition.” Not knowing anything about the dam, McGuigan asked him what the consequences might be if the dam broke.

“He kind of smiled,” McGuigan told the story later, “and said, ‘It would cover this whole valley from hill to hill with water.’ I got kind of frightened myself then, and I came right down, and told the passengers the second time to be on the lookout…. The ladies got frightened, and one of them wanted to know if they should not better go to the hills now, but the manager of the troupe said ‘No, there is no danger yet’…seemed to be ready for it…I think they were very sensible people.”

McGuigan then went back to the last car to the other crewmen. When the whistle began blowing, he ran to the passenger coach, shouting that the flood was coming, while conductors Bell and Easton took off for their trains, shouting the same thing.

“The women were sitting down, and the men were standing up, and they all had their grips and valises in their hands, and the men ran to the upper end of the car, and the ladies to the west end where I was.

“I assisted them out, and got up and looked through the train, and I couldn’t see anybody on the train, and then I ran with two of the ladies, caught hold of their hands, and ran until we came to the ditch…and Miss Eberly, she refused to go into the ditch, and I threw her into it, and jumped down and assisted her up on the other side, and ran up the hill.”

No one was lost, not even the baggagemaster, J. W. Grove, who decided to jump onto one of the yard engines standing about instead of trying for the hill. Every other loose engine in East Conemaugh was dumped over, driven into the hillside, or swept off with the flood, except the one he picked.

Brakeman McGuigan went about for some time after carrying a picture of Miss Eberly, who was the pretty, young star of the company and actually Mrs. Eberly. She in turn was quoted widely when she returned to New York and described the bravery of the trainmen.

Later the Pennsylvania Railroad, in an effort to establish exactly what had happened at East Conemaugh, conducted its own investigation, which would provide the one full account of the whereabouts of several dozen employees, the official decisions made before the water struck, and the personal decisions made when it was seen rounding the bend behind the Hess train. The study revealed several cases such as that of brakeman McGuigan, but it included many more where the reaction had been a good deal less coolheaded and quite a lot more human.

Samuel S. Miller, for example, was also a brakeman, on the first section of the Day Express, the one on which most of the fatalities occurred. Part of his testimony went as follows:

Q. Where were you when the big wave came?

A. I was partly up on the hill.

Q. What were you doing up there?

A. Well, I was told that it was coming, and I got up on the hill for my own safety. I had gone to the Agent at Conemaugh, he was in the office at Conemaugh station—

Q. Who is he?

A. E. R. Stewart—and I borrowed the key from him for the water closet at the station, and I went in the water closet, and I think I was reading a Commercial-Gazette at the time when I heard the big whistle, and not knowing of any freight moving, I first thought probably it might be a freight engine that was to assist first Day Express up the mountain; I thought maybe they were alarming the passengers to get on the train and wondered why it wasn’t a passenger engine whistle. The next thought that came to me was that South Fork dam had broken. I made a hasty exit, and when I got outside, a young fellow came along and said that was what was wrong. He seemed to be in a great hurry, and I asked him if South Fork dam had broken, and he replied, “Yes, so people say,” and it seems to me, I told him to run, and I ran too.

Q. You broke for the hill?

A. Yes, sir, I broke for the hill.

Q. You didn’t go to your train?

A. No, sir; I got up on the hill probably 110 yards from the station, and looked back, and could see that the water had come. I could see that the water was between the houses at that time. I concluded I wasn’t high enough, and I went up onto still higher ground.

Q. You didn’t climb a tree?

A. No, sir.

Q. Why didn’t you go to your train and help get your passengers out?

A. Well, for my own safety. From the descriptions I had heard, I concluded I had better be on the hill.

Q. You might have gone to your train if you had tried?

A. I could have, but the question was whether I could then have gone to the hill or not.

Q. You believed your life was in danger, did you?

A. Yes, sir.

Now several hundred freight cars, a dozen or more locomotives, passenger cars, nearly a hundred more houses, and quite a few human corpses were part of the tidal wave that surged on down the valley.

Before it had plowed through East Conemaugh, the water had cut along the valley below Mineral Point, crashing back and forth against the mountainsides as the river channel swung this way and that. A mile or so above East Conemaugh, at the place the railroad men called “the big cut,” the Pennsylvania tracks again left the riverbank to take a short cut across another oxbow. Here again the flood had divided briefly, with part of it rushing headlong through the cut, while the rest went with the river on its two-mile loop off to the north. It was a course which sapped much of the wave’s potential speed and energy. But from East Conemaugh on to Johnstown the valley opened up considerably and the river headed directly for its meeting with the Stony Creek. Past East Conemaugh the flood was on a straightaway, and there it began to gather speed.

Woodvale got it next. Woodvale was somewhat bigger than East Conemaugh, prosperous, new, and the pride of the Cambria Iron Company. It was a sort of model town, built by the company, and with its clean white houses it looked, as one man said, more like a New England town. It was connected to Johnstown by a streetcar line that ran along its main thoroughfare, Maple Avenue, which was far and away the prettiest street in the valley. Maple Avenue was nearly a mile long and looked like a green tunnel that May. The trees reached over the tracks where the little yellow streetcars rattled by, their horses heading for the stable. When the flood had passed, there would be no trace of Maple Avenue.

About 1,000 people lived in Woodvale. There was a woolen mill, built by Cambria Iron, which employed several hundred women. There was the Rosensteel tannery, two schoolhouses, some churches, and no saloons (they evidently were contrary to the Iron Company’s idea of a model town).

Unlike East Conemaugh, Woodvale got no warning. It was all over in about five minutes. The only building left standing was the woolen mill, and there was only part of that. At the western end of the town, the end almost touching Johnstown, stood the Gautier works, part of it in Woodvale, part in Conemaugh borough. The huge works sent up a terrific geyser of steam when the water hit its boilers, and then the whole of it seemed simply to lift up and slide off with the water. The tannery went and so did the streetcar shed, along with eighty-nine horses and about thirty tons of hay. When the water had passed, the town was nothing but a mud flat strewn with bits of wreckage. There was only a tiny fringe of houses left along the edges, on the foothills. There was not a tree, not a telegraph pole, not a sign of where the railroad had been. Two hundred and fifty-five houses had been taken off, and there was no way of telling where they had been.

The official figure for Woodvale’s dead would later be set at 314, which means that about one out of every three people in town had been killed.

A number of people had tried to crawl under a freight train that was blocking their way to the hill and had been crushed when the water hit the train and it started moving. Dozens of others had never made it out of their houses. At the woolen mill three men had kept retreating to different rooms and higher floors as the big brick building caved in piece by piece, all around them, until there was only that small part which miraculously withstood everything that was thrown against it.

When the wireworks broke up it contributed miles and miles of barbed wire to the mountain of wreckage and water that, once past the wireworks, had only a few hundred yards to go until it struck Johnstown.

It was now not quite an hour since the dam had given way. The rain was still coming down, but not so hard as before, and the sky overhead was noticeably brighter.

In Johnstown the water in the streets seemed actually to be going down some. It had been a long, tiresome day in Johnstown, and the prospects for a night without gas or electricity were not especially cheerful, but by the looks of the water and the sky, the worst of it had passed.

Johnstown was still sparsely settled when this map made about the time of the Civil War. Woodvale (top) and Kernville (lower right) were mostly vacant lots. By 1889 population in the area had tripled.

One of the few surviving photographs of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club shows two lake-side boathouses, boardwalks, a rowboat planted with flowers (at lower left) and several cottage fronts.

The Moorhead house, once among the finest “cottages” on Lake Conemaugh, stands today at the edge of St. Michael, a coal town that, years after the flood, grew up around the abandoned summer colony.

The heroic “resident engineer” at the club, John G . Parke, Jr.

At left below, a small railing marks the crest of South Fork dam, the immense ends of which still stand above South Fork Creek. From railing to distant rooftops (the town of St. Michael) was once the northern end of Lake Conemaugh. Large roof is the old clubhouse, only half of which still stands. It is now a miners’ bar and hotel.

FOUR MEMBERS OF THE SOUTH FORK FISHING AND HUNTING CLUB
(Clockwise from top left) Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Robert Pitcairn, Philander C. Knox

FOUR OF JOHNSTOWN’S LEADING CITIZENS
(Clockwise from top left) Daniel J . Morrell, John Fulton, Captain Bill Jones, Tom L . Johnson

A wide-angle view of Johnstown taken on the day before the flood gives the valley a broader look than it actually has, makes the hills appear too low-lying, but shows such principal features as the Stony Creek (foreground), the Cambria works (where the smoke rises at far left), Prospect Hill (the rows of white houses to the right of the mills), and the gap (center) through which the wall of water rushed. Kernville is at right. Johnstown proper lies between the gap and the church steeples, and to the left of the river.

This view was taken from the same point several months after the flood and shows the extent of damage to the lower part of Johnstown (at left) and Kernville. Not shown are Woodvale (which sits in the middle of the gap), where the whole town was wiped out, or Cambria City. Also, though there are still hundreds of houses to be seen in the main part of town, only a relative few were still in one piece, or standing where they belonged. Green Hill , a refuge for thousands of flood survivors, rises on the right of the gap.

With dozens of displaced buildings and tons of debris piled up behind it, the big stone Methodist church (at upper left in the view above) stands unmoved, looking over the desolation of lower Johnstown (in the far distance) and the dim side of Prospect Hill (at upper right).

A favorite subject for the swarms of photographers who rushed to cover the disaster was the house belonging to John Schultz. It had been neatly skewered by a huge tree and then dumped down near the Point. Six people were in it when the wave hit. Miraculously they all came out alive.

The photograph at right is almost certainly a fake. Though hundreds of corpses were strewn among the wreckage, few were found looking quite so neat and clean as this barefoot “victim,” and by the time the photographers arrived any body so well exposed would have been long since removed.

A view taken less than 24 hours after the flood shows the Cambria Iron offices (the big buildings on the left) and the swamped ruins of the city beyond. A t far right is part of the depot. Two Cambria Iron locomotives stand at lower right, inside the high board fence that enclosed company grounds.

Weeks after the flood, workmen tackle the last remains of the debris piled against the Pennsylvania Railroad's massive stone bridge.

In a view from above the Stony Creek, looking toward the Point (the stone bridge and the mills can be seen faintly in the distance), a slim island of surviving houses stands amid acres of mud and ruin.

Gertrude Quinn, at the age of 5. This photograph was one of the few Quinn family possessions to survive the flood.

Victor Heiser as he looked at 19, three years after the flood, when he had left Johnstown to begin his college education.

For Richard Harding Davis, the flood was the first big assignment in a long, colorful career as roving reporter and author.

For Clara Barton, “Angel of the Battlefield,” the flood was the first great test of her newly organized American Red Cross.

With their houses swept away, their money and belongings all gone, many families “made do” in rough hillside shelters such as these, built and furnished with the best they could scavenge from the devastated valley.

At the center of town, where the militia had set up camp, a young sentry stands guard while a survivor signs up for relief rations.

The body of a child is carried into the Adams Street schoolhouse, a temporary morgue where 301 bodies were recorded in the log books.

An artist’s drawing of the broken dam, seen from inside the empty reservoir, shows the spillway (at far right) and the bridge that crossed it. The breach in the dam was about 420 feet across the top.

At the Pennsylvania depot survivors crowd one of the several commissaries set up by volunteers from Pittsburgh and other nearby towns.

Scenes such as the one above and at left below were repeated many times, as survivors searched among the dead, or suddenly found a lost loved one among the living. But the illustration at right below, supposedly depicting the demise of three “Huns” who had been caught robbing the dead, has no basis in fact. Popular as they were in the nation’s press, lurid stories of rampant pillage and bloodshed were soon entirely discredited.

At Grandview Cemetery, on a high hill above Johnstown, hundreds of plain marble headstones mark the graves of the flood’s unknown dead.

V

“Run for your lives!”

–1–

Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing as it rushed on them.

It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it had become an avalanche of sound, “a roar like thunder” was how they generally described it. But one man said he thought the sound was more like the rush of an oncoming train, while another said, “And the sound, I will never forget the sound of that. It sounded to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats.”

Everyone heard shouting and screaming, the earsplitting crash of buildings going down, glass shattering, and the sides of houses ripping apart. Some people would later swear they heard factory whistles screeching frantically and church bells ringing. Who may have been yanking the bell cords was never discovered, but it was later reported that a freight engineer named Hugh Clifford had raced his train from above the depot across the stone bridge, his whistle going the whole way; and a man named Charles Horner blew the whistle over at Harry Swank’s machine shop.

Those who actually saw the wall of water would talk and write of how it “snapped off trees like pipestems” or “crushed houses like eggshells” or picked up locomotives (and all sorts of other immense objects) “like so much chaff.” But what seemed to make the most lasting impression was the cloud of dark spray that hung over the front of the wave.

Tribune editor George Swank wrote, “The first appearance was like that of a great fire, the dust it raised.” Another survivor described it as “a blur, an advance guard, as it were a mist, like dust that precedes a cavalry charge.” One young man said he thought at first that there must have been a terrible explosion up the river, “for the water coming looked like a cloud of the blackest smoke I ever saw.”

For everyone who saw it, there seemed something especially evil about this “awful mass of spray” that hovered over “the black wreck.” It was talked of as “the death mist” and would be remembered always.

The fact was there had been something close to an explosion up the river, at the Gautier works, when the water rolled over the fires there, which undoubtedly accounted for a good part of what they saw. Horace Rose, who witnessed about as much as anyone, thought so.

At the first sound of trouble he had rushed to the third floor of his house on lower Main Street and from the front window could see nearly a mile up the valley. Only a few minutes before he had been playfully teasing his neighbors’ child, Bessie Fronheiser, from another window downstairs, telling her to come on over for a visit. The distance between the two houses was only about five feet, so he had put some candy on the end of a broom and passed it over to her. That was so successful that he next passed across a tin cup of coffee to Bessie’s mother in the same way. She was just raising the cup to her lips when the first crash came.

From the third floor Rose could see the long line of the rolling debris, stretching from hill to hill, slicing through the Gautier works, chopping it down and sending up a huge cloud of soot and steam.

The sight took his breath away. Once clear of the wireworks, the wave kept on coming straight toward him, heading for the very heart of the city. Stores, houses, trees, everything was going down in front of it, and the closer it came, the bigger it seemed to grow. Rose figured that he and his family had, at the most, two or three minutes before they would be crushed to death.

There would be slight differences of opinion later as to precisely when the wave crossed the line into Johnstown, but the generally accepted time is 4:07.

The height of the wall was at least thirty-six feet at the center, though eyewitness descriptions suggest that the mass was perhaps ten feet higher there than off to the sides where the water was spreading out as the valley expanded to a width of nearly half a mile.

It was also noted by dozens of people that the wave appeared to be preceded by a wind which blew down small buildings and set trees to slapping about in the split seconds before the water actually struck them. Several men later described how the wind had whipped against them as they scrambled up the hillsides, grabbing at brush to pull themselves out of the way at the very last instant.

Because of the speed it had been building as it plunged through Woodvale, the water struck Johnstown harder than anything it had encountered in its fourteen-mile course from the dam. And the part of the city which took the initial impact was the eastern end of Washington Street, which ran almost at right angles to the path of the oncoming wave.

The drowning and devastation of the city took just about ten minutes.

For most people they were the most desperate minutes of their lives, snatching at children and struggling through the water, trying to reach the high ground, running upstairs as houses began to quake and split apart, clinging to rafters, window ledges, anything, while the whole world around them seemed to spin faster and faster. But there were hundreds, on the hillsides, on the rooftops of houses out of the direct path, or in the windows of tall buildings downtown, who just stood stone-still and watched in dumb horror.

They saw the eastern end of Washington Street, the block where the Heiser dry-goods store stood, disappear in an instant. From there the wave seemed to divide into three main thrusts, one striking across the eastern end of town behind the Methodist Church, one driving straight through the center, and the other sticking more or less to the channel of the Little Conemaugh along the northern side of town. Not that there was any clear parting of the wave, but rather that there seemed to be those three major paths of destruction.

East of the park, Jackson and Clinton streets became rivers of rubbish churning headlong for the Stony Creek. On Main and Locust, big brick buildings like the Hulbert House collapsed like cardboard while smaller wood-frame stores and apartment houses jumped from their foundations and went swirling away downstream, often to be smashed to bits against still other buildings, freight cars, or immense trees caught by the same roaring current.

Every tree in the park was torn up by the roots and snatched away as the water crossed through the center of town. John Fulton’s house caved in, and other big places went down almost immediately after—the Horace Rose house, the John Dibert house, the Cyrus Elder house. The library, the telegraph office, the Opera House, the German Lutheran Church, the fire station, landmarks were vanishing so fast that no one could keep count of them. Then, perhaps no more than four minutes after the water had plunged across Washington Street, it broke past Vine on the far side of town and slammed into the hill which rises almost straight up to nearly 550 feet in back of the Stony Creek.

It was as though the water had hit an immense and immovable backboard, and the result was much as it had been at South Fork when the wave struck the mountainside there. An immediate and furious backwash occurred. One huge wave veered off to the south, charging up the Stony Creek, destroying miles of the densely populated valley, which, it would seem, had been well out of reach of any trouble from the valley of the Little Conemaugh. Other waves pounded back on Johnstown itself, this time, very often, to batter down buildings which had somehow withstood the first onslaught.

Houses and rooftops, dozens of them with thirty or forty people clinging on top, went spinning off on a second run with the current, some to end up drifting about for hours, but most to pile in to the stone bridge, where a good part of the water headed after striking the hill, and where eventually all the water had to go.

The bridge crossed the Conemaugh River downstream from the Point where the Stony Creek and the Little Conemaugh come together. Past the bridge, another mile or so west, was the great Conemaugh Gap, the deepest river gorge between the Alleghenies and the Rockies and the flood’s only way out of the mountains. But the bridge was never hit by the full force of the water. It had been built far enough down from the Point so that when the wave went grinding over Johnstown, it was shielded by Prospect Hill, and after the wave broke apart against the mountainside, the bridge had to withstand the impact of only a part of the wave.

As a result the bridge held. Had it been in the direct path and been struck full force, it would have been taken out just like everything else. But as it was, the mountainside took the brunt of the blow, the bridge survived, and the course of events for the next several hours went very differently.

Debris began building rapidly among the massive stone arches. And now it was no longer the relatively small sort of rubbish that had been clogging the bridge most of the day. Now boxcars, factory roofs, trees, telegraph poles, hideous masses of barbed wire, hundreds of houses, many squashed beyond recognition, others still astonishingly intact, dead horses and cows, and hundreds of human beings, dead and alive, were driven against the bridge until a small mountain had formed, higher than the bridge itself and nearly watertight. So once again, for the second time within an hour, Lake Conemaugh gathered in a new setting. Now it was spread all across Johnstown and well beyond.

But this time the new “dam” would hold quite a little longer than the viaduct had and would cause still another kind of murderous nightmare. For when darkness fell, the debris at the bridge caught fire.

No one knows for sure what caused the fire. The explanation most often given at the time was that oil from a derailed tank car had soaked down through the mass, and that it was set off by coal stoves dumped over inside the kitchens of mangled houses caught in the jam. But there could have been a number of other causes, and in any case, by six o’clock the whole monstrous pile had become a funeral pyre for perhaps as many as eighty people trapped inside.

Editor George Swank, who had been watching everything from his window at the Tribune office, wrote that it burned “with all the fury of the hell you read about—cremation alive in your own home, perhaps a mile from its foundation; dear ones slowly consumed before your eyes, and the same fate yours a moment later.”

By ten o’clock the light from the flames across the lower half of town was bright enough to read a newspaper by.

–2–

The water in front of the Heiser store had been knee-deep since early in the afternoon, which was a record for that part of town. In the other floods over the years there had never been any water at all so far up on Washington Street.

People had been coming in and out of the store most of the morning joking about the weather, buying this and that to tide them through the day. The floor was slick with mud from their boots, and the close, warm air inside the place smelled of tobacco and wet wool. George Heiser, wearing his usual old sweater, was too busy taking care of customers to pay much attention to what was going on outside.

But by early afternoon, with the street out front under two feet of water, hardly anyone was about, and the Heiser family was left more or less to itself. A few visitors dropped in, family friends, and an occasional customer. Mrs. Lorentz, from Kernville, sat visiting with Mathilde Heiser upstairs. She had come by alone, without her husband, who was the town’s weatherman, and, no doubt, a busy man that day.

Sometime near tour o’clock George Heiser had sent his son, Victor, out to the barn to see about the horses. The animals had been tied in their stalls, and George, worried that they might strangle if the water should get any higher, wanted them unfastened.

The barn, like the store front, was a recent addition for the Heisers. It had a bright-red tin roof and looked even bigger than it was, standing, as it did, upon higher ground at the rear of their lot. To get back to it, Victor had left his shoes and socks behind and, with a pair of shorts on, went wading across through the pelting rain. It had taken him only a few minutes to see to the horses and he was on his way out the door when he heard the noise.

Terrified, he froze in the doorway. The roar kept getting louder and louder, and every few seconds he heard tremendous crashes. He looked across at the house and in the second-story window saw his father motioning to him to get back into the barn and up the stairs. Just a few weeks earlier he and his father had cut a trap door through the barn roof, because his father had thought “it might be a good idea.”

The boy was through the door and onto the roof in a matter of seconds. Once there he could see across the top of the house, and on the other side, no more than two blocks away, was the source of all the racket. He could see no water, only an immense wall of rubbish, dark and squirming with rooftops, huge roots, and planks. It was coming at him very fast, ripping through Portage and Center streets. When it hit Washington Street, he saw his home crushed like an orange crate and swallowed up.

In the same instant the barn was wrenched from its footings and began to roll like a barrel, over and over. Running, stumbling, crawling hand over hand, clawing at tin and wood, Victor somehow managed to keep on top. Then he saw the house of their neighbor, Mrs. Fenn, loom up in front. The barn was being driven straight for it. At the precise moment of impact, he jumped, landing on the roof of the house just as the walls of the house began to give in and the whole roof started plunging downward.

He clambered up the steep pitch of the roof, fighting to keep his balance. The noise was deafening and still he saw no water. Everything about him was cracking and splitting, and the air was filled with flying boards and broken glass. It was more like being in the middle of an explosion than anything else.

With the house and roof falling away beneath him, he caught hold of still another house that had jammed in on one side. Grabbing on to the eaves, he hung there, dangling, his feet swinging back and forth, reaching out, trying to get a toe hold. But there was none. All he could do was hang and swing. For years after he would have recurring nightmares in which it was happening to him all over again. If he let go he was finished. But in the end, he knew, he would have to let go. His fingernails dug deep into the water-soaked shingles. Shooting pains ran through his hands and down his wrists.

Then his grip gave out and he fell, backwards, sickeningly, through the wet, filthy air, and slammed down on a big piece of red roof from the new barn. And now, for the first time, he saw water; he was bumping across it, lying on his stomach, hanging on to the roof with every bit of strength left in him, riding with the wave as it smashed across Johnstown.

The things he heard and saw in the next moments would be remembered later only as a gray, hideous blur, except for one split-second glimpse which would stick in his mind for the rest of his life.

He saw the whole Mussante family sailing by on what appeared to be a barn floor. Mussante was a fruit dealer on Washington Street, a small, dark Italian with a drooping mustache, who had been in Johnstown now perhaps three years. He had had a pushcart at first, then opened the little place not far from the Heiser store. Victor knew him well, and his wife and two children. Now there they were speeding by with a Saratoga trunk open beside them, and every one of them busy packing things into it. And then a mass of wreckage heaved up out of the water and crushed them.

But he had no time to think more about them or anything else. He was heading for a mound of wreckage lodged between the Methodist Church and a three-story brick building on the other side of where Locust Street had been. The next thing he knew he was part of the jam. His roof had catapulted in amongst it, and there, as trees and beams shot up on one side or crashed down on the other, he went leaping back and forth, ducking and dodging, trying desperately to keep his footing, while more and more debris kept booming into the jam.

Then, suddenly, a freight car reared up over his head. It looked like the biggest thing he had ever seen in his life. And this time he knew there could be no jumping out of the way.

But just as it was about to crash on top of him, the brick building beside him broke apart, and his raft, as he would describe it later, “shot out from beneath the freight car like a bullet from a gun.”

Now he was out onto comparatively open water, rushing across a clear space which he judged to be approximately where the park had been. He was moving at a rapid clip, but there seemed far less danger, and he took some time to look about.

There were people struggling and dying everywhere around him. Every so often a familiar face would flash by. There was Mrs. Fenn, fat and awkward, balanced precariously on a tar barrel, well doused with its contents, and trying, pathetically, to stay afloat. Then he saw the young Negro who worked for Dr. Lee, down on his knees praying atop his employer’s roof, stark naked, shivering, and beseeching the Lord in a loud voice to have mercy on his soul.

Like the Mussante family, they were suddenly here and gone like faces in nightmares, or some sort of grotesque comedy, as unreal and as unbelievable as everything else that was happening. And there was nothing he could do for them, or anybody else.

He was heading across town toward the Stony Creek. As near as he could reckon later, he passed right by where Horace Rose’s house had stood, then crossed Main and sailed over the Morrell lot, and perhaps directly over where the Morrell greenhouse had been. Almost immediately after that, about the time he was crossing Lincoln Street, he got caught by the backcurrent.

Until then he had been keeping his eyes on the mountainside, which looked almost close enough to reach out and touch, and on the stone bridge. Both places looked to be possible landings, and either one would do as well as the other.

But now his course changed sharply, from due west to due south. The current grabbed his raft and sent it racing across the Stony Creek a half mile or so, over into the Kernville section, and it was here that his voyage ended.

“I passed by a two-and-a-half-story brick dwelling which was still remaining on its foundations. Since my speed as I went up this second valley was about that of a subway train slowing for a stop, I was able to hop to the roof and join a small group of people already stranded there.”

When he had been standing on the roof of his father’s barn, looking across the housetops at the avalanche bearing down on Johnstown, he had taken his watch out of his pocket to look at the time. It was a big silver watch with a fancy-etched cover, which had been his fourteenth birthday present from his father. He had snapped it open, because, as he would say later, “I wanted to see just how long it was going to take for me to get from this world over into the next one.”

Now, on the rooftop in Kernville, realizing that he had perhaps a very good chance of staying on a little longer in this world, he pulled out the watch a second time.

Amazingly enough, it was still running, and he discovered with astonishment that everything that had happened since he had seen his home vanish had taken place in less than ten minutes.

Agnes Chapman had watched her husband walk to the front door in his bedroom slippers about four o’clock, open it, peer out, and turn around looking, as she told it later on, “pale and affrighted.” The Reverend had just seen a boxcar with a man standing on top roll down the pavement in front of the parsonage. As he passed under the tree in the Chapmans’ yard, the man had caught hold of a limb and swung himself up onto the roof of the front porch, from which he stepped through the second-story window directly over the Reverend’s head.

The man was the ticket agent from the B & O station, across Washington Street from the Heiser store. Upon hearing the commotion up the valley, he had climbed on top of the car to see what was going on. Then the car had started running with what must have been a small but powerful current preceding the main wave. It swept the car down Franklin, across Locust, too fast for the man to do anything but hang on until he was within reach of the Chapmans’ tree.

The whole scene meant only one thing to the Reverend. The reservoir had broken. He shouted for everyone to run for the attic.

Agnes Chapman, with her seven-year-old granddaughter, Nellie, Mrs. Brinker (their neighbor from across the park), Mr. Parker, and Lizzie, the cook, all made a dash up the front stairs, while Chapman ran to the study to shut off the gas fire. As he turned to go back out to the hall, he saw the front door burst open and a huge wave rush in. He ran for the kitchen and scrambled up the back stairs. A few seconds more and he would have been swept against the ceiling and drowned. The water was up the stairs and into the second floor almost instantly.

By now the whole family was in the attic, along with the B & O ticket agent and two other young men who had jumped through an open window from a whirling roof.

“We all stood there in the middle of the floor, waiting our turn to be swept away, and expecting every minute to be drowned.” Mrs. Chapman said. “When our porches were torn loose, and the two bookcases fell over, the noise led us to think the house was going to pieces.”

The noise everywhere was so awful they had to shout to hear one another. Outside other buildings were scraping and grinding against theirs, or crashing in heaps, and the thunder of the water kept on for what seemed an eternity.

“We knew…that many of our fellow citizens were perishing, and feared that there could be no escape for us,” the Reverend Chapman wrote later. “I think none was afraid to meet God, but we all felt willing to put it off until a more propitious time…”

About then a man Chapman thought to be “an Arabian” came bounding through the window, clad only in underdrawers and a vest. He was drenching wet, shaking with cold and terror, and kept shouting at them, “Fader, Mudder. Tronk! Tronk! Two, tree hooner tollar, two, tree hooner tollar.”

“I think he wanted to tell us he had lost his trunk with two or three hundred dollars he had saved to bring his mother and father over here,” Chapman later explained.

The man got right down on his knees and started praying over a string of beads with such frenzy that the Reverend had to quiet him down, as he “excited and alarmed the ladies.”

But despite everything happening outside, the parsonage appeared to be holding on. And when the roar began to die off, Chapman went to the window to take a look. It was, he wrote afterward, “a scene of utter desolation.” With darkness closing down on the valley and the rain still falling, his visibility was quite limited. Still, he could make out the tall chimneys and gables of Dr. Lowman’s house across the park, poking above what looked to him like a lake spread over the town at a depth of maybe thirty feet. There was not a sign of any of the other houses that had been on the park, but over on the left, where Main Street had been, he could see the dim silhouettes of the bank, Alma Hall, which was the Odd Fellows new building, and the Presbyterian Church sticking up out of the dark water. There were no lights anywhere and no people. “Everyone is dead,” Chapman thought to himself.

Mrs. Brinker asked him to look to see if her house was still standing. When he said it was not, the others did what they could to console her. The room grew steadily darker, and from outside came more sounds of houses cracking up and going down under the terrible weight of the water.

The Hulbert House had been the finest hotel in town. It was not so large as the Merchants’ Hotel on Main, but it was newer and fitted out “with all the latest wrinkles” as one paper of the day put it. Drummers made up most of the trade, and things were arranged to suit them. Breakfast was served early, dinner at noon (a custom most big-city hotels had long since abandoned), and like the other chief hotels in town, each of its rooms had a long extension table where the salesmen could display their wares. “Through some open door we can always see one piled high with samples of the latest fashions as adulterated for the provincial market,” wrote a visitor from New York. It was also, for some strange reason, the only hotel in town without a bar.

Located on Clinton Street, three doors from Main on the east side of the street, it was all brick and four stories tall. Earlier that morning it had looked to quite a number of people like one of the safest places in town.

For example, Jeremiah Smith, a stonemason who lived in a small frame house over on Stony Creek Street, brought his wife and three children (nine-year-old Florence, seven-year-old Frank, and a four-month-old baby) across town through the rain to the safety of the Hulbert House. How long Smith stayed on with them is not known, but the evidence is he soon went back home again. In any case, he and his house survived the flood. His wife and children were crushed to death when the Hulbert House collapsed almost the instant it was hit by the flood.

In all there were sixty people inside the building by four o’clock in the afternoon. Only nine of them got out alive.

“Strange as it may seem, we were discussing the possibility of the dam breaking only a few hours before it really did,” one of the survivors, a G. B. Hartley of Philadelphia, was later quoted.

“We were sitting in the office shortly after dinner. Everyone laughed at the idea of the dam giving way. No one had the slightest fear of such a catastrophe.”

As the afternoon passed, Hartley moved to the second-floor parlor. He was sitting there talking to a Miss Carrie Richards, Charles Butler of the Cambria Iron Company, and Walter Benford, brother of the proprietor, when they heard shouting in the streets, immediately followed by loud crashes.

“At first sound,” Hartley said, “we all rushed from the room panic-stricken. Why it was I do not know, but we ran for the stairs. Mr. Butler took Miss Richards’ hand. She called to me, and I took hold of her other hand. Then we started up the stairs. Mr. Benford did not go with us, but instead ran downstairs where his brother had an office. The scene in the hotel is beyond imagination or description.

“Chambermaids ran screaming through the halls, beating their hands together and uttering wild cries to heaven for safety. Frightened guests rushed about not knowing what to do nor what was coming. Up the stairs we leapt. Somewhere, I do not know when or how it was, I lost my hold of Miss Richards’ hand. I really cannot tell what I did, I was so excited. I still rushed up the stairs and thought Miss Richards and Mr. Benford were just behind and I had reached the top flight of stairs and just between the third and fourth floors, when a terrific crash came. Instantly I was pinned by broken boards and debris…”

Hartley then looked up and saw that the building’s big mansard roof had been lifted right off and he was looking at nothing more than a sullen sky. In what must have been no more than thirty seconds or so, he managed to scramble out from under the debris and climb onto the roof, which was floating to the side of the crumbling hotel.

F. A. Benford, proprietor of the house, was already on the roof, along with his brother Walter, a traveling salesman from Strawbridge & Clothier named Herbert Galager, and two chambermaids, one of whom had a dislocated shoulder. The roof floated off with the current. The rest of the building just disappeared; the walls fell in and it was gone.

Gertrude Quinn was the six-year-old daughter of James Quinn, who, with his brother-in-law, Andrew Foster, ran Geis, Foster and Quinn; Dry Goods and Notions, which stood diagonally across Clinton from the Hulbert House. The two of them, Gertrude would later say, looked like the Smith Brothers on the cough-drop box.

James Quinn was one of the few prominent men in Johnstown who had been noticeably concerned about the dam since early that morning. He had been to the lake several times over the years and had a clear idea of the volume of water there. If the dam should let go, he had said, not a house in town would be left standing.

The Quinns lived in one of Johnstown’s show places, a three-story, red-brick Queen Anne house newly built at the corner of Jackson and Main. It was surrounded by an iron fence and stood well up off the street, perfectly safe, it was to be assumed, from even the worst spring floods. There were fruit trees and a flower garden in the front yard, a kitchen garden, a barn with one cow and some ducks out back. Inside, everything was the latest—plumbing, icebox, organ, piano, Arab scarves, Brussels carpets, a marble clock from Germany on the mantel.

Besides Gertrude, there were six other children in the family. Vincent, who was sixteen, was the oldest. Helen, Lalia, and Rosemary came next; then Gertrude, Marie, and Tom, who was only a few months old. Rosina Quinn, their mother, was the daughter of old John Geis, who had started the store back in canal days, soon after he arrived from Bavaria. She had worked in the business herself before marrying and was later teased for having five of her seven children in July, which, as everyone knew, was the slow season for dry goods.

Then there was Libby Hipp, the eighteen-year-old German nursegirl, Gertrude’s Aunt Abbie (Mrs. Geis), and her infant son, Richard. Aunt Abbie, who was probably no more than twenty-eight years old and a woman of exceptional beauty, had come east for her health from her home in Salina, Kansas. She had had three children in a very short time and needed rest.

James Quinn was most definitely head of the household. He was a trim, bookish man who had been an officer in the cavalry during the war and still held himself in a like manner. He was President of the Electric Light Company, a member of the school board, and, along with Cyrus Elder, Dr. Lowman, and George Swank, he was one of the trustees of the Johnstown Savings Bank. As a boy he had been taken by his father, a construction worker, to ask for a job in the Cambria mills but had been turned down because he looked too scared—for which he would be forever thankful. For a while before the war he had toyed with the idea of becoming an artist, and one of his early efforts, Rebecca at the Well, done in house paints, hung in the third floor of the new house on Jackson Street. (Later on, his wife would tell him, “The flood wasn’t so bad, when you realize we got rid of Rebecca so gracefully.”)

At home he was quite exacting about the use of the English language, abhorring slang and insisting on proper diction. He liked cigars. He was quiet, dignified, a strong Republican, and a good Catholic.

The advertisements he was placing in the Tribune that spring let it be known that Foster and Quinn were offering the finest in Hamburg embroideries, Spanish laces, Marseilles quilts, and “new French sateens.” But the store also dealt in carpets, umbrellas, hatpins, hairpins, flannel drawers, striped calico dresses, pearl buttons, black hose, bolsters, and pillowcases.

“I cannot separate thoughts of parents, brothers, sisters, or home from our store,” Gertrude would say later. “When we went there, we became personages…the clerks, vying with one another for our attention, were always doing thoughtful little things for us.”

The place was big and brightly lighted, with people coming and going, exchanging news and gossip. For the children it was all a grand show, from which they took home strings of stray beads or buttons or some other trinket.

For Foster and Quinn (father-in-law Geis had long since retired), the place represented an investment of about $60,000 and provided a very good living.

On the morning of the 31st, James Quinn had gone to the store early to supervise the moving of goods to higher levels. Before leaving home he had told everyone to stay inside. One of his children, Marie, was already sick with measles, and he did not want the others out in the rain catching cold. He did, however, allow young Vincent to come along with him downtown to lend a hand.

At noon, when he had returned for dinner, the water had been up to his curbstone. He had been restless and worried through the meal, talking about the water rising in the streets and his lack of confidence in the South Fork dam.

A few days before, he and his wife and the infant, Tom, and Lalia had gone to Scottdale for a christening, and Mrs. Quinn and the two children had stayed on to visit with her sister. Now Aunt Abbie and Libby Hipp were more or less running things, and he was doing his best to make sure they understood the seriousness of the situation.

“James, you are too anxious,” his sister-in-law said. “This big house could never go.”

In recalling the day years afterward, Gertrude felt sure that her father was so worried that he would have moved them all to the hill that morning, even though he had no special place to take them, if it had not been for Marie. He was afraid of the effect the light might have on her eyes.

After dinner he had gone back to the store, and Gertrude slipped out onto the front porch where she began dangling her feet in the water, which, by now, covered the yard just deep enough for the ducks to sport about among the flowers. Everyone who survived the flood would carry some especially vivid mental picture of how things had looked just before the great wave struck; for this child it would be the sight of those ducks, and purple pansies floating face up like lily pads, in the yellow water.

Shortly before four Gertrude’s father suddenly appeared in front of her. He took her with one hand, with the other gave her a couple of quick spanks for disobeying his order to stay inside, and hurried her through the door.

“Then he gave me a lecture on obedience, wet feet, and our perilous position; he said he had come to take us to the hill and that we were delayed because my shoes and stockings had to be changed again. He was smoking a cigar while the nurse was changing my clothes. Then he went to the door to toss off the ashes.”

It was then that he saw the dark mist and heard the sound of the wave coming. He rushed back inside, shouting, “Run for your lives. Follow me straight to the hill.”

Someone screamed to him about the baby with the measles. He leaped up the stairs and in no more than a minute was back down with Marie wrapped in a blanket, his face white and terrified-looking.

“Follow me,” he said. “Don’t go back for anything. Don’t go back for anything.” Everyone started out the door except Vincent. Just where he was no one knew. Helen and Rosemary ran on either side of their father, holding on to his elbows as he carried the baby. When they got to the street the water was nearly to Rosemary’s chin, but she kept going, and kept trying to balance the umbrella she had somehow managed to bring along. The hill was at most only a hundred yards away. All they had to do was get two short blocks to the end of Main and they would be safe.

James Quinn started running, confident that everyone was with him. But Aunt Abbie, who was carrying her baby, and Libby Hipp, who had Gertrude in her arms, had turned back.

When she reached the top of the steps that led from the yard down to the street, Aunt Abbie had had second thoughts.

“I don’t like to put my feet in that dirty water,” Gertrude would remember her saying. Libby said she would do whatever Aunt Abbie thought best, so they started back into the house.

“Well, I kicked and scratched and bit her, and gave her a terrible time, because I wanted to be with my father,” Gertrude said later. How the two women, each with a child, ever got to the third floor as fast as they did was something she was never quite able to figure out. Once there, they went to the front window, opened it, and looked down into the street. Gertrude described the scene as looking “like the Day of Judgment I had seen as a little girl in Bible histories,” with crowds of people running, screaming, dragging children, struggling to keep their feet in the water.

Her father meanwhile had reached dry land on the hill, and turning around saw no signs of the rest of his family among the faces pushing past him. He grabbed hold of a big butcher boy named Kurtz, gave him Marie, told him to watch out for the other two girls, and started back to the house.

But he had gone only a short way when he saw the wave, almost on top of him, demolishing everything, and he knew he could never make it. There was a split second of indecision, then he turned back to the hill, running with all his might as the water surged along the street after him. In the last few seconds, fighting the current around him that kept getting deeper and faster every second, he reached the hillside just as the wave pounded by below.

Looking behind he saw his house rock back and forth, then lunge sideways, topple over, and disappear.

Gertrude never saw the wave. The sight of the crowds jamming through the street had so terrified her aunt and Libby Hipp that they had pulled back from the window, horrified, dragging her with them into an open cupboard.

“Libby, this is the end of the world, we will all die together,” Aunt Abbie sobbed, and dropped to her knees and began praying hysterically, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Have mercy on us, oh, God…”

Gertrude started screaming and jumping up and down, calling “Papa, Papa, Papa,” as fast as she could get it out.

The cupboard was in what was the dining room of an elaborate playhouse built across the entire front end of the third floor. There was nothing like it anywhere else in town, the whole place having been fitted out and furnished by Quinn’s store. There was a long center hall and a beautifully furnished parlor at one end and little bedrooms with doll beds, bureaus, washstands, and ingrain carpets on the floors. The dining room had a painted table, chairs, sideboard with tiny dishes, hand-hemmed tablecloths, napkins, and silverware.

From where she crouched in the back of the cupboard, Gertrude could see across the dining room into a miniature kitchen with its own table and chairs, handmade iron stove, and, on one wall, a whole set of iron cooking utensils hanging on little hooks. Libby Hipp was holding her close, crying and trembling.

Then the big house gave a violent shudder. Gertrude saw the tiny pots and pans begin to sway and dance. Suddenly plaster dust came down. The walls began to break up. Then, at her aunt’s feet, she saw the floor boards burst open and up gushed a fountain of yellow water.

“And these boards were jagged…and I looked at my aunt, and they didn’t say a word then. All the praying stopped, and they gasped, and looked down like this, and were gone, immediately gone.”

She felt herself falling and reaching out for something to grab on to and trying as best she could to stay afloat.

“I kept paddling and grabbing and spitting and spitting and trying to keep the sticks and dirt and this horrible water out of my mouth.”

Somehow she managed to crawl out of a hole in the roof or wall, she never knew which. All she saw was a glimmer of light, and she scrambled with all her strength to get to it, up what must have been the lath on part of the house underneath one of the gables. She got through the opening, never knowing what had become of her aunt, Libby, or her baby cousin. Within seconds the whole house was gone and everyone in it.

The next thing she knew, Gertrude was whirling about on top of a muddy mattress that was being buoyed up by debris but that kept tilting back and forth as she struggled to get her balance. She screamed for help. Then a dead horse slammed against her raft, pitching one end of it up into the air and nearly knocking her off. She hung on for dear life, until a tree swung by, snagging the horse in its branches before it plunged off with the current in another direction, the dead animal bobbing up and down, up and down, in and out of the water, like a gigantic, gruesome rocking horse.

Weak and shivering with cold, she lay down on the mattress, realizing for the first time that all her clothes had been torn off except for her underwear. Night was coming on and she was terribly frightened. She started praying in German, which was the only way she had been taught to pray.

A small white house went sailing by, almost running her down. She called out to the one man who was riding on top, straddling the peak of the roof and hugging the chimney with both arms. But he ignored her, or perhaps never heard her, and passed right by.

“You terrible man,” she shouted after him. “I’ll never help you.”

Then a long roof, which may have been what was left of the Arcade Building, came plowing toward her, looking as big as a steamboat and loaded down with perhaps twenty people. She called out to them, begging someone to save her. One man started up, but the others seemed determined to stop him. They held on to him and there was an endless moment of talk back and forth between them as he kept pulling to get free.

Then he pushed loose and jumped into the current. His head bobbed up, then went under again. Several times more he came up and went under. Gertrude kept screaming for him to swim to her. Then he was heaving himself over the side of her raft, and the two of them headed off downstream, Gertrude nearly strangling him as she clung to his neck.

The big roof in the meantime had gone careening on until it hit what must have been a whirlpool in the current and began spinning round and round. Then, quite suddenly, it struck something and went down, carrying at least half its passengers with it.

Gertrude’s new companion was a powerful, square-jawed millworker named Maxwell McAchren, who looked like John L. Sullivan. How far she had traveled by the time he climbed aboard the mattress, she was never able to figure out for certain. But later on she would describe seeing many flags at one point along the way, which suggests that she went as far up the Stony Creek as Sandy Vale Cemetery, where the Memorial Day flags could have been visible floating about in the water. Sandy Vale is roughly two miles from where the Quinn house had been, and when Maxwell McAchren joined her, she had come all the way back down again and was drifting with the tide near Bedford Street in the direction of the stone bridge.

On a hillside, close by to the right, two men were leaning out of the window of a small white building, using long poles to carry on their own rescue operation. They tried to reach out to the raft, but the distance was too great. Then one of them called out, “Throw that baby over here.”

McAchren shouted back, “Do you think you can catch her?”

“We can try,” they answered.

The child came flying through the air across about ten to fifteen feet of water and landed in the arms of Mr. Henry Koch, proprietor of Koch House, a small hotel and saloon (mostly saloon) on Bedford Street. The other man in the room with him was George Skinner, a Negro porter, who had been holding Koch by the legs when he made the catch. The men stripped Gertrude of her wet underclothes, wrapped her in a blanket, and put her on a cot. Later she was picked up and carried to the hill, so bundled up in the warm blanket that she could not see out, nor could anyone see in very well.

Every so often she could hear someone saying, “What have you got there?” And the answer came back, “A little girl we rescued.” Then she could hear people gathering around and saying, “Let’s have a look.” Off would come part of the blanket in front of her face and she would look out at big, close-up faces looking in. Heads would shake. “Don’t know her,” they would say, and again the blanket would come over her face and on they would climb.

Gertrude never found out who it was who carried her up the hill, but he eventually deposited her with a family named Metz, who lived in a frame tenement also occupied by five other families. The place looked like paradise to her, but she was still so terrified that she was unable to say a word as the Metz children, neighbors, and people in off the street jammed into the kitchen to look at her as she lay wrapped now in a pair of red-flannel underwear with Mason jars full of hot water packed all around her.

Later, she was put to bed upstairs, but exhausted as she was she was unable to sleep. In the room with her were three other refugees from the disaster, grown women by the name of Bowser, who kept getting up and going to the window, where she could hear them gasping and whispering among themselves. After a while Gertrude slipped quietly out of bed and across the dark room. Outside the window, down below where the city had been, she could now see only firelight reflecting on water. It looked, as she said later, for all the world like ships burning at sea.

The Reverend Dr. David Beale, pastor of the Presbyterian Church on Main Street, was one of the several hundred people crowded into the cavernous, pitch-dark rooms of the second, third, and fourth floors of Alma Hall. The building was on Main, five doors up from Dr. Beale’s church and directly across the street from the park. It was the tallest, largest structure in Johnstown.

Dr. Beale had been at home that afternoon, in the Lincoln Street parsonage, which stood directly behind his church, and like his good friend and neighbor the Reverend Chapman, he had been working on his sermon for Sunday. About four he had gone into the parlor to help take up the carpet. Then all at once the house was struck, and in the next few seconds he snatched up the family Bible, his wife turned off the gas, his daughter grabbed the canary cage, and they and several neighbors who had dropped by earlier all dashed up the front stairs. By the time they reached the second floor the water was up to their waists, and a hat rack was driven against Beale’s back with such force that it nearly knocked him under. As they reached the third floor a man washed in through the window.

“Who are you? Where are you from?” Beale shouted.

“Woodvale,” the man gasped. He had been carried on a roof a mile and a quarter.

Expecting at any moment “to be present with the Lord,” Beale led the group in a prayer and read aloud from the Bible, his voice straining against the noise of the flood:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

“Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea…”

Outside twisted wreckage, tank cars, freight cars, and what appeared to be every house in sight went tumbling past the window. The Reverend Beale saw J. Q. Benshoff, Johnstown’s leading bookseller go by, Mrs. John Fulton and her daughter, and two small children clinging to a roof, both of them nearly naked. For blocks around every building appeared to have been obliterated.

There were ten people in the Beale attic, counting the newcomer from Woodvale. Soon after, Beale helped save Captain A. N. Hart, his wife, sister, and two small sons by pulling them in through the window. But there was considerable doubt as to how long the frame parsonage could last, and especially when, after a shifting and quieting of the current, the wreckage which had been shoved against the west side of the house began slowly drifting off and the whole building started to jerk and tremble.

A decision was made to try, before nightfall, to walk across the flood—over the debris—to Alma Hall, which was the equivalent of about one block away. Captain Hart went out the window first on the end of a rope, tested a roof that was floating below, found it stable enough, and the other fourteen, plus the Beales’ dog, a terrier called “Guess,” followed after. The Reverend Beale was the last one out. Then they started off, picking their way over tree trunks, timbers, stepping from one moving house to another, climbing up the sides of roofs sometimes so steep that part of the group on one side would be out of sight from those on the other side, then jumping across sudden spaces of dark water or bridging them with stray planks. At one point one of the girls lost her balance and fell in, vanishing from sight except for her hair which floated on the surface. She was rescued by pulling her back on some long boards, and everyone continued on.

By now, very near dark, the city was one huge, vile-looking lake anywhere from ten to thirty feet deep, much of it crusted over with a grinding pack of wreckage, across which now other groups of tiny figures, barely visible in the fading light, could be seen groping their way toward the hills or the few buildings still left standing.

About the time the Reverend Beale and his party had climbed out of the parsonage, a break had occurred in the railroad embankment to the right of the stone bridge, between the bridge and the depot, and the water began raging through just as though it were a spillway. House after house had plunged through the break like boats running the rapids, many of them loaded with people, dozens to be dashed to pieces when they hit Cambria City below.

But there were some people who, one way or another, survived the trip to be fished out by rescue teams farther along the river. One of them was Maxwell McAchren, who, after throwing little Gertrude to safety, sailed on toward the bridge in time to be sucked through the break. He wound up riding the mattress straight through Cambria City at the time when a good part of it was being destroyed, past the Cambria works as they were being pounded by the water, and on down the Conemaugh four miles before he was finally pulled to shore by a crowd of men with ropes.

With the break in the embankment the level of the water over the city began to go down, but only slowly, since the Little Conemaugh and the Stony Creek were still pouring in immense quantities of water, mud, and debris. So as night began, those buildings which had somehow held up against everything so far were still withstanding as much as twenty feet of water, and very often they had had several hundred tons of wreckage dumped against them. For those who would manage to get inside them, the long night ahead would be by far the most agonizing part of the whole ordeal.

When the Reverend Beale’s group finally reached Alma Hall, there were already close to 200 people inside. At the Dean Canan house there were 60 people in the attic. At least 51 people were in the attic of Dr. Walters’ house on Vine Street. The Fred Krebs house had 125 people inside before the night ended. Nearly 200 people were in the upper floors of the Union Street School, more than 100 on top of the Wolfe Building, and at the Morrell house (by then it had been converted into the Morrell Institute, a vocational training school for the Iron Company) there were 175 people. And over at Dr. Swan’s tall brick house at the corner of Vine and Stony Creek streets there were close to 90 people, including Horace Rose, who lay stretched out on the floor with a dislocated shoulder, a broken collarbone, several crushed ribs, and half of his face ripped open.

There had been a few minutes after the flood had fallen on his part of Main Street during which Rose had been at his window, almost hypnotized by the scene outside. He had seen John Dibert’s house squashed like a paper bag. Another brick house fell with a crash. A large frame building directly across the street had lifted up and charged right for him. Then there had been a horrible noise, he had felt himself falling, and all was dark.

“A moment later I felt the press of a heavy shock, a sense of excruciating pain came upon me that I was being crushed to death…”

His whole right side had been caved in by falling timbers, and he was powerless to free himself. He had heard his youngest son calling for help but had been unable to do anything for him. He had seen his daughter, June, rise up out of the water, then, almost immediately, sink back out of sight. From out of nowhere a small boy had appeared among the chaos and told him his wife had drowned. Then another stranger, this one a young man, seemed, Rose said later, to shoot out of the debris. Rose told him to go help his wife and daughter. The man, Rose learned afterward, was a Pittsburgh dentist named Phillips, and in a few frantic minutes he managed to free Mrs. Rose from the timbers that had fallen on her. Then the majority of the Rose household—Rose, his wife and daughter (she too had been rescued somehow), two of his sons, one maid, “the strange boy,” as Rose called him, and an elderly lady who had been pulled off a floating shutter by one of his sons—were all together on a single stout roof which chanced by at the very moment when the last of their house was disappearing in the tide. The roof had been heading toward the stone bridge. But, Rose wrote later, “Scarcely was the complement of passengers complete, when the current turned, and our ship was driven with terrific velocity directly up the channel of the Stony Creek…”

Then for several more hours they had floated about, sometimes wallowing in dead water, other times rushing rapidly back over a course they had just completed. And through it all Rose lay helpless, in terrible pain, and shaking with severe chills as the cold rain beat down.

They had seen the spire of St. John’s Catholic Church catch fire, which according to most accounts had happened about eight o’clock, and had watched the flames leap clear to the cross on top before the whole thing toppled and fell into the water. At another point they had been becalmed within perhaps a hundred feet of where Rose’s office had been on Franklin Street, and listened to the ringing of the ponderous bell in the town clock. The clock was in the steeple of the Lutheran Church, and somehow or other its mechanism was still functioning the same as ever. Through the rest of the night, despite everything, every hour on the hour, it bonged away. The sound had a powerful effect on everyone who heard it.

Then by another sudden change in the surface currents, the roof had been driven off over the main channel of the Stony Creek, where by now the current was again heading downstream. They were carried a hundred yards or more before the roof lodged against the side of the Swan house.

Rose was lifted from the roof and through a window. From then until morning he lay listening to buildings breaking up somewhere out in the night and watching the light from the fire at the bridge play across the walls and ceiling.

For the Reverend Beale and the others inside Alma Hall there had been an immediate fear of fire and what might happen if panic should break out among so many people waiting in the dark. An Alma Hall government had been set up, with Beale and Captain Hart each put in charge of one of the floors. Some whiskey was confiscated, and the use of matches was strictly forbidden because of the likelihood of a natural-gas leak in the basement. A count was made to see how many there were (it came to 264), and the Reverend once again led a prayer.

James Walters, a lawyer, was named director of the building. Walters had made one of the day’s most extraordinary voyages, having been swept from his home on Walnut Street on top of a roof which took him spinning across town until he smashed into the side of Alma Hall, flew headlong through a window, and landed square in the middle of his own office.

The fourth member of the governing body was the only physician in the building, Dr. William Matthews, who spent the entire night tending to the wounded, without sleep or rest, despite the fact that he had two broken ribs.

In the Reverend Beale’s words, it was a “night of indescribable horrors.” The only light was the faint, eerie glow from the fires outside. Up near the long front windows that earlier in the day had looked down into the green treetops of the park, the light was bright enough to recognize a nearby face; but farther back in the deep, high-ceilinged rooms it was nearly pitch-black, and on the stairways between floors there was no light at all.

Nearly everyone was wringing wet, filthy, and suffering from the cold. A number of people had most of their clothes torn off. There was no food and no water. There were no blankets, no dry clothes, and no medical supplies. The injured lay shivering in the dark. The rooms were filled with their moaning, with the crying of scared, hungry children, and with a lot of fervent praying.

Outside they could hear the rush of the rain and faint calls for help, a sudden scream, and every now and then the unearthly howling of dogs and other animals, which to many people was the most frightful sound of all.

Nor was there any assurance whatsoever that the whole enormous building would not go the way of so many others and crack apart and bury them all under tons of brick and plaster and falling timbers. Everyone was asked to move about as little as possible. According to Beale, “the expressed opinion of the contractors present” was that the building would not last the night.

People began thinking about whether their own corpses would be recognizable or where they might be buried, if ever their bodies were found. The suspense was unbearable, and it kept on, hour after hour. It seemed morning would never come.

But Alma Hall stood through the night, as did the Presbyterian Church and its parsonage, Dr. Lowman’s house, where a small crowd had gathered in the top floor, and the Methodist parsonage, where the Chapmans and their assorted guests huddled together in the numbing cold praying for morning. The buildings survived because they were on the lee side of the big, stone Methodist Church. Standing as it did, at the corner of Franklin and Locust, on the northeastern corner of the park, the church was one of the first sizable buildings in town to be struck by the wave. Not only had it held, but it had split the wave and so served as a shield for buildings directly in line behind it. (One tale to come out of Alma Hall later on told of a voice in the dark saying, “We’ve been saved by the Methodist Church,” whereupon another voice answered back, “Only the Catholic Church can save!”)

Elsewhere in the night the story was quite different. Buildings caved in or caught fire and burned to the water line. The St. John’s fire was the biggest and most spectacular, but there were fires among several houses close by; the Keystone Hotel caught fire and there were one or two small fires over in Kernville.

And aside from the many large groups of people gathered inside Alma Hall, Dr. Swan’s house, or the other buildings that were still standing, there were any number of smaller groups of four to six, or even one to two, people who spent the night inside their own tiny attics or atop the roofs of little houses that bobbed about with the current. Some were closed in under roof beams, with no windows to look out or escape through; they were still alive, but trapped, and with no way of knowing what might happen next.

At least one family had jumped into a large bed when the water rushed up their stairs. The bed was borne clear to the ceiling by the water, and the family stayed there, floating inside their own house through the remainder of the night.

Another family named Williams had their house split in half at the bridge, then went floating up the Stony Creek in what was left of the attic. In the darkness that night Mrs. Williams gave birth to a baby boy; and the family stayed there until morning, soaked, freezing cold, the baby wrapped in a shawl.

Scores of others floated on rooftops or freight cars or half-submerged debris, without any protection from the pouring rain. A Mrs. Jacob Malzi hung on to the eaves of a house all night, up to her waist in water. A Miss Minnie Chambers had climbed inside a freight car which had been carried through the cut near the bridge and smashed to pieces against the roof of the Cambria works, where she, miraculously still alive, spent the night holding on to a small pipe that stuck up through the roof. James Shumaker lay half-unconscious across a heap of drifting wreckage all night, his face and arms badly torn and nearly blinded in both eyes by sand and lime.

Several people spent the night in trees, hanging on with the water lapping about below, never daring to close their eyes, even for a few moments, for fear they might fall asleep, lose their grip, and drop into the black current. Jacob Horner and his family of eight spent all night in a tree; so did Reuben Bensen and Mrs. Ann Buck, who was eighty years old, and Mrs. John Burket, who had had every bit of her clothing ripped from her back by the flood.

Of the great many people who were lucky enough to get to dry land, there were a number who were in such a state of shock and fear that they just started walking, stopping for nothing, stumbling on blindly through the dripping woods until the first light of morning.

But by far the worst of the night’s horrors was the fire at the bridge. Minnie Chambers, the girl who clung to the roof of the Cambria works, said later that she could hear screaming from the bridge all through the night. William Tice, who owned a drugstore on Portage Street, described what he saw soon after he had been fished out of the water near the bridge.

“I went up on the embankment and looked across the bridge, which was filled full of debris, and on it were thousands of men, women, and children, who were screaming and yelling for help, as at this time the debris was on fire, and after each crash there was a moment of solemn silence, and those voices would again be heard crying in vain for the help that came not. At each crash hundreds were forced under and slain.

“I saw hundreds of them as the flames approached throw up their hands and fall backward into the fire, and those who had escaped drowning were reserved for the more horrible fate of being burned to death. At last I could endure it no longer, and had to leave, as I could see no more.”

Frank McDonald, a railroad conductor who apparently kept on watching, said, “They reminded me of a lot of flies on flypaper, struggling to get away with no hope and no chance to save them.”

Actually, for anyone to see much of what was going on was extremely difficult, with the rain pouring down, the dark, the smoke, and the wild flames. One after another, houses had been swept against the pileup and quickly took fire. Out of them, crawling on hands and knees, climbing, jumping from place to place, helping one another, small, dark figures had appeared, now silhouetted sharply against the high, wind-whipped flames, now invisible against the black shadow of mangled debris, now emerging again from the smoke and groping their way toward the ends of the bridge. That there looked to be thousands of them and that they seemed insectlike is understandable enough; but evidence is that, at most, perhaps 500 to 600 people were driven into the burning heap, and though exact figures were never settled on, it is likely that all but about 80 of them managed to escape.

A good many escapes were made thanks to the courage of bystanders who rushed in to help. They lifted old people and children from the windows of half-shattered houses. They helped carry the badly injured across the wreckage to the hillsides.

A girl named Rose Clark was trapped near one end of the bridge, half submerged under water, with a broken arm and a broken leg which was pinned down by timbers. A group of men had worked for several hours to free her leg but without success and the fire kept spreading closer. For a short while there was talk among them of cutting her leg off, rather than letting her burn to death, and for a few tense minutes, when the flame was almost on top of them, it looked as though they would have to. But the leg came free at last, and they carried her to safety.

The fire burned on through the night, and would be still blazing when morning came. In little towns miles away downriver and on the other side of the mountains, people could see a strange, shimmering, blood-red glow in the sky.

But even for those who had somehow succeeded in getting to the high ground in time, even for those who were uninjured or were lucky enough to have a roof to sleep under, there was the indescribable agony of remembering what they had seen, and not knowing what had become of others. No one really knew for sure the extent of what had happened, but they knew it had been terrible beyond belief, and if the whereabouts of someone was not known, then only the worst could be imagined. All that could be done now was to wait for morning, and hope.

VI

A message from Mr. Pitcairn

Mr. Robert Pitcairn’s private car had been attached to eastbound passenger train Number 18 shortly before noon that morning and rolled out of Pittsburgh’s Union Station about an hour later. Mr. Pitcairn was on his way to Lilly to see how serious the storm damage was there, and to look things over at Johnstown and South Fork on the way.

Messages about trouble along the line had been coming in to his office since early morning, including one about the dam. Pitcairn had read it and thought little more of it. First of all, he could not quite understand how Colonel Unger could be sending such warnings, since he knew perfectly well that Colonel Unger had no telegraph wire at the club and that the telephone line was not open yet. And secondly, as he would say later, he simply “paid little attention to any reports about the South Fork dam, as they had been made perhaps nearly every year.”

When later messages came in from South Fork, from agent Dougherty and Pitcairn’s old friend J. P. Wilson, Pitcairn was already on his way east.

Pitcairn’s knowledge of the dam went back more than thirty years, to the time when the Pennsylvania had first bought it. His old boyhood friend Andy Carnegie had gotten him a job on the railroad, as a ticket agent at Cresson, not long before that. He and Carnegie had been telegraph operators together in Pittsburgh; then they went with the Pennsylvania. Later on, when Andy quit his job as head of the Pittsburgh Division to go into business for himself, Pitcairn had been named to replace him.

But his first real interest in the dam began when it broke in 1862 and wrecked a lot of railroad property in South Fork. Then nearly twenty years later, when the South Fork club finished its restoration and there was talk in the valley about leaks at the base of the dam, Pitcairn had gone up to see for himself, taking along several of his own people from South Fork. They had given the dam what he felt was a thorough enough going-over. Benjamin Ruff had walked with them, saying that what everyone called leaks were actually springs that came from near the ends of the dam. Ruff also promised that he would strengthen things some, and then they all shook hands and went home.

“The only point we were afraid of,” Pitcairn said later, “was the leaks at the bottom of the dam increasing.” And he was evidently afraid (or cautious) enough to ask Wilson and others in the area to keep an eye out for him. Whether his subsequent membership in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was, even in part, his way of keeping his own eye out, is not known. Though it seems highly doubtful, since, unlike Daniel J. Morrell, he had every sort of social and business reason for wishing to be there.

Now his train headed out of Pittsburgh along the muddy Monongahela, past the towering black Edgar Thomson works at Braddock, where the British general by the same name had suffered his famous defeat; then on through one little town after another, East McKeesport, Irwin, Jeannette, Greensburg, and out into open hill country. He had been over the route maybe a thousand times during his years with the railroad. He knew every bend, bridge, siding, every water tower, coal tipple, every depot, every barn and farmhouse along the horizon. He could not claim to know all the men, that would be impossible, but he knew the good part of them, and certainly every last one of them knew him. He was their supreme commander. His word was law from Altoona to Pittsburgh, and the portly frame, the bullet head, the pince-nez glasses and walrus mustache were far better-known among them than the rather inconspicuous features of the man who was then President of the United States. And if it were a question as to which one wielded the most authority, there would have been some debate.

Men who had been with the Pennsylvania for a dozen years or more still talked about Pitcairn during the “Great Strike” of ’77. A lot of them felt that he had been the chief cause for what happened in Pittsburgh. The strike had begun on the B & O in Baltimore and had been spreading fast. Times were hard, and wages had been cut. But Pitcairn had chosen that particular moment to institute new practices on the division which would have meant increased work loads and even more layoffs. “The men were always complaining about something,” he would say later. When it was all over, a pitched battle had been fought between militia and a mob of strikers and unemployed, a good part of downtown Pittsburgh had been burned to the ground, and fifty-seven people had been killed. The men had gone back to work, having gained nothing. And Robert Pitcairn’s hold on them was stronger than ever.

He liked to say that the railroads (by which he really meant his railroad) were “the heart, blood, veins, and arteries of Pittsburgh,” which, of course, put him in a most important position indeed.

Pitcairn was in his mid-fifties. He was an elder of the fashionable new Shady Side Presbyterian Church and a man of considerable financial means. For aside from his earnings on the railroad, he had also managed to put together a good-sized fortune on the side, largely by backing his inventive friend George Westinghouse. Slabtown and the squalid back streets where he and Carnegie and Phipps had grown up were far, far behind him now.

Sitting in the upholstered splendor of his private car, he looked appropriately substantial, and quite tired. He had been up late the night before at the telegraph instrument in his home making inquiries about the weather between Pittsburgh and Altoona. Then he had gone off to town earlier than usual that morning, and with the news of the storm growing worse every hour, it had been a difficult day ever since. But now, watching the landscape sweep past his window, he began to realize just how serious things were.

The rain was coming down in wild, silvery sheets. The whole countryside was awash. Hillsides were mortally veined with angry little creeks. Fields were covered with water that looked to be a foot deep or more. At Latrobe, at the foot of Chestnut Ridge, the Loyalhanna was twice its normal size and well over its banks. Ten miles farther, he saw the Conemaugh for the first time and knew he was up against something unlike anything he had ever experienced. His train was moving very slowly by this time, following the course of the river where it cut through the ridge. On the other side of the ridge, at the village of Bolivar, people were out along the riverbanks watching the torrent rush by. At New Florence the water had spilled through the lowlands, flooding miles of woods and meadows. Pitcairn thought he could actually see the water rising, it was coming up so fast.

After New Florence the train pulled through little Nineveh, where men and boys in gum coats, their collars turned up against the biting wind, their hats dripping with rain, stood beside the track watching the cars clack by.

Then the train started into the breath-takingly beautiful Conemaugh Gap, or Packsaddle, the one pass through Laurel Hill to Johnstown. The railroad ran well above the river here, even with the river in its present condition, but above the tracks the mountainside loomed up another 1,500 feet.

Several miles farther on in the gorge, at a place called Sang Hollow, about four miles from Johnstown, they stopped. The time by now was about five after four.

Pitcairn climbed down from his car and went up to the tower to find out what the trouble was. The operator told him the lines east had gone dead; they tried again several times to get Johnstown, but it was no use. The operator said he could not let them through without clearance, which, according to the rules, was exactly what he was meant to say, even to Pitcairn.

“I was about making up my mind to proceed cautiously, running carefully, to find the trouble,” Pitcairn said later, “when looking east, I saw some debris. The water before this had been muddy, but very little drift. The debris attracted my attention from its singular appearance, being broken up wood entirely, and in very small pieces. In a short time, the telegraph poles commenced to break down, and threatened to take the tower down with it.”

Then they saw a man coming down the river on some debris, moving very fast. Pitcairn thought the water must have been going by at about fifteen miles an hour. They saw more people coming, hanging on to telegraph poles or what appeared to be parts of buildings or just being swept along and trying desperately and futilely to swim. Pitcairn and the others rushed out to do what they could to save them, but the river carried them off and out of sight.

“I returned to the telegraph office to see what word I could get, when the people came down by the scores; the water rising very rapidly, and men, women, and children on the drift, and we perfectly helpless.”

By this time most of the male passengers on board the train were out on the riverbanks doing everything possible to help. They got hold of long poles and big limbs and held them out over the current as far as they could, hoping maybe the people going by could reach them. They threw ropes, and at one point, one of them actually stripped off his coat and jumped into the water to save a mother and her small child.

He was a rugged, seventeen-year-old Pittsburgh boy named Bill Heppenstall, who was on his way back to school at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, after being home ill. A small house had lodged momentarily in some overhanging trees. The men heard a baby crying, but the house was too far out to reach. Heppenstall decided he would go in and get the child. The others tried to talk him out of it, but he got the bell cord out of one of the cars, tied it around him, and swam out to the house. In no time he was back with the child. There were great cheers from the crowd. But he then told them the mother was still back there and started into the water again, this time taking a railroad tie along with him to help hold her up. Just as he got her to shore the house tore loose from the trees and went spinning off downstream.

By the time it began getting dark, the operator at Sang Hollow had counted 119 people going by, dead and alive. Despite everything they had tried, the men on the riverbank had been able to rescue only seven.

About six o’clock Pitcairn ordered the train back down to New Florence. The water was still high, but it did not seem to be getting any higher. He had decided to take the passengers back to Pittsburgh, giving them the option to stop off at New Florence if there were any accommodations to be had.

But before leaving, Pitcairn got off a message to Pittsburgh. It was directed to the editors of the morning papers, and its exact wording remains unclear. But sometime between five thirty and six the news was out and on the wire. A dam had failed at South Fork and caused a disastrous flood at Johnstown. By then Pitcairn had faced up to the awful realization of what had gone wrong.

His train rolled ever so slowly back through the gorge, reaching New Florence by perhaps six thirty. The first thing he did there was to write out a still longer and more detailed message, which he then put aside, in the hope that some further word might come in from Johnstown itself. So for the next several hours they sat and waited. The rain hammered down outside; men kept coming in and out talking of more bodies found or the few half-drowned souls they had been able to drag ashore.

The village sat well back from the river, on high, dry ground. Only a few houses near the river were under water, and few citizens were suffering any serious discomforts. As a result the streets were filled with people going to and from the river, standing in doorways, talking to passengers from Pitcairn’s train, or gathered in groups looking at the dull, red glow in the sky to the east.

About ten o’clock Pitcairn received word from Johnstown by way of Sang Hollow. One of his men in Johnstown, a W. N. Hays, had managed to get from Johnstown to Sang Hollow on foot. Apparently he had been on the hillside above the west end of the bridge and was able to make his way down the tracks above the rampaging river. Once he reached Sang Hollow, the message was put on the wire to New Florence.

Pitcairn was told how things were at Johnstown, and he then sent a second message to Pittsburgh, which would be quoted in the papers there at some length. He reported the number of bodies that had been counted going by at Sang Hollow. He said there was no way clear to Johnstown, but that his information was that the city was “literally wiped out.” He said that the debris at the stone bridge was reported to be forty feet high and that it was burning.

Then he said, “I fear there will be terrible suffering among those saved which should be relieved as soon as possible. In the interest of humanity I think a public meeting should be called early tomorrow to send food, clothing, etc. to those poor people which we will be glad to forward to Johnstown…as soon as we can get a clear track there.”

This message, like the one before it, went right on the wire. Before midnight the story was across the country:

Pittsburgh, Penn. May 31—A rumor, loaded with horror, holds this city in dreadful expectancy tonight. It is said that the bursting of a reservoir, just above Johnstown, a flourishing place in Cambria County, had flooded the town and swept at least 200 of her citizens to death. The news is of a very uncertain character, there being no communication with the district were the flood is reported to have occurred, all the wires being down…There is no way to get to the scene of the disaster and full particulars are not expected tonight.

But the fact was that the rush to Johnstown had already begun hours before. Two trains had been chartered by five Pittsburgh newspapers, and the first of them, the one with the Dispatch and Times men on board, started out from Union Station a few minutes after seven. The second, chartered by the Post, the Commercial-Gazette, and the Chronicle-Telegraph, followed almost immediately after. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, in Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis, reporters picked up their hats and coats and went directly to the nearest depot, taking no time to pack or anything else. Some of them were still in evening clothes after a night at the theater.

The trains from Pittsburgh got no farther than Bolivar, where the men piled out into the rain and moved among the crowds gathered at the station and along the dark edge of the river. They picked up stories of the bodies and wreckage that had been washing past, about the few rescues that had been made, and the horrid things people had seen happen.

Not long before dark a man and two women had been seen rounding the bend upstream. They were on a raft of some sort, a barn roof most people thought it was, and they were coming on fast, the women down on their knees, the man with his arms around them and looking about for something to grab on to. That had been before the bridges went, and the men on the bridges had been hanging ropes down for the people in the river to get hold of. When the raft shot by under the first bridge, the man reached out for the rope but missed. Then he and the two women were heading for the second bridge, and everyone along the shore line was rooting for them as they watched him telling the women to try for the next rope. As they came under the second bridge, he made a lunge for the rope, got it, and was jerked violently off balance; but seeing that the women had missed, he let go and fell, back down on the raft again. The current then swept them toward the bank, where he was able to catch hold of a tree. With an immense effort he managed to pull the two women into the tree with him, but at almost the same instant a large section of the bridge upstream let go with a sudden crash. It came careening down the river, smashed into the tree, carried it away, and drowned the man and the two women.

Everyone in Bolivar had seen the whole thing and they wanted to tell exactly how it happened. Some people in the crowd said they knew the man and said his name was Young. Others said they thought the women looked like mother and daughter, and that they could be heard praying as they went by. The newspapermen wrote it all down, asking questions, taking names.

It was too dark to see much by the river, but the rush of the water could still be heard plain enough, and tiny, dim specks of light could be seen moving through the trees along the shore where men with lanterns were still watching for possible signs of life.

Johnstown was still twenty miles away. Among the newspapermen there was talk about what to do next. The tracks from Bolivar on were under water and not safe enough to take the train any farther. Most of the men decided to push on in the direction of New Florence, some by foot and some in wagons. The ride up from Pittsburgh had taken quite a long while, with conditions what they were. It was ten thirty when they had pulled into Bolivar. By the time they had slogged through the rain and dark to New Florence, it was getting on toward three in the morning.

Mud-spattered, dead-tired, cold, wringing-wet, they moved into whatever dry space there was left in the little town and began interviewing everyone who was willing to talk, which was just about everyone. Several of them got hold of wires to Pittsburgh and started filing their stories.

At that point about all they could say was that every sign was that “hundreds if not thousands” of people had been killed in “an appalling catastrophe.” They reported rumors of panic-stricken people fleeing through the woods from the scene of the disaster and of the number of people who had been seen going by in the river at New Florence (counts varied, but eighty-five seems about average). And they sent back what information they could pick up concerning the dam, a good deal of which was inaccurate. Several reporters had the dam 110 feet high and the lake as much as eight miles long and three miles wide. But they did have the name of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club by then, reported it accurately, and added that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s engineers had inspected the dam once a month, which suggests that Pitcairn was also, by then, doing some talking himself. “Investigations showed that nothing less than some convulsion of nature would tear the the barrier away and loosen the weapon of death,” one reporter put on the wire.

About four o’clock there was great excitement when a man from Johnstown, a carpenter named McCartney, and his wife came staggering out of the night. He said they had left Johnstown right after the flood struck and had been walking ever since. He told them there was hardly a building left standing in Johnstown, and, in general, substantiated the wildest of the rumors that had been circulating since the night began.

Sometime soon after four Pitcairn decided that there was no use staying in New Florence any longer. He boarded his private car, and with the passengers back on board again, his train started for Pittsburgh. It was also about the same time that several of the newspapermen decided that if the McCartneys could make it across the mountain on foot, they could too, and they set off through the woods. With luck, they figured, they could be on the hill above the city by daybreak.

VII

In the valley of death

It was nearly morning when the strange quiet began. Until then there had been almost no letup from the hideous sounds from below. Few people had been able to sleep, and several of the war veterans were saying it was the worst night they had ever been through.

But in the last chill hour before light, the valley seemed to hang suspended in an unearthly stillness, almost as unnerving in its way as everything else that had happened. And it was then, for the first time, that people began to realize that all those harsh, incessant noises which had been such a part of their lives—mill whistles screeching, wagons clattering over cobblestones, coal trains rumbling past day and night—had stopped, absolutely, every one of them.

About five the first dim shapes began emerging from the darkness. But even by six very little stood out in detail. There were no shadows, no clear edges to anything. Some survivors, years later, would swear it had been a bright, warm morning, with a spotless blue sky, which, after the night they had been through, it may well have seemed. But the fact is that though the rain had at last stopped, the weather on that morning of June 1 was nearly as foul as it had been the morning before. The valley looked smothered in a smoky gray film. The hills appeared to be made of some kind of soft, gray-green stuff and were just barely distinguishable from a damp, low sky that was the color of pewter. Odd patches of the valley were completely lost in low-hanging ribbons of mist, and the over-all visibility was reduced to perhaps a mile at best.

Still the view that morning would be etched sharply in the memories of everyone who took it in. Along the Frankstown Road on Green Hill some 3,000 people had gathered. On the rim of Prospect Hill and on the slopes above Kernville, Woodvale, and Cambria City the crowds were nearly as big. Chilled to the bone, hungry, many of them badly injured, hundreds without shoes or only partly clothed against the biting air, they huddled under dripping trees or stood along narrow footpaths ankle-deep in mud, straining their eyes to see and trying hard to understand.

Spread out below them was a vast sea of muck and rubble and filthy water. Nearly all of Johnstown had been destroyed. That it was even the same place was very difficult to comprehend.

There were still a few buildings standing where they had been. The Methodist Church and the B & O station, the schoolhouse on Adams Street, Alma Hall, and the Union Street School could be seen plain enough, right where they were meant to be. The Iron Company’s red-brick offices were still standing, as was Wood, Morrell & Company next door. But everywhere else there seemed nothing but bewildering desolation. The only immediately familiar parts of the landscape were the two rivers churning toward the stone bridge, both still swollen and full of debris.

From Woodvale to the bridge ran an unbroken swath of destruction that was a quarter of a mile wide in places and a good two miles long. From Locust Street over to the Little Conemaugh was open space now, an empty tract of mud, rock, and scattered wreckage, where before saloons, stores, hotels, and houses had been as thick as it had been possible to build them. Washington Street was gone except for the B & O station. Along Main, where a cluster of buildings and gutted houses still stood like a small, ravaged island, the wreckage was piled as high as the roofs of the houses.

At the eastern end of town all that remained between Jackson and Clinton was a piece of St. John’s Convent. At the corner of Jackson and Locust the blackened rafters of St. John’s Church were still smoking, and where the Quinn house had stood, fifty feet away, there was now only a jumble of rubbish.

Across the Stony Creek, Kernville had been swept clean for blocks. Virtually everything was gone, as though that whole section had been hosed down to the raw earth. The entire western end of town, near the Point, was now a broad, flooded wasteland. Every bridge was gone except the stone bridge and against it now lay a good part of what had been Johnstown in a gigantic blazing heap.

Below the stone bridge the ironworks, though still standing, looked all askew, with stacks toppled over and one of the biggest buildings caved in at the end as though it had been tramped on by an immense heel. Cambria City had been ravaged past recognition. At least two-thirds of the houses had been wiped out, and down the entire length of its main street a tremendous pile of mud and rock had been dumped.

With the light the first small groups of people who had survived the night down in the drowned city could be seen making their way across the debris, most of them heading for Green Hill, where dry ground could be reached without having to cross a river. From Alma Hall and the Union Street School they came in steady little batches, moving up and down over the incredible flotsam. Then, at the same time from Frankstown Road and other near hills, men started moving down into town. And as they came closer, the dim sweep of destruction began to take on a different look. Slowly things came into ever sharper focus.

The Morrell house could be seen with part of its side sheared off. Dr. Lowman’s house stood alone on the park, the only big house still there, but its two-story front porch had been squashed and every window punched in. Colonel Linton’s place on lower Main looked as though it had been blasted in two by dynamite, and the black span of an iron bridge was resting where the yard had been. Beyond, houses were dumped every which way, crushed, broken, split clean in half, or lying belly up in the mire, with their floor beams showing like the ribs of butchered animals.

Telephone poles, giant chunks of machinery, trees with all their bark shredded off, dead horses and pieces of dead horses, and countless human corpses were strewn everywhere. “Hands of the dead stuck out of the ruins. Dead everywhere you went, their arms stretched above their heads almost without exception—the last instinct of expiring humanity grasping at a straw,” wrote George Gibbs, one of the reporters from the Tribune.

And now, too, all the litter of thousands of lives could be seen in sharp detail. Shattered tables and chairs, tools, toys, account books, broken dishes, chamber pots and bicycle wheels, nail kegs, bedquilts, millions of planks and shingles were thrown up in grotesque heaps ten, twenty, thirty feet high, or lay gently shifting back and forth in huge pools of water that covered much of the valley floor like a brown soup.

“It were vain to undertake to tell the world how or what we felt, when shoeless, hatless, and many of us almost naked, some bruised and broken, we stood there and looked upon that scene of death and desolation,” David Beale wrote.

The flood and the night that had followed, for all their terror and destruction and suffering, had had a certain terrible majesty. Many people had thought it was Judgment Day, God’s time of anger come at last, the Day of Reckoning. They thought that the whole world was being destroyed and not just Johnstown. It had been the “horrible tempest,” with flood and fire “come as a destruction from the Almighty.” It had been awful, but it had been God Awful.

This that lay before them now in the dismal cold was just ugly and sordid and heartbreaking; and already it was beginning to smell.

Rescue parties got to work bringing the marooned down from rooftops and went searching among the wreckage for signs of life. Men scrambled over piles of debris to get to the upstairs windows of buildings that looked as though they might fall in at any minute. They crawled across slippery, cockeyed roofs to squeeze through attic windows or groped their way down dripping back hallways where the mud was over their boot tops. It was treacherous work and slow going. Walls were still falling in and fires were breaking out.

At the stone bridge, gangs of men and boys, many of whom had been there through the night, were still working to free people trapped alive within the burning pile. Young Victor Heiser, who had succeeded in reaching solid ground after his night in a Kerville attic, had made his way down the west bank of the Stony Creek as far as the bridge, where, as he wrote later, “I joined the rescue squads, and we struggled for hours trying to release them from this funeral pyre, but our efforts were tragically hampered by the lack of axes and other tools. We could not save them all. It was horrible to watch helplessly while people, many of whom I actually knew, were being devoured in the holocaust.”

Across the whole of the valley the dead were being found in increasing numbers. And as the morning passed, more and more people came down from the hillsides to look at the bodies, to search for missing husbands and children, or just to get their bearings, if possible. They slogged through the mud, asking after a six-year-old boy “about so high,” or a wife or a father. They picked their way through mountains of rubbish, trying to find a recognizable landmark to tell them where their house or store had been, or even a suggestion of the street where they had lived. Or they stood silently staring about, a numb, blank look on their faces. Over and over, later, when the day had passed, people would talk about how expressionless everyone had looked and how there had been so few people crying.

There was some shouting back and forth among the men. People who had been separated during the night would suddenly find one another. “What strange meetings there were,” wrote one man. “People who had hardly known each other before the flood embraced one another, while those who found relations rushed into each other’s arms and cried for very gladness that they were alive. All ordinary rules of decorum and differences of religion, politics and position were forgotten.”

Lone stragglers went poking about looking for only they knew what, many of them strangely clad in whatever odd bits of clothing they had been able to lay hands on. One man, hatless and with a woman’s red shawl across his shoulders, came limping along in his stocking feet, using a piece of lath for a cane. He was looking for his wife, Mrs. Brinker, who, as he would soon discover, had survived the night inside the Methodist parsonage and who had long since given him up for dead.

People recovered some pathetic belonging or other and carried it carefully back to high ground or began building little personal piles of salvage. There was no order to what went on, no organization, and not much sense. Most people were unable even to look after themselves; they were stunned, confused, trying, as much as anything, to grasp what had happened and what was left of their lives. Where they went from there was something they were not yet ready to think about. Many of them struck off into the country, with no special destination. They just kept walking for hours, looking for food or a dry place to lie down for the night, or, very often, just trying to put as many miles as possible between themselves and the devastated city. They were afraid of the place and wanted no more part of it.

The problems to be faced immediately were enormous and critical. People were ravenously hungry, most everyone having gone twenty-four hours or more without anything to eat, and now there was virtually no food anywhere. The few provisions uncovered among the ruins were nearly all unfit for eating, and what little else people had was given to the injured and to the children. Moreover, there was no water that anyone felt was safe to drink. Thousands were homeless, hundreds were severely injured. Mrs. John Geis, for example, little Gertrude Quinn’s grandmother, had had her scalp torn off from her forehead back to the nape of her neck. Hundreds of others were dazed by lack of sleep or in a state of shock. Dozens of people, as a result of exposure, were already in the early stages of pneumonia. There was almost no dry clothing to be had and no medicines.

People had no money, except what change they may have had in their pockets at the time the water struck, and even if they did, there were no stores left at which to buy anything. There was no gas or electric light. Fires were burning in a dozen different places, and no one knew when a gas main might explode. Every telegraph and telephone line to the outside world was down. Bridges were gone, roads impassable. The railroad had been destroyed. And with the dead lying about everywhere, plus hundreds of carcasses of drowned horses, cows, pigs, dogs, cats, birds, rats, the threat of a violent epidemic was very serious indeed.

But by noon things had begun to happen, if only in a small way. Rafts had been built to cross the rivers and to get over to those buildings still surrounded by water. People on the hillsides whose houses had escaped harm and farmers from miles out in the country began coming into town bringing food, water, and clothing. At the corner of Adams and Main milk was passed out in big tinfuls. Unclaimed children were looked after. A rope bridge had been strung across the Little Conemaugh near the depot, and, most important of all as it would turn out, up at the Haws Cement Works, on the hill at the western end of the stone bridge, several bedraggled-looking newspaper correspondents had established headquarters in a coal shed and were in the process of rigging their own wire down the river to Sang Hollow.

The men had reached Johnstown about seven in the morning, and like everyone else were cold, dirty, hollow-eyed from no sleep. There remains some question as to which of them arrived first, but William Connelly, who was the Associated Press correspondent in western Pennsylvania, Harry Orr, a telegraph operator for the A.P., and Claude Wetmore, a free-lance reporter working for the New York World, are generally given the credit. Others kept straggling in from New Florence through the rest of the day. But until nightfall the major stories were still being filed out of the little railroad crossing on the other side of Laurel Hill.

New Florence, Pa. June 1 bodies have been found on the shore near this town, two being on a tree where the tide had carried them. The country people are coming into the news centers in large numbers, telling stories of disaster along the river banks in sequestered places…The body of another woman has just been discovered in the river here. Only her foot was above the water. A rope was fastened about it and tied to a tree…R. B. Rogers, Justice of the Peace at Nineveh, has wired the Coroner at Greensburg that 100 bodies have been found at that place, and he asks what to do with them.

That afternoon, at three, a meeting was called in Johnstown to decide what ought to be done there. Every able-bodied man who could be rounded up crowded into the Adams Street schoolhouse. The first step, it was quickly agreed, was to elect a “dictator.” John Fulton was the obvious choice, but he was nowhere to be found, so it was assumed he was dead, which he was not. He had left town some days earlier and was at that moment, like hundreds of others, trying desperately to get to Johnstown.

The second choice was Arthur J. Moxham, a remarkable young Welshman who had moved to Johnstown a few years before to start a new business making steel rails for trolley-car lines. In the short time he had been there Moxham had about convinced everyone that he was the best newcomer to arrive in the valley since D. J. Morrell. His business had prospered rapidly, and it was earlier that spring that he had opened a sprawling new complex of mills up the Stony Creek beside the new town he had developed. He named the business the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company, after his lively young partner, Tom L. Johnson, who, in turn, had named the town Moxham. They paid their men regularly each week, in cash, and did not maintain a company store—all of which had had a marked impact on the town’s economic well-being and a good deal to do with their own popularity.

Both men were energetic, able executives. Both were already wealthy, and both, interestingly enough, were devout followers of the great economic reformer of the time, Henry George, and were equally well known in Johnstown for their impassioned oratory on George’s single-tax scheme.

Moxham was a fortunate choice. He took charge immediately and organized citizens’ committees to look after the most pressing and obvious problems. Morgues were to be established under the direction of the Reverends Beale and Chapman. Charles Zimmerman and Tom Johnson were put in charge of removing dead animals and wreckage. (That anyone could have even considered cleaning up the mess at that point is extraordinary, but apparently the work began right away, against all odds, against all reason. Trying to bail the rivers dry with buckets would have seemed not much more futile.)

Dr. Lowman and Dr. Matthews were responsible for establishing temporary hospitals. Captain Hart was to organize a police force. There was a committee for supplies and one for finance, to which George Swank and Cyrus Elder were assigned.

Captain Hart deputized some seventy-five men, most of whom were employees of the Johnson Company sent down from Moxham. They cut tin stars from tomato cans found in the wreckage, threw a cordon around the First National and Dibert banks, and, according to a report made days later, recovered some $6,000 in cash from trunks, valises, and bureau drawers lying about.

As dusk gathered, the search for the living as well as the dead went on in earnest. There seemed to be no one who was not missing some member of his family. James Quinn had already found little Gertrude, but he was still looking for his son Vincent, his sister-in-law and her infant son, and Libby Hipp, the nursegirl, though he had little hope of finding any of them except his son. That Gertrude was alive seemed almost beyond belief.

He and his other daughters had been luckier than most and had spent the night in a house on Green Hill. At daybreak he had been outside washing his face in a basin when his sister, Barbara Foster, came running up shouting that she had found Gertrude. She had seen her on the porch of the Metz house, still speechless with fright, still unidentified, and almost unrecognizable with her blonde hair tangled and matted with mud, her dark eyes quick with terror. Quinn at first found it impossible to accept what he heard, but started off at a run, the lather still on his face, and the other little girls running behind.

“When he came near the house,” Gertrude wrote later, “I saw him and recognized him at once. I fairly flew down the steps. Just as he put his foot on the first step, I landed on his knee and put both my arms around his neck while he embraced me.”

Quinn gathered up the child. They both began crying. A small crowd had assembled by now, on the porch and on the street below, and the scene caused several people to break down for perhaps the first time. Then there was a lot of handshaking and Quinn set off with his children to find his son.

Victor Heiser had spent most of the day searching for his mother and father, hoping against hope that somehow they had come through it all alive and in one piece. His own survival seemed such a miracle to him that he could not help feeling there was a chance they might be somewhere in the oncoming darkness looking for him.

At the bridge late in the afternoon an old man and his daughter were rescued from a house wedged among the burning wreckage. The old man made quite a reputation for himself when, on being helped down into a rowboat, he asked his rescuers, “Which one of you gentlemen would be good enough to give me a chew of tobacco?” And on the hillside a few hundred yards away two young ladies who had been stripped naked by the flood were found cowering in the bushes, where they had been hiding through the long day, too ashamed to venture out before dark.

Cyrus Elder’s wife and daughter were missing. Horace Rose did not learn until late in the afternoon that the two sons, Winter and Percy, from whom he had been separated during the flood were still alive, and that he was the only member of his large family who had even been injured.

His neighbor John Dibert had already been identified among the dead, as had Mrs. Fronheiser, whom Rose had last seen in her window next door. The bodies of Samuel Eldridge, one of the best-known policemen in town, and Elizabeth Bryan of Philadelphia, who had been on the Day Express, had also been found. But of the other dead found only a small number had as yet been identified for sure.

At the Adams Street schoolhouse and a saloon in Morrellville, where the first two emergency morgues had been opened, the bodies were piling up faster than they could be properly handled. They came in on planks, doors, anything that would serve as a stretcher, and with no wagons or horses as yet on hand, the work of carrying them through the mud and water was terribly difficult.

Each body was cleaned up as much as was possible, and any valuables found were put aside for safekeeping. Those in charge tried hard to maintain order, but people kept pushing in and out to look, and the confusion was terrific.

“We had no record books,” David Beale wrote, “not even paper, on which to make our records, and had to use with great economy that which we gathered amid the debris or happened to have in our pockets.”

One way or other the bodies were numbered and identified, whenever that was possible. Many were in ghastly condition, stripped of their clothes, badly cut, limbs torn off, battered, bloated, some already turning black. Others looked as though they had suffered hardly at all and, except for their wet, filthy clothes, appeared very much at peace.

A Harrisburg newspaperman named J. J. MacLaurin, who had been near Johnstown at the time the flood struck, described a visit to the Adams Street School early Saturday afternoon, where he counted fifty-three bodies stretched on boards along the tops of the desks. “Next to the entrance lay, in her damp clothing, the waiter-girl who had served my last dinner at the Hulbert House, with another of the dining room girls by her side.”

How many dead there were in all no one had any way of knowing, since there was, as yet, almost no communication between various parts of town. But wild estimates were everywhere by nightfall, and with more bodies being discovered wherever the wreckage had been pulled apart, it was generally agreed that the final count would run far into the thousands. Some were saying it would be as much as 10,000 by the time the losses were added up from South Fork to Johnstown, and few people found that at all hard to believe. What may have happened on down the river at Nineveh or New Florence or Bolivar was anyone’s guess.

Within another day the Pennsylvania station and the Presbyterian Church, a soap factory, a house in Kernville, the Millville School, and the Catholic Church in Cambria City would be converted into emergency morgues. But it would be a week before things got down to a system at these places, and not for months would there be a realistic count of the dead. Actually, there never would be an exact, final count, though it is certain that well over 2,000 people were killed, and 2,209 is generally accepted as the official total.

Hundreds of people who were lost would never be found. One out of every three bodies that was found would never be identified beyond what was put down in the morgue records. With all the anguish and turmoil of the first few days, such entries were at best a line or two.

Later, more care would be taken to be as explicit as possible.

In all, 663 bodies would be listed as unknown. A few were not identifiable because they had been decapitated. Close to a hundred had been burned beyond recognition, and some so badly that it was impossible even to tell what sex they had been. And many of the bodies found in late June or on into the summer and fall would be so decomposed as to be totally unrecognizable.

Part of the problem, too, was the fact that on the afternoon of May 31 Johnstown had had its usual share of strangers in town, nameless faces even when they had been alive, foreigners who had been living there only a short time, tramps, traveling men new to the territory, passengers on board any one of the several trains stalled along the line, countrypeople who had decided to stay over after Memorial Day. They made up a good part of the unknown dead, and doubtless many of them were among those who were never found at all.

Among the known dead were such very well-known figures as Dr. John Lee; Theodore Zimmerman, the lawyer; Squire Fisher, the Justice of the Peace, and his entire family; C. T. Schubert, editor of the German newspaper; and Ben Hoffman, the hackman, who, according to one account, “always got you to the depot in plenty of time” and whose voice was “as familiar as train whistle, iron works, or the clock bells.” (Hoffman had gone upstairs to take a nap shortly before the flood struck and was found with his socks in his pockets.)

The Reverend Alonzo Diller, the new rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, was dead, along with his wife and child. George Wagoner, who was a dentist as well as a part-time preacher, and so one of the best-known men in town, was dead, as were his wife and three daughters. Emil Young, the jeweler, was dead; Sam Lenhart, the harness dealer, was dead; Henry Goldenberg, the clothier, Arthur Benshoff, the bookseller, Christian Kempel, the undertaker, were all dead. Mrs. Hirst, the librarian, lay crushed beneath a heap of bricks, slate, and books that stood where the public library had been.

Vincent Quinn was dead, as were Abbie Geis, her child, and Libby Hipp. Mrs. Cyrus Elder and her daughter Nan, Hettie Ogle and her daughter Minnie were dead, and their bodies would never be identified. George and Mathilde Heiser were dead.

Ninety-nine whole families had been wiped out. Three hundred and ninety-six children aged ten years or less had been killed. Ninety-eight children lost both parents. One hundred and twenty-four women were left widows; 198 men lost their wives.

One woman, Mrs. John Fenn, wife of the tinsmith on Locust Street, lost her husband and seven children. Christ Fitzharris, the saloonkeeper, his wife, father, and eight children were all drowned. Charles Murr and six of his children went down with his cigar store on Washington Street; only his wife and one child survived. In a house owned by John Ryan on Washington Street, twenty-one people drowned, including a man named Gottfried Hoffman, his wife and nine children.

At “Morgue A,” the Adams Street schoolhouse, 301 bodies would be recorded in the logbooks. At the Presbyterian Church, which was “Morgue B,” there would be 92; at “Morgue C,” in the Millville schoolhouse, the total would come to 551 by the time the last entry was made (“Unknown”) on December 3. And along with the prominent merchants and doctors, the lawyers and preachers, there were hundreds of people with names like Allison, Burns, Evans, Shumaker, Llewellyn, and Hesselbein, Berkebile, Mayhew, McHugh, Miller, Lambreski, Rosensteel, Brown, Smith, and Jones. They made up most of the lists, and in the town directory that was to have been published that June they were entered as schoolteacher, porter, or drayman, clerk, miner, molder, barber, sawyer, dressmaker, or domestic. Dozens of them were listed as steelworker, or simply as laborer, and quite often as widow.

In that part of the valley through which the flood had passed, the population on the afternoon of the 31st had been approximately 23,000 people, which means that the flood killed just about one person out of every ten. In Johnstown proper, it killed about one out of nine.

But there were no statistics for anyone to go on that Saturday night. It would be weeks before even a reasonably accurate estimate would be made on the death toll. The business of finding the dead just went very slowly. Young Vincent Quinn’s body, for example, was not uncovered until June 7, buried beneath the wreckage in Jacob Zimmerman’s yard. Victor Heiser’s mother was found about the same time, her clothing still much intact, her body scarcely marked in any way; but the search for George Heiser went on for weeks after, and his body never was identified for certain. Toward the end of June a body was found which Victor was told was his father, but it was by then in such dreadful condition that he was not permitted to look at it.

In July there would be many days when ten to fifteen corpses would be uncovered. About thirty bodies would be found in August, including that of little Bessie Fronheiser; and so it would go on through the fall. In fact, for years to come bodies would keep turning up in and near the city. Two bodies would be found west of New Florence as late as 1906.

But by dark that Saturday only a small part of the dead had been accounted for, perhaps no more than 300 or 400, and only a very few had been buried. Most of the living found shelter well back from the city, on Prospect Hill or Green Hill, or on up the Stony Creek, where against the dark mountains tiny windows glowed like strings of orange lanterns. Or they walked to little towns like Brownstown, which was set in a high valley above Cambria City. Victor Heiser spent the next several nights there, along with more than 1,000 other refugees from the flood who were all housed, one way or other, by Brownstown’s fifty-three resident families.

Houses, barns, stables, schools, churches, every remaining upright structure for miles around was put into service. Crude tents were fashioned from blankets and bedspreads. Lean-tos were built of planks and doors dragged from the wreckage.

One man later described smelling the odor of ham frying as he walked along the front street on Prospect Hill, and how he was invited into a small house “filled with a strangely composed company.” There were two or three women who had been just recently rescued, and who were “pitiably pale, and with eyes ghastly at the flood horror.” There was the hostess, who carried an infant on one hip, “a divine, a physician, a lawyer, two or three merchants,” and several others. The dining room was too small to hold everyone, so they ate in shifts, waiting their turn out on the front porch. Below them, almost at their feet it seemed, lay the devastated valley.

The cold was nearly as cruel as it had been the night before. Pitch-blackness closed down over the mountainsides that crowded so close; but across the valley floor bonfires blazed, torches moved among the dark ruins, and the rivers and big pools of dead water were lighted by the fire that raged on at the stone bridge.

And with the deep night, for nearly everyone, came dreadful fear. There was the rational and quite justifiable fear of typhoid fever and of famine. It was entirely possible that a worse catastrophe than the flood itself could sweep the valley in a matter of days if help did not get through.

There were also rumors of thieves prowling through the night and of gangs of toughs who had come into the valley looking for trouble. Great quantities of whiskey were supposedly being found among the ruins, and drunken brawls were breaking out. People were warned to be on the lookout, that there would be looting and rape before the night was over; and men who had not slept since Thursday night took turns standing guard through the night, watching over their families or what little they may have had left of any earthly value.

Perhaps worst of all, however, was the wholly irrational fear of the very night itself and the nameless horrors it concealed. The valley was full of unburied dead; they were down there among the cold, vile remains of the city, waiting in the dark, and no one could get that idea out of his head for very long. If there were such a thing as ghosts, the night was full of them.

But despite it all, the hunger, the grief, the despair and fear, people gradually did what they had to; they slept. They put everything else out of their minds, for the moment, because they had to; and they slept.

Sunday the weather eased off. It was still cold, but the sky had cleared some, and for the first time in days it looked as though there would be no rain.

Sunday they began taking bodies across the Little Conemaugh in skiffs and carrying them to a plot on Prospect Hill where shallow graves were dug in the gravelly soil and the bodies buried without ceremony. (George Spangler, who had been night watchman at the First National Bank, wrote in his diary, “bisey holing the dead this day I hold 62 to the semitre.”) Sunday a post office was set up at the corner of Adams and Main, and a clearinghouse where everyone who was still alive was meant to come in and register his name and tell what he knew about the rest of his family. Sunday the first patients were cared for in a temporary hospital on Bedford Street. And on Sunday the first relief trains got through.

A train from Somerset came in on the B & O tracks about daybreak. The other train, from Pittsburgh, had arrived at Sang Hollow about ten thirty Saturday night but had been unable to get any closer. From Sang Hollow to Johnstown there was practically nothing left of the old line. There were at least ten miles along the Pennsylvania where it was impossible to tell even where the tracks had been, and several of those ten miles could be accounted for between Sang Hollow and Johnstown.

The lonely little Sang Hollow depot had become the scene of great activity Saturday night, from about eleven on. Several boxcars had been unloaded and volunteers organized to start moving things upriver by hand. “The men carried the provisions on their backs,” one participant wrote, “over landslides and the trackless roadbeds to points where handcars passed. All night long a procession of lights was moving to and fro from Sang Hollow to the stone bridge.”

By morning nearly two carloads of supplies had been deposited at the western end of the bridge and work had begun on a rope bridge to get them over the Conemaugh. But more remarkable still was the fact that early Sunday, perhaps as early as eight in the morning, the Pittsburgh train itself came steaming up the valley clear to the stone bridge. So swiftly had the railroad swung back into action during the night that by dawn enough new track had been put down from Sang Hollow to start the train cautiously on its way. And as it crept through the ruins of Morrellville and Cambria City, men standing in the open doors of the boxcars passed out bundles of bread, cheese, and crackers to the ragged crowds that lined the tracks.

The supplies had left Pittsburgh about four Saturday afternoon. Pittsburgh had been in a frenzy since early that morning. The Allegheny River had risen sharply during the night, and the riverbanks and bridges were lined with people watching the wreckage sweep past. Already there were rumors that dead bodies had been fished out. “A sense of intense uneasiness pervaded the air,” one man wrote.

There were still precious few facts to go on, but the papers were getting out a new edition every hour, and the news kept growing more and more alarming. Outside the newspaper offices, traffic was snarled by the crowds that pressed in to read the latest bulletins and kept calling for names.

At one o’clock a mass meeting was held at Pittsburgh’s Old City Hall, at which Robert Pitcairn stood up and spoke briefly about what he had seen. “Gentlemen,” he said in closing, “it is not tomorrow you want to act, but today; thousands of lives were lost in a moment, and the living need immediate help.” Then there was a call for contributions. At the front of the hall two men using both hands took in $48,116.70 in fifty minutes. “There was no speech making,” a reporter wrote, “no oratory but the eloquence of cash.”

Wagons were sent through the city to collect food and clothing. Union Station looked like wartime, swarming with people and with train after train being loaded in the yards. The first train went out with twenty cars full. On board were some eighty volunteers of the “Pittsburgh Relief Committee,” a dozen reporters, perhaps thirty police, and, according to one account, Mr. Durbin Home, a member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, who was on his way to find out what had happened to several friends and relatives who had not been heard from since they left for the lake on Memorial Day.

When the rope bridge was finally finished Sunday morning at Johnstown, the men started over with their heavy loads, swaying precariously above the raging river. They came across one at a time and very slowly. And for the next several days, until the stone bridge was open again, they would keep on coming almost without stop.

Later on Sunday several good-sized boats would be hauled up the valley by train and put into service crossing the river, taking men and supplies over and bringing refugees back. On Sunday the boats ferried some 3,000 passengers, coming and going. Monday, they carried 7,000, along with supplies and dead bodies.

Wagons loaded down with salt pork, bedding, goods of every kind, rolled down flood-gullied roads from Ebensburg and Loretto, splashing up showers of gummy mud the color of a new baseball glove. Doctors and work crews started off from Altoona, where it was reported 5,000 people were milling about the railroad station. In dozens of little towns along the Pennsylvania toward Pittsburgh, and back along the B & O toward Somerset, church bells were ringing and hundreds of people were coming in from the country with their donations; and all day, one after another, relief trains kept streaming through, many of them with “For the Johnstown Sufferers” scrawled in big letters on the boxcars. One train in by the Somerset line carried a whole shipment of tents sent by the governor of Ohio. Another Pittsburgh train, eleven cars long, carried nothing but coffins.

Some of the offerings that were mounting up in Johnstown created more than a little amusement. In their eagerness to help, some people had not bothered to think much about what would be needed. One nicely tied bundle opened Sunday afternoon contained a ball of carpet rags, a paper of tacks, two bags of salt, one baby’s shoe, and two darned stockings of different colors. A box of homemade liniment, with” warm before using” written on the side, was tossed out of one car. There was a package of worn-out schoolbooks, a Bible with several pages marked, some fancy needlework, even bits of bric-a-brac.

But almost everything else that came in, however shabby or trivial seeming, was immediately grabbed up and put to good use. A blue dress coat with bright brass buttons that looked every bit of seventy years old was presented to an equally ancient-looking Grubbtown man who wore it away with much pride. Children went shuffling off in shoes several sizes too big for them. Women gladly put on men’s coats and hats.

And as much as there was coming in, it was nowhere near enough. There were perhaps 27,000 people in the valley who had to be taken care of, who had to be supplied with every kind of basic necessity; and added to them were all those others streaming in to help.

By nightfall Sunday well over 1,000 people were in from out of town. Something like fifty undertakers had arrived from Pittsburgh. The railroad was bringing work crews in by the trainful. A Pittsburgh fire department had arrived and, remarkably enough, by midnight had just about extinguished the fire at the stone bridge. There was also present a rather stout Republican politician by the name of Daniel Hartman Hastings, the Adjutant General of the state, who, after looking the situation over since morning, had decided it was time the military took over.

A lawyer by profession, the general’s only military experience had been at Altoona during the strike of ’77. Saturday morning he had hitched up his team and driven nonstop from his home in Bellefonte, seventy miles to the northeast, arriving at Prospect Hill after dark. He had slept that night in the company of several tramps on the floor of the signal tower at the Pennsylvania station and managed to cross over to Johnstown first thing the next morning. He talked to Moxham and his committeemen about calling out the National Guard but was advised strenuously against it. Moxham thought it was important that the people handle their problems themselves; it would do more than anything else, he said, to help them get over their anxieties.

Later in the day, when a company of troops arrived from Pittsburgh, sent by the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Hastings told them to go back to where they had come from. They had received no proper orders to turn out, he said, and had no business being there. He gave the officer in charge a vigorous dressing down, and back they went.

But by nightfall another meeting was held with the local officials and it was agreed to draw up a formal request to the governor for troops. For by now it was clear to just about everyone that the job of running things had gone beyond what the Moxham “dictatorship” could cope with. In another two days Moxham would resign his authority altogether, and James B. Scott, head of the Pittsburgh Relief Committee, would take over as the civilian head.

Rumors of looting and drunken fist fights were now even more exaggerated than they had been the previous night, but now they were not totally unfounded. The Reverend Beale and others later testified to witnessing attempted thefts. On Prospect Hill there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of whiskey. One husky farm boy who had come down from Ebensburg with a load of provisions stayed long enough to get so drunk that he toppled off the hillside, rolled head over heels down the embankment, and fell into the Little Conemaugh, nearly drowning in minutes. “God only saved him,” his father said later, “and for something better we hope.”

Captain Hart’s police seemed unable to keep order, and if things were not troublesome enough as they were, one of his lieutenants, a much-respected local lawyer and sportsman named Chal Dick, went riding about on horseback brandishing a Winchester rifle and telling lurid stories about the Hungarians he had seen robbing the dead and how he had already shot a couple of them. The stories spread like wildfire, and with them went more fear and suspicion of any man who spoke with an accent or even looked slightly foreign. People talked of how Paris had been looted by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War, or harked back to tales of violence and evil doings in the old country at the time of the plagues.

And to make matters still worse, it was well known that even more people were on their way. Word was Sunday night that Booth and Flinn, the big Pittsburgh construction company, was sending 1,000 men the next day, and everyone had heard about the kind of riffraff Billy Flinn was known for hiring. He would pack them into freight cars like cattle and then turn them loose into Johnstown. Every last one of them would have to be fed and sheltered, and where was it all to come from? And who was there to police the place?

But what was not known, even as Hastings sent out his message to the governor, was just how many others were heading for the devastated city. For along with the Flinn crew there were thousands more coming—charity workers, doctors, preachers, men looking for work, smalltime crooks and pickpockets, drifters, farm hands, ladies of the W.C.T.U., former Johnstown people heading back to look for relatives, railroad officials, prostitutes, sight-seers.

From Pittsburgh Captain Bill Jones was on his way with three carloads of supplies and a small army of 300 men from the Edgar Thomson works, a number of whom had been with him in the old days at the Cambria mills. In Philadelphia pretty society girls were packing medical supplies and making ready to start off with relief units organized by half a dozen churches. Mr. H. C. Tarr of the Utopia Embalming Fluid Company of Brooklyn had already struck out for Johnstown and would wind up traveling nearly 200 miles by horseback before he got there. In Washington, Miss Clara Barton and her newly organized American Red Cross had boarded a special B & O train.

For, already, the Johnstown Flood had become the biggest news story since the murder of Abraham Lincoln. On Saturday night, quite late, the reporters camped inside the brickworks had finally gotten a line clear to Pittsburgh, and the words had been pouring out ever since. (“The awful catastrophe at Johnstown is by all odds the most stupendous fatality ever known in the history of this country….”)

The news had an effect that is difficult to imagine; by Sunday it was spread across the front page of virtually every paper in the country. On Saturday the papers had hedged on how many had been killed. The New York World had reported 1,500 lives lost; the Times had been even more cautious, saying only that hundreds were dead. But on Sunday the World headlines ran halfway down the page, and though they still had no firsthand facts to go on, the editors had decided to pull out all stops:

10,000 DEAD

Johnstown Blotted Out by the Flood

HALF ITS PEOPLE KILLED

Two Thousand Burned to Death in the Wreck

ALL APPROACHES CUT OFF

In Pittsburgh the Post-Gazette was selling its editions so fast that it had to reduce its page size temporarily in order not to run out of paper. Everywhere people were talking of little else and wanted to know more, much more; they wanted facts, names, details, pictures. And so along with all the others heading for Johnstown there came more reporters (perhaps a hundred or more), telegraph operators, editors, authors, artists, photographers.

The great rush to Johnstown, which had begun in Pittsburgh Friday night, was now under way full force. They came, thousands of them, from every station in life and from as far away as California, heading for a place very few of them had ever heard of two days earlier, driven by the most disparate motives imaginable.

VIII

“No pen can describe…”

–1–

Henry S. Brown of the Philadelphia Press had been sitting at his desk at eleven o’clock Friday night when the news first came in. At 11:25 he was on board a westbound train pulling out of the Broad Street Station, having taken no time to pack or, for that matter, to give much thought to just where it was he was going or what chance he had of getting there. At Harrisburg the train was delayed by floods along the Susquehanna, but Brown stayed on board when the conductor assured him everything would be cleared up in a few hours and that they would be moving on again. At dawn he was told things had changed rather drastically; nothing would be open west for two weeks.

Brown got hold of some maps and decided that if he could get a train to Chambersburg, fifty miles to the southwest, and could hire a team there, he might just be able to drive the rest of the way, which, according to the map, looked to be another hundred miles. He took the Cumberland Valley Railroad out of Harrisburg, but it was not until Sunday afternoon that he reached Chambersburg, located a double team, and started over the Tuscarora Mountain to McConnellsburg, twenty-two miles due west. Halfway over the mountain his wagon broke down, but he managed to borrow another from a farmer. At McConnellsburg he picked up another team and pushed on, along the Pennsylvania Pike (the old Forbes Road), heading for Juniata Crossing. From then on he splattered his way down washed-out roads, forded streams where bridges had been swept away, walked when he had to, crossed Sideling Hill in the dark, changed teams five more times, and never stopped to eat or rest. He reached Bedford about seven Monday morning and, finding no train there as he had expected, went whirling off once again, this time bound for Stoystown behind a pair of snow-white mules. Between Bedford and Stoystown, still traveling the state road, he managed to cross the Allegheny Mountain at a place where the elevation approaches 3,000 feet.

At Stoystown he would be able to pick up the B & O line from Somerset, but he arrived just in time to miss a relief train there; so rather than wait for another, he hired still one more team and headed on again, following the tortuous route of the raging Stony Creek down to Johnstown.

It was about seven thirty Monday night when he finally reached Johnstown, after having traveled the hundred miles from Chambersburg in about twenty-eight hours. No more than ten minutes later he was shaking hands with another correspondent by the name of F. Jennings Crute, also of the Press. Crute had left the Philadelphia office at the same time as Brown and had pulled into Johnstown only an hour before, having traveled about seven times as far as Brown. For instead of heading west on the Pennsylvania Friday night, Crute had made the whole trip by rail, first by heading east to New York, then going by way of Buffalo (on the Central) to Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

Brown and Crute went directly to work and, like the other reporters swarming over the place, were soon filing their stories from the brickworks above the stone bridge, which by now had become quite a center of operations. The Pittsburgh papers, the Times, the Press, the Dispatch, the Commercial-Gazette, and the Leader, were all represented. (In an old photograph taken at the end of the stone bridge on Sunday, a group of twenty-one Pittsburgh correspondents pose proudly beneath derby hats, several with cigar in hand, their dark vests crossed by heavy watch chains.) They had taken over two floors of one building, as well as a woodshed. The newcomers squeezed in where best they could, everyone working under tremendous difficulties. Those who had been there for more than twenty-four hours were unshaven, red-eyed, and near collapse from lack of sleep. They were using barrelheads, coffin lids, and shovel bottoms for writing desks, and the words they wrote were put on the wire as fast as was humanly possible.

The place became known as the “Lime Kiln Club” and rapidly gave rise to that special kind of fellowship-through-duress, which so often happens in war. “The culinary department,” one of the group wrote later, “was taken charge of by Tom Keenan of the Press. With an old coffee-pot taken from the debris at the bridge, some canned corned beef, a few boxes of crackers, a few quarts of condensed milk and a bag of unground coffee, he was soon enabled to get up a meal for his starving comrades which was the envy of those in the neighborhood who, while hungry, did not belong to the band of scribes, whom they looked upon as a lot of luxurious revellers.”

By late Monday the force of telegraph operators had increased enough to set up night and day shifts. Food became more plentiful, and the presence of the new men did much to boost spirits. The New York Sun reporters had come by the same roundabout route as F. Jennings Crute, while their rivals from the Herald, World, Times, and Tribune had gone more or less the way of Henry Brown. The correspondent of the Chicago Inter-Ocean walked up from Sang Hollow, as did several others, and every one of them was brimful of tales of his experiences.

The early arrivals at last got some sleep that night, there at the brickworks, while the newcomers found what accommodations they could elsewhere around town. Eight of them, including the Philadelphia men, wound up on the narrow first floor of the signal tower across the river. About midnight they were awakened by a man at the door saying, “Isn’t this terrible. Look at them, human beings, drowned like rats in their hole.” At which point one of the corpses sat bolt upright and said, “Get the hell out of here and let us sleep!”

But for all the boon companionship and oft-told stories, the hardships endured by “the gentlemen of the press” were considerable. Vile-smelling smoke from the still smoldering bridge blew through the windows of the old building where they worked. The floor was shaky and full of holes, and to enter the place in the dark of night was, as one man said, “to place one’s life in jeopardy.” John Ritenour of the Pittsburgh Post fell twenty feet, wedging between timbers and so severely injuring himself that he had to be sent home. Sam Kerr of the Leader fell off the top of a house lodged in the drift and would have drowned if one of his colleagues had not been on hand to pull him out. Clarence Bixby of the Post fell from the railroad bridge while trying to get across at one in the morning and was badly banged up. And several weeks later, F. Jennings Crute, worn down by lack of sleep and exposure, caught a cold that turned to pneumonia. On December 3 he died.

The competition between papers was friendly but fierce, with every man scrambling for an advantage. One of them, a William Henry Smith of the Associated Press, had actually been on board a section of the ill-fated Day Express and wrote a long, florid description of the experience. (“It was a race for life. There was seen the black head of the flood, now the monster Destruction, whose crest was raised high in the air, and with this in view even the weak found wings for their feet.”) But for the rest it was a matter of finding out what was happening amid the chaos around them, and as of Monday night there was plenty happening.

The city itself was still the most overpowering spectacle. (“It is a scene that blanches the faces of strong men, and in its multiplying horror is almost beyond description,” wrote a reporter for the New York Daily Graphic.) The weather had turned dull and cold again, which was unpleasant but welcome news as far as the doctors and sanitation workers were concerned. This way the dead would not decay quite so fast.

Bonfires by the hundreds were blazing across the valley where the ungainly and by now putrid carcasses of drowned horses were being cremated. The stench everywhere was terrible, of burned plaster and sodden bedding, of oil-soaked muck, of water thick with every kind of filth, and, worst of all, of still unfound bodies. The correspondents wrote of negotiating the rope bridge over the Conemaugh (“A slide, a series of frightful tosses from side to side, a run, and you have crossed…”) and of the curious things to be found once in town (“In the midst of the wreck a clothing store dummy, with a hand in the position of beckoning to a person, stands erect and uninjured.”). They interviewed bystanders (“‘I have visited Johnstown a dozen times a year for a long time,’ said a businessman to-day, ‘and I know it thoroughly, but I haven’t the least idea now of what part of it this is. I can’t even tell the direction the streets used to run.’”); and they quoted General Hastings as saying that there were 8,000 people dead. (“Nobody thinks this too small,” the Sun reporter added. “Nobody who has been about here an hour would think anything too awful to be possible.”)

Sunday night four enormous relief trains had rolled in below the bridge. Monday Billy Flinn brought in 280 teams of horses and 1,300 men. (“Very few Americans among them,” wrote one reporter.) Mrs. Lew Wallace, wife of the war hero and novelist, was reported missing from the Day Express. (She had actually taken another train and was safe in Altoona.) John Fulton and Colonel John Linton were both mistakenly reported dead (Fulton was reported “positively drowned”), and James McMillan, vice-president of Cambria Iron, was asked when work would start on rebuilding the mills, to which he answered, “Immediately.” There was talk of dynamiting the wreckage at the stone bridge, and there was a strong plea from the doctors and the sanitation officials from Pittsburgh to let it burn. The smell of burning flesh among the wreckage was something awful (“People in New York who remember the smell of the ruins of the Belt Line stables, after their destruction by fire…know what the odor is.”), but fire would cut the odds against a typhus outbreak, and throughout the valley and on downriver, clear to Pittsburgh, typhus had become an overriding concern.

In Pittsburgh the papers urged everyone to boil his water. From Nineveh, where nearly a hundred bodies had been recovered, Dr. Benjamin Lee, head of the Pennsylvania Board of Health, sent a message to the sheriffs of the four counties between Johnstown and Pittsburgh:

The State Board of Health hereby directs and empowers you to immediately summon a posse to patrol the Conemaugh river, tear down the drift heaps and remove the dead bodies, both human beings and domestic animals. This is absolutely necessary to protect your county from pestilence.

The wreckage at the bridge was described in detail, with some saying it covered thirty acres, others claiming it was more like sixty. (It was about halfway in between.) “I stood on the stone bridge at 6 o’clock,” wrote a Sun reporter Monday, “and looked into the seething mass of ruin below me. At one place the blackened body of a babe was seen; in another 14 skulls could be counted…At this time the smoke was still rising to the height of 50 feet…” On Wednesday, June 5, a little boy named Eddie Schoefler would be found still alive amid the wreckage. It would be one of the momentous events of the week.

Then, from Sunday on, there had been increased tension over the Hungarians, which was something quite colorful indeed to write about. Thanks to Chal Dick and, by now, many others, tales of “foul deeds” perpetrated by the “fiendish Huns” were rampant, and only a few reporters bothered to try to check them out. Story after story went on the wire describing how “ghouls, more like wild beasts” were slicing off fingers for gold wedding bands, and how angry Johnstown vigilantes were hunting them down. One account described how a woman’s body had been decapitated in order to steal her necklace. The Post told how gangs of Hungarians tried to raid unguarded freight cars for food and clothes. Another report said that a Hungarian had been caught in the act of blowing up a safe in the First National Bank. The Daily Graphic described how a crowd cornered a Hungarian at his “fiendish work” and strung him up on a lamppost.

This sample of the over-all tone and content of the reports was written late Sunday:

Last night a party of thirteen Hungarians were noticed stealthily picking their way along the banks of the Conemaugh toward Sang Hollow. Suspicious of their purpose, several farmers armed themselves and started in pursuit. Soon their most horrible fears were realized. The Hungarians were out for plunder. They came upon the dead and mangled body of a woman, lying upon the shore, upon whose person there were a number of trinkets of jewelry and two diamond rings. In their eagerness to secure the plunder, the Hungarians got into a squabble, during which one of the number severed the finger upon which were the rings, and started on a run with his fearful prize. The revolting nature of the deed so wrought upon the pursuing farmers, who by this time were close at hand, that they gave immediate chase. Some of the Hungarians showed fight, but, being outnumbered, were compelled to flee for their lives. Nine of the brutes escaped, but four were literally driven into the surging river and to their death. The thief who took the rings was among the number of the involuntary suicides.

The “thugs and thieves in unclean hordes,” as one writer described them, were nearly always Hungarians, though there was at least one report of two Negroes being shot at by Pittsburgh police when seen robbing a dead body, and there were a few references to “the worthless Poles.”

Such accounts were given a great deal of space by all but a few of the big eastern papers and were featured prominently in the headlines. (“FIENDS IN HUMAN FORM” ran the New York Herald headline on Monday. “DRUNKEN HUNGARIANS, DANCING, SINGING, CURSING AND FIGHTING AMID THE RUINS.”) Lurid illustrations were published, drawn by artists who had only the reporters’ stories to go by. One scene showed two bodies dangling from a telephone pole near the riverbank, while in the foreground a “wild-eyed” Hungarian, who looks much like a touring company Fagin, is held at bay, knee-deep in water, by a stalwart gentleman with a horse pistol who could very well be Robert E. Lee.

They were stories which had great appeal to anyone ready to believe in the darker side of humanity and particularly that segment of humanity which spoke with a thick accent, smelled of garlic, and worked cheap. The only trouble was that there was scarcely any truth to the stories, as several correspondents had already begun to suspect. At four Monday afternoon Alfred Reed of the World cabled his editors:

NO LYNCHINGS. I WARNED YOU LAST NIGHT NOT TO PRINT WILD RUMORS, AND AM GLAD TO HEAR YOU HAD ENOUGH CONFIDENCE IN ME TO HOLD OUT SUCH STORIES.

The next day an angry General Hastings issued a statement that reports of lynchings and rioting were “utterly devoid of truth,” sharply criticized the newspapers for publishing them, and suggested that the reporters stick to the facts.

Several characters had indeed been caught trying to pilfer the dead and had received some rather rough treatment, including, it appears, enough mock preparations for a lynching to put a terrific scare into one of them; and it is quite possible that a few fingers may have been mutilated by thieves trying to wrench off gold wedding bands. But there were certainly no diamond rings stolen (one survivor doubted that there were more than one or two diamond rings in all Johnstown at that time), no bank safes were blown, and, as David Beale wrote later, no fingers were cut off by human ghouls. Furthermore, the Hungarians themselves apparently had almost nothing to do with what foul doings there were. “There was little stealing done by the Hungarians,” Beale wrote, “and most accounts of outrages attributed to these people were apocryphal; and I am glad to say that all statements of shooting and hanging them were without foundation.” And to emphasize the validity of this last statement, he said his source was Chal Dick himself.

Dick, it seems, had gone slightly out of his head immediately after the disaster and had been suffering from vivid and vicious delusions. His wife and children had been killed and he simply went berserk for about a day or so. By the time he snapped out of it, the damage had been done, and from then on the stories were spread, according to the best evidence, largely by outsiders who had come into the valley.

For though there may have been relatively little resentment in Johnstown against the Hungarians (or the other Southern European peoples called Hungarians), in Pittsburgh feelings were different. The steel bosses, like Henry Clay Frick, had been bringing them in by the thousands to work in Braddock and Homestead. They were single men mostly, willing to work for the lowest wages, and under the worst conditions, just to save enough to go back home and buy a small farm on the Danube. They got the toughest jobs, worked hard, and were generally hated by the Irish, the German, and American workers. Years later, John Fitch, the historian, interviewed an old Scotch-Irish furnace boss in Pittsburgh about the “hunkies.”

“They don’t seem like men to me hardly,” he said. “They can’t talk United States. You tell them something and they just look and say, ‘Me no fustay, me no fustay,’ that’s all you can get out of ’em.” When wages were going down, when men were let go at the mills, when the unions suffered setbacks, somehow the Hungarians seemed at the root of things.

The few Hungarians there were in Johnstown (perhaps 500 of them were living in the valley at the time of the flood) were subjected to days of abuse. Speaking little English, fearful and suspicious even under normal circumstances, they now became so terrified of the angry crowds that hung outside their homes that they dared not go out even to collect their share of the relief provisions. Their children were starving; the men grew desperate. At one point about twenty of them were encouraged to come out to help dig graves in the cemetery above Minersville. After working all day, on their way back home in the dark, they were set upon by a gang armed with clubs and were badly beaten.

But by midweek the Hungarian scare was over. There were still rumors, but papers like the Philadelphia Press were saying, “There is not an inch of truth in them,” and nearly everyone in Johnstown knew that that was so. While in Chicago the Herald wrote that the “Magyars” there were “justly indignant” over the stories, and tried to resolve the whole unfortunate business by adding, “The wretches who now prey upon the dead at Johnstown and refuse to aid in the work of rescue, are undoubtedly Bulgarians, Wallachs, Moldavians, and Tartars, classes degraded in all their manners as is the North American Indian….”

Sometime Monday Colonel Unger came into town from South Fork, accompanied by the Shea brothers, John Parke, and one or two other employees of the fishing and hunting club. Understandably, the press was most interested in talking to them.

Unger gave the Pittsburgh Post a brief rundown on what had happened at the dam Friday morning and how he and his men had tried to prevent the disaster. He estimated that the loss to the club was about $150,000 and said that the club members who had been at the lake were all safe and that they had gone off to Altoona.

Parke seemed more interested in getting word to his people in Philadelphia that he was alive and in good health, but was quoted by the New York Sun, “No blame can be attached to anyone for this greatest of horrors. It was a calamity that could not be avoided.” He said the fault was “storm after storm” and that “by twelve o’clock everybody in the Conemaugh region did know or should have known of their danger.”

But an employee by the name of Herbert Webber, who must have been interviewed separately, launched into a long description of the dam the morning before it failed. He told the reporters that at around eleven he had been attending to a camp a mile back from the dam when he noticed that the surface of the lake seemed to be lowering. He could not quite believe what he saw, he said, so he went down and made a mark on the shore, and sure enough he found his suspicions were well founded. For days before, he went on, he had seen water shooting out between the rocks on the front of the dam, so that the face “resembled a large watering pot.” The force of the water was so great “that one of these jets squirted full thirty feet horizontally from the stone wall.” When he ran up to the dam that morning, he declared, he saw the water of the lake “welling out from beneath the foundation stones.”

The story was preposterous, of course, and had no connection with what actually happened, but the reporters had no way of knowing that. The watering-can image made splendid copy, so out it went, along with everything else.

But by this time at least one enterprising reporter had already made his way to the club. In Pittsburgh that Monday the headline across the front of the Post read: “TO THE DAM AT LAST.” The story had been sent out at nine the night before and said, as Unger had, that the Pittsburgh people were safe and, as Parke had, that warnings had been sent down the valley before the break. In another two days more reporters would show up at South Fork. They would begin looking over the construction of the dam itself and start questioning the local people about the club. South Fork would shortly become the center of a stormy series of events, but for now Johnstown remained the major focus of attention.

One survivor after another was interviewed and dozens of frightful personal experiences were penciled into reporters’ notebooks. The heroism of Bill Heppenstall (Hepenthal several papers spelled it), the adventures of Gertrude Quinn, and John Hess’s ride into East Conemaugh were described at length.

Numerous stories were collected of ironic or incredible things that happened. All of Johnstown’s three or four blind people had survived the flood. Frank Benford’s dun-colored mare was found in an alley next to where the Hulbert House had been, up to her belly in debris, alive, but blinded in both eyes. Old Mrs. Levergood, widow of Jacob Levergood, whose father had owned the town way back in the early days, was found dead, all the way up at Sandy Vale, still seated in her rocking chair.

Then there was the story about the engineer at the Cambria works who early in the afternoon of that fateful Friday had started a letter to an old college friend, “Thank God, I am through with a day such as I hope never to pass again.” A “gay girl” of the town was said to have jumped from a hotel window during the very worst of the flood in a fatal effort to save a drowning child. There was a Newfoundland dog that supposedly hauled a Woodvale woman to safety and then swam back to save a drowning baby. And another dog, a water spaniel named Romeo, was said to have towed his mistress, Mrs. Charles Kress, to the windows of Alma Hall. And just above the hideous pileup at the stone bridge, on a billboard at the depot, there was a large poster, undamaged by the flood, which several reporters made a point of mentioning. Put there a few days before the flood to announce the arrival of Augustin Daly’s A Night Off, its very large headline read, “Intensely Funny.”

Among the best pieces describing the human condition in Johnstown during these days were several by a late-arriving cub reporter for the Philadelphia Press whose name was Richard Harding Davis. The son of two prominent Philadelphia literary figures, he was strikingly handsome, twenty-five, elegant, aloof, and loving every minute of his first real assignment. At Lehigh he had been the most popular figure on campus, despite what one of his classmates described as his “strict adherence to everything English in the way of dress and manner.” His first job had been on the Philadelphia Record where he sported a long, yellow ulster, carried a cane, and was rather hard for the old newspapermen to swallow. As it was, he only lasted three months. He was caught one day by the city editor writing up an assignment with his kid gloves on and was promptly fired on the spot.

But with the Press he had fared better. He had sold a few short stories, interviewed Walt Whitman, and sent some samples of his work off to Robert Louis Stevenson with a request for advice. Stevenson advised writing “with considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models.” The slowness Davis would never quite master, nor would he try really; and the only ambitious model he ever seems to have set his sights on was his own very clear picture of himself as the world’s most dashing and celebrated foreign correspondent.

At the time the Johnstown story broke, Davis had been on vacation. It took several days for him to persuade the paper to send him, and when he finally arrived, he got off to a characteristic start. “A Philadelphia reporter was sent here to finish up the disaster, but the disaster is likely to finish him,” wrote The New York Times man. On alighting from his train, Davis “paralysed Newspaper row” by asking for the nearest restaurant. When it was explained that everyone had to forage on the country, Davis wanted to know where he could hire a horse and buggy, which set off another round of laughter. “But,” concluded the Times man, “he capped the climax by asking where he could buy a white shirt. A boiled shirt here is as rare as mince pie in Africa.”

Boiled shirt or no, he went to work, concentrating on human-interest stories. He wrote of walking over thousands of spilled cigars and of a pretty, young relief worker named Miss Hinkley of Philadelphia who was

…sitting busily writing at a table beside an open window which looked out on the yard of the morgue, and in which forty odd coffins filled with the dead were being examined by the living. Miss Hinkley’s hair was as carefully arranged and her tailor-made gown as neat and fresh as if she had stepped that moment from the Quaker City’s Rittenhouse Square. Reporters became painfully conscious of clothes that have been slept in for seven nights, and chins that had forgotten razors.

He wrote about a fist fight down in Cambria City between a local deputy sheriff and a drunken National Guard lieutenant named Jackson, who was put under arrest and sent back to Pittsburgh after several bystanders, including Davis, stepped in to break things up. He described the offers coming in from people all over the country who wished to adopt a Johnstown orphan, and told the story of a man named John McKee, whose body had been found inside a cell of the town jail. McKee had been locked up for twenty-four hours for overcelebrating on Memorial Day.

And along with the reporters, working their way among the ruins, came the photographers, lugging their ponderous, fragile equipment. They made pictures of men standing on freight cars in the midst of Main Street, of wagons loaded down with coffins, and of the great barren mud flat where Woodvale had been. The monstrous debris that clogged the city was pictured from virtually every angle, and at least one photographer decided to improve slightly on his composition by having a man lie down and play dead in the foreground. The picture later became one of the most popular stereoptican views of the disaster. But by the time the photographers were about, any body so exposed would have been long since found and removed; moreover, the shirt on the man’s back looks a bit too neat and clean and the things around him are a little too nicely arranged.

Upturned houses, gangs of laborers carrying shovels and axes and threading their way through huge dunes of rubbish, like a drab, derby-hatted army moving through the remains of a fallen city, the jerry-built shelters on the hillsides, farm women in poke bonnets working at the commissaries, they all made splendid subjects. But the most popular subject by far was a house owned by John Schultz which had stood on Union Street but was now stranded at the east end of Main. It had been pitched up on its side, and through an upstairs window a gigantic tree had been driven, its roots jutting thirty feet into the air. The building looked as though it had been skewered by some terrible oak-flinging god. One by one men and boys would crawl out on the tree to sit for a portrait, their faces registering no emotion, their feet dangling in light that had little more color than it would have in the final printed photograph. Six people had been in the house when the water struck, and they had all come out alive.

At one point it was estimated that there were no less than 200 amateur photographers about town, enough in any case that they had become a serious nuisance. So the word went around that if you were an able-bodied man but had no official business in town, then you had to work if you wanted to stay on. It was, as one observer said, a policy which had a “most salutary effect.”

Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s, and some of the other picture magazines had sent artists to cover the story. There were two or three writers gathering material for quick books. And in New York the World even managed to get Walt Whitman, who had celebrated his seventieth birthday on the day of the flood, to write a poem which was promptly printed on page one.

A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power,

With sudden, indescribable blow—towns drown’d—humanity by thousands slain,

The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron bridge.

Dash’d pell-mell by the blow—yet usher’d life continuing on,…

And in the Denver, Boston, and Brooklyn papers, long excerpts were published from a novel called Put Yourself in His Place, which had been written by a well-known English author named Charles Reade nearly twenty years before. Its closing chapters described the bursting of a reservoir and a dreadful flood which were surprisingly similar to what had happened at Johnstown.

Reade had based his book on the failure of the Dale Dyke at Sheffield, England, which had taken 238 lives in 1864; but for the millions of Americans who now read the excerpts, the “Hillsborough” of his story, with its steel mills and coal mines “fringed by fair woods,” and its reservoir in the mountains to the east, seemed so like Johnstown as to be uncanny. The story told of people dreaming of floods, of workmen who had long “misliked” the foundation of the dam. When the break came, it was only after a storm had raised the level of the lake so far that it started flowing over the center of the dam. Then down the valley came “an avalanche of water, whirling great trees up by the roots, and sweeping huge rocks away, and driving them, like corks, for miles.”

Meanwhile, the headlines blared away, day after day. “Agony”…“WOE!”…“PESTILENCE!”…and by midweek, “DEATH GROWS—A GIANT! One Pervading Presence Throughout the Conemaugh Valley, FIFTEEN THOUSAND CORPSES, A Tale of Grief That Can Only Be Told in Bitter Tears, Another Day of Utter Despair.”

The phrase “no pen can describe…” kept cropping up again and again, but the pens kept right on describing. The story took up the entire front page of both The New York Times and the World for five straight days. The Boston Post carried little else on its front page for twelve days running. It was called “The Great Calamity,” “The Nation’s Greatest Calamity,” “The Historic Catastrophe.” Frank Leslie’s said outright, “It is the most extraordinary calamity of the age.” Great battles had destroyed more life, said one writer after another, but no battle left such a ghastly trail of horror and devastation. That such a thing had happened in the United States of America in the year 1889 seemed almost more than the editorial writers could accept. Several papers, including Frank Leslie’s, allowed that similar slaughter might occur in India or China or other remote lands “where human life is cheap,” but how in the world had it ever happened here?

All over the country newspapers published column after column of names of the dead. An extraordinary amount of space was given over to telling of the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” The bodies of women and children found among the wreckage or in the deep, flood-dumped silt downstream were described in grim detail. Every reporter at Johnstown it seems saw at least one dead mother still clutching her dead child, and much was made of the fact that more women died in the disaster than men. (Of the bodies finally recovered 923 were men, 1,219 women.)

Victorian sentimentality had a heyday. The most pathetic-looking “Johnstown orphans” imaginable were drawn by New York artists and published beside long accounts of lost children. There were stories published of families tenderly bidding each other a final good-by just as the flood was about to pounce on them and of people tucking farewell notes into bottles before they slipped beneath the water for the last time.

One publisher, Kurz & Allison of Chicago, eventually got out a color lithograph which became one of the popular works of art of the age. In the upper right-hand corner a dam bursts almost directly on top of a Johnstown where all the women and children are bare-foot and many are in their night clothes at four in the afternoon. The women are fainting, falling, down on their knees praying, while the men, most of whom are amply clothed and shod, dash about trying bravely to contend with the rush of fire and water.

The newspapers, too, went very heavy on the horrors to be seen among the ruins of Johnstown, sometimes stretching the art nearly to the breaking point. This memorable sample, written at Johnstown on Wednesday, June 5, appeared the following day in the Philadelphia Press:

…One of the most ghastly and nauseous sights to those unaccustomed to scenes of death is the lunching arrangement for the undertakers. These men are working so hard that they have no time for meals, and huge boilers of steaming coffee, loaves of bread, dried beef and preserves are carried into the charnel house and placed at the disposal of the workers. Along comes one weary toiler, his sleeves rolled up, and apron in front and perspiring profusely despite the cold, damp weather. He has just finished washing a clammy corpse, has daubed it with cold water, manipulated it about on the boards and in the interval before the body of another poor wretch is brought in, gets a cup of coffee and a sandwich. With dripping hands he eats his lunch with relish, setting his cup occasionally beside the hideous face of a decomposing corpse and totally oblivious to his horrible surroundings.

Whatever the reporters may have lacked in the way of facts, they made up for in imagination. Distortions, wild exaggerations, and outright nonsense were published in just about every major paper in the country. One reporter described buzzards (“incited by their disgusting instinct”) circling over the stone bridge; another claimed the rivers were literally dammed with dead bodies. There were tales of wild dogs ravaging the graves of flood victims and devouring corpses by the dozens. Indianapolis readers were told that “each blackened beam hides a skull.”

There seems little doubt that there was plenty of drinking going on, but one writer for the New York World had men staggering about with whole pailfuls of whiskey. (“Barrels of the stuff are constantly located among the drifts, and men are scrambling over each other and fighting like wild beasts in their mad search for it.”) A large family was pictured sailing by during the height of the flood singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” in harmony. And of those stories emphasizing the pitiful fate of the innocent, perhaps the most imaginative was one filed from New Florence. A bride from Johnstown (she was supposedly married just before the flood) was quoted: “Today they took five little children out of the water, who had been playing ‘Ring around a rosy.’ Their hands were clasped in a clasp which even death did not loosen, and their faces were still smiling.”

But the most splendid story of the lot was one about a man named Daniel Peyton, the so-called “Paul Revere of the Flood,” who was said to have galloped down the valley on a big bay warning everyone to run for the hills. Peyton (in some versions he is Periton) seems to have evolved out of young John Baker of South Fork and John Parke, Jr. He can also be traced to Charles Reade’s Put Yourself in His Place, where a rider sped through the night warning isolated farm families that the water was on the way. In most versions of the Peyton story, including the best-known of several epic poems, The Man Who Rode to Conemaugh, by John Eliot Bowen, which was published first in Harper’s Weekly, the hero gallops the length of the valley just ahead of the onrushing wave. (The fact that there was no valley road on which to make such a ride never seemed to bother any of the authors very much.) Pale, his eyes aflame, he cries out “Run for your lives to the hills!”—then dashes on.

Spurring his horse, whose reeking side

Was flecked with foam as red as flame.

Wither he goes and whence he came

Nobody knows. They see his horse

Plunging on his frantic course,

Veins distended and nostrils wide,

Fired and frenzied at such a ride.

Nobody pays any attention to him. They decide he is a lunatic and jokingly dismiss the whole thing.

“He thinks he can scare us,” said one with a laugh,

“But Conemaugh folks don’t swallow no chaff;

’Taint nothing, I’ll bet, but the same old leak

In the dam above the South Fork Creek.”

In one version published as a Sunday-school lesson in 1891, the messenger goes into a saloon to spread the warning and winds up getting so drunk he can go no farther. But in either prose or poetry, in the end the flood finally catches up with poor Peyton, and nowhere is the moment more superbly described than in a book titled The Official History of the Johnstown Flood, which was put together that June by two Pittsburgh newspapermen named Frank Connelly and George C. Jenks. Peyton, in their “official” account, is about thirty years of age, and though he does not come clear from South Fork, but sticks only to the streets of Johnstown (Connelly and Jenks apparently felt they could not quite get away with the valley ride), his message and manner are essentially the same, and his end comes this way:

…At last he completed the circuit of the city and started in search of a place of safety for himself. To the hills he urged his noble steed. Tired out from its awful ride, the animal became slower and slower at every stride, while the water continued to come faster and faster in pursuit. Like an assassin upon the trail of his victim, it gained step by step upon the intrepid rider. But the hills are in sight. No, he is doomed, for at that moment a mighty wave, blacker and angrier than the rest, overtook horse and rider and drew both back into the outstretched arms of death.

As the Reverend David Beale wrote, “This fate was very necessary to the story, as it rendered an interview of the hero by another impossible.”

Though the story appeared in a dozen or more different versions and was accepted outright as fact, it was quickly discredited in Johnstown. For there seemed to be no one who actually saw this Daniel Peyton. Furthermore, as near as anyone knew, and according to every available record, there never was anyone by that name in South Fork, Johnstown, or any other place in the valley. Victor Heiser and some of his friends got so interested in the tale that they spent some time trying to track it down. If there were such a fellow, they wanted to meet him; and if he had been killed as people said he had, then they surely wanted to see him get the credit he had coming. But they never turned up anything, nor did anyone else.

Still, with all the stretching of facts, with all the fabrication and bunk being printed, no one seemed to mind very much. If the horror of what had happened was not described exactly according to facts, people knew that what had happened was still a great deal worse than any words could convey, however accurate. And if a few small fables had been called up for the occasion, well they were really no more extraordinary than a dozen other stories that were “the God’s truth.”

For the publishers it was one of the headiest weeks ever. Newspaper circulations broke all records. For days on end, one edition after another sold out almost as soon as it hit the streets. The New York Daily Graphic was selling an unheard of 75,000 copies a day. In Pittsburgh there seemed no letup to the clamor for more news. A new weekly picture newspaper called the Utica Saturday Globe, published in upstate New York but widely circulated, increased its circulation by better than 63,000 with its special addition on the disaster.

Songs were written, including one called “Her Last Message,” which was more or less based on Hettie Ogle, and another called “That Valley of Tears,” which was about a baby who was swept from the hearthside and drowned in its cradle. The last one, arranged for piano and orchestra, closed with the lines:

And there midst all that wreck, with cruel waters laved,

That babe within its cradle bed tho’ dead ’tis saved;

Saved from a life of toil and worldly care,

Oh! That we could in thy glorious prospects share.

Magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper got out special editions filled with pages of pictures and maps. Books were dashed off in a few weeks and rushed to the printers. Before the year was out, in less than six months, a dozen books would be written and published, most of them little more than an assembly of newspaper accounts, full of repetition, contradictions, and abundant nonsense. Several became best-sellers. One, a rousing period piece called The Johnstown Horror, was on sale in Johnstown itself in less than a month after the tragedy.

–2–

For Johnstown the result of the journalists’ handling of the story was even more staggering. The enormous sympathy aroused by the newspaper accounts, the pictures, the songs and poems, brought on the greatest outpouring of popular charity the country had ever seen. (And this too, alas, the journalists felt obliged to immortalize: “As the bow of promise gilded the Oriental sky after the Noachian deluge, so the dark cloud enfolding the Conemaugh Valley had a ray of brightest sun light. A great, grand glorious tide of sympathy for the sufferers swept the land like a conflagration, warming men’s hearts to deeds of radiant luster.”)

On the Saturday following the calamity more than $100,000 had been raised in Pittsburgh. By the time they had finished, the people of Pittsburgh would give $560,000. New York City gave $516,000; Philadelphia, $600,000; Boston, $150,000. Nickels and dimes came in from school children and convicts. Churches sent $25, $50, $100. In Salt Lake City thousands of people turned out for a concert given in the huge Mormon Tabernacle, the proceeds of which were sent to Johnstown.

In New York’s Madison Square Garden, Jake Kilrain, who was to take on John L. Sullivan in another few weeks for the world championship, put on an exhibition fight with Charley Mitchell to raise money for Johnstown. (Sullivan was invited to attend the show but did not, and was soundly hissed when his telegram of apology was read by the manager.) At the Metropolitan Opera House, Edwin Booth played the third act of Othello and raised $2,500. In Washington, John Philip Sousa gave a band concert. In Paris, Buffalo Bill staged a special production of his Wild West Show, which was attended by the Prince of Wales. And in Altoona, on the night of Monday, June 3, there had been a benefit performance presented by the Night Off troupe.

Tiffany & Company sent $500. R. H. Macy & Company sent $1,000. Joseph Pulitzer sent $2,000; Jay Gould, $1,000; John Jacob Astor, $2,500. The New York Stock Exchange gave $20,000. An old Confederate soldier sent four $100 Confederate bills, and the citizens of Cupola, Colorado, sent a solid-silver brick.

There were donations from Nantucket ($1,136.93), Yazoo City, Mississippi ($350), and Tombstone, Arizona ($101). The first check to arrive was supposedly one for $100 from Senator Matthew S. Quay, leader of the Republican forces in Pennsylvania; and Simon Cameron, the state’s crusty, old Republican boss, who would be remembered as the man who defined an honest politician as one “who when he is bought stays bought,” sat down and wrote out what was said to be one of the last checks he ever signed, for $1,000.

The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles contributed $1,000. The United States Brewers Association sent $10,000. The Pittsburgh Society of Spiritualists collected $100. Money poured in from every state and from fourteen countries overseas. The London Stock Exchange gave $5,000. The total donations from Germany came to $30,000. There was money from the Lord Mayor of Dublin, the Mayor of Belfast, and the Sultan of Turkey. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to President Harrison, and from Washington came more than $30,000, including a check from Harrison for $300. (The President had presided over a mass meeting at the Willard Hotel Tuesday afternoon, looking very small and gray as he sat in a big armchair in the center of the stage. He had made a brief appeal for help, during which, according to one account, his voice trembled, and nearly $10,000 had been raised.)

In all, the contributions from within the United States would come to $3,601,517.80. The sum from abroad was $141,300.98, making a total of $3,742,818.78. And this does not include the goods of every kind that rolled in by the trainload.

From Saturday on the relief trains kept coming without letup. Lumber came in by the carload, and furniture, and barrels of quicklime, embalming fluid, pitch, pine tar, and resin. There was a carload of potatoes from Walla Walla. Minneapolis sent sixteen carloads of flour. Cincinnati sent 20,000 pounds of ham. Prisoners at the Western Penitentiary baked 1,000 loaves of bread. From Arbuckle’s in Pittsburgh came 30,000 pounds of coffee, and a New York butcher sent 150 pounds of bologna. Wheeling, West Virginia, sent a whole carload of nails.

By Friday, June 7, two hundred carloads of provisions had cleared Pittsburgh. At the Pennsylvania depot in Johnstown, and at the B & O depot, the platforms and yards were piled with cans of biscuits, boxes of candles, cheese, lamp chimneys and matches, huge cases of soap and canned goods, bacon by the barrelful, and hundreds of sacks of corn meal. People had donated cots, mattresses, hair combs, pipes, pillows, teakettles, tents, cookstoves, and more than 7,000 of shoes.

By Thursday, the 6th, the day the Cincinnati hams arrived, any fears there had been of serious food shortages were over. The problem now was distribution. Commissaries had been set up and were run with reasonable efficiency. Several women complained that the prettiest girls were getting more than their share, and often people came climbing back up the hillsides with empty baskets after waiting hours in line. But considering how many more there were to feed, things were exceptionally well organized. The Army had arrived the day before, which helped a lot. Hastings had held off calling in more troops but had decided late Tuesday to bring in the 14th Regiment from Pittsburgh (580 men), and now with their white tents pitched in rows where the park had been and on Prospect, the place began to look like a cross between a military encampment and a wide-open mining town. For along with the Army had come another Booth and Flinn gang of 1,100, and with the railroads bringing in their own crews, with more and more drifters arriving, by the end of the week there would be nearly 7,000 men at work in the valley. They too pitched tents or built rough shanties on the hillsides, upon which they hung names like “Lively Boys,” “Willing Workers,” and “The Ladies’ Pets.” They were making $2.00 a day, which was good money; and a man with a team could make $5.00, which was good enough to have attracted men all the way from Ohio and New York. And with the pay went “room and board.”

Enormous tents served as so-called dining halls, where several hundred men could be fed at a sitting. Coffee was ladled out of a bucket, bread was passed out in big dishpans, followed by more dishpans, each with a ten-pound slab of butter in it. When meals were ready, “the rush for the table cast the Oklahoma boom all in the shade,” wrote the Times.

The men worked hard and made notable progress. By sundown Thursday more had been accomplished than in all the days since the disaster. The air rang with shouts and the screech of nails yanked out by crowbars. Hundreds of bonfires crackled and sent up columns of black smoke where now barrels of resin were being dumped on to burn up dead animals and the worst of the debris. Teams were hitched to mud-bound machinery and dangerous-looking walls that came down with a crash. There were tools enough now for every man, and by midweek a shipment of dynamite along with an expert to handle it had arrived to break the jam at the stone bridge.

So far every attempt to pull loose the debris there had failed. Locomotives and a steam winch had been tried, and a gang of lumberjacks from Michigan had done their best but had made hardly a dent. The ugly mass had been driven against the bridge with such savage force, and was so tightly ensnared by miles of barbed wire, that nothing, it seemed, could break it loose. Then for several days the valley echoed with the roar of dynamite as slowly, one by one, great gaps were blasted through the entanglement, which, most people believed, still held many human corpses.

The expert in charge was a man named Kirk, who was known among the press as “The Prince of Dynamiters.” He was short, squat, about fifty years old, with a grizzly beard and a habit, when walking, of waving his hands about as if warning people back from his next explosion.

“He personally superintends the preparations of all blasts,” wrote the Times man on the scene, “and when ready emits a peculiar cry more like a wail than a warning. Then he surveys the atmosphere with the air of a Major General and yells, ‘Fire!’ The yell often terrifies the spectators more than the explosion itself.” But on Saturday Kirk managed to scare the daylights out of everybody, and with a good deal more than his yell.

Despite the inroads he was making, he was not at all satisfied with the time the job was taking, so he cut loose with a 450-pound charge, hoping to break the jam with one blow. Nine fifty-pound boxes of dynamite were planted at the base of the mass, each set about thirty feet apart. The whole valley and every building that was still standing trembled with the blast. Horses shied violently. Work stopped all over town. And within no time Kirk had been told in quite explicit language by what seemed like half the surviving population that he was to pull no such stunt again. But a gaping hole had been gouged out of the wreckage and at last daylight could be seen under the arches.

Some men became so exhausted from the work that they had to give up and go home. Everyone by this time had grown more or less accustomed to the grisly look of the place, the smell, and the constant presence of death; but the work itself was grueling, and no matter how much was accomplished, there seemed always an insurmountable lot still left to be done.

The wreckage spewed across the city was far greater in quantity than all that had stood there before the flood. The water had swept the valley above the city of virtually everything that man had built there over some eighty years and dumped it on Johnstown. Now every last bit of it had to be cleaned up, searched through, burned, or carted away. On top of that, sanitation problems were enormous. One gang of workers did nothing but sprinkle disinfectants over the entire district, and as George Swank later wrote, there was “a fortune for the man who concocts a disinfectant that won’t stink the nose off a person.” Four thousand barrels of quicklime would be used before the cleanup was finished.

Another gang was detailed to gather and burn bedding, clothes, and carpets which had been ruined by the water. The houses that had not been swept away were left, as Dr. Matthews said, in the most unsanitary condition imaginable. “The flood water,” he wrote, “was heavily charged with every kind of filth, and whatever this water touched it contaminated. As a result, every house in the flooded district was filled, in most cases to the second floor, with most offensive matter. There was not a place which the flood touched where a man could lay his head with safety.”

One of the biggest and most unpleasant jobs was digging out hundreds of cellars. Where houses had been swept from their foundations, it was often close to impossible to tell where they had been, the cellars having been so completely filled in by the flood. But every one of them had to be shoveled clean and their foul contents hauled out of the city.

The work camps themselves were another part of the problem, with their “open plumbing, openly arrived at,” as one doctor described it. Within the first week there were something like ninety-eight doctors at work, who, along with the Army, helped enforce basic sanitary practices. But what helped most of all was the weather. For ten days following the flood, temperatures stayed low, skies clouded, and there were frequent drenching rains. It was, wrote Dr. Lee, head of the sanitation board, a “great advantage in delaying decomposition.” It was also miserable weather to work in or to be camping in amid the reeking muck.

On Friday morning Captain Bill Jones was back home in Pittsburgh, close to a state of collapse after working four straight days with almost no sleep or rest. Jones had paid out of his own pocket for the supplies he had brought to Johnstown and the wages of the men he had taken with him. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Press he gave great credit to the leadership Moxham had shown and added that he had had a hundred or so Hungarians working for him and that they had “worked like heroes.”

General Hastings held up handsomely against the strain. He rode about town on a big horse, waving his floppy hat, and, in the main, did a good job. Director James Scott stayed on day after day, working with boundless energy. He wound up growing a full beard during his time in Johnstown and lost thirty pounds.

But perhaps the most resilient worker of them all, and certainly the one who stirred up the most talk, was a stiff-spined little spinster in a plain black dress and muddy boots who had brought the newly organized American Red Cross in from Washington. Miss Clara Barton and her delegation of fifty doctors and nurses had arrived on the B & O early Wednesday morning.

Clara was sixty-seven. She had been through the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and several nervous breakdowns. For a while she had tried running a women’s prison in Massachusetts. But since 1881, when, after a long campaign, she had succeeded in establishing an American branch of the International Red Cross, little else had been of real interest to her. And though her position as president was only a part-time job, she had already been down the Ohio by river barge to help during the floods of 1884 and to Texas with food and supplies during the famine of 1887. She had taken her workers to Illinois after a tornado in ‘88, and later that same year to Florida during a yellow-fever epidemic.

But these had been minor challenges compared to Johnstown, which she realized the moment she saw the valley from her train window. When the news of the disaster had first reached Washington Friday night, she had postponed doing anything for twenty-four hours; the story seemed too frightful and improbable to be true. But once there she knew that her Red Cross had arrived at its first major disaster. The organization, she had long argued, was meant for just such emergencies, and now she intended to prove it.

She set up headquarters inside an abandoned railroad car and, using a packing box for a desk, began issuing orders. Hospital tents were to be opened immediately, construction was to start on temporary “hotels” for the homeless, and a house-to-house survey was to be conducted to see just how many people needed attention. Hastings, it appears, did not know quite what to make of all this, or of Clara. “I could not have puzzled General Hastings more if I had addressed him in Chinese,” she wrote later, adding that “the gallant soldier could not have been more courteous and kind.”

In her stocking feet Clara stood five feet tall. She had a prominent nose, bright, black eyes, and a resolute set to her mouth. She took what little sleep she needed on a hard, narrow cot and had no use for demon rum, bumbling male officials, or for that matter anyone who attempted to tell her how to run her business. “A keen, steadfast, powerful New England woman,” she was described as by one writer.

Within a very short time several large tents were serving as the cleanest, best-organized hospitals in town; six Red Cross hotels, two stories tall, with hot and cold running water, kitchens, and laundries, had been built with some of the fresh lumber on hand; and Clara herself was situated in her own command tent with the Red Cross banner flying overhead. When the survey was completed it was found that a large number of people with serious injuries had been too weak or broken in spirit to do anything to help themselves. Moreover, a surprising number of cases of prolonged shock were discovered, a phenomenon that would also be noted by a correspondent for the Medical News of Philadelphia. “A profound melancholia,” he called it, “associated with an almost absolute disregard of the future” and evidenced by “a peculiar intonation of words, the persons speaking mechanically.”

Clara and her people did their best to tend everyone they could. Clara herself worked almost round the clock, directing hundreds of volunteers, distributing nearly half a million dollars’ worth of blankets, clothing, food, and cash. She also spoke her mind once or twice to the head of the Philadelphia chapter of the Red Cross, with the result that within a few days neither group would have anything to do with the other.

There seems little doubt that except for Hastings she was the best-known, among the people of Johnstown, of all the outsiders on hand and certainly the one who would be remembered the longest. She stoutly proclaimed that the Red Cross was there to stay as long as there was work to do. “We are always the last to leave the field,” she said. She seemed to be everywhere at once, bouncing through the streets in a buckboard, scrutinizing the way things were being handled, whether she had anything to do with them or not. On one such ride she was accompanied by an Episcopal priest who was afraid she would be jolted to pieces and told her so. “Oh, this is nothing,” she shouted back, “so long as we have no bullets flying around us.”

Clara stayed for five months, never once leaving the scene even for a day. In October, when she did finally pack up and go, it was with all sorts of official blessings and thanks. She was presented with a diamond locket from the people of Johnstown; glowing editorials were written (“…too…too much cannot be said in praise of this lady…To her timely and heroic work, more than to that of any other human being, are the people of the Conemaugh Valley indebted…”); and back home in Washington a dinner was given in her honor at the Willard with the President and Mrs. Harrison in attendance. The Red Cross had clearly arrived.

There were others who would be remembered. A few smalltime crooks slipped in with the crowds. They queued up with the flood victims to collect whatever the Red Cross happened to be handing out at the moment or grabbed what they could from the debris. One or two suspicious-looking characters were nabbed before they had a chance to do much of anything and were swiftly hustled out of town. There were some, too, who simply hung around long enough to educate themselves on the place, then lit off to play on the sympathy of neighboring towns, describing the horrors of the devastation and their own heart-rending experiences in the flood at one back doorstep after another. One of them who went straight to Pittsburgh even managed to take the Relief Committee there for a good deal of cash before he was found out.

A handful of crackpots appeared on the scene, most of whom were of the religious-fanatic sort, and the most memorable of them was a gaunt prophet from Pittsburgh known as “Lewis, the Light,” who wore nothing but long, red underwear and passed out handbills that said, among other things:

Death is man’s last and only Enemy, Extinction of Death is his only hope. Your soul, your breath, ends by death. Whew! Whoop! We’re all in the soup. Who’s all right? Lewis, the Light.

Then there were the “harpies,” as some of the newspaper correspondents called them, who apparently came in from Pittsburgh. It was reported that a number of them had been seen at points along the line from Johnstown to Pittsburgh trying to recruit girls for “their nefarious calling” among the prettiest flood victims. Several who had tried to board the trains had been put off, but enough of them managed one way or other to reach Johnstown, so that within not too long a time Prospect Hill was making its own lively contribution to the mining-camp spirit of the place. Prospect “is overridden with bawdy houses and places for the illicit sale of liquor,” one police official said.

This in turn added fuel to the cause of the W.C.T.U. ladies who had arrived almost immediately after the disaster and stayed on as the valley filled up with more and more men and as the demand for strong drink grew apace. Through most of June, Hastings kept the lid on liquor sales; the only thing being served was lemonade, which was sold at little makeshift stands through town. When, in July, the liquor ban was lifted, the lemonade concessions went immediately out of business. Twenty-two celebrants were arrested the first day, and George Swank wrote in the Tribune that the lemonade had “made more sickness than all the beer and whiskey that could be drunk.”

And, of course, there were the sight-seers. They had been coming almost from the first morning after the disaster. They came into South Fork by special trains from Altoona. They arrived in Johnstown on excursion trains that chugged in along the B & O weekend mornings. On Sunday, June 23, several hundred arrived, turned out in holiday attire and carrying picnic baskets. It seemed incredible; but there they were. The wreckage at the stone bridge seemed to fascinate them the most. But they strolled about everywhere, got in the way, set up their lunch parties inside abandoned houses, laughed, took pictures, asked a lot of silly questions, and infuriated nearly everyone except a few enterprising local men who set up booths and began selling official Johnstown Flood relics: broken china, piano keys, beer bottles, horseshoes, buttons, even bits of brick or wood shingles.

Hastings and the other officials kept asking the railroads to stop selling tickets to anyone who had no rightful business in Johnstown; before the month was out the railroads had agreed to comply as best they could and the number of visitors dropped off sharply.

Actually there would have been many more sight-seers than there were had there not been such widespread fear of disease; and though the cooperation of the railroads helped considerably to diminish the problem, the real turn came when it became known that typhoid fever had actually broken out in the valley.

The first clear-cut case was identified on Monday, June 10. More cases were found in the next several days, but the news was kept quiet. Within a week, however, the disease had spread swiftly and so had the rumors. By July 25 there would be 215 cases of typhoid within the flooded area and 246 beyond.

The doctors and sanitation crews, already dog-tired, flew into a frenzy of activity, working night and day to stop the thing and to keep the valley from panicking. Considering what might have happened under the circumstances, they did a spectacular job. But before the summer ended, forty people would die of typhoid; and like those who died of injuries or exposure in the first days after the disaster, they would not be included in the official figure given for the flood’s victims.

Interestingly enough, along with the typhoid, there ran a long spell of unusually good health in Johnstown. There were fewer colds, fewer cases of measles, and fewer people complaining of “spring disorders” than there would have been under normal conditions. Those who managed to stay healthy through the first frightful days immediately following the disaster, stayed very healthy from then on. The regulations and precautions enforced by the sanitation people undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this, but so, most everyone would later agree, did the fact that there was by the end of the first week something almost like a spirit of exhilaration in the air. There was so much happening all around. Every day there was some kind of excitement. Those who had survived, despite how much they may have suffered, began to discover new energy in themselves. They were alive, and bad as things were that was still a lot better than being dead. And there was now so very much to be done.

There were exceptions, to be sure. Dr. Swan, for example, was so broken in spirit by what he had been through that he would never be able to practice medicine again. And the only fatality among the polyglot army of people brought in to help was a suicide among General Hasting’s troops. Sunday afternoon a moody farm boy with a wife and two children back home became so depressed by what he had seen that he went into his tent and shot himself through the head.

But for nearly everyone else the almost absurd idea that they were going to pick up and start over again, to rebuild everything, began working like a tonic. They started pulling together what was left of their old lives and got to work on the new.

Most of them had precious little left of the old. Dr. Matthews, who had opened a new practice in Johnstown just a few months before the flood, found not a shred of all that he had owned except for one shaving mug. Of George and Mathilde Heiser’s earthly possessions, the only thing recovered was a big wardrobe which young Victor retrieved from the wreckage on Main Street. When he pried open the door, he found his father’s old Civil War uniform inside, and in one pocket a single penny. It represented his entire inheritance.

Men like Horace Rose and John Fulton had lost their homes and virtually everything else they owned. James Quinn and his brother-in-law were able to recover scarcely a single board from their dry-goods store. The only possessions recovered from the Quinn home were some books, a photograph album, and some silverware, which were found scattered a mile or more from where the house had stood.

Quinn, like hundreds of others, had sent his children off to Pittsburgh to live with relatives, while he stayed on to do what he could to help. But there were a few days before they left which the children would remember always. For nearly every child who survived, the week after the flood was a time of high adventure. The dynamite blasting at the bridge, the commissaries with their wondrous stacks of goods, the mobs of strangers tramping through the streets, the Iron Company’s little wood-burning switching engines with their bell-shaped stacks shunting back and forth moving supplies, the nuns, the soldiers, the Pittsburgh firemen in their long rubber coats, were all something to see.

Gangs of small boys made great sport of sneaking past the sentries posted about town, or crawling among the rows of tents. Little prefabricated houses, called “Oklahomas,” were being put up everywhere, and often, if he acted sensible enough, a boy could get a chance to help out. And every child, it seemed, took up relic hunting. “Every yard would yield something if one had the energy to dig,” Gertrude Quinn wrote later. Gold and jewelry were supposedly being found all over town. One story had it that a crockery jar full of $6,500 worth of gold had been found in the mud where old William Macpherson had had his grocery store. Gertrude Quinn’s sister Marie found a two-and-a-half-dollar goldpiece. And it was no trick at all to find half dimes or three-cent pieces or even a shirt stud with what looked like a diamond in it.

On Sunday, the 9th, the sun broke through for the first time since the flood. The spring green of the hills gleamed in bright morning sunlight, and overhead there were only a few small, soft clouds, and all the rest of the sky was a clean blue. Work went on the same as any other day. The air, already warmer than it had been for weeks, rang with the sound of picks and axes, hundreds of hammers, and, strangely it seemed at first, church bells.

On the embankment near the depot, just back from where Hastings had his headquarters, the chaplain of the 14th Regiment, H. L. Chapman, and David Beale began conducting the first services since the flood.

There were no more than thirty people gathered at first, but as time passed the crowd grew. Soldiers hanging about nearby drifted over. People came from the depot and over from the center of town. Beale stood on a packing box and told a story about over-hearing a newcomer in the valley ask a small boy how bad things were in Johnstown, to which the boy was said to have replied, “If I was the biggest liar on the face of the earth I could not tell you half.”

The rest of the service went as might be expected until John Fulton got up and started saying things that soon had the crowd stirring.

He said the Cambria shops would be rebuilt. “Amen!” answered several voices. “Johnstown is going to be rebuilt,” he said. “Thank God!” someone answered again.

He said he could not speak for the Gautier works, but he was sure, nonetheless, that they, too, would be rebuilt, and bigger than ever. The Cambria men would be taken care of, he told them, and if you still have your family left, he said, then “God bless your soul, man, you’re rich.” His sermon was simple: “Get to work, clean up your department, set your lathes going again. The furnaces are all right, the steel works are all right. Get to work, I say. That’s the way to look at this sort of thing…Think how much worse it could have been. Give thanks for that great stone bridge that saved hundreds of lives. Give thanks that it did not come in the night. Trust in God. Johnstown had its day of woe and ruin. It will have its day of renewed prosperity. Labor, energy, and capital, by God’s grace, shall make the city more thriving than ever in the past.”

“Amen!” again from the crowd.

That Johnstown should be rebuilt was by now taken as a matter of course. That it should be rebuilt right where it was before was also something everybody took for granted. No matter how dreadfully the valley had been ravaged, it was still their home. In fact, there is no record of anyone ever seriously considering the idea of not rebuilding in that particular place. The only question now was how long was it going to take to get things rolling once more.

The scene on the hillside would be remembered for years. Fulton, tall and spare, with his iron-gray beard and dark brow, certainly looked and sounded like a man of God; but he was also, as everyone knew, the voice of the Cambria Iron Company speaking, and as sincere as he may have been in asking them to trust in the Lord, his audience had had somewhat more experience putting its trust in the Cambria Iron Company. And either way, any man who could speak for both God and the Iron Company was someone to listen to closely.

The idea that the stone bridge had actually saved lives was a new one to most people, but the more they thought about it, the more they accepted it. The fire at the bridge seemed to epitomize the worst of the flood’s horrors, but the fact was the death toll would have been far greater, perhaps even twice as great, had the bridge collapsed. The whole town would have been plunged down the valley to almost total destruction.

But it was when Fulton began talking of still another matter that a tense stillness came over the crowd and his every word could be heard over the sounds from the city below.

“I hold in my possession today,” he said, “and I thank God that I do, my own report made years ago, in which I told these people, who, for purposes for which I will not mention, desired to seclude themselves in the mountains, that their dam was dangerous. I told them that the dam would break sometime and cause just such a disaster as this.”

Then he changed to another subject. But he had said enough. In just two sentences he had hit on something that had been smoldering in people’s minds for days. There had been plenty of talk about what had happened at South Fork and about the club. People were bitter, and with their renewed energy had come anger, deep and highly inflammable, and perhaps even contributing to that energy.

It was not that Fulton had been the first to raise the question of the dam and who was to blame for the flood; what was important was that he, John Fulton, had said what he had. The issue was now right out in the open, full-scale and officially. Moreover, there was no longer any question about which side the Iron Company might be on; and, perhaps most significant of all, if things came to a showdown, which everyone felt sure they would, Fulton, it would appear, held a piece of paper of considerable importance.

IX

“Our misery is the work of man.”

The excitement in Pittsburgh continued day after day. Johnstown seemed to be the only thing people were talking about, and the papers carried almost nothing but flood news, with stories running on and on, page after page, and in even greater detail than what was being published elsewhere. The two cities had always had ties, through the steel business and family connections. Now almost everyone in Johnstown, it appeared, had relatives in Pittsburgh.

Refugees from the disaster kept pouring into Union Station by the thousands. The sick and the injured had to be cared for. Children, hundreds of them, lost or orphaned, many wearing tags for identification, had to be fed and looked after. Homes had to be found for them and all the others. On Wednesday, the 5th, four trains full of survivors, most of them women and children, came in.

People had dropped everything to help. Ladies’ groups were sorting clothes and packing medical supplies in church basements all over town. The Masons, the Republican Club, factory workers were organizing, collecting, donating, and proudly announcing their accomplishments to the papers. The involvement grew so that the local merchants began complaining of a serious drop off in trade. “From a business point of view” things were the worst they had been for years, according to one report. Several firms canceled their regular newspaper advertisements in order to express their sympathies for the people of Johnstown, and Young’s picture store on Wood Street attracted considerable attention by displaying in its window a painting of South Fork dam done a few years earlier by a local artist.

Everybody, it seemed, had his own latest story from Johnstown. A husband had heard from another man at the mill, a brother had just come back from the railroad depot, a cousin who worked at the Mellon bank had overheard something, two sons from the big Italian family across the alley had actually been there with one of the Flinn gangs, and they all had stories to tell, inside information. The city was alive with the most hair-raising tales and rumors. And nowhere was there more talk, or were things in such turmoil, than at the Pennsylvania depot and yards, where tons of food and supplies were still piling up, and the crowds were so thick, any hour of the day, that you could barely make your way through.

The railroad itself had never known such times, not even during the worst of the war years. Every schedule had been canceled. All normal business had been stopped. Nothing went east but trains bound for Johnstown, and as it was, the traffic was almost more than could be handled. If there had been only the storm damage to contend with, troubles would have been bad enough; but train after train kept steaming in from across the country, men and supplies had to be kept moving, repair equipment had to be sent forward, and everything that went up had to come back by the same route.

Pitcairn, with full authorization from the main office in Philadelphia, did everything possible to speed things up. The Pennsylvania had already donated $5,000 to the relief fund, but that was of small consequence compared to what was accomplished to keep the line open. Pitcairn himself worked almost without letup. All available manpower east and west was rushed into the area, and the cost of everything was assumed by the line.

This was by far the biggest emergency the Pennsylvania had ever been called on to face, and all its extraordinary power, its almost military-style discipline and organization, its vast resources in men and equipment, were brought to bear on the problem. The results, the swiftness and efficiency with which forces were marshaled, tangles unsnarled, damages repaired, help rushed through, were indeed remarkable and left a lasting impression on everyone involved. For all its highhanded ways, for all the evils people attributed to it, in a crisis the railroad had been worth more than any other organization, including the state, and they would remember that.

Still it would be two full weeks until the line from Harrisburg west would be opened and relief trains could start to Johnstown by way of Altoona. Until then Pittsburgh would remain the one channel through which everything had to pass.

The Allegheny River, with its endless freight of wreckage, also continued to be an immense fascination. Children were brought from miles away to watch the tawny water slip past the shores, so that one day they might be able to say they had seen something of the Johnstown Flood. The most disreputable-looking souvenirs, an old shoe, the side of a packing box with the lettering on it still visible, were fished out, dripping and slimy, to be carried proudly home.

There were accounts of the most unexpected finds, including live animals. But the best of them was the story of a blonde baby found at Verona, a tiny river town about ten miles up the Allegheny from Pittsburgh. According to the Pittsburgh Press, the baby was found floating along in its cradle, having traveled almost eighty miles from Johnstown without suffering even a bruise. Also, oddly enough, the baby was found by a John Fletcher who happened to own and operate a combination wax museum, candy stand, and gift shop at Verona.

Fletcher announced his amazing discovery and the fact that the baby had a small birthmark near its neck. Then he hired a pretty nineteen-year-old, dressed her in a gleaming white nurse’s uniform, and put her and the baby in the front window of his establishment. Within a few days several thousand people had trooped by to look at the Johnstown baby and, it is to be assumed, to make a few small purchases from the smiling Mr. Fletcher. Then, apparently, quite unexpectedly, the baby was no longer available for viewing. The mother, according to Fletcher, had lived through the flood and, having heard the story back in Johnstown, rushed to Verona, identified the birthmark, and went home with her baby.

But there was another subject that was stirring up far more talk in Pittsburgh. It was not until three or four days after the flood that the rest of the country began growing keenly interested in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, but in Pittsburgh, not surprisingly, the interest had been high since news of the disaster first came through Friday night. And for those who may have forgotten, or who never knew, the nature of the club’s membership, the Pittsburgh newspapers were quick to remind them.

In the beginning there had been some concern over those clubmen who had been at the dam when it failed. But when it became known that they were alive and unharmed, the emphasis immediately shifted to what exactly the other club members might do next.

On Saturday, at the mass meeting called by Pitcairn, Frick and Phipps had been named to serve on the executive board of the Relief Committee. That night, at the home of another member, Charles Clarke, a number of the clubmen met in private to agree on what their policy should be. At that point, like everyone else in Pittsburgh, they knew very little about what precisely had happened at the dam; but judging from the way things looked, the wisest policy for the moment seemed to be to say nothing, except that no immediate action was planned and that the club would make a donation to the people of Johnstown of 1,000 blankets.

But, unfortunately for the others, a few members decided to speak their minds all the same. One member, who asked that his name be withheld, told reporters that in the past he had heard questioning about the strength of the dam, but that he had never looked into the matter personally. Then he told a story of riding from the lake down to Johnstown a few years earlier with a driver who had said, “The time will come when more than you and I will talk about that embankment.” And he finished up by saying that there were some in Johnstown who used an Episcopal prayer, “Lord deliver us from mountain floods!”

Another member, James McGregor, who gave his name without any hesitation, said he refused to believe that there had been any trouble at South Fork. He was certain the whole thing was a mistake.

“I am going up there to fish the latter part of this month,” he said. “I am a member of the South Fork Fishing Club and I believe it is standing there the same as it ever was.

“As for the idea of the dam ever being condemned, it is nonsense. We have been putting in from twenty thousand to fifteen thousand dollars a year at South Fork. We have all been shaking hands with ourselves for some years on being pretty clever businessmen, and we should not be likely to drop that much money in a place that we thought unsafe. No sir, the dam is just as safe as it ever was, and any other reports are simply wild notions.”

His own notions, which appeared in the papers on the morning of Sunday, June 2, were so wild, and so very tactless in the face of what was by then known of the suffering at Johnstown, that the only possible excuse for making such a statement must have been that he actually believed every word of it.

And to make matters worse, he was not alone. Young Louis Clarke next told a correspondent for the New York Herald that there was great doubt “among the engineers” who had examined the reservoir whether, after all, it had been that particular dam which broke. Just which engineers he was referring to is unclear, but he was interviewed along with another club member, James Reed, who said that in the past he himself had climbed all over the dam, studying it closely, and that “in the absence of any positive statement I will continue to doubt, as do many others familiar with the place, that it really let go.” Perhaps, he then suggested, it had been a dam at Lilly which broke.

Reed’s comments were of more than passing interest for he was the partner of Philander Knox in the prestigious Pittsburgh law firm of Knox & Reed. If there were to be lawsuits over the disaster, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club would almost certainly be represented by Knox & Reed. And already the press was playing up the likelihood that such suits would follow. On June 2 the World published a statement attributed to a prominent lawyer practicing in Allegheny County, who preferred to remain anonymous:

“I predict there will be legal suits with possible criminal indictments as a result of this catastrophe. I am told that the South Fork Club has been repeatedly warned of the unsafety of its dam, and it comes from good authority…”

On another page the World published an interview with Jesse H. Lippincott of New York City, who was the son of a club member and who had spent several summers at the lake. The dam, he said, was built almost entirely of solid stone, but if it had indeed broken, the death toll would likely run to several thousand, and “Pittsburghers will…deprived of their most popular resort.”

Then, on Monday, the 3rd, reporters from Johnstown reached the dam and started sending a series of dispatches from South Fork which removed once and for all any fantasies about the dam still standing; and out of conversations with people in the neighborhood, they began building a history of the structure which did not bode well for the club members.

Feelings were running very strong against the club at South Fork. Monday after dark an angry crowd of men had gone up to the dam looking for any club members who might have been still hanging about. When they failed to find anyone, they broke into several of the cottages. Windows were smashed and a lot of furniture was destroyed. Then, apparently, they had gone over to the Unger farm to look up the Colonel. The reporters later called it a lynch mob and said they were bent on killing Unger. Whether or not it would have come to that, there is no way of knowing, for Unger by that time was on his way to Pittsburgh. There was a good deal of grumbling among the men as they milled about outside Unger’s house; threats were shouted; then the men went straggling off through the night, back down the hollow.

The clubmen who had been at the lake had gone off on horseback, heading for Altoona, almost immediately after the dam broke Friday afternoon, though one of them, it seems, stuck around long enough to settle his debts with some of the local people. He had no intention of ever coming back again, he told them, which they in turn repeated for the benefit of the newspapermen. They also emphasized that the Pittsburgh people had not made things any better for themselves by pulling out so rapidly at a time when, as anyone could see, there was such a crying need for able-bodied men in the valley. Had they stayed on to help, it was said, then people might have felt somewhat differently toward them. This way there was only contempt.

But it was when they began describing how the dam had been rebuilt by Ruff and his workers that their real bitterness came through, that all the old, deep-seated resentment against the rich, city men began surfacing. Farmers recalled how they had sold Ruff hay to patch the leaks. A South Fork coal operator who insisted that his name be withheld, but who was almost certainly George Stineman, South Fork’s leading citizen, told how, years earlier, he had gone to Johnstown on more than one occasion to complain about the dam’s structural weaknesses. Reporters heard that the dam had been “the bogie of the district” and how it had been the custom to frighten disobedient children by telling them that the dam would break. The clubmen were described as rude and imperious in their dealings with the citizens of the valley. Reporters were told of the times neighborhood children had been chased from the grounds; and much was made of the hated fish guards across the spillway. Old feuds, personal grudges, memories of insults long forgotten until then, were trotted out one after the other for the benefit of the press.

Someone even went so far as to claim that several of the Italian workmen employed by the club had been out on the dam at the time it failed and had been swept to their death, thus implying that the Pittsburgh men had heartlessly (or stupidly) ordered them out there while they themselves had hung back on the hillsides.

One local man by the name of Burnett, who conducted a reporter on an inspection of the dam, told the reporter that if people were to hear that he was from Pittsburgh, they might jump to the conclusion that he was connected with the club and pull him from the carriage and beat him to death. “That is the feeling that predominates here,” Burnett said, “and, we all believe, justly.”

The plain fact was that no one who was interviewed had anything good to say about the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, its members, or its dam. And when a coroner’s jury from Greensburg, in Westmoreland County, showed up soon after the reporters, the local people willingly repeated the same things all over again.

The jurymen had come to investigate the cause of death of the 121 bodies that had been recovered at Nineveh, which was just across the line in Westmoreland County. They poked about the ruins of the dam, talked to people, made notes, and went home. The formal investigation, with witnesses testifying under oath, was to be held on Wednesday, the 5th.

In the meantime, Mr. H. W. Brinkerhoff of Engineering and Building Record, a professional journal published in New York, arrived in South Fork to take a look at the dam and was soon joined by A. M. Wellington and F. B. Burt, editors of Engineering News. Most of the reporters remained cautious about passing judgment on the dam, waiting to see what the experts had to say. But on June 5 the headline on the front page of the New York Sun read:

CAUSE OF THE CALAMITY

The Pittsburgh Fishing Club
Chiefly Responsible

The Waste Gates Closed
When the Club Took
Possession

The indictment which followed, based on a Sun reporter’s “personal investigation,” could not have been much more bluntly worded.

…There was no massive masonry, nor any tremendous exhibition of engineering skill in designing the structure or putting it up. There was no masonry at all in fact, nor any engineering worthy of the name. The dam was simply a gigantic heap of earth dumped across the course of a mountain stream between two low hills….

In Johnstown on the same day, General Hastings told a World correspondent that in his view, “It was a piece of carelessness, I might say criminal negligence.” In Greensburg the Westmoreland coroner’s jury began listening to one witness after another testify to the shoddy way the dam had been rebuilt and the fear it had engendered, though two key witnesses had apparently had second thoughts about speaking their minds quite so publicly and refused to appear until forced to do so by the sheriff.

Two days later, on the 7th, a verdict was issued: “…death by violence due to the flood caused by the breaking of the dam of the South Fork Reservoir…” It seemed a comparatively mild statement, considering the talk there had been and coming as it did on the same day as Hastings’ pronouncement. But on the preceding day, another cornoner’s inquest, this one conducted by Cambria County, had rendered a decision that spelled out the cause of the disaster, and fixed the blame, in no uncertain terms.

The Cambria jurors had also visited the dam and listened to dozens of witnesses. But their inquest was held to determine the death of just one flood victim, a Mrs. Ellen Hite. Their verdict was “death by drowning” and that the drowning was “caused by the breaking of the South Fork dam.”

But then the following statement was added:

“We further find, from the testimony and what we saw on the ground that there was not sufficient water weir, nor was the dam constructed sufficiently strong nor of the proper material to withstand the overflow; and hence we find the owners of said dam were culpable in not making it as secure as it should have been, especially in view of the fact that a population of many thousands were in the valley below; and we hold that the owners are responsible for the fearful loss of life and property resulting from the breaking of the dam.”

Now the story broke wide open. “THE CLUB IS GUILTY” ran the World’s headline on June 7. “Neglect Caused the Break…Shall the Officers of the Fishing Club Answer for the Terrible Results.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer said that in Johnstown, as more facts became known, the excitement was reaching a “fever heat” and that “it would not do for any of the club members to visit the Conemaugh Valley just now.” The Chicago Herald said there was “no question whatever” as to the fact that criminal negligence was involved.

Although it would be another week before the engineering journals would publish their reports on the dam, the gist of their editors’ conclusions had by now leaked to the press. On Sunday, the 9th, The New York Times headline ran:

An Engineering Crime

The Dam of Inferior Construction

According to the Experts

Actually, the engineering journals never worded it quite that way. The full report which appeared in the issue of Engineering News dated June 15 said that the original dam had been “thoroughly well built,” but that contrary to a number of previously published descriptions, it had not been constructed with a solid masonry core. (From this some newspapers would conclude that the “death-dealer” was nothing but a “mud-pile.”) The repairs made by Benjamin Ruff, however, had been carried out “with slight care,” according to the report. Most important of all, there had been “no careful ramming in watered layers, as in the first dam.” But Ruff’s work was not the real issue, according to the editors. “Negligence in the mere execution of the earthwork, however, if it existed, is of minor importance, since there is no doubt that it was not a primary cause of the disaster; at worst, it merely aggravated it.”

The primary causes, it was then stated, were the lowering of the crest, the central sag in the crest, the fact that there were no outlet pipes at the base, and the obstruction of the spillway. The details of these matters were carefully described, and it was speculated that the disaster might have been averted that Friday afternoon if the bridge over the spillway and the fish guards had been cut away in time, or if some “man of great resolution, self-confidence, and self-sacrifice” had (as John Parke had contemplated) cut the dam at one end, where the original and more firmly built surface would have held up better against the enormous force of erosion.

But the point the editors of the report seemed most determined to hammer home was that there was no truth to any claims being made that the dam had been rebuilt by qualified engineers.

“In fact, our information is positive, direct, and unimpeachable that at no time during the process of rebuilding the dam was ANY ENGINEER WHATEVER, young or old, good or bad, known or unknown, engaged or consulted as to the work,—a fact which will be hailed by engineers everywhere with great satisfaction, as relieving them as a body from a heavy burden of suspicion and reproach.”

Moreover, contrary to some statements made in Pittsburgh since the disaster, they had found no evidence that the dam had ever been “inspected” periodically, occasionally, or even once, by anyone “who, by any stretch of charity, could be regarded as an expert.”

In other words, the job had been botched by amateurs. That they had been very rich and powerful amateurs was not considered relevant by the engineering journals, but so far as the newspapers were concerned that was to be the very heart of the matter. It was great wealth which now stood condemned, not technology.

The club had been condemned by the coroners’ juries, General Hastings, and by the engineering experts. The newspapers made no effort to investigate the dam themselves, and only one or two made any effort to present the facts about the dam or to explain even in passing why it had failed. Nor did the editorial writers make an effort to remain even moderately objective until more information became available. The club was guilty, criminally guilty several papers were saying, and that was that. Unlike the Hungarian stories, this one, it seemed, would hold up. It was based on about as solid information as could be hoped for, and in terms of its emotional content, it was perhaps even stronger. Now across the country there arose a great howl of righteous indignation.

For everyone who had been asking how such a calamity could possibly happen in the United States of America, there now appeared to be an answer, and it struck at the core of something which had been eating at people for some time, something most of them had as yet no name for, but something deeply disturbing.

For despite the progress being made everywhere, despite the growing prosperity and the prospect of an even more abundant future, there were in 1889 strong feelings that perhaps not all was right with the Republic. And if the poor Hungarians of Johnstown were signs of a time to come when a “hunky” could get a job quicker than a “real American,” then the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were signs of something else that was perhaps even worse. Was it not the likes of them that were bringing in the hunkies, buying legislatures, cutting wages, and getting a great deal richer than was right or good for any mortal man in a free, democratic country? Old-timers said that with every gain they made people were losing something. If that was so, people were beginning to think a little more about just what it was they might be losing, and to whom. And the more they thought about it, and especially the workingmen, the less they liked it.

It would be another three years before this kind of feeling would burst out in the terrible violence of the Homestead steel strike in Pittsburgh and Henry Clay Frick would nearly die of a bullet in his neck. And it would be another several years after that before public indignation over the power of the trusts, the giant corporations, and the men who ran them would erupt into public outrage. But the feeling was there in 1889, and it ran a great deal deeper than most people would have supposed. Certainly the language used by the press reflected a level of scorn and bitterness that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was now described as “the most exclusive resort in America,” and its members were referred to as millionaries, aristocrats, or nabobs. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer not even vast wealth was enough to gain admission, unless it was hereditary. “Millionaries who did not satisfy every member of the club might cry in vain for admission,” the Enquirer wrote. “No amount of money could secure permission to stop overnight at the club’s hotel…” The paper said that no one could visit the club without a permit, and called it “holy ground consecrated to pleasure by capital,” but added that no one would want to go there now, “except to gaze a moment at the Desolate Monument to the Selfishness of Man…” J. J. McLaurin, the Harrisburg newspaperman, who was otherwise relatively reliable in his reporting on the disaster, wrote: “The club was excessively aristocratic, and so exclusive that Tuxedo itself might pronounce the Lorillard ideal a failure. The wealthy members never deigned to recognize the existence of the common clay of the neighborhood, farther than to warn intruders to keep off the premises.”

Like dozens of others, McLaurin was also infuriated over the idea that the lake had served as a summer resort. He wrote that “50,000 lives in Pennsylvania were jeopardized for eight years that a club of rich pleasure-seekers might fish and sail and revel in luxurious ease during the heated term.”

For an age which by no means looked upon pleasure as something to be expected in life, let alone life’s chief objective, the very fact that the lake had been put there solely for pleasure seemed almost more than anyone could take; and in several editorials the writers seemed to imply that if the lake had served some other purpose, some practical purpose, then the tragedy would not have been quite so distressing.

“It is an aggravation of the calamity to reflect that the reservoir which gave way served no useful purpose, but merely ministered to the amusement of a gentleman’s club composed of millionaires,” wrote a small-town newspaper in New England. “The dam served no useful end, beyond the pleasure of a few rich men,” said the Daily Graphic in New York. And the Chicago Herald published a cartoon showing what were supposedly seven clubmen done up in loud-checked coats and diamond stickpins, tossing down champagne on the clubhouse porch, while in the valley below them Johnstown is being wiped out.

Like several other papers, the Herald likened the clubmen to the Romans. “These wealthy sportsmen, these pleasure-seekers, sat in a secure place, in the amphitheater, like the noble Roman spectators when they gave the signal when the wild beasts were to be admitted into the arena to rend the bodies of the human victims. The Pittsburgh pagans did not give the signal, but they were just as guilty in the fact that they were told that the massacre was about to occur and made no effort to stop it…”

The effort alluded to here was the failure to remove the fish guards, which, very quickly, had come to symbolize everything repellent about the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. “…To preserve game for some Pittsburgh swells the lives of fifteen thousand were sacrificed,” wrote the Herald. “…The ghosts of Johnstown are the ghosts of American labor that is dead.” And a man by the name of Isaac Reed wrote a widely quoted poem which opened with the lines:

Many thousand human lives—

Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives,
Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,
Hosts of martyred little ones,

(Worse than Herod’s awful crime)

Sent to heaven before their time;
Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,
Darlings lost but never found!

All the horrors that hell could wish,

Such was the price that was paid for—fish!

Interestingly, for all the abuse that was flung at the Pittsburgh people, very few newspapers ever went so far as to mention any specific names of members, and those that did mentioned only a half dozen or so. The Philadelphia Press, for all its superb coverage of what was going on in Johnstown, said hardly a word about the club or its members, and perhaps, as was hinted by another paper, because one club member, Calvin Wells, was a major stockholder in the Press.

As might be expected, the Pittsburgh papers were extremely cautious about printing anything untoward about the club, or, in some cases, were outright sympathetic toward the renowned members. The Pittsburgh Press, for example, took the position that too much scorn was being heaped on the club, since the dam had been built a long time back and the disaster, therefore, could as easily have happened at some earlier time. The Post-Gazette also felt the clubmen were being unfairly chastised. And Connelly and Jenks, authors of the so-called Official History of the flood, which was being written in Pittsburgh about that time, went out of their way to counteract popular images of opulent splendor at the lake. It was no center of pagan pleasure seeking or vulgar display, they wrote, but a place where the members of the club with their families and friends could “rough it” throughout the summer months. It was, they said, a comfortable, homelike place and as different from the “ordinary fashionable summer resort” as could be imagined. As for stories of any highhanded ways with the local people, well, “The place was exclusive only in the sense that a private house or garden is of that character. There was no lofty disregard of other people’s rights, nor any desire on the part of the members to set themselves above those around them. The club was a happy family party, and nothing more.”

Forest and Stream, a national fishing and hunting magazine, took strong objection to the “paragraphs hot with indignation” that were being published. Such stuff was easy to write, said the magazine’s editors, who rose to the defense of the club largely on the grounds that its members were sportsmen who appreciated the beauties of the natural world and so, therefore, were essentially good men. Also, in the opinion of the editors, it was nonsense to condemn the clubmen because their lake was meant for pleasure. “To maintain a dam to form a lake for pleasure purposes is,” they argued, “an enterprise no less legitimate than to build a dam for running a mill wheel.” If the warnings about the stability of the dam had gone unheeded, perhaps that had been because the members were so preoccupied with the joys of life in the out of doors. And, concluded Forest and Stream there ought to be some compassion for the members, who in their hearts must surely be suffering terribly.

There were many, too, who looked upon the disaster as a time of the apocalypse. Countless sermons on “The Meaning of the Johnstown Flood” were delivered in every part of the land for many Sundays running. One Pittsburgh preacher compared the “wolf cry” about the dam breaking to those in his congregation who tired of hearing him on the admonitions of the Lord. Another said that the lesson was to be ever prepared to meet thy Maker.

In New York the illustrious Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage, using the 93rd Psalm as his text (“The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice;…”), told an audience of some 5,000 that what the voice of the flood had to say was that nature was merciless and that any sort of religious attitude toward nature meant emptiness. “There are those who tell us they want only the religion of sunshine, art, blue sky and beautiful grass,” said Talmage. “The book of nature must be their book. Let me ask such persons what they make out of the floods in Pennsylvania.”

Not a few ministers chose to talk about the spirit of sympathy that was sweeping the country. The New York Witness, a religious newspaper, went so far as to say there was a “loving purpose of God hidden in the Flood,” which turned a great many stomachs in Johnstown.

But the theme that set the most heads nodding in agreement was the old, old theme of punishment from on high. The story of Noah was read from thousands of pulpits. (“And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt;…And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me;…”) This was The Great American Flood; it had been a sign unto all men, the preachers said, and woe unto the land if it were not heeded. The steel town had been a sin town and so the Lord had destroyed it; for surely only a vile and wicked place would have been visited by so hideous a calamity.

It was a line of reasoning which many people were quick to accept, for at least it made some sense of the disaster. But it was a line of reasoning which met with much amusement in Johnstown, where, as anyone who knew his way about could readily see, Lizzie Thompson’s house and several rival establishments on Green Hill had not only survived the disaster, but were going stronger than ever before. “If punishment was God’s purpose,” said one survivor, “He sure had bad aim.”

There really was never much mystery in anyone’s mind in Johnstown about the cause of the flood. George Swank spoke for just about everyone when he wrote, “We think we know what struck us, and it was not the hand of Providence. Our misery is the work of man.”

The Tribune had started publishing again on the 15th. Swank referred to the Pittsburgh men as “the dudes” and said that they wanted “an exclusive resort where, in all their spotlessness and glory, they might idle away the summer days.” The people of Johnstown, he said, had never had a chance. “A rat caught in a trap and placed in a bucket would not be more helpless than we were.”

Dozens of Johnstown people spoke out against the dam, telling the out-of-town newspapermen what an awful menace it had been and describing the dread shadow of fear it had cast over their lives, and nearly every last one of them refused to give his name. The one outstanding exception was Cyrus Elder, Johnstown’s only member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, who said that he had never considered the dam structurally faulty and, contrary to what John Fulton was saying, that he knew of no serious concern about the dam among the Cambria Iron people.

Having lost his wife and one daughter, his home and just about everything he owned but the clothes on his back, Elder had as much cause as anyone to lash out at the club, and certainly not to do so was to go against the temper of the entire town. But he stuck to his position. He admitted that Johnstown people had long been edgy about the dam and said, “Therefore, if anybody be to blame I suppose we ourselves are among them, for we have indeed been very careless in this most important matter and most of us have paid the penalty of our neglect.” It was a brave and most unpopular thing to be saying in Johnstown. The statement was picked up immediately by the newspapers. But his line of reasoning was never given any serious consideration by the popular press, though Engineering and Building Record registered surprise that the men responsible for Johnstown’s welfare, not to mention the officials of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with all that they had at stake, had not made sure that the lake over their heads was carefully built in the first place and properly maintained thereafter.

The railroad, for its part, remained quiet about any involvement it might have had in the dam’s past, taking the position, no doubt, that its actions in bringing relief to Johnstown would speak a great deal louder and more favorably than any words—which indeed they did. And once the engineering journals had established that the so-called engineers from the railroad who, according to statements made by Pitcairn, had kept a watch on the dam were in no way qualified to make any sort of intelligent judgment, then there was really very little more that the railroad could say.

But if the club’s guilt had been established as far as the newspapers were concerned, there still remained the matter of paying the penalty, and that such a penalty should be paid seemed self-evident.

One newspaper after another said that the club should have to make amends for what had happened. Not a little facetiously, The New York Times wrote, “Justice is inevitable even though the horror is attributable to men of wealth and station, and the majority of the victims the most downtrodden workers in any industry in the country.”

Even the Boston Post, which except for the Pittsburgh papers was about as conciliatory toward the club as any paper, said that the members had better be prepared to pay up. The Post, quite generously, stressed that the members must have acted as most men would have under the circumstances, “trusting, perhaps not unjustifiably, to others” with no thought of imperiling the lives of anyone. “Even if all that is reported as to the construction of the dam proves true, there is the possibility that personally the owners were not guilty of the reckless parsimony attributed to them.” Still, added the Post, “If they were unable or failed to cope with forces of nature which they called into action, the responsibility is theirs, and as they have sown so must they reap, even if the harvest is the whirlwind.”

And behind every editorial was the suggestion of what the Sun said outright: “If they [the club members] should be held liable in civil suits for damages it is probable that many, if not all of them, will be financially ruined.”

The Pittsburgh men had by now given some $6,000 to the relief fund, in addition to the 1,000 blankets, but that did not seem to help their cause much. “As they are almost all millionaires,” wrote the New York Daily Graphic, “the sum is not staggering, but shows that, while they were negligent, they are not heartless…. Yet they should do more than they have for the sufferers. It was through their indifference that this great disaster was precipitated upon the residents of the peaceful valley. Remorse, if nothing else, should lead them to alleviate to the fullest extent of their wealth the suffering they have caused.”

Very shortly thereafter several club members did, in fact, give generously; but, needless to say, it was far from the “fullest extent of their wealth.”

Henry Clay Frick, through H. C. Frick Coke Company, gave $5,000. The Mellon family, through T. Mellon & Sons, gave $1,000. The Carnegie Company gave $10,000. There were several gifts of $1,000, $500, and $100. There was also one member who gave $15, and there were about thirty of them who never gave anything.

The members did suggest that the clubhouse could be used as a home for Johnstown orphans, but the offer was turned down with the excuse that the location was too inconvenient. There was also one member, S. S. Marvin, who actually went to Johnstown to see what he could do to help, and contrary to the many warnings published, he suffered no injuries, or even insults, from the people in the valley. Marvin had been appointed to one of the committees organized by the governor. He was in the baking business in Pittsburgh and had already contributed great quantities of bread. At Johnstown he looked about with absolute dismay and said, “Johnstown is a funeral,” an expression the newsmen were quick to pick up.

As for the other members, they grew increasingly cautious about saying anything. Phipps, Mellon, and Knox said nothing at all. Unger, who was staying with his daughter in Pittsburgh, tried hard to play down the importance of the fish guards, saying that they were only a few feet high. He also reminded the reporters that the dam had been originally built by the state, thus implying that the matter of responsibility, if pursued, might become a very complicated piece of business.

Frick refused to see anyone from the press. Except for Carngie, Frick was, of course, the best-known and most powerful of the members, and unlike Carnegie, Frick had already had his name published in the papers as one of the members. Moreover, he was, after Ruff, the ranking stockholder in the original organization and one of the few founding members still in the organization. In other words, he was one of the few people who had been involved in the club at the time Ruff made his renovation of the dam. So anything he might have to say would be of great interest, and possibly of great importance to how things might go for the club in the courts.

But Frick was not talking, and it was probably not so much that he was fearful of saying anything at that particular time as it was that he simply did not talk to the press ever, at any time. It was his standing policy. He was a highly uncommunicative sort anyway and, by nature, abhorred all forms of notoriety. He had no trust in newspapers, no liking for reporters, and talking to them, he was convinced, was bad for business. Only once in his life did he break his rule and speak freely to a reporter, but it was with the understanding that he could edit the copy, which he did, reducing a full column to exactly ten lines.

In the weeks following the disaster Frick made no public statements, nor did he ever in later years.

Carnegie, on the other hand, had much to say, but never anything to suggest that he had had any connection with the club, and almost no one was ever the wiser, since it would not be for another year or more, when the story had been largely forgotten, that a complete membership list was divulged. Carnegie was in Paris attending the World’s Fair at the time the disaster occurred. When a meeting of Americans had been called at the United States Legation, by the American Minister to France, Whitelaw Reid, it had been Carnegie who put forth the resolutions quickly adopted by the assembly. The people of Johnstown were to receive “profound and heartfelt sympathy” from their brethren across the Atlantic; they were also to be congratulated for their “numerous acts of noble heroism” and especially were they to be admired for the way they had “preserved order during chaos” through their own local self-government. How much Carnegie then contributed to the 40,000-odd francs that were pledged is not known.

But as for the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and any thoughts or feelings he may have had concerning its part in what had happened, Carnegie made no mention of that, and there would be none forthcoming. Carnegie wound up his affairs in Paris shortly thereafter, then left for his castle in Scotland, stopping off long enough in London to visit with the American Minister there, Robert Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.

Reporters in Pittsburgh, meanwhile, had been looking into the financial status of the South Fork sportsmen’s association and had found, much to their dismay, that, for all the colossal wealth of the men who belonged to it, the club itself was capitalized for a mere $35,000 and there was a $20,000 mortgage still outstanding on the clubhouse. Since any future lawsuits would most likely be brought against the club, and not individual members, the chances for anyone collecting very much appeared to have diminished drastically. And just to be sure that no one missed this particular point, on June 12 James Reed once again granted the press an interview. Reed was a tall, sharp-faced man, quiet-spoken and scholarly looking. His practice included several of Pittsburgh’s biggest concerns, as well as the Carnegie interests. His professional prestige was very high. What he had to say, therefore, was carefully taken down and later read with special interest.

The capital stock of the club would be the extent of the liability, he declared, if, that is, there were any liability, and in his opinion there was not. “I have tried,” he said, “to divest myself of my identity with the South Fork Fishing Club to see if there could possibly be any grounds for a suit against the company or individual stockholders, and I am free to say I have been unable to find any. If a person was to come to me as an attorney and want me to bring suit against the company for damages resulting from the flood, I could not do so, because there are no grounds for such a suit.”

Then, in conclusion he said, “As one of the stockholders I most certainly regret the sad occurrence, and I know the rest do; but I cannot see how the organization can be held legally responsible for the breaking of that dam.”

But if he could not, there were others who could. At the end of July the first case brought against the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was filed at the Allegheny Court House in Pittsburgh, where the club had been originally incorporated. Mrs. Nancy Little and her eight children were suing the club for $50,-000 for the loss of her husband, John Little, a woodenware salesman from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, who had been killed at the Hulbert House. The attorneys for the defense were, as had been expected, Knox & Reed, who filed a voluntary plea of not guilty. Then the case was put off for several months.

Early in August a group of Johnstown businessmen organized to sue the club. They raised some $1,300 to help meet expenses and hired John Linton and Horace Rose to start preparing their case.

Later on, James and Ann Jenkins, backed by some businessmen of Youngstown, Ohio, brought suit for $25,000 for the loss of Mrs. Jenkins’ father, mother, and brother, who had been drowned at Johnstown.

There were also suits against the Pennsylvania Railroad, the most important of which was one filed in September by a Mr. Farney S. Tarbell of Pittsburgh. Tarbell accused the railroad of negligence in the death of his wife and three children, who had been passengers on the Day Express. There were suits for lost luggage, and a Philadelphia company sued for the loss of ten barrels of whiskey, which had been looted from a freight car. This last case was won by the Philadelphia company when a conductor admitted that he had looked the other way when the whiskey was being taken. It was, as things turned out, the only case won by any of those who brought suit against either the club or the railroad.

Not a nickel was ever collected through damage suits from the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club or from any of its members. The Nancy Little case dragged on for several years, with the clubmen claiming that the disaster had been a “visitation of providence.” The jury, it seems, agreed.

There is no account of how things went in court, as it was not the practice to record the proceedings of damage suits. Nor is there any record of the Jenkins case, though there, too, the clubmen were declared not guilty.

In the Tarbell case the judge acquitted the railroad, also designating the disaster a “providential visitation.” And in Johnstown, after nearly two years of preparation, Colonel Linton and Horace Rose urged their clients to give up their suit, saying that it would almost certainly fail. The club had no assets, they argued, and there was no chance of winning unless individual negligence could be proved and that would be next to impossible since Ruff was dead. So Linton and Rose were paid $1,000 for their services and the suit was dropped.

Perhaps the most frustrating attempt to recover some retribution was carried on by Jacob Strayer, the Johnstown lumber dealer, who set out to sue the club for $80,000. The case sat for years, in one county court after another, as the club kept seeking a change of venue due to local feelings. Then after waiting something like five years without hearing anything, Strayer discovered that his lawyer, unbeknownst to him, had settled out of court (taking $500) and had died shortly after that. Strayer next went bankrupt; the club was long since insolvent; and nothing more happened.

Had the Little case or the Jenkins case been tried in Johnstown instead of Pittsburgh, it is possible that the decisions would have gone the other way, though in Johnstown there would have been small chance of finding twelve men to serve on a jury who would have been able to profess no bias against the club. In the judgment of lawyers who have examined the facts of the disaster in recent years, it also seems likely that had the damage cases been conducted according to today’s standards the club and several of its members would have lost. It is even conceivable that some of those immense Pittsburgh fortunes would have been reduced to almost nothing. What the repercussions of that might have been is interesting to speculate. Possibly it would have delayed, perhaps even altered significantly, the nation’s industrial growth.

In trying to evaluate why the cases went as they did, it is, of course, important to keep in mind the tremendous power of the people who were being sued. Their influence and prestige were such that few would have ever dared challenge them on anything. “It is almost impossible to imagine how those people were feared,” Victor Heiser would say many years later. They were the ruling class. It was that simple. The papers could rail away to their heart’s delight (while seldom ever mentioning any names), but to actually strike out at the likes of the clubmen, even within the confines of the courts, was something else again. Practically speaking, the odds against winning against them were enormous, even had the cases been open and shut, which they were not.

For to prove that any living member of the club had been personally negligent would have been extremely difficult. And in all fairness, it is quite likely, as the Boston Post suggested, that the clubmen themselves knew no more about the structural character of the dam than did anyone in Johnstown. Like nearly every leading citizen of Johnstown, with the exceptions of Morrell and Fulton, they made the mistake of assuming that the men who had rebuilt the dam had known what they were doing.

They had been told that the dam was properly engineered and properly maintained, and so, as long as everything went all right, they had no cause to think otherwise.

In addition, there is no doubt that the storm which brought on the failure of the dam was without precedent; or at least that during the relatively short period of time in which there had been some semblance of civilization in the area (which was less than a hundred years), no one had recorded a heavier downpour. So for such skillful lawyers as Knox and Reed to have argued that the whole dreadful occurrence was an act of God would have been very easy, and judging by the outcome, they made their point with great effect.

Certainly in the eyewitness testimony collected by the Pennsylvania Railroad in preparation for the suits it might have to face, repeated emphasis was placed on proving that no one had ever seen such a storm; and therefore if the “reasonable precautions” taken by railroad employees such as yardmaster Walkinshaw had turned out badly, it was only because the storm itself was so very unnatural. (It is also interesting to note that Pitcairn, in defense of Ruff’s abilities, agreed openly that Ruff had no engineering training; Ruff was a lot better than any engineer, Pitcairn said.)

Still the heart of the matter remained the dam itself, and judging from occasional comments that appeared in the papers, it seems that the club’s defense was based on the proposition that the dam would have broken anyway—even if it had had no structural flaws.

Apparently that was a convincing argument, despite the fact that several small dams which had been built near Johnstown to supply the city’s drinking water had not failed as a result of the storm; and these, significantly enough, had been built under the personal supervision of Daniel J. Morrell.

The water in Lake Conemaugh, the attorneys for the defense must have claimed, was coming up so fast on the afternoon of the 31st, and would have continued to come up so fast, even had the dam held past 3:10, that eventually it would have started over the top, and once that happened, sooner or later, the best of earth dams would have failed. Even had there been no sag at the center, even if the spillway had been working to full capacity, the volume of water rushing into the lake was greater than what could get out, and so, they held, the end result would have been the same, except that it would have come later, and perhaps at night when the consequences would have been far more disastrous. It was a specious line of defense, for several reasons.

First of all, there is no way of ascertaining for certain whether the inflow of water was such that it would have caused the lake to spill over the breast of the dam for an extended period of time had the dam been higher at the center, instead of lower, and had there been no obstructions in the spillway. There is also no way of telling whether there was a drop off in the volume of water pouring into the lake in the hours following the break. In other words, would there have been enough water rushing off the mountain to keep the lake at a level higher than the breast of the dam (a properly engineered dam, that is) for many hours? It seems unlikely. Moreover, it was clear from the engineering studies made, and from photographs taken of the dam after the break, that it was that part of the dam which had been repaired by Ruff and his crew which went out on the afternoon of the 31st.

But even if it were assumed, for the sake of argument, that the Ruff repairs were as solid as the original dam, that the spillway obstructions did not greatly diminish its capacity, and that there was no sag at the center to reduce even further the spillway’s usefulness, there still remains one very obvious and irrefutable flaw in the dam and in any argument in its defense.

Because there were no longer discharge pipes at the base of the dam, the owners never at any time had any control over the level of the lake. If the water began to rise over a period of days or weeks to a point where it was becoming dangerously high, there was simply nothing that could be done about it. If, on the other hand, the pipes had still been there, as they were up until they were removed by Congressman Reilly, or if new pipes had been installed by Ruff, then through that abnormally wet spring of 1889 the men in charge of the dam, Unger, John Parke, and others, could have kept the lake at a safe level of say at least ten to twelve feet below the crest of the dam.

So while there is no question that an “act of God” (the storm of the night of May 30-31) brought on the disaster, there is also no question that it was, in the last analysis, mortal man who was truly to blame. And if the men of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, as well as the men of responsibility in Johnstown, had in retrospect looked dispassionately to themselves, and not to their stars, to find the fault, they would have seen that they had been party to two crucial mistakes.

In the first place, they had tampered drastically with the natural order of things and had done so badly. They had ravaged much of the mountain country’s protective timber, which caused dangerous flash runoff following mountain storms; they obstructed and diminished the capacity of the rivers; and they had bungled the repair and maintenance of the dam. Perhaps worst of all they had failed—out of indifference mostly—to comprehend the possible consequences of what they were doing, and particularly what those consequences might be should nature happen to behave in anything but the normal fashion, which, of course, was exactly what was to be expected of nature. As one New England newspaper wrote: “The lesson of the Conemaugh Valley flood is that the catastrophes of Nature have to be regarded in the structures of man as well as its ordinary laws.”

The dam was the most dramatic violation of the natural order, and so as far as a few rather hysterical editorial writers were concerned, the lesson of the flood was that dams in general were bad news. The writers took up the old line that if God had meant for there to be such things as dams, He would have built them Himself.

The point, of course, was not that dams, or any of man’s efforts to alter or improve the world about him, were mistakes in themselves. The point was that if man, for any reason, drastically alters the natural order, setting in motion whole series of chain reactions, then he had better know what he is doing. In the case of the South Fork dam, the men in charge of rebuilding it, those who were supposed to be experts in such matters, had not been expert—either in their understanding of what they did or, equally important, in their understanding of the possible consequences of what they did.

What is more, the members of the club and most of Johnstown went along on the assumption that the people who were responsible for their safety were behaving responsibly. And this was the second great mistake.

The club people took it for granted that the men who rebuilt the dam—the men reputed to be expert in such matters—handled the job properly. They apparently never questioned the professed wisdom of the experts, nor bothered to look critically at what the experts were doing. It was a human enough error, even though anyone with a minimum of horse sense could, if he had taken a moment to think about it, have realized that an earth dam without any means for controlling the level of the water it contained was not a very good idea. The responsibility was in the hands of someone else, in short, and since that someone else appeared to be ever so much better qualified to make the necessary decisions and pass judgment, then why should not things be left to him?

In Johnstown most men’s thoughts ran along the same general line, except that it was the clubmen who were looked upon as the responsible parties. And just as the clubmen were willing to accept on faith the word of those charged with the job of rebuilding the dam, so too were most Johnstown people willing to assume that the clubmen were dutifully looking to their responsibilities. If the dam was in the hands of such men as could build the mightiest industries on earth, who could so successfully and swiftly change the whole character of a city or even a country, then why should any man worry very much? Surely, those great and powerful men there on the mountain knew their business and were in control.

In the North American Review, in August 1889, in an article titled “The Lesson of Conemaugh,” the director of the U. S. Geological Survey, Major John Wesley Powell, wrote that the dam had not been “properly related to the natural conditions” and concluded: “Modern industries are handling the forces of nature on a stupendous scale…. Woe to the people who trust these powers to the hands of fools.”

It was, however, understandably difficult for the people of Johnstown ever to feel, like Cyrus Elder, that they too had been even partly to blame. Practically everyone felt that he had foreseen the coming catastrophe, and if he had not, like John Fulton, actually put anything down on paper, he, nonetheless, had been equally aware of the troubles with the South Fork dam and every bit as dubious about its future. That the members of the club were never required to pay for their mistakes infuriated nearly everyone in Johnstown and left a feeling of bitter resentment that would last for generations.

As for the club people, their summers at South Fork were over. The cottages sat high and dry along the vast mud flat which had been Lake Conemaugh and where, here and there, like the remains of some prehistoric age, stood the stumps of great trees that had been taken down more than fifty years earlier just before the dam had been built. By July grass had sprung up along South Fork Creek where it worked its way through the center of the old lake bed, and deer left tracks where they came down to drink.

For some time several cottages were occupied by Johnstown people. James McMillan, the plumber, and six or seven other men moved their families into the biggest of the houses, apparently with the consent of the owners, and, according to a notice in the Tribune at the end of July, the accommodations were as elegant as ever. But the owners themselves never came back, except for one, Colonel Unger, who not only returned, but lived out the rest of his life on the farm just above the remains of the dam. All the other property was broken up and sold off at a sheriff’s auction.

In Johnstown the Cambria works had started up again by mid July. It would be a long time before the furnaces were working to capacity, but nearly the full pay roll was being met and slowly things began to return to normal. Estimates were made on the total property damage (about $17 million). The banks opened. The Quicksteps were playing again. By August the Saturday night band concerts had been revived and a piano tuner had come to town. There was ice cream for sale; Haviland china was back on the shelves of those few stores that had been spared. A camera club was started, and the plumbers and steam fitters organized a union.

In September Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Carnegie came to town to see the flood damage, and before he left Carnegie had agreed to build a new library where the old one had been. In late fall the schools reopened.

New houses and shops were going up all over town. People who had fled the valley began coming back again. The Quinns were back by October, astonished to find how much had been accomplished and how bad the place still smelled. There was plenty of work still to be done, of course, and plenty of jobs, and it would stay that way for a long time. Just getting the place back to where it had been before would take five years or more.

But there were many who would leave Johnstown after the flood. For hundreds of people, like Victor Heiser, the disaster had deprived them of every meaningful connection with the place. Suddenly they were alone and there seemed no very strong reason for staying any longer, and particularly if they had ever had an ambition to see something of the world. Had his mother and father survived, Victor Heiser would have remained in Johnstown, probably, he would later speculate, to become a watchmaker. As it was, he left the valley within a year, and after working his way through medical school, spent most of his life as a public-health officer and physician, fighting disease around the world. He would also write a best-selling book on his experiences, An American Doctor’s Odyssey, and would be credited with saving perhaps two million lives.

There were others who could stay no longer because of the memory of what had happened. And David Beale was among those who left out of bitterness over an experience during the frantic days which had followed the disaster. In Beale’s case it had been a falling out with some of his congregation over the fact that he had turned the church into a morgue without authorization from the elders. There were plenty who rose to his defense, saying it had been the only intelligent and Christian thing to do under the circumstances and that somebody had to make the decision, but there were enough hard words exchanged to send Beale on his way to another charge in another town.

For years, too, there would be much speculation on how many of those people listed among the unfound dead were actually very much alive in some faraway place. It seemed reasonable enough to figure that some men, suddenly, in the first dim light of that terrible morning of June 1, had decided that here was an opportune time to quietly slip away to a new and better life. And if one of those names on the unknown list was somebody you had been close to, it was a whole lot pleasanter to think of him living on an apple farm in Oregon or tending bar in a San Francisco saloon than rotting away beneath six feet of river muck somewhere below Bolivar. Furthermore, such speculation seemed well justified when, eleven years later, in the summer of 1900, a man by the name of Leroy Temple showed up in town to confess that he had not died in the flood but had been living quite happily ever since in Beverly, Massachusetts. On the morning of June 1 he had crawled out of the wreckage at the bridge, looked around at what was left of Johnstown, then just turned on his heels and walked right out of the valley.

Stories of the flood would live on for years, and in time they would take on more the flavor of legends, passed along from generation to generation. Each family had its tales of where they had been when the wall of water came, where they ran to, who shouted what to whom, who picked up the baby, who went back for the horse, or how they had survived the night. Children who were only four or five years old at the time would live to be old men and women who would describe in the most remarkable detail how they had watched the flood strike the city (from a place where it would have been impossible to have seen the water) or how they had looked at their wrist watch at that exact moment (there were no wrist watches in 1889) and read (at age five!) that it was exactly such-and-such time. There would be stories of how grandfather tried to save an ax handle (“of all things!”) or how Uncle Otto had thrown away his Bible when he saw what had happened. There would also be a great amount of durable gossip and some rather bad feelings about “certain people” who had somehow gotten their hands on more than their share of the relief money and how “their families are rich to this day because of it.” And at least one Irish undertaker from Pittsburgh was said to have made “a positive fortune” out of the disaster.

There would also, one day, be signs posted in saloons from one end of the country to the other saying: PLEASE DON’T SPIT ON THE FLOOR, REMEMBER THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD. At Coney Island and in Atlantic City re-creations of the great disaster would be major attractions for many seasons. And “Run for the hills, the dam has busted” would be a standard comedy line the country over for years.

In Johnstown three babies born on the fateful day would grow up with the names Moses Williams, Flood C. Raymond, and Flood S. Rhodes.

General Hastings would later be elected governor largely because of the name he had made for himself at Johnstown; and when William Flinn later became the Republican boss of Pittsburgh and a state senator, he made it a practice to remind election-year audiences of the job he had done at Johnstown.

Tom L. Johnson, who later gave up a lucrative business career to become the highly progressive (some said “socialistic”) mayor of Cleveland, would use the flood to make a case for his political philosophy. In his autobiography he would write at length about the disaster and its cause and how charity had vitiated local energies (he was still Moxham’s man in this regard). The flood, he would conclude, was caused “by Special Privilege,” and: “The need of charity is always the result of the evils produced by man’s greed.”

In after-dinner speeches at the Duquesne Club, Robert Pitcairn would recall the services rendered by the railroad and ask if a “heartless corporation” could have behaved so. Bill Jones never said much about what he did, though he was quoted as saying that perhaps Johnstown ought to rebuild on higher ground. When he returned to Pittsburgh from Johnstown, Jones had only two months to live. At the end of the summer he was killed when a furnace he was working on at the Braddock mill exploded.

The members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club remained silent. The matter of their part in the flood was simply not mentioned, and as the years passed less and less was heard of it. In another generation it would be just about forgotten in Pittsburgh.

The more or less agreed-to attitude of Johnstown’s business people was also that the flood should be forgotten as soon as possible. There was no sense dwelling on the thing. It was bad for the spirits, and it most certainly was harmful to business.

“It may be well to consider that the flood, with all its train of horrors, is behind us, and that we have hence forth to do with the future alone,” said George Swank in the Tribune on the morning of June 1, 1892. It was his conclusion to a long description of the ceremonies held the day before at Grandview Cemetery. The whole city had been shut down and close to 10,000 people had gone up to the new burying grounds.

Except for the plot for the flood dead, Grandview was still very sparsely occupied. It had been started by Cyrus Elder, John Fulton, and others only a few years before the flood and was laid out a good distance from town up on some of the highest land for miles around. The idea was that here the dead would be safe from spring floods. The view was very grand indeed, stretching off in every direction as far as the eye could carry; but the trees blocked a direct look back down into the great amphitheater among the hills where Johnstown lay, and so the city was wholly concealed, and except for the distant sound from the mills, it was almost as though there was nothing even like a city anywhere near.

On the afternoon of the 31st, with the new governor present, and with Johnstown’s first mayor, Horace Rose, officiating, a large granite monument was dedicated to the “Unknown Dead Who Perished in the Flood at Johnstown, May 31, 1889.”

Behind the monument, arranged very precisely row on row, were 777 small, white marble headstones.

The unknown plot had been purchased by the Relief Commission and the bodies moved there from Nineveh, Prospect Hill, and half a dozen other places during the early fall of 1889. It had taken the time since to raise money for the monument and the nameless headstones. Actually, there were not quite a full 777 bodies buried in the plot; someone had decided to set out a few extra stones just to make an even pattern. But the effect on the immense throng gathered in the warm afternoon sunshine was very great. Against the long sweep of grass and the darker green of the bordering trees, the people stood in their funeral best, clustered in a dark, tight mass, strangely motionless and silent beneath the veiled monument. A few steps beyond, the carriages for the dignitaries were drawn up.

There were several speeches, the longest and best of which was by the governor, Robert Pattison, who, in offering a lesson to be learned from the disaster, said, “We who have to do with the concentrated forces of nature, the powers of air, electricity, water, steam, by careful forethought must leave nothing undone for the preservation and protection of the lives of our brother men.”

Then the choir sang “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”; the monument was unveiled, and people started back along the winding road that led down into town.

List of Victims

Total Number Lost, 2,209

This list, dated July 31, 1890, is the one printed in the Johnstown Tribune fourteen months after the Flood.

GRAND VIEW CEMETERY.

[Buried in private lots in Grand View.]

Alexander, Arailia K., Broad street.

Andrews, John, Sr., 57, John street.

Arther, Mrs. Alice, 29, Water street.

Bantley, William G., 36, Third Ward.

Bantley, Mrs. Ella, 30, Third Ward.

Bantley, George L., 6 months, Third Ward.

Barbour, Mrs. Mary, 25, Woodvale.

Barbour, Florence, 4, Woodvale.

Barley, Mrs. Barbara, 56, Woodvale.

Barley, Nancy, 29, Woodvale.

Barley, Viola, 9, Woodvale.

Beam, Dr. Lemon T., 55, Market street.

Beam, Charles C., 4, Market street.

Beam, Dr. W. C., 35, Locust street.

Beam, Mrs. Clara, 32, Locust street.

Beckley, E. E., 23, Main street.

Bending, Mrs. Elizabeth, 48, Locust street.

Bending, Jessie, 24, Locust street.

Bending, Katie, 15, Locust street.

Beneigh, John C., 65, Cambria.

Benford, Mrs. E. E., 63, Hulbert House.

Benford, Maria, 34, Hulbert House.

Benford, May, 26, Hulbert House.

Benford, Louis, 30, Hulbert House.

Benshoff, J. Q. A., 62, Somerset street.

Benshoff, Arthur, 27, Somerset street.

Bowman, Nellie, 9, Haynes street.

Bowman, Charles H., 7, Haynes street.

Bowman, Frank P., 33, Woodvale.

Bowman, Emma, 28, Woodvale.

Brinkey, Dr. J. C., 28, Franklin street.

Brinkey, Elmer, 26, Hulbert House.

Buchanan, John S., 69, Locust street.

Buchanan, Mrs. Kate J., 63, Locust street.

Buchanan, Robert L., 20, Locust street.

Connelly, Maud, 6, Franklin.

Constable, Philip E., 60, Broad street.

Cope, Mrs. Margaret, 65, Conemaugh.

Cope, Ella B., 28, Conemaugh.

Cooney, Mrs. Elizabeth.

Davis, Mary Ann, 40, Woodvale.

Davis, Thomas S., 59, Locust street.

Davis, Mrs. Elizabeth.

Davis, Mrs. Susan, 27, Millville.

Davis, Clara, 8, Millville.

Davis, Willie, 3, Millville.

Davis, Eliza M.

Davis, Margaret, E.

Davis, Mrs. Cora B., 25, Water street.

Davis William L.

Davis, Willard G.

Davis, Mary G.

Delaney, Mrs. Jessie, 29, Vine street.

Delaney, Mrs. Ella A.

Dibert, John, 56, Main street.

Dibert, Blanche, 9, Main street.

Dixon, David, 40, Millville.

Diller, Rev. Alonzo P., Locust street.

Diller, Mrs. Marion, Locust street.

Diller, Isaac, Locust street.

Dinant, Lola, Locust street.

Dorris, August.

Drew, Mrs. Mark, 62, Millville.

Drew, Mollie, 8, Conemaugh street.

Duncan, Mrs. Sarah A., 23, Woodvale.

Dyer, Mrs. Nathan, 64, Somerset street.

Eck, Mary Ellen.

Edwards, Mrs. Annie R.

Eldridge, Samuel B., Apple Alley.

Eldridge, Abram S., 34, Merchants’ Hotel.

Etchison, John, 44, Napoleon street.

Evans, Mrs. William F., 63, Union street.

Evans, Maggie, 11, Lewis Alley.

Evans, Kate, 5, Lewis Alley.

Evans, Mrs. Josiah, 36, Vine street.

Evans, Maggie, 16, Vine street.

Evans, Lake, 6, Vine street.

Evans, Ira, 6 months, Vine street.

Evans, Mrs. Maggie, 37, Vine street.

Evans, Mrs. Ann.

Evans, Sadie, 8, Vine street.

Evans, Herbert, 3, Vine street.

Evans, Pearl, 1, Vine street.

Evans, Lizzie.

Fails, Francis.

Fenn, John, 35, Locust street.

Fenn, Genevieve, 9, Locust street.

Fenn Bismarck S., 3, Locust street.

Findlay, Lulu, 16. Woodvale.

Fisher, John H., 55, Main street.

Fisher Mary J., 46, Main street.

Fisher, Emma K., 23, Main street.

Fisher, Ida, 19, Main street.

Fisher, Madge, 10, Main street.

Fisher Minnie, 21, Main street.

Fisher, George 12, Main street.

Fisher, Frank, 9 months.

Fleck, Leroy Webster.

Fox, Martin 51, Conemaugh.

Frank, John, Sr., 58, Washington street.

Frank, Mrs. Eliza, 44, Washington street.

Frank, Katie, 19, Washington street.

Frank, Emma, 17, Washington street.

Frank, Laura, 12, Washington street.

Fredericks, Mrs. A. G., 45, Millville.

Fredericks, Mrs. Sarah A.

Frederick, Edmon.

Fritz, Maggie, 26, Conemaugh.

Fritz, Kate, 22, Conemaugh.

Fronheiser, Mrs. Kate, 33, Main street.

Fronheiser, Bessie, 8, Main street.

Fronheiser, Catherine, 3 months, Main street.

Gageby, Mrs. Rebecca, 74, Jackson street.

Gageby, Sadie, 27, Jackson street.

Gallagher, Prof. C. F., 34, Main street.

Gallagher, Lizzie, 29, Main street.

Gard, Andrew, Jr., 25, Main street.

Geddes, George, 47, Woodvale.

Geddes, Marion, 17, Woodvale.

Geddes, Paul, 15, Woodvale.

Gilmore, Mrs. Margaret, 40, Union street.

Gilmore, Anthony, 8, Union street.

Gilmore, Llewelyn, 6, Union street.

Gilmore, Willy, 4, Union street.

Gilmore, Clara, 2, Union street.

Golde, Mrs. Henry, 32, Walnut street.

Griffin, Mary, 47, Walnut street

Hager, Mary E., 33, Washington street.

Hager, Mrs. Emma.

Hamilton, Jacob, 70, Bedford street.

Hamilton, Jessie, 30, Bedford street.

Hamilton, Laura, 24, Bedford street.

Hamilton, Alex, Jr., 35, Locust street.

Hamilton, Mrs. Alex, 30, Locust street.

Hamilton, Marion, Locust street.

Hamilton, Louther J.

Hammer, George K., 19, Moxham.

Harris, Mrs. William T.

Harris, John, 3, Market street.

Harris, Margaret, 47, Market street.

Harris, Wm. L., 23, Market street.

Harris, Winnie, 21, Market street.

Harris, Maggie A., 19, Market street.

Harris, Sarah, 16, Market street.

Harris, Frank, 12, Market street.

Haynes, Walter B., 22, Horner street.

Haynes, Laura C., 20, Horner street.

Hennekamp, Rebecca, 24, Franklin street.

Hennekamp, Oscar E., 2, Franklin street.

Hennekamp, S. E., 27, Lincoln street.

Heidenthal, Harry R.

Heiser, George, 50, Washington street.

Heiser, Mrs. George, 48, Washington street.

Helsel, George, 16, Johns street.

Hite, Mrs. Ella, 37, Somerset street.

Hochstein, Henry, 30, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Benjamin F., 56, Market street.

Hoffman, Mrs. Mary, 43, Market street.

Hoffman, Bertha, 19, Market street.

Hoffman, Minnie, 16, Market street.

Hoffman, Marion, 14, Market street.

Hoffman Florence, 10, Market street.

Hoffman, Joseph, 8, Market street.

Hoffman, Helen, 4, Market street.

Hoffman, Freda, 1, Market street.

Hoffman, Mrs. Mary, 41, Washington street.

Hohnes, Mrs. Ann, 24, Conemaugh.

Hohnes, Mrs. Elizabeth, 80, Lincoln street.

Hohnes, Julia, 18, Conemaugh.

Hollen, Charles.

Howe, Thomas J., Bedford street.

Howells, William, 59, Union street.

Howells, Maggie, 23, Union street.

Howells, Mrs. Ann.

Hughes, Maggie, 22, Sugar Alley.

Hughes, Evan, 57, Sugar Alley.

Humm, Geo. C, Merchants’ Hotel

Humphreys, William, 18, Levergood street.

Jacobs, Lewis, 41, Cambria City.

James, Mrs. Ellen M., 42, Main street.

James, Mollie, 13, Market street.

Jones, Mary J.

Jones, Reuben, 1, Main street.

Jones, James, 32, Conemaugh.

Jones, Ann, 9 Conemaugh.

Jones, Mrs. W. W.

Jones, Edgar R.

Jones, Mrs. Mary A., 52, Pearl street.

Jones, Eliza, 15, Pearl street.

Karns, Joseph, 50, Locust street.

Keedy, Harry C., 30, Millville.

Keedy, Mrs. Mary, 32, Millville.

Kegg, William E., 17, Locust street.

Keiper, Essie J., 24, Franklin.

Keiper, Ralph, 5 months, Franklin.

Kennedy, H.D., 32, Stonycreek street.

Keyser, Mrs. John.

Keyser, Ralph.

Keighly, Mary L., 52, Main street.

Kidd, Joshua, 65, Walnut street.

Kidd, Mrs. Sarah, 60, Walnut street.

Kirkbride, Mahlo’n, 33, Hager Block.

Kirkbride, Mrs. Ida, 30, Hager Block.

Kirkbride, Luida, 8, Hager Block.

Kirlin, Thomas, 40, Conemaugh street.

Kirlin, Eddie, 12, Conemaugh street.

Kirlin Frank, 5, Conemaugh street.

Knorr, Mrs. Mary, 45, Jackson street.

Knorr, Emma, 16, Jackson street.

Knorr, Bertha, 14, Jackson street.

Knox, Mrs. Thomas, 45, Somerset street.

Koenstyl, Samuel.

Kratzer, Mrs. Mary, Market street.

Kuntz, Wade, 21, Morris street

Lambreski, Mrs. Barbara, 35, Cambria.

Lambreski, Mary, 6, Cambria.

Lambreski, John, 4, Cambria.

Layton, Mrs. Elvira.

Layton, William, 58, Broad street.

Layton, Mrs. William, 53, Broad street.

Layton, May, 22, Broad street.

Layton, David, Broad street.

Layton, Ella, Broad street.

Lee, Dr. J. K., 48, Main street.

Leitenberger, Mrs. Leah, 68, Vine street.

Leitenberger, Nancy, 48, Vine street.

Leitenberger, Ella, 35, Vine street.

Leitenberger, Eliza, 46, Vine street.

Lenhart, Samuel, 58, Clinton street.

Lenhart, Mrs. Mary, 56, Clinton street.

Lenhart, Annie E., 20, Clinton Street.

Lenhart, Emma J., 17, Clinton street.

Lenhart, Katie M., 13, Clinton street.

Lewis, Mrs. Ann.

Lewis, Ananias, 41, Millville.

Levergood, Mrs. Jane, 75, Bedford street.

Levergood, Lucy, 45, Bedford street.

Lewis, Orrie P., 6, Millville.

Lewis James.

Linton, Minnie, 20, Lincoln street.

Litz, Mrs. John, 74, Morris street.

Llewellyn, Mrs. Margaret, 37, Walnut street.

Llewellyn, Annie, 5, Wainut street

Llewellyn, Sadie, 8, Walnut street

Llewellyn, Herbert, 3, Walnut street.

Liewellyn, Pearl, 1, Walnut street.

Luckhart, Louis, 69, Main street.

Luckhart, Mrs. Adolph, 26, Main street.

Ludwig, Charles.

Ludwig, Henry G., 34, Bedford street.

Ludwig, Mrs. Kate, 35, Bedford street.

Mangus, Martha.

Marbourg, Dr. H. W., 56, Market street.

McDowell, Geo., 29, Pearl street.

McDowell, Mrs. Agnes, 33, Pearl street.

McDowell, Lilly, 3, Pearl street.

McDowell, Georgia.

McClelland, Mrs. Jennie, 34, Sherman street.

McConaghy, Mrs. Kate, 68.

McConaughy, James P., 72, Walnut street.

McConaughy, Mrs. Caroline M., 65, Walnut street.

McConaughy, Wallace, 25, Walnut street.

McConaghy, Robert W.

McKee, John, 21, Bedford street.

McKinstry, Mrs. Mary C., 45, Hager Block.

McKinstry, Annie R., 14, Hager Block.

McVay, Lizzie, 20, Locust street

Merle, Elmer E.

Moore, Mrs. Charlotte L.

Meyers, Mrs. Elizabeth, 55, Washington street.

Meyers, Mary, 24, Washington street.

Meyers, Mrs Catherine, 31 Millville.

Meyers, John, 3, Millville.

Miller, Jessie B., 16, Somerset street.

Morgan, Mrs. Charlotte, 49, Millville.

Morgan, Martha, 13, Millville.

Morgan, Minnie, 4, Milliville.

Murr, Charles, 41, Washington street.

Murr, Maggie, 14, Washington street.

Musser, Charles, 23, Main street.

Nixon, Mrs. Elizabeth, 39, Woodvale.

Nixon, Emma R., 16, Woodvale.

Nixon, Eddie, 8, Woodvale.

Noro, Kate.

Owens, Gladies, 5 months, Conemaugh street.

Owens, Thomas, 10, Conemaugh street.

Owens, William, 65, Market street.

Owens, Annie.

Owens, Mrs. Mary Ann, 31, Conemaugh street.

Owens, Mary, 8, Conemaugh street.

Oyler, Mrs. Mary R., 27, Woodvale.

Oyler, John R., 6, Woodvale.

Parke, Mrs. Agnes J., 56, Bedford street.

Parke, William E., Bedford street.

Parsons, Mrs. Eva M., 23, Locust street.

Penrod, William H., 59, Conemaugh.

Peyton, John W., 65, Clinton street.

Peyton, George A., 19, Clinton street.

Peyton, Marcellus K., 16, Clinton street.

Peyton, Julia F., 13, Clinton street.

Phillips, Mrs. Jane M., 68, Market street.

Pike, William W., 50, Haynes street.

Pike, William W., 15, Haynes street.

Pike, S. Bowen, 10, Haynes street.

Poland, Walter, 5, Market street.

Poland, Frederik, 3, Market street.

Potter, Joseph R., 63, Woodvale.

Potter, Mrs. Sarah, 59, Woodvale.

Potter, Nora G., 17, Woodvale.

Potts, Miss Jane E., 47, Walnut street.

Powell, Richard, 4 weeks, Vine street.

Powell, George, 11/2, Vine street.

Pritchard, Henry, 62, Market street.

Prosser, Fannie, 22, Market street.

Prosser, Bessie, 19, Market street.

Prosser, Maria.

Purse, Mary L., Market street.

Raab, George, 44, Clinton street.

Rabb, Mrs. George, 88, Clinton street.

Rabb, Norma, 16, Clinton street.

Raab, Lizzie, 24, Washington street.

Raab, Emilia, 20, Washington street.

Raab, John C.

Raab, Ella.

Rainey, Mrs. Lizzie L., 25, Bedford street.

Rainey, Parke, 11/2, Bedford street.

Randolph, George F., 26, Beaver Falls.

Reibert, Julius, Washington street.

Reese, Sarah, 10, Conemaugh street.

Reese, John, 2, Conemaugh street.

Reese, Mrs. J. W.

Reese, Samuel.

Reese, Idris, 3, Vine street.

Reese, Gertie.

Reese, Mrs. Mary D., 74, Market street.

Repp, Mrs. Catherine, 26, Sherman street.

Rhodes, Link, 26, Somerset street.

Rhodes, Ellen, 20, Somerset street.

Rhodes, Clarence, 10 months, Somerset street.

Ripple, Jackson, 34, Apple alley.

Roberts, Howard J., 59, Walnut street.

Roberts, Mrs. Howard J., 50, Walnut street.

Roberts, Otis, 23, Walnut street.

Roberts, Mrs. Lucinda H., 81, Main street.

Robinson, Thomas, 60, Woodvale.

Rodgers, Mrs. D. L.

Rodgers, Mrs. Rose, 48, Millville.

Roland, Louis, 31, Conemaugh.

Roland, Lizzie, 29, Conemaugh.

Rosensteel, James M., 50, Woodvale.

Rose, Harry G., 29, Locust street.

Roth, Mrs. Kate 27, Bedford street.

Roth, John, 38, Potts street.

Schoff, Mrs. E. T., 32, Clinton street.

Schotz, Mrs. Elizabeth, 63, Union street.

Schotz, Annie, 23, Union street.

Schotz, Jennie, 21, Union street.

Schubert, C. T., 39, Stonycreek street.

Seibert, Henry, 58, Woodvale.

Shaffer, Jacob, 47, Cambria.

Shulteis, Henry, 26, Potts street.

Shumaker, John S., 11, Locust street.

Shumaker, Edith M., 7, Locust street.

Shumaker, Irene G., 5, Locust street.

Shumaker, Walter S., 2, Locust street.

Slick, George R., 60, Stonycreek street.

Smith, Mr., 54, Cambria.

Smith, Mrs. Sarah, 72, Walnut street.

Stremel, Julius R., 21, Washington street.

Streum, John, 63, Locust street.

Stufft. J. Wesley, 37, Woodvale.

Stufft, Mrs. J. W, 39, Woodvale.

Suder, Homer, 7. Millville.

St. John, Dr. C. P., 32, Hulbert House.

Stophel, Mrs. Maggie, 21, Baumer street.

Stophel, Frank Earl, 4, Baumer street.

Stophel Bertha, Hulbert House.

Swank, Mrs Ella, 29, Main street.

Swank, Jennie, 15, Bedford street.

Swank, Jacob, 61, Bedford street.

Swank, Mrs. Catherine, 57, Bedford street.

Swank, Maud, 11, Napoleon street.

Swank, Fred B., 10, Bedford street.

Swank, Susan, 8, Napoleon street.

Swank, Mrs. Neff, 31, Napoleon street.

Swank, Samuel, 5, Napoleon street.

Swank, Edna, 3, Napoleon street.

Statler, Mrs. Amelia, 51, Park Place.

Statler, May, 23, Park Place.

Statler, Frank E., 17, Park Place.

Teeter, Mrs. Mary, 83, Locust street.

Tittle, Cyrus P., 53, Broad street.

Tradenick, Edward, 18, Union street.

Turner, May, 15, Main street.

Tyler, Jno. T., 29, Stonycreek Township.

Thoburn, Thomas, 17, Millville.

Thoburn, Jennie, 7, Millville.

Thomas, Mrs. Mary A., 39, King street.

Thomas, Ida, 7, King street.

Unverzagt, George, Sr., 67, Main street.

Unverzagt, George, Jr., Main street.

Updegraff Samuel 15, Woodvale.

Viring, Mrs. Louisa, 38, Conemaugh.

Viering, Lizzie, 20, Conemaugh.

Viering, Henry, 14, Conemaugh.

Viering, Herman, 1, Conemaugh.

Vinton, Margaret, 8, Jeannette, Pa.

Von Alt, Mrs. Catherine, 80, Washington street.

Wagoner, Dr. George, 63, Market street.

Wagoner, Lizzie, 20, Market street.

Wagoner, Mrs. Mary L.

Wagoner, Frances E., 18, Market street.

Wagoner, Cora M., Market street.

Wenner, Carl, 32, Locust street.

Wenner, Mrs., Locust street.

Wenner, Mary, 1, Locust street.

Weaver, Mrs. Sue D., 27, Market street.

Weaver, Martha B., 15 months, Market street.

Weakland, John W., 30, Napoleon street.

Werry, Thomas Albert, 17, Chestnut street.

White, Mrs. Mima.

White, Mrs. Ella, 34, Union street.

White, Mrs. Margaret E.

White, Mary P., 20, Market street.

White, Maggie, 31, Union street.

Wild, Jacob, 72, Main street.

Wild, Mrs. Jacob, 58, Main street.

Wild, Bertha, 16, Main street.

Williams, Maggie, 26, Lewis alley.

Williams, Joseph M., 22, Conemaugh street.

Williams, William J., Union street.

Wiliiams, Carrie E., 20, Woodvale.

Worthington, Mrs. Richard, 28, Conemaugh St.

Worthington, Richard, Jr., 1, Conemaugh St.

Worthington, Mamie, 7, Conemaugh street.

Worthington, Annie, 4, Conemaugh street.

Young, Katie.

Yong, Emil, 48, Levergood street.

Young, Frank, 16, Levergood street.

Young, August, 29, Main street.

Young, Andrew C., 36, Broad street.

Zimmerman, Emma, 16, Bedford street.

Zimmerman, Theo. F., 34, Locust street.

SANDYVALE CEMETERY.

Abler, August, 28, Conemaugh.

Abler, Mrs. Louisa, 31, Conemaugh.

Abler, George, 11, Conemaugh.

Baldwin, George, 69, Apple alley.

Bishop, Charles, 45, Woodvale.

Brindle, Mollie, 25, Conemaugh.

Clark, John.

Davis.

Davis.

Davis.

Eberle, Joseph, 63, Conemaugh.

Forbes, Mrs Rachael, 38, Pearl street.

Forbes, Harry E., 10, Pearl street.

Fredericks, Mrs. Annie E., 78, Vine street.

Gray, S. Taylor, 37, Woodvale.

Gallagher, C. F.

Gallaher, Mrs. C. F.

Greenwood.

Greenwalt, Mrs.

Greenwalt, child.

Given, Jane, Millville.

Given, Benj. F., Millville.

Greenwood, Jennie, 17, Cambria.

Greenwood, Geo., 55, Cambria.

Hammer, Daniel, Railroad street.

Hesselbein, Chas., 27, Conemaugh.

Hesselbein, Lewis, 23, Conemaugh.

Hite, Samuel, 26, Woodvale.

Hoffman. Gottfried, 40, Washington street.

Hoffman, Harry, 6, Washington street.

Hoffman, Daniel.

Hoffman, Godfrey, 41, Washington street.

Hoffman, Lizzie, 16, Washington street.

Hoffman, Mrs. Conrad, 38, Market street.

Hoffman, Charles B., 16, Market street.

Hoffman, Willie, 15, Market street.

Hoffman, Annie, 11, Market street.

Hughes, Emma, 26, Potts street.

Jones, Thomas, 50, Woodvale.

Jones, Mary W., 21, Woodvale.

Jones, Richard, 46, Woodvale.

Jones, child of Richard, Woodvale.

Jones, Clara. 6, Woodvale.

Kimpel, Christ., 47, Clinton street.

Knee, Geo. D., 54, Conemaugh.

Meyers, Mrs. Mary, 69, Cambria.

Morgan, Job, 50, Walnut street.

McClarren, Samuel, 49, Cambria.

McClarren, Mrs. Jane, 42, Cambria.

McClarren, Smith, 22, Cambria.

McClarren, Jno. J., 19, Cambria.

McClarren, James, 4, Cambria.

Peppler, Wm., 20, Conemaugh.

Raab, Geo. C, 28, Washington street.

Reese.

Reese.

Reese.

Reese.

Recke, Alex., 35, Washington street.

Scheetz, Jacob, 61, Clinton street.

Schnable, Conrad, 38, Baumer street.

Schnable, John, 20 Main street

Stahr, Fred.

Strayer, Mrs. Elizabeth, 47, Market street.

Strayer, Cora, 17, Market steet.

Strayer, Bertha, Market street.

Teeter, Mrs.

Thomas, Mrs. Edward, Woodvale.

Thomas, Edward, 49, Woodvale.

Thomas, Lydia, 12, Woodvale.

Thomas, Frank, 8, Woodvale.

Tross, Mrs. Margaret, 39, Woodvale.

Unverzagt, Lizzie, Washington street.

Unverzagt, Minnie, 27, Washington street.

Will, Casper, 45, Bedford street.

Wier, Frank A., 18, Cambria.

Willower, Miss Bella, Somerset street.

Wehn, Mrs. Rachel, 57, Main street.

LOWER YODER CATHOLIC CEMETERY.

Blair, Mrs., 50, Woodvale.

Bopp, Jacob, 32, Broad street.

Bracken, Katie, 21, Woodvale.

Bracken, Minnie, 19, Woodvale.

Bridges, Chas., 2, Cambria.

Bridges, Emma, 18, Cambria.

Brown, Peter, Woodvale.

Brown, Thomas, 24, Woodvale.

Brown, Emma, 20, Woodvale.

Brown, Gertrude, 17, Woodvale.

Byrne, John, 32, Hulbert House.

Byrne, Ella, 24, Hulbert House.

Carroll, Mrs. Bridget, 70, Conemaugh.

Carroll, Thomas, 30, Conemaugh.

Carroll, Rose, 20, Conemaugh.

Clark, Mrs. J. B., 39, Conemaugh.

Cronin, Daniel, 50, Vine street.

Cullen, James, 55, Cambria.

Cullen, Mrs. Ann, 50, Cambria.

Cullen, Mrs. Alice, 48, Cambria.

Cullen, Annie, 20, Cambria.

Cullen, Annie, 20, Locust st.

Pro'bly dupl'ted

Cullen, Mrs. Alice, 48, Cambria.

Cush, Mrs. Ann, 55, Cambria.

Cush, Daniel. 33, Cambria.

Cush, Joseph, 19, Cambria.

Cush. Mrs. Tillie, 20, Cambria.

Daily, Mrs. Ann, 60, Locust street.

Daily Frank, 30 Locust street.

Degnan, Mrs. Mary, 60, Cambria.

Downs, Mrs. Catherine, 55, Millville.

Downs, Mary, 32, Millville.

Downs, Katie, 28, Millville.

Dowling, Mrs. Catherine, 42, Market street.

Dowling, Mary E., 21, Market street.

Dunn, Mary Ann, 25, Prospect.

Early, Mary, 22, Woodvale.

Fitzpatrick, Mrs’ Peter, 28, Cambria.

Fitzpatrick, Ella, 6, Cambria.

Fitzpatrick, Mary, 3, Cambria.

Fitzharris, Christ, 42, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, Mrs. Margaret, 40, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, Christ, Jr., 14, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, John, Jr., 12, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, Maggie M., 9, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, Gertie, 5, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, Katie, 7, Franklin street.

Gaffney, Catherine, 2, Cambria.

Gaffney, John, 4, Cambria.

Gallagher, Mrs. Margaret, 32, Washington street.

Gallagher, Thomas, 4, Washington street.

Garvey, Bernard, Sr., 62, Cambria.

Grady, Mrs. Abbie, 60, Cambria.

Halleron, May, 5, Washington street.

Hayes, Mrs. Jane, 32, Cambria.

Hayes, Michael, 12, Cambria.

Hayes, Mary, 8, Cambria.

Hayes, Rose, 7, Cambria.

Hayes, John, 6 Cambria.

Hart. Eliza.

Harrigan, Ella, 22, Hulbert House.

Howard, James B., 45, Conemaugh.

Howe, Mrs. Edward, 50, Railroad street.

Howe, Mrs. Bridget, 48, Cambria.

Howe, Maggie, 24, Cambria.

Howe, Lizzie, 22, Cambria.

Howe, Rose, 19, Cambria.

Howe, Gertrude, 13, Railroad street.

Kane, John, 20, Cambria.

Kane, Mary, 18, Cambria.

Kinney, Mrs. Mary, 50, Washington street.

Kinney, Mary Ellen, 12, Washington street.

Kirby, Wm., 32, Washington street.

Kirby, Mrs. Lena, 25, Washington street.

Lambert, Johanna.

Lavelle, Michael, 22, Broad street.

Lavelle, Wm. M.

Madden, Kate, 17, Cambria.

Matthews, Thos., 22, Clinton street.

McAneny, Neal, 50, Cambria.

McAneny, Mrs. Neal, 45, Cambria.

McAneny, Rose, 23, Cambria.

McAneny, Kate, 18, Cambria.

McAneny, Mary, 13, Cambria.

McAneny, Wm., 9, Cambria.

McAneny, Annie, 5, Cambria.

McAneny, Agnes, 2, Cambria.

McGee, John, 55, Market street.

McGinley, James, 34, Conemaugh.

McVay, Lizzie, 20, Locust street.

Mullin, Peter, 50, Conemaugh.

Murphy, Michael J., 34, Brunswick Hotel.

Murphy, Mrs. Mary, 26, Millville.

Murphy, John, 17, Millville.

Murphy, Rose, 14, Millville

Murphy, Wm., 11, Millville.

Murphy, J. J., 55, Park Place.

Murphy, Lily, 9, Park Place.

Nightly, John 30, Millville.

O’Connel, Capt. Patrick, 70, Washington street.

O’Connel, Margaret, 63, Washington street.

O’Connel, Nora, 60, Washington street.

O’Donnel, Frank, Washington street.

O’Neil, Edward, 3 months, Cambria.

O’Neil Mrs. Bridget, 28, Cambria.

O’Neil, John.

Quinn, Ellen, Franklin street.

Quinn, John, Franklin street.

Riley, Frances, 15, Cambria.

Riley, Gertrude, 13, Cambria.

Riley, Mary, 18, Cambria.

Rogers, Mary, 17, Millville.

Rogers, Tatt.

Rogers, Mrs. Susan.

Rogers, Jane, child.

Ryan, John, 55, Washington street.

Ryan, Mrs. John, 50, Washington street.

Ryan, Maggie, 14, Washington street.

Ryan, Mrs. Mary, 73, Washington street

Sagerson, Catherine, 4, Railroad street.

Sagerson. Agnes, 2, Railroad street.

Sagerson Thomas, 6 months, Railroad street.

Sharkey, Mary, 4, Washington street.

Sinniger, Mrs. Mary, Cambria.

Slick, Mrs. Nancy, 55, Fourth Ward.

Takacs, Mrs. Teresa, 31, Cambria.

Takacs, Mrs. John, 21, Cambria.

Tokar, Mrs. Dora, 23, Cambria.

Tokar, Mary, 4, Cambria.

Tokar, Annie, 1, Cambria.

Taylor, Frances.

ST. MARY’S CEMETERY.

(Lower Yoder.)

Banyan, Mrs. Rose, 36, Cambria.

Betzler, Mrs. Agnes, 38, Cambria.

Boyle, Charles, Sr., 45, Cambria.

Boyle, Mary, 12, Cambria.

Boyle, Charles, 8, Cambria.

Boyle, Thomas, 7, Cambria.

Brotz, Pancrotz, 55, Cambria.

Brotz, Mrs. Lena, 50, Cambria.

Brady, John, 53, Franklin street.

Brady, Mrs. Julia, 50, Franklin street.

Coby, Elizabeth, Cambria.

Culliton, Mrs. Teresa, 28, Cambria.

Deitrich, Mrs. Amelia, 23, Cambria.

Fish, Lena, 17, Cambria.

Fisher, Ignatius, 59, Cambria.

Fisher, Margaret, 14, Cambria.

Fleckenstein Mrs. Ann, 25, Cambria.

Fleckenstein, Regina, 2, Cambria.

Gerber, Mrs. Margaret, 41, Cambria.

Gerber, John C., 45, Cambria.

Gerber, Rose, 8, Cambria.

Gerber, Vincent, 6, Cambria.

Hanki, Edward, Cambria.

Hecker, Mrs. Christ, 58, Cambria.

Heider, Mrs. Ella, 24, Cambria.

Heider, John Leo, 6 months, Cambria.

Hessler, Mrs. Fedora, 29, Cambria.

Hessler, Mary, 10, Morrellville.

Hessler, Joseph, 1½, Cambria.

Hirsch, Eddie, 8, Cambria.

Just, Magdalena, 29, Cambria.

Just, William, 9, Cambria.

Just, Eddie, 4, Cambria.

Kintz, Mrs. Mary, 26, Cambria.

Kintz, Katie, 19, Cambria.

Kintz, Mrs. Mary, 25, Cambria.

Knoblespeice, Maggie.

Koebler, Mrs. George, 60, Cambria.

Kropp, Katie, 21, Cambria.

Lambert, Johanna, 19, Washington street.

Lambreski, Kate, 12, Cambria.

Macheletzky, Stanislaus, 10, Cambria.

Martinades, Mrs. Mary, Cambria.

Miller, Mrs. Annie M., 46, Cambria.

Miller, George, 65, Cambria.

Miller, Eddie, 3, Cambria.

Miller, Annie, 1, Cambria.

Nich, Mrs. Margaret, 30, Cambria.

Nich, Frank, 6, Cambria.

Nich, John, 4, Cambria.

Osterman, Joseph, 38, Cambria.

Quinn, Mrs. Terry, 26, Railroad street.

Schnell, Mrs. Fidel, 68, Cambria.

Schnell, Mrs. Margaret, 60, Cambria.

Schnell, Mrs. F., Cambria.

Schmitt, Mary, 31, Cambria.

Schmitt, George, 4, Cambria.

Schmitt, Sophia, 11/2, Cambria.

Shmitt, Fredericka, Cambria.

Shmitt, Mrs. Hortena, Cambria.

Shmitt, Leo, Cambria.

Sininger, Mrs. Mary, Cambria.

Sarlouis, Mrs. Barbara, 48, Cambria.

Sarlouis, Mrs. Peter, Cambria.

Snell, Mary, 13, Cambria.

Stinely, Mrs. Mary, 35, Cambria.

Stinely, Kate, 12, Cambria.

Stinely, Joseph, 5, Cambria.

Weber, Mrs. Tresa, 43, Cambria.

Weber, John, 4, Cambria.

Weinzierl, Louis, 41, Cambria.

OLD CATHOLIC GRAVEYARD.

(Conemaugh Borough.)

Akers, Alvar, 54, Upper Yoder.

Coad, Mrs. Mary, 57, Washington street.

Coad, John, 59, Washington street.

Conrad, William, 26, Woodvale

Halleran, Mrs. Mary C., 30, Washington street.

Hannan, Eugene, 14, Woodvale.

Howe, Abner.

Lynch, John, 27, Conemaugh.

Lynch, Mary, 16, Conemaugh.

Mayhew, Jennie, 18, Woodvale.

Mayhew, Joseph, 16, Woodvale.

Mayhew, Annie, 12, Woodvale.

Mayhew, Earnest, 9, Woodvale.

Mayhew, Harry, 6, Woodvale.

Mayhew, James, 3, Woodvale.

McKarley, Mrs. Mary.

Nugent, Mrs. Mary Jane, 50, Hager Block.

Quinn, Vincent, 14, Main street.

Wehn. Mrs. Laura. 29. Conemaugh.

Wehn, Annie, 4, Main street.

Wehn, Mary, infant, Conemaugh.

Wehn, Joseph, 4, Conemaugh.

Wheat, Frank, 28, Clinton street.

GERMAN CATHOLIC CEMETERY.

(Sandyvale.)

Brindle, Mary.

Geis, Mrs. Abbey, 24, Salina, Kansas.

Geis, Richard P., 2, Salina, Kansas.

Hable, John, 29, Conemaugh.

Hoffgard, Conrad, 18, Clinton street.

Holtzman, Joseph, 35, Woodvale.

Home, William J., 21, Conemaugh.

Home, Emma J., 22, Stormer street.

Hornick, John P., 26, Conemaugh.

Hornick, Mrs. Amelia, 25, Conemaugh.

Horton, Joseph, Sr., 59, Woodvale.

Keifline, Mrs. Catherine, 56, Conemaugh.

Maloy, Manassas, 45, Clinton street.

Malzi, Jacob, 34, Washington street

Murtha, James, 65, Conemaugh.

Murtha, James, 28, Main street.

Murtha, Mrs. Barbara, 24, Main street.

Murtha, Frank, 6, Main street.

Murtha, Flora May, 4, Main street.

Murtha, Lily, 1, Main street.

Oswald, Charles, 44, Third Ward.

Oswald, Mary, 19, Third Ward.

Quinn, Vincent D., 16, Main street.

Ripple, Maggie B., 27, Merchants’ Hotel.

Robine, Christina, 25, Franklin street.

Sarlouis, Sophia.

Schnurr, Charles, 40, Conemaugh.

Schnurr, Robert, 27, Smith alley.

Schry, Joseph, Sr., 78, Woodvale.

Schry, Mrs. Joseph, 68, Woodvale.

Shellhammer, Lorentz.

Shellhammer, Patricius

Schaller, Joseph, 62, Woodvale.

Schaller, Mrs. Joseph, 62, Woodvale.

Schaller, Annie, 24, Woodvale.

Schaller, Rose, 21, Woodvale.

Werberger, Prof. F. P., 70, Locust street.

Voegtly, Germanus, 62, Conemaugh.

(Geistown.)

Rubritz, Peter, 65, Franklin Borough.

Rubritz, Mrs. Margaret, 56, Franklin Borough.

Rubritz, Maggie, 20, Franklin Borough.

Schiffhauer, John, 62, Washington street.

Stenger, John, 12, Main Street.

Stenger, Leo, 3, Main street.

Steigerwald, William, Conemaugh.

Steigerwald, Mrs. Mary, 38, Conemaugh.

Steigerwald, infant, 1 month, Conemaugh.

PUBLIC PLOT.

[Known to have been found, but bodies never recovered by friends, and buried in Public Plot in Grand View Cemetery.]

Arthur, Earl H., 8, Water street.

Baker, son of Andrew.

Bohnke, Charles.

Bopp, son of Jacob.

Bopp, Katie, 9, Broad street.

Bricker, Henry.

Burns, John.

Barbour, Harry L., 16, Locust street.

Barker, Mrs. Susan, 28, Woodvale.

Behnke, Charles.

Bloch, Louisa, 17, Conemaugh.

Boehler, Mrs. Annie, 39, Conemaugh.

Brawley, George D., 17, Cor. Union and Vine sts.

Brennan, Mrs. Martha, 36, Woodvale.

Brennan, Mary, 16, Woodvale.

Brennan, William, 12, Woodvale.

Brennan, Lewis, 10, Woodvale.

Brennan, Arthur, 7, Woodvale.

Brennan, Frank, 3, Woodvale.

Brown, Sadie, 22, Woodvale.

Bruhn, Claus, 58, Conemaugh.

Bryan, Wm. A., 45, Mansion House.

Campbell, Peter, 40, Conemaugh.

Casey, William, 48, Cambria.

Cornelison, Maggie.

Craig, Thomas A., 32, Market street.

Craig, Mrs. T. A., 30, Market street.

Craig, Christ, 45, Cambria.

Craig, Annie, 13, Walnut street

Cunz, Lydia, 6, Napoleon street.

Cunz, Robert, 4 months, Napoleon street.

Dillon, James, 35, Napoleon street.

Downey, Mrs. 55, Pearl street.

Dudzik, Andrew, 28, Cambria.

Eager, Annie

Eck, Mary Ann, 37, Woodvale.

Eck, Lily, 12, Conemaugh street.

Edwards, Mrs. Ann R., 70, Union street

Elsaesser, Andrew, 16, Conemaugh.

English, Joseph, 24, Railroad street.

Fagan, Matthew, 40, Millville.

Fagan, Mrs. M., 38, Millville.

Fagan, Monica, 12, Millville.

Fagan, Daniel, 10, Millville.

Fagan, Clara, 3, Millville.

Fagan, Thomas, 1, Millville.

Faloon, Mrs. Ann E., 63, Pearl street.

Fichtner, Mrs. Tillie, 33, Main street.

Fiddler, Elmira, Bedford street.

Fiddler, Eliza J.

Fockler, Herman, 21, Franklin street.

Griffin, Miss Mary.

Hamilton, Mary, 33, Bedford street.

Hanki, Mrs. Teresa, 40, Cambria.

Hause, Mollie.

Hellriggle, Chas.

Hellriggle, Mrs. Lizzie, 30, Woodvale.

Henry, William, 34, Cumberland, Md.

Hocker, Mrs. John, 72, Somerset street.

Hop Sing, Franklin street.

Hurt, Charles, London, England.

Irwin, Maggie, 22, Hulbert House.

Johnson, David, 45, Conemaugh street.

Jones, Mary, 14, Main street.

Kast, Clara, 17, Clinton street.

Keene, Katie, 16, Union street.

Keinxstoel, Samuel, 30, Market street.

Larimer, James, 45, Somerset street.

Lee Sing, Chinaman, Franklin street.

Lucas, Maria, 50, Conemaugh.

Madden, Mrs. Mary, 47, Cambria City.

Mack, August.

McClarren, 8, Cambria City.

McCue, Mrs.

Melden, Richard.

Maley, Henry.

Mosser, Mrs. Mary, 65, Conemaugh street.

Mullen, Margaret.

Oswald, Mrs.

Owens, Mrs.

Oyler, John R.

Phillips, Mrs. Eliza, 48, Union street.

Reese, Mrs. Lizzie, 30, Conemaugh street.

Reese, Annie, 7, Vine street.

Reidel, John C. 60, Conemaugh.

Rich, Mrs. Charlotte, 45, Stonycreek street.

Roberts, Mrs. Jennie, 18, Somerset street.

Rosenfelt, Solomon, Washington street.

Saylor, Henry.

Schnable, Mrs. Conrad, 35, Baumer street.

Schittenhelm, Anton, Cambria.

Schittenhelm, Anton Jr., Cambria.

Shumaker, Mrs. James M., Locust street.

Skiba, Mrs. Stainslous, 32, Cambria.

Skiba, Joseph, 4, Cambria.

Smith, Ralph, 11, Woodvale.

Smouse, Jennie, Hulbert House.

Stern, Bella.

Strauss, Moses, 77, Vine street.

Strauch. Henry 50, Conemaugh.

Smith, Willie, 1, Cambria

Surany, David.

Thomas, John T.

Till, Arthur, 27, Market street.

Unverzagt, Daniel, 66, Washington street.

Unverzagt, Mrs. Daniel, 62, Washington street.

Viering, Mrs.

White, Mrs. John, 76, Union street.

Wagnor, Henry, Cambria.

Warsing, Jane, 24, Coopersdale.

Warkeston, Miss.

Weinzierl, Mrs. Mary, 38, Cambria.

Wearn, Willie, 6, King street.

Walford, Frank.

Will, Elizabeth, Conemaugh.

PASSENGERS ON DAY EXPRESS.

[Those marked ? bodies never found. Those found lived at the places named, to which places the remains were taken.]

Bates, Mrs. Annie, Delavin, Wis.

? Brady, Mrs. J. W., Chicago, Ill.

Bryan, Elizabeth M., 20, Philadelphia.

Christman, Mrs. A. C., Dallas, Texas.

Day, John R., 60, Prospect, Md.

Day, Miss, Prospect, Md.

Ewing, Andrew, Snow Shoe, Pa.

? Feustermaker, Victor, Egypt, Lehigh County

Harnish, Blanche, Dayton, O.

? Hemingway, Fred, and wife, Kokomo, Ind.

King, Mrs. J. F.

? Lyon, E., New York.

? McCoy, Mrs.

? McCoy,—

? McCoy,—

Meisel, Christ, 32, Newark, N. J.

Minich, Kate, Fostoria, Ohio.

Paulson, Jennie, 20, Allegheny City.

? Phillips, Frank (porter), Jersey City.

Rainey, Mrs. Sophia, 64, Kalamazoo, Mich.

Ross, John D.

Schrantz, George, Pleasant Gap, Pa.

? Shelly, W., Newark, N. J.

Shick, Cyrus, Reading.

? Sible, Mrs. Springtown, Bucks County, Pa.

Smith, Mrs. H. K., 25, Osborn, Ohio.

Smith, R. Wardwell, 3, Osborn, Ohio.

Stinson, Eliza, Norristown, Pa.

? Swaney, Mrs. Mary A., 67.

Swineford, Mary A., St. Louis, Mo.

Swineford, Mrs. Ed., St. Louis, Mo.

Tarbell, Mrs. Farney, 32, Cleveland, Ohio.

? Tarbell, Grace, 7, Cleveland, Ohio.

? Tarbell, Bertie, 5, Cleveland, Ohio.

? Tarbell, Howard, 2, Cleveland, Ohio.

Weaver, Beneval, Millersburg, Pa.

Woolf, Jennie, Chambersburg, Pa.

MISCELLANEOUS.

[Bodies taken to places named in subheads for burial. The place named in line with name of individual is where they were lost from.]

LOYSBURG, BEDFORD COUNTY, PA.

Aaron, Mrs. H. B., 29, Railroad street.

Aaron, Flora, 10, Railroad street.

BLAIRSVILLE, PA.

Alexander, John G., 45, Woodvale.

Alexander, Mrs. John G., 45, Woodvale.

Brown, Emma, 20.

McLaughlin, Mrs. Julia, 60, Cambria.

Miller, Robert, 22, Sixth Ward.

Pike, Fanny, 19, Haynes street.

WILMORE, PA.

Beiter, Mathias, 3, Clinton street.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.

Butler, Chas. T., Hulbert House.

Carlin, Jonathan, Hulbert House.

Cox, James G., Hulbert House.

Clark, W. H. L., 50, Hulbert House.

De Walt, Chas. B., 36, Hulbert House.

Dorsey, John D., Hulbert House.

Lichtenberg, Rev. John, Locust street.

Lichtenberg, Mrs.

Murray, James, 50, Hulbert House.

Nathan, Adolph, 40, Main street.

Overbeck, William H., 38, Main street.

Spitz, Walter L., Hulbert House.

Woolf, Mrs. M. L., Jackson street.

LOUISVILLE, KY.

Marshall, Chas. A., 34, Hulbert House.

BRADDOCK, PA.

Cadogan, Mrs. Mary A., 46, Millville.

Cadogan, Ann, 25, Milville.

Young, Mrs. Kate, 34, Market street.

Young, Samuel, 13, Market street.

PITTSBURGH, PA.

Creed, David, 60, Washington street.

Creed, Mrs. Eliza, 55, Washington street.

Creed, Maggie, 28, Washington street.

Fisher, Moses, 24, Mansion House.

Sweeney, Mrs. Ann, 70, Conemaugh.

BENSHOFF’S, CAMBRIA COUNTY, PA.

Custer, William H., 35, Millville.

STEUBENVILLE, OHIO.

Davis, Frank B., 40, Main street.

Davis, Frank, infant.

SOMERSET, PA.

Gaither, Harry, 18, South street.

Houston, Minnie, Hulbert House.

Hurst, Nathaniel, 15, Washington street.

SHIPPENSBURG, PA.

Diehl, Carrie, 20, Hulbert House.

Wells, Jennie, 22, Hulbert House.

MERCER COUNTY, PA.

De France, Mrs. H. T., 32, Hulbert House.

NEW YORK, N. Y.

Dow, W. F., Hulbert House.

HOLLIDAYSBURG, PA.

Fitzharris, John, Sr., 97, Franklin street.

PHILIPSBURG, PA.

Eskdale, James, 42, Woodvale.

Eskdale, Mrs. James, Woodvale.

BERLIN, PA.

Garman, Grace, 21, Washington street.

PITTSTON, PA.

Groff, Nellie C., 20, Hulbert House.

LEECHBURG, PA.

Hill, Ivy, 6, Washington street.

Jack, Jennie.

COVER’S HILL,

CAMBRIA COUNTY, PA.

Hinchman, Harry, 4, Woodvale.

Long, Samuel.

Shaffer, Fred, 21, Conemaugh.

DERRY, PA.

Jackson, H. A., 36.

CUMBERLAND, MD.

Katzenstein, Mrs. Ella, Hulbert House.

Katzenstein, Edwin, Hulbert House.

HARRISBURG, PA.

Keis, Charles A., 26, Conemaugh.

Weber, E. Vincent, 26, Woodvale.

Weber, Mrs. Florence, 25, Woodvale.

BUTLER, PA.

Bonner, Mrs. Ann, 24.

Kenna, Mrs. Alice B.

HUNTINGDON COUNTY, PA.

McDivitt, Mattie, 32, Water street.

HEADRICK’S, CAMBRIA COUNTY, PA.

Allison, Florence, 12, Texas.

Beck, William J., 30, Woodvale.

Beck, Mrs. Blanche, 29, Woodvale.

Wilson, Dr. J. C., 53, Franklin.

Wilson, Caroline E., 52, Franklin.

QUAKERTOWN, PA.

Smith, Mrs. J. L., 34, Hulbert House.

Smith, Florence, 9, Hulbert House.

Smith, Frank, 7, Hulbert House.

Smith, infant, 4 months, Hulbert House.

Wilson, Charles H., 45, Hulbert House.

ARMAGH, PA.

Young, Sarah C., 66, Court street.

BEAVER FALLS, PA.

Leslie, John S., 30, Levergood street.

YPSILANTI, MICH.

Richards, Carrie, Hulbert House.

Richards, Mollie, Hulbert House.

BALTIMORE, MD.

Goldenberg, Henry, 54, Lincoln street.

Hoopes, Walter E., 30, Woodvale.

Smith, Mrs. Alice M., 29, Woodvale.

GREENSBURG, PA.

Kilgore, W. Alex., 52, Washington street.

Montgomery, Alex., 55, Stonycreek street.

SEWICKLEY, PA.

Little, John A., 43, Hulbert House.

BANGOR, PA.

Llewellyn, Mrs. J. J., 27, visiting at J. T. Llewellyn’s.

SOUTH FORK, PA.

Mullin, James, 24.

JERSEY HEIGHTS, N. J.

Myer, Bernhart.

ROME, N.Y.

Richards, John O., 70.

YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO.

White, Mrs. Alex., 42.

INDIANA, PA.

Ziegler, James B., 24.

READING, PA.

Fediman, W. M., 56, Main street.

BLOUGH’S, STONYCREEK TOWNSHIP, PA.

Blough, Samuel, 40, Market street.

Blough, Sophia, 38, Main street.

Blough, child, Main street.

SCALP LEVEL, PA.

Owens, William L., 11, Market street.

Owens, Daisy, 13, Market street.

NICHOLSON, PA.

Rosensteel, Mrs. J. M., 35, Woodvale.

Rosensteel, Ray Halstead, 18, Woodvale.

NO CEMETERY RECORD.

[Bodies found, but not known where buried.]

Adams, Henry Clay.

Alberter, Anna, 22, Cambria.

Amps, Nicodemus, 42, Cambria.

Amps, Mrs. Teresa, 32, Cambria.

Atkinson, John, 72, East Conemaugh.

Baer, Rosa L., 17, Grubbtown.

Bagley, William, Morrellville.

Baird, Charles.

Baker, Mrs. Nelson.

Baker, Mrs. Mary, Woodvale.

Baker, Catherine, 70, Market street.

Baker, Agnes, 68, Market street.

Barley, Myrtle, 11, Woodvale.

Barley, Mamie, 7, Woodvale.

Barley, Effie, 5 Woodvale.

Barley, Laura, 6 months, Woodvale.

Barrett, Jas., ‘27, Franklin St., St. Charles Hotel.

Berg, Mrs. Marion, 24, Woodvale.

Berkebile, Mahlon, Morrellville.

Blough, Emanuel, 22 Bedford street.

Blough, infant, School alley.

Bowersox, Frank, 22, Market street.

Boyer, Solomon, 62, East Conemaugh.

Bradley, Thomas, 42, Conemaugh.

Bruhn, Mrs. Anna, 45, Portage street.

Bunting, Mrs. Caroline, 45, Woodvale.

Burk, Mrs. Matilda, 38, East Conemaugh.

Burkhard, Mrs. Molliie, 36, Woodvale.

Carr, Alexander, 36, East Conemaugh.

Carr, Sissie, 2, East Conemaugh.

Christie, Andrew C., 50, Woodvale.

Clark, Thomas, 42, Union street.

Clark, John B., 50, Portage St., and 7 children.

Cole, John, Cambria.

Connors, Mrs. Mary, Millville.

Cooper, Otto, 8, Kurtz alley.

Cooper, Mrs. 38, Kurtz alley.

Couthamer, Mr.

Coy, Mrs. Sarah, 46, East Conemaugh.

Coy Newton G., 16, East Conemaugh.

Craig, Mrs. Catherine, 40, Walnut street.

Crowthers, infant, 3, Chestnut street.

Cummings, Amy, Somerset street.

Davis, Frank, 8. Woodvale.

Davis, Mrs. Philip, 60.

Davis, Mrs. Thomas S., 55, Market street.

Delaney, Mrs. C.W., 59, Conemaugh street.

Dimond, Frank, 36, Conemaugh.

Dimond, Mrs. Ann, 64, Conemaugh.

Doorocsik, Mrs. Annie, 28, Cambria.

Doorocsik, Miss, 6, Cambria.

Doorocsik, Mary, 4, Cambria.

Dorriss, August, 54, Conemaugh.

Doubt, Mrs. William, 63, Cambria.

Dougherty, Mary, 16, Cambria.

Eberle, Lena, 14, Woodvale.

Fails, Dolly F., 15, Union street.

Fers, Frank, 23, Millville.

Fink, Mary E., 17, Conemaugh street.

Fisher, Wolfgang, 33, Main street.

Fisher, Noah, East Conemaugh.

Flegle, David G.

Flegle, Miss Annie.

Flinn, Mrs. Mary, Bedford street.

Fogarty, Thomas, 50.

Forrest, Frank, 12, Locust street.

Foust, Conrad, Woodvale.

Gardner, Rose, 20, Prospect.

Gill, William, 7, Prospect.

Gillen, Laura, Bedford street.

Gordon, Susan L., 62, Hager Block.

Greenwood, Mrs. Rose, 33, Conemaugh.

Gromley, Lilly, 19, Mineral Point, Pa.

Gromley, J. A., 14, Mineral Point, Pa.

Hallen, Charles E., 33, Millville.

Harris, Mrs. Mary T., 48, Walnut street

Hartzell, Mr., Market street.

Hecker, John, 10, Cambria.

Heckman, Francis, 25, Main street.

Heffley, Edward, 22, Somerset street.

Heine, Henry, 26, Cambria.

Heine, Mrs. Lizzie, 25, Somerset street.

Herman, Edward, Cambria.

Hess, William B., 55, Millville.

Hipp, Elizabeth P., 20, Main street.

Hitchins, Mrs. Cordelia, 35, Market street.

Hornick, Agnes, Broad street.

Hughes, Mary, 7, Chestnut street.

Hughes, Mrs., 64, Union street.

James, Lena, 26, River avenue.

James, Maggie, 1, River avenue.

Jenkins, Mrs. Susan, 40, Somerset street.

Johill, Joseph, Third Ward.

Johnson, John M., 40, Union street.

Johnson, Mrs. John M., 38, Union street.

Johnson, Mrs. Oliver, 22, Conemaugh street

Jones, Maggie, 29.

Kane, John 45, Union street.

Kane, Bridget, 20, Market street.

Keifline, Mary, 4, Conemaugh.

Kelly, Charles, Millville.

Kunkle, Lizzie, 21, Washington street.

Laban, Mrs. Teresa, 50, Cambria.

Leech, Mrs. Sarah E., 60, Franklin.

Leech, Alice M., 18, Franklin.

Lingle, Mrs. Mary J., 44, Pearl street.

Long, Samuel, 60, Vine street.

Lotz, Conrad, 64, Sherman street.

Lyden, Mary, 20, Merchants’ Hotel.

Maneval, Clarence, 17, Lincoln street.

Mann, Michael, 41, South Fork.

Marczi, Mrs. Mary, 42, Cambria.

Marshall, Wm. H., 23, Clinton street.

Maurer, John, 77, Morris street.

McAuliff, Laura, 16, Woodvale.

McDowell, Geo., 8, Pearl street.

McGuire, Mrs. Mary, 45, Walnut street.

McHugh, Mrs. D. A., 45, E. Conemaugh.

McHugh, Gertrude, 16, E. Conemaugh.

McHugh, Jno. L., 14, E. Conemaugh.

McNally, Patrick, 42, Prospect.

Mecke, August, 51, Cambria.

Melczer, Frederick, 28, Cambria.

Miller, Robert, 5, Napoleon street.

Miller, John A., 25, Cambria.

Miller, William, 44, Franklin.

Mingle, Sarah.

Monteverde, Mary, 11, Washington street.

Monteverde, Emelia, 7, Washington street.

Morran, James A., 53, Somerset street.

Nau, Katie, 20, Bedford street.

Neary, Mrs. Kate, 34, Bedford street.

Neary, Mary Ellen, 11, Bedford street.

Noblespiece, Maggie, 14, Morrellville

Nugent, Mrs. Mary Jane, 60, Hager Block.

O’Connell.—, Cambria.

O’Conner, Rose, 20, Locust street.

O’Neal, John, 19, Wood alley.

Oswald, Appahmarian, 12, Cambria.

Page, Emma, 11, Mineral Point.

Page, Herman, 6, Mineral Point.

Palmer, Mrs. J. H., 76, Napoleon street.

Partsch, Mrs. Josephine, 59, Woodvale.

Phillips, John, 15, Union street.

Rausch, John, 44, Daisytown.

Repp, George, 5 months, Daisytown.

Robine, Eddie, 2, Franklin.

Robine, Willie, 9 months, Franklin.

Rodgers, Patrick, 52, Millville.

Rodgers, Grace, 5, Millville.

Rodgers, Mrs. Mary, 50, Millville.

Ross, Joseph, 30, Conemaugh.

Roth, Annie, 5, Cambria.

Rowland, Emma, 32, Market street.

Rowland, Ran, 16, Market street.

Samen, Mrs. Annie, 25, Cambria.

Samen, John, 4 Cambria.

Samen, Annie, 3, Cambria.

Samen, Mary, 3 months, Cambria.

Schmidt, Mrs. Frederick, Cambria.

Schmidt, Hortense.

Schmidt. Leo.

Schmitz, Gustave, 33, Clinton street.

Schittenhelm, Max, Cambria.

Snyder, Mrs. Annie, 34, Woodvale.

Spareline, John, 64, Railroad street.

Smith, Mrs. Maggie L., 38, Woodvale.

Smith, Addie, 13, Pearl street.

Smith, Philip, 16, Walnut street.

Smith, Mrs. Amelia, 32, Cambria.

Smith, Mrs. Mary, 52, Conemaugh.

Smith, Philip, 16, Conemaugh.

Slick, Josephine, 20, Woodvale.

Sutliff, George, 25, Somerset street.

Stern, Bella, 1, Washington street.

Stewart,—, Second Ward.

Spicsak, Mrs. Annie, 27, Cambria.

Tacey, Peter L., 20, Woodvale.

Trindle, John M., 39, Nineveh.

Trawatha, Mrs. Annie, 60, Conemaugh.

Thomas, Mabel, 6, Market street.

Thomas, Edward M., 71, Woodvale.

Uhl, Mrs. Ludwig, 80, Peter street.

Valentine, George M., 42, Market street.

Weisz, Mrs. Martin, 46, Cambria.

Weisz, Jacob, 13, Cambria.

Weisz, Jacob.

Weisz, Isaac, 6, Cambria.

Weisz, Anna, 4, Cambria.

Welsh, Thomas, 60, Cambria.

Weinzierl, Louis, 41, Cambria.

Williams, Elanor, 7 months, Lewis alley.

Williams, Mrs. Margaret, 27, Conemaugh street.

Wild, Mrs. Margaret, 80, Conemaugh.

Willower, Miss Bella, Somerset street.

Willower, Bertha, Somerset street.

Wissinger, Mrs. Catherine, 47, Morris street.

Yost, Charlotte, 16, Pine street.

NOT KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN FOUND.

Abele, Katie, 21, Main street.

Abler, Lulu, Woodvale.

Alberter, Teresa, 3, Cambria.

Alexander, Mrs. Martha, Main street.

Allison, Mrs. Jane, 45, Pittsburgh.

Alt, John, 65, Conemaugh.

Alt, Teresa, 20, Conemaugh.

Alt, George, 60, Cambria.

Alt, Mrs. Ann, 75, Cambria.

Amps, Mary, 11, Cambria.

Aubrey, Thomas, 45, Conemaugh street.

Backer, George, 27, Conemaugh.

Baker, James, 22, Woodvale.

Baker, Catherine, Market street.

Baker, Lydia, 20, Woodvale.

Baker, Nancy, Market street.

Baker, Richard, 1, Woodvale.

Baker, Mellville, 11, Woodvale.

Baker, Deronda, 5, Woodvale.

Baker, Dolly, Woodvale.

Baker, Clara, 17, Woodvale.

Banyan, John, 7, Cambria.

Banyan, Albert, 4, Cambria.

Banyan, Theodore, 2, Cambria.

Barbour, Howard, 7, Woodvale.

Barbour, John F., 3 months, Woodvale.

Barbour, Mrs. Sarah, 59, Woodvale.

Barker, Edward, 27, Woodvale.

Barker, Clara, 2½, Woodvale.

Barker, infant, 1 month, Woodvale.

Bartosh, Mrs. Hannah, 39, Cambria.

Bartosh, Frank, 14, Cambria.

Baumer, Mrs. Eliza, 68, Woodvale.

Beam, Roscoe, 2, Locust street.

Beecher, Mrs. Jane, 44, Woodvale.

Beecher, Mary, 23, Woodvale.

Beck, Alfred, 6.

Beck, Roy, 3.

Beckley, Mrs. Mary, 48, Woodvale.

Benson, Mrs. Bessie, 23, Cambria.

Benson, Flora, 3, Cambria.

Bare, Mrs.

Bare, infant.

Barkley, George.

Barnes, Andrew, Conemaugh.

Barron, Anton.

Barron, Mrs.

Benson, Cora Belle, 1½, Cambria.

Berkey, Henry S., 45, Clinton street.

Beske, John, 7, Cambria.

Beske, Joseph, 5, Cambria.

Beske, Frank, 3, Cambria.

Beske, Lewis, 1, Cambria.

Betzler, Frank, 9, Cambria.

Betzler, Katie, 7, Cambria.

Bishop, Julius, 55, Cambria.

Bitner, A. B.

Blair, Alfred, 53, Woodvale.

Blair, Oliver, 25, Woodvale.

Blair, Alfred, Jr., 14, Woodvale.

Blair, Emanuel, 12, Woodvale.

Blair, Rosana, 10, Woodvale.

Bloch, Mrs. Rose, 54, Conemaugh.

Bloch, Annie, 26, Conemaugh.

Block, Minnie, 15, Conemaugh.

Bloch, Emma, 13, Conemaugh.

Boehler, Barbara, 7, Conemaugh.

Boehler, Annie, 9, Conemaugh.

Bogus, William.

Blough, Mrs. First Ward.

Bopp, Naomie, 7, Broad street.

Bonson, Charles R.

Booser, Eddie, 14, Market street.

Bowers, George, Woodvale.

Bowersox, Mrs. Elia, 16, Market street.

Bowersox, Cordelia, 3, Market street.

Bowman, Jessie, 4, Woodvale.

Bowman, Blanche, 2, Woodvale.

Boyer, Emma, 17, Woodvale.

Boyle, Rose, 6, Cambria.

Boyle, Bridget, 4, Cambria.

Boyle, William, 2, Cambria.

Boyle, Joseph, 8 months, Cambria.

Braden, Patrick, Milliville.

Bradley, Mrs. Elvira, 39, Conemaugh.

Brawley, Mrs. Maggie, 42, Union street.

Brawley, Robert J., 4, Union street.

Brawley, John.

Brennan, Mrs. Mary Ann, 46, Woodvale.

Brennan, Mary Ann, 23, Woodvale.

Brennan, Ellen, 19, Woodvale.

Brennan, Jane 16, Woodvale.

Brennan, Agnes, 13, Woodvale.

Bridges, Mrs. Jane, 64, Market street.

Brindle. Vincent.

Brindle, Frank.

Brindle, Rose.

Brinker, Henry.

Briney, Matilda, 25. Woodvale.

Brockner, Samuel, 28, Conemaugh.

Brown, Mrs. Magdalena, 58, Cambria.

Brown, Lizzie, 15, Woodvale.

Brown, Mrs., Conemaugh.

Buckhard, Mrs. Elizabeth, 50. Woodvale.

Buckhard, Charles, 19, Woodvale.

Buckhard, Mrs., 63, Woodvale.

Buckley, Mrs. Mary, 48, Woodvale.

Burket, Frank, 14, Washington street.

Burket, Blair, 8.

Burkhard, Howard, 12, Woodvale.

Burkhard, Gussie J., 5, Woodvale.

Burkhard, Charles C., 2, Woodvale.

Burkhard, Mrs. Catherine, 85, Mineral Point.

Burns, Peter, Woodvale.

Butler, John, 51, 84 John street.

Butler, Robert, 40, Millville.

Butler, Mrs., 70, Millville.

Butler, Annie, 17, Millville.

Butler, Fannie, 14, Millville.

Butler, George, 11, Millville.

Butler, Mrs. Sarah.

Byers, Mrs. Catherine, 46, Mineral Point.

Callahan, Mary, 22, Locust street.

Callahan, Mrs. Frank, Locust street.

Carr, Mrs. Mary, 42, Woodvale.

Carr, William, 7, Woodvale.

Carr, Patrick, 22, Cambria.

Carr, Mrs. Sarah’, 20, Cambria.

Cartin, Mrs. Thomas, 46, Woodvale.

Cartin, Frank, 5, Woodvale.

Christie. Mrs. Lizzie, 46. Woodvale.

Christie, Daisy, 19, Woodvale.

Clark, Thomas, Jr., 9, Union street.

Clark, Annie, 5, Union street.

Clark, Hamilton.

Coad, William, 12, cor. Market and Washington.

Cleary, Alice, Cambria.

Conrad, John, 21, Woodvale.

Constable, Mrs. Sarah E., 48, Broad street.

Constable, Clara, 16, Broad street.

Constable, George, 39, Franklin.

Cope, Ahlum, 70, Conemaugh.

Costlow, Michael, 70, Locust and Union streets.

Costlow, Zita, 6, Woodvale.

Costlow, Juniata, 2½, Woodvale.

Costlow, Regina, 1, Woodvale.

Craig, William, 8, 314½ Walnut street.

Creed, Kate, 26, 200 Washington street.

Creed, Mary, 16, Washington street.

Crown, Thomas, 51, Conemaugh.

Crowthers, Samuel, 30, Cambria.

Crowthers, Mrs. Verna, 27. Cambria.

Culleton, George F., 1, Chestnut street.

Culleton, John F., 2, Chestnut street.

Cummings, Mrs., Somerset street.

Cummings,—, Somerset street.

Cunz, Mrs. Catherine, 37, Napoleon street.

Cunz, Edward, 12, Napoleon street.

Cunz, Gussie, 3, Napoleon street.

Curtin, Johanna.

Cush, Annie, 112 Railroad street.

Cush, Thomas, 11/2, 116 Railroad street.

Custer, Mrs. Emma J., 27, Bedford street.

Curry, Robert.

Darr, George E., 28, Millville.

Davis, Martha, 18, Woodvale.

Davis, Ada, 15, Woodvale.

Davis, Mrs. Ann, 60, Locust street.

Davis, Mrs. Mary, 54, Locust street.

Davis, Della, 22, Locust street.

Davis, Evan, 16, Locust street.

Davis, Reese, 13, Locust street.

Davis, Mrs. Mary D., 55, Millville.

Deible, Harry, Woodvale.

Deihl, Mrs. Mary, 40, Conemaugh.

Delaney, Charles, 18, 51 Conemaugh street.

Devlin, Melissa, 12, East Conemaugh.

Dick, Cornell, 17, Cor. Locust and John streets.

Dill, Robert, 26, Woodvale.

Dill, Mrs. Robert, 26, Woodvale.

Dill, William, 7, Woodvale.

Dill, Harry, 3 Woodvale.

Dinkel, Adam, 50, Conemaugh.

Dishong, Lizzie, 22, Union street.

Dluhos, Jacob, 3. Cambria.

Dluhos, Mary, 3 months, Cambria.

Dolny, Mike, Cambria.

Dorillia, Mrs., 30, Cambria.

Dorillia,—, Cambria.

Dorillia,—, Cambria.

Downs, Willie, Millville.

Dudzik, Mike, 21, Cambria.

Dudzik, Albert, 21, Cambria.

Early, Mrs. Ella, 59, Woodvale.

Eck, Ellen C., 6, Woodvale.

Eck, Edna Marie, 1½, Woodvale.

Eck, John B., 38, Conemaugh street.

Eck, Dora, 7, Conemaugh street.

Eck, Mabon, 2, Conemaugh street.

Edmonds, Nancy.

Edwards, Roger, 55, Millville.

Edinger, Annie, 19, Millville.

Elder, Mrs. Cyrus, 49, Walnut street.

Elder, Nannie M., 23, Walnut street.

Eldridge, Pennell, 39, Morrellville.

Eldridge, Mrs. Sarah T., 71, Woodvale.

Eldridge, Mrs. Sallie, 27, Woodvale.

Eldridge, Clara, 3, Woodvale.

Eldridge, Annie, 1, Woodvale.

Elsaesser, Constantine, 44, Railroad street.

Elsaesser, Mrs. Frances, 41, Railroad street.

Elsaesser, Charles, 13, Railroad street.

Elsaesser, Adolph, 11, Railroad street.

Elsaesser, Maggie, 10, Railroad street.

Elsaesser, Rose, 4, Railroad street.

Elsaesser, Mary, 1, Railroad street.

English, John.

Etchison, Samuel, 37, Hulbert House.

Evans, Evan B., 50, Woodvale.

Evans, Susannah, 16, Woodvale.

Evans, Mrs. Mary, 55, Main street.

Evans, Annie, 26, Millville.

Evans, Jennie, 13, Millville.

Evans, Susannah, 9, Millville.

Evans, Idris, 3, Millville.

Evans, Walter, 8, Vine street.

Evans, Albert, 12, Conemaugh.

Evans, Elizabeth.

Fairfax, Mrs. Susan, 94, Somerset street.

Fairfax, Mrs. G. W., 38, Somerset street.

Fedorizen, Miklosz, Cambria.

Fenlon, Patrick, 70, Conemaugh.

Fendra, E. H.

Fenn, John Fulton, 12, Locust street.

Fenn, Daisy, 10, Locust street.

Fenn, George Washington, 8, Locust street.

Fenn, Virginia, 5, Locust street.

Fenn, Esther, 1½, Locust street.

Fentiman, Edwin F., 19, Main street.

Fees, Frank, 23, Millville.

Fichtner, Carrie, Stonycreek street.

Fichtner, Annie, 21, Main street.

Fiddler, son of Jacob, Cambria.

Findlay, Mrs. Phoebe, 58, Woodvale.

Findlay, Robert B., 17, Conemaugh.

Fingerhute, Mary, 18, Conemaugh street.

Fingle, Mrs. Mary.

Fink, Samuel P., 54, Conemaugh street.

Fink, Mrs. Mary, 47, Conemaugh street.

Fisher, John, 60, Cambria.

Fisher, Johanna, 19, Cambria.

Fisher, Kate, 9, Cambria.

Fisher, Eddie, 7, Cambria.

Fisher, George, 3, Cambria.

Fisher, August.

Fisher, William.

Fitzgerald, Mrs. Catherine. 40, Millville.

Fitzpatrick, Eliza, 15 months, Cambria.

Fitzharris, Mary J., 16, Franklin street.

Fitzharris, Sarah A., 15, Franklin street.

Foling, August, Cambria.

Foster, Mrs. Margaret, 64, Woodvale.

Foster, Maggie, 29, Woodvale.

Frank, August, 26, Washington street.

Frank, Lena, 15, Washington street.

Fritz, Mrs. Matilda, 26, Homer street.

Fritz, Jane, 2, Homer street.

Fritz, Lily, 1, Horner street.

Gaffney, Mrs. Ellen, 26, Cambria.

Gaither, Willie, 15, South St.

Gardner, John.

Geczie, John, 47, Cambria.

Geczie, Veronica, 37, Cambria.

Geczie, Stephen, 8, Cambria.

Geczie, Annie, 4, Cambria.

Geczie, August, 2, Cambria.

Geczie, Belle, 3 months, Cambria.

Geddes, Mrs. George, 40, Woodvalo.

Geisel. Julia. 9. Cambria.

Geisel, Rolla, 9, Cambria.

Geraldan, Mrs. 17, Conemaugh street.

Gillas, David, 66, Cambria.

Given, Cora, Millville.

Glass, James, 45, School Alley.

Golde, Harry, 5, Walnut street.

Gouchenour, Frank, 31, Conemaugh.

Grant, Mrs. Kate, 24, Cambria.

Grant, Bernard, 5, Cambria.

Grant, John, 3, Cambria.

Gray, Mrs. Frances, 36, Woodvale.

Gray, Gerald, 5, Woodvale.

Gray, Inez, 3, Woodvale.

Greenwood, Mary A., 8, Cambria.

Greitzer, George, 27, Cambria.

Greger, Ann.

Griffith, Mr.

Gromley, Mrs. Magdalena, 48, Mineral Point.

Gromley, Mary M., 16, Mineral Point.

Gromley, Daniel J., 13, Mineral Point.

Gromley, Emanuel L., 9, Mineral Point.

Gromley, Emma B., Mineral Point.

Hager, Mrs. Mary, 62, Washington street.

Hagerty, Mrs. Mary J., 36, School alley.

Hagerty, Kate, 12, School alley.

Hagerty, Stella, 8, School alley.

Haight, Annie, First Ward.

Haltie, Miss.

Haldiman, Hy, Woodvale.

Hammers, George.

Hammill, Mrs. Catherine, 70, Cambria.

Hamilton, Lou.

Hannan, Mamie, 22, Woodvale.

Hanekamp, Mrs. Louise, 28, Lincoln street.

Hanekamp, child.

Harrigan, Mary L., Millville.

Harris.

Hart, May, 9, Market street.

Harkey, William G.

Hess, Mrs.

Haugh, John, Conemaugh.

Hayes, Thos., 10, Cambria.

Hayes, Annie, 5, Cambria.

Hayes, Agnes Gertrude, 3 weeks, Cambria.

Heckman, Miss, 18, Cambria.

Heidenthal, Mrs. Mary, 38, Woodvale.

Heidenthal, Joseph, 14, Woodvale.

Heidenthal, Annie, 12, Woodvale.

Heidenthal, Phoebe, 10, Woodvale.

Heidenthal, Bertha, 6, Woodvale.

Heidenthal, Alfred, 2, Woodvale.

Heingard, Annie, 22, Woodvale.

Heine, Joseph, 1, Cambria.

Heine, Amelia, 8 months, Cambria.

Hellenberger, Miss E.

Hellreigle, Chas. J., 28, Woodvale.

Henahan, John, 40, Cambria.

Henahan, Mrs. Mary, 24, Cambria.

Henahan, Mary, 7, Cambria.

Henahan, Catherene, 4, Cambria.

Henahan, Frances, 1, Cambria.

Henderson, Thomas, South Fork.

Henderson, Robert, 6 months, Main street.

Henning, John.

Henning, Mary.

Hickey, Stephen, 9, Conemaugh.

Hicks, Miss Ella, Woodvale.

Himes, Charles C., Conemaugh street.

Himes, Mrs. C. C., Conemaugh street.

Himes,

Himes,

Himes,

Children.

Hinchman, Franklin, 2, Woodvale.

Hirsch, Henry, 10, Cambria.

Hockenberger, Ann, Napoleon street.

Hoffman, Mrs. Mary, 69, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Joseph, 10, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Mary, 8, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Peter, 78, Market street.

Hoffman, Frank C., 11, Market street.

Hoffman, Sehna, 3, Market street.

Hoffman, Lena, 19, Washington street.

Hoffman, George, 12, Washington street.

Hoffman, Crissie, 9, Washington street.

Hoffman, Albert, 4, Washington street.

Hoffman, Walter, 2, Washington street.

Hoffman, Stella, 6 months, Washington street.

Hoffman, Fred W., 42, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Mrs. Jennie, 40, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Lena, 19, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Henry, 65, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Mrs. Mary Ellen, 55, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Stewart, 24, Conemaugh.

Hoffman, Mrs., Conemaugh.

Hoffman.

Hoffman.

Hoffman.

Hoopes, Mrs. Maria, 25, Woodvale.

Hoopes, Ernest, 5, Woodvale.

Hoopes, Allen C., 6 months, Woodvale.

Hopkins, Hannah, 40, Locust street.

Hopkins, Elizabeth 4, Conemaugh.

Hopkins, Geo., 8, Conemaugh.

Hopp, Mary E., 7 months, Vine street.

Homer, Miss, Hulbert House.

Horner, Elwood, 15, Levergood street.

Hornick, Wm., 23, Conemaugh.

Hough, Mrs. Louisa, 48, Conemaugh.

Hough, Patrick, 5, Conemaugh.

Houghton, Mrs. Lizzie J., 24, Walnut street.

Howe, Mary E., Washington street.

Howe, Mrs. Nancy, 50, Bedford street.

Howe, Robert G., 8, Bedford street.

Howe, Mrs. W. J.,

Howells, Maggie, 15, Union street.

Howells, John, 25, Union street.

Howells, Wm., 4 days, Union street.

Hughes, Lizzie A., 1, Chestnut street.

Hurst, Mrs. Minnie, 60, Washington street.

Hurst, Emily, 10, Washington street.

Hammell, Margaret, 14, Washington street.

Illis, Daniel, Cambria.

James, John K., 8, Main street.

James, William, 10, Market street.

James, Mrs. John.

James. Benjamin, Third Ward.

Janosky, Mrs. Lena, 27, Market street.

Jenkins, John, 20, Upper Yoder.

Jenkins, Harvey, 6, Vine street.

Jenkins, Thomas, Third Ward.

Jenkins, Mrs. Thomas, Third Ward.

Jenkins,—.

Johns, Mrs. Josephine, 32, Woodvale.

Johns, Richard, 14, Woodvale.

Johns, Silvie, 11, Woodvale.

Johns, Stephen, 5, Woodvale.

Johnson, Mrs. David, 40, Conemaugh.

Johnson, Geraldine, 17, Conemaugh.

Johnson, George, 17, Union street.

Johnson, William, 15, Union street.

Johnson, Gertrude, 13, Union street.

Johnson, Lottie, 11, Union street.

Johnson, Dollie, 7, Union street.

Johnson, Frederick, 4, Union street.

Johnson, Lulu, 3, Union street.

Johnson, Ellen, Hulbert House.

Jones, Mrs. Alice, 65, Millville.

Jones, Mrs. Rachael, 41, Main street.

Jones, Ella, 11, Main street.

Jones, Sarah, 8, Main street.

Jones, Abner, 6, Main street.

Jones, Ida, 3, Main street.

Jones, Thomas, 6, Conemaugh street.

Jones, Elmer, 2, Conemaugh street.

Jones, Mrs. Jennie, 50, Woodvale.

Jones, Williams, 17, Woodvale.

Jones, Amanda, 40, Woodvale.

Jones, Pearl, 9, Woodvale.

Jones, William, 4 months, Woodvale.

Jones, James, 19, Pearl street.

Jones, Charles, 16, Pearl street.

Jones, Emma, Second Ward.

Jones, Walter B., 7, Main street.

Jones, Mrs. Margaret, 65, Llewellyn street

Jones, Rev. E. W., 56, Vine street.

Jones, Mrs. Rev. E. W., 55, Vine street.

Kane, Mrs. Lidia, 44, Union street.

Kane, Ellsworth, 18, Union street.

Kane, Laura, 15, Union street.

Kane, Willie, 12, Union street.

Kane, Dollie, 10, Union street.

Kane, Lester, 2, Union street.

Kane, Emma, 21, Prospect.

Kane, Mrs. Ann, 60, Cambria City.

Kast, Mrs. Charlotte, 43, Clinton street.

Kalor, Mrs. Philapena, 67, Conemaugh.

Kalor, Jamanes.

Kalor, Jane.

Kaylor.

Kaylor.

Kaylor.

Kaylor.

Keedy, Clay, 5, Millville.

Keelan, Mrs. Catherine, 55, Cambria.

Keelan, Daphne, 13, Cambria.

Keelan, Edward.

Keelan, Frank.

Keene, Mrs. Elizabeth, 60, Union street.

Keenan, Mrs. Jane, 26, Washington street.

Keiflein, Philamena, Conemaugh.

Keis, Mrs. Caroline, 24, Railroad street.

Keis, infant. Railroad street.

Kehoe, Thomas, 24, South Fork.

Kelly, Mary M., 30, Millville.

Kelly, Mary C., 1½, Millville.

Kelly, Maggie, 17 days, Millville.

Kelly, Mrs. Ann, 45, Cambria.

Kelly, John W., 24, Cambria.

Kidd, Mrs. Jenny, 35, Walnut street.

Kidd, Laura, 5, Walnut street.

Kilgore, Mrs. W. A., 48, Washington street

Kilgore, Jessie, 15, Washington street.

Kilgore, Fred, 12, Washington street.

Kilgore, Alex., 9, Washington street.

Kimpel, Mrs. Christ, 43, Clinton street.

Kinder, Thomas, 40, Moxham.

King, Mrs. James, 48, Broad street.

King, Katie M., 24, Broad street.

King, James, 5, Broad street.

Kinney, Mrs. Margaret, 31, Washington street.

Kinney,—, 4, Washington street.

Kinney, Agnes, 10, Washington street.

Kintz, Teresa, 24, Cambria.

Kinley, Jane, Bausman alley.

Kirkbride, Fannie, 11, Hager Block.

Kirkbride, infant, Hager Block.

Kirkwood, Finley, 19, Conemaugh.

Kirlin, Mrs. Thomas, 32, Conemaugh street.

Kirlin, Willie, 2, Conemaugh street.

Knable, John.

Knable, Leonard.

Knox, Thomas, 54, Somerset.

Keohler, Mrs. Philomen, 87, Conemaugh.

Keohler, Wm., 16, Conemaugh.

Kraft, Mrs. Maggie, 37, Walnut street.

Kraft, Herman, 12, Walnut street.

Kraft, Frederick, 10, Walnut street.

Krieger, Katie.

Kunkle, Katie, 19, Washington street

Lambreski, Willie, 2, Cambria.

Lavelle, Miss Mary, 31, Broad street.

Lavelle, Kate, 24, Broad street.

Lavelle, Sallie, 18, Broad street.

Lavelle, Mrs. Mary, 58, Broad street.

Lavelle, John F., 8, Conemaugh street.

Lavelle, Edgar R., 4, Conemaugh street.

Lavelle, Frances A., 6, Conemaugh street.

Laystrom, Mrs., 30, Union street.

Layton, infant, Broad street.

Lewis, Mrs. Lizzie, 28, Lewis alley.

Lichtenberg.

Lichtenberg.

Lichtenberg.

Lightner, James, 23, Cambria.

Lightner, Mrs. Mary, 21, Cambria.

Lightner, Eddie, 1, Cambria.

Lohr, Julia, 17, Bedford street.

Lonaenstein, Mrs. Ida, 27, Franklin.

Ludwig, Charles E., 30, Railroad street.

Luther, Michael, 40, Cambria.

Madden, Willie, 12, Cambria.

Maloy, Mrs. Ann, 35, Millville.

Maloy, Jane, Hulbert House.

Marks, William.

Martin, Edward, 48, River avenue.

Martin, Mrs. Catherine, 40, Millville.

Martin, Mary, 18, MiUville.

Martin, Ann, 7, Millville.

Martin, Celia, 7, Millville.

Masters, Margaret.

Masterton, Miss.

Mayhew, Annie, 12, Woodvale.

Mayhew, Earnest, 9, Woodvale.

Mayhew, Harry, 6, Woodvale.

McAteer, Mrs. Jane, 38, Cambria.

McAneny, Sarah, 7, Cambria.

McAley, P.

McCann, Mrs. John, 30, Railroad street.

McCann, John, 31, Railroad street.

McCann, infant, Railroad street.

McClarren, Mary, 13, Cambria.

McClarren, Philip, 1½, Cambria.

McConaghy, Harry M., 6, Main street.

McConaghy, Fank A., 2, Main street.

McCoy, Mr., Railroad street.

McGrew, Oscar, Conemaugh.

McGuire, Constantine, 48, Woodvale.

McGuire, Ann, 19, Woodvale.

McGuire, Christian, 17, Woodvale.

McHugh, Kate, 19, Cambria.

McKeever, Mrs. Mary.

McKim, Mrs. Polly, 65, East Conemaugh.

McMeans, William, 33, Conemaugh street.

McPike, Rosie, 4, Cambria.

McWilliams, Susie, 13, Pittsburgh.

Melczer, Robert, 35, Cambria.

Melczer, Mrs. Johanna, 30, Cambria.

Melczer, Albert, three weeks, Cambria.

Melczer, Mary, 4, Cambria.

Melczer, John, 2, Cambria.

Merle, Mrs. George, Washington street.

Merle, Mrs. Ida, 29, Washington street.

Merle, Nettie, 5, Washington street.

Merle, Elmer, 2, Washington street.

Meredith, Mr. (probably duplicate).

Meyers, Joseph, 70, Cambria.

Meyers, Lizzie, 11, Millville.

Meyers, Annie, 9, Millville.

Meyers, Stella, 7, Millville.

Meyers, Charlie, 5, Millville.

Meyers, Philip, 1, Millville.

Michalitch, Mrs. Mary, 38, Cambria.

Michalitch, Martin, 6, Cambria.

Michalitch, Mary, 3, Cambria.

Michalitch, John, 1, Cambria.

Miller, Lizzie, 11, Woodvale.

Miller, John, 1, Cambria.

Miller, Mrs. Sophia, 45, Cambria.

Miller, John, 8, Cambria.

Miller, Mary, 12, Horner street.

Monteverde, Mrs. Maria, 40, Washington street.

Monteverde, Joseph, 5, Washington street.

Monteverde, Eleanora, 1½, Washington street.

Moore, Melda, 20, Main street.

Moreland, Mrs. Margaret, 48, Quarry street.

Morgan, Gertie, 11, Millville.

Morgan, Mrs. Mary R., 66, Conemaugh street.

Morgan, Miss, Conemaugh.

Moser, Heinrich, Cambria.

Moschgat, Amelia, 22, Bedford street.

Mullen, Mrs. Mary, 65, Conemaugh street.

Mullen, Mrs. Margaret, 47, Prospect.

Mumma, Mrs. Eliza, 26, Washington street.

Murphy, Mrs. Kate H., 48, Park Place.

Murphy, Mrs. Maggie, 34, Brunswick Hotel.

Murphy, John, 10, Brunswick Hotel.

Murphy, Clara, 8, Brunswick Hotel.

Murphy, Genevieve, 6, Brunswick Hotel.

Murphy, Martin F., 4, Brunswick Hotel.

Murphy, Maggie, 2, Brunswick Hotel.

Murr, Stella, 16, Washington street.

Murr, Frederick, 11, Washington street.

Murr, Nellie, 6, Washington street.

Murr, Frida, 3 months, Washington street.

Nadi, Frank.

Nainbaugh, Henry.

Nayuska, Mrs. Hannah, 65, Market street.

New, Frank.

Newell, August.

Newman, Banheim, 68, Washington street.

Nich, Peter, 30, Cambria.

Nich, William, 2, Cambria.

Nich, Lena, 23, Cambria.

Nich (infant), Cambria.

Nix, Frank, Cambria.

Nixon, Fannie, 5, Woodvale.

Neice, Conrad.

O’Brien, Mrs. Sarah, 60, Millville.

O’Brien, Mrs. Ellen, 31, Millville.

O’Brien, Mrs. Catherine, 55, Millville.

O’Callahan, James, 70, Millville.

O’Callahan, Mrs. Bridget, 68, Millville.

O’Callahan, Miss Ella, 25, Millville.

O’Connell, Edward, Cambria.

O’Donnell, Mrs. Julia, 26, Washington street.

O’Donnell, John, 2, Washington street.

Ogle, Mrs. Hettie M., 52, Washington street.

Ogle, Minnie T., 32, Washington street.

Oberlander, Robert, 35, Locust street.

Oberlander, Mrs. Robert, 30, Locust street.

Oberlander, Mary, 2, Locust’ street.

O’Lily, Catherine, 20, Cambria.

O’Neill, James, 2, Cambria.

Oswald, Eulaliah, 9, Third Ward.

Osterman, Mrs. Victoria, 31, Cambria.

Osterman, Conrad, 4, Cambria.

Osterman, Joseph Jr., 6, Cambria.

Osterman, Mary Ann, 1½, Cambria.

O’Shea, Mary, Second Ward.

Owens, Mrs. Mary, 62, Market street.

Owens, John, 12, Conemaugh street.

Owens, Amelia, 6, Conemaugh street.

Owens, Willie, 4, Conemaugh street.

Owens, Mrs. Elizabeth, 37.

Pfeifer, Charles, 30, Woodvale.

Pfeifer, Ella, 21, Woodvale.

Pheng, John, Conemaugh.

Phillips, Mary, 16, Union street.

Phillips, Grace, 12, Union street.

Phillips, John J., 14, Market street.

Phillips, David, 12, Market street.

Phillips, Richard, 10, Market street.

Phillips, Mary, 8, Market street.

Phillips, Evan, 6, Market street.

Pipple, Mrs., Fourth Ward.

Plummer, Alvin.

Pollocks, Louis, 19, Cambria.

Polk, John.

Potts, Mrs. Mary, 29, Market street.

Powell, Mrs. Reese, 74, Main street.

Pratt,—, Cambria.

Pratt,—, Cambria.

Pritchard, Mrs. Henry, 48, Market street.

Pritchard, Howell, 9, Market street.

Pritchard, Alice, 5, Market street.

Pritchard, Rachael, 3, Market street.

Price, Mrs. Abe, 29, Millville.

Progner, Samuel, 28, Conemaugh.

Prosser, Mrs. David, 68, Union street.

Pukey, Julius, 23, Cambria.

Pukey, Matilda, 1, Cambria.

Raab, Mollie, 18, Clinton street.

Raab, Bertha, 13, Clinton street.

Raab, Katie. 3, Clinton street.

Raab, Mrs. Minnie, 24, Washington street.

Rawn, Mrs. Henrietta, 78, Conemaugh.

Ream, Mrs. Mary, 34, Woodvale.

Ream, Joseph, 10, Woodvale.

Ream, Effie May, 6, Woodvale.

Ream, Cora, 1, Woodvale.

Ream, Frederick E., 23, Third Ward.

Ream, Amelia, 20, Third Ward.

Reamus, Gussie, 17, Woodvale.

Recke, Mrs. Alex., 29, Washington street.

Reed, Charles.

Reese, Susie, 14, Millville.

Reese, Sarah, Woodvale.

Reese, Mrs., 70.

Reidel, Mrs. Teresa, 56, Conemaugh.

Reilly, Timothy, 27, Millville.

Ressler, John.

Reynolds, Mrs. Elizabeth, 40, Woodvale.

Reynolds, Idella, 14, Woodvale.

Reynolds, Columbia, Conemaugh.

Rhodes, Frank, 2, Somerset street.

Rich, Harry, 16, Stonycreek street.

Richards, Mrs. Margaret, 40, Union street.

Riffle, Mary C., Cambria.

Riley, Mrs. Bridget, 40, Cambria.

Riley, Annie, 8, Cambria.

Riley, Katie, 6, Cambria.

Ripple, Emma, 24, Bedford street.

Ritter, Katie, 20, Cambria.

Ritter, Sophia, 12, Cambria.

Rodgers, Mary, Hulbert House.

Rodgers, Mary G., 19, Woodvale.

Rodgers, Mrs. Mary, Water street.

Roland, Lizzie, 5 months, Conemaugh.

Roose, John, 31, Haynes street.

Rosenfelt,—.

Rosenfelt,—

Rosenfelt,—.

Rosenfelt,—.

Rosenfelt,—.

Rosensteel, Matilda V., 19, Woodvale.

Roth, Albert, 8, Cambria.

Roth, Mary, 6, Cambria.

Roth, Sebastian, First Ward.

Ruth, John.

Rowland, Mrs. E. J., 64, Market street.

Ryan, Sadie, 16, Washington street.

Ryan, Gertie, 3, Washington street.

Ryan, Mary, Third Ward.

Sagerson, Mrs., 96, Millville.

Salenty, E.

Sample, Mrs. Catherine, 63, East Conemaugh.

Sarlous, Grace, 16, Cambria.

Savage, Mrs. Bridget, 76, Woodvale.

Saley, Joseph, 50, Millville.

Shaffer, Mrs. Mary, 43, Cambria.

Shaffer, Carl, 19, Cambria.

Schanvisky, August, 10, Cambria.

Sherer, Mrs. Kate, 49, Conemaugh.

Sherer, Emma, 24, Conemaugh.

Sherer, Mary, 11, Conemaugh.

Schiffhauer, Frances, 19, Washington street.

Schittenhelm, Wilmena.

Schmitt, William J., 7, Cambria.

Schmitt, Mrs. Augustina, 38, Cambria.

Schmitt, August, 8, Cambria.

Schmitt, Anton, 2, Cambria.

Schmitt, Annie, 1, Cambria.

Schmitz, Ferdinand, Cambria.

Schmitz, Gabriel, 50, Conemaugh.

Schmidt, John L., Cambria.

Schonhardt, Victoria, 56, Conemaugh.

Schultz, Mrs. William, Clinton street.

Schultz, Clinton street.

Schultz, Clinton street.

Schultz, Clinton street.

Schultz, Clinton street.

Schultz, Joseph, First Ward.

Schweitzer, William, Conemaugh.

Schweitzer, Catherine E., Conemaugh.

Schurtz, Peter, 38, Conemaugh.

Seibert, Mrs. Elizabeth, 56, Woodvale.

Schaffer, Howard, 21, South Fork.

Shea, Mrs. Mary, 30, Locust street.

Sheldon, H.

Sherman, Mrs. Ann, 35, Market street.

Shinkey, Mrs., Second Ward.

Shorper, Jacob.

Shorper, Jacob, Jr.

Silverman, Moses, Second Ward.

Seigmund, Mrs. Matilda, 52, Woodvale.

Seigmund, Mrs. Carolina, 28, Woodvale.

Seigmund, John, 20, Woodvale.

Singer, Mrs. E. H., Unionport, Ohio.

Siroczki, Mrs. Mary, 30, Cambria.

Siroczki, Mary, 7, Cambria.

Siroczki, Annie, 4, Cambria.

Siroczki, Lizzie, 2, Cambria.

Skiba, Annie, 6, Cambria.

Skiba, Sophia, 1½, Cambria.

Smith, Harry, 5, Woodvale.

Smith, Hattie, 4, Woodvale.

Smith, infant, 3, Woodvale.

Smith, Alice J., 2, Woodvale.

Smith, Clarence, 6 months, Woodvale.

Smith, George A., 38, Pearl street.

Smith, Mrs. Jennie, 36, Pearl street.

Smith, Charles, 7, Pearl street.

Smith, Alum, 4, Pearl street.

Smith, Effie, 9 months, Pearl street.

Smith, Mrs. Mary, 21, Cambria.

Smith, Mollie, 22, Cambria.

Smith, Mrs. Ann, 55, Cambria.

Smith, Francis, 3, Cambria.

Smith, Charles, 1, Cambria.

Smith, John M., 38, Millville.

Smith, William, 9, Millville.

Smith, Mrs. Mary, Third Ward.

Smith, William, Third Ward.

Smith, Esther, Third Ward.

Smith, Charles, First Ward.

Smith, Richard, First Ward.

Smith, Frank, First Ward.

Snyder, Polly, 14, Woodvale.

Snyder, William, 8, Woodvale.

Snyder, Annie, 6, Woodvale.

Snyder, John, 3, Woodvale.

Snyder, Patrick V., 5 months, Woodvale.

Snyder, Hollis, Woodvale.

Snyder, Mary.

Snyder, Annie.

Snyder, John.

Snyder, Mary E.

Snyder, Harrison V.

Speers, Mrs. L. E.

Spenger, Mrs. Catherine, 56, Stonycreek street.

Spenger, Edward, 16, Stonycreek street.

Spoiler, Mrs.

Spoller, Lee.

Stansfield, James C., 30, Woodvale.

Stansfield, Mrs. J. C., 25, Woodvale.

Stansfield, Ralph, 9 weeks, Woodvale.

Steckman, Fred, 42, Cambria.

Stewart, Watson, 60, Pearl street.

Stewart, Mrs., 70, Walnut street.

Stews, Louis, Walnut street.

Stinely, Annie, 4, Cambria.

Stinely, infant, 4 months, Cambria.

Stork, Casper, 43, Walnut street.

Stork, Mary, 38, Walnut street.

Stork, John, 20, Walnut street.

Stork, Lizzie, 14, Walnut street.

Strauss, Charles S., Conemaugh.

Strayer, Katie, 22, Market street.

Strayer, Bertha, 14, Market street.

Stroup, Henry, Conemaugh.

Stufft, Vera, 10, Woodvale.

Stufft, Earl B., 8, Woodvale.

Stufft, Lula B., 6, Woodvale.

Stufft, Elda M., 3, Woodvale.

Stufft, infant, four months, Woodvale.

Suder, Lizzie, 9, Millville.

Suder, James, 5, Millville.

Sullivan, Mrs. Catherine, 55, Millville.

Swank, Leroy, 4, Main street.

Swank, Miss, Morris street.

Sweitzer, William, 35, Morrellville.

Temple, Leroy.

Thoburn, John, 40, Millville.

Thoburn, Mrs. Flora, 36, Millville.

Thoburn, John, Jr., 10, Millville.

Thoburn, Harry, 1, Millville.

Thomas, Tydvil, 19, Millville.

Thomas, Mrs. Annie E., 56, Napoleon street.

Thomas, Mrs. Ann, 41, Woodvale.

Thomas, Albert E., 17, Woodvale.

Thomas, Vivian D., 15, Woodvale.

Thomas, James Roy.

Thomas, Sylvester.

Thomasberger, Fannie, 42, Conemaugh.

Thomasberger, Nellie, 13, Conemaugh.

Thomasberger, Charles, 11, Conemaugh.

Thurin, Levi.

Totas, Jacob, Cambria.

Totas, Sophia, Cambria.

Totas, Michael, Cambria.

Totas, Wavreck, Cambria.

Trefts, William S.

Tross, W. J. Sr., 43, Woodvale.

Tross, Katie, 19, Woodvale.

Tross, William, 17, Woodvale.

Tross, Conrad, 16, Woodvale.

Tross, Charles, 13, Woodvale.

Tross, George, 9, Woodvale.

Tross, Louis, 7, Woodvale.

Tross, Edward, 6, Woodvale.

Tucker, Mrs. Margaret N., 45, Woodvale.

Tucker, Lillian G., 18, Woodvale.

Tucker, Mabel, 6, Woodvale.

Tynan, Michael J., 49, Conemaugh.

Tynan, Mrs. M. J., 47, Conemaugh.

Unverzagt, Lulu, 23, Washington street.

Vallance, David, 55, Conemaugh street.

Vallance, Mrs. Sarah, 66, Conemaugh street.

Vallance, Annie, 21, Conemaugh street.

Valentine, Mrs. Carrie, Market street.

Valentine, Alexander L., 14, Market street.

Valentine, Annie May, 11, Market street.

Valentine, Burt, 7, Market street.

Valentine, Howard, 4, Market street.

Valentine, Ruth, 1½, Market street.

Varner, Viola, 12, Cambria.

Varner, Sarah, 10, Cambria.

Varner, Ida, 7, Cambria.

Varner, Ella, 5, Cambria.

Varner, infant, six weeks, Cambria.

Veith, Mrs. Carrie, 52, Stonycreek street.

Veith, Emma, 14, Stonycreek street.

Voeghtly, Mrs.

Von Alt, Henry, Clinton street.

Wagnor, Mrs. Henry, Cambria.

Wagnor, Frank, Cambria.

Wagnor, John, Cambria.

Walker, Conrad, 27, Clinton street.

Walker, Ida J., 22, Conemaugh.

Walser, Mrs. Ann, Alum Bank, Pa.

Ward, Ella, Cambria.

Warren, Edward, 28, Millville.

Waters, Thomas J., 15, Conemaugh.

Watkins, Mary J., 22, Washington street.

Wearn, Mrs. Priscilla, 66, Walnut street.

Wearn, Richard, 30, King street.

Wearn, Mrs. Ella, 27, King street.

Wearn, Myrtle, 3, King street.

Weaver, Joseph H., 19, Woodvale.

Weaver, Margaret J., Second Ward.

Webber, Christian, 31, Woodvale.

Wehelco, John, Cambria.

Wehn, Casper, 80, Clinton street.

Weinzarl, Annie, 13, Cambria.

Weinzarl, Martha, 11, Cambria.

Weinzarl, Sarah, 7, Cambria.

Weinzarl, Mollie, 5, Cambria.

Weinzarl, John, 3, Cambria.

Weinzarl, George, 4 months, Cambria.

Weisc, Rosa, 10, Cambria.

White, Annie. 23, Market street.

White, Raymond, 4, Youngstown, O.

Wickersham, Richard G., 26, Woodvale.

Wilson, Mrs. Lavina, 38, East Conemaugh.

Wilson, James, 33, Mineral Point.

Wilson, Henry, 58, Millville.

Wilson, Mr., Cambria.

Wiseman, Charles, 26, Conemaugh.

Wiseman, Emma, 4, Conemaugh.

Wiseman, August, 2, Conemaugh.

Witz, Sarah, Third Ward.

Wolf. Anthony, 24, Cambria.

Wolf, Albert, 1 ½, Cambria.

Wolford, Andrew, Conemaugh.

Wolford, Conemaugh.

Wolford, Conemaugh.

Wolford, Conemaugh.

Woren, Richard, Walnut street.

Woren, Mrs. Richard, Walnut street

Woren, Willie, 6, Walnut street.

Woren,—,, child, Walnut street.

Woren,—, child, Walnut street.

Woren, Mrs. Priscilla, 60, Walnut street.

Woren, Miss, 24, Walnut street.

Woren, Mrs. Thomas, Walnut street.

Yocum, Samuel, Third Ward.

Yost, Laura, 18, Grant street.

Yost, Lottie, Jackson street.

Young, Mamie, 12, Broad street.

Young, Katie, 10, Broad street.

Youst, Mr.

Youst, Eddie.

Zellar, Rose.

Zern, Miss.

Zimmerman, Milton, 19, Locust street.

Zimmerman, Morgan, 11, Young’s alley.

Zimmerman, Owen N.

Bibliography

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Amory, Cleveland, The Last Resorts. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1952.

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Barton, William E., The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and New York, 1922.

Beale, The Reverend David J., Through the Johnstown Flood. Hubbard Brothers, Philadelphia, Boston, 1890.

Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1961. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1961.

Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Cambria County. Philadelphia, 1896.

Bishop, Philip W., The Beginnings of Cheap Steel. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1959.

Bridge, James Howard, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company. The Aldine Book Co., New York, 1903.

Bruce, Robert V., 1877: Year of Violence. The New Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis-New York, 1959.

Burgess, George H., and Kennedy, Miles C, Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company 1846-1946. Pennsylvania Railroad Co., Philadelphia, 1949.

Carnegie, Andrew, Autobiography. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and New York, 1920.

Carson, Herbert N., The Romance of Steel, The Story of a Thousand Millionaires. A. S. Barnes, New York, 1907.

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Chambers, Julius, Lovers Four and Maidens Five, a Story of the Allegheny Mountains. Porter & Coates, Philadelphia, 1886.

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Clark, C. B., C. B. Clark’s Johnstown Directory and Citizens Register. Altoona, 1889.

Clark, Victor S., History of Manufacturers in U.S., Vol. II, 1860-1893. Peter Smith (with permission Carnegie Institute of Washington), New York, 1949.

Connelly, Frank, and Jenks, George C., Official Hisory of the John-town Flood. Journalist Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, 1889.

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Epler, Percy H., The Life of Clara Barton. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1915.

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General Alumni Catalogue of University of Pennsylvania, 1922.

Grand-View Cemetery, An Historical Sketch. Johnstown, 1931.

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Hendrick, Burton J., and Henderson, Daniel, Louise Whitfield Carnegie; The Life of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie. Hastings House, New York, 1950.

Historical Sketch and Manual of Shady Side Presbyterian Church. Pittsburgh, 1892.

Holbrook, Stewart H., The Age of the Moguls. Doubleday, New York, 1954.

Illustrated Historical Atlas Combination of Cambria County. Philadelphia, 1890.

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Jackson. R. M. S., M.D., The Mountain. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1860.

Johnson, Tom L., My Story. B. W. Huebsch, New York, 1911.

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Johnstown Borough Council Minute Book, 1889.

Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1934.

Langford, Gerald, The Richard Harding Davis Years. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961.

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Swank, James M., Cambria County Pioneers. Allen, Lane & Scott, Philadelphia, 1910.

_____, History of the Manufacture of Iron in All Ages. American Iron and Steel Association, Philadelphia, 1892.

Taft, Pauline Dakin, The Happy Valley (The Elegant Eighties in Upstate New York). Photographer, Leonard Dakin. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, 1965.

Testimony Taken by the Pennsylvania Railroad Following the Johnstown Flood of 1889. Two copies in possession of Irving London, Johnstown, and the author.

Toasts and Responses at the Banquet Given by the Chamber of Commerce of Pittsburgh, May 27, 1892, at the Duquesne Club.

Transactions American Society of Civil Engineers. June 1891.

Van Rensselaer, M. G., In the Heart of the Alleghenies. Allen, Lane & Scott, Philadelphia, 1885.

Veteran Employes Association of the Pittsburgh Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Pittsburgh, 1902.

Victims of the Johnstown Flood. Johnstown, 1890.

Walker, James H., The Johnstown Horror. L. P. Miller & Co., Chicago, 1889.

Wallace, Paul A. W., Pennsylvania, Seed of a Nation. Harper & Row, New York, 1962.

Watkins, J. Elfreth, History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846-96. Withheld from publication, bound proofs.

Weil, The Reverend Carl, The Rider of Johnstown. Pittsburgh, 1892.

Wilson, William Bender, History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. H. J. Coates & Co., Philadelphia, 1899.

Winkler, J. K., Incredible Carnegie. Vanguard Press, New York, 1931.

World’s Charity to the Conemaugh Valley Sufferers and Who Received It, The. Harry M. Benshoff, Publisher, Johnstown, 1890.

MAGAZINES

Engineering News

Forest and Stream

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, August 1883

Harper’s Weekly

Iron Age, The

Le Monde Illustré, June 29, 1889

Leslie’s Weekly

North American Review, August 1889

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (which contains, in its July and October issues of 1933, much of a semi-official but incomplete report on the disaster, written by the noted historian, John B. McMaster)

NEWSPAPERS

Boston Daily Globe

Boston Morning Journal

Boston Post

Cambria Freeman

Chicago Herald

Cincinnati Enquirer

Greensburg Tribune and Herald

Johnstown Daily Democrat

Johnstown Daily Tribune

Johnstown Tribune-Democrat

Johnstown Weekly Democrat

London Times

Mansfield (Mass.) News

New York Daily Graphic

New York Herald

New York Sun

New York Times

New York Tribune

New York World

Philadelphia Press

Pittsburgh Commercial Dispatch

Pittsburgh Post

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Press

Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

Utica Saturday Globe

Index

Adams, Ignatius, 45

Adams, Solomon, Samuel, and Rachael, 27

Adams Street schoolhouse (morgue), 141, 192, 195

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, 49

Allegheny Mountain, 24, 41, 44–46, 50

Allegheny Mountains, 19, 27, 45, 47

Allegheny River, 25, 37, 44, 51, 60, 199

Alma Hall (Odd Fellows), 155, 165–167, 169–70, 184, 185, 215

Altoona, Pennsylvania, 22, 32, 39, 48, 55, 86, 175, 176, 200, 201, 209, 213, 224, 240, 243

American Iron and Steel Association, 67

American Doctor’s Odyssey, An (Heiser), 265

American Notes (Dickens), 51

"AO" Tower, 95, 96, 113

Argyle Coal Company, 95

Arnold, Matthew, 46

Associated Press, 189, 208

Astor, John Jacob, 225

Atlantic City, New Jersey, 266

B&O Railroad, 35, 53, 154, 176, 184, 198, 200, 206, 229

Baker, John, 96, 221

Barton, Clara, 139, 203, 229–31

Baumgardner, Jacob, 99

Beale, Reverend David, 169, 186, 192, 202, 212, 222, 235, 265; experience in the flood, 165–67; named as emergency morgue head, 190

Bear Creek, 24

Bear Rock Run, 24

Beaver Dam Run, 25

Bedford, Pennsylvania, 27, 206

Bell, S. E., 123

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, 179, 201

Benford, F. A., 157, 215

Benford, Walter, 156–57

Bennett, H. M., 103–107

Bens Creek, 24, 88

Bensen, Reuben, 172

Benshoff, Arthur, 195

Bessemer, Sir Henry, 69

Bessemer process (as developed at Johnstown), 68–70

Beverly, Massachusetts, 266

Bidwell, D. W. C, 20, 59, 92, 93

Bixby, Clarence, 208

Blairsville, Pennsylvania, 33

Blue Knob, 41

Bolivar, Pennsylvania, 34, 177, 180–181, 265

Booth, Edwin, 224

Booth & Flinn, 202

Boston, Massachusetts, 224

Boston Post, 254, 259

Bottle Run, 41

Bowen, John Eliot, 221

Boyer, Dan, 92–93, 100

Braddock, Pennsylvania, 32, 60, 72, 175, 212, 267

Braddock, General Edward, 175

Brinker, Mrs. A. D., 84, 154, 155, 187

Brinkerhoff, H. W., 244

Brooklyn Bridge, 51

Brown, Reverend G. W., 100

Brown, Henry S., 205–206, 207

Brownstown, Pennsylvania, 197

Bryan, Elizabeth, 116, 119, 122, 192

Bucannon, John, 92

Buck, Mrs. Ann, 172

Buffalo Bill (William Cody), 224

Burket, Mrs. John, 172

Burns, Robert, 46

Burt, F. B., 245

Butler, Charles, 156–57

Buttermilk Falls, 94, 112, 113, 118

Cambria City, Pennsylvania, 28, 30, 112, 167, 184, 185, 193, 199, 216

Cambria County, Pennsylvania, 19, 27, 46, 49, 80, 245

Cambria Iron Company, 23, 28, 38, 63, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 126, 127, 137, 156, 167, 209, 253; leads in pioneering Bessemer steel, 67–71; concern over South Fork dam, 71–75; plans to rebuild after the flood, 236–37

Cape May, New Jersey, 57

Carnegie, Andrew, 23, 48, 49, 57–61, 67–69, 71–72, 91, 132, 175, 264; early enthusiasm for Alleghenies as resort area, 44–47; reaction to news of the disaster, 255–57

Carnegie, Phipps & Company, 58, 61, 71, 255

Carpenter, C. A., 73

Centennial of the U.S. Constitution, 32

Chalfant, John W., 59

Chambers, James, 59

Chambers, Minnie, 171, 172

Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, 205, 206

Chapman, Reverend H. L., 22, 33–34, 83–85, 165, 190, 235; experience in the flood, 154–56

Chestnut Ridge, 177

Chicago, Illinois, 26, 31, 61, 85

Chicago Herald, 213, 246, 250

Chicago Inter-Ocean, 207

Chicago Limited, 103–104

Cincinnati, Ohio, 225, 226

Cincinnati Enquirer, 246, 249

Civil War, 23, 35, 45, 54, 68, 80, 97, 183, 229, 234

Clapboard Run, 24

Clark, Rose, 173

Clarke, Charles, 241

Clarke, Louis, 43, 242

Cleveland, Ohio, 267

Clifford, Hugh, 145

Conemack Old Town, 27

Conemaugh, Pennsylvania, 28

Conemaugh Gap, 149, 177

Conemaugh River, 24, 29, 37, 65, 81, 148, 177, 199, 208, 209

Coney Island, New York, 266

Connelly, Frank, 222

Connelly, William, 189

Coolidge, Calvin, 59

Cresson, Pennsylvania, 91, 175; development as summer resort, 44–47

Crute, F. Jennings, 206, 207, 208 Cumberland Valley Railroad, 205

Dale Dyke, 218

Daly, Augustin, 34, 215

Davis, California Tom, 30

Davis, Richard Harding, 139, 215–17

Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, 91

Day Express, 85, 86, 114, 192, 208, 209, 258; at East Conemaugh, 115–23

Deckert, Frank, 87, 97

Dibert, John, 81, 148, 168, 192

Dick, Chal, 202, 212

Dickens, Charles, 51

Diller, Reverend Alonzo, 195

Dougherty, C. P., 95–96, 174

Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh, 59, 267

Durno, John, 108

East Conemaugh, Pennsylvania, 28, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103, 112–15, 214; trains held on morning of flood, 85–87; flood strikes, 115–26

East McKeesport, Pennsylvania, 175

Easton, Levi, 123

Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, 27, 30, 200, 202

Eddyville, Kentucky, 68

Edgar Thomson works, 60, 71, 72, 175, 203, 267

Ehrenfeld, Emma, 93–97, 103–105

Eiffel Tower, 32

Eisenhower family, 91

Elder, Cyrus, 84–85, 148, 158, 190, 192, 253, 263, 267

Eldridge, Samuel, 192

Engineering and Building Record, 244, 253

Engineering News, 245, 246–48

Epidemics: diphtheria, 31–32; cholera, 52; typhus, 209; typhoid fever, 233

Erie Canal, 50, 51

Fallen Timber Run, 25

Fenn, John, and family, 195

Fire at the stone bridge, 149–50, 172–73, 197

Fisher, Squire, 82, 194

Fisher, George, 102

Fishing in the 1880’s, 47–48

Fitch, John, 213

Fitzharris, Christ and family, 195

Fletcher, John, 240

Flinn, William, 202, 209, 266

Forest and Stream, 251–52

Foster, Barbara, 191

Franco-Prussian War, 202, 209

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 218, 219, 223

Franklin, Pennsylvania, 122

Frick, Henry Clay, 49, 57–58, 59, 61, 67, 132, 212, 241, 248, 255, 256

Frick Coke Company, H. C, 57–58, 255

Fritz, George and John, 69

Fronheiser, Bessie, 146, 196

Fulton, John, 34, 75–77, 133, 148, 189, 209, 234, 253, 260, 263, 267; stature in Johnstown, 72–73; letter to Morrell concerning the South Fork dam, 73–74; delivers impassioned speech, 236–37

Galager, Herbert, 157

Gautier Steel Company, 28, 70, 82, 127, 146, 236

Geis, Mrs. Abbie, 158–62, 195

Geis, Foster and Quinn, 156, 159

Geis, John, 158, 159

Geis, Mrs. John, 188

George, F. N., 88

George, Henry, 190

Gibbs, George, 186

Giffen, Kate, 121

Goldenberg, Henry, 195

"Gospel of Wealth, " 60

Gould, Jay, 225

Graham, George, 120

Gramling, George, 99

Grandview Cemetery, 144, 267–68

"Great Strike" of 1877, 176, 201

Green Hill, 64, 184, 185, 191, 196, 253

Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 32, 175, 189, 244, 245

Gromley, Christopher, and family, 111

Grubbtown, Pennsylvania, 28, 201

Haak, Charles, 117

Hank, William, 88

Hanna, Marcus Alonzo, 78

Harding, Warren G., 59

Harper’s Weekly, 218, 221, 223

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 91, 205, 240

Harrison, President Benjamin, 61, 225, 231

Hart, Captain A. N., 166, 169, 190, 202

Hartley, G. B., 156–57

Hastings, Daniel Hartman, 201–202, 209, 212, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 245, 248, 266

Haws Cement Works, 189

Heidenfelter family, 88

Heiser, George, 35–38, 66, 150, 195, 196, 234

Heiser, Mathilde, 35–38, 150, 195. 196, 234

Heiser, Victor, 35–38, 66, 139, 186, 191, 196, 222, 234, 259, 265; experience in the flood, 150–54

Helman, Sam, 100

Henderson, Thomas, 107

Heppenstall, Bill, 178, 214

"Her Last Message, " 223

Hess, John, 112–15, 121, 214

Hipp, Libby, 158–62, 191

Hirst, Mrs., 195

Hite, Mrs. Ellen, 246

Hoffman, Ben, 195

Hoffman, Gottfried, and family, 195

Holley, Alexander, 69

Homestead, Pennsylvania, 60, 212, 248

Hoover, Herbert, 59

Home, Durbin, 59, 199

Horner, Charles, 146

Horner, Daisy, 34

Horner, Jacob, 172

Horseshoe Curve, 53

How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 26

Huff, George F., 59

Hulbert house, 31, 148, 215, 258; destroyed by the flood, 156–57

Hungarians, 26, 143, 202, 229, 248; blamed for widespread crime, 210–13

Irwin, Pennsylvania, 175

Jackson, Robert Montgomery Smith, 45–46

Jeannette, Pennsylvania, 175

Jenkins, James and Ann (Jenkins case), 258–59

Jenks, George C, 222

Jersey City, New Jersey, 91

Johnson, Tom L., 133, 190, 267

Johnson Street Rail Company, 30, 190

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 20, 134–35; before the flood, 22–38; canal basin, 51; history of floods, 65–66; development of steel industry, 68–71; on the morning of May 31, 79–87; map, 129; flood strikes, 145–50; on the morning of June 1, 183–89; citizens organize after the flood, 189–90; statistics on deaths caused by the flood, 193–96; first relief arrives, 198–204; the press arrives, 205–210; Hungarian scare, 210–13; as the press described it, 215–21; legends, 221–24; massive charity, 224–32; recovery, 234–38; reaction to trials, 263; ceremonies for the unknown dead, 267–68

Johnstown City Council, 29

Johnstown Horror, The, 224

Johnstown Tribune, 22, 25, 26, 30, 34, 54–56, 62–64, 66, 83, 85, 97–98, 146, 149, 186, 232, 253, 264, 267

Jones, B. F., 5

Jones, Captain Bill, 69, 71–72, 78, 203, 229, 267

Joseph Home & Company, 59

Juniata Crossing, Pennsylvania, 208

Kalamazoo, Michigan, 119

Keenan, Tom, 207

Kehoe, Thomas, 107

Kelly, William, 68–69, 78

Keltz, S. W., 103–107

Kempel, Christian, 195

Kernville, Pennsylvania, 150, 153, 171, 185, 193

Kilrain, Jake, 224

Kiskiminetas River, 25

Krebs, Fred, 82, 167

Knox, Philander C, 42, 58, 132, 242, 255, 260

Knox & Reed, 242, 258

Koch, Henry, 164

Kress, Mrs. Charles, 215

Kuhn, William, 34

Kurz& Allison, 219

Lake Conemaugh, 39, 41, 88, 101, 108, 131, 149, 260, 264; activities on the morning of the flood, 89–93; last moments before the dam failed, 98–100

Lamb’s Bridge, 40, 41, 102

Latrobe, Pennsylvania, 177

Laurel Hill, 25, 33, 77, 177, 189

Laurel Run, 24

Lawrence, J. J., 20

Leap, Mrs., 88

Lee, Dr. Benjamin, 209

Lee, Dr. John, 194

Leishman, John G. A., 58, 59, 61

Lenhart, Sam, 195

Levergood, Mrs. Jacob, 215

Levergood, Peter, 27

"Lewis the Light, " 232

Libby Prison, 35

Liggett, R. C, 112, 114

Ligonier, Pennsylvania, 33

Lilly, Pennsylvania, 24, 88

"Lime Kiln Club, " 207

Lincoln, Abraham, 23, 203, 257

Lincoln, Robert, 257

Linton, John, 80, 185, 209, 258

Lippincott, James, 42, 59

Lippincott, Jesse H., 243

Little, John, 257

Little, Nancy, 257

Little case, 257–58, 259

Little Conemaugh River, 24, 39, 53, 64, 81, 86, 94, 96, 103, 105–107, 113, 148, 167, 189, 198, 202

Lord Mayor of Dublin, 225

Loretto, Pennsylvania, 22, 33, 200

Lovett, John, 87

Lowman, Dr. John, 34, 155, 158, 170, 185, 190

Loyalhanna Creek, 25, 177

Macy, R. H., & Company, 225

Madison Square Garden, 224

Mail train, 123–25

Main Line Canal, 50–51, 54

Maine, U.S.S., 61

Malzi, Jacob, 171

Man Who Rode to Conemaugh, The, 221–22

Mann, Michael ("The First Victim"), 105–106

Matthews, Dr. William, 170, 190, 228, 234

McAchren, Maxwell, 163–64, 167 McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, 206

McDonald, Frank, 172

McGregor, James, 241–42

McGuigan, C. J., 124–25

McKee, John, 217

McKinley, William, 59

McLaurin, J. J., 192, 249

McMillan, James, 209

McMillan, James (plumber), 264

McNally, Mrs. Mary, 83

Medical News, 230

Mellon, Andrew, 58–59, 255

Mellon, T., & Sons, 58, 255

Memorial Day (in Johnstown), 22–23, 26–27, 32–33, 94, 164

Methodist Church, Johnstown, 34, 136, 152, 170–71

Metropolitan Opera House, 224

Metz family, 191

Miller, J. G., 123

Miller, Samuel S., 125–26

Millville, Pennsylvania, 28

Mineral Point, Pennsylvania, 94, 97, 109–11

Minersville, Pennsylvania, 213

Mitchell, Charlie, 224

Molly Maguires, 109

Monongahela River, 44, 60, 175

Montgomery, Christ, 110, 111

Montgomery, D. M., 117

Monument to the Unknown Dead, 268

Moore, Charles, 87

Moore, Mickey, 109

Moorhead, James N., 52

Morgues and morgue records, 192–96

Morrell, Daniel J., 133, 175, 190, 260; leadership in Johnstown, 67–72; concern about the dam, 73–77; death, 77–78

Morrellville, Pennsylvania, 28, 199

Morris, William E., 52

Mountain, The (Jackson), 45

Mountain House, Cresson, 46

Moxham, 28, 31, 97, 190

Moxham, Arthur J., 190, 201–202, 229, 267

Muddy Run, 41, 90

Murr, Charles, and family, 195

Mussante family, 152, 153

New Florence, Pennsylvania, 34, 177, 178–79, 181–82, 189, 196, 221

New Haven, Connecticut, 119

New York Central Railroad, 53

New York, New York, 57, 116, 156, 218,  224, 243, 244, 252

New York Daily Graphic, 208, 223, 250, 255

New York Herald, 207, 211, 242

New York Stock Exchange, 225

New York Sun, 207, 209, 210, 214, 245, 254

New York Times, 203, 207, 216, 219, 246, 254

New York Tribune, 207

New York Post, 210

New York Witness, 252

New York World, 189, 203, 211, 218, 219,  220, 242, 245, 246

Newport, Rhode Island, 57

Niagara Falls, 102

Night Off, A, 34, 123–25, 215, 224

Nineveh, Pennsylvania, 177, 189, 209, 244, 268

North American Review, 263

Official History of the Johnstown Flood (Connelly and Jenks), 222, 251

Ogle, Hettie, 97, 195, 223

Ohio River, 37, 50

Oil City, Pennsylvania, 35, 36

Oklahoma Territory, 32

Orr, Harry, 189

Otto Run, 88

Overholt, Abraham, 49, 62

Packer, Hezekiah, 52

Paint Creek, 25

Pattison, Governor Robert, 268

Parke, General John G., 20

Parke, John G., Jr., 95, 98–100, 101–102, 131, 213, 214, 221, 247, 261; at the club on Memorial Day, 20–22; investigates Lake Conemaugh on the morning of the flood, 89–90; rides to South Fork with warning, 93

Paul, Elmer, 96

"Paul Revere of the Flood" legend, 221–23

Paulson, Jennie, 116, 119, 122

Pearson, Edward, 56

Peblin, Sam, 88

Pennsylvania, state of, 50, 53, 54

Pennsylvania Board of Health, 209

Pennsylvania Canal, see Main Line Canal

Pennsylvania Pike, 206

Pennsylvania Railroad, 26, 28, 35, 39, 45, 49, 53–54, 55, 56, 59, 91, 95, 116–17, 175, 182, 198–200, 239–40, 253–54, 267; conducts its own investigation, 125–26

Peyton, Daniel, 221–23

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 45, 50, 68, 116, 156, 203, 205, 206, 213, 216, 224, 230, 231, 239, 258

Philadelphia Record, 215

Philadelphia Press, 205, 206, 207, 213, 215, 220, 257

Phillips, F., 122

Phipps, Henry, Jr., 58, 61, 67, 241, 255

Photographers arrive at Johnstown, 217–18

Pickerell, W. H., 94–97, 110–11, 113

Pitcairn, Robert, 58, 61, 87, 94, 95, 96, 118, 132, 174–79, 182, 199, 239, 241, 254, 260, 267

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48–53, 72, 78, 85, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 103, 116, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 206, 209, 212, 214, 216, 226, 229, 232, 247, 248, 251, 255, 257, 258, 259, 266, 267; club members from, 57–62; receives first news of the flood, 178; sends help to Johnstown, 198–204; cash donations to Johnstown, 224; club members interviewed by the press, 238–43

Pittsburgh "Blue Book, " 59

Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, 201

Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph, 180

Pittsburgh Commercial-Gazette, 180, 206

Pittsburgh Dispatch, 180, 206

Pittsburgh Leader, 206, 208

Pittsburgh Post, 208, 213, 214

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 204, 251

Pittsburgh Press, 206, 229, 240, 251

Pittsburgh Relief Committee, 199, 202, 232, 268

Pittsburgh Times, 180, 206

Plotner, H. W., 88

Plummer, J. B., 112, 114–15

Port Royal, Pennsylvania, 120

Portage Railroad, 50–51, 54, 107

Powell, John Wesley, 263

Presbyterian Church, Johnstown, 22, 73, 155, 165, 170, 193, 195

Prospect, Pennsylvania (and Prospect Hill), 28, 35, 86, 184, 197, 198, 201, 202, 232, 268

Pulitzer, Joseph, 225 Put Yourself in His Place (Reade), 218, 221

Quicksteps (baseball team), 32

Quinn, Gertrude, 139, 157–60, 188, 191, 214, 235; experience in the flood, 160–65

Quinn, James, 23, 157–61, 191, 234, 235, 264

Quinn, Vincent, 158, 159, 160

Raymond, Flood C, 266

Rea, Samuel, 59

Reade, Charles, 218, 221

Red Cross, 203, 229–31

Reed, Alfred, 211

Reed, Isaac, 250

Reed, James, 242, 257, 260

Reichard, William, 94–95

Reid, Whitelaw, 256

Reilly, Congressman John, 48–49, 55, 261

Reynolds, Sylvester, 88

Rhodes, Flood S., 266

Richards, Carrie, 156–57

Riis, Jacob, 26

Ritenour, John, 208

Robinson, Reverend T. H., 116, 119–21

Rockefeller, John D., 59

Roebling, John Augustus, 51

Roosevelt, Theodore, 59

Rorabaugh Creek, 41

Rose, Horace W., 80–82, 146, 148, 153, 192, 234, 258; experience in the flood, 168–69

Ross, John, 122–23

Ross, Joseph, 83

Ruff, Benjamin F., 55, 57, 67, 78, 243, 244, 247, 256, 260, 261; organizes the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, 48–49; correspondence with Daniel J. Morrell concerning South Fork dam, 74–76

Rusher, L. L., 94–95

Ryan, John, 195

St. John’s Catholic Church, Johnstown, 169

St. Michael, Pennsylvania, 130, 131

Salt Lake City, Utah, 224

Saltlick Creek, 24

Sandy Run, 99

Sandy Vale Cemetery, 22, 77, 164, 215

Sang Hollow, 112, 177, 178, 179, 189, 198–99, 207

Schantz, Joseph, 27

Schick, Cyrus, 120, 122

Schubert, C. T., 195

Schultz, John, 136, 217

Schwab, Charles, 23

Schwartzentruver, U. Ed, 92, 100

Scott, James B., 202

Scottdale, Pennsylvania, 159

Sewickley, Pennsylvania, 257

Shade Creek, 25

Shady Side Academy, Pittsburgh, 59

Shady Side Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, 176

Shafer, Howard, 107

Shea, C. B., 59

Showers, Bill, 90

Sideling Hill, 206

Siebert, Dan, 95

Sightseers at Johnstown, 232–33

Sipe, Dan, 88

Skinner, George, 164

Slabtown (in Allegheny, Pennsylvania), 61, 176

Smith, William Henry, 208

Somerset, Pennsylvania, 22, 35, 198, 200

Sousa, John Philip, 224

South Fork, Pennsylvania, 39, 53, 63, 92, 93, 95–96, 98, 174, 175, 243, 244, 245, 264; flood strikes, 103–107

South Fork Creek, 24, 39, 40, 41, 42, 48, 76, 87, 90, 96, 97, 104, 105, 107, 264

South Fork dam, 19, 20, 37, 49–50, 63–64, 117, 141, 175, 214, 260–64; described, 39–41; construction of, 52–53; first breaks, 54; rebuilt, 55–56; faults with renovation, 75–77; first message from, 87; second message from, 96; third message from, 96; fails, 100; remains examined by engineering experts, 243–45; coroner’s jury verdicts concerning, 245–46

South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, 41, 75, 84, 130, 175, 182, 199, 253, 256, 267; on Memorial Day, 19–20; described, 42–44; history of organization, 44–50; membership, 57–62; subject of publicity, 241–43: declared guilty by the press, 244–45, 248–52; law suits against, 257–64

Spangler, George, 198

Steel industry, 22–23, 60–61, 68–70

Steelton, Pennsylvania, 69

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 216

Stineman, Sheriff George, 88, 93, 104, 244

Stinson, Eliza, 120

Stone bridge, 26, 86, 138, 145, 148, 172–73, 186, 191, 197, 210; fire breaks out at, 149–50

Stone viaduct, 107–109

Stony Creek, 24, 29, 30, 65, 66, 81, 82, 83, 97, 148, 153, 164, 167, 171, 196, 206

Storm of May 30–31, 21, 87–89

Stowe, Judge Edwin H., 49

Stoystown, Pennsylvania, 206

Strawbridge & Clothier, 157

Strayer, Jacob, 259

Sullivan, John L., 224

Summerhill, Pennsylvania, 88

Susquehanna River, 205

Swank, George T., 83, 85, 97, 146, 149, 158, 190, 228, 232, 253, 267

Swank, Harry, 146

Swing, Lizzie, 85, 154

Talmage, Reverend T. DeWitt, 252

Tarbell, Farney S., 258

Tarr, H. C, 203

Temple, Leroy, 265

"That Valley of Tears, " 223

Thompson, Lizzie, 30, 253

Thomson, Edgar, works, see Edgar

Thomson works Thomson, J. Edgar, 45, 53, 60

Tice, William, 172

Tiffany & Company, 225

Toppers Run, 41

Tuscarora Mountain, 205

Tuxedo Park, New York, 57, 249

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 29

Underground Railroad, 27

Unger, Colonel Elias J., 41, 73, 99, 100, 101, 103, 174, 213–14, 243, 255, 261, 264; tries to stave off disaster at South Fork dam, 90–93

U.S. Geological Survey, 263

U.S. Signal Service, 21

University of Pennsylvania, 20

Unknown dead, 194, 268

Utica Saturday Globe, 223

Verona, Pennsylvania, 240

Victoria, Queen, 225

W.C.T.U., 203, 232

Wagoner, George, 195

Walkinshaw, J. C, 87, 95, 118–19

Wallace, Mrs. Lew, 209

Walters, James, 169

Walton, Izaak, 48

Warthen, Charles, 123

Washington, D.C., 225, 229, 230, 231

Washington, George, 27

Webber, Herbert, 214

Wellington, A. M., 245

Wells, Calvin, 59, 251

Welsh, Sylvester, 51, 53, 108

Western Reservoir, 39, 51–52

Western Theological Seminary, 116

Westinghouse, George, 176

Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, 244, 245

Wetmore, Claude, 189

Wheeling, West Virginia, 226

Whiskey Rebellion, 27

Whitman, Walt, 216, 218

Willard Hotel, Washington, 225, 231

Williams, Moses, 266

Wilmore, 88

Wilson, J. P., 95–97, 106, 174, 175

Wood, Morrell & Company, 71, 184

Woodvale, Pennsylvania, 28, 31, 166, 184, 217; flood strikes, 126–27

World’s Fair, Paris, 32, 256

Yellow Run, 41, 88

Young, Emil, 195

Youngstown, Ohio, 258

Zimmerman, Charles, 80–81, 190

Zimmerman, Jacob, 196

Zimmerman, Theodore, 194

Zozo the Magic Queen, 29

BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

John Adams

Truman

The Johnstown Flood

The Great Bridge

The Path Between the Seas

Mornings on Horseback

Brave Companions

David McCullough

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt

SIMON & SCHUSTER

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Copyright © 1981, 2001 by David McCullough

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

McCullough, David G.

Mornings on horseback: the story of an extraordinary family, a vanished way of life, and the unique child who became Theodore Roosevelt / David McCullough

Originally published: cl981. With new introd. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919—Childhood and youth. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.

E757.M45 2001
973.91’1’092—dc21
[B]  2001027005

ISBN 0-7432-1738-1

ISBN 978-0-7432-1-738-5

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5

For Melissa

Contents

Introduction

Author’s Note

PART ONE

1. Greatheart’s Circle

2. Lady from the South

3. Grand Tour

4. A Disease of the Direst Suffering

5. Metamorphosis

PART TWO

6. Uptown

7. The Moral Effect

8. Father and Son

PART THREE

9. Harvard

10. Especially Pretty Alice

11. Home Is the Hunter

12. Politics

13. Strange and Terrible Fate

14. Chicago

15. Glory Days

16. Return

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Picture sections follow pages 160 and 320

Introduction

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ideas to convey in writing history and biography is that events past were never on a track. Things could have gone any number of different ways for any number of reasons almost any time, and they who lived in those other vanished years had no way of knowing how it would all turn out any more than we do. That the frail, frightened, peculiar little boy who is the center of this book would turn out to be the robust Theodore Roosevelt of history, symbol of American confidence and vitality at the turn of the twentieth century, is surely a case in point.

Theodore Roosevelt is a writer’s delight and, to a degree that I’m not sure I adequately conveyed in my original author’s note, I had a wonderful time writing this book. To begin with there was the freedom I felt in the kind of book it was to be. I had no intention or writing a conventional biography. I felt no requirement to begin at the beginning of my protagonist’s life or end at the end. I would concentrate instead on a handful of formative years, less than twenty, and close the story just as his great part in national life was about to begin. I had mainly to tell a family story and absent the weight of a lot of obligatory history.

Then there was the very great pleasure of working with the Roosevelt family papers at Harvard. I can’t imagine anyone in a graduate program at Harvard having a better time than I did over four years reading in the Houghton Library. And how good were the long conversations with the best of the Roosevelt storytellers—P. James Roosevelt of Oyster Bay and Sheffield Cowles of Connecticut, both kinsmen of Theodore Roosevelt and both gone now, and John Gable, director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, who knows more about Theodore Roosevelt than anyone alive.

I had the thrill of seeing North Dakota for the first time, the pleasure of meeting and talking to state historians, ranchers, men very like those Theodore Roosevelt knew. I remember one in particular who when I asked him if there were any expressions peculiar to the state said emphatically, “Oh, you betcha!” Another time I remarked on how the wind seems always to blow there. “They say,” he replied, “if the wind ever stops blowing in North Dakota, all the chickens will fall down.”

There were weekend expeditions with my family to Sagamore Hill, a house that speaks of the man and the family who lived there about as clearly as any house in America. And there was the pure joy of writing a story set in New York in what was one of its most vibrant, fascinating eras.

I knew nothing about the agonies of asthma when I began the book, nothing about taxidermy or fashionable nineteenth century sojourns on the Nile, and I learned a great deal about all such matters. But then it is what you learn by writing that gives the work its pull.

If there was one discovery or revelation that meant the most, it was coming to know Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., who is central to this book, as he was in the life of his small namesake. I think it is fair to say that one can not really know Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth President of the United States, without knowing the sort of man his father was. Indeed, if I could have one wish for you the reader, it would be that you come away from the book with a strong sense of what a great man Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was.

Who is to say what would have become of little “Teedie” had he had a different kind of father? Or in what direction his career might have gone had his father not died so tragically when he did? But then, as I have said, there were always so many ways things could have gone differently.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH

New York,

February 2001

Author’s Note

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Theodore Roosevelt was in Pittsburgh about 1943. He was busy stealing the show in a Peabody High School production of Arsenic and Old Lace and I, at age ten or so, thought him sensational, and especially since in real life he was my oldest brother, Hax.

I have no idea how much or how little I knew of the historical TR before that night, but the impression that lasted was of a wondrously high-powered, comical, slightly loony, tremendously alive and appealing figure, all teeth, glasses, and mustache, who said “Bully!” at every chance and blew on a bugle and yelled “C-H-A-R-G-E!” at just the moment when it would bring the house down. I came away, in other words, with pretty much the impression of our twenty-sixth President that so many of us have grown up with, except that for me he happened also to be one of my very own family.

Years later, doing background reading on the Panama Canal, I encountered another Theodore Roosevelt—still the showman, still in command of the stage, but also shrewd, complex, a man of many gifts and masks—and it was what I read of his early life in particular that led to this book. My intention was not to write a biography of him. What intrigued me was how he came to be. Having written about the creation of two of the most conspicuous inanimate wonders of his era, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, and having acquired as a result great appreciation for the simple idea that such things don’t just happen, I was interested in knowing what was involved in the metamorphosis of this most conspicuous animate wonder. There were pieces of the puzzle that fascinated me—his childhood battle with asthma, for example, his beautiful southern mother, the adoration he had for his father. What, who, were involved in the forming of all that energy and persistence? How much of him was playacting or a composite of borrowings from others who were important to him?

The underlying theme would be the same as that of my earlier work—the creative effort, the testing and struggle, the elements of chance and inspiration involved in any great human achievement. The book would end when I thought he was formed as a person, at whatever age that happened, when I felt I could say, when the reader could say, there he is. San Juan Hill, the White House, the Canal, the trust-busting and Big Stick wielding, the Bull Moose with his “hat in the ring,” would all be after the fact, another story, so far as my interests.

But it was when I discovered the range and richness of surviving Roosevelt family correspondence—the many thousands of letters written not just by TR but by his mother, father, sisters, brother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, the private diaries and journals in the great Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library—that I realized what a truly marvelous and very large subject I had. The letters, only a small fraction of which have been published, offered the chance to get inside the life of a well-to-do Victorian American family—a very particular and vanished way of life—to go below the surface of their world, in a way that is seldom possible for a writer, except in fiction. It became the most engrossing work imaginable. The point that one of their number was to “make history” one day seemed almost immaterial. It was a story I would have wanted to tell had their names been something other than Roosevelt or had none of them done anything special later in life.

“During all this period New York was very much in the condition described in Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence,” writes Anna Roosevelt, Theodore’s older sister, in a private reminiscence that is part of the collection; “though naturally I did not realize it at the time,” she adds. Nor, importantly, did any of the family realize then that they were to be figures in history. The name Roosevelt was not yet a household word. National fame had not as yet touched any of the family and there was no reason to expect it might. And so there is an absence of affectation in almost everything they wrote to one another then, a wonderful candidness not always present in surviving correspondence from later stages.

Few of the Roosevelts could spell very well and punctuation for them, as for so many Victorians, was largely a matter of personal preference. Theodore, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, had the poorest spelling of all. He could handle “hippopotamus” or come close with “antediluvian,” even as a small boy, but words like “Chicago” or “forest” could prove too much for him. His brother, Elliott, had to write him at one point, “As you don’t know how to spell my name, I have entirely forgotten how to spell ‘yourn.’ Elliot does not spell Elliott, my dear Teedore.”

So for the benefit of the reader, the spelling in the writings quoted here has been corrected and punctuation made to conform to present standards, except in a few instances where the idiosyncrasy adds to the spirit of what is being said.

The volume of published work one must become familiar with when dealing with even part of such a life as Theodore led is almost overwhelming. It is not just that so much has been written about him and about other Roosevelts, but that he wrote and published so much himself and read so much that had a direct bearing on his life. Though a bibliography and source notes are included at the back of the book, I would like to express my particular indebtedness to two published works from the 1950s: the monumental The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (in eight volumes), edited by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and John J. Buckley; and Carleton Putnam’s masterful Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886. Numbers of other books were helpful and a pleasure—Henry F. Pringle’s biased and lively Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Harbaugh’s The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, which is much the best one-volume biography of TR, John Morton Blum’s superb The Republican Roosevelt, Hermann Hagedorn’s Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, Nicholas Roosevelt’s Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him—but the Letters and the Putnam biography have been indispensable.

For his advice on research, his valuable comments on the manuscript, his friendship over the past four years, I thank especially Dr. John Allen Gable, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and author of the definitive The Bull Moose Years. I am also greatly indebted to Wallace F. Dailey, Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, which in total comprises some seventeen thousand manuscript papers (mostly letters) and ten thousand photographs housed in the Houghton Library plus approximately twelve thousand volumes housed in the Widener Library. I thank Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, and Martha Eliza Shaw and the others of the Houghton Reading Room staff who were so helpful. I salute, too, the resourceful John D. Knowlton of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for his efforts in determining what was concealed beneath an ink blot in one of TR’s diaries; I thank Timothy Beard of the New York Public Library’s genealogy division for sharing some of his latest findings on the remarkable private life of Robert B. Roosevelt. For the very thorough tour he gave me through TR’s home at Oyster Bay, his quick and helpful answers to my written queries over the years, I thank Gary Roth, Curator of the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

In Mr. and Mrs. W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., of Farmington, Connecticut, who were so generous with their time and memories, I found invaluable living links with several key figures in the story. Mr. Cowles, who is the son of TR’s sister Anna, not only talked with me at length about his mother, his Uncle Theodore, his Aunt Corinne, but provided rare documentary material to be found nowhere else and was good enough to go over the manuscript and give me his views.

Other present-day descendants of the family who have been helpful include two of TR’s granddaughters, Sarah Alden Gannett and Edith Roosevelt Williams (Mrs. Gannett also read and commented on the manuscript); Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt of Oyster Bay, who is the granddaughter of Robert B. Roosevelt; and her son, P. James Roosevelt, who made a remark at lunch one day four years ago that did as much as anything to set the course of my work. Was there, I asked him, any important missing ingredient in the existing biographies of TR? “Yes,” he said. “No writer seems to have understood the degree to which he was part of a clan.”

In no part of the work have I been assisted by others quite so much as in my effort to get to the bottom of Theodore’s asthma, and most helpful in this respect has been Dr. Peter H. Knapp of the Boston University Medical Center, who is a leading authority on the psychosomatic aspects of the disease. My indebtedness to Dr. Knapp is very great. He took hours of his time to discuss the Roosevelt “case” with me, to guide me in my reading, and to go over my work as it progressed, telling me what to watch for in the family record, which were often quite different things from what I would have been watching for normally.

In addition to Dr. Knapp, the following physicians contributed ideas and/or shared with me their experiences in dealing with asthmatic children, for which I am most grateful: Tully Benaron, William H. Dietz, Richard Galdston, Milton Mazer, Shirley Murphy, and George Simson. And for their illuminating comments on the manuscript, I thank Dr. Robert Eisendrath and Dianthe Eisendrath.

Among the first things a layman discovers when trying to learn about asthma is that there is practically nothing in the literature on what the victim of an attack actually feels. (The best, most vivid account I could find was in a professional treatise published in 1864.) So for their willingness to talk openly and subjectively about the disease—something asthmatics commonly refuse to do because even talking about it can be painful for them—I am particularly grateful to Jeanne Crosby, Edward T. Hall, Jack D. Enns, and Cort Sutton. For sharing their experiences and insights as the parents of an asthmatic child, I am also grateful to Mr. and Mrs. John Curtiss. (Most of these interviews were conducted during an extended stay in New Mexico, where I was also fortunate to have access to the Medical Library of the University of New Mexico.)

During my time in North Dakota, I was offered help and hospitality at almost every turn, but wish to thank especially Liess Vantine and Frank E. Vyzralek of the State Historical Society at Bismarck; and in Medora and vicinity, Tom Adams, Mr. and Mrs. William Connell, William Herr, who is the wildlife specialist at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Joe L. Hild, who owns and runs TR’s old Chimney Butte Ranch, John O. Lancaster, Superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Harold and Sheila Schafer, Al Tescher, and Mayor Rod Tjaden; also, Harry Roberts of Dickinson and Mrs. Janet Buldhaupt of Beach.

My thanks to those who have assisted me at the Albuquerque Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, the Georgia State Historical Society in Savannah, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Oral History Collection at Columbia University, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, the University of New Mexico Library, and the West Tisbury Public Library.

And to all of the following I am grateful for favors large and small, for advice, encouragement, and ideas: Thomas A. Ashley, Clarence A. Barnes, Jr., William Bentinck-Smith, Edith Blake, the late Bruce Catton, J. Felton Covington, Jr., Robert Ferguson, John and Ruth Galvin, John Hawkins, Woody Jackson, David Kahn, Jessica Kraft, George McCullough, Elinor and George Montgomery, Tony de Mores, Elting Morison, Royall D. O’Brien, Audre Proctor, Paul R. Reynolds, Robbin Reynolds, Philippa Roosevelt, Elizabeth Saltonstall, and Margot Street.

I thank my literary agent, Morton L. Janklow, and those at Simon and Schuster who have been such a pleasure to work with and who have contributed greatly: my editor, Peter Schwed; Kim Honig, Edith Fowler, Pat Miller, and Frank Metz.

Above all there is my family: Melissa and John McDonald, David, William, Geoffrey, and Dorie McCullough, who have played a larger part, helped more than they know; and my wife, Rosalee, who with her understanding of people, her editorial judgment, her good spirits, patience, and devotion, has been an unfailing inspiration.

And lastly, thanks to brother Hax for getting up there on the stage in the first place.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH

West Tisbury, Massachusetts

December 5, 1980

Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE
Greatheart’s Circle

1

In the year 1869, when the population of New York City had reached nearly a million, the occupants of 28 East 20th Street, a five-story brown-stone, numbered six, exclusive of the servants.

The head of the household was Theodore Roosevelt (no middle name or initial), who was thirty-seven years of age, an importer and philanthropist, and the son of old Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the richest men in the city. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt—Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, or Mittie, as she was called—was thirty-three, a southerner and a beauty. The children, two girls and two boys, all conceived by the same father and mother, and born in the same front bedroom, over the parlor, ranged in age from fourteen to seven. The oldest, Anna, was known as Bamie (from bambina, and pronounced to rhyme with Sammy). Next came ten-year-old Theodore, Jr., who was called Teedie (pronounced to rhyme with T.D.). Elliott, aged nine, was Ellie or Nell, and the youngest, Corinne, was called Conie.

Of the servants little is known, except for Dora Watkins, an Irish nursemaid who had been employed since before the Civil War. Another Irish girl named Mary Ann was also much in evidence, beloved by the children and well regarded by the parents—it was she they picked to go with the family on the Grand Tour that May—but in family papers dating from the time, nobody bothered to give Mary Ann a last name. Concerning the others, the various cooks, valets, coachmen, and housemaids who seem to have come and gone with regularity, the record is no help. But to judge by the size of the house and the accepted standards for families of comparable means and station, there were probably never less than four or five “below stairs” at any given time, and the degree to which they figured in the overall atmosphere was considerable.

The house stood in the block between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, on the south side of the street, and it looked like any other New York brownstone, a narrow-fronted, sober building wholly devoid of those architectural niceties (marble sills, fanlights) that enlivened the red-brick houses of an earlier era downtown. The standard high stoop with cast-iron railings approached a tall front door at the second-floor level, the ground floor being the standard English basement, with its servants’ entrance. A formal parlor (cut-glass chandelier, round-arched marble fireplace, piano) opened onto a long, narrow hall, as did a parlor or “library,” this a windowless room remembered for its stale air and look of “gloomy respectability.” The dining room was at the rear, again according to the standard floor plan. Upstairs were the master bedroom and nursery, then three more bedrooms on the floor above, with the servants’ quarters on the top floor.

Only one thing about the house was thought to be out of the ordinary, a deep porch, or piazza, at the rear on the third-floor level. Enclosed with a nine-foot wooden railing, it had been a bedroom before the Roosevelts tore out the back wall and converted it to an open-air playroom. It overlooked not only their own and neighboring yards, but the garden of the Goelet mansion on 19th Street, one of the largest private gardens in the city, within which roamed numbers of exotic birds with their wings clipped. Daily, in their “piazza clothes,” the children were put out to play or, in Bamie’s case, in early childhood, to lie on a sofa.

The house had been a wedding present from Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt—CVS to the family—whose own red-brick mansion on Union Square, six blocks south, was the figurative center of the Roosevelt tribal circle. The father of five sons, CVS had presented them all with houses as they married and the one given Theodore, youngest of his five, adjoined that of Robert B. Roosevelt, the fourth son, who was a lawyer.

With their full beards and eyeglasses, these two neighboring brothers bore a certain physical resemblance. The difference in age was only two years. Beyond appearances, however, they were not the least alike. Robert was the conspicuous, unconventional Roosevelt, the one for whom the family had often to do some explaining. Robert wrote books; Robert was bursting with ideas. He was a gifted raconteur, a sportsman, yachtsman, New York’s pioneer conservationist (fish were his pet concern), an enthusiastic cook, an authority on family origins. He was loud and witty and cherished the limelight, seeking it inexplicably in the tumult of Tammany politics. Until the Civil War, the Roosevelts had all been Democrats. As late as 1863, Theodore had still been an avowed War Democrat—one who supported the war and thus the Republican Administration—but when he and the rest of CVS’s line at last turned Republican, Robert alone remained in the Democratic fold and was never to be anything but proud of the fact. (”Our party is the party of the people!”)

Robert’s middle name was his mother’s maiden name, Barnhill, but in anticipation of what his political foes might make of this (”manure pile” or variations to that effect), he had changed it to Barnwell and it was as Uncle Barnwell that he was sometimes known to the small nieces and nephews in the house beside his.

Robert’s wife, Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt, was called Aunt Lizzie Ellis to distinguish her from still another Aunt Lizzie in the family, and she too was considered “unorthodox.” At the back of her third floor—the floor corresponding to the piazza next door—she maintained a marvelous and odorous menagerie of guinea pigs, chickens, pigeons, a parrot, a monkey, “everything under the sun that ought not be kept in a house.” The monkey, her favorite, was a violent little creature that bit. She dressed it like a fashionable child, complete with ruffled shirts and gold studs. Once Aunt Lizzie Ellis aroused the neighborhood with the purchase of a cow that had to be led from East 20th Street into her back yard by the only available route, through the house, an event that, for excitement, was surpassed only by the removal of the cow, once Aunt Lizzie Ellis was threatened with legal action. On the return trip through the house the animal became so terrified it had to be dragged bodily, its legs tied, its eyes blindfolded.

To the children next door such occasions naturally figured very large, as did Uncle Barnwell with his talk of fishing and hunting, his yacht, and his flashy political friends. So it is somewhat puzzling that so little was to be said of him in later years. His immediate proximity would be passed over rather quickly, his influence barely touched on. He is the Roosevelt everybody chose to forget about. Politics undoubtedly had much to do with this, but more important, it would appear, was his private life. For in addition to all else, brother Rob was a bit lax in his morals. He was what polite society referred to as a Bohemian, the kind of man who kept company with “actresses and such.” An admiring later-day kinsman would describe him as an Elizabethan in the Victorian era and a story has come down the generations of the ladies’ gloves Robert purchased in bulk at A. T. Stewart’s department store, these in a violent shade of green. The gloves had been on sale, according to the story, and he distributed them liberally among his “lady friends,” with the result that for years those who knew him well knew also to watch for the gloves while strolling Fifth Avenue or driving in the park.

Ordinarily, such stories might prompt some question as to whether Robert only seemed scandalous—so very straitlaced was the family, so quick was “the best society” to leap on the least deviation from the prescribed code and call it, if not immoral, then indecent. But in truth Robert was something more than a mere rake or charming boulevardier. He was a man living a remarkable double life, keeping another woman and ultimately an entire second family in a house only a block or so distant on the same street, an arrangement that would come to light only long afterward as a result of genealogical research sponsored by some of his descendants. Her name was Minnie O’Shea, or Mrs. Robert F. Fortescue, as he had decided she should be called, and in 1869 she was already pregnant with their first child.

How much of this Theodore knew, how strenuously he disapproved, if at all, is impossible to say. But the contrast between the two could hardly have been more striking.

Theodore was invariably upright, conservative, the very model of self-control. He cared nothing for public acclaim, “never put himself forward,” as friends would remember. Theodore was the model duty-bound husband and father, a junior partner at Roosevelt and Son. He was a faithful communicant at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, who often attended two services on the same Sunday. He belonged to the Union League Club and the Century Association. He served on charitable boards, raised money for museums. Not in seven generations on the island of Manhattan had the Roosevelts produced so sturdy or so winsome an example of upper-class probity, or so fine a figure of a man—physically imposing, athletic, with china-blue eyes, chestnut hair and beard, and a good, square Dutch jaw. In his formal photographs, the eyeglasses removed, he is someone who will do what he has to, direct, sure of himself. Only the eyes raise questions, with their unmistakable hint of severity, which seems odd in a man remembered mainly for the “sunshine of his affection.”

Clothes concerned him. The choice of a suit, the right hat for the occasion, were issues of consequence. His suits were of the best quality and beautifully tailored. Appearances mattered. Indeed, it may be said that appearances figured quite as much in the life at 28 East 20th Street as everywhere else within the circumscribed world of New York’s “good old families.” “Did I tell you that he took the other end of the table at the dinner I gave to Captain Cook and behaved admirably?” Theodore writes of brother Rob to Mittie. “He was dressed perfectly, except for a colored cravat with his dress suit.”

Together at dinners and balls, he and the exquisite Mittie made a picture people did not forget. It was in the Roosevelt tradition to be solicitous to women. While their mother was alive, the five brothers stopped regularly every morning en route to work to pay her their respects. But Theodore seems to have genuinely preferred the company of women—he had an eye for feminine beauty, his children all remembered—and the attention he showered on Mittie was exceptional even for that day and those circles. An employee at one of his charities remarked that he had never understood the meaning of the word “gentleman” until the evening he watched Theodore Roosevelt escort his wife about the premises.

In all Theodore was a seemingly uncomplicated person. He had no particular gifts. He was not musical as Mittie was. He shared little of her love of art. He was not creative; he did not write or charm after-dinner audiences as Robert could. He dabbled in nothing. He was perfectly intelligent, to be sure; he enjoyed books, enjoyed the talk of lawyers, editors, and others who traded in words and abstract ideas, but he was unintellectual. In matters of taste he habitually deferred to his wife, refusing even to buy a bottle of wine unless she had passed on it. If he regarded himself as an authority on anything, it was horses.

But greatest of all was his interest in and feeling for children. He responded immediately to them, and they to him. “My personal impression,” a nephew would recall, “. . . is that he was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man with an intense sympathy with everything you brought to him. He loved children especially.”

From childhood he had been called Thee and as the youngest son, the Benjamin of the family, he had been doted on. He was Mama’s darling and did nothing but shine in her eyes until her dying day. In turn, he adored her and would credit any good qualities he had to her and her “settled notions.” She had been an event in the Roosevelt line, the first non-Dutch entry on the family tree. She was Margaret Barnhill of Philadelphia. Her background was English-Irish-Quaker. She was gentle but dominating and the first of the Roosevelts to espouse the spirit of noblesse oblige. Great wealth imposed obligations, she preached; the opportunities bestowed by private fortunes must be put to “some good purpose.” Bamie, as the oldest of her fathers children, could remember going as a very small child to call on her at the house on Union Square. There was a cavernous front hall with a floor of polished black-and-white marble and great mahogany doors with silver knobs and hinges that opened to the dining room. “In the dining room, where a bright soft-coal fire was always burning in the fireplace, between two south windows, we invariably found my grandmother sitting in her corner with her work basket on a table near her, and some books, always apparently delighted to see us, and with a most lovely smile.”

Through Theodore’s youth, dinner conversation in that same room, at his fathers end of the table, had been in Dutch. Short, homely, pink-faced, invariably punctual, CVS Roosevelt regarded his brood with rather quizzical large, round eyes that were made to look even larger by his small, square gold-framed spectacles. He was the essence of old-fashioned New York. “Economy is my doctrine at all times,” he had once informed Margaret Barnhill in the midst of their courtship, “at all events till I become, if it is to be so, a man of fortune.” And though Roosevelt and Son had been founded by his own father and grandfather, it was he, CVS, who had become the family’s initial man of fortune, the first Roosevelt millionaire. It was he who switched the family business from hardware to importing plate glass. And still more fortuitously, in the Panic of 1837, when Theodore was a child of six, he bought up building lots, “hither and yon,” on the island of Manhattan, all at a good price.

Theodore’s formal education had been limited and erratic, as his spelling gave evidence. There had been a private tutor through boyhood and never a lack of books at hand, but college was ruled out because CVS thought it would ruin him. (Weir Roosevelt, the oldest brother, had gone to Columbia College, but to study law, which apparently made it tolerable in the fathers eyes; Robert, in his turn, had become a lawyer without going to college, as was still possible then.)

In 1851, however, at age nineteen, Theodore was sent off on a Grand Tour, something his brothers had been denied and that Robert for one greatly envied. It was the year of the London Exhibition and the opening of the Crystal Palace, an event of obvious importance to a family in the glass business. He saw the Exhibition, traveled the Continent, even went on to Russia, which was unheard of. He improved his French, acquired a little German and Italian, and sent home dutiful, descriptive letters that were his mother’s joy and to Robert a large annoyance.

“I’m afraid, Theodore, you have mistaken the object of traveling,” Robert lectured. “It is not to see scenery, you can see finer at home. It is not to see places where great people lived and died, that is a stupidity. But it is to see men. To enlarge your mind, which will never be enlarged by looking at a large hill, but by conversing with, and seeing the bent of the minds of other people.”

A month later, after still more from Theodore on the churches and monuments he was seeing, Robert could barely contain himself.

I have it in mind to go to all the big stores in Broadway and write you an account. So look out as sure as you describe to me any more big buildings, you may know what to expect. Now answer seriously, have you been anywhere but to monuments, etc.? Have you been to a masked ball, a theater, an opera, or even into a French store where little girls tend the counters? Have you seen a Dutchman, a Frenchman, an Irishman; besides the porters who carried your trunks? If so, what did you say to them and what did they say to you? Have you seen anything odd or original? Where have you been, where are you going?

But six months later, Robert felt obliged to rescind.

Firstly, Advice. Don’t write any more experience in the lower walks of life, or moralize upon its wickedness. . . . Mother gets into a pigeon fit and thinks her “darling innocent” is going straight to destruction. And the old gentleman ruminates on the disappearance of the £1,000 and looks blank when it is suggested to him that he is supporting Theodore’s “French teacher.” The old lady takes it hard and no matter what you do perhaps you had better not write about it. You had better keep to towers and castles.

Russia—the overwhelming splendors of St. Petersburg, the squalor of Moscow—affected Theodore profoundly. “I scarce know terms strong enough to express my feelings. . . . Everything is in the extremes.” Conceivably it had taken Robert’s admonitions to bring him to see the human element; still, the kind of sensitivity that began to emerge in his letters and in his journal was very much his own. He toured a Moscow foundling hospital where every year some six thousand infants were received. On the edge of the city early one Sunday he watched a thousand prisoners start the long march to Siberia. A dignified, elderly figure he identifies in the journal only as Dr. Haase had come to bid the prisoners farewell. Nothing or no one that Theodore encountered in his travels seems to have impressed him as this man did.

He was dressed in the old style with silk stockings and slippers, his breast decked with honor. . . . He is one of the finest-looking old gentlemen I ever saw and his actions carry out his appearance. He went around among the prisoners asking them if they were well and content. . . when they were departing he distributed among those whom he thought deserving. It was more the universal feeling of kindness which prompted every movement than any particular action which I can adduce which evinced his character.

The prisoners must be fairly treated, the old man insisted, for at Judgment Day their word would count as much as that of anyone. Though a few of the sick had been put in wagons, the rest had started off on foot with the prospect of six months of continual walking before them.

To the great relief of his father, Theodore came home with no new revolutionary ideas or worldly airs. Nor, apparently, was it with the least misgiving that he entered directly into the family firm, downtown at 94 Maiden Lane. The Russian journal would be taken up and reread from time to time and one “treasure” among the few he had brought back, a small square of malachite supporting a small gilt Russian peasant pulling a gilt sledge, was to occupy a prominent position in the 20th Street parlor. Only after they were grown would the children become aware that it was anything other than a priceless work of art.

The impression is that the family business more or less ran itself. CVS had announced his retirement soon after Theodore joined the firm, and another brother, James Alfred Roosevelt, was made senior partner. James Alfred, as nobody disputed, had the best head for business. He was shrewd and tough, and he had married an Emlen from Philadelphia, a move which, in the words of one descendant, “did the family’s fortune no harm.” James, too, like his father, was made a director of the Chemical Bank, and the Chemical Bank, with real estate, was of greatest importance to the Roosevelts and their standing in the financial community. CVS had been a founding father of the Chemical Bank, the only bank in New York that had never failed to meet its obligations in gold, even during the Civil War.

The family’s real-estate holdings were lumped under what was called the Broadway Improvement Association, of which James Alfred was also head and chief spokesman.

So it was James Alfred, ultimately, who had the final say on all questions pertaining to money, a subject about which all Roosevelts cared deeply but which they preferred also to keep altogether private. When, in 1868, a publication called Gallaxy presented the names of New York’s ten bona fide millionaires, with CVS listed among them, Weir Roosevelt responded angrily in a letter to The New York Times that no man’s privacy was safe any longer. “I ask you whether it is the present opinion of the respectable newspapers that a rich man has no rights, or, in other words, whether the mere accumulation of property by a private citizen is of itself a sufficient offense against society to call for a public exposure and justify the interference of the press?”

One of Theodore’s rare observations on the atmosphere at Roosevelt and Son is contained in a love letter to Mittie written hastily at his desk in 1853, shortly before they were married. So wonderful was the mere thought of her, he said, it could even brighten a day at 94 Maiden Lane, “where such a thing as sentiment would be laughed at as a humbug worthy of Mr. Barnum’s collection.” The bookkeeper, he cheerfully informed her, had warned him never to marry a southern girl.

As a businessman Theodore appears to have been miscast. He had no apparent aversion to trade, or any philosophical conflict with moneymaking as such. (For a time he even thought seriously of leaving the family firm in order to make more in some other line, though what that might be he had no idea.) Rather he appears to have found little or no satisfaction in the work. His letters rarely touch on it. The one picture we get of him having any fun on the job, evincing any of his usual enthusiasm, is an account of a winter day in Washington when he scaled the snow-covered roof of the new Treasury Building to measure for skylights. He felt like a mountaineer, sometimes sliding thirty or forty feet down the roof. All he needed was his alpenstock, he said. Otherwise, the impression is of years at a desk going through the motions, performing dutifully as the proper Victorian breadwinner, a prudent, attractive figure, quite in the Roosevelt mold, but uninspired, unaggressive, and, probably, not very good at what he did.

The power rested in the older brothers hands. Theodore was free to do Europe at will, while James Alfred stayed on and ran things, and Theodore seems to have gone off to Europe—or to the country or to his eager philanthropy—at every chance.

As time went on, his crusades among the needy, his hospital and museum projects, became his true vocation. It was thus that he became one of the prominent men of the city, as truly good a good citizen as New York had ever known. “Whatever he had to do, he did all out,” remembered Charles Loring Brace, the pioneer social worker. To some, he seemed strangely driven. John Hay, another friend, spoke of his “maniacal benevolence,” and in letters to his wife Theodore himself infers occasionally that “with so much to do” he has no choice. “I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.”

Together with Brace and a friend named Howard Potter, he had helped establish the Children’s Aid Society, to do something for the city’s homeless children—”street rats” as the police chose to call them—whose numbers by 1869 probably exceeded twenty thousand. Largely through Theodore’s initiative a permanent Newsboys’ Lodging House had been established on West 18th Street, where nightly several hundred stray boys, most of them newsboys, were given a clean bed in a warm room for five cents, a fraction of what was charged by the lowest kind of commercial flophouse. It was Braces contention—the theme by which he appealed for funds and enlisted the efforts of men like Theodore—that decent society had no greater threat than the existence of a “class of vagabond, ignorant, ungoverned children.” The time would come, Brace warned, when these children would have the vote, “the same rights as ourselves”—a very different justification for Christian mercy from that espoused by Theodore’s old gentleman in Moscow, but one that carried Brace and his projects far.

The mission of the Children’s Aid Society was to bring “moral disinfectants” to the festering “crime nests” of New York. A kindhearted agent or “visitor” was first dispatched to the “infected quarter,” someone who could naturally befriend the homeless waifs, this being work that Theodore, for one, did extremely well. Then an informal religious meeting, or mission class, was established; then a reading room, then an industrial school or workshop. Presently came the Lodging House. But the long-range objective was to return as many of the children as possible to their own families, if such existed, or, more often, to ship them off to farms in the Middle West or beyond, to get them out of the city entirely. By 1869 some 4,500 children had been thus dispatched to Ohio, Illinois, and points beyond. In time more than 100,000 would be sent.

When Brace first asked Theodore if he might spend every other Sunday evening at the Lodging House, talking with the boys, Theodore declined, saying his “troublesome conscience” would not permit it. He would be there every Sunday.

He “threw himself” into the work, Brace remembered: “He knew them by name, he knew their histories . . . they would gather round him, and he would question each one as to what he was doing, and give him advice and sympathy and direction. You felt the moment Mr. Roosevelt was in the room that he was a help to those poor fellows.”

As generous with his money as his time, he gave regularly to this and other causes, and raised still more among his well-to-do friends, some of whom eventually learned to take out their checkbooks the moment he came into their offices. One man, on hearing that Theodore was going abroad, estimated it would save him at least a thousand dollars.

Importantly, Theodore’s influence was felt just at that stage in the city’s growth when it could have the greatest effect, a point he never lost sight of. He believed in New York, he said, not so much for what it was as for what it might become, the example it could set. No city offered more opportunity for those wishing to do something for the good of mankind; his joy, he said, was being connected with new work, worthy institutions in their infancy, the influence of which would be felt throughout the country. The year following the war he helped start the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, for the treatment of children deformed by spinal disease. With Joseph Choate, Pierpont Morgan, Howard Potter, and others he had founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. It was in the front parlor at 28 East 20th Street that the original charter for the Museum of Natural History was approved the evening of April 8, 1869.

No one seems ever to have spoken ill of him. A man who knew him in business for more than twenty years said he never heard him utter an angry word, never saw him out of sorts. When Albert S. Bickmore, the brilliant young naturalist, first came to the city with his idea for a natural history museum, it was to Theodore that he went, because he had been told that Theodore Roosevelt was “just the man” to make such a project a success. Thirty years later Bickmore could still quote Theodores response: “Professor, New York wants a museum of natural history and it shall have one, and if you will stay here and cooperate with us, you shall be its first head.”

Most memorable was what Brace called his “rich power of enjoyment of everything human.” Pious as he was, as solemn sounding as his religious speculations might become, he adored parties and would dance all night. Like the new President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, he had a passion for fine horses and to see him astride one of his own in Central Park was, as one friend remarked, to see the model of Christian manhood.

He would make the most of any situation, of every moment, often replenishing his energies with occupations or chance conversations that others would have found irksome or boring. “I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out,” he would say of someone he met on a train.

Best were the pleasures of a morning walk or his books or a good cigar or what he called the quiet luxury of home life. He loved flowers, yellow roses especially, and the Palisades along the Hudson River. Separated from home and the beloved “home faces,” he could slip rapidly into abject homesickness and sound, on paper at least, most uncharacteristically plaintive. He felt bereft of real friends, he wrote to Mittie one such summer evening. “The city is deserted by all my acquaintances and I scarce meet anyone now in the Park that I know.”

I wonder in so large a city, living here all my life, how it comes that I have so few intimate friends; it seems strange, especially when I know that you consider me so very sociable. But I have no more time to moralize. Those who I love love me and I would not give up their affection for the lukewarm article called by that name by thousands.

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was as though he was in league with them. As Ellie once told him, he was one of those rare grown men who seem never to forget that they were once children themselves—”just my ideal,” Ellie said, “made to govern and doing it so lightly and affectionately.” Sweetest of all was his undivided attention, the “sunshine of his affection.”

Day began with the three youngest poised at the foot of the long stairway waiting for his descent and their morning prayers together, this ritual being held on the library sofa, two of them seated to one side of him, the third wedged into what they regarded as the prime position between him and the arm of the sofa. Evenings, in the library, they would wait for the sound of his key at the door, then rush to greet him and troop after him up the stairs to his room to watch him dress for dinner. (He always dressed for dinner and with what seemed to them the most amazing speed.)

He taught them to ride and to climb trees. Conie remembered “the careful way in which he would show us dead limbs and warn us about watching out for them, and then, having taught us and having warned us, he gave us full liberty to try our wings . . .” As they grew older he tried to include them in his own outside activities, taking along one or more, for example, on his Sunday-night visits to the Newsboys’ Lodging House. Those evenings when he brought some friend of special interest to the house—John Hay, Matthew Arnold, Albert Bickmore—he saw that the children sat and listened to what was being said.

His own preachments were fundamental and heartfelt, and it would be hard to overemphasize the extent to which they charged the atmosphere. Cultivate a hopeful disposition, he told them. Accept the love of others and you will be loved.

“I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking.” (To show their love for him, they could improve their handwriting or learn to swim or memorize a passage from the Bible.)

“I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language.”

He hated idleness. Every hour must be accounted for and one must also enjoy everything one did. Get action, he said. Seize the moment. “Man was never intended to become an oyster.”

Deceit or cowardice was not to be tolerated. Courage he rewarded openly and sometimes with dramatic effect. At a rented country house in New Jersey one summer, he surprised the three youngest children with a new pony. When he asked who would jump on, Conie, then four, was the only one not to hang back, and so he declared the pony was hers, to the humiliation of her older brothers. “I think I did it,” she would write long afterward, “to see the light in Fathers eyes.”

That a great, bearded figure of a man was also one so readily touched by the sufferings of others, so tender-hearted with children, so sensitive to the pulls of conscience, seemed strangely incongruous to some who knew him. But to those closest to him this androgynous quality was the essence of his personality. Howard Potter, the friend who probably knew him best, saw him as a “singular compound of feminine and masculine qualities, lovable as a woman, and as strong as a man.”

To Teedie, the little namesake, he was at once the most magnificent creature on earth and quite frightening, but then Teedie was full of fears of all kinds, as he would acknowledge in time. Anna Bulloch Gracie, the elder Theodore’s pious and adoring sister-in-law, called him Greatheart. It had come to her on a Sunday morning as she watched him go off to church with his children—the warrior Puritan, Greatheart, from The Pilgrim’s Progress, stout Greatheart, guide and protector of wayfaring innocents, fearless leader in life’s purposeful journey. “Come now, and follow me, and no hurt shall happen to you from the lions. ...”

“There never was anyone so wonderful as my father,” Bamie remembered. And the fact that he swept in and out of the house, in and out of their lives, the fact that he was not always around as their mother was, made him seem all the more special and “wonderful.”

2

Of the four children it was Bamie who most closely resembled him; Bamie, who, to use her own words, never let herself be young, and who, as would be said, probably had the best mind in the family.

Bamie was the mainstay, then and for as long as she lived. For a girl born into New York society she was also severely handicapped. She was not in the least pretty, for one thing. Her dark-blue eyes were deep-set, the lids heavy, which made her look tired and years older than she was. In repose she could look painfully sad.

More seriously, she was also somewhat physically deformed. The standard family explanation for this has been that as an infant she had been dropped by a careless nurse. However, no mention of such an incident is to be found in family records dating from the time it supposedly occurred, or afterward. The one specific early reference to the problem is in a letter written by Grandmamma Bulloch, an observant member of the household in that earlier day. Writing of the infant Bamie, she said, “I am quite uneasy about her back. There is something wrong there. She cannot stand more than a second on her feet, then her countenance expresses pain, and she crumbles down.”

The problem, in fact, was Pott’s disease, the form of tuberculosis which softens and destroys the bones and which, when localized in the spine, causes hunchback. Known to have been a child crippler since the time of the Pharaohs, it was first identified in the eighteenth century by a British physician, Percivall Pott. Still, by the late nineteenth century, it remained a mystery and was thought to be incurable.

In Bamie’s case the effect was severe curvature of the spine and intense suffering. At age three, at the time of Teedie’s birth, she was fitted with her “terrible instrument,” a heavy steel-and-leather apparatus that left her immobile and rubbed a hideous sore on her back. The doctor came regularly each morning to wash and dress the sore and to strap her in again, and through the rest of the day she had to be picked up and carried from room to room or out to her sofa on the piazza. She could lie face down only. In the evening it was her father who removed the apparatus and at bedtime Grandmamma Bulloch would rub her legs until she fell asleep.

Her fathers devotion became the most important thing in her life. A summer when she had to be left behind at 20th Street while her mother, grandmother, the new baby, and Dora Watkins went off to the country was a summer of untold happiness because he was there with her so much of the time, because at the end of his business day he would come directly to her on the piazza, bringing her ice cream or fresh peaches or some small gift, because he would sit with her while she had her supper, then carry her to bed “with his very strong arms.”

She was also released from the “terrible instrument” that same summer, the summer of 1859, when she was four. He had found another doctor for her, Charles Fayette Taylor, an orthopedic surgeon who in some professional quarters was thought to be a quack. Pott’s disease was Taylor’s specialty. He treated it with what he called the “movement cure,” a form of physical therapy based on Swedish techniques that he had learned in Europe. Bamie was among his first patients and he not only transformed her daily regimen, giving her virtually a new life, but interjected into the family circle his conviction that physical well-being and mental outlook are directly correlated.

She was fitted with a radically different kind of back brace, a custom-made “spinal assistant” that was light in weight and designed so that she could be up and moving about, which, Taylor stressed, was the whole point. He wanted her moving about, both for her back and for what it would do to her spirits. Improvement was slow but unmistakable, and it was seeing this, seeing what Taylor had done for his own child, that led Theodore to establish the Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital with Taylor at its head.

A full cure was never to come, however. Through most of childhood she was required to lie down part of every day, and, by Roosevelt standards, her physical activity was limited. The rest of her life she wore a piece of ram’s wool on her back beneath her clothes in order to sit comfortably in a chair. She was not, by the time she attained her full growth, exactly a hunchback, but she did have an odd hunched stance. The small figure she presented to the world, or that she confronted in the hall mirror, was plainly “curious,” thick through the shoulders.

“Poor little thing,” her father wrote when she was seven. “I never think of Bamie without pain. It seems such a dreary life that is in store for her.”

He wanted her with him whenever possible. At some point during the war, on one of his periodic trips to Washington—the exact date is not known—he took her along and she sat on Abraham Lincoln’s lap. She would remember nothing of the event, only that she had been with her father.

In a family notable for its intense attachments, theirs was perhaps the most intense of all. She was emphatically “Papa’s pet.” He kept her photograph in a leather case and carried it with him wherever he traveled. His letters to “My own Darling Bamie” were overflowing with tenderness, with concern for her every move, with advice, warnings, and not a little baring of his own soul. “Try to cultivate a quiet sober style,” he would write, “and bottle up your spirits a little until I have possession of you. Then you may let them out again as much as you please.”

The one and only time he ever physically punished Teedie—possibly the only time he ever physically punished any of his children—was when, at age four, Teedie bit Bamie on the arm.

Bright, conscientious, she picked things up quickly (French, the piano) and her energy was very nearly the match of Theodore’s. “Dear busy Bamie,” Grandmamma Bulloch called her. But it was her odd, almost quaint maturity that set her off. She was “competent beyond her years,” even when very small. She had no interest in games or toys. She wished only to be “useful,” to look after her own needs, to look after the younger three, to whom she never seemed like anything but another grownup. Teedie, by way of introduction to his diary of the European tour, was to explain, “When I put ’We 3’ I mean Ellie, Conie, and I. When I put ’big people’ I mean Papa, Mama, and Bamie.” That she was plain and deformed seems never to have figured in their picture of her. Not once in all that Mittie wrote about her children is there even a trace of pity or worry over Bamie. Bamie was strength. Bamie was good sense, the one to lean on, to turn to for help. She was, as Teedie would tell her fondly, “a kind of little feminine Atlas with a small world on her shoulders.”

Of the youngest three, Ellie was the best-looking and the most convivial, and in many ways the most endearing. As a baby he had been “decidedly pretty.” At two he could speak more clearly than his older brother and in no time became larger, better coordinated, the natural athlete of the two. Little brother was big brother. He was also distinguished by a sweet, even temper and what seemed an inordinate fund of kindness for someone so young. Once, at about the age of seven, he had gone off for a walk wearing a new overcoat and returned without it. He had given it away, he explained, to a ragged child who had none and looked cold.

Unlike Bamie, whose hair was dark brown, he, Teedie, and Conie were all fair-haired and Conie was known for her “ardent” blue eyes.

Teedie, in Bamie’s expression, was the “great little home-boy” of the family. He was extremely frail and undersized for ten, a nervous, timid, often solitary child with bad color and what his mother described as a “quiet patrician air . . . his large blue eyes not looking at anything present.” His joy was in stories of high adventure, in birds and animals, almost anything to do with nature. “My mouth opened wide with astonish[ment] when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you,” he had written to his mother the spring before, in April 1868, when she was in Savannah. “I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mockingbird, get some of its feathers if you can.” He kept pet mice in a bureau drawer, and, in partnership with a cousin, West Roosevelt, had founded his own “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in the back hall on the fourth floor, a collection already comprising some several hundred specimens.

Teedie was an asthmatic. His attacks had started at about the age of three and more even than Bamie’s affliction they had had a profound effect on the life of the family—summer plans, sudden cancellations of dinner engagements, changes in plans of all kinds being determined time and again by the status of his health. During the first few days at any summer house or hotel, his mother would keep her bags packed, knowing from experience that some unknown something might trigger an attack and off she would have to go with him, back to the city or to try still another, different locale.

Conie, too, had “the asthma,” but very infrequently and never so seriously. Teedie, moreover, was beset by chronic stomach trouble, by headaches, by colds, fevers, and a recurring nightmare that a werewolf was coming at him from the bottom of his bed. Earlier in the year, in January 1869, he had fallen into such a low state that Mittie had taken him off to Philadelphia for a stay with her half sister, Susan, whose husband, Hilborne West, was a physician. Teedie, as Mittie said, kept everyone “on the stretch.” Rarely could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair, so difficult was it for him to breathe. For a time, his father had thought possibly the trouble had something to do with the furnace at East 20th Street.

The attacks were a dreadful experience for everyone. They happened nearly always at night and there was little anybody could do. Theodore would gather the child up in his arms and walk the floor with him for hours. Some nights, in desperation, he would bundle him up against the cold, servants would be roused to fetch the carriage to the door, and father and child would drive off in the dark in the hope that the sudden change of air might bring relief—which sometimes it did.

Like other parents of their social position, the Roosevelts did not wish to see their children “coarsened” by public schools. But mainly it was from worry over their health that all four were kept from school of any kind, public or private. They were tutored within the home walls and from within the home ranks by their own Aunt Anna, who, until her marriage to James K. Gracie in 1866, was, like Grandmamma Bulloch, a vital part of the household. At one point Teedie and Ellie were sent down the street to private classes only a stone’s throw from the house, these conducted by Theodore’s own boyhood tutor, but even so cautious a departure had proved unsatisfactory. The boys were withdrawn after only a month or two and not made to go again.

Since school played no part in their lives, they were cut off from their contemporaries. The only accessible—the only permissible—playmates were those within the family circle, namely cousins and the approved offspring of a few old family friends of comparable station and antecedents. Bamie seems to have had no childhood friends, while the youngest three had but one who had figured significantly thus far—little Edith Carow, who was Conie’s age and the daughter of Charles Carow, a lifelong friend of Theodore’s.

But then neither did any of them suffer from a lack of affection or stimulation. If anything, there was a surplus of both. Aunt Anna, who had no children, was as devoted as though they were her own. Grandmamma in her lace cap was famous for her “melts,” overwhelming outbursts of maternal, southern affection; and nurse Dora Watkins was considered so overly indulgent to the children as to be a possible hindrance to their health and/or moral character. Years after her death, the mere mention of Grandmamma’s name was enough to make the youngest three burst into tears.

The charming, erudite Dr. Hilborne West, the Philadelphia uncle, spent part of each summer with them, read and acted Shakespeare with all four children under the trees, and allegedly no one had more to do with their “early stirring of intellectual desires.” “The very fact that he was not achieving a thousand worthwhile things, as was my father,” wrote Conie years afterward, “the very fact that he was not busied with the practical care and thought for us, as were my mother and aunt, brought about between us that delightful relationship when the older person leads rather than drives the younger into paths of literature and learning.”

It was, plainly, a family of paradoxes: privileged and cushioned beyond most people’s imagining, yet little like the stereotype of the vapid, insular rich; uneducated in any usual, formal fashion but also uninhibited by education—ardent readers, insatiable askers of questions; chronically troubled, cursed it would often seem, by one illness or mysterious disorder after another, yet refusing to subject others to their troubles or to give in to despair.

Of the tawdriness and drudgery of the workaday world they knew almost nothing. They had never experienced drought or hunger or steerage or any of a dozen other ordeals common to so many Americans of the day. They were never without money or servants. They scarcely knew what it was to clean out a stall or put their hands in dishwater. When a cook got drunk one evening at the Union Square house and CVS went to see what the fuss was about, it marked the first time he had set foot in his own kitchen.

They knew themselves to be aristocrats, though it is unlikely they used that word: “people of good family” was preferred. They had little patience with bad manners, no use for social climbers, little knack for the kind of easy familiarity that businessmen and politicians traded on and that Europeans thought so very American. “Be careful always in chance acquaintances” was another of father Theodore’s admonitions to the children.

“Family” and “stocks” or “antecedents” were favorite topics. Their own position relative to that of the common herd was an accepted fact of life. Theodore was no more averse to using an expression like “our class” than was anyone else of comparable background. But if conscious of their position, they were also conscious of their duty. They had standards, standards which they never questioned. They were Roosevelts, but, being Roosevelts, that in itself could never be thought of as enough. Duty and family name demanded more.

And then, in addition, there was Mittie, in some regards the most fascinating of them all, “darling little Mittie,” a Roosevelt by marriage only.

CHAPTER TWO
Lady from the South

1

THE BULLOCHS OF GEORGIA were nothing like the Roosevelts of New York. For several hundred years the good, solid Roosevelts had kept to their mercantile pursuits, content with the same horizons. Seldom had any of them ventured beyond the confines of Manhattan Island for reasons other than business, and never longer than necessary. They had lived and applied their renowned family acumen, met and married their Dutch wives, bred, prospered, and died, generation after generation, all within a radius of about three miles. “The Roosevelt stock,” observed the New York World, “has always been noted for a tendency... to cling to the fixed and the venerable.” A move from one Manhattan address to another was as serious a disruption of the pattern as a true Roosevelt cared to suffer in a lifetime. CVS had been born in Maiden Lane; the family business had been located in Maiden Lane since 1797. When, in the 1830s, CVS at last succumbed to the tide of fashion and built the house on Union Square, at 14th Street and Broadway, he did so with the consoling thought that by going that far uptown he had at least relieved his progeny for several generations from ever having to move again.

One searches the Roosevelt family history nearly in vain for a sign of daring or spontaneity or a sense of humor. The family reputation for probity in business and personal conduct demanded certain restraints, of course, and so much uniform absence of color may have been partly disguise, another bow to appearances. There were also exceptions. One Nicholas Roosevelt, an uncle of CVS, had an interest in steamboats early in the century and made the first descent by steam down the Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. But he and a figure like Robert stand out against the rest of the line as conspicuous as mutations. It is said of James Alfred Roosevelt, for example, that if he ever had an unconventional thought in his life he kept it to himself. Of his private, domestic enthusiasms, it is recorded that he was inordinately fond of waffles.

About the only break Theodore had made from the established pattern was to leave the Dutch Reformed Church to join the Presbyterians; unless, of course, one considers his bringing Mittie Bulloch into the family.

The Bullochs, by contrast, were not only southern in background and outlook—antebellum slaveholding Georgia patricians—they were an entirely different breed, of Scottish blood mostly and “spirited,” as Theodore said of Mittie.

The first to reach the New World was James Bulloch of Glasgow, a scholar versed in Latin and Greek, who landed at Charleston, South Carolina, about 1729, which, as the Roosevelts measured such things, was rather late in the game, their own Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt having arrived in New Amsterdam in 1649. (All that is known of Claes Martenszen is that he was a farmer with a wife named Jannetje, and that he was called Kleytjen, which in the idiom of the day meant Shorty.) James Bulloch became a planter, married, and attained some standing in South Carolina politics before removing to coastal Georgia, where he received a grant of several thousand acres in the Sea Island district. His wife was Jean Stobo, also of Glasgow, who, with her mother and her father, Archibald Stobo, a noted Presbyterian divine, had set forth in 1699 as part of the ill-fated effort to found a Utopian Scottish colony in the jungles of Darién, on the Isthmus of Panama. The situation at Darién being hopeless, the expedition, a flotilla of three ships, turned back, and on the voyage home to Scotland the Stobos’ ship, Rising Sun, stopped at Charleston to take on water and supplies. The ship anchored outside the harbor, passengers remaining aboard, but the people of Charleston, hearing Stobo was so close at hand, requested that he come preach. So consequently, he, his wife, and daughter, Jean, were safely ashore the following day when a hurricane struck, sinking the ship and taking the lives of nearly all aboard. Stobo was at once offered a pulpit—the congregation being “obedient to the finger of Providence”—and in time he became a Charleston institution, his customary sermon running to such length that it was possible to leave in the middle, go home for a large midday meal, and return to find him still going strong.

Thus began the Bulloch line in America, the annals of which, by Mittie’s time, included one noted “radical,” several valorous soldiers, frontiersmen, politicians, young men who went off to sea, at least one scandal, a dozen or more handsome women, “even a French strain of blood.” Archibald Bulloch, a son born to James Bulloch and Jean Stobo, was the radical and a man of consequence in Georgia history. He was elected the first president of the Provincial Congress of Georgia and a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1776 he became the first president and commander in chief of Georgia, only to die suddenly and mysteriously, and the Savannah burial vault in which he was placed long remained a subject of gossip and speculation since it had no inscription, no identifying mark whatsoever except a snake carved in the shape of a circle.

Archibald’s wife, Mary de Veaux, was the daughter of James de Veaux, judge of the King’s Court of Georgia before the Revolution and a colonel in the Continental Army. Archibald’s son, another James and a captain in the Continental Army, married Anne Irvine, the daughter of Dr. John Irvine, head of the Georgia Medical Society; and they, in turn, produced still another James—James Stephens as he was called—who was Mittie’s father and who managed to complicate the Bulloch family tree in such a way as to leave many people wondering how it could possibly be respectable.

The situation was as follows:

As a young man James Stephens Bulloch married Hester Elliott, who was the oldest daughter of John Elliott, a United States senator from Georgia and a widower. That was in 1817. A year later, Senator John Elliott was himself married to Martha Stewart of Savannah, who was young enough to be his daughter and who at some point prior to 1817 had turned down a proposal from James Stephens Bulloch. It is said the marriage was arranged by her father, a legendary figure named Daniel Stewart, General Daniel Stewart, a Revolutionary War hero who had decided to push on to the Florida frontier and thought his beautiful daughter would be better off staying behind as the wife of his friend John Elliott. But whatever the reason for the marriage, it made Martha the step-mother-in-law of her former suitor.

One child, James Dunwody, was born to James Stephens and Hester Bulloch before Hester died; and with the death of Senator John Elliott, Martha Stewart was left a widow with three children of her own, Susan, Georgia, and Daniel. By the standards of the day, she and James Stephens were middle-aged when they at last married: she was thirty-three; he, thirty-nine. Among her Elliott stepchildren, some of whom were older than she, it was also thought scandalous that “Mother” should be marrying “Brother” James Stephens.

From this union came Anna, Mittie, and, finally, Irvine, who arrived twenty-two years after Martha Stewart’s firstborn, Susan. In the course of this extended life as wife and mother, Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch—she who became the Roosevelt children’s beloved Grandmamma—had to cope altogether with four categories of children: her Elliott stepchildren, her own Elliott children, her Bulloch stepson (who was also her step-grandson), and her own Bulloch children. The total came to fourteen.

Like his forebears, James Stephens was a low-country planter (cotton and rice), but also a banker, Deputy Collector of the Port of Savannah, and a director of the company that built the Savannah, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. Savannah was his home and Anna and Mittie spent their first years there. Then about 1839, when Mittie was four, James Stephens moved his large, composite household about 250 miles inland, to Cobb County in northwest Georgia, to what a few years earlier had been Cherokee country. There, in a settlement called Roswell, among rolling green hills twenty miles north of Atlanta, Mittie did most of her growing up, never considering her family as anything other than perfectly normal, though apparently the infinite number of Stewart, Elliott, and Bulloch aunts, uncles, cousins close and distant—the whole geometric progression of the Savannah kinships—was something only her mother could make heads or tails of. “The relationships in Savannah are more bewildering than ever,” sister Anna wrote Mittie during a visit to the coastal city after they were both grown women. “I would not be at all surprised to find out that Miss Harriet Campbell was my sister.”

Roswell, forever “home” to Mittie, was a mere dozen or so buildings, some exceedingly impressive, strung along a hilltop close by the Chattahoochee River. A coastal Georgian named Roswell King—once manager of the Pierce Butler plantation on Sea Island—had found the site while exploring for gold, and with his son Barrington laid out a future community with wide streets and a park. The idea was to make it a summer colony for a few wealthy friends, a refuge from the deadly fevers that plagued Savannah and the coastal lowlands during the hottest months. The elevation was exactly one thousand feet. “Exposure to cold and rain is hardly ever attended by serious consequences,” declared one observer. “No case of consumption has ever occurred in the country. The summer diseases are bowel complaints, etc.”

With the water power available, the Roswell Manufacturing Company, a small cotton mill, was also established by Barrington King, this in the valley below town.

Six or seven prominent Savannah families joined in the venture, built houses and, as time passed, spent more of each year there, living quite handsomely on incomes derived from holdings on the coast, where by the mid-1840s the slave population had advanced to some twenty thousand. There was a Roswell general store, a small “academy” for boys, another for girls, a white frame Presbyterian church, and a graveyard. The Barrington King family (nine children and a tutor) occupied Barrington Hall, a columned Greek Revival mansion with the incongruous New England touch of a widow’s walk. (The architect-builder of the house, and much else in town, including Bulloch Hall, was a Connecticut man named Willis Ball.) Phoenix Hall was the home of the Dunwody family, Great Oakes, Roswell’s red-brick manse, housed the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt, whose wife was a King. Holly Hill belonged to a Savannah family named Lewis.

Bulloch Hall stood a few hundred yards west of the King place, on the gentle knoll that formed the highest point in town. Bulloch Hall faced east, its deep veranda supported by four massive Doric columns: a white clapboard Greek temple set among giant oaks and Virginia cedars, magnolias, mimosa—the quintessence of the Old Plantation, classic Greece by way of Thomas Jefferson as interpreted by the Connecticut Yankee Willis Ball.

For the Roosevelt children, stories of the life in this house, the parties, the games of tableaux vivants, the constant stream of friends, family, neighbors, servants, all the people, white and black, recounted by the hour by their mother, aunt, and grandmother, were as magical, as different from what they knew, as anything in books. Mittie herself, with her liquid southern-gentry voice, her everlasting interest in people, her gift for mimicry, her overflowing romanticism, could not have been more unlike the Roosevelts her children encountered if she had been reared in some distant foreign land. She adored to tell stories and, as Conie said, no one told them better. Also, she had very southern ideas about the meaning of manhood. Inherent to her stories was a great love of the heroic. It was “Little Mama,” so exquisite and fragile, who could fire the spirit of adventure—impart to a child a sense of bloodline kinship with real-life men of action. The ancestral feats of daring, the family heroes the children were raised on, were all on her side; they were not Roosevelts, they were “Mama’s people.” James Dunwody Bulloch, the older half brother, had gone to sea as a midshipman in the Navy, become a captain of a packet ship, later a Confederate admiral assigned to secret missions in England. It was James Bulloch who built the famous Confederate raider Alabama, and Irvine Bulloch, Mittie’s younger full brother who served on the Alabama, was said to have fired the last shot in the fight with the Kearsarge off Cherbourg.

There were stories of old Senator Elliott’s daughter Corinne, for whom Conie was named, who with her two children was lost at sea when the steamer Pulaski sank in 1838, while her rich husband escaped on a raft; of Grandfather Stewart, the Revolutionary War general who left Georgia to fight Indians in Florida, marching off with his six sons, all of whom were more than six feet tall; of Georgia bear hunts and a black slave named Bear Bob, so named because a bear once tore away part of his scalp. The stories were at once bizarre, scary, always long ago and far away, always exciting. At night, with the onset of stomach cramps or an attack of asthma, they could soothe and distract as could almost nothing else, as we know from Teedie’s diaries. “It was all so picturesque, so different from northern life, that it made an indelible impression,” Bamie would remember.

In 1849, when Mittie was fourteen, James Stephens dropped dead of a heart attack while teaching Sunday school, and from that point on, to make ends meet, family sojourns in Savannah were dispensed with and Roswell became the permanent home. In the census of the following year, the widowed Martha, aged fifty, listed herself as a farmer. Her new son-in-law, Susan’s husband, Hilborne West, came on from Philadelphia to help manage things temporarily, but for all practicalities it was Martha herself who was in charge of household, children, crops, and those referred to always as “the servants.” As an agricultural enterprise it was nothing much. To rank as a true planter, one was supposed to have land and twenty slaves. Her slaves numbered nineteen, eight of whom were children. Still, it was no small task for a woman and she faced it gallantly.

That her Grandmamma Bulloch had owned slaves, “and all that implied,” seemed incredible, Bamie said, but also, somehow, very special. Daddy Luke had been the coachman; Mom Charlotte, the head housekeeper and cook. Mittie and Anna had been served hand and foot by a nurse called Mom Grace, but each also had her own slave child, her little black shadow, as was the expression. Mittie’s was called Toy, Anna’s, Bess; and Toy and Bess slept on straw mats on the floor of the girls’ bedroom. Another black child slept beneath Grandmamma’s big four-poster, “to run errands for her in the night,” it was explained, which probably meant to empty her slop jar.

Half brother Daniel Stuart Elliott once had to be sent abroad for a year of travel, so full of remorse was he. In a fit of rage he had shot and killed his “little shadow,” who by then, like Daniel Elliott himself, was no longer very little.

Guns, violence, savage death, episodes that seemed more like the stuff of fable or fantasy, were all part of the world Mittie spun. Ellie spoke for all her offspring when he called her his “sweet little Dresden china” mother; she seemed so delicate, like an exquisite work of art, as Conie said. Yet she could portray in marvelous detail how a pack of bloodhounds pulled a cougar to pieces or describe the midnight death struggle between a cougar and a half-naked black man, one of great-grandfather Daniel Stewart’s slaves, a story the impressionable little Teedie would remember all his life. The black man, “a man of colossal strength,” had been cutting through a Florida swamp in the dark of night, taking a shortcut to “see his sweetheart.” His torn body was found the next day with that of the cougar lying beside him.

How much the Roosevelt children were told of the duel fought by Daniel Elliott we can only surmise. But in 1857, the year before Teedie was born, Daniel Elliott shot and killed the son of a prominent Savannah family, Tom Daniell, in a duel fought with rifles on a mud embankment beside the Savannah River. There had been an argument at the Chatham Club, where Savannah’s “young bloods” met for billiards and cards and a good deal of heavy drinking. Daniell had thrown a glass of wine in Daniel Elliott’s face, which by the code duello meant but one thing. Daniel Elliott, who was an expert shot, had been willing to accept a reasonable apology and forget that anything had happened, but Daniell refused. Seconds were named, the whole grim, stilted ritual was acted out at a chosen spot on the opposite shore of the river, in South Carolina, where dueling had yet to be outlawed. At the signal both men fired and Daniell dropped, a bullet through the heart. The news caused a sensation in Savannah society—Daniell’s father, William Coffee Daniell, was a leading physician and a former mayor of the city—and Daniel Elliott was in disgrace. When it became known a year later that he would wed Lucy Sorrel of Savannah, one eminent chronicler noted privately, “Were I a lady, I would certainly be very loath to marry one who had the guilt of homicide upon his skirts.”

The Roosevelt children never knew their Uncle Dan—he died of tuberculosis during the Civil War—but his widow, Aunt Lucy Sorrel Elliott, and her two children, cousins Maud and Johnny Elliott, had come on from Savannah several times to spend summers with them in New Jersey. Another vivid southerner, another effusively affectionate female presence, Aunt Lucy was the sister of Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, who had been a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia at the age of twenty-six and credited as “the best staff officer in the Confederate service.”

Everything recalled of the life at Roswell was utterly fascinating, we are told in Conie’s recollections. “In the roomy old home with its simple white columns there was led an ideal life,” she thought. Her mother described picnics and riding parties, a life spent almost constantly in the out of doors, in all seasons, in unspoiled open country, with sweet-smelling trees and flowers in bloom. A particular variety of blue violet grew beside the house and the view of the valley to the west was especially lovely in the late-afternoon light. And there was the looping Chattahoochee, which ran the color of heavily creamed coffee.

Uncle Dan, whatever his tragic failings, was “brilliant,” with a particular love of art and music. He played the flute and James Dunwody—Uncle Jimmie—played the violin. Mittie and Anna sang together, Mittie alto, Anna soprano. “They apparently none of them had any particular education,” Bamie said, “but all of them had the most delightful gifts. They were all good-looking, and all had entrancingly stormy love affairs, rarely marrying the people whose lives we adored hearing about.” Anna had been engaged for a time to Henry Stiles of Savannah, who rode a Morgan horse no one could handle; Mittie had a running flirtation with one of the Kings, Tom, who thought the world of her.

For her children to picture Mittie as she was when their father first arrived on the scene required no effort of imagination, for in appearance and manner she had aged hardly at all. At thirty-three she looked to be in her early twenties. She was really quite extraordinary. Small, scarcely over five feet tall, very slender, she had tiny, perfect hands, and extremely fine features, the eyes of a soft, clear blue. Hers was a flawless, delicate little face, the complexion “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and framed by a head of lustrous black hair that she and her French hairdresser could fuss over interminably. With company she was ever chattering, “bright and full of life,” “sweet and winning,” to quote some of her New York friends. She was “like some vision of exquisite beauty,” “so young, so beautiful and gentle, that she might almost have been a sister to her children.”

Many years later, in the early 1920s, in an altogether different time and world, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal drove out to Roswell to interview Mrs. William Baker, who had been Evelyn King in her youth, another of the nine King children, and who was still living, with one grandchild, in Barrington Hall. Mrs. Baker had been Mittie Bulloch’s closest friend and a bridesmaid in Mittie’s wedding. At eighty-seven she was the lone survivor of that whole generation in Roswell.

The reporter was a young woman who was then signing herself Peggy Mitchell; she was Margaret Mitchell, whose re-creation of the Old Plantation South in her Gone With the Wind would one day supplant all others in the popular mind. To what extent her book was fiction, how much she had based on actual people and places, were questions she would face repeatedly, once the book became famous, and her insistence that there was no real-life Scarlett O’Hara, no actual Tara to be found in the Atlanta vicinity, was no doubt sincere. Still, the combination of the beautiful dark-haired Mittie Bulloch with her tiny waist and perfect complexion and the aura of Bulloch Hall is remarkably close to what she created, in general outline and spirit if not in specific detail, and there is no question about the impress on the young writer’s mind of what she saw and heard at Roswell. She noted the “stately silence engendered by the century-old oaks,” the “atmosphere of dignity, ease and courtesy that was the soul of the Old South.” Walking through Bulloch Hall, she found the rooms “unbelievably” large and airy and tried to picture the bridal party that had once clustered on the main staircase.

“Weddings were great affairs then,” Mrs. Baker told her. People came from miles around and stayed for days in the big houses in the village. “Weddings were different from what they are now. The bride and groom didn’t rush off right after the ceremony. They stayed at home sometimes for a week or two, and everybody gave them parties.... Of course, Mittie Bulloch’s wedding was a very fine affair.”

The groom, however, had been an abolitionist from the North. “A very nice man he was, to be sure,” said Mrs. Baker. “But he was firm against slavery.”

2

Theodore Roosevelt went south to Georgia for the first time when he was nineteen, in 1850, prior to his Grand Tour. Mittie’s sisters husband, Hilborne West, had a sister who was the wife of Theodore’s brother Weir, and by this somewhat circuitous chain of communication, Theodore had picked up enough about the charms of Roswell and of the two beautiful Bulloch sisters to go see for himself. He sent a letter in advance, but somehow the letter did not arrive in time; so when he appeared at Roswell, arriving in the middle of the night, it was without advance warning and his knock at the door roused the whole house from a sound sleep. The first face he saw was Toy’s, peering through a crack in the door. He presented his visiting card, which she speedily delivered to the startled group upstairs.

He wound up staying several weeks and apparently for Mittie, too, it was love at first sight. She was then fifteen. A man who knew her at about this time in her life, a contemporary who became a prominent figure in Savannah, described her as a splendid horsewoman, as “full of spirit and courage as she was beautiful.”

She did not see Theodore again for nearly three years, not until the spring of 1853, when she came north to visit Susan and Hilborne West at their home in Philadelphia, and then to stay briefly with the Weir Roosevelts in New York, at which time she became tacitly betrothed. “Does it not seem strange,” she wrote Theodore soon afterward, “to think we should have met and become engaged, after having only known each other time enough to create a passing interest, then to be separated for almost three years. Sometimes when I think of it all I feel as though it were ordered by some high power.” Then, as an afterthought, she told him, “If I fail to please, and if ever you should fail, I might persuade Tom King to retire with me in the far West.”

Her mother approved the match. She had been “impressed favorably” by Theodore during his visit to Roswell. “I have never interfered with the matrimonial designs of my children,” she told him, “and never will when the object chosen is a worthy one.”

By early summer he was with Mittie once more at Roswell, promising as they sat alone one evening on the veranda to love her with all her faults, promising voluntarily, as she would enjoy reminding him. Once the engagement was formally declared and he had left for New York, she wrote:

Roswell, July 26,1853

THEE, DEAREST THEE,

I promised to tell you if I cried when you left me. I had determined not to do so if possible, but when the dreadful feeling came over me that you were, indeed, gone, I could not help my tears from springing and had to rush away and be alone with myself. Everything now seems associated with you. Even when I run up the stairs going to my own room, I feel as if you were near, and turn involuntarily to kiss my hand to you. I feel, dear Thee—as though you were part of my existence, and that I only live in your being, for now I am confident of my own deep love. When I went in to lunch today I felt very sad, for there was no one now to whom to make the request to move “just a quarter of an inch farther away”—but how foolish I am—you will be tired of this “rhapsody” . . .

Tom King has just been here to persuade us to join the Brush Mountain picnic tomorrow. We had refused but we are reconsidering.

She did go off to Brush Mountain, picnicked on chicken wings, bread and cheese, and had a “most delightful time.” Tom King built a bonfire as the sun went down and on the way home she rode with Henry Stiles.

I had promised to ride back with Henry Stiles, so I did so [she explained to Theodore], and you cannot imagine what a picturesque effect our riding party had—not having any habit, I fixed a bright-red shawl as a skirt and a long red scarf on my head, turban fashion with long ends streaming. Lizzie Smith and Anna dressed in the same way, and we were all perfectly wild with spirits and created quite excitement in Roswell by our gay cavalcade—But all the same I was joked all day by everybody, who said that they could see that my eyes were swollen and that I had been crying.

At a big family gathering in September she danced past midnight, as she told him. Another evening she and Anna put on a “grand supper party.” When one of her accounts of still another such occasion brought a piqued response from New York, she responded: “My dear Thee, I kiss a great many different people and always expect to. I cannot allow you a monopoly there. Why just think of what the world would be without kisses. I could not think of depriving my friends of that pleasure.”

They had agreed to a small wedding in November, but she changed her mind. She preferred December and she wanted to have bridesmaids, a decision he found mystifying. In the South, she informed him, a wedding was always done according to the wishes of the bride and her family; for a gentleman to interfere with the arrangements was quite unheard of.

Thee, I grant they may be different entirely, your northern customs, but will I ever be able to impress upon you the fact that it is a southern young lady and in a southern village that the wedding is to occur; consequently I must observe the rules and customs prevalent in that village. I cannot imagine you for one moment supposing I would take the step decided upon unless I had thought well of what I was doing.

“Capricious Mittie” she called herself. “How will you please me ever?”

She was having palpitations of the heart, which she thought “entirely nervous.” Under no circumstances was he to arrive any sooner than two days before the wedding. “It may be a southern idea, but remember it is a southern young lady,” she insisted still one more time. Then in mid-November, with only a month to go and feeling extremely agitated, she asked:

Dear Thee, how are you going to behave when we meet? If I see you first before them all, mind seriously please, don’t kiss me or anything of the kind. I would not let the brothers see you do so for worlds. I am in earnest. I would regard my affections as misplaced if you should take any liberties. Please read this carefully and act like a perfect gentleman.

She herself would be as dignified as possible in the presence of her bridesmaids, “so as to show them how to do the thing, particularly as I am much younger than any of them.”

The wedding took place at Bulloch Hall three days before Christmas—Thursday, December 22, 1853—the Reverend Nathaniel Pratt officiating. It was all she wished. The bridesmaids were sister Anna, Evelyn King, Mary Cooper Stiles, and Julia Hand. They were all in white, the bridesmaids in white muslin dresses with full skirts, Mittie in white satin with a long veil. “We carried flowers, too, and came down the wide steps of Bulloch Hall with the trailing clusters in our arms,” remembered Mrs. Baker. The ceremony was held in the dining room, the bridal party grouped at the folding doors. Fires burned in every fireplace; mahogany tables were crowded with hams, turkeys, “cakes of every conceivable kind.” Ice cream had been made with ice brought all the way from Savannah, a touch that especially impressed Theodore’s mother and father, who were the only Roosevelts present. “It was their first trip south,” said Mrs. Baker, “and like most northern people of that time, they were very ignorant about the South. Goodness only knows what they expected us to be like ...”

When it was time for dancing, brother Dan played the flute. (”That is the only music we can engage,” Mittie had explained to Theodore, “but he plays in such perfect time that it will be delightful.”) According to family tradition, brother Dan also fell head over heels in love with one of the bridesmaids who was already engaged to another and much older man, and who rode off leaving Dan broken-hearted. This romantic episode, it is further said, ended tragically in the girl’s unwilling marriage to the older man, to a duel and “much else that was unfortunate.” But since the only known duel in Dan’s stormy life, that with Tom Daniell, took place three years later and since Tom Daniell was both unmarried and Dan’s own age, the story is open to a good deal of question—unless, of course, an entirely different duel was fought earlier and did not prove fatal, in which case there would be no record of its ever having occurred.

The bride and groom stayed on at Roswell through Christmas and there were parties every night. Then they were on their way to New York. “Everybody packed up and went home,” Mrs. Baker said, “for it was all over and we were very tired.”

Mittie returned again to Roswell with Theodore a year and a half later, in the spring of 1855, bringing her new baby daughter. She had not been feeling right since the baby’s birth in January. Theodore worried intensely over her; she herself did not like the way she looked. “I do not think she will get strong until she breathes fresh air,” her mother had declared and Theodore emphatically concurred, as little as he happened to care for Roswell and the life there. His belief in the therapeutic powers of fresh air—country air, mountain air, sea breezes, almost any air other than that of the city—exceeded even that of his mother-in-law. He stayed in Roswell only long enough to pay his respects and see Mittie settled.

Mittie was in love as never before. “Darling, it would be impossible to tell you how I have missed you,” she wrote five days after he had gone. “I feel so a part of you I cannot do without you.”

... I do not know what I would not give to be in your arms, petted and loved. I love you inexpressibly ... I want to talk to you. I want to see you. I cannot live without you. . . . Write me everything about yourself and how you love me.

A day later she filled four pages with her love and longing: “You have proved that you love me, dear, in a thousand ways and still I long to hear it again and again.... darling, you cannot imagine what a wanting feeling I have.”

He was trying his best to feel at home, he wrote his first night back at East 20th Street. “It is of no use; everything is in apple-pie order but there is a kind of dreariness reigning everywhere, the one pillow on the bed positively gave me a shiver. I even handled the crib, which I used to regard as rather an encumbrance to our room, with a kind of reverence.”

Her brother Jimmie was in town and staying with him temporarily. They were greatly enjoying each other’s company, he told her, and “keeping late hours,” for which he was grateful. “Indeed, bed does not offer me the same inducements as of yore and I rather regret when the time comes for me to retire alone.”

He wrote nearly every day. May 13: “Everything begins to look like spring. . . . We have little glimpses of country over Mr. Goelet’s wall and the sounds of his numerous birds. ... It is just such a day as would give you a pleasant impression of a New York spring . . .” May 15: “I exerted all my taste to please you in the selection of my summer cravats this afternoon.” May 16: “You know how I love you, darling, and what an intense pleasure it would be now to carry you up to bed in my arms . . .” May 23: “I will be very glad to have charge of you again ...”

On May 24, in his last letter before leaving to bring her home, he told her he had bought a new felt hat especially for the trip, but that his mother had disapproved, saying felt would be out of place at Roswell. “If it must it must,” he told Mittie, “but I will first hear your opinion of it.”

As difficult for her as anything about her new life in the North was the separation from her mother and sister. She and Anna had been inseparable for as long as either could remember and the bond between them, they were both convinced, was of a kind others could never understand. If anything, Anna had suffered worse than Mittie in the time since the wedding. “If anyone mentions you rather suddenly I feel like screaming,” she wrote to Mittie. “I do not try to feel so, darling, but we were so happy together and it is all passed away.” She had thought they would never be “anything but Anna and Mittie, inseparable, always sewing, reading, walking, riding, talking incessantly together.” She consoled herself with the thought that at least they would be together in heaven.

But as things worked out they were all together again in less than a year. Mrs. Bulloch and Anna packed up and came north, moving in at East 20th Street to stay in 1856. So by the time the second baby arrived, the Roswell circle, or what remained of it, was happily reinstated under the same roof. Brother Irvine as well was an occasional member of the household, on vacations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Bulloch Hall, meantime, was left in the care of Daddy Luke and his wife.

Bulloch family finances appear to have been the real reason for this new arrangement. Mrs. Bulloch and Anna came to live with Mittie not just to be of help and comfort, but because they were extremely hard-pressed. To pay for the wedding and trousseau, for example, had required that four slaves be sold, including Anna’s own Bess. (According to one bill of sale, $800 was received from a John F. Martin for “one Negro woman named Bess, and her child John.”) “I hope that you will make so good a wife that Thee will never have cause to regret his not having married a girl with a fortune,” Mrs. Bulloch advised shortly before she and Anna moved in. Anna would be governess to Mittie’s children in return for her keep, and Mrs. Bulloch, it is known, received spending money from Susan West, to whom, on occasion, she wrote on cheap, blue-lined school paper, saying it was all she could afford.

The second baby arrived October 27, 1858, a Wednesday. Mittie had been feeling fine. After a morning’s shopping she had returned for lunch, then went to her room to rest, which is where her mother found her in great pain at about half past three. The house was at once in turmoil, servants flying off to find the family doctor, who, it turned out, was himself too sick to respond. Until another man was found, Mrs. Bulloch was “almost the whole time alone with Mittie,” as she told Susan. “Anna had taken Bamie over to Lizzie Ellis’—I sent over for her, but she was too unwell to come—I could not bear the idea of having no female friend with me, so sent for Mrs. Roosevelt and she came over.”

Mittie got “worse and worse” until quarter to eight that evening when “at last” the birth took place. As labor went, hers was, in her mother’s experienced eye, “a safe but severe time.”

No chloroform or any such thing was used, no instruments, consequently the dear little thing has no cuts or bruises about it. . . . Mittie has behaved throughout the whole time like a sensible woman, has objected to nothing that was right.

A few days later mother and child were doing splendidly. Mittie had no trouble nursing; the baby was in perfect health. “All quite well,” noted Mrs. Bulloch the morning of November 3, “. . . little Theodore is a week old . . . Mittie is quite motherly, likes to have him lying quite near her.” But it was not until December that Mittie came downstairs, which suggests she was suffering from depression, and it was then that Bamie was going through the worst of her ordeal with the back harness.

Two more pregnancies followed with little delay—Elliott was born in February 1860, a year and four months after Theodore; Corinne, in September 1861, a year and seven months after Elliott—which for Mittie meant three children in less than three years. And by the time Corinne was born, the Civil War had begun.

3

It was the great demarcation line in her life, the point at which her southern past was forever delineated as past and irretrievable. It put strains on her household, her marriage, her physical strength, and her emotions unlike anything in her experience. For her two oldest children, and for Teedie particularly, the war was the first news from the world outside to penetrate the secure haven of home and family. “Are me a soldier laddie?” he asked his Aunt Anna, as she tried to fit him for a little Zouave shirt the first year of the war. “I immediately took his own suggestion and told him he was and that I was the Captain,” she told Mittie, “... this kept him still for a moment or two!”

The story that on the occasion of a Southern victory Mittie hung a Confederate flag from the house on East 20th Street is a story with no foundation in fact; it never happened. A gesture so flamboyant would have been out of character, furthermore, and publicly disrespectful of her husband, which was simply not in her. The story is appropriate, however, in that the staid Roosevelt brownstone with its three passionately loyal Georgian ladies did indeed remain a stronghold of Southern sympathy; the colors of the Confederacy flew in spirit, if not in fact, undaunted, from the start of the conflict until Appomattox. On the news that Port Royal had fallen, early in November 1861, Grandmamma Bulloch cried for three days. Like all true southerners, she said, she would rather be buried in one common grave than ever live again under the Yankee government.

As time went on, with Theodore away—only with Theodore away—Mittie, she, and Anna made up packages of flannel shirts, woolen socks, scarves, combs, toothbrushes, and boxes of soap to be sent secretly (by way of Nassau in the Bahamas) to family and friends in the South. One of Bamie’s most vivid memories of life in the 20th Street house was of “the days of hushed and thrilling excitement” when these bundles were being put together, she and Teedie, at first, understanding little of what it was all about, “except that it was a mystery and that the box was going to run the blockade.”

In contrast to the Roosevelts, not one of whom went to war, Captain James Bulloch, young Irvine, and Daniel Elliott were all three fighting for the Confederacy, each having joined the cause as rapidly as possible. Captain James, who had been in command of a merchant ship when the war began, first sailed back to New York and turned the ship over to the owners before going south to be assigned his secret duties in England. Daniel enlisted as a private in the Georgia Volunteers, and Irvine, at age nineteen, left the University of Pennsylvania to sign on as a midshipman in the Confederate Navy. Virtually every able-bodied man Mittie had known in Roswell or Savannah was in uniform—including six of the Kings and Henry Stiles. Both Tom King and his brother Barrington were to die in the war, and another brother, Joseph Henry, would never fully recover from his wounds.

The least scrap of news from someone dear on the other side was an enormous event. Early in 1862, for example, through contacts in Washington, Theodore learned that Captain Bulloch had successfully run the blockade, bringing a “cargo of contraband goods” from Nassau to Savannah. (Actually, it was a shipload of military supplies—munitions, some fourteen thousand Enfield rifles, perhaps the most valuable cargo to reach the Confederacy during the entire war.) Any letter that got through to the house in New York became a treasure of untold import. Its contents would have to be immediately shared, read aloud, then copied down and sent on to Susan. “The amount of it is that Providence is on the side of the right,” wrote young Irvine in one such letter; “... the life [at sea] is as hard as it is exciting, as painful to be away from home and family as it is pleasant to think I am doing my all for my oppressed country.”

Saturday dinners at Grandfather Roosevelt’s house, one of the iron-bound rituals in her married life, became such a trial for Mittie, the air so thick with the “fulminations” of her northern in-laws, that she could no longer bear to go.

Reminiscing about her mother and the Roosevelts long afterward, Bamie would remark, “I should hate to have married into them at that time unless I had been one of them in thought. They think they are just, but they are hard in a way.”

In Theodore’s presence Mittie kept her sentiments to herself, as did her mother and sister. The evenings he entertained Union officers, Grandmamma retired early. “You know he does not feel as we do,” she explained to Susan, “and it is his own house. It jars upon my feelings, but of course I keep my room. Mittie can’t do this, and it is to please him that Anna does not absent herself.”

For Theodore the approach of the war had loomed as a tragedy beyond compare. Joining with prominent New York business people, he appealed to Congress to do everything possible to prevent it. He signed petitions, helped promote a huge anti-war rally. When it came, the war presented him with the most difficult decision of his life. And though only twenty-nine at the time and in magnificent health as always, he chose not to fight, a determination dictated, it is said, by the “peculiar circumstances” of his marriage: he did what he did out of deference to Mittie and her feelings, for all that he himself felt about the Union and the evils of slavery.

Possibly the teachings of his Quaker mother also played a part. Nor can it be overlooked that few he knew of comparable social or financial position and none of his brothers or kinsmen fought in the war. The gentry of the city gloried in the power of Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn”; they founded their Union League Club, and equipped the first units of black soldiers; they cheered heartily the regiments of Germans and Irish, the upstate farm boys who marched down Broadway. But they themselves chose not to march. It was simply not done—any more, say, than one would go into politics—and though this may not necessarily have been a measure of Theodores convictions or innermost desires, it at least meant his decision, within his own social circles, carried no stigma whatever.

He avoided the war by hiring a substitute. He paid to have some other man go in his place, which was both legal and costly. The sum he paid is not known, but the going rate, once the draft was initiated in 1863, was about $1,000, a figure far beyond the reach of the ordinary wage earner (the dollar then having toughly ten to fifteen times its present value), and went appreciably higher as the war dragged on and casualty reports became more appalling.

The regulation in the Conscription Act that permitted such an arrangement was as blatant a piece of class legislation as could be imagined. In essence, as one angry senator charged, it exempted the rich entirely. By paying a $300 commutation fee a man could become exempt from a particular draft call, but was still subject to subsequent calls. Hiring a substitute, on the other hand, provided permanent exemption. Substitute brokers operated in every northern city and the substitutes they sent to the Army were a sorry lot, largely criminals and drifters, who would desert at the first opportunity. The ordinary soldier had only contempt for such men and so the onus of the system, while the fighting lasted, was on the substitute rather than on the civilian who hired him. And the fact that in less than a year more than $12 million poured into the Treasury in draft-exemption fees of one or the other kind gives some idea of how many were eager to take advantage of the arrangement. A list of those who thus stayed out of the war would include nearly all the financial and industrial tycoons of the postwar era, and a future President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, not to mention most of the masculine element of New York’s “best society.”

According to Bamie, in a private memoir written in her old age, her father regretted the decision to his dying day. He “always afterward felt that he had done a very wrong thing in not having put every other feeling aside and joined the absolute fighting forces.” Conie, for her part, would further contend that the decision had a profound effect on his older son and namesake, for whom it became the glaring single flaw in the life of an idolized father and one he would feel forever compelled to compensate for. Neither Theodore nor his sons ever discussed the subject that we know of, but there was no doubt as to which side little Teedie was taking at the time. In their pretend games played on a bridge in Central Park, Bamie was always the Rebel blockade-runner, Teedie the government boat. Once, kneeling at his evening prayers with Aunt Anna, he implored the Almighty “to grind the southern troops to powder.”

For Mittie the thought of Theodore fighting against her brothers was abhorrent in the extreme. Still, it must have been with some inner conflict that she saw him spared—saw herself spared so much that other women were going through—by a system that was the antithesis of every standard of patriotism and gallantry by which she had been raised. For her brothers, or for any of the men she had known in the South, to pay somebody else to do their fighting for them would have been inconceivable. Nor could anyone of conscience blink the injustice of the system. When the Draft Riots exploded in New York in July 1863, largely in reaction to this injustice, the Roosevelt family was safely ensconced at an oceanfront hotel at Long Branch. It was hoped that order could be quickly restored, observed Mrs. Bulloch in the quiet of her room overlooking the sea, “but really I do not wonder that the poor mechanics oppose conscription. It certainly favors the rich at the expense of the poor.”

But though he refused to bear arms in the great crusade, Theodore was also incapable of sitting idly by. As he told Mittie in a letter from Washington: “I would never have felt satisfied with myself ... if I had done nothing and ... I do feel now that I am only doing my duty. I know you will not regret having me do what is right and I don’t believe you will love me any the less for it.”

He and two other wealthy New Yorkers, William E. Dodge, Jr., and Theodore Bronson, had conceived a plan whereby soldiers could send home part of their pay on a regular basis and at no additional cost to them or their families. The three men drafted a bill for an Allotment Commission and after months of lobbying in Washington succeeded in getting both congressional sanction and the backing of the President. Then followed still more months in the field, since the idea—all quite novel—had to be sold to the soldiers themselves, which proved a slow and arduous task. Theodore was away from home nearly two years all told and approximately half that time was spent going from regiment to regiment, by train, boat, but mostly on horseback in all weather and seasons.

Like his Newsboys’ Lodging House or the Orthopedic Hospital, the allotment plan represented another determined effort to help the helpless, those innocent victims of the war for whom the government had been doing nothing, thousands upon thousands of women and children made destitute by the absence of husbands and fathers serving in the Army. It was the family of the fighting man that concerned him, rather than the fighting man himself who was being asked to sacrifice that part of his pay which customarily fell into the hands of sutlers and other traditional camp followers.

For his own family the months of separation seemed endless and especially the first long stretch when he was in Washington.

“Teedie was afraid last night that there was a bear in your dressing room,” Mittie wrote. “He is the most affectionate, endearing little creature in his ways, but begins to require his papa’s discipline badly. He is brimming full of mischief and has to be watched all the time.”

One by one the children took sick. “You must not either get sick yourself or let the children do so,” he told her. Mittie had “her hands full with the fretful little sick things,” her mother noted; “. . . Thee has not returned . . . does not say when he will return.” Then Mittie was reporting Teedie “very unwell,” and though the word “asthma” never appears, it may have been at this point that the disease took hold. “I was up with him six or seven times during the night,” she wrote, saying little or nothing about her own health or what Conie was to call her “mental suffering.” Only once does she allow herself even a momentary flash of self-pity. It is night as she writes, that being the “only time unoccupied with the dear, troublesome little children deserted by their papa.”

She was constantly in his thoughts, she knew, from the letters that arrived, often several a week, which was more than she wrote to him.

Ever the man to take the direct approach, he had gone to the White House the morning he got off the train. “I obtained a room at Willard s,” he told her, “dressed myself and called upon Hay [John Hay, who was then Lincoln’s private secretary], explained my object in a few words and was immediately shown into the next room where the President sat.” Lincoln had listened “attentively,” read the few documents Theodore presented, “then at my request endorsed them.” Ten-year-old Willie Lincoln had come into the room “and the President’s expression of face then for the first time softened into a very pleasant smile.”

Mittie was instructed to address her letters in care of John Hay at the White House, for Theodore and the whimsical, boyish secretary had struck up the friendship that was to last a lifetime. One Sunday, in Lincoln’s absence, Hay invited him to share the presidential pew at St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square, and as the two walked down the aisle, many in the expectant congregation, seeing Theodore with his height and abundant whiskers, mistook him for Lincoln. Or such at least had been Theodore’s impression.

Mrs. Lincoln, who was of southern background, found him charming and included him in her circle, a somewhat ambiguous honor, given the variety of sycophants she chose to surround herself with. He was asked to accompany her on afternoon carriage rides and on one occasion she insisted that he go with her to shop for a hat. The night of her famous soirée in the newly redecorated White House, February 5,1862, he was among the select five hundred on her guest list and thus very pleased with himself. “I find that but six men under fifty are invited,” he told Mittie.

The party had come under severe attack in the press because of the expenses involved and the limited guest list, but for Mrs. Lincoln it had proved a social triumph—everybody who was invited came, “the largest collection of notables there ever gathered in this country,” Theodore crowed. “No one in the army lower than a division general, not even a brigadier, was invited. . . . Some complained of the supper but I have rarely seen a better and often a worse one. Terrapin, birds, ducks, and everything else were in great profusion.” It was called a ball and the Marine Band played in the vestibule, but at the President’s wish, there was no dancing, out of respect for “the national tribulation” and because upstairs young Willie Lincoln lay seriously ill. Theodore’s one criticism of the evening was of the number of police present.

He stayed the whole time at Willard’s Hotel, where in the bar and public rooms, amid clouds of blue cigar smoke, the endless dickering and dealing of war went on. (In his suite upstairs the pomaded Jim Fisk is said to have remarked, “You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you’ve got the guts to ask.”) Theodore was spending the better part of his time on Capitol Hill, “gaining experience daily in a political point of view.” Only after a month or more did his impatience begin to show. The problem, as his friend Dodge said, was “the utter inability of congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage.”

Waiting for Congress to act, with little or nothing to do but bide his time, he himself took sick; but then, amazingly, a week of continuous exposure in the field, standing out in the cold and damp while talking to troops, cured him completely.

His first real success selling his plan was with a New York regiment which, at first glance, struck him as the “scum of our city.” An adjutant assigned to help was so drunk he could barely speak and did nothing as he was supposed to.

The delays were so great that I stood out with one of these companies after seven o’clock at night with one soldier holding a candle while I took down the names of those who desired to send home money. The men looked as hard as I have often seen before in our Mission neighborhood, but after a little talk explaining my object and reminding them of those they had left behind them, one after another put down his name, and from this company alone they allotted, while I was there, $600. ... I stood out there in the dark night surrounded by the men with one candle showing glimpses of their faces, the tents all around us in the woods. One man putting down $5.00 a month said, “My old woman has always been good to me and if you please change it to $10.00.” In a minute half a dozen others followed his example and doubled theirs.

In one forty-eight-hour spate of activity in Virginia, in the vicinity of Newport News, he emerged unharmed and unshaken from a derailed train, rode twenty-five miles on horseback (”As I had broken my eyeglasses I had to trust entirely to my horse who jumped over the ditches in a most independent manner”), used both his French and his German to proselytize in front of one New York regiment, then rode another twenty-five miles to talk to an Irish regiment, after which he spent one of “the most thoroughly Irish” nights of his life drinking with the officers until nearly dawn. The ride to Fortress Monroe the next day was “delightful”—a favorite Roosevelt word—and following lunch there with the officers he was on his way by boat back to Washington. His co-worker Bronson, he told Mittie, was so “used up” by the experience that he was quitting and going home. “Of course this makes me doubly homesick but I must see it through.”

Once, writing to say he was on his way home for a visit, he told her not to expect him until very late and to leave the front door unlocked. “I hope you will take a good long nap in the daytime,” he added.

Early in 1862, Mrs. Bulloch decided she must get through to Georgia to be with her son Daniel, who, she had learned, was dying of tuberculosis. “I think I am required there,” she said simply. A pass was needed and so this, too, Theodore undertook, pulling what strings he could, something he pointedly disliked. The problem, he explained to Mittie, was greatly compounded by the family connection with Captain Bulloch, whose success in running the blockade had made the name anathema in Washington. But then in a letter from Baltimore he suddenly announced the arrangements were set. Her mother and Anna could both go, on the condition that they would not return. He himself strongly advised against it, but if such remained their wish they were to meet him the Friday following at Barnum’s Museum in Baltimore and he would go with them by boat from Baltimore to Fortress Monroe, where he would see them off under a flag of truce. “Write me what you think will be her determination even if she is doubtful.” But Mrs. Bulloch had backed down at the last. The mere mention of her leaving, she explained to Susan West, was enough to make Mittie break down in tears. When word came that Daniel was dead, she expressed the one wish that she would never live so long as to know that Irvine too was dead or that Richmond had fallen.

With his work in Washington drawing to a close, Theodore regretted he had not kept a diary. “All those whom I have seen in social intercourse day by day will be characters in history,” he surmised, “and it would be pleasant hereafter [to read] my own impressions of them and recall their utterly different views upon the policy which should be pursued by the government.”

Interestingly, his letters contain little or nothing of his feelings about the war itself or the direction it was taking. There is no sorrow expressed over the butchery and waste of it, nor any excitement over its pageantry. “Tell Bamie that the streets are all lined with wagons,” he writes, “... that I have a soldier who always rides behind me to show me the way . . . and that several times soldiers have pointed their guns at me to make me stop when I was riding through their lines.” But that is about as far as he ever goes to suggest there is even a war in progress. It was his way of sparing Mittie, no doubt. The one note of tragedy in the entire picture he gives of wartime Washington is the death of the Lincolns’ son Willie.

On a Sunday in March 1862, with snow falling outside his hotel window, he seems to have been trying to boost both their spirits by telling her what several high-ranking officers had been telling him, namely, that the war would be over by May. Even so, he confessed to feeling very sad: “I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country, but I know you cannot understand my feelings, and of course I do not expect it.” This is the one known mention of even the existence of an issue between them, and to judge by the remembrances of their children, it was as demonstrative on the matter as either ever became.

The war, of course, did not end in May, but ground on for another three years. The work for the Allotment Commission continued, principally in upstate New York, he, Dodge, and Bronson having been named by Lincoln as New York’s three Allotment Commissioners. In one two-month stretch Theodore spent, by his own reckoning, thirty-one nights sleeping on trains. “Thee,” remarked his mother-in-law, “is a good young man. I really think if anyone ever tried to do their duty he does.”

He received no pay for his efforts and the consensus was that he, as much as anyone, was responsible for the program’s success. The grand total of the money sent home to soldiers’ dependents as a result ran to many millions of dollars.

His family’s health remained a constant concern the whole while. Mittie’s troubles are never spelled out very clearly in the surviving record, but the summer of their stay at Long Branch she was being subjected to treatments with ether, treatments that greatly alarmed her mother. (”I think it was really running the risk of losing her life, or her reason.”) Teedie’s asthma, now spoken of by name, grew steadily more alarming, the “sweet invigorating sea breeze” of Long Branch notwithstanding. No sooner had the family arrived at the hotel than he was hit by an attack and had to be rushed back to a doctor in New York; then returning from the city he was struck a second time and so Theodore and Mittie took him off to Saratoga, leaving the others in the charge of Grandmamma.

Elsewhere we read that Bamie suffered with eyestrain, that Mittie was again having “palpitations” and “much pain about the region of the heart.”

Troubles or not, Mittie kept pace with her husband and in a style the long indestructible Grandmamma was beginning to find exhausting and a bit inappropriate. In November 1863, when the Russian fleet paid a ceremonial visit to New York, a grand ball was staged at the Academy of Music, the great Russian Ball as it was to be remembered. Theodore took a leading part, served as secretary, lent his name to the announcements. “Thee was anxious for Mittie to go for political reasons,” Grandmamma told Susan, “and Mittie would not go without Anna. So they both went.” Grandmamma was not pleased. Life was too precious to be squandered on “trifles.”

So much activity “confuses me,” she wrote again from East 20th Street at the close of the year. “I think it ought to be a calm time for reflection. . . . But alas, there is too much gaiety. . . . There is so ’much to do’ as to leave little time to think. Mittie and Thee give a large party New Year’s evening. All day they will receive visitors. Just imagine how tiresome it will be.”

“The reception is going on downstairs,” she continued the next day. “Mittie and Anna are dressed beautifully and I hear the carriages constantly coming to the door.”

4

Grandmamma died the following autumn, October 1864, at age sixty-five, and was buried across the river in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, that incomparable Valhalla of nineteenth-century New York wherein are to be found so many of the kind—unsavory political bosses, Plymouth Church abolitionists—that the proud old southern lady could not abide. The following spring, in the first week of April, Richmond fell and a week later came Appomattox. The war was over. On April 25, with the city’s church bells tolling, Lincoln’s funeral procession marched up Broadway, and a photograph taken as it passed the CVS Roosevelt house at Union Square shows the heads of two small children in an open window on the second floor. It is believed they are Teedie and Ellie.

Of Mittie’s original thirteen brothers and sisters four were still alive. Captain James Bulloch and brother Irvine had survived the war but, because of their involvement with the Alabama, were excluded temporarily from pardon and so took up residence in Liverpool, England. Susan remained in Philadelphia and Anna, the year following, 1866, was married to James K. Gracie, a New York banker, and moved to a home of her own. The house at Roswell, like the whole town, had been miraculously spared in Sherman’s sweep through Georgia, but the old way of life there was ended forever. House and property were sold off.

Yet for all this—or perhaps because of it—Mittie entered upon a new life, very much renewed in spirit. She became, in the years immediately following the war, a figure of real consequence, or at least within the limits imposed by gender and the social order. To her already stunning physical beauty was now added the luster of success. She became a personage, quite as much as her husband, one of the great ladies of New York and one to whom society could naturally turn for example and leadership. She, the southerner, the outsider, ranked with Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Lewis Rutherford, Mrs. Belmont, and the two Mrs. Astors as one of those “gentle-woman of such birth, breeding and tact that people were always glad to be led by them . .. whose entertainments claimed most comment, whose fiat none were found to dispute,” to quote a contemporary authority, Mrs. Burton Harrison.

The great failings of the era, Grandmamma Bulloch had lectured, were “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.” One must always choose the best in the way of furniture and the like but “avoid ostentation.” But now, with her mother dead, Mittie did over the house, brightened up the parlor with pale French wallpaper, reupholstered the furniture in sky-blue damask. Her teas were attended by decorous little maids in lilac print dresses, white caps and aprons, and she invariably held center stage. In the “graciousness of her manner and that inherent talent for winning and holding the sympathetic interest of those around her,” wrote Mrs. Harrison, “I have seen none to surpass her.”

The one great mystery to Mrs. Harrison, as to others apparently, was why such radiant beauty and charm had failed to reappear among her four offspring. “Why nature, having found such a combination, should not be content with repeating it!”

Other transplanted southerners were to attain positions of influence in the city’s postwar era, including such notable fellow Georgians as Charles C. Jones and John Elliott Ward, both attorneys, and the fawning Ward McAllister, whose social edicts held sway for more than a generation (it was he who invented the “Four Hundred”). But no southern woman had quite the presence of Mittie Roosevelt, or would be remembered so fondly for her irrepressible southern ways.

On an evening when he was a guest at dinner, John Hay happened to mention spending some time with his sister and, as Bamie recalled, Mittie suddenly looked at him in astonishment. “You have a sister?” she said. “Yes, I have a sister,” Hay responded happily, “and I had a mother and a father, though I have always realized that you thought of me as being like Melchizedek, without beginning or end.”

“Mother was embarrassed,” wrote Bamie, “because, with her little aristocratic, southern feeling she had always considered Mr. Hay’s family connection as entirely negligible.”

She remained immutably herself. “There is nothing more like a Roosevelt than a Roosevelt wife,” it would be said within the tribe, but in her case this was patently not so and never would be.

Neither the sufferings of the poor nor the call of the Christian faith touched her in the way they did her husband. She played no part in his good works, and those speculations on life in the hereafter or the status of one’s soul, speculations that appear in Theodore’s correspondence (as in a large proportion of private correspondence from that high-Victorian day), are not to be found in what she wrote. She was not an agnostic exactly. It was just that for her religion never became the central, pervading part of life it was for Theodore, or that it had been for her mother. (“If she was only a Christian, I think I could feel more satisfied,” Mrs. Bulloch had lamented near the close of her life.) When Mittie found exhilaration or beauty in a church service, it was nearly always from the music.

In time to come a good deal would be said and repeated in print about her inadequacies and eccentricities. In the reminiscences of Roosevelt descendants who never knew her, she would be compared to her husband, measured against his strength, his Christian spirit, and nearly always to her disadvantage. And thus in many published accounts she has been kindly but pointedly dismissed as decorative and inconsequential, lovable enough in her way, but without weight, a sort of chatty, indolent, cliché southern belle prone to sick headaches and silly about money. The picture is not only unfair and inaccurate, it is considerably less interesting than the truth. As her letters and the observations of innumerable contemporaries attest, including those of her children and husband, she was an exceptional person in her own right, and a large part of that aliveness, the feeling for words, the warmth of personality that were to characterize the most outstanding of her children came from her.

The stories of her eccentricities are nearly all based on a later time in her life and seldom take into account several important factors. She was, for example, enormously fond of the color white and dressed in white more than any other shade, even in winter. In later years, as a widow, she seldom wore anything but white, which, to be sure, set her off as something out of the ordinary. But then one also finds in Theodore’s correspondence that he greatly preferred her in white and liked to picture her in white whenever they were apart.

She wanted things in her life to be clean—clean house, clean clothes, clean children. Feverish bursts of housekeeping would leave her so exhausted she had to take to her bed. She bathed daily and always twice—the first time to wash, the second to rinse. She also had a stubborn reluctance to do anything on time. But considering her background, such behavior is not especially bizarre or incomprehensible and may perhaps be seen as very human responses to the two aspects of northern city life that distressed her most—excessive dirt and excessive hurry. Beyond her walls, and not far beyond, was a world of squalor and disease of a kind she had probably never imagined before coming to New York—families living in rat-infested cellars, people by the thousands packed into foul tenements. Smallpox and scarlet fever were rampant; typhus was worst of all. In one miserable house on East 17th Street there were 135 cases of typhus in the single year of 1869. For someone raised in Roswell, Georgia, it was no easy thing living with such realities, any more than it was to accept as axiomatic the idea that life must be played out according to timetables and the dictates of the clock.

As for the lavish expenditures, they too came later, when, as it happens, there was a very large amount of Roosevelt money with which to be lavish. If she was extravagant in Theodore’s eyes, he apparently never said so. Indeed, in another of his letters dating from this earlier day, he tells her that she, by nature, is more economical than he and better suited to look after the family finances.

That she was and remained chronically troubled by sick spells and mysterious upsets is indisputable. She would be hit by what she called “my horror,” violent intestinal trouble of some kind, perhaps brought on by a nervous condition, and perhaps not. She was put on restricted diets; she did retire to her room on occasion, not to return for hours. But this, it must be stressed, was not uncommon among women of her day and for someone of such exquisite, fragile beauty it was almost expected. Theodore worried incessantly over her health, even when she appears to have been perfectly fine. It was his way of expressing his love for her. She was his to protect and care for. “I have always been accustomed to think of you as one of my little babies,” he tells her at one point, and at another implores, “Do not become a strong-minded woman.” “My loving tyrant,” she called him.

Yet there is no evidence that her health ever kept Mittie from doing anything she wanted to do, and there was no complaining on her part. It was she, not Theodore, who liked to stay up late talking, writing letters, who could quite literally wear him out with her “gaiety.” On the first trip to Europe, as will be seen, she could keep a pace—set a pace—that would have left most healthy women her age exhausted.

Her children adored her and found her no less remarkable in her way than their father. “I have just received your letter!” Teedie once wrote. “What an excitement. . . . What long letters you do write. I don’t see how you can write them.” She could quote Dickens, Shakespeare. She “rushed into conversation,” made conversation come alive. She was the first to see the humor in a situation. Teedie sternly praying that the Rebel troops be ground to powder had struck her as wonderfully funny, whereas Theodore, on hearing the story, had told him never to do it again. It was she who first insisted that Bamie be taken to the theater and to galleries, before the age when most children were permitted such things. It was she who induced Theodore to take them all abroad that spring of 1869.

Her “devotion wrapped us round as with a mantle,” wrote Conie; hers was “the most loving heart imaginable.” Yet “in spite of this rare beauty and her wit and charm, she never seemed to know that she was unusual in any degree . . .”

CHAPTER THREE
Grand Tour

1

THE ROOSEVELTS SAILED the afternoon of May 12 on the Scotia, finest of the Cunard Line’s paddle steamers and still, in 1869, the fastest ship to Europe. With Mary Ann, the nursemaid, they made a party of seven and we may picture them coming aboard in the bright sunshine of a spring day in New York, the ship’s deck crowded with trunks and porters and several hundred other passengers, everybody looking exceptionally well turned out (the Scotia offered only first-class accommodations), and many, like the Roosevelts, traveling with children and servants. Among the familiar faces were Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Seligman and their three children; Mrs. Jesse Seligman and her daughter; the actor Lester Wallock, who was traveling with his wife and two young sons; the Egerton Winthrops and their three children. (Egerton Winthrop, a cultivated, superior-looking figure, was literally right out of an Edith Wharton novel: he was to appear in The Age of Innocence rather thinly disguised as the arch snob Sillerton Jackson, who carried between his narrow temples “most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society.”)

To be going abroad was not the rare thing it once had been. Americans were crisscrossing the Atlantic, resolutely “doing” Europe’s galleries and monuments, hiking the Alps, taking the waters in a dozen different spas, filling the best hotels, in numbers that would have been unheard of before the war. So near and commonplace had Europe become, announced the popular travel writer Bayard Taylor, that he would write no more on the subject. It was the year of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s often jeering declaration that a touch of Old World culture was neither beyond the ken of the ordinary citizen nor anything to be afraid of. “I basked in the happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement,” Twain wrote of his sojourn abroad.

Those notable Americans discovering Europe as tourists that same year included such disparate figures as Jefferson Davis, who went for his health, and young Henry James, who was finding every other American he met “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” Numerous wealthy Americans, moreover, had happily taken up residence abroad as a more or less permanent thing, and among their offspring, contemporaries of the Roosevelt children, were little Edith Jones (the future Edith Wharton), John Singer Sargent, and Jennie Jerome (the future Mrs. Randolph Churchill).

Still, for the Roosevelts it was a momentous undertaking, a first complete break from the established pattern of their lives, a first adventure as a family. In part, of course, they were going because it was the thing to do—for the “cultural enrichment” of the experience. The children would “benefit,” young as they were. Mittie had never been out of the country. She wanted to see her brothers in Liverpool and to be shown some of what Theodore had seen in his own earlier travels. But they were going also for Teedie’s health. Grandfather Roosevelt, who came to see them off, later wrote the child a little rhyme:

We all shall gladly see you back
Again at your home,
And hope that sickness may no more
Compel your feet to roam.

They were to be gone a year, which to the children seemed like forever. On the ride from the house to the pier, Teedie had cried most of the way.

The first several days at sea were so calm and clear that even Theodore, a lifelong sufferer from seasickness, fared quite well. Not until the fourth day out, a Sunday, when the wind picked up, did he and Teedie take to their berths. “As it was a little rough and I a little sick and being down,” Teedie wrote in his diary. “I could not go to [church] service.”

Mittie spent her days on deck, wrapped up happily in a chair, enjoying the view and the salt tang of the air, chatting, reading (a popular romance called The Heir of Redclyffe), writing long letters to Anna, and keeping a weather eye on Teedie, who alone of her four refused to have anything to do with the other children on board. Elliott, as she told Anna, had quickly become the leader of the children’s sports and played with the Winthrop children nearly all day.

The ship suited her perfectly. The air on deck was a bit sharper than she wished and the grand salon was invariably overheated, but she had grown to feel quite at home.

Six days out, as they entered the Gulf Stream, the weather turned warmer and Teedie at last found a friend. “I made the acquaintance of Mr. St. John, a most interesting gentleman from the West Indies,” he wrote that night. “We had a long talk in the cabin after supper.”

Mr. St. John—Thomas B. St. John, according to the passenger list—was traveling alone for his health and appeared to know no one. His name was pronounced “Singen,” Mittie explained to Anna. He was a “quaint little well of knowledge” who suffered from heart trouble and spoke barely above a whisper, but whose interest in the natural sciences “fills Teedie’s heart with delight.” Teedie had introduced him very formally. “Mama, have you conversed with Mr. St. John?” he asked, as she put down her book. “I feel so tenderly to Teedie,” she told Anna.

The afternoon of Friday, May 21, they were steaming through the smooth bottle-green waters of the Irish Sea, the coast of Wales on the starboard. By turns with a telescope, they picked out windmills and farmhouses along shore, then, with much excitement, the suspension bridge at Holyhead. By nightfall, having crossed some three thousand miles of ocean in nine days, they entered the Mersey at Liverpool.

It was one wild scene of commotion [said Mittie of their arrival]. Passengers all ready, luggage heaped up, children fretting (not mine) . . . Custom House officers busy examining the trunks . . . all done by the aid of lamps . . . Finally a tender neared us on each side. . . . Thee suddenly said here they are, Irvine and brother Jimmie. Imagine our excitement! One gentleman would stay with the trunks thusly. Thee would find a trunk, Irvine sit on it until another was found. . . .

One person only seemed oblivious to what was happening. Teedie sat off to himself in the salon, reading a book. “Strange child!” his mother mused. She must wake him up to the world, “and make him observe.”

She herself seems to have missed nothing, her own considerable powers of observation plainly heightened by an unbound delight in being where she was and who she was.

The first several days with her brothers were filled with breathless talk and laughter. It had been eight years since she had seen Captain James Bulloch, and her one brief meeting with Irvine in that time had been under such strained circumstances that it seemed more like something they had imagined. A year or so after the war he had returned to New York illegally under an assumed name, working his way across on a sailing ship in order to see Mittie and Anna for all of an hour. They had been told nothing of the plan. An unsigned note in the morning mail said merely that at three on Thursday a young man “of interest” would be in the mall at Central Park, standing beneath the third tree on the left, a red handkerchief about his neck. They did as directed and when the hour was up he left for his ship and the return voyage to Liverpool.

Now, at twenty-seven, Irvine was a lanky, clean-shaven, altogether proper southern expatriate and Liverpool businessman who, Theodore observed, smoked his pipe as if it were the serious duty of his life. At the moment, he was also much in love with the daughter of an American couple living in Liverpool, Ella Sears.

Irvine, Ella, Mr. and Mrs. Sears, “brother Jimmie,” his small children, and his wife, Hattie (Harriott Cross Foster, whom he had married before the war), converged on the hotel the first morning, Hattie hugging and kissing Mittie and crying profusely. After that there were drives in a varnished landau through Liverpool’s Princess Park and a longer excursion to the suburbs down country roads with hawthorn hedges in bloom. Mittie picked her first primrose and cowslip. (”You have no idea of my enthusiasm,” she told Anna. “You know every poet from Shakespeare mentions ‘sweet cowslip and primrose.’”) Another day, May 24, they went to brother Jimmie’s home at Waterloo, twenty minutes by train, where the children played on the beach and at dinner the “grown people” toasted the Queen’s birthday (Victoria had turned fifty) and sang and danced until time to catch the last train back to Liverpool.

James and Irvine Bulloch had established themselves in the cotton business in Liverpool and managed to survive as well as they did largely through the contacts James had made during the war. Of the two, James was plainly the leader, a big, vital man with a military bearing and resplendent muttonchop whiskers. No English colonel looked more like an English colonel. As the young captain of a U.S. mail steamer before the war, he had impressed Richard Henry Dana as the model American officer—in his book To Cuba and Back, Dana told what a pleasure it was to stroll the deck with a man of such good cheer and obvious ability—and now in middle age he was said to be the personification of Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome, the beloved ultimate gentleman of Victorian prose. He was kindly, reserved, rarely talked about himself or of his former exploits, which, as it happens, were again very much in the news. The Roosevelts had arrived—his little New York nieces and nephews were casting their eyes upon him for the first time—just as his former creation, the Alabama, had become a headline issue once again on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Alabama Claims, claims against Britain for damages done by the Confederate raider—his ship—had been made a thundering cause in Washington by the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Britain’s involvement with the Alabama had doubled the length of the war, Sumner claimed, and the damages therefore might exceed $100 million. (In fact, in her two years at sea the Alabama had destroyed fifty-eight commercial vessels valued at $6,547,000.) “When civilization was fighting a last battle with slavery,” Sumner declared in a famous speech, “England gave her name, her influence, her material resources to the wicked cause. ...” Popular opinion in the United States was strongly behind him. The speech had roused a response in the Congress and the country of a kind that set the British back on their heels. Cartoons in the British press at the time the Roosevelts arrived portrayed an American brigand, his belt full of revolvers and knives, calculating how much he might make John Bull pay. Publications normally friendly to the United States—The Spectator, The Pall Mall Gazette, the London Daily News—denounced Sumner and his claims and said the whole nation “would go to war twenty times over” rather than accept such a national humiliation.

The crux of the issue was the degree to which the government had knowingly participated in the creation of the Alabama and under what circumstances the ship had escaped from Liverpool to begin her reign of destruction—in other words, to what extent had James D. Bulloch been aided and abetted in his efforts. If ever there was a central character to a drama it was he, he being the one man who knew all that happened and why, and had this been another, later day, he would have been made a newspaper and television sensation, an international somebody, overnight. As it was, the arrival of his sister and her family remained the sole disruption in the sedate life he had fashioned in exile, and his treasured privacy survived intact.

To the Roosevelt children, he and Irvine were almost mythical in stature. Here were two of the heroic figures from Mittie’s stories, the real thing at last. Had some marvelous heroes from one of their books materialized before their eyes, the effect would not have been much greater. And most obviously stirred was Teedie, whose hunger for adventure in any printed or spoken form was insatiable and whose private musings on large matters of historic consequence were sometimes so out of proportion with his physical size and age as to be strangely amusing. (”Father,” he would ask apropos of nothing a little later on in the trip, “did Texas wish to annex itself to the United States?”)

“It was from the heroes of my favorite stories,” he would explain as a grown man, “from hearing of the feats performed by my southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father [that] I felt great admiration for men who were fearless . . . and I had a great desire to be like them.” To a crowd gathered in his honor at Roswell, he would one day tell in detail how his Uncle Irvine Bulloch had stuck to his post to the last as the guns of the United States corvette Kearsarge raked the Alabama. When the Alabama went down off Cherbourg, Irvine was among those survivors rescued by the British yacht Deerhound, and afterward he served on the raider Shenandoah, preying on whalers in the Bering Strait.

James Bulloch’s story was larger, more important, more the stuff of fiction. His influence on the boy was to be considerable.

His original mission, as defined in orders from Jefferson Davis, had been to build “with the quickest possible dispatch” six steam vessels in England, for which the Confederate Congress appropriated a total of a million dollars. He had arrived in Liverpool in June 1861, and the first ship, Florida, was ready in less than a year. Then followed the Alabama, originally known as No. 290, because she was the two hundred ninetieth ship built at the Laird yards in Liverpool. Launching of the Florida had greatly alarmed the American minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, so everything concerning No. 290 had to be done under secrecy and with unstinting sensitivity on Bulloch’s part to the British laws that forbade the building of warships for belligerents. “I cannot exaggerate, sir, the caution and tact required to get a ship to sea with even the external appearance of a man-of-war,” he wrote to James M. Mason, the Confederate diplomatic agent in London. No. 290, furthermore, was to be no ordinary ship and he expected to be given her command.

He had designed her specifically as a commerce raider, rather than for combat with other warships—900 tons, 230 feet in length, and drawing, when provisioned and coaled, all of 15 feet. Rigged as a barkentine, she carried large fore and aft sails and handled as well under sail as under steam—as most such vessels did not—because he had devised a means whereby, in a matter of minutes, the propeller could be detached and lifted high enough out of the water not to slow her down. Top speed was to be about thirteen knots. John Laird, the builder, thought her the finest cruiser of her class in the world.

The plan was for the ship to leave Liverpool as an innocent-looking merchantman, to be armed later in the Azores. He picked the island of Terceira as the rendezvous, secretly arranged for the purchase of armaments and stores, and had these sent by another ship, again devising detailed instructions for every necessary step. All in all it was a brilliant performance and things were falling together nicely, until Charles Francis Adams, supplied by his own agent in Liverpool, presented the British government with proof of what was afoot. The situation could have gone either way, but the Queen’s Advocate went insane at this juncture; the documents supplied by Adams sat untouched for five crucial days, and Bulloch, determined to get the ship out of British waters, took her to sea himself, “very unexpectedly.” Only by the narrowest margin did he bring it off. He arranged for a British crew, and on the morning of July 29,1862, the still incomplete No. 290 started down the Mersey draped in bright bunting and carrying a large party of fashionable ladies and gentlemen who had been invited for a short trial run and a picnic lunch. Several customs officials were also aboard to see that “no international wrong” was perpetrated. But about noon, a tug came alongside, the guests were put off, and No. 290 sailed away—north through the Irish Sea—never to return. Bulloch had himself put ashore on the north coast of Ireland and made his way back to Liverpool. Three weeks later he was in the Azores seeing to final preparations before turning the ship over to Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate Navy, his superiors at home having decided his services on land were invaluable.

That he failed in a later attempt to build two ironclad rams at the Laird yards—ships which, in the long run, would have done far greater damage to the Union cause than did the Alabama—was due to the grim, unequivocal declaration by Charles Francis Adams to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell that should the rams leave Liverpool, it would mean war.

Teedie’s allegiance to the Union side—to his father’s side—remained as passionate as always. Passing through Liverpool some months earlier, Jefferson Davis had enrolled his son in the same school at Waterloo attended by Teedie’s cousin, and when Teedie and Ellie ran into the Davis boy during a visit to the school, “sharp words ensued,” as Teedie reported proudly in his diary. But there could be no stigma surrounding James Bulloch, not ever. As an adult, Teedie would remember Uncle Jimmie as a “blessed” figure, “as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived . . . one of the best men I have ever known.” An important bond grew between them—important to each and to the writing of naval history—and this Liverpool visit of 1869 marked the beginning. It would be his very pro-Union nephew, ultimately, who persuaded James Bulloch to write the book only he could write, setting forth his part in the war and all he knew concerning the Alabama. (Called The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, it appeared in two volumes in 1883.) And James Bulloch, in turn, would provide invaluable assistance to his nephew’s own first effort as a historian, a study of the naval side of the War of 1812—all this taking place years after the Alabama Claims had been settled, the issue laid to rest.

The Roosevelts left Liverpool by train June 2, their party now increased to eight with the addition of a newly hired valet by name of Noel Paovitch. They were bound for the Lake Country and to Scotland, heading north, their first stop at Furness Abbey, the magnificent ruin of a monastery founded in the twelfth century in what had been the wilds of Icelandic-speaking Furness. It was a stop of only a night and a day and much that they were to see afterward was to be still grander in scale and more evocative in spirit, but the abbey was their maiden encounter with Europe’s truly ancient past. They were on their own as tourists for the first time.

A tremendous complex covering some sixty-five acres, the abbey was set in a hidden valley named Bekangesgill in Icelandic, or the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade, “from the deadly herb,” Mittie explained excitedly to Anna, “which with henbane grows here . . . two flourishing specimens of the former in one of the curved archways.” Once a remote empire unto itself, the abbey and its way of life had survived unchallenged for centuries. The buildings were of red sandstone—a monumental church, cloisters, quarters for the lay brothers and novices, the abbot’s private chapel, an infirmary, offices, school—and these with gardens and orchards and cemetery, as well as a modern hotel, were all contained within a great encircling wall. The end had come with Henry VIII and his break with Rome. The abbey was abandoned, roofs caved in, gates, windows, anything salvageable had been carted off long since. But the remaining shells of buildings were awesome. Among connoisseurs of ruins, of whom there were a great many in that Victorian day, they were considered among the choicest of all. What had been the floor of the abbey was now vivid green turf speckled with bluebells and buttercups and there were as yet no restrictions as to where one could walk or climb; everything was open to all comers and for children, a glorious playground.

The light of day was nearly gone when the Roosevelts arrived and a fine rain was falling, blotting out all but the barest outlines. It was only the next morning that the scale and power of the place burst upon them. The sun was shining, the day spectacular, with a few foamy clouds trailing overhead in a soft blue sky. The family was up and dressed by six and following breakfast set off with guidebooks in hand. The three small children, seeing the sweep of green turf, raced ahead, through archways, up broken staircases, then up a spiral stairway to the belfry, then to the top of what had been a water tower, where they “saw it all.” “When we three were on the belfry,” wrote Mittie, recounting for Anna the somewhat more sedate route she had taken with Theodore and Bamie, “on the opposite side were the three children peeping through one of the . . . lancet windows. . . . We beckoned to them and in a trice they all raced down, up the nave of the church and mounted the belfry steps. As I write . . . the children are climbing over the ’Porter’s Lodge’ (ruin). . . . It would be impossible to tell you all. . . .”

In the chancel, immediately in front of the high altar base, they stood before the stone effigy of a crusader, thought to be William de Lancaster, eighth Baron of Kendal, who died in 1246. By the way the moss had grown, the figure’s stone limbs and sword were perfectly delineated. From the cracked stone helmet of another effigy Mittie picked a dandelion. Thrilled by the whole romantic spell of the place she found herself “gazing at the wide open windows and thinking how the glorious light must have streamed through . . . over the high altar [and] down upon the monks as they sang their solemn chants or the moonbeams when at their midnight devotions.”

Her health was already improved, she told her sister. She had to watch what she ate, but could depict herself overall as “intensely interested and much freckled.”

We leave here at 5 PM for Windermere, where Noel and our baggage await us. . . . Thee and I wish for you incessantly. How you would appreciate it all. . . . I hurry to the close of this letter because I see Thee’s coattails flitting around the ruined Abbey and he shall not know more than I do about it.

In the days that followed, as they cruised Lake Windermere and went on by train to Edinburgh, the weather held clear and fair. Mittie wished only that there were more time. Scotland was both a return to the ancestral home of the Bullochs and a literary pilgrimage to the world of Sir Walter Scott, who, with his love of the legendary and valorous, his openair healthiness, his strong sense of the interlocking of human lives, appealed powerfully to the romantic Mittie. They saw Abbotsford, the sprawling stone mansion where Scott had lived like some feudal laird (”saw his clothes, . . . petrified things and armor and curiosities,” wrote Teedie), traveled to Dryburgh to pay homage at Scott’s tomb. In the Trossachs, the setting of Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake, Mittie felt “as though we were on magic ground.” One fine morning they hiked beside Loch Katrine, as Theodore marched along reading the poem aloud. “Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!”

“We had a charming drive on top of [the] coach, between Loch Katrine and Lomond,” Mittie told Anna, “and steamed up the latter . . . which was beautiful all the time. I could not help thinking of the highland songs dear mother used to sing. . . . ”

Then they turned south again, from Edinburgh to York, an exhausting, sooty eight hours “in the cars” relieved by some of the most appealing scenery of the whole trip: distant blue glances of the Firth of Forth, small white beaches, rolling surf, rolling country; then red-tiled Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Tweed emptying into the North Sea; then fields of sheep and cattle followed by Newcastle-upon-Tyne with its huddled houses and tall chimneys and thick yellow smoke. After this everything became more soft and green, more thoroughly English, Mittie thought, the hawthorn “perfectly lovely.” She adored landscapes with “everything like the most perfect picture.”

They were two days in York; then came Leamington (and Warwick Castle), Oxford, and, finally, London on June 21. Except for the time on trains, most every day was given to “hard sightseeing.” And if not exploring a Roman wall (at York) or exclaiming over the heroic proportions of a Saxon giant’s porridge bowl (at Warwick Castle) or seeing “some collages” (as Teedie wrote at Oxford), Mittie and the children were usually buried in their books, which, by the time they reached London, had been read and reread to such an extent that she had to go out and buy a “fresh lot.” A few months later, in Venice, Teedie would reckon that since leaving New York they had read fifty books.

At times the strain would show. Bamie’s feet had become so blistered in Scotland she could barely walk. Teedie’s asthma kicked up once before reaching London and Ellie too suffered several days with a bad throat, then took offense when told to ease up and miss part of one day’s touring. “I want to learn about things, too, like Teedie,” he insisted.

Yet the pace only quickened. In three weeks’ time there were repeated expeditions to the London Zoo and to the British Museum. They “did” Hampton Court, Kensington Gardens and Museum, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and the “very wonderful” Crystal Palace, where the two boys were transfixed by a mechanical figure that played chess and they begged to go back again the next day. The zoo called for five visits.

She had seen “the real Rosetta Stone,” Mittie exclaimed in a letter to Anna following a day at the British Museum. She had seen the prayer book carried to the scaffold by Lady Jane Grey (”her own notes written in it!”), the original manuscripts of Pope’s Iliad, Scott’s Kenilworth, letters from Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Charles the First, Cromwell, George Washington. “Etc., etc.” From the Ladies’ Gallery at the House of Commons, she and Bamie watched the members nodding, laughing, doing “anything they pleased,” their hats on, while one of their number droned on about cattle plague.

Shopping at Sears & Wells, she had the three youngest children fitted in matching sailor suits, with white braid and red silk ties, Conie’s differing only in that it had a skirt. Time was made for riding lessons for the boys, Teedie’s wheeze notwithstanding, and for innumerable “splendid romps” in Hyde Park under the surveillance of Mary Ann or Noel Paovitch, the latter, somewhere along the line, having acquired a red fez.

Most evenings about six, Mittie and Theodore took an hour’s drive in the park and one Saturday, their last in London, they attended a party given by the Duke of Devonshire, a high point for Mittie and a chance to exercise her powers of observation (albeit with “furtive glances” only) for the benefit of sister Anna, whose interest in great houses, clothes, jewelry, and English gentry was apparently no less than her own. The following is only part of a letter written at top speed from the Netherlands several days later.

I wore my pale-green silk, lace cap arranged as a bertha and some lovely pale-pink real rosebuds in my hair which Bamie arranged prettily. We arrived at Devonshire House, Piccadilly W . . . . where we were met by policemen and servants in livery knee breeches, etc., now ushered into the first vestibule, more servants, into second vestibule, more liveried servants. Instead of being taken into dressing rooms, in this vestibule a servant behind a kind of counter covered with red cloth . . . took our cloaks, giving tickets in return. We ascended a beautiful wide winding staircase of pure white marble, glass banisters; about midway, a servant [who was] standing at [the] head of [the] stairs, then ushered us into the Saloon (I suppose), a beautiful very large room. Lord and Lady Frederick Cavendish [Lord Frederick was the son of the Duke of Devonshire] came up immediately, very cordially. She is a little like Mrs. Jimmie Dreer, taller, was dressed not very prettily but stylishly, deep-pink silk, trimmed with some lace, large diamond ornaments arranged on pink ribbon round [her] neck, which was tied behind in long streamers, wreath of pink roses and green leaves. Lord Frederick is [a] sweet, clean-looking person, very diffident, he is in the House of Commons. He introduced his father as “My father the Duke,” who had the broad blue ribbon and star of the Order of Bath, blazing with diamonds. He received us very cordially. I forgot to say “Your Grace,” but talked along quite pleasantly . . . [the] room was gold and white with beautiful pictures, soft carpet in half the room (the other half apparently inlaid and waxed), furniture and curtains blue and gold . . . this opened into [a] beautiful salon, frescoed, high ceiling lighted from above, furniture light blue and vapor color; in one corner [at a] table in [the] shape of [a] crescent, served by servants (some maids in caps) . . . delicious reviving tea in lovely little cups, then slices of bread and butter, cakes, and other very light things. There were lovely flowers; two small anterooms and supper rooms were all that were thrown open. The supper seemed only to consist of ices, and fruits, all in brilliant-looking glass and china. . . . All the people as they entered shook hands with their host and each other. I had no idea the English did this, as Americans are generally accused of doing so. Lady Frederick introduced several of her friends to me, among them the Duchess of Manchester, very brilliantly dressed in pink and lace; Lady Waterford, whom she said had been a great beauty, walked most splendidly. . . a tiara of diamonds, pearls wound in with her black hair. Lady DeViser (I think this was the name) in deep blue and Venetian point lace, red cherries in her hair; her daughter, Lady Bath, [a] sweet delicate, refined-looking person, plain white silk, no trimming except fine lace in [the] neck, [a] little white ostrich tip in her hair. There was one fat Begum in blue satin and lace who walked slowly about. . . leaning on or should I say leading about a deaf, dumb, blind, lame, very ill-looking stick covered with orders. There was an old gentleman with soft gray curls, excessively refined-looking . . . with an immense diamond ring. . . . I asked Lord Frederick who he was, but he did not know, said that he went very little out. I was disappointed because I had seen and been interested in this same old gentleman at the Conversazzione at the Kensington Museum. . . . When we were leaving, the servants would call out “Lord so and so’s carriage stops,” the way just as you read in Miss Edgeworth’s novels. I enjoyed everything very much but would have liked to have gazed more, had to content myself with furtive glances out the sides of my eyes. . . .

Teedie provided the single disruption of the London stay. His asthma returned and a doctor who was called to the hotel, finding nothing wrong with the boy’s lungs, recommended that he be taken to the seashore. So off Teedie had gone with his father to Hastings, by train, early Saturday, July 3. They registered at the Queen’s Hotel fronting on the sea and after a very man-sized midday dinner set out for a walk on the beach. As the day wore on, Teedie was treated to a ride in a goat cart and in the late-afternoon sunshine the powerful-looking bearded father and the sallow, spindly little son hiked the steep path up Castle Hill, to a castle ruin from Saxon times. From the hilltop they could look back on the town and their hotel with its turrets and flags flying. The sky and sea were beautiful. Everything was beautiful to the boy. The dinner that night was “the best dinner I ever had.”

At the close of the following day, Sunday, he would say simply, “This is the happiest day I have ever spent.” After church they had again hiked to the castle, where this time Theodore conducted a private outdoor Sunday school. Then they walked on several more miles, atop high limestone cliffs, the beach and surf far below. On the return trek they cheered the Fourth of July together with all the lung power they could muster, a “feeble attempt,” Teedie conceded, but “such fun.” Putting himself to bed that night, finding he had too little breath even to blow out his candle, he doused the flame in a tumbler of water and dropped blissfully off to sleep.

Back in London they found Mittie and Bamie at the National Gallery, making their way slowly through Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode. “Both had enjoyed Hastings very much,” Mittie wrote. Teedie was “decidedly better.”

2

The Grand Tour of the Continent that got under way at Antwerp was an enormously ambitious undertaking, given the means of transportation available, the size of the party, the ages of the children, the staggering quantity and variety of baggage to be looked after in that day of large, elaborate wardrobes. Even to a seasoned present-day traveler the course of the Roosevelts’ journey across the map of Europe looks slightly overwhelming.

They reached Antwerp July 14, 1869, and were scheduled to sail for home exactly ten months later on the Russia, departing Liverpool, May 14, 1870. Between times they would travel several thousand miles by countless different trains, by river steamer, lake steamer, and rowboat (across Lake Como), by carriage and stagecoach, on horseback, by mule, by donkey, and on foot (through much of Switzerland). They would stay at sixty-six different hotels in eight countries (including Monaco) and the numbers of porters required at each stop, the numbers of room clerks, ticket agents, and headwaiters who had to be dealt with—with or without the benefit of English—may be imagined.

After several days of sightseeing in Antwerp, The Hague, and Amsterdam, they started up the Rhine from Cologne, visiting Mainz, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden, and Strasbourg. They were in Basel by the end of July and from there made a long, looping path through Switzerland, south first, through the Jura Mountains to Bern, then on to Geneva. They cut southeast across part of France to Mont Blanc and Chamonix, then northeast up the valley of the Rhone to Visp. There was a stop at Zermatt. The children threw snowballs on top of the Eggishorn. They saw the Rhone Glacier, crossed the Grimsel Pass to Grindelwald, steamed down Lake Brienz to Interlaken, filling their lungs with a lake breeze scented by freshly cut hay. At Lucerne they spent a week with Theodore’s former colleague on the Allotment Commission, Theodore Bronson, and his family, after which came the requisite ascent to the Rigi-Kulm. In Zurich they stopped at the famous Hotel Baur au Lac, with its flower gardens and meticulously raked gravel walks. In all, they were six weeks in Switzerland, Theodore’s favorite part of Europe and the place, it was hoped, that would do the most for Teedie. “A course of travel of this sort,” an English physician had written, “. . . in a pure and bracing air, under a bright sky, amid some of the most attractive and most impressive scenes in nature, in cheerful company . . . will do all that the best medicines can do . . . and much that they never can accomplish.” Henry James, trudging over the Swiss Alps that same summer, described his exertions as “a pledge, a token of some future potency.”

After Switzerland came the Italian lakes, then Milan, followed by a week in Venice. From Venice, September 25, they went by night boat across the Adriatic to Trieste and from there to Vienna by train, one of the longest legs of the journey. They were another week in Vienna, after which they turned west to Salzburg and Munich before making the swing north to Berlin by way of Nuremberg and Dresden. From Berlin they doubled back to Cologne, arriving in time for Teedie’s birthday, October 27.

The month of November was spent in Paris. Then followed a tour of southern France (Dijon, Marseilles, Nice) en route to Italy for the winter. With the return of spring they were back in Paris for a second and last stay of nearly two months, after which they left for London, Liverpool, and the ship home.

In time-honored tourist fashion they gathered up quantities of guidebooks and keepsakes—photographs, rare coins, stamps, crystals, bits of rock, souvenir spoons—and like countless other Americans abroad, then and since, they took huge pleasure in running into other Americans abroad. But never did they take Europe lightly, or in the smug or mocking way some did. There were times of disappointment and disillusion—“sunny Italy,” their first week there, was “cold, dreary, smelly”—but far more often they were exhilarated or deeply moved by scenery, by art, architecture, the places of history. If few families could have afforded such a year, fewer still would have attempted anything so ambitious or kept to their schedule with such energy. They did everything that was expected. They saw Venice by moonlight; at the Volksgarten in Vienna they thrilled to the strains of “The Beautiful Blue Danube” as rendered by Professor Strauss himself. They climbed the Arc de Triomphe and saw Emperor Napoleon III ride by in the Tuileries; they climbed the Tower of Pisa; they climbed Vesuvius. They saw The Last Supper, Pompeii, St. Peters and the Pope (Pius IX)—all that was obligatory and considerably more. There was hardly a church of note, a palace or ruin or gallery or garden en route that escaped their collective perusal, all six—”the whole of us,” as Teedie said—generally going everywhere in a body.

Children took sick. Teeth had to be tended to (a morning in Berlin was lost at a dentists office), birthdays and Christmas were celebrated (with Mittie and Theodore putting on full dress for each such occasion). Correspondence had to be kept up. Word came of the panic on Wall Street that began September 24, Black Friday, and, later, of the death of Theodore’s brother Weir. Still, the pilgrimage went resolutely forward and the fact that there were no serious snags in the plan anywhere en route, no train tickets lost or timetables misread, no troubles with hotel reservations that we know of, speaks highly for Theodore, who, it appears, was responsible for all the advance arrangements.

On balance, probably Switzerland was the best time for everyone. Conie, recalling the trip in later years, would write fondly of “weeks in the great Swiss mountains” and “lovely times when we were not obliged to think of sculpture or painting.” The distances covered on their family hikes through the Alps seem almost incredible. On August 11, for example, crossing the Tête-Noire, Theodore went twenty-two miles, Bamie eighteen miles, Ellie twelve, Conie three. Mittie, the supposed invalid, walked nine miles, while Teedie went very nearly as far as his father, nineteen miles. On August 21, crossing the Grimsel Pass, Teedie walked twenty miles to Theodore’s twenty-two and this at an altitude of seven thousand feet! At Lucerne Ellie and Teedie were both sick, Teedie depressed and homesick, but then the trip to the heights of the Rigi rapidly restored all spirits.

Known as the “island mountain,” the Rigi stands by itself above lakes Lucerne and Zug, and to many thousand “sensitive souls” of that day the spectacle of sunset and sunrise from its summit, the Rigi-Kulm, was the climax of a visit to Switzerland. The “incredible horizon,” as Victor Hugo called it, takes in nearly three hundred miles, an utterly dazzling panorama of Alps on one side (to the southeast) and on the other, beyond the lakes, the lovely Zurich countryside reaching to the Juras. Traditionally one went to the top in time for sunset, as the Roosevelts did, then stayed the night at the hotel to be awakened before dawn by an Alpine horn, which the morning of September 4 sounded at quarter to five.

Rose immediately [Mittie wrote], but did not get out in time to see the first pink lights before the sun rising. All the panorama of high Alpine peaks visible . . . Litlis and its glaciers, Finisterahorn, Schreckhorn, Wetterhorn, Jungfrau, and Silverhorn and Blumis Alps. The Wetterhorn was beautifully peaked and covered with snow. A mass of thick clouds laid at the same level all around the Rigi in the early morning, looking something as a glacier, with its rifts of gray color, completely hiding the lower world.

“Down the mountain a different way,” exclaimed Teedie. “Papa and I walked most. . . . I had a splendid day.” Later, in Nice, writing in his diary of a descent from another mountain, this with a view of the sea, he would describe “little Mama and Bamie trying to follow as fast as they could, all of us laughing and talking about what a nice time we were having and that this was a second Switzerland.”

Teedie was the diarist of the trip. Two or three other journals were begun and fragments of some have survived. Mittie, in hers, has an eye for nature—she names trees, flowers, birds—and for the “romantic” spell of places like Lake Como. Conie has exceptionally good handwriting for a child her age and frequently demonstrates her own sense of the romantic. (”We got up when it was pitch dark,” she writes at San Remo, “. . . and Ellie and I went all over the garden and stood by the Mediterranean and heard the roaring waves as they came dashing in.”) But Teedie alone kept methodically at his record, never missing a day during the entire year, however much else was going on and no matter how miserable he felt.

The diary has survived intact and it is an amazing document filled with innumerable revelations, not the least of them concerning the author himself. In physical form, it is actually several small, cheap stiff-backed notebooks. The entries are in pencil, the pages are nearly all badly smudged and blurred, and the handwriting is dreadful, sometimes nearly impossible to read. But his eye for detail is exceptional and he can be startlingly thorough. “He takes a great deal of interest now in everything he sees,” Mittie reported to Anna. Some of his inventories of “sights” seen in a single day ran to as many as thirty or even fifty items. He is tremendously fond of castles and of armor and armaments of all kinds, of fresh raspberries and dogs of any size or breed wherever he finds them. He loves all things Roman—Pompeii, Hadrian’s Villa, Roman coins, Roman walls, the Colosseum. “I . . . was given by Papa what in my wildest dream I had never thought to have,” he says at Naples, “a Roman vase and coin. Just think of it!!!”

There is an obvious interest in nature, but of the birds and animals that figure in the running chronicle, it is the bear that has the strongest fascination—a dancing bear at Lake Windermere, a game of “wild bears and hunting” with Conie and Ellie in the park at London and again at the Tuileries in Paris, a bear clock that he sees in a shop at Bern. At Florence he takes pad and pencil to the zoo to do a drawing of a bear.

Another entry made at Florence, a mention of a visit to “Mr. Elliot’s where we saw a beautiful book of birds written by him,” is of particular interest, since this was Daniel Giraud Elliot, the great American ornithologist whose collection of bird specimens, the finest collection then extant, was about to be acquired by the new American Museum of Natural History. Daniel Elliot was tall and bearded and enormously dignified. As a child he too had been “delicate in health.”

The manner at times is wonderfully pompous. It is easy to imagine the response had he so expressed himself among other American boys his age. At the end of the day at Oxford he writes, “I had a headache and Conie and Ellie made a tremendous noise playing at my expense and rather laughed when I remonstrated. . . .” He declares of the route to Genoa, “this railroad is an abomination.” The standard word of approval is “splendid” and once in Florence he is forced to excuse himself from play in order to “arrange my pantaloons.”

That he was enjoying himself the large proportion of the time, and nearly always when his health was right, is apparent throughout. Page after page he is having “fine fun,” “a great play,” “great fun.” There are touches of humor (”We are to write all our letters four pages, so much the worse for our friends!”) and one surprising, pleasurable moment at Ellie’s birthday party in Rome when he is kissed by a little girl named Elliese Van Schaack “as the boy she loved best in the room.”

This memorable account of a battle that took place on the Pincian Hill in Rome is from the entry of January 15, 1870:

We had a splendid day today. Ellie went out to get a sword and gun and I went to Mrs. Dickey’s for Charlie. Going back . . . we met Ellie with gun and sword. He lent the gun to Charlie and I picked up some stones. I was a little rebellious soldier. Ellie struck me with his sword. We then got for my weapons a club and two javelins. We then encamped and as I was sentinel, I revenged the blows of the sword by running away. I ran to a small hillock of dust and caves and took my stand. Up they came and Charlie made at me with the gun and cut my hand with it. I struck him in the chest and he fell on his back. But Ellie was on me with his sword and had me on my knees but I hurled him on Charlie. I saw, however, that I would be beaten in another battle and I rushed down a steep hill and when we fought again I defeated them and rushed up to another position and again encountered and beat them. They were now forced to receive me as an honored soldier.

But the same honored soldier plays dolls and “baby” with Conie, and he can be withered by the least sign of disapproval or ridicule. One entire evening at Nice is written off as “miserable” because “Papa called us children bothers. . . .”

At supper [another night] Mama laughed at me a great deal and made fun of me because I always say “Pretty Papa, Pretty Mama” and made me feel (and I feel now) very cut and ashamed of myself and I don’t feel natural, though Mama and Papa both tried to make it up when they saw what she had done.

On being told that his Uncle Weir Roosevelt is dead, he turns to the diary and writes, “It is the third relation that has died in my short life. What will come?”

Best by far are the “fine sociable times” with Papa and Mama. “We went in the cars and had a tremendous play with Mama.” “I and Mama and Papa had a sociable time by the fire with my stampbook.” “Papa and I had a jolly walk.” “In the evening Mama told us incidents of her early life and adventures of my ancestors. . . .” “I had such nice real tea for supper and such a nice time we did have, especially Mama and I who petted each other up. . . . Did I say I had real tea.”

Mama is all-comforting, never angry. Papa leads the way. Papa makes the rules; Papa gives out the spending money and requires an accounting of how it is used. Papa, dressed for the Vienna Opera, is “more handsome than I ever saw him.” In a crowd at St. Peter’s, as the family waits for a glimpse of the Pope, a monk shoves Teedie out of the way and Papa springs forward to fling the man aside. Papa gives “a grand dinner” at the hotel in Rome and invites “22 persons!!!”

On a few occasions Papa appears not to have been at his best. He seems to step strangely out of character. In the entry for January 4, 1870, we are told how Papa tossed pennies to a crowd of beggar children outside Naples, but that when one child “transgressed” some rule Papa had made, Papa whipped him “till he cried.” (It was immediately following this incident, interestingly, that he presented Teedie with the Roman vase and coin.) Another time, surrounded by a horde of half-starved Italian women and children, Papa bought baskets of cake. “We tossed the cakes to them,” Teedie writes,”... fed them like chickens with small pieces, and like chickens they ate it. . . . We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it.” This was all great fun, according to Teedie. Papa was a marvel. “We made the crowds . . . give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.”

Bamie is “such a kind sister,” but remains part of the adult world, more like a second mother. Ellie is “the chief” or “captain” in their games. Conie remains his favorite playmate.

Still, there runs a theme, a mounting refrain really, of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, an eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply to be alone, absorbed in private thoughts. It begins as early as the shipboard friendship with Mr. St. John, which he had managed entirely on his own and in his own fashion. “I was the first one that got on the continent,” he writes of the landing at Antwerp. “I walked with Papa before the rest most of the way,” he says of their hike out of Switzerland over the Splügen Pass. On a September day beside Lake Como he sits in a shaded woodland “with no sound save the waterfall and the Italian breeze on my cheek. I all alone am writing my journal.” “I began my ascent of the snow-covered Vesuvius,” he writes the last day of 1869. “I soon passed the rest and left them far behind.”

For Mittie, it may well have been the happiest year of her life. To judge by Teedie’s account she was never once ill or even out of sorts. Ironically, she appears to have been the only one of the family who never took sick, who never missed a day.

Italy had thrilled her. She had led the children through one museum after another, often plunking one or the other of them before a favorite painting or piece of sculpture: “Now, darling, this is one of the greatest works of art in the world, and I am going to leave you here alone for five minutes, because I want you to sit very quietly and look at it. . .”

Arriving in Paris the second time, in early March 1870, she could still write glowingly of sights yet to be seen. “I have only been once inside the Louvre,” she told Anna. “We are going to commence vigorously this week, it is so fascinating.”

For reasons that remain obscure, it had also been decided that Bamie would stay on in Paris. She was to be put in the hands of Mile. Marie Souvestre, headmistress of Les Ruches, a private school for girls in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. Then in her mid-thirties, with a long, distinguished career ahead of her, the remarkable Mile. Souvestre was a woman of singular poise and great culture, but also an outspoken agnostic, and this, in view of Theodore’s feelings on religion, makes the decision a little puzzling and suggests that Mittie may have had the final say. In any event, a first visit to Fontainebleau to see the school was made March 19, and as brief as Bamie’s time there would be, Mile. Souvestre’s influence would carry far.

In one respect only had the year been a failure. Teedie’s health, far from improving, had been conspicuously wretched throughout, as his amazing diary also reveals. From what he writes and from observations and clues to be found in family correspondence, the year can also be seen as a substantial medical profile of a very sick little boy whose case was by no means simple.

CHAPTER FOUR
A Disease of the Direst Suffering

1

BRONCHIAL ASTHMA is among the most serious of childhood afflictions—baffling, capricious, expensive, and, in its acute stages, terrifying. It is also a family affliction and a severe one, which is something seldom understood by those who have never lived with an asthmatic child, for rarely does anyone beyond the immediate family or the medical profession see an actual attack or have any idea of the suffering involved. The child known by the outside world is the child between attacks who appears to have little or nothing the matter with him, who can play and carry on like most any healthy youngster, even hike twenty miles in the Alps. It is only those closest to him who know how tenuous such intervals are. For the parents it is “living with a time bomb.” The attacks, when they come, are a shattering, numbing experience—always, no matter how many times it has happened before. Nights are made a shambles, sleep is lost, nerves are frayed. Parents become intensely wary of anything that might bring on an attack. They grow increasingly protective, often engulfing in their good intentions. And if, as the years go by, the child shows no improvement, they begin feeling desperate and depleted; they see themselves caught in the grip of something altogether beyond comprehension and their ability to cope. Some mothers “just about go crazy” with worry.

On the third day of October 1869, her fifth day in Vienna, Mittie Roosevelt sat in the garden at the Schönbrunn Palace, writing still another long letter to her sister. Again that morning, as in London, it had been necessary for Theodore to rush Teedie out of the city for a “change of air.” By this point in their married life, she and Theodore had been living with Teedie’s asthma for about seven years.

This morning Thee and Teedie left us immediately after breakfast to spend the day and sleep tonight at [Bad] Voslau, an hour by rail from Vienna. Teedie . . . seems hardly to have three or four days’ complete exemption and keeps us constantly uneasy and on the stretch. For instance on Lake Como . . . it came to a point where he had to sit up in bed to breathe. After a strong cup of black coffee the spasmodic part of the attack ceased and he slept; consequently woke up partly restored. Had the coffee not taken effect, he would have gone on struggling through the night. . . . Thee had warded off one or two attacks with this coffee, but likes to keep it for our trump card. . . . On Saturday was exactly the fortnight since we reached Venice. These entire two weeks he has had nothing but diarrhea and threats of asthma . . . and this morning, as I said, they have gone out of the city for this little change of air. We had almost every day lovely weather in Venice and these few days in Vienna cloudless blue skies and soft breeze. So what it is that keeps up the attacks is a mystery.

How conversant she and Theodore were with the latest medical theories on asthma, what medical advice they were getting, we may only speculate; but their concern for health being what it was and given the frequent contact they had with physicians—Hilborne West, Charles Fayette Taylor, John Metcalfe, the family doctor—they probably knew as much as did any parents of that day. And while it is true that enormous strides have since been made in pulmonary medicine, the things then perceived were neither trivial nor tangential. Asthma had been recognized as a definitive clinical disease for more than a century. A hereditary tendency, the fact that there is a “genetic predisposition” to asthma, had been noted. A seasonal pattern was perceived by many physicians. Certain foods, certain odors, bed feathers, house dust, cat fur, as well as abrupt changes in temperature or humidity, were cited as specific irritants that could bring on an asthmatic “fit” and patients were advised accordingly.

Equally impressive was the mounting body of opinion that the key lay somewhere in the “neurotic character of the complaint.” The first experimental work on the psychological factors in asthma was not to come until the 1880s. Freud and his revelations concerning the unconscious world were further still in the future. But the idea that asthma might be somehow connected with the emotions was very old—allegedly Hippocrates had warned, “The asthmatic must guard against anger”—and from the early part of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of physicians had become convinced that states of grief, anger, joy, “nervous influences” or “passions of the mind” played a more important part than heretofore reckoned.

The fact that an asthmatic’s lungs may be quite “perfect”—as the doctor in London found Teedie’s lungs to be—had been determined as early as 1819 by the famous French physician René Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope, who perceived no organic causes to which asthma could be attributed but listed “mental emotion” among the primary probable causes.

“A preternaturally nervous . . . temperament, if not the cause, wonderfully favors the attack of asthma,” wrote an American doctor named Joshua Bicknell Chapin in 1843. “Extreme nervous irritability not only invites the attack, but aggravates the symptoms and prolongs continuance,” he said, and elucidated on the frustrations of trying to pin down a specific dietary or environmental cause.

What will almost universally relieve one case, will as assuredly induce a paroxysm in another. Ordinarily the air of low situations is more congenial than mountain breezes. . . . Some suffer in a certain room, but are immediately relieved if removed to an opposite room in the same house. One cannot sleep or rest in one street, or lane, but slumbers quietly if removed to another part of the same village or city. Another can breathe freely if he can only be allowed to sit in a room filled with smoke to suffocation, but pure air is almost intolerable. . . . While one is benefited by a journey in the country, another will find more relief in the contaminated atmosphere of the densest mart. . . . Most will avoid a crowded assembly as they would a pesthouse; but I have a friend who always resorts to such a place when practicable, for a moment of private breathing.

All such cases, he surmised, “owed their origin to certain mental impressions, or emotions.”

In 1864, or two years after the infant Teedie’s asthma had begun, a highly important work was published in Philadelphia, a book of 256 pages titled On Asthma. The author was an English physician, Henry Hyde Salter, a very keen observer who as the father of an asthmatic child had “experienced the horrors” of the disease. Like Laënnec, Salter had found no abnormalities in the lungs of his asthmatic patients, no trace of the disease in either the respiratory or circulatory system, and hence concluded that the trouble lay in the nervous system. Asthma, a disease of “the direst suffering,” a disease “about whose pathology more various and discrepant ideas prevail than any other,” was “essentially a nervous disease.”

Sudden “mental emotion,” Salter said, could both bring on an attack and abruptly end one. He did not know why, only what he had observed. He reported on a patient whose attack ceased the moment he saw a fire outside the window and another who had his asthma stop when put on a fast horse. Still other patients found that as soon as they neared the doctor’s office their asthma vanished, “suddenly and without any apparent cause except the mental perturbation at being within the precincts of the physician.” The onset of an attack, he noted, was frequently preceded by a spell of depression or “heaviness” (what Teedie called feeling “doleful”), and twenty years in advance of what might be regarded as the first studies in the psychosomatic side of asthma he reported on a small boy who “found his disease a convenient immunity from correction.”

“Don’t scold me,” he would say, if he had incurred his fathers displeasure, “or I shall have the asthma.” And so he would; his fears were as correct as they were convenient.

The nature of an actual attack was described by Salter in accurate, vivid detail and with considerable sympathy for anyone who had to try to deal with the situation. Specific kinds of treatment were described, including the “beneficial influence of sustained bodily exertion.” It was the most comprehensive study on asthma that had as yet appeared, the definitive word, and either Hilborne West, Taylor, Metcalfe, or all three, must have known about it and so consequently would the Roosevelts, in part if not in whole. Much of what Salter wrote on the importance of exercise reads as if it might have been the very text for all Theodore was to preach to his small son and that the son himself would choose as his own lifelong creed. “Organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well,” insisted Dr. Salter.

The common methods then used to confront an attack varied greatly and to the present-day reader seem excessively harsh. Emetics and purges were standard. The common way to avert an attack was to make the patient violently ill, to dose him with ipecac or with incredibly nauseating potions made of garlic and mustard seed and “vinegar of squills,” a dried plant also used for rat poison. Children were given enemas, plunged into cold baths. Whiskey and gin were used, laudanum (opium mixed with wine) and Indian hemp (marijuana). The patient was made to inhale chloroform or the fumes of burning nitrate paper or the smoke from dried jimson weed (Datura stramonium), another poisonous plant, coarse and vile smelling, that had been used in treating asthma in India for centuries. Many children were made to smoke a ghastly medicinal cigarette concocted of jimson weed and chopped camphor.

Black coffee may have been the Roosevelts’ “trump card,” as Mittie said, but Teedie was also made to swallow ipecac and smoke cigars. The purpose of the cigar was to subject the child to what, in essence, was a dose of nicotine poisoning. “In those who have not established a tolerance to tobacco,” explained Henry Hyde Salter, “its use is soon followed by a well-known condition of collapse, much resembling seasickness—vertigo, loss of power in the limbs, a sense of deadly faintness, cold sweat, inability to speak or think, nausea, vomiting.”

The moment such a condition could be induced, he said, “the asthma ceases as if by a charm.”

The picture of such loving parents as Mittie and Theodore inflicting punishment of this kind seems almost inconceivable. But they did, which, if nothing else, is a measure of the extremes to which a mother and a father will go to avoid a bad attack. Also, violent vomiting very often works, just as Salter said. It can in fact avert an attack and is still resorted to in certain situations. And black coffee, it happens, was also a sound choice; caffeine, a stimulant, is closely akin to theophylline, among those drugs used most frequently to treat present-day asthmatics.

The sensation of an acute asthmatic attack is that of being strangled or suffocated, only infinitely more complex. The whole body responds. When Victorians used the words “fit” or “seizure” they were close to the mark. The trouble is not just in the lungs. The central nervous system is involved, the endocrine system, both sides of the brain, possibly the stem of the brain as well. The agony is total, unlike that, say, of smashing a finger in a door, where the pain is concentrated at one point. And the largest part of the agony is psychological—inexpressible terror, panic.

“Witches in my chest” is an expression sometimes used by children, while most adult asthmatics find it impossible to give words to what they experience during an attack. A feeling like drowning is frequently mentioned—slow drowning—but not even that quite suits. In the words of one asthmatic, “If I were drowning I would know I was drowning and I was going to die and that wouldn’t be so bad. Asthma is just plain terrifying. . . . You may die . . . but your fear is you won’t.”

Many asthmatics cannot bring themselves to talk about their illness, largely, it would seem, for fear that the mere thought of an attack might bring one on. Ten-year-old Teedie, for all that he was capable of including in his diary about the contents of museums or the events of a day, writes nothing of the feelings he experienced when “very sick” or having “a miserable night.” In later years he would remain equally reticent—very uncharacteristically reticent—saying only that as a child he had been “wretched,” “suffered much” from asthma and that “nobody seemed to think I would live.”

For reasons that are still imperfectly understood, the attacks come nearly always at night, usually about three or four in the morning. Asthma is a disease of the night, which, for a small, impressionable child, can contribute greatly to its terrors. The onset may be sudden or gradual. The first stage is a tightening of the chest and a dry, hacking cough. Breathing becomes labored and shallow. The child starts to pant for air (”asthma” in Greek means panting). A high-pitched wheeze begins. The child has to sit up. If he tries to speak at all, it is in short, desperate bursts. Soon he is unable to speak or move, except with the utmost difficulty. He is battling for breath, tugging, straining, elbows planted on his knees, shoulders hunched high, his head thrown back, eyes popping. Fiercely as he pulls and gulps for air, what he gets is never enough. A distance runner near the point of collapse knows much the same agony, except he also knows he can quit running if he chooses. The asthmatic has no such choice, and there is no telling how long the agony will go on.

“I sat up for 4 successive hours and Papa made me smoke a cigar,” reads the entry describing an attack the night of the crossing to Trieste.

“Poor little Teedie is sick again . . .” reads part of a letter written by Bamie from Munich,

it was coming on all day yesterday, but in the evening he seemed a little better so Father went out—before his return, however, Teedie had a very bad attack. Mother and I were very much worried about the poor little fellow and at last Mother gave him a strong cup of coffee, which failed as he could not sleep but sat in the parlor to have stories of when Mother was a little girl told to him.

At another point in the diary, he writes that he was rubbed so hard on the chest “that the blood came out.” By whom he does not say.

The cause of the horrendous difficulty in breathing is a swelling of the bronchial tubes which lead to the lungs, specifically the branchlike extensions of the bronchial tree. The normal involuntary muscular action of these airways is not functioning as it should. The bronchial tubes are filling with mucus. They are in spasm, no longer dilating (contracting and releasing) properly; they narrow and close down. Hyperventilation occurs, as less and less air is pulled into the lungs. The feeling, it has been said, is of taking in mere spoonfuls of air, these reaching only the top of the lungs, “and you know that no more is going to penetrate, that everything under that has turned to lead, and you’re depending on that little tablespoon as fast as you can get it.” Back and chest muscles are put to tremendous strain. The heart is pounding. The child coughs and perspires and turns deathly pale, a ring of compressed white around the mouth. He is being strangled to death. And the alarm of those with him does nothing to relieve his own terrible anxieties.

But though the sensation is of being unable to take air in, the problem is actually the reverse; the air already inside cannot be expired as in normal breathing. It is the used air trapped within the swollen lungs that is keeping the child from breathing in the fresh air so desperately wanted. The struggle is to get the used air out.

If the severity of the attack continues, if his strength begins to fail, the child will start to turn blue—the sign that he is in “status asthmaticus,” very near death from asphyxiation. With modern drugs, with potent bronchodilators like epinephrine, ephedrine, or aminophylline, such a state can usually be avoided, the attack kept within bounds. Oxygen can also be given. But no such drugs, no nebulizers or oxygen tents, were available in the Roosevelts’ day. How near Teedie came to dying during the worst of his attacks, whether, for example, he actually ever turned blue, is impossible to determine.

Once the attack is ended, the ordeal at last over, the child commonly experiences an upsurge of good feelings, an exuberance unlike any other. Nothing seems too big or too difficult to tackle. The fact that Teedie could get up and do all he did the day after a bad attack—that his best, most strenuous days during the European year were often those immediately following his worst nights—fits the pattern exactly. The attack the night of the crossing to Trieste was among the most severe, yet the day after, literally within hours, having had almost no sleep, he was out happily exploring the city on his own. The day following he hiked two hours, “in the broiling sun,” up and back, to a castle on a hilltop in what is now Postojna, Yugoslavia.

For the parents of the child, however, there is little such relief. As the attacks grow worse, their worry and frustration are compounded accordingly, as Mittie’s letter from the garden of the Schönbrunn Palace amply illustrates. Still, such concerns, like asthma itself, remain largely private matters. It is not the severity of the child’s condition or the anguish of the parents that the outside world sees. It is the special treatment the child gets, the costly, sometimes ostentatious things done in his behalf—special medicines, doctors, emergency travel to some distant, exotic change of scene. And if there happens to be money in the family, then such “signs” of the seriousness of the case are heavily accentuated, for while any family may be willing in theory to try almost anything to help the child, the family of wealth can in fact try almost anything. Money being no obstacle, the rich can respond to asthma in ways the poor or even the moderately well-to-do cannot, and this was particularly so in the days before public clinics and health insurance.

With asthma and wealth combined in the same family, it is as if the drama of the problem—and asthma is nothing if not dramatic—can be played out on a much larger, showier stage. And naturally the leading player, the small, ailing child, becomes even more special and out of the ordinary, his influence on the family destiny larger by far.

So it was not merely that Teedie was acutely asthmatic, but that he was acutely asthmatic in conjunction with virtually all the relief, diversion, every advantageous change of scene or consideration that money could buy. When he set things spinning, as every asthmatic does, the result was quite different from what it would have been for a child of lesser station. An attack comes at home and he is whisked into the night in a family carriage pulled by magnificent, matched horses, a carriage that may be summoned to the door at a moment’s notice, whatever the hour. It is a very privileged kind of resolution to the crisis, not to mention an exciting one.

The ocean breezes at Long Branch do not suffice, so off he is taken to Saratoga. Visits to Philadelphia are arranged whenever need be. Or summers in the country. Or a year in Europe.

This is not to suggest that his suffering was any the less for such treatment—or that the burden he presented was any less heartrending for Mittie and Theodore—but to emphasize the special circumstances within which the problem was cast. For in the light of what has since become known about asthma, there is little question that the family milieu, the specific ways in which the family responds to the problem—as individuals and collectively—bear directly on the severity of the disorder, even the timing of attacks.

2

The exact role of the emotions in asthma is still elusive, after nearly a century of study. Recent investigations strongly suggest that the disease is physiological in origin: something about the asthmatic makes him abnormally susceptible to an irritant of some kind—an airborne allergen in most instances—and so in the beginning stages, many physicians now contend, asthma can be properly described as allergic. But the interplay of emotions may also figure in the allergic process itself—nobody really knows—and once the asthmatic “mechanism” or “habit” is established, the part played by the emotions in “triggering” attacks is indisputable. It is as if the patient has somehow established a freak circuit and the emotions can trip it, setting him off. The attack is not deliberate (though it can be), rather it is provoked by certain painful feelings—buried anger, guilt, fear of abandonment, fears of all kinds—or of tensions that need not necessarily be unpleasant, the approach of a birthday or Christmas, for example. “It isn’t that the emotions of the asthmatic patients are different from those of other people,” stresses a specialist, “it is that with them the effects of an upset can be explosive.” If the patient is a child, the causes are essentially “wrapped up in the fears which beset most children and which they find so hard to acknowledge or discuss.” More important than the feeling itself is the fact that it remains bottled up inside. Dust, animal dander, the pollen season, damp night air, a hundred and one impersonal, external factors may play a part, but the psychological factors weigh heavy in the balance and it is in this sense that asthma is understood to be a psychosomatic disorder, like duodenal ulcers or hypertension. A view frequently heard among experts in pulmonary medicine is that there is no such thing as a totally nonpsychosomatic case of asthma—a view that, understandably, is often difficult for parents to accept.

The medical paper regarded as the first study of asthma’s psychological side appeared in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1886, too late to have any effect on Mittie or Theodore Roosevelt. A Baltimore physician, John Noland Mackenzie, reported on a severely asthmatic patient, a woman in her early thirties, whose attacks could be brought on by everything from thunderstorms to overeating to perfume, but who was particularly susceptible to the smell of roses. She was unable to be in a room where roses were present for more than a few minutes without having a violent attack. But then Mackenzie found that the sight of an artificial rose produced exactly the same result, a discovery, he said, that “opens our eyes to the fact that the association of ideas sometimes plays a more important role in awakening the paroxysm . . . than the alleged vital property of the pollen granule.”

While the validity of Mackenzie’s experiment was to be challenged, it nonetheless inspired countless studies along similar lines, the results of which were often astonishing, Asthmatic children said to be sensitive to house dust, for example, have been hospitalized in rooms generously supplied with dust from their own homes, and in nineteen out of twenty cases no asthma has resulted. Physicians have developed techniques whereby patients can be talked out of an oncoming attack. Important work has been done in the “family dynamics” of asthma—chronic unresolved conflicts within the “family constellation” are probed for—and a major facility, the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital in Denver, Colorado, has been founded on the proposition that the best possible therapy for many acutely asthmatic children is to get them away from their families altogether.

Asthma is now commonly explained to parents as a form of behavior; the child is unconsciously “using” his affliction for purposes of his own. “We tend to use what is available to us to influence our environment or to solve our problems,” writes a leading authority. “Children with asthma have asthma available to them . . . [and] behavior, not verbalization, is the language of children.”

The likeliest source of the child’s anxieties, it has long been thought, is the mother. Asthma is repeatedly described as a “suppressed cry for the mother”—a cry of rage as well as a cry for help. The child has an intense fear of being abandoned by the mother or of any form of rivalry for her affection. If the advent of asthma coincided with actual separation from the mother—from either parent—this too is considered an important piece to the puzzle. Thus a present-day specialist analyzing Teedie’s case would take very seriously the fact that his troubles began during the Civil War, years of great confusion and tension for the Roosevelts, when Theodore was away months at a time and two new infants arrived on the scene to vie for Mittie’s attention. The whole “climate” of ill health within the Roosevelt household—Mittie’s palpitations and headaches and intestinal grief, Bamie’s troubles with her back, Conie’s asthma—would also be reckoned as much or more an environmental factor in Teedie’s asthma than, say, the quality of the air he happened to be breathing.

Oncoming attacks in his case were often signaled a day or so in advance by moods of dark melancholy or homesickness. “I feel very, very homesick tonight,” he writes one Friday in Lucerne. “Teedie threatened with asthma,” Mittie notes in her journal the same evening. The attack followed in less than forty-eight hours.

But in nothing the Roosevelts said or wrote during the year is there even a suggestion that his condition was the result of an allergy, or thought to be. There is no talk of the hay season, no obvious avoidance of dogs or cats or specific foods.

Nor, we find, is there a seasonal pattern to the attacks. As the diary shows, they came in every season, year around. They happen in city and country, in damp, cold climates and the heat of summer, at sea level and in Switzerland. No one time of year or environment seems to be any more beneficial or harmful than another. The fact that he was abroad—away from New York and anything at the 20th Street house that might have been the cause—did him no apparent good. If anything, the year abroad appears to have been his worst yet.

Indeed, from looking at the diaries one might be inclined to see the attacks as entirely random—that is if one were to note only where they occurred or in what season, rather than which day of the week. It is when the attacks are plotted day by day on a calendar for the years 1869 and 1870 that a distinct pattern at once emerges.

His asthma strikes on weekends, usually Saturday night or what was actually early Sunday morning. There are exceptions, ordinary weekdays when he is “rather sick” or “still sick.” Tuesday, October 26, the day before his birthday, his condition was serious enough to cause a hurried departure from Berlin, ahead of schedule, though in this instance apparently it was the sign of an oncoming attack, rather than an actual seizure, that set everyone in motion. (”I feel very doleful and sick and homesick and there is such a bustle my head aches. . . . Perhaps when I’m 14 I’ll go to Minnesota, hip, hip hurrah!”) But the number of times in which Sunday figures as his bad day is astonishing. The worst attacks, moreover, virtually all occur on Sunday.

His first illness of the trip, it will be recalled, the siege of seasickness, his one bad day aboard ship, occurred Sunday, May 16. In July he was rushed from London by train to spend the weekend of the fourth, a Sunday, at Hastings with his father. Sunday, August 29, at Lucerne, he writes, “I was very sick on the sofa and lay in bed all day. . . .” The bad night at Lake Como mentioned by Mittie in her Schönbrunn garden letter happened the weekend of September 11–12. The attack on the way to Trieste began at approximately three o’clock the morning of Sunday, September 26.

The following Sunday, October 3, was the morning Theodore took off with him from Vienna to Bad Voslau, the morning of Mittie’s letter.

The attack at Munich described by Bamie took place the following Saturday night and Teedie’s diary entry for that Sunday, October 10, reads: “I was very sick last night and Mama was so kind telling me stories and rubbing me with her delicate fingers. I was so sick in the morning that in the afternoon Father, Ellie, and I went to Starnberg.”

This made the third such emergency exit to spend a Sunday out of town. In Paris it would happen twice again. On two consecutive weekends, because of his condition, the child was hurried from the city to the fresh air of Fontainebleau, these expeditions coming immediately after the initial trip to see Bamie’s school.

The intriguing question, of course, is why this should have been so. Why the weekends? Why Sunday?

The pattern is too pronounced to be coincidental. How long it had been the pattern, what the timing of attacks may have been prior to that year abroad, is impossible to resolve, since there are no comparable records. References to his condition in earlier years rarely specify when the seizures came. Interestingly enough, however, the one bad time for which we do have a calendar date occurred on a weekend and reached its greatest severity on a Sunday. The letter in which Grandmamma Bulloch tells how Mittie and Theodore packed the child off from Long Branch to Saratoga—the first known mention of his asthma in family records—was written the day of their departure, Monday, June 22, 1863. The difficult time had been the day before.

Salter, in his book, had written on the strange “periodicity” of asthma among some patients, noting that a weekly cycle was not uncommon. His example was of a small boy whose attacks came every Monday morning, a pattern that appeared to be an effort to avoid school but that Salter attributed to the family routine of a large Sunday meal.

In Teedie’s case the answer may lie in the nature of Sunday itself, which in the Victorian era was still the Lord’s Day, the sanctified day of rest and the one day of the week when the head of the household was home from work and thus also available to his children. Among such properly devout families as the Roosevelts it was a day of rigidly prescribed dress and behavior, of formal family gatherings, of little or no play, of church, Bible readings, family prayers, evening hymn singing in the parlor. The Roosevelts “kept” the Sabbath. It was a day for letter writing, a quiet walk perhaps, and for Theodore, his weekly turn at the Newsboys’ Lodging House (with other children outside the home). Teedie, in his mature years, would remember it as a day “we children did not enjoy—chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean clothes and keep neat.” The single redeeming feature was the chance to gather in the front parlor, a room of “splendor” with its cut-glass chandelier.

On the expedition across Europe, Sunday invariably meant church, wherever the Protestant variety could be found, and a day off from touring. The few Sundays when they did not attend church the children were required to remain quiet—to draw a church or memorize several verses from the Bible. It was permissible to look at things as the day went on, but not to do much. At Pisa one Sunday, the family went to see the tower, but not until the following day did they climb it.

As a very small child Teedie had also experienced a peculiar and memorable fear of church. It was a small incident that, in later years, made an amusing anecdote of the kind every Roosevelt loved to tell. But for him at the time it was no joke and should not be discounted.

Mittie had found he was so afraid of the Madison Square Church that he refused to set foot inside of it alone and so she pressed him to tell her why. He was terrified, she discovered, of something called the “zeal.” It was crouched in the dark corners of the church ready to jump at him, he said. When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon. He had heard the minister read about it from the Bible.

Using a concordance, she read him those passages containing the word “zeal” until suddenly, very excited, he told her to stop. The line was from the Book of John, chapter 2, verse 17: “And his disciples remember that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”

The Sundays he was sick in Europe he was seldom obliged to go to church. That certainly, the diaries show, was among the immediate, obvious consequences of a “bad night” or of merely being “a little sick,” even those Sundays when he was not whisked off to the country. During the first stay in Paris, for instance, he missed church three consecutive Sundays. (”I was sick and did not go out at all except for my Russian bath.”) In Rome, Saturday, January 8, 1870, he is “a little sick.” Sunday, January 9, he “did not go to church at all.” In Florence, Sunday, February 27: “As I was sick with a headache I and Ellie went out to the garden and made roads with stones. . . . No Sunday school.”

But the outstanding examples, of course, are the Sundays afield, out of London, Vienna, Munich, Paris, immeasurably wonderful times in the blessed open air, the best being those spent alone with Papa. The Sunday at Hastings was “the happiest day I have ever spent.” He did attend church in this instance, but Sunday school was conducted beside a castle wall, in view of the sea. The Sunday at Bad Voslau was again like Hastings, “viz, there were only the 2 of us,” and “we had Sunday school out. . .” “Papa and I went a long way through the wood and had Sunday school in them.” The Sunday away from Munich with Ellie also along was “splendid” and of the two escapades outside Paris he writes as follows:

Saturday, April 16, 1870
I had such a bad night that we went to Fontainebleau. We children went first. We played in the garden and woods. We had a nice time but in the night I was sick.

Easter Sunday, April 17, 1870
Today was the happiest Easter I ever spent. After breakfast and a walk in the woods alone, Mama, Papa, and all we children went out in the woods to hunt for violets. . . . We played . . . and then had Sunday school in the woods and picked cowslip and heard the cuckoo sing.

After dinner we all drove out through the woods to the rocks. We then walked all round the rocks and over crevasses. We saw a tree 1,400 years old and [an]other 300 years old. We saw a stream of pure and cold water. We had such a happy time.

Saturday, April 23, 1870

We went to Fontainbleau in the cars with Bamie. I had a bad time till two o’clock, when after dinner we went to the rocks and there we made such a scramble and went in dark caves and over big cracks, and up steep places and all over.

Sunday, April 24, 1870
We went in the park where on a sand bank we made tunnels 10 paces long. After dinner we went to the rocks where we jumped over crevasses and ran in them and had such fun. . . . In one of our rambles we saw very fresh traces of a deer.

All the stifling formality and constricted horizons of Sunday were at once transformed by the space and excitement of the natural world—by a tree 1,400 years old, streams of pure water, dark caves, and fresh deer traces. “If Raphael had only painted landscapes instead of church things,” he laments in the diary after a visit to the Vatican. To be with Papa, to have Papa’s undivided attention, to be off and away on an adventure together, was the ultimate joy. Any opportunity to be with Papa, then, later, made him feel better. (”Well, well, said Mr. Greatheart, let them that are most afraid, keep close to me.”)

Their day at Bad Voslau was nearly ruined by a chance encounter with a few of “Papas friends (or as I thought of them, enemies).” With their unexpected appearance, it became a “miserable time,” he writes, adding quickly, “but it was not Papa’s fault.”

Neither Mittie nor Theodore, nor any of the family, appears to have been aware of the timing of the attacks. Nor, apparently, was Teedie. Twice, however, he reports testily that Conie tries to get attention by faking she is sick. She complained she was too weak to walk, “and then went bouncing down the stairs . . . until she saw Mama, when she suddenly became very sick again (sarcastic).” Another time, “Conie was sick but her sickness always decreased when Mama was out of the room and she could not be petted.”

Both of these performances occurred on weekends, the first on a Saturday, the second on a Sunday, and at neither time did Teedie himself become ill. He was struck instead, in the first instance, by a siege of abject homesickness; in their hotel suite at Dresden he lay on the floor in the light of the fire pining away for “times at home in the country.” Of the morning of Conie’s own Sunday “sickness,” he further reports, “Papa, Bamie, Ellie, and I went to church but I did not like it.” Conie’s condition required that Mama stay behind.

Mama’s love and attention were magic. His physical need for her, the intense attachment he felt, are expressed with striking candor and frequency. In Paris they went together to the Russian baths six days in a row, to be subjected to clouds of steam and switches of fir boughs. She was with him through his headaches and stomach cramps. To pull him out of his doleful spells, she told him stories and looked at pictures with him. One evening in Paris she showed him a photograph of little Edith Carow and the effect was devastating. Her face, he noted in an air of grand tragedy, only “stirred up in me homesickness and longing for the past which will come again never, alack never.”

Whereas Papa made him drink black coffee or smoke a cigar or swallow ipecac (with “dreadful effects”), Mama soothed, petted, “rubbed me with her delicate fingers.” After a day of unremitting rain at Nice, when he was up late alone, “Mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and nearly cried because they were feverish. We had a fine sociable time. . . .” Papa took him to the doctor (in Vienna and Paris), and on the train from Berlin, it was Papa who made him get out for air at every station stop, despite the cold and the falling snow.

Why it was Papa nearly always who rushed him off to Hastings and the other places is an interesting point, since Mittie could have managed it as well, or she could have gone along with them to make a day of it. Or the whole thing could have been turned over to Bamie or a servant. Doubtless Theodore knew how large he loomed in the child’s eyes, how desperately the boy needed him. Almost certainly he wanted to give Mittie some relief, to get him away from her, for her benefit.

Another likely possibility, of course, is that Theodore himself, for all his piety and adherence to convention, enjoyed being off and away; he wanted a day of freedom every bit as much as did his small companion. If so, then the asthma was serving both their needs—it was doubly “convenient,” to use Dr. Salter’s word—and Teedie, conceivably, would have sensed as much. In some way for which there were no words he could have understood perfectly what those days meant to his father and this too would have figured in whatever troubling, complex combination of feelings lay at the heart of his troubles.

3

As different—as very different—as is every case of asthma from another, much of the impact of the disease is commonly shared by severely asthmatic children. Many of the same feelings and fears are engendered, many of the same perceptions of the world, and there is no reason to believe Teedie was an exception. For a child as acutely sensitive and intelligent as he, the impact of asthma could not have been anything but profound, affecting personality, outlook, self-regard, the whole course of his young life, in marked fashion. The asthmatic child knows he is an oddity; that somehow, for some reason no one can explain, he is a defective, different. But he knows also that his particular abnormality lends a kind of power. He knows, in ways a normal child can scarcely imagine, what it is to be the absolute center of attention. His attacks, horrible as they are, dreaded as they may be, are riveting to all who are present, his hold on his audience is total. Nothing can go on as usual, no one can remain indifferent to him, in the presence of an attack, and it is for no mere fleeting moment that he commands center stage. “A beheading is over in seconds,” observes one of the few chronic asthmatics who are willing to talk candidly. “A hanging—how long does that take? Three, four minutes, possibly five at the most. But an attack of asthma!”

The inclination, as time goes on, is to demand more and more attention—if not through asthma, then some other means.

Inevitably, as part of his way of coping with the world, the asthmatic also acquires a highly sensitized feeling for his surroundings. Of necessity he becomes acutely cognizant of the size and shape of rooms, the nearness of people and their comparative size, the whole look and feel and smell of spaces small and large, of fresh air, of skies and winds.

Ailments other than asthma, any of the inevitable knocks and scrapes of childhood, or of later life, are often taken with notable stoicism. It is as if having experienced asthma, he finds other pains and discomforts mild by comparison.

He has learned at an early age what a precarious, unpredictable thing life is—and how very vulnerable he is. He must be prepared always for the worst.

But the chief lesson is that life is quite literally a battle. And the test is how he responds, in essence whether he sees himself as a helpless victim or decides to fight back, whether he becomes, as Teedie was to say of a particular variety of desert bird, “extremely tenacious of life.”

Oftentimes it is a question of which parent is chosen to identify with and emulate.

In the history of asthma, among the most celebrated cases is that of the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), who thought his asthma, like his homosexuality, was rooted in the unconscious and was part of a price he had to pay for his creative gifts. “We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things,” Proust wrote, “but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in sleeplessness, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsy.... Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”

Some aspects of Proust’s case have a familiar ring. His mother, like Mittie Roosevelt, was a cultivated, sensitive woman. Being a Jew set her off from her Catholic husband and his background much as Mittie’s southern origins set her off from Theodore and the rest of the Roosevelts. Proust, like Teedie, had a younger brother, close in age, who was the stronger, more robust of the two. His father, however, unlike Theodore, was a distant and indifferent figure. As a child, Proust, also, had been considered too weak to live. His devotion to his mother was intense, overwhelming. Indeed, among those specialists who see asthma as a suppressed cry for the mother, Proust’s case is the classic example. “You demolish everything until I am ill again,” he once accused his mother, while on another occasion, he told her, “I’d rather have asthma and please you.”

Proust never saw himself as anything but a victim, Proust, sealed off in his cork-lined writing room, is the quintessential recluse. Following his mother’s death, he remained a semi-invalid, dying ultimately of respiratory complications.

Just as no two cases of asthma are ever exactly alike, so the response to the disease varies infinitely. In the end, it seems to depend on the individual. Many children “grow out” of it. For others it is a life sentence. Henry Hyde Salter’s prognosis was hardly encouraging. The asthmatic, he wrote, “knows that a certain percentage of his future life must be dedicated to suffering . . . and from many of the occupations of life he is cut off. . . his usefulness is crippled, his life marred. . . . The asthmatic is generally looked upon as an asthmatic for life.”

For Teedie, in some powerful way, father and the out of doors meant salvation, and Theodore, in his efforts to bring the shy child out of himself—in all the ways he encouraged confidence, gave diversion, companionship, set an example of strength—was, consciously or not, taking the best possible approach, given the circumstances. The goal, according to a treatise written a century later, is to make the child “a participant, not a spectator in his own care.” “I am to do everything for myself,” Teedie wrote proudly at the close of one of those days alone with his father.

As interesting perhaps as any line in the journal, in what it foreshadows, is one written at Nice, in which he reflects on a joyous day’s hiking. “It was,” he writes, “the first time I had walked up a hill of decent size for a long time and I felt quite refreshed.”

Walking—even a day of “severe walking”—was strongly recommended by Salter and other authorities, and horseback riding was considered the most beneficial exercise of all for asthmatics. Get action, Theodore had long preached. His beloved Bamie had been saved by the “movement cure” and by a doctor who believed in treating the patient as a whole being in mind and body.

“Organs are made for action . . .” Salter wrote; “they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well.”

CHAPTER FIVE
Metamorphosis

1

May 25, 1870

This morning we saw land of America and, swiftly coming on, passed Sandy Hook and went into the bay. New York!!! Hip! Hurrah! What a bustle we had getting off.

They were on home ground at last, back to aunts, uncles, cousins, servants (”all our friends”), and pink-faced, important Grandpa; back to the perpetual life and hubbub of the biggest, best city in the best country in the whole wide world; to traffic clogged to a standstill and the familiar New York smell of coal smoke and cooking and horses and hay and horse manure—with a damp, salt-air touch of the East River. The house on East 20th Street was found to be exactly as remembered. Life picked up with amazing ease, at about where it had left off—afternoon calls, teas, tutors, lessons, books, Father’s morning paper, Father’s office week, and those rectitudinous Roosevelt Sundays. There was talk of business, which was good, and of Grandfathers new summer house at Oyster Bay, Long Island. Over the back wall Mr. Goelet’s garden was in its springtime glory.

One bright day, Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux, came riding down Fifth Avenue in an open carriage, a real-life warrior from the Dakota prairies wearing a stovepipe hat. There was a clamor in the papers for an eight-hour day and talk of “the engineering wonder of the age,” the East River Bridge, which was finally under construction. One of its two colossal towers was to rise at the foot of Roosevelt Street.

A new experimental passenger tube, the first subway, had been opened downtown and the building boom uptown was thought to be “marvelous.” Change was the order of the day, as always in New York, and a year was a long time to have been absent.

Some of what had transpired in the interval was not so marvelous, to be sure. The panic in September had sent shock waves among the established, old families. Bad enough that a couple of conniving parvenus like Fisk and Gould could have caused it all, but must they remain outrageously vulgar, flaunting their money and political pull? What did it portend if such men could attain the pinnacles of financial power? The Gould-Fisk scheme to corner the gold market had nearly worked, and their crony Tweed, the new Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, the most conspicuously corrupt politician in anyone’s memory, was riding higher than ever. He owned the mayor, judges, editors, even some Republicans, as was noted sadly at the Union League. No decent man could enter public life any longer “without imminent danger of losing caste.”

So surely it was with sinking hearts that Theodore, brothers Cornelius and James Alfred, and their father received word that brother Rob would shortly announce for Congress on the Tammany ticket.

But only with the onset of summer did life seem suddenly to bear down heavily on Theodore and Mittie. July brought a murderous heat wave, among the worst on record, and from France, where they had left Bamie, came news of the calamitous war with Prussia, which was declared July 15. No actual fighting took place for several weeks and Bamie herself happened to be hugely enjoying the excitement—she would tell in later years how French troops went marching past her school windows singing—but for her father especially it was a time of exceeding tension and worry, a condition felt by the entire household and one not greatly helped by his own fathers insistence that he do something about the child’s safety before it was too late.

Further, in combination with all this—or possibly as a consequence—Teedie, who had been “peculiarly well” since the return from Europe, went into a sharp decline. His attacks resumed, coming so often now that Theodore and Mittie had to take turns rushing him off to some country place or watering spot—to Saratoga or Oyster Bay, a rented house at Spuyten Duyvil, a summer hotel at Richfield Springs. Theodore began to wear thin. “I am away with Teedie again much to my regret,” he told Bamie in an undated letter written from his father’s place on Long Island. “He had another attack, woke me up at night and last night to make a break, I took him to Oyster Bay. It used me up entirely to have another attack come so soon after the last. I know and appreciate all the mercies for which I should be thankful but at the moment it seems hard to bear.”

To drop everything and leave with the boy at any emergency was becoming very difficult for him, he told her in another letter. He had much too much to do.

On August 10 Mittie wrote to Bamie, “Teedie had an attack of asthma on last Sunday night and Papa took him to Oyster Bay where he passed Monday night and Tuesday night. Of course, Teedie was in ecstasies of delight...”

By the time the fighting broke out in France and the vaunted armies of Napoleon III began their spectacular collapse, Bamie was across the Channel safe in the care of Uncle Jimmie Bulloch, her exodus having been arranged by Theodore through American friends in Paris named Lamson. It had gone smoothly according to plan. “Do not let them spoil you in Liverpool,” he chided her; he had troubles enough as it was. Her mother and Teedie were off to “take the waters” at Richfield Springs, for the second or third time, accompanied now by Uncle Hilborne.

“Your mother came back . . .” Theodore reported two weeks later, “Teedie still suffering... and they returned leaving me once more a bachelor.”

Two days later at Richfield Springs, on a Sunday, Teedie had another attack. “The spasm yielded,” Mittie reported, “. . . but [he] passed a wheezy miserable night and I have concluded to leave . . . for New York tomorrow, with the feeling that this last week Teedie has lost all he gained . . . and the sulfur baths and water proved no good.”

“I have just received bad news from your mother,” Theodore wrote to Bamie. “She returns with Teedie asthmatic again. His attacks have been more frequent. . . . All say that Denver City would be just the air for Teedie, but until he is older this seems impossible.”

That was on September 6, when his patience was all but gone. How soon afterward he and Teedie had their talk is not known, but probably it was soon. As Mittie later recounted the scene, he called the boy to him and addressed him as Theodore.

“Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.” He must build himself up by his own effort. “You must make your body.” It was a summons and the offer of a counterpoise, a way, the one way, to right his own balance.

“It is hard drudgery to make one’s body,” the father said, “but I know you will do it.”

And with that, allegedly, the sorry little specimen threw back his head and declared he would do it.

Instead of Denver City he got Wood’s Gymnasium, Mittie accompanying him—and Elliott as well—for daily workouts under the direction of Mr. John Wood, whose young protégés included Sloanes and Goelets and Vanderbilts and whose tutelage was claimed to be as beneficial to character as to physique. She never missed a session and a more unlikely presence in a gymnasium is hard to picture. She sat alone patiently on a large settee against one wall, intent on every part of the program. Standing in front of a weight machine, body forward, head and chest up, arms out, Teedie pulled and hauled, hoisted the weights up from the floor, then let them ride slowly back down again, time after time. He and Ellie hammered away at punching bags, swung dumbbells, spent hours straining at the horizontal bars. After about three months of this, Mittie had John Wood equip their own back piazza with all the required apparatus and it was thus, under her direction (as Wood later acknowledged), that the famous family gymnasium came into being.

As the weeks and months rolled by—as winter came and Bamie returned from Liverpool, as Uncle Rob went off to his newly won seat in Congress, as a besieged and starving Paris at last surrendered to the Germans—Teedie plugged away at his dreary regimen. His sisters would later write that among the most vivid of all childhood memories was the sight of him out on the piazza struggling between the horizontal bars, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”

Long years afterward, reflecting on what had been on his mind at this critical juncture, he would tell a friend of certain lines from the Browning poem “The Flight of the Duchess” that had brought him up short. The passage described the overbred son of a noble line—”. . . the pertest little ape I That ever affronted human shape.”

So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it; . . .
And chief in the chase his neck he perilled,
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;. . .

Suddenly, as he told the friend, he saw himself for what he was—an affront to human shape, boneless, all speed, no strength: a pretender. It was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshiped if he made no effort to be like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else.

The sting of the poem was something quite different from and beyond a command to “make” a body. Now shame entered in. He felt “discovered.”

Yet for all he put himself through as time passed, lifting and hauling on weights, his progress was pathetic. He remained embarrassingly undersized and underweight, a scrawny frame with stick arms and stick legs. If he dared venture beyond the family circle, he counted on Ellie to be his protector in case of trouble. Two years later, traveling to Maine for his asthma, but alone, he would be humiliated by a couple of boys of about his own age who, to pass the time during a ride in a stagecoach, decided to make life miserable for him. When at length he tried to fight back, he found either one could handle him with easy contempt, to use his own words, “. . . handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet... prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”

In overall health, he does appear to have improved somewhat, enough at least to lend encouragement. How much direct encouragement he was getting from Theodore, he never said. He did once remark later on, however, that his father “used now and then to say that he hesitated whether to tell me something favorable because he did not think a sugar diet was good for me.”

The attention Theodore devoted to Bamie, meantime—now that she was back in his “possession”—was striking.

Saturday became their special day together. Nothing was allowed to interfere with “our Saturdays,” she remembered. They would spend the morning on horseback in Central Park, usually dropping in at the Museum of Natural History, which was then temporarily located in the old arsenal just inside the park at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue. Or they might stop at one of his Children’s Aid Society schools. “We would get home for lunch very late,” she wrote, “and as a rule would find whoever was most interesting at the moment in New York lunching with us.” In the afternoon they would go for a drive or visit a hospital. He was exhausting, she said proudly. At the day’s end she was a “complete wreck—deeply attached to my father, but worn to a shred.”

In Mittie’s absences, Bamie ran the house for him. “Order it [dinner] at prompt quarter before seven,” reads a note he left her. He was expecting guests.

Menu as usual—raw oysters if small, soup, oyster coquilles, saddle of venison if in the house, or turkey, croquettes, quail, lobster salad, cheese and crackers, candied fruit, ice cream of course. Give John [the new butler] the wines and tell him and Mary [Ann] that I wish everything nice.

Her life was increasingly determined by such directives, and to her very great satisfaction. Nothing pleased her—nothing pleased any of them—so much as pleasing him. And he appears to have resolved that if she was to have none of her mothers beauty, not a trace of that porcelain delicacy deemed so essential by fashion and that he himself prized so in Mittie, if she was to be homely and handicapped and still have any kind of life, then she must make up for it in other ways. She would know how to manage, to take charge, and be everlastingly useful.

The story among Roosevelts of later generations was that she actually took over from her mother and ran the household from the time she was about fifteen, but this simply was not so. It was only that she seemed to be running everything, she was so capable and eager to cope. Spinsterhood seemed her certain destiny, but one could also be a force in this world, like Theodore’s fellow toiler in philanthropy, Louisa Schuyler, who, as was said, had the willpower of a captain of industry.

2

Alone of the family the boy had his alternative world, his own dark continent to explore.

Once, as a very small child, he had seen the face of a fox in a book and declared it was the face of God. Father, he said, had the head of a lion. He drew endless numbers of mice and birds, filled notebooks with written descriptions of ants, spiders, beetles, dragonflies, all such entries being “gained by observation.”

Nor was he ever anything but serious about his “career” in science, as he called it, the beginnings of which could be traced, he later said, to a dead seal he had seen laid out on a plank in a market on Broadway. He seems to have been about seven or eight at the time, which, interestingly, would correspond with his anguish over the “zeal” in the Madison Square Church.

“That seal,” he later wrote, “filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure.” He asked where it had been killed and was told in the harbor. He kept coming back to see it, day after day as long as it was there. He brought a pocket rule and measured it. He wanted to buy it for his “museum,” but wound up getting the skull only—a memorable incident, since it was one of the few times in his life when he had not gotten what he wanted.

Dozens of books had passed through his hands, beginning with David Livingstone’s mammoth Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, discovered when he was too young to read and barely big enough to lift it, but could gaze by the hour at the pictures. He liked the second part of Robinson Crusoe for its account of wolves, and then with the books of Captain Mayne Reid he was borne off spellbound to the Great West.

Captain Reid was among the most popular authors of the day and especially with boys. (Other contemporary devotees included young Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.) An Irishman, Reid had exchanged the life of a tutor for that of trapper and trader on the American frontier and his books—The Boy Hunters, Hunter’s Feast, The Scalp Hunters—were rollicking adventures, full of action, violence, and grand-scale visions of the out of doors. God was in nature—a force—and nowhere so plainly as beyond the Mississippi.

Unroll the worlds map [begins The Scalp Hunters], and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild West—away towards the setting sun—away beyond many a far meridian. . . . You are looking upon a land . . . still bearing the marks of the Almighty mold, as upon the morning of creation. A region, whose every object wears the impress of God’s magic. His ambient spirit lives in the silent grandeur of its mountains, and speaks in the roar of its mighty rivers. A region redolent of romance—rich in the reality of adventure.

Reid’s world was all that the boy longed for, one of great manly quests and boundless inspiriting freedom. In such settings, with such a life, one could be reborn, made brave, made strong. He read “enthralled,” curled in a chair or standing on one leg, “like a pelican in the wilderness,” the other leg raised and propped, foot on thigh, to make a bookrest.

What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch fires [says one hero] I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life.... My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied my eyes reached to a more distant vision.

Along with his rollicking yarns Reid regularly provided descriptions of birds, animals, plant life, quantities of geology, geography—most of it quite accurate. A story suddenly stops so a Darwinian “chain of Destruction” may be dramatized. (A tarantula is killed by a hummingbird, which is eaten by a chameleon, which is done in by a scorpion lizard, which is swallowed by a snake, which falls prey to a kite; then the kite is the victim of an eagle and the eagle is shot by the boy-hero who is the “last link.”) Even proper zoological names may appear in the midst of a story, as though the reader will of course wish to know such things.

About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage (Artemisia tridentata), a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse (Tetrao urophasi), the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.

On the heels of Reid’s books came those of J. G. Wood, an entertaining English writer who specialized in natural history, and by age ten or so, even before the trip to Europe, he was led by Uncle Hilborne, “my father in Science,” to On the Origin of Species. Later, staying with the Wests in Philadelphia, he would report to Theodore, “I go to the Academy every spare moment and am allowed to have the run of all the 38,000 books in its library. They have got quite a number of specimens, also.” Mittie, writing from a summer house at Dobbs Ferry, tells how Hilborne “talked science and natural history and medicine, etc., with Teedie, who craves knowledge.”

Summers now—those of ’71 and ’72, when Theodore rented a succession of country houses in the hills along the Hudson—were very near to paradise for the boy. No letup in lessons was permitted. (”I study English, French, German, and Latin now,” he wrote to Aunt Annie.) It was also a rule that at the dinner table they speak only French. But the drudgery of weights and parallel bars could be replaced with riding, swimming, running barefoot; and nothing, not even French, could offset the ecstasy of open fields and living things. As a family they all adored the country. Summers, Conie wrote, were “the special delight of our lives.” But Teedie led “a life apart,” his love of nature becoming a passion and one which they all had to learn to live with. There were snapping turtles tied to laundry tubs, a litter of newborn squirrels, their eyes still closed, that needed feeding with a syringe three times daily. A tree frog positioned beside the lamp on the parlor table “proved a remarkable fly catcher,” and when Mittie found he was storing dead mice in the icebox and ordered that they be thrown in the garbage, he despaired over “the loss to science.”

His reading became steadily more ambitious. He moved on to the works of Audubon and those of Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost American naturalist of the day (Catalogue of North American Birds, Review of American Birds, North American Reptiles, Catalogue of North American Mammals).

The first encounter with actual wilderness came the summer of ’71, in August, when Theodore initiated an expedition to the Adirondacks. Their destination was Paul Smith’s, on Lake St. Regis, a favorite summer hostel among well-to-do sportsmen and their families.

They all went—in true Roosevelt fashion, in a swarm—Theodore, Mittie, and the four children, Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Laura, Uncle Hilborne, Aunt Susy, and Cousin West. Theodore packed a copy of The Last of the Mohicans to read by the campfire after dark and he, Teedie, Ellie, Uncle Hilborne, and Cousin West, separating from the others (who happily remained at Paul Smith’s), spent three days roughing it “in the bush.” So at long last Teedie could write from personal experience of “those grand and desolate wilds,” write pages in his own journal that might have been penned by Captain Reid himself.

We wandered about and I picked up a salamander (Diemictylus irridescens). I saw a mouse here which from its looks I should judge to be a hamster mouse (Hesperomys myoides). We saw a bald-headed eagle (Halietus leucocephalus) sailing over the lake.

From the Adirondacks they went to the White Mountains, where the three boys climbed Mount Lafayette, and at no point in the journal for all the month of August is there even one mention of asthma.

That fall, at the American Museum of Natural History, it was officially recorded that the year’s acquisitions (in addition to a human hand bestowed by Mr. P. T. Barnum) included one bat, twelve mice, a turtle, the skull of a red squirrel, and four birds’ eggs presented by Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

A year later he was receiving lessons in taxidermy from a striking old man who had been the great Audubon’s own “stuffer.” John G. Bell, who kept a musty little taxidermy shop on Broadway, had been to Dakota Territory with Audubon and to the upper reaches of the Yellowstone. It was for him that Audubon named the Vireo belli. Once on the Yellowstone he had actually saved Audubon’s life by grabbing a rifle and shooting a wounded bull buffalo that was within feet of trampling Audubon to death. The boy would remember Bell for the rest of his life as a tall, white-haired figure in a black frock coat, “straight as an Indian,” who had done “very valuable work for science.”

Then, at a stroke, the summer of 1872, he was given a gun and a large pair of spectacles and nothing had prepared him for the shock, for the infinite difference in his entire perception of the world about him or his place in it.

The gun was a gift from Papa—a 12-gauge, double-barreled Frenchmade (Lefaucheux) shotgun with a lot of kick and of such simple, rugged design that it could be hammered open with a brick if need be, the ideal gun for an awkward, frequently absent-minded thirteen-year-old. But blasting away with it in the woods near Dobbs Ferry he found he had trouble hitting anything. More puzzling, his friends were constantly shooting at things he never even saw. This and the fact that they could also read words on billboards that he could barely see, he reported to his father, and it was thus, at summer’s end, that the spectacles were obtained.

They transformed everything. They “literally opened an entirely new world to me,” he wrote years afterward, remembering the moment. His range of vision until then had been about thirty feet, perhaps less. Everything beyond was a blur. Yet neither he nor the family had sensed how handicapped he was. “I had no idea how beautiful the world was . . . I could not see, and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.”

How such a condition could possibly have gone undetected for so long is something of a mystery, but once discovered it did much to explain his awkwardness and the characteristic detached look he had, those large blue eyes “not looking at anything present.”

3

It was the world of birds—birds, above all—that burst upon him now, upstaging all else in his eyes, now that he could actually see them in colors and in numbers beyond anything he had ever imagined.

Normally, with summer ended and city life resumed, he would have had to wait until spring to return to the woods, but that same fall, in October 1872, the family set off for a second sojourn abroad, an even longer tour than the last, beginning with a winter on the Nile. So by mid-December, with gun and spectacles, he was tramping the shores of the “great and mysterious river,” knocking birds from the sky as rapidly as he knew how, happy as he had ever been.

The birdlife of the Nile is extraordinary. The river is a flyway and a winter haven for thousands upon thousands of birds. The air is thick with them—larks, doves, herons, kingfishers, and tremendous flocks of snow-white cattle egrets, which are called ibises locally, or “the farmers’ friends”; wild ducks of a dozen different varieties, geese and vultures and hawks, and magnificent black-and-yellow kites that sail like hawks against the sky, their wings golden in the sunshine. And he could see it all—”quite well through my spectacles.” At sundown once, outside Cairo, he watched for nearly two hours as tens, then hundreds of “ibises” came in to roost in the treetops of a distant island in the river, until the trees were “whitened with immense multitudes.” In an hour’s time another day he counted fifteen different species of birds.

But seldom was he content merely to look. As a serious scientist, he must collect, and from the day the family expedition set forth, heading “up south” on the river, the collecting—the killing—commenced in earnest. He downed his first specimen, a warbler, the first bird he had ever killed, December 13, the first morning on the Nile, a few miles above Cairo. He next very proudly “blew a chat to pieces” and in the days following, combing the riverbanks, wandering through groves of date palms, he fired away at just about anything in sight, killed a wagtail, a pelican, hawks, larks, doves, then an ibis. Christmas morning he was given another shotgun with which he found he could bring down five starlings with a single shot.

Theodore allowed he, too, had caught the spirit, so intense was the boy’s pleasure. Theodore seems to have shown no prior enthusiasm for killing anything. He was the sort of father who, at breakfast, would rescue a yellow jacket from the honeypot, cup it in his hands and carry it out the door to freedom. But now it was “Father and I” who “sallied out with our guns,” day after day, leaving the rest of the family on board the great Nile houseboat, or dahabeah, which Theodore had chartered for the trip. “Father and I went out shooting and procured eighteen birds,” reads one entry. On another foray he “procured” a grosbeak, a sand lark, four chats, a crested lark, a ringed plover, and a dove. Writing to sister Anna, Mittie described how at Thebes Teedie came to her with “eyes sparkling with delight”—a dead crane in his arms. It was, he noted, the biggest thing he had as yet killed.

No one appears to have objected to any of this. To him it was all “splendid sport.” Egypt was like another long summer of freedom, of brilliant skies and open space. Lessons in French and English taught by Bamie occupied only a few hours a day. Father was a steady companion.

Again his asthma vanished. He had never known such a winter, he wrote. To look over the desert gave one the same feeling as looking over the Great Prairies of America, said the boy who had never been west of Philadelphia but who knew his Cooper and Captain Mayne Reid. He was Natty Bumppo on the Nile. Or Rube Rawlings, Captain Reid’s version of Natty. He was Humboldt on the Orinoco, seeing new worlds with the eyes of science. Or John James Audubon, who in his time may have killed more varieties of birds than any man who ever lived.

Sky and river and birds became his element. Work, his “serious work,” was what gave the journey its “chief zest.” Only on Sundays was he required to put up his gun and abstain from the assault.

And in all there was something faintly comic about him. He had, as would be said, a kind of headlong, harum-scarum quality that was more Don Quixote than Humboldt. Bamie, remembering the big spectacles and the great gun slung over one shoulder, described how he would charge off astride a small donkey, “ruthlessly” in chase of “whatever object he had in view.” Appearing suddenly in the midst of other mounted tourists, his donkey out of control, he could be “distinctly dangerous,” as he and his gun bounced every which way.

Theodore wrote of plunging after him through a bog (both were on foot in this instance), doing his all to keep up” at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours . . . I felt I must keep up with Teedie.”

The advent of gun and spectacles, moreover, had coincided with marked physical changes. He was rapidly growing out of his clothes. He was suddenly all wrists and anklebones, unkempt and shaggy, wearing his hair “à-la-mop,” as he said. River mud clung to shoes and trousers. “The sporting is injurious to my trousers,” he explained in mock annoyance.

The return to the dahabeah at the end of each day’s hunt, game bag full, was his chance to shine. He performed right on deck, in the still, hot afternoons, his taxidermy kit—knives, scissors, arsenic, tweezers, needle, thread, cotton padding, an old toothbrush—spread before him. He worked in the shade of a long, sun-bleached canopy, skinning the day’s kill, surrounded usually by odd members of the family, guests, or some of the boat’s crew.

The procedure was the same for each bird, large or small. It was placed on its back on a clean towel or sheet of paper. He opened the beak, put in a bit of cotton padding, then bound the beak tight with thread. The anus also was packed with a bit of cotton, to keep it from excreting blood and excrement and soiling the feathers. Then he parted the feathers from the hollow of the breast to the anus and with his knife made an incision, being extremely careful not to bear down any more than necessary. With his fingers he then began slowly to peel the skin away from the body, again working with the greatest care, so as not to tear the skin. The legs had next to be cut away, at the first joint, then the end of the spine had to be severed, again very carefully, leaving all tail feathers intact. If he became too hurried, if he tore the skin or flooded the feathers with blood, the job would be ruined.

The wings were cut with scissors near the body. Then the skin from the skull had to be peeled back with utmost caution and particularly around the eyes, the skin being pulled away up to the beak, at which point he would cut the neck at the base of the skull. This done he could clean out the brain, tongue, and palate, then pull the skin back over the skull. And once all that was accomplished he had only to skin the legs, wings, and tail, each in itself a ticklish process requiring equal care and patience.

It was, plainly, work neither for the squeamish nor for anyone accustomed to tossing things off in half-hearted fashion. Many adults might find it beyond them, even as spectators.

Once, dissecting a kestrel, he discovered in its crop (to his utter delight) the remains of a lark, a lizard, and several beetles.

Neither the game bag nor the taxidermy kit nor he himself smelled any too good apparently. It was, remembered Bamie, “to the discomfort of everyone connected with him” that he carried forth with his new passion.

4

“The traveler is a perfect king in his boat,” explained Lloyd’s guidebook to the Nile, and large, bearded Theodore Roosevelt might have served as the model. When not off with Teedie chasing after birds, he liked to sit on deck smoking his cigar or reading aloud to the assembled group from a heavy volume of Egyptian history. It was he who organized picnics ashore and planned their outings to the great monuments. Sundays he served as pastor to his fold, preaching on deck. Watching the shoreline slide by, he found that “everything carries me back to old Bible times.” Like countless other travelers on the river, he seems to have been filled with a sense of the everlastingness of life. These were the people who had held the Jews in bondage, he said, and they looked no different, he imagined, from what they had then. “We have even seen the magicians with their snakes in the public streets,” he wrote to Anna Gracie, “taking quietly scorpions and cobras out of their shirt bosoms, and the old bricks that gave the Jews so much worry are still made of mud and straw now lying on the bank as I look up.”

Once, in Cairo, Teedie had noted how “a beautiful Circassian lady, inmate of a rich man’s harem, was looking (with veil dropped) out of a window above us . . . and appeared to have no objection to being openly admired by Father.”

Mittie, from what she and others wrote of the journey, may be pictured rising early each day to get the morning air, a slim, youthful woman in white, lovely as the morning, and tiny beneath the sweep of canopy. Temperatures by midday were in the high seventies, mornings and evenings were more like October, and though her dyspepsia caused her to feel “pretty bad” at times, her spirits were high. The heavenly air and sunshine, the slow lulling rhythm of their progress on the river, stirred a sensual joy in the elements and in her own being. She relished the privacy and comfort of the boat, the “open air life with nothing to do,” “the splendid sun.” Theodore questioned how such advanced people as those of the ancient kingdoms could have worshiped birds and wolves. Mittie wrote, “In such a climate as this, I do not wonder that they became sun worshippers.”

As a way to travel there was really nothing like it. Henry Adams, who was also “doing” the Nile that winter in a dahabeah, said he had never known until then what luxury was. To Mittie it was the ultimate departure from life as usual. She was the Roosevelt who knew how to relax; the hours of peace and quiet, the service on board, suited her exactly. “The children have gone to bed,” she begins a letter about ten one evening. “I am seated in the little salon of our dahabeah. The door is open which leads to our deck, and by the lamp which is on the table there I can see Ibrahim, our waiter, ironing some of our linen. . . . Some of his front teeth are gone, but I love him still.”

The boat, the Aboul Irdan (Ibis in English), had a crew of thirteen, not counting the captain and steersman, a “first-class cook” and his assistant, plus two servants. As specified in the contract, it was well supplied with “everything (excepting wines and liquors) necessary for the comfort of the passengers.” Teedie describe it as “the nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place you ever saw.” Three meals daily were served in a paneled dining salon. There were staterooms for everyone, bath, divans on deck.

In total, in two months’ time, they traveled nearly twelve hundred miles on the river, from Cairo to the First Cataract at Aswan and back again, and along with climate and scenery and monumental ruins, they enjoyed a very social time, since they were actually traveling in a small convoy with two other parties. Four young Harvard men—Nathaniel Thayer, Augustus Jay, Francis Merriam, and Harry Godey—were aboard the dahabeah Rachel. Mr. and Mrs. Smith Clift of New York, with their daughters Edith and Elizabeth, were on the Gazelle.

Because of Egypt’s prevailing northerly winds, progress southbound, upriver on the Nile, was good most of the time. With sufficient wind they were under sail day and night. (It was also specified in the contract that day and night “one of the crew shall at all times of sailing hold the rope or sheet that is attached to each sail.”) Those times when the wind suddenly dropped, the river would take hold. “Sometimes we sail head foremost,” wrote Conie to her friend Edie Carow, “and sometimes the current turns us all the way around . . .” On days when there was no wind at all, the choices were to wait at anchor near shore, accept a tow from a steam tug, or start “tracking,” the immemorial system whereby the crew went wading ashore to drag the boat forward.

Initially, it had been suggested that a steam tug be hired at Cairo to tow the whole convoy of Americans to Aswan, but the Roosevelts declined, “as we go for the entirely different life,” Mittie explained. On the return trip they could ride with the current.

To the children, for the rest of their lives it would always be “that wonderful winter” on the Nile. “Our life on board I cannot describe,” wrote Ellie; “it is lazy I know and yet I have not a minute to spare.” Conie recalled “an absolute sense of well being”; Bamie, the “golden sunshine with never a moment’s rain.”

They were all three years older than they had been the first time abroad. It was not Teedie alone who was changing; they all were. Bamie, who at Vienna in another few months would make the first of her several debuts, turned eighteen at Aswan, an event celebrated with a family expedition by moonlight to the island of Philae. It had been discovered that she too was painfully nearsighted and like Teedie she was fitted with spectacles, but so great was her fathers power over her that when he said—in jest presumably—that he had no wish to present a daughter to society who wore such things, she put them away and refused ever to wear them.

She sits with him in a studio portrait made at about this point in her life, the only photograph we know for which he posed with any one child. It is in the classic Victorian father-daughter mode. There are yards of damask drapery, a tasseled bell cord, a pedestal, a painted backdrop of a garden wall. She has a footstool and sits hands in lap. Her feathered hat and tailored jacket, the large bow at her neck, are the height of fashion, and her small figure, for all that conceals it, is plainly that of a young woman. He studies her from behind, one elbow on the pedestal, only his head and upper torso revealed, which is what makes the picture so interesting. Father is seen quite literally on a pedestal, his pensive, adoring gaze fixed forever on the focal point of the arrangement, her plain, pale, but somehow very determined little face.

She was interested, very interested, in the Harvard foursome who came aboard to visit time after time, but then she realized all at once that it was Mittie they came to see; it was her “darling little mother” who so fascinated them, just as later in Europe Mittie would be taken for her sister, her younger sister.

“Still, we all became devoted friends,” she would recall by way of dismissing the incident, yet for her to have harbored no resentment, no jealously toward her mother would have been nearly inhuman, and one day her own son would confirm that she was in fact quite jealous of Mittie through much of her youth.

Her duties as tutor to the younger three were assumed without complaint. It was an effort, she said, that “taught me more than I had ever learned before . . . it did make us work, and that was what Father wished. . . .”

Elliott, still the larger, more robust of the two brothers, was an ingratiating youngster, as naturally sociable, open-faced, and now as carefully combed and particular about his appearance as Teedie was the opposite. He seemed to have little of Teedie’s hunger for attention. Conversation, friends, came easily. He loved to sing and to write nonsense verse and was good at both:

There was an old fellow named Teedie,
Whose clothes at best looked so seedy
That his friends in dismay
Hollered out, “Oh! I say!”
At this dirty old fellow named Teedie.

His gift from Papa at Christmas was a rowboat, by which he put off from the dahabeah to wander alone over the river at will, disturbing neither man nor beast so far as we know.

Possibly the most changed of all the children was Corinne, who at eleven was an infant no more, but a pert, unmistakably female little presence, quick to learn, quick to laugh or cry over not very much, yet sufficiently mature to be moved both by the majesty of Karnak and the “mystic” face of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson too was on the Nile that same season, and when, at Rhoda, he and his daughter anchored close by the Roosevelts, Theodore at once took his four to meet him. Later Emerson and his daughter, Ellen, returned the visit and Ellen in a letter has left us one of the rare observations on the children written by somebody outside the family. “Enchanting children,” she called them, “healthy, natural well-brought-up, and with beautiful manners.”

New Year’s Eve Theodore organized a party on deck that the children remembered as the high point of the trip. They were anchored at Minya, four dahabeahs tied up in the dark, another boat, Waterlily, with some people named Waitman, having joined the flotilla. With the newcomers, the Clift family, the Harvard men, and the Roosevelts there were fifteen to twenty people by the time everybody assembled. Theodore and Bamie made eggnog and young Francis Merriam started off the singing with something called “She’s Naughty but So Nice.” They did “Paddy, Come Over the Hill” and “Clochette, Clochette, She Was a Sad Coquette” and “Old Folks at Home”:

All up and down the whole creation,
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for the old plantation,
And for the old folks at home.

Champagne was uncorked at midnight and space was cleared for a Virginia reel. “Mamma joined,” wrote Conie, “and Father danced with Mr. Clift, he, ‘Papa,’ acting as a lady—’rather a large one, was he not?’”

But nearing Cairo on the return voyage, Theodore became downcast and sentimental. The boat must soon be turned over to other travelers who would neither know nor care anything about the times they had passed there. The boat was “not to be our home but only one more step on our journey of life.”

The picture is of a family strangely and most contentedly adrift, riding the timeless river, as in some dreamy romantic nineteenth-century painting, an incongruous Stars and Stripes luffing above a huge brown sail. It was a time of transition, as they all appreciated. Their life as a family was about to change dramatically; everything was to be different henceforth, something Theodore felt most acutely.

His own father was dead. Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, “merchant of the old school” (as said The New York Times), had “passed from the scene” July 17,1871. The loss to the family, their grief, had been profound. The old man had seemed inviolable, an institution unto himself, as a neighbor wrote. But with the estate settled, Theodore had been made a very rich man. Though the total left by his father has never been determined for certain, it appears to have been somewhere between $3 million and $7 million, which means Theodore’s share would not have been less than $1 million ($10 million or more in present-day dollars).

A fortune had come into his hands at what was the height of the postwar boom and this Egyptian winter was only among the immediate, more obvious consequences. (Such travel was “horribly expensive,” as Henry Adams had discovered. In two months Theodore spent something over $2,000, or about five times what the average American family had to live on for a year.) Of far greater consequence had been a decision to give up the house on East 20th Street and build anew uptown. Theodore and his brother James Alfred had bought adjoining lots on the south side of 57th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, which would put them two blocks from Central Park, in the heart of what was becoming “the” section of town. Theodore was brimming with enthusiasm for the project. He and James Alfred had decided on adjoining houses. Their architect was Russell Sturgis, whose Gothic country estates were all the rage. Plans were drawn, approved, construction begun. It was to be no mere brownstone this time. Indeed, little would be spared in the way of expense. All the principal woodwork and furniture, for example, were being custom made in Philadelphia, after designs by still another fashionable architect, Frank Furness.

To uproot everyone from East 20th Street after so many years was no light decision, obviously, but probably a move somewhere would have been forced upon them in any event—with or without their new fortune—for the uptown tide was running strong.

Everything near 20th Street was turning commercial. Union Square was being overrun by the needle trades. The stately old Roosevelt house on Union Square had already been torn down to make way for a sewing-machine factory. Lord & Taylor was moving to new quarters at Broadway and 20th Street, less than a block from Theodore’s front door.

It was because the new house would not be ready until summer that Theodore had planned such an extended stay abroad. After Egypt, the family would tour the Holy Land, then stop in Vienna. By May they were to reach Dresden, where the youngest three were to be placed in the care of a German family, to be tutored in German for a few months. Mittie and Bamie would go on to Paris and Carlsbad, meantime, and he would return to New York to see to business and the final stages of the new house. Lucy Sorrel Elliott and her children—cousins Johnny and Maud—were living in Dresden temporarily, so such an arrangement seemed eminently sensible.

“If one allowed himself to dwell upon the moral to be drawn from all our surroundings here,” Theodore wrote near the end of their time on the Nile, “it would not be enlivening. Our gayest parties are made up to visit tombs .. . of those who have passed away centuries ago and whose names even are now unknown. . . . It is more painful to reflect upon the people gone than even the relics of their greatness.”

His father had died at the age of seventy-seven. He was now fortyone. His fathers dream of a permanent tribal enclave in the vicinity of Union Square and 20th Street had lasted all of twenty years. ”One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.”

But what chance he had for extended reverie seems open to question, given the activities of his older son the nearer they drew to Cairo and journeys end. The “collecting” reached a fever pitch during their last weeks on the river—sixteen pigeons one day, a peeweet, a zick-zack, two snipes, and eleven pigeons on another, never a day but Sunday when the gun ceased blasting. It must have seemed at times as if there were a war raging amid the palms, for the boy was a poor shot, missing many more times than he hit. Some days he hit nothing at all.

The grand total of birds killed during the two months came to something between a hundred and two hundred. He really did not know for certain. He had lost count.

PART TWO

CHAPTER SIX
Uptown

1

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER of 1873, alone in New York, Theodore kept steadily on the move. It was his way of fighting loneliness, he said, though the impression is of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. “You know I never approved of rusting out,” he wrote Bamie, which sounds more like him.

The “perpetual rush” of his day began at six in the morning and seldom ended before midnight. The once leisurely pace at Roosevelt and Son was a thing of the past. Orders for plate glass were pouring in and particularly from Chicago, where a new city was being built in the aftermath of the Great Fire. But there were, besides, questions to be settled pertaining to Roosevelt investments and Roosevelt properties. People like Louisa Schuyler came to discuss further good works, others to talk of business schemes needing Roosevelt money. His museums, the Children’s Aid Society, the Orthopedic Hospital, all suddenly required his attention, while work on the new house demanded that he look in there at least once a day, usually first thing in the morning.

He was staying at the Union League Club. Evenings he dined with friends; weekends, whenever possible, he went to the country. One letter mentions an “unexpectedly pleasant” visit with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish at his home in Garrison; in another he reports on a dinner across the river from Dobbs Ferry, “after which we took our cigars on the edge of the Palisades and enjoyed the last shadows of the setting sun.” He went cruising on Long Island Sound with the Aspinwalls on their yacht Day Dream. He bought an expensive new saddle horse named Fritz of which he was inordinately proud and a “very stylish” new T-cart for drives in the park. “Fritz goes beautifully,” he reported, “and it is glorious to be able to go into the country at once from our door . . .”

Seeing the finished house for the first time, he had been astonished by its size and beauty, astonished and tremendously pleased. There was no better-built house in New York, he declared. When he noticed that the architect had included imitation oak beams—beams done with plaster—in the ceiling of the front hall, he ordered that the ceiling be torn down. It “seemed hard to destroy so much beautifully finished work,” he explained to Mittie, but he knew how dissatisfied she would be with anything artificial. There would be real beams instead.

“I can see all who pass in Fifth Avenue nicely from your room,” he told Bamie, “and just came in time to save a bathtub from going, as originally intended, into your closet.”

Farther uptown, on the west side of Central Park at 77th Street, the new American Museum of Natural History was under construction. For the moment it was only a huge hole in the ground for one wing—this in the center of acres of mud and squatters’ shacks—but the plan was for a great red-brick fortress, going on and on, nearly Egyptian in scale, to house one of the most valuable scientific collections in the world. The architect was Calvert Vaux, who, with Frederick Law Olmsted, had laid out Central Park. Theodore, as a member of the committee for plans, had become familiar with every detail. The final complex was to cover fifteen acres, fill a space three times larger than the British Museum. Plate glass for windows and showcases, as it happens, was also to be supplied by Roosevelt and Son.

No other project so appealed to his pride, he wrote Mittie the day he inspected the site. He liked to imagine the value of such a collection for all those who, “like Teedie,” were in quest of scientific knowledge. If there was to be a monument to his own efforts on earth, to prove he had “done something” with his life, he wanted it to be this museum.

“I think without egotism this really would never have been carried through without my aid,” he told her.

His financial contribution to the project that year was $2,250, double what it had been before. When a $10 annual membership was organized, he and five other Roosevelts (brothers, cousins) were among the charter subscribers.

Sunday was his day to write letters. This period was the longest he and the family had been separated since the war and at times his concern for their well-being seems to have been no less than in those earlier years. (One letter is even mistakenly dated 1863.) Bamie was directed to “relieve your mother of every care possible.” Bamie must “bring her home able to undertake the cares of our large house.” Mittie was told to rest, to obey her diet, to avoid “indulgences,” to take every day at Carlsbad very seriously. Mittie must come home strong. “I am so anxious to see you home well, and so well that we will never be obliged to repeat this experiment.”

Her stay at the famous spa had been his idea. (”The more I think of it, the better I am pleased with my own self-denial.”) The regimen at Carlsbad, as he knew from her letters, was a far cry from their life on the Nile or at Vienna. She was living on zwieback and soft-boiled eggs and “nasty glasses” of mineral water, walking, reading, turning in no later than ten. His concern over “indulgences” must have struck her as mildly amusing.

But the main worry, as for so long, was Teedie. His asthma had returned almost from the moment they left the Nile, the first attack coming the Saturday night they reached Port Said after touring the Suez Canal. More attacks followed in the Holy Land, including a “bad” one. He was “very sick” with colic at Constantinople, “had the asthma” again on a cruise up the Danube. At Vienna he turned listless and gloomy. They were staying in the Grand Hotel, enjoying the best of everything. The city’s parks and gardens were in spring bloom. But the “big three” were preoccupied with things in which he could take no part. Theodore had been suddenly pressed into service as a substitute American commissioner for the Vienna Exposition; Bamie and her mother had been taken up by Viennese society, and were busy buying clothes, going to receptions and balls. To Teedie it was all “the most dreary monotony.”

In a letter to Theodore from Dresden, the boy asked forgiveness for his handwriting, since “the asthma had made my hand tremble awfully.” There were more attacks, violent headaches. Alarmed by what she heard, Mittie left Carlsbad for Dresden to find him wheezing badly and forced to sleep sitting up, as he had as a small child. What he needed, he told her, was a change of scene. So a few weeks later came word from the Swiss Alps that all was well. They were enjoying the “bluest of blue skies,” Mittie wrote. Teedie had “improved vastly,” Teedie “goes to bed well.”

In September when the terrible Panic of 1873 burst upon the country, Theodore was as incredulous as everyone else. There had been warnings and most notably a run on the Vienna bourse in May, at the time the Roosevelts were there. Some newspapers and financial specialists kept insisting the country was sound, even as railroads began to fail, that this was only another “Wall Street panic,” like that of 1869, and would soon pass. In fact, a great depression had begun, the worst of the century thus far, the causes of which were many and complex—the staggering costs of the Civil War and of the Franco-Prussian War, overspeculation in railroads, trade dislocations resulting from the opening of the Suez Canal, heavy borrowing to rebuild Chicago, too-easy credit, worldwide inflation. The heady postwar boom had ended with shattering finality. The suffering was to be widespread and of much longer duration than anyone as yet imagined.

It began in Philadelphia September 18 with the bankruptcy of Jay Cooke and Company. When the firm closed its doors shortly before eleven, it was as if the Bank of England had failed. In New York nearly forty banks and brokerage houses went under that same day. September 20 all trading was stopped, the Stock Exchange closed for ten days. “The failures continue in unheard-of numbers,” Theodore wrote Mittie from the quiet of his club. Banks were being mobbed. Henry Clews and Company, a Wall Street bastion, had gone down that afternoon (September 23). He pitied especially “poor Mr. Clews, who has made his business his life. He told me a short time since that he had not for years taken a holiday. . . . Now all. . . is swept away in a day.”

Mittie, again in Paris, wrote of feeling “very anxious” over the news from New York. “At supper last evening a note was handed [to me] telling of the suspension of three banks and [the] Union Trust Company.” But then this seems to have ended such distasteful topics. Their correspondence returns at once to private matters. She is buying china soap dishes for the new house and bolts of claret-colored cloth for new livery for the servants. He is hiring servants (a much larger staff will be needed). A marble mantelpiece has arrived; the new furnace is in and going “full blast.” A carpet she picked out earlier in Paris is in port. He has ordered gas fixtures that he hopes she will like and the old chandelier from the 20th Street library looks quite well, he thinks, in the room that is to be his study.

“I have left the billiard room without any chandelier at present,” he tells Bamie, “only side lights, so if you do find it will answer for dancing it will [not] be in your way.”

Everything on order from Philadelphia—furniture, woodwork, a huge hand-carved front staircase—was behind schedule. When the staircase arrived and was put in place, it missed its connection with the second floor by three feet. The architect had given the wrong measurements, with the result that the entire thing had to be taken out and remade.

The house was filled with ladders and workmen on October 5, the day Theodore moved in, and there was still considerable disorder and no front staircase when the family arrived on the Russia a month later to the day. But with Dora Watkins, Mary Ann, a footman named Frank, some four or five further additions to the “family below stairs,” including a Sophie, a Mary, a George, and a black groom named Davis, they moved in bag and baggage—”all the way up on 57th Street.” The new address was Number 6 West 57th Street.

A remark by Bamie years later that her mother’s European buying spree for the house “proved rather fatal to the family fortunes” would seem to have no basis in fact. Nothing—not the house or its furnishings or the panic—appears to have put the slightest dent in the family fortune. The one inconvenience suffered was the postponement of Bamie’s debut, which was to have taken place before Christmas. As it was, the party was given in January, and in the interim, to please her, Theodore arranged another dance in her honor in Philadelphia.

The house was a showplace, even by the extravagant standards being set in the vicinity along upper Fifth Avenue. There was no resemblance whatever to the house on East 20th Street. To move “uptown” was to move up in the world, but this was something more. The whole feeling was different, foreign. It was as if one had entered the domain of an altogether different family, another kind of people.

Rooms, hallways, mirrors, fireplaces, bookcases, furniture, everything was larger and infinitely more luxurious. There were tremendous mirrors everywhere, tasseled chandeliers, walls of glassed-in books, intricately carved sliding doors, paneled and tiled fireplaces, huge urns, inlaid woods, polished silver, Persian rugs on Persian rugs. East 20th Street had had a degree of restraint, even simplicity—or at least simplicity as understood by mid-Victorians. There the furniture had been largely the standard pieces for the standard domestic gentility. (Grandmamma Bulloch, it will be remembered, warned of “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.”) But the sumptuous pieces conceived by Furness were all one of a kind, all of rich inlaid woods and mighty in scale—great hand-carved, leather-upholstered, brass-studded dining-room chairs, heavy as thrones and broad enough to accommodate even the very largest of that era’s well-fed gentry; a bed for the master of the house and his lady that might have been commissioned for an oriental potentate.

No one knows what such things cost. A generation later they would be considered in “horrid taste,” “utterly ghastly,” and, except for the bed and one or two other pieces, they would be happily sold off for little or nothing. A generation after that each would be a rare and magnificent period piece.

Windows were few and heavily curtained, closing off the world beyond. On the top floor was a fully equipped gymnasium. (”We are going to have boxing lessons . . .” wrote Ellie; “it will be jolly fun.”) Space for Teedies museum was provided in the attic, his collection now greatly expanded by the birds from the Nile, each of which was to be properly identified with its Latin name on a little card printed in pink.

For Bamie’s “at home” debut, it is recorded, some five hundred invitations were sent, which gives an idea of how large a house it was.

How much of the interior look had been dictated by the architects, or to what degree it was expressive of Mittie or Theodore, is impossible to say. Nor is there any record of what the final bill came to. But it was the only time Theodore had everything built to order for him, and if, as he said, he expected to live out his days there, he obviously intended that no comforts be spared. Had his name not been Roosevelt, he might have been fairly accused of “ruinous display.”

To keep the two boys and Conie on an upward path that winter, he hired a new tutor, a young Harvard graduate named Arthur Cutler, in whose care Cousin West, the son of Theodore’s late brother Weir, was also placed. For several months, until Teedie began pulling ahead, the four youngsters worked at the same pace; but that summer—the summer of 1874—by which time Teedie was working six to eight hours a day at his studies, it was determined that he would be going on to college, whereas Ellie, most likely, would not. Teedie’s efforts under Cutler were directed exclusively to passing the entrance examination at Harvard, this choice having possibly been influenced by the four young men on the Nile, or, more likely, by Harvard’s preeminence in the field of natural science. Yale or Princeton would have been closer to home, Columbia closer still and there were family ties to Columbia. Harvard, however, produced men like Albert Bickmore, head of the Museum of Natural History. The whole approach to teaching the natural sciences had been transformed at Harvard by the late Louis Agassiz, whose son was curator of the new Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Harvard had broken all precedent and made a man of science its president, Charles Eliot, and included on its faculty such figures as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the geologist, and William James, both of whom, like Bickmore, had been star pupils of the great Agassiz.

To his charitable efforts Theodore gave more and more of himself all the while, as the depression worsened and increasing misery was to be found everywhere. A decade earlier his money had enabled him to miss the war and now, like most of the very rich, he and his sailed high above the panic, quite untouched by it in any material way. But as in the earlier national tragedy, he was incapable of detachment or of withholding his compassion. “All that gives me most pleasure in the retrospect,” he preached to his older son, “is connected with others, an evidence that we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.” He visited hospital wards, talked with the inmates of prisons, went into the slums to console and moralize. He urged the establishment of workhouses for vagrants. He toured the city’s dreadful asylums for the insane on Ward’s and Blackwell’s islands and was so sickened by what he saw that he led a delegation of city officials back to both places. In an insane time the plight of the insane especially became uppermost for him. He lobbied for better conditions and human care, for altogether different kinds of asylums, “where the patients could work out of doors, and gain strength and mental and physical health in useful occupations.”

He gave money, wrote letters, often working at his desk until two in the morning. Friends remarked at his energy and “industry.” Corinne, remembering all he managed to squeeze into a day, said he had the “power of being . . . focused.”

“Without his power of concentration and great physical endurance such a life would have been impossible,” said Louisa Schuyler. He made everything look easy, she said.

Together with Louisa Schuyler he tried to bring some system and order to the welter of charitable efforts going on in the city. They launched a new Bureau of Charities, the first of its kind, with Theodore as chairman, and enlisted the support of Charles Loring Brace, Abram Hewitt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and others. They decided to compile a list of all those on welfare in the city, something that had never been tried before, and in less than a month had ten thousand names. He was particularly alarmed, Theodore told reporters, by the hordes of begging children in the streets whose numbers were increasing daily.

But if the plight of the homeless and downtrodden was tugging him one way, the pleasures of his own extremely good fortune were certainly not going awasting. He embraced his heightened circumstances with open arms, living in style, living as never before, and apparently seeing nothing ambivalent or contradictory about that.

In the spring of 1874, a cornerstone ceremony was being planned for the Museum of Natural History. President Grant was to come on from Washington to do the honors and it was suggested that a silver trowel be specially made up by Tiffany. “My dear Mr. Haines,” wrote Theodore to a fellow member of the museum board, “by all means order the trowel, one must certainly have it and the President is entitled to a good one.”

And he seems to have taken much the same view concerning his own affairs—that he and his were also entitled to a good one, of most anything they wished. It was in these years of dreadful want that Theodore became a thoroughgoing sport, to borrow the word used by his older son in a later-day reminiscence. He was “the first American to drive four horses handsomely through New York—in style, in the good English style, with everything that belonged.” He enjoyed himself to the full—fine clothes, “meals with courses”—and a little more conspicuously every year. That “rich power of enjoyment of everything human” remembered by Charles Loring Brace now included his money as well.

One could be a moralist without being gloomy, one could work for the welfare of others without being an ascetic, his behavior seemed to say. He was “no ascetic,” declared Louisa Schuyler categorically and approvingly. To her, as to others, there was something wonderfully glamorous about him and this, in her eyes, made him an even stronger force for good. She had been observing him for years, from the time she first went to work as a teacher for the Children’s Aid Society, and of course she knew him socially (Miss Schuyler was a descendant of both General Philip John Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton). “I can see him now, in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging House, and later dashing off to an evening party in Fifth Avenue.”

To build support for the Orthopedic Hospital, he and Mittie gave a reception at 57th Street for their wealthiest friends, and with the occasion in full swing he signaled for attention, then dramatically threw back the doors to the dining room. On top of the great round dining table, against a background of heavy paneled walls with inlaid designs of lobsters, fish, and other such symbols of plenty, he had placed several pathetically cripple children, some sitting, some lying on their backs, all in various braces of the kind only large donations could provide. Conie stood beside the children to help show how the braces were fitted and how they worked. The effect was stunning. Mrs. John Jacob Astor III is said to have announced at once that “of course” Theodore must have help in his work.

He was, it was said, “neither spoiled by good fortune, nor soured by zeal.” He was interested in “every good thing,” to quote Louisa Schuyler one more time. To another friend, D. Willis James, “He seemed to be able to control the strongest affections of the heart, and to reach men who were not easily drawn into affection . . .”

Indeed, it is only in the private family correspondence and reminiscences that one finds even an occasional hint that life with such a person may not always have been easy. Mittie, in a letter from Europe to her “dearest old Greatheart Darling,” remarks out of the blue, “I wish you were not so good, it makes me sad.” And later:

I love you and wish to please you more than anyone else in the whole world and will do everything I can to please you . . . I think you have been perfectly lovely to me in your care of me always, and so good and indulgent and thoughtful, and I am so proud of you, and honor and respect you, so don’t be too hard upon me.

Then she adds, “I have decided that your dear letters are just a little plaintive and it rather comforts me to receive the ’Private’ letter to see that you have one little scrap of the devil in you yet.” (The “private letter” has not survived.)

Bamie, recalling her debut and the parties at which he was her escort, writes of “mingled feelings of pleasure and disappointment.” Knowing so few of her contemporaries had made that winter difficult; “and Father himself was so very young. . . and he was so popular that I felt like a wall flower.”

Sunday mornings he led them two blocks south to the new Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which opened its doors the spring of 1875.

There they prayed among Auchinclosses and Blisses, Livingstons and Wolcotts, “the most influential congregation” in the city, and listened to the word as preached by John Hall, the Irishman of golden tongue, as Beecher called him.

Mittie organized a dancing class for the youngest three—rounding up some forty children altogether—and encouraged Bamie in a new friendship with tall, graceful Sara Delano, who came down from her family’s estate on the Hudson to spend some of each winter season at 6 West 57th Street.

Mittie’s portrait was painted, a first for any of the family, and it must have pleased Theodore greatly. The face that looks out from the canvas is radiant, poised, quite as beautiful as she is described in so many contemporary accounts. Dressed for one of those society occasions he so enjoyed, she must have been something to see. Bamie described later how she looked as she left for a wedding at the Jay estate.

She had on an enormous crinoline and a perfectly exquisite white muslin dress over a pink silk lining, with all the little ruffles at the bottom edged with real lace, and the cloak, which was a very long sort of cape, matched the dress, and the bonnet tied under her chin with great pink ribbons and . . . on the brim of the bonnet was a great big pink rose with perfectly realistic little green dragonflies. She also had a parasol with a real ivory handle and the lining of pink covered with muslin and trimmed with real lace. She was considered one of the beauties at the wedding . . .

It was only at “the store” that things were not going so well any longer. The depression had produced not only business stagnation, but knife-edge competition of a kind that Theodore and James Alfred were unaccustomed to, and from domestic manufacturers of glass in particular. So rather than attempting to save their sagging import trade, the two brothers spent their time looking for new outlets for their money. They became financiers, James Alfred being the “guiding genius.”

City real estate still comprised a large part of the family fortune, and no one, even in these worst of times, had lost faith in the future of New York. The Chemical Bank, true to tradition, was also surviving the depression with flying colors.

Yet rich as these Roosevelts had become, they might have become richer still. (All things are relative, including the disappointment of missed opportunities.) Some years earlier the brothers had backed a copper-mining venture in Montana, the National Mining and Exploring Company, of which James Alfred was president. (Brother Rob, who had the least business sense supposedly, was the only one who bothered to go out to see the site.) The copper found did not amount to much. It was only with the discovery of gold that the venture proved “not without profit” to the family. The mines, however, were in the vicinity of Butte, in the heart, that is, of what would become one of the richest copper regions of all. Had deep mining been possible at the time, the Roosevelts might have become some of the richest men of their day.

It is said also that among those who came looking for Roosevelt backing was Alexander Graham Bell, who hooked up his newly invented telephone so that Theodore could talk from his desk to a room down the hall. While agreeing that it was an interesting device, with potential as a toy perhaps, Theodore thought it had no real future and refused to put money into it.

He was made a Supervisor of the Census, a director of the Bank of Commerce and of the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company. The glass import business was eventually sold to a British firm in 1876, after which Roosevelt and Son switched over entirely to private banking and investment. It was no longer to Maiden Lane that Theodore went each morning, but to new offices on Pine Street.

“What business I shall enter . . . I do not know,” his older son wrote, “for we have been forced to give up the glass business on account of the ‘panic.’” But were it not for this and one or two other chance remarks, one might conclude that such workaday concerns as business, or so disturbing a word as “panic,” never actually penetrated the charmed circle of family life, at the center of which, like some elegant patron saint, stood Theodore.

2

The best of times for him—for all of them—were at Oyster Bay. The years of random summer houses in New Jersey or along the Hudson were also behind now. In conjunction with the move uptown, he had decided to join the Roosevelt colony at the quiet little watering spot on Long Islands North Shore, beginning the summer of 1874. Oyster Bay itself was a mere hamlet of modest white clapboard houses built around the time of the Revolutionary War or earlier, many occupied by old local families with ties going back to the days of earliest settlement. The summer houses—the Beekmans’, the Tiffanys’, the Swan “place” —were of a different order and set on low wooded hills or bluffs beyond town and in view of the water.

The one Theodore “hired” was out Cove Road a short way from the village, a roomy, old white frame ark with long windows and a columned front porch reminiscent of Bulloch Hall. The requisite porch rockers faced the bay and the best air; the bathing beach was only a short walk across the road.

Now the customary family summer extended nearly four months, beginning as early in June as possible and lasting until late September or early October, the fashionable time to “return to town.”

Theodore took the same house year after year. He longed for a country place of his own, he told Mittie, and anticipated the day when he might own one. The children always assumed the house was theirs, that naturally he owned it. To them it was “home,” “dear home.”

“I had a very delightful visit at Oyster Bay at the Roosevelts’ and wish you could see their pleasant way of life there,” Theodore’s friend Joseph Choate wrote his wife. “They are only twenty-seven miles from New York, and in the midst of a country which doesn’t correspond in the least to your ideas of Long Island. Instead of the dreary sandy wastes of the South Shore, it is pleasant and well-wooded rolling country and apparently filled with quiet good people.”

The full complement of servants was in residence. As would be said, no Russians of the ruling class tucked away in a dacha were better tended or more safely removed from the unpleasantness of the world. The hard years of the depression, summers of breadlines and bloody labor violence, were times of “every special delight” at Oyster Bay, “the happiest summers of our lives.”

There were lovely mornings on horseback, with Father leading the cavalcade, long sparkling afternoons on the water. Everyone had his own horse or pony. There were rowboats, a sailboat, other large Roosevelt houses for children to charge in and out of, miles of shoreline to explore, woods and fields to tramp and shoot in. To the noisy troop of Roosevelt cousins were added the Elliott cousins, who came as guests, and two other “regulars,” Conie’s friends Edie Carow and Fanny Smith, whose well-to-do fathers, both old friends of Theodore’s, were experiencing “temporary reverses” due to the panic and could ill afford such vacations for their families.

Theodore had them put on theatrical productions and spent hours rehearsing them in their lines. (”But, Uncle, I am not a passionate man!” protested Johnny Elliott, upon being cast as the lover in something called To Oblige Benson.) At the dinner table, as the plates were being cleared, he would ask this child or that to get up and give an impromptu speech, an experience some of his young guests would remember until their dying day. “These Roosevelts were without inhibitions to an unusual degree,” wrote Fanny Smith. She loved them for their vitality, their kindnesses, their “explosions of fun.” To her they were “a family so rarely gifted as to seem . . . touched by the flame of the ’divine fire.’” Their gaiety was “unquenchable.” They were lovers of books and poetry. They invested everything they did with their own “extraordinary vitality.” Of Theodore Senior she remembered mainly the enthusiasm with which he entered into every activity, the inspiration he was. (It was she he picked for the female lead in To Oblige Benson—her first chance ever to put on makeup and play a part.) That he insisted on calling the house Tranquillity struck her as wonderfully inappropriate.

“How I will enjoy my holiday,” he wrote at the start of the second summer at Oyster Bay. When he was absent everyone felt let down. Teedie, who had begun calling himself Thee or even Theodore on occasion, wrote of the tonic it was just to be in his presence.

He will be with us now . . . enjoying his holiday with a vim. I wish he would not sit down on something black whenever he has on white trousers. At the close of the day he always has a curiously mottled aspect. Seriously, it is a perfect pleasure to see him, he is so happy and in such good health and spirits. We become quite stagnant when he is away.

3

There was, however, one rather serious problem casting a shadow on all these perfect summers and the winters between, a peculiar turn of events about which as little as possible would ever be said outside the immediate family. Ellie had started having strange seizures—fainting spells, a rush of blood to the head as it was described, even fits of delirium.

The trouble had begun the very first summer at Oyster Bay, when the boy was fourteen, and it was for this reason that Theodore ruled out college for him. Almost overnight his hitherto robust, confident second son, “the strong one,” the boy for whom there seemed to be no obstacles, had become the family’s chief concern, a victim of spells, a child afraid of the dark, afraid to sleep alone.

The policy seems to have been the less said the better. Not even Fanny Smith appears to have known there was anything wrong with Elliott, close as she was; or, if she did, she also chose to delete that part of the story. In her account, as in others, he remains only the perennial family charmer. To judge by what she, Conie, and others said of those summers, there were no problems, no bad days, no bad nights. Teedie, in one letter, observes that Ellie has been at times “very ill,” but then goes no further.

In later years, among later-day Roosevelts, it would be said Elliott suffered some form of epilepsy. There was no record of epilepsy in the family but then neither was there a record of asthma. The family physician attending him appears to have been baffled and diagnosed the trouble only as a nervous condition or “congestion of the brain.” The word “epilepsy” does not appear in the multitude of family papers dating from the time.

Descriptions of what exactly went on during these seizures are also fragmentary and inconclusive. But the chance that the problem was in fact epilepsy seems remote. More likely the trouble stemmed from some intense inner turmoil. That the boy was chagrined by his failure to keep pace with Teedie academically, that he worried excessively over his future, his ability to live up to his fathers expectations, are all quite evident and particularly in the confidences he shared with his father. Even before the return from Europe he had written of the extreme difficulty he was having with German, and a letter he mailed from Liverpool just before sailing for home could not have but touched Theodore deeply.

“What will I become when I am a man?” he had asked his father. “Are there not a very large number of partners in the store . . . I think Teedie would be the boy to put in the store if you wanted to be sure of it, because he is much quicker and [a] more sure kind of boy, though I will try my best and try to be as good as you if [it] is in me, but it is hard. But I can tell you that better when I get home and it does not look nice to read.”

In the fall of 1874, following the first summer at Oyster Bay, his condition was such that another sea voyage was arranged—still one more therapeutic “change of scene.” Theodore took him back to England on a business trip. But Ellie had a relapse at Liverpool. When Theodore left him behind with the Bullochs while he went on to Paris, a serious attack followed and Theodore had to be summoned at once.

The attack [Theodore wrote Mittie] has been decidedly the worst he has had and very difficult in character. It came from overexcitement but of so natural a kind that I foresee it will be very difficult to guard him from it. A pillow fight was perhaps the principal exciting cause; it was Harriott’s children. It produced congestion of the brain with all its attendant horrors of delirium, etc. The doctor says that there is no cause for anxiety as it is only necessary to avoid all excitements for two or three years and he will entirely outgrow it. He is perfectly well again now, but of course weak and confined to his bed. . . . Ellie’s sweetness entirely won the heart of the doctor as it has that of all the servants here. The doctor says . . . that the boy should lead a quiet life in the country and I have vainly puzzled my brain to think how this can be accomplished.

There were signs of improvement in another week. The one problem now, Theodore wrote, was nighttime. “He evidently still has a fear of being left alone at night (i.e., is nervous) although he stoutly denies it. He sleeps in my bed. I think it would be very wise for Theodore and himself to occupy the large bed in [the] back third-story room for while together. I should be afraid to leave him alone.”

A little later, in an affectionate letter to the son at home, Theodore said that, things being what they were, he, Teedie, would have to start acting more like the older brother. In some ways it may have been as important a directive as the one to make his body.

It is a pleasure to receive your letters and gives Ellie so much enjoyment to hear them read. His first inquiry is if there is anything from Teedie when a bundle of letters is brought in. You will have to assume more of the responsibilities of elder brother when we return. Ellie is anticipating all sorts of pleasures with you that he will not be able to realize, and it will require much tact on your part not to let him feel his deprivations too much.... His sickness at night, although worse, often reminds me of your old asthma, both of you showed so much patience and seemed more sorry on account of those about you than for yourselves. Aunt Ella is singing to him upstairs now; music often seems to soothe him when he is nervous.

“It is so funny, my illness,” Ellie himself wrote to his brother, “it comes from the nerves and therefore is not at all serious, but my body is getting so thin I can get a handful of plain skin right off my stomach, and my arms as well as my legs look like I have the strength of a baby. I jump involuntarily at the smallest sound and have a perpetual headache (and: nearly always in low spirits). . .”

The doctor came again and said the attacks were “hysteria.” “I scarce know how I will come back to active life again,” Theodore wrote Mittie.

Another trip was arranged for the boy that winter, almost from the time his father brought him home. He was sent south with the family physician, John Metcalfe, for several months of shooting and outdoor life and it did him wonders. “I have not had a respectable suit on since I left home, or a white shirt,” he wrote proudly, “and as I have to clean all the guns on our return from shooting you may imagine the state of my hands. I am very well and happy.” The one problem he acknowledged was homesickness, “sometimes.”

Curiously, Theodore then wrote to say that in the future he must always stand by Teedie, who was a “noble boy,” a charge Ellie took greatly to heart. Why Theodore did this, having so recently said almost the same thing to the other boy, is open to question. Possibly he felt that in Ellie’s case the best medicine might be a feeling of importance, the assurance from his father that he qualified for so manly a mission no less than ever and had his fathers confidence. Something of this same psychology may also, of course, have been behind what he wrote to Teedie from Liverpool, though in that instance, one senses that he did in truth need the boys help and was counting on him.

Whatever his reasons, the directive evoked a heartrending response from his distant and obviously very heartsick second son.

Dear Old Governor—for I will call you that not in public but in private for it does seem to suit you, you splendid man, just my ideal. . . My darling Father you have made me a companion and a very happy one. I don’t believe there is any boy that has had as happy and free of care life as I have had.

Oh, Father, will you ever think me a “noble boy”? You are right about Teedie, he is one and no mistake, a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. If you ever see me not stand by Thee you may know I am entirely changed. No, Father, I am not likely to desert a fellow I love as I do my brother, even you don’t know what a good noble boy he is and what a splendid man he is going to be as I do. No, I love him, love him very very dearly and will never desert him and if I know him he will never desert me.

Father, my own dear Father, God bless you and help me to be a good boy and worthy of you, goodbye.

Your Son.

[P.S.] This sounds foolish on looking over it, but you touched me when you said always to stand by Thee in your letter.

Elliot’s closest friend by now was a cousin once removed, Archibald Gracie, and from the time Cousin Archie had been sent off to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, Elliott had been begging that he be allowed to go also. The following summer (1875) Theodore consented. But only weeks after arriving, the boy was stricken, first by nearly paralyzing homesicknesses, then by the most severe attacks to date.

“Yesterday, during my Latin lesson, without the slightest warning, I had a bad rush of blood to my head,” he wrote his father in a letter marked Private; “it hurt me so [much] that I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out . . .

“Don’t forget me please and write often,” he added.

By December he was in no condition to remain. “Poor Ellie Roosevelt has had to leave on account of his health,” Archie Gracie wrote. “He has ’ever been subject to a rush of blood to his head’ and while up here exerted himself too much both physically and mentally. He studied hard and late. One day he fainted just after leaving the table and fell down. . . . His brother came up to take him home.”

That Theodore chose to respond as he did should come as no surprise. He had been warned to keep the boy from excitement, a quiet life in the country was what the doctor in England had advised, but he did exactly the opposite. Ellie was packed off to the wilds of central Texas, to “rough it” on an army post, Fort McKavett, where the officer staff included several friends of Theodore’s from the war years. The decision was made at once and Ellie was on his way, accompanied yet again by Dr. Metcalfe, who appears to have gone more for the promise of sport and adventure than out of any great concern for his patient.

“Do you know, Father, it strikes me it’s just a sell my being down here,” the boy wrote during a stop at Houston: “it’s a very pleasant one but a sell nevertheless, for I feel well enough to study and instead here am I spending all your money down here as if I was ill, I don’t believe I will ever be ‘weller’ than I am; it’s rather late to think of this but the Dr. evidently don’t think I’m sick and I am not, and altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying.”

So it was Ellie, not his brother, who went first to try the great elixir of life in the West, who became the true-life Mayne Reid kind of boy-hunter on the prairie. The letters he wrote of his adventures were quite amazing—long, spirited, and wonderfully well written, disclosing his own full-hearted love of the hunt and the great outdoors (not to mention his own obvious appreciation for the Mayne Reid style). His brother was held spellbound. And it is hard to imagine Mittie and Theodore being anything but pleased and proud.

As time passed he wrote of “fearfully cold” nights about the campfire, of long days in the saddle and keeping company with “rough-looking chaps.”

I have not taken a drink or a smoke [he also reported to his father], but I do want to do the latter very much, I don’t care how much you laugh and I can see you do it just as plainly as you did that night in the study. It seemed rather hard at first to say “I never drink” or “I never smoke,” when asked about every five minutes of the day, for the young officers have unfortunately no way of spending their time but in one of the two of those employments, but it was a very difficult thing to do.

He was enjoying Texas “just as much as anyone ever enjoyed anything.” He slept one night on the floor of a log hut, sharing a blanket with a real “cowboy from way out west” and using a dog for a pillow, “partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bedfellow.” It was all Teedie had ever dreamed of and the letters kept coming. Elliott’s health was perfectly fine and Theodore, who so recently wondered how he would ever get back to active life again, had embarked already on a new adventure of his own in politics.

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Moral Effect

1

POLITICAL REFORM and the Roosevelt name had already been joined in the public mind well before Theodore took up the cause in 1876. Brother Robert had in fact become one of New York’s more celebrated champions of reform, albeit in a style quite his own and as one of “the other” party. Having happily accepted Tammany backing in his bid for Congress in 1870, Robert had turned on the notorious William Tweed in dramatic fashion less than a year later, in September 1871, the summer CVS died. He had denounced Tweed and Tammany electioneering tactics in a fiery speech at a mass meeting at Cooper Union, saying at one point that anyone caught tampering with a ballot box deserved to be shot on sight. Afterward, he served on the famous Committee of Seventy in its assault on Tweed, and once Tweed fell, Robert was looked upon as one of those distinguished few gentlemen-Democrats, figures of wealth and position, of whom New Yorkers could be most proud. He was commonly mentioned in the same breath with such reform Democrats as Abram Hewitt and the present governor, Samuel Tilden. He held no office any longer, but with his writing and after-dinner speaking, he kept himself in the forefront. While Theodore went about his philanthropy in his quiet way, Robert called for government action to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. In angry letters to the New York papers, he warned of uprisings unless something was done. People were starving, he said. “Let us try some plan and convince the poor that we have the blood of civilized men in our veins.” He called for the city to mount a program of public works, to give men jobs on the city payroll building docks and paving streets; and he was immediately denounced as a well-meaning fool. (”Absolutely the only protection which we can have against the dangerous tendency of laborers to crowd into large cities,” answered the Tribune, “is the sure punishment which nature brings, in want of work, suffering or starvation. If a workman is wise he will quit a city whenever he finds no employment, as he would quit a house infested with fatal disease.”)

Robert, too, of late, like Theodore, had been living in style, in a country house on Long Island, but at Sayville, on the South Shore, well separated from the other Roosevelts at Oyster Bay.

As it had taken Tweed to bestir the Democrat Robert into righteous wrath, so it took the scandalous Grant regime to inspire the Republican Theodore to join the great Republican reform crusade of 1876. The idea was to rescue the party from the hands of the professionals, which was no new idea in American politics certainly; nor did Theodore’s part call for any particular courage or personal sacrifice. Still, it was an experience of a kind he had not had before, and as with everything else he ever did, he entered wholeheartedly, certain the crusade was just, and thoroughly innocent, by all appearances, as to where it might be taking him. Brother Robert, from what may be seen in some of his private political correspondence, was seldom if ever innocent about anything, but now there were two Roosevelts having their say in their different ways. Theodore knew and admired the people leading the Republican reform movement; he enjoyed their company, enjoyed their obvious high regard for him. Mittie, it appears, thought little of such doings, but things seemed to follow very naturally, and before he knew it, Theodore was off to Cincinnati to his first convention.

At the head of the crusade were Senator Carl Schurz and George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s Weekly, two lifelong battlers for liberal reform—women’s rights, civil service reform—and true Lincoln Republicans, which was what Theodore liked to call himself. Curtis was the one Theodore knew best, a tidy, erudite man much in the Emerson mold, silver-haired and priestly. In his youth he had helped build Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, and a novel he wrote in the 1850s, a satire on New York society called The Potiphar Papers, was high among Theodore’s favorite books. Curtis, above all, was a moralist. He had made a career of preaching the public—political—duty of “the educated class.” (”While good men sit at home, not knowing that there is anything to be done, not caring to know; cultivating a feeling that politics are tiresome and dirty, and politicians vulgar bullies and bravoes; half persuaded that a republic is the contemptible rule of a mob, and secretly longing for a splendid and vigorous despotism—then remember it is not a government mastered by ignorance, it is a government betrayed by intelligence.”) He was totally sincere, highly influential, and not without political ambition of his own; he saw in Theodore, as he later said, the living example of what he preached. Theodore Roosevelt “walked these streets the image and figure of the citizen which every American should hope to be,” he would say. They were never close friends. They knew each other at the Union League and the Century, saw each other socially, on occasion. “I knew,” said Curtis, “that we thought alike in all the great interests of society.”

The light had failed in Washington, in the second term of Ulysses S. Grant. A country in the grip of hard times was confronted with thievery and fraud in nearly every department of the federal government, including the Presidents own staff. Scandal had followed scandal. A Secretary of the Navy had somehow profited by $300,000 beyond his apparent income. A giant Whiskey Ring had robbed the Treasury of an estimated $4 million. From Boston, Charles Francis Adams warned that unless strong action was taken the entire political system could collapse, and he was deadly serious as only an Adams could be.

When a Republican Reform Club was organized at the Union League at the start of the new year, Theodore joined at once and was soon looked to for leadership. In February, Adams’ son Professor Henry Adams of Harvard put out a call for a special conference of reformers, a very high-toned affair, he stressed, to be held in New York in advance of the national conventions. It was to be by invitation only, “for about 200 of the most weighty and reliable of our friends.” And when the conference got down to business at the Fifth Avenue Hotel the afternoon of May 15, Theodore was among those prominently mentioned to indicate how “weighty and reliable” a group it was. Others included Theodore Dwight Woolsey, former president of Yale, E. L. Godkin of The Nation, Frederick Law Olmsted, Brooks Adams, William Graham Sumner, Mark Hopkins, New York’s two most esteemed ancients, William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper, and the very young Henry Cabot Lodge of Boston, who, as secretary of the meeting, did most of the work. Nothing of consequence was accomplished—“Oh, they reenacted the moral law and the Ten Commandments for a platform, and have demanded an angel of light for President,” said a Tammany observer—nonetheless, it was as important a gathering of truly distinguished citizens as New York had seen in a long time, and if they took themselves a little too seriously as the “saving element” in politics, so too did many others. One out-of-town reporter, picking his way past the potted palms in the lobby of the hotel, observed for his readers, “Men whose names ring through the country and round the world were to be encountered at every step through the crowd, and upon every face not familiar was the plain stamp of intelligence and character.”

General Grant was himself the issue no longer, since by this time he had declined to run again. He wanted a third term, Grant said, no more than he had wanted a first and no one doubted that he meant it. What loomed now was an even more worrisome prospect, the candidacy of Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, a man of Theodore’s own generation, who was among the most fascinating, outrageous men of the era and the one Republican against whom every reformer could gladly join ranks. Conkling, a Stalwart (one steadfastly loyal to Grant), was considerably larger than life—tall, beautiful, enormously talented in the art of politics—and in the eyes of the “saving element,” evil incarnate. From the moment he let his presidential aspirations be known, there seemed to be a smell of brimstone in the air. Schurz, addressing the Fifth Avenue Conference, declared unequivocally that no machine politician could ever be the Republican standard-bearer, however brilliant he might be. And by the time he departed for the Republican National Convention, at the head of a sixty-man reform delegation, Theodore had instructions to “fight Conkling at all events.”

The essential, underlying corrupting force in public life, the evil of “practical” politics, the reformers insisted, was the party system and its sacrosanct creed of party loyalty. Public policy must be above party; the ideal candidate, as Henry Adams lectured young Lodge, was the man who cared nothing for party. And it was thus that the reformers were so ardently opposed to Conkling. Conkling was not a crook; his name had been linked with no scandals; nor had he any personal crudities of the kind associated with a reprobate like Tweed. What was so objectionable about Conkling was his utterly masterful, arrogant use of the very system they deplored. He was the ultimate professional. He loved power; he believed in power. He believed in “structure,” and for the keystone of his empire he had the Customhouse on Wall Street, the largest federal office outside Washington. His most valued lieutenant, Chester A. Arthur, was Collector of the Port of New York; all the Customhouse “boys” were his; and it was thus that he ruled the Republican Party in New York. In Washington, largely through his friendship with Grant, he had achieved a grip on patronage second to none. “Which one is Conkling?” visitors to the Senate gallery would ask, wishing to see the most powerful man in Washington City.

Conkling’s scorn for all reformers was monumental, which naturally endeared him to the party professionals and made him all the easier for the reformers to hate. To him they were “the dilettanti” and beneath contempt. At his most charitable, he called them “leaders without followers.” More often, he scoffed at their “snivel service” reform, ridiculed their idealism. “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling once observed, “he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform.” Curtis and his kind were “the men-milliners” of politics, the goody-goodies; their masculinity was questionable.

Conkling himself, the picture of conspicuous manhood, stood six feet three, and was solidly formed beneath his extravagant clothes. He had built himself up with hard exercise, boxing and horseback riding. A leader ought to look the part, he believed. He walked as though he owned the world, stomach in, his great chest swelled. A worshipful reporter said it was the walk of a prince, but Congressman James G. Blaine, a fellow Republican, called it his “grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut,” words that had stunned the House and that Conkling would refuse ever to forgive or forget.

Women thought Conkling gorgeous, which he was. He carried a sun umbrella and favored bright bow ties, fawn-colored vests and trousers, English gaiters, and gleaming pointed shoes. His beard was the color of burnished copper and it too was pointed. His hair was a darker red, thick and wavy, and he combed it to produce a single Hyperion curl at the center of his forehead. The curl—everything—was done for effect. His voice was rich and beautifully modulated. His thrilling stump speeches, delivered without notes, were all carefully memorized in advance and rehearsed on long walks in the country. He was a detail man, like every great performer. Had he chosen a career on stage, it was commonly agreed, he would have been a sensation.

Even his private life had about it a kind of forbidden, theatrical glamour. Though a married man with children he had for years been carrying on an affair with a fellow senator’s wife, the beautiful, ambitious Kate Chase Sprague. It was the sort of thing that simply was not done, but that everybody knew about. The explanation sometimes heard was that he was too good-looking to be pure.

For a master politician Conkling was an odd combination. He had little humor, no patience with those he thought beneath him intellectually. He remained haughty and insufferably vain, anything but a man of the people. He deplored the use of tobacco and whiskey and said so. He disliked reporters and crowds; he hated ever to be touched. But his gift for leadership was surpassing and he had a mind approaching genius.

To Theodore virtually everything about him was repugnant, and the fact that Conkling was a man of education and polish, the son of an eminent upstate jurist and scholar, the fact that Conkling’s man “Chet” Arthur was regarded as a thorough gentleman, belonged to the Union League and the Century, made Conkling’s power and treachery seem the more hateful. Also, Conkling represented something new in Theodore’s experience. Mr. Greatheart had done battle with ignorance and poverty and the Giant Despair, with cruelty and crippling disease; he had waded into unpleasant, unsung work of the sort others shunned; but nowhere along the line does he appear ever to have faced an individual adversary, and certainly none like “the Lordly Roscoe.”

Probably he and Conkling had met each other in times past, perhaps even as early as the war when Conkling was a young congressman and Theodore was making his rounds on Capitol Hill lobbying for the Allotment Commission. In any event, the prospect of taking the field against the seemingly impregnable giant of New York politics cheered Theodore tremendously. As his friend Howard Potter once observed, this most “lovable,” “tenderest” of men had a decided instinct for a fight.

2

In hindsight it would become clear that Conkling never had a chance for the nomination at Cincinnati and many would wonder what all the fuss had been about. But only in hindsight. Conkling himself, as shrewd a political judge as any, thought his hour had arrived. Further, his candidacy was based on the kind of precept that any serious politician would take to heart: he could carry New York against all comers, including Governor Tilden, who seemed certain to be the Democratic nominee.

As a matter of policy, Conkling never attended national conventions and he refused now to break that rule. He sent Chester Arthur to work in his behalf and to nobody’s surprise the official New York delegation, largest of all the state delegations, went “solid for Conkling,” with the single exception of George William Curtis. A Pennsylvania delegate, seeing the Conkling people file into their hotel, remarked that it was a mystery to him “where the Customhouse got bail for all those fellows.” In fairness it ought also to be noted that The New York Times and the Sun, both openly admiring of Conkling’s candidacy, were impressed most by the perfect decorum and obvious “quality” of the Conkling people. “It is conceded [said the Sun] that the men who are here urging the claims of ’the noble statesman from Oneida’ are the best dressed, the best-looking, and the best behaved of any of the outside deputations ...” The total number of Conkling “shouters” on hand was estimated at fifteen hundred.

Theodore and the New York Reform Club reached Cincinnati on June 10 and stretched their banner across the front of the Gibson House. They had agreed upon a candidate, Benjamin H. Bristow of Kentucky, Grant’s former Secretary of the Treasury, a man of impeccable record who had been responsible for uncovering the Whiskey Ring. Bristow clubs had cropped up around the country and the one in Cincinnati numbered three thousand people or more. So for the first few days things looked somewhat promising.

“You would never recognize your father in his new guise,” Theodore wrote enthusiastically to Bamie. He was doing all in his power to “work conversions,” discovering how it felt to be a “colporteur,” and not without results. “I have really brought one very important man to think with me and his action will be productive of much good. Several more are helpful and I fully appreciate how desirable and indeed necessary for the moral effect it was that we [the Reform Club] should come.” Richard H. Dana and James Russell Lowell of Cambridge were “perhaps the pleasantest additions” to his list of new friends, but then the number of friends already made was “legion.”

According to other accounts, he and his club worked “day and night” against Conkling and there is reason to believe Theodore was paying a large part of the club’s expenses while in Cincinnati. Temperatures were in the nineties, their hotel rooms “stewing hot,” as Lowell said. Lowell and others complained of the dirt and grime in the air. But nothing seemed to bother Theodore.

The leading contender for the nomination, as he explained to Bamie, was James G. Blaine, Conkling’s old nemesis. Blaine was an entirely different kind of man from Conkling—warm, captivating, a “magnetic” personality—yet no less the professional politician and scarcely less objectionable to Theodore and his fellow crusaders. Further, in light of events now only weeks old, it appeared Blaine was not exactly incorruptible. The sensation of the Mulligan letters had burst upon Washington. A Boston bookkeeper named Mulligan had produced letters in Blaine’s hand indicating that Blaine had once used his position as Speaker of the House to profit secretly in the sale of some western railroad bonds. On June 5, only nine days before the convention was to open, Blaine denied everything in an emotional speech before the House, and to the great rank and file of the Republican Party, and especially among Westerners, he stood vindicated; he was “Blaine of Maine,” the most exciting man in public life.

Strolling with Carl Schurz in Lafayette Square, just before Schurz left Washington for the convention, Blaine threw an arm about Schurz’s shoulder and said, “Carl, you won’t oppose me, will you?” But Schurz had no intention of supporting Blaine, whatever happened, nor did any of his followers. Some, in fact, like James Russell Lowell, had come to Cincinnati for the express purpose of stopping Blaine.

All the same, after less than twenty-four hours in Cincinnati, Theodore was sure Blaine stood far in the lead, a view he modified only somewhat with the news from Washington on Sunday, June 11, that Blaine had collapsed on his way to church and remained in a coma. A rumor swept the hotels that Blaine was dead and so the Conkling threat seemed greater than ever.

It was the following night, Monday, June 12, that Theodore made a speech from a balcony at the Gibson House. A band hired by the Reform Club “tendered a serenade” from the street below, where a large, friendly crowd had gathered. It was the first such speech he had ever made, and taking his instructions to fight Conkling quite to heart, he delivered the most vivid, biting attack on Conkling of the entire week, enjoying every moment—the whole noisy, torchlight spectacle, the excitement and approval in the faces below. It was “altogether like a scene from one of those electioneering Irish rows,” he told Bamie happily, “but all perfectly good [and] natural.”

“Mr. Roosevelt of New York, a Bristow man, got the floor of the balcony,” wrote a local reporter, “and made such a strong hit at Conkling that a convenient [Conkling] band put him down.” With the music blaring below, Theodore simply paused, waited his turn, then when the band stopped, he told the crowd it had just been treated to a perfect demonstration of how the forces of political corruption sought always to drown out every honest expression of respectable opinion. “The crowd cheered violently,” he reported to Bamie. “We were all in perfect harmony . . .”

We have no text of his speech, which is a shame, but it was the conviction and vigor with which he spoke, more than any one thing he said, that had the greatest force. Such was the force of the speech, in fact, that it earned him the everlasting enmity of the man at whom it was directed. The absent Conkling, upon learning what had been said, was not to forget or to forgive him, any more than he had James G. Blaine.

FRIENDS OF CANDIDATES WORKING WITH HEROIC ENERGY, read one headline. SUBLIME DISPLAY OF CONFIDENCE ALL AROUND . . . THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE IN THE STREETS AT NIGHT.

The actual convention got under way at noon Wednesday, June 14, inside the giant wooden Exposition Hall, and that afternoon George William Curtis, the only official reform delegate from New York, berated the “odious” Conkling machine as a menace to “the very system of our Government.” The one memorable oration of the convention, however, was delivered the next day—Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll’s famous nominating speech for Blaine, which, with its impassioned portrayal of the “plumed knight” of the party, sent delegates and spectators into paroxysms of approval and very nearly put Blaine over. Blaine’s recovery from his mysterious attack had been confirmed, and had the balloting begun after Ingersoll finished, Blaine almost certainly would have been the nominee. But it was turning dark outside and the gas lighting in the hall was said to be unsafe, so the vote was put off another day.

As it was, neither Blaine nor Conkling nor Bristow was chosen. A compromise candidate, the dark-horse governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, uninspiring but respectable, won on the seventh ballot. The party professionals at once lined up behind the nominee. (”How is New York?” a Hayes delegate is said to have asked Conkling’s man Arthur. “All right,” was the answer, “all the time for Hayes.”) And among the reformers the outlook was equally cheery, if not ecstatic, the Hayes people having convinced Schurz and Curtis that “the Governor” was one of them.

For his part Theodore came home from Cincinnati thoroughly satisfied. Conkling had been stopped and he himself had had the grandest kind of time. He felt, he told a reporter, like the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea, so thankful was he for the narrow escape from the disaster of a Conkling nomination.

By the time summer rolled around and the Democrats had proclaimed Governor Tilden their nominee, Theodore was once more immersed in life at Oyster Bay and probably as much at peace with himself and his prospects as he was ever to be. Ellie was home from Texas and thriving by all appearances. Teedie had been accepted at Harvard and would start in the fall. A letter he wrote to Bamie, who was with friends of Maine, provides one of the best pictures we have of the summer life that had become so dear to him, and the setting in which the family was to remember him best.

Oyster Bay

August 9, ’76

MY OWN DEAR LITTLE BAMIE,

I actually have a few minutes to myself by refusing sail with Elliott. Annie Gracie has gone with him, your mother is preparing for the Reading Class, Conie is at her lesson and Theodore out shooting specimens. I took answers to the Smiths at Laurelton this morning on my ride, accepting for a hop for the boys’ account. The ride was lovely. The morning delightful, and I did enjoy the woods intensely. I have just paid George his wages and parted with him so you will scarce recognize the family below stairs when you return. The cause of the suddenness of his departure is the appearance of a jealous wife to whom the servants have described in glowing terms his intimacy with Sophie, but I had already dismissed him to go as soon as I could find a good man. Davis will now be above until I find one.

Your mother is learning to swim and our baths are becoming the feature of the day, all else gives way to them. The competition between your mother and Aunt Annie runs high, your aunt is a little in advance. Conie and [Cousin] Leontine dive from Ellie’s boat after swimming out to it. The summer is passing delightfully away and my only regret is the rapidity with which it is going. Theodore’s departure for Cambridge is one of the straws that show that the time is approaching when the birds will leave their nest and I am very glad for them all to have such pleasant memories connected with this summer. Our pleasures tie us all so much together . . .

He was worlds away from politics, one might gather, and perfectly contented to have it so. But then late in September, in a letter to Teedie, who had departed for college, he mentions how a crowd of Oyster Bay Republicans came out from the village that evening to serenade him. He would have liked very much to make them a “Hayes speech,” he said, but Mittie locked the front door.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Father and Son

1

THEODORE SAW HIS SON off to Cambridge—off to become a “Harvard man”—from the little station stop at Syosset, Long Island, on September 27, 1876.

At seventeen the boy was as tall as he would grow, five feet eight inches, and he weighed at most 125 pounds. His voice was thin and piping, almost comical. The blue-gray eyes squinted and blinked behind thick spectacles, which, when he laughed or bobbed his head about, kept sliding down his nose. The sound of his laugh was described by his mother as an “ungreased squeak.”

In conversation he spewed words with a force that often startled people not accustomed to him, and this, with his upper-class New York accent, would be enough to set him off as something out of the ordinary at Harvard—even at Harvard—from the time he arrived. To many it seemed he had a speech impediment, and possibly the problem may have been associated with his asthmatic condition, physiologically that is; but it appears also to have been such an integral part of his make-up, so established a trait, that those within the home circle took no notice of it. They were as oblivious to this, apparently, as they had been earlier to his myopia. If he talked “funny,” they never thought so.

At Harvard, classmates soon learned to goad him into an argument for the sheer fun of hearing him. His large, extremely white teeth appeared to chop sentences to pieces. Words tumbled over one another. “At times he could hardly get them out at all,” remembered a friend, “and then he would rush on . . . as skaters redouble their pace over thin ice.”

The teeth and glasses were the outstanding features, though he preferred his ears, which were unusually small and close to his head. (”I don’t think my features separately are very good with the exception of my ears,” he would one day tell a sculptor. “I like my ears, they are good. I always notice the ears of everyone.”) His hands and feet too were unusually small, his feet actually dainty, a mere size five or six. The slippers he took with him to Harvard were his mother’s and they fit perfectly.

The great reformation of physique to which he had devoted so many hours would have been judged a flat failure by anybody unfamiliar with the circumstances. A classmate named Richard Welling, seeing him for the first time during a workout at the Harvard gym, could hardly believe his eyes. He confronted, Welling said, a “youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development” who was standing between two upright poles, gripping them with both hands and swaying forward and back, rising nicely on tiptoe at each forward thrust. “What a humble-minded chap this must be,” Welling thought, “to be willing to give such a ladylike exhibition in a public place.”

In a “Sporting Calendar” that he had kept at Oyster Bay the summer of 1875, it is recorded that he could do the hundred-yard dash in 12.25 seconds, broad-jump 13 feet, and clear the bar in the pole vault at 5 feet 8.5 inches—in all nothing very special for a boy of his age, but apparently better than his cousins could do and attainments of much pride to him. His health, though unquestionably improved over what it had been earlier, was still a worry and a burden. He was no more a model of good health than he was a strapping physical specimen. His health, like his physique, was impressive only in contrast to what it had been. Some of his sieges of colic, his headaches, the vomiting and diarrhea (his dreaded cholera morbus), appear to have been quite serious. In March, preparing for the Harvard examinations, he worried that he “lost so much time in my studies through sickness.” And after he had been accepted at Harvard, it was decided that for reasons of health he could not possibly live among other students in one of the dormitories. He was to have private rooms of his own and no roommate. Bamie—Bamie “the Major Generaless,” as Ellie called her—was sent on in advance to Cambridge that summer to find suitable quarters off campus. She chose his furniture, had the rooms painted, papered, saw that there was coal for the fireplace.

Except for the time in Dresden, he had never lived apart from the family, and even at Dresden he had Ellie and Conie with him, two cousins and an adoring aunt nearby, and lived with a German family. Harvard was to be his first solo venture into the world, as his father said, and the fact that his father had such faith in him probably counted for more than anything else. “As I saw the last of the train bearing you away,” Theodore wrote, “. . . I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I could place perfect trust and confidence . . .”

His preparation for Harvard under Arthur Cutler had been rigorous. The hardest work had been in mathematics, which was Cutler’s specialty and the subject in which he himself was most obviously deficient. In two years he had accomplished what would normally have taken three and did well on the entrance exams, but like so much else in his life, his tutoring had all been custom-tailored for him and experienced in the privacy of his own home. He was in all things still—in all save his imagination—”a great little home-boy,” as Bamie called him. He had never faced a real professor. He knew little about academic competition, to say nothing of the unwritten rules by which classmates determine who the good fellows are. Most freshmen could count on a certain number of ready-made friends from previous schools, and those from the Boston area—the great majority of the class—were already soaked in Harvard custom and tradition. He came knowing one other boy and that one not very well—John Lamson, of the family that had helped Bamie get out of France the summer of 1870. He apparently had never seen Harvard, knew nothing of Cambridge until the night he found his way to Number 16 Winthrop Street and the rooms Bamie had arranged on the second floor.

The picture we get from his summers at Oyster Bay is of a slight, tousled boy browned by the sun, clothes in disarray, who could barely keep still. As the tutor Cutler would write proudly in remembrance, “the young man never seemed to know what idleness was.” The collecting continued in earnest. (”At present I am writing in a rather smelly room,” he tells Bamie, “as the fresh skins of six night herons are reposing on the table beside me.”) He was busy with his field notes and scientific essays, including one remarkable composition titled “Blarina talpoides (Short-Tailed Shrew),” which appears to have been written sometime shortly before he left for Harvard. He had captured a male shrew and kept it in a wire cage for study, feeding it insects at first, then a live mouse, which the tiny shrew instantly attacked and killed. Fascinated by such ferocity in something so very small, the boy then put in a garter snake.

It did not attack at once as with the mouse [he observed] but cautiously smelt his foe . . . then with a jump the shrew seized it, low down quite near the tail. The snake at once twisted itself right across the shrews head and under one paw, upsetting him; but he recovered himself at once and before the snake could escape flung himself on it again and this time seized it by the back of the neck, placing one paw against the head and the other on the neck, and pushing the body from him while he tore it with his sharp teeth. The snake writhed and twisted, but it was of no use, for his neck was very soon more than half eaten through and during the next twenty-four hours he was entirely devoured.

“Certainly a more bloodthirsty animal of its size I never saw,” he wrote in wonder.

Socially he was generally ill at ease. With girls of his own age he could act theatrically superior—Fanny Smith would recall how he tapped her lightly on the top of her head with his riding crop—or become painfully shy and self-deprecating. At such times he would talk pointedly of Ellie’s superior attainments. Yet he rarely missed a chance to show off, with his shotgun or his memory for things he had read. As Fanny Smith observed, the summer before he left for Harvard, “If I were writing to Theodore I would have to say something of this kind, ‘I have enjoyed Plutarch’s last essay on the philosophy of Diogenes excessively.’”

To family and servants he was young lord of the manor, father’s “noble boy,” and in spirit he hungered for visions of noble quests and high valor. The Saga of King Olaf, the Longfellow epic, had been discovered and devoured by now. He adored The Song of Roland, read and reread the whole of the Nibelungenlied, taking it all very much to heart.

Another Oyster Bay youngster, Walt McDougall, later a well-known political cartoonist, remembered him as studious, nervous, and “somewhat supercilious besides.” But Fanny Smith confided to her diary that he was “such fun, the most original boy I ever knew,” and a lifetime later she would remember how, at formal dinners, she dreaded being seated next to him for fear he would get her laughing so uncontrollably she would have to leave the table.

The limits of his social world had been defined by Oyster Bay summers and the Monday dancing classes in New York under a dancing master named Dodsworth. The “ladies” at these sessions were only those of whom Mittie approved, naturally, and if anything, his own concern over decorum seems to have been greater than hers. Besides Fanny Smith his “great favorites” were Annie Murray, whom he judged both pretty and “singularly sweet,” and Edith Carow, for whom he had lately named his rowboat. When Edith “dresses well,” he observed, “and don’t frizzle her hair, [she] is a very pretty girl.” Fanny, he judged pure, religious, bright, well read, “and I think a true friend.” “The dancing class went off very well,” he noted one evening, “and was very orderly except that Mr. Dodsworth once had to stop the ladies from talking.”

Any expressions of endearment, however, were reserved for his “Darling Motherling,” as he and Ellie had begun calling her, and for Conie, now fifteen and flirtatious, who adored parties and to moon with him over “serious” poetry. Her health, like his, remained “delicate.” She was “Baby Conie” or “Little Pet Pussie,” a nickname in fashion among their “set” (Edith Jones, the future Edith Wharton, was another Pussie). They shared eager “intimacies” and in private correspondence with her, as with his mother, he could slip into a cloying baby-love-talk that no one in that pre-Freudian household thought a thing of. “Little Pet Pussie,” he would write from Harvard, “I want to pet you again awfully! You cunning, pretty, little, foolish Puss. My easy chair would just hold myself and Pussie.”

In the first letter he wrote to Mittie from Harvard, he told her how he had put her picture on his mantelpiece, “where I can always see Motherling.” He emphasized how “cosy” everything was, with a bright coal fire burning in the grate. “The table is almost too handsome, and I do not know whether to admire most the curtains, the paper or the carpet.”

His tone with her was very different from what it was with his father. With Father he must measure up, show the progress he was making along approved paths. But with Mittie, or with Conie, he could relax, ramble, even be “frivolous,” sounding at times very much the mama’s boy, or somebody’s parody of a preposterous little Harvard snob. He had been “down to New Haven” to see the Harvard football team play Yale; Harvard had lost, he explained to his mother, “principally because our opponents played very foul.” Yale was not at all to his taste. “The fellows too seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours.”

He tells her he is wearing her slippers, “which remind me of you all the time.”

In pursuing his new social career, he wished all at home to know, he was choosing his acquaintances exclusively from the “gentleman sort” and it was slow going, since he knew so little of anyone’s “antecedents.” “On this very account, I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”

Then, to his amazement, he discovered that numbers of his classmates had come to Harvard with no intention of getting an education. John Lamson, he reported indignantly, was there only to enjoy himself.

“Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies,” the elder Theodore wrote.

They all wrote to him, the letters going off at a rate of two, three, sometimes four a week. One from Liverpool from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch touched him so that it was all he could do to keep from weeping. Like his father, he reserved Sundays for correspondence. “Sundays I have all to myself, as most of the fellows are in Boston on that day. . . . Our ideas as to how it should be spent . . . are decidedly different ...” They must understand that he was not in the least homesick. Ignoring the countless nights he had suffered from asthma, forgetting the fears and loneliness and terrible feelings of inferiority he had lived with for as long as he could remember, he told his Beloved Motherling: “It seems perfectly wonderful, in looking back over my eighteen years of existence to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault! When I think of this, and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am), I feel that I have an immense amount to be thankful for.” To Theodore he wrote, “I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am sure that there is no one who has a father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine.... I do not find it nearly so hard as I expected not to drink and smoke . . .”

He was signing himself Thee, Jr., or Theodore, or, as time passed, Ted or Teddy or Tedo. He seemed not to know what he should be called.

On October 27, from Philadelphia, where he had gone to see the Centennial Exposition, his father wrote as follows, addressing him as Theodore:

I must write a few lines to my oldest boy on his eighteenth birthday. I cannot realize that you really are so old, and still it is a great comfort to find that you are approaching mans estate. I have worked pretty hard all my life and anticipate passing over to you many of my responsibilities as soon as your shoulders are broad enough to bear them. It has always seemed to me as if there was something peculiarly pleasant in the relations between a father and a son, the enjoyment of the father is so great as he cares for the boy and sees him gradually become a reasoning being, his mind and his physique both developing under his care and training, and above all his religious views becoming more fixed. As he approaches manhood the boy enjoys relieving the father of first the responsibilities which he has borne until that time, and those cares prepare the boy to take the fathers place in the great battle of life.

We have both been fortunate so far and have much cause for thankfulness to that one who has guarded and made our lives so much more happy than those of the many by whom we are surrounded. Indeed, it seems strange how few great sorrows I have been called upon to bear and you scarce one.

He wanted the boy to send him a complete description of his daily routine. How much exercise was he getting and of what sort? Did he find he was keeping up his health as well as at home?

The wonder was his health had never been better. It was quite the most remarkable development since leaving home. He was “in beautiful health,” he exclaimed to Mittie after having been away nearly two months; and he added confidently, “I do not think I shall have any difficulty at all on that score ...” His eyes had bothered him a little, but it was nothing to worry about. Most amazing of all, his asthma had disappeared. There had not been a sign of it since leaving home. Nor would there be that entire freshman fall, other than a brief flare-up in November, on the eve of his return for Thanksgiving, but it was so slight an attack that he never bothered to mention it until weeks afterward. To Bamie, at the time, he said it would be mistaken to picture him in anything other than perfect health, “entirely free of asthma,” and without a worry. His real troubles, he said, were math and “my rug, which will curl up at the edges, although I devote a half hour every day to stamping it back into shape.”

Not even a typically miserable, raw Cambridge winter set him back. Cambridge in January and February might have been a health resort, to judge by the state of his health. He wanted the name of a doctor, “in case of accidents,” and through Professor Henry Adams was put in touch with a local man, Dr. Morrill Wyman—an interesting choice, since Dr. Wyman happened to be a leading specialist in pulmonary ailments—but all he was ever treated for was a mild case of measles, a condition he found amusing.

His health was good, his outlook was good. There was too much going on to leave time even to be homesick, he wrote in February. “I have been very much astonished at this, and also at my good health. Excepting a little asthma in November, I have not been sick at all.”

The picture that emerges, sketchy as it may be, is of an almost miraculous transformation, an improvement of the kind often seen among present-day asthmatic children who are treated by removing them temporarily from their home lives and environments. Away from his family for the first time, he had a year of health like none he had ever known. He was “astonished.”

There was to be a misconception in later years that he conquered his childhood infirmities mainly through will power and body building, that he rid himself of asthma by making himself a strong man. But that is not quite the way it happened. First of all, he never would be rid of asthma entirely, and if there was a point at which he clearly found reprieve from suffering of the kind he had known, it came well before he attained anything like rugged manhood. It came when he went to Harvard, when he left home and was on his own in ways he had never been.

Returning to New York for the Christmas holidays, he sported a new beaver hat, a cane, and “English” side-whiskers. Several classmates came on for the New York parties—the first guests of his own choosing to be brought into the house. Mittie and Theodore put on a party in his honor. “We all like his friends so much,” reported Aunt Annie to Elliott, who was back in Texas for more Wild West therapy. “They seem to be such manly gentlemen. . . . Teedie is a lovely boy . . .”

His last day home he spent sleighing in the park with his father. The snow and the day were perfect, the horses in peak condition. “He went off most cheerfully to Cambridge again,” Theodore wrote. “He has had a glorious time . . .”

At Cambridge, he came suddenly to life socially. He was being asked to friends’ homes for dinner. He wrote now of an assembly dance at Brookline, of a sleighing party with “forty girls and fellows, and two matrons in one huge sleigh. . . . dragged by our eight horses rapidly through a great many of the pretty little towns which form the suburbs of Boston.” Another dance at Dorchester was “quite a swell affair.” He was playing cards, drinking coffee, taking dancing lessons. A Miss Wheelright, a Miss Richardson, a Miss Andrews, and a Miss Fisk began to appear in his letters. He was having a “pretty gay time” and happened also to be needing some money. A hundred dollars ought to do, he thought, though “by rights” it should be more. (A year at Harvard then could cost anywhere from about $500 to $1,500, depending on the style in which the student chose to live. The average was about $800. But for this first year the elder Theodore would pay $1,600—or roughly $17,000 in present-day money—and it was to be the boys most economical year of the four.)

He and another boy, Henry Minot, were already planning a collecting trip to the Adirondacks once classes ended in June. Henry Minot was his one close friend, the son of a prominent Boston family (the “antecedents” were quite acceptable), who, at seventeen, had already published a book on New England birds. He would bring Henry home one day, he wrote in a long letter to Mittie and Theodore; he was sure they would approve.

By the way, as the time when birds are beginning to come back is approaching, I wish you would send on my gun, with all the cartridges you can find and my various apparatus for cleaning, loading it, etc. Also send on a dozen glass jars, with their rubbers and stoppers (which you will find in my museum), and a German dictionary, if you have one.

He was in a world of his own, absorbed, bookish, happy. He had a manservant to black his boots and light his fire in the morning. A large black woman looked after his laundry. To please his father he began teaching Sunday school at Christ Church, opposite the town common, just outside Harvard Yard. Of Cambridge life in general, however, he cared nothing. Of the whole workaday world, or those happenings that filled the newspapers, he appears to have been oblivious. That fall, just before the national elections—if we are to believe the reminiscences of one or two classmates—he had marched in a demonstration for Rutherford B. Hayes. It was supposedly his first show of political interest and he is described responding with characteristic, theatrical anger, fists thrashing in the air, when a potato came flying from an upstairs window. But his own letters from that freshman year contain no mention of such an event, no mention of politics or of the election and its bizarre outcome—which is odd mainly in view of how greatly such events filled the thoughts of his beloved father.

2

The elder Theodore had first seen the Republican candidate in the flesh at the Philadelphia Exposition, during one of Hayes’s rare campaign appearances; and having seen him, Theodore felt even better about what had happened in Cincinnati.

“He talked very pleasantly,” Theodore wrote to his Harvard son, “and impressed one as being perfectly honest.” Most people found Hayes disappointing, dowdy. A reporter for The New York Times covering the same occasion despaired over the candidates “dreadfully shabby coat and shockingly bad hat, all brushed up the wrong way.” But Theodore concentrated on the face, finding in it no sign of “divided character.”

Theodore took most of what he knew of the campaign from his morning paper, the Tribune, as ardent a Hayes paper as any in New York, and his faith in Hayes held steady, even afterward, during the drawn-out winter months when nobody knew who—whether Hayes or Tilden—had been elected President. At first it seemed Tilden had. Tilden swept New York and nationally held a clear majority. But the votes in four states—Oregon and three in the Deep South—were in dispute, states that, if carried by the Republicans, would swing the electoral vote to Hayes. Republican “statesmen” rushed south to confer with election boards. Through February a special committee met daily in Washington to appraise the conflicting tallies, and outraged Democrats from all walks spoke of violence should the Republicans try to steal the election. In Columbus, Ohio, somebody fired a shot at Hayes’s house as he sat down to dinner.

Given the conscience he had, it is somewhat hard to picture Theodore wholly at ease with the declaration on March 2 that Hayes was the winner by a single electoral vote, but like countless others (including Hayes), he appears to have accepted the proposition that the Republicans really did carry all four of the disputed states and that claims to the contrary were but further evidence of the usual Democratic calumny. Like peaceable men of both parties he breathed a sigh of relief at Tilden’s refusal to contest the decision, and like every true liberal Republican he brightened at the news that Carl Schurz was to be the new Secretary of the Interior and that William Evarts, the eminent New York attorney and old Conkling foe, had been named Secretary of State. Even James Russell Lowell was to be rewarded with the post of minister to Spain.

Hayes’s inaugural address carried the memorable line, “he serves his party best who serves his country best.” And in another month came word of a full-scale investigation into the affairs of the New York Customhouse. A blue-ribbon investigating commission was announced, with John Jay, an old friend of Theodore’s, at its head. By the time Hayes made his first visit to New York as President in May, the hearings were under way downtown at the Customhouse and causing a stir wherever politics were talked. Quite obviously the Administration had decided it was time to cut Conkling down to size.

The record of what was going on behind the scenes is far from complete, but from all available evidence it appears that William Evarts was in charge of the assault. It was Evarts who proposed to Hayes that Chester Arthur be removed and that the new man at the Customhouse be Theodore Roosevelt.

Evarts was the law partner of Theodore’s close friend Joseph Choate, himself a crusading liberal Republican and somebody who had had ample opportunity to appraise Theodore’s executive abilities at close hand over many years. (It was Choate who, at Theodore’s request, had drawn up the original charter for the Museum of Natural History, for example.) And Evarts, too, had had his own dealings with Theodore only the year before, when Evarts headed a committee to raise the money for a pedestal for a promised gift from France of a giant Statue of Liberty. Theodore had served on the committee and served well, seeing at once the importance that so great a work—like his museums or the bridge to Brooklyn—would have to his beloved city.

At what point Theodore’s name was first broached for the Customhouse is impossible to determine, but judging by the attention he received during the days that the President was in town, it could have been as early as May. One gets the impression certainly that he was being looked over or lined up for something and it took no great acumen to see what an ideally suited choice for the post he was. Few men stood higher in the estimate of the community—or of those high-toned, high-placed liberals upon whom the Administration must count for support in any fight with Conkling. Theodore, moreover, had already proved himself admirably in a somewhat analogous situation at Vienna in 1873 when he stepped in as a commissioner at the Exposition. The authorized commissioner had been found to be dishonest and Theodore, at a moments notice, had righted a confused and embarrassing situation with both dispatch and tact, and the home papers had taken note.

His very name bespoke rectitude. Great wealth—supposedly—placed a man above such crass temptations as were traditional at the Customhouse. As a merchant and importer, he had ample knowledge of customs procedures. Yet with the Roosevelt family now divested of the glass trade, there could be no charge of conflicting allegiances. The point that Collector Arthur happened to be doing a rather respectable job, all things considered, was immaterial since the real target was Conkling.

Beyond all that there was William Evarts himself, who was not without his own ambitions concerning future control of party machinery in the state. A strong, reliable, honest man in the Customhouse—his man—would be as valuable to him as “Chet” Arthur was to Conkling. And the fact that Theodore had shown himself to be such a fiercely outspoken foe of Conkling meant he was not just a worthy ally but one whose appointment was guaranteed to enrage the unforgiving Conkling.

The Collectorship of the Port of New York was a government post like none other. Politically it was the ultimate plum. The power and responsibility attending the job were enormous, greater than those of most Cabinet officers; and the pay, as things were constituted, could exceed even that of the President.

Everything about the Customhouse was mammoth. If considered as a business operation, it stood in a class by itself, doing an annual dollar volume approximately five times that of the largest business office in the country. The revenues collected exceeded those of all the other American ports of entry combined. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s total tariff revenue was taken in at New York. Employees numbered more than a thousand. The building itself was colossal.

Customs collectors and clerks, importers, and customs brokers carried on their transactions in an echoing rotunda beneath a huge dome supported by marble columns, the desks of the collectors and clerks being arranged in concentric circles around a large four-faced clock at the center of the floor. Messengers darted in and out while visitors, there to enjoy one of the “sights” of downtown, watched from the periphery. Collector Arthur, tall, radiant, invariably dapper, paraded through to his private office usually around noon, ready for his official day.

The Collector had direct authority over the majority of employees. The next highest ranking officials were the Naval Officer, who was primarily a backup for the Collector; the Surveyor of the Port, who ran a staff of inspectors, weighers, gaugers, and “keepers of storage places”; and the Appraiser, whose people decided what incoming goods were worth and therefore determined the size of the duty to be paid. These officials had their deputies and the deputies had their deputies, and as previous investigations had shown, “overemployment” was standard down the line. Indeed, the customs service was notorious as an asylum for nonentities and has-beens, a kind of warm, dry dumping ground for failed merchants and broken-down sports with political connections, and for every kind of political hack. Numbers of customs service people were, of course, honest and hardworking. One, we know, was a genius, Herman Melville, who was finishing out his life in dreary anonymity as a customs inspector at a Hudson River wharf at $4 a day. But the opportunities for personal “rewards” in addition to salary—for emoluments, gratuities, and for plain bribery—were so great that almost any job could be made to pay handsomely.

Of greatest importance, and especially to those at the top, was the moiety system, as it was known, a practice deep in the grain at the Customhouse and quite within the law. It was the chief reason why the Collectorship was known as the best-paying job “within the gift of government.”

Instituted as early as 1789, the system provided that employees share in all fines and forfeitures. The idea had been to inspire perseverance among inspectors, but the temptation, naturally, was for inspectors to find discrepancies where there were none, in order to collect their share of the fine and also win favor with those at the top—the lieutenants of the New York machine—whose own shares would be substantial. Every importer resented the system but it was not until Chester Arthur’s first year as Collector, with the sensational Phelps, Dodge case, that their feelings turned to outrage. Theodore, with his ties to the Dodge family, could hardly have been more stunned, one imagines, had his own firm been the victim.

The case can be summarized briefly as follows:

Phelps, Dodge and Company, importers of copper, lead, zinc, and other metals, was among the most respected firms in New York. It was headed by William E. Dodge, Sr., and by his son, William E. Dodge, Jr., Theodore’s lifelong friend. In 1872 the senior Dodge was summoned to the office of a special agent at the Customhouse, a man named Jayne, and was informed privately that by undervaluing certain shipments his firm had been defrauding the government. Dodge, who had been an outspoken critic of Customhouse mores, was impressed with the extreme seriousness of the situation and given a choice. He could either settle out of court for the amount owed to the government, all of which had been figured down to the penny ($271,017.23), whereupon the case would be closed, or he could face a lawsuit and whatever costs and publicity that might entail, in addition to an ultimate fine that conceivably could exceed a million dollars. Never bothering to question the authenticity of the charge, Dodge paid up, only to learn that in actual fact the government had been cheated of nothing. The few undervaluations committed by his firm had been minimal, less than its errors of overvaluation. He had been the victim of an extortion. He spoke out at once, a congressional investigation resulted, and in 1874 Congress put an end to the moiety system. But the money paid by Dodge had been divided up meantime. The Collector, the Naval Officer, and the Surveyor of the Port—good Conkling men all—got some $22,000 each; special agent Jayne received roughly three times that for his part; and for legal services rendered, Senator Conkling received a sizable fee. Claiming he knew nothing of the details of the case, Collector Arthur survived the investigation untouched.

Though the fixed salary of the Collector was $12,000, which was more than that of a Cabinet officer, Collector Arthur’s real annual income from his position ranged around $55,000. The present-day equivalent would be $500,000 or more.

“We look back upon it, and we think . . . that we were fools,” Dodge had told the congressional committee. The government, he said, must have intelligent men in the Customhouse, men of high character and standing.

Theodore, Collector Arthur, and both Dodges were present with several hundred others at the lavish Chamber of Commerce banquet given for the President at Delmonicos the night of May 14. Dodge, Sr., in fact, was seated with John Jay, Schurz, and William Evarts at the head table. The Jay Commission was in its third week of hearings by this time and Schurz, the main speaker of the evening, was at his rousing best. The time had come for a “thorough reform of the public service of the country [loud applause]—the organization, I mean, of a public service upon sound business principles [renewed applause]. . . . The public service ought not to be a souphouse to feed the indigent, a hospital and asylum for decayed politicians [great cheering]. . . .” The expression on Collector Arthurs face through all this is not recorded.

Then the following afternoon, May 15, a soft, lovely spring day in New York, Theodore and Albert Bickmore escorted the President on a preview tour of the American Museum of Natural History, which was in its final stages before being officially opened to the public. They peered together at cases of Cherokee beadwork, arrowheads, spearpoints, and silver ornaments unearthed from burial mounds in Georgia.

Mittie was included at the reception for the President and Mrs. Hayes given that same evening by former governor Edwin D. Morgan at his Fifth Avenue mansion. And the morning of the sixteenth, when the President went downtown for an official welcome at City Hall, Theodore was again part of the official entourage, riding in the second carriage with old Thurlow Weed and Webb Hayes, the Presidents son. At the conclusion of still one more opulent affair that night, this at the home of John Jacob Astor III, Theodore and Mittie were asked to stay on for a small, private gathering with the President and the First Lady, as the wife of the Chief Executive was now being called.

In another few weeks rumors were in the wind of Arthur’s dismissal. Hayes refused to say anything officially until the Jay Commission completed its work, which consumed most of the summer, as witness after witness confirmed the worst suspicions of Customhouse corruption, inefficiency, waste, and stupidity. On June 22, however, Hayes issued an executive order forbidding party assessments of federal employees and forbidding federal employees any role in the running of party affairs—an order aimed squarely at Conkling and his “boys.” Chester Arthur, for whom nobody seems to have felt any ill will, was invited to Washington and quietly offered the consulship in Paris if he would simply resign, but this he refused to do. Presently, when the newspapers learned before he did that his resignation was to be requested, Arthur felt he had no choice but to stand fast. The New York Sun, a Democratic paper, speculated that perhaps Secretary Evarts’ real wish in bringing new management to the Customhouse was to foster some fresh Republican leadership in New York.

To date there had been no response from Roscoe Conkling, who had been abroad for the summer (Mrs. Sprague was currently living in Paris). It was not until September that he opened his attack, in a speech at a Republican state convention in Rochester, and with a savagery that appalled everyone, including many of his admirers.

Who were these men cracking the whip over him like schoolmasters, Conkling demanded, these man-milliners, these carpet knights of politics with their veneer of superior purity. George William Curtis, who had spoken in support of Hayes only moments before, sat muttering, “Remarkable! What an exhibition! Bad temper! Very bad temper!” Hammering on, glaring at Curtis, Conkling said no party was ever built on deportment or ladies’ magazines or gush. The speech was taken to be an unfortunate emotional outburst, the senator having momentarily lost hold of himself. The New York Times said he sounded like a maniac. But in fact it had all been quite carefully prepared and memorized, every breath of it timed for maximum effect.

“We are all excited here about politics just now, everybody outraged at the late performances at Rochester,” wrote Joseph Choate to his wife after spending the weekend with Theodore and the family at Oyster Bay.

For Theodore life went on all the same. He had become interested in a scheme to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to New York. He was busy at the office, busy as always with his good deeds, and working too hard, the family felt. In May he had taken a break to escort Bamie, Conie, Cousin Maud, and Edith Carow on a weekend visit to Harvard, and again in midsummer he and Bamie went off to stay with friends at Mount Desert Island in Maine. Back at his office later, he observed that he, the gay butterfly, had been reduced once more to a grub. Elliott had returned from Texas to stay and young Theodore was embarking on prodigious expeditions up and down Long Island Sound by rowboat, covering in one day as much as twenty-five miles. The long summer was a “capital time,” highlighted by a visit from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch. Then the first week in September Theodore went off to Saratoga to a State Board of Charities meeting to discuss the conditions of insane children.

The formal announcement that he was to replace Arthur at the Customhouse came in October. Two others—General Edwin A. Merritt and a lawyer with the majestic name of Le Baron Bradford Prince—had been picked to fill the posts of Surveyor and Naval Officer. The nominations went to the Senate on the twenty-fourth, by which time it was obvious that more than the fate of the Customhouse or the Conkling machine was riding on the outcome. At issue was the power of the presidency as measured against that of the Senate, and the realities of Senate politics being what they were, and in view of the decline of presidential power since Lincoln, the chance for a Hayes victory looked slim. For one thing, the committee through which the nominations would first have to pass was the committee on commerce, of which Senator Conkling was chairman. Still, Hayes remained firm. “I am clear that I am right,” he wrote in his diary. “I believe that a large majority of the best people are in full accord with me.” Senator George Edmunds, Republican of Vermont, was delegated to warn Hayes of the risks he was running and to ask that he “cooperate.” “We must cooperate in the interests of the country,” Hayes responded.

To the reformers, of whom very few were members of the United States Senate, it had become a test case.

Conkling’s committee sat on the nominations for another month and more, during which, to the delight of reporters, Conkling gave forth with some of the choicest invective of his career. Stopped one day in New York by a man from the Herald, Conkling observed that there were in total perhaps three hundred in the city who opposed him, “who believe themselves to occupy the solar walk and the milky way, and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear even the heavens might stain them. . . . They would have people fill the offices by nothing less than divine selection.”

Theodore, meantime, was appearing at City Hall before the New York Board of Apportionment to protest, in behalf of the State Board of Charities, scandalous conditions in the city’s asylums for the indigent and the insane. (TERRIBLE CHARGES, read the headline in the Herald the morning after he had spoken his piece.) He denounced the mixing of criminals with the sick and the insane, deplored the wretched food, the rampant incompetence and “graver moral deficiencies” of the people employed to work in such places. The underlying problem, he insisted, was politics, the system by which every job was political and no one person could ever be held accountable.

To friends and admirers he seemed to have reached a new plateau of maturity and influence. The stature of the Collectorship would be raised to new heights the moment he took office, his admirers knew. One friend, D. Willis James, who had been away from the city for a year, wrote after seeing him again that fall that “he seemed to me another man,” so great was the change. “I was astonished. I was amazed at the growth . . .”

At age forty-six he was, as said the Tribune, “in the prime of vigorous manhood” and stood ready to do his duty. Naturally he stood ready to do his duty. “I will take the office not to administer it for the benefit of a party,” he told the papers, “but for the benefit of the whole people.” If confirmed he would serve without pay. Editorials praised the appointment. “Mr. Roosevelt is a gentleman above reproach and would unquestionably inaugurate a new order of things at the Customhouse.” George William Curtis said in Harper’s Weekly that the President could have found no man “of higher character or greater fitness.”

But the fight over the confirmation was one in which Theodore himself could take no personal part, conspicuous as he was made by the appointment; and his frustrations and worries compounded as weeks went by and nothing happened beyond talk and speculation. Greatly as he detested Conkling he was unable to speak out. He must bide his time, maintain perfect decorum and silence, and so passive a role did not sit at all well with him.

In secret he hoped he would be turned down, he later told young Theodore. To “purify” the Customhouse would be a task of unfathomable difficulty and he dreaded it. He knew what to expect at the hands of the politicians and the press.

To the rest of the family, meantime, he seems to have said as little as possible about the job or the changes it would mean for all of them; and to judge by the very little his son said about the subject in what he wrote from Harvard, none of them was overly concerned in any event. “Tell Father I am watching the ’Controllership’ movements with the greatest interest,” the boy added to the end of a letter to Bamie, suggesting he was ignorant even of the name of the job. But he also asked that his subscription to the Tribune be renewed and observed in another letter to Bamie in November that it looked as though their father would not get the Collectorship. “I am glad on his account, but sorry for New York.” His own triumph of the moment was “The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N. Y.,” his first published work, a pamphlet of three or four pages that he and Henry Minot had gotten up as a result of their trip the previous summer.

There was something in the papers about the Customhouse nominations nearly every day. On November 10, Senate Republicans caucused in “unusual secrecy” for five hours during which Conkling argued against any nomination made to succeed an officer dismissed without cause. On November 30, Conkling’s committee on commerce unanimously rejected the Customhouse appointments, and four days later when the Senate went into executive session to consider the full list of presidential appointments—circuit judges, Indian commissioners, postmasters—time was somehow never found to decide on any appointments to the customs service. Since the current session of Congress expired that same day, the Administration would thus be required to send those particular nominations to the Senate all over again with the start of the next session. Conkling was not merely stalling for time to line up the votes he needed, but giving the Administration opportunity to see the light and drop the matter altogether.

By now the story filled the front pages. Following a Cabinet meeting on December 4, it was reported that a compromise was in the making. Allegedly, to appease Conkling, Theodore Roosevelt would not be named again for the Collectorship. Conkling, it was understood, might accept some other nominee, but not Roosevelt under any circumstances. But on December 6, Hayes told a delegation of New York congressmen who had come to speak for Collector Arthur that his nominees were “good men” and he would make no changes. He sent his customs service list to the Senate later the same day and the Senate went into executive session at once.

Conkling challenged Hayes for not giving due cause for removing Arthur. He denounced Hayes personally, ridiculed the civil service passages in Hayes’ annual message to Congress issued the day before. Conkling was “forcible, witty, and severely sarcastic.” He also proved himself grandly inconsistent by supporting the nomination of a new customs Collector at Chicago to replace someone being removed without explanatory cause.

“I am very much afraid that Conkling has won the day,” young Theodore wrote to his father.

On December 11, the committee on commerce confirmed the appointment of Edwin A. Merritt and rejected those of Theodore Roosevelt and Le Baron Bradford Prince. The vote in the Senate came the afternoon of the twelfth, when the doors of the Senate were again swung shut for another executive—secret—session. Conkling’s speech this time was one of his major orations, reputedly one of the three most brilliant performances of his political career. He spoke last and for nearly an hour and a half. From an undisclosed source a reporter put together a vivid picture of the scene, of Conkling striding up and down the aisle as he spoke, his voice gathering strength until he was shouting “and [he] clinched every sentence with violent gestures.” He tore into the Administration, as before; he defended his dear and loyal friend Arthur. He denied “in an excited manner” that the Customhouse was in any way a political machine. But the climax came with his attack on Theodore Roosevelt. “He said Mr. Roosevelt was his bitter personal enemy, who had lost no opportunity of denouncing him, and he appealed to Senators to protect him and the four millions of people he represented.” It was because Roosevelt was his enemy that the Administration had picked Roosevelt for the job in the first place. The appointment, Conkling said, had been made solely to destroy and humiliate and dishonor Roscoe Conkling and he would not have it.

The vote came at eight that evening and of the Republicans a mere six refused to go along with Conkling. The nominations of Theodore and Le Baron Bradford Prince were rejected by a count of 31 to 25. “In the language of the press,” wrote Hayes in his diary, “’Senator Conkling has won a great victory over the Administration.’ . . . But the end is not yet. I am right, and shall not give up the contest.”

Theodore, who is not known ever to have kept a diary, wrote to his older son the following Sunday evening.

6 West 57th Street
December 16, 1877

DEAR OLD THEODORE,

As usual I sit down to my desk in my little room after the others have gone to bed. You know that it is not the want of the will that makes me a poor correspondent, but even tonight when I had passed over the newsboys to Mr. Blagdon’s care and anticipated a quiet evening we have been obliged to devote ourselves to others. People have been calling, including Mr. [Albert] Bierstadt, who came in late to ask me to dine with him and gave some very interesting descriptions of the manner in which he made his studies of the buffalo.

A great weight was taken off my shoulders when Elliott read the other morning that the Senate had decided not to confirm me, no one can imagine the relief. To purify our Customhouse was a terrible undertaking which I felt it was my duty to undertake but I realized all the difficulties I would encounter and the abuse I must expect to receive. I feel now so glad I did not refuse it. The machine politicians have shown their colors and not one person has been able to make an accusation of any kind against me. Indeed, they have all done me more than justice. I never told your mother but it would have practically kept me in the city almost all the time in summer and that would be no joke. I feel sorry for the country, however, as it shows the power of the partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests. I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

What he failed to mention was that in the final weeks of the battle he had been stricken with severe intestinal pains, of which he apparently wished the boy to know nothing. Bamie, however, had already sent word on and in a letter to her written from Cambridge that same Sunday he said he was “very uneasy about Father.” Did the doctor think it anything serious, he asked. “Thank fortune, my own health is excellent, and so, when I get home, I can with a clear conscience give him a rowing up for not taking better care of himself . . . The trouble is the dear old fellow never does think of himself in anything.”

3

Theodore died less than two months later. He had his good days, mornings when the pain subsided as if by miracle and he and Bamie would go for a drive. Through one long remission—the week after Christmas, with young Theodore home—he actually seemed to be recovering. But even then his confidence and cheer were a front. When the American Museum of Natural History had its grand opening on December 22, he was too ill to attend. Again President Hayes took part and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, was the main speaker. It was described in the papers as “one of the most brilliant daylight assemblages that New York has ever seen,” and for Theodore, by all rights, it should have been a day of days, a moment of acclaim and restitution after what he had been through since October. Of his defeat at the hands of Senator Conkling, he had been willing to say only that he remained “definitely hostile” to machine politics in any form.

The first sign that there was something seriously wrong with him had come less than forty-eight hours after he had written the long letter to young Theodore, his final letter to the boy so far as is known. The diagnosis then was acute peritonitis, which was regarded as extremely alarming. As one of young Theodore’s friends would write, “You couldn’t have your appendix out then, you didn’t know the word, you got something they called peritonitis, or inflammation of the bowels, and usually died.” But as later determined, he was, in fact, dying of cancer of the stomach—of a malignant, inoperable tumor of the bowel that was growing rapidly.

The anxiety that swept through the family may be felt even in such brief entries as to be found in a diary kept by Anna Gracie.

Tuesday, December 18
Ellie stopped on his way downtown, and his father was taken very ill about 4 o’clock this morning. Bamie’s party tonight. I saw Thee before I went into [the] drawing r[oo]m, very ill. Conie sat with him until two o’clock.

Thursday, December 20
All day at 57th St. Thee desperately ill.

Friday, December 21
First ray of hope, dear Thee will be better of this attack of peritonitis, but the disease is no better.

Sunday, December 23
Took tea at 57th St. Thee so ill but more comfortable.

Monday, December 24
Spent tonight at 57th, arranged table and stockings of children’s things. Thee more easy but very weak.

Tuesday, December 25
Saw dear Thee a short time before we went to church. Afternoon sat with him while Bamie rested. He made us all but Mittie go in to Xmas dinner . . .

“Can I do anything for you and Mrs. Roosevelt?” asked Louisa Schuyler in a note to Bamie. “I mean by way of sitting downstairs to answer messages and notes—or anything of the kind?” “Xmas. Father seems much better,” wrote young Theodore, who was keeping a “Private Diary” of his own once again and who left for Harvard after New Year’s convinced his father had passed the crisis.

They said goodbye to each other January 2, and according to later entries in the new diary, Theodore told him he was the dearest of his children and had never caused him a moment’s pain. There had been a heavy snowfall. The city was a winter scene from Harper’s Weekly and the boy and the family coachman, bundled to the ears, were not a hundred feet from the door, heading for the boat, when their sleigh tipped over and they were dragged off down the street by the horses like a snowplow—all “rather good fun,” as the boy said. He expressed no particular concern for his father in the letters that followed from Cambridge, nor in his diary, but then neither was he being told anything of the actual situation. It had been decided that he should be spared any worry. With Henry Minot, he had now joined the Nuttall Ornithological Club of Cambridge, before which, on the evening of January 28, 1878, he presented a paper on certain aspects of the English sparrow problem.

As the days passed, Theodore’s physical pain became excruciating. Mittie seldom left his side. But they all took their turns watching over him—Anna Gracie, James Alfred, who came in from next door, Bamie, Elliott, Conie, the maid Mary Ann. They sat and read aloud to him, or they just sat. “I have sat with him some seven hours,” Conie told Edith Carow. “He slept most of it but at times was in fearful agony. Oh, Edith, it is the most frightful thing to see the person you love best in the world in terrible pain . . .” He was suffering so, she said, that his hair was turning gray.

The morning of February 7 he was either sufficiently free from pain or sufficiently sedated to be taken for a sleigh ride, Bamie riding in the seat beside him; and that afternoon there was a letter from young Theodore that pleased him enormously. “I was with your dear father when your mother read your letter to him out loud,” wrote Anna Gracie. “You would have felt more than repaid for the exertion of writing such a cheery, long letter to him, if you could have seen the expression of his face. . . . His whole face lighted up with a beautiful smile when she read the figures out of the two examinations you have just passed. . . . I have not seen him look so pleased and like himself for a long time.”

The next morning, early, he and Bamie went off again, though this time, on return, he was again in agony. The doctor was sent for. Carriages came and went through the rest of the day as friends called to express their concern and to ask if there was anything they could do. Word of his condition had also reached the newspapers by now and the day following, Saturday, February 9, a crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside. It was there hour after hour as the day passed. Conie would remember it as a “huge” crowd, which perhaps it was, and most heartrending to her, as to all those who came and went, were the numbers of ragged children who stood waiting—his newsboys and orphans. The scene, as recalled, seems so very Victorian as to be not quite real, like some sentimental deathwatch from Dickens. One imagines the wind whipping the snow. (Actually it had turned warm and rain fell several times during the day.) But the children were there at the steps to the house waiting for news of the man who doubtless meant, just as Conie said, more to them than any other human being.

A telegram was sent telling young Theodore to return at once. Three doctors were rushed to the house. James Alfred and Aunt Lizzie stood by on the first floor. Cornelius and Laura arrived, as did Anna and James Gracie. Counting the servants there were at times as many as twenty people in the home.

The end did not come until nearly midnight. Of the long day itself, there is only one firsthand account. It was written by Elliott, whose devotion to his father over the past week or more had been heroic. He had hardly taken time to eat or sleep. He was ill, close to a complete collapse, his “young strength . . . poured out,” as Conie remembered, even before the day began. The account, given here with only a few minor deletions, appears to have been written soon after Theodore died, possibly the following day, the “terrible Sunday” when young Theodore arrived by the night boat from Boston.

Feb. 9, 1878

This morning at ten while I was sitting in my room smoking, Corinne ran in and said, “Ellie, Father wants to be moved, will you come upstairs?” I went immediately and found Father still under the influences of sedatives, sitting in the rocking chair in the morning room. As I came in he beckoned to me. I ran to him and . . . my arms about him, he got up and with my help tottered to the mantel. Here suddenly his face became distorted with pain and he called out loud for ether. I left him, got the bottle and taking him in my arms put him on the sofa and drenching the handkerchief I held it on his face. Mother, Bamie, and Mary Ann came up and we sent for the doctor. This was 10:15. From then until 11:30 all the strength I had could barely keep him on the sofa. He never said anything but “Oh! My!” but the agony in his face was awful. Ether and sedatives were of no avail. Little Mother stood by with a glass of water which I drank at intervals, being deathly sick. Pretty soon Father began to vomit after which he would be quiet a minute, then with face fearful with pain [he] would clasp me tight in his arms. . . . The power with which he would hug me was terrific and then in a second he would be lying, white, panting, and weak as a baby in my arms with sweat in huge drops rolling down his face and neck. . . . At 11:30, thank God, the doctor came. I ran up to the Ellises, found Dr. Thomas and returned to find the doctor about to give Father chloroform. On its application Father became quiet instantly but the two doctors despaired of his life and from then until 1:30 Mother sat at his head and I by him with the chlo[roform] and handkerchief. We put him from one chlo[roform] sleep into another . . . Dr. Polk relieved Mother and I at 1:30 when we tried to take a bit of lunch. The afternoon Dr. Polk, Mother, Uncle Jim, [Dr.] Thomas, and I were by his side all the time. . . . At 6:30 Mother and I went down and tried to eat dinner. I felt so sick I stayed to smoke a cigar and after felt well and more myself. I sat in the little room with Uncles Corneil and Jim and Aunts Laura and Lizzie and little Mary Ann. Going upstairs at 7:30 I found the servants in the hall waiting with scared faces in Corinne’s room, Aunt A[nna], B[amie], and C[onie] all in tears. Mother, Dr.’s Polk and Goldthwait and Uncle Jimmie by the bedside. Father seemed the same but his pulse much feebler. Dr. P[olk], Bamie, and C[onie] went to bed. Uncle Jim came up and Mother and the two uncles and Dr. G[oldthwait] and watched. Oh, my God, my father, what agonies you suffered. . . . So it went on. At eleven fifteen he opened his eyes. I motioned to the Dr. who applied the tube and brandy to his mouth. He did not make an effort to suck even. We put the glass up and dropped it [the brandy] down. He turned sharp to the left and throwing up his arms around, he gave one mighty clasp and then with a groan of pain turned over and with his right hand under his head and left out over the side of the sofa began the gurgling breathing of death. “Call the doctor.” “Bamie—Corinne.” “Mother, come here for God’s sake quick.” And then Dr. Polk sitting by his side. Mother kneeling by him, Bamie by her. The little Baby [Corinne] trembling and crying, kneeling by me on his left side and all the rest standing near. His eyelids fluttered, he gave three long breaths. It is finished. No, my God, it cannot be. “Darling, darling, darling, I am here,” cried my little widowed mother. I knelt down and prayed, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy will be done, Thy will be done.” As the last breath left his body the little clock on the table struck one—one half past eleven. Thirteen and a quarter hours of agony it took to kill a man broken down by three months’ sickness.

We got the girls and Mother to bed. The uncles watched the dead. I lay down on the sofa in Father’s dressing room but not to sleep . . .

4

He was extolled from a half-dozen pulpits and by the editorial pages of nearly every newspaper in the city, by lifelong friends, fellow philanthropists, and political reformers during memorial tributes at the Union League and the State Charities Aid Association. He was praised for his “high moral purpose” (in the Tribune), his “singular public spirit” (Evening Mail), his “generous public spirit” (Telegram), his contributions to science and art (Evening Post), for “using great opportunity for the best end” and preserving the honor of a great family name (The New York Times).

George William Curtis, in what he wrote for Harper’s Weekly, called him “an American citizen of the best type—cheerful, hearty, sagacious, honest, hopeful, not to be swerved by abuse, by hostility or derision.” Godkin, in The Nation, said New York should take heart in such a life: “We believe, the mere fact that New York could even in these later evil years produce him, and hold his love and devotion, has been to hundreds of those who knew him and watched his career a reason for not despairing of the future of the city.”

His “sweet strong influence,” his “magnetic power in influencing others,” the “stirring summons” of his example, were all mentioned repeatedly. “What a glorious example!” a friend wrote to Bamie. And in the other sympathy notes that poured into the house most people seemed to be saying in one way or other that they felt better for having known him.

At the family’s request there were no flowers at the funeral. Eight pallbearers—William E. Dodge, Jr., and Howard Potter among them—carried the plain rosewood coffin out of the house after a brief family service in the front parlor. The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church was filled to overflowing. There were two thousand people, perhaps more, within the huge nave as the coffin was borne down the sloping center aisle to the altar. Two preachers officiated, John Hall and the venerable William Adams, Theodore’s former pastor at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and now head of the Union Theological Seminary, whose voice broke several times in the course of his remarks. Burial was at Greenwood Cemetery, in the family plot, beside Mittie’s mother, the funeral procession crossing the East River in Brooklyn by ferry under a cold winter sky.

Secluded once more at 57th Street, the devastated family hardly knew which way to turn, let alone how to face what Conie called “the blank” of life without Father. Anna Gracie was staying on, to be near Mittie. Everyone drew nearer. Conie was to remember “something infinitely inspiring” about those days. Father had preached that one must live for the living, and so “[we] felt that our close family tie must be made stronger rather than weaker by the loss . . .”

What Mittie felt we cannot begin to know. A month later she would write to young Theodore simply, “It is so hard to have parted with him. I think of him daily and almost hourly . . . long to have him with us. It must be a comfort to you to know that you never gave your dearly loved and prized father anything but pleasure.”

Years later Bamie would say only that “Of course, after his death, we all had to work out our own salvation.”

Elliott, we know, was shattered. It was as if, in the convulsive grip of his father’s arms, he had had something crushed irreparably within. Theodore’s death was the ultimate disaster from which he would never quite recover.

To young Theodore it was all a “hideous dream.” His mother and sisters were suffering the worst, he wrote to Henry Minot, and “it was best that Fathers terrible sufferings should end.” But in his Private Diary he let go, pouring out pain and bewilderment and presently a torrent of longing and loneliness and angry self-judgment. He began within hours after the funeral, describing the suspense of his ride home on the night boat, the “bitter agony when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me,” the sound of the first clod of earth striking the casket.

“He was the most wise and loving father that ever lived: I owe everything to him.”

His anguish spills across pages, for weeks, months. Back at Harvard, alone in his room, he wrote of little else:

Sunday, March 3
Have been thinking about Father all evening, have had a good square breakdown, and feel much better for it.

Wednesday, March 6
Every now and then there are very bitter moments; if I had very much time to think I believe I should go crazy . . .

Saturday, March 9
It is just one month since the blackest day of my life.

Sunday, March 10
. . . had another square breakdown.

Sundays, with all their memories, were the hardest for him. It had been a Sunday, “that terrible Sunday,” that he had “kissed the dear, dead face.”

In the margin of his Bible he writes “February 9,1878” beside a verse of the 69th Psalm: “I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.”

Twice, in different letters, he reaches out to Bamie. With Father gone, he says, she must help him. She must take Father’s place in his life. “I know only too well the dull, heavy pain you suffer,” he wrote, “and I know too that it . . . has been easier for me . . . for here I live in a different world . . . I am occupied busily all the time.” Still, she must stand by him. She must tell him what to do. “My own sweet sister, you will have to give me a great deal of advice and assistance, now that our dear father is gone, for in many ways you are more like him than any of the rest of the family.” Henry Minot, his closest friend at Harvard, has “left college!” he reports in dismay to her that spring. “His father has taken him away and put him in his office to study law.” To Henry himself he writes of how greatly he misses “someone to talk to about my favorite pursuits and future prospects.”

With Father gone, nothing seems to have any purpose. “Am working away pretty hard,” he reports in May; “but I do not care so much for my marks now; what I most valued them for was his pride in them.”

Other times he seems insistent that Father had not “gone.” “I almost feel as if he were present with me,” he tells his mother; and it is emphatically in the present tense that he writes, “Every event of my life is tied up with him.” Father’s words keep coming back with a vividness that is “really startling.” During a brief visit to Oyster Bay just before exams, he picks up the journal he kept during the winter on the Nile and finds that “every incident is connected with him.” He walks about the empty house and “every nook and corner . . . every piece of furniture . . . is in some manner connected with him.” “Oh, Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you,” he writes June 7, still at Oyster Bay. “All the family are wonderfully lovely to me,” reads the next entry, “but I wish Mother and Bamie would not quarrel among themselves.”

Then Sunday, June 9, in the dim light of the little Presbyterian church at Oyster Bay, he sees Father sitting beside him in the corner of the pew, “as distinctly as if he were alive.”

Father was the shining example of the life he must aspire to; Father was the perfect example of all he himself was not. Grief turned to shame and a sense of futility. He felt diminished by the memory of the man. “Looking back on his life it seems as if mine must be such a weak, useless one in comparison.” He was engulfed by self-doubt. Self-reproach bordered on self-contempt. How could such a wonderful man have had a son of so little worth, he asked. One especially difficult Sunday he brooded over “how little use I am, or ever shall be . . . I am so much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.” He had failed his father when his father had needed him most and for this, in the light of his own conscience, he stood condemned.

He did everything for me, and I nothing for him. I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a very weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms . . . and oh, how my heart pains me when I think I never was able to do anything for him during his last illness!

“Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss,” he writes, “I feel as if I should go mad.”

Conie would recall sitting with him by moonlight on a high point called Cooper’s Bluff, overlooking Long Island Sound, and listening while he recited Swinburne in a high-pitched singsong voice:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

But there were notable chinks in all this gloom, moments even in the diary when he was unable any longer to deny his own good cheer or outright exuberance. It was only a few weeks after Theodore’s death when he confided to Conie that he felt not nearly so sad as he had expected to. He is “astonished,” he says later in the diary, at how readily he goes about his daily life “as if nothing had happened.” And as summer begins he is feeling so very good at times, his spirits so high, that he can no longer hold back. “I could not be happier,” he writes, but then immediately feels obliged to justify this. It would be “wrong,” he says, for him to be anything other than cheerful; “. . . and besides, I am of a very buoyant temper, being a bit of an optimist. Had a glorious 20-mile ride on Lightfoot, cantering the whole time.”

It was a summer of tremendous highs and lows. At Harvard, the week before his final examinations, his asthma had returned. (It was for “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma,” he explains, that he did so poorly in French.) He had yearned as never before for the “wilds” of Oyster Bay, to be in the woods again, to be on horseback, to be out alone on the water in his rowboat. One day in July he rowed alone all the way across the Sound to Rye Beach and back again. Elliott was the sailor, as Conie explained, while “Theodore craved the actual effort of the arms and back.” He “loved to row in the hottest sun, over the roughest water, in the smallest boat. . .”

He ran, he hiked, rain or shine; he blasted away with a new Sharps rifle at birds, bottles, almost anything in sight. On one “tramp” he went twenty-five miles “through awful places.”

Some days in the diary he seems about to burst with his joyous outdoor freedom. He turns to one of his father’s favorite passages in the Bible: “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing . . .” “Oyster Bay is the perfection of a place for fellows,” he declares. “I wonder if anyone could have a happier time than I...” It is August 9, a date he has marked heavily in black, as it is now six months since Theodore’s death.

Yet one senses a darker undercurrent, a kind of desperate, underlying frenzy bespeaking anger and fear. The pace of his activities is punishing, sometimes cruel. It is as if he is striking back at something, taking it out on Lightfoot, his horse, taking it out on himself—do or die, literally. Annoyed by a neighbor’s dog on a morning ride, he shot and killed it, “rolling it over with my revolver very neatly as it ran alongside the horse,” he reports in the diary. The horse he rode so hard day after day that he all but ruined it.

From one or two comments he and others made long afterward, it appears there was also a romance that summer with Edith Carow, and that it too blew up in a fit of anger. The diary says nothing of any of this, but years later he would tell Bamie how close he and Edith had been, and that “we both of us had . . . tempers that were far from being of the best.”

By midsummer he was down with stomach troubles (his dreadful cholera morbus), then hit “pretty hard” by an attack of asthma in early September en route to the genuine wilds of Maine. He went with cousins West and Emlen and a doctor named Thompson. “Look out for Theodore,” the doctor is said to have advised their Maine guide. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.”

His fathers fatal illness, it had been concluded among the family, stemmed from a hike he had taken in Maine the previous summer. Theodore had strained himself somehow mountain climbing, during the stay at Mount Desert with Bamie. Beyond that there seemed no possible explanation why someone of such vigor—such a “splendid mechanism”—could have been brought down. With his Maine guide, a large, bearded, kindly man named William Sewall, a man as large as Theodore had been, the boy now hiked twenty, thirty miles a day, all such feats being recorded in his diary, just as during another summer in the mountains of Switzerland when he was ten.

“I feel sorry for the country...” Theodore had told the boy in his last letter. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.” He would keep his fathers letters always, the boy vowed. They were to be his “talismans against evil.”

Death and political defeat had coincided in the life of “the one I loved dearest on earth.” It is not known for certain that he or others in the family made a direct connection between what had happened at the hands of Senator Conkling and the tragedy that befell Theodore and thus all of them so soon afterward. But it is almost inconceivable that they would not have made such a connection and have felt it deeply.

President Hayes, true to his word, had refused to concede defeat over the Customhouse. That same summer of 1878, with Congress in recess, he simply fired Chester Arthur and put Edwin Merritt in his place. The appointment was subsequently endorsed by the Senate (the Democrats had since gained a majority), the Conkling forces were rolled back. So had Theodore lived, he would have been made Collector after all, and his political fortunes thereafter might have been considerable. Instead, he had died a loser. If not exactly killed off by Conkling, he had been unhorsed, made to look foolish and impotent in a battle known to the entire country.

So what should a noble boy and namesake make of that? How should one respond to the downfall of Greatheart?

It is easy enough to speculate about all this, tempting to see an edge of vengeance in the career that was to follow. Allegedly, the family resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. But in fact we really do not know what was resolved, if anything. The future was very much on the young man’s mind; this we do know from the Private Diary. “I should like to be a scientist,” he declared only a few months after Theodore’s death. He felt he had aged since the tragedy. He tried to picture himself a man as head of a family of his own. “I so wonder who my wife will be! ‘A rare and radiant maiden,’ I hope; one who will be as sweet, pure, and innocent as she is wise. Thank heaven I am at least perfectly pure.”

“How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name,” he would write in the diary. For the moment, however, having had a private talk with James Alfred, he decided to think only of his remaining two years at Harvard, resolving to study hard and to conduct himself “like a brave Christian gentleman.”

PART THREE

CHAPTER NINE
Harvard

1

“YOU BELONGED TO HARVARD, and she to you.” The bond was everlasting, asserted William Roscoe Thayer, Harvard ’81, who was a biographer and historian and for twenty-three years editor of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, which lent certain weight to anything he said. Moreover, “she” in that day—Theodore’s day—had been a “crescent institution ... in the full vigor of growth” and this “crescent spirit,” Thayer said, had been of enormous benefit to all fortunate enough to have been there at the time, however insensitive some were to what was happening to them.

Theodore, recalling his Harvard years, would credit Harvard mainly with providing him an especially good time.

The growth and change had begun well before either he or Thayer arrived on the scene. In 1869 Charles W. Eliot had been named president at age thirty-five and after that Harvard was not the same. Eliot insisted that Harvard become a modern university, and, by stages, instituted what has become known as the elective system. He enlarged the faculty, overhauled the Law School and the Medical School, raised money as never before, and commenced the greatest building boom in Harvard’s long history up to that time. A scientist by training, he held that science and the humanities were not incompatible; further, that to be educated in science was to be educated for the future. He believed, as he had said in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Natural History in New York, that science was “the firm foundation” for man’s faith in himself and in what he called “the present infinite Creator.”

Eliot wished the Harvard student to be treated like an adult, to flourish in an atmosphere of academic freedom. He got rid of petty disciplinary rules, so that by Theodore’s time the old rule book of nearly forty pages had been reduced to one of five. In back of his elective system was an unshakable faith in the instinctive capacity of free human beings to follow the path that was best for them. No one could master anything worthwhile “without a deal of drudgery,” but then with so much that was so urgent and difficult in school life—in any life—it seemed “superfluous to invent other disagreeableness, whether for children or for men.” “Do you think it is a wise parent who invents disagreeable tasks for his children, or enforces any observance simply because it is disagreeable?” He was a turning point for Harvard and for American education, and as an example of serene, Unitarian, Boston sagacity and rectitude none could match him. To those like William Roscoe Thayer who viewed the college as one big family, he was the supreme father whose influence—whose outlook and standards—touched all. He was large and straight, “with the back of an oarsman,” and unforgettable, since most of the right side of his face was covered by an ugly, liver-colored birthmark. He believed in public service and in duty. On a gate to the Yard he would have inscribed:

Enter to grow in wisdom
Depart better to serve thy country and thy kind.

His personal motto was a saying of one of his Overseers, Edward Everett Hale: “Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.”

But generations of Harvard undergraduates would also remember him stalking through the Yard looking neither left nor right and recognizing no one. They did not like him, for all the new freedoms he brought. He would be remembered for the few rules he enforced more than for the many he did away with. Owen Wister, a freshman in Theodore’s junior year, called him a “flagstaff in motion.” To others he was New England’s “topmost oak.”

Along with his liberal reforms, Eliot also brought a variety of memorable personal views. He disapproved of sermons that mentioned “that scoundrel King David,” for example, and he believed in the benefit to mind and body of strenuous physical activity in the open air. A morbid mental condition, he once told his own son, was of physical origin. He himself could work twelve hours a day and not feel tired. As part of his preparation for life, every boy ought to be able to row a boat and ride a horse, swim a mile and hike twenty-five miles. He approved of football, but had the odd idea that the ball carrier ought always to do the manly thing and hit the most resistant part of the enemy’s line, not look for holes. Baseball he did not much care for because it depended too much, he said, on the pitcher and the pitcher resorted too often to deceptions. The curve ball, a recent innovation, was to his way of thinking a low form of cunning.

The Harvard campus then, like the enrollment, was still comparatively small. About fifteen dissimilar buildings, mostly of red brick, stood near or facing a main parklike quadrangle, the Yard, as it had long been known, which was crisscrossed with straight gravel paths, shaded by numerous elms, and loosely framed by a low rail fence. Massachusetts Hall, built several generations before the Revolutionary War, was the oldest building. Thayer, Matthews, and Weld halls were new since Eliot had taken over. And just beyond the Yard, set apart between Cambridge and Kirkland streets, stood the great red-brick Memorial Hall, the university’s most magnificent building, which had been completed the year Theodore arrived as a freshman. It overtopped the trees with its turrets and pinnacles. Within was a huge central dining hall, or commons, hung with portraits, a theater, and a vaulted transept, the great marble-floored Memorial Hall proper, consecrated to the sons of Harvard—the Union sons only—who had fallen in the Civil War. The walls were lined with white marble tablets, each with the names of the war dead, student-soldiers fallen in battle, arranged by class and with eloquent inscriptions in Latin—“CONSUMMATI IN BREVE EXPLEVERUNT TEMPORA MULTA.” There was no comparable memorial to the war anywhere in the country. “The effect of the place,” wrote Henry James, “is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honor, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor. . .”

What, one wonders, was the effect on an impressionable youth whose father had hired a substitute?

The famous Museum of Comparative Zoology, the “Agassiz Museum,” where Theodore spent a good part of his junior and senior years, was another several blocks beyond Memorial Hall, opposite the Divinity School.

That was all to the north of the Yard. To the south and southwest were Harvard Street (later Massachusetts Avenue), where the Boston horsecars ran, and Harvard Square (actually a triangular junction of Harvard, Boylston, and Brattle streets), where a variety of modest shops clustered about the University Bookstore, the telegraph office, and the Cambridge Bank.

Winthrop Street, where Theodore lived, was two blocks from Harvard Street, in the direction of the Charles River. The quickest route was down Holyoke. The two-story frame house—Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse—stood on the southwest corner of Holyoke and Winthrop.

A student’s room at Harvard, by tradition, was his sanctuary. “Its occupant for the time being is its master,” we read in a contemporary account. “He can do as he will in it; lock his door and be not at home; admit all comers; sit alone and read or study, or sit with his congenial friend and talk out whatever he may have the good fortune to have in mind.” One was expected to have a personal library in view (“nothing furnishes a room so well”), a few sporting prints, family tintypes on the mantel, a tennis racket on the wall, and sufficient furniture (”nothing need match”) to suggest “solid comfort.” A convenient spittoon was usually of polished brass, but the fancier kind, of porcelain with hand-painted rosebuds, was not uncommon.

Theodore’s quarters, all four years, were those Bamie had picked for his freshman year and consisted of a living room or study and a small bedroom behind, to which various “improvements” had since been added. (”I had Harry Chapin in here the other day to look at the new bookcase,” he had written Bamie in his sophomore year, “... and after he had examined it he exclaimed, ‘Jove! Your family do act squarely by you!’”)

Harvard undergraduates numbered just over eight hundred, and at a time when only about one American in five thousand went to any college, let alone Harvard, they were an extremely privileged lot. They were not all the sons of rich men, as popularly supposed, and President Eliot’s own particular interest was in those of modest means, who, in his view, constituted “the very best part” of Harvard. But then they were hardly representative of the country that, by Eliot’s lights, they were supposed to serve. Judged by the color of their skin, the churches they attended, the number of syllables in their names, by almost any such criteria, they were as homogeneous an assembly of young men—and as unrepresentative of turbulent, polyglot, post-Civil War America—as one could imagine. It was not just the comparatively small scale of Harvard that gave it a “family” feeling, they all looked alike. There was virtually no diversity to be seen, except by the practiced eye, and then it was usually measured by such things as money or “family” or the cut of one’s clothes. William Roscoe Thayer, warming to his undergraduate memories, would write of the exceptional opportunity Harvard had afforded to meet students of many different views and from all parts of the country, but in fact the decided majority came either from Boston or from towns close by. A study of Theodore’s Class of 1880 shows that nearly two-thirds came from within a hundred-mile radius of the Harvard campus. Harvard, moreover, was supplied year in, year out by the same New England schools. In the case of Theodore’s class, more than half had come from Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Noble’s, Hopkinson, Adams Academy, and other such prestige training grounds. A high-school boy from some point beyond New England was a rarity (there were about a dozen among the 171 who finally graduated).

The same surnames appeared in class after class. In Theodores there were a Blodgett and a Cabot, a Guild, a Morison, a Quincy, and a Saltonstall. The Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott, was actually the sixth of his line to attend Harvard; the first, Nathaniel, graduated in the Class of 1695.

There were no blacks in the Class of 1880, suffice it to say, and no foreign students. There were exactly three Roman Catholics, but no Boston Irish, no Italians, Swedes, or Latin Americans, no one with a name ending in an i or an o; and there were no Jews. Full-page cartoons in the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine, were sometimes crudely anti-Irish, anti-Semitic, or mocking of Negro aspirations.

“If you asked me to define in one word the ‘temper’ of the Harvard I knew,” reflected a contemporary named Samuel Scott, “I should say it was patrician, strange as that word may sound to American ears. . . .”

Birth of course counted for much, prominence in athletics was naturally a help, but scholarly attainments per se went for very littie, I fear. A certain amount of money was necessary, for a man had to dress decently and share in the pleasures and convivialities peculiar to youth, but wealth as wealth was no passport to anything in that community. . . .

This code, unwritten yet all pervading and all powerful, is difficult to define. Over and above the copybook virtues, it insisted upon a composure of manner, a self-suppression and a sense of noblesse oblige that were in happy contrast with the blatant self-assertions, the unbridled enthusiasms and misconceived doctrines of equality that were characteristic of the country in general. It gave its approval to those who understood that modesty was compatible with manliness, who knew how to combine self-respect with respect for authority and for the opinions of others, and who were firmly convinced that it was truer sport to lose the game by playing fair than to win it by trickery.

I think I am not exaggerating this influence in the college life.... It was all rather narrow and provincial, perhaps, but I still believe that those who were really in sympathy with such a discipline greatly benefited by it, while those who were not, must have been in some way affected by it.

About the only remaining vestige of “old Harvard” in the way of rules was compulsory chapel every morning at 7:45, from which a student could be excused only for reasons of health—for an asthmatic condition, for example—an option Theodore never exercised. Otherwise the student could live much as he chose, so long as he performed up to the mark academically. The elective system had also evolved sufficiently by Theodore’s time so that in his junior and senior years a student was free to pick just about any course he cared to.

The faculty, though still comparatively few in number, was strong in most areas, and when the names of the larger Harvard-Cambridge literary-intellectual community are included, the list is truly awesome.

Emerson, Phillips Brooks, and Charles Francis Adams were Overseers, as was the elder Theodore’s friend from the Cincinnati convention, Richard H. Dana. Francis Parkman (then at work on his Montcalm and Wolfe) was a member of the Corporation, and Longfellow, former professor of Belles Lettres—Old Poems, as he was called—could be seen strolling on Brattle Street in his familiar brown overcoat. The renowned botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief spokesman in America, was officially retired from the faculty, but was still at work and also much in evidence. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler taught geology and zoology, and the younger faculty—all recruited since Eliot took over—included Charles Dunbar, Harvard’s (and the country’s) first professor of political economy; William James, who taught anatomy and physiology; and Charles Eliot Norton (Eliot’s cousin), who offered “Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients.” Recently, Henry Cabot Lodge had been installed to teach a new course in the history of the United States.

But by tradition Harvard students and Harvard professors were a different species and in this at least tradition held sway. Contact between them, apart from the lecture hall or classroom, was minimal. Henry Adams, who had given up teaching in 1877, found it nearly impossible to get students to talk to him. Others on the faculty, like the students, preferred it that way. To involve themselves in the lives or interests of undergraduates was simply not part of their job.

“Don’t take it upon yourself... to ask questions or offer observations in recitations,” the undergraduate newspaper, the Crimson, advised light-heartedly in Theodore’s freshman year. “Your questions would bore the students, and your observations would bore the tutors. And don’t talk to the tutors out of hours.”

In opposition to the Eliot ideals of academic freedom and individual initiative stood a modish student pose of indifference, not to mention the plain laziness that came as naturally to Harvard undergraduates as to any others. “We ask but time to drift,” sang Theodore’s friend George Pellew, class poet, in a Hasty Pudding show during their senior year:

We deem it narrow-minded to excel.
We call the man fanatic who applies
His life to one grand purpose till he dies.
Enthusiasm sees one side, one fact;
We try to see all sides, but do not act.
. . . We long to sit with newspapers unfurled,
Indifferent spectators of the world.

If everyone “flocked” to hear Charles Eliot Norton, it was because his course was a “snap”; while Henry Cabot Lodge, who was known to be difficult, soon had almost no students. “My system was simple,” Lodge later explained, “to make the students do as much work for themselves as possible and have them lecture to me.” His classes shrank from fifty students to three.

“A boy could go completely to pieces and there was no one whose job it was to know anything about it,” remembered a classmate of Theodore’s, who, like many, viewed the Eliot Epoch as a disaster. “There never was a worse time for a boy to be in Harvard.”

In Washington a historic blow for temperance had been struck by Lucy Hayes, the first First Lady with a college degree. “Lemonade Lucy” had banned all alcoholic beverages from the White House. (At state dinners, said William Evarts, the water flowed like champagne.) But no such edict stood in the way of Harvard undergraduates in these years of the Hayes regime. “Students got drunk then” was the terse assessment of another in Theodore’s class, John Woodbury. Even Charles Eliot, looking back, would concede that there had been “much intemperance,” though he thought it had been mainly in the clubs and particularly the Porcellian, the summit of Harvard’s social hierarchy. (He had thought the same of the Porcellian in his own undergraduate days and had refused to have anything to do with it.)

They drank whiskey, which was relatively cheap and easy to get. They drank French champagne and Burgundy, and endless quantities of beer and ale, which were cheapest of all, and shandygaff, a mixture of beer and ginger ale. (For Sunday mornings a concoction of ginger ale and rum was thought “just right.”) The favorite local stop was a grogshop called Carl’s below sidewalk level on Brighton Street.

There were at Harvard, said Scribner’s Magazine, “lads of good morals and lads with an inclination toward unwholesome experiment.” A Boston paper, angry over a student disturbance in one of the theaters, wrote that seeing the world to such young men meant only “gazing with watery eyes upon half-clad ballet girls and burlesque actresses, and hovering about them, later, like flies about a carcass.”

One wonders if the elder Theodore may have known more of Harvard life than he let on when he advised his son to take care of his morals first. Or if the decision to postpone any thought of Ellie going to college suggests something more than concern for his health alone, if possibly the father had sensed even then what the boy’s susceptibilities were.

The sharpest division within the undergraduate body was between those who were the sons of Boston’s elite and those who were not, and the line between them was clearly understood. In Theodore’s class the “set” or “high set,” “the club crowd” as it was also known, was composed of perhaps twenty-five young men, or no more than ten percent of the class. They were mainly all Bostonians and thought to be very rich and quite impressed with themselves. Their clothes were English in cut. They carried slim canes or walking sticks and wore the heavy gold watch fobs of the kind customarily worn by men twice their age. Several—Robert Bacon, Ralph Ellis, Josiah Quincy, Richard Saltonstall, Minot Weld—parted their hair in the middle, which to the average American was the hallmark of the pampered snob. General Grant was only the best known of those who disliked on sight any man whose hair was parted in the middle.

“The set had a new suit of clothes for every day of the week,” remembered a classmate named Rand, who because of Harvard’s alphabetical seating system was able to observe one such higher being, Josiah Quincy, at close range. Rand sat beside Quincy in class through all four years, yet Quincy never “deigned” to speak to him once. Quincy may have been the worst example, Rand conceded. Bacon and Saltonstall, for instance, would say hello.

But for those few non-Bostonians whom the set found acceptable, the Harvard years could be quite pleasurable, for their society included not just the “right” clubs, but entrée to the “right” families. As Owen Wister, a Philadelphian, observed, “pleasant doors in Boston, and round about in Milton, Brookline, and Chestnut Hill, stood open” to a world of “gentlefolk” who were truly hospitable—”not mere entertainers”—who could talk of books and horses and winters in Rome. It made all the difference, he thought, in how one benefited from Harvard.

Those students—that small minority—who insisted on taking their studies seriously, who worked hard and made no effort to conceal their academic ambitions, were known as “digs” and were naturally outcasts. Socially, they had no chance. As the Crimson advised, only a little in jest, digs might be “eminently worthy” as people and it was “well to have a pleasant, bowing acquaintance with them, for they may turn out in the future to be very great men,” but their manners, like their clothes, were “apt to be bad; and except at class elections, their friendship is of no sort of use.”

Still, anyone who did not take seriously the academic side of life—or who did not appear to take it seriously—was expected to “go in” for something else (the air of indifference notwithstanding), and athletics rated above all. The late 1870s would be regarded afterward as among the most brilliant years in the history of Harvard athletics. Football, like so much else at Harvard, was new—still spelled as “foot ball”—but already great status attached to anyone who played. (The Harvard-Yale “match” that Theodore saw in his freshman year was only the second time the two colleges had played each other in football and the first game in which the teams were limited to eleven men each, rather than fifteen.) In baseball Harvard was “repeatedly victorious” and Harvard’s eight-oar crew defeated Yale three years running—in ’77, ’78, and 79. Harvard’s color, as of 1875, had been officially designated as crimson—rather than magenta as before—and to wear the crimson on the playing field or as an oarsman on the Charles was the quickest way to notoriety and acclaim. In Theodore’s time there was never any question as to the most popular man in the class. He was Robert Bacon, “the manly beauty,” captain of the football team, heavyweight boxing champion, winner in the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile, number seven on the crew. The Class of 1880 was known then and later as Bacon’s class.

2

The difference between Theodore’s final two years at Harvard and the first two was enormous. In the first two he had discovered he could handle the work and function reasonably well socially. His name, background, all that comprised his own “antecedents,” had also proved an advantage, something that was not to occur very often again in his life. He had fallen in immediately and quite naturally with the young Brahmins and their respective families, after which, with the death of his father, he had become a subject of great sympathy among them. But it was not until his junior year that he found himself a social success all at once. “People knew who he was,” as said William Roscoe Thayer. Indeed, he enjoyed a celebrity of a kind, for the first time ever. He knew things were to be different almost from the day he arrived at Cambridge that fall of 1878 and the feeling was heady.

“All the fellows greeted me with enthusiasm,” he writes in his diary, September 27. “Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he tells Mittie a little later, “having been elected into several different clubs.”

In no time he belonged to nearly everything one was supposed to—the Hasty Pudding Club, the “Dickey” (DKE), the lofty Porcellian—and several others as well. The night of his initiation into the Porcellian, which occupied several rooms over a store on Harvard Street, he got “‘higher’ with wine than I have ever been.” “Of course” he was “delighted to be in,” he reported to Bamie; “there is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch room, etc., and my best friends are in it.”

Apart from the drinking, he embraced the new life with open arms. (He suffered so from a hangover the morning after the Porcellian rites—his “spree”—that he drank but sparingly, if at all, from then on. Besides, he noted, “Wine always makes me fighty.”) He was savoring partridge suppers at “the Pore,” served by a dignified liveried black man named George Washington Lewis. He was picking up expressions like “Jove” and “dear old boy.” “Pore men” were “perfect trumps.”

“Roosevelt was right in this group in every way,” recalled classmate Rand. Roosevelt would talk to others if the occasion arose, Rand said, “though such did not often occur.”

“Please send my silk hat at once,” he demanded in a letter to Mittie written on Porcellian stationery, “why has it not come before?”

He was regarded as a “little fellow” and richer even than his elegant friends, and while this may have been no guarantee of success, it did lend an aura. Henry Jackson, one of the Bostonians who had gone to New York for the Christmas parties their freshman year, would remember for the rest of his life the splendor of the “Roosevelt establishment” on 57th Street. (Real-life butlers and footmen were not ordinarily part of domestic life among Bostons best families.) In his junior year, furthermore, Theodore kept his own horse in Cambridge, something few could afford, and during his senior year he drove a smart little tilbury, or “dog cart,” which pleased him no end. With horse, cart, whip, and lap robe, he had, he said, “as swell a turnout as any man.”

He spent his money in grand style, as he would never have dared were his father alive. His inheritance from his father, he had been informed by Uncle James Alfred, was $125,000, and from this he could expect an annual income of approximately $8,000 a year, a princely sum. It was, for example, considerably more than the salary of the president of Harvard. On $5,000 a year Charles Eliot kept a comfortable home, entertained, owned a summer house, a boat, and put his own two sons through Harvard. But Theodore, as he wrote in his diary, judged himself only “comfortable, though not rich,” which may have been the way Uncle James Alfred had expressed it to him by way of encouraging a degree of financial caution.

For additions to his wardrobe in his junior year, we know from his neat accounts, he spent $685.80 (in a day when the best suit cost about $35); in his senior year, he spent a whopping $761.59 more on clothes. This was more for clothes than some students had to cover all expenses. And clothes and club dues combined for those same two years added up to $2,400, a sum the average American family could have lived on for six years.

Just to stable the horse cost more than $900 a year. In present terms it would correspond to spending an annual $12,000 on clothes and clubs, plus another $9,000 or more to have a car at college.

But while it is hard to imagine him daring to live quite so lavishly under his father’s eye, it is also obvious that, consciously or not, he was actually behaving very like his father—that side of the father that was the dandy, the lover of fine horses, expensive clothes, the best clubs. Once, as Theodore would later relate, his father had given him a brief lesson in economy—this in view of his possibly entering a life of science wherein he could expect to earn little or no money. The great trick was to “keep the fraction constant,” his father had said. If one could not increase the numerator, then he must reduce the denominator. But it would have been an extremely unobservant boy indeed who failed to sense the kind of figures the father himself had to be working with in his own “fraction.” Expenditures on the order of those the family was accustomed to obviously added up to a very large denominator indeed, but they also implied an equally large or larger numerator. The elder Theodore was a rich man who knew how to spend money—to enjoy his money—and the son, thus far, was doing the same. And extravagant as he might appear, he was still spending less than his income.

He could hardly have been more conspicuous, it seems—or more energetic. He was a figure of incessant activity (as he himself said), of constant talk, constant hurry, a bee in a bottle. He rowed on the Charles in a one-man shell (and posed for a photographer wearing rower’s skullcap and knee breeches, barefoot and bare-chested, arms folded and his whiskered face set in a defiant scowl). He took boxing lessons and enrolled in Papanti’s Dancing Class. (”. . . am very fond of dancing,” he would note in his diary; “it is my favorite amusement, except horseback riding.”) He wrestled and went off on long hikes of the kind President Eliot approved. “He was always ready to join anything,” remembered Richard Saltonstall, who became the nearest thing to a close friend. He was “forever at it,” said another man. There was no one who possessed such an amazing array of interests, said John Woodbury, who came to be one of his most steadfast admirers.

He joined the Rifle Club, the Art Club, the Glee Club. (Even if unable to carry a tune, he could help raise money.) He was vice president of the Natural History Society, helped start a Finance Club, and was named to the editorial board of the Advocate, the undergraduate magazine, which in turn “opened the door” to the O.K. Society.

His grades were excellent. In his junior year, his best academically, he carried nine courses—German, Italian, themes, forensics, logic, metaphysics, Philosophy 6 (as Dunbar’s course in political economy was known), Natural History 1 (geography, meteorology, and structural geology), and Natural History 3 (elementary zoology)—and finished with an 87 average. During his senior year, in addition to his thesis, he began work on a book, his study of the naval side of the War of 1812; and though his grades were down some from the year before, he finished with an overall average high enough to qualify him for Phi Beta Kappa.

It was hard for others to imagine how he could possibly do all that he did, quite aside from his social schedule, which with the advent of Alice Lee in his life consumed as much of his time—or more—than everything else. There was always the possibility, of course, that his involvement with the extracurricular activities and organizations was something less than met the eye. The editor of the Advocate, for example, could not recall that Theodore ever attended a board meeting and knew of only one article he had written.

Nor, for all his joining, did he seem to belong in the way others did. There was always something “different” about him. The “unchastened eagerness” that one was supposed never to show was what showed most of all. He was wholly—constitutionally—incapable of indifference. He was the kind who spoke up in class. The strange, shrill manner of speech persisted. George H. Palmer, his professor of metaphysics in his junior year, remembered that he “sort of spluttered” as he spoke, his thoughts charging on faster than his mouth could handle them. The sound, said Palmer, was something like water coming out of a thin-necked bottle. Yet he would be heard and at length if necessary. Shaler, the geologist, a man of tremendous bearing and his own expansive enthusiasms, is said to have exclaimed on one such occasion, “See here, Roosevelt, let me talk, I’m running this course.”

Crossing the Yard between classes, he scurried when one was supposed to saunter. At the gymnasium some afternoons he could be seen skipping rope (!) and his rooms on Winthrop Street were said to contain live lizards, snakes, and other such “loathsome” creatures, so intense was his passion for natural science. In fact, he may have kept nothing of the kind at Winthrop Street—Richard Saltonstall, who lived on the floor below, remembered no caged animals, or anything, for that matter, which was the least out of the ordinary about Theodore’s rooms, and a photograph said to be of his living room looks not unlike any number of others from the time, except for a few mounted birds in bell jars to be seen on top of a bookcase. But the story was one everybody liked (then as later), which was more important. It was “Teddy exactly,” off to himself with his books and bird skins and creepy live things, and it became standard. Robert Bacon is supposed to have been so repulsed by the mere thought of Theodore’s quarters and all therein that he refused to go near the place.

Forty years later, sorting out his own personal recollections of “Roosevelt at Harvard,” William Roscoe Thayer remembered thinking of him as chiefly comical, “a joke ... active and enthusiastic and that was all.” Thayer had certainly perceived no portents of greatness, though one spring day in Theodore’s senior year, they had talked about the future. They were sitting in a window seat in Charles Washburn’s room in Holworthy, overlooking the Yard, and Theodore had said something to the effect that he might try to help the cause of better government in New York, though he hardly knew how. Thayer’s only reaction, as he remembered, was to look hard at Theodore and ponder to himself “‘whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities which he appears.’”

The ever-admiring John Woodbury seems to have been alone in his forecast of distinction. Woodbury, as he said later, figured Theodore might amount to something—as a professor of history perhaps—if only because he seemed to know what he wanted.

To most others he remained likable but peculiar (”queer”), and much too intense for comfort. “Some thought he was crazy,” said Woodbury.

Martha Cowdin, a Boston debutante known to all the class because she was engaged to Robert Bacon, described Theodore as “not the sort to appeal at first.” He was too eccentric, she said, too ambitious, while Bacon, by contrast, was “a wonderful normal human being.”

“He danced,” said Rose Lee, sister of Alice, “just as you’d expect him to dance if you knew him—he hopped.” Charles Washburn remembered how he ate chicken “as though he wanted to grind the bones.”

Washburn was one of the relative handful of classmates “good and true” whose friendship mattered most to Theodore. The others were Saltonstall, Bacon, Harry Chapin, Henry Jackson, Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, and Minot Weld. They were Boston to the bone, and following graduation, with but few exceptions, they would settle happily in good, predictable Boston careers in banking, finance, or the law. (Jackson, who chose medicine, returned to a position on the Harvard faculty.) Their names figure time and again in Theodore’s letters and in the pages of his diaries. Saltonstall—“Old Dick”—a large, well-fed young man with a big, soft, bland face, is certified “my most intimate friend,” with Harry Shaw coming second. And since Saltonstall was also Theodore’s entrée to the Lee household at Chestnut Hill, and thus to Alice, he would always be regarded in a different light from the others. By their senior year Saltonstall qualified for the highest rating possible: “Old Dick I place on par with the Roosevelts.”

There were also two acknowledged “dig friends” who should be mentioned, both New Yorkers—George Pellew, the class poet, who afterward became a writer for the New York Sun, and Richard Welling, later a prominent New York attorney and reform crusader. Welling was a particularly interesting young man, a serious student and a powerful physical specimen. It was he, during their freshman year, who had been so astonished by Theodore’s namby-pamby workout at the gymnasium, and once, sometime later, during a skating expedition to Fresh Pond, he had discovered how very mistaken he had been in that first impression.

The day was bitterly cold, with a furious wind blowing, and the ice was much too rough. Any sane man would have given up and gone home, Welling recalled, but Theodore had kept exclaiming his delight as they beat their way across the pond, arms flailing, neither knowing how to skate very well. The harder the wind blew, the more miserable Welling felt, the greater Theodore appeared to be enjoying himself. (Welling actually remembered him shouting, “Isn’t it bully!” but then Welling wrote his account of the incident a very long time afterward.) “Never in college was my own grit so put to the test,” Welling said, “and yet I would not be the first to suggest ‘home.’”

They were out on the pond nearly three hours. Only when it became too dark to see did Theodore at last say that perhaps they ought to stop. Had there been a moon, Welling surmised, they might have gone on until midnight.

Like some of the other stories, this one could be taken two ways, as proof either of an indomitable will—what Welling called Theodore’s amazing vitality—or of mental imbalance.

He would be remembered reading by the fire in a room full of friends, unmindful of their talk or the fact that his boots were being singed. In another story he flies into a rage when a drunken clubmate does an imitation of his facial contortions—the teeth, the thrusting jaw. In still another he becomes so flustered on entering Eliot’s office that he announces, “Mr. Eliot, I am President Roosevelt.”

The truth of such anecdotes is hard to gauge. Even the best-known of the Harvard stories may be largely apocryphal. It appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post some twenty years later, in an article by Owen Wister. Alice Lee, “pretty ... in nice furs,” is said to have been watching from the balcony as Theodore fought for the Harvard Athletic Association’s lightweight boxing cup in the spring of his junior year. The setting was the Harvard gymnasium—the “old” gymnasium, as it would be known, since it was shortly replaced by a larger, more up-to-date building—and his opponent was the defending lightweight champion, a senior named C. S. Hanks. When the referee called time at the end of a round and Theodore dropped his guard, Hanks is said to have landed a smashing blow on the nose that produced a great spurt of blood and angry booing and catcalls from the crowd—whereupon Theodore raised an arm for silence. “It’s all right,” he said, “he didn’t hear him.” Then, with bloody face, Theodore stepped over to Hanks to shake his hand and we are left to imagine the effect on the girl in the balcony.

That Theodore fought Hanks and lost on March 22, 1879, is a matter of record. Hanks was entered at 133 1/2 pounds, Theodore at 135, and Hanks was much the better of the two, “punishing Roosevelt severely,” according to an account that appeared in The New York Times. But the old gymnasium had no balcony and no women were present. In his diary, where he never let modesty stand in the way if there was something of which he was proud, Theodore states only the fact that he was beaten. The Times reports no display of high sportsmanship, nor does the Advocate in its comments on the event, and to picture a reporter of that day passing up a scene such as Wister described is a little hard to imagine. Fiction was Wister’s specialty and the mere thought of his friend Theodore seems at times to have inspired the Parson Weems in him. Another eyewitness to the Hanks-Roosevelt bout, a man named George Spalding, who was sitting beside Wister, called Wister’s account “the most barefaced egregious manufactured history ever conceived.”

Theodore never became a champion boxer at Harvard, never distinguished himself at any sport. He was not a good or natural athlete. He had no interest in organized athletics, played on no team and shunned—because of his poor eyesight—any game that involved a moving ball, with the exception of lawn tennis, the new game, which he played socially only and poorly.

He was, to be sure, a rabid competitor in anything he attempted. He was constantly measuring his performance, measuring himself against others. Everybody was a rival, every activity a contest, a personal challenge. “As athletes we are about equal,” he wrote the summer between his junior and senior years, comparing himself to his brother; “he rows best; I run best; he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling or boxing; I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, etc., etc.” On another expedition to Maine later that summer, he climbed Mount Katahdin carrying a forty-five-pound pack and noted in his diary that both Cousin Emlen and Arthur Cutler had given up in exhaustion long before reaching the top.

Theodore, his cousin Maud Elliott had once observed, “always thought that he could do things better than anyone else.” But the impression is more of somebody who wants to prove, who must prove, he could do things better than anyone else.

Of course, one had to maintain a certain perspective. All rivals were not equal. Writing Bamie about his academic record the fall of his senior year, he put the matter succinctly and, apparently, in total seriousness.

“I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows,” he said. “Only one gentleman stands ahead of me.”

The memory of his father could still leave him “desolate and heartsore.” Those lone spells of brooding, however, the painful diary entries, were far fewer now, confined almost exclusively to special or commemorative calendar days—the eve of departure for Christmas vacation, an anniversary of his father’s death, or his own birthday.

“Oh, how little worthy I am of such a father,” reads the most anguished of such passages in the diary from his junior year. “I feel such a hopeless sense of inferiority to him; I loved him so.... But with the help of God I shall try to lead such a life as he would have wished, and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very . . .”

The next page, consisting of seven lines, has been carefully blotted out in heavy black ink. Apparently, he had gotten drunk again, or was still sorely distraught over what had happened the night of the Porcellian initiation. For under laboratory conditions, by back-lighting the page, it has been possible to determine two and a half lines of the seven he chose to censor: “angry with myself for having gotten tight when . . .”

“May God help me to live as he would have wished,” he repeats one more time, this in his senior year, as he turns twenty-one.

Morally, he had tied himself to the mast. He did not smoke—and never would—and he remained preeminently “pure,” as he said. He abhorred foul language, and humor smacking of what he called smut. One expression of righteous indignation to be found in the diary, this on the news that Cousin Cornelius had married a French actress, might be a line from an English drawing-room farce: “He is a disgrace to the family—the vulgar brute.”

The Sunday-school classes at Christ Church continued regularly each week for a total of three and a half years. He quit only in January of his senior year when it was discovered that he was a Presbyterian, not an Episcopalian. He must either join the church, he was informed by the rector, or go.

“I told the clergyman I thought him rather narrow-minded,” he wrote Mittie. He then started teaching a mission class in the poorest section of Cambridge.

His health was superb, better even than during the first two years. Apparently he had but one bout with asthma all his junior year and none his senior year.

The attack during his junior year had again coincided with a trip to Maine, another arduous hunting expedition like the one before, again under the guidance of Bill Sewall, only this time in the dead of a Maine winter. “The first two or three days I had asthma,” he reported to his mother, “but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into [the logging] camp.” Beyond that he said no more on the subject. It was his joy in the wilds that he wanted to share with her. He had never beheld anything so beautiful as the Maine woods in winter. He had killed a buck and trapped a lynx, he also told her proudly.

He was a steadfast correspondent, certainly, however busy he was, and as he liked to remind those at home, writing was slow work for him. The words never came easily, a letter always took more time than they would ever suppose. His longest letters were to his “own sweet Motherling” and he signed himself now as his father had, as Thee.

Of the world at large, of events in the daily papers, he apparently thought no more than in previous years. The one odd note was a passing remark in an eight-page letter to Mittie written early in his junior year. He was enjoying especially Dunbar’s lectures in political economy, as well as Palmer’s course in metaphysics. These, he wrote, were even more interesting than his natural-history courses.

3

Long afterward, looking back, he would say he had left Harvard little prepared for “the big world.” He thought what he had learned at Harvard of considerably less value than what he had learned at home. Further, he blamed Harvard for killing the old boyhood dream of a career in science. The emphasis, he said, had been entirely wrong for him, almost exclusively on laboratory work and the minutiae of biology, none of which appealed. (”I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician.”) Had Harvard encouraged the active life of a field naturalist, a career like those of his boyhood heroes—Audubon, Baird—things might have gone differently, he implied.

On the surface this would seem a sad and ironic commentary and especially if, as appears, Harvard had been chosen in the first place for its strength in the natural sciences. But there is little reason to believe that the young man at Harvard would have given anything like the same explanation, had he been asked. To judge again by what he said in the diary, he enjoyed particularly the time in the laboratory; and if grades are a fair index, it was in the sciences that he did his very best work at Harvard, scoring in the 90s in three of his four science courses in his junior and senior years, and an 89 in the fourth.

His boyhood dream, he later charged, had been the victim of a “total failure” on the part of the science department “to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists.” Yet a more outgoing outdoor naturalist, a more inspirational teacher than Nathaniel Southgate Shaler would have been extremely difficult to find. Shaler was the antithesis of the laboratory recluse and Shaler was the dominant spirit of the Natural History Department, which had all of three professors. His geology field trips were famous. (”If he hears you call him old man,” said a student, “he’ll walk your damned legs off.”) Reporters sometimes went along to describe the experience—the huge love of nature he exuded, his humor and unending intellectual enthusiasm. In the Agassiz tradition Shaler was “thoroughly human”; he wrote, he traveled, he was refreshingly outspoken. “He was much like what Roosevelt later became,” remembered President Eliot, “very energetic and large hearted.”

Indeed, every sign is that the boyhood vision of a lifework in natural history faded for Theodore in spite of the way science was taught at Harvard, rather than as a consequence. Not even Shaler could hold him. The fact that he had no praise for Shaler in later years, no Shaler stories of the kind so many of his contemporaries told, may not mean much, since he was often to be silent on people who had mattered in his life, and particularly, it would seem, if he felt they had somehow abandoned him, or he had abandoned them. The only Harvard professor he was to remember fondly, A. S. Hill, in the English Department, was also the only one he was known to have openly disliked as an undergraduate.

The fairest judgment seems to be that he had found other interests—such as the Dunbar lectures and Alice Lee. If Harvard failed him, or let him down, it was in other ways.

He never found any real intellectual excitement there, for all his good grades. He was never inspired to reach or push himself academically. At no point did he churn with intellectual curiosity or excitement. He was conscientious about his work and could give it all his concentration when need be. Like his father, he had the power of being “focused,” and because of this—and because he very carefully organized his time—he gave the impression of working relatively little. Richard Saltonstall, for one, was under the impression that he was pretty much coasting.

When President Eliot was asked long afterward if there was anything he could say as to the influence of Harvard on Theodore, he responded “No.” Eliot’s recollection of Theodore as an undergraduate was vague. He could recall only a “feeble” youth with prominent teeth, a boy who probably read a good deal but never got “to the bottom of things.”

He had had no real contact with Eliot, as almost no one did. William James, from whom he had taken anatomy in his sophomore year, made no apparent impression. The names of Emerson or Dana or Parkman fail to appear anywhere in his letters and diaries. Also, for someone supposedly enthralled by the works of Longfellow—someone so deeply moved by the heroic theme of King Olaf— it seems odd that he never reports sighting the Great Man himself, or makes any effort to go see him.

Nor, as time would tell, did Harvard provide him with any lasting male friendships. He was never anything but proud of his Harvard affiliations. He liked being known as a Harvard man. He would return for reunions. He would report dutifully on his career for class biographies and recall with conspicuous pride—and, on occasion, with something less than strict regard for the truth—his various undergraduate accomplishments. He would claim, for example, to have held Harvard’s lightweight boxing crown; and in describing his academic record, he would remember finishing in the top ten percent of his class, which was also inaccurate, since at graduation he stood number 21 out of 171.

Of his Porcellian connection he was proudest of all. The day would come when, in a letter from Washington, he would inform Kaiser Wilhelm II of the engagement of his daughter Alice, his own firstborn, and include the wonderful news that it was to be a match with a Porcellian man.

But his Harvard friendships were to become peripheral very rapidly. Except for Henry Minot, the departed friend from his freshman year, he had found no one with whom he shared common interests, beyond the social or athletic. Years later, having interviewed a number of those who had known him best, another Harvard man, the writer Hermann Hagedorn, would conclude that Theodore must have been lonely as an undergraduate. Several said they thought he had had few real friends. “I have discovered no one who was intimate with him and few who were sympathetic,” Hagedorn noted privately. “Most of his classmates simply did not like him,” he was told by Mrs. Robert Bacon.

It is certain, however, that Theodore had an extremely good time at Harvard, just as he remembered. When, midway through his junior year, he writes, “Truly these are the golden years of my life,” he means every word. He “can’t conceive of a fellow possibly enjoying himself more.” “I doubt I shall ever enjoy myself as much again” is the emphatic declaration as his junior year ends. If he knew others thought him peculiar or “bumptious,” as one professor said, he never let on.

For Mittie, in the fall of his senior year, he provided this memorable social log:

Cambridge, October 20, 1879

DARLING MOTHERLING,

I have just returned from spending Sunday with the Guilds, cousins of Harry Shaw, who live out at Forest Hills near the Minots. I drove over there in my cart, and the ride home this morning was delicious. Yesterday (Sunday) Harry Guild and I drove over to the Whitneys’ to take tea.

Last Monday I drove Jack Tebbets over to call on the Miss Bacons, who are very nice girls. Wednesday I dined at the Lees’, and spent the loveliest kind of an evening with Rosy, Alice, and Rose. The two girls [Bamie and Corinne] must come on to Boston next month if only to see Chestnut Hill; and, by Jove, I shall be awfully disappointed if they don’t like it. Mamie Saltonstall’s birthday was on Friday; I gave her a small silver fan chain. Saturday I spent all the morning playing tennis with the two Miss Lanes; I forgot to say that on Thursday they took Dick and myself to call on the Chinese professor. We had a most absurd visit.

This afternoon I am going to drive Van Rensselaer over to Chestnut Hill; tomorrow he and I take tea and spend the evening at the Lanes’. Wednesday Harry Shaw and I give a small opera party to Mr. and Mrs. Saltonstall, Rose, and Alice. Thursday six of us—Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, Minot Weld, Dick Saltonstall, Harry Chapin, and myself—are going to take a four-in-hand and drive up to Frank Codman’s farm, where we will spend the day, shooting glass balls, etc.

He did have fun, time after time. And he did fall in love, head over heels.

“I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he begins one of the most candid and heartfelt entries in the diary, a summing up written shortly after graduation.

I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation, and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together, I have won the sweetest of girls for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.

He counted himself a success, and that too was an altogether new feeling.

CHAPTER TEN
Especially Pretty Alice

1

THEY MET THE FIRST TIME on October 18,1878, which is to say they met early that same heady autumn of Theodore’s junior year when suddenly everything seemed to be going so right for him. He had his “burst of popularity” and found the girl of his dreams, his “‘rare and radiant maiden,’” all within about ten days.

The eighteenth was a Friday. Classes were over for the week and in the afternoon Dick Saltonstall had driven him out to Chestnut Hill in a buggy to meet his family and spend the weekend. It was a ride of only six miles, but through open country most of the way, hills brilliant with fall color, and Theodore’s first impression, almost from the hour they arrived, was of coming home.

The two great neighboring homesteads of the Saltonstalls and the Lees might have been Oyster Bay mansions and the two large, active families into which he was at once gathered might have been Roosevelts.

The houses were within calling distance of each other, about fifty yards distant, with hayfields and orchards and woodland falling away down the hillside. A connecting path ran from the Saltonstall back door on a gradual uphill slope to the Lee place, past the Saltonstall barn. The Saltonstalls faced east, the Lees south; but the houses were of the same vintage and much the same in scale and appearance—huge and Victorian, with clapboard siding and an endless number of windows, high porches, high, peaked gables, tremendous red-brick chimneys, and long kitchen wings. The kitchen alone at the Saltonstalls’ was as big as a barn (quite large enough to serve as an additional Saltonstall dwelling, years later, when it was cut off and removed from the main house). And the Lee house was larger even than the Saltonstalls’.

Leverett Saltonstall, Dick’s father, and George Cabot Lee, the father of Theodore’s heart’s desire, were two wealthy, important, middle-aged Bostonians, dignified, good friends, brothers-in-law, and as steeped in Harvard as one could possibly be. (Leverett had been in the Class of 1848; George, in the Class of 1850.) Leverett, an attorney, had given up his regular practice to dabble in one thing and another, including politics; George was a Lee of Lee, Higginson and Company, the Boston banking and investment firm. Indeed, there was no more exemplary figure of good, old, Boston financial stability than George Lee, he being the keeper of the famous vaults at Lee, Higginson. Another of the firm, Colonel Henry Lee, some fifteen years before had hit upon the idea of a safe-deposit vault beneath the State Street headquarters, the first such vault in the country, but George had become its manager. A small, compact man with a high forehead, high color, and a white mustache, he was known to be “prudent, assiduous, a lover of detail,” a little gruff in manner but kindly withal, and totally reliable. To have your money securely invested, in the Boston vernacular of that day, was to be “as safe as Lee’s vaults.”

They were men certainly of whom the elder Theodore would have approved. The one notable difference in their outlook and his was political, since both were Democrats, and Saltonstall, in particular, harbored bitter enmity toward almost all Republicans as a consequence of the 1876 election. Sent by the National Democratic Committee to witness the tally of disputed votes in Florida, he had seen the presidency being stolen before his eyes and refused ever to forget it.

Saltonstall’s wife was George Lee’s sister, Harriett Rose, which made the Saltonstall and Lee children first cousins. Dick was the oldest of five Saltonstall children, followed by Rose, Mary, Phillip, and eight-year-old Endicott. Alice—Alice Hathaway—was the second of six Lee children, five girls and one boy. Rose, or Rosy, Lee was her older sister. Then followed Harriett, Caroline, Isabella, and George, who was nine. Their mother was Caroline Haskell Lee.

So together the two households comprised what amounted to one very large family of fifteen, and with five or six full-time servants for each house, with horses to ride, surrounding countryside to explore, fireplaces in every room for chill October nights, this was everything Theodore could have wished for, the whole atmosphere being “so homelike,” as he said.

Alice was seventeen. Theodore was nineteen, the same age his father had been when he first reached Roswell and found his Princess from Afar in another large country house on a hill. What Alice was wearing when he first saw her, whether they were at the Saltonstalls’ or the Lees’ house, or somewhere along the path between, we do not know; but as he told her later, she affected him in a way he had never experienced before. The feeling was instantaneous. He loved her, he later wrote, as soon as he saw her. And she was “my first love, too.”

She was, by every surviving account, extraordinarily attractive, slender, graceful in her movements, and “rather tall” for a girl of that era, five feet seven, which meant that with shoes on she was as tall as he. Her hair was a honey-blond and done in fashionable “water-curls” about her temples, in “the Josephine look.” Her eyes were extremely blue, her nose just slightly tilted. She is described repeatedly as “radiant,” “bright,” “cheerful,” “sunny,” “high-spirited,” “enchanting,” “full of life,” the same words one finds in descriptions of Mittie Bulloch at that age. She loved games, as Mittie did; she wore white; she was full of humor and flirtatious (”bewitching,” Theodore said); her birthday was in July, as Mittie’s was.

Saturday morning, accompanied by Dick and one of his sisters, she and Theodore walked in the woods together. In the afternoon they all drove to Milton, to the Ellerton Whitney estate, for dinner and tea. “We spent the evening dancing and singing, driving back about 11 o’clock,” he reports in his diary. Sunday, after church, just the two of them went “chestnutting” and three weeks later he was back again for another Sunday, to see the Saltonstalls ostensibly.

Invited for Thanksgiving, he could write proudly at the day’s end, “They call me by my first name now.”

As time passed they were to cover countless miles in country walks together, she more than keeping up with him with her “long, firm step.” They played tennis, at which she was quite good; they went to dances, dinners, and endured what appears to have been an unending quantity of tea and talk and always in the best company.

“Snowed heavily all day long,” reads one Saturday entry in the diary. “But in spite of the weather I took a long walk with pretty Alice . . . spent most of the remainder of the day teaching the girls the five step and a new dance, the Knickerbocker. In the evening we played whist and read ghost stories.” He had a rug made for her from the lynx he trapped in Maine. She made him a pair of slippers (to replace Mittie’s presumably); and it was that spring that he had his horse shipped on to Cambridge so he could ride to Chestnut Hill on his own whenever he chose. (”It was the best stroke I ever made getting him on here.”)

To judge by what he said in his letters home, he was having a “capital time” with any number of Boston girls—Jennie Hooper, Nana Rotch, Lulu Lane, Bessie Whitney—and when he mentioned Alice, even in the supposed privacy of the diary, it was usually in the same breath with Rose Saltonstall, as if there were no difference in their appeal to him. Nor did he neglect to include periodic references to others from his “past.” “Remember me to Annie and Fanny, and give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humor,” he wrote to Corinne; “otherwise my respectful regards. If she seems particularly good-tempered tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”

Once he ventured to declare in the diary, “The more I see of Rose Saltonstall and Alice Lee the more I like them, especially pretty Alice.” By spring he felt up to saying the same thing (and in almost identical words) to Bamie, adding quickly, “All the family are just lovely to me.”

“I want you particularly to know some of my girl friends now,” he wrote to Corinne, expecting that she, Mittie, Bamie, and Aunt Anna might show up for Class Day. “They are a very sweet set of girls,” he assured her.

Through that summer, until he left for Maine (and to see Alice en route), he appeared to have little or nothing on his mind, exactly as if Alice Lee did not exist. Her name never appears in the diary rendition of his days at Oyster Bay. He writes instead of “the same active, out-of-door life that I always enjoy so much.” He is thinking mainly about “getting into beautiful condition,” spending “the whole time out in the open air; and at night am always tired enough to sleep like a top. Naturally I am in magnificent health and spirits.” A “pretty little Miss Hale” from Philadelphia turns up as a guest of Uncle James Alfred and family. “I take her out rowing quite often.” Another of “the prettiest girls in Oyster Bay” is a Miss Emily Swan, with whom he has had “several very pleasant rows and rides.” He walks with Bamie and “Pussie,” he walks with Mittie, who is “just too sweet and pretty for anything.” On August 11 he reports, “I am teaching pretty Miss Emily Swan to play lawn tennis.”

But it was all an elaborate deception, according to what he revealed later. In truth he had already proposed to Alice. He had made up his mind to marry her as early as that Thanksgiving at Chestnut Hill. He had even recorded the decision in the diary at that time, but then, thinking better of it, carefully removed the page with a straight razor. The proposal came sometime in June, to judge by things he said later, and from the diary, one gets the impression it was on the evening of the twentieth, Class Day, for which none of the Roosevelts had made an appearance. There were parties most of the day—an afternoon tea dance at the new gym, a dinner at the Hasty Pudding Club—and after dark, from about eight o’clock until ten, he and Alice sat together in a window at Hollis Hall “looking at the Yard beautifully lighted and listening to the Glee Club.” He had “never seen her look so lovely,” he wrote. “We then went and danced at Memorial [Hall].”

But whatever the time or setting, she turned him down, or at least put him off.

As he wrote later to Henry Minot, he had “made everything subordinate to winning her.” His entire last two years at Harvard, as he saw them, were in “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”

“See that girl?” Mrs. Robert Bacon would remember him saying at a Hasty Pudding function. “I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her!”

The showy little dog cart was acquired as his senior year got under way and it was now that the expenditures on clothes took their biggest jump. His campaign was rolling. He enlisted all the help he could get. Early in November, he arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Alice, and her sister Rose to visit Mittie at 57th Street. Two weeks later Bamie and Corinne made their appearance at Chestnut Hill, where they were given dinners at both the Lee and Saltonstall houses. On November 22 he put on a lunch in their honor at the Porcellian, complete with wine and flowers, the table set for thirty-four guests, including Alice and her mother.

He escorted Rosy Lee to a tennis party and had “lovely fun” dancing with her at a Harvard Assembly. He took “dear and honest” (and very homely) Rose Saltonstall driving in his “swell” dog cart. He talked poetry and theology with the rather august Leverett Saltonstall most of one long evening.

Other young men, meantime, circled about Alice as moths to a flame (in the words of another of her cousins), and with the return of winter Theodore was beside himself. He is described wandering sleepless through the woods near Cambridge “night after night.” Obsessed with the idea that somebody else would run off with her, he sent abroad for a set of French dueling pistols, which it is said he actually succeeded in getting through the Customhouse “after great difficulty.” One winter night when he was off on another of his wanderings in the woods, somebody telegraphed New York and Cousin West, now a medical student, had to come on immediately to see what could be done for him.

Then, over the Christmas holidays, the course of the romance took an abrupt turn. Alice came back to New York for a second visit, accompanied by Rosy and Dick and Rose Saltonstall. It becomes “an uproariously jolly time.” There is a theater evening. Parties are given in Alices honor by Aunt Anna and Aunt Lizzie next door. New Year’s Day Elliott stages a lunch and a dance at Jerome Park. It is a sparkling winter day with fresh snow on the ground and everyone rides to and from the party in three big sleighs.

On Sunday, January 25,1880, again at Cambridge, he could announce unequivocally in his diary, “At last everything is settled . . .”

I drove over to the Lees’ determined to make an end of things . . . and after much pleading my own sweet, pretty darling consented to be my wife. Oh, how bewitchingly pretty she looked! If loving her with my whole heart and soul can make her happy, she shall be happy; a year ago last Thanksgiving I made a vow that win her I would if it were possible; and now I have done so, the aim of my whole life shall be to make her happy, and to shield her and guard her from every trial. . .

He was off at once on a flying visit to New York to “tell the family,” all of whom were “very much surprised,” according to his impression. By February 2, he had bought her a diamond ring.

Feb. 3 Snowing heavily, but I drove over in my sleigh to Chestnut Hill, the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife. My sweet life was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and so innocent, and so very, very pretty. I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune. Coming home I was upset in a great drift, and dragged about 300 yards holding on to the reins, before I could stop the horse . . .

Feb. 4 Superb sleighing, took Dick out for a long drive. The engagement is not to come out till a week from Monday; it is awfully hard to keep away from her.

Feb. 13. . . I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her; for a year and a quarter now I have never (even when hunting) gone to sleep or waked up without thinking of her; and I doubt if an hour has passed that I have not thought of her. And now I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose.

He began sending advance notices to a few select friends, to Hal Minot, to Edith Carow and Fanny Smith. To Mittie, who seems to have been greatly distressed, he wrote, “Really you mustn’t feel melancholy, sweet Motherling; I shall only love you all the more.”

The formal announcement was made February 14. When Mittie, Bamie, Elliott, and Corinne arrived three days later, he drove them to a “great family dinner at the Lees’.” Later, at the Hasty Pudding Club, too excited to sleep, he played billiards until dawn.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Robert Bacon long afterward, “. . . did not want to marry him, but she did.”

Alice, in her own words, felt as if in a dream, to have “such a noble man’s love.” She loved Theodore deeply, she wrote to Mittie, in answer to a letter welcoming her into the Roosevelt fold, “and it will be my aim both to endear myself to those so dear to him and retain his love. How happy I am I can’t begin to tell you, it seems almost like a dream.”

A date for the wedding was a subject no one had broached as yet, and when she told Theodore she wanted to be married the following autumn, he anticipated a “battle royal” with her father, who apparently thought she was too young to be in any rush and would have welcomed a long engagement. “I most sincerely wish I had you here to assist me,” Theodore wrote Bamie. But then Mittie proposed that he bring Alice home to live at 57th Street, once they were married, and it was thus that he “carried the day” when the confrontation took place. “Indeed,” he told Corinne, “I don’t think Mr. Lee would have consented to our marriage so soon on other terms.”

To Mittie he now announced, “I wish to send invitations to all my friends and acquaintances in New York; so couldn’t you send me on a visiting list of all the people I know or ought to know? I want to include everybody, so as to rub up their memories about the existence of a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who is going to bring a pretty Boston wife back to New York next winter.”

2

6 West 57th Street

MY DEAR MRS. WARD,

Will you take a cup of tea with me on Monday next, the 12th, at 4 o’clock.

I wish to present to you Miss Alice Lee of Boston who with her mother will be visiting us then.

Miss Lee is a very lovely young girl of eighteen and is just engaged to my oldest son, Theodore, who does not graduate from Harvard until June.

I think I can rely upon your interest, my dear Mrs. Ward, in my son’s engagement and I am anxious to welcome you to my home among a few of my friends. . . .

Hoping to welcome you then, my dear friend, on April 12th. I am faithfully yours—

M. B. ROOSEVELT

April 5, 1880

The note was one of the many Mittie sent off in her own hand on her monogrammed cream-colored stationery that spring of 1880 and there were to be a very great many more, several hundred at least, before the year ended. It was as if time and circumstances and all those rites of passage expected by proper society had conspired to put her at center stage as she had not been since her own engagement. And with so much expected of her—her particular grace and “example” often critical to the success of an occasion—she appears to have played her part with nothing but pleasure, and flawlessly. One New York paper was to write of her “brilliant prowess” as a hostess. “All the entertainments that she gave . . . were stamped with the spirit of good cheer, high breeding, and elevating conversation. Few houses have entertained so many guests and none has made of guests so many friends.”

Her small tea of April 12 had been preceded by a family reception for Alice on April 8 and was followed by a large evening affair on April 13 at which she and Alice made a striking picture receiving their guests in front of the ornate mantelpiece in the dining room at 57th Street. In December she would stand in the same spot, Corinne on her right this time, Alice on her left, at Corinne’s coming-out party, hothouse flowers banked on all sides, rooms so full of people it was difficult to move about.

Between these two occasions, in about seven months’ time, she would give perhaps twenty dinner parties and an equal number of teas; she would see the 57th Street house closed for the summer—silver packed, furniture shrouded with slipcovers—and move to Oyster Bay (on May 29). She would attend Theodores graduation at Cambridge (June 30); entertain a steady stream of guests at Tranquillity through the summer; settle issues among her servants; fret over Theodore’s health; see Theodore and Elliott off to the West for a hunting trip; have Tranquillity put in order for Theodore’s honeymoon; reopen the 57th Street house and arrange an “apartment” for Theodore and Alice on the third floor; attend the wedding at Chestnut Hill; plan Corinne’s party; issue the invitations for Corinne’s party; and adjust to the idea that Elliott was going off to hunt big game in India.

Theodore’s romance, moreover, was but one of several with which she must play a part.

It was at one of her April dinner parties at 57th Street, a week or so after the reception for Alice, that Bamie’s friend Sara Delano first met James Roosevelt of Hyde Park, a dignified member of the Hudson River “branch,” who was twice Sara Delano’s age and a widower. “He talked to her the whole time,” Mittie remarked to Bamie when the evening was over. “Why, he never took his eyes off her!” Sara, like Bamie, had resigned herself to the probability of lifelong spinsterhood and would credit Mittie ever after for the way things turned out. On May 7, following up on an invitation from “Squire James,” Mittie took Bamie and Sara for a visit to Hyde Park, a day Sara was to remember as among the most important in her life. “If I had not come then,” she would tell her son years later, “I should now be ’old Miss Delano’ after a rather sad life!”

Sara Delano and James Roosevelt were married at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, that October, a few weeks before Theodore and Alice were married. In November Sara and James sailed for a European honeymoon, taking the Germanic. On the same ship was Elliott, who was en route to India by way of London.

Cousin West was in love with Fanny Smith (she turned him down when he proposed), and Corinne, too, was being actively courted by a large, demonstrative, florid young Scot, a friend of Elliott’s named Douglas Robinson, heir to a real-estate fortune, who, like Alice, spent part of that summer with the family at Oyster Bay, his booming voice adding a new note—like that of a calliope, Theodore thought—to the usual sounds of summer.

Corinne was thought “clever” (Fanny Smith said she had “genuine intellectual power”) and though no beauty she had, at eighteen, a certain vitality and natural femininity that appealed to men and women. Beside Alice or Mittie, Corinne looked rather plain, but between her and Bamie, she was much the more attractive to the eye and her two brothers and her male cousins made a great fuss over her. She was a little taller than Mittie, with tiny hands and delicate features. For her summer reading this year she had undertaken Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

The same big porch rockers tilted back and forth at Tranquillity as in years past. The blue bay and sunshine were no different from other summers, or any less a tonic. The familiar, noisy games went on in timeless fashion and in the midst of it all Mittie herself often seemed a timeless summer note, “the mother in white . . . seated in state on the lawn,” a book usually in hand, or talking on in her easy, unchanged Georgia way to Sister Anna or Lucy Elliott. Only the strong-willed Bamie seems to have lost patience with her on occasion.

Nothing could ruffle Mittie. Corinne, who treasured especially her mothers warmth and spontaneity, saw in her also a steady enduring strength—of a kind different from Bamie s, but strength all the same. A “perfect readiness to meet all situations,” Corinne called it.

Mittie approved of Douglas Robinson, it appears; and having accepted Theodore’s decision, she had taken Alice to her heart quite literally as one of her own. Elliott may have become a worry by now; it is impossible to know for certain.

Elliott had begun working for Uncle James Gracie at a bank downtown and in summer commuted to and from Oyster Bay. As some writers have said, Elliott may also have begun already to drink more than was good for him, and so the trip west in August could have been as much for his benefit as for Theodores. Returning to Chicago after a week’s hunt in Iowa, Theodore would write to Corinne of their brother’s joy in “the change to civilization.”

As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening shandygaff.

But the letter is so plainly Theodore’s idea of humor—tall-tale humor out of the Wild West—that it suggests there was no “problem” as yet. That he would treat a subject of such seriousness in so open and bantering a vein would seem a sign that neither he nor Elliott nor any of them was very concerned.

As Elliott and Theodore proceeded on their western expedition, it was Elliott who got on most readily with the people encountered—male and female—some of whom, according to Theodore, were “pretty rough.” Elliott’s natural, easy way with people cut across barriers of class or background, an attribute Theodore could only admire, and doubtless Elliott’s past experiences in Texas gave him confidence of a kind Theodore lacked.

“Last Sunday night we got this motley crew together to sing hymns,” Mittie read in one of Theodore’s letters, this dated August 25,1880, from a farm in Illinois; “thanks to Elliott it was a great success. It was all I could do to keep a sober face when I saw him singing from the same book with the much-flattered Mrs. Rudolf and Miss Costigan.”

The trip had been badly planned. With no clear idea where to go, they kept trying different spots, first in Illinois, then Iowa and Minnesota, taking time out in Chicago between each foray to recuperate and figure their next move. The flies were dreadful in Illinois and on a lake in Iowa they both nearly drowned when their rowboat capsized. But they saw it as their last chance for an adventure together, entirely on their own, which probably would have been reason enough for going in the first place, quite aside from Theodore’s health. “I enjoy being with the old boy so much,” Theodore said. “I am so glad ... we two brothers have been able at last to be together,” wrote Elliott. “All the happier we are solely dependent on each other for companionship. . .”

Theodore had become violently ill during a midsummer visit to Bar Harbor with Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall. He had weathered his final examinations at Harvard, Class Day, graduation, the excitement of having Alice as a guest at Oyster Bay, all with no ill effect, only to be struck down in embarrassing fashion in far-off Maine. He was hit by violent diarrhea, his old cholera morbus (”very embarrassing for a lover,” as he told Corinne), and to Mittie he declared a trip west would be just the thing to put him back on his feet and build him up.

What he did not tell her—or Alice or Elliott, so far as we know—was that he had also received some extremely disquieting news from the college physician as far back as March. He had gone for a routine physical examination, at the conclusion of which Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant told him he had “heart trouble.” Of what variety, or whether that was even discussed, we do not know and it was only years later that Theodore ever talked about the incident. But apparently he was warned he must live a quiet life, choose a relatively sedentary occupation. He was to avoid strenuous physical exertion—he was not to run up stairs, for example. He responded at once and defiantly, telling the doctor he could never live that way, that he would do exactly the opposite.

He was sick again in Minnesota, at the Red River bordering on Dakota Territory, their farthest point west. An attack of asthma had him gasping so that he spent the night sitting up in order to breathe. The day after he was in such pain with colic he could hardly walk. Yet only a few days before, writing from Chicago, Elliott had described him as looking like a new man, “as brown and well as can be,” the picture of health. “I think he misses Alice, poor dear old beloved brother. But I try to keep him at something all the time and certainly he looks a hundred percent better than when he came out.”

For all the grouse, geese, snipes, sharp-tailed plovers, ducks, and grebes they managed to kill—in excess of four hundred birds—the shooting was “not as good as expected.” They had hunted on foot, not horseback. There had been no whirlwind rides over the prairie as in a Mayne Reid adventure. They had never reached the “real West,” the “Far West,” as Theodore called it. The whole episode had been very tame and colorless in contrast to what Elliott had experienced in Texas or what he could expect in the wilds of India.

As once Theodore had stayed safely at home with his studies while Elliott went off to Fort McKavett, so now he would settle in with his “little pink wife” while Elliott circled the world. But plainly there was an element of escape to Elliott’s forthcoming adventure. He was getting out before Theodore returned, abdicating his place as man of the house, and to “a far better man,” he assured Bamie in another letter from the western trip.

Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory, but fail to put in practice.

Theodore wanted Elliott to be his best man at the wedding and declared further that if, because of his India plans, Elliott was unable to be there, then he wanted no best man—all of which pleased Mittie greatly.

“Theodore is in the city now . . . wild with happiness and excitement,” wrote Fanny Smith in her diary on October 15. “I went with him to see the wedding presents he is going to give Alice. I hope she is very fond of him.”

He had spent several thousand dollars on a sapphire ring, other jewelry and more gifts for her. He would begin saving, he vowed, once they were married. Two days ahead of the others, he departed for Boston.

They were married on a perfect New England fall day, the height of Indian summer, Wednesday, October 27,1880, Theodore’s twenty-second birthday, at noon in the Unitarian Church at Brookline. Mittie had invited Fanny Smith and Edith Carow to come on to Boston with the family and so they were both in the pew beside her, along with Bamie and the Gracies. Corinne was a bridesmaid. Elliott stood beside his brother with the ring and Theodore, when it came time for his vows, responded, as Fanny Smith said, “in the most determined and Theodorelike tones.”

One of the servants in the Lee household, Alice’s nurse from childhood (recorded only as Christina), ran the two miles from the house to the church, having missed the last carriage when it departed, and arrived just in time for the ceremony.

Alice made a stunning bride. Some weeks before, on a flying visit to Boston after his western trip, Theodore had found her “the same as ever and yet with a certain added charm” he was unable to describe. “I cannot take my eyes off her,” he wrote in his diary; “she is so pure and holy that it seems almost profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly; and yet when we are alone I cannot bear her to be a minute out of my arms.”

The reception was in the grand tradition—at home, with music, food, dancing, servants with trays of champagne, the bride the center of everyone’s attention, the big house where she had grown up bright with sunshine streaming through long windows.

On their wedding night the couple stayed in Springfield, at the Massasoit House, and from there the following day went directly to Oyster Bay for a honeymoon of two weeks. A proper European honeymoon had been postponed until summer, Theodore having since decided, at the urging of Uncle Robert) to enter the Columbia Law School.

Early the first week of November, a few days before Elliott sailed, Mittie received word that they were “living in a perfect dream of delight” at Tranquillity, waited on hand and foot by two faithful Roosevelt servants—the ever reliable Mary Ann, the groom Davis—and by a local woman named Kate, who did all the meals. “The house is just perfection,” Theodore told her; “Kate cooks deliciously, and Mary Ann is exactly the servant for us; and Davis does his part beautifully too, always sending in his respects in the morning to ’the good lady’ as he styles Alice.”

Breakfast was at ten, dinner at two, tea at seven. Except for the servants and a big black-and-white collie named Dare, they had the place to themselves. The summer “crowd” had long since departed. The big summer houses stood silent in the golden autumn light.

They played more tennis, went on more walks and for long drives over the hills in the family buggy. At night they read aloud from Keats and Sir Walter Scott before a log fire. Their one contact with the outside world was the morning paper. Once, on November 2, Theodore had Davis drive him over to East Norwich so he could cast his first vote in a presidential election, for the Republican, James A. Garfield, and his running mate, none other than Chester Arthur.

“There is hardly an hour of the twenty-four that we are not together,” he wrote in his diary a few days later. “I am living in a dream land; how I wish it could last forever.”

Saturday, November 13, Mittie welcomed them home at 6 West 57th Street.

3

That winter in New York was the busiest and possibly the happiest time Theodore had ever known. Even the most frenetic days at Harvard had never been quite so full. For Alice, after the pace of life at Chestnut Hill, the change must have been overwhelming.

Theodore at once took up the part of his father, presiding at the head of the family table, presiding Sunday evenings in his father’s old place at the newsboys’ dinner, beginning their first Sunday in New York. He was elected a trustee of the Orthopedic Hospital and the New York Infant Asylum. And for the Roosevelt women now, at least figuratively in his charge, he became the main source of news from “downtown,” the perfect escort to the theater and the opera, the whip hand on sleigh rides through the park or along Riverside Drive. Reading aloud to them from Mark Twain’s latest, A Tramp Abroad, he would laugh so uproariously that he could hardly go on, turning “literally purple,” as Corinne said.

At meetings of the St. Andrews Society he chatted with Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune and with others who had known his father. He joined a Free Trade Club, organized a whist club, started to work seriously on the naval history he had more or less toyed with the year before. By mid-February Corinne could also report in a letter to Douglas Robinson that “he has been going to Republican meetings steadily this week, and gives us most absurd accounts of them.”

And all of this, meantime, was only tangential to the new career in the law.

From 57th Street to the Columbia Law School, then located in the battered, old Schermerhorn house on Great Jones Street, was a distance of about three miles—fifty-four blocks down Fifth Avenue—and he walked it regularly every morning, leaving the house around 7:45, arriving in time for an 8:30 class. Classes over, he sometimes stopped in at the Astor Library, across Lafayette Place, to do research for the book, then walked home again. The six-mile round trip, he remarked apologetically, was the only regular exercise he was able to work into his day, given all he had to do.

“The law work is very interesting,” he said in his diary; and again, “I like the law school work very much.” Some afternoons, when not at the Astor Library, he read law in the offices of Uncle Robert, who was back in the news again as one of the new reform trustees of the Brooklyn Bridge, now in its eleventh year of construction and still unfinished.

Before dark, if there was snow, he would bundle Alice into the sleigh and strike off to the north, through the park or crosstown to the Hudson. “I love to take my sweet little wife up the Riverside Park,” he wrote shortly before Christmas; “it is a beautiful drive now, with the snowy palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, as with the dark waters of the Hudson, covered with ice, at their feet.”

Once, on a sleighing party along the Hudson, the elder Theodore and Mittie had gone as far as one of their summer “cottages,” at Riverdale, where Mittie insisted on getting out to inspect the place. The snow was deep and Theodore had picked her up and carried her in his arms, only to step in a hole and over they had gone. “She enjoyed it like a child,” he happily told the family afterward. “Your Uncle Jimmie and Mrs. Dodge looked shocked.”

“When my sweetest little wife can’t go,” reads another of the diary entries, “I always take dear little Mother. It is lovely to live as we are now.”

But the quantities of energy expended on his studies and sleigh rides, the historical research, the daily constitutionals in every kind of weather, or his clubs and meetings and charities, seem almost secondary to what went into “the season,” the New York social whirl that dominated the winter and took front rank in the running diary account he maintained so conscientiously. From the night of Corinne’s debut, December 8—the “great ball at our house” when Alice wore her wedding dress and white flowers in her hair—there was something going on, some reception, dinner, musical, or spectacular society ball, nearly every night of the week. He and “pretty Alice” were an immediate triumph as part of the ultra-fashionable “young married” set, “taken up” and fussed over by what Edith Wharton called “the little inner group of people who, during the long New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest.”

There was a “jolly little dinner” at the lselins’, a “very pleasant little party” at Aunt Annies, dinners at the Leavitts’, the Griswolds’, the Weekeses’, the Keans’, the Morans’, the Tuckermans’, the Stuyvesant Fishes’, a musical at the Betts’, a dinner for twenty-four at home, and several large dinners given by Mrs. William B. Astor, Jr.—the Mrs. Astor—who was homely and without charm and so laden with chains of diamonds as to be immobile, but who, with her social counselor. Ward McAllister, reigned over New York society. The Roosevelts and the Astors were “family” now, after a fashion, since Mrs. Astors daughter Helen had married young James Roosevelt Roosevelt—”Rosy” Roosevelt—who was the son of Sara Delano’s James by his first marriage.

There were theater parties and “small suppers” afterward, a box at the opera Monday nights, the Mendelssohn Concert series. There were private dances by candlelight at Delmonico’s that often lasted until three in the morning, the Patriarchs’ Ball and the Family Circle Dancing Class (the F.C.D.C.), these latter two the inspiration of Ward McAllister and already regarded as time-honored social institutions.

“Dinner at Delanos’,” reads the diary entry for Monday, January 11, 1881, at the start of a new week on the social calendar; “sat between Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Drayton.” The night following came a “very jolly theater party and supper at Tuckermans’;” the night after that, a “great ball” at the Astors’. On Friday, January 14, Theodore, Alice, and some thirteen others, including Bamie, Corinne, and Douglas Robinson, went off to Niagara Falls by private railroad car.

Saturday, January 15 Ideal day; perpetual spree. Saw falls, rapids, and whirlpool; took long sleigh rides, ended trip with every kind of dance in evening. Took hotel by storm. Everybody so jolly and congenial.

Sunday, January 16 Sleighed to church. Went under Falls; grand sight. Took night train for N.Y. Ghost stories and songs. Trip is the success of the season.

Monday, January 17 Went to Patriarch Ball.

It was “the greatest kind of fun.” He knew how to pace himself, he said. “I never stay more than two minutes with any girl and so don’t get talked out.” Corinne, he claimed, was a “great belle” of the season, while Alice grew ever more dazzling. With her on his arm he could not help being the center of attention. “Alice is universally and greatly admired; and she seems to grow more beautiful day by day . . . and oh, how happy she has made me!” The attentions showered on her at every party seem only to have pleased and flattered him. The old wild jealousy, any thoughts of dueling pistols, were all in the past apparently.

For her own part, meantime, Alice had also joined a tennis club and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (”now we are one in everything,” said Theodore emotionally), and formed a bond with her new mother-in-law that, from the evidence we have, must have been extraordinary. If one chose to marry a Roosevelt, Douglas Robinson was to remark, one ran the risk of being “bullied or ignored or hung on the family like a tail to a kite,” but Alice is not known to have shared or ever to have expressed any such feelings and the love she and Mittie had for each other would be talked about for years.

There was no friction between them and it was not as though Alice was an unfelt presence. Practicing at the piano in the corner of the parlor, she played loud enough to be heard through the wall of the adjoining Roosevelt house. She entered into conversation—Mittie found her “so companionable”—and for all her sunny spirit appears to have had no fear of expressing exasperation or impatience with some of her husband’s ways. (In another of Owen Wister’s vignettes involving the spilling of Roosevelt blood, Theodore is described working away at his War of 1812 studies, alone in the library, standing on one leg, checking through a book on navigation while making little sketches, his desk a sliding panel that pulled out from the bookcase. Alice bursts in on him and exclaims, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships,” whereupon “Teddy” charges to the third floor, cuts himself shaving, and is at once attended by the adoring wife and other resident female Roosevelts who “take measures” to save his collar from being stained.)

At times, too, she questioned the need for such everlasting activity in their lives. While Theodore and Bamie thrived on the tightly packed schedule—“Oh, Energy, thy name is Bamie!” Theodore once hailed his adored sister—Alice seems to have felt something alien in the pellmell rush of New York life, just as Mittie had when she first came to the city as a bride. Racing down the street with Corinne to catch a horsecar one morning, Alice had panted out, “Do you always have to run to catch anything in New York?” And Corinne, writing reflectively to Elliott later in the day, had agreed it was true, they were indeed constantly rushing to catch something or other. “Sometimes we succeed,” she said, “and sometimes we do not, and it is not particularly satisfactory either way.” Only within the home walls was life “intensely satisfactory.”

During the flurry of excitement surrounding Corinne’s engagement to Douglas Robinson later that winter, Alice seems to have remained largely in the background. The engagement was a peculiar business—eagerly supported by Theodore and Bamie and looked upon by Corinne as a great mistake from the moment she agreed to it. She had no wish to be married. She had a horror of marriage, as she told her ardent Douglas in a variety of ways, one letter after another, he having departed from New York almost immediately after the announcement to check over some landholdings in West Virginia.

She had interests other than marriage, she insisted, interests she knew he regarded as “unwomanly.” Her favorite nights at home were those when Theodore came bursting in from one of his political meetings “full of it all.” Douglas was her “dear old fellow,” to be sure, but she was utterly unable to say she loved him and would not until she did. But following an afternoon ride with Theodore up Riverside Drive, she wrote, “Such a lovely long talk as we had ... He is very fond of you, Douglas, and said there was not a single other man he knew except you that he would like me to marry.” “Sometimes,” she wrote later, “I think if I could have one talk with my father it would be all right.”

Alice and Corinne became close companions, shopping together, making social calls, reading aloud to each other. With Bamie, Alice seems to have acted with a certain restraint, that same edge of respect, even deference shown by others toward Bamie since childhood. If at a party she found herself caught in conversation with some formidable someone whose mind ranged beyond her own, she wished always, Alice said, that Bamie could be there to take her place. One rainy evening toward spring, when Mittie was not feeling well, the three young women—Alice, Corinne, and Bamie—sat with Mittie in her room talking at length of their own lives and ambitions. Bamie would have preferred to live in more stirring times, she said, and to have taken a prominent part. “What a splendid queen she would have made,” wrote Corinne to Douglas. “With you and Teddy as prime ministers and Elliott as master of ceremonies, you might have ruled the world!!”

The one false note in the picture was the inclusion of Douglas Robinson—a gesture of kindness on Corinne’s part—for there could never be but one prime minister to Queen Bamie; no one could possibly be regarded on a par with Theodore in the eyes of his two sisters, then or ever. Their love for him was a force, a presence precluding, as it would turn out, any feelings of comparable intensity for any other man—as Corinne herself had all but said already to her long-suffering, distant suitor.

And possibly, everything considered, it was Alice’s acute awareness of this, her seemingly instinctive understanding of how very much Theodore meant to the other Roosevelt women and her pleasure in their presence in her married life, that speaks most for her character. As Corinne herself observed long afterward, Alice was wholly unselfish about sharing Theodore with his adoring, now entirely female family. It was this that endeared her most to them and made her at once one of them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Home Is the Hunter

1

Some years afterward, reflecting on the personality of Theodore Roosevelt, a friend and fellow politician by the name of John S. Wise wrote that it would be mistaken to picture Theodore as resembling his father. He had never known the father, Wise acknowledged. “But from all accounts of him he was one of the gentlest, most lovable, public-spirited and popular men that ever lived in New York City.” Theodore, however, had not inherited “the gentler traits” of the father. “In his sturdiness and love of life’s battles and enterprises, he much more resembled his uncle, Mr. Robert Roosevelt, who had been my friend and associate these many years.”

Then Wise spoke of the Roosevelt he liked best, about whom the general public knew little or nothing, Elliott, “the most lovable Roosevelt I ever knew.”

He was one of my earliest acquaintances in New York and our attachment grew from the moment of our first meeting until his death. Perhaps he was nothing like so aggressive or so forceful a man as Theodore, but if personal popularity could have bestowed public honors on any man there was nothing beyond the reach of Elliott Roosevelt.

Little that counted for “home news,” the news he hungered for, was lost on Elliott during his time away, so thoroughly, so conscientiously was he posted by Mittie, Bamie, Theodore, Corinne, and by the ever sympathetic Aunt Annie, whose affection for him surpassed even what she felt for the other three of her sisters children. “At present I have thirty-two! letters to answer,” he declared at one point in his travels. Aunt Annie alone, we know, wrote him a total of sixty-one times.

He was apprised of the ups and downs of Corinne’s romance and from four or five different perspectives. Word of her engagement left him “flabbergasted.” (“Is Bamie showing any signs of the same thing?” he asked Theodore excitedly from Hyderabad.) He was posted on the departure of “the two innocents” (Alice and Theodore) for their summer abroad. He heard how Theodore had climbed the Matterhorn.

“I have tried to make Corinne understand she’s not to marry unless she is sure,” Mittie was still writing in August.

Theodore’s reunion with Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool had been a huge success . . . Theodore and Alice were home again. (”Teddy brought out from London with his dress suits two or three satin waistcoats—purple, pale yellow, and blue, and one rich black silk one,” wrote Mittie. “. . . Emlen has been quite contemptuous about them, and you should hear Douglas standing up for Teddy”) Theodore was “going in” for politics, as a candidate for the State Assembly. . . . Theodore was elected by a margin of fifteen hundred votes.... Uncle Jim’s new house at Oyster Bay was up to the second story.... Father’s old friend Theodore Bronson had died in Paris. . . . Edith Carow had given Theodore and Alice a party and Theodore led an impromptu cotillion. . . . Theodore’s book was finished and delivered to the publisher.

“Has not our dear Thee done well,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir.

Their letters took anywhere from two to three months to catch up with him, once he got to India, and there was no little frustration in hearing things so long after the fact, and particularly since other news often reached him astonishingly fast. When James A. Garfield was shot in Washington in July, much of the world knew about it in a matter of days. Word of Garfield’s death in September—and of the ascension, incredibly, of Chester A. Arthur to the presidency—reached Elliott in Delhi not much after it did Theodore in Liverpool.

Of his own adventures he could hardly say enough. His travels became ultimately a trip around the world.

Through social contacts in London made possible by the James Roosevelts and with the help of a letter he carried from Secretary of State Evarts, introducing him as the son of the eminent Theodore Roosevelt of New York, he had no trouble making himself welcome among Her Majesty’s forces in India. Arriving at Bombay in mid-January he was put up at the Byculla Club and provided with a full-time servant who slept outside his door. There were lunches (”tiffins”) in his honor, a round of elaborate dinners.

“I would not trust myself to live here,” he wrote Mittie. “There is no temptation to do anything but what you please . . .

“At seven Aya brings me my coffee and cigarette,” he went on, describing a typical day, “and I sit on the veranda lazily taking in all the beauties of the early morning—

At my feet directly under me is the race track and the horses are being taken round for a morning spin. Some of them, beautiful Arabs, bounding by with that long easy stride so sure an indication of the dash and go of the breed. Over the field, beyond the belt of green waving trees yonder, stretches the ocean; as the mist slowly rises, see the boats lazily drift along. To sit and read and think for an hour here is perfect happiness. But the bath is ready by eight, I am dressed for nine o’clock breakfast with Mr. Clark of the Bombay Club, where I go in a buggy or gig, the “hansom” of the city. “Stewed sole—egg toast—prawn curry and beer cup” does not make a bad beginning for the day. A little business, a good deal of sporty talk, and the papers bring a fellow very quickly to M. Vouillon’s two o’clock tiffin in my honor. I cannot describe it, it was all too Arabian night-like. The rich peacock feather hand punka, the delicious perfume, the delicate dishes and still more delicate wines, the quiet service—no sound of boots for the boys go without them, and the clothes make no noise. They are certainly wonderful servants. The afternoon, a call on the Governor of Bombay—and a visit to the Apollo Bunder [a popular rendezvous for fashionable Bombay]—to pay my respects to Mme. Vouillon, who drives in a handsome C-spring landau, two Sikhs, a coachman in scarlet and gold and she herself a beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, looks particularly well, as she is set off by the odd contrast—though there are many other as perfect turnouts and pretty women. Kittredge drives me to the Club, I dress and sit on his right at a dinner he gives me. A fairly fitting ending to the eastern day, a dinner of six, each man his own servant to wait on him and a boy to keep him cool. Then bed—almost in the open air. . . .

To his hosts he was a refreshing novelty—an American sportsman of impeccable taste and manners, a good shot, handsome, high-spirited, a born gentleman. The hard-drinking, polo-playing officers wished only “to give me the best of times.”

En route to Kashmir, as the guest of Sir Salar Jung, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he was escorted to an evening banquet through lines of black men holding flaming torches, dined in the open court of a palace beside a fountain filled with floating candles. He was shown a room made entirely of china, furniture as well. On another day, in company of his British host, Colonel Hastings Fraser, he was received by Sir Salar as though he were a visiting prince—the colonel in full uniform, Elliott in black coat and top hat. “Just fancy your young brother talking, aye, and advising with two of the most celebrated men in these parts,” he wrote Bamie.

On a tiger hunt south of Hyderabad, arranged by Sir Salar, he traveled by horse, by elephant, and by palanquin, a large, covered litter carried on poles by sixteen men. Camp gear was transported by forty camels and there were horses enough to mount the full party of about two hundred men. It was “roughing it” of a rather different kind, he wrote. The usual evening meal “in camp” consisted of soup, salmon, various chicken or veal cutlets, broiled chicken, tongue, wild duck, “gulow” and rice, six or seven different curries, then possible snipe or Welsh rarebit, cheese, and coffee. “And a big pitcher of cooled beer and soda water, which has been in a wet blanket and fanned all day. Each one of us has his pitcher and it is good. The heat gives one an awful thirst...”

The tiger he shot was one of the largest ever seen locally and he was at once a great hero. “Three hours after the blood had been running she weighed 280 lbs.,” he wrote Theodore in a state of utter euphoria. “Her length was 9 feet 1 1/2 inches, height, 3 ft., 7 in.” The “brute” had been “glorious” in her final agony as she made her last charge and he “finished her... with a spare shot from the Bone Crusher—by George, what a hole that gun makes.”

If only his “brave, old Heart of Oak Brother” could have been with him. Here was “sporting work worthy of the Roosevelt name.”

“It is the life, old man. Our kind. The glorious freedom, the greatest excitement. . . . How everything here would have pleased your fondness for the unusual and the dangerous.”

In the parlor at 6 West 57th Street, watching her husband’s reaction to such letters, Alice worried he might at any moment drop everything and leave for India himself. “Poor dear Teddy... longs to be with you and walks up and down the room,” wrote Mittie, “. . . when Alice appealed to him, he smothered her with kisses.”

“This is your last hunt,” Theodore advised solemnly, “so stay as long as you wish . . .”

Dora, Mary Ann, Daniel the butler, were thrilled by his letters, Mittie told him, and so pleased to be remembered by him. Alone of all the family, he regularly inquired for the servants in his letters.

The claws of the tiger would be made up for her as a necklace, Mittie was told. Skin and head were being shipped to London, where Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter,” would see that a proper rug was prepared. In other letters came word that three crates of skins, heads, and horns were on the way, two crates of painted woodwork from Kashmir, another of silver and gold works, tea sets.

But a siege of fever at Srinagar had also left him feeling and looking like a “perfect bag of bones.” And he was upset terribly by the human wretchedness to be seen everywhere. How could beings created in the image of God be brought so low? “And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?”

In Europe, at virtually the same moment, traveling by boat with Alice on the Rhine, Theodore puzzled over the numbers of castles on shore. The Age of Chivalry, he speculated, must have been lovely for the knights, but gloomy indeed for those who had to provide the daily bread.

On hearing that Theodore and Alice had purchased land at Oyster Bay on which to build their dream house, Elliott told Theodore wistfully that he too might build something there one day. “We will all live there happily as in old times . . .”

“It delights me beyond bounds to see the way you have ’gone in’ for everything as a son of the dear old father should,” he went on, “and I will come back ready and eager to put my shoulder by yours at the wheel, Thee.”

“How proud of you [I am], Thee, in your life so useful and so actively led at home,” he wrote another time. “Will it be any help to have me one of these days go round with you to back you in your fights, old man?”

Do take care of yourself now for everybody’s sake, the little wife’s (to whom give my best love), the family’s, and mine. I tell you, Thee, I shall need you often in your good old strong way to give a chap a lift or for that matter if I am on the wrong road a blow to knock me back again.

For the sheer pleasure of living, he said in another letter, this to Bamie, he had never known anything to equal his time in India. But a life lived solely for pleasure was not in the cards; it was not “‘our way,’ for that means life for an end.”

In Ceylon he brought down two elephants, killing the second only after it had chased him through the jungle for two and a half hours, Elliott running as fast as he could the whole time. He had hit it in one eye with his first shot, but that had not slowed the animal in the slightest: “. . .it was only after I had put sixteen bullets into him that his great, crushing weight fell down in the bamboos.”

From Ceylon he went to Singapore and from there to Saigon, in the teeth of a typhoon. Saigon had “the quaint air of old France . . . much shipping and an air of thrift and quiet comfort that reminded one more than anything else of a prosperous southern city in the old days, say in Louisiana.” At Hong Kong he took a side trip to Canton, riding an “ordinary American river steamboat” up the Pearl River, “really into China proper.”

That was late in December 1881, or about the time Theodore was making ready to leave for his first session in the Albany legislature. In January, from the neat, curtained privacy of Aunt Anna Gracie’s house on West 36th Street, Aunt Ella Bulloch, in New York for a brief visit, wrote Elliott of the long conversation she and “Teddy” had just had, “mostly about you, darling.”

“The dear old fellow is back from Albany on a short leave and spent an hour with me . . . and we gloried in you together, Teddy exclaiming, ’What a fellow that is!’”

I was so glad to find that Teddy too thinks so highly of your power of influence with others. He spoke of the differences between you in this respect with such noble generous warmth and said that where he would naturally wish to surpass other men, he could never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward you. Then we talked of his book and his political interests. Thee thinks these will only help in giving him some fame, but neither he says will be of practical value, or giving him advancement, but says he must begin again at the beginning.... So that you will both in point of fact start your career together, he having gained this intermediate experience while you gain yours in a different way during your travels. Thee is a dear “grand” old fellow in very truth. . . . Sometimes he reminds me so much of you . . .

Then the morning of March 11, 1882, having been gone a year and four months, Elliott walked through the front door at 6 West 57th Street and a week or so after that, having dined privately with him, having listened to his stories, Aunt Annie, we know from her diary, was in church, head bowed, praying to God “to cure him”—but of what, whether of some mysterious Oriental fever or of his old “nervous” seizures or of drinking, is not known. “Ellie is very ill” is all she says in another entry.

Whatever the problem, it does not seem to have held him back. He was asked by the James Roosevelts to be a godfather for their infant son, Franklin Delano, an honor that touched him deeply, as he wrote in reply, and one he would have declined had not “my dear mother . . . persuaded me that I should accept.” (The small ceremony took place at Hyde Park’s St. James Chapel on March 20, just nine days after his return.) And when Corinne was at last married that April, he performed his supporting part admirably, convinced like everyone else—everyone but Corinne—that Douglas Robinson was the ideal match, “a good fellow . . . worthy of our bright, innocent little girl.” Theodore gave her away before a flower-banked altar at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church; the reception followed at 6 West 57th Street; Corinne, it is said, spent the better part of the day weeping.

“My little heart,” Elliott had written her from India, “if I could only take you in my arms and kiss you this evening, pet you and love you. . . . Ah! My little love ... I smile to myself now as I recall the old dreams about you, Baby Sister, now a big woman going to be married . . .”

“Why if you don’t take him [Douglas Robinson],” reads another letter, “you and Old Nell will keep house in some cozy country corner all by ourselves . . .”

“Dear Elliott has been such a loving, tender brother to me,” Corinne once told Douglas. Elliott was so much more sensitive than other men, so much more understanding and considerate of her feelings and of her shortcomings, never dogmatic or judgmental. “How different people are,” she mused; “there is Teddy, for instance, he is devoted to me too, but if I were to do something that he thought very weak or wrong, he would never forgive me, whereas Elliott no matter how much he might despise the sin, would forgive the sinner . . .”

“If you were my brother or cousin,” she explained to Douglas, “how freely I could say I love you dearly. That kind of love I give absolutely. . .”

In time Elliott joined with Theodore and Douglas, Poultney Bigelow, and Cleveland Dodge (the son of William, Jr.) to start a New York Reform Club, the first meeting being held in the library at 57th Street. (”The respectable, educated, refined young men of this city should have more weight in public matters,” Theodore told a reporter somewhat pompously.) Elliott also joined Douglas and Archibald Russell in the real-estate business downtown at 106 Broadway. The firm was renamed Robinson, Russell, and Roosevelt, new stationery printed. So at twenty-two, Elliott appeared to be on his way in the world of serious affairs, his adventuring over.

He lived at home, meantime. Indeed, having faced the beasts of the jungle, having seen and doubtless experienced more of the “big world” than any at home—or that they could have even imagined, one expects—he now found himself quartered at Mittie’s insistence in a small room just off hers, exactly as though he were a small boy in need of watching and mothering.

She called him her “comfort child.” He was the son who had given her greatest solace and who, until his travels, had stayed closest to her. She adored him, openly, happily. She spoiled him. And he as openly welcomed her love and attention. “My special charge,” he called her, since his father sometime in his final agony had charged him to look after her.

“Ah! Dear one, if you love me, your son, does he not love you?” he had written her from Madras. “I tell you yes, little Motherling, and so tenderly.” She was never to worry over a thing. “Tell me all, I have broad shoulders and am amply strong. When I come back, dear, I come to see you alone. Not to leave you again . . .” And another time: “Remember Father left me particularly to care for you and at any time you want me no other mortal thing shall keep me from being with you. Trust Nell.”

Among the reasons he liked Douglas Robinson as much as he did was Robinson’s fondness for Mittie, who of late, Elliott conceded privately, was showing a “slight unevenness.” A few of her long-standing peculiarities—her chronic tardiness, her need for order and cleanliness—had become considerably more pronounced. To judge by some accounts she was becoming really quite odd. In an exchange that took place many years later, a recorded conversation between a daughter of Corinne’s, Mrs. Joseph Alsop, Jr., and Bamie’s son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., the situation was portrayed as follows:

MRS. ALSOP: Then, she [Mittie] had an absolute passion for cleanliness. Well, it was a phobia.... Mother would, with peals of laughter, tell me things she would do, and it would sound to me exactly as though she were talking about a crazy person. Not to be able ever to be on time.... Then she had a library closet where she tied and untied bundles of different kinds. She and the maid worked all the time in the library closet. . . . She had a white chenille net that she wore on her hair to keep the dust out. She always took two baths—one for the soap, and then she got out and it was run again by the maid and she got in again, so as to wash the soap off. Then when anybody came to see her if she was in bed a large sheet was put down, particularly if the doctor came. And when she said her prayers a sheet was put down so that she wouldn’t touch the floor.

MR. COWLES: She was crazy!

MRS. ALSOP: Oh, yes, of course, she was; but crazy, according to my mother, in a perfectly delightful, charming and companionable way. . . . The whole thing is very fascinating.

But what makes it still more “fascinating” is the very contrary impression Mittie made on so many others at the time who found her anything but odd or laughable. Most notably there was Sara Roosevelt, Cousin Sally, a woman of strong mind and will who was never known to suffer fools. She thought the world of Mittie, invited Mittie to visit her at Hyde Park, where Mittie sometimes stayed for as long as a week, Cousin Sally obviously preferring her company to that of almost anyone else of that generation. “I was very proud when she came and stayed with me,” Cousin Sally would recall. (Her diary entry from the time reads, “I love having her. We have read together, admired Baby, driven with James, tea’d at Mother’s.”)

Theodore, too, was proud to bring his political friends to the house, sure of the impression she and Alice both would make. To Elliott she remained “the beautiful center of our home worship.” If she babied him, he accepted that with good grace and with what Fanny Smith called a “caressing” kind of humor. Describing his new sleeping arrangement, he would say, “Now when my little mother feels cold at night, she comes in and puts an extra blanket on me, so that I wake up perfectly roasted, and when she is warm, she comes in and takes the covers off me so that I wake up frozen.”

The great tiger-skin rug was stretched before the parlor fireplace, where it dominated the entire room. The front hall now was lined with the heads of other animals Elliott had shot. Once, as he was about to leave India, Mittie had written, “I am very jealous that you gave some of your trophies away in Bombay, when I value even a tail of a mouse that is my darling Elliott’s trophy!” Her interest in every detail of his letters describing the tiger hunt had been, as she said, quite as intense as that of Theodore.

Those nights when he came in late from parties, or not at all, she left little penciled notes. “My darling son, I have missed you all evening. Sleep well, darling, and call Mother if you wish her.”

2

While Theodore went churning back and forth to Albany, making speeches, railing against corruption in high places, getting his name in the papers day after day, Elliott was preoccupied principally with becoming a man-about-town. He was drinking more than he should—but then so did many others of his set and there is nothing to suggest that anyone found him offensive.

In appearance, he was a taller—by two inches—and only somewhat handsomer version of his brother, not the Apollo-like figure portrayed in some later accounts. He and Theodore had each grown a mustache by this time—Elliott’s being the thicker, more successful effort—both were parting their hair in the middle, or nearly so, and Elliott, too, now wore metal-rimmed spectacles. Seen from a distance, in riding attire, say, or waving from a sailboat out on the Sound, either could easily be taken for the other. Appearing at the Newsboys’ Lodging House for the first time, immediately after his honeymoon at Oyster Bay, Theodore had been amazed when the boys started stamping and cheering. “As soon as they saw me, they mistook me for you,” he had explained to Elliott. “I thought it pretty nice of them; they were evidently very fond of you.”

It was Elliotts effortless charm, his generosity and humor, his way of talking to people—as if he had never found anything quite so fascinating as what the other person had to say—that made him so very attractive. He was glamorous in much the way his father had been—and as Theodore most obviously was not—and this, with the aura of his recent adventures, plus a certain bravura and suggestion of decadence, made him enormously appealing to women especially. He had none of the self-righteousness which in his brother put some people off; and little or none of Theodore’s combativeness or bombast. Isaac Hunt, a friend of Theodore’s in the legislature, described Elliott as “a smooth, quiet [compared to Theodore], nice fellow.” Unlike Theodore he had not an enemy in the world.

Reading through surviving reminiscences, one senses that Elliott was very like some of his Bulloch forebears, that he would have been quite at home with the young bloods at the Savannah Club in days past. And it was not simply the women in the family who fawned and fussed over him, or melted before his attentions. “If he noticed me at all,” wrote Fanny Smith, “I had received an accolade and if on rare occasions he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible.”

(“He drank like a fish and ran after the ladies” was Edith Carow’s less charitable summation, years later. “I mean ladies not in his own rank, which was much worse.”)

As befitting a gentleman and a Roosevelt, he gave time to the Orthopedic Hospital, took an occasional turn Sunday evenings at the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He was also understood to be “working up” his travel notes, compiling his letters and journal entries, with the thought of doing a book on big-game hunting. Few Americans had been to India, or experienced all he had, and since he did write well, the possibilities in the idea were genuinely promising. But somehow nothing ever came of this. He seemed incapable of pulling things into focus, or of seeing a piece of work through to completion, as his brother could. To write his Naval War of 1812, Theodore had forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship—Theodore, who never particularly cared for sailing, who disliked long sea voyages. Theodore had plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents to amass volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments, crews. He had started out knowing no more about his subject than anyone else and with no experience or training in historical research. At times he felt he had taken on more than he could handle. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me,” he had written Bamie from The Hague, where, in the midst of his European honeymoon, he was still hammering away at the book. And had he not been able to spend several weeks soon after that soaking up “advice and sympathy” from the “blessed” Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool, he might not have brought it off. But persist he would, and though the end result, his first published opus, was often dry and tedious in the extreme—much of it virtually unreadable to anyone without a prior interest in the subject or in the author (one can only sympathize with poor Alice or Mittie trying to make headway in such a book)—it was also scrupulously thorough, accurate, fair, and would remain a definitive study.

“‘It’s dogged as does it,’” Theodore liked to say, quoting a line from Trollope. He admired “staying power” in anyone. It was a hunter’s virtue, he said. Yet the most celebrated hunter of the moment seemed not to have it, as he himself recognized. He was lacking, said Elliott, “that foolish grit of Theodore’s.”

Long afterward, when Elliott did at last try his hand at serious writing, it was in fiction, a well-handled, revealing short story that was never published. It is about a New York society figure living abroad—a woman he calls Sophie Vedder—who is described as having “so many friends, so many good and lovable qualities,” but who is also plainly bound for a tragic end. “Live and let live” is her motto. “Never miss an opportunity of enjoying life, no matter at what cost, and when the end comes, well, take it cheerfully.” There will be no dirges played at her funeral, she boasts, only Strauss. “My life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it.... I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler.” “Poor Sophie, what a frivolous, useless thing you are,” he has her say to herself at the last, as she is about to pull the trigger in front of her mirror. “Still, you never did anyone any harm but yourself. . .”

When Elliott began spending time with a society belle named Anna Hall, the whole family took heart. The Halls were Hudson River gentry, with Ludlows and Livingstons in their background. Anna, the oldest of four Hall sisters, had been raised at Tivoli-on-the-Hudson, twenty miles above Hyde Park, where she was schooled by a painfully pious, self-absorbed father who never worked and who for years, before an early death, required that she walk up and down the lawn with a stick pressed against the small of her back to instill the “carriage” of a lady. She was tall, golden-haired, like Alice Lee, but unlike Alice, prim and cool, and where Alice was lovely-looking, fresh, radiant, Anna was something more. She was stunning, regal, with a magnificent figure and large, haunting blue eyes. She was “made for an atmosphere of approval,” as a friend said. In London a few years later, the poet Robert Browning became so infatuated with her beauty that he asked if he might just sit and gaze while she had her portrait painted.

Elliott was dazzled. A courtship proceeded. Letters were exchanged, his addressed to “My dear Miss Hall,” hers to “My dear Mr. Roosevelt.” He sent flowers, took her driving in the park.

They were seen at parties. They knew the same people; their families, of course, knew one another and all about one another. One Sunday evening she went with him to meet his newsboys, and according to Fanny Smith, it was at a house party at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, over Memorial Day in 1883, that he asked her to marry him. Apparently she accepted, though no one was told for another several weeks.

“I am honestly delighted,” wrote Theodore to Corinne from Richfield Springs, where he was convalescing, taking the waters as he had as a child. Alice had announced she was pregnant and Theodore had been hit by an attack of asthma as bad as any in years, in addition to a siege of cholera morbus worse even than that of the summer before their marriage. But Ellie’s news was something they could all be glad about. It would do “the dear old boy” great good, said Theodore, “to have something to work for,” “to marry and settle down with a definite purpose in life.” In measured brotherly fashion, Elliott was told it was “no light thing to take the irrevocable step,” while Aunt Annie reminded him, “You must be very pure and very true now that you have secured the right to guard, love and cherish so sweet a girl as Anna.”

When, at summer’s end, Theodore picked up and went west again for his health and some shooting, to Dakota Territory this time, for two weeks in the “real West,” he went alone, Elliott being preoccupied. Anna, not Mittie, now wore the tiger-claw necklace. Elliott was riding to hounds at Hempstead, on Long Island, playing polo at Meadow Brook. At Tivoli one weekend he suffered some kind of relapse or seizure—”My old Indian trouble,” he explained to Anna—and had a difficult time getting back to New York on the train. He was injured at polo several times. He played extremely well, but with an ardor bordering on recklessness. Some nights, nursing a sprain or a “beastly leg,” he would sit alone brooding and smoking in his room at 57th Street, and Anna worried that he was keeping something from her. “I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” he wrote, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”

Theodore and Alice had moved into a house of their own, on West 45th Street, next door to Corinne and Douglas, who in April had become the parents of a son, Theodore Douglas Robinson, the first of the new generation. Theodore by now had also purchased more than a hundred acres of prime land at Oyster Bay, on Cooper’s Bluff, then sold parcels to Bamie and Aunt Annie, so they could build beside him. His stable was already going up on the ninety-five acres he had kept for himself.

Theodore had any number of irons in the fire. He had taken a flier in cattle in Wyoming, investing $10,000 in a ranch run by a Harvard classmate. Theodore had put another $20,000 into G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the publisher of his Naval War, in order to make himself a limited partner. And though he had gone to the Dakota Bad Lands ostensibly to shoot a buffalo while there were still a few left to shoot, he returned to announce he had launched a cattle venture of his own. He talked proudly now of “my ranch in Dakota.”

As a politician, Theodore was already seen as a phenomenon, often abused or made a laughingstock by the opposition papers, but a somebody nonetheless and a bright, rising star in the eyes of the men his father had set such store by. Theodore, as everyone said, was on his way, his life had taken hold, while Elliott had only Anna Hall.

Their wedding, “one of the most brilliant social events of the season,” took place at Calvary Church downtown, in the neighborhood of the old house on East 20th Street, on December 1, 1883. Theodore was best man and it was the last such occasion at which the whole family was present.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Politics

1

It was, as would be said, no ordinary thing for a young man of wealth and social position, a son of the “solid, old quiet element,” to go of his own accord down into the great bear pit of politics—thrash it out, survive or fall, in “the rough hurly-burly of the caucus, the primary, and the political meeting.” But the impression that Theodore was virtually the only such young man of his day, or that he did what he did against the wishes of family and friends, is mistaken—as mistaken as was the doctrine so earnestly espoused then that any such young man would automatically raise the level of political morality and serve as inspiration for more of his kind to join the good work. New York already had a sterling example of such high ambition in Seth Low, the young reform mayor of Brooklyn, who was a Columbia College graduate and heir to the Low shipping fortune; nor should it be forgotten that another recent Harvard graduate was Boies Penrose of Philadelphia, who had been in the class behind Theodore’s. Penrose too was descended from a wealthy, distinguished line. He was a “lover of vigorous outdoor sports,” an aspiring author, and he too started off exactly as Theodore, by running for the state (Pennsylvania) legislature as a gentleman champion of reform. But Penrose was to become another of the era’s flagrant political bosses, overbearing, power obsessed, the antithesis of the reform spirit. Penrose was a perfect, Harvard-cultivated, Harvard-sounding aristocrat—and when among his political cronies, to quote one biographical sketch, “capable of conduct and utterances which caused the judicious to grieve and moved the pious to indignation.”

Theodore said later it was a combination of curiosity and “plain duty” that led him into politics, and that “I intended to be one of the governing class,” which may be taken as another way of saying he wanted power. In the novel The Bostonians (1886), Henry James would portray a leading character as “full of purpose to live . . . and with high success; to become great, in order not to be obscure, and powerful not to be useless.” The description would apply perfectly to Theodore. Obscurity, one imagines, would have snuffed him out like a candle.

He claimed also, years later, that a “young man of my bringing up and convictions could join only the Republican Party,” a curious observation in view of the large number of Democrats within his own “intimate” circles—Uncle Robert, father-in-law George C. Lee, the Saltonstalls, the Delanos, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, his friend Poultney Bigelow. Nor does it suggest how tenuous old party ties had become among Republicans of comparable social background and moral sensitivities as a result of the Grant scandals, the stolen election of 1876, or the dominance of such figures as Conkling and Blaine.

In any event, no one in the immediate family objected to his trying for the Assembly. Rather, it was quite the opposite. He received their most enthusiastic support and from Bamie especially, whose interest in his career was to serve him well. She and Corinne clipped everything written about him, filling large scrapbooks as time passed. Corinne told her devoted Douglas that he too had better begin taking part. “If there is one thing I like particularly,” she said, “it is public spirit.”

In afteryears Theodore would remember the prominent clubmen, businessmen, and lawyers who had “laughed at me,” warning that political parties were composed of riffraff, “saloon keepers, horsecar conductors, and the like.” But at the time, he happily talked politics with William Waldorf (“Willie”) Astor, who had served in the state legislature and was then running for Congress. And the fact is his strongest backing came from the most influential of his father’s friends—the ultimate clubmen, businessmen, lawyers—who lent their immediate support, attesting publicly to his “high character . . . honesty and integrity.” Among his very prominent backers were Joseph H. Choate, J. Pierpont Morgan, William Evarts, Elihu Root, and Morris K. Jesup, and it was support he gratefully acknowledged at the time. “I feel that I owe both my nomination and election more to you than to any other one man,” he wrote Joseph Choate, for example, following his initial run for the Assembly. At a testimonial dinner at Delmonico’s attended by three hundred leading figures in white tie and tails, he was praised to the skies by none less than Chauncey Depew, the after-dinner speaker of the day, who described himself as a “cordial friend” of the late Theodore (and who mused privately that the son looked about eighteen).

Robert Roosevelt approved emphatically and, despite party differences, asked the powerful Democratic assemblyman Michael C. Murphy, chairman of the City Affairs Committee, to keep an eye out for the young man once he reached Albany, and it was thus that Theodore was put on Murphy’s committee first thing.

Within his own social set he was a hero. “We hailed him as the dawn of a new era,” remembered Poultney Bigelow, “the man of good family once more in the political arena; the college-bred tribune superior to the temptations which beset meaner men. ‘Teddy,’ as we all called him, was our ideal.”

As near as can be determined all of three people disapproved—Uncle James Alfred, cousins Alfred and Emlen. “All my friends stand by me like trumps,” he says in his diary, “except for Al, Em, and Uncle Jim.”

“We thought he was, to put it frankly, pretty fresh,” recalled Cousin Emlen, who added the ultimate condemnation: “We felt that his own father would not have liked it. . . The Roosevelt circle as a whole had a profound distrust of public life.” But this recollection—frequently quoted later—was offered long after the fact, when Emlen, a somewhat stuffy man to begin with, had become considerably more so. Writing to Bamie in that earlier day, as he began work as a bookkeeper at Roosevelt and Son, Emlen said he wished he might do something for his country. “It is very plain that our young men must take a more active interest in our government, something more than mere voting and talking.” For a while, he trailed along with Theodore to meetings at Morton Hall, the district Republican headquarters, but dropped out because, as he later said, “I did not relish the personnel of that organization.”

Unaccountably, Theodore did. He was fascinated by the likes of big Jake Hess and Joe Murray, two machine “pols” if ever there were. Hess, the district leader, was a German Jew and a City Commissioner of Charities and Corrections (who, as a consequence, knew not only of the work done by the elder Theodore, but appreciated the political value of the young man’s name). Murray, a Hess lieutenant, was an Irish Catholic and onetime Tammany heeler who had worked his way up from the very bottom of the political heap in time-honored fashion, by being resourceful, loyal, and, on occasion, good with his fists. Murray appealed strongly to Theodore. Murray’s vision of the spoils system—as different from what Theodore had been raised on as were Murray’s religion and his background—was unequivocal. As Theodore later explained, “Not to insist on the spoils when you get into office and share them equitably among your political friends seemed [to Murray] almost as dishonorable as not to pay your debts.”

The membership of the Twenty-first District Republican Association was a “mixed lot,” Morton Hall itself nothing more than a big, dingy room over a saloon on East 59th Street. Some wooden benches, brass spittoons, and framed pictures of General Grant and Levi P. Morton comprised the principal “appointments.” Jake Hess ran things from a dais at one end, seated at a small table upon which rested a single pitcher of ice water.

“They rather liked the idea of a Roosevelt joining them,” Theodore recalled when talking some years afterward with a visitor from England who was gathering material on the “good government” movement. “I insisted on taking part in all the discussions. Some of them sneered at my black coat and a tall hat. But I made them understand that I should come dressed as I chose.... Then after the discussions I used to play poker and smoke with them.” His intent, he said, had been to get inside the machine.

It was only when he reached Albany, however, that he realized what an extraordinary world he had entered. A new “Legislative Diary” was begun, filled with a whole new cast of characters, some as closely observed as various rare birds in the boyhood field journals. There was much the same feeling of wonder and discovery, a little as though he were back on the Nile seeing fauna of unimaginable shapes and kinds and plumage.

The other 127 members of the Assembly consisted of farmers, mechanics, a half-dozen liquor dealers, a cooper, a butcher, a tobacconist, a compositor, a typesetter, three newspapermen, thirty-five lawyers, and a pawnbroker. Roughly a third of these he judged to be crooked. Approximately half the Democrats came under the category of “vicious, stupid-looking scoundrels.”

Appraising his fellow members on the City Affairs Committee, he found his Uncle Rob’s friend, Chairman Murphy, to be a tall, stout Fenian, “with a swollen, red face, a black mustache, and a ludicrously dignified manner; always wears a frock coat (very shiny) and has had a long experience in politics—so that to undoubted pluck and a certain knowledge of parliamentary forms he adds a great deal of stupidity and a decided looseness of ideas as regards the 8th Commandment.” Another Democrat named Shanley was shrewder than Murphy and easier to get along with, “being more Americanized,” but equally dishonest. Higgins was “a vicious little Celtic nonentity from Buffalo”; Gideon, “a Jew from New York who has been a bailiff and is now a liquor seller.” Dimon, a country Democrat, was “either dumb or an idiot—probably both,” and still another notable Democrat, a physical giant named McManus, he described as “a huge, fleshy, unutterably coarse and low brute . . . formerly a prize fighter, at present keeps a low drinking and dancing saloon . . . is more than suspected of having begun his life as a pickpocket.”

The leading lights in his own party were hardly less objectionable. One senior Republican, the veteran Thomas Alvord from Syracuse, was a “bad old fellow.” Of another, John Rains, he wrote, “he [has]. . . the same idea of public life and civil service that a vulture has of a dead sheep.”

He liked a gigantic, one-eyed Civil War general named Curtis, and a German from Cattaraugus County named Kruse was a “capital fellow.” Peter Kelly, a young Democrat from Brooklyn, was an ardent believer in Henry George and thus much else in the way of doubtful “abstract theories,” but on “questions of elementary morality, we were heartily at one.”

His favorites were two freshmen Republicans named Isaac (”Ike”) Hunt and William (”Billy”) O’Neil. Hunt, a tall, thin, melancholy young man, was a lawyer from Watertown and “thoroughly upright.” O’Neil, who kept a crossroads store in the Adirondacks, became “the closest friend.” Both were as untried and as ambitious nearly as Theodore, and would take his side on issues again and again.

Nothing seemed to intimidate him. Though all of twenty-three, though unmistakably the youngest member of the Assembly, he plunged ahead, deferring to no one, making his presence felt. It was a spectacle not to be forgotten. Whatever astonishment or incredulity he felt concerning his fellow members was more than matched by their response to him. One Albany reporter of long experience, seeing him on the floor of the Assembly, watching him wipe his eyeglasses, thought to himself, “What on earth will New York send us next?”

“We almost shouted with laughter,” recalled Ike Hunt, “to think that the most veritable representative of the New York dude had come to the Chamber.”

Hunt had seen him first at a Republican caucus held one evening in a committee room at the State House.

He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult. He had on an enormous great ulster . . . and he pulled off his coat; he was dressed in full dress, he had been to dinner somewhere. . . . [Later] I was standing right by the fireplace, and Teddy got up and looked around and bolted over to where I was. He said, “You are from the country”—which was the most crushing thing he could have said to me . . . I was standing there and was laboring under the hallucination that nobody would ever think I was from the country, but that is what he said to me. And he proceeded to go into all the details of how we got along and how we managed our affairs . . . and how we did everything in the country.

As at Harvard, the impression among many was that he had a speech defect of some odd kind. Hunt was sure of it. “He would open his mouth and run out his tongue and it was hard for him to speak.” The New York Sun called it a Dundreary drawl, to go with his English side-whiskers. When, in his maiden speech, he used the expression “rather relieved,” it was printed in the Sun as “r-a-w-t-h-e-r r-e-l-i-e-v-e-d.”

Wishing to gain attention on the floor he would stand at his place, stretching far forward over the desk, calling, “Mr. Spee-kar! Mr. Spee-kar!” his voice often shifting suddenly from tenor to penetrating falsetto.

“I do not speak enough from the chest,” he told Mittie, “so my voice is not as powerful as it ought to be.”

The new gold-rimmed spectacles and their fluttering black ribbon, his gold watch fob, the part in his hair, the narrow cut of his clothes, made him known at once. For reporters for the Sun, the World, and other Democratic papers, he was the fairest kind of game and they went right after him. He was called a “Jane-Dandy,” “his Lordship,” “weakling,” “silly,” “Oscar Wilde,” “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt,” “little man,” the fun always at his expense. The World reported that his trousers were cut so tight that when making his “gyrations” before an audience “he only bent the joints above the belt.”

Yet despite all this, and a trivial, patronizing maiden speech, he left no doubt that he was there to accomplish something—”to do the right thing.” The Republican papers also gave him every chance and he made friends steadily. As his Maine guide, Bill Sewall, once observed, “wherever he went he got right in with people.” Some at Albany, like Hunt and O’Neil, and two reporters, George Spinney of The New York Times and William Hudson of the Brooklyn Eagle, quickly perceived how much more there was to him than the bizarre mannerisms and foppish clothes. They saw something in the glittering gray eyes. They listened to what he was actually saying. If he was “green as grass,” said Spinney, he was also “a good-hearted man to shake hands with, and he had a good, honest laugh . . . not an affected laugh ...” He worked hard; he obviously cared and wanted to learn. “You could see that there was an uncommon fellow,” said Spinney, “distinctly different.”

The great question was whether he would prove to be what Tammany Hall’s leading political philosopher, George Washington Plunkitt, would call a “mornin’ glory”—the usual high-principled, blue-blooded amateur who “looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time.”

The eagerness with which he had approached Hunt the first night, firing questions about Hunt’s experiences in the country, was only a light warm-up. Spinney called him a walking interrogation point. Theodore would literally stand a man against a wall, “boring in,” as Spinney said, for half an hour. At breakfast in the dining room of the old Delavan House, down the hill from the Capitol, he would sit talking and reading a stack of morning papers, going through the papers at tremendous speed. “He threw each paper, as he finished it, on the floor, unfolded,” remembered William Hudson, “until at the end there was, on either side of him, a pile of loose papers as high as the table for the servants to clear away. And all this time he would be taking part in the running conversation of the table. Had anyone supposed that this inspection of the papers was superficial, he would have been sadly mistaken. Roosevelt saw everything and formed an opinion on everything ...”

The Assembly was elected annually. Theodore’s first term, in 1882, ran five months, from January 1 to June 2; his second term, in 1883, just four months, from January 1 to May 4. So in those two years he was actually in Albany a total of only nine months. Yet the change in him was amazing. Even by the close of the first term, according to Spinney, he knew more about state politics than nine out of ten members. He was chronically impatient, impulsive, and could be inconceivably impolitic (a “perfect nuisance”), but he grew steadily. “He made me think of a growing child,” said Hunt. “You know you take a child and in a day or two their whole character will change. They will take on new strength and new ideas, and you can see them growing right up.... He would leave Albany Friday afternoon and he would come back Monday night and you would see changes that had taken place. . . . New ideas had taken possession of him. He would run up against somebody and he got a new perspective. . . . He would be entirely changed, just like a child.”

He and Theodore boarded at the same house. Hunt always knew when it was Theodore returning from a weekend, because Theodore would swing the front door open and be halfway up the stairs before the door swung shut with a bang.

2

Much of what happened in the beginning was unexceptional. He had won his seat about as handily as expected, the Twenty-first being New York’s safely Republican “brownstone” district. (His opponent had also helped. He was a former director of the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum who had been dismissed for incompetence, exactly the sort of political hack the elder Theodore had tried to drive from office in his campaigns for asylum reform. Even the man’s name sounded like one specially contrived for some low character out of the nightmare world of the madhouse, Dr. W. W. Strew.)

And many of the positions he took on issues his first term were about as would have been expected, conservative, unspectacular—that is until the Westbrook Scandal. He opposed salary increases for New York policemen and firemen, opposed a bill that would have set the minimum wage for municipal workers at $2 a day, and for such stands he was hailed as a “watchdog” over the people’s money. He favored supplying New York with pure water.

But it was also in his first term, even before the Westbrook affair, that he became involved with the Cigar Bill, as it was known, and though his part in the issue was to receive none of the notoriety of the Westbrook affair, the experience was one from which he learned a great deal.

The Cigarmakers’ Union had introduced a bill to outlaw the manufacture of cigars “at home” in the tenements of New York, a system of long standing and the sole livelihood for thousands of the city’s poorest families. The bill was referred to the City Affairs Committee and Theodore found himself named to a subcommittee of three to look into the matter. Of the other two members, one, a Republican, had little use for the bill but intended to vote for it, he said, because of labor strength in his district. The second member, a Tammany man, confided candidly that he would vote no because that was what was required of him by “certain interests.” This left Theodore the deciding vote, and as yet none of them had been to see the conditions the bill was designed to stop.

“As a matter of fact, I had supposed I would be against the legislation,” Theodore remembered, “and I rather think that I was put on the committee with that idea, for the respectable people I knew were against it; it was contrary to the principles of political economy of the laissez-faire kind.”

There had been cigarmakers’ unions in New York since the Civil War and they had accomplished almost nothing. A prolonged strike in 1877 had been a complete failure, and the unions, bankrupt and without discipline, would have remained little more than debating societies had not a few determined young men taken charge, the most able of whom was Samuel Gompers. It was Gompers who had drawn up the new bill, the first important law against the exploitation of workers, and it was Gompers who prevailed on Theodore to make an inspection tour and see for himself, an invitation Theodore at first refused, because, in Gompers’ words, “he disbelieved the conditions which I portrayed to him.” Gompers had previously gathered his own information by going from tenement to tenement posing as a book salesman offering a set of Dickens.

Gompers was short, squat, almost gnomelike, opinionated and a good talker. He also believed in action, quite as much as Theodore, and at thirty-two was practically a contemporary. But he came from an entirely different world. He had been born in a London slum, the son of a cigar-maker. He was a Jew and had known only work and deprivation his whole life. So the two of them, going the rounds of the sweatshops, made an improbable pair. Once Theodore had seen for himself, Gompers remembered, “his whole manner toward me changed.”

Nothing had prepared Theodore for the wretchedness he beheld, the stench and filth. Some scenes would stay with him the rest of his days.

I have always remembered [he would write nearly forty years later] one room in which two families were living.... There were several children, three men, and two women in this room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food. The men, women, and children in this room worked by day and far into the evening, and they slept and ate there. They were Bohemians, unable to speak English, except that one of the children knew enough to act as interpreter.

It was because so few legislators knew of such conditions, Gompers said, that nothing was done to change the system or alleviate the distress. Simply to survive, such people had to work twelve to eighteen hours a day. Infectious disease was rampant among them. The manufacturers owned the tenements and so for the majority of workers there seemed no way out.

His rounds with Gompers were enough to settle Theodore’s mind. It made no difference how many theories of economics or of the rights of the individual might argue against the bill, he would back it. He returned for two further inspection tours, once with his two subcommittee colleagues in tow, another time by himself. When the Cigar Bill came out of committee, he spoke for it on the floor, and when it failed to come up in the Senate—because a lobbyist for the manufacturers stole the official copy—he resolved to carry the fight in the next term. He had by no means been converted to a union sympathizer, he was no “sentimentalist,” as he would say, but for possibly the first time in his life he had come face-to-face with certain extremely unpleasant realities that struck him as intolerable, a side of American life he had been unwilling to believe existed until seeing it with his own eyes.

Gompers would remember his “aggressiveness and evident sincerity.”

But the Cigar Bill, really everything he took a hand in that first session, was put in the shadows by his sudden call, on March 29, for the investigation and impeachment of a State Supreme Court judge, T. R. Westbrook, who, it appeared, was in league with the notorious Jay Gould.

The resolution was, as Hunt said, a bombshell. It was not that Theodore was exposing some awful new truth—Gould’s “association” with this particular judge had been dealt with in the papers, and in The New York Times in some detail—but that he, a very small fry in the legislature, was challenging not only the judiciary but the likes of Gould, who was understood to have more power than any man in the United States; Gould, who controlled something like ten percent of the country’s railroads; who now also controlled the Western Union Telegraph Company, and through it, the Associated Press; who owned the New York World, which published or withheld news however he wished; who had his own spies and agents and whose personal fortune was of a kind to make those of such “old money” aristocrats as the Roosevelts appear minuscule. (On a March day in 1882, when word began circulating that he was broke, Gould had called Russell Sage and one or two others into his office and spread before them on his desk a few of his securities—$23 million of Western Union stock, $12 million of Missouri Pacific Railroad, $19 million of “other stocks.”) Furthermore, few men had such a long-standing, proved reputation for largess in and about the corridors of the State House at Albany.

That the “best society”—Theodore’s constituency—scorned the whispery little Gould was no secret. He had been refused membership in the New York Yacht Club; he was never seen at Mrs. William Astor’s balls because he was never invited. It is even said James Alfred Roosevelt personally threw Gould out of his office on one occasion. Indeed, Gould was held contemptible by a great variety of decent people and was so despised by some whom he had destroyed along the way that he required plainclothes police protection day and night.

But scorn also had its limits, and while no gentleman could condone such shady dealings or ruthlessness of the kind Gould practiced, or accept him as a social equal, few prudent, ambitious men would ever openly attack him. Further, several of the city’s most important business people saw no reason not to join him in his ventures if it was to their advantage. They could make their peace with Gould in a purely business way readily enough and without apparent qualm. Having gained control of the Western Union Company the year before by the most blatant kind of piracy, Gould had had no trouble bringing in as board members such figures as John Jacob Astor and J. Pierpont Morgan. As head of his more recently acquired Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, the centerpiece of the Westbrook Scandal, Gould had installed Cyrus Field, who was famous as the promoter of the first Atlantic Cable and was one of New York’s most socially prominent “good citizens.”

Theodore had happened on the Westbrook affair through his friend Hunt. In conjunction with work he was doing on an investigative committee, Hunt had learned that certain lawyers, assigned by the courts as receivers for insolvent insurance companies, were taking exorbitant fees and with court approval. Hunt had gone down to New York to the county clerk’s office and searching through the files found that such fees not only amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that they had all been allowed by the same judge, T. R. Westbrook. When Hunt returned to Albany and recounted his findings to Theodore, the name rang a bell—The New York Times had earlier charged Westbrook with complicity in Gould’s sudden acquisition of the huge Manhattan Elevated—so Theodore now went to New York to talk to the city editor at the Times, Henry Loewenthal, and to ask to see what the Times had in its files. This turned out to be quite a lot. Theodore was at the newspaper’s offices much of the day and afterward invited Loewenthal back to 57th Street, where they talked until well after midnight.

In his book, The Naval War of 1812, Theodore had devoted a large part of his energies to refuting the recognized authority on the subject, an English author named William James, whom Theodore found to be much in error and attacked on point after point. Often, he seemed more intent on destroying James than in telling his story. But he did it by going to documentary sources, seeing for himself, and here the situation was the same. He was attacking a figure of established authority, but only after having done the necessary spadework.

In the picture that emerged, Westbrook was plainly Goulds pawn, even to the point of holding court in Gould’s private office at the Western Union Building. As Westbrook said himself in a letter to Gould—a letter the Times had somehow obtained but not published—he was “willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion” to protect Gould’s interests.

Recognizing the tremendous future in store for any rapid-transit system in New York, Gould had decided he needed the Manhattan Elevated. His scheme, as usual, was to harass and intimidate the existing owners at every opportunity, drive the stock down below its true value, then begin buying. He was joined in the venture by Russell Sage, possibly the shrewdest of all Wall Street freebooters, and all the while his editors at the World kept up a running attack on the owners of the Manhattan Elevated, implying they were corrupt, the company insolvent. But even more effective for Goulds purposes was his judge, Westbrook, who at the proper moment declared the company bankrupt and appointed two of Goulds people as receivers. The stock fell to a fraction of its previous value and once Gould had taken over a major share of the stock and the price suddenly rebounded, the judge as suddenly reversed himself, declaring the company miraculously solvent. He ordered that its affairs be removed from the hands of the receivers and entrusted to management, which appeared to be Cyrus Field but which in fact was Gould. In the World, the editors said they “never believed but that Manhattan would be rescued by men who have the brains and the means to make the most of it.”

In days gone by, when Gould had been starting out on his rise to power, his first lawyer was T. R. Westbrook.

Theodore had been warned to tread lightly and no sooner was his call for an investigation put before the Assembly than it was stalled through parliamentary maneuver (tabled for further discussion), the leadership on both sides manifestly wishing no part of it.

He was warned again, only now, too, by an old family friend, someone he never identified except as a “member of a prominent law firm.” Theodore was taken to lunch and was advised patiently that while it had been fine of him to make the “reform play,” he had done enough. It was time he left politics and identified himself with “the right kind of people,” those who in the long run “controlled others” and reaped rewards “worth having.” Theodore was appalled. Did this mean, he asked, that he must give in to the “ring”? It was naïve, said the friend, to imagine a mere political ring of the sort the newspapers pictured. The real “inner circle” was one of businessmen, judges, lawyers, and politicians all “in alliance,” and this was the point: the successful man had to win his success by the backing of these same forces, whatever his field.

Late the afternoon of April 5, the official day nearly over, “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt” was up again calling, “Mr. Spee-kar! Mr. Spee-kar!” He wanted his resolution debated and voted on with no further delay. “No! No!” shouted “bad old fellow” Tom Alvord. But Theodore kept talking, “clearly and slowly,” for another ten minutes, his voice filling the huge chamber. He went through Westbrooks conduct step by step, attacking Gould by name, calling him a shark and a swindler whose dishonesty was a matter of common knowledge. The members sat in absolute silence, listening to every word. As the Times commented the next morning, for any public man to speak so, “calling men and things by their right names in these days of judicial, ecclesiastical, and journalistic subservience to the robber-barons,” required “some little courage.”

I am aware that it ought to have been done by a man of more experience, and, possibly, an abler source than myself, but as nobody else chose to demand it [the investigation], I certainly would in the interest of the Commonwealth of New York . . .

There was no applause when he finished, only the hum of great muffled excitement. Ten minutes remained until closing time at five, and had Theodore known how to bring the issue to vote right then, it might have carried. As it was, Tom Alvord very smoothly intervened. Alvord had been Speaker of the Assembly the year Theodore was born. He stood now in the aisle, leaning on his cane, recalling slowly how often in his career he had seen good men shattered by irresponsible, unsubstantiated charges. Possibly there should be an investigation, possibly he would support such an investigation, he said. But there need be no hurry—indeed, “the young man from New York” would be well advised to take a little time to reflect on the wisdom of his actions.

So the clock ran out, nothing was accomplished.

The issue could be ignored no longer, however. There had been an immediate response in the press to what Theodore had said and, except for the World, nearly all laudatory. With his first major speech he had made himself known throughout the state. Goulds representatives in Albany were also busier than usual. A special messenger from John Kelly, head of Tammany Hall, came on from New York at once by night train.

Theodore tried again the next morning and again he was outmaneuvered. He forgot to specify the kind of vote he wanted. The Speaker called for a standing vote and the whole body started bobbing up and down so rapidly nobody could keep count. The clerk’s tally, the only one that mattered, was 50 for, 54 against.

Another try in the afternoon fared better. Theodore waited for a lull, when many members had wandered away from their seats. “I demand ayes and nays,” he remembered to say this time, and though the count was still short of the two-thirds majority needed for such an investigation, there were now more members voting with him than against, and from then on his support gathered rapidly. Public indignation had been roused and as a consequence the change of heart among his colleagues was astonishing. On April 12, the Assembly voted the investigation by a margin of 104 to 6.

For most of what remained of the session, the matter was in the hands of the Judiciary Committee, and when the committee presented its report at the end of May, it was a whitewash. The judge was said to have done nothing for which he should be impeached. Apparently the committee had been “turned” by three bribes of $2,500 each, a reasonable sum, it was thought, for decisions of such large import.

Theodore was up on his feet once more, expressing himself as forcefully as he knew how. The effect, said Hunt, was “powerful, wonderful,” and to no avail. The vote sustained the committee report; the judge was not to be touched.

The pressures brought to bear on individual members had been enormous. Virtually the entire Democratic Party had lined up behind Westbrook, and the afternoon of the final vote the lobby was crawling with “prominent men from all over the state,” there to see exactly who voted which way. Ike Hunt had been called on by a fellow lawyer from his hometown and reminded of how once Westbrook had decided a case in his, Hunt’s, favor. “Now you don’t want to go to work and destroy a good judge like Judge Westbrook,” Hunt was told. Years afterward, Hunt would concede that Westbrook had been a respectably good man, until he “got in that thing and sharpers got him . . .” And Theodore, too, in retrospect, said he never knew if Westbrook was corrupt or not. “He may have been; but I am inclined to think that, aside from his being a man of coarse moral fiber, the trouble lay chiefly in the fact that he had a genuine . . . reverence for the possessor of a great fortune as such. He sincerely believed that business was the end of existence, and that judge and legislator alike should do whatever was necessary to favor it.”

The Assembly disbanded two days later. The Westbrook Scandal faded into the background. Westbrook himself was later found dead in a hotel room in Troy, whether by suicide or natural causes remained a mystery. Gould and Russell Sage held on to the Manhattan Elevated, but disposed of Cyrus Field, leaving him financially ruined. The distinguished Field, unlike Gould or Sage, actually knew something about the elevated system and thought it should be run as an institution of public service. Gould had needed Field’s name and his money, and the trusting Field had foolishly concluded that Gould was his friend.

For Theodore, prospects had never looked so bright. It was said, by the Evening Post, that he had accomplished more good than any man of his age and experience had accomplished in years. (The Evening Post at the moment was being edited by Carl Schurz.) George William Curtis singled him out for national attention in Harper’s Weekly.

It is with the greatest satisfaction that those who are interested in good government see a young man in the Legislature who . . . does not know the meaning of fear, and to whom the bluster and bravado of party and political bullies are as absolutely indifferent as the blowing of the wind.

More important, no one in Albany could dismiss him as a lightweight any longer. Henceforth, as Hunt recalled, he was to be “considered a full-fledged man worthy of one’s esteem.” He had worked an almost miraculous change.

Running again the fall of 1882, he carried his district by better than two to one, and in the face of a victorious Democratic ticket headed by a reform candidate for governor, the mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland. Back at Albany again, he was made the Republican nominee for Speaker, a somewhat empty honor in view of the overwhelming Democratic majority, but one which put him at the head of his party in the Assembly at the age of twenty-four. It was almost inconceivable prominence for one so young and inexperienced, let alone so unconventional. The papers began writing about the Cleveland Democrats and the Roosevelt Republicans. Theodore now was called to the governor’s office to confer on pending legislation. Remembering the two of them together, William Hudson of the Brooklyn Eagle would write, “The Governor would sit large, solid, and phlegmatic, listening gravely to the energetic utterances of the mercurial young man, but signifying neither assent nor dissent. Not infrequently taking silence for acquiescence, Roosevelt would go away thinking he had carried everything before him.”

“There is great sense in a lot of what he says,” Cleveland would remark of Theodore, “but there is such a cocksuredness about him that he stirs up doubt in me all the time. . . . Then he seems to be so very young.”

He was seldom out of sight, seldom still. “Such a super-abundance of animal life was hardly ever condensed in a human being,” said Hunt. If Theodore had a failing, in Hunt’s estimate, it was only that he wanted to set everything to rights instantly, and it was because of this that the second term was not what either of them anticipated. Success had gone to his head, Theodore later said, though the second term was hardly the disaster he felt it was, and in what it revealed about him as a human being, it was, if anything, more interesting than the first.

His sudden rise may be explained in part by other, earlier developments involving his father’s old enemy, Conkling. An unexpected dissolution of power had occurred just before Theodore ran for his first term and again the Customhouse was the issue. Early in 1881, the newly elected President, Garfield, had refused to follow Conkling’s dictates concerning the appointment of a Collector. In a fury Conkling resigned from the Senate, his friend and ally, New York’s other senator, Thomas C. Platt, going along with him. Both men had expected to be quickly vindicated and reinstated by a compliant legislature at Albany and thus to return to Washington stronger than ever. But it had not worked out as planned. Most people thought Conkling had made a fool of himself; the legislature turned on him and chose another in his place. Inconceivable as it seemed, the giant Conkling had come crashing down; his political career was ended. “I am done with politics forever,” he announced, and he meant it. He resumed the practice of law on Wall Street, his clients including Jay Gould. In Albany his minions were left “wandering around like wild geese without a gander.” Conceivably Tom Platt might have stepped in then, instead of later—Platt being a “great man for organization”—but Platt had been discovered in a compromising position with a young woman and was forced to retire from the scene in disgrace. Very possibly he had been framed. To quote Ike Hunt, “Jimmy Husted and some of them peeked over the transom and saw Tom one night in the hotel.”

All this left the old party machinery in disarray and provided opportunity of a kind not known for years for ambitious newcomers. The game had opened up just as Theodore commenced to play. Moreover, the reform spirit was gathering momentum on all sides—it was what had swept Cleveland into office—and so for someone like Theodore the timing could not have been better. In Washington that January, as Theodore started his second term, Congress was passing the Pendleton Act, the country’s first civil service reform legislation, which, irony of ironies, would be signed into law by ex-Collector Chester A. Arthur. When the bill went before the Senate, not a single Republican voted against it.

His first months back in Albany Theodore lashed out at the New York City Board of Aldermen (”miserable and servile tools”) and went after Jay Gould again, calling on the Attorney General to bring suit to dissolve the Manhattan Elevated. Sounding much like his Uncle Robert, he warned of a great popular uprising unless legal action was taken against such corrupt corporations. A bill comparable to the Pendleton Act was before the Assembly and this too he championed, gladly joining forces with the Democrat Cleveland.

He never doubted the moral virtue of any of his own positions or of the need to punish the wicked. (At one point he called for the return of the public whipping post as punishment for any man who inflicted brutal pain on a woman or a child.) Every issue was seen as a clash between the forces of light and dark. His side was right; the other was the side of corruption or self-interest. Among the several hundred clippings being pasted into the scrapbooks at 6 West 57th Street was one containing a remark by a New York editor that “there is an increasing suspicion that Mr. Roosevelt keeps a pulpit concealed on his person.”

So when suddenly he reversed himself on still another issue involving Jay Gould and the Manhattan Elevated, then took the floor to deliver an emotional apology for his earlier stand, he was the talk of the Capitol.

The Five-Cent Bill, as it was called, had been introduced to reduce by half the ten-cent fare on the elevated railway. It was seen as a way to strike a blow at the haughty Gould, who was supposedly reaping huge concealed profits, and, of course, to please the many thousands who rode the elevated railway. Theodore, like nearly everybody else in Albany, gave the bill his support—until Grover Cleveland, in a brave, forceful message, insisted it was unconstitutional, since it violated commitments made by the state in the company’s original charter. Cleveland vetoed the bill and sent it back, expecting the decision would prove ruinous for him politically.

The day the message was read in the Assembly, Theodore got the floor as quickly as possible. Like others, he realized Cleveland was right and that his own position had been wrong. He said this, which was somewhat remarkable in itself, but then he went on:

I have to say with shame that when I voted for this bill I did not act as I think I ought to have acted, and as I generally have acted on the floor of this House. . . . I have to confess that I weakly yielded, partly in a vindictive spirit towards the infernal thieves and conscienceless swindlers who have had the elevated railroad in charge and partly to the popular voice of New York.

For the managers of the elevated railroad I have as little feeling as any man here. If it were possible, I would willingly pass a bill of attainder on Jay Gould and all of Jay Goulds associates. . . . I regard these men as furnishing part of that most dangerous of all dangerous classes, the wealthy criminal class. Nevertheless, it is not a question of doing justice to ourselves. . . .

We have heard a great deal about the people demanding the passage of this bill. Now, anything the people demand that is right it is most clearly and most emphatically the duty of this Legislature to do; but we should never yield to what they demand if it is wrong. . . . If the people disapprove our conduct, let us make up our minds to retire to private life with the consciousness that we have acted as our better sense dictated; and I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I had acted as I ought not to.

It was a speech that was to be published and quoted widely as illustrative either of his rank duplicity and opportunism or of his innate decency. It was a wrenching confession, a little sermon, a crystallized declaration of political philosophy; noble and self-serving. To profess shame in oneself was something a politician did not do if he liked his job and it was something Theodore found personally distasteful and almost never indulged in, even among those closest to him. Any ostentatious baring of one’s transgressions smacked of self-pity or a desperate craving for attention, he thought. “Never indulge yourself on the sinner’s stool,” he would lecture his friend Owen Wister. “If you did any harm, that won’t undo it, you’ll merely rake it up. The sinner’s stool is often the only available publicity spot for the otherwise wholly obscure egotist.” Yet here he was doing exactly that.

His expression “the wealthy criminal class” was new and original and would not be forgotten. The righteousness he bespoke was the old Roosevelt family theme, the burden and spur of “our way.” (”I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” Elliott had told Anna Hall, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”) Probably Theodore had not the least idea how arbitrary and self-righteous he sounded.

The reaction in the press and among other members was immediate and almost entirely adverse. The Tribune and one or two papers upstate said it took a special kind of courage to confess a lack of courage, but elsewhere he was dubbed a weakling and a bogus reformer, which doubtless hurt very much. Even the loyal Evening Post found it strange that he could think so little of the views of the people unless those views coincided with his own; and though ridicule in the World was to be expected, the remarks published there must have been the most painful of all. “It is quite bad enough that a son of Theodore Roosevelt could have brought this discredit upon a name made honorable by the private virtues and public services of the father,” said the World; friends of the late Theodore could only take satisfaction that at least he had been spared seeing the boy make a public spectacle of himself.

When the Five-Cent Bill was put before the Assembly, Theodore voted against it, with the majority as it turned out, but in doing so was parting company with Hunt, O’Neil, and others of his closest allies.

He was acting as though he were under some kind of emotional strain, seemed not to know how to handle himself. A day or so later he made another grandstand play on the floor, suddenly tendering his resignation from a committee when the Assembly refused to go along with the committees recommendation. The speech turned into a wild, childish diatribe against the whole Democratic Party. It was as if, like the tiny shrew in the cage, he would fling himself at the great Democratic snake and tear it to pieces before anyone knew what happened.

“The difference between our party and yours,” he shouted across the aisle, “is that your bad men throw out your good ones, while with us the good throw out the bad.” The entire history of their party was rotten.

You can run down the roll from Polk, the mendacious, through Pierce, the Copperhead, to Buchanan, who faced both ways. You can follow the record of their party from its inception down to this time. . . . You can take the record made by their party now in this House; the shameless partisanship they have displayed; the avidity they have shown for getting control of even the smallest offices . . .

When in an interview held in the quiet of the Harvard Club in New York, many years later, Ike Hunt referred to Theodore as “the most indiscreet guy I ever knew,” it was moments such as this that he had in mind. “Yesterday, in a speech,” reported the New York Observer, “Mr. Roosevelt got up and said in effect that he couldn’t have his own way in that House and he wouldn’t stand it, so there!”

As it was, the Assembly merely refused to accept his resignation and passed on to other matters.

“Billy O’Neil and I used to sit on his coattails,” remembered Hunt. “Billy O’Neil would say to him: ’What do you want to do that for, you damn fool; you will ruin yourself and everybody else!’” Even Michael C. Murphy, the questionable guardian chosen by Uncle Rob, he of the swollen red face and shiny frock coat, could be heard from his seat nearby saying in fatherly fashion, “Now, Theodore, now, Theodore . . .”

But toward the end of the session another, smaller incident occurred, a different kind of apology having more to do with his make-up as a human being than with any question of moral principle. In his scathing attacks on the Democrats he had been concentrating on a particular member from Staten Island, the elderly Erastus Brooks, whom he picked on repeatedly. Brooks finally spoke up in his own defense and with great feeling, hitting hard at Theodore. When the speech ended and Brooks’ friends gathered about to congratulate him, Theodore came pushing through, tears in his eyes, holding out his hand. “Mr. Brooks,” he said, “I surrender. I beg your pardon.”

Success had come to him too fast, he later said; he had lost his perspective, “and the result was I came an awful cropper and had to pick myself up after learning by bitter experience the lesson that I was not all-important and that I had to take account of many different elements in life.”

All the same, his legislative record surpassed that of the first term. The civil service bill was enacted. And so also was the Cigar Bill—by both houses this time—though after a protracted battle in the courts the Cigar Bill was to be found unconstitutional. The judges sided with the manufacturers, whose counsel, former Secretary of State William Evarts, argued that socialism and communism were in back of the bill and that such home industry was actually beneficial to the “proper culture of growing girls.” In its final judgment, in 1885, the New York Court of Appeals asked how possibly a cigarmaker’s health and morals could be improved by forcing him from his home and its “hallowed associations.”

Theodore had spoken for the bill both in the Assembly and at a hearing in the governor’s office. Conceding at one point that the measure was in a “certain sense a socialistic one,” he said the terrible growing extremes of poverty and wealth in the cities demanded something be done, even if it meant modifying certain doctrines and principles. No children raised under conditions such as he had seen in the tenements would ever be fit for citizenship, he argued, echoing the old theme espoused by Charles Loring Brace and by his own father. In the end, however, he had resorted to the plea that the measure be passed if for no other reason than hygiene, an appeal which seems to have had no small influence on the preponderant number of cigar smokers among his colleagues.

3

Elected a third time in the fall of ’83, he returned to Albany in advance of the new session, late the December of Elliott’s wedding, determined to be named Speaker. The Republicans had gained a majority in the Assembly, largely because of what he and his Roosevelt Republicans had accomplished the session before, and so it seemed his time was ripe. But he lost when John J. (”Johnny”) O’Brien, Republican boss of New York City, an old Conkling henchman, once one of the Customhouse “boys,” withdrew his support at the last moment. Senator Warner Miller (Platt’s replacement in Washington) had shown Johnny “the valuables in the Treasury” that could become available were he to see his way clear to voting the right way. O’Brien had been the first powerful figure among the “regulars” to line up behind Theodore, and a main reason for Theodore’s confidence. Many of Theodore’s admirers had been skeptical at the time, sure that something was afoot.

The defeat was a bitter blow. He had wanted the job badly and felt he had earned it. The day after Christmas he had hired a suite at the Delavan House, the somewhat seedy hotel where he often took breakfast and where in years past so many other political fortunes had been won or lost. Old Thurlow Weed and William Seward, Tweed, Conkling, Chester A. Arthur, had all practiced their craft in the lobby and corridors and private suites of the Delavan, cajoled and traded, entreated, listened, charmed, bribed, threatened, flattered unmercifully, all in the endless give-and-take of political maneuver. And Theodore, as he said, had managed “a stout fight.”

The problem was the prospect of the political year ahead. A presidential election was in the offing, a Republican national convention less than six months away. Rivalry in the party, along the old Stalwart-Half-Breed lines, was as intense as ever, the Blaine people feeling it was their turn at last. And given the importance of New York at the convention, not to say in the general election, there was abnormally high interest in who was to occupy the Speaker’s seat at Albany. To the professionals it was business of the most serious kind. Scouting the lobby of the Delavan just after Christmas, one reporter remarked on the numbers of “friends of the Administration in Washington” who were present, “friends of United States Senator Miller . . . representatives of the Customhouse . . . friends of the corporations.”

Refusing to align himself with any faction, Theodore had declared, “I am a Republican, pure and simple, neither a ’Half-Breed’ nor a ’Stalwart’; and certainly no man, nor yet any ring or clique, can do my thinking for me.” But he was called “unsound” by the professionals—”That young fellow might go off like a rocket,” one of them warned. The Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds joined ranks against him and that decided it. At the party caucus New Years Eve the position of Speaker went to a “regular,” an underwear manufacturer from Little Falls named Titus Sheard.

Theodore knew in advance he was beaten and it was he who moved that Sheard’s nomination be made unanimous. Allowing that the defeat left him “chagrined,” he would claim later that by waging his own fight he had assured his standing as floor leader and consequently accomplished more than he would have as Speaker. Achievement was “the all-important thing,” position mattered “only in so far as it widened the chance of achievement.”

His Cousin Emlen, recalling the eagerness with which Theodore persisted, said he was “the most ambitious man I ever knew ...”

As recompense he was named chairman of the City Affairs Committee. Within days he had issued three major bills, one to reduce the power of the New York City aldermen and strengthen the office of mayor, another to put a limit on the city’s debt, and a third to raise the license fee for the sale of liquor. None was designed to please the “regulars,” but the first, the Reform Charter Bill, as he called it, was the one aimed directly at what he, like many others, saw as the fundamental cause for big-city political corruption. The aldermen, the legislative side of city government, were an amorphous and anonymous body to all but the professionals and those who did business with them. Yet the power wielded by the aldermen was tremendous, including, most importantly, the power of approval over the appointment of department heads. City government in New York had become an exceedingly big business, with a payroll of some $12 million and twelve thousand jobs, making it a larger employer, for example, than the Carnegie iron and steel works. But the aldermen, those who really ran the city (taking their orders from the bosses), were cloaked in very carefully maintained obscurity. Scarcely any voter could name even one alderman or explain what his duties were. Who was to tell who was accountable, let alone remember at election time. Which was exactly as the machine wished to have it.

The remedy, according to reform theory, was to simplify and concentrate power; and to make power as conspicuous as possible: give someone the responsibility and hold him responsible, that someone being the mayor. And the model was the business corporation. “Some one man must be given the power of direction,” preached Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn; “... they [the public] understand that power and responsibility must go together from the top to the bottom of every successful business organization.”

The arrangement by which Seth Low ran Brooklyn was exactly what Theodore hoped to attain in New York. Theodore knew a good deal about Low, not only from what had appeared in the papers, but through Uncle Robert, who had worked with the young mayor as part of his duties concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, that great work now having been finished at last. Low functioned under a new Brooklyn city charter put in effect in 1882 and unlike any other. It made the mayor of Brooklyn the real, as well as the nominal, head of government, with absolute authority over the appointment of police commissioner, fire commissioner, health officers, treasurer, tax collector, and on down the line. This, said Low, was “a great and direct gain . .. because it creates and keeps alert a strong public sentiment, and tends to increase the interest of all citizens in the affairs of their city.” And by “all citizens,” he, Theodore, and other high-minded gentlemen concerned with municipal reform had specifically in mind the hordes of immigrants who, like Theodores cigarmakers, spoke little English, who were illiterate, bewildered by the political system, and thus easily manipulated by the political bosses (who, as it also happened, knew considerably more about these same people and what their real needs were than did the high-minded gentlemen concerned with municipal reform). It was not that the system must be simplified merely for the average citizen, but for what Seth Low called “the simplest citizen.”

In Brooklyn the results were astounding. In Brooklyn more people had voted in the election for mayor than in the election for governor. And having such power as Seth Low had, said Low himself, “appeals to the best that is in a man as strongly as it exposes him to the fire of criticism if he does not do well.”

To strip the New York aldermen of their power—those “creatures” of the bosses, as Theodore called them—and give New York a mayor like Seth Low struck nearly everybody but the bosses as eminently sensible, and so with his Reform Charter Bill Theodore had placed himself squarely in the forefront of a very popular cause. Quite rightly he saw it as his most important effort since entering politics.

Samuel Gompers had been impressed by his aggressiveness. On January 15, or less than a week after introducing the Reform Charter Bill, Theodore was made head of a special committee to investigate New York City government. Four days later, at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York, he opened hearings into the affairs of the city’s Department of Public Works, which of late, under the direction of Commissioner Hubert O. Thompson, had shown an increase in expenditures of some sixty-five percent and with no discernible benefit to the city. Thompson was well known in Albany, where he spent a disproportionate amount of his time “conferring” at the Delavan House. Early in his first term, Theodore had picked him out as among the most blatantly odious and fascinating political “creatures”—”a gross, enormously fleshly man with full face and thick, sensual lips; wears a diamond shirt pin and an enormous seal ring on his little finger.” And though Thompson, who had had prior experience with investigative hearings, succeeded in making the first session something of a joke at Theodore’s expense, it was Theodore’s intention to keep the hearings going at the hotel every Friday, Saturday, and Monday until the job was done.

It was a chance at last to do battle, good against evil, in New York itself and in what he liked to call “the full light of the press,” light he very obviously loved. He relished the publicity and he relished the battle itself. He loved a fight, more even than his father had. It was possibly the chief reason he loved politics, needed politics. He was never more pleased with himself than when he had made a “stout fight.” The political allies he cared most for were those who were fighters, who were “fearless,” like Joe Murray. He loved the camaraderie of such men. Of Billy O’Neil, the “best friend,” he would write, “we stood shoulder to shoulder in every legislative fight.”

Experience, moreover, had already taught him a grudging respect for the rogues who fought against him, who, too, were fearless and forthright in their fashion. Indeed, he preferred them to what he called the “parlor reformers,” “the timid good men” who stood on the sidelines. Unhappily, “blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined.” It was exactly because politics was a bear pit that he wanted in.

“A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth,” advised Henrik Ibsen in his 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. Theodore never wore anything but his best trousers; he was every inch the “dude” the newspapers portrayed; he made no pretense by word or dress at being anything other than wellborn, never resorted, as Boies Penrose did, to being “one of the boys” by talking or acting like one of the boys. But in a political fight he fought tooth and claw. As the journalist Mark Sullivan would observe, “Roosevelt did not regard politics as a gentleman’s sport, to be played in the spirit of a private duello, with a meticulous code about choice of time and place. Roosevelt had a trait of ruthless righteousness.’”

Years later, writing about his father’s old friend John Hay, Theodore made an acutely revealing observation—revealing of his own nature. The problem with Hay, he said, was his unwillingness to “face the rather intimate association which is implied in a fight.”

One must never shrink from what was “rough in life”; one must never recoil or flinch in the face of a Jay Gould or a Hubert O. Thompson. He had marked another verse in his Bible: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

Also, as Charles Eliot once observed, a man in a fight had little chance to be lonely.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Strange and Terrible Fate

1

HE FELT FINE. He felt better, in fact—about his work, about himself, his future—than he had in a long while.

At his worst, he got what he called his “caged wolf feeling.” To be confined, hemmed in, to have nothing to do, was unbearable. Boredom was something he had had to deal with so rarely in life that when he had to he hardly knew how to respond. The hotel at Richfield Springs the summer before had been torture. He complained of it more than the asthma that sent him there. “I have a bad headache, a general feeling of lassitude, and am bored out of my life by having nothing whatever to do,” he told Corinne, “and being placed in that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering place for underbred and overdressed girls, fat old female scandal mongers, and a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives.”

Of late in Albany he had even begun boxing again, taking sparring lessons for the first time in five years. “I felt much better for it,” he wrote Alice January 22,1884, “but am awfully out of training. I feel much more at ease in my mind and better able to enjoy things since we have gotten under way; I feel now as though I had the reins in my hand.”

The winter of his first term she had come with him to “that dear, dull, old Dutch city,” but the year after, for his second term, she remained behind in New York, in the brownstone on West 45th Street, and more recently, because of her advancing pregnancy, she had moved back with Mittie once more. So now with the hearings in session at the Metropolitan Hotel, he was staying on at 57th Street three or four nights a week.

In all regards the personal, domestic side of his life was wholly satisfactory. Uncle James Alfred worried that he was spendthrift, but appears also to have been the only one who did. His income was substantial, not quite $14,000 a year, or nearly twice what it had been before he was married. James Alfred had been looking after his “affairs” exceedingly well. The income from Roosevelt and Son alone had been nearly $8,000 the previous year. In addition there were returns from a variety of railroads in which James Alfred was himself actively involved (the Mobile and Ohio, the Rochester and Pittsburgh, the Shenango and Allegheny). There were dividends from Uncle Jimmie Gracie’s J. K. Gracie Company, from the Union Trust, and from his own Wyoming cattle investment. His salary as an assemblyman, his only earned income, was $1,200 a year.

What Alice contributed, from money or investments of her own, was never spoken of, but considering her background it was probably a respectable sum; and in any event, they knew there was a great deal to fall back on, if need be, in both families. By the way he was spending—buying the 45th Street house, buying property at Oyster Bay, sinking no small amounts in this and that—he obviously felt there was plenty to spend, plenty more where that came from. At the time he decided to buy in as a partner with George Haven Putnam he handed Putnam a check for $20,000, which, as he did not seem to understand, was approximately twice what he had in his account. But the difficulty was smoothed over at once by James Alfred, who borrowed the difference out of Theodore’s “expectations.”

To return from the political battlefields to his “own sunny darling” was all he had dreamed marital bliss might be. He knew no greater happiness than to be with her in his own sitting room at 45th Street, playing backgammon “before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me.” The house, since rented to Elliott and his bride, had been the first and only home of their own, and for the benefit of the two maids who ran it, Aunt Anna Gracie had drawn up a detailed program for cleaning, cooking, and so forth, a manuscript of several pages that included one directive Theodore thought memorable. “’Every morning the cook should meet the ashman with a pail of boiling water,’” he would read aloud to friends, then question what the ashman might have done to deserve a scalding.

Seeing old friends on the street, he would insist they come home with him to see Alice. He was sure she was a great asset to him in his political career and told her so. Now, when the hearings broke up at week’s end, he would bring two or three others from the committee home to 57th Street. “All of the men were perfectly enchanted with their visit to our house . . .” he wrote her from Albany January 28, after one such occasion. “They could hardly believe that Mother was really our mother; and above all they praised my sweet little wife.” One man, Tom Welch, a Niagara Falls Democrat whom he liked particularly, told him he had never seen anyone look prettier than Alice, a remark Theodore thought she would enjoy since she was then a little more than eight months pregnant.

Her confinement precluded any social life of the kind that had once occupied so much of their time, and this suited him perfectly. Such a life led to nothing, he had decided.

He had shaved off his side-whiskers, given up keeping a diary. The Newsboys’ Lodging House and the other good works of his father’s no longer interested him and he gradually gave them up also. He had gone into such activities, he would explain, in the same spirit as the Sunday-school classes at Harvard, because of his father, but it had not worked. He had no patience with simple, unsung altruism. “I tried faithfully to do what Father had done,” he later told the author Jacob Riis, “but I did it poorly . . . in the end I found out that we have each to work in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do.”

He had also abandoned the law. It was not just that his political life was growing larger, crowding out other things, but that other things seemed to be falling away as in some very natural process. Part of the previous summer had been spent in Uncle Robert’s office, but Theodore was not to return there again and he had not been back to the Columbia Law School in more than a year. He had become, he later said, sadly disillusioned by the law. In the careers of the corporation lawyers one was supposed to admire and emulate he saw little that was “compatible” with his own ideals. Lawyers, it appeared to him, were trained to serve clients, not justice. “The caveat emptor side of the law, like the caveat emptor side of business, seemed to me repellent; it did not make for social fair dealings,” he wrote long afterward in his memoirs.

There is the possibility, of course, that he simply found the law dull and had too much else he would rather be doing. The philosophical conclusions may have been those of the older man, a career’s-end distillation of accumulative disrespect for certain kinds of legal giants, and thus as open to question as his subsequent views on the teaching of natural history at Harvard. The few specific references he made to his law work at the time are actually quite positive. Still, the thesis offered by the old family friend at lunch, the unnamed member of the prominent law firm who appeared in the midst of the Westbrook Scandal, was more than just “incompatible” with his idealism; it revolted him. And if that were not sufficient, the spectacle soon after of the vaunted William Evarts mouthing nonsense about the sanctity of the home as cause for perpetuating the cigar sweatshops must have made very clear the priority of client over “social fair dealing.” Theodore then, as later, equated a law career with moneymaking, not with social service, and as he also said then, as later, his inheritance had liberated him from moneymaking.

Oddly, for all his quick success in politics, the passion and energy he exuded, he was still unable, or unwilling, to accept politics as his life-work. He never spoke of it as a career or calling. To have announced he was a professional politician, or openly aspired to that, would have been awkward, to be sure, since “professional” was considered synonymous with “corrupt.” It was only as a gentleman doing his part in the public interest—as a temporary volunteer, so to speak—that he could maintain a reputation for independence and integrity. A degree of disinterest in a political future had obvious political value; it was part of what made him “different,” less vulnerable to the ways by which the obviously ambitious are bought or held in check. But even among the few with whom he was most candid, he admitted to no clear vision of a lifework. In the parlance of later-day psychologists he had still to find an occupational identity, and it troubled him. His plight was nothing like that of his brother, but, by the same token, he was by no means as resolved and focused as implied by his soaring performance.

It was only within the last six months, for example, that he and Alice resolved to build on the land he had bought at Oyster Bay. At one point, earlier, he thought seriously of settling upstate at Herkimer, in the Mohawk Valley, where Douglas Robinson’s family had a large estate. “I hardly know what to do about taking a place up here,” he wrote Bamie in the fall of 1882, she being the one to whom he still invariably turned for serious counsel on serious questions; “it would be lovely to have a farm, and fortunately Alice seemed enchanted with the country. The only, or at least the chief, drawback, is the distance from New York. Still, if I were perfectly certain that I would go on in politics and literature I should buy the farm without hesitation; but I consider the chances to be strongly favorable to my getting out of both . . .”

The Oyster Bay house, once decided on, was his first commitment to the future. And certainly there was nothing equivocal or tentative about the plans that evolved—once he, Alice, Mittie, Bamie, Aunt Anna Gracie, and architects Lamb and Rich had hiked over the site, savored the view, and picked the spot. He knew too little of architecture, he said, to say what ought to be done on the outside, but on “inside matters” he was “perfectly definite.” As he later told an editor for the magazine Country Life in America, “I wished a big piazza . . . where we could sit in rocking chairs and look at the sunset; a library with a shallow bay window looking south, the parlor or drawing room occupying all the western end of the lower floor . . . big fireplaces for logs . . . I had to live inside and not outside . . .”

The house was to be enormous, suggesting a future for Alice, at least, of unending pregnancies. Along with his other wishes, the plans called for ten bedrooms, excluding maids’ rooms.

Everything bespoke solidity, permanence, comfort, security, family. The foundations were to be nearly two feet thick. There were eight fireplaces, four on the first floor, four above, twenty-two rooms in all. The materials, interestingly, were to be of the most ordinary kind. No fine paneling or costly plasterwork was called for. Doors, windows, doorframes, and the like were all of the common, inexpensive variety. Frills were dispensed with. Size, command of the hill, were what seemed to matter. It was the way he liked his food, simple but plentiful, heavy on the plate.

The “outside cover” supplied by the architects was Queen Anne—brick on the ground floor, then shingles and a slate roof. The final cost was to be something just under $17,000.

It should be called Leeholm, he decided. From the front piazza they would be able to see a whole, long sweep of Long Island Sound and, on clear days, Connecticut beyond. Now, in winter, the trees bare, the water dominated the panorama and was a deep vivid blue, different from summer. In summer, after dark, they would be able to see the lights of the Fall River steamers as they passed in the distance.

Albany, February 6, 1884

DARLING WIFIE,

How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love yesterday afternoon! I love you and long for you all the time, and oh so tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife. I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again.

Today I sparred as usual; my teacher is a small man and in the set-to today I bloodied his nose by an uppercut, and knocked him out of time.

In the House we had a most exciting debate on my Reform Charter Bill, and I won a victory, having it ordered to a third reading. Tomorrow evening I am to dine at the Rathbones’, at half past seven; it was very kind to ask me, but I do not anticipate much fun.

Goodbye, sweetheart.

Her pregnancy appears to have been without incident. Mittie had once remarked how “very large” she looked, but no one seems to have been concerned about her, and with the baby expected any time, he apparently had no misgivings about being away from her. Albany was five hours by train.

In another letter also written February 6, he told her he had given one of his “best speeches” the day before, and if she was looking in the papers that day, she saw that others agreed. “Mr. Roosevelt’s argument... was conclusive and unanswerable,” said the Times. “Mr. Roosevelt,” according to the Evening Post, had made “a speech admirable both in clearness and force.” A headline in the Herald spoke of “MR. ROOSEVELT’S BRILLIANT ASSAULT ON CORRUPTION.”

“I propose to put the power in the hands of the men the people elect,” he had said. “At present the power is in the hands of one or two men whom the people did not elect.” It was being called the Roosevelt Bill now. A rally in its support was to be held at Cooper Union the next week.

2

On Friday, when he returned to 57th Street, he found that Mittie was “quite sick” with what appeared to be a cold, and that Corinne and Douglas had left their infant son in Bamie’s charge while they went off to Baltimore for a long weekend.

The weather was miserable, chill and damp. There had been no sign of the sun for days. Monday, Mrs. Lee arrived on a morning train. Theodore put in another day at the hearings downtown, then left for Albany first thing Tuesday morning.

Later that day, Tuesday, the twelfth, Alice went into labor and some time that night a baby girl was born. Telegrams went off the next morning announcing the news that mother and child were doing well. Ike Hunt would remember Theodore, “full of life and happiness,” accepting the congratulations of his friends. But then a few hours later a second telegram arrived and Theodore, looking suddenly “worn,” rushed for the next train.

The Times that morning called it suicide weather. It covered most of the Northeast—rain, unending fog, rivers over their banks. In New York, traffic barely moved on the rivers, so thick was the fog. Trains were hours behind schedule. Corinne and Douglas, who had received a telegram at Baltimore and started for New York, would remember crossing through thick fog by ferry from New Jersey, then taking the elevated train uptown, everything moving at a crawl.

They were the first to reach the house. Corinne would remember walking from the elevated station to 57th Street and seeing a single light through the fog in a third-story window. She went up the front steps a little ahead of Douglas. The door was thrown open and Elliott stood in the doorway, the light from the hall behind him, a terrible look on his face. If she wished to see her baby, he said, she should do so before coming in. The baby was at Aunt Annie’s. “There is a curse on this house! Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”

The time was approximately 10:30. Mittie, the doctor said, was dying of typhoid fever; Alice, of Bright’s disease. Theodore did not arrive for another hour.

By the time he reached her bedside and took her in his arms, Alice barely knew who he was. He stayed there, holding her, until some time just before three in the morning when he was told that if he wished to see his mother again, he must come at once.

Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside. Alice lingered on another eleven hours. Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.

The first man to rise when the Assembly convened the next day said he had never in his years at Albany stood in the presence of such sorrow. Six others spoke, including three of Theodore’s most hostile opponents, all visibly shaken. In an unprecedented gesture of respect, the Assembly voted to adjourn until the following Monday.

Saturday in New York, the morning of the double funeral service, skies were clear, the temperature back down in the twenties. Theodore, his face a mask, sat in the front pew with Elliott, Bamie, Corinne, and Alice’s father. Again, as six years before, the enormous church was full; except that now two rosewood coffins stood at the altar. The familiar faces scattered among the more than two thousand who had gathered included Astors, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, but also Speaker Titus Sheard, Johnny O’Brien, and Mayor Seth Low. They sang “Rock of Ages”; Dr. John Hall prayed for the bereaved and for the four-day-old baby, weeping openly as he spoke. Then two hearses clattered off down Fifth Avenue, followed by carriages carrying the immediate family. Burial was at Greenwood, beside Grandmamma Bulloch and Theodore.

Again disease had struck and destroyed and changed everything. The life of the family had seemed an unending, tragic struggle against one cursed disease after another—Pott’s disease, asthma, cancer, whatever nameless disorder plagued Elliott—and now came typhoid and nephritis, or Bright’s disease, chronic inflammation of the kidneys. Mittie, whose precautions against dirt and contamination had seemed silly and obsessive, died of contaminated food or water, of the acutely infectious bacteria Salmonella typhosa. Typhoid fever, an ordeal of usually several weeks, had killed her in five days. It had appeared at first as though she had only a cold, because that is how typhoid begins. Little that mattered was done for her, because there was little anyone could do, given what was known, what was available. And it had been the same for Alice. Two summers before, the country had learned about Bright’s disease when the Associated Press carried a story saying President Arthur was ill with it. The story was denied, on authority of the President, but the feeling remained that Arthur was a dying man, since Bright’s disease in adults was almost inevitably fatal. That it had gone undiagnosed in Alice all that winter seems odd. Plainly neither she nor any of the family had any idea there was something the matter with her. And though none of the family was to challenge or investigate the part played by her doctor, some of her friends would later contend that the doctor had been guilty of criminal negligence.

No one knew how possibly to justify or explain such tragedy. There were no answers save “God’s will” or fate, “strange and terrible fate,” Theodore said. The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life, the sense that the precipice awaited not just somewhere off down the road, but at any moment. An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back, and all Papa’s admonitions to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all. Father had died at forty-six; Mittie had been only forty-eight; Alice, all of twenty-two, her life barely begun. Nothing lasts. Winter waits.

3

“He does not know what he does or says,” wrote his old tutor, Arthur Cutler, the day of the funeral. Yet three days later Theodore was back in Albany, and the day following, at ten in the morning, he was in his seat as usual and that afternoon he took up where he had left off, arguing for his Reform Charter Bill. In one of the speeches given in sympathy the week before, an old Republican named Lucas Van Allen, a man who had opposed Theodore time and again, prayed Theodore be given the strength “to work bravely in the darkness.”

Now week after week, on into March and April, he did little but work, shunting back and forth from Albany to his hearings by night trains. He reported a flood of bills out of his City Affairs Committee—seven, nine, fourteen a day. His outpouring of work, of words printed and spoken, of speeches delivered, of witnesses grilled, of interviews, of inspection tours (of conditions at New York’s infamous Ludlow Street jail), of headlong, concentrated energy was utterly phenomenal, surpassing anything he had ever done before and causing those close at hand to wonder how much longer he could maintain a hold on himself. One day in March he reported fifteen bills out of committee, then six more at a night session; and even then his work for the day had only begun. Dissatisfied with a report on his hearings that had been drafted by counsel for the committee, he wrote an entirely new version at a single sitting, working through until morning.

He didn’t want to [Ike Hunt recalled], but he did it. He started in at night and he wrote all night long and he got his breakfast and still continued to write. The House opened and he came up to the House and he wrote that report, and as soon as he got a sheet of foolscap written in long hand the page was right there to take it down to the printer because the committee had got to report that morning. But Teddy would get up and say, “Mr. Speaker, that bill so-and-so with reference to so-and-so is all right,” and then he would sit down and commence to write again. Finally, he said, “There it is, I am finished.” I sat right in front of him. I said, “There won’t be any continuity to that report, I don’t believe.” He said, “Don’t you worry.” In a little while the printer came up with the report all printed and Teddy went out and read it to the committee and they signed it and that was the report that was handed in.

Of his personal tragedy, he would say nothing. “You could not talk to him about it,” Hunt remembered. “. . . He did not want anybody to sympathize with him.”

“I have taken up my work again; indeed, I think I should go mad if I were not employed,” he wrote in answer to a sympathy note from Carl Schurz, who a number of years before had survived the death of his own wife by pouring himself into his work in just such manic fashion.

“Teddy was as sweet and gentle as ever on Sunday,” wrote Corinne after one of his weekends in the city, “but he feels the awful loneliness more and more, and I fear he sleeps little for he walks a great deal in the night and his eyes have that strained red look.”

Within days after the funeral, it had been decided to sell 6 West 57th Street. It was put on the market and snapped up at once by an immensely wealthy old friend of the elder Theodore’s, a fellow director of the Museum of Natural History, John S. Kennedy, who, with his banking firm, J. S. Kennedy & Company, was closely involved with James Alfred in the financing of the Great Northern Railroad. The family had until May to be out of the house. Theodore left it to Bamie to handle the details and to sell his own place on West 45th Street. “That year seems a perfect nightmare,” she would recall, “parting with all the places we had cared for, dividing everything that had always meant home and deciding how to recommence life.”

Several hundred condolence letters had to be answered, and again it was Bamie who bore the major burden. There were letters from Bullochs in Savannah, recalling “the beautiful, angelic and active girl I knew and loved so well”; from friends made abroad (”It seems such a short time ago when we were together on the Nile ...”); and from people like Aunt Lucy Elliott, who must be answered at length. “If baby is living who will take it?” wrote a cousin from Charleston.

In the interval between her mother’s death and the hour when Alice died, Bamie had sent off a wire to Liverpool and in a strong, clear hand Uncle Jimmie Bulloch had written in reply, “The cable has never carried through the depths of the sea a sadder message than it has brought us today. . . . Our anxiety about dear Alice adds to our unhappiness, but we will doubtless learn how it fares with her.”

I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking, her father had drummed into her. Faced with the decision of whether to proceed as planned with the house at Oyster Bay, whether to sign with the contractor, Theodore decided to go ahead with it, but wanted Bamie to supervise the job, to tend to all details. He wished no part of the project, only to have it finished.

Nor was he interested in his baby, Alice, as she had been christened the Sunday after the funeral, and so she too was entrusted to Bamie, who now bought a house of her own on Madison Avenue, “furnishing it with my share of the 57th Street things.” Theodore, for the house at Oyster Bay, was to have the furniture from the master bedroom.

“It seems,” wrote Conie, remembering her mother, “as if there were so few that one really cared for.” She longed for Mittie. Even her joy in her own child seemed changed somehow, depreciated with Mittie gone.

Baby is lying on the bed taking his lunch by me [she wrote Elliott]. Though he is my greatest comfort and delight, still so much of my pleasure in him is changed, for I never was so happy as when I saw her with him. She loved him so extravagantly . . .

On the day Alice died, Theodore had made a large X on the page for February 14 in an otherwise empty diary for the year 1884, and beneath he wrote only, “The light has gone out of my life.”

Later in the year, working at a small table in a cabin in the Dakota Bad Lands, he wrote a memorial for private publication.

She was born at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, on July 29,1861; I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face; we were betrothed on January 25, 1880, and married on October 27th, of the same year; we spent three years of happiness such as rarely comes to man or woman; on February 12, 1884, her baby girl was born; she kissed it, and seemed perfectly well; some hours afterward she, not knowing that she was in the slightest danger, but thinking only that she was falling into a sleep, became insensible, and died at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, February 14, 1884, at 6 West 57th Street, in New York; she was buried two days afterward, in Greenwood Cemetery.

She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; and there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be but just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.

And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out from my life for ever.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chicago

1

May 31, Chicago—Fast and thick the delegates to the convention are flocking into this city. . . a canvass of the members of the convention here shows Blaine to be in the lead. . . .

IN THE GILDED, MIRRORED COMFORT of the Palmer House barbershop, where, as every visitor to Chicago learned soon enough, the floor was inlaid with silver dollars, they sat waiting for a morning shave, smoking their first cigars of the day, or, if not that, spitting tobacco juice with amazing accuracy, some among the Californians—those newly arrived by the “Blaine Train”—looking, as one man said, as if they had walked in from the Pacific Coast. They talked of Blaine’s strength in the West, of the send-off they had had at San Francisco, of stops the day before, Memorial Day, at places like Marshalltown, Iowa, where several thousand people were waiting at the depot to cheer them on. They studied the plan of the convention floor published in the morning Tribune or read aloud a quote from Tom Platt that “for every kicker who does bolt, Blaine will get two Irish votes in exchange.” Such observations as “It’s Blaine’s turn now” and “Arthur can’t carry New York” were also exchanged as the long line of barbers went about their business. Then shaved, combed, made fragrant with a splash of bay rum, their bright red-and-white BLAINE badges in place, they went out to join the fun.

In the marble lobby of the hotel there were still more of them, talking, reaching for outstretched hands, huddled in threes and fours. At the Grand Pacific Hotel, four blocks away, they were even more numerous. At Blaine headquarters upstairs Titus Sheard of New York was already claiming 341 Blaine votes on the first ballot, a mere 70 shy of what was needed to nominate, and by midday in the bar and the main dining room, they were clinking green glasses in toasts to the next President of the United States, James Gillespie Blaine.

Reporters were struck by their exuberance, their confidence, and the contrast with the Arthur people, who were so plainly downcast and uninspired. “Whenever you meet a Blaine man,” complained the correspondent for The New York Times, “he seizes you and pours into your ear the same old story. ’Everybody wants him. The great West cries for him. The Middle States yearn for him.’” “All were filled with enthusiasm,” noted another reporter, “and the most enthusiastic were filled with whiskey.” Some ambitious orators like to climb up on the lobby furniture in order to make known their theories for the salvation of the country.

They were the rank and file of the party, as they were fond of saying, from city and country alike, as Tom Platt stressed. Theodore, in a letter to Bamie, would describe them as mainly “good, ordinary men, who do not do very much thinking, who are pretty honest themselves, but who are callous to any but very flagrant wrongdoing in others, unless it is brought home to them most forcibly, who ’don’t think Blaine any worse than the rest of them’. . .”

It was their feelings for Blaine that made them such a force to reckon with. Blaine’s only power was the devotion he inspired through force of personality (demagoguery, Theodore and his friends called it). Blaine controlled no patronage, no machine, held no keys to the Customhouse or the Treasury. His home state of Maine had no political importance nationally. And though in recent years he had served quite ably as Garfield’s Secretary of State, and could be thus fairly described as a “statesman,” he did not even hold public office any longer. Blaine was adored for being Blaine—for his very real human warmth and love of people, his brains and loyalty, and “that gorgeous surplus of personal grace called magnetism.” He remained, since the Ingersoll speech at Cincinnati eight years before, the “Plumed Knight” of the party, the Republican’s Republican whose mere presence on a platform could work magic wherever Republican fortunes were in trouble. At the last national convention, also held in Chicago, his forces had carried their fight through thirty-six ballots before Garfield was named. It had been Blaine who handed his friend Garfield the nomination at the last and it had been Conkling who kept the nomination from Blaine; and now with Conkling out of the picture, Blaine’s people were bound to let nothing stand in the way.

The famous visage—the long, pale face with its luminous dark eyes and silvery beard—was to be seen everywhere about the hotels and in store windows, but the idol himself, like President Arthur, remained in Washington. Ironically, with the prize closer to his reach than at any time before, Blaine no longer craved it as he once had.

Also, in April, only weeks before the convention, the old burden of the Mulligan letters had been resurrected in brilliant, vicious fashion by a famous full-color cartoon that the opposition was busily passing out in Chicago, just in case there was anyone left who had not seen it. It had appeared in Puck. Blaine was displayed as “The Tattooed Man,” stripped to his undershorts before a tribunal of his Republican peers. The tattoos were all his old sins—”Mulligan Letters,” “Little Rock RR Bonds,” “N Pacific Bonds,” “Corruption”—and his famed personal magnetism was revealed to be nothing more than a cheap “magnetic pad” worn about the neck.

Nor was the old “saving element” of the party any less adamant in its opposition to Blaine than in times past. Virtually everyone from the Fifth Avenue Conference who was still active in politics was lined up against him—Schurz, Curtis, Godkin, Lodge—and some, like Schurz, talked openly of bolting the party if Blaine was the nominee. They saw him as morally obtuse and the most “venal” of apologists for the spoils system. He had been too close all his career to “the wealthy criminal class,” and to Jay Gould in particular. About the only thing they would not do to stop him was support Chester Arthur. Theodore, writing to Lodge shortly before leaving for Chicago, described the choice as between the Blaine devil and the Arthur deep sea, though of the two, Blaine was “the most dangerous man.”

The puzzling thing about Arthur was that he had turned out to be quite a respectable President. Since Garfield’s murder in 1881, he had been a surprise to almost everybody. His record was a good one. He had conducted himself with great dignity, denied old cronies special license. (“He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur any more,” Johnny O’Brien observed wistfully, “he’s the President.”) He had supported the Pendleton Act, the national indebtedness had been cut, the cost of domestic postage reduced. At his urging a decrepit wooden navy was being phased out, new steel cruisers built. The country was prospering. Times were so good that when General Grant’s Wall Street firm of Grant and Ward failed that spring, it “created only a temporary disturbance” in the overall business picture.

With his height and elegant tailoring, Arthur also looked more like a President than any of his Republican predecessors. He had insisted that the somewhat dowdy old Executive Mansion be brought up to standards (according to the taste of the day), and that official hospitality be raised from the depths of the Hayes years. Modern plumbing was installed in the White House, and the first elevator. Louis Tiffany of New York had done over the Red, Blue, and East rooms, and the showpiece of the new look was a jeweled Tiffany glass screen, fifty feet in length, that now divided the main corridor from the public north vestibule. At Arthur’s invitation, Madame Christine Nilsson and other opera singers performed at state dinners, where, customarily, there were flowers in abundance, as well as small bouquets of roses at every lady’s place, boutonnieres for the men, and gilt-edged place cards embossed with the national coat of arms in gold. There could be as many as fourteen courses with seven or eight wines, each with its proper glass. It was said that Arthur had brought more tact and culture to the White House than anyone in memory, and if such influential figures as Schurz and Curtis thought little better of him than in days gone by, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher thoroughly approved. “I can hardly imagine how he could have done better,” Beecher was quoted as saying. More important for the moment, he was liked by businessmen and could count on strong support from those on the federal payroll and from black politicians and party workers from the South. Of the 820 accredited delegates converging on Chicago, something over 100 were government employees.

Arthur had made little effort to get the nomination and professed he did not want it. His representatives on the scene were badly organized, poorly financed. When a New Yorker showed up with a suitcase full of cash amounting to $100,000, all for the Arthur cause, Arthur, by cable from Washington, ordered that the money be returned. But Arthur’s forces also included such able men as Elihu Root, such thorough professionals as Johnny O’Brien, who had no doubt that he wanted another term.

Besides Arthur and Blaine, there were a half-dozen different dark horses and favorite sons whose strength, if combined, could conceivably stop Blaine. There were John Sherman of Ohio and John A. Logan of Illinois, both United States senators, dainty little Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, and Robert Todd Lincoln. There was talk of Senator Sherman’s more famous brother, William Tecumseh Sherman, and of George William Curtis. But the only one with any substantial support, other than the two front-runners, was the candidate the reformers had settled on, the man upon whom Theodore was banking his fortunes, Senator George Franklin Edmunds of Vermont. Edmunds was the Bristow of this seasons crusade. He was bearded, scowling, capable, incorruptible, eligible, contentious, colorless, devoid of humor, and the very one, it had been decided, to rescue the party and restore it to the high ideals of the founders. (That Blaine, too, had been among the founders was a point left unsaid.) Theodore, so far as is known, had never met Edmunds, nor does he appear to have been aware that it was Edmunds, back at the time of his fathers nomination for the Customhouse, who made a special trip to the White House to urge Hayes to compromise with Conkling and choose another, more acceptable man.

The drumbeat for Edmunds had begun as far back as January, when Harper’s Weekly described him as “in full sympathy with the intelligent progressive spirit,” an “inflexible Republican of spotless personal character,” and it had been Curtis who led the campaign thereafter, joined by George Jones of The New York Times, Godkin of The Nation, President Eliot of Harvard, Andrew D. White, who was president of Cornell, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Of the bare handful of actual politicians who announced for Edmunds the two most frequently mentioned were John D. Long of Massachusetts, who was a congressman and former governor, and Theodore, who in that spring of furious, headlong work and sleepless nights had done all he could to further the Edmunds cause, and with notable results. At the state convention at Utica in April, working at fever pitch, he had neatly outmaneuvered the Blaine and Arthur forces and seen that the four who were elected as delegates-at-large to the national convention were all Edmunds men, he himself and Andrew D. White receiving the most votes. Henry Cabot Lodge, also newly elected as a delegate-at-large from Massachusetts, had written to suggest that they combine forces at Chicago, and that in the meantime they make a run down to Washington to see what Edmunds support could be found. The Washington trip proved nothing, except that Theodore and Lodge got to know each other. Lodge stopped over in New York, spending a weekend at 6 West 57th Street amid packing boxes and bare floors. “We are breaking up house,” Theodore had warned, “so you will have to excuse very barren accommodations.”

When Theodore departed for Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited the evening of May 30, he traveled in a private car with the same two who had led his father’s one political crusade in 1876, Schurz and Curtis. (Again as in 1876, Schurz was going to the convention as an observer.) And when Theodore and Curtis were seen checking in at the Grand Pacific Hotel the next morning, amid the swarming Blaine crowd, they were at once the subjects of much talk and speculation. Curtis, with his white bangs and sallow, priestly look, was a face everyone knew. Theodore, according to the New York Evening Post, was “more specifically an object of curiosity than any other stranger in Chicago.” He was the boy wonder of Albany, New York’s “Cyclone Assemblyman,” the youngest delegate at the convention. Curtis and his cartoonist, Thomas Nast, had been giving Theodore handsome attention in Harper’s Weekly that spring. In one Nast cartoon he had been shown holding a whole sheaf of reform bills as Governor Grover Cleveland signed them into law.

They were there to work for Edmunds, Theodore told reporters. He was carrying a bamboo cane and wearing a “clipper” straw hat, the brim of which, on the underside, was bright blue. He talked extremely fast. He had “a mouth full of regular white teeth like a young lady,” it was noted, and his gold-rimmed spectacles kept sliding down his nose. He was asked by a man from the Chicago Tribune what he might do should Blaine be the nominee. Would he bolt the party? “I will not speak for the others, but for myself I say freely that under no circumstances will I cast a vote for either Blaine or Arthur in this convention. But I am a Republican, and should one or the other of them be nominated, then I will support him.”

Curtis, who was standing at his side, let the remark pass, but by saying what he had to the Tribune, Theodore had guaranteed that in a matter of hours it would be available in print for every delegate in town.

Later in the day, when Theodore, Curtis, and Schurz walked into the main dining room and stood waiting for a table, they looked, said one man, “as if the fate of the nation was in their keeping. Perhaps it is.”

Lodge, who arrived from Boston that same day, seems to have known from the start that there was no way to stop Blaine. And indeed to any experienced observer it looked as though the convention was already decided, three days before it officially opened. By nightfall New York reporters were cabling their home offices that the Blaine boom had “burst all bounds.”

Bits of good news . . . came thick and fast to cheer the partisans of Blaine and keep their enthusiasm at the boiling point. . . . To sum it all up, the drift today has been decidedly toward Blaine. He was never so near the nomination. . . .

Thousands more poured into the city the following day, Sunday, June 1, and it was emphatically “ANOTHER BLAINE DAY.” As a Boston correspondent observed, few people went to church. In New York the Times gave notice that if Blaine was nominated, the Times would abandon the Republican Party.

Monday, the papers were saying Arthur was clearly beaten and the word from the Arthur people was that if the nominee could not be their man, then it must be Blaine, which was about the same as saying Blaine was nominated. If noise and cheap enthusiasm were to be the deciding factors, said The New York Times indignantly, then Blaine was a certain victor. A sure sign, supposedly, was the swing to Blaine by the Ohio congressman William McKinley. No one talked of issues or programs, only of winning in November.

The first news of consequence came Monday night, and it was then that Theodore and Lodge went to work. Theodore, almost alone of the delegates, it would seem, was sure Blaine could be beaten.

The National Committee, dominated by Blaine people, had announced that the name to be placed in nomination for the honor of temporary chairman, the name to be put before the convention first thing in the morning, was that of Powell Clayton, a former Arkansas governor and Grand Army general who had lost an arm in the war and whose personal reputation was very low. Clayton, who had come to Chicago uncommitted, had offered his fourteen Arkansas votes to the Arthur people in trade for a Cabinet seat. “Not for forty nominations,” Arthur responded by wire, and so Clayton went immediately to see the Blaine people. He and Tom Platt, it was known, had been closeted most of that afternoon. (His Conkling past behind him, his “bit of scandal” in the Albany hotel fading from memory, Platt had “thrown in” with Blaine and as head of the New York Blaine delegates was realistically viewed as one of the two or three most important men at the convention.)

Naming Clayton had been a silly move by the Blaine people, the crudest kind of arrogance, and insulting to a large number of delegates. Even the most case-hardened veterans of political compromise were visibly stunned. Chauncey Depew is said to have received the news with his mouth hanging open, speechless for perhaps the first time in his career.

Theodore saw it at once as a chance to force a fight and test Blaine’s strength at the outset. Lodge came rushing to him with much the same idea and so the two “pulled together and went in for all we were worth,” as Theodore said. They were up most of the night, working the hotel corridors, seeing everyone they could. To challenge a decision of the National Committee at the start of a convention was unheard of. “Many of our men were very timid,” Theodore reported to Bamie, and chief among the “weak-kneed ones” was George William Curtis.

Just finding somebody willing to stand as a candidate against Clayton proved difficult and apparently it was Theodore’s personal appeal that made the difference. The volunteer was former Congressman John R. Lynch, a black delegate from Mississippi, who was pledged to Arthur.

When, at ten the next morning, the different delegations began forming up in the hotel lobbies for the march to the convention hall, Theodore had had perhaps two hours’ sleep. The day, June 3, 1884, marked his debut in national politics, his first chance on the national stage.

2

Probably he had his mind on business only as the march began—out of the hotel into the glare of the morning. But the day was spectacular, clear and surprisingly cool for June, and Chicago itself on such a day, and at that particular moment in history, could be a tonic. Four years earlier, when stopping there with Ellie, he had called “Chicagoe,” as he spelled it, a “marvelous city.” Chicago was the new America, the real thing, full of “go-aheadism,” as everyone heard from its outspoken citizenry. It exuded “a sense of big things to be done.” If Chicago had faults, it was because Chicago was “young yet”; Chicago was the “Phoenix City of America,” risen out of its own ashes, as the saying went. One could take heart in Chicago, from new life, energy, enterprise, even grandeur, springing forth from tragedy.

The parade to the Exposition Hall was under way by eleven, the crowds falling back and making way for the delegates to pass. They marched two by two in the glaring sunshine, everybody adorned with his proper badge. Their party, for all its failings, its scandals and fallen idols, was still the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Union, freed the slaves, restored the national credit. Even to so sensitive a moralist as George William Curtis it remained “the party of the best instincts, of the highest desires of the American people.” Many men were Republicans as they were church elders or lodge brothers. It was as if one belonged to an order. Their loyalties, their faith and pride in party, were often deeper, more vital to their self-respect and sense of worth than they could express. Delegates to Republican national conventions, as Mark Sullivan noted, sometimes had their official badges cast in gold and passed them along in their wills as precious relics. When a man like Tom Platt talked about the depth of James G. Blaine’s loyalty to the party, he did so knowing full well the emotional content in those words—”loyalty” and “party.” He felt it himself, even Tom Platt. They all did, or nearly all. “What I liked about him [Blaine] then, as always,” Platt remembered, “was his bold and persistent contention that the citizen who best loved his party and was loyal to it, was loyal to and best loved his country.”

The line of march was east, toward the lake, along Adams Street to where it joined wide, wood-paved Michigan Avenue. The Exposition Hall, pale green with much glass and a red roof, stood straight ahead on the other side of the avenue, and from all its turrets, domes, and gable ends, a hundred or more flags and banners were flying in the breeze, flying and floating exactly as flags are supposed to, against a clear blue sky. The hall had been built expressly to show that Chicago could rise from the disaster of the Great Fire. It stood at the edge of a broad park and beyond the park was the lake, at the moment nearly violet in color and flat as a tabletop. Above the main portico hung a single, tremendous sign: NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.

The crowd converging from all directions, stopping traffic, backing up at six or seven different entrances, was estimated at ten thousand. The scalpers’ price for tickets was $50.

The parading delegates entered through the main door, then moved along a passage beneath the back gallery which opened all at once on to several acres of faces turned in their direction. The Iowans came in first, followed by Rhode Island. Congressman McKinley—short, solid, close-shaven—walked at the head of the Ohio delegation.

The Pennsylvanians wore brilliant blue neckties and cream-colored plug hats and matching cream-colored silk handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, a spray of lily of the valley on the lapel. The New Yorkers, seventy-two in all, largest of the delegations, had white badges with gold fringe and as they started down the aisle the band struck up “When First I Put This Uniform On.” A Chicago reporter thought them “fine-looking fellows” and observed that nearly all were wearing the latest low-cut shoes. “The leader was Mr. George William Curtis with his handsome white whiskers. . . . He had on his arm Theodore Roosevelt who bowed right and left to delegates and newspapermen.” Theodore was wearing his straw hat. Immediately behind walked Andrew D. White and bringing up the rear was Tom Platt.

They had the priority position, four rows front and center. Curtis sat on the aisle, beside the New York pennon. As the others were getting settled, Theodore was seen to vault lightly over several chairs to sit directly in front of Curtis, after which Andrew D. White negotiated a seat beside Theodore. Platt, meantime, sat at the far end of the row from Curtis and appeared to have nothing more on his mind than the slow, rhythmic stroking of his beard.

The setting looked like nothing else so much as a tremendous, dressed-up railroad terminal. An enormous vaulted ceiling was carried overhead by iron girders, these springing upward from long clerestory windows through which great shafts of sunshine slanted onto portions of the crowd like theatrical spotlights. The ironwork was painted red; the ceiling, pale blue; and red-white-and-blue bunting, state flags, and shields of every color banked the galleries.

The stage was at the west end of the hall and back from the stage was a still higher platform reserved for a thousand or more who qualified as “distinguished persons.” Directly above this point, suspended at an angle of about sixty degrees, was a colossal sounding board, hung from the ceiling, a duplicate of which could also be seen at the other end of the hall. The combined surface of these two devices was twenty-five thousand square feet, about half the area of a football field, and their combined acoustical effect was quite amazing. A speaker on stage, talking in a normal voice, could be heard anywhere in the hall and the hall sat about twelve thousand people.

The stage itself was a big semicircle with a long, curving prow now all but buried in still more bunting. A speaker’s stand was flanked with battle flags. There were potted palms and several large bouquets of flowers and two large portraits of Washington and Lincoln.

Members of the press, of whom there were no less than eight hundred in attendance, were arranged behind a line of tables on a raised platform immediately in front of the stage. Then across the entire main floor, from the press section to midpoint in the hall, were the cane-seated oak chairs for the delegates, row after row, divided into three equal sections. The pennons marking each reserved section were of blue silk lettered in gold, one for each of the thirty-eight states, eight territories, and the District of Columbia. The boundary line between the delegates and all other ticketholders was a white picket fence running across the center of the hall, from which point the floor sloped steadily uphill to the bleachers at the very back. At the center of the bleachers, directly below the second sounding board, was a thirty-piece band under the direction of “Professor” Johnny Hand. The overhead galleries, running the length of the hall on two sides, were perhaps fifty feet above the main floor.

The opening gavel of the Eighth Republican National Convention fell at 12:28. A slender young clergyman with yellow hair stepped to the rostrum and with hands behind his back thanked God for Plymouth Rock, Yorktown, Appomattox, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republican Party, then prayed for—in vain, as it happened—”dignity of temper” in the forthcoming campaign. The chairman of the National Committee, a senator from Minnesota named Sabin, spoke of Chicago as sacred ground (Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield had all been nominated in Chicago), after which he put Powell Clayton’s name before the convention.

Immediately, Lodge was on his feet calling to substitute Lynch of Mississippi. Lodge, tidy, prim, full-bearded, and close-buttoned, spoke without passion, as though he wished merely to express a polite difference of opinion. He offered the name of Lynch, he said, with no view of attempting to make a test vote, but simply to strengthen the party. His manner was described as “supercilious.”

Others demanded to be heard. The Blaine people claimed that any challenge to the National Committee would subject the party to needless divisiveness. The opposition insisted that the convention had the right to do as it pleased. Meantime, if we are to believe one of those observing the scene from the press section, the “rather dudish-looking” Roosevelt and the “properly English” Lodge “applauded with the tips of their fingers, held immediately in front of their noses.”

Then it was Theodore’s turn. “Up from the midst of the Empire State Delegation rose a slight, almost boyish figure,” wrote the admiring correspondent for The New York Times. “Everybody knew the man, for there is not a State headquarters which he had not visited in his canvass for Edmunds, and scarce an individual delegate with whom he had not conversed in a straightforward, manly way, carrying conviction even when he could not convert.” He had handed someone his hat and climbed onto his chair. It was said he looked like a college boy.

“It was the first time I had ever had the chance of speaking to ten thousand people assembled together,” he would tell Bamie.

He had one hand on his hip. A reporter described how his “slight frame shook with the effort to make himself heard.”

“Mr. Chairman . . . I hold it to be derogatory to our honor, to our capacity for self-government, to say that we must accept the nomination of a presiding officer by another body; and that our hands are tied . . .” He asked that the vote on the temporary chairman be taken by an individual poll of the delegates. “Let each man stand accountable . . . let each man stand up here and cast his vote, and then go home and abide by what he has done.”

It is now, Mr. Chairman, less than a quarter of a century since, in this city, the great Republican Party for the first time organized for victory and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who broke the fetters of the slave and rent them asunder forever. It is a fitting thing for us to choose to preside over this convention one of that race whose right to sit within these walls is due to the blood and treasure so lavishly spent by the founders of the Republican Party. And it is but a further vindication of the principles for which the Republican Party so long struggled. I trust that the Honorable Mr. Lynch will be elected temporary chairman of this convention.

Then, as quickly, he was back in his seat again, the “warmest applause” ringing in his ears, and once five or six others had spoken, the roll was called. Lynch won—Blaine had lost—by a margin of forty votes.

So for the moment, for one exhilarating, fleeting afternoon, it looked as if Blaine might be stopped after all. Certainly, he could not be nominated on the first ballot. In New York the Evening Post hailed the all-night efforts of Roosevelt and Lodge as a brilliant flanking movement. The New York Times singled Theodore out as not only the most conspicuous of the Edmunds men, but the most effective. But what the vote had actually done was to show that the balance of power was held by the reform contingent, the Edmunds people: the “Plumed Knight” could be stopped, but only if they were to give up on Edmunds and agree to Arthur, or resolve a way to unite the Edmunds and Arthur forces behind some acceptable alternative, such as John Sherman. It was clearly a case of Blaine against the field and the field could win only by uniting, which seemed just about hopeless, given the known preference of the Arthur people for Blaine as their second choice.

That night at the Grand Pacific, as a glee club hired by the Arthur forces paraded about the lobby singing the praises of the President, Theodore went back to work.

Wednesday, June 4, was taken up with routine business. The weather was cloudy and warm. “Young Roosevelt alone was buoyant. . .” The one bit of excitement was a resolution put forth by the Blaine people—an old Conkling resolution from the previous convention—calling for every delegate to pledge in advance his support of the nominee, irrespective of who it might be. It was aimed directly at George William Curtis and Curtis was instantly on his feet. The color was drained from his face, his hands clenched. Curtis had a magnificent voice—a famous voice—and he spoke now with what was described as “electric” intensity: “A Republican I came into this convention. By the grace of God, a Republican and a free man I will go out of this convention.” The resolution was withdrawn.

Thursday, June 5, petitions for women’s suffrage were read and referred to committee, there to die; the party platform, replete with praise for a high tariff and the gold standard, was read aloud in its entirety by William McKinley. Again the weather was correspondingly gray and dull, and again Theodore was extremely active, “quick, watchful, rather enjoying his brief lease on public life.” An Ohio delegate, Joseph Foraker, would later relate that he had found one conference with the indefatigable New Yorker “so trying upon the strength and the mental operations” that he was barely able to make it back to the convention hall that evening for the nominating speeches.

Sixteen nominating speeches were delivered, beginning at 7:35 and lasting more than five hours. Every seat was taken, every foot of standing room. The night was hot and close and thousands of little fans were moving in the mellow gaslight. Outside, thousands of people crowded about the building, waiting for whatever news was shouted down from those inside who were seated in the last rows of the galleries, up along the line of clerestory windows.

Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois nominated his colleague Logan; the principal speaker for Arthur was an elderly unknown from Troy, New York, named Martin Townsend, who was obviously unprepared; John Sherman was nominated by Foraker of Ohio; and the two speeches for Edmunds were delivered by John D. Long, a noted speaker, and George William Curtis. Theodore thought the speech by Long the finest he had ever heard. It struck the old theme of the Hayes inaugural: country before party. “We are here as Republicans, and yet. . . not in the interest of the Republican Party alone. Even in this tumultuous excitement, we feel that. . . we are here in the interests of the people and all the people . . . of the country and the whole country.” And then Long said, “Gentlemen, I nominate the Honorable—aye! the Honorable—George F. Edmunds of Vermont.”

But the overwhelming, unforgettable event of the night was the nominating speech for Blaine and what it did to the audience. No one could remember having witnessed anything comparable. It was one of the most memorable events in the whole history of national political conventions. To some it was appalling. Andrew D. White called it a scene “absolutely unworthy of a convention of any party, a disgrace to decency.” Godkin, from what he was told, would dismiss it as “a mass meeting of maniacs.” Theodore, in a moment of calm reflection afterward, would concede to Bamie that it had been “most impressive.”

The speaker was a blind man, Judge William H. West from Bellefontaine, Ohio, a tall, gaunt, white-bearded figure in an ancient blue cloak that reached nearly to the floor, who was led to the stage and up the steps by a small boy. He “stood looking with his sightless eyes towards the vast throng,” wrote Theodore, “. . . his voice rang like a trumpet. . .”

He had been in Chicago in 1860, said the speaker. He had been there when they nominated Abraham Lincoln.

Four and twenty years of the grandest history in recorded times have distinguished the ascendancy of the Republican Party. The skies have lowered and reverses have threatened, but our flag is still there, waving above the mansion of the Presidency. . . . Six times, in six campaigns, has that symbol of union, freedom, humanity, and progress, been borne in triumph . . .

The cadence was Biblical and he looked as if he might have been present at the Creation.

Gentlemen, the Republican Party demands of this convention a nominee whose inspiration and glorious prestige shall carry the Presidency.... Gentlemen, three millions of Republicans believe that the man to accomplish this is the Ajax Telamon of our party, who made and whose life is a conspicuous part of its glorious history. Through all the conflicts of its progress, from the baptism of blood on the plains of Kansas to the fall of the immortal Garfield, whenever humanity needed succor or freedom needed protection or a country a champion, wherever blows fell thickest and fastest, there, in the forefront of the battle, was seen to wave the white plume of James G. Blaine, our Henry of Navarre. . . . Nominate him, and the campfires and beacon lights will illuminate the continent from the Golden Gate to Cleopatra’s Needle. Nominate him, and the millions who are now waiting will rally to swell the column of victory that is sweeping on. In the name of the majority of the delegates from the Republican States and their glorious constituencies who must fight this battle, I nominate . . .

But he never completed his sentence. It was as if the huge auditorium had been rocked by an explosion. The noise was horrendous. Delegates were cheering, screaming, stamping their feet, shouting at the tops of their lungs. They climbed onto chairs, leaped and danced about in the aisles, grabbed one another in great bear hugs and went spinning around in circles. There were hats spinning on the tops of canes held overhead, hats flying into the air. Bonnets, coats, canes, umbrellas, thousands of white handkerchiefs, were waving frantically. People were singing, weeping. Flags and banners were being stripped from the walls. The noise went on and on. It was “pandemonium universal and all-pervading,” a scene “never equaled and utterly indescribable.” And just when everyone’s energy seemed to have been spent, somebody came down the aisle and onto the stage carrying a huge American flag on a long staff at the top of which rode a helmet of pink and white roses surmounted by a waving snow-white plume, “the helmet of Navarre.”

“. . . James G. Blaine of Maine,” Judge West was able to exclaim at last, a half hour later, and then “another great roar went up like the noise of many waters, sweeping in great waves of sound around the hall, and the crowd without. . . answered in a muffled roar, which echoed within.”

Here and there on the floor, chiefly among the Massachusetts and New York delegations, could be seen small islands of silent men who sat with their arms folded and who, from the looks on their faces, might have been at a funeral.

Nothing said in the other speeches mattered greatly. Everything after the West speech was anticlimactic and by the time it was decided to adjourn, the hour then being past midnight, there was little doubt as to what would happen the next morning.

Yet once again Theodore and Lodge worked through the night. As a last-ditch effort they tried to unite the Arthur and Edmunds forces behind John Sherman, working behind closed doors with an Ohio delegate, a political nobody who was also attending his first convention and learning a great deal, Mark Hanna. Another idea was to stampede the convention for Robert Lincoln.

“It is a life or death struggle for the Republican Party in Chicago,” wrote the editor of The New York Times as the paper was put to bed that night in New York. “. . . [Blaine’s] nomination means a disastrous defeat for the Republican Party, and from that defeat the party would never recover except under other leaders and perhaps another name. The party has assuredly fallen upon evil days.” The Times had decided at this late hour to support Robert Lincoln.

“It quickly degenerates into ‘anything to beat Blaine,’” said a Chicago reporter who was on the scene.

It is eager, bitter, and peculiar. Dudes and roughs, civil service reformers and office-holding bosses, shorthairs and college presidents—many men of various kinds of ambition or selfishness join in midnight conferences. . . . Logan refuses all combination. The Lincoln boom collapses. . . . To throw Arthur to Edmunds is impossible. To transfer Edmunds to Arthur is merely to send Logan and Sherman to Blaine. Logan will not have Edmunds; the Edmunds men do not want Logan. Arthur also prefers Blaine to Sherman . . .

The balloting began the morning of the fourth day, Friday, June 6, the hall as packed as the previous night. “It was a tumultuous crowd, but a very good-natured one [noted a Chicago reporter]. . . . Tally sheets are ready, pencils are out, the delegates who are still toiling with the weak and weakening the stubborn, hurry to their places, while the gavel keeps up its heavy staccato.”

Blaine did not win on the first ballot, nor the second, nor the third, but he kept gaining, while Arthur held steady and Edmunds kept slipping, so that by the end of the third ballot Blaine needed only thirty-six votes for the nomination. The opposition could only fight for time. Foraker moved to recess, and when a delegate from Pennsylvania challenged him, Theodore was up shouting that the motion was not debatable or amendable. Blaine people pushed their way across the stage to the chairman, surrounding him. Theodore and the Pennsylvania delegate stood on their chairs shouting at each other, but the noise of the crowd was so great it was impossible to hear what they were saying. Theodore, thrashing his arms in the air, “vociferated and gesticulated in a dramatic manner amid the cheers and jeers of the vast audience . . .” No one was seated any longer, most people were standing on their chairs. Theodore was trying to get on stage to ask a question, and getting nowhere until he thrust aside “several officious persons who were attempting forcibly to exclude him.” But then William McKinley, the conventions great conciliatory figure, emerged from the crowd on stage, raised a small, pale hand, and “lo! as if Canute had found the sea obedient, the Blaine men drop into their seats, wipe their brows and puff out their short breath. . . . The storm is over.”

“The gentlemen representing the different states here have a right to the voice of this convention upon this subject,” said McKinley in a resolute voice, “and, as a friend of James G. Blaine, I insist that all his friends shall unite in having the roll of states called ...”

A vote was taken on the move to adjourn and the Blaine forces voted it down.

So it was on the fourth ballot that Blaine carried the day, Logan released his Illinois delegation, 34 votes, to Blaine. Minutes later Ohio made it final.

The final vote for Blaine was 541; for Arthur, 207. Edmunds ended with only 41. In one of the galleries Carl Schurz took out his watch and remarked to a neighbor, “This is the hour and minute which will go down in history as marking the death of the Republican Party.”

The crowd was euphoric, as the night before, “crazy with rapture . . . sheer ecstasy.” The band was playing and somewhere in the distance a cannon boomed. There was a motion to make the nomination unanimous and William McKinley came pushing down the aisle to where Theodore and Curtis sat. He urged one or the other to go to the platform and speak for Blaine, but neither would budge. When Curtis shook his head, wrote one of the many reporters who were watching the whole interchange, it was not in anger but in sorrow. A reporter took hold of Theodore by the arm as he started toward the exit. He had nothing to say, Theodore insisted. His face was crimson, his “eyes flashed with indignation behind his gold-rimmed spectacles as he contemplated his first real defeat.”

“I decline to say anything ...”

“But you will certainly support Blaine, will you not?”

“That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.”

“Will you not enter the campaign in the interests of the Republican Party?”

“I am going cattle ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and part of the fall. What I shall do after that I cannot tell you.”

He brushed off another reporter by telling him to wait a week. To the man from the Times he said that by tradition he was expected to support the nominee, but refused to say more.

“A grave would be garrulous compared to me tonight,” he told still another man, this one from the Boston Transcript, but then suddenly he said that picking Blaine was the greatest possible blunder—and that he would support him.

Lodge and Curtis were being besieged with the same questions. “Don’t hit a fellow because he’s down,” Lodge responded. “I think on the whole I may join the machine and keep in politics. This country is in such a hurry it can’t stop for reform.”

Curtis, in Theodore’s presence, said he had been a Republican too long to break from the party now.

The convention ended that evening with the naming of John A. Logan as Blaine’s running mate. Logan, a profane, contentious figure, had been an excellent commander in the Union Army and in politics a “thick-or-thin” Grant supporter. He was on the ticket to please the old Conkling crowd and to bring in the soldier vote. It was Logan who, in 1868, had conceived the idea of Memorial Day. Blaine, like Cleveland, had hired a substitute during the war.

At the White House Chester A. Arthur sent off a cable pledging his “earnest and cordial support.” Two weeks later, he would confide to a friend that he was indeed suffering from an advanced case of Bright’s disease and did not have long to live.

Jubilant crowds surged through the streets of Chicago most of the night, tying up traffic for blocks around the main hotels. Bonfires burned at several street corners; one, in front of the Vickers Theater, gave off such heat that passing horses were injured. Rockets flashed from housetops; “people—young and old—formed impromptu processions and marched . . . howling like madmen: ’Blaine, Blaine, hurrah for Blaine!’”

Bulletins reported similar demonstrations for Blaine in Pittsburgh, Dayton, Princeton. In San Francisco all business was suspended. The city had “gone wild.”

It was also that night, about midnight, according to one of the editors of the Evening Post, Horace White, that Theodore came into the Independent committee room at the Grand Pacific, where White was busy composing a dispatch to the New York office, predicting a revolt among the Independent Republicans. Theodore sat down, according to White’s account, and White read aloud what he had written, asking at the end if he had made it strong enough. No, he had not, said Theodore, his fury and fatigue having caught up with him. “If I were writing it, I would say, ’any proper Democratic nomination will have our hearty support.’” He thought the best Democrat would be Cleveland.

By midmorning the following day, Saturday, June 7, however, Theodore had packed and checked out. “ROOSEVELT TAKES TO THE WOODS,” scoffed a headline in the World. Roosevelt and Curtis, alone of all the delegates, had pouted and sulked like whipped schoolboys, said a Midwestern paper.

But then two days later came a report from St. Paul, Minnesota, quoting Theodore as saying, “I shall bolt the nomination of the convention by no means. I have no personal objections to Blaine . . . I believe Blaine will be elected. . . . I have been called a reformer but I am a Republican . . .” He had been interviewed by a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press during a stop en route to the Bad Lands. The story was picked up all over the East—the New York Tribune carried it on the front page—and so suddenly whether he was in or out of the party, with Blaine or against him, was cause for an uproar.

“ROOSEVELT’S RECANTATION REGARDED AS HIS POLITICAL DEATH WARRANT,” announced the World, while the Evening Post insisted the whole thing was a hoax and sent off a wire to Medora, in the Bad Lands, calling for a denial. The Times decided to say nothing of the reported statement, so certain were the editors that it was false.

“Theodore, beware of ambition!” observed the Daily Globe in Boston. The Evening Transcript speculated that the story was the work of “some bungling Western reporter” (a remark some readers of the Transcript probably considered redundant). “If Mr. Roosevelt’s remarks are reported aright,” declared the author of a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, “they are among the most startling effects of modern practical politics.”

The so-called repudiation from Medora was dated June 12, an enigmatic telegram saying, “To my knowledge had no interview for publication; never said anything like you report. May have said I opposed Blaine for public reasons not personal to myself.”

So cheered were the editors of the Boston Transcript by this news that they put out an extra edition.

On June 16 came another telegram, but again there was no telling where he stood on Blaine, whether he was bolting the party or not.

“Just saw my alleged St. Paul interview for the first time. It is wholly fictitious. I never was interviewed on this subject, and never said anything even approximately resembling what was reported.”

To the editors of the World it was all becoming wonderfully ludicrous.

The gallant young man rushed away from the Chicago convention full of heat and bitterness. Now that he has expanded his lungs with the rarefied air incident to the high altitudes of the earth and cooled his intellectual brow in the streams which flow down from regions of virgin snow he might confer a favor on mankind by simply saying explicitly whether he is for or against Blaine.

In Boston, meantime, the revolt had begun in no uncertain terms. A meeting of the Massachusetts Reform Club had been called at the Parker House the very next day after the nominations in Chicago. Blaine was denounced, and a committee was organized to work for his defeat in November. Charles W. Eliot and Theodore’s old classmate Josiah Quincy were principals in the movement. Most of those Theodore had known on the Harvard faculty were bolting the party (with the exception of Shaler, who was already a Democrat). Both James Russell Lowell and Richard H. Dana, his father’s two friends from the ’76 convention, were bolting.

In New York the Times ran columns of letters from Republicans who were joining the exodus. Schurz, Godkin, and the editors of the Times had already renounced Blaine, and so, too, by now had Curtis, who, in spite of what he said at Chicago and for all that the party had meant to him, was unable to go along with such a nominee. On June 14 Harper’s Weekly came out against Blaine. On July 5, in an editorial, Curtis put the magazine squarely behind Grover Cleveland, and when at Chicago the next week, the Democrats made Cleveland their candidate, the effect among influential Republicans exceeded anyone’s expectations. The staunchly Republican New York Times announced its support for Cleveland. Henry Ward Beecher was leaving the party. So was Mayor Seth Low of Brooklyn. So was Theodore’s senior partner in the publishing business, George Haven Putnam, who called the Republican nominations “a farce and an absurdity, not to say an anachronism.” Even J. Pierpont Morgan was bolting. And along with Curtis, Schurz, Godkin, Lowell, Dana—all those with whom the elder Theodore had worked with such verve and conviction in ’76—there was even added the name of Benjamin H. Bristow.

Henry Cabot Lodge, who continued to say, as he had at Chicago, that he would stand by the nominee, was being denounced by old friends and admirers as little better than a traitor. He was no longer invited to dinner. Some in Boston who had known him all their lives were refusing even to speak to him. “Mr. Lodge maintains that he has changed his mind,” remarked one man. “I call it not a change of mind but a change of soul.” Schurz, in a kindly letter of advice, urged Lodge to come to his senses.

You are a young man. You have the great advantage of affluent circumstances. You have the promise of an honorable and useful career before you. . . . The course you are now in danger of following . . . will unite you more and more in fellowship with . . . the ordinary party politicians. The more you try to satisfy them the less you will satisfy yourself.

“Whatever the result of the election, the parties will remain,” Lodge answered Schurz with cold logic. “By staying in the party I can be of use. By going out I destroy all the influence for power and good I may possess. . . . If I am to be banned because I vote according to what I believe . . . I will fight against such treatment with all my strength.”

Lodge said later that he and Theodore had made a pact before Chicago to stand by the nominee even if it was Blaine, which is precisely what Theodore had told the Chicago Tribune he would do, the first morning at the Grand Pacific. It was also what he had told the Boston Transcript he would do within an hour after Blaine was nominated. But the last week in June, Lodge received a letter from the Bad Lands dated the seventeenth. “I am absolutely ignorant of what has been said or done since the convention,” wrote Theodore, “as I have been away from all newspapers for ten days. I hope soon to be back when I will see you and decide with you as to what we can do.”

A day or so later a second letter reached Lodge. He was heading east in another week, Theodore wrote, “as I wish to see you at once. You are pursuing precisely the proper course; do not answer any assaults unless it is imperatively necessary; keep on good terms with the machine, and put in every ounce to win.” He was writing under certain difficulties, Theodore said, being in a cattleman’s hut and having just spent thirteen hours in the saddle. In a postscript he repeated again that he had not seen a newspaper since leaving Chicago.

3

Without question, the Chicago convention was one of the crucial events of Theodore’s life, a dividing line with numerous consequences. He had carried the fight against Blaine with all that was in him, and if he had lost, if, as he told Bamie, it had been “an overwhelming rout,” no one could fault him for not trying, and the impression he had made in this first appearance on the national political stage was phenomenal. He was still all of twenty-five years old; it had been his first national convention. Yet from the first day he had proved himself a force to reckon with, by friend or foe, and the attraction he had for newspaper attention was the kind every politician dreams of. He was a natural politician. He had a born genius for the limelight, for all the gestures and theatrics of politics. In his undersized, overdressed way he had presence. Unquestionably, he had nerve.

He understood the part reporters play and knew exactly how to play to them. He was wonderful copy, easy—a pleasure—to write about, however one felt toward him. Also, for many who wrote about him, there was the underlying excitement of discovery: here was somebody with a future. In his best “notices” he was portrayed as “fearless,” “courageous,” “manly,” “tireless,” “plucky and unyielding,” as “the most interesting” man on hand, the “young chief,” as “an earnest direct speaker, who will be listened to whenever he speaks.” The Chicago Tribune, a Blaine paper, had called him “brilliant” and lauded his gallantry, placing him alongside Curtis as a standard of moral rectitude and character. He had been “young Casabianca Roosevelt [who] ’stood on the burning deck whence all but him fled’...” The Chicago Times called him very simply “the most remarkable young politician of the day,” and then made the point that he had had to get where he had in politics despite his background. “The advantage of being a self-made man was denied him. An unkind fortune hampered him with an old and wealthy family.”

Those who had fought for Edmunds with him—Lodge, Andrew D. White, John D. Long—had been enormously impressed. Andrew D. White, the Cornell president, would remember the rest of his life this “first revelation of that immense pluck and vigor . . . nothing daunted him.”

Possibly the most fervent of all admirers through the week at Chicago had been George William Curtis, who at lunch one day at the Grand Pacific is said to have pushed back from the table, placed his napkin beside his plate, waited a few seconds, then responded as follows to a reporters question about “young Roosevelt.”

You’ll know more, sir, later; a deal more. . . . He has integrity, courage, fair scholarship, a love for public life, a comfortable amount of money, honorable descent, the good word of the honest. He will not truckle nor cringe, he seems to court opposition to the point of being somewhat pugnacious. His political life will probably be a turbulent one, but he will be a figure, not a figurehead . . . or, if not, it will be because he gives up politics altogether.

As important as anything, as time would show, was the bond formed with Lodge. Chicago marked the beginning of the first lasting male friendship Theodore had ever made outside the family; and like another friendship also formed at that same convention—between McKinley and Mark Hanna—the political consequences were to be far-reaching.

In some respects Lodge was an improbable choice. Eight years Theodore’s senior, he struck most people as unbearably superior and fastidious, cold, calculating, a man who appeared to find any but his own patrician kind extremely distasteful. But Lodge was also fiercely loyal to his friends. He had tremendous energy, wide-ranging interests, a keen mind. He was a scholar, wellborn, wealthy. He loved history and literature, long walks, horses, and Harvard University. He was a fellow member of the Porcellian. By 1884 he had already published five books and yet was ambitious for a political career, despite his obvious handicaps. (He was called “Lah-de-dah Lodge,” among other things, and the sound of his voice was once compared to the tearing of a bed sheet.) Furthermore, he liked Theodore and let Theodore know it. They were fellow spirits in many respects and the difference in age made Lodge something of the big brother Theodore had never had. “I can’t help writing you,” he would tell Lodge some years later in a letter from New York, “for I literally have no one here to whom to unburden myself; I make acquaintances very easily, but there are only one or two people in the world, outside my own family, whom I deem friends or for whom I really care.”

And beyond all that Lodge was a fighter. “I have never been able to work so well with anybody before,” Theodore would tell him.

So . . . he had been in the roughest political fight of his experience and though beaten badly he had fought in a way no one would forget or that he need ever be ashamed of. He had commanded attention. He had found a friend, given a speech before the largest crowd he had ever seen, heard one speech he thought brilliant, heard another by a blind man whose voice “rang like a trumpet” and swept the convention. He had seen the voice of the people in action and had been both awed and a little appalled. But he had also perceived that Arthur failed because, as he wrote Bamie, Arthur had “absolutely no strength with the people.” Probably, he had drawn from the experience the lesson that in politics “strength with the people” is what ultimately counts. He was glad to have been present, he also told her; it had been a “historic scene.”

Interestingly, neither he nor any of those who wrote about him at such length ever mentioned the tragedy of February or the burden of grief he carried.

But the overriding importance of the Chicago convention for Theodore was that it marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician. He made no formal announcement of his support for Blaine until he had seen Lodge that July, but from all he had already said it is clear he knew what he would do even before leaving Chicago; he only needed, as he later said, time to cool down and think things over. Like Lodge, he was opening himself to heavy abuse from friends and from those admiring members of the press whose favor counted so much to him. Like Lodge, he could be accused of gross ambition, of moral backsliding, of betraying his own high-minded kind. And such condemnation could be extremely painful. Still, as he had said in a letter to Bamie soon after leaving Chicago, Blaine had been the “free choice of the great majority” of Republicans. It had been a fair fight, and while he found Blaine repellent, there was something about stalking off, quitting the game because he lost, that was even more repellent, quite apart from whatever personal ambition he harbored. He had no sentimental attachment to majority rule. “It may be,” he told Bamie, “that ’the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty-one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty-nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” But voice of God, devil, fool, whatever it was, he must abide by it, both out of some fundamental sense of fair play and out of plain determination to have a stake in political power. If he bolted, he knew, he would be finished, out of politics except in some chance or peripheral fashion. He would be an outsider, devoid of that “inside influence” he knew to be essential if he was ever to accomplish anything. He had arrived at the point where he must decide whether he was to be a “mornin’ glory” or the real thing.

A writer of the day, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, who kept close watch on Theodore’s career and became a later-day confidant, said that with the nomination of Blaine, Theodore confronted “what in many respects was the most serious crisis of his career. . . . He insisted upon deciding the question himself, and in his own way and time.”

Similarly, a kinsman, the author Nicholas Roosevelt (son of Cousin West), was to write years later, “After watching American party politics closely for more than half a century. I am of the opinion that if TR had run out on the party in 1884, his political career would have been finished then and there.”

Yet apart from the more obvious difficulties of the decision, there was the break it meant for Theodore with so much that his father had stood for. He was severing himself from his father’s approach to public service, deserting his father’s old friends, all the people his father had so admired. It was now, far more than when he entered the legislature, that he was taking the step his father would almost certainly have disapproved. Had Blaine or Conkling been nominated at Cincinnati in ’76, there is little doubt what his father would have done.

Two years before, in February 1882, Theodore had written what, in the context of his decision on Blaine, is a very important letter. It was addressed to an old friend and admirer of his father s, the noted philanthropist and reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell.

I honestly mean to act up here [in the Assembly] on all questions as nearly as possible as I think Father would have done, if he had lived. I thoroughly believe in the Republican Party when it acts up to its principles—but if I can prevent it I never shall let party zeal obscure my sense of right and decency. What my success as a politician may be I do not care an atom: but I do wish to be able to end my work here with an entirely light heart and clear conscience.

The most striking and appropriate example of what would most likely have happened to him, had he bolted, is the case of Seth Low. Low refused to support Blaine, maintaining he was not a Republican mayor but the mayor of all the people in Brooklyn. As a consequence he never again received the wholehearted backing of the Republican organization, and his political career never came to much.

Theodore spent three days in New York with Bamie and his child, then several days at Chestnut Hill with the Lees before going to Lodge’s summer home at Nahant on Boston’s North Shore. The two of them spent a warm Friday evening sitting on a porch looking at the sea and talking until quite late. The following day, Saturday, July 19. Theodore made his statement to the Boston Herald.

I intend to vote the Republican presidential ticket. While at Chicago I told Mr. Lodge that such was my intention; but before announcing it, I wished to have time to think the whole matter over. A man cannot act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he cannot possibly do both. . . . I went in with my eyes wide open to do what I could within the party; I did my best and got beaten; and I propose to stand by the result. . . .

I am by inheritance and by education a Republican; whatever good I have been able to accomplish in public life has been accomplished through the Republican Party; I have acted with it in the past, and wish to act with it in the future . . . I am going back in a day or two to my western ranches, as I do not expect to take part in the campaign this fall.

People like William Roscoe Thayer felt “dumbfounded.” “We thought of him as a lost leader,” Thayer remembered. Owen Wister was convinced Theodore had come under the maleficent influence of Lodge, “his evil genius.” At the State Street offices of Lee, Higginson and Company, where he was working as a clerk in the vaults, Wister overheard Henry Lee remark to George C. Lee, “As for Cabot Lodge, nobody’s surprised at him; but you can tell that young whippersnapper in New York from me that his independence was the only thing in him we cared for, and if he has gone back on that, we don’t care to hear anything more about him.”

In New York he was denounced as “a crank and a nuisance.”

Young men like Mr. Roosevelt owe all their force in politics not to party fidelity [wrote the Evening Post], but to popular confidence in their absolute integrity. . . . In fact, the function of such men is to stand firm against bursts of party folly or baseness, until the popular conscience has time to act. . . . There is no ranch or other hiding place in the world in which a man can wait for Blaine and the Mulligan letters to “blow over,” for they will never blow over until justice is done.

Alone of those who had bolted, George William Curtis admitted privately that Theodore, in staying with the party, had “played the game fairly.”

Theodore seemed immensely relieved, once the step had been taken. “Most of my friends seem surprised to find that I have not developed hoofs and horns,” he wrote Lodge jauntily from New York before leaving again for the West. Next, he was writing from his ranch. “You would be amused to see me, in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.” He had changed his mind about the fall campaign, he said. Lodge could count on his help.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Glory Days

1

The cowboy as folk hero was still an emerging phenomenon in the 1880s, at the time Theodore went west. The mythic figure of present understanding had yet to take shape in the popular mind—the success of the dime novel and the new Wild West shows notwithstanding—largely because Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, the first true “western,” was still in the future, as were the magazine illustrations and paintings of Frederic Remington and Theodore’s own books and articles. For it was these three upper-class “Ivy League” easterners, Wister and Roosevelt of Harvard, Remington of Yale, in their efforts to catch “the living, breathing end” of the frontier, who produced what in most respects remains the popular version of the “real West” and its leading player, the cowboy. In New York, meantime, as Clarence Day relates in Life with Father, a small boy of proper upbringing could still be informed by an all-knowing parent that cowboys were no better than tramps, wild fellows who put up with dreadful food and the worst possible accommodations.

But a ranchman (also called cattleman or stockman) was quite another matter, as Theodore was to stress in the first of two books on his time in the West, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which was to be published in a limited, exceedingly elegant quarto-sized edition priced at an unheard-of $15, and dedicated “To that keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my brother Elliott Roosevelt.”

Part of the mark of the ranchman was his attire, which, though similar to that of a cowboy, was of considerably finer materials, as Theodore explained. A ranchman’s saddle, bridle, spurs, revolver, and the like were all of the first quality. A ranchman spoke (or wrote) of his men, his herds, and the quantity of horses he maintained (”on my own ranch there are eighty”). A ranchman had ample time for hunting and good books. (”No ranchman who loves sport can afford to be without Van Dyke’s Still Hunter, Dodge’s Plains of the Great West, or Caton’s Deer and Antelope of America . . .” Theodore wrote. “As for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell, and the other standbys, I suppose no man, East or West, would willingly be long without them.”) It was a life, he said, closely akin to that of the old southern planters.

The great appeal, of course, was the freedom and “vigorous open-air existence.” It could do wonders for the spirit, wonders for one’s health. It was also quite fashionable at the moment, a point he need not stress to those who would pay the $15 for his book, and it could be extremely profitable, which he did mention in the second and far better book, though with a cautionary reminder that financial disaster, too, was possible. The danger was a severe winter, he wrote prophetically, in advance of the winter of 1886.

Theodore’s interest in the Dakota Bad Lands probably began with Commander Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the former naval officer and audacious entrepreneur who in 1880 masterminded the transporting of Cleopatra’s Needle (a 69-foot monolith weighing 220 tons) from Egypt to Central Park, a daring, difficult, and justly celebrated feat. Gorringe had bought up an abandoned government cantonment located on the Northern Pacific Railroad where the railroad crossed the Little Missouri in upper Dakota Territory, just east of the Montana line, in the heart of the northern Dakota Bad Lands. The idea had been to establish a hunting camp for eastern sportsmen, along the lines of Paul Smith’s in the Adirondacks. And when Theodore made his initial trip to the Bad lands in 1883, to get his buffalo, he was to have gone with Gorringe, who for some unknown reason backed out at the last moment.

But it could have also been his publishing partner George Haven Putnam who first told Theodore about the Bad Lands and/or about Gorringe, since it was Putnam who put out The Great Northwest for the Northern Pacific Railroad, the book containing the first glowing account of the Bad Lands and their charms. Or if not Putnam, it could have been any of a number of others with an interest in cattle and the West, including his own father-in-law, George C. Lee, since Lee, Higginson and Company, like many eastern banks and investment firms, was much involved in the “beef bonanza.” Eastern and European money was going into cattle in a grand way and among those jumping in were numerous Roosevelt family friends and fellow Harvard men. The Wyoming ranch Theodore invested in earlier was known as the Teschemacher & DeBillier Cattle Company. Hubert E. Teschemacher and Frederic DeBillier were in the Class of ’82 at Harvard, Owen Wister’s class, and their partner Richard Trimble, a classmate of Theodore’s and fellow New Yorker, was probably the one who enticed Theodore into that venture and schooled him on the potential profits involved. Teschemacher had decided to become a ranchman after reading a newspaper article in Paris. Trimble was to be long remembered in Wyoming strolling among his cattle with a pet poodle.

A classmate named Sanford Morison was also “pioneering” in Dakota Territory near Edmunds. Robert Bacon, now employed at Lee, Higginson, had put money in the Teschemacher & DeBillier venture, as well as in another Wyoming outfit called Riverside Land and Cattle, which was currently paying dividends of nine and a half percent. Henry L. Higginson himself was involved with the great Union Cattle Company, as was Alexander Agassiz. In New York the Seligmans were major backers of the immensely profitable Pioneer Cattle Company, and Poultney Bigelow’s father, the diplomat John Bigelow, was another of those tied into Teschemacher & DeBillier. Abram Hewitt was involved in the Gorringe venture and the biggest and most publicized splash of all in the Bad Lands was being made by a young French aristocrat, one Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores, recently of the French cavalry, who was the husband of Medora von Hoffman, daughter of the Wall Street banker Louis A. (“Baron”) von Hoffman.

To be off to one’s ranch in the Wild West, or the ranch one had taken a “flier” in, or better still, to be just back from one’s ranch full of stories, looking brown and fit, was all the rage. Ranching was in the aristocratic tradition—requiring courage, horsemanship, offering deliverance from the tedium and pettiness of trade. It was adventurous. It was romantic. Ranching, wrote Theodore, had “little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century. . . the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman.” The cowboys happened also to be much better fellows and pleasanter companions than, say, farmers or farm workers; “nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath.” Cowboys, “except while on . . . sprees,” were “quiet, rather self-contained men, perfectly frank and simple, and on their own ground treat a stranger with the most whole-souled hospitality . . .”

Hundreds, possibly as many as a thousand, “dudes” were scattered over the West and more would follow, drawn often by what Theodore was to write of the life and by his warning that it was a life soon to vanish. He wrote of the adversities to be prepared for (broiling heat, hailstorms, rattlesnakes), the kinds of horses to expect (very different from eastern mounts), of the stars at night and endless reaches of prairie, of the guns to bring.

Of course every ranchman carries a revolver, a long .45 Colt or Smith & Wesson, by preference the former. When after game a hunting knife is stuck in the girdle. This should be stout and sharp, but not too long, with a round handle. I have two double-barreled shotguns: a No. 10 chokebore for ducks and geese made by Thomas of Chicago; and a No. 16 hammerless built for me by Kennedy of St. Paul, for grouse and plover. On regular hunting trips I always carry the Winchester rifle, but in riding round near home, where a man may see a deer and is sure to come across ducks and grouse, it is best to take the little ranch gun, a double-barrel No. 16, with a 40-70 rifle underneath the shotgun barrels.

His description of his own ranch “home” on the Little Missouri was every man’s dream of a place in the West.

In the hot noontide hours of midsummer the broad ranch veranda, always in the shade, is almost the only spot where a man can be comfortable; but here he can sit for hours at a time, leaning back in his rocking chair, as he reads or smokes, or with half-closed, dreamy eyes gazes across the shallow, nearly dry riverbed to the wooded bottoms opposite, and to the plateaus lying back of them. Against the sheer white faces of the cliffs, that come down without a break, the dark-green treetops stand out in bold relief. In the hot, lifeless air all objects that are not nearby seem to sway and waiver. There are few sounds to break the stillness. From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead—whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver and sigh all day long—comes every now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away . . .

Wister called it a “perfect picture.” Wister himself would be on his way in 1885, in search of health and big game in Wyoming, as guest of Teschemacher, DeBillier, and Trimble. “This life has a psychological effect on you,” Wister would write to his mother. “. . . You begin to wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia anywhere.” His impression of cowboys at that time was that they were “a queer episode in the history of the country” and “without any moral sense whatsoever.”

The picture Theodore had given Lodge of his own ranchman’s costume was understated. He had spent a small fortune to look the part. Besides the big hat, the buckskin shirt, chaps, bridle, and silver spurs, he had fancy alligator boots, a silver belt buckle, beautifully tooled leather belt and holster, a silver-mounted bowie knife by Tiffany. His silver belt buckle was engraved with the head of a bear; the silver spurs had his initials on them. His Colt revolver was engraved with scrolls and geometric patterns and plated with silver and gold. On one side of its ivory handle were his initials; on the other side, the head of a buffalo to commemorate the one he shot in 1883. The buckskin shirt, all beautifully patterned and fringed, had been made to order by a woman in the Bad Lands and was part of a complete buckskin suit. He gloried in dressing up in his regalia and posing for pictures. He was in the saddle all day, he had told Bamie in June, “having a glorious time here.”

Returning from the East in midsummer he brought Bill Sewall along and Sewall’s nephew, Wilmot Dow, a rugged and resourceful man in his twenties, who, like Sewall, was an old companion from past hunting trips in Maine. They were to help out, now that he was expanding his operations. Looking the Bad Lands over, the large, homespun Sewall told Theodore it was no country for cattle. Theodore told him he was wrong and knew nothing about it. Sewall, in the privacy of a memorable letter to his family in Maine, described it as “queer country,” “a dirty country and very dirty people on an average” (so much for his impression of cowboys). “Tell the boys,” he continued, “they are better off there than here unless they could get hold with some rich man as we have and that is hard to do . . . tell all who wish to know that I think this [is] a good place for a man with plenty of money to make more, but if I had enough money to start here I never would come here.”

2

The Bad Lands cattle boom had begun in 1883, the year Theodore made his first visit and his initial $14,000 investment there. Several big Texas cattle companies, pushing their herds farther and farther north in search of new range lands, had discovered the Bad Lands, and because the Northern Pacific Railroad had also penetrated the area just then, and was eager to see it developed, the buildup of cattle and money came quickly. Experienced cattlemen and eastern and European money people alike saw at once that the Bad Lands were not all the name implied.

To French-Canadian fur trappers exploring the area a hundred years before, it had been les mauvaises terres à traverser—bad lands to travel through. It was as if the rolling prairie land suddenly gave way to a weird other world of bizarrely shaped cliffs and hummocks and tablelands, these sectioned and sliced every which way by countless little ravines and draws and by the broad, looping valley of the Little Missouri River, which, unlike the Big Missouri, flowed north and in summer was not much more than a good-sized stream. It was a region of “startling appearance,” “of strange confusion,” extending some two hundred miles along the river, a kind of Grand Canyon in miniature, the work of millions of years of erosion on ancient preglacial sediments. Stratified layers of clay, clays as pale as beach sand, were juxtaposed against brick-red bands of scoria or sinuous dark seams of lignite. Some formations had the overpowering presence of ancient ruins. The leader of an early military expedition against the Sioux described the landscape as hell with the fires out—though in some places, where seams of lignite had caught fire, the ground literally smoldered.

George Armstrong Custer, who spent several days snowbound in the Bad Lands en route to the Little Big Horn in 1876, called it worthless country, and Frederic Remington, when he arrived for a first look some years after Theodore, saw it as “a place for stratagem and murder, with nothing to witness its mysteries but the cold blue winter sky.”

In an effort to make it a tourist attraction, the Northern Pacific tried renaming it Pyramid Park and described the geological curiosities to be found, along with the bracing air, the good shooting, and opportunity for some real “rough riding.”

But the cattlemen saw it differently from everyone. Unlike the other Bad Lands to the south (those of present-day South Dakota, which are geologically quite different), these were green along the river bottoms and green above, on the tops of the tablelands. “What a wondrous country it was for grass!” remembered the veteran cattleman John Clay of his first visit in the summer of ’83. There was “grass and more grass” in the bottom lands and up along sweeping valleys: little blue-stem grass, “good as corn for fattening,” and curly buffalo grass, “making unexcelled winter feed.” Men like Clay and greenhorn money people alike were “dazzled by the prospects.” The land was all public domain. The grass was free for the taking. There was water; and the very outlandishness of the terrain promised shelter from winter storms. Possibly fifty thousand cattle were driven into the Little Missouri basin that first summer alone.

The big Texas outfits included the Berry-Boice Cattle Company (the “Three-Sevens” brand), Towers & Gudgell (the “OX”), and the still larger Continental Land and Cattle Company (the “Hashknife”). These were “the real cattlemen.” The smaller ranchers were nearly all from the East or from Canada and Europe. They were primed on such newly published authoritative works as The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on the Plains, and they were mostly all young (Bill Sewall, who was not yet forty when he arrived, would be known as “the old Mennonite”). There were the four Eaton brothers from Pittsburgh, who had been among the earliest arrivals; A. C. Huidekoper was from Meadville, Pennsylvania, and was a kinsman of a Harvard classmate of Theodore’s, Frank Huidekoper. Gregor Lang and his teenage son, Lincoln, were from Scotland and had the financial backing of Sir John Pender of London. Lloyd Roberts was from Wales; Alfred Benson was an Englishman; Laval Nugent was the son of an Irish baronet; J. A. Van Eeghan, son of a prominent Dutch family, was “wayward but attractive,” a fine musician, and could supposedly wire New York for money anytime he wished.

It was at Gregor Lang’s ranch that Theodore had put up during his initial visit in ’83, and it was from conversations with Lang, Howard Eaton, and two young Canadians named Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield that he had decided to join forces with the Canadians, whose rude cabin beside the Little Missouri was known as the Chimney Butte or, alternatively, the Maltese Cross Ranch. Theodore had handed over a check for $14,000 to buy 450 head of cattle, a small start, but the direct, trusting way he did it made an impression. “All the security he had for his money,” remembered Sylvane Ferris, “was our honesty.”

He bought no land, then or later. Like everybody in the area but the young Marquis de Mores, he was a squatter. And then, after just two weeks, he had been on his way home, having killed his buffalo and all but killed his guide, Joe Ferris, a brother of Sylvane. The chase had carried them pell-mell for seven days over some of the wildest, most difficult terrain in the Bad Lands. Twice they found a buffalo and each time Theodore had shot and missed. Exhausted by the pace Theodore set, Ferris kept praying things would get so bad they would have to give up. It rained incessantly, but Theodore’s joy was not to be extinguished; every new adversity seemed a refreshment. It was Fresh Pond all over again, Theodore exclaiming, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” For two days they had nothing to live on but biscuits and rainwater. Remembering the expedition long afterward, Ferris would be no less incredulous. “You just couldn’t knock him out of sorts. . . . And he had books with him and would read at odd times.” When at last he shot his buffalo, just over the Montana line, Theodore broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance and handed Ferris a hundred dollars. “I never saw anyone so pleased in all my life,” remembered Ferris.

The dominant figure, the dominant force and center of attention in the Bad Lands, however, was the Marquis de Mores, who on April Fools’ Day in 1883, or six months before Theodore first appeared on the scene, cracked a bottle of Mumm’s champagne over a tent peg to found the town of Medora, named in honor of his wife. He had plans far more ambitious than mere cattle ranching, as he announced; he had come to found an enterprise unlike any in the West. “It takes me only a few seconds to understand a situation that other men have to puzzle over for hours,” said the deadly serious Frenchman in his nearly perfect English.

He was just Theodore’s age and like Theodore a passionate lover of hunting and the outdoors. Other than that, they had little in common. The Marquis was tall, spare, and supremely fit, a product of St. Cyr and of Saumur, regarded as the finest cavalry school in the world. He was a superb horseman, a crack shot. Included with his baggage the day he arrived on the Northern Pacific was a silver-headed bamboo walking stick filled with ten pounds of lead—to exercise his dueling arm, it was explained. One held the stick straight out at arm’s length for several slow counts, “thusly.” He was black-haired, dark-eyed, his handsomeness the most obvious thing about him, but it was a handsomeness of the Victorian stage-villain variety, to judge by the pictures we have. His tremendous black mustache was waxed to perfection.

In duels in France, he had already killed two men. Seen heading off on one of his forays along the Little Missouri, he looked like a mounted arsenal—weighed down with two huge Colt revolvers, two cartridge belts, a heavy-caliber rifle cradled in one arm, a bowie knife strapped to one leg. He was as well a professed anti-Semite, a devout Roman Catholic, and a royalist who liked to tell his new neighbors of his aspirations to the French throne and how the fortunes he would pile up in the Bad Lands were to be applied to that purpose.

Theodore seems not to have encountered the Marquis in person until his return in 1884, by which time the Marquis’s town and enterprise were much in evidence.

His plan was to revolutionize the beef industry by butchering cattle on the range, there in the Bad Lands beside the railroad, and thus eliminate the cost of shipping live animals all the way to Chicago. That dressed meat could be transported almost any distance in the new refrigerator cars without spoilage had already been demonstrated. So, the Marquis reasoned, why not put the packing plant where the cattle were? It would do away with the Chicago middlemen, which would mean lower prices for the consumer, which in turn would produce an ever greater demand for beef.

He had picked the eastern side of the river for his site, just back from the Northern Pacific’s bridge, and directly across from the old cantonment. His wife, it appears, had been provided by her father with an income of $90,000 a year, and this plus backing from his own family gave him, as he said, little worry over finances. He himself would head the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, while his father-in-law, Baron von Hoffman, was listed as treasurer.

He brought in hundreds of carpenters and masons to build his town and packing plant. He drew up plans, ordered equipment. Within a year or less he had bought up twenty-one thousand acres of land. He bought cattle, brought in twelve thousand sheep, and announced plans to raise cabbages, these to be fertilized with offal from the packing plant and shipped east in his refrigerator cars. He was not wanting in imagination. Another idea was to produce pottery from Bad Lands clays. Yet another was to ship Columbia River salmon from Portland to New York, at a profit of $1,000 a carload according to his estimates.

He had intended originally to make do in a tent until his own house was ready, but finding the tent a bit more inconvenient than expected, he had a private railroad car delivered and put on a siding. “I like this country,” he remarked to one of his employees, “because there is room to turn around without stepping on the feet of others.”

But in fact he seemed incapable of doing anything without stepping on feet or sensibilities. The West, despite its aura of freedom, its apparent absence of rules and regulations, was a place—an economy, a way of life—based on very definite rules, mostly all unwritten. If there was nothing illegal or even illogical about bringing in sheep or buying up land in country where nobody else owned any or believed in owning any, it conflicted with local custom and was thus, by the prevailing ethic, extremely dangerous. Worst of all, he had begun fencing his land, and when fences were cut, as he had been warned they would be, he as quickly replaced them. When three drunken cowboys shot up the town and vowed to kill him on sight, he prudently took a train back to Mandan to ask the territorial justice of the peace what he ought to do. “Why, shoot,” he was told.

The next time the same threesome went on a rampage, the Marquis and his men were waiting by a bend in the river outside of town. It may have been an ambush—cold-blooded murder as Theodore’s friends the Langs said—or it may have been self-defense as the Marquis pleaded in court. Either way, one of the three cowboys, a skinny, long-legged nineteen-year-old named Riley Luffsey, was dead with a bullet in his neck. The Marquis was acquitted after two highly publicized hearings in Mandan and resumed his projects as before, acting as though he were unaware of how many now despised him. Medora grew by leaps and bounds, becoming overnight one of the wildest cow towns in the West, the sort of place, as Theodore once remarked, where pleasure and vice were considered synonymous. But it also had a hotel and a brick chapel built for Madame de Mores, a brick house with a picket fence to accommodate father-in-law von Hoffman during his visits, and a breezy little newspaper, The Bad Lands Cow Boy, the mission of which was “to preach King Cattle to all men.”

“Again and again is the fitness of the Bad Lands for a cattle country brought to our notice [declared the paper in an early issue]. . . . We have yet to hear of a solitary head ever having died in the Bad Lands from exposure.”

There are now in the Bad Lands many cattle men who have had experience in every cattle country in the United States [read another item]. . . . We have questioned many of them and the invariable answer has been that nowhere in the United States is there a better cattle country than the Bad Lands.

And what was good for beast was good for man, claimed the editor-publisher, twenty-two-year-old Arthur T. Packard, who was newly graduated from the University of Michigan. “There is a wonderful amount of electricity in this atmosphere,” he explained. “... This prevalence of electricity is doubtless one cause of the great vitality of anyone who lives in this climate. It takes hard and continued labor to tire a man in this country, and then a rest of a few minutes is sufficient to completely restore his energies. No one feels that lassitude so common in the East.”

Most important of all, by the summer of 1884, a gigantic, up-to-date packing plant was in operation. Cattle were being slaughtered; dressed Bad Lands beef was rolling east in the Marquis’s new refrigerator cars. It was all but impossible not to be impressed. In New York, in an article about the Marquis and his efforts, the Times described Medora as a “thriving, bustling” town with nearly one thousand people and a big future. It had become obvious to everyone “that the foreigner was not so crazy after all.” The Marquis, said the Times, was a man of “good sense” who ran a “wonderful business,” and in time would become “one of the great millionaires of the country.”

“Before long some of my wealthy friends in France will come over to build tanneries, glue factories and horn works, and so establish interests that will tend toward a speedy development of the country,” a reporter for the World was told by the Marquis, who when not in the Bad Lands lived at the fashionable Brunswick Hotel on Fifth Avenue. “My neighbors are all wealthy American ranchers. . . . We all work together and are on the best of terms.”

He had completed his own house, “the château,” as everyone in Medora called it, and Madame de Mores was in residence much of that summer. In truth, the château was an oversized frame farmhouse. There was nothing especially grand about it, except that it was large (twenty-six rooms), and since it stood in full view of town on top of a bare promontory across the river, it looked even larger. It was painted a light gray, with red shutters and a red roof. A deep porch stretched around two sides. And once the Madame’s big square piano had arrived by train from St. Paul and a staff of twenty servants had taken up their duties, it became in the minds of the local citizenry as much a château as any on the Loire.

The Madame was small and pretty, with fine features and an abundance of dark-red hair. In country almost devoid of women, she would have been talked about endlessly and regarded as a great lady however modest her attainments. But she was a superb horsewoman, spoke several languages (seven, allegedly), painted in watercolors, played Liszt and Verdi on the big piano. A local woman remembered her as “one of the most dignified, stately, and aristocratic women I ever met.” Perched sidesaddle on one of the magnificent mounts the Marquis had also had shipped from the East, with her face shielded from the fierce Dakota sun by a huge black “sugar loaf” sombrero, the Madame looked not much bigger than a child. Yet she was reputedly a better shot than her husband (he insisted she was), and on a hunting expedition with him in the Big Horns, she killed three bears, including a grizzly. He had a special hunting coach built for her, equipped with folding bunks, kitchen, china, silver, and linens.

Gregor Lang and his son, who detested the Marquis—it was they who buried Riley Luffsey the day after the killing—had warned Theodore about him, but Theodore maintained a cordial, if somewhat formal, relation, as was befitting two gentlemen. They had attended a meeting of the local stockmen’s association held at the railroad depot that June and later took a few days out to go by train together to Miles City, Montana, to volunteer for a vigilante campaign against rustlers and horse thieves, but were turned down because their faces were too well known. Theodore was a dinner guest at the château on several occasions as time passed, and the Marquis and Madame de Mores, we also know, dined with Theodore and Bamie at Bamie’s house in New York. Meals at the château were prepared by a French chef, served on the Madame’s blue Minton china, and accompanied by selections from her husband’s wine cellar. With her travels (she had met the Marquis in Cannes) and culture, not to mention her love of shooting, she must have been a very refreshing note for Theodore. Bamie, years later, would remark that “Theodore did not care for the Marquis, but he was sorry for his wife . . .”

Theodore had told Bamie in June that the outlook for making a business success of ranching was ”very” hopeful. “This winter I lost about 25 head, from wolves, cold, etc.; the others are in admirable shape, and I have about a hundred and fifty-five calves. I shall put on a thousand more cattle and shall make it my regular business.” With such confidence and excitement in the air at Medora, with the buildup the Marquis was getting in the eastern papers, one could hardly blame him. Like his sisters and brother, he had also by now come into his share of Mittie’s trust fund, some $62,500. So at a stroke he more than doubled his investment in cattle, sinking an additional $26,000 into another one thousand head. But while this represented a very serious commitment on his part—a full $40,000, or roughly twenty percent of his total resources—his was still a small operation compared to some others. According to the county census of the following year, he was running some forty-five hundred head of his own, while such outfits as Berry-Boice and Towers & Gudgell were running four to six times that number.

In August, with Sewall and Dow on hand, he established a second ranch, known as the Elkhorn, where he and they could live to themselves, rather than with Merrifield and Ferris at the Maltese Cross. Like the Eaton brothers’ Custer Trail Ranch and the Langs’ ranch, the Maltese Cross was south of Medora and only seven miles out. The new spot he had found was in the opposite direction, north, or downstream on the river, and more than thirty miles from town, the packing plant, and the railroad. His nearest neighbors would be ten to fifteen miles away. He wanted to be off to himself where he could write, and it was the ranch house Sewall and Dow built for him there, in a clump of cottonwoods by a bend in the river, that he was to describe at length in such passages as the one quoted earlier. It was begun in October, after Theodore had left again for the East, and by Bad Lands standards it was sumptuous, with eight rooms, numerous windows, a stone fireplace, and a cellar that Theodore was to use as a darkroom for processing his photographs. “I designed the house myself,” Bill Sewall would remember proudly, “and it was a sizable place, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and seven feet high, with a flat roof and a porch where after the day’s work Theodore used to sit in a rocking chair, reading poetry.”

The other ranchers called him Theodore or Roosevelt; the cowboys, Mr. Roosevelt, as he wished, or Four-Eyes or Old Four-Eyes out of hearing, and their initial impressions were about what one would have expected. Once, in an effort to head off some stray calves, he immortalized himself along the Little Missouri by calling to one of his cowboys, “Hasten forward quickly there!”

He was only an average rider and never learned to handle a rope very well, as he would readily admit. But there came a moment one night in a bar across the Montana line in what was then known as Mingusville (present-day Wibaux) when he stood up and in quiet, businesslike fashion flattened an unknown drunken cowboy who, a gun in each hand, had decided to make a laughingstock of him because of his glasses. Theodore knocked him cold with one punch. As Theodore later explained, the man had made the mistake of standing too close to him and with his heels close together.

After the “saloon incident,” he was looked on with new respect—it “gained him some reputation,” as Bill Sewall said. But more important as time went on, he “did all the regular work of the cowboy,” “worked the same as any man,” asking no favors and never complaining. Sewall, who had known him since he was eighteen, spoke of him in letters home as “a very fair fellow” and “as good a fellow as ever.” “He worked like the rest of us,” Sewall would recall, “and occasionally he worked longer than any of the rest of us, for often when we were through with the day’s work he would go to his room and write.”

Once, seeing one of his ablest cowboys about to put the Maltese brand on an unbranded stray found on Gregor Lang’s range, Theodore dismissed him on the spot. The cowboy could not understand. “A man who will steal for me will steal from me,” Theodore said. “You’re fired.”

Sometimes that first year, as Bill Sewall also remembered, Theodore could become “very melancholy... very much down in spirits.” It made no difference what became of him, he told Sewall; he had nothing to live for.

“‘You have your child to live for,’ I said. ’Her aunt can take care of her a good deal better than I can,’ he said. ’She never would know anything about me, anyway. She would be just as well off without me.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ’... you won’t always feel that way... you won’t always feel as you do now and you won’t always be willing to stay here and drive cattle . . .”

Whatever it was Theodore felt for the Bad Lands was quite beyond Sewall. Anybody who preferred such a place to the East, Sewall wrote his brother, “must have a depraved idea of life or hate himself or both.”

Theodore saw grandeur and mystery. The Bad Lands were “dreary and forbidding,” they were “as grim and desolate and forbidding as any spot on earth could be,” and he felt he belonged. “The country is growing on me, more and more,” he had written Bamie in June, “it has a curious, fantastic beauty of its own . . .” The Bad Lands looked, he decided, the way Poe sounds.

The words “loneliness” and “solitude” appear repeatedly in what he wrote. He writes again and again of “great dreary solitude” and “melancholy pathless plains,” “the deathlike stillness.” “Nowhere,” he writes in 1884, “not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. . . . Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind ...”

Loneliness and desolation, a sense of exile, were old themes in the literature of the West, literature he knew and loved. Parkman, to whom he would dedicate one of his own later works, wrote in The Oregon Trail of “something impressive and awful” about the prairie. Parkman, the first Harvard man to venture beyond the Mississippi and go home to write about it, had found “something exciting in the wild solitude of the place.” Parkman, before Theodore was born, had written of “green undulations like motionless swells of the ocean”; Theodore writes that “the grassland stretches out in the sunlight like a sea.” “The very shadow of civilization lies a hundred leagues behind,” wrote Parkman. “Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past,” Theodore says.

“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie!” was the cowboys’ song.

But in some of what he wrote it is as if Theodore has found a way at last to unburden what he could never talk about. The voice of a mourning dove in his own cottonwoods seems ever “far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.” And later, having seen winter there, he would write:

When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never-ending, then all the great northern plains are changing into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through the naked canyons; they shiver the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an Aeolian harp. Again, in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind may stir; and then the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow of silent death seems even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than is the lawless madness of the storms. All the land is like granite; the great rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. . . .

But as in the summer following his father’s death, this in the West also had its flights of exhilaration, of pure soaring exuberance more than matching the depths of his other moods. Again he is incapable of holding himself down. Something within refuses to be subdued. In the West, in his gaudy regalia, on his horse, he can be something entirely different from the man he had been.

He was on the frontier he had dreamed of and imagined for as long as he could remember, living a life free of more than just fences. More even than Harvard or politics it was a world without women. Background, family, all the conventions of polite society, counted for nothing. Nobody knew him; nobody knew his family or cared particularly. “Everybody in New York has always known everybody,” wrote Edith Wharton, describing “the tight little citadel” of the New York they both knew so well. Here everybody was a stranger and liked it that way. It was customary not to ask too many questions about a man’s past. “What was your name in the States?” another old song began. In Medora alone there were three men who went by the name Bill Jones. Antecedents counted for nothing and Theodore felt himself a new man. “You would be amused to see me . . .” he had written to Lodge, which was another way of saying, “You would hardly know me.” He felt, he wrote, “as absolutely free as a man could feel.”

Life here was elemental, he said. He was constantly in the midst of birds and animals. The letters and literary efforts alike are filled with deer, antelope, buffalo, bighorn sheep, pack rats and mice, the howling of wolves at night, birds on the wing, birds stalking the mud flats of the river, a great golden eagle, the gaudy black-and-white magpies that are so common to the Bad Lands, meadowlarks that sang like no meadowlarks he had ever heard: “this I could hardly get used to at first, for it looks exactly like the Eastern meadowlark, which utters nothing but a harsh disagreeable chatter. But the plains air seems to give it a voice . . .”

Most marvelous of all was his horse, Manitou. Manitou was the “best and most valuable animal on the ranch,” “a treasure,” “as fast as any horse on the river,” “very enduring and very hardy,” “perfectly sure-footed,” “willing and spirited.” There was never such a horse as “good old Manitou” and there were never such mornings as those of the “long, swift rides” over the prairie with his men, when Manitou carried him on and on endlessly in the “sweet, fresh air,” under a crystal sky . . .

and the rapid motion of the fiery little horse combine to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading. As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on the top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough . . .

From the Elkhorn to the Maltese Cross Ranch was a distance of forty miles. And it was all extremely “rough riding.” To get from the Elkhorn to Medora, following the river, meant crossing and recrossing the river more than twenty times. One day, as he told Bamie proudly, he covered seventy-two miles between dawn and darkness.

“I have been fulfilling a boyish ambition of mine,” he tells her at another point. “We are so very rarely able to, actually and in real life, dwell in our ideal ’hero land,’” he tells Corinne.

What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch-fires, I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life [Captain Mayne Reid had written]. . . . It grew upon me apace. The dreams of home began to die within me; and with these, the illusory ideas of many a young and foolish ambition. Died away, too—dead out of my heart—the allurements of the great city—the memory of soft eyes and silken tresses . . . all died away, as if they had never been, or I had never felt them!

My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and a vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied that my eyes reached to a more distant vision. I could look boldly upon the sun, without quivering in my glance.

With his horse and his Winchester rifle, he felt like a figure from other days; and the rifle, like the horse, was the finest thing of its kind and of greatest importance to him. It was a lever-action 45-75 Winchester (Model 1876) that had been custom made to his specifications—”stocked and sighted to suit myself.” It was engraved with deer and buffalo and antelope, but more than that, “the best weapon I ever had . . . handy to carry, whether on foot or on horseback . . . comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun . . . deadly, accurate . . . unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” Not since his father presented him with his first gun had anything pleased him so much and not since the winter on the Nile had he known such shooting.

On August 18 he set out on an expedition to the Big Horns in Wyoming three hundred miles to the southwest. “How long I will be gone I cannot say,” he wrote Bamie. He took Bill Merrifield with him and a man named Lebo, who did the cooking and drove the team, and who at one point made the mistake of calling him Theodore, instead of Mr. Roosevelt, and was told not to do it again. They traveled by what Theodore described as a light prairie schooner drawn by two horses.

Days later, seeing a chance rider who agreed to serve as a mail carrier, Theodore wrote again to Bamie.

I am writing this on an upturned water keg, by our canvas-covered wagon, while the men are making tea, and the solemn old ponies are grazing round about me. I am going to trust it to the tender mercies of a stray cowboy whom we have just met, and who may or may not post it when he gets to “Powderville,” a delectable log hamlet some seventy miles north of us.

We left the Little Missouri a week ago, and have been traveling steadily some twenty or thirty miles a day ever since, through a desolate, barren-looking and yet picturesque country, part of the time rolling prairie and part of the time broken, jagged Bad Lands. We have fared sumptuously, as I have shot a number of prairie chickens, sage hens and ducks, and a couple of fine bucks—besides missing several of the latter that I ought to have killed.

Every morning we get up at dawn, and start off by six o’clock or thereabouts, Merrifield and I riding off among the hills or ravines after game, while the battered “prairie schooner,” with the two spare ponies led behind, is driven slowly along by old Lebo, who is a perfect character. He is a wizened, wiry old fellow, very garrulous, brought up on the frontier, and a man who is never put out or disconcerted by any possible combination of accidents. Of course we have had the usual incidents of prairie travel happen to us. One day we rode through a driving rainstorm, at one time developing into a regular hurricane of hail and wind, which nearly upset the wagon, drove the ponies almost frantic, and forced us to huddle into a gully for protection. The rain lasted all night and we all slept in the wagon, pretty wet and not very comfortable. Another time a sharp gale of wind or rain struck us in the middle of the night, as we were lying out in the open (we have no tent), and we shivered under our wet blankets till morning. We got into camp a little before sunset, tethering two or three of the horses, and letting the others range. One night we camped in a most beautiful natural park; it was a large, grassy hill, studded thickly with small, pine-crowned chalk buttes, with very steep sides, worn into the most outlandish and fantastic shapes. All that night the wolves kept up a weird concert around our camp—they are most harmless beasts.

As it turned out, they were gone nearly two months. They did not return until October 5. In that time Theodore shot and killed quantities of duck, grouse, prairie chickens, sage hens, doves, rabbits—more than a hundred birds and small game—as well as elk, deer, and bear. On August 29 he killed two blacktail bucks with a single shot and at a distance of more than four hundred yards. (“I went back and paced off the distance. . . . This was the best shot I ever made.”) He killed a blacktail doe, several elk, including a yearling calf, because, he later said, the party was in need of meat.

The blacktail buck, he wrote, was one of the most noble-looking of all deer. “Every movement is full of alert, fiery life and grace, and he steps as lightly as though he hardly trod the earth.” The bugling of the elk seemed such a beautiful, musical cry, he wrote, it was “almost impossible to believe that it is the call of an animal.” Yet he would kill either at any chance, he would drive himself to his physical limits to kill such animals, and to no one who was a hunter need he ever explain why. He was in the Big Horns when he shot his “best” elk of the trip, “killing him very neatly” at a distance of about seventy-five yards.

That was on September 12, somewhere along a branch of Ten Sleep Creek, at about nine thousand feet, the nearest sign of civilization being the army post at Buffalo, Wyoming. They had left their wagon behind twelve days earlier, packed into the mountains with supplies enough for two weeks. He shot the elk in the late afternoon, removed the head, and then, just before dark, crossing a patch of burned-over forest, he saw the “huge, half-human footprints” of a grizzly. The next day, September 13, he confronted “the great bear” and killed it.

“I was very proud over my first bear,” he would write in his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. His brother, he said, had killed tigers in India, but never a grizzly, and though it would be “hard to say” which was the more savage, he himself was sure a grizzly, with its size and strength, its teeth as large as a tiger’s, its tremendous claws, could “make short work” of any tiger. And his, he stressed, was a “monstrous” bear, nearly nine feet in height, weighing about twelve hundred pounds. Until then neither he nor Merrifield had ever seen a grizzly, dead or alive.

Everything had happened very suddenly. It was all over in a matter of seconds. They had returned to where the elk was shot and found the bear had been feeding on the carcass during the night. From the size of the tracks they knew the bear was enormous. The tracks strayed off and they followed, moving noiselessly over a pine-needle forest floor, on and on in the half-light beneath tremendous pines. Presently, they picked up very distinct prints in the dust of a game trail that led across a hillside, where the terrain was broken by hollows and boulders. Then at a windfall, the trail veered off into a thicket. They could still follow the tracks, by claw-marks on the fallen trees and by bent and broken twigs.

They started slowly into the thicket and all at once there was the bear. Merrifield saw it first and Theodore, his rifle cocked, stepped forward. The bear was not more than twenty feet off, in among some young spruces. It turned and reared up on its haunches, then, seeing Theodore, dropped down again on all fours.

“I found myself face to face with the great bear,” he was to tell Bamie, “. . . doubtless my face was pretty white, but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock. . . I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes; as I pulled the trigger I jumped aside out of the smoke, to be ready if he charged, but it was needless . . . as you will see when I bring home his skin, the bullet hole in his skull was as exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter’s rule.”

Between them, in the next few days, he and Merrifield killed three more grizzlies, including a cub that Theodore shot, as he noted, “clean through him from end to end.” And then, their horses loaded down with elk heads, antlers, bearskins, they started down out of the mountains and by September 19, having reached their wagon and repacked, set off on the three-hundred-mile trek back to the Bad Lands.

Three of the elk heads were magnificent, exactly the thing for the house at Oyster Bay, as he told Bamie.

So I have had good sport; and enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought; and moreover I have at last been able to sleep well at night. But unless I was bear hunting all the time I am afraid I should soon get as restless with this life [as I] was with life at home.

I shall be very, very glad to see you all again. . . .

Long afterward he was to write, “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ’mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”

3

In autumn in the Bad Lands the light is luminous, the immeasurable sky something to take the breath away. Cottonwoods along the Little Missouri are a blaze of gold. Then, in no time at all, autumn is over and winter descends, the Bad Lands are the end of the world.

A fierce north wind was blowing the sand so hard one could hardly see, Bill Sewall wrote as early as October 19,1884. In December the temperature hit 26 below, then one night it got down to 65 below. In February he was writing his brother in Maine, “I never saw cold weather till this winter.” He and Dow had the cabin finished and “my grit is good,” Sewall said, “but I believe it is a better country to live in at home than here . . .”

Theodore had gone East the first week in October, immediately upon returning from the Big Horns, to see his Baby Lee, as he called her, and to take a part in the Blaine campaign as he had promised Lodge he would. In November he was back again—Blaine had lost, Grover Cleveland had won, and Theodore, convinced his own political career was finished, had decided that it was definitely as a writer that the world would hear from him. This made his fourth trip to the Bad Lands in little more than a year and his first taste of a Dakota winter. But then he departed again before Christmas, not to return until spring.

In describing the ranchman’s “very pleasant” life, Theodore would stress that the ranchman, though bound on occasion to experience hard work and hardship, need not “undergo the monotonous drudgery attendant upon the tasks of the cowboy.” A ranchman had time for hunting expeditions of a month or more, for reading or writing. But some ranchmen had also—as he did not say—the choice of not being there at all, which is what he chose more often than not. His own Bad Lands years, as they were to be known, lasted from 1883 to 1886, but in that time he was unable to keep away from New York for more than a few months at a stretch. He crossed the continent on the Northern Pacific time after time, Pullman porters came to know him by name. He never “disappeared into the West,” as Wister put it. His time in the Bad Lands, taken altogether, added up to little more than a year and most of his best writing about his home on the range was written at home in the East. As Wister was to write The Virginian in Charleston, South Carolina, and Remington to do much of his best work in a studio in suburban New Rochelle, New York, so Theodore was to write of raging Dakota blizzards and spring roundups in his “house on the hill” at Oyster Bay. As it was for Wister and Remington, the West for Theodore was a fountain of inspiration, and it was not the length of time he spent there that mattered, but the intensity of the experience.

The most immediate and important benefit of his time in the Bad Lands was what it did to restore him in body and spirit. But he had also found a subject and, with it, found he could write as he had not before—not certainly in his naval history—with life and feeling. Some of his writing on the West was to be repetitious and overly sentimental. Still the scenes and events he pictures were drawn from direct experience, from real people, real places, all closely observed. If he was never really a cowboy, but (as he stressed) a ranchman, and largely an absentee ranchman at that, he did take what he saw greatly to heart, recognizing also that he had arrived at the very last hour, that the “great free ranches,” “the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live,” were about to vanish forever.

Returning in mid-April for a stay of two months, he “put on” another thousand head of cattle (at a cost of another $12,500), lunched with the Marquis at the château (they discussed the rigors of the Meadow Brook hunt), and then in mid-May he started south with his “outfit” to take part in his first spring roundup, as rugged a physical test as he had ever been put through in his life and the best chance he had thus far to see cowboys in action.

“Invariably he was right on the job holding his own with the best of them . . . with all his natural intensiveness,” Lincoln Lang remembered. “Riding circle twice a day, often taking the outer swing, taking his turn on day-herd or night-guard duty, helping with the cutting-out operations, branding calves . . . he was in the saddle all of eighteen hours per day . . . like the rest of us . . .” After a time, as he himself recalled, “all strangeness . . . passed off, the attitude of my fellow cowpunchers being one of friendly forgiveness even toward my spectacles.”

The roundup involved the Langs, the Eatons, the Huidekoper outfit, the “Three-Sevens,” and the “OX,” every ranch big or small in the Little Missouri basin, a hundred men or more, nearly a thousand horses, thousands upon thousands of cattle, taking in a territory of perhaps ten thousand square miles. It was, as A. C. Huidekoper remembered, “a very vivid affair . . . like a reunion . . . There is a great deal of life. . . . The ponies are fresh and some buck hard, the men shout, ’Stay by him,’ ‘Go to him,’ and if a man is thrown they shout with glee.” Breakfast was at three in the morning, dinner about ten o’clock in the morning.

By custom, the men drew straws for their horses at the start of the day and the morning Theodore drew a mean, bucking horse he climbed on and, as Lincoln Lang said, “gave us all an exhibition of the stuff he was made of . . . he had his grip and like grim death he hung on. . . . Hat, glasses, six-shooter, everything unanchored about him took the count. But there was no breaking his grip . . . he stuck ...”

“I rode him all the way from the tip of his ear to the end of his tail,” Theodore later remarked.

Thrown by another horse, he landed on a stone and broke a rib. Still another horse pitched over backward on him and broke something in the point of his shoulder, “so that it was some weeks before I could raise the arm freely.” Still he kept on, saying nothing of the pain. He appears never to have excused himself for any reason from any part of the work. He was “very thorough in whatever work was assigned to him [and]... game to the core,” remembered John Goodall, one of the Marquis’s men, who was foreman of the roundup. “He would grab a calf or a cow and help drag it right into the fire to be branded,” Bill Merrifield recalled. “He could rassle a calf just as good as anybody. He used to be all over dirt from head to foot.”

Some days he rode as much as a hundred miles. The dust and heat were terrific. On stifling hot evenings the mosquitoes would rise from the river bottoms in great clouds to make the nights “one long torture” for men and horses. One night in early June, when the roundup had reached a point a little south of the Maltese Cross, a lightning storm stampeded the herd. Theodore was among those on night duty and there was nothing a cowboy dreaded more, nothing so dangerous as a stampede at night.

For a minute or two I could make out nothing except the dark forms of the beasts running on every side of me, and I should have been very sorry if my horse had stumbled, for those behind would have trodden me down. Then the herd split, part going to one side, while the other part seemingly kept straight ahead, and I galloped as hard as ever beside them. I was trying to reach the point—the leading animals—in order to turn them, when suddenly there was a tremendous splashing in front. I could dimly make out that the cattle immediately ahead and to one side of me were disappearing, and the next moment the horse and I went off a cut bank into the Little Missouri. I bent away back in the saddle, and though the horse almost went down he just recovered himself, and, plunging and struggling through water and quicksand, we made the other side. . . . I galloped hard through a bottom covered with big cottonwood trees, and stopped the part of the herd that I was with, but very soon they broke on me again, and repeated this twice. Finally toward morning the few I had left came to a halt.

It had been raining hard for some time. I got off my horse and leaned against a tree, but before long the infernal cattle started on again, and I had to ride after them. Dawn came soon after this, and I was able to make out where I was and head the cattle back, collecting other little bunches as I went. After a while I came on a cowboy on foot carrying his saddle on his head. . . . His horse had gone full speed into a tree and killed itself, the man, however, not being hurt. I could not help him, as I had all I could do to handle the cattle. When I got them to the wagon, most of the other men had already come in and the riders were just starting on the long circle. One of the men changed my horse for me while I ate a hasty breakfast and then we were off for the day’s work.

By the time he had finished that “day’s work” he had been in the saddle nearly forty hours and worn out five horses. “I can now do cowboy work pretty well,” he wrote Lodge a day or so later.

In his next book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, most of which appeared first as a series of articles in Century Magazine, these illustrated by Remington, he wrote of the cowboy with an appreciation not to be found in the work of previous writers. He was, as Wister said, the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously. He wrote of their courage, their phenomenal physical endurance. He liked their humor, admired the unwritten code that ruled the cow camp. “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he observed. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work.” It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: “He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”) The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.

It was not only to the meadowlark that the plains air gave new voice and spirit. Theodore was looking different, even sounding different from what he had. The change is cited in numerous surviving accounts and appears to have become obvious by the time the roundup ended. He himself was to describe the experience as “superbly health-giving.”

The spectacled dude who appeared on the scene the year before had been “a light little feller.” “I have seen him when you could have spanned his waist with your two thumbs and fingers,” remembered a cowboy named Roberts. From what Bill Sewall wrote, it appears Theodore had suffered from both asthma and stomach trouble that first year, and Bill Merrifield, recalling their hunting trip in the Big Horns, would tell how Theodore “ate heart medicine,” whatever that may have been. But after this Bad Lands spring of 1885—the point, by all signs, that marks the final turn in his lifelong battle for health—no such references are to be found again. He is even called “rugged” in an account in a St. Paul paper written in late June as he headed home again. “Rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health, Theodore Roosevelt passed through St. Paul yesterday, returning from his Dakota ranch to New York and civilization,” we read in the Pioneer Press. In New York later, in the Tribune, another reporter wrote of “his sturdy walk and firm bearing,” again attributes not to be found in previous accounts.

Theodore, remembered William Roscoe Thayer, had become “physically a very powerful man . . . with broad shoulders and stalwart chest, instead of the city-bred, slight young friend I had known earlier.”

When Theodore passed through Pittsburgh on the Chicago Limited later that summer, on his way back to Medora, another reporter thought he had put on perhaps thirty pounds. “But what a change. . . . The voice which failed to make an echo in the . . . [Albany] capitol when he. . . piped ’Mistah Speakah,’ is now hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.”

4

The summer of 1885 the Marquis was indicted again, taken to court still another time on the old Riley Luffsey murder charge, and again, after a travesty of a trial, he got off. But in the meantime, he was kept in jail at Mandan and the story was splashed across the newspapers east and west. Alone, brooding in his cell, the Marquis saw it all as a conspiracy by his business enemies—the Chicago beef trust—to destroy him, and in this he may have been partly correct. But his notion that Theodore, too, had a hand in his troubles was nonsense.

Rumors of bad blood between Theodore and the Marquis had circulated off and on since the time they both arrived in the Bad Lands and these were now picked up by the papers. Sometime that spring, apparently, Theodore and several of his men had delivered a hundred head of cattle to Medora only to find that the Marquis had decided to disregard the agreed-to price. There had been a moment when they stood face-to-face with a number of others looking on. Theodore had asked the Marquis if he had not quoted a higher price the day before and the Marquis said he had, but that there had since been a drop in the Chicago market. Theodore asked the Marquis if he was not going to stick to his original figure, and when the Marquis said no, Theodore said nothing, then turned and ordered that the animals be driven out of the yards and back to the range. Neither man, however, had since expressed any hard feelings over the episode and they had continued to exchange the usual pleasantries.

Numbers of local people claimed later that a showdown between the two had been inevitable all along and were they two figures in a western we would know it had to come. In what actually took place, however, it is the part played by the Marquis that is particularly fascinating, since it is so at odds with the whole violent pattern of his life.

Four days after he was imprisoned at Mandan, the Marquis sent Theodore a letter that Theodore immediately took to be a challenge to a duel. Conceivably the Marquis meant is as just that, but not likely; the whole tone of the letter suggests otherwise. It was dated September 3 and read as follows:

MY DEAR ROOSEVELT,

My principle is to take the bull by the horns. Joe Ferris [Theodore’s old hunting guide, now a storekeeper in Medora] is very active against me and has been instrumental in getting me indicted by furnishing money to witnesses and hunting them up. The papers also publish very stupid accounts of our quarreling—I sent you the paper to N.Y. Is this done by your orders? I thought you my friend. If you are my enemy I want to know it. I am always on hand as you know, and between gentlemen it is easy to settle matters of that sort directly.

Yours very truly,

Mores

I hear the people want to organize the county. I am opposed to it for one year more at least.

Plainly the Marquis wanted Theodore as a friend. Nor would a formal note designed to provoke a duel close with some offhand postscript about another wholly irrelevant subject. In any event, Theodore answered at once that he was emphatically not the Marquis’s enemy, but that if the Marquis was threatening him, then he, Theodore, stood “ever ready to hold myself accountable . . .”

But there was no duel because the Marquis kept his head and let the matter drop. Theodore was sure he had called the man’s bluff—the Marquis had “backed off,” he would later boast. Others, including several who had no use for the Marquis, were equally sure he had done nothing of the kind. “Whatever else is to be said for or against de Mores,” wrote Lincoln Lang, “even his worst enemy could not accuse him of cowardice . . .” The Marquis, it was argued, made nothing of Theodore’s response because the Marquis had never challenged him in the first place.

Had there been a duel—with rifles, pistols, swords (Theodore wanted Winchester rifles at twelve paces)—almost certainly Theodore would have been killed. So it can be fairly said for the Marquis that his unaccountably cool head in this instance spared Theodore for other things.

Passing through Mandan sometime later, Theodore took time out to go to the jail to see the Marquis and is said to have found him sitting on his bunk calmly smoking a cigarette, but nothing is known of what was said.

Life at the Elkhorn had changed considerably, meantime. Will Dow had gone home to Maine to be married and returned bringing his new bride, as well as Mrs. Sewall and the Sewalls’ small daughter, who was the same age as Baby Lee. “We were all a very happy family,” Sewall wrote. That was in the summer of 1885. The next year Theodore was at work on another book, this a biography of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and seemed, Sewall thought, as happy as he had ever known him.

“I miss both you and darling Baby Lee dreadfully...” he wrote Bamie. “Yet I enjoy my life at present. I have my time fully occupied . . . so have none of my usual restless, caged wolf feeling. I work two days out of three at my book or papers; and I hunt, ride and lead the wild, half adventurous life of a ranchman all through it. The elements are combined well.”

He wished only that Bamie would send on some toys for the Sewall child. He thought a big colored ball, some picture blocks, letter blocks, a little horse and wagon, and a rag doll would be perfect.

But time was running out. The Marquis’s empire had already begun to come apart by then, that is, a whole year before the tragic winter of 1886-87. A stagecoach line from Medora to Deadwood proved a failure. The Marquis’s sheep turned out to be the wrong breed for the climate, and more than half died. His powerful father-in-law began questioning expenditures, then withdrew his financial support.

Yet none of this seemed to faze the young entrepreneur. Like another celebrated Frenchman of the day, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was then promoting his doomed attempt at a Panama canal, the Marquis talked only of success and dazzled reporters with still more innovative schemes to come. He would open his own retail stores in New York and sell his Bad Lands beef at three cents a pound below the going price. Good beef at a good price for the workingman was his dream. Stock in his National Consumers Meat Company was listed at $10 a share. His shareholders, he said, were to be the common working people (just as de Lesseps was counting on the common people of France to pay for his canal). The slogan for the bright-red stores, three of which actually opened in New York, was “From Ranch to Table.”

But the stock issue failed. Pressures—from the railroad interests, the Chicago packers, the retail butchers—were too strong. Even had the Marquis been a more adroit businessman, it is unlikely he could have survived. It is also true that his range-fed beef simply did not taste as good as beef fattened in the Chicago yards.

The packing plant was shut down in the fall of 1886. It is not known what the venture had cost, and estimates on the Marquis’s losses vary from $300,000 to $1.5 million. But it is also possible that he lost nothing at all, such was the eventual market value of his landholdings.

He and Madame de Mores were gone before winter came. The château was left exactly as it was, as though they would return at any time. And Theodore too had departed by then. “Overstocking may cause little or no harm for two or three years,” he had written that fall in one of his articles for Century, “but sooner or later there comes a winter which means ruin to the ranches that have too many cattle on them; and in our country, which is even now getting crowded, it is merely a question of time as to when a winter will come that will understock the ranges by the summary process of killing off about half of all the cattle throughout the Northwest.” There had been little or no rain all summer, the growing time for grass. The range was bone-dry and still more cattle were being driven in from the south; one outfit brought in some six thousand head. Prices fell drastically. Sewall and Dow, shipping off to Chicago what was marketable from Theodore’s herd, found the price they received was less than the cattle had cost. So they decided it was time they got out of the cattle business. “Sept. 22, 1886, squared accounts with Theodore Roosevelt,” reads the entry in Sewall’s diary. By early October the Sewalls and the Dows had departed for Maine.

Storm on top of storm, blinding snows, relentless, savage winds, the worst winter on record swept the Great Plains. In the Bad Lands, children were lost and froze to death within a hundred yards of their own doors. Cattle, desperate for shelter, smashed their heads through ranch-house windows. The snow drifted so deep in many places that cattle were buried alive and temperatures hovered at about 40 below. People locked up in their houses could only wait and hope that elsewhere conditions were not so bad. A few who could not wait blew their brains out.

The losses, when they were tallied up in March, were beyond anyone’s worst estimates. Not a rancher along the Little Missouri had come through with half his herd. The average loss was seventy-five percent. Theodore, when he finally returned to survey the damage, called it a perfect “smashup.” He rode for three days without seeing a live steer.

He would come back as time went on, every other year or so, but only for hunting, never again in the same spirit, and he seldom stayed more than a week or two. All told he had invested $52,500 in cattle, which, added to another $30,000 spent on his cabin, on wages, travel, equipment, made a total of $82,500. Eventually he sold off what little he had left in the Bad Lands, added up his losses and arrived at a figure of $20,292.63. But beyond that, of course, he had lost the interest on the investment—five percent over a period of nearly fifteen years—which figured to about $50,000. So the complete loss was more on the order of $70,000, or in present-day money, about $700,000.

So the glorious Bad Lands days had lasted all of three years, and numbers of other ranchers, like Theodore, gave up and went on to other things. Howard Eaton, for example, resettled in Wyoming, to found one of the best-known dude ranches in the West.

The subsequent career of the Marquis was one most people who had known him preferred to put out of their minds. Following a tiger hunt in India, he went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The Chicago beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He turned to politics, launched a crusade to save France, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and went parading about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure too on the Jews. It was this mania that led eventually to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.

The Marquis was himself murdered in June 1896 by a band of Tuareg tribesmen in North Africa, where he had set off on a lone, harebrained scheme to unite the Muslims under the French flag in an all-out holy war against the Jews and the English. He seems to have been mourned only by his children and by Madame de Mores, who remained his stout defender until her dying day.

Once, on the morning of April 11, 1886, the spring before the disastrous winter, in the little town of Dickinson, forty miles east of Medora on the Northern Pacific, a young physician, a Vermonter named Victor Hugo Stickney, had come out of his office about noon on his way home to lunch when he saw “the most bedraggled figure I’d ever seen come limping down the street.” The man was covered with mud, his clothes in shreds, and he struck Stickney as “the queerest specimen of strangeness that had descended on Dickinson in the three years I had lived there.”

He was all teeth and eyes.... He was scratched, bruised and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bull dog. He was actually a slender young fellow, but I remember that he gave me the impression of being heavy and rather large. As I approached him he stopped me with a gesture asking me whether I could direct him to a doctor’s office. I was struck by the way he bit off his words and showed his teeth. I told him that I was the only practicing physician, not only in Dickinson but in the whole surrounding country.

“By George,” he said emphatically, “then you’re exactly the man I want to see. . . . My feet are blistered so badly that I can hardly walk. I want you to fix me up.”

I took him into my office and while I was bathing and bandaging his feet, which were in pretty bad shape, he told me the story. . .

The story, one Theodore was to tell many times and one that was to be told about him for years after he had left the Bad Lands, was of his last and biggest adventure in the West and may be summarized briefly as follows. It has the ring of the adventure stories he had loved so as a boy, but it also happened just as he said.

Earlier in March, having just returned to the Elkhorn after a winter in New York, Theodore was informed by Sewall one morning that a boat, a light, flat-bottomed scow that they kept on the river, had been stolen in the night by someone who had obviously taken off in it downstream. They suspected the culprit was a man named Finnegan, who lived upriver, toward Medora, with two cronies of equally bad reputation. So in the next few days Sewall and Dow put together a makeshift boat, and after waiting for a blizzard to pass, the three of them took off in pursuit, pushing into the icy current on March 30, Sewall steering.

It was a matter of principle, Theodore later said. “To submit tamely and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain repetition of the offense . . .”

They were three days on the river before catching up with the thieves, their boat charging along between snow-covered buttes and weird Bad Lands configurations that looked to Theodore like “the crouching figures of great goblin beasts.” He had brought along some books to read and his camera, expecting there might be a magazine article in the adventure. Each man had his rifle. The second night the temperature dropped below zero.

The next day, at a point about a hundred miles downstream from where they had started, they spotted the missing boat and going ashore found Finnegan and his partners, who surrendered without a fight. (”We simply crept noiselessly up and rising when only a few yards distant covered them with the cocked rifles.”) From there they spent another six days moving on down the river, making little headway now because of ice jams, and taking turns at night guarding the prisoners, who because of the extreme cold could not be bound hand and foot. Food ran low and the cold and biting winds continued. But not the least extraordinary part of the story is that during these same six days after catching the thieves, Theodore, in odd moments, read the whole of Anna Karenina, and “with very great interest.” (Tolstoy was truly a great writer, he would tell Corinne in a letter written at Dickinson the day after his encounter with Dr. Stickney. But had Corinne noticed the unmoral, as opposed to the immoral, tone of the book? “Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages?” For his own part Theodore found Anna “curiously contradictory; bad as she was, however, she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Vronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly—but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband.”)

At a remote cow camp Theodore was able to borrow a horse and ride another fifteen miles to the main ranch, at the edge of the Killdeer Mountains, where he got supplies and hired a team, a wagon, and a driver. And then came the roughest part of the escapade. It was agreed that Sewall and Dow would continue downstream with the two boats and that he, Theodore, would go with the three captives overland heading due south some forty-five miles to Dickinson, where he could turn them over to the sheriff. The captives rode in the wagon with the driver; Theodore walked behind, keeping guard with his trusty Winchester. So by the time Dr. Stickney saw him he had walked forty-five miles in something less than two days with no sleep and had at last deposited his prisoners in jail.

When Stickney and others at Dickinson asked why he had not simply shot or hanged the thieves when he first found them and saved himself all that trouble, Theodore answered that the thought had never occurred to him.

“He impressed me and he puzzled me,” wrote Stickney years afterward, “and when I went home to lunch, an hour later, I told my wife that I had met the most peculiar and at the same time the most wonderful man I had ever come to know. I could see that he was a man of brilliant ability and I could not understand why he was out there on the frontier.”

At Dickinson’s Fourth of July celebration that summer, Theodore was asked to be the “orator of the day.” It was the first time Dickinson (population: 700) had made an all-out occasion of the Fourth and Dr. Stickney, who in a lifelong career of patching up broken cowboys and delivering babies at remote ranches would become as legendary locally as Theodore or the Marquis, was the presiding officer. The crowd was also the largest ever seen in Stark County and included about half of Medora, its citizens having come over on the same train as Theodore. A parade led by the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band included a wagon drawn by four white horses carrying thirty-eight little girls dressed in white, representing the states of the Union. According to one Medora man, everybody got caught up in the spirit and wanted to be part of the parade, with the result that there was no one left to watch it except two drunks who were beyond watching anything.

Somebody named Western Starr read the Declaration of Independence and the crowd joined in singing “America, the Beautiful.” Another speaker, well practiced in oratorical flourishes, spoke in advance of Theodore, his theme the size of the country on its one hundred and tenth birthday; and then it was Theodore’s turn.

I am peculiarly glad to have an opportunity of addressing you, my fellow citizens of Dakota, on the Fourth of July, because it always seems to me that those who dwell in a new territory, and whose actions, therefore, are peculiarly fruitful, for good and for bad alike, in shaping the future, have in consequence peculiar responsibilities. . . . Much has been given to us, and so, much will be expected of us; and we must take heed to use aright the gifts entrusted to our care.

The Declaration of Independence derived its peculiar importance, not on account of what America was, but because of what she was to become; she shared with other nations the present, and she yielded to them the past, but it was felt in return that to her, and to her especially, belonged the future. It is the same with us here. We, grangers and cowboys alike, have opened a new land; and we are the pioneers, and as we shape the course of the stream near its head, our efforts have infinitely more effect, in bending it in any given direction ... In other words, the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them; and their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities.

So it is peculiarly incumbent on us here today so to act throughout our lives as to leave our children a heritage, for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse. . . . If you fail to work in public life, as well as in private, for honesty and uprightness and virtue, if you condone vice because the vicious man is smart, or if you in any other way cast your weight into the scales in favor of evil, you are just so far corrupting and making less valuable the birthright of your children. . . .

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity; like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as in the case of Europe; we rule ourselves. All American citizens, whether born here or elsewhere, whether of one creed or another, stand on the same footing; we welcome every honest immigrant no matter from what country he comes, provided only that he leaves off his former nationality, and remains neither Celt nor Saxon, neither Frenchman nor German, but becomes an American, desirous of fulfilling in good faith the duties of American citizenship.

When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them. In a new portion of the country, especially here in the Far West, it is peculiarly important to do so; and on this day of all others we ought soberly to realize the weight of the responsibility that rests upon us. I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner; I am proud, indeed, to be considered one of yourselves, and I address you in this rather solemn strain today, only because of my pride in you, and because your welfare, moral as well as material, is so near my heart.

On the train back to Medora later in the day, Theodore sat with Arthur Packard, the editor-proprietor of The Bad Lands Cow Boy, and remarked to Packard that he thought now he could do his best work “in a public and political way.” “Then,” responded Packard, “you will become President of the United States.”

What impressed Packard was that Theodore seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.

Remembering how it all had ended in the Bad Lands, Bill Sewall was to write, “We were glad to get back home—gladder, I guess, than about anything that had ever happened to us, and yet we were melancholy, for with all the hardships and work it was a very happy life . . . the happiest time that any of us have known.”

Of Theodore’s status as things wound up, Sewall said simply: “When he got back into the world again, he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for a livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Return

1

SHE REMAINED “the strong good wise old sister,” sole survivor of the original “big people.” In January she had turned thirty-one. So she was well established now as a spinster, the role everyone had long since consigned her to. Family and friends spoke of her attributes of character, her poise and wonderful vitality, seldom ever of her looks. “She has no looks,” a friend once remarked. “She is very nearly ugly—she is almost a cripple, and yet no one for a moment thinks of those things.” She was prized for her wit, her breadth of knowledge, her insights, her strong, logical approach to things. “In many ways hers was the best mind in the family, and her personality one of the most dominant and fascinating,” we read in the reminiscences of a Roosevelt of the next generation. There was a subtleness to her not present in her brothers or her sister, she was more of a diplomat, she had more ballast, as it was said. She was stable, capable, a “powerful” figure with a strong sense of duty, and the resources of energy she drew upon, somewhere in her small misshapen frame, seemed greater even than Theodore’s. She was constantly busy—”dear busy Bamie”—but more than that her energy and activity stirred others into motion. Anyone around her for long got going, doing things. She liked minding other people’s affairs, liked responsibility, and because she was so extremely dependable, she was depended upon time and again.

She was, as another of the next generation would say of her, “intensely on-the-ball.” She seemed always to know what was going on, in the world and in the family. She made it her business to know and to keep the others abreast, with letters, clippings, telegrams if necessary. She was the indispensable gatherer and dispenser of vital Roosevelt information, out of thoughtfulness in part, but also because she knew that was what was expected of her and it gave her influence if not exactly control. How would he know anything of importance if it were not for Bamie’s correspondence, James Alfred Roosevelt once remarked while traveling abroad, and her letters to Theodore in the Bad Lands had arrived some weeks by the bundle.

She could deal with “situations” better than anyone, the others felt. In time of need or crisis she was the first person they turned to. When Elliott’s wife, Anna, gave birth to her first child on October 11,1884, after months of family worry, because of what had happened to Alice, it was Bamie they wanted on the scene to help.

“Bamie’s telegram at 11:30 this morning brought us the joyful news,” reads a message from Aunt Anna Gracie. The child had been christened Anna Eleanor—Anna for her mother and for Bamie, Eleanor for her father, Ellie—but she was to be known only as Eleanor and in time would become deeply attached to Bamie, depending on her for the love and understanding she desperately needed and could find nowhere else. Indeed, for the two children born to her two brothers in the year 1884—Theodore’s Alice and Elliott’s Eleanor, two very individual, very different little girls—Bamie was to be childhood’s primary source of kindness, stories, humor, guidance, sympathy, interest, and from what each was to write of her in later years there is no question as to the influence she had on their lives or their utter devotion to “Auntie Bye.” (Bye and Bysie were nicknames her father had sometimes used and that Theodore and others used interchangeably with Bamie as time went on.)

In the world of blond, blue-eyed Alice, now approaching age three, there was no more marvelous figure. Except for summers, when she stayed with her grandparents at Chestnut Hill, she was with Bamie constantly, and no one, as she later said, had such importance. “Always Auntie Bye meant more to me than anyone.” Auntie Bye was “always the mainstream somehow,” it was she who “brought the generations together.”

“Auntie Bye provided . . . a great warmth and pooling of the generations. . . . It was that.”

She used to tell me stories about her, Father’s, Uncle Elliott’s, and Corinne’s childhood, and about Grandfather and Grandmother Roosevelt, what they looked like and the things they did—how Grandfather Roosevelt drove a four-in-hand, how he used to bring them peaches when he came home in the afternoon. . . . She told of the sad, difficult times during the Civil War when Grandmother Roosevelt’s brothers were fighting on the southern side, she living in New York with her northern husband. There were stories too about their trips abroad when they were children, of the time when she was in school near Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. I used to make her describe to me over and over the soldiers marching past, singing, on their way to the fighting.

More wonderful still, Auntie Bye would tell the child about her own real mother who was in heaven. “She was the only one who did,” Alice remembered years afterward. “You see none of the others ever mentioned her. . . . Oh, she said how pretty she was and how attractive she was and how fond Auntie Bye was of her . . . things of that sort.”

“Auntie Bye had a mind that worked as a very able mans mind works,” remembered Eleanor. “She was full of animation, was always the center of any group she was with . . . wherever she lived there was an atmosphere of comfort. . . . The talk was always lively . . . and, young or old, you really felt Auntie Bye’s interest in you.”

To Eleanor she was “one of the most interesting women I have ever known.” Alice, in an interview years later, said Auntie Bye would have been President had she been a man—”because she had such determination . . . [and] an extraordinary gift with people.”

“Her hair was lovely, soft and wavy,” remembered Eleanor. “Her eyes were deep set and really beautiful, making you forget the rest of the face, which was not beautiful. . . . To young people ... she was an inspiration . . .”

If she had a fault it was an instinct for the cutting or caustic remark about those who were perhaps not quite so “on-the-ball” as she, an ability “to stick the knife in” with a word or two, and not without certain pleasure. Yet no one seems to have been damaged as a result. And as Corinne’s daughter—her second child, Corinne Douglas Robinson—was to remark, “She was such a tremendous personality that you wanted to be in her favor.”

As in childhood, because of her back, Bamie was required still to lie down part of each day. She still wore a piece of ram’s wool as a cushion on her back, to ease the discomfort of sitting, and the evidence is that, sitting or standing, she was in pain much of the time, though she never said so.

She read widely, saw a great deal of a few particular friends, visited, entertained constantly, and made one long trip to Mexico and California that spring of 1886, traveling in “the most ideal way,” by private railroad car as the guest of Cousin Sally, still among her closest friends, and James Roosevelt, whom she regarded as “the most absolutely honorable upright gentleman” she knew. Her best friend was Mrs. Whitelaw Reid—Elizabeth Mills Reid—whose husband owned the Tribune and who, somewhat like Bamie herself, would be remembered as a “queer, little dumpy figure, but bursting with vitality and intelligence.”

Her joy was in good talk. She was in her element in stimulating company, with friends who traveled, with artists, men of affairs, “people who wrote,” Theodore’s political friends—”every kind of person,” as Eleanor remembered proudly. All the Roosevelts were talkers, but with Bamie conversation was an art form. She was never torrential, as Theodore could be when off on one of his subjects. She often listened more than she spoke. Corinne was more imaginative, mercurial and gregarious like Theodore. Bamie chose her words with care. But she could, by all accounts, draw out the very best in people; even in the dullest guest she could find something and make that person shine under her encouragement. (”I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out,” her father had written Mittie of someone he had met on a train.) But she could also pick up at once on virtually any subject. “She grasped everything immediately,” remembered a cousin.

Her letters, it is said, suggest little of the life and originality that characterized her talk. Something happened in conversation that did not on paper. She was somebody people wanted to meet and when they did they opened up to her, as they did not to others. Theodore, who was enormously proud of her, kidded her about the “incongruous” circle she attracted, but also saw her as the center of a future salon and hoped, for his own benefit, that she might take that role very seriously.

He called her “the Driving Wheel of Destiny and Superintendent-in-Chief of the Workings of Providence.”

Theodore mattered most of all. He gave focus to her life; he was her consuming interest, her favorite subject, her primary means of selffulfillment. His child, his house, his health, his career, his future, had become uppermost in her life. The house on Madison Avenue was maintained as much for his as for her own use, as his base of operations in New York. “I always insisted that we did not live together,” she later explained, “that we only visited one another.” That way, she said, a breakup, if it ever came, would be easier for both of them. Her teas and “evenings” were for his benefit often as not; the parties—summer dinner dances, hunt breakfasts—she gave at Sagamore Hill (as he had renamed the Oyster Bay house) were designed to bring him back into society, back to the life he knew.

She wanted him to return to politics. She was certain it was where he belonged and she both encouraged whatever she thought beneficial to his career and discouraged anything she thought potentially detrimental. She strongly encouraged his friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, and included Lodge now in her correspondence as though he were one of the family. (“Theodore would not be happy out of public affairs,” Lodge concurred early in what was to be a lifelong correspondence with Bamie.) When Theodore gave her his account of capturing the thieves, she (with Lodge) strongly advised against his doing it as an article for Century, sure that such heroics might strike an eastern audience as a bit extravagant and self-aggrandizing. (”I shall take good care,” he promised her, “that the pronoun ‘I’ does not appear once in the whole piece.”)

She felt she was closer to him than anyone. She knew what he was spending on his cattle venture, and like James Alfred, she worried about it; she knew what the Oyster Bay place had cost, having overseen its construction from the start; she knew what was in his checking account, what his bills were, because in his absences she paid them. “Can you send me at once three or four blank checks from my checkbook?” he writes at one point from the West. “I need them immediately. Darling old Bysie, as usual I am bothering you with my affairs.”

Politics fascinated her and she had followed every step of his career with intense interest. Moreover, she knew how much that interest meant to him, how few people mattered to him in the way she did and how much he needed her approval of all his exploits. In some letters, such as the one describing his battle on the convention floor at Chicago or the one about the bear hunt, it is as if he carries with him his own proscenium arch and is performing for her alone, his audience of one. “Look how well I am doing,” he seems to be saying to her again and again, just as he had done at Harvard when writing to her or to their father.

Possibly more than anyone in the family, she knew how much of himself he withheld from view—the tenderness in him, the overriding attachment to home, to family, how much of the “great little home-boy” he remained at heart.

Women, she knew, did not greatly interest him and this made her role in his life all the more exceptional. He did not enjoy the company of women the way their father had, or as Elliott obviously did. Until that summer, and the mention of a Mrs. Selmes at Mandan, there had been nothing since Alice’s death to suggest the slightest interest in any woman beyond the Roosevelt circle. Tilden Selmes was a young lawyer, a Yale man and neophyte rancher; his wife, Martha Flandrau Selmes, was the daughter of a distinguished Minnesota jurist and historian, Charles Eugene Flandrau. Theodore had been a guest at their Mandan home on several occasions in August and September and “the singularly attractive” Mrs. Selmes was somebody he wanted Bamie to know about. “She is, I think, very handsome,” he wrote; “... she is very well read, has a delicious sense of humor and is extremely fond of poetry—including that of my favorite, Browning, as well as my old one, Swinburne.” Other accounts of Mrs. Selmes and several surviving photographs bear him out—she was indeed a vivacious and strikingly beautiful young woman—and unquestionably she impressed him as few women ever had or ever would (he was to refer to her, as time went on, as “the wonderful Mrs. Selmes”), but the fact that there was also a Mr. Selmes would, for Theodore—and doubtless for Bamie also—have precluded any thought of a romantic involvement. The contribution Mrs. Selmes makes to what can be pieced together of the larger story is a recollection, offered years later, of Theodore pacing the floor during one of his visits, muttering audibly that he had no “constancy.”

2

In the last days of August 1886 The New York Times carried a small social item reporting the engagement of ex-Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt to Miss Carow of New York and then, on September 5, a retraction, which was doubtless placed in the Times by Bamie:

The announcement of the engagement of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, made last week, and which came from a supposedly authoritative source, proves to have been erroneous. Nothing is more common in society than to hear positive assertions constantly made regarding the engagement of persons who have been at all in each other’s company, and no practice is more reprehensible.

Theodore was notified as to what had happened and Bamie waited for his answer. It came by return mail in a letter from Medora dated September 20. What the Times had reported was true, he told her. “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean to marry her.” How anyone had found out was a mystery to him. “You are the first person to whom I have breathed one word on the subject.” He had hoped to be able to tell her before this, but that had been impossible. He would explain everything when he saw her.

I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages [his remarkable letter continued]; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one-half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead. No matter what your judgment about myself I shall assuredly enter no plea against it. But I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith. It is certainly not her fault; the entire blame rests on my shoulders.

Bamie could keep Baby Lee, she was told. Nor should she feel obligated to inform the others; he would take care of that himself by letter. Meantime, he wanted nothing said to anyone beyond the immediate family.

Bamie and Corinne were both taken totally unawares by this news. Nor were they at all pleased.

Edith Carow was, of course, a very known and admired quantity, as close to the family as anyone could be, very like “family,” no less than ever. She was someone they had both continued to see on a regular basis, until just that previous spring when Edith’s widowed mother, due to straitened circumstances, sold her house and departed with Edith and another daughter for an indefinite stay in Europe. “It makes me quite blue,” Corinne had written at the time.

Edith was lovely-looking, with a mind of her own and wide-ranging interests. If somewhat reserved by Roosevelt standards and somewhat disapproving of fashionable society, she had a quiet kind of dignity and a will to match Bamie s, which was the problem. “They didn’t want it at all,” said Alice years afterward, “because they knew her too well and they knew they were going to have a difficult time with her, that she would come between them and Father.”

Doubtless they too wished Theodore had more “constancy.” Ideally, by the prevailing, romantic code, he would never remarry—as a testimony of his love for his beautiful dead wife, his first and only great love. Or, at the least, a decent interval of several more years would have been expected, during which the widower brother and the spinster sister could carry on just as they were and quite happily.

He was home by early October. He and Edith, Bamie learned, had been secretly engaged for nearly a year. It had been the previous September in Bamie’s front hall that they had met one day by chance, having until then seen little or nothing of each other since Alice’s death. Theodore had started calling on her in New York after that—quietly, discreetly, and though he even asked Edith to attend a hunt ball at Sagamore Hill in October, apparently no one imagined there could be anything between them. In November he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes, with the understanding that the engagement would be kept secret until a more propitious moment. He had returned to the Bad Lands in March; in April she sailed for Europe. “What day does Edith go abroad, and for how long does she intend staying?” he had inquired innocently, almost as an afterthought, in a letter to Corinne, the same letter with his observations on Anna Karenina, written at Dickinson the day after bringing in the thieves. “Could you not send her, when she goes, some flowers from me? I suppose fruit would be more useful, but I think flowers ‘more tenderer’ as Mr. Weller would say.”

Bamie, whatever misgivings or pain she felt, was ready to stand by him. In the face of his overwhelming good health and high spirits it is hard to imagine her doing anything else. He was ready to embrace life again. He was also being asked by the Republicans to run for mayor of New York, almost from the moment he had his bags unpacked, an offer he at once accepted, to her great delight, even though, as they both appreciated, he had little chance of winning. . . . Get action! Seize the moment! It was to be a three-way race. His opponents were the Democrat Abram Hewitt and a Labor candidate, Henry George. Hewitt, distinguished in manner, admired as an “enlightened” businessman, had been a friend of their fathers and appeared the likely winner. Henry George was the author of Progress and Poverty, famous as the great exponent of the single-tax scheme, and a fiery speaker who drew huge street-corner crowds and gave newspaper editors and propertied people a bad case of the jitters. Theodore set up headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Bamie, by all signs, could not have been happier. The office of mayor, since the passage of Theodore’s Reform Charter Bill, was one of real consequence.

He was called “the Cowboy Candidate” and the Times at one point claimed he was in the lead. “We haven’t had campaign headquarters that looked so much like business in this county since ex-President Arthur was chairman of the county committee and carried things with a rush,” one party worker was quoted as saying. “It seems like old times and warms the cockles of an old-time Republican’s heart. This is just glorious . . .”

So convinced was Theodore that he had no serious chance of being elected that he bought two tickets under false names—Mr. and Miss Merrifield—on the Etrura, which was due to sail for England on Saturday, November 6, or four days after the election. Bamie had agreed to go with him to London, where he and Edith were to be married. The only thing she would not agree to was any talk of her keeping the child.

“It almost broke my heart to give her up,” Bamie was to recall years later. “Still I felt. . . it was for her good, and that unless she lived with her father she would never see much of him . . .” It was remembering what she had felt as a child for her own father, the knowledge of what his love had meant to her own life, she said, that made her decide as she did.

In a letter to Edith Carow dated October 23, Bamie wrote in a swift, strong, somewhat illegible hand:

MY DEAREST EDITH,

You will be astonished at another letter so soon, but though of course Theodore writes you of everything, still you wish to hear what I try to write; of the wonderful enthusiasm he certainly inspires; never mind what the results . . . it is astounding the hold that he has on the public. . . . Douglas has been as always a trump, having organized “the Roosevelt Campaign Club of businessmen” which brings in many active workers. Theodore breakfasts and sleeps at home where he is very comfortable . . . by half after nine he is in the Headquarters at the Fifth Avenue, never leaving except for lunch and dinner... even then he can but spare a short time; he is very bright and well considering the terrific strain which of course will be worse constantly until the second [of November] is past. It is such happiness to see him at his very best once more; ever since he has been out of politics in any active form, it has been a real heart sorrow to me, for while he always made more of his life than any other man I knew, still with his strong nature it was a permanent source of poignant regret that even at his early age he should lose these years without the possibility of doing his best and most telling work; in that there should be the least chance that he might find his hold over the public gone when he once more came before them and this is the first time since . . . [Albany] days that he has enough work to keep him exerting all his powers. Theodore is the only person who had the power, except Father, who possessed it in a different way, of making me almost worship him and now it is such a desperate feeling to realize that in all this excitement I cannot help him in the least except that he knows how interested I am. I would never say or write this except to you, but it is very restful to feel how you care for him and how happy he is in his devotion to you . . . I go back again tomorrow [to Sagamore Hill] to remain over the Hunt Ball. I wish you were to be there this year also as you were last. . . I send you the pieces from this morning’s Times, they are samples of what appear daily, of course, the favorable side, but those most against him can find nothing but his youth, supposed wealth, and being born a gentleman to say as detrimental. . . .

“Theodore is radiantly happy and we sail on Saturday for England,” she wrote on Election Day to Lodge’s wife, Nannie.

Edith will be in London and they are to be married there early in December. . . . Edith we have known intimately always. She is very bright and attractive and I believe absolutely devoted to Theodore so I think their future looks most promising. . . . Today is of course politically one of intense excitement to me personally and apparently to New York generally. Theodore, Douglas and a number of men have been in to lunch and tonight I shall simply haunt the streets. . . .

Abram Hewitt was swept into office as expected, and as Bamie later observed, he “made an admirable mayor.” Henry George ran second and Theodore, for all the excitement he had generated, finished third. Large numbers of Republicans, fearful that a vote for Theodore might increase George’s chances of winning, had voted instead for Hewitt. Historically, it would stand as one of the most interesting campaigns the city had ever seen and at the age of twenty-eight Theodore was the youngest man who had ever been a candidate for mayor. “At least I have a better party standing than ever before,” he wrote to Lodge, who had just been elected to Congress.

Friday night, after the horse show, their last night before sailing, Bamie and he worked together until nearly daybreak addressing the last of the engagement announcements.

Afterword

ANNA

In the summer of 1895, to the astonishment of all the Roosevelt tribe, Bamie announced her engagement to Navy Commander (later Admiral) William Sheffield Cowles, a large, dignified, placid man from Connecticut. She was forty, he nearly fifty, and at age forty-three, she gave birth to a son, William Sheffield Cowles, Jr. In the years Theodore was President she established a home on N Street that became known as “the little White House.” As Eleanor was to recall, “There was never a serious subject that came up while he was President that he didn’t go to her at her home on N Street and discuss it with her before making his decision. He talked things over with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decision, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.”

In her middle years Bamie became almost totally deaf, yet few people ever knew since she learned to read lips, and later still, living in Connecticut, she suffered intensely from arthritis, a condition she refused to discuss. Recalling an evening at her Connecticut home, when she sat in a wheelchair talking and laughing with Cousin Sally’s son, Franklin, who by then was also in a wheelchair, a family friend remarked, “You felt such gallantry in all of them, you know, such humor, such complete elimination of any problem about bodies.”

Though devoted to her husband, her own dear “Mr. Bearo,” she refused to let him call her Bamie or Bye, only Anna, and her feelings for him were never what they were for her brother Theodore, who remained the center of her universe for as long as he lived.

Bamie died in August 1931, at the age of seventy-six.

THEODORE

With the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore became at forty-two the youngest President in history and possibly the best prepared. He had by then served six years as a reform Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland), two years as Police Commissioner of New York City, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on the eve of the Spanish-American War, as a colonel in the Rough Riders—and “hero of San Juan Hill”—as Governor of New York, and as Vice President. He was also the first President born and raised in a big city, and the first rich man’s son to occupy the White House since William Henry Harrison. He was a well-to-do, aristocratic, big-city, Harvard-educated Republican with ancestral roots in the Deep South and a passionate following in the West, which taken all together made him something quite new under the sun.

As President he was picturesque, noisy, colorful in ways that amused and absorbed the press, worried the elders of his party, and delighted the country. To his admirers he was “the outstanding, incomparable symbol of virility in his time” (Mark Sullivan), “a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital” (Harry Thurston Peck), “the most striking figure in American life” (Thomas Edison); while to others, some of whom had once been his friends, he was “that damned cowboy” (Mark Hanna), a man “drunk with himself” (Henry Adams), “an excellent specimen of the genus Americanus egotisticus” (Poultney Bigelow). The cartoonists had a field day. But he was also a President with a phenomenal grasp of history, who spoke German and French (in a style entirely his own) and knew something of the world from having traveled abroad from the time he was a child. More important, he was as able an executive as ever occupied the office. He loved being President, loved the power, for what he could accomplish with it.

He settled the great anthracite coal strike of 1902 by entering the mediation as no President had done before. He initiated the first successful antitrust suit against a corporate monopoly, the giant Northern Securities Company (and when his fathers old friend J. P. Morgan came to Washington to demand an explanation, such action served only to harden his resolve). He “took the Isthmus” and built the Panama Canal, and served as peacemaker in the Russo-Japanese War, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. And he was openly proud of all his achievements.

As President, the boy who adored hero stories, and who idolized Captain James Bulloch, built a new Navy and sent a fleet of battleships around the world on a good-will mission. As President, the asthmatic child who craved the out of doors—for whom the unspoiled natural world had literally meant life itself—increased the area of the national forests by some forty million acres, established five national parks, sixteen national monuments (including the Grand Canyon), four national game refuges, fifty-one national bird sanctuaries, and made conservation a popular cause. As President, the son of the first Theodore Roosevelt made the White House “a bully pulpit,” preached righteousness, courage, love of country, “The Strenuous Life”—which, everything considered, may have been his greatest contribution. Once, when the old family friend Louisa Schuyler asked how he “felt the pulse” of the country, his response was: “I don’t know the way the people do feel... I only know how they ought to feel.”

Ironically, he who had worried that he might never live up to his father’s name loomed so large in his own time that he obliterated his father’s name. Only one Theodore Roosevelt was to be remembered, once his father’s generation had passed from the scene.

His devotion to the memory of his father, a feeling of his father’s presence in his life, remained with him to the end. “My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew,” he would say. It was to him he felt he must be true. In the study at Sagamore Hill between small portraits of Lincoln and Grant, he hung a large oil portrait of his father. Four duplicate portraits had been done posthumously from a photograph, one for each of the four children, and Theodore placed his so the pale-blue eyes kept steady watch over him at his desk. His first day in the White House following McKinley’s death was September 22, his fathers birthday. (Had he been alive then, in 1901, the elder Theodore would have been seventy.) “I have realized it as I signed various papers all day long, and I feel that it is a good omen,” he remarked to Bamie and Corinne, who with their husbands were his only guests at dinner that evening. “I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder.”

Among his first acts as President was to have all those Victorian embellishments introduced by Chester A. Arthur, including the fifty-foot Tiffany screen, torn out and the house restored to its original “stately simplicity.”

His highest-ranking Cabinet officer, the Secretary of State, inherited from McKinley, was his father’s friend John Hay. (In 1905 Theodore named another of his father’s friends, Elihu Root, to succeed Hay; when Root resigned in 1909, Theodore filled the position with his Harvard classmate Robert Bacon.)

“It was peculiarly pleasant having you here. How I wish Father could have lived to see it too!” he wrote to Uncle Rob following his inauguration in 1905. “You stood to me for him and all that generation, and so you may imagine how proud I was to have you here.” (Uncle Rob was in his seventy-sixth year. Following the death of Aunt Lizzie Ellis, in 1887, he had married Mrs. Minnie O’Shea Fortescue.)

Of his mother Theodore was to say comparatively little. But to some who had known her, he was more a Bulloch than a Roosevelt. The New York Sun in 1900 quoted an unnamed New Yorker, a transplanted “old-time southern gentleman” of social prominence: “I have always thought, and others who knew Miss Bulloch in Savannah have quite agreed with me, that it was from his mother that Governor Roosevelt got his splendid dash and energy.”

Of Alice Lee, Theodore was to say nothing. Nor, supposedly, was her name ever spoken within the new family he and Edith established. To judge by his Autobiography (1913) she never existed; their romance, his first marriage, never happened. Whether this was his doing or Edith’s remains an issue of debate among later-day Roosevelts. The one possible explanation to be found in his own writings is a comment in a letter to Corinne concerning a mutual friend whose life had taken a tragic turn.

I hate to think of her suffering; but the only thing for her to do now is to treat the past as past, the event as finished and out of her life; to dwell on it, and above all to keep talking of it with anyone, would be both weak and morbid. She should try not to think of it; this she cannot wholly avoid, but she can avoid speaking of it. She should show a brave and cheerful front to the world, whatever she feels; and henceforth she should never speak one word of the matter to anyone.

His own brave and cheerful front was what the world knew him for, what the large proportion of his countrymen most loved him for. No one seemed to do so much or to enjoy what he did so thoroughly. Yet his favorite contemporary poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose themes were loneliness and the burden of personal memory. The robust, quick-stepping, legendary “T.R.” was a great deal more pensive and introspective, he dwelt more on the isolation and sadness inherent in human life, than most people ever realized. Black care, for all the phenomenal pace he maintained through life, clung to him more than he let on.

He kept at his writing. In his public career, it is estimated, he wrote 150,000 letters. He also wrote his own speeches and presidential messages, and more than twenty books dealing with history, literature, politics, and natural history. His Autobiography is particularly interesting if read with a view to all that is left out. (Not only does he make no mention of Alice Lee or their marriage, he neglects to mention his sisters by name and devotes all of three sentences to his mother. He leaves out his race for mayor of New York—the one resounding political defeat of his early career. He says nothing of his father’s actions at the time of the Civil War, just as he says nothing about Elliott’s tragic life and other lesser family “failures.”)

Judged by almost any criteria, his second marriage was an unequivocal success. Edith, a person of marked intelligence, poise, and common sense, brought “wonderful balance” to his life. She was, “in many ways, as formidable a figure as Bamie, or even as Theodore,” said a cousin. “It is curious and notable that few great men have had closely related to them three women of such exceptional intelligence and gifts as those of Bamie, Corinne and Edith.”

The second marriage produced five children—Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin—to whom their father was openly, passionately devoted. He read to them at night, told ghost stories (of which he knew many), joined headlong in their games (pillow fights, hide-and-seek, running obstacle courses down the halls of the White House); he bounced with them in the haymow at Sagamore Hill, led them on long morning excursions on horseback, exactly as his father had done and over the same hills, a half dozen of their cousins or friends usually joining the cavalcade. “To be with him was to have fun,” remembered one of the cousins, “if for no other reason than that he so obviously was having a good time himself.” “I love all these children and have great fun with them, and am touched by the way in which they feel that I am their special friend, champion, and companion,” he wrote Edith’s sister. The letters he wrote his children—from Cuba, the White House, Panama, whenever separated from them—were to become famous when published as a best-selling book the year of his death.

Yet there is evidence that being his child could be very difficult. Just before the Spanish-American War, when the family was living in Washington, young Ted, who had asthma, began suffering from severe headaches or “nervous prostration,” because, as the family doctor was convinced, his father was driving him too hard. At the doctor’s urging, the boy was sent to stay with Bamie in New York, where the headaches and other ailments quickly went away. “Hereafter I shall never press Ted either in body or mind,” Theodore wrote Bamie. “The fact is that the little fellow, who is peculiarly dear to me, has bidden fair to be all the things I would like to have been and wasn’t, and it has been a great temptation to push him.”

Theodore continued to ride, shoot, hike, spar, row, play tennis. He never did kill a tiger, but of the other most fearsome beasts of the wilds he could claim at least one of each—as all the world was made aware. His knowledge of the large animals of North America probably surpassed that of anyone of his day. The last letter he wrote, like the first that we know of, had to do with birds.

A book was about the only thing that could make him sit still and his love of books lasted as long as he lived. He read everything and anything, sometimes two books in an evening, and his favorites—the Irish sagas, Bunyan, Scott, Cooper, the letters of Abraham Lincoln, Huckleberry Finn—he read many times over.

The two cousins who had been closest to him in boyhood, Emlen and West, had families of their own close by at Oyster Bay. Emlen was Theodore’s financial adviser and West, who was a physician, delivered two of Theodore’s children.

His health was not particularly good in later life, appearances to the contrary. He was dogged by all his old ailments, by stomach trouble, insomnia, chest colds, and by asthma from time to time. Poor eyesight was a lifelong handicap. Sailing off to fight in Cuba in 1898, he carried a dozen extra pairs of glasses in his pockets and in the lining of his hat, and a blow suffered during a sparring match in the White House blinded him permanently in his left eye, something about which the public was to be told nothing. He put on weight (he weighed over two hundred pounds when he was President) and as time passed he was bothered with rheumatism or gout, he did not know which. “I am falling behind physically,” he told his son Ted as early as 1903.

When he died, in his sleep at Sagamore Hill in the early hours of January 6, 1919, he was sixty years old, yet seemed much older. But by then, since leaving the White House, he had fallen out with his hand-picked successor (Taft); broken up the 1912 Republican National Convention; launched his own Progressive (”Bull Moose”) Party; campaigned again for President; been shot in the chest by a fanatic in Milwaukee (his glasses case and a folded copy of a speech in his breast pocket saved his life); lost the 1912 election; he had hunted big game in Africa, flown in a plane, led an exploring expedition in the Amazon jungles (during which he contracted malaria, lost fifty pounds, and again nearly died); campaigned to get the country into the First World War; and suffered the loss of a son, Quentin, the youngest, who was killed in aerial combat behind German lines in 1918.

Theodore was buried with a minimum of ceremony on a bitter cold day in a small cemetery at Oyster Bay, just off the road between Tranquillity and Sagamore Hill. Of the things said in his memory, among the simplest and best is this by a friend since childhood, Edith Wharton:

... he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed . . .

ELLIOTT

Elliott’s tragic life ended in August 1894, at age thirty-four, after a torturous battle with alcoholism. His marriage had become a shambles, he had been involved in a paternity suit, threatened suicide more than once, and was placed in various institutions in Europe and the Middle West for the “cure,” beginning the winter of 1891 when Bamie escorted him to a sanitarium in the Austrian Alps, at Graz. Determined that nothing go amiss, she persuaded the head of the sanitarium to break the rules and let her have a room also, so she could keep watch over him.

In 1892 his wife, Anna, died of diphtheria. In May 1893 his son and namesake, “little Ellie,” died of scarlet fever. “Poor Elliott is wandering about New York. Heaven knows where,” wrote Edith the following summer. “He rarely spends a night in his rooms ... drinks a great deal... will not come to Sagamore ... it wears on Theodore dreadfully and if he gets thinking of it he cannot sleep.”

Corinne and Douglas Robinson tried to keep track of Elliott, going regularly to his hotel. Theodore eventually gave up on him. “He can’t be helped,” he told Bamie. Little Eleanor, who was being looked after by her Grandmother Hall, came to visit at Sagamore Hill in the spring of 1894. “Poor little soul,” wrote Edith to Bamie, “she is very plain. Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future, but as I wrote to Theodore, the ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan.”

In that last year of his life Elliott was living under an assumed name with a mistress on West 102nd Street, “like some stricken, hunted creature,” Theodore wrote to Bamie, who was in London. “His house was so neat and well kept,” Theodore continued, “with his Bible and religious books, and Anna’s pictures everywhere, even in the room of himself and his mistress. Poor woman, she had taken the utmost care of him, and was broken down at his death.”

I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now [Theodore later wrote to Corinne]. He is just the gallant, generous, manly, loyal young man whom everyone loved. I can think of him when you and I and he used to go round “exploring” the hotels, the time we were first in Europe; do you remember how we used to do it? And then in the days of the dancing class, when he was distinctly the polished man-of-the-world... Or when we were off on his little sailing boat for a two or three days’ trip on the Sound, or when we first hunted . . .

Eleanor, who had idolized her father, would strive to be as brave and selfless as he had wanted her to be, guided by Bamie and encouraged by Theodore, who, in 1905, while President, gave her away at her wedding to Cousin Franklin, for whom Elliott had once served as godfather.

CORINNE

The youngest of the four, Corinne lived until February 1933, or long enough to know that another Roosevelt had been elected President. More gregarious even than Theodore, she became a figure and patron in literary circles, and among her own large, loud, spirited family she thrived especially on talk and roars of laughter and huge dinner parties. On an evening when Fanny Smith and her new husband, James Parsons, were going to Corinne’s house for dinner, Fanny is said to have advised him, “Now, don’t forget! Talk as loudly as you possibly can and answer your own questions!”

While her marriage to Douglas Robinson survived satisfactorily, Corinne never found it in her heart to love him. Like Bamie, her strongest affection was reserved for Theodore, who, she said, “was truly the spirit of my father reincarnate.” Together with Bamie after his death, she organized a reconstruction of the 20th Street house as a memorial, complete in every detail, exactly as it was when they were growing up. She lectured on the subject of Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote and published poetry in his honor, as well as My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, an adoring book of personal memories.

Like so many others she never ceased to be amazed by her brother or to be inspirited by his power of curiosity, by that delight in so much else other than self, which, with courage, had carried him forward since childhood. Walking beside him on the White House grounds one spring morning she watched him stop, stoop, pick up, and examine a minute feather, which he held between thumb and forefinger. “Very early for a fox sparrow,” he said.

Notes

The following abbreviations have been used throughout these notes:

All family correspondence cited is from the Theodore Roosevelt Collection unless otherwise indicated.

PART ONE

1. GREATHEART’S CIRCLE

Recollections of life in the house on East 20th Street and heartfelt, often effusive descriptions of Theodore Senior are to be found in the later-day writings of all the Roosevelt children but Elliott: Bamie in a series of unpublished reminiscences (TRC); Theodore in his Autobiography; and Corinne in My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (referred to here as Robinson). Of the many family letters dealing with domestic details perhaps the most revealing are those written by Martha Stewart Bulloch (Grandmamma) to her daughter Susan West (also TRC). Among secondary sources Nathan Millers The Roosevelt Chronicles provides a good general account of family roots and branches.

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22 “gloomy respectability”: TR, Autobiography, 8.

22 Goelet garden: B reminiscences.

23 Robert Roosevelt on family origins: It was RBR, in 1903, with his nephew in the White House, who clarified for the public (in a letter to the N.Y. Sun, May 25) how the name Roosevelt was to be pronounced. “In English when we try to distinguish the long from the short ‘o’ we get into trouble. In Dutch they do not. The double V is simply the long ‘o’. The word ‘Roos’ means rose and is pronounced in identically the same way under all circumstances and in all combinations. So the first syllable of the President’s name is ‘Rose’ pure and simple.”

25 Aunt Lizzie Ellis and her misadventures: B reminiscences.

24 Robert an Elizabethan: N. Roosevelt, Front Row Seat, 15.

24 Robert and the green gloves: interview with Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt.

24 Robert and Minnie O’Shea: interview with Roosevelt genealogist Timothy Beard.

24 “never put himself forward,” “sunshine of his affection”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 42, 15.

25 TR Sr. on Roberts attire: TR Sr. to MBR, June 29, 1873.

25 TR Sr. the perfect gentleman: Riis, 11.

25 Mittie passes on the wine: Robinson, 18.

25 “My personal impression”: W. Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn, Hagedorn files (TRC).

25 TR Sr.’s feelings for his mother: TR Sr. to B, July 22, 1870.

26 Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt and the spirit of noblesse oblige: N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878.

26 Bamie’s description of the Union Square house: B reminiscences.

26 “Economy is my doctrine”: quoted in Churchill, 104.

26 CVS rules out college: N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878.

27 “I’m afraid, Theodore”: RBR to TR Sr., Aug. 1, 1851 (WSCC).

27 “I have it in mind”: RBR to TR Sr., Aug. 30,1851 (WSCC).

27 “Firstly, Advice”: RBR to TR Sr., Feb. 20, 1852 (WSCC).

28 “I scarce know terms”: TR Sr. to his mother, Aug. 13, 1851 (WSCC).

28 “He was dressed”: TR Sr., Russian journal, Aug. 24, 1851 (WSCC).

28 The gilt Russian and sledge on the square of malachite is one of the numerous original pieces to be seen in the restoration of the 20th Street house. Its value in the eyes of the children is described by TR in his Autobiography (page 8).

29 James Alfred’s marriage to an Emlen does the family fortune “no harm”: P. James Roosevelt to the author.

29 Chemical Bank meets obligations in gold: Cobb, 46. See also, History of the Chemical Bank, 111.

29 Broadway Improvement Association: Cobb, 46.

29 Weir Roosevelt responds to Gallaxy article: N.Y. Times, Apr. 25, 1868.

29 “where such a thing as sentiment”: TR Sr. to MBR, Aug. 18, 1853.

29 Bookkeepers views: TR Sr. to MBR, Aug. 2, 1853.

30 TR Sr. scales the Treasury Building: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 2, 1860.

30 “Whatever he had to do”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 25.

30 “maniacal benevolence”: John Hay to TR Sr., Feb. 4, 1862 (WSCC).

30 “as much as I enjoy loafing”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 29, 1873.

30 Twenty thousand homeless children: Brace, 31.

30 Clean bed for five cents: Lynch, 269-70.

30 Brace sees society threatened: First Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1854), quoted in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 21, 1869.

31 Approach taken by the Children’s Aid Society: 16th Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1869), quoted in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 21, 1869.

31 “troublesome conscience”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 26.

31 “He knew them by name”: ibid., 24.

31 Friends take out checkbooks: Riis, 447. One foresees saving a thousand dollars: Nation, Feb. 14, 1878.

31 TR Sr.’s feelings for New York: TR Sr. to MBR, Sept. 28, 1873.

32 Original charter for the American Museum of Natural History approved in 20th Street parlor: Bickmore, 12.

32 “Professor, New York wants a museum”: ibid., 17.

32 TR Sr.’s “rich power of enjoyment”: Brace, 325.

32 TR Sr. on horseback: Rev. Henry C. Potter, quoted in the N.Y. Tribune, Feb. 18, 1878.

32 “I amused myself”: quoted in Putnam, 41.

32 TR Sr.’s fondness for yellow roses: Robinson, 207.

32 “The city is deserted”: TR Sr. to MBR, July 10, 1873.

33 “just my ideal”: E to TR Sr., Mar. 6, 1875 (FDRL).

33 Morning prayers on the sofa: TR, Autobiography, 13-14.

33 Lessons on climbing trees: Robinson, 8.

33 Preachment on accepting the love of others: ibid., 88.

33 “I always believe in showing affection”: TR Sr. to B, July 31, 1868.

33 TR Sr. on unselfishness: Robinson, 88.

34 Hatred of idleness: TR, Autobiography, 11-12.

34 “never . . . become an oyster”: TR Sr. to Mrs. J. A. Roosevelt, Dec. 25, 1851 (WSCC).

34 “I think I did it”: quoted in Putnam, 31.

34 “singular compound”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 47.

34 Fear of father: TR to Edward Sanford Martin, Nov. 26, 1900, Letters, II, 1443.

34 “Come now, and follow me”: Bunyan, 269.

34 “never was anyone so wonderful”: B reminiscences.

35 “uneasy about her back”: MSB to Susan West, Apr. 29,1858(?).

35 Care for Bamie: In a letter to Susan West dated Dec. 1858, Grandmamma Bulloch writes: “We get up and have breakfast. At ten, or half past ten, Dr. Davis comes to adjust the apparatus. Then stories must be told or stories read all of the time during the operation to keep her from crying. Under her arms, her back and chest are bathed first with water, and then alum and water to prevent chafing. Then the abscess has to be washed with castile soap and water and greased. . . . Then the Dr. puts on the apparatus again. She then has her lunch and is put to bed to take a little nap. Sometimes she sleeps, sometimes she does not. At one she is taken up and changed, takes her dinner at two, then goes out a little while if the weather is good. When she comes in again it requires constant effort to amuse her and keep her quiet. In the evening about half past seven she goes through the same process with the apparatus as in the morning except Thee fixes her instead of the Dr. Then she is put to bed and I rub her little legs until she goes to sleep.”

35 TR Sr. and Bamie: B reminiscences.

36 Charles Fayette Taylor and the “movement cure”: article in The Stethoscope (published by the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center), Dec. 1956; MSB to Susan West, Aug. 22, 1859. See also, DAB.

36 Ram’s wool for back: interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

36 Bamie’s appearance: E. Roosevelt, This Is My Story, 57.

36 “Poor little thing”: TR Sr. to MBR, May 31 [n.d.].

36 Abraham Lincoln’s lap: interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

36 TR Sr. and Bamie’s photograph: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 10, 1873.

37 “Try to cultivate”: TR Sr. to B, undated.

37 Teedie punished: TR, Autobiography, 10.

37 “When I put ’We 3’”: TR, Diaries of Boyhood, 11.

37 Ellie gives away his coat: E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, IX.

37 “ardent” blue eyes: Parsons, 18.

37 “great little home-boy”: Robinson, 45.

37 “quiet patrician air”: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 14, 1869.

38 “My mouth opened wide”: TR to MBR, Apr. 28,1868, Letters, I, 3. This is the earliest known letter by TR.

38 TR’s natural history collection: TR, “Record of the Roosevelt Museum” (TRC).

38 TR Sr. walks the floor with TR: TR, Autobiography, 15; TR to Edward Sanford Martin, Nov. 26, 1900, Letters, II, 1443.

39 Influence of Hilborne West: Robinson, 54.

40 CVS goes to the kitchen: TR Sr. to MBR, Aug. 28, 1853.

40 “careful . . . in chance acquaintances”: TR Sr. to E, Jan. 6, 1877 (FDRL).

2. LADY FROM THE SOUTH

With few exceptions almost everything published about Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt has been superficial and misleading. It is mainly in her own unpublished correspondence—letters numbering in the many hundreds to her husband, children, and sister Anna—that she emerges as a person of vivid personality and great interest. Of her children’s published recollections the most sympathetic and admiring are those of Corinne in My Brother Theodore Roosevelt.

For background details on the Conscription Act and the entire substitute system during the Civil War, the author is indebted to the late Bruce Catton.

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41 Roosevelts “cling to the fixed”: N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878.

41 CVS sees move uptown as final: ibid.

42 James Alfred’s fondness for waffles: reminiscences of his son Emlen, private collection of Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt.

42 Claes Martenszen known as Shorty: Cobb, 9.

42 Rev. Archibald Stobo arrives at Charleston: Pringle, 8; also Wallace, 57.

43 “even a French strain of blood”: B reminiscences.

43 Mystery surrounding Archibald Bulloch’s grave: Harden, 55.

43 Bulloch family history can be found in The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XV, 1907; J. G. B. Bulloch, A History and Genealogy of the Families of Bulloch and Stobo and of Irvine of Cults; B reminiscences; and in the biographical notes provided by Robert Manson Myers in his monumental The Children of Pride.

44 “The relationships in Savannah”: Anna Gracie to MBR, Apr. 8, 1858.

44 Background on Roswell has been drawn from Leckie, Georgia; Martin, Roswell; and Temple, First Hundred Years.

45 “Exposure to cold and rain”: quoted in Temple, 109.

45 Barrington Hall: Like Bulloch Hall, indeed like most of the old Roswell mansions, Barrington Hall still stands, looks very much as it did in Mittie’s day.

46 Corinne Elliott Hutchison lost on the Pulaski: Myers, Children of Pride, 1559.

46 Story of Bear Bob: TR, Autobiography, 7.

46 “It was all so picturesque”: B reminiscences.

46 Bulloch slaves: Seventh Census of U.S., 1850, Georgia Slave Schedule.

47 Daddy Luke, Mom Charlotte, Toy, and Bess: B reminiscences.

47 Daniel Stuart Elliott kills his “little shadow”: ibid.

47 Battle between the slave and the cougar: TR, Hunting Trips, 22-23.

47 Duel with Tom Daniell: Gamble, 249-56.

48 Gilbert Moxley Sorrel “the best staff officer”: quoted in Myers, Children of Pride, 1682.

48 “In the roomy old home”: Robinson, 10.

48 “none . . . had any particular education”: B reminiscences.

49 “more moonlight-white”: Robinson, 18.

49 Friends’ descriptions of Mittie: condolence letters to B, Feb. 1884 (TRC).

49 Margaret Mitchell’s visit to Roswell: Atlanta Journal, June 10, 1923.

50 TR Sr.’s first visit to Roswell: B reminiscences.

50 “Does it not seem strange”: MBR to TR Sr., June 9, 1853.

51 “I have never interfered”: MSB to TR Sr., May 21, 1853.

51 “I promised to tell you”: MBR to TR Sr.; also quoted in Robinson, 13-14.

51 “promised to ride back with Henry Stiles”: MBR to TR Sr., July 27, 1853; also quoted in Robinson, 14.

52 Dancing past midnight, world “without kisses”: MBR to TR Sr., Sept. 22, 1853.

52 “it is a southern young lady”: quoted in Putnam, 16.

52 “Capricious”: MBR to TR Sr., Sept. 27, 1853.

52 “It may be a southern idea”: MBR to TR Sr., Oct. 12, 1853.

52 “how are you going to behave”: MBR to TR Sr., Nov. 13, 1853.

53 “how to do the thing”: MBR to TR Sr., Oct. 12, 1853.

53 Baker recollections: Mitchell interview, Atlanta Journal, June 10, 1923.

53 “much else . . . unfortunate”: B reminiscences.

54 “I do not think she will get strong”: MSB to TR Sr., 1855.

54 “Darling, it would be impossible”: MBR to TR Sr., May 1, 1855.

54 “You have proved that you love me”: MBR to TR Sr., May 2, 1855.

54 “dreariness reigning everywhere”: TR Sr. to MBR, May 1, 1855.

54 “bed does not offer”: TR Sr. to MBR, May 6, 1855.

55 Sister Anna laments separation: July 1, 1854; Sept. 1854.

56 Grandmamma’s account of TR’s birth: MSB to Susan West, Oct. 28, 1858; also partly quoted in Putnam, 22-23.

56 Baby doing splendidly: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 1 and Nov. 3, 1858.

57 “Are me a soldier laddie?”: Anna Gracie to MBR, Sept. 9, 1861.

57 Mittie hangs a Confederate flag: TR denied any truth to the story in a letter to Rev. J. L. Underwood. See Underwood, 216.

57 Grandmamma wishes to be buried in a common grave: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 16, 1861.

57 Mittie and Anna send packages: B reminiscences; also MSB to Susan West, Dec. 18, 1862.

58 Letter from Irvine: quoted, MSB to Susan West, Feb. 10, 1863.

58 Mittie breaks with traditional Saturday dinners: Dec. 15, 1861, she writes to TR Sr.: “I went down [to his fathers house] yesterday to dinner but, Thee, something occurred there which has made me determine not to dine there again . . . I felt my blood boil . . . I could not touch another mouthful. . . Thee, I wish I could see you tonight.”

58 “I should hate to have married into them”: Abbott, Letters of Archie Butt, 278-79.

58 “You know he does not feel as we do”: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 29, 1862.

59 TR Sr. helps with anti-war rally: Churchill, 126.

60 TR Sr. “felt that he had done a very wrong thing”: B reminiscences.

60 Corinne sees influence on TR: interview, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

60 War game in Central Park: B reminiscences.

60 Prays for Almighty to “grind . . . troops to powder”: Robinson, 17.

60 “poor mechanics” oppose draft: MSB to Susan West, July 14, 1863.

60 “I would never have felt satisfied”: TR Sr. to MBR, Jan. 1, 1862.

60 “Teedie was afraid” of a bear: MBR to TR Sr., Nov. 13, 1861.

61 “You must not. . . get sick”: TR Sr. to MBR, Dec. 6, 1861.

61 Mittie has “hands full”: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 18, 1861.

61 Up “six or seven times”: MBR to TR Sr., Dec. 9, 1861.

61 “children deserted by their papa”: MBR to TR Sr., Nov. 13, 1861.

62 TR Sr. goes to the White House: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 7, 1861.

62 Mistaken for Lincoln at church: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 10, 1861.

62 Shops for Mrs. Lincoln’s hat: Robinson, 26.

62 TR Sr.’s account of the White House ball is contained in two letters to Mittie, Feb. 5 and Feb. 6, 1862.

63 Gaining political experience: TR Sr. to MBR, Dec. 6,1861.

63 “utter inability of congressmen”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 19.

63 “The delays were so great”: TR Sr. to MBR, Jan. 1,1862; also quoted in Robinson, 22-23.

63 Forty-eight-hour adventure in Virginia: TR Sr. to MBR, Oct. 14, 1862; also quoted in Robinson, 30-31.

64 “hope you will take a good long nap”: TR Sr. to MBR, Dec. 19, 1861.

64 TR Sr. arranges for Grandmamma to get through the lines: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 14 and Mar. 1, 1862.

64 Wishes he had kept a diary: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 27, 1862.

65 “Tell Bamie”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 10, 1861.

65 Death of Willie Lincoln: TR Sr. to MBR, Feb. 21, 1862.

65 “I wish we sympathized together”: TR Sr. to MBR, Mar. 2, 1862.

65 “Thee is a good young man”: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 15, 1862.

65 Mittie risking life or reason: MSB to Susan West, June 23, 1863.

66 Grandmamma on the Russian Ball: MSB to Susan West, Nov. 9, 1863.

66 “too much gaiety”; downstairs, carriages at the door: MSB to Susan West, Dec. 30, 1863.

67 Mrs. Burton Harrison’s views on Mittie: Harrison, 278-79.

68 Mittie’s exchange with Hay: B reminiscences.

68 “nothing more like a Roosevelt than a Roosevelt wife”: interview with Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt.

68 “If she was only a Christian”: MSB to Susan West, Dec. 15, 1863.

69 TR Sr. preferred Mittie in white: letter dated Dec. 27, 1861.

69 Bursts of housekeeping: MSB to Susan West, Jan. 9, 1863.

69 Mittie more economical: TR Sr. to MBR, Jan. 23, 1862.

70 Thinks of her as “one of my little babies”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 16, 1873.

70 “loving tyrant”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Jan. 12, 1873.

70 “just received your letter”: TR to MBR, Apr. 28, 1868, Letters, I, 3.

70 Mittie amused by prayer: TR, Autobiography, 13.

70 Takes Bamie to theater: MSB to Susan West, Feb. 8, 1864.

70 “devotion wrapped us round”: Robinson, 18.

3. GRAND TOUR

Unless otherwise indicated this chapter has been drawn from TR’s boyhood diaries for the years 1869 and 1870, the originals of which are in the Theodore Roosevelt Collection. Background on James D. Bulloch and the building of the Alabama has come from Rush and Woods, Official Records; Kell, Recollections; Meriwether, Semmes; and from Bulloch’s own Secret Service.

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71 Scotia fastest ship to Europe: N.Y. Times, July 25, 1866.

71 Fellow passengers: ibid., May 13, 1869.

71 Sillerton Jackson: Wharton, Age of Innocence, 10.

72 “I basked in the happiness”: Kaplan, 42.

72 “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar”: Edel, 304.

72 Rhyme by CVS: (TRB).

73 Mittie meets Mr. St. John: Robinson, 42.

73 “It was one wild scene of commotion”: MBR to Anna Gracie, May 1869.

74 “Strange child!”: ibid.

74 Irvine’s secret return: Robinson, 36-37.

74 “You have no idea of my enthusiasm”: MBR to Anna Gracie, undated.

75 Richard Henry Dana’s impression of James D. Bulloch: To Dana it seemed a great shame that men of the caliber of Captain Bulloch had to give up careers in the Navy in order to make a better living. “By night, I walk deck for a couple of hours with the young captain,” Dana wrote. “After due inquiries about his family in Georgia, and due remembrance of those of his mother’s line whom we loved, and the public honored... the fascinating topic of the navy, the frigates and the line-of-battle ships and little sloops, the storms, the wrecks, and the sea fights, fill up the time. He loves the navy still, and has left it with regret; but the navy does not love her sons as they love her. On the quarter-deck at fifteen, the first in rank of his year, favored by his commanders, with service in the best vessels, making the great fleet cruise under Morris, taking part in the actions of the Naval Brigade on shore in California, serving on the Coast Survey, a man of science as well as a sailor—yet what is there before him, or those like him, in our navy?” (To Cuba and Back, 13-14.)

75 Bulloch like Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome: TR, Autobiography, 14.

75 “When civilization . . . fighting a last battle”: Donald, 374.

75 Response in British press: London Times, May 25, June 11, 14, and 17, 1869.

76 “Father, did Texas . . . annex itself’: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 11, 1869.

76 Heroes in books and among southern kinsfolk: TR, Autobiography, 30.

76 Talks of Irvine in speech at Roswell: N.Y. Times, Oct. 21, 1905.

78 “as valiant... a soul as ever lived”: TR, Autobiography, 14-15.

78 TR’s influence on James D. Bulloch: TR to MBR, Sept. 14, 1881, Letters, I, 52. “I have persuaded him to publish a work which only he possesses the materials to write,” TR reported proudly to his mother.

78 Furness Abbey: background from Lefebure, English Lake District; details of the Roosevelt visit from MBR’s long letter to Anna Gracie dated June 3, 1869.

80 “on magic ground”: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 11, 1869.

80 TR Sr. reads from Lady of the Lake: ibid.

80 Excursion on Loch Lomond: ibid.

81 “I want to learn about things, too”: ibid.

81 Sights seen at the British Museum: MBR to Anna Gracie, July 15,1869.

82 “I wore my pale-green silk”: ibid.

83 Asthma in London: TR to Edith Carow, July 10,1869, private collection of Sarah Alden Gannett.

84 TR douses candle in tumbler: MBR to Anna Gracie, July 15, 1869.

84 Teedie “decidedly better”: ibid.

85 “A course of travel of this sort”: Forbes, 12-13.

85 “a token of some future potency”: Edel, 296.

86 “lovely times when . . . not obliged to think of sculpture or painting”: Robinson, 49.

86 Long-distance hikes: The figures quoted, from TR’s diaries, are substantiated by other references. Aug. 16, 1869, TR Sr. writes to Anna Gracie, “Teedie and Ellie have walked today thirteen miles each and are very proud of their performance, although Teedie has been farther several times.” (Quoted in Putnam, 63.)

87 Details on the Rigi-Kulm: Baedeker, Switzerland (1869).

87 “Rose immediately”: MBR diary, Sept. 4, 1869.

88 “He takes a great deal of interest now”: MBR to Anna Gracie, June 11, 1869.

91 “Now, darling, this is one of the greatest works of art”: Robinson, 48.

91 “We are going to commence vigorously”: MBR to Anna Gracie, [n.d.] 1869.

4. A DISEASE OF THE DIREST SUFFERING

In addition to material from the Roosevelt papers this chapter is based on extensive interviews with asthmatics, the parents of asthmatics, and physicians specializing in the treatment of asthma. Those technical writings that have been most helpful include Kemp, Understanding Bronchitis and Asthma; Travis, Chronic Illness in Children; Knapp, “The Asthmatic Child and the Psychosomatic Problem of Asthma”; Knapp, “The Asthmatic and His Environment”; and Knapp, Mathé, and Vachon, “Psychosomatic Aspects of Bronchial Asthma.”

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93 Asthma as a family affliction: see essay by Miriam Pachacki in Travis, 189-94; Liebman, Minuchin, and Baker, “The Use of Structural Family Therapy in the Treatment of Intractable Asthma.”

94 “genetic predisposition” already noted: Rosenblatt, “History of Bronchial Asthma,” in Weiss and Segal, 11.

95 “neurotic character of the complaint”: Thorowgood, 35.

95 Work by Laënnec: Rosenblatt, in Weiss and Segal, 9.

95 Findings of Joshua Bicknell Chapin: Chapin, 13-14.

96 Findings of Henry Hyde Salter: Salter, 33-34.

96 “Organs are made for action”: ibid., 102.

97 Ways to avert an attack: Chapin, 16; Rosenblatt, in Weiss and Segal, 10.

97 Salter on the use of tobacco: Salter, 120-21.

97 Agony of an asthmatic attack: interviews with Cort Sutton and Edward T. Hall. Of published accounts of the anxieties experienced, the finest by far is still that written by Salter more than a century ago, On Asthma, 61.

98 “If I were drowning”: interview with Edward T. Hall.

98 “wretched,” “suffered much”: TR to Edward Sanford Martin, Nov. 26, 1900, Letters, II, 1443; Autobiography, 15.

98 “nobody seemed to think I would live”: TR quoted in N.Y. World, Nov. 16, 1902.

98 Smokes a cigar: this treatment also described in MBR’s Oct. 3,1869, letter to Anna Gracie.

98 “Poor little Teedie is sick again”: quoted in Putnam, 64.

99 Bronchial tubes in spasm: see Weiss, Bronchial Asthma.

99 “everything under . . . turned to lead”: interview with Mrs. John Curtiss.

101 Interplay of emotions and the asthmatic “habit”: see especially Pachacki, in Travis, 189-94; Kemp, 28.

101 “It isn’t that the emotions . . . are different”: Kemp, 33.

102 Experiment with house dust: Knapp, Mathé, and Vachon, in Weiss and Segal.

102 “We tend to use what is available”: Pachacki, in Travis, 190.

103 “suppressed cry for the mother”: Travis, 168-71; Knapp, in Schneer, 245.

103 TR Sr.’s absence during the Civil War: “the syndrome of the absent father” is described by Pachacki, in Travis, 191.

104 Hurried departure from Berlin: Robinson, 45.

105 Grandmamma’s description of the departure for Saratoga and the first known mention of the word “asthma” in the Roosevelt papers are contained in her letter to Susan West, June 22, 1863.

105 “periodicity”: Salter, 35.

105 Sunday a day “we children did not enjoy”: TR, Autobiography, 8.

105 The story of TR and the “zeal” is from Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 19-21, and was written in cooperation with TR. Yet, curiously, in one of his own essays, “The Bible and the People” (Works, XIII, 647-48), TR tells the story as though it had happened to another little boy.

109 “let them that are most afraid”: Bunyan, 294.

109 Asthma lends a kind of power: see Liebman, Minuchin, and Baker, “The Use of Structural Family Therapy in the Treatment of Intractable Asthma.”

109 “A hanging—how long does that take?”: interview with Cort Sutton.

110 Life as a battle: Travis, 174-75.

110 “We enjoy fine music”: quoted in Miller, Nostalgia, 189.

110 Proust’s case: see especially Knapp, “The Asthmatic and His Environment.”

111 Salter on the asthmatics future life: Salter, 18.

111 Making the child “a participant, not a spectator”: Travis, 183.

111 Horseback riding as therapy: Thorowgood, 64.

5. METAMORPHOSIS

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112 Red Cloud on Fifth Avenue, eight-hour day, East River Bridge: N.Y. Times for June 1870.

113 “without imminent danger of losing caste”: Nevins and Thomas, 246.

113 Heat wave: N.Y. Times, July 1870. Thirty-five people died of heat prostration in the city in one day (July 19).

113 French troops singing: Longworth, 20.

113 CVS anxious about Bamie’s safety: TR Sr. to B, [n.d.] 1870.

113 TR “peculiarly well”: TR Sr. to B, July 20, 1870.

114 “I am away with Teedie again”: TR Sr. to B, undated.

114 “Do not let them spoil you”: TR Sr. to B, Aug. 15, 1870.

114 “Your mother came back”: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 1, 1870.

114 “The spasm yielded”: MBR to B, Sept. 5, 1870.

114 “bad news from your mother”: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 6, 1870.

115 “You must make your body”: Robinson, 50.

115 Sessions at Woods gymnasium: interview with John Wood, N.Y. World, Jan. 24, 1904.

115 “widening his chest”: Robinson, 50.

115 Impact of “The Flight of the Duchess”: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 39-40.

116 Humiliated by boys in Maine: TR, Autobiography, 30-31.

116 “he did not think a sugar diet was good for me”: TR to Quentin Roosevelt, Nov. 4, 1914, Letters, VIII, 829.

116 Bamie’s Saturdays with TR Sr.: B reminiscences.

117 “Menu as usual”: July 11, 1872.

117 Fox the face of God: Robinson, 23.

118 Incident of the dead seal: TR, Autobiography, 16.

118 Favorite reading: ibid., 17-19.

118 “Unroll the world’s map”: Reid, Scalp Hunters, 7.

119 “What with the wild gallops”: ibid., 19.

119 “chain of destruction”: Reid, Boy Hunters, 105.

119 “About noon”: ibid., 333.

119 Uncle Hilborne introduces TR to Darwin: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 38.

119 At the Academy “every spare moment”: TR to TR Sr., Sept. 18, 1872, Letters, I, 6.

119 Hilborne “talked science”: quoted in Putnam, 78-79.

120 Studying English, French, German, and Latin: TR to Anna Gracie, July 7, 1872, Letters, I, 6.

120 Summers “the special delight”: Robinson, 51.

120 Teedie lives “a life apart”: ibid., 36.

120 Newborn squirrels and tree frog: TR, “Notes on Natural History,” Aug. 1872 (TRC).

120 “the loss to science”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 8.

120 Expedition to Paul Smiths: TR, diary, Aug. 1871 (TRC).

121 TR’s contributions to the museum: Third and Fourth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History.

121 “stuffer” John G. Bell: Herrick, 253; Adams, Audubon, 461; TR, “My Life as a Naturalist,” Works, V, 385-86.

121 First gun: TR, Autobiography, 20-21.

121 Spectacles open “an entirely new world”: ibid.

122 Sees birds on the Nile: TR, diary, Dec. 3, 1872; Jan. 8, 1873 (TRC).

122 Kills first bird, Dec. 13: TR, diary (TRC).

123 TR Sr. rescues yellow jacket: MBR, diary, Aug. 27, 1869 (TRC).

123 “Father and I” shoot eighteen birds: TR, diary, Dec. 31, 1872 (TRC).

123 “eyes sparkling with delight”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Feb. 3, 1873.

123 The look of the Great Prairies: TR, diary, Dec. 3, 1872 (TRC).

123 “serious work” the “chief zest”: TR, Autobiography, 22.

123 Comic figure on a donkey: Robinson, 57; B reminiscences.

124 TR Sr. has trouble keeping up: Robinson, 57.

124 “The sporting is injurious to my trousers”: Robinson, 60.

124 Skinning procedure was the same then as now. See Labrie, Amateur Taxidermist.

125 “traveler is a perfect king”: quoted in Bull and Lorimer, 44.

125 TR Sr. reads Egyptian history: Robinson, 58.

125 “back to old Bible times”: quoted in Putnam, 91.

125 Circassian lady and TR Sr.: TR, diary, Dec. 7, 1872 (TRC).

126 Mittie relishes weather and privacy: MBR to Anna Gracie, Jan. 12,1873.

126 “In such a climate”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Feb. 3, 1873.

126 Henry Adams on the Nile: Ford, Letters of Henry Adams.

126 “The children have gone to bed”: MBR to Anna Gracie, Jan. 12, 1873

126 Aboard the Aboul Irdan: copy of the original contract between TR Sr. and Antonio Sapienza, dragoman, Dec. 10, 1872 (WSCC).

126 “nicest, coziest, pleasantest little place”: TR, diary, Dec. 12, 1872 (TRC).

126 Harvard men and Clift family: B reminiscences.

126 “Sometimes we sail head foremost”: Robinson, 57.

127 “as we go for the entirely different life”: quoted in Putnam, 82.

127 “Our life on board”: E to Archibald Gracie, Dec. 15,1872 (FDRL).

127 Moonlight expedition to Philae: TR, diary, Jan. 18, 1873 (TRC).

127 Bamie and Mittie: B reminiscences; interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

128 There was an old fellow named Teedie”: E to Archibald Gracie, Sept. 5, 1873 (FDRL).

128 Visit with Emerson: Robinson, 63.

128 Ellen Emerson’s impression: quoted in Rusk, Emerson, 470.

128 New Year’s party: ibid., 59; also C to Edith Carow, Feb. 1, 1873.

129 Flying the Stars and Stripes: E to Archibald Gracie, Dec. 15, 1872 (FDRL).

129 CVS Roosevelt estate as high as $7 million: W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., and Corinne Robinson Alsop to Hermann Hagedorn, Dec. 1954 (TRB); as low as $3 million: P. James Roosevelt to the author.

130 Cost of Nile winter: original contract previously cited (WSCC).

130 Union Square house demolished: Nevins and Thomas, 422.

130 “If one allowed himself to dwell”: quoted in Putnam, 91.

131 Total birds killed: TR to Anna Gracie, Feb. 9, 1873.

PART TWO

6. UPTOWN

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135 Fighting loneliness: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 24, 1873.

135 Business from Chicago: Cobb, 51.

135 Weekend activities: TR Sr. to B, July 17 and Aug. 9, 1873.

136 “Fritz goes beautifully”: TR Sr. to B, Oct. 9, 1873.

136 Tears down plaster beams: TR Sr. to MBR, July 20,1873.

136 “can see all who pass”: TR Sr. to B, June 29, 1873.

136 Windows and showcases: Hellman, 27.

136 “I think without egotism”: TR Sr. to MBR, July 20, 1873.

136 Annual contributions: Fifth and Sixth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History.

137 Letter misdated: TR Sr. to B, July 17, ’63 [1873].

137 “so anxious to see you home”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 6, 1873.

137 Pleased with “self-denial”: TR Sr. to MBR, June 16, 1873.

137 Return of asthma: TR, diary, Feb. 22, 1873 (TRC).

137 TR Sr. pressed into service at Vienna: newspaper clippings, Robert B. Roosevelt Papers, New York Historical Society.

137 TR in the doldrums: Putnam, 101.

137 “hand tremble awfully”: TR to TR Sr., June 29, 1873, Letters, I, 11.

138 Switzerland works wonders: MBR to TR Sr., Aug. 17, 1873.

138 Panic of 1873: Nevins, Emergence of Modern America, 290-304.

138 “poor Mr. Clews”: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 24, 1873.

138 Mittie “anxious”: MBR to TR Sr., Sept. 21, 1873.

138 Mittie on shopping spree: B reminiscences.

138 New furnace going: TR Sr. to MBR, Sept. 21, 1873.

138 Carpet in port: TR Sr. to B, Sept. 24, 1873.

139 Billiard room: ibid.

139 Trouble with staircase: B reminiscences.

139 Return on Russia: N.Y. Times, Nov. 6, 1873.

139 Mittie and the family fortune: B reminiscences.

139 Interiors at 57th Street: photographs (TRB).

140 Top-floor gymnasium: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 50.

140 “boxing lessons”: E to Archibald Gracie, Nov. 16, 1873 (FDRL).

140 Teedie’s Nile specimens: Several of these, with their original cards, are at the American Museum of Natural History.

141 “All that gives me most pleasure”: TR Sr. to TR, Oct. 6, 1874.

141 The “power of being . . . focused”: Robinson, 3.

141 Schuyler on “power of concentration”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 10-11.

142 Work with Bureau of Charities, remarks to reporters: miscellaneous clippings, scrapbook (TRC).

142 Incident of the silver trowel: Hellman, 23-24.

142 “no ascetic”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 11.

142 “I can see him now”: ibid.

143 Crippled children on the dining-room table: Robinson, 5.

143 “neither spoiled by good fortune”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 52.

143 Interested in “every good thing”: ibid., 10.

143 “control the strongest affections”: ibid., 33.

143 “wish you were not so good”: MBR to TR Sr., June 2, 1873.

143 “love you and wish to please”: MBR to TR Sr., Oct. 15, 1873.

143 “mingled feelings”: B reminiscences.

144 Dancing class for forty: MBR to B, Nov. 11, 1874.

144 Sara Delano friendship: letters to B, 1876, 1877 (FDRL).

144 Mittie’s portrait: it now hangs at TRB.

144 Mittie in her finery: B reminiscences.

144 Chemical Bank weathers the panic: According to History of the Chemical Bank, the old institution remained “a veritable beacon light of returning confidence” in 1873 when it declared a dividend of 100 percent.

145 Roosevelt venture in Montana mining: an undated clipping from a publication called Copper (TRC).

145 TR Sr. and Alexander Graham Bell: Mrs. TR, Jr., Day Before Yesterday, 37-38.

145 TR Sr.’s various activities: TR Sr. to B, June 6, 1875.

145 “What business I shall enter”: TR to Anna Fisher (Dresden, Germany), Feb. 5, 1876, Letters, I, 14.

146 “I had a very delightful visit”: quoted in Martin, Choate, 329.

146 Times of “every special delight”: Robinson, 89.

146 Mornings on horseback, Father in the lead: ibid., 8.

147 “But, Uncle”: Parsons, 32.

147 Fanny Smith’s recollections: ibid., 18-26.

147 “How I will enjoy”: TR Sr. to B, June 6, 1875.

147 “He will be with us now”: TR to B, July 25, 1876, Letters, I, 15.

148 Ellie at times “very ill”: TR to Anna Fisher, Feb. 5, 1876, Letters, I, 14.

148 Illness thought to be epilepsy: ARL, interview with Hermann Hagedorn (TRB).

148 “congestion of the brain”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 9, 1874.

148 “What will I become”: E to TR Sr., Sept. 19, 1873 (FDRL).

149 “The attack . . . decidedly the worst”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 9, 1874.

149 “fear . . . alone at night”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 14, 1874.

149 “pleasure to receive your letters”: TR Sr. to TR, Nov. 23, 1874.

150 “It is so funny, my illness”: E to TR, Nov. 22, 1874.

150 “scarce know how”: TR Sr. to MBR, Nov. 27, 1874.

150 “not had a respectable suit”: quoted in E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, 6.

150 “Dear Old Governor”: E to TR Sr., Mar. 6, 1875 (FDRL); also quoted in Lash, 31-32.

151 “Yesterday, during my Latin lesson”: E to TR Sr., Oct. 1,1875 (FDRL); also quoted in E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, 6.

151 “Poor Ellie Roosevelt”: quoted in Lash, 33.

152 “just a sell my being down here”: Jan. 14,1876, quoted in E. Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game, 26.

152 “have not taken a drink”: ibid.

152 Enjoying Texas; dog for a pillow: E to TR Sr., Jan. 9 and 12, 1876 (FDRL); latter also quoted in Lash, 33-34.

7. THE MORAL EFFECT

None of the Roosevelt children, for all they wrote about their father, mentioned a thing about his political activities. Nor have any of TR’s biographers touched on this side of the family story; rather, the impression given is of a wholly apolitical patriarch. Only Jacob Riis, in his Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen, even mentions, in a sentence, the fact that TR Sr. attended the Cincinnati convention. So it has been primarily from contemporary newspapers and TR Sr.’s own correspondence that this account has been drawn.

For material on Roscoe Conkling, the author has relied on David M. Jordan’s Roscoe Conkling of New York, Donald Barr Chidsey’s The Gentleman from New York, and Gentleman Boss, the superb biography of Chester A. Arthur by Thomas C. Reeves.

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154 Robert Roosevelt’s activities: miscellaneous clippings, letters, notebooks in the Robert B. Roosevelt Papers, New York Historical Society; also DAB.

155 “Let us try some plan”: N.Y. Tribune, Aug. 28, 1877.

155 “Absolutely the only protection”: ibid.

156 TR Sr.’s fondness for The Potiphar Papers: letter to MBR, May 31,1853.

156 “While good men sit at home”: Norton, Orations, 269.

156 “the image and figure”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 51-53.

156 Grant scandals: White, Republican Era, 365-74.

156 Charles Francis Adams warns: ibid., 366.

156 Fifth Avenue Conference: N.Y. Times, May 16, 1876. See also, Garraty, Lodge, 44-47.

156 “weighty and reliable of our friends”: Ford, 273.

157 “Oh, they reenacted the moral law”: Garraty, Lodge, 47.

157 The “saving element”: N.Y. Tribune, May 17, 1876.

157 “Men whose names ring”: Boston Evening Transcript, May 16,1876.

157 “fight Conkling at all events”: quoted in Jordan, 239.

157 Ideal candidate according to Adams: Ford, 279.

158 “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism”: quoted in Jordan, 279.

158 “grandiloquent swell”: quoted in Muzzey, 61.

158 Conkling’s appearance: from a reporters account, N.Y. Commercial Gazette, June 18, 1883, quoted in Reeves, 42-43.

158 Too good-looking to be pure: Chidsey, 116-17.

159 A mind approaching genius: see Depew, 77-79.

160 Conkling thought his hour had arrived: Chidsey, 203.

160 “bail for all those fellows”: quoted in Reeves, 93.

160 Convention excitement, activities: N.Y. Sun, N.Y. Times, N.Y. Tribune, N.Y. Herald, Cincinnati Daily Gazette.

160 “You would never recognize your father”: TR Sr. to B, June 13, 1876.

161 “Carl, you won’t oppose me”: Fuess, 220.

161 TR Sr.’s attack on Conkling: Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 13, 1876. See also, Shores, 247-48.

162 Headlines: Cincinnati Daily Gazette, June 14, 1876.

162 Curtis on Conkling: quoted in Muzzey, 104.

162 “How is New York?”: quoted in Reeves, 96.

8. FATHER AND SON

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165 An “ungreased squeak”: quoted in Putnam, 78.

166 “At times he could hardly get them out”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 20.

166 Likes his ears: Fraser, “Sculpting TR.”

166 Richard Welling’s first impression: Welling, “My Classmate Theodore Roosevelt.”

166 “Sporting Calendar” entries: Aug. 21, 1875 (TRC).

166 Time lost “through sickness”: TR to MBR, Mar. 4, 1876, Letters, I, 15.

166 Bamie picks his rooms: “Theodore would prefer you decide upon and take his rooms,” TR Sr. writes B, May 22, 1876.

167 “As I saw the last of the train”: TR Sr. to TR, Sept. 28, 1876.

167 Never knew “what idleness was”: Cutler, unpublished memoir dated Sept. 18, 1901 (TRC).

167 “rather smelly room”: TR to B, June 20, 1875, Letters, I, 13.

168 TR’s description of the shrew: quoted in Cutright, 36-37.

168 Theatrically superior: Parsons, 28.

168 “If I were writing to Theodore”: quoted in Robinson, 96.

168 King Olaf, Song of Roland, Nibelungenlied: TR, Autobiography, 19, 326, 23.

168 “somewhat supercilious”: McDougall, 129-30.

168 “such fun, the most original”: Parsons, 34.

169 “and don’t frizzle her hair”: TR to C, Feb. 5, 1877, Letters, I, 23.

169 Dancing class “very orderly”: quoted in Putnam, 121.

169 “Little Pet Pussie”: Mar. 27, 1877, quoted in Robinson, 98.

169 First letter to Mittie: TR to MBR, Sept. 29, 1876, Letters, I, 16.

170 “opponents played very foul”: TR to MBR, Nov. 19, 1876, ibid., 20.

170 The “gentleman sort”: TR to B, Oct. 15, 1876, ibid., 17.

170 “antecedents”: TR to C, Nov. 26, 1876.

170 Lamson there only to enjoy himself: TR to B, Nov. 12, 1876.

170 “Take care of your morals”: quoted by TR in a letter to MBR, Mar. 24, 1878, Letters, I, 33.

170 “Sundays I have all to myself’: TR to B, Oct. 15, 1876, Letters, I, 17.

170 “never spent an unhappy day”: TR to MBR, Oct. 29, 1876, ibid., 19.

170 “not... a fellow in college”: TR to TR Sr., Oct. 22, 1876, ibid., 18.

171 “in beautiful health”: TR to MBR, Nov. 19, 1876, ibid., 20.

171 “rug, which will curl”: TR to B, Nov. 26, 1876.

172 In touch with Dr. Wyman: TR to MBR, Jan. 18, 1877, Letters, I, 22.

172 “a little asthma in November”: TR to TR Sr. and MBR, Feb. 11, 1877, ibid., 26.

172 Asthmatic children removed from home lives: see Purcell, “The Effect on Asthma in Children of Experimental Separation from the Family.”

172 “We all like his friends”: Anna Gracie to E, Jan. 5, 1877 (FDRL).

172 “He went off most cheerfully”: TR Sr. to E, Jan. 6, 1877 (FDRL).

173 Sleighing party: TR to C, Feb. 5, 1877, Letters, I, 23.

173 Cost of a year at Harvard: King, 18; also, Grant, “Harvard College in the Seventies.”

173 “send on my gun”: TR to TR Sr. and MBR, Feb. 11,1877, Letters, 1,26.

173 TR in Hayes parade: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 51-52.

174 “He talked very pleasantly”: TR Sr. to TR, Oct. 27, 1876.

174 Hayes shot at: Russell, 99.

175 Evarts proposes TR Sr. for Customhouse: Barrows, 327.

175 Evarts’ past work with TR Sr.: ibid., 469.

176 Above crass temptations: Nation, Nov. 1, 1877.

176 Collectorship and the Customhouse: see Reeves, 62-63, 67-68.

177 Melville a customs inspector at $4 a day: Howard, 284.

177 Phelps, Dodge case: see Reeves, 82-83; also Lowitt, 276-81.

178 “We look back . . . we were fools”: quoted in Reeves, 82.

178 Delmonico’s banquet: N.Y. Times, May 15,1877.

179 TR Sr. escorts Hayes on museum tour: ibid., May 16, 1877.

179 TR Sr. rides with Hayes entourage: ibid., May 17, 1877.

180 Conkling at Rochester convention: Jordan, 278-79.

180 “all excited here about politics”: quoted in Martin, Choate, 329.

180 TR Sr.’s interest in Cleopatra’s Needle: interview with W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.

180 TR Sr. leads group for Harvard visit: TR to C, June 3, 1877, Letters, I, 28.

180 Butterfly reduced to a grub: TR Sr. to B, Aug. 15, 1877.

180 Saratoga charities meeting: N.Y. Times, Sept. 8, 1877.

181 “I am clear”: Williams, Hayes, Diary.

181 “even up there they lift their skirts”: N.Y. Herald, Nov. 9, 1877.

181 “TERRIBLE CHARGES”: N.Y. Herald, Oct. 31, 1877.

181 Denounces management of city’s asylums: N.Y. Times, Oct. 31, 1877.

182 “he seemed to me another man”: Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting, 34.

182 “in the prime of vigorous manhood”: N.Y. Tribune, Oct. 30, 1877.

182 “Tell Father I am watching”: TR to B, Oct. 14, 1877, Letters, I, 29.

183 Republicans caucus in secrecy: N.Y. Times, Nov. 11, 1877.

183 Compromise reported: ibid., Dec. 5, 1877.

183 Nominees called “good men”: ibid., Dec. 7, 1877.

183 Afraid Conkling has “won the day”: TR to TR Sr., Dec. 8,1877, Letters, 1,30.

183 Conkling’s speech of Dec. 12: N.Y. Times, N.Y. Tribune, N.Y. Evening Post, Dec. 13,1877.

184 Calls TR Sr. his “bitter personal enemy”: N.Y. Tribune, Dec. 13, 1877.

184 “the end is not yet”: Williams, Hayes, Diary.

185 “uneasy about Father”: TR to B, Dec. 16, 1877, Letters, I, 31.

186 “brilliant daylight assemblages”: N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 1877.

186 “couldn’t have your appendix out then”: Wister, 17.

186 Entries from Anna Gracies diary: (TRC).

187 Schuyler note: Dec. 22, 1877 (TRC).

187 New “Private Diary”: Dec. 25, 1877 (LC).

187 Sleigh upsets: TR to B, Jan. 19,1878.

187 “sat with him some seven hours”: quoted in Putnam, 147.

187 “I was with your dear father”: Anna Gracie to TR, Feb. 8 [1878].

188 Crowd gathered: Robinson, 105.

188 “young strength . . . poured out”: ibid., 104.

188 Elliott’s account of his father’s death: (TRC).

190 Newspaper tributes: scrapbook (TRC).

191 “What a glorious example!”: condolence note (TRC).

191 “something . . . inspiring”: Robinson, 105.

191 “hard to have parted”: MBR to TR, Mar. 8, 1878.

191 “work out our own salvation”: B reminiscences.

192 “best . . . sufferings should end”: TR to Henry Minot, Feb. 20, 1878, Letters, I, 31.

192 Private anguish: Private Diary (LC).

192 Marks 69th Psalm: TR’s personal Bible (WSCC).

193 “easier for me”: TR to B, Mar. 17, 1878, Letters, I, 32.

193 “My own sweet sister”: TR to B, Mar. 3, 1878.

193 “working away pretty hard”: May 7, 1878, Private Diary (LC).

193 “as if he were present”: TR to MBR, Feb. 28, 1878, Letters, I, 32.

193 Private feelings of remorse and inadequacy: all drawn from June entries, Private Diary (LC).

194 Swinburne on Cooper’s Bluff: Robinson, 100-101.

194 Not so sad as expected: TR to C, Mar. 3, 1878, Letters, I, 32.

195 “Theodore craved”: Robinson, 102.

195 “For ye shall go out with joy”: Isaiah 55:12.

195 “we both of us had . . . tempers”: TR to B, Sept. 20, 1886 (TRB); also quoted in Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 58.

195 “Look out for Theodore”: Sewall, “Bill Sewall Remembers TR,” clipping (TRC).

195 TR Sr. strained himself: B reminiscences; Robinson, 104.

196 “talismans against evil”: Robinson, 106.

196 “‘A rare and radiant maiden’”: TR was especially fond of Poe, so this undoubtedly refers to “The Raven” (“For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—”).

PART THREE

9. HARVARD

Among the greatest of all pleasures in the research for this book has been the chance to work with material in the Harvard University Archives—photographs, scrapbooks, class records, class biographies, memorabilia of all kinds dating from the years when TR was an undergraduate. Of published works the most valuable has been the two-volume biography Charles W. Eliot, by Henry James.

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201 “You belonged to Harvard”: Thayer, 15.

201 “crescent institution”: ibid., 16.

202 Science “the firm foundation”: quoted in N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 1877.

202 Petty rules: see Morison, Three Centuries, 357-58.

202 Rule book reduced: Hawkins, 110.

202 “a deal of drudgery”: James, Eliot, II, 44.

202 “Do you think it is a wise parent”: ibid., 45.

202 Eliot and Hale motto: ibid., I, 317.

202 Looking neither left nor right: Harry Rand, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

202 Eliot was disliked: James, Eliot, I, 311.

202 “flagstaff in motion”: Wister, 20.

203 “that scoundrel King David”: Eliot, “Eliot of Harvard.”

203 Mental condition has physical origin: James, Eliot, II, 38.

203 Disapproves of baseball: ibid., 69.

203 Memorial Hall: The great building still stands, though in somewhat neglected condition. See also Whitehill, 12-14.

203 “The effect of the place”: James, The Bostonians, 208-09.

204 “Its occupant... is its master”: Martin, “Undergraduate Life.”

204 “to look at the new bookcase”: TR to B, Nov. 9, 1877, Letters, I, 30.

204 One in five thousand went to college: Putnam, 134.

205 Harvard said to offer diversity of student views and backgrounds: Thayer, Roosevelt, 15.

205 Records for the Class of 1880: Harvard Archives.

205 Three Roman Catholics: Class of 1880, Secretary’s Report, Number 1, Commencement 1880, Harvard Archives.

205 Humor anti-Irish, anti-Semitic, and mocking Negro aspirations: see Lampoon, Mar. 7, Oct. 24, and Dec. 19, 1879.

205 Scott on Harvard “temper”: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

206 Asthmatics excused from chapel: William Hooper, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

207 Younger faculty recruited by Eliot: James, Eliot, I, 254-55.

207 Students and professors a different species: Santayana, “The Academic Environment at Harvard.”

207 “Don’t take it upon yourself”: Crimson, Oct. 6, 1876.

207 “We ask but time to drift”: quoted in Pringle, 32.

207 “My system was simple”: Garraty, Lodge, 51-52.

208 “A boy could go completely to pieces”: Harold Fowler, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

208 “Students got drunk”: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

208 Eliot on “intemperance”: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

208 “unwholesome experiment”: Martin, “Undergraduate Life.”

209 Rand’s recollections: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

209 “pleasant doors”: Wister, 19-20.

209 Crimson on “digs”: Sept. 28, 1876.

210 Class of 1880 known as Bacon’s class: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

210 Thayer’s recollections: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

210 “Funnily enough”: TR to MBR, Oct. 8, 1878, Letters, I, 34.

210 “delighted” to be in the Porcellian: TR to B, Nov. 10, 1878, Letters, I, 35.

211 “send my silk hat”: TR to MBR, Jan. 11, 1880, Letters, I, 42.

211 Jackson on splendor at 57th Street: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

211 Few could afford a horse: Grant, “Harvard College in the Seventies.”

211 TR’s financial position and expenses for 1877,1878, 1879, and 1880 are all to be found in his private diaries (LC).

211 Eliot’s salary: Eliot, “Eliot of Harvard.”

212 “keep the fraction constant”: TR, Autobiography, 26.

213 “ready to join anything”: Richard Saltonstall, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

213 Academic achievement: for a complete account of TR’s grades at Harvard, see Letters, I, 25-26.

213 “sort of spluttered”: George H. Palmer, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 “See here, Roosevelt”: Wilhelm, 35.

214 Saltonstall remembered no caged animals, nothing unusual: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 TR chiefly “a joke”: Thayer, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 “‘whether he is the real thing’”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 21.

214 Foresees future professor of history: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

214 Martha Cowdin (Bacon) recollections: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

215 Rose Lee on TR dancing: ibid.

215 “Old Dick . . . on par with the Roosevelts”: Diary, Oct. 1, 1879 (LC).

215 Welling’s account of the skating expedition: “My Classmate.”

216 Rage at drunken classmates imitation: William Hooper, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

216 Wister’s version of the boxing match: Wister, 4-5.

216 N.Y. Times account: Mar. 23, 1879.

217 Spalding’s denunciation of the story: letter to the editor in Time, Dec. 14, 1931 (TRC).

217 “As athletes we are about equal”: Diary, July 30, 1879 (LC).

217 “always thought that he could do things better”: quoted in Putnam, 100.

217 “Only one gentleman stands ahead of me”: TR to B, Oct. 13, 1879, Letters, I, 41-42.

218 Words under the ink blot: A laboratory examination of the diary page was made at the authors request by the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, working with the Library’s Preservation Office.

218 “He is a disgrace”: Diary, Oct. 23, 1878.

218 “I told the clergyman”: TR to MBR, Jan. 11, 1880, Letters, I, 43.

218 “The first two or three days”: TR to MBR, Mar. 16, 1879, ibid., 37.

219 Prefers political economy to natural history: TR to MBR, Oct. 8, 1878, ibid., 33-34.

219 Blames Harvard for killing interest in natural history: TR, Autobiography, 26-27.

220 Shaler: Shaler’s inspirational powers are attested to again and again. “Students whose unimaginative lives had never carried them beyond home and prep school and Harvard Square sat in Shaler’s presence and saw the face of the earth becoming an endless wonderland,” writes Rollo Walter Brown in Harvard Yard, 106. See also William Roscoe Thayer’s memorial essay on Shaler in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine.

220 TR’s dislike for A. S. Hill: John Woodbury, Hagedorn interview (TRC).

220 Saltonstall recollection: Hagedorn interview (TRC).

220 Eliot recollection: ibid.; also Pringle interview notes (TRC).

221 Claims to have held lightweight crown: biographical sketch prepared for an Albany newspaper editor, May 1, 1884, Letters, I, 67.

221 Claims to have been in top ten percent: TR, Autobiography, 25.

221 Note to the Kaiser: Morison, Three Centuries, 427.

221 Hagedorn observations: Hagedorn interviews (TRC).

221 “the golden years”: TR, Diary, Dec. 21 1878 (LC).

221 “can’t conceive . . . possibly enjoying himself: TR, Diary, May 8, 1879 (LC).

221 “ever enjoy myself so much again”: TR, Diary, June 28, 1879 (LC).

222 Letter of Oct. 20, 1879: Letters, I, 42.

222 “I have had just as much money”: Diary, May 5, 1880 (LC).

10. ESPECIALLY PRETTY ALICE

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224 Lee and Saltonstall homesteads: Though greatly altered in appearance, the two houses still stand and amid surroundings that are very little different.

225 Leverett Saltonstall and George Cabot Lee: biographical sketches in (Harvard) Class of 1848 and Class of 1850, as well as miscellaneous clippings, Harvard Archives.

225 “safe as Lee’s vaults”: Amory, 66.

226 Atmosphere “so homelike”: TR, Diary, Oct. 18, 1878 (LC).

226 “Call me by my first name”: ibid., Nov. 28, 1878.

227 “Remember me”: TR to C, Nov. 10, 1878, Letters, I, 36.

227 “especially pretty Alice”: TR, Diary, Jan. 26, 1879 (LC).

227 “All the family . . . just lovely”: TR to B, Apr. 20, 1879, Letters, I, 38.

227 “I want you particularly”: TR to C, May 20, 1879, Letters, I, 40.

227 Summer activities at Oyster Bay: TR, Diary, entries for July 1879 (LC).

228 Class Day evening with Alice: ibid., June 20, 1879.

228 “made everything subordinate”: TR to Henry Minot, Feb. 13, 1880, Letters, I, 43.

228 “one all-absorbing object”: July 5, 1880, quoted in Putnam, 194.

228 “See that girl?” Mrs. Bacon quoted in Pringle notes (TRC).

229 Dueling pistols: Pringle interview with Mrs. Thomas Lee (a cousin of Alice’s), Pringle notes (TRC).

229 Cousin West sent for: C to Pringle, letter dated Sept. 22, 1930, Pringle notes (TRC).

230 “you mustn’t feel melancholy”: TR to MBR, Feb. 8,1880, Letters, I, 43.

230 “Alice . . . did not want to marry him”: Mrs. Bacon quoted in Pringle notes (TRC).

230 “it will be my aim . . . to endear myself”: ALR to MBR, Feb. 1880.

230 “wish I had you here”: TR to B, Mar. 1, 1880, Letters, I, 44.

231 “don’t think Mr. Lee”: TR to C, Mar. 8, 1880, ibid.

231 “invitations to all my friends”: TR to MBR, Mar. 11, 1880, ibid.

232 “brilliant prowess”: N.Y. Sun, Feb. 17, 1884.

232 Mittie’s activities: miscellaneous family correspondence; Anna Gracie’s diary for 1880 (TRC).

232 “He talked to her the whole time”: Kleeman, 101.

233 “If I had not come then”: Davis, 37.

233 “genuine intellectual power”: Parsons, 29.

233 “readiness to meet all situations”: Robinson, 18.

234 “As soon as we got here”: TR to C, Sept. 12, 1880, Letters, I, 46.

234 “Last Sunday night”: quoted in Putnam, 203.

235 “I am so glad”: E to B, Aug. 29 [1880] (FDRL).

235 Warning of heart trouble: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 63-64.

235 Asthma and colic: Putnam, 207.

235 “brown and well”: E to B, Aug. 29 [1880] (FDRL).

236 “Thee is well able”: ibid.

236 Wants no best man if not Elliott: TR to B, May 11, 1880.

236 Fanny Smith’s diary entry: Parsons, 43.

236 “Theodorelike tones”: ibid.

237 “cannot take my eyes off her”: quoted in Putnam, 209.

237 Law school urged by Uncle Rob: Hagedorn, Boys’ Life, 69.

237 “perfect dream of delight”: TR to MBR, Oct. 31, 1880, Letters, I, 47.

238 TR turning purple: C to Douglas Robinson, Feb. 10, 1881.

238 “going to Republican meetings”: ibid.

239 Law work “very interesting”: TR, Diary, Nov. 24, 1880 (LC).

239 Likes law school “very much”: ibid., Dec. 4, 1880.

239 Loves to take Alice sleighing: ibid., Dec. 22, 1880.

239 “She enjoyed it like a child”: TR Sr. to B, Feb. 18, 1871.

239 “the little inner group of people”: Wharton, Age of Innocence, 48.

240 Alice “greatly admired”: TR, Diary, Dec. 11, 1880 (LC).

241 Douglas Robinson on being married to a Roosevelt: quoted in Butt, I, 175.

241 Alice’s playing heard through the wall: Emlen Roosevelt to B, Feb. 21, 1881.

241 Mittie finds Alice “so companionable”: MBR to E, Dec. 25 [1880] (FDRL).

241 Wister vignette: Wister, 24.

241 “Oh, Energy, thy name is Bamie!”: TR to B, Apr. 1, 1877.

241 “Do you always have to run”: C to E, Dec. 6, 1880 (FDRL).

241 “Sometimes we succeed”: ibid.

242 “Such a lovely long talk”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 17, 1881.

242 Alice’s feelings about Bamie: ALR to B, Sept. 8, 1881.

242 Talk in Mittie’s room: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 19, 1881.

243 Alice shares TR: C to Pringle (TRC); also Pringle, 49-50.

11. HOME IS THE HUNTER

Unless shown, the details of Elliott’s adventures in India and Ceylon, as well as quotations from his letters home, are from Hunting Big Game in the Eighties, a collection of his letters and journal entries from this period that was compiled and edited by his daughter, Eleanor. The observations of John S. Wise are from his Recollections of Thirteen Presidents.

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245 “Is Bamie showing any signs”: E to TR, Mar. 23, 1881.

245 “have tried to make Corinne understand”: MBR to E, Aug. 7, 1881 (FDRL).

245 “Teddy brought out from London”: MBR to E, Dec. 4,1881 (FDRL).

245 Edith Carow’s party: ibid.

245 “Has not our dear Thee”: quoted in Lash, 37.

246 Letter from Evarts: original (FDRL).

247 “Three hours after the blood had been running”: E to TR, Mar. 6,1881.

248 “brave, old Heart of Oak Brother”: E to TR, Apr. 24,1881.

248 “It is the life”: ibid.

248 Alice worried: B to E, Dec. 7, 1880 (FDRL).

248 “Poor dear Teddy”: MBR to E, Dec. 7, 1880 (FDRL).

248 “This is your last hunt”: TR to E, Dec. 6, 1880 (FDRL).

248 Servants pleased to be remembered: MBR to E, Aug. 7, 1881 (FDRL).

248 Upset by wretchedness: quoted in Lash, 38.

248 Speculates on Age of Chivalry: TR to B, Aug. 21, 1881, Letters, I, 50.

248 “We will all live there happily”: E to TR, Mar. 23, 1881.

248 “It delights me beyond bounds”: ibid.

249 “How proud of you”: E to TR, Aug. 8, 1881.

249 “Do take care of yourself”: E to TR, Apr. 24, 1881.

249 Not “‘our way’”: quoted in Lash, 39.

249 Letter from Aunt Ella Bulloch: Jan. 8, 1882 (FDRL).

250 Anna Gracie worries over Elliott: Anna Gracie diary, Mar. 30, Apr. 5, 1882 (TRC).

250 “dear mother . . . persuaded”: quoted in Davis, 54.

250 “My little heart”: E to C, Nov. 29, 1881 (FDRL).

251 “Why if you don’t take him”: E to C, June [n.d.] 1881 (FDRL).

251 “such a loving, tender brother”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 19, 1881.

251 “If you were my brother”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 31, 1881.

251 “The respectable . . . young men”: N.Y. Tribune, Oct. 13, 1882.

251 “comfort child”: MBR to E, undated note (FDRL).

252 Mittie’s “slight unevenness”: E to Douglas Robinson, May 9,1881 (FDRL).

252 Remarks about Mittie by Mrs. Alsop and W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.: interview transcript, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

253 “I was very proud”: Kleeman, 129-30.

253 “I am very jealous”: MBR to E, Dec. 4, 1881 (FDRL).

253 “My darling son”: MBR to E, undated (FDRL).

254 “they mistook me for you”: TR to E, Nov. 21, 1880 (FDRL).

254 Hunt’s impression: Harvard Club Transcript (TRC).

254 “If he noticed me at all”: Parsons, 29.

254 “drank like a fish”: from notes made by Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt after a conversation with Edith Carow Roosevelt, Jan. 1941, courtesy of P. James Roosevelt.

255 “can’t get it into words”: TR to B, Aug. 21, 1881, Letters, I, 50.

255 Indebtedness to Uncle Jimmie Bulloch: see Introduction, Naval War (Works, VI).

255 “that foolish grit”: quoted in Lash, 37.

255 Elliott’s unpublished short story: typescript (FDRL).

256 Anna Hall admired by Browning: Lash, 50.

256 “I am honestly delighted”: TR to C, July 1, 1883, Letters, I, 61.

256 “to marry and settle down”: TR to MBR, July 8, 1883, Letters, I, 62.

257 “You must be very pure”: Anna Gracie to E, July 1, 1883 (FDRL).

257 “old Indian trouble”: quoted in Lash, 46.

257 “I know I am blue”: ibid.

257 $10,000 in Wyoming ranch: Putnam, 334.

257 $20,000 in G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Pringle, 54.

258 “one of the most brilliant social events”: quoted in Lash, 47.

12. POLITICS

The remembrances and observations of George Spinney and Isaac Hunt quoted in this chapter are from an interview conducted by Hermann Hagedorn at the Harvard Club, New York City, in 1923, and are referred to below as Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC). For background on Jay Gould and his conquests, Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons has been especially useful.

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260 “capable of conduct and utterances”: DAB.

260 “intended to be one of the governing class”: TR, Autobiography, 59.

260 “full of purpose to live”: James, Bostonians, 137.

260 “could join only the Republican Party”: TR, Autobiography, 58.

260 “one thing I like particularly”: C to Douglas Robinson, Mar. 14, 1881.

260 “saloon keepers, horsecar conductors”: TR, Autobiography, 59.

261 “I feel that I owe”: TR to Joseph Choate, Nov. 10, 1881, Letters, I, 55.

261 Depew at Delmonico’s: Depew, 158-60.

261 Uncle Rob and Michael Murphy: Pringle, 69-70.

261 “We hailed him as the dawn”: Bigelow, 276.

261 “All my friends”: TR, Diary, Oct. 22, 1881 (LC).

261 Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn (TRC); also quoted in Pringle, 57.

261 “It is very plain”: Emlen Roosevelt to B, July 13, 1876.

261 “did not relish the personnel”: Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn (TRC); also Pringle, 57.

261 Jake Hess, Joe Murray, the decor at Morton Hall: see TR, Autobiography, 59-60.

262 “Not to insist on the spoils”: TR quoted in Shannon, 15.

262 “They rather liked the idea”: ibid.

262 TR’s views of other assemblymen: from TR’s Legislative Diary, Appendix I, Letters, II.

263 Views on Curtis, Kruse, Kelly, Hunt, O’Neil: TR, Autobiography, 67-69.

264 “What on earth”: Nevins, Cleveland, 139.

264 “came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult”: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

264 N.Y. Sun on TR: Jan. 25, 1882.

265 N.Y. World on TR: Apr. 15, 1883

265 “he got right in with people”: Sewall, 6.

265 “He threw each paper”: Hudson, 144-45.

267 “As a matter of fact”: TR, Autobiography, 82-83.

267 Gompers: DAB; Putnam, 301.

268 “I have always remembered”: TR, Autobiography, 83.

268 “aggressiveness”: quoted in Harbaugh, 40.

269 Gould spreads his stocks on the desk: Myers, Great American Fortunes, 491.

269 Gould unacceptable socially: Josephson, 205.

269 James Alfred Roosevelt and Gould: Cobb, 55.

269 Gould and the Manhattan Elevated: Josephson, 209-12; Putnam, 261-72.

270 Hunt puts TR on to Westbrook: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

270 TR sees Loewenthal: ibid.

270 “willing to go to the very verge”: TR, Autobiography, 79.

271 N.Y. World view: Oct. 18, 1881.

271 Advice from family friend: TR, Autobiography, 80.

272 “I am, aware”: N.Y. Times, Apr. 7, 1882; also, Works, XIV, 7-11.

272 Clerk’s tally: Putnam, 266.

273 Bribes: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

273 “He may have been”: TR, Autobiography, 79.

273 Gould and Cyrus Field: Josephson, 211.

274 “The Governor would sit large”: Hudson, 146-47.

275 “like wild geese without a gander”: Hunt, Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

276 “a pulpit concealed on his person”: unidentified clipping, Scrapbook (TRC).

276 “I have to say with shame”: N.Y. World, Mar. 3, 1883; also quoted in Putnam, 285.

277 “Never indulge yourself”: quoted in Wister, 21.

278 Reactions of N.Y. Evening Post and World: Scrapbook (TRC).

278 “The difference between our party and yours”: quoted in Putnam, 287-88; also, full speech in Works, XIV, 16-21.

279 N.Y. Observer. Mar. 10, 1883.

279 “Now, Theodore”: quoted in Pringle, 70.

279 Erastus Brooks incident: recalled by Assemblyman F. S. Decker (TRC).

279 Court ruling on the Cigar Bill: TR, Autobiography, 84-85; also Harbaugh, 40-42.

280 Admirers skeptical of O’Brien support: N.Y. Times, Dec. 27, 1883.

281 Reporter notes “friends of the Administration” in Delavan lobby: N.Y. Evening Post, Jan. 2, 1884.

281 “I am a Republican”: TR to Jonas S. Van Duzer, Nov. 20, 1883, Letters, 1,63.

281 “That young fellow”: N.Y. Times, Dec. 29, 1883.

281 “most ambitious man”: Emlen Roosevelt to Hagedorn (TRC).

282 Larger employer than Carnegie: Reeves, 46.

282 Seth Low on city government: Low in Bryce, I, 650-66.

283 TR on Hubert O. Thompson: TR, Legislative Diary, Appendix I, Letters, II.

284 “we stood shoulder to shoulder”: TR, Autobiography, 67.

284 “blamelessness and the fighting edge”: ibid., 88.

284 Mark Sullivan observation: Sullivan, II, fn. 221.

284 Unwillingness to “face the rather intimate association”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jan. 28, 1909, Letters, VI, 1490.

284 “The wicked flee”: Proverbs 28:1.

284 Eliot on a man in a fight: Brown, Harvard Yard, 25.

13. STRANGE AND TERRIBLE FATE

page

285 “I have a bad headache”: TR to C, July 1, 1883, Letters, I, 61.

285 “I felt much better for it”: TR to ALR, Jan. 22, 1884, Letters, I, 64.

286 James Alfred worried: TR to E, Nov. 28, 1880 (FDRL).

286 Income and sources: TR, Diary, 1883 (LC).

286 $20,000 to Putnam: Pringle, 54.

286 “before a bright fire”: TR, Diary, Jan. 3, 1883 (LC).

286 Anna Gracies instructions: Parsons, 44-45.

287 Friends to see Alice: ibid.

287 “All of the men”: TR to ALR, Jan. 28, 1884, Letters, I, 64.

287 End to social life: The social doings of Elliott and his wife, meantime, were a pet topic in the papers. When Mrs. Astor’s ball was front-page news that January, Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt’s importance in The New York Times account was second only to that of Mrs. Astor. “Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt wore white tulle and green velvet and silver. It was made with a long train and a low neck, fastened with a diamond. Pearls and diamonds were the ornaments,” reported the Times, Jan. 22, 1884.

287 “I tried faithfully”: Riis, 36-37.

287 Disillusioned by the law: TR, Autobiography, 57.

288 “I hardly know what to do”: TR to B, Sept. 15, 1882, Letters, I, 57.

289 Remarks to Country Life: Hagedorn, Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, 7.

289 Final cost $17,000: ibid., 9.

291 Hunt’s recollections: Harvard Club Transcripts (TRC).

291 Corinne’s account of return to 57th Street: C to Pringle, Sept. 1930, Pringle notes (TRC).

292 Mittie’s death at three o’clock: TR, memorial to MBR (TRC).

292 Double funeral service: N.Y. Times, Sun, and Tribune, Feb. 17, 1884.

292 Chester A. Arthur and Bright’s disease: Reeves, 317-18.

293 Talk of criminal negligence: Mrs. Robert Bacon, Pringle interview, Pringle notes (TRC). Since Mrs. Bacon’s husband was then employed at Lee, Higginson, it is possible that the Lee family too had similar thoughts concerning Alice’s death.

293 “He does not know what he does”: quoted in Sewall, 11.

293 “bravely in the darkness”: quoted in Putnam, 389.

294 Hunts account of all-night work: Hagedorn files (TRC).

294 “I have taken up my work”: TR to Carl Schurz, Feb. 21, 1884, Letters, I, 66.

294 Schurz and the death of his wife: Fuess, 219.

294 “as sweet and gentle as ever”: C to E, Mar. 4, 1884 (FDRL).

294 Sale of 6 West 57th Street: B reminiscences.

295 “That year seems a perfect nightmare”: ibid.

295 Condolence letters; J. Bulloch cable: (TRC).

295 Alice entrusted to Bamie: B reminiscences.

295 “so few that one really cared for”: C to E, Mar. 4, 1884 (FDRL).

296 Memorial to Alice: (TRC).

14. CHICAGO

Newspapers of the late nineteenth century, in a day when it was still not possible technically to publish photographs, reported events in a vivid, pictorial style seldom found in present-day journalism; and since newspapers then were also intensely competitive and openly partisan politically, the coverage of a national convention to be found in the files of almost any great paper of the era is especially alive and colorful, filled with detail. The papers referred to for this account of the Republican National Convention of 1884 include The N.Y. Times, N.Y. Sun, N.Y. Tribune, N.Y. Herald, N.Y. Evening Post, N.Y. World, Chicago Tribune, Boston Transcript, and the Washington Post. Excerpts from various speeches have all been taken from Proceedings of the Eighth Republican National Convention Held at Chicago, Illinois, June 3, 4, 5, and 6,1884.

page

297 “Fast and thick the delegates”: N.Y. Times, June 1, 1884.

297 California delegates in the Palmer House barbershop: a composite of several newspaper accounts, but especially Chicago Tribune, May 31,1884.

298 “All were filled”: N.Y. Sun, June 1, 1884.

298 TR to Bamie: June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 71-72.

299 “Tattooed Man”: cartoon by Bernard Gillam, Puck, Apr. 16, 1884.

299 TR to Lodge: May 26, 1884, Letters, I, 70.

300 “He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur any more”: quoted in Reeves, 260.

300 Failure of Grant and Ward: Rhodes, 205.

300 Arthur transforms the White House: Reeves, 268-71.

300 Beecher endorsement: ibid., 368.

300 Orders return of $100,000: ibid., 374.

301 Harper’s Weekly on Edmunds: Feb. 2, Mar. 1, 1884.

301 State convention at Utica: for a thorough account see Putnam, 413-24.

301 Washington trip with Lodge: Lodge journal, Mar. 20,1885, Massachusetts Historical Society.

302 “We are breaking up house”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 5, 1884, Letters, I, 69.

302 To Chicago in a private car: N.Y. World, June 6, 1884.

302 Evening Post appraisal of TR: May 31, 1884.

302 Nast cartoon of TR and Cleveland: Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 19, 1884.

302 “mouth full of regular white teeth”: N.Y. Tribune, June 6, 1884.

302 Statement to the Chicago Tribune: Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1884.

302 “as if the fate of the nation”: N.Y. Herald, June 1, 1884.

303 Lodge doubts Blaine can be stopped: Lodge journal, Mar. 20, 1885, Massachusetts Historical Society.

303 “Bits of good news”: N.Y. Tribune, June 1, 1884.

303 McKinley a sign: ibid., June 3, 1884.

303 “Not for forty nominations”: Stone, Fifty Years, 150.

304 “pulled together”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 72.

304 “Many of our men”: ibid.

304 “Chicagoe” a “marvelous city”: TR to B, Sept. 2, 1880.

305 Badges cast in gold: Sullivan, II, 215.

305 “What I liked about him”: Platt, 185.

306 “The leader was Mr. George William Curtis”: Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1884.

306 Platt stroking his beard: N.Y. Times, June 4, 1884.

308 “rather dudish-looking” TR: unidentified newspaper account quoted in Foraker, 167-68.

308 “Up from the midst of the Empire State”: N.Y. Times, June 4, 1884.

308 “It was the first time”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 72.

308 TR’s speech: Proceedings, 10; also, Works XIV, 37-38.

309 N.Y. Times praise: June 4, 1884.

309 “quick, watchful, rather enjoying”: N.Y. Tribune, June 6, 1884.

310 Andrew White’s scorn of the convention: White, Autobiography, 204.

310 “his voice rang like a trumpet”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, Letters, I, 72.

312 “It is eager, bitter, and peculiar”: Chicago Herald, quoted in Bryce, II. (Bryce thought so highly of the Herald’s coverage of the convention, thought it such a classic bit of political Americana, that he included it in the Appendix of his own classic work.)

313 “It was a tumultuous crowd”: ibid.

313 TR tries to get on stage: N.Y. Times, June 7, 1884.

313 McKinley calms the storm: Chicago Herald, quoted in Bryce, II.

314 “This is the hour”: quoted in Fuess, 286.

314 “I decline to say anything”: N.Y. World, June 7, 1884.

314 “A grave would be garrulous”: Boston Transcript, June 7, 1884.

315 Arthur pledges support, confides he does not have long to live: Reeves, 381.

315 TR’s encounter with Horace White: White, letter to N.Y. Times, Oct. 20, 1884. TR, in answer to the Times (Oct. 21), expressed surprise that any gentleman would so divulge a private conversation. He had been “savagely indignant at our defeat,” TR said, as explanation of his own behavior.

316 Pioneer Press interview and newspaper response: clippings in B’s scrapbook (TRC).

316 “The gallant young man”: N.Y. World, June 27, 1884.

316 Reaction in Boston: Nevins, Cleveland, 157.

317 Letters to the Times: N.Y. Times, June 8, 1884.

317 Putnam response: Nevins, Cleveland, 157.

317 “Mr. Lodge maintains”: William Everett quoted in Garraty, Lodge, 80.

317 Schurz advice: quoted, ibid., 81.

318 Lodge answer: July 14, 1884, Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

318 Lodge on pre-Chicago pact with TR: Lodge journal, Mar. 20, 1885, Massachusetts Historical Society.

318 “I am absolutely ignorant”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 17, 1884, Letters, I, 73.

318 “precisely the proper course”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 18, 1884, ibid., 75.

319 Chicago Tribune tribute: June 7, 1884.

319 Chicago Times tribute: quoted in the N.Y. Evening Post, June 6, 1884.

319 “first revelation of that immense pluck”: White, Autobiography, 205.

319 “You’ll know more, sir, later”: quoted in Riis, 69.

320 “I can’t help writing you”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Oct. 11, 1895, Letters, I, 484.

320 “never been able to work so well”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Aug. 12, 1884, ibid., 77.

321 “It may be that ’the voice of the people’”: TR to B, June 8, 1884, ibid., 71.

321 “the most serious crisis”: Bishop, 35-36.

322 View of Nicholas Roosevelt: N. Roosevelt, Roosevelt, 97.

322 Letter to Josephine Shaw Lowell: Feb. 24, 1882, Letters, VIII, 1425.

323 TR’s statement to the Boston Herald: see also, N.Y. World, July 21, 1884.

323 “We thought of him as a lost leader”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 55.

323 “As for Cabot Lodge”: Wister, 26.

323 “Young men like Mr. Roosevelt”: N.Y. Evening Post, July 21, 1884.

324 “Most of my friends”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 28,1884, Letters, 1,75.

324 “You would be amused”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Aug. 12, 1884, Letters, I, 77.

15. GLORY DAYS

The standard work on TR’s time in the West is Hermann Hagedorn’s Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (here referred to as Hagedorn, RBL), which was based on interviews with a number of the principals in the story and appeared in 1921. And though it is plainly flawed by Hagedorn’s almost blind adulation of TR and by the use of fictitious names for any characters presented in a bad light, it remains the single most valuable source for what was one of the most important periods in TR’s life. Hagedorn’s Bad Lands notes for the book are also part of the great Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard.

Material in this chapter concerning the influence of Remington, Wister, and TR on the overall aura of the cowboy West has been drawn chiefly from G. Edward Whites The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (1968); background for eastern investment in the cattle empire comes from Gene M. Gressley’s excellent Bankers and Cattlemen (1966). Of the several articles from North Dakota History relied upon, the most useful have been “Ranching in the Dakota Badlands,” by Ray H. Mattison, referred to here as Mattison, and “The Career of the Marquis de Mores in the Badlands of North Dakota,” by Arnold O. Goplen, referred to as Goplen.

Of TR’s own voluminous published accounts, the best is Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, which is included with Hunting Trips of a Ranchman in Volume I of the collected Works (page numbers below refer to that edition).

page

325 Clarence Day on cowboys: Day, 12.

326 TR’s recommended reading: TR, Hunting Trips, 11.

326 Warns of financial disaster: ibid., 17; also TR, Ranch Life, 290.

326 Gorringe interests: Hagedorn, RBL, 8-10.

327 Teschemacher and the Paris paper: Clay, 76.

327 Trimble and his poodle: Forbis, 216.

327 Bacon, Agassiz, the Seligmans, et al.: Gressley, Bankers.

328 “little in common with the humdrum”: TR, Ranch Life, 274.

328 “nor are the mechanics”: ibid., 278.

328 “Of course every ranchman carries”: TR, Hunting Trips, 27-28.

328 “In the hot noontide hours”: TR, Ranch Life, 309.

329 “perfect picture”: Wister, “The Young Roosevelt,” in Works, I, 260.

329 “This life has a psychological effect”: quoted in White, Eastern Establishment, 123.

329 “wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia”: ibid.

329 “a queer episode”: ibid., 132.

329 TR’s costly regalia: see Wilson, 44.

329 “having a glorious time”: TR to B, June 17, 1884, Letters, I, 73.

330 Sewall’s observations: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

330 Bad Lands terrain: TR’s own descriptions in both Hunting Trips and Ranch Life; also, Winser, The Great Northwest, the Northern Pacific Railroad’s 1883 guidebook, and Clark, The Badlands.

330 Hell with the fires out: remark attributed to General Alfred Sully, 1864.

331 “a place for stratagem”: quoted in White, Eastern Establishment, 104.

331 “What a wondrous country”: Clay, 90.

331 Large and small ranchers: Mattison.

332 “All the security he had”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 43.

332 “By Godfrey”: ibid., 36.

332 Ferris recollection: Ferris, “When Roosevelt Came to Dakota.”

332 Champagne over a tent peg: N.Y. Times, Sept. 21, 1884.

332 “It takes me only a few seconds”: Hagedorn, RBL, 61.

333 Marquis had already killed two men: Dresden, 20.

333 Wife’s income $90,000: Goplen.

333 Twenty-one thousand acres, twelve thousand sheep, salmon shipments: ibid.

334 “I like this country”: Hagedorn, RBL, 335.

334 “Why, shoot”: Dresden, 60.

334 Pleasure and vice synonymous: TR, Hunting Trips, 7.

334 “preach King Cattle”: Bad Lands Cow Boy, Feb. 7, 1884.

335 “Again and again is the fitness”: ibid., Feb. 21, 1884.

335 “There are now in the Bad Lands”: ibid., Mar. 13, 1884.

335 N.Y. Times reports on Medora and the Marquis: Sept. 21, 1884.

335 Marquis quoted in N.Y. World: Dresden, 90.

335 The château: Except for a big box elder beside the back door, the house looks today no different from what it does in old photographs and is furnished throughout just as it was. The Marquis and Madame de Mores left everything behind—trunks, children’s clothes, his books, rifles, the lead-filled walking stick, her china and watercolors. The property now belongs to the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

336 “most dignified, stately, and aristocratic”: C. O. Armstrong quoted in Goplen.

336 Madame kills bears: Bismarck Weekly Tribune, Sept. 4, 1885.

336 Langs bury Luffsey: Lang, 75.

336 TR and Marquis turned down as vigilantes: Putnam, 461.

337 “Theodore did not care for the Marquis”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 338.

337 “lost about 25 head from wolves”: TR to B, June 17,1884, Letters, I, 73.

337 TR’s share of Mittie’s trust fund: Putnam, 337.

337 Additional $26,000 in cattle: Hagedorn, RBL, 94.

337 “I designed the house myself”: Sewall, 19. (The house is gone, but the site today looks as it did in TR’s time. One can sit among the cottonwoods and look over the river to the distant plateaus and understand perfectly why he so adored the place.)

338 “Hasten forward”: Hagedorn, RBL, 101.

338 Fight in the Mingusville bar: TR, Autobiography, 125-26.

338 “gained him some reputation”: Sewall, 43.

338 “He worked like the rest of us”: ibid., 39.

338 “A man who will steal for me”: Hagedorn, RBL, 256.

338 Exchange between TR and Sewall: Sewall, 47-48.

338 “Must have a depraved idea”: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

339 “The country is growing on me”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 105.

339 Bad Lands looked the way Poe sounds: TR, Hunting Trips, 11.

339 “Nowhere . . . does a man feel more lonely”: ibid., 151-52.

339 Parkman and TR on sea of grass and being far afield from civilization: Parkman, 34; TR, Ranch Life, 274, 307.

339 Sound of the mourning dove: TR, ibid., 309-10.

339 “When the days have dwindled”: ibid., 341.

340 Edith Wharton on New York: Age of Innocence, 30-31.

340 Voice of the meadowlark: TR, Hunting Trips, 12.

341 Praise for Manitou: ibid., 28-29.

341 “and the rapid motion”: TR, Ranch Life, 329.

341 “fulfilling a boyish ambition”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 105.

341 “in our ideal ‘hero land’”: quoted in Robinson, 138.

341 “What with the wild gallops”: Reid, Scalp Hunters, 19.

342 “the best weapon I ever had”: TR, Hunting Trips, 27.

342 Lebo and TR: Hagedorn BL notes, Merrifield interview (TRC).

342 Letter to Bamie: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 179-80.

343 “I went back and paced off the distance”: TR, Diary, 1884 (LC).

343 Describes blacktail buck: TR, Hunting Trips, 116-17.

344 Bear hunt and kill: TR, Diary, 1884 (LC).

344 Remarks on Elliott’s tiger: ibid., 231.

345 “I found myself face to face with the great bear”: TR to B, Sept. 20, 1884, Letters, I, 82.

345 “So I have had good sport”: ibid.

345 “all kinds of things of which I was afraid”: TR, Autobiography, 55-56.

345 Sewall on Bad Lands winter: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

347 An additional $12,500: Hagedorn, RBL, 255.

347 TR lunches at the château: TR to Lodge, May 15, 1885, Letters, I, 90.

347 Two fine accounts of a Bad Lands roundup, besides what TR wrote, are to be found in Huidekoper, 29-36, and Lang, 176-200.

347 “Invariably he was right on the job”: Lang, 185.

347 “all strangeness . . . passed off”: TR, Autobiography, 105.

347 “a very vivid affair”: Huidekoper, 29.

347 “gave us all an exhibition”: Lang, 183-84.

348 “I rode him all the way”: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, fn. 289.

348 Broke something in his shoulder: TR, Ranch Life, 320.

348 “very thorough in whatever work”: Burdick, 12.

348 “He could rassle”: Hagedorn BL notes, Merrifield interview (TRC); also quoted in Putnam, 524-25.

348 TR’s account of the night stampede: TR, Autobiography, 107-08.

349 “can now do cowboy work”: TR to Lodge, June 5, 1885, quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 299.

349 “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty”: TR, Ranch Life, 325.

349 “He would not tolerate”: TR, Autobiography, 9-10.

350 “I have seen him when”: unidentified clipping, Hagedorn BL notes (TRC); also quoted in Putnam, 527.

350 Asthma and stomach trouble: Sewall, 41.

350 “ate heart medicine”: Hagedorn BL notes, Merrifield interview (TRC).

350 “Rugged, bronzed”; quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 308.

350 “a very powerful man”: Thayer, Roosevelt, 57.

350 “But what a change”: Pittsburgh Dispatch, Aug. 23, 1885, quoted in Putnam, 530.

351 Marquis’s Sept. 3 letter to TR: (TRC); also quoted in full (postscript included) in Putnam, 537-38.

352 Marquis “backed off”: TR to Bill Sewall, Dec. 28, 1893, quoted in Sewall, 102.

352 Lang on the Marquis: Lang, 75. Huidekoper, too, took the same view as Lang, except that Huidekoper also greatly admired the Marquis as a person: “The Marquis was a fine man and game as a pebble; when they tell the story of Roosevelt backing him down, they are sure guessing wrong.” (Huidekoper, 27.)

352 TR wanted Winchester rifles at twelve paces: Sewall, 27.

352 TR sees Marquis in jail: Hagedorn, RBL, 344.

352 “all a very happy family”: ibid., 38-39.

352 TR to Bamie: May 15, 1886, Letters, I, 101.

353 Marquis launches retail stores: Goplen.

353 Marquis done in by the beef trust: Dresden, 140-46.

353 Loss estimates: Goplen.

353 TR on “overstocking”: TR, Ranch Life, 290.

354 Sewall’s diary entry: Mattison, “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.”

354 Seventy-five percent losses: Mattison.

354 TR’s losses: Hagedorn, RBL, Appendix, 482.

355 Stickney recollection: undated article by Stickney, Hagedorn BL notes (TRC); see also Hagedorn, RBL, 382-83; Putnam, 568-69.

356 Chase after the thieves: TR’s own account is in Ranch Life, 383-98; see also, Sewall, 58-83.

356 “To submit tamely”: TR, Ranch Life, 384-85.

356 TR to Corinne on Tolstoy: Apr. 12, 1886, Letters, I, 96.

357 “He impressed me”: undated article by Stickney, Hagedorn BL notes (TRC); also quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 383.

358 TR’s July 4 speech: quoted in Hagedorn, RBL, 407-10.

360 Packard predicts presidency: ibid., 411.

360 “We were glad to get back”: Sewall, 94-95.

360 “When he got back”: ibid., 41.

16. RETURN

page

361 “She has no looks”: quoted in Longworth, 19.

361 “hers was the best mind”: N. Roosevelt, Front Row Seat, 33.

362 “intensely on-the-ball”: Mrs. W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., to the author.

362 “Bamie’s telegram at 11:30”: quoted in Lash, 52.

362 “Always Auntie Bye meant more”: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

363 “She used to tell me stories”: Longworth, 20.

363 “She was the only one”: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

363 Eleanor on Bamie: E. Roosevelt, This Is My Story, 57-58.

363 Auntie Bye would have been President: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

363 “to stick the knife in”: W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., to the author.

363 “She was such a tremendous personality”: Mrs. J. Alsop, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

364 Trip to Mexico with the James Roosevelts: B reminiscences.

364 “queer, little dumpy figure”: Mrs. J. Alsop, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

364 “She grasped everything”: Helen Roosevelt quoted in N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 32.

364 TR wants Bamie to organize a salon: TR to B, Apr. 22, 1886, Letters, I, 98.

365 “insisted that we did not live together”: B reminiscences.

365 “Theodore would not be happy”: quoted in Rixey, 56.

365 TR promises to forgo the pronoun “I”: TR to B, June 28, 1886, Letters, I, 104.

365 “Can you send me at once”: Nov. 3, 1884, Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 70.

366 Remarks on the “singularly attractive” Mrs. Selmes: Aug. 11,1886, ibid., 88-89.

366 TR laments he has no “constancy”: Putnam, 557 (Putnam heard the story from Mrs. Selmes’s daughter, the Arizona congresswoman Isabella Greenway).

367 TR’s letter to Bamie of Sept. 20, 1886: (TRB); also quoted in Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 90-91.

367 Bamie could keep Baby Lee: ibid.

368 “makes me quite blue”: C to B, Mar. 29, 1886.

368 “They didn’t want it”: ARL, Hagedorn interview (TRB).

368 Chance meeting in Bamie’s front hall: Fanny Smith (Parsons) to Putnam; see Putnam, 556-57.

368 TR and Edith: see Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 79-83.

368 “What day does Edith go abroad”: TR to C, Apr. 12,1886, Letters, 1,96.

369 “We haven’t had campaign headquarters”: undated N.Y. Times clipping, scrapbook (TRC).

369 “It almost broke my heart”: B reminiscences.

369 Bamie’s letter to Edith, Oct. 23, 1886: Sarah Alden Gannett collection (private).

370 Bamie’s letter to Nannie Lodge: quoted in Rixey, 62.

371 “At least I have a better party standing”: ibid.

371 Addressing the engagement announcements: B reminiscences.

AFTERWORD

page

373 “There was never a serious subject”: quoted in Rixey, 230.

373 “You felt such gallantry”: Mrs. Emory Gardiner, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.

375 TR’s response to Louisa Schuyler: N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 100.

375 “My father, Theodore Roosevelt”: TR, Autobiography, 9.

375 “I have realized . . . all day”: quoted in Robinson, 206-07.

376 “peculiarly pleasant having you here”: TR to RBR, Mar. 6,1905, Letters, IV, 1131.

376 Recollection of Mittie in the N.Y. Sun: Oct. 21, 1900.

376 “I hate to think of her suffering”: quoted in Robinson, 240-41.

377 “wonderful balance”; “in many ways, as formidable”: Nicholas Roosevelt to Lilian Rixey, Jan. 15, 1964 (courtesy of P. James Roosevelt).

377 “To be with him was to have fun”: N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 11.

377 “I love all these children”: TR to Emily Carow, Aug. 16,1903, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (Works, XIX), 441.

378 “Hereafter I shall never press Ted”: TR to B, Mar. 1898, Letters, II, 804.

378 “I am falling behind physically”: TR to Theodore, Jr., Oct. 24, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (Works, XIX), 449.

379 The life of ex-President TR: see Gardner, Departing Glory.

379 Lines from Edith Wharton: quoted in Wagenknecht, 109.

379 Bamie at Austrian sanitarium with Elliott: B reminiscences.

379 “Poor Elliott”: Edith Roosevelt to B, July 19, 1893.

380 “He can’t be helped”: quoted in Lash, 89.

380 “the ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan”: Edith Roosevelt to B, Apr. 18, 1894.

380 “like some stricken, hunted creature”: TR to B, Aug. 18, 1894 (TRB); also quoted in Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 143–44.

380 “I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now”: quoted in Lash, 96.

381 “Talk as loudly”: N. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 34.

381 “Very early for a fox sparrow”: quoted in Robinson, 232.

Bibliography

I. MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

American Museum of Natural History, New York: early records and correspondence.

Cowles, W. Sheffield, Jr., Farmington, Connecticut: private collection of Roosevelt family papers, photographs, scrapbooks.

Derby, Ethel Roosevelt, Collection: Roosevelt family correspondence, privately held, Sarah Alden Gannett, Brattleboro, Vermont.

Hagedorn, Hermann, notes and interview transcripts: Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Papers: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

Oral History Collection, Columbia University: transcripts of conversations and recollections of various Roosevelt family members and friends of Theodore Roosevelt.

Pringle, Henry F., notes for his Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard.

Roosevelt, Elliott, Papers: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park.

Roosevelt, Robert B., Papers (fragmentary): New York Historical Society, New York City.

State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck: correspondence, photographs, memorabilia, and taped interviews dealing with the early days of Medora.

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, New York City: a large collection of Roosevelt family memorabilia, photographs, some correspondence (unsorted), interview transcripts.

Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard: the great assembly of Theodore Roosevelt correspondence, family correspondence, diaries, journals, family scrapbooks, mementos, and photographs.

Theodore Roosevelt Papers: mainly the official correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential years, and mementos.

II. NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND JOURNALS

American Heritage

American Journal of the Medical Sciences

American Journal of Psychiatry

American Legion

The Bad Lands Cow Boy

Bismarck Weekly Tribune

Boston Advertiser

Boston Evening Transcript

Brooklyn Eagle

Chicago Times

Chicago Tribune

Cincinnati Daily Gazette

The Crimson (Harvard)

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

Harper’s Weekly

Harvard Advocate

Harvard Graduates’ Magazine

Harvard Lampoon

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

London Times

The Nation

New York Evening Post

New York Herald

New York Observer

New York Sun

The New York Times

New York Tribune

New York World

North Dakota History

The Outlook

Psychosomatic Medicine

Puck

St. Paul Pioneer Press

San Francisco Chronicle

Springfield Daily Republican

The Stethoscope

Time

Washington Post

Wide World

III. PUBLISHED WORKS ON THE BULLOCHS AND THE ROOSEVELTS

Bulloch, J. G. B., A History and Genealogy of the Families of Bulloch and Stobo and of Irvine of Cults. Washington, 1911.

Bulloch, Joseph Gaston, History and Genealogy of the Stewart, Elliott and Dunwody Families. Savannah, 1895.

Churchill, Allen, The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats. Harper & Row, New York, 1965.

Cobb, William T., The Strenuous Life: The “Oyster Bay” Roosevelts in Business and Finance. William E. Rudge’s Sons, New York, 1946.

Davis, Kenneth S., FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1971.

Hagedorn, Hermann, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1954.

Kleeman, Rita Halle, Gracious Lady. D. Appleton-Century Co., New York, 1935.

Lash, Joseph P., Eleanor and Franklin. New American Library, New York, 1971.

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, Crowded Hours. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933.

Miller, Nathan, The Roosevelt Chronicles. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1979.

Morris, Sylvia Jukes, Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1980.

Parsons, Frances Theodora (Smith), Perchance Some Day. Privately printed, 1951.

Rixey, Lilian, Bamie: Theodore Roosevelt’s Remarkable Sister. David McKay Co., New York, 1963.

Roosevelt, Eleanor, ed., Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933.

Roosevelt, Eleanor, This Is My Story. Harper and Bros., New York, 1937.

Roosevelt, Nicholas, A Front Row Seat. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1953.

Roosevelt, Theodore, II, All in the Family. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1929.

Roosevelt, Mrs. Theodore, Jr., Day Before Yesterday. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1959.

Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.). Memorial Meeting of the State Charities Aid Association, New York, 1878.

Theodore Roosevelt [Sr.]: A Tribute. The Proceedings at a Meeting of the Union League Club, New York City, February 14, 1878. New York, 1902.

IV. ON AND BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Abbott, Lawrence F., Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1919.

Beale, Howard K., Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. Collier Books, New York, 1970.

Bishop, Joseph Bucklin, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920.

Blum, John Morton, The Republican Roosevelt. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1977.

Butt, Archie, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt. 2 vols. Doubleday, Doran & Co., Garden City, New York, 1930.

Chessman, G. Wallace, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1969.

Cutright, Paul Russell, Theodore Roosevelt the Naturalist. Harper and Bros., New York, 1956.

Douglas, George William, The Many-Sided Roosevelt. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1907.

Ferris, Joseph A., “When Roosevelt Came to Dakota.” Wide World, 1921.

Fraser, James Earle, “Sculpting T. R.” American Heritage, Apr. 1972.

Gardner, Joseph L., Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as ex-President. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1973.

Guild, Curtis, Jr., “Theodore Roosevelt at Harvard.” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Dec. 1901.

Hagedorn, Hermann, The Boys’ Life of Theodore Roosevelt. Harper and Bros., New York, 1918.

———, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1921.

Harbaugh, William H., The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Oxford University Press, New York, 1975.

Hart, Albert Bushnell, and Herbert Ronald Ferleger, eds., Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia. Roosevelt Memorial Association, New York, 1941.

Iglehart, Ferdinand C., Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him. Christian Herald, New York, 1919.

Lang, Lincoln A., Ranching with Roosevelt. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1926.

Leupp, Francis E., The Man Roosevelt. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1915.

Lorant, Stefan, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1959.

Mattison, Ray H., “Life at Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, The Letters of William W. and Mary Sewall.” North Dakota History, Vol. 27, Nos. 3 and 4, Summer and Fall 1960.

———, “Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch.” North Dakota History, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring 1960.

Morison, Elting E., ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. 8 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1951-54.

Morris, Edmund, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York, 1979.

Pringle, Henry F., Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1931.

Putnam, Carleton, Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1958.

Riis, Jacob A., Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen. Johnson, Wynne Co., Washington, D.C., 1904.

Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1921.

Roosevelt, Nicholas, Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1967.

Roosevelt, Theodore, An Autobiography. (Works, Vol. XX.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. (Works, Vol. I.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 1870-1918. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York and London, 1924.

———, The Naval War of 1812. (Works, Vol. VI.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, Theodore Roosevelt’s Diaries of Boyhood and Youth. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1928.

———, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. (Works, Vol. XIX.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

———, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Hermann Hagedorn. National Edition, 20 vols. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1926.

Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1925.

Sewall, William Wingate, Bill Sewall’s Story of T.R. Harper and Bros., New York and London, 1919.

Thayer, William Roscoe, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1919.

Wagenknecht, Edward, The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt. Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1958.

Welling, Richard, “My Classmate Theodore Roosevelt.” American Legion, Jan. 1929.

———, “Theodore Roosevelt at Harvard.” The Outlook, Oct. 27, 1920.

Wilhelm, Donald, Theodore Roosevelt as an Undergraduate. John W. Luce, Boston, 1910.

Wilson, R. L., Theodore Roosevelt, Outdoorsman. Winchester Press, New York, 1971.

Wister, Owen, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1930.

Wood, Frederick S., Roosevelt as We Knew Him: The Personal Recollections of One Hundred and Fifty of His Friends and Associates. John C. Winston Co., Philadelphia, 1927.

V. ON ASTHMA

Chapin, Joshua Bicknell, Asthma, Its Causes and Treatment. Thomas H. Webb and Co., Boston, 1843.

Cohen, Samuel I., “Psychological Factors,” in T. J. H. Clark and S. Godfrey, eds., Asthma. W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1977.

Derbes, Vincent J., and Hugo Tristram Engelhardt, eds., The Treatment of Bronchial Asthma. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1946.

Kemp, Robert, Understanding Bronchitis and Asthma. Tavistock Publications, London, 1963.

Kendig, Edwin L., ed., Disorders of the Respiratory Tract in Children. W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1967.

Kiell, Norman, “Effects of Asthma on the Character of Theodore Roosevelt,” in Henry Irving Schneer, ed., The Asthmatic Child. Harper & Row, New York, 1963.

Knapp, Peter H., “The Asthmatic Child and the Psychosomatic Problem of Asthma,” in Henry Irving Schneer, ed., The Asthmatic Child. Harper & Row, New York, 1963.

———, “The Asthmatic and His Environment.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 149, 1969.

Knapp, Peter H., Aleksander A. Mathé, and Louis Vachon, “Psychosomatic Aspects of Bronchial Asthma,” in E. B. Weiss and M. S. Segal, eds., Bronchial Asthma: Mechanisms and Therapeutics. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1976.

Liebman, Ronald, Salvador Minuchin, and Lester Baker, “The Use of Structural Family Therapy in the Treatment of Intractable Asthma.” American Journal of Psychiatry, May 1974.

Mackenzie, John Noland, “The Production of the So-called ’Rose Cold’ by Means of an Artificial Rose.” The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1886.

McDermott, Neil T., and Stanley Cobb, “A Psychiatric Survey of Fifty Cases of Bronchial Asthma.” Psychosomatic Medicine, Apr. 1939.

Miller, Milton L., Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1956.

Purcell, Kenneth, “The Effect on Asthma in Children of Experimental Separation from the Family.” Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol. XXXI, 1969.

Salter, Henry Hyde, On Asthma. Philadelphia, 1864.

Thorowgood, John C., Notes on Asthma. Philadelphia, 1873.

Travis, Georgia, Chronic Illness in Children. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1976.

Weiss, Earle, Bronchial Asthma. CIBA Pharmaceutical Co., Summit, N.J., 1975.

Weiss, Earle B., and Maurice S. Segal, Bronchial Asthma: Mechanisms and Therapeutics. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1976.

VI. OTHER

Abbott, Lawrence F., ed., The Letters of Archie Butt. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1924.

Adams, Alexander B., John James Audubon. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1966.

Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams. Sentry Edition. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1961.

Amory, Cleveland, The Proper Bostonians. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1947.

Barrows, Chester L., William M. Evarts. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1941.

Bickmore, Albert S., An Autobiography. Unpublished, 1908.

Bigelow, Poultney, Seventy Summers, Vol. I. Edward Arnold & Co., London, 1925.

Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Random House, New York, 1973.

Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them. 1880.

Brown, Henry Collins, New York in the Elegant Eighties. New York, 1926.

Brown, Rollo Walter, Harvard Yard in the Golden Age. Current Books, New York, 1948.

Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, 2nd ed. 2 vols. Macmillan and Co., New York, 1891.

Bull, Deborah, and Donald Lorimer, Up the Nile. Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1979.

Bulloch, James D., The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. 2 vols. London, 1883.

Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1965.

Burdick, Usher L., “Life and Exploits of John Goodall.” McKenzie County Farmer, Watford City, N.D., 1931.

“Cambridge on the Charles.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1876.

Cary, Edward, George William Curtis. Houghton Mifflin Co., Cambridge, 1894.

Chidsey, Donald Barr, The Gentleman from New York: A Life of Roscoe Conkling. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1935.

Clark, Champ, The Badlands. Time-Life Books, New York, 1974.

Class of 1848. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1896.

Class of 1850. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1900.

Class of 1880, Secretary’s Report, Number 1, Commencement 1880. Cambridge.

Clay, John, My Life on the Range. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1962.

Coleman, Kenneth, ed., A History of Georgia. University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1977.

Croly, Herbert, Marcus Alonzo Hanna. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1912.

Curtis, George William, The Potiphar Papers. New York, 1853.

Dana, Richard Henry, To Cuba and Back. Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1859.

Day, Clarence, Life with Father. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1935.

Depew, Chauncey M., My Memories of Eighty Years. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1924.

Donald, David, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1970.

Dresden, Donald, The Marquis de Mores, Emperor of the Bad Lands. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1970.

Edel, Leon, Henry James, 1843-1870, the Untried Years. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1953.

Eliot, Alexander, “Eliot of Harvard.” American Heritage, Aug. 1974.

Eliot, Charles W., Harvard Memories. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1923.

Fancher, Betsy, Savannah: A Renaissance of the Heart. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1976.

Fifth and Sixth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History. New York, 1874.

Foraker, Joseph Benson, Notes of a Busy Life, Vol. 1. Stewart & Kidd Co., Cincinnati, 1917.

Forbes, John, The Physician’s Holiday, or a Month in Switzerland in the Summer of 1848. London, 1853.

Forbis, William H., The Cowboys. Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Va., 1973.

Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Letters of Henry Adams. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1930.

Fuess, Claude Moore, Carl Schurz, Reformer. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1932.

Gamble, Thomas, Savannah, Duels and Duellists, 1733-1877. The Reprint Co., Spartanburg, S.C., 1974.

Garraty, John A., Henry Cabot Lodge. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1953.

———, The New Commonwealth. Harper & Row, New York, 1968.

George William Curtis, Proceedings at the Memorial Meeting of the Unitarian Club of New York. Nov. 14, 1892.

Goplen, Arnold O., “The Career of the Marquis de Mores in the Badlands of North Dakota.” North Dakota History, Vol. 13, Nos. 1 and 2, Jan. and Apr. 1946.

Grant, Robert, “Harvard College in the Seventies.” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1897.

Gressley, Gene M., Bankers and Cattlemen. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1966.

Harden, William, Recollections of a Long and Satisfactory Life. Negro Universities Press, New York, 1968.

Harriman, Mrs. J. Borden, From Pinafores to Politics. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1923.

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, Recollections Grave and Gay. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1911.

Harvard Class of 1880, Secretary’s Report. Cambridge, 1905.

Hawkins, Hugh, Between Harvard and America. Oxford University Press, New York, 1972.

Hellman, Geoffrey, Bankers, Bones and Beetles. National History Press, Garden City, New York, 1969.

Herrick, Francis Hobart, Audubon the Naturalist. 2 vols. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1917.

Historical Collections of the Joseph Habersham Collection, Daughters of the American Revolution, Vol. II. Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1968.

History of the Chemical Bank, 1823-1913. Privately published, 1913.

Howard, Leon, Herman Melville: A Biography. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1951.

Howe, George Frederick, Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1934.

Hudson, William C., Random Recollections of an Old Political Reporter. Cupples & Leon Co., New York, 1911.

Huidekoper, A. C., My Experience and Investment in The Bad Lands of Dakota and Some of the Men I Met There. Wirth Bros., Baltimore, 1947.

James, Henry, The Bostonians. Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1966.

———, Charles W. Eliot. 2 vols. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1930.

Jordan, David M., Roscoe Conkling of New York. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1971.

Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1934.

Kaplan, Justin, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.

Kell, John McIntosh, Recollections of a Naval Life. The Neal Co., Washington, D.C., 1900.

King, Moses, Harvard and Its Surroundings. Cambridge, 1882.

Labrie, Jean, The Amateur Taxidermist. Hart Publishing Co., New York, 1972.

Leckie, George G., ed., Georgia: A Guide to Its Towns and Countryside. American Guide Series. Tupper and Love, Atlanta, 1954.

Lefebure, Molly, The English Lake District. Hastings House, New York, 1964.

Lowitt, Richard, A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century, William E. Dodge. Columbia University Press, New York, 1954.

Lynch, Denis Tilden, The Wild Seventies. 2 vols. (Reprint) Kennikat Press, Port Washington, N.Y., 1971.

“Many Years of Benevolence Lead to Outstanding Advances Against Various Kinds of Crippling.” The Stethoscope, Vol. II, No. 10, Dec. 1956.

Marcus, Robert D., Grand Old Party. Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.

Martin, Clarece, Roswell, Historic Homes and Landmarks. Roswell Historical Society, Roswell, Ga., 1974.

Martin, Edward Sanford, The Life of Joseph Hodges Choate, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1921.

———, “Undergraduate Life at Harvard.” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1897.

Mattison, Ray H., “Ranching in the Dakota Badlands.” North Dakota History, Vol. 19, Nos. 2 and 3, Apr. and July 1952.

McDougall, Walt, This Is the Life! Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1926.

Meriwether, Colyer, Raphael Semmes. George W. Jacobs & Co., Philadelphia, 1913.

Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind. Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1936.

Morgan, H. Wayne, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1969.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, Three Centuries of Harvard. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1946.

Muzzey, David Saville, James G. Blaine, a Political Idol of Other Days. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1934.

Myers, Gustavus, History of the Great American Fortunes. Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1937.

Myers, Robert Manson, ed., The Children of Pride. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1972.

Nevins, Allan, The Emergence of Modern America, 1865-1878. Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1971.

———, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1933.

Nevins, Allan, and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 4. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1952.

North Dakota, A Guide to the Northern Prairie State. Oxford University Press, New York, 1950.

Norton, Charles Eliot, ed., Letters of James Russell Lowell, Vol. II. Harper and Bros., New York, 1894.

———, Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis, Vol. 1. Harper and Bros., New York, 1894.

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, The American Museum of Natural History. The Irving Press, New York, 1911.

Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail. New American Library, New York, 1950.

Platt, Thomas Collier, The Autobiography of Thomas Collier Platt. B. W. Dodge and Co., New York, 1910.

Proceedings of the Eighth Republican National Convention Held at Chicago, Illinois, June 3, 4, 5, and 6,1884.

Rasenel, Mrs. St. Julien, Charleston. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1925.

Reeves, Thomas C., Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1975.

Reid, Captain Mayne, The Boy Hunters; or Adventures in Search of a White Buffalo. (Reprint) Gregg Press, Ridgewood, N.J., 1968. (Originally published in New York in 1852.)

———, The Scalp Hunters. New York, 1863.

Rhodes, James Ford, History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1919.

Robinson, Elwyn B., History of North Dakota. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966.

Rush, Richard, and Robert H. Woods, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. Series I, Vol. I. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1894.

Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1949.

Russell, Francis, The American Heritage History of the Confident Years. American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1969.

Santayana, George, “The Academic Environment at Harvard in the 80’s and 90’s.” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, undated, Theodore Roosevelt Collection.

Saum, Lewis O., “The Marquis de Mores: Instrument of American Progress.” North Dakota History, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 1969.

Scott, James Brown, Robert Bacon. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1923.

Shannon, David A., ed., Beatrice Webb’s American Diary. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1963.

Sherman, John, Recollections of Forty Years, Vol. II. Werner Co., Chicago, 1895.

Shores, Venila Lovina, “The Hayes-Conkling Controversy.” Smith College Studies in History, Vol. IV. Department of History of Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 1919.

Steele, Joan, Captain Mayne Reid. Thayne Publishers, Boston, 1978.

Stone, Candace, Dana and The Sun. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1938.

Stone, Melville E., Fifty Years a Journalist. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1921.

Sullivan, Mark, Our Times, Vol. 2. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1927.

Taylor, Bayard, By-Ways of Europe. G. P. Putnam and Son, New York, 1869.

Temple, Sarah Blackwell Gover, The First Hundred Years. Walter W. Brown Publishing Co., Atlanta, 1935.

Thayer, William Roscoe, “Nathaniel Southgate Shaler.” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Sept. 1906.

Third and Fourth Annual Reports of the American Museum of Natural History. New York, 1872.

Thomas, Harrison Cook, The Return of the Democratic Party to Power in 1884. Columbia University Press, New York, 1919.

Underwood, Rev. J. L., The Women of the Confederacy. Neale Publishing Co., New York, 1906.

Wagner, Charles A., Harvard, Four Centuries and Freedoms. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1950.

Wallace, David Duncan, South Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1951.

Weinstein, Gregory, The Ardent Eighties. International Press, New York, 1928.

Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920.

———, A Backward Glance. D. Appleton-Century Co., New York, 1934.

White, Andrew D., Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White. Century Co., New York, 1905.

White, G. Edward, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1968.

White, Leonard D., The Republican Era, 1869-1901. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1958.

Whitehill, Walter Muir, Boston and the Civil War. Boston Athenaeum, Boston, 1963.

Wilkins, Robert P., and Wynona Huchette, North Dakota, a Bicentennial History. W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.

Williams, T. Harry, ed., Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881. David McKay Co., New York, 1964.

Winser, Henry J., The Great Northwest, A Guidebook and Itinerary for the Use of Tourists and Travellers over the Lines of the Northern Pacific Railroad. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1883.

Wise, John S., Recollections of Thirteen Presidents. (Reprint) 1968. (Originally published 1906.)

VII. REFERENCE

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1969.

The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents of the United States. American Heritage Publishing Co., New York, 1968.

The Annals of America. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1968.

Baedeker, K., Switzerland, and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy, and the Tyrol, Handbook for Travellers. London, 1869.

Berkow, Robert, M.D., ed., The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, Rahway, N.J., 1977.

The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Vol. XV. Franklin-Turner Co., Atlanta, 1907.

Dictionary of American Biography. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936.

Dunglison, Robley, A Dictionary of Medical Science. Philadelphia, 1866.

1840 Census for the Cobb County, Georgia.

Kouwenhoven, John A., The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1953.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1974.

Seventh Census of U.S., 1850, Georgia Slave Schedule.

White, Norval, and Elliot Willensky, eds., AIA Guide to New York City. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1968.

Index

Adams, Brooks, 156

Adams, Charles Francis, 76–78, 156, 206

Adams, Henry, 126, 130, 157, 207, 374

Adams, William, 191

Adirondacks, 120–21

Advocate, 213, 216

Agassiz, Alexander, 327

Agassiz, Louis, 141, 204, 220

Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 71

Alabama (Confederate raider), 46, 67, 75–78

Allotment Commission, 61ff., 65, 159

Alsop, Mrs. Joseph, Jr., 252

Alvord, Thomas, 263, 271, 273

American Journal of the Medical Sciences, The, 102

American Museum of Natural History, 88, 116, 141, 175, 294

founding of, 32

new building, 136, 142, 179, 202

TR donates specimens to, 121

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 356–57

anthracite coal strike, 374

Arnold, Matthew, 33

Arthur, Chester A., 280

and Chicago Republican convention (1884), 297–304

passim, 309, 310, 312–13, 321

at Cincinnati Republican convention (1876), 160, 162

and Customhouse, 158, 159, 175–80, 183–84, 196

Garfield’s running mate, 237

illness of, 292–93, 315

pledges support of Blaine, 315

as President, 245, 275, 299–300, 375

Associated Press, 269

asthma, 93–111

and causes of difficult breathing, 99

circumstances surrounding TR’s attacks of, 102–9

influence on TR of, 108–11

medical theories of, 94–95

nineteenth-century remedies for, 97

and psychological factors, 95–97, 101–3

see also under Roosevelt, Theodore Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn, 67, 240, 269

Astor, John Jacob III, 179, 269

Astor, Mrs. John Jacob III, 67, 143

Astor, William Waldorf, 260

Astor Library, 238–39

Atlanta Journal, 49

Atlantic Cable, 270

Audubon, John James, 120, 121, 123, 219

Autobiography (Roosevelt), 376, 377

Bacon, Martha Cowdin, 214, 221, 228, 230

Bacon, Robert, 209, 210, 214, 215, 327, 376

Bad Lands, 257, 296, 316, 318, 326–60

Bad Lands Cow Boy, The, 334–35, 360

Baird, Spencer Fullerton, 120, 219

Baker, Evelyn King, 49, 53

Ball, Willis, 45

Barnum, P. T., 29, 121

Beecher, Henry Ward, 144, 300, 317

“beef bonanza,” 327

Beef Bonanza, The, 331

Bell, Alexander Graham, 145

Bell, John G., 121

Belmont, Mrs. August, 67

Benson, Alfred, 331

Benton, Thomas Hart, 352

Berry-Boice Cattle Co. (“Three Sevens” brand), 331, 337, 347

Bess (Anna Bulloch’s slave), 47, 55

Bickmore, Albert S., 32, 33, 39

Bierstadt, Albert, 184

Bigelow, John, 327

Bigelow, Poultney, 251, 260, 261, 327, 374

Bishop, Joseph Bucklin, 321

Black Friday, 86

Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, 266

Blaine, James G., 158, 260

and Chicago convention (1880), 299

and Chicago convention (1884), 280–81, 297–316

and Cincinnati convention (1876), 161, 162, 298

defections following nomination of, 316–24

election campaign, 346

and Mulligan letters, 161, 299, 323

Boston Daily Advertiser, 316

Boston Daily Globe, 316

Boston Herald, 323

Bostonians, The (James), 260

Boston Transcript, 314, 316, 318

Boy Hunters, The (Reid), 118

Brace, Charles Loring, 30, 31, 142, 280

Bright’s disease, 291, 292–93, 315

Bristow, Benjamin H., 160, 162, 317

Broadway Improvement Association, 29

Bronson, Theodore, 61, 64, 65, 85, 245

Brooklyn, N.Y., 282–83

Brooklyn Bridge, 113, 175, 239, 282

Brooklyn Eagle, 265, 274

Brooks, Erastus, 279

Brooks, Phillips, 206

Browning, Robert, 115–16

Bryant, William Cullen, 156

Bull Moose Party, 379

Bulloch, Anna, see Gracie, Anna Bulloch

Bulloch, Anne Irvine, 43

Bulloch, Archibald, 43

Bulloch, Ella, 249

Bulloch, Harriott Cross Foster 74

Bulloch, Hester Elliott, 43–44

Bulloch, Irvine, 44, 55

in Confederate Navy, 46, 57–58, 64, 67, 76–77

Mittie reunited with, 73–74

Bulloch, James I, 42–43

Bulloch, James II, 43

Bulloch, James Dunwody, 44, 48, 54–55, 114, 180

and Alabama, 46, 67, 75–78

blockade runner, 58, 64, 67

family reunion with, 73–75

and Mittie’s death, 295

TR and, 76, 78, 170, 245, 255, 375

Bulloch, James Stephens, 43–44

Bulloch, Jean Stobo, 42–43

Bulloch, Mary de Veaux, 43

Bulloch, Martha Stewart Elliot (Grandmamma Bulloch), 43–44, 46–47, 50, 54, 67, 68

and Civil War, 57–58, 60, 64, 66–67

death of, 66–67

in Roosevelt household, 35, 38, 39, 55, 56

Bulloch Hall, 45ff., 55, 67

Bunyan, John, 378

Bureau of Charities, N.Y.C., 141–42

Butler, Pierce, 44

Carow, Charles, 39, 147

Carow, Edith, 187

childhood friendship with the

Roosevelts, 39, 108, 126, 147, 169

on Elliott, 254, 380

engagement to TR, 366–68

girlhood relations with TR, 180, 195, 227

and TR’s first marriage, 230, 236, 245

Catalogue of North American Birds (Baird), 120

Catalogue of North American Mammals (Baird), 120

Century Association, 23, 156, 159

Century Magazine, 349, 353

Chapin, Harry, 204, 215, 222

Chapin, Joshua Bicknell, 95

Chemical Bank, 29, 144

Chicago, conventions at, 297–316, 317

Chicago Fire, 135, 138

Chicago Times, 320

Chicago Tribune, 302, 318, 320

Children’s Aid Society, 31, 117, 135, 142;

see also Newsboys’ Lodging House

Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital, 102

Choate, Joseph H., 32, 146, 175, 180, 261

Cigar Bill, 267–68, 279–80

Cigarmakers’ Union, 267

Cincinnati, Republican convention at, 155, 157–63, 298

civil service bill (New York State Assembly), 275–76, 279

Civil War, 23, 29, 56–66, 138

Clay, John, 331

Clayton, Powell, 303–4, 307

Cleopatra’s Needle, 180, 326

Cleveland, Grover, 274

and civil service reform, 275–76, 302 1884

presidential election, 315, 317, 346

Clews, Henry, 138

Clift family, 126, 129

Codman, Frank, 222

Columbia Law School, 237, 238–39, 287

Committee of Seventy, 154

Conkling, Roscoe, 260, 280

and Chicago convention (1880), 299, 309

and Cincinnati convention (1876), 157–63

and Customhouse controversies, 176, 178–84, 186, 196, 275, 301

resigns from Senate, 275

Conscription Act (1863), 59

Continental Land and Cattle Co., 331

Cook, James, 25

Cooke, Jay, 138

Cooper, James Fenimore, 123, 326, 378

Cooper, Peter, 156–57

Country Life in America, 289

Cowles, Anna Roosevelt, see Roosevelt, Anna (Bamie)

Cowles, William Sheffield, 373

Cowles, William Sheffield, Jr. (Bamie’s son), 128, 252, 373

Crimson, 207, 209

Cullom, Shelby, 310

Curtis, Assemblyman, 263

Curtis, George William, 190–91

and Customhouse controversy, 181, 182

and 1884 Republican convention, 299–306

passim, 309, 310, 314, 315

in Republican reform crusade (1876), 155–56, 158, 160, 162

TR praised by, 274, 319–20, 324

supports Cleveland against Blaine, 317

Custer, George Armstrong, 330

Customhouse controversies, 175–85, 196, 275, 301

Cutler, Arthur, 140, 167, 217, 293

Daddy Luke, 47, 55

Dakota Territory, 121, 235, 257, 326ff.; see also Bad Lands

Dana, Richard Henry, 75, 160, 221, 317

Daniell, Tom, 47–48, 53

Daniell, William Coffee, 48

Darwin, Charles, 207

Davis, Jefferson, 72, 76, 78

Day, Clarence, 325

Day Dream (yacht), 136

De Billier, Frederic, 327, 329

Deer and Antelope of America (Caton), 326

Deerhound (British yacht), 76

Delano, Sara, see Roosevelt, Sara Democratic Party Cleveland nomination, 317

and 1876 election, 225

New York mayoralty campaign (1884), 317

Tilden nomination, 159, 163 see also Tammany Hall

Depew, Chauncey, 261, 304

de Veaux, James, 43

Devonshire, Duke of, 82

Dimon, Assemblyman, 263

Dodge, Cleveland, 251

Dodge, William E., Jr., 61, 63, 65, 178, 191, 251

Dodge, William E., Sr., 178

Dodsworth, Mr., 169

Dow, Wilmot, 329, 337, 352, 354, 356, 357

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 118

Draft Riots, 60

Dunbar, Charles, 207, 213, 219, 220

Dreyfus Affair, 355

Drumont, Édouard, 355

Eaton, Howard, 331–32, 337, 347, 354

Edmunds, George Franklin, 181, 301, 309, 310, 312–13, 320

Eeghan, J. A. van, 331

Eliot, Charles, 284

and Blaine, 316

and Edmunds, 300

as Harvard president, 141, 201–8

passim, 211, 212–13, 220–21

at museum opening, 185, 202

Elkhorn Ranch, 337, 341, 352, 356–57

Elliot, Daniel Giraud, 88

Elliott, Corinne, 46

Elliott, Daniel Stuart, 44, 48, 53, 57, 64

Elliott, Georgia, 44

Elliott, John, Senator, 43, 46

Elliott, Johnny, 48, 130, 147

Elliott, Lucy Sorrel, 48, 130, 233

Elliott, Maud, 48, 130, 147, 180

Elliott, Susan, see West, Susan Elliott

Ellis, Lizzie, see Roosevelt, Elizabeth Ellis

Ellis, Ralph, 209

Emerson, Ellen, 128

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 128, 206

Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen), 284

Etruria, S. S., 369

Evarts, William, 246, 261

and Cigar Bill, 279, 288

and Customhouse controversy, 175–76, 178, 179

on Hayes dinners, 208

Family Circle Dancing Class, 240

Ferris, Joe, 332, 351

Ferris, Sylvane, 332, 337

Field, Cyrus, 270, 271, 273

Fifth Avenue Conference, 299

Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, 143–44, 191, 241, 250

First World War, 379

Fish, Hamilton, 135

Fish, Mrs. Hamilton, 67

Fisk, James, 63, 113

Five-Cent Bill, 277–79

Flandrau, Charles Eugene, 366

“Flight of the Duchess, The” (Browning), 115–16

Florida (Confederate raider), 76

Foraker, Joseph, 309–10, 313

Franco-Prussian War, 113, 114, 115, 138

Fraser, Hastings, 247

Free Trade Club, 238

Freud, Sigmund, 95

Furness, Frank, 130, 140

Furness Abbey, 78–80

Gallaxy (publication), 29

Garfield, James A., 237, 245, 275, 298–99, 307

George, Henry, 369, 371

Germanic, S. S., 233

Gideon, Assemblyman, 263

Godey, Harry, 126, 127, 128

Godkin, E. L., 156, 191, 299, 300, 310, 317

gold standard, 309

Goldthwait, Dr., 189

Gompers, Samuel, 267–68, 283

Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 49

Goodall, John, 348

Gorringe, Henry Honeychurch, 326, 327

Gould, Jay, 113, 268–73, 275–77, 284, 299

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 257

Gracie, Anna Bulloch, 44, 82, 239, 249, 286, 362

and Civil War, 56–58, 60, 64–66

passim early life, 48, 52, 53

and Elliott, 245, 250, 257

and “Greatheart,” 34

in household of TR Sr., 38, 39, 55

Irvine’s secret meeting with, 74

marriage, 67

at Oyster Bay, 163, 233, 257

and TR’s first marriage, 229, 236

and TR Sr.’s death, 186–91

Gracie, Archibald, 151

Gracie, James K., 39, 188, 233, 236, 286

Grant, Ulysses S., 209, 300, 307

as President, 32, 142, 155, 156, 158, 160, 260

refuses to run again, 157

Grant and Ward, 300

Gray, Asa, 207

Great Northern Railroad, 295

Great Northwest, The (Putnam), 326–27

Greenwood Cemetery, 66, 191, 292, 296

Haase, Dr., 28

Hagedorn, Hermann, 221

Hale, Edward Everett, 202

Half-Breeds, 281

Hall, Anna, see Roosevelt, Anna Hall Hall, John, 144, 191, 292

Hall, Mary Ludlow, 380

Hamilton, Alexander, 142

Hand, Johnny, 307

Hand, Julia, 53

Hanks, C. S., 216–17

Hanna, Mark, 312, 321, 374

Harper’s Weekly, 155

Blaine renounced by, 317

on Edmunds, 300

on TR, 274, 302

on TR Sr., 182, 190–91, 300

Harrison, Benjamin, 300, 374

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 67

Harrison, William Henry, 374

Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, 201

Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, 141, 204

Harvard University, 140–41, 165–74, 201–23

Hasty Pudding Club, 207, 211, 228, 229

Hay, John, 30, 33, 62, 68, 284, 376

Hayes, Lucy W, 179, 208

Hayes, Rutherford B., 162, 164, 173–75, 178–84

passim, 196

Hayes, Webb, 179

Hess, Jake, 261–62

Hewitt, Abram, 142, 154, 327, 369, 371

Higgins, Assemblyman, 263

Higginson, Henry L., 327

Hill, A. S., 220

Hippocrates, 95

Hoffman, Louis A. (”Baron”), 327, 333, 334

Hooper, Jennie, 227

Hopkins, Mark, 156

Howe, Julia Ward, 59

Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 378

Hudson, William, 265, 274

Huidekoper, A. C., 331, 347

Huidekoper, Frank, 331

Hunt, Isaac, 263–66 passim, 291, 294

on Elliott, 254

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

on Platt scandal, 275

on TR, 274, 278–79

and Westbrook Scandal, 270, 273

Hunter’s Feast (Reid), 118

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (Roosevelt), 325–26, 344

Husted, James, 275

Hyde Park, N.Y., 232, 250, 253, 256

Ibsen, Henrik, 284

Independent Republicans, 315

Ingersoll, Robert G., 162, 298

Innocents Abroad, The (Twain), 72

Irvine, John, 43

Jackson, Henry, 211, 215

James, D. Willis, 143, 182

James, Henry, 72, 85, 203, 260

James, William (American philosopher), 141, 207, 221

James, William (English author), 270

Jay, Augustus, 126, 127

Jay, John, 175

Jay Commission, 175–79

Jerome, Jennie, 72

Jesup, Morris K., 261

J. K. Gracie Co., 286

Johnson, Samuel, 158

Jones, Charles C., 68

Jones, George, 300

Jung, Sir Salar, 247

Katahdin, Mount 217

Kearsage, 46, 76

Kelly, John, 273

Kelly, Peter, 263

Kennedy, John S., 294

King, Barrington, 44, 45, 58

King, Joseph Henry, 58

King, Roswell, 44

King, Tom, 48, 50, 51, 58

Kruse, Assemblyman, 263

Lady of the Lake, The (Scott), 80

Laënnec, René, 95

Laird, John, 77

Lamb and Rich, 289

Lampoon, 205

Lamson, John, 167, 170

Lamson family, 114, 167

Lane, Lulu, 227

Lang, Gregor, 331, 334, 336, 337, 338, 347

Lang, Lincoln, 331, 334, 336, 347, 352

Lebo, 342, 343

Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 120

Lee, Alice see Roosevelt, Alice Lee

Lee, Caroline, 225

Lee, Caroline Haskell, 225, 228, 291, 322

Lee, George, 225

Lee, George Cabot, 225, 228, 260, 292, 322, 323

and “beef bonanza,” 327

Lee, Harriett, 225

Lee, Henry, 225, 323

Lee, Isabella, 225

Lee, Rose, 214, 222, 225, 228, 229

Lee, Higginson and Co., 225, 323, 327

Leeholm, 289

Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 353

Lewis, George Washington, 211

Life with Father (Day), 325

Lincoln, Abraham, 36, 66, 307, 378

TR Sr. and, 61, 62, 65

Lincoln, Mary Todd, 62

Lincoln, Robert Todd, 300, 312

Lincoln, Willie, 62, 63, 65

Livingstone, David, 118

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 157, 157, 207, 329, 340

elected to Congress, 371

friendship with TR, 319–20, 322–23, 365

opposes Blaine at convention, 299, 303, 307, 309

stands by Blaine’s nomination, 317–18, 321, 323

Lodge, Nannie, 370

Loewenthal, Henry, 270

Logan, John A., 300, 310, 312–13, 315

London Daily News, 75

London Exhibition (1851), 27

Long, John D., 300, 310, 320

Long Branch, N.J., 60, 65–66, 101, 105

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 168, 206, 221

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, see Roosevelt, Alice (TR’s daughter)

Low, Seth, 259, 282–83, 292, 317, 322

Lowell, James Russell, 160–61, 161, 175, 317, 326

Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 322

Luffsey, Riley, 334, 336, 350

Lynch, John R., 304, 307

Mackenzie, John Noland, 102

Madison Square Presbyterian Church, 191

Maltese Cross Ranch, 332, 337, 341

Manhattan Elevated Railway Co., 269–71, 273, 275–77

Martin, John F., 55

Mary Ann (Roosevelts’ maid), 21–22, 71, 82, 117, 139, 187, 189, 237, 248

Mason, James M., 77

Massachusetts Reform Club, 317

McAllister, Ward, 68, 240

McDougall, Walt, 168

McKinley, William, 306, 309, 321, 374, 376

and Blaine, 303, 313, 314

McManus, Assemblyman, 263

Medora, Dakota Territory, 316, 332, 333–37, 340, 341, 351, 357–58

Melville, Herman, 177

Memorial Day, 315

Merriam, Francis, 126, 127, 129

Merrifield, Bill, 332, 337, 342–45, 348, 350

Merritt, Edwin A., 180, 183, 196

Metcalfe, John, 94, 96, 150, 152

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32

Miller, Warner, 280, 281

Minot, Henry, 173, 182, 187, 192, 193, 221, 228, 229, 230

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (Livingstone), 118

Missouri Pacific Railroad, 269

Mitchell, Margaret, 49

Mobile and Ohio Railroad, 286

Montcalm and Wolfe (Parkman), 206

Mores, Marquise de (nee Medora von Hoffman), 327, 332, 333, 334, 335–36, 353, 355

Mores, Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca de Vallombrosa, Marquis de, 327, 332–37, 347, 350–55

Morgan, Edwin D., 179

Morgan, J. Pierpont, 32, 261, 269, 317, 374

Morison, Sanford, 327

Mulligan letters, 161, 299, 323

Murphy, Michael C., 261, 263, 279

Murray, Annie, 169, 227

Murray, Joe, 261–62, 284

My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (Robinson), 381

Napoleon III, 86, 114

Nast, Thomas, 302

Nation, The, 156, 190, 300

National Mining and Exploring Co., 145

Naval History of the War of 1812, The (Roosevelt), 78, 213, 238, 241, 255, 257, 270

Newsboys’ Lodging House, 31, 33, 105, 142, 238, 254, 287

New York City Board of Aldermen, 275, 281–83

New York Court of Appeals, 279

New York Evening Mail, 190

New York Evening Post, 190, 302

and Blaine, 309, 315, 316, 323

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

and Reform Charter Bill, 290

and Westbrook Scandal, 273

New York Herald, 181, 290

New York Infant Asylum, 238

New York Observer, 279

New York Orthopedic Dispensary and

Hospital, 31, 36, 135, 143, 238, 254

New York Reform Club, 251

New York Sun, 179, 215, 264, 376

New York Telegram, 190

New York Times, The, 29, 129, 174, 190, 216, 265, 300, 308, 309

and Blaine, 303, 312, 314, 317

and Gould-Westbrook Scandal, 270, 271, 272

and Reform Charter Bill, 290

and TR’s engagement, 366–67

New York Tribune, 238, 316, 350, 364

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

and Hayes, 174

opposes public works, 155

on TR Sr., 182, 190

New York World, 41, 264–65

and Five-Cent Bill, 278

on TR’s support of Blaine, 316

and Westbrook Scandal, 270–71

New York Yacht Club, 269

Niagara Falls, 240

Nibelungenlied, 168

Nile River, 122–31

Nilsson, Christine, 300

Nobel Peace Prize, 375

North American Reptiles (Baird), 120

Northern Pacific Railroad, 326, 327, 330, 333

Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Co., 333

Northern Securities Co., 374

Norton, Charles Eliot, 207

Nugent, Laval, 331

O’Brien, John J. (”Johnny”), 280, 292, 300

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 136, 142, 156

On Asthma (Salter), 96

O’Neil, William (”Billy”), 263, 265, 275, 278, 284

On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 119

Oregon Trail, The (Parkman), 339

O’Shea, Minnie, 24, 376

Oyster Bay, N.Y., 112, 114, 378

TR plans home at, 248, 257, 286, 288–90; see also Sagamore Hill

TR Sr.’s home at, 145–48, 163–64, 167, 169, 233, 235

Packard, Arthur T., 335, 360

Pall Mall Gazette, The, 75

Palmer, George H., 213, 219

Panama Canal, 353, 355, 374

Panics 1837: 26

1869: 86, 113

1873: 138, 144

Paovitch, Noel, 78, 82

Parkman, Francis, 206, 221, 339

Parsons, Fanny Smith, see Smith, Fanny Parsons, James, 380–81

Patriarchs’ Ball, 240

Peck, Harry Thurston, 374

Pellew, George, 207, 215

Pender, Sir John, 331

Pendleton Act, 275, 300

Penrose, Boise, 259–60, 284

Phelps, Dodge and Co., 177–78

Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 170, 174

Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 34

Pioneer Cattle Co., 327

Pius IX, Pope, 86

Plains of the Great West (Dodge), 326

Platt, Thomas C., 275, 297, 298, 303, 305, 306

Plunkitt, George Washington, 265

Plymouth Church, 66

Polk, Dr., 189, 190

Porcellian Club, 208, 211, 218, 221, 222, 228, 321

Potiphar Papers, The (Curtis), 156

Pott, Percivall, 35

Potter, Howard, 30, 32, 34, 159, 191

Pratt, Nathaniel, 45, 53

Prince, Le Baron Bradford, 180, 183–84

Progress and Poverty (George), 369

Progressive Party, 379

Proust, Marcel, 110

Puck, 299

Pulaski, S.S., 46

Putnam, George Haven, 286, 317, 326; see also G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Quincy, Josiah, 209, 316

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Roosevelt), 349

Rains, John, 263

Rand (classmate of TR), 209, 211

Red Cloud, Chief, 112

Reform Charter Bill, 281–83, 290, 293, 369

Reid, Elizabeth Mills, 364

Reid, Sir John Rae, 248

Reid, Mayne, 118–19, 123, 152, 341

Reid, Whitelaw, 364

Remington, Frederic, 325, 330, 346, 349

Republican Party 1876 convention and election, 155, 157–63, 260, 298

1880 convention and election, 237, 299

1884 convention and election, 297–324

1886 New York mayoralty campaign, 368–71

1894 convention, 280–81

1912 convention, 379

Republican Reform Club (New, York, 1876), 156–57, 160–61

Review of American Birds (Baird), 120

Richfield Springs, N.Y., 114, 256

Rüs, Jacob, 287

Riverdale, N.Y., 239

Roberts, Lloyd, 331

Robinson, Corinne Douglas, 363

Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt (Conie) and Alice Lee, 228, 230, 232, 240

appearance and personality, 37, 128, 233, 364

birth, 56

childhood, 21, 33–34, 37–40, 71–92

passim, 103, 107–8, 122–31

passim, 130, 140, 143, 145ff., 163, 167

children of, 257, 291, 363

courtship and engagement, 233, 238, 240–42, 245

death, 380

debut, 232

in Dresden, 130, 167

and Edith Carow, 126, 187, 366–68

and Elliott’s decline, 379–80

European tour, 71–92

passim and fathers death, 187–92

health, 36–37, 103, 108, 169

later life, 380–81

marriage, 250, 256–57, 380–81

and mothers death, 291–92

Nile journey, 122–31

TR, devotion to, 381

Robinson, Douglas, 288, 291

courtship and engagement, 233, 238, 240–42, 245

and Elliott, 251, 379–80

marriage, 250, 256–57, 380–81

and TR, 245, 369–71

Robinson, Edward Arlington, 376–77

Robinson, Theodore Douglas, 257, 291

Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad, 286

Roosevelt, Alfred, 261

Roosevelt, Alice (TRs daughter), 322, 346, 352

and Bamie, 295, 365, 367, 369

birth, 291

on Edith, 368

engagement, 221

Roosevelt, Alice Lee (TR’s first wife), 213–16 passim, 220

appearance, 226

and baby Alice’s birth, 291

courtship, engagement, wedding, 222–38

death, 291–96

honeymoons, 237, 245, 248

married life, 237–43, 248, 256, 257, 285–90

TR’s silence about, 376

Roosevelt, Anna (Bamie) appearance and character, 34, 37, 127, 361ff.

and baby Alice, 295, 322, 362–63, 365, 367, 369

back trouble, 32–34, 56, 103, 111, 363–64

birth, 54

childhood, 21, 26, 34–37, 39–40, 65–66, 70

and Civil War, 57, 58, 60

and Corinne’s engagement, 241, 242

and Cousin Sally, 232, 364

death, 373

debut, 127, 139, 140, 143

and Elliott, 166-67, 362, 379

European tour, 71–92 passim, 137–38

father, relations with, 33–35, 116–17, 127

and father’s death, 185–92

France, schooling in and flight from, 91–92, 113–14

passim ”Major Generaless,” 166–67

marriage, 373

mother, relations with, 127–28, 233

and mother’s death, 291–92, 295

Nile journey, 122–31

TR, devotion to, 364–66, 373

and TR’s asthma, 98–99, 103, 104

and TR’s engagement and marriage to Alice, 228, 230, 236, 241, 242, 257–58, 289

and TR’s engagement to Edith, 366–68

Roosevelt, Anna Hall, 256–58, 277, 286, 362, 379

Roosevelt, Archibald, 377

Roosevelt, Cornelius (TR’s cousin), 218

Roosevelt, Cornelius (TR’s uncle), 113, 120, 188, 189, 191

Roosevelt, Cornelius Van Schaack (CVS: TR’s grandfather), 21, 40, 42, 72, 113

business interests, 26, 29

death, 129, 130

N.Y.C. house of, 22, 41, 58, 66

Oyster Bay house of, 112, 114

and TR Sr.’s wedding, 22, 53

Roosevelt, Corinne (Conie), see Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Edith Carow, see Carow, Edith Roosevelt, Eleanor, 362, 363, 364, 373, 380

Roosevelt, Elizabeth (Mrs. James Alfred Roosevelt), 188, 189

Roosevelt, Elizabeth Ellis (Aunt Lizzie Ellis), 23, 55, 229, 376

Roosevelt, Elliott (Ellie), 244–58

alcoholism, 233, 250, 253, 254, 379

appearance and charm, 37, 128, 253–54

and Bamie, 167, 362, 379

birth, 56

in business, 251

childhood and education, 21, 32–33, 37–40, 67, 71–92

passim, 115, 122–31

passim, 140, 145ff., 152–53, 167

and Corinne’s marriage, 251

courtship of Anna Hall, 256–57, 277

decline and death, 379–80

in Dresden, 130, 167

Eleanor and, 380

European tour, 71–92

passim, 104, 106–7

and father’s death, 187–92

health, 147–53, 163, 172, 250, 257

in India, 233, 236, 237, 244–49, 253, 254

marriage, 256–57, 286, 362, 379

mother, relations with, 248, 251–53

and mother’s death, 291–92

Nile journey, 122–31

to Texas and return, 152–53, 163, 172, 180

TR dedicates book to, 326

and TR’s first marriage, 229, 230, 236

western trip with TR, 233, 234–36

writings of, 254, 255

Roosevelt, Elliott, Jr., 379

Roosevelt, Emlen, 195, 217, 245, 261, 281, 378

Roosevelt, Ethel, 377

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 250, 253, 373, 380

Roosevelt, Helen Astor, 240

Roosevelt, James, 232–33, 240, 253, 260, 364

Roosevelt, James Alfred, 42, 227, 238, 362

and family business, 28–30, 144–45

and Gould, 269

homes of, 130, 245

and politics, 113, 261

railroad interests, 286, 295

and TR’s finances, 211, 286

and TR Sr.’s death, 187–92, 196–97

Roosevelt, James Roosevelt (Rosy), 240

Roosevelt, Kermit, 377

Roosevelt, Laura, 120, 188, 189

Roosevelt, Margaret Barnhill (Mrs. CVS), 23, 26, 53, 55, 56

Roosevelt, Martha Bulloch (Mittie), 21, 25, 32, 40, 337

and Alice Lee, 228, 230–33, 236, 237, 241

appearance, 48–49, 144

background and early life, 41–48

Bamie, relations with, 127–28, 233

and children’s birth, 35, 54, 56, 103

and Civil War, 56–58, 60, 61, 65, 66–67, 103

courtship and marriage, 29, 48–54

and Cousin Sally, 232, 252–53

cultural interests, 70

death, 291–96

eccentricities, 69, 252–53

Elliott, relations with, 233, 251–53

European tour, 70, 71–92

passim, 103–8

passim, 137–38

expenditures, 67, 69, 138–39

and family gymnasium, 115

health, 54, 66, 69–70, 103

Irvine, secret meeting with, 74

Nile journey, 122–31

at Oyster Bay, 114, 145ff., 163–64, 289

and religion, 68

at Riverdale, 239

in society, 67–68

TR, influence on, 376

and TR’s asthma, 38, 93–94, 96–97, 99–105

passim, 108, 113–14, 137

and TR Sr.’s death, 187–92, 193

Roosevelt, Minnie O’Shea, 24, 376

Roosevelt, Nicholas (TR’s great-uncle), 42

Roosevelt, Nicholas (TR’s second cousin), 322

Roosevelt, Quentin, 377, 379

Roosevelt, Robert Barnwell, 22–27, 145, 244

and Brooklyn Bridge, 239, 282

political career, 113, 115, 154–55, 260

second marriage, 376

and TR’s law studies, 237, 239, 287

and TR’s political debut, 261, 263

Roosevelt, Sara Delano (Cousin Sally), 144, 232–33, 250, 252–53, 364, 373

Roosevelt, Theodore (Teedie, TR), 21, 36–40, 47, 67

in Adirondacks, 120–21

and Alice Lee: courtship and wedding, 222–38

and Alice Lee: honeymoons, 237, 245, 248, 255

and Alice Lee: married life, 237–43, 248, 256, 257, 285–90, 290

and Alice’s death, 291–96, 376

appearance, 37–38, 124, 165, 166, 167, 254, 264

in Assembly, 245, 249, 253, 257, 259–84, 290, 293–94, 322

assassination attempt on, 379

asthma attacks, 38, 46, 61, 65–66, 72, 81, 83–84, 92, 93–111, 113–16, 137, 194, 195, 218, 235, 256, 350, 378

Autobiography, 376, 377

Bamie’s devotion to, 364–66, 373

Benton biography by, 352

birth, 35, 56

birthplace, 19–20, 381

and Blaine, 299, 302–4, 308–10, 312–16, 318, 322–23, 346

body building, 115–16, 166, 172

children of, 377; see also Roosevelt, Alice (daughter) and Cigar Bill, 267–68, 279–80

and civil service reform, 275–76, 279, 281–83, 290, 369, 374

and Civil War, 56–57, 60, 70

and Cleveland, 274, 276, 302, 315

Corinne’s devotion to, 381

and Corinne’s engagement, 241–42

in Dakota Bad Lands, 257, 296, 316, 324, 325–60

death, 378–79

in Dresden, 130, 137, 167

Edith Carow, early friendship with, 108, 169, 180

Edith Carow, early romance with and subsequent relations, 195, 227, 230, 236, 245

Edith Carow, later engagement and marriage to, 366–69, 376–78

education, 38–39, 120, 123, 128, 130, 140–41, 163, 164, 167; see also at Harvard,

below Elliott, big brother to, 148–53

Elliott, western hunting trip with, 232, 234–36

European tours, 37, 71–92

passim, 103–8

passim, 137, 245, 248, 255

father, devotion to, 34, 217–18, 375

father, excursions with, 83–84, 104, 106–9, 114

and fathers death, 185–97

father’s final letter to, 184–85, 186, 196

and Five-Cent Bill, 277–79

and Gould, 268–73, 275–77, 284

at Harvard, 165–74, 182, 187

passim, 192, 194, 197, 201–32

passim, 235

his Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 325–26, 344

income and expenditures, 211–12, 286, 337

later life, 374–79

and law studies, 237, 239, 287–88

Lodge, friendship with, 301–2, 319–20, 322–23, 365

Maine trips, 195–96, 217, 218, 227, 235

mayoralty campaign of, 367–71, 377

and mothers death, 291–92

mother’s influence on, 376

nature studies and collecting, 38, 117–25, 131, 140, 141, 167–68, 214, 219–20

his Naval History, 78, 213, 238, 241, 255, 257, 270

new house with Alice, 286

Nile journey, 122–31, 193

Nobel Peace Prize, 375

and Oyster Bay, 114, 145–47, 167–69, 248, 257, 286, 288–90;

see also Sagamore Hill philanthropies, 238, 254, 287

as President, 373, 374–76

his Ranch Life, 349

at Republican 1884

convention, 297–99, 301–4, 306, 308–10, 312–15, 318–21

“Summer Birds of the Adirondacks,” 182

and Westbrook Scandal, 266, 268–74, 288

in Wyoming, 342–45

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr. (Ted: TR’s son), 377, 378

Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr. (TR’s father), 21–40

abolitionist, 50

in Adirondacks, 120–21

appearance and character, 24–25, 32

and Bamie, 34–36, 116–17

and body building, 114–15

and business, 28–30, 144–45

in Civil War, 23, 57, 58–66, 103, 159

and Conkling, 157–59, 161–63, 183–84, 186, 196

and Corrine, 34

courtship and marriage, 29, 48, 50–54

and Customhouse controversy, 175–83

passim, 196, 300

death, 185–96

education, 26

and Ellie, 33, 148–53

European tours, 26–28, 70, 71–92, 104–7

passim, 137–38

and father’s death, 129, 131

“Greatheart,” 34

and the insane, 141, 180, 181

and Mittie’s health, 54, 69, 137

new 57th St. house of, 130, 136, 138–40

Nile journey, 122–31

at Oyster Bay, 145–47, 163–64, 165

and Panic (1873), 138, 141, 144

philanthropies, 30–32, 36, 105, 116, 135, 141–43

political reformer, 154–64

passim and religion, 24, 32, 42, 68, 91, 105, 125, 144

at Republican 1876

convention, 155, 157, 160–63

at Riverdale, 239

in society, 142–44

TR, birthday letter to, 170–71

TR, economy lecture to, 212

TR, final letter to, 184–85, 186, 196

and TR’s asthma, 38, 83–84, 94, 96–97, 101, 103–8

passim, 111, 113–14

at Vienna Exposition, 137, 176

Roosevelt, Weir, 26, 29, 50, 86, 90, 140

Roosevelt, West, 140, 229, 233, 322, 378

nature interest and trips, 38, 120–21, 195–96

Roosevelt and Son, 26, 29, 41, 135, 136

investment firm, 144–45, 261, 286

“Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” 38

Root, Elihu, 261, 300, 376

Rosenvelt, Claes Martenszen van, 42

Rosenvelt, Jannetje van, 42

Roswell, Ga., 44ff., 54–55, 67, 76

Rough Riders, 374

Rotch, Nana, 227

Russell, Archibald, 251

Russell, Lord John, 78

Russia, S.S., 84, 139

Russian Ball (1863), 66

Russo-Japanese War, 374

Rutherfurd, Mrs. Lewis, 67

Sabin, Senator, 307

Sagamore Hill, 365, 370, 375, 377, 378, 379, 380

Saga of King Olaf, The (Longfellow), 168, 221

Sage, Russell, 270, 273

St. Andrews Society, 238

St. John, Thomas B., 73, 91

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 316, 350

St. Paul’s School, 152, 205

Salter, Henry Hude, 96–97, 105, 109, 110

Saltonstall, Endicott, 225

Saltonstall, Harriett Rose, 225

Saltonstall, Leverett, 225, 228

Saltonstall, Mary (Mamie), 222, 225

Saltonstall, Nathaniel, 205

Saltonstall, Phillip, 225

Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott, 205, 209, 213, 215, 220

and TR’s courtship of Alice Lee, 222, 224, 229, 235

Saltonstall, Rose, 222, 225, 227, 228, 229, 235

Saratoga, N.Y., 66, 101, 105, 113, 180

Sargeant, Dudley A., 235

Sargent, John Singer, 72

Saturday Evening Post, The, 216

Savannah, S.S., 44

Scalp Hunters, The (Reid), 118

Schurz, Carl, 155, 157, 175, 274

and Customhouse investigation, 178–79

opposes Blaine, 161, 162, 299, 300, 302, 313–14, 317

and wife’s death, 294

Schuyler, Louisa, 117, 135, 141–43, 375

Schuyler, Philip John, 142

Scotia, S.S., 71–74

Scott, Samuel, 205

Scott, Sir Walter, 80, 237, 378

Scribner’s Magazine, 208

Sears, Mr. and Mrs., 74

Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, The (Bulloch), 78

Seligman, Mrs. Jesse, 71

Seligman, Mr. and Mrs. Leopold, 71

Selmes, Martha Flandrau, 366

Selmes, Tilden, 366

Semmes, Raphael, 78

Sewall, William, 196, 218, 265

in Bad Lands, 329, 331, 337, 338, 345–46, 350, 356, 357

quits, 354, 360

Seward, William, 280

Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 141, 206, 213, 220, 317

Shannon, Assemblyman, 263

Shaw, Harry, 222

Sheard, Titus, 281, 292, 298

Shenandoah (Confederate raider), 76

Shenango and Allegheny Railroad, 286

Sherman, John, 301, 309, 310, 312–13

Sherman, William Tecumseh, 67, 300

Smith, Fanny, 147, 148, 168, 169, 227, 253, 254, 256

marriage, 380

and TR’s first marriage, 230, 236

and West Roosevelt, 233

Smith, Paul, 120

Song of Roland, The, 168

Sorrell, Gilbert Moxley, 48

Souvestre, Marie, 91

Spanish-American War, 374, 378

Spectator, The, 75

Spinney, George, 265, 266

Sprague, Kate Chase, 159, 180

Stalwarts, 281

State Board of Charities, New York, 180, 181

State Charities Aid Association, 190

Statue of Liberty, 175

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 118

Steward, Daniel, 43, 46, 47

Stickney, Victor Hugo, 355, 357

Stiles, Henry, 48, 51, 58

Stiles, Mary Cooper, 53

Still Hunter (Van Dyke), 326

Stobo, Archibald, 42–43

Strauss, Johann, 86

Strew, W. W, 266

Sturgis, Russell, 130

Suez Canal, 137, 138

Sullivan, Mark, 284, 305, 374

“Summer Birds of the Adirondacks” (TR and Minot), 182

Sumner, Charles, 75

Sumner, William Graham, 156

Swan, Emily, 227–28

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 194

Taft, William Howard, 379

Tammany Hall, 23, 113, 154, 265, 273

tariff, 309

Taylor, Bayard, 72

Taylor, Charles Fayette, 36, 94, 96

Tebbets, Jack, 215, 222

Teschemacher, Hubert E., 327, 329

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 75

Thayer, Nathaniel, 126, 127, 128

Thayer, William Roscoe, 201, 202, 205, 210, 214, 323, 350

Thomas, Dr., 189

Thompson, Dr., 195

Thompson, Hubert O., 283, 284

Thoreau, Henry David, 155

Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 142, 300

Tilden, Samuel, 154, 159, 174–75

Tivoli, N.Y., 256, 257

To Cuba and Back (Dana), 75

Tolstoy, Leo, 356–57

Towers & Gudgell (”OX” brand), 331, 337, 347

Townsend, Martin, 310

Toy (Mittie’s slave), 47, 50

Tramp Abroad, A (Twain), 238

Trimble, Richard, 327, 329

Trollope, Anthony, 255

Twain, Mark, 72, 238, 300

Tweed, William Marcy, 113, 154, 280

Union Cattle Co., 327

Union League Club, 24, 59, 113, 135, 156, 159, 190

Union Theological Seminary, 191

Union Trust Co., 138, 286

Utica, N.Y., 300

Van Allen, Lucas, 293

Van Schaack, Elliese, 89

Vaux, Calvert, 136

Victoria, Queen, 74

Vienna Exposition (1873), 137, 176

Wallock, Lester, 71

Ward, John Elliott, 68

Washburn, Charles, 215

Watkins, Dora, 21, 35, 39, 139, 248

Weed, Thurlow, 179, 280

Weld, Minot, 209, 215, 222

Welling, Richard, 166, 215–16

West, Hilborne, 38, 39, 46, 50

in Adirondacks, 120

and TR’s asthma, 94, 96, 114

TR’s science mentor, 119

West, Susan Elliott, 38, 44, 46, 50, 56, 58, 64, 66, 67, 120

West, William H., 310–12

Westbrook, T. R., 268–74

Westbrook Scandal, 266, 268–74, 288

Western Union Telegraph Co., 269, 270

Wharton, Edith, 71, 72, 169

on New York society, 239, 340

on TR, 379

Whiskey Ring, 156, 160

White, Andrew D., 300, 306, 310, 320

White, Horace, 315

Whitney, Bessie, 227

Whitney, Ellerton, 226

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 221

Winthrop, Egerton, 71

Wise, John S., 244

Wister, Owen, 202, 277

his anecdotes about TR, 216–17, 241

on Harvard, 209

on Lodge’s influence on TR, 323

and the West, 325, 327, 329, 346, 349

women’s suffrage, 309

Wood, J. G., 119

Wood, John, 115

Woodbury, John, 213, 214

Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 156

Wyoming, 257, 327, 329, 342–45, 354

About the Author

DAVID MCCULLOUGH was born in Pittsburgh in 1933. An avid reader from an early age, he graduated from Yale with honors in English literature. After college he moved to New York and began work as a trainee at Sports Illustrated, a new magazine at the time. He spent five years working in New York, and at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an editor at the United States Information Agency. There he discovered that he enjoyed writing history, and began doing occasional pieces for American Heritage magazine.

After Kennedy was assassinated, McCullough moved back to New York to become an editor at American Heritage, where he worked for six years. During that time he wrote his first book, The Johnstown Flood, at nights and on weekends.

After the success of The Johnstown Flood, he made the difficult decision to quit his job at American Heritage, and support his family by writing books. Fortunately, his next work was The Great Bridge. He has been a full-time author ever since, publishing all his books with Simon & Schuster, including his new biography, John Adams. None of his books has ever gone out of print.

McCullough is twice winner of the National Book Award and twice winner of the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize. For his monumental Truman, he received the Pulitzer Prize. For his work overall he has been honored by the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, the National Humanities Medal, the St. Louis Literary Award, and the New York Public Library’s Literary Lion Award.

In a crowded, productive career, McCullough has been an editor, essayist teacher, lecturer, and familiar presence on public television as host of The American Experience and narrator of numerous documentaries, including The Civil War and Napoleon.

He is past president of the Society of American Historians. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received thirty-one honorary degrees.

Still an avid reader, traveler, and landscape painter, McCullough now lives in Massachusetts, with his wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough. They have five children and fifteen grandchildren.

Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Lincoln’s funeral procession approaches Union Square, April 1865. The Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt house is on the left, and the children watching from the second-story window are believed to be Theodore and Elliott.

Martha Bulloch Roosevelt (Mittie), considered one of the most beautiful women in New York.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (Greatheart), large, powerful, the idolized father and humanitarian.

Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch (Grandmamma).

Uncle Jimmie—Captain James Dunwody Bulloch.

FOUR PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Irvine Bulloch.

Two unidentified former slaves of the Bulloch family at Bulloch Hall, sometime after the Civil War.

COURTESY HISTORIC ROSWELL, INC.

Bulloch Hall, Roswell, Georgia, as it looks today.

Robert Barnwell Roosevelt.

ALL PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Roosevelt & Son, 94 Maiden Lane, New York City.

Early work by the student naturalist, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

“Teedie” at age ten.

Theodore, Sr., and his beloved Anna (Bamie).

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Teedie, Elliott, Cousin Maud Elliott, Corinne, and Cousin John Elliott, Dresden, 1873.

COURTESY DEBORAH BULL

Interior of a typical dahabieh of the type the Roosevelts used to “do” the Nile.

a letter from Teedie to Edith Carow, written in 1869, during the family’s first tour abroad.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Mittie, Dresden, 1873. (The necklace was a prized gift from Theodore, Sr., purchased in Egypt.)

Senator Roscoe Conkling.

Chester A. Arthur.

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: CULVER PICTURES

The New York Customhouse.

The American Museum of Natural History.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

“Tranquillity,” Oyster Bay, New York. Mittie and Theodore, Sr., are on the porch. Figures in the foreground are believed to be Corinne and Edith Carow. (The house no longer stands.)

Teedie, Elliott, Corinne, and Edith at Oyster Bay, probably the summer of 1876, before Teedie left for Harvard.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore Roosevelt (now “Teddy”) at Harvard.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

The room Bamie chose and furnished for Theodore off campus.

Theodore in rowing attire.

Theodore as yachtsman.

THREE PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore the hunter, in Maine with Bill Sewall (left) and Will Dow.

A page from Theodore’s diary, junior year.

FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Alice Lee.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

The young politician with some Albany allies. The “best friend,” Isaac Hunt, is seated at left, and behind stands Billy O’Neil. At center seated is George Spinney of The New York Times. At right is an assemblyman from Brooklyn, Walter Howe.

The gentleman reformer is paired with New York’s new reform governor, Grover Cleveland, in a cartoon by Nast in Harper’s Weekly.

BOTH PHOTOS: THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

The Roosevelt brothers (Elliott with pipe) pose in a photographer’s studio in 1880, the summer of their hunting trip in the West.

SAGAMORE HILL, NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Parlor of the Roosevelt mansion at 6 West 57th Street, with Elliott’s tiger as centerpiece.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT LIBRARY

Anna Hall.

COURTESY THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Elliott at the Meadowbrook Hunt.

CULVER PICTURES

Henry Cabot Lodge.

HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD

Theodore in the Bad Lands in full cowboy regalia.

Theodore’s Elkhorn Ranch, as sketched by Frederic Remington.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Studio portrait of Theodore as “the plainsman,” made to help promote one of his books. (The buckskin suit cost $100—the equivalent of $1,000 or more today. Knife and scabbard were custom-made by Tiffany.)

Madame de Mores, the former Medora von Hoffman.

TWO PHOTOS: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF NORTH DAKOTA

The Marquis de Mores in the Bad Lands.

Bamie with Baby Alice, about 1886.

COURTESY OF W. SHEFFIELD COWLES, JR.

Sagamore Hill, soon after completion.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Edith Carow.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Theodore Roosevelt, age 27, at the time he ran for mayor of New York.

BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

John Adams

Truman

Brave Companions

Mornings on Horseback

The Path Between the Seas

The Great Bridge

The Johnstown Flood

DAVID McCULLOUGH

The Path
Between the Seas

The Creation of the Panama Canal
1870–1914

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1977 by David McCullough All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Edith Fowler
Manufactured in the United States of America

10   9   8   7   6  5     4   3   2   1
Pbk. 50

The excerpts from Goethals, Genius of the Panama Canal by Joseph Bucklin Bishop and Farnham Bishop, are copyright 1930 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., and are reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The excerpts from William Crawford Gorgas, His Life and Work by Marie D. Gorgas and Burton J. Hendrick, are copyright 1924 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., and are used by permission of the publisher.

The excerpts from Monument for the World by Robert E. Wood, are copyright © 1963 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., and are reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCullough, David G.
     The path between the seas.

Bibliography: p.
    Includes inaex.
    1. Panama Canal—History. I. Title.

F1369.C2M33     972.875’04     76–57967
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN 0–671-22563–4
ISBN 0–671-24409–4 Pbk.

For Rosalee Barnes McCullough

Contents

PREFACE

BOOK ONE: THE VISION 1870–1894

1. Threshold

2. The Hero

3. Consensus of One

4. Distant Shores

5. The Incredible Task

6. Soldiers Under Fire

7. Downfall

8. The Secrets of Panama

BOOK TWO: STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER 1890–1904

9. Theodore the Spinner

10. The Lobby

11. Against All Odds

12. Adventure by Trigonometry

13. Remarkable Revolution

14. Envoy Extraordinary

BOOK THREE: THE BUILDERS 1904–1914

15. The Imperturbable Dr. Gorgas

16. Panic

17. John Stevens

18. The Man with the Sun in His Eyes

19. The Chief Point of Attack

20. Life and Times

21. Triumph

Afterword

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SOURCES

INDEX

MAPS

Panama During the French Era

Panama, the Canal, and the Canal Zone

PICTURE SECTIONS

Preface

The creation of the Panama Canal was far more than a vast, unprecedented feat of engineering. It was a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war. Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever before mounted anywhere on earth. It held the world’s attention over a span of forty years. It affected the lives of tens of thousands of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality. Great reputations were made and destroyed. For numbers of men and women it was the adventure of a lifetime.

Because of it one nation, France, was rocked to its foundations. Another, Colombia, lost its most prized possession, the Isthmus of Panama. Nicaragua, on the verge of becoming a world crossroads, was left to wait for some future chance. The Republic of Panama was born. The United States was embarked on a role of global involvement.

In the history of finance capitalism, in the history of medicine, it was an event of signal consequence. It marked a score of advances in engineering, government planning, labor relations. It was a response to Sedan, a response to the idea of sea power. It was both the crowning constructive effort, ”The Great Enterprise,” of the Victorian Era and the first grandiose and assertive show of American power at the dawn of the new century. And yet the passage of the first ship through the canal in the summer of 1914—the first voyage through the American land mass—marked the resolution of a dream as old as the voyages of Columbus.

So this book is an attempt to give fitting scope to the subject, to see it whole. I have tried to discover underlying causes for what happened, to measure forces of national pride and ambition, to grasp the still untarnished ideal of progress.

What was the nature of that day and age now gone to dust? What moved people?

Primarily my interest has been in the participants themselves. Of great importance, I felt, was the need to show the enormous variety of people involved, and the skills and strengths called upon by such an undertaking, quite apart from technical competence. I wanted to see these people for what they were, as living, fallible, often highly courageous men and women caught up in a common struggle far bigger than themselves, caught up frequently by forces beyond their control or even their reckoning. I have tried to present the problems they faced as they saw them, to perceive what they did not know as well as what they did know at any given time, and to keep constantly in mind that like all mortals in every age, they had no sure way of telling how it would all come out. The book is their story.

Pure chance, fate if you prefer, played a major part, as it always does. Popular misconceptions, self-deceptions large and small, were determining factors all along the line from the time Ferdinand de Lesseps first set things in motion. One is struck, too, by what a moving, potent force personality can be—de Lesseps and Theodore Roosevelt being the outstanding examples. But no less impressive to me are the numbers of instances in which large events turned on the actions of individuals who had little notion that they were playing a part in history.

A good deal of what follows is new. It has been drawn from interviews, from unpublished sources, from published documents hitherto ignored. Several leading characters emerge as quite different from previous portrayals, and major portions of the book are set far indeed from the jungles of Panama.

Much of the French side of the story will, I expect, come as a surprise to many readers. To many readers, also, the Panama revolution and the bizarre chain of events surrounding it may seem more like the creations of fiction. But let me stress that nothing in the book has been invented. Documentation will be found in the Notes at the end.

I feel I should add a word of explanation concerning the current controversy over the canal.

My work was begun years before the canal leaped back into the headlines, and my purpose throughout has remained what it was at the start: to tell a large and important story beginning in 1870 and ending in 1914, because that was where the story belonged—back on the other side of the Great War. That was the world that built the canal.

The root causes of the present controversy are all here, however; they too are part of the story, as the reader will discover.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH

West Tisbury, Massachusetts
October 1976

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT

BOOK ONE

The Vision
1870–1894

1
Threshold

There is a charm of adventure about this new quest...

–The New York Times

I

The letter, several pages in length and signed by Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson, was addressed to Commander Thomas O. Selfridge. It was an eminently clear, altogether formal document, as expected, and had a certain majesty of tone that Commander Selfridge thought quite fitting. That he and the Secretary were personally acquainted, that they had in fact become pleasantly drunk together on one past occasion and vowed eternal friendship as their carriage rolled through the dark capital, were in no way implied. Nor is it important, except that Selfridge, a serious and sober man on the whole, was to wonder for the rest of his days what influence the evening may have had on the way things turned out for him.

His own planning and preparations had already occupied several extremely busy months. The letter was but the final official directive:

Navy Department

Washington, January 10, 1870

Sir: You are appointed to the command of an expedition to make a survey of the Isthmus of Darien, to ascertain the point at which to cut a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The steam-sloop Nipsic and the store-ship Guard will be under your command . ..

The Department has entrusted to you a duty connected with the greatest enterprise of the present age; and upon your enterprise and your zeal will depend whether your name is honorably identified with one of the facts of the future. . ..

No matter how many surveys have been made, or how accurate they may have been, the people of this country will never be satisfied until every point of the Isthmus is surveyed by some responsible authority, and by properly equipped parties, such as will be under your command, working on properly matured plans. . ..

So on January 22, 1870, a clear, bright abnormally mild Saturday, the Nipsic cast off at Brooklyn Navy Yard and commenced solemnly down the East River. The Guard, under Commander Edward P. Lull, followed four days later.

In all, the expedition comprised nearly a hundred regular officers and men, two Navy doctors, five civilians from the Coast Survey (surveyors and draftsmen), two civilian geologists, three telegraphers from the Signal Corps, and a photographer, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who had been Mathew Brady’s assistant during the war.

Stowed below on the Guard was the finest array of modern instruments yet assembled for such an undertaking–engineers’ transits, spirit levels, gradienters, surveyors’ compasses and chains, delicate pocket aneroid barometers, mercurial mountain barometers, current meters–all “for prosecuting the work vigorously and scientifically.” (The Stackpole transits, made by the New York firm of Stackpole & Sons, had their telescope axis mounted in double cone bearings, for example, which gave the instrument greater rigidity than older models, and the introduction of a simplified horizontal graduation reading allowed for faster readings and less chance of error.) There were rubber blankets and breech-loading rifles for every man, whiskey, quinine, an extra 600 pairs of shoes, and 100 miles of telegraph wire. Stores “in such shape as to be little liable to injury by exposure to rains” were sufficient for four months: 7,000 pounds of bacon, 10,000 pounds of bread, 6,000 pounds of tomato soup, 30 gallons of beans, 2,500 pounds of coffee, 100 bottles of pepper, 600 pounds of canned butter.

The destination was the Darien wilderness on the Isthmus of Panama, more than two thousand miles from Brooklyn, within ten degrees of the equator, and, contrary to the mental picture most people had, east of the 80th meridian–that is, east of Florida. They would land at Caledonia Bay, about 150 miles east of the Panama Railroad. It was the same point from which Balboa had begun his crossing in 1513, and where, at the end of the seventeenth century, William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, had established the disastrous Scottish colony of New Edinburgh, because Caledonia Bay (as he named it) was to be the future “door of the seas.” Harassed by the Spanish, decimated by disease, the little settlement had lasted scarcely more than a year. Every trace of it had long since vanished.

Darien was known to be the narrowest point anywhere on the Central American isthmus, by which was meant the entire land bridge from lower Mexico to the continent of South America and which included the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Guatemala, Honduras, British Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, the last of which was still a province–indeed a most prized province–of Colombia. From Tehuantepec to the Atrato River in Colombia, the natural, easternmost boundary of Central America, was a distance of 1,350 miles as the crow flies, as far as from New York to Dallas, and there were not simply a few, but many points along that zigzagging land mass where, on the map at least, it appeared a canal could be cut. A few years before, Admiral Charles H. Davis had informed Congress that there were no fewer than nineteen possible locations for a Central American ship canal. But at Darien the distance from tidewater to tidewater on a straight line was known to be less than forty miles.

Because of the particular configuration of the Isthmus of Panama– with the land barrier running nearly horizontal between the oceans– the expedition would be crossing down the map. The men would make their way from the Caribbean on the north to the Pacific on the south, just as Balboa had. (Hence Balboa’s designation of the Pacific as the Sea of the South had been perfectly logical.) The Panama Railroad, the nearest sign of civilization on the map, also ran from north to south. Its faint, spidery red line looked like something added by a left-handed cartographer, with the starting point at Colón, on Limon Bay, actually somewhat farther west than the finish point at Panama City, on the Bay of Panama.

They were to measure the heights of mountains and the depths of rivers and harbors. They were to gather botanical and geological specimens. They were to take astronomical observations, report on the climate, and observe the character of the Indians encountered. And they were to lose as little time as possible, since the rainy season–the sickly season, Secretary Robeson called it–would soon be upon them.

Six other expeditions were to follow. A Presidential commission, the first Interoceanic Canal Commission, would be established to appraise all resulting surveys and reports and to declare which was the chosen path. The commission would include the chief of the Army Engineers, the head of the Coast Survey, and the chief of the Bureau of Navigation. Nothing even remotely so systematic, so elaborate or sensible, had ever been attempted before.

But the Darien Expedition was the first, and the fact that it was to Darien, one of the wildest, least-known corners of the entire world, was a matter of extreme concern at the Navy Department. Sixteen years earlier, in 1854, well within the memory of most Americans, an expedition to Caledonia Bay had ended in a disaster that had the whole country talking and left the Navy with a profound respect for the terrors of a tropical wilderness. What had happened was this.

In 1850, Dr. Edward Cullen, an Irish physician and member of the Royal Geographical Society, had announced the discovery of a way across Darien by which he had walked from the Atlantic to the Pacific several times and quite effortlessly. He had been careful to mark the trail, Cullen said, and at no place had he found the elevation more than 150 feet above sea level. It was the miracle route everyone had been searching for and the story caused a sensation. A joint expedition to Darien was organized by England, France, Colombia (then known as New Granada), and the United States. But when the American ship, Cyane, reached Caledonia Bay ahead of the others, Navy Lieutenant Isaac Strain and a party of twenty-seven men started into the jungle without waiting, taking provisions enough for only a few days and fully expecting to pick up Cullen’s trail. Balboa, when he started into this same jungle, had gone with a force of 190 heavily armed Spaniards and several hundred Indians, some of whom knew the way.

Strain was not seen again for forty-nine days. His troubles had begun from the moment he set foot on shore. The Indians, impressed by the guns of the Cyane, agreed to let his party pass, but refused to serve as guides. Cullen’s trail was nowhere to be found. Within days the expedition was hopelessly lost. Food ran out; rifles became so rusted as to be useless. Strain picked up a large river–the Chucunaque–which he thought would take him to the Pacific but which, in reality, was leading him on an endless looping course eastward, through the very center of the Isthmus. When a band of Indians warned him that it was the wrong way, he decided they were deliberately trying to mislead him.

Verging on starvation, his men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps. The smothering heat, the rains, the forbidding jungle twilight day after day, were unlike anything any of them had ever experienced. Seven men died; one other went temporarily out of his mind. That any survived was due mainly to the discipline enforced by Strain and Strain’s own extraordinary fortitude. Leaving the others behind, he and three of the strongest men had pushed on in search of help. When they at last staggered into an Indian village near the Pacific side, Strain, who was torn and bleeding and virtually naked, turned around and led a rescue mission back to the others. A British doctor who examined the survivors described them as the most “wretched set of human beings” he had ever seen. “In nearly all, the intellect was in a slight degree affected, as evinced by childish and silly remarks, although their memory, and the recollection of their sufferings, were unimpaired. . . . They were literally living skeletons, covered with foul ulcers. . . .” Strain’s weight was seventy-five pounds. A few years later, at Colón, having never fully recovered, Strain died at age thirty-six.

Strain had found the mountains at Darien not less than one thousand feet. From what he had seen, Darien was “utterly impracticable” as the route for a canal. Just the same, others were not quite willing to abandon the idea. While Strain’s ordeal was taken as a fearful object lesson at the Navy Department, there were some who were still willing to accept the possibility that Edward Cullen had been telling the truth after all.

Cullen, who had come out with one of the British ships but then made a hasty retreat to Colón (and from there to New York) the moment it appeared something was amiss, turned up later as a surgeon with the British Army in the Crimean War. He also kept persistently to his story. The expedition had been deplorably misled, he argued. Strain had had no business proceeding without him or without his map, which by itself would have made all the difference.

Admiral Davis, Commander Selfridge, and, most importantly, Admiral Daniel Ammen, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, were among those who considered the case still very much open. “It is to the isthmus of Darien that we are first to look for the solution to the great problem,” Davis had informed Congress. “The statements of Dr. Cullen had been so severely criticized,” Selfridge was to explain, “and so persistently advocated by him, that I was inclined to put some faith in his representations.” To Admiral Ammen, who had pored over every recorded detail of the episode, the critical clue was in Strain’s own report. Days after he had started inland, at a time when he should have been well beyond earshot of Caledonia Bay, Strain had written in his journal of hearing the evening gun on the Cyane, and this, Ammen believed, was evidence of a low-lying valley running inland from the bay; otherwise the sound would have been blocked by intervening hills.

Interest in the new expedition was considerable in numerous quarters. The very times themselves seemed so immensely, so historically favorable. If there was one word to characterize the spirit of the moment, it was Confidence. Age-old blank spaces and mysteries were being supplanted on all sides. The summer before, the one-armed John Wesley Powell, in the interests of science, had led an expedition down the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon. The great geological and geographical surveys of the West had begun under the brilliant Clarence King. Poking about in godforsaken corners of the western desert, Othniel C. Marsh, of Yale, who was not yet forty and the country’s first and only professor of paleontology, had unearthed the fossils needed to present the full evolution of the horse, the most dramatic demonstration yet of Darwin’s theory.

People were reading Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The Roeblings had begun their Brooklyn Bridge. Harvard had installed a chemist as its president. In Pittsburgh, experiments were being made with a new process developed by the English metallurgist Bessemer. And within the preceding nine months alone two of the most celebrated events of the century had occurred: the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad and the opening of the Suez Canal. All at once the planet had grown very much smaller. With the canal, the railroad, the new iron-screw ocean steamers, it was possible–in theory anyway–to travel around the world in a tenth of the time it would have taken a decade earlier, as Jules Verne would illustrate in his next voyage extraordinaire.

The feeling was that the revealed powers of science, “the vast strides made in engineering and mechanical knowledge,” as Commander Selfridge would say, had brought mankind to a threshold. It was said that the power generated by one steamship during a single Atlantic crossing would be sufficient to raise from the Nile and set in place every stone of the Great Pyramid. Men talked confidently of future systems of transport that would bring all peoples into contact with one another, spread knowledge, break down national divisions, and make a unified whole of humanity. “The barrier is down!” a French prelate proclaimed on the beaches of Port Said when Suez was opened. “One of the most formidable enemies of mankind and of civilization, which is distance, loses in a moment two thousand leagues of his empire. The two sides of the world approach to greet one another . . . The history of the world has reached one of its most glorious stages.”

There really seemed no limit to what man might do. While an official report of the kind Commander Selfridge was to submit might contain the expression “under Providence” (in conjunction with certain accomplishments), such terms seemed perfunctory. Man, modern man–the scientist, the explorer, the builder of bridges and waterways and steam engines, the visionary entrepreneur–had become the central creative force. In the summer of 1870, the summer Selfridge returned from Darien, thirty, perhaps forty, thousand people would fill London’s Crystal Palace for a public reception that only a Nelson might have been accorded in an earlier day. Thousands of rockets would hurtle into the night and two hundred boys from the Lambeth Industrial Schools would wave four hundred colored flares in an “Egyptian Salute,” all to honor the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. This was jubilation of a kind not known before and that future generations would have some trouble comprehending. De Lesseps’ desert passage of 105 miles had brought Europe 5,800 miles closer to India. The Near East had been restored to its ancient position as a world crossroads. Africa had been made an island at a stroke. And the fact that the project had been denounced by men reputedly far wiser than de Lesseps–most especially by Britain’s own Robert Stephenson–made the ultimate triumph all the more thrilling.

Victoria, who was to give a name to the era, its elegance, its sense of purpose, its heavy, varnished furniture, its small and large hypocrisies, was very much in her prime at age fifty-one. Samuel Smiles, that most eminent Victorian, had published his Lives of the Engineers, wherein good and useful giants–Brindley of the English canals, Rennie of the Waterloo Bridge, the genius Telford–did good and useful work for the betterment of all. Paris was newly transformed by the brilliant Georges Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, and the picture-book troops of Napoleon III, in their kepis and pantalons rouges, were thought to be the most formidable on earth, the Franco-Prussian war being still over the horizon.

Among the American tourists to be found strolling Baron Haussmann’s magnificent boulevards as the Nipsic and the Guard sailed for Darien was an undersized eleven-year-old in the company of his parents, Theodore Roosevelt, whose ambition at the moment was to be a naturalist.

The President of the United States at this juncture was Ulysses S. Grant and it was he, the year before, who had instructed Admiral Ammen to organize the series of expeditions–“practical investigations,” he called them. Grant, despite his subsequent reputation as a President of little vision or initiative, was more keenly interested in an isthmian canal than any of his predecessors had been. He was indeed the first President to address himself seriously to the subject. If there was to be a water corridor, he wanted it in the proper place–as determined by civil engineers and naval authorities–and he wanted it under American control. “To Europeans the benefits of and advantages of the proposed canal are great,” he was to write, “to Americans they are incalculable.”

Grant’s blind faith in old friends was to prove his greatest failing as time wore on, but in Admiral Ammen, a friend since boyhood, he had made an excellent choice. Ammen had been reassigned from sea duty and put at the head of the Bureau of Navigation almost the moment Grant became President. A picture of authority, Ammen was whiskered, grizzled, like Grant himself, but with a large, imposing nose and a permanent scowl. Once, while in command of a training cruise to Panama, he had settled a mutiny on the instant by calmly shooting the two leaders. He also had an agile and resourceful mind.

The Navy was to provide the ships and most of the personnel. Ammen selected the officers. Thomas Oliver Selfridge, irrespective of any impression he may have made on Secretary Robeson, had been first in his class at Annapolis and distinguished himself as a commander of gunboats at Vicksburg and on the Red River. En route to Darien he would celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday. Captain Robert Shufeldt, who would lead the Tehuantepec Expedition in the fall of 1870, had had thirty years at sea. He was a physical giant who appeared equal to any wilderness and he had, besides, considerable tact. (Though it had been more than twenty years since the Mexican War, there was much apprehension over the reception an American expedition might receive in Tehuantepec.) And the studious, likable Edward P. Lull, who was in charge of the Guard, and who was later to command both the Nicaragua and Panama expeditions, was as able a young officer as was to be found in the Navy.

These particular officers, moreover, had been imbued with a starspangled sense of American destiny in the Pacific Ocean. As a young lieutenant, Daniel Ammen had sailed On Commodore James Biddle’s voyage to China and Japan, the voyage that resulted in 1846 in the first treaty between China and the United States. Selfridge also had begun his career with a South Pacific cruise and Shufeldt had been in command of the Wachusett in the Orient only the year before the Tehuantepec Expedition.

“Sufficient is it to add that advantageous as an interoceanic canal would be to the commercial welfare of the whole world, it is doubly so for the necessities of American interests,” Selfridge was to write. “The Pacific is naturally our domain.”

“It May be the future of our country lies hidden in this problem,” Shufeldt would address his crew when the Kansas sailed for Tehuantepec. And from the rail of a battered little river steamer laboring against the brown current of the San Juan, his eyes squinting against the hard glare of a Nicaragua morning, Edward Lull would envisage American ships of the line riding the same path to the Pacific.

These were professional sailors, not remarkable men, or so they undoubtedly would have said. They were experienced in command, meticulous about details, physically very tough; but without airs or pretense. In the field, with their sun hats and field glasses, their blue northern eyes, they would look much like other English-speaking harbingers of civilization in other so-called “dark” corners of the world. But there was no overflowing ego among them, no Burton or Speke or Stanley possessed by visions of personal destiny. Nor were they great men in the way a Powell or a King was, intellectually and in orginality of purpose. Had they been asked, they undoubtedly would have said they were doing their job.

II

The seven Grant expeditions to Central Americ a between 1870 and 1875 can be seen as a sharp, clean line through the whole long history of canal plans and proposals reaching back to an obscure reference concerning an obscure Spaniard, Alvaro de Saavedra, a kinsman of Cortez’, who supposedly “meant to have opened the land of Castilla del Oro . . . from sea to sea.” There had never been any serious possibility of a canal during Spanish times. “There are mountains, but there are also hands” was the lovely declaration of a Spanish priest of the sixteenth century, “and for a king of Castile, few things are impossible.” The priest, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, was the first to raise the issue of location, naming Panama, Nicaragua, Darien, and Tehuantepec as the best choices, in a book published in 1552. But he was sadly deceiving himself. Not for another three hundred years, not until the nineteenth century, would a canal, even a very small canal, become a reasonable possibility. It required certain advances in hydraulic engineering, among other things; and it required the steam engine.

The place most nineteenth-century North Americans expected to see the canal built, including the President, was Nicaragua. If not Darien, it would be through Lake Nicaragua; if not there, then probably it would have to be Panama. Tehuantepec had the virtue of being so much closer to the United States, but that was about all that could be said for Tehuantepec. The great overriding problem, however, was the extremely low level of reliable geographical information on Central America, and this despite more than fifty years of debate over where a canal ought to go, despite volumes of so-called geographical research, engineering surveys, perhaps a hundred articles in popular magazines and learned journals, promotional pamphlets, travel books, and the fact that Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec had all been heavily traveled shortcuts to the Pacific since the time of the California gold craze. As Admiral Davis had quite accurately stated, there were not in the libraries of the world the means to determine even approximately the most practicable route.

The earliest authoritative study of the problem, or rather the first to be taken as authoritative, appeared in 1811 and designated Nicaragua as the route posing the fewest difficulties. The author of this rather tentative benediction was Alexander von Humboldt, the adventurous German-born naturalist and explorer, and Nicaragua thereafter had been “Humboldt’s route.” Humboldt, as it happens, had never set foot in Nicaragua, or in any of the four alternatives he named. He had built his theories wholly from hearsay, from old books and manuscripts, and the few pitiful maps then available, all of which he plainly acknowledged. The precise location of the City of Panama was not even known, he warned. Nor had anyone determined the elevation of the mountains at Panama, or at any other point along the spine of Central America.

Panama he judged to be the worst possible choice, primarily because of the mountains, which he took to be three times as high as they actually are. Tehuantepec appeared to be too broad, as well as mountainous, and he feared the “sinuosity” of the rivers. About the best that could be done at either Panama or Tehuantepec would be to build some good roads for camels. Humboldt was still comparatively unknown when he wrote his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, the book containing his long canal essay; his renown was limited still to scientific circles. No Peruvian current or glacier or river had been named for him; Humboldt, Kansas, and Humboldt, Iowa, were still unbroken prairie grass. His views, nonetheless, were to have more influence on the canal issue than everything that had been written previously taken together, for by mid-century he was to tower above all others as the beloved high priest of modern science, a university unto himself, as Goethe would say.

Humboldt’s Political Essay was the result of a five-year journey through Spanish America, the likes of which would never be equaled. He had been up the Orinoco and the Magdalena; he had been over the Andes on foot. In Ecuador he had climbed Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain on earth, and though he failed to reach the top, he had gone to nineteen thousand feet, which was higher–considerably higher–than any human being had ever been before, even in a balloon. If he had not been in Nicaragua or Panama or Tehuantepec or anywhere along the drenched, green valley of the Atrato River, the location of his two other possible pathways to the Pacific, he had been almost everywhere else and no one was assumed to have more firsthand knowledge of the American jungle. The rather vital fact that his canal theories were almost wholly conjecture was generally ignored. More-over, those who used his name to substantiate their own pet notions, those who would quote and misquote him endlessly, would find it convenient to forget that it was he who insisted that no canal should be considered until the comparative advantages and disadvantages of all possible routes were examined firsthand by experienced people and according to uniform standards.

The Nicaragua canal he visualized was much along the lines of Thomas Telford’s Caledonian Canal in Scotland, then the most ambitious thing of its kind. Lake Nicaragua, besides being navigable, would, like Telford’s Scottish lakes, provide a natural and limitless source of water for the canal–a vast “basin”–at the very summit of the canal.

Should Nicaragua be found unsatisfactory, then perhaps one of the two routes on the Atrato would serve best. The Napipi-Cupica route, as he named it and as it is still known, would follow the Napipi River, a tributary of the sprawling Atrato, to its headwaters, then continue down to the Pacific at Cupica Bay.

The other Atrato scheme, the so-called “Lost Canal of the Raspadura,” appealed mainly to his imagination. Years before, he had heard, a Spanish monk “of great activity” had induced some Indians to build a secret passage betweeen the Atrato and the Pacific, a passage large enough only for small boats, but one that followed a near-perfect path for a canal of larger size, somewhere off the Raspadura River, another distant tributary. All one had to do was find it.

How much of all this he may have discussed with Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1804, at the end of the Spanish-American odyssey, is not known. But probably his stay at the White House marks the start of Presidential interest in the canal. It is known that Jefferson had shown prior curiosity on the subject while he was minister to France. Furthermore, the visit coincided with the departure of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to seek, on Jefferson’s orders, a northwest water passage to the Pacific. And Humboldt, a lean, deeply tanned, explosively energetic young man, had so enthralled Jefferson with accounts of his travels that Jefferson kept him on as a guest for two weeks. So it is difficult to imagine them not discussing a Central American corridor as they strolled the White House grounds or sat conversing, hours on end, at the big table in Jefferson’s first-floor office, maps and charts all over one wall and Jefferson’s pet mockingbird swinging in a cage overhead.

Humboldt’s Spanish-American travels had been the result of an unprecedented grant from the Spanish Crown to investigate wherever he wished in the cause of scientific progress. Until then explorations of any kind by foreigners within Spain’s New World realm had been strenuously discouraged. But once Spanish rule began to dissolve in the 1820’s the way was open to almost anyone. And almost anyone was what turned up. Engineers, naval officers, French, English, Dutch, Americans, promoters, journalists, many of whom expressed grand visions of a canal, in the event political permission could be obtained, in the event the necessary capital could be assembled. A few of these were able people, but very few had any technical competence. Many of them were also perfectly genuine in their aspirations and sincerely believed in their rainbow-hued promises, however inept or naive they may have been. Others, quite a good many others, were petty adventurers or outright crackpots.*

The canals they had in mind, regardless of specified location, were invariably feasible technically, within range financially, and destined to be bonanzas for all investors and for whichever impoverished little Central American republic was to be involved. Emissaries from Bogotá and Managua and Mexico City were dispatched to the capitals of Europe and to Washington to enlist support. Even the pope was approached. Special agreements and franchises were signed and sealed with appropriate formality. The future was rich with possibilities.

With the opening of Telford’s canal and the Erie Canal, both in the 1820’s, reasonable men also felt justified in projecting comparable works across the map of Central America. “Neptune’s Staircase,” the spectacular system of locks on the Caledonian Canal, could lift seagoing ships–could lift a thirty-two-gun frigate, for example–a hundred feet up from the level of the sea. The Erie Canal, though built for shallow-draft canal barges, was nonetheless the longest canal in the world, and its locks overcame an elevation en route of nearly seven hundred feet. So on paper a canal at Panama or Nicaragua or any other place in favor at the moment did not seem unrealistic. Telford in his last years was considering “a grand scheme” for Darien. DeWitt Clinton, “father” of the Erie Canal, had joined with Horatio Allen, builder of the Croton Aqueduct, to plan a water passage through Nicaragua.

A skeptical or cautionary voice was the rare exception. The view of someone such as Colonel Charles Biddle, sent by President Andrew Jackson to appraise Panama and Nicaragua, stands in solitary contrast to almost everything else being written or said. Having made his way up the Chagres River by canoe, then overland to Panama City, a trek of four days, Biddle concluded that any talk of a Panama canal was utter foolishness and that this ought to be clear to all men, “whether of common or uncommon sense.” (He did not bother to go see Nicaragua.)

Far more representative were the views of John Lloyd Stephens, which appeared about the time John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, was writing that “our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

The task, declared Stephens, posed no major problems and ought not cost more than $25,000,000, a figure most people took to be absurdly high.

Stephens was “the American traveler,” an engaging, romantic, red-bearded lawyer and author of popular travel books who passed through Nicaragua on his way to the Mexican provinces of Chiapas and Yucatan in 1840. He was looking for the “lost” cities of the Maya, which he found, and the book describing those discoveries, Incidents of Travel in Central America went through edition after edition. It was a classic, thrilling piece of work and can be seen now as the beginning of American archaeology. But Stephens had no more business issuing pronouncements on the feasibility of a Nicaragua canal from the little he had seen than had the engineer Horatio Allen from the comforts of his Manhattan office.

A Nicaragua canal posed no major problems, Stephens declared. Here was an enchanting land of blue lakes and trade winds, towering volcanic mountains, rolling green savannas and grazing cattle. Nicaragua could become one of the finest resorts on earth were a canal to be built. Like Humboldt he had scaled a volcano–Masaya–then, to the horror of his guide, descended bravely into its silent crater. “At home, this volcano would be a fortune, with a good hotel on top, a railing to keep the children from falling in, a zigzagging staircase down the sides, and a glass of iced lemonade at the bottom.” The mountain, he noted, could probably be purchased for ten dollars.

The truth is that all the canal projects proposed, every cost estimated, irrespective of the individual or individuals responsible, were hopelessly unrealistic if not preposterous. Every supposed canal survey made by mid-century was patently flawed by bad assumptions or absurdly inadequate data. Assertions that the task would be simple were written by fools or by men who either had no appropriate competence or who, if they did, had never laid eyes on a rain forest.

The one important step taken prior to the California gold rush was of another kind, but very little was made of it.

On December 12, 1846, at Bogotá, a new American charge d’affaires, Benjamin Alden Bidlack, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, acting entirely on his own initiative, signed a treaty with the government of President Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera. The critical agreement was contained in Article XXXV. New Granada guaranteed to the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of Panama, “upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may be, hereafter, constructed.” In exchange the United States guaranteed “positively and efficaciously” both the “perfect neutrality” of the Isthmus and New Granada’s rights of sovereignty there. (It was this agreement by which the Panama Railroad was to be made possible.)

In Washington the news was greeted with only moderate interest since Bidlack had acted without instruction and since there was much old, deep-seated distrust of “entangling” alliances. Not for another year and a half did the Senate act on confirmation and not until the government of New Granada had sent a special envoy to Washington, the very able Pedro Alcantara Herran, to lobby for the agreement.

The Bidlack Treaty, as it was commonly called, was Bidlack’s only diplomatic triumph. A small-town lawyer and newspaper editor, a congressman briefly before going to Bogotá, he died seven months after the treaty was ratified.

For three centuries the gold in the stream beds of the Sierra Nevada had gone undetected and for all the commotion over Central American canals in the first half of the new world-shaking nineteenth century, Central America remained a backwater. No canals, no railroads were built. There was not a single wagon road anywhere across the entire Isthmus. But in January of 1848 a carpenter from New Jersey saw something shining at the bottom of a millrace at Coloma, California, and within a year Central America re-emerged from the shadows. Again, as in Spanish times, gold was the catalyst.

There were three routes to the new El Dorado–“the Plains across, the Horn around, or the Isthmus over”–and for those thousands who chose “the Isthmus over,” it was to be one of life’s unforgettable experiences. The onslaught began first at Panama, early on the morning of January 7, 1849, when the little steamer Falcon anchored off the marshy lowlands at the mouth of the Chagres River and some two hundred North Americans–mostly unshaven young men in red flannel shirts loaded down with rifles, pistols, bowie knives, bedrolls, pots and pans, picks, shovels–came swarming ashore in one great noisy wave. To the scattering of native Panamanians who stood gaping, it must have seemed as if the buccaneer Morgan had returned after two hundred years to storm the Spanish bastion of San Lorenzo, the frowning brown walls of which still commanded the entire scene. The invaders shouted and gestured, trying to make themselves understood. Nobody seemed to have the least idea which way the Pacific lay and all were in an enormous hurry to get started.

Amazingly, all of this first group survived the crossing. They came dragging into Panama City, rain-soaked, caked with mud, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry. They had gone up the Chagres by native canoe, then overland on mule and on foot, as Charles Biddle had and as thousands more like them would, year after year, until the Panama Railroad was in service. Old letters and little leather-bound journals mention the broiling heat and sudden blinding rains. They speak of heavy green slime on the Chagres, of nights spent in vermin-infested native huts, epidemics of dysentery, mules struggling up to their haunches in the impossible blue-black Panama muck. A man from Troy, New York, counted forty dead mules along the Cruces Trail, the twisting jungle path, barely three feet wide, over which they all came from the river to Panama City. Others wrote of human companions dropping in their tracks with cholera or the dreaded Chagres fever.

“I have no time to give reasons,” a Massachusetts man wrote home after crossing Panama, “but in saying it I utter the united sentiment of every passenger whom I have heard speak, it is this, and I say it in fear of God and the love of man, to one and all, for no consideration come this route. I have nothing to say for the other routes but do not take this one.”

Yet the gain in time and distance was phenomenal. From New York to San Francisco around the Horn was a months-long voyage of thirteen thousand miles. From New York to San Francisco by way of Panama was five thousand miles, or a saving of eight thousand miles. From New Orleans to San Francisco by Panama, instead of around the Horn, the saving was more than nine thousand miles.

Besides, how one responded to Panama depended often on the season of the year and one’s own particular make-up. Many were thrilled by the lush, primeval spectacle of the jungle–“overwhelmed with the thought that all these wonders have been from the beginning,” as one man wrote. For wives and parents left behind they described as best they could those moments when magnificent multicolored birds burst into the sky; the swarms of blue butterflies–“like blossoms blown away”; the brilliant green mountains, mountains to put Vermont to shame said a young man from Bennington who was having a splendid time traveling up the Chagres. “The weather was warm but we had a roof to our boat . . . and what was of more consequence still we had on board a box of claret wine, a bacon, bread, and a piece of ICE!”*

The little railroad was begun in 1850, with the idea that it could be finished in two years. It was finished five years later, and at a cost of $8,000,000, six times beyond anyone’s estimate. For a generation of Americans there was something especially appealing about the picture of this line across Panama, of a steam locomotive highballing through the jungle, pulling a train of bright passenger cars, a steam whistle scattering monkeys to the treetops–“ocean to ocean” in something over three hours. It was also the world’s first transcontinental rail-road–one track, five-foot (or broad) gauge, exactly forty-seven and one-half miles long–and the most expensive line on earth on a dollarper-mile basis, expensive to build and expensive to travel. A one-way ticket was $25 in gold.

To its owners the railroad was the tiny but critical land link in the first all-steam overseas system to span the new continental United States. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, with offices in New York, had been established just before the news of California gold reached the East, or when such an idea had looked dangerously, if not insanely, speculative. The ships operated to and from Panama on both oceans, providing regular passenger service and mail delivery to California. (A generous subsidy from the federal government to carry the mail had made it considerably less speculative.) William Henry Aspin-wall, a wealthy New York merchant, was the founder and guiding spirit of the steamship line, and in the railroad venture he was joined by a banker named Henry Chauncey and by John Lloyd Stephens, who, in the time since his Nicaragua travels, had concluded that Panama was where the future lay. Stephens was the first president of the Panama Railroad Company and its driving force until his death at age forty-six. He was the one member of the threesome to stay with the actual construction effort in the jungle, and the result was an attack of fever, a recurrence of which was fatal in the fall of 1852.

Having, as it did, a monopoly on the Panama transit, the railroad was a bonanza. Profits in the first six years after it was finished were in excess of $7,000,000. Dividends were 15 percent on the average and went as high as 44 percent. Once, standing at $295 a share, Panama Railroad was the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange.

So dazzling a demonstration of the cash value of an ocean connection at Panama, even one so paltry as a little one-track railroad, was bound to draw attention. Matthew Fontaine Maury, the pioneer oceanographer, had told a Senate committee as early as 1849 that a Panama railroad would lead directly to a Panama canal “by showing to the world how immense this business is,” but nobody had been prepared for success on such a scale. The volume of human traffic alone–upward of 400,000 people between 1856 and 1866–gave Panama a kind of most-beaten-path status unmatched by any of the other canal routes talked of.

Surveys for the railroad had also produced two pertinent pieces of information. The engineers had discovered a gap in the mountains twelve miles from Panama City, at a point called Culebra, where the elevation above sea level was only 275 feet. This was 200 feet less than what had been considered the lowest gap. Then, toward the close of their work, they had determined once and for all that there was no difference between the levels of the two oceans. The level of the Pacific was not twenty feet higher than that of the Atlantic, as had been the accepted view for centuries. Sea level was sea level, the same on both sides. The difference was in the size of their tides.

(The tides on the Pacific are tremendous, eighteen to twenty feet, while on the Caribbean there is little or no tide, barely more than a foot. When Balboa stood at last on the Pacific shore, he had seen no rush of lordly breakers, but an ugly brown mud flat reaching away for a mile and more, because he had arrived when the tide was out.)

Yet, ironically, it was the experience of the railroad builders that argued most forcibly for some different path, almost any other location, for the canal. If humane considerations were to be entered in the balance, then Panama was the worst possible place to send men to build anything.

Panama had been known as a pesthole since the earliest Spanish settlement. But the horror stories to come out of Panama as the railroad was being pushed ahead mile by mile quite surpassed anything. The cost paid in human life for the minuscule bit of track was of the kind people associated with dark, barbaric times, before the age of steam and iron and the upward march of Progress. The common story, the one repeated up and down the California gold fields, the one carried home on the New York steamer, the claim that turns up time and again in the dim pages of old letters, is that there was a dead man for every railroad tie between Colón and Panama City. In some versions it was a dead Irishman; in others, a dead Chinese. The story was nonsense–there were some seventy-four thousand ties along the Panama line–but that had not kept it from spreading, and from what many thousands of people had seen with their own eyes, it seemed believable enough.

How many did actually die is not known. The company kept no systematic records, no body count, except for its white workers, who represented only a fraction of the total force employed over the five years of construction. (In 1853, for example, of some 1,590 men on the payroll, 1,200 were black.) However, the company’s repeated assertion that in fact fewer than a thousand had died was patently absurd. A more reasonable estimate is six thousand, but it could very well have been twice that. No one will ever know, and the statistic is not so important as the ways in which they died–of cholera, dysentery, fever, smallpox, all the scourges against which there was no known protection or any known cure.

Laborers had been brought in by the boatload from every part of the world. White men, mostly Irish “navvies” who had built canals and railroads across England, “withered as cut plants in the sun.” But of a thousand Chinese coolies, hundreds fell no less rapidly or died any less miserably of disease, and scores of Chinese workers were so stricken by “melancholia,” an aftereffect of malaria, that they had committed suicide by hanging, drowning, or impaling themselves on sharpened bamboo poles.

Simply disposing of dead bodies had been a problem the first year, before the line reached beyond the swamps and a regular cemetery could be established on high ground. And so many of those who died were without identity, other than a first name, without known address or next of kin, that a rather ghoulish but thriving trade developed in the shipping of cadavers, pickled in large barrels, to medical schools and hospitals all over the world. For years the Panama Railroad Company was a steady supplier of such merchandise, and the proceeds were enough to pay for the company’s own small hospital at Colón.

A reporter who visited this hospital in 1855, the year the railroad was finished, wrote of seeing “the melancholy rows” of sick and dying men, then of being escorted by the head physician to an adjoining piazza, “where, in conscious pride, he displayed to me his collection of well-picked skeletons and bones, bleaching and drying in the hot sun.” It was the physician’s intention, for the purposes of science, to assemble a complete “museum” representing all the racial types to be found among the railroad dead.

The worst year had been 1852, the year of Stephens’ death, When cholera swept across the Isthmus, starting at Colón with the arrival of a steamer from New Orleans. Of the American technicians then employed–some fifty engineers, surveyors, draftsmen–all but two died. When a large military detachment, several hundred men of the American Fourth Infantry and their dependents, made the crossing in July en route to garrison duty in California, the tragic consequence was 150 dead–men, women, and children. “The horrors of the road in the rainy season are beyond description,” wrote the young officer in charge, Captain Ulysses S. Grant, whose memory of the experience was to be no less vivid years later when he sat in the White House.

Nicaragua was different.

The United States and Great Britain had come close to war over Nicaragua, in fact, at the beginning of the gold rush, so seriously was Nicaragua’s importance as a canal site regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. The Caribbean entrance to a Nicaragua canal would be San Juan del Norte, at the mouth of the San Juan River, and a British gunboat had seized San Juan del Norte in 1848 and renamed it Grey-town. A crisis was averted by a treaty specifically binding the United States and Great Britain to joint control of any canal at Nicaragua, or, by implication, any canal anywhere in Central America. This was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850–after John Clayton, the American Secretary of State, and Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, the special British envoy involved–and it seemed a very good thing in Washington, in that it blocked a foothold for the British Empire in Central America and precluded any chance of a wholly British-owned and -operated canal in the Western Hemisphere. So important a document signed by the two powers had also put the Nicaragua canal in a class by itself.

Nicaragua and Tehuantepec both competed with Panama for the California trade, and though the Tehuantepec transit never really amounted to much, the one at Nicaragua did and far more so than is generally appreciated. In 1853, for example, traffic in both directions across Panama was in the neighborhood of twenty-seven thousand people; that same year probably twenty thousand others took the Nicaragua route, going from ocean to ocean on an improvised hop-skip-and-jump system of shallow-draft steamers on the San Juan, large lake steamers, and sky-blue stagecoaches between the lake and the Pacific. The actual overland crossing at Panama was shorter and faster, but Nicaragua, being closer to the United States, was the shorter, faster route over all– five hundred miles shorter and two days faster. A through ticket by way of Nicaragua also cost less and, perhaps as important as everything else, Nicaragua was not known as a deathtrap.

The Nicaragua system was the creation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who became seriously enough interested in a Nicaragua canal to hire Orville Childs, a highly qualified engineer, to survey the narrow neck of land between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific. And in 1851 Orville Childs had the good fortune to hike into a pass that was only 153 feet above sea level. He had found a place, in other words, that was a full 122 feet lower than the summit of the Panama Railroad, and by 1870 no lower point had been discovered anywhere else.

The impetus to resolve the canal question grew steadily as the steam engine transformed ocean travel on a global scale. In 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry with his “black ships” had forced Japan to open her ports to Western commerce. Seven years later the first Japanese delegation to the United States, eighteen lords wearing the swords and robes of samurai, passed through Panama on its way to Washington.

A Wall Street man named Frederick Kelley calculated that a canal through Central America could mean an annual saving to American trade as a whole of no less than $36,000,000–in reduced insurance, interest on cargoes, wear and tear on ships, wages, provisions, crews– and a total saving of all maritime nations of $48,000,000. This alone, he asserted, would be enough, irrespective of tolls, to pay for the entire canal in a few years, even if it were to cost as much as $100,000,000, a possibility almost no one foresaw.

Darien had been tried several times again since Lieutenant Strain’s tragedy, as had the Atrato headwaters, all without luck. Small French exploring parties had begun turning up in both areas in the 1860’s, and Frederick Kelley, who became the most ingenuous canal booster of the day, expended a fortune backing several disappointing expeditions, including one in search of Humboldt’s “Lost Canal of the Raspadura.” The leader of that particular Kelley venture was a hard-bitten old jungle hand, John C. Trautwine, who had worked on the Panama Railroad surveys. There was no lost canal, he reported, at the conclusion of a search across hundreds of miles of Atrato wilderness. Perhaps a Spanish priest had induced his flock to make a “canoe slide,” but it was never anything more than that. “I have crossed it [the Isthmus] both at the site of the Panama Railroad and at three other points more to the south,” Trautwine wrote in a prominent scientific journal. “From all I could see, combined with all I have read on the subject, I cannot entertain the slightest hope that a ship canal will ever be found practicable across any part of it.”

But whose word was to be trusted? which data were reliable? The information available had been gathered in such extremely different fashions by such a disparate assortment of individuals, even the best of whom found it impossible to remain objective about his own piece of work. The more difficult it was to obtain the data, the higher their cost in physical hardship, time, or one’s own cash, the harder it was to appraise them dispassionately. The conditions under which the field work had to be conducted were not only difficult in the extreme, but even the best-intentioned, most experienced men could be gravely misled if they allowed themselves to be influenced by the “feel” of the terrain, as nearly all of them had at one time or another.

The French explorers and engineers had little faith in American surveys; the Americans had still less regard for any data attributed to a French source. The only surveys of consequence were that of the Panama Railroad and the Nicaragua survey by Childs. Only one of these had been made with a canal in mind and it was really far from adequate. The organized approach Humboldt insisted on had never once been tried, for all the talk and energies expended. Nor, it must be added, had any serious body or institution–American, European, scientific, military–addressed itself to the critical question of the kind of canal to be built; whether in the interests of commerce and of future generations, it ought to be a canal cut through at sea level, such as the Suez Canal, or whether one that would lift ships up and over the land barrier with a system of locks.

III

Late in the afternoon of February 21, 1870, having made a stop at Colón to pick up a Colombian commissioner, Senor Don Bias Arosemena, who was to accompany the expedition, as well as a force of macheteros, the steam sloop Nipsic arrived at Caledonia Bay. The weather was delightful. The dry season at Darien is the time when trade winds blow fresh from the north and a heavy blue sea breaks all along the coast. Little rain falls, except in the mountains. Temperatures range in the low eighties; the sky is spotlessly clear day and night.

The line of march was to be over the abrupt green mountains that rise only a few miles in from shore. Selfridge would head for the Caledonia gap, which, from the bay, appears lower than it is and might well be taken even by an experienced observer as the perfect place for a canal. It was what had attracted Dr. Edward Cullen originally. Selfridge issued strict orders concerning the Indians. Their property was to be “perfectly respected,” no villages were to be entered without their consent. Any “outrage of their women” would be answered with the most severe punishment.

Operations commenced February 22, the morning after arrival. Self-ridge met on the beach with the chief of the Caledonia tribe. “When you give an order to one of your young men, do you expect him to obey?” Selfridge asked. “I am sent here by my great chief,” he continued, “with orders to pass through the country and I must obey. I shall cross to the Pacific, peaceably if possible, but if not I have ample force at my command.” The Indian said the white men could go at will but he professed no knowledge of the interior. Like the other Indians to be seen on the beach, he was quite small in stature, but muscular and quick, with bright, intelligent eyes. “I was not able to discover their ancient form of worship,” Selfridge wrote. “They believe in evil spirits, and . . . they believe that God made the country as it is, and that He would be angry with them and kill them if they assisted in any work constructed by white men.”

Four days later, leaving a small party behind to organize a telegraph station and an astronomical observatory, Selfridge and a force of about eighty men, including Marines and macheteros, started inland to make a reconnaissance. In a week they were back, dirty, exhausted, and full of stories. They had found the Sucubti River, which flows to the Pacific, the river Strain should have followed. Once they had reached the mountains it had rained nearly the whole time, and in some places the trail had run along ridges only a few feet wide, with great gorges dropping off on both sides (“in the depths of which was heard the roaring of wild animals”). Some of the older men, veterans of the Civil War, said they had never experienced anything to equal the march. But they had crossed the divide.

On March 8, a full-scale surveying party got under way, stringing a telegraph wire as it went in order to report its progress back to the base camp. Two weeks later, on March 22, the chief telegrapher with the party, W. H. Clarke, sent the following message:

I am at the front. We are progressing finely through the worst country I ever saw, on our way to the Pacific; impossible to write; everybody is well and in good spirits.

On March 30 came another message from Chief Telegrapher Clarke, this one to Commander Lull and the crew of the Guard.

The entire column of the Surveying and Telegraphic Corps unite in sending you and all friends on board, a greeting from the summit of the dividing ridge. Looking to the westward we see the long-looked-for slope of the Pacific stretching far away, seemingly all an impenetrable forest; to the northeast Caledonia Bay and the Guard is plainly visible; immediately around me I see Lieutenant Schulze, Mr. J. A. Sullivan, Ensigns Collins and Eaton of the Guard, Messrs. H. L. Merinden, J. P. Carson, T. H. O’Sullivan and Calvin McDowell, and as I telegraph this message they are singing “Jordan is a hard road to travel.”

What was not reported, but already known by then, was that the lowest pass on the Sucubti was 553 feet above sea level, and that the mountains were indeed a thousand feet or more in elevation, just as Strain had reported. So Edward Cullen was a fraud after all.

Still the expedition continued and under considerable hardship. The terrain was often such that it was impossible to do the chaining and leveling for the survey, detours had to be made, progress on the survey slowed to not more than a thousand feet a day. The cameras of Timothy O’Sullivan, the heavy glass plates and the dark tent he had brought along, were just about useless because of the heat and humidity and the vegetation that shut out nearly all daylight.

The standard attire was a big straw hat, blue flannel shirt, duck trousers, shoes with canvas leggings. The flannel shirt was to be worn next to the skin, and the day began with a tablespoon of whiskey and two grains of quinine per man. To such precautions–“under Providence”–Selfridge attributed the “wonderful good health” of the command the entire time in the jungle.

Perhaps because of his preliminary orders, perhaps because of the conspicuous Marine guard, there were no troubles with the Indians of the interior, many more of whom were encountered than expected and none of whom had ever before seen a white man. Once on the Sucubti several Indians armed with poisoned arrows volunteered to serve as guides, then led the party along the most tortuous course possible. The Americans saw what was going on and said nothing, as “it was thought better not to offend them.”

A few entries from the field diary kept by Selfridge give an indication of their days:

Thursday, April 7.–Took up our March at 6:30 A.M., the Indian Jim and others with us. . . . One of the Marines shot another private by accident in the arm, and he was left behind in camp. The Indians were very much surprised that the affair was taken so coolly, and two or three ran off to tell their chief. About 9 A.M. we struck the river again, and the Indians left us. . . . At half past 2 o’clock we forded the La Paz; this was the deepest river we met, the water coming up to our armpits, and obliging us to carry our ammunition and provisions on our heads. Several bungo-trees full of monkeys were seen, as many as twenty or thirty in a tree; some were shot, and provided a pleasant and much-needed repast. . ..

Friday, April 8– . . . Eugenio, the machetero, was bitten during the night by a scorpion or tarantula, and his leg and foot became so swelled that we were forced to leave him behind. . . . Passed a miserable night, tormented by mosquitoes and sand-flies.

Saturday, April 9.–Started down the right bank of the river. Left behind nine men who were shoeless. Cut through 5,000 feet, a dense mangrove [swamp]. . ..

Sunday, April 10– Another sleepless night, on account of insects. . ..

“We were to find,” he later wrote, “that in spite of the most careful preparations, the success of the expedition also depended upon extraordinary persistence and willingness to endure hardships.” The torment inflicted by the sand flies and mosquitoes was indescribable–“mosquitoes so thick I have seen them put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies.” There was no longer any mystery, he mused, why the secrets of the Isthmus had remained locked up for so many hundreds of years.

At Caledonia Bay, a week later, Selfridge concluded that he had seen as much as needed of Cullen’s route. So on April 20 the expedition packed up and steamed out of the bay for the Gulf of San Bias, another magnificent harbor on the Darien coast, approximately a hundred miles west, toward the Panama Railroad. Here again the mountains gave the appearance of a low pass, and from one of Frederick Kelley’s expeditions it was known that the distance from tidewater to tidewater at this point was less than thirty miles. San Bias was a mere knife edge, where the two oceans came nearer to touching each other than at any other point in Darien or all of Central America.

Selfridge took his men ashore to search the Mandinga, the one large river on the Atlantic slope between the Atrato and the Chagres. By now the rainy season had returned and the bottom lands were a vast pulsing swamp. Frequently the men were “obliged to pass the night in trees, the water rising so rapidly as to drive them from their beds.” In a week of relentless effort they were able to survey a bare two miles, and it was a full month later still by the time they had measured the mountain gap that from the sea had seemed so near. The elevation was a disappointing three hundred feet.

With provisions now runing low, his men worn out (“. . . and no longer kept up by the charm of novelty”), with their entire stock of shoes used up–all six hundred pairs!–Self ridge thought perhaps he ought to pull back and sail for” home. But “ . . . could we carry our levels over the divide, we should be able to decide upon the practicability of this route.” So on he went with a picked crew, moving their cumbersome, delicate equipment from point to point, putting down stakes, filling notebooks with pages of computations, observations on plants and animals, and geological notations. On June 7, at the top of the ridge, at an altitude of 1,142 feet by the barometer, they hammered in stake No. 96,000.

On the Pacific slope, the climate, the whole character of the country, changed. “Trees, soil, all different,” Selfridge noted, “and the weather beautiful.” They took their line to the point where it coincided with the one Kelley’s people had mapped. Then, having followed the Kelley line far enough to be satisfied with its accuracy, they turned back, without going the whole way to the Pacific.

The San Bias route, Selfridge now could report, was no more practicable than the one at Caledonia Bay. A tunnel would be required, and even if enough locks could be built to lift ships over the mountains–to the preposterous altitude of a thousand feet–there were no rivers at that level to supply water for the canal.

Selfridge would return to Darien with a second expedition before the year ended, to search that section fronting on the Gulf of Uraba where the Isthmus joins South America. He would, on this second expedition, sail far up the Atrato to the Napipi to explore the route Humboldt had thought so promising. Later, in 1873, he would command a third expedition, this one to the Atrato headwaters. But none would compare to the Darien Expedition of 1870. It was the proudest accomplishment of his life. Nothing done before or after was so difficult or gave such personal satisfaction. It did not matter that they had failed to find the proper path, he would write near the end of a long life; they had led the way.

In the official report he filed with Secretary Robeson, Selfridge said merely that the effort had served to simplify matters–“the field of research is reduced and the problem narrowed.” He was convinced that the determining factor must be the canal to be built. The canal “should partake of the nature of a strait, with no locks or impediments to prolong the passage . . .” It must be a “through-cut,” at the level of the sea, he wrote, a canal like the canal at Suez, and, from what was known of Central America, the only feasible point for such a passage was Panama.

* One outstanding example was Charles de Thierry, or Baron de Thierry, as he preferred. An Englishman and graduate of Cambridge, he had so impressed some Maori chiefs who were visiting London that they asked him to come to New Zealand and rule as their king, or so he reported. His idea was to build a canal across Panama to further European trade with New Zealand and he thought the complete project could be finished without difficulty in three years. A railroad over the same route was quite out of the question, however, he said, since the ground was so uneven and covered with so many leaves.

* The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then known as Russian America.

2
The Hero

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d not to shine in use!

–ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Ulysses

I

Independence, his vital source of strength, he often remarked, had come late in life to Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps. The charm, the pervasive, indomitable, world-famous de Lesseps charm that had carried him so very far, had been there right along, born in him, a family streak, it was said, like the zest for adventure and the good looks. From the very start of his career at Lisbon he had made a strong impression. Older observers likened him to his father and to his celebrated uncle, Barthelemy de Lesseps. Friends of both sexes were gathered effortlessly. “Ferdinand encounters friends everywhere,” his first wife had written from the post at Malaga. “He is loved with true affection. . . . It is wonderful to have a husband so liked by everyone.” And a little later on: “Ferdinand is so good, so amiable, he spreads life and gaiety everywhere.”

He was gifted, passionate; he loved books, music, horses, his work, his children, his graceful, witty first wife, his stunning second wife, and occasionally, if we are to believe one admiring French biographer, the wives of others. But independence had not come until he was past forty, thrust upon him unexpectedly by forces not of his own making.

In the summer of 1870, when he stood on the flower-banked platform within the great Crystal Palace, beaming as the boys from the Lambeth Industrial Schools waved their “Egyptian Salute,” Ferdinand de Lesseps was sixty-four years old, very nearly as old as the century. He had been born on November 19, 1805, the year of Austerlitz, in a beige-colored stone house with white shutters that still stands in the town of Versailles. Less than fifty yards from the house, through an iron gate at the end of the Rue de la Paroisse, were the gardens of the Versailles Palace, the great Neptune Basin with its spectacular fountains, and just beyond that, within a mile or so, the Grand Canal of Versailles, which once, in the time of Louis XIV, had been alive with brightly painted gondolas and had been the setting for mock naval battles staged by actual ships of the line.

His family was long distinguished in the French diplomatic service. The men were esteemed as “lovers of progress and movement”; they were cultivated, athletic, fond of extravagant living, and immensely attractive to women. A great-uncle, Dominique de Lesseps, had been ennobled for his services to the state a hundred years before Ferdinand’s birth. Grandfather Martin de Lesseps had been French consul general to the court of Catherine the Great, and Ferdinand’s father, Comte Mathieu de Lesseps, had been an accomplished Napoleonic diplomat, a friend of Talleyrand’s. In Egypt, at the time of the British occupation, or shortly before Ferdinand was born, the vivacious Mathieu de Lesseps had worked miracles for Franco-Egyptian relations, and in 1818, when young Ferdinand was entering the Lycee Napoleon, Mathieu had been posted to the United States. Some sixty years later, at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty in New York, Ferdinand would tell how his father had negotiated the first commercial treaty between France and the United States.

Barthelemy de Lesseps, the famous uncle, had been able to speak three languages by the time he was ten. While still in his twenties, he had sailed on the final expedition of the navigator La Perouse, around Cape Horn to California and, at length, to Petropavlovsk, in Kamchatka. From there, in 1787, on orders from La Perouse, all alone and with winter approaching, he had set out to find his way home to France. A year later, dressed as a Kamchatkan, he was presented to Louis XVI at Versailles, having traveled the entire distance across Siberia to St. Petersburg, mostly by dog sled, then on to Paris. He was a national hero overnight and in his subsequent diplomatic career–first under the Monarchy, then under the Empire, finally under the Restoration–he distinguished himself repeatedly, surviving three years of imprisonment in Turkey and the retreat of the Grande Armee from Moscow. So throughout his boyhood Ferdinand had been nourished on tales of valiant endurance, of heroic quests and heroic triumphs at the far ends of the world.

His mother was Catherine de Grivignee, whose French father had settled in Spain, prospered in the wine business, and married a Spanish girl of good family. His mother had lived her entire life in Spain until her marriage; Spanish was her first language and she was very Spanish in temperament, as Ferdinand would recall. He had grown up speaking Spanish as well as he did French, all of which would be offered later in explanation for the special allure of Panama, “a country made to seduce him. “

There was never an overabundance of money in the family, appearances to the contrary. His mother’s jewels had been pawned privately at least once to meet family expenses and his father had died all but bankrupt. Nor did Ferdinand attain great wealth. Like his father, he married well; like his father, he always lived in grand style. But the reputed de Lesseps fortune was a fiction.

Whether as a youth he ever envisioned a life other than the diplomatic service is impossible to say. But at age nineteen, having studied a little law, he was appointed eleve-consul to his uncle, then the French ambassador to Lisbon. He served in Tunis afterward, with his father, until 1832, the year of his father’s death; then came a Biblical seven years in Egypt, where being the son of Mathieu de Lesseps was a decided advantage. Later came Rotterdam, Malaga, and Barcelona. In 1848, at age forty-three, he was made minister to Madrid.

It was work he naturally enjoyed and he did it well. He was efficient; he was gallant. He sat a horse beautifully. He was a crack shot and a great favorite among sportsmen. (“These healthful occupations,” wrote one high-Victorian biographer, “contributed largely to the promotion of that robust health and that iron constitution, thanks to which he was able to bear, without even feeling them, the innumerable fatigues, labors, and voyages in all parts of the world”)

Though of less than average height, he was handsomely formed. He had a fine head of thick black hair, a good chin, a flashing smile that people would remember. The eyes were dark and active. The mustache had still to make its appearance.

His wife, the former Agathe Delamalle, bore him five sons, only Two of whom would live to maturity, and she appears to have been another important asset to his career. A French officer described her as “this young woman with the clear gaze, witty, decided . . .” “Diamonds glittered everywhere,” reads another account from the time, a description of a ball she gave at Barcelona. “Madame de Lesseps received the guests with perfect grace. Her toilette was ravishing, and she wore it with that marvelous air of which only Parisiennes have the secret. Let us add that the affection which everyone bears her did not a little to increase the charm of this magnificent soiree, which lasted until dawn.”

His interest in canal building began supposedly in Egypt in the early 1830’s with the arrival of the Saint-Simonians, about twenty Frenchmen, many of them civil engineers, who were led by an improbable figure named Prosper Enfantin. They had come, they announced, to dig a Suez canal, a work of profound religious meaning.

Their messiah was the late Claude Henri de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, who had fought under Lafayette at Yorktown, then, back in France, founded his own radical philosophy aimed toward a new global order. It was he who wrote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Private property and nationalism were to be things of the past. The leadership of mankind was to be entrusted to an elite class of artists, scientists, and industrialists. Mainly the good society was to be attained through ennobling, regenerative work. The world was to be saved–from poverty, from war–through immense public improvements, networks of highways, railroads, and two great ship canals through the Isthmus of Suez and the Isthmus of Panama.

Prosper Enfantin had taken up the banner after the death of the Master, calling himself Le Pere, “one half of the Couple of Revelation.” The other half, he said, was a divine female who had still to make herself recognized. A “church” was established on the Rue Monsigny in Paris; lavish receptions were staged to welcome the female messiah, candidates for the honor being received in Father Enfantin’s ornate bedchamber. Further, at a private estate near Paris, he founded an all-male colony for the faithful, where the prescribed habit, an outfit designed by the artist Raymond Bonheur, was a long, flowing tunic, blue-violet in color, tight-fitting white trousers, scarlet vest, and an enormous sash of richly embroidered silk. Enfantin, a big, bearded man, had the words “Le Pere” embroidered across the front of his blouse. When he was taken to court for his advocacy of free love, he appeared in Hessian boots and a velvet cloak trimmed with ermine. Asked to defend his behavior, he stood motionless and silent, then explained that he wished the court to have a quiet moment to reflect on his beauty.

But for all this he had a decisive intelligence. He had been an excellent student at the Ecole Polytechnique, the ultimate in French scientific training. He was a financier of importance and converts to the creed included eminent financiers, respected business people, journalists, many of the ablest civil engineers in France.

Enfantin had judged Suez to be an easier undertaking than Panama. He was further inspired by a premonition that his female counterpart waited for him somewhere in the ancient cradle of civilization. So after serving a brief prison term, he had sailed for Egypt, and it was de Lesseps who persuaded the ruling viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, not to throw him out of the country. De Lesseps may also have provided Enfantin with financial assistance. At any rate, Enfantin and his engineers went into the Suez desert.

After four years, more than half of them had died of cholera and little of practical value had been accomplished. Nonetheless, the prospect of a Suez canal was being talked about in Europe with seriousness at last, as a result of Enfantin’s proselytizing, and young de Lesseps, if not exactly a complete convert to Saint-Simonianism, had been uplifted by ideas that were to last a lifetime. “Do not forget that to accomplish great things you must have enthusiasm,” Enfantin had said, repeating the deathbed exhortation of the Master.

There was, however, to be no immediate deviation from the progress of a model career, and by any reasonable standard of evaluation, nobody could possibly have prophesied the future the young diplomat had in store. What heights he personally aspired to can only be guessed at. Probably they were of the predictable kind.

Viewed in retrospect, de Lesseps’ life stands out as one of the most extraordinary of the nineteenth century, even without the Panama venture. That he of all men of his time should have been the one to make “the miracle” happen at Suez is in itself miraculous. Suddenly there he was. known after 1869 as “The Great Engineer,” he was no such thing. He had no technical background, no experience in finance. His skills as an administrator were modest. Routine of any kind bored him quickly.

The great turning point, the traumatic personal watershed from which so much history was to flow, came in 1849. That it happened that particular year, the year of the gold rush, when Panama emerged from the shadows once again, seems a play of fate that not even a novelist of his day might have risked.

A French expeditionary force sent to subdue Mazzini’s newborn Roman republic and restore papal rule had been unexpectedly thrown back at Rome by Garibaldi. De Lesseps, then in Paris, was told he was to leave at once to resolve the crisis. “Guided by circumstances,” he was to please all parties and achieve a peaceful accommodation. With all eyes on him he had shown the incredible stamina and single-mindedness he could summon–and especially if all eyes were on him. Convinced that he could succeed, he very nearly had, and apparently quite blind to the fact that he was being used by his own government merely as a means to gain time. A temporary cease-fire was agreed to. But then French reinforcements arrived; Louis Napoleon, the new “Prince-President” of France, gave the order and the French army attacked.

Summarily recalled, de Lesseps was publicly reprimanded before the Assembly for exceeding his instructions. When Rome fell to the French army, he was left with no choice but to resign. The gossip was that the strain of the mission had been too much, that he had temporarily departed from his senses.

So at age forty-three he was without the career his background and natural gifts had so ideally suited him for, and to which he had given himself so wholeheartedly. The future was a blank page. He was in debt. Public disgrace was something he had never experienced. Yet outwardly he remained the man he had always been, jaunty, confident, up at dawn, busy all day. With his wife and three young sons he moved into a flat on the Rue Richepanse and for the next five years divided his time between Paris and a country estate in central France, an ancient, towered chateau in the province of Berri that had once belonged to Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII. Known as La Chesnaye, it had been purchased at de Lesseps’ urging by his mother-in-law, Madame Delamalle, who had recently come into a sizable inheritance. The estate was located near the little village of Vatan on an open plain, mostly wheat country and extremely good land, with a great belt of forest a few miles to the south. His ambition was to create a model farm and he plunged into the role of country gentleman.

To occupy his mind he returned to the old interest in an Egyptian canal, reading everything he could lay his hands on. He was in touch again with Prosper Enfantin, for whom the Egyptian dream still burned. Enfantin generously supplied studies and papers from his files in the belief that he and de Lesseps could join forces. De Lesseps, however, had no such intention. His destiny henceforth, he had decided, would be in his own hands. Once, years before in Egypt, Mo hammed Ali had advised, “My dear Lesseps . . . when you have something important to do, if there are Two of you, you have one too many.”

France, meantime, had been wrenched by still another bloody political turn. The improbable Prince-President sprang a coup d’etat, made himself dictator, and proclaimed the birth of the Second Empire. As Emperor Napoleon III, he would take France into a new age of progress, he said. “We have immense territories to cultivate, roads to open, harbors to deepen, canals to dig, rivers to make navigable, railroads to complete.” The Saint-Simonians were among his strongest supporters.

He established a brilliant court at the Tuileries, and on a bright winter morning at Notre Dame, he married the spectacular Eugenie de Montijo, who was half Spanish, half Scottish, something of an adventuress, and a distant cousin of Ferdinand de Lesseps’. (His mother and her grandmother were sisters.) Young enough to be the daughter of her cousin Fernando, as she called him in Spanish, she had always looked to him for advice. Especially in her new responsibilities would she welcome his views, she wrote the week before the wedding.

A few months afterward, in the spring of 1853, Agathe Delamalle de Lesseps died of scarlet fever and a son, his father’s namesake, died of the same cause. De Lesseps took refuge at La Chesnaye, pouring him self into routine projects and his canal studies. Life, he wrote to his oldest son, Charles, demanded courage, resignation, and trust in Providence. Charles, a bright, attentive boy of twelve, a student in Paris, had become a particular source of pride.

Then quite out of the blue came the news that Egypt’s ruling viceroy had been murdered by Two slaves. De Lesseps was on a scaffold working with some stonemasons on the old house when the postman appeared in the courtyard with the Paris mail. “The workmen passed My letters and papers from hand to hand. Imagine My astonishment when I read of the death of Abbas-Pasha . . . I hurried down, and at once wrote to the new Viceroy to congratulate him. . . .” The new viceroy was Mohammed Said, whom de Lesseps had befriended years before when Mohammed Said was a fat, unattractive, and friendless little boy.

Mohammed Said, for whom de Lesseps was to name Port Said, had since become a walleyed mountain of a man, a great eater and drinker and jovial teller of “French stories,” a ruler who liked to have his pashas wade through gunpowder carrying lighted candles to test their nerve. More important, he was known for his generous impulses and so de Lesseps wasted no time in getting to Egypt. By way of welcome, Said arranged to go on maneuvers in the Western Desert with an army of ten thousand men. They were joined by Bedouin tribesmen and a military band. It was the sort of show de Lesseps adored. He traveled in style–his own private tent, mahogany furniture, quilted silk bedding, ice for his drinking water.

In the pages of his journal one senses a sudden exhilaration, a tremendous feeling of release and adventure.

He joined Said at his desert command post outside Alexandria on November 13, 1854. Both were in top spirits. Said expressed a singular desire to commence his regime with some great enterprise. did Ferdinand have any ideas? But de Lesseps said nothing of the canal; he was waiting for a sign, as he explained later.

At night he searched the desert sky. Before dawn he was up and out of doors and the day was spent galloping miles over the desert on a magnificent Arabian steed. But the following morning, he knew the moment had come. He was standing at the opening to his tent, wrapped in a red dressing gown, looking and feeling for all the world like an Arab sheik. The description that follows is from his journal:

The sun’s rays were already lighting up the eastern horizon; in the west it was still dark and cloudy. Suddenly I saw a vivid-colored rainbow stretching across the sky from east to west. I must admit that I felt my heart beat violently, for . . . this token of a covenant . . . seemed to presage that the moment had come for the consummation of the Union between East and West. . ..

Before breakfast, but with everyone watching, he mounted his horse and went sailing over a high wall, a bit of imprudence, he calls it in the journal, but one “which afterward caused the Viceroy’s entourage to give the necessary approval to my scheme. The generals with whom I shared breakfast congratulated me and remarked that my boldness had greatly increased their opinion of me.”

And thus was launched the great Suez Canal. He broached the subject to Said at the close of day. Said asked a few questions, then declared the matter settled. His staff was summoned to hear the news.

Nothing had been said about cost. That de Lesseps had no experience faintly related to such an undertaking, that he represented no powerful organization, no combination of interests, that he had neither rank nor office nor any entree to financial sources, seems not to have concerned either of them.

For the next fifteen years he was everywhere at once–Egypt, London, Constantinople, Paris–coaxing, flattering, convincing monarchs and newspaper editors, issuing endless reports, driving the work forward in the desert, watching over every detail, frequently overruling his technical advisers, defying the European bankers, and facing the scorn of the English prime minister, Palmerston, who called him a swindler and a fool and who saw the canal as nothing more than a cheap French grab for power in the Mediterranean.

The engineer Stephenson, builder of the Britannia Bridge, member of Parliament, rose from a bench in Commons to pronounce the scheme preposterous. De Lesseps, whose English was terrible and whose experience as a builder had begun and ended with the restoration work at La Chesnaye, hung a French flag from his hotel window on Piccadilly, and went traveling across England giving more than eighty speeches in a month. “They never achieve anything who do not believe in success,” he loved to say.

When the Rothschilds wanted 5 percent for handling the initial stock subscription, he said he would hire an office and raise the money himself. “You will not succeed,” said Baron de Rothschild, an old friend. “We shall see,” de Lesseps had answered.

Approximately half the money had come from France (from twenty-five thousand small investors), the rest from Mohammed Said. when Said died, in 1863, his replacement, Khedive Ismail, was even more beneficent, so much so that by 1869 he had nearly put Egypt into bank-ruptcy. In the final stages it had been the colossal steam dredges designed by French engineers that made the difference. Nor can the repeated influence of the empress, her faith in her brilliant cousin, be discounted. Yet de Lesseps remained the driving spirit, and in truth he was something new under the sun; he had no historical counterpart. What he was–what he became–was the entrepreneur extraordinaire, with all the requisite traits for the role: nerve, persistence, dynamic energy, a talent for propaganda, a capacity for deception, imagination. He was a bit of an actor and as shrewd and silky a diplomat as anyone of his time.

He had no interest in making money, as he professed. “I am going to accomplish something without expediency, without personal gain,” he once wrote in his quick, sure, upward-sloping hand. “That, thank God, is what has up to now kept my sight clear and my course away from the rocks.” At any time he could have sold his precious concession and realized a fortune, but this he never did; his driving ambition throughout was to build the canal, “pour le bien de I’humanite”

“He persevered, you see,” a grandson would recall. “He was a very stubborn man.” Jules Verne called it “the genius of will.” But de Lesseps spoke of patience. “I wait with patience,” he wrote to a correspondent in the final year of the work, “patience which I assure you requires more force of character than does action.”

On the morning of the Grand Opening, November 17, 1869, tens of thousands of people lining both banks of the canal saw him ride by. Radiant with health, his hair turned nearly white by now, he stood beside the empress on the deck of the imperial yacht, Aigle. She was wearing a big straw hat and waving a white handkerchief.

Khedive Ismail had spared no expense on the inaugural ceremonies. Six thousand invitations were sent, offering to pay all travel and hotel expenses. A Cairo opera house had been built for the occasion and Verdi had been commissioned to write a spectacular new work, Aida* Five hundred cooks and a thousand waiters were imported from Europe. At Lake Timsah, halfway down the canal, a whole town, Ismailia, had been created, trees planted, hotels put up, a palace built.

Behind Aigle steamed an Austrian frigate carrying Emperor Franz Josef, who was turned out in scarlet trousers, white tunic, and a cocked hat with a green feather. There were two Austrian corvettes, five British ironclads, a Russian sloop of war, several French steamers-fifty ships in all. “There was a real Egyptian sky,” Eugenie would remember, “a light of enchantment, a dreamlike resplendence. . . .”

For the next eight months, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was Europe’s reigning hero. The empress presented the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. The emperor hailed his perseverance and genius. He was cause for dozens of banquets in Paris. His name was constantly in the papers, his face in the illustrated magazines. And the fact that he had also become a bridegroom added immeasurably to his hold on the public imagination.

A small, private ceremony had been performed at Ismailia a few days after the opening of the canal. The bride was a stunning French girl of twenty, with large, dark eyes and great spirit, Louise Héléne Autard de Bragard, the daughter of an old and wealthy friend of de Lesseps’ and of a magnificent mother who, in her own youth, had been the inspiration for a sonnet by Baudelaire. She had been raised On the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, where her family, Huguenots, owned large plantations. According to the traditional story, it was love at first sight when she and de Lesseps met at one of Eugenie’s “Mondays. “By this second marriage he was to produce no fewer than twelve children–six sons, six daughters–which in some circles was considered a more notable accomplishment than the canal.

Palmerston was in his grave. In London, a few days after the great Crystal Palace reception, Prime Minister Gladstone informed the hero of Suez that Her Majesty had bestowed upon him the Grand Cross of the Star of India.

Few men had ever been so vindicated or extolled while they lived.

II

The first skirmish of the war, “La Debacle” that overcame France with such appalling fury in 1870, was fought on August 4, the day Ferdi nand de Lesseps returned from London, and the outcome, despite French heroism, was plain almost immediately. Napoleon III was suddenly aged and so ill he could barely sit a horse; yet he insisted on commanding an army in the field. An American observer, General Sheridan, wrote of the “marvelous mind” of Moltke and called the German infantry “as fine as I ever saw.” The steel guns from the Krupp Works had twice the range of the French bronze pieces.

Within Two weeks the main French army was penned in at Metz. On September 2, at Sedan, Napoleon III and 100,000 of his troops surrendered. It was the most stunning, humiliating defeat in French history. The Second Empire collapsed instantly. Sunday, September 4, Léon Gambetta climbed out onto a window sill at the Hotel de Ville to proclaim to a Paris mob the birth of the Third French Republic. The empress, with the help of Ferdinand de Lesseps, escaped from the Tuileries and rushed to the home of her American dentist, a Dr. Evans, who got her to the Normandy coast and arranged for a yacht that carried her to asylum in England.

The war ended with the capitulation of Paris in January, after a siege of four months, during which the beleaguered citizens ate pet cats and elephants from the Paris zoo. The French dead were three times the German casualties, and by the peace terms France lost the rich, industrial provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Further, Bismarck demanded an indemnity of 5,000,000,000 francs-$ 1,000,000,000-enough, he thought, to keep France crippled and subservient for another generation. And as a final humiliation, the despised German troops with their spiked helmets were to be permitted to parade down the Champs Elysees.

Then, with the return of spring, the tragedy was compounded. While a German army of occupation stood idly by, a vicious civil war raged; the savage days of the Commune became a bloodier time even than the infamous Terror.

Yet the Third Republic survived and the sudden resurgence of France after the war was as astonishing as her defeat. It was as if Sedan had released a vital inner resource. Everywhere people doubled their efforts, fired by a spirit of revanche. It was to be a revenge won on battlefields of “peace and progress”–for the while, anyway. In Paris the rubble was carted off and the new government carried on with the grandiose construction programs of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. Coal and iron production increased even without Alsace and Lorraine. Money was plentiful, furthermore, for capitalizing new enterprises, for foreign investments. Amazingly, the German indemnity was paid off in full by 1873, two years ahead of schedule. The days of grandeur were not past; France would be herself again.

For his own part Ferdinand de Lesseps was no more interested in retirement than he had been twenty years earlier. Inspirited by his new marriage and constant public attention, he was openly casting about for new worlds to conquer. He had been untarnished by the war; he was among the few. People spoke of him as the living embodiment of French vitality and the century’s “splendid optimism.” “We have had a lot of other men who have done things perhaps more remarkable and who have been less popular,” a grandson would remember, “but that’s the way he was.” Once, on Bastille Day, when he was on his way to the station to take the train to his country place, a cheering crowd stopped his carriage, unhitched the horses, and pulled the carriage the rest of the way to the station. Gambetta called him Le Grand Français –The Great Frenchman, The Great Patriot–and the name was picked up by everyone.

He kept in excellent physical condition. He exercised regularly-fencing, riding–and with the zest of a man half his age. He looked at least ten to fifteen years younger than he was. An admiring American of the day described him as “a small man, French in detail, with . . . what is called a magnetic presence.” A reporter for the New York Herald provided this description:

He bears his years with ease and grace, showing no sign of age in his movements, which are quick and frequent, though never jerky. . . . His hair is almost white. His eyes are black, large, restless, and fringed by heavy lashes over which are shaggy eyebrows. His face is tanned . . . and ruddy with the evidence of perfect health. A mustache is the only one hirsute adornment on his face. It is small, iron-gray, bristling and has an aggressive look. In stature he is a little below medium height. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous and polished.

Come winter he was usually off to Egypt with his wife and children, and wherever they went she attracted still more attention for him. “Her form is the admiration of every dressmaker in the French capital,” reported the Paris correspondent of the Chicago News, “and a tight fitting dress sets off her elegant figure to the greatest advantage.” They were seen riding in the Bois, at balls at the Elysee, where the stately Marshal MacMahon, president of the Republic, and his lady led “the decorous waltz” past flower-wreathed panels that still bore the imperial initials of “N” and “E.”

They entertained often and grandly at a new apartment on the Rue Saint Florentin, a home with “every elegance”–Persian rugs, walls of family photographs and paintings in heavy gilt frames, a pair of tremendous elephant tusks in one antechamber, in another a display of his decorations. Presently, with her money, a larger, more impressive residence was purchased, a five-story private mansion, or hotel particulier, on the chic new Avenue Montaigne, where, as at La Chesnaye, the custom was never-ending hospitality. There were always ten to twelve people at dinner, always some old Suez comrade or distant kinsman or other stopping over for the night and staying a week or six months.

As chairman and president of the Suez Canal Company, he remained for thousands of shareholders the charmed guardian of their fortunes, which kept gaining steadily as the value of the stock grew ever greater. He thrived on the public role expected of him, rising to all occasions banquets, newspaper interviews–with exuberant renditions of his adventures in the desert, or, increasingly, with talk of some vast new scheme in the wind. He talked of building a railroad to join Paris with Moscow, Peking, and Bombay. He had an astonishing plan to create an inland sea in the Sahara by breaking through a low-lying ridge on Tunisia’s Gulf of Gabes and flooding a depression the size of Spain.

Interestingly, when a special commission of engineers was appointed to appraise this particular scheme, his absolute faith in it was not enough. Among the members was Sadi Carnot, a future president of France, who would recall de Lesseps’ performance years later. “We had no difficulty in showing him that the whole thing was a pure chimera. He seemed very much astonished, and we saw that we had not convinced him. Take it from me that as a certainty he would have spent millions upon millions to create his sea, and that with the best faith in the world.”

It was said that he could command money as no one else alive, and encouragement came from every quarter. Victor Hugo urged that he “astonish the world by the great deeds that can be won without a war!”

A forum for de Lesseps’ interests, now a favorite gathering place for those most intrigued by his future plans, was the Societe de Geographic de Paris, where Humboldt had once been a reigning light. Geography, since the war, had become something of a national cause. Among men of position it had also become extremely fashionable. It was said that ignorance of the world beyond her borders had put France in an inferior position commercially, that it had contributed to her disgraceful performance in the late war. Geographical societies sprouted in the provinces. Geography was made mandatory in the schools. Membership in the Paris society increased four times, and Vice Admiral Clement Baron de La Roncière-Le Noury, president of the society, wrote of “this ardor for geography” as one of the characteristics of the epoch. When the first serialized chapters of Around the World in Eighty Days appeared in Le Temps in 1872, Paris correspon-dents for foreign papers cabled their contents to home offices as though filing major news stories. Nothing else had ever made the geographical arrangement of the planet quite so clear or so interesting in human terms. An extravagant stage production of the novel opened in Paris, complete with live snakes and elephants, and between acts audiences jammed the theater lobby to watch an attendant mark Phileas Fogg’s progress on a huge world map.

Jules Verne, strictly an armchair adventurer, worked in a tower study in his home at Amiens, but came often to Paris to attend meetings of the Societe de Geographie and to do his research in its library. When he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, it was on the nomination of Ferdinand de Lesseps, and the sight of two such men at Societe functions, talking, shaking hands with admirers, was in itself a measure of the organization’s standing.

It was at an international congress held under the auspices of the Societe the summer of 1875 that de Lesseps made his first public declaration of interest in an interoceanic canal. The meetings opened at the Louvre, in conjunction with a huge geographical exhibition, the first of its kind, that took Paris by storm. Crowds ranged from ten to twelve thousand people a day.

Two issues must be resolved, he said. First was the best route; second was the type of canal to be built, whether at sea level (a niveau was the French expression) or whether a canal with locks. Several French explorers who had been to Darien spoke On their experiences and presented proposals. Joseph E. Nourse, of the United States Naval Observatory, reported On the recent American expeditions to Nicaragua and Panama. But de Lesseps was the center of attention, and when he declared that the canal through the American Isthmus must be a niveau and sans ecluses (without locks), it seemed that side of the problem had been settled.

Events began to gather momentum. Aided by the Rothschilds, England suddenly acquired financial control of the Suez Canal, and de Lesseps, while still head of the company, with offices in Paris, found his influence substantially undercut. The beloved enterprise, the pride of France, had become the lifeline of the British Empire.

Then before winter was out came the decision of President Grant’s Interoceanic Canal Commission. Having weighed the results of its surveys in Central America, the commission had decided in favor of Nicaragua. The decision was unanimous. Panama received little more than passing mention.

Within weeks it was announced that the Societe de Geographie would sponsor a great international congress for the purpose of evaluating the scientific considerations at stake in building a Central American canal. The American efforts had been insufficient, it was stated.

III

Whether Ferdinand de Lesseps was merely an adornment for the Tün Syndicate or a willing confederate or its guiding spirit were to become questions of much debate. In some accounts he would be portrayed as the victim of forces beyond his control. “Inevitably the whirlpool began to draw Ferdinand nearer and nearer its vortex,” reads one interpretation of events surrounding the origins of the Panama venture, and he is pictured struggling valiantly against the current. To a great many contemporary American observers he would appear more the innocent dupe of furtive schemers–“insidious influences,” as one of the New York papers said–who were placing the old hero out in front of the French people like a goat before sheep.

Had things turned out differently, however, it is unlikely that the galvanizing leadership of the effort would ever have been attributed to anybody other than Ferdinand de Lesseps, which, from the available evidence, not to mention the man’s very nature, appears to have been the truth of the matter. As he himself once remarked to an American reporter, “Either I am the head or I refuse to act at all.”

The newly formed Türr Syndicate was quite small but made up of such “well-selected” figures as to command immediate attention and confidence. Its better-known stockholders included Senator fimile Littre, author of the great French dictionary, and Octave Feuillet, the novelist. (Littre declared that the five thousand francs he put in represented the first financial investment of his life.) There were General Claude Davout, Charles Cousin, of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, the Saint-Simonian financier Isaac Periere, and Jules Bourdon, who was curator of the Opera. Dr. Henri Bionne, an official of the Societe de Geographie, was an authority on international finance, a former lieutenant commander in the French Navy, who had degrees in both medicine and law. Dr. Cornelius Herz, a newcomer to Paris and an American, was a physician and entrepreneur who claimed a personal friendship with Thomas Edison.

The syndicate’s formal title was the Societe Civile Internationale du Canal Interoceanique de Darien. It had a capital of 300,000 francs represented by some sixty shares and de Lesseps was neither a shareholder nor an officer. The leadership and the bulk of the stock were in the hands of three directors. The most conspicuous of these was General Istvan Türr, a Hungarian who had covered himself with glory in Sicily as Garibaldi’s second in command and who for a time had been employed by King Victor Emmanuel II for diplomatic missions. With his long, elegant figure, his long, handsome face and spectacular Victor Emmanuel mustache–it must have been the largest mustache in all Paris in the 1870’s–Istvan Türr had become something of a celebrity, the sort of personage people pointed out on the boulevards. His social connections included Le Grand Français.

The second man was the financier Baron Jacques de Reinach, a short, stout, affable man about town, known for his political pull and his voracious interest in young women. Like Türr, he was foreign-born, but a German and a Jew, as would be made much of later. He had founded the Paris banking firm of Kohn, de Reinach et Compagnie and had become rich speculating in French railroads and selling military supplies to the French government. His dealings had been subject to some question, although as yet nothing serious had come of it. Most important of the three was Lieutenant Wyse, Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse, who was the illegitimate son of the first Napoleon’s niece Princess Laetitia. Temporarily on leave from the French Navy, Wyse was twenty-nine years old. He did not look much like a Bonaparte. Tall and slender, he had an open, friendly face with a high forehead, blue eyes, and full beard. His mother, a sensational woman who had been known in every capital in Europe, was the daughter of Napoleon’s wayward brother Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino. Her early marriage to Sir Thomas Wyse, an Irish diplomat, had failed, but was never dissolved legally, and by the time Lieutenant Wyse was born, nineteen years had passed since she and her husband had even seen each other. Two illegitimate daughters had also resulted, magnificent-looking women, very much like their mother, one of whom married Istvan Türr (which made Türr and Wyse brothers-in-law). The other, known as Madame Rattazzi, was a literary figure of sorts and one of the most dazzling and publicized figures of the day. The father of the sisters was an English Army officer who had pulled Princess Laetitia from a pond in St. James’s Park after she had attempted a public and rather ridiculous suicide at the time her marriage was breaking up. But the identity of the young lieutenant’s father was never divulged, though naturally there was speculation on the subject and especially when the Panama venture commenced. The money he put into the syndicate had come from his wife, a wealthy English-woman.

It was Wyse who went to see de Lesseps and in the early stages de Lesseps appears to have found him a young man much after his own heart. Wyse would also be the sole member of the syndicate to subject himself to any physical danger or hardship.*

The initial plan announced by the Societe de Geographie was for a series of definitive explorations and surveys, a binational, wholly non-partisan effort, with the world’s leading scientific societies participating. But all such talk ceased the moment the Türr Syndicate made itself available, offering to handle everything. Permission to conduct explorations within Colombian territory was secured by sending an intermediary to Bogotá, and six months later, in early November 1876, an expedition of seventeen men sailed on the steamer Lafayette, flag-ship of the French West Indies line. Lieutenant Wyse was in command, assisted by another French naval officer, Lieutenant Armand Réclus, and their orders were to find and survey a canal route, but to confine their activities to Darien, east of the railroad, since the Colombian government had forbidden any intrusion along the railroad’s right of way. In other words they were to look only in that area wherein the syndicate had a legal right to carry on its business, which was scarcely the broad-range perspective embodied in the Society’s original proposal.

The party was gone six months, two of which were spent at sea. Everyone suffered from malaria, two men died in the jungle, a third died during the voyage home. Wyse returned thin and drawn and covered with tiny scars from insect bites. He was thoroughly discouraged and made little effort to hide it. Though they had managed to cross the divide, the terrain, the punishing heat, the rains, had defeated them. The best he could recommend–and purely by guesswork–was a Darien canal with a tunnel as much as nine miles in length.

De Lesseps was wholly dissatisfied. How instrumental he had been in planning the expedition, if at all, is not apparent. His role was supposedly that of an arbiter only. He was the head of the Societe’s Committee of Initiative.

At any rate, having heard the young officer’s report, he declared it as good as worthless. He would agree only to a canal at sea level–no locks, no tunnels. Furthermore, he now knew where to build the canal. As he would remark later to a New York newspaperman, “I told Messrs. Wyse and Réclus when they made their report that there could be no other route than that of the railroad. ‘If you come back with a favorable report on a sea-level canal on that route I shall favor it.’ “

So Wyse and Réclus sailed again, accompanied by many of the same men who had been on the first expedition. And this time things went differently. Considering how much was to hang on their efforts, how much would be risked on the so-called Wyse Survey at Panama, it is interesting to see just how their time was occupied.

Landing at Colón and crossing to Panama City, Wyse assembled the necessary provisions and sailed for the Pacific shores of San Bias, where his efforts appear to have been half-hearted. Indeed, it is puzzling why he bothered at all, knowing de Lesseps’ attitude. In three weeks, certain that no canal could be built at San Bias without a tunnel, Wyse ordered everybody back to Panama City.

Lieutenant Réclus was told to explore the Panama route, keeping to the line of the railroad, and since this was in violation of the agreement secured earlier, Wyse decided to go himself to Bogotá. Time suddenly was of the essence. On the first of April the president of Colombia, Aquileo Parra, would be retiring from office and President Parra was known to favor the Wyse-Türr enterprise.

Lieutenant Réclus, meantime, began an informal reconnaissance of the Pacific slope a few miles east of the railroad, assisted by a young Panamanian engineer, Pedro Sosa. It was, as Réclus himself noted in his diary, “not an exploration in the true sense of the word.” It was more of a walk, a ride on the railroad even. Sosa became ill Within a week. Then Réclus too was stricken with an excruciating earache, and so he called the whole thing off. On April 20, they were back in Panama City and ten days later, with no word from Wyse, Réclus sailed for France.

And that was the sum total of the Wyse Survey. The exploration of the Panama route that was “not an exploration” had occupied all of Two weeks, four days. Wyse had played no part in it and in fact no survey had resulted.

By contrast, the American expedition of three years before had remained Two and a half months in Panama and virtually all that time had been spent in the field. The Americans, more than a hundred in number, had run a line of levels from ocean to ocean, explored the Chagres watershed, and prepared maps, charts, and statistical tables. And the Government Printing Office in Washington had made most of these findings, except for the maps and plans, available in a document of several hundred pages, a document Wyse would be perfectly happy to rely upon. Such borrowing would pose no conflict presumably, since the material had been published in the spirit of open exchange of scientific information and the Americans had already rejected the Panama route.

It was well afterward, when he was safely back in Paris, that Wyse wrote of his mission to Bogotá, then one of the most inaccessible cities on the face of the earth. From Panama City to Bogotá was normally a journey of three, even four weeks, though the distance on a straight line was only about five hundred miles. Moreover, it was a vastly different world from Panama that one found On arrival–a gray stone city set on a tableland at 8,600 feet and hemmed in by two of the three tremendous ranges of the Andes that divide Colombia like giant fingers; a mild damp climate that seldom varies, skies often clouded; a solemn, impoverished populace clothed in black; a proud ruling class of bankers, scholars, poets, who spoke the most perfect Castilian to be heard in Latin America.

Because the Darien wilderness stood between Panama and the rest of Colombia, Panama was as removed as if it were an island, and Colombia could be reached only by sea, either by the Caribbean or the Pacific. One sailed first either to Barranquilla or to Buenaventura. The journey from Barranquilla to Bogotá involved a four-hundred-mile trip by river steamer up the Magdalena to a point called Honda, then another hundred miles over the mountains by horse or wagon. There were no railroads.

The other way, by Buenaventura, the route Wyse took, was shorter but considerably more arduous, covering nearly four hundred miles. Wyse went by horseback, traveling with one companion, a French lawyer, Louis Verbrugghe, the two of them in serapes and big Panama hats. The general direction, as Wyse wrote, was “perpendiculaire.”

They reached Bogotá in just eleven days, during which they sometimes spent twenty-four hours in the saddle. They arrived unshaven, their clothes torn and filthy. Wyse was missing one spur and had broken the other so that it clanked disconcertingly as they walked along the streets. Hotels turned them away because of their appearance, as Wyse would tell the story. But the following morning, March 13, bathed, shaved, looking most presentable, Wyse met with Eustorgio Salgar, Secretary of Foreign Relations. On March 14 he saw President Parra, who was especially “well disposed” toward his proposition.

The newspapers in Bogotá, all closely tied to the party in power, the Liberals, took little notice of Wyse’s presence in the capital. That the visit was one of the utmost importance to the future of Colombia, that Wyse was there in fact to settle the basic contract to build a Panama canal, a contract that could mean a world of difference to Colombia for centuries to come, or more immediately help solve the country’s dire financial troubles, was in no way suggested. Possibly someone somewhere along the line had decided that a better bargain might be driven with the young man by playing down his importance.

On March 15, or just three days after his arrival, Wyse presented a draft of a contract. Everything was going as smoothly as could be hoped for. Five days later, having made only minor modifications, Salgar and Wyse fixed their signatures to the document, and three days after that, on March 23, 1878, President Parra, who had exactly one week left in office, did the same. Confirmation by the Colombian Senate took longer, but by mid-May, the concession at last in his pocket, Wyse was on his way back to Panama, going this time by steamer down the Magdalena.

At Panama City he learned from Pedro Sosa of the little that Sosa and Réclus had accomplished, yet took no time to do anything more. Rather, he wound up his affairs in the least time possible, sold off the supplies left over from the expeditions, made Sosa a gift of the surveying instruments, and departed. He seems to have felt obliged only to see Nicaragua–to travel the route the Americans had settled on–and it was another journey in record time. He crossed from San Juan del Norte, going by steamer up the San Juan, then over the lake. The Americans had “much simplified” his task, he was to report. In fact, their Nicaragua Expedition had been their largest and most extensive. To plot their canal line they had had to chop a path nearly the length of the entire valley, or more than twice the distance across Panama, and much of the time the men had worked in swamps in water up to their shoulders. Their survey was an accomplishment Wyse especially could appreciate. He himself paused only long enough to pick up a few rock samples.

From Nicaragu a he went to Washington, but by way of San Francisco, another odd side of the story, since he could so easily have returned to Colón, taken a steamer to New York, and saved himself several thousand miles. The impression is that he wanted to appraise financial interest in San Francisco, the American city that stood to gain the most from the canal. But possibly he wanted only to take the transcontinental railroad, to ride like Phileas Fogg the “uninterrupted metal ribbon.” Whatever his reasons, he can be pictured flying along in a Union Pacific parlor car, observing “the varied landscape” as Fogg had, checking his watch at the Great Salt Lake, or taking some air during the stop at Green River Station.

At the Navy Department in Washington he was received by Commander Edward P. Lull and A. G. (Aniceto Garcia) Menocal, authors of both the Nicaragua and Panama surveys. Lull had had overall command; Menocal, a Cuban by birth, had been foremost of the civilian engineers assigned by Admiral Ammen “to place the results of the work beyond the reach of criticism.”

The conversation was cordial and for Wyse perfectly fruitless. The Americans showed great interest in his travels, and Wyse, who spoke excellent English, made much of their pioneering efforts in the jungle. But it was their maps and plans that Wyse had come for and he was politely told that these were not available, that the department “did not feel disposed” to grant his request. He asked if he might pay his respects to Admiral Ammen, but Admiral Ammen, he was told, was not available.

So it was with the Bogotá contract only–the famous Wyse Concession–that Wyse sailed from New York; no survey of his own, not even a map of Panama other than one made by the railroad twenty-five years before. For the moment, however, the concession was enough. That its cash value could be phenomenal went without saying.

The agreement was this:

The United States of Colombia granted the Societe Civile–the Türr Syndicate–the exclusive privilege, good for ninety-nine years, to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. As a guarantee of their good faith, the grantees were obligated to deposit 750,000 francs in a London bank no later than 1882. It was required that surveys be made by an international commission of competent engineers, for which three years were allowed, and the grantees were permitted two additional years in which to organize a canal company, and then twelve years to build the canal.

Colombia in turn was to get 5 percent of the gross revenue from the canal for twenty-five years, 6 percent for the next twenty-five years, 7 percent for the next twenty-five years, and 8 percent for the final years of the concession. The minimum payment, however, was never to be less than $250,000, which was the same as Colombia’s share in the earnings of the Panama Railroad.

Colombia conceded to the company, without charge, 500,000 hectares (1,235,500 acres) of public lands, in addition to a belt of land 200 meters (219 yards) wide on each side of the canal. The terminal ports and the canal itself were declared neutral for all time. At the end of ninety-nine years the canal would revert to Colombia.

Further conditions were stipulated, but the crucial ones were these:

The concession could be transferred (i.e., sold) to other individuals or financial syndicates, but under no circumstances could it be sold to a foreign government. It was left to the grantees to negotiate “some amicable agreement” with the Panama Railroad concerning its rights and privileges.

Once reunited in Paris, Wyse and Réclus quickly put together a plan to present to de Lesseps. It was for a sea-level canal following the line of the Panama Railroad and again they resorted to a tunnel as the essential feature. De Lesseps voiced no objections to any of it. Nor did he register any serious dissatisfaction with Wyse’s so-called survey. The one dissenting voice at this stage was that of a young Hungarian engineer named Bela Gerster, who had served with Wyse on both expeditions and who pointedly refused to sign Wyse’s final report. Gerster prepared his own minority report, but when he took it to a number of French newspapers none were interested in printing it.

Some loose ends had to be attended to before de Lesseps could convene his canal congress. He had to have a guarantee that the Americans would attend–their presence was essential to the prestige of the affair–and he needed a commitment from the Panama Railroad Company that there would be no problem over the “amicable agreement” required by the Wyse Concession. Actually, he wanted to buy the railroad. So back Wyse sailed once more, early in 1879, arriving at New York, where he saw the president of the Panama Railroad Company, a clever Wall Street speculator named Trenor W. Park. Standing up to greet Wyse, Park looked no larger than a twelve-year-old boy, but he had come as far as he had in the business world by making the most of every advantageous position, and at the moment he was in an extremely advantageous position, as he and Wyse both appreciated. The details of the Bogotá contract had become public knowledge by now, and if an amicable understanding could not be reached with Trenor Park, the major stockholder in the railroad, then obviously the contract was worthless.

It was within Park’s power to decide whether Wyse or de Lesseps need go a step further with their plans.

Park was “not altogether reluctant” to sell the railroad. His price, he told Wyse, was $200 a share, or twice its market value at the moment. Park, it was understood, owned fifteen thousand shares.

In Washington next, Wyse not only succeeded in seeing Admiral Ammen, but was presented to the Secretary of State, William Evarts, and later to President Hayes, who expressed great interest in the forth-coming Paris congress. Evarts, however, seemed as suspicious as Palmerston had been about Suez. The ill-fated attempt by Napoleon III to make Maximilian emperor of Mexico had left Evarts, like many Americans, extremely uneasy about France and her aspirations in the Western Hemisphere and anything but trustful of anyone with the name Bonaparte, even so amiable a Bonaparte as Lieutenant Wyse. So it was a difficult interview.

At length Evarts agreed that the United States should participate in the congress but only Ammen and A. G. Menocal would be permitted to go as authorized delegates. They could join in the technical discussions–to “communicate such scientific, geographical, mathematical, or other information . . . as is desired or deemed important”–but they were to have no official powers or diplomatic function, no say concerning the canal policy of the United States.

Shortly afterward in Paris, sometime in the early spring of 1879, just before the opening of the congress, Charles de Lesseps met with his father in the office of Dr. Henri Bionne, one of the most respected figures in the Türr Syndicate.

At age thirty-eight, Charles was nearly bald, and with his dark brows and thick dark beard, he looked a good deal older than he was. Like his father, he was a man of great pride and natural courtesy. He was also a capable administrator and this, plus a good deal of common sense and a capacity for hard work, had won him wide admiration at Suez, where he had served as his father’s principal aide. He was intelligent, rather than brilliant, careful, considerate, but with none of his father’s glamour or his need for public acclaim. Charles was a chess player.

The demands on him at Suez had been heavy. His only child, “Little Ferdinand,” had died in infancy of cholera at Ismailia in 1865. Still, he idolized his father no less than ever and remained his good right arm in numerous ways. Charles, as would be said later, was above all a devoted son. More, he was a son who knew his devotion was returned in full.

Charles was strongly opposed to the Panama venture and had been from the day Lieutenant Wyse first came to La Chesnaye to present his plan. To Charles the whole scheme was a kind of madness.

The account we have of the scene in Bionne’s office is Charles’s own, provided years later in a private memoir.

“What do you wish to find at Panama?” he asked his father. “Money? you will not bother about money at Panama any more than you did at Suez. Glory? You’ve had enough glory. Why not leave that to someone else? All of us who have worked at your side are entitled to a rest. Certainly the Panama project is grandiose . . . but consider the risks those who direct it will run! you succeeded at Suez by a miracle. Should not one be satisfied with accomplishing one miracle in a lifetime?”

Then, not waiting for a reply, he added: “If you decide to proceed with this, if nothing will stop you . . . if you want me to assist you, then gladly I will take whatever comes. I shall not complain no matter what happens. All that I am I owe to you; what you have given me, you have the right to take away.”

Ferdinand de Lesseps replied that he had already made up his mind. What he did not say, what perhaps he was unable to admit to himself just yet, was the extent to which his trust in Charles had influenced that decision.

* The opera was not ready in time, so the performance was put off until 1871.

* In examining the relationship that developed between Wyse and de Lesseps, their kinship of purpose, the shared sense of adventure, the almost father-son spirit, the question inevitably arises: Might de Lesseps have been the unknown father? There is, however, nothing in the available record to suggest this was so. About all we can safely assume is that for a young man of such background, with his paternity in doubt and his aspirations so high, de Lesseps must have been an appealing figure and one to which he might very naturally wish to attach himself.

3
Consensus of One

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes,
of a multitude of fibers.

–VICTOR HUGO

I

The Congrès International d’fitudes du Canal Interoceanique, as it was formally titled, convened in Paris at two in the afternoon, Thursday, May 15, 1879. After centuries of dreams and talk, of hit-or-miss explorations and hollow promises, of little scientific knowledge, little or no cooperation among nations, leading authorities from every part of the world–engineers, naval officers, economists, explorers–were gathering under one roof “in the impartial serenity of science” to inaugurate La grande entreprise, greatest of the age. Or so it was being said.

The setting was the handsome new headquarters of the Societe de Geographie, in the Latin Quarter, at 184 Boulevard Saint Germain, where rows of neatly spaced young chestnut trees, each fenced in ornamental iron, were in full leaf and crowds of bystanders gathered in the sunshine to watch the delegates alight from their carriages. De Lesseps had picked mid-May because it was the perfect time to be in Paris. He personally had issued every invitation. He had had final say on agenda, rules, the make-up of committees, even the entertainment. He would have nothing left to chance.

In all, 136 delegates entered through the great oak doors that opened onto the street. In addition to France and her colonies (Algeria and Martinique), a total of twenty-two countries were to be represented: Austria-Hungary, Belgium, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany, Great Britain, Guatemala, the still-independent nation of Hawaii, Holland, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Russia, El Salvador, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Among the Dutch delegates was the renowned Jacob Dirks, builder of the Amsterdam Canal. Sir John Stokes and Sir John Hawkshaw, equally distinguished engineers, had come over from London. The Germans had sent a general inspector of mines; the Russians, an admiral. (The Russians had actually been so little interested in the historic convocation that they had neglected to appoint a delegate, and none would have appeared had de Lesseps not cabled a last-minute reminder.) Colombia had sent a four-man delegation, one of whom was young Pedro Sosa; and the Mexican delegate, Francisco de Garay, was in such a rush not to miss de Lesseps’ opening remarks that he left his baggage in customs at Saint-Nazaire and arrived on the Boulevard Saint Germain unshaven and still in his traveling clothes. At a nearby shop he picked out the appropriate attire (top hat, morning coat, gray gloves), had a barber sent in, then made his entrance with time to spare–a story that greatly pleased Ferdinand de Lesseps.

The American delegation, largest of the foregoing groups, numbered eleven, including Ammen, Menocal, and Commander Selfridge, plus delegates from the American Geographical Society, the National Academy of Science, the United States Board of Trade, and the City of San Francisco. And among the French were such recognizable personages as Jules Flachat, the explorer; Levasseur, the economist and geographer; Daubree, president of the Academie des Sciences; Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, of the Societe des Ingenieurs; and the very elegant Admiral de La Ronciere-Le Noury. Finally there was de Lesseps himself, the star attraction, his young wife on his arm.

They gathered in the grande salle on the first floor of the Societe, a beautifully detailed, cream-colored auditorium with a lofty arched ceiling, a small stage, and a seating capacity for nearly four hundred people. De Lesseps, his officers, and Admiral de La Ronciere-Le Noury occupied the stage; the delegates filled the first five rows, while every remaining seat was taken by spectators, including, as no newspaper reporter failed to note, a surprising number of fashionable women in the feathered bonnets of the day. When de Lesseps stood up to bid all welcome, there was a storm of applause.

This first session, however, was purely ceremonial and amounted to little. De Lesseps offered a few pleasantries (“The presence of ladies at a scientific gathering is always a good omen. . .”), and Henri Bionne, who was to be secretary of the congress, read a rather tedious paper on the Society’s prior interest in the canal idea. Then de Lesseps introduced those who were to head the various committees, hastily described the work of the committees, and read off the full list of delegates, asking each to rise in turn and be recognized. (The most prolonged applause was for the Chinese delegate, Mr. Li-Shu-Chang, first secretary of the Chinese legation in London, since China, as the newspapers explained, was expected to provide the labor to dig the canal.)

Several of the Americans were highly annoyed by all this. De Lesseps’ remarks were obviously unprepared. The whole session had not lasted an hour and nobody but de Lesseps and Bionne had been heard from. Everything seemed too neatly and arbitrarily prearranged. Despite the emphasis on the numbers of nations represented, there was an obvious predominance of French delegates, most of whom seemed committed already, out of past loyalties or for reasons of personal ambition, to take whatever course the old man dictated. The more prominent French delegates, for example, included the former director general at Suez, Voisin Bey; Abel Couvreux, of the giant Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie, a major Suez contractor; and Alexandre La valley, who had built the great steam dredges used at Suez.

Of the several committees, only one really mattered, the fourth, or so-called Technical Committee, which was charged with deciding where the canal should be built, what kind of canal it should be, and what it was all going to cost. It was the largest committee, the one de Lesseps himself would sit on, and of the 52 other delegates he had assigned to it, more than half were French. Indeed, of all the 136 delegates in attendance, a total of 73–well over a majority–were French and not a quarter were engineers.

Further, de Lesseps seemed bound to hurry things through in record speed. The congress, he had said in conclusion, should get on with its work “in the American fashion–that is to say, with speed, and in a practical fashion. . .” One week, he thought, should suffice.

Probably the least inhibited appraisal of the congress was that of the representative from the American Geographical Society, Dr. William E. Johnston, a New York physician who described de Lesseps as “kind-hearted and obliging, but . . . ambitious also,” and from the start was convinced that he and the other non-French delegates would count for little. Ammen and Menocal especially had no business even being there, he wrote. No plan other than that of the famous Frenchman and his compatriots stood the least chance of adoption.

Still, de Lesseps had welcomed the Americans with such warmth and courtesy that even Ammen could be seen to thaw. He had made Ammen the first of five vice-presidents of the congress; he had Ammen sit at his right hand; he insisted that Ammen and Menocal serve on the Technical Committee.

The labors of the smaller committees, which met elsewhere in the building, were minimal and of little significance. One group concluded that the canal would be opened ten years hence and accommodate an annual traffic roughly twice that at Suez. (In the committee’s report it was stressed that such traffic should not be anticipated for the first year of operation, but de Lesseps would choose to disregard that.) Another group, estimating world commerce, a committee headed by Nathan Appleton, of Boston, the delegate from the United States Chamber of Commerce, met only three times and accomplished nothing. A committee on ship dimensions concluded that the canal need be no wider or deeper than Suez, and a committee on tolls, hamstrung to do much of anything without knowing what the Technical Committee would decide, made a gallant guess. With tolls set at $3 a ton, it was thought the canal could bring in a gross revenue of $18,000,000 a year, which was worked out to mean an annual net profit of no less than $8,000,000, or a return of 8 percent on a canal costing $100,000,000.

The deliberations of the Technical Committee, held in the auditorium, remained the focus of attention, the “impartial serenity of science” being pretty well shattered at the very first of these sessions on May 16.

The first speaker was to have been Admiral Ammen–another of de Lesseps’ courtesies–but the trunk containing the reports and maps from the American surveys had been delayed somewhere between Liverpool and Paris. So it was Commander Selfridge who spoke instead and his subject was the Atrato River route, which should have been no problem, and would not have been, had Ammen been willing to let Selfridge simply have his say. Ammen, however, thought very little of any and all Atrato River schemes; nor did he wish anyone to get the impression that Selfridge spoke as an official representative of the American government; nor apparently did he like the idea that Selfridge was even in attendance; nor does he seem to have much cared for Selfridge personally. (What the issue was between them remains obscure.) Ammen openly challenged certain of Selfridge’s claims and in no time a sharp and rather undignified argument resulted between the two: Ammen insisting that he, as the rightful head of the American delegation, should have the final say; Selfridge refusing to defer to the august admiral (now retired) and insisting with equal conviction that he had a perfect right to be heard and, further, that he could speak with authority since he at least had been there.

Selfridge would be asked to address the committee again in another few days. His explorations in Darien, his advocacy of a canal a niveau, his passable French, all made him a popular figure. (Later, the congress at an end, Selfridge would receive the Legion of Honor for his pioneering efforts in Darien.) But the Atrato scheme, though a “projet sans écluses” never really had a chance of attracting serious attention, as Ammen should have recognized, and it was put aside just as soon as Selfridge had had the opportunity to speak his piece. What was interesting to the delegates was the tone of the exchange between the two eminent Americans–to see how intensely, how passionately, such an issue could matter to fellow countrymen, fellow officers and gentlemen.

Ammen had his turn the following day, the crucial trunk having been located meantime, and was followed immediately by Menocal. The effect was stunning. “When it came to the turn of Messrs. Ammen and Menocal to give their figures and estimates of the different routes, a complete revolution took place,” wrote Dr. Johnston. “The great body of able engineers who had come to seriously study the question without prejudice, were astounded to find that nobody in Europe knew anything about the question. The expose of the American delegates was a revelation . . . .”

Ammen’s part was a brief overall description of the American surveys, but the maps and plans he used to elaborate his remarks had an instant effect, since nothing of the kind had been seen before in Europe. Then followed the “technical exposition” on Nicaragua by Menocal.

A Nicaragua canal would involve fewer engineering problems than a canal at any other possible location, the audience was informed. The cost, based on an actual survey of the line, was so much less by comparison that for economy reasons alone a Nicaragua canal had to take precedence. The plan was for a lock canal, a sea-level canal at Nicaragua being out of the question.

The route of the canal was similar to that laid out by Vanderbilt’s engineer, Orville Childs, in the early 1850’s. The San Juan River would be made navigable by building several small dams and these would be bypassed with relatively short canal sections. Going west, up to the lake, there would be about forty miles of canal in total and ten locks. From the lake to the Pacific, a distance of only sixteen miles, there would be another section of canal with ten more locks descending back to sea level. The entire route, from Greytown to Brito, on the Pacific, would measure 181 miles, or more than three times the length of the Panama route. But as with the Childs’ scheme, 56 of those 181 miles were already provided for by Lake Nicaragu a and almost 70 miles of the San Juan could be made navigable for seagoing ships. So that left only 50-odd miles–58.23 according to Menocars figures–of actual canal construction, or not much more than the length of a Panama canal.

The cost of such a canal he put at $65,600,000, a third less than the price being quoted by Lieutenant Wyse for his project.

It was a polished, confident performance lasting five hours, and it was made to look even better by the speaker who followed–Lieutenant Wyse. Menocal had spoken as one who had appraised all sides of the problem, seen to every detail, who had covered every foot of the ground on his own Two legs. He was the thoroughgoing professional, the voice of experience. Wyse, by contrast, was often vague on details, unsure of his facts. He talked, said one delegate, as though he had dreamed up his entire plan without ever having left Paris.

Wyse, General Türr, Armand Réclus, and several others associated with them had been present from the first session, and though they were not accredited delegates, and so in theory had no real power or say, they were, as members of the Societe de Geographie, perfectly at home in such surroundings and known to all. Wyse, as it happened, was the recipient of the Society’s gold medal for that year, for his Darien explorations. Yet virtually from the moment he began to speak of his Panama project it was clear to a large number of delegates that he had little substantive knowledge of the terrain and that there was really no such thing as a Wyse Survey. And whereas Menocal had encouraged questions at the conclusion of his remarks and answered them to the satisfaction of every engineer present, Wyse was at a loss to defend his plan on even the most fundamental level. Specifically, he did not know what could be done about the Chagres River, which stood in the path of any canal taking the route of the railroad, or how, when he went down to sea level, he could cope with the twenty-foot tides of the Pacific.

When on Monday, May 19, General Türr and Lieutenant Réclus appeared before the committee and talked for several more hours, they contributed scarcely any more than Wyse had.

Tuesday, May 20, Menocal took the platform again. It was his professional judgment, as a result of three months in the Chagres valley, that any attempt to build a Panama canal would be disastrous. The absolutely unavoidable problem was the river. Any canal at Panama–a lock canal, a sea-level canal–would have to cross the river at least once, possibly several times. If a sea-level canal were cut through the river, the result, as anyone could readily picture, would be a stupendous cataract. The fall of the river into the canal would be 42 feet and this measurement was based on the level of the river in the dry season, when the river was only a few feet deep. In the rainy season the river could be instantly transformed into a torrent. It could rise 10 feet in an hour. At flood stage it could run as much as 36 feet deep, he said, and measure 1,500 feet across. The cost of controlling so monstrous a force–if it could be done at all–was beyond reckoning.

When he first went to Panama, in 1875, his own intention, he said, had been to plan for a sea-level canal. He had abandoned the idea as soon as he grasped the true nature of the Chagres River. Any plan that did not take the river into account was altogether unrealistic.

Lieutenant Wyse asked to be heard. Where had the speaker obtained his data? From actual surveys and from local authorities, Menocal replied. His figures had been obtained through surveys in the field.

The official American plan for Panama was for a lock canal that would dispense with the problem of the Chagres by going over it. Menocal had designed a colossal stone viaduct 1,900 feet long to carry the canal over the river at a point known as Matachin. The elevation of the canal at the viaduct–the summit of the canal, that is–was to be 124 feet, and to carry the ships to this height there were to be a total of twenty-four locks (an equal dozen in either direction from the summit). To build such a canal would cost $94,600,000, a figure that startled a large number of his listeners, since it was approximately what Wyse was claiming for the cost of a canal at sea level.

Menocal believed it to be as ingenious a solution as possible, considering the circumstances, but he had no heart for it. In good conscience he was unable to recommend a Panama canal of any kind. Even a lock canal, he emphasized, would always be threatened by possible floods, and he further warned that the deep cuts that would have to be made through the Cordilleras at that section known as Culebra–even for a lock canal–would be subject to persistent mud slides.

“The surprise and painful emotion on the part of those who had plans a niveau, and of their many friends in attendance, can hardly be conceived,” wrote Daniel Ammen. “The fact stared them in the face that the plans which they had presented so confidently for adoption were absolutely impracticable.”

“From this moment,” observed Dr. Johnston, “the Congress became a real Congress and not a sham.”

All together the Technical Committee was to consider proposals for fourteen different points on the map of Central America. Frederick Kelley’s old San Bias plan was presented, for example. The Mexican delegate, de Garay, spoke for Tehuantepec. But these other options were rejected one by one. In less than a week the issue had come down to the Wyse plan for Panama and the American plan for Nicaragua, and to a great many delegates, having heard Menocal, the choice had been narrowed to Nicaragua. Had a vote been taken at the conclusion of Menocal’s remarks on Panama, it is probable that the congress would have picked Nicaragua, as de Lesseps himself conceded privately. But with de Lesseps in charge nothing of the kind was even to be considered.

Behind the scenes he was extremely busy, talking to the French delegates in a manner that “would do credit to a modern American political boss.” There could be no turning back. They could agree to no decision other than Panama. “That was the French route,” wrote Dr. Johnston; “they had been manufacturing enthusiasm for that route; the bankers and the public would not give a cent to any route that was not patronized by M. de Lesseps and Lieut. Wyse. So that to abandon that route was to abandon entirely for France the glory of cutting the interoceanic canal, and that was not to be thought of for a moment.”

By now, moreover, it was commonly understood that large sums of money were at stake. A Panama canal company had been formed in secret, it was rumored. “We were to be brought face to face with the singular spectacle of a congress which had become serious and honest, and which saw its way clear to the truth,” observed Dr. Johnston, “and yet which was obliged to remain dishonest, and carry out the original plan, no matter by what means. . . . It was the game of ‘I see you, and go you one better,’ played by men who had no cards, but plenty of money.”

Nor, it should be emphasized, were the warnings voiced solely by the Americans. A noted French engineer named Ribourt, one of the builders of the Saint Gotthard Tunnel, urged the delegates not to misjudge the magnitude of the undertaking. To cut through Panama a niveau, to dig a tunnel such as Lieutenant Wyse spoke of, would require not less than nine years of continuous labor, even if the work went on twenty-four hours a day. The cost, said Ribourt, would be at least twice what Wyse was saying. In the view of the revered John Hawkshaw a sea-level canal was physically impossible, since it would have to provide for the entire drainage of the Isthmus at that point. The tunnel being advocated would not be big enough to handle such a volume of water, he said, let alone any ships.

Wyse and Réclus were livid. Réclus could respond only with a rapid list of extraneous claims and countercharges. When the chair requested that he confine his remarks to the subject under discussion, Wyse all but shouted that their plans were being constantly attacked yet they were never given a chance to defend them. His manner, noted Daniel Ammen, was “very excited.”

Wyse and Réclus, meantime, were working all hours making drastic revisions. The idea of a tunnel was dropped. Their canal would be an open cut from ocean to ocean. The Pacific tides, they announced, would be handled by a tremendous tidal lock at that end of the canal. The Chagres would be “diverted” into a man-made channel, although Wyse was less than clear as to how this was to be managed.

The week that de Lesseps had thought sufficient to settle all issues and problems had by now passed and a consensus seemed farther away, less likely than ever. So on Friday, May 23, he “threw off the mantle of indifference,” as one delegate wrote, and convened another general session in the auditorium. “He is tenacious as well as able,” observed Dr. Johnston, “and did not propose to suffer a defeat.”

For the first time now he spoke at length, alone on the dais, a large map displayed behind him. The audience hung on every word and he spoke as though they were all his dearest friends, as confident of their eventual support as he was in his own preeminence in such matters. Walking back and forth freely before the map, he talked effortlessly, without pause, without notes. He was more like an actor on stage, radiant, virile, his ideas phrased in the simplest, most direct, and sensible-sounding terms.

One had only to look at the map to see that Panama was the proper place for the canal. The route was already well established, there was a railroad, there were thriving cities at each end. Only at Panama could a sea-level canal be built. It was really no great issue at all. Naturally, there were problems. There were always problems. There had been large, formidable problems at Suez, and to many respected authorities they too had seemed insurmountable. But as time passed, as the work moved ahead at Suez, indeed as difficulties increased, men of genius had come forth to meet and conquer those difficulties. The same would happen again. For every challenge there would be a man of genius capable of meeting and conquering it. One must trust to inspiration. As for the money, there was money aplenty in France just waiting for the opening of the subscription books.

He knew his audience and he delivered every line with perfect confidence in its effect. His audience adored him.

II

It was later that same day that another of the French delegates, one who had had nothing to say thus far, came to the front of the auditorium to deliver the most extraordinary pronouncement of the entire congress. A man of genius stepped forward then and there, in fact, although no one, not even de Lesseps, perceived this.

He was Baron Godin de Lepinay–Nicholas-Joseph-Adolphe Godin de Lepinay, Baron de Brusly–a small, bearded aristocrat who was a chief engineer with the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees (the French Department of Bridges and Highways), and a man known both for his brilliance and his ill-concealed disdain for those who failed to agree with him. He had devised an original answer to the Panama problem, including Panama’s deadly climate, which he regarded as the most serious aspect of the problem. He was, as he told the delegates, one of the very few present who had had any actual experience with engineering construction in “the warm lands of tropical America.” This, as he did not say, had been the building of a railroad between Cordoba and Veracruz, in 1862, during which a third of the labor force and two-thirds of the engineering staff died of yellow fever.

His solution was what Philippe Bunau-Varilla would call the “Idea of the artificial Nicaragua.” Incredibly and tragically, the delegates paid him no attention. The Americans dismissed the plan as ridiculous. Menocal could hardly bring himself to mention de Lepinay’s name in his report on the congress. Ammen referred only to the “plan,” in quotes, as an illustration of the extremes some of the French had gone to in an effort to rescue the Panama route. Had the delegates reacted differently, had they taken de Lepinay seriously, the story of the canal could have turned out quite differently.

He acknowledged the truth of all Menocal had said regarding the Chagres River. He himself had been considering the problem of a Panama canal for some years. The idea of digging down to sea level was thoroughly unrealistic if one understood the terrain and ought to be discarded without further fuss. Those who talked of diverting the Chagres River in some fashion were sadly misinformed and deceiving themselves. They were allowing the triumph at Suez to distort their capacity to see things for what they were. Suez and Panama must not be regarded as comparable, he said. The environmental conditions were opposite in the extreme. “At Suez there is a lack of water, the terrain is easy, the land nearly the same level as the sea; in spite of the heat, it is a perfectly healthy climate. In tropical America, there is too much water, the terrain is mostly rock, the land has considerable relief, and finally the country is literally poisoned.” To act in the same manner in places of such opposite character, he declared, would be to “outrage nature” instead of to benefit by it, “which is the primary goal of the engineer.”

His own plan–“the most natural method”–was brilliantly simple, a genuine stroke of genius, and, as time would tell, it was absolutely sound.

Like Menocal, he had concluded that the Chagres must be bridged, but instead of a stone viaduct at Matachin, he envisioned a bridge of water across most of the Isthmus. There would be two artificial lakes, with flights of locks, like stairs, leading up to the lakes from the two oceans. As Lake Nicaragua was the essential element in the Nicaragua plan, providing both easy navigation and an abundant source of water for the canal, so his man-made lakes would serve at Panama. Through engineering, in other words, he would create at Panama what already existed at Nicaragua.

What he was proposing was not really a canal at all in the conventional sense. His lakes would be created by building two huge dams, one at the Chagres near the Atlantic, the other on the Rio Grande, which flows into the Pacific. The dams would be built as near to the two oceans as the configuration of the land permitted. The Chagres dam, the largest, should be built, he said, at the confluence of the Chagres and the Gatun rivers, at a point called Gatun, and it would hold the largest of the lakes. The surface of the lakes would be eighty feet above sea level and the lakes would be joined by a channel cut through the mountain spine at Culebra, this being the only heavy excavation required.

The virtues of the plan were enormous. To begin with, it greatly reduced the amount of digging to be done. Further, it eliminated all danger of Chagres floods, since the river would feed directly into the lakes. The dams would control the river; the river would serve as an unlimited water supply for the lakes–for the canal. Thus the river would become the life blood of the system, rather than its mortal enemy.

The resulting passage, furthermore, would be a broad lake, rather than a narrow channel. Ships would be able to move at greater speeds and they would be able to pass one another without shunting into sidings, or tying up, as was necessary at Suez. Passage through such a canal would take no more than twelve hours, even if one were to figure the time in each lock at half an hour, when, in fact, actual time in the lock would probably run closer to fifteen minutes. And twelve hours was only an hour and a half more than could be expected for passage through the best-engineered sea-level canal at Panama.

Such a project could be completed in six years, he said, and at a cost of 500,000,000 francs ($100,000,000), including interest and overhead, but not including the cost of buying the Panama Railroad, which, he stressed, would be an essential step and a very sizable expenditure.

Most important of all, he said, was the saving the plan would mean in terms of human lives. As was understood by everyone in the audience, nearly all varieties of tropical fever and miasma were caused by “noxious vapors” released from the putrid vegetation and rank soil of the jungle. Any excessive disturbance of such ground, therefore, naturally meant the spread of disease in epidemic proportions. But since his scheme called for a minimum of excavation, there would be a minimum of disturbance during construction and the incidence of disease would be correspondingly small. Furthermore, once the canal was built, much of the poisonous terrain would be sealed off by the lakes, producing a long-lasting beneficial effect. To dig a canal a niveau in Panama, he said, would cost the lives of no less than fifty thousand men.

His ideas were eloquently expressed and uncannily prophetic, but the delegates did not think enough of them to grant him even a token discussion. The congress turned to other matters.

Two subcommittees–one on tunnels and another on lock canals-were in closed session through the weekend and on Monday, May 26, presented their conclusions. Menocal’s Nicaragua canal was found to be perfectly practicable. Its cost was figured at $140,000,000 and the opinion was that it could be built in six years. The Wyse plan too was declared practicable. But the cost was put at $209,000,000. It was further stated that at least twelve years would be needed to build such a canal and all claims were qualified by a final explicit warning that construction of a Panama canal at sea level, as well as any measures designed to restrain the Chagres, presented many problems past reckoning.

Those delegates friendly to Lieutenant Wyse responded by asserting privately–in the halls outside the auditorium, over lunch in nearby cafes and restaurants on the Boulevard Saint Germain–that de Lesseps “would positively refuse” to lead the building of any canal other than one at Panama, a statement that had the desired effect of bringing a number of wavering delegates quickly back into line.

Commander Selfridge joined those attacking the Nicaragua plan and for the first time raised the issue of Nicaragua’s history of earthquakes and volcanic disturbances. But two of the most prominent French members of the Technical Committee, Cotard and Lavalley, both former engineers with de Lesseps at Suez, sided with the Nicaragua forces, as did Gustave Eiffel.

Wednesday, May 28, following a late night at the banquet tables (at the Hotel Continental, overlooking the Tuileries Gardens), the language of several speakers became considerably less diplomatic than heretofore. Menocal in particular made no effort to conceal his mounting disgust. He had come to Paris, he said, to present serious proposals based on volumes of information gathered through great effort and at great cost. He and his colleagues had expected other delegates to present material of comparable character, and that from a proper consideration of all such data, serious people, professionals of proven competence, would make their decisions in a spirit of reason and impartiality. Instead, the American plans were being weighed on the same scale as were imaginary schemes traced on imperfect maps, some of them the result of a night’s inspiration.

With that the oratory became highly charged. One French delegate, speaking for several hours, declared that it must be a sea-level canal, no matter what the cost.

The final recommendation of the Technical Committee, the decision the whole congress had been waiting for, was arrived at late that night amid tremendous confusion and excitement. Even in the stilted official account of the proceedings it is apparent that the session very nearly became a brawl. Twenty delegates, nearly half the committee, walked out before the vote was taken. In the end, only Ferdinand de Lesseps and eighteen others were willing to vote on a resolution, and of these, just three refused to vote as he wished.

Panama was pronounced the proper place for the canal and a sea-level canal was especially recommended.

It had been raining off and on for the past few days and it was raining again the following day, Thursday, May 29, when at 1:30 in the afternoon the full congress convened to hear the committee’s report and to cast the final, historic vote. “The hall was densely crowded, many ladies being present,” recalled Admiral Ammen; “about one hundred members or delegates and three to four hundred other persons . . . .” Dr. Johnston, who had no illusions as to how the vote would go, wrote bitterly:

We had arrived at the moment of “sublime resolutions,” of those “sublime resolutions” which have been the glory and ridicule of France; they were going to carry hundreds of millions of money abroad for the good of mankind in general. It would cost much money, but the money they had; it would require men of genius, but these also they had; the absurd barrier which nature had thrown up between the two seas was going to fall before the force of French genius and the power of French money.

French observers would recall the solemnity of the moment as de Lesseps read aloud the crucial resolution:

The congress believes that the excavation of an interoceanic canal at sea level, so desirable in the interests of commerce and navigation, is feasible; and that, in order to take advantage of the indispensable facilities for access and operation which a channel of this kind must offer above all, this canal should extend from the Gulf of Limon to the Bay of Panama.

The necessary time for construction was fixed at twelve years–a finished canal by 1892–and the cost of construction was estimated at 1,070,000,000 francs, or $214,000,000. Supposing the interest payable in the meantime would amount to 130,000,000 francs, the total expenditure worked out to 1,200,000,000 francs, or $240,000,000-almost triple the cost of Suez.

It was a voice vote in alphabetical order. Henri Bionne called the names.

Daniel Ammen rose and abstained on the grounds that only professional engineers should be allowed to vote on such a proposition. Two other Americans, Nathan Appleton and Christian Christiansen, the latter from San Francisco, voted yes. The first no was sounded by the Guatemalan delegate. Daubree, who had been chairman of the Technical Committee, voted yes, as did a former Suez engineer named Dauzats. Gustave Eiffel voted no.

Flachat, Hawkshaw, and Dr. Johnston decided to absent themselves from the proceedings. Alexandre Lavalley was also absent. When Godin de Lepinay was called, he got to his feet and looked about the large crowd. “Though unable to make my advice triumph, I will not abandon it. And in order not to burden my conscience with unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure I say ‘no!’ ” When he sat down it was to a noisy chorus of jeers and booing.

Seventy-seven of the delegates had voted at this point and forty-three had voted yes. The next name in alphabetical order, everybody knew, was Ferdinand de Lesseps.

“I vote ‘yes!’ ” he cried out, his voice filling the room. “And I have accepted command of the enterprise!” It was his first such public declaration and it electrified the house. The applause and cheering went on and on, interrupting the roll call for several minutes.

The rest went swiftly. Eli Lazard, of San Francisco, the Russian admiral, the Chinese delegate, a man from the Italian Geographical Society, declared themselves in the affirmative. A. G. Menocal abstained. As the final tabulation was being made, de Lesseps, looking immensely pleased, told the audience, “Two weeks ago I had no idea of placing myself at the head of a new enterprise. My dearest friends have tried to dissuade me, telling me that after Suez I should take a rest. Well! If you ask a general who has just won a first victory whether he wishes to win a second, would he refuse?”

To other audiences later he was to say that it was the overwhelming approval of the congress, the faces he saw before him, and especially the look his wife gave him that propelled him to make the decision, adding that to have backed down then would have been an act of cowardice. His wife, he would say, had been the foremost of those dearest friends who had tried to dissuade him. She had wished only that their life could continue as it was. So apparently she too had been swept up by the spirit of the moment.

There was absolute silence as the vote was declared: in favor of the resolution, 74; opposed, 8; abstaining, 16; absent, 38.

Delegates were on their feet cheering; women were waving hand-kerchiefs. It was as if an astonishing victory had been won. De Lesseps stepped forward and promised success; Admiral de La Ronciere-Le Noury declared that the day marked the beginning of one of the greatest undertakings of modern times. “It seems to me that nothing could have been more glorious. . .” Henri Barboux, attorney for Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, would recall years later before a packed courtroom. “Might not one think of it as a council ordaining, after the lapse of seven hundred years, a new crusade?”

Ferdinand de Lesseps was a man accustomed to having his own way and he had not been disappointed. The congress, as its severest critics claimed, had been put on primarily to give the Wyse Concession a legitimacy, an authority, that it otherwise lacked and that it greatly needed to attract the necessary financial backing, as de Lesseps knew better than anyone. The grand international gathering had been conceived not to arrive at a consensus, but to provide an inaugural ceremony for a decision already made by the one delegate who mattered, Ferdinand de Lesseps. The objective from the start had been to ordain, to consecrate, the Wyse Concession, the Wyse plan, in full public view, with all possible ceremony, to give the appearance of an impartial, scientific, international sanction. The Americans with their maps and plans and convictions had come alarmingly close to spoiling the effect, but even they had been no match for “the first promoter of the age.”

Virtually all of de Lesseps’ blind spots, all the tragic errors of his way, had shown themselves in the course of the two weeks–the jaunty disregard of technical problems, the inability to heed, to trust, the views of recognized authorities if those views conflicted with his own, the faith that the future would take care of itself, that necessity would give rise to invention in required proportions and at the proper moment, the unshakable faith in his own infallibility.

But then all these same qualities had been fundamental to his success in Egypt, and combined with his love of people, his charm, these were what made him Ferdinand de Lesseps. And who then was to say that he knew more about building a canal, more about success in such grandiose undertakings?

The Americans went home furious and extremely skeptical that any-thing would ever come of the affair.

Why Ammen and Menocal had failed to vote no, to record their negative views in public when it counted, remained a puzzle to many and a disappointment to the handful who had. By way of explanation Dr. Johnston offered that “these delegates were met and surrounded during their whole stay with such a large hospitality, they were so dined and feted, that they will be excused for lacking the heart to look their entertainers in the face and pronounce so harsh a word as ‘no.’”

A. G. Menocal, afterward, did an interesting analysis of the vote. Though the yea votes were predominantly French, not one of the five delegates from the French Society of Engineers had voted for the proposal. Of those seventy-four delegates who did declare themselves for a sea-level canal at Panama, only nineteen were engineers and of those nineteen only one had ever set foot in Central America and he was young Pedro Sosa of Panama.

CULVER PICTURES, INC.

Ferdinand de Lesseps

CULVER PICTURES, INC.

Jules Verne

COLLECTION OF GEORGES SIROT

The second Madame de Lesseps, Louise Héléne Autard de Bragard

Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse

BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE

Charles de Lesseps

CULVER PICTURES, INC.

Secretary of State William Evarts

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Admiral Daniel Ammen

HARPER’S WEEKLY

American skepticism over the vast undertaking as expressed by Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly: “Is M. de Lesseps a Canal Digger or a Grave Digger?”

BOTH PHOTOS: CULVER PICTURES, INC.

View of the Chagres River at the time the French arrived. The Panama Railroad is in the foreground; the village of Gatun is across the river.

Front Street, Colón, as it looked during the French era

UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY

Headquarters of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique, Cathedral Plaza, Panama City

Ferdinand de Lesseps with his entourage in Panama in 1880

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Four unidentified French engineers and an unidentified companion. Probably three of the five died of disease.

UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY

One of the giant French excavators upon which de Lesseps based his high expectations

BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

I’Hôpital Nôtre Dame du Canal, the French hospital on Ancon Hill outside Panama City

Operating room at Ancon sometime in the late 1880’s

FROM MOSQUITO CONTROL, JOSKPII I.K PRINCE, G. P. PUTNAM, 1916

Crockery rings filled with water were used by the French to protect plants on the hospital grounds from the ravages of umbrella ants, but served also as perfect breeding grounds for Stegomyia fasciata, the yellow-fever mosquito

One of hundreds of surviving death certificates from the Ancon hospital, this of a twenty-nine-year-old Frenchman who died of yellow fever in 1886

Philippe Bunau-Varilla at the time of his graduation from the Ecole Polytechnique

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

The hanging of Pedro Prestan at Colón, August 18, 1885, following the disastrous “Prestan Uprising”

BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

West Indian labor gangs ride a raft specially devised by Bunau-Varilla for the underwater placement of dynamite charges prior to dredging. Long steel drills were driven by hand according to his mathematically calculated pattern,

French ladder dredge at work. It was upon machines of this kind that Bunau-Varilla rested his novel scheme for rescuing the French effort during its desperate finale.

Baron Jacques de Reinach

Georges Clemenceau

ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE

Charles de Lesseps pleads his case in the Paris Court of Appeal in January 1893, at the start of the first of two sensational trials. The three other defendants seated behind Charles are, from left to right, Gustave Eiffel, Henri Cottu, and Marius Fontane. Henri Barboux, attorney for Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, is the small white-haired figure standing behind Charles’s empty chair. This courtroom looks today exactly as it did then.

A contemporary artist’s conception of the bedridden Cornelius Herz, the “mystery man of Panama,” sequestered in his hotel room at Bournemouth, England

The abandoned château of the first Directeur Général, the muchpublicized “folie Dingler”

An abandoned French excavator is overtaken by the jungle near Tabernilla.

4
Distant Shores

. . . and I maintain that Panama will be easier to make, easier to complete, and easier to keep up than Suez.

–FERDINAND DE LESSEPS

I

With no further delay Ferdinand de Lesseps swung into action. In a matter of days he had organized a private syndicate of some 270 rich and influential friends who, for providing 2,000,000 francs, were to receive founders’ shares at a bargain price, once a company was legally established. It was the same as he had done for Suez.

Next he bought out the Türr Syndicate for 10,000,000 francs ($2,000,000). Payment was to be half in cash, half in stock in the new company. The Wyse Concession was now his alone, as much as the Suez concession had been, and Wyse, Türr, and the rest realized a profit on their initial investment of more than 3,000 percent. Istvan Türr took his money and went off to negotiate a concession from the king of Greece to build a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth. Wyse and the others, however, were in to stay, convinced that the best was yet to come. Wyse was happily telling friends that de Lesseps had promised to put him in command of the work, as reward for his efforts. But as others had learned at Suez, de Lesseps was not one to share power or glory. He denied having guaranteed Wyse a role of any kind. The young officer had served his purpose and so now he was dropped–“betrayed” Wyse felt.

A prospectus was prepared for the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique de Panama and de Lesseps was off on a whirlwind tour of the provinces to drum up 400,000,000 francs, twice what he had raised to launch the Suez venture. His support, he said, would come as it had before, from small investors, people from every walk of life. His self-confidence had never been greater. He would go to Panama, he said, to make a personal evaluation. He would tour the United States to explain his mission to the people of that great land. “M. de Lesseps is convinced that it [the canal] is the right thing,” wrote the Paris correspondent of The New York Times, “and . . . the simple fact of his connection with it will secure that Archimedean lever of the nineteenth century, money . . .”

But it was not to be that simple. Times had changed since the Suez company had been organized. The powers of the financial world and of the press had advanced considerably and the new venture had already become the target of a calculated attack. Influential French bankers wished to demonstrate the indispensable nature of their services at such times, then to step in and take control of subsequent stock subscriptions, once de Lesseps’ initial subscription failed, as they assured everyone it would. Influential publishers expected to be paid for their editorial backing.

Rumors were started in the Bourse that de Lesseps was in his dotage and ought not to be trusted with other people’s money. It was claimed that at the first blow of a French pickax at Panama, the American fleet would arrive and massacre the workers. Credit Maritime said the canal would cost so much that it would never pay a dividend. Another financial paper called the scheme a swindle and warned readers not to risk their savings in it.

The result was the failure of the stock issue, a failure so resounding that almost any man other than de Lesseps would have abandoned the whole plan there and then and spared himself any further humiliation.

Of 800,000 shares offered, a trifling 60,000-less than 10 percent-were purchased. Yet “the wonderful old man” appeared undaunted. It was obvious what had to be done, he said privately. The bankers would be invited to participate. “The financial organs were hostile,” he explained, “because they had not been paid.”

Those who had subscribed to the stock got their money back along with a new circular promising another issue the moment things were straightened out. Meantime, the firm of Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie, one of his Suez contractors, was sending its best man to appraise the Panama route from end to end. “I have never feared obstacles and delays. Experience has proved to me that those who are too quick to believe have no deep roots.”

On September 1 appeared the first issue of the Bulletin du Canal Interoceanique, an eight-page newspaper published for propaganda purposes that was to appear regularly thereafter twice monthly, its contents comprised largely of selected articles reprinted from French newspapers and magazines. (A similar journal, underwritten by Mohammed Said, had been published all through the Suez years.) The pledge to go to Panama was renewed. He would be accompanied by a party of internationally famous engineers–his own New International Technical Commission–who would be responsible for the final survey required by Colombia according to the Wyse Concession. To demonstrate that there was nothing to fear from the climate, he would also take several of his family.

When the representative of Couvreux, Hersent, an engineer named Gaston Blanchet, returned from Panama with a favorable report, de Lesseps announced that a crew of sappers would go next to make test borings along the projected canal line. That was in November. in December, with a large entourage, he boarded the Lafayette at Saint-Nazaire, leaving his affairs in the hands of Charles. Included were his wife, Two young sons and a daughter–Mathieu, ten; Ismael, nine; Ferdinande, seven–a governess, Henri Bionne, Lieutenant Réclus, Gaston Blanchet, Abel Couvreux fils (the son of de Lesseps’ old friend), the Dutch engineer Jacob Dirks, and about a dozen others. Expenses for the trip were to be met by Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie.

The crossing appears to have been pleasant and without incident, other than an angry scene in front of everyone in the ship’s salon between de Lesseps and Lieutenant Wyse, who had not been asked to make the voyage but had booked his own passage at his own expense. For the rest of the trip Wyse remained “apart and taciturn,” while de Lesseps seems to have been quite literally the life of the party.

It was a voyage of approximately 4,595 miles, a great circle route, plotted, when weather permitted, by the brightest stars in the heavens, by Capella, the double star; by Altair and Vega; and afterward by Rigil Kent and Acrux, new stars in a new southern sky. The ship, a handsome, black two-masted steam sailer, made about eight to ten knots, and her progress into lower latitudes was marked by the steady decline toward the horizon of Polaris, the North Star, the great constant at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. And low on the opposite horizon, meantime, off the port bow, rose the Southern Cross.

II

The Lafayette steamed into Limon Bay under a scorching sun, and with all passengers crowding her rail, on the afternoon of December 30, 1879, at the start of Panama’s dry season. On the Pacific Mail wharf a little brass band was playing mightily.

The welcoming ceremonies were held in the ship’s salon, moments after she tied up. It was proclaimed an occasion second only to the arrival of Columbus in Limon Bay. Señor J. A. Cespedes, chairman of an extremely sober-looking reception committee, made the first and longest of several speeches. De Lesseps, when it was his turn, responded in perfect Spanish, “very pleasantly, wearing the diplomatic smile for which he was noted,” in the words of the one American present, a Panama Railroad official named Tracy Robinson. “When he spoke, the hearer would not fail to be convinced that whatever he said was true, or at all events that he believed it to be true.”

After dark the town blazed with Japanese lanterns, and when the final burst of a fireworks display fell into the bay, de Lesseps came down the gangplank. Accompanied by a few friends and a small, noisy crowd–mostly ragged black children–he walked a while along Front Street, Colon’s sole thoroughfare.

The following morning he was up in time to see the tropical dawn that comes all at once. With Madame de Lesseps he set off on an “inspection tour,” their children, thrilled to be on solid ground again, racing ahead, climbing posts and stanchions, and astonishing the local citizenry, who, because of the long hair and velvet clothes, thought all three were girls. De Lesseps, fresh in a white linen suit, talked incessantly, concluding one remark after another with the assertion, “The canal will be made.” The upper Chagres would be turned into the Pacific, thus ending floods in the lower valley. “The canal will be made.” At the great cut at the summit, the work of many thousands of men would be handled by modern explosives. “The canal will be made.” He was overjoyed by the morning air. Colón was a delightful place. “The canal will be made.”

Yet it is hard to conceive of his being anything but terribly disappointed by Colón. Seen from a distance, from an inbound ship, the town appeared to float on the bay as if by magic. White walls and red roofs stood out against blue water and flaming green foothills. But close up, it was a squalid shantytown set on stilts, paint peeling. There was a stone church that the railroad’s guidebook made much of but that would have been of little interest anywhere else. A variety of saloons and stores lined the east side of Front Street, facing the harbor. There were an icehouse, a railroad office, a large stone freight depot, two or three seedy hotels, and the “tolerable” Washington House, a galleried white-frame affair, which, like virtually everything else in sight, belonged to the railroad company. The railroad itself ran down the middle of Front Street, and in a park, or what passed for a park, in front of the Washington House, stood an ugly red-granite monument to the railroad’s founders, Aspinwall, Chauncey, and Stephens. In a nearby railroad yard there was also a bronze statue of Columbus, an Indian maiden at his side, which had been a gift from the Empress Eugenie years before. But that was the sum total of Colón’s landmarks.

The town had been built by the railroad on Manzanillo Island, a coral flat, no more than a mile by three-quarters of a mile in area, at the entrance to Limon Bay; and so there was open salt water on all but its southern side, where a narrow channel, the Folks River, divided it from the mainland. John Lloyd Stephens had christened the town Aspinwall, but the Colombians had insisted on calling it Colón, for Columbus, and so a silly dispute had been dragging on ever since. To most of the older Americans it was still Aspinwall.

Streets, barely above tide level, were unpaved and strewn from end to end with garbage, bits of broken furniture, dead animals. (One French visitor would write of walking ankle-deep in “les immondices imaginables”) Enormous dark buzzards circled interminably overhead, and the human populace, most of which was black–Jamaicans, by and large, who had been brought in to build the railroad–lived in appalling squalor. Disease and poverty, hopeless, bedrock poverty as bad as any to be seen in the Caribbean, seemed to hang in the air of back streets, heavy as the atmosphere.

The entire town reeked of putrefaction. There was nothing to do. It was as if a western mining camp had been slapped together willy-nilly in the middle of an equatorial swamp, then left to molder and die. Once, at the height of the gold rush, there had been a kind of redeeming zest to the place, and old-timers talked of such celebrated establishments of the day as the Maison du Vieux Carre, which specialized in French girls. Now travelers disembarking to take the train dreaded spending an hour more than necessary.

There was, however, one quite pleasant section of the town, at the northern end of the island, near a tremendous iron lighthouse that could be seen from ten miles at sea. There the houses faced onto a white coral beach. Neat and freshly painted, with green lawns and surrounding palms, they were the quarters reserved for the white Americans who ran the railroad, and it was to one of them, the home of Tracy Robinson, that de Lesseps and his family were conducted, to judge for themselves the supposed privation of life in the American tropics. Robinson, a personable and intelligent man, had spent twenty years in Panama. He was fascinated by the country, liked the people and the life, and he was certain, as he told de Lesseps, that the great future of mankind was in the tropics.

About ten o’clock the Pacific Mail steamer Colon docked beside the Lafayette, bringing Trenor W. Park and a party of gentlemen from New York who were to join the tour. By 11:30, the introductions completed, baggage ashore, everyone climbed aboard a train standing on Front Street, its bright-yellow coaches bedecked with French and Colombian flags.

The new arrivals included several stockholders in the railroad, who by their own admission had come more for pleasure than business; a reporter from the New York World; a rotund and overbearing former Union Army engineer named W. W. Wright; and Colonel George M. Totten, one of the original builders of the Panama Railroad. Wright and Totten had agreed to serve on de Lesseps’ Technical Commission. Wright, however, was a man of no particular reputation. It was Totten who got de Lesseps’ attention. Totten had been in charge of the railroad all through the years of construction. He had weathered the heat, the bugs, the mud, political uprisings, stockholders’ inspection tours, floods, fever, even a siege of yellow fever that brought him so near to death that his companions had his coffin ready and waiting. Now he was a leathery, white-bearded old figure with steel-rimmed spectacles. It is said also that he had a nice sense of humor, but a search of available sources reveals no evidence of it.

The brass band was pumping away again as the train rolled down Front Street, bell clanging, a cheering crowd chasing alongside in the brilliant sunshine. Then, after affording a brief open view of the glittering bay, the tracks turned into the jungle.

Of several surviving accounts of the tour, the most detailed is that by the World reporter, J. C. Rodrigues, who was as fascinated by the “lively Frenchmen” and their leader as the group was by the passing scenery.

M. de Lesseps himself rode most of the way on the platform of the car on the rear of the small train. For half an hour that I was at his side I could witness the deep interest which he took in the luxuriant nature, which was to him so extremely novel. . . . Inside the car, however, there reigned more than tropical–simply torrid–enthusiasm. A yellow butterfly would cause a commotion in these excitable people. But you do not imagine what an event the first approach to the Chagres River was. The car was pandemonium. The train had to be stopped and the Chagres– the enemy–had to be inspected.

The point where they first saw the river was Gatun, a native village seven miles from Colón, at the confluence of the Rio Gatun, the place Godin de Lepinay had picked for his great Chagres dam. Before that, just out of Colón, they had passed Mount Hope, or Monkey Hill, as it was better known, a low rise on the left where during construction days the railroad had buried its dead. Then for the next several miles they had crossed a broad mangrove swamp on tracks only inches above the water. Between the swamp and Gatun, the growth of vegetation was as exuberant as any on earth. Giant cedro trees towered a hundred feet or more in the air, their smooth gray trunks like pillars of concrete. Trailing vines, blossoming creepers, scarlet hibiscus, orchids, crimson passionflowers, parasitic plants of every imaginable variety, hung wherever one looked. Bamboo crowded the tracks in clumps the size of a house. It was as if the train were running along the bottom of a narrow green canyon that went winding on and on with only a thin trace of bright sky to be seen straight up, in the gap between the crowns of the trees. Every so often there would be a sudden break–a patch of banana trees, a canebrake–but as quickly it would be gone again. So relentlessly did the jungle try to recover what it had lost to the railroad, the passengers were informed, that parts of the line had to be cleared several times a year.

At Gatun the entire population had gathered for the occasion, several hundred brown, square-faced, friendly-looking people, men in white linen and straw hats, women in loose-fitting muslin in a variety of sun-faded colors, children mostly naked, everyone smiling and waving. On the left side of the train was Gatun station, a two-story white-frame building with green shutters and picket fence that might have been transplanted directly from Massachusetts. On the other side of the train was the river, “now very low, running sluggishly,” as Rodrigues noted. The actual village was across the river. About fifty grass huts were scattered within a great bend in the river and in the forefront of a sun-flooded green savanna that reached to a range of darker-green hills, two, three miles in the distance.

Most of the passengers got out for a look, and the overwhelming green of the landscape, the intensity and infinite variety of green under a cobalt-blue sky, caught them unaware. Like so many before, they had come to Panama with little thought of being stirred by landscapes. That the place could be so breathtakingly beautiful struck them as a singular revelation. “La plus belle region du monde” de Lesseps exclaimed in a letter to Charles.

At Gatun the flags that hung over some of the train windows were taken away to give a better outlook. They were running along the valley of the Chagres now, where the river came down in big, wide loops, brown and unhurried–now that the dry season had returned– through intermittent patches of deep shadow and sharp, white sunlight. The river was on their right; their general direction was south and slightly east. They were still barely above sea level, climbing only very gradually, going “up” the valley (that is, against the current of the river) but “down” the map, as several of them needed to have explained.

They crossed miles of swamp, including the infamous Black Swamp, which supposedly was bottomless. It was not–Totten and his engineers had found bottom at 185 feet–yet the roadbed kept sinking there and had to be built up year after year. “Everything kept going down and down,” an old-time employee would tell a Senate committee in Washington years later, “and they kept filling in and filling in.”

There were more white station houses, all quite similar, neat, almost prissy, but often with names very much in keeping with the surroundings–Tiger Hill, Lion Hill, Ahorca Lagarto (which means “hanging lizard”). There was a glimpse of the Chagres again at Bohio Soldado (“place where a soldier lives”) and at Frijoles (“beans”). Then, twenty-three miles from Colón, or just about halfway to Panama City, the train stopped and everyone was asked to get out. They had arrived at Barbacoas, an Indian word meaning “bridge,” the point where the railroad crossed the Chagres. Only, at the moment, the bridge at Barbacoas was out of service.

The river here was swift and rocky, about three hundred feet wide and contained between high embankments. The bridge, a heavy wrought-iron structure set on stone piers, was more than six hundred feet in length and built forty feet above the river, or what had been presumed to be safely above the flood line. But in November, just weeks earlier, a violent “norther” had struck, bringing three days of torrential rain and the worst flood on record. In three days the Chagres had risen forty-six feet. Thirty miles of track had been under water and the bridge had been wrenched apart or out of line in several places. As future hydrographic studies would show, the discharge of the Chagres in the vicinity was normally less than 1,000 cubic feet per second in the dry season. In the rainy season, under normal conditions, the discharge would be ten times that–or more–with fluviograph readings of 10,000 to 13,000 cubic feet per second. But in the November flood, according to later studies based on the railroad’s records, the flow of the river must have been nearly 80,000 cubic feet per second.

The river’s drainage basin, from its headwaters to the Caribbean, was comparatively small–about 1,300 square miles, an area about the size of Rhode Island. Yet except for the dry season, virtually this entire basin was running water. The river originated in the steep jungle uplands miles off to the east, a “quick and bold” wilderness with mountains of two thousand to four thousand feet, where at the time of the Spanish conquest a legendary Indian chief, Chagre, had ruled. Even under average conditions, the runoff from such country was phenomenal. With abnormally heavy rains in the mountains, it was as if a dam had burst. And while the recent flood had been the worst since the railroad began bothering with records, the floods of 1857, 1862, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1873, and 1876 had been nearly as awesome.

The situation at Barbacoas should have been the clearest possible warning to de Lesseps and the others. The condition of the massive iron bridge was such that no through trains had crossed the Isthmus, no freight had moved between Colón and Panama City, in five weeks. Only by a crude arrangement of planks put across the breaks was it possible for passengers to walk over and transfer to another train. The river’s violence, quite obviously, had been greater even than what A. G. Menocal had described in his speech before the Paris congress.

Readers of the Bulletin du Canal Interoceanique were to be told nothing of the broken bridge, however. The official account of the tour would contain only passing mention of an unexplained delay at Barbarcoas.

Most of them crossed single file, slowly, cautiously, amid much good-natured banter, the river sliding by forty feet below. A fuss was made over the safety of the de Lesseps children, who greatly enjoyed every moment of the experience, and then two or three of the Americans, after appraising the problem, decided to risk the crossing another day. Quantities of champagne had been available on the train since leaving Colón and this seems to have had a bearing on their decision.

On the other side stood a second train and beside it another official delegation, a dozen or so citizens from Panama City, all as formal as pallbearers. Among them were the president-elect of the province, Demaso Cervera, and a former president, Rafael Aizpuru, “a disreputable revolutionist,” de Lesseps was told. Because of the heat, there was just one very short speech; then with several blasts of the whistle the journey resumed.

The river was on the left now as the train rolled smoothly along through open meadows. “In Suez we had to build everything,” de Lesseps remarked; “here you already have a railroad like this. . . .” The first mountains came into view, small and bright-green and heaped up like the mountains in a child’s drawing. Lunch was served–“with wines, etc., etc., and everything gave entire satisfaction.”

Within the space of a few miles the railroad crossed the Rio Caimilo Mulato, the Rio Baila Monos, the Rio Culo Seco, the Rio Caribali, all tributaries of the Chagres. (Forty-seven and a half miles of railroad had required 170 bridges and culverts of 15 feet or more, 134 bridges and culverts of less than 15 feet, a statistic that gives some idea of the difficulties there had been in making headway in such half-drowned country.) Past Gorgona Station the train left the river again, taking a shortcut through steep red-clay embankments. Then it swung around a hill to meet the river at Matachin, another cluster of grass huts and the point where Menocal had proposed to build his giant stone viaduct. Again the train stopped, to be instantly surrounded by beaming brown faces.

Matachin was best known as the place where Chinese workers, hopelessly lost to “melancholia,” had committed suicide en masse. Matar is Spanish for “to kill,” it was explained; chino, the word for “Chinese.” The fact that matachin is also a perfectly good Spanish word meaning “butcher” or “hired assassin,” and that the place had been called that long before the railroad came through, did not seem to matter. Everyone who passed through Matachin heard the story.

To what extent de Lesseps and Totten discussed such topics, whether Totten was closely questioned on the death toll during construction of the road, or how much, if anything, may have been said about disease or bodies pickled in barrels, how much Totten may have been willing to admit, even to himself at this late date, is not known. The point he does seem to have stressed–the great lesson to be learned from his experience–was that everything, everything, had to be brought to Panama, including the men to do the work. The Panamanians themselves would be of no use. The poor were unused to heavy manual labor and were without ambition; the upper classes regarded physical work as beneath their dignity. There would be no home-grown labor force to count on, no armies of Egyptian fellahin this time. Labor had to be figured like freight, very expensive freight. Then every pick and shovel, every tent, blanket, mattress, every cookstove and locomotive, had to be carried by ship across thousands of miles of ocean. De Lesseps could count on Panama to provide nothing but the place to dig the canal.

Beyond Matachin the train left the Chagres bottom lands and entered the narrow valley of the Rio Obispo, largest tributary of the Chagres. After Emperador, or Empire, as the Americans called it, came the summit at Culebra (“snake”), or Summit Station. On January 27, 1855, at midnight, in the pitch dark and in pelting rain, the last rail had been laid. Totten himself had driven the last spike with a nine-pound maul.

Summit was ten and a half miles from Panama City, and on the rest of the ride, descending to the Pacific, the party looked out on scenery reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting, with feathery green conical mountains rising on every side. At one dramatic turn, a cliff of basalt seemed to hang precariously close overhead, the great crystals of the dark rock lying every which way. The route now followed the Rio Grande, “a narrow noisy torrent winding along through dense forests below the track.” Its drainage was south, to the Pacific.

Paraiso, another native village, was tucked between high hills shaped like inverted teacups. Pedro Miguel and Miraflores followed, then a stretch of spongy lowlands, a brackish swamp with soil the color of coal, then, ahead, the bald top of Ancon Hill, overlooking Panama City. The train covered the last few miles with its whistle screaming, bell clanging. Cathedral towers and red tile roofs were in view ahead on the right, and dead ahead was the Pacific. At once everyone was cheering.

With all stops en route, the delay at Barbacoas, the trip had lasted six hours. In his letter to the Bulletin, de Lesseps said they did it in three.

III

The original city of Panama had been founded in 1519, or just six years after Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific, and by an extraordinarily treacherous individual, Pedro Arias de Avila, usually referred to as Pedrarias, who had been governor of Castilla del Oro, as the Central American isthmus was known, and who, to solidify his power, had Balboa beheaded on a trumped-up charge of treason.

A Cueva Indian word, Panama means “a place where many fishes are taken.” For the Spanish, Panama became a marshaling point and clearinghouse for the most important crossroad in the New World, the camino real, or royal road, which was nothing more than a narrow, mean mule track cut from Panama to Nombre de Dios, then the one Spanish fort on the Caribbean side. The gold of the Incas, pearls, Bolivian silver–no one knows how many thousands of tons of treasure –went across to Nombre de Dios, to be picked up by Spanish galleons. And though Panama never became especially large–because of disease primarily–or achieved the fabled wealth pictured in some old accounts, its importance was considerable. The stone ruins of the original city, Old Panama, or Panama Viejo, still stood several miles down the bay. The site had been abandoned after the city was sacked and burned by the pirate Morgan in 1671, and the present Panama, a walled city, was begun three years later, at the head of the bay, on a narrow tongue of volcanic rock with water on three sides.

“Panama is a very miserable old town . . . fast crumbling to pieces,” an American sea captain noted in his journal, at the start of the gold rush, having brought the California, the first of the San Francisco steamers, around the Horn. “The houses are miserable and going to decay and the churches are crumbling. . . .” The harbor was also too shallow for a ship of any size. He did, however, find the climate “delightful at evening and in the morning.” Thereafter, for the next several years, the city had been a wide-open booming seaport wherein, as one disapproving traveler commented, “most of the people are deficient in the higher moral attributes.” now the pace was more what it had been centuries before.

Fire had ravaged the city again and again. As recently as 1878, nearly a third of it had burned to the ground. Streets were narrow, with hardly room for two carriages to pass, and shadowed by overhanging balconies. There was not one proper sewer, little sanitation of any kind. As at Colón, fresh water had to be collected in huge rain barrels that could be seen everywhere, or carried in from the country in jars on mules; and whatever its source, the water never looked particularly clean. Tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, and malaria were all common. A Canadian physician named Wolfred Nelson, who took up residence soon after de Lesseps’ visit, described the city as “simply awful.”

Still, it was a considerable step up from Colón, and, unlike Colón, almost entirely Spanish in feeling–Spanish architecture, Spanish faces, Spanish traditions. The government of the province was in Panama City; the bishop of Panama resided there. The Star & Herald, in English and Spanish, appeared daily. There was an established society among patrician landowners and professional people whose family names could be found on the rolls of Balboa’s and Cortez’ companies. Panama City was Panama. The humidity was not quite so oppressive as on the Atlantic side; there was less rain. The climate was indeed “delightful at evening and in the morning”–just about ideal in the dry season with the trade winds blowing–and on moonlight nights the view of the bay from the Bovedas, the old Spanish seawall and the city’s “choice promenade,” was one of the loveliest sights anywhere in the American tropics.

For de Lesseps’ arrival, furthermore, an almost miraculous transformation had been worked. The local populace had been told to clean up the streets, to paint, scrub, or whitewash everything within sight of his path, or face a stiff fine. Such an air of neatness, according to one report, had not prevailed within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. To give the celebrated visitor the right impression, to see that he was properly honored and entertained, the local government had allocated its entire budget for the forthcoming year.

“The reception of M. de Lesseps at this town was something never to be forgotten,” wrote J. C. Rodrigues in his first dispatch from Panama City.

It seems that every one of the 14,000 inhabitants was at the railway station, shouting, struggling to get a glimpse of the distinguished guest. I doubt very much whether more than one twentieth of them knew the true importance and meaning of the occasion. But . . . [their] enthusiasm did not know any bounds. We may laugh all we want at their ways of expressing it, but it was a most genuine triumphal entry, this one of M. de Lesseps.

After the predictable speeches at the depot, a procession of carriages rolled off to Cathedral Plaza, along the Avenida Central, which was lined the whole way by an honor guard of little Colombian soldiers in white trousers, white tunics, and blue caps trimmed with red. The plaza was in the exact center of the city and was dominated by the old brown cathedral with its twin bell towers, the most imposing structure on the Isthmus. De Lesseps and his party were to be quartered in the handsome new Grand Hotel, also on the plaza, and so the entire square, lampposts, every window and doorway, had been hung with French flags–the perfect sign, de Lesseps would tell readers of the Bulletin, of “nos bonnes revanches.”

There was a state banquet at the hotel that evening, followed by dancing and singing that went on through the rest of the night, spilling out into the plaza, which was lit by hundreds of Japanese lanterns. Almost nobody was able to sleep. But bright and early the following morning, New Year’s Day, de Lesseps was up and dressed in full formal attire, all his medals pinned on, and parading across to the cathedral for the inaugural ceremonies of President Demaso Cervera.

Then he was off to the harbor, where a steam tug stood by to take perhaps a hundred people and a large supply of champagne and cognac three miles along the bay to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the projected Pacific terminus of the canal. Before leaving Paris, he had promised to strike the first blow for the canal on the first day of the new year.

Some six hundred people turned up, in addition to de Lesseps, his family, his Technical Commission, the bishop of Panama, and the boat was so late getting under way that they missed the tide and were unable to get anywhere near the appointed spot. “The whole fun seemed to be spoiled,” Rodrigues remembered. De Lesseps, however, was “not a man to change plans.” He climbed onto a wooden seat, as two men held him by each arm, and he called the passengers to attention, which was no easy task since the boat was pitching badly and the champagne and cognac had been distributed freely in the hot sun for nearly two hours. Wherever it was made, the first stroke– “le premier coup de pioche”–would be symbolic only, he said. There was no reason why it could not be done where they were, on the boat. His little daughter, Ferdinande, would deliver the historic blow.

The child then swung a shiny pickax, brought especially from France for the occasion, into a champagne box filled with sand, after which each of the Technical Commission took a swing (“en signe de I’alliance des tous peuples qui contribuent à Funion des deux oceans, pour le bien de I’humanité”). The bishop, Jose Telesforo Paul, blessed the work and the boat turned back to the city. There were more banquets in the days following, more speeches, toasts, fireworks, a horse race, a bullfight. Between times the French visitors went fishing in the bay or strolled the Bovedas or picked out Panama hats at the “emporium” of Vallarino & Zabieta across from the cathedral.

The hotel was the center of all activity. “Everybody meets every-body at the Grand Hotel,” wrote Rodrigues. The food was “a la Française” as advertised, and the best to be had in Panama. The salon featured a “FIRST-CLAS SPIANO PLAYER.” Everything was new and clean. Large, airy rooms opened on to interior galleries that looked down on a cool interior court that served as bar and billiard room and was the place where most of Panama’s business was transacted. The billiard tables, the largest the guests had ever seen, were busy at all hours; the bar, in their words, was “one of those vast bars that have such a place in American life.” At a crowded roulette table adjacent to the bar, a croupier called out the winning numbers in Spanish, French, and English.

Once, for posterity, de Lesseps gathered everybody for a formal portrait. The photograph, though badly faded, has survived. They sit or stand in three rows, some holding their new hats, some with umbrellas, every man in coat and tie in a country where a light shirt can feel heavy. De Lesseps sits in the center of the middle row, in his white suit, looking handsome and a bit distracted. Totten is at his right, the seat of honor; Dirks, at his left, wears thick round spectacles that give him a strange popeyed look. It is not hard to imagine the occasion de Lesseps made of the sitting, the bit of ceremony that must have gone with the placement of each man.

Wyse, who is on the far right, holding a large umbrella, looks as if he is about to break into a smile or a sneer–it could be either. Gaston Blanchet, the Couvreux, Hersent engineer who stands in the center of the back row, is a tall, good-looking man with a big shock of dark hair. Rodrigues, also in the back row, end man on the right, is full-bearded and dapper and especially uncomfortable-looking in a heavy three-piece suit, complete with wing collar, stickpin, and watch chain.

Trenor Park is not in the picture, which may or may not say something about de Lesseps’ feelings toward him. Nor is it clear what Park was doing all this time. We know only that he and most of the others who had come down from New York sailed for home shortly after the picture was taken. We have only his parting comments. He still saw no reason, Park said, why a sale of the road could not be arranged once the French company was organized, which was the polite way of saying once de Lesseps had the cash.

The Technical Commission got down to business officially at the Grand Hotel on the morning of January 6. The first meeting was brief. The canal was to be an open cut, de Lesseps reminded them. “And now, gentlemen,” he said, “you see what you have got to do, go ahead and do it.”

“From that time,” General Wright would recall, “he left us entirely to ourselves–went out of the room and left us to consult. We were of different nationalities and different ideas as to how the work should be done . . .” Later in the day, de Lesseps, Wright, and Jacob Dirks–all three of them past seventy–took a train back to Matachin, and for an hour or more, under what de Lesseps benignly categorized as a “rather bright” sun, they drifted down the Chagres in a dugout canoe. They saw several drowsy alligators, and Wright, who spoke neither French nor Spanish and so was unable to converse with de Lesseps, decided after looking around that, indeed, “the best type of canal is obviously one at sea level.”

A ball at the hotel the night of January 15 went on until one in the morning, when there was an enormous banquet, after which the music and dancing resumed until dawn. There was a day’s outing to the island of Taboga, ten miles out in the bay. A French man-of-war, Grandeur, arrived. There was even a wedding one evening at eight at the cathedral, which was described as “gay with the presence of a multitude of the best of our Panama society.” Gaston Blanchet was the groom; the bride was the daughter of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, a stunning Panamanian girl whom Blanchet had found time to fall in love with during his previous inspection tour. Madame de Lesseps, “with great sweetness and expression,” sang a selection from Gounod.

If Ferdinand de Lesseps was not having the time of his life all this while, he certainly left everyone with that impression. The Panamanians adored him, for his energy, for his “vivid interest in our rather dull Isthmus life” (as the Star & Herald said), for his beautiful children, his beautiful wife. (“Her form was voluptuous and her raven hair, without luster, contrasted well with the rich pallor of her . . . features,” Tracy Robinson would still be able to recall nearly thirty years later.) “They really believe he is their man,” wrote Rodrigues.

Rodrigues, who had the room next door to de Lesseps, described how at five in the morning de Lesseps’ hearty laugh could be heard resounding through the halls of the hotel. Then, in the comparative cool of the early morning, the old man would be off on a fishing expedition or a hike with his sons. One morning, in the plaza, as Madame de Lesseps watched from the balcony of their room and a large and approving crowd gathered, he put a lively horse through its paces. Had there been a stone wall, as once there had been in Egypt, no doubt he would have attempted that as well.

“Then, M. de Lesseps is one of those men who know how to please,” observed Rodrigues. “He begins by enjoying hugely those popular attentions, and because he wishes to retain them he tries to deserve them.” which was perhaps as good an explanation as anyone ever offered of why the old hero did what he did. His exuberance was irrepressible. At one point an elderly resident Frenchman told him that if he persisted with his plan there would not be trees enough on the Isthmus to make the crosses to put over the graves of his laborers. De Lesseps appeared unmoved. As Robinson wrote, “Nothing ever seemed for an instant to dampen the ardor of his enthusiasm, or to cloud the vista of that glorious future which he had pictured in his imagination.”

Yet there is at least one clear sign in the record that the old hero saw more than he let on. In an amazing interview published a few years later, he told Emily Crawford, Paris correspondent for the London Daily News and the New York Tribune, that in fact he knew as soon as he traveled across Panama that the task would be far more difficult than he had been led to suppose, that the Wyse plan for a canal was a fraud–“daringly mendacious” were his words. “But,” wrote Mrs. Crawford, “he was in for the enterprise, and as he thought it feasible, he meant to go on with it.”

Less than twenty-four hours before de Lesseps was scheduled to sail for New York, his nine-man Technical Commission presented its final report. Three hundred pages in length, it was little more than a rubber stamp for what he had been planning. A canal a niveau was approved. A dam to hold the Chagres in check was recommended. There was to be a breakwater at Colón, as he wanted, a tidal lock on the Pacific end. Construction time was figured to require eight years rather than twelve, as declared at the Paris congress.

De Lesseps liked everything but the estimated cost–843,000,000 francs, a figure 357,000,000 francs below what had been estimated at the Paris congress. The new figure was still too high, he thought, and this in spite of the fact that now no interest on capital for eight years was included, or administrative expenses, or the sums due the Türr Syndicate and the Colombian government, or the very large expense of buying the Panama Railroad. Many such details had not been bothered with in the Paris estimate, it is true. However, the figure produced in Paris had included an extra 25 percent for contingent expenses, whereas the amount now added for contingencies was only 10 percent.

But what made the new estimate look even more remarkable was the further fact that the anticipated volume of excavation–the amount of digging to be done–had been increased by more than 50 percent (from 46,000,000 cubic meters, as reckoned at the congress, to 75,000,-000 cubic meters). Having seen Panama, having been over the ground, having decided that the job was to be half again greater than previously declared, the commission had reduced the total cost of the canal, then allotted less for unexpected difficulties. And de Lesseps’ sole complaint was that their reductions were too timid.

“Our work will be easier at Panama than at Suez,” he announced. To Charles he wrote: “Now that I have gone over the various localities in the Isthmus with our engineers, I cannot understand why they hesitated so long in declaring that it would be practicable to build a maritime canal between the two oceans at sea level, for the distance is as short as between Paris and Fontainebleau.” Talk of the deadly climate, he said, was nothing more than the “invention of our adversaries.”

None of the party had experienced any sign of ill health. The nearest thing to a crisis had been a case of sunburn suffered by Madame de Lesseps on the outing to Taboga.

On board the Colon, somewhere between Limon Bay and New York, seated quietly in his stateroom, de Lesseps took a pencil and went to work on the commission’s report. By the time the ship reached the East River he had cut the estimated price by another 184,400,000 francs, or by nearly $37,000,000. The canal, he told the reporters who came aboard at New York, was going to cost no more than $131,720,-000. It was, everyone agreed, an impressive reduction from the $240,-000,000 predicted at Paris.

IV

To nobody’s surprise he was front-page news the whole time he was in New York. Not for twenty years, the papers declared, had a foreign visitor been greeted by the city with such warmth and wholehearted appreciation. Newspaper articles made much of his striking physical appearance, the snow-white hair, the tropical tan, the youthfulness and intellectual vigor–all in notable contrast, it should be added here, to the claims made later that he was a dim, muddled old man by the time he first saw Panama. One reporter who had interviewed him years before at Suez found him “not a whit changed. The same marvelous bright eyes, the same earnest voice, the same sympathetic chuckle, personally magnetic as ever, erect, impulsive, and, if anything, younger.” A writer for the World thought he looked about fifty-five.

It was his first time in the United States and, as at Panama, he enjoyed himself grandly. He strolled Fifth Avenue, took a ride on the El, went by elevator to the top of the Equitable Life Assurance Building on Broadway (a full six stories high), “inspected” the half-finished Brooklyn Bridge. The great Culebra Cut at Panama, he declared dramatically, would be as deep as the bridge towers were tall–274 feet

In his suite at the Windsor Hotel On Fifth Avenue, talking rapidly but softly, and with numerous gestures, he assured reporters that his Panama plan posed no conflict with the Monroe Doctrine. The venture was a private enterprise and the American people especially should understand the virtues of private enterprise. The point was that he welcomed American investment. “I am but an executor of the American idea,” he insisted, and in fact he would be happy to see a majority of the stock sold in the United States and to have the company’s headquarters located in New York or Washington.

The tricolor flew over the Windsor as though a head of state were in residence. He was received by the American Geographical Society, and a reception given by the city’s French community was attended by an estimated eight thousand people. Another night, wearing white tie and tails, he walked onto a stage banked with potted palms and told the American Society of Civil Engineers that he was a diplomat, not an engineer, but that he was honored to be welcomed as a colleague. As at all such occasions he spoke through an interpreter and extemporaneously. He never used notes, he explained, because he always spoke the truth, the truth required no preparation.

For a banquet at Delmonico’s, the main dining room was decorated with French and American flags, a central chandelier had been transformed into an enormous floral bell from which ropes of evergreen intertwined with flowers ran to all corners, and every table had its ingenious confectionery centerpiece–Ferdinand de Lesseps in evening dress, shovel in hand, bestriding Africa; a sphinx; a Suez dredging machine; the steamer Colon. The menu was embossed with the de Lesseps coat of arms, and the all-male guest list, some 250 “notables,” included Mayor Cooper, Andrew Carnegie, Jesse Seligman, Russell Sage, Albert Bierstadt, Clarence King, Octave Chanute, Abram Hewitt, Chauncey Depew, Peter Cooper, David Dudley Field. At about nine o’clock, just before the speeches began, Madame de Lesseps made a dramatic entrance onto the musicians’ balcony, accompanied by Emily Roebling, wife of the crippled chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The speakers were Alexander Lyman Holley, pioneer of the Bessemer process in America; John Bigelow, the diplomat and publisher; Dr. Henry W. Bellows, the famous Unitarian; and Frederick M. Kelley, who gave the main address. In terms of who was there, the things said, the setting and all, it was one of those marvelous moments around which a whole study of an age could be developed. (One of Bierstadt’s vast western landscapes had recently been purchased by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, for example; Carnegie’s steel empire was by now the mightiest in the world due primarily to the innovative skills of Alexander Holley; a spiritual leader such as Henry W. Bellows could still speak, as he did, with perfect faith in “the white winged dove of commerce.”) Nonetheless, as several editorials stressed the morning after, the occasion and the sentiments expressed were plainly in honor of the man, not his present scheme. New York was enormously interested in Ferdinand de Lesseps, interested–but guardedly–in his Panama canal.

“For what he has done we give him our most cordial welcome and the homage of our heartiest applause,” declared Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune. “What he proposes to do is another matter . . .”

And so it was to be everywhere else he traveled in the United States. In Washington, where there were no banquets or receptions, the message was especially blunt. Everybody was perfectly cordial, to be sure, including President Hayes. On Capitol Hill, de Lesseps was received by the House Interoceanic Canal Committee and gave an eloquent plea for his project, then was invited to hear Captain James B. Eads, builder of the famous St. Louis bridge, present his proposal for a colossal ship railway across Tehuantepec. The plan was to hoist ships out of the water bodily, in huge wheeled cradles, and haul them overland with enormous locomotives pulling in tandem. An ingenious system of hydraulic rams, Eads explained, would push supports, or blocks, against the ship’s hull. Each block would be equipped with a universal joint so that it would automatically conform to the shape of the hull at the point of contact, thereby distributing equally the weight of the ship. To put a six-thousand-ton ship into the cradle would take half an hour. The cradle itself would ride on twelve rails placed five feet apart and on 1,200 wheels (100 on each rail). The locomotives, five times as powerful as the largest then in existence, would have an average speed in crossing of ten to twelve miles per hour. The complete transfer of a ship from one ocean to the other, over a distance of 134 miles, would take sixteen hours. And to build such a system, Eads said, would cost only $50,000,000, about a third that of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ canal.

De Lesseps’ listened politely to all this and perhaps some of it touched a vital nerve. Such visions of ships being picked from the water like toys and towed over the mountains of Mexico might have been hatched by Jules Verne in his tower study at Amiens. In any event, he offered Eads his compliments and made a gracious exit, only to be confronted by reporters carrying the full text of a new Presidential message to Congress. The United States, Hayes avowed, would not surrender its control over any isthmian canal to any European power or combination of powers. Nor should corporations or private citizens investing in such an enterprise look to any European power for protection. “An interoceanic canal . . . will be the great ocean thoroughfare between our Atlantic and our Pacific shores and virtually a part of the coastline of the United States.” The “policy of this country is a canal under American control.”

The message was a clear and deadly serious repulse to de Lesseps’ intentions. He could have protested, or he could have been diplomatic and evasive, or he could have said nothing for the moment. Instead he had Henri Bionne send off a cable addressed to Charles in Paris and, ultimately, to the Bulletin: “The message of President Hayes guarantees the political security of the canal.”

He, Le Grand Français, had won another noble victory, that was the implicit claim. If the United States declared that no European power could function as protector over the canal, then this meant that the United States would fulfill that vital function. And with the United States watching over the enterprise during construction and afterward, investors could be certain of success. That was not at all what had been meant. “What the President said,” wrote J. C. Rodrigues in his subsequent analysis, “[was that] he did not wish to see European corporations building canals in Panama; but M. de Lesseps was equal to the occasion, and consistent once more with all the plot of a play of which he was protagonist.”

Then, like the veteran performer who knows how well physical movement alone can command attention, he was on his way, barn-storming across the continent by train, From Philadelphia to St. Louis to San Francisco, then back by way of Chicago, Niagara Falls, and Boston. Madame de Lesseps and the children meantime remained in Philadelphia, where she had relatives.

He made the trip in three weeks and he was news at every stop. His crowds were large, often very large, and they were always friendly. Frequently they were even as enthusiastic as the Bulletin claimed. He called Americans the most hospitable people on earth. In Chicago a heckler shouted a gibe about the Monroe Doctrine. “Here are twenty thousand of you Americans,” de Lesseps responded. “Now explain to me how the Monroe Doctrine prevents my making the canal.” He waited; no one answered. Then he patiently explained their Monroe Doctrine to them and why it had no bearing on his canal, adding, “I cannot agree with a town only a third my own age . . . which says that the thing is impossible.”

“Hurrah! That’s the boy we want!” somebody shouted and there was a long approving cheer.

In Washington the French minister presented a note to Secretary Evarts saying the French government was in no way involved in the de Lesseps enterprise at Panama “and in no way proposed to interfere therein or to give it any support, either direct or indirect.”

De Lesseps and party sailed on April 1, 1880. He had been praised and feted right up to the final day, when there was a farewell luncheon at the home of Cyrus Field, who had laid the Atlantic Cable. Moreover, he had found the time in New York to put together what he was to call his Comite Americain to handle the sale of Panama stock in the United States. Three New York firms had agreed to participate–J. & W. Seligman & Company, Drexel, Morgan & Company, and Winslow, Lanier & Company. And yet for all this, his popularity, his vigor, there were no takers. He had sold no stock. Not a single American capitalist of consequence had expressed the least serious interest in his Compagnie Universelle.

The real money, he responded to his followers, would come from France. “It is in France alone, where one is in the habit of working for the civilization of the world, that I shall . . . raise the capital necessary . . .” And within no less than two hours after his arrival in Paris he was sitting beneath a large Venetian chandelier in the upstairs salon of Madame Juliette Adam expounding on his travels to a gathering of old friends and admirers.

The next weeks were packed with lectures, dinners, interviews, and he thrived on the schedule no less than he had on all the thousands of miles at sea, the countless new faces, the rich food and strange hotels and endless talk. Friends told him he never looked better. A doctor in one after-dinner speech accused him of jeopardizing the medical profession, since obviously the visit to Panama had resulted in the discovery of the fountain of youth.

So the odyssey of four, nearly five, months had ended in a resounding display of popular approval of exactly the kind he knew to be essential. By simply going to Panama, returning physically whole and hearty, he had worked a stunning transformation at home. His grave mistake was to underestimate his own success. His popular support now was far greater than he had any idea, and his misreading of that fact, ironically, was to prove nearly as fateful as his more obvious misreading of Panama itself.

5
The Incredible Task

For country, science, and glory.

–Motto of the Ecole Polytechnique

I

The early years of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique were a time of soaring hopes, a considerable amount of misleading propaganda, and some real, if costly, progress. In Panama amazing things were accomplished by men whose devotion to the task was exemplary, often heroic. Their achievements were never quite what Ferdinand de Lesseps promised, and for all their noble intentions, they made serious mistakes almost from the beginning. Still, in view of the difficulties they had to face, the sheer magnitude of the task, the things they simply did not know, the repeated instances of personal suffering and tragedy, they did extremely well.

In Paris the sale of stock in the company–Ferdinand de Lesseps’ second attempt to go public–turned out to be one of the most astonishing events in financial history.

La grande entreprise was to be the biggest financial undertaking ever attempted until then. Panama stock was to be more widely held than any ever issued before. And never had any strictly financial proposition inspired such ardent devotion among its investors. The explanation, of course, in good part, was that to most of them it was never a strictly financial proposition. Nothing so vital to French pride just then, nothing led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, could have been seen as that only. Of enormous importance also were the almost limitless expectations associated with venture capitalism– pionnier capitalisme. The talk was of “the poetry of capitalism” and of “the shareholders’ democracy.” The unprecedented response of the French people to de Lesseps had many sides, many psychological levels, and only later, in hindsight, would their allegiance seem blind or his leadership purposefully deceitful.

He put the management of the sale this time in the hands of Marc Levy-Cremieux, vice-president of the powerful Franco-Egyptian Bank, who had been among his vigorous opponents during the first go-around. Levy-Cremieux also sent his own man–an engineer–out to appraise the situation at Panama, and the man returned with the confidential report that the canal would never pay. Half a dozen companies would go down in ruin before any ship passed through Panama, the man insisted. But not a word was said of this publicly.

A consortium of commercial and investment banks was put together. The initial capital was set at 300,000,000 francs ($60,000,000). Clearly, this was nowhere near enough, but it was de Lesseps’ decision. And it was a bad one.

Six hundred thousand shares were offered at 500 francs ($100) each. So for the average person, the investor de Lesseps was banking on, it was very expensive stock: 500 francs was nearly a year’s wages for about half the working population of France. The terms, however, were tremendously appealing–only 25 percent down, with six years to pay off the rest. And added to this was the knowledge that Suez stock, which also had cost 500 francs a share initially, was presently listed on the Bourse at more than 2,000 francs and was paying dividends of 17 percent.

During the time of construction, shareholders were to receive 5 percent on their paid installments. Once the canal was completed, they were to get 80 percent of the net profits. The remaining 20 percent was to be divided among the “founders”–de Lesseps, Charles, those friends who had put up the initial 2,000,000 francs–and the Levy-Cremieux syndicate. Founders’ shares in the Suez company, priced the same as these originally– 5,000 francs each–were currently valued at 380,000 francs

“Subsidization” of the newspapers and magazines commenced the moment the syndicate was formed. Payments were made discreetly for the most part and the effect was pronounced. Almost without exception those papers that had so vociferously denounced the canal and its progenitor now praised it and him to the skies. Panama became “the magic word,” le synonyme de dividendes fantastiques. “Capital and science have never had such an opportunity to make a happy marriage,” said the Journal des Debuts. Le Figaro said the canal would be built in seven years and de Lesseps could then proceed with some further titanic work. La Liberte declared that the canal had no more opponents. “Oh, ye of little faith! Hear the words of M. de Lesseps, and believe!”

Émile de Girardin, proprietor of Le Petit Journal, among the most powerful of French press lords and one of those who had been particularly unpleasant in his attacks on de Lesseps the year before, was now delighted to become a member of the company’s board of administrators.

The price paid for such enthusiasm was high–1,595,573 francs, as near as could be determined by subsequent investigations–and the brokers’ commissions for the flotation were higher still, in excess of 4,000,000 francs. For the bankers it was a perfect bonanza. Their com-mission on the stock sales was 4 percent, or 20 francs a share. Still, as some of the foreign correspondents in Paris were to note, such houses as the Credit Foncier and the Rothschilds had steadfastly “refused to allow their counters to be used for such a flytrap.”

The results were far beyond anyone’s wildest hopes. Indeed, the success of the sale was such that it dramatically underscored how very much de Lesseps had misjudged the accumulative effect of all he now had working for him. He had asked for far too little money–less than half what even he was saying the canal would cost–and the irony is that he could have had all he thought he needed and more, right then at the start. Furthermore, he could have had it on relatively easy terms, and conceivably he might have succeeded without payoffs to the press. But he had failed to comprehend the difference that support from his former adversaries in the financial world could make, or, most importantly, the psychological impact of his trip to Panama.

Sale of the stock began December 7, 1880. Within three days, more than 100,000 people subscribed for 1,206,609 shares, or more than twice the number available. As a result many people had to be satisfied with considerably less than what they wanted.

As de Lesseps had forecast, it was the small investor who made the sale such a runaway success. Some eighty thousand people had bought one to five shares each. Only fourteen people owned a thousand shares or more. And about sixteen thousand of the shareholders were women.

Nothing like this had ever occurred before. The Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee railway, a huge corporation, with capital valued at 1,200,000,-000 francs, and with 800,000 shares–or 200,000 more shares than were offered by the Compagnie Universelle–had but thirty-three thousand shareholders, or less than a third the number that the Compagnie Universelle was starting with. The first stockholders’ meeting, in January 1881, had to be held in the Cirque d’Hiver, the circus building on the Boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire, but even it held only five thousand people. All problems had been solved, de Lesseps said, all difficulties had been smoothed over.

The official incorporation of the company took place on March 3, 1881. De Lesseps was formally designated president; Henri Bionne was to be secretary general. Charles de Lesseps was named a director.

Salaries were remarkably low, considering the scale of the enterprise. De Lesseps would receive only 75,000 francs a year ($15,000); Bionne, a mere 18,000 francs ($3,600). But by contrast, interestingly, a salary of $25,000, or more than de Lesseps’, would be paid to an American, Richard Wigginton Thompson, who had agreed to head the Comite Americain, which was to be among the most costly and fruitless of the company’s operations.

Thompson, who had been Secretary of the Navy, was actually de Lesseps’ second choice for the job. His first choice, General Grant, had been approached through Jesse Seligman, but had flatly declined the offer, a decision Grant explained in a letter to Daniel Ammen: “. . . while I would like to have my name associated with the successful completion of a ship canal between the two oceans, I was not willing to connect it with a failure and one I believe subscribers would lose all they put in.”

The committee, as de Lesseps described it, was to mount opposition to the rival Nicaragua project–through the press, by lobbying in Washington–and to impress upon the American people the surpassing virtues of a canal at sea level. It was to supervise the purchase of American-made equipment and material for Panama. But its primary mission was to induce American investors to join in the Panama venture, and in that, as in most everything else, the committee proved just about useless. Thompson was the only member to do anything to justify his pay, chiefly as a lobbyist. The New York office served little purpose. Few investors were found. About all de Lesseps got for his bargain was the use of some impressive stationery, plus the freedom to mention, when need be, the name of somebody such as Jesse Seligman as among his backers.

Yet a fee of $300,000 was paid outright to the Seligman firm, and to each of the other two firms, and all three organizations would receive another $100,000 as time went on. The total cost of the Comite Americain would be $2,400,000.

So with brokers’ commissions running to more than 4,000,000 francs, with “remuneration to banks” totaling about 1,800,000 francs, plus a commission of 11,800,000 francs for the Levy-Cremieux syndicate, plus 12,000,000 francs to the American committee, then the 1,600,000 francs for “publicity,” and another 750,000 francs for miscellaneous organization expenses, the grand sum for getting out the stock and getting the company under way came to something over 32,200,000 francs, or about $6,400,000.

Early in 1881, between his first and second stockholders’ meetings, de Lesseps also purchased for 1,000,000 francs an office building at 46 Rue Caumartin, which stood back to back with the Suez Canal office on the Rue Charras. Ten thousand shares of stock that had been withheld from sale were turned over to the Türr Syndicate as previously agreed, and de Lesseps relinquished to the new corporation, at no charge, all rights and privileges obtained earlier from the Türr Syndicate. Thus the Wyse Concession now belonged to the Compagnie Universelle. The project was under way.

II

French civil engineers of the nineteenth century were an exceptional breed and justly proud of their heritage. It was the French who pioneered in the use of pneumatic caissons for bridge foundations and who perfected the use of wrought-iron I-beams for building construction. Les Halles, the famous Paris market building, the Menier Chocolate Works, the stunning Galerie des Machines at the recent Paris exhibition, were recognized as bold and innovative structures suggesting infinite possibilities for the future of architecture. It was in France that reinforced concrete had first been tried and French engineers remained preeminent in its use. Over all, the French were preeminent in civil engineering in general, and French technical schools, like French schools of medicine, were the finest in the world.

There were two varieties of engineers in France, other than the military engineers: the ingenieurs de Fetat, who had been trained first at the ficole Polytechnique, then at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees; and the ingenieurs civils, whose school was the newer Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. Of these, the graduates of the ficole Poly-technique were the cream of the crop, an elite technical class of a kind, who had vast influence in the bureaucracy, and, consequently, over the whole economic life of France.

Just to be accepted at the state-run Polytechnique was a supreme honor. A rigorous entrance examination excluded all but the most brilliant applicants. And from the moment a young man walked through the gray stone portals on the Rue Descartes, he knew that nothing less than intellectual superiority and full devotion to La Patrie, les Sciences, et la Gloire were expected of him. Founded in 1794, the school was the chief scientific creation of the Revolution. Napoleon hailed it as his hen with the golden eggs, and the symbol of hen and eggs had been carved into keystones and made the centerpiece of the stained-glass skylight over the largest lecture hall, lest any student forget. It was not an engineering school, but a military school–rigid rules, tight-fitting blue uniforms, swords, the traditional bicorne for parade-ground ceremonies–and devoted to the study of pure science. The curriculum provided what was essentially a classical secondary education plus what was then the most advanced mathematical education in the world.

Upon finishing at the Polytechnique, the highest-ranking graduates generally went on to the Ponts et Chaussees–an ecole d? application–from which they emerged as engineers in the service of the state, as builders of bridges, highways, harbors, or as officials with the state-run railroads. Early in the 1860’s, after a thorough study of the system, an American authority on education, Henry Barnard, declared it gave France the best-trained corps of civil and military engineers of any nation. Lavalley, builder of the Suez dredges, Sadi Carnot, Godin de Lepinay, had come out of the Polytechnique, as had Ferdinand Foch, and as would, in another era, Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

The ingenieurs civils, the graduates of the Ecole Centrale, were the engineers of private enterprise and closer to American engineers in spirit. Gustave Eiffel was an outstanding example; another was William Le Baron Jenney, a Chicago architect and engineer, who was to build the world’s first skyscraper.

But all French engineers, and those from the Polytechnique especially, regarded themselves as men of science. Their creations were the result of abstract computation. The Americans, in the French view, were merely adroit at improvisation, which, however inspired or ingenious, was nonetheless of a lower intellectual order. The bias concerning American engineers was not wholly justified. Still the essential American spirit was improvisation. It was the attitude expressed in a remark attributed to the engineer John Fritz, who, upon building a new machine, is supposed to have said, “Now, boys, we have got her done, let’s start her up and see why she doesn’t work.”

But at Panama the French had to improvise–or rather they had to learn to improvise under pressure. And they had no past experience to go by. Virtually everything had to be learned by trial and error, and their chief difficulty as time went on was the fearful cost of their errors. The experience at Suez was little help. Probably they would have been better off in the long run had there been no Suez Canal in their past. For despite all de Lesseps told the press and his public, Panama had only one advantage over Suez: the distance to be covered. Everything else at Panama was infinitely more difficult. Panama was an immeasurably larger and more baffling task than Suez, just as Godin de Lepinay had warned.

There was, to begin with, the fundamental geology of the Isthmus, a subject that had been given scarcely a fraction of the study it deserved. At Suez the digging had been mostly through sand. The climate at Suez had been hot, but dry; the climate at Panama, eight months of the year, was not only hot, but heavy, smothering, with a humidity of about 98 percent. At Suez there had been the problem of bringing enough water to the canal site to sustain the labor force; the annual rainfall at Suez had been about nine inches. At Panama the annual rainfall could be measured in feet, not inches; ten feet or more on the Caribbean slope, five to six feet at Panama City.

Suez was as flat as a tabletop, with a maximum elevation along the canal line all of 50 feet above sea level. Panama was covered with steep little mountains, and the maximum elevation on the canal line would prove to be 330 feet. There was the Panama jungle. And there was the Chagres River, which still stood directly in the path of the canal.

Questions of housing, labor supply, and health had to be faced. John Bigelow, who would visit the Isthmus later to appraise the French effort, wrote, “There probably was never a more complicated problem–a problem embarrassed by a larger proportion of uncertain factors–presented to an engineer. . . . Every step . . . is more or less experimental.”

Ferdinand de Lesseps would never see it that way, however. “It is,” he informed his stockholders, “an operation the exact mathematics of which is perfectly well known. . . .” Couvreux, Hersent had built Suez; Couvreux, Hersent and exact mathematics would build Panama. He could never quite put Suez out of his mind and his engineers in the field had had no experience in the tropics and had not been trained to improvise. So they not only had to learn as they went along, which would have been difficult enough, but they had to learn to learn as they went along and to unlearn nearly everything that had been supposedly “taught” at Suez.

The first group arrived at Colón on the faithful Lafayette at the end of January 1881. There were some forty engineers, headed by Gaston Blanchet and by Armand Réclus, who was the new general agent of the canal company, and his assistant, Louis Verbrugghe, the lawyer who had gone to Bogotá with Lieutenant Wyse. Several of the engineers had brought their wives with them and there were various festivities at Panama City to honor the occasion. There is, however, nothing to the story that Sarah Bernhardt had also come out on the Lafayette or that she “presented a drama in the wretched little box of a play-house that was then the only theater in the city.” Bernhardt’s one and only visit to the Isthmus came later, in 1886.

On February 1, Réclus sent a two-word telegram to Ferdinand de Lesseps that was to thrill newspaper readers all over France: “Travail commence”–“Work begun.”

Réclus had overall control, as things were organized, but Blanchet, as the ranking official for Couvreux, Hersent, was the one in charge of the actual work. De Lesseps’ contract with the construction firm was for two years and the work was to be done on a cost-plus basis; that is, any costs above the estimates were to be met by the canal company.

As someone to set things in motion, Blanchet was a good choice. He was decisive and forceful and his marriage had smoothed the way in Panama society. His strategy was to spend a year preparing to dig. He wanted to cut a path four hundred feet wide the whole way across the Isthmus, nearly fifty miles, to provide enough open space for the most accurate siting of the canal line as possible. But right away the idea was rejected by the Paris office. He had to content himself with clearing a strip of only fifty feet, which proved too narrow to do what he wanted, so, eventually, the entire line would have to be redone as he had intended in the first place.

With a force of black and Indian laborers hired locally, he proceeded to chop his way from Colón to Panama City on a line that crossed the looping brown Chagres no less than fourteen times. This in itself was an enormously difficult and dangerous task. Immense trees and all their tangled undergrowth had to be taken down by hand.

Except for the path of the railroad, the jungle was no different than it had been when the railroad was begun, or, for that matter, than in the time of the earliest Spanish explorers. The men worked in constant fear of poisonous snakes (coral, bushmaster, fer-de-lance, all three among the world’s most deadly reptiles) and of the big cats (puma and jaguar). Days and nights were made a living hell by bichos, the local designation for ticks, chiggers, spiders, ants, mosquitoes, flies, or any other crawling, buzzing, stinging form of insect life for which no one had a name. The only tools were machete and ax, and the jungle, as one engineer wrote, was “so thickly matted that one could only see a few yards in any direction. . . .” Beyond Gatun the line cut through seven miles of marshy flats and swamp.

And before the job was finished, the rains had begun.

There were, as all newcomers learned, but two seasons in Panama: the season Ferdinand de Lesseps had seen and the wet season. The dry season, with its clear skies and trade winds, began normally about mid-December and lasted four months, during which, in Panama City, water carts had to be used to keep the dust down. Then, abruptly, about the first of May, the rains returned. It did not rain all the time in the wet season, as many supposed. In a country where an inch of rain can fall in an hour, 120 or 130 inches in a year may not mean a great many more than 120 or 130 hours of rain all told. Some of the most torrential downpours lasted only a few minutes. But it did rain nearly every day and it never just rained. At Colón six inches in twenty-four hours or less was not uncommon. In the single month of November, when the heaviest storms struck, rainfall along the Chagres basin–on the Atlantic slope, that is–could range from two to three feet.

But no statistic conveyed a true picture of Panama rain. It had to be seen, to be felt, smelled; it had to be heard to be appreciated. The effect was much as though the heavens had opened and the air had turned instantly liquid.

The skies, when it was not raining, were nearly always filled with tremendous, towering clouds–magnificent clouds, and especially so in the light of early morning. Then there would be an unmistakable rush of wind in the trees, a noticeable drop in temperature, a quick darkening overhead followed by a sound that someone likened to the “trampling of myriad feet” through leaves. In villages and towns everyone would instinctively dash for cover. From the hills at Culebra the jungle could be seen to vanish before onrushing silver cataracts of rain, and howler monkeys would commence their eerie ruckus.

If one were to wait out the storm beneath a corrugated iron roof, the sound was like that of a locomotive. Often these storms became violent thunderstorms, with lightning “so stunning,” wrote one American, “it just makes a person feel as though he were drunk.” And then, while the trees still tossed and roared, the rain would be over–in an instant. The sun would be out again, fierce as ever. Everything would glisten with rainwater and the air would be filled with the fecund, greenhouse smell of jungle and mud.

By May the canal line had been cleared from Colón to Panama City and Colón had become a beehive of building and of ships unloading. A sawmill went up, along with fifty prefabricated houses that had been shipped from New Orleans. Crates of equipment and vast quantities of material were piling up the length of Front Street.

Great gaps in the jungle were cleared for intermediate towns at Gatun and Emperador. (The one at Gatun was to be called Lesseps City.) There were to be machine shops at Bohío Soldado, labor camps at San Pablo (just beyond Barbacoas) and at Matachín. Barracks for black workers were set on high concrete footings, a precaution against floods and rats. The buildings were large enough for fifty bunks each. Well-seasoned lumber was used, and the design was sensible for the climate, with long verandas and plenty of windows.

The “cottages” for the white technicians were also as comfortable and as well constructed as conditions would allow. They were built near the water, along the eastern shoreline in what was to be a new community called Christophe-Colomb (later renamed Cristobal). They were one-story buildings, all very much alike, white with green shutters, each enclosed by verandas, and generally there was a Yucatán hammock slung at one corner of the front veranda. Everything considered, the location was ideal. At night, with a full moon flooding the white beach and a breeze coming in off* the water, a young newly arrived French engineer might well find Panama all that he had dreamed.

At Panama City, the company bought the Grand Hotel and set up headquarters. From a second-floor office overlooking the plaza, Armand Réclus wrote regularly to Paris, as instructed, to report on local politics, employee morale, his own daily problems. To maintain an adequate labor force seemed nearly impossible. In this first year only about ten out of every one hundred newly arrived laborers remained on the job after six months. But contrary to later accusations, the well-being of the men was regarded as a priority responsibility. “We must make certain that the personnel suffer no privations and that their welfare is looked into,” Charles wrote to Réclus. “You will always find us disposed to approve any measures that you may have to propose in this matter.” The great hope of the de Lesseps’, father and son, was to establish a “Panama family.” “Everything you can do to ensure the well-being of the personnel, including their pleasures, will be immediately approved,” Charles would advise. “Do all you can so that off-duty there are no bosses and employees, but only members of the same family united by sentiment.” And at the bottom, his father added in his own hand, “This is an excellent letter and I am one with it.”

A hospital, to be known as L’HÓpital Notre Dame du Canal, was being planned for a spacious site on Ancon Hill, overlooking the city and bay. The physician in charge, Dr. Louis Companyo, was the former head of the sanitary division of the Suez Canal. There were to be several handsome buildings, with good ventilation and comfortable verandas, set among magnificent gardens. There would be a full-time staff of doctors and nurses, the Filles de la Charité. A smaller hospital would be built on the northern shore at Colón, to take advantage of the sea breezes; and a hotel on the island of Taboga, a rambling, filigreed white ark, was to be converted into a sanitarium for convalescents.

It would be told later how the French had plunged into Panama blithely disregarding the threat of disease, and how hopelessly primitive their medical facilities were. But the intentions expressed repeatedly in personal correspondence between Panama and Paris, the efforts taken in Panama, the money spent by the canal company, all belie this. De Lesseps had once faced a cholera epidemic in Egypt; he had lost a wife and a son to disease; he was no fool, however frequently his public declarations concerning health conditions in Panama would appear to prove otherwise. The facility at Ancon, which was to include some seventy buildings by the time it was finished, would cost $5,600,000, a staggering sum in that day. Another $1,000,000 was spent on the hospital at Colón, nearly $500,000 on the Taboga sanitarium. Dr. Wolfred Nelson, the Canadian physician who had opened an office in Panama the previous year, a man who was to be severely critical of almost everything the French did, wrote, “The canal hospitals on the Panama side are without doubt the finest and most perfect system of hospitals ever made within the tropics.” William Crawford Gorgas, writing some thirty-five years afterward, was to appraise the Ancon complex as “a very much better institution than any in the United States . . . at the same period carried on by a firm or corporation.” The effect of the climate on tools, clothing, everyday personal items, was devastating. Anything made of iron or steel turned bright orange with rust. Books, shoes, belts, knapsacks, instrument cases, machete scabbards, grew mold overnight. Glued furniture fell apart. Clothes seldom ever dried. Men in the field finished a day drenched to the skin from rain and sweat and had to start again the next morning wearing the same clothes, still as wet as the night before. Without laundry facilities, a clean shirt or fresh pair of trousers were luxuries beyond compare.

Panama was “a hell upon earth,” an English traveler on the Panama Railroad once observed; besides, he said, it was “overrun with Yankees.” And for those French officials struggling to establish system and order to their efforts, the Yankees who ran the Panama Railroad were proving to be as large an aggravation as anything they had to face. To judge by the correspondence of Armand Réclus, the railroad people seldom if ever did anything as he wished, and since the railroad was the sole means of transportation and communication, the results were maddening. When nothing moved on the railroad, nothing moved on the Isthmus. If there were delays, if shipments were held up, lost, damaged, the effect was felt all down the line.

Reclus saw more than poor or indifferent management or simple bad luck as the root causes of his troubles. It was all, he believed, part of a diabolic scheme to force de Lesseps to buy the railroad at an inflated price. “I am persuaded that this, in effect, is their plan,” he informed Charles. The Americans were merely following “orders from New York to do everything to create the greatest possible difficulty for us.” The only conceivable solution was the one the railroad company wanted. “It is necessary that we become the absolute masters of the railroad,” and that, he emphasized, could only be done by buying the road outright as quickly as possible.

Trenor Park by now owned even more stock in the line than he had before–and he had raised his price, should the French still be interested. The $200-a-share figure quoted initially had been advanced to $250 a share. Park insisted on full payment in cash.

It was a holdup, a great many people felt, but there was little that could be done about it. He had de Lesseps in a corner. “It is necessary at any price to settle the question of the railroad,” Réclus pleaded again in desperation, “because on its possession or not depends the accomplishment of the canal.”

So in June 1881, after drawn-out negotiations between Paris and New York, the sale was agreed to. The canal company bought some 68,500 of the existing 70,000 shares, which at $250 a share came to more than $17,000,000. In addition the company took over a sinking fund amassed by the railroad toward the eventual amortization of its bonded indebtedness of some $6,000,000. So all told the little stretch of track cost over $20,000,000, which was more than equal to a full third of the company’s resources. On a per-share basis the stock actually wound up costing $292 at a time when the true par value was less than $100.

For all that the legal status of the road remained the same. It was still an American company, incorporated under the laws of the state of New York; its franchise from the Colombian government remained unchanged. Trenor Park, who personally cleared approximately $7,000,000 on the transaction, did step down as president of the line. However, the man who replaced him was John G. McCullough, his son-in-law.*

Furthermore, the old Bidlack Treaty, the 1846 treaty between Colombia and the United States, was as much in effect as ever. The railroad’s fundamental right of transit still rested on Article XXXV of the treaty, and to guarantee uninterrupted traffic on the line, as well as Colombian sovereignty on the Isthmus, remained the obligation of the United States. So an American military presence would continue, in the form of gunboats standing off Colón and Panama City.

At a stockholders’ meeting in June, de Lesseps explained the purchase in straightforward, businesslike terms. He asked for approval to borrow the money to pay the bill, plus another 300,000,000 francs, which, with the company’s present capital, would give him, he said, an ample amount to build the canal. The stockholders approved.

Gaston Blanchet, meantime, had led a surveying party far up the Chagres, to begin work on the first serious maps and surveys. They were the advance guard and they made a striking picture–intent, tanned faces under white sun helmets, pistols at the belt. They chewed on Havana cigars as they squinted into the brass eyepieces of surveying instruments. They slapped at the interminable mosquitoes; they picked scorpions the size of a hand from their boots in the morning. They shot alligators, some twenty feet in length, and brought back the stripped pelts of jaguars. And they were extremely good at their work.

Copies of their surveys, compilations of the data accumulating, were sent off to Paris, and as a detailed picture began to materialize in the office on the Rue Caumartin, de Lesseps called in a new superior advisory board, still another technical commission, to give an opinion on all plans. None of these men was to take part in making the plans, or in the preparation or control of contracts; they were merely to give an opinion. And of course the mere fact that they were gathered, that they were known to be sitting as a jury over all technical decisions, had considerable public-relations value.

The important point is that de Lesseps, once again, would get exactly what he wanted; he would follow his own lead and they would nod in agreement and go along with him as willingly as his stockholders had, raising no serious objections about anything, which must be viewed as another testament to his powers of persuasion, rather than any lack of perception on their part. Unmistakably these were men of eminence and ability. At the head of the group was Lefebure de Fourcy, inspector general of Ponts et Chaussées. Jacob Dirks, Daubrée, Voisin Bey, participated again. There were six chief engineers of Ponts et Chaussées. One man was the chief-of-port at Marseilles. Another was an admiral. Yet none was willing, or bold enough perhaps, to challenge de Lesseps’ judgment or to take seriously the inevitable cost of a sea-level canal. Later it would be charged that de Lesseps never listened to his engineers. But in fact it was the other way around; it was they who were listening to him.

“Perhaps no other man ever possessed to such a marvelous extent the power of communicating to other minds the faith and the fervor which animated his own,” a writer for the Illustrated London News once observed.

III

By summer of 1881 there were two hundred French or European technicians and clerical help on the Isthmus and some eight hundred laborers at work–making test borings with great, cumbersome steam drills, building barracks and hospitals, assembling and testing newly arrived equipment.

But by summer it was also apparent that yellow fever had returned to the Isthmus. The wet season was traditionally the time of sickness and this year had been no exception. Several cases were reported in May. Then in the second week of June the first canal employee died of yellow fever, another of those incidental details not featured in the Bulletin.

On July 25 an engineer named Étienne, a graduate of the Polytechnique and one of the ablest of the young technicians, died at Colon–of “brain fever,” supposedly–and was hastily buried at Monkey Hill that same afternoon. On July 28 Henri Bionne died.

Bionne’s death would be attributed in Paris to “complications in the region of the kidneys.” But on the Isthmus the story would be told for as long as the French remained. He had arrived from France to make a personal inspection for de Lesseps, and several of the engineers had arranged a dinner in his honor at the employees’ dining hall at the camp at Gamboa. It was a festive evening apparently. Bionne, the last to arrive, had come into the hall just as everyone was being seated. One of the guests, a Norwegian woman, was exclaiming with great agitation that there were only thirteen at the table. “Be assured, madame, in such a case it is the last to arrive who pays for all,” Bionne said gaily. “He drank to our success on the Isthmus,” one engineer recalled; “we drank to his good luck. . . .” Two weeks later, on his way home to France, Bionne died of what the ship’s doctor designated only as fever, not yellow fever. The body was buried at sea.

“The truth is that the climate . . . like all hot climates, is dangerous for those who underestimate its effects . . . and who fail to observe the principles of hygiene,” explained the Bulletin. Yellow fever was not prevalent in Panama, the paper assured its readers, though “unhappily” a few laborers had been victims of the disease.

The British vice-consul at Panama, young Claude Coventry Mallet, decided out of curiosity to join one of the surveying parties in the upper reaches of the Chagres. The expedition consisted of twenty-two men. Within a few weeks everyone but Mallet and a Russian engineer named Dziembowski was sick, whether of so-called Chagres fever or yellow fever is not clear. The expedition returned, in any event, and of the twenty men who went into the hospital ten died. Mallet and Dziembowski returned to Cathedral Plaza feeling no ill effects, however. Mallet, who told the story later, said they agreed to meet for lunch the following day and that Dziembowski asked for a loan to buy a new suit. When Dziembowski failed to show up for lunch, Mallet went around to the canal offices to ask his whereabouts. The Russian, he was told, had died of yellow fever at three that morning and had been buried at dawn in a new suit of clothes.

There were more deaths as the summer wore on, but in October, speaking before a geographical congress at Vienna, de Lesseps said there were no epidemics at Panama and that the few cases of yellow fever had been “imported from abroad.”

Then, in November, a few days after he had returned from a particularly strenuous exploration of the upper Chagres, Gaston Blanchet died, apparently of malaria. The importance of Henri Bionne to the operation in Paris had been considerable and his death had been a heavy personal blow for Ferdinand de Lesseps, but Blanchet was the driving spirit of the enterprise in the field, and his loss would be felt for a long time.

How many died that first year is uncertain. The official company estimate on record is about sixty. Malaria, which is an entirely different disease from yellow fever, probably accounted for a great many of the fatalities then as later. The fact is that more people would die of malaria at Panama than of yellow fever, notwithstanding the popular impression to the contrary.

Malaria, the most common of tropical diseases and the one endemic disease at Panama, takes many forms and went by many different names on the Isthmus: calentura, miasma, the shakes, the chills, paludisme, ague, pernicious fever, putrid fever, intermittent fever, and, in its most virulent form, Chagres fever. Historically, malaria was the world’s greatest killer and it was confined to no one geographical area. Only the year before, there had been a serious epidemic in New England. But in places such as Panama, malaria never went away. The prevailing attitude was that everyone got a dose of it sooner or later. Among the native population, infection usually began in childhood.

The typical malarial attack began with terrible chills, uncontrollable shivering, and chattering teeth, the spell lasting perhaps fifteen minutes, sometimes more. Often the shivering of patients in a malaria ward would be so violent that the room could actually be felt to tremble; a single bed would move on the floor.

The chills would be followed by high fever and a burning thirst. As the fever fell off, the patient would break out in a drenching sweat. For those who survived, the experience was unforgettable. With the passing of the fever, the patient was left feeling totally debilitated, mentally as well as physically. Acute depression usually set in, the “melancholia” that was so well known in Panama.

And the patient could be stricken again. Indeed, it was considered impossible ever to recover fully from malaria so long as one stayed on in such country. But by the same token, a patient could move to some distant, seemingly safe climate and still experience a return siege of malaria, which was perhaps the most insidious characteristic of the disease. John Lloyd Stephens, as noted, was struck down by malaria in the spring of 1852, recovered sufficiently to return to New York, only to die of a recurrence of the disease in October.

There was no such thing as an immunity to malaria. With yellow fever it was different. A person had yellow fever only once. Either he lived or he died. If he lived he would never get it again. Malaria could be a lifelong infirmity, and if the first dose did not kill, the second, third, or fourth could.

Yet in the tropics, malaria was taken as an inevitable fact of life, part of the landscape. Yellow fever, by contrast, came and went in vicious waves, suddenly, mysteriously. In those places where it was most common–Panama, Havana, Veracruz–it was the stranger, the newcomer, who suffered worst, while the native often was untouched. Wherever or whenever it struck, it spread panic of a kind that could all but paralyze a community. It was a far more violent and hideous thing to see; a more gruesome way to die.

The mortality rate among those who contracted the disease could vary enormously, from 12 or 15 percent to as much as 70 percent. Generally speaking, however, a yellow-fever patient in Panama in the 1880’s had a less than fifty-fifty chance of survival. As with malaria, the patient was seized first by fits of shivering, high fever, and insatiable thirst. But there were savage headaches as well, and severe pains in the back and the legs. The patient would become desperately restless. Then, in another day or so, the trouble would appear to subside and the patient would begin to turn yellow, noticeably in the face and in the eyes.

In the terminal stages the patient would spit up mouthfuls of dark blood–the infamous, terrifying vómito negro, black vomit. The end usually came swiftly after that. The body temperature would drop, the pulse fade. The flesh would become cold to the touch–“almost as cold as stone and [the patient] continues in that state with a composed sedate mind.” Then, as a rule, in about eight to ten hours, the patient would die. And so great was the terror the disease generated that its victims were buried with all possible speed.

Blacks and nonwhites were somewhat less susceptible to malaria than were whites. But while it was commonly believed among whites, and repeatedly published on supposed scientific authority, that all blacks were naturally immune to yellow fever, they were not. Panama, famous as “the white man’s graveyard,” was in fact deadly territory for any nonimmune of any race or color. Many blacks, lifelong residents of Caribbean islands or coastlands, had an immunity resulting from previous mild cases of the disease, usually during childhood. Modern medical research also indicates that the common tropical disease known as dengue, or “breakbone fever,” can also have the resulting effects of an immunity to yellow fever. But no human being ever achieved an immunity to malaria; there was no such thing as a natural immunity to yellow fever, and if many blacks had been made immune to yellow fever before reaching Panama, there were vastly more blacks at work than whites, so the number of nonimmune blacks on the Isthmus was always quite large. Black laborers died of both malaria and yellow fever and no less miserably than the whites.

Yellow fever–yellow jack, fievre jaune, fiebre amarilla, the “American plague”–had been a terror of seamen for centuries. A single case on board ship could mean death for the entire crew. The legendary Flying Dutchman was founded on the story of a ship condemned to haunt the seas after yellow fever broke out on board and no country would permit the ship in its harbors. The Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793 had been as savage as an attack of bubonic plague and doomed the supremacy of Philadelphia among the cities of North America. Recently, in 1878, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than five thousand people had died of yellow fever and the estimated financial loss, due to the entire cessation of commerce, was upward of $100,-000,000.

Historically, the disease had played a critical role in Central America and the Caribbean since the first known outbreak in Barbados in 1647, and ironically, the French had already seen one New World dream fail disastrously, in good part because of the disease. Napoleon, with plans for an American empire of his own, had sent a military expedition of twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law General Leclerc to Haiti in 1801 to put down the black insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. With that accomplished, the French army was to have occupied New Orleans and Louisiana. But yellow fever cut through the veteran troops like no enemy imaginable; thousands died, including Leclerc, and this was a major contributing factor in the ultimate triumph of the black patriots. Haiti achieved independence, and Napoleon, thoroughly disenchanted with his American venture, decided to sell all of the Louisiana Territory to the United States.

There was still no known remedy or palliative for yellow fever. The medical profession stood helpless. For malaria, however, there was quinine, the bitter, colorless powder made from the bark of the cinchona tree, a palliative the Indians of Peru had known for centuries. Quinine was distributed freely among the French in Panama and was taken regularly in preventive doses, usually at meals and mixed with wine to kill the dreadful taste. Nobody knew why quinine worked, but it did. The one big problem with it was that a heavy dose could cause vomiting and headaches, or, worse, a horrendous ringing in the ears that rendered the patient deaf.

The word “malaria” was from the Italian mal’aria (“bad air”), and it had been widely agreed long since that bad air, “noxious effluvium”– poisonous marsh gas in particular–was the cause. The French for malaria, paludisme, was even more specific, being derived from a word meaning “marsh fever.” This miasma theory, as it was called, had been undisputed for centuries and seemed perfectly logical since the disease prevailed in hot, low-lying country where the humidity was high, the growth and decomposition of vegetation extremely rapid.

Yellow fever also was believed to be airborne, but filth was supposedly its source–sewage, the putrefying carcasses of dead animals, all the distasteful human and animal waste to be found in the streets of Colón or Panama City. The greatest source of contamination supposedly was the patient himself, and to touch his clothing, his soiled bedding, anything he had come in contact with, meant almost certain death–hence the mortal fear of the body after death and the quickest possible burial.

The night air was thought to be especially dangerous in any area infected by fever of any kind. It had been observed also that the wind had an effect. People spoke of yellow-fever winds, for example. At Panama City, south winds, those blowing in from the marshy lowlands near Panama Viejo, were regarded as especially deadly.

There was, however, another theory–even as early as 1881.

Dr. Josiah Clark Nott was a general practitioner in Mobile, Alabama, and it is one of those extraordinary coincidences of history that he happened to be the doctor who, in 1854, attended Amelia Gayle Gorgas at the birth of her son, William Crawford. In 1848 Dr. Nott published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in which he made the fantastic claim that malaria and yellow fever were undoubtedly conveyed by insects and possibly by the mosquito. His mention of the mosquito was only in passing. His main point was that the spread of the disease could not be explained by any laws governing vapors or gases. But in 1854 a “traveling naturalist” for the Paris Museum, Lewis Beauperthuy, then in Venezuela, concluded that malaria and yellow fever “are produced by a venomous fluid injected under the skin by mosquitoes like poison injected by snakes.” Swamps and marshes spread sickness, he said, not by the vapors they exuded, but because mosquitoes bred there. In Washington, a Dr. Albert Freeman Africanus King, a professor of obstetrics, had arrived at the same conclusion.

King was a well-known figure. On the night of Lincoln’s assassination, he had been in Ford’s Theater and was the first physician to reach the dying President. His mosquito theory was not to be formally presented until 1882, however, and when he suggested how malaria might be eradicated from the capital, many people, understandably, took the whole thing as a jest. The way to do it, he wrote, was to encircle the city with a wire screen as high as the Washington Monument. Still, well before the French engineers arrived at Panama, King had worked out the means for reducing the spread of the fever–by window screens, the drainage of swamps and pools, and the destruction of the insects by special traps.

Others as well had all but hit on the solution. Amazingly, buried in the reports of the Nicaragua Expedition of 1872–1873 and the Panama Expedition of 1875 are two small notations by John Bransford, a Navy doctor who accompanied both expeditions. He had observed that the mosquito netting provided by the Navy afforded notable protection against fever or miasma of all kinds–“by straining the air of germs and moisture.”

In 1880, the very year de Lesseps launched his Compagnie Universelle, a French doctor on the staff of a military hospital in Algeria, Dr. Alphonse Laveran, discovered the presence of tiny crescent-shaped bodies wriggling in a blood sample taken from a malaria patient. Incalculably minute, they were detectable only under the strongest microscope, but he had little doubt that they were living organisms and it dawned on him that here was the cause of malaria. He described his discoveries in a letter to the Academie de Medecine in Paris and published a small monograph.

Laveran’s claims were not accepted, however, any more than were the theories of Nott or King. The miasma theory had been fixed in people’s minds for generations. In addition, there now appeared a rival claim that seemed to support the miasma theory with scientific fact. Two doctors working in Rome, a German named Klebs and an Italian, Tommasi-Crudeli, had isolated a bacteria from the soil of a malarious region that when injected into a rabbit produced a malaria-like fever. The phenomenal discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had educated everyone to the role of bacteria, that whole other world beneath the micro-scope, and so it was widely accepted that a bacterium– bacillus malariae –was the long-sought cause of malaria. (Ronald Ross was at this time in his early twenties and newly enlisted in the Indian Medical Service, having barely passed the entrance examination. An indifferent student, a physician because it had been his father’s ambition for him, he was as yet mainly interested in music and poetry.)

But in 1881, the year the ill-fated Gaston Blanchet began chopping his path across Panama, the mosquito theory was voiced once more, and with greater conviction than ever, by a Havana physician.

Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay was the son of a Scottish father and a French mother. He had been educated in France and at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and having practiced medicine in Havana for twenty-odd years, he had concluded that yellow fever was not only transmitted by the mosquito but by a specific mosquito–a silvery, comparatively noiseless household variety, Stegomyia fasciata (later to be called Aedes aegypti). Out of some eight hundred known varieties, he had picked this one as the carrier of the disease.

Finlay was an ingratiating hawk-nosed individual who looked out on the world through gold-rimmed spectacles and spoke with a lisp, the result of a childhood case of chorea. He was a linguist, an amateur historian, and he was a tireless worker. But he had failed to produce any proof of his theory–he was not very good at research–and his professional peers in Havana gave no encouragement. He applied innumerable mosquitoes that had bitten yellow-fever patients to healthy persons, yet no case of yellow fever ever resulted. Thus it was his own work that appeared to bring the most discredit to his theory.

Like Nott, Beauperthuy, and King, Finlay had the right idea about mosquitoes, and with astonishing precision he had singled out the right variety. Gorgas was to call it a splendid example of medical clairvoyance, “a beautiful manifestation of scientific imagination.” However, it made little difference. Finlay was utterly ignored. At the Ancon hospital, Dr. Girerd, chief surgeon of the canal company and a “profound microscopist,” set up a system of experiments whereby he examined the blood of new workers upon their arrival, then again in another month or so, when, invariably, he found the supposed malarial bacillus.

And all the while, in the lovely gardens surrounding the hospital, thousands of ring-shaped pottery dishes filled with water to protect plants and flowers from ants provided perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. Even in the sick wards themselves the legs of the beds were placed in shallow basins of water, again to keep the ants away, and there were no screens in any of the windows or doors. Patients, furthermore, were placed in the wards according to nationality, rather than by disease, with the result that every ward had its malaria and yellow-fever cases. As Dr. Gorgas was to write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.

But if malaria and yellow fever were airborne, if plague could come or go with the wind, if the slimy pools and swamps along the railroad and the suffocating back streets of Colón and Panama City were the sources of deadly night airs and miserable death, it was also “known” that not everyone was in equal jeopardy. Fever struck according to a discernible pattern. Some people stood a better chance of surviving than did others, as countless examples attested. Simply stated, the odds on one’s survival were in direct proportion to one’s moral fortitude. The clean, blameless life was the long life in the tropics. Confidence, courage, belief in one’s destiny, a “disdain of peril,” as Philippe Bunau-Varilla would say, also mattered enormously. Debauchery, sins of the flesh, moral or physical cowardice, were sure paths to ruin.

There were some, to be sure, who held that a dose of whiskey or rum was as dependable a palliative as quinine. (Bourbon and mustard seed was a popular “infallible specific” for yellow fever.) But few old-timers on the Isthmus subscribed to such theories. “Many foreigners have fallen victims to fear rather than fever,” Tracy Robinson wrote, “while many others have wrought their own destruction by drink, which . . . has killed, directly and indirectly, more than the entire list of diseases put together . . .” (Robinson had arrived at this conclusion, he said, after trying both abstinence and “moderate indulgence.”) Dr. Nelson was “firmly of the opinion that the people who best resist such climates and make the best fight against disease, are the total abstainers.”

Like numbers of North Americans on the Isthmus, Robinson and Nelson had a low regard for the manner in which the French were conducting themselves off-hours. Nelson, from the suffering and death he was to witness professionally, would develop an abiding hatred of Ferdinand de Lesseps–“The Great Undertaker,” he would call him. But many of the French engineers were the most puritanical of all in their views, and nearly everyone was profoundly shaken whenever the death of some notably upright person seemed to make a mockery of such views. “Certainly his moral character was above reproach,” wrote one bewildered, grieving French engineer of another who had died of yellow fever the first year.

In the United States especially, the death toll among the French would be attributed largely to moral decadence. One of the American railroad contractors, for example, would tell a congressional committee of seeing with his own eyes piles of discarded wine bottles in Colón that were as high or higher than a two-story house. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, a prim New York newspaperman who was to spend a decade in Panama, wrote that the French years had been a “genuine bacchanalian orgy.” Colón was a “veritable sink of iniquity. . . . Champagne, especially, was comparatively so low in price that it ‘flowed like water,’ and . . . the consequences were as deplorable as they were inevitable.” Bishop was to be Theodore Roosevelt’s official biographer, and his views on the French in Panama, expressed in one of the popular early books about the canal, would have a broad and lasting effect.

The most frequently quoted summation was by James Anthony Froude, the reigning English historian and biographer of the day, who declared that “in all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.” According to Froude the place was overrun with cardsharpers and “doubtful ladies.” “Everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality. . . .” Froude, however, was speaking only from what he had been told during a visit to Jamaica. He had been urged to go on to Panama, he wrote, to see for himself, “but my curiosity was less strong than my disgust.”

For all the underlying self-righteousness of such (for then) lurid descriptions, they were probably justified. We have no eyewitness account of what went on; no private diaries of professional gamblers or confessions of “doubtful ladies” have come to light. But the general tone can be imagined. Tracy Robinson, who must have seen a good deal of life during his years on the Isthmus, was appalled by the spectacle. “Vice flourished,” he wrote. “Gambling of every kind, and every other form of wickedness were common day and night.” Issues of the Star & Herald are filled with reports of barroom brawls and riots. In the first year alone there were half a dozen murders among the canal workers. At Gatun, for example, the night of May 25, 1881, a Dutch employee went wild and stabbed two men to death in their sleep, then vanished into the jungle.

As to the consumption of wine there is little doubt. It was phenomenal–and for understandable reasons. The French were accustomed to wine with meals and wine happened also to be a great deal safer to drink than the local water, as even Joseph Bucklin Bishop conceded. The bottle dumps at Colón were every bit as high as a house. The foul alley behind Front Street was actually paved with wine bottles turned bottom-side up and became famous as “Bottle Alley.” Nearly a hundred years later construction workers and amateur archaeologists would be turning up French wine bottles.

Gambling was widespread, and prostitution appears to have flourished from the start. The three most thriving industries were gambling houses, brothels, and coffin manufacturing. To signal the arrival of new “ladies of leisure” on the Isthmus, a code announcement was flashed along the railroad’s telegraph line: “langoustes arrivees” (“lobsters arrived”). And the women, like the labor force and the technicians, came from every part of the world. If there was one obvious characteristic of the so-called French years that would be misunderstood in time to come, it was this cosmopolitan quality of society at every level.

By the end of 1881 there were two thousand men at work, including the technical staff and office help. Any thought of reliance on local labor had been put aside. Some of the laborers were from Colombia, some from Venezuela and Cuba. The vast majority, however, were English-speaking blacks from the West Indies–from Jamaica mostly. Subsequently some five hundred black Americans would come down from New Orleans and other Gulf ports of the United States. So among the actual laborers the language was English, not French.

Also, more white Americans were involved than was ever fully realized in the United States. White American technicians arrived along with equipment purchased in the United States. Nearly all the mechanics were Americans. American contractors arrived, bringing their own people, and the Panama Railroad was run by Americans-engineers, conductors, stationmasters, telegraph operators.

There were German, Swiss, Russian, Italian engineers, Dutch and English contractors. The Gamboa camp had a Belgian cook. Looking back, Tracy Robinson could recall no country that was not represented.

IV

The actual digging of The Great Trench– La Grande Tranchee- -began at Emperador on Friday, January 20, 1882, with much champagne and dynamite. Thereafter the work at Emperador proceeded by steam shovel and by pick and shovel–mostly by pick and shovel–and it moved faster than expected, the ground in the vicinity being unusually soft. It was again the dry season.

In February, Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie agreed to subcontract the dredging of the Atlantic end of the canal to an American firm, Huerne, Slaven & Company, and later, in November, a second American firm, the Franco-American Trading Company, was signed to start at the Pacific end. Presently other small subcontractors, several of them American, appeared and went to work. Excavation was under way at Culebra, Monkey Hill, Gorgona, and Paraiso. At Colón a gigantic earth platform was built out into the harbor from spoil brought from Monkey Hill. The hospitals were completed; the first fire engine arrived.

But it was a year marked by repeated and entirely unexpected setbacks, beginning with the sudden resignation of Armand Réclus and ending with the complete withdrawal of Couvreux, Hersent from the Isthmus and from all further responsibility for the project. In between, the death toll mounted alarmingly, and the Isthmus was struck by an earthquake.

Réclus’ decision to quit was never explained. The best guess is that he had about reached the breaking point, trying to cope with what he described as “the disorder of details.” Whatever the facts, he returned to Paris to serve as a “consultant” to de Lesseps, his real usefulness ended. Until a suitable replacement could be found, Louis Verbrugghe, a lawyer, not an engineer, became the ranking official in the field. When the new man, Commodore Richier, finally arrived, he proved no more capable of mastering “the disorder of details” than Réclus and soon he too quit.

The most horrendous and immediate problem for anyone in command was the volume and diversity of equipment in use. The display was terribly impressive and terribly confusing–thirty-odd steam shovels, three thousand flatcars and dirt trucks, fifty locomotives, steam launches, tugs, coal lighters, dredges, hundreds of rock drills, pumps, some eighty miles of railroad track–and this was only the beginning. Most of the machinery arrived in parts and had to be assembled at Colon. Most of it was also the best available at the time. The fashion later among American politicians and writers would be to ridicule the European-built machinery and various items ordered by the French engineers for their tropical empire–including “ten thousand snow shovels” to a land “where snow never ever has fallen.”

The problem with the equipment was not its quality, but the bewildering variety of it. The track put down by Couvreux, Hersent had a different gauge than that on the Panama Railroad. French-made railroad cars came in differing sizes and gauges. French and Belgian locomotives, though built like a watch in workmanship, some with all-copper fireboxes, had such a rigid wheelbase that they required track built to the most exacting standards; otherwise, as one American noted, “they just went off and started for somewhere else.”

The French “plant” was in effect something of a mechanical Noah’s Ark, with every imaginable species represented. To get it all working efficiently, according to some kind of harmonious system, seemed nearly impossible. And while in a few instances certain tools and machines proved of little or no use in the tropics, there had been no certain way of knowing that in advance. No ten thousand snow shovels were ever sent out to Panama, as later charged–only a thousand shovels that looked like snow shovels but were in fact specially designed for scooping the ash out of steam-shovel boilers, a use for which they were ideally suited.

The first shock of the earthquake occurred at 3:30 the morning of September 7, and though it lasted but a fraction of a minute, it was the longest and worst ever experienced on the Isthmus. At Panama one of the two towers on the great cathedral crashed through the roof near the main entrance, while a big part of the front wall toppled into the plaza. The Cabildo, or town hall, was wrecked, and the walls of the Grand Hotel were so badly cracked that it was feared another tremor would bring the building down.

Wolfred Nelson, who lived in an annex of the hotel, said it was difficult to see anything at first. He had jumped from his bed and rushed out into the plaza. “It was black with people who had . . . got in the open and away from buildings that were expected to fall. There was still a little light, and the moon was in its last quarter. The hum of voices and excitement was something astonishing. There they were, people of all classes–black and white–some dressed, and some very hastily dressed, and some had brought chairs with them.” One elderly lady, duenna of an old, distinguished family, was found dead sitting in her chair, the victim of a heart attack.

Damage along the railroad was extensive. In some places the roadbed had sunk as much as ten feet, leaving rails torn and twisted. At Colón, starting at the freight depot, a fissure in the earth, inches wide, ran some four hundred feet down Front Street.

There was another violent tremor the next morning, again before daylight, and the sense of panic this time was worse. All told, five people were killed, including the old lady in the chair. A week was lost getting the railroad back in running order. Cable communication with Jamaica (and the United States) was not resumed for another month.

Of greatest concern among the French officials, however, was the psychological damage the news might have among investors in France, since Panama was supposed to be safe from such natural convulsions. But when the news reached Paris, de Lesseps simply promised that there would be no more earthquakes and one cannot help but wonder if his deceptive propaganda was becoming self-deceptive.

More progress had been made at Panama in the first two years, he told his stockholders, than there had been at Suez in the first six years. And who was to refute such a claim? Those closest to the financial side of the company had already seen their founders’ shares soar from 5,000 francs to 75,000 in the over-the-counter market. The press remained enthusiastic. The public had every confidence that all was well. A first bond issue, to meet the cost of buying the Panama Railroad, had been heavily oversubscribed. Nor was belief in de Lesseps by any means limited to the French. “With $30,000,000 already invested in the enterprise,” reported the New York Tribune, “and with applications for shares showering him from all quarters of France . . . he can now reckon with confidence upon the resources required for so vast a scheme. He can get the money, and unquestionably he has the genius requisite for surmounting the engineering difficulties. Englishmen and Americans may as well reconcile themselves to the situation.”

At the end of the year, when it was suddenly announced that the great firm of Couvreux, Hersent was retiring from the field, leaving the work entirely in de Lesseps’ hands, he again stood unfazed, his leadership unchallenged. Such news could well have been a mortal blow to almost any other venture. His public composure and poise were total.

By its contract Couvreux, Hersent had every legal right to back out. The contract had been drawn up in an atmosphere of monumental mutual trust–for instance, it named de Lesseps as among those who could arbitrate any misunderstandings that might arise–and now the parting was carried off with comparable equanimity. The partners Couvreux and Hersent declared themselves honor-bound to say that the excavation could be carried forward more effectively without them. The canal could proceed faster and at less cost, it was said, by parceling the work out to a number of smaller contractors, each specializing in a particular task, an arrangement partly in effect and showing excellent results. The canal company henceforth should merely supervise the work on its own.

To this de Lesseps obligingly agreed; the contract was not renewed, and Couvreux and Hersent were out in the clear.

The real reason for the break, however, appears to have been rather different, as revealed by subsequent investigations conducted by the Chamber of Deputies. The death of the resourceful Gaston Blanchet had been a disheartening blow to Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie. Nor was there anyone else in the firm of comparable ability who was willing to go to Panama and take Blanchet’s place. But much more important was the realization, after two years, that the canal could never be built in anything like the time or for anywhere near the cost foreseen by the exuberant Grand Frangais, whose glowing declarations often as not were derived from figures and forecasts supplied by Couvreux and Hersent.

They could, of course, have made public their disheartening view of the situation. But they chose not to, as they later explained, out of respect for Ferdinand de Lesseps and so as not to add to his burdens. “The truth is,” reads the report issued later by the Deputies committee, “that during the trial period Couvreux and Hersent had been able to form a shrewd idea of the difficulties of the enterprise but were unwilling to undermine the [canal] company’s credit by a frank admission of the motive behind their retirement.”

For the Compagnie Universelle the situation was really quite serious, and it is hard to imagine anyone in de Lesseps’ position failing to go to Panama as soon as possible to determine to his own satisfaction what should be done. However, he saw himself as the company’s major asset–its sole asset–and he believed, as did the financial interests involved, that his visible presence in Paris, at the helm, was essential. Appearances, as always, mattered enormously. There must be no sign of alarm, nothing to suggest that the contractors’ defection had been either harmful or indicative of some deeper, fundamental flaw or anything other than a perfectly natural administrative reorganization.

Also, he had other demands on his time just then. British troops had seized Alexandria, ostensibly to protect the khedive’s government, and de Lesseps had rushed to the scene in a futile, single-handed effort to keep the British from occupying the Suez Canal zone. Later he was in London to negotiate with more success an agreement covering Suez operations, only to rush back to the Avenue Montaigne to be present for the birth of his tenth child. Twenty years before, at Suez, “with jealous personal authority,” he had taken a direct interest in everything that went on. Now, more often, it was Charles who took the initiative, who handled the numerous small decisions that had to be dealt with daily–Charles, who had never set foot in Panama. “With your good judgment you will arrange things as they should be,” reads a line from one of his notes to Charles; “everything you do will have my approbation.”

Thus it was Charles, rather than his father, who departed for Panama in the wake of the Couvreux, Hersent defection–Charles and a new chief engineer, the first Directeur General.

* Trenor Park would have little chance to enjoy his new fortune. A year and a half later, in December 1882, en route from New York to Colón, he died on board the ship. The cause of death was reportedly an overdose of sedatives.

6
Soldiers Under Fire

“We are, gentlemen, soldiers under fire; let us salute
the comrade who falls in the battle, but let us think
only of the fight of tomorrow and of victory.”

–PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA

I

Jules Isidore Dingler–pronounced Danglay in French–was not impressive-looking. In his mid-forties, he was short and bald. He had small, round shoulders, a soft, round face, soft blue eyes, and a drooping mahogany-colored mustache. He might have been a bank clerk or a provincial wine merchant. The appearance suggested neither initiative nor resolution and the appearance was deceiving.

In his student days at the Polytechnique he had been a shining star, finishing near the top of his class and going on to the Ponts et Chaus-sees. As an engineer for the state he had risen rapidly to become a chef des Ponts et Chaussees, a very thorough professional accustomed to the multitudinous demands of large-scale public works. To Charles de Lesseps and his father, he seemed as qualified as anyone could be for the task at Panama; and unlike the three or four others whom they had approached with an offer, he alone had been willing to go. Concerning his own final decision in this regard, it would be said that he had an ambitious wife, that hers had been the deciding voice.

For the next two years, from early 1883 until the summer of 1885, he was to direct the largest, most ambitious engineering effort the world had as yet seen. His decisions were not to be the best always. Before sailing from France he also made the unfortunate declaration that once on the Isthmus he would prove that “only drunkards and the dissipated take the yellow fever and die there.” Still it would be a long time before a more effective chief engineer would be dispatched to Panama–not until Theodore Roosevelt sent John Stevens in 1905– and Jules Dingler was to pay a dreadful price for his devotion to the work.

Yet subsequent histories of the canal would have little to say for Dingler. Quite unjustly, his memorial in most accounts would be the big frame villa built for him on Ancon Hill– “la folie Dingler”

Charles and Director General Dingler reached the Isthmus on March 1, 1883, and were occasion for the predictable round of banquets and spirited oratory. The work was entering its “Second Great Stage”– “The Period of Construction” had begun. Champagne corks popped and Charles, sounding remarkably like his father, promised progress on all fronts. Ferdinand de Lesseps himself, declared the son, would return to oversee the work and a hundred chairs were shoved back in the dining room of the Grand Hotel as everyone rose to drink to the health of Le Grand Français some four thousand miles away in Paris.

Charles stayed on for another month. Dingler got directly to business in the office upstairs in the hotel, where by now the effects of the earthquake had been largely mended. He would begin by restoring order and confidence, both sadly lacking since the departure of Couvreux, Hersent. Paper work was in disarray. To date, one French writer observed, it had been an enterprise of passionate pioneers and mediocre accountants. Dingler was an organizer. Responsibilities needed clarifying; the work load had to be distributed. So at the outset a number of individuals accustomed to the comparative ease and convenience of the head office found themselves arbitrarily reassigned to one of the camps in the jungle. The word spread that the new man had no aversion to stepping on toes and at first chance several of those individuals most offended would take their revenge by spreading stories of the royal comforts Dingler had arranged for himself at company expense.

Dingier was not merely contemptuous of laggards and incompetents, but regarded them as cowardly, disloyal, less than true Frenchmen. “The purge continues,” he would inform Charles nearly a year later. “I can well imagine that in Paris you are getting echoes of the complaints of the victims . . . [but] I never [act] until I am sure of facts.” Later, again to Charles: “It was put into [their heads] that I had come to the Isthmus to martyrize them. Today they must realize that I have hatred towards no one except the idlers and the traitors.”

Having inspected the entire line, having examined all completed surveys, reports on soundings, he prepared a master plan for the canal, the first that had been made in all this time and in fact the only one ever made by the French.

Like all their surveys and maps, the plan was in the metric system. The line from Colón to Panama was 74 kilometers, including a deep-water channel into the Bay of Panama ending near the island of Naos. The bottom width of the canal was to be 22 meters (72 feet); the depth, 9 meters (29½ feet).

To confine the Chagres, a tremendous earth dam, one of the largest ever built, possibly 48 meters (157½ feet) high, was to be stretched across the river valley at Gamboa, several miles above the Barbacoas bridge. The river was the heart of the matter, Dingler wrote; it was “the great unknown.” He also had no doubt of success–“it only requires that we quadruple our efforts, which is absolutely possible.” The incoming tides from the Pacific could be handled by a tidal lock that would maintain a constant water level in the canal from Colón to Panama.

His most important change was to reduce the slope of the cutting– that is, he declared that the sides of the canal would have to be sloped back far more than previously foreseen, a change of tremendous consequence since it increased the so-called “cube” of the total excavation by 60 percent.

His estimate was that the final amount of earth and rock to be removed would amount to 120,000,000 cubic meters. This was 45,000,-000 cubic meters more than the Technical Commission had estimated, 74,000,000 cubic meters more than what had been prognosticated at Paris in 1879. Indeed, the difference between Dingler’s estimate and that made at the beginning in Paris was equal to the total amount of excavation required for the entire Suez Canal. Yet when, in the early fall of 1883, he returned to Paris to review the plan with de Lesseps and the advisory board, it was calmly approved in total. Notwithstanding so radical a reassessment of the task, de Lesseps declared no change either for the completion date or the projected cost. Everything was proceeding quite smoothly as planned, he said.

In May alone Dingler signed seventeen new contracts for excavation. Orders for equipment went out to Belgium, France, the United States. The numbers of steam shovels, locomotives, and flatcars in use were to be more than doubled, even tripled, in less than two years’ time. Ware-houses were built, machine shops, locomotive roundhouses, coal depots, a half mile of new docks. He was spending big money now. By September of 1883 the work force was increased to ten thousand men. By the end of the year there were thirteen thousand on the payroll. The harbor at Colón had become so crowded that inbound freighters sometimes had to wait weeks for a turn to unload.

Before he was finished, Dingler would sign up nearly thirty contractors, but the most impressive show was put on by Huerne, Slaven & Company, later known as the American Contracting and Dredging Company. The firm’s association with the canal predated Dingler, but it was in April 1883, about the time he was getting things in rein, that the monstrous Slaven dredges arrived.

Prosper Huerne, one of the partners, was a San Francisco architect who had contracted to build some of the French work camps and supervised repairs on the Grand Hotel. Slaven was the galvanizing force in the organization and a fascinating sample of the sort of individual such an undertaking could attract. Actually there were two Slavens, Moses and his brother, H. B. (Henry Bartholomew). They were Canadians who had settled in San Francisco, where H. B. established a drugstore. Moses, we are told, was a “mechanical engineer,” which could have meant any number of things. But H. B., the druggist, was the one in charge, and it was he who carried on at Panama, gathering in a fortune, after Moses died.

Neither of the Slavens nor Prosper Huerne knew the first thing about building a canal, and they never let that bother them. Hearing of the enormous contracts being let out by the French “and determined to have a finger in the canal pie,” H. B. had sent off bids for several miles of excavation and the bids were accepted. He found a financial backer in New York, a banker named Eugene Kelly, who had never met H. B. and knew nothing about him until H. B. walked into his office. Kelly put up $200,000.

The famous Slaven dredges were built and launched at Philadelphia, and getting them to Colón was a harrowing experience. Each machine resembled an immense wooden tank, square at both ends, about 120 feet long and 30 feet wide. At sea they had all the sailing qualities of a medium-sized barn. So long as the weather was calm, there was relatively little trouble, but towing one in a gale became a nightmare, especially for the men stationed on the dredge itself.

The first of the machines to arrive had been tied up at Colón only a week when it burned to the water’s edge, leaving nothing but a blackened hulk. After it were to come the Comte de Lesseps, the Prosper Huerne, the Nathan Appleton, the Jules Dingler, and miraculously none was lost en route. Once fitted out, with their booms and chains and iron buckets, they might have been fantastic war machines. Each dredge was powered by several steam engines, the largest to turn the great wheels by which an endless chain of iron buckets was kept in motion. The buckets, with a capacity of one cubic meter, ran to the top of a wooden tower, like a moving flight of stairs. At the top a blast of water washed the earth out through pipes, or “chutes,” four feet in diameter, that extended, like great dangling arms, 180 feet on both sides, or far enough to be clear of the working site.

The smaller engines were used to run the powerful force pump that sent the blast of water to the top of the tower, or to move the huge dredge forward, or to swing it from side to side, or to hoist or lower huge legs, or spuds, “by means of which she walked step by step into the material to be excavated.”

“The towers were from fifty to seventy feet high,” Tracy Robinson would recall, “and I often climbed one and another, and stood fascinated and thrilled upon the summit, watching what seemed more like some intelligent antediluvian monster revived.”

The Americans who ran the dredges–Crawford Douglas, Nathan Crowell, Captains Ward, Morton, Bardwell–were tough, independent men who lived on board, where they hung out their wash. A few had brought their wives with them, even children; a few had brought women who were merely listed as wives. Once everything was in order, smoke poured from stacks like those at a factory. The noisy bucket chains ran day and night.

For the new arrivals at Colón, the Slaven operation was the first and most impressive visible sign of actual canal construction, something Ferdinand de Lesseps had “very dextrously” considered (in the view of a correspondent for The Times of London). The gigantic American contrivances churning away at the front door, so to speak, were bound to have a favorable effect. De Lesseps had an abiding faith in machines and spoke often of how Alexandre Lavalley’s dredges had revolutionized the work at Suez. He had every confidence that at Panama still more extraordinary machines would work an even more astonishing success.

The wonderful thing was that the American dredges did make progress, and rapidly, starting inland from the mud flats of Limon Bay. Later, farther inland, difficulties would increase, the pace would slow as the ground became less easy to work, and of necessity the price would rise. All told the Slaven firm would be paid more than $14,000,-000 for its efforts. What its profits were remained a secret, since the company’s books were kept in New York. Long afterward, a French investigating committee would conclude that the firm cleared $7,000,-000. In any event, H. B. was never to return to his drugstore.

The Atlantic end was the easiest part of the work, and the progress there in the mud flats would have been the most conspicuous whichever firm had been fortunate enough to get that assignment. Still the Slaven firm alone, out of the two hundred-odd contractors that were ultimately involved, completed its allotted task on schedule and would account for as much of the total excavation as the five other largest contractors combined. Among the more curious facts about the French canal at Panama is that about a third of it was dug by Americans.

Excavation continued along the entire line, the work organized in three divisions: Limon Bay and the lower reaches of the Chagres rep-resented the first division; the second took in the upper Chagres and the hills between Matachin and Culebra; the third ran from Culebra to the approaches to the Bay of Panama. At the head of each division was a French engineer and there were a dozen or more contractors at work under any one of these men. In the lower Chagres and in the channel on the Pacific side the work was done almost entirely by dredges. In the first division, for example, a Dutch firm, Artigue et Sonderegger, had twenty dredges at work. These too were ladder dredges, Belgian-made and not so large or powerful as the Slaven machines, but more efficient and extremely well built. The dredges used off Panama City were a self-propelling marine type, constructed like a ship. They had been built in Scotland and came out to the Isthmus under their own steam.

In the uplands the work was done by steam shovel, pick and shovel, and wheelbarrow. It was there the army of black workers were concentrated, where in these first years, progress was made largely by hand, as at Suez. Wages were regarded as extremely good, about $1 to $1.50 a day, more money than most of the men had ever dreamed of making. Each worker was required to do a specific amount in a day– so many buckets of earth–but he could work at his own speed and do more if he wished, his pay being computed by the bucket.

Lieutenant Raymond Rodgers, an officer from an American gunboat stationed offshore, made a tour of the work in 1883 and described the canal as “fairly begun.” He had watched the dredges in action; he had been to the top of the fluviograph at Gamboa, a picturesque, brightly painted tower where watch was kept of the temperamental Chagres and where, on a small platform enclosed by a fancy gingerbread railing, he had been able to look out over the treetops as his French hosts expounded on their plans. At Matachin he watched a force of men drill and blast through solid rock. He was astonished by the “immense amount of machinery and material now on hand” and by the courtesy he was shown. A special train was put at his disposal. He was given maps, statistics. At Culebra a barefoot gang of workers stopped long enough to pose beside the most conspicuous piece of American equipment in view, an Osgood & McNaughton steam shovel made at Albany, New York. But seen from a nearby hilltop where Lieutenant Rodgers climbed for a panoramic view, the same machine was a mere toy, the line of excavation nearly lost in the tossing green hills.

Visitors were told that the rate of progress would soon exceed 1,000,000 cubic meters a month, then 2,000,000 cubic meters. In fact, the present rate was considerably less than 200,000 cubic meters– 146,000 in May, 156,000 in June. There was, moreover, one irrefutable cloud in the sky.

According to the company’s records 125 employees died in 1882, more than twice the number given for the first year. In 1883 there were 420 recorded deaths, or almost eight times the number given the first year. Yet such figures can be taken as only suggestive. Patients in the company hospitals were charged $1 a day, nearly a day’s wages. While the company covered this expense for its own employees, all but a fraction of the labor force worked for the contractors, not the company. Aware of what hospital expenses could amount to, familiar with the mortality rate inside the wards, the contractors were reluctant to finance such care and would even discharge a man at the first sign of illness to avoid the responsibility. Among the workers themselves the hospitals were regarded with abject horror, the common belief being that if a patient did not have malaria or yellow fever when he entered, he would very shortly. A hospital permit was considered little better than a ticket to the graveyard.*

So for all these reasons the majority of the sick never went near a hospital, and consequently, the majority of deaths never appeared in the record books. Dr. Gorgas would calculate that for every recorded death in the French hospitals there were at least two more outside that were not counted. In other words, the given casualty figures have to be multiplied by three: the toll in 1883 was closer to 1,300 than to 420.

It was the suffering and death of individuals, rather than aggregate numbers, that most affected those around them.

In the fall of 1883, when Dingler returned to the Isthmus after reviewing his plans with de Lesseps, he brought his family–Madame Dingler, a son, a daughter, and the daughter’s fiance. This, stressed the Bulletin, was the best possible proof of the director general’s perfect confidence in Panama. They moved into a large, comfortable house on the Avenida Central, just off Cathedral Plaza, the Casa Dingler, as it would be known henceforth, which was supposed to serve temporarily until the more elaborate quarters were built. They were a family of avid equestrians and Dingler, who enjoyed a little show, had arranged that each be provided with magnificent mounts brought over from France. (The diminutive ponies used locally would never have satisfied any self-respecting European horseman.) It was the dry season and there were family excursions into the hills, accompanied by servants with enormous picnic hampers. One old photograph shows his daughter, a pretty, dark-haired girl who appears to be about eighteen, sitting sidesaddle in full skirt and a little Panama hat.

But in January the daughter contracted yellow fever and died within a few days. Dingler was overcome with grief. “My poor husband is in a despair which is painful to see,” his wife wrote to Charles de Lesseps. “My first desire was to flee as fast as possible and carry far from this murderous country those who are left to me. But my husband is a man of duty and tries to make me understand that his honor is to the trust you have placed in him and that he cannot fail in his task without failing himself. Our dear daughter was our pride and joy.”

The death of the young woman had a profound effect on everyone, canal officials, workers, the local citizenry. Bishop Paul presided over the funeral in the crowded cathedral, and with the cathedral’s great discordant bells tolling, Dingler and the fiance rode at the head of a long procession to the cemetery.

A month later Dingler’s son, age twenty-one, showed signs of the dreaded disease. In three days he too was dead. Some weeks after, it was Dingler who wrote to Charles:

I cannot thank you enough for your kind and affectionate letter. Mme. Dingler who [knows] that she is for me the only source of affection in this world, controls herself with courage, but she is deeply shaken. . . . We attach ourselves to life in making the canal our only occupation; I say “we” because Mme. Dingler accompanies me in all my excursions and follows with interest the progress of the work.

Presently the fiance died, also of yellow fever. By summer, forty-eight officers of the canal company had died of yellow fever alone, and according to one American naval officer, laborers were dying at a rate of about two hundred a month.

Still the work went ahead. Travelers crossing by train were amazed by the spectacle. It was true, they wrote; a canal really was being built at Panama. Buildings were going up almost everywhere one looked. Hundreds of acres of jungle were being chopped back to make room for more. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was being unloaded at Colon. More and more young French recruits were arriving, more engineers, more doctors, nurses, more boats from Jamaica, their decks solid with black men. By May upwards of nineteen thousand people were at work and the payroll was running to 200,000 francs ($40,000) a day.

In Paris the fearful death toll was no longer secret, despite the uniform silence of the press on the matter. Too many parents had been informed of the death of their sons. Among professional engineers the tragedies of the Dingler family were taken especially to heart. Older faculty members at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees were now privately advising graduates not to go to Panama, saying it would be suicidal. Still there was never a shortage of able volunteers. Indeed, the young men who came over the sea to Colón were the pick of the best-trained technicians. For them the canal was a stirring opportunity, a “Cause”–grand in scale, glorious in concept, French– and they sailed as if to battle, as they themselves said repeatedly. They were warriors bearing the banner of France. Discomforts, dangers, the likelihood of a miserable death on the wrong side of the world, these, wrote Philippe Bunau-Varilla, only “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.”

Philippe Bunau-Varilla merits a great deal of attention. Everything considered, he is one of the most fascinating figures in the entire Panama story, as important and controversial as Ferdinand de Lesseps, as time would tell. And it is fair to say, as his admirers have, that without him there would have been no canal at Panama. Because he survived the so-called French years and wrote extensively, drawing on his experiences, he also provided the fullest account we have of the French effort seen from the point of view of the elite young French technician, the man upon whom, presumably, the fate of the enterprise, not to mention the national honor, rested. And though his declarations of faith in the task, his ardor for the historic civilizing mission of France, would seem foolishly high-blown in another later age, more like lines from a melodrama of his time, they appear to have been both sincere and representative.

In his last year at the Polytechnique the young man had sat spellbound in the front row when de Lesseps, newly returned from his triumphant Panama tour, came to lecture on the great task ahead. In 1884, having finished at the Ecole des Ponts et Chausees, and having served briefly in North Africa, he sailed for Colón on the Washington (sister ship of the Lafayette) at the same time Jules and Madame Dingler were returning from a home leave.

He was a small man. He stood only five feet four, which was shorter even than Dingler, and probably weighed no more than 130 pounds. However, he had a square, high brow, a good chin, extremely pale blue eyes, a luxuriant dark-red mustache, and his posture was always perfect. He was, as well, proud, ambitious, phenomenally energetic, blatantly self-confident, and, for all that, quite likable, in an eager and direct way. His age was twenty-six, a fact even the mustache failed to camouflage.

When he became a celebrity in the United States years later, it would be said that he was from a prominent, wealthy Paris family. But according to his registration records at the Ecole Polytechnique he was the son of Pamela Caroline Bunau and of a pere inconnu, unknown father, which can only mean that he was an illegitimate child. He was registered, moreover, as plain Philippe Jean Bunau. His mother, the records show, was the widow of someone named Varilla, but apparently Philippe was born well after Varilla’s death, or at least long enough so that she was obliged to give her son her maiden name. The widow Varilla is also recorded as rentiere, meaning she had some kind of in-come or pension of her own. However, it could not have amounted to very much, since Philippe is listed as a scholarship student. In addition, he is registered as a Protestant and by the time he finished the Poly-technique he had added Varilla to his own name.

No sooner had he reached the Isthmus than he was made a division engineer in charge of operations at Culebra and the Pacific end, which immediately set him off as somebody to watch. (Dingier appears to have been as impressed by him on the voyage out as was he by Dingler.) The advance thereafter was to be remarkable. Why in the name of God would he want to go to Panama? the old librarian at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees had asked in Paris. “As an officer runs to it when he hastens to the battlefield,” Bunau-Varilla answered, “and not as the coward who flees from the sorrows of life.” Once there, seeing one compatriot die after another, he would exhort the living that they were soldiers under fire who think only of the victory to be won. Disdain of peril was the surest safeguard. There was nothing good men and true could not accomplish when committed to a Noble Task. He saw them all as figures in a romance, embarked on what he was to call The Great Adventure of Panama. They were more themselves, better men, in this wild field of combat.

For Bunau-Varilla, for all the younger engineers, Dingler remained an inspirational figure. Dingler was “bold, loyal, scientific, and stimulating.” Dingler bore his suffering with grave dignity and courage. Dingler was determined to succeed. The exorbitant salary he was supposedly receiving, the various trappings of position he fancied, seem never to have offended the sensibilities of any of them.

Liveried servants were in attendance at the offices on Cathedral Plaza. Elaborate stables had been built. Horses and expensive carriages had been imported from New York for staff use. The stablemaster was a full-fledged baron. For inspection tours back and forth on the railroad there was a special Pullman car that supposedly cost $42,000. And on Ancon Hill stood the famous private villa, nearly completed, an imposing structure with mansard roofs and spacious verandas.

Wolfred Nelson reported Dingler’s salary to be $50,000, that one French engineer had a pigeon house put up at a cost to the stockholders of $1,500, that another official had a private bathhouse built for $40,000, again at company expense.

The most colorful source for the supposed extravagances perpetrated under Dingler was a little book published by an embittered stockholder named Henri Marechal, who visited the Isthmus the winter of 1884 and who enjoyed spreading nonsense.

In one part of the jungle he had seen men at work building beautiful avenues and ornamental clearings, “a kind of miniature Bois de Boulogne, where the officials entertain at charming picnic parties and make daily pleasure excursions on the company’s horses. . . . Ladies, possibly somewhat too swarthy but not too strictly virtuous, render these jaunts more agreeable and are repaid for their services by being carried on the company’s payrolls as laborers.” He declared that since the dump cars sent from Europe proved to be too high for the average workman to reach, the company, at great expense, had sent a delegation to Mexico to investigate a tribe of giants whose existence had been reported by some practical joker.

The truth was considerably less sensational. The Pullman car, though hardly a necessity, was not the sumptuous affair pictured in later accounts and seems to have been little used. The horses too were seldom used and were soon sold off. The house, though very grand by Panama standards, probably cost about $100,000-not $1,000,000, as later claimed–and because of the tragedies in the Dingler family it was never lived in. Dingler’s salary was $20,000, not $50,000.

That some ladies “not too strictly virtuous” may have been carried on the payroll is certainly possible. Simple mismanagement was conspicuous enough, according to dozens of reports; the company was swindled repeatedly in small ways. One common deception concerned the delivery of coal at Colon. When a coal ship arrived, only part of the cargo would be landed, but vouchers were made for the full amount. The ship then departed, to return again with what supposedly was another load, for which another voucher would be given, the result being that the company paid for the same shipment twice, even three times.

And certainly money was wasted on needless, even foolish material comforts. But for those then struggling against the jungle and the heat, life was never easy and often extremely grim. In retrospect there is even something pathetic about Dingler’s gestures toward a semblance of civilization as he knew it. How grand could one Pullman car have been on a railroad forty-seven and a half miles long?

The intensity of the boredom these men faced after hours, the longing for home, can be imagined. There were no restaurants or cafes of quality, no theaters in the city, no galleries, no libraries, never a concert. A walk on the old seawall, as one of them recalled, was as pleasant as could be expected, “but after one has strolled up and down it every day . . . for several months . . . it ceases to provide more than mild diversion.” Even to sit and read at night could be a misery, since the smallest lamp or candle drew swtarms of insects.

What praise and respect they did get would be a long time coming– from the American engineers who were to follow years later, none of whom ever deprecated the French work, despite all that appeared in the papers, all that had been long since fixed in the public mind. Among critics of the work, as an American naval officer observed, not one in a hundred would have the courage to go out and stay in such a place. The French engineers, he said, were “young, zealous, and energetic . . . and no one can appreciate more than these men the difficulties that lie in their path. Instead of censure and detraction, they deserve the highest praise and respect.”

But the image of vain, spendthrift, immoral officials squandering company funds, heedless of the misery of others, blind to the hand-writing on the wall, was to be too useful an image later, in France no less than in the United States.

II

The task to be faced daily in the field grew ever more horrendous. Presumably the work would go more smoothly with time and experience, but not so. Hard as the engineers pushed, as seasoned as many of them became to the sweltering climate, the incessant rains, the going was always more difficult than before, the technical problems ever larger and more perplexing. Maddeningly, some problems seemed quite insoluble.

The river remained the worst of these. Success, as the best of the French engineers understood perfectly, depended on somehow containing and controlling the Chagres, yet it remained, in Dingler’s phrase, “the great unknown.” The dam he proposed to throw in its path at Gamboa was a reasonable solution, but only in the abstract. No adequate rock formation had been located upon which to found such an enormous structure. Nobody had devised a realistic means for handling the tremendous overflow there would be when the river was in flood. After one storm in May of 1884, the fluviograph at Gamboa had recorded a rise of ten feet in twenty-four hours. On July 18 and 19 of the same year, the river came up fourteen feet.

Visitors were told that plans for the dam were not available as of the moment. One French engineer privately declared that the whole idea was hopeless. As the work went bravely on, as the river responded to the turn of the seasons, as the elder de Lesseps kept insisting in Paris, Micawber-fashion, that something would turn up–his man of genius with the perfect answer–nobody on the Isthmus honestly knew what in the world might be done. So this most vexatious of problems was simply put aside.

More immediate and much more discouraging were the slides in the cut through Culebra, which grew steadily worse the further the excavation progressed. For those in charge, they were the most infuriating part of the entire undertaking. Nearly twenty years later an American named S. W. Plume, an old man by then, would shake his head in dismay as he tried to describe for a Senate committee the troubles the French had encountered at Culebra. He had spent a lifetime building railroads and canals throughout Central and South America, but never had he seen anything like Panama “in the French time.” He had been employed by the Panama Railroad and kept an eye, he said, on just about everything that went on. Once Dingler had asked him to make a personal inspection of the operation at Culebra.

“The whole top of the hill, sir, is covered with boiling springs,” he would recall. “It is composed of a clay that is utterly impossible for a man to throw off his shovel once he gets it on. He had to have a little scraper to shove it off.” Nothing they had tried had kept the hill from sliding. “It won’t stay there . . .”

Why? he was asked.

“The rainy season will saturate the earth and it will slough off.”

“Did it do so while you were there?”

“Yes, we had a cut right alongside of where the canal was going to be built and it sloughed off, not only over the top of our track, but we found it was going to be so expensive to move it that I cut the track away there and laid another one. And a year or so afterwards the same thing took place and I laid another track, and where the present track is there are two underneath.

“. . . when I was there at Culebra that week, my house was up on the hill about four hundred to five hundred feet from the canal and I got up one morning and come out and the land had gone off and left a crack there two to three feet wide, and I did not say anything, but I knew what it was. . . . The whole side of that mountain is going down into that canal. . . . Every rainy season, whenever it rains a little, the earth becomes saturated and it slides right off on this strata of blue clay.”

“It slides on the blue clay?”

“It slides on the blue clay.”

In somewhat more precise terms the Culebra uplands can be described as a disorderly combination of several geological formations, some sedimentary, others volcanic in origin–a generally unstable combination that was bound to mean a great deal of trouble. The oldest of these formations dated from the geological time period known as the Oligocene, making them roughly thirty million years old. Probably the Isthmus had its beginnings in the Oligocene as a string of islands in a shallow sea. A land bridge formed, and in the long geological periods that followed, this land bridge sank back below the sea at least four different times. In the late Pleistocene, the epoch of the glaciers-yesterday in geological time–the land was elevated to several hundred feet above its present level, then subsided again to perhaps thirty feet below the present level. The uplifting that followed began within a thousand years of the arrival of the canal builders (as evidenced by freshly raised old sea beaches) and the uplifting was still going on.

The whole history of the ground underfoot, wherever one went on the Isthmus, was of change and instability. Within the forty-plus miles between Colón and Panama City was a total of seventeen different rock formations, six major geologic faults, five major cores of volcanic rock.

A formation at Culebra, one taking its name from the hill itself, was found to consist of beds of soft, dark shales, marls, and carbonaceous clays–the blue clays S. W. Plume remembered–of beds of limestone and sandstone, sandwiched among thin layers of lignite. Such material drilled and blasted readily enough, as the engineers discovered, but then other formations were composed largely of volcanic or igneous rock–of dark, fine-grained basalt, of andesite or diorite or the glassy rhyolite, all rocks much like granite. The great volcanic core of Culebra Hill, for example, was solid basalt.

It was endlessly fascinating terrain to a geologist, but for the engineer it was an unrelieved nightmare. The worst troubles were in what was called the Cucaracha formation, composed chiefly of dark-green and reddish clays, lava mud flows, gravel, some shales. The first of the Cucaracha slides occurred on the eastern side of the Culebra Cut, where the uppermost layers of porous clay, layers overlying relatively impervious rock stratum, were from ten to forty feet thick. In the rainy season these clays became thoroughly saturated, slick and heavy, with a consistency of soap left overnight in water. But the saturation stopped at the underlying rock, and the build-up of water created a slippery zone along the whole plane of contact. If that plane happened to be tilted toward the Cut, then it was merely a matter of time until the clay began to move, by simple force of gravity, down into the Cut. Tremendous masses of the upper stratum would let go with all the effect of an avalanche, carrying with them whole sections of track, steam shovels, anything caught in the way.

In the dry months the sides of the Cut remained reasonably stable. But always with the return of the rains the slides resumed. (And to grasp the magnitude of the problem, one must always keep in mind what those rains meant–thirteen inches in the month of June 1884, for instance, sixteen inches in August, ten inches in September, twenty-two inches in October.)

In an attempt to alleviate the problem, the French dug an extended system of drainage ditches parallel to the Cut to channel the rainwater away from the exposed slopes. But such efforts had little lasting effect. Year after year hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of mud and rock came thundering down into the open Cut, blotting out months of work. Everything that came down had to be laboriously cleared away. Progress slowed, or stopped; contractors’ estimates had to be drastically altered.

Removing the mud and debris was only part of it, for the one sure way to prevent further slides was to keep slicing the sides of the Cut back and back; that is, to stabilize the slopes by making them less steep, flattening them out until they had reached an angle of repose, the point at which the material would remain at rest of its own accord. Yet as far back as they cut the slopes, it was never enough. The amount of digging involved, furthermore, was always greater than one might imagine, for the reason that the canal was being dug through a saddle between steep hills. So as the Cut was made steadily broader at the top, its sides, against the bordering hills, rose steadily higher. Or to express it another way, every foot added to the width of the Cut at the top increased its depth as measured from the brow of the Cut.

This meant that the volume of excavation, the total cube, was being compounded steadily and enormously. The deeper the Cut was dug, the worse the slides were, and so the more the slopes had to be carved back. The more digging done, the more digging there was to do. It was a work of Sisyphus on a scale such as engineers had never before faced.

Simple mathematics made the prospects appear overwhelming. Prior to Dingler’s initial reappraisal of the situation, all estimates on the quantity of excavation to be done were figured on an angle for the sides of the canal of one on one–one meter back for every one meter deep–a slope of 45 degrees in other words. In actual practice it appeared as though the sides would have to be one on four–four back for every one deep. So if Culebra Hill was 339½ feet above sea level and the canal was to be 29½ feet deep, this would give a total depth to the Cut of 369 feet. The breadth of the bottom was to be 72 feet; the breadth at the water line, 90 feet. If from that point upwards, with sides sloped back at one on four, then the final Cut would have to be three-quarters of a mile across

To further complicate matters there remained the very basic problem of what to do with the mountains of rock and earth being excavated, and it was a problem the French failed to solve.

Their method of excavation at Culebra was first to carve off any intervening hilltops along the projected line, then start their giant steam excavators, their steam shovels, and their labor gangs working along in the direction of the line, digging down in a series of stepped terraces, each about sixteen feet wide and sixteen feet deep–the depth to which the excavators could reach. (These machines looked much like a big railroad car with tall smokestacks and long iron ladders that hung down on one side, each ladder supporting an endless chain of dirt buckets. They worked on the same principle as a dredge, but were borne by tracks rather than water.) The spoil was then hauled away by trains of little dump cars (Decauville dump cars with a carrying capacity of 4½ cubic meters) to some convenient adjacent valley, where, from improvised tracks run along the brow of the valley, the spoil was dumped over the side until it built up sufficiently below to create a terrace. The track was then taken up and relaid below. So in time the dumping grounds, like the Culebra Cut, became a vast series of long, horizontal terraces of raw-looking mud.

As solutions went, this system was quick and economical, which was what the contractors wanted. And the contractors, as Bunau-Varilla noted, were “absolute masters when it came to choosing their method of work.”

The trouble was that the plan was fundamentally flawed. The terraced dumps were less stable even than the slopes of the Cut. When the torrential rains struck, whole terraces slipped out of line, track was dislodged, buried. The entire system broke down. Excavation would have to stop until things were back in order and the dirt trains could start running again, as hundreds of men with crowbars and shovels struggled knee-deep in the gummy morass.

Natural watercourses were blocked, water gathered in great pools, acres of new swamplands were formed–all perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

The time lost, the effort wasted, grew to alarming proportions. But for some strange reason the French never figured a better way. It never dawned on them that digging the Cut was more a problem of transportation–of moving the spoil out of the way–than of actual excavation. They never saw that the Panama Railroad was the key, which is especially ironic considering the heavy price that had been paid to get control of the railroad. That de Lesseps had neglected to send to Panama a single specialist in railroads was among his gravest errors.

Predictably, as progress grew more difficult, contractors, and especially the smaller ones, grew obstinate, peevish, or quit outright. Invariably the next contractors to take on the same tasks wanted more advantageous terms. Since few of them could afford the kind of equipment needed, the canal company bought the machines, which were then rented out. And as much machinery as there was, it was never enough or, often, it was not exactly suited for the particular job at hand.

The canal company, in addition to the machines, was also obliged to furnish–that is, to deliver to the Isthmus–the necessary labor and to provide adequate housing. The contractors then had only to pay the men’s wages. Any failure on the part of the canal company to provide either men or machines could give a contractor excuse enough to back out of his contract if it was proving unprofitable, or to hold on to a profitable arrangement irrespective of his failure to perform as agreed. The large Anglo-Dutch Company–its formal name was Cutbill, de Longo, Watson, and Van Hattum–had the Culebra contract and was bound to remove 700,000 cubic meters a month. As yet it had managed to remove 100,000 cubic meters in a month. Still it hung on, subcontracting the most troublesome tasks to more and more small operators. One high hill on the western slope of the saddle soon had so many different contractors laboring away that it became known as Contractors Hill.

Across from this same hill, on the eastern side of the Cut, stood Gold Hill, so named and widely known because supposedly it was one of the canal company’s greatest assets–enough to offset all mounting costs. According to one prospectus issued in Paris, company officials had been informed that “this mountain is full of gold and it is believed that the ore from this place alone will be worth more than will be the total cost of the canal construction.”

By October 1884 there were 19,243 employees at work, of whom 16,249 were blacks. To order and distribute supplies, to keep watch on contractors, to keep the books and see to the needs of this labor force, naturally required a small army of clerks, paymasters, stenographers-six to seven hundred in office help–most of whom were French. And French bureaucracy, it was found, could flourish no less in the jungle than at home. File clerks were given the title of Keeper of the Archives. Among the supplies being landed at Colón were crates weighing hundreds of pounds filled with nothing but pen points. “There is,” wrote Wolfred Nelson, “enough bureaucratic work, and there are enough officers on the Isthmus to furnish at least one dozen first-class republics with officials for all their departments.”

Now, too, more seriously, observers with technical backgrounds had begun reporting that the actual work was not going so well as supposed. Completion of the canal according to present plans was highly doubtful, Navy Lieutenant Robert M. G. Brown informed his superiors in Washington. A writer for the American Engineer, after several months on the Isthmus, figured that at the present rate of progress twenty-four years would be needed to finish the canal and charged that the French press was being bribed to withhold the truth. In October 1884 a Captain Bedford Clapperton Pirn, of the British Navy, reported in a confidential memorandum to the American Secretary of the Navy that de Lesseps’ dream of a canal at sea level was plainly impossible. Pirn’s only praise, after an extended tour of the work, was for “the gallant employees who have struggled manfully to carry out the wishes of their chief . . .”

On New Year’s Eve, 1884, the last of Jules Dingler’s family, Madame Dingler, died of yellow fever. It is not known how long her agony lasted, but the morning following her death, though so grief-stricken he could barely speak, Dingler was at his desk at the customary hour. Later, following the funeral, he took all the family’s horses, including his own, up into one of the mountain ravines and shot them.

The toll in human lives was growing ever more ghastly, unlike any-thing anyone had foreseen, except possibly Godin de Lepinay. Eighteen eighty-five was to be the worst year. Probably more people died then than at any other time during the French regime. In the years to follow, the ravages of yellow fever, malaria, typhoid fever, smallpox, pneumonia, dysentery, beriberi, food poisoning, snakebite, sunstroke, were only a shade less appalling. Ordinarily on the Isthmus, yellow fever came and went in cycles of two to three years. Now, unaccountably, it never went away and there was not a thing anyone could do. Malaria, ever present as always, remained the deadliest killer.

New arrivals, unaccustomed to the climate, suffered worst. The files of the Panama Star & Herald carry the obituaries of individual French officials who had been on the Isthmus so brief a time as to be scarcely known. A new French consul, Paul Savalli, died on July 25, 1885, having only arrived at his post. Louis Frachen, a young engineer of the Ecole Centrale who had come to do a special inventory of equipment in use, died miserably of yellow fever on August 10. Two division chiefs named Petit and Sordoiliet, who had sailed from France on the same ship, died of yellow fever on the same day. They had been on the Isthmus two weeks. There were scores of others. Of one dead engineer, Henri Berthaut, the Star & Herald could say only that at age twenty-six he “gave great promise of attaining distinction in his profession.”

Bunau-Varilla estimated that of every one hundred new arrivals at least twenty died, and of those who survived, only about twenty were physically strong enough to do any real work; “and many of that number had lost the best of their intellectual value.” (Whether he was speaking of all new arrivals, black as well as white, is not clear.) Others calculated that of every four people who came out from France at least two, often three, died of fever.

But these were neat mathematical averages, whereas numerous individual experiences recalled later were far more tragic. One French engineer told William Gorgas of sailing to Colón with a party of seventeen young Frenchmen. In a month he was the sole survivor. Of thirty-three Italian workers who arrived in 1885, twenty-seven were dead within three weeks. In October 1886, thirty French engineers arrived at Colón and in less than a month thirteen had died of what de Lesseps once called the “supposed deadliness” of Panama. There were times when the death toll from all causes ran to forty a day.

Bunau-Varilla would write of ships riding at anchor in Colón harbor without a soul on board. Their crews were all dead of yellow fever. Of the initial group of French nuns who had come to serve in the hospital at Ancon–twenty-four Daughters of Charity, wearing the big white, winged coifs that had earned their order the affectionate name “God’s geese”–only two had survived, one of whom, by great fortune, was the head nurse, or Mother Superior, Sister Marie Rouleau. A woman of extraordinary courage and stamina, Marie Joseph Louise Rouleau had entered the order in 1868, when still in her early twenties, at the hospital at Versailles; and in 1877, or several years in advance of the first French engineers, she had been sent to Panama. Throughout the worst of the yellow-fever years, indeed throughout all the French era in Panama, she would remain a leading figure, known to everyone.

A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported that the mortality rate in the hospital wards–roughly 75 percent–was a subject never discussed in the presence of a patient. There were “no long faces” at the Ancon hospital and Sister Marie was “one of those rare women whose personal zeal is contagious.” At the foot of each bed hung a card giving the patient’s name, his job, the nature of his illness. Rarely was the real disease listed if it was known to be fatal. Fievre jaunt was usually put down as gastritis.

So swiftly were patients dying, so desperate was the need for bed space, that in his final minutes of life, a dying man sometimes saw his own coffin brought in. It was even claimed that the bodies placed in the coffins and carried off were not always without life. When one exhausted chief physician on the staff was sent home to France for a rest, he was in such an unsettled mental state that he had to be locked in his cabin.

For the sick who never made it to the hospital–for the vast majority, that is–the end was frequently even more gruesome. The accusation that black workers were sometimes disposed of in the dumping grounds–simply rolled down an embankment, then buried beneath several tons of spoil–appears in several accounts and is undoubtedly based on fact.

The following account by the Tribune man, a guest in a Panama City hotel, is also a reliable one most likely, the buzzard and all:

. . . Sitting on your veranda late at night you see the door of the little adobe house across the way open. The woman of the house, who lodges two or three canal employees, peers cautiously out into the street, re-enters the house, and when she comes out again drags something over the threshold, across the narrow sidewalk, and leaves it lying in the dirty street. When she closes the door again there is no noise but the splash of tide. . . . Soon it grows lighter. A buzzard drops lazily down from the roof of the cathedral and perches on something in the street. The outlines become more distinct. You walk down, drive away the bird who flies sullenly back to his watchtower, and stand looking in the quick dawn of the tropics at what was yesterday a man–a month before a hopeful man, sailing out of Havre. He is dead of yellow fever.

From Colón the Panama Railroad ran a regular funeral train out to Monkey Hill each morning. “Over to Panama,” S. W. Plume would recall in his memorable testimony, “it was the same way–bury, bury, bury, running two, three, and four trains a day with dead Jamaica niggers all the time. I never saw anything like it. It did not matter any difference whether they were black or white, to see the way they died there. They die[d] like animals.”

The rate of sickness throughout the French operations (as opposed to the mortality rate) would be as impossible to determine accurately from surviving records as the mortality rate; but it was extremely large. A conservative estimate made later by American physicians was not less than a third of the total force at any given time. So in a year such as 1884, with more than nineteen thousand at work, probably six thousand were sick.

Company doctors advised staying out of the hot sun and to avoid getting wet, which was about like advising an arctic explorer to avoid the cold. New arrivals were warned against the night air and were told not to eat fruit. A few doctors were frank to say that it did not matter greatly what a person did or ate or drank and that nobody understood the cause of the fevers anyway. With sardonic unanimity it was agreed among physicians and employees alike that the only safe course was to get out, to leave the Isthmus as quickly as possible.

One of the many who did was the painter Paul Gauguin, whose entrance and exit date from a later time, but whose feelings about the experience were no doubt shared by hundreds of others. Gauguin came out from France with another young painter, Charles Laval, in 1887. It was Gauguin’s first attempt to escape the atmosphere of Europe. The dream was to buy some land on Taboga and live “on fish and fruit for nothing . . . without anxiety for the day or for the morrow,” as he wrote. But he was broke by the time he reached Colón, and so like countless other drifters who wound up on the Isthmus-tropical tramps, as they were called–he took a job on the canal as a common laborer. (Though the vast majority of the labor force was black, the company would hire anyone who looked the least fit and willing.) The ordeal of swinging a pick all day in such heat was like nothing he had ever experienced. “I have to dig . . . from five-thirty in the morning to six in the evening, under tropical sun and rain,” he wrote to his wife. “At night I am devoured by mosquitoes.” His partner, Laval, had been making money doing portraits of canal officials, but Gauguin would have none of it, since only portraits done “in a special and very bad way” would sell.

Land on Taboga, he discovered, like land anywhere near the canal, was priced far beyond reach. He felt himself weakened–“poisoned”– by the wet heat and he took an ardent dislike to the Panamanians. At one point he was arrested for urinating in public in Panama City. His defense, that the street was nothing but an open sewer anyway, failed to sway the arresting policeman who marched him across town at gunpoint to pay a fine of one piastre (four francs). His one desire thereafter was to earn enough money to leave and in another month he was happily sailing for Martinique.

III

Central to the health problem all along, the French recognized, was their lack of jurisdiction over the two cities through which everything and everyone had to pass and wherein a sizable number of their employees lived and worked. Without jurisdiction, there could be no control over sanitation in either Colón or Panama City, and as things stood, sanitation at even the most primitive level was still virtually nonexistent in both places. Colon–port of entry for all new recruits from France, for the thousands of workers from Jamaica, for all shipments of food from New York, and where everybody took the train to Panama City or to points along the way–grew more vile by the year. Compared to Colón, wrote one French journalist, the ghettos of White Russia, the slums of Toulon or Naples, would appear models of cleanliness. There were still no proper sewers in Colón, no bathrooms. Garbage and dead cats and horses were dumped into the streets and the entire place was overrun with rats of phenomenal size. And since yellow fever was understood to be a filth disease, Colón was looked upon as its prime breeding ground.

Where the French did have control, the contrast was striking. Their town of Christophe-Colomb, side by side with Colón, was neat and clean, as different as if separated by a hundred miles.

Then early in 1885 tragedy struck, taking everyone by surprise and eliminating the sanitation problem at Colón in about the most thorough fashion possible. On March 31, with a strong wind blowing out of the north, the town went up in flames.

The fire was the climax of what was to be called the “Prestan Uprising,” a brief reign of terror that was set off by another bloody affair in Panama City, the work of the former Panamanian president, Rafael Aizpuru. Though the French had been uneasy from the beginning about the incendiary quality of Panamanian politics–it will be recalled that de Lesseps was warned his first day on the Isthmus about Aizpuru –the violence of what happened seems to have caught them completely off guard.

Pedro Prestan was a tiny Haitian mulatto with a deep-seated hatred for foreigners, white men and white North Americans most especially. It was a feeling shared by Aizpuru apparently. Still there appears to have been no direct connection between the two. As with most political upheavals on the Isthmus, the situation had its origins in the politics of distant Bogotá and was somewhat complicated. In essence, here is what happened.

Rafael Nunez, a major political figure for years, a former Liberal turned Conservative, had been elected to the presidency of Colombia and this had touched off insurrections in a number of places, including Cartagena and Buenaventura. Government troops stationed on the Isthmus were rushed off to Cartagena and Buenaventura, leaving at Colón only a token force of a few hundred men. With Panama City thus unguarded, Aizpuru, a Liberal who had been waiting his chance, led his “army” of some 250 men into the city and, after much destruction and loss of life, seized control. The loyal troops at Colón, under an officer named Gonima, then crossed by train to drive Aizpuru out. Aizpuru took refuge in the hills for the time being, but at Colón, with Gonima gone, Prestan went into action.

At this stage Prestan’s band probably did not number more than a dozen barefoot men armed with machetes and perhaps a pistol or two. Yet with the French all about and an American gunboat, Galena, sitting in the harbor, he commandeered the Colón prefecture and arranged substantial “loans” from several Front Street merchants. He moved swiftly, displaying, as most everyone had to concede later, considerable ability as a leader. Nobody did a thing to stop him.

On the morning of March 29 the Pacific Mail steamer Colon arrived from New York with a contraband shipment of arms consigned to “order.” Prestan and his men marched to the Pacific Mail wharf and demanded that the weapons be turned over. When the order was refused by the Pacific Mail superintendent, an American named William Connor, Prestan seized him and five other Americans–the general agent of the steamship line, the American consul, the superintendent of the Panama Railroad, and two officers from the Galena, one of whom was sent out to the ship to tell his commanding officer that no hostages would be released until Prestan got the guns. Should the American commander try to land any men, Prestan said, he would kill the hostages and every other American in Colon.

The ship’s commander, Theodore F. Kane, was in a difficult position. The presence of the Galena in the harbor was a routine matter (as part of the 1846 agreement with Colombia), but he was under instructions not to intercede in local matters without express orders from Washington or in the event that railroad property or services were plainly in jeopardy. Across the Isthmus, in the Bay of Panama, two more American ships stood by, Shenandoah and Wachusett, with similar instructions.

The American consul saw himself in a far more difficult position. Convinced that Prestan meant what he said, he ordered the Pacific Mail agent, a man named Dow, to surrender the arms. Hearing this, Prestan let the men go. Only now, before Prestan knew what was happening, Commander Kane brought the Galena up to the wharf, boarded the Colon, and towed her a safe distance out into the harbor. The incensed Prestan made Connor and Dow prisoners again, which is the way things stood by nightfall.

At first light the next day Kane landed a force of a hundred men. Yet to the aggravation of the French officials and the American rail-road people, all of whom were in a great frenzy over what might happen to their property, he refused to take Prestan or to intervene in any fashion. Prestan’s force by now had increased to several hundred. word of this reached Panama City, and by dark, Gonima’s troops were on their way back by train.

To avoid a pitched battle in Colón, the railroad superintendent, George Burt, required that Gonima disembark with his troops at Monkey Hill. So before dawn the morning of March 31, taking Connor and Dow along as a shield, Prestan marched out to Monkey Hill. A savage battle back and forth across the tracks lasted about an hour, during which the two American hostages managed to fade into the jungle. Then Prestan was on the run. Falling back on Colón, he set fire to the city and in a few hours there was little left but heaps of smoldering ashes. Only the brick offices of the railroad, the steamship offices, the stone church, and a fringe of buildings along the beach were still standing. Eighteen people had been killed. Perhaps eight thousand had been made homeless.

The seesaw effect continued. At the moment Prestan was being routed at Monkey Hill, Aizpuru was again on the rampage in Panama City at a cost of another twenty-five lives. Again triumphant, he declared himself Panama’s supreme authority.

A desperate George Burt called on the American naval officers to do something. Aizpuru’s men had been tampering with the railroad’s switches, he said, and they had boarded and robbed a train. Prestan had ripped up track, cut the telegraph lines, derailed an engine. So with this, men were landed from the Shenandoah and the Wachusett and order was quickly restored all along the railroad. On April 10, the Tennessee and the Swatara, under the command of Rear Admiral James Jouett, arrived at Colón with a battalion of Marines.

In Panama City, crowds gathered in Cathedral Plaza to watch the Americans parade about in their smart uniforms, wheeling a Gatling gun this way and that. Only once was there any real excitement. A fight broke out between some of the local citizens; the Gatling was fired across the plaza at an elevation to clear the tops of the buildings and the plaza was emptied in seconds.

Troops were sent across the Isthmus on improvised armored cars, flatcars fitted out with half-inch steel boiler plate and more Gatling guns. Marine guards in white sun helmets were posted at the Barbacoas bridge and at Matachin, but nothing more happened along the line. In Colón fifty-eight people were rounded up by government troops, tried for treason, and shot. Many, it would be said later, had been quite innocent.

In Panama City, Aizpuru claimed to have adequate force to maintain order on his own, but his invitations to the American officers to come to the Governor’s Palace to confer were ignored. He then offered to declare Panama independent if the United States would recognize his government, but this offer too was ignored. “You have no part to perform in the political or social disorder of Colombia,” Admiral Jouett had been explicitly instructed in a telegram from the Navy Department before landing, “and it will be your duty to see that no irritation or unfriendliness shall arise from your presence on the Isthmus.” He was to protect American interests without offense to the sovereign, Colombia.

On April 24 Aizpuru met with the American officers at the Central Hotel and surrendered. A few days later more Colombian troops arrived by ship and in another week most of the American forces had been withdrawn from the Isthmus.

Prestan, who had fled into the jungle after firing Colón, was captured and brought back to await trial. The grim job of cleaning up, of tending to the injured and homeless, the whole effort of rebuilding Colón from scratch–a job that would be accomplished with amazing speed–fell largely to the American railroad officials.

The canal company had suffered no physical damage to speak of. Close as it was to Colón, Christophe-Colomb had not been touched. When, during Aizpuru’s brief reign, a mob of looters swept up the road to the Ancon hospital, Sister Marie took a big umbrella, gathered up her skirts, and went out to meet them at the gate to the hospital grounds. “Listen to me, you,” she said. “Someday you will be sick yourselves, and if you trouble us now, do you think we will have you in the hospital? No! Now go!” And back down the road they had gone.

Dingier reported to Paris, “Our works have continued to function in the usual manner.” But the uprising had had its effects on the French enterprise, and some were quite serious. At Culebra, government troops had broken into a company barracks and slaughtered a number of Jamaicans, claiming afterward that the Jamaicans had fired on them first. A savage riot broke out among the black workers, more lives were lost, and hundreds of men walked off the job and took the next boat to Kingston, where the company’s recruitment efforts henceforth would be extremely hampered.

As for the blame for what happened at Colón, the French and the Americans agreed. Commander Kane, it was charged, could have averted the entire tragedy by simply grabbing Prestan the morning he started on his rampage, something the prudent Commander Kane understood he had had no right to do.

Prestan and Aizpuru were dealt with in due course. Wearing a black suit and derby, Prestan was marched to the tracks on Front Street and was hanged before one of the largest crowds ever seen in Colon. Aizpuru was more fortunate. He was taken to Bogotá, tried, fined, and sentenced to ten years in exile.

Politically, things quieted down. The crisis passed, and seemingly without significant aftereffects. But, in fact, the rebellions in Panama and the other provinces marked a critical turning point for Colombia. The long-range repercussions would be considerable. To strengthen his position, President Nunez would proclaim a new constitution, with all real power centered in Bogotá. The nine provinces of Colombia, Panama included, were to be headed hereafter by governors appointed by the federal government–by Bogotá.

Also of importance as time would tell was the presence through all that had happened on the Isthmus of three observant parties whose personal roles had been relatively minor, but who would not forget what they had seen and the lessons to be drawn. Philippe Bunau-Varilla was one. Another was Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, a physician employed by the railroad. The third was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Wachusett, who had landed with one of the Marine guards to protect the railroad.

What most impressed Bunau-Varilla and Dr. Amador Guerrero was the degree to which events had been shaped by the mere presence of American naval strength. In back of everyone’s mind throughout had been those ships and the question of what their commanders might or might not do given the state of affairs ashore. And it was only a few months later that Captain Mahan, having been appointed to the faculty of the war College at Newport, Rhode Island, would commence to develop a series of lectures on the influence of sea power.

Things began coming apart now. In the office overlooking the plaza, his last reserves of strength nearly exhausted, Jules Dingler had become so short-tempered and abusive of his staff that several key people, including one division head, resigned. Late in August, close to physical and mental collapse, Dingler himself gave up and sailed for France, a lone and defeated man. He had left all his family buried in Panama. He was never to return again.

His place was filled by Maurice Hutin, the next in line. Hutin too was ill and worn out and in another month he quit. That left Philippe Bunau-Varilla. So, a year after his arrival, at age twenty-seven, Bunau-Varilla found himself acting head of the entire effort. For the next several months, until another director general was recruited, he would seldom have more than two hours’ sleep a night.

He moved into Dingler’s office, determined, as he later said, to be all de Lesseps had been at Suez. “Men’s energies are spontaneously influenced by a chief who is inspired by a sincere faith in the ultimate triumph of a difficult undertaking,” he would lecture later in one of his books. “They take their place in regular order, like particles of iron around the pole of a powerful magnet.” When a new French consul general was ushered into the office to meet him and expressed surprise at finding so young a man in a position of such vast responsibility, Bunau-Varilla suggested that the new consul general learn to judge men according to their ability.

Elsewhere along the line there was widespread bitterness. Failure was in the wind and people were looking for somebody to blame. Lieutenant William Kimball, an officer from the Tennessee who accompanied Bunau-Varilla on a tour of the work, wrote of rampant suspicion of Americans. Bunau-Varilla was unfailing in his courtesies, Kimball noted, but other French officials made little effort to disguise their feelings. American contracts, American machinery, American technicians, were no longer wanted. French mechanics accused their American counterparts of trying to sabotage equipment in order to stop the work so that the United States could take over. Lieutenant Kimball attributed such talk to the depression caused by malaria.

His remarks were contained in a special intelligence report transmitted to the chief of the Bureau of Navigation in Washington. It was an extremely interesting document. He estimated that not more than a tenth of the work had been accomplished, a perfectly accurate estimate as it happens. “Unforeseen and vexatious, as well as stupendous and apparently insuperable, difficulties are constantly occurring.” At Paraiso he saw a slide so large that it came down completely intact, the grass on top undisturbed, and with such force that it carried the entire distance across the Cut.

Hospital facilities, extensive as they were, were not enough. Food prices were high. Workers, black and white, were fearful of more political violence. Black workers were leaving faster than they were being replaced, going home to spend their money “before they are killed by the climate.” But, Kimball emphasized, loss of human life would never be a deterrent in itself. Money was what counted. Human life was “always cheap.”

* Such fears were well founded. Physicians who were at Colón and Panama City during these years would later state that more than 75 percent of all hospital patients had malaria.

7
Downfall

Faithful to my past, when they try to stop me, I go on.

–FERDINAND DE LESSEPS

I

On April 23, 1885, three weeks after news of the Colón fire reached Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps donned the green robe of the Academie Franchise. With all traditional solemnity, in the small ceremonial hall beneath the great dome of the venerable Institute, he achieved the ultimate honor in French life. He belonged now to the forty “Immortals,” the chosen of chosen.

We are told that “such a galaxy of celebrities had rarely gathered” and that de Lesseps spoke with the air of a conquering general. Great works were never easy, he affirmed. Nothing was easy in this world, especially the useful. Skeptics and doomsayers and character assassins were what one had to expect. The world was not without evil. “The Arab proverb says, ‘The dogs bark, the caravan passes.’ I passed on.”

Yet at this crowning moment the dogs had scarcely been heard. While talk of the sums being spent by Jules Dingler was commonplace in financial circles and Henri Marechal’s diatribe had given rise to considerable gossip, no publication of influence within France, no individual of importance, had had a derogatory word to say as yet.

De Lesseps’ own popularity seemed as invulnerable as always. Though Panama shares had begun to slip quite noticeably on the Bourse, though the company’s credit was being questioned for the first time, virtually none of the small shareholders were selling out. At the annual stockholders’ meeting in July, he was cheered again and again; and like some figure from Shakespeare, he gave his audience visions of heroic contest waged against an exotic, distant wilderness. They were part of the crusade; they were one with him in this great and good and terribly difficult work. The triumphs of the engineers– their engineers–were real; the task was better than half finished–“the efforts actually put forth May be considered as more than half the total efforts necessary” was his exact claim and a total fiction. (Only about a tenth of the canal had been dug, as the American officer Kimball rightly judged.)

The completion date, he also said, was being deferred somewhat and the original cost estimate of 1,200,000,000 francs, as set by the Paris congress, was being adopted. But such announcements went unchallenged. Nobody questioned or protested anything he said. When a man called for a formal investigation of the company’s management, there was no one in the entire hall who would even second the motion.

Not until later that summer did the talk of failure begin to sound serious. Writing in the Economiste Frangais on August 8, the highly regarded financial editor Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, known to be an old friend of de Lesseps’, warned that unless the canal company was reorganized, “we shall see the most terrible financial disaster of the nineteenth century.” The New York Tribune, among other foreign papers, began calling the canal a “gigantic wild-cat speculation” and lamented that the poor innocent stockholders were unable to go out and see the truth for themselves.

The most blistering attack was a series of articles carried by the London Financial News, a series written by J. C. Rodrigues, the American reporter, who had had a tremendous change of heart since his tour of Panama five years before. Like de Lesseps, Rodrigues had not been back to the Isthmus in all that time. Nor had he bothered to talk to anyone connected with the canal, anyone whatsoever with firsthand knowledge of the situation there or inside the offices on the Rue Caumartin. The articles in fact contained no new information. But By combing through the published observations of other journalists, by looking through what de Lesseps and the French press had been saying from one year to another, by shrewdly noting all that had not been forthcoming from the canal company in the way of solid data on costs and the volume of excavation actually accomplished (rather than what was anticipated), he had come up with a picture of willful deception at every turn. The French newspapers were giving de Lesseps their unstinting support, he charged, because editors and reporters were being bought wholesale. This was perhaps the tenth time the same accusation had appeared in print in the past year, but like others who had made it, Rodrigues had no proof or testimony to back it.

His statistics were taken from the Bulletin, from de Lesseps’ letters to stockholders, from public pronouncements, and the like. It was shown that the projected completion date had been a fantasy from the beginning, as had every projected cost figure. No plan for the Chagres dam existed on paper as yet, after five years. The canal was doomed because the company was going to fail. The enterprise would be defeated in Paris, that is, not on the Isthmus, and it was only a matter of time. “The whole thing is a humbug, and has been so from the start.”

In October, as the articles were being published as a book in the United States, Panama stock hit a new low of 364 francs. Then in the first week of December a raging “norther” swept across the Caribbean and struck Colón, smashing eighteen ships onto the shore and destroying much of the waterfront. Fifty seamen were killed. Tremendous rains fell and the Chagres, rising thirty feet in a few hours, flooded miles of railroad and canal diggings. No trains could get through. To inspect the line after the storm, Philippe Bunau-Varilla had to go most of the way by canoe and wrote afterward of gliding past half-drowned trees the tops of which were black with millions of tarantulas.

The effect of such news on the skeptics at home may be imagined. Yet de Lesseps, sanguine as always, reminded everyone that there had never been a year at Suez without a crisis. The Suez venture had been called all the same names; as had he. The caravan would pass on.

In May he had spoken for the first time of lottery bonds to guarantee the canal. And at the July stockholders’ meeting he had asked for and received a show of approval. Now he talked of little else. Canal bonds would be sold with numbered tickets attached, some of which, the winning tickets, would be worth large cash prizes. In the final year of the Suez Canal, when an issue of conventional bonds failed to provide funds sufficient to finish the work, just such a lottery issue had saved the canal. Moreover, those same bonds were now worth almost twice their original value. To finish “promptly” at Panama, he said, would take another 600,000,000 francs. The only thing needed was government authorization for a lottery issue. So as summer turned to autumn the Chamber of Deputies was swamped with petitions signed by thousands of Panama stockholders–a grand, spontaneous show of faith, said the Nyons banker, Ferdinand Martin, who started the campaign. And to ease any possible apprehensions over the situation on the Isthmus, de Lesseps declared he would go again to look things over.

Impressed by the flood of petitions, the Chamber appointed a committee of deputies to study the lottery proposal and a noted civil engineer, Armand Rousseau, was selected to go to Panama and report back to the committee. Rousseau departed before de Lesseps did. Whether he wished specifically to avoid the old man’s irradiating influence is not clear, but he did sail on the Lafayette at the same time as Charles, who was taking a new director general, thirty-five-year-old Léon Boyer, to relieve Philippe Bunau-Varilla.

Bunau-Varilla, meantime, had decided to resign from the canal Company, but would stay on in Panama, in the employ of a private contractor, as head of the major excavation at Culebra.

When he departed for this, his second, tour of the Isthmus–for his first actual look at the Panama canal–Ferdinand de Lesseps was eighty years old. And in the minds of his thousands of shareholders this was the critical figure in the equation, more important than any stock prices or excavation statistics. It was not a company they believed in, or even a canal through Panama, so much as one exceptional human being. For them he was la grande entreprise. So, baldly put, the question was, How much longer could the mortal hull last and perform?

His large and much publicized retinue included technical advisers, company officials, and special guests (delegates from half a dozen French chambers of commerce, a German engineer, an Italian diplomat, an admiral in the Royal Navy, the Duke of Sutherland), and everyone went at company expense. His wife and children remained in Paris. Interestingly, there was no one along this time from the first expedition. Bionne and Blanchet were dead; he and Wyse had not spoken for years; Jacob Dirks, Colonel Totten, Trenor Park, they too were dead by now.

In the end, when everything was in ruin, few would regard him very kindly for such efforts as this. The dazzling faith would seem almost maniacal and pathetic in hindsight. It would be forgotten how magnificent he was in so many respects. The man of younger days, the Hero of Suez, would be the one eulogized. Yet of all the performances in that long, glittering career, there is nothing quite comparable to the final drive to succeed at Panama. The falling star blazed very bright indeed.

They reached Colón on February 17, only days after Armand Rousseau had completed his studies and departed. The stay on the Isthmus this time lasted just two weeks, and the intentions throughout, in all de Lesseps said and did, were fundamentally the same as six years earlier– to be inspirational, to foster courage, confidence, and to draw attention to himself. In this, once again, he succeeded grandly. In the army of laborers strung out across the Isthmus, he had crowds unlike anything since Egypt. For the thousands at work the mere sight of him was electrifying. “You are for us,” said one engineer in a welcoming speech, “the venerated chief around whom we rally, ready at all times to sacrifice even our very lives to assure your triumphant success in your present great and glorious work.”

“With hearts and minds like yours,” de Lesseps responded, “everything is possible.”

Again he had chosen the dry season. He would appear, as before, in brilliant sunshine. For one inspection tour he went on horseback. “M. de Lesseps,” reported one member of the party, “always indefatigable, rode at the head of the caravan. I saw him gallop up the hillside at Culebra, amid a roar of approval from blacks and whites, all astounded by so much ardor and youthfulness.” Years afterward young American engineers relaxing in comfortable new clubrooms would listen to old Panama hands tell how he wore a flowing robe of glorious colors, “like an Oriental monarch.”

There were parades and fireworks at Panama City. A triumphal arch in the plaza was emblazoned, “Glory to the Genius of the Nineteenth Century.” Little girls presented bouquets. He made speeches; he drank toasts. He sat through banquets that would have finished off most men his age. He danced all night at a grand ball in his honor.

His accommodations on the Atlantic side were in an imposing frame house facing the water at Christophe-Colomb, built especially for his use and known ever after as de Lesseps’ Palace. In Panama City he stayed at the palace of the bishop, where the guardian at his door was a dog called Bravo, a local phenomenon of unknown breed and origin which had first attached itself to Dingler some years before, then Hutin, then Bunau-Varilla, and most recently to Charles de Lesseps. Through long, stifling mornings, as noisy crowds filled the plaza, he conferred with his engineers in the canal offices. He toured the hospital, machine shops, labor camps. Bunau-Varilla set off a tremendous charge of dynamite for his benefit, then made a little ceremonial presentation of one small bit of the rock–a “thousandth part of onemillionth of the little mountain which he had seen raised in the air . . .” De Lesseps, with somewhat less ceremony, would later give it to the Académie des Sciences.

Bunau-Varilla was kept close at hand to answer all technical questions. Charles likewise was never very far. Charles was “very clear headed and capable,” noted John Bigelow, an emissary from The New York Chamber of Commerce who had joined the party, and the friendship Bigelow struck up with Bunau-Varilla was to last a lifetime.

All in all, it was a brave show. Morale had been restored on the Isthmus to a degree no one there would have thought possible. Boyer, the new head, had been installed. The guests enjoyed themselves throughout, with the exception of Bigelow, who came down with something briefly and thought he was dying of yellow fever. Their host enjoyed himself supremely. When it came time to go, all parties (Bigelow also by then) were in perfect health.

The one dissatisfied individual seems to have been Philippe Bunau-Varilla, whose devotion to the work was no less for having been relieved of command, but who felt he had been slighted by Le Grand Français. In their private talks de Lesseps had expressed nothing but praise and gratitude for all the young man had done, yet said nothing to that effect publicly. “Any homage paid to any other personality but himself seemed to steal a ray from his crown of glory,” Bunau-Varilla would write years later, still resentful.

On reaching home the delegates from the French chambers of commerce expressed unqualified confidence. Unquestionably the canal could be built–provided de Lesseps had the funds needed (provided the government let him have his lottery). Bigelow, too, in a long, detailed, and entirely fair appraisal, concluded that the canal could and would be built, for the reason that “too large a proportion of its cost has already been incurred to make retreat as good a policy as advance.” He had been bothered by the heat; he remained deeply troubled by the great number of lives being lost, a subject scarcely mentioned during the tour. But like Lieutenant Kimball, he concluded that the critical, unanswerable question was cost, not the cost of construction simply– and any figure offered, even by the most experienced engineers, was pure conjecture–but the cost of the money itself. “Till the money is secured, and the cost of getting it is ascertained, it would be about as safe to predict the quarter in which the winds will be setting next Christmas day at St. Petersburg . . .”

Bigelow was a prominent figure, in addition to being highly intelligent and observant, a former part-owner (with William Cullen Bryant) of the New York Evening Post, a former American minister to France, lawyer, and scholar. He had taken the tour very seriously, preparing in advance long lists of questions for the French engineers. What impressed him beyond everything else was the magnitude of the effort, and this, like a certain foreboding, can be read between the lines throughout his report. The task had no parallel in history he said. Americans had far too little appreciation of what the French were attempting. Once, to his astonishment, Charles had told him that the United States would eventually have to take financial control, as England had done at Suez. It was a remark made in confidence–and with sadness, one would imagine–and Bigelow said nothing of it, other than in his diary. But in his report, published well before any of Captain Mahan’s theories, Bigelow did write that whenever or by whatever manner the canal was completed, the great beneficiary would be the United States, for the canal would “secure to the United States, forever, the incontestable advantage of position in the impending contest of nations for the supremacy of the seas.”

De Lesseps, as soon as he reached Paris, made a predictable declaration of faith in the speedy completion of the work. Yet in virtually the same breath, and as smoothly and cheerfully as if he had been announcing some favorable turn of events, he also conceded that Panama was a more difficult undertaking than Suez–ten times more difficult.

On March 29, in an interview with Emily Crawford, correspondent for the London Daily News, he further claimed that the baffling issue of the Chagres was at last resolved: “. . . we have changed the whole course of the river and made it run on the other side of the mountains altogether.” Undoubtedly he meant that the river had been rerouted on paper, which it had, and actual excavation for a vast diversion channel had begun. That, however, was not the impression given by Mrs. Crawford’s article, which, as she noted in conclusion, he read and vouched for prior to publication. The distinct impression was that the river no longer intervened, that it had been neatly placed somewhere safely out of the way, and thus success was assured.

Meantime, as the government, indeed, as the whole of France, waited for the other prognosis–the one from Armand Rousseau–the canal company was having trouble paying its bills, despite another issue of conventional bonds.

The Rousseau Report was released in May, and to the French public, accustomed to unwavering support for the canal in the press, to the shareholders, long fortified by the Bulletin and de Lesseps, its impact was considerable. Rousseau, a former chef des Ponts et Chaussées, was a man of the highest repute and his views were taken as entirely forthright, which indeed they were.

To abandon the canal now would be unthinkable, he had concluded. It would spell disaster not merely for thousands of shareholders, but for French prestige. If the present company were to drop the work, a foreign one–unnamed–would surely take it up. The canal company therefore ought to be given some kind of moral assistance by the government. He favored the lottery. But then came the crucial passages. Completion of the canal was possible; however, completion with the resources anticipated or within the time announced appeared extremely doubtful unless the company would agree at once to radical modifications of its plans. He did not specify what ought to be done, because he believed his charter did not authorize him to do so. But there was little doubt as to what he had in mind. The one radical modification possible was to abandon the sea-level plan while there was still time.

In sum, he was saying that the hopes entertained by Ferdinand de Lesseps were without foundation–in terms of time, money, and, most important, the canal he had been selling the French people all these years. A canal a niveau had been the axiom of de Lesseps’ conception since before the Paris congress. It had been his reason for picking Panama in the first place. So it was easy enough to draw from the report the dark and unsettling conclusion that the whole plan had been a stupendous mistake from the beginning.

In quick succession came two more opinions, both filed at the request of the canal company. The first was from another respected engineer, a man named Jacquet, whose candor was courageous in view of the situation and the mood among those paying for his services. Having toured the work, he declared that a sea-level passage was unattainable and urged the building of a canal with locks along the same path. The second opinion, sent from Colón, was written by Director General Boyer, whom Bunau-Varilla would recall as one of France’s most gifted sons. Boyer had brought sixty engineers out from France. Within a few months they had nearly all fallen by the wayside, sick, demoralized, or dead. Then, only a week or two after his report reached Paris, came the news that Boyer too was dead, another victim of yellow fever.

His was the most disquieting judgment of all, in that he spoke as the company’s ranking technical authority. Like Rousseau and Jacquet, he regarded the sea-level canal as impossible within the limitations of available time and money. It had taken him but a short time on the scene to reach this view.

Charles knew that his father must give way, but if his father saw this, he never let on publicly. Rather, he now insisted that it must be a canal at sea level–a great new “Ocean Bosporus” was his favorite expression–saying that it could be achieved in just three more years. His will was iron. All critics were enemies. What secret, unspeakable dread he may have felt–if any–what premonitions of disaster haunted his private hours, will never be known. But he certainly had all the facts at his disposal and the truth of the situation was plain as day: with the excavation in its fifth year, the contractors had managed to extract little more than a quarter of the total excavation anticipated by Dingler’s reckoning.

The Minister of Public Works, Charles Baihaut, moved that a lottery bill be acted upon without delay, but with the cloud of the Rousseau Report hanging over them, the deputies on yet another special lottery committee now voted to postpone further discussion and called for an audit of the canal company’s accounts. Outraged, de Lesseps refused to comply. Further, he wanted his application for a lottery withdrawn. “I am postponed, I do not accept the postponement,” he exclaimed in a letter to his stockholders. “Faithful to my past, when they try to stop me, I go on. . . . I am confident that together we will overcome all obstacles and that you will march with me . . .”

But by no means had he dismissed the lottery from his plans, the defiant words notwithstanding. His immediate next move was another conventional bond issue, and although the results appeared perfectly respectable–some 90 percent of the offering was taken–the company was paying too much for too little. It was becoming a dangerous, costly trend. In total the company was presently paying out a staggering 750,000,000 francs, or $15,000,000, just for annual interest on its borrowed money,

Paris was filled with conflicting claims and rumors emanating from the Bourse or from the offices on the Rue Caumartin, or from around the corner at the Suez offices, where de Lesseps still spent much of his regular day. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, home since spring, was telling visiting Americans of the money he had behind him, claiming he had a new concept that would revolutionize the work and save the canal. He had returned from Panama after barely surviving an attack of yellow fever, resigned his position with the company, and was currently the guiding spirit of the reorganized Artigue, Sonderegger et Compagnie, now the Culebra contractor.

But others were talking of the resignation of the secretary general of the canal company, Etienne Martin, because he regarded the contract with Artigue, Sonderegger as so outrageously advantageous to Artigue, Sonderegger. His replacement was Marius Fontane, the Company’s publicity agent. For every rumor of collapse and bankruptcy, there was another story, always on good authority, that the government was prepared to rescue the canal come what might, that the company’s great hidden strength was its political influence. It was noted, for example, that the Minister of Public Works, Baihaut, who had set the lottery bill in motion, had declared his support for the lottery, irrespective of what Rousseau might conclude. Baihaut, known as “the man with the beautiful wife,” was an outspoken moralist (an officer of the Society for the Promotion of Good) and a popular topic, since until recently the beautiful wife had been married to his best friend.

Management of the company’s financial affairs, moreover, had fallen to new hands. Marc Levy-Cremieux, the banker who directed de Lesseps’ initial stock successes, had died. Serving now as the canal’s chief financial agent was Baron Jacques de Reinach, of the original Türr Syndicate. The ebullient little baron had friends in high places– Adrien Hebrard, publisher of Le Temps; Jules Grevy; General Boulanger, the glamorous new Minister of War; the Radical leader Georges Clemenceau; Premier de Freycinet.

Emile de Girardin’s Petit Journal, the most popular paper in France, remained conspicuously loyal to the “cause of Panama.” As Emily Crawford was to note, the paper’s chief editorial writer “puffed Panama” to such a degree that he was “carried above the concert pitch of the paper by the heat of his enthusiasm.” Mrs. Crawford, the widow of an English newspaperman, was among the ablest foreign correspondents of the day, a handsome middle-aged Irishwoman who knew just about everyone in power and “did not worry about being conventional.”

De Lesseps remained as active as ever, a familiar figure on the boulevards, still fathering children, still to be seen riding in the Bois with a troupe of the older ones. He appeared to be without a problem. Ac cording to one story, a group of salesmen struck up a conversation with him on a train somewhere outside Paris and failing to recognize him asked what his line might be. “Isthmuses!” he said. He was introducing ship canals and after Panama he would build the Kr a Canal across the Malay Peninsula.

In October, largely in response to a malicious rumor that he was terminally ill, he crossed the Atlantic still one more time–his last–to participate in the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. At a rollicking celebration in New York Harbor, October 28, 1886, with cannon booming and tug whistles screaming on every side, he stood with President Grover Cleveland on a flag-draped platform set at the foot of the colossal statue.

“Soon, gentlemen, we shall meet again,” he said, “to celebrate a peaceful conquest. Good-bye until we meet at Panama . . .”

II

The façade of an Ocean Bosporus was maintained for another year. In January of 1887 de Lesseps’ Advisory Commission formally convened to consider the possibility of a lock canal, with the net result that a subcommission was appointed to look into the matter. The subcommission would not meet until the fall.

Charles de Lesseps returned to Panama in March, taking still another delegation of experts to give still another appraisal, and the delegation returned with the unanimous opinion that the sea-level plan must be dropped at once if disaster was to be averted. The company quietly put this report into safe storage.

Every day the decision was postponed was a day of enormously expensive wasted effort on the Isthmus. Cash reserves in Paris were shrinking rapidly. And not until the sea-level plan was scrapped could there be any hope of government action in support of the lottery.

Had de Lesseps decided on a lock canal in the fall of 1886, had he gone to his stockholders then with a new plan, instead of sailing off to New York, the outcome of la grande entreprise might have been quite different. Possibly the dream could have had a different ending had he but spent the first part of 1887 preparing his public for the change in plans. This he did not do, however. Apparently he kept thinking that somehow, some way, the crisis could be resolved, that some miraculous turn of fate would save the sea-level canal. It is hard to imagine what turn of fate he possibly had in mind, but then he remained, as before, one who saw his own existence and all that he did as part of a glorious cosmic pattern.

Meantime, consideration was being given to a temporary solution devised by Bunau-Varilla. He wanted to make one kind of canal in order to dig another kind. It had been the accepted engineering wisdom that dredges were pretty nearly useless against rock. At Suez, for instance, when the dredges struck underlying rock between the Bitter Lakes and the Red Sea, the engineers had put earth dams across the cut and drained that section so it could be excavated “in the dry.” Consequently at Panama the assumption had been that only soft strata could be removed by dredging. But when the Slaven machines hit rock at a point called Mindi, near Colón, Bunau-Varilla conceived a technique whereby the rock could be blasted into pieces of an exact size for the dredges to cope with. The system rested on a particular mathematical placement of underwater charges, and once perfected, it was no more expensive than conventional dry excavation, or such was his claim. Later on, at Culebra he had taken the idea another step. Artificial lagoons were built at either side of the saddle. Earth dams were thrown up and water was piped in. The dredges were then brought up and floated on these lagoons and the excavation proceeded.

His proposal now was to carry the idea to its ultimate conclusion: Subdivide the whole line of the canal into a series of such artificial pools and unite these with locks; in other words, build a lock canal upon which to float the dredges and let the dredges eventually transform that canal into an uninterrupted passage at sea level. He would use water, rather than railroad track, to transport his excavation machinery, and to carry the spoil away. Such a system would be little affected by rains or landslides. The cut at Culebra need only be made half as deep for the time being. The locks could be removed two by two as the dredging progressed. And since the locks would be built to accommodate conventional ships, regular canal traffic could begin as soon as the locks were ready. So ships could be passing to and fro as the work proceeded, the tolls going far to meet the cost of the work.

Bunau-Varilla was an extremely high-powered, persuasive individual, as future events would bear out; and he appears to have convinced most of the engineers and technical advisers that the scheme could actually work. The genius of the proposal, however, its enormous value at the moment, was not in its technical ingenuity. It was the fundamental precept that a lock canal need be only a transitional step toward the old ultimate goal of a channel a niveau. It represented no betrayal of the dream. It offered de Lesseps an honorable alternative. There need be no promises broken, no semblance of retreat or failure.

Another bond issue was tried, the third in little more than a year. It produced a sum de Lesseps quickly pronounced sufficient to carry on for another two years. But again the company had paid dearly for the money and by autumn its financial position was desperate.

It was only then, with his back to the wall, that de Lesseps at last did what had to be done.

The subcommission of his Advisory Commission met and endorsed the temporary lock canal; a new set of plans was rushed into presentable form. At the end of October he used an invitation to speak at the Academie des Sciences as opportunity to prepare the public for the momentous change. Saying nothing of the plan itself, he announced that the canal would be far enough along by 1890 to permit the passage of twenty ships a day. Annual receipts, he said, would be 100,000,000 francs.

Panama stock, in steady decline since late summer, now fell to a new low of 282 francs.

On November 15, de Lesseps sent off two letters. One was to the Minister of Finance asking once again for authority to sell lottery bonds. The other, addressed to his shareholders, contained the dramatic announcement that “as of this morning” Alexandre Gustave Eiffel had been engaged to design and build the locks that would open Panama to the ships of the world.

The new canal was to follow the same line. There were to be two huge flights of locks, with five locks to each flight, at Bohio Soldado on the Atlantic side and between La Boca and Paraiso on the Pacific side. They would be single locks–that is, locks capable of handling ship traffic in one direction at a time–and the dimensions of each were to be 180 by 18 meters (590 by 59 feet). Passing through the full flight, a ship would be lifted to, or brought back down from, a summit level of 49 meters (roughly 161 feet), which would be well above the level of the Chagres at flood stage. So instead of a canal with a bottom 29 l A feet below the level of the sea, it was to be one 161 feet above. The total excavation required was reckoned to be only 80,000,000 cubic meters (instead of 120,000,000, as Dingler had figured), which, it was said, left only about 34,000,000 cubic meters still to go (instead of 74,000,000, using Dingler’s estimate as the base figure).

The official cost of the completed canal was also revised, making this the fourth time since the Paris congress. The estimate arrived at by the congress, it will be recalled, was 1,200,000,000 francs; at Panama in 1880 the Technical Commission had cut that to 843,000,000 francs; next, on reaching New York, de Lesseps had announced that it would be 658,600,000 francs. In July of 1885 it was back to what it had been to begin with–1,200,000,000 francs. Now, for a lock canal 161 feet above sea level, the price was declared to be 1,654,000,000 ($331,200,-000).

To build a Panama canal the French public to date had supplied something over 1,000,000,000 francs. Now de Lesseps was declaring in the same old positive, confident tones that another 600,000,000 francs were needed to open a canal of a kind he had long since educated them to regard as inferior and therefore unacceptable.

Recruiting Eiffel had involved some fast footwork on both sides and a contract that Eiffel and company officials alike thought best kept confidential. De Lesseps considered Eiffel’s name a golden touch. It was as though, or it could appear as though, that “man of genius” was making his entrance in the final thrilling act, just as he, de Lesseps, had foretold so many years before: Eiffel, the most brilliant engineer in France, suddenly famous as progenitor of the gigantic iron tower being started on the Champ de Mars. Conceived as the centerpiece for another Paris exposition scheduled for 1889, the tower was to be the tallest structure on earth. The plan had caused an uproar–many Parisians foresaw their City disfigured by an iron monstrosity–but to the vast majority of the public, the tower, like the canal at Panama, was a bold affirmation of French genius, French supremacy in the art of civilization. So for Eiffel to step forth now and join forces with Ferdinand de Lesseps seemed the perfect, brilliant stroke, and the announcement had an especially energizing effect on de Lesseps, whose response to such dramatic turns, even when self-contrived, was invariably infectious.

Eiffel’s locks, the gates and operating apparatus for which were to be manufactured in France, were in fact modified versions of the locks he had designed for his Nicaragua plan ten years earlier, prior to the Paris congress. Also, construction of the lock basins was to be delegated to another contractor, a new firm organized by Philippe Bunau-Varilla. Still, Eiffel believed in action and decisiveness. He did move quickly. By January his engineers were on the Isthmus. In another month, excavation for the lock basins was under way.

For all this, however, Panama stock kept falling.

Months slipped by as a new premier, Pierre Tirard, refused even to submit the lottery request to the Chamber of Deputies. “From all information received through other channels than the Company,” reported Economiste Français, “it is clearly shown that the situation of the undertaking is getting more and more hopeless. . . . The year 1888 will certainly see the liquidation of the Company. The lottery bonds can do nothing towards meeting such necessities.”

On March 4, 1888, several deputies introduced a bill permitting the company to go ahead with the lottery. How quickly the Chamber might act on the bill or what its chances were remained open questions. De Lesseps, however, was in the midst of offering still another issue of bonds–this made eight times in eight years that he had gone to the public for money–but with a proviso that they could be converted into lottery bonds should such a bill be passed into law. It appeared that he had been given a saving boost, and as always with every chance bit of good news, he made as much of it as possible.

Even so the sale was a fiasco. Not a third of the bonds were sold. The lottery was no longer the best hope for salvation, it was the last hope. There was no money to be had by conventional means.

The parliamentary process that followed was painfully slow. The Chamber had to vote first on whether to consider the bill, then the bill had to be appraised by a committee of eleven duly appointed deputies. Weeks passed. All signs were that the committee would defeat the bill by a vote of six to five, until one member, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War, Charles François Sans-Leroy, switched his vote at the last minute and the bill was approved by a margin of one. By now it was mid-April. The debate in the Chamber began, with loyal Panama supporters packing the public galleries. Every speaker for the bill was vigorously cheered; anyone who attacked it, or even questioned the idea, was roundly jeered or interrupted, which caused several of the bill’s more vocal opponents to grow even more impassioned and bitter. “The ruin is getting on fine!” declared one irate member from the tribune. “Scarcely more than fifty per cent remains to be lost.”

On April 28, the Chamber approved the lottery by a wide margin and instantly the company’s stock soared. In the Senate, on June 5, the bill was again approved. On June 8, three years after de Lesseps first proposed the lottery, the new law went into effect.

It was none too soon. So desperate had the company’s situation grown that Charles de Lesseps had been forced to negotiate a hurried loan of 30,000,000 francs from Two of the largest commercial banks, the Crédit Lyonnais and the Societe Generate. As security he had been required to put up the Panama Railroad stock. Moreover, the banks had insisted that they handle the sale of a large block of the lottery bonds, in the event the bill passed, for which they were to receive extremely handsome commissions.

It is conceivable that what happened next could have been avoided. many of those involved would always think so.

By the new law the company was authorized to borrow a total of 720,000,000 francs. Six hundred million francs were to be used to finish the canal according to the lock plan, while the remainder was to go into government securities to guarantee payment on the bonds, as well as the cash prizes.

There was nothing in the law stipulating how the issue should be staged, and at the canal company and the Two banks, opinions were sharply divided. Baron Jacques de Reinach argued for scheduling the sales in successive installments, rather than going for everything in one blow. Until then, his position was, the public had supplied the canal company with some 150,000,000 francs a year on the average. If the lure of cash prizes proved strong enough even to double that, then the most that could be expected was 300,000,000 francs, or less than half the amount that was wanted. The safest plan therefore was to try for smaller parts spread out over a year or more.

The banks thought otherwise. Primarily it was Henri Germain, the august founder and chairman of the board of the Crédit Lyonnais, who thought otherwise. The strength of the whole lottery concept, he insisted, was in the size of the cash prizes. Since subdividing the issue would proportionately reduce the prizes, he was against it. “The prudence, the maturity of judgment of the man who endowed France with one of its greatest banking concerns, seemed to exclude the possibility of any error of judgment,” Bunau-Varilla would write. That Germain also had the railroad stock in hand, that he had the company By the throat, as a matter of fact, was doubtless of great importance. And it was Charles de Lesseps, not de Reinach, who had responsibility for the final decision. So the bonds were to go on sale in one gigantic issue–2,000,000 bonds redeemable in 1897 at 400 francs ($80) and priced at 360 francs ($72). The sale would start June 20, run six days, and there were to be lottery drawings every two months thereafter, year after year. Prizes in one year would range from as high as 500,000 francs ($100,000) down to 1,000 francs ($200).

A stupendous publicity campaign was launched at a cost of more than 7,000,000 francs, a figure, like many others, that was not to be divulged until long afterward. The intensity of feeling for and against the company was enormous. Throughout France people talked of little else.

On the morning the bonds went on sale, somebody–his identity remains a mystery–put a telegram on the wire in Paris to every major provincial city, to London and to New York, announcing the death of Ferdinand de Lesseps. There was no truth to it and the company issued an immediate denial, but the damage was done. Two days later, bear raiders dumped Panama shares on the market, driving the stock into sharp decline. Company securities could now be bought on the open market for nearly 100 francs less than the bonds being offered.

Defeat appeared inevitable and it was. of the 2,000,000 bonds offered, less than half–800,000–were sold. Receipts for the company amounted to 255,000,000 francs, or considerably less than half of what was wanted. The cost of the issue had been enormous–31,000,000 francs–and since the law required that 120,000,000 francs be set aside for interest and for the prize fund, that left the company with little more than 100,000,000 francs.

By all rights, by every established rule of the game, that should have been the end of the Compagnie Universelle. The bubble should have burst then and there and certainly it would have had de Lesseps con-ceded defeat. His faith, however, was in people. He saw the arithmetic differently. (Edouard Drumont, who was to be his most vicious critic, asserted that the whole problem all along was that de Lesseps never learned how to add and subtract.) While it was true that only 800,000 bonds had been sold, they had been subscribed for by 350,000 persons. That was 350,000 men and women who still believed, who were still behind him and the honor of France. That was also three times the number of people who had subscribed to the 1880 stock issue, which had been such an unprecedented demonstration of the “people’s capitalism.” The bond sale had shown that after eight years, after all the setbacks, the expenditures, the loss of life, his popular following was greater than ever! In the words of one contemporary English writer, “M. Lesseps soon showed he was not dead, and he was speedily laboring with great energy to repair the effects of the blow . . . .” A less admiring editor of the New York Tribune wrote of his “unscrupulous audacity.”

He would launch a campaign to sell the remainder of the lottery issue. Again he would take his case to the people of France. Striding onto the platform at a mass meeting of shareholders in August, he was cheered as never before in his career. His mere presence was a magnetic charge; he was inspiring, heartrending, commanding, all these at once; he was the voice of authority, the ageless living emblem of French verve and grandeur. The Suez Canal had brought 2,000,000,000 francs to France, he told them; the Panama Canal would bring 3,000,-000,000. “All France, it may be said, is joined in the completion of the Panama canal. Actually more than six hundred thousand of our compatriots are directly interested in the rapid success of the enterprise. If each of them will take Two lottery bonds or get them sold, the canal is made!”

His call was for one all-out, climactic assault. The proposition was like that of a chain letter: a bonanza only if everyone participates, only so long as no one breaks the spell. To line up new investors, security holders throughout France were organized into hundreds of committees, these supposedly an expression of a huge ground swell of popular support. He and Charles set off on a grueling cross-country tour to Lyon, Nimes, Marseilles, Bordeaux, to Nantes (where the Eiffel locks were being built), to Lorient, to twenty-six cities in October and November, spending long nights on trains, listening to advice, shaking hands, sitting for photographers, answering questions, exhorting local committee heads, enduring endless formal banquets. It was billed as a lecture tour, but de Lesseps, who turned eighty-three on November 19, was unable any longer to sustain the old exuberance. It was Charles who gave most of the speeches this time, while his father sat on the stage like some national monument. On cue he would rise and add a few words.

The price of the unsold bonds was cut once, twice, three times, to a bargain price of 320 francs. A buyer need only put down 90 francs ($18) and could pay the balance in eight monthly installments.

Only once does the strain of the ordeal seem to have affected the old hero. He and Charles had taken their campaign across to England, for an appearance before the British Association at Bath. Afterward came reports of personal bitterness, reports ignored by the French press but picked up in Panama by the Star & Herald. In London he implied that there had been more to his labors than met the eye. He threatened “to publish an account of every step he had been forced to take in the Panama Crusade” steps that had involved certain high-placed figures in the French government.

If it was an attempt to frighten the government at home into saving the company at the last minute, it did not work.

The remaining lottery bonds went on sale November 29. The closing of the issue was set for December 12. The condition of the sale was that unless 400,000 of the bonds were taken, the subscription would be annulled. “I appeal to all Frenchmen,” wrote de Lesseps in a final stirring call. “I appeal to all my colleagues whose fortunes are threatened. . . . Your fates are in your own hands. Decide!”

The offices on the Rue Caumartin became the focus of a tremendous emotional tension that reached to every part of France. For hundreds of thousands of people the fate of the company meant the difference between a chance of real security for once in their lives and absolute financial disaster. If the company were to fail, it would indeed be, as Paul Leroy-Beaulieu had said, the largest, most terrible financial collapse on record, a stupendous event historically; but for the vast majority of those who had stood behind Ferdinand de Lesseps all these years, investing their life’s savings, often borrowing heavily, mortgaging land, selling off family treasures–jewelry, pictures–to invest more, it would very simply mean a personal disaster of almost unimaginable proportions.

Again bear raiders made an all-out attack and Panama stock plum-meted more than 100 points in less than two weeks, from 270 francs to 165 francs. By December 8, lottery bonds on the Bourse were selling for 260 francs, 40 francs less than what de Lesseps was asking.

December 11, the next to the last day of the sale, the large public hall on the ground floor of the company’s offices was filled with investors, “flushed and excited,” as Emily Crawford wrote, “but willing to stake their last penny on the hope of retrieving their fortunes.” They were, she said, like desperate gamblers, their hopes highest at the point when their losses had become greatest. “Strangers met and mutually strengthened their faith with words of comfort. A man who ventured to express doubts as to the possibility of the canal found the place too hot for him.” That same day Panama shares on the Bourse closed at 145, down another 115 points in three days.

The next day, the final day of the sale, the scene at the canal offices was even more frenzied, as a still larger, more excited crowd packed into the public hall. At about four in the afternoon, de Lesseps appeared, causing a sensation. A way was cleared and he climbed onto a table at one end of the room. He motioned for silence.

“My friends,” he cried out, “the subscription is safe! Our adversaries are confounded! We have no need for the help of financiers! you have saved yourselves by your own exertion! The canal is made!”

Tears were streaming down his face. Then he was being helped from the table and the crowd seemed delirious. People were crying, cheering, embracing one another. He began reaching out for hands. Several women tried to kiss his clothing.

No details were available on the success of the sale. But by nightfall reports swept through the City that more than the required 400,000 bonds had been sold in Paris alone, that Marseilles had taken another 86,000.

The throngs that pressed into the Rue Caumartin the next morning, December 13, had come for a victory celebration. Orders were still pouring in, it was announced when the company opened its doors. The subscription had reached an astounding 800,000. There were repeated shouts for de Lesseps to appear; everyone was pressing toward the table where he had stood the day before. Perhaps an hour went by. Then the figure that entered, moved through the crowd, and climbed onto the table was seen to be Charles de Lesseps.

“Do you wish to see Monsieur de Lesseps?” he called, and there was a roar of approval. (“Yes! We want to see that good Monsieur de Lesseps,” said an elderly woman standing beside Mrs. Crawford. )

“My father will always be happy to see you, but I suppose you all wish for some information.”

He waited for the cheering to stop.

“We are sitting at an important meeting of directors which I have left for a moment to come here. I do not know what decision may be taken by this meeting, but I am willing to tell you whatever I know. “

The crowd was suddenly still. He had barely to raise his voice to be heard.

“I will be perfectly open with you, only do not hold me responsible if you learn anything else tomorrow. If you would like to wait for another hour, I will let you know the full result of our deliberations, but would you rather know at once what I can tell you? “

According to Mrs. Crawford, whose account of the scene is the most vivid available, everybody assented to this. He asked what sort of information they wanted, she wrote, “and being told in reply that they wished to know the result of the subscription, he went on in a deliberate tone.”

The subscription, he said, had thus far reached a total of 180,000 bonds. “This being below the minimum fixed by Monsieur de Lesseps, we will commence returning the deposits tomorrow. You see, I am telling you exactly how things are.”

People began muttering that . . . yes, this was the best thing; yes, there must be another subscription. It was as if they did not yet understand the meaning of what he had said. Many people were so dazed they stood frozen, saying nothing at all, little expression on their faces. When someone finally asked how the picture could possibly have changed so drastically overnight, Charles answered: “My father is younger in spirit than I. His remarks were made on the strength of a hopeful report that I made to him. The result is bankruptcy or the winding up of the company.”

The morning after, December 14, the company suspended payments and petitioned the government for a three-month moratorium on bills and interest, so that a new company could be organized to continue the work. The news was immediately put on the wires and within hours newspapers around the world carried the story of “The Great Canal Crash.” At the Palais Bourbon, on the other side of the Seine, the Chamber of Deputies convened at once and the following day, December 15, 1888, turned down the proposal by a vote of 256 to 181. Within hours the appropriate court, the Tribunal Civil of the Department of the Seine, appointed three temporary receivers to administer the company’s affairs.

It was a reporter for Le Figaro, arriving at de Lesseps’ home just ten minutes after the vote in the Chamber, who told him how the vote had gone. De Lesseps turned dreadfully pale, the man wrote afterward, and could only whisper, “It is impossible! It is shameful!”

The pallor and the loss of words were but momentary, however. Instinctively the old reflexes responded. He was in motion again, issuing statements, talking of new schemes. The company was in wreckage, the government had turned its back; the long battle was ended and he had been crushed. It was Sedan again for France, yet he refused to accept that–he was incapable of accepting that.

For his family and friends the next weeks were an agony, as he drove himself and others in a final, hopeless attempt to pick up the pieces and rally his forces. Demonstrations of popular support were staged throughout the country. At one in Paris, in the Palais d’Hiver, a huge ice-skating rink, five thousand of the faithful turned out. “Shall we pledge ourselves, each according to his means, to aid this great enterprise by purchasing new shares of Panama stock?” one speaker had cried and the response was thundering, “Oui! Oui!”

H. B. Slaven arrived in Paris and there were daily conferences on the Rue Caumartin. It was announced that the major contractors would continue all essential operations for the time being, working on credit, since any abrupt cessation of the effort would mean the certain ruin of machinery worth millions of francs (machinery all belonging to the company), as well as tremendous damage to the unfinished excavation.

A new company would be launched, de Lesseps said, and in late January new stock actually went on sale. The idea never had a chance, of course; of 60,000 shares, all of 9,000 were sold.

The official end came on February 4, 1889. In accordance with a desire formally expressed by shareholders in the original company, the Tribunal Civil appointed a liquidator. The Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique was no more.

8
The Secrets of Panama

“What have you done with the money?”

–EDOUARD DRUMONT

I

It was nearly three years later when the Panama scandal broke wide open, rocking France to its foundations. Between times, the great Universal Exposition of 1889 had been staged beneath Gustave Eiffel’s gargantuan tower, and French political life went along little changed from year to year, one ministry succeeding another, despite the flaming oratory, despite the Boulanger crisis. General Boulanger, “the strong man,” having sat out his chance to seize power, having escaped to Brussels with his adored mistress, Madame de Bonnemains, had also, soon after her death, shot himself at her graveside.

Panama, to be sure, had remained a major topic. Some 800,000 French men and women had been directly affected, the savings of entire families had utterly vanished. People who could ill afford to lose anything had lost everything. Still, no panic had been touched off when the company went under. There were no demonstrations in the streets May 15, 1889, the day the liquidator ordered that the work be halted on the Isthmus. Instead, shareholders submitted their grievances by formal petition, in polite, written pleas for redress through government action. Tempers cooled; rumors of fraud and political payoffs were denied or discounted or simply grew stale. When the liquidator established a special committee to go to Panama and estimate the cost of finishing the canal, many shareholders actually took heart, convinced that the government was about to rescue them.

Among those who had been distrustful of the Panama proposition all along and remained clear of it, there was the feeling that such was life for the unwary, that sheep were there to be shorn. For the rest, for nearly everyone as time passed, there was the feeling that Panama was best put behind. The prospect of the tragedy being compounded by a sensational and ruinous scandal was neither anticipated nor desired by the public at large. And very possibly there would never have been an affaire de Panama had it not been for the country’s leading anti-Semite, the strange, secretive Edouard Drumont.

Edouard Drumont, a devout Roman Catholic, a professed lover of history, had observed the world about him and concluded that the sickness of modern France–by which he meant France since “La Debacle” –was finance capitalism and that the nation’s most treacherous human foe was the Jew. The Jew by his very nature, said Drumont, had no sense of justice, none of the finer sensibilities that made civilization possible. Jews were carriers of disease, born criminals and traitors, who could be recognized by their “crooked nose, the eager fingers, the unpleasant odor.” He had said this and much more in La France Juive (Jewish France), a book of more than a thousand pages that appeared in 1886, that ran to more than a hundred editions and made the author famous–feared, despised, secretly admired–throughout the country.

Drumont was black-haired and spectacled, with a thin, hooked nose, and a thick black beard and mustache that together masked the whole lower half of his face so effectively that his mouth was all but hidden. Many people thought he looked Jewish. His wife was dead; he had no children; he kept his money hidden in secret nooks and crannies about his house. By profession he was a journalist, and until the appearance of La France Juive, he had been tremendously frustrated by lack of recognition, having tried his luck as a traveling salesman and a novelist but without success.

That his elephantine tract received such phenomenal attention was in itself a point of fascination, since anti-Semitism had been rare in France. Beyond Paris it was hardly known. Drumont’s assertion was that there were 500,000 Jews in France; in reality there were perhaps 80,000. But it was the time of the pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine, and those refugees who had found their way to France, though comparatively few in number, were highly conspicuous and had aroused anxiety among some elements of French society, including French Jews. More important, there was the growing belief that finance capitalism had become a conspiracy, that the country was in the grip of the financiers, and that in the face of such power, the small shopkeeper or the ordinary workingman counted for little.

It was for the Jewish monarchs of finance–the Rothschilds, the Ephrussi–and those Christians who courted the favor of such people that Drumont reserved his worst venom. Saint-Simonianism was declared to be nothing more than a device of the Jews to lift themselves out of the ghetto. The Franco-Prussian war had been engineered by Jews. If examined closely, all failures in modern French society could be traced to the Jewish capitalist system, Drumont asserted.

So with the fall of the Compagnie Universelle–the greatest of ventures thus far in finance capitalism–he naturally began looking into things.

The initial result was another book, La Derniere Bataille (The Last Battle), a self-styled “history” of la grande entreprise that appeared in 1890 and became a runaway best seller. How could a forthright government fail to audit the canal company’s books? Drumont demanded. How could the likes of Ferdinand de Lesseps be permitted to walk about a free man? “This evil doer is treated like a hero. The poor devil who breaks a shop window to steal a loaf of bread is dragged . . . before the judge of a criminal court. But into this affair, which has swallowed up almost a billion and a half [francs], there has been no investigation whatever; not once has this man been asked: ‘What have you done with the money?’ ” Le Grand Français, he cried, was in fact a great fraud, a cheat and liar, a fountainhead of corruption. He painted a vivid and greatly distorted picture of extravagant luxuries on the Isthmus and took special pleasure in a vicious, personal assault on Jules Dingler. Dingler’s house had cost $1,000,000, he insisted. “This man, who seems to have endured heavy afflictions but who was a stranger to every sentiment of justice and humanity, was hated so bitterly that the death of his wife became the occasion of a merry festival. Champagne flowed in torrents . . .” Sixty percent of the workers had died, he claimed. The death count could not have been less than thirty thousand. “The Isthmus has become . . . an immense boneyard. . . .” Presently, he founded his own newspaper, an illustrated anti-Semitic daily called La Libre Parole (Free Speech). His chief lieutenants included such individuals as Jacques de Biez, who enjoyed asking priests if it was true that Christ was a Jew (“Drumont doesn’t mind,” he would say, “but I can’t swallow it!”), and the Marquis de Mores, an aristocratic psychopath whose wife was Medora von Hoffman, daughter of a Wall Street banker. On one occasion de Mores, who was a crack shot, had stood in for Drumont in a duel and killed a French Army officer, a Jew who had challenged Drumont as a result of certain insulting remarks about Jewish officers in La Libre Parole. Drumont and de Mores were accused of staging the whole episode, as a kind of execution, and de Mores was tried for manslaughter but was acquitted.*

La Libre Parole was no runaway success, however, not, that is, until September of 1892, when Drumont broke a series of sensational stories under the title “The Secrets of Panama,” these signed “Micros.” The “Jewish plot” at the heart of the Panama tragedy had at last been found and enough else had begun to happen meantime to make the public sit up and take notice.

The chief magistrate of the Paris Court of Appeal, Samuel Perivier, under orders from the Minister of Justice, had appointed a court counselor and an expert accountant to audit the canal company’s books and to interrogate various former officers, including Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps. The charge was fraud and breach of trust.

Ferdinand de Lesseps had made an unforgettable appearance before the court counselor, a man named Henri Prinet. For nearly two years de Lesseps had been living in seclusion. In the early months of 1889, after the company failed, he had tried manfully to assist in the liquidation process, while at home he went through the customary motions as head of the family. From the upper floors of the big house on the Avenue Montaigne, he–all of them–had been able to watch Eiffel’s tower rise higher and higher as the spring of 1889 and the opening of the exposition approached. But by that summer he had become a distant, bewildered old man. In recent months he had been confined to his bed under the care of a physician.

Yet on the day he was to appear before the court counselor, he suddenly revived. It was as if something had clicked on inside the ancient head and suddenly he was himself again. Charles afterward described what happened:

The doctor . . . expressed the opinion that it would be very imprudent for my father to go out. . . . Nevertheless the meeting had to take place sooner or later; I hoped that one conference would suffice and . . . so I thought it better for him to suffer the shock immediately. . . . My father rose from his bed and . . . said: “I shall go.” He dressed, and by the time he reached M. Prinet’s he had apparently recovered all his strength; he remained three quarters of an hour . . . and when he left his face radiated charm and energy as it always did under difficulties.

It is not known what de Lesseps said in the interview, other than that he defended his management of the company and the canal itself. On returning home, however, he went straight to his bed and for three weeks he hardly stirred, saying nothing to anyone other than to tell his wife a day or so later that he had had the most horrible dream. “I imagined,” he said, “I was summoned before the examining magistrate. It was atrocious.”

The homes and offices of company officials, and of Gustave Eiffel, were gone through by police and documents were seized. On January 5, 1892, in response to persistent prodding by a hotheaded young Boulangist named Jules Delahaye, the Chamber of Deputies voted unanimously for “resolute and speedy action” against all those involved in any foul play in the Panama business. Next, the court-appointed accountant who had been auditing the company’s books reported that though he found no sign of company officers profiting personally, he nonetheless thought several of them were indictable for misuse of funds and for willfully deceiving the public.

But these were faint tremors compared to the impact of the so-called “Micros” articles in Drumont’s paper, the first of which appeared September 10. “Micros,” as was later divulged, was a pseudonym for Ferdinand Martin, the banker from Nyon who had organized the first petitions for a lottery in 1885. That great show of popular support, as Martin would testify, had in fact been wholly conceived and organized in the offices on the Rue Caumartin. He had been paid for playing his part, but not enough in his view, and as a result he had had a falling out with Charles de Lesseps the following year. The articles for Drumont were his way, six years later, of evening the score.

The articles charged that twenty members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate had been bribed by the canal company to vote for the lottery bond bill and that the prime fixer for the company was Baron Jacques de Reinach. A director of the company, Henri Cottu, had been involved, as had the publisher of L’Économiste Pratique, a man named Blanc. The actual cash deliveries had been made by one Leopold-Emile Arton.

Arton, or Aron, as he was also known, was a flashy, out-and-out swindler, a former sales agent for the Societe de Dynamite, the explosives trust, who had once unloaded a bad shipment of dynamite on the unsuspecting canal officials and as a reward had been placed in a secretarial position in the Societe’s head office. Thus established, he had then managed to embezzle somewhere in the range of 4,600,000 francs, and at the moment, with a warrant out for his arrest, he was no longer to be found in France.

Almost daily La Libre Parole provided additional bits and pieces, bearing down heavily all the while on Jacques de Reinach. It became the most eagerly read paper in France. Other Paris papers quickly took up the scent. To a powerful figure such as Arthur Meyer, publisher of Le Gaulois, a royalist paper, the scandal was the long-awaited chance to topple the Republic, and so every new revelation was given full play, irrespective of the fact that Meyer was himself a Jew.

When La Cocarde, another right-wing paper, carried an interview with Charles de Lesseps that appeared to confirm the “Micros” revelations, a new Minister of Justice, Louis Ricard, felt compelled to act. De Reinach, Cottu, Blanc, and Charles de Lesseps were summoned for interrogation. All but de Reinach either denied the allegations or refused to reply; the publisher Blanc was so convincing that he would not be bothered again. De Reinach conceded to the interrogator, Henri Prinet, only that he had given Arton 1,000,000 francs to use for publicity and that he personally had distributed large sums to the press–in excess of 3,000,000 francs–but that he had certainly never bribed anyone in a position of public trust.

Convinced of the baron’s guilt, Prinet ordered the commissioner of police to see de Reinach at his home at once and to confiscate all papers relating to his Panama dealings. For some unexplained reason, however, the commissioner allowed several days to pass before doing anything. When he appeared at de Reinach’s door in the fashionable Pare Monceau quarter, he was told the baron had gone to the Riviera. So no papers were obtained.

Drumont’s charges, meantime, had become far more specific and detailed. It was plain that he had found a new inside source, somebody who knew precisely how the Panama business had been run. With the public outcry mounting, the Ministry of Justice was under tremendous pressure to act. Delahaye and others in the Chamber were demanding a parliamentary investigation. But Premier Émile Loubet and his Cabinet held back, urging prudence, urging patience, hardly daring to make a move, living only day by day and fearing the worst. None could say how many old friends might have been involved, who might be destroyed were the avalanche to let go.

In October the public prosecutor, one Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, proposed a civil suit for damages, instead of a criminal trial. He had no wish to see Ferdinand de Lesseps in prison. His purpose, he stated, was to provide some restitution to the ruined shareholders rather than to impose “the sterile penalty of imprisonment upon an octogenarian in his dotage” So now the government had to decide, and at length, on November 15, a special meeting of the Cabinet was convened. Premier Loubet, small and spotlessly groomed, excused himself from any part in the decision, saying it should be the prerogative of the Minister of Justice. (Such deference was a quality hitherto unknown in Premier Loubet.) The decision had already been made, declared the Minister of Justice, Ricard, who was large and fat and had creamy-white side whiskers. He had ordered that criminal charges be brought against Ferdinand de Lesseps and the others thus far implicated.

But on Monday morning, November 21, the morning the summonses were to be served, Paris awoke to the stunning news that Baron Jacques de Reinach had been found dead.

The papers were vague on details. It was known only that when his valet went to wake him as usual at seven Sunday morning, he found on entering the bedroom “a member of the family” who turned and said the baron was dead. The “member of the family,” as later disclosed, was the baron’s nephew Joseph Reinach (without the de), an influential editor, and it was he who reported the death first to Adrien Hebrard, of Le Temps.

The rest of the day was one nobody would forget. The summonses were served that morning as scheduled, on Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, Henri Cottu, Marius Fontane (former secretary general of the Compagnie Universelle), and Gustave Eiffel. At the Palais Bourbon the word spread that Delahaye would speak in the afternoon, and when another deputy, seeing Delahaye walk by, stopped him to urge restraint, Delahaye responded, “Do not leave the sitting, there will be a big explosion.”

At five o’clock, when Delahaye rose from his place and started down to the speaker’s stand, all seats in the semicircular red-plush tiers of the Chamber were taken. Premier Loubet and his ministers were seated down front; the two levels of the public galleries were solid with spectators. Newspaper reporters and the Chamber’s veteran silver-chained, frock-coated ushers could recall no moment quite like this one.

Delahaye mounted the eight steps to the rostrum, just below and in front of the president of the Chamber, Charles Floquet. Delahaye, Deputy for Chinon and a member of the extreme right, was known as a “good hater.” He was spare and athletic, with sleek black hair and an upswept handlebar mustache nearly the size of a sickle blade. He seldom ever smiled and there was a decided squint in his right eye. It was a face, wrote his fellow deputy and fellow Boulangist Maurice Barres, that bespoke “inflexible cruelty.” Whether Delahaye and Drumont were working together is not entirely clear, but Barres, among others, would claim they were.

“I would stake here my honor against yours,” Delahaye began. He would give no names, but behind the canal company there had been an “evil genius”: the directors duped the public, the evil genius duped the directors.

“Name him, name him!” several voices shouted from the packed chamber.

“If you want names, you will vote an inquiry,” Delahaye answered. He charged that 3,000,000 francs had been distributed in the Chamber, that 150 deputies had been bought. He had seen the list. At once there was a violent uproar. “The names! The names!”

There were only two kinds of deputies, Delahaye exclaimed, those who took the money and those who did not. Floquet, who was also a former premier, was now on his feet directly behind Delahaye. “You cannot come into this house and accuse the entire body,” he thundered down at the Deputy. Again there were angry cries for names.

“Vote the inquiry,” Delahaye shouted.

When he started for his seat the great room was in wild disorder. He was hissed at; deputies banged their desks to add to the uproar. The Premier next ascended the steps to the tribune but for several minutes was unable to speak against the noise. Such irresponsible charges, he cried, stemmed solely from uncontrolled political passions–that is, the old Boulangist faction was trying to destroy the Republic. Assuredly, light must be shed on so grave a matter; of course his government would hide nothing.

The Chamber voted the inquiry. A committee of thirty-three members was named and the debate raged on. At another sitting of the Chamber, two days later, one honored member became so excited he collapsed and had to be carried out. Men wept as accusations were hurled from the tribune. Fist fights broke out in the aisles.

Much of the country and the foreign press could scarcely believe what was happening. George Smalley, star reporter of the Battle of Antietam, who was now London correspondent for the New York Tribune, cabled his home office that as fraught with recklessness and venality as the Panama business must have been, “we can with difficulty be induced to believe that it has utterly debauched public life in France.”

There were wild rumors concerning de Reinach, the evil genius of Delahaye’s speech, whose body had been taken from Paris and buried immediately after the required twenty-four-hour delay. It was said that he had taken poison. (Le Gaulois, the smart society paper, described his final agony in such exquisite detail that it was as if someone from the paper had actually been in the bedroom.) It was said that he had been poisoned by someone, that he had been murdered in his sleep. It was said that he was alive and out of the country. The coffin was empty, exclaimed one deputy in a speech.

A family physician had attributed the death to “cerebral congestion”; a regular certificate of death had been signed by a city doctor. Still the Chamber rang with cries for an autopsy. The critical issue had been found; the line had been drawn. And the Ministry of Justice held fast. The baron’s body, Louis Ricard announced, could be exhumed only if there was a clear suspicion of murder, and having no such suspicion, he refused to step beyond the law.

But it was too late; it was, as Philippe Bunau-Varilla would write, “the beginning of a convulsion.” On November 28 the Chamber voted overwhelmingly to proceed with an inquiry into Jacques de Reinach’s death. And with that the Loubet government fell.

The week following, the president of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, called upon Alexandre Ribot, Loubet’s foreign minister, to form a new government.

II

No one ever got to the bottom of the Panama Affair and no one ever will. The Chamber’s own committee of inquiry, the much-publicized Committee of Thirty-three, held 63 sessions; it received 158 depositions, compiled more than 1,000 individual dossiers. Its final report fills three ponderous volumes. But time and again the fact-finding stopped short of facts that might prove too embarrassing or destructive. Old colleagues were protected. Barres, by no means an impartial observer, but a keen judge of human nature, wrote, “The committee fell into the mistakes of all inexperienced courts of inquiry. They were unduly affected by the skillful emotional show of a lot of sly old sinners who appeared before them.”

De Reinach’s lips were permanently sealed of course. His death, the pivotal event in the unfolding story, would also remain one of the most puzzling of several unsolved mysteries.

The coffin was exhumed four days after the new government took office. A large party of physicians, police, and newspaper people went out to the baron’s country place at Nivillers and stood about in a snow-covered cemetery to witness the unearthing. The body was in the coffin, but the autopsy proved nothing since by then the vital organs had so decomposed that the cause of death was impossible to determine.

No sooner had the mutilated remains been returned to the grave than the fundamental design of the scandal–as then perceived–was drastically altered by the introduction of an entirely new character of even more sinister cast. To the astonishment of everyone, de Reinach was now revealed to have been but nominally the villain of the piece. At once the affair became more complex, more fascinating, and far more sensational politically, because now it implicated the most formidable figure in French public life, Georges Clemenceau.

The new character in the plot had been involved since the time when the Türr Syndicate had been organized. He was Cornelius Herz –known to his associates as “Le Docteur”–and to the decided satisfaction of Edouard Drumont and the rapidly growing numbers who saw things as Drumont did, he was both a foreigner and a Jew. He was unknown to the public and to most of the press when his name first turned up. The papers could report only that he was an American who somehow or other had been awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and who had a standing in the electrical industry.

The rest of his story came later, pieced together by reporters in Paris and San Francisco, and seldom had a more perfect charlatan been discovered. The man was shrewd, daring, utterly charming when it suited his purpose. Though he had attained his initial fortune and social acceptance as a physician and “man of science,” the best evidence was that he had neither a medical degree nor little, if any, substantive scientific knowledge.

Herz was born at Besançon, in eastern France, in 1845, which made him forty-seven at the time his name leaped into print. His parents were German Jews who, when he was three years old, emigrated to New York, where the father became a packing-box manufacturer. At thirteen Cornelius entered the College of the City of New York; in 1864 he was graduated at the bottom of his class. Presently he returned to France to study medicine, and by the time of the Franco-Prussian War he had acquired enough background–or said he had–to qualify as an assistant surgeon in the French Army.

After the war he went to Chicago, where his parents had relocated. Later he turned up on the staff of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, but in a few months he was on the move again. Officials of the hospital had begun investigating his background and found, in the words of their report, that he had “very ingeniously avoided taking the examination for house physician and surgeon,” and that “his supposed graduation from the University of Paris was fictitious.” Whenever asked for his diploma, Herz said it had been destroyed in the Chicago fire.

He arrived in San Francisco with one volume of medical terminology (a twenty-six-year-old edition of John Mayne’s Dispensatory and Therapeutical Remembrancer), a few hundred dollars, and a dark-haired American wife, Bianca Saroni. Presenting himself as a specialist in diseases of the brain, he opened an office filled with electrical gadgetry. “He was a man of the world, apparently well equipped for his profession,” the San Francisco Evening Bulletin would later report, “yet with a sanguine, sky-scraping temperament that made him soar above men and to seek wonderful and world-stripping achievements. A dozen valuable inventions were his–a hundred marvelous scientific processes were to be worked out by his genius.”

His practice grew rapidly until 1877 when, with his wife and two infant daughters, he suddenly departed for France. As later disclosed, he had gone off with several checks from a retired brewer, a former patient, amounting to $80,000, notes the brewer had made out to Herz when Herz had him under hypnosis. In New York, as his ship was about to sail, Herz cashed a check from another patient, this for $30,000, which supposedly he was to invest in a French electrical scheme. A San Francisco electrician had been taken for $13,000; a physician who had been in a partnership with Herz was out $20,000.

In Paris he became known as the successful young American with large plans. Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were personal friends, he said. Some of Edison’s ideas were actually his own. He founded a respected scientific and industrial review, La Lumiere Électrique. He established telephone service between Paris and Versailles, invested in a variety of speculative, quasi-scientific ventures, including the Türr-Wyse scheme. Within an amazingly short time he seemed to know everybody who counted–Charles de Freycinet (four times premier), Hebrard of Le Temps (who introduced him to Clemenceau), Emily Crawford, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Boulanger, President Jules Grevy.

De Freycinet had been the one who had arranged for him to receive the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. The decoration, as de Freycinet was to explain subsequently, and to the satisfaction of very few, had been conferred at the request of the scientific community.

In Emily Crawford’s phrase, Herz understood “the inner lines” of French politics and by far his most valuable friendship was with Clemenceau, with whom he had much in common. Clemenceau too had begun his career as a physician; Clemenceau had lived in the United States and married an American girl. It was a friendship that Herz knew how to advertise and that Clemenceau would later find expedient to forget. Herz supplied the money to launch Clemenceau’s newspaper, La Justice, and put still more into the paper as time went on, perhaps as much as 2,000,000 francs. At one point Clemenceau even appointed Herz the guardian of his children in the event of his death.

Clemenceau, the impassioned republican, the fiery voice of “revanche” editor, atheist, teetotaler, the most aggressive orator in the Chamber of Deputies, occupied a unique position: he was feared by everybody–on the left, extreme left (his own Radical party), center, right, extreme right. Harsh, even ruthless, brilliant, he made other politicians seem dull-witted, flabby in spirit. He was the “Tiger,” and with his taut physique, his bristling eyebrows and yellowish complexion, he looked the part.

As for Herz, he was the most ordinary-looking of men. “Everything is ranged against me,” he is said to have once remarked, “even my own appearance.” Anyone trying to remember him at the scene of a crime would have had trouble thinking of a single distinguishing feature. There was a full mustache, a mustache of the kind then being worn by most every male Parisian past the age of twenty. There was a round face, a generally bland expression, a thinning hairline. He was short, a bit overweight; he could have been any of a dozen men on any busy street in the city. Only the eyes, it is said, suggested the energy and cunning within.

The first public mention of Herz in connection with the Panama scandal came as a result of an appearance before the Deputies committee by a banker who had once been an employee of the firm of Kohn, de Reinach. Anthony Thierree said that in July 1888 de Reinach had deposited with him a single check issued by the canal company for 3,390,000 francs. In return de Reinach had asked for twenty-six separate checks of differing amounts equivalent to the same sum. The checks were made out to “Bearer.” It had seemed a perfectly normal transaction. Though the banker first claimed to have no records of the checks, the stubs were soon confiscated from the bank’s vault and on all but one were the plainly written initials or first several letters in the names of prominent recipients, as well as the amounts of the individual checks.

The stubs were the first solid evidence in the case and they caused a sensation. The checks were to be traced through banks all over Europe. The sums made out to various government officials and legislators ranged from 20,000 to 195,000 francs (from $4,000 to $39,000). The recipients included such personages as Senator Albert Grevy, brother of the former president; Senator Leon Renault, one of the most esteemed legal minds in France; and a deceased Minister of Agriculture. The single illegible stub was for 80,000 francs and the identity of the recipient became another of those tantalizing mysteries that would sell enormous numbers of newspapers and keep the rumors flying in the marble corridors of the Palais Bourbon.

But the largest amount–two checks for an even 1,000,000 francs each, or $400,000–had gone without any explanation to Cornelius Herz, who, it was now learned, had removed himself to London.

A few days after the committee obtained the check stubs, a lawyer for Herz, a dandified and rather notorious former Paris prefect of police, Louis Andrieux, produced for the committee a photograph of a note containing a list of names, a photograph obtained from Herz. The names were the same as those on the stubs, but the note referred to still another check for more than 1,000,000 francs that had been broken down by the unsavory Leopold-Emile Arton and delivered to 104 members of the Chamber of Deputies. The two largest payoffs, the photograph further disclosed, a check for 250,000 francs and another for 300,000 francs had gone to none other than Charles Floquet and to Deputy Charles Sans-Leroy, the man whose last-minute vote had cleared the lottery bill for action in the Chamber.

The note appeared to corroborate everything that Jules Delahaye had charged in his momentous attack. Overnight the public fastened on to one expression, one tangible, understandable image–the check-taker, the chequard. A new word had been added to the French language. “That fatal word became the topic of every song, gibe, anecdote, and demonstration,” wrote a contemporary chronicler. “All along the boulevards itinerant vendors sold songs and broadsheets, ‘Who Hasn’t Had His Little Check,’. . . Comedians, cabaret singers, and everyone else found the chéque a mine of inexhaustible satire.”

As the committee pressed on with its investigation, and later, when the actual trials got under way with witnesses testifying under oath, the picture of what had been going on began to change dramatically. Bit by bit Herz emerged, like some crucial but long-concealed figure discovered beneath the surface of a familiar painting. For all those absorbed in the scandal–for just about all of France–it would be impossible thereafter to think of Panama and not think of Cornelius Herz.

There was testimony to the effect that Charles de Freycinet had extracted campaign contributions from the Panama company. A deputy who had served with Charles Sans-Leroy on the lottery-bill committee said he too had been offered money–100,000 francs–to vote for the bill, by a professed emissary of Charles de Lesseps, and that when he refused, the offer had been tripled. Charles de Lesseps denied any knowledge of such an offer, but when it was charged that former Minister of Public Works Baihaut (“the man with the beautiful wife”) had been paid 1,000,000 francs to give the lottery bill his support, Charles de Lesseps made no denial.

Adrien Hebrard admitted that he had entered into a secret partnership with Gustave Eiffel, in Eiffel’s bid for the Panama contract. Eiffel, moreover, had paid Hebrard 2,000,000 francs and had paid de Reinach nearly the same amount for their influence.

Then Andrieux, Herz’s lawyer, dropped the astounding news that Drumont’s inside source in the weeks following the “Micros” articles had been none other than de Reinach. Indeed, had it not been for de Reinach, Drumont’s despised Jew, the paper would have run short of material. The bargain had been that Drumont would keep de Reinach out of the columns of the paper so long as de Reinach kept Drumont supplied with incriminating Panama details. Andrieux knew because he had been the go-between.

Drumont, called to appear as a witness, happened to be in jail–he had at last been convicted on a libel charge–and he refused to appear unless his sentence was suspended, a proposition the courts refused.

But the thing that was most perplexing to the investigators was the gathering evidence that de Reinach, supposedly the arch crook in the plot, had been keeping nothing for himself. He who was bleeding the canal company of millions–to “subsidize” the press ostensibly, but in fact to pay off a great many others as well–he who was getting regular kickbacks from several other Panama contractors besides Eiffel, was in turn being bled by someone else. And the someone was Herz.

Herz and the baron had known each other since Herz first arrived in Paris from San Francisco. De Reinach had been instrumental in obtaining government contracts for various Herz enterprises. It was de Reinach who had brought Herz into the arrangement with Istvan Türr and Lieutenant Wyse. But at no time thereafter, not once in all the years the canal was being attempted, had Herz lifted a finger to help the Compagnie Universelle. He had never performed a single identifiable service for the company–legal or illegal–to warrant compensation; yet, as near as could be figured, he had received millions of francs through de Reinach, possibly as much as 10,000,000 francs, or $2,000,000. In addition, the company had made at least one direct payment to Herz of 600,000 francs.

The arrangement had been this. At the time of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ first campaign for a lottery issue, Herz had persuaded the old man and Charles to advance him the 600,000 francs for the good he could do them politically–the expenditure was entered in the company’s books under “publicity”–and to agree to a 10,000,000-franc payoff if and when a lottery bill was passed. The elder de Lesseps had even blithely agreed to give Herz a written copy of the secret agreement, which put the company pretty much at Herz’s mercy until 1887 when Charles recovered the incriminating paper and burned it.

Apparently the final 10,000,000-franc payment was to have been made through de Reinach, who was to take a cut for himself in repayment for money Herz owed him. But Herz had suddenly turned the tables on de Reinach. When the lottery bill was passed in June of 1888, the company refused to give de Reinach the 10,000,000 francs to give to Herz, the company’s position being that Herz had done nothing and so deserved nothing. Herz, who was then in Frankfurt, immediately informed the directors by telegram that de Reinach must “pay or be destroyed . . . I shall wreck everything rather than be robbed of a single centime; take warning, the time is short.”

So it was then that the directors turned over to de Reinach the check for 3,390,000 francs, which de Reinach took to the bank and converted into the various checks to “Bearer,” the two largest of which went to Herz. From that point on Herz had been blackmailing de Reinach, and thereby the canal company, for everything he could get.

What hold Herz had on de Reinach remained obscure, although there were innumerable theories concerning various dark secrets in de Reinach’s past, things so dreadful that he had been willing to go to any lengths to keep Herz silent. A favorite theory was that de Reinach had committed treason in order to advance himself socially or financially– the sale of state secrets to Italy possibly, or to the British Foreign Office–and that Herz had made it his business to know the details.

At one point de Reinach had threatened to expose Herz if he did not leave him alone, but it was a hollow threat. At another time, according to Louis Andrieux, de Reinach became so desperate that he hired an assassin to do away with Herz, a charge that was never substantiated or denied.

The story of de Reinach’s last night alive was revealed by degrees, beginning with an article in Le Figaro. On hearing of Ricard’s decision to proceed with criminal charges, de Reinach had rushed back from the Riviera, and on the fateful evening of November 19 he had gone to see Herz at Herz’s home near the Bois. But he had not gone to see Herz alone, the paper reported. There had been two others with him, Finance Minister Maurice Rouvier and Georges Clemenceau, whose mission was to plead for mercy in de Reinach’s behalf. When this side of the story broke, the response in the Chamber, and in the cafes, was a host of new theories about de Reinach’s death: he had been poisoned by Rouvier, by Clemenceau, by Herz.

Rouvier resigned at once. It was true that he had gone with de Reinach, he told his stunned colleagues in an emotional speech. It had seemed the humane thing to do; de Reinach was being driven insane by the newspapers and he thought Herz had the power to silence the attacks. The explanation satisfied almost no one, however, and the fall of a figure of Rouvier’s stature–he was the one brilliant financial expert in the government, as well as a former premier–sent shock waves through Paris and set off a panic on the Bourse.

Clemenceau told a similar story and without so much as a trace of remorse. It was at Rouvier’s urging, he said, that he had agreed to go along that night; Rouvier had thought it important. The conference in Herz’s study had been brief. De Reinach had been extremely agitated, “his face crimson and his eyes popping out of his head.” Herz had said it was too late to silence the papers; he considered the subject closed. Herz was perfectly cool and controlled, Clemenceau recalled, and wholly unsympathetic.

Later in the evening de Reinach went alone to see his nephew Joseph, then, still later, to see two young women whom he kept in respectable style in the Rue Marbeuf. Apparently he reached his own home about one in the morning and was found dead six hours later. The consensus in Paris was that he had taken poison and probably that is what happened.

It was Adrien Hebrard who informed Herz of the death, immediately after Hebrard had been informed by Joseph Reinach. So Herz knew before almost anyone and Herz departed for London that after-noon–that is, the afternoon of the Sunday before the arrests were made. On his way to the station he called on Andrieux to report that Joseph Reinach was “at work” on his uncle’s papers and could be trusted to leave nothing embarrassing lying about.

Herz was cause for torrents of invective in the Chamber, naturally enough. But Herz was out of the country and would stay there presumably, so in a large sense Herz was a straw man. The real target was Clemenceau.

How had such an individual as Herz, a foreigner, a quack doctor, risen so far so fast? In back of de Reinach was Herz, but who was in back of Herz? who was the powerful, unseen patron of “this little German Jew”?

“Now, this indefatigable and devoted intermediary, so active and so dangerous, you all know him, his name is on all lips,” exclaimed Deputy Paul Deroulede, self-appointed superpatriot and fanatic Boulangist. “But all the same not one of you would name him, for there are three things that you fear, his sword, his pistol, his tongue. Well, I brave all three and I name him: it is . . . Monsieur Clemenceau.” Instantly the Chamber became a shouting mob. One deputy jumped up and cried that Herz was an agent of the Foreign Office, a British spy. Yes, yes, Deroulede proclaimed, and Clemenceau had been his colleague.

Clemenceau responded with cold fury and looking directly at his accuser proclaimed him a liar: “Monsieur Paul Deroulede, vous en avez menti”

The inevitable duel followed, in a paddock at the Saint Ouen race track outside Paris on a chill, gray afternoon a few days before Christmas. Deroulede, tall and somber, stood bareheaded; Clemenceau, who was known as an expert marksman, kept his hat on. It was agreed in advance that photographers could be present and that dying words would be faithfully recorded. They each fired three times; they each missed three times. After the final volley, Deroulede was seen to examine a corner of his coat with “an appearance of apprehension.”

So by the year’s end, in the less than four months since Édouard Drumont commenced his disclosures in La Libre Parole, a government had fallen; three former premiers had been named in the plot, along with two former ministers and two prominent senators; more than a hundred deputies or former deputies stood accused of taking payoffs; there had been one probable suicide, a panic on the Bourse, a much-publicized duel. The sinister Herz had become a subject of worldwide fascination and there was the growing conviction that France had been the victim of a diabolic conspiracy.

About the only missing ingredient was a femme fatale and the suggestion of prominent government officials involved in illicit pleasures of the flesh. But then that also was added shortly by the Paris correspondent for The New York Times. In a long dispatch on the front page of the Times, January 15, 1893, appears a reference to the dazzling courtesan Leonide LeBlanc. It is not very much, only enough to imply a great deal, and there is no way either to verify it or to enlarge upon it. According to the Times report, “Her house in Paris was the center of the whole Panama intrigue and at her dinners these incriminated ministers, deputies, and editors met the cashiers of the rotten enterprise. She herself feathered her nest luxuriously out of the haul. . . .” She was also, according to the Times, “so braided up on every detail” of all that had gone on that nobody would dare say a word about her, and especially no one in the Chamber, “since more than half its members were guests under her roof [in] those lavish, hospitable days.” And as it turned out, no more was said of her.

III

Ferdinand de Lesseps remained unaware of events unfolding in Paris. Though somewhat improved physically, he passed his days seemingly oblivious of the world at large, wanting only peace. He had been removed from the city to the seclusion of his country place, where Madame de Lesseps made certain that he saw no one who by some slip might give things away. Bundled into a double-breasted seaman’s jacket, a smoking cap on his head and a fur-lined robe over his knees, he spent hours staring into a log fire. Only on New Year’s Day when Charles failed to appear for the traditional family gathering did he become suspicious, demanding to know what had happened. He was told and the effect was devastating; but then he lapsed into the slow, silent decline from which he was not to recover.

The arrest at Charles’s apartment on the Avenue Montaigne had been handled with such discretion by the police that his wife was unaware of their presence. But like Marius Fontane, Cottu, and former Deputy Sans-Leroy, Charles was to be treated thereafter as if he were a dangerous public enemy. They were taken to the Mazas, the old metropolitan jail opposite the Gare de Lyon, and were put in separate cells. No visitors were permitted, other than their attorneys; the few times they were taken from the jail to testify in advance of the trials, they went handcuffed and under heavy guard, riding in the sort of van used to transport common criminals.

For Charles the ordeal was to be a long one. He would be tried twice, in two separate courts on different charges. The first trial was for fraud and maladministration, for “fraudulent maneuvers to induce belief in unreal schemes, and to raise imaginary hopes of the realization of a chimerical event.” The second trial was for corruption of public officials–political bribery. And since the elder de Lesseps was to be excused from appearing, because of his health and advanced age, Charles would bear the entire weight of the defense.

The first trial commenced in the Paris Court of Appeal on January 10, 1893, and lasted four weeks, two days.* On the eve of the first session the mood of the city was strange and unsettling. People by now, people of every political hue, were openly questioning the entire structure of French society. An atmosphere of general distrust pervaded the whole of France. “The situation in Paris grows more ominous day by day,” reported Smalley of the Tribune, There was talk of a royalist coup; military units near the city were kept on alert. The Italian ambassador informed his government that France was on the brink of revolution.

“Panama” had become a universal term of abuse, and, for many, a battle cry. On the night of January 6, La Libre Parole had staged a large anti-Semitic rally at the Tivoli Vauxhall. Jews had created Panama, exclaimed the main speaker, the Adarquis de Mores, and it was the Jews who were rejoicing now at the ruin of French honor. When several hundred spectators rose in angry protest (as the rest of the audience cheered wildly), a riot broke out. Chairs were smashed; people were beaten to the floor and trampled.

This was not the “real France,” the still-incredulous Smalley cabled New York. “The real France is the France of M. Pasteur,” he urged his readers to bear in mind. “. . . It is the France of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, who makes the new year welcome to the poor by his gift of a million in charity. It is the France not of Panama but of the French who rejoice to think themselves . . . the one great republic of Europe.”

Large crowds gathered outside the beautifully wrought iron gates of the huge, gray Palais de Justice and an unmistakable air of apprehension filled the courtroom from the moment the prisoners were brought in. Perivier, the chief magistrate, and the four other judges and the prosecuting attorney entered in black robes and round gold-encrusted black caps. They were seated, the caps were placed on the benches before them, pencils were picked up, Perivier nodded to the clerk who then read the indictments.

Charles, the first witness, rose from the prisoners’ benches, a line of four folding chairs placed directly in front of the judges. Behind him, also standing now, was his attorney, Henri Barboux, who, like all others of his profession present, wore the traditional black gown and white, starched bib and collar of the avocat. Charles appeared in good health, even “full of energy,” despite a month in solitary confinement, but he would remain noticeably circumspect, even a shade pompous. He showed, as one reporter observed, little of the “elan that would have made him a more sympathetic figure.”

The others took their turn in due course: the gray, bookish Fontane, who appeared frightened and maintained that he had done only what he had been told; the impeccable Cottu, who nervously twisted a black mustache; Gustave Eiffel, vigorous in speech, handsome, near-sighted, whose lawyer was Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, a future premier of France. Eiffel, though not imprisoned like the others, had been charged with making ill-gotten profits from a contract by which he had been guaranteed, among other things, an enormous cash advance and an enormous cash indemnity should the company fail to provide the necessary machinery for his locks within a ridiculously brief time. In the aggregate (as estimated by the Deputies committee), the company had paid out more than 74,000,000 francs to Eiffel, from which his profit had been tremendous. As an example, the indemnity paid on account of undelivered lock machinery was 18,000,000 francs, whereas his own outlay for such equipment amounted to less than 2,000,000 francs.

It would be said in Eiffel’s defense, however, even in the committee’s report, that the famous engineer had done nothing dishonest himself; he had merely had the advantage of a “curious” contract. Moreover, had the entire project been completed, the locks built, his profit would have diminished greatly.

In reply to questions from the bench, Eiffel said he had been deeply touched by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ call for his help, but that it was with de Reinach that he had entered into negotiations. “Oh, I hesitated,” Eiffel recalled. “I hesitated a long time.”

A decrepit old man from Nimes, a witness for the prosecution, who was deaf and nearly blind, gave a moving description of how he had invested the last of his savings in Panama upon seeing Ferdinand de Lesseps at one of the lottery bond rallies. Then four other similar “victims” were brought in by the prosecution, and the last of them, after telling the court he had been ruined, recalled that Ferdinand de Lesseps had personally counseled him to hang on to his Panama shares. “It is terrible,” remarked the chief magistrate. “Everybody here pities you.”

No witness questioned the good faith of Charles. Armand Rousseau pointedly dismissed all thought that Charles could have harbored fraudulent intentions. And since the political side of the scandal was not at issue in this trial and no political celebrities were paraded in to testify, Charles remained the central figure. His intention from the beginning, he said, had been to serve his father to his best ability; he was proud to have played that role and to have stayed at his father’s side to the end. He affirmed that Baïhaut, who also had been arrested by this time to await criminal prosecution, was paid to introduce the lottery bill and that de Reinach had been too. “You wasted the millions of your stockholders intentionally,” charged the prosecutor, a bald, fierce-looking man named Rau.

“With as much intention as one hands over one’s watch at pistol point,” Charles answered.

“And how did you understand that Baron de Reinach used these enormous sums?” Judge Perivier broke in.

“In remunerating financiers and, without doubt, senators, deputies, and ministers. Others also assisted de Reinach,” Charles said. He had taken care not to ask what was done with the money.

“That is, you gave them the dirty job which you preferred not to do yourself, but provided them with the means of doing!”

Charles made no reply and as the trial wore on he grew increasingly solemn and diffident. At times his voice was so low that only those in the first rows could hear him.

The prosecutor talked of “the greatest fraud of modern times.” Addressing the bench he exclaimed, “You will not hesitate to punish these criminals, who in order to attract millions have had recourse to every maneuver, every fraud . . . I demand the most stringent application of the law.”

The plea for Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, delivered by the small, white-haired Henri Barboux, was a classic example of nineteenth-century courtroom oratory lasting the better part of two days. With rolling phrase and mounting emotion, he called upon the court to recall just who Ferdinand de Lesseps was, what he had done in his life, what he had meant to France, what he still meant in the hearts of millions, including those very people who had suffered most from the Panama failure. Hours passed, marked by a large, gilt-edged clock high on one wall. The longer he spoke, the greater the tension became. Imagine the response, he said, were the old hero to enter the room at this very moment to speak in his own defense, and much of the audience appeared to catch its breath, half expecting the rear doors to swing open at any instant.

How could his clients be charged with fraud when they had taken nothing to enrich themselves?* If they had miscalculated the expense of the undertaking, what great projects had ever cost what was originally estimated? His clients had never been alone in their faith that the great enterprise would succeed. The one sin Le Grand Français might be found guilty of was excessive optimism. But it was only the optimist who succeeded in this world. Pessimists were never anything but spectators.

The Court of Appeal passed judgment on the morning of February 9, the room “packed to suffocation.” The five defendants were found guilty as charged and the sentences were unexpectedly severe. Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps were each sentenced to five years in prison and fined 3,000 francs. Fontane and Cottu were sentenced to two years and also fined 3,000 francs. Eiffel, though acquitted of complicity in swindling, was found guilty of misusing funds entrusted to him. He was sentenced to two years and fined 20,000 francs.

Several days later, in the evening, and escorted by two police officers, Charles left the Mazas prison on a special pass. Ferdinand de Lesseps had been demanding to see his son, whom he accused of abandoning him. His anxiety was such that his doctor had become extremely concerned.

Charles, his wife, and the two policemen arrived at the little railroad station nearest La Chesnaye well after midnight. A carriage was waiting and they drove another fifteen miles through the dark countryside, arriving at the chateau around three in the morning. At first light Charles went in to see his father.

He found the old man awake but still in bed. On the bedside table were a number of Paris papers, all of them a year or more out of date.

“Good morning, Father. I have been able to leave my work and here I am.”

“Ah, Charles,” the old man responded. “Is there nothing new in Paris?” Then he kissed his son, repeating simply, “Ah, Charles! Ah, Charles!”

When the family gathered for lunch in the huge dining room with its great, carved seventeenth-century buffets, Ferdinand de Lesseps entered slowly with a cane and took his customary place at the head of the table. No one explained to him who the policeman was sitting beside Charles, and he never asked. Once he smiled at his son and seemed about to say something.

In the afternoon Charles and the family and the two policemen took a long walk; then, after dark, the prisoner was returned to Paris. Charles was a different man after that. It would be said that his manner during the first trial had been carefully contrived, the strategy being that discretion, even silence on certain matters, would be rewarded with a light sentence. There may be some truth to the interpretation. However, it does not seem quite in character. More likely the months in prison, the personal humiliation of the trial, and the visit to La Chesnaye had been a momentous inward journey from which he had returned with a profoundly different view of himself and his responsibilities.

His deportment during the second trial was still that of the perfect gentleman, only now there was an unmistakable edge of outrage; that and the utter composure–even ease–of a man with little more to lose, with no one left to protect, who has decided quite literally to have his day in court.

Again the setting was the Palais de Justice, but now in the larger Court of Assizes and before a jury. Charles and Fontane were charged with distributing bribes; Baihaut, Sans-Leroy, three relatively unknown deputies, one inconsequential senator, and a go-between named Blondin, a former employee of the Credit Lyonnais, were charged with accepting them. Charges against those more celebrated figures implicated thus far–Floquet, de Freycinet, Senators Grevy and Renault, various deputies of note–had all been dropped for lack of evidence. So the important politicians were not to be tried. Nor was Ferdinand de Lesseps.

The payoff artist Arton was another absent party and a dreadful embarrassment to the police, for in recent weeks Arton had led two Paris detectives, one an aide to the head of the Surete, on a wild chase across half of Europe, from Budapest to Bucharest to Jassy to Nuremberg to Prague to Magdeburg to Hannover, then back to Budapest, where the detectives lost the trail. Where he was now nobody could say.

Cornelius Herz had also been added to the list of accused this time. But he was sequestered in a small seaside hotel at Bournemouth, England, refusing to return to Paris on the grounds that he, like the elder de Lesseps, was too ill to travel. Nor did there appear to be much that could be done. To secure total privacy, Herz had rented the entire hotel (no great problem at that season of the year). Two men from Scotland Yard sent to arrest him on an extradition warrant affirmed that he was indeed an extremely sick man. He was placed under house arrest until several eminent London physicians, including the queen’s own Dr. Russell Reynolds, could be dispatched to Bournemouth to give an opinion. To a man, they certified the gravity of Herz’s condition.

But what if Herz was putting on an act? What if, in fact, he was an agent for the Foreign Office, as had been charged, and so the whole thing was an act?

Paris was filled with such conjecture, and the same questions come readily enough to mind even now. But if it was an act, then Herz must have been something of a theatrical genius or the new government of Premier Alexandre Ribot must have been in on it as well; for a succession of French physicians came next to Bournemouth at the invitation of the Foreign Office and they too reported the patient to be in a ghastly state, and mentally as well as physically.

So Herz, still under arrest, remained in his suite overlooking the English sea. No one could see him, no one could get him to divulge a word–not until Emily Crawford appeared and talked her way through the guarded front door and up to Herz’s bedroom. The inter-view was the only one Herz was ever to permit and it raised questions concerning the Panama Affair that never were to be answered.

Herz, she reported, was suffering from Bright’s disease (an acute inflammation of the kidneys), complicated by an unnamed “malady of the nervous system.” He would never come out of the hotel alive she prophesied.

She found him in bed, propped up with pillows and covered with furs and blankets. She was shocked by the change in him, but “the light hazel eye had lost none of its electrical brilliance . . . The clearness and vigor with which he expressed himself was amazing.”

He told her that de Reinach had been involved in a vast European intrigue, the object of which was a “readjustment” of the alliances that then bound the central powers and to “fill the pockets” of a syndicate of politicians who were working under the direction of de Reinach.

They were to have divided among themselves a tremendously big sum which was to have been obtained as a commission on a state loan issued in Paris under the auspices of M. Rouvier and by means of “virements,” or transfers of credits voted by Parliament [the Chamber of Deputies] from the War and Public Works Departments to the Foreign Office, which was to pay the members of the syndicate.

The story was like something from the Arabian Nights, she wrote. “But . . . I could not regard it as fanciful. Dr. Herz was the key to worse scandals than the Panama one. . . .” The incriminating documents were in a safe place in London, Herz said. The reason he refused to return to France was that he had been charged with treason and espionage in the Chamber, and this meant he could be tried behind closed doors. His sentence, almost certainly, would be one of long penal servitude–Devil’s Island.

“It smells bad in here,” one spectator is reported to have said the morning of March 8 as the second trial began. “Yes,” answered another, “it stinks of scapegoats.”

The judges now were in magnificent red robes, and the parade of witnesses included Floquet, de Freycinet, Clemenceau. Remarks made by some witnesses also struck the audience as uproariously funny for the first time. Sans-Leroy, for example, declared on the second day that the 200,000 francs he deposited in his bank account just after the committee vote on the lottery had been part of his wife’s dowry. His attitude, he insisted after the judge called for order, was always “that of a member of a committee who wished to be enlightened,” which sent the audience into another convulsion of laughter.

Then, that same day, Charles Baihaut burst into a long, agonized confession, head down, voice cracking. The once exceedingly self-righteous minister told how he had obtained 375,000 francs as a down payment for his support of the lottery measure. “For fifteen years I served France faithfully as deputy and as minister and led an irreproachable life. Even now I cannot understand how I could have sinned.”

Yet for all this, Charles de Lesseps was again the one around whom everything turned in a drama that held the nation spellbound. His account now was at once open and lively and immensely interesting. Spectators were immediately conscious of the change. “His intelligence, his ability, his dignified bearing, all made a marked impression . . .” wrote the French historian Andre Siegfried. “He appeared chiefly as someone who had been struggling against a gang. He had undertaken an impossible task, and had done so against his own better judgment, and yet he had tried to fight on to the bitter end. But the sharpers had got the better of him . . .”

He could have put the blame on his father at any time, but this he never did, not even by inference. His position, simply stated, was that neither he nor any official of the Compagnie Universelle had set out to bribe anyone; rather, they had been the repeated victims of extortion. Everybody had wanted a cut. The company had been told to pay for political support, for influence on the Bourse, for the willingness not to discredit its claims–or face the consequences. Newspaper reporters, financial advisers, people who merely knew people who supposedly could help or do harm–“They seemed to rise up from the pavement. We had to deal with their threats, their libels, and their broken promises.”

At one point, when Judge Pilet Desjardins told him to “cut it short,” Charles calmly replied, “No, I have time enough. All this is necessary to my defense.”

Powerful financiers, he continued, could not force anyone to buy stocks or bonds, but they certainly could prevent them from doing so. He described the initial overtures made by Herz, who had talked of the “improvements” he could obtain in the company’s standing with the government. “We should have preferred that he had not come to us, but . . . it was better to do that which would make him our ally instead of that which would make him our enemy.” Herz had taken him to visit President Grevy at Grevy’s country estate, where Herz, Charles said, had been received as a friend of the family. “I was then convinced that he was a man we must reckon with.”

“Your duty as a man of honor was to show such a fellow to the door,” interrupted the judge.

“But we could not make an enemy of the sleeping partner in La Justice” he answered.

He recalled how the first sale of lottery bonds had been wrecked by anonymous telegrams announcing his father’s death. “Subscriptions stopped and we appealed to the courts for the punishment of those who had sent the telegrams, but there was no prosecution of the offenders. We were obliged to protect ourselves. . . . The financiers showed us how to resort to those methods which are now matters of general knowledge. They said: ‘Unless you pay the money to all the banks under the influence of Girardin [Emile de Girardin, owner of Le Petit Journal] you will have all the newspapers in Paris against you.’ We still held out against such methods, the newspapers attacked us, and finally we were driven to paying out enormous sums right and left . . . and this mode of procedure was encouraged by the government.”

“Leave the government alone,” the judge responded sharply, which brought a great outburst from the audience–shouts of “Why not the government?” “Give us the truth”–and the judge ordered that the room be cleared. Charles testified subsequently that he had decided not to pay de Reinach and that de Reinach had threatened to take the company to court, warning that a public scene would bring the company to its knees. But Charles had made up his mind to run that risk and would have, he said, had not Floquet, de Freycinet, and Clemenceau sent for him, one by one, to tell him–“for the good of the Republic”–to pay de Reinach off and keep the waters smooth. Boulanger had been on the rise, Charles explained, and they were fearful of the consequences should the Panama company suddenly collapse. “They were very polite about the matter. They did not take me by the nape of the neck. . . .”

When their turn came de Freycinet and Clemenceau denied any part in the affair. Charles Sans-Leroy said he had no idea how his initials happened to be on the incriminating check stubs. Accused by the prosecution of selling his vote, Sans-Leroy, a large and extremely homely man in pince-nez glasses, replied with perfect equanimity, “Prove it.”

Charles de Lesseps was probably telling the simple truth as he knew it through the length of this, “The Great Bribery Trial.” Yet neither Floquet, nor de Freycinet, nor Clemenceau, nor Rouvier, nor anyone of importance was ever prosecuted. No newspaper publishers or reporters were brought to judgment. Those deputies and the one senator on trial were acquitted, Sans-Leroy as well. The single political figure to be convicted was Baïhaut and that was only because he had confessed.

The jury delivered its verdict March 21, 1893. Charles and Blondin, the intermediary in the arrangement with Baïhaut, were found guilty with extenuating circumstances. Charles was sentenced to a year in prison, Blondin to two years. Baihaut’s sentence was for five years, the forfeiture of all civil rights, a fine of 750,000 francs, and full repayment of the 375,000-franc bribe. If Baïhaut were to find himself unable to meet these payments, Charles de Lesseps would be held accountable.

Charles de Lesseps was alone in maintaining his composure through the long reading of the sentence.

From everything that was said during the course of the two trials and from the mammoth report issued by the Deputies committee when its investigations ended in June, a few generalizations and one or two further facts of interest can be drawn.

The total amount paid out to de Reinach, Herz, and different political people, either directly or through de Reinach or Arton, can only be approximated. De Reinach, for example, received some 4,500,000 francs for his handling of the flotation syndicates, plus another 3,000,000 francs for “publicity,” plus nearly 5,000,000 more at the time Herz was threatening to “wreck everything.” That makes 12,500,000 francs–$2,500,000–that the company paid to Jacques de Reinach alone. Some of that was perfectly legitimate theoretically (for his part in the various security flotations); a good portion of it (according to the check stubs) went to fix various politicians; much of it, perhaps even all the rest of it, went to Cornelius Herz. But Herz is known to have received 600,000 francs directly from the company. Baihaut got 375,000, Floquet obtained another 250,000, Sans-Leroy almost certainly got 300,000. And undoubtedly there were others. But how many? Perhaps there were more than a hundred, as the brave, unpleasant Delahaye had charged. No one will ever know. But it seems reasonable to conclude that the total sum paid out for political influence and for “friendship” on the Bourse could not have been less than 20,000,000 francs, or roughly $4,000,000. Conceivably it could have been a great deal more than that.

Payments to the press, beginning with the first stock flotation in 1880–a subject about which little was said during the trials–were reckoned by the committee to have been between 12,000,000 and 13,000,000 francs. No less than 2,575 different French newspapers and periodicals had shared in the company’s beneficence. Some little fly-by-night publications had even been founded for the sole purpose of getting in on the take. In addition to such giants as he Temps and he Petit Journal (which received the largest sums), the full list included such publications as Wines and Alcohols Bulletin, Bee-keeper’s Journal and the Choral Societies Echo.

Frequently payments were made to a particular editor or writer (for example, checks written to Arthur Meyer, of he Gaulois, amounted to 100,000 francs); and often as not, and especially in the early years, the confidence these men expressed in the Panama enterprise, their faith in Ferdinand de Lesseps, were perfectly genuine. One man who did several Panama articles for a fee of 1,000 francs per article became so thoroughly sold by what he wrote that he invested all his savings in Panama stock and as a result lost everything.

Nor, it should be noted, was there anything strictly illegal or even unorthodox about such practices. What impressed the committee most, in fact, was the extent of services rendered for money invested. As large a sum as 12,000,000 to 13,000,000 francs might seem, it represented only about 1 percent of the company’s total expenditures. of course, it was regrettable, the committee declared, that the press had need to resort to such practices, but such were the realities of survival.

Of those convicted, Baïhaut suffered the most. He was put in solitary confinement in a prison where inmates were made to wear a hood whenever they were taken from their cells. Only after three years of this did the courts and the public decide he had been punished enough.

Gustave Eiffel, the only engineer to have been stained by the scandal, would be cleared later of having done any “dishonorable” act by a special committee of inquiry convened by the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor. But his career as a builder was finished; he would thereafter apply himself to wholly different work in meteorology and aerodynamics.

De Freycinet, Floquet, and Rouvier would recover from their disgrace in time and be recalled to office. Loubet eventually became president of the Republic.

For Georges Clemenceau, the future savior of France– he Pere de la Victoire during the First World War–the next elections (those of 1893) were a disaster. The voters had cast their own verdict on his part in the affair and it would be nine more years before he made a successful return to public life. His own standard interpretation of the scandal was that it had been engineered by the Boulangists, and that the only reason they descended on Herz was that Herz had refused to give them money. When he re-emerged to save the country in 1917, Clemenceau would be seventy-six, as old as de Lesseps had been when he set out to redeem French honor after Sedan.

As for Cornelius Herz, he spent the rest of his life inside the hotel at Bournemouth. How much or how little truth there was to the things he told Emily Crawford cannot be determined. The secret cache of incriminating documents was never found. He died in 1898, taking his side of the story with him.

Leopold-Emile Arton was eventually discovered living peacefully in London. He was returned to France, tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Some years after his release, he committed suicide. Yet he had achieved an immortality of sorts. Spoofs of his flight from the detectives became the delight of the Paris music halls and among the most fascinated observers at his trial was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who did a series of rapid pencil sketches of the proceedings.

Gustave Eiffel never went to prison because in June of 1893 the Cour de Cassation, the supreme court of France, overruled the verdict of the Court of Appeal. Eiffel, Fontane, Cottu, Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps were all acquitted on a technical ground: the summonses for their arrest, issued November 21, 1892, had come more than three years after the most recent of their alleged crimes and so, the court ruled, they were entitled to immunity under the statute of limitations.

Since the decision did not apply to the recent sentence by the Court of Assizes, Charles still had the one-year sentence to serve. But the months he had spent in the Mazas were deducted, and after becoming seriously ill, he was moved to a hospital, where he remained for the duration of his sentence. He was released in September 1893.

Charles’s troubles did not end there, however. Because Baïhaut was unable to make good on his fine and indemnity, Charles was ordered in 1896 to pay nearly 900,000 francs in Baihaut’s behalf. Unable to produce any but a small part of that amount and faced with another prison sentence if he did not make full payment, he fled the country and remained in London in self-imposed exile. Not until January of 1899, when the government at last agreed to accept a partial payment, did he return to Paris. By then it had been ten years since the fall of the canal company and Ferdinand de Lesseps had been dead for four years.

With family and friends and in all the remaining years of his life, Charles refused to speak of Panama. “He would not talk about it,” recalled an adoring nephew, “never, never, never, never.” And in the view of those who knew him best, he was regarded no less than ever as the most honest and admirable of men. The Suez company had kept him on its board of directors even during his time in prison. “He was a very honorable man, you know, the old-fashioned sort of thing,” the nephew would say. “And I am absolutely certain–I don’t know about the whole story, it’s very complicated–I’m certain he would never have done anything he thought dishonorable. That’s positive.”

Charles had been with his father at the end. It happened the year following Charles’s release from the hospital. Madame de Lesseps and the rest of the family were also present and death came very quietly for the old adventurer. He died at La Chesnaye, in his second-floor bedroom facing south, late in the afternoon on December 7, 1894, three weeks after his eighty-ninth birthday.

The body was taken up to Paris by train for burial in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. There was no grand funeral procession; there were no crowds at the graveside services, only the family, a representative of the Societe de Geographie, one very old boyhood friend, and the directors of the Suez Canal Company. The Suez company paid all the funeral expenses. In the eulogies the word “Panama” was never mentioned.

IV

The extraordinary venture had lasted more than a decade. It had cost, according to the best estimates, 1,435,000,000 francs–about $287,000,-000–which was 1,000,000,000 francs more than the cost of the Suez Canal, far more in fact than had ever before been spent on any one peaceful undertaking of any kind.

The number of lives lost, a subject that had been strangely avoided throughout the Affair, had not been determined, nor was it ever to be with certainty. Dr. Gorgas, from his analysis of the French records, would conclude that at least twenty thousand, perhaps as many as twenty-two thousand, died. Possibly that is high, but it remains the accepted estimate.

For France to have suffered such a massive financial and psychological defeat so soon after Sedan seemed a cruel, undeserved turn of fate. Even Bismarck lamented that so heavy a tragedy had overtaken so gallant a people. And the surge of anti-Semitism that Edouard Drumont unleashed was soon to spill over into the appalling Dreyfus Affair.

It had indeed been a blunder on such an inordinate scale, a failure of such overwhelming magnitude, its shock waves extending to so very many levels, that nobody knew quite what to make of it; and as time passed, the inclination was to dismiss it as the folly of one man, Ferdinand de Lesseps, about whom markedly different views evolved.

A popular conception was of the flamboyant enthusiast who began with limitless faith in his own omniscience, but reverted to his worst instincts the moment the scheme began to founder. That he had fallen in with the likes of de Reinach and Herz was, by this view, natural enough, since he was as accomplished a swindler as any of them. France, the world, had been taken in, according to a great many attorneys and business people who claimed to regard the Panama effort “by the ordinary rules of financial probity,” no more, no less.

To many American writers he had been the leading performer in a comedy of the absurd–“dancing and pirouetting in the front of the stage blissfully unconscious, apparently, of everything except his own capers.” Later, in Panama, it would be commonly understood among American canal workers that he had died in an insane asylum. For a surprisingly large part of France, he still remained the beloved grandfatherly hero of old; “ancient and honorable,” but sadly lacking the power of sober analysis or even common sense–like all creative geniuses. His submission to the demands of financiers and crooked politicians had been, by this interpretation, as innocent as his disregard for what the engineers called practicalities. His gaze had been on his star, and his star, this time, had failed him. To debate his tragedy was to debate the stars. It was a view that bequeathed innocence by making him something of a simpleton. Monumental naïveté had been both his making and his unmaking. And destruction at the end for such a spirit thus became no less inevitable or blameworthy than it had been for, say, Joan of Arc, such being the real world’s reward for sainted madness.

But as events receded farther into the distance, he became something rather different. He was seen more and more as the tragic victim of earthly forces beyond his control: of the satanic jungle; of ambitious technical advisers willing to say anything, conceal anything, to satisfy their own selfish ends; of unscrupulous financiers (who to many people would be forever regarded as unscrupulous Jewish financiers). The fatal mortal flaw according to this interpretation had been to grow old. Once during the affaire de Panama, a. newspaper had suggested quite sympathetically that it might have been better had Ferdinand de Lesseps died earlier, at the peak of his career, and Madame de Lesseps had written a moving reply that was quoted widely, then and for years to come.

“I will not protest against this unchristian sentiment,” she wrote, “except to say that its author can have given no thought to the wife and children who deeply love and revere this old man and to whom his life, however frail it may be, is more precious than anything in the world. It is no crime to grow old.”

So the corollary assumption was that he would have succeeded had he not grown old, that he would have repeated Suez at Panama had he still been the de Lesseps of Suez, at the height of his manhood and in possession of his famed “powers.”

There was a degree of truth, of course, in all such interpretations. In the main, however, they were delusions. The real man had been infinitely more complex, his motives far more ambivalent, the personality filled with many more contradictions, than implied by any simplistic answers. He was both the most daring of dreamers and the cleverest of back-room manipulators. He was the indestructible optimist, believing to the depths of his soul that goodness and right invariably triumphed in the long run; and he was perfectly capable of deceit and of playing to the vanity and greed in other men. He was a trusting, decent, endearing man who could confide to a reporter several years after the canal was under way that he had known from the start that there would be trouble, who could blithely inform the press that his engineers had redirected the entire course of the impossible Chagres, who could tell his adoring stockholders on the eve of the final, inevitable collapse that success was theirs.

Arteries were hardening in the old system, no doubt, but to argue that age was his undoing is to disregard too many other factors of importance. His age, furthermore, became an apparent problem only toward the end when the cause was already lost. Until then it was the display of youthfulness that so captivated his following, that impressed so shrewd and impartial a close-hand observer as John Bigelow. Indeed, it could be as readily argued that his curse was the failure to decline, his inability to look and act his age. It is no crime not to grow old, Madame de Lesseps might have said. Again and again things could have gone differently, more prudent or realistic views might have prevailed, had he been incapable any longer of playing on his powers–to charm, to flatter, to inspire, to sweep good men onward, contrary to their better instincts, using nothing but the phenomenal force of personality. Men who did know how to compute realistic excavation schedules, men who had experienced Culebra “in the wet,” serious expert engineers at the top of their form, had listened and agreed and gone ahead as he wished time after time.

The root sources of his downfall had been apparent since the Paris congress of 1879: the insistence on a sea-level passage through country he knew nothing about, the total disinterest in conceptions other than his own, the refusal to heed voices of experience, the disregard for all data that either conflicted with or that appeared to vitiate his own cherished vision; but none of these would have mattered greatly had it not been for that extraordinary ability to inspire the loyalty and affection of individual human beings at every social and intellectual level.

From the technical standpoint the tragedy hung on the decision to cut through at sea level, to make another Suez Canal. Such a task at Panama was simply too overwhelming, if not impossible. The strategy did not suit the battleground.

The handwriting had been on the wall a good three to four years before the money was gone. With the equipment then available, even a lock canal of modest dimensions would have been an enormously difficult and costly task. But had he and his technical advisers decided to make it a lock canal even as late as 1886, at the time of his second tour of the Isthmus, there probably would have been a French canal at Panama, death, disease, jungle, geology, costs, and de Lesseps’ advanced age all notwithstanding. The size of the locks being contemplated would have made the canal obsolete in relatively little time, but the canal would have been built.

As for any possible complicity on his part in the less-than-noble practices that went on behind the scenes, there is no real mystery. He was neither innocent nor a simpleton. He was involved in bribing the press, in the Herz compact, indeed he was the one who crossed that line at the very beginning at the time of the first successful stock issue. His public pronouncements, his Bulletin, were replete with misinformation, misleading statistics, promises that he knew to be beyond realization. In his “dashing, off-hand way [he] lied any amount to interviewers,” as Emily Crawford said. He was determined to build the canal, to succeed again, to be all that his adoring multitude believed him to be. As the situation worsened, he had agreed to desperate measures to gain time, to postpone disaster. When Charles said in court that he himself had done what he thought he had to do, he was undoubtedly speaking for his father as well. “What would you have decided in our place?” Charles had asked.

The fundamental mystery one comes down to in the end is the endlessly trumpeted faith of Ferdinand de Lesseps in success. Was all this the skilled and quite conscious deception of a grand imposter? Or was it the self-deception of a vain old fool who had been captured by his past success? These are the implicit questions in nearly all that has been written about the man.

The evidence is that it was something else again.

At heart, by nature, by every instinct in his body, Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps was a rainmaker. He was, as Masefield said of Shakespeare, “the rare unreasonable who comes once in ten generations.” And it had been on that fundamental ground that Henri Barboux had rested his defense. “Beautiful illusions!” the attorney had exclaimed at the high point of his sonorous two-day oration. “That is what the Attorney General would call all great adventures which do not succeed. But humanity has need of such illusions. And when a great people is no longer kindled by them, then it must resign itself to be but a stolid ox, head bowed to earth.”

But the crucial point is that de Lesseps was a rainmaker to the nineteenth century: he himself was no less bedazzled than anyone by that era’s own new magical powers. An enormous part of his appeal, perhaps the very essence of his appeal, was the fact that he was a nontechnical, nonscientific spirit, the most human of humanists. It made it possible for people to take him to their hearts. And yet it was he who had, at Suez, succeeded in bringing science and technology to bear for one noble, humanitarian purpose; and after that it had been very difficult to doubt his word or distrust his vision. From Suez on, as he himself once said, he enjoyed “the privilege of being believed without having to prove what one affirms.” It was this that made him such a popular force and such a dangerous man.

His was not “the faith that could move mountains,” as was written or said by so many who never troubled to look at what he had been saying repeatedly since the Paris congress. Not at all. His was the faith that the mountains could be moved by technology. He was as much bedazzled by the momentum of progress as by his own past triumph. “Science has declared that the canal is possible, and I am the servant of science,” he had remarked at the Delmonico’s dinner in 1880. Wondrous new machines would save the day, he told his stock-holders again and again. Men of genius would come forth, by which he meant technicians and scientists–workers in physics, mathematics, soil engineering, chemistry, tropical medicine, hydraulics–things about which he knew little or nothing, but which he counted on. He had the nonscientific, nontechnical man’s faith that science and technology would “find a way.” That was his faith; that had been his experience. Of the 75,000,000 cubic meters excavated at Suez, 60,000,000 had been removed by machines in the final four and a half years of the work. In the years since, he had seen the use of dynamite and nitroglycerin become widespread. He had witnessed the miracles achieved by Pasteur. So in the largest sense, his tragic folly had been to misjudge the momentum of progress: he had felt certain the machines, the medicines, whatever it took, would be ready in time and he was wrong. And one cannot help but feel that in the end he drifted into that last dim stage of his life haunted by an awful sense of betrayal.

It can also be said, and with certainty, that nothing whatever would have been attempted or accomplished at Panama had it not been for Ferdinand de Lesseps, a point missing from the postmortems of the 1890’s, largely since the actual work itself had been either forgotten or was assumed to be utterly without value. In France, as Andre Siegfried observed, no one seemed to recall that Panama had had anything to do with the building of a canal. “In the end one almost believed that The Company had hardly done anything at all in the isthmus . . .” The money, declared The Times of London, was “as clean gone” as if it had been sunk in the North Atlantic.

Nobody talked of the hospitals that had been built, the offices, storehouses, and dock facilities, the living quarters and machine shops; the maps, plans, surveys, and hydrographic data that had been assembled; the land that had been acquired or the Panama Railroad. And the fact that more than 50,000,000 cubic meters of earth and rock had been removed from the path of the canal, an amount equal to two-thirds of the total excavation at Suez, was virtually forgotten. All had been in vain was the prevailing, unchallenged attitude; the defeat of the old pioneer had been total.

As it happens, the commission appointed by the liquidator to appraise the work had returned with an encouraging report: the amount accomplished was “very considerable”; the plant was “in a good state of preservation”; the lock canal could be completed in about eight years. With an eye to the future, the liquidator had also arranged an extension of the old Wyse Concession, by sending Wyse back to Bogotá. The concession was declared valid until 1903 on the condition that a new French company should be organized to carry on the work, and on October 20, 1894, just seven weeks before the death of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama had been formally incorporated.

Yet few people took any of this very seriously. The jungle was said to have already reclaimed most of what it had lost to the French engineers, and further, an American canal at Nicaragua was regarded as a certain thing, irrespective of the fact that one American attempt in Nicaragua–by the Maritime Canal Company, which had been chartered in 1889–had already gone down in defeat. It had been an under-financed affair that collapsed with the Wall Street Panic of 1893.

A canal was beyond the capacity of any purely private enterprise; that much now was plain. It must be a national undertaking. The United States appeared to be the one nation ready to mount such an effort, and if the American people had drawn one overriding conclusion from the French disaster, it was that the place not to build a canal was Panama. The failure of the French–“the greatest failure in modern times”–was above all a lesson in geography. They had gone down to defeat not merely because they were French (and therefore incompetent, impractical, and decadent) and led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, but primarily because they–he–had chosen the wrong path.

American correspondent Richard Harding Davis wrote in Harper’s Weekly that in all probability Panama had a curse on it. He had gone to see for himself in 1896, and he judged it “unholy ground.” It was, he wrote, as if some evil spirit haunted the Chagres bottom lands. He was astounded to see the care with which French equipment and machinery was still being maintained. The armies of black laborers had since departed–returned home at the expense of the Jamaican government–but locomotives stood safely on blocks, oiled and cared for, he reported, as if on display at the Baldwin Works. In machine shops “each bit and screw in each numbered pigeon-hole was as sharp and covered as thick with oil as though it had been in use that morning.”

Other writers traveling through Panama had found melancholy themes in the hulks of abandoned French machinery lying belly up in wayside swamps. But to Davis such devoted care and attention were more pathetic. “For it was like a general pipe-claying his cross-belt and polishing his buttons after his army has been routed and killed, and he has lost everything, including honor.”

In time to come, he wrote, when the Americans built the Nicaragua canal, Panama would remain one of the greatest ruins on earth, a relic of swindle and death and of the tragic old man who had been so misguided as to believe in a Panama passage.

*This same Marquis de Mores had also challenged a young American rancher to a duel not very long before this, when de Mores was establishing himself as a cattle baron in the Bad Lands of Dakota Territory. The American was Theodore Roosevelt, who responded by informing de Mores that he harbored no ill will toward him but that he would be willing to face him if de Mores insisted, whereupon de Mores let the matter drop. In his days in the Bad Lands, de Mores had built a thirty-room mansion on a high bluff overlooking the Little Missouri and was known behind his back as “the crazy Frenchman.” He lost most of his wife’s money in the venture, because of, he asserted, the Jewish-controlled beef trust.

*Since Ferdinand de Lesseps was a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, he could be tried only in an appeal court–that is, without a jury–and this meant that the others accused had to be tried in the same court.

*Neither de Lesseps was a man of wealth, as attorney Barboux would substantiate for the court and as time would bear out. Charles’s total assets amounted to less than 400,000 francs, less than $80,000. And while it was true that Ferdinand de Lesseps had at one point sold his Panama founders’ shares for 1,400,000 francs, he had invested 1,778,000 francs, including part of his wife’s savings, in the canal, all of which was lost. So he too had suffered financially from the collapse. His avowed disinterest in ever making money from the venture was genuine; he could have, several times along the way, just as at Suez, but he had not.

BOOK TWO:
STARS AND STRIPES FOR EVER
1890–1904

9
Theodore the Spinner

. . . the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.

–RUDYARD KIPLING

I

On a summer day in the year 1901 there was, as the guidebooks said, no pleasanter place in Washington to sit and pass the hours than Lafayette Square. In the shade of a southern magnolia or a flowering Chinese paulownia (or perhaps an elm or a beech planted by Jefferson) one could watch the flow of traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue or contemplate the north façade of the White House; or try to fathom–as nearly everyone did–what marvelous bit of ingenuity kept the equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson in such uncanny equilibrium.

Flower beds were carefully tended, paths swept clean. Tourists came and went, and pretty girls on their noon hour passed by in twos and threes, wearing the wide-brimmed straw hats and crisp white shirt-waists that had become the fashion.

Especially satisfying was the sense one had of being at the very center of things. It was the nearness not just of the White House but of the elegant private residences fronting on the other three sides of the square, of the Arlington Hotel, the Cosmos Club, the easy proximity of the Metropolitan Club, the Treasury Building, and that great baroque pile, the State, War, and Navy Building, that made it such a rarefied and endlessly fascinating world within the world of Washington.

On the east side of the square, next door to the Cosmos Club, lived Senator Hanna–Number 21 Madison Place, the “Little White House.” At the buff-colored Cosmos itself, once the home of Dolly Madison, could be found such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell or Professor Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. The Arlington, diagonally across from the Cosmos, on H Street, was the city’s largest “distinguished hostelry.” Virtually every President since Grant had been accommodated there the night before his inauguration.

Secretary of State John Hay, who had first come to Washington as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, and Henry Adams, that cultivated lineal descendant of two Presidents, lived in adjoining houses at the corner of H and 16th streets, just across from beautiful little St. John’s Episcopal Church. A comparatively new addition, built in the eighties, this Hay-Adams edifice was the one “unconventional” note on the square. It appeared to be one massive red-brick bastion with trimmings of light-colored stone, innumerable windows, imposing stone steps, and dark carved doors set within deeply shadowed archways–all trademarks of Henry H. Richardson, the most brilliant architect of the day. It seemed the safest possible refuge for the two fragile gentlemen who resided within, both of whom were looked upon as national treasures of a sort. Adams wryly referred to his address as the only position of importance he had attained in life and he reigned there over the nearest thing thus far to an American salon. To be asked to breakfast at 1603 H Street was to have “arrived.”

For John Hay, author of the “Open Door” policy in China, his house was little more than a block from his office at the State Department or from the Metropolitan on 17th Street, the city’s most fashionable club, or from the French embassy, the large yellow house beside the Metropolitan. “Life,” wrote Adams, “is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together.” It was a view one might well have conceived from so privileged a vantage point.

But at summer’s end, on September 6, 1901, the comparative tranquillity of Lafayette Square, like the whole order that had evolved in Washington, ended when two shots from a .32-caliber revolver were pumped point-blank into the unsuspecting William McKinley at Buffalo, New York. He had gone to attend the Pan-American Exposition and was standing in the Temple of Music beside a potted palm shaking hands with a long line of people, one of whom, a deranged young anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, stepped forward, his right hand wrapped in what appeared to be a bandage. Eight nights later McKinley was dead.

“Now look!” Mark Hanna is said to have exploded on hearing the news. “That damned cowboy is President of the United States.”

The sudden advent of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House was to mark the most dramatic shift in Presidential style and attitude since the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, the first avowed “man of the people,” when tubs of liquor had been put out in Lafayette Square to divert an overjoyed mob from the White House grounds. Roosevelt’s own inaugural was a rushed, solemn little ceremony held in an over-stuffed Victorian parlor in Buffalo. But it can be said that the twentieth century truly began when he took the oath of office.

At age forty-two he was not only the youngest President in history, he was an entirely novel figure in American politics–an eastern Republican with national appeal (phenomenal national appeal, as the campaign had shown). Where McKinley had been Midwestern, “of the plain people,” “TR” was big-city gentry, raised among nursemaids and gilded mirrors. He was a Harvard-trained, Harvard-sounding reader of books (two a day on the average); he was the Rough Rider, author, historian . . . a bird watcher! . . . and the most tireless political warrior the country had ever encountered. As the Vice-Presidential candidate he had been seen in twenty-four states, traveled twenty-one thousand miles, made nearly seven hundred speeches, all in one tour, while William McKinley, as was his custom, kept to the shade of his front porch in Canton, Ohio.

Violent fate in the form of Leon Czolgosz had put Roosevelt in power at a time when the country was prospering, just as Mark Hanna had promised; when his party was in control of Congress; when the national spirit was expansive, confidence boundless; when the average American felt “400 percent bigger” than he had before the turn of the century, as Senator Chauncey Depew observed.

And he had every intention of exercising power as it had not been in a very long time. “I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power,” he would write, “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”

The first weeks in office would remain a vivid memory for all who were on hand. “He strode triumphant among us,” recalled Lincoln Steffens, “talking and shaking hands, dictating and signing letters, and laughing. Washington, the whole country was in mourning, and no doubt the president felt that he should hold himself down; he didn’t; he tried to, but his joy showed in every word and movement.” To Harry Thurston Peck, the literary critic, he was “a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital.” He himself, at the end of his first week, confided to Henry Cabot Lodge, “It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way; but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it. . . .”

He saw more people, he handled more paper work, he cut more red tape in the next several months than anyone who had ever held the office. And he adored the role. No man ever had a better time being President.

There were some, to be sure, and particularly within his own party, who were considerably less than ecstatic over the prospect of such a person in power. Hanna was the outstanding example. “We need not tell our readers that up to this time we have discovered in Mr. Roosevelt very little cause for serious rejoicing,” declared the conservative Washington Post. “He has at all times been far too theatrical for our taste.” Even the venerable Henry Adams, who had found Roosevelt the Vice President “breezy and a tonic,” returned home gravely unsettled by his first social evening with Roosevelt the Chief of State. Everything at the White House had been too informal for Adams, the meal indifferent and badly served. Worse, Roosevelt had lectured him, the former Harvard professor. “As usual Theodore absorbed the conversation,” wrote a disgruntled Adams to a friend. “If it tired me ten years ago, it crushes me now . . . really, Theodore is exasperating. . . .”

But for reporters and the reading public he was a dream come true. He would give a Presidential view on any subject any time. The monologues were likened to Niagara Falls. To get him to listen, the story went, it was best to see him about 12:40, just before lunch, when he was being shaved.

He was the first President to call his official residence the White House (rather than the Executive Mansion), the first to be known by his initials, the first to take up tennis, which he played badly but with explosive verve, the first to be photographed jumping on horseback. (When the photographer missed his shot, the President gladly obliged by jumping several times again.) He also brought to Washington the large, young, and exuberant family that was to dominate the popular imagination in ways that had never been known or that would never quite be equaled again. Edith Carow Roosevelt looked so youthful driving about the city in her carriage that she was sometimes mistaken for her stepdaughter, seventeen-year-old Alice; and Alice, as the country quickly discovered, was a “handful.” The five other children, the eldest just turned fourteen, seemed wholly unaffected by the aura of their new surroundings. Visitors were to encounter Roosevelt off-spring racing the White House halls on stilts. A Cabinet meeting would have to be halted temporarily due to the noise overhead. The President himself, it became known, was in the habit of “looking in” on the children before state dinners, by which he meant a terrific pillow fight.

It all seemed to agree with him, as did everything in life. He had acquired some poundage in recent years, but physical bulk was in style for men of position, and he was by no means fat. He stood only five feet eight inches tall, yet most people, when they saw him for the first time, were struck by how big he seemed. His frame was big, his neck and shoulders were big, and he stood with his shoulders thrown back, which gave him an even more imposing look. His weight during the time he was President was something over two hundred pounds. “His walk,” recalled William Allen White, “was a shoulder-shaking, assertive, heel-clicking, straight-away gait, rather consciously rapid as one who is habitually about his master’s business.”

Mainly Theodore Roosevelt was interesting, interesting as no President had ever been. He was someone who would make things happen.

II

The obvious differences in age and nationality aside, there were striking similarities between Theodore Roosevelt and Ferdinand de Lesseps. Both were the products of cultivated, worldly families. Both were raised on the ideal of patriotic service and the heroic exploits of adventurous kinsmen. There is the common love of the out of doors, of shooting, and of horses; the common joy in children, books, theatrics, popular acclaim. In his boundless love of life, his immensely attractive animal vitality, Theodore Roosevelt might have been a direct descendant of Ferdinand de Lesseps. There is even a kind of continuity to such traits as they were sometimes despised for–craftiness, self-glorification, self-deception.

Nor was Roosevelt ever anything but positive about the need for a Central American canal to rival Suez. “No single great material work which remains to be undertaken on this continent is of such consequence to the American people,” he declared in his first message to Congress. Whether he or any of those around him suspected then that the canal would become the great material set piece of his Administration, as well as the work in which he would take the most personal pride, or that it would be the subject of more controversy than anything else he did while in office, is impossible to say. But his eagerness to get on with the job was unmistakable.

Roosevelt, however, looked upon the canal quite differently than de Lesseps had, differently, in fact, than nearly everyone. It was very well for others to talk of it as the dream of Columbus, to call it a giant step in the march of civilization, or to picture as de Lesseps so often had its immeasurable value to world commerce. Roosevelt was promoting neither a commercial venture nor a universal utility. To him, first, last, and always, the canal was the vital–the indispensable– path to a global destiny for the United States of America. He had a vision of his country as the commanding power on two oceans, and these joined by a canal built, owned, operated, policed, and fortified by his country. The canal was to be the first step to American supremacy at sea.

All other benefits resulting, important or admirable as they might be, were to him secondary.

His guiding light in this regard, the beloved prophet and teacher, was a tall, spare, beaked, painfully shy, deadly serious naval officer and scholar, who looked like a predatory bird. As bald nearly as an egg, with pale hooded eyes, Alfred Thayer Mahan had been a member of the faculty at the Naval war College at Newport, Rhode Island, when Roosevelt, years before, had been invited to lecture there on one of his specialties as a historian–the war of 1812. The two had liked each other instantly and remained fast friends and earnest correspondents. And for some fifteen years, first in the war College lectures developed following his Panama experience, then in his famous book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, as well as in magazine articles and private correspondence, Mahan had been preaching a strident, uncompromising canal doctrine. His role as teacher and prophet had been a factor of the greatest importance, giving the old dream of a Pacific passage a meaning it had not had before.

Like Mrs. Stowe, earlier in the nineteenth century, Mahan had happened out of the blue. Born at West Point, New York, in 1840, he was the son of Dennis Hart Mahan, a noted professor at the Military Academy who had taught Grant, Sherman, Lee, Jackson, and who was the author of a mathematics text familiar to a whole generation of cadets, including several who were eventually to build Theodore Roosevelt’s canal. The younger Mahan’s naval career had been undistinguished, however. He and his father agreed that he might have done better in some other profession. By the time he was appointed to the staff of the war College, after thirty years in the service, he was still, in his own words, “drifting on the lines of simple respectability as aimlessly as one ever could.” An Annapolis classmate would subsequently remember him as the most intellectual man he had ever known, yet nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to him; he was not an especially able line officer–he was never able to do knots, the square knot was the “top of his ability”–and he had written nothing to indicate any literary gifts or penetrating grasp of world history.

His world-shaking Influence of Sea Power upon History, the result of four strenuous years “in the closet,” as he said–reading, writing, rewriting–was published in May of 1890 by Little, Brown & Company. The essence of his views was contained in the first ninety pages. By tracing the rise and decline of past maritime powers, he had arrived at the extremely simple theory that national greatness and commercial supremacy were directly related to supremacy at sea. This, he declared, was the towering truth of history. Like many earthshaking concepts, it was not exactly original; numbers of his own contemporaries in the Navy had been thinking along similar lines for some time. He, however, had developed the thesis historically, and that, he also asserted, no one had done before. Also, like many such iron-willed theorists, he had a knack for making his case so that it seemed indisputable.

In England, predictably enough, the book was taken as gospel and had its earliest success. Clad in dress uniform, wearing a sword beneath red-silk academic robes, the author received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge and later dined with the queen at Buckingham Palace.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had telegraphed his friend Poultney Bigelow, son of old John Bigelow, to praise the book: “It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by my captains and officers.” On the other side of the world Mahan was adopted as a text for the Japanese military colleges.

Not to be outdone by Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale conferred honorary degrees, and in the United States Senate such powerful “expansionists” as Lodge and John Tyler Morgan were immediately won over. “It is sea power which is essential to every splendid people,” Lodge lectured the nation from the Senate floor.

Most important, however, was the overwhelming effect on the ambitious young man with the eyeglasses and the flashing teeth who was then serving on the Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt, it is a matter of record, was the first person of influence to read the book and to grasp its import. Probably not another ranking political official in the country had ever heard of Mahan at the time the book appeared. But for Roosevelt, who received one of the first copies and who wrote the first major review for the Atlantic Monthly, the prophet had arrived. The book, he immediately informed Mahan, was “very much the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind with which I am acquainted. . . . A very good book . . .”

If ever there was a disciple ideally suited, by interest and temperament, Roosevelt was it. In the long introduction to his opus, Mahan had lamented that conventional historians seldom knew anything about the sea. It was because of this that the “profound determining influence of maritime strength” had been so long overlooked. Roosevelt had no such blind spot. He had been fascinated by ships and the sea since childhood. Two uncles on his mother’s side had been in the Confederate Navy. His uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the fabled Alabama, and the accepted family story was that he fired the last gun in the battle with the Kearsarge. James Dunwoodie Bulloch was a Confederate admiral and an exceedingly resourceful Confederate operative in England during the war who arranged the building of the Alabama. In his own travels with his parents, Roosevelt had crossed the Atlantic several times, and on one trip had sailed through the Suez Canal. His first published work, The Naval War of 1812, had been started when he was still an undergraduate. Furthermore, he had acquired a fundamental conviction that life is a struggle and life among nations no less than life among man and beast. He believed in military strength, the military virtues; he deplored pacifists, he said, as he deplored men with “shoulders like champagne bottles.” He was, as every American youngster would come to appreciate, the champion of the strenuous life, the once near-sighted, asthmatic little boy who had willed himself to be the world’s leading proof of “the rugged fighting qualities.”

Roosevelt’s determination to have a canal can be dated from the appearance of The Influence of Sea Power in 1890, which, very interestingly, was the same year the Census Bureau declared there was no longer any land frontier. The Caribbean Sea was the American Mediterranean, wrote Mahan, and like the Mediterranean, it demanded a canal. The canal was the thing to bestir “the aggressive impulse,” and turn the American people from their “peaceful gainsaying” ways. With the isthmian barrier broken, the Caribbean would become not simply a prime commercial crossroads, but a vital military highway. The United States would require Caribbean bases, “which by their natural advantages, susceptibility of defense, and nearness to the central strategic issue [the canal] will enable her fleets to remain as near the scene as any opponents.”

The problem, as Mahan explained it, was that thus far the nation had been too well supplied with its own resources, too complacent in its self-sufficiency.

So the canal, “the central strategic issue,” was to be the great redeeming task. It would shake the country out of its naïveté, release it from myopic concerns. It would breed an international, expansionist spirit. It would breed ships, coaling stations, naval bases, colonies afar. It would create an American navy. “Whether they will or no,” Mahan wrote in the December Atlantic Monthly, “Americans must now begin to look outward.” His head was filled with American armadas steaming to distant and glorious horizons.

Roosevelt was thirty-one years old at the time Mahan’s book appeared and had already made a place for himself among the leading figures in Washington. He would expound on his views at length during evenings at the Cosmos Club, for example, and to the rapt delight (appropriately) of the young English writer Rudyard Kipling, who used to drop in about half-past ten with the express purpose of hearing the expansive young American go on. “I curled up on the seat opposite,” said Kipling, “and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.”

In an “entirely confidential” letter written from Washington in 1897, Roosevelt told Mahan that the Nicaragua canal should be built “at once” and, in the same breath, that “we should build a dozen new battleships.” By then, through the influence of Lodge, who had been primed by Mahan, Roosevelt had been made Assistant Secretary of the Navy and had entered upon his duties characteristically, as if accompanied always by a band playing Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” He visited shipyards, poked his nose into technical matters, from ordnance to dry docks, went out on maneuvers. From a richly carved desk in the State, War, and Navy Building, with John Paul Jones looking down from a gold frame and a big, glass-cased model of Dewey’s flagship, Olympia, standing within arm’s reach, he mapped global strategy and fired off letter after letter to congressmen and newspaper editors, urging more ships, improved weapons. “Gradually,” he would recall, “a slight change for the better occurred, the writings of Captain Mahan playing no small part therein.” Lodge, Roosevelt’s closest friend and greatest admirer in the Senate, was saying that the canal would make Hawaii a necessity. Senator Morgan declared that Cuba was needed as well, because of its position in relation to the canal. To Roosevelt, Lodge and Morgan were uncommonly “far-sighted,” a favorite accolade of Captain Mahan’s.

Home from the Cuban war a few years later, Roosevelt told a Chicago business club in his rasping falsetto, “We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.” Such a policy would be self-deluding and disastrous. (It might have been Mahan himself speaking.) “. . . if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our borders. We must build the Isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the east and west.”

A naval base had been established at Cuba. Hawaii had been annexed. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines had been acquired, and the canal had become an enormously popular cause largely as a result of an incident early in the war, the celebrated “Voyage of the Oregon”

The Oregon, one of the first true battleships, had made Mahan’s and Roosevelt’s case for them about as effectively as anything could have. The ship had been in San Francisco when the Maine blew up in Havana harbor and victory in the Caribbean was said to depend on her. Her orders from Washington were to proceed at once around the Horn. So on the morning of March 19, she had steamed off on a perilous race of 12,000 miles–instead of some 4,000, had there been a Central American canal. For the next two months the whole country waited in mounting suspense. There were long, ominous periods of silence, weeks when the ship was “lost from communication.” Then came rousing dispatches from some point in Peru or Chile. The excitement kept building, every American was caught up in it.*

From Rio north the gleaming white ship was cleared for action and repainted a dull battle gray. Then just over the equator, approximately on a line with the mouth of the Amazon, there occurred an amazing crossing of paths. The Oregon steamed by the tiny sloop Spray, a random speck in the empty sea, upon which, sailing all alone, was Captain Joshua Slocum, of Massachusetts, then on the last leg of the first solitary cruise around the world. “. . . I saw first a mast,” he wrote, “with the Stars and Stripes floating from it, rising astern as if poked up out of the sea, and then rapidly appearing on the horizon, like a citadel, the Oregon/” Signals were exchanged and Slocum learned for the first time that his country was at war.

On May 24, sixty-seven days after leaving San Francisco, the Oregon was spotted off Palm Beach, Florida, and the news was flashed across the country. She had arrived in time to play a part in the Battle of Santiago Bay.

Though the voyage was hailed as “unprecedented in battleship history,” a triumph of American technology and seamanship, it was the implicit lesson of the experience that would matter in the long run. “By that experience,” wrote Mark Sullivan, social historian of the era, “America’s vague ambition for an Isthmian canal became an imperative decision.” As a demonstration of the military importance of the canal, it had been made to order.

Still, of those impelling new reasons for the canal produced by the Spanish war, none counted for so much in Washington as the acquisition of the Philippines. The Philippines, Roosevelt foresaw, would affect America’s future more than any other result of the Spanish war. He was not an imperialist, he insisted. It was inconceivable to him that Americans could ever be viewed as imperialistic. In all the United States he had never met an imperialist, he once said before an audience in Utah. He was personally offended by the charge. Expansion was different; it was growth, it was progress, it was in the American grain. He was striving to lead his generation toward some larger, more noble objective than mere moneymaking. (“For after all,” the revered Mahan wrote, “if the love of mere glory is selfish, it is not quite so low as the love of mere comfort.”)

To each generation was allotted a task, Roosevelt knew. “I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”

Roosevelt was governor of New York when he first thrust himself into the actual shaping of policy concerning the canal. The contribution was uninvited and was an extreme aggravation to Secretary of State John Hay. In 1898, the war in Cuba over, McKinley had directed Hay to begin negotiating a new canal treaty with Great Britain, to supplant the old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which, after nearly fifty years, still remained a diplomatic stumbling block to any substantive support of a Central American canal by the United States government. Hay and the British ambassador, Sir Julian Pauncefote, had made rapid progress. Tied down with its own unpopular Boer war in South Africa, by now disenchanted with Central America as a “sphere of influence,” the Foreign Office was ready to bow out of a partnership in building the canal, quite willing to sign the task over to the Americans.

According to Hay’s proposal, the United States was to have the right to construct and operate the canal, which, like Suez, was to be “free and open in time of war as in time of peace, to vessels of commerce and of war of all nations, on terms of entire equality. . . .” The United States could keep order along the route with its own police, but there were to be no fortifications. The agreement was signed in Hay’s office on February 5, 1900.

That was the first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and for a few days John Hay felt he had achieved a milestone. McKinley too spoke elatedly of “the great achievement.” But Hay had chosen to ignore the Senate. No one on the Hill had been shown a draft of the treaty, nor had he bothered to describe its provisions to anyone on the Foreign Relations Committee. “When I sent in the Canal Convention,” he later explained to McKinley, “I felt sure that no one out of a mad house could fail to see that the advantages were all on our side.” The rumblings commenced quickly enough, principally over the concept of a neutralized canal, a subject seldom questioned before. Suez had long since established the precedent of neutrality. The concept was in keeping with the old American policy of freedom of the seas. In addition, there was substantial naval opinion that if the need ever arose, the canal could be quite properly defended from bases at San Juan and Pearl Harbor.

Senator Lodge was the “first to flop,” in Hay’s words. The British had given up nothing, Hay was told; they had simply agreed to let the United States spend the money and do the work. John Tyler Morgan, another “force” on the Foreign Relations Committee and now head of his own Senate canal committee, concurred.

Then from Albany came the most shrill denunciation of all, which, to add to Hay’s exasperation, was played across page one of the New York papers no less than if it had been a major policy pronouncement.

George Smalley, former London correspondent for the New York Tribune, now Washington correspondent for The Times of London, was the one who rushed across Lafayette Square to give Hay first word of Roosevelt’s attack. “You can imagine to what extent the fat is in the fire!” wrote a bemused Henry Adams. “If Hay is beaten on his treaty he will resign; if he doesn’t resign, he will certainly hamstring Teddy. Won’t it be fun?”

For his own part, Hay sent an icy response to Albany, declaring that such matters ought not concern a mere governor.

The mere governor would be heard all the same. “I do not see why we should dig the canal if we are not to fortify it so as to insure its being used for ourselves and against our foes in time of war,” he wrote to Captain Mahan. To Hay he insisted that the treaty was in fact a step backward and “fraught with very great mischief.” He asked the Secretary to consider the case of the Oregon. Had a canal of the kind the treaty guaranteed been in existence in 1898, the Oregon could certainly have reached the Atlantic more quickly; but the advantage would have been far outweighed by the fact that the Spanish fleet would also have been at liberty to use the canal to prey on the Pacific Coast or to go after Dewey in the Philippines.

“If that canal is open to the war ships of an enemy it is a menace to us in time of war; it is an added burden, an additional strategic point to be guarded by our fleet. If fortified by us, it becomes one of the most potent sources of our possible sea strength.”

Roosevelt’s view was the popular one and opposition to the treaty gathered rapidly. In the Senate, Morgan noted that England had once done everything short of war to prevent the canal at Suez, but then took it over after the work was completed. Allegedly this could again be the intent.

To add to Hay’s burdens, meantime, his friend Adams, who had since departed for Paris, lectured by mail that the whole balance of world power rested on the two isthmuses. Suez was settled, but who was to say what the consequences might be if the Kaiser were to make a move for Panama? Five minutes of negotiation in Paris would be enough, said Adams, to guarantee the completion of the French canal.

The Senate refused to ratify the treaty without amendments. Hay was beside himself. Overly sensitive by nature, he was stunned by the attacks on the treaty, taking everything said about it quite personally. It was his first experience with “filthy newspaper abuse.” He was certain he was in the right, and he had assured Pauncefote that the treaty would be acceptable. A career dedicated to the resolution of Anglo-American difficulties appeared to be going up in smoke.

He handed McKinley his resignation, which McKinley calmly refused. “We must bear the atmosphere of the hour,” the President said. “It will pass away.” And like many of McKinley’s instinctive responses, it was the right one.

When the British refused to accept an amended version of the treaty, Hay, to his enormous credit, picked up the pieces and began over again. Negotiations with Pauncefote resumed; this time the Senate was kept apprised. By late summer of 1901, shortly before McKinley left for Buffalo, Hay was able to report that much progress had been made. He had worked on harder than ever, and despite personal tragedy and recurring premonitions of doom. In June his elder son, Del Hay, McKinley’s private secretary, had been killed when he fell from an open window at New Haven, while attending a Yale commencement. “I have hideous forebodings,” Hay wrote Adams. “Good luck has pursued me like my shadow. Now it is gone . . .”

And then had come the shattering news from Buffalo. His world, his career, his usefulness, all had ended, he wrote to Roosevelt. But he also saw Roosevelt as a “young fellow of infinite dash and originality,” as he confided to a friend on the day of McKinley’s death, and when Roosevelt arrived in Washington with the funeral train the night of September 16, Hay was among the first to come forward on the crowded station platform to pay his respects.

Hay was a man who generated lasting affection. The French ambassador, Jules Jusserand, would remember him as “modest withal, never trying to push himself to the front, speaking in subdued tones and scarcely opening his lips when uttering a memorable saying or shrewd humorous remark.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, over tea, Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, at the mere mention of his name, would say simply, “Oh, dear little Mr. Hay . . .” He was, as well, many things Theodore Roosevelt was not–fastidious, subtle, self-effacing, a public official who lost sleep over speeches that had been written perfectly in advance. To Roosevelt he was “the most delightful man to talk to I ever met.” His only problem, to Roosevelt’s way of thinking, was a “very ease-loving nature . . . which made him shrink from all that was rough in life.”

But on the station platform that September night, Roosevelt implored Hay to remain as Secretary of State. They stood together only a moment, Roosevelt with his hand on Hay’s arm, both men in black, wearing high silk hats, the noise of the station drowning out their words to everyone but themselves. He told Hay that he must stick by him–it was a command, Roosevelt said–and Hay, deeply touched, said he would. So it was Hay after all who put his signature to what was to go down in history as the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, the first important treaty of Roosevelt’s Presidency.

This time the clause forbidding fortification had merely been omitted. The United States was to be free to do whatever was necessary to protect the canal “against lawlessness and disorder” and the unwritten understanding was that this in fact authorized fortification. Roosevelt, Lodge, and Morgan were quite satisfied and there was never any serious doubt about the fate of the document after that.

On the morning of November 18, 1901, the portly, white-haired Pauncefote was ushered into Hay’s large office at the south end of the State, War, and Navy Building. No special fuss was made. It was not even generally known that the British ambassador was in the building until he had been with the Secretary for about an hour. Then two elderly Negroes–William Gwin and Edward Savoy, State Department messengers who had attended countless such occasions–were asked in. Gwin held a silver candlestick which contained the taper used to burn the red wax for the seals. Savoy would apply the wax. Hay and Pauncefote signed their names. The seals were fixed. “If there was anything approaching ceremony it was putting out the candle,” observed a reporter. “It is never blown out . . . but must be snuffed out with a silver extinguisher.”

At the White House Theodore Roosevelt declared himself “Delighted!”

III

Like John Hay, the British Foreign Office, Lodge, Captain Mahan, like the editors of virtually every major newspaper, like all but a tiny minority of his countrymen, Theodore Roosevelt had been operating on the assumption that the canal was to be built in Nicaragua. In none of his numerous speeches on the subject, for example, had he ever even used the word “Panama.” (He had either referred to the Nicaragua canal or the isthmian canal, never to a Panama canal.) And like everybody else in Washington, or everyone who understood how things worked there, he looked to Senator John Tyler Morgan as not merely the ultimate authority on the subject but someone with whom cooperation would be mandatory. Only a few weeks after becoming President, Roosevelt had written to Morgan, “You know the high regard I have for you. . . . I particularly wish to see you and consult with you about various matters; and I hope, my dear Senator, you will understand that I desire earnestly to hear from you about every appointment as well as every question of public policy, and that wherever possible I shall pay the utmost heed to your advice.”

Morgan was chairman of the Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, the Morgan Committee, as it was more commonly known, which included several extremely interesting and influential figures: Spooner, of Wisconsin, who was as fine a speaker as anyone then in Congress; William Harris, a burly, imposing man, who had an engineering background and had actually seen something of Central America; and Senator Hanna, who was regarded, with reason, as the most important man in American politics, Roosevelt not necessarily excluded. But it was Morgan who ran the show; Old Morgan, of Alabama, who at age seventy-seven qualified as one of the most powerful and interesting figures in American politics.

Morgan did not look like much. He was small and frail, a dry little stick beside a man like Hanna. His hair and mustache were as white as paper, his scrawny neck several sizes too small for the inevitable wing collar. He was known as one of the old-time characters on the Hill. A lawyer from Selma, Alabama, he had led a cavalry charge at Chickamauga and survived to become a brigadier general. He had been elected to the Senate first in 1876 and had been serving without interruption ever since. Friend and foe considered him the most intellectual of Democrats (as Hoar was the most intellectual of Republicans), and to judge by performance, rather than appearance, his career was anything but in the decline. No member of the Senate, irrespective of age, worked harder.

Morgan’s efforts over the years had been largely constructive. He was watchful, uncompromising, fiercely independent, nearly always irritable. He was also scrupulously honest. Never had he been known to vote on anything for reasons other than his famous “principles” some of which, such as those concerning relations between the black and white races, were viewed as shamefully out of date. His handwriting, a savage, consistently illegible scrawl, was known all over town, as was his sense of humor, which was a bit like that of Mark Twain, whom he resembled to a degree. “A lie,” he was once heard to declare on the floor of the Senate, “is an abomination unto the Lord and an ever-present help in time of need.”

To cross him in any fashion was considered extremely dangerous. “Senator Morgan was an extraordinary man in many respects,” wrote Shelby Cullom, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “He had a wonderful fund of information on every subject . . . He was one of the most delightful and agreeable of men if you agreed with him . . . but he was so intense on any subject in which he took an interest, particularly anything pertaining to the interoceanic canal, that he became almost vicious toward anyone who opposed him.”

The two greatest pleasures in Morgan’s life, it was commonly said, were work and a good fight.

The interest in the canal dated from his first years in the Senate. He knew the reports of every surveying expedition to Central America, the findings of the several successive canal commissions since the Grant Administration. It was John Tyler Morgan, everyone knew, who had worked longest and hardest for congressional support for the ill-fated Maritime Canal Company, who had been the author of several canal bills, who had done more to inform the public, heard more testimony, read more, asked more questions, and had more information on the entire subject of an interoceanic passage than any figure of either party. The canal was the dream of his life and he was as certain as he could possibly be that it must be a Nicaragua canal. Nicaragua, in the popular phrase, remained “the American route” and his long, frequently lonely fight to have the canal built there had made him a national figure.

The canal would be his monument, Morgan was often told by admiring colleagues. He, however, was not interested in prestige. He wanted no monuments, he wanted the Nicaragua canal.

Because of his strong expansionist sentiments, and the support he had lent to the Roosevelt-Lodge-Mahan doctrines, Morgan also had a unique kind of leverage. In most other respects he was a good Bryan Democrat and a Southerner to the core. Still he could usually count on support from the other side of the aisle when he needed it. And for several years now he had been more welcome at the White House than any Democrat in town.

Morgan wanted an American canal under American control no less than did Roosevelt. Nor had he ever been the slightest bit tentative about that, which was among the chief reasons for Roosevelt’s admiration. Several of his strongest arguments for a Nicaragua canal were, nonetheless, avowedly provincial. An ocean passage at Nicaragua would mean a return of prosperity to the South. A Nicaragua canal would be closer to any American port than would a canal at Panama, but a Nicaragua canal would also be seven to eight hundred miles closer to the Gulf ports of Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston than to New York or Boston. He foresaw his native southland fronting on one of the world’s principal sea lanes and every Gulf port a major coaling station. World markets would open for southern lumber, southern iron, cotton, manufactured goods. It was a position that made him extremely popular at home.

But on top of this Morgan believed quite sincerely that Nicaragua was the superior choice from an engineering standpoint and in view of political considerations. His technical argument was much the same as that advanced by Grant’s canal commission or by Menocal and Ammen at the Paris congress: Nicaragua offered the lowest pass any-where on the Cordilleras from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; Nicaragua provided fifty-odd miles of magnificent lake, perhaps as much as sixty miles of navigable river; the lake offered a limitless supply of water at the summit level of the canal. Politically, Nicaragua was a stable country in which to make so vast an investment of American capital and effort. A Nicaragua canal had already been the subject of six treaties between Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the United States. Nicaragua was clean, fertile, relatively free of disease; it had great potential for development. And he could marshal impressive facts and figures, drawing from his prodigious memory, government reports, and such widely respected authorities as A. G. Menocal.

By the same token, his contempt for the Panama route was monumental, his utterances on the subject, if anything, even more notable. Earlier in the year, as the newly elected Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, presided rather nervously over a Senate debate on the canal, Morgan had called the Panama plan “a job which has disgusted France . . . until she had shuddered like a sick baby at the enormity of the villainies perpetrated by her own people.” The entire affair had been “gangrene with corruption.” The Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama was the so-called New Panama Canal Company, the words spoken as though they had an unpleasant smell. The company’s assets and franchises were held to be virtually worthless, its stockholders little better than common thieves. Its officers were paid schemers and to be trusted under no conditions. These people, Morgan warned, had no intention of finishing the canal; their present efforts in Panama were a thin sham; their only objective, their only reason for existence, he insisted, was to sell their poisonous junk heap to the United States.

And since this was closely in tune with the opinion of the vast majority of Americans, his position seemed impregnable. The very dark cloud that hung over Panama in the popular mind appeared immovable, while Nicaragua, by stunning contrast, was seen as a sunny, hospitable land much favored by fortune. Nicaragua would be a fresh start. Those few Americans who had spoken out for Panama Morgan regarded as fools or, worse, stooges for the transcontinental railroads that were conspiring to defeat any waterway through Central America that they could not own or control. Morgan was a railroad fighter of long standing and the railroads, he insisted, were as much opposed to a canal at Panama as they were to one at Nicaragua. But by playing up Panama they hoped to stall a congressional decision on Nicaragua. He accused no one in particular, but there was no call to. At the heart of the “Panama Plot,” the public and most of the press assumed, were E. H. Harriman, J. P. Morgan, and James J. Hill. And quite possibly the assumption was correct, or at least partly so, although neither Morgan nor the newspapers were ever able to produce substantive proof.

In the place of proof were the frequent declarations of the railroad people themselves, and since the railroads had shown no prior aversion to political wirepulling, and since their grip on the country as a whole had become a very live political issue, the specter Morgan raised of paid railroad agents scheming to wreck the canal was one nobody took lightly.

Speeches by others on the subject of the Nicaragua canal filled hundreds of pages of the Congressional Record. In the archives of the House and Senate were tens of thousands of pages of reports from special canal committees, testimony from explorers, engineers, sea captains, all supporting the fundamental wisdom of the Nicaragua route. (If pens were spades, remarked the Minneapolis Times, the canal would have been dug long since.) There were all the maps and surveys of the Grant expeditions, tabulations on weather and tides and annual rainfall gathered by still further Nicaragua expeditions in the 1880’s, when the French were busy at Panama. Most of the popular magazines– Harper’s Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, Munsey’s, Century–had carried major articles on the Nicaragua canal. The Maritime Canal Company, before it went bankrupt, had built a magnificent scale model of its canal, complete with running water and tiny locks that actually worked, and this had been exhibited in Washington and a dozen other cities. American boards of trade, state legislatures, scores of civic groups of one kind and another, had passed solemn resolutions for a Nicaragua canal. A Nicaragua canal had been a showpiece in both the Republican and Democratic platforms. But a clinching argument for Nicaragua heard repeatedly was that if Old Morgan, knowing all he did, having given the better part of a lifetime to the subject, said it was the place, then certainly that must be so. A Nicaragua canal bill would go before Congress, it was presumed, and Morgan would see it safely and speedily through. The one remaining piece of business was the release of a Presidential study on the “most practicable and feasible route” for the canal. The study had been ordered by William McKinley and authorized by Congress in 1899. It was the work of the Isthmian Canal Commission, the second such high-level commission established by McKinley (the first, the Nicaragua Canal Commission, had been organized in 1897), and it was to be the final word on the subject. Chairman of the commission was Rear Admiral John G. Walker, who had also headed the earlier study, and hence it was referred to as the Second Walker Commission, or more commonly as time passed as simply the Walker Commission. Besides Walker, eight others, most of them eminent civil or military engineers, composed the board. A million dollars had been appropriated. The field work had involved two years, hundreds of men–surveyors, engineers, naval officers, physicians, geologists–and it was in November, only a few days before Hay and Pauncefote met to sign their treaty, that Admiral Walker had marched up the steps to the State Department on his way to Hay’s office, two men trailing a few paces to the rear carrying the long-awaited report in two large wooden boxes.

The report was supposed to have remained secret until the President had read it and sent it on to Congress, but on November 21, three days after the Hay-Pauncefote signing, William Randolph Hearst broke the results in the New York Journal. One of the admiral’s stenographers had been bribed and Hearst had a carbon copy of the full text.

Having considered all factors of climate, health, legal rights, existing franchises, having arrived at probable figures for the cost of construction and operation of ship canals in both Panama and Nicaragua, the Walker Commission had again declared Nicaragua the preferred choice. The issue, it seemed, had been settled once and for all. The rest would be largely a matter of legislative formality.

For those few who bothered to read the commission’s report, however, it was obvious that the important news was not the concluding decision for Nicaragua–a decision that had been expected all along– but the exceedingly strong case being made for Panama. There was no need to read between the lines. All one had to do was to look at the technical arguments being presented, none of which was very technical or complicated.

The deciding factor had been the price put by the French company on its Panama holdings. Nicaragua was the “most practicable and feasible” route “after considering all the facts developed by the investigations . . . and having in view the terms offered by the New Panama Canal Company,” which were “so unreasonable that its acceptance cannot be recommended by this commission.” Yet with amazingly few exceptions the editorial writers and politicians chose to pay no attention to that. The commission’s findings were hailed as the ultimate confirmation of the American route.

The Journal followed its great scoop with an article on a minority report (also provided by the obliging stenographer) in which the virtues of the Panama route were stressed in further detail by the most eminent civil engineer on the commission, George Shattuck Morison. The New York Times and one or two other papers had also made mention of a “Panama Lobby” stepping up its “gumshoe campaign” in Washington and of a “powerful coterie” in the Senate working secretly for the Panama route, irrespective of the commission’s conclusions. But the stories were generally discounted. Asked by reporters if he had any knowledge of Panama sentiment among his colleagues, John Tyler Morgan drawled, “I haven’t heard a brush crack in the woods about it.”

When Congress convened in the first week in December, a House bill for a Nicaragua canal was pushed through committee without a hitch. Its author, William Peters Hepburn, of Iowa, was a Republican with a large streak of vanity who had once blocked a similar bill because it was then called the Morgan Bill. He had decided that if any one individual or party was to be immortalized by the canal legislation it was to be Congressman Hepburn and the Republicans. Morgan had since assured Hepburn that he would not respond in kind, that he would be quite happy to see it be a Hepburn Bill, and so it was expected to pass quite handily.

On December 10, a formal diplomatic convention was signed in Managua “with a view to the construction of a Nicaragua canal by the United States.” On December 16, to nobody’s surprise, the Senate ratified the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Three days later the House of Representatives, by unanimous consent, placed the Hepburn Bill on the calendar for immediate consideration following the Christmas holidays.

Then just before Christmas came reports from Paris that the president of the Compagnie Nouvelle had suddenly resigned. A stock-holders’ meeting on December 21 had become so tumultuous that the police had to be called in. The gist of the speeches had been to get the United States to buy the canal at any price.

To date, technically speaking, the French company had never really fixed a price for its holdings. Admiral Walker had been informed only as to what the company considered the Panama property, equipment, and franchises to be worth–which was $109,000,000. Having nothing else to go by, Walker and his commissioners had taken that to be the price and had based their decision on it.

The new price, the first price actually quoted from Paris, was presented to Walker by representatives of the company early on January 4, 1902, the morning most of Washington was absorbed in accounts of Alice Roosevelt’s coming-out party at the White House the night before. Walker and his eight-man commission had concluded in their report that what the French company had to sell was worth considerably less than $109,000,000. The useful portions of the French excavations they valued at $27,400,000. They were willing to include $2,000,000 for the French maps, surveys, drawings, and records. The Panama Railroad they judged to be worth nearly $7,000,000, and another $3,000,000-plus had been added to cover possible oversights. So the total estimated value came to $40,000,000, which, interestingly, was the precise figure the French were now offering to sell for.

Walker had hurried over to the State Department at noon and from there the news had been taken next door to the White House. The French had not only slashed their price, they had cut it by more than 60 percent. As Admiral Walker was to tell the Morgan Committee in his deadpan fashion, “It put things on a very different footing.”

But when the House took up the Hepburn Bill, the debate, if it can be called that, lasted all of two days. On January 9, the House voted all but unanimously–308 to 2–to proceed with the Nicaragua canal. As Mark Hanna observed, probably not one congressman in four had even read the report of the Walker Commission. Morgan, who had read it, and closely, announced that he would commence hearings and see that the bill reached the Senate with all dispatch.

The Administration all this while had been keeping silent, the implicit understanding being that the choice was the prerogative of Congress and that Roosevelt remained a Nicaragua man. But no sooner had the House acted than Roosevelt called the members of the Walker Commission to the White House, one by one, for private consultation. He wished their own personal views, freely expressed, one man at a time. A meeting of the full commission followed, a closed, secret meeting in the President’s office, during which Walker and the others were told to get together and issue a supplementary report. Roosevelt wanted the French offer to be accepted. The conclusion of the commission, he said, was to be unanimous.

Morgan was incredulous when Mark Hanna confronted him with the news. “Go ahead and ask the President if you do not believe it,” Hanna replied, and Morgan went down to the White House that same day. What sort of exchange he and Roosevelt had neither man ever disclosed.

That was on Thursday, the sixteenth. By Saturday the papers were saying that Roosevelt had a new canal report in his hands. Walker, intercepted by reporters between the State Department and the White House, would say only that the report was likely to be a disappointment to the public. On Monday, January 20, the story was out. On the motion of George S. Morison, the commission had reversed its decision: Panama was now declared the unanimous choice for the canal.

A general inventory of the French property was provided for the first time. There were some thirty thousand acres of land, which, along with land belonging to the Panama Railroad, comprised nearly all the ground required for the canal itself. There was the railroad. There were more than two thousand buildings (offices, living quarters, storehouses, shops, stables) in addition to the large central headquarters in Panama City and the hospitals at Panama City and Colon. There was “an immense amount of machinery” (tugs, launches, dredges, excavators, pumps, cranes, locomotives, railroad cars), as well as surveying instruments and medical supplies. The excavation already accomplished, that excavation that would be of value according to the commission’s own plan, was figured to be 36,689,965 cubic yards.

Very few in Washington missed the point.

Assuming Theodore Roosevelt was as impatient to build the canal as he appeared, then his fastest, most expedient course would be to ignore the last-minute overtures of the French company and let John Tyler Morgan handle the rest. That way there would be no more time wasted. But Roosevelt quite obviously had chosen not to do that. In-stead he was flying head-on against the Senator in defiance of all the old man’s authority and power, not to mention the popular sentiment of the country. He was throwing all past faith in the Nicaragua route to the winds, and by so doing he was risking still further delays, more interminable debate, and very likely a personal defeat at the outset of his Presidency. Clearly something or somebody had caused him to conclude that Panama was not just the better alternative, but so much better as to be worth making a fight for.

Or possibly, it was being said, he was no less susceptible than his predecessor to the will of the Senator from Ohio. And if Mark Hanna was for Panama, there was no special mystery about that, since it was axiomatic that Mark Hanna spoke for the railroads.

Hanna could not “bamboozle”the American public like a lot of children, declared an irate press. The American people are not fools, said the New York Herald. National opinion was unanimous for Nicaragua and the lesson of democracy was to trust the public instinct:

All the objections shown have been admitted by competent scientific authorities, but their weight is nil compared with the instinctive conviction so deeply rooted in the American nation, that the Nicaragua canal project is a purely national affair, conceived by Americans, sustained by Americans, and (if, later on, constructed) operated by Americans according to American ideas and for American needs. In one word, it is a national enterprise.

Sentiment, the editors insisted, must be reckoned in national as in personal affairs. The fundamental question was whether the United States Senate would prove more “permeable to foreign influence” than the House had.

The Louisville Courier-Journal, in an editorial that was carefully clipped and saved by John Tyler Morgan, wrote of the “bare-faced comicality of the medicated steal: twenty millions to enable the thieves on this side to pass the bill; twenty millions for the insiders on the other side; a few rusty pots and pans and an international law suit for Uncle Sam.”

Morgan’s frequent assertions that the title of the property was in-valid, that Colombia would never willingly abandon its rights on the Isthmus, that political unrest was endemic in Panama, were all very much in evidence now. “Talk about buying a lawsuit,” wrote William Randolph Hearst in the New York Journal, “the purchase of the Panama Canal would be buying a revolution. Apparently the only way in which we could secure a satisfactory concession from Colombia would be to go down there, take the contending statesmen by the necks, and hold a batch of them in office long enough to get a contract signed.”

Meantime, the Colombian minister in Washington, Dr. Carlos Martinez Silva, assured the State Department and the press that his government was ready to deal liberally with the United States concerning Colombia’s isthmian province. The government in Bogotá would show “no mean nor grasping spirit. Everything in the way of a concession the United States needs to warrant it in undertaking to build the Panama Canal, Colombia is willing to grant.”

On January 28, Senator John Coit Spooner introduced an amendment to the Hepburn Bill. It authorized the President to acquire the French company’s Panama property and concessions at a cost not to exceed $40,000,000; to acquire from Colombia perpetual control of a canal zone at least six miles wide across the Isthmus of Panama; and to build a Panama canal. If a clear title or a satisfactory agreement with Colombia could not be reached within “a reasonable time,” then the President was authorized to proceed with a canal at Nicaragua.

If passed, the proposal would obviously transform the House bill into an entirely new measure. It was the strongest evidence of all that Roosevelt had made up his mind that it must be a Panama canal. Spooner had shown no prior partiality for the Panama route. But Spooner was an able floor leader for Administration bills who would never have taken such a stand without full White House approval. So plainly the plan had emanated from the White House.

Theodore was still the spinner.

*One of many popular renditions of the story, “The Race of the Oregon,” by John James Meehan, went as follows:

Lights out! And a prow turned toward the South,

And a canvas hiding each cannon’s mouth,

And a ship like a silent ghost released

Is seeking her sister ships in the East. . ..

When your boys shall ask what the guns are for,

Then tell them the tale of the Spanish War,

And the breathless millions that looked upon

The matchless race of the Oregon.

10
The Lobby

In the course of a very active and very extended professional career . . . the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell had found itself placed in intimate relations, susceptible of being used to advantage with men possessing influence and power.

–WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL

The first bugle-note had been heard. I hastened to settle up my business affairs and left France on the Champagne . . . for this crusade which was to result in the resurrection of Panama.

–PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA

I

As Chairman John Tyler Morgan gathered his committee for the first hearings on the Hepburn Bill, the idea of building the American canal at Panama, of buying out the French and finishing what they had begun, was altogether devoid of popular appeal and without a single spokesman of national reputation. What open support there was for the Panama proposition was just barely discernible–a few newspapers (the New York Evening Post being the most persistent), a few Mid western business groups, perhaps a half-dozen prominent civil engineers. Political support appeared to be nonexistent. Extraordinary as it may seem in light of what was to transpire, by the start of 1902 not a single politician of importance had ever declared himself in favor of a Panama canal. The idea had no constituency, whereas the enthusiasm for Nicaragua, within Congress and without, appeared to be overwhelming.

Any ordinary citizen who dared even to suggest that perhaps the French had picked the best place after all, or that a Panama canal ought not be dismissed out of hand because it was a French idea or because it would be a Panama canal, spoke virtually alone. Old John Bigelow, for example, had become something of a curiosity for espousing such views, as well as something of a nuisance to such influential former colleagues as John Hay, who responded with due courtesy, but nothing more, to Bigelow’s lengthy, reflective letters on the matter.

As things stood, there was every reason to assume that the commerce of the world, not to mention the white ships of the United States Navy, would one day be plying the waters of beautiful Lake Nicaragua. And this is doubtless what would have occurred had it not been for certain unexpected events and a mere handful of extremely determined individuals, Two of whom comprised the main thrust of what the newspapers darkly referred to as the “Panama Lobby.” They were William Nelson Cromwell and Philippe Bunau-Varilla. Their activities to date require some explaining.

Both Cromwell and his French counterpart were small, aggressive, fatherless men who would each be compared to Napoleon. Only Cromwell, however, had made “influence” a profession. Cromwell was something New in the legal world, a corporation lawyer, a kind of mutation sprung forth in the Wall Street jungle during the rise of the railroads. An almost pretty little man, with thick, curly, prematurely white hair and white mustache, he had large, glittering blue eyes–“as clear as a baby’s,” according to one account–and a smooth, pink com plexion that “would not shame a maiden.” In striped trousers and morning coat he looked like a clever drama student dressed for the part of elder statesman. But the look he fancied, the role he cultivated, were those of the man with all the cards, and possibly several more up his sleeve. As one young protégé would recall, Cromwell delighted in being known as a mystery man, a puller of strings. An incensed con gressman was to call him “the most dangerous man the country has produced since the days of Aaron Burr,” which was extravagant, but exactly the sort of remark from which Cromwell took extreme satisfaction.

He had no interest in sensational trial work, never courted publicity. He was a talker man to man. “No life insurance agent could beat him,” a reporter for the World wrote after a long interview. “He talks fast, and when he wishes to, never to the point.” His great genius was for “arranging” things, for planning every move in advance. “Accidents don’t happen” he would admonish young associates, “they are permitted to happen by fools who take no thought of misadventure.”

William Nelson Cromwell–he preferred the use of all three names –was the good, eager, poor diminutive boy from Brooklyn, the son of a Civil war widow, “a lad of delicate health,” who had once played the organ in the Church of the Pilgrims and went to work first as an accountant in a railroad office. He was the model of Ambition Rewarded who began each day at first light and advised others: “A successful man never forgets his work. He gets up in the morning with it, he works all day with it, he takes it home with him, he lives with it.” He had worked his way through Columbia Law School in his off-hours, was graduated in 1876, and three years later, with an older, well-established trial lawyer named Algernon Sullivan, founded the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When Sullivan died in 1887, Cromwell became the senior partner at age thirty-three.

He hired equally promising young men (one of whom was John Foster Dulles) and busily cultivated his own legend. To his more staid peers he seemed a touch vulgar. His “training in finance and accounts,” an associate would explain, had “developed in him valuable skills unusual to lawyers of that day who were generally trained in literature, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and the classics.”

Cromwell’s fees for straightening out the affairs of troubled corporations or arranging giant mergers were the largest of their kind up until that time. Still in his early forties, he was already a millionaire many times over. When the New York firm of Decker, Howell & Company failed in 1891, with debts of $10,000,000, Cromwell, who had been named assignee, had the company’s affairs straightened out in six weeks–creditors paid, operations resumed–and his fee was an unheard-of $250,000. By 1901 he had reorganized the Northern Pacific Railroad and assisted J. P. Morgan in founding the United States Steel Corporation. (He was also among those privileged to participate in the stock syndicate that made the giant steel combine possible, along with such “Lords of Creation” as H. H. Rogers, W. K. Vanderbilt, and John “Bet-a-Million” Gates. Cromwell’s share was for $2,000,000, for which he had been required to put up a bare 12½ percent.) He was adviser to and confidant of several of the most powerful men in America, whom he admired and flattered to the skies. Once, speaking before a Wells, Fargo stockholders’ meeting, he declared, “Mr. Harriman is the one man to be thanked for what this company has gained through the favor of the railroads. He cannot be replaced, for he moves in a higher world which we cannot hope to enter.” Nor had he the slightest compunction about trading openly on such friendships.

In 1894, the year the New Panama Canal Company was organized, Cromwell had become general counsel for the Panama Railroad, a stockholder, and a director. This had come about because he was at the time involved with C. P. Huntington and the Southern Pacific, which by then virtually controlled the Panama Railroad as the result of a traffic agreement. Presently he had started looking after the “interests” of the New Panama Canal Company, promising its officers an “open, audacious, aggressive” campaign of “publicity, enlightenment, and opposition” all planned with “Napoleonic strategy.” He was to profess most earnestly later on that his underlying purpose at all times had been to give the United States the best possible canal. But from other things he said and did it is clear that his fundamental objective was to sell the French company to the United States government, or, that failing, to some other government or combination of foreign capital. And for such efforts he expected to be well paid. His fee for services rendered when finally submitted to the Compagnie Nouvelle would be for $800,000.

Few lobbyists had ever gone about their task with such intensity or imagination. He made lobbying one of the lively arts, as someone said. No opportunity was missed. Editors and congressmen were supplied with reams of material on Panama, the French company, the drawbacks of the Nicaragua route. He was in Washington again and again, often for weeks at a time, seeing people on the Hill, negotiating with the Colombians. He had some help from a lawyer named William Curtis and a newspaperman, Roger Farnham, whom he had hired away from the World. But he was the spearhead. It was he who counted Hann a and Spooner among his “intimate” friends. It was he who called at the White House.

He made liberal use of his own and his client’s money. He brought people together. Once he had even arranged a meeting between his client’s representative and William McKinley. On the Hill his strategy was to do everything possible to dampen the Nicaragua ardor and he was as “ubiquitous and ever present” as John Tyler Morgan said he was. Indeed, the hatred he engendered in the old Senator is probably the clearest proof of his effectiveness.

His most demonstrable achievement was the establishment of the Isthmian Canal Commission, at least such was to be his lifelong claim. To bring this off he had concentrated on House Speaker Thomas B. Reed and Congressman Joseph (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, both Republicans who quickly saw, he later said, “the wisdom, the justice, and the advantages” of one conclusive, grandiose scientific study and gave it their backing, which was all that was needed. It was an inspired delaying tactic–and a critical one, as things turned out–but it was also an enormous gamble, since a verdict by the commission in favor of Nicaragua would utterly demolish his client’s already slim prospects.

Once the idea was in motion he had moved quickly to influence the selection of the nine men who were to serve on the commission. He urged McKinley not to reappoint Admiral Walker. A Corps of Engineers officer, Colonel Peter Hains, and a professor of civil engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Lewis Haupt, were also unacceptable in his view, since, like Walker, they had served on the earlier Nicaragua Canal Commission and were therefore not without Nicaragua bias. (Professor Haupt was actually on record as saying that nothing could change his mind about the superiority of the Nicaragua route.) A fourth man, Alfred Noble, a noted Chicago engineer, had also been compromised, Cromwell argued, by service on a still-earlier, short-lived Nicaragua canal board. Among the Army engineers, nearly all of whom were strongly, if privately, behind the Nicaragua plan, Cromwell’s influence with McKinley was described as “too powerful for ordinary mortals to counteract.”

Cromwell failed to block the appointments of Hains, Haupt, Noble, and Walker, but the three other civil engineers chosen were from Cromwell’s acceptable list, and among them was the Olympian Morison, whose reputation among Cromwell’s railroad friends was second to none.

Once the new commission was set up for business in the Corcoran Building, it was the “silver-tongued” Cromwell who convinced Admiral Walker that the place to commence his studies was in Paris, not Central America. And so it was to France that the nine commissioners and several of their wives had sailed in August 1899, Cromwell, meantime, having hastily departed on an earlier ship.

The final report issued by the commission contains no mention of Cromwell. It is stated only that in Paris the officers of the Compagnie Nouvelle “received the commissioners with great courtesy and were ready at all times to assist them in making a study of this [Panama] route in all its aspects.” The most important and attentive of those officers, however, had been the American lawyer. It was Cromwell who turned up at the Continental Hotel to greet the commissioners the morning after their arrival. It was Cromwell who served as master of ceremonies throughout their five-week stay, and who came to bid them each farewell the day they left.

A staggering quantity of material had been gotten up for display, its value far exceeding any Panama data then available in Washington or anything the commission could possibly have assembled on its own in the time available, as Cromwell appreciated perfectly well and as his guests quickly saw for themselves.

They gathered at the company’s offices at Number 7 Rue Louis-le-Grand. There were maps, engineers’ reports, hydrographic studies of the Chagres River, geologic profiles, reports on test borings along projected dam and lock sites, plans for dams, plans for locks, records of tidal observations on the Pacific, reports on excavation expenses at Culebra, a detailed inventory of the company’s equipment and property. Everything was beautifully arranged. Printed copies of the most important documents, a total of 340 different items, had been prepared for each member of the commission, the documents contained in fifteen neatly labeled cream-colored folders and these secured with dark-green ribbons.

At the end of August, Cromwell had arranged a special convocation of the Comité Technique International, a board of engineers established earlier by the Compagnie Nouvelle to evaluate the work accomplished on the Isthmus. It was a genuinely impressive body. The chairman was a retired inspector of the department of Ponts et Chaus-sées; General Henry Abbot had recently retired from the United States Army Corps of Engineers; there were a chief of the Manchester Canal, a noted Russian engineer, and a former technical director of the Kiel Canal. The year before, this same group had declared its unanimous confidence in the feasibility of completing the Panama canal.

To introduce the gentlemen of the Comité to the gentlemen from the United States, a luncheon was arranged at the sumptuous Pavilion Paillard, a restaurant in the park on the Champs Élysées directly across from the gardens of the Élysée Palace. Everything was done just so personalized menus with an engraved view of the Pavilion, four wines, six courses–“a very fine lunch & pleasant occasion,” noted George S. Morison in his diary, which for George S. Morison was a positively rhapsodic accolade.

General Abbot, who was well known to the commissioners and unquestionably able, told them he was so convinced of the soundness of the French company’s overall scheme for a lock canal that he was sure some other country or some combination of foreign capital would jump at the chance to carry on, should the United States be foolish enough to proceed at Nicaragua. For six years after the de Lesseps company failed, the canal had been idle, no digging, no work at all to speak of; but for the past four years, since 1895, things had begun to stir again on the Isthmus, since progress of a kind had to be shown by the new company in order to maintain the Colombian franchise. This was no mere token effort, Abbot assured them, however modest in scale. A long-needed railroad wharf had been built at Panama City; some excavation had been resumed at Culebra. The place was being tidied up, the jungle chopped back again, equipment looked after. This was phase one, he explained; phase two would be to go to “the great moneyed people of the world and show them it would be a good investment.”

The technical discussions that followed during the next several weeks were conducted as if “before a court of highest jurisdiction,” according to the dapper little attorney from New York, who by his own subsequent declaration was “in attendance” every moment. And afterward, back in Washington, before the commission left for its own firsthand inspection tours at Panama and Nicaragua, he had “kept in constant and personal communication with various members of this body, adding to their information, furnishing documents . . . overcoming their hesitations . . . etc.”

Yet his single most valuable service, Cromwell later avowed, was the personal conversion of one man, Mark Hanna. Just when Hanna saw the light is not clear in Cromwell’s account, but it was he, and no one else, Cromwell insisted, who had led the famous Senator to the truth; it was he who had made Hanna his specialty, from the time McKinley asked Hanna to post himself on the business and technical aspects of the canal project and Hanna had dutifully taken his place on Old Morgan’s committee.

II

Cromwell’s counterpart in the crusade, the former acting director general of the Compagnie Universelle, was no less passionately committed than in earlier years to The Great Adventure of Panama. Now in his mid-forties, he looked a little stouter than before, the hairline had receded considerably, and what hair there was he kept cut extremely close. He had also acquired a certain fixed look of fierce pride. In photographs from the time, he focuses directly on the camera; he is flawless, stiff-necked, and unflinching, the eyes steady and grave. As in earlier days the face is dominated by a large mustache, only now it has been waxed to fine spikes and looks ornamental, overdone. It might be something pasted on in jest were it not for the eyes, which are plainly those of a man who never did anything in jest. Roosevelt called it the look of a duelist.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla was to be greatly misunderstood in another generation. The tendency among historians would be to see him as an almost comic figure, a sort of road-show French schemer who, though colorful enough in his fashion, should not be taken altogether seriously. Possibly the mustache had a bearing on that judgment. But primarily it was Bunau-Varilla’s own account of all that happened, his obsession with the first person singular in everything he wrote, which to even the most tolerant modern reader seems so absurdly one-sided, so inflated by self-interest, as to be ludicrous. In his books, the most important of which is Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection, his ideas are invariably brilliant, his actions invariably bold, inspired, pivotal. Anyone who opposed him or dared to disagree with his point of view is portrayed as stupid or villainous or mentally deranged. Those who see things as he does are gentlemen of the first magnitude, uncommonly intelligent and marked by a high sense of moral purpose.

He saw himself as the gallant crusader—“a soldier of the ‘Idea of the Canal’ ”–going forth to battle Prejudice in the cause of Scientific Truth. He was still the central figure in a spacious romance. He would, he had resolved, restore the honor of France, an honor tarnished By Panama and by the Dreyfus case. Single-handedly, if necessary, he would salvage “The Great Idea of Panama.”

Things happened to him, he writes, as if they were occurring in a work of fiction. Fortune “smiled” on him as it did on very few. “At every turn of My steps it seemed as if I were accompanied by a protecting divinity.”

Yet in view of what in fact did happen, considering the romantic tradition he was a product of, there is little wonder he felt as he did. The shame is that he also felt compelled to unfold it all in such high-blown fashion. He never seems to have understood how much more readily his story would have been accepted—especially in a less posturing, more skeptical age—how much more impressive it would have been, had he only told it straight. Moreover, there is ample evidence that the man himself bore little resemblance to the character he becomes in his books. In truth he was a hardheaded, practical, personable, exceptionally intelligent, almost unbelievably energetic individual who made an impression on people that they would remember all their days.

If anyone failed to take him seriously at the time, there is no evidence of it. Edward P. Mitchell, of the New York Sun, among the ablest newspapermen of the day, later wrote: “When I came to know him well I found him to be in mind and will one of the most surprising dualities it was ever my privilege to encounter; Napoleonic, indeed, in his practical energy and resourcefulness, yet an idealist of the first grade in disinterested devotion to a patriotic sentiment.” John Hay, who was to have more direct dealings with him than anyone in Washington, was astounded by the man’s diversity and by the uncommon speed with which he could accomplish things. George Morison, appraising him purely on professional grounds, declared him “brilliant,” a tribute George Morison seldom conferred on any man.

Even those who were instinctively suspicious of his motives never seem to have discounted his ability. It would be a grave mistake to underrate this man, the Chicago engineer Alfred Noble warned Senator Morgan in confidence at the time Bunau-Varilla arrived in the United States to begin his campaign.

His English was excellent and spoken with marked precision. There were bows for the ladies; his table manners were impeccable. He was the cultivated, upper-class European par excellence and he knew exactly how to gain attention wherever he went. “He didn’t just come into a room, he made an entrance” recalled Alice Roosevelt Long-worth admiringly. It was he, rather than the theatrical-looking Cromwell, who had the actor’s timing, the intuitive feel for the dramatic gesture. The engineer was the evangelist of the pair, oddly enough, and it was he who became “the peripatetic spellbinder” (as John Tyler Morgan would say), carrying his campaign cross-country much as de Lesseps had done twenty years before.

The impact of his whirlwind tour was unmistakable. He was a novelty. American audiences had simply not encountered an authority on Panama before, let alone an engineer who had had the experience of actually attempting to dig a canal there. And the engineering argument for building at Panama rather than at Nicaragua had never been set forth publicly and with conviction.

“Every phase of the canal question was at tongue’s end with this envoy of the Panama idea,” wrote Mitchell. But most appealing, one gathers, was the capacity to invigorate others with his vision, to light the imagination with the possibilities of a Panama canal. It was a capacity many of his listeners thought quite remarkable in a Frenchman. He had, the newspapers said, “a sort of resourceful energy which some people are accustomed to regard as peculiarly American.” He was “the Frenchman who is like an American.”

When the original canal company went bankrupt in 1889, Bunau-Varilla’s first impulse, he afterward explained, was to rally his countrymen to carry on with the work. To this end he had plunged into politics and campaigned for election to the Chamber of Deputies–“to lash slander with the whip of truth.” Discouraged after a narrow defeat, he had come to New York to look up John Bigelow and get his advice. This friendship between the older man and the brilliant youth “ripened into almost a father-son relationship,” as Bigelow’s biographer would write. Bigelow told him to go home and put his case in writing, with the result that in 1892 he produced a book, Panama: Past, Present, and Future, in which the Panama and Nicaragua routes were compared on purely technical grounds, something that had not been done before other than in government reports of the kind produced in the 1870’s.

But the idea of getting the United States to take over at Panama had either not dawned on him as yet or was still too much at odds with his vision of French destiny. So he had gone first to see the Russians.

There had been a chance meeting with a Russian prince on a train in 1894, after which Bunau-Varilla rushed to St. Petersburg to try to convince Tsar Alexander III that Russia should provide the capital to finish the canal. He never saw the Tsar, only the Tsar’s powerful Minister of Finance, Count Sergei Witte. He told Witte that a Panama canal and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, then under construction, could be the perfect Franco-Russian counterpart to the Anglo-American combination of the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroads. A lock canal at Panama, Bunau-Varilla said, could be finished in four more years if the Russian sovereign would give a guarantee of 3 percent to the necessary capital, which he put at $140,000,000. Witte promised to present the plan to the Tsar and Bunau-Varilla returned to Paris bursting with expectations. The French government was astonished by what he had to report, and highly interested, according to Bunau-Varilla, whose word is all we have to go by. The government fell shortly afterward, however, and Alexander II was assassinated. Moreover, the liquidator of the defunct Panama company, furious over Bunau-Varilla’s meddling, saw to it that he would have no more say in company matters. What the consequences might have been had the Russian scheme gone any further is interesting to speculate on.

Not for five more years was his American crusade launched, in Paris, the summer of 1899, when the Isthmian Canal Commission arrived.

“Everybody, the world over, then supposed that the Nicaragua Canal–the old American solution of the problem–would be carried out. I determined thenceforth to center my efforts toward the adoption of Panama by the United States. The task seemed impossible of achievement!”

There had been a letter from John Bigelow, an amazingly well-timed, plot-turning letter just like those in novels. What was urgently needed was “someone competent to persuade our engineers,” wrote the dignified old New Yorker. “I shall be eighty-one years old the 25th of this month,” Bigelow wrote, “and of course am not of much use in a fight except perhaps to beat the drum.” He had sent one of the engineers on the commission, Colonel Oswald Ernst, to see Bunau-Varilla first thing on arriving in Paris, and a neat, scrubbed-looking Yale man and lawyer named Frank D. Pavey, who was in Bunau-Varilla’s pay later, if not then, was also instrumental in arranging the first meetings.

The little Frenchman applied himself in the tradition of his former leader and idol, Ferdinand de Lesseps. But while Cromwell was devoting his energies to the entire commission, Bunau-Varilla, who at this stage had still to meet Cromwell, concentrated on just three of the group–Colonel Ernst, Professor William Burr, of Columbia University, and George S. Morison, the three who, with the concurrence of Admiral Walker, had agreed to make Panama their particular concern. And of the three, Morison was the primary target, Morison having the greatest professional eminence and a reputation for being a highly independent and persuasive individual in his own right.

“Our conferences were long and frequent,” wrote Bunau-Varilla, among the few understatements he ever permitted himself. They met at one of his favorite restaurants or at his palatial gray stone hotel particulier, on the Avenue d’léna, near the Arc de Triomphe, then, as later, the most fashionable of Paris addresses. “Dinner with him meant half past eight,” Frank Pavey would recount, “and after dinner we settled down in his library, and he never let go of an American victim when he got one in that library until he thought he had converted him . . . the first time I dined in his house I stayed until two o’clock the next morning, listening to his picturesque and fascinating argument.”

The wives of the visiting Americans were often included in such evenings and their host could not have been more charming. He had a fund of fascinating conversation on all manner of subjects, but the great dominating topic that summer was the Dreyfus trial and to their amazement they learned that he personally had played a critical part in the drama. Among his interests since returning from Panama had been the newspaper Le Matin, which he had purchased and put under the charge of his brother, Maurice. It was Maurice who had obtained a photograph of the incriminating letter that Captain Dreyfus had allegedly written to the German attaché. Philippe had known Dreyfus years before at the École Polytechnique, where they had been friends and classmates, and upon seeing the photograph he had hunted up an old letter from Dreyfus. The difference in the handwriting was not merely obvious, but astounding. So, convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, the brothers had published pictures of both letters in Le Matin, a sensational bit of journalism that led to the reopening of the case and a story that held the American guests spellbound.

Before their departure that September, the three engineers had been given a copy of Panama: Past, Present, and Future and instructed by the author to throw it away if a single mistake in fact or logic could be found. “When my three eminent new friends left Paris a large hole had been made in the dam of prejudice then existing against Panama in their minds–as in everybody’s.”

It was not quite large enough, however. The following year, in the autumn of 1900, the commission issued a preliminary report recommending Nicaragua. “The fight to a finish was now to begin,” wrote Bunau-Varilla and from this point on, by his own account, he was accompanied by deep mystical feelings of Fate taking charge. It was as though everything that happened had been prearranged.

An unexpected cable arrived, an invitation from some Cincinnati business people who wanted him to come to their city as soon as possible to lecture on the comparative values of the Panama and Nicaragua routes. They too had met him during a summer sojourn in Paris. “We have not forgotten the presentation with which you favored us,” they wrote in a follow-up letter, “–so vivid, so comprehensive, and so convincing–and we are anxious to have it reach our American public in the most effective manner we can devise.”

The “bugle-note had been heard.” He sailed on a ship called Champagne. There was little chance of his influencing public opinion in America, he had decided, but he was bound to “conquer for the Panama side” those who could.

Strolling the deck he struck up a friendship with a French priest who after hearing him expound on his favorite subject suggested that he look up an American whom he, the priest, had met in Rome. The man’s name was Myron T. Herrick. He was a Cleveland banker, a friend of President McKinley’s, explained the priest, who, as Bunau-Varilla tells the story, had now become part of the great puzzle Fate was piecing together. “Every time I was in need of a man he appeared, of an event it took place.”

But a letter written by Lieutenant Commander Asher Baker, an American naval officer and another of those Americans Bunau-Varilla had managed to cultivate in recent years, suggests that Bunau-Varilla had more than Fate working for him. “Everything has been done for Philippe,” Baker informed the lawyer Pavey. Baker, who met the Frenchman at the ship, was being reimbursed for his expenses and services by Pavey, who himself was serving as Bunau-Varilla’s “man” in New York.

The historic whirlwind crusade began with an after-dinner speech before the Cincinnati Commercial Club in a large room bedecked with French and American flags the evening of January 16, 1901. The speech, the first Bunau-Varilla had ever attempted in English, was an unqualified success. He said approximately what he would say wherever he went thereafter and with such winsome conviction that he held everyone’s attention. Included in the large collection of his papers on file in the Library of Congress is an affectionate little note from his young daughter back in Paris, who had enclosed a tiny map of Central America that she had drawn most carefully with pen and crayons. Hovering over Nicaragua is a black devil brandishing a pitchfork, while above Panama sails a winged angel. The conception was the very same as that of her Papa adoré and it was precisely that kind of partiality, as much as the barrage of facts he had at his command, that so held his audience. It was “the intensity of conviction which inspired all your utterances” that had the most telling effect, wrote one of his hosts, adding, “I love a man who loves a great cause.”

The standard speech began with a profession of independence: he represented no private interests, which was to be taken as a guarantee that he had not come as a salesman for the new Panama company. His mission was purely to defend “a grand and noble conception which gave me many happy years of struggle and danger . . . during which I do not remember one hour of despair.”

That said, he would get to particulars. He stressed basically what was to be stressed by the revised report of the Walker Commission: a Panama canal would be a third the length of a canal at Nicaragua; it would have fewer curves; it would require less excavation in total, fewer locks; it would cost less.

He talked about the railroad at Panama, the harbors at Colón and Panama City. He referred to the Chagres as “this monster of the imagination.” He did not talk about the rains or the slides at Culebra. He did not talk about yellow fever or malaria. He did not mention the uprising of 1885 or How he had felt on seeing Colón burned to the ground. He did not describe the Chagres in flood. Nor did he bring in the fact that he was a stockholder in the Compagnie Nouvelle or the circum stances by which that had been brought about.

There was, however, a further element to the set speech that seemed almost incidental at first, but that quickly became its most important element.

Panama had no volcanoes. There was not a single volcano, active or inactive, Within 180 miles of the Panama line, he assured his listeners. In Nicaragua this was by no means the case. In Nicaragua in 1835 the eruption of the volcano known as Coseguina had lasted nearly Two days. The noise, he said, had been heard a thousand miles away and enough stone and ashes had been ejected every six minutes to fill a Nicaragua canal.

He was not the first to have raised the issue. Humboldt had cautioned that there was “no spot on the globe so full of volcanoes” as Nicaragua. John Lloyd Stephens, as will be recalled, had made much of Mount Masaya and its potential as a tourist attraction. At the Paris congress, Commander Selfridge had cautioned against Nicaragua for this very reason. But those who heard Bunau-Varilla lecture regarded it as a fascinating revelation.

Always “the force of things” had driven men to build at Panama, he would conclude; it had been the Spanish gold trail to begin with, then the American railroad, then the de Lesseps canal. At times men had thought otherwise and intended to build elsewhere, “But the force of things drives them to Panama and it will again.”

It was the volcano part of the speech, however, that had the greatest impact.

Among his Cincinnati hosts were several who were personally acquainted with Myron T. Herrick. Herrick was not just a friend of McKinley’s, Bunau-Varilla now learned, but of “a man far more important for my purpose,” Mark Hanna. A phone call was put through, letters of introduction were prepared, and Bunau-Varilla took the night train for Cleveland.

At a private lunch at a Cleveland business club, seated with the tall, inordinately handsome Herrick and some twenty other pillars of Cleveland enterprise, he held sway for three and a half hours, popping up every so often to illustrate a point on a blackboard that had been wheeled in. “Never did a more propitious occasion offer itself, nor a completer success crown my efforts. All who listened to me, and whom I had made sincere and deeply convinced believers in Panama, formed the circle of Senator Hanna’s intimate friends.”

From Cleveland he went to Boston where he spoke at a banquet at the New Algonquin Club the evening of January 25, 1901. “This French engineer,” observed the Boston Herald in a long, glowing editorial, “treated the matter [of a canal at Panama] from a distinctly professional point of view,” something quite novel in Boston. He was in Chicago a week later, accompanied by Asher Baker, who handled the advance arrangements. His host was James Deering, of the Deering Harvester Company, and the lecture this time was at the Central Music Hall, where he was introduced by the illustrious civil engineer William Sooy Smith.

“He lectured before 250 representative people,” Baker reported excitedly to Frank Pavey. “. . . Western Society Civil Engineers, members of the Nicaragua Canal Commission, most of the solid and very well known Chicago Clubmen were there. I introduced him to Marshall Field, Robert Lincoln and a lunch was given him at the Club . . . there was a dinner and theater every night. Coquelin and Bernhardt were in town, the whole trip was simply perfect.” Best of all, Baker went on, “I have arranged through most important people To HAVE HIM MEET SENATOR MORGAN in Washington (!!!!). . . in an intimate and friendly way. It would take pages to explain how this was brought about.”

Back in New York briefly, Bunau-Varilla dined with George S. Morison, who advised him to make less of the volcano issue. They made quite a pair. The stiff, tiny Frenchman with his waxed mustache and bullet head was often taken for a military attaché; Morison, a figure of vast bulk, ponderous double chins, and walrus mustache, looked like a German sausage maker. While Nicaragua was undoubtedly an area of volcanic activity, Morison did not believe that would have any serious effect on canal structures. From the engineering point of view, the issue was a phony. Through Cyrus McCormick, of Chicago, a speech was arranged at Princeton University, and it was followed by a half-hour appearance before the New York Chamber of Commerce, this being, in Bunau-Varilla’s private estimate the most important of all possible public plat-forms. The Chamber of Commerce audience was polite and unenthusiastic; still, the resulting publicity had great value. At Philadelphia, Bunau-Varilla told an especially large and attentive audience that to prefer Nicaragua over Panama was equivalent to preferring the stability of a pyramid resting on its point to one resting on its base; “. . . and to that stability is attached the prosperity and welfare of a whole continent.”

He stopped always at the best hotels. He was extended guest privileges at the best clubs. In return he was generous with theater tickets and fine cigars ($28 worth of “Segars” are included on one hotel bill). For the wives of his hosts there were enormous bouquets of roses and, invariably, a prompt, gracious thank-you note (for “one of the most grateful remembrances of this agreeable sojourn in America”). For the dutiful Asher Baker, there was a $100 clock from Tiffany.

Busy as a day might be, there was always time for a dozen or more letters–to people he had just met, or, more often, to friends of people he had just met–asking for doors to be opened, introductions arranged, contacts. He prepared a pamphlet entitled Panama or Nicaragua? and had thirteen thousand copies printed and mailed. Again, disregarding what Morison had said, he hammered away at his volcano story. Let those inclined to dismiss his warnings take note:

Open any dictionary of geography, any encyclopedia, and read the article entitled “Nicaragua.” I will say also: Look at the coat of arms of the Republic of Nicaragua; look at the Nicaraguan postage stamps. Young nations like to put on their coats of arms what best symbolizes their moral domain or characterizes their native soil. What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize their country on their coat of arms, on their postage stamps? Volcanoes

The mailing list for the pamphlet included every congressman, the governor of every state, a thousand bank presidents, some six hundred shipowners, two hundred merchants reputedly worth more than $100,000, the editors of four thousand newspapers and magazines, hundreds of boards of trade and chambers of commerce, plus all those names on the list he himself had compiled during his travels, a list that by now came to nearly a thousand names.

He had John Bigelow send copies to Secretary Hay and Admiral Walker, with covering letters explaining how he had first met the distinguished French engineer in Panama. Hay, who had once served as Bigelow’s aide in the Paris embassy, confided in response that of course there was “a good deal of searching of hearts” over the proper path for the canal, but reminded his old friend that the decision did not “lie in the discretion of the Executive.” Walker’s reply was that the Frenchman was making too much of the volcano matter.

Having been steadily on the move for close to three months, Bunau-Varilla talked privately in New York to Bigelow and others of sailing for home. The interview with Senator Morgan remained on his schedule still, and he had not met Senator Hanna, but for pressing personal reasons he thought it time to wind things up. Once again, if his story is to be believed, Fate stepped in.

Towards midnight, as I was about to go out for a breath of fresh air before retiring, I met a party of people in evening dress entering the Waldorf Astoria. My surprise was great when I saw at the head of them Colonel Herrick with a lady on his arm, and behind them Mrs. Herrick, accompanied by a short stout gentleman who limped slightly.

His characteristic face, so frequently reproduced in the papers was familiar to me. . ..

It was Hanna, and Herrick happily made the introductions. “Ah!” Hanna said (recounts Bunau-Varilla). “Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, how glad I am to meet you!” More important, the Senator wished to have M. Bunau-Varilla call on him in Washington anytime that was convenient. “The ice was broken, under the best and most cordial conditions,” wrote the author of the scene.

His love of the chance encounter, of famous figures in elegant attire, of fateful exchanges between men of power made in a suitably grand setting, was very great. Perhaps this is the way it happened, perhaps it is not. But he did go directly to Washington “to attack the political fortress.” He saw Hanna at the Arlington Hotel, then the Senator’s Washington residence, and Hanna smoked and listened, his large cigar poised in a surprisingly delicate hand. According to Bunau-Varilla, the interview was decisive, which makes a mockery of Cromwell’s subsequent claims. “Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, you have convinced me,” Hanna is said to have exclaimed when it was over. He naturally wanted to find out what Panama specialists on the commission thought, but: “If, as you assert, they think as you do, I shall go over to your side.”

A few days later Bunau-Varilla was at the White House, chatting pleasantly with William McKinley. The introduction this time had been made by Charles G. Dawes, Comptroller of the Currency, whose friendship Bunau-Varilla had acquired in New York and again as a result of another chance encounter in the Waldorf lobby. He did no more than pay his respects at the White House. As he later explained, he did not wish to “inflict” a long lecture On the President, knowing the value of his time and “that the opinion of Senator Hann a would be his [McKinley’s]own.” In other words, he had already spoken to the head man.

There was another, final encounter in Washington and it must have been a memorable one.

A little after dark he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol and turned left at John Marshall Place to a tall brick row house, Number 315, the home of John Tyler Morgan–“the Lion’s cage.” He went convinced that the old man was a dangerous paranoid. “The fanatical and almost demented state of mind of the old Senator, after twenty years’ uninterrupted efforts for Nicaragua, prompted him to see conspirators everywhere.” That Morgan might be a man of keen intelligence, whose motives, by his own lights, were quite as noble and patriotic as his own, apparently never occurred to him. Again Bunau-Varilla’s account is the only one available.

“My visit produced a deep impression on him. In spite of his apparent courtesy I saw he was trembling with passion.” Morgan insisted on doing all the talking and this it seems was more than Bunau-Varilla could endure. “But the volcanoes of Nicaragua–” he blurted in desperation, cutting Morgan off in mid-sentence. Morgan would hear none of it. “Now, between ourselves,” he thundered, “You would not put one dollar of your own money in this absurd project–in this rotten project–of Panama!”

Apparently they were both on their feet by this time and Bunau-Varilla, unable to contain himself, lifted his hand to strike Morgan across the face. But the hand stopped in midair; he had a sudden vision of giant newspaper headlines-FRENCH ADVENTURER ASSAULTS DEFENDER OF NICARAGUA DREAM. Morgan had deliberately provoked him, he now saw in a flash; the whole encounter had been arranged to trap and destroy him. “I lowered My half-raised hand, and extending it solemnly toward the Senator, I said: ‘You have just inflicted upon me, sir, a gratuitous and cruel insult. But I am under your roof, and it is impossible for me to show you My resentment without violating, as you do, the laws of hospitality.’ ” And having delivered that little speech, the Bonaparte of Engineers turned on his heel and strode out the door.

He sailed for France on April 11, 1901.

What had it all cost? And who had paid for it?

Philippe Bunau-Varilla would say only that he had met all his expenses himself, out of a private source that also remains something of a mystery and that had been the subject of resentful, unpleasant talk in Paris.

The situation was this. Years before, at Panama, when he resigned his position with the canal company and went to work as a private contractor at Culebra, he had been able to take only a government salary because of a rule requiring all French government engineers to remain in service, accepting no pay or fees from private sources, for a minimum of five years. However, he had seen to it that his brother, Maurice, was put into the Paris office of the contracting firm as its financial manager, and he and his brother had made a secret agreement. A salary would simply be put aside for him until the required five years were up. It was a maneuver that evoked no little disdain when revealed later, but Bunau-Varilla maintained that the money was rightfully his and, furthermore, that it enabled him to “consecrate” his life to the Panama canal, “to save the noble conception of French genius through its adoption by America.” How much money was involved, how much of it he may have used, if any, has never been determined.

It is quite certain, nonetheless, that he did have a direct monetary interest in the fortunes of the new canal company, since he and his brother were what were known as “penalty stockholders.”

The founding of the Compagnie Nouvelle had been arranged in a most ingenious fashion, which was the chief reason why Senator Morgan and others viewed that whole organization as no better than an assembly of crooks. The court-appointed liquidator of the old de Lesseps company, in the interests of the stockholders in the old company, had devised a very direct and effective means of capitalizing the risky new company.

Those French contractors who had worked on the canal–and who were still solvent–were simply told that they could either invest in the new company or face prosecution for fraud and breach of contract. The rush to buy stock was pronounced. Two-thirds of the new company’s capital, some $8,000,000, was raised in this fashion. In plain fact there would have been no new company had the liquidator not resorted to this bit of blackmail, a point Morgan had made more than once on the floor of the Senate.

The largest of these “penalty stockholders” was Gustave Eiffel, and so ostensibly he stood to gain the most were the company’s holdings sold to the United States. Threatened with an 18,000,000-franc breach-of-contract suit, Eiffel had put 10,000,000 francs ($2,000,000) into the new company. The investment of the Bunau-Varilla firm was 2,200,000 francs.

So one theory is that Bunau-Varilla had come to the United States representing not only his own and his brother’s interests, but those of Eiffel and the other penalty stockholders, none of whom was permitted to have any say in the management of the company, and few of whom had much respect for the way in which the new company was being managed.

Another intriguing theory is that Bunau-Varilla had been “discovered” and subsidized by the Seligmans, the great Jewish financiers of New York, whose reputation for the strictest integrity had been badly stained by their prior role in Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Comité Américain. The late Jesse Seligman had been vigorously interrogated before a congressional committee at the time of the Panama Affair. Nothing very serious had been turned up by the committee, other than the obvious fact that the Seligman firm had been paid an exorbitant amount to do no more than lend its name to the de Lesseps scheme. Nonetheless, the Seligmans were eager to see the legitimacy of the Panama idea restored and thereby justify their prior involvement. And so, the theory goes, it was they who invented “The Man who Invented Panama,” Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who had initially caught their attention through his role in the Dreyfus case.

That Bunau-Varilla knew the Seligmans quite well, and Isaac Seligman in particular, that the family took a keen interest in his lobbying activities in Washington, are matters of record. Isaac Seligman, for example, wrote letters of introduction in his behalf, including one to Mark Hanna, and went out of his way to speak to Hanna privately about Bunau-Varilla’s engineering credentials. But if Bunau-Varilla was actually the creature of the Seligmans, or in their pay, there is no solid evidence of it, and to his dying day he would angrily denounce any suggestion that he had ever been anyone’s agent or taken money for anything he ever said or did about Panama.*

But the puzzle the man presents is made still more complex by the very existence of the private, personal sources from which, by his own account, he drew his expenses, as well as still larger outlays to come. Where, how had he acquired all the money? How could he afford the enormous house on the Avenue d’léna, a house in which there were “servants to wait on the servants,” as one member of the family would recall. No one knew, or at least no one said. The son of an unwed mother of no apparent wealth, a scholarship student at the École Poly-technique, he had gone to Panama, where theoretically he had earned only a modest government salary, then returned to Paris to dabble unsuccessfully in politics, buy a newspaper, and write books about the inherent Genius of the Idea of Panama. Yet somewhere along the line he had become an extremely wealthy man. His wife, a semi-recluse who took her meals alone in her room for fear of catching some disease, was not a wealthy woman. To his own descendants the origins of the family fortune would remain a mystery.

The only hireling, the only mercenary in the crusade, according to his version of the story, was Cromwell, whom he had come to detest and whom he customarily referred to as “the lawyer Cromwell,” the word “lawyer” to be taken as an epithet. The most Bunau-Varilla could ever bring himself to say for Cromwell was to call him “an active and useful messenger between important men,” but then added on another occasion: “An active go-between will easily think he is the author of the messages he has to carry.”

It was not until the following year, 1902, that these two remarkable figures actually met for the first time. During Bunau-Varilla’s initial campaign they had kept as clear as possible of each other despite the obvious benefits some degree of cooperation might have produced. The Frenchman never asked the attorney for favors; the attorney made no use of the Frenchman’s technical expertise or his skill at persuasion. Most likely Cromwell had been so instructed by his client in Paris, who, with Bunau-Varilla’s Russian episode in mind, probably regarded him as unreliable and a possible embarrassment. And Bunau-Varilla doubtless felt that any overt connection with someone known to be in the employ of the Compagnie Nouvelle, and especially someone whose allegiances were so plainly for hire, could only jeopardize his own stance as the Champion of Truth.

Whatever the explanation, each man would cast himself in the hero’s role when it came time to account for what happened and would pointedly belittle or ignore any constructive part claimed by the other.

Cromwell’s claim that he had inspired the creation of the Walker Commission was, for example, utterly absurd, according to Bunau-Varilla. He was the one who had done that; he had convinced Asher Baker that Panama was the place for the canal and Asher Baker, during the winter of 1898–1899, had “enlightened” Speaker Reed and Congressman Cannon.

As for Cromwell’s boasted influence on Hanna, that, said Bunau-Varilla, was strictly a question of business as usual for “the lawyer Cromwell.” During the Presidential campaign of 1900, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mark Hanna, had received a donation from Cromwell of $60,000, a donation that Cromwell had charged off to the Compagnie Nouvelle. In return for the donation, said Bunau-Varilla, Hanna had seen to it that the Republican platform called for the construction of an “isthmian” canal, rather than specifying one at Nicaragua, as the Democrats had done. And to that extent only would Bunau-Varilla acknowledge a Cromwell role in Hanna’s conversion.

How he learned of the donation Bunau-Varilla never said. But the idea that $60,000 would have caused Hanna to make any such change seems highly remote and suggests that Bunau-Varilla may never really have understood Mark Hanna, who was accustomed, as he himself said, to frying bigger fat and never with strings attached. Neither Hanna’s vote nor his public expressions were ever for sale, whatever his faults and irrespective of his notoriety as “Dollar Mark,” the brutal money-bags of the party.

Later, for the public record, Cromwell would tally up the most amazing list of accomplishments in behalf of his client, but that was mainly to justify his staggering $800,000 fee. He was the professional putting the best shine possible on services rendered. To Bunau-Varilla the client was posterity, the judgment of history, before which he wished only to appear as the unrivaled knight-errant. Neither one ever fully appreciated the contributions made by the other. Neither one was ever quite capable of telling the whole truth.

III

On April 10, 1900, Admiral Walker had addressed a letter to the president of the Compagnie Nouvelle. did the company have a clear title to its franchises and property on the Isthmus, the admiral wished to know, and for what sum, in dollars and in cash, would the company be willing to sell these franchises and property?

On June 25, 1901, still having received no definite answers from Paris, the admiral made a special trip to New York to call on William Nelson Cromwell at his offices at 49 Wall Street. The commission was nearly finished with its studies, the admiral told Cromwell. There was, therefore, an urgent need for a firm price from the French company. Did Mr. Cromwell have an idea what figure his client had in mind?

Cromwell promised to look into the matter. His cable to Paris, sent later in the day, was so blunt about the state of things that the officers of the company not only refused to make a definite offer of sale, but they informed Cromwell by return cable that his services as attorney were no longer desired. Apparently they had had enough of his high-pressure methods and his liberal use of their money.

So that fall, following the death of McKinley, when the report of the Walker Commission was about to be released in Washington and the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty was about to be signed, the Panama Lobby had been reduced to a party of one, Bunau-Varilla, who now came hurrying back to New York.

The assassination at Buffalo had been a terrible blow to Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla alike, both having spent so much of their time and energies cultivating Mark Hanna, whose relations with the new President were known to be far from smooth. When Roosevelt had been merely Vice President, neither Cromwell nor Bunau-Varilla had bothered to pay him any attention.

Arriving in New York on November 13, Bunau-Varilla found the situation “as bad as it could possibly be.” He rushed about trying to determine which way the wind was blowing. He must meet Roosevelt face to face he told Frank Pavey and others, but nobody seemed to know how to arrange that. Within a week Hay and Pauncefote had signed their treaty and cartoons in the papers showed John Bull swinging wide the gate to Nicaragua as a jaunty Uncle Sam marched through with pick and shovel.

But then Hearst broke the Walker Commission report, and if Hearst and others missed its importance–that the French company’s price tag was all that had kept the commission from naming Panama as the most advantageous route–Bunau-Varilla did not. With little delay he was on his way back to France again.

Exactly what happened in Paris in the next few weeks can only be roughly pieced together. On December 17, he received a telegram from Washington from a man named Walter Wellman, a reporter for the Chicago Times-Herald and another of the contacts he had established. Perhaps he was paying Wellman, perhaps Wellman was doing favors for some of the Chicago industrialists who had been caught up in the Panama campaign.

VARILLA

53 AVENUED’IÉNA, PARIS
CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION. COMMISSION SENATE PROBABLY ACCEPT OFFER FORTY MILLIONS. IMPERA TIVE NOT HIGHER. MOVE QUICKLY.

WELLMAN

Bunau-Varilla’s answer read as follows:

WELLMAN
1413 G., WASHINGTON

THANKFUL TELEGRAM AM MAKING MOST ENERGETIC EFFORTS TO MAKE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND SITUATION

VARILL A

He was present at the riotous stockholders’ meeting of December 21, and he held forth immediately afterward in a private session with the New president, Marius Bo, and Henri Germain, of the Credit Lyonnais, who, like Eiffel and Bunau-Varilla, had also been steamrollered into investing in the new company.

A price must be set at once Bunau-Varilla told them. Time had run out. Yesterday they might have done it; yesterday they might have gotten $60,000,000, perhaps $70,000,000. But yesterday was past. The price now must be $40,000,000 and they must accept that figure. Congress would convene again in Two weeks. If by then the price had not been settled, all would be lost and they would have to accept the responsibility.

On New Year’s Day, in a large advertisement in Le Matin that cost him nearly $6,000, he took the company to task for neglecting its own interests as well as the honor of France. On January 3, he sent identical cables to Senators Hann a and Lodge, to Wellman, John Bigelow, Myron T. Herrick, Professor William Burr, and George Morison :

CONSIDER ALMOST CERTAIN DEFINITIVE OFFER SALE PANAMA FORTY MILLIONS WILL BE CABLED TOMORROW AND OFFICIALLY PRESENTED MONDAY.

VARILLA

On January 4, the cable to Admiral Walker offering the sale of the entire Panama property for $40,000,000 was put on the wire at Paris.

And so, wrote Bunau-Varilla, the year 1902 “began with the wind blowing in the sails of Panama.” When the Walker Commission reversed its decision on January 18, he sent off dozens of cables to Cincinnati and Chicago expressing his “heartfelt thanks” to all those who had enabled him to speak out “in the name of the Great Idea.”

On January 27, Cromwell was reinstated as attorney for the company. The officials were in such despair, Cromwell later explained, that they asked him to resume his former connection, and so “leaving aside all our other business we acceded to this request.” But Bunau-Varilla told a different story. It was he who fixed things for Cromwell as a favor to Senator Hanna. Cromwell meant nothing to Hanna, but Hanna’s banker, Edward Simmons, who was also president of the Panama Railroad, had asked Hanna to ask Bunau-Varilla to have Cromwell reinstated, or at least so Bunau-Varilla would declare in a written statement prepared some years later for a House committee that was looking into the extent of Cromwell’s influence. On January 27, he informed Cromwell that his case had been settled in Paris, but that it had not been easy.

According to the formal written directive from Paris, the company would rely on Cromwell’s cooperation in concluding the sale of the Panama property; however, “. . . it must be clearly understood . . . that the result must be sought only by the most legitimate means; that is to say, that in no case could we recourse to methods as dangerous as they are unlawful which consist principally in gifts or promises . . .”

To Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Cromwell’s return was “but a slight incident in the great struggle . . .” To Cromwell, the Frenchman was someone who served a useful purpose, but whose “pretense of influence is grossly exaggerated.”

CULVER PICTURES, INC.

Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Mark Hanna at Buffalo at the time of McKinley’s death

George Shattuck Morison

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Captain (later Admiral) Alfred Thayer Mahan

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Senator John Tyler
Morgan

CULVER PICTURES, INC.

“The Deliberations of Congress” (from Harper’s Weekly)

Philippe Bunau-Varilla

COURTESY OF SULLIVAN & CROMWELL

William Nelson Cromwell

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

FROM PANAMA: THE CREATION, DESTRUCTION, AND RESURRECTION, PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA, ROBERT M. MCBRIDE, 1920

The stamp used as “proof” of active volcanoes in Nicaragua

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

U.S.S. Nashville

FROM THE MAKERS OF THE PANAMA CANAL, 1911

founding fathers of the Republic of Panama. Seated (left to right): José Agustín Arango, Dr. Manuel Amador, Federico Boyd. Standing (left to right): Nicanor de Obarrio, Carlos C. Arosemena, Manuel Espinosa, Tomás Arias, Ricardo Arias

UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY

General Esteban Huertas among admirers

Roosevelt at work in his study at Sagamore Hill

NEW YORK GLOBE

“Now Watch the Dirt Fly”

“The Man Behind the Egg”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLLECTION, HARVARD

Philippe Bunau-Varilla (left) and John Hay in Hay’s office at the State Department, November 13, 1903, just prior to the formal recognition of the Republic of Panama

FROM PANAMA: THE CREATION, DESTRUCTION, AND RESURRECTION, PHILIPPE Bunau-Varilla, ROBERT M. MCBRIDE, 1920

NEW YORK EVENING MAIL

“He’s Good Enough for Me!” Homer Davenport’s famous 1904 cartoon (from the New York Evening Mail) was more representative than any others of the country’s support for Roosevelt’s actions in office, including the steps taken at Panama.

*As late as 1939, when Life magazine ran an article in which he was referred to as a lobbyist and an adventurer, Bunau-Varilla, at age eighty, responded that he had been no such thing: “Unless you call adventurer a man who sacrifices his time, his money and his scientific capacities to the glory of his nation and to the service of her great friend the United States. . . .”

11
Against All Odds

“I do not want to be interrupted, for I am very tired . . .”

–MARK HANN A

I

At age sixty-six Rear Admiral John Grimes Walker was still a majestic figure. Even in his dark civilian suit and string tie he looked like The Old Man of the Sea, as he was sometimes known in Washington. Large and handsome, he carried himself, especially on public occasions, in grand military fashion. The gray hair was smartly parted in the exact center of his head. The complexion was ruddy, the brows heavy and beautifully arched, and from the sides of his face grew magnificent muttonchop whiskers that reached to his lapels and that were several decades out of style.

For more than forty years, Admiral Walker had been a special favorite in the capital, enjoying, it was said, more political influence than any officer in the Navy. He was direct, unaffected in manner, and if a bit self-important, he plainly meant well. His reputation for integrity was second to none.

Since his retirement in 1897, he had been devoting himself solely to his duties as head of the two Presidential canal commissions. And on the face of it he had been the ideal choice for the position. His one shortcoming was a lack of engineering background or experience, which until now nobody had made an issue of. He had never tried to assume the role of a technical authority. Over dinner at the Metropolitan Club, soon after the latest commission had been organized, he told its illustrious members that it was for them, the experts, to get at “the bottom facts,” however long that took, however much it might cost; and not once thereafter had he said or done anything to make them doubt his sincerity or his willingness to trust their professional judgment.

As the commission’s head, Walker was the first member to testify before the Morgan Committee. He appeared the morning of February 7, 1902. There had been several other witnesses to date, but except for Édouard Lampré, spokesman for the Compagnie Nouvelle, they had been Morgan’s witnesses–that is, predictably pro-Nicaragua or anti-Panama. A. G. Menocal had appeared two days earlier, for example. Now in his sixties and also retired from the Navy, Menocal was supposedly Morgan’s strongest technical witness, and prodded by Morgan’s patient questioning, he had documented his whole long commitment to Nicaragua. But there was nothing new in anything he said; nothing for the newspapers.

The only remark thus far that the reporters had pounced on was one made by Morgan during an exchange with the Frenchman Lampré– that he would not give 37 ½ cents for Lampré’s canal–a remark quoted out of context and that had been nowhere near as offensive as the headlines implied. Morgan had been trying to show his contempt for any purchase of the French property whereby the money would go to the new company, rather than to those original small stockholders who had sacrificed so much. Were they to be denied a just share, said Morgan, then he would want no part of the arrangement even if he could get the canal for 37 ½ cents.

Morgan had been enjoying himself enormously the whole while. It had been his show from the first day, when he kept Lampré under fire for three and a half hours, and pointedly reminded the witness several times that he was under oath. When S. W. Plume, the old Panama Railroad man, appeared the day before Walker, Morgan seemed not in the least disturbed that the room was virtually empty. Only one other member of the committee bothered to attend, Senator Kittredge, a Republican, who made a show of looking bored, but Morgan had gone right along in high spirits, questioning the witness as though the entire country were present and as if the hard-bitten old man’s memories of Panama’s horrors far outweighed the views of high-powered engineers.

Walker’s testimony took up the better part of one day and the morning following. In the record book the transcription fills seventy-five pages. The full committee was present this time. And from the moment Walker took his seat it was plain that Morgan and his allies had their knives out for him. To Morgan especially, Walker’s new position on Panama seemed little less than treasonous. It might also prove calamitous to Morgan’s cause, unless Walker could be made to look the fool or led to say, even by inference, that he had no real heart for the Panama plan. One rumor in the Senate corridors was that in return for his Panama support the White House had promised Walker the job of directing construction of the canal, from his office in Washington and with a large salary. It was easy for Walker to recommend Panama, the American minister in Nicaragua had written to Senator Morgan, since Walker would not have to live there. The admiral, it was known, liked his comforts.

The questioning was focused almost entirely on Walker’s grasp of the technical issues involved in the commission’s plan for Panama and it was Senator Harris, the one former civil engineer on the committee and Morgan’s staunchest ally, who monopolized the first hour. Morgan, who had a way of glaring at people even under ordinary circumstances, never took his eye off the witness.

The commission’s Panama scheme, the projected Panama canal upon which all cost estimates were based and against which all virtues or shortcomings in the Nicaragua plan were compared, had been based in large part on a plan devised by the Compagnie Nouvelle. The essential element in the plan, its key, was a giant dam that would check the Chagres River at Bohio and form a large inland lake reaching nearly two-thirds of the way across the Isthmus. The commission’s decision had been to abandon the sea-level concept, as de Lesseps’ engineers had finally done, and to build a lock canal much along the lines of the proposal made by Godin de Lépinay in 1879. The Isthmus was not to be severed by a vast trench, but bridged by an artificial lake, Lake Bohio, as it was called in the plan. Ships would leave one ocean, climb to the level of the lake by a flight of locks, cross the lake, then descend by another flight of locks to the ocean on the opposite side, just as de Lépinay had outlined. The one great task of excavation would be at Culebra, at the Pacific, or southern, end of the lake, where a channel of nine miles would have to be cut through the Cordilleras.

But while the Bohio dam was the most important structure on the line and a “vital necessity to the scheme,” it also presented enormous “difficulties of construction.” Numbers of prominent engineers considered it an extremely uncertain, hazardous solution if not an impossible one.

The dam was to be a man-made earthen hill a hundred feet high and it would create a lake some forty square miles in area, the largest artificial lake in the world. But the dam was also to have a masonry core that would extend farther below ground than the dam was high, and to achieve this, pneumatic caissons–for the foundations of the core–were to be sunk 128 feet below sea level, a depth far in excess of anything previously attempted.

Did the commission’s entire Panama plan hang on the Bohio dam? Senator Harris asked. Yes, replied Walker. Everything depended on the Bohio dam, but the dam would not be the most difficult undertaking. The great cut through the spine of the Cordilleras would be more momentous still. It alone might take as much as eight years.

When it was Morgan’s turn, he began with costs. Why was there a difference of $1,000,000 in the estimates for the two canals? The number of locks accounted for most of that, Walker said. There would be five locks in the Panama canal, eight in the Nicaragua canal. The reason for the fifth lock at Panama, he explained, was the great rise and fall of the tide in the Bay of Panama.

“We lift up from the Atlantic to the surface of Lake Bohio with two locks and then we drop down on the Pacific side with three locks, the last lock being the lock in which the lift varies very much, depending on the height of the tide. . . . The lock is intended as a method of passing ships from one level to another.”

“I understand that,” Morgan replied in a low, even drawl.

They were facing each other square on, the regal old Yankee sailor looking no less resolute than the small, white-haired one-time leader of Confederate cavalry.

Did the admiral recall any point of fact upon which he had so suddenly changed his mind as to where the canal should be built?

“Well, that would be pretty hard to answer. I went into the thing with my sympathies and prejudices, as far as I had any, in favor of the Nicaragua line, but I endeavored to take hold of this question with a mind open to proof.”

Morgan said he had no doubt that this was so, but wished to know whether the admiral’s new position was based upon any fact.

“I have changed it to this extent, that I know that the best line is the Panama line. . . .”

“In an engineering sense?” “Yes, in an engineering sense.”

Morgan, as he told reporters earlier, was convinced that the commission’s sudden affection for Panama had nothing to do with engineering arguments, but was based on price alone, “cheapness” was his word.

“Well, you come to that conclusion without changing any facts in your former statements?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Your judgment is convinced that you were in error in the first statement?”

“No, sir; not at all. I have not changed my mind a particle.”

Then how, Morgan demanded, could he conclude that Panama was the best canal when he had recommended Nicaragua?

Because, said Walker, when he recommended Nicaragua it had been the most feasible route under conditions then prevailing.

“What conditions?”

“When I voted in favor of the Panama route it was under quite different conditions.”

“What conditions do you refer to?”

“Very largely the unreasonable price that the Panama people asked for their property.”

“Is it not exclusively that?”

Walker fumbled for words. “I don’t think of anything–I do not go back . . . I think that the engineering features of the Panama route are better than those of the Nicaragua route, although both routes are feasible. . . .”

“You think so?”

“I think so.”

Morgan, who had made his reputation in Selma as a trial lawyer, abruptly shifted ground. His interest now was in the sources upon which the commission had drawn its technical data. His purpose was to show that the commission’s entire Panama proposal, hence its entire decision, was founded on the word of Frenchmen, or on French plans, which by Morgan’s lights were as suspect as the people who drew them up.

“How many days did your commission spend on the Isthmus of Panama?”

“We were there about two weeks.”

“You have not been back since?”

“No, sir.”

“Has any member of the commission been back since?” “Not to Panama.” “Well, in two weeks’ time you did undertake, I suppose, to obtain accurate knowledge of the engineering and of all the conditions of that canal and the country through which it passes?”

“Yes,” said Walker, taking the bait, “we had very good knowledge of the matter from having examined the French data with great care; we had our working parties on the Isthmus of Panama. . . . We had a locomotive and a special car every day to take us back and forth along the line, so that we lost no time, and we devoted ourselves to that work every day that we were there. . . .”

Morgan had a vivid picture in mind of the old admiral and his party breezing up and down the Panama Railroad in a private car, deciding the fate of the canal from the view from the window, attended by a swarm of hovering Frenchmen doing everything possible to put them at their ease. It was a grossly unfair picture, but it was one also shared by many in the room.

“Well, you say you made an examination of the French surveys before you went to the canal?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you examine them?”

Like everyone on the committee, Morgan knew perfectly well that it had been in Paris; he knew of Cromwell’s stage-managing, the displays gotten up by the French company, and so forth.

“In Paris. We spent about a month in Paris, working every day, usually two sessions a day with officers of the French company, who laid everything before us . . . and then we went to the Isthmus in person to supplement that information. . . . We made our plans for the building of a canal after we had examined this data and after we had personally visited the Isthmus and been over the ground with great care. . . .”

“You did not undertake to make an independent survey of that canal line?” (As everyone present also appreciated, the entire Nicaragua survey had been “independent,” by which Morgan meant the work of American engineers alone.)

“No, sir,” answered the admiral, who now apparently saw the trap being set for him. “For instance, we bored the site of the Bohio dam most thoroughly, much more thoroughly than the French had bored it. So far as what is ordinarily called surveying, topographical work, we did enough of it to convince ourselves that the French work was good and that we could accept their work as our own.”

“Well, you did adopt it?”

“We did adopt it after convincing ourselves of its accuracy.” “But the basis of that survey and the basis of your calculations and plans was the French survey?”

“No; we accepted their survey after checking it enough to be sure that it was right, and then after that our work was our own.”

“But based on what?”

“Well, based on their surveys, if you like.”

“That is what I mean,” Morgan said smoothly.

Morgan moved right along, taking up the geology of the Bohio valley, the design of the controversial dam, the intended use of levees, the silting up of the old French works. It was his characteristic approach, persistent and exasperatingly patient. The impression he seemed to be striving for was this: that Walker and his commission, by recommending Panama, were asking Congress and the country to risk everything on faith, faith in old John Grimes Walker, faith in the assumptions of one particular set of civil engineers, and, at root and worst of all, faith in the French.

Did the admiral happen to know whether the Bohio basin would hold water if a dam were built there? Would the admiral’s entire plan hold water was the implicit question.

“Have we any right to suppose that it would not hold water?” Walker replied, obviously annoyed.

“I am just asking your judgment,” Morgan said. “I am not an engineer or a commissioner. I am not recommending the government take your plan.”

“I have never seen anything to make me suppose there was the slightest danger of its not holding water.”

“You made no inquiry about that?”

“I did not make any inquiry about that,” said Walker. “There are a great many things that I have not inquired about.”

In the days when Walker had headed the Nicaragua Canal Commission, indeed until the latest reversal by the current commission, he and Morgan had often worked closely together. They had been colleagues in a common mission. But there was never the slightest sign of familiarity through this long session–no personal asides, no pleasantries–and when the committee convened the next morning, a Saturday, Morgan started in again. Often he was openly uncivil to Walker, or “spluttered” (as one reporter wrote) in exasperation at Walker’s answers.

No, the locomotives left behind by the French were not worthless, Walker insisted. They would have to be overhauled, but they were quite serviceable, as were many of the French excavators and dredges. He knew of nothing along the Panama line that was not within engineering precedents, except for the Bohio dam. No, he had not experienced Panama in the rainy season. No, he did not think that $2,000,000 for the French maps and surveys was excessive. Yes, he thought the engineers on the commission were quite able, as able as any in the United States.

Only when Morgan announced, after about an hour, that he had no more questions, did the tension in the air suddenly subside. It was then that Hanna, in sharp contrast, began to talk to the witness in genial, respectful tones. He asked merely for the admiral to tell the committee why–price aside–the canal should be built at Panama.

“To start with the route has better harbors,” said Walker. “It is a much shorter canal, has easier curves, and we are surer by that route of what we are doing. While we made a very careful examination of the Nicaragua line, as thorough an examination as perhaps is ever made or likely to be made before undertaking a new enterprise . . .”

“Right there let me interrupt you,” Hanna said. “You also had the advantage of all previous surveys made by the United States government of the Nicaragua route?”

“Yes. We know far less about the Nicaragua line than we do about the Panama line. It is impossible to know as much. The Nicaragua line is in comparatively wild country which has not been explored to anything like the same extent that the Panama line has. The Panama line has been a great thoroughfare, traveled for two or three hundred years. It has been examined with reference to a canal for many years past . . . and the country along the line is cleared up so that one can see what he is doing. In the wild parts of Nicaragua it is a jungle, where often we could not see fifty feet, and we would be much more likely to meet disagreeable surprises by the Nicaragua line than by the Panama line.”

He told Hanna he had no misgivings about any aspect of the Panama plan. Further, he did not regard the Panama climate as any greater threat to health than any other place in the tropics.

“There was a great loss of life in building the railroad,” he conceded, “and when they [the French] first went to work on the canal there was a good deal of sickness, but the surface material from which this sickness is supposed to come has largely been removed, and of late years it has been as healthy there as anywhere in a tropical country. . . .”

“Is it not likely,” Hanna put in, “that in the construction of the Nicaragua canal, working a large force, turning up the surface of that soil, and in dredging, that malarial conditions conducive to fevers would arise?”

“Certainly,” said the admiral. “As it stands today Nicaragua is a healthier route, because there is no work of that kind being done and very few people get sick, but when you get to turning up the ground there would be sickness there, as there would be anywhere.”

The parade of witnesses continued on into March. Much of what was said was repetitious or boring. Frequently one committee member or another would lead the witness through drawn-out explanations simply to get some obscure point into the record. Still much was said that had not been said before, at least for the records, and was of considerable interest.

Lewis Haupt, the University of Pennsylvania professor, declared, for example, that he had signed the commission’s decision on Panama only to make it unanimous. He did not think Panama the superior choice. Alfred Noble, another eminent member of the commission, said no self-respecting American contractor would take the French equipment at Panama as a gift. A third commission engineer, William Burr, told the committee that the French work would all have to be greatly enlarged, from a bottom width of 98 feet and a depth of 29 feet to a bottom width of 150 feet and a depth of 35 feet. This, he said, would make it the largest canal in the world, but none too large for the American Navy being projected.* Morgan, taking a dim view of such talk, drawled, “Do you expect to make a canal that will carry Noah’s ark or something like that through it?”

“No, probably not,” Burr answered. “We hope there will be no occasion for Noah’s ark.”

The name Ferdinand de Lesseps came up repeatedly. He and his young French engineers seemed to fill the big room like specters. There was talk of the ruined canal, of ruined machinery wallowing forlornly in the jungle, of the graves on Monkey Hill, of scandal and dishonor, and whether the same would happen all over again if Americans were to go into Panama. Morgan was convinced that it would. The engineers said no. De Lesseps’ failure resulted from insufficient investigations on the grounds, said General Abbot, of the Comité Technique. An underlying theme in much of the testimony was that industrious, practical, moral men–Americans–might succeed where others had failed. Indeed, in an inverse way, the downfall of the French, the sheer unpleasantness and difficulty of taking the Panama route, began to have a peculiar, compelling kind of attraction. The pesthole could be a proving ground, an opportunity to succeed gloriously, for all the world to see, where a less industrious, less manly, and less virtuous people had failed so ignominiously. One witness, a railroad contractor, had told Morgan in a letter, “Engineers are sometimes the least practical of men, they may be attracted by difficulties. . . ..”

Another of Morgan’s witnesses, a noted and most convincing engineer named Lyman Cooley, asked how anyone could possibly guarantee that Americans would prove three times as honest, three times as competent, as the French, because that, he said, was what it would take.

The head of the Maritime Canal Company made the legal transactions involved in the purchase of its Nicaragua properties and franchise sound extremely simple and tidy. General Edward Porter Alexander, a former Army engineer, assured the committee that there would be no technical difficulties involved in a Nicaragua canal, then finished with a tribute to the physical allure of the country that not even Morgan ever quite equaled. “It impressed me as one of the most attractive countries that I ever saw for a poor man to make a living in . . . if I had to be born again I would ask the angel that was bringing me down to take me to Nicaragua. . . .”

By far the greatest amount of time was spent on Panama, however, and the most impressive testimony was that of George S. Morison, whose reasons for wanting a canal there were essentially the same as those stated by Admiral Walker, only coming from him they appeared unassailable. Morison, as someone remarked, was a “force”–a huge, human bulwark, slow and deliberate in manner, slow to make up his mind and intractable once he had. The basic Panama plan was sound, he said; things that were impossible twenty years earlier were now quite possible. The dam could be built. The river could be controlled. The dam need not have a masonry core; the whole business of pneumatic caissons could be dispensed with.

The thing that must not be underestimated, he said, was the size of the job. The Culebra Cut would be the largest excavation ever attempted. “It is a piece of work that reminds me of what a teacher said to me when I was in Exeter [Phillips Exeter Academy] over forty years ago, that if he had five minutes in which to solve a problem he would spend three deciding the best way to do it.” No less than two years, Morison said, ought to be spent just getting ready for such a task.

Again, as with Walker, Hanna asked about the problem of disease. “If the reports are correct” Morison said, “we can get rid of yellow fever by killing the mosquitoes.” Nobody picked him up on that, nobody seemed the least interested, and nothing more was said on the subject during the whole course of the hearings.

The final witness, a fusty retired congressman from Nevada, who had spent some time in Nicaragua half a century earlier, appeared on March 10. Three days later the committee reported the Hepburn Bill favorably: the committee wanted a Nicaragua canal. The vote was seven to four, exactly what it would have been had it been taken before the hearings began.

The odds against a Panama victory in the Senate appeared now to be about 100 to 1. The impression also was that a great deal of time had been spent on a great deal of talk for nothing. And in contrast to the events that were soon to follow, the drawn-out testimony of the engineers would seem particularly colorless and unimportant. But the case for Panama had not gone unnoticed in certain quarters, and this was to prove of critical importance. An incident in Brooklyn, for example, caught the attention of the New York papers, and thus, almost certainly, the New Yorker in the White House. At a dinner on March 16, in honor of a Brooklyn engineer, C. C. Martin, one of the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, the main speaker was Irving M. Scott, of San Francisco, head of the Union Iron Works, builder of the battleship Oregon. The canal was his topic. “We must have that canal. Whether it be Panama or Nicaragua, I care not. But have it we must.” His listeners, nearly all civil engineers, did care, however. “Panama! Panama!” someone shouted. Then at once everyone in the room was on his feet, handkerchiefs were fluttering in the air. Everyone was shouting, “Panama! Panama!”

II

One topic that had been scarcely touched on, ironically, was that of “seismic disturbances.”

The commission had pretty well dismissed seismic action of any kind as a serious threat to canals in either location, but between volcanoes and earthquakes, earthquakes were regarded as a more serious danger. There had been fourteen recorded earthquakes along the Nicaragua line, the report noted, including one in 1844 that did damage four miles from the canal line. But, as the report explained, canals were underground structures; even the proposed dams would be so broadly based as to be virtually part of the ground itself; the locks would all be founded on rock.

Of the fourteen or so volcanoes in Nicaragua, only a few had shown any signs of life since the time of the Spanish, and all but one of these, Ometepe, which rises on an island in Lake Nicaragua, were a considerable distance from the proposed canal line. Even Ometepe was thirteen miles from where the ships would cross the lake, and from Ometepe to the site for the nearest lock was a distance of twenty miles.

Late in April, however, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, 1,500 miles from Nicaragua, an enormous, long-dormant volcano, Mount Pelée, began rumbling ominously and spewing up clouds of hot ash. Then on the night of May 2, the mountain trembled to the accompaniment of thunderous, terrifying subterranean explosions. The city of St. Pierre, the “little Paris,” was showered with volcanic dust and the sea for miles was littered with dead birds. After that the volcano was seldom still. At 7:52 on the morning of May 8, 1902, the whole mountain exploded. The city of St. Pierre was wiped out in approximately two minutes. It was one of the most appalling disasters of all time. Sailors on a cable ship anchored eight miles off shore felt the heat. A man watching from a distant mountainside said it looked “as if Martinique was sliding into the sea.” Nearly thirty thousand people had been killed, and above the island, blotting out the sky, was a tumultuous black cloud, perhaps fifty miles across. The sole survivor of St. Pierre was a prisoner locked in a windowless underground jail cell who had no idea what had happened until he was discovered by rescue workers.

At the White House, disregarding all red tape, Roosevelt ordered the cruiser Cincinnati to leave for Martinique at once under full steam and the Dixie, a converted freighter, followed, carrying Army rations, medical supplies, and doctors. Congress was asked for an immediate appropriation and Congress quickly granted $200,000. Pelée kept erupting in subdued fashion, meantime.

For Philippe Bunau-Varilla the news was heaven-sent. “What an unexpected turn of the wheel of fortune!” he would write. “If not the strongest of my arguments against Nicaragua, at least the most easily comprehensible of them was thus made a hundred times more striking . . .”

In the past months he had been chasing about seeing newspaper editors, talking to Hanna, talking to everyone who would listen, with such fanatical zeal that word had reached Paris that he had lost his mind. Now he swung into action as never before. A letter outlining the “terrible object lesson” of Pelée was rushed to the White House and a still more elaborate version went off to Senators Hanna and Spooner. There was an impassioned appeal on Waldorf stationery to John Tyler Morgan.

In New York the ancient and reliable John Bigelow was stirred into action still one more time. Through Bigelow a meeting was arranged with editor Edward P. Mitchell, of the Sun, the result of which was a vigorous editorial declaring that the “volcanic menace” in Nicaragua could no longer be dismissed as a remote issue.

On May 14, incredibly, came a dispatch from New Orleans describing the eruption of Momotombo, in Nicaragua itself. Now “even the mountains of Nicaragua are enlisted in the alleged conspiracy to defeat the great purpose of Senator Morgan’s life,” observed Mitchell in the Sun. Momotombo was said to be shooting great shafts of fire into the sky, and an accompanying earthquake had supposedly sent a government dock plunging into Lake Managua. On May 20, Pelée exploded a second time, leveling what little remained of St. Pierre, and on the island of St. Vincent, just to the south of Martinique, still another volcano erupted.

At the request of John Tyler Morgan, the Nicaraguan minister in Washington cabled Managua for verification of the Momotombo story. Morgan, meantime, had also obtained assurance from John Hay that the President would remain silent on the canal matter. “He greatly prefers, as did President McKinley,” Hay wrote assuringly, “that the question of the route be decided by Congress . . .” The Senate was to commence debate on June 4.

On June 3, the Nicaraguan minister reported back to Morgan with a copy of the reply from Managua, a cable signed by Jose Santos Zelaya, president of Nicaragua:

The NEWS PUBLISHED ABOUT RECENT ERUPTIONS OF VOLCANOES AND EARTHQUAKES IN NICARAGUA EN TIRELY FALSE.

“I may add also,” wrote the Nicaraguan minister in a covering letter to Morgan, “that Nicaragua has not had any volcanic eruption since 1835, and at that time Coseguina discharged smoke and ashes, but no lava. No one was killed or injured and no property was destroyed by that occurrence.” Momotombo was a hundred miles from the proposed canal line.

The minister’s name was Luis Corea. Whether he actually received such a cable from President Zelaya or was responsible for the copy he passed on to Morgan is impossible to determine. In any event, Momotombo had definitely erupted; the cable accredited to President Zelaya was quite false.

It was Old Morgan who made the first speech when the debate on the Hepburn Bill began in the Senate, Wednesday, June 4, 1902.

“Mr. President, I do not care to approach the discussion of this important measure in a cloud of volcanic smoke and ashes which the opponents of the measure outside of the Senate have brought as a funeral pall to place over its bier, and I think it proper that I should try to clear the atmosphere. . . .”

He read Luis Corea’s letter, then two others from the American minister at Managua, his old friend William Merry, who emphasized that there had been no seismic disturbances along the proposed canal line. But mainly the speech was an attack on Panama for its political violence, “its mixed and turbulent people,” for its seismic disturbances. He read a vivid eyewitness account from the Panama Star & Herald of the destruction caused by the earthquake of 1882. If seismic disturbances were the only way to defeat the Nicaragua canal, then he was sorry to report that the argument would carry Panama down with it.

For quite a while the Senate was subjected to a lesson in geopolitics, as Morgan explained the peculiar relationship of Panama to the rest of Colombia because of geography. Taking Bancroft’s History of Central America as his text, he explained the Bidlack Treaty and the touchy nature of American involvement in Panama. The one possible solution to Panama’s political demoralization, the immortal Bancroft had said, was a strong government “provided from abroad.” Did this mean then, the historian had asked rhetorically, that the United States–“as the power most interested in preserving the independence” of a Panama waterway–would take upon itself “the whole control for the benefit of all nations?” Only time would tell, Bancroft had written. Only time would tell, repeated the frail, white-haired Senator from Alabama. That, he said, looking about the chamber, was what concerned him above all. Should the United States decide on a canal at Panama, it would be merely a matter of time before the United States would be compelled to take Panama by force. And he wanted no part in that. It would “poison the minds of people against us in every Spanish-American republic in the Western Hemisphere, and set their teeth on edge against us . . . it would tarnish our national honor to enter Panama under the pledge that our purpose is to build a canal and follow it with the annexation of Panama.” He was Jeremiah now, and the part came easily. “And no actual necessity for annexation, however imperative it may be, would ever excuse or palliate that result, in the opinion of the Spanish-American people. If this is to be . . . as a necessity for the protection of the canal, it would be the most dangerous national pitfall into which we could plunge.”

The place for the canal, as always, was Nicaragua, “where all the people are anxiously awaiting the coming of the United States to their assistance, with eager hopes and warm welcome, to their fertile, healthy, and beautiful land.”

Morgan was not much of an orator. He paused often to frame his sentences and like all his speeches this one would read better than it sounded. He closed with an appeal for an act of kindness, as he said, for his beloved South. “. . . I would brighten that land with the bloom of prosperous industry, and bring back to my brethren the consciousness that they live and move in the current of human affairs. I hope to see the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea . . . as busy with commerce as the bay of San Francisco.”

He had spoken for some two and a half hours and he had made no mention of engineering considerations.

The following day, June 5, shortly before two in the afternoon, Marcus Alonzo Hanna limped down the aisle of the Senate to deliver the most important speech of his career. Behind him hurried a secretary carrying a stack of books, papers, and pamphlets.

The chamber was nearly full and all about were hung enormous maps and plans. One map of Central America and the Caribbean islands reached from the gallery railing to the floor. It showed the location of every principal volcano, active or extinct, the active ones being marked in red, the extinct in black, with the result that an almost solid band of red dots ran from the Mexican-Guatemalan border on the Pacific shore to about midway into Costa Rica. Eight of the red dots were in Nicaragua. In the Colombian province of Panama there were none. Also, as many observers were quick to note, Pelée, on Martinique, was indicated as extinct.

The maps and the plans were merely colossal enlargements of several from the report of the Walker Commission, copies of which had long since been made available to every member of the Senate and to the press. But Hanna, who had an instinct for promotion, knew the effect such a display would have. No graphic presentation of such scale had ever been seen before in the Senate.

“Ladies and diplomats, reporters, agents of the powers, all jammed the gallery’s aisles,” we are told. Telephones had been ringing across town all morning with the message that Hanna was to speak.

Largely misunderstood in his own day, largely forgotten by the time the last of his generation had passed from the scene, Marcus Alonzo Hanna was an original, the plain, plain-spoken, brilliant, eminently practical man who had made a business of politics and made himself the nearest thing there had ever been to a national political boss. Coal merchant, ironmonger, owner of ore boats and newspapers, he was burly, but seemingly bland, with a bald head and large brown eyes and a bad case of rheumatism. He had put his adored friend William Mc Kinley in the White House by amassing the biggest campaign fund on record and through keen political judgment, and when McKinley made Senator Sherman Secretary of State in 1897, Hanna was appointed to fill his place. He was still finishing out Sherman’s term and until now he had had comparatively little to say in the Senate. He thought political speeches “gas.”

But the talk now, increasingly, was of Hanna for President in 1904, which was a major reason for the stir over the speech he was about to make. For while he made light of any possible Presidential ambitions, the idea of big, able “Uncle Mark,” friend of business, friend of labor, host of sumptuous parties, holding forth in the White House in his own style appealed to many, and especially to Wall Street, where Roosevelt was thought “unsafe.” History, moreover, seemed to be on his side. Of the four Vice Presidents who had previously succeeded to the Presidency upon the death of a President not one had even been nominated by his party to run for the office in his own right.

“He has a mass of material,” Cromwell informed Bunau-Varilla the day before, “but he says he will use little of it and speak only in his own simple and direct way. . . .” Cromwell, who was sitting in the gallery as Hanna made his entrance, had been personally responsible for a volume of testimony, now in the hands of Hanna’s trailing secretary. Some eighty-three shipowners, shipmasters, officers, and pilots– those who would use the canal–had given their unanimous preference for the Panama route. The lawyer had prepared a businesslike questionnaire covering trade winds, weather conditions, canal curvature, towing, and nighttime navigation, and through his Wall Street connections he had seen that copies were sent to the ranking officers with the Cunard, White Star, American, and Red Star lines. Only two had said they would risk their ships through a Nicaragua canal at night. None thought the Nicaragua canal would offer a saving in time, because of its length, and without exception they agreed that the shorter the canal, the less time spent in the canal, the less risk to their ships, and so the better the canal.

Bunau-Varilla, no less busy than Cromwell, had contributed a number of clever diagrams of his own design, all based on the canal commission’s own statistics, each pointing up Panama’s essential engineering and navigational virtues. The diagrams were as simple as illustrations in a child’s primer, conveying their message at a glance and easy to remember. They were an inspiration, Hanna saw instantly. The inevitable problem with technical reports, with any arguments based on technical data, was that few would read them, and the only advantage that Panama could claim was its technical superiority. So it had been arranged that the pamphlets containing the diagrams be delivered to the Senate in quantity at the close of Hanna’s speech.

Hanna was even less an orator than John Tyler Morgan. He was also in poor health and would be forced to spread his remarks over two days, stopping suddenly, unexpectedly, on this first day after being on his feet little more than an hour. But he had a disarming manner of talking as though he had no intention of inflicting a speech on anybody. He made things sound easy and sensible. He had thought the subject through, as a business proposition. It was the voice of common sense speaking, of American enterprise, of the North, of power and “stubborn facts,” as he called them. “This plain old person in a dull gray suit,” wrote a biographer, “was doing something and a drama heaped itself in the warm chamber while he drawled along, explaining this investment without an eloquent phrase.”

We have passed the experimental stage, Hanna began. We have passed the sentimental stage, we want the best route, we want the best canal, we want a canal to serve the needs of the entire world, we will build not just for today or next year but for all time.

“It is the great, broad, liberal American policy for which we stand in the building of a world canal. I sympathize with all those who in other days, laboring for an isthmian canal, had but one star to guide them– Nicaragua–and who must now naturally feel like giving up an old friend to pass it by. But in this age of progress and development, Mr. President, the American people are looking to Congress to answer to them on this question without regard to sentiment. . . .”

De Lesseps had been no fool. At Panama there could be a sea-level canal, at Nicaragua there would be no chance for that, never ever. If Panama was unsettled politically, all Central America was unsettled. In any event, an American canal would be a great peacemaker.

It was then that his legs gave out. He was too tired to go on, he said suddenly, causing a commotion in the gallery, and at once he sat down. But the next day he was back again and took up as though nothing had happened.

Panama was the place to build the canal for the following reasons, Hanna began, as his secretary, who sat behind him, handed up a sheaf of papers. One: A Panama canal would be 134.57 miles shorter, terminal to terminal. Two: It would have considerably less curvature. Three: The time in transit, by steam, would be less than half that at Nicaragua–twelve hours against thirty-three. Four: Panama required fewer locks. Five: Panama had better harbors. Six: Panama was “a beaten track in civilization.” Seven: Panama had a railroad “perfect in every respect.” Eight: A Panama canal would cost less to run. Nine: “All engineering and practical questions involved in the construction of the Panama canal are satisfactorily settled and assured. . . .”

He wanted no one to underestimate the importance of reason nine. The engineers wanted a Panama canal and they were the ones to listen to. “Why, Mr. President, there are now done a great many things which fifty years ago were unheard of, never dreamed of, never thought possible, as a product of human intelligence and ingenuity in engineering. It has become almost a byword today that in the hands of a skillful engineer nothing is impossible.”

Morgan had called for a boon to his native southland; Hanna said neither sentiment, sectionalism, nor personalities ought ever enter into so momentous a decision. Morgan had cited the preference of past canal commissions for Nicaragua; Hanna urged his colleagues to think not of the past but of the future.

When Senator Mitchell, an ardent Nicaragua man, tried to break in as Hanna read Cromwell’s survey of shipmasters, demanding to know who the author of this questionable document might be, Hanna had replied, “I do not want to be interrupted, for I am very tired . . .”

He ended on a warning. If the United States were to build a Nicaragua canal, what then was to prevent some other power–by which he meant Germany–from finishing the French canal? Our competitors then, he said, would have all the advantages.

“Mais, il est formidable!” the Russian envoy was heard to remark.

It was the finest speech Hanna ever made. There were no ringing phrases, but apparently it did something very rare in the Senate; it changed some votes. One Senator told Hanna that he had been undecided until then. He would vote now, he said, for the “Hannama Canal.”

Even so, the Hanna forces felt the tide was running against them as the debate continued in the days after. A Nicaragua speech by Senator Harris received blazing newspaper acclaim. More serious was the spreading belief that the volcano scare in Nicaragua was something Hanna and his cohorts had manufactured. The Nicaraguan embassy stuck by its denial of any serious disturbances, and a cartoon in the Washington Star showed Hanna at an easel slapping out Nicaraguan volcanoes by the yard to the delight of two onlookers, Philippe Bunau-Varilla and the head of the Great Northern railroad, James J. Hill. (In Minneapolis, Hill had sounded off to reporters about asinine congressmen and the “nasty, crooked” Nicaragua canal; only if a volcano were belching beneath the seat of his pants would any congressman ever take heed, said James J. Hill.) Hanna was enraged by the cartoon and he, Cromwell, and Bunau-Varilla tried desperately to think of some response.

“It was absolutely necessary to reply with emphasis,” Bunau-Varilla recalled, “. . . but it could have no weight unless official. How could I obtain such a document? Nicaragua was far away. The authorities had shown their bad faith. It seemed impossible to procure anything what-ever. . . . Only six or seven days remained.”

And it was then that he remembered the postage stamp.

“Young nations [he had written in his pamphlet of the previous year] like to put on their coats of arms what best symbolizes their moral domain or characterizes their native soil. What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize their country on their coat of arms, on their postage stamps? Volcanoes!”

He knew the exact one, a pretty little one-centavo Nicaraguan stamp showing a railroad wharf in the foreground and, in the background, Momotombo “in magnificent eruption.” Rushing about to every stamp dealer in Washington he managed to purchase ninety altogether, one for each senator. He pasted the precious stamps on sheets of paper and below each typed out: “An official witness of the volcanic activity on the isthmus of Nicaragua.” The stamp arrived at the office of every member of the Senate with the morning mail on Monday, June 16, three days before the deciding vote. He had, declared Philippe Bunau-Varilla, fired the last shot of the battle.

But that was not so; not quite. The last shot, like the first, was fired by Old Morgan, who, the following day, rose from his seat still one more time, to enter into the debate the name of William Nelson Cromwell, unleashing, as he spoke, years of stored hatred for the lawyer’s “humiliating and repulsive” intrusion into the decisions and policies of the United States government.

No talk of volcanoes, not the cleverest propaganda, could disguise the insidious course of this hired agent, Morgan said. “I trace this man back . . . to the beginning of this whole business.” It was Cromwell who had fed Hanna every supposed fact that Hanna stood behind, Cromwell who had intruded the commercial interests of the nefarious French company into congressional legislation, the hearings, the deliberations of technical commissions. “He has not failed to appear anywhere in this whole affair . . .”It was all a matter of record and the record was as much as Morgan ever wished to know of such an individual. “I would not dare to follow him when he is not on the surface.”

Panama, declared the old Senator at length, was “death’s nursery”; those who wished “to touch that thing” might go ahead and do so.

On June 19, after fourteen days, the debate ended. The majority report–for the Nicaragua canal–had been spoken for by Morgan, Harris, Mitchell, Turner, Perkins, Stewart, and Pettus. Besides Hanna, those for the minority–for the Panama canal–included Kittredge, Cullom, Gallinger, Teller, Allison, and Spooner. There had been a full gallery most all the time; the press and the country had followed the story very closely. Hanna claimed to have forty-five votes, exactly half the Senate. Everybody knew it would be extremely close.

The test came the afternoon of the nineteenth. The vote was 42 to 34. Panama had won by eight votes. So had there been a difference of just five votes, the result would have been a Nicaragua canal.

III

They were all very busy congratulating one another–Hanna, Spooner, Cromwell, Bunau-Varilla. Telegrams went off, effusive letters of gratitude to supporters in Cincinnati and Chicago, editorials were clipped and saved. Bunau-Varilla called it a “conclusive vindication.” Hanna was told that his place in history was fixed forever. Cromwell was happily confiding to almost anyone who would listen that he had written most of Hanna’s speech.

As time went on, as the details of what happened emerged, Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla would both be amply credited (or scorned) for the parts they had played in the astonishing victory, which, as one able historian would write, ranks among the masterpieces of the lobbyist’s art. Hanna’s role would be weighted heavily by his colleagues in the Senate. Senator Orville Piatt would call Hanna’s speech the most effective he had ever heard in all his political career. Senator Frye said Hanna had converted him from a lifelong advocacy of Nicaragua.

Pelée and Momotombo would also figure prominently in all subsequent accounts of the “Battle of the Routes,” as well they should. Had there been no such eruptions that spring, it is quite unlikely that the Senate would have voted as it did.

How much the little postage stamp really mattered, whether it actually changed any votes, is impossible to say. Probably it did not, Bunau-Varilla’s assertions notwithstanding. His diagrammatic pamphlet probably had a more telling effect. Still, the stamp was an inspired bit of propaganda, perhaps even worth ten thousand senatorial words, and it would brighten after-dinner reminiscences in Washington and Paris for years to come.

But a careful study of the record and some reasonable conjecture suggest, in retrospect, that one other figure had been a great deal more influential than had met the eye, a man who deserves our recognition. That was George S. Morison.

If one traces back through the chain of events that led to the Senate vote, keeping count of who was influencing whom and when, and if it is remembered that Morison, unlike Hanna, Bunau-Varilla, or the garrulous Cromwell, made no effort to glorify his contributions, at the time or later, then Morison emerges a bit like the butler at the end of the mystery–as the ever-present, frequently unobtrusive, highly instrumental figure around whom the entire plot turned.

The significant thing about the outcome of the “Battle of the Routes” is that it was decided on technical grounds. It was the technical view, the considered judgment of the engineers, that triumphed in the Senate. The situation was the exact reverse, interestingly, of that at the Paris congress of 1879 and yet Panama was still the end result. The emotional power, the force of personality–Morgan’s–had been on the side for Nicaragua this time. At Paris it had been the engineers– Menocal, Eiffel, and others–who had urged a decision for Nicaragua.

The most articulate and forceful of the engineers and by far the most stubborn Panama proponent was Morison. It was Morison whom Bunau-Varilla singled out as the leader on the commission. It was Morison, in the summer of 1901, before McKinley’s death, who prevailed against the inclination to wind things up with a unanimous decision for Nicaragua because the French company refused to set a price. It was Morison who wrote the minority report in favor of Panama. It was Morison who did the most to convince others on the commission and Walker in particular that the Bohio dam could be built, and who then convinced Mark Hanna.

Indeed Morison seems to have had just about everybody’s ear at one time or other, except Morgan’s, of course, and most important of all he seems to have been the one who worked the conversion of Theodore Roosevelt. Someone did, it is certain. It could not have been Cromwell or Bunau-Varilla. Neither of them had entree to the White House as yet. It was not Hanna.

The most solid evidence we have is a letter Morison wrote to the President dated December 10, 1901. The letter sets forth in the clearest, strongest terms the technical reasons why the canal should be built at Panama and Morison’s own personal unwillingness to accept Nicaragua as the only choice. The date is important. For it means Roosevelt received the letter before–a month before–he called the commissioners in to see him one at a time, to hear each explain things in his own words.

Morison himself seems to have had little doubt of what he accomplished. Years later, his close friend and confidant, Dr. Leonard Waldo, of Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Morison family physician, wrote that Morison “practically alone” had changed official opinion regarding Panama and it is unlikely that the doctor had any other source for the claim than George S. Morison.

Nor is it without significance that Morison was exactly the sort of man Theodore Roosevelt admired, trusted, and listened to. His whole career had been built on intelligence and daring. He was at the very top of his profession because of what he had done and he had done it in spite of his background. He was a preacher’s son, a classics major at Harvard, who had made himself an engineer on his own, through self-study, self-development, sheer will power. Bright but not distinctive as an undergraduate, he had gone to Harvard Law School and finished in the same class as Justice Holmes. But the law bored him–as it had Ferdinand de Lesseps, as it had Roosevelt–so he had decided to be an engineer, “that I may lead a good and useful life.”

Unlike Roosevelt, Morison was a lifelong bachelor and a prude. The sole failing he ever admitted to was an inability to handle horses. “There is a kind of man,” he once said, “that likes animals and handles them well, particularly horses, and such men are usually the type who are popular with others, and are known as ‘good fellows,’ but–but such men are usually fellows with lax morals.” Morison was never known as a good fellow. He was arrogant, inflexible, most unpopular, a man who was easy to admire from a distance.

Probably it was his total candor, the unshakable air of authority, that appealed most to Roosevelt. The Harvard background, a mutual interest in the West, in books, also gave them common ground. But in the last analysis Morison was brilliant, he did know what he was about, and he knew how to make other intelligent men feel that in their bones. “I hate to eat my lunch with Morison, he always quarrels with the waiter,” one noted engineer once remarked, “but I’d trust his judgment sooner than that of any other engineer I know.”

Originally he had been for Nicaragua, Roosevelt was to say, until the engineers convinced him otherwise. How often he was exposed to Morison is not known, but it is easy to picture them being quite direct with each other. Had Morison lived, it is probable that Roosevelt would have asked him to take a major part in the building of the canal. Very possibly he would have been made chief engineer, but he died in 1903, during his first illness since childhood, at age sixty.

The important fact is that Theodore Roosevelt had been convinced that Panama was the superior choice from the strictly objective technical standpoint. And to have a fair understanding of Roosevelt’s subsequent moves this must be kept in mind. “I took the Isthmus” was to be his arrogant, unfortunate claim, but in a very real and crucial sense, quietly, rationally, without fanfare, well before the Panama revolution, he “took the Isthmus” because the sort of men who would have to build the canal assured him that Panama was the place to put it. A momentous policy decision was determined by technical advisers here at the start of the new century.

And Panama was the superior choice, as George Morison said, and for the reasons he, Hanna, and the others cited. Given the sort of canal that was needed, considering the size of the ships of the day, taking into account all the advantages offered by the two routes, Panama was the place. The choice was never so clear-cut as Bunau-Varilla made it out to be, and while a Nicaragua canal would have taken longer to build and would have cost more, it would not have been a failure. Furthermore, if such nonengineering concerns as health and Central American politics are entered into the discussion, as Morgan had always insisted they must be, then the issue becomes as debatable in hindsight as it was then. On June 26, the House passed the Spooner Bill by an overwhelming vote of 259 to 8, the Nicaragua forces in the House having received word from Senator Morgan that the game was not up quite yet, since failure to obtain a clear title to the French properties was certain and this would force the Administration to revert to Nicaragua. “Make way for the canal!” cried one congressman. “Make way for the canal!”

The President signed the Spooner Act two days later, June 28, 1902, and so it became the law.

* The largest ships being built for the Navy then were of the Virginia class, which had a beam of 76 feet. The largest commercial ship then on the ways was the Kaiser Wilhelm II, with an overall length of 706 feet and a 72-foot beam. As Burr pointed out, the Suez Canal was already insufficient for such ships.

12
Adventure by Trigonometry

The plan seems to me good.

–MANUEL AMADOR

I

Although negotiations for the canal treaty with the Republic of Colombia had begun well before passage of the Spooner Act, it was not until January of the following year that the agreement was at last signed, and for those most directly involved, the negotiations had been the most difficult, tortuous experience of their professional lives. Dr. Carlos Martínez Silva, the first of three successive Colombian diplomats, had been retired in a state of complete exhaustion and would die a year or so after returning home, a victim apparently of the strain in Washington. His replacement, Dr. Jose Vicente Concha, suffered a physical and emotional collapse upon resigning his post and reportedly was put on a ship in New York in a straitjacket. Even the indomitable William Nelson Cromwell succumbed to a siege of “nervous exhaustion” at one point in October. For John Hay it was the most thankless and exasperating episode in a long career.

To begin with, the routine at the State Department had been greatly altered by what Hay’s biographer would describe as “a new impelling force”–the man next door in the White House. The overriding aggravation, however, had been the Colombians, about whom, by 1903, even the temperate and very proper Hay could speak of as disparagingly nearly as did Roosevelt. Accustomed to treating with such adroit, worldly professionals as Julian Pauncefote–men much like himself– Hay had been forced to deal with a succession of edgy, inexperienced Latin Americans who were obliged to consult with Bogotá at every move. Communications with the Colombian capital were dreadful. An official exchange of letters between the minister in Washington and his government could consume three to four months, and Bogotá’s shifting, frequently cryptic positions were an endless source of frustration for the Colombian ministers no less than for anyone else.

Martinez Silva had made his first call on Hay in March of 1901. His instructions from Bogotá were to do all in his power to make possible the adoption of the Panama route by the United States, and with coaching from Cromwell he had been extremely conscientious, working with Hay, checking regularly with Admiral Walker, releasing statements to the American press that his government was ready at any time to deal liberally with the State Department. But then his superiors in Bogotá decided that he had allowed himself to become too closely associated with the French canal company–that is, attorney Cromwell–and so he had been replaced by the nervous, painfully proud Jose Vicente Concha, a former Colombian Minister of War, no diplomat either by training or temperament, who had never been outside his own country before, and who spoke no English.

The primary issue, as stated both by Martinez Silva and Concha, was Colombian sovereignty over the proposed canal zone, and in the fall of 1902, just at the critical point in Hay’s conversations with Concha, Colombia’s seemingly interminable civil war had flared up anew on the Isthmus. To secure the Panama Railroad, Roosevelt sent American Marines ashore without first receiving the expressed consent of Colombian authorities–neither those on the Isthmus nor those in Washington–as had always been done before whenever American forces had been landed. The Marines were withdrawn eventually but the damage done to progress on the treaty seemed irreparable. Of particular aggravation to the Colombians was the decision of an American admiral to prevent any movement of Colombian troops on the Panama Railroad at one crucial stage. To Dr. Concha such use of American force had been not merely a violation of the 1846 treaty, but an inexcusable humiliation and the perfect expression of the underlying imperialistic ambitions of the United States. His hostility to Hay personally became such that he refused to see him for weeks. The fact that Hay cabled Bogotá his regret at the misunderstanding that had arisen, declaring there had been “no intention to infringe sovereignty or wound the dignity of Colombia,” did not improve matters.

Meantime, Senator Morgan and other pro-Nicaragua figures on Capitol Hill, along with several influential newspapers, were saying that the “reasonable time” allowed by the Spooner Act for treaty negotiations was fast expiring.

The strain on Concha was severe. He grew ever more suspicious, ever more obstinate about the sovereignty issue. He also stood fast on Colombia’s right to make its own bargain with the Compagnie Nouvelle before releasing the company from the provision in the Wyse Concession that explicitly prohibited the sale of the franchise to any foreign power. It was Concha’s position, as it had been Martinez Silva’s before him, that if the French company was to receive $40,000,000 for its Panama properties and the rights granted by the Colombian government, then in all justice Colombia ought to receive an appreciable part of that sum in return for its willingness to permit the sale. It was a question of tremendous financial importance to Colombia.

Describing the Americans he dealt with for his home office, Concha wrote, “The desire to make themselves appear, as a Nation, most respectful of the rights of others forces these gentlemen to toy a little with their prey before devouring it, although when all is said and done, they will do so in one way or other.” For their part, Hay and Cromwell were undecided as to whether Concha was wholly sane, and from the American minister in Bogotá came a report that Concha was known there to be “subject to great nervous excitement.”

Infuriated by what he took to be insults to the honor of his home-land, Concha resigned several times in succession, only to be instructed to stay with his responsibilities. He was certain that his messages to Bogotá were being intercepted and requested his home office to change codes. In November he was at last ordered by Bogotá to sign the treaty, whatever his feelings about it (the final decision would rest with the Colombian Congress, he was reminded), but this his “conscience” would not permit him to do and so he quit. His distaste for dealing with Hay, he wrote, amounted to a “neurosis.”

His replacement was a sixty-year-old career diplomat, the Colombian chargé d’affaires, Dr. Tomás Herrán, a naturally tactful, intelligent, and rather sad-looking man, who was the son of General Pedro Alcántara Herrán, who in 1848 had campaigned so effectively in Washington for ratification of the Bidlack Treaty. It had been then, traveling with his father as a small boy, that Herrán had first come to the United States. He was a graduate of Georgetown University, the master of four languages; his English was perfect; he had innumerable friends in Washington. By Hay’s standards he was a vast improvement and so it had been presumed at the State Department that the final details of the treaty would now be dispensed with smoothly and swiftly. But Herrán proved extremely cautious and burdened with apprehension. In private, in his correspondence with Bogotá, he expressed his fear that Roosevelt’s “impetuous and violent disposition” might lead him to seize Panama by eminent domain, on the ground of universal public utility. It was only when Hay issued a sharp ultimatum–by command of the President, as Hay stated–that the impasse was broken. If Colombia refused any longer to agree to the treaty as it stood, then Hay would commence negotiations for a Nicaragua canal.

The ultimatum was issued on January 21. The Hay-Herrán Treaty was signed at Hay’s home the afternoon of the following day. “I feel,” Herrán wrote to a friend, “as if I am waking from a horrible nightmare. Gladly shall I gather up all the documents relating to that dreadful canal and put them out of sight.” Among those documents, one he quietly buried in the legation archives, was a cable from Bogotá, received three days after he had signed the treaty, directing him not to sign but to await further instructions.

The reaction in Washington was immensely favorable. To nearly everyone it seemed a solid, straightforward treaty, and in spite of the fiery, often brilliant, unyielding opposition of John Tyler Morgan, who proposed no less than sixty amendments, it was ratified by the Senate on March 17, without amendment and by an overwhelming margin (73 to 5).

By the treaty the Compagnie Nouvelle was authorized to sell its “rights, privileges, properties, and concessions” to the United States, and Colombia granted the United States control of a canal zone six miles wide from Colón to Panama City, but not including either of those cities. The franchise was for a hundred years and was renewable at the option of the United States. In return the United States was to pay the Republic of Colombia the lump sum of $10,000,000 cash (gold) plus an annual rent of $250,000. Though Colombian sovereignty over the canal zone was specifically recognized in Article IV, the United States was permitted to establish its own courts of law within the zone and to enforce its own regulations concerning the canal, ports, and the railroad. Police protection for the canal and the railroad was to be provided by Colombia, but if Colombia was unable at any time to meet this obligation, the United States could act with Colombia’s consent, or in an emergency, without that consent.

The response to the agreement in Bogotá was another matter, however, and the Colombian Congress had yet to grant its sanction. The Colombian government insisted still that it had the right to negotiate its own settlement with the Compagnie Nouvelle. The annual payment of $250,000 was regarded as too little, since it was no more than what was being received yearly from the Panama Railroad as things already stood. Being vastly larger, more important, more valuable, the canal ought to pay more than the little railroad, it was felt, and the payments for the canal, as the treaty presently read, were not to start until nine years after ratification. Ten million dollars was not enough for the cession of any territory in Panama, wrote a noted Colombian intellectual and political activist, Raul Perez, in the pages of the North American Review. “Panama is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of Colombia, and has always been her cherished hope.”

Nor did the expressed guarantee of Colombian sovereignty within the canal zone appear quite so conclusive in Bogotá as it did in Washington.

Repeated warnings of Colombian anger over the treaty were cabled to the State Department by the American minister at Bogotá, Arthur Beaupré. “Without question public opinion is strongly against its ratification,” Beaupré wrote as early as March 30. What began as suspicion had quickly become outspoken hostility, he reported two weeks later. The Colombians, he reported next on May 4, believed the guarantee of sovereignty meant nothing, that “the lease is perpetual . . . the whole document is favorable to the United States and detrimental to Colombia.”

Beaupré was to be the target of much criticism later. He would be blamed for his roughshod, amateurish handling of the situation, his disregard of Latin sensitivities. But the charges are at odds with the facts of his career (he had had six years’ experience in Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia), his reputed “urbane, dignified manners and courtly demeanor,” and the perception apparent in his striking dispatches. That he was frequently blunt, even dictatorial, in his pronouncements to Colombian officials is also a matter of record, but in view of his orders from Washington he was left with little choice.

As of April 28, for example, Beaupré was instructed to inform the Colombian government that the United States would consider any modification whatever of the terms of the treaty as practically a “breach of faith” on the part of the Colombian government. By June, as the Colombian Congress was about to convene in special session, John Hay had abandoned any pretense of regard for the wishes or feelings of the Colombian people. The message of June 9 to Beaupré was strikingly ominous. “If Colombia should now reject the treaty or unduly delay its ratification, the friendly understanding between the Two countries would be so seriously compromised that action might be taken by the Congress next winter which every friend of Colombia would regret.” Beaupré was ordered to communicate the substance of this verbally to the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was, as one noted diplomatic historian would observe, “an aggressiveness rarely found in friendly diplomatic intercourse.” The contrast in tone to that of the correspondence relating to the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, for example, could not have been much more pointed.

The nature of the threatened “action” was never specified officially, but just four days later, William Nelson Cromwell emerged from the White House after a “long conference” with the President and immediately dispatched his press agent, Roger Farnham, to the Washing ton bureau of the New York World. The following morning, June 14, the World carried this remarkable item:

Washington, June 13, 1903

President Roosevelt is determined to have the Panama canal route. He has no intention of beginning negotiations for the Nicaragua route.

The view of the President is known to be that as the United States has spent millions of dollars in ascertaining which route is most feasible, as three different Ministers from Colombia have declared their Government willing to grant every concession for the construction of a canal, and as two treaties have been signed granting rights of way across the Isthmus of Panama, it would be unfair to the United States if the best route be not obtained.

Advices received here daily indicate great opposition to the canal treaty at Bogotá. Its defeat seems probable for two reasons:

1. The greed of the Colombian Government, which insists on a largely increased payment for the property and concession.

2. The fact that certain factions have worked themselves into a frenzy over the alleged relinquishment of sovereignty to lands necessary for building the canal.

Information also has reached this city that the State of Panama, which embraces all the proposed Canal Zone, stands ready to secede from Colombia and enter into a canal treaty with the United States.

The State of Panama will secede if the Colombian Congress fails to ratify the canal treaty. A republican form of government will be organized. This plan is said to be easy of execution, as not more than 100 Colombian soldiers are stationed in the State of Panama.

The citizens of Panama propose, after seceding, to make a treaty with the United States, giving this Government the equivalent of absolute sovereignty over the Canal Zone. The city of Panama alone will be excepted from this zone, and the United States will be given police and sanitary control there. The jurisdiction of this Government over the zone will be regarded as supreme. There will be no increase in price or yearly rental.

In return the President of the United States would promptly recognize the new Government, when established, and would at once appoint a minister to negotiate and sign a canal treaty. This can be done expeditiously, as all the data is already supplied.

President Roosevelt is said to strongly favor this plan, if the treaty is rejected. . ..

It is known that the Cabinet favors the President’s idea of recognizing the Republic of Panama, if necessary to secure the canal territory. The President has been in consultation both personally and by wire with leading Senators, and has received unanimous encouragement. . ..

It is intended to wait a reasonable time for action by the Colombian Congress, which convenes 20 June, and then, if nothing else is done, to make the above plan operative.

The article was unsigned. The White House issued no denials.

A large part of the problem in Washington was a pervading ignorance of, indeed a chronic disinterest in, Colombia in general, Colombian politics, or the individuals with whom Beaupré was dealing. Bogotá itself was still as removed from the rest of the world as it had been when Lieutenant Wyse made his trek over the mountains in 1878. It was one of the most isolated, inaccessible cities in the world. In all Colombia in 1903, in a country as large as the combined areas of California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, there were less than four hundred miles of railroad. To reach Bogotá from either Buenaventura or Barranquilla still required anywhere from Two weeks to a month of arduous travel. By North American standards Colombia was pathetically poor and backward and its government was both unstable and financially destitute as a result of a disastrous three-year civil war that had only ended in November 1902.

The present head of state was a Conservative, a direct descendant, politically speaking, of Rafael Nunez, whose triumphs following the uprisings of 1885 had centralized political power in Bogotá under a new constitution. He was Jose Manuel Marroquín, an elderly, bearded scholar and man of letters whose shyness had kept him in the background most of his career. In 1897 he had been elected first designado, or vice-president, on a ticket with an eighty-five-year-old presidential candidate named Manuel Sanclemente, also a scholar, who was in extremely feeble health. In 1900 Marroquín had taken power by coup d’etat.

At the State Department and at the White House, Marroquín was understood to be an iron-handed despot. His power was thought to be absolute and thus the whole process of treaty ratification by a specially convened Colombian Congress was regarded in Washington as a charade. Marroquín supposedly had only to say the word and the treaty would be accepted. At both the State Department and the White House the consensus was that Marroquín and a few cohorts would one day retire to some private place and divide up the $10,000,000 payment from the United States.

But in fact Marroquín’s power was limited, his personal prestige was in the decline, and in his every move concerning the canal issue he was subject to savage attacks from his political opponents, the Liberals, who accused him of selling out to the North Americans. Personally he was a rather abstract and inefficient idealist and, generally speaking, those about him were politically high-minded men of character, whatever their limitations, and exceedingly sensitive about their national honor–none of which, again, was ever quite understood in Washington.

Colombian regard for the political ideals of the United States was enormous. The country’s federal and state system had been modeled after that of the United States. Bolivar, the Liberator, was known as the “George Washington of South America.” Wealthy and educated Colombians sent their sons to be educated in the United States. By no means did the leading political figures fit the portrayal Theodore Roosevelt was to provide. An American minister to Colombia, James T. Du Bois, was to write some years later in this connection, “An impartial investigation at Bogotá . . . convinced me that, instead of ‘blackmailers’and ‘bandits,’ the public men of Colombia compare well with the public men of other countries in intelligence and respectability. . . .” Until 1903, Du Bois said, Colombia was the best friend the United States had south of the Rio Grande.

Another large and important part of the problem in Washington was William Nelson Cromwell, since Roosevelt’s and Hay’s appraisal of the situation in Bogotá, the picture they had of Marroquín and his regime, the tactics devised, even the wording of instructions to Beaupré, were strongly influenced by Cromwell.* Especially was his influence felt at the State Department. He was consulted just about daily; he was relied upon for information (Cromwell had his own paid operative in Bogotá to keep him posted); his say, his expertise, were major factors at virtually every important juncture, as is plain in the record and as Cromwell himself would later boast.

It was a highly unorthodox arrangement, to say the least, to have the attorney for the corporation most directly in line to benefit from the treaty, a man with no official title, no rightful business to be involved in any official capacity, operating at will at the highest diplomatic level, instrumental to a degree exceeded only by the Secretary and the President, and with full impunity. But such was this exceptional man’s influence over Hay and such it had been since the negotiations began. When Hay had at last put his large, legible signature to the treaty in January, it was to Cromwell that he turned and presented the pen.

Most important, Cromwell had succeeded in persuading Hay–and thus Roosevelt–that the United States must not sanction or be party to any move by Colombia to deal independently with his client, the Compagnie Nouvelle. Roosevelt had earlier sent Attorney General Philander C. Knox to Paris to make a thorough examination of the French firm, which Knox reported to be “vested with good and sufficient title to the property it intended to convey.” On February 17, Knox had formally notified the company that its offer of sale was hereby accepted by the United States; that is, that the United States would pay the full asking price of $40,000,000 for the Panama holdings. So as the company’s attorney, Cromwell was determined that nothing should jeopardize this unprecedented transaction, this largest real-estate sale on record.

Specifically, he was determined that Colombia would be given no chance at any part of the $40,000,000.

Hay not only agreed to this in principle, but instructed Beaupré to make it known in Bogotá in the plainest terms. Thus the State Department was being used to secure the interests of the French company, its stockholders, and its American attorney, who, if the sale went through, stood to profit more personally than any other individual involved.

And it was when Beaupré reported back that ratification could probably be secured if the French company were to agree to pay Colombia $10,000,000 that Hay responded with his ominous telegram of June 9, a telegram drafted by Cromwell.

That the United States government had no rightful authority in a dispute between a foreign power and a private corporation was lost sight of. A settlement by Colombia and the Compagnie Nouvelle would have cost the United States nothing, and in retrospect it would appear that even a comparatively modest settlement–plus a little tact–could have resolved the whole issue quite swiftly. But to Hay, to Roosevelt, talk of a Colombian lien on the French company was patent extortion, a “holdup.” As men of honor they could never be “party to the gouge,” as Roosevelt expressed it.

Their personal regard for Latin-American politicians of any nationality had never been particularly high, it must be emphasized, but Cromwell had succeeded in convincing them that here they were dealing with the slipperiest, most corrupt variety of Latin American and that the sovereignty issue was the purest political hypocrisy. So the report from Beaupré that $10,000,000 from the French company would settle everything served only to substantiate all their worst suspicions of “those bandits in Bogotá,” as Roosevelt was to call them.

When in early August the State Department released the information that the Colombians were holding out on the treaty in the hope of getting more money, the press mistakenly reported that the increased payment was to come from the United States–a misstatement the State Department did not bother to contradict. The widespread impression, therefore, was that Colombia was trying to “hold up” the United States, which was not at all the case.

The generally arbitrary tone assumed by the State Department, the threatening cable of April 28, were all designed to call Colombia’s bluff, Cromwell would later explain. The story he planted in the World had also been contrived, he said, purely to frighten the Colombian Congress into ratifying the treaty.

Quite possibly that is so. But it is also possible that his underlying intention right along, perhaps even the underlying hope at the White House, was for the treaty to fail at Bogotá. In other words, if the language used by Beaupré or a story leaked by Cromwell following an ostentatious exit from the White House infuriated the Colombians, it was because they were meant to, because a crisis situation was wanted.

A great deal would be written and said to refute accusations that the White House or the State Department was ever in any way party to the kind of scheme Cromwell had prophesied for the World in such amazing detail. And in fact the full story of what was transpiring behind the scenes will probably never be known. Cromwell, for example, for all that he would have to say for public consumption, appears to have purposefully created one of the larger gaps in the historical record. For in the otherwise complete file of his business dealings, still in the possession of the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, there is not a paper relating to his Panama operations; all correspondence, cables, documents, expense vouchers, and the like are mysteriously missing.

On August 14, having finished a lunch with the President at Saga-more Hill, the President’s home at Oyster Bay, Long Island, Senator Shelby Cullom, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, held a press conference with reporters from the New York papers. The President, he said, was fully prepared for bad news from Bogotá and the President still wanted a Panama canal. “What will be done is a matter of discussion and consideration after the Colombian Congress has finally acted.” When a reporter asked how the canal could be built without the treaty, Cullom replied in a matter-of-fact way that “we might make another treaty, not with Colombia, but with Panama.”

Was the United States prepared to foster a Panama revolution? he was asked.

“No, I suppose not. But this country wants to build that canal and build it now.”

The interview appeared the morning of August 15, the same day the long-awaited cable from Beaupré reached the State Department. Three days before, on August 12, the Colombian Senate had rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty by a unanimous vote.

The President was notified immediately, as was the Secretary of State, who was also away from Washington at his summer place on Lake Sunapee in Newbury, New Hampshire. All matters of consequence at the State Department were being attended to by Acting Secretary Francis B. Loomis and Second Assistant Secretary Alvey A. Adee, both conversant with the Colombian situation. Adee, a man of vast experience with the department, a friend and colleague of John Hay’s for thirty years, had installed a cot in his office and was on duty virtually around the clock.

Roosevelt’s mounting frustration with the entire situation had become a source of some concern to Hay. “Those contemptible little creatures in Bogotá ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future,” Roosevelt had written earlier in the summer. Hay’s instinctive response, then as now, was to urge restraint, patience. “I would come at once to Oyster Bay to get your orders,” he now wrote, “but I am sure there is nothing to be done, for the moment.” He advised consultation with Hanna and Spooner. Then, pointedly, he referred to Nicaragua as the “simple and easy” course, adding, “If you finally conclude to close with Nicaragua, it will be quick work to get a treaty ready. But I presume you may think best to do nothing definite until our Congress meets . . .”

It was Hay at his best and a very different letter than he would have written had Cromwell been with him in New Hampshire. It crossed in the mail with another angry missive from Roosevelt saying, “We may have to give a lesson to those jack rabbits.”

These must have been exciting days for anyone sorting the mail in the little New Hampshire community. On August 18, Alvey Adee cautioned the Secretary by letter against any thought of American involvement in a Panama revolution. “Such a scheme could, of course, have no countenance from us–our policy before the world should stand, like Mrs. Caesar, without suspicion.” A day later Adee wrote again to suggest to Hay that maybe, after all, Nicaragua was the best way out. “. . . We are very sorry, but really we can’t help it if Colombia doesn’t want the Canal on our terms.”

But writing to Hay that same day, Roosevelt left no doubt as to his position concerning Panama. “. . . It seems that the great bulk of the best engineers are agreed that that route is the best; and I do not think that the Bogotá lot of jack rabbits should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization . . . what we do now will be of consequence, not merely decades, but centuries hence, and we must be sure that we are taking the right step before we act.”

Roosevelt’s particular interest at the moment was a memorandum that had been sent on to him by Acting Secretary Loomis, a lengthy document prepared by a specialist in international law and diplomacy at Columbia University, Professor John Bassett Moore, which Roosevelt now forwarded to Hay. Professor Moore’s thesis, in essence, was that by the tenets of the old Bidlack Treaty the United States already had sufficient legal grounds to proceed with the canal. The “right of way” at Panama was already “free and open” to the United States, as stated in the treaty of 1846. Hay went to Sagamore Hill on August 28, and there, while numerous Roosevelt children in light summer clothes scampered over a great green sweep of lawn, the two men conferred at length. Afterward, a correspondent for the Herald sent a long dispatch to his office. The President and the Secretary had settled on three possible courses of action in view of the failure of the canal treaty. The first was to proceed to construct the canal under the treaty of 1846, and “fight Colombia if she objects.” (This, it was felt, would be a short and inexpensive war.) The second was for the President to move in accor-dance with the Spooner Act and turn to the Nicaragua route. The third course was to delay the great work “until something transpires to make Colombia see the light,” then negotiate another treaty.

It will, doubtless, be a surprise to the public that a course which is sure to involve the country with war with a South American Republic is one of the methods of procedure being soberly contemplated by the United States. . ..

Persons interested in getting the $40,000,000 for the Panama Canal Company are of course eager that this government shall go ahead and seize the property, even though it leads to war.

II

When Dr. Manuel Amador first landed in New York he had still to meet William Nelson Cromwell. Dr. Amador, whose full name was Manuel Amador Guerrero, was a leading physician and a popular figure in the social life of Panama City. His wife was the brilliant Maria de la Ossa and he himself was known as a man of “unblemished character,” large property interests, and much political acumen. Born in Turbaco (near Cartagena), Colombia in 1833–which made him just seventy in 1903–he was a graduate of the University of Cartagena who had come to Panama at the time of the gold rush. His political career as a Conservative had flourished along with his medical practice until 1867, when he was designated president of the Department of Panama, but did not take office because of a revolution. Defeated, captured by the opposition, he was sent into exile, not to return again for a year, at which point he went back to medicine at the Santo Tomas Hospital, where he became superintendent. It was as chief physician of the Panama Railroad, however, that Dr. Amador had attained most of his influence and prestige, as well as his interest in the canal. He had been among those prominent Panamanians to appear at the various occasions arranged to honor Ferdinand de Lesseps. When Lieutenant Wyse made his second journey to Bogotá in 1890 to secure an extension of the Wyse Concession for the court-appointed liquidator, the doctor was the head of a delegation of Panamanians who joined Wyse there to lobby in his behalf.

He was a neat, frail-looking man of medium height with thin white hair, a shaggy white walrus mustache, large ears, and heavy black brows, and he wore small steel-rimmed glasses. In his photographs at least, he seems to have had a habit of looking at people with his head cocked slightly sideways. He was also a man of nerve and ambition and he had come to New York to help arrange a revolutionary takeover at Panama.

The first known organized meeting of the movement had been held at a country estate outside Panama City on a Sunday late in July, probably July 25, 1903, a meeting at which Dr. Amador had not been present. Those who were there included his old friend Senator Jose Agustin Arango, Carlos Constantino Arosemena, and an American named Herbert G. Prescott, all of whom, like the doctor, were employees of the Panama Railroad and had been in regular communication with William Nelson Cromwell. Arango, a senator from the Department of Panama, was the railroad’s attorney on the Isthmus, its land agent and chief lobbyist; Arosemena was a staff civil engineer; Prescott was the assistant superintendent. Also present were the United States consul general at Panama City, Hezekiah A. Gudger, and two officers from the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the only American Army officers on the Isthmus, who had been sent by the Walker Commission, Major William Black and Lieutenant Mark Brooke. The complete guest list is said to have numbered twenty-five or twenty-six people and the hosts were Ramon and Pedro Arias. Hezekiah Gudger, who was the main speaker, would be unable to recall later exactly what the meeting established, other than that “plans for the revolution were freely discussed.”

All evidence is that Senator Arango (El Maestro), a most distinguished-looking gentleman with a white Vandyke beard, was the inspirational force; that in May he had begun talking revolution with his sons, sons-in-law, and the “intelligent and devoted” Arosemena, men in their late twenties or early thirties, all of whom had been educated in the United States. It was also El Maestro, whose office was side by side with Amador’s, who personally recruited Amador early in August.

At that point the group was anxiously awaiting the return from New York of another railroad employee, James Beers, freight agent and port captain, who had left on a secret mission to see Cromwell. Whether he went on Cromwell’s orders, whether he was actually summoned to New York, as later charged, cannot be proved. But at least six men were to testify that Cromwell sent for Beers, and it is unlikely that Beers or any other railroad employee would leave his job to stir up a revolution unless sent for by a superior, and as the railroad company’s New York attorney, Cromwell ran the railroad. Beers, “a shrewd and calculating” former sea captain, had Cromwell’s confidence, in any event, and he returned to Panama with the word that Cromwell was ready to “go the limit” for them. (Cromwell, in Arango’s subsequent account, Data for the History of the Independence, would be referred to never by name, only as “the responsible person.”)

Arango, Amador, and Arosemena became the nucleus of the conspiracy, to be joined shortly by Federico Boyd, son of the founding editor of the Star & Herald. Amador insisted that Arango should become the first president of the projected new republic of Panama. Arango, out of courtesy, said it should be Amador, and Amador agreed.

Amador, it was further decided, should also be the one to go to New York to see “the responsible person” in order to line up the necessary arms and money, and to secure some kind of assurance from the American Secretary of State that a revolution would be given military support by the United States. Amador, it was thought, would arouse the least suspicion since he had a son in the United States, a doctor with the United States Army, who was then stationed in Massachusetts. As instructed, the son sent a cable to his father saying, “I am sick; come.” So on August 26 Amador sailed for New York, taking with him a cable code that he and the others had devised to cover every possible contingency.

The code had thirty numbered expressions for Amador to use in cables to Panama–he need only cable the appropriate number or combination of numbers–and sixteen numbered expressions for those at home to use in reply. Amador’s list is especially interesting in that it shows how very uncertain things were at this stage. It shows, for example, that the conspirators had not excluded the possibility that Cromwell might be a liar.

Amador’s code went as follows:

1. Have not been satisfied with Hay in my first conference.

2. Have had my first conference with Hay, and I found him determined to support the movement effectively.

3. Have not been able to talk to Hay personally, only through a third person; I believe that everything will turn out in line with our desires.

4. Hay is determined to aid us in every way, and has asked me for exact details of what we need to ensure success.

5. My agent is going with me, fully authorized to settle everything there.

6. Cromwell has behaved very well, and has facilitated my interviews with important men who are disposed to cooperate.

7. you can hurry up matters, as everything here goes well.

8. I am satisfied with the result and can assure success.

9. Minister Herrán has suspected something and is watching.

10. Have not been able to obtain assurances of support in the form in which I demanded it.

11. Delay of Cromwell in introducing me to Hay makes me suspect that all he has said has been imagination and that he knows nothing.

12. It appears that Hay will not decide anything definitely until he has received advices from the commissioner who is there [in Panama].

13. I understand that Hay does not wish to pledge himself to anything until he sees the result of the operation there.

14. The people from whom I expected support have attached little importance to my mission.

15. Those who have decided can do nothing practical for lack of necessary means.

16. I have convinced myself that Hay is in favor of the rival route, and for that reason will do nothing in support of our plan.

17. News that has arrived from there on facilitating the construction of the canal has caused opinion here to shift in regard to our plan.

18. The pretensions manifested in the new draft of an agreement [treaty] render all negotiations between the two Governments impossible, and for this reason I have again resumed conferences.

19. The new commissioner is expected here to negotiate. On this depends my future movements.

20. I consider that I can do nothing practical here now, and for this reason I have decided to take passage for home.

21. Await my letter, which I write today.

22. Here it is thought best to adopt a different plan in order to obtain a favorable result for the construction of the work.

23. Cromwell is determined to go the limit, but the means at his disposal are not sufficient to ensure success.

24. Hay, Cromwell, and myself are studying a general plan of procedure.

25. The commissioner there is an agent of Cromwell’s, of which fact Hay is ignorant.

26. I wish to know if anything has been advanced there and can I fix date here to proceed.

27. Delay in getting satisfactory reply obliges me to maintain silence.

28. B. [Beaupré apparently] communicates here that the contract can be satisfactorily arranged.

29. I have considered it prudent to leave the capital [Washington] and continue negotiations from here [New York] by correspondence.

30. I await letters from there in reply to mine, in order to bring matters to a close.

Of additional interest is the fact that Amador departed from Colón with insufficient cash to meet even the most modest travel expenses. It was only as a result of several good days at the poker table during the voyage that he was able to make ends meet.

There was trouble almost immediately. Among Amador’s fellow passengers–indeed, the one he had won the most from at the poker table–was a man of “large interests” in Panama, J. Gabriel Duque, a Cuban by birth and a naturalized American who owned the Star & Herald, an ice plant, a construction company, and the extremely lucrative Panama lottery. Though not part of the Arango-Amador inner circle, Duque was aware of all that was going on and appeared entirely sympathetic. On reaching New York he went directly to Wall Street to see Cromwell, while Amador trailed off uptown to find an inexpensive hotel.

It is unclear exactly what Duque was up to, but Cromwell said that if Duque provided $100,000 to finance the revolution, then he, Cromwell, would see that Duque was made the first president of the new republic. He told Duque, furthermore, that the Secretary of State was eager to see him, and with Duque sitting before him, he picked up the phone, put through a call to Hay at the State Department, and set up the appointment. It was further suggested that Duque go to Washington by overnight train to avoid registering in a Washington hotel, a suggestion that Duque followed the next evening.

He arrived in Washington at seven in the morning, September 3, and after a breakfast at Harvey’s Restaurant, he went to the State Department. At ten o’clock Hay appeared. The conference lasted for the next two and a half hours. Hay is said to have given Duque no promise of direct American assistance in the conspiracy. But in the same breath he emphasized that the United States was determined to build a Panama canal and did not propose to let Colombia stand in the way. Then, allegedly, he went still further. Should revolutionists take possession of Colón and Panama City, he said, they could depend on the United States to stop Colombia from landing troops to put down the revolution. This, Hay said, would be done to guarantee “free and uninterrupted transit” on the railroad, which the United States was treaty bound to maintain.

Duque understood perfectly. And no sooner had he descended the front steps of the State Department than he was on his way to the Colombian legation to see Tomas Herrán and tell him everything. Perhaps this had been his intention all along out of spite over some real or imagined insult on the part of the inner circle. Perhaps it was a sudden impulse resulting from something Hay had said, or the way he said it. Or possibly he thought such a warning, when relayed to Bogotá, would jolt the Colombian regime into apprising the seriousness of the situation. Whatever the explanation, Cromwell had been double-crossed.

Herrán immediately sounded the alarm. He cabled Bogotá that revolutionary agents were in Washington seeing Hay, and that if the treaty was not ratified, Panama in all probability would secede, and with American support. He notified the Colombian consul general in New York of the Panama Railroad Company’s involvement in the plot and of Amador’s activities. The plot, he wrote, had been “well received” in Washington. He put detectives on Amador’s track, then wrote to Cromwell and to the Paris office of the Compagnie Nouvelle to warn that they would be held directly responsible for any secessionist movement on the Isthmus. Implicit in the warning was the threat of full abrogation of all rights and privileges possessed by the Compagnie Nouvelle–all that it was about to sell for $40,000,000–if the company or its agents were party to an act of sedition.

For Amador, meanwhile, the mission to New York had suddenly become a bewildering dead end.

Unaware of what Duque had done, oblivious of the fact that he was being trailed by detectives, he saw only that Cromwell, the model of hospitality and enthusiasm on first meeting, had turned unexplainably rude and unreceptive. Amador appears to have made his first call on Cromwell on September 2, or the day after Cromwell saw Duque. Cromwell made “a thousand offers in the direction of assisting the revolution,” even promised Amador that he would finance the undertaking. “I was to go to Washington to see Mr. Hay,” Amador would recall. But by the time Amador returned for a second conference with the lawyer, Duque had been to see Herrán. Herrán had fired off his warning letters to New York and Paris, and Cromwell, determined to protect himself and safeguard the interests of his client, had decided to have no further ostensible dealings with conspirators from Panama.

Amador was told that Mr. Cromwell was out. When Amador declined to leave, insisting that he be received by the attorney, Cromwell at last burst out of his office and ordered Amador to go at once and not come back. In the end the elderly physician was shoved into the hall and the door was slammed behind him. No explanation had been given and there appeared to be nowhere else to turn. Furious, worried that his money was running out, at a loss to report what had happened by means of his code phrases, he sent off a one-word cable (in English)–“Disappointed”–to his friends in Panama and prepared to leave on the next ship.

But then through a Panamanian banker based in New York, Joshua Lindo, of Piza, Nephews & Company, at 18 Broadway, Amador received word that if he simply remained quiet in New York there would be “help from another quarter.”

“We can never know too much about the personality of Theodore Roosevelt,” a learned student of the President’s career once remarked. And to the many who were trying to appraise what was happening in regard to Panama, or more important, what the next turn might be, that personality seemed the crux of the matter.

“The warning I gave [in a previous telegram] . . . is founded on threatening statements which he has uttered in private conversations, and which by indirect means have come to my knowledge,” wrote Tomas Herrán to his home office on September 11. “Your excellency knows the vehement character of the President, and you are aware of the persistence and decision with which he pursues anything to which he may be committed. These considerations have led me to give credit and importance to the threatening expressions attributed to him.”

And Roosevelt’s ultimate response to the Panama situation was to become the most disputed act of his career largely because it appeared to be an act of such violent impulse, an expression of what even many of his strongest admirers saw as an arrogant, nearly infantile insistence on having things his way and plunging ahead heedless of obstacles or consequences. To some observers there seemed something unpleasantly appropriate about the fact that his recreational passion at Sagamore Hill that summer of 1903 was the so-called point-to-point “obstacle walk,” the one rule, the only rule, being that the participant must go up and over, or through, every obstacle, never around it. He was invariably the leader on such escapades, followed by a band of excited children, perhaps a stout-hearted guest or two. Once his sister Corinne Robinson saw him approach “an especially unpleasant-looking little bathing-house with a very steep roof” and she hoped this time a detour would be in order. “I can still see the sturdy body of the President of the United States hurling itself at the obstruction and with singular agility chinning himself to the top and sliding down the other side.” But for all the “vehement” reputation, for all his unpleasant private remarks concerning contemptible little creatures in Bogotá, for all the deliberate misstatements or threats by Cromwell and others that he let stand, Roosevelt was still taking no action as summer ended and the record shows that he was still giving serious thought to several possible “ways around” at Panama.

The expert on international law, Professor Moore, was invited to spend a night at Sagamore Hill to elaborate on his theory. Mark Hanna was queried for his views. (Hanna recommended patience and moderation. He was sure a satisfactory settlement could be reached with Colombia.) Hay remained a steady sounding board.

Hay observed in early September that a revolution on the Isthmus was “altogether likely,” but advised caution and careful consideration. “It is for you to decide whether you will (1) await the result of that movement, or (2) take a hand in rescuing the Isthmus from anarchy, or (3) treat with Nicaragua.”

Roosevelt’s reply of September 15 was to agree to do nothing until he returned to Washington at the end of the month. “Then we will go over the matter very carefully and decide what to do.” Only to this extent had he reduced the field of choice. Henceforth, he told Hay, he wanted no further dealings with “those Bogotá people.”

“No one can tell what will come out in the Isthmian Canal business,” he wrote that same day to his friend “Will” Taft in the Philippines.

Once, in describing his method of executive leadership, Roosevelt remarked to a friend, “When I make up my mind to do a thing, I act. A good many . . . call me jumpy and say I go off half-cocked, when, as a matter of fact, I have really given full consideration to whatever it is that is to be done.” It was his quickness in following up on a decision that misled people, his cousin Nicholas would reflect years later; the decision itself, however, was rarely ever arrived at without enormous forethought.

For the moment, Roosevelt was waiting also for response to a request made through Secretary of war Elihu Root as far back as mid-March, before the Senate approved the Hay-Herrán Treaty. He had ordered that two or three picked men from the Army be sent to Panama in civilian dress to appraise the situation from a military point of view and to report back to him personally.

On October 1, or several days after Roosevelt’s return to Washington, Tomas Herrán reported the official policy to be one of “watchful waiting.”

III

Manuel Amador’s “help from another quarter” arrived September 22. “I had gone to New York by pure chance,” Philippe Bunau-Varilla maintained later. But so “fortuitous” a coincidence would strike many as highly improbable. It had been just two weeks since Amador had sent his “Disappointed” cable, or exactly time enough for Cromwell to have wired Paris and have Bunau-Varilla catch the next steamer.

At any rate the audacious little engineer had been busy much of the summer burning up the wires to Bogotá with vigorous, costly cables to Marroquín warning of dire consequences should the Colombians reject the treaty. He had been corresponding with Loomis at the State Department and publishing lengthy paid announcements in Le Matin. He was sure the dark forces that had destroyed Ferdinand de Lesseps were loose again.

Once in New York, according to his subsequent testimony, he “never even saw the shadow” of Cromwell. He had come, he said, to pick up his thirteen-year-old son, Etienne, a hay-fever victim who had been spending the summer at John Bigelow’s country place on the upper Hudson. “I naturally took advantage of my presence in America to visit and to question, as to the state of affairs at Panama, those who could give me any information,” he wrote later. In fact, through Joshua Lindo, whom he had known in Panama years before, Bunau-Varilla was in touch with Amador by phone the day after his arrival.

He had checked in at his favored Waldorf-Astoria and it was in his room there, Room 1162, that he and Amador sat down to talk for the first time on the morning of September 24, at precisely 10:30, according to Bunau-Varilla’s recollection. They too had known each other in years past on the Isthmus, but Bunau-Varilla had by no means forgotten what the difference in rank had been between a mere local physician in the employ of the railroad and the director general of the Compagnie Universelle.

Amador, “deeply moved by emotion and indignation” (according to Bunau-Varilla), unburdened himself of all that had happened. If his friends in Panama should be found out and shot as a result of Cromwell’s meddling, Amador declared, then he would kill Cromwell. Bunau-Varilla called it “unpardonable folly” ever to have listened to Cromwell in the first place. “With your imprudence you have indeed brought yourselves to a pretty pass,” he lectured. The situation, how-ever, was not hopeless. To extricate themselves from their plight the doctor and his friends had only to appeal to reason and to put the matter in the hands of Philippe Bunau-Varilla. “Tell me what are your hopes and on what are based your chances of success. Tell me all calmly, methodically, precisely.”

The particulars, as Amador presented them, were these: Only a small, weak garrison of federal troops was maintained on the Isthmus. The soldiers had not been paid for months and their commanding officer, young General Huertas, was known to be sympathetic to the revolutionary movement. Colombia, however, had command of the sea and so could land more troops at will.

(Except for the part about General Huertas, it was all information that could have been obtained from a careful reading of the newspapers over the past few months–or from Cromwell, were Bunau-Varilla and Cromwell secretly in contact with each other, a side of the story that will never be known.)

The immediate need was money Amador said. Exactly what figure did he have in mind? Bunau-Varilla asked. Six million dollars replied Amador, which would cover the cost of the necessary gunboats.

Bunau-Varilla told Amador that he now understood the situation perfectly and that he would need a few days to devise a solution. In the meantime Amador was to keep out of sight and talk to no one. Amador had impressed him as a risky confederate–“a childish dreamer.” If Amador wished to make contact by phone, he was to use the name Smith. “I shall take that of Jones.”

According to Bunau-Varilla he was now confronted with a grave question of conscience. “Had I the moral right to take part in a revolution and to encourage its development?” The answer, he quickly decided, was yes. “Yes, because Colombia was obviously prosecuting a policy of piracy aiming at the destruction of the precious work of Frenchmen.”

IV

At noon on October 10, 1903, Assistant Secretary of State Loomis escorted Philippe Bunau-Varilla across from the State Department to the White House. Loomis was a handsome man in his early forties, starched, eager, with a marvelous handlebar mustache and thin black hair plastered with brilliantine. A former press agent, Loomis planned to introduce Bunau-Varilla to Roosevelt informally as the publisher of Le Matin. Loomis, another of Bunau-Varilla’s “personal friends,” had been spotted and cultivated by the Frenchman in Paris a few years before when Loomis was en route to a post in Portugal.

According to the subsequent recollections of both Bunau-Varilla and Roosevelt, their conversation began with talk of the Dreyfus Affair and of the part played by Le Matin, after which Bunau-Varilla asserted, “Mr. President, Captain Dreyfus has not been the only victim of detestable political passions. Panama is another.” The exchange that followed was conducted by all parties with scrupulous care. Describing the scene later, Roosevelt would remark that there might just as well have been a Dictaphone in the room. Bunau-Varilla predicted a revolution on the Isthmus and according to Bunau-Varilla the “features of the President manifested profound surprise.”

“A revolution?” murmured Roosevelt (according to Bunau-Varilla’s account). “Would it be possible?”

Bunau-Varilla said later that he never asked Roosevelt what the United States would do in the event of such an uprising. But in Roosevelt’s version, given off the record ten years later, Bunau-Varilla asked point-blank whether the United States would prevent the landing of Colombian troops, then added, “I don’t suppose you can say.” To which Roosevelt replied in substance that he could not. All he could say was that Colombia by its action had forfeited any claim on the United States–and that he had no use for the Colombian government.

In a letter to Roosevelt written only a few months later, a letter very possibly written on request, Loomis stated, “Nothing was said that could be in any way construed as advising, instigating, suggesting, or encouraging a revolutionary movement.”

Be that as it may, Bunau-Varilla left the President’s office positive that he knew where Roosevelt stood, and Roosevelt allowed later that had Bunau-Varilla failed to grasp what he, Roosevelt, intended to do then Bunau-Varilla would not have been very bright. “Of course I have no idea what Bunau-Varilla advised the revolutionists,” Roosevelt would tell John Bigelow, “. . . but I do know, of course, that he had no assurances in any way, either from Hay or myself, or from anyone authorized to speak for us. He is a very able fellow, and it was his business to find out what he thought our Government would do. I have no doubt that he was able to make a very accurate guess, and to advise his people accordingly. In fact, he would have been a very dull man had he been unable to make such a guess.”

Bigelow, however, was among those who would remain unconvinced. And his private observations cast a very different light on the situation. Bunau-Varilla had come to Bigelow’s country place at Highland Falls, on the Hudson–his family was staying with the Bigelows– immediately after seeing the President, and from the conversation that had passed between them there, Sunday the eleventh, Bigelow clearly understood that Roosevelt had been fully informed as to Bunau-Varilla’s revolutionary plan. Bigelow, it should also be noted, was a staunch admirer of Roosevelt’s and would later share none of the scruples over the role of the United States in “the Panama business,” as Roosevelt called it. The following is taken from Bigelow’s private journal. It was written within a week of Bunau-Varilla’s White House conference:

Bunau-Varilla was up over Sunday, has seen the President and the Ass’t Secretary of State; unfolded to them his scheme for proceeding with the Isthmian Canal without much more delay. . . . It is in brief to have Isthmians revolt from the Colombian govt, declare their independence . . . issue a Proclamation to that effect, adopt the Constitution of Cuba at the same time, and give Dictatorial powers to the President [Amador] who is an old and trusty friend of B-V., have the U.S. send vessels to protect . . . the new state from any hostility that could do it any harm, etc. &c.

But according to Bunau-Varilla it was only when he was on the train back to New York from Washington that he conceived his plan. Fundamentally, it was no different from what Cromwell had outlined for the World months earlier, except that Bunau-Varilla saw American gunboats playing the key role. He knew it would work, he said later, because he had watched it happen during the revolution of 1885. In point of fact, however, he had seen no such thing, since no American force at Panama had prevented the landing of Colombian troops in 1885 or during any previous disturbance.

He saw Amador at the Waldorf the night of the thirteenth and told him there was no cause to buy gunboats, explaining why in only the most general terms. Amador insisted that there was still a great need for money to guarantee the support of the Colombian garrison at Panama City. Bunau-Varilla thought $100,000 ought to be sufficient and promised to provide that amount from his own pocket if necessary. Amador remained highly agitated. He had had visions of much larger sums; he felt there ought to be a commitment from someone in Washington, something beyond the Frenchman’s mere say-so. He was distressed over a notion of Bunau-Varilla’s that the new republic need only comprise the canal zone, not the whole of the Isthmus. If he and his friends wanted the entire Department of Panama, they could take it later, Bunau-Varilla said; with the canal treaty ratified, they would get the $10,000,000 authorized by the Spooner Act and could wage all the war they wanted.

They separated “coldly,” but Amador was back again first thing the next morning, pale and haggard after a sleepless night, and declared himself prepared to go along with whatever Bunau-Varilla wished.

“This is what I call a sensible speech,” responded Bunau-Varilla. He would be leaving again that morning for Washington. The doctor meantime was to prepare himself to sail for Panama. On Bunau-Varilla’s return from Washington, he would be given the precise program of action.

At his Washington hotel over the next few days, prior to seeing John Hay, Bunau-Varilla prepared everything he thought Amador would need–a ready-made revolution kit, including a proclamation of independence, a basic military plan, a scheme for the defense of Colón and Panama City, the draft of a constitution, a code by which he and the rebels could correspond. The one element lacking for the moment was a flag for the new republic.

Things began to move rapidly. On October 15, Cromwell, who had been staying under cover this whole time, sailed for France, removing himself thereby from any possible association with activities in Washington or New York. As a parting gesture, in a letter to Roosevelt dated the fourteenth, he advised that his associates in New York would be on call at the President’s command. “Never before was this problem of the ages so near solution as at this moment,” Cromwell wrote, “and, if the opportunity be lost, it probably will be lost for centuries to come.”

It was also on the fifteenth that a dispatch went out from the Navy Department to Admiral Henry Glass, commander in chief of the Pacific Squadron. One week hence, on the twenty-second, he was to proceed with his squadron on an “exercise cruise” to Acapulco. Further instructions would follow.

The next day, October 16, with Loomis again serving as his entreé, Bunau-Varilla saw John Hay at Hay’s house on Lafayette Square–this at Hay’s suggestion. The meeting occurred in the afternoon and it was a most curious and ultimately critical confrontation.

Bunau-Varilla had pictured Hay as cold and severe, an American Bismarck, as he later wrote, but instead he found a man of “delicate and refined mind” whose ideas “coincided rigorously with my own.” Together they deplored “the blindness” of Colombia. The entire state of affairs, declared the Frenchman, would end in a revolution, and Hay agreed that this, unfortunately, was the most probable hypothesis. “But we shall not be caught napping,” Hay said. “Orders have been given to naval forces on the Pacific to sail towards the Isthmus.”

To anyone with a personal interest in a revolution, this was, as both men appreciated, a momentous, an invaluable, piece of information. But as in Bunau-Varilla’s exchange with the President, the tone remained one of perfect propriety. Bunau-Varilla appears neither to have registered any response to the news nor to have given Hay any indication as to his own intentions.

What followed instead was a long diversion by Hay, a lot of small talk seemingly about a novel the Secretary had just read and that he happened to have at hand. Giving Bunau-Varilla the book, he told him to take it and read it at first opportunity. The title was Captain Macklin, and the author was Hay’s friend Richard Harding Davis. Bunau-Varilla was to write that it was “the subtle symbol, the password exchanged between Mr. Hay and myself.”

The story, as Hay briefly recounted for Bunau-Varilla, concerns an idealistic young West Point cadet, Royal Macklin, who sails to Central America (on a ship called Panama) to seek his fortune after being expelled from the Academy for a minor infraction of the rules. He casts his lot with an older French officer and together they bring off a revolution in Honduras. There is much of the author’s customary zest for manly combat, and at one point, the hero, a figure very much like the author, kisses the locket given to him by his sweetheart and thereby recovers his confidence and determination. But it is also a book in which the local political leader is a figure of ridicule, the revolution is a “comic opera,” and Central America is seen as a frontier of untold opportunity if only the white man were to take charge.

“‘I know all of Central America, and it is a wonderful country,’” observes one character, a North American.

“There is not a fruit nor a grain nor a plant that you cannot dig out of it with your bare fingers. It has great forests, great pasture-lands, and buried treasures of silver and iron and gold. But it is cursed with the laziest of God’s creatures, and the men who rule them are the most corrupt and the most vicious. . . . They are a menace and an insult to civilization, and it is time that they stepped down and out, and made way for their betters, or that they were kicked out.”

The book’s most memorable figure, however, is the French free booter, a tragic, sad, honorable, chivalrous knight-errant who fights on at the head of Latin soldiers, but who is plainly too good for them. To John Hay, as he told Bunau-Varilla, the ambitious young Macklin and the French officer were brothers in spirit, “searchers after the Ideal.”

By his own account Bunau-Varilla came away from the interview in something like a spiritual daze. He had met “one of the most noble characters it has ever been given me to know”; he would “cherish . . . the memory of Mr. Hay [with] an almost religious admiration.” Was Hay saying that they too were “searchers after the Ideal”? did Hay see this Frenchman’s own soldierly part in the epic of Panama as akin to that of the Frenchman in the story? Plainly the American Secretary of State was trying to tell him something. “Did he not wish to tell me symbolically that he had understood that the revolution in preparation for the victory of the Idea, was taking shape under my direction? . . . It only remained for me to act.”

The same evening, the evening of October 16, two Army officers were ushered into the President’s office at the White House to report on their confidential mission to Panama. Captain Chauncey B. Humphrey was an instructor of drawing at West Point; Lieutenant Grayson M.-P. Murphy had graduated from the Academy only the year before. Either might have been picked to portray Captain Macklin had anyone been casting a stage production.

From all they had seen, the officers told the President, a revolution on the Isthmus could be expected at any moment. Rifles and ammunition were being smuggled into Colón in piano boxes, a fire brigade recently organized in Panama City was intended as a revolutionary military unit, a man named Arango was the ringleader (they had picked up the name of the wrong Arango, as it happens), and the people of Panama seemed unanimous in their low regard for the government at Bogotá.

As Lieutenant Murphy would later confide, the prospects for a swift, neat, potentially lucrative revolution had struck them as so very certain that they were thinking of resigning their commissions forthwith and “assisting in its consummation.” Their plan was to approach J. P. Morgan for the necessary financing. For bringing the revolution off, their fee was to be $100,000 each, a fair cut they believed of the $10,000,000 the United States was to turn over to Panama.

That their reconnaissance had been no chance or casual assignment is borne out by a subsequent written report, which includes such vital details for a military campaign as the best positions for artillery to command Colón and Panama City and the estimated number of mules that could be procured in remote interior villages. Nor is there much question that the word of such men would have carried great weight with Roosevelt. Probably theirs was the first account of the situation in Panama that he felt he could regard as trustworthy.

However, the response they saw was such that they left the White House convinced the United States would play no part in any such revolution. They had been astonished at how much Roosevelt seemed already to know of the topography of the Isthmus and other such details, but their immediate mutual reaction was to scrap any further thought of seeing J. P. Morgan. “There goes our revolution,” Murphy said. “I sail for the Philippines.”

Philippe Bunau-Varilla was now in high gear. He had gone directly from Hay’s house to the station, had taken the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore had sent a telegram telling “Smith” that “Jones” expected to see him at the usual place at 9:30 in the morning. At the stated hour Amador knocked at Room 1162 at the Waldorf, which, according to Bunau-Varilla, deserved to be regarded as “the cradle of the Panama Republic.”

He had Amador sit down. There was no time left to quibble over details. Amador was to question neither his assertions nor his sources. He could now assure Amador that he and his junta would be protected by American forces within forty-eight hours after they proclaimed their new republic. Only one prior commitment was required. They must agree to entrust him, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, with the diplomatic representation of the new nation at Washington. He must be the one to draw up the canal treaty with the American Secretary of State.

Amador objected. To have a foreigner serve as their first representative abroad would be a blow to Panamanian pride.

“I can easily see that,” Bunau-Varilla answered, “but a supreme law must dictate our resolution. It commands us to assemble every element which may ensure final success. A battle royal will be fought at Washington. Let him wage it who is best equipped to win the victory.”

Amador promised to see what he could do.

The following day, October 18, was a Sunday, a sparkling autumn Sunday along the Hudson River, as Bunau-Varilla went north by train again to John Bigelow’s place at Highland Falls, adjacent to West Point. On Monday he returned, looking like any other man of affairs newly refreshed by country air and vistas, but bringing in his suitcase a strange silk “flag of liberation” that Madame Bunau-Varilla and Bigelow’s daughter Grace had spent nearly all Sunday stitching together “in the greatest secrecy.”

Amador appeared again at Room 1162 for a last briefing. Bunau-Varilla displayed the flag, which, according to Bunau-Varilla, Amador “found perfect.” The design was very like that of the flag of the United States, the differences being that the white stripes were yellow and in place of white stars were two yellow suns (symbolizing the two continents) joined by a yellow band (for the canal). As one Roosevelt biographer would note, there is a certain injustice to the fact that Roosevelt was unaware of these latest preparations. With his sense of humor and boyish love of adventure he would have savored every detail.

Amador said it would take him at least fifteen days after reaching Panama to get everything ready. His ship was due at Colón on the twenty-seventh. Bunau-Varilla said he could not wait that long. He wanted the revolution to occur on November 3–election day in the United States–which gave Amador exactly seven days once he reached home. If he and his friends could not do what had to be done in that time, if the revolution did not occur on the third, then they were on their own and he would take no responsibility for the consequences.

Amador received all the documents Bunau-Varilla had prepared, the code, the flag, on the following morning just before his ship sailed. He was also given the text for a telegram that he was to send to Bunau-Varilla the moment the new republic was proclaimed.

The government has just been formed by popular acclamation. Its authority extends from Colón inclusive to Panama inclusive. I request you to accept the mission of Minister Plenipotentiary in order to obtain the recognition of the Republic and signature of Canal Treaty. You have full powers to appoint a banker for the Republic at New York, and to open credit for immediate urgent expenses.

Upon receipt of this message, and only upon its receipt, he would send Amador the promised $100,000 and the guaranteed military protection would arrive within forty-eight hours. According to Bunau-Varilla, Amador then departed from the Waldorf, having solemnly affirmed his complete agreement with all “conditions thus stipulated.”

Amador sailed on the steamer Yucatan, the same ship that had once carried Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders to the war in Cuba. To the purser, he entrusted a package, telling him to put it in the ship’s safe and to guard it carefully, as it was vital to the future of Panama. The purser, young George Beers, was the son of Captain James Beers.

“The plan seems to me good,” Amador had written to his son, the Army doctor, in a letter mailed just before sailing.

For Bunau-Varilla the week that followed was interminable. He busied himself with cables to Paris banks to arrange for a loan of $100,000 borrowed against personal securities and saw to the transfer of the money by cable to a New York bank (Heidelbach, Ickelheimer & Company). But mainly he worried over the possible movement of Colombian troops from Cartagena to Panama, a turn of fate that, if it came too soon, could wreck everything. He watched the New York papers and on October 26 read with “indescribable joy” a small dispatch saying that General Tobar, commander of the Colombian troops at Cartagena, though expected to leave soon for the Isthmus would probably not do so until November.

On the twenty-seventh, the day the Yucatan was due at Colón, there was no word from Amador. And there was nothing on the twenty-eighth. But on the morning of the twenty-ninth, Bunau-Varilla received the following signed “Smith”:

FATE NEWS BAD POWERFUL TIGER. URGE VAPOR COLON.

The first part of the message was in Bunau-Varilla’s code and was perfectly clear.

Fate–This cable is for Bunau-Varilla
News–Colombian troops arriving
Bad–Atlantic
Powerful–Five days
Tiger–More than 200

Though the rest– Urge vapor Colon– did not conform to the prearranged code, he took it to mean Send steamer Colón,

These were puzzling and annoying words and he was at a loss to understand what they implied. But then it dawned that Amador wanted him to send an American man-of-war to Colón at his, Amador’s, request. He was asking Bunau-Varilla to prove to the others at Panama, to the rest of the junta, that he could deliver on notice and exactly what was needed. “It was not information which was transmitted to me, it was a test to which I was being submitted.”

The little Frenchman was at once in a grand state of agitation. An American ship must be sent to Colón at once; everything depended on it. But how? “If I succeeded in this task the Canal was saved. If I failed it was lost.” He could think better on a train he decided, and so out of the Waldorf he hurried, on his way to Washington again.

He saw Francis Loomis at his home that evening and told him to keep in mind the date November 3. There would be a repetition of what had happened at Colón in 1885, he said, and it would be a terrible shame if no American ship were on hand, or if her commander were to behave as had the commander of the Galena during the Prestan Uprising. Apparently Loomis said he could not and would not commit himself. But the following morning, as Bunau-Varilla was walking about Lafayette Square wondering whether to call on Hay directly, he ran into Loomis and this time Loomis declared in a notably formal manner that the situation at Colón was indeed “fraught with peril” and that it would be “deplorable if the catastrophe of 1885” were to be repeated.

And this, according to Bunau-Varilla’s subsequent account, is all Loomis said. Still the message was clear: “The words I had heard could have but one interpretation: ‘A cruiser has been sent to Colon.’ ”

He was at that moment like the character in King Solomon’s Mines who, recalling that a solar eclipse is imminent, tells his savage captors that he will show his powers by blotting out the sun. He now had only to inform Amador that the ship was on its way and the first sight of it on the horizon at Colón would have exactly the desired effect.

A very great many people, however, were to find this explanation extremely difficult to believe. The Frenchman had gone to Washington, it would be charged, not to clear his thoughts or to stroll idly about Lafayette Square, but to tell Loomis to send a ship at once and that Loomis had assured him the next morning that the ship was on its way.

The answer given to this charge is vintage Bunau-Varilla:

My only reply to such critics is that they have not the slightest idea of scientific methods.

I built all this subtle diplomatic structure as a bridge is built: that is, by calculating its various elements, and not by trying to obtain direct information which it would have been impossible to obtain.

The abstract operations of trigonometry lead to results more certain than physical measurements, when both operations are possible, but in the majority of cases trigonometry alone can be used. I have made diplomacy as it were by trigonometry.

Such a method will without doubt seem incomprehensible to many minds.

He had noticed in the New York papers the reported movements of certain American naval vessels. The Dixie had been reported on its way to Guantanamo a few days earlier in The New York Times. The Nashville was at Kingston, Jamaica. If a ship had been ordered to Colón, it would be the Nashville, the one stationed nearest Colón, which, as he knew, had been in Colón earlier in the month. Figuring the ship’s speed to be ten knots, he decided that she could cover the five hundred miles from Kingston to Colón in two days. He then added twelve hours for preparations before sailing, which, he reckoned, would bring her over the horizon at Colón on the morning of November 2.

Having talked to Loomis, he took the morning (eleven o’clock) train back to New York and again at Baltimore got off to send a wire to Amador. The wire went off a little after noon on October 30. Decoded it read as follows:

ALL RIGHT WILL REACH TWO DAYS AND HALF.

In The New York Times delivered to his room the morning of Sunday, November 1, on page 4 in the bottom right-hand corner, Bunau-Varilla found a small dispatch datelined Kingston, Jamaica, October 31:

The United States gunboat Nashville sailed from here this morning under sealed orders. Her destination is believed to be Colombia.

* Reportedly it was Senator Hanna who put Roosevelt on to Cromwell. “You want to be very careful, Theodore,” Hanna is supposed to have advised in fatherly fashion, “this is very ticklish business. You had better be guided by Cromwell; he knows all about the subject and all about those people down there.” Roosevelt replied that “the trouble with Cromwell is he overestimates his relation to Cosmos.” “Cosmos?” said Hanna. “I don’t know him–I don’t know any of those South Americans; but Cromwell knows them all; you stick close to Cromwell.”

13
Remarkable Revolution

It was a remarkable revolution–I think the most remarkable I ever read of in history.

–SENATOR SHELBY M. CULLOM

I

Manuel Amador’s arrival at Colón had been without incident. By prior agreement none of his fellow conspirators were waiting to greet him when his ship docked. He was met only by Herbert G. Prescott, assistant superintendent of the Panama Railroad, who came on board with the port captain, as appeared perfectly routine, to carry off any papers or documents Amador would not wish to have found in his possession. The doctor came ashore looking innocent enough, and there seemed nothing unusual about the fact that he and Prescott departed together on the next train to Panama City. Had the doctor been searched, however, he would have been found to have an odd-looking flag wrapped about his waist.

The trouble started that evening when the flag and the rest of Philippe Bunau-Varilla’s revolutionary paraphernalia were presented to the others at a secret gathering in a house on Cathedral Plaza, the home of Federico Boyd. Amador’s report evoked only disappointment or harsh disapproval. The mere promises of an unknown Frenchman impressed no one. The idea of an independence movement that did not include the whole of the Isthmus was viewed as asinine, since several of those present owned extensive properties outside the Frenchman’s proposed zone. The expectation had been that Amador would return with an actual agreement signed by John Hay or possibly even Roosevelt himself. Nobody liked the flag, which was thought to look too much like the flag of the United States.

It was nearly midnight when the meeting disbanded and the only agreement reached was that emissaries should be sent to the interior to drum up revolutionary support. Amador went home thoroughly dejected.

The following day it appeared that the whole game was up. Tomás Arias, one of the wealthiest, most influential members of the junta, came to tell Amador that he was backing out. “You are an old man,” Arias said, “Arango is an old man, and you don’t care if you are hung. I do not like to be hung.”

Within hours Amador further learned from José de Obaldía, governor of the Department of Panama, that a force of picked Colombian troops–a detachment of tiradores, or sharpshooters–was on its way to Colón from Barranquilla. Obaldia, another wealthy landowner, had been appointed governor by José Marroquín only the summer before and because Obaldía was known to favor separation from Colombia in the event the canal treaty fell through, the appointment had caused a great stir in Bogotá. He was not involved in the conspiracy, only sympathetic and a close personal friend of Amador’s. In fact, he happened to be living temporarily in Amador’s house.*

Amador decided, first, that he himself had gone too far to pull back and, second, that for the time being he would confide this latest piece of information to no one except Herbert Prescott, who would be described as a “very energetic and typical railroad man, one who does not do things halfway.” Together they agreed to “bluff it out.”

That was October 28. Early the following day, Amador made his move. He would demonstrate to the others what could be achieved by merely saying the word. The crucial telegram–“Fate news bad powerful tiger. Urge vapor Colon.”–went off to New York. Conferences were hastily arranged with Porfirio Meléndez, a stout, highly political police chief and part-time straw boss for the railroad at Colón, who agreed to manage the uprising on the Atlantic side, and with General Ruben Varón, commander of the Padilla, one of two Colombian gunboats presently in the Bay of Panama. For the promise of $35,000 in silver, Varón agreed to turn his ship over to the junta the moment their revolution commenced. The uprising was scheduled for November 4.

By Sunday, November 1, Amador had his answer from New York, which “had the effect of putting fresh life into the conspirators.” Tomás Arias instantly regained his faith in the scheme. Dr. Carlos Mendoza, leader of the Liberals, and two of his prominent compatriots, Eusebio Morales and Juan Henríquez, agreed to prepare a proper manifesto and to improve upon Bunau-Varilla’s declaration of independence. A new flag was designed by Amador’s son Manuel and was sewn together by Senorita Maria Amelia de la Ossa, the fiancée of Herbert Prescott’s brother, who was the railroad’s chief telegrapher. The flag was composed of four rectangles, the lower left of blue, the upper right of red, the upper left of white with a blue star in the center, the lower right of white with a red star in the center. And it was rapidly duplicated by other ladies, including Señora Amador and her daughter Elmira (who was married to the nephew of United States Vice-Consul Felix Ehrman), and various members of the Arango and Arosemena households.

Even J. Gabriel Duque lent his unqualified support, promising that the city’s fire brigade, of which he was the leader and major financial support–some 280 men–could be counted on when the time came.

None of the so-called inner circle, not even Arango, was as yet aware that Colombian troops were en route. Only Amador knew, probably his wife, Herbert Prescott, and, as of now, Colonel James Shaler, superintendent of the railroad. Shaler had to be included: the railroad was not only the one means of moving men from Colón (where the troops would land) to Panama City (where the revolution was to begin), the railroad had the only telephone and telegraph system between Colón and Panama City.

Prescott had gone over to Colón to confer with Shaler as soon as Amador apprised him of the situation; and with Shaler’s blessing, Prescott had shifted all idle rolling stock, every car that might be used to transport troops, out of the yards and back to the Panama City end of the line. The railroad, these two men saw immediately, was the key. Shaler remained where he was; Prescott returned to Panama City to “wait until something turns up.” Which is how things stood on Monday, November 2, when the Nashville came over the horizon.

The urgent cable to Commander Hubbard of the Nashville, a cable classified as secret and confidential, had been sent on October 30, the day of Philippe Bunau-Varilla’s chance encounter with Assistant Secretary Loomis in Lafayette Square. The Nashville was to proceed at once for Colon; Hubbard was to telegraph in cipher the situation there once he had consulted with the United States consul; and he was to keep his destination secret. Nothing was said of an expected revolution on the Isthmus or of any action to be taken in such event. So to Hubbard and his crew as they steamed out of Kingston, it had seemed a relatively routine matter. The long, white two-stacked gunboat had called at Colón on other occasions and as recently as two weeks before.

Nor was the ship’s arrival at Colón taken as any particular cause for alarm by those Colombian or local officials who knew nothing of the schemes afoot. It only surprised them that the ship had returned so soon.

To Amador’s fellow conspirators, however, it was the long-awaited decisive moment, the irrefutable sign that the United States stood prepared to guarantee their success, that Amador’s Frenchman was truly their deliverer. “Have just wired you that the Nashville has been sighted,” James Shaler wrote in a quick letter to Prescott at about four the afternoon of November 2. “This, I presume, settles the question.”

The ship dropped anchor in the harbor at 5:30, or only about eight hours later than Bunau-Varilla had specified. Hubbard went ashore and found that “everything on the Isthmus was quiet.” But he also talked to Shaler and there is no reason to believe that Shaler kept anything from him. So Hubbard undoubtedly appreciated exactly what the situation was when the Colombian gunboat next arrived in the harbor.

According to Hubbard’s log it was nearly midnight when the Cartagena steamed in, her lights all aglow. Whether anyone was on duty at the railroad office at that hour or could determine what ship she was, what message Shaler may have put on the wire to Panama City that night, if any, are not known. But at daybreak, November 3, Hubbard took a launch to the Colombian ship, went aboard, and was informed by General Juan Tobar that she was carrying nearly five hundred troops and that he, General Tobar, intended to put them ashore at once.

Hubbard made no protest, despite what he knew. He had no orders to prevent such a landing and as yet there was not a sign of disturbance of any kind by which he might have justified his own intervention.

News of the landing was immediately telephoned to Panama City, and to those conspirators who had been kept in the dark this whole time, it was a crushing revelation. word of a Colombian warship standing off Colón would in itself have had a devastating effect; but far worse was the realization that the American ship had made no move to prevent the Colombian troops–and assuredly a Colombian firing squad –from coming ashore. All the bravado engendered by the arrival of the Nashville the evening before was undone in an instant. The conspirators saw themselves as the victims of a diabolic Yankee betrayal. Even Amador, by all accounts, was having his own bleak second thoughts and might have called the whole thing off right then, early on the morning of the third, had it not been for the stately Arango, who declared himself ready to stand by his old friend, and for Señora Amador, a woman “of courage and snap” (as William Howard Taft would later describe her) who was considerably younger than her husband and who declared that it was time to get on with the fight, soldiers or no soldiers.

A plan was hurriedly improvised, an extremely neat stratagem that appears also to have been the inspiration of Señora Amador, and the details were quickly communicated by telephone to Colonel Shaler, he being the one chosen to bell the cat.

Colonel James Shaler was seventy-seven years old, older even than Amador, and he was widely regarded as the most important and popular North American on the Isthmus. A New York reporter who met Shaler a few months later perceived that “the impress of his personality” could be felt everywhere. In a land where most of mankind was short or medium-sized, brown-skinned and black-haired, Shaler was tall and lean and was made especially conspicuous by a huge white mustache and a great bushy crown of pure white hair. In a society where prolific families counted above all else, he was also a bachelor, a quiet man of quiet, contemplative pleasures (books, billiards). But he openly adored Panama and both his physical and mental vitality belied all traditional accounts of the torpor engendered by permanent residence in such a climate. To the junta he was suddenly indispensable. As several of them were to acknowledge later, without him there would never have been an independent Republic of Panama.

General Tobar and the Tiradores Battalion (plus perhaps a dozen wives) landed at the old Panama Railroad wharf, Tobar and his aides “glittering in elaborate uniforms and bristling with all the arms it was permissible for officers to bear.” They were being received with customary deference by various local officials when Shaler approached from the railroad office. Shaler introduced himself, bid the officers welcome, and calmly recommended that they depart at once for Panama City on a special train, a single car and a locomotive, which had been arranged for their convenience, he said, at the personal request of Governor Obaldóa. The troops could not be transported immediately because of a temporary shortage of equipment, he explained, but they would follow shortly. Tobar hesitated; Shaler was insistent, saying that the time fixed for departure had already passed and that there was no reason in the world why the officers should have to stand about in the killing heat a moment longer.

“I pointed out to him,” Tobar explained afterward in his own defense, “that it was necessary for me to take the proper measures for the disembarkation of the troops . . . [but] as he insisted in his efforts, and as I was able to satisfy myself, even by the assurance of the prefect himself, that the troops could and would go over in a special train . . . I found no justifiable reason to persist in my refusal. . . .”

A young officer was picked to remain in command of the battalion, a Colonel Eliseo Torres.

But just as Tobar and his aides–fifteen men in all–were being comfortably settled in their special car, Tobar’s second-in-command, General Ramon Amaya, grew suddenly uneasy about the arrangement, saying he must get off at once. Tobar objected, claiming it would be unseemly if the two of them were not to arrive in Panama City together. The issue was resolved only when Shaler stepped quietly to the rear of the car, pulled the signal cord, and hopped off the train. He was smiling broadly and waving as the train steamed away.

The railroad office now became a kind of command post. Shaler telephoned Prescott and told him to expect the generals at about eleven. He would do all he could to hold the troops in Colón, Shaler said, but he did not know how long it would be before they became suspicious and decided to take things into their own hands.

Sometime between 10:30 and 11:00, Commander Hubbard appeared at the office eager to know the situation, as he had just received a most important cable from Washington. His specific, secret orders now– orders issued the day before, November 2–were to prevent the landing of Colombian troops. The cable, a document of particular interest in time to come, read as follows:

NASHVILLE, CARE AMERICAN CONSUL, COLÓN:
SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL. MAINTAIN FREE AND UNINTERRUPTED TRANSIT. IF INTERRUPTION THREATENED BY ARMED FORCE, OCCUPY The LINE OF THE RAILROAD. PREVENT LANDING OF ANY ARMED FORCE WITH HOSTILE INTENT, EITHER GOVERNMENT OR INSURGENT, EITHER AT COLÓN, PORTO BELLO, OR OTHER POINT. SEND COPY OF INSTRUCTIONS TO THE SENIOR OFFICER PRESENT AT PANAMA UPON ARRIVAL OF BOSTON. HAVE SENT COPY OF INSTRUCTIONS AND HAVE TELEGRAPHED DIXIE TO PROCEED WITH All POSSIBLE DISPATCH from KINGSTON TO COLÓN. GOVERNMENT FORCE REPORTED APPROACHING COLÓN IN VESSELS. PREVENT THEIR LANDING IF IN YOUR JUDGMENT THIS WOULD PRECIPITATE A CONFLICT. ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS REQUIRED.

DARLING, ACTING.

Shaler told Hubbard what he had done with the generals, and Hub-bard left to send a return cable to Washington. Colombian troops were already ashore, he reported; however, no revolution had been declared (Washington had said nothing of a revolution) and there had been no disturbances. Still: “Situation is most critical if revolutionary leaders act.”

Hubbard was being scrupulously careful. Nothing would be done out of line, nothing, that is, without specific instructions from Washington. That Shaler had decided to “act,” that things were also moving swiftly on the other side of the Isthmus, were perfectly obvious. Hub-bard, in fact, was probably present when Porfirio Meléndez came into the office and Shaler and Meléndez began concocting a plan in the event that the soldiers demanded a train at gunpoint. The plan, as Shaler later explained, was to put all their rifles and ammunition in the rear car. When the train reached Lion Hill, one of Meléndez’ men would pull the rear coupling pin and leave the arms stalled in the jungle. The engineer would then run the train full steam to Culebra, where he would abandon his engine and let the stranded, unarmed soldiers walk out whichever direction they chose.

To inform the others in Panama City of this scheme, and of a plan to hijack the Cartagena, it was decided to make up an unscheduled train and send Meléndez’ daughter across. Aminta Meléndez, a tiny, cheerful eighteen-year-old who appeared considerably younger than her age, made the journey as asked, an act of considerable courage, which she would modestly discount afterward. She was neither stopped nor questioned by anyone. She simply found Arango, whom her father regarded as the real leader of the movement, and delivered the message. And as things turned out, the information had no effect one way or the other, since neither scheme was to be necessary, but Aminta Meléndez and her “ride” would become an essential element in the story of the revolution. In a favorite version she would be pictured as riding in the cab with the engineer, when in fact she sat quite comfortably in a coach.

The trap for Tobar and Amaya was being neatly set, meantime.

As soon as Herbert Prescott received Shaler’s message that the generals were on their way, he went to Amador’s house and told him it would have to be “now or never.” Some very fast thinking was called for, as they had about two hours to get things ready. Amador was also convinced, from what he had learned during his trip to New York, that excessive bloodshed would seriously jeopardize American sympathy for their cause. The revolution, it was decided, would take place that afternoon.

Amador at once ordered his carriage and drove to the Cuartel de Chiriquí, the barracks of the Colombian garrison, a large pale building by the seawall, facing onto the Plaza Chiriquí. In command of the garrison was General Esteban Huertas, small, smooth-faced, impeccable, young, and very ambitious, as Amador well knew. According to the recollection of one of Huertas’ own men, who was standing nearby when Huertas received the white-haired doctor, Amador said that he himself was old and tired but that Panama and the general had a great future ahead.

“If you will aid us, we shall reach immortality in the history of the new republic.” An American ship had arrived, more were coming, Amador added. “You and your battalion can accomplish nothing against the superior force of the cruisers, which have their orders. Choose here, glory and riches; in Bogotá, misery and ingratitude.”

Huertas is said to have remained “impassive” for a moment, then put out his hand. “I accept.”

But since this appears to have been the only time the two met more or less privately that morning, an agreement must also have been reached regarding the sums Huertas and his men were to receive for their part, unless, of course, the bargain had already been worked out in secret in the days preceding, which is perfectly possible. In any event, payment to the soldiers was to be $50 per man, while Huertas was to be compensated for his revolutionary fervor with $65,000, an absolute fortune in Panama in the year 1903.

At 10:30, in full uniform, Huertas marched at the head of his regiment down the Avenida Central to receive the generals at the railroad station.

At 11:30 the train pulled in and Tobar, Amaya, and their aides stepped down to an amazing welcome. Governor Obaldóa was there, accompanied by all his official family; General Francisco Castro, military commander of Panama, with his aides; United States Vice-Consul Ehrman, who was also head of the important Ehrman bank in Panama City; and Huertas with his troops, drawn up on the dusty little plaza across from the station. There was much saluting, much cheering, Obaldóa was full of mellifluous words of welcome, and a line of sleek carriages stood waiting.

“There was,” Tobar said later, “nothing that did not show the greatest cordiality and give me the most complete assurance that peace reigned throughout the department.”

An elaborate luncheon followed at the Government House. But as the afternoon wore on, with still no sign of his troops, Tobar grew increasingly suspicious and finally demanded to be taken to military headquarters at the Cuartel, where he promptly assumed command. An officer confided that rumors of an uprising were sweeping the city; a cryptic note from a prominent citizen warned Tobar to trust no one.

Sometime near two o’clock the anxious general sent several of his aides to Obaldóa to inform him of these rumors and to request that Obaldóa order the immediate dispatch of the troops from Colon. The aides returned saying the governor had assured them that everything would be taken care of.

Apparently satisfied by this, Tobar and a number of his officers crossed to the barracks, where, joined by Huertas and Huertas’ own retinue of officers, they inspected the local troops. The seawall was next, Tobar showing Huertas where he wanted the best marksmen placed to command the streets running from the harbor to Cathedral Plaza.

All this time Amador had been extremely busy completing his arrangements. He had met with Arango, who was to tell Carlos Mendoza to have the declaration of independence ready. He had met with J. Gabriel Duque to tell him the uprising would begin promptly at five, that the fire brigade must be at Cathedral Plaza, ready to march on the barracks. He had met Huertas on a street corner near the plaza, just before Tobar went to the barracks, and had listened rather impatiently as Huertas argued for a different plan. (Huertas wanted to strike later in the evening when there was to be a band concert and it would be easier to take the generals separately.)

Tobar and Huertas were still on the seawall when a secretary to Governor Obaldóa appeared to tell Tobar that unfortunately the railroad superintendent, Colonel Shaler, was placing difficulties in the way. The troops could not be moved, Shaler had insisted, until their fares had been paid in full and in cash; it was a company regulation. Tobar told the man to go straight back and inform Obaldóa that he was prepared to pay and that the troops were to be dispatched at once.*

Reports reached the barracks that things were getting out of hand elsewhere in the city. The head of the Panama Treasury, Eduardo de la Guardia, arrived to inform the generals that an uprising was certain and that Obaldóa would do nothing to suppress it. By now it was nearly 4:30.

At about five o’clock, as Tobar, his officers, and Huertas sat conferring on a bench outside the barracks near the gate to the seawall, Tobar was informed that a crowd had begun gathering at the front of the building. General Amaya went out and returned to confirm the report. Huertas asked if it was not time to order out the first patrol. Tobar assented and Huertas, excusing himself to change out of his dress coat, went inside, followed by General Castro.

When a company of soldiers marched out with fixed bayonets, the generals were still sitting in the same place. The soldiers wheeled to the right of the seawall gate, as if to pass in front of the generals, but then suddenly opened into two files, one going in front of the seated men, the other behind. At a command the soldiers stopped and swung about with bayonets lowered at the astonished generals.

“Generals, you are my prisoners,” said the officer in command, a young captain named Salazar.

“I am the commander in chief” Tobar declared.

“You and your aides,” answered Salazar.

“By whose orders?”

“General Huertas’.”

Tobar lunged at the nearest soldier in an effort to escape, but was instantly hemmed in by bayonets. He appealed to Salazar, begging him not to be a traitor. He called on sentinels along the wall, the other soldiers, to come to the defense of their country, all to no avail. But neither he nor any of his companions had attempted to draw a sword or reach for a side arm.

Disarmed, they were marched out the seawall gate, through a crowd of several thousand people, and on to Cathedral Plaza, across the plaza and up Avenida Central to the jail, the crowd shouting “Viva Huertas! . . . Viva Amador! . . . Viva el Istmo Libre!” Those in the crowd who were armed began firing shots in the air.

Minutes after the generals were locked up, at 5:49 by the wall clock in the railroad office, Herbert Prescott was on the phone to tell Shaler and Meléndez. It was “the hour of freedom.”

Amador ordered that Obaldóa be taken into custody–as a matter of form–then went himself to see the American vice-consul, Felix Her-man, who dictated a cable to Washington:

UPRISING OCCURRED TONIGHT, SIX; No BLOODSHED. ARMY And Navy OFFICIALS TAKEN PRISONERS. GOVERNMENT WILL BE ORGANIZED TONIGHT, CONSISTING THREE CONSULS, ALSO CABINET. SOLDIERS CHANGED. SUPPOSED SAME MOVEMENT WILL BE EFFECTED IN COLON. ORDER PREVAILS SO FAR. SITUATION SERIOUS. FOUR HUNDRED SOLDIERS LANDED TODAY, BARRANQUILLA.

Then, immediately, Amador, Ehrman, Arango, Federico Boyd, and Tomas Arias repaired to Cathedral Plaza to be acclaimed by the crowd.

At dusk, as the municipal council met to give the junta its formal recognition, the Colombian gunboat Bogotá opened fire, throwing five or six shells into the city, killing one man–a Chinese shopkeeper who had been asleep in bed–and a donkey. These were the day’s only casualties. When a shore battery responded, the ship withdrew behind an island in the bay and was heard from no more. The Padilla, meantime, had kept perfectly silent.

So by nightfall there remained only the problem of the troops at Colon.

II

It was very early on the morning of November 4 that Commander Hubbard of the Nashville issued the order addressed to Superintendent Shaler forbidding the movement of “troops of either party [Colombian or insurgent] or in either direction by your railroad.” So when the young Colombian colonel, Eliseo Torres, who had been left in charge, appeared again at Shaler’s office that same morning to resume his effort to get transportation for his men, Shaler had only to tell him that his hands were tied. The troops and the number of women who accompanied them were camped in the streets and were the cause of much curiosity. There had been no friction with the local populace; not the slightest sign of trouble. And Torres, having no means of communication with Panama City, knew nothing of what had transpired there the day before and had yet to grasp the extreme gravity of his own situation.

Not until noon was he told–by Porfirio Meléndez, who, after conferring with Shaler, escorted Torres across Front Street to the saloon at the Astor Hotel. Over a drink, Meléndez explained what had happened to the generals, warned the young officer that more American help was on the way, and offered him a handsome honorarium in cash if he would be so sensible as to order his men back onto the Cartagena and quietly sail away.

The response of the young officer was explosive. He “flew into a violent passion” and, like Pedro Prestan, announced that he would burn the town and kill every American in it unless the generals were released by two that afternoon.

So there followed two extremely critical hours.

Hubbard had all American women and children put on board a German steamer then in port and on another ship belonging to the railroad. He gathered the men inside the railroad’s stone warehouse and landed a detachment of forty sailors with an extra supply of arms. Cleared for action, the Nashville weighed anchor and moved in closer to shore, her guns trained on the railroad wharf and on the Cartagena, which to the surprise of everyone got up steam and departed at full speed.

The Colombians had the railroad building surrounded almost immediately, their purpose being, in Hubbard’s view at least, to provoke an attack. It was a situation ripe for catastrophe. Yet for all the tension on both sides, no shots were fired and at about 3:13 Torres walked up to the barricaded building and told Hubbard that in fact he was “well disposed toward the Americans” and wished only to make contact with General Tobar to find out what he was supposed to do. He proposed that he withdraw his own troops to Monkey Hill, that Hub-bard and his force return to the Nashville, and that he be permitted to dispatch an emissary to Tobar to explain the gravity of the situation and to bring back Tobar’s answer. After a hurried conference with Shaler, Meléndez, and the American consul at Colón, a man named Oscar Malmros, all of whom were impressed by Torres and convinced of his “good faith,” Hubbard agreed to the proposition. Two emissaries were chosen, one of Torres’ men and a local policeman. Shaler at once produced a special train, then put through a call to apprise Panama City of what had happened.

A murderous showdown had thus been averted for the moment. A number of people had kept their heads. However, with the Cartagena no longer standing by to evacuate Torres and his troops, the problem of their departure had also been compounded, and their quickest possible dispatch from Colon–from the Isthmus entirely–was of paramount importance to the success of the revolution. For as long as loyal troops remained where they were, Bogotá’s claim to de facto sovereignty over Panama was quite as valid as that of the junta. Colonel Torres was in a comparatively strong position, furthermore. No insurgent force had as yet made itself known in Colón, and if the American commander stood by his own order that neither loyal nor insurgent forces could be transported on the railroad, then no insurgent force could be brought over from Panama City to challenge him. With nearly five hundred well-armed veteran troops at his command, he was unquestionably a force to reckon with, and he certainly had it within his power to lay waste to Colón as threatened, and to much of the railroad and its property. Most important, as he wrote in a note for Tobar, he and his men were fully prepared to “resist any attack rather than be traitors.”

Torres was, in fact, the trump card and everything depended on how Tobar chose to respond.

At Panama City it was decided that a personal appeal by Amador (El Presidente, as the crowds were now calling him) might do the trick. The day at Panama City had been a very different one from that at Colon. The junta was riding high; the whole city was celebrating; the new flag had been raised at the Government House and at Cathedral Plaza. “The world is astounded at our heroism,” Amador had told the troops at the barracks that morning. “Yesterday we were but the slaves of Colombia; today we are free. . . . President Roosevelt has made good. . . . Long live President Roosevelt! Long live the American Government!” He and Huertas had stood beside eight large wooden boxes filled with Colombian silver delivered for the troops from the Ehrman Bank. (Huertas and his officers, as they were informed privately, would receive their share in another five days, with checks drawn on another local bank, Isaac Brandon & Brothers.) “We have the money! We are free!” exclaimed Huertas, who was picked up in a chair and borne in triumph through the streets at the head of an enormous crowd. When a sudden downpour struck just as the parade reached the plaza, all who could crowded into the Central Hotel, where for another jubilant hour bottles of champagne were poured over Huertas’ head.

Amador got to the police station about five o’clock, or roughly half an hour before the arrival of the emissaries from Colon. He talked to Amaya first, then to Tobar, and his point was the same with both: that further resistance on their part was useless since the United States was involved. “You must understand that we who started this movement are not insane,” he told Amaya, whom he had known for years but had yet to face in quite this way. They were seated in the guardroom alone. “We fully appreciated the fact that in no case could we withstand all the rest of the nation, and in consequence we had to resort to means that, although painful, were indispensable. The United States has fully entered into this movement . . . and our independence is guaranteed by that colossus.”

With Tobar he had been more explicit, saying that the plan had been sanctioned in Washington, that the United States had already supplied him with $250,000 to meet the expenses of establishing the new republic, which was quite untrue.

The generals refused to be swayed. “I answered Señor Amador,” Tobar later related, “that I would take no account of what he had just told me, as my duty and the duty of the army I commanded was sufficiently clear, and that in consequence no human force could drag from me the order he desired.”

Apparently Amador was no more out the door when the two messengers from Colón were brought in. Tobar read the note from Torres and said he positively refused to order the evacuation. Yet neither would he order Torres not to depart. Colonel Torres knew his duty, the general insisted.

Nor had he anything different to say the following morning, November 5, when it was reported from Colón that Torres and his men had marched back into town from Monkey Hill–claiming the mosquitoes had driven them out–that Hubbard had landed his force once again, and that therefore the situation was fully as serious as before.

Urgent meetings were called on both sides of the Isthmus. Shaler was on the phone to Prescott perhaps five or six times. Then at about five o’clock Tobar, Amaya, and the other Colombian officers were told to get ready to leave for the railroad depot. It had been decided to take them back to Colon.

They left the jail, surrounded by a large, well-armed escort. But at the station Herbert Prescott refused to put Tobar aboard until Tobar gave his word that he would make no attempt to escape. An extended “altercation” took place, Prescott insisting that Tobar must go as a voluntary prisoner because orders from the American government prohibited the transportation of soldiers to guard him.

Tobar, unfortunately for his cause, stood on his dignity. As an officer he could give no such guarantee; they could either transport him as a prisoner in fact, he said, or they could return him to prison. The argument dragged on, more time passed. Prescott called Shaler on the phone to ask what to do. Commander Hubbard, who was in the Colón office at the moment, told Shaler to tell Prescott to put the generals under an armed civilian escort and send them across.

And this was what was about to be done, the generals were actually seated on the train, when Shaler called again, great excitement in his voice. He and Porfirio Meléndez had just succeeded in getting Colonel, Torres to agree to embark on the Orinoco, a Royal Mail steamer that had come in the day before. The price, Shaler told Prescott, would be $8,000. Prescott had only to get the money from the junta and he, Shaler, would pay Torres out of the railroad’s safe and the troops could start their evacuation immediately.

Ordering one of the others to hold the generals until he got back, Prescott rushed out of the depot and took a carriage back to Cathedral Plaza where he found Amador, Boyd, and Arango. The only available cash, the three said, had been given out already to Huertas’ troops, but the Brandon bank would vouch for whatever was necessary. Not wanting to lose a minute more than necessary, Prescott raced back to the phone, called Shaler, and told him he had the money. Fifteen minutes later Shaler called back and said the Colombian troops were just beginning to go on board the Orinoco.

Commander Hubbard, as he later testified in Washington, had had no part in the bargain struck with Torres. Shaler and Porfirio Meléndez had done all the talking, and Torres, as Shaler acknowledged, had agreed to their offer only after Shaler assured him that five thousand American troops were about to arrive. Then, at 6:20, as if on cue, the Dixie had been sighted on the horizon.

The $8,000 for Torres was carefully counted out in the railroad office by the company’s cashier, a Mr. Wardlaw, and by Joseph Lefevre, a local resident who was later to become Minister of Public Works for the new Republic of Panama. The money, all in American twenty-dollar gold pieces, was put in two sacks and was carried out the door.

The only snag had occurred just as the troops were crowding onto the wharf beside the Orinoco. The local agent for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company had suddenly specified cash in advance for their passage to Cartagena. Shaler told him there was not money enough left in the railroad safe, but not to worry, that whatever the cost it would be covered soon enough. Citing various regulations, the agent at first refused, then said he would clear the ship if Shaler and Hubbard put their signatures on a voucher for the passage money, which came to something over É1,000. Both men signed their names, and as a final gesture, Shaler sent Torres two cases of champagne.

At 7:05, while the troops were still going aboard, the Dixie anchored in the harbor. It was pitch dark by this time and raining very hard. At 7:35 the Orinoco cast off and steamed away, and in less than an hour four hundred Marines under Captain John A. Lejeune had landed.

The formal proclamations were read the following morning in front of the Colón prefecture. “We separate ourselves from our Colombian brothers without hatred and without joy,” Porfirio Meléndez read from the declaration of independence, but the joy of the crowd was unmistakable. As a gesture of gratitude, Meléndez then asked Major William Black, the Walker Commission officer, to raise the new flag.

In Panama City that same morning, Senor Don Eduardo Ycaza, who had been appointed paymaster by the junta, began writing checks drawn on the Brandon bank–$30,000 to Huertas, who was to get another $50,000 later on (why he wound up with $80,000 all told, rather than the $65,000 originally promised, has never been explained); $35,000 for General Varón of the Padilla, $10,000 each for Captain Salazar, who had handled the actual arrest of the generals, and several other of Huertas’ officers whose loyalty was deemed important.

Tobar and his generals, who had been returned to police headquarters, were again released and transported by train to Colón to await passage on the next ship to Cartagena.

Cables to Secretary of State Hay were composed and sent in the meantime, one from Arango, Arias, and Boyd, the other from Vice-Consul Ehrman. The authority of the new republic, the cables said, had been established and enthusiastically received throughout the entire Isthmus (in fact no news of the uprising had as yet reached several important parts of the interior), and Philippe Bunau-Varilla had been appointed “confidential agent” in Washington.

The reply came that afternoon. It was dated November 6–12:51 P.M. The United States government had formally recognized the new Republic of Panama.

III

It had been fifty-seven years since Benjamin Bidlack had signed the treaty at Bogotá, fifty-five years since the United States Senate had confirmed the treaty, fifty-one years since the first trains had begun rolling on the Panama Railroad. And in all that time, throughout the entire second half of the nineteenth century, there had been no serious misunderstandings as to the critical agreements of the treaty contained in Article XXXV. In no way was the arrangement to impair Colombian sovereignty over the Isthmus; Colombia was to remain the sole protector of the Isthmus and of the isthmian transit against domestic obstruction. The clear specific intent was to safeguard for Colombia its sovereignty in perpetuity, a guarantee for which Colombia had been willing to grant to the United States the right to create an isthmian transit–rail or canal. The United States was obligated to maintain order only when requested by Colombia and, as President Cleveland once stated, “always in maintenance of the sovereignty of Colombia.”

“The purpose of the stipulation [Article XXXV],” Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, had declared in 1865, “was to guarantee the Isthmus against seizure or invasion by a foreign power only. It could not have been contemplated that we were to become a party to any civil war in that country by defending the Isthmus against another party.” Concerning Colombia, the United States desired nothing more, Seward wrote, than the enjoyment of “complete and absolute” sovereignty, and if that were “assailed by any power at home or abroad,” the United States would be ready to cooperate with Colombia to “maintain and defend” its sovereignty.

The same or similar policy had held under subsequent administrations in Washington, including three illustrious Republican secretaries of state–Hamilton Fish, William Evarts, and James G. Blaine. Secretary Fish, for example, had on one occasion notified the American minister at Bogotá that the treaty of 1846 “has never been acknowledged to embrace the duty of protecting the road [the Panama Railroad] . . . from the violence of local factions . . . it is . . . the undoubted duty of the Colombian Government to protect it [the railroad] against attacks from local insurgents.”

Thus the secret orders cabled to Commander Hubbard from the Navy Department, November 2–to prevent the landing of any armed force “either government or insurgent”–had been contrary not only to the spirit and intent of the treaty but to long-established policy and precedent. Colombia, the sovereign, was to be denied the right to land its own troops on the pretext that the United States was obligated to maintain “free and uninterrupted transit” on the railroad. In addition, the orders had been issued when there was not a sign of disturbance as yet anywhere on the Isthmus, when no revolution had even been declared, let alone physically set in motion.

Since General Tobar and his troops had already landed by the time Hubbard actually received the November 2 order, the United States, of course, had still done nothing out of line up to the moment when Hubbard took charge of the railroad. It was at that point, early on the morning of November 4, that American armed power had become an actual, rather than symbolic, factor in the plot, and at that point there was still no sign of trouble in Colon–no mobs gathered, no guns brandished–and nothing whatever had put the railroad or its operations in jeopardy. Neither had there been the least sign of an uprising in Colón even as Hubbard and his small force faced Colonel Torres from within their barricaded warehouse. No local patriots had rushed to help Hubbard, it should be further noted; the only violence threatening at Colón was between the Colombian troops and the American sailors.

Hubbard had taken command of the railroad because those were his orders. Indeed, as would be revealed afterward, Washington had been so anxious that he understand this that on November 3 two cables ordering Hubbard to take the railroad and keep the Colombian troops bottled in at Colón were sent to Consul Malmros from Washington, and another to Vice-Consul Ehrman at Panama City. The first of these cables, signed by Acting Secretary of State Francis B. Loomis, had been sent at 8:45 in the morning–or nine hours before the uprising took place at Panama City. (In fact, Acting Secretary Loomis was so overly anxious about things in general that a little later that same morning he cabled Ehrman, “Uprising on Isthmus reported. Keep Department promptly and fully informed.” Ehrman replied, “No uprising yet. Reported will be in the night. Situation critical.”) What settled the fate of the infant republic, however, was the arrival of the Dixie followed, all within a week or so, by the Atlanta, Maine, Mayflower, and Prairie (at Colon), and the Boston, Marblehead, Concord, and Wyoming (at Panama City). The ships had come from Acapulco and Kingston; the Maine, among the last to arrive, had been on maneuvers at Martha’s Vineyard. In several public appearances Theodore Roosevelt by now had mentioned “an old adage which runs, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’ ” By the big stick he meant a strong Navy and he was wielding it for the first time. The latest orders from Washington were to prevent the landing of Colombian troops anywhere within the Department of Panama, not merely in the vicinity of the railroad. On the Pacific side the Boston and the Concord patroled as far east as the Gulf of San Miguel. More American troops were landed, some were sent into the interior. Rarely had there ever been so neat and effective a practice of all that Captain Mahan had preached.

Without the military presence of the United States–had there been no American gunboats standing off shore at Colón and Panama City– the Republic of Panama probably would not have lasted a week. Rear Admiral Henry Glass, for example, would conclude after a careful appraisal of the republic’s capacity to defend itself that at the very most six hundred men might have been furnished with adequate arms. Taft, on his first visit to Panama a year later, would describe its army as “not much larger than the army on an opera stage.” Colombia, had it had free access from the sea, could have landed several thousand veteran troops on both sides of the Isthmus, just as the conspirators themselves had appreciated from the beginning. As it was, a Colombian force of some two thousand men did attempt an overland march through the Darien wilderness, but ravaged by fever, they gave up and turned back.

The orders that sent Hubbard ashore at Colón, that secured the railroad, that started ten warships converging on Panama from points several thousands of miles off, had all emanated from the State, War, and Navy Building and were accredited to the Secretary of the Navy William H. Moody or to Acting Secretary Charles Darling and to Secretary of State Hay or to Acting Secretary Loomis. But the responsibility for “the dynamic solution of the Panama Question” (in the words of John Hay’s biographer) rested entirely with Theodore Roosevelt, as Roosevelt himself would proudly acknowledge. “I did not consult Hay, or Root [Secretary of war Elihu Root], or anyone else as to what I did, because a council of war does not fight; and I intended to do the job once for all.”

The American flag would “bring civilization into the waste places of the earth,” he had declared in one of his speeches earlier in the year. The burden of empire was to advance liberty and order and material progress. “We have no choice as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world,” he had told another cheering crowd at San Francisco. “That has been determined for us by fate. . . .” They were popular words and very like those in a novel that was to appear less than a year after Panama became a republic– Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s tale of a Latin-American revolution and of the self-deceptions men work with the words they summon to deceive others. “‘We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not,’ ” a San Francisco financier remarks early in the story.” ‘The world can’t help it–and neither can we, I guess.’ ”

On the morning of November 3, the morning General Tobar and his tiradores came ashore at Colón, Roosevelt, as expected, had been at Oyster Bay, having taken the night train from Washington in order to vote in his hometown. On the second floor of Fisher’s Hall on Main Street, over a Chinese laundry, with reporters and well-wishers crowding about, he had cast his ballot for two New York state judges and an assemblyman. He was back at the White House shortly after eight that night and from then on was caught up in “the Panama business.”

Yet even as the crisis was still unfolding he had begun to plead his case, searching for exactly the right phrase or expression. In a letter to his fourteen-year-old son written the following night he explained that the United States had been policing the Isthmus for too long, that he had no intention “any longer to do for her work which is not merely profitless but brings no gratitude.” Two days later, the afternoon of the sixth, he was happily talking of a “covenant running with the land” on the Isthmus, an expression his friend Oscar Straus, author, lawyer, diplomat, had used over lunch to suggest a basis for an American claim on the canal zone. Vice-Consul Ehrman’s cable from Panama declaring the apparent success of the “Isthmian movement” had been delivered to the White House at 11:31 that morning; at 12:51, just seventy minutes later, Panama had been recognized by John Hay; and at virtually the same moment, Straus had produced what seemed the perfect legal ground. “Why that is splendid–just the idea,” Roosevelt exclaimed and he sent Straus straightaway from the table to “explain that to Hay.” On Roosevelt’s orders the following day, Hay assured reporters that “the action of the President is not only in the strictest accordance with the principles of justice . . . but it was the only course he could have taken in compliance with our treaty rights and obligations.”

“It is reported we have made a revolution, it is not so,” Roosevelt confided to the French ambassador, Jules Jusserand. “. . . it is idle folly to speak of there having been a conspiracy with us,” he assured Dr. Albert Shaw, one of his kitchen cabinet.

The faculty of Yale University was up in arms, meantime. The head of the American Bar Association spoke angrily of the “crime” committed. A torrent of outrage was unleashed in editorial columns.

The first news of the revolt had been given very little play in the papers because of the election news. The front pages of the New York papers, for example, the morning the story broke, were taken up almost entirely by the triumph of George B. McClellan, Jr., the Democratic candidate for mayor. But Panama was the lead story everywhere in the days that followed, and many powerful papers immediately commenced a blistering attack on the Administration, holding Roosevelt strictly responsible for what had happened. The New York Times scarcely let a day pass without some new assault on the President and his “act of sordid conquest.” Cartoons in the World by the brilliant Charles Green Bush showed a brutish Rough Rider, armed to the teeth, pouncing on Panama or glowering down the barrel of an enormous cannon at a helpless little Colombia.

But to the editor of The Northwestern Christian Adovcate Roosevelt wrote of the “oppression habitual” suffered by the people of Panama and insisted that “our Government was bound by every consideration of honor and humanity . . . to take exactly the steps that it took.”

The explaining, the affirmations of high purpose, would continue for weeks, months, indeed for years–in a special message to Congress, in private conversation and correspondence, in magazine articles, speeches, his memoirs.

The United States had a mandate from civilization to build the canal, he told Congress on January 4, 1904, in a message devoted entirely to the subject. “The time . . . for permitting any government of anti-social and of imperfect development to bar the work, was past.” The fundamental purpose–“the great design”–of the treaty of 1846, he claimed, had been to secure the construction of an isthmian canal; so therefore Colombia was violating the treaty, “the full benefits of which she had enjoyed for over fifty years.” No American warships had been present, no American troops or sailors, when the revolution took place at Panama City. At Colón, Commander Hubbard had acted with “entire impartiality toward both sides, preventing any movement, whether by the Colombians or the Panamanians, which would tend to produce bloodshed. . . . Our action was for the peace both of Colombia and of Panama.”

The people of the Isthmus, he said, “rose literally as one man.” (“Yes, and the one man was Roosevelt,” remarked Senator Edward Carmack, of Tennessee.) “I think proper to say, therefore, that no one connected with this Government had any part in preparing, inciting, or encouraging the late revolution on the Isthmus of Panama, and that save from the reports of our military officers . . . no one connected with this Government had any previous knowledge of the revolution except such as was accessible to any person of ordinary intelligence who reads the newspapers. . . .”

“We did our duty, we did our duty by the people of Panama, we did our duty by ourselves,” he wrote in one of his several magazine pieces. “We did harm to no one save as harm is done to a bandit by a policeman who deprives him of his chance of blackmail.” To talk of Colombia as a responsible power–“to be dealt with as we would deal with Holland or Belgium or Switzerland or Denmark”–was a mere absurdity, he informed a correspondent. “If they [the people of Panama] had not revolted, I should have recommended Congress to take possession of the Isthmus by force of arms . . .”

His action had been the farthest thing from impulsive, he would stress in a long chapter in his Autobiography. Nine-tenths of wisdom was to be wise at the right time; his whole foreign policy, he wrote, had been based on “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis” and Panama was “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs.” Colombia had proved itself utterly incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus; Colombia had no right to block a passageway so vital to the interests of civilization. For reasons of national defense no further delays could be tolerated. He had been prepared to act; no blood-shed had resulted. “From the beginning to the end our course was straight-forward and in absolute accord with the highest standards of international morality. Criticism of it can come only from misinformation, or else from a sentimentality which represents both mental weakness and a moral twist.”

John Hay lent his support, sounding more and more like Theodore Roosevelt. “Some of our greatest scholars, in their criticisms of public life, suffer from the defect of arguing from pure reason, and taking no account of circumstances,” he wrote to a member of the Yale faculty. “It was a time to act and not to theorize . . .” An attempt would be made by Hay’s admirers to establish that he had been “disgusted” with all that went on and that on the pretense of poor health he had taken no active part; but the claim was without support and Hay himself, publicly and in private, remained “as emphatic and free from doubt about our Government’s course” as the President.

Others in the Cabinet fell into line, without apparent qualm, nor with anything approaching Roosevelt’s solemn air of righteousness. Attorney General Knox, having been asked by Roosevelt to construct a defense, is said to have remarked, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.” At another point, during a Cabinet meeting, Roosevelt talked of the bitter denunciations in the press, then entered into a long, formal statement of his position. When he had finished, the story goes, he looked about the table, finally fixing his eye on Elihu Root. “Well,” he demanded, “have I answered the charges? Have I defended myself?”

“You certainly have, Mr. President,” replied Root, who was known for his wit. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”

But years later, on March 23, 1911, at Berkeley, California, at the climax of a speech before eight thousand people in the Greek Theater at the University of California, Roosevelt, in academic gown, was to make the remark that would undo virtually all of his other utterances concerning his “most important action” and that would be remembered afterward, by critic and admirer alike, as the simplest and best explanation of what the Panama revolution came down to. The speech, until that point, had been a heartfelt call to the youth of the Pacific slope to carry on with the high courage and purpose of the vanishing pioneers. And the audience had been profoundly stirred. Then his mood had shifted:

The Panama Canal I naturally take special interest in because I started it. [Laughter and applause.’]

There are plenty of other things I started merely because the time had come that whoever was in power would have started them.

But the Panama Canal would not have been started if I had not taken hold of it, because if I had followed the traditional or conservative method I should have submitted an admirable state paper occupying a couple of hundred pages detailing all of the facts to Congress and asking Congress’ consideration of it. In that case there would have been a number of excellent speeches made on the subject in Congress; the debate would be proceeding at this moment with great spirit and the beginning of work on the canal would be fifty years in the future. [Laughter and applause.]

Fortunately the crisis came at a period when I could act unhampered. Accordingly I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me. [Laughter and applause.]

“I took the Isthmus” was an expression of the kind that came naturally to him, “the kind of exaggeration that he liked to make,” as Root observed. It was what Hay called “a concise impropriety,” like “We want either Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” the famous declaration made during the Moroccan kidnapping incident in 1904 (a statement Hay himself had actually written). It was also, in its fashion, as misleading and as self-congratulatory as some of the other things he said in his defense, since it seemed to dismiss out of hand the contributions of Amador and his fellow revolutionaries, not to mention the railroad personnel, or Cromwell, or General Esteban Huertas and his garrison, or Philippe Bunau-Varilla. “I took Panama because Bunau-Varilla brought it to me on a silver platter,” Roosevelt is supposed to have remarked privately, which would be a more accurate summation.

But primarily, questions of morality aside, it was a mistake to have implied a deliberate, master strategy conceived and directed from the Oval Office. Tremendous effort would be made by newspaper reporters and latter-day historians to prove that Roosevelt had told Bunau-Varilla what to do, that Amador too had actually gone to Washington in secret and had been briefed by both Roosevelt and John Hay, that the money for the junta had been supplied, as Amador believed to be the case, from Washington. But no solid evidence, no evidence of any kind, was ever found to support these charges. And in fact one need only review the steps by which the plot unfolded to see how very tenuous it all had been and how many critical turns were determined by the individual responses of people about whom Theodore Roosevelt knew nothing.

Had James Shaler not pulled the signal cord when he did, had Señora Amador failed to fire her husband’s flagging resolve, had the Colombian general Tobar been less concerned over his injured dignity, had he gone peacefully to Colón and merely remained there quietly with Torres and the troops, had any of a dozen small but critical developments gone differently, Theodore Roosevelt’s ships would have arrived to find a wholly different situation and in all probability there would have been no new Republic of Panama either to proclaim or to protect. If American sea power had settled the issue on the instant, made Panama an immediate fait accompli, it is equally obvious that belief in an American involvement far in excess of reality was for the actual conspirators the vital sustaining force: what Amador and his compatriots believed the situation to be–their mistaken impressions as a result of the arrival of the Nashville–was far more important than were the facts of the situation. An enormous gamble with far-reaching, immensely vital consequences was made by a variety of participants, and by all ordinary rules of chance the story should never have come out as it did. But as Conrad also observed in Nostromo, “Men of affairs venture sometimes on acts that the common judgment of the world would pronounce absurd; they take their decisions on apparently impulsive and human grounds.”

Roosevelt’s haste, his refusal–his inability–to see the Colombian position on the treaty as anything other than a “holdup,” were tragically mistaken and inexcusable. It seems certain that with a modest amount of good will and patience the issue with Bogotá could have been resolved to the satisfaction of both sides; another six months’ delay would have mattered little. In truth he was doing no more than to guarantee that the Compagnie Nouvelle received its full $40,000,000 –which would lead to the charge that he was protecting the French investment because certain of his friends and relatives were secret stockholders, a charge that would later precipitate a sensational lawsuit. In 1908 Roosevelt had the government prosecute Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the World, for libel, but the court found that though there were “many very peculiar circumstances about . . . this Panama Canal business,” Roosevelt had no case against the World. And since there was not a shred of evidence to support the charge against Roosevelt, the whole furor came to nothing.

For Colombia, already crippled by a costly civil war, Roosevelt’s “most important action” meant the loss of what since the days of Bolívar had appeared to be its most valuable natural treasure, the Isthmus, with its unique geographic position “between two oceans.” It meant also the loss of the $10,000,000 lump sum that was to be paid by the United States, the $250,000 annual payment by the Panama Railroad (for decades a crucial part of the national income), and the $250,000 annual payment that was to be forthcoming from the United States as part of the canal agreement. There were riots in Bogotá; desperate offers were to be made by special Colombian emissaries dispatched to Washington, including an offer to accept the treaty as it stood, which served only to satisfy the Administration conclusively that the earlier rejection of the treaty had been an outrageous act of extortion.

The damage done to American relations with Colombia, indeed with all of Latin America, was enormous, just as John Tyler Morgan had prophesied. As an American minister at Bogotá, James T. Du Bois, would write in 1912, the breach worsened as time passed.

By refusing to allow Colombia to uphold her sovereign rights over a territory where she had held dominion for eighty years, the friendship of nearly a century disappeared, the indignation of every Colombian, and millions of other Latin-Americans, was aroused and is still most intensely active. The confidence and trust in the justice and fairness of the United States, so long manifested, has completely vanished, and the maleficent influence of this condition is permeating public opinion in all Latin-American countries, a condition which, if remedial measures are not invoked, will work inestimable harm throughout the Western Hemisphere.

“I fear,” declared a much embittered John Tyler Morgan on the floor of the Senate, “that we have got too large to be just and the people of the country fear it.” But in fact the people of the country were generally well satisfied with what had happened, with the results –and with Theodore Roosevelt.

* According to John Bigelow’s private journal, Bunau-Varilla had actually received a letter from Obaldía leaving no doubt as to his sympathy with the planned revolt.

* Tobar, as it happens, was well supplied with cash. Knowing that the national treasury at Panama was virtually empty, he had had the foresight to bring some $65,000 in American money to meet his own payroll and that of the local garrison.

14
Envoy Extraordinary

I had fulfilled my mission . . . I had safeguarded the
work of the French genius; I had avenged its honor; I had served France.

–PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA

I

The newly designated “confidential agent” of the Republic of Panama –a citizen of France who had not laid eyes on Panama for eighteen years–had waited out the birth of the nation in the privacy of his room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. On first word of success from Dr. Amador he had cabled an emotional reply hailing the infant republic (“small in extent but great in the part she will play”) and like proud fathers he and the banker Lindo had celebrated with a bottle of champagne in the Waldorf dining room.

Some anxious days followed, during which Amador made the expected request for $100,000 but made no mention of diplomatic powers for Bunau-Varilla, who grew “very suspicious” and refused to honor his side of their bargain. Cables went back and forth; for a time something went wrong with the code. Then at last came official word from Arango, Boyd, and Tomas Arias designating him “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary near the Government of the United States of America.” So by Sunday, November 8, he was installed in the new Willard Hotel in Washington, ready to embark on another chapter of “The Great Adventure,” and the next day at a private lunch at Lafayette Square, he was received by the Secretary of State, whose only concern was a dispatch in the morning papers saying that a special commission was about to leave Panama for Washington to make the canal treaty.

The situation was indeed perilous, declared Bunau-Varilla. “Mr. Secretary of State, the situation harbors the same fatal germs–perhaps even more virulent ones–as those which caused at Bogotá the rejection of the Hay-Herrán Treaty.” Before, there had been only the intrigues of the Colombians to contend with. Now, he said, to the intrigues of the Colombians would be added the intrigues of the Panamanians. (“Against my work formidable interests were up in arms,” he would confide in a memorable, melodramatic aside in his Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection. “Fortunately the firm basis of clearness and straightforwardness, which I had, throughout my life, taken for my acts, defied the most desperate assault.” The departure of a special commission from the Isthmus could only conceal a “maneuver” and Amador was a party to it. “I knew his childish desire to sign the Treaty.” It was the start of “a plot against me.”)

“So long as I am here, Mr. Secretary,” he said, “you will have to deal exclusively with me.” It was all John Hay wished to know.

The special commission sailed on the mail steamer City of Washington the following day, November 10. On the eleventh, Vice-Consul Felix Ehrman cabled the news of their departure to the State Department, explaining that they were coming only to assist Envoy Bunau-Varilla. “I am officially informed,” the cable said, “that Bunau-Varilla is the authorized party to make treaties.”

Who had thus informed the American vice-consul remains obscure, but in actuality the written instructions for Bunau-Varilla being carried north from Colón were quite to the contrary. It was quite clearly specified that the envoy extraordinary was to “adjust” a canal treaty, that all clauses in the treaty were to be discussed in advance with Amador and Boyd, that he was “to proceed in everything strictly in accord with them.”

Just seven days later, on November 18, 1903, came the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty. What had transpired within those seven days, the document that resulted, would evoke a whirlwind of controversy. The treaty would be the subject of one of the angriest debates in the history of the United States Senate and would remain a bone of contention between Panama and the United States for generations to come. This is what happened.

Between his Monday luncheon with John Hay and a ceremonial first call at the White House on Friday the thirteenth–the call that marked the formal diplomatic recognition of Panama by the United States-Envoy Bunau-Varilla made a flying visit to 23 Wall Street, the six-story, white-marble headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company. He saw the regal head of the firm in a glass-enclosed ground-floor office and in less than an hour an arrangement was agreed to. Morgan would serve as financial agent for the new republic. Morgan would supply an immediate loan of $100,000, which, for the moment, Bunau-Varilla would cover through the Lindo Bank. Morgan & Company was also to have the “exclusive faculty” (granted by Envoy Bunau-Varilla) of cashing the $10,000,000 indemnity to be paid by the United States. If Morgan’s friend and legal adviser Cromwell or Senator Hanna had played any part in this affair, as is quite possible, Bunau-Varilla never said so. He stressed only the wonder of a fledgling republic coming into its own not merely under the guardianship of the United States of America, but of the house of Morgan.

Returning to Washington with all speed, and accompanied now by his thirteen-year-old son, who he hoped might witness some of the history about to transpire, he had himself photographed in full diplomatic regalia–morning coat, striped trousers–and at 9:30 sharp the morning of Friday the thirteenth was at the State Department, ready to be escorted to the White House. Hay, however, insisted that first they pose together for an official portrait in his office. Chairs were drawn up to the end of a heavy, polished table. Thin patches of sunlight fell on a Brussels carpet. Hay, impeccable, stiff as a tailor’s dummy, his small white hands in his lap, sat in profile, gazing vacantly toward the windows; but Bunau-Varilla faced directly at the camera, his expression deadly serious, and cocked an elbow on the table. He was a man in perfect accord with his surroundings it would appear, and in perfect command of the situation.

They went down to the street, to Bunau-Varilla’s waiting carriage, where young Etienne Bunau-Varilla sat idly absorbed in the passing scene. Hay, as Bunau-Varilla would recall, “instantly had the charming idea of taking him to the White House,” so moments later the boy too was ushered into the Blue Room and was provided a chair as his father and the President read their formal declarations and then shook hands. “What do you think, Mr. Minister,” Roosevelt asked, “of those people who print that we have made the Revolution of Panama together?”

“I think, Mr. President, that calumny never loses its opportunity even in the New World. It is necessary patiently to wait until the spring of the imagination of the wicked is dried up, and until truth dissipates the mist of mendacity.”

He then introduced his son to the President, who was plainly pleased by the boy’s presence.

The ceremony was over. Panama, in the formal sense, had attained legal status in the family of nations. Not a Panamanian had been present; not a word had been spoken in Spanish. And as was understood by all who had participated, there remained only four days until the special commission from Panama was due in New York.

To much of the press it had been a bit of barefaced comic opera. “Doubtless M. Bunau-Varilla, whirled along on the torrent of his own tropical eloquence, came almost to believe in it, and was too impassioned to wink,” wrote The New York Times. “Neither, we may be sure, did the President yield to his human impulse to drop the eyelid.” A cartoon in the Sunday Times, titled “The Man Behind the Egg,” portrayed the envoy extraordinary in top hat and spats clutching French canal stock in one hand and with the other applying a candle marked “intrigue” to hatch the Panama chick for Theodore Roosevelt.

Having seen Roosevelt, Bunau-Varilla concentrated next on Jusserand, the French ambassador, writing formally that same Friday of Panama’s abiding love for France and requesting that he be received officially by the ambassador (that is, that France recognize Panama) at the soonest possible moment. Then–“in a purely private character”– he went to see Jusserand to assure him that all former contracts and concessions between Colombia and the French canal companies would be honored by the new government of Panama, that there would be no “intrigue against French interests.”

Two days later, on Sunday, a large Manila envelope was hand-delivered to the Willard Hotel for M. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Envoy Extraordinary for the Republic of Panama. It contained a copy of the Hay-Herrán Treaty with minor penciled modifications and a covering note marked “Most Confidential” from John Hay requesting that the document be returned with the envoy’s own suggestions at his earliest convenience.

Bunau-Varilla recalled later that he devoted the full day to appraising the treaty and the entire night as well, except for two hours’ sleep between midnight and two in the morning. By dawn he had decided it would not do. The “indispensable condition of success” was to write a new treaty “so well adapted to American exigencies” that it would be certain to pass in the Senate by the required two-thirds majority. A failure to obtain that two-thirds majority, he was convinced, could still mean a Nicaragua canal after all. The major difference in the new treaty must be in the share of sovereignty attributed to the United States within the canal zone.

Frank Pavey, his lawyer and long-time colleague in the Panama crusade, had already been summoned from New York and appeared at the Willard suite shortly after breakfast. A stenographer was installed in a room down the hall and the two men got to work. Bunau-Varilla drafted all the articles of the new treaty in longhand and in English. Pavey “corrected the literary imperfections, polished the formulas, and gave them an irreproachable academic form.”

Once during the day Bunau-Varilla hurried across town to tell Hay what was going on, and presumably Hay had no objections. By ten that night two finished copies of the treaty were ready. Despite the hour, Bunau-Varilla left directly to see Hay, but on reaching Lafayette Square found the big house in darkness. So it was not until the following morning, November 17, the same day the steamer from Colón was due at New York, that the treaty was delivered.

“It was with anxiety that I awaited a summons from the Department of State during the day . . .” Bunau-Varilla would remember. “It did not come. Mr. Hay made me no sign.”

To the Panamanian delegates, meantime, he sent a telegram of welcome through Joshua Lindo, instructing them to remain in New York, “to observe the greatest secrecy with regard to their mission,” and to say nothing to the newspapers.

By nightfall he and Pavey were still at the Willard waiting for word from Hay, not daring to leave their room. At ten, unable to stand the suspense any longer, Bunau-Varilla sent his own message. “I cannot refrain from respectfully submitting to you that I would like very much to terminate the negotiations . . .” he told Hay. “I feel the presence of a good deal of intrigues round the coming Commission and people hustling towards them who will find great profit in delaying and palavering and none in going straight to the end.

“I beg, therefore, dear Mr. Secretary, that we should fulfill our plan, as originally laid, to end the negotiations now.”

The answer, by return messenger, was immediate: He could come over that night if he preferred. Bunau-Varilla left directly for Lafayette Square, where a “long conference” ensued, at the conclusion of which Hay congratulated Bunau-Varilla on his work. But whether Hay was actually ready to accept the treaty remained unclear to Bunau-Varilla, who ended the evening with what he intended as the plainest possible inducement to action.

“So long as the delegation has not arrived in Washington,” he declared, “I shall be free to deal with you alone, provided with complete and absolute powers. When they arrive, I shall no longer be alone. In fact, I may perhaps soon no longer be here at all.”

“As for your poor old dad, they are working him nights and Sundays,” John Hay was to tell his daughter in a letter. “I have never, I think, been so constantly and actively employed as during the last fortnight.” Nor, in truth, had he ever enjoyed himself quite so much. The breathless sense of motion, the hurried messages after dark, the extraordinary Frenchman with the waxed mustache, were all the stuff of an adventure tale, and so to Hay, a devotee of the form, a novelist himself, all wonderfully therapeutic. In the morning mail, that Tuesday the seventeenth, was a light-hearted note from Richard Harding Davis saying he had been about to write a novel telling how a foreign adventurer robbed Colombia of Panama. “The day I started to write the story,” said Davis, “Panama became a republic, and somebody owes me the money I lost on the story.”

Hay was also thoroughly satisfied–overjoyed one must imagine–at the treaty he had been presented. Though much of the wording was identical to that of his own Hay-Herrán Treaty, the privileges now granted to the United States were far more sweeping and advantageous to the United States than in the earlier pact. As Hay himself was to confide in a letter to Senator Spooner, the new treaty was “very satisfactory, vastly advantageous to the United States, and we must confess, with what face we can muster, not so advantageous to Panama. . . . You and I know too well how many points there are in this treaty to which a Panamanian patriot could object.”

The basic tenets were these:

The United States was empowered to construct a canal through a zone ten miles in width (in contrast to a zone of six miles in the Hay-Herrán pact). Colón and Panama City were not to be part of the zone, but the sanitation, sewerage, water supply, and maintenance of public order in these terminal cities were placed under United States control. Further, four little islands in the Bay of Panama–Perico, Naos, Culebra, and Flamenco–were granted to the United States and the United States had the right to expropriate any additional land or water areas “necessary and convenient” for the construction, operation, sanitation, or defense of the canal. In return the United States guaranteed the independence of Panama.

The French canal company was granted the right to transfer its concessions and property (including the Panama Railroad) to the United States and the compensation to Panama was to be the same as offered earlier to Colombia–$10,000,000 on exchange of ratifications and an annual annuity of $250,000 that would commence nine years later.

The most significant difference, however, between this and the earlier treaty was contained in Article III, which specified that Panama granted to the United States within the canal zone “all the rights, power and authority . . . which the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory . . . to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.” Though not the sovereign within the canal zone, the United States was to be able to act like the sovereign.

And instead of a one-hundred-year lease of the zone that would be indefinitely renewable, as in the Hay-Herrán pact, the zone was to be held by the United States “in perpetuity.”

His one remaining obligation, Hay felt, was to have Root and Knox look the document over, and Leslie Shaw, the Secretary of the Treasury, all of whom he convened for lunch at Lafayette Square on Wednesday the eighteenth–that is, the very next day after Bunau-Varilla’s night visit.

Hay was “putting on all steam.” The lunch went smoothly, all were in agreement, and he hurried back to the State Department and “set everybody at work” drawing up final drafts. To Bunau-Varilla he sent a one-sentence note requesting that he call at his house at six that evening and either Hay or his stenographer was sufficiently excited to put the wrong date on the note.

Bunau-Varilla arrived at Hay’s front door at the hour stated and it was not a moment too soon, as he had just learned from Joshua Lindo that Amador, Boyd, and Arosemena had departed from New York and were due in Washington in a matter of hours.

When reporters outside Hay’s house asked the envoy if he was there to sign the treaty, the reply was that he did not know.

He was received with inordinate solemnity, the Secretary now addressing him as “Excellency.” It was his wish, Hay said, providing his Excellency was in agreement, to sign the treaty to permit the construction of the interocean canal. Bunau-Varilla, responding in similar tone, said he also was fully prepared to sign–“at the orders of Your Excellency.”

They then went over the document, the text of which, with the exception of only a few small alterations, was that submitted by Bunau-Varilla. In Article II, he had used the expression “leases in perpetuity” to describe American control over the canal zone. Hay preferred to have it read “grants to the United States in perpetuity the use, occupation and control . . .”

“You see,” said Hay, “that from a practical standpoint it is absolutely synonymous.” No other substantive change had been suggested.

“If Your Excellency agrees to it the Treaty will now be read and we will then sign it.”

Bunau-Varilla without hesitation agreed and suggested that the reading be “abridged as far as possible.” Time was very much on his mind. They had been together now for approximately forty minutes.

According to Hay’s letter to his daughter, it was exactly seven o’clock when they signed “the momentous document.” They were in a small drawing room with blue walls overlooking the square and the lights of the White House. It was two years to the day, Hay noted, since the signing of the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Bunau-Varilla had brought no seal with him, so Hay gave him a choice either of his own signet ring (a ring, as Hay explained, that Lord Byron had worn the day he died) or a ring with the Hay family arms. For Bunau-Varilla it was the one difficult decision of the hour and, as he later stressed, “I had not a long time to think it over.” He chose the family seal.

The pen was dipped in an inkwell that had once belonged to Abraham Lincoln. Bunau-Varilla signed first, in a small, rapid, controlled hand, just beneath the final line of the pact: “Done at the City of Washington the 18th day of November in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and three.” Then Hay affixed his own large, clear signature, and with a few final words presented the pen to the envoy extraordinary.

“We separated not without emotion,” Bunau-Varilla would recall, “and I hastened back to my hotel . . .” In another two hours he was at the railroad station to greet “the travelers with the happy news!”

He was standing on the platform as the Panamanians stepped off the train and his first words were these: “The Republic of Panama is henceforth under the protection of the United States. I have just signed the Canal Treaty.”

According to Bunau-Varilla’s own account, Amador looked as though he was about to faint. Federico Boyd, again according to Bunau-Varilla, was no less able to mask his “consternation.” But as the story would be told later in Panama, considerably more than consternation was expressed. The Panamanians had been by stages incredulous, indignant, then livid with rage. Federico Boyd is said to have hit Bunau-Varilla across the face.

In the days that followed, Boyd kept insisting that Bunau-Varilla had acted without authority, illegally, specifically contrary to his written instructions. Bunau-Varilla, with marked impatience, assured him that any such protestations were quite pointless, “as everything is finished.”’

The treaty had only to be ratified by the United States Senate and by the government of Panama, and Bunau-Varilla was determined to obtain immediate ratification from Panama, before the treaty went to the Senate, a move the three Panamanians absolutely refused to be party to. He warned that a special mission from Bogotá was expected in Washington at any time to treat with the Americans and that the surest guarantee against any possible trouble was to confront that mission with a ratified treaty. He took Amador and Boyd to see Hay, trusting to the conciliatory effect of the old diplomat’s grace and courtesy, and Hay even went so far as to promise a supplementary treaty to correct any possible defects. But it was all to no avail. They were without authority to act on the treaty, the Panamanians told the American Secretary of State; nor would they retreat from that position when, after leaving the State Department, Bunau-Varilla accused them of bad manners and warned that they had made a “decidedly bad impression” upon the Secretary.

So once again the kinetic Frenchman decided he must remove matters from “inexpert hands” and place them in his own, and it was this next phase of his activities, more even than the hurried signing of the treaty, that would be regarded in Panama as his great act of treachery.

Though he and the three Panamanians were barely speaking by this time, it was agreed among them that the actual treaty would be sent to Panama on the City of Washington when the ship sailed the following Tuesday, and that they would all convene in New York to officiate over the placing of the document safely on board.

Bunau-Varilla, however, left Washington before the others and on Saturday, November 21, without consulting any of them, he sent the entire text of the treaty by cablegram to Panama’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. F. V. de la Espriella. He informed the minister that the commission had behaved very poorly before American officials and that Panama’s sudden caution and unwillingness to cooperate were proving an embarrassment to the government in Washington, which was being condemned by its political enemies for having acted with undignified haste in recognizing Panama. He wanted immediate ratification of the treaty by Panama and “the immedate expedition of telegraphic instructions” so that he might inform Washington. The treaty, he warned, would not be sent to the Senate until Panama did its part.

The reply from Minister de la Espriella did not reach Bunau-Varilla at the Waldorf until Monday night and it was negative. Amador and Boyd, he was certain, had intervened, had cabled Panama to ignore his advice and to give no sanction to his treaty.

Nonetheless, they all convened as agreed the following morning in Bunau-Varilla’s usual room, Number 1162, where, he reminded them, their liberation had been prepared. The treaty was placed in an envelope, the envelope was wrapped in the flag of Panama and was placed in a small safe filled with cotton. The safe was sealed; then in a body they went out the door with it.

When the City of Washington sailed that afternoon, the safe was on board and Bunau-Varilla was on his way back to Washington. He had decided, he later explained, “to shake off the web which I felt was being woven about me.”

The evening of the twenty-fifth, he sent a 370-word cable to Minister de la Espriella that struck an entirely new note of fear. If the government of Panama failed to ratify the treaty immediately upon the treaty’s arrival at Colón, then the almost certain consequence would be an immediate suspension of American protection over the new republic and the signing of a canal treaty with Bogotá.

Possibly, as would be suggested, John Hay had had something to do with this astonishing message. Bunau-Varilla never implied as much, but Hay was to remark later in a letter to Senator Cullom that “we” insisted on immediate ratification.

In any event, it was the ultimate knife at the throat and wholly spurious. The notion that Roosevelt would abandon Panama at this point, that he would leave the junta to the vengeance of Colombia, that he would now suddenly turn around and treat with Bogotá, was not simply without foundation, but ridiculous to anyone the least familiar with the man or the prevailing temper in Washington. Nothing of the kind was ever even remotely contemplated at the White House or the State Department.

“This time I hit the mark,” Bunau-Varilla was to exclaim. “The Government of Panama was at last liberated from the morbid influence of its delegation.” The following day, November 26, he received cabled instructions from Panama–from Arango, Tomas Arias, Manuel Espinosa, and Minister de la Espriella–to notify Washington officially that the treaty would be ratified and signed as soon as it arrived at the Isthmus.

The provisional government of Panama kept its pledge. The treaty was formally approved, unanimously and without modification, on December 2, less than one month after the revolution and just five days before Congress was due to convene in Washington.

The debate in the Senate began at once, with John Tyler Morgan and Hoar, of Massachusetts, a dogged anti-imperialist, leading the assault not simply on the treaty, but on the means by which Panamanian independence had been obtained and on the President’s conduct. As it was, however, for all the acrimony that filled the pages of the Congressional Record, comparatively little fault could be found in the treaty, even among those most inclined to oppose anything put forth by the Administration. In one long speech, for example, Senator Hernando de Soto Money, of Mississippi, an old ally of Senator Morgan’s and diehard champion of the Nicaragua route, conceded that the treaty “comes to us more liberal in its concessions to us and giving us more than anybody in this Chamber ever dreamed of having . . . we have never had a concession so extraordinary in its character as this. In fact, it sounds very much as if we wrote it ourselves . . .”

Support for the measure, moreover, was massive and led by Spooner, Cullom, and Lodge. The forthcoming Presidential election helped solidify Republican ranks. So to all practiced observers the outcome seemed foreordained. “The debates will be long and heated,” wrote Dr. Herrán, “but there is no doubt that the treaty will be finally approved.” The one missing element this time was Mark Hanna. Ill, exhausted from a successful campaign to make his friend Myron Herrick governor of Ohio, Hanna remained in his rooms at the Arlington Hotel, slowly dying.

In a letter written February 10, Roosevelt told his son Theodore, Jr., that Panamanian opposition seemed “pretty well over.” On the same day, Dr. Herrán closed the Colombian legation and notified John Hay that he was departing for home–“with crushed spirits and broken health,” as Herrán wrote to a friend. He would die soon afterward.

On February 15 Mark Hanna died at age sixty-six, and soon there-after, on February 23, 1904, the Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 66 to 14.

II

In Panama a National Constitutional Convention had convened in the capital city on January 15 and completed its labors in less than a month. The new constitution was generally in accord with that of the United States, but with some notable added provisions. Only the government could import or manufacture arms, for example. No president could succeed himself, nor could he be succeeded by any member of his family. Citizenship could be suspended for habitual intoxication.

The government was divided into three parts, the legislative, executive, and judicial, the delegates in the legislature and the president being elected by popular vote. And with the work of framing the constitution completed, the convention at once resolved itself into a National Assembly and elected Manuel Amador the first president. His inauguration took place in Cathedral Plaza on February 20, 1904, three days before Senate ratification of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty.

The nation over which the new government presided extended from the Costa Rican border on the west to Colombia on the east, where the precise location of the border line would remain undetermined and a rankling issue for years to come.

Since no complete survey of the country had ever been attempted, its total area could only be approximated. It was thought to be from 30,000 to 35,000 square miles. In fact, with the Colombian border resolved, Panama was something less than 30,000 square miles (29, 208, not counting the Canal Zone). So it was about the size of South Carolina, smaller than Portugal or Scotland, larger than Ireland or Sierra Leone. Its population in 1904 was estimated at 350,000, which was roughly the population of the District of Columbia.

From a strictly economic perspective, the future appeared grand beyond imagining. The long night at Panama, the years of economic stagnation since the demise of the Compagnie Universelle, was ended. The one significant, hopeful development in the local economy during the 1890’s had been in banana production, as a result of the systematic efforts of an American entrepreneur, Minor C. Keith. Though the origins of the entire banana trade dated back to the 1860’s when, as an experiment, small shipments were made from Colón to New York by a man named C. A. Frank, it was not until Keith began buying up land on Chiriquí Lagoon, west of Colón and established enormous banana plantations there, that production of the fruit on the Isthmus became a serious, large-scale enterprise. At Bocas del Toro, on Chiriquí Lagoon, once a tiny Negro village, thousands of acres were under cultivation and the population by the early 1900’s was perhaps nine thousand. Keith talked of eventual rail connections from Panama all the way to New York. He “saw into the banana future and builded for it,” in the words of one account. In 1899 he had joined forces with the Boston Fruit Company (which had plantations on Jamaica and Cuba) to form the United Fruit Company, which at its inception was the world’s largest agricultural enterprise. To many on the Isthmus it had seemed that the banana was to be Panama’s economic salvation.

But now construction of the canal promised the return of boom times, prosperity that would surely surpass even the French era. There would be all the commensurate demands for local goods and services, and payment this time in dollars. With the United States committed to the task, no one appeared in the least doubtful that it would be completed, that not very far off in the future, Panama was to be what Simon Bolivar had once prophesied, “the emporium of the universe.”

As a physician, Amador foresaw sweeping advances in sanitation and an end to centuries of plague. Panama could become a model for all the tropics.

On the more immediate level, his country was also commencing operations from the unique position of being wholly debt free. Instead of a national debt, Panama had what amounted to a national endowment in the form of the stipulated $10,000,000 payment from the United States. Of this some $750,000 was kept in hand as working capital; roughly $2,000,000 was applied at once to much-needed public works; while the major portion, approximately $6,000,000, was very profitably invested in first mortgages on New York City real estate, the arrangements for this being handled by Panama’s designated fiscal representative in the United States, J. P. Morgan & Company, and by Panama’s appointed New York counsel, William Nelson Cromwell.

First payment of the $10,000,000 was made on May 2, when Morgan & Company received a Treasury draft for $1,000,000, of which $200,000 was promptly shipped to the Isthmus. On May 19, two weeks after Panama formally transferred control of the Canal Zone to the United States, Secretary of the Treasury Leslie Shaw paid Morgan & Company the remaining $9,000,000, the greater part of which was to be retained in New York.

It was, however, the far larger financial transaction between Washington, New York, and Paris that most concerned the Roosevelt Administration, attorney Cromwell, J. P. Morgan, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, and the scores of others involved on two sides of the North Atlantic.

The purchase of the French holdings at Panama was the largest real-estate transaction in history until then. The Treasury warrant for $40,000,000 made out to “J. Pierpont Morgan & Company, New York City, Special Dispensing Agent,” was the largest yet issued by the government of the United States, the largest previous warrant having been for the $7,200,000 paid to Russia for Alaska in 1867. Participation by the house of Morgan had been agreed to by both the buyer and the seller and in late April, prior to receipt of the Treasury warrant, J. P. Morgan sailed for France to oversee the transaction personally. His bank shipped $18,000,000 in gold bullion to Paris, bought exchange on Paris for the balance, and paid the full sum into the Banque de France for the account of the Compagnie Nouvelle and the liquidator of the Compagnie Universelle. On May 2, at the offices of the Compagnie Nouvelle on the narrow, little Rue Louis-le-Grand, the deeds and bills of the sale were executed. On May 9 in New York the United States repaid the $40,000,000 to the house of Morgan. Morgan’s fee for services, charged to the Compagnie Nouvelle, was $35,000.

With the $10,000,000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 to the Compagnie Nouvelle, the United States had spent more for the rights, privileges, and properties that went with the Canal Zone–an area roughly a third the size of Long Island–than for any actual territorial acquisition in its history, more than for the Louisiana Territory ($15,000,000), Alaska ($7,200,000), and the Philippines ($20,000,000) combined.

At the then exchange rate, $40,000,000 came to 206,000,000 francs. By an earlier private contract the directors of the Compagnie Nouvelle and the liquidator of the Compagnie Universelle had agreed that approximately 38 percent of any future canal profits would go to the Compagnie Nouvelle and 62 percent to the liquidator. Thus the Compagnie Nouvelle now received 77,400,000 francs; the liquidator, 128,600,000. So as it worked out, shareholders in the new company, the largest of whom were the penalty shareholders such as Eiffel and the brothers Bunau-Varilla, received 130 francs per share, which was the equivalent roughly to a 3 percent return on their investment over the ten uneasy years since the company had been organized. The Bunau-Varilla firm, for example, recovered all of its 2,200,000-franc stake ($440,000) in the Compagnie Nouvelle, plus a profit of about 66,000 francs, or $13,200.

When the liquidator distributed his 128,600,000 francs among some 200,000 claimants–all bondholders in the old Compagnie Universelle– the return on their investment came to approximately ten cents on the dollar. Stockholders in the old company received nothing.

Cromwell, who placed the value of his services to the Compagnie Nouvelle at $800,000, was forced to wait another several years as the fee was arbitrated in Paris. In 1907 the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell was awarded the sum of $200,000.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla, meantime, had returned to Paris and resumed his duties as publisher of he Matin. Three days after ratification of the treaty by the Senate he had submitted his resignation as envoy extraordinary, asking that in lieu of salary for his services the money be withheld by the new republic for the erection of a monument at Panama City to Ferdinand de Lesseps. His replacement, the new Panamanian ambassador to Washington, was former Governor Obaldía.

The Frenchman’s final official act had been performed on a bright February morning in Washington when he and John Hay formally exchanged the ratified treaties and bid each other farewell. It was, he wrote later, a deeply moving moment for both of them. And in his vaulting literary fashion he recalled a rush of private thoughts–

of all those heroes, my comrades in the deadly battle, worthy grandsons of those Gauls who conquered the Ancient World, worthy sons of those Frenchmen who conquered the Modern World, who fell in the struggle against Nature . . . of the shameful league of all the passions, of all the hatreds, of all the jealousies, of all the cowardices, of all the ignorances, to crucify this great Idea . . . of my solitary work, when I went preaching the Truth on the highways . . . of the untold number of stupidities I had had to destroy, of prejudices I had had to disarm, of insults I had had to submit to, of interests I had had to frustrate, of conspiracies I had had to thwart, in order to celebrate the Victory of Truth over Error and mark at last the hour of the Resurrection of the Panama Canal.

At the moment, however, looking at Hay, he had said only, “It seems to me as if we had together made something great.” The actual delivery of the canal works at Panama occurred early on the morning of May 4, 1904, and to the Panamanians, who adored ceremony and celebration, who remembered Cathedral Plaza festooned with palm branches and French flags, who remembered parades and banquets and Ferdinand de Lesseps prancing on horseback, it was a terrible disappointment and most unbecoming to the occasion. At 7:30 A. M. Lieutenant Mark Brooke met with half a dozen American officials and a duly authorized representative of the Compagnie Nouvelle at the company headquarters on the plaza, the old Grand Hotel. On being handed the keys to the storehouses and to the Ancon hospital, Lieutenant Brooke swiftly signed the receipt of the property and read aloud a brief proclamation. The transaction occupied no more than a few minutes. Scarcely anyone other than those present was aware of the event. Lieutenant Brooke had not even thought to invite President Amador.

Having shaken hands with the Panamanians and the French officials, the young officer raised the Stars and Stripes to the top of the hotel flagpole.

BOOK THREE

The Builders
1904–1914

15
The Imperturbable Dr. Gorgas

The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.

–SIR RONALD ROSS

I

“It is all unspeakably loathsome,” concluded a New York reporter who was among the earliest to arrive at Colon. That his countrymen could and would build the mighty ship canal, he, like his countrymen, took as a matter of course. Any contrary view would have placed him among an all but indistinguishable minority. Having tamed a continent, having achieved industrial supremacy, having embarked upon the great adventure of world leadership, the American people–some 80,000,000 strong–would now triumph where the French had failed so ignobly. “There is nothing in the nature of the work . . . to daunt an American,” the reporter insisted. “I have made three excursions over the canal route . . . and while I do not pretend to speak expertly of the engineering aspects of the problem, I should say that the building of the canal will be a comparatively easy task for knowing, enterprising and energetic Americans.”

Still, Colón was troubling. The Negroes lived in the most appalling fashion in rotting shanties propped on stilts in a swamp, “a morass, a vast expanse of black water covered with green scum.” There was no plumbing, not one sewer. The stench was like nothing in his experience; the nights were made “hideous” by the interminable din of thousands of frogs.

He described the poisonous mists rising over the Chagres River, mists quite visible from Colón in the early morning; and not wishing to appear ignorant of advanced medical theory, he wrote also of the mosquitoes. What conceivable chance, he asked, was there to make so vile a place safe for white men?

The article appeared in the New York Tribune the first week in February 1904, three months before Lieutenant Brooke raised the flag over the old French administration building, and three weeks before the President emphasized comparable concern to the chairman of his new Isthmian Canal Commission. “As you know, I feel that the sanitary and hygienic problems . . . on the Isthmus are those which are literally of the first importance, coming even before the engineering . . .” Roosevelt declared.

The tragic experience of the French was never far from mind. But more immediate and vivid was the memory of Cuba in 1898, when thirteen times the number of American troops killed by the enemy had died of yellow fever, malaria, and typhoid fever. For Roosevelt personally, Cuba had been an unforgettable lesson in the havoc disease could bring down on an expeditionary force. Cuba had been primarily the fault of bad or indifferent leadership in the field and “not too many gleams of good sense” in Washington. It was Roosevelt, following the capture of Santiago, who with Leonard Wood wrote the famous roundrobin letter to General Shafter, saying that the army must be moved at once or else perish of malaria. His own brigade, he said in a second letter, was “ripe for dying like rotten sheep.”

To head the new commission, he had turned again to old John G. Walker, who, as time would tell, was an unfortunate choice; he was as ill-suited for his responsibilities as had been the Secretary of war in 1898, Russell Alger, the cause of much of the anguish in Cuba. But the difficulties of mounting the task at Panama were compounded still more by the unwieldly composition of the commission itself, a matter over which Roosevelt had no say. The Spooner Act required that there be seven members, at least four of whom must be “learned and skilled in the science of engineering,” and of those four, two must be military officers (one Army, one Navy). All seven were to have equal authority.

Walker was the Navy man; for the Army there was General George W. Davis, “a fine old plains warrior” who had been a vice-president of the defunct Nicaragua Canal Construction Company. The civilian engineers were Professor William H. Burr (from the prior Walker Commission), Benjamin M. Harrod, Carl E. Grunsky, and William Barclay Parsons. The seventh member, Frank J. Hecker, was a businessman. On the surface it was a distinguished body. But none of them had ever organized a gigantic construction project. None was accustomed to handling problems of supply, labor, or overall planning on a scale even approaching what was now called for.

Nor had any of them had the least medical training. Congress had looked upon the canal as a problem of engineering construction exclusively. The presence on the commission of a physician or of someone experienced in sanitation had not been deemed essential, so none had been named.

That a sanitary officer was assigned to serve under the commission was due primarily to the insistence of Dr. William Henry Welch, of Johns Hopkins, who, during a personal call at the White House, had urged Roosevelt to tackle the sources of disease prior to every other effort on the Isthmus. Welch, one of the celebrated “big four” (Welch, Osier, Kelley, and Halsted) at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, went to the White House with a delegation of prominent physicians, plus, significantly, the chief of the Bureau of Entomology at the Department of Agriculture, Leland O. Howard. “We passed through a room crowded with persons waiting to see the President,” Welch recalled, “and I felt that he must begrudge every minute we occupied . . .” But Roosevelt afterward told Walker to find the very best medical man in the country to take charge of the hospitals and sanitary work at Panama, and although he did not tell Walker who that man should be, Walker was instructed not to make the appointment before consulting with Welch.

The result was the naming of an Army doctor, a former student of Welch’s, Colonel William Crawford Gorgas, who since the death of Walter Reed (of appendicitis in 1902) was known in professional circles as the outstanding authority on tropical disease. Gorgas was forty-nine years old, a courtly, white-haired man whose humorous eyes and “sunny” Alabama manner concealed a marvelous tenacity. Everyone had a good word for him. He was the son of the Confederate general Josiah Gorgas, the career soldier from Pennsylvania who became Jefferson Davis’ chief of ordnance; and so, for political purposes, the appointment helped offset a preponderance of Yankees on the commission.

The seven had been chosen rather hastily–too hastily, Roosevelt later conceded–during the last week of February. On March 4, he sent seven telegrams announcing the appointments and giving each recipient four days to drop what he was doing and convene at the White House. (Walker and General Davis were already in Washington; Burr and Parsons in New York, Hecker in Detroit, Harrod in New Orleans, Grunsky in San Francisco.) He was not interested in their politics, Roosevelt said at their first meeting. They had been picked solely on their reputations for integrity and ability. He had nothing to offer concerning the details of the work. “What this nation will insist upon is that the results be achieved.”

The commission set up headquarters in the Star Building on 14th Street and the position of chief engineer was offered to a Chicago railroad official named John Findley Wallace, an offer he accepted with the understanding that the job required residence on the Isthmus. His salary was to be $25,000 a year, which was more than that of any other government employee in 1904, with the exception of the President, and $10,000 more than he, Wallace, was receiving as general manager of the Illinois Central. William Gorgas’ annual income as an Army colonel was $4,000.

On May 9 came the executive order placing the commission under the direct supervision of the new Secretary of War, William Howard Taft.* The commission thus had full authority to proceed with the canal.

So six months following the Panama revolution, everything seemed set to go. To the Yale professors who still challenged the legality of his part in the revolution, the Harvard man in the White House responded with another of those spontaneous, eminently quotable retorts for which he had such a gift, wholly avoiding the issue but greatly pleasing the country: “Tell them that I am going to make the dirt fly!”

To William Gorgas there was no real problem about what had to be done at Panama. Nor does he appear to have had any doubt that he could succeed, his assumption being that full support would be forth-coming from the office in the Star Building. He would concentrate on yellow fever first. Malaria was the larger, more serious threat in his judgment, but an outbreak of yellow fever could result in panic and yellow fever was his specialty. Though the means by which both diseases are transmitted had become known, only yellow fever had been eradicated in any one plague spot as a result of such knowledge– in Havana in 1901–and he had been the man chiefly responsible.

The carrier of yellow fever, it had been determined, was the small, quiet, silvery household mosquito known as Stegomyia fasciata, exactly as the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had announced years earlier. As is presently known there are no fewer than 2,500 different species of mosquito (rather than 800-odd, as Finlay believed), and these belong to three important genera: Culex, Anopheles, and Aëdes. The Culex group includes the ordinary gray household mosquito found in northern latitudes (Culex pipiens pipiens). The Anopheles are the only known carriers of malaria and also transmit encephalitis, or sleeping sickness. The Aëdes aegypti is Stegomyia fasciata, as it was then called, the yellow-fever mosquito.

Credit for finding the cause of malaria, one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time, belonged to the English physician Ronald Ross, who had addressed himself to the problem alone in a remote field hospital in Secunderabad, India. Though malaria was a worldwide killer, flourishing in a broad zone on both sides of the equator, its greatest toll in human life was in Asia, and in India it was the arch destroyer, taking possibly a million lives a year. Ross, once the indifferent student, amateur poet and musician, had figured out the pattern by which the disease is spread, a pattern that seemed simple enough only after he had explained it. In the summer of 1897 he dissected under a microscope an Anopheles mosquito after it had fed on a malaria patient. In the insect’s stomach he saw the same circular cells that the French physician Laveran had discovered in Algeria in 1880, the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Besides, he determined that the cells were growing.

In his notebook that night he wrote a poem describing the moment. It was to be his only published verse, the last stanza of which became famous:

I know this little thing
  A myriad men will save.
O Death, where is thy sting?
  Thy victory, O Grave?

Not until the following year, however, was he able at last to prove the mosquito theory by locating the mosquito’s salivary gland and determining that the expanding parasite within the mosquito’s stomach eventually penetrates all parts of the mosquito’s body, including that gland. “The door is unlocked,” he wrote in an exultant letter to England, “and I am walking in and collecting the treasures.”

The solution was this: Anopheles, comparatively large, brown mosquitoes with little black dots on their wings, transmitted malaria only after having bitten someone already infected with the disease. The mosquito drew the blood containing the parasite, the parasite multiplied in the stomach of the mosquito, then moved to the salivary gland whence the parasite was delivered to the bloodstream of whomever the mosquito bit next. The insect was not the source, in other words, only the agent of conveyance. But this particular insect was the only means of conveyance. Furthermore, it could cause damage only when there was infected blood to feed on, when there were people about who were sick with malaria. So the way to stamp out malaria was not simply to get rid of the Anopheles mosquito, but to make it as difficult as possible for the Anopheles mosquito to get at anyone who had the disease.

The idea of preventing malarial epidemics by exterminating the Anopheles was first put forth in a letter addressed by Ross to the government of India on February 18, 1901. The following year Ross published a small book, Mosquito Brigades, explaining how such a campaign should be organized. By then, however, Gorgas and his Army doctors had demonstrated at Havana what almost no one had believed possible. In 1901, in one of the worst fever cities on earth, they had eliminated yellow fever in less than eight months and very nearly got rid of malaria. There had been nothing comparable in medical or military history to their war on mosquitoes.

Gorgas had played no part in determining the cause of yellow fever. As it happens, he had been one of the last of the Army doctors in Cuba to accept the mosquito theory. Like Ross he had even come to the practice of medicine itself without noticeable interest or enthusiasm and most of his professional life had been spent at “hitching post” forts, as far removed as Secunderabad from the salient discoveries and innovations that had so dramatically transformed medical science during the last part of the nineteenth century. In 1880, the year Gorgas finished his training at Bellevue, the germ theory of disease was still a subject of debate; from 1880 to 1900–the years that marked the emergence of Pasteur, Koch, Lister, the founding of Johns Hopkins– Gorgas was at such places as Fort Brown, Texas, or Fort Randall, South Dakota, attending to routine duty. Fort Randall, set in a boundless prairie, was seventy-five miles from the nearest railroad.

Gorgas became a doctor because of a boyhood determination to have a military career. As a child in Richmond he had seen Lee and Jackson confer with his father in the front parlor, and in the final winter of the war, as ragged Confederate troops filled the streets, he insisted, at age ten, on going barefoot. He received a bachelor of arts degree from the struggling little University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, where his father had been made president, but still determined to be a soldier, much against his father’s wishes, he tried for an appointment to West Point. When West Point turned him down, he chose medicine because it was the only way left to get into the Army.

Classmates at the Bellevue Medical College in New York would remember “Billy” Gorgas as a devout Christian, a careless speller, too poor to go home for vacations, the most likable man in the class, and “imperturbable.” It was at Bellevue that he encountered Dr. Welch, then in his late twenties, and after receiving his degree in June 1879 Gorgas spent another year as an intern at Bellevue Hospital.

His father, meantime, learning that his ambition remained unchanged, protested that the life of an Army doctor “would not be a life to look forward to as a permanent thing. It is not in the army that the sphere of a doctor is ennobling.”

To Gorgas later it would seem that the pattern of his life had a large, definable purpose, perhaps God-willed. It was as if every important turn had been designed to prepare him for one historic task. He was not a person to dwell overly on questions of cosmic destiny. Rather, genuine modesty was an important part of his considerable charm. “I am not much of a doctor,” he once remarked to a gathering of prominent physicians, “that is, I am not experienced in the care of the sick, and I am not very much of a military man, although I have been in the army service practically all my professional life.” But while he seemed incapable of taking himself seriously, he was intensely serious about his work and what it could mean to his fellow mortals.

To him the years at frontier outposts had been supremely invigorating. He had grown physically rugged, accustomed to riding out hardships and boredom of a kind to defeat other men. He learned discipline, acquired an unequivocating devotion to duty. His wife would recall nights when, wrapped in buffalo robes, he would set off in a sleigh in the midst of a North Dakota blizzard to deliver an Indian baby in a cabin sometimes thirty miles away. “Life like this was more than an education in medicine,” she would write.

The degree to which yellow fever had affected his career, his personal life, even his very existence, was quite uncanny. It was because of a yellow-fever epidemic at Mobile in 1853 that his mother and father first met. She was Amelia Gayle, daughter of a former governor of Alabama, who for her safety had been sent to stay with an older brother at Mount Vernon, a small town on high, dry ground to the north of Mobile and the site of a federal arsenal. Her brother, the company surgeon at the arsenal, lived next door to the young ordnance officer who was in command, Josiah Gorgas. The wedding was in December that same year, and William, the first of six children, was born the following year, October 3, 1854. The attending physician, as noted earlier, was Alabama’s pioneer yellow-fever specialist, Josiah Nott.

Gorgas’ own first test as a young officer in the Army Medical Corps was a yellow-fever outbreak in Texas. In 1882 he was assigned to Fort Brown, on the Rio Grande, close to the border settlement of Brownsville where the epidemic raged. “I am sending you the most progressive young surgeon under my command,” the surgeon general informed the post commander, and having set himself to work, Gorgas proved so very persistent, ignoring strict orders to keep away from the infected wards, that he was put temporarily under arrest.

Of particular concern as the epidemic worsened was Miss Marie Doughty, sister-in-law of the post commander, for whom little hope was given. A grave had been dug for her in the yellow-fever burial ground on an island in the Rio Grande and Gorgas had volunteered to go with the body and read the last rites. But then he too fell ill, nearly died, but recovered, as did Miss Doughty, with the result that they were convalescent at the same time and fell in love. She became the doctor’s wife following a visit to Tuscaloosa to meet his widowed mother, and since they were now permanently immune to yellow fever, he would be summoned repeatedly for special duty wherever the disease broke out.

He advanced in rank, to major by the time of the Cuban war, but preferred then, as later, to be called Dr. Gorgas. When the American forces occupied Havana in 1898, he was put in charge of the yellow-fever camp at the village of Siboney. One patient, recalling Gorgas’ efficiency and kindness, wrote that had it not been for him the death rate among the troops might have been twice what it was. But Gorgas was no closer to understanding the cause of yellow fever than he had ever been. When the situation at Siboney became critical, his only solution was to burn the town, along with all the medical supplies.

The great yellow-fever discoveries at Cuba, those later dramatized in Sidney Howard’s play Yellow Jack and in a movie made from the play, were the work of Gorgas’ superior officer, Dr. Walter Reed, who had taken his lead from Carlos Finlay. At the time the Americans moved into Havana, Finlay was still laboring to prove that Stegomyia fasciata –and only Stegomyia fasciata–was the yellow-fever carrier. And for all his persistence he had gotten nowhere. His carefully tended laboratory mosquitoes drew blood from diseased patients and were then permitted to attack the bare arms of willing victims. Yet no yellow-fever cases had ever resulted for Finlay. His notion that the mosquito had to be the transmitting agent was perfectly correct and like Ross in India he had hit upon it alone. What he did not know, what Reed and his staff were to demonstrate, was that Stegomyia fasciata transmits the yellow-fever parasite only according to a very particular time pattern, that the development of the parasite within the insect requires what is known as the period of “extrinsic incubation.”

For the mosquito to become infected it must suck the blood of the yellow-fever patient within the first three days after the patient has contracted the disease. Then once the mosquito has taken the blood, another twelve to twenty days must pass before the mosquito can transmit the infection. Finlay had simply been applying his infected mosquitoes too soon.

Determination of this critical time factor, a phenomenon that evaded not just Finlay but all previous investigators, had been made in Mississippi the year of the Cuban war by an aristocratic Virginian who was with the Public Health Service. Dr. Henry Rose Carter, like Gorgas, had been immunized by a previous attack of yellow fever and consequently made the disease a specialty. He had noted that often when a man developed yellow fever on board ship none of his shipmates became ill. He wondered if somehow there might be a period of delay, or incubation, at the source of the disease. So during an epidemic in Mississippi, he made a statistical study among isolated rural families, meticulously recording how many people–relatives, visitors–came near a yellow-fever patient, when, and with what result. What he found was that a yellow-fever patient could be visited without hazard so long as the visit was made within ten to twelve days after the patient became ill. But beyond that period, even after the patient had died and the body had been removed from the house, family or visitors were in mortal danger. Hence the sick man could not possibly be the source of contamination. Hence there had to be a period of “extrinsic incubation,” as Carter named it.

Carter’s findings were published two years later, in 1900, just as the Army Yellow Fever Commission under Reed arrived in Havana.* Impressed by Finlay, who volunteered to help in any way he could, and by Carter, who had been sent to Havana as a quarantine officer, Reed decided to concentrate on Stegomyia fasciata, to prove that yellow fever was not a filth disease. Gorgas, who remained positive it was, had been reassigned meanwhile to clean up the city, street by street, house by house.

Associated with Reed were Dr. James Carroll, Dr. Aristides Agramonte, and Dr. Jesse W. Lazear. Late in August, a few days after he had allowed a mosquito to bite him, Dr. Carroll fell ill with yellow fever, and though he recovered, his health was so damaged that he died a few years later. In mid-September, while placing mosquitoes on patients in a fever ward, Lazear saw a free mosquito of undetermined species land on his hand and he also purposefully allowed the insect to take its feed of blood. Five days later Lazear had what Gorgas described as one of the most violent cases of yellow fever he had ever attended. On September 25, the day Lazear died, he was in such wild delirium that it took two men to hold him in bed.

Convinced now of the truth of Finlay’s theory, Reed pressed on with further experiments proving conclusively that Stegomyia fasciata was the carrier, and that neither filth nor “fomites,” the term used for the soiled clothes or bedding of yellow-fever patients, had anything whatever to do with spreading the disease. For twenty nights, as part of one experiment, a doctor and three volunteer soldiers, confined to a one-room shack, slept in the soiled pajamas of yellow-fever patients, on beds reeking of black vomit and other excreta; and for all the discomfort of the experience, none of them suffered the least sign of illness.

Gorgas had been at the bedside of Carroll and Lazear. He had become a close friend of Finlay’s and knew Reed’s work to be of paramount importance. Still, he remained “unconvinced.” He did not believe mosquitoes to be even the principal cause, much less the only cause. There was only one way to determine whether Stegomyia fasciata was the carrier, he insisted, and that was to rid the city of the insect and see if yellow fever disappeared. Reed agreed in theory but is said to have told Gorgas, “It can’t be done.” Gorgas, no less doubtful of success, proceeded because “it was our duty to take precautions in this direction.”

His historic Havana campaign commenced in February 1901. The year before, there had been 1,400 known cases of yellow fever in the city. In 1901 there were 37 cases. But starting in October 1901 there were none. “For the first time since English occupation in 1762,” Gorgas wrote to Ronald Ross, “we have an October free from yellow fever, and malaria decreased more than one half.” In 1902 there was no yellow fever at all and deaths from malaria totaled 77, in contrast to 325 in 1900.

The techniques developed at Havana were what Gorgas intended to use on the Isthmus. However, as he had explained to Surgeon General Sternberg, there were considerable differences between the task at Havana and what had to be faced in a place such as Panama. Sternberg had been one of those in Washington who so badly underestimated the problems of disease when fighting the Cuban war. But he had also been responsible, at the war’s end, for establishing the Yellow Fever Commission. He was one of the very few to appreciate the vast significance of what Gorgas achieved at Havana, and it was he who decided that Gorgas must become the Army’s man on tropical disease. In particular, Gorgas was to prepare himself for a role in building the interoceanic canal, which both men had then assumed would be in Nicaragua. In 1902 Gorgas was sent to attend a world conference on tropical medicine at Cairo and to inspect the work being done on malaria at the Suez Canal according to precepts laid down by Ross. With Sternberg’s blessing, Gorgas also spent several months in Paris going over the medical reports and records on file at the offices of the Compagnie Nouvelle in an effort to determine as nearly as possible what the French experience had been at Panama. But Sternberg had since retired from active duty; it was John G. Walker to whom Gorgas had now to address his explanations and upon whom he became dependent for support.

II

Before leaving for Panama, Gorgas made an ardent appeal for proper supplies and sufficient experienced personnel to carry out his program. The commission deliberated and decided that for the time being considerably fewer personnel would suffice than what he had in mind and that the question of supplies required further study. So the advance party that landed at Colón in June 1904 consisted of a mere seven men, including Dr. Carter and one woman, an English nurse named Eugenie Hibbard, and they were forced to begin their campaign without benefit of even such essential supplies as wire screening and disinfectants. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say . . . when they landed at Panama to engage in the mighty task of ridding this jungle of disease, [they] had little more than their own hands and their own determined spirit to work with,” Marie Gorgas would recall.

The whole of the Isthmus, they found, was a “mosquito paradise.” The temperature, scarcely changing the year around, allowed constant breeding of the insects. A first inspection of Panama City revealed an abundance of Stegomyia in practically every building. Anopheles were still more numerous. By local custom, household drinking water was kept indoors in red earthenware jars, tinajas, within which Stegomyia larvae abounded. Mosquito larvae, or “wrigglers,” swarmed in the open cisterns and rain barrels beside nearly every building. It was the rainy season and innumerable pockets of water, perfect for mosquito breeding, collected everywhere–in large quantities along the old French diggings, in small quantities in the impressions left where railroad ties had been pulled up or in the hoofprints of cattle that grazed in an open field on Ancon Hill.

At Ancon Hospital, where Gorgas established his headquarters, there were no screens in the windows; plants in the surrounding gardens created by the French were still protected from umbrella ants by crockery rings filled with water. In the wards it was still the practice to set the legs of the beds in shallow pans of water. There was no yellow fever among the few patients in the wards, only malaria; but most of the hospital’s small staff–French Sisters of Charity, two French doctors, one priest–were also infected with malaria. After dark the mosquitoes were so thick in the wards that work had to be done in relays, one set of doctors or nurses using fans to protect those working. A nurse named Jessie Murdock, who arrived in July with a small contingent of American nurses, would tell how during night duty they wrapped themselves in bandages soaked in citronella.

At Havana the task had been confined to a comparatively small area and the success with malaria had been largely a side effect of the main campaign: the assault on Stegomyia had simply resulted in the destruction of most Anopheles as well. But Stegomyia and Anopheles are quite different creatures, just as yellow fever and malaria are quite different diseases, and here, at Panama, there was not one city but two, and fifty miles of jungle between. It was by considering the mosquitoes as predators more deadly than the most savage beasts of the jungle that Gorgas intended to solve the problem. Only by understanding the exact nature of the particular mosquitoes in question–their reproductive processes, feeding habits, flight range, and so forth–could he hope to destroy them.

Until the Cuban war comparatively little had been known about mosquitoes. It was not until 1895, for example, that a full account was published of even the common North American variety. The general impression was that all mosquitoes were more or less alike. At the time Reed and his co-workers identified Stegomyia as data as the yellow-fever mosquito, no studies had ever been made of the insect’s natural life history. So this too had been part of Gorgas’ task at Havana and consequently he and his associates had discovered astonishing peculiarities that were of enormous value.

Seen under the microscope, Stegomyia is a creature of striking beauty. Its general color is dark gray, but the thorax is marked with a silvery-white lyre-shaped pattern; the abdomen is banded with silvery-white stripes and the six-jointed legs are striped alternately with black and pure white. Among mosquitoes Stegomyia is the height of elegance.

Stegomyia is also, like the rat, a creature of human society. It survives by maintaining a close proximity to human beings. As among all mosquitoes it is only the female that bites–that is, only the female feeds on blood, while the male gets by on other liquids such as fruit juices and is quite harmless. For the female, blood is essential to mature her eggs. Though the female Stegomyia can feed on any warm-blooded animal, her decided preference is for human blood, and thus the whole life cycle of the insect must be maintained in close association with human society.

While all mosquitoes lay their eggs in water, the yellow-fever mos-quito is extremely particular about where the water is located and its condition. The female Stegomyia will deposit her eggs only in or near a building occupied by human beings and only in water held in some sort of artificial container such as an earthenware jar or a rain barrel. In addition, it is essential that the water be clean.

With such information available, all acquired during the work at Havana, the problem of destroying the yellow-fever carrier became infinitely more manageable. “Men who achieve greatness,” the brothers Mayo were to write in an essay about Gorgas, “do not work more complexly than the average man, but more simply. . . . In dealing with complex problems, with the simplicity natural to him he went directly to the point, unaffected by the confusion of details in which a smaller man would have lost himself.” At Havana the hopeless task of destroying all mosquitoes was reduced to destroying a particular mos-quito; then, once the natural peculiarities of that species were recognized, it was possible to reduce the task further still. The campaign would center on the insect’s method of propagation. The task, very simply, was to eliminate every possible opportunity for the female Stegomyia to deposit her eggs. Yellow fever was eradicated chiefly by ridding the city of all standing fresh water, or by sealing it off with wire screening or wooden lids, or with a skim of oil or kerosene, an idea first suggested for mosquito control in 1892 by the entomologist Leland O. Howard. (The oil not only discouraged the mosquito from depositing her eggs, but killed any larvae already in the water, since the larvae require air to survive.)

Thousands of adult mosquitoes had been destroyed in Havana by systematic fumigation of houses wherein yellow-fever cases had been found. Doors and windows had been sealed off with newspaper, room by room, and pans full of sulphur or powdered pyrethrum (a dried flower used as an insecticide) had been burned for an hour or more. But the main attack had been on water jars, barrels, cisterns, any stray bucket, tin can, or broken dish in which rainwater might collect. A card file had been made on every house and building within city limits; the city had been divided into sections and inspectors had been sent out daily to report on the Stegomyia-producing status of households within their districts. Water kept indoors for household use had to be covered. It had been a laborious, often thankless task, yet extremely simple in concept, and the results had been amazingly rapid.

The female Stegomyia lays anywhere from 35 to 120 minute black eggs and the maturation cycle from egg to larva to pupa to mosquito takes less than ten days. So with the campaign fully organized and in effect, Havana’s Stegomyia population diminished quite suddenly. Adult mosquitoes died off, of fumigation or of old age, after three or four weeks, and because Stegomyia has an extremely limited flight range (another crucial characteristic discovered by Gorgas and his people), few replacements migrated into the city from outlying villages. It was thus that victory over yellow fever had come so quickly and decisively.

Anopheles, the malaria mosquitoes, were quite different creatures and thus a wholly different kind of problem. Anopheles, to begin with, are not purely house-bred insects. The female, unlike her Stegomyia counterpart, will deposit her eggs in still water of any kind–any stagnant swamp, marsh, any clogged drain or ditch or mud puddle. Anopheles, therefore, are as much creatures of field or jungle as of the backyard. So while Stegomyia mosquitoes were always readily within range, their breeding grounds closely, neatly defined, Anopheles were literally everywhere, and in fantastic numbers, since the female deposits as many as two hundred eggs every ten days.

The sanitary measures taken at Havana–the clearing away of garbage and refuse, the installation of proper drainage systems plus the campaign on Stegomyia’s breeding grounds had had the effect of giving no mosquito, Anopheles included, much chance to propagate within the city limits. But what chance would there be at Colón with its swamps or along the canal line?

Malaria, not yellow fever, Gorgas stressed to his associates, was the problem upon which their success would ride or fall. Malaria, he emphasized, had accounted for the greatest loss of life during the French years. “If we can control malaria, I feel very little anxiety about other diseases. If we do not control malaria our mortality is going to be heavy.” Knowledge of the kind gathered at Havana on Stegomyia would now have to be gathered on Anopheles.

The initial question was which particular species of Anopheles to go after. “It was not known how many different species of Anopheles existed,” wrote Joseph Le Prince, one of Gorgas’ advance guard, “nor was it definitely known which of them were the important malaria carriers.” To Le Prince, who had also been Gorgas’ right hand at Havana, it was evident that “much investigative or pioneer work” was still called for.

We had no means of determining how seasonal changes would affect propagation, and the available data were unreliable. It was generally believed at that time that all mosquitoes traveled more or less with gentle air currents, but there was no positive knowledge of habits of flight, and the length of flight of Anopheles . . . was yet to be determined. It was not known if or how topography affected the distribution of species, whether Anopheles larvae thriving in small collections of water held by plants were of . . . importance, or whether certain species were confined to fixed geographical limits.

So while detailed information was being gathered and put on file concerning the whereabouts of Stegomyia larvae in Panama City, Anopheles larvae and pupae were being carefully taken from puddles and swamps along the canal line, scooped up in white-enameled dippers, poured into wide-mouthed jars, and carried back to a makeshift laboratory at Ancon Hospital. Live adult Anopheles collected in villages along the railroad could not survive the return trip, it was found, unless carefully protected from direct sunlight, rain, and strong air currents–an observation that was to have considerable subsequent value.

This preliminary survey disclosed the presence of Anopheles breeding grounds in or near every existing settlement, every abandoned camp built by the French. At a work camp at Culebra, a village of roughly five hundred Jamaicans, Gorgas found that every child he examined had a greatly enlarged spleen, a sign of chronic malarial infection. Every adult he talked to spoke of attacks of chills and fever within the preceding six months. On a hill above this same village a detachment of United States Marines was encamped, half of whom already had malaria. “The condition,” he wrote, “is very much the same as if these four or five hundred natives had smallpox, and our Marines had never been vaccinated.”

No one even tried to approximate the numbers of Anopheles present at any given point. Within the hospital compound itself their presence was phenomenal. On the panel of a single doorway one dutiful assistant counted fifty-four. Like Stegomyia, the Anopheles were easily recognized by their resting stance. In contrast to the common northern mosquito, which stands with proboscis and head crooked at right angles to its body, Stegomyia and Anopheles kept proboscis, head, and body on a straight line, but at an angle to the resting surface. When feeding on an arm or wrist, an Anopheles looked as though it were standing on its head.

To determine the time of day or night when the Anopheles would take blood, the men stretched out on cots in one of the wards, each man with a supply of pillboxes and a pocket watch. Every time a mosquito bit, or tried to, it was captured, put in a pillbox, and the date and hour were recorded on the box. The Anopheles, it was learned, would attack a human at rest at any hour, though the night hours were by far the worst. The life span of the insect seemed to be about a month and in that time the female required a meal of blood every two to three nights. Her bite did not cause any appreciable swelling, nor was the itch especially bothersome. Often a person was not even aware of being bitten by an Anopheles.

After a month or so, with only a few exceptions, all the small American force, Gorgas as well, had been down with malaria.

Time was the pressing concern. For although there were but one or two yellow-fever cases, and none serious, at the moment, that condition would change rapidly as soon as new human material became available for the Stegomyia fasciata– and thus the disease–to feed on. Gorgas’ analogy to explain the violent wave effect of yellow fever– the apparent absence of the disease followed by a sudden, vicious outbreak–was the exhausted fire wherein concealed embers lay in wait for fresh supplies of fuel. The arrival of several thousand nonimmunes would be equivalent to heaping on dry kindling: nothing much would happen at first; then the disease would catch; the carrier mosquitoes would infect ever more victims with the deadly parasite, thereby creating more diseased blood for still more mosquitoes to feed upon. Un checked, the disease would flare into a monstrous geometrical progression of death, taking hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives.

Were conditions on the Isthmus to remain as they were, and were upwards of twenty to thirty thousand men to be brought to Panama, as planned, then, Gorgas calculated, the annual death toll from yellow fever alone could run to three or four thousand.

The build-up of men and equipment was beginning. Every arriving steamer had its contingent of prospective carpenters, mechanics, file clerks, assistant engineers, all eager to be “in at the start at Panama.” General Davis, who had been named the first Governor of the Canal Zone, and Chief Engineer Wallace had arrived and had taken up residence in Panama City. Gorgas, still working with the same small staff, tried to explain the situation, the need for immediate decisions, for men and supplies, and he got nowhere.

In August Admiral Walker and several of the commission came for an inspection tour and Gorgas again made his case as explicit as he knew how. The admiral and his party departed, weeks passed, nothing happened. Gorgas’ cabled requests were answered evasively, if at all. Presently he was reminded by return cable that cables were costly and henceforth to use the mails.

III

The problem in essence was that Admiral Walker, Governor Davis, and several others on the Isthmian Canal Commission, as well as a very large part of the populace and its political leadership, did not seriously entertain the notion that mosquitoes could be the cause of yellow fever or malaria. To spend time and money chasing after mosquitoes in Panama would be to squander time and money in a most irresponsible fashion.

That the minds of men in such positions could be so closed in the face of all that had been learned and demonstrated in Cuba, not to mention the insistent warnings from Roosevelt and Welch, may seem inconceivable. In the conventional understanding of history, human advancement is marked by specific momentous steps: on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers fly in a heavier-than-air machine and at once a new age dawns; in a hospital ward outside Havana Dr. Jesse Lazear dies a martyr’s death and the baffling horror of yellow jack is at last resolved. But seldom does it happen that way. Ideas too have their period of extrinsic incubation, and particularly if they run contrary to what has always seemed common sense. In the case of the Wright brothers, it was five years after Kitty Hawk before the world accepted the idea that their machine could fly.

During the long hearings of the Morgan Committee in 1902, prior to the vote on the Spooner Bill, despite all the concern expressed over disease in Panama, the recounting of the French tragedy, the mosquito theory had not even been discussed. George Morison mentioned it once in passing, but without evoking the slightest interest among the others, who had been content to dwell on miasmatic fumes emanating from the rank isthmian landscape. No reference was made to the breakthroughs achieved by either Ross or Reed, nor was anything ever said of Gorgas’ demonstrated success at Havana. Yet all the efforts of the Yellow Fever Commission, all of Gorgas’ work, had been initiated by the Army, all the resulting reports had been published at government expense.

In the autumn of 1904, with the situation on the Isthmus unimproved, Gorgas returned to Washington to plead his case. It had been nearly four years since the epochal report of the Yellow Fever Commission. Ross had won the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his discoveries. A scientific congress held in Paris in 1903 had thoroughly reviewed Reed’s work and declared that the mosquito transmission of yellow fever was a “scientifically determined fact.” But to Walker, Davis, and their fellow commissioners, Gorgas was wasting their time. Walker’s word for the theory of mosquito infection was “balderdash.” Gorgas spent hours waiting in Walker’s anteroom, hours more with Walker going over the evidence in support of the theory. The correct procedure, Walker insisted, was to get rid of the garbage and the dead cats, paint the houses, pave the streets. In his zeal he even offered to give Gorgas a detailed set of rules to guide him in the work. Walker remained a bastion of integrity. The years he had devoted to the canal question, his study of the French disaster in particular, had convinced him that material wastefulness and graft were the gravest threats to American success at Panama. To Gorgas he remarked, “. . . whether we build the canal or not we will leave things so fixed that those fellows up on the Hill can’t find anything in the shape of graft after us.”

With Davis, who had returned briefly to Washington, Gorgas had no better success. “What’s that got to do with digging the canal?” was his rejoinder to Gorgas’ plan. Davis professed great friendship for Gorgas, then in tones that Gorgas later described as kindly and patient, Davis tried to “set him right.” “On the mosquito you are simply wild,” Davis said. “All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea out of your head.”

Before Gorgas had left for Washington, several of his staff had urged him to resign rather than face such continuing ignorance and obstructionism. But having gotten nowhere with the commission–indeed, having been shown how very little actual authority he possessed–he sailed again for Colón within a few weeks. Old Walker’s attitude, however galling, was of a kind he had experienced before in the military. He had kept his temper. He made no attempt to undermine or dislodge anyone on the commission, nor did he resort to political or social by-paths to the war Department or to the White House. The doctor was neither fighter nor schemer. But then neither would he give up. “That persistence which had always been his chief asset . . . forced him to the task,” according to his wife. He was not merely returning, moreover; he was returning to stay, for this time he took her with him.

Of all those who had been named to positions of importance that year, only Gorgas would stay on. Not only was he the one perfectly qualified man for his particular role and the one really solid appointment made in 1904, he was also to be the only major official of importance to stay with the work on the Isthmus from start to finish.

It is in Marie Gorgas’ published reminiscences that we find some of the earliest first impressions of Panama as recorded by one of the American canal force. Colón was “unspeakably dirty,” swarming with naked children, ugly, dilapidated, and terribly depressing. Yet the two-hour ride on the Panama Railroad more than compensated. In places the jungle swept the sides of their car and the jungle itself she found astonishingly beautiful. From the depot at Panama City they rode to Ancon in an open victoria through “a sea of mud reaching at times almost to the hub . . .” Their quarters were to be on the second floor of the hospital, in Ward Eleven, once the officers’ ward for the French.

. . . Dr. Carter was on hand to greet us . . . A flight of stairs led to the gallery of the second floor. Although it was only a little after five o’clock, the short twilight gave a somber though refreshingly cool aspect. My spirits rose. On the right, facing the stairs, was the large living room, comfortably furnished . . . With wicker chairs and small tables–a room of many windows. Following the gallery to the right was a bedroom running across the back porch . . . Two small rooms across the back porch were fitted up as bath and servants’ rooms. There was no running water, and, as I found out afterward, water was exceedingly scarce, being delivered daily in small quantities.

During the years of French occupation, she was told, more men had died of yellow fever in this building–in these very rooms–than in any other building on the Isthmus.

After dinner with the staff–served “Spanish style” in six or seven courses, in a screened, candlelit room on the ground floor–she, her husband, Dr. Carter, and several others returned to the upper gallery.

There is an alluring something about a night in the tropics. Dr. Gorgas experienced a melancholy pleasure listening to the sighing of the royal palms . . . in imagination visioning through the haze of his cigar the ghosts that haunted the old building. . ..

It was a beautiful and starry evening. Beyond stretched the great Pacific, the dotted islands in the distance dimly seen . . . every place teeming with the history of departed glory and vast enterprise.

The night, with its “creeping noises on the roof and On the floor,” had considerably less charm. In the morning she had her first full view of the city and bay spread below.

We were on a high point, with only the road separating our ward from the sheer descent to the valley below, a descent so steep that a retaining wall had been built as a protection. The road was bordered by a row of stately royal palms, planted by the French . . . Beyond a stretch of green valley the hills and mountains were seen emerging from the heavy mist . . . The sun was rising from the Pacific, a strange phenomenon, and the rays gave a jeweled appearance to the dew-soaked plants and the leaves of the trees. . ..

The city of Panama lay tantalizingly near . . . From our high point . . . the pastel shades of the Spanish tiled roofs were easily discernible; also the animation and movement of the streets. . . . She remained “content,” however, to confine her excursions to walks about Ancon Hill in company with the French nuns in their blue gowns and vast white headdresses, or with Laura Carter, wife of Dr. Carter, who arrived in midsummer.

Miss Hibbard, the head nurse, Jessie Murdock, and the other American nurses (Margaret Magurk, Mary Markham, Eleanor Smith, Anna Turner) were quartered in still another ward. “Old rusted French beds, with mildewed mattresses and pillows lined the walls,” Bessie Murdock remembered. “Each [bed] had a candle, but it was soon found that it was not wise to keep these burning, as they attracted moths and all sorts of flying insects. Yet, in spite of these many difficulties, we were not disheartened, but thoroughly enjoyed the novel experience.”

Accommodations in the ward for the unmarried male members of the staff were no less “deluxe,” as one of them, W. C. Haskins, would recall for his fellow townsmen in Oelwein, Iowa:

One straight-backed chair was made to do for the entire bunch. . . . We had but one lamp. . . . There were no mirrors, and the fortunate possessor of an individual looking glass was to be envied. Some combed their hair and shaved with the aid of the swinging glass windows backed up against the wall. There were but two washstands for all of us. . . . We lived in constant dread of the alacrán, or scorpion, who seems to have a penchant for buildings long unused, and for going to sleep in your clothes or shoe. . ..

Gorgas, who spoke a little Spanish, had already done more to win the trust and friendship of the Panamanians than any other American on the Isthmus. The name Gorgas was Spanish. According to family tradition, he was descended from a Spaniard who settled in Holland in the sixteenth century, when Spain ruled the Low Countries. And from his experience in Cuba he was appreciative of Latin pride and humor. In Manuel Amador, a fellow physician, he had an especially important ally. His tact, his sensitivity to the feelings of others, were unfailing. An American engineer would remember him as “a grand, quiet, lovable man.” Dr. Victor Heiser, a young American physician who was passing through en route to the Philippines, saw Gorgas stopped in the street by a beggar. “He bowed to the man, shook his hand, even inquired for his name, then gave him a single penny–the only coin he had I suppose–but it was all done so perfectly naturally, with such dignity that the man walked away very pleased.”

From Gorgas’ private secretary it would also be learned years later that the kindly doctor, seemingly as imperturbable as ever, could also become so incensed over red tape and bureaucrats in Washington that he would sweep the papers from his desk, lock them in a drawer, and storm out of the office, not to be seen again for a day or more.

He rose early, cared little about his clothes, his customary ensemble a rumpled three-piece civilian suit, stiff detachable collar, black tie with stickpin. His main pleasures were food–virtually anything set before him–horseback riding, a glass of beer, conversation, and books, his reading being done according to a lifelong routine. He always kept three books at hand–one scientific, one of classical literature or history, one light fiction–which he took up in turn, giving each exactly twenty minutes according to a pocket watch placed on the table beside his chair. In this fashion, he said, he was able to remember what he read.

“He loved especially the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard,” his daughter would recall; “King Solomon’s Mines! I think those books had a great deal to do with his enthusiasm for the adventure of Panama, for being there in the jungle then.”

It was in the autumn of 1904, during the time Gorgas was on home leave, that Ronald Ross made his brief, almost universally ignored, visit to Panama as the result of an invitation issued by Gorgas. Ross crossed the Atlantic to attend the world’s fair in St. Louis, where, among other things, he noted surprising numbers of both Stegomyia and Anopheles mosquitoes nicely thriving. Then, following a pleasant few days with William Osier at Baltimore, he sailed for Colón on the steamer Advance. Gorgas came down to the New York pier to see him off. For an hour before the ship sailed, they sat chatting on the fantail, the two men who had done more than any others alive to rid the world of tropical plague and whose lonely, unending battle with official indifference or official enmity had long since made them brothers of the same blood.

After a week on the Isthmus, Ross described Gorgas’ projected campaign as sound in every particular. Panama, Ross declared, could be made an example for the entire world.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

John F. Wallace

John Stevens

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Fumigation brigade, Panama City

Stegomyia fasciata, an adult female (much enlarged)

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Yellow-fever patient inside a portable isolation cage at Ancon Hospital

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

“The Man and the Machine”: Theodore Roosevelt strikes his famous pose at the controls of a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus shovel at Pedro Miguel.

COLLECTION OF J. W. D. COLLINS

Five unidentified American workers, one of whom holds an issue of the Canal Record, the weekly paper that began publication in 1907

FROM THE PANAMA GATEWAY, JOSEPH BUCKLIN BISHOP, CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 1913

Goethals and his high command on the steps of the Administration Building at Culebra. Left to right, Lieutenant Colonel William L. Sibert, Joseph C. S. Blackburn, Rear Admiral Harry H. Rousseau, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Colonel George W. Goethals, Lieutenant Colonel Harry F. Hodges, Colonel William C. Gorgas, and Lieutenant Colonel David D. Gaillard

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

ON PAGES 436–437, Culebra Cut

West Indian dynamite crew

Spanish track gang

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Motion-picture still of a mechanical track shifter in operation

* This was done “inasmuch as the war Department is the department which has always supervised the construction of the great civil works for improving the Rivers and Harbors of the country and the extended military works of public defense . . .”

* Publication of Carter’s vitally important observations had been delayed because the editor of a medical journal returned his paper saying it was too long.

16
Panic

I

You are going to have the fever,
Yellow eyes!

–JAMES STANLEY GILBERT

Later, in his own defense, Chief Engineer John Findley Wallace would say that he was denied the free hand promised at the time he accepted the job. He would complain of red tape–“System gone to seed”–and of the mad clamor to “make the dirt fly.”

How much autonomy, if any, he may have been assured is impossible to know. But the red tape was quite as horrendous as he said it was and in that regard he was wholly blameless. What began in Washington as a conscientious concern over possible misuse of funds, anything that might nurture graft, rapidly became an obsessive fear of the least extravagance. Each member of the seven-headed Isthmian Canal Commission considered himself personally responsible for every step taken, every dollar expended. An elaborate, insanely deliberate system of forms and regulations was handed down and every detail of procedure had to be cleared by the seven who sat two thousand miles from the scene. The well-meaning but intractable Walker and his commissioners had to pass with due formality on virtually every purchase voucher, irrespective of importance, with the inevitable result that delivery of equipment and material took months instead of weeks to reach Colon. One shipment of urgently needed water pipe ordered in August would not arrive until January, and then by sailing schooner. When Wallace, like Gorgas, cabled Washington in despair, he too was “delicately informed” of the high cost of telegraphic communication.

The appointment of any employee at a salary exceeding $1,800 required the approval of the full commission. The commissioners very often had trouble agreeing with one another, while Walker’s insistence on his prerogatives as chairman had an increasingly stultifying effect. When he departed from office later, no less than 160 requisitions would be found unopened in his desk, many of them months old.

On the Isthmus, to hire a single handcart for an hour required six separate vouchers. Carpenters were forbidden to saw boards over ten feet in length without a signed permit. The clerical work required for each fortnightly payroll was amazing: by September, with 1,800 workers on the books, payment took six and a half hours and involved the filling out of 7,500 separate sheets of paper weighing in all 103 pounds.

In anticipation of long delays in Washington, department heads would order material in excessive quantity and well in advance of need, only to see more shipments arrive than there were men enough to unload, or a staggering oversupply of some odd item for which there was no real or immediate demand. Wallace’s chief architect, as an illustration, determined that fifteen thousand new doors would be required eventually, for which he would need fifteen thousand pairs of hinges. Consequently, twelve thousand doors were shipped to Colón without delay, but because someone in the Washington office decided that fifteen thousand pairs of hinges would be insufficient, and because the architect’s original order appears also to have been inadvertently duplicated by someone else in Washington, the order of doors was accompanied by 240,000 pairs of hinges.

If Philippe Bunau-Varilla, as he told his admiring American audiences, never knew a single day of despair in Panama despite the most crushing setbacks, John Findley Wallace seems to have known little else but despair. From the time of his initial reconnaissance in July, he had been openly incredulous and discouraged. He had seen only “jungle and chaos from one end of the Isthmus to the other.” Yet in fact there was comparatively little jungle to face along the actual canal line; in contrast to the French in 1880, he and his engineers began with the decided advantage of being able to see the problems before them along the length of the fifty-mile corridor. The only chaos, when Wallace first arrived, was in the forlorn wreckage left in the path–the millions of dollars’ worth of French equipment lying in huge scrap heaps, the silent lines of rusted locomotives overgrown with vines and brush. Within a mile radius of Cristobal (the former Christophe-Colomb) there were eighty French dredging machines toppled over or sunk in the shallows. Shiploads of beautifully machined and tooled castings for the Eiffel locks had been dumped in the same vicinity, and for miles along the canal line the discarded rails and pipes, the enormous gears and axles and hundreds of nameless parts and pieces strewn everywhere, gave the look of bitterly contested ground in some titanic battle of machines.

Most of the French buildings, unoccupied for years, were in sad disrepair. Floor joists and roof beams had rotted; mold, rats, and termites had all taken their toll. Some of the work camps had become so overgrown by vines and bamboo scrub as to be nearly impossible to find. Several years later, while studying one of the old French maps, George Goethals would note a camp marked Caimito Mulato that did not appear on the American maps. He sent some men to look into it and they found an entire village built by the French completely buried in the jungle.

The Panama Railroad was also in deplorable condition, service slow and unpredictable, equipment worn out, coaches ramshackle and filthy, freight cars in short supply and ridiculously undersized. The entire line was virtually without signals or siding. Bridges were in dangerously poor repair.

But the French had left their successors a canal, a navigable water passage upward of twenty-five feet deep and seventy feet wide, running inland from Colón to Bohio, a distance of eleven miles. At Bohio, across the river from the railroad, was a vast excavation in solid rock, where the Eiffel locks were to have been built. For the next thirty miles, as far as Miraflores, there was evidence of excavation along the entire route, except for one seven-mile stretch just before the summit at Culebra. At Culebra itself the ground had been cut to a depth of 163 feet below its original surface; and beyond Miraflores, through the salt marshes of the lower Rio Grande on out to the Bay of Panama, ran another open channel. Indeed, to most new arrivals “the first surprise” of Panama was the “magnificence of the French failure.” “One cannot spend much time on the Isthmus without discovering in himself a mighty respect for the French” was the grudging conclusion of a writer for Everybody’s magazine. “They showed skill in every part of their work,” wrote a correspondent in The Outlook, “and the excellence of all their material is the wonder of every practical man who tests it.” A third man declared, “One appreciated more and more the wonderful amount those French had really accomplished. It is vastly more than the popular impression . . . It touches from ocean to ocean.”

To be sure, there was much that could deceive the novice. The channel at the Pacific end was scarcely a third as deep as it would have to be; even the terraced cut at Culebra, by far the most dramatic evidence of the French assault, was a bare beginning compared to the canyon that would have to be created before a ship passed through.

What is more, a large part, something over half of the French work, would be of little or no use to a canal of the kind planned by the Walker Commission, as had been pointed out in the commission’s own report. For instance, the huge network of diversion channels built by the French as a last-resort answer to the problem of the Chagres River would be of only marginal value to a lock-and-lake canal, and those channels alone ran to more than thirty-three miles.

Still, the useful portions of the French work amounted to approximately 30,000,000 cubic yards of excavation; that was 30,000,000 cubic yards of Panama that no longer stood in the path of the canal, a volume equal to about a third of the excavation of the Suez Canal.

Locomotives and dump cars and Two French excavators were still in service at Culebra, where the Compagnie Nouvelle had been scratching away, however slowly, since 1895. Quantities of French tools, machines, stationary engines, carloads of spare parts, were still safely under cover. Six large machine shops and a power plant were in working order. Furthermore, a surprising percentage of the equipment abandoned by the wayside, despite its appearance, could be put back in running order, as Wallace would soon determine. By December of 1904 there would be six of the old French excavators in use in Culebra Cut. By 1905 a hundred of the boxy little Belgian locomotives would be in service and Two thousand French dump cars. Wrecked dredges and sunken tugboats would be raised, floated, rebuilt. of the 2,149 buildings left by the French, a total of 1,500 would be refurbished as time went on.

The real problem, as much nearly as with the bureaucracy in Washington, was with Wallace himself.

Wallace was a competent enough technician and someone who worked well with men of large affairs. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman, equable and intelligent-looking, he had built railroads, and a number of impressive terminals for the Illinois Central (at Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis); he had devised the system for transporting the crowds in and out of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 and few American engineers had attained such professional honors. At fifty-one, he was a past president of the Western Society of Engineers, past president of the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association, and a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers of Great Britain. But at Panama he never displayed the least enthusiasm for the work. He was tentative, withdrawn, wholly uninspirational. Men who served under him would have nothing particularly derogatory to say about him afterward, nor anything very complimentary. Most seriously he appeared to have no clear idea how he would build the canal.

He said he wanted a year at least to experiment with the French equipment–to test it against modern American equipment–and to experiment with various kinds of American equipment. And though he would insist later on that he had a “regular system” in mind the whole while, his assistants were never given the slightest hint as to what it might be.

He had started digging at Culebra without delay, or rather he simply continued on with the machines and token force of the Compagnie Nouvelle. By early November he had managed to install a new American steam shovel–a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus, a machine three times the size of the American shovels used by the French–and on November 12 it clanked into motion and began gouging away at the brick-red slope of Gold Hill, on the east bank of the Cut. The impression at home was that the American canal was under way. It was one of the year’s outstanding developments, in company with the Russo-Japanese war and Theodore Roosevelt’s victory over the hapless Democratic candidate for President, Judge Alton B. Parker. But the effort at Culebra was entirely random. For all practical purposes it meant nothing. The laborers who had to put down the track for the new shovel and dirt trains did not even have the right tools. Railroad spikes were being driven with axes.

Like those in Washington with whom he felt at such cross-purposes, Wallace insisted on putting second things first. Had George Morison been alive and serving as head of the Isthmian Canal Commission or as chief engineer, this would not have happened. (“It is a piece of work that reminds me of what a teacher said . . . that if he had five minutes in which to solve a problem he would spend three deciding the best way to do it.”) Wallace failed to see that his primary responsibility, the priority task, was not to dig but to prepare the way–to formulate a comprehensive plan, to assemble the necessary equipment, to provide facilities for feeding and housing the army of laborers who would do the work, to put the railroad in order, to settle the problems of yellow fever and malaria in the quickest, most effective manner possible. And he failed to see that it was his duty to make all this plain to the commission. The call to make the dirt fly was as naive and misguided as the cry of “On to Richmond” before the First Battle of Bull Run, and would look equally silly in the light of subsequent events.

A charitable assessment of Wallace by his successor, John Stevens, was that he failed because he was not sufficiently aggressive, that a more demanding approach with his superiors would have straightened things out. (There were times, Stevens wrote, “when fighting becomes a righteous duty.”) When the commissioners came on their inspection tour in August, daily conferences were held at Ancon for nearly a month. In September Wallace returned to Washington to confer at still greater length. So it was not that he had no opportunity to make his case.

The men on the line seldom ever saw him. To his office staff in the old French headquarters on Cathedral Plaza, it seemed his strongest views too often centered on trifles. When an assistant, William Karner, kept him posted with weekly reports during his time in Washington, reports that Karner wrote in longhand by lamplight after hours and amid swarms of flying insects, Wallace, in one reply dated October 16, commended him for the penmanship but added peevishly that he did not like to read reports written in longhand.

Instructions were constantly changed. Men were abruptly shifted from one job to another, seldom with explanation.

“Send forth the best ye breed” Kipling wrote in his ironic poem “The White Man’s Burden.” But those being sent forth by Washington were seldom even second-best. “One young man came down with an appointment as a rodman,” William Karner recalled. “On the supposition that he was a graduate of some technical school, I asked him where he graduated. He said he was not a graduate. I then asked him where he got his engineering education. He replied he had none. I then asked him if he knew the difference between a level and a transit and he frankly replied he did not. . . . He lived in one of the southern states and said his member of Congress wrote him if he wanted a position on the work he could get him appointed.”

Of some two dozen supposedly experienced track hands recruited by the Washington office none had ever worked on a railroad. Lieu-tenant Robert E. Wood, one of the few Army officers sent by the Isthmian Canal Commission, would recall, “The beginnings of the force recruited in 1904 . . . were largely Americans who had left the United States for this country’s good–railroad men who were black-listed on the American railroads, drunks, and what we called tropical tramps, American drifters in Latin America.”

Even the best of the new men were young and inexperienced as a rule, and yet often found themselves thrust into positions of critical importance knowing little or nothing of what was expected of them. Frank B. Maltby, an engineer from Pittsburgh, was told on arrival to report to Wallace, who, after the usual observations concerning the heat and rain, plunged into the subject of what was being done and what should be done in the immediate future.

Nothing was said as to how I came to be there [Maltby wrote afterward], my appointment, my rank or salary, and I do not recall that anything was said about dredging, except in a very general way. He then said, “I want you to take charge of the Atlantic and Pacific divisions. You will make your headquarters at Cristobal, as that is the much more important end of the canal at present. You can live in house No. 1 [the old de Lesseps’ Palace]. There is a resident engineer in charge there now, who will give you information as to what is to be done. I want you to build up an organization so complete and efficient that you won’t have to do anything but sit on the veranda and smoke good cigars.”

By November there were 3,500 men at work. New recruits from the States who had been promised clean, furnished quarters were fortunate to find space to put a canvas cot in an unfurnished, often miserably small room with five or six others. Many of the old French quarters were put in service before repairs had been made. While two new “hotels” were under construction, the majority of the men were left to find what they could in Colón or Panama City, where decent rooms rented for three to four times what they would have at home. For unskilled black workers–that is, for about two out of every three-there was practically nothing to choose from, with the result that they crowded into the foul native side of Colón or whatever shacks could be found or improvised in villages beside the railroad.

The food available was meager, monotonous, high-priced, and as detrimental to morale as nearly all other troubles combined. There was no ice, no fresh milk, rarely a fresh vegetable; the local bread was tasteless and dirty. No one dared trust the water. Men went for weeks on a diet of canned sardines, canned Danish butter, and crackers. Nearly everyone was disheartened; a few had already packed up and left for home. Wallace was not oblivious to the situation. He had decided at the outset, for example, to provide Panama City and Colón with their own water system (which was the reason for the order of pipe) and to install sewage facilities in both cities. There is even in his organizational headings a basic appreciation of the diversity of tasks to be met other than digging dirt: Supplies, Personnel and Quarters, Buildings and Architecture, Machinery, Maps and Printing, Climatic Conditions and River Hydraulics, Communications. His thoughts, nonetheless, were tied up with the work at Culebra. Only by digging could he train the men, only by digging could he determine his unit cost– “the cost of explosives, cost of loosening and excavating material, cost of loading, cost of transportation, cost of disposition, and the cost of all the various elements of supervision and the maintenance of equipment, track and appliances, on the basis of the cubic yard.” Only by digging could he satisfy Washington with monthly progress reports.

To his credit it can also be said that, as a result of his experiments, he had settled on the Bucyrus shovel as the machine to dig the canal. It was altogether a sound decision of far-reaching consequences. When in October, specifications for eleven shovels were put out for bids in Washington, they were those of the Bucyrus machine and Bucyrus, which was also low bidder, got the entire order. In the spring Wallace would order a dozen more.*

But it happens that Wallace was also stalling for time. He was in no rush to present a comprehensive plan because he had privately concluded that the canal as conceived by the earlier Walker Commission was a vast mistake. A series of recent test borings made along the site of the proposed Bohio dam indicated bedrock at not less than 168 feet below sea level, a revelation he kept to himself prior to the visit of Secretary Taft at the end of November.

Taft had been sent to straighten out certain complications with the new Republic of Panama, in particular the tariff policy and postal rates within the American Zone, and to convey the personal assurance of the President (now that he was embarking on his first full term in office) that the United States had no imperialistic designs on Panama, that the Americans were there for no purpose other than to build the canal. Taft, who weighed approximately three hundred pounds, was credited by one admiring reporter with “dominating the whole scene.” With the official entourage also was William Nelson Cromwell, the American counsel for the new republic, who kept very close to Taft the entire time, which had the effect of making Taft look even larger.

Taft stood with Mrs. Taft in receiving lines; he waltzed “light as a feather” with Señora Amador; he perspired mightily; and in the open, judicious manner that had made him so effective in the Philippines, he conferred at length with Amador and Arango. Panamanian goods, it was agreed, would enter the Zone duty-free; postage rates in the Zone and in Panama would be the same.

But Taft also returned to Washington convinced that the Isthmian Canal Commission must not continue as constituted, that virtually all problems with the work could be traced directly to the office of Admiral Walker, that the canal was a far larger, more bewildering task than anyone at home yet grasped, and that it must be a canal at sea level.

The futility of mounting the largest overseas effort in the country’s history, the largest public work ever attempted anywhere, by placing its fate in the hands of seven men in Washington had already occurred to Taft, as to Roosevelt. But not until Taft had been to Panama, not until he had listened to Wallace expound on his problems, was he sufficiently convinced to make a move. Like many men of decisive mind, Taft prided himself in recognizing the same quality in others. During their ten days on the Isthmus, he and Mrs. Taft stayed with Wallace and his wife. Wallace had impressed Taft with his “earnestness and interest in the work, his ability, his facility of expression. . . .” (Wallace, the engineer, had also had the forethought to have one large dining-room chair taken to a blacksmith shop and thoroughly bolted and braced to bear the weight of the distinguished visitor, a courtesy Taft particularly appreciated, since, as he told Wallace, it gave him a great feeling of security throughout his stay.)

Wallace had become a frequent correspondent thereafter and because of Roosevelt’s boundless respect for Taft the repercussions were not long in coming. On January 13, Roosevelt asked Congress to reduce the seven-man commission to a group of three, a solution specifically urged by Wallace. A sea-level passage became a common topic once again and an issue of controversy in the newspapers.

So while Congress debated what to do about the canal commission and Roosevelt toyed with the idea of still another blue-ribbon technical board to tell him which kind of canal it ought to be, Wallace continued with his “experiments” at Culebra. By January of the new year there were two Bucyrus shovels at work in the Cut and 1,500 men; but the shovels could not operate at even a quarter of their theoretical efficiency because there were too few trains to haul the spoil away and because what trains there were kept running off the tracks. And without an overall plan the whole effort was no less pointless than before.

The possibility of replacing Wallace had been considered, but not seriously. He was, Governor Davis reported, a “very superior man, and he ought to be retained,” thus confirming what Taft already knew.

John Wallace had one further problem. He lived in mortal terror of disease.

Detesting Panama–this “God-forsaken country” he called it in one letter to Taft–he appears to have been haunted by the fate of his French predecessors. The official residence of the chief engineer was the same as it had been for the French, the old Casa Dingler on the Avenida Central, where for the first several months, until the arrival of Mrs. Wallace, he lived with his assistant, William Karner. Even the servants were holdovers from the French regime–a French butler named Benoit, a French-speaking black cook from Martinique, a Panamanian houseboy, and a personal valet who apparently was descended from one of the Irish “navvies” who built the Panama Railroad. So Wallace had heard soon enough and in detail of all that had befallen the Dingler family. To the mental burden of unit costs and endless vouchers in triplicate, to the strange night sounds of the crumbling old city, was added a vision of stark tragedy within his own walls. Under such circumstances even a trained technical mind might begin to imagine things.

Before September and his return to Washington, he saw Karner taken ill with malaria and removed to Ancon Hospital. His valet was stricken and carried from the house, only to be followed by the cook. Wallace departed filled with morbid premonitions. When he returned in November, his wife came with him, a sign of confidence it appeared, but in no time the story was all over the Isthmus that he had also taken the precaution to bring back two expensive metal caskets.

II

The first case of yellow fever was brought into the Santo Tomas Hospital in Panama City on November 21. The patient, an unemployed Italian laborer, had been found in a restaurant near the center of town. He was isolated at once in a screened ward and he eventually recovered. Little was said of the matter.

Of six more cases in December none was a canal employee and none was fatal. In January eight more cases were reported, including three on board a steamship at Colón, of whom two died. But again the victims, members of a touring Italian opera company, had no connection with the canal enterprise. It was not until later in the month when the disease broke out on the cruiser Boston, anchored in Panama Bay, that official notice could no longer be avoided. The ship was immediately ordered north to Puget Sound and there was but one fatality, the ship’s doctor. The story, however, was out: YELLOW JACK in PANAMA.

The mosquito specialists, meantime, had divided Panama City into eleven districts. Inspectors were assigned and a record was kept on every house, exactly as at Havana. The objective was an inventory of every essential well, water tank, cistern, water barrel, or water jar in the city. All that were unessential would be disposed of. But progress was maddeningly slow and the influx of new population increased steadily. The inspectors, mostly local men, had to be taught what to do. Frequently careless or indifferent, they had to be checked and double-checked, and a large segment of the native populace saw it all as some kind of nonsensical Yankee game played chiefly for their inconvenience.

Anyone taken suddenly ill, whatever the cause, was rushed to the closest hospital, put immediately in isolation and watched. Frank Maltby, the division head at Cristobal, became violently sick in the middle of one night, but of common diarrhea only, with the result that he spent the next week in the old French hospital in Colon. “People came and looked at me through the screen as if I were a wild animal of some sort.”

A retired Army engineer, a Colonel Philip G. Eastwick, a popular figure in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, arrived in Panama City to visit his son, a member of Wallace’s staff. He died of yellow fever the second week. A carpenter named Thomas Clark had been on the Isthmus only ten days when he died.

Most of Wallace’s people, some three hundred technicians and office help, worked in the headquarters building on the plaza where, during an earlier inspection, Gorgas had found mosquitoes breeding in almost every office, in certain small glass receptacles in which were kept the brushes used for copying letters. Yet even here his efforts were met with little or no cooperation. Wallace was “distrustful” of the mosquito program. He and his aides regarded Gorgas’ work as being largely experimental, like their own efforts at Culebra. The necessity for screening windows and doors in the building was brought repeatedly to Wallace’s attention and without effect. His chief architect, M. O. Johnson (the one who had ordered the doors and hinges), declared himself too busy with serious problems to start worrying about window screens. When Joseph Le Prince went to talk to him in his third-floor office, Johnson even joked about the fuss being made. He had, wrote Le Prince, “little faith in modern ideas pertaining to yellow fever transmission.”

To quell rumors about his own health, Wallace took time out to ride around town with his wife in an open carriage. Governor Davis cabled Washington to discount the stories in the press, which he categorized as “cruelly exaggerated.” Conditions were actually improving, Davis insisted. But then he also was suddenly so ill with malaria that he was unable to carry on with his duties.

Meantime, Congress having failed to do anything about the Spooner Act so that a more effective commission could be organized, Roosevelt simply asked for the resignations of the present commission, Admiral Walker as well, and the chief engineer was summoned to Washington to assist in organizing a new commission along the lines he had sketched for Secretary Taft.

Again seven members were appointed, since the Spooner Act still applied, but this time Roosevelt ingeniously arranged to have just three members serve as an executive committee. Control of the work was thus placed in the hands of three, not seven, and two of the three made a quorum. The other four, three of whom fulfilled the necessary military representation, were figureheads only. The new arrangement went into effect April 1, 1905.

So the first commission had lasted less than a year. Its members retired or returned to whatever they had been doing before, with the exception of Benjamin Harrod, who stayed on as one of the figure-heads.*

Under the new system the real power was not simply vested in three men, but each of the three was to head a particular administrative department. The chairman, based in Washington, would look after the purchase of supplies and serve as liaison between the commission and the government. The chief engineer, for the first time, was to have full charge of the actual work on the Isthmus, while the governor would oversee health and sanitary conditions, besides the political administration of the American Zone.

Roosevelt’s first choice for chairman was former Secretary of war Elihu Root, who had succeeded brilliantly–and against bitter opposition–in giving the Army the greatest shake-up in its history. Privately Roosevelt expressed a willingness to pay Root almost any salary to take charge of the canal. If not Root, then he wanted the steel baron Henry Clay Frick. But neither man was at all interested in Panama, which Root referred to as “that graveyard of reputations.”

So the man chosen to head the second Isthmian Canal Commission, or I.C.C., was Theodore Perry Shonts, an Iowa lawyer turned railroad executive. Wallace had been among those who recommended Shonts for the job. Wallace would stay on as chief engineer. The new governor was Charles E. Magoon, a portly war Department lawyer whose specialty was colonial administration.

Taft announced the changes on April 3, but it was not until May 24 that Magoon and Wallace reached Colon. Taft, greatly concerned over increasingly grim accounts of sickness and chaos on the Isthmus, had urged Wallace to leave at once, not to wait for Magoon, who had other war Department affairs to wind up. But Wallace had wanted a vacation, and so spent another several weeks at his home in Illinois. His absence from the work was again stretched to nearly two months.

Newspapers around the country were carrying letters from embittered local citizens who had gone to Panama to build the canal. A file clerk from Cincinnati, Taft’s hometown, informed readers of the Enquirer that at the rate things were going the canal would not be finished for fifty years. A young man named Will Schaefer, declaring that he spoke for all the Americans in Panama, wrote to the New York Herald, “There is not a bit of amusement or pleasure of the remotest kind here. . . . It is a case of work, work, work, all day long, and infrequently all night long, with no reward in view.” Things were “altogether different” from what he had been led to believe.

“Tell the boys to stay home if they get only a dollar a day,” wrote Charles Carroll to his mother in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. He was sick to death of the Panama Canal, he said in a letter picked up by the Pittsburgh papers. “Everybody is afflicted with running sores. . . . The meals would sicken a dog.”

Wallace, in an interview in New York, assured reporters that conditions were no worse than to be expected. “Everything is now proceeding in harmony, with a well-defined general plan.” In an article for Harper’s Weekly, sounding very like Jules Dingler, he further observed that good health On the Isthmus was nothing more than a question of personal deportment. There were no climatic effects that a “clean, healthy, moral American” could not readily withstand.

In fact, the crisis was both real and very apparent. Charles Ma goon, soon after his arrival, made no effort to conceal his astonishment at the situation, reporting to Shonts of unrest and insecurity every-where he turned, of employees who were “ill-paid, over-worked, ill housed, ill-fed, and subjected to the hazards yellow fever, malaria.”

In Wallace’s absence, yellow fever had broken out in the Administration Building and among the first to be stricken and to die was the architect Johnson. Gorgas had personally attended to the case and could do little or nothing. The only known treatment for yellow fever was the same as it had always been–to keep the patient as quiet and as comfortable as possible and hope for the best. It had been over in a few days. Johnson, who was twenty-nine, had given up his job with the Illinois Central and had come to Panama at Wallace’s personal bidding. It was, wrote Governor Davis, like the “ending of many a bright young man I have seen on the battlefield.” Since Wallace had been away, Johnson was buried in Wallace’s metal casket.

Wallace’s auditor, Robert West, had died, leaving a wife and five children back in the States. J. J. Slattery, an executive secretary in the building, had suffered the same fate. Mrs. John Seager, wife of Wallace’s secretary, died. She had come to Panama as a bride only months before.

Young engineers and their families, some sixty people, had been hurriedly moved out of the City to a vacant building at Ancon Hospital. But in less than Two weeks some Two hundred employees had resigned, including several of the hospital staff. One nurse, upon reaching New York, told reporters that contrary to all declarations of the chief engineer–and much to her own amazement–yellow fever was taking the lives of “well set-up, clean boys with good principles.” One could be neither decadent nor French, apparently, and still succumb.” A white man’s a fool to go there and a bigger fool to stay,” declared another returning worker, Harry Brainard, of Albany.

“A feeling of alarm, almost amounting to panic, spread among the Americans on the Isthmus,” Magoon would write with total candor in his official report. “Many resigned their positions to return to the United States, while those who remained became possessed with a Orders were issued that all unscreened windows in the Administration Building be kept closed. The building was fumigated repeatedly. Houses in the immediate area were fumigated. Gorgas even had the holy water in the font at the cathedral changed daily after it was found that mosquitoes were breeding there, a gesture many Panamanians looked upon as possibly some subtle new form of religious persecution. But with his limited manpower and desperately limited supplies there was only so much that he could do. One critical shortage, for example, was ordinary newspaper–sufficient paper of any kind–for sealing buildings prior to fumigation. When he cabled Washington to send two tons of old newspapers on the next ship, Washington cabled back to question the request. It was thought that he was asking for reading matter for his hospital patients and that two tons seemed excessive. As a result, the ship sailed without the paper and further fumigation was delayed for ten days.

The fever wards were filling rapidly. The Star & Herald had introduced a regular yellow-fever report that included both obituaries and a listing of all new cases. In Colón, local undertakers, familiar with previous epidemics, had stacks of coffins standing ready in plain view at the depot.

It was the time of “The Great Scare,” during which fully three-quarters of the Americans on the Isthmus fled for home. It was an episode that need never have happened and that most people, whether they stayed or left, would prefer to forget when things quieted down again, since the level of panic was so out of proportion to the actual seriousness of the epidemic. Compared to past experiences with yellow fever on the Isthmus, this was really only a mild flare-up.

Older hands among the railroad staff, veterans of the French effort, urged others to stay calm, but then it was they who also provided lurid renditions of 1885 and ‘86, or of the epidemic of just three years earlier, in 1902, when more than two hundred had died. In one instance in June, thirty new recruits who landed at Colón heard enough of such talk in their first few hours ashore to get back on board ship and return to New York.

You are going to have the fever,
Yellow eyes!
In about ten days from now
Iron bands will clamp your brow;
Your tongue resemble curdled cream,
A rusty streak the center seam;
Your mouth will taste of untold things,
With claws and horns and fins and wings;
Your head will weigh a ton or more, And forty gales within it roar

The poem “Yellow Eyes” and others of much the same vein had just appeared in a little volume with a burgundy-colored binding, Panama Pathwork, published by the Star & Herald. The author, James Stanley Gilbert, an American resident of Colón for many years, had done for Panama something comparable to what Robert Service was to do for the Yukon. His themes–in “Funeral Train,” “The Isthmian Way,” “King Fever,” “Beyond the Chagres”–were disease, alcoholism, everencroaching death, and the futility of any and all human endeavor associated with the valley of the Chagres River.

Beyond the Chagres River
’Tis said–the story’s old
Are paths that lead to mountains
Of purest virgin gold;
But ‘tis my firm conviction,
Whatever tales they tell,
That beyond the Chagres River
All paths lead straight to hell

Funeral processions were continually passing through the streets. Funeral trains ran daily to Monkey Hill, their bells clanging the length of Front Street in Colon–or “Coal-on,” as the Americans pronounced it. People feeling the least sign of illness were immediately certain that the end had come. Governor Magoon, seized with chills one afternoon, stood at his window at Ancon watching what he felt sure was his last sunset.

Then, at the very height of the panic, in mid-June, only three weeks after his return, Chief Engineer Wallace and wife packed and sailed for New York. To an editor of the Star & Herald and the others who came to see him off, Wallace would say only that he had “matters of importance” to take up with Secretary Taft. But almost from the moment the ship cast off, rumors were flying to the effect that even Wallace had now fled and that he had no intention of ever returning. The Star & Herald carried a prominent, if tentative, denial: “To say the least it does not seem plausible that a man of the type of Mr. Wallace would give up a position like the one he was occupying in the United States . . . to come to the Isthmus to engineer the canal . . . then leave . . . at this stage of the game, when the work was scarcely begun.”

On July 3, with as yet nothing further in the paper concerning Wallace, came the stunning news that a man had died at Ancon Hospital of bubonic plague. A Barbadian, a stevedore on the wharf at La Boca, had been brought to the hospital on June 20 with what looked alarmingly like plague, a diagnosis that was confirmed by the autopsy. Keeping the cause of death secret, Gorgas and his staff moved with all possible speed. The La Boca wharf was put under immediate quarantine. Hundreds of rat traps were set, poison was put out; the barracks where the man had taken ill was fumigated; two ships tied up at the wharf were towed into the bay and were fumigated–all in less than twenty-four hours. The following day La Boca was declared officially off-limits and a police cordon was positioned around the entire area, on land and water. Buildings were fumigated a second time. Walls, floors, and ceilings were sprayed with a solution of bichloride of mercury. Soiled clothes and dirty bedding were soaked in the same thing. Garbage was carried away. Chicken coops, animal pens, latrines, were torn down and burned, while in Panama City a bounty of ten cents was offered for all rats and mice. Among the hundreds of rats killed at La Boca–rats the size of guinea pigs, as one Panamanian recalled–several were found to be infected with plague.

In June, despite all Gorgas’ efforts, the incidence of yellow fever had been double what it was in May–62 known cases, 19 of which were fatal. There had been two or three cases of smallpox about which very little was said. For months malaria and pneumonia, tuberculosis and dysentery, had been taking a much heavier toll in life than had yellow fever, and especially among black workers, a fact no one had as yet faced up to. In all more than a thousand people had been admitted to the canal hospitals alone. But the news of one case of bubonic plague was like a scream in the night. In the language of one official report, the number of those who left the Isthmus was now “limited only by the ability of the outgoing boats to carry them away.” Chief Engineer Wallace had secured permission for his return to the United States, his third such trip in a year, by cabling Taft that he had “complicated business” to discuss which could not be handled by correspondence. He gave no further explanation, which greatly irritated the Secretary, but after conferring with Roosevelt and Shonts, Taft had reluctantly cabled his consent.

From Magoon, however, Taft heard what was on Wallace’s mind. Wallace had unburdened himself to Magoon in the course of two lengthy conversations, saying that he had been offered a high-paying position with a private engineering firm and that he intended to quit. He could be induced to stay on, Wallace also said, but only if he were put in as chairman (instead of Shonts), given authority over the entire work, and granted a salary of perhaps $60,000. He would insist also, Wallace said, that he be free to come to the Isthmus “when he sees fit and depart as his discretion determines.”

He made a further statement [Magoon continued], to which I attached grave significance–that he left the Illinois Central twice without telling them, directly, what he wanted, and was sent for and given three times as much as would have induced him to remain at the time he left.

Evidently he considers himself essential to this enterprise, and, for the immediate present, he is. He has never secured an assistant engineer competent to take his place or keep the work going at a decent pace for sufficient time to enable a new chief engineer to master the situation. . ..

Speaking of his desire to be the head of the enterprise, he told me that he figured from the first that Admiral Walker would not last more than two years and he had intended to have things in such shape by that time that he would be made chairman; but the old commission went to pieces too quickly for him. . . . I cannot escape the conviction that he is trying to “pull off” a carefully contrived coup d’état. . . . I hope I am doing him a grave injustice, for personally I like him . . . I can readily understand that from his point of view the action and motive I attribute to him are entirely justifiable. In railroad circles, as on the stock exchange, it is entirely justifiable and even commendable to “squeeze” friend or foe when you have the chance and can profit by it.

This letter from Magoon, dated June 11, was followed two days later by another, less harsh appraisal. As a result of talks with Wallace, Magoon now thought better of Wallace’s motives. “He seems to be fully prepared to quit, but willing to remain upon terms that seem to him justifiable . . . There is no difference in its effect on the public service, but there may be considerable difference between the two mental attitudes.” Taft cared not the slightest about Wallace’s mental attitudes. The genial Taft, the man known for “the most infectious chuckle in the history of politics,” was in a towering rage. The new commission had been tailored specifically to Wallace’s wishes. Wallace had expressed unequivocal approval of the arrangement on several occasions since April and in writing. Wallace had been profuse in his praise of Shonts, full of gratitude for being able to serve under such a man.

Taft felt betrayed. To Taft so self-serving an ethic as Magoon depicted was neither understandable nor tolerable. If Wallace deemed himself essential to the enterprise, Taft now quite emphatically did not. Though Magoon’s letters reached the war Department on the eve of an important trip to the Philippines, Taft went directly to New York to confront Wallace in person three days after Wallace arrived from Panama.

Wallace was told to be at Taft’s room at the Manhattan Hotel at ten o’clock the morning of June 25. To Wallace’s immediate annoyance, he was ushered into the room by William Nelson Cromwell, who showed no signs of leaving. Wallace said he preferred to speak with the Secretary alone, but Taft, in what Wallace later described as a “rather peremptory manner,” told Cromwell to stay where he was. He wanted Cromwell present as a witness. “This action, of course, caused irritation and apprehension on my part that the interview would be unpleasant,” Wallace would recall, “. . . and the irritation under which the Secretary was evidently laboring had a tendency to prevent that calm and dignified consideration of the question in all its bearings which should have been given it.”

Taft, who had spent most of his career as a judge, wished first, he said, to know what possible “complicated business” could warrant Wallace’s absence from Panama at so inopportune a moment? Wallace replied that he had received an attractive offer from a private firm and explained at some length why he could “not afford” to turn it down. The income, with salary and various opportunities for investments, would be equivalent to $60,000 a year Wallace said. Life at Panama, he remarked, was lonely and “accompanied by risk” to his health and to that of his wife. He proposed that he spend the summer winding up his duties from his home in Illinois. In the future he would be glad to serve on the commission in an advisory capacity.

“Mr. Wallace,” Taft began after a pause, “I am inexpressibly disappointed, not only because you have taken this step, but because you seem so utterly insensible of the significance of your conduct.”

There followed an angry but measured summation lasting half an hour. He reminded Wallace that when appointed by the commission the year before, his salary had been increased by $10,000 over what it had been under his former employer. He reminded Wallace that he had known of the risks when he accepted the position, that he had both recommended and approved the latest organizational changes made by the President. “For mere lucre you change your position overnight . . . You are influenced solely by your personal advantage. Great fame attached to your office, but also equal responsibility, and now you desert them in an hour.”

He demanded Wallace’s immediate resignation. When Wallace said that he would prefer to discuss the matter further, that perhaps some new and different arrangement might be worked out, Taft told him there could be no further talk.

“Mr. Secretary,” said Wallace, “while there is a difference between us as to the point of view we take concerning my duty, I consider that there can be no question that I have performed my full duty up to this hour.”

“Mr. Wallace,” Taft replied slowly, “I do not consider that any man can divide such a duty up to any one point where it suits him to stop . . . In my view a duty is an entirety, and is not fulfilled unless it is wholly fulfilled.”

The following day Taft took Wallace’s resignation to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Roosevelt was attending a Harvard reunion.. On June 28 the resignation was accepted by the President, to take effect immediately. On the twenty-ninth, back in Washington, Taft, as directed by Roosevelt, released to the press the full transcription of his exchange with Wallace, the text apparently being that recalled by Cromwell. John Wallace was finished.

The immediate response in the press was one of dire concern. Though a few papers suggested that it was now merely a question of finding somebody else, the majority saw the reputation of Roosevelt’s Administration suddenly at stake, not to mention that of the country, and found the outlook, in the words of the Louisville Courier-Journal, “not cheering.” In the London papers it was said that Roosevelt was paying the price for his rash “land-piracy” in Panama.

Wallace, who ultimately became president and chairman of the board of Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Company, as well as a board member of several other industrial firms, would spend the rest of his life trying to repair the damage done to his reputation. Monetary considerations, he would insist, had never entered into the decision to “disconnect” himself from Panama. He denied any personal fear of disease, claiming he had actually had a light attack of yellow fever while on the Isthmus and so thereafter had considered himself immune.

Privately he said that he heartily disliked Shonts and knew they could not work together. And appearing before the Senate canal committee he would delight John Tyler Morgan with the further admission that it was really Cromwell whom he hated most of all. The tragedy, said Wallace again and again, was that Taft never gave him a chance to express his real reason for resigning, which was that he had “become convinced some other men in my place could render better service to the enterprise.”

John Stevens, reflecting on the episode, would remark simply and without scorn that Wallace had had a “thorough case of fright.”

*Chief sales representative for the Bucyrus Company, interestingly, was a young man named George A. Morison, who had left New England to join the Milwaukee firm on the advice of his Uncle George. For a young man interested in a business future, George S. Morison had said not long before his death, the then small steam-shovel manufacturer clearly had “possibilities.”

* The three others were Rear Admiral Mordecai T. Endicott and two Army officers from former commissions, Brigadier General Peter C. Hains and Colonel Oswald Ernst.

17
John Stevens

What we needed was a fighter. And we got one.

–FRANK MALTBY

I

John Stevens was picked to build the Panama Canal on the recommendation of James J. Hill–Hill, who had never had any use for the project and whose personal distaste for Theodore Roosevelt was monumental. Roosevelt, the “Empire Builder” once complained, had never done anything but “pose and draw a salary.”

Hill considered Stevens the best construction engineer in the country, if not the world, and apparently he told Roosevelt as much during a visit to Washington in June 1905. “Mr. Hill told the President that he knew a man who could build the Panama Canal,” Stevens’ son would recall, “and when the President showed much interest he spoke of my father . . . and said he would see him in Chicago and report the President’s interest in him. He did so, talking the matter over in detail. . . .”

As it also happens, Stevens was about to leave with Secretary Taft for the Philippines, as a new special adviser on railroad construction. So Taft too called Stevens in Chicago about taking the Panama post instead, just as soon as he, Taft, discovered why Wallace was coming on from Colon. The Monday following the Sunday of Taft’s confrontation with Wallace, Stevens was told the job was his if he wanted it. The salary was $30,000.

His immediate impulse, he later wrote, was to say no. Wallace by then was back at his home outside Chicago. Stevens sent a note asking him to meet him at the Union League Club and discuss the matter, but Wallace refused. So Stevens boarded a night train to New York, where he met with Cromwell, who persuaded him to accept. And all things considered, this was probably the most valuable service yet rendered by the clever, “silver-tongued” attorney. More active than ever as an all-purpose troubleshooter for the Republican Party, Cromwell had become greatly concerned–as had others–over what a failure at Panama might mean to the party’s fortunes.

At home again in Chicago, Stevens talked things over with his wife, who told him his whole career had been in preparation for this greatest of engineering projects and that of course he should go. “. . . I allowed arguments as to what was my duty to override my own feelings, and . . . my better judgment,” Stevens remembered. He wired his acceptance on June 30. Roosevelt and Taft had little time to give the matter further attention. John Hay was ill and Taft, in addition to everything else, was looking after the State Department. Roosevelt was absorbed in preparations for the historic meeting at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which he would bring an end to the Russo-Japanese War. On July 1, John Hay suddenly died; there was a funeral to be attended, a new Secretary of State (Elihu Root) to be installed; and the Russian and Japanese delegations were arriving meantime. When Stevens and Shonts went to Oyster Bay so that Roosevelt could meet his new chief engineer, one of the other guests at lunch was the Japanese minister.

Stevens was fifty-two years old, powerfully built, heavy-shouldered, five foot ten, with black hair and black mustache and a hard, weather-beaten, handsome face. Roosevelt wrote of him admiringly as a “backwoods boy,” “a rough and tumble westerner,” “a big fellow, a man of daring and good sense, and burly power.”

Like Gorgas–and unlike Wallace–he had spent most of his life surviving frontier conditions. Born on a small farm in Maine, he had had little formal education, but learned surveying, and in 1873, at the age of twenty, went west to work on surveys for the new city of Minneapolis. He had come up the hard way since–as a track hand in Texas, as a junior engineer locating and building railroads in New Mexico, Minnesota, and British Columbia. In 1886, at thirty-three, as principal assistant engineer for the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway, he had been charged with building a line of nearly four hundred miles through the swamp and pine forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from Duluth to Sault Ste. Marie. By the time he went to work for James J. Hill in 1889, he had survived Mexican fevers, Indian attack, Upper Michigan mosquitoes, and Canadian blizzards. He had been treed by wolves on one occasion; he had learned to sleep sitting up while crossing the prairie in a buckboard; with surveying gear, tent, and provisions packed on his back he had traveled hundreds of miles into the Rockies on snowshoes. “. . . I became tough and hard physically,” he would write. “I learned to sleep under wet skies . . . rolled only in a single blanket . . . to adapt myself . . . under the most primitive conditions. And I loved it!”

His personal faith was in the strides ordinary men might achieve. “With respect to supermen, it has probably been my misfortune, but I have never chanced to meet any of them.” Hard work, he often said, was the only “open sesame” he had had any experience with. By studying on his own at night, he learned mathematics, physics, chemistry. And for all his rather rough, often profane, frontier manner, his exceptional ability was unmistakable.

Working for Hill was the turning point. In 1889 he had started as one of Hill’s locating engineers, assigned to explore a route west from Havre, Montana. Hill had decided to build a railroad to the Pacific; the Great Northern was to be his own personal path of empire; and in the dead of winter, 1889, Stevens found the Marias Pass, Hill’s passage over the Continental Divide. The Marias Pass saved more than a hundred miles and, at an elevation of 5,215 feet, gave the Great Northern the lowest grade of any railroad to the Pacific. Stevens became something of a legend in the Northwest, “The Hero of Marias Pass.” He had made the discovery on foot and alone, his Indian guide having given up. At night, with no wood for a fire, and the temperature at 40° below zero, he had kept from freezing to death by tramping back and forth in the snow until dawn.

In the Cascades, on the western slope, he found another key pass (later named Stevens Pass). Hill made him his chief engineer in 1895 and ultimately his general manager. Stevens built bridges, tunnels (including the two-and-a-half-mile Cascade Tunnel), and more than a thousand miles of railroad, as much as had been built by any one man in the world. He built exceedingly well and Hill never intervened.

Hill was fiercely independent (the Great Northern was the only western road built without government subsidy); he was blunt, tough, a pioneer and a fighter. He had the common touch; with his physical bearing alone he exuded power. And much of what Hill was had rubbed off on Stevens, who for the rest of his life would talk of Hill as the finest man he had ever known. Of Stevens, Hill once remarked, “He is always in the right place at the right time and does the right thing without asking about it.”

But Stevens was also restless, often temperamental, and in 1903 he had left Hill to become chief engineer (and eventually vice-president) of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific. His reason, he later explained, was that Hill had had a still higher position in mind for him, one that called for “a diplomacy which I was temperamentally unfit to exercise.” Then in 1905 he turned around and accepted the Philippines assignment, because, he said, he needed a change.

In the course of conversation during the lunch at Oyster Bay, Roosevelt told Stevens to take charge and report to him directly if need be. Things at Panama were in a “devil of a mess,” Roosevelt conceded. He was reminded, he continued, of the man who engaged a butler and set him to work by saying, “I don’t know in the least what you are to do, but . . . you get busy and buttle like hell!”

Afterward, when Shonts and Stevens met with reporters at the Oyster Bay railroad station, it was Shonts who did the talking. Stevens would have “no one to blame if the work is not done right,” Shonts said, “for he will be supreme in the engineering department.” Stevens, sitting on a stone post off to one side, merely nodded in agreement.

Shonts and Stevens landed at Colón without ceremony on July 26, 1905. Neither man had ever been to Panama before.

“Shonts and Stevens will soon be with you, and the mountains will move,” Taft had cabled Magoon. But whether dirt would fly or mountains move was no longer the question. The question was whether the entire American venture in Panama could be rescued from humiliating defeat. The unavoidable fact was that it had been a wretched beginning and already $128,000,000 had been spent, as The New York Times emphasized. For all the deprecating talk of French inefficiency, French failure, for all the proud claims of American know-how and resolve, the United States had performed with less efficiency, less purpose, and markedly less courage than had the French at any time during their ordeal. A whole year had been lost and the situation on the Isthmus was an utter shambles.

Recalling his own first impressions, Stevens wrote, “I believe I faced about as discouraging a proposition as was ever presented to a construction engineer.” Accommodations on returning ships were still at a premium. Upwards of five hundred white technicians and skilled workers had evacuated. Those left behind were frightened–“scared out of their boots,” Stevens said–and had every reason to despair. Some of the freight piled up at Colón had been there for more than a year. “I found no organization . . . no answerable head who could delegate authority . . . no cooperation existing between what might charitably be called the departments. . . .”

The review board appointed by Roosevelt to decide whether it should be a canal at sea level, as urged by Wallace, had not even convened as yet. So there was still no final plan to go by and everyone was waiting to be told what to do. Most of the Americans Stevens encountered seemed to believe that Shonts and he had come to order them to abandon everything and sail for home.

Theodore Shonts, with his pince-nez, mustache, and bulldog expression, looked like an older, more sedate version of Theodore Roosevelt. He was also very much the man in charge so long as he remained on the Isthmus, which was not long; with his abrupt, authoritative manner he rubbed nearly everybody the wrong way.

“Governor, what’s the matter down here?” Shonts demanded over cigars the first night, as he, Magoon, Gorgas, and Stevens sat on Ma goon’s veranda at Ancon. Magoon was easy in manner, but very proper and highly polished–a friend likened him to a Roman cardinal–and he believed that keeping peace with the Panamanians was chief among his duties. The most pressing problem, he explained to Shonts, was food for the work force. The local merchants kept pushing prices higher and higher, until it had become nearly impossible for the men to survive on what they earned. Some workers, verging on starvation, had taken to foraging like buccaneers.

Shonts said commissaries must be established immediately, and when Magoon explained that this would be in violation of an agreement with Panama whereby all foodstuffs were to be bought from local merchants, Shonts responded, “. . . it’s evident that you haven’t heard the news. . . . I’ve come down here to build the Canal . . .” The Isthmian Canal Commission would feed the men at cost beginning immediately.

It was also Magoon’s ambition to establish a model government Within the American Zone, as an “edifying” example for Panama and the rest of Central America. Shonts told him to forget that. There would be no more government than was necessary to preserve order. “Our sole purpose . . . is to build the Canal, so ‘keep your eye on the ball.’ ”

Turning to Gorgas he remarked, “We are not here to demonstrate any theories in medicine, either.” He was wholly unimpressed by what Gorgas had accomplished and put him on notice that he had four months to rid Panama of yellow fever.

Stevens, as at Oyster Bay, said very little, and when Shonts departed a few weeks later, Stevens continued to say very little. Yet in manner, appearance, in the way he treated people, he was plainly a different sort than his predecessor. He was seen out on the line daily, whatever the weather, hiking about in rubber boots and overalls, wearing a battered old hat and puffing steadily on a black cigar. “He was [seen] climbing about in the mud of the ditch, catching a switch engine, pausing among machinery,” wrote a magazine correspondent. “. . . He had very little to say except to ask questions. He was very quiet, very business-like. The men were not certain at first, mostly because they could detect no pose.”

Anybody could talk to him, it was discovered, and with a few terse observations he began putting spirit into the work for the first time.

“There are three diseases in Panama,” he told the men. “They are yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet; and the greatest of these is cold feet.” There was lost time to be made up for; there was much to learn. When it was pointed out to him that no collisions had occurred on the Panama Railroad in more than a year, he remarked, “A collision has its good points as well as its bad ones–it indicates there is something moving on the railroad.”

He wanted the engineering offices moved from the Administration Building in Panama City to Culebra Cut as quickly as possible. Shown plans for an elaborate new residence for the chief engineer scheduled to be built at Ancon, he cancelled the plans. He would live at Culebra and specified an inexpensive one-story bungalow with a corrugatediron roof. Until the house was ready he would be content with a small place on the hospital grounds.

Privately he was appalled by what he saw of Wallace’s work and by the antiquated equipment in use. Once, standing on a point overlooking Culebra Cut, he counted seven trains off their tracks. Every steam shovel in view was standing idle because the crews, along with the entire labor force, were struggling to get the trains back on the tracks– “an unwise proceeding,” he noted acidly, “for they [the trains] were of more value where they were.”

While the public and the press at home speculated on what progress the new chief might effect, Stevens, on August 1, ordered a complete stop of all work in Culebra Cut. Excavation would not be resumed, he informed his staff, until he had everything ready. Steam-shovel engineers and cranemen were sent back to the United States. They would hear from him later.

“The digging is the least thing of all,” he declared. Starting at once, Dr. Gorgas was to have whatever men and supplies he needed. Panama City and Colón were to be cleaned up and paved. Warehouses, machine shops, and piers were to be built. Entire communities were to be planned and built from scratch–houses, mess halls, barracks, more hospitals, a visitors’ hotel, schools, churches, clubhouses, cold-storage facilities, laundries, sewage systems, reservoirs. He was determined, as he said in a letter to Taft, to prepare well before beginning construction, “regardless of clamor of criticism . . . as long as I am in charge of the work . . . and I am confident that if this policy is adhered to, the future will show its absolute wisdom.”

Working twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day, he saw no reason why others should not too. In the first few months, as he made his daily rounds, he walked the line from Colón to Panama. The melting heat, the rain, the terrible mud, appeared neither to discomfort nor distress him. His own health remained perfect.

He and Gorgas got on extremely well from the start. With his backing, Gorgas’ real work began in earnest. Through the summer, disease of all kinds continued to cut through the ranks of the labor force. Yellow fever had abated somewhat, but only somewhat–forty-two cases in July, thirteen deaths; twenty-seven cases in August, nine deaths. But malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and intestinal diseases were still rampant and taking many more lives than yellow fever, while at the same time debilitating two or three times as many as were killed, facts the public at home would never quite comprehend. Between May 1 and August 31, 1905, the time of the so-called yellow-fever epidemic, yellow fever took forty-seven lives. In this same period nearly twice as many people died of malaria, forty-nine of pneumonia, fifty-seven of chronic diarrhea, forty-six of dysentery. Black workers were hardest hit by malaria and pneumonia. When bubonic plague struck a second time at La Boca, the victim again was a Barbadian.

But while a drastic reduction of all disease was considered essential in the long run, yellow fever had to be the immediate objective. To rid the Isthmus of yellow fever, Gorgas remarked, would be to rid it of fear.

He now found himself leading the most costly, concentrated health campaign the world had yet seen. Stevens, as he later boasted, “threw all the weight of the engineering department” to his aid. Gorgas henceforth had first call for labor. His requisitions had priority over all others. By November there were four thousand men working solely on Gorgas’ projects. Until then, for all expenses and supplies, Gorgas had been limited to an annual budget of $50,000. Stevens would sign requisitions for $90,000 for wire screening alone. Gorgas now got all the supplies he needed and with a minimum of red tape–120 tons of pyrethrum powder (instead of 8 tons), 300 tons of sulphur, 50,000 gallons of kerosene oil per month. Orders were put through for 3,000 garbage cans, 4,000 buckets, 1,000 brooms, 500 scrub brushes; for carbolic acid and sulphur powder, wood alcohol, mercurial chloride; for 5,000 pounds of “common soap”; for padlocks, lanterns, machetes, lawn mowers, 1,200 fumigation pots; for 240 rat traps for the hospital grounds alone.

The city of Panama was fumigated house by house, some sections several times over. The same was done at Colon. Fumigation brigades –hundreds of men carrying ladders, paste pots, buckets, rolls of brown paper, old newspaper–trailed through the streets in the early morning like some strange ragtag army of occupation. And by nightfall, when they had gone, strips of paper fluttered from windows and doorways on hundreds of houses.

The persistency with which New yellow-fever cases were tracked down is shown in this example taken from an official report:

. . . a man was reported ill at a hotel. . . . When search was made for him he had disappeared. The next day he was found drunk on the street and sent to the hospital, where, after his case had been diagnosed as yellow fever, he became delirious and died. He had stated that he had been at the hotel all the time, but since this house was full of non-immunes and no other cases appeared there it became evident that he had contracted the fever elsewhere. The man was dead, nobody knew him, and apparently no information was obtainable. It was known, however, that other men of the same nationality as the deceased were in the habit of visiting a certain cafe. Every one of his countrymen in this establishment was questioned. At last a man was found who stated that he had seen him with an Italian. Then every Italian who could be found in town was interviewed, and finally one was discovered who said he had seen the deceased with the bartender of the theater on two occasions. The bartender was looked for and could not be found. After a hard search he was located the following day. He was in bed and had yellow fever. He stated that the man who died of yellow fever, although registered at the hotel, had been sleeping all the time in the same room as himself in the theater. It appeared probable that the theater had been the center of infection, and it was accordingly fumigated. A few days later a third case was discovered, that of a little girl, who had been in the theater every evening with her mother, thus confirming the indications which had already been acted upon.

Cisterns and cesspools were oiled once a week. Most critically, Panama City, Colón, Cristobal, Ancon, La Boca, Empire, Culebra, were all provided with running water, thus dispensing–after centuries– with the need for domestic water containers.

Stevens made no public declaration of faith in Gorgas or the mos-quito theory. “Like probably many others I had gained some little idea of the mosquito theory,” he would recall, “. . . but, like most laymen, I had little faith in its effectiveness, nor even dreamed of its tremendous importance.” Still, Gorgas’ presence seemed “Simply an act of Providence” and Stevens’ own instinct was that the only way to back Gorgas was to back him to the fullest. When a movement began in Washington to have Gorgas removed, a movement initiated by Shonts and supported by Taft, Stevens fought back. Taft thought Gorgas had “no executive ability at all.” Shonts, who seems to have liked Gorgas well enough, had little confidence in the mosquito theory and was no less insistent than his predecessor, Admiral Walker, that “cleaning up” Panama must be made the priority task. Shonts had found a replacement for Gorgas, moreover, a Johns Hopkins man named Hamilton Wright, and went to Oyster Bay to tell Roosevelt what he intended to do. But Stevens in correspondence from Panama insisted that Gorgas be kept on, and so it became a test issue, the decision being left ultimately to Roosevelt, who again consulted Dr. Welch as well as a friend and hunting companion, Dr. Alexander Lambert.

Welch was actually asked for a recommendation for his Hopkins colleague, Wright, rather than for a comment on Gorgas and his relative progress at Panama. But while testifying to Wright’s ability, Welch insisted that no one was better equipped for the work than Gorgas. The best man was already on the job, that was the implicit message. “Would to God,” wrote Roosevelt to Welch in reply, “there were more men in America who had the moral courage to write honest letters of recommendation such as yours . . .”

Dr. Lambert expressed his views in private conversation in the study of Sagamore Hill. “Smells and filth, Mr. President, have nothing to do with either the malaria or the yellow fever,” Lambert said. “You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career. you must choose between Shonts and Gorgas. If you fall back upon the old methods of sanitation, you will fail, just as the French failed. If you back up Gorgas and his ideas and let him pursue his campaign against the mosquitoes, you will get your canal.”

Roosevelt, according to Lambert’s version of the conversation, decided then and there that Gorgas would stay. Shonts was called to the White House soon afterward and was told to “get back of Gorgas.” And to his great credit, Shonts accepted the decision and saw to it that the Sanitary Department became what it should have been from the start, an independent bureau reporting directly to the chairman. Shonts, as Gorgas later wrote, was a man “who thought and acted in millions [of dollars] where we army and navy officers did in thousands . . . I would never have dared even to make an application for the immense amounts of money he authorized me to spend . . .”

But the real hero, in Gorgas’ view, was Stevens. “The moral effect of so high an official taking such a stand at this period . . . was very great,” Gorgas wrote, “and it is hard to estimate how much sanitation on the Isthmus owes to this gentleman for its subsequent success.” To Stevens, years later, he wrote privately, “The fact is that you are the only one of the higher officials on the Isthmus who always supported the Sanitary Department . . . both before and after your time. So you can understand that our relations, yours and mine, stand out in my memory . . . as a green and pleasant oasis.”

The eradication of yellow fever at Havana had taken eight months. At Panama it took nearly a year and a half. But had it not been for Stevens it would have taken considerably longer. Had Stevens been chief engineer from the beginning, doubtless many lives would have been spared; there would have been far less grief and no panic. Once Gorgas’ program was under way, incidence of yellow fever fell off with the same dramatic suddenness as at Havana. The epidemic was over by September, when there were only seven cases and four deaths. On an afternoon some weeks later, Gorgas and several of his staff gathered in the dissecting room at Ancon to perform an autopsy. Gorgas told them to “take a good look at this man,” for he was the last yellow-fever cadaver they would see. By December the disease had disappeared from the Isthmus.

II

John Stevens ushered in what was to be known on the Isthmus as the Railroad Era. And it is one of the ironies of the story that the unseen guiding spirit as the canal got under way was James J. Hill. Stevens was not only Hill’s man, but he would run the work the way Hill ran the Great Northern. Indeed, the building of the Panama Canal was among other things one of the greatest of all triumphs in American railroad engineering.

At the Great Northern the “best-fitted” men were given tremendous authority, then held strictly accountable for results. Familiarity with details was stressed at every level, but obligatory for operating officers. “Intelligent management,” according to the familiar Hill dictum, “. . . must be based on exact knowledge of facts. Guesswork will not do.” How many best-fitted men might be found among the holdovers from the Wallace fiasco seemed questionable at first. Losses from disease, the pell-mell rush to get away, the very serious difficulty in recruiting replacements, had inevitably meant the advancement to key positions of young men who under normal conditions would probably never have been considered. “Personally, I have always felt grateful to the yellow fever for my first great opportunity in life,” wrote Robert E. Wood nearly sixty years later. As a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant he had had “no idea of getting the fever, and did not . . . Anyone who stayed was promoted.” Straight, clean-shaven, as square-jawed and forthright as a Charles Dana Gibson hero, Wood was among the first spotted by Stevens as part of his reorganization. Assigned to the Department of Labor and Quarters, Wood was later to become Chief Quartermaster of the Zone; later still he would become General Wood and ultimately the commanding genius of Sears, Roebuck and Company.

Frank Maltby, Wallace’s division head at Colón, was summoned to Panama City soon after Stevens got settled. “We sat on the veranda under a full tropical moon. . . . Everyone else disappeared,” Maltby would write, recalling the interview. “Mr. Stevens did not talk much but asked questions–and could that man ask questions! He found out everything I knew. He turned me inside out and shook out the last drop of information. . . . At 1 A. M. we retired.” The following day Stevens cabled Washington to say that the man he had in mind for the position at Colón was no longer needed; Maltby would do. Maltby, long-legged and sallow, was given the following guideline: “You won’t get fired if you do something, you will if you don’t do anything. Do something if it is wrong, for you can correct that, but there is no way to correct nothing.”

Wallace’s ranking engineer at Culebra, a glum, scowling man named W. E. Dauchy, was also kept on, but he would last only a short time longer and with few exceptions all the rest of the new regime would be composed of experienced railroad men brought in by Stevens. Whereas Ferdinand de Lesseps had failed to see the project as fundamentally a railroad problem and neglected to send a single railroad specialist to Panama, Stevens never saw it as anything other than that, and he recruited railroad men only. Jackson Smith, young, ill mannered, efficient, had been in railroad construction for five years in Mexico and Ecuador; he was put over Lieutenant Wood as head of Labor and Quarters. William Belding, the new chief of building construction, had been in charge of much the same thing on the Illinois Central. Edward J. Williams, the new disbursing officer, had been paymaster of the Chicago and North Western. A former general auditor of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company became the new head of accounting. A general storekeeper for the Great Northern became the new chief of Materials and Supplies. William Grant Bierd, brought in to run the Panama Railroad, had been with Stevens at the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific. He replaced the illustrious Colonel Shaler, who was quietly banished to permanent retirement.

The one man ever urged upon Stevens by Washington–by both Taft and Shonts–was of no interest to Stevens because he was not a railroad man. Taft thought he had found the perfect assistant engineer, someone “exceedingly able,” as he told Roosevelt, who could in fact replace Stevens, should Stevens ever take it into his head to do what Wallace had. This was Major George Goethals. Shonts described him in a letter to Stevens as the top construction engineer in the Army, suitable in every way–“direct, resourceful, energetic, and a worker of the most pleasant personality.” Taft even brought Goethals to the Isthmus on another of his inspection tours. But Stevens would have none of it, and so Major Goethals returned to Washington.

Stevens saw at once, as the French had not, that the Panama Railroad was the lifeline along which not only men, food, supplies, everything needed to sustain the work, would have to move freely and efficiently, but the Culebra dirt trains as well. He also saw that there was no sense in working with anything less than the biggest, heaviest equipment possible. The French had tried to improve their output by continuously modifying their “plant,” using different kinds of equipment in different combinations; but generally it was all too small, too light for the size of the task. “Now I would liken that [French] plant to a modern one as baby carriages to automobiles,” Stevens observed. “This is no reflection on the French, but I cannot conceive how they did the work they did with the plant they had.”

The track itself, to begin with, was too light. By his standards the railroad as it stood was a pathetic toy. Equipment on the Great Northern was four times the size of that used on the little jungle line. (Hill had been the first railroad baron to equip his road with large-capacity freight cars and monster locomotives.) So within a year the line was completely overhauled and double-tracked with heavier rails. Bridges were strengthened, signals and sidings were improved upon, equipment was rehabilitated or replaced. A new telegraph and telephone system was installed, using old rails for poles. Warehouses and repair shops were built and enormous locomotive sheds were put up at Matachín. Orders were placed for freight cars, dump cars, refrigerator cars, more than a hundred locomotives, all to be shipped “knocked down,” then reassembled on arrival in the new shops.

To run the line an entirely new force was brought in–yard and train masters, superintendents, dispatchers, master mechanics, and what Stevens described as “an army of conductors, engineers, and switch men.”

Until Colon’s New water system was completed, he used the railroad to run trainloads of clean water into the city night and day. The railroad fed the work force, it ran the commissaries and it ran the Panama Steamship Company by which the food was shipped from New York. A tremendous cold-storage plant was built in conjunction with new terminal facilities at Cristobal. Perishable foods were soon being delivered on a regular schedule along the line every morning.

The men rebuilding the railroad, those building the New towns beside the railroad, began enjoying such luxuries as fresh eggs, lettuce, dressed meats– ice. A bakery was built capable of producing forty thousand loaves of bread per day.

There was no building construction, no construction enterprise of any kind not associated with the railroad. It was as if all the activity of the usual large-scale railroad project, activity normally strung across vast open space, had been compressed into this one narrow fifty-mile corridor, with the result that everything seemed tremendously intensified. The size of the labor force was tripled in six months after Stevens took over. By the end of 1906 there were nearly twenty-four thousand men at work, more than there had been working on the Union Pacific in the final race to finish at Promontory, Utah, more than there had been at any time during the French years at Panama. For several months he had twelve thousand men doing nothing but putting up buildings.

Again, as during the French effort, the labor force came from every part of the world–ninety-seven countries according to the records– but again the unskilled pick-and-shovel workers were nearly all black men and this time it was Barbados, rather than Jamaica, that supplied the majority. Because of the suffering experienced by those Jamaicans left stranded on the Isthmus when the de Lesseps venture collapsed, the Jamaican government refused to allow any recruiting on the island and imposed a tax on anyone desiring to leave to work on the canal. As a result those Jamaicans who immigrated to Panama did so of their own volition and were mostly skilled artisans–those who could afford the tax.

On those islands where recruiting was permitted, all workers were given a contract by which they received free passage to Colón and were guaranteed free repatriation, if they so chose, after five hundred working days (roughly a year and eight months). Martinique and Guadeloupe accounted for some 7,500 men all told, but the total from Barbados was to be nearly 20,000.

Wages were ten cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. Segregation by color, long an unwritten rule on the railroad, as well as in Panamanian society in general, became established policy. There were separate mess halls for blacks. Housing, schools, hospitalization, were separate and by no means equal. And it remained a “Jim Crow” railroad, though restrictions were never hard-and-fast or enforced. Travel on the line was either first or second class, and while most whites rode first class and most blacks second, low-paid white laborers frequently chose second class, just as higher-paid skilled blacks sometimes traveled in the first-class cars.

In all official rules and documents, on signs in post offices and other public places, the color line was expressed in “gold” and “silver” rather than black and white, these designations having been derived from the pay system. Pay for the unskilled work force was in Panamanian silver –balboas, as the standard coins were called. Pay for Americans, on the other hand, was in gold, that still being the monetary standard of the United States. And since nearly all the unskilled workers were black and since virtually all the Americans recruited were skilled workers and white, the terms “gold roll” (gold payroll) and “silver roll” came to be used more or less synonymously for skilled whites from the United States (who might be anything from a steam-shovel engineer to a postal clerk to a nurse to a division engineer) and for black unskilled British subjects (most likely from Barbados and most likely illiterate; but who could also be an educated, French-speaking artisan from Martinique, a Swiss surveyor, or an illiterate Spaniard or Italian). Recruiting offices were opened in New York and New Orleans and recruiting agents were sent out from Washington to rove the country in search of men. The variety of skills and trades suddenly in demand was enormous. Stevens’ own estimate for the upcoming year was for 4,892 American workers skilled in some forty different specialties-bricklayers, blacksmiths, boilermakers, conductors, cooks, car in spectors, car repairers, ship captains, carpenters (1,710 carpenters was the specific request), coppersmiths, calkers, dredge operators, hand-drill operators, steam-drill operators, helpers for the steam-drill operators, engine dispatchers and their helpers, firemen, ironworkers, lithographers, locomotive engineers, locomotive foremen, molders, masons, marine engineers, machinists, plumbers, plasterers, pattern-makers, painters, pipe fitters, riggers, shipwrights, steam-shovel engineers, steam-shovel cranemen, steam-shovel firemen, stationary engineers, timers, watchmen, waiters.

Free transportation to the Isthmus was offered; free housing and medical treatment were part of the enticement. The average pay per month was $87.

The results, however, were disappointing. Too often applicants were those unable to hold a job. These were prosperous years at home and the bad publicity attending the yellow-fever scare had greatly undermined whatever patriotic or romantic appeal Panama might otherwise have had. Instead of 4,892 skilled workers, Stevens got 3,243, and Within a year or so, more than half of these would find life in Panama more than they had bargained for and would quit and go home.

Though the idea of building the canal entirely with American labor, unskilled as well as skilled, received some consideration in the early stages and was described by the press as the proper course idealistically, it was never taken seriously. Unskilled white workers, even those at the very bottom end of the pay scale, had no desire to go to Panama. Union leaders strenuously opposed any wholesale shipment of men to “that deathtrap” and particularly after an inspection team from Japan, representatives of large contractors of Japanese labor, reported the Isthmus too unsafe to risk the lives of their men.

What was needed for the heavy physical work, according to the accepted doctrine, were battalions of men who by nature and habit could withstand the punishing climate: black men from the West Indies. That black North Americans might also serve–as General Ben Butler once proposed to Abraham Lincoln–was taken into account, but this too met with strenuous opposition from southern congressmen who foresaw their home states suddenly drained of their natural supply of cheap labor.

The comparative inefficiency and technical ignorance of the West Indian became a source of terrible aggravation for the American engineers and foremen, not a few of whom were naturally prone to scoff at any black man and particularly if he had a singsong British accent. By Stevens’ own estimate the efficiency of the average West Indian was about one-third that of an American laborer, white or black.

Reporters were told of the West Indian’s “childish irresponsibility,” that he was “wasteful . . . stupid . . . possessed with unutterable hatred of exertion other than conversation.” And reporters from their own observations reached much the same conclusion. A writer for the popular Outlook magazine declared that in all his weeks on the Isthmus he had never once seen a West Indian swing a pick properly, that “their dullness is almost beyond belief.”

It does not matter whether they are digging a drainage trench- in Colón, or laying tracks at the very bottom of the Great Cut, or breaking up the ancient cobblestone pavements of Panama. Watch them work for but a single day and you are puzzling over the worst problem that faces our engineers. The only labor they can find in the Western Hemisphere for building the canal has less than one third the efficiency of our labor of the North. The West Indian’s every movement is slow and bungling; every small object a subject for debate; anything at all a sufficient excuse for all hands to stop work. A slow upward look from one or two of a gang is usually the only sign that they have heard the foreman’s yell, for there is no change in pace or manner of work.

Still, the same writer could see a “certain and unjustified cruelty” in forcing “poor half-fed fellows” to work eight to ten hours in such heat. “Until you have tried to do a good fifteen minutes’ work with a pick and shovel during the rainy season . . . you can have no idea of the exhaustion that tropical heat brings even to the laborer who is used to it.”

From his experience in the West, Stevens preferred contract Chinese labor gangs above all other choices and he wanted to bring Chinese to Panama in the shortest time possible. Consequently, bids were invited on contracts to furnish up to fifteen thousand Chinese at a pay scale the same as that of the West Indians. But the prospect of wholesale shipments of coolie labor into the Canal Zone by a government that had excluded the importation of such labor since 1882 was received at home with what Stevens called “the customary outcry.” The Panamanians protested even more strenuously. In reaction to the success of Chinese merchants in Colón and Panama City, many of them descendants of Chinese laborers left over from earlier projects, the New republic had enacted its own Chinese exclusion law. Moreover, the government of Chin a protested as well, its view being the same as that of the Japanese contractors.

So the matter was dropped. Stevens, infuriated by the politics of the incident, failed to comprehend, he said, what difference it made whether a laborer was white or black or yellow; or why some people would rather spend millions On one variety rather than another, when the performance of the other was so plainly superior.

As an experiment, he had several hundred unskilled workers brought over from the Basque Provinces of Spain. The physical endurance of these men, their effectiveness whenever gang labor was called for (such as in moving railroad track), proved so exceptional that he imported nearly eight thousand more and paid them twice what the West Indians were getting, a policy he justified On the grounds that they worked three times as hard.

But recruitment at Barbados went ahead as rapidly as possible, under the direction of William Karner, Wallace’s former assistant. work of any kind was extremely scarce On the vastly overpopulated island. The mass of the populace, black and desperately poor, survived primarily on a few months of planting and harvest On the sugar plantations, when an able-bodied man could earn about twenty cents a day, the same as he could earn in Panama in Two hours. So for every man who was picked to go to Panama there were five or more others eager for the chance. On the days Karner opened his recruiting office off Trafalgar Square in Bridgetown, the police had to be On hand to keep the crowds in order.

Examinations were conducted in a large, bare loft. The men, in batches of a hundred-odd at a time, were formed in a line around the wall. Any who looked too old, too young, or too feeble were told to leave. The others were checked first for trachoma, then were told to strip, after which they were gone over for tuberculosis, heart trouble, and rupture. By the time the process was finished, only about twenty men would have passed. A correspondent who watched one such session wrote that he had never seen a more serious-looking body of men until the doctor told the remaining twenty they had been chosen to go. The change was immediate; they started to shout and dance about, clapping one another on the shoulders.

A flood of light came in through the window at the end, and many streaks shot down through the broken shingles on their naked bodies. It was a weird sight–something like a war dance–as they expressed their relief . . . It meant semi-starvation for themselves and their families if they were rejected, and untold wealth–a dollar a day–if they passed. They were all vaccinated . . . their contracts signed, and they went prancing down-stairs to spread the good news among their friends in the square.

Sailing days for Panama were occasions remembered for years afterward, with thousands of women gathered at the wharf to bid the men farewell. “I never saw so many Negro women in my life,” wrote the correspondent. “All of them in their gayest Sunday clothes, and all wailing at the top of their voices.” Royal Mail steamers sailed with every inch of space occupied, the number on board generally averaging seven or eight hundred. The nearly twenty thousand men recruited at Barbados during the years of construction represented 10 percent of the island’s population and approximately 40 percent of all the adult males. Virtually every able-bodied man went off to build the Panama Canal and the money they sent home to the island was something over $300,000 a year.

For the average West Indian the initial weeks at Panama–the constant movement of men and equipment, the rules, schedules, the confusion and noise–were unlike anything in his experience, often frightening, often highly unpleasant. Most of these men, it must be remembered, had never before seen or heard a locomotive. They were cane-field workers, wholly unfamiliar with modern machinery of any kind. Once, in October 1905, several hundred men inbound from Martinique were so terrified by the prospect of being vaccinated that they refused to leave the ship when it docked at Colón and so had to be put ashore by force. Fifty years later in Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, Martinique, St. Vincent, old men would remember being herded aboard their first labor train (“. . . when saying train, I don’t mean passenger train; it was a boxcar train”); or being put directly to work while still wearing their best suit or a new derby purchased especially for the trip.

They were marched out by the hundreds to dig ditches, to cut brush, to carry lumber, to unload boxcars of dynamite. “I load cement, I unload cement,” remembered one of them. “I carry lumber until my shoulder peel.” Previous training or trade skills were generally ignored, former schoolteachers, and skilled craftsmen were made messengers and waiters, experienced carpenters were put to work cutting points on the ends of stakes for the engineers. Rarely did a black man ever rise to a supervisory level and never over white men.

At the camps each man was assigned to a tent or to one of the new barracks and was given a tin plate, tin cup and spoon, and a brass number tag. Fifty years later most of them would still be able to recite their number. The food provided would be recalled by some as sumptuous (“. . . corn beef, bread, coffee which We enjoyed . . . bread, sardines, and ice cream . . . and never forget our ice cream, I am saying here it was refreshing”). But most of such declarations date from a later time. In fact, the food from the mess kitchens in the labor camps appears to have been quite dreadful to begin with, or at least bad enough that in 1906 some sixteen thousand of the labor force preferred to fend for themselves, cooking their own meals in iron pots. Indeed, so little did the West Indians care for the food and the housing provided, so great was their distaste for the regimentation of barracks life, that not more than one in five would stay on in the camps, while the rest crowded into the slums of Colón and Panama City or put up their own ramshackle huts in the bush, exactly as in the days of the French canal.

Shortly after his own arrival on the Isthmus, John Stevens had watched three West Indians at work with a wheelbarrow. when the wheelbarrow was full, Two of them hoisted it onto the head of the third man who carried it away. The scene was one he would often use to depict the variety of problems he faced. But it was Stevens who also said the West Indian would learn rapidly if given the chance and who suggested that the West Indian’s diet might explain his comparative lassitude. On both counts Stevens was to prove correct. The West Indians did become increasingly proficient with tools and at working in unison and in association with heavy machinery, as many of them would recount afterward with pride. The replacement of their traditional high-starch, low-protein diet (chiefly rice and yams) with more nourishing meals did have an effect. Furthermore, while the output of the West Indians improved, that of the Spanish workers declined; they became gradually less industrious, less able to withstand the climate. In time there would be no appreciable difference in the efficiency of one group as compared to another. “The West Indian, while slow, has learned many of the trades and many of them have developed into first-class construction men,” Robert Wood was to write afterward in his final official report. “The bulk of the building work on the Canal has been done by West Indian carpenters, masons and painters . . . and toward the end of the construction period the West Indian remained on the job as steadily as the Spaniard or even the American.”

The racket of hammers and saws could be heard from one end of the line to the other. Stevens remarked that there was not a half mile between Colón and Panama City that did not show signs of the “tremendous activities” of his building department, a claim that if not literally true certainly agreed with everyone’s impression. Under the previous chief engineer, in the one year John Wallace was in charge, a total of 336 old French structures had been renovated, 150 new buildings put up. In one year under Stevens, 1,200 structures were renovated, 1,250 new ones built.

Mountains of supplies were gathered; the worst of the old French wreckage was hauled off for scrap or dumped into swamps for fill. And while much of what went on seemed perfectly bewildering, even to the trained eye–to Major Goethals, for example, it had all looked like utter chaos–one new community after another gradually took shape, and Stevens behaved always as if everything was progressing in the smoothest and most orderly fashion.

“In his office, his desk was always clear,” Frank Maltby wrote, “and apparently he had nothing to do.” Reporters described him as “the type who . . . always has time on his hands,” who was never a day behind in his correspondence.

Concerned greatly about the morale of the skilled American workers, disturbed by the continuing turnover among them as men gave up and left, he had clubhouses built, arranged for weekly band concerts, established a baseball league, with each settlement along the line organizing its own team. When a young clerk informed him that no funds had been allocated for building baseball fields, Stevens said to charge them to sanitary expenses.

Married men on the gold roll were encouraged to send for their wives and families as soon as housing became available, or if not married, to find a wife at the earliest opportunity. To avoid disputes or rivalry over accommodations, it was decided that each man should get one square foot for every dollar of his monthly pay. The rule applied to bachelor and married quarters alike, but wives were also entitled to a square foot per dollar earned by their husbands.* Devised and enforced by Jackson Smith, who was hence known thereafter as “Square- # For dependents other than wives the rule became a bit more complicated: each child qualified for 5 percent of the father’s base allotment for each year of the child’s age (a ten-year-old thus rated 50 percent of the base allotment), while all adult members of the family other than the wife rated 75 percent. foot” Smith, the rule established a standard understood by everybody. It also provided a strong incentive for advancement and especially with the arrival of increasing numbers of wives.

Most of the New houses were Two stories, with Two or four apartments each, and were enclosed completely with screened verandas. They were big, plain, pine-clapboard buildings that stood well up off the ground and were painted gray with white trim. Roofs were of corrugated iron. They were not the least fancy, but with their high ceilings and long windows On all sides, they were suited perfectly to the climate.

Each apartment was equipped with modern plumbing and was furnished at government expense. Coal for cooking, ice for the “icebox,” water, electricity, garbage disposal, maintenance, grounds keeping, were all provided free of cost. The bachelor “hotels,” big, rambling affairs that looked like any medium-priced summer hotel on the New Jersey shore, were kept clean by full-time janitors, but married employees were “obliged” to look after themselves.

In the eyes of a professional engineer such as Stevens, the canal in certain respects was a simpler undertaking than other less conspicuous engineering projects of the era. There was plenty of space Within which to work. There were no property rights to worry about along the line of construction, no possibility of damage to existing buildings, no outside traffic to contend with. The labor force was at hand; only the steam-shovel and locomotive engineers were unionized; there were no contracts to live up to, and never any question about the money supply.

Nor were any radical or untried technical concepts necessary to handle the excavation. Most of what needed to be done had been done before.

What made the undertaking so exceptional was its overwhelming scale. “There is no element of mystery involved in it,” Stevens re ported to Washington, “. . . the problem is one of magnitude and not miracles.”

Greatly compounding this problem of magnitude was, of course, the enormous primary task of approximating the conditions of a modern industrial community in an equatorial wilderness Two thousand miles from the base of all supplies. when various of Stevens’ subordinates wrote afterward that he laid the foundations for the work, it was the startling advances in housing, health, supply, his dramatic marshaling of men and machines, that they had in mind.

In more abstract terms, in terms of pure professional problem solving, Stevens’ greatest contribution was the basic vision of the excavation of the canal as a large-scale problem in railroad freight. As conceived by Stevens, the Panama project was simply one of moving unprecedented tonnage–dirt–by railroad with the least possible wasted motion.

The “overshadowing” challenge would be Culebra Cut. In a letter to Shonts, with his own kind of blunt eloquence, Stevens said what no one had, but what had needed to be said for a very long time:

Yet we must reflect that at best, even with the backing and sentiment and finances of the most powerful nation on earth, that we are contending with Nature’s forces, and that while our wishes and ambition are of great assistance in a work of this magnitude, neither the inspiration of genius nor our optimism will build this canal. Nothing but dogged determination and steady, persistent, intelligent work will ever accomplish the result; and when we speak of a hundred million yards of a single cut not to exceed nine miles in length, we are facing a proposition greater than was ever undertaken in the engineering history of the world.

One recent proposal was to wash that whole section of the divide into the Pacific, using tremendous blasts of water, as in hydraulic mining. Another, equally fantastic, was to build a huge compressed-air plant in the Cut and blow all the spoil to the sea through vast pipes. Stevens’ objective was to create a system of dirt trains that would function like a colossal conveyor belt, rolling endlessly beside steam shovels working at several levels at once. And his success, he knew, would depend on how well things could be managed at the disposal end of the system.

He would haul the dirt to either coast, or to both, or to wherever it was needed for fill. If a high-lake lock canal was decided on, then Culebra could supply the material to build the necessary dams. By double-tracking the railroad he had provided open access in both directions without interrupting regular traffic on the line. The distance from the point of excavation to the dumping grounds was immaterial. It made no difference whether the dirt had to be moved ten feet or ten miles. The trick was to keep the dirt trains in constant motion in and out of the Cut, to and from the dumps.

As possibly no other engineer could have, he devised an elaborate, yet ingeniously elastic system of trackage within the Cut whereby loaded trains would roll out on a downgrade and trains of empty cars would be constantly available to serve the steam shovels. For a shovel to perform at maximum efficiency, the boom had to be swinging every possible minute; and this, as he stressed, could be accomplished only by maintaining a steady supply of empty cars.

By early 1906 he had his plans far enough along and had sufficient equipment in line to resume excavation. Day after day he trudged about among the men and machines, asking questions, observing, smoking cigars like Grant at the Wilderness, as a reporter noted. The men called him “Big Smoke.”

III

The summer before, when he first arrived in Panama, Stevens had assumed that he would be building a sea-level canal. He had come to the job, he later wrote, with a picture in mind of a “wide expanse of blue, rippling water and great ships plowing their way through it like the Straits of Magellan.” It was the age-old preconception, the dream of Columbus, the vision that had dominated at Paris in 1879 and that persisted still in both the popular and official imagination, irrespective of the French experience. Authorized by the previous commission to design an official seal for the Canal Zone, Tiffany & Company, after much historical research, had prepared a shield upon which a Spanish galleon under full sail could be seen traversing an open strait between steep embankments, on into the Pacific, the sky aglow with a tropical sunset. Beneath the shield was inscribed the motto: “The Land Divided–The World United.” And both design and inscription had been approved.

That the proper canal to build even remained an issue at so late a date was in itself a serious and immensely bothersome handicap for Stevens. In his position the French directors general had at least known what was wanted of them. There was of course much that he could do in the way of preparation, work that would be applicable regardless of the final decision, but only up to a point. As he would explain to John Tyler Morgan, it was “as though I had been told to build a house without being informed whether it was a tollhouse or a capitol.”

Now, in addition to everything else, he would be required to play a political role, a role he claimed to detest and for which he felt ill equipped. Yet in restrospect, it is hard to imagine anyone doing better than he did, and at the close of a long life, he himself would look back upon it as his greatest single service.

The special international board appointed by Roosevelt to consider the problem was composed of eight Americans and five Europeans. Chairman of the group was General Davis, the former Governor of the Canal Zone. Others included Professor Burr and William B. Parsons, from the first Isthmian Canal Commission; a former member of the Walker Commission, Alfred Noble; and General Henry Abbot, from the old Comité Technique. Joseph Ripley was chief engineer of the St. Marys Falls Ship Canal–the “Soo” Canal, as it was better known–at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Frederic P. Stearns was chief engineer of Boston’s Metropolitan Water Board; Isham Randolph was chief engineer of the Sanitary District of Chicago.

The foreign members were a chef des Ponts et Chaussées, Adolphe Guérard; William Henry Hunter, chief engineer of the Manchester Canal, who also had served on the Comité Technique; a Prussian state engineer named Eugen Tincauzer; E. Quellenac, consulting engineer of the Suez Canal; and J. W. Welcker, director of all Dutch water-ways.

It was another distinguished panel drawn from an international, professional upper crust, which for Stevens, with his lack of education, was something of a world apart. At its first meeting in the I.C.C. offices in Washington, September 1, 1905, the board was presented with numerous past reports, volumes of current data, as well as assorted proposals deemed deserving of attention (including one from Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who insisted still that the surest approach was to build a lock canal and by means of dredges take it down to sea level). Roosevelt gave a lunch for the group at Oyster Bay and told them he hoped it might be a sea-level passage, but warned that time and practicality must be kept in mind. It was his vital interest to “secure a Panama waterway” in the shortest time possible. The plan must be one that would work.

John Findley Wallace returned to Washington to argue that no plan should be approved that might prevent the ultimate creation of the “Straits of Panama.” And at the end of September the board went to the Isthmus to tour the line under abnormally sunny skies. In Limon Bay, in a stateroom on their ship, they interviewed Stevens, Maltby, and others from Stevens’ staff. By the time of their twenty-fifth meeting in Washington, November 18, they were prepared to cast their vote. The decision, by a margin of eight to five, was for a sea-level canal. Without exception the European members wanted it that way and they were joined by Chairman Davis, Professor Burr, and William B. Parsons.

In language and logic the case as presented by the majority had a very familiar ring: the setting might have been the grande salle of the Société de Géographie in 1879. Speaking for the majority, Chairman Davis declared that he had known since boyhood that Suez and Panama would be “overcome” one day; a passage at Suez had been declared impossible, a passage like that at Suez must be built in Panama. Again the issue was one of national pride and honor. Only in this instance the spokesman was an American official who knew Panama from personal experience and who no less than any of the others, presumably, should have had little difficulty understanding what had happened to the French and why. But the model was not the French canal at Panama; the model–again–was the French canal at Suez. To those in opposition, to anyone familiar with the history of the French experience on the Isthmus, the views of Chairman Davis seemed like the return of a bad dream.

The task that confronted the private company [at Suez] . . . measured by the difficulties they had to encounter, was many times greater, it seems to me, than the task which, measured by the standard of engineering methods and capabilities that exist today, confronts the United States at Panama; but the French company carried that work to completion at Suez thirty-six years ago, and it has yielded enormous profits. The many difficulties were overcome and an open waterway was made 100 miles long, affording unobstructed navigation. . ..

We know that at Panama to make a waterway similar to the Suez Canal we must construct a channel less than half as long. . . . Should the United States withdraw from the attempt to make at the American Isthmus a channel as open, free, and safe as already existing at Suez? Should they climb over the hill or remove it? . . . I think the dignity and power of this great nation . . . require that we should treat this matter not in a provisional but in a final, masterly way.

Control of the Chagres River–“the lion in the path,” Davis called it–could be easily attained.

A mountainous Report of the Consulting Engineers for the Panama Canal was delivered to the White House On January 10, 1906. The recommended sea-level canal was to cost $247,000,000 and to be completed in twelve to thirteen years, which was approximately $100,000,-000 more and three to four years longer than required for a lock canal of the kind proposed by the dissenting members.

This minority proposal was for a canal much like the one recommended by the Walker Commission; it was, that is, essentially the same canal for which the Spooner Act had been passed, a canal that would not divide the land, but bridge it with a high-level lake reached by flights of locks at either end. It had, however, one major difference. The site of the Chagres dam had been moved from Bohio downstream to Gatun, to within four miles of Limon Bay. What had been Lake Bohio in the earlier plan now became a much larger Gatun Lake. The span of the water bridge had been extended nine miles.

The elevation of the lake was to be eighty-five feet. At Gatun there would be a single flight of three locks built into the eastern end of the dam. A ship entering the locks would be lifted to the level of the lake, then proceed twenty-three miles across the lake, south to Culebra Cut, which, like the neck of a bottle, extended for nine miles through the divide and was capped by another small dam and one lock at Pedro Miguel. There the ship would be lowered thirty-one feet to a small terminal lake, another body of fresh water, this one being contained by a dam at La Boca, beside Sosa Hill, at the edge of the Pacific. Descending through two more locks, the ship would return to sea level and thus complete the ocean-to-ocean transit.

The model for the plan, its proponents stressed, was the Soo Canal, which for fifty years had been the gateway between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. There was no more heavily traveled canal in the world. By contrast to the 105-mile-long sea-level passage at Suez, the Soo was all of a mile and half from end to end. Yet the annual tonnage through the locks–44,000,000 tons in 1905–was more than three times that of the Suez Canal, even though the Soo was closed by ice during the winter. In season, huge Great Lakes ore boats moved through with an efficiency and safety that belied all the customary arguments against lock canals. No vessel had ever been seriously injured in the locks of the Soo, not in fifty years of constant traffic. “Danger to ships in a canal is not at the locks, where they are moving slowly and under control, but in the excavated channels . . . through which they pass at speed, and where if the width is insufficient, groundings are likely to happen.” The experience gained at the Soo was not only applicable to navigation at Panama, but of more value than any or all experience related to any other canal, according to the minority report, most of which was written by Alfred Noble, who in his earlier years had helped build the so-called Weitzel Lock on the Soo and who presently, at age sixty-one, was one of the two or three leading engineers in the country. (As chief engineer of the East River division of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1902 to 1909, Noble was responsible for tunnel construction under the river and for the foundations of Pennsylvania Station in New York City.)

Yet in its essentials this latest high-level lake plan for Panama was no different from that proposed by Godin de Lépinay in Paris twenty-seven years before. Gatun, it will be recalled, was the site specified by de Lépinay for the Chagres dam.

There had been others in the interval who had also seen Gatun as the most suitable place to check the river. Two interested Americans, C. D. Ward and Ashbel Welch, had each presented papers on the subject before the American Society of Civil Engineers. But because the breadth of the valley was far greater at Gatun than at Bohio, a much larger dam would have to be built at Gatun, thus making it an even more controversial project than the one at Bohio had been. This “controlling feature” in the new proposal was to be a mountain of earth nearly a mile and a half long (7,700 feet) and more than 100 feet high. And while earth dams of nearly the same size had been built with success elsewhere, this would be the highest on record and the Gatun site appeared to offer little if any bedrock upon which to found such a structure.

Stevens was chief among those who now backed the Gatun plan. Recalled to Washington to give his views, he met with Shonts, Taft, and Roosevelt and made a memorable appearance before the Senate canal committee. Stevens, however, was not the “architect” of the lock plan, as later claimed by some of his more ardent admirers. As recently as October, when appearing before the advisory board in Colón, he had in fact quite stubbornly refused to endorse any plan for the canal, saying he was too new to the work. The present lock plan was the work of Alfred Noble and Joseph Ripley, and was based largely on their experience on the Soo. Stevens, whose background was in railroad construction only, had no knowledge of lock construction or hydraulics. The real “architect” of the present plan, if such is an appropriate designation, remained Godin de Lépinay.

Still, Stevens had experienced a revelation since October. He had seen the effect of the rains; he had seen the Chagres in flood. In conversations with Maltby and others who had served under Wallace, he had found none who favored a sea-level canal. Stevens had once believed like others that a sea-level canal “meant simply digging a little more dirt.” Now he saw that the issue was one of the most momentous consequence and he could not have been more partisan. To his mind any sea-level plan for Panama was “an entirely untenable proposition,” “an impracticable futility.” The sea-level passage advocated by the majority of the board was to be only 150 feet wide for nearly half its length–“a narrow, tortuous ditch.” He foresaw endless landslides, a precarious transit under the best of conditions. Whenever two ships passed in so narrow a channel, one would have to make fast to mooring posts, as at Suez. Even if there were no difference in cost or time of construction, he would still prefer the lock plan.

It will provide a safer and quicker pas sage for ships. . . . It will provide, beyond question, the best solution to the vital problem of how safely to care for the floodwaters of the Chagres. . . . Its cost of operation, maintenance and fixed charges will be much less than any sea-level canal.

The estimated time of completion for a lock canal was nine years. He thought it could be done in eight years, by January 1914. He doubted that a sea-level canal could be built in anything less than eighteen years, or not before 1924.

As a witness on Capitol Hill, he was particularly impressive, answering all questions with characteristic confidence. Predictably, much anxiety had been voiced in the press and in Congress over the prospect of risking everything on an earth dam. Still fresh was the memory of the Johnstown Flood of 1889, when an entire city had been wiped out and more than two thousand lives lost as a result of the failure of an earth dam.

Stevens assured the committee that if properly engineered an earth dam would serve perfectly and that such suggested reinforcements as a masonry core could be dispensed with.

“Yes, if it is absolutely safe,” one senator replied. “Here I suggest that that is a very positive opinion or conviction that you have.”

“Well, I am a positive man,” Stevens said.

His most persistent interrogator, and easily the most intelligent in his private opinion, was John Tyler Morgan, who at age eighty-one had a little more than a year to live, but who at this juncture was still going strong. At the close of the hearings, Morgan came up to Stevens and told him, “If we had [had] you on our side, the canal would be built at Nicaragua.”

In November, before Stevens reached Washington, the New York Tribune made front-page news with an unauthorized report that Roosevelt wanted a lock canal because that was Stevens’ choice. Ac cording to Stevens, however, it was only because he “talked to Teddy like a Dutch uncle” after arriving in Washington that Roosevelt swung around to favor the lock plan.

On February 5, in response to Stevens’ views, the Isthmian Canal Commission overrode the majority opinion of the advisory board and chose the lock canal. Two weeks later, when submitting the reports to Congress, Roosevelt gave the lock canal Presidential sanction. It was, he said, the canal the chief engineer wanted and of all men the chief engineer had “a peculiar personal interest in judging aright.”

No sooner had Stevens returned to Panama than he learned that he might be needed again to lobby further on Capitol Hill. He protested to Shonts by cable declaring that he had said all he could. As Shonts also knew, Stevens suffered severely from seasickness and dreaded every trip to or from Panama. By April the issue was still tied up in committee and Stevens, infuriated over the “vexatious manner” in which things were being handled in Washington, kept cabling Taft to do something. Professor Burr, William B. Parsons, and John Wallace had appeared before the Senate committee and denounced with notable conviction virtually every feature in the lock proposal. So Stevens was called back to Washington.

On May 17, by a margin of one vote, the Senate committee reported for the sea-level plan. Stevens, who was never known to complain of the heat at Panama, would remember the rest of his life how “for two

blistering hot days” he “withstood the severest” questioning before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Determined to make Congress and the country understand the nature of the problem, he kept hammering at the same fundamental idea that de Lépinay had failed to put across before the gathering in Paris. “The one great problem in the construction of any canal down there is the control of the Chagres River,” he insisted. “That overshadows everything else.”

He talked to congressmen, assembled statistics, and prepared a large map for display in the Senate. Most important, he drafted large sections of what was to be the major speech in the Senate, an address by the bantam-sized Philander Knox, Roosevelt’s former Attorney General, who had since become senator from Pennsylvania.

In the speech, as in the lock plan itself, Gatun Dam was the focal point. Knox assured the Senate that the dam was safe. Interestingly, Knox had once been part-owner of the ill-fated dam at Johnstown, a connection that somehow eluded notice in 1906. Knox happened also to live in Pittsburgh and his personal fortune, as well as the influence of his law firm, had been built on legal services in behalf of the Pittsburgh steel empire and its leaders. In the plan as it presently stood, a total of six double locks was called for and these would require gigantic gates–gates that would be built of steel. This was a point neither Knox nor anyone else happened to raise publicly, and how strenuously the steel interests may also have been lobbying for the lock plan is impossible to determine. But the great lock gates for the Panama Canal would in fact be fabricated in Pittsburgh one day and they would be erected by a Pittsburgh contractor.

Again, as in the “Battle of the Routes,” the issue was resolved in the Senate and by the narrowest of margins.

Knox spoke on June 19. Two days later the Senate voted 36 to 31 for a lock canal. A difference of three votes would have caused the United States to attempt a sea-level canal, which in all probability would have ended in terrible failure. As further experience would demonstrate, the advisory board had been no less naive than de Lesseps concerning the true cost of so vast an excavation in terms of both money and time. George Goethals was to remark at one critical point that there was not money enough in the world to construct a sea-level canal at Panama.

Still in the opinion of a very large number of people, including a great many technical and military specialists, a dreadful error had been committed. And it was a view that would persist for years to come. Roosevelt was to be told to his face by no less a figure of valor and resolution than Lord Kitchener that he had blundered shamefully, Kitchener’s contention–expressed in a very loud voice–being that a sea-level canal was the only proper canal, as any sensible person could perceive. When Roosevelt countered that there were too many technical difficulties involved, Kitchener answered, “I never regard difficulties, or pay heed to protests like that; all I would do in such a case would be to say, ‘I order that a sea-level canal be dug, and I wish to hear nothing more about it.’ ” Roosevelt responded by saying, “If you say so, I have no doubt you would have given such an order; but I wonder if you remember the conversation between Glendower and Hotspur, when Glendower says, ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and Hotspur answers, ‘So can I, and so can any man; but will they come?”’

For the engineers on the Isthmus the decision was a great parting of the clouds. They knew at last the canal they were to build. Plans prepared in expectation of the decision could immediately be put into effect. Stevens had left specific instructions. Though he did not get back to Colón again until July 4, construction of a new town at Gatun was started within twenty-four hours after the Senate vote. Clearing the site for Gatun Dam was begun; tracks were laid for the dirt trains from Culebra.

Residents of the old village of Gatun, hearing that the dam was to be built where the village stood, refused to concern themselves, let alone move to the new site that had been provided for them. Such impossible things had been spoken of by the French some twenty-five years before, they said. So it was not until later, when actual construction began on the dam–and rock being dumped for the foundations crashed over several houses–that they agreed to move out.

On Stevens’ return, after careful study of core samples, after much tramping back and forth, he and Maltby fixed the center line of the Gatun locks. Responsibility for the design of the locks and of the dam was put in the hands of Joseph Ripley, the chief engineer of the Soo Canal, whom Stevens had managed to recruit before leaving Washington. As Stevens wrote, “Things began to quicken everywhere.”

Surveying parties were sent into the jungle to map and locate the contour line–the perimeter–of what was to be the largest artificial lake in the world. Eventually five such parties were in the field and their work was carried on almost entirely through unbroken jungle. Nearly every foot of the way had to be cleared by heavy cutting by hand. Progress was extremely slow; some parties were out for a year.

The creation of Gatun Lake would mean that approximately 164 square miles of jungle, an area as large as the island of Barbados, would vanish under water. Every village between Gatun and Matachín would be covered over, a prospect that the native populace found impossible to imagine. Mile after mile of the Chagres River, the Panama Railroad, nearly everything along the path of the French, not to mention most of the new towns being built, would be lost beneath the lake. A new railroad would have to be built on higher ground to skirt the eastern shore of the projected lake.

The preparatory period was over. Stevens’ headquarters, the entire engineering department, had been moved from Panama City to Culebra, to a steep green bluff looking directly down into the Cut. It had been a year and three months since John Stevens had taken charge.

18
The Man with the Sun in His Eyes

And never did a President before so reflect the quality of his time.

–H. G. WELLS

I Theodore Roosevelt had taken a great liking to John Stevens. Stevens, in addition to his other attributes, was a reader of books, Roosevelt had discovered–“and . . . he has the same trick that I have of reading over and over again books for which he really cares.” Stevens’ favorite of all was Huckleberry Finn, which he read “continually,” and this to Roosevelt was the mark of the finest literary discernment.

Roosevelt’s one reservation about Stevens was his obvious insensitivity to the fact that the canal was an undertaking of the United States government. Stevens, Roosevelt complained to Taft, seemed incapable of understanding that he was no longer working for James J. Hill. Stevens had painfully little patience with congressmen, or with the Panamanians, and none at all with labor unions. When a delegation of steam-shovel engineers came to his office threatening to strike unless paid more, Stevens reportedly told them: “You all know damn well that strikes do not get you anywhere. Now, get the hell out of this office and back to work . . .” The men had returned to their machines and the story, when it got around, raised Stevens’ standing even higher in the eyes of most other Americans on the Isthmus. But the steam-shovel men had sent angry protests to their Union leaders at home, who very quickly took the matter to Washington where it wound up on Roosevelt’s desk.

But it was the technical executive ability of Stevens and Shonts that Roosevelt valued most. They were “the very best men we could get for actually digging the canal,” he told Taft; their administrative abilities were “phenomenal.” And so it was in that spirit in the summer of 1906 that Roosevelt addressed himself to two propositions that would greatly change the execution of the work.

Stevens and Shonts wanted to build the canal by contract, as the French had tried, and as the transcontinental railroads had been built. It was the system to which they, as railroad men, were accustomed. Stevens envisioned a powerful syndicate of railroad contractors who “by combining their strength and influence” could bring to Panama the best people in the world to do the job. Taft was certain the plan meant trouble, and especially if selection of the contractors was to be determined by Stevens, which was what Stevens wanted, rather than by open bidding. Stevens was insistent, but Taft held his ground, and in the end Roosevelt agreed to put the work out to contract on a trial basis but only on the condition that there be open bidding.

The second and more important proposition concerned the manner in which the work was being administered. Shonts and Stevens wanted things greatly streamlined. To Shonts it would be “suicidal” to continue with the work without a “clear-cut organization with centralized power.” Stevens, in a long letter from Panama dated August 5, 1906, told Roosevelt that “from now on, everything should be made subordinate to construction . . . “

“I believe that the power and responsibility should be concentrated,” Stevens wrote, “. . . that the commission, constituted in whatever way it may be . . . must resolve itself into what will amount to a one-man proposition.”

More correspondence followed and several meetings, and consequently a new executive order was prepared. The present three-man commission was to be abolished. Authority was to be vested in a single head, the chairman, and he in turn would report to the Secretary of War. On the Isthmus, heads of the major departments–engineering, sanitation, labor–would become members of the commission, reporting to and receiving instructions from the chairman. But since 90 percent of the employees on the Isthmus worked for the engineering department, it was really the chief engineer who had the power.

The chain of command had thus become a straight line, from Roosevelt to Taft to Shonts to Stevens. The office of governor of the Zone no longer existed. Stevens, the chief beneficiary of the change, was to be supreme commander in the field. Governor Magoon, never a favorite of either Shonts or Stevens, happened to be absent from the Isthmus on an emergency legal mission in Cuba. He would be quietly informed that he was not to return to Panama.

Since the administration of so large, complex, and distant an undertaking was a new experience for the United States government, or more specifically for the executive branch, this refinement of the com-mission was in itself something of a pioneering process, for which Roosevelt was ultimately responsible, although Stevens, perhaps justifiably, would later say he was the one who had mapped it all out. In less than three years’ time the commission had gone from a seven-headed board that oversaw all decisions, to the three-man executive body (wherein chairman, governor, and chief engineer each had his own specific responsibilities), to the present arrangement. Had Elihu Root or even Henry Clay Frick agreed to run things earlier, possibly something of the kind would have been arrived at in much less time. Shonts and Stevens had been given exactly the power they wanted.

The order, it was agreed, would be signed when Roosevelt got to Panama.

The trip to Panama to see the canal was one of those small, luminous events that light up an era. No President had ever before left the country during his time in office and so from the day of the first advance announcement in June the journey became the talk of the country. In much of the press, serious apprehensions were expressed, even though it had been stressed that he would be in constant communication with Washington by wireless and that every possible precaution would be taken to insure his physical safety. But by and large the idea of Teddy Roosevelt going personally to Panama, like a general to the front, had tremendous appeal, and on the eve of his departure in November, even the cautious Washington Star lent its support. Perhaps it was a good thing after all for a President to get out and see something of the world, the paper declared; conceivably future occupants of the office might even undertake European journeys. He sailed on November 9, 1906, on the new 16,000-ton Louisiana, largest battleship in the fleet, escorted by two cruisers, Tennessee and Washington. He took Mrs. Roosevelt with him, and Navy doctor Presley Rixey, his personal physician, and three Secret Service men, but no reporters. The ships traveled south at fourteen knots through quiet seas and by the time they reached the Caribbean the weather was ideal.

Mother and I walk briskly up and down the deck together or else sit aft under the awning or in the aftercabin, with the gun ports open and ready . . . [he wrote to their son Kermit]. Mother, very pretty and dainty in white summer clothes, came up on Sunday morning to see inspection and review, or whatever they call it . . . I usually spend half an hour on deck before Mother is dressed. Then we breakfast together alone . ..

Their quarters were those of the admiral of the fleet, only somewhat enlarged, several walls having been removed for the occasion. Pictures of the rooms, with their wicker chairs and big brass beds and Oriental rugs, had already appeared in the illustrated magazines.

It is a beautiful sight, these three great war vessels steaming southward in close column [his letter continued], and almost as beautiful at night when we see not only the lights but the loom through the darkness of the ships astern. . . . I have thought a good deal of the time over eight years ago when I was sailing to Santiago in the fleet of warships and transports. It seems a strange thing to think of my now being President, going to visit the work of the Panama Canal which I have made possible.

All together, with the voyage down and back, he was away two weeks. The most memorable part of the visit was the rain. He had picked November because it was the height of the rainy season. He wished to see Panama at its absolute worst, he said, and he was not disappointed. “It would have been impossible to see the work going on under more unfavorable weather conditions,” he would report enthusiastically to Congress. It was raining the morning he landed. It was raining as he and President Amador rode through the streets of Panama City in an open carriage, Roosevelt waving a top hat to sodden but exuberant crowds. The deluge the second day was the worst in fifteen years. Three inches of rain fell in less than two hours. He saw the Chagres surge a hundred yards beyond its banks. The railroad was under water in several places. Villages were “knee-deep in water.” There was even a small landslide on the railroad cut at Paraíso. The contrast between the Panama he saw and the sunny, benign land toured by Ferdinand de Lesseps could not have been much greater. “I tramped everywhere through the mud,” he wrote with satisfaction.

Advance preparations had involved the efforts of thousands of people. As in de Lesseps’ day, streets were scrubbed, houses were painted or whitewashed, flags were hung from windows and balconies. Programs were printed; schoolchildren were rehearsed in patriotic airs. The Republic of Panama declared his day of arrival a national day of “joy and exalted enthusiasm” and instructed the populace to behave, since “all thinkers, sociologists and philosophers of the universe [will] have their eyes upon us in penetrating scrutiny.”

At Ancon, construction of a big three-story frame hotel called the Tivoli, a structure begun the year before but still far from finished, was rushed ahead with all speed as soon as Stevens learned of the visit. One wing of the building was finished and furnished in six weeks, because Roosevelt insisted upon living on shore and in the Zone.

Predictably, perhaps inevitably, Roosevelt did almost nothing by the comparatively relaxed schedule planned by Stevens. (In a cable from Washington, Taft had advised a full tour but without “overdoing matters.”) The white battleship appeared in Limon Bay on November 14, a day before she was supposed to. When Amador, Shonts, Stevens, and their wives rushed by train to Cristobal that afternoon, it was only to learn that Roosevelt would stay on board through the night so as not to disrupt any of their arrangements. At 7:30 the next morning, the appointed hour, as the official welcoming party stood at the end of the pier, all eyes searching for signs of life on the big ship, an amazing figure called “Good morning” from shore. He advanced into their midst. He was wearing a white suit and a seaman’s sou’ wester, the brim of which reached his shoulders. The pince-nez glistened with fine rain-drops. He had been rowed ashore two hours earlier, he explained, and had been having a grand time “exploring” the waterfront.

At Tivoli Crossing, a station stop built especially for his arrival at the new hotel, his immediate move was to disappear. Perhaps a hundred Zone police had been waiting to protect him. Their captain, a big, picturesque figure named George Shanton, was a former Rough Rider whom Roosevelt had personally recruited to organize the Panama force and the uniform Shanton had chosen was the same as that of the Rough Riders. So with Shanton and his men prancing about on horseback, the reception, when the train pulled in, looked very much like those staged during political campaigns.

In the confusion of the rain and the crowds, Roosevelt spotted William Gorgas and pulled him into a closed carriage. But when the carriage arrived at the hotel, escorted by the galloping Shanton, neither Roosevelt nor Gorgas was inside. Before leaving the station, they had slipped out the other door of the carriage and Roosevelt had Gorgas take him directly to Ancon Hospital for an inspection tour, two hours before he was expected.

By noon he had toured the bay in a seagoing tug and had walked unannounced into one of the employees’ mess halls at La Boca, where, with several hundred “gold roll” men, he and Mrs. Roosevelt sat down to a 30-cent lunch of soup, beef, mashed potatoes, peas, beets, chili con carne, plum pudding, and coffee. According to the official schedule, he was supposed to have attended a large luncheon in his honor at the Tivoli Hotel.

The American President, said Manuel Amador in a speech from the steps of the cathedral that afternoon, was the commander in chief in the great struggle for progress. “To harmonize the various elements that had to be united . . . to reorganize the great work, to grasp, in a word, its immense magnitude, a superior man was necessary, and you were this man,” said Amador. Panama and the United States, Roosevelt responded, were partners in the “giant engineering feat of the ages.”

Meantime, some two hundred prominent, rain-soaked Panamanians had paraded by on horseback, all dressed as Rough Riders.

The visit lasted all of three days, which, he later stressed to Congress, was insufficient time for an “exhaustive investigation of the minutiae of the work . . . still less to pass judgment on the engineering problems.” But according to the Star & Herald, no one in the four hundred years of Panama’s history had ever seen so much in so little time.

“He seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him,” Frank Maltby would recall. “. . . He was continually pointing to some feature and asking, ‘What’s that? . . . Well, I want to see it.’. . . he was continuously stopping some black man and asking if he had any complaint or grievance.”

Everyone who tried to maintain his pace wound up exhausted and half-drowned.

He walked railroad ties in Culebra Cut, leaped ditches, splashed through work camps, made impromptu speeches in the driving rain. “You are doing the biggest thing of the kind that has ever been done,” he said, “and I wanted to see how you are doing it.”

He inspected the quarters for both white and black workers, poked about in kitchens and meat lockers. On the morning of the third day, John Stevens told Maltby that it was his turn to lead the procession. “I have blisters on both feet and am worn out,” Stevens said. At Gatun, Roosevelt said he needed an overall view of the dam site and pointed to a nearby hill. In Maltby’s recollection, “. . . we, together with three or four secret service men, charged up the hill as if we were taking a fort by storm.”

At home the papers reported his every move. “ROOSEVELT IS THERE” proclaimed the Washington Post. “A STRENUOUS EXHIBITION ON THE ISTHMUS” read another headline. “THE PRESIDENT CLIMBS A CANAL STEAM-SHOVEL” The New York Times announced on its front page.

The famous moment on the steam shovel occurred early on his second day, en route to the Cut. It was about eight in the morning and again the rain was coming down hard. At the site of the Pedro Miguel locks, Roosevelt spotted several shovels at work and ordered that the train be stopped. He jumped down, marched through the mud, and was soon sitting up in the driver’s seat, engineer A. H. Grey having happily moved over to make a place for him.

He was fascinated by the huge machine and insisted on knowing exactly how it worked; he asked that it be moved back and forth on its tracks. He had to see how everything was done. “All his questions, like his movements, were deliberate and emphatic to a noticeable degree,” a reporter noted; “he would stand for no ceremony. . . .”

He was at the controls for perhaps twenty minutes, during which a small crowd gathered and the photographers were extremely busy. Presidents of the United States had been photographed at their desks and on the rear platforms of Pullman cars; Chester A. Arthur had consented once to pose in a canoe. But not in 117 years had a President posed on a steam shovel. He was wearing a big Panama hat and another of his white suits. And the marvelous incongruity of the outfit, the huge, homely machine and the rain pouring down, not to mention his own open delight in the moment, made it at once an event, an obvious and inevitable peak for the man who so adored having his picture taken and who so plainly intended to see success at Panama. One of the photographs would quickly become part of American folklore, and as an expression of a man and his era, there are few that can surpass it.

The shovel was a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus, mainstay of the work. Going at full capacity it could dig three to five times as much as one of the old French excavators, none of which was any longer in use. It could take up five cubic yards–roughly eight tons of rock and earth– with a single scoop. Under ideal conditions it could load a dirt car in about eight minutes.

Ten men were needed to run such a machine. In addition to the engineer, there was a craneman, who handled the dumping, two coal stokers, and a “move-up” crew of six whose job it was to level the ground and place the track so that the shovel could be advanced as it worked, always keeping its nose to the bank. The engineer earned $210 a month, which was as much as the best-paid office workers received, more even than some doctors. But unlike the locomotive engineers, they got no overtime, as engineer Grey told Roosevelt in no uncertain terms.

The rain was descending in wild silver sheets when Roosevelt entered Culebra Cut for the first time, riding along the bottom of the Cut in a special train. Water was pouring from the red clay slopes in “regular rivers.” But there was a great blowing of locomotive whistles and cheering as he came into view. On the side of one shovel was stretched a big, hand-lettered banner that pleased him enormously: “WE’LL HELP YOU DIGIT.”

The shovels were working along the sides of the Cut on extended terraces, or benches, as in surface mining. They were advancing from either end of the Cut toward the middle, or summit, all of them digging on the upgrade, and it was thus that the loaded dirt trains rolled out of the Cut–north and south–on the downgrade. The spur tracks for the shovels ran side by side with those for the trains, the shovels working on the lower level. The area to be excavated was drilled and blasted, then the shovel moved up to begin the heavy work of swinging the debris, much of it rock, into the dirt cars. As each shovel progressed, it made a cut approximately fifty feet wide by twelve feet deep.

Very few of the old French dump cars were in use in the Cut any longer. The spoil was being hauled out on long trains of much larger American-built cars pulled by full-sized American-built locomotives. Most of the cars Roosevelt saw were wooden flat cars that were used in conjunction with a rather crude but amazingly effective unloading device, the Lidgerwood system, as it was called. The cars had only one side and steel aprons bridged the spaces between them. The dirt was piled on, high up against the one side; then at the dumping grounds a three-ton steel plow was brought up to the last car and hitched by a long cable to a huge winchlike device mounted on a flatcar at the head of the train. The winch took its power from the locomotive. At a signal the plow was hauled rapidly forward and the whole twenty-car train was unloaded with a single sweep, all in about ten minutes. One such machine, Stevens told Roosevelt, could do the work of three hundred men under the old method of unloading by hand.

In another letter to his son Kermit, written on the Louisiana on the way home, Roosevelt would give this description of Culebra Cut:

Now we have taken hold of the job. . . . There the huge steam shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters, loading it on trains which take it away to some dump, either in the jungle or where the dams are to be built. They are eating steadily into the mountain cutting it down and down. Little tracks are laid on the side hills, rocks blasted out, and the great ninety-five ton steam shovels work up like mountain howitzers until they come to where they can with advantage begin their work of eating into and destroying the mountainside. With intense energy men and machines do their task, the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is not worthwhile to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, and one of immense significance.

He had seen the Cut from above, from the rim, following lunch and a change of clothes at John Stevens’ house. The excavation was still only in its early stages and because of the rain there were only about twenty-five shovels at work. Even so, it was the largest cavern yet made in the earth’s surface and the noise and commotion from below were like nothing to be experienced anywhere. It was a scene, we are told in other accounts, that might only have come from the mind of H. G. Wells.

Once, earlier in the year, H. G. Wells had called at the White House. It was a bright spring afternoon and he and Roosevelt had talked at length in the garden, much as Jules Verne and Ferdinand de Lesseps had conversed in the library of the Société de Geographic Wells was in America, he said, to search for the future and “question the certitudes of progress,” for unlike Verne, he had grave misgivings about the long-range human consequences of science and technology.

Whether Roosevelt had any such thoughts as he looked down into Culebra Cut for the first and only time in his life is impossible to say. More likely it was a supreme and ineffable moment. Wells, in his travels, had seen a hall of dynamos at the Niagara Falls Power Company that evoked something verging on religious awe. They were, he wrote, the creations of “serene and speculative, foreseeing and endeavoring minds.” The hall itself was a sanctuary; there had been no clatter, no dirt, no tumult, still the outer rim of the big generators traveled at the speed of 100,000 miles an hour. He had been moved to the depths of his soul by the vision of such vast power in the hands of man.

For Roosevelt at Culebra, with the rain hammering down, there had to have been something of the same sensation, though for him the noise and tumult would be the better part of it.

In their talk in the White House garden Wells had asked if the creative energies of modern civilization had any permanent value, and Roosevelt’s answer had been immediate. He had no way of disproving a pessimistic interpretation of the future, Roosevelt declared. But he chose not to live as if that was so. He referred specifically to The Time Machine, Wells’s most despairing vision of the future.

“He became gesticulatory,” Wells recalled, “and his straining voice a note higher in denying the pessimism of that book. . . .” Gripping the back of a garden chair with his left hand, Roosevelt had stabbed the air with his right, the familiar platform gesture.

“Suppose after all that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real. It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it–even then.”

“I can see him now,” Wells remembered, “. . . and the gesture of the clenched hand and the–how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that, as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence. . . .”

In the long letter to Kermit written on the homeward voyage, Roosevelt said the Panama wilderness had made him wish he had more time. “It is a real tropic forest, palms and bananas, breadfruit trees, bamboos, lofty ceibas, and gorgeous butterflies and brilliant colored birds fluttering among the orchids. . . . All my old enthusiasm for natural history seemed to revive, and I would have given a good deal to have stayed and tried to collect specimens.” But there was no apparent conflict between such splendors and what went on in Culebra Cut, between orchids and steam shovels. “Panama was a great sight,” he told his son Ted, by which he meant everything in Panama.

To the majority of those on the job his presence had been magical. Years afterward, the wife of one of the steam-shovel engineers, Mrs. Rose van Hardeveld, would recall, “We saw him . . . on the end of the train. Jan got small flags for the children, and told us about when the train would pass . . . Mr. Roosevelt flashed us one of his well-known toothy smiles and waved his hat at the children . . .” In an instant, she said, she understood her husband’s faith in the man. “And I was more certain than ever that we ourselves would not leave until it [the canal] was finished.” Two years before, they had been living in Wyoming on a lonely stop on the Union Pacific. When her husband heard of the work at Panama, he had immediately wanted to go, because, he told her, “With Teddy Roosevelt, anything is possible.” At the time neither of them had known quite where Panama was located.

II

His “Special message Concerning the Panama Canal,” the first message to Congress to be illustrated with photographs, was released on December 17, 1906. He sketched the progress being made. He praised the French for what they had achieved; he praised Congress for having had the sense to refuse to attempt a passage at sea level. He described the hospitals, living quarters, his meal in the mess hall at La Boca. He wrote of the rain. Only on the last morning had he caught a glimpse of the sun, and then only for a few minutes.

He did his best to depict the size of the work and urged Congress and the nation to take notice. “It is a stupendous work upon which our fellow countrymen are engaged in down there on the Isthmus,” he declared. At present, he could report, there were nearly six thousand Americans on the job. “No man can see these young, vigorous men energetically doing their duty without a thrill of pride. . . .”

A very large part of the message was given over to the progress made in health and sanitation and in praise for Gorgas. The message, Gorgas wrote privately, was “indeed a corker. I had not expected anything of the kind. I do not think that an army medical officer ever had such recognition in a Presidential message. It probably marks the acme of my career.”

Roosevelt called the medical progress astounding in view of Panama’s past; and yet, oddly, the statistical tables included at the conclusion of the report, transcriptions from the actual hospital records, gave a very different picture and a disquieting one. The specific strides he cited were quite unprecedented and indisputable: yellow fever had disappeared, there was no more cholera, there was no plague. Among the Americans, including dependents, there had not been a single death from disease in three months, an almost unbelievable record for Panama and very impressive, as Roosevelt stressed, even by North American standards.*

Medical care and services on the Isthmus were in fact “as good as that which could be obtained in our first-class hospitals at home.” The Sanitary Department was currently spending $2,000,000 a year; Ancon Hospital had a staff of 470. More than a dozen new hospitals and dispensaries had been built along the line. All hospital care was free for all employees, white and black.

Nearly a thousand laborers were kept constantly at work digging drainage ditches, cutting grass, burning brush, hauling garbage, pouring or spraying oil on streams and swamps.

But to anyone who bothered to study the records at the back of the report it was at once apparent that the success of the health crusade was really quite relative. It depended on which segment of the work force one was talking about. The white worker and his family were indeed faring extremely well; otherwise, for the vast black majority, the picture was alarming.

For the first ten months of 1906 the actual death rate among white employees was seventeen per thousand. But among the black West Indians it was fifty-nine per thousand! Black laborers, those understood to be so ideally suited to withstand the poisonous climate, were dying three times as fast as the white workers. If Panama was no longer a white man’s graveyard, it was little less deadly than it had ever been for the black man. And since the black workers outnumbered the white workers by three to one, the disparity in the numbers of fatalities among the black workers was even more shocking.

In the previous ten months a total of thirty-four Americans had died, whereas the toll among men and women from Barbados alone was 362, ten times greater; 197 Jamaicans had died, 68 from Martinique, 29 from St. Lucia, 27 from Grenada.

The causes of death as listed–among all workers, irrespective of color–included everything from railroad accidents to alcoholism to dysentery, suicide, syphilis, and tuberculosis. The chief killer among black people, however, and therefore the most fatal disease on the Isthmus at the moment, was pneumonia. Since the start of the year 390 employees had died of pneumonia. of those, 375 were black. In October alone, as Roosevelt had been informed, 86 workers had died of pneumonia.

Malaria, the second worst killer, had taken 186 lives, all but 12 of whom were West Indian Negroes.

The problem was that much of the labor force was particularly vulnerable to viral pneumonia. On Barbados the disease was unknown. And since so many black workers lived where they pleased and as they pleased, often in the jungle, often ignorant of the simplest rules of hygiene, nearly always without the benefit of wire screening, the chances of their contracting almost anything, and malaria in particular, were extremely high.

The ditch-digging, brush-burning, swamp-draining activities carried on by the Anopheles brigades, as they were known, had been highly effective within specified areas. Those earlier studies that had shown the Anopheles mosquitoes to be susceptible to strong sunshine and wind had produced a calculated program to create as much unshaded, unprotected clear space, as little shade or shelter for the insect, as possible. And thus the new towns along the line stood on open ground, everything neatly clipped and trimmed. Anopheles mosquitoes were rarely seen in the immediate vicinity any longer. Roosevelt noted “the extraordinary absence of mosquitoes.” He and his party had seen exactly one in three days and it was “not of the dangerous species.”

But by no means had every swamp been drained, every breeding ground destroyed. A very large swamp at Miraflores, for example, was especially prolific; the usual catch in a mosquito trap overnight there was about a thousand. The jungle was never much more than a stone’s throw from any point along the line and in the jungle the Anopheles were as plentiful as always.

Malaria would continue to take more lives, as William Gorgas allowed in his own reports, and the “amount of incapacity” caused by the disease was, as he said, very much greater than that due to all other diseases combined.

Nearly all of the patients Roosevelt saw in the hospitals at Panama had been black men, as he acknowledged. And privately he had been appalled by some of the things he had seen, as we know from his correspondence with Shonts. “The least satisfactory feature of the entire work to my mind was the arrangement for feeding the negroes,” he wrote as soon as he reached Washington. “Those cooking sheds with their muddy floors and with the unclean pot which each man had in which he cooked everything, are certainly not what they should be. . . . Moreover, the very large sick rates among the negroes, compared with the whites, seems to me to show that a resolute effort should be made to teach the negro some of the principles of personal hygiene . . .” Could not something be done to provide better housing, better health for these workers? he asked.

Overall, the trip had made him more exuberant than ever on the subject of the canal. Of its ultimate success, he was as “convinced as one can be of any enterprise that is human.” His faith in Stevens was implicit throughout the message to Congress, as no one appreciated more than Stevens, who called it an “unqualified endorsement” of his conduct of affairs.

The executive order had been signed at a meeting in the old de Lesseps’ Palace at Cristobal on November 17, Roosevelt’s last day on the Isthmus. Stevens’ authority, therefore, was now firmly fixed.

So it was both puzzling and extremely annoying to Roosevelt when, at the very moment he released his message, Stevens began making trouble. In Washington for a brief visit in December, Stevens was strangely irritable and caustic. He seemed inexplicably resentful of Gorgas and talked of having Gorgas fired. Roosevelt found it “well-nigh impossible to get on with him.”

What went sour for Stevens is a mystery that Stevens chose never to explain. With the return of the dry season, the work was rolling ahead as never before. Excavation in Culebra Cut exceeded 500,000 cubic yards in January, more than double the best monthly record of the French. In February the figure was more than 600,000 cubic yards and Stevens’ own popularity reached a new high.

In any event, the crisis followed Shonts’s resignation on January 22. Shonts was leaving to head the Interborough Rapid Transit Company in New York City, a decision Roosevelt and Stevens knew of in advance and that Roosevelt accepted with none of the fireworks that had attended the Wallace incident. Stevens was formally apprised of the news two days later in a letter from I.C.C. Secretary Joseph Bucklin Bishop.

Then on January 30, at Culebra, Stevens sent a letter to Roosevelt that reached the White House on February 12.

It was six pages in length and as devoid of cant or circumlocution as all his correspondence. It also revealed a very different man from the John Stevens of the previous year, an exhausted and embittered man. He complained of “enemies in the rear” and of the discomforts of being “continually subject to attack by a lot of people . . . that I would not wipe my boots on in the United States.” While some “wise lawmakers” might think his salary excessive, he wanted it known that by staying on at Panama he was depriving himself of not less than $100,000 a year. His home life was disrupted; he was separated from his family much of the year. And at his age he had little enough time left “to enjoy the pleasures and comforts of a civilized life.”

He wrote of the tremendous responsibility and strain put upon the man in his position, saying he doubted that he could bear up under them for another eight years. Technical problems were not the issue; it was “the immense amount of detail” one had to keep constantly in mind.

If there was to be glory attached to his role, he was uninterested. Nor in the final analysis did he see any special romance or meaning in the canal itself:

The “honor” which is continually being held up as an incentive for being connected with this work, appeals to me but slightly. To me the canal is only a big ditch, and its great utility when completed, has never been so apparent to me, as it seems to be to others. Possibly I lack imagination. The work itself . . . on the whole, I do not like. . . . There has never been a day since my connection with this enterprise that I could not have gone back to the United States and occupied positions that to me, were far more satisfactory. Some of them, I would prefer to hold, if you will pardon my candor, than the Presidency of the United States.

This was the passage that settled his fate. The letter was not a formal resignation. He never said specifically that he wanted out, only that he was not “anxious to continue in service.” He wanted a rest, and having assured Roosevelt of his high personal regard for him, he asked for his “calm and dispassionate” consideration of the matter.

A reporter who talked to someone who was with Roosevelt at the time Roosevelt received the letter wrote, “To say that the President was amazed at the tone and character of the communication is to describe the feelings mildly.” The letter was sent immediately to Taft with a covering note: “Stevens must get out at once.” Even if Stevens were to change his mind, it would make no difference “in view of the tone of his letter.”

After a brief meeting with Taft, Roosevelt cabled Stevens that his resignation was accepted.

Taft again told Roosevelt that Major Goethals (who was about to become Lieutenant Colonel Goethals) was the best-equipped man for the job, so on the night of February 18 Goethals was summoned to the White House. The change, however, was kept secret until the twenty-sixth, when, with the announcement, Roosevelt issued his widely quoted declaration–a remark made as much for the benefit of the work force on the Isthmus as for the general public–that he would put the canal in the charge of “men who will stay on the job until I get tired of having them there, or till I say they may abandon it. I shall turn it over to the Army.”

But in the same breath, according to the New York Tribune, he also remarked, “Then if the man in charge suffers from an enlarged cranium or his nerves go to the bad, I can order him north for his health and fill his place without confusion.”

Privately Roosevelt was “utterly at sea” over Stevens’ behavior. When a friend who was visiting the Isthmus wrote in confidence that Stevens suffered from insomnia, Roosevelt seemed much relieved. “If he were a drinking man or one addicted to the use of drugs, the answer would be simple,” he wrote in reply. “As it is, I am inclined to think that it must have been insomnia or something of the kind, due to his tropical surroundings . . .” Then he added: “He has done admirably.”

On the Isthmus the announcement had a shattering effect. The Star & Herald, standing firmly behind Stevens, declared the top-heavy craniums were all in Washington and that the French must be laughing up their sleeves.

When Stevens’ own men appealed to him for some word of explanation, he answered, “Don’t talk, dig.”

As time passed, numerous theories were put forth. It was said that he had found the Gatun Dam plans to be unsound; that he was angry over a contract that had been agreed to in Washington without his say; that his wife did not like the looks of the contractor; that he had been offered another job; that he was crazy. One editor, exasperated by the absurdity of all that was appearing in print, declared that in fact the problem of green mold on his books was what finally broke the spirit of John Stevens.

The most common and in retrospect the most plausible explanation was that he was overworked and verging on a breakdown, which is what his own letter plainly implied. It was the explanation Taft gave to Congress in the course of later testimony and the conclusion Goethals would reach once he got to the Isthmus. “. . . I think he has broken down with the responsibilities and an evident desire to look after too many details himself,” Goethals wrote privately.

“He was not a quitter,” Frank Maltby would insist. “He could not have been driven off the canal with a club, if it was a question of fighting for what he thought was the right thing. . . . My own personal opinion . . . is that he disliked notoriety very much.”

A more intriguing but wholly unsubstantiated theory was offered some years later by Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. According to Daniels, Stevens had inadvertently come upon certain incriminating information concerning the activities of William Nelson Cromwell at the time of the sale of the Compagnie Nouvelle and its franchises. It was information, Daniels wrote, that if revealed “would blow up the Republican Party and disclose the most scandalous piece of corruption in the history of the country.”

An explanation that carried great weight on the Isthmus was that Stevens had been merely letting off steam in his letter to Roosevelt and he was as startled as anyone by the reaction it produced. A canal employee who claimed to have been with Stevens in his office when the letter was written said Stevens handed him a carbon, remarking jovially, “I’ve just been easing my mind to T.R. It’s a hot one, isn’t it?” When the man told Stevens it was a letter of resignation, Stevens laughed and said Roosevelt would know perfectly well that he did not mean to quit. But if Stevens truly understood Roosevelt, as he claimed, it is inconceivable that he could so misjudge the inevitable effect of belittling remarks concerning the canal, not to mention the decidedly unpleasant edge to his remark about the Presidency.

Stevens had thrived on change his whole career. He left Hill twice because he needed a change. He had accepted the Philippines assignment in 1905 because he was worn out and needed a change. Change, he was to write in an appeal to young men to enter engineering, was for him among the prime attractions of the profession. So possibly a resignation was bound to come sooner or later.

He himself was to assert that all alleged reasons for his sudden departure were alike in one respect: they were all false. “The reasons for the resignation were purely personal . . .” he wrote. “I have never declared these reasons, and probably never will. . . .” He never did.

His work had been outstanding. His railroad scheme in Culebra Cut was, according to George Goethals, beyond the competence of any Army engineer of the day. Others would contend–indeed argue passionately–that in fact it was Stevens who should go down in history as the builder of the canal. Never a modest man, Stevens had his own view about this. He had handed over to the Army engineers, he later said, a “well-planned and well-built machine,” which apart perhaps from a squeak or two would run perfectly. His replacement (Goethals) merely “turned the crank,” he wrote. “The hardest problems were solved, the Rubicon was crossed, the canal was being built. . . . Only gross mismanagement or a failure to supply the necessary funds, could militate against its triumphant accomplishment.”

But this was manifestly unfair. Closer to the truth was the picture he had implied in the letter to Roosevelt of an immense, complex task, a man-killing responsibility, extending for years to come. Goethals’ later tributes to Stevens, that Stevens was one of the greatest engineers who ever lived, that the canal was Stevens’ monument, were professional compliments of the highest order offered in all sincerity. But such remarks also say as much about Goethals as they do about Stevens.

Stevens’ railroad system would remain the fundamental operating procedure in the Cut until the excavation was finished. But excavation was only beginning in early 1907 and Stevens had not been confronted by major landslides. Surveys were still incomplete. The relocation of the Panama Railroad had not yet begun. The size of the locks had still to be determined. All the complex details of the locks had yet to be designed. Indeed, all the great construction work of the canal had still to begin–the building of Gatun Dam, the building of the locks–tasks of unprecedented magnitude requiring technical expertise that Stevens really did not possess.

Stevens’ primary tasks–the creation of a well-fed, well-housed, well-equipped, well-organized work force, the conception of a plan of attack–were over by 1907. As a railroad engineer he was inexperienced in the large-scale use of concrete; he knew very little about hydraulics; and these were the specialties of the Army engineers.

Stevens’ two-fisted, independent spirit had been exactly what was needed. The critical situation in 1905 had demanded, as he later said, “a kind of politic ‘roughneck,’ who did not possess too deep a veneration for the vagaries of constituted authority.” But ultimately the role called for a larger sense of mission than that.

For a long time now Roosevelt had spoken of building the canal as though it were a mighty battle in which the national honor was at stake, much as Ferdinand de Lesseps had so often spoken. Panama was a tumultuous assault for Progress, the only assault this most bellicose-sounding of American Presidents was ever to launch and lead. At the end of his last day at Cristobal, in an off-the-cuff speech to several hundred Americans, including John Stevens, he had said the canal was a larger, more important endeavor than anyone could as yet realize, and that by bringing it to successful completion they would stand like one of the famous armies of history. It was to be a long, arduous, uphill struggle, he said, one not unlike that of their fathers’ in the Civil War.(His own two-month Cuban war would never have served as an example.)

When your fathers were in the fighting, they thought a good deal of the fact that the blanket was too heavy by noon and not quite heavy enough by night, that the pork was not as good as it might be . . . and that they were not always satisfied with the way in which the regiments were led. . . . But when the war was done–when they came home, when they looked at what had been accomplished, all those things sank into insignificance, and the great fact remained that they had played their part like men among men; that they had borne themselves so that when people asked what they had done of worth in those great years all they had to say was that they had served decently and faithfully in the great armies. . . . I cannot overstate the intensity of the feeling I have . . . I feel that to each of you has come an opportunity such as is vouchsafed to but few in each generation. . . . Each man must have in him the feeling that, besides getting what he is rightfully entitled to for his work, that aside and above that must come the feeling of triumph at being associated in the work itself, must come the appreciation of what a tremendous work it is, of what a splendid opportunity is offered to any man who takes part in it.

By Roosevelt’s lights, Stevens had failed in the most profound and fundamental sense, scarcely less than Wallace had. To Roosevelt the triumph was in the task itself, in taking the dare; the test was in the capacity to keep “pegging away,” as he often stressed to his sons. Stevens was not merely giving up; Stevens saw it only as a “job”; there was no commitment of heart, not the slightest apparent sense of duty. To Roosevelt, Stevens was a commander abandoning his army.

He appears to have harbored no bitterness toward Stevens. (“You have done excellent work . . . and I am sorry to lose you, “he wrote a few days after receiving Stevens’ letter.) It was merely that if Stevens was the sort of man who looked upon the task as something to take or leave at will, then he was someone Roosevelt could quite readily do without and put from mind. In Roosevelt’s long essay On the canal in his Autobiography, there would be no mention of John Stevens.

III

With the appointment of George Washington Goethals, Roosevelt’s worries over the work at Panama came to an end. The canal would now be the “one-man proposition” John Stevens had called for, only the one man was to be an entirely different sort from Stevens.

At forty-eight Goethals was the same age as Roosevelt and of similar ancestry. His Flemish father and mother had arrived in New York with the great wave of immigration in 1848. The second of three children, he had been born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1858, and later, when he was eleven, moved with his family to a house on Avenue D in Manhattan, a block from the East River. But his family had been poor and struggling and unlike Roosevelt he had had to make his way “exclusively by his own exertions.” Starting at age fourteen he had worked his way through City College in New York, then went on to West Point, where he was elected president of his class and finished second in his class in 1880, the same year Roosevelt was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard.

Goethals’ career in the Corps of Engineers had been exemplary. In the Department of the Columbia in 1884, William Tecumseh Sherman had singled him out as the finest young officer in his command and predicted a “brilliant future.” He had worked on “improvements” in the Ohio River valley (1884–1885); as an instructor of civil and military engineering at West Point (1885–1889); on improvements on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers and particularly on the Muscle Shoals Canal (1889–1894), where he designed and built a lock with the record lift of twenty-six feet; as assistant to the Chief of Engineers (1894–1898); and harbor works from Block Island to Nantucket (1900–1903). In 1903, the year of Elihu Root’s reorganization of the Army, he had been picked to serve on the new General Staff, a corps of forty-four officers who were relieved of all duties in order to assist the new Chief of Staff. And it was thus, as a specialist in coastal defenses, that he had come to Taft’s attention.

He was a model officer, but a soldier like many in the Corps of Engineers who had never fought in a war, never fired a shot except on a rifle range, and who seems in fact to have had little affection for conventional “soldiering.” Once on a parade ground in Panama, while watching some troops pass in review on a broiling-hot drill field, he would mutter to a civilian companion, “What a hell of a life.”

Cool in manner, capable, very correct, he was a man of natural dignity and rigorously high, demanding standards. He had had no experience with notoriety, nor apparently any craving for it. And it would be hard to imagine him losing himself in Huckleberry Finn or anything other than his work. Asked years later how “the Colonel” had amused himself, a member of the family would respond, “He did not amuse himself.”

A reporter wrote that “above everything he looks alert and fit.” Six feet tall, he was in fine physical trim. The salient features were his intent, violet-blue eyes–“rather savage eyes,” Alice Roosevelt Long-worth would recall–and his close-cut, silvery hair, which he parted in the middle and washed daily. If a bit stiff socially, he was never pompous, largely because he was almost incapable of talking about himself. To pretty young women he could be especially gracious, in a rather fatherly fashion, and they considered him extremely attractive.

He was also a chain smoker and he detested fat people–with the one exception of William Howard Taft. Secretary Taft, Goethals was once heard to remark, was the only clean fat man he had ever known.

On the night that he was first summoned to the White House, Goethals and his wife had been entertaining an old friend, Colonel Gustav Fieberger, head of the engineering department at West Point, at their home on S Street. A messenger arrived with a note from William Loeb, Roosevelt’s secretary, asking if Goethals would be free to come by the first thing in the morning. Goethals had immediately telephoned Loeb, who told him not to wait until morning but to come over that night at twenty minutes after ten. So Goethals had excused himself from his guest, changed into dress uniform, and left the house having no idea whatever as to why he was being sent for. Nor had he ever met Theodore Roosevelt.

“He entered at once upon the subject of the Canal,” Goethals would recall. The canal commission was again to be reorganized and for the final time. Goethals was to be both chairman and chief engineer. Jackson Smith and Dr. Gorgas were to be members of the commission, along with four new men: a former senator from Kentucky named Joseph C. S. Blackburn, Rear Admiral Harry Harwood Rousseau, and Major David Du Bose Gaillard and Major William Sibert, both of the Corps of Engineers. Gaillard was the only one on the list with whom Goethals was personally acquainted–Gaillard, too, had been a member of the first General Staff–but he knew Sibert and Rousseau by reputation and agreed to their appointments.

The critical decision, however, concerned Goethals. “He [Roosevelt] expressed regret that the law required the work to be placed in charge of a commission or executive body of seven men,” Goethals remembered, “but . . . his various efforts to work under the law . . . were so unsuccessful that he resolved to assume powers which the law did not give him but which it did not forbid him to exercise.”

So while all members of the commission were to be on the Isthmus henceforth, Goethals was to wield supreme authority, an authority that would be backed by another new executive order the following year. Goethals was to be a virtual dictator–“Czar of the Zone”–responsible only to the Secretary of war and the President. In the words of his biographer, Goethals at once became one of the world’s- absolute despots, who “could command the removal of a mountain from the landscape, or of a man from his dominions, or of a salt-cellar from that man’s table.”

This was a long way from the spirit of the Spooner Act, but by such means only, Roosevelt insisted, could the task ever be accomplished, a view with which Goethals concurred.

A common misconception later was that the canal was built by the Army, that it was the creation of the Corps of Engineers. It was not. Goethals and the other engineering officers were detached from the Army to serve in Panama. They did not report to the Chief of the Corps of Engineers; they, like the civilian engineers, reported to the canal commission–which was Goethals–and Goethals reported to Taft, exactly as Stevens had according to the previous reorganization.

The critical difference now was that an Army man could not and would not quit. For a West Point graduate to abandon his appointed task in the face of adversity or personal discomfort was all but inconceivable.

In the next several days, Blackburn, Rousseau, Gaillard, and Sibert appeared at the White House one by one to meet with the President and Goethals in the President’s office. The same scene was repeated in each instance. Having introduced Goethals, Roosevelt would ask the man to be seated, then would inform him that he was to be appointed to the commission. “It will be a position of ample remuneration and much honor,” Roosevelt said. “In appointing you I have only one qualification to make. Colonel Goethals here is to be chairman. He is to have complete authority. If at any time you do not agree with his policies, do not bother to tell me about it–your disagreement with him will constitute your resignation.”

Goethals’ salary, Roosevelt had decided, would be $15,000 a year, which was substantially more than he had been earning, but only half what Stevens had been paid.

A week or so after his new assignment had been announced in the papers, Goethals wrote in reply to the congratulations of a friend, “It’s a case of just plain straight duty. I am ordered down–there was no alternative.”

To a whole generation of Americans it was Theodore Roosevelt who built the Panama Canal. It was quite simply his personal creation. Yet the Panama Canal was built under three American Presidents, not one–Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson–and in fact, of the three, it was really Taft who gave the project the most time and personal attention. Taft made five trips to Panama as Secretary of war and he went twice again during the time he was President. It was Taft who fired Wallace and hired John Stevens, Taft who first spotted Goethals. When Taft replaced Roosevelt in the White House in 1909, the canal was only about half finished.

None of this made much difference, however. Nor ought there ever be any question as to the legitimacy of the Roosevelt stamp on the canal. His own emphatic position was that it would never have been built but for him and it was a position no one tried to dispute. To Goethals, “The real builder of the Panama Canal was Theodore Roosevelt.” It could not have been more Roosevelt’s triumph, Goethals wrote, “if he had personally lifted every shovelful of earth in its construction. . . . “

The work had not simply begun anew while Roosevelt held office; his leadership had been decisive–in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, the choice of the Panama route, the creation of an independent Panama, the defense and support of William Gorgas, the choice of a lock-and-lake plan.

Even with his Panama visit, however brief, he achieved at a stroke something that had never been done before: he made the canal a popular success.

And finally, he had entrusted command of the work to one extremely well-chosen man. “I believe in a strong executive,” he once wrote to a correspondent, “I believe in power. . . .”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

High tea at Culebra (Colonel and Mrs. David D. Gaillard)

Typical housing at Ancon for upper-echelon employees
FROM THE MAKERS OF THE PANAMA CANAL, 1911

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Typical dining room in middle-echelon dwelling

Momentary pause at a Saturday-night dance at the Tivoli Hotel

BOTH PHOTOS:
COLLECTION OF J. W. D. COLLINS

Bathers en route to Toro Point

BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Bachelor quarters (bottle on the dresser is bay rum)

Culebra Station as it looked in 1911

FROM THE MAKERS OF THE PANAMA CANAL, 1911

Billiard room at one of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses. Dues were $10 a year.

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

The steamer Ancon arriving at Cristobal from Barbados with 1,500 laborers

BOTH PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

West Indian wedding party

Typical housing for West Indian laborers

COLLECTION OF D. P. GAILLARD

President and Mrs. William Howard Taft with Colonel Gaillard at Culebra

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Aftermath of a slide in Culebra Cut

“Headquarters” at Mount Hope

Interior of the pay car, which delivered 1,600 pounds of gold, 48,000 pounds of silver coin monthly

ALL PHOTOS: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Movie still of labor train

The rise of Gatun Locks. Aerial tramway delivers buckets of concrete to steel forms.

PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Giant bull wheel that opens and shuts a lock gate.

Gate leaves (double gates in foreground, intermediate gates beyond) near completion, 1912.

The Approaches to Gatun Locks by Joseph Pennell

BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY

Shovel No. 222 and shovel No. 230 meet nose to nose on the bottom of the Cut, May 20, 1913.

A party of tourists views Culebra Cut and the Cucaracha slide early in 1914, after Goethals had filled the Cut with water and continued the work with dredges.

The tug Gatun approaches Gatun Locks for the first trial lockage.

Steamer Ancon starts into Culebra Cut on the official opening transit of the canal, August 15, 1914.

* In an average city in the United States in 1906 the death toll from disease among an equal number of people would have been about thirty.

19
The Chief Point of Attack

The chief point of attack was, of course, the Culebra Cut, then, as always, the most formidable obstacle to be fought and overcome. How much more formidable it really was than had been suspected was soon to be revealed.

–JOSEPH BUCKLIN BISHOP

I

For anyone to picture the volume of earth that had to be removed to build the Panama Canal was an all but hopeless proposition. Statistics were broadcast–15,700,000 cubic yards in 1907, an incredible 37,000,-000 cubic yards in 1908–but such figures were really beyond comprehension. What was 1,000,000 cubic yards of dirt? In weight? In volume? In effort?

The illustrative analogies offered by editors and writers were of little help, since they were seldom any less fantastic. The spoil from the canal prism, it was said, would be enough to build a Great Wall of China from San Francisco to New York. If the United States were perfectly flat, the amount of digging required for a canal ten feet deep by fifty-five feet wide from coast to coast would be no greater than what was required at Panama within fifty miles. A train of dirt cars carrying the total excavation at Panama would circle the world four times at the equator. The spoil would be enough to build sixty-three pyramids the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. (To help its readers imagine what this might look like, Scientific American commissioned an artist to draw Manhattan with giant pyramids lining the length of Broadway from the Battery to Harlem.)

The material taken from Culebra Cut alone, exclaimed one writer toward the completion of the work, would make a pyramid topping the Woolworth Building by 100 feet (the Woolworth, at 792 feet, was then the world’s tallest building), while the total spoil excavated in the Canal Zone would form a pyramid 4,200 feet high, or more than seven times the height of the Washington Monument.

If all the material from the canal were placed in one solid shaft with a base the dimension of a city block, it would tower nearly 100,000 feet–nineteen miles–in the air.

But who could imagine such things? Or how many could also take into account the smothering heat of Panama, the rains, the sucking mire of Culebra, none of which was less troublesome or demoralizing than in times past. For however radically systems or equipment were improved upon, however smoothly organized the labor army became, the overriding problem remained Panama itself–the climate, the land, the distance from all sources of supply. At the bottom of Culebra Cut at midday the temperature was seldom less than 100 degrees, more often it was 120 to 130 degrees. As Theodore Shonts once remarked, to have built the same canal in a developed country and a temperate climate would have posed no special difficulties.

More manageable–and more impressive–were the results of, say, a month’s or even a day’s work in Culebra Cut, or the relative effectiveness of the whole earth-digging, earth-moving system as compared to what the French had achieved at Suez or at Panama, these being the only prior efforts that were really analogous. When the work under Goethals was at its height, the United States was excavating at Panama the equivalent of a Suez Canal every three years. The 37,000,000 cubic yards of earth and rock removed in the one year of 1908 was nearly half as much as two successive French companies had succeeded in digging at Panama in a total of nearly seventeen years, and more than all that portion of excavation by the French that was useful to the present plan.

In any one day there were fifty to sixty steam shovels at work in the Cut, and with the dirt trains running in and out virtually without pause, the efficiency of each shovel was more than double what it had been. Along the entire line about five hundred trainloads a day were being hauled to the dumps. A carload of spoil was being removed every few seconds and the average daily total was considerably more than what the French had been digging in a month’s time the year John Wallace arrived on the scene. But all prior effort, American as well as French, was put in the shadows.

Perhaps as extraordinary as anything that can be said is that the work could not have been done any faster or more efficiently in our own day, despite all technological and mechanical advances in the time since, the reason being that no present system could possibly carry the spoil away any faster or more efficiently than the system employed. No motor trucks were used in the digging of the canal; everything ran on rails. And because of the mud and rain, no other method would have worked half so well.

But the canal builders were not merely achieving what others had failed at; they were doing more, much more, than they or anyone had foreseen, for every prior estimate of the size of the task had been woefully inaccurate. The American engineers had been no less naive in their reckoning of the total mass to be removed than had the French. On November 13, 1904, the day after the first Bucyrus shovel began digging in Culebra Cut there had been a small landslide which put that shovel out of commission for several days. Presently, in Stevens’ time, there had been further slides on the order of what the French had experienced. But no one had the remotest conception of what was to occur during the Goethals years. Rather, it was felt that the whole issue of slides had been overemphasized. Professor Burr, of Roosevelt’s international advisory board, had testified that there really need be no concern: “All that is necessary to remedy such a condition is simply to excavate the clay or to drain it to keep the water out. It is not a new problem. It is no formidable feature of the work.”

The advisory board in its 1906 study–that is, in the minority report for a lock canal–had placed the total volume of excavation still to be accomplished at not quite 54,000,000 cubic yards. But by 1908 that estimate had to be revised to about 78,000,000 cubic yards. In 1910 it was put at 84,000,000; in 1911, at 89,000,000. By 1913 the estimate had reached 100,000,000 cubic yards, or nearly equal to the figure initially given by the advisory board for a canal at sea level

As in the French time, the more digging that went on, the more digging there was to be done.

For the man who now bore the burden of responsibility for all that occurred, the initial hurdle had been primarily personal and as difficult as anything in his experience.

Goethals’ reception upon arrival had been pointedly cool. Plainly, neither he nor the Army was wanted by the rank and file of Americans on the job and everyone seemed eager to make a special point of Stevens’ tremendous popularity. Thousands of signatures had been gathered for a petition urging Stevens to withdraw his resignation and stay. No one, it seemed, had anything but the strongest praise for him and all he had done. Never in his career, Goethals remarked, had he seen so much affection displayed for one man.

Stevens and Dr. Gorgas were at the pier the morning Goethals and Major Gaillard landed. No real reception had been arranged; nothing had even been done about a place for Goethals or Gaillard to stay. Stevens still occupied the official residence of the chief engineer, a new six-bedroom house at Culebra that was to be Goethals’ once Stevens departed, but since Stevens “didn’t seem inclined to take us into his house” (as Goethals wrote to his son George), the two officers had moved in with Gorgas at Ancon, where there was little privacy, not even a desk at which Goethals could work. His letters to his family those first weeks were written on his lap as he sat in a straight-backed chair in one of the bedrooms.

To add to the spirit of gloom, the Star & Herald openly deplored the prospect of military rule. Probably no workers would have to wear uniforms, the paper presumed, but neither should anyone be surprised if he had to answer roll call in the morning or salute his new superiors.

That the railroad men around Stevens had scant regard for Army engineers seemed also abundantly plain to Goethals. “Army engineers, as a rule, were said to be, from their very training dictatorial and many of them martinets,” he would write, “and it was predicted that if they . . . were placed in charge of actual construction the canal project was doomed to failure.” The Army men had only technical training, it was said; they had never “made a success as executive heads of great enterprises.”

His own private estimate of the state of the work was entirely favorable. The difference between what he saw now and what he had seen in 1905, during the visit with Taft, was extraordinary. As he wrote to his son, “Mr. Stevens has done an amount of work for which he will never get any credit, or, if he gets any, will not get enough. . . .”

Several days passed before he was granted a more or less official welcome–a Saturday-night “smoker” given as much to entertain a party of visiting congressmen. John Stevens declined to attend and Goethals, at the head table, sat listening without expression as the toastmaster extolled Stevens at length and made several cutting remarks about the military. It was an evening he would never forget. With each mention of Stevens’ name there was a resounding cheer, while the few obligatory references to Stevens’ successor were met with silence. Goethals was furious at what he regarded as “slurs” on the Army, but kept still until it was his turn. He had come to the affair not in uniform but in a white civilian suit. In fact, he had brought no uniforms to the Isthmus and never in the years to come would he be seen in one.

He was, he told the assembled guests, as appreciative as they of the work Stevens had accomplished and he had no intention of instigating a military regimen. “I am no longer a commander in the United States Army. I now consider that I am commanding the Army of Panama, and that the enemy we are going to combat is the Culebra Cut and the locks and dams at both ends of the Canal, and any man here on the work who does his duty will never have any cause to complain of militarism.”

He took over from Stevens officially at midnight, March 31, 1907, and a week later Stevens sailed for home. One of the largest crowds ever seen on the Isthmus jammed the pier at Cristobal to see him off, everyone cheering, waving, and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” Stevens was noticeably amazed and touched by the outpouring of affection. This time it was Goethals’ turn not to attend.

Having none of Stevens’ colorful mannerisms or easy way with people, Goethals impressed many at first as abrupt and arbitrary, a cold fish. The word “goethals” in Flemish, it was soon being said, meant “stiff neck.”

He hated to have his picture taken. He found the visiting congressmen rude, tiresome, terribly time-consuming. Callers were “an awful nuisance.” It was expected that he appear at every dance and social function at the Tivoli or the Culebra Club. He would “brace up” and go “out of a sense of duty” and spend the evening sitting on a porch listening to the music, waiting only for the time when he could politely withdraw.

Stevens’ former secretary, having agreed to stay and help with the transition, suddenly resigned. William Bierd, the railroad boss, made a surprise announcement that he was retiring because of his health, but then Goethals learned that Bierd was taking a job with Stevens on the New Haven Railroad. Frank Maltby decided no civilian engineer had a future any longer at Panama and so he too quit. Then the steam-shovel engineers, sensing the time was at last right for a show of strength, threatened to strike unless their demands were met. Goethals refused and they walked off the job. It was the first serious strike since the work had begun. Of sixty-eight shovels, only thirteen were still in operation. He recruited new crews.

Even the newly arrived Major Sibert was proving “cantankerous and hard to hold” in meetings. Mrs. Sibert, Goethals learned, was “disgusted” with the Panama weather.

From surviving letters written to his son George, then in his senior year at the Military Academy, it is apparent that he was also extremely lonely. Mrs. Goethals was still in Washington “doing society at a great rate”; another, younger son, Thomas, was at Harvard. He felt very out of touch, he wrote; there was not time even to read the paper. His sole source of amusement was the French butler, Benoit, who still spoke practically no English but went with the official residence at Culebra, Goethals being his seventh chief engineer.

The day began at first light. At 6:30, with Benoit standing stiffly in attendance, “the Colonel” had his breakfast–one peeled native orange stuck on the end of a fork, two eggs, bacon, one cup of coffee. By seven he had walked down to Culebra Station to catch either the No. 2, northbound, at 7:10, or the No. 3, southbound, at 7:19. The morning was spent inspecting the line. He carried a black umbrella and customarily wore white. Invariably he looked spotless; invariably he was smoking a cigarette.

Back at the house again, immediately upon finishing a light lunch, he would rest for half an hour, then walk to his large, square corner office on the first floor at the Administration Building. There he would receive people until dinner at seven. In the evening, unless otherwise engaged, he would return to the office to concentrate on his paper work until about ten.

To most observers he seemed wholly oblivious of his surroundings, intent only on his work. One employee, relaxing on his own porch one particularly beautiful moonlit evening, witnessed the following scene:

“There were only a few lights here and there in the Administration Building. One by one they went out, all except that in the old man’s office. It was getting on toward ten when his window went dark. . . . A full moon, as big as a dining-room table, was hanging down about a foot and a half above the flagstaff–a gorgeous night. The old man came out and walked across the grass to his house. He didn’t stop to look up at the moon; he just pegged along, his head a little forward, still thinking. And he hadn’t been in his own house ten minutes before all the lights were out there. He’d turned in, getting ready to catch that early train. . . .” To his elder son, Goethals wrote that he was better off occupied, since there was nothing else to do. He confessed to working so hard that he would often end the day in a kind of daze. He was not the “clean-desk” man Stevens had been. His “IN” and “OUT” baskets were always jammed. Papers were piled wherever there was room on his desk–correspondence, folded maps, specifications, plans, half a dozen black notebooks, reports in heavy dark-blue bindings. The bit of clear desk surface he managed to maintain directly in front of him was soon peppered with cigarette burns.

He liked things on paper. If during his morning excursions along the line a department head or engineer urged some new approach or improvement, the inevitable response was “Write it down.”

It was not in him to court popularity. He wanted loyalty first, not to him but to the work, that above all. He abhorred waste and inefficiency and he was determined to weed out incompetents. Nor was there ever to be any doubt as to his own authority. “What the Colonel said he meant,” a steam-shovel engineer remembered. “What he asked for he got. It didn’t take us long to find that out.” Requests or directives from his office were not to be regarded as subjects for discussion. When the head of the Commissary Department, a popular and influential figure, informed Goethals that he would resign if Goethals persisted in certain changes in the purchasing procedure, Goethals at once informed him that his resignation was accepted and refused to listen when he came to retract the threat. “It will help bring the outfit into line,” Goethals noted privately. “I can stand it if they can.” He put Lieutenant Wood in as a replacement. “. . . I just put it up to him to make good . . .” he wrote.

“Executive ability,” he observed on another occasion, “is nothing more or less than letting the other fellow do the work for you.” But to some he gave every appearance of wishing only to dominate everything himself. Marie Gorgas, in particular, found him “grim, self-sufficing.” He was much too abrupt for her liking. “His conversation and his manners, like his acts, had no finesse and no spirit of accommodation.” She grew to dislike him heartily. Even Robert Wood, who admired his “iron will and terrific energy,” found him “stern and unbending–you might say a typical Prussian. . . . I was his assistant for seven years,” Wood recalled long afterward, “and I might say that everything in my life since has seemed comparatively easy.”

But if the manner was occasionally severe, the standards demanding, he was invariably fair and gave to the job a dignity it had not had before. “I never knew him to be small about anything,” recalled an electrical engineer named Richard Whitehead, who joined the force that same summer of 1907. Goethals knew how to pick men. He knew how to instill determination, to get people to want to measure up. He was not loved, not then or later, but he was impressive. And by late summer he had “the outfit in line.”

“Another week of observation has confirmed my view . . . that the discontent and uneasiness which followed the departure of Stevens have nearly passed away . . .” wrote Joseph Bucklin Bishop to Theodore Roosevelt in mid-August. Undersized and grouchy-looking, with a little, pointed gray beard and a shiny bald head, Bishop was another new addition. He had been transferred from the Washington office on Roosevelt’s orders and was to be at Goethals’ side from then on, as secretary of the commission, ghost writer, policy adviser, alter ego. And not incidentally he was to feed confidential reports to the White House on how things were going.

Goethals, reported Bishop, was “worn and tired and says that he has had a veritable ‘hell of a time,’ but I believe he has won out. When I told him so, he said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ ”

Mrs. Goethals had arrived and departed meantime. So his marriage, characterized years afterward by members of the family as “difficult,” became still another topic for local speculation as the lights in his office burned on into the night.

At Bishop’s suggestion, Goethals started a weekly newspaper, the Canal Record, the first such publication since de Lesseps’ Bulletin du Canal Inter océanique and very similar in format. Goethals insisted that the paper be neither a rehash of news from the United States nor a means for trumpeting the reputation of anyone on the canal commission. Indeed, quite unlike the de Lesseps’ paper, its editorial policy specifically forbade praise of any official. The objective was to provide the American force–as well as Congress–with an accurate, up-to-date picture of the progress being made, something hitherto unavailable in any form, as well as reports on social life within the Zone, ship sailings, sports, any activities “thought to be of general interest.”

With Bishop as editor, the first edition appeared September 4, 1907. The style was direct and factual and so it would remain, except for occasional letters from employees. Still it was an amazing morale builder. It did for its readers much what Stars and Stripes would do for the A.E.F. in France. It brought the strung-out settlements in closer touch, made the Zone more of a community. In addition, it had an almost instant effect on productivity.

Bishop began publishing weekly excavation statistics for individual steam shovels and dredges, and at once a fierce rivalry resulted, the gain in output becoming apparent almost immediately. “It wasn’t so hard before they began printing the Canal Record” a steam-shovel man explained to a writer for The Saturday Evening Post. “We were going along, doing what we thought was a fair day’s work . . . [but then] away we went like a pack of idiots trying to get records for ourselves.”

To give employees opportunity to air their grievances, Goethals next established his own court of appeal. Every Sunday morning, from about 7:30 until noon, he was at his desk to receive any and all who had what they believed to be a serious complaint or problem. He saw them personally, individually, on the basis of first come, first served, irrespective of rank, nationality, or color. By late 1907 there were thirty-two thousand people on the payroll, about eight thousand more than when he took over. By 1910 there would be nearly forty thou :

sand. Yet once a week, beginning in the fall of 1907, any of these people–employees or dependents–could “see the Colonel” and speak their minds.

The scene was unique in the American experience, unique and memorable in the eyes of all who saw it. Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador, likened it to the court of justice held by Saint Louis beneath the oak at Vincennes. “One sees the Colonel at his best in these Sunday morning hours,” wrote a reporter who had been greatly frustrated by what seemed a congenital inability on Goethals’ part to talk about himself. “You see the immensely varied nature of the things and issues which are his concern. Engineering in the technical sense seems almost the least of them.”

Some advance screening was done. Bishop saw the English-speaking workers, while the Italians, Spaniards, and other Europeans were seen by a multilingual interpreter, Giuseppe Garibaldi, grandson of the Italian liberator. And often these preliminary interviews were enough to resolve the problem–the mere process of free expression gave the needed relief–but if not, Goethals’ door stood open.

On an average Sunday he saw perhaps a hundred people and very few appear to have gone away thinking they had been denied justice. They came to the front of the tall, barnlike Administration Building, entered a broad hallway hung with maps and blueprints and there waited their turn. Their complaints included everything from the serious to the trivial: harsh treatment by a foreman, misunderstandings about pay, failure to get a promotion, dislike of the food or quarters, insufficient furniture. He listened to appeals for special privileges and financial dispensation. One request was for the transfer of a particular steam-shovel engineer to a different division where a particular baseball team needed a pitcher. (The request was granted.) He was given constructive ideas regarding the work and was made party to the private quarrels between husbands and wives or families in adjoining apartments. By all accounts he was a patient listener.

Many complaints could be settled at once with a simple yes or no or by a brief note sent down the line. A serious situation of any complexity was promptly investigated. “He was a combination of father confessor and Day of Judgment,” wrote Bishop. The vast majority who came before him were almost excessively respectful. Rarely would anyone challenge his authority and then to no avail. “If you decide against me, Colonel, I shall appeal,” one man declared. “To whom?” Goethals asked.

Some of the remaining officials from the Stevens regime had expressed vehement disapproval when these Sunday sessions were first announced. Jackson Smith, of the Labor Department, had been especially exercised, since his own policy in past years had been to tell anyone who had a complaint to feel free to leave on the next ship. And this, apart from Smith’s own rude manner, had been considered a perfectly appropriate policy. Stevens had been in full accord. The new approach was in fact wholly unorthodox by the standards of the day. In labor relations Goethals was way in advance of his time, and nothing that he did had so discernible an effect on the morale of the workers or their regard for him: “they were treated like human beings, not like brutes,” Bishop recalled, “and they responded by giving the best service within their power.”

In Goethals’ own estimate, expressed privately many years afterward, it was thus that he won “control of the force,” and control of the force was “the big, attractive thing of the job.”

When another delegation of congressmen, members of the House Appropriations Committee, arrived in November, they were impressed as much by Goethals as by the strides being made, a point of special satisfaction at the White House. “I was present at all the hearings . . .” Bishop wrote to Roosevelt. “Not only did he [Goethals] show that he knew his business thoroughly, had absolute grasp of the work as a whole, but that he had at his tongue’s end more knowledge of details than any of his immediate subordinates.”

Before leaving for Washington the chairman of the delegation, Congressman James A. Tawney, told Goethals privately not to worry about appropriations–he could count on whatever he wanted. The committee reported the situation in Panama to be in “excellent shape.” And as time went on, Goethals’ standing on Capitol Hill was to be a factor of the greatest importance. Money sufficient to do the job correctly was never to become an issue.

“There is only one man who should be heard at Washington on the Canal, and that is Goethals,” Bishop stressed to Roosevelt. “He has absolute knowledge, perfect manners, and can talk. . . . He says I am the man who should be spokesman rather than he, but don’t let him persuade you into such a belief. He is the man at the helm . . .”

Within less than a year after Goethals took charge, several major changes were made in the basic plan of the canal, and with a sweeping reorganization, beginning in early 1908, he installed his own entirely new regime. The widespread impression was that the plan was firm, that this at last was the canal that was to be built, and that these were the men who would build it. The widespread impression was correct.

The changes, each very important, were as follows: –The bottom width of the channel through Culebra Cut was to be made half again wider, from two hundred to three hundred feet. Thus it was to be more than four times as broad as the French canal would have been at that point.

–The width of the lock chambers was enlarged, primarily to satisfy the Navy. The locks would be 110 feet wide (rather than 95 feet) to accommodate the largest battleship then on the drawing boards, the Pennsylvania, which had a beam of 98 feet. (The largest commercial vessel then being built was the Titanic, with a beam of 94 feet.) So each lock chamber was to be 110 feet by 1,000 feet.

–On the Pacific side, where heavy silt-bearing currents threatened to clog the entrance to the canal, the engineers now planned a tremendous breakwater that would reach three miles across the tidal mud flats to Naos Island.

–When trestles began sinking in the mud at the site of the Sosa Dam, a major change had to be made in the placement of the Pacific locks. Previously, there was to have been one lock at the south end of Culebra Cut, at Pedro Miguel, then an intermediate-level lake and another set of two locks close to the Pacific shore, at Sosa Hill. In the new arrangement, the Pedro Miguel complex remained unchanged, but the dam and second set of locks were pulled back from Sosa Hill back from the Pacific–to a new site at Miraflores. Consequently the terminal lake (called Sosa Lake on the old plan) was greatly reduced in area and the first flight of locks at the Pacific end was now to be as far inland as were the Gatun Locks. From the military viewpoint this was regarded as a far better solution, since the Pacific locks would now be far less vulnerable to bombardment from the sea, a point Goethals had made to Taft as early as 1905, following their tour of the area. The possibility of bombardment from the air had not been considered then, nor was it now late in 1907, since the world had as yet to catch up to the achievements at Kitty Hawk.

With his reorganization Goethals did away with all the old departments first established by Wallace and carried on by Stevens. Under that system the work had been portioned off according to specific types of activity–excavation and dredging, labor and quarters, and so forth. Now everything was simply divided into three geographic units –an Atlantic Division, a Central Divison, and a Pacific Division–each run by one overall chief who was responsible for virtually everything within the district other than sanitary and police activities. It was a scheme very like that used by the French, with the fundamental difference that none of the work was to be done by contract, except for the lock gates. Stevens’ contract plan had been dropped at the time Goethals took over.

The Atlantic Division included the four miles of sea-level approach from Limon Bay, Gatun Locks, and Gatun Dam. The Pacific Division included the sea-level entrance at that end, as well as the locks and dams. Everything in between, some thirty-two miles of canal and including Culebra Cut, comprised the Central Division.

The Atlantic side was to be run solely by Army men, with Major Sibert as division head assisted by several other engineering officers. Forty-seven years old, large, headstrong, full of ambition and good humor, William Sibert was cut from much the same pattern as John Stevens, with whom he was one day to collaborate on a book about the canal. Sibert’s civilian clothes fit him badly, he chewed on unlit cigars, and he spoke his mind. His relations with Goethals, strained from the start, were to become more and more unpleasant.

Born on a farm in Alabama, Sibert had finished at West Point in 1884, worked on the famous Poe Lock at the Soo Canal and ran a railroad in the Philippines. But for the past six years, assigned to river and harbor work at Pittsburgh, he had built more than a dozen locks and dams on the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. His experience in such work was second to none, a point neither he nor Goethals would lose sight of.

The Central Division was assigned to Major Gaillard, but his highly competent executive officer was a civilian, a lean, red-haired Bostonian named Louis K. Rourke, who had been running things very well in Culebra Cut for nearly two years.

David D “Bose Gaillard (pronounced Ge-yard) was a South Carolinian. He was a year older than William Sibert and a close friend. As cadets at the Military Academy they had been roommates and were known as David and Goliath. Still slim and youthful-looking, Gaillard had had a solid if unspectacular career in the Corps of Engineers and like Goethals had been singled out for the initial General Staff. “Sibert’s experience on locks and dams makes his assignment to that work very necessary,” Goethals explained to his West Point son, “. . . so Gaillard had to take the Cut.”

Like Goethals, these and the other engineering officers who were to serve in Panama considered themselves part of an honored tradition; and this, it should be emphasized, gave to their whole mode of operation a very different tone from that of the previous regime. It was not that they were necessarily superior technicians to the railroad people who preceded them, but that their entire training and experience had been directed toward large construction works in the national interest. They were engineers of the state, no less than those who had come out from France to build the de Lesseps canal. Even their training had been patterned after that of the École Polytechnique, from the time Sylvanus Thayer instituted the sweeping academic reforms at West Point that were to make him “Father of the Military Academy.” It was Thayer in the 1820’s who, after observing the program of the famous French school, made engineering the heart of the curriculum at West Point and instilled the mission to construct into the academic program. “We must get up early, for we have a large territory,” a cadet once explained to a visitor in the 1850’s; “we have to cut down the forests, dig canals, and make railroads all over the country.” And that had remained the prevailing spirit. Only the top men from each class qualified for the Engineers.

But the Goethals regime did not consist solely of Army people, the common view again notwithstanding. Indeed, the only division head that he personally appointed was a civilian, Sydney B. Williamson, who had been a young assistant at Muscle Shoals when Goethals constructed the high-lift lock. He and Williamson had worked well together then and on several subsequent projects, and their trust in each other was total. Williamson was put at the head of the Pacific Division and all his subordinate engineers were to be civilians. So naturally the lines were drawn: if the Army was to build the Atlantic locks and the civilians the Pacific locks, then it would be a test to see which group was the most resourceful and competent. A sharp rivalry ensued, just as Goethals anticipated.

Meantime, Rear Admiral Harry Harwood Rousseau, who at thirty-eight was the youngest member of the canal commission, was given responsibility for the design and construction of all terminals, wharves, coaling stations, dry docks, machine shops, and warehouses. Lieutenant Frederick Mears, aged twenty-nine, was put in charge of relocating the Panama Railroad, a large and very difficult task. To build the forty-odd miles of the new line would take five years and cost nearly $9,000,000.

Two further resignations were announced, those of Joseph Ripley, who had been Stevens’ choice for lock design, and Jackson Smith, whose competence Goethals recognized but whose manner had become more than Goethals was willing to tolerate. As a result Smith’s Department of Labor and Quarters was broken up and Major Carroll A. Devol was named Chief Quartermaster of the Zone, with responsibility for labor, quarters, and supplies. The personal choice of Secretary Taft, Devol had been in charge of the Army transport service in San Francisco in 1906 at the time of the earthquake and had managed the distribution of all supplies to the stricken city, an enormous and ably handled operation for which the Army was wholly responsible and for which the Army was to get too little credit.

Up until now all the design work on the locks had been handled in Washington, but with Ripley’s departure, Goethals transferred the design staff to the Isthmus and installed still another Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Foote Hodges, at its head.

Everything considered, Hodges was probably Goethals’ most valuable man, as well as the sort journalists and historians could readily overlook. Born in Boston, class of ‘81 at the Academy, he was small, fussy, humorless, quite unspectacular in manner and appearance. With his sharp little face and large, dark, intense eyes, he looked not unlike a bright mouse. Like Sibert, he had spent several valuable years working with Colonel Poe on the Soo, and like Sydney Williamson, he was Goethals’ personal choice. Hodges, henceforth, had overall responsibility for the design and erection of the lock gates, all the tremendous conduits and valves beneath the walls and floors of the locks, every intricate mechanism required. He had, that is, the most difficult technical responsibility in the entire project, upon which depended the canal’s success. When Goethals was away from the Isthmus, Hodges would serve as acting chief engineer. According to Goethals, the canal could not have been built without him.

II

The “special wonder of the canal” was Culebra Cut. It was the great focus of attention, regardless of whatever else was happening at Panama. The building of Gatun Dam or the construction of the locks, projects of colossal scale and expense, were always of secondary interest so long as the battle raged in that nine-mile stretch between Bas Obispo and Pedro Miguel. The struggle lasted seven years, from 1907 through 1913, when the rest of the world was still at peace, and in the dry seasons, the tourists came by the hundreds, by the thousands as time went on, to stand and watch from grassy vantage points hundreds of feet above it all. Special trains had to be arranged to bring them out from Colón and Panama City, tour guides provided, and they looked no different from the Sunday crowds on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City. Gentlemen wore white shoes and pale straw hats; ladies stepped along over the grass in ankle-length skirts and carried small, white umbrellas as protection from the sun. A few were celebrities: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Lord Bryce, President Taft, and William Jennings Bryan (who “evinced more general excitement than anyone since T.R.”). “He who did not see the Culebra Cut during the mighty work of excavation,” declared an author of the day, “missed one of the great spectacles of the ages–a sight that no other time, or place was, or will be, given to man to see.” Lord Bryce called it the greatest liberty ever taken with nature.

A spellbound public read of cracks opening in the ground, of heart-breaking landslides, of the bottom of the canal mysteriously rising. Whole sides of mountains were being brought down with thunderous blasts of dynamite. A visiting reporter engaged in conversation at a tea party felt his chair jump half an inch and spilled a bit of scalding tea on himself.

To Joseph Bucklin Bishop, writing of “The Wonderful Culebra Cut,” the most miraculous element was the prevailing sense of organization one felt. “It was organization reduced to a science–the endless-chain system of activity in perfect operation.” On either side were the grim, forbidding, perpendicular walls of rock, and in the steadily widening and deepening chasm between–the first man-made canyon in the world–a swarming mass of men and rushing railway trains, monster-like machines, all working with ceaseless activity, all animated seemingly by human intelligence, without confusion or conflict anywhere. . . . The rock walls gave place here and there to ragged sloping banks of rock and earth left by the great slides, covering many acres and reaching far back into the hills, but the ceaseless human activity prevailed everywhere. Everybody knew what he was to do and was doing it, apparently without verbal orders and without getting in the way of anybody else. . ..

Generally, the more the observer knew of engineering and construction work, the higher and warmer was his appreciation.

Panoramic photographs made at the height of the work gave an idea of how tremendous that canyon had become. But the actual spectacle, of course, was in vibrant color. The columns of coal smoke that towered above the shovels and locomotives–“a veritable Pittsburgh of smoke”–were blue-black turning to warm gray; exposed clays were pale ocher, yellow, bright orange, slate blue, or a crimson like that of the soil of Virginia; and the vibrant green of the near hills was broken by cloud shadow into great patchworks of sea blue and lavender.

The noise level was beyond belief. On a typical day there would be more than three hundred rock drills in use and their racket alone– apart from the steam shovels, the trains, the blasting–could be heard for miles. In the crevice between Gold Hill and Contractors Hill, where the walls were chiefly rock, the uproar, reverberating from wall to wall, was horrible, head-splitting.

For seven years Culebra Cut was never silent, not even for an hour. Labor trains carrying some six thousand men began rolling in shortly after dawn every morning except Sunday. Then promptly at seven the regular work resumed until five. But it was during the midday break and again after five o’clock that the dynamite crews took over and began blasting. At night came the repair crews, men by the hundreds, to tend the shovels, which were now being worked to the limit and taking a heavy beating. Night track crews set off surface charges of dynamite to make way for new spurs for the shovels, while coal trains servicing the shovels rumbled in, their headlights playing steadily and eerily up and down the Cut until dawn. And though it was official I.C.C. policy that the Sabbath be observed as a day of rest, there was always some vital piece of business in the Cut that could not wait until Monday.

Among the most fascinating of the surviving records of the work is a series of Army Signal Corps films made down in the Cut. Watching these rare old motion pictures (now in a collection at the National Archives), seeing the trains cut back and forth across the screen, seeing the dynamite go off and tiny human figures rush about through clouds of dust and smoke, one senses too how extremely dangerous it all was. At one point, when a shovel suddenly swings, Goethals can be seen to jump nimbly out of the way.

Bishop and those others who described the spectacle from the cliffs above had very little to say about such hazards. But year after year hundreds of men were being killed or hideously injured. They were caught beneath the wheels of trains or struck by flying rock, crushed to death, blown to bits by dynamite. “Man die, get blow up, get kill or get drown,” recalled one black worker; “during the time someone asked where is Brown? He died last night and bury. Where is Jerry? He dead a little before dinner and buried. So on and so on all the time.”

Construction of the canal would consume more than 61,000,000 pounds of dynamite, a greater amount of explosive energy than had been expended in all the nation’s wars until that time. A single dynamite ship arriving at Colón carried as much as 1,000,000 pounds– 20,000 fifty-pound boxes of dynamite in one shipload–all of which had to be unloaded by hand, put aboard special trains, and moved to large concrete magazines built at various points back from the congested areas.

At least half the labor force was employed in some phase of dynamite work. Those relatively few visitors permitted to walk about down in the Cut saw long lines of black men march by with boxes of dynamite on their heads, gangs of men on the rock drills, more men doing nothing but loading sticks of dynamite into the holes that had been drilled. The aggregate depth of the dynamite holes drilled in an average month in Culebra Cut (another of those statistics that defy the imagination) was 345,223 feet, or more than sixty-five miles.* In the same average month more than 400,000 pounds of dynamite were exploded, which meant that all together more than 800,000 dynamite sticks with their brown paper wrappings, each eight inches long and weighing half a pound, had been placed in those sixty-five miles of drill holes, and again all by hand.

Difficulty was had at first in determining how much dynamite to use in a single shot, depending on the depth of the holes, the spacing of the holes, and the character of the rock, which could be anything from basalt to the softest shale. The foremen responsible for the loading and tamping learned by trial and error. Different grades of powder were tried, different kinds of fuses and methods of firing.

Premature explosions occured all too often as the pace of work increased. “We are having too many accidents with blasts,” Goethals noted in June 1907. “One killed 9 men on Thursday at Pedro Miguel. The foreman blown all to pieces.” Several fatal accidents were caused when shovels struck the cap of an unexploded charge. Another time a twelve-ton charge went off prematurely when hit by a bolt of lightning, killing seven men. Looking back years later, one West Indian remembered, “The flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days.”

The worst single disaster occurred on December 12, 1908, at Bas Obispo. More than fifty holes had been drilled in the solid rock on the west bank of the Cut and these had been loaded with some twenty-two tons of dynamite. The charges had been tamped, the fuses set, but none of the holes had been wired since the blast was not scheduled until the end of the day. As the foreman and one helper were tamping the final charge, the whole blast went off, by what cause no one was ever able to determine. Twenty-three men were killed, forty injured.

As time went on the men became extremely proficient and accidents became comparatively rare considering the volume of explosives being used and the numbers of laborers involved. Still, more men would be killed, and very often, as at Bas Obispo, there would be too little left of them to determine who they were.

The shovels in the Cut set records “never anticipated,” as Goethals noted, and in the eyes of most beholders they became something more than mere machines. They had personality and gender–usually feminine, yet they were also likened to Theodore Roosevelt–and accounts of their prodigious feats of strength, as well as their agility, acquired a kind of mythical quality. The Canal Record’s full-page reports on their performance were read as avidly as baseball scores.

The peak was in March 1909, when sixty-eight shovels, the largest number ever used at one time in the Cut, removed more than 2,000,000 cubic yards, ten times the volume achieved by the French in their best month. The record for a single shovel was set in March 1910, when a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus (No. 123), working twenty-six days, excavated 70,000 cubic yards. More astonishing is the realization that the vast rift in the earth at Culebra was dug entirely by what, comparatively speaking, was a mere handful of machines. The volume removed from the Cut was 96,000,000 cubic yards. So even allowing for replacements, the average shovel dug well over 1,000,000 cubic yards, despite the worst kind of punishment year in, year out. No machines had ever been subjected to such a test and their record was a tribute to the men who designed and built them.

The shovels were deployed along the entire nine miles of the Cut, but in one section just to the north of Gold Hill they were stacked one above another at seven different levels, while seven parallel tracks carrying the dirt trains were kept constantly busy. “There were any amount of . . . trains, which were going in every direction,” noted a young English tourist in her diary; “they must be very well arranged.” In fact about 160 trains a day were running in and out of the Cut, and the degree of planning needed to handle such traffic can be further appreciated when it is taken into account that most of the track had to be shifted–removed, replaced, relocated–time and again. There were 76 miles of construction track within the nine-mile canyon, while in the Central Division as a whole there were 209 miles, not counting the Panama Railroad. In any one year well over a thousand miles of track had to be shifted about within that area just to keep the work moving in the Cut. And to complicate the problem further still, the bottom of the Cut, the main work level, kept steadily contracting in width the deeper the Cut became.

No one part of the operation–not the drilling, the blasting, the shoveling, the dirt hauling–could ever be permitted to interfere or disrupt another. So consequently every move was the result of very careful study. All shovels, every mile of track, every one of the hundreds of rock drills in use, were located daily on a map at division headquarters at Empire. Careful estimates were made as to the progress of each individual steam shovel, when it would have to be repositioned, when tracks would have to be shifted, what effect such moves would have on the disposition of drilling and blasting crews. So neatly was everything coordinated, so smooth were communications, that at the close of each day locomotive crews, as an example, had only to check the assignment boards at the roundhouses to see exactly what they were to do the day following. Traffic in and out of the Cut was directed from towers at either entrance by yardmasters who kept in telephone contact with the various dumps and with a half-dozen small towers strung out along the line of excavation. The yardmasters, who took their orders from the chief dispatcher at Empire, directed the passage of each loaded train to a particular dumping ground and ordered the right of way for the train when it hit the main line of the Panama Railroad. When the empty trains returned, it was the yardmaster again who distributed them to the shovels.

The dumping grounds–the other end of the system–were located anywhere from one to twenty-three miles from the Cut. Sixty-odd locations were used in the course of excavation, and though much of the spoil was simply gotten rid of–that is, put to no useful purpose–a very considerable part of it served to build earth dams, to build embankments on the new line of the railroad, and to create the huge new Naos Island breakwater at the Pacific end. To keep the flooding Chagres from backing up into the Cut as the great trench deepened, an earth dike was thrown across the north end, at Gamboa, seventy-eight feet above sea level.

All the dumps were carefully engineered, with tracks on several terraces. At each dump was another yardmaster who reported the arrivals and departures of trains and his “readiness for spoil,” who ordered the distribution of loaded trains to the several dumping tracks, and who, in addition, directed the movements of the Lidgerwood unloaders as well as two additional pieces of equipment that had since come into use: the dirt spreader and the track shifter.

Both devices were of vital importance to the efficiency of the entire system, since the least delay at the dumping end at once decreased progress in the Cut. The dirt spreader was a railroad car with big steel blades mounted on either side, these operated by compressed air. Once a train had been unloaded, its spoil dumped beside the tracks, the spreader came through, pushed by a locomotive, and did the job of several hundred men working with shovels. The track shifter, an even cruder-looking piece of equipment, was the creation of William Bierd, former head of the Panama Railroad, who had built the first one in the shops at Gorgona shortly before Goethals’ arrival. It was a huge crane-like contraption that could hoist a whole section of track–rails, ties, and all–and swing it in either direction. And since the tracks at the dumps had to be shifted constantly, to keep pace with the loads being delivered, it was an extremely valuable adjunct. Bierd’s own creation could shift track about three feet, but subsequent models, built after he resigned, could reach as much as nine feet. With one such rig, fewer than a dozen men could move a mile of track in a day, a task that would have taken not less than six hundred men working by hand.

The largest of the dumps were at Tabernilla (fourteen miles beyond the north end of the Cut), Gatun Dam (the most distant location), Miraflores, and La Boca, the largest, which had been renamed Balboa. Some of the dumps covered as much as a thousand acres, and in the rainy season they became great seas of mud, with tracks slipping and sinking five or six feet. At Tabernilla, more than 16,000,000 cubic yards of spoil were simply dropped in the jungle. At Balboa, 22,000,000 cubic yards were deposited, with the result that 676 acres were reclaimed from the Pacific as a site for a new town.

By far the most troublesome of the dumps was the Naos breakwater, where, as at Gatun Dam, spoil from the Cut was dumped from a huge trestle, this one being extended slowly across the mud flats of the bay. At first everything went as hoped. But then the soft bottom sediments began to give way beneath the heavier material being poured on top. Overnight whole sections of trestle and track would vanish into mud and everything would have to stop until they were replaced. In some areas the vertical settlement exceeded a hundred feet, while the slippage sideways was three times worse. In time not a single foot of the long trestle remained where it had been to start with. By 1910 well over 1,000,000 cubic yards of spoil had been dumped into the breakwater and still it was a mile short of Naos Island. To reach the island, ultimately, would require 250,000 cubic yards of earth and rock from Culebra, which was ten times what had been originally estimated.

“Culebra Cut was Hell’s Gorge,” one steam-shovel man would write, recalling the heat and dust and noise. Nor were the rains any less of a problem than in times past. In 1908 and again in 1909, the years of the heaviest work, well over ten feet of rain fell. To check the torrential runoff, to reduce the chance of landslides, Goethals did what the French had done: he had diversion channels dug parallel to the Cut. But he greatly expanded on their plan. The channel on the east side of the Cut, known as the Obispo diversion, ran for a distance of five and a half miles and had a minimum width of fifty feet. To build this ditch, and another similar to it on the opposite side, the so-called Camacho diversion, required another 1,000,000 cubic yards of excavation. And very possibly they were a mistake, as Goethals himself later conceded, since they were dug too close to the Cut and water seeping from them below ground may have been the cause of several of the more disastrous slides.

All technical problems at Panama were small problems compared to the slides in the Cut. The building of the great dam at Gatun, for so long the most worrisome part of the plan, turned out to be one of the least difficult tasks of all. A tremendous man-made embankment simply grew year by year at Gatun, extending a mile and a half across the river valley, a ridge of earth that was to be fifteen times as wide at its base as it was high. At the eastern end were the beginnings of the Gatun Locks; in the center were the beginnings of what was to be the dam’s giant concrete spillway. Two big outer walls of “dry” spoil were built first as a base for the embankment. These toes, as they were called, were nearly half a mile apart–the river, meantime, having been turned into an old diversion channel built by the French–and into the space between them was pumped hydraulic, or “wet,” fill, a solution of blue clay, which when dry would create a core almost as impervious as concrete. There was no lack of controversy over the project as time went on (much of it stirred up by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who was convinced that Goethals did not know what he was doing), and once, on November 20, 1908, a section about two hundred feet long slipped sidewise and sank nearly twenty feet at the point where the dam crossed the old French canal. In the face of a storm of criticism and alarm in the newspapers, Goethals insisted that the situation was not serious and as it turned out he was perfectly correct. The damage was repaired; the work went on.

The slides, however, were a wholly different matter. The first occurred early in the fall of 1907, or just as Goethals was beginning to feel he had things under control.

The Cucaracha slide, located on the east bank of the Cut just south of Gold Hill, was the slide that had given the French such grief. On the night of October 4, 1907, after days of unusually heavy rain, Cucaracha “started afresh.” Without warning, an avalanche of mud and rock plunged into the bottom of the Cut, destroying two steam shovels, obliterating all track in its path. And for days afterward that same part of the slope, about fifty acres in area, kept moving down and down, slipping anywhere from ten to fifteen feet a day. “It was, in fact, a tropical glacier–of mud instead of ice,” Major Gaillard noted in an article for Scientific American, “and stakes aligned on its moving surface and checked every 24 hours by triangulation, showed a movement in every respect similar to stakes on moving glaciers in Alaska upon which the writer has made observations in 1896.” After ten days, when the slipping stopped, 500,000 cubic yards of mud had been dumped into the canal.

In 1910 Cucaracha let go twice again, burying shovels, track, locomotives, flatcars, and compressed-air lines. The entire south end of the Cut was bottled up for months. Within a year Gaillard reported that the worst of the slides were over, but in fact they were still to come. From 1911 on, as the Cut grew very much deeper, the slides occurred season after season and grew increasingly worse. “No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be when the sun arose the next morning,” Bishop wrote. “The work of months and years might be blotted out by an avalanche of earth or the toppling over of a small mountain of rock.” There were slides at Las Cascadas, La Pita, Empire, Lirio, East Culebra–twenty-two slides all together. Cucaracha was almost never still. It took three months to dig out the rock and mud dumped into the Cut by slides in 1911. In 1912 more than a third of the year, four and a half months, was spent removing slides. On one day more than a hundred trains would roll out of the Cut; the next day there would be none, because a monstrous slide had occurred.

Steam shovels were buried so deep in mud that only the tips of their cranes were left protruding. Hundreds of miles of track disappeared or were twisted into crazy roller-coaster patterns. In one bizarre instance a shovel and track were picked up by a landslide and were deposited unharmed halfway across the floor of the Cut.

On some of the terraced slopes the ground crept ever so slowly, barely inches a day, which was never enough to do any serious damage, but for two years gangs of men had to be kept constantly at hand, day after day, moving the track back to where it belonged.

At another place a slow but relentless slide kept perfect pace with the steam shovel working at its base. The shovel never had to move; as much as it dug, the slide replenished.

For the engineers the problem was not merely the size of the slides. They were also confronted with a type nobody had anticipated. Those slides that had beset the French, like the comparative few experienced by Wallace and Stevens, were normal, or gravity, slides–Cucaracha being the largest and most destructive example. As explained earlier, they nearly always occurred in the rainy season, when a top layer of soft, porous material slid from the sloping plane of underlying rock, “like snow off a roof,” as one American said. But the new variety, and much the worst, were what geologists classified as structural break and deformation slides. They were due not to sliding mud, but to unstable rock formations, the height of the slopes, and, in part, to the effects of heavy blasting. As the Cut deepened, the underlying rock formations of the slopes lost their lateral support and were unable to withstand the enormous weight from above. It was as if the flying buttresses had been removed from the wall of a Gothic cathedral: the exposed wall of the Cut simply buckled outward under its own load and fell. Rains and saturation actually had little to do with such slides. In fact, some of the most horrendous happened during the dry season.

The first signs of trouble were huge cracks in the ground running along the rim of the Cut, anywhere from a few feet to a hundred yards back from the edge. The next stage might come weeks or months later, or it might take years. A settling or outward tilt of big blocks, whole sections of the slope, would commence. Then the whole slope would give way, sometimes in an hour or two, sometimes over several days.

The worst of such slides occurred in front of the town of Culebra, on the west bank of the Cut, where huge cracks in the ground began appearing in 1911. By the summer of 1912, “the large and annoying Cucaracha” had put an additional 3,000,000 cubic yards in the path of the canal, but the slide on the west bank at Culebra had deposited more than twice that amount. Thirty buildings in the town of Culebra had to be moved back from the brow of the Cut.

“Now suddenly the people living nearest the Cut were being compelled to move,” wrote Rose van Hardeveld, the young wife and mother from Wyoming. “The bank was sliding into the Cut! One after another, the houses were being vacated.

“The neighbors three doors east of us were warned time and again that it was not safe to stay. . . . One morning they awakened to find their back steps well on the way to the bottom of the Cut.”

Before long some seventy-five acres of the town broke away and fully half of all the buildings had to be dismantled and removed to save them from being carried over the edge. Ultimately these breaks, all occurring in the dry season, dumped 10,000,000 cubic yards into the Cut, while on the opposite side another 7,000,000 cubic yards fell away, with the result that the top width of the Cut at that point was increased by a quarter of a mile.

The slides “seem to be maneuvered by the hand of some great marshal and sent forth to the fray in every way calculated to put the canal engineers to discomfiture,” declared the National Geographic Magazine. “Now they are quiescent, attempting to lull the engineers into a false security . . . now they come in the dead of night, spreading chaos and disrupting everything in whatever direction they move . . .” To many of the workers it seemed the task would go on forever. “I personally would say to my fellow men,” recalled one Barbadian, “that . . . my children would come and have children, and their children would come and do the same, before you would see water in the Cut, and most all of us agree on the same.”

Often wisps of smoke would trail from the moving embankments. Once cracks in the surface below Culebra issued boiling water. When Gaillard arrived to investigate the matter, he took a Manila envelope from his pocket and held it over one of the vents in the earth. In seconds the paper was reduced to ashes. The explanation, according to the geologist who was summoned, was “oxidation of pyrite,” but the terrified workers were convinced that they were cutting into the side of a volcano.

The most uncanny of all effects, however, was the rising of the floor of the Cut. Not merely would the walls of the canal come crashing down, but the bottom would rise ten, fifteen, even thirty feet in the air, often quite dramatically. Gaillard on one occasion grew concerned as a steam shovel appeared to be sinking before his eyes, but looking again he realized it was not that the shovel was descending, but that the ground where he stood was steadily rising–about six feet in five minutes, “and so smoothly and with so little jar as to make the movement scarcely appreciable.”

This phenomenon, diabolical as it seemed, had a simple explanation. It was caused by the weight of the slipping walls of the Cut acting upon the comparatively soft strata of the exposed canal floor. The effect was exactly that of a hand pressed into a pan of soft dough–the hand being the downward pressure of the slides, the rising dough at the side of the hand being the bottom of the canal.

The slides attracted worldwide attention and inspired all kinds of suggestions as to how the problem might be solved, very few of which were practical. The most popular remedy was to plaster the sides of the Cut with concrete, and this was actually tried in one particularly troublesome area, but without success. The concrete crumpled and fell along with everything else as soon as the slide resumed its downward progress.

To check the deformation slides considerable excavation was also done along the uppermost portions of the slopes in an effort to decrease the pressure on the underlying strata. But by and large there was still only one way to cope with the problem and that was the same as it had been since the time of the French–to work for an angle of repose, to keep cutting back at the slopes, to keep removing whatever came down, until the slides stopped. And no one honestly knew how long that might take. By late 1912 at Cucaracha and at Culebra, the chief trouble spots, the angle of inclination was about one on five (one foot vertical to five horizontal). Still the ground kept moving.

Fifteen thousand tourists came to watch the show in 1911 and in 1912 there were nearly twenty thousand. “You are now overlooking the world-famous Culebra Cut,” exclaimed the tour guides at the start of their standard spiel. There was more tonnage per mile moving on the tracks below, the visitors were informed, than on any railroad in the world. But meanwhile a big clubhouse at the town of Culebra was being dismantled and removed (“in order to lighten the weight upon the west bank of the canal at this point”), and on January 19 Cucaracha broke loose once again. It was one of the worst slides on record. It spilled the whole way across the Cut and up the other side. All traffic was blocked at that end; for the sixth or seventh time, the slide had wiped out months of work.

Gaillard was practically in shock, according to one account, and Goethals was hurriedly called to the scene. “What are we to do now?” Gaillard asked. Goethals lit a cigarette. “Hell,” he said, “dig it out again.”

* The drills themselves were of two types, a well drill that could bore a hole five inches in diameter to a depth of one hundred feet and a smaller tripod drill that could bore a three-inch hole to a depth of thirty feet. These drills were all powered by compressed air fed into the Cut through some thirty miles of pipe from big compressors at Rio Grande, Empire, and Las Cascadas. The elaborate compressed-air system was another of those advances that distinguished the American effort from that of the French.

20
Life and Times

For a while we tramped on in silence, till Umbopa, who was marching in front, broke into a Zulu chant about how brave men, tired of life and the tameness of things, started off into a great wilderness to find new things or die, and how, lo, and behold! when they had got far into the wilderness, they found it was not a wilderness at all, but a beautiful place full of young wives and fat cattle.

–H. RIDER HAGGARD

King Solomon’s Mines

And this on the slope of the death-dealing Chagres!

–CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

I There were six passenger trains daily on the Panama Railroad, three in each direction, and since the railroad was still the one way to get back and forth, the trains were always crowded and the crowds were always interesting to look at. Especially in the cool of the evening every little station platform would be thronged with people, and to anyone newly arrived on the Isthmus it was astonishing to see American women and children in such numbers and all looking so very healthy, clean, and perfectly at home. They were not merely surviving in such alien–and once deadly–soil, but plainly thriving, and this to many visitors was as impressive, as great a source of patriotic pride, as anything to be seen.

One grew tired of hearing of “the largest dam, the highest locks, the greatest artificial lake, the deepest cut,” wrote a correspondent for The Outlook, in an effort to explain the thrill he experienced watching a simple, unimportant scene on the platform at Empire. A man returning from work, grimy and wringing with perspiration, was being met by his wife, a woman of perhaps thirty dressed all in white, who held a baby, and by a still younger woman, apparently her sister, who stood “like a Gibson summer girl,” holding the hand of a blond little boy with bare legs and wearing an immaculate white Russian tunic. To the correspondent, watching from the train window, there was something quite miraculous about this “New Jersey group,” as he called them, and the way the father, holding his greasy hands stiffly behind, bent forward and kissed his wife and children.

Old Charles Francis Adams–brother of Henry Adams, railroad expert, historian–had a similar experience. In 1911, in his seventy-sixth year, Adams had come to Panama for no other purpose than to see the construction in progress. One evening while waiting for the train at Culebra, his eyes fell on a group of American girls, about ten in number and anywhere from ten to fifteen years of age. Each was nicely dressed in a thin white frock and the sight of them in such a setting affected him profoundly. “A more healthy, well-to-do and companionable group of children could not under similar conditions have been met at any station within twenty miles of Boston,” he would report to his fellow members of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Several of the girls had come to take the train, the others to see them off. They were chatting and laughing under the glare of the station lights, oblivious of everything but themselves, without chaperons and wholly without fear–of yellow fever, of malaria, of anything whatever as near as he could surmise. “The material, social and meteorological conditions would in every respect have compared favorably with those to which we are accustomed to during the midsummer season; the single noticeable difference was the more complete absence of insect life. . . . And this on the slope of the death-dealing Chagres!”

Gatun Dam, the locks, Culebra Cut, were all tremendously impressive, he affirmed, but dams and waterways had been built before; the majesty of these was largely a question of degree. But this “vanquishing of pestilence,” this clean, prosperous, flourishing Anglo-Saxon civilization in the very heart of the jungle, was, he insisted, unlike anything before in history.

Those resident bystanders who remembered the Isthmus from times past were no less incredulous over the transformation. To any of Adams’ own generation, those old enough to remember the hell-roaring days of the gold rush, the change was almost inconceivable. Even the French era seemed part of another time, another world. Tracy Robinson, who had been the sole resident American present at the arrival of Le Grand Français in 1880, and who was still a familiar figure in Colón, had lived, he said, to see the confirmation of his lifelong conviction concerning the tropics. The tropics had been “set apart for great things,” he had said to de Lesseps. And he said it again now with greater faith in his memoirs, an inscribed copy of which he presented to George Goethals: “It seems to me that Design May be clearly traced in this tendency. The evolution of mankind toward a higher destiny is involved.”

The enormous discrepancy between white and black society along this same jungle corridor, the point that the Canal Zone was in actuality a rigid caste society, was barely even implied by such observers (which, of course, was in itself another facet of the life and times). And neither did any but a very few question the kind of white community that had evolved, other than to point out, somewhat apologetically, that it was indeed “a sort of socialism.” The statement that the Canal Zone was “a narrow ribbon of standardized buildings and standardized men working at standardized jobs” stands almost alone in all to be found in published or private accounts. To William Franklin Sands, an American diplomat, this New civilization created by his countrymen was simply awful, “a drearily efficient state,” “a mechanization of human society.” “Every American looked and behaved exactly like every other–to the vast bewilderment of the natives, who had previously thought of us as a race of extreme individualists. . . .” To Sands the view from the train window was cause for despair, as he wrote years later:

From a railway car one could tell by the type of mission furniture and the color of the hammock swings on the back porches the salaries and social standings of the occupants of all the houses that one passed. In some ways the Canal Zone of the early 1900’s was a foretaste of those New Jersey and long Island suburbs of the 1920’s where social ratings were according to the number and cost of one’s automobiles. . ..

To those who lived in such houses, however, to the individual men and women like those seen By The Outlook correspondent, Panama seems to have been the experience of a lifetime, almost without exception. The work, the way of life, the sense of being part of a creative undertaking so much larger and so much more important than oneself, were like nothing they had known, as they openly and cheerfully expressed then and for the rest of their lives. “It is as if each were individually proud of being one of the chosen people and builders of the greatest work of the modern age,” noted a thoughtful young rookie on the Zone police force, an aspiring writer named Harry Franck who had been assigned to take a census. Families returning by ship from home leave invariably spoke of their eagerness to get back. “Not one but was ready and even glad to go back,” Charles Francis Adams observed of the group he met during the voyage to Colon; “all looked forward to remaining there for the end–till, as the expression went, they ‘saw the thing through.’ ”

“We felt like pioneers,” numbers of them would recall a lifetime afterward. Far from home, they were rolling back the wilderness, serving the cause of progress, serving their country in one of its grandest moments. They were building large and building to last. It was to be a “monument for the world.” Every day was a story for the grandchildren.

No one could quite see himself as a soldier under fire any longer, far too much was being provided in the way of creature comforts. There were scarcely even inconveniences any more, let alone real hardships to face. There were never “hard times” in the Zone, as Harry Franck observed, “no hurried, worried faces.” Morale was amazing.

Very little if any time was spent worrying over the possible detrimental effects of so structured and paternalistic an order. Their days were too busy, for one thing. Furthermore, there was never any question as to the finite nature of their circumstances. If this was an entirely novel social experiment, it was also to be a brief one, they knew. Vestiges of their way of life would survive–some to the present day– but their own particular era would end abruptly just as soon as the canal was built. The houses they lived in, their schools, offices, whole communities, would disappear with the advance of Gatun Lake. Other towns on higher ground would also be struck like stage sets and carried away, leaving not a trace.

They themselves would depart by the thousands, and for the relative few who would decide to stay on, life would become something quite different. Another era would begin once “Big Job” was no longer the common, galvanizing cause.

The work was everything. “Pride and joy in the work,” wrote Bishop, “constituted the magic bond which held the canal colony together . . .” There was no one who was not associated with the work. No one could live within the Zone unless he or she was a worker on the canal or a member of a worker’s family. The entire social order existed solely for the work and it rewarded its members according to their importance to the work. Indeed, on a small and limited scale, there existed within the American Zone in Panama between, roughly, 1907 and 1914 something very like what Claude de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, had envisioned for the world a century before. All were caught up in a noble effort that was to benefit humanity: the canal he had also envisioned. Society was controlled by a gifted technician, as he had espoused. His famous maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” could well have been the motto of the Isthmian Canal Commission.

Joseph Pennell, an artist who came to do a series of lithographs showing the final heroic stages of construction, called the canal “The Wonder of Work” and said the devotion it inspired, the spirit it engendered among the Americans, were of a quality he had never encountered.

Even the animosity or ill-concealed disdain felt by many Americans toward the Panamanians seems to have stemmed in large measure, if not chiefly, from what the Americans took to be a disgraceful lack of regard for “honest work” on the part of the Panamanians. It was not so much that the Panamanian was lazy, that he had done nothing for centuries, or even that he refused now to take a hand with the canal, but that he appeared to sneer at the fundamental belief that hard work could be good in itself, an ennobling act of faith. To large numbers of young American technicians such contempt was little short of blasphemous.

The fundamental problem with the Panamanian, noted census-taker Harry Franck, was that he could not “rid himself of his racial conviction that a man in an old khaki jacket who is building a canal must be inferior clay to a hotel loafer in a frock coat. . . . Even with seven years of American example about him the Panamanian had not yet grasped the divinity of labor. Perhaps he will eons hence when he has grown nearer true civilization.”

The full work force in the last years of construction numbered about 45,000 to 50,000, which was nearly equal to the combined populations of Colón and Panama City. But the total number of white North Americans was only about 6,000, of whom roughly 2,500 were women and children. In 1913 there were 5,362 gold-roll employees and dependents, practically all of whom were Americans. Their average pay was $150 a month. A nurse or teacher received $60 to start; clerks and bookkeepers, $100; a doctor, $150; steam-shovel engineers were by now getting $310. The number of women employed was never more than about 300 and the top salary for a woman was $125 (for a railroad telegraph operator).

A young graduate engineer with two or three years’ experience could expect to make $250 to start, which was about $25 more than he could make in the United States. And added to his salary was the host of free benefits and services (housing, hospital care) to which all employees were entitled. His annual vacation was forty-two days with pay (this in a day when two weeks was still the standard) and he was entitled to thirty days’ sick leave with pay.

If he was single he generally shared a room with another man in one of the bachelor hotels, as they were called, where the phonograph blared “seven kinds of ragtime” through the night and poker games, strictly forbidden by I.C.C. regulations, were carried on “in much the same spirit as Comanche warfare.” The buildings were seldom quiet until 4:30 A.M., when the first alarm clocks began going off.

Meals at this same hotel cost 30 cents each (comparable fare in the United States would have run about 75 cents), and since a man needed only work clothes and one or two light suits, his clothing expenses were minimal. For bowling, billiards, pool, a book or a current magazine and the comforts of a Morris chair, for a game of chess, a chocolate soda, the use of a gymnasium or a quiet place in which to write a letter, he could go to one of the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses, where his dues were $10 a year. (One glowing article about the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses written for home consumption was titled “Uncle Sam’s Fight with the Devil.”)

“In fact, everything is done to make it as pleasant as possible for the men,” one steam-shovel engineer wrote home, after getting settled at Culebra, “and I have not seen a man that was not satisfied. As for myself, I like it very much. This is a pretty town.”

For diversions or pleasures not provided at the Y.M.C.A. clubhouses, one could take the train to Colón or to Panama City.

An enormous amount of scrubbing and sanitizing had gone on in the two cities. Yet there remained a sharp division between them and the Zone, on the map and in the mind. On Saturday nights, even on an hour’s pass, men would rush over the line like sailors on shore leave, eagerly forsaking the unrelieved wholesomeness of the Zone and very often to do nothing more licentious than stroll about Cathedral Plaza or take in a movie at the Electric Theater.

The cities, observed Harry Franck, “serve as a sort of safety valve, where a man can . . . blow off steam; get rid of the bad eternal vapors that might cause an explosion in a ventless society.” There were very few saloons within the Zone itself–half a dozen perhaps–and they were small, rough stand-up bars where, as one writer remarked, “the glitter of mirrors and of cut glass was notably absent,” and closing time was eleven sharp. The saloons in the cities, however, were “many, varied, and largely disreputable.” According to the Canal Zone Pilot, a guidebook that first appeared in 1908, there were 131 saloons in Colón, 40 on Bolivar Street alone. In Panama City there was a total of 220 to choose from. And after dark, things could get pretty rough. Prostitution, if not so gaudy or open as in the French era, was commonplace. Coco Grove, the notorious red-light district in Panama City, was a regular stop for the little horse-drawn coaches, or carimettas, that stood waiting at the railroad station as each train pulled in.

Most notable of the brothels was the Navajo, on I Street, run by one of the best known of all Americans on the Isthmus, Mamie Lee Kelly, of New Orleans, who would be remembered vividly by one man more than half a century later as “lusty, large, voluptuous, very profane and very capable.” Since all such establishments were known locally as “American houses” and their occupants, irrespective of nationality, were known as “American women,” a local ordinance was put through making it unlawful for American women to be on the streets after dark, a rule that not surprisingly gave rise to a number of unfortunate misunderstandings.

If a canal employee were to get married, his entire status changed immediately. If he was earning less than $200 a month, he and his bride moved into a furnished, rent-free, four-room apartment, with a broad screened porch (really a fifth room) and a bath. The apartment would be one of four in what was known as a Type 14 house, the model in which the majority of American families was quartered during the construction years. If the employee was making from $200 to $300 a month, then he was eligible for a Type 17 house (two families) or a small individual cottage. Any American earning $300 to $400 lived in a Type 10: two stories, living room, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms and bath, porches on both levels, while those in the over $400-a-month bracket were given “large houses of a type distinguished by spaciousness and artistic design.”

Whatever the husband’s rank, his wife would shop at one of the eighteen I.C.C. commissary stores, each essentially a big department store (and forerunner of the military post exchange), which stocked everything from work pants (“Battleship” brand) to lamb chops to finger bowls and at prices nearly always lower than in the States. (The pants were $1.25; the lamb chops, 24 cents a pound; the finger bowls, 10 cents each.) Moreover, as the purchasing department in Washington grew more proficient, the prices kept going down while prices at home were rising. In early 1909, for example, a porterhouse steak was 29 cents a pound in the commissaries, but a year later it was down to 21 cents, which was less than half what it would have cost in New York.

The I.C.C. bakery produced a different fruit pie fresh daily (Monday, apple; Tuesday, mince; Wednesday, peach; etc.). The garbage was collected, lawns were cut, and a black serving girl could be hired for $10 a month. If she did not work out satisfactorily there was always a dozen eager to take her place.

The whole system was in fact quite intentionally designed to favor the married employee, to provide every inducement for matrimony, to bring stability to the skilled white segment of the community.

Books from the best-seller list and recordings of the newest hit tunes were no less current than at home. Indeed, with several ships a week arriving from New York, with thousands of tourists pouring through full of news and wearing the latest fashions, many residents of the Zone felt more in touch and up to date than ever before in their lives. For a very large number of the Americans living and working in Panama, perhaps even the majority, the initial voyage to Colón had been their first experience with salt water. Many had never been away from their hometowns. “Lord, yes, I liked it here,” recalled Mrs. Winifred Ewing, a schoolteacher at Empire. “I didn’t know anything else but the hills of West Virginia.”

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by John Fox, Jr., and The Winning of Barbara Worth, by Harold Bell Wright, were popular reading along the diggings in the years 1907–1914, as were When a Man Marries, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. In On the Spanish Main, by John Masefield, a young American engineer relaxing on his screened porch at the end of the day, the light of an electric lamp falling over his shoulder, could imagine himself accompanying Henry Morgan on the trek up the Chagres to sack Old Panama. (” . . . They rowed all day, suffering much from mosquitoes, but made little progress. . . . To each side of them were stretches of black, alluvial mud, already springing green with shrubs and water plants. Every now and then as they rowed on, on the dim, sluggish, silent, steaming river, they butted a sleeping alligator as he sunned in the shallows. . . .”)

Whether anyone was reading Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (“Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism.”) after it appeared in 1911, or Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1913, cannot be determined.

In the evenings after dinner, with the soft night air stirring the jungle, couples sat with coffee talking of much the same news being talked of at home–the return of Halley’s Comet, the women’s suffrage movement, the income-tax amendment. The most-talked-of story in 1912 was the same as everywhere, the sinking of the Titanic.

A clerk from the Ancon post office, a Mr. S. C. Russel, walked across the Isthmus in fourteen hours, and that too was news. On April 27, 1913, an aviator from California, Robert G. Fowler, flew a small single-engine hydroplane from the Bay of Panama to Limon Bay, the first trancontinental flight, ocean to ocean in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Four others had attempted the flight before but had failed because of the turbulence of the air. Fowler, who had taken a photographer along for the ride, had banked in a big, slow circle over Culebra Cut to get the first aerial views. Far below, at the bottom of the gaping chasm, men were looking up and wildly waving to him.

The biggest social occasions, year in, year out, were the Saturday-night dances at the Tivoli Hotel, where the band played such favorites of the moment as “Moonlight Bay” and “Wait ‘til the Sun Shines, Nellie.” Probably the tune danced to more than any other was “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and it was with special zest that everyone sang “Under the Bamboo Tree.” A better-looking crowd of young people would be hard to find, wrote the correspondent for The Outlook. “Hot water and grit soap had been busy on the men, and the scene, except that some of the men were in white, looked like a college dance.”

Besides the dances there were band concerts every Sunday, performed by a “very creditable” thirty-six-piece I.C.C. band. There were lectures, Halloween parties, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. July fourth was the biggest day of the year. Once the Battle of Lexington was staged at Colón in Colonial costume.

The number of clubs and fraternal organizations was simply astonishing. There were camera clubs, bowling clubs, literary clubs, debating clubs, dramatic clubs. The Texans had a club. There were nine women’s clubs in nine different towns led by a full-time professional women’s club director, Miss Helen Varick Boswell, who was a paid employee of the I.C.C. There was a Strangers Club at Colón and a Century Club in Panama City. There was a club for Spanish-American war veterans, another for college men, and another for college men who were members of national fraternities. The Isthmian Canal Pioneers Association was reserved for those who had been on the work from the start.

Joseph Bucklin Bishop gave the activities of all such organizations full play in a regular column in the Canal Record called “Social Life on the Zone.” The launching of an Ancon Art Society in 1911 was reported thus:

The art section of the Ancon Woman’s Club, organized under the title of the Ancon Art Society, will hold its first monthly meeting on the evening of January 29, at the residence of Mrs. Herbert G. Squires, the American Legation, Panama, from eight to ten o’clock. In accordance with the regular plan of the society, the evening will consist of music given during the hour’s sketching; an exhibit and judgment of work by the critic appointed by the society, and a social half hour during which refreshments will be served. The program of work during the month of January has been figure, landscape, still life, genre and applied design.

“The whole Zone was friendly,” remembered Robert Worsley, a stenographer from North Carolina. “People were always willing to help, it was easy to get to know people.”

“I just thought I was something. . . . Everybody was so friendly,” Winifred Ewing said.

Locomotive engineers, train conductors, and steam-shovel men had their respective “brotherhoods.” Fraternal and secret orders abounded. The Masons, the Patriotic Sons of America, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Improved Order of Red Men, the Modern Woodmen of the World, the Knights of Pythias, and the Knights of Malta had chapters and every chapter was extremely active. The Improved Order of Red Men, “the pioneer of all secret, or fraternal orders and societies in the Canal Zone,” had six “tribes,” and for special functions, members turned out in full Indian regalia, war bonnets, war paint. But the organization–“largest and strongest”–was the Independent Order of Panamanian Kangaroos (motto: Optimus est qui optima facit–He is best who does best), founded in 1906 when a number of Americans for their own amusement began staging mock trials, or kangaroo courts, in a boxcar in the yards at Empire. Within a few years, membership had reached a thousand.

Everyone belonged to something. Everyone was someone’s “brother” in some fashion, and for large numbers of men their standings in these various organizations were vitally important. In 1911, for example, a large, costly illustrated volume much like a college yearbook, The Makers of the Panama Canal, was sold by subscription to American employees, so that by paying the price, any clerk, teacher, or mechanic could have his or her picture, as well as a brief biographical sketch, included along with those of Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, with Goethals, Gorgas, and Panama’s prominent political leaders. In nearly all these biographical sketches the orders and brotherhoods figure quite prominently.

Most men listed three or four affiliations. Harvey C. Dew, for example, was an “Assistant Chief Clerk” from Dillon County, South Carolina, who had been on the Isthmus since 1906. He belonged to the Independent Order of Panamanian Kangaroos, the Odd Fellows, and the Knights of Pythias, as well as the University Club of Panama and the Strangers Club of Colon. John L. Davis, a steam-shovel engineer from Indiana, belonged to the Masons, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Odd Fellows, and the Junior Order of American Mechanics. Charles Montague, a railroad conductor from Allegan County, Michigan, who worked on a dirt train at Las Cascadas, was “Chancellor Commander of Balboa Lodge, K. of P.” (Knights of Pythias), as well as a member of the B.R.T. (Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen), O.I.T. (Order of Isthmian Trainmen), the Modern Woodmen of the World, and the Kangaroos. The complete entry for Joseph H. Painter reads as follows:

JOSEPH H. PAINTER

Steam Shovel Engineer, was born in Cincinnati, Missouri. He arrived on the Isthmus in March, 1908. Mr. Painter has taken about all the upright, regular steps in Masonry, having gone up through blue lodge, Royal Arch chapter and Knights Templar commandery on the York Rite side and to the thirty-second degree in the Scottish Rite. He is also a noble of the Mystic Shrine and belongs to the Kangaroos. He is married.

By 1910 there were also thirty-nine churches within the Zone, twenty-six of which, like the Y.M.C. A clubhouses, were built and owned by the I.C.C. Fifteen full-time chaplains were employed–three Catholic, four Episcopal, four Baptist, two Methodist, one Wesleyan, one Presbyterian–their salaries and living expenses being charged off, as someone in Goethals’ office decided, to the Sanitary Department.

The cost to the I.C.C. of all these various “privileges and perquisites” was something over $2,500,000 a year.

But neither were the possibilities for unorganized activities limited or ignored. On Sundays, the one day off in the week, hundreds of employees with their wives, girl friends, or families joined the swarms of tourists sight-seeing at Culebra. There were day-long excursions to the beach at Toro Point, across Limon Bay from Colón, and to the old Spanish fort of San Lorenzo, looking down on the mouth of the Chagres.

Taboga Island, in the Bay of Panama, was the most popular of all Sunday destinations. It seldom rained heavily at Taboga, the air was cooler, and while there was also no overabundance of things to do once one arrived, the three-hour boat trip across the glassy bay imparted a sense of getting far away. The one village on the steep little island stood beside a sheltered crescent of bathing beach. Excursionists in their Sunday clothes trailed up and down narrow paths of crushed shells and spread their picnics under the trees near the brown sand. Families went swimming. They took snapshots of themselves grouped in twos and threes beside a lime tree, or in the hard white sunshine in front of a tiny, ancient church at the head of a miniature plaza in the village. In old photograph albums brought back from the Isthmus, they stand arm in arm, their beaming faces half shadowed by hat brims.

They bought pineapples and cold Coca-Cola and a good, crusty bread sold in a pink bakery shop overhung with a filigreed balcony painted an electric blue. On the slope just beyond the village stood the old French sanitarium, the former Hotel Aspinwall, which was still used for convalescents from Ancon Hospital, but took paying guests as well. The view from its long verandas was lovely. For many young couples it seemed very near to paradise.

Numbers of people became keenly interested in Panama’s history. Lieutenant Colonel Gaillard, for example, bought and read every book he could find on the subject, and Gorgas’ favorite Sunday pastime was to lead day-long excursions on horseback to the ruins of Old Panama. When it was learned that gemstones–sapphires, opals, garnets–as well as fossil shark’s teeth could be found in and around the canal diggings, many men spent their Sundays that way, and with considerable success. Mrs. William Sibert raised a dozen or more varieties of orchids on her front porch. Lieutenant Colonel Sibert, among others, sent to the States for a pack of hounds, organized hunting parties in the jungle (for deer mostly), and kept a pet eleven-foot boa constrictor which he fed live possums.

To some visitors it seemed that perhaps everyone was having too good a time, that a little too much was being done at government expense. Others worried more over what the future effect might be of so efficient and apparently so successful a demonstration of socialism. In this largest of all modern enterprises, reporters were writing, not one man at the top, no one at any level, was working for profit. Visiting bankers and business people went home to report that the government-run Panama Railroad was a “model of efficiency and economy in every department.” No railroad in the United States was better equipped with safety devices. No private contractor in the world was feeding laborers so well as the I.C.C. In every phase of employer-employee relations the I.C.C. was more liberal than any private concern of the day, as several publications had already emphasized. The government ran the Tivoli Hotel, very well and at a profit. The steam-ship line between New York and Colón, also government-run, was earning a profit of some $150,000 a year.

What were to be the consequences when the canal workers, spoiled By such paternalism, came home again?

When these well paid, lightly worked, well and cheaply fed men return to their native land [warned a New York banker], they will form a powerful addition to the Socialist party. . . . By their votes and the enormous following they can rally to their standard they will force the government to take over the public utilities, if not all the large corporations, of the country. They will force the adoption of government standards of work, wages and cost of living as exemplified in the work on the Canal.

Yet how could it be socialism, some pondered, when those in charge were all technical men and “little interested in political philosophy,” as one reporter commented. “The marvel is,” wrote this same man, “that even under administrators unfriendly or indifferent to Socialism, these socialistic experiments have succeeded–without exception.”

A member of the Socialist Party was found on the payroll, a mechanic who had been on the job almost from the start, and he declared that by no means was it socialism. “First of all, there ain’t any democracy down here. It’s a Bureaucracy that’s got Russia backed off the map. . . . Government ownership don’t mean anything to us working men unless We own the Government. We don’t here–this is the sort of thing Bismarck dreamed of.”

II

To Harry Franck, who was to record his experiences in a book titled Zone Policeman 88, one of the most candid and perceptive of published reminiscences, a more fitting analogy was the caste society of India. “The Brahmins,” he wrote, “are the gold employees, white American citizens with all the advantages and privileges thereto appertaining.” But this Brahmin caste itself, he emphasized, was divided and subdivided into numerous gradations, each very clearly defined. The ultimate Brahmin was “His Brahmin Highness the Colonel.” Immediately below him were the “high priests” of the canal commission–Sibert, Gaillard, Hodges, Gorgas, Rousseau, and the portly former Senator, J. C. S. Blackburn, who was officially Chief of Civil Administration, a job and title that meant almost nothing. (Blackburn’s duties were once described unofficially as attending commission meetings, signing cab licenses, and drawing $14,000 a year.)

Down the scale, grade by grade, were the assistant division heads, the highest-paid civil and electrical engineers, the supervisors of construction, the assistant supervisors of construction, heads of machine shops, accountants, paymasters, storekeepers, yardmasters, sanitary inspectors, locomotive engineers, beneath which were the “roughnecks” –steam-shovel men, boilermakers, plumbers, ordinary mechanics, and so forth. (A roughneck, by Franck’s description, was a “bull-necked, wholehearted, cast-iron fellow” who was both admirable and likable, but only to a point: “a fine fellow in his way, but you can sometimes wish his way branched off from yours for a few hours.”)

There was, however, still one lower level within the white community, that of the regular enlisted man, either Army or Marines, for whom Corporal Jack Fitzgerald, of Boston, may serve as an example. Eighteen years old, single, Corporal Fitzgerald was one of some eight hundred regular Army troops based in the Zone at Camp Otis, near Las Cascadas, beside the western edge of Culebra Cut. Being neither an officer nor an employee of the canal commission, he had no entree into the social life of the Army elite or among the canal workers. He had no access to the clubhouses, to the mess halls, to anything maintained or put on for the comfort or amusement of the workers. His pay was $18 a month, or considerably less than that of the lowest-paid unskilled laborer. When he went to town in his uniform–and his uniform was all he was permitted to wear–he was an easy target for the Panamanian police, who had no liking for Americans at best, but who could be vicious when dealing with American servicemen.*

It was a very different Panama that Corporal Fitzgerald knew from the one seen, or perhaps even imagined, by his fellow Bostonian Charles Francis Adams, as different nearly as the two Bostons they came from. Later, when the locks were nearing completion, Corporal Fitzgerald would stand guard at Miraflores; but most of his three-year hitch in Panama was taken up with map duty in the jungle and with endless routine chores in camp. Still: “The natives had stills in the jungle and plenty of sugar cane available,” he would recall happily. “So a lot of us boys got off to a bad start. No ice, no mixing, just right out of a bottle, ninety proof!” Paydays “you took your turn” at one of the dollar houses in Coco Grove. “There was a few [other] places that were closed to the general run, private like, they were for those high up with the canal, engineers and such.”

Corporal Fitzgerald was like those countless others in history who could say in later life that they had been present at some momentous event but who in fact saw almost nothing of it. In his three years he saw little of the excavation going on and took practically no interest in it. He never laid eyes on Goethals, as near as he could recall, but once he did see Taft. His only brush with anything like the glamour or historic grandeur that the rest of the world associated with the work at Panama was to stand at attention for nearly three hours one broiling-hot morning at the side of a little spur on the railroad.

. . . I think it was in 1912, I’m pretty sure it was in the spring. . . . The President was coming– Taft! William Howard Taft!–and, gee, they got us out there about nine o’clock in the morning, standing, standing, waiting, waiting, waiting, Christ, the sun kept coming up, and it– boy! You know, that place when it rains, it’s just like throwing water on a stove, everything steams. And we waited. Finally the damn train came by. And here’s Taft with a big white suit on–he weighed about three hundred pounds, a big belly on him–standing on the observation platform. And, well, he just . . . he just waved. That was all there was. That was all there was to it.

On another occasion, on a Sunday when he was looking about among the exposed rock down in the Cut, Corporal Fitzgerald saw a fossil print of a fish (“not the meat, just the bones”) and still another of a fern, “proving,” he would recall, “that millions of years ago it was all in the sea. It all makes you feel very insignificant.”

To Charles Francis Adams, as to others, the “innate force” of the entire order was very plainly derived from one man. “The individuality and character of Colonel Goethals today permeate, and permeate visibly, the entire Zone–unconsciously on his part, unconscious on the part of others, his influence is pervasive.”

Praise at home for Goethals was boundless. Collier’s called him “The Solomon of the Isthmus.” He received standing ovations when he appeared before congressional committees. Yale, Columbia, and Harvard conferred honorary degrees. Newspapers were full of speculation about his prospects as a dark-horse candidate for the Presidency. “Goethals has created a wonderful, smooth-as-oil, 100 percent efficient machine that is getting results every working day in the year,” the Atlanta Constitution declared. Everyone returning from the Isthmus spoke of his ability. “Congressmen and senators, civilians, administrators, newspaper and engineering experts, united in the verdict that the digging of the big ditch has developed one of the greatest figures in contemporaneous American life in the person of Colonel Goethals.”

To Harry Franck, he was simply “Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent.”

The omnipresence had become legendary almost from the moment he began making his daily tour of the line in an extraordinary self-propelled private car. It was bright yellow, heavily lacquered, shined, spotless, and looked like a dreadful cross between a small locomotive and a stagecoach. Powered with a gasoline engine and run by a uniformed driver, it was known as “The Yellow Peril” and the sight of it rounding a bend in the tracks was an instant warning to look sharp, that the “Old Man” was coming. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who toured the canal with her husband, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, and who shocked everyone by smoking in public, wrote that “nothing was ever pleasanter than riding along in his track motor, ‘The Yellow Peril’ and seeing the big job and hearing him talk about it.” “It rattled by at all hours of the day,” wrote Rose van Hardeveld of the strange-looking contrivance, “this official car of the I.C.C. . . . The Old Man was so constantly on the job that we never thought of him as being at home or eating or sleeping.”

Except for the times he was called to Washington, a few brief vacations, and one official trip to Germany, he was on the Isthmus the entire seven years until the canal was finished.* He seldom entertained, seldom accepted invitations. Only a select coterie appears to have known him on anything more than the most formal working basis-Hodges, with whom he seems to have had the most direct day-to-day rapport; Bishop; Williamson; Major Chester Harding, who was one of Sibert’s ablest assistants; Dr. W. E. Deeks, a Canadian on Gorgas’ staff; and Father Collins, the Catholic priest at Culebra, whose company he appears to have enjoyed above all others.

Mrs. Goethals–Effie Rodman Goethals–tall, vain, a member of an old New Bedford whaling family, was in residence most of the time, but seemed little pleased with the life or ever very comfortable in her role as the first lady of the Zone. It had been arranged also that their older son, George, now a second lieutenant in the Engineers, be assigned to duty on the canal and he brought with him his bride, who, to judge from her photograph, must have been one of the prettiest young women on the Isthmus. Still, to the rank and file Goethals remained a solitary and enigmatic figure and an endless subject for gossip. Stories of supposed romances with the wives of subordinates would persist through all his years in Panama and on into the succeeding generation of canal employees. One especially vivacious young woman named Henrietta Otis, when asked by a close friend and neighbor to confide whether there was any truth to the gossip that she and the Colonel were “very close,” affirmed that there was. But according to other stories still told on the Isthmus, the Colonel’s lady was someone else entirely.

Intensely partisan factions formed within that small but all-important segment categorized by Harry Franck as the Brahmin high priests. There were the Goethals people, the largest faction, and there were the others, chief of whom were Sibert, Gaillard, Gorgas, and Marie Gorgas. Sibert and Goethals all through the final years of the work were barely speaking to each other.

“Colonel Sibert and my father felt sure he was trying to get rid of them,” recalled Gaillard’s son, Pierre, then a young M.I.T. graduate who had been employed as a junior engineer on the locks at Pedro Miguel. “He’d give them the silent treatment. Only my father refused to let him get away with that. My father talked to him the same as always. We’d been great friends of the Goethals for years. Our houses at Culebra were right next door to one another. . . . He [Goethals] did a damn good job, but he got delusions of grandeur.”

In Washington, reporters quoted an unnamed southern Democrat, a recent visitor to the Isthmus, who said Goethals’ “keen dislike” of Gaillard, Sibert, and Gorgas, all three of whom were from the Old South, had been very apparent to him. The Southerners, he said, were “outraged” because Goethals was attempting to freeze them out of their share of the glory.

Marie Gorgas, the only one of the group ever to say anything in print on such matters, wrote that it was Goethals’ ”passion for dominating everything and everybody” that made him such a trial. He had become, by her account, a man virtually without feeling, except for power. Power was “the relish and the sweetness of his life.” And indeed, one evening while escorting Mrs. Gaillard across the way to her door, Goethals said that he cared very much for the power he exercised. The salary, the title, the prestige, he said, were of but small satisfaction compared to the feeling of such power.*

The Goethals-Gorgas rift came to a head over a difference of views about who should cut the grass. Goethals was concerned with cost efficiency in every department and in the Sanitary Department no less than any other, and, like Taft, his private estimate of Gorgas as an administrator was very low. He wanted the mechanical tasks of cutting grass and clearing brush, a substantial part of Gorgas’ operation, put under the quartermaster, where they would normally fall, and he saw no reason why Gorgas should object since such work required no special sanitary knowledge or training. Gorgas did object, however, on the grounds that any change in his campaign against Anopheles mosquitoes would jeopardize his success in reducing malaria (and jeopardize thereby the lives of the workers). But they were grounds Goethals refused to accept. So for six months the grass was cut under the direction of the quartermaster, over a larger area than under the old system and, as it turned out, at appreciably less cost. And since the

At this point in the test of wills, according to Marie Gorgas, Goethals exclaimed, “Do you know, Gorgas, that every mosquito you kill costs the United States Government ten dollars?”

“But just think,” Gorgas replied, “one of those ten-dollar mosquitoes might bite you, and what a loss that would be to the country.”

By Goethals’ account, however, no such exchange ever occurred. Like Marie Gorgas’ other uncomplimentary remarks and recollections, the story appeared in her biography of her husband in 1924, all of which Goethals chose to ignore. But when Mark Sullivan repeated the story Two years later in his popular Our Times, Goethals presented his version in a letter to Sullivan. “No further discussion of the matter ever occurred and the sick rate continued to decrease.”

What he may have felt privately about Gorgas, Sibert, or Gaillard is less than clear, since he kept most of his feelings very much to himself. Apparently, from remarks he made to the unidentified southern Democrat, he thought seriously of firing Sibert. Sibert was known to regard himself as a better man than Goethals and better qualified for the top job. Goethals sensed this and naturally resented it. Sibert, moreover, at least by Goethals’ lights, was a bit too openly ambitious, too political. Primarily the problem seems to have been one of clashing personalities, and though this made the tasks of both no easier, nothing of serious consequence ever came of it. In answer to the charges that he was interested only in the glory his role would bring him, Goethals told one reporter that he intended to resign before the opening of the canal because “I couldn’t stand the glamour.” But Taft would insist that he stay and in the end Goethals would publicly commend Sibert, Gorgas, all his subordinates, for their professional ability and continued loyalty to the work.

Richard Whitehead, always one of Goethals’ staunchest allies among the young engineers, as well as a lifelong friend and admirer afterward, would concede that possibly Goethals “wasn’t quite human enough for everyone.” But, he added, “None of the others had the responsibilities he did.”

The only real scars were those left by the Gaillard tragedy. In the summer of 1913, following the tremendous slides at Culebra, Gaillard appeared suddenly to have cracked under the mental and physical strain of his responsibilities. He left the Isthmus and did not return. The stories were that he had gone crazy. What actually happened was this:

He was sitting at lunch with his wife and son, looking and acting entirely as usual, when he broke off in the middle of a sentence and began to talk rapidly and incoherently of his childhood at his grandmother’s house in South Carolina. From that point on he remained in a state of terrible confusion. “Poor Gaillard . . . went completely to pieces,” Goethals wrote privately in August, his diagnosis being the same as that of everyone else. “It is a nervous breakdown. His memory seems to have gone and [Dr.] Deeks doesn’t believe he will ever be able to return. He, accompanied by Mrs. Gaillard and Pierre, sailed for the States . . . accompanied by [Dr.] Mason. . . .”

But Gaillard had not broken under stress. He was suffering from a tumor on the brain, “an infiltrating tumor in the brain,” according to the records of the case, and an operation performed at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and subsequent treatment at Johns Hopkins were to no avail. Gaillard died at Baltimore, December 5, 1913.

His work at Panama had no correlation with the tragedy. The tumor would have killed him had he been serving still at his desk in Washington. However, to his family and numbers of those who had worked with him at Panama, he had been worked to death. At the hospital in Boston, Goethals’ son Tom, a medical student at Harvard, had been invited to observe the operation on Gaillard, which was performed by the famous Harvey Cushing, and afterward he had encountered Mrs. Gaillard. “Your father has killed my husband,” she told him. Once in Washington, years later, Pierre Gaillard and Colonel (by then General) Goethals passed each other in the street. Each looked directly at the other and neither spoke.

III

In the popular picture of life in the Canal Zone as it emerged in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, that vast force of black men and women who were doing the heaviest, most difficult physical labor–some twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand human beings-could be but very faintly seen. As individuals they had no delineation whatsoever. They were there only as part of the workaday landscape. That they too were making a new life in an alien land, that they too were raising families, experiencing homesickness, fear, illness, or exhilaration in the success of the work, was almost never even inferred. In the United States the public had little if any conception of the part played in Panama by “pioneers” who were neither American nor white, or How very small numerically the white American force was by contrast. To judge by many published accounts, the whole enormous black underside of the caste system simply did not exist. Cartoons in the newspapers depicted the canal being dug by cheerful white Americans with picks and shovels and many came to Panama expecting to see just that. Harry Franck would write that he had arrived actually believing he could take up a shovel and descend into the canal with other workmen, “that I might someday solemnly raise My hand and boast, ‘I helped dig IT. ’But that was in the callow days before I . . . learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world. “

Official visitors, congressmen on so-called tours of inspection, writers gathering material for books, could not help but be amazed, even astounded, at the degree to which the entire system, not simply the construction, depended on black labor. There were not only thousands of West Indians down amid the turmoil of Culebra Cut or at the lock sites but black waiters in every hotel, black stevedores, teamsters, porters, hospital orderlies, cooks, laundresses, nursemaids, janitors, delivery boys, coachmen, icemen, garbage men, yardmen, mail clerks, police, plumbers, house painters, gravediggers. A black man walking along spraying oil on still water, a metal tank on his back, was one of the most familiar of all sights in the Canal Zone. Whenever a mosquito was seen in a white household, the Sanitary Department was notified and immediately a black man came with chloroform and a glass vial to catch the insect and take it back to a laboratory for analysis.

Yet little official notice would ever be paid to such contributions. In that official journal of Zone life, the Canal Record– a reliable, admirable publication in most other respects–the black employee went unrecognized, except in death, and then only in a line or two, his tag number invariably appended, as if he were not quite human. It would be reported that Joshua Steele, of Barbados, Number 23646, was killed in an explosion in the Cut or that Samuel Thomas, of Montserrat, Number 456185, was crushed to death in the pulleys of a mud scow. But no obituaries appeared in the paper, any more than notices of black weddings, social affairs, or the birth of a black child.

As a consequence, the popular mental picture of what life was like in the Canal Zone, and popular pride in the kind of society that had been created there, were founded on a very limited and erroneous view of reality. The measure of Utopia achieved through American know-How and largess was again relative, like the success of the medical crusade. And as a consequence of such distortion, most all of what would be written in the way of a social history of these years contains but part of the story.

In truth, the color line, of which almost nothing was said in print, cut through every facet of daily life in the Zone, and it was as clearly drawn and as closely observed as anywhere in the Deep South or the most rigid colonial enclaves in Africa. This, some observers later speculated, was the fault of the many Southerners among the skilled workers and among the military officers. Others, including the Southerners, attributed the practices to the upper-class Panamanians, who were notably color conscious, and to the long-established policies of the Panama Railroad. Harry Franck, who as census taker spent the better part of his time among the black workers, wrote acidly, “Even New Englanders grow almost human here among their broader-minded fellow-countrymen. Any northerner can say ‘nigger’ as glibly as a Carolinian, and growl if one of them steps on his shadow.”

The “gold” and “silver” system had become the established practice throughout the Zone; it applied everywhere and nobody misunderstood its purpose. Black West Indians and white North Americans not only stood in different lines when the pay train arrived, but at the post office and the commissary. There were black wards at the hospitals (on the side away from the best views and breezes) and black schools for black children. (Although the number of black children enrolled in Zone schools was twice that of the white children, there were less than half as many black teachers employed.) Black men served on the Zone police force–ninety some out of a force of three hundred were West Indians–but they drew half pay and were not eligible for promotion.

The Y.M.C.A. clubhouses, gold-roll hotels and churches, were all off limits to a West Indian, unless he or she was employed there. “As for the man whose skin is a bit dull,” recalled Harry Franck, “he might sit on the steps of an I.C.C. hotel with dollars dribbling out of his pockets until he starved to death–and he would be duly buried in the particular grave to which his color entitled him.”

Most conspicuous was the contrast between the black and white living quarters. To much of the white populace–employees, tourists–it was easier not to think about such things, easier to put the black people out of mind except for the services they performed. But in fact the living conditions for the black people were deplorable and the I.C.C. did practically nothing to set things right.

The greatest source of discontent and despair in the early years, for black and white workers alike, had not been the difficulty of the work or the unpleasant climate so much as the prospect of a life almost wholly devoid of women; and just as the I.C.C. had initiated a campaign to bring American women to Panama and thereby establish something approaching normal domestic life within the white community, so it also took steps to bring in large numbers of black women, from all over the West Indies. The first black women to arrive were from Martinique and were listed officially as laundresses; and while some may have been prostitutes, as charged, the accusation that they were all prostitutes, or that they were being shipped in at government expense solely for purposes of prostitution, was absurd and manifestly unfair.* As time went on, as the laborers sent word back to all the islands, several thousand black women came to Panama to join their husbands, a brother, a father, to find a husband, but mainly to find what the men had come for: steady work at better pay than they could ever hope to get at home. “Most of us came from our homelands in search of work and improvements,” said John Butcher, of Barbados. “We turned out to be pioneers in a foreign land.”

The I.C.C, however, made no provision for housing black women. Only a few crude quarters were provided for black workers who were married. The rest of the quarters available to black workers were the same as they had been at the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s visit–the roughest kind of barracks with canvas transport bunks packed in as closely as in steerage. Many hundreds of laborers lived in converted boxcars that were shifted back and forth along the line, according to where the men were most needed. To the single men such accommodations appealed no more than they ever had, while men with wives and families had no choice but to fend for themselves. Furthermore, Gorgas, for several years now, had officially encouraged such dispersal as a way to reduce the spread of pneumonia.

As a result, no fewer than four out of five West Indians paid rent for wretched tenements in Colón or Panama City, where one room usually served an entire family. Or, more often, they settled in the jungle, building whole villages of dynamite boxes, flattened tin cans, any odd scraps of lumber or corrugated iron that could be scavenged. They lived where they pleased, as best they could, without benefit of screen doors or janitor service, growing small gardens, always a great many chickens pecking about their small shacks, and nobody of official importance cared very much about them one way or the other.

So it was not that the I.C.C. was providing its black labor force-that is, the overwhelming majority of its workers–with substandard quarters; the I.C.C. was providing them with no quarters at all. And in almost nothing that was published for popular consumption was this point ever made explicit; or if touched on at all, it was expressed as another act of generosity on the part of the canal officials, in that they were allowing the Negroes to live the way they were happiest. Yet as one observer did write, no visitor had to search very far to see what a wholly different life these people were subjected to. “The visitor who saw first the trim and really attractive houses and bachelor quarters assigned to the gold employees could hardly avoid a certain revulsion of opinion as to the sweetness and light of Isthmian life when he wandered into the Negro quarters across the railroad in front of the Tivoli Hotel . . . or in some of the back streets of Empire or Gorgona.”

A less dramatic but more specific index to the relative inequality of the system was the difference in benefits derived by white and black workers from the $2,500,000 being spent annually on employee entertainment and recreation. To the average skilled (white) worker who was married, this one I.C.C. expenditure meant in plain monetary value about $750 a year. But to the average unskilled (black) worker who was married, it meant $50. In other words, as the system was designed, the white American, who represented about one-fifth of the population, was being treated fifteen times better in the way of free social facilities, sports, and amusements than was the black West Indian, who represented as much as three-quarters of the population.

It could be very naturally assumed that this was all the most blatant kind of racial injustice. And in a very large measure, of course, it was; but not entirely. Simple problems of supply and demand also entered in, that is, experienced technicians (men to run and repair the machines), doctors, and competent clerical people were always in short supply and had to be kept satisfied if the canal was to be built; common unskilled laborers from the impoverished islands of the Caribbean were always available in abundance and expected no better than what they got, which for the most part was better than what they had known at home. And besides, there was the political factor: the labor force was not merely black, it was foreign; these were not United States citizens and in Washington therefore they represented no constituency.

Whether a West Indian working on the Panama Canal was better or worse off than a miner in the coal fields of Kentucky or an immigrant mill hand in Homestead, Pennsylvania, during these same years is debatable. But no coal miner or mill hand of the day received free medical care. As extremely hazardous as the work in Panama was for the black laborer, the safety regulations set down by the I.C.C. were far in advance of those of American industry. No company store could ever compare to the I.C.C. commissaries. Further, it can be said with certainty that no one in Panama went hungry.

The frequent claim was that no labor army in history had ever been so well paid, well fed, well cared for; and this, on balance, was unquestionably true, despite all the obvious inequities of the system, however one-sided or hypocritical other claims made for it may have been. Certainly the fellahin who built the Suez Canal or the West Indians who came to Panama during the French era had been far worse off than any black employee of the I.C.C.

Generally speaking, the West Indian worker on the Panama Canal was soft-spoken, courteous, sober, very religious, as nearly everyone associated with the work came to appreciate. John Stevens once remarked that he never knew such law-abiding people and the records show the crime rate, as well as the incidence of alcoholism and venereal disease, among the black employees to have been abnormally low throughout the construction years.

Approximately 80 percent of the black workers were illiterate. While it was official I.C.C. policy in Washington to hire no one under age twenty, a good many black workers were also little more than children. Joseph Brewster, of Barbados, went to work as a track hand, as he later wrote, at age sixteen; H. B. Clayton, a West Indian born and raised at Gorgona, began as “a young boy,” probably fifteen; Jules LeCurrieux, from French Guiana, had just turned seventeen; Alfred Mitchel, who had come from Jamaica with his mother, began as a water boy at fourteen; Jeremiah Waisome, who also had come to Panama with his mother, was twelve or thirteen and proud of his ability to both read and write. His account of the day he first applied for work reads as follows: Unknown to my mother one morning instead of going to school, I went to Balboa to look myself a job. . . . I approach a boss . . . I said good morning boss, he retorted good morning boy. At this time he had a big wad of tobacco chewing. I ask him if he needs a water boy, he said yes, he ask what is your name, I told him. I notice that my name did not spell correctly as Jeremiah Waisome, so I said excuse me boss, my name do not spell that way. He gave me a cow look, and spit a big splash, and look back at me and said you little nigger you need a job? I said yes sir, he said you never try to dictate to a white man, take that bucket over there and bring water for those men over there.

Whatever his first job the black worker was not likely to stay with it very long, largely since the steady turnover or some chance turn in his own circumstances seemed always to lead to something more attractive elsewhere along the line. The experience of Clifford St. John was not exceptional. He began at age seventeen working with a steam-shovel gang in the Cut at Gold Hill. Injured by falling rock, he was sent to Ancon Hospital, where he was offered a job he liked better and so stayed there for two years. Next he strung telephone wire on the Panama Railroad, until stricken with typhoid fever. Then after a month of recovery in the hospital at Colón, he returned to the railroad, this time as a watchman. Presently he changed again, to work as a longshoreman at Cristobal, then again, to drive piles at Gatun Dam. When construction of the lock gates began, he was hired to bore holes for the rivets. This made seven different jobs in less than seven years.

Like others who were to reminisce in later life, recalling their “times on the canal,” black workers would talk repeatedly of incredible rains and “working all wet,” of bugs and mud and the smothering heat. (A waiter at the Tivoli Hotel recalled having to change his suit three times a day, so badly did he perspire.) They remembered the low cost of food and the trains rolling out of the Cut (“It was something marvelous to see”), a particular foreman or engineering officer, or even Goethals (“a great man . . . calm, principled, dignified”). But recurring again and again through all such accounts are memories of tremendous physical exertion and of the constant fear of being killed. “I tell you it was no bed of roses.” “It would not be surprising to say those were very rough days.” “We had to work very hard.” “I worked very hard . . . much danger . . . constant danger.” “I had a narrow escape of death.” “I had to jump for my life.” “I feel blessed to be still alive.” “You had to pray every day for God to carry you safe, and bring you back. Those days were horrible days to remember. Those were the times you go to bed at nights and the next day you may be a dead man.”

One extremely dangerous task in the last years of the work, for example, was the demolition of the giant trees that stood in what was to be the main channel through Gatun Lake. After the trees were cut down, dynamite crews–hundreds of West Indians–chopped holes in the huge trunks, sometimes as many as fifteen holes in a single tree. Two or three sticks of dynamite were put in each hole, with cap and fuse, then plastered over with mud. The blasting began once the workday had ended and the area was clear, just as dark came on.

“After the 5:15 passenger train pass for Panama, we start lighting”, remembered Edgar Simmons, another Barbadian. “Some of us has up to 65 or 72 holes to light and find our way out. So . . . you can judge the situation. . . .” Each man, torches in both hands, dashed from tree to tree, lighting fuses as fast as possible, then ran for cover. “Then it’s like Hell. Excuse me of this assertion, but it’s a fact . . . it was something to watch and see the pieces of trees flying in the air.” Afterward, the pieces were gathered up and piled and burned, a task that went on for months. Gigantic heaps of trees were doused with crude oil, then touched off–and “another Hell roar again.”

Sickness among the laborers remained a problem to the very end, the popular impression notwithstanding. Though the incidence of death from malaria and pneumonia was reduced dramatically from the level at the time of Roosevelt’s tour, both diseases persisted. Also, typhoid and tuberculosis were on the rise. The much-publicized picture of the Canal Zone as a veritable health resort was genuine so far as it applied to the white community, and medical progress over all in the Zone was far beyond anything ever before achieved in a tropical wilderness. But the hospital records show the situation to have been anything but ideal. And again, as in earlier years, it was the nonwhite, non-American labor force that suffered.

Reports for the fiscal year 1907–1908, the point at which Goethals replaced Stevens, show that 1,273 employees died of all causes. At the end of the construction era, that is, in fiscal year 1913–1914, deaths from all causes totaled 414, a phenomenal reduction. In 1907–1908 there had been 205 deaths from malaria; in the final year of construction, there were only 14. Deaths from pneumonia dropped from 466 to 50. As remarkable as any statistic was the average death rate in the final year among all employees–7.92 per thousand, which was much lower than the general death rate in the United States. Not even in Washington, Montana, or Nebraska, then the healthiest states in the country, was the death rate lower than it was in the Canal Zone.

However, in the 1907–1908 records typhoid fever was not even listed among causes of death, while in 1913–1914 typhoid killed 4 people. Tuberculosis, which in 1907–1908 took 7 lives, took 63 lives in 1913–1914. More astonishing is the fact that during the final year of construction not less than 24,723 employees were treated for illness or accidents, this is to say that nearly half of the work force had been in the hospital at one point during those twelve months. In the earlier report the number treated was 11,000. And while only 14 employees died of malaria in 1913–1914, more than 2,200 were hospitalized for the same disease.

Of the total 414 deaths for the final year, 30 were white Americans, 31 were white employees of other nationalities. All the rest, 353, were black. The death rate among all white employees from the United States was actually a mere 2.06 per thousand, an almost unbelievably low figure and deserving all the acclaim that ensued, but the death rate among black workers was 8.23. So, in fact, for all the medical progress that had been made, Panama was still four times more deadly for the black man than it was for the white.

Nor, it must also be emphasized, was the incidence of violent death any less than in years past. In 1907–1908 there were 104 such fatalities; in the final year of construction there were 138. Gorgas, in the earlier report, had called the number of violent fatalities “very excessive” and expressed particular concern that so many were caused by railroad accidents. In 1913–1914 there were 44 people killed in railroad accidents, more than in the earlier year.

Of the 138 who died by violence in the last year, 106 were listed as “colored.”

The black laborer who had not spent time in the hospital was the exception. Many were in and out three, four, five times. Nor do the records show the numbers of men who were permanently maimed. “Some of the costs of the canal are here,” wrote Harry Franck of the black hospital wards, “sturdy black men in a sort of bed-tick pajamas sitting on the verandas or in wheel chairs, some with one leg gone, some with both. One could not help but wonder how it feels to be hopelessly ruined in body early in life for helping to dig a ditch for a foreign power that, however well it may treat you materially, cares not a whistle-blast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives rusting away in the jungle.” Very few laborers had ever been inside a hospital until they came to Panama. Most of them had never in their lives been treated by a doctor, let alone a white doctor or a white nurse. So it was usually in a state of abject fear that sick or injured black workers arrived at the hospital the first time, fear, as much as anything, of what might befall them next, inside. To judge by available first-person accounts nothing in their experience made quite so lasting an impression.

James A. Williams, a Jamaican, was taken ill in 1910, when still in his teens. He was then working in a kitchen at one of the labor camps. His own account, written fifty years later, is among the most vivid in the canal archives. It is given here just as he wrote it:

One morning the Doctor making his usual visit to the kitchen some one reported to him that I am having fever. The Doctor immediately advanced to me and felt my pulse, I could remember he said to me “you are going to be sick boy,” go right over to the “Sick Camp” and tell the Clerk to write you up to the Hospital, right away. He further asked me, Are you a God fearing man? I replied yes. He said to me you are going to die. It was near time for the midday train and the Doctor ran over to the Sick Camp and assisted to write up the necessary papers and I was placed on the train to the Ancon hospital. Dr. Beard was the name of the Doctor in that section.

I was placed on a bed on the train to the hospital all the way and when the train arrived in the Panama Station, there were many horse drawn ambulances awaiting to receive the patients to the hospital. We then arrived in the big Ward 30 to be lined up and a very pleasant American nurse was right on the job and started to feel the pulses and assigned each patient to the different bed. As I noticed when she came to me and took my hand, she appeared to be frightened and she called the Orderly and said to him do not put this patient under the shower, give him a bed bath. I wondered to myself as to what is this bed bath. Because I had never been in an Hospital before. However, I was escorted to the Ward by the Orderly Mr. St. Hill and he turned me over to Mr. Norman Piercy right from My home in Partland, Jamaica, W.I. but we at that time did not recognize each other. St. Hill said to Piercy, Give this patient a bed bath. While I kept wondering in my mind what do they mean by this bedbath when I saw this Mr. Piercy placed a heavy waterproof Blanket in the bed and two buckets full of heavy crushed ice and several buckets of water and not even the courtesy as to consult me but stripped me naked and threw me in that cold deadly water. To be truthful, I thought I could not any longer live. However, he gave me a thorough bathing and took me out and dried me with a towel and placed me in a white clean bed. I felt cool for a moment but still fretting over the Iced bath as I had never heard or seen anything of that kind before. . ..

The next shock I had while I felt a little thirsty and when I saw some one coming with a wine glass of water I felt glad as I thought it was some cool water which I felt so much the need and the kindly Nurse handed it to me and said drink it. So thirsty for a drink of water, I hurried and as it reached my lips it was down my stomach. I tell you, I had never before tasted anything so terribly bitter. I always hearing about Quinine but I thought it was something tasty and nice. And every two hours I was dosed with that bitter liquid night and day and instead of getting rid of the fever it was growing worse.

Then the next thing that happened. I was placed in front of the Nurse’s desk and a basin with clean water was placed on the stand beside me, I then thought it was water placed there for me to drink. As I felt thirsty at the time I used My hand and took three hand full three times and swallow and when I heard the Nurse called to me and asked what, that you do drink it? I could not answer her but I saw when she picked up the Telephone I really did not know what happened until I discovered about five Doctors over me and find myself throwing up. And a few hours after I was settled I noticed they drew some blood from my arm. I then noticed from that time there no more of that bitter liquid. The hole night I was not bothered with that stuff.

The next morning two men came with a Stretcher and lifted me from the bed and placed me on the Stretcher and carried me off out of the Ward. I thought they were going to bury me as I was actually given over as dead. However, I was taken to Ward 24 . . . that was the place where typhoid patients were being treated. They found out that the fever I had was typhoid and not malaria.

What I can truthfull say Those American Nurses My own dear mother could not be more kind and tender to me. They did everything lies humanly even to let me take a little nourishment so to keep life in my body. I should right here tell of the incident with the water I drank from the basin on the stand beside my bed. It was poisoned water to kill flies that buzzed around when I thought it was placed there for me to drink as I had never before entered a hospital.

I could never, never in life forget the tender kindness those American Nurses administered to me especially in that Ward 24. I had no desire for nourishment of any kind, my life was ebbing out. But how they plead with me to take some nourishment. Not only that, but they closely watched the colored Orderlies how they handle the patients.

One night, the Nurse on duty came to me, she said to me now, bed 6, if you don’t take some nourishment you would never get well and the tone she spoke to me with her hand on my head I forced to swallow a little milk and from that I continued to take little by little and a few days past and she came on duty the night and took my temperature she said to me you are getting better “bed 6.” I began to feel a desire for the milk now, very fast. Then they started to give eggnog twice a day also real American Whiskey every day. I was not allowed to raise my head from the pillow even though I am feeling well. I began to feel real hungry but only liquid diet was give me for over three weeks after the fever left me. One mid day at breakfast I was given a toasted Potato. Oh. how I enjoyed it. Even that did not satisfied my starving apetite. I was therefore convinced by the Nurses and Doctors such starvation was for my good. One morning in the month of May Dr. Connor the Night Doctor came in, that Ward were then run by himself and Dr. Bates. Dr. Connor came to my bed side with the Nurse and took up my Chart, asked me how you feeling James? I replied, ok. doctor. He asked me you hungry? I replied yes doctor. He turned and ordered her to give me light diet and pair of Pajamas.

The morning in question when I was given the Pajamas and was told to get out of bed and tried to walk, every step that tried I had to be supported. That morning I was given a bowl of porridge, two eggs, nice bread and butter, a lovely slice of melon. But they never ceased to give the Whiskey and Eggnog during the days, and a week later I was given “Full Diet.” I was then feeling happy and good as when at meal time when we are told that what ever we like having that’s no on the table just call.

I was discharged in May and the treatment had me so fat and robus that when I went home to San Pablo Aunt surprise to see how good I was looking.

I took sick in April and was in the Hospital until May 1910.*

Had the black labor force been housed in screened quarters comparable to those provided the white employees, in areas where the sanitary officers exercised control, malaria might possibly have been eradicated, as had yellow fever. As it was, the total loss from disease in the ten years it took to build the canal was less than five thousand people. But Gorgas later declared that if conditions had remained as they had been during the French era, the death toll would have been upward of seventy-eight thousand (figured on a death rate of Two hundred out of every one thousand employees). That a man such as James Williams, or the many thousands of others who took sick, survived at all was regarded, by black laborers as much as by anyone, as a miracle of medical progress.

In his ten days of dining at the Tivoli Hotel, Charles Francis Adams had seen exactly three houseflies; it was indeed a wondrous age. The correspondent for The Outlook, after a stiff climb in the hills behind Paraíso, was shown a galvanized ash can full of oil placed On a plank over a little stream, so that oil dripped slowly, constantly, onto the water as it flowed toward the canal line. So simple a solution to so large a problem, he wrote, was not the least of the “marvels” of Panama.

There seemed to be but one aspect of progress on the Isthmus over which one might reasonably express some skepticism or concern. Relations between the canal builders and the local populace, uneasy from the beginning, had deteriorated markedly. “In temperament and tradition we are miles away from the Panamanians,” noted The Outlook correspondent. “. . . The age-old hostility to the ‘Gringo’ is deep-rooted. Differences in language, customs and religious practices keep the breach wide.”

To the average American, Panama was a land of dark, ignorant, undersized people who very obviously disliked him. (“It is hard to like people who have evidently made up their mind to dislike you.”) It was said that the whole country had a “chronic case of sulks.” The Panamanian–any Panamanian, regardless of position or social status–was a “Spiggotty” or “Spig,” terms supposedly derived in earlier years from the erroneous claim of Panama City hackmen that they could “speaks-da-English.”

It was thought that the Panamanian showed too little gratitude for all that was being done for him. When Robert Wood declared in a speech years afterward that the United States had created all the wealth in Panama, he was expressing the profound conviction of virtually every American who worked on the canal.

The Panamanian, not surprisingly, resented the Gringo’s power, his deprecation of the Panamanian way of life. The Americans were loud, arrogant, impolite, they drank too much. The canal that was to have brought such untold prosperity to everyone appeared to be doing no such thing. Commissaries within the Zone had deprived local merchants of a long-anticipated bonanza; and the Panamanian populace, unable to shop there themselves, resented that goods in such abundance and at such very low prices should be the exclusive privilege of the well-paid canal workers. Even Gorgas’ efforts were a source of resentment.

They hate us because we cleaned their towns and are keeping them clean [one writer surmised], not perhaps because they actually prefer the old filth and fatalities, but because their correction implies that they were not altogether perfect before we came. For the strongest quality of the Panamanian is his pride, and it is precisely that sentiment which we North Americans have either wantonly or necessarily outraged.

Seeing the poverty of those native Panamanians who lived in the old Chagres villages within the Zone, many Americans knew the feelings expressed by Rose van Hardeveld:

The poor we had literally all around us. I think each one of us found our wash women or fruit vendors always some one or two that were more wretchedly miserable than the others, and that seemed to cry personally for help, to us who had so much where they had nothing.

Much neglect and needless cruelty came to our notice every day. It seemed not so much to proceed from wishing to be cruel or neglectful as from the fact that they knew nothing better. . ..

All of our women felt deeply sorry for the sad-eyed children passing by every day, and yet there was little that we could do that would be of any lasting benefit.

If we gave them clothing it would only tend to make them dissatisfied with what they had, and money would usually go for rum or lottery tickets. We came to feel that charity was really not much good as just charity.

One American who had tried very hard to do something had been quickly removed. Rufus Lane, a former seaman from Massachusetts, had arrived looking for a position during the Stevens regime. He had no technical skills, but he had a letter of introduction from Henry Cabot Lodge and he spoke fluent Spanish, so it was decided to put him in charge of “Canal Zone municipalities in the jungle,” a wholly meaningless position but one that he took quite seriously. The “jungle Panamanians”–Indians, West Indians–soon began doing as he instructed. “They cleared the jungle around their huts,” the diplomat William Sands reported. “They joined their settlements by hard little foottrails . . . they learned how to dispose of disease-fostering refuse and how to set up simple first aid and sanitation centers. They held town meetings on the primitive New England plan . . . Lane’s job seemed to me one of the finest things Americans were doing in Panama.” But Lane and his work were abolished by a visiting congressional committee, one member of which told Sands, “These people are of no more use than mosquitoes and buzzards; they ought all to be exterminated together.”

With the advance of the waters of Gatun Lake, as thousands of villagers were dispossessed of their land and homes and were moved to new sites on higher ground, very few of them felt that they were given fair compensation and bitterly resented the arbitrary fashion in which their new locations were decided for them. “The Americans took awful advantage of the poor people, because they had no one to speak for them,” one woman would remark sadly, more than sixty years later, remembering the home her family had been forced to abandon.

Of the officers in charge of the work, only Gorgas seemed to know how not to alienate the Panamanians. Few officials spoke Spanish or made an effort to learn. Goethals spoke none at all. (“Oh, I suppose he knew how to say no,” recalled one American disapprovingly.) During his first year on the job, Goethals had written to one of his sons that a state dinner given by President and Señora Amador was “the most trying function that I have had anything to do with.” He had been placed between Señora Amador and Señora Obaldía, neither of whom spoke English.

Amador had died in 1909, not long after being succeeded in office by Jose de Obaldía. What Goethals thought of Obaldía is not known, but he had long before depicted Amador as “no great shakes,” and when Obaldía, after taking office, privately revealed some inside facts about the Amador regime, it was as if all the worst American beliefs regarding the high tone of Panamanian politics and politicians had been confirmed. What truth there was to the information is impossible to know; more important was the fact that the American officials believed every word of it.

The charge was that $200,000 to $300,000 had disappeared from the Panamanian treasury, the discovery having been made only when Obaldía took office. Goethals appears to have learned of it first on October 8, 1908, in a confidential letter from Admiral Rousseau written when Goethals was away from the Isthmus on official business. “It is said Amador gets half the loot himself,” Rousseau reported. “Not only that Amador charged up to the Panamanian Government all sorts of private entertainment, presents, etc. given President and Mrs. Roosevelt, Secretary Taft, Secretary and Mrs. Root, and also Miss Roosevelt’s wedding present. The pieces charged up are 5 to 10 times actual expenditures. Obaldía and his party are ‘mad’ all the way through and threaten to publish far and wide just what Amador has done.” But as Rousseau further explained it had been agreed to keep the story “bottled up,” out of respect to Roosevelt and his family.

Nor was any official alarm expressed over the larger animosities between the two peoples. If such feelings prevailed, the consensus seemed to be, they had always prevailed, from the time the first wave of gold prospectors came ashore in 1849. And doubtless there was no quick or ready solution.

To the average American at work on the canal, the aggrieved pride or “smoldering wrath” of the Panamanian (to use the words of one reporter) was of only marginal concern. There would be time enough later to resolve such difficulties. For now the work was going too well, morale was too high, the end was much too plainly in view to think much about anything else.

* The diplomat William Sands, who spent much of his time settling American-Panamanian differences, wrote that the Panamanian police had “various . . . disconcerting habits, such as carving an American or hammering him unconscious before they arrested him.” When fights broke out in a Coco Grove brothel on a night in July 1912, the Panamanian police moved in, shot and killed three unarmed Marines, then rounded up a number of others, who were put in jail, to be beaten and tortured. That Goethals and the American minister refused to order American troops into the city was, according to one journalist present, the cause of “almost universal regret within the American Zone.”

* The trip to Germany was to visit the new locks on the Kiel Canal. He went in the spring of 1912 and at one point was entertained by the Kaiser, whom he described as “Roosevelt toned down.”

* Afterward James Williams worked in one of the machine shops at Gorgona, then as a telephone operator on the railroad. At the time the canal was finished he was a sales clerk at the Corozal commissary. He retired from canal service in 1949.

*$$$ This account is Mrs. Gaillard’s own, as related by her son to the author. Marie Gorgas, who considered the scene the key to Goethals’ character and who, of course, was not present, gave a rather more colorful version:

One beautiful moonlight night Goethals was walking on a little hill, overlooking the cut, with one of the best-known ladies of the Zone. His companion was much affected by the splendor of the tropical scene.

“Yes, it’s a beautiful spot,” the Colonel replied to her exclamations, “and I love it! But I love it for other reasons than its beauty or the things I get from it. Above all, I love it for the power.”

He was silent for a moment and then went on:

“I remember once visiting a monastery of Jesuit Fathers. I saw the wretched cells they lived in, the little rude cots they slept in, the rough tables at which they had their meals. And then I remembered the vast power that the men who lived like that had once exercised. It was worth living simply in order to have that.”

In his enthusiasm he raised his hand.

“That’s the only thing in life worth having. Wealth–salaries–these are nothing. It’s power, power, power!” incidence of malaria continued to decline during this same trial period, Goethals felt that he had proved his case and refused to turn the work back to Gorgas.

* The issue had caused a brief sensation at home with the appearance of an article in The Independent magazine (March 22, 1906) titled “Our Mismanagement at Panama.” The author was Poultney Bigelow, son of John Bigelow, who had spent a few days in Colón and who wrote, “Prostitutes are not needed on the Isthmus– and if they were there is no call to send for them at the expense of the taxpayer.” The charge was shown to be based wholly on hearsay, as was virtually all of the article. But to quell the outcry numbers of black women were asked to swear before a duly appointed I.C.C. official that they were leading a moral life and that they were in Panama of their own free choice; and these affidavits were sent on to the appropriate congressional committee.

21
Triumph

Everything is on a colossal scale.

–Scientific American

March 18, 1911

I

“It is hard for me to transmit to you the feeling we all possessed toward the work,” Robert Wood said. “Rarely can man see his own work, but we saw it physically . . . year by year . . .”

They saw it in the deepening of Culebra Cut; in the rise of docks and warehouses; in the new railroad; in the fortifications being built at Toro Point and Margarita Island in Limon Bay and on the islands of Perico, Flamenco, and Naos in the Bay of Panama. (The giant 16-inch guns being installed were the largest, heaviest weapons in the possession of the United States and had a range of twenty miles.) They saw it in the hydroelectric plant built adjacent to the spillway of Gatun Dam, and in the dam itself, which in its final stage looked as if it had been there always, more like a huge glacial moraine than anything else. It was all measurable progress.

And there was the lake. It had begun its rise with the closing of the West Diversion channel in 1910, when the dam was still incomplete. In the time since, as the water inched steadily up the long, sloped inner face of the dam, as the Chagres gathered and spread inland mile by mile, the realization of what a very different kind of canal it was to be, the conception of a long arm of fresh water suspended in the jungle, began to take hold and with good effect.

Popular interest at home mounted proportionately, the nearer the dream seemed to fulfillment. In the last years of construction, hundreds of articles appeared in magazines and Sunday supplements under such titles as “The Spirit of the Big Job” or “Realizing the Dream of Panama,” “Great Work Nobly Done,” “The Greatest Engineering Work of All Time,” “Our Canal.” In 1913, in anticipation of the projected grand opening, close to a dozen different books were published about Panama and the canal.

But it was also in the closing years of the task that the great locks took form for all to see and they were the most interesting and important construction feats of the entire effort. They were the structural triumphs at Panama. In their overall dimensions, mass, weight, in the mechanisms and ingenious control apparatus incorporated in their design, they surpassed any similar structures in the world. They were, as was often said, the mighty portals of the Panama Gateway. Yet they were something much more than monumental; they did not, like a bridge or a cathedral, simply stand there; they worked. They were made of concrete and they were made of literally thousands of moving parts. Large essential elements were not built, but were manufactured, made in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Schenectady, and other cities. In a very real sense they were colossal machines, the largest yet conceived, and in their final, finished form they would function quite as smoothly as a Swiss watch. They were truly one of the engineering triumphs of all time, but for reasons most people failed to comprehend.

To build all the locks took four years, from the time the first concrete was laid in the floor at Gatun, August 24, 1909. Most impressive of all was their size, and especially if seen during the last stages of construction before the water was turned in. Visitors who stood on the dry floor of a single lock chamber when all of it was still open to the light felt as though they had suddenly lost their sense of scale. Each individual chamber was a tremendous concrete basin closed at both ends with steel gates. The walls, one thousand feet long, rose to eighty-one feet, or higher than a six-story building. The impression was of looking down a broad, level street nearly five blocks long with a solid wall of six-story buildings on either side; only here there were no windows or doorways, nothing to give human scale. The gates at the ends, standing partly open to the sky, were like something in a dream.

Greatest of the “ocean leviathans” in the year 1913, a ship larger than the Titanic had been, was the proud new 52,000-ton Imperator, of the Hamburg-American Line. The Imperator accommodated 5,500 people (for whom there were no less than eighty-three lifeboats); she had a “Pompeian Bath,” a “social hall” that could accommodate seven hundred passengers traveling first class; and the Imperator could have been contained within a lock chamber with ample room to spare (six feet on each side, nearly sixty feet at either end). A single lock if stood on end would have been the tallest structure in the world, taller even than the Eiffel Tower.*

The artist Joseph Pennell, having climbed down to the floor of an empty lock chamber at Pedro Miguel, found the shapes of gates and walls towering above him so “stupendous” that he was almost unable to draw. Walter Bernard, editor of Scientific American, returned from a visit to the Isthmus to write an article on “The Mammoth Locks” in which he conceded that it is impossible even to consider the subject “without drifting into the superlative mood.” Another visitor would recall “the feeling that follows a service in a great cathedral.”

To build the Great Pyramid or the Wall of China or the cathedrals of France, blocks of stone were set one on top of the other in the ageold fashion. But the walls of the Panama locks were poured from overhead, bucket by bucket, into gigantic forms. And within those forms there had to be still other forms to create the different culverts and tunnels, the special chambers and passageways, required inside the walls. Everything had to be created first in the negative, in order to achieve the positive structure wanted.

Moreover, the creation of the building material itself was a “science” requiring specific, controlled measurements and a streamlined system of delivery from mixing plant to construction site. Timing was vital.

Concrete–a combination of sand, gravel, and portland cement (itself a mixture of limestone and clay)–had been known since the time of the Romans, but was used very little as a building material until the late nineteenth century and then mainly for subbasements and floors. Dry docks and breakwaters were built of reinforced (or ferro) concrete–concrete in which metal rods are added–and in the early 1900’s several major buildings were built of the same material in Europe and the United States, as well as silos, some small bridges, and a Montgomery Ward warehouse in Chicago. George Morison drew up plans for his concrete bridge over Rock Creek Park in Washington, and by 1912 a tremendous concrete railroad bridge, the Tunkhannock Viaduct, was under way near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Nothing even approaching the size of the Panama locks had yet been attempted, however, and not until the building of Boulder Dam in the 1930’s would any concrete structure equal their total volume. The largest amount of concrete ever poured in a day anywhere else was about 1,700 cubic yards. At Gatun alone the daily average was nearly double that.

“No structure in the world contains as large an amount of material,” William Sibert wrote proudly of the great flight of locks at Gatun. With their approach walls, they measured nearly a mile from end to end. The volume of concrete poured was more than 2,000,000 cubic yards–enough, somebody figured, to build a solid wall 8 feet thick, 12 feet high, and 133 miles long. Taken together, the locks at the other end of the canal, at Pedro Miguel and Miraflores, were larger still, with a volume of some 2,400,000 cubic yards.

The lock chambers all had the same dimensions (110 by 1,000 feet) and they were built in pairs, two chambers running side by side in order to accommodate two lanes of traffic. The single flight at Gatun consisted of three such pairs. There was one pair at Pedro Miguel and two at Miraflores, making six pairs (twelve chambers) in all.

The chambers in each pair shared a center wall that was sixty feet wide from bottom to top. The width of the side walls was forty-five to fifty feet at the floor level, but on the outside they were constructed as a series of steps, each step six feet high, starting from a point twenty-four feet from the base level. So at the top, the side walls were only eight feet wide.

The floors of the chambers were solid concrete, anywhere from thirteen to twenty feet thick.

Once completed, the stepped backs of the side walls would be filled in, covered entirely with dirt and rock. And the locks, once they were in use, would never be less than half full of water. So their size would appear nowhere near so overwhelming.

Seen during construction they were a fantasy of huge, raw-looking concrete monoliths, of forms of sheet steel that looked like colossal, blank theatrical flats, of monstrous cranes and soaring cableways– aerial bucket brigades, as somebody said–and of little automatic railroads shunting here and there. The swarms of workers at the lock sites appeared lost beside the rising shapes and the incredible array of mechanical contrivances. The noise was shattering.

At Gatun big square buckets of concrete, nearly six tons to a bucket, were swung through the air high above the locks, dropped to position, and dumped, all by means of a spectacular cableway. Eighty-five-foot steel towers stood on either side of the locks (four on each side) and the cables stretched across a span of some eight hundred feet. The towers were on tracks, so they could be moved forward as the work progressed.

Sand and gravel were brought up the old French canal in barges and were stockpiled near a mixing plant. Then sand, gravel, and portland cement were fed into the plant (a battery of eight concrete mixers) By a little automatic railroad, the cars running in and out on a circular track. Another small railroad carried the buckets of wet concrete from plant to cableway, Two buckets on Two flatcars pushed by one of the French locomotives. At the cableway Two empty buckets would descend from overhead, the Two full buckets would be snatched up, delivered through the air at a speed of about twenty miles per hour, then returned to repeat the cycle.

The advantage of such an overhead delivery system was that the work area could be kept free of everything except the essential forms Within which the concrete was poured. As fast as a bucketload was deposited, men knee-deep in wet concrete would spread it out.

All the locks were constructed in thirty-six-foot sections, each a single monolith that took about a week to build to its full height. The big steel forms, also on tracks, would then be moved ahead to the next position.

At Pedro Miguel and Miraflores, where the terrain was not so open or spacious as at Gatun, division head Williamson and his civilian engineers decided to use cantilever cranes rather than cableways, cranes so enormous in size that they could be seen rising above the jungle from miles distant. Some of these were in the shape of a gigantic T. Others looked like Two gigantic T’s joined together and were known as “chamber cranes,” because they stood within the lock chambers, their long cantilever arms reaching out over the center and side walls. All the cranes moved on tracks and were self-propelling.

The T-shaped variety were the “mixing cranes.” One arm of the T hoisted sand and gravel and cement from stockpiles to mixing plants located in the base of the T. The other arm transferred buckets of fresh concrete to the chamber cranes that in turn swung the buckets to the desired position. The complete operation was about as mechanized as it could possibly have been and to the average onlooker a very weird, unearthly sight to behold. The operator of a chamber crane, the man who guided the concrete to its destination, sat alone in a tiny box hanging from the delivery arm of the crane, nearly a hundred feet off the ground.

Five million sacks and barrels of cement were shipped to Panama to build the locks, dams, and spillways, all of it from New York on the Ancon and the Cristobal, and an idea of what such quantities amounted to is imparted by a single budgetary statistic: an estimated $50,000 was saved in recovered cement after Goethals issued a directive requiring the men to shake each sack after it was emptied.

Gravel and sand for those structures closest to the Atlantic– Gatun Locks, the Gatun spillway–came by water from points twenty to forty miles east of Colón, the gravel from Porto Bello, where a big crushing plant was built, the sand from Nombre de Dios.* On the Pacific side, the rock (basalt, or traprock) was quarried and crushed right at Ancon Hill, while the sand came from Chamé Point, in the Bay of Panama.

By latter-day standards the engineers were novices in the use of concrete. Numerous discoveries had still to be made about the critical water-cement ratio in the “mix design” and the susceptibility of the material to environmental attack. To build anything so large as the concrete locks at Panama was an unprecedented challenge, but what was built had also to hold up in a climate wherein almost everything, concrete included, could go to pieces rapidly. Yet, however comparatively crude the level of theoretical technology may have been regarding the material, the results were extraordinary. After sixty years of service the concrete of the locks and spillways would be in near-perfect condition, which to present-day engineers is among the most exceptional aspects of the entire canal.

The design and engineering of the locks, the results of years of advance planning, can be attributed largely to three men: Lieutenant Colonel Hodges and two exceptionally able civilians, Edward Schildhauer and Henry Goldmark. Schildhauer, slight of build, clean-shaven, very businesslike, was an electrical engineer and still in his thirties. Goldmark, who with his starched collars and thin, well-brushed hair looked like a corporation lawyer, had responsibility for designing the lock gates.

The fundamental element to be reckoned with and utilized in the locks– the vital factor in the whole plan and all its structural, mechanical, and electrical components–was water. Water would lift and lower the ships. The buoyancy of water would make the tremendous lock gates, gates Two to three times heavier than any ever built before, virtually weightless. The power of falling water at the Gatun spillway would generate the electrical current to run all the motors to operate the system, as well as the towing locomotives or “electric mules.” The canal, in other words, would supply its own energy needs.

No force would be required to raise or lower the level of water in the locks (and thus to raise or lower a ship in transit) other than the force of gravity. The water would simply flow into the locks from above–from Gatun Lake or Miraflores Lake–or flow out into the sealevel channels. The water would be admitted or released Through giant tunnels, or culverts, running lengthwise within the center and side walls of the locks, culverts eighteen feet in diameter, as large nearly as the Pennsylvania Railroad tubes under the Hudson River. At right angles to these main culverts, built into the floor of each lock chamber, were smaller cross culverts, fourteen to a chamber, these about large enough to admit a two-horse wagon. Every cross culvert had five well like openings into the floor, which meant there were all together seventy such holes in each chamber, and it was from these that the water would surge or drain, depending on which valves were opened or shut.

The valves in the large culverts were immense sliding steel gates that moved On roller bearings up and down in frames in the manner of a window. There were Two gates to each valve and they weighed ten tons apiece. To fill a lock, the valves at the lower end of the chamber would be closed, those at the upper end opened. The water would pour from the lake through the large culverts into the cross culverts and up through the holes in the chamber floor. To release the water from the lock, the valves at the upper end would be shut, those at the lower end opened.

The reason for having as many as seventy wellholes in the chamber floor was to distribute the turbulence of the incoming water evenly over the full area and thereby subject chamber and ships to a minimum of disturbance. It was the engineers’ intention to be able to raise or lower a ship in a chamber in about fifteen minutes. Of all the moving parts in the system, the largest and most conspicuous were, of course, the lock gates, or “miter gates,” as they were known, which swung open like double doors and closed in the form of a flattened V. The leaves of the gates weighed many hundreds of tons apiece and were the largest ever erected. Their construction was begun at Gatun in May 1911. As structures they were relatively simple and posed no special challenge, except, again, for their magnitude. A skin of plate steel was riveted to a grid of steel girders in exactly the manner of a steel ship’s hull–or of a modern airplane wing, which they much resembled in vastly enlarged form. And being both hollow and watertight, they would actually float, once there was water in the locks, and thus the working load on their hinges would be comparatively little.

The leaves were all a standard sixty-five feet wide and seven feet thick. They varied in height, however, from forty-seven to eighty-two feet, depending on their position. The highest and heaviest (745 tons) were those of the lower locks at Miraflores, because of the extreme variation in the Pacific tides.

During construction, inspectors went down inside the gates through a system of manholes to check every rivet, an extremely uncomfortable task with the sun beating on the outer steel shell. All imperfect rivets were cut out and replaced and the watertightness of the shell was tested by filling the gate leaves with water.

As a safety precaution there were also to be duplicate gates throughout. One set of double doors was backed by another, in the event that the first set failed to function properly or was rammed by a ship. And since each lock chamber (except the lower locks at Miraflores) had its own set of intermediate gates, the complete system consisted of 46 gates (92 leaves), the total tonnage of which (sixty thousand tons) was almost half again greater than that of a ship such as the Titanic.

The purpose of the intermediate gates was to conserve water. While the locks were built to accommodate ships as large as the Titanic or the Imperator, or larger, each lock chamber could be reduced in size, by closing the intermediate gates, if the ship in transit was not one of the giants and could be accommodated by a chamber of six hundred feet or less. And of all the oceangoing ships in the world at that time, approximately 95 percent were less than six hundred feet long.

To lift a great merchant liner, or any ship of more than six hundred feet, to the level of Gatun Lake would require an expenditure from the lake of 26,000,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of a day’s water supply for a major city. For a complete lockage through the canal, for one ocean-to-ocean transit, the expenditure would be double that amount, all of it fresh water and all washed out to sea.

The technical challenge of the lock gates was in their mechanical engineering, in the design and manufacture of all the devices needed to make them open, close, shut, and lock. So basic an “accessory” item as a hinge assembly called for specifications unlike any previously prepared for a manufacturer. Flawless, precision hardware had to be cast of special steels in pieces that weighed several thousand pounds and that could withstand a strain of several million pounds. The yoke assembly used to fasten the tops of the gates to the lock walls weighed seven tons and looked not unlike the metal creations of some latter-day sculptors.

The gates were opened and closed by a simple, very powerful mechanism devised by Edward Schildhauer. The leaves of the gates were connected by steel arms, or struts, to enormous horizontal “bull wheels” concealed within the lock walls. These wheels, nearly twenty feet in diameter, were each geared to a big electric motor; and wheel and strut worked like the driving wheel and connecting rod on a locomotive, only here the action was reversed since the power was being delivered from the wheel. To open or close a gate, the wheel revolved about 200 degrees.

In the design of such a fundamental piece of apparatus the young engineer had had no established model to go by. Available data “were at variance,” as he wrote, and he had to reckon with such forces as mechanical friction, acceleration, wind resistance, and the effect of different water levels on the two sides of a gate. The extreme test would be the opening and closing of the heaviest gates in a dry chamber. But in recalling the first of such “dry lock” tests, Bishop wrote that the gates swung to and fro “as easily and steadily as one would open an ordinary door.”

But as resourceful as Schildhauer had been in this and other designs, as notably as he and Goldmark succeeded in everything they undertook, the end results were, above all, a stunning demonstration of how very far industrial technology had advanced. Among the more fascinating facts about the Panama Canal, for example, is that all hardware for the lock gates–the lifting mechanisms for the stem valves, the special bearings, gears, and struts for the gate machines, all ninety-two bull wheels–was made by a single manufacturer in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1878, only thirty-five years before, the Quaker ironmaster Daniel J. Morrell had marveled at certain relatively simple steel castings displayed by the French at their Universal Exposition in Paris. Most of what he had seen was quite beyond the most advanced work at Pittsburgh then or at his own mills in Johnstown. now a comparatively small organization, the Wheeling Mold and Foundry Company, in a comparatively small industrial center, could produce castings in sizes and quantities unimagined in 1878, and of alloy steels formerly used in small quantities only for fine tools and cutlery. Carbon steel, nickel steel, vanadium steel, steels of exceptional strength and high resistance to corrosion, were being developed for naval armament before the turn of the century, but it was the advent of the automobile that spurred their real production. Vanadium steel, for instance, had been adopted by the Ford Motor Company for use in its engines in 1904, and it was of vanadium steel that the most important casting in the lock gates was made, the huge plate upon which the base of each gate leaf turned, a plate that had not only to bear the weight of the gate, but withstand constant immersion in water.

The most obvious and frequently emphasized differences between the French and American efforts at Panama, between failure and success at Panama, were in the application of modern medical science, the methods of financing, and the size of the excavation equipment used. But it should also be understood that the canal that was built was very different from what could have been built by anyone thirty years earlier. It was not only a much larger canal than it would have been (the locks were nearly twice as large as those designed by Eiffel, which measured 59 by 590 feet); it was constructed differently and of different materials. And its means of operation and control were altogether different. “Strongly as the Panama Canal appeals to the imagination as the carrying out of an ideal,” wrote one astute editor, “it is above all things a practical, mechanical, and industrial achievement.”

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the city of Pittsburgh, where some fifty different mills, foundries, machine shops, and specialty fabricators were involved in the canal, making rivets, bolts, nuts (in the millions), steel girders, steel plates, steel forms for the lock walls, special collapsible steel tubes by which the main culverts were formed, steel roller bearings (18,794 steel roller bearings) for the stem valves and spillway gates. The building of the gates themselves had been entrusted to McClintic-Marshall, a Pittsburgh contracting firm that specialized in heavy steel bridge construction.

The giant cranes in use on the Pacific locks traced their structural lineage to the Eiffel Tower. The steel rope–wire cable–used in the cableways and on the cranes, used in fact on every steam shovel and dipper dredge, had its origins in the Brooklyn Bridge, and indeed most of the cable had been manufactured by John A. Roebling Sons.

Cranes, cableways, rock crushers, cement mixers, all ran by electricity. The canal’s own motive power, its entire nervous system, was electrical, and an all-electric canal was something quite new under the sun and something that would have been altogether impossible even ten years earlier.

Operation of the locks would depend on no less than 1,500 electric motors. All controls were electrical. The most important part played by any one manufacturer was that of the General Electric Company, which produced approximately half the electrical apparatus needed during construction and virtually all the motors, relays, switches, wiring, and generating equipment that was installed permanently, in addition to the towing locomotives and all the lighting.

Besides the ninety-two motors used to swing the lock gates, there were forty-six small motors to run a miter forcing “mechanisms that locked the gate leaves once they were in the closed position. On top of every gate was a footwalk with a handrail, so attendants could go back and forth from one side of the lock to the other whenever the gates were closed. With the gates open, the handrail would be in the way, so it too was raised or lowered by an electric motor.

There were more than a hundred 40-horsepower motors to operate the big stem valves in the main culverts, while the largest motors installed, motors of 70 and 150 horsepower, similar to those being developed for heavy duty in steel mills, were needed for Two “extraordinary precautions” taken to safeguard the lock gates from damage.

As a ship approached the entrance to the locks, its path would be blocked by a tremendous iron “fender” chain stretched between the walls. The chain would be lowered (into a special groove in the channel floor) only if all was proceeding properly–that is, if the ship was in proper position and in control of the towing locomotives. If the ship was out of control and struck the chain, then the chain would be payed out slowly by an automatic release until the ship was brought to a stop, short of the lock gates. (A 10,000-ton ship moving at five knots could be checked Within seventy feet.) The length of the chain was more than four hundred feet and its ends were attached to big hydraulic pistons housed in the lock walls. There were pumps to supply water for the pistons and more electric motors to run the pumps.

If by some very remote chance a ship were to smash Through the fender chain, the safety gates would still stand in the path, the apex of their leaves pointed toward the ship. To break through the safety gates would take a colossal force, and it was almost inconceivable that the forward motion of any ship could be that great, having just encountered the fender chain. But in the event that this too occurred, there was still one further safeguard.

The most serious threat to the locks would be from a ship out of control as it approached the upper gates, a ship, that is, about to go down through the locks and out of the canal. For if the upper gates were destroyed, then the lake would come plunging through the locks.

So on the side walls at the entrance of each upper lock, between the fender chain and the guard gates, stood a big steel apparatus that looked like a cantilever railroad bridge. This was the emergency dam. It was mounted on a pivot and in a crisis it could be swung–turned electrically–across the lock entrance in about two minutes’ time. From its underside a series of wicket girders would descend, their ends dropping into iron pockets in the concrete channel floor. The girders would form runways down which huge steel plates would be dropped, one after another, until the channel was sealed off. It was an ungainly contraption, but it worked most effectively.

The likelihood of a ship even hitting the chain was extremely small. The chance of a ship hitting the chain and breaking it was reckoned at perhaps one in ten thousand.*

Under normal procedure a ship would be controlled by the towing locomotives all the way through the locks, with four locomotives to the average-sized ship, two forward pulling, two aft holding the ship steady. At no time in the locks would a ship move under its own power.

Like nearly every detail of the locks, the towing locomotives were the first of a kind. Presently they would become one of the most familiar features of the canal. They were designed by Schildhauer to work back and forth on tracks built into the top of the lock walls and to move a ship from point to point at about two miles an hour or less. But they also had to negotiate the 45-degree incline between the locks.

Built at Schenectady, the early model cost $13,000. The first order was for forty. Each machine was a little more than thirty feet long, weighed forty-three tons, and had identical cabs at either end, duplicate controls and driving engines, so that it could run in either direction without being turned around. The key feature, however, was a big independently powered, center-mounted windlass that handled some eight hundred feet of steel cable. With the windlass the loco motive could control a ship without even moving. Line could be payed out or reeled in at rapid speed and with loads On the line of as much as twenty-five thousand pounds.

For the still young, still comparatively small General Electric Company the successful performance of all such apparatus, indeed the perfect efficiency of the entire electrical system, was of the utmost importance. This was not merely a very large government contract, the company’s first large government contract, but one that would attract worldwide attention. It was a chance like none other to display the virtues of electric power, to bring to bear the creative resources of the electrical engineer. The canal, declared one technical journal, would be a “monument to the electrical art.” It had been less than a year since the first factory in the United States had been electrified.

In the broader context, the arrangement was also a historic forerunner: a large, novel, technological objective was to be obtained in abnormally little time and according to the most stringent standards through the combined efforts of the federal government and a specialized industry. (It is, to be sure, a very long way from the electrical installations at Panama to the Manhattan Project, but the lineage is plain.) Furthermore, the outstanding success of the arrangement, the most original and important piece of work to come out of the con tract, was that for which the spirit of government-industry cooperation was the most pronounced.

The advantages of electrical power were many: it could be transmitted over long distances; in complicated installations each different machine or mechanism could have its own motor drive (exactly as in the locks), instead of the power being transmitted here and there from one central source by an elaborate system of drive shafts, belts, and pulleys (as in a conventional steam-driven factory). The motors themselves were relatively small, compact, watertight; they turned at constant speeds irrespective of the loads put upon them; they required a minimum of attention; they would not blow up.

But the chief virtue of electricity was in the degree of control it afforded. Things could be made to happen–stop, start, open, close– with the mere press of a button or the turning of a few simple switches on a central control board. And so it was to be at Panama, and with one other extremely important feature. In this operation, things could be made to happen only as they were supposed to, in exactly the prescribed sequence.

Though the fundamental principles were much like those developed for railroad switchboards, no comparable control system had been produced heretofore. Again credit for the basic conception belongs to Edward Schildhauer, but otherwise it was a wholly joint effort. “No specifications could have been more exacting or explicit as to the results to be accomplished,” wrote one of the engineers at Schenectady, “or have given a wider range as to the method of their accomplishment. . . . It was the single aim of all concerned to produce something better, safer and more reliable than anything before undertaken.” A special department was set up at the General Electric works, wherein picked employees concentrated solely on the Panama project. Company engineers were sent to the Isthmus to become thoroughly familiar with all aspects of the problem; Schildhauer and members of his staff came to Schenectady. The result was an unqualified success.

The operation of each flight of locks was to be run from the second floor of a large control house built on the center wall of the uppermost lock. From there, with an unobstructed view of the entire flight, one man at one control board could run every operation in the passage of a ship except the movement of the towing locomotives.

Each control board was a long, flat, waist-high bench, or counter, upon which the locks were represented in miniature–a complete working reproduction. The board at Gatun was sixty-four feet in length and about five feet wide. There were little aluminum fender chains that would actually rise in place or sink back out of sight on the board as a switch was turned. The lock chambers were represented by slabs of blue marble. There were aluminum pointers placed in the same relative positions as the lock gates and these opened or closed as the actual lock gates opened and closed. There were upright indicators showing the positions of the rising stem valves, and there were still taller upright indexes showing the level of the water in the chambers to within half an inch.

Everything that happened in the locks–the rise and fall of the fender chains, the opening and closing of the gates–happened on the board in the appropriate place and at precisely the same time. So the situation in the locks could be read in an instant on the board at any stage of the lockage.

In addition, the switches to work the fender chains, lock gates, stem valves, all the switches for every mechanism in the system, were located beside the representation of that device on the board. To lift a 40,000-ton ship twenty-one feet in a lock chamber, one had only to turn a small aluminum handle about like that on an ordinary faucet.

The genius of the system, however, was in the elaborate racks of interlocking bars concealed from view beneath the board. For not only was the operator able to see the entire lockage process in miniature and in operation on the board before him, but the switches were interlocking–mechanically. Each had to be turned in proper sequence, other-wise it would not turn. It was impossible therefore to do anything out of order or to forget to take any crucial step in the necessary order. For example, the switch to lower the fender chain would not operate until the switch to open the lock gates had been thrown into the opening position. Thus no one at the control board could inadvertently lower the chain for a ship to proceed and not have the gates open for the ship to enter the locks. Nor could the same gates be closed once the ship was in the lock without first turning the switch to raise the fender chain again, thus assuring that the chain would always be in the up position to protect the gates whenever the gates were closed.

The gate switch was further interlocked with the switch for the miter-forcing machine (to open the gates the operator had first to unlock the miter-forcing machine). when the stem valves in the culverts were to be opened, to raise the water and lift the ship to the next level, it was possible to open only the correct valves. At Gatun, for example, this would mean that an operator could not possibly flood the lower locks in the flight by opening the valves for the middle and upper chambers at once.

Only with a system run by electricity could the locks have been controlled from a central point. In some instances the distance from an individual motor in the system to the control board was as much as half a mile.

More than half a century later the same control panels would still be in use, functioning exactly as intended, everything as the engineers originally devised. “They were very smart people,” a latter-day engineer at Miraflores would remark. “After twenty-one years here I am still amazed at what they did. “

Once, just before the canal was completed, the Commission of Fine Arts sent the sculptor Daniel Chester French and the landscape architect Frederick Olmsted, Jr., son of the famous creator of New York’s Central Park, to suggest ways in which the appearance of the locks and other components might be dressed up or improved upon. The Two men reported:

The canal itself and all the structures connected with it impress one with a sense of their having been built with a view strictly to their utility. There is an entire absence of ornament and no evidence that the aesthetic has been considered except in a few instances. . . . Because of this very fact there is little to find fault with from the artist’s point of view. The canal, like the Pyramids or some imposing object in natural scenery, is impressive from its scale and simplicity and directness. One feels that anything done merely for the purpose of beautifying it would not only fail to accomplish that purpose, but would be an impertinence.

Consequently nothing was changed or added. The canal would look as its builders intended, nothing less or more.

II

For all practical purposes the canal was finished when the locks were. And so efficiently had construction of the locks been organized that they were finished nearly a year earlier than anticipated. Had it not been for the slides in the Cut, adding more than 25,000,000 cubic yards to the total amount of excavation, the canal might have opened in 1913.

The locks on the Pacific side were finished first, the single flight at Pedro Miguel in 1911, Miraflores in May 1913. Morale was at an all-time high. Asked by a journalist what the secret of success had been, Goethals answered, “The pride everyone feels in the work.”

“Men reported to work early and stayed late, without overtime,” Robert Wood remembered. “. . . I really believe that every American employed would have worked that year without pay, if only to see the first ship pass through the completed Canal. That spirit went down to all the laborers.”

The last concrete was laid at Gatun on May 31, 1913, eleven days after two steam shovels had met “on the bottom of the canal” in Culebra Cut. Shovel No. 222, driven by Joseph S. Kirk, and shovel No. 230, driven by D. J. MacDonald, had been slowly narrowing the gap all day when they at last stood nose to nose. The Cut was as deep as it would go, forty feet above sea level.

In the second week in June, it would be reported that the newly installed upper guard gates at Gatun had been “swung to a position halfway open; then shut, opened wide, closed and . . . noiselessly, without any jar or vibration, and at all times under perfect control.”

On June 27 the last of the spillway gates was closed at Gatun Dam. The lake at Gatun had reached a depth of forty-eight feet; now it would rise to its full height.

Three months later all dry excavation ended. The Cucaracha slide still blocked the path, but Goethals had decided to clear it out with dredges once the Cut was flooded. So on the morning of September 10, photographers carried their gear into the Cut to record the last large rock being lifted by the last steam shovel. Locomotive No. 260 hauled out the last dirt train and the work crews moved in to tear up the last of the track. “The Cut tonight presented an unusual spectacle,” cabled a correspondent for The New York Times, “hundreds of piles-of old ties from the railroad tracks being in flames.”

Then on September 26 at Gatun the first trial lockage was made.

A seagoing tug, Gatun, used until now for hauling mud barges in the Atlantic entrance, was cleaned up, “decorated with all the flags it owned,” and came plowing up from Colón in the early-morning sunshine. By ten o’clock several thousand people were clustered along the rims of the lock walls to witness the historic ascent. There were men on the tops of the closed lock gates, leaning on the handrails. The sky was cloudless, and in midair above the lower gates, a photographer hung suspended from the cableway. He was standing in a cement bucket, his camera on a tripod, waiting for things to begin.

But it was to be a long, hot day. The water was let into the upper chamber shortly after eleven, but because the lake had still to reach its full height, there was a head of only about eight feet and so no thunderous rush ensued when the valves were opened. Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of this phase of the operation, so far as the spectators were concerned, was the quantity of frogs that came swirling in with the muddy water.

With the upper lock filled, however, the head between it and the middle lock was fifty-six feet, and so when the next set of culverts was opened, the water came boiling up from the bottom of the empty chamber in spectacular fashion.

The central control board was still not ready. All valves were being worked by local control and with extreme caution to be sure every-thing was just so. Nor were any of the towing locomotives in service as yet. Just filling the locks took the whole afternoon. It was nearly five by the time the water in the lowest chamber was even with the surface of the sea-level approach outside and the huge gates split apart and wheeled slowly back into their niches in the walls.

The tug steamed into the lower lock, looking, as one man recalled, “like a chip on a pond.” Sibert, Schildhauer, young George Goethals, and their wives were standing on the prow. “The Colonel” and Hodges were on top of the lock wall, walking from point to point, both men in their shirt sleeves, Goethals carrying a furled umbrella, Hodges wearing glossy puttees and an enormous white hat. The gates had opened in one minute forty-eight seconds, as expected.

The tug proceeded on up through the locks, step by step. The gates to the rear of the first chamber were closed; the water in the chamber was raised until it reached the same height as the water on the other side of the gates ahead. The entire tremendous basin swirled and churned as if being stirred by some powerful, unseen hand and the rise of the water–and of the little boat–was very apparent. Those on board could feel themselves being lifted, as if in a very slow elevator. With the water in the lower chamber equal to that in the middle chamber, the intervening gates were opened and the tug went forward. Again the gates to the stern swung shut; again, with the opening of the huge subterranean culverts, the caramel-colored water came suddenly to life and began its rise to the next level.

It was 6:45 when the last gates were opened in the third and last lock and the tug steaméd out onto the surface of Gatun Lake. The day had come and gone, it was very nearly dark, and as the boat turned and pointed to shore, her whistle blowing, the crowd burst into a long cheer. The official time given for this first lockage was one hour fifty-one minutes, or not quite twice as long as would be required once everything was in working order.

That an earthquake should strike just four days later seemed some-how a fitting additional touch, as if that too were essential in any thorough testing-and-proving drill. It lasted more than an hour, one violent shudder following another, and the level of magnitude appears to have been greater than that of the San Francisco quake of 1906. The needles of a seismograph at Ancon were jolted off the scale paper. Walls cracked in buildings in Panama City; there were landslides in the interior; a church fell. But the locks and Gatun Dam were untouched. “There has been no damage whatever to any part of the canal,” Goethals notified Washington.

Water was let into Culebra Cut that same week, through six big drain pipes in the earth dike at Gamboa. Then on the afternoon of October 10, President Wilson pressed a button in Washington and the center of the dike was blown sky-high. The idea had been dreamed up by a newspaperman. The signal, relayed by telegraph wire from Washington to New York to Galveston to Panama, was almost instantaneous. Wilson walked from the White House to an office in the Executive Building (as the State, War, and Navy Building had been renamed) and pressed the button at one minute past two. At two minutes past two several hundred charges of dynamite opened a hole more than a hundred feet wide and the Cut, already close to full, at once became an extension of Gatun Lake.

In all the years that the work had been moving ahead in the Cut and on the locks, some twenty dredges of different kinds, assisted by numbers of tugs, barges, and crane boats, had been laboring in the sea-level approaches of the canal and in the two terminal bays, where forty-foot channels had to be dug several miles out to deep water. Much of this was equipment left behind by the French; six dredges in the Atlantic fleet, four in the Pacific fleet, a dozen self-propelled dump barges, two tugs, one drill boat, one crane boat, were all holdovers from that earlier era. Now, to clear the Cut of slides, about half this equipment was brought up through the locks, the first procession from the Pacific side passing through Miraflores and Pedro Miguel on October 25.

The great, awkward dredges took their positions in the Cut; barges shunted in and out, dumping their spoil in designated out-of-the-way corners of Gatun Lake, all in the very fashion that Philippe Bunau-Varilla had for so long championed as the only way to do the job. Floodlights were installed in the Cut and the work went on day and night. On December 10, 1913, an old French ladder dredge, the Marmot, made the “pioneer cut” through the Cucaracha slide, thus opening the channel for free passage.

The first complete passage of the canal took place almost incidentally, as part of the new workaday routine, on January 7, when an old crane boat, the Alexandre La Valley, which had been brought up from the Atlantic side sometime previously, came down through the Pacific locks without ceremony, without much attention of any kind. That the first boat through the canal was French seemed to everyone altogether appropriate.

The end was approaching faster than anyone had quite anticipated. Thousands of men were being let go; hundreds of buildings were being disassembled or demolished. Job applications were being written to engineering offices in New York and to factories in Detroit, where, according to the latest reports, there was great opportunity in the automobile industry. Families were packing for home. There were farewell parties somewhere along the line almost every night of the week.

William Gorgas resigned from the canal commission to go to South Africa to help fight an alarming surge of pneumonia among black workers in the gold mines. The understanding was that it would be a brief assignment, after which he was to be made surgeon general of the Army.

Joseph Bucklin Bishop left to resume his literary career in New York.

With the arrival of the new year the Isthmian Canal Commission was disbanded and President Wilson named Goethals the first Governor of the Panama Canal, as the new administrative entity was to be officially known. Goethals’ salary as governor was to be $10,000 a year, which was $5,000 less than what he had been paid as chairman of the I.C.C., a decision made in the Senate, which inspired the popular “Mr. Dooley,” the syndicated creation of humorist Finley Peter Dunne, to observe:

“They say republics are ongrateful, but look, will ye, what they’ve done f’r that fellow that chopped the continent in two at Pannyma. He’s a hero, I grant ye, although I’m sorry f’r it, because I can’t pronounce his name. . . . What is he goin’ to git? says ye? Why, Hinnissy, th’ Governmint has already app’inted him Governor iv th’ Canal at a greatly rejooced salary.”

In Washington after a drawn-out, often acrimonious debate, Congress determined that the clause in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty stipulating that the canal would be open to the vessels of all nations “on terms of entire equality” meant that American ships could not use the canal toll free, as many had ardently wanted and as much of the press had argued for. American ships would pay the same as the ships of every other nation, 90 cents per cargo ton.

In Washington also, and in San Francisco, plans were being made for tremendous opening celebrations intended to surpass even those at the opening of the Suez Canal. More than a hundred warships, “the greatest international fleet ever gathered in American waters,” were to assemble off Hampton Roads on New Year’s Day, 1915, then proceed to San Francisco by way of Panama. At San Francisco they would arrive for the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a mammoth world’s fair in celebration of the canal. The estimate was that it would take four days for the armada to go through the locks.

Schoolchildren in Oregon wrote to President Wilson to urge that the old battleship Oregon lead the flotilla through the canal. The idea was taken up by the press and by the Navy Department. The officer who had commanded the ship on her famous “race around the Horn” in 1898, retired Admiral Charles Clark, hale and fit at age seventy, agreed to command her once again and the President was to be his honored guest.

But there was to be no such pageant. The first oceangoing ship to go through the canal was a lowly cement boat, the Cristobal, and On August 15 the “grand opening” was performed almost perfunctorily By the Ancon. There were no world luminaries on her prow. Goethals again watched from shore, traveling from point to point on the railroad. The only impressive aspect of the event was “the ease and system with which everything worked,” as wrote one man on board. “So quietly did she pursue her way that . . . a strange observer coming suddenly upon the scene would have thought that the canal had always been in operation, and that the Ancon was only doing what thousands of other vessels must have done before her.”

Though the San Francisco exposition went ahead as planned, all but the most modest festivities surrounding the canal itself had been canceled.

For by ironic, tragic coincidence the long effort at Panama and Europe’s long reign of peace drew to a close at precisely the same time. It was as if Two powerful and related but vastly different impulses, having swung in huge arcs in the forty some years since Sedan, had converged with eerie precision in August 1914. The storm that had been gathering over Europe since June broke on August 3, the same day the Cristobal made the first ocean-to-ocean transit. On the evening of the third, the French premier, Viviani, received a telephone call from the American ambassador who, with tears in his voice, warned that the Germans would declare war Within the hour. The American ambassador was Myron T. Herrick, who had once been so helpful to Philippe Bunau-Varilla, and at the same moment in Panama, where it was still six hours earlier in the day, Philippe Bunau-Varilla was standing at the rail of the Cristobal as she entered the lock at Pedro Miguel, at the start of her descent to the Pacific, he being one of the very few who had come especially for the occasion.

Across Europe and the United States, world war filled the newspapers and everyone’s thoughts. The voyage of the Cristobal, the Ancon’s crossing to the Pacific on August 15, the official declaration that the canal was open to the world, were buried in the back pages.

There were editorials hailing the victory of the canal builders, but the great crescendo of popular interest had passed; a new heroic effort commanded world attention. The triumph at Panama suddenly belonged to another and very different era.

Of the American employees in Panama at the time the canal was opened only about sixty had been there since the beginning in 1904. How many black workers remained from the start of the American effort, or from an earlier time, is not recorded. But one engineer on the staff, a Frenchman named Arthur Raggi, had been first hired by the Compagnie Nouvelle in 1894.

Goethals, Sibert, Hodges, Schildhauer, Goldmark, and the others had been on the job for seven years and the work they performed was of a quality seldom ever known.

Its cost had been enormous. No single construction effort in American history had exacted such a price in dollars or in human life. Dollar expenditures since 1904 totaled $352,000,000 (including the $10,000,-000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 paid to the French company). By present standards this does not seem a great deal, but it was more than four times what Suez had cost, without even considering the sums spent by the two preceding French companies, and so much more than the cost of anything ever before built by the United States government as to be beyond compare.* Taken together, the French and American expenditures came to about $639,000,000.

The other cost since 1904, according to the hospital records, was 5,609 lives from disease and accidents. No fewer than 4,500 of these had been black employees. The number of white Americans who died was about 350.

If the deaths incurred during the French era are included, the total price in human life may have been as high as twenty-five thousand, or five hundred lives for every mile of the canal.

Yet amazingly, unlike any such project on record, unlike almost any major construction of any kind, the canal designed and built by the American engineers had cost less in dollars than it was supposed to. The final price was actually $23,000,000 below what had been estimated in 1907, and this despite the slides, the change in the width of the canal, and an additional $11,000,000 for fortifications, all factors not reckoned in the earlier estimate. The volume of additional excavation resulting from slides (something over 25,000,000 cubic yards) was almost equal to all the useful excavation accomplished by the French. The digging of Culebra Cut ultimately cost $90,000,000 (or $10,000,-000 a mile). Had such a figure been anticipated at the start, it is questionable whether Congress would have ever approved the plan.

The total volume of excavation accomplished since 1904 was 232,440,945 cubic yards and this added to the approximately 30,000,000 cubic yards of useful excavation by the French gave a grand total, in round numbers, of 262,000,000 cubic yards, or more than four times the volume originally estimated by Ferdinand de Lesseps for a canal at sea level and nearly three times the excavation at Suez.

The canal had also been opened six months ahead of schedule, and this too in the face of all those difficulties and changes unforeseen seven years before.

Without question, the credit for such a record belongs chiefly to George Goethals, whose ability, whose courage and tenacity, were of the highest order.

That so vast and costly an undertaking could also be done without graft, kickbacks, payroll padding, any of the hundred and one forms of corruption endemic to such works, seemed almost inconceivable at the start, nor does it seem any less remarkable in retrospect. Yet the canal was, among so many other things, a clean project. No excessive profits were made by any of the several thousand different firms dealt with by the I.C.C. There had not been the least hint of scandal from the time Goethals was given command, nor has evidence of corruption of any kind come to light in all the years since.

Technically the canal itself was a masterpiece in design and construction. From the time they were first put in use the locks performed perfectly.

Because of the First World War, traffic remained comparatively light until 1918, only four or five ships a day, less than two thousand ships a year on the average. And not until July of 1919 was there a transit of an American armada to the Pacific, that spectacle Theodore Roosevelt had envisioned so long before. Thirty-three ships returning from the war zone, including seven destroyers and nine battleships, were locked through the canal, all but three in just two days.

Ten years after it opened, the canal was handling more than five thousand ships a year; traffic was approximately equal to that of Suez. The British battle cruiser Hood and the U.S. carriers Saratoga and Lexington squeezed through the locks with only feet to spare on their way to the Pacific in the 1920’s. By 1939 annual traffic exceeded seven thousand ships.

But in the decades following the Second World War, that figure more than doubled. Channel lighting was installed in 1966 and night-time transits were inaugurated. Ships were going through the canal at a rate of more than one an hour, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Many of them, moreover–giant container ships, bulk carriers–were of a size never dreamed of when the canal was built: the 845-foot Melodic, the 848-foot Arctic, the 950-foot Tokyo Bay, the largest container ship in the world at the time she made her first transit in 1972. Traffic in the canal by the 1970’s was beyond fifteen thousand ships a year, annual tonnage was well beyond the 100,000,000 mark. Tonnage in 1915 had been 5,000,000.

The Queen Mary, launched in 1936, was the first ship too large for the locks and others followed– Queen Elizabeth, Norman die, and, in recent years, supertankers larger even than the Tokyo Bay, ships more than 1,000 feet long with beams of more than 150 feet.* As a consequence of this and the steadily mounting traffic in the canal, serious proposals were prepared for a new canal. The President of the United States appointed a commission and all the old routes were surveyed once again–across Tehuantepec, Nicaragua, in the valley of the Atrato, and across the Darien wilderness, at San Bias and at Caledonia Bay.

In 1915 tolls for the year were about $4,000,000. By 1970 they exceeded $100,000,000, even though the rates remained unchanged. In 1973, after sixty years, the Panama Canal Company recorded its first loss, as a result of mounting costs of operation, so in 1974 tolls were raised for the first time, from 90 cents per cargo ton to $1.08, an increase of 20 percent.† Annual revenues from tolls presently exceed $140,000,000.

The largest toll yet paid was for the largest passenger ship ever to pass through the canal, the Queen Elizabeth II. She was locked through in March 1975 and paid a record $42,077.88. The average toll per ship (at the present rate) is about $10,000, which is roughly a tenth of the cost of sailing eight thousand miles around Cape Horn.

The lowest toll on record was paid by Richard Halliburton, world traveler, best-selling author, toast of the lecture platform, who in the 1920’s swam the length of the canal, doing it by installments one day at a time. He was not the first to swim the canal, but was the first to persuade the authorities to allow him through the locks. So based on his weight, 140 pounds, he was charged a toll of 36 cents.

Changes have been made in the canal as time passed: the Cut was widened to five hundred feet, a storage dam was built across the Chagres about ten miles above Gamboa, and the original towing loco-motives were retired and replaced by more powerful models made in Japan. But fundamentally, and for all general appearances, the canal remains the same as the day it opened and its basic plan has been challenged in only one respect. It has been argued that the separation of the two sets of locks at the Pacific end was a blunder, that it would have been a more efficient canal had the Pacific locks been built as a unit at Miraflores, just as at Gatun. But those who have had the most experience with running the canal in recent years do not regard the Pacific arrangement as a limiting factor, and indeed various tests run by the Panama Canal Company through the years indicate that Gatun is actually more of a bottleneck. With certain improvements, the engineers believe the capacity of the present canal could be increased to about twenty-seven thousand ships a year.

The one undeniable misjudgment on Goethals’ part was his forecast concerning the slides: he was sure they were over the summer the canal opened. But on a night in October 1914, the side of the Cut at East Culebra gave way and in half an hour the entire channel was blocked. In August the following year the same thing happened again. On September 18, 1915, came the most discouraging break of all in what had been newly renamed Gaillard Cut–an avalanche that closed the canal to traffic for seven months. When the canal reopened, Goethals again insisted that the problem would be “overcome finally and for all time.” But that day never arrived. Hundreds of acres of mud and rock slipped into the Cut as the years passed; dredging remained an almost continuous task and a huge expense. And the angle of repose has still to be found. One slide in 1974 dumped an estimated 1,000,000 cubic yards into the Cut.

The creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the supreme human achievements of all time, the culmination of a heroic dream of four hundred years and of more than twenty years of phenomenal effort and sacrifice. The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished. Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization.

For millions of people after 1914, the crossing at Panama would be one of life’s memorable experiences. The complete transit required about twelve hours, and except for the locks and an occasional community along the shore, the entire route was bordered by the same kind of wilderness that had confronted the first surveyors for the railroad. Goethals had determined that the jungle not merely remain untouched, but that it be allowed to return wherever possible. This was a military rather than an aesthetic decision on his part; the jungle he insisted before a congressional committee was the surest possible defense against ground attack. (Actually he wanted to depopulate the entire Zone, since, as he explained to reporters, “we, as Americans, have no property rights in it.”) But for those on board a ship in transit, the effect for the greater part of the journey was of sailing a magnificent lake in undiscovered country. The lake was always more spacious than people expected, Panama far more beautiful. Out on the lake the water was ocean green. The water was very pure, they would learn, and being fresh water, it killed all the barnacles on the ship’s bottom.

In the rainy season, storms could be seen long in advance, building in the hills. Sudden bursts of cool wind would send tiny whitecaps chasing over the lake surface. The crossing was no journey down a great trough in the continent, as so many imagined it would be, but a passage among flaming green islands, the tops of hills that protruded still above the surface. For years after the first ships began passing through, much of the shore was lined with half-drowned trees, their dry limbs as white as bones.

The sight of another ship appearing suddenly from around a bend ahead was always startling, so complete was the feeling of being in untraveled waters, so very quiet was everything.

In the Cut the quiet was more powerful, there being little if any wind, and the water was no longer green, but mud-colored, and the sides of what had been the spine of the Cordilleras seemed to press in very close.

Even in the locks there was comparatively little noise. Something so important as the Panama Canal, something so large and vital to world commerce, ought somehow to make a good deal of noise, most people seemed to feel. But it did not. Bells clanged on the towing locomotives now and again and there was the low whine of their engines, but little more than that. There was little shouting back and forth among the men who handled the lines, since each knew exactly what he was to do. The lock gates appeared to swing effortlessly and with no perceptible sound.

* If placed upright in present day Manhattan, a Panama lock would be among the tallest structures on the skyline, surpassed only by the World Trade Center and the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. The difference between the length of a lock and the height of the Empire State Building, for example, is 250 feet.

* In their initial search for sand of the proper quality, the engineers had gone as far as the San Bias Islands, ninety miles east of Colón, and found just what they wanted. But the San Bias Indians declared that the islands–land, water, and sand-were God’s gifts to them and that which God had given they would neither sell nor give to the white man. The engineers were permitted only to anchor overnight, and on the condition that they would leave at dawn and never return.

* In fact, the emergency dams, like the 16-inch guns, would never be used and eventually they were dismantled and removed.

* Except for wars, the only remotely comparable federal expenditures up to the year 1914 had been for the acquisition of new territories, and the figure for all acquisitions as of that date–for the Louisiana Territory; Florida; California, New Mexico, and other western land acquired from Mexico; the Gadsden Purchase; Alaska; and the Philippines–was $75,000,000, or only about one-fifth of what had been spent on the canal.

* At this writing there are more than seven hundred “superships” of a size too large to pass through the Panama Canal. But it should be understood that those who built them knew the dimensions of the locks; in other words, use of the canal by such vessels was never intended.

† By law the canal is designed to be self-sustaining and must break even.

Afterword

Among those who were most profoundly stirred by the opening of the canal in August 1914 were Charles de Lesseps and Admirals Alfred Thayer Mahan and Thomas Oliver Selfridge, all three quietly retired, but each still very much alive.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla, having declared it a moment of glory for Goethals (and for “the Genius of the French nation”), rushed home to fight. He lost a leg at Verdun and in later years could be seen “taking his exercise” on the Champs Elysees, a tiny, upright figure marching along on a wooden leg, eyes front, his chauffeur in a limousine following slowly some distance behind. A young American journalist in Paris, Eric Sevareid, who made his acquaintance in 1940, would recall, “I had never encountered such a powerful personality.”

Bunau-Varilla died on May 18, 1940, only weeks before Paris was occupied by the German Army.

Theodore Roosevelt never returned to Panama; he never saw the Panama Canal. The passage of the Pacific fleet through the locks in 1919 took place seven months after his death. Nor did he live to see the United States pay Colombia an indemnity of $25,000,000 (in 1921) for the loss of Panama, a move that had been initiated during the Wilson Administration, much to Roosevelt’s fury. “One of the rather con temptible features of a number of our worthy compatriots,” he wrote privately to Bunau-Varilla, “is that they are eager to take advantage of the deeds of the man of action when action is necessary and then eager to discredit him when the action is once over.”

William Gorgas, who headed the Army medical service in the First World War, died of a stroke while in London in 1920. Before his death, Gorgas was visited in the hospital by King George and was knighted for “the great work which you have done for humanity.”

George Goethals remained as Governor of the Panama Canal through 1916. During the war he was made quartermaster general in Washington and had charge of procurement, transport, and storage of all supplies for the Army. As a private consulting engineer after the war, with offices on Wall Street, he was extremely active but not a particular success financially, largely because he refused to allow the use of his name “for financial consideration.” He died of cancer in 1928 and was buried, as he had requested, at West Point.

John Stevens survived the longest. His work had taken him over much of the country since leaving Panama, and in 1917, at the request of Woodrow Wilson, he went to Russia to reorganize the Trans-Siberian Railway, an assignment that lasted five years. Unlike the others, he made a return trip to Panama, but though tremendously impressed by all that he saw, it was the flight on a Pan American Clipper that gave him the greatest thrill. Vigorous to the end, Stevens died in Pinehurst, North Carolina, in 1943 at the age of ninety.

Once, in a paper addressed “To the Young Engineers Who Must Carry On,” Stevens said something with which all of these remarkable men would assuredly have agreed–for all that had happened to the world since Panama.

His faith in the human intellect and its creative capacities remained undaunted, Stevens wrote. The great works had still to come. “I believe that We are but children picking up pebbles on the shore of the boundless ocean. . . .”

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the numbers of persons who over the years have generously helped me with the preparatory work for this book.

First, to my editor, Peter Schwed of Simon and Schuster, who had the idea and who is a steadfast source of creative advice and encouragement; to my literary agents, Paul R. Reynolds and John W. Hawkins, for their counsel; to Captain Miles P. DuVal, Jr., a lifelong student of canal history and author of two fine books on the subject, who offered valuable suggestions at the start of my research; to my sons David and William, who at the ages of fourteen and twelve went with me to Panama and observed things I might otherwise have missed; to my wife, Rosalee, whose confident spirit was never failing, and to whom the book is dedicated. Her part in the work was important beyond measure.

Of enormous value, year by year, were my conversations with numbers of actual participants in the American effort in Panama prior to 1914 and with the descendants and friends of many of the central figures in the book–American, French, Panamanian, and West Indian. The names of twenty-nine of these persons, several since deceased, are listed in the Sources.

Many interviews lasted two to three hours; the majority were taped in part or whole, depending on the wishes of the individual being interviewed. And though all who participated helped tremendously, recalling what life and work on the Isthmus meant in human terms, several supplied explanations, recollections of events, and people, of the kind that no amount of conventional research could ever produce.

Especially in this respect do I acknowledge my indebtedness to Mme. Herve Alphand, who by a former marriage was the daughter-in-law of Philippe Bunau-Varilla; Alice Anderson, who recalled her childhood beside the canal “diggings” and what the coming of the Americans meant to her family and others of Panama’s West Indian community; Crede Calhoun of Panama City; Arthur H. Dean, who as a young man was a protege of William Nelson Cromwell’s; Katharine Harding Deeble, whose father, Chester Harding, served on Goethal’s staff and afterward became Governor of the Canal Zone; John Fitzgerald; David St. Pierre Gaillard; Mrs. Thomas Goethals; Alice Roosevelt Longworth; Aminta Melendez of Colón.

Hubert de Lesseps, whom I interviewed in his office on the Boulevard Haussmann, had not only a fund of sparkling stories about his famous grandfather, Ferdinand, but a clear memory of his Uncle Charles. More-over, with his physical appearance and bearing, his exceeding charm, M. de Lesseps provided the author with a living example of the legendary family personality.

Professor Elting E. Morison of M.I.T., historian, author, authority on Theodore Roosevelt, guided me in my research into the career of his greatuncle, George Shattuck Morison, and read and commented on portions of the manuscript. The late Richard H. Whitehead of Laconia, New Hampshire, with whom I spent days and with whom I corresponded over several years, was then the last surviving member of Goethals’ staff. Aileen Gorgas Wrightson, not long before her death, reminisced at length about her father, William Crawford Gorgas.

In the course of my reading, more than four hundred books were consulted (the listing in Sources is a “select” bibliography) and nearly a hundred different newspapers, magazines, and technical journals. Many months–well over a year in total–were spent combing through collections of unpublished correspondence, diaries, field journals and notebooks, company reports, bulletins, contracts, meteorological records, maps, surveys, boxes of press clippings, scrapbooks, photograph albums–often in out-of-the-way places. The background material has been pieced together from libraries and archives and private collections in twelve different states, in Paris, in Bogotá, in Panama and the Canal Zone, and in Washington, where the major portion of the surviving record of both the French and the American efforts is on file at the Library of Congress and the National Archives. (A rough idea of the volume of material in Washington alone can be conveyed with a few statistics. The general records of the two French canal companies take up 111 feet of shelf space at the National Archives; the general correspondence of the Isthmian Canal Commission from 1905–1914 occupies 186 feet. The papers of Philippe Bunau-Varilla at the Library of Congress include approximately ten thousand items; the Goethals’ papers, fifteen thousand items.)

Yet a remarkable amount of rare material has been within arm’s reach on my own office shelves, thanks to the interest and generosity of Elinor T. Douglas of Santa Barbara, who let me borrow the pick of what was once General Goethals’ own collection of Panama history-books long since out of print, some extremely rare, all hard to come by; Mrs. James B. Moore, Jr., of Plandome, New York, who loaned letters, private memoranda, and technical reports passed down from her grandfather, the eminent civil engineer Alfred Noble (this collection has since been given to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor); and again to Richard H. Whitehead, who contributed volumes of material collected over a lifetime (as well as a suitcase to carry it all off in).

For their assistance with translation I wish to thank Harold Bell (in Paris), Annie Geohegan, Constance C. Jewett, and Alfred E. Street. Keith L. Oberg worked with newspaper files in Bogotá. Anne Rauffet of the Paris office of The Reader’s Digest helped with introductions and interviews at the Societe de Geographie and the Ecole Polytechnique. Kate Lewin (Paris) and Judith Harkison (Washington) helped track down old photographs. I am a strong believer in the research value of photographs and literally thousands have been examined.

The help and cooperation received from the Canal Zone Library at Balboa and from the staff of the Panama Canal Information Office were unstinting. Especially am I indebted to Librarian Emily J. Price and the late Ruth C. Stuhl, and to Mrs. Nan S. Chong, who is the Panama Collection Librarian; to Frank A. Baldwin, Panama Canal Information Officer, and his able associates Victor G. Canel and Annie R. Rathgeber. (They answered my many queries as time went on. They arranged interviews, provided statistics, photographs, and a complete transcript of the written reminiscences of 112 canal laborers, most of them West Indians and all veterans of construction years–an invaluable collection assembled in 1963 by the Isthmian Historical Society.)

Others in Panama who gave of their time and knowledge and hospitality were Major General David S. Parker, then Governor of the Canal Zone; Ruth Rickarby; and Frank H. Robinson. Dr. Patricia A. Webb of the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Tropical and Preventive Medicine kindly guided me in my reading on yellow fever.

To the following I am also indebted in many different ways: James C. Andrews, Director of Libraries, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Thomas Alton Ashley; the Baker Library, Dartmouth College; Clarence A. Barnes, Jr.; Doreen Kane Barnes; Peter McC. Barnes; Samuel E. Barnes; Mrs. Ira Barrows; Roy P. Basler, John C. Broderick, Carolyn H. Sung, and the other staff members of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; Dr. William B. Bean of the University of Iowa; A. L. Bentley, Jr.; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Stephen Birmingham; the Boston Public Library; Jean-Frangois Burgelin, Secretaire General de la Premiere Presidence de la Cour d’Appel de Paris; Roger Butterfield; the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh; Charleton Coulter, III; Mrs. Gerrit Duys; the staff of the Da Rosa Corporation; Maria Ealand; the Eastern Massachusetts Regional Public Library System and in particular Ann Haddad of the Falmouth Public Library; Gerald Feuille; Mrs. Harry A. Franck and her daughter, Patricia Sheffield; Valarie Franco of the Huntington Library; Frangois Geoffroy of The Reader’s Digest, Paris; George W. Goethals, II; Peter Goethals; Herbert R. Hands of the American Society of Civil Engineers; Mrs. John U. Hawks; Henry B. Hough; Paula R. Hymes of the American Geographical Society; Kathleen Moore Knight; Mrs. Bronislaw Lesnikowski, Librarian, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School; the staff of the newspaper files, Library of Congress; Dennis Longwell of the Museum of Modern Art; Maria Look; H. H. McClintic, Jr.; John McCullough; the late John McKenna, Director of the Middlebury College Library; Leonard Martin; W. V. Graham Matthews, whose own determined explorations into the career of Philippe Bunau-Varilla have been an inspiration; Burroughs Mitchell; Hazel M. Murdock of the Washington office of the Panama Canal Company; the National Geographic Society; the staff of the New York Historical Society Library; the staff of the Science and Technology Room, New York Public Library; Norah Nicholls; Royall and Sally O’Brien; Charleton and Vera Ogburn; Professor Aime Perpillou of the Societe de Geographie; Eulalie Morris Regan of the Vine-yard Haven Public Library and her staff, Margaret Cunningham and Carol McCulloch; Robert L. Reynolds; Mme. Giselle Bunau-Varilla Rocco, daughter of Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who corresponded from her home in Kenya; Soeur Lucie Roge, Superieure Generate de la Compagnie des Filles de la Charite de Saint Vincent de Paul, Paris; Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt; Betty Ross; John B. Rothrock; Colonel Charles H. Schilling and Marie T. Capps of the United States Military Academy; Cecil O. Smith, Jr., of Drexel University; John F. Stevens, Jr.; Carolyn T. Stewart, Director, Gorgas Home and Library, University of Alabama; Margot Barnes Street; the University of North Carolina Library; the University of Vermont Library; Robert Vogel of the Smithsonian Institution; James D. Walker and Joel Barker of the National Archives; Richard H. Whitehead, Jr.; Nancy Whiting of the West Tisbury Library; the Widener Library, Harvard University; the Yale University Library.

Finally, I wish to thank my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. C. Hax McCullough of Pittsburgh, for their abiding interest and encouragement; Audre Proctor, who typed the manuscript; Pat Miller, the copy editor; Frank Metz; Sophie Sorkin; Rafael D. Palacios; Wendell Minor; Edith Fowler, the designer; my daughter Melissa, who did a variety of chores; my son Geoffrey; and Dorie McCullough, who at age seven cannot remember when her father was not working on a book about the Panama Canal.

Notes

Authors and / or book titles are given here in the most convenient abbreviated form; full details on all works cited may be found in the Sources.

BOOK ONE

1. THRESHOLD

The official account of the first Darien Expedition—Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Practicability of a Ship-Canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by way of the Isthmus of Darien, by Thomas Oliver Selfridge—is not only exhaustive but a delight to read and is accompanied by magnificent maps. This and Selfridge’s own handwritten journal (Library of Congress) have been the primary sources here. From the large and exceedingly colorful body of material on the gold rush and the Panama Railroad, I have relied primarily on Kemble, The Panama Route; Otis, History of the Panama Railroad; Taylor, Eldorado; and Tomes, Panama in 1855.

PAGE

19 “There is a charm”: N.Y. Times, Jan. 24, 1870.

22–24 Strain expedition: Cullen, Over Darien; “Darien Exploring Expedition,” Harper’s New Monthly, Mar., Apr., May, 1855; Kirkpatrick, “Strain’s Panama Expedition,” Naval Proceedings, Aug. 1935; Strain, letter to the Sec. of the Navy, Oct. 1854.

23 “In nearly all, the intellect”: Cullen, Over Darien, 27–28.

23 “It is to the isthmus of Darien”: Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 38.

25 “One of the most formidable enemies”: Beatty, 256.

26 “To Europeans the benefits”: North American Review, Feb. 1881.

27 “Sufficient is it to add”: Selfridge, Reports, 6. “It may be the future”: Shufeldt, 20.

27 Views of Francisco López de Gómara: Mack, 43.

31 Views of Charles Biddle: ibid., 126.

31 Stephens’ cost estimate: Incidents, Vol. 1, 413.

32 “At home, this volcano”: ibid., Vol. 2, 13.

32 Article XXXV: I.C.C., Report, 1899–1901, 451.

34 “I have no time to give reasons”: Howe, 26.

34 “overwhelmed with the thought”: Taylor, Eldorado, 15.

34 Young man from Bennington: letter from Charles G. Lincoln, May 12, 1852, Park-McCullough Papers.

34 Footnote: Harper’s New Monthly, Jan. 1859.

36 Opinion of Matthew Fontaine Maury: DuVal, 3.

37 Blacks on payroll: P.R.R. Stockholders’ Report, 1853.

37 Trade in pickled dead: Schott, 68.

37 “well-picked skeletons and bones”: Tomes, 207.

38 Grant’s ordeal: Richardson, 139–145.

39 Childs survey: I.C.C., Report, 1899–1901, 75–76.

39 Kelley calculations: Scribner’s, June 1879.

39 Trautwine explorations and conclusions: Journal of the Franklin Institute, May 1854.

41 “When you give an order”: N.Y. Times, Apr. 10, 1870.

41 “I am at the front”: ibid.

     “The entire column”: ibid.

42–43 Diary entries: Selfridge, Reports, 20.

44 Top of the ridge: ibid., 28.

44 Concluding views: ibid., 6–7.

2. THE HERO

Strange to say, there is no adequate modern biography of Ferdinand de Lesseps. The best of those in French is that by G. Edgar-Bonnet (1951). Of those in English my preference is for the contemporary work by G. Barnett Smith. The biography by Beatty (1956) devotes very little to Panama and is marred by inaccuracies. De Lesseps’ own Recollections is characteristically high-spirited and one-sided and contains little more than glowing forecasts for Panama, since it was written in the late 1880’s.

PAGE

45 “He is loved with true affection”: Edgar-Bonnet, 116.

45 “Ferdinand is so good”: ibid., 118.

     Love of life, wives of others: ibid., 119.

46 “lovers of progress”: Bertrand, 9.

47 “These healthful occupations”: Smith, 8.

48 “Madame de Lesseps received”: Beatty, 47.

48–49 Saint-Simon and Enfantin: Dondo.

50 New life at La Chesnaye: Edgar-Bonnet, 125–127.

51 “My dear de Lesseps”: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Nov. 15, 1879; also Mack, 300.

52 Luxury in the desert: de Lesseps, Suez Canal, 9.

52 Description of rainbow: de Lesseps, Lettres, Vol. 1, 16.

53 “I am going to accomplish”: de Lesseps to Mme. Delamalle, Jan. 22, 1855, quoted in Beatty, 114.

54 “He persevered, you see”: Hubert de Lesseps, conversations with the author.

54 Verne on de Lesseps: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “I wait with patience”: Edgar-Bonnet, 117.

54 “There was a real Egyptian sky”: Aronson, 30.

56 “We have had a lot of other men”: Hubert de Lesseps, conversations with the author.

56–57 “a small man”: Robinson, 139.

57 “He bears his years”: N.Y. Herald, Feb. 25, 1880.

57–58 “Her form”: quoted in Panama Star & Herald, Apr. 6, 1880.

58 “We had no difficulty”: Hyndman, 119.

58 “Astonish the world”: Siegfried, 236.

58 Great geographical movement: Murphy, 1–35.

58–59 Louvre exhibition: N.Y. Times, Aug. 1, 1875.

59 “Inevitably the whirlpool”: Beatty, 283.

59 “insidious influences”: N.Y. Times, May 31, 1879.

60 “Either I am the head”: N.Y. Tribune, Mar. 4, 1880.

60 Syndicate launched: Edgar-Bonnet, 86.

61 Wyse background: Bonaparte-Wyse.

62–66 Wyse describes his two isthmian expeditions and the resulting journey to Bogota, San Francisco, and Washington in his Canal Interocéanique and Le Canal. Also Rodrigues, 43–49; Panama Star & Herald, Jan. 21, 24, 26, 1878.

62 “I told Messrs. Wyse and Réclus”: N. Y. World, Feb. 25, 1880.

64 Lack of interest in Wyse by Bogotá press: El Relator And others, Mar. 1878.

66 Turndown by Menocal and Lull: Menocal, North American Review, Sept. 1879; also Wyse letter to Ammen, July 26, 1876, quoted in Canal Interocéanique, 277.

66 Wyse Concession: English translation, Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 473–478.

67 Sole dissenting view: Gerster, 20.

67 Wyse-Park meeting: Wyse, Le Canal, 268–269; Wyse interview, N.Y. World, Jan. 29, 1880.

68 Authorized delegates: Instructions, 3.

68 “What do you wish to find at Panama?”: Courau, 135–136. (Also quoted in somewhat different versions in Beatty, Siegfried, and Mack.)

3. CONSENSUS OF ONE

The complete proceedings of the Paris congress are contained in the Compte Rendu des Séances (Paris, 1879) and the event was well covered by the daily press. (I have used Le Temps, The New York Times, the New York Tribune, and reports by the Paris correspondent for the Panama Star & Herald, May 29, June 14, 1879.) The observations by Dr. Johnston are from the Journal of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 11, 1879, 172–180. Menocal, in addition to his official report to Secretary Evarts, wrote of the affair in the North American Review, Sept. 1879.

PAGE

70 “Great blunders”: Bartlett, 497.

72 De Lesseps’ opening remarks: Compte Rendu, 28.

73 Missing trunk: Menocal to Evarts, June 21; Instructions, 12.

75 Wyse speech: Compte Rendu, 223.

77 “The surprise and painful emotion”: Ammen to Evarts, June 21; Instructions, 6.

77 “a modern American political boss”: Bishop, Gateway, 69–70.

78 “threw off the mantle of indifference”: Cristano Medina (from Guatemala), North American Review, Sept. 1903.

79–81 Proposal of Godin de Lépinay Compte Rendu, 293–299; personal background: Forot.

82 Menocal’s disgust: Menocal to Evarts, June 21; Instructions, 20.

82 Sea-level canal at Panama recommended: Compte Rendu, 454.

83 “The hall was densely crowded”: Ammen to Evarts, June 21; Instructions, 10.

85–86 “The Congress believes”: Compte Rendu, 646.

86 Menocal’s analysis: North American Review, Sept. 1879.

4. DISTANT SHORES

The Panama Star & Herald reported the de Lesseps visit to the Isthmus in great detail, as well as the U.S. tour, beginning with the issue of Jan. 1, 1880. De Lesseps’ Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique is full of descriptive material; the New York Tribune carried eyewitness accounts by “an occasional cor-respondent” the Rodridgues dispatches ran in the New York World, Jan. 11, 22, 23, 24, 29.

PAGE

101 “Panama will be easier”: Recollections, 200.

102 “M. de Lesseps is convinced”: N.Y. Times, July 25, 1879.

102 Rumors on the Bourse: Edgar-Bonnet, 123–124.

103 Scene with Wyse: ibid., 129.

104 Welcoming ceremonies: Robinson, 139.

104 “The canal will be made”: ibid., 140.

107 “M. de Lesseps himself rode”: N.Y. World, Jan. 22, 1880.

108 “Le plus belle région”: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Feb. 1.

109–110 Crossing at Barbacoas: N.Y. World, Jan. 22.

110 “a railroad like this”: ibid.

112 “Panama is a very miserable old town”: Pomfret, 222–223.

113 Mass cleanup: N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 22.

113 “14,000 inhabitants”: N.Y. World, Jan. 22.

114 Striking the first blow: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Feb. 1; also Rodridgues, N.Y. World, Jan. 22; Rodrigues, Panama Canal, 65–66.

115 Group portrait: Archives, Panama Canal Company.

116 “And now, gentlemen, you see”: N.Y. World, Feb. 25.

116 “he left us entirely to ourselves”: ibid.

116 “rather bright” sun: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Feb. 1.

116 Wright’s conclusion: Edgar-Bonnet, 135.

116 Blanchet wedding: Panama Star & Herald, Feb. 7.

116 “Her form was voluptuous”: Robinson, 143.

117 “one of those men who know how to please”: N.Y. World, Jan. 22.

117 “Nothing . . . to dampen the ardor”: Robinson, 146.

117 Emily Crawford interview: N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 13, 1889.

118 “cannot understand why they hesitated so long”: Siegfried, 246–247; also Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Feb. 1, 1880.

118 Shipboard revisions: Bishop, Gateway, 75.

119 Windsor Hotel interview: N.Y. Tribune, Feb. 25.

119–120 Delmonico’s banquet: New York papers, Mar. 2; also Addresses.

120 De Lesseps on Capitol Hill: Testimony, 1880.

120 Eads project: Address . . . Before the House Select Committee, Mar. 9, 1880.

121 President Hayes’s message: N.Y. Tribune, Mar. 9, 1880; also Sen. Exec. Doc. No. 112, 46th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1–2.

121 “The message of President Hayes”: New York papers, Mar. 10; also Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Mar. 15.

121 “What the President said”: Rodrigues, Panama Canal, 69.

121–122 Cross-country tour: Panama Star & Herald, Apr. 20, 21.

122 “It is France alone”: Edgar-Bonnet, 127.

122 Arrival in Paris: Panama Star & Herald, Apr. 29.

122–123 Lectures, exuberance: ibid.

5. THE INCREDIBLE TASK

Appendix B (pages 197–213) of the Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901 gives a clear, brief history of the Universal Interoceanic Canal Company from 1880 to 1889, with pertinent dates and statistics to document both the financial and engineering sides of the story.

PAGE

125 Spirit of venture capitalism: Siegfried, 240.

125 Dire forecast by Lévy-Crémieux man: Emily Crawford in the N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 13, 1889.

125–127 Launching of the Compagnie Universelle: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique; also Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 202–203; also Mack, 310–311.

125–126 Press response: Mack, 312.

126 Crédit Foncier and Rothschilds: N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 1, 1881.

127 Comparison to Paris-Lyon-Mediterranée railway: Rodrigues, 81.

127 First stockholders’ meeting: N.Y. Times, Jan. 31, Feb. 1, 1881.

127 Salaries: Mack, 314.

127 Grant to Ammen: quoted in N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1888.

128 Comité Américain, expectations and performance: Sen. Doc. 429, 59th Cong., 1st Sess.; also Rodrigues, 112–113.

129 French civil engineers: Artz.

129 Henry Barnard view: Scientific Schools.

130 “never a more complicated problem”: Bigelow, Tanama Canal, 6–7.

131 “Travail commencé”: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Feb. 15, 1881.

133–134 “We must make certain”: Charles to Réclus, July 15, 1881, quoted in Edgar-Bonnet, 171.

134 “Everything you can do”: Charles to Richier, May 17, 1882, quoted in Edgar-Bonnet, 172.

134 “The canal hospitals”: Nelson, 236.

134 “a very much better institution”: Gorgas, Sanitation, 224.

135 “overrun with Yankees”: Bidwell.

135 “I am persuaded”: Réclus to Charles, Mar. 30, 1881, quoted in Edgar-Bonnet, 173.

135 “It is necessary at any price”: Chambre des Deputes Rapport, Vol. 3, 205; also Simon, 48.

135–136 Purchase of the Panama Railroad: Robinson, 159–163; also Mack, 315.

137 “Perhaps no other man”: Illustrated London News, Nov. 27, 1869.

138 Bionne’s death: Bishop, Gateway, 93–94.

138 “The truth is”: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Sept. 1, 1881.

138 Mallet story: Bishop, Gateway, 92–93.

138–139 De Lesseps’ claim at Vienna: Panama Star & Herald, Oct. 2, 1881.

139–145 My material on yellow fever and malaria has been drawn from a variety of sources, chief of which were Gorgas and Hendrick, Dr. Gorgas’ own writings, Heiser, Nelson, Theiler and Downs, and Warshaw.

144 Mosquitoes breeding in gardens and hospital wards: Gorgas, Sanitation, 232.

145 “Many foreigners”: Robinson, 239.

145 “the people who best resist”: Nelson, 17.

145 “Certainly his moral character”: Bishop, Gateway, 94.

146 “genuine bacchanalian orgy”: ibid., 88.

146 Lines from Froude: English in the West Indies, 177.

146 “Vice flourished”: Robinson, 142.

146 Stabbing: Panama Star & Herald, May 27, 1881.

148 “ten thousand snow shovels”: Haskin, 209.

149–150 Earthquake: Panama Star & Herald, Sept. 14, 1882; also Nelson, 170–178.

150 “With $30,000,000 already invested”: N.Y. Tribune, Sept. 28, 1882.

151 “The truth is”: Chambre des Députés Rapport, Vol. 1, 451.

152 “With your good judgment”: Ferdinand to Charles, Feb. 23, 1883, quoted in Edgar-Bonnet, 165.

6. SOLDIERS UNDER FIRE

While the recollections of Philippe Bunau-Varilla (Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection) and the files of the Panama Star & Herald provide much of the color and human interest to be found in the surviving record of the French years, the most balanced views of the project are the intelligence reports of Navy lieutenants Kimball, Rodgers, and Rogers.

PAGE

153 “soldiers under fire”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 52.

154 “only drunkards and the dissipated”: Haskins, 194.

154 “The purge continues”: Dingler To Charles, Apr. 1, 1884, quoted in Edgar-Bonnet, 182.

155 “It was put into [their heads]”: Dingler to Charles, Oct. 5, 1884, ibid., 183.

155 “quadruple our efforts”: Dingler to Charles, Apr. 29, 1884, ibid., 183.

155 Dingler’s estimate: Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 205.

156–158 Slaven operations: Robinson, 150–158.

160 Photograph of Dingler’s daughter: Bibliothèque Nationale.

160 “My poor husband”: Edgar-Bonnet, 184.

160–161 “I cannot thank you enough”: ibid.

161 “love for the great task undertaken”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 36.

162 Illegitimate birth of Bunau-Varilla: Archives of the École Polytechnique, Paris.

163 “As an officer runs to it”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 44–45.

163–164 Costly expenditures: Nelson, 235.

163 “a kind of miniature Bois de Boulogne”: Chambre des Députés, Rapport, Vol. 1, 451; also Mack, 344.

163–164 Search For tribe of giants: Mack, 344.

164–165 “No one can appreciate more than these men”: Rogers, 57.

165–166 Recollections of S. W. Plume: Hearings, H.R. 3110.

166–167 Geological conditions: Donald F. MacDonald, “Outline of Canal Zone Geology, “in Goethals, ed., Panama Canal, Vol. 1, 67–83.

168–169 Method of excavation: Goethals, “The Dry ExcavatiOn of the Panama Canal, “ibid., 335–338; also Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 67–70.

170 “this mountain is full of gold”: quoted in Whitehead, Our Faith, 36.

170 “There is enough bureaucratic work”: Nelson, 235.

171 “the gallant employees”: Pirn, Remarks, quoted in DuVal, Mountains, 82.

171 Dingler kills horses: Bennett, 196.

172 Death for two, perhaps three, out of four French workers: Bishop, Gateway, 91.

172 Career of Sister Marie Rouleau: Archives, Compagnie des Filles de la Charité de Saint Vincent de Paul, Paris.

172 “one of those rare women”: N.Y. Tribune, Aug. 22, 1886.

173 Chief physician locked in his cabin: Mimande.

173 Bodies rolled down the embankment: N.Y. Tribune, Aug. 5, 1886.

173 “Sitting on your veranda”: ibid., Aug. 29, 1886.

173 Doctors advise staying out of the sun: ibid., Oct. 1, 1886.

174 Gauguin’s experiences: Mack, 341–342; also Perruchot, 136–140.

175–179 Prestan and Aizpuru uprisings: Bennett, 84–85; also N.Y. Times, Apr. 4, 18, 19, 22, Sept. 4, 1885; Papers on Naval Operations, 1885; Report of Commander McCalla.

180 “Men’s energies are spontaneously influenced”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 48.

7. DOWNFALL

Events leading to the demise of the canal company were covered in detail by the principal papers on both sides of the Atlantic. I have relied primarily on The New York Times, the New York Tribune, and The Times of London.

PAGE

182 De Lesseps at the Academie: Smith, 211–227.

183 “the most terrible financial disaster”: Rodrigues, iv-v.

184 “The whole thing is a humbug”: ibid., 124.

184 Storm hits Colon: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 53–56; also Panama Star & Herald, Dec. 4, 7, 8, 1885.

186 “You are for us”: Panama Star & Herald, Feb. 20, 1886.

186 “With hearts and minds like yours”: ibid.

186 “always indefatigable”: Bishop, Gateway, 83.

187 Charles “very clear headed”: Bigelow, Diary.

187 “Any homage paid”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 59.

187–188 “Till the money is secured”: Bigelow, Panama Canal.

188 “incontestable advantage”: ibid.

188 Ten times more difficult: Ernest Lambert, “Panama: The Story of a Colossal Bubble,” Forum, Mar. 1893.

189 Crawford interview: N.Y. Tribune, Mar. 30, 1886.

189 Rousseau Report: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, July 1, 1886; also Mack, 329–330.

189–190 Jacquet and Boyer views: Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 206.

190 “I am postponed”: The Times, July 13, 1886; also Siegfried, 265.

191 Baïhaut’s reputation and personal life: Brogan, 271; also Simon, 64–65.

191–192 Emily Crawford: obituary, Contemporary Review (London), Feb. 1916.

192 Salesmen converse with de Lesseps: Panama Star & Herald, Feb. 27, 1888.

192 “Soon, gentlemen, We shall meet”: N. Y. Tribune, Nov. 29, 1886.

193–194 Bunau-Varilla plan: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 79–85.

194 Eiffel engaged: The Times, Nov. 16, 1887.

194–195 New “temporary “plan: I.C.C., Report, 1899–1901, 207–208.

196 “From all information received”: Smith, 287.

196 “The ruin is getting on fine!”: Siegfried, 268.

197 “The prudence, the maturity”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 88.

198 False telegram: ibid.; also Chambre des Députés, Rapport, Vol. 1, 2073.

199 “M. Lesseps soon showed he was not dead”: Smith, 293.

       “unscrupulous audacity”: N. Y. Tribune, July 1, 1888.

199 “All France, it May be said”: Chambre des Députés, Rapport, Vol. 3, 101–102.

200 Threatens to reveal “every step”: Panama Star & Herald, Nov. 26, 1888.

200 “I appeal to all Frenchmen”: Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, Dec. 2, 1888; also Mack, 363.

200–201 Last day of the sale: Pall Mall Gazette, London Daily News, N. Y. Tribune; also Simon, 79–80.

8. THE SECRETS OF PANAMA

There is an abundance of material on the Panama scandal and the resulting trials in Mack, The Land Divided; Simon, The Panama Affair; and D. W. Brogan’s France Under the Republic; in Dansette, Les Affaires de Panamá, And in both the Smith And Courau biographies of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Again I have relied heavily on the voluminous coverage of the story in the New York And London papers. The most vivid, if something less than an objective, portrayal of the political side of the story is to be found in Leurs Figures, the novel by Maurice Barrès.

PAGE

205–206 Drumont and his impact: Byrnes; also Tuchman, 183–184.

206 “This evil doer”: Drumont, 325–326.

206 Drumont on Dingler: ibid., 362.

208 Charles describes father’s visit: Mack, 378–379.

208 “I imagined I was summoned”: Smith, 310.

209 Arthur Meyer’s motivation: Vassili, 262.

211 Barrès view: Barres, “The Panama Scandal, “Cosmopolitan, June 1894.

211 “I would stake here my honor”: Smalley, N. Y. Tribune, Nov. 22, 1892.

212 “We can with difficulty”: ibid., Nov. 23.

213–215 Career of Cornelius Herz: Simon, 183–197; also N. Y. Herald, Dec. 4, 1892; N.Y. World, Dec. 22, 23; Vizetelly, Republican France, 357–358.

215 Herz and Clemenceau: Bruun, 47–48.

215 “Everything is ranged against me”: Bertaut, 117.

217 “That fatal word”: ibid., 121.

223 Anti-Semitic rally: N.Y. Times, Jan. 7, 1893.

223 “The real France”: N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 1, 1893.

224 “Oh, I hesitated”: Harriss, 157.

225 “With as much intention”: N.Y. Times, Jan. 13,1893.

225 Barboux plea: Cour d’Appel, Barboux.

226 Sentences: ibid., Feb. 10, 1893.

226 Charles’s visit to his father: Smith, 401–402.

227 Charles a changed man: Dansette, 202; also Smith, 411.

228–229 Crawford interview with Herz: N.Y. Tribune, Feb. 12, 1893.

229 “It smells bad”: Courau, 236–237.

229 “For fifteen years”: ibid., 225.

229 “His intelligence, his ability”: Siegfried, 275.

230–231 Charles’s testimony: N.Y. Times, Mar. 9, 1893.

234 “He would not talk about it”: Hubert de Lesseps, conversations with the author.

234–235 Funeral: Times (London), Dec. 17, 1894.

235 “dancing and pirouetting”: Bishop, Gateway, 65.

236 “I will not protest”: Beatty, 309.

238 “Beautiful illusions!”: Cour d’Appel, Barboux.

239–240 “In the end one almost believed”: Siegfried, 277.

240 Money “as clean gone”: Times, Dec. 8, 1894.

240–241 Richard Harding Davis reflections: Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 11, 1896.

BOOK TWO

9. THEODORE THE SPINNER

A biography of the extraordinary John Tyler Morgan has as yet to be written. I have relied chiefly on the numerous newspaper clippings contained among his own papers and among those of Philippe Bunau-Varilla; on obituaries, the published recollections of some of his colleagues in the Senate (Cullom especially), and upon his own speeches and correspondence.

PAGE

247 “Now look! That damned cowboy”: quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, Vol. II, 380.

247 “400 percent bigger”: quoted in Lord, 1.

247 “I did not care a rap”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 357.

247 “He strode triumphant”: Steffens, 503.

248 “a stream of fresh, pure”: Sullivan, Our Times, Vol. II, 399.

248 “It is a dreadful thing”: ibid., 393.

248 “We need not tell our readers”: ibid., 404.

248 “As usual Theodore absorbed”: Adams, Letters, 365.

249 “His walk”: quoted in Keller, ed., 18.

249 “No single great material work”: Messages, 6663.

251 “drifting on the lines”: Mahan, Recollections, 274.

       unable to do knots: Puleston, 24.

251 “It is sea power”: Tuchman, 135.

252 “very much the clearest”: Morison, Letters, Vol. I, 221.

252–253 Mahan on the canal: Mahan, Influence, 33–34.

253 “I curled up on the seat opposite”: quoted in Thayer, Vol. II, 333.

253 Build the Nicaragua canal “at once”: Roosevelt to Mahan, May 3, 1897, quoted in Pringle, Roosevelt, 171.

253 “Gradually, a slight change”: Roosevelt: quoted in Autiobiography, 207.

254 “We cannot sit huddled”: quoted in Hill, 1.

254 “The Race of the Oregon”: quoted from Sullivan, Our Times, Vol. I, 456.

255 “I saw first a mast”: Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World, 1900 (Dover reprint, 1956), 264.

255 “By that experience”: Sullivan, ibid., 456.

255 “For after all”: Mahan, Recollections, 200.

255 “I wish to see”: quoted in Beale, 81.

256 “great achievement”: quoted in Leech, 508.

256 “no one out of a madhouse”: quoted in Beale, 104.

257 “You can imagine”: ibid., 102–103.

257 “I do not see why”: Bishop, Roosevelt, Vol. I, 144.

257 “fraught with very great mischief”: Roosevelt to Hay, Feb. 18, 1900, quoted in Thayer, Vol. II, 339–340.

257 “If that canal”: ibid.

257 “filthy newspaper abuse”: ibid., 229.

258 “We must bear the atmosphere of the hour”: ibid., 228.

258 “I have hideous forebodings”: Hay to Adams, July 11, 1901, quoted in Thayer, Vol. II, 263.

258 “young fellow of infinite dash”: Hay to Lady Jeune, Sept. 14, 1901, ibid., 266.

258 “modest withal”: Jusserand, 262.

258 “Oh, dear little Mr. Hay”: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, conversation with the author.

258 “the most delightful man to talk to”: Roosevelt to Lodge, Jan. 28, 1909, quoted in Pringle, Roosevelt, 243.

259 Signing of the treaty: N.Y. Times, Nov. 19, 1901.

259 Panama never mentioned in prior speeches: Pringle, Roosevelt, 302.

259 “You know the high regard”: Roosevelt to Morgan, Oct. 5, 1901, Morison, Letters, Vol. Ill, 161.

260 “Senator Morgan was an extraordinary man”: Cullom, 348.

262 “a job which disgusted France”: Pringle, Roosevelt, 303.

264 Walker delivers the report: Panama Star & Herald, Dec. 3, 1901.

264 Hearst releases report: N.Y. Journal, Nov. 21, 22.

265 “gumshoe campaign”: N.Y. Times, Dec. 8, 1901.

265 “I haven’t heard a brush crack”: ibid.

265–266 Paris stockholders’ meeting: ibid., Dec. 22.

266 Commission’s appraisal of French holdings: Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 171–175.

266 “It put things”: Hearings, H.R. 3110.

267 Oval Office meeting: Story of Panama, 166.

267 Morgan goes to the White House: N.Y. Times, Jan. 17, 1902.

267 Inventory of French property: I.C.C., Report, 1899–1901, “Supplementary Report,” 673–681.

268 “All the objections shown”: N.Y. Herald, Jan. 30, 1902.

268 Courier-Journal response: Jan. 28, clipping, Morgan papers.

268 “Talk about buying a lawsuit”: reprinted, Panama Star & Herald, Feb. 22, 1902.

269 “no mean nor grasping spirit”: N.Y. Times, Jan. 20, 1902.

10. THE LOBBY

My chief sources here have been the Bunau-Varilla papers. Bunau-Varilla’s own published accounts (particularly his Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection), and the voluminous transcript of hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the document known as The Story of Panama.

PAGE

270 “In the course of a very active”: Story of Panama, 207.

270 “The first bugle-note”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 174–175.

271 eyes “as clear as a baby’s”; complexion: N.Y. World, Oct. 4, 1908.

271 the look of a clever drama student: oil portrait in the Wall Street offices of Sullivan & Cromwell.

271 delight in mysterious reputation: Arthur H. Dean (Sullivan & Cromwell), conversation with the author.

271 “the most dangerous man”: Story of Panama, 61–62.

271 “No life insurance agent could beat him”: N.Y. World, Oct. 4, 1908.

271–272 “Accidents don’t happen”: Arthur H. Dean, conversation with the author.

272 Cromwell background: Dean, Cromwell.

272 “skills unusual to lawyers”: Dean, Cromwell.

273 $800,000 fee rendered: Story of Panama, 141.

274 Influence on McKinley concerning I.C.C. appointments: ibid., 152, 227.

274 Cromwell “ready at all times to assist”: Isthmian Canal Commission, Report, 1899–1901, 14; also Story of Panama, 228; personal Diary, 1899, George S. Morison.

275 Materials assembled for the commission: a complete set of all the maps, reports, and other documents is included among the George S. Morison papers.

275 The elegant Pavilion Paillard, now called the Pavilion Élysée, is still in business and little changed.

275 personalized menus: one survives among the Alfred Noble papers.

275 “a very fine lunch”: Diary, 1899, Morison papers.

276 “kept in constant. . . communication”: Story of Panama, 231.

277 “At every turn of my steps”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 177.

278 “When I came to know him”: Mitchell, 343.

278 Morison view of Bunau-Varilla: Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Feb. 1903.

278 a mistake to underrate this man: Noble to Morgan, Apr. 8, 1901, Morgan papers.

278 Bunau-Varilla’s English: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, conversation with the author.

278 “He didn’t just come into a room”: ibid.

278 “Every phase of the canal question”: Mitchell, 345.

279 “a sort of resourceful energy”: N.Y. Sun, Mar. 19, 1903.

279 “father-son relationship”: Clapp, 307.

279 Bunau-Varilla’s Russian escapade: Panama, 145–151; also “Russia and the Panama Canal,” Review of Reviews, June 1904.

280 Bigelow letter: Nov. 9, 1898, Bunau-Varilla papers.

280 “Our conferences were long and frequent”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 166.

280 Pavey recollection: Story of Panama, 5.

281 Involvement in the Dreyfus case: Dreyfus, 112.

281 “When My three eminent new friends”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 166.

281 “The fight to a finish”: ibid., 174.

281 “We have not forgotten”: William Watts Taylor to Bunau-Varilla, Dec. 13, 1900, Bunau-Varilla papers.

282 “Every time I was in need”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 177.

282 “Everything has been done for Philippe”: A. C. Baker to Pavey, Feb. 7, 1901, Bunau-Varilla papers.

282 Cincinnati speech: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 179.

282 Note and drawing from daughter: Mar. 1902, Bunau-Varilla papers.

282 “intensity of conviction”: William Watts Taylor to Bunau-Varilla, no date, Bunau-Varilla papers.

284 “Never did a more propitious occasion”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 181.

284 “This French engineer”: Boston Herald, Jan. 26, 1901.

284 “He lectured before 250”: Baker to Pavey, Feb. 7, 1901, Bunau-Varilla papers.

285 Expenditures: Bunau-Varilla papers.

285 “Open any dictionary”: Bunau-Varilla, Nicaragua, 31.

286 Replies from Hay and Walker: Bunau-Varilla papers.

286 “Towards midnight”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 184–185.

286 “Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, you have convinced me”: ibid., 186–187.

287 Hanna’s opinion was McKinley’s “own”: ibid., 187.

287 Bunau-Varilla’s account of the scene: ibid., 187–188.

288 Method of organizing the Compagnie Nouvelle: I.C.C., Report, 1899–1901, 213; also Mack, 406–408.

289 Bunau-Varilla the creation of the Seligmans: This is the theory offered by Stephen Birmingham in “Our Crowd.” when I wrote to ask Mr. Birmingham what his sources were, he replied that he could not remember.

289–290 Footnote: Life, June 19, 1939.

290 “servants to wait on the servants”: Mme. Hervé Alphand, conversation with the author.

290 Origins of family fortune remain a mystery: Mme. Hervé Alphand and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, II, conversations with the author.

290 “An active go-between”: Story of Panama, 13.

291 $60,000 donation from Cromwell: ibid., 70–71.

291 A strong case for why $60,000 could never have “fixed” Hanna is made by Miner, 102–103.

291–292 Walker letter: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 205–206.

292 Walker sees Cromwell: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 240–241.

292 Bunau-Varilla returns: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 207.

292–293 Wellman message: Bunau-Varilla papers.

293 Bunau-Varilla’s answer: ibid.

293 Bunau-Varilla meets with Bo: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 209.

293 Cables sent Jan. 3: Bunau-Varilla papers.

294 Cromwell reinstated: Story of Panama, 244–246.

294 Terms of reinstatement: ibid., 245.

11. AGAINST ALL ODDS

The testimony of Admiral Walker and others is quoted directly from the published transcript, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals on H.R. 3110. The speeches of Morgan and Hanna on the Senate floor are from the Congressional Record (57th Cong., 1st Sess.).

PAGE

315 Reaction at Brooklyn dinner: N.Y. Times, Mar. 16, 1902.

316 Pelée disaster: ibid., May 9, 10, 12, 19, 28; also Lately Thomas, “Prelude to Doomsday,” American Heritage, Aug. 1961.

316 “What an unexpected turn”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 228.

317 “He greatly prefers”: Hay to Morgan, Mav 12, 1902, quoted in Thayer, Vol. II, 302.

320 “Ladies and diplomats”: Beer, 265.

320 “He has a mass of material”: telegram, June 3, 1902, Bunau-Varilla papers.

321 “This plain old person”: Beer, 265.

322 “Mais, il est formidable!”: ibid.

323 “It was absolutely necessary”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 246.

324 Hanna claims forty-five votes: N.Y. Times, June 11.

324 Outcome: ibid., June 20.

326 Morison letter of Dec. 10: Morison papers.

326–327 Career and character of Morison: Morison papers; also Morison, George Shattuck Morison; Elting E. Morison, conversations with the author.

326 “There is a kind of man”: Morison, Morison, 19.

327 “I hate to eat My lunch”: Fullerton L. Waldo, “An Engineer’s Life in the Field on the Isthmus,” Engineering Magazine, Dec. 1905.

328 “Make way for the canal!”: June 27, 1902.

12. ADVENTURE BY TRIGONOMETRY

The primary source for Bunau-Varilla’s activities is Bunau-VariUa; still, it should be stressed that there is little or nothing in the rest of the surviving record to lead one to dispute or doubt his version of the story to any serious degree. Nor did others involved (such as Cromwell or Loomis) issue denials or contrary accounts following publication of Bunau-Varilla’s Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection in 1920.

The finest overall study of the struggle between the Colombian ministers and the State Department, and of the Marroquin regime, is Dwight C. Miner’s The Fight for the Panama Route.

PAGE

329 Concha in a strait jacket: Dennis, 314.

329–330 “new impelling force”: Thayer, Vol. II, 297.

331 “The desire to make themselves appear”: Story of Panama, 192.

331 Concha “subject to great nervous excitement”: Hart to Hay, Nov. 3, State Department Dispatches from Colombia, Vol. 50; also Miner, 182.

331 Concha’s “conscience”: quoted in Miner, 184.

332 Hay ultimatum: ibid., 195.

332 “waking from a horrible nightmare”: quoted in DuVal, Cadiz, 207.

332 Morgan proposes sixty amendments: Story of Panama, 273.

333 Raúl Perez article: “A Colombian view of the Panama Question,” North American Review, July 1903.

333 “Without question”: State Department Dispatches from. Colombia, Vol. 59; also Miner, 249.

333 “the whole document is favorable”: quoted in Pringle, Roosevelt, 310–311.

333 “urbane, dignified manners”: Dictionary of American Biography.

334 June 9 message to Beaupre: Hill, 53.

334 “an aggressiveness rarely found”: ibid., 48.

336 “An impartial investigation”: quoted in Freehoff, 43.

337 “You want to be very careful, Theodore”: quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, Vol.II, 319.

339 Gap in Cromwell files: Arthur H. Dean, conversation with the author.

339 Cullom interview: N.Y. Herald, Aug. 15, 1903.

340 “Those contemptible little creatures”: Roosevelt to Hay, July 14, 1903, quoted in Pringle, Roosevelt, 311.

340 “I would come at once”: Dennis, 342–343.

340 “We may have to give a lesson”: Roosevelt to Hay, Aug. 17, quoted in Pringle, Roosevelt, 311.

340 Adee cautions: Adee to Hay, Aug. 18, Hay papers.

340 “We are very sorry”: Adee to Hay, Aug. 19, Hay papers.

340 “It seems that the great bulk”: Roosevelt to Hay, Aug. 19, Morison, Letters, Vol. III, 567.

341 “It will, doubtless, be a surprise”: N.Y. Herald, Aug. 29.

343 Cromwell ready to “go the limit”: Story of Panama, 349.

343 “the responsible person”: ibid., 348.

343–344 Amador’s code: ibid., 358–359.

345 Poker en route: ibid., 359.

345 Hay gives Duque promise of American assistance: ibid., 360.

346 Cromwell made “a thousand offers”: ibid., 362.

346 “I was to go to Washington”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 291.

347 “Disappointed”: Story of Panama, 364.

347 “We can never know too much”: Allan Nevins, in the introduction to Nicholas Roosevelt’s Theodore Roosevelt, vii.

347 “The warning I gave”: quoted in Miner, 349.

347 Corinne Robinson recollection: Hagedorn, 177.

348 “It is for you to decide”: quoted in Miner, 351.

       Roosevelt’s reply: ibid.

348 “No one can tell”: Roosevelt to Taft, Sept. 15, Morison, Letters, Vol. III, 598.

348 “When I make up my mind”: quoted in Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 64–65.

349 “I naturally took advantage”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 289.

349 “With your imprudence”: ibid., 291.

350 “Tell me what are your hopes”: ibid., 292.

350 “Had I the moral right”: ibid., 302–303.

350–351 Meeting and exchange with Roosevelt: ibid., 310–312.

351 “Nothing was said”: Loomis to Roosevelt, Jan. 5, 1904, quoted in DuVal, Cadiz, 299.

351 “Of course I have no idea”: Roosevelt to Bigelow, Jan. 6, 1904, Morison, Letters, Vol. III, 689.

352 “Bunau-Varilla was up over Sunday”: quoted in Clapp, 313.

353 “Never before was this problem”: Cromwell to Roosevelt, Oct. 14, 1903, quoted in DuVal, Cadiz, 303.

354 “But we shall not be caught napping”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 318.

354 “’There is not a fruit nor a grain’”: Davis, Captain Macklin, 197–198.

355 Bunau-Varilla’s reaction to the interview: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 318–319.

355–356 Mission of Captain Humphrey and Lieutenant Murphy; meeting with Roosevelt: Miner, 353–354; also Story of Panama, 367–368; Pringle, Roosevelt, 321.

356 Bunau-Varilla demands that he represent the new republic: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 320–321.

357 Telegram provided by Bunau-Varilla: ibid., 324.

358 “The plan seems to me good”: Story of Panama, 71.

358 Telegram from “Smith”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 328.

358 “It was not information”: ibid., 329.

359 “If I succeeded”: ibid.

359 “The words I had heard”: ibid., 331.

359 “My only reply to such critics”: ibid., 333.

360 “The United States gunboat”: N.Y. Times, Nov. 1, 1903.

13. REMARKABLE REVOLUTION

The Story of Panama: Hearings on the Rainey Resolution before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives is the source for what transpired at Panama during the course of the revolution, almost minute by minute. It includes Cromwell’s plea for fees, a lengthy statement by Bunau-Varilla, the log kept by Commander Hubbard, and, most im portant, the testimony of Henry N. Hall, of the New York World. Hall had been assigned by the World to investigate every facet of the revolution–who did what, when, both in Panama and in Washington and New York–in preparation for the subsequent Roosevelt-World lawsuit. The Story of Panama runs to 736 pages.

PAGE

361 “It was a remarkable revolution”: Fifty Years, 383.

362 “You are an old man”: Story of Panama, 379.

363 $35,000 payoff for Varon: ibid., 382, 445.

364 “Have just wired you”: ibid., 386.

365 Stratagem and Sehora Amador: ibid., 387.

365 Personality and background of Shaler: N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 2, 1904.

366 “I pointed out to him”: Story of Panama, 388.

366–367 Hubbard’s orders: Diplomatic History, 362.

367 Hubbard’s return cable: ibid., 365.

367–368 Mission of Aminta Melendez: Aminta Melendez, conversation with the author; also Story of Panama, 389–390.

368 “If you will aid us”: ibid., 390.

368–369 Payoffs to soldiers, $65,000 for Huertas: ibid., 382, 447, 459.

369 “There was nothing that did not show”: ibid., 390.

370 Footnote: ibid., 391.

370 “Generals, you are My prisoners”: ibid., 394.

371 Ehrman’s cable: ibid., 395.

372 Meléndez and Torres at the hotel bar: ibid., 441.

373 “The world is astounded”: ibid., 446–447.

374 “We have the money! We are free!”: ibid.

374 “You must understand”: ibid., 450–451.

374 “I answered SeNor Amador”: ibid.

375 Arrival of Dixie; Torres payoff, ibid., 456–457.

376 Marines land: ibid., 458; also Lejeune, 155.

376 Checks On BrandOn bank: Story of Panama, 462.

377 Reply From Washington: ibid., 463–464.

377 Cleveland On sovereignty: Message to Congress, Dec. 1885, quoted in Freehoff, 158.

377 Seward statement: Miner, 168.

377–378 Fish statement: Freehoff, 234–235.

378 Two cables ordering Hubbard to take the railroad: Story of Panama, 440.

378 “Uprising On Isthmus reported”: ibid., 393.

379 Taft view: Pringle, Taft, Vol. I, 281.

379–380 “I did not consult Hay”: Thayer, Vol. II, 328.

380 CivilizatiOn to the “waste places”: quoted in Beale, 76.

380 “We have no choice”: ibid., 159.

380 “covenant running with the land”: memorandum written by Oscar Straus, Nov. 6, 1903, quoted in Morison, Letters, Vol. III, 648–649, fn.

381 “It is reported We have made a revolution”: quoted in Jusserand, 253.

381 “act of sordid conquest”: N.Y. Times, Nov. 5, 1903.

381 “oppression habitual. . . our Government was bound”: Bishop, Roosevelt, Vol. 1, 294–295.

381–382 Message to Congress: House Doc. No. 1 (58th Cong., 2nd Sess.).

382 “We did our duty”: Outlook, Oct. 7, 1911. Colombia not a “responsible” power: Roosevelt to W. R. Thayer, July 2, 1915, quoted in Thayer, Vol. II, 327.

382 “the exercise of intelligent forethought”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 508.

382 “most important action”: ibid., 512.

382 “our course was straight-forward”: ibid., 524.

382–383 “Some of our greatest scholars”: Hay to Professor George P. Fisher (Yale), Jan. 20, 1904, quoted in Thayer, Vol. II, 323.

383 Knox remark: Jessup, Vol. I, 404. Root view: ibid., 404–405.

       Root view: ibid., 404–405.

383–384 Berkeley speech: San Francisco Examiner, Mar. 24, 1911; also DuVal, Cadiz, 438.

384 “because Bunau-Varill a brought it. . . On a silver platter”: Bunau-Varilla, Great Adventure, 34.

386 “By refusing to allow Colombia”: Hill, 68.

14. ENVOY EXTRA ORDINARY

PAGE

387 “I had fulfilled My mission”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 429.

388 “the same fatal germs”: ibid., 357.

388 “Against my work”: ibid., 352–353, 358.

388 “So long as I am here, Mr. Secretary”: ibid., 358.

388 “I am officially informed”: ibid., 359.

388 “to proceed in everything strictly in accord with them”: ibid., 360.

390 “What do you think, Mr. Minister”: ibid., 366.

390 “I think, Mr. President”: ibid.

390 “Doubtless M. Bunau-Varilla”: N.Y. Times, Nov. 14, 1903.

391 Pavey “corrected”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 369.

391 “It was with anxiety”: ibid., 372.

391 “I cannot refrain”: ibid., 373.

392 “As for your poor old dad”: Thayer, Vol. II, 318.

392 Davis letter: Nov. 15, 1903, Hay papers.

392 “very satisfactory, vastly advantageous”: Hay to Spooner, quoted in Dennis, 341.

393 wording of Article III: Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, National Archives; also quoted in full in DuVal, Cadiz, 476–486.

394 “You see that from a practical standpoint”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 376.

394 “I had not a long time to think it over”: ibid., 377.

394 “We separated not without emotion”: ibid. Bunau-Varilla’s greeting at the station: ibid., 378.

395 Boyd said to strike Bunau-Varilla: Aminta Melendez, conversation with the author.

397 “This time I hit the mark”: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 384.

397 Senator Money’s speech: ibid., 427.

397 “The debates will be long and heated”: quoted in DuVal, Cadiz, 407.

397 Opposition “pretty well over”: Roosevelt to Theodore, Jr., Feb. 10, 1904, Morison, Letters, Vol. IV, 724.

397–398 Hérran departs “with crushed spirits”: quoted in DuVal, Cadiz, 418.

401 Bunau-Varilla’s rush of private thoughts: Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 429.

401 Departing words to Hay: ibid.

BOOK THREE

15. THE IMPERTURBABLE DR. GORGAS

Material on the family background of Dr. Gorgas and on his early career has been drawn almost entirely from the biography William Crawford Gorgas, written by his wife Marie D. Gorgas and her collaborator, Burton J. Hendrick. Accounts of Gorgas’ work in Cuba can also be found in the first volume of Mark Sullivan’s Our Times and in Joseph Bucklin Bishop’s The Panama Gateway. The excellent sketches of Walter Reed, Surgeon General Sternberg, Carlos Finlay, and Henry Rose Carter in the Dictionary of American Biography have been of particular value.

PAGE

405 “The world requires”: Memoirs.

405 “It is all unspeakably loathsome”: N.Y. Tribune, Feb. 4, 1904.

405 “There is nothing in the nature of the work”: ibid., Jan. 23, 1904.

406 “As you know”: Roosevelt to Walker, Feb. 24, 1904, Morison, Letters, Vol. IV, 738.

406 seven members required: Spooner Act, Sec. 7; also Miner, 411.

407 “We passed through a room”: quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, Vol. I, 458.

408 “What this nation will insist upon”: Instructions to the Isthmian Canal Commission, Morison, Letters, Vol. IV, 746.

408 “Tell them that I am going to make the dirt fly”: Nation, Nov. 23, 1905.

408 Footnote: Roosevelt to Taft, May 9, 1904, Morison, Letters, Vol. IV, 786.

410 “The door is unlocked”: Ross, Memoirs, 301.

411 “not. . . a life to look forward to”: Gorgas and Hendrick, 53.

411 “I am not much of a doctor”: Martin, 61.

412 “more than an education in medicine”: Gorgas and Hendrick, 60.

415 “For the first time since English occupation”: quoted in Ross, Memoirs, 453.

416 “It is hardly an exaggeration to say”: Gorgas and Hendrick, 151.

416 Bessie Murdock’s recollection: “Ancon Hospital in 1904 and 1905,” Society of the Chagres, Yearbook, 1913.

417 “Men who achieve greatness”: Martin, 62.

419 “If we can control malaria”: Gorgas, article prepared for Engineering Record, May 1904, Gorgas papers.

419 “It was not known how many different species”: Le Prince, 43.

419 “We had no means”: ibid., 44.

420 “The condition is very much the same”: Gorgas, article for Engineering Record, Gorgas papers.

420 Study of mosquitoes in the wards: Le Prince, 21–22.

421 Gorgas told to use the mails: Gorgas and Hendrick, 151–152.

422 Walker’s views on mosquito theory: ibid., 162–164.

423 “. . . whether we build the canal”: Pepperman, 54.

423 Davis response: Gorgas and Hendrick, 164–165.

423 “That persistence”: ibid., 152.

424 “. . . Dr. Carter was on hand to greet us”: ibid., 154.

424 “There is an alluring something”: ibid., 155–156.

424 “We were on a high point”: ibid., 156–159.

425 “Old rusted French beds”: Bessie Murdock, “Ancon Hospital in 1904 and 1905,” Society of the Chagres, Yearbook, 1913; also quoted in Pepperman, 228–230.

425 “One straight-backed chair”: Canal Record, Sept. 11, 1907.

425 “He bowed to the man, shook his hand”: Dr. Victor Heiser, conversation with the author.

426 “He loved especially the adventure stories”: Mrs. Aileen Gorgas Wrightson, conversation with the author.

426 Ross meets Gorgas, goes to Panama: Ross, Memoirs, 492–493.

16. PANIC

PAGE

439 Commission approval of employees at $1,800 or more: Pepperman, 48.

439 Six vouchers for a handcart: ibid,, 50.

439 Carpenters forbidden to cut ten-foot boards: John Foster Carr, “The Chief Engineer and His Work, “Outlook, June 2, 1906.

439 Paper work for payroll: Pepperman, 49.

439 Incident of the hinges: Bates, 30; also Cameron, 120.

440 Abandoned French equipment and parts: F. L. Waldo, “The Present Status of the Panama Canal,” Engineering (London), Mar. 15, 1907.

440 “One cannot spend much time”: Lindsay Denison, “Making Good at Panama,” Everybody’s, May 1906.

440 “They showed skill”: John Foster Carr, “The Chief Engineer and His Work, “Outlook, June 2, 1906.

441 “One appreciated more and more”: Eugene P. Lyle, Jr., “The Real Conditions at Panama,” World’s Work, Nov. 1905.

442 Wallace claim to have had a “regular system” in mind: Wallace testimony, Mar. 20, 1906, Hearings. . . an Investigation.

443 “fighting becomes a righteous duty”: Stevens, “The Panama Canal,” A.S.C.E., Transactions, XCI, 949. Wallace and handwritten reports: DuVal, Mountains, 148.

443 “One young man came down”: Karner, 24.

444 “The beginnings of the force”: Wood, 17.

444 “Nothing was said as to how I came to be there”: Frank B. Maltby, “In at the Start at Panama,” Civil Engineering, June 1945.

445 “the cost of explosives, cost of loosening”: Wallace, “Building the Foundations,” in Bennett, 190–191.

445 U.S. has no imperialist designs: Pringle ,Taft, Vol. I, 280–281.

446 Taft wants to revise the I.C.C., wants sea-level canal: ibid., 282.

446 Taft impressed by Wallace: Taft testimony, Apr. 19, 1906, Hearings. . . an Investigation.

446 Wallace has chair reinforced for Taft: Karner, 75.

447 “very superior man”: Davis to Taft, Jan. 6, 1905, quoted in DuVal, Mountains, 151.

447 Wallace and the atmosphere of the old Dingler house: Wallace, “Building the Foundations,” in Bennett, 195–196; also Karner, 13–14.

447 First case of yellow fever: Le Prince, 275. Cases in December, January, on the Boston: ibid., 276.

448 Death of Philip G. Eastwick: Panama Star & Herald, Jan. 30, 1905.

449 Davis calls press stories “cruelly exaggerated”: ibid., Feb. 20, 1905.

450 Remarks by will Schaefer: ibid., Feb. 13,1905.

451 Wallace in Harper’s Weekly: ibid., May 29,1905.

451 “ill-paid, over-worked, ill-housed”: Magoon to Shonts, June 13, 1905, I.C.C. Records.

451 Death of architect Johnson: Panama Star & Herald, May 15, 1905.

451 “ending of many a bright young man”: quoted in DuVal, Mountains, 176.

451 Embittered nurse’s views: N.Y. Tribune, July 6,1905.

451 “A white man’s a fool”: Panama Star & Herald, July 17, 1905.

451 “A feeling of alarm”: Isthmian Canal Commission, Annual Report for 1905, 30.

452 Men feel “doomed”: Gorgas, Sanitation, 154.

452 Gorgas calls for old newspapers: Karner, 69–70.

454 “To say the least”: Panama Star & Herald, June 26,1905.

454 Outbreak of plague: I.C.C., Annual Report for 1905, 35–38.

455 “complicated business”: Wallace to Taft, June 5, 1905, quoted in Pepperman, 109.

455 Magoon to Taft: June 11,1905, ibid., 111–14.

455 Second Magoon letter: June 13, 1905, ibid., 115.

456 “This action, of course”: quoted in Johnson, Four Centuries, 312.

456 “Mr. Wallace, I am inexpressibly disappointed”: quoted in Pepperman, 118.

457 “For mere lucre”: ibid., 121–123.

457 Press reaction: Panama Star & Herald, July 31, 1905.

457–458 Wallace claims to have had yellow fever: “Building the Foundations,” in Bennett, 199.

458 Wallace dislike of Cromwell, claim he stepped aside for others better qualified: Wallace testimony, Feb. 5, 1906, Hearings. . . an Investigation.

458 “thorough case of fright”: Stevens to Taft, Mar. 22, 1906, I.C.C. Records.

17. JOHN STEVENS

No one who studies the American effort at Panama can fail to admire John Stevens, of whom a full-scale biography has still to be written. In addition to the sources cited, I have been aided by conversations and/or correspondence with William Russell and Richard H. Whitehead, who knew Stevens personally, by his son, John F. Stevens, Jr., and his granddaughter, Mrs. John U. Hawks. The remarks and observations attributed to Frank Maltby are from a series of four articles that he wrote for Civil Engineering (June, July, August, and September 1945) under the title “In at the Start at Panama.”

PAGE

459 “pose and draw a salary”: Pringle, Roosevelt, 262.

459 “Mr. Hill told the President”: John F. Stevens, Jr., Speech before the Panama Canal Society, Washington, May 19, 1951.

460 Wallace refuses Stevens’ invitation to talk: Stevens to Taft, Mar. 22, 1906, I.C.C. Records.

460 Stevens confers with wife: John F. Stevens, Jr., Speech.

461 “I became tough and hard”: Marion T. Colley, “Stevens Has Blasted His way Across America,” American Magazine, Feb. 1926.

461 “With respect to supermen”: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 44.

462 “He is always in the right place”: John Foster Carr, “The Chief Engineer and His Work, “Outlook, June 2, 1906.

462 “diplomacy. . . unfit to exercise”: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 36.

462 Things in a “devil of a mess”: Stevens, “Panama Canal,” A.S.C.E., Transactions, XCI.

462 “buttle like hell”: ibid.

462 Shonts’s press conference: N.Y. Tribune, July 15, 1905.

462 Taft cable to Magoon: June 30, 1905,1.C.C. Records.

422–463 “about as discouraging a proposition”: Stevens, “The Truth of History,” in Bennett, 210.

463 “scared out of their boots”: Stevens testimony, Jan. 16, 1906, Hearings . . . an Investigation.

463 “I found no organization”: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 44.

463 Exchange of views on Magoon’s veranda: Pepperman, 132–136.

464 “There are three diseases in Panama”: Bishop, Goethals, 133.

464 “A collision has its good points”: Isthmian Canal Commission, Annual Report for 1905, 121.

465 “The digging is the least thing”: quoted in Eugene P. Lyle, “The Real Conditions at Panama,” World’s Work, Nov. 1905.

465 “regardless of clamor or criticism”: Stevens to Taft, Mar. 22, 1906, I.C.C. Records.

466 $90,000 for screening: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 45–46.

466 Supplies ordered: Minutes of Meetings, 1906.

466–467 “. . . a man was reported ill”: I.C.C, Annual Report of 1905, 32.

467 “Like probably many others”: Stevens, “Panama Canal,” A.S.C.E., Transactions, XCI.

467 Roosevelt’s reply to Welch: Gorgas and Hendrick, 198.

467–468 Advice of Dr. Lambert: ibid., 198–202; also Hagedorn, 240–242.

468 Gorgas’ tribute to Shonts: Pepperman, 6–7.

468 Gorgas’ tribute to Stevens: Gorgas, Sanitation, 155.

468 “The fact is that you are the only one”: Gorgas to Stevens, Apr. 17, 1914, quoted in Stevens, “Panama Canal,” A.S.C.E., Transactions, XCI.

469 Hill dictum: Dictionary of American Biography.

469 “Personally, I have always felt grateful”: Wood, 19–20.

470 “Now I would liken that [French] plant”: Stevens, Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers, 1906.

473 Different specialties wanted: Minutes of Meetings, 1906.

474 Outlook writer’s view: John Foster Carr, “The Silver Men,” Outlook, May 19, 1906.

475 Correspondent’s account of recruiting in Barbados: Edwards, 29.

476 Martinique workers forced ashore: I.C.C, Annual Report for 1905, 56.

476 “I load cement”: Albert Banister in Reminiscences.

477 “and never forget our ice cream”: George H. Martin, ibid.

477 –478 “The West Indian, while slow”: R. E. Wood, “The Working Force of the Panama Canal,” in Goethals, ed., Panama Canal, Vol. I, 199.

478 Goethals sees only chaos: Panama Star & Herald, Mar. 19, 1907.

478 Funds for baseball fields: William Russell, conversation with the author.

479 “There is no element of mystery”: I.C.C., Annual Report for 1905, 120.

480 Stevens observations to Shonts: Dec. 19, 1905,1.C.C. Records.

483 Views of Chairman Davis: Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers, 1906.

484 “Danger to ships in a canal”: ibid.

485 Stevens’ refusal to endorse any plan: ibid.

485–486 Stevens’ argument for lock plan: quoted in Engineer’s Recollections, 41.

486 “Yes, if it is absolutely safe”: Stevens’ testimony, Jan. 23, 1906, Hearings. . . an Investigation.

486 “If we had [had] you on our side”: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 42.

487 “a peculiar personal interest”: Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers, 1906.

487 “The one great problem”: DuVal, Mountains, 206.

488 “I never regard difficulties”: Hart, 287.

18. THE MAN WITH THE SUN IN HIS EYES

PAGE

490 “And never did a President”: The Future in America, 250.

490 Stevens and Huckleberry Finn: Roosevelt to George Otto Tre velyan, Jan. 22, 1906, Morison, Letters, Vol. V, 137.

490–491 “You all know damn well”: quoted in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal,” Morison, Letters, Vol. VI, Appendix, 1547.

491 Stevens’ Aug. 5 letter to Roosevelt: quoted in Stevens, “The Truth of History,” in Bennett, 222.

493 “Mother and I walk briskly”: Roosevelt to Kermit, Nov. 11, 1906, Morison, Letters, Vol. V, 495.

493 “It would have been impossible”: Special Message, 4.

494 Panama declaration: quoted in DuVal, Mountains, 232–233.

494–495 Gorgas and Roosevelt disappear: Gorgas and Hendrick, 206–207.

495 Speeches of Amador and Roosevelt: Panama Star & Herald, Nov. 19, 1906.

495 “He seemed obsessed”: Maltby, “In at the Start at Panama,” Civil Engineering, Sept. 1945.

496 “I have blisters on both feet”: ibid.

498 Roosevelt’s description of Culebra Cut: Roosevelt to Kermit, Nov. 20, 1906, Morison, Letters, Vol. V, 497–498.

498–499 Wells’s response to Niagara dynamos: Future in America, 54–55.

499 Wells’s exchange with Roosevelt: ibid.

499 –500 “We saw him. . . on the end of the train”: Hardeveld, 78.

500 “It is a stupendous work”: Roosevelt, Special Message, 28.

500 “No man can see”: ibid., 15.

500 Message “a corker”: Gorgas and Hendrick, 210.

500–501 Health figures: all from Roosevelt, Special Message, Appendix II.

502 “The least satisfactory feature”: Roosevelt to Shonts, Nov. 27, 1906, Morison, Letters, Vol. V, 504.

503 Roosevelt finds Stevens “impossible to get on with”: Roosevelt to Richard Rogers Bowker, ibid., 629.

503–504 Stevens’ letter of Jan. 30: I.C.C. Records.

505 “If he were a drinking man”: Roosevelt to Richard Rogers Bowker, Mar. 22, 1907, Morison, Letters, Vol. V, 630.

505 “Don’t talk, dig”: Panama Star & Herald, Mar. 1, 1907.

505 “. . . I think he has broken down”: quoted in Bishop, Goethals, 151.

505 “He was not a quitter”: Maltby, “In at the Start at Panama,” Civil Engineering, Sept. 1945.

505–506 Josephus Daniels’theory: Wilson Era, 214.

506 “I’ve just been easing my mind”: Edwards, 495.

506 “The reasons for the resignation”: Stevens, “Panama Canal,” A.S.GE., Transactions, XCI.

506 “well-planned and well-built machine”: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 52.

506 “The hardest problems were solved”: Stevens, “Panama Canal.”

508 Roosevelt’s speech at Colon: quoted in Special Message, Appendix I

509 “What a hell of a life”: R. H. Whitehead, conversation with the author.

509 “He did not amuse himself”: Mrs. Thomas Goethals, conversation with the author.

510 “savage eyes”: Longworth, Crowded Hours, 182–183.

510 Taft, only clean fat man: Mrs. Thomas Goethals, conversation with the author.

510 Summons from the White House: Bishop, Goethals, 141.

510 “He entered at once”: ibid., 143.

510 “He [Roosevelt] expressed regret”: ibid., 144.

511 “command the removal of a mountain”: ibid., 239.

511 “It will be a position of ample remuneration”: quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, Vol. I, 466.

511 “a case of just plain straight duty”: Bishop, Goethals, 149.

512 “The real builder”: ibid., 144.

512 “I believe in a strong executive”: quoted in Morison, Letters, Vol. V, xvii.

19. THE CHIEF POINT OF ATTACK

Were ic not for Goethals’ letters to his son George, included among his papers in the Library of Congress, one might mistakenly assume that he was as devoid of warmth and human emotion as his critics insisted. The letters are a window thrown open upon a sensitive and appealing inner man; for the author they were a revelation and one of the high points of the research.

PAGE

529 “The chief point of attack was”: Bishop, Gateway, 184. Yardage figures: ibid., 198, 200.

530 Scientific American illustration: issue of Nov. 9, 1912. A pyramid to top the Woolworth Building: Abbot, 135.

530 Temperature in Culebra Cut: Canal Record, Jan. 20, 1909.

530 A carload every few seconds: ibid., Apr. 1, 1908.

531 System could not be improved upon today: R. H. Whitehead, conversation with the author.

531 Burr statement: Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers; also quoted in Bishop, Gateway, 186.

531 Estimates revised: Bishop, Gateway, 185.

532 Never such affection displayed: quoted in DuVal, Mountains, 266–267.

532 Moves in with Gorgas: Goethals to G. R. Goethals, Mar. 10, 1907, Goethals papers.

532 “Army engineers, as a rule”: Goethals, “The Building of the Panama Canal,” Scribner’s, Mar. 1915.

532 “Mr. Stevens has done an amount of work”: Goethals to G. R. Goethals, Mar. 17, 1907, Goethals papers.

532–533 Suffers through “smoker”: Goethals’ recollections quoted in Bishop, Goethals, 155.

533 “. . . I am commanding the Army of Panama”: Panama Star & Herald, Mar. 19, 1907.

534 Sibert “cantankerous and hard to hold”: Goethals to G. R. Goethals, June 13, 1907, Goethals papers.

534 Morning routine: Bishop, Goethals, 227.

534 “There were only a few lights”: Edwards, 497.

535 “What the Colonel said he meant”: Edgar Young, “The Colonel Passes,” N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Feb. 5, 1928.

535 “It will help bring the outfit into line”: Goethals to G. R. Goethals, May 1, 1907, Goethals papers.

535 “Executive ability”: ibid., June 24, 1907.

535–536 “His conversation and his manners”: Gorgas and Hendrick, 218.

535 Robert Wood’s assessment: Monument, 34.

536 Whitehead view: conversation with the author.

536 Bishop report to Roosevelt: quoted in Goethals, 181.

536 Goethals has had “a veritable ‘hell of a time’ ”: ibid., 180.

537 “It wasn’t so hard”: Samuel G. Blythe, “Life in Spigotty Land,” Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 21, 1908.

537 Goethals’ Sunday-morning sessions were described by any number of reporters and visitors; among the best accounts are: Peter C. Macfarlane, “The Solomon of the Ishtmus,” Collier’s, Dec. 9, 1911; Edwards, 504.

538 “If you decide against me”: Bishop, Gateway, 295.

538 “treated like human beings”: ibid., 294.

538 “I was present at all the hearings”: Bishop, Goethals, 190.

539 “He has absolute knowledge”: ibid., 190–191.

541 “We must get up early”: West Point, 1915–16 Catalog, 5.

543 “He who did not see the Culebr a Cut”: Abbot, 210.

543 Lord Bryce remark: South America, 36.

543–544 Bishop’s description: Gateway, 185–186.

544 Night activities: “Repairing Steam Shovels, “Canal Record, Apr. 13,1910.

545 “Man die, get blow up”: Albert Banister in Reminiscences.

545 Greater amount of explosive energy than in all previous wars: Dutton, 200.

545 Million pounds of dynamite in one shipment: Canal Record, Oct. 21, 1908.

545 Aggregate depth of dynamite holes: Goethals, “Dry Excavation, “in Goethals, ed., Panama Canal, Vol. I, 350.

546 “We are having too many accidents”: Goethals to G. R. Goethals, June 13, 1907, Goethals papers.

546 “The flesh of men flew in the air”: Berisford G. Mitchellin Reminiscences.

546 Worst single disaster: Canal Record, Dec. 16, 1908.

546 sixty-eight shovels: Goethals, “Dry Excavation, “in Goethals, ed., Panama Canal, Vol. I, 351.

547 Record For single shovel: ibid., 354.

547 96,000,000 cubic yards: ibid., 384.

547 Miles of track Within the Cut: ibid., 359.

548 Handling of traffic: ibid., 357–359.

548 Dumping grounds: “Utilizing Spoil, “Canal Record, Apr. 7, 1909.

549 Volume deposited at Balboa: Goethals, “Dry Excavation, “in Goethals, ed., Panama Canal, Vol. I, 369.

549–550 DiversiOn channels a mistake: ibid., 339.

550 Cucarach a “started afresh”: Bishop, Gateway, 187.

550 “It was, in fact, a tropical glacier”: Gaillard, “Culebr a Cut and the Problem of the Slides,” Scientific American, Nov. 9, 1912.

551 “No one could say when”: Bishop, Gateway, 193–194.

551 twenty-Two slides altogether: Goethals, “Dry Excavation, “in Goethals, ed., Panama Canal, Vol. I, 377.

552 Rose van Hardeveld’s recollection: Make the Dirt Fly, 135.

552–553 National Geographic quote: “Battling the Panama Slides,” Feb. 1914.

553 “I personally would say to My fellow men”: George H. Martin in Reminiscences.

553 Sees shovel rise: Gaillard, “Culebr a Cut and the Problem of the Slides,” Scientific American, Nov. 9, 1912.

554 Angle of inclinatiOn in 1912: Bishop, Gateway, 190.

554 “WhAt are We to do now?”: Bishop, Goethals, 208–209.

20. LIFE AND TIMES

Because the American community in Panama was a government creation from start to finish, there are endless records of every facet of daily life food, housing, varieties of entertainment, health, job efficiency. The body of documentary material on this one subject alone would be enough for several scholarly theses. Moreover, a vast photographic record was made of that now vanished community, a record from which I have drawn again and again for this account.

PAGE

555–556 Observations by the Outlook reporter: Edwards, 48–50.

556 “A more healthy, well-to-do and companionable group”: Adams, Panama Canal Zone, 6–1.

557 “standardized buildings and standardized men”: Sands, 25.

557 “Every American looked and behaved”: ibid.

557 Sands’train-window view: ibid., 27.

558 “It is as if each were individually proud”: Franck, 225.

559–560 Pay scale: Manual of Information, 1909; Canal Recordy May 27, 1908.

560 “In fact, everything is done”: Canal Record, Sept. 18, 1907.

561 Remembrance of Mamie Lee Kelly: Crede Calhoun, conversation with the author.

562 Winifred Ewing recollection: conversation with the author.

563 Fowler flight: John O. Collins, “The Year 1913 in Canal History,” in Society of the Chagres, Yearbook, 1913.

563 “Hot water and grit soap”: Edwards, 52.

564 Robert Worsley recollection: conversation with the author.

565 $2,500,000 expenditure: Bishop, Gateway, 279.

566 Sapphires and shark’s teeth: John Fitzgerald, conversation with the author.

566 orchids and hounds: General Edwin L. Sibert, conversation with the author.

567 New York banker on socialism and consequences: Abbot, 326–327.

567 “The marvel is”: Edwards, 571.

567 “First of all, there ain’t any democracy”: ibid.

567–568 Harry Franck on the caste system: Zone Policeman 88, 219.

568 “bull-necked, wholehearted, cast-iron fellow”: ibid., 86.

568–569 Corporal Fitzgerald’s experiences: John Fitzgerald, conversation with the author.

568 Footnote: Sands, 5; also Abbot, 235–237.

569–570 “The individuality and character”: Adams, Panama Canal Zone, 16.

570 “Goethals has created”: Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 14, 1912.

570 “Congressmen and senators”: ibid., Jan. 13, 1912.

570 Rose van Hardeveld’s recollection: Make the Dirt Fly, 100.

571 Goethals’ romantic life: R. H. Whitehead, Mrs. R. H. Whitehead, Winter Collins, conversations with the author.

571 Pro- and anti-Goethals’ factions: General Edwin L. Sibert, Katharine Harding Deeble, R. H. Whitehead, D. St. P. Gaillard, conversations with the author.

571 D. St. P. Gaillard recollection: conversation with the author.

571 Goethals’ dislike of others reported in Washington: miscellaneous newspaper clippings, Goethals papers.

572 Footnote: Gorgas and Hendrick, 217.

572 Goethals’ estimate of Gorgas as an administrator: R. H. White head, conversation with the author.

573 Goethals-Gorgas exchange: Gorgas and Hendrick, 222.

573 Whitehead opinion: conversation with the author.

574 Gaillard stricken at lunch: D. St. P. Gaillard, conversation with the author.

574 “Poor Gaillard”: Bishop, Goethals, 207.

574 “Your father has killed my husband”: Mrs. Thomas Goethals, conversation with the author.

574 Goethals and D. St. P. Gaillard do not speak: D. St. P. Gaillard, conversation with the author.

575 “that I might someday solemnly raise my hand”: Franck. 12.

576 “Even New Englanders”: ibid., 225.

576 Black teacher-pupil ratio: Canal Record, July 7, 1909.

576 “As for the man whose skin”: Franck, 221.

577 “Most of us came from our homelands”: John Butcher in Reminiscences.

578 “The visitor who saw first”: Abbot, 344–345.

578 Difference in benefits derived by black and white workers: Bishop, Gateway, 279.

579 Stevens’ view: Stevens’ testimony, Jan. 16, 1906, Hearings. . . an Investigation. 579 Amount of illiteracy: Franck, 129.

579–580 Account by Jeremiah Waisome: Reminiscences.

580 Experience of Clifford St. John: ibid.

581 Account by Edgar Simmons: ibid.

582 Figures of illness and fatalities: Isthmian Canal Commission, Annual Report, 1914, 381–391.

582 Accident figures: ibid.

582 “Some of the costs of the canal are here”: Franck, 85.

583–585 Account by James A. Williams: Reminiscences.

585 78,000 would have died: Gorgas, Sanitation, 283.

586 “In temperament and tradition”: Edwards, 81–82.

586 “It is hard to like people who”: ibid., 93.

586 Robert Wood view: Monument, 43.

586 “They hate us because”: Abbot, 235.

586–587 Rose van Hardeveld feelings: Make the Dirt Fly, 116–117.

587 “They joined their settlements”: Sands, 30–31.

587 “These people are of no more use”: ibid., 31.

587 “The Americans took awful advantage”: Alice Anderson, conversation with the author.

588 “It is said Amador gets half the loot”: Rousseau to Goethals, Oct. 8, 1908, Goethals papers.

21. TRIUMPH

The collection of superb papers in Vol. II of The Panama Canal: An Engineering Treatise, edited by Goethals, has been the main source for this account of the locks and how they were built. The authors of the papers were the principal builders themselves: Hodges, Goldmark, Whitehead, and Schildhauer, among others. Colonel Sibert’s essay, “Construction of Gatun Locks, Dam, and Spillway,” is contained in Vol. I. The various figures pertaining to the canal after 1914 are from materials provided by the Panama Canal Information Office.

PAGE

589 “It is hard for me to transmit to you”: Wood, 44.

597 Gates swing “easily and steadily”: Bishop, Gateway, 372.

598 “Strongly as the Panama Canal appeals”: Ira E. Bennett, in Bennett, 322.

598 Pittsburgh participation: “Industrial Roll of Honor,” ibid., 436–460.

602 “No specifications could have been more exacting”: J. W. Upp, “An Instance of Co-operation,” General Electric Review, Jan. 1914.

603 “They were very smart people”: Roy Wallace, conversation with the author.

603–604 French-Olmsted report: quoted in Mack, 512.

604 “The pride everyone feels”: Scientific American, Mar. 9, 1912.

604 “Men reported to work early”: Wood, 36.

604 Upper gates operated: Scientific American, June 22, 1912.

605 “The Cut tonight”: N.Y. Times, Sept. 10, 1913.

605–606 Gatun makes first passage through the locks: John O. Collins, “The Year 1913 in Canal History,” in Society of the Chagres, Yearbook, 1913; photographs, National Archives; N.Y. Times, Sept. 27, 1913.

606 President Wilson sets off Gamboa blast: N.Y. Times, Oct. 11, 1913.

608 “Mr. Dooley” on Goethals: Bishop, Goethals, 255.

609 “So quietly did she pursue her way”: John Barrett, “The Opening of the Panama Canal,” Bulletin of the Pan-American Union, Sept. 1914.

613 Engineers do not regard Pacific arrangement as a limiting factor: Maj. Gen. David S. Parker, correspondence with the author.

613 1974 slide: Panama Canal Spillway, Oct. 18, 1974.

614 “we. . . have no property rights”: quoted in W. Va. Gazette, undated clipping, Goethals papers.

AFTERWORD

616 “I had never encountered such a powerful personality”: Eric Sevareid, “The Man who Invented Panama,” American Heritage, Aug. 1963.

617 “One of the rather contemptible features”: Roosevelt to Bunau-Varilla, July 7, 1914, quoted in Wagenknecht, 272.

617 Goethals refuses use of name: R. H. Whitehead, conversation with the author.

617 “I believe that we are but children picking up pebbles”: Stevens, Engineer’s Recollections, 69.

Sources

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Library of Congress

Philippe Bunau-Varilla Papers

George Goethals Papers

William Gorgas Papers

John Hay Papers

A. T. Mahan Papers

Theodore Roosevelt Papers

Thomas Oliver Selfridge Papers

John F. Stevens Papers

William H. Taft Papers

John G. Walker Papers

National Archives

Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty

Records of the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panamá

Records of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique

Records of the Isthmian Canal Commission

John Bigelow Papers, New York Public Library

George S. Morison Papers, Peterborough, N. H .

Alfred Noble Papers, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Park-McCullough Papers, North Bennington, Vermont
General Francis E. Pinto Diary (1848), New York Public Library
Richard H. Whitehead Papers, Laconia, N. H .

Reminiscences of life and work during the construction of the Panama Canal

(letters in response to a competition in 1963), Isthmian Historical Society,

Balboa Heights, C.Z.

II. OFFICIAL AND SEMIOFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS

Canal Record. Ancon, C.Z. 1907–1914.

Chambre des Deputes. 5e Legislature, Session de 1893, Rapport General Fait au Nom de la Commission d'Enquete Chargee de Faire la Lumiere sur les Allegations Portees a la Tribune a I’Occasion des Affaires de Panama. 3 vols. Paris, 1893.

Congressional Record. Washington: Government Printing Office.

Cour d’Appel de Paris, Ire Chambre. Plaidoirie de Me. Henri Barboux pour MM. Ferdinand et Charles de Lesseps. Paris, 1893.

Davis, Rear Admiral Charles H. Report on Interoceanic Canals and Railroads between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1867.

Diplomatic History of the Panama Canal (Sen. Doc. 414, 63rd Cong., 2nd Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914.

Goethals, George W., ed. The Panama Canal: An Engineering Treatise. 2 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1916

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Hearings before the Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals on the Senate Resolution Providing for an Investigation of Matters Relating to the Panama Canal (Sen. Doc. 401, 59th Cong. 2nd Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907.

Howard, L. O. The Yellow Fever Mosquito (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Farmer’s Bulletin 547). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913.

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Isthmian Canal Commission. Annual Reports. 1904–1914.

Kimball, Lieutenant William W. Special Intelligence Report on the Progress of the Work on the Panama Canal during the Year 1885 (House Misc. Doc. 395, 49th Cong., 1st Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886.

List of Books and of Articles in Periodicals Relating to Interoceanic Canal and Railway Routes (Sen. Doc. No. 59, 56th Cong., 1st Sess.). Compiled by Hugh A. Morrison, Jr., of the Library of Congress. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900.

Lull, Edward P. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for the Location of Interoceanic Ship-Canals through the Isthmus of Panama, and by the Valley of the River Napipi, by U.S. Naval Expeditions, 1815 (Sen. Exec. Doc. 15, 45th Cong., 3rd Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879.

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Manual of Information Concerning Employments for Service on the Isthmus of Panama. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909.

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Papers on Naval Operations during the Year Ending 1885. Navy Department, Bureau of Navigation, Office of Naval Intelligence. Washington, 1885.

Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers for the Panama Canal. Washington; Government Printing Office, 1906.

Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission, 1889–1901 (Sen. Doc. 222, 58th Cong., 2nd Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Reports of the United States Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition, 1818. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878.

Rodgers, Lieutenant Raymond P. Progress of Work on Panama Ship-Canal (Sen. Doc. 123, 48th Cong., 1st Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884.

Rogers, Lieutenant Charles C. Intelligence Report of the Panama Canal, March 30, 1881 (House Misc. Doc. 599, 50th Cong., 1st Sess.). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889.

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Selfridge, Commander Thomas Oliver. Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Practicability of a Ship-Canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by way of the Isthmus of Darien. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874.

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The Story of Panama: Hearings on the Rainey Resolution before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913.

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Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

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–––Letters, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930–1938.

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Bates, Lindon Wallace. Retrieval at Panama. New York, 1907.

Bennett, Ira E., ed. History of the Panama Canal: Its Construction and Builders. Washington: Historical Publishing Co., 1915.

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Edgar-Bonnet, G. Ferdinand de Lesseps. Paris: Plon, 1951.

Evans, I. O. Jules Verne and His Work. London: Arco Publications, 1965.

Freeman, T. W. A Hundred Years of Geography. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1961.

Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Hagedorn, Hermann. The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill. New York: Macmillan Co., 1954.

Harriss, Joseph. The Tallest Tower, Eiffel and the Belle Epoque. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Hart, Albert Bushnell, ed. Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia. New York: Roosevelt Memorial Association, 1941.

Herring, Hubert. A History of Latin America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.

Hill, Howard Copeland. Roosevelt and the Caribbean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927.

Howarth, David. Panama, Four Hundred Years of Dreams and Cruelty. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Howe, Octavius Thorndike. Argonauts of “49. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923.

Jessup, Philip C. Elihu Root, Vol. I. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1938.

Keller, Morton, ed. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Kemble, John Haskell. The Panama Route, 1848–1869. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943.

Lee, W. Storrs. The Strength to Move a Mountain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958.

Leech, Margaret. In the Days of McKinley. New York: Harper and Bros., 1959.

Lewis, Oscar. Sea Routes to the Gold Fields. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

Lofts, Norah, and Margery Weiner. Eternal France, A History of France, 1189–1944. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1968.

Lorant, Stefan. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1959.

Lord, Walter. The Good Years. New York: Harper and Bros., 1960.

Mack, Gerstle. The Land Divided. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944. (An excellent overall history of the canal based on careful scholarship.)

Manuel, Frank E. The New World of Henri Saint-Simon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956.

Marlowe, John. World Ditch. New York: Macmillan Co., 1964.

Martin, Franklin. Major General William Crawford G or gas. Chicago: Gorgas Memorial Institute. (No d.)

Miner, Dwight Carroll. The Fight for the Panama Route. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.

Minter, John Easter. The Chagres. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948.

Morison, George Abbot. George Shattuck Morison, 1842–1903. Peterborough, N.H. : Peterborough Historical Society, 1932.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1942.

–––The European Discovery of America, The Southern Voyages, 1492–1616. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Murphy, Agnes. The Ideology of French Imperialism, 1811–1881. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1948.

Padelford, Norman J. The Panama Canal in Peace and War. New York: Macmillan Co., 1942.

Perruchot, Henri. Gauguin. New York: World Publishing Co., 1913.

Pomfret, John E., ed. California Gold Rush Voyages, 1848–1849. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1954.

Pringle, Henry F. The Life and Times of William Howard Taft. 2 vols.

New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1939. (Archon Books reprint, 1964.)

–––Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931.

Puleston, W. D. Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939.

Roosevelt, Nicholas. The Restless Pacific. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928.

–––Theodore Roosevelt, The Man As I Knew Him. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1967.

Schonfleld, Hugh J. Ferdinand de Lesseps. London: Herbert Joseph, 1937.

Schott, Joseph L. Rails Across Panama. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967.

Simon, Maron J. The Panama Affair. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.

Smith, G. Barnett. The Life and Enterprises of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Lon don: W. H. Allen, 1895.

Taylor, Charles Carlisle. The Life of Admiral Mahan. London: John Murray, 1920.

Thayer, William Roscoe. The Life and Letters of John Hay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1915.

Theiler, Max, and W. G. Downs. Arthropod-Borne Viruses of Vertebrates. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.

Tuchman, Barbara W. The Proud Tower, A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914. New York: Macmillan Co., 1966.

Wagenknecht, Edward. The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1960.

Warshaw, Leon J. Malaria, The Biography of a Killer. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1949.

Washington, D.C., A Guide to the Nation’s Capital. American Guide Series. New York: Hastings House, 1942.

Weigley, Russell F. History of the United States Army. New York: Macmillan Co., 1967.

Whitehead, Richard H. Our Faith Moved Mountains. New York: Newcomen Society, 1944.

Williams, Wythe. The Tiger of France. New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1949.

Williamson, Harold F., and Kenneth H. Myers, II. Designed for Digging. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1955.

V. INTERVIEWS

Mme. Hervé Alphand, Paris

Alice Anderson, Vineyard Haven, Mass.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla, II, New York City

Crede Calhoun, Panama City

Winter Collins, Balboa Heights, C.Z.

Lavinia Dahlhoff, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Arthur H. Dean, New York City

Katharine Harding Deeble, West Tisbury, Mass.

Winifred Ewing, Panama City

John Fitzgerald, Amherst, Mass.

David St. Pierre Gaillard, Washington, D.C.

Mrs. Thomas Goethals, Vineyard Haven, Mass.

Dr. Victor Heiser, New York City

Walter L. Hersh, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Keith E. Kelley, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Hubert de Lesseps, Paris

Tauni de Lesseps, New York City

Prisca Bunau-Varilla Lionelli, Paris

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Washington, D.C.

Aminta Meléndez, Colón

Eking E. Morison, Peterborough, N.H .

William E. Russell, New York City

General Edwin L. Sibert, West Tisbury, Mass.

Maurice Thatcher, Washington, D.C.

Mary Weller, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Richard H. Whitehead, Laconia, N.H .

Mrs. Richard H. Whitehead, Laconia, N.H.

Robert Worsley, Panama City

Aileen Gorgas Wrightson, Washington, D.C.

VI. NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND TECHNICAL JOURNALS

American Geographical Society Bulletin

American Heritage

American Magazine

American Society of Civil Engineers, Proceedings

American Society of Civil Engineers, Transactions

Atlanta Constitution

Atlantic Monthly

Boston Evening Transcript

Boston Herald

British Medical Journal

Brooklyn Eagle

Bulletin de la Société de Géographie

Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique

Bulletin of the Pan-American Union

California Historical Society Quarterly

Catholic World

The Century

Chicago Tribune

Civil Engineering

Collier’s

Contemporary Review (London)

El Derecho (Bogotá)

Engineering (London)

Engineering Magazine

Engineering News

Engineering News-Record

Everybody’s Magazine

Le Figaro (Paris)

Forum

General Electric Review

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

Harper’s Weekly

Illustrated London News

Independent

Journal of the American Geographical Society

Journal of the Franklin Institute

Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs

Journal of the Society of Arts

The Leisure Hour

Leslie’s Newspaper

La Libre Parole (Paris)

Life

Lippincott’s Magazine

Literary Digest

London Daily News

Louisville Courier-Journal

Martha’s Vineyard Gazette

Le Matin (Paris)

Medical Journal

Montana History

Munsey’s Magazine

Nation

National Geographic Magazine

New York Daily Commercial Bulletin

New York Economist

New York Evening Post

New York Herald

New York Journal

New York Journal of Commerce

New York Sun

The New York Times

New York Tribune

New York World

Newcomen Society, Transactions

North American Review

The Outlook

Pacific Historical Review

Pall Mall Gazette

Panama Canal Spillway

Panama Star & Herald

El Relator (Bogotá)

Review of Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Examiner

The Saturday Evening Post

Scientific American

Scribner’s Magazine

Tacoma Evening News

Le Temps

The Times (London)

United States Naval Proceedings

The University Magazine

Washington Post

Washington Star

World’s Work

VII. PICTORIAL SOURCES

American Geographical Society

American Museum of Natural History

Clarence A. Barnes, Jr.

Bibliothéque Nationale

Canal Zone Library-Museum

Winter Collins

Culver Picture Services

Mrs. Katharine Deeble

École Polytechnique

David St. Pierre Gaillard

Mrs. Thomas Goethals

Library of Congress

Museum of Modern Art

National Archives

New York Public Library

Smithsonian Institution

United States Military Academy Archives

VIII. REFERENCE WORKS

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969.

Bartlett, John. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1955.

Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.

Dictionary of American History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942.

Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1921.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. 15th ed. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, and Henry Steele Commager. The Growth of the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

National Geographic Atlas of the World. Rev. 3rd ed. Washington: National Geographic Society, 1970.

Webster’s Geographical Dictionary. Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1949.

Index

Abbot, Henry, 275–76, 313, 482

Académie de Medecine, 143

Académie des Sciences, 73, 187, 194

Académie Française, 182

Adam, Juliette, 122

Adams, Charles Francis, 555, 556, 558, 569, 585

Adams, Henry, 246, 248, 257, 258

Adee, Alvey A., 339, 340

Agramonte, Aristides, 414

Aïda (Verdi), 54

Aigle (yacht), 54

Aizpuru, Rafael, 110, 175–78

Alabama, C.S.S., 252

Alexander II, Tsar, 279

Alexander, Edward Porter, 314

Alexandre La Valley, S.S., 607

Alexandria, 151

Alger, Russell, 406

Ali, Mohammed, 49, 51

Allen, Horatio, 31, 32

Allison, William Boyd, 324

Amador, Elmira, 363

Amador, Sefiora, 341, 363, 365, 384, 385, 446, 588

Amador Guerrero, Manuel, 179, 300 illus., 329, 341–75 passim, 384–385, 399, 402, 588

biographical sketch, 341–42

revolutionary conspiracy, 342ff.

trip to New York (Aug. 1903), 343–50, 352–53, 356–61

trip to Washington (Nov. 1903), 393, 395–96

meetings with Bunau-Varilla, 349–350, 352–53, 356–60

elected president of Panama, 398

Bunau-Varilla’s ambassadorship, 356–57, 387–88

and Gorgas, 425

meeting with Taft, 446

meeting with T.R., 493–95

Amaya, Ramon, 366, 368–70, 374–75

American Bar Association, 381

American Contracting and Dredging Company, 156

American Engineer (periodical), 171

American Geographical Society, 71, 72, 119

American Line, 321

American Society of Civil Engineers, 119, 485

Ammen, Daniel, 23–24, 65–67, 89 illus., 127, 262

background, 26–27

at Congres International (1879), 71–74, 77–79, 83, 85

Ancon, S.S., 518 illus., 529 illus., 594, 609

Ancon (town), 424, 443, 453, 494, 514 illus., 563

earthquake at, 606

running water at, 467

Ancon Art Society, 564

Ancon Hill, 94 illus., Ill, 154, 163, 178, 416, 594

M. Gorgas’ description of, 424–25

Ancon Hospital, 94 illus., 95 illus., 178, 424–25, 429 illus., 501, 566, 580, 583–85

American takeover, 402

bubonic plague case, 454

establishment, 134

Gorgas’ headquarters, 416, 420, 532

malaria at, 416, 447

Roosevelt tour of, 495

yellow fever at, 451, 468

Andrieux, Louis, 216–20

Anglo-Dutch Company, 170

anti-Semitism, 205–7, 223, 235, 236

Appleton, Nathan, 73, 83

Arango, José Agustin, 300 illus., 362, 363

background, appearance, 342–43

revolutionary group, 342–43, 355, 365, 368–69, 371

treaty with U.S., 376, 387, 397

meeting with Taft, 446

Arctic, S.S., 612

Arias, Pedro, 342

Arias, Ramon, 342

Arias, Tomas, 300 illus., 362, 363, 371, 376, 387, 397

Arlington Hotel, 245, 246, 286, 397

Arosemena, Don Bias, 40

Arosemena, Carlos Constantino, 300 illus., 342–43, 363, 393

Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne), 58

Arthur, Chester A., 496

Artigue et Sonderegger, 158

Artigue, Sonderegger et Cie., 191

Arton, Leopold-Emile, 209, 216, 227, 232, 233

Aspinwall, William Henry, 35, 105

Aspinwall Hotel, 566

Atlanta, U.S.S., 379

Atlanta Constitution, 570

Atlantic Monthly, 252, 253, 263

Atrato River, 21, 29, 30, 39, 44, 73, 74

Autobiography (Roosevelt), 382, 508

Avila, Pedro Arias de, 112

Baïhaut, Charles, 190, 191, 217, 224, 227, 229, 231–34

Baker, Asher, 282, 284, 285, 291

Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 21, 22, 36, 112

Balboa, C.Z., 549

Baldwin Works, 241

banana trade, 398–99

Bancroft, George, 318

Banque de France, 400

Barbacoas, 108–9, 155, 178

Barcelona, 48

Barbados, 141, 502, 577

Canal labor recruiting, 472, 475–476, 501, 579

Barboux, Henri, 84, 98–99 illus., 223, 225, 238

Bardwell, Captain, 157

Barnard, Henry, 129

Barranquilla, 64

Barrés, Maurice, 211, 213

Bas Obispo, 543, 546

Bauperthuy, Lewis, 142, 144

Beaupré, Arthur, 333–39

Beaurepaire, Jules Quesnay de, 210

Bee-keeper’s Journal, 232

Beers, George, 358

Beers, James, 342–43, 358

Belding, William, 470

Bell, Alexander Graham, 214, 246

Bellevue Hospital Medical College, 410, 411

Bellows, Henry W., 120

Benoit, butler, 447, 534

Bernard, Walter, 591

Bernhardt, Sarah, 131, 284

Berthaut, Henri, 171–72

Bessemer, Sir Henry, 24

“Beyond the Chagres” (Gilbert), 453

Biddle, Charles, 31, 34

Biddle, James, 27

Bidlack, Benjamin Alden, 32–33, 377

Bidlack Treaty, 136, 318, 331, 340–41

Bierd, William Grant, 470, 533

Bierstadt, Albert, 120

Biez, Jacques de, 207

Bigelow, Grace, 357

Bigelow, John, 187, 237, 293, 317, 351–52, 362fn.

with Lesseps on Panama tour, 187–88

pro Panama canal project, 120, 130, 271, 280

friendship with Bunau-Varilla, 279–80, 285, 286, 349, 352, 356

Bigelow, Poultney, 251, 577fn.

Bionne, Henri, 60, 68, 72, 83, 127, 185

with Lesseps on Panama tour, 103, 121

death of, 138, 139

Bishop, Joseph Bucklin, 146, 147, 432–33 illus., 529, 543–45, 551, 558, 597, 608

Secretary of I.C.C., 503

association with Goethals, 536–39, 571

and Canal Record, 536–37, 564

Bismarck, Otto von, 55–56, 235

Black, William, 342, 376

Blackburn, Joseph, C. S., 432–33 illus., 510, 511, 568

Blaine, James G., 377

Blanc, Louis, 209

Blanchet, Gaston, 103, 115, 131, 136, 144

marriage, 116

death, 139, 151, 185

Blondin, M., 227, 231

Bó, Marius, 293

Bocas del Toro, 399

Boer War, 256

Bogotá, 32, 335–40, 342

Wyse mission to, 62–64

riots in, 385

inaccessibility of, 63–64, 335

Bogotá, S.S., 371

Bohio, Lake, 484

Bohio Soldado, 133, 484

dam (projected) at, 307, 308, 311–312, 326, 445, 485

locks (projected) at, 194, 440

see also Gatun

Boston and Panama Ice Company, 34fn.

Bolívar, Simon, 336, 399

Bonaparte, Lucien, 61

Bonheur, Raymond, 48

Bonnemains, Madame de, 204

Boston, 284

Boston, U.S.S., 367, 379, 448

Boston Fruit Company, 399

Boston Herald, 284

Boswell, Helen Varick, 563

Boulanger, Georges, 191, 204, 215, 231

Boulangists, 211, 220, 233

Boulder Dam, 592

Bourdon, Jules, 60

Bournemouth, England, 227–28, 233

Bourse, 220

Boyd, Federico, 300 illus., 343, 361, 371, 376, 387, 388, 393, 396

assails Bunau-Varilla, 395

Boyer, Leon, 185, 187, 190

Bragard, Louise Helene Autard de, see Lesseps, Louise …

Brainard, Harry, 451

Brandon, Isaac & Brothers Bank, 374–76

Bransford, John, 143

Brewster, Joseph, 579

Brindley, James, 25

British Association, 199

Brito, Nicaragua, 75

Brooke, Mark, 342, 402, 406

Brooklyn, 272

Brooklyn Bridge, 119, 599

Brooklyn Navy Yard, 20

Brown, Robert M. G., 171

Bryan, William Jennings, 543

Bryce, James, Lord, 543

bubonic plague, 454, 465, 500

Bucyrus steam shovel, 442, 445, 447, 496, 531, 547

Buenaventura, 64, 175–76

Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique, 111, 114, 121, 122, 138, 160, 184, 189, 536

first issue, 103

suppression, slanting of news, 109, 138, 238

Bulloch, Irvine, 252

Bulloch, James Dunwoodie, 252

Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton, 38

Bunau, Pamela Caroline, 162

Bunau-Varilla, Etienne, 389, 390

Bunau-Varilla, Maurice, 281, 288, 400–401

Bunau-Varilla, Philippe, 79, 145, 172, 190, 191, 298 illus., 400, 482, 550

background, character, 161–63, 276–78

Bigelow friendship, 187, 279–80, 285, 286, 349, 352, 356

Canal opening, 609

Cincinnati trip, 281

Compagnie/project, his role in, 179–180, 184, 197, 212, 400–401, 607

Cromwell association, 289–91, 294, 320, 349

death of, 616

and Dreyfus case, 277, 281, 289

at École Polytechnique, 96 illus., 162

and Eiffel, 196, 400

and Lesseps, 187, 401

Panama-canal-site lobbyist, 270, 271, 279–94, 316–17, 320–25, 327, 609

Panamanian revolution, 349–64, 377, 384

Panama Republic’s envoy, 303 illus., 356–59, 377, 384, 387–97, 401

and Roosevelt, 350–52, 354

Russian-participation scheme, 279

and Seligman, 289

U.S. purchase of Compagnie, 292, 293, 400

Bunau-Varilla, Madame Philippe, 356

Burr, William H., 280, 293, 313, 407, 408, 482, 487, 531

Burt, George, 177

Bush, Charles Green, 381

Butcher, John, 577

Butler, Ben, 473

Caimito Mulato, 440

Caledonia Bay, 20, 21, 22, 24, 40, 43, 44

Caledonian Canal, 29, 31

California, S.S., 112

California, University of, 383

Camacho diversion, 549

Canal Record, 431 illus., 536, 537, 546, 564, 575

Canal Zone, 398–400, 445, 446, 481, 492, 614

Chinese-exclusion policy, 474–75

excavation statistics, 530, 537

government of, 421, 450, 463, 542

racial inequities, 474–77, 557, 559, 567–68, 574–84

Roosevelt visit, 494–500

set up by U.S.-Colombia treaty (proposed), 332–35, 352, 391–95

social life in, 557–72

sovereignty question, 391–94

U.S. claim to, 380

U.S. violation of Colombian sovereignty, 330, 333

weekly newspaper in, 536–37

women in, 560–63

Canal Zone Pilot (guidebook), 561

Cannon, Joseph “Uncle Joe,” 274, 291

Captain Macklin (Davis), 354

Carmack, Edward, 382

Carnegie, Andrew, 120

Carnot, Sadi, 57, 129, 212

Carroll, Charles, 450

Carroll, James, 414

Carson, J. P., 42

Cartagena, 175–76, 358

Cartagena, S.S., 364, 367, 372, 373

Carter, Henry Rose, 413–14, 416, 424–25

Carter, Laura, 425

Casa Dingler, 100 illus., 154, 160, 163, 447

Cascade Tunnel, 461

Castilla del Oro, 27, 112

Castro, Francisco, 369, 370

Central America, 38, 249, 256, 282, 322, 327

search for canal site in, 19–44, 59, 77, 261, 263

yellow fever in, 141

Central Hotel, 178, 374

Century magazine, 263

Cervera, Demaso, 110, 114

Céspedes, J. A., 104

Chagre, Indian chief, 109

Chagres River, 90 illus., 107–11, 132, 158, 159, 283, 406, 441, 453

American plans for, 307, 483–89

damming of, 107, 117, 155, 165, 184, 307, 484–89, 548, 590, 613

Dingier plan, 155, 165

Eiffel plan, 194

exploratory trips on, 31, 33, 34, 63, 116, 130, 136, 139

Lépinay plan, 80–81, 307, 484–85

Lesseps plan, 104, 188

in Menocal plan, 76

Roosevelt visit to, 493

in Technical Commission plan, 117

in Wyse plan, 75–76, 78, 82

Champagne, S.S., 281

Chanute, Octave, 120

Chauncey, Henry, 35, 105

Chesnaye, La, 50, 51, 53, 226–27, 234

Chicago, 122, 284, 294, 324

Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, 462, 470

Chicago News, 51

Chicago Times-Herald, 293

Childs, Orville, 39, 40, 75

Chimborazo, Mount, 29

China, 27, 71, 72, 475

China-U.S. treaty, 27

Chinese labor, 37, 72, 110, 474–75

Chiriqui Lagoon, 399

cholera, 34, 37–38, 49, 68, 134, 500

Choral Societies Echo, 232

Christiansen, Christian, 83

Christophe-Colomb, 133, 175, 178, 186

see also Cristobal

Chrysler Building, 591fn.

Chucunaque River, 22

Cincinnati, 281–83, 294, 324

Cincinnati Commercial Club, 282

Cincinnati Enquirer, 450

Cipriano de Mosquera, Tomas, 32

Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 127

City of Washington, S.S., 388, 395, 396

Clark, Charles, 609

Clark, Thomas, 448

Clarke, W. H., 41

Clayton, H. B., 579

Clayton, John, 38

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 38, 256

Clemenceau, Georges, 98 illus., 191, 213, 215, 219, 233

duel with Boulangist, 220–21

witness at trial, 229, 231

Cleveland, Grover, 192, 377

Cleveland, Ohio, 284

Clinton, De Witt, 31

Coast Survey, 20, 22

Cocarde, La (newspaper), 209

Coco Grove, 561, 568fn., 569

Collier’s, 570

Collins, Ensign, 42

Collins, Father, 571

Coloma, Calif., 33

Colombia, 11, 22, 71

contract with Wyse, Türr, 61–67, 103, 276, 390

Prestan Uprising, 175–79

secession of Panama, 360–97 passim

transit treaty with U.S., 32–33, 136, 318, 340–41, 351, 377

U.S. canal-building treaty, 268–69, 329–60 passim, 377

Colón, 21, 175, 178, 452, 453, 469, 557, 559–63

Canal operations at, 117, 131–34, 148, 155–57, 161, 164, 463, 545

Lesseps’ visits, 104–6, 112–13, 186

earthquake, 149

Front Street, 90 illus., 104–6, 133, 147, 149, 453

hospital at, 37, 134, 148, 159fn., 267, 448, 580

housing, 444, 577

hurricane (1885), 184

“immorality” at, 146–47

Prestan Uprising, 175–79

rainfall at, 132

revolutionary activities in, 345, 353, 355, 357–82 passim

sanitation, 112, 175, 392, 405–6, 465–67

slum conditions in, 405, 423, 477, 577

in U.S.-Colombia treaty, 332

in U.S.-Panama agreement, 345, 353ff., 392

water supply in, 112, 175, 392, 445, 471

Colon, S.S., 106, 118, 176

Colorado River, 24

Columbian Exposition (1893), 442

Columbia University, 340, 570

Columbus, Christopher, 12

statue of, 105

Comité Americain, 122, 127–28, 289

Comité Technique International, 275, 313

Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama, 262, 282, 283, 288–94, 306, 415, 441, 442, 610

beginning of, 240, 288–89

Bohio dam project, 307

and Comite Technique, 275

contract with Colombia, 331–33, 337–38, 346, 385, 393

Cromwell’s services, 273, 324

and Isthmian Canal Commission, 274

U.S. purchase of, 265–66, 273, 291–94, 337–38, 385, 393, 400–402, 506

Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, 91 illus., 102, 122, 127, 151, 170, 183–85, 204–41 passim

bribery of press and parliament, 125–26, 209, 211, 217–18, 227, 229–33, 238

collapse of, 202–6

court trials, 222–34

official investigations, 206–9, 211–213, 216–21

stock issues, 124–28, 185, 189, 194–202

stock-and-lottery project, 185, 189–91, 194, 208–9, 218, 224, 229–30

ultimate financial settlement, 288–289, 400–401

Companyo, Louis, 134

Concha, José Vicente, 329–31

Concord, U.S.S., 379

Congrès International d’Etudes du Canal Interoceanique, 58–59, 70–86, 117–18, 183, 189, 195, 237, 239, 262, 283, 325

Congressional Record, 263, 397

Connor, William, 176, 177

Conrad, Joseph, 380, 385

Cooley, Lyman E., 314

Cooper, Edward, 120

Cooper, Peter, 120

Coquelin, 284

Corea, Luis, 318

Coseguina (volcano), 283, 317

Cosmos Club, 245, 246, 253

Cotard, M., 82

Cottu, Henri, 98–99 illus., 209, 210, 222, 223, 226, 234

Court of Appeal, 98–99 illus., 226, 234

Court of Assizes, 227, 234

Cousin, Charles, 60

Couvreux, Abel, 72

Couvreux, Abel, fils, 103

Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie, 72, 103, 130–31, 148, 150–51, 154

Crawford, Emily, 117, 188, 191, 200–201, 215, 228, 233, 238

Crédit Foncier, 126

Crédit Lyonnais, 197, 293

Crédit Maritime (periodical), 102

Cristobal (Christophe-Colomb), 133, 175, 178, 186, 440, 467, 471, 494, 533, 580

Cristobal, S.S., 594, 609

Cromwell, William Nelson, 299 illus., 310, 329, 456–58, 460

appearance, character, 271, 272

biographical sketch, 272–76

and Bunau-Varilla, 286, 290–91, 294, 320–21

and French canal company, 324, 325, 330, 337, 400, 401

influence with McKinley, 274

Panama-canal lobbyist, 273–76, 280, 286, 290–92, 310, 320–25

and Panama independence, 339–353, 384, 389, 399–401, 446

and Republican Party, 460, 506

and Roosevelt, 336–37

and treaty with Colombia, 330–31, 334, 336–46, 348–50, 352–53

Crowell, Nathan, 157

Cruces Trail, 34

Crystal Palace, London, 25, 46

Cuba, 254, 256, 406, 417

Cucaracha slide, 526–27 illus., 550–552, 554, 604, 607

Culebra (Summit Station), 36, 76, 80, 111, 367, 513 illus., 516 illus., 552, 556, 560

housing at, 571

Lesseps visit, 186

Prestan Uprising, 178

Stevens headquarters, 489, 532

water supply, 467

Culebra Cut, 420, 436–37 illus., 469, 521 illus., 526 illus., 528 illus., 529–54, 563, 566, 575

accidents, 546

Bunau-Varilla at, 162, 185, 193

Canal opening, 605–6, 614

contracts, 148, 170, 185, 191

dimensions, 119, 539

equipment, 159, 464, 470

excavation, 148, 159, 170, 276, 307, 314, 440–42, 464–65, 503, 604–5, 611

excavation techniques, 168–69, 193, 445–47, 480, 506, 548–49

Roosevelt visit, 495–99

slides at, 165–69, 283, 521, 531, 550–554, 573, 604–5, 613

statistics, 159, 530, 545, 547, 611

Cullen, Edward, 22, 23, 40, 42, 43

Cullom, Shelby M., 260, 324, 339, 361, 396, 397

Cunard Line, 321

Cupica Bay, 29

Curtis, William, 273

Cushing, Harvey, 574

Cutbill, de Longo, Watson and Van Hattum (Anglo-Dutch Company), 170

Cyane, U.S.S., 22, 24

Czolgosz, Leon, 247

Daniels, Josephus, 506

Darien, Isthmus of, 19–23, 39, 40, 43, 62, 64, 74, 379

Darling, Charles, 367, 379

Data for the History of the Independence (Arango), 343

Daubrée, Gabriel Auguste, 71, 83, 137

Dauchy, W. E., 469

Dauzats, M., 83

Davenport, Homer, 304 illus.

Davis, Charles H., 21, 23, 28

Davis, George W., 407, 408, 421–23, 447, 449, 482–83

Davis, John L., 565

Davis, Richard Harding, 240–41, 354, 392

Davout, Claude, 60

Dawes, Charles G., 287

Decker, Howell & Company, 272

Deeks, W.E., 571, 574

Deering, James, 284

Delahaye, Jules, 208, 210–12, 217, 232

Delamalle, Madame, 50

de Lesseps, see Lesseps

Delmonico’s, 119, 239

dengue fever, 141

Depew, Chauncey, 120, 247

Dernière Bataille, La (Drumont), 206

Déroulède, Paul, 220–21

Desjardins, Judge Pilet, 230

Detroit, 607

Devol, Carrol A., 542

Dew, Harvey G., 565

Dewey, George, 257

Dingier, Jules, 154–55, 160–65, 168, 178, 195

appearance, background, 153–54

his casa, 154, 160, 163, 447

collapse and defeat, 179–80

family, 160, 171, 180, 447

his spending, 163, 182, 206

Dingier, Madame, 153, 160, 171

Dirks, Jacob, 71, 103, 115, 116, 137, 185

Dixie, U.S.S., 316, 360, 367, 375, 376, 379

Douglas, Crawford, 157

Drexel, Morgan & Company, 122

Dreyfus, Alfred, 277, 281, 289, 351

Drumont, Edouard, 198, 205–11, 213, 217–18, 221, 235

Du Bois, James T., 336, 386

Dulles, John Foster, 272

Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway, 461

Dunne, Finley Peter, 608

Duque, J. Gabriel, 345, 346, 363, 369

Dziembowski, 138

Eads, James B., 120–21

earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, 148–50, 285–87, 299 illus., 315–317, 319, 323, 324, 606

East Culebra, 551

Eastwick, Philip G., 448

Eaton, Ensign, 42

École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, 129, 171

École des Ponts et Chausees, 128–129, 153, 161–63

École Polytechnique, 49, 128–29, 153, 162, 541

Économiste Français (periodical), 183, 196

Économiste Pratique, V, 209

Edison, Thomas A., 215

Egypt, 48, 50–55, 57, 151, 186

Ehrman, Felix, 363, 369, 376, 378, 380, 388

Ehrman Bank, 373

Eiffel, Alexandre Gustave, 129, 208, 211, 218, 598

at Congrès International, 71, 82, 83

contract with canal company, 194–96, 217, 598

locks designed by, 195, 598

pro Nicaraguan canal, 82, 325

shareholder in Compagnie, 289, 293, 400

trial and verdicts, 98–99 illus., 224, 226, 233–34

Eiffel Tower, 195, 204, 207–8, 598

Empire (Emperador), C.Z., 111, 133, 147, 467, 547, 548, 551, 556, 562, 578

Empire State Building, 591fn.

encephalitis, 409

Endicott, Mordecai T., 449fn.

Enfantin, Prosper, 48–50

engineers, 53, 92 illus., 128–31, 314, 322, 325

Ephrussi family, 206

Erie Canal, 31

Ernst, Oswald, 280, 449fn.

Espinosa, Manuel, 300 illus., 397

Espriella, F.V. de la, 396, 397

Eugénie, Empress, 51, 54, 55, 105

Evans, Doctor, 55

Evarts, William, 67, 89 illus., 122, 377

Everybody’s magazine, 440

Ewing, Winifred, 564

Falcon, S.S., 33

Farnham, Roger, 273, 334

Feuillet, Octave, 60

Fieberger, Gustav, 510

Field, Cyrus, 122

Field, David Dudley, 120

Field, Marshall, 284

Figaro, Le, 126, 202, 219

Finlay, Carlos, 144, 409, 413, 414

Fish, Hamilton, 377

Fitzgerald, Corporal Jack, 568

Flachat, Jules, 71, 84

Floquet, Charles, 211, 217, 227, 229, 231–33

Flying Dutchman, 141

Foch, Ferdinand, 129

Fontane, Marius, 98–99 illus., 191, 210, 222, 223, 226, 227, 234

Ford Motor Company, 598

Ford’s Theater, 143

Fort Brown, Texas, 412

Fowler, Robert G., 563

Fox, John, Jr., 562

Frachen, Louis, 171

France, 11

anti-Semitism in, 205–7, 223, 235, 236

Chamber of Deputies, 185, 190, 196–97, 202, 208–21, 224, 228–31, 279

Franco-Prussian War, 55, 56, 206

Ministry of Justice, 210

press, 125–26, 171, 183–84, 230–32, 238

and U.S., 67, 122–23, 266

France Juive, La (Drumont), 205

Franck, Harry, 558–60, 567, 568, 570, 571, 575, 576, 582

Franco-American Trading Company, 148

Franco-Egyptian Bank, 125

Frank, C. A., 399

Franz Josef, Emperor, 54

fraternal and secret orders, 564

French, Daniel Chester, 602

French engineers, 40, 53, 92 illus., 128–31, 314, 322, 325

Freud, Sigmund, 563

Freycinet, Charles de, 191, 215, 217, 227, 229, 231, 233

Frick, Henry Clay, 450, 492

Fritz, John, 130

Front Street, see under Colón

Froude, James Anthony, 146

Frye, William P., 325

“Funeral Train” (Gilbert), 453

Gaillard, David D., 432–33 illus., 513 illus., 532, 550, 553, 566

on Canal Commission, 510–11, 568

at Culebra Cut, 520 illus., 541

and Goethals, 571, 573

nervous breakdown, 573–74

Gaillard, Mrs. David D., 510, 511, 513 illus.

Gaillard, Pierre, 571, 574

Gaillard Cut, 613

Galena, U.S.S., 176, 359

Galérie des Machines, 128

Gallinger, Jacob H., 324

Gambetta, Leon, 55, 56

Gamboa, 138, 147, 155, 159, 165, 548, 606, 613

Garay, Francisco de, 71, 77

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 50, 537

Gates, John “Bet-a-Million,” 272

Gatun, town of, 80, 90 illus., 133, 488, 489, 587

Lesseps’ visit, 107–8

vice, crime at, 146

Gatun (tug), 528 illus., 605

Gatun Dam, 505, 556, 604, 606

Lépinay proposal, 80, 484–85

construction of, 488, 489, 507, 540, 549, 550, 589–90

Gatun Lake, 484, 489, 558, 581, 595, 604, 606, 607

extent of inundation, 587

Gatun Locks, 484, 489, 507, 525 illus., 528 illus., 550, 613

construction of, 540, 590, 592–96

control board, 602, 603

finishing of, 604, 605

Gatun River, 80, 107–8

Gauguin, Paul, 174

Gaulois, Le (newspaper), 209, 212, 232

General Electric Company, 599–602

geography, study of, 58

Germain, Henri, 197, 293

Germany, 56; see also Franco-Prus-sian War

Goethals’ trip to, 570

Gerster, Bela, 67

Gilbert, James Stanley, 438

Girardin, Emile de, 126, 191, 230

Girerd, Doctor, 144

Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 129

Glass, Henry, 353, 379

Goethals, Efrie Rodman, 534, 536, 571

Goethals, George, 534, 535, 571, 605

Goethals, George W., 432–33 illus., 530–43, 545, 546, 549, 550, 554, 557, 565, 604–17 passim

background, 508, 509

Canal opening, 609

Canal Record, 536, 537

character, personality, 534, 535, 554, 572–73

chief of Canal, Commission, Zone, 504–5, 510–11, 530–43, 570, 580, 610–11, 616

close associates, 571

and Congress, 538–39

death of, 616

Gaillard, 574

and Gorgas, 572–73

Governor of Panama Canal, 608, 616

Panamanians, 587–88

personnel policies, 536–38, 540, 541, 581, 604

reorganization of work, 539–43

Roosevelt and, 510–12, 546

sea-level canal, 488

and Stevens, 478, 505–7, 532–33

Sunday court, 537–38

and Taft, 470, 504, 510, 511

vacations, trip to Germany, 570

Goethals, Thomas, 534, 574

gold and silver wages, 472

Gold Hill, 170, 547, 550, 580

Goldmark, Henry, 594–95, 597, 610

gold rush, 33, 35, 38, 50

Gorgas, Amelia Gayle, 142, 412

Gorgas, Josiah, 408, 412

Gorgas, Marie Doughty, 412, 416, 423–25, 535, 571–73

Gorgas, William C, 134, 144, 145, 159, 172, 235, 432–33 illus., 454, 566, 582, 585

birth, early life, 142, 410–15

and Canal Commission, 407–9, 421–23, 448–49, 464, 510, 568

death of, 617

and Goethals, 571–72

and Panamanians, 425, 586–87

personality, 424–26

and Roosevelt, 494–95, 500, 512

and Stevens, 465–68, 503

work on malaria, 419–23, 502

work on pneumonia, 577, 608

work on yellow fever, 144, 145, 409–19, 448–49, 451–52, 464–65, 500

Gorgona, 148, 578, 579

Grandeur (French man-of-war), 116

Grand Hotel, Panama City, 114–16, 133, 149, 154, 156, 402

Grant, Ulysses S., 26, 27, 38, 59, 127, 262, 263

Great Britain:

and Egypt, 151

Foreign Office, 219, 228, 259

Lesseps’ bond-selling tour of, 199

and Suez Canal, 59, 151, 188, 257

and U.S., canal agreements, 38, 256, 257, 259

Great Northern Railroad, 461, 469–471

Great Pyramid, 24

Grenada, 501

Grévy, Albert, 216, 227

Grévy, Jules, 191, 215, 230

Grey, A. H., 496–97

Grey, Zane, 562

Greytown, 38, 75

Grivignée, Catherine de, 47

Grunsky, Carl E., 407, 408

Guadeloupe, 472

Guam, 254

Guard, U.S.S., 20, 25, 26, 41–42

Guardia, Eduardo de la, 370

Gudger, Hezekiah A., 342

Guérard, Adolphe, 482

Gwin, William, 259

Haggard, H. Rider, 426, 555

Hains, Peter C, 274, 449fn.

Haiti, 141

Halley’s Comet, 563

Halliburton, Richard, 612–13

Halsted, William Stewart, 407

Hamburg-American Line, 591

Hanna, Marcus Alonzo, 246, 260, 266, 267, 295 illus.

and Bunau-Varilla, 284, 286, 287, 289, 292–94, 317

and Cromwell, 273, 276, 291, 292, 294

illness and death, 397–98

pro Panama canal, 276, 312, 315, 317, 324–26, 337fn., 389

and Roosevelt, 247, 248, 268, 292, 348

Senate speech pro canal, 319–21, 324–325

Hardeveld, Jan van, 500

Hardeveld, Rose van, 499, 542, 570, 586–87

Harding, Chester, 571

Harper’s Weekly, 89 illus., 240–41, 263, 297 illus., 451

Harriman, E. H., 263, 272

Harris, William, 260, 307, 308, 323, 324

Harrod, Benjamin M., 407, 408, 449

Harvard University, 247, 326, 327, 457, 570

Haskins,W.C., 425

Haupt, Lewis, 274, 313

Haussmann, Baron Georges, 25, 56

Havana, 254, 410, 412, 414–19, 422, 468

Hawaii, 254

Hawkshaw, Sir John, 71, 78, 84

Hay, Del, 258

Hay, John, 246, 271, 286, 303 illus., 317

and Bunau-Varilla, 278, 285, 353, 359, 388–97, 401

canal treaty with Britain, 255–59, 264, 292; see also Hay-Pauncefote Treaty

canal treaty with Colombia, 327–332, 334, 336–41, 346, 348, 353–355; see also Hay-Herran Treaty

and Cromwell, 336–40, 343–45

and Panamanian insurgents, 343–348, 351, 354–55, 359, 362, 376, 379–84; see also Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty

resignation offer, 257

and Roosevelt, 255–59, 379–84

death of, 460

Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, 388, 392–95, 396–98, 401

Hay-Herran Treaty, 332, 339, 348, 388, 392–93

Hayes, Rutherford B., 67, 120, 121

Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 256–59, 264, 265, 292, 394–95, 512, 608

Hearst, William Randolph, 264–65, 268, 292

Hebrard, Adrien, 191, 210, 215, 217, 220

Hecker, Frank J., 407, 408

Heidelbach, Ickelheimer & Company, 358

Heiser, Victor, 425

Henriquez, Juan, 363

Hepburn, William Peters, 265

Hepburn Bill, 265, 266, 269, 270, 315, 318

Herrán, Pedro Alcantara, 33, 331

Herran, Tomas, 331–32, 344–48, 397–398

Herrick, Myron T., 282–84, 286, 293, 397, 609

Herz, Bianca Saroni, 214

Herz, Cornelius, 60, 98–99 illus., 213–216, 218–21, 227, 229–33, 235, 238

Hewitt, Abram, 120

Hibbard, Eugenie, 416, 425

Highland Falls, N.Y., 352, 356

Hill, James J., 263, 323, 459, 461, 462, 468–69, 490, 506

History of Central America (Ban-croft), 318

Hoar, George F., 260, 397

Hodges, Harry Foote, 432–33 illus., 542–43, 568, 571, 594, 605–6, 610

Hoffman, Medora von, 207

Holley, Alexander Lyman, 120

Hood,H.M.S., 611

Hôpital Notre Dame du Canal, 94 illus., 134

Horn, Cape, 33, 34

hospitals, 134, 159–60, 172–73, 240, 267

see also Ancon Hospital

Howard, Leland O., 407, 418

Howard, Sidney, 413

Hubbard, Commander, 364, 366–67, 371–76, 378, 379, 382

Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 490

Huerne, Prosper, 156

Huerne, Slaven & Company, 148, 156, 158

Huertas, Esteban, 301 illus., 350, 368–71, 373, 374, 376, 384

Hugo, Victor, 58, 70

Humboldt, Alexander von, 28–30, 32, 39, 40, 44, 283

Humphrey, Chauncey B., 355

Hunter, William Henry, 482

Huntington, C. P., 273

Hutin, Maurice, 180

Illinois Central Railroad, 408, 441, 455, 470

Illustrated London News, 137

Imperator y S.S., 591, 596

Incas, 112

Independent, The, magazine, 577fn.

Independent Order of Panamanian Kangaroos, 564

Indians, 21–23, 41, 42, 131, 141

Influence of Sea Power upon History, The (Mahan), 250–52

Interborough Rapid Transit Company, 503

International Technical Commission, 103

Interoceanic Canal Commission, 22, 59

Ismail, Khedive, 53, 54

Ismailia, Egypt, 54

Isthmian Canal Commission (Walker Commission), 326, 342, 376, 463, 544, 559–79 passim, 607

Bunau-Varilla and, 280, 291

Canal purchase price, 266, 292–94

construction plans, decisions, 307–311, 486, 487, 491

creation of (1899), 264, 273

Cromwell and, 273–76, 291

dissolution of, 608

equipment, supplies, 438–41

methods of operation, 438–45

Paris conference of (1899), 273–276, 280, 310

public-health section, 407, 415, 416, 421–23, 572; see also Gorgas, William C.

reorganizations, 406–8, 449–50, 492, 511, 542

Isthmian Canal Pioneers Association, 564

“Isthmian Way, The” (Gilbert), 453

Jackson, Andrew, 31

statue of, 245

Jacquet, Engineer, 189, 190

Jamaica, 150, 161, 241, 472, 501

Japan, 39, 473

Jefferson, Thomas, 30

Jenney, William Le Baron, 129

Joan of Arc, 236

Johns Hopkins University, 407, 411

Johnson, M.O., 449, 451

Johnston, William E., 72–74, 77, 78, 83–85

Johnstown Flood (1889), 486, 487

Jouett, James, 177–78

Journal des Debats, 126

Jusserand, Jules, 258, 381, 390, 537

Justice, La (periodical), 215, 230

Kaiser Wilhelm, S.S., 313fn.

Kane, Theodore F., 176–77, 179

Kansas, U.S.S., 27

Karner, William, 443, 447, 475

Keith, Minor C, 398–99

Kelley, Frederick M., 39, 43, 44, 77, 120

Kelly, Eugene, 156

Kelly, Mamie Lee, 561

Kiel Canal, 570fn.

Kimball, William, 180, 183, 187

King, Albert Freeman Africanus, 143, 144

King, Clarence, 24, 120

“King Fever” (Gilbert), 453

King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 359, 426

Kipling, Rudyard, 245, 253, 443

Kirk, Joseph S., 604

Kitchener, Lord, 488

Kittredge, Senator, 306, 324

Klebs, Doctor, 143

Knox, Philander C, 337, 383, 393, 487–88

Koch, Doctor, 143

La Boca, Panama, 194, 454, 465, 467, 484, 495, 500, 549

labor unions, 490–91

la Espriella, F. V. de, 396, 397

Laetitia, Princess, 61

Lafayette, S.S., 62, 103–4, 131, 185

Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., 245–47, 256

la Guardia, Eduardo de, 370

Lambert, Alexander, 467, 468

Lambeth Industrial Schools, 25, 46

Lampré, Edouard, 306

Lane, Rufus, 587

Langley, Samuel, 246

La Pita, 551

La Roncière-Le Noury, Clement Baronde, 58, 71, 84

Las Cascadas, 551

Laval, Charles, 174

Lavalley, Alexandre, 72, 82, 84, 129, 157

Laveran, Alphonse, 143, 409

Lazard, Eli, 84

Lazéar, Jesse W., 414, 422

Le Blanc, Leonide, 221

Leclerc, Charles Victor Emmanuel, 141

Lefebure de Fourcy, 137

Lefevre, Joseph, 376

Legion of Honor, 58, 74, 213, 215, 222fn.

Lejeune, John A., 376

Lepinay, Adolphe Godin de (Baron de Brusly), 79, 84, 107, 129, 130, 171, 307, 484–85, 487

Le Prince, Joseph, 419, 449, 579

Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 183, 200

Les Halles, Paris, 128

Lesseps, Agathe Delamalle de, 45, 47–48, 51

Lesseps, Barthelemy de, 45, 46

Lesseps, Charles de, 69, 88 illus., 135, 185–90, 202, 229, 234, 238

and John Bigelow, 188

and Bunau-Varilla, 187

company duties, 103, 125, 127, 134, 152, 197, 199, 201, 217–18

court probe, trial, 207–10, 217, 218, 222–31, 234, 235

devotion to his father, 68, 226

Dingler’s letters to, 154–55, 160–61

father’s letters to, 108, 118, 121

lottery, 197, 199, 201, 217–18

trips to Panama, 152–54, 192

Lesseps, Dominique de, 46

Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 12, 45–69, 87 illus.

appearance, 57

background, lineage, 46–47

character, personality, 45, 165

court probe, trial, 206–10, 225–28, 234

Egypt, sojourn in, 47–48, 52–53

and Eiffel, 195, 224

failing health, 208, 222, 227

and C. Herz, 218

lottery, 184, 187, 190–91, 195–201, 218

marriage (first), 45, 47, 51

marriage (second), 54–55

monument to, 401

overoptimistic reports, estimates, 101, 183–84, 189, 194, 201, 228

Panama Canal, financing of, 101–102, 124–27, 191, 196–99, 225

Panama Canal, planning of, 58–69, 84

Panama Canal, visits to, 102–18, 154, 185–87

Panama Canal, sea-level plan, 189–190, 192–96, 237

popularity of, 25, 46, 55, 183–84, 191, 206

and the press, 218, 232

pride in son Charles, 51, 226

public criticism of, 183–84, 191, 206

and Roosevelt, comparison with, 249

Saint-Simonianism, 48–50

and Suez Canal, 25, 46, 48–50, 52, 151; see also entry Suez Canal

trips to U.S., 102, 118–23, 192

Lesseps, Ferdinand de (infant son of Charles), 68

Lesseps, Ferdinande de, 103, 114

Lesseps, Louise Helene (nee Autard de Bragard), de, 54–55, 71, 84, 88 illus., 222, 234, 236, 237

description of, 57

on Panama trip, 103–5, 116–18

tour of U.S., 120

Lesseps, Martin de, 46

Lesseps, Comte Mathieu de, 46, 47

Levasseur, Pierre-Emile, 71

Levy-Crémieux, Marc, 125, 128, 191

Lewis and Clark Expedition, 30

Lexington, U.S.S., 611

Liberié, La, 126

Libre Parole, La (newspaper), 207–209, 221, 223

Lidgerwood system, 497

Life magazine, 289fn.

Limon Bay, 104, 157, 158, 482, 484, 494

Lincoln, Abraham, 143, 394

Lincoln, Robert, 284

Lindo, Joshua, 347, 349, 387, 391, 393

Lindo Bank, 389

Lion Hill, Panama, 367

Lirio, Panama, 551

Li-Shu-chang, 72

Littré, Émile, 60

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 248, 251, 259, 261, 293, 397, 587

Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 256, 259

friend of Roosevelt, 253, 254

Loeb, William, 510

London, 25, 55, 229, 234

London Daily News, 117, 188

London Financial News, 183

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 249, 258, 266, 278, 510, 543, 570, 588

Longworth, Nicholas, 570

Loomis, Francis B., 339, 340, 349–51, 359, 360, 364, 378, 379

López de Gomara, Francisco, 27

lottery, 194, 196–203, 208, 209, 230

Lesseps’ proposal, 184–85, 194

Deputies approve, 196, 218–19

bribery of Deputies for, 209, 217, 224–25, 229

Loubet, Emile, 210–12, 233

Louisiana, U.S.S., 493

Louisiana Territory, 141

Louisville Courier-Journal, 268, 457

Lull, Edward P., 20, 26, 27, 41, 65

Lumière Électrique, La, 215

MacDonald, D. J., 604

MacMahon, Marshal, 57

Magoon, Charles E., 450, 451, 453, 455, 456, 462, 463, 492

Magurk, Margaret, 425

Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 179, 188, 250–55, 257, 259, 261, 296 illus., 379, 616

Mahan, Dennis Hart, 250–51

Maine,U.S.S., 254, 379

Makers of the Panama Canal, The, 565

malaria, 37, 145, 443, 449, 454, 465, 467

description of, 139

experience of, in Cuba, 406, 415, 416

no immunity to, 140, 141

incidence of, 171, 502, 573–74, 581, 582

mosquito the transmitter, 142–43, 409, 420–21

origin of word, 142

racial segregation and, 585

Mallet, Claude Coventry, 138

Malmros, Oscar, 373, 378

Maltby, Frank B., 444, 448, 482, 485, 489

recollection of Goethals, 478

Roosevelt visit, 495–96

on Stevens, 459, 469, 505

Managua, 265

Managua, Lake, 317

Mandinga River, 43

Manhattan Project, 601

manifest destiny, 31

Manzanillo Island, 105

Marblehead, U.S.S., 379

Maréchal, Henri, 163, 182

Marias Pass, 461

Maritime Canal Company, 240, 261, 263, 314

Marroquin, Jose Manuel, 335–36, 349, 362

Martin, C. C, 315

Martin, Etienne, 191

Martin, Ferdinand, 185, 208

Martinez Silva, Carlos, 268, 329–31

Markham, Mary, 425

Marmot, S.S., 607

Marsh, Othniel C, 24

Martinique, 316–17, 319, 472, 501, 577

Masaya, Mount, 32, 283

Masefield, John, 238, 562

Massachusetts Historical Society, 556

Matachin, 76, 80, 110, 133, 158, 159, 178, 471, 489

Matin, Le, 281, 293, 349–51, 401

Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 36

Maximilian, Emperor, 67

Mayflower, U.S.S., 379

Mayo brothers, 417

Mazas jail, 222, 226, 234

McClellan, George B., Jr., 381

McClintic-Marshall, 598

McCormick, Cyrus, 285

McCuUough, John G., 136

McDowell, Calvin, 42

McKinley, William, 256–58, 273, 287, 320

assassination, 246–47, 258, 292

canal-site study, 264, 274, 276

Mears, Frederick, 542

Meléndez, Porfirio, 362, 367–68, 371–373, 375, 376

Melodic, S.S., 612

Memphis, Tenn., 141

Mendoza, Carlos, 363, 369

Menier Chocolate Works, 128

Menocal, Aniceto Garcia, 65, 110

for Nicaragua canal, 75, 77, 79–82, 109, 262, 306, 325

at Paris canal congress, 68, 71, 73–75, 77, 79–82, 84, 85, 325

Merinden, H. L., 42

Merry, William, 318

Metropolitan Club, 306

Metz, France, 55

Mexico, 67, 71

Meyer, Arthur, 232

Mindi, 193

Minneapolis Times, 263

Miraflores, Panama, 440, 549, 569

locks at, 540, 592–93, 595, 596, 603, 604, 607, 613

swamp at, 502

Miraflores Lake, 595

Mitchel, Alfred, 579

Mitchell, John H., 322, 324

Moltke, Helmuth von, 55

Momotombo, 317–18, 323, 325

Money, Hernando de Soto, 397

Monkey Hill, 107, 148, 173, 177, 313, 372, 374, 453

Monroe Doctrine, 119, 122

Montague, Charles, 565

Montgomery Ward, 592

Moody, William H., 379

Moore, John Bassett, 340, 348

Morales, Eusebio, 363

Morès, Marquis de, 207, 223

Morgan, J. P., 263, 272, 355, 356, 389, 400

Morgan, J. P., & Company, 389, 399–400

Morgan, John Tyler, 251, 257, 263, 297 illus., 386, 397, 481, 486

and Bunau-Varilla, 278, 284, 287–289

and Compagnie Nouvelle, 288–89

and W. N. Cromwell, 273, 324

and Hay-Herran Treaty, 331

and Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 256, 259

heads Senate canal committee, 260–261

hearings and debate on Hepburn Bill, 265–70, 306–28 passim

for Nicaraguan canal, 261–65, 318–319, 322, 324, 325, 328

and Roosevelt, 254, 259, 267–69

for takeover of Cuba, 254

U.S. purchase of Panama Canal, 331–32

Walker Commission report, 264, 266, 267, 270, 306–12

Morison, George A., 445fn.

Morison, George S., 296 illus., 325–327, 445fn., 592

and Bunau-Varilla, 278, 280, 284, 285, 293

at hearings on Hepburn, Spooner Bills, 314–15, 422

Walker Commission report, 265, 267, 274, 275, 326, 442

Morrell, Daniel J., 597

Morton, Captain, 157

mosquito, 95 illus., 406

conveyors of disease, 142–43, 315, 422, 423

different kinds, 409

fight against, 410, 448–49, 452, 467, 468, 502, 572, 573

malaria carrier, 410, 416, 418–20, 468, 502, 572

yellow-fever carrier, 413–14, 416–421, 429 illus.

Mosquito Brigades (Ross), 410

Mount Hope, 522 illus.

Munsey’s, 263

Murdock, Jessie, 416, 425

Murphy, Grayson M.-P., 355, 356

Naos Island, 155, 539, 548, 549

Napipi River, 29, 44

Napoleon I, 129, 141

Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 50, 51, 55, 56, 67

Nashville, U.S.S., 300 illus., 360, 364, 365, 367, 371, 372, 385

Nast, Thomas, 89 illus.

National Geographic Magazine, 522

Naval War of 1812, The (Roosevelt), 252

Nelson, Wolfred, 134, 145, 149, 163, 170

New Algonquin Club, 284

New Edinburgh, 21

New Granada, see Colombia New Orleans, 141

New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, 142

New Panama Canal Company, see Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama

New York:

Lesseps’ visits, 118–20, 192

Amador’s visit, 343

Panamanian insurgents in, 343, 345

Bunau-Varilla in, 349, 356

Panama’s investment in, 399

New York Chamber of Commerce, 187, 285

New York Evening Mail, 304 illus.

New York Evening Post, 188, 270

New York Globe, 303 illus.

New York Herald, 56, 268, 341, 450

New York Journal, 264–65, 268

New York Sun, 278, 317

New York Times, The, 19, 102, 265, 303 illus., 360, 462, 496, 605

on Bunau-Varilla’s role, 391

on T.R.’s “sordid conquest,” 381

New York Tribune, 117, 120, 150, 183, 486, 505

on death rate in Panama, 172, 173

on Lesseps’ “unscrupulous audacity,” 199

on Panama Affair in France, 212, 223

on putrid conditions in Colon, 406

New York World, 106, 107, 271, 273

on Lesseps’ appearance, 119

on U.S.-Colombia crisis, 334, 338, 339, 381

T.R.’s libel suit, 385

New Zealand, 30fn.

Nicaragua, 11

earthquakes and volcanic activity, 82, 283, 285–87, 299 illus., 315–318, 323

exploration for best canal route, 26–32, 40, 65, 312, 612

U.S. relations with, 265, 340–41, 348

Nicaragua, Lake, 28, 29, 75, 80, 271, 316

Nicaragua Canal Commission, 264, 274, 284, 311

Nicaragua Canal Construction Company, 407

Nicaraguan canal (proposed), 31–32, 38

apparent project of U.S., 123, 240, 253, 259–65, 281, 308–9, 313, 326–327

construction plans, 83, 269

location favored by Menocal, 74–77

location favored by U.S. Commission, 59

Roosevelt’s attitude toward, 253, 266–67, 269, 326–27, 332, 334, 340–41

Senate vote against, 324–27

still-possible alternative, 328, 332, 334, 340, 341, 348

Nipsic, U.S.S., 20, 25, 40

Noble, Alfred, 274, 278, 313, 482, 484–85

Nombre de Dios, 112, 594

Normandie, S.S., 612

North American Review, 333

Northwestern Christian Advocate, The, 381

Nostromo (Conrad), 380, 385

Nott, Josiah Clark, 142–44, 412

Nourse, Joseph E., 59

Nuñez, Rafael, 175, 179, 335

Obaldía, José de, 362, 366, 369–71, 401, 588

Obaldía, Señora, 588

Obarrio, Nicanor de, 300 illus.

Obispo, 549

Obispo, Rio, 111

Olmsted, Frederick, Jr., 603

Ometepe, 316

Oregon, U.S.S., 254–55, 257, 315, 608

Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, 470

Orinoco, S.S., 375–76

Osier, William, 407, 426

Ossa, Maria de la, 341

Ossa, Senorita Maria Amelia de la, 363

O’Sullivan, John, 31

O’Sullivan, Timothy H, 20, 42

Otis, Camp, 568

Otis, Henrietta, 571

Our Times (Sullivan), 573

Outlook, The, 441, 474, 556, 557, 563, 585, 586

Pacific Mail Steamship Line, 35, 106, 176

Padilla, S.S., 363, 371, 376

Painter, Joseph H., 565

Palais de Justice, Paris, 223

Palais d’Hiver, Paris, 203

Palmerston, Lord, 53, 55

Panama, Republic of, 11, 334–35, 339, 343, 445

Chinese-exclusion law, 475

revolutionary secession, 339, 343, 361–69

Roosevelt’s part in creation of, 379, 495, 512

treaty negotiation with U.S., 334–335, 338–39, 387–400

U.S. role in revolution, 343, 363–367, 379

Panama Affair, 212, 223, 228, 231, 232, 235–37, 289

see also France, Chamber of Deputies

Panama Canal

accidents, 545–46

Americans at, 135, 145–47, 157, 365, 372, 425, 452, 491, 557–59, 586–87; see also Canal Zone, social life in

beginning of French work on, 131, 147–48

contracts, 148, 150–51, 155–56, 169–70, 491, 601

cost of, 75–76, 81–83, 117–18, 151, 183, 184, 194–96, 235, 308, 483, 610–11; see also Compagnie Universelle; Compagnie Nouvelle

dams, 165, 307, 308, 484, 488–89; see also Chagres River

dredges, 156–59, 193, 311, 607

dynamiting, 545–46, 581, 607

earthquakes, see earthquakes and volcanic eruptions

electrical components, 599–603

engineering problems, 130, 155, 165ff., 193, 479–81, 506, 539–40; see also Chagres River; landslides (this entry)

equipment, 148–49, 156, 170, 241, 267, 440–42, 464–65, 470–71, 545fn., 546–47, 598; see also dredges (this entry)

excavation, 155–59, 168–69, 184, 195, 267, 440–41, 529–31, 537, 546–50, 610–11; see also Culebra Cut

failure of French project, 182ff.; see also Compagnie Universelle

health hazards, death rate, 159, 161, 171–73, 464–65, 501, 581–85, 610; see also malaria; yellow fever

health and sanitation facilities, 134, 174–75, 406, 421–22, 450, 466–68, 500–501, 575; see also hospitals; Gorgas, Wm. C.

housing, 133, 444, 478–79, 542, 577, 585

International Advisory Board, 481–85, 531

labor: living and working conditions, 133–34, 159, 174, 180–81, 444, 450, 465, 472, 502–3, 544, 567, 577–79

labor: recruitment and supply, 131, 137, 147, 170, 178–79, 181, 444, 469–78, 559

labor: unions, 490–91, 533–34, 579

labor: wages, 158, 161, 181, 472–73, 478–79, 559–60

landslides, 165–69, 180, 531, 550–554, 613

locks: design and dimensions, 195, 539–40, 590–604

lock-type plans, 189, 192–93, 237–238, 481–89, 531, 539

management personnel (French), 131, 138–39, 148, 153ff., 162–65, 180, 185, 191

——(U.S.), 438, 444, 449–50, 459, 469–70, 490fT., 540–43

opening of, 605–10

reorganization of project, 540–42

Roosevelt’s favoring of, 266–67, 327, 334–35, 339–41, 379–80

Roosevelt’s supervision of, 449, 462, 467, 491–92, 507, 511

Roosevelt tour of, 493–500

Russian purchase solicited, 279

sea-level plan, 116–17, 189–96 passim, 237, 307, 446, 481–88, 531

statistics, 184, 529–31, 545–47, 589–599, 610–13

and Suez, comparisons, 49, 130–31, 155, 188, 199, 235, 239, 530, 579, 610, 611

surveys, 136–39, 154–55

transportation (of spoil) problem, 169

U.S. interest in, 240, 262–63, 270–271, 590

U.S. purchase of (projected), 188, 266–69, 291–94, 399–401

U.S. takeover, 402

see also Canal Zone; Isthmian Canal Commission

Panama City, 21, 28, 133, 267, 276, 332, 335, 392, 401, 476

earthquake, 149, 606

health, sanitation, 142, 175, 419, 428 illus., 447, 448, 454, 466, 467

history, 111–15

housing, 444, 445, 467, 477, 478, 577

Lesseps’ visit (1885), 186

Prestan Uprising, 175–79

recreational facilities in, 560–61, 563

Republican revolution, 345, 352–353, 355, 363–67, 372–73, 378, 379, 382

Roosevelt visit, 493

Panama Expedition of 1875, 143

Panama Lobby, 127, 263, 265, 271, 273, 280fT., 292; see also Bunau-Varilla, Philippe; Cromwell, William N.

Panama or Nicaragua? (Bunau-Varilla pamphlet), 285

Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 608–9

Panama: Past, Present and Future (Bunau-Varilla), 279, 281

Panama Pathwork (Gilbert), 453

Panama Railroad, 21, 62, 66, 106, 147, 169, 173, 178, 423, 464, 555

condition, equipment, 148–49, 440, 470–71

and Cromwell, 273, 342–43

earthquake damage to, 149

French acquisition of, 67, 81, 118, 135–36, 150, 197, 240

history of, 33–40

Lesseps’ trip on, 110–11

personnel of, 147, 470–71

and Panama revolution, 361, 366, 371–79, 385, 393, 440

racial discrimination, 576

removal of, in Gatun area, 489, 507

role of, in excavation, 548

U.S. military protection of, 177–179, 330, 377–79

U.S. purchase and operation of, 266–67, 333, 341–43, 567

Panama Star & Herald, 113, 146, 318, 505, 532

on Lesseps’ visit, 116, 199

management connections with revolutionary elements, 343, 345

obituaries, 171

on Roosevelt visit, 495

yellow-fever report in, 452–54

Panama Steamship Company, 471

Paraiso, 111, 148, 180, 194, 493, 585

Paris:

anti-Semitism in, 205, 223, 235

International Canal Congress at, see Congres International…

Lesseps’ popularity in, 59, 201, 203

newspapers of, see France, press

riot in, 223

rumors and conjectures, 191, 228

Paris Exposition of 1889, 195, 204, 208

Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee railway, 127

Park, Trenor W., 67, 106, 115, 135, 136, 185

Parker, Alton B., 442

Parra, Aquileo, 63–65

Parsons, George, 285

Parsons, William Barclay, 407, 408, 482, 487

Pasteur, Louis, 143

Paterson, William, 21

Paúl, Jose Telesforo, 114, 160

Pauncefote, Sir Julian, 256, 257, 259, 264, 292, 330

Pavey, Frank D., 280, 282, 284, 292, 391

Peck, Harr y Thurston, 248

Pedrarias, see Avila, Pedro Arias de

Pedro Miguel, 484, 496, 539–40, 543, 546, 571, 592–93, 606, 607, 609

Pelée, Mount, 316–17, 319, 325

Pennell, Joseph, 525 illus., 559, 591

Pennsylvania, U.S.S., 539

Pennsylvania Railroad, 595

Pére Lachaise Cemetery, 234

Perez, Raul, 333

Periere, Isaac, 60

Périvier, Samuel, 207, 223, 225

Perkins, George C, 324

Perry, Matthew, 39

Petit Journal, Le, 126, 191, 230, 232

Pettus, Edmund W., 324

Philadelphia, 141, 285

Philippines, 254, 255, 257, 459, 506

Piercy, Norman, 583

Pim, Bedford Clapperton, 171

Pittsburgh, 487–88, 598

Piza, Nephews & Company, 347

Piatt, Orville, 325

Plume, S. W., 165–67, 173, 306

pneumonia, 454, 465, 501–2, 577, 581, 608

Poe, Colonel, 542

Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (Humboldt), 29

Porto Bello, 594

Port Said, 25, 51

Portsmouth, N. H., 460

postage stamps, Nicaraguan, 285, 323, 325

Powell, John Wesley, 24

Prairie, U.S.S., 379

Prescott, Herbert G., 342, 361–64, 366, 368, 371, 374–75

Prestan, Pedro, 96 illus., 175–79, 372

Prestan Uprising, 96 illus., 175–77

Princeton University, 285

Prinet, Henri, 207–9

Puerto Rico, 254

Pulitzer, Joseph, 385

Queen Elizabeth, S.S., 612

Queen Elizabeth II, S.S., 612

Queen Mary, S.S., 612

Quellenac, F., 482

racial discrimination, 474–77, 557, 574–83

Raggi, Arthur, 610

Randolph, Isham, 482

Raspadura, Lost Canal of the, 29–30, 39

Rattazzi, Madame, 61

Reclus, Armand, 103, 131, 133–35, 148

canal-survey expedition, 62–63, 65

canal-tunnel plan, 66

at Congres International, 75, 76, 78

Red Star Line, 321

Reed, Thomas B., 273–74, 294

Reed, Walter, 407, 413, 414, 417, 422

Reid, Whitelaw, 120

Reinach, Jacques de, 60, 98 illus., 228, 235

agent of Compagnie Universelle, 191, 197, 209, 218–20, 224–25, 231–32

and Drumont, 217–19

and Herz, 218–20

death of, 210–13, 220

Reinach, Joseph, 210, 220

Renault, Leon, 216, 227

Rennie, Sir John, 25

Republican National Committee, 291

Republican Party, 291, 460, 506

Reynolds, Russell, 228

Ribot, Alexandre, 212, 228

Ribourt, Engineer, 77–78

Ricard, Louis, 209, 210, 212, 219

Richardson, Henry H., 246

Richier, Commodore, 148

Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 562

Rio Grande, 80, 111, 114

Ripley, Joseph, 482, 485, 489, 542

Rixey, Presley, 493

Robeson, George M., 19, 21, 26, 44

Robinson, Corinne, 347

Robinson, Tracy, 104, 106, 116–17, 145–47, 157, 557

Rock Creek Park, 592

Rodgers, Raymond, 158–59

Rodrigues, J. C, 107, 108, 113–17, 121, 183, 184

Roebling, Emily, 120

Roebling, John A., Sons, 599

Roeblings, 24

Rogers, Henry Huddleson, 272

Rome, 143

Roosevelt, Alice, see Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Edith Carow, 248, 493, 495, 588

Roosevelt, Kermit, 493, 498, 499

Roosevelt, Nicholas, 348

Roosevelt, Theodore, 15, 26, 207fn., 295 illus., 302 illus., 304 illus., 316, 320, 546, 570fn., passim

background, 247–69

and Bunau-Varilla, 277, 292, 350–351

for canal in Central America, 249rT., 317

and Colombia negotiations, 332, 334–41, 348, 379, 384–86

and Congress, 258, 262, 266–68, 317, 381, 500, 502–3

election victory (1904), 442

expansionism and imperialism, 255

family, 248–49

Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 255–59

and Isthmian Canal Commission, 266–67, 406, 449–50

libel suit against World, 385

and Lesseps compared, 249

and Mahan, 250–53

for Nicaraguan canal, 253, 259, 261, 266

for Panama canal, 269, 326–28, 379–86, 390, 616–17

Panama Canal purchase, 400

and Panama revolution, 351–53, 355–57, 362, 373, 379–86, 390, 396–97

Panama visit, 430 illus., 492–502, 577, 581

personality, 12, 332, 347

and the Presidency, 247–50, 258, 320, 442

sea-power advocate, 250–55

White House life, 248–49

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 397, 499

Root, Elihu, 348, 380, 383, 384, 450, 492, 509, 588

and Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, 393

Secretary of State, 460

Ross, Ronald, 144, 405, 409–10, 415, 422, 426

Rothschild, Baron Alphonse de, 53, 223

Rothschild family, 59, 126, 206

Rough Riders, 494, 495

Rouleau, Sister Marie, 172, 178

Rourke, Louis K., 541

Rousseau, Armand, 185, 186, 188–90, 224, 432–33 illus.

Rousseau, Harr y Harwood, 510, 511, 542, 568, 588

Rouvier, Maurice, 219, 220, 228, 231, 233

Royal Geographical Society, 22

Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, 375–76, 476

Russel, S. C, 563

Russia, 279

Russo-Japanese War, 460

Saavedra, Alvaro de, 27

Sagamore Hill, 341, 347, 348

Sage, Russell, 120

Sahara desert, 57–58

Said, Mohammed, 51–53, 103

St. John, Clifford, 580

St. Lucia, 501

St. Pierre, Martinique, 316–17

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de, 48, 559

Saint-Simonianism, 49, 206

St. Vincent Island, 317

Salazar, Captain, 370, 376

Salgar, Eustorgio, 64

San Bias, 44, 62–63, 77

San Bias, Gulf of, 43

Sanclemente, Manuel, 336

Sands, William Franklin, 557, 568fn., 587

San Francisco, 34, 65, 71, 83, 213, 542, 606, 608–9

San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 214

San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua, 38

San Juan River, 27, 65, 15

San Lorenzo fort, 566

San Pablo, 133

Sans-Leroy, Charles Francois, 196, 217, 222, 227, 229, 231, 232

Santiago Bay, Battle of, 255

Santo Tomas Hospital, 341, 447

Saratoga, U.S.S., 611

Saturday Evening Post, The, 537

Savalli, Paul, 171

Savoy, Edward, 259

Schaefer, Will, 450

Schildhauer, Edward, 594, 597, 600, 602, 605, 610

Schulze, Lieutenant, 42

Scientific American, 530, 550, 589, 591

Scott, Irving M., 315

Secunderabad, India, 409, 410

Seager, John, 451

Sedan, 12, 55

Selfridge, Thomas O., 19, 23–27, 40–44, 71, 73–74, 82, 283, 616

Seligman, Isaac, 289

Seligman, J. & W., Company, 122

Seligman, Jesse, 120, 127, 128, 289

Service, Robert, 453

Sevareid, Eric, 616

Seward, William, 377

Shafter, General, 406

Shaler, James, 363–68, 370–76, 384, 470

Shanton, George, 494–95

Shaw, Albert, 381

Shaw, Leslie, 393, 400

Shenandoah, U.S.S., 176, 177

Sheridan, Philip H., 55

Sherman, William Tecumseh, 509

Shonts, Theodore, 455, 462–64, 470, 491, 492, 502, 530

appearance, personality, 463

appointed head of Canal Commission, 450

and Gorgas, 467–68

resignation from Commission, 503

and Roosevelt, 460, 491, 494, 502

and Stevens, 462, 464, 480, 485, 487, 491, 492

and Wallace, 450, 456, 458

Shufeldt, Robert, 26, 27

Sibert, William L., 432–33 illus., 534, 540–42, 566, 592, 605, 610

appointed to Canal Commission, 510

friction with Goethals, 540, 573

Sibert, Mrs. William L., 534, 566

Siboney, Cuba, 412–13

Siegfried, Andre, 229, 239

Sierra Nevada, 33

Simmons, Edward, 294

Slattery, J.J., 451

Slaven, Henry Bartholomew, 156, 158, 203

Slaven, Moses, 156

Slocum, Joshua, 255

Smalley, George, 212, 223, 256

smallpox, 37, 454

Smiles, Samuel, 25

Smith, Eleanor, 425

Smith, Jackson, 470, 478–79, 510, 538, 542

Smith, William Sooy, 284

Socialist Party, 567

Société Civile Internationale du Canal Interoceanique de Darien, see Türr Syndicate

Société de Dynamite, 209

Société de Géographie de Paris, 58, 59, 61, 62, 70, 72, 75

Société des Ingénieurs, 71, 86

Société Générale, 197

Soo Canal, 482, 484, 540

Sosa, Pedro, 63, 65, 71, 86

Sosa Dam, 539

Sosa Hill, 484, 540

South, University of the, 411

Southern Pacific, 273

Spain, canal labor from, 475, 477, 478

Spanish-American War, 255–57 “Spigs,” 586

Spooner, John Coit, 260, 269, 273, 317, 324, 340, 392, 397

Spooner Act, 329, 331, 341, 353, 406, 422, 449, 483

passed in House, 328

Spray, U.S. sloop, 255

Squires, Mrs. Herbert G., 564

Stackpole transits, 20

Star & Herald, see Panama Star & Herald

Stars and Stripes, 536

Statue of Liberty, 46, 192

Stearns, Frederick P., 482

Steele, Joshua, 575

Steffens, Lincoln, 247

Stephens, John Lloyd, 31–32, 35, 37, 105, 140, 283

Stephenson, Robert, 25

Sternberg, George Miller, 415

Stevens, John, 427 illus., 459–89

appointed Chief Engineer, 154, 459–60

background, 460–61

and Goethals, 531–33

labor supply, efficiency, 474–81

opinion of Wallace, 443, 458

public-health policy, 466–69, 581

railroad orientation, 468–71

and Roosevelt, 490–92, 494–500

resignation from project, 503–8

departure from Panama, 533

later life and death, 617

Stevens, Mrs. John, 460

Stokes, Sir John, 71

Strain, Isaac, 22–24, 41, 42

Straus, Oscar, 380

Sucubti River, 41, 42

Suez Canal, 49–54, 79–81, 130, 184, 193, 239, 483, 484

British takeover of, 59, 151, 188

compared with Panama Canal, 49, 155, 199, 530, 579, 610, 611

financing, 125

opening of, 24–25

Suez Canal Company, 57, 234

Sullivan, Algernon, 272

Sullivan, J. A, 42

Sullivan, Mark, 255, 573

Sullivan & Cromwell, 272, 339, 401

Summit Station, 111

Sutherland, Duke of, 185

Swatara, U.S.S., 177

Tabernilla, 549

Taboga Island, 134, 174, 566

Taft, William Howard, 365, 512, 542, 588

appearance, 445–46

and Goethals, 470, 504, 509–12, 532, 540, 573

and Gor gas’ work, 467, 572

and Isthmian Canal Commission, 408, 446–47, 449, 450, 491–92

Panama visits, 379, 445–46, 470, 512, 520 illus., 532, 540, 543, 569

Roosevelt and, 348, 446, 490–91, 494

and Stevens, 459–60, 462, 465, 485, 504, 505, 512

and Wallace, 446–47, 449, 455–58, 512

Taft, Mrs. William Howard, 446, 520 illus.

Tawney, James A., 539

Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 562

Technical Committee, 77, 82–83, 106, 114, 116, 117, 155, 195

Tehuantepec Expedition, 26, 27

Telford, Thomas, 25, 29, 31

Teller, Henry M., 324

Temps, Le, 232

Tennessee, U.S.S., 177, 180, 493

Thayer, Sylvanus, 541

Thierée, Anthony, 216

Thierry, Charles (Baron) de, 30fn. Thomas, Samuel, 575

Thompson, Richard Wigginton, 127

Tiffany & Company, 285, 481

Time Machine, The (Wells), 499

Times, The, of London, 157, 240, 256

Tincauzer, Eugen, 482

tiradores, 362, 365, 380

Tiradores Battalion, 365

Tirard, Pierre, 196

Titanic, S.S., 539, 563, 591, 596

Tivoli Crossing, 494

Tivoli Hotel, 494, 495, 515 illus., 563, 567, 578, 580, 585

Tobar, Juan, 358, 364–66, 368–70, 372–76, 378, 380, 384

Tokyo Bay, S.S., 612

Tommasi-Crudeli, Doctor, 143

Toro Point beach, 566

Torres, Eliseo, 366, 372–76, 378, 384

Totten, George M., 106, 108, 110, 115, 185

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 233

Toussaint L’Ouverture, 141

Trautwine, John C, 39

Tribunal Civil, 203

tuberculosis, 581, 582

Tunkhannock Viaduct, 592

Turner, Anna, 425

Turner, George, 324

Türr, 1st van, 60–61, 75, 76, 101, 218

Türr Syndicate, 59–63, 66, 101, 118, 128, 213, 215

typhoid fever, 406, 580, 581, 582, 584

Ukraine, pogroms in, 206

Union League Club, 460

Union Pacific Railroad, 24, 471

United Fruit Company, 399

U.S. Army, 450

Engineers Corps, 22, 274, 275, 342, 505–7, 509–11, 532–33, 541

Fourth Infantry, 38

Medical Corps, 412

Panama intelligence mission, 348

Signal Corps, 20, 545

typical Canal Zone soldier, 568–69

Yellow Fever Commission, 414, 415, 422–23

U.S. Board of Trade, 71

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 73

U.S. House of Representatives:

Canal appropriations hearing, 538–539

canal-site issue in, 265, 266, 268, 269, 328

and canal-site study, 273–74

hearings on lock plan, 487–88

U.S. Marine Corps, 177–78, 300, 376, 420, 568

U.S. Naval Observatory, 59

U.S. Navy:

Bureau of Navigation, 22, 26, 180

and Canal width, 313, 539

and Panama revolution, 353, 378–379

and Prestan Uprising, 178–79

War College, 179, 250, 251

U.S. Senate:

canal-site issue in, 259–62, 265, 266, 268–70, 306–15, 317–25; see also Morgan, John Tyler

and Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, 388–89, 391, 395, 397–98

and Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 256–259, 265

and lock plan, 486–88

U.S. State Department, see Hay ,John

U.S. Treasury Department, 400

Universal Exposition (1878), Paris, 597

Urabá, Gulf of, 44

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 39, 74

Vanderbilt, William K., 272

Varón, Ruben, 363, 376

Vatan, village, 50

Verbrugghe, Louis, 64, 131, 148

Verdi, Giuseppe, 54

Verne, Jules, 24, 54, 58, 121, 498

Versailles, 46

Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy, 60

Victoria, Queen, 25, 55

Vienna, 138

Virginia, U.S.S., 313fn.

Viviani, Rene Raphael, 609

Voisin Bey, 72, 136

volcanoes, see earthquakes and volcanic eruptions

Wachusett, U.S.S., 27, 176, 177, 179

Waisome, Jeremiah, 579–80

Waldeck-Rousseau, Pierre, 224

Waldo, Leonard, 326

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 286, 287, 349, 352, 356, 357, 387, 396

Walker, John G., 326, 330, 438–39, 446, 455

appearance, 305

appointed head of Canal Commission, 264, 274, 406–8

Canal purchase price, 266–67, 291–294

Commission report, 292–93

at Senate hearing, 306–15

public-health issue, 415, 421–23, 467

resignation from Commission, 449

Walker Commission, Second, see Isthmian Canal Commission

Wallace, John F., 421, 427 illus., 438–451, 464, 469, 478, 482, 508

background, 441–43

chosen Chief Engineer, 408

favors sea-level canal, 463, 482, 485, 487

quits project, 453–58, 460

Wallace, Mrs. John F., 446, 447, 449, 453

Ward, Captain, 157

Ward, C. D., 485

Wardlaw, Mr., 376

Washington, D.C., 120–21, 143, 245–248, 287

Washington, S.S., 162

Washington, U.S.S., 493

Washington House, Colon, 105

Washington Monument, 530

Washington Post, 248, 496

Washington Star, 323, 492

Weitzel Lock, 484

Welch, Ashbel, 485

Welch, William Henry, 407, 411, 422, 467

Welcker, J. W., 482

Wellman, William, 292–93

Wells, H. G, 490, 498–99

West, Robert, 451

Western Society Civil Engineers, 284

Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Company, 457

West Point Military Academy, 541

Wheeling, W. Va., 597

Wheeling Mold and Foundry Company, 598

White, William Allen, 249

Whitehead, Richard, 536, 573

White Star Line, 321

White House, 247, 248, 249

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 251, 257, 570fn.

Willard Hotel, Washington, 388, 390, 391

Williams, Edward J., 470

Williams, James A., 583–85

Williamson, Sydney B., 541–42, 571, 593

Wilson, Woodrow, 512, 606, 608, 617

Windsor Hotel, New York, 119

Wines and Alcohols Bulletin, 232

Winslow, Lanier & Company, 122

Witte, Count Sergei, 279

women, 73, 560–63, 577, 586–87

Wood, Leonard, 406

Wood, Robert, E., 443–44, 469, 470, 477, 535, 586, 604

World Trade Center, New York, 591fn.

World War I, 609, 611

World War II, 612

Worsley, Robert, 564

Wright, Hamilton, 467

Wright, Harold Bell, 562

Wright, W. W., 106, 116

Wyoming, U.S.S., 379

Wyse, Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte, 61–67, 75, 88 illus., 101, 115, 215, 218, 342

at Congres International, 75–78, 81

Darien survey expedition, 62–63, 67

and Lesseps, 61fn., 102, 103, 185

mission to Bogota, 63–64, 66, 61

Nicaragua visit, 65

plan for sea-level Panama canal, 65–67, 77, 78, 81, 117

visit to U.S., 65, 67

Wyse Concession, 66–67, 85, 101, 103, 128, 331, 342

Yale University, 258, 381, 383, 570

Ycaza, DOn Eduardo, 376

yellow fever, 137–42, 144–45, 172, 175, 424, 443, 451–54, 473

American troops felled by, 406

description, symptoms, 140–42

Dingier family deaths, 160–61, 171, 447

Gorgas’ work on, 409–19, 447–49, 451–52, 464–68, 500, 585

and moral decadence, 145–47

mosquito as carrier, 142, 315, 421–423, 448–49

remedy or palliative for, 141

wave effect in outbreaks, 421

Yellow Jack (Howard), 413

Y.M.C.A., 516–17 illus., 560, 565, 576

Yucatan, S.S., 357, 358

Zelaya, Jose Santos, 317–18

Zone Policeman 88 (Franck), 567

Praise for Truman

“Perhaps the highest tribute one can pay a biographer is to say that through him one comes to know his subject almost as though in person. In fostering the reader’s acquaintance with Harry Truman, not once does McCullough get in the way. This is in every respect a splendid work.”

—Myron A. Marty, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Since I’ve been in national politics, whenever I’ve been asked who my favorite political leader of the century is, I have always said Harry Truman…. David McCullough has always been a favorite of mine. The Truman biography is outstanding.”

—Jimmy Carter, The Boston Phoenix

“Exemplary and riveting…. The book is like a comfortable Victorian three-decker novel. There are two plots, a hero and heroine, and a glittering cast of characters ranging from Dean Acheson, Churchill and General Marshall to the Pendergasts and General MacArthur, as well as a splendid collection of Shakespearean clowns…. McCullough’s book will stand for a long time as the outstanding analysis of an extremely important subject: the greatness of Truman, and its role as an exogenous ‘cause’ in the history of his time.”

—Eugene V. Rostow, Times Literary Supplement, London

“An impressive and valuable study of Truman, worthy of its subject.”

—C. Vann Woodward, The New York Review

“Truman is biography as good as it gets, as absorbing and readable as it is voluminous. McCullough writes like a novelist, digs like a zealous reporter and puts things in perspective like the superb historian he is.”

—Lorenzo Carcaterra, People magazine

“This is the biography of President Harry S. Truman against which not only all other Truman biographies but probably all other presidential biographies will be measured. It is comprehensive, well reasoned, insightful and yet elegantly simple. It is written with a love for the subject that is contagious.”

—Steve Weinberg, The Kansas City Star

“McCullough takes us on a beautifully guided tour of recent history—a journey that is as much a celebration of American experience as it is a captivating portrait of the ordinary ‘man from Missouri’ who became an extraordinary figure in the Cold War world. Keeping Truman himself always vividly in the foreground, Mr. McCullough has written a stirring, masterly, thoroughly absorbing book.”

—Jean Strouse, author of Alice James: A Biography

“We are always at Truman’s side, at poker and bourbon and at his high moments. Coverage is complete and fascinating…. Now we know Truman in all his candor, courage, straightforwardness, determination and his occasional blunder…. This long, penetrating book is biography at its best.”

—W. A. Swanberg, Chicago Sun-Times

“Sweeping and vivid…. As a comprehensive and highly readable account of one of the most American of Americans, this is a distinctive and distinguished volume.”

—Hoyt Purvis, The Dallas Morning News

“An enthralling and fluidly told surprise-success story…. A book that handles an enormous amount of material with deftness, taste, and an acute understanding of Truman’s world and the men who made it.”

—Rhoda Koenig, New York magazine

“Superbly researched and carried forward by McCullough’s narrative drive, Truman is endlessly readable. The Harry we were all wild about is re-created exactly as Harry was—feisty, preposterous, decisive, tireless, outrageous, but always honorable, always courageous, always guided by his inner gyroscope of conscience and character.”

—William Manchester, author of William Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion

“David McCullough brings Truman vividly to life in this masterpiece of American biography. It’s a superb political study and human history.”

—Steve Neal, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Splendid…an elegantly written, even moving work…deserves a wide audience—if nothing else to remind us of what we were and what we had.”

—Stanley I. Kutler, Chicago Tribune

“Surefooted, highly satisfying biography…. an impressive tribute to a man whose brisk cheerfulness and self-confidence were combined with a God-fearing humility.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Not only outstanding biography but a great American story as well—by a master of the art. It is about how modern America was made. It is also about character and leadership in a time that needed both.”

—Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize

“Harry Truman has found his biographer. David McCullough’s monumental Truman perfectly mirrors its subject—vivid, straightforward, fast moving, intensely human, never boring for a moment. Truman himself once asserted the right to be both a president and a human being; it is McCullough’s great achievement as a biographer that he has managed to pin both Trumans to paper.”

—Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The Civil War: An Illustrated History

“David McCullough has a rare gift for combining scholarship with storytelling. His Truman ranks with William Manchester’s American Caesar and Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt among the finest biographies of our time. To call Truman definitive is an understatement. For what Mr. McCullough has created is a vast panorama of American life and politics, from the stagecoach to the space capsule, all swirling around a seemingly ordinary protagonist whose extraordinary qualities make Truman’s life a stirring confirmation of democracy at its finest.”

—Richard Norton Smith, Director, Herbert Hoover Library

“A fresh, wonderful new biography…My only complaint about this marvelous book is how much it makes me miss the old guy with the snappy bow tie.”

—Daniel Schorr, USA Today

“Plain wonderful.”

—Justin Kaplan

“Masterful…. Everyone seems to be reading Truman. Those who are sixty years of age or more, and therefore old enough to have adult memories of the man himself, recognize the loving accuracy of McCullough’s account. Professional historians of any age will acknowledge that McCullough has done the hard work necessary for good history and has added zest and imagination—qualities often absent from academic writing.”

—Gaddis Smith, The Yale Review

Also by David McCullough

JOHN ADAMS

BRAVE COMPANIONS

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS

THE GREAT BRIDGE

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1992 by David McCullough

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Eve Metz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCullough, David G.

Truman/David McCullough.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972.

2. Presidents—United States—Biography.

I. Title.

E814.M26 1992

973.918′092—dc20 [B]         92-5245 CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6029-9
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN-10: 0-7432-6029-5

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

FOR DORIE KANE MCCULLOUGH

Contents

Part One—Son of the Middle Border

1. Blue River Country

2. Model Boy

3. The Way of the Farmer

4. Soldier

Part Two—Politician

5. Try, Try Again

6. The Senator from Pendergast

7. Patriot

8. Numbered Days

Part Three—To the Best of My Ability

9. The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets

10. Summer of Decision

Part Four—Mr. President

11. The Buck Stops Here

12. Turning Point

13. The Heat in the Kitchen

14. Fighting Chance

Part Five—Weight of the World

15. Iron Man

16. Commander in Chief

17. Final Days

Part Six—Back Home

18. Citizen Truman

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

Bibliography

We can never tell what is in store for us.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

Part One
Son of the Middle Border

1
Blue River Country

As an agricultural region, Missouri is not surpassed by any state in the Union. It is indeed the farmer’s kingdom….

—The History of Jackson County, Missouri, 1881

I

In the spring of 1841, when John Tyler was President, a Kentucky farmer named Solomon Young and his red-haired wife, Harriet Louisa Young, packed their belongings and with two small children started for the Far West. They had decided to stake their future on new land in the unseen, unfamiliar reaches of westernmost Missouri, which was then the “extreme frontier” of the United States.

They were part of a large migration out of Kentucky that had begun nearly twenty years before, inspired by accounts of a “New Eden” in farthest Missouri—by reports sent back by Daniel Morgan Boone, the son of Daniel Boone—and by the fact that in 1821 Missouri had come into the Union as a slave state. The earliest settlers included families named Boggs, Dailey, and Adair, McCoy, McClelland, Chiles, Pitcher, and Gregg, and by 1827 they had founded a courthouse town called Independence, pleasantly situated on high ground in Jackson County, in what was often spoken of as the Blue River country. Those who came afterward, at the time of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, were named Hickman, Holmes, and Ford, Davenport, McPherson, Mann, Noland, and Nolan, Freeman, Truman, Peacock, Shank, Wallace, and Whitset, and they numbered in the hundreds.

Nearly all were farmers, plain-mannered and plain-spoken, people with little formal education. Many of them were unlettered, even illiterate. They were not, however, poor or downtrodden, as sometimes pictured—only by the material standards of later times could they be considered wanting—and though none were wealthy, some, like red-haired Harriet Louisa, came from families of substantial means. She had said goodbye to a spacious Greek Revival house with wallpaper and milled woodwork, the Kentucky home of her elder brother and guardian, William Gregg, who owned numerous slaves and landholdings running to many hundreds of acres.

The great majority of these people were of Scotch-Irish descent. They were Baptists and they were Democrats, and like Thomas Jefferson they believed that those who labored in the earth were the chosen people of God. They saw themselves as the true Americans. Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, “One-man-with-courage-makes-a-majority” Jackson, the first President from west of the Alleghenies, who was of their own Scotch-Irish stock. It was for him that Jackson County had been named, and like him they could be tough, courageous, blunt, touchy, narrow-minded, intolerant, and quarrelsome. And obstinate. “Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn,” was a line from an old Scotch-Irish prayer.

With their Bibles, farm tools, and rifles, their potent corn whiskey, their black slaves, they brought from Kentucky a hidebound loathing for taxes, Roman Catholics, and eastern ways. Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky—or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas—was due primarily to “good, hard sense,” as they said, and no end of hard work.

They were workers and they were loners, fiercely independent, fiercely loyal to their kind. And they were proudly prolific. David Dailey, recorded as the first man to break the prairie sod in Jackson County, came west with a wife and twelve sons, while Christopher Mann, who outlived everybody of that generation, had already produced with his Betsie seventeen sons and daughters and with a second marriage fathered eight more. (Years afterward, at age eighty-seven, this memorable Jackson County pioneer could claim he had never lost a tooth from decay and could still hold his breath for a minute and a half.) They believed in big families, they came from big families. Children were wealth for a farmer, as for a nation. President Tyler himself had eight children, and in another few years, at age fifty-four, following the death of his first wife, he would remarry and have seven more children, making a total of fifteen, a presidential record.

Solomon Young, who was one of eleven children, and his wife Harriet Louisa, one of thirteen, were from Shelby County, Kentucky, east of Louisville. And so was Nancy Tyler Holmes, a widow with ten children, who made the journey west to Missouri three or four years later, about 1845, once her sons had established themselves in Jackson County. Carrying a sack of tea cakes and her late husband’s beaver hat in a large leather hatbox, she traveled in the company of several slaves and her two youngest daughters, one of whom, Mary Jane Holmes, was secretly pining for a young man back in Shelby County named Anderson Truman. He was one of twelve children.

If Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young were acquainted with any of the Holmes or Truman families by this time, there is no record of it.

Nearly everyone made the expedition the same way, traveling the wilderness not by wagon or horseback but by steamboat. The route was down the winding Ohio River from Louisville, past Henderson and Paducah, to the confluence of the Mississippi at Cairo, then up the Mississippi to St. Louis. Changing boats at St. Louis, they headed west on the Missouri, the “Big Muddy,” fighting the current for 457 miles, as far as the river’s sudden, dramatic bend. There they went ashore at either of two miserable, mudbound little river settlements, Wayne City or Westport, which put them within a few miles of Independence, still the only town of consequence on the frontier.

With the “terrible current” against them, the trip on the Missouri took a week. The shallow-draft boats were loaded so deep the water broke over the gunwales. Wagons and freight jammed the deck, cordwood for the engines, mules, horses, piles of saddles and harness, leaving passengers little room. (One side-wheel steamer of the era that sank in the river and was only recovered more than a century later, carried cargo that included everything from ax handles and rifles to school slates, doorknobs, whale oil lanterns, beeswax candles, 2,500 boots and shoes, and thousands of bright-colored beads and buttons intended for the Indian trade.) Day after day, the heavy, shadowed forest passed slowly by, broken only now and then by an open meadow or tiny settlement where a few lone figures stood waving from among the tree stumps. Some trees towering over the river banks measured six feet through. On summer mornings the early filtered light on the water could be magical.

These were the years of the great Missouri River paintings by George Caleb Bingham. The river Bingham portrayed was the settlers’ path. The distant steamer appearing through the sun-filled morning haze in his Boatmen on the Missouri, as an example, could be the Radnor, the Henry Bry or Winona, any of twenty-odd river packets that carried the Kentucky people.

The only notable sign of civilization west of St. Louis was the state capitol on a bluff at Jefferson City, a white limestone affair, “very substantial in execution,” within which was displayed a full-length portrait of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri’s own thundering voice of westward expansion. The painting was said to have cost the unheard-of sum of $1,000.

Besides those from Kentucky, the migration included families from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee, who, with the Kentuckians, made it a predominantly southern movement and so one of numerous slaveholders other than Nancy Tyler Holmes. Possibly, Solomon Young, too, brought slaves. In later years, it is known, he owned three or four—a cook, a nursemaid, one or two farmhands—which was about the usual number for those bound for Jackson County. They were farmers, not cotton planters, and for many, a slave was a mark of prosperity and social station. Still, the accumulative number of black men, women, and children traveling to the frontier was substantial. Incredibly, one Jabez Smith, a Virginia slave trader who set up business near Independence, is on record as having transported more than two hundred slaves.

White, black, young and old, they crowded the upbound steamers in the company of hellfire preachers and cardsharps, or an occasional pallid easterner traveling west for his health. Old journals speak, too, of uniformed soldiers on their way to Fort Leavenworth, blanketed Kaw (or Kansas) Indians, French fur traders and mountainmen with their long hair and conspicuous buckskins—a seemingly endless, infinitely colorful variety of humankind and costume. Nancy Tyler Holmes is said to have worn a white lace cap that concealed an ugly scar. As a child in Kentucky, during a Shawnee uprising, she allegedly saved herself by pretending to be dead, never moving or making a sound as she was being scalped. True or not, the story served long among her descendants as a measure of family grit.

The feeling in surviving accounts is of noisy good company and wild scenery and of “history” as an immediate and entirely human experience. Lieutenant John Charles Frémont, the celebrated Path Finder, came up the river in 1842, on his first exploring expedition to the Rockies. (One traveler described Frémont’s party as “healthy and full of fun and elasticity…by no means a choir of Psalm-singers, nor Quakers. They ate, drank, talked, sang, played cards and smoked cigars when they pleased and as much as they pleased.”) The following year, 1843, came John James Audubon. In the summer of 1846 a young historian from Boston, Francis Parkman, stood at the rail of the Radnor marveling at the immense brown sweep of the river, its treacherous snags and shifting sandbars. “The Missouri is constantly changing its course,” Parkman was to write in The California and Oregon Trail, his classic account of the journey, “wearing away its banks on one side, while it forms new ones on the other. Its channel is continually shifting. Islands are formed, and then washed away, and while the old forests on one side are undermined and swept off, a young growth springs up from the new soil upon the other.” It was “frightful,” he noted, “to see the dead and broken trees, thick-set as a military abattis, firmly imbedded in the sand, and all pointing downstream, ready to impale any unhappy steamboat that at high water should pass over them.” The landing near Independence was described approvingly as a “wild and enterprising region.”

It was also in that summer of 1846 that Anderson Truman came on from Kentucky, and, for some unexplained reason, on horseback, which was one of the few exceptional things ever recorded about Anderson Truman. Possibly he couldn’t afford boat passage.

Of this first Truman to reach Jackson County, there is not a great deal to be said. His full name was Anderson Shipp (or Shippe) Truman. His people were English and Scotch-Irish and farmers as far back as anyone knew. His father, William Truman, had come into Kentucky from Virginia about 1800 and reportedly served in the War of 1812. Andy, as he was called, grew up on the Truman farm near the tiny crossroads village of Christianburg, Kentucky. He was slight, gentle, soft-spoken, thirty years old, and without prospects. Nonetheless, Mary Jane Holmes, who was five years younger, had seen enough in him to defy her mother and marry him. On the pretext of visiting a married sister, she had returned to Kentucky earlier that summer and once there, announced her intentions.

Her mother, the redoubtable Nancy Tyler Holmes, was horrified, as she let Mary Jane know in a letter from Missouri dated July 24, 1846—a letter dictated to another of her daughters, which suggests that Nancy Tyler Holmes may have been illiterate. Since hearing the news she had been unable to sleep or eat. “Mary are you the first daughter I have that has refused to take my advice?” What made Anderson Truman so unacceptable is unclear. An explanation given later was that Mother Holmes thought Mary Jane was “marrying down,” since the Trumans had no slaves.

The wedding took place in Kentucky in mid-August at the home of the married sister, a handsome red-brick house with white trim that still stands. Then Mary Jane’s “Mr. Truman,” as she would always refer to him, set off by horse for “the wild country” of Missouri, intending to stay only long enough to secure the blessing of his new mother-in-law.

His first letter from Missouri reached Mary Jane a month later. To his amazement, he had been welcomed with open arms, her mother and sisters all hugging and kissing him, everybody laughing and crying at once. He was urged to stay and take up the frontier life. He could be happy anywhere, even in Missouri, he wrote to Mary Jane, if only she were with him. “As for myself I believed that I would be satisfied if you was out here…I believe I can live here if you are willing.”

She arrived by steamboat, and with her mother’s blessing and the wedding gift of a Holmes slave named Hannah and her child, the young couple settled on a rented farm belonging to a prominent local figure, Johnston Lykins, a Baptist missionary (preacher and physician) who had come to the frontier originally to bring salvation to the Indians, but had lately turned to land speculation. He and others were in the throes of founding a new town on the Missouri’s great bend, at the juncture of the Kansas River and the Missouri, this to be ambitiously named Kansas City. To such men the future was in towns and trade. They talked of geographic advantages plain to anyone who looked at a map. Here was the Missouri, the great “natural highway” downstream to St. Louis, and so to New Orleans, Louisville, or Pittsburgh. There, upstream, beyond the great bend, stretched all the Northwest and its immeasurable opportunities.

Here also, importantly, began the overland trails to Santa Fe, California, and Oregon. Jackson County was the threshold, the jumping-off point, to an entire second America of dry grasslands reaching clear to the Rockies. In a newly published guidebook to the Santa Fe Trail called Commerce of the Prairies (1844), the author, Josiah Gregg of Jackson County, portrayed Independence as the port of embarkation for the “grand prairie ocean.”

In fact, Independence, “Queen City of the Trails,” was the country’s first western boomtown, and to newly arrived settlers, after long days on the river, it seemed a metropolis of stores, blacksmith sheds, wagon shops, of crowded streets and unceasing commotion. The crack of bull-whips split the air like rifle fire as wagon trains made up for Oregon. Mexican caravans from Santa Fe rolled in with still more wagons, pack mules, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in Mexican gold to be spent on American trade goods. The spring Solomon Young and his family arrived, one Santa Fe caravan of twenty-two wagons is reported to have brought $200,000 in gold specie. Like a seaport town Independence had a customshouse.

“Mules, horses, and wagons at every corner,” observed Francis Parkman. “Groups of hardy-looking men about the stores, and Santa Fe emigrant wagons standing in the fields around…. Some of these ox-wagons contained large families of children, peeping under the covering.”

The permanent population of Independence by the 1840s was perhaps only seven hundred people, but on any spring day two or three thousand would be congregated in or about Jackson Square, at the center of which stood a trim red-brick courthouse with a fanlight over the door. Of the several public houses around the Square, the largest and best known, the two-story, brick Noland House, was acclaimed the westernmost hotel in America, offering accommodations for four hundred guests, provided no one minded sleeping two or three to a bed. The nearby wagon shops were the shipyards of the “prairie ocean” and no wagons supposedly were better suited for the rigors of a prairie crossing than those built by a free black man named Hiram Young, an enterprising manufacturer who, like nearly everyone involved with the feeding, housing, or outfitting of emigrants, was prospering handsomely.

But it was land that the Kentucky people came for, the high, rolling, fertile open country of Jackson County, with its clear springs and two “considerable” rivers, the Little Blue and the Blue, both flowing out of Kansas Territory. Every essential was at hand—limestone quarries, splendid blue-grass pastures very like those of Kentucky, and ample timber where the creeks and rivers ran. “To live in a region devoid of the familiar sight of timber seemed unendurable,” reads one old chronicle, “and the average Kentuckian could not entertain the idea of founding a home away from the familiar forest trees.” They counted hickory, ash, elm, sycamore, willow, poplar, cottonwood, and oak in three or four varieties. Walnut, the most prized, was the most abundant. Entire barns and houses were to be built of walnut.

It was land beautiful to see, rising and falling in broad swells and giving way to long horizons. Prairie grass was “high and green.” Wildflowers, wild herbs—meadow rose, turtlehead, snakeroot, wolfberry, thimbleweed—grew in fragrant profusion everywhere the prairie remained unbroken, and starting about ten miles south of Independence the country was nearly all still prairie.

To cut through the sod with a plow took six to eight yoke of oxen. Horses wouldn’t do. But beneath the crust, the dark prairie loam could be two to six feet deep. In places along the river bottoms, it was 20 feet deep. Josiah Gregg, the guidebook author, having seen all the country from the Missouri to the Rio Grande, declared that the “rich and beautiful uplands in the vicinity of Independence might well be denominated the ‘garden spot’ of the Far West.”

Much of the best land, it happens, was already under cultivation. Moreover, it had been violently contested when, a decade earlier, the “garden spot” had been the setting for what were politely referred to as the Mormon Difficulties. In 1831, only a few years after the founding of Independence, a small, advance party of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints arrived on the scene and were at first regarded by the local citizenry as little more than harmless fanatics. But more followed. They bought land, founded a settlement and a ferry crossing on Blue River, opened their own general store in Independence, and established the town’s first newspaper. Some began speaking out against slavery. In little time, seen as a threat, they were decried as “the very dregs” of the East, vicious, immoral, and in education “little above the condition of our blacks.” That they referred to the Indians across the border in Kansas Territory as their fellow tribes of Israel struck many hard-bitten old pioneers as close to insane.

More ominous was their announced intention to become proprietors of the entire region. Joseph Smith, their prophet and leader, proclaimed Jackson County holy land and commanded that Independence become their City of Zion. By the summer of 1833, with the Saints in the county numbering more than a thousand, or roughly a third of the population, it appeared they might control the fall elections. A mass meeting was called at the courthouse. Angry speeches were made and a proclamation issued declaring Mormons no longer welcome.

Violence quickly followed. A mob smashed the Mormon printing press, a Mormon bishop was tarred and feathered. On Halloween night armed riders, “without other warrant than their own judgment of the requirements of the situation,” attacked the Mormon settlement on Blue River, driving women and children from their homes. Crops and barns went up in flame, men were dragged into the fields and flogged. Jackson County was in a state of “dreadful fermentation.” In another clash three men were killed.

When, on the night of November 12, the skies ignited in a spectacular meteor shower like none ever seen on the Missouri frontier, many took it as a sign to rid the land of Mormons once and for all. More than a thousand people were forced from their homes and driven across the Missouri River into less settled territory to the north, where their persecutions only grew worse, but with the difference now that they fought back. The governor of Missouri, an Independence storekeeper named Lilburn W. Boggs, called out the militia and declared that for the public good all Mormons must leave the state or be “exterminated.” A religious war was under way, Missouri’s first civil war, and ended only when the Mormons departed for Illinois in 1839.

Such events were past history by the time Solomon Young and his small family arrived in 1841. Yet only a year later, in 1842, a lone assassin, a Mormon presumably, crept to a window in Independence and shot Lilburn W. Boggs, all but killing him. As favored by nature as the Blue River country may have been, it was no peaceable kingdom.

Nor was nature ever entirely benign in Missouri, as the new settlers learned soon enough. Winters could be severe, or marked by weeks of raw gloom when the whole country looked as grim and hard as iron. The cold cut to the bone. The diary of one farmer, though written years later, speaks for generations of Jackson County people:

Awful cold; I did not work today, too cold; Colder than it has been this year; I slept cold; Cloudy and wind blowing; I am chilly; Tremendous windy and cold; Cold, blue cold this morning…too cold to work; Awful cold, all of us housed up, nobody stirring; I got very cold….

It was a climate of great extremes, even in the span of a day. Temperatures could rise or drop 50 degrees in a matter of hours. Summers turned too dry or too wet and either way were nearly always broiling hot. The year 1844 brought the worst floods on record, followed by a tornado that tore up trees and fences and killed a number of people.

But then no one came to the frontier expecting things to go easily, least of all a farmer.

Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young made their start on a farm known as the Parrish place, not far from the Missouri River and well within the projected outlines of Kansas City. Then, shortly afterward, in 1844, possibly because of the flood, they made a first claim to public land on high ground back from the Blue River approximately sixteen miles south of Independence, near the settlement of Hickman’s Mills, on what was called Blue Ridge. It was high, fertile, well-drained ground, ideal grazing country, good for corn and wheat, as high and fine as any land in the county, with distant views miles into Kansas Territory.

This first Blue Ridge claim comprised just 80 acres, the minimum purchase required by the Land Act, and Solomon Young paid $1.25 an acre, the minimum price for public land. To gain title he was also obliged to occupy the land for a time, and consequently stories were passed down of how he and Harriet Louisa came there with “a gun and an axe and two babies and a blanket.” Grandchildren would listen to Harriet Louisa tell how Solomon rode off to file his claim at the land office at Clinton, seventy miles distant, and describe the nights she spent in a shelter of fence rails and brush, alone with the two children, Susan Mary and William, who, if not exactly babies any longer, were still quite small.

The family expanded and so did Solomon’s holdings. Six more children were born—Sarah Ann, Harrison, Elizabeth, Laura Jane, Martha Ellen, and Ada—as ever larger parcels of land were acquired. A house and barn went up. Blue Ridge became the homeplace. Solomon’s financial setbacks were frequent and might have crushed a less resilient spirit, but by reputation he was one of the best farmers and stockmen in the county and in the long run he prospered. He had an eye for horses, he knew mules, he knew land, and he bought and sold either at every opportunity. In time he established a trans-prairie freighting enterprise and amassed landholdings that, for Jackson County, amounted to a small empire. Indeed, by all accounts, Solomon Young was a remarkable man, and considerably more is known about him and Harriet Louisa than about Anderson or Mary Jane Truman.

He was born in Shelby County, Kentucky, near the town of Simpsonville, in 1815, the year of Andrew Jackson’s triumph at the Battle of New Orleans, which made him twenty-six when he came to Missouri. His father, Jacob Young, was a Revolutionary War veteran from North Carolina. His mother, Rachael Goodnight Young, died when he was twelve. When his father remarried and moved on, Solomon was left to fend for himself, earning his keep weighing hogs and trading livestock. Full grown he was tall, powerful, self-reliant, bounding with energy, and a world-beating talker. Talk was nourishment for Solomon, as it never was for Harriet Louisa.

Unlike so many who came out from Kentucky, he was neither Scotch-Irish nor a Baptist, but of German descent (the name had been spelled Jung in North Carolina) and only a nominal Methodist. Skeptical of preachers or anyone who made too much show of religion, he liked to say that whenever he heard a man praying loudly, his first instinct was to go home and lock the smokehouse. Politics interested him not at all.

Solomon had married Harriet Louisa Gregg in the second week of January 1838. She was Scotch-Irish, her people ardent members of Kentucky’s first and largest Baptist congregation, the Long Run Baptist Church at Simpsonville, which had been built on land once owned by Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln. Her first child was born in 1839, her second two years following, the same spring she and Solomon started west, which means she must have been nursing the baby on the boat trip up the Missouri. Remembered for her imperturbable disposition, no less than her abundant red hair, Harriet Louisa was not known to have complained or lost heart then or at any time afterward, whatever happened. “She was a strong woman…and there wasn’t a thing in the world that ever scared her,” it would be said. Her last pregnancy was in 1856, but the baby did not survive. Nearly forty, she was well past middle age by the standards of the day, yet still short of midpoint in what was to be an extremely long, eventful life.

Exactly when Solomon went west on the first of his wagon-train expeditions, leaving Harriet Louisa in charge of everything, is not clear. It is known only that he went several times prior to the Civil War, beginning as early perhaps as 1846, the momentous year of the Mexican War and the trek of the Mormons out of Illinois to the Great Salt Lake (not to mention the year of Anderson Truman’s arrival in Independence). Such undertakings were epic in scale, in any event. The customary overland train was made up of forty to eighty giant canvas-covered freight wagons, each requiring six yoke of oxen or mules and two drivers. A single wagon and team stretched 90 to 100 feet. And since the practice under way was to keep the wagons about 100 feet apart, some trains would be strung across the prairie for as far as three miles. To keep his bearings, Solomon carried a brass telescope, like a sea captain.

The goods hauled could be worth a fortune, $30,000 or more, and the profits, if all went as planned, could be correspondingly large. Solomon, who at census time now listed himself as a freighter, appears to have done quite well. In 1850, his recorded wealth was $5,000. Ten years later, he was worth ten times that. At age thirty-five he could count himself a wealthy man, with land and property valued at nearly $50,000. He is said to have owned as much as 5,000 acres, fancy, blooded horses, and there was real silver on the table.

Because the Santa Fe Trail first headed south out of Independence, before swinging west across the Blue River, it passed within only a few miles of the Young farm. Solomon would depart in the spring. Large and full-bearded, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, he must have been something to see as he pushed off, as his family saw him and remembered him—a man “who could do pretty much anything he set his mind to.” Once, he started for California with a herd of fifteen hundred cattle. It took him a year and he lost five hundred cattle on the way, but he made it, through every kind of weather and hardship, across half the continent. At Sacramento he traded the surviving herd for a ranch of 40,000 acres. But this, as the story goes, he was forced to sell to cover the debts of a partner. A man made good on his debts, a man stood by his friends. And a world-beating talker had a tale to tell his children, and they theirs.

Another year, 1860, Solomon took forty wagons to Utah, with goods and salt pork for the Army, and his arrival at Salt Lake caused a stir:

The wagons were coupled together in pairs [noted the August 16, 1860, edition of the Deseret News], one behind the other, each pair having on board about sixty hundred pounds and drawn by six pairs of oxen….Mr. Young is of the opinion that the couple of two wagons together in that manner is the most economical way of freighting to this Territory…. Mr. Young’s cattle look remarkably well, and, as we are informed, he did not lose a single ox by accident or otherwise during the trip.

When the officer in charge at Salt Lake refused for some reason to receive the goods, Solomon met with Brigham Young, who, though no relation, was a fellow Mason and agreed to take the whole shipment if Solomon would extend him credit. The bargain worked out to the satisfaction of both.

Meantime, Solomon also did a thriving trade in outfitting and advising emigrants bound for Oregon or Santa Fe, who now, every year, numbered in the thousands. But by 1849 and 1850, the years of the California Gold Rush and the greatest traffic through Independence, the little town’s time in the sun was nearly over. For the same human tide brought virulent cholera. In the spring of 1849 ten people died at the Noland House within a single day. In 1851 cholera struck again. In 1854, with no rain from June to November, crops failed all over the county. Scarlet fever, pneumonia, and cholera were epidemic the next several years. In the spring of 1857 the Youngs themselves lost a child, nine-year-old Elizabeth, who died of causes unrecorded.

And all the while across the line in Kansas, the old issue of slavery was building to a terrible storm that was to affect the lives and outlook of nearly everyone in Jackson County for a very long time to come.

II

To many in western Missouri the Civil War commenced not in 1861 with the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, but in 1854, when Congress passed the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, leaving to the residents of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska the decision of whether to allow slavery. Missouri had come into the Union as a slave state following the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820–21, another congressional inspiration that admitted Maine, a free state, at the same time and prohibited slavery north of Missouri’s southern border, latitude 36°30′. Now the old Missouri Compromise line was gone. The new bill, designed to ease tension, had exactly the opposite effect.

What compounded the problem was the disproportionate size of the slave population along Missouri’s western border—where possibly fifty thousand slaves were held, which was nearly half the slaves in all Missouri. In Jackson County alone there were more than three thousand, and their owners, whatever their feeling for the Union, dreaded the prospect of free territory so close, to which a slave might escape, or from which could come armed bands of slave liberators. For the owner, his slave was very often his most valuable possession, in addition to being vital to his livelihood, and as the chances of war increased, the monetary value of every slave increased steadily, to the point where a male in good health was worth $3,000, as much as 500 acres of prime land.

Elsewhere in the nation Kansas was seen as the issue that would settle things. “Come on then, gentlemen of the Slave States,” said Senator William H. Seward of New York in a speech in Washington, “…We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” As if in answer, several thousand pro-slavery Missourians—“enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory,” as one of their leaders expressed it—stormed over the border with guns and whiskey to help Kansas elect a pro-slavery legislature.

In response, more Free-Soilers poured in from the East, a new kind of emigrant traffic from which struggling little Kansas City began to benefit. When armed pro-slavery ruffians, later to be known as “bushwhackers,” tried to close passage on the Missouri by terrorizing the riverboats, the Free-Soilers merely crossed overland through Iowa.

Time obviously was running out.

On May 22, 1856, hard-riding Missouri “Border Ruffians” shot up the town of Lawrence, Kansas, an abolitionist stronghold. Two days afterward, a strange, wild-looking old man named John Brown, a new Kansas settler, decided the moment had come to “regulate matters.” Armed with broadswords honed to razor sharpness, Brown and his sons descended after dark on three isolated cabins on little Pottawatomie Creek. There they took five pro-slavery Kansas men and boys, none of whom had anything to do with the raid on Lawrence, and chopped them to pieces—“as declared by Almighty God,” said John Brown.

No sooner had the Free-Soilers gained control in Kansas in the next round of elections than Kansas riders came charging over the line into Missouri to take their turn at murder and arson. For years before the Civil War began in the East, this terrible Border War—civil war in every dreadful sense of the term—raged all up and down the Missouri-Kansas line and continued until the surrender at Appomattox. It was like some horrible chapter out of the Middle Ages, with gangs of brigand horsemen roaming the land. They could appear out of nowhere any time, led often by men who were no better than young thugs, some possibly deranged, like the bantam-sized “Doc” Jennison, whose outlaw Kansans were called Jayhawkers or Red Legs (for their red leather leggings), or the Missouri guerrilla “Bloody Bill” Anderson, who liked to mutilate his victims. It was a war of plunder, ambush, and unceasing revenge. Nobody was safe. Defenseless towns were burned. Osceola, Missouri, and Shawneetown, Kansas, were all but wiped from the map.

Neither then nor later did the rest of the country realize the extent of the horrors. Nor was it ever generally understood that most Missourians remained loyal to the Union—including slaveholders like Solomon Young and Anderson Truman—or that most Missourians bore no resemblance to the infamous bushwhackers. The popular picture of all western Missourians as gun-slinging, whiskey-swilling riffraff was grossly inaccurate—as inaccurate as the idea that every Kansan was a transplanted, upright New England abolitionist. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and it was innocent civilians who suffered most. As one Kansan later said, “The Devil came to the border, liked it, and decided to stay awhile.”

Jackson County became “the burnt country.” Judge Henry Younger of Lee’s Summit saw his farm destroyed during Jayhawker “Doc” Jennison’s first sweep through the county, and Judge Younger was a Union man. Later, he was brutally murdered, which led his hot-blooded son Coleman, or Cole, to join up with the celebrated Missouri guerrilla chief, William Quantrill.

A Jackson County physician named Lee was gunned down in cold blood because his sons had joined the Confederate Army. John Hagan, a farmer, was stopped by Union cavalry while out for a Sunday drive with his family. Ordered to get down from the wagon, he was led into the woods and shot through the head for no known reason. Christopher Mann, the prolific old Kentucky pioneer who had the ability of holding his breath for a minute and a half, was made to stand by at gunpoint and watch his farm burned by Missouri guerrillas. “They asked me if I was not a black abolitionist, and when I told them, ‘I am a Union man, sir!’ one of the bushwackers struck me with his revolver and broke out two of my teeth.”

A first battle of Independence was fought before dawn the morning of August 11, 1862, when Quantrill and his ragtag band came screaming into the Square and a uniformed Confederate force overran a sleeping Union camp. In a second battle two years later, another Confederate victory, fierce block-to-block fighting raged back and forth across town for two days.

The worst atrocity, the unpardonable Lawrence Massacre, was committed by Quantrill, a brave, ingenious, wretched man who was continuously in and out of Jackson County, hiding in the heavy brush of the winding Blue River bottoms. To most slaveholders Quantrill was a hero and in memory, in after years in Jackson County, he would acquire a romantic glow, an aura like that of no other figure of the war, as if he had been the very soul of Old South gallantry in service of the Cause. In reality, he came from Ohio. Nor had he ever shown any southern sympathies or convictions, until the killing began.

At first light the morning of August 21, 1863, with a force of nearly 500 men riding under a black silk flag, Quantrill struck Lawrence, Kansas. Most of the town was still asleep. His orders were to kill every man big enough to carry a gun and to burn the town. When it was over, at least 150 men and boys had been murdered. The day was clear and still and smoke from the inferno, rising in tremendous black columns, could be seen from miles away.

Like many others in Jackson County, Solomon and Harriet Louisa had a personal tie to the bushwackers. Their third child, Sarah Ann, had married a man named James J. Chiles, a highly unsavory character known as Jim Crow Chiles. He was the dark side of frontier life, a future skeleton for the Young-Truman family closet.

Jim Crow, whose nickname was said to have been bestowed in boyhood for his exuberant performance of a popular dance called the “Jim Crow Set,” belonged to one of the original pioneer families in the county, and large landholders, which initially stood him well with the Youngs. But in 1857, Jim Crow had killed a man in the bar at the Noland House, a stranger who had done no more than remark on his table manners. (Another man who traveled with Jim Crow to Santa Fe shortly afterward remembered him as often good-natured, even jovial, “but subject to violent fits of anger, and when angry, a very dangerous man.”) Tried for murder at the Independence Courthouse in 1859, he got off, the standing of the Chiles family weighing heavily in the jury’s decision, and it was almost immediately afterward that he and Sarah Ann, or Sallie, were married. She was sixteen. Jim Crow, a “dashing fellow,” was notable for his dark eyes and “powerful, symmetrical build.”

At the onset of the war, Jim Crow took off with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, and quickly demonstrated that like them he enjoyed killing, “always exhibiting the traits of the most inhuman savage,” as a Kansas City paper would write at the time of his death. He was an active participant, for example, in the capture of Union Captain Daniel H. David on the Little Blue, when Captain David and his men were hacked to death John Brown style.

In this pitiless onrush of history, the Youngs, too, were caught in the middle no less than anyone along the border, and their stories of what happened, of all that was taken and destroyed, would be told repeatedly, some events merging in memory with others as time passed, some details being dropped or made a touch more vivid than the truth perhaps, depending on who was telling the story to whom and when. Whether, for example, the fanatical “Grim Chieftain of Kansas,” Jim Lane, struck the Young farm the summer of 1861, two years before the Lawrence Massacre, as Lane headed through Missouri to burn Osceola, or whether it was earlier, just after the war officially began in the spring of 1861, is a matter of some confusion. But there is no doubt that he came or that Solomon was somewhere far afield on one of his expeditions. (Solomon may have reasoned that since he was an avowed Union man his family would be safe.) Will Young, the oldest son, was also absent—Will had joined the Confederate Army—which left Harriet Louisa alone with the children.

In a theater of war characterized by strange, terrifying human apparitions, James Henry Lane may have been the strangest, most terrifying of all. Tall, gaunt, always wildly disheveled even in uniform, he had a sallow hatchet face, atrociously bad teeth, and a voice with a raspy, unearthly sound. He was also a brilliant orator and a rampant political opportunist. As an overnight, fire-eating Republican he had been elected as one of the first two senators from the new state of Kansas. Arriving in Washington on the eve of the war, he organized a Frontier Guard to protect Abraham Lincoln and for a few nights he and his men actually bivouacked in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. In Missouri he was known as a “freedom” soldier, meaning he would free you of anything he could lay his hands on—food, forage, money, silk dresses, the family silver, even a piano on occasion. Everybody knew about Jim Lane. He was as feared and reviled on the Missouri side of the line as was Quantrill in Kansas. For Harriet Louisa there could have been no mistaking who it was in Union blue riding up the road.

In the formal claim she filed in 1902, more than thirty-five years after the war, it is recorded that Union forces under five different officers came to the farm on five different occasions, beginning with General Lane in May 1861. All that they took or destroyed is itemized. If the record is accurate, then Lane was accountable only for fifteen mules and thirteen horses valued at $4,525. But by Harriet Louisa’s own recollection on numerous occasions before and after the report was filed, as well as the stories repeated by those of her children who were witness to the same events, this is what happened:

Lane and his Kansans proceeded to shoot four hundred Hampshire hogs, then cut out only the hams, leaving the rest to rot. Harriet Louisa was ordered to bake biscuits, which she did “until her hands blistered.” Some of the soldiers passed the time playing cards in the yard, sitting in the mud on her best hand-sewn quilt. Others, “out of sheer cussedness,” blasted away at her hens.

Whether Lane knew of the family’s connection to Jim Crow Chiles or the fact that Will Young had joined the Confederates is not known. But, to determine the whereabouts of Solomon Young, the Kansans took the “man of the place,” fifteen-year-old Harrison, looped a rope about his neck, threw the other end over a tree, and said they would hang him if he didn’t tell where his father was hiding. Harrison, according to the story, told the truth, saying Solomon had gone west with a wagon train. They tightened the rope, “stretching his neck,” and asked again. Harrison answered as before. Then, suddenly, bored with their game, the men let him go. Hay barns were set ablaze. Lane and the rest rode off, taking the hams, biscuits, feather beds, and the family silver.

According to Harriet Louisa’s formal claim, however, it was a Colonel Burris, not Lane, who made off with 1,200 pounds of bacon in October of 1862, as well as 65 tons of hay, 500 bushels of corn, 44 head of hogs, 2 horses (one with bridle and saddle), 1 “lot of beds and bedding,” 7 wagons, and 30,000 fence rails. A General Sturgis was also responsible for taking 150 head of cattle and a Captain Axaline for 13,000 fence rails, 1,000 bushels of corn, and 6,000 “rations.” The total value of everything confiscated came to $21,442, the equivalent in present-day money of a quarter of a million dollars.

Interestingly, no family silver is listed. Nor is there any reference to buildings destroyed. Yet the theft of the family silver by Old Jim Lane would be talked of repeatedly in after years, and Martha Ellen Young, who was nine at the time, would one day describe for a New York Times writer how she and her mother, their faces blackened with the soot and ash that rained down from the burning barns, stood in the yard watching the hated blue soldiers ride away.

Though possibly no silver ever was taken, certainly it might have been, and if no buildings were actually destroyed on the Young farm, the little girl may well have been witness to other farms going up in flames in “the burnt country.” The resulting hatred was the same in any event. The stories were what mattered as they were passed along, not the formal claim. From such times and memories, as was said, a family “got solid” in its feelings.

But nothing that happened in western Missouri during the course of the war left such a legacy of bitterness as the infamous Union measure known as General Order No. 11. Estimating that two thirds of the outlying Missouri populace were either “kin to the guerrillas” (like the Youngs) or “actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing, and sustaining them” (like the Slaughter family, near neighbors of the Youngs on Blue Ridge), the Union commander at Kansas City, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, decided to deny the guerrillas their base of supply by depopulating the entire area.

The order was issued August 25, 1863. All civilians in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties, except those living within a mile of Union posts at Kansas City, Independence, Hickman’s Mills, Pleasant Hill, and Harrisonville, were to “remove from their present places of residence” within fifteen days. If they could prove their loyalty to the Union to the satisfaction of the post commander, they could remain in those towns or cross over into Kansas. If not, they must leave Missouri. All grain and hay found in the district after the deadline was to be destroyed.

Twenty thousand people were driven from their homes. The country was depopulated in a matter of weeks, as Union cavalry helped themselves to whatever of value was left behind, then put a torch to buildings and crops. “It is heartsickening to see what I have seen,” wrote a Union officer to his wife. “…A desolated country and men and women and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.” Another Union officer appalled by the suffering he witnessed firsthand was the artist George Caleb Bingham, whose outrage would take form after the war, when, settling in Independence, he painted Order No. 11, in which General Ewing himself would be seen driving a family from their home.

At the Young farm, the policy appears to have been carried out to the letter, despite the fact that Solomon had signed a loyalty oath more than a year before. The family was permitted to take away one wagonload of possessions. Little Martha Ellen would remember trudging northward on a hot, dusty road behind the swaying wagon, headed for “bitter exile” in Kansas City.

Anderson Truman, meantime, had fared far better. He too had signed a loyalty oath. He wanted only “the Union as it was,” like the rest of the Trumans back in Kentucky. (“I hope you have not turned against this glorious Union,” wrote his brother John Truman from Shelby County, where, as in Missouri, families and neighbors were sharply divided.) But earlier Anderson and his family had moved across the Missouri to Platte County, which, close as it was, the war hardly touched. An increasingly religious man, he wished no part in violence. He hated Catholics, but little else apparently, and he kept to his land and labors, living simply and almost without incident. Once, after dark, the slave Hannah heard screams and a commotion of horses at the adjoining farm. Everyone assumed the Red Legs had arrived and Grandmother Holmes, then in her eighties, fled with the youngest Truman children to hide in a cornfield. The Red Legs proved to be a detachment of Confederate cavalry who had come to press a neighbor’s sons into service. This was as close as the war ever came to the Trumans.

The children numbered five, three girls, Margaret, Emma, and Mary, and two boys, William and John, neither of whom was old enough to fight in the war.

When it was all over in April 1865, Anderson loaded his five slaves—Hannah, Marge, and their three daughters—into a big farm wagon with a month’s supply of food and drove them to Leavenworth, Kansas, the place they had chosen to begin their freedom. When he returned to Leavenworth some years later to learn what had become of them, nobody knew.

“They never bought one, they never sold one,” a keeper of the family annals would later conclude, speaking somewhat defensively of the Anderson Trumans and their slaves.

The wounds of nearly nine years of war in Missouri were a long time healing. While most veterans of the defeated Confederate Army took up life as best they could, married, and settled down, others found it impossible to return to anything like the old ways. Cole Younger turned desperado and with his brothers joined forces with two more who had fought with Quantrill, Frank and Jesse James. The gang held up its first bank on the main square of little Liberty, Missouri, about ten miles from Independence as the crow flies, in February 1866. Later they hit upon the novel idea of robbing trains.

Closer to home was the case of Jim Crow Chiles, who for years conducted his own one-man reign of terror, using a notorious gambling hall in Kansas City called Headquarters as a base of operations. Having made himself leader of the toughest element in that now wide-open town, he swaggered about armed with two heavy dragoon revolvers, two pocket Derringers, and a black snake whip that became his trademark. His home was in Independence, where he owned a livery stable and kept a pack of bloodhounds that bayed half the night, but that nobody ever dared complain about. He was “universally hated,” the kind of town bully who figured in children’s nightmares. To black people he was a living terror. On drinking sprees, he would mount a horse and hunt them down with his whip. It is recorded that he killed two black men in cold blood on two different occasions in Independence, shot them “to see them jump.” Reportedly, he had killed nine men altogether and was under indictment for three murders by the time a deputy marshal named James Peacock decided to stand up to him as no one ever had.

Both men were heavily armed and both accompanied by a young son, also armed, the morning of the confrontation on the west side of the courthouse square. September 21, 1873, was a Sunday and a number of people on hand witnessed everything.

Advancing on Peacock, Jim Crow challenged him to fight, then hit him in the face. Peacock struck back and at once they tore into each other with fists and pistols, pellmell in the dust of the street, the two boys plunging in. Jim Crow’s son, Elijah, had eyesight so poor he was nearly blind, yet he never hesitated. Shots were fired. Jim Crow was hit in the shoulder, Peacock in the back. Elijah, too, was hit. Then Peacock fired point blank into Jim Crow’s face, killing him instantly.

Jim Crow’s body was carried to the Noland House, to the same barroom where he had killed his first man. The boy Elijah died the next night. Peacock, however, survived, a bullet lodged in his spine, and as the sheriff who killed Jim Crow Chiles, he became a county legend and unbeatable at election time, the Chiles family, meanwhile, having publicly exonerated him from any blame.

For the Youngs, as for the Chileses, it was a tragedy of terrible proportions and one they refused to discuss, then or later, though it is said Solomon Young cursed his daughter Sallie and that Martha Ellen, her father’s pet, burned a portrait of Jim Crow. Sallie, a widow at thirty, was expecting another child. Her son Elijah had been all of thirteen.

III

For Martha Ellen Young—Matt or Mattie, as she was known—life had picked up again three years after the war, in 1868, the year she turned seventeen and the family resettled on Blue Ridge in a new, more spacious house. Harriet Louisa had chosen the spot. The new house faced west at the end of a straight quarter-mile drive lined with double rows of elm trees that Mattie helped her father plant. The house, wood frame and painted white with green shutters, had a wide front veranda and two large square front parlors off a central hall. Dining room and kitchen were in a wing to the rear, this enclosed by more porches. Beyond, to the rear, past the orchard, stood a huge red barn built entirely of heavy walnut planks and beams taken from the old, original mill at Hickman’s Mills.

The immediate farm comprised 600 acres, with fields bound by squarely built limestone walls—rock fences, as they were known. Whatever his losses from the war, Solomon appears to have taken hold again. Matt had her pick of several fine saddle horses and would spend some of the happiest days of her life riding sidesaddle over the high, open land. If she never learned to milk a cow, her father advised, she would never have to milk a cow. So she never learned.

She did learn to bake and sew and to use a rifle as well as a man. If she swept the veranda, she made the broom fly. “Lively” is the adjective that turns up in old correspondence to describe Mattie Young. Presently, she was sent away to the Lexington Baptist Female College, in sedate, tree-shaded Lexington, Missouri, where for two years she learned to sketch, play the piano, and acquired a lifelong love of books and the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Of above average height—about 5 foot 6—she was a slender young woman with dark hair, a round bright face, and a way of looking directly at people with her clear, gray-blue eyes. Like her father, whom she adored, she was inclined also to speak her mind.

Life on the farm, meantime, had returned to the old rhythms of seasons and crops and work. Talk at the dinner table was of hog prices and taxes; of the Mormons who had begun returning to the county from Utah, convinced still that Independence was their City of Zion; and of the new Hannibal Bridge at Kansas City, the first railroad bridge over the Missouri, which promised to change everything.

Kansas City was growing beyond anyone’s dreams. The bridge was finished in 1869, the year of the opening of the transcontinental railroad. By 1872, just three years later, there were seven railroad lines in and out of Kansas City. The days of steamboats and wagon trains were all but vanished. Missouri—“Muzoorah,” as one was supposed to pronounce it—was no longer the Far West, but the Great Center of the country.

In the summer of 1874 grasshoppers came in black clouds that shut out the sky. When they were gone, the land was as bare as if scorched by fire. The following year they came again, as if to mock the progress people talked about.

The social occasions Mattie Young loved best were the dances at home in the front parlors, or at neighboring farms. She was a spirited dancer, a “light-foot Baptist.” One winter, after a blizzard, there was a dance every night for a week. Neighbors would dance most of the night, then spend the following day riding in big box sleighs cross-country to the next house.

Possibly it was on such a night that she first met John Truman, who since the end of the war had returned with his family to Jackson County and taken up farming nearby. In any event, they seem to have known one another for some while before announcing their plans to marry in 1881, by which time Mattie was twenty-nine.

John Anderson Truman, who was a year older, had had no education beyond a rural school, and except for the night during the war when he fled with Grandmother Holmes into the cornfield, he had had no known adventures. Nor had he any special skills or money. None of the Trumans had ever had money. Still he was ambitious—he aspired to be a stock trader like Solomon Young—and he was a hard worker, cheerful, eager to please. He loved to sing while Mattie played the piano. He also had a violent temper, though thus far this had landed him in no trouble. Overall he made a good impression. In a thick new History of Jackson County, Missouri published the year he and Matt were married, it was said of John A. Truman that “he resides with his father and manages the farm; he is an industrious and energetic young man, and one that bids fair to make a success in life.”

His mother, Mary Jane Truman, had died two years before in 1879. The indomitable Nancy Tyler Holmes was also in her grave by this time, having lived to age ninety-four.

Appearances would always matter greatly to John Truman. For his wedding photograph taken in Kansas City, he wore a white string tie, kid gloves, and a black frock coat. His boots were gleaming, his thin reddish-brown hair clipped and plastered to perfection. He also chose to be seated for the picture, it is said, because he was sensitive about his height. At 5 foot 4, he was two inches shorter than Mattie. She stood beside him in brocaded satins and a wide lace collar, her hair parted in the middle and brushed smoothly back, in the current fashion, her left hand resting on his shoulder, her eyes, like his, directly on the camera.

As a wedding gift, Solomon gave her a three-drawer burl walnut dresser, with a marble top and a mirror with small, side shelves. She was never to own another piece of furniture quite so fine.

The ceremony took place at the homeplace three days after Christmas, December 28, 1881. The couple’s own first home was in Lamar, Missouri, a dusty, wind-blown market town and county seat (Barton County), ninety miles due south. For $685 John became the proud owner of a corner lot and a white frame house measuring all of 20 by 28 feet, which was hardly more than the dimensions of the Youngs’ kitchen. It had six tiny rooms, no basement, no running water, and no plumbing. But it was new, snug and sunny, with a casement window in the parlor on the southern side.

For another $200 John bought a barn diagonally across the street and there he opened for business, his announcement in the Lamar Democrat reading as follows:

Mules bought and sold. I will keep for sale at the White Barn on Kentucky Avenue a lot of good mules. Anyone wanting teams will do well to call on J. A. Truman.

A spinster sister, Mary Martha Truman, who, like John’s father, came for an extended stay, considered Lamar the end of the world. The place made her miserable, yet Mattie, she observed, remained “lively as ever.”

Mattie’s first child, a boy, was stillborn the couple’s first autumn in Lamar. A year and a half later a second child, a boy, was born in a bedroom off the parlor so small there was barely space for the bed. The attending physician, Dr. W. L. Griffin, received a fee of $15, and to celebrate the occasion the new father planted a seedling pine in the front yard. A story that John Truman also nailed a mule shoe over the front door for luck is apocryphal.

The date was May 8, 1884.

Two days later, a Baptist circuit rider took the baby out into the spring air, and holding him up in the sunshine, remarked what a sturdy boy he was.

Not for a month afterward, however, did Dr. Griffin bother to register the birth at the county clerk’s office up the street, and even then, the child was entered nameless. In a quandary over a middle name, Mattie and John were undecided whether to honor her father or his. In the end they compromised with the letter S. It could be taken to stand for Solomon or Shipp, but actually stood for nothing, a practice not unknown among the Scotch-Irish, even for first names. The baby’s first name was Harry, after his Uncle Harrison.

Harry S. Truman he would be.

The child would have no memory of Lamar or the house where he was born, for shortly afterward John Truman sold out and moved everybody north again, to a farm near Harrisonville, only seven miles from the Young place. The earliest written description of Harry Truman is in a letter from Harrisonville dated April 7, 1885, when he was still less than a year old. “Baby is real sick now,” wrote John’s sister Mary Martha, “he is so cross we can’t do anything.”

The mule business at Lamar had been disappointing. And so, apparently, was the Harrisonville farm, for the Trumans remained there even less time, only two years, during which a second son was born, John Vivian Truman—named for his father and a popular Confederate cavalry officer, John Vivian—who was to be known henceforth as Vivian.

Of these Harrisonville years little Harry would remember just two incidents. His earliest memory, interestingly, was of laughter. He was chasing a frog around the yard, laughing every time it jumped. To Grandmother Young, who had observed so many children, so splendid a sense of humor in a two-year-old was quite remarkable. The second memory was of his mother, for fun, dropping him from an upstairs window into the outstretched arms of his very large Uncle Harry, who was to be a particular favorite from then on.

Solomon Young, by now in his seventies and among the most respected men in the county, was still fit and active. It seemed nothing could touch him, not wars or epidemics or advancing years. But in 1887, the John Truman family moved back to the Young farm and John became Solomon’s partner. To what extent John’s two false starts influenced the decision, or how much say Mattie had, can only be imagined.

Thus it was to be the Young homeplace where small Harry S. Truman made most of his earliest observations of the world, beginning at age three. Grandfather Anderson Truman also moved in—he was given a room of his own upstairs—and a place was found for one of the fatherless Chiles grandchildren, Cousin Sol. Counting everybody—Harrison, who remained a bachelor, sister Ada, a hired girl, several hired hands, and nearly always a visiting relative or stray neighbor child—this made a household of seldom less than fourteen or fifteen people spanning three generations, all under one roof on the same Blue Ridge where Solomon and Harriet Louisa had made their claim so many years before.

2
Model Boy

Now Harry, you be good.

—MARTHA ELLEN TRUMAN

I

Harry Truman liked to say in later years that he had the happiest childhood imaginable. Grandpa Young took him riding over the countryside in a high-wheeled cart behind a strawberry roan trotting horse. Grandpa adored him, the boy knew. One summer, every day for a week, they drove six miles to the Belton Fair and sat together in the judges’ stand watching the races and eating striped candy. It was “the best time a kid ever had.” Grandpa was “quite a man, a great big man” with a flowing white beard and strong hands.

Until Mamma gave birth to a third child, the boy’s only competition for attention was little Vivian, who still wore his hair in curls. On a day nearly as memorable as those at the Belton Fair, Grandpa and he conspired to give Vivian a haircut, sitting him up in a highchair on the south porch. Mamma was furious when she discovered what they had done, but amazingly she said nothing, so unassailable was Grandpa’s authority.

The porch where the haircut took place overlooked a broad bluegrass pasture with a creek where the boys were allowed to explore on their own, accompanied by a black-and-tan dog of uncertain ancestry called Tandy and a cat named Bob. Harry would also remember a swing under an old elm close to the house and another swing indoors in the front hall for rainy days. The long porch on the north side of the house made a perfect race track for their red express wagon.

They went hunting for bird nests and gathered wild strawberries in prairie grass as tall as they. The farm was “a wonderful place.” These were “wonderful days and great adventures.” The Young land seemed to go on and on. A few miles beyond the immediate farm with its 600 acres was a second farm owned by Grandpa, this with nearly a 1,000 acres. There were herds of cattle, saddle horses, draft horses, mules, sheep, hogs, chickens, ducks, and geese. Harry’s father presented him with a black Shetland pony and a new saddle. With the pony on a lead, he let the boy ride beside him as he made his rounds. “I became familiar with every sort of animal on the farm,” Harry wrote long afterward, “and watched the wheat harvest, the threshing and the corn shucking, mowing and stacking hay, and every evening at suppertime heard my father tell a dozen farmhands what to do….”

It was a time of self-contained security and plenty, such as the Trumans were not to know again.

Most marvelous in memory for Harry was the abundance of food—dried apples, peaches, candy and nuts of all kinds, “wonderful cookies,” pies, corn pudding, roasting ears in summer. “There were peach butter, apple butter, grape butter, jellies and preserves,” he would write, all produced in a big crowded kitchen by Grandma Young and a German hired girl. Following the late autumn freeze and hog-killing time came homemade sausages, souse, pickled pigs’ feet, and lard rendered in a tremendous iron kettle said to have been too heavy for Old Jim Lane to carry away.

From his Aunt Ada, the boy learned to play euchre. Uncle Harry told amusing stories and taught him a card game called cooncan, a form of gin rummy then more popular than poker. Though Uncle Harry, the bachelor uncle, had forsaken farming for the “bedazzlements” of Kansas City, he returned often, bringing candy and toys. Like Grandpa Young, he was a big man, over six feet tall, “strong as a wrestler,” good-humored, handsome, and like Grandpa Young, he made Harry feel he was somebody particular, because he was named for him. “When he came it was just like Christmas.”

The child liked everybody, to judge by his later recollections. Cousin Sol Chiles, then in his teens and often surly and difficult, would be remembered as somebody who “really made life pleasant.” Sol’s mother, Aunt Sallie, was a “lovely person.” Aunt Laura, another frequent visitor from Kansas City, was “somebody we always enjoyed.”

Yet life had its troubles and woes. On the summer day when his Grandfather Truman died, three-year-old Harry had rushed to the bed to pull at the old man’s beard, trying desperately to wake him. Climbing on a chair sometime afterward, in an attempt to comb his hair in front of a mirror, he toppled over backward and broke his collarbone. Another time he would have choked to death on a peach stone had his mother not responded in a flash and decisively, pushing the stone down his throat with her finger, instead of trying to pull it out. Later, when Grandpa Young lay sick in bed and the little boy approached cautiously to inquire how he was feeling, the old pioneer, fixing him with a wintry stare, said, “How are you feeling? You’re the one I’m worried about.”

It was Mamma, Harry decided, who understood him best. She was brighter than anyone, he thought, and cared most about his well-being. Holding him in her lap while explaining the large print in the family Bible, she taught him to read before he was five. Then the summer of 1889, following his fifth birthday, Mamma surprised him with a baby sister, of whom nothing had been said in advance. From the sound of crying upstairs he and Vivian thought a new pet had arrived. The baby was named Mary Jane, after John Truman’s mother, the grandmother they had never known, and to Harry she was a miracle. He adored her.

It was Mamma also, a year later, who hustled him off to Kansas City for expensive eyeglasses. Though he had been badly handicapped by poor eyesight all along—“blind as a mole,” in his words—no one seems to have noticed until the night of a July Fourth fireworks when Matt saw him responding more to the sound of the skyrockets than to the spectacle overhead. The Kansas City optometrist diagnosed a rare malformation called “flat eyeballs” (hypermetropia, which means the boy was farsighted) and Matt agreed to a pair of double-strength, wire-rimmed spectacles at a cost of $10.

All at once the world was transformed for him, as if by magic. And as quickly he became a curiosity, small boys with eyeglasses being almost unknown in rural Missouri.

Her heart went out to him, Matt later said, but she was determined not to pamper. While Grandma Young gave every youngster free rein, Mamma taught that punishment followed transgression. She had a switch and she would use it. When Harry led Vivian and another child on an expedition to a water hole in the south pasture, to spend a glorious afternoon plastering each other with mud, she punished Harry severely, and Harry alone, for being the ringleader.

But more painful by far were Papa’s occasional outbursts, for though John Truman never spanked, never laid a hand in anger on any of his children, which seems remarkable for a man of such known temper, his scoldings were enough to “burn the hide off.” One incident was never forgotten. His father had been leading him on the pony when Harry fell off, only to be told that any boy who could not stay on a pony at a walk must walk himself. Harry cried all the way back to the house, where Mamma let it be known she thought he had been unjustly treated.

Still more change followed in the summer of 1890, the summer of the eyeglasses, when Mamma announced they were leaving the farm, moving to Independence, so that Harry could receive proper schooling. With money inherited from his father, John Truman acquired a house and several lots on South Crysler Avenue, close to the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks. At age forty, having attained nothing like the success forecast in the Jackson County History, John had decided to try again as a stock trader. He paid $1,000 down for house and land, and took out a mortgage for $3,000, certain he had driven a good bargain with the owner, Samuel Blitz, one of the few Jews in town.

For Harry, whose world, through the new eyeglasses, had only just come into focus, the next few years were to be a time of great adjustment.

In 1892, Solomon Young died at age seventy-seven. Less than a year later, a black servant girl trying to light a coal-oil lamp accidentally ignited a fire that burned the Young house to the ground. Practically nothing was saved, and though a small house, intended as a temporary replacement, was put up on the same spot for Grandma Young, and Uncle Harrison returned to help manage things, the old way of life at the homeplace was over. The one personal possession of Grandpa Young’s to survive the disaster was the brass telescope from his days on the plains, which he had given to Matt sometime before.

Nine-year-old Harry’s feelings at the time of his Grandfather Young’s death went unrecorded. But in later years he would talk often of the “big man” in his background who had made his own way in the world, on nerve and will, who had seen the Great West when it was still wild, who played a part in history, and who—of course—came home always to Missouri. With such a grandfather a boy could hardly imagine himself a nobody.

He appears to have liked school from the start. He liked his first-grade teacher, Miss Mira Ewin. He liked his second-grade teacher, Miss Minnie Ward. He liked all his teachers, by his later account—“I do not remember a bad teacher in all my experience,” he would reflect—and learned quickly how to make them like him. In this he felt he had quite a knack. He made a study of people, he remembered. “When I was growing up it occurred to me to watch the people around me to find out what they thought and what pleased them most…. I used to watch my father and mother closely to learn what I could do to please them, just as I did with my schoolteachers and playmates.” It was thus, by getting along with people, he discovered, that he could nearly always get what he wanted.

By all surviving evidence he was an exceptionally alert, good little boy of sunny disposition who, with the glasses that so greatly magnified his blue eyes, looked as bright and interested as could be. Mira Ewin, the first-grade teacher, remembered never having to reprimand him. “He just smiled his way along,” she said. A report card for second grade shows him consistently in the 90’s in spelling, reading, and deportment. His lowest grade for the first marking period was an 86 in writing—naturally left-handed, he was being taught to use his right hand—but by the third marking period he had brought that up to a 90, while for both language and arithmetic he received a perfect 100 percent.

The fourth marking period is missing because in midwinter, early in 1894, both he and Vivian came down with diphtheria, and though Vivian recovered quickly, Harry took a dramatic turn for the worse. He became paralyzed in his legs and arms and could only lie helplessly. For months Matt wheeled him about in a baby carriage, until abruptly, miraculously he recovered, and from that point on was seldom sick again.

When it was suggested to Vivian years later that his mother had to have been terribly frightened by the crisis, he said she “didn’t scare easy.”

Tutored through the summer, Harry made such progress that he was allowed to skip third grade and go directly into fourth. By now also he was reading “everything I could get my hands on—histories and encyclopedias and everything else.” For his tenth birthday, in the spring of 1894, his mother presented him with a set of large illustrated volumes grandly titled in gold leaf Great Men and Famous Women. He would later count the moment as one of life’s turning points.

There were four volumes: Soldiers and Sailors, Statesmen and Sages, Workmen and Heroes, and Artists and Authors. They were not books for children, but anthologies of essays from Harper’s and other leading American and English magazines. The subjects, numbering in the hundreds, ranged from Moses to Grover Cleveland. The authors included Edward Everett Hale on Goethe, Lord Macaulay on Samuel Johnson, H. Rider Haggard on Cortéz, and young Theodore Roosevelt on Winfield Scott. Harry would eventually plow his way through all of them, Soldiers and Sailors appealing especially. He dreamed of becoming a great general. He loved best the story of Hannibal, who had only one eye. “There is not in all history [he read] so wonderful an example of what a single man of genius may achieve against tremendous odds….” Of the American heroes, his favorites, not surprisingly, were Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee, who was his mother’s idol. It was to be worthy of her, he would one day confide to a friend, that he studied the careers of “great men.”

Included in the Lee biography was a letter from Lee to his son written in 1860. Though she could never have found the words, it was what Matt herself might have written to the boy as the new century approached:

You must be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right…. Never do anything wrong to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so, is dearly purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly, but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all do not appear to others what you are not.

Matt and John Truman both wanted books in the house. John kept loose change in a tray from an old steamer trunk, to save for a set of Shakespeare. Harry would never recall being bored, “not once,” he said, because “we had a houseful of books.” He read the Bible (twice through by the time he was twelve, he later claimed), “pored over” Plutarch’s Lives, a gift from his father, and in time to come, read all of the new set of Shakespeare. The reading was not something you talked about outside the house, he explained. “It was just something you did.”

Home now was a white clapboard, carpenter’s-planbook house not unlike a number of others in Independence, except for a cupola with a gilded rooster weathervane. Sloping away at the back was an unusually deep lot of several acres, where John Truman, an avid gardener, grew strawberries and vegetables, and kept cows, horses, and whatever livestock he happened to be trading at the moment, which could be a surprising number. For a time there were no fewer than five hundred goats quartered on the property. Trying to sink a well, he hit natural gas, with which he heated both his house and that of a neighbor. It was a rare piece of good luck for John Truman.

Beyond the back fence, about 150 yards or so distant, was the Missouri Pacific depot, while on the north side of the house the main tracks ran so close the trains would rattle the kitchen dishes. The soot and noise were something for Matt to contend with, not to say the smell of five hundred goats.

Harry was fascinated by trains, and daily a total of twenty-three went by. He would sit alone on the roof of the coal shed behind the house counting freight cars, or, on winter nights, awake in his bed, listen for the eastbound Kansas-Nebraska Limited, which made no stop at Independence and began shrieking its warning whistle miles beyond town.

“Harry, do you remember how much you loved the trains?” his cousin Ethel Noland would ask years afterward.

“I still do,” he said.

First and second grade were at the Noland School on South Liberty Street, which was a long walk, but when the new eight-room Columbian School opened on South River Boulevard, he had only to go three blocks. He kept to himself more than most boys his age and in later years he would speak feelingly of the isolation of childhood. “It’s a very lonely thing being a child.” He seldom played games. He was afraid of the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard and because of his glasses, felt incapable of any sport that involved a moving ball. He much preferred being at home.

To help with the cooking and washing, the family now employed a woman named Caroline Simpson, who was “black as your hat,” and who, with her husband, “Letch,” and four children, lived with the Trumans. Caroline Simpson taught Harry to cook on the big wood stove and talked to him by the hour. He liked the warmth and chatter of the kitchen, liked to look after his little sister. He would sit with her in a rocking chair for hours at a time, braiding her hair or singing her to sleep. No one was ever so nice to her as her brother Harry, Mary Jane would say in later years. Outside in the yard he never took his eyes off her, afraid she might hurt herself, as he once had. The cellar door had slammed on his foot and cut off the end of his big toe. Mamma had rushed to the rescue, found the severed piece, and held it in place until the doctor arrived to secure it with a coating of crystalline iodoform and a bandage.

For a small boy he was also abnormally neat and clean. John Truman was the kind of father who wanted everything looking just so—grass clipped around fence posts, horses “slicked up,” and his children turned out in like fashion. But in a photograph of Harry made in Kansas City when he was thirteen and about to enter high school, he looks not just spotless, every detail in order, but like a boy who will stay that way.

He was never popular like other boys, never one of the fighters as he called them. Reminiscing long afterward, he spoke of the teasing he endured because of his glasses. “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy,” he would say, using the hated word. He ran from fights, he admitted. Yet his brother Vivian had no memory of Harry being teased about his glasses, and to judge by the recollections of several boyhood friends he wasn’t considered a sissy exactly, only different, “serious,” as one recalled:

They wanted to call him a sissy, but they just didn’t do it because they had a lot of respect for him. I remember one time we were playing…Jesse James or robbers and we were the Dalton brothers out in Kansas…and we were arguing about them…we got the history mixed up…but Harry came in and straightened it out, just who were the Dalton brothers and how many got killed. Things like that the boys had a lot of respect for. They didn’t call him sissy.

With girls of his own age he was so shy he could barely speak. His initial brush with other children in Independence was at Sunday School when the family first moved to town. Matt had sent him to the big, new red-brick First Presbyterian Church on Lexington Street, rather than to one of the Baptist churches, because the Presbyterian minister had been especially welcoming to her. At the Presbyterian Sunday School Harry met a blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl named Elizabeth Wallace and decided she was the most entrancing creature he had ever seen. But it was five years before he dared say a word to her. The only girls with whom he felt at ease were his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, the daughters of his father’s sister Ella and her husband, Joseph Noland.

His days passed largely in the company of women—Mamma, Caroline Simpson, his teachers, or Grandma Young, who came often to visit. He was surrounded by “women folk” and he got along with them splendidly, kidding and telling stories. His mother liked to say he was “intended for a girl” anyway, an observation he seems to have taken always in good spirit.

II

John Truman was getting on in the world. There was money now for servants, books, for studio photographs. As a surprise for the children he bought a pair of matched red goats, with custom-made harness, and a miniature farm wagon. The little rig became the talk of the neighborhood.

John was an early riser, an all-day striver, and thought to be “pretty ingenious” besides—because of his backyard gas well and various inventive ideas. He patented a staple puller for use on barbed-wire fences. For an automatic railroad switch that he devised, the Missouri Pacific reportedly offered an annual royalty of $2,000. When the Chicago & Alton topped that with an offer of $2,500, four times what most American families had to live on in a year, John asked for double the amount, with the result that both railroads turned him down and adopted another version of the same thing—pirated his idea apparently—and he wound up with nothing. It was a story told usually to show just how stubborn John Truman could be.

As a livestock trader, he stood well in the community. He had “a good eye.” He could determine the age of mules or horses at a glance, seldom needing to examine their teeth, and though a quiet man, he had perfected a nice “line of trade talk.” More important, John Truman’s word was good. “A mighty good trader, John Truman,” recalled a neighbor, “…very stubborn, but on the square.”

Because of Harry’s obvious affection for his mother, his eagerness to please her, and the enjoyment he took from her company as time went on, much would be said later of her influence, the extent to which he was “his mother’s son.” But as time would also tell, he and his father had much in common, more indeed than either of them realized through much of Harry’s boyhood, and the influence of the father on the son would never be discounted by those who knew John Truman, or by anyone in the family, including Harry himself.

Small and compact, like a jockey, John had a weathered, sunburned face and crow’s-feet that gave a hint of a smile around the eyes. The grin, when it came, was the kind people warmed to and remembered, as they remembered the temper. Touchy about his size, his honor, he would explode at the least affront, “fight like a buzz saw,” as Harry would say. Once, at the courthouse, when a lawyer accused him of lying, John took after the man with his fists, chasing him out the door and into the street. On election day John Truman was nearly always in a fight. One boyhood friend of Harry’s, Mize Peters, who was also the son of a horse trader, remembered a man coming into his father’s place, his head covered with blood, saying he had had an argument with John Truman, who hit him with a whip.

To the town, such ferocity seemed a remarkable thing in someone so unprepossessing physically and so good-natured ordinarily. “A fiery fellow,” it would be said. “But a man of John Truman’s integrity and industry…you excuse a whole lot of things.”

Like many men of the time, John had a strong, sentimental veneration of women. “No one could make remarks about my aunts or my mother in my father’s presence without getting into serious trouble,” Harry recalled. Of the three children, Mary Jane was John’s favorite. Papa, it seems, was as partial to Mary Jane as Mamma was to Harry. That Harry spent so much time watching over Mary Jane was in part because he knew how much it would please Papa.

Unlike his own father, John was considered a “liberal” in religion. He professed great faith in God, but faith also in what could be accomplished through courage and determination. “He had no use for a coward,” according to a niece named Grace Summer. “He raised his children to have faith in themselves and their potentialities….”

Assisted by the black hired man, Letch Simpson, John did a little farming still on rented land south of town, and occasionally he dabbled in real estate. Possibly, too, by this time he had begun speculating in grain futures in Kansas City. He was looking always for the main chance, wanting desperately to get rich. Meanwhile, as Harry said, he would trade nearly anything he owned.

In 1895, when the boy was eleven, John traded their house for another several blocks to the north, receiving some $5,400 in the bargain. Though the new house had less property than the one on Crysler Avenue, it stood on a corner lot at Waldo Street and River Boulevard, a more fashionable neighborhood and within easy walking distance of the courthouse square. Crysler Avenue had never been the wrong side of the tracks, but for an ambitious man, 909 Waldo was unquestionably progress in the right direction.

A down payment was made on a new piano for Matt, who would be remembered playing for her own “amusement and amazement.” When Harry showed signs of interest, she first tried teaching him herself, then arranged for regular lessons with a young woman next door, Florence Burrus.

A piano in the parlor had become part of the good life in America, a sign of prosperity and wholesome home entertainment, and the Trumans had an upright Kimball, the most popular piano of the day, priced at about $200. (“Music for the multitudes” was the Kimball company’s slogan.) Customarily, piano lessons were for the young women of a household, but Harry took to it wholeheartedly, pleased by his progress and by the approval of both parents.

For Harry, no less than for his father, life was picking up. The new neighborhood was filled with children of his own age. He was making friends as never before. The Waldo Street years would be remembered, like those on the farm, as nothing but “wonderful times.”

He had a “gang” now. “Our house became headquarters for all the boys and girls around…. There was a wonderful barn with stalls for horses and cows, a corn crib and a hayloft in which all the kids met and cooked up plans for all sorts of adventures….” Mamma remained “very patient,” whatever went on.

As he started high school, the friendships meant even more. Paul Bryant lived on the other side of Waldo at little Woodland College for Women, where his father was president. Across the back alley was Fielding Houchens, the Baptist minister’s son. Elmer Twyman was the son of the Truman family doctor who had seen Harry through the siege of diphtheria and restored the severed tip of his toe. There was Tasker Taylor, who could draw better than anyone, and tall, shy Charlie Ross, who never missed a day of school and who, like Harry, read everything in sight.

Yet, as much as he liked them all, Harry had no best pal among the boys. His only close friends remained his girl cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland, who were as good-natured and well read as he, interested in everything, not at all vain (or pretty), and, importantly, devoted to him. Harry once calculated that he had a grand total of thirty-nine cousins, but Ethel and Nellie were the favorites and they would remain so all of his life. Ethel in particular would understand him as almost no one else ever did.

Just six months older than Harry, Ethel was a year ahead in school. Nellie, who was four years older, was very like a big sister to him. As a threesome they spent hours together after school and in the evenings, usually at the Noland house on Maple Avenue. In summer the girls were regular visitors at the farm on Blue Ridge. Harry was always considerate, always companionable, Ethel remembered. “Harry was always fun.” They read Shakespeare aloud, taking parts. After doing Hamlet, Ethel began calling him Horatio, brave Horatio, the staunch friend.

The Noland sisters knew, too, how much he still secretly cared for Elizabeth Wallace, who had been in his class from the time he switched to the Columbian School in fourth grade, and who, year after year, because of the alphabetical seating arrangement, occupied the desk immediately behind him.

Bessie, as everyone called her, lived on North Delaware Street, two and a half blocks from the Trumans, in a tall frame house, number 608, with a bur oak shading the front lawn. “If I succeeded in carrying her books to school and back home for her I had a big day,” he would later say, appraising how far he had advanced in overcoming his shyness.

She was his “ideal.” She was popular. She stood out in class, always dressed in the latest thing. A natural all-round athlete, she played baseball as well as a boy (as third baseman she had no trouble with the long throw to first). She could run faster than her brothers and beat them in tennis. She was better at tennis than almost anyone her age, as Harry knew from watching her on the courts at Woodland College. In winter he would stand and watch her race off on skates across the college pond. She could skate, she could dance, she could do so much that he could not, that he had never learned. She could even whistle through her teeth, as almost no girl ever could.

Her street, North Delaware, with its ample houses and sidewalks of hexagonal flagstone, was considered the finest street in Independence, the houses lending an air of dignity to the whole neighborhood west of the Square. The tall gray residence of her wealthy grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, up the street on North Delaware, was one of the show-places of town. Grandmother Gates was English. At Christmas, Bessie gave gifts to her friends wrapped in fancy paper and wore silk dresses to formal parties and dances of the kind to which Harry was never invited.

Besides, Bessie was a Presbyterian, which socially put her at “the top of the pole.” (Since the war, the Baptists had slipped to perhaps third or fourth place, below the Campbellites and the Northern Methodists and Southern Methodists, but were still ahead of the Lutherans, the Catholics, and the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, those Mormons who had come back from Utah.) Asked long afterward whether she remembered Harry Truman hanging about the Wallace house in the years they were all growing up, Bessie’s close friend and next-door neighbor, Mary Paxton, responded emphatically, “No! No! Harry was a Baptist.”

III

It was, as people said, the kind of town where everybody knew everybody and everybody’s business. The population was six thousand and growing, but only slowly. Compared to Kansas City it was a sleepy backwater, churchgoing, conservative, rooted to the past, exactly as most residents preferred. Kansas City was a brassy Yankee town, “money-wise” and full of “new people.” Independence was southern in both spirit and pace—really more southern than midwestern—and very set in its ways.

There had been considerable building since the war. The coming of the railroads, the pellmell growth of Kansas City, the rise of several new local enterprises had had an effect. North Delaware Street, which ran north-south, four blocks west of the Square, was a perfect example of the changed look. The large Bullene house, the Sawyer house with its Tiffany glass windows, the big Gates place were all new since the war, like the money that built them. The Bullenes belonged to the family that founded Kansas City’s most popular dry goods firm, Emery, Bird, Thayer. Aaron Sawyer was head of the Bank of Independence, which had been organized since the war. George Porterfield Gates was partner in the Waggoner-Gates Milling Company of Independence, founded in 1866, which hit a bonanza with “Queen of the Pantry Flour,” a product known throughout the Midwest.

Gates himself was part of a postwar Yankee influx. He had come from Vermont by way of Illinois, joined William Waggoner in the milling business in 1883, and two years later greatly remodeled and expanded his relatively modest house at the corner of North Delaware and Blue Avenue, spending in all, according to the Independence Sentinel, a fabulous $8,000. Painted gray with black trim at the windows, the finished clapboard “mansion” had fourteen rooms, verandas front and rear, fancy fretwork, tinted (“flashed”) glass in the front bay windows, slate roof, gas illumination, and hot and cold running water.

Gates’s partner, William Waggoner, lived in even grander style, across from the mill on Pacific Street, in the house George Caleb Bingham once occupied, but that Waggoner had done over sparing no expense. It sat on a knoll, in a leafy, parklike setting of 20 acres.

The Swope place on South Pleasant Street had a ballroom on the top floor. (The Swope fortune came from land in Kansas City.) The Vaile house on North Liberty, the showiest house in Independence, was a towering stone-trimmed, red-brick Victorian wedding cake, with thirty-one rooms and Carrara marble fireplaces. The Vaile stable had mahogany-paneled stalls. There was a greenhouse and four full-time gardeners. If Harvey Vaile, who made his money in “pure water” and contract mail delivery, was not the richest man in town, he certainly lived as though he were.

Overall it was quite a handsome community. The primary streets were paved, clean, and shaded by large old elms and cottonwoods. People took pride in their gardens. On summer evenings, after dark, families sat visiting on front porches, their voices part of the night for anybody crossing the lawns between houses.

National holidays and politics provided what little excitement occurred from one year to another. Most memorable for young Harry Truman was the day of Grover Cleveland’s second victory, in 1892, when the family was still in the house on Crysler Avenue. John Truman had scrambled to the top of the roof to tie a flag to the gilded weathervane, and that night, looking extremely proud, he rode a gray horse in a torchlight parade. Bessie Wallace’s friend Mary Paxton, a latter-day chronicler of town life, remembered how the men with their blazing torches came swinging down North Delaware leaving a trail of light under the dark trees. She, Harry, all their generation would remember it as a night-of-nights, since twenty years went by before Democrats, with the election of Wilson, could celebrate another presidential victory.

In lots of ways it was a country town still. Roosters crowed at dawn. Dinner remained a midday meal in many households. The standard Sunday dinner after church was fried chicken, buttered peas, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, and beaten biscuits, which, being made of Queen of the Pantry Flour, a “soft wheat” flour, were understood to be the world’s best. Mud-spattered buggies and farm wagons clogged the Square on Saturday nights when the farmers came to town for haircuts and supplies. Town boys grew up with farmer’s chores as part of the daily routine. Harry and Vivian had cows to milk, horses to curry, water, and feed, wood to split for the kitchen stove.

On clear winter nights, with the trees bare and the soft glow of gas and oil lamps still the only light in the windows of town, stars in the black sky overhead blazed with a clarity that residents of a later, “electrified” era would never experience.

Local boosters insisted on calling it a city and bragged about the new electric plant under construction at a cost of $30,000, or the new high school, which had cost still more. Local merchants were described as unexcelled “in regard to integrity, uprightness and faithfulness in business affairs and cordiality and good nature in social life.”

Yet for all this there was an air of great understated gentility, even sophistication. There were those in town, among the old moneyed families, who talked of travels in Europe, or summers in Colorado Springs. “Study groups” met to discuss literature and poetry, and with a degree of appreciation and vitality that could take visitors by surprise.

The teaching in the schools Harry attended was superb. In addition to Woodland College for Women, there was Presbyterian College, also for women, and St. Mary’s Academy for girls. These, to be sure, were only tiny, struggling institutions—the usual graduating class at Woodland numbered just a dozen or so—but they were well regarded and cause for much local pride. Independence, remembered Ethel Noland years later, “stood for culture,” a claim easy for outsiders to scoff at, she knew, but that she and others like her took very much to heart.

“There was conversation,” she said. “I mean by that talk about what was going on in the world, talk about ideas.”

The town supported two bookstores and most of the leading families took the Kansas City papers, in addition to the Sentinel or the Jackson Examiner. Kansas City, furthermore, was only a ten-mile ride by trolley or on the new train known as the Airline. So there was little sense of being cut off from the wide world, if the wide world was what you wished.

And with so much history attached to the town, no one with a feeling for the past could find it uninteresting. “No town in the west is richer in historical interest than the beautiful city of Independence,” declared a new guide to Independence. At the point south of town where the wagon trains had crossed Blue River, crevices worn by their wheels were still plainly evident. George Caleb Bingham had painted his Order No. 11 in one of the old outbuildings at the Waggoner estate. The brick walls of the Chrisman-Sawyer Bank, on the northwest corner of the courthouse square, showed the scars still of Civil War battles, and on pleasant mornings in the years of Harry Truman’s boyhood, old Marshal Peacock could often be seen walking stiffly about town, a spare, erect figure with a white beard and cane, who, as everyone knew, still carried the bullet fired by Jim Crow Chiles lodged in his spine.

George Porterfield Gates, Bessie Wallace’s grandfather, liked to frighten and delight Bessie and her friends with his tale of a late-night drive home in a buggy from a long-ago country wedding. A mysterious rider had appeared out of the dark, put a gun to Gates’s neck, and held it there all the way into town. It was Jim Crow Chiles, who, Gates was sure, had only murder in his heart. But, as they turned down North Delaware Street, Jim Crow “laughed his fiendish laugh” and vanished in the night, as suddenly as he had appeared.

The atmosphere remained pervadingly southern—antebellum Old South, unreconstructed. Handkerchiefs were waved whenever the band played “Dixie.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy thrived, and such formal parties as attended by genteel young folk like Bessie Wallace and her friends were hardly different from those put on in Macon or Tuscaloosa, from the floral decorations entwining stair rails to the refreshments of chicken salad and charlotte russe. The biggest memorial in Woodland Cemetery was the Confederate monument. Portraits of Lee and Jackson were displayed prominently in many front parlors, and in summer Quantrill’s “boys”—grizzled, tobacco-chewing, Border War veterans dressed as if for church—gathered for daylong outdoor reunions, a portrait of Quantrill draped in crepe as their centerpiece. Often Jesse James’s brother Frank appeared for such occasions, causing great excitement.

At school, one of Harry’s favorite teachers, Ardelia Hardin, who taught Latin, would describe for the class how her father had been hit three times during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and left for dead until discovered by Catholic sisters and taken to a Baltimore hospital, where, once recovered, he refused to swear allegiance to the United States and for this was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. “Harry always wanted to know about that,” Miss Hardin would remember half a century later, very pleased.

Virtually the entire town was American-born, though nearly every black resident past the age of forty had been born in slavery. Immigrant Irish, Italians, Croatians, and other foreign, impoverished people of the kind crowding into the vile West Bottoms of Kansas City were rarely ever seen in Independence.

Black residents lived in what was called “Nigger Neck,” a cluster of makeshift houses and shacks in a persimmon grove northwest of the Square. Blacks were unwelcome at most stores and were denied use of the town library. Black children went to a separate school—the Young School, named for the free-black wagonmaker of pioneer days, Hiram Young—and while white families like the Trumans might feel great, lifelong affection for their own black servants, words like “nigger” and “coon” were used as a matter of course in so-called “polite society.” And below the surface always lay a threat of violence, should any blacks forget their “place.” News of lynchings in the South were given lurid play by both local papers, invariably in the spirit that the victim only got what he had coming to him. The summer of 1901, the year Harry finished high school, the Jackson Examiner declared on its editorial page:

The community at large need not be especially surprised if there is a Negro lynching in Independence. The conditions are favorable at this time. There are a lot of worthless young Negro men in town who do nothing. They do not pretend to work and stand around on the streets and swear and make remarks about ladies and others who may pass by. They crowd into the electric cars and become offensive….

There were also in town, the editors were careful to add, many law-abiding Negroes “who are good citizens and who understand the truth of what we say as well as anyone.”

Certain precepts and bywords were articles of faith in such a place, in such times, and nearly everybody growing up there was imbued with them, in principle at least:

Honesty was the best policy. It saved time and worry, because if you always told the truth you never had to keep track of what you said.

Make yourself useful.

Anything worthwhile required effort.

If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. “Never, never give up,” Harry’s father would say.

Children were a reflection of their parents. “Now Harry, you be good,” his mother would tell him time after time as he went out the door.

He appears never to have questioned such dictates, any more than he questioned the established inequality of black people. “In those days,” he would remember, “right was right and wrong was wrong, and you didn’t have to talk about it.”

Many of the most familiar guidelines came directly from the Bible: “Honor thy father and mother.” “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.” “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.” “Be of good cheer.”

From Sunday School and his own reading of the Bible, Harry knew many passages by heart—particularly Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount. “Ye are the salt of the earth…. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works….”

He memorized a prayer, one he would say through much of his life:

Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe:

Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellowmen—help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings—even as Thou understandest mine!

Amen, Amen, Amen.

Say what you mean, mean what you say, he was taught at home. Keep your word. Never get too big for your britches. Never forget a friend.

They were more than words-to-the-wise, they were bedrock, as clearly established, as integral to the way of life, it seemed, as were the very landmarks of the community, its schools, church steeples, and courthouse. Not everyone lived up to them, of course, but to Harry it seemed everyone ought to try.

The Square was the center of the world if the town was the limit of your experience and at age fourteen, while still in high school, Harry went to work on the Square at J. H. Clinton’s drugstore. It was his first paying job.

Clinton’s drugstore stood at the northeast corner of the Square. Proprietor Clinton lived upstairs. Harry’s job was to come in each weekday morning at 6:30 to open up the place, sweep the sidewalk, mop the floor, wipe the counters, and do as much overall dusting and cleaning as possible before seven o’clock when Mr. Clinton came down and it was time for Harry to leave for school. More than half a century later, he could remember it all in detail:

There must have been a thousand bottles to dust and yards and yards of patent-medicine cases and shelves to clean. At least it seemed that way, because I never finished the bottles and shelves by schooltime and had to start the next morning where I’d left off the day before. By the time I got around them all, it was time to start over.

Two large glass vases in the front windows had to be cleaned and dusted, as well as a surrounding display of patent medicines. The windows were to be washed once a week, the prescription cases dusted “very, very carefully.” Saturdays and Sundays the boy worked from four in the afternoon until ten at night by the courthouse clock, when Mr. Clinton would lock up and Harry would head off in the dark, the lights in other shop windows along the Square going out one by one. Hurrying, he could make it home in twelve minutes.

J. H. Clinton advertised “Cigars, Smokers Supplies & Tobaccos, Perfumes, Toilet Articles, Soaps & Stationery, Prescriptions Carefully Compounded Day or Night.” But the store accommodated the town in yet another way, as Harry soon discovered, and it was this apparently that awakened him for the first time to the hypocrisies of certain prominent citizens known for their moral rectitude, the “high hats,” as he called them.

In a little closet under the prescription case, which faced the front and shut off the view of the back end of the store, was an assortment of whiskey bottles. Early in the morning, sometimes before Mr. Clinton arrived, the good church members and Anti-Saloon Leaguers would come in for their early morning drink behind the prescription case at ten cents an ounce. They would wipe their mouths, peep through the observation hole in front of the case, and depart. This procedure gave a fourteen-year-old boy quite a viewpoint on the public front of leading citizens and “amen-corner-praying” churchmen.

He would set the bottle on the counter and wait. “They’d put their dimes on the counter, and I’d leave all those dimes there until Mr. Clinton came in, and he’d put them in the cash register.” It was because these customers were such “counterfeits” that he hated having any part in the transaction. Far better, he thought, were the “tough old birds” around town who bought a proper drink in a real saloon whenever they wished, regardless of appearances.

The drugstore was one of several shops and stores fashioned out of what had once been the old Noland House, the frontier hotel and saloon where the body of Harry’s infamous uncle, Jim Crow Chiles, had been laid out after the shooting, a point of history Harry surely knew all about but never spoke of. The store was at the corner of Maple and Main, which with Lexington and Liberty, framed the Square. A jewelry store, a bookshop, two groceries, the Hotel Metropolitan, H. W. Rummel’s harness and saddle shop, a dry goods store, and the Courthouse Exchange Saloon were in the same block on Maple. Elsewhere around the Square, all facing the courthouse, were three more drugstores, two more saloons, A. J. Bundschu’s Department Store (“Once a patron, always a patron”), two barbershops, a tobacco shop, a shoe store, a theater, an opera house, a hardware store, a bakery, and an ice cream parlor. Three banks—the First National, the Bank of Independence, and the old, brick Chrisman-Sawyer—stood prominently at three different corners, while upstairs over several of the stores were various law and dental offices and Miss Dunlap’s dancing classes. A lumberyard, the Western Union offices, a barbershop for blacks, two livery stables, a feed store, the post office, the town jail, and the Airline railroad station were just off the Square, which meant that most of life’s necessities were all extremely handy, including the Ott-Mitchell Undertaking Parlor, which stood catty-cornered to J. H. Clinton’s drugstore.

But for size and impressiveness, nothing approached the courthouse, rising from its shaded lawn at the center of the Square. The simple, dignified little building of old with its fanlight over the door had long since disappeared, swallowed up by a great red-brick renovation in the high-Victorian mode with a mansard-roofed clocktower five stories tall. The courthouse was the focal point of Independence—the clocktower could be seen for miles jutting above the trees—and the courthouse, of course, was Democratic, for though Republicans were not unknown in Independence, the town remained solidly Democratic. People were born and raised Democrats as they were born and raised Baptists or Catholics. It was not something you questioned. As one said, “You were a Democrat come hell or high water. Or you were a Republican.”

In the warm months, on wooden benches in the dappled light of the courthouse lawn, the town loafers and “philosophers” congregated. Courthouse politicians, tradesmen, out-of-town salesmen, store clerks and bank presidents, mothers in long skirts shopping with their daughters—a good part of the town—passed up and down the sidewalks, stopping frequently to “visit.” The dark green Kansas City streetcar arrived and departed, making its cautious turn at Liberty and Lexington with bell clanging and a screech of wheels. In full summer, farm wagons laden with fresh produce lined the curbstones. Some summers, to keep the dust down, the town water wagon had to circle the Square several times daily.

To go up to the Square each morning to a regular job was for a boy to be very like a man. It was to be known, to be spoken to, and spoken well of if one were a brisk, cheerful, dependable boy like Harry Truman—and however disillusioned he may have been by some of the clientele at the drugstore, he was clearly enjoying himself and probably would have stayed on had his father not intervened. His first week’s wages of three silver dollars were, in memory, “the biggest thing that ever happened to me.” He bought a present for his mother and tried to give what money was left to his father, who said kindly that he should keep it for himself.

After three months, John Truman told the boy he had done enough. Better that he concentrate on his studies.

IV

He grew dutifully, conspicuously studious, spending long afternoons in the town library, watched over by a white plaster bust of Ben Franklin. Housed in two rooms adjacent to the high school, the library contained perhaps two thousand volumes. Harry and Charlie Ross vowed to read all of them, encyclopedias included, and both later claimed to have succeeded. Harry liked Mark Twain and Franklin’s Autobiography. He read Sir Walter Scott because Scott was Bessie Wallace’s favorite author. The fact that the town librarian, Carrie Wallace, was a cousin to Bessie may also have influenced the boy’s show of scholarly dedication.

“I don’t know anybody in the world that ever read as much or as constantly as he did,” remembered Ethel Noland. “He was what you call a ‘book worm.’ ”

History became a passion, as he worked his way through a shelf of standard works on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. “He had a real feeling for history,” Ethel said, “that it wasn’t something in a book, that it was part of life—a section of life or a former time, that it was of interest because it had to do with people.” He himself later said it was “true facts” that he wanted. “Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt that I wanted and needed.” He decided, he said, that men make history, otherwise there would be no history. History did not make the man, he was quite certain.

His list of heroes advanced. To Andrew Jackson, Hannibal, and Robert E. Lee were added Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great, and Gustavus Adolphus, the seventeenth-century Swedish king. No Jeffersons or Lincolns or Leonardos were part of his pantheon as yet. Whatever it was that made other boys of turn-of-the-century America venerate Andrew Carnegie or Thomas Edison, he had none of it. The Great Men by his lights were still the great generals.

Few boys in town ever went to high school. The great majority went to work. High school, like piano lessons, was primarily for girls. In Harry’s class, largest yet at the new high school, there were thirty girls and just eleven boys.

Harry was good in Latin, “very good” in math, poor in spelling, and greatly influenced by his teachers who were all women except for “Professor” W. L. C. Palmer, the principal, who taught science, the one subject Harry didn’t care for. The women were spinsters, as required by the school system. (When his Latin teacher, Ardelia Hardin—she with the Pickett’s Charge grandfather—became the wife of Professor Palmer, she had to give up teaching.) Known by everybody, they comprised a kind of town institution unto themselves, as upholders of standards. They were “the salt of the earth,” Harry would say. “They gave us our high ideals, and they hardly ever received more than forty dollars a month.” They taught the old rooted values—loyalty, love of home, unquestioning patriotism—no less than Latin, history, or Shakespeare. She could never enter the classroom, said Miss Tillie Brown, without hearing the admonition to “put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the spot on which thou standest is holy ground.” And while some may have snickered at her manner, none doubted her sincerity.

The influence of his teachers on his life, Harry later said, was second only to that of his mother, and when crediting a Tillie Brown or a Margaret Phelps for all they had done for him, he did so with the assumption that everybody of his generation had a Tillie Brown or Margaret Phelps in their background and could therefore understand how he felt.

The panorama of history, as taught by Margaret Phelps, began with Adam and Eve. Tall, slender, her upswept hair always in place, she was an exacting person and somewhat frightening to most of her pupils until they got to know her. Harry liked her best of all his teachers and it was in history that he did best. There was no more important field of study, Margaret Phelps affirmed in a memorable statement of faith: “It cultivates every faculty of the mind, enlarges sympathies, liberalizes thought and feeling, furnishes and approves the highest standards of character.”

Tillie Brown, Matilda D. Brown, the English teacher, was hardly less impressive—“a genius at making us appreciate good literature”—and two of Harry’s composition books done under her guidance would survive, one from 1899, the other dated 1900-1901, his senior year. His focus was on people and moral ideals. He responded strongly to the stamp of patriotism on an author or a character. He abhorred sham. Courage counted above all, to judge by what he wrote. At times, when writing of the corrupting influences of money and of what he called “the passions,” the boy seemed wise beyond his years. How much of what he wrote was his own, how much the outlook of Tillie Brown is impossible to know, but as one who, by his own account, knew how to please a teacher, he may well have been giving her as much Brown as Truman in his value judgments.

Of James Fenimore Cooper he wrote in 1899:

The name Cooper suggests to me stories of Indians, the sea and the Revolution, in which we go through a great many adventures and narrow escapes. It also makes me think of a man who upheld his country and who would not step out of his way because it was hard or because he had to meet a quarrel. He was a man who would not let another “run over him.” He would support an argument to the last.

“Cooper’s books,” he also observed, “are interesting and famous but his sentences are too long.”

Under the heading “Courage,” he wrote in a strong, clear, straightaway hand, “The virtue I call courage is not in always facing the foe but in taking care of those at home…. A true heart, a strong mind and a great deal of courage and I think a man will get through the world.” In an essay on The Merchant of Venice, in the composition book from senior year, writing on Antonio, he said that though ideal men were few, his ideal man “should in the first place be brave; then he should fear his God…he must not be cold, haughty, or hypocritical; but he must have a warm heart and love someone (a woman is preferable).”

Shylock interested him primarily because Shylock was a strong man. Shylock’s failing was that he let his passions rule him. “When a man loses control of his passions he is gone,” wrote sixteen-year-old Harry Truman. Further along, he had this to say about Bassanio:

This world is made up of all sorts of conditions of men, from the best one could wish to the basest one could imagine. There are men who love money who will do anything for money, who will sell their souls for money. Then there are men who love money for the good that is in it, who like to use it to make others happy. There are men who love everything worldly, love wine women and a good time; then there are those who are so religious they have no time to think of anyone or anything. These men are extremists who run the thing into the ground. I like a man who has enough worldly wisdom to take care of himself; but I like him to have time to love both his God and those around him.

But it was the boy’s “steadfastness” that most impressed his teachers, said Ardelia Hardin. When called on to speak in class, he would stand clear of his desk and square his shoulders before saying a word.

What his grades were remains unknown, since the school’s records were later destroyed in a fire.

Measured by the time and effort expended, the most important activity in his life was the piano. Having progressed beyond the abilities of Miss Burrus, who taught by a numbers system, he began going twice weekly to Kansas City for lessons with Mrs. E. C. White, a gifted teacher who had studied under Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, one of the leading American pianists of the era, and with Theodore Leschetizky, who had been a teacher of Paderewski. Harry grew extremely fond of Grace White. (He was fond of most older people, as his cousin Ethel observed. “He was brought up to be fond of them.”) She opened a new world for him and his response was to work with exceptional determination, practicing two hours a day without fail, beginning at five o’clock every morning. As a grown man he would often speak lightly of “tickling the ivories,” as if it were only something he had happened to pick up along the way. But the slender, straight-backed youth with the round eyeglasses who sat at the keyboard in the half-light of dawn every morning was in dead earnest. He thought he had the makings of a concert pianist. And apparently so did Mrs. White.

He was willing not only to do the work, but to face whatever ridicule might come. His friend Charlie Ross would remember Harry going up the street with a music roll under his arm hurrying to catch the trolley for Kansas City. “Mothers held him up as a model, so he took a lot of kidding. It required a lot of courage for a kid to take music lessons in a town like Independence.” Another friend, Henry Bundschu, said Harry was the sort of boy who “seemed to do whatever his mother told him.”

He also loved music; he genuinely adored the great classical works Mrs. White guided him through and insisted he learn. On a big Steinway in her old-fashioned house on Brooklyn Street in Kansas City she drilled him in Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” pieces by Weber and Grieg. He learned the new “Woodland Sketches” by the contemporary American composer Edward MacDowell. For the rest of his life he could play Paderewski’s Minuet in G and several Chopin waltzes by heart. He was moved by “sad music,” Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique and Chopin’s Funeral March. Von Weber, he thought, wrote “beautiful things”—the Rondo Brillante, the Polka Brillante. But he liked still more the Chopin waltzes and polonaises. Mozart he loved most of all and with Mrs. White’s help eventually mastered the Ninth Sonata.

He was playing serious music with utmost seriousness and going to concerts at every opportunity. Many of the concert greats of the day came to Kansas City. Twice when Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler performed, first at the Lyceum, later at Pepper Hall, Harry was in the audience. He heard her play Scarlatti’s Pastorale and Capriccio, and Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 111, which a reviewer in the Kansas City Journal called her “most profoundly developed offering.” This was in 1898, the year he worked in the drugstore, when he was fourteen. Later he heard Josef Lhévinne, who was “the best on the globe,” he thought. In 1900, when Paderewski came to Kansas City on tour, Mrs. White arranged a meeting backstage with “the great man,” who treated Harry to a private demonstration of how to play his Minuet in G.

As a boy brimming with such musical aspiration, his head filled with Shakespeare and noble Romans, as one who had taken teasing in a town where appearances were vital, and where every youngster bore the constant scrutiny of innumerable aunts, uncles, teachers, shopkeepers, and neighbors, he might well have burned to rebel. He might have longed for escape, as had Willa Cather growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, or to strike back somehow against the kind of small-town minds and souls that Sinclair Lewis would remember from boyhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. But nowhere in all that Harry Truman wrote and said about his youth, or in the lengthy recollections of him by friends and family, is there even a hint of anger or hurt or frustration over his surroundings. Clearly he liked Independence, Missouri, and its people. He liked being Harry Truman.

He had thinned out, stretched out, to perhaps, 5 foot 7, which was not as tall as he would be, but above average and already several inches taller than his father. Neat, clean, cheerful, he had still the gift for getting along with almost anyone. People knew who he was and people liked him, and partly because of the music roll and the eyeglasses. He had no enemies, he held no grudges. He had done no wrong, nor anything yet to be ashamed of, so far as is known. Importantly, his father approved of him, for all their seemingly different interests. Harry was “all right,” John Truman said. “He knew Harry had ability,” Vivian remembered. “He liked the way he never had an idle moment….”

Vivian, in contrast to his girlish-sounding name, was a sturdy, man’s kind of boy, who was good at games and wished no part of books or piano lessons. Already Vivian had shown such a knack for horse trading that John Truman gave him a checkbook and set him up as a “partner” at the age of twelve. Harry, try as he might, had no heart for trade. As he would later explain to Bessie Wallace, “When I buy a cow for $30 and then sell her to someone for $50 it always seems to me that I am really robbing that person of $20.”

Where Harry and his father found common ground was in the sociability and excitement of politics. Among the happiest of all Harry’s boyhood memories would be the big Democratic picnics every August at Lone Jack. John Truman would have everyone up early. He and the boys would hitch two of the best mules to a spring wagon, and with everything ready, the whole family would set out for the five-mile drive, the wagon filled with fried chicken, cakes, and pies. By noon at Lone Jack there would be thousands of people spreading food on tablecloths on the grass, and visiting back and forth. Then, about two, the speaking would begin. Harry liked particularly a candidate known as Colonel Crisp, “a colonel by agreement,” who ran for Congress time after time but never won and was famous for his annual picnic oration on the Battle of Lone Jack during the Civil War. Challenged once on his accuracy by a veteran who had been in the battle, Crisp responded, “Goddamn an eyewitness anyway. He always spoils a good story.” Another speaker, Congressman William S. Cowherd from Lee’s Summit, told a story that Harry would take pleasure in retelling the rest of his life. Speaking of certain provisions in a pending tariff bill that he found unpalatable, the congressman was reminded of a farmer on a visit to New York, having his first experience in a fancy hotel dining room. First he was served celery, which he ate, then a bowl of consommé, which he drank. But when the waiter placed a lobster before him, the farmer looked up indignantly and said, “I ate your bouquet. I drank your dishwater. But I’ll be darned if I’ll eat your bug.”

Now, in the summer of 1900, Harry went with his father to Kansas City to attend the Democratic National Convention that renominated the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, to run a second time against William McKinley. John Truman sat in a box seat, as the guest of one of Kansas City’s most up-and-coming citizens, William T. Kemper, a friend in “the grain business” and a national committeeman. Harry was consigned to the balcony or ran errands for Kemper, and hugely enjoyed himself. He remembered the immense sweep of the great hall and a crowd of seventeen thousand people, nearly three times the population of Independence, all under one roof. The nominating speech for Bryan touched off a demonstration that lasted half an hour.

Harry and his father declared themselves thorough “Bryan men,” and though Bryan and his running mate, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, went down to defeat in November to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Bryan remained an idol for Harry, as the voice of the common man.

The Democrats made imperialism the issue in the election of 1900, but it was McKinley prosperity that carried the country, the Republicans campaigning on the theme of the “Full Dinner Pail.” How aware the boy may have been of his own family’s unprecedented prosperity at the moment is unknown. But by speculating in grain futures, through such contacts as he had established with “insiders” like William T. Kemper, John Truman was moving rapidly toward his dream of riches.

With his senior year under way that same fall, Harry found himself busier than ever. He, Charlie Ross, Tasker Taylor, and several others launched a first yearbook for the school. Charlie named it The Gleam, after Tennyson’s poem “Merlin and the Gleam.” Tasker did the illustrations. As part of their Latin studies, Harry and Charlie worked on translations of Cicero—Salus populi suprema, est lex, “The people’s good is the highest law.” Charlie, who was class president as well as editor of The Gleam, was also first in scholarship.

With Elmer Twyman, Harry spent weeks building a wooden model of Caesar’s bridge over the Rhine, as described in Caesar’s Commentaries, and met regularly with his cousin Nellie Noland, who was a “whiz” at Latin. The Noland family by this time had moved to 216 North Delaware, a small frame house opposite the Gates mansion. Best of all, Bessie Wallace was now part of the group there.

She was “over a good deal,” Cousin Ethel would remember. “I don’t know whether they got much Latin read or not because there was a lot of fun going on.” Harry had taken up fencing. “He had two foils, or rapiers, or whatever you call them; and so we would sometimes practice fencing, which we knew absolutely nothing about, but it was fun to try, and we had the porch…room here to play and have fun…which we did, with a little Latin intermingled.”

Progress and the new century were popular topics. “ ‘Progress’ is the cry on every hand,” wrote Elmer Twyman in The Gleam; “and invention, reform, and improvement is everywhere—in weapons, heat, light, food, medicine, building, transportation. Truly we are wizards performing miracles. We lack nothing but the airship and the philosopher’s stone, or, perhaps, the ‘fountain of youth.’ ” Harry copied down and saved the lines of a favorite poem by Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” describing all the wonders to come, including airships and air warfare and universal law:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

For the class picture taken outside the school’s main entrance, Harry stood by himself in back of the back row. Elmer Twyman, who stood nearby, proudly holding a man’s hat, had decided to become a doctor like his father. Charlie Ross, who sat on the ground at the near end of the front row, his long legs drawn up so that his socks were showing, was headed for the University of Missouri and a career in journalism. Harry had removed his glasses for the picture. He was not smiling, only paying attention to the photographer, his right hand resting on the shoulder of the slight, wistful-looking boy in front, Will Garrett, the class poet. Harry had decided to try for West Point. He and Fielding Houchens, who wanted to go to Annapolis, were preparing for the examinations by taking extra hours in history with Miss Phelps. Bookish Harry, who fenced with girls, who had never been in a fight in his life and was admittedly afraid of guns, thought he might make a general, if not a concert pianist.

Intentionally or not, his position in the picture put him about as distant as possible from Bessie Wallace, who sat smiling at the far end of the second row.

The night of graduation, it seemed half the town was packed into the high school auditorium. The girls were in white, the boys in dark suits and stiff collars. According to the Jackson Examiner, no finer-looking set had ever gathered on a single platform. Harry was not one of the student speakers, he received no awards or honors. The date was May 30, 1901, Memorial Day-Decoration Day as it was more commonly called—and so there had been band music and flags flying since morning. Harry was seventeen.

3
The Way of the Farmer

Experentia does it—as Papa used to say.

—CHARLES DICKENS, David Copperfield

I

Within a year of Harry’s graduation from Independence High School, calamity struck the Truman family, changing the course of their lives in ways none of them could have anticipated. For Harry it was as if a curtain suddenly descended, marking the end of boyhood and the small-town life he loved and that had seemed so secure and suited to him.

John Truman’s run of luck on Wheat futures had ended. He began losing heavily that same summer of 1901, and to recover his losses kept risking more and more until he had gambled away nearly everything he and Matt owned—as much as $40,000 in cash, stocks, and personal property, including 160 acres of prime land on Blue Ridge given to Matt by her father.

The situation could not have been much worse. At age fifty-one, John Truman was wiped out. The Waldo Avenue house had to be sold. For a while the family lived in another part of town, trying to keep up appearances, but eventually they had to pack and leave Independence altogether. They moved to a modest neighborhood in Kansas City, where John took a job for wages, something no Truman had done before. He went to work as a night watchman at a grain elevator. It was the best job he could find, at pay comparable to that of a farmhand. For a man of such fierce pride, and for those who loved him, it could only have been a painful time.

But there were no complaints. The Trumans were never a complaining people. It was not nice to tell your troubles, one must always be cheerful, Ethel Noland would remember. If asked how you were, you were always to respond, “I’m fine. And you?” Keep your troubles to yourself. She knew from experience, for her own father, having “plunged” in railroads, went “very flat indeed.”

Of his father’s catastrophe, Harry would only say in later years, “He got the notion he could get rich. Instead he lost everything at one fell swoop and went completely broke.”

Harry had tried a little gambling himself the summer after graduation, while traveling east by train to visit his favorite Aunt Ada, Matt’s younger sister, in southern Illinois. It was his first time away from home alone, and on the return trip, stopping in St. Louis to see still more of Matt’s people, a great-aunt named Hettie Powell and her family, he was taken to a horse race and urged by a cousin and three other young men to put in one of the five dollars they bet on a long shot called Claude. As Harry learned afterward, Claude was a well-known “mud horse”—the worse the track, the better he ran. Just as the race was to start, rain came in torrents. Not only did Claude finish first, he paid 25 to 1. Harry had never felt so rich in his life, but he was not to bet on a horse again for another forty years.

West Point had turned him down because of his eyes. Now, with his father’s financial troubles, college of any kind was out of the question. Back from St. Louis he signed up for an accounting course at little Spaulding’s Commercial College in downtown Kansas City, but even that had to be abandoned as too costly. To help the family, he went to work in the mailroom at the Kansas City Star. Then, in late summer, after the tragic death of a school friend, a better job came available. Tasker Taylor, the artist of the class, had been working as a construction timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad. On a hot evening in August, he was drowned while swimming in the Missouri River just upstream from the Independence pumping station. At John Truman’s urging, Harry took the job, which, for a boy who had seen so little of life, proved a rough initiation.

The Santa Fe was doubling its tracks into Kansas City. Harry worked ten-hour days, six days a week for $30 a month, plus board, which meant living with the labor gangs in their tent camps along the river, eating greasy food, and listening to their talk. On an hourly basis the pay was not much better than at Clinton’s drugstore. The talk included profanity and raw observations on life of a kind he had never imagined.

He kept tabs on everybody’s time—mule drivers, blacksmiths, and the common laborers who were mostly hoboes, four hundred men in total—and saw that they were paid off every two weeks, a transaction customarily performed on Saturday nights in a saloon, so the men would drink up their earnings and thereby guarantee a return to work Monday morning, a strategy that, Harry observed sadly, nearly always worked.

Much about the job he found highly enjoyable. He liked particularly traveling up and down the line from camp to camp, spinning along alone in a handcar. And the longer he was with them, the more he liked the men—“A very down-to-earth education,” he would call it—and they liked him. When the work was completed six months later, and the time came to say goodbye, a foreman, wishing him well, announced to all within earshot that Harry Truman was an “all right” fellow. “He’s all right from his asshole out in every direction.”

It was Harry’s first public commendation.

On Friday, April 24, 1903, looking scrubbed and spruce in a dark suit and high starched collar, every bit the perfect candidate for a bank clerk, he walked up Walnut Street in Kansas City and applied for a job at the stately National Bank of Commerce.

“Are you good at figures?” he was asked on a two-page employment application form. “Fair,” he wrote. Had he ever been fired? No. Did he smoke? Did he use intoxicating spirits? Had he any debts? No to all three, he answered, moving steadily down the page, using a swift dash line to indicate ditto. “Have you ever gambled or played cards for money?” No, again. “Have you ever ‘played the races’ or speculated in any way?”

To what extent the memory of Claude came rushing back can only be guessed, but here he hesitated, as is evident in the surviving document. He began to write something—there is the start of the down stroke of a letter—but thinking better of it apparently, he quickly repeated his ditto line. The answer was no once more, and it is the earliest known sign in his own hand that he was capable of telling less than the truth if the occasion warranted, capable of being quite human.

Asked if he had any extravagant tastes or habits, he answered that he didn’t think so. “In what forms of recreation or amusement do you find pleasure?” Theaters and reading, he wrote. “Where do you spend your evenings and Sundays?” At home. All true.

He had a letter from Dr. Twyman describing him as a “model young man.” Possibly, too, he had help from William T. Kemper, John Truman’s friend from better days, who was a director of the bank. In any event, he was hired as a clerk in the vault starting at $20 a month, which was about what his father was making at his night watchman’s job, and there he stayed for two years. In the view of his employers, his performance was outstanding. His immediate superior, a man named A. D. Flintom, could hardly say enough for him. “He is an exceptionally bright young man and is keeping the work up in the vault better than it has ever been kept,” Flintom wrote in a first report on young Harry Truman.

He is a willing worker, almost always here and tries hard to please everybody. We never had a boy in the vault like him before. He watches everything very closely and by his watchfulness, detects many errors which a careless boy would let slip through. His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best.

In a later report, “Trueman,” as Flintom spelled it, was again praised for his “excellent character and good habits.” He was accurate. He was “always at his post of duty,” his work was “always up.” Further, he was “very ambitious.” “I do not know of a better young man in the bank than Trueman,” wrote Flintom to vice-president Charles H. Moore. Nor was Flintom one to lavish praise indiscriminately, as is clear from what he said of Vivian Truman, who had also come to work at the bank by this time. Vivian, though “nice appearing,” was “possessed of very little ability,” thought Flintom. “He is a very different boy from his brother….”

The vault where Harry spent his days—“the zoo,” as the clerks called it—was below street level, downstairs from the bank’s cavernous main lobby with its Corinthian columns and brass spittoons. He cleared checks drawn on country banks, sometimes handling as much as a million dollars a day, while keeping all notations in longhand. It was not work calling for much initiative or imagination or that he especially cared for; and Charles H. Moore, the vice-president, appears to have been the first person Harry actually disliked. Moore, said Harry Truman years later, was “never so happy as when he would call some poor inoffensive little clerk up before him in the grand lobby of the biggest bank west of the Mississippi and tell him how dumb and inefficient he was….” Harry continued to do his best, however, and his pay advanced steadily. In time he was earning $40 a month, which made him the family’s number one breadwinner.

His years at the National Bank of Commerce were 1903 to 1905. Two months after he went to work came the stunning news that Bessie Wallace’s father, David Wallace, one of the best-known men in Independence, had committed suicide. The story was in the papers. At first light the morning of June 17, while his family still slept, he had gotten up from bed, taking care not to disturb his wife, dressed fully, took a revolver from a dresser, and walked down the hall to the bathroom where, standing in the middle of the floor, he placed the muzzle of the gun behind his left ear and fired. He was forty-three years old and had, in the words of the Jackson Examiner, “an attractiveness about him that was natural and spontaneous.” In addition to his wife, Madge Gates Wallace, and Bessie, age eighteen, he was survived by three sons, ranging in age from sixteen to three. He left no note.

“Why should such a man take his own life?” asked the Examiner. “It is a question we who loved him are unable to answer….” Included also in the story was the gruesome detail that the bullet had passed through his head and landed in the bathtub.

Older friends and neighbors in Independence remembered the wedding of Madge Gates to David Wallace twenty years earlier as one of the most elegant occasions in the town’s history. It had been a brilliant moonlit night, the lawn at the Gates mansion ablaze with Chinese lanterns. Wedding presents in the parlor included oil paintings and an after-dinner coffee service in silver and china. David Wallace was the son of one of the old settlers from Kentucky, but until his marriage had had no wealth or social standing to speak of. He was a courthouse politician. Yet the importance of the Gates family more than compensated and David Wallace, many believed, was the hand-somest man in Independence. He was like the elegant small-town figure in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” who “fluttered pulses” with his good looks and who also “one calm summer night, /Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

What the Examiner did not mention, but that everyone knew, was that David Wallace had a drinking problem—often he had to be carried home by friends—and most efforts to fathom the tragedy came back to that. Or to gossip about money troubles, the view being he was badly in debt “and didn’t see any way out.”

If the Trumans had known shame during John’s financial downfall, it was little compared to what the family of a suicide would experience. The Trumans had moved away. Madge Gates, with Bessie and the younger children, left for Colorado Springs, not to return for a year. No one close to the family would ever discuss the subject except in strictest confidence. It was not something “decent people” wished to talk about. Sixty years had to go by before Bessie’s friend Mary Paxton described how her father had awakened her early that morning and told her to go next door at once to be with Bessie, because Mr. Wallace had killed himself. “[Bessie] was walking up and down back of the house with clenched fists, I remember. She wasn’t crying. There wasn’t anything I could say, but I just walked up and down with her….” Harry Truman is not known ever to have said a word on the subject outside the family.

He had seen nothing of Bessie in the time since the Trumans left town. Nor did he now. Even after she was back from Colorado Springs and began commuting to the Barstow School, Kansas City’s finishing school for wealthy young women, they kept to their separate lives. With her grief-stricken mother and her brothers, Bessie moved in permanently with Grandfather and Grandmother Gates at 219 North Delaware. So at a time when the Truman family’s “circumstances” were so greatly reduced, Bessie had become the “family princess” of the Gates mansion. What news Harry had of her came from the Noland sisters, who from their observation post across the street knew as much as anyone.

Since starting at the bank, Harry had been living at home, or what for the time being passed for home in Kansas City, spending little more than carfare and lunch money, which, according to the pocket account book he kept, came to about 50 cents a day. Once, throwing economies to the wind, he spent $11 for “Ties Collar Cuffs Pins, etc.” Later $10 went for “Music,” piano lessons with Mrs. White, which he soon had to drop. He would sometimes say later that he quit because playing the piano was “sissy.” The truth was the lessons had become more than he could afford.

His one indulgence was the theater, which he loved and for which he was willing to splurge, sometimes as much as two dollars. He went to vaudeville at the Orpheum and the Grand. For a while he worked as an usher on Saturday afternoons at the Orpheum, just to see the show for free. He saw the Four Cohans and Sarah Bernhardt. He went to concerts and the opera at Convention Hall. A note from “Horatio” dashed off on National Bank of Commerce stationery, telling his cousins Ethel and Nellie where to meet him for their theater date, ends: “I understand that Mr. Beresford is exceedingly good so don’t fail to come. I’ve already got the seats….” A performance by Richard Mansfield in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde left Harry so shaken he was afraid to go home alone.

With a population of 200,000, Kansas City was still a cow town and a grain town. St. Louis was by contrast old metropolitan and old money. St. Louis looked eastward, Kansas City faced west. They were two entirely different cities. But Kansas City was growing by leaps and bounds and prided itself in offering the latest and best of everything. There was hardly a city in America where an observant youth could have had a better day-to-day sense of the country’s robust energy and confidence at the start of the new century. To Harry it was a place of “things doing.” Once, with the other clerks, he rushed out of the bank and down 10th Street to see President Theodore Roosevelt speak from the back of a railroad car. It was his first chance to see a President, and though a Republican who spoke with a piping voice and who seemed surprisingly short, Roosevelt gave a good speech, Harry thought. The crowd was delighted. “They wanted to see him grin and show his teeth, which he did.”

In May of 1905, Harry signed up with a new National Guard unit. “I was twenty-one years old in May of that year,” he remembered, “and could do as I pleased.” It was a far cry from the dream of West Point, but Private Truman began drilling with Missouri’s Light Artillery, Battery B, First Brigade. (“They needed recruits,” he also said later, in explanation of how, with his poor eyesight, he passed the physical exam.) His first encampment that summer was at Cape Girardeau, in the far-off southeastern corner of Missouri. He went by train as far as St. Louis, then down the Mississippi by steamboat, “quite an experience.” He came home a corporal—“the biggest promotion I ever received”—and for a weekend visit to the Young farm put on his new dark blue dress uniform with its beautiful red piping on the sleeves, expecting to impress his grandmother. But as he stepped through the door, she could think only of Union soldiers. He was never to wear it again in her presence, she said.

Largely he was on his own by now. John Truman, fed up with city life, miserable in his job, had decided to try still another new start. He rented a small farm at Clinton, Missouri, about seventy miles southeast, on Grand River in prosperous farm country. Again Matt had to pack and move, and Harry began boarding out with John’s sister Emma, Mrs. Rochester Colgan, in Kansas City.

It was a wide-open town still, more than living up to its reputation. Sporting houses and saloons far outnumbered churches. “When a bachelor or stale old codger was in sore need of easing himself [with a woman], he looked for a sign in the window which said: Transient Rooms or Light Housekeeping,” remembered the writer Edward Dahlberg, whose mother was proprietor of the Star Lady Barbershop on 8th Street. To Dahlberg, in memory, nearly everything about the Kansas City of 1905, the city of his boyhood, was redolent of sex and temptation. To him it was a “wild, concupiscent city.” Another contemporary, Virgil Thomson, who was to become a foremost composer, wrote of whole blocks where there were nothing but saloons, this in happy contrast, he said, to dry, “moralistic” Kansas across the line. “And just as Memphis and St. Louis had their Blues, we had our Twelfth Street Rag proclaiming joyous low life.” But with such joyous low life Harry appears to have had little or no experience. Long afterward, joking with friends about his music lessons, he would reflect that had things gone differently he might have wound up playing the piano in a whorehouse, but there is no evidence he ever set foot in such a place, or that he “carried on” in Kansas City in any fashion.

After several months with Aunt Emma, he moved to an altogether respectable boardinghouse kept by a Mrs. Trow on Troost Avenue where, for room and board (breakfast and dinner), he paid five dollars a week. Another young boarder was a messenger at the Bank of Commerce named Arthur Eisenhower from Abilene, Kansas, (Arthur’s younger brother, Dwight David, was still at home in high school.) “Harry and I had only a dollar a week left over for riotous living,” Arthur would recall.

Refused another raise at the Bank of Commerce, Harry quit and went to work for the Union National Bank at 9th and Baltimore, in Kansas City’s famous ten-story New York Life Building, with its giant bronze eagle over the main entrance. The pay was better—$75 a month—and the Union National a pleasanter place to work. As an assistant teller, he was soon making $100 a month, truly, as he said, a magnificent salary.

With the new job, the big paycheck, his new friends, his drill sessions with the National Guard, Harry was as busy and happy as he had ever been. Had he gone to college four years earlier, he would only now be looking for his first job. He bought a Panama hat. He had his photograph taken. At the lavish new Willis Wood Hall, he saw Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice.

But any thoughts he may have entertained about a career in banking were shortlived. Beset by more misfortune—his entire corn crop was lost to floods at Clinton—John Truman had agreed to move in with Grandma Young and run the Blue Ridge farm. Uncle Harrison, who had been in charge until now, had found the work more than he could handle and wanted to move to the city. The farm was large and good help ever harder to find.

The new arrangement appeared to suit everybody, and in October 1905 all the Trumans but Harry moved back to Blue Ridge. The problem was John also found the work too much, even with Vivian to help. So some four or five months later, Harry was told to quit his job and come home. The family came first. If Harry harbored any regrets or resentment, he never let on. His friends were sure he wouldn’t last as a farmer.

II

The change from his life in Kansas City was stunning. For five years, until he rediscovered Bessie Wallace, his preoccupations were to be almost exclusively those determined by crops, seasons, weeds, insects, rain and sunshine, livestock, farm machinery, bank loans, and the dictates of an energetic, opinionated father who was determined to succeed at last.

Everything now revolved about the farm. It was the focus of the whole family’s life, its livelihood, its constant responsibility, its sole source, of income. Everyone worked, “and woe to the loafer,” as Harry remembered.

“Well, if you don’t work, you don’t make it,” was the common philosophy as expressed by a neighbor. “You may do a lot of work and not make it, too, but you’ve got to do it or you won’t make it.”

‘“The simple life was not always so simple,” remembered another. “It was a hard life…a life which demanded perseverance…. It demanded first things first.”

The day began for Harry with his father’s call from the bottom of the stairs at five in the morning when it was still dark and cold outside. (That spring of 1906, Harry’s first on the farm, happened to be one of abnormal cold in Jackson County, of mud and heavy rains.) And it was his father who kept at him through the day, showing him what to do, working as hard as two men, and warning Harry time after time not to hurt himself, not to try to lift anything too heavy. A building up of both the farm and the owlish-looking bank clerk was apparently much on John Truman’s mind.

Harry learned to drive an Emerson gang plow, two plows on a three-wheeled frame pulled by four horses. The trick was to see that each horse pulled his part of the load. With an early start, he found, he could do five acres in a ten-hour day. Some mornings, to keep warm, he walked instead of riding. Some mornings, he remembered, not even a sweater, two coats, and an overcoat were enough to keep out the cold.

As spring moved on, he took instructions in driving the corn planter and wheat drill. John Truman would tolerate no crooked rows in the corn, no skipped places in the wheat, the money crop. If bare spots appeared in the corn or wheat, Harry would hear about it all summer. “My father told me to adjust the planter before starting, have the horses well in hand and under control, pick out an object on the other side of the field usually a quarter or a half mile away, point the tongue of the planter at that object and keep it there, letting the horses step out at a lively gait.” It was how Harry would conduct much of his life.

Some of the wheat fields were immense. One horse made such trouble that Harry found himself yelling at him in his sleep.

With its nearly 600 acres, the farm was among the largest in the county, more than four times the size of the average Missouri farm, and required the full-time efforts of John, Harry, Vivian, and several hired men. For John Truman, Harry observed, everything about the life seemed second nature. The small, weatherbeaten man could not understand why anybody would wish to sleep past 5:00 A.M. Nothing about the work daunted him. Harry disliked milking cows, particularly when they flipped their manure-soaked tails in his face. Raking hay was a “cussin’ job.” He hated the whole business of putting rings in hogs’ noses and thought husking corn, with the dirt and dust flying about, was work devised by Satan. Yet John Truman was happier than his children had seen him in years. He would never have left the farm in the first place, he told them, had it not been for their education. Mary Jane would remember knowing where he was almost any time of day because she could hear him singing at his work.

He knew how to make them all “step lively,” but was also quick to single out good work when he saw it. “Yes, and if you did a good job, he would compliment you,” said Gaylon Babcock, a neighbor who from boyhood helped at threshing time. “He made you want to do a good job.” Another man recalled seeing the Trumans planting a cornfield with three teams of horses working at once. A few days later he saw the same three teams cultivating the corn before it was up, to get a head start on the weeds.

Every day was work, never-ending work, and Harry did “everything there was to do”—hoeing corn and potatoes in the burning heat of summer, haying, doctoring horses, repairing equipment, sharpening hoes and scythes, mending fences. Some things he did better than others. Using an ax or saw left-handed, he took a lot of kidding for work that looked left-handed. He learned the song of the meadowlark (it said, “Pretty boy go to work,” according to local tradition) and that wind from the northwest meant rain. By paying attention to what his father had to teach, he became highly knowledgeable about livestock, as proficient nearly as Vivian. They raised registered short-horn cows and bulls, sheep, mules, thoroughbred horses, and Hampshire hogs. John won prizes for his horses. Harry’s “real love” was the hogs, which he gave such names as “Mud,” “Rats,” and “Carrie Nation.” Harry also kept the books, listing which crops were sold to whom and for how much:

Boundary lines for the farm were the same rock fences from Solomon Young’s time, and two of his big square limestone gateposts marked the main entrance from the rock road. The elm trees along the front drive had grown huge by now, so that the whole distance from the road to the house was in deep shade. Beyond the house still, through the orchard, was the old walnut barn, solid as ever and still painted red.

The only neighbors in view were the Slaughters, to the north, with whom the Trumans shared a common boundary of nearly a mile. A large family of eight children, the Slaughters were the most prosperous farmers in the vicinity. O. V. Slaughter and his wife Elizabeth had known Matt since childhood. Theirs were the only lights to be seen after dark. Everything else in view was cropland, trees, and sky.

The big change in community life in the years the Trumans had been away from Blue Ridge was the growth of Grandview, a mile to the south. The little town was the creation of two railroads that cut through corners of the farm, the Kansas City Southern and the St. Louis & San Francisco, or “Frisco,” both built shortly before Solomon Young’s death. Post office, bank, grocery, feed, and hardware stores and the two railroad depots were now only a ten-minute ride down the rock road. On Sunday mornings the bells of Grandview Baptist Church carried clearly.

The whole farm belonged still to Grandma Young. The small, frame farmhouse built for her after the fire was well kept but crowded now with the five Trumans. Painted plain white with dark green trim, it had seven rooms, all very small—kitchen, dining room, front parlor, sitting room, and two bedrooms at the top of the front stairs. Harry and Vivian slept under the eaves over the dining room, in a tiny room with two tiny windows down at floor level, reachable only by a narrow back stairway.

The house was without electricity. There was no running water or plumbing. Matt cooked on a coal stove. In winter, the hand pump often froze solid. In summer, Harry and Vivian’s room under the eaves became a furnace. Except for Matt’s walnut dresser, the furnishings were of the plainest kind. The single modern convenience was a telephone, which hung on the wall beside the front door.

Neighbors remembered the house being scrupulously neat and clean. No one took such pleasure in creating a disturbance with a broom as did his mother, Harry observed. “The coldest day in winter she’ll raise all the windows, get a broom and a dust rag, and just be perfectly blissful while the rest of us freeze,” he wrote. “Whenever the dog and cat see her coming they at once begin hunting means of exit.”

It was all rich land still, some of the most valuable in the state. Harry was satisfied it was the “finest land you’d find anywhere.” To his astonishment, he was taking great interest in “the creation of things that come out of the ground.” He read Cato’s De agri cultura with its advice on planting beans, sowing clover, making compost, curing hams, and the medicinal value of cabbage. He pored through Wallace’s Farmer and, for scientific ideas, reports from the agricultural colleges. In advance of most farmers in the area, the Trumans began rotating crops and some years the results were impressive—from yields of 13 bushels of wheat an acre to 19 bushels. To hold back erosion, Harry dumped bales of spoiled straw into gullies. Once soil had washed over the straw, he sowed timothy seed. It was an idea no one around Grandview had tried before.

Ed Young, the local veterinarian, described Harry as “always bustling around getting things done.” If John Truman was a stickler for doing jobs just so, Harry was, too, the more time passed. Brownie Huber, one of the hired men, recalled that Harry was the only man he ever worked for who had him take all the buckles off the harness before oiling so the oil would get under the buckles.

Harry also had two further attributes, according to Brownie Huber, who was with the Trumans for six years. Harry could “stir up as good a batch of biscuits as any woman” and he could admit a mistake. Thirty years later Huber recalled an incident that occurred one fall when he was plowing for winter wheat:

The ground was terribly hard so I was having to stop every round to let a three-year-old colt rest. Somebody in the family must have mentioned that I was stopping a lot because about the second day Harry came out and said, “Brownie, I’d keep them going pretty steady.” I was on my third round without stopping when the colt suddenly tumbled over. I called Harry and he came running out very much upset. We got the horse unhitched, into the shade and cooled out, after which Harry turned to me and said, “Brownie, from now on use your own judgment.” And those orders were never changed as long as I worked for Harry.

To more than a few people Harry seemed somehow different. One Grandview resident considered him so neat and polite he was sure Harry must be a preacher. Another, a young woman, remembered how easy he was to talk to. “He was so down-to-earth, yet he was something else, too, even then,” she said.

At threshing time, when neighboring farmers came to help the Trumans, as part of the season’s usual exchange of labor, Harry would work through the morning, but then, just before the big midday meal, while the other men were relaxing, he would clean up quickly and go to the kitchen to help his mother and sister. Stephen Slaughter, youngest of the Slaughter children, would remark that he never saw Harry wearing bib overalls like every other farmer, which seemed to distinguish him. “He always looked neat—not dressed up, but he looked neat. No, no, no, he never wore bib overalls.” Stephen’s first glimpse of Harry was on the morning of a threshing day at the Slaughter farm when Stephen was a small boy. Harry had come swinging into the yard driving one of the wagons, only Harry drove standing up and wore a Panama hat.

His circle was enlarging. After three years on the farm, he joined the Masons. Both grandfathers had been Masons and John Truman, though he never joined, said he always meant to. Harry was elected to receive degrees at the Belton Lodge on January 30, 1909. By March, having become “letter perfect” in the ritual, he passed to Master Mason. He greatly enjoyed the fellowship and took the ritual and spiritual teachings of Freemasonry with extreme seriousness. He felt uplifted by brotherhood in an order claiming great antiquity and to which both Mozart and Andrew Jackson had belonged, as had so many presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and his recent successor, William Howard Taft. As every Mason knew, George Washington took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible and laid the cornerstone of the Capitol with a Masonic trowel.

In the autumn of 1909, Harry Truman was appointed a deacon. The following year he organized a new lodge at Grandview, in a room over a store on Main Street. By age twenty-six, he was already a figure of importance in the community. “Harry was a very good lodge man,” recalled Gaylon Babcock, a brother Mason, who happened not to be as impressed as were others by Harry’s abilities as a farmer, or by Harry’s personality. To Babcock, Harry seemed more of a “utility man” around the Truman place. Babcock, further, was bothered by the fact that Harry, a grown man, played the piano and still called his mother “Mamma.” Babcock much preferred Vivian or John Truman. Nonetheless, he thought Harry did “a good job in the lodge work—excellent.”

The man primarily responsible for Harry’s involvement in the Masons was Frank Blair, a clerk in the bank at Belton. “Frank Blair got Harry interested…and Harry was, as a bright fellow, ambitious,” Stephen Slaughter remembered. “And he [Harry] had ideas…I’m sure he had ideas…that he might even go into politics.” Stephen’s father, O. V. Slaughter, was president of the Jackson County Farm Bureau, which Harry also joined.

In December of 1909, shortly after her ninety-first birthday, Grandma Young died. Harry, who had been devoted to her, tried to imagine all she had seen in her life. She had been born in 1818. She had once told him of a time when Solomon was away and a band of Indians came to the door saying they wanted honey and hung about sharpening their knives on the grindstone until she turned a big dog loose and sent them flying. In recent years she liked to sit silently in the sunshine in a rocker smoking a corncob pipe. Her death was the first to touch Harry directly. That Christmas without her, he said, was the saddest he had ever known.

By the will of Harriet Louisa Young the farm went to Matt and Harrison, her five other children sharing none of it on the grounds that they had played no part in the work and should consider the money gifts they received over the years as fair compensation. Not surprisingly a storm broke over the will.

Meantime, Harry delighted in the increasingly frequent visits of Uncle Harrison, who came out from Kansas City full of funny stories and eager to beat Harry in a game of double dummy bridge. Uncle Harrison, as Harry came to appreciate, was a “character,” a huge, talkative, profane, generous-spirited man, a kind of Missouri Falstaff who had a splendid time doing—or talking about doing—most of the things one wasn’t supposed to. Certainly he was not like anyone in Grandview. Six feet tall and extremely stout—Harry estimated he weighed 240 pounds—he wore good three-piece suits, a gold watch chain, and always carried lots of cash. He prized the time he spent loafing, loved vaudeville, gambling, and Kansas City women, and thought it time Harry learned a new dance step called the “Pigeon Wing.” He also drank considerably, and asleep on the couch, he could, as Harry noted, set a record for snoring.

All Trumans, Harry decided, were worriers by nature, but Uncle Harrison said he let others do his worrying for him. Uncle Harry was part of Harry’s education, as they both appreciated.

He was filling out, becoming much stronger physically. The time with his father had also brought an important change. Working together in all seasons, they had grown closer than either ever supposed they might. Indeed, John Truman had come to depend on Harry and to respect his judgment. When a horse pulled a beam over on John in the barn, breaking his leg, Harry took charge and ran things for three months, until April of 1911. Then a calf knocked Harry down and broke his left leg below the knee. The attention and kindness showered on him by both parents through the next weeks took him by surprise. “Papa buys me candy and fruit as if I were a two-year-old,” he wrote, “and Mamma spends half her time making me comfortable and making my favorite pies. You really don’t know how much you’re thought of until you get knocked out. I shall try to keep my head though.”

Later in the year, when Vivian was married to Luella Campbell, the daughter of a nearby farmer, and moved off the homeplace, John made Harry a full partner, as once Solomon Young had done for him. If, in a good year, the farm cleared $4,000, then Harry might make as much as $2,000, or twice what he had earned at the bank. But by the same agreement Harry also assumed equal responsibility for John Truman’s debts, which were substantial.

They had new stationery printed for “J. A. Truman and Son, Farmers.” By the standards of the family’s time-honored way of life, not to say the viewpoint of the surrounding community, Harry Truman had arrived. “To be a good farmer in Missouri—that’s tops. That’s the finest thing you can say about a man,” Vivian would declare emphatically a lifetime later. Harry himself, writing in October 1911, summed up generations of bedrock faith in the old Jeffersonian dream of a nation of farmers:

You know as long as a country is one of that kind, people are more independent and make better citizens. When it is made up of factories and large cities it soon becomes depressed and makes classes among people. Every farmer thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little bit better.

This was in a letter, one of many, designed to inform and influence Bessie Wallace of Independence, who knew nothing of farms or farming. For by now Harry was head over heels in love.

III

“Well, I saw her,” he is said to have exclaimed with a grin to the Noland sisters one summer night in 1910.

Ethel and Nellie Noland, who had both become schoolteachers, were still living in the family house on North Delaware Street. According to Ethel, keeper of family history, Harry had stopped for a visit when someone mentioned a cake plate that should be returned to Mrs. Wallace and Harry volunteered “with something approaching the speed of light.” He crossed the street, went up the walk to the Gates house, up four steps and onto the porch, cranked the bell of the tall, double-leafed front door, then stood waiting. “And Bess came to the door,” remembered Ethel, who must have been watching from her own porch, “and of course nothing could have been a bigger occasion than that, to see her again and talk to her.” He didn’t return for two hours.

From the farm to North Delaware Street was only sixteen miles, but a long ride by horse and buggy—four hours or more round trip—even assuming John Truman would make the horse and buggy available when Harry wished. Nor was going by train much faster or easier. Harry had to walk into Grandview and catch the Frisco to Kansas City, then change to an Independence train. Relatively few trains stopped at Grandview, however, and connections were poor, with long delays even if everything went right. The one other possibility was to hitch a ride by buggy to a point called Dodson on Blue River, where he could take the interurban, the electric streetcar, into Kansas City, then transfer to another streetcar to Independence. Whichever way he chose seemed designed to make life difficult. Yet he made the trip at every opportunity, often spending the night on a couch at the Nolands’. Old friends and relatives in town were greatly impressed by such ardor. To people in Independence, Grandview was “the sticks.”

He was invited to Sunday dinner and sat politely with Bessie and her very formal mother, her brothers, and Grandmother and Grandfather Gates, as a black servant passed dishes. In the parlor afterward he played the piano for them. Bessie also accepted his invitations to concerts and the theater in Kansas City and went with him to meet his former piano teacher, Mrs. White. Harry was sure they would like one another. (“Isn’t she a caution?” he said later of Mrs. White.) Yet Bessie, as others noticed, did not go out to the farm to meet his family.

But it was in letter after letter—hundreds of letters as time passed—that he poured himself out to her, saying what he found he never could in her presence, writing more than he ever had in his life and discovering how much satisfaction there was in writing. He also longed desperately for her to write him, which, as he told her, was the main reason he wrote so often and at such length. Phone calls on a party line were out of the question, with the neighbors listening. He didn’t like the telephone under any circumstances. “I’m always rattled and can never say what I want to,” he explained to her.

What she wrote to him, what tone her correspondence took, can only be imagined, or deduced from what he said in response, since none of her letters from this period has survived.

It was a cheerful, often funny, consistently interesting, extremely alert, straightforward, and irrepressible young man that she came to know in this outpouring of mail from Grandview. And she possessed many of the same qualities. Her vitality and good humor, in particular, had made her quite popular in her own circles. Several young men had found her attractive well before she was rediscovered by Harry Truman. Chrisman Swope, son of one of the wealthiest families in Independence, had come calling frequently. There was a Mr. Young, a Mr. Harris, and a “romance” apparently with a young man named Julian Harvey from Kansas City. As Harry understood from the start, she was used to attention.

He could not spell very well, as he was aware. (“Say, it sure is a grand thing that I have a high school dictionary handy,” he wrote. “I had to look on the back to see how to spell the book itself.”) And clearly he delighted in talking about himself. He was his own favorite subject, yet nearly always with a sense of proportion and a sense of humor. She had never received letters anything like them—and very fortunately she saved them.

It is necessary to sit about half a mile or so from the horses when you drive an old binder [he explained in one] and it’s yell or stand still. My whip is just too short. If I make it longer it grinds up in the machinery and causes a disaster not only to the insides of the binder but to my record in the Book of Justice. It’s cheaper to cuss the team.

“This morning I was helping to dig a grave,” he reported in another letter, attempting to illustrate that farmers “get all kinds of experience in lots of things….”

It is not nearly such a sad proceeding as you’d think. There were six or seven of us, and we’d take turns digging. Those who weren’t digging would sit around and tell lies about the holes they’d dug and the hogs they’d raised. We spent a very pleasant forenoon and then went to the funeral.

They were hardly love letters, no “nonsense or bosh.” He told her about Uncle Harry, about the hired men, and while he bragged occasionally of how hard he worked, he in no way romanticized life on the farm for her benefit. If anything, he went to the other extreme. “I have been to the lot and put about a hundred rings in half as many hogs’ noses. You really haven’t any idea what a soul stirring job it is, especially on a day when the mud is knee deep….” He described being stuck in the eye by a blade of corn, and how his face had burned to the color of raw beef after hauling hay all day.

He had strong opinions and no small share of bigotry, though she never saw it that way, never found his use of expressions like “coon,” “nigger,” “bohunk,” “Dago,” or “Chink” objectionable, or she would have let him know and that would have been the end of it, since as he said, “I’m horribly anxious for you to suffer from an excessively good opinion of me!”

In his way he could also become quite philosophical, a word he didn’t like.

“You know when people can get excited over the ordinary things in life, they live,” he said at one point.

“You’ve no idea how experience teaches sympathy,” he observed in another letter, soon after breaking his leg.

Of his religious convictions, a matter he knew to be of great importance to her mother, he said that while he remembered well their Presbyterian Sunday School days together and though he had since joined the Baptist Church, he was only a reasonably good Baptist as the term was understood in Grandview. “I am by religion like everything else. I think there’s more in acting than in talking.” Bessie had invited him to attend an Episcopal service in Independence. (The Wallaces, too, had abandoned the Presbyterian Church.) It was his first time at an Episcopal service, he told her. He knew nothing of “Lent and such things.” Once, on a Sunday in Kansas City, he confessed, “I made a start for church and landed at the Shubert.”

They exchanged views on writers. Mark Twain was his patron saint in literature, Harry said. The year before, as he did not tell her, he had spent $25 of his own money for a twenty-five-volume set of Twain’s works. She urged him to read the longer novels of Dickens and in a letter written in May 1911, after his accident, he told her that to his surprise he was greatly enjoying David Copperfield:

I have been reading David Copperfield and have really found out that I couldn’t appreciate Dickens before. I have only read Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities. They didn’t make much of an impression on me and I never read anything else. A neighbor sent me Dombey & Son and David C., and I am glad for it has awakened a new interest. It is almost a reconciliation to having my leg broken to contemplate the amount of reading I am going to do this summer. I am getting better fast and I am afraid I’ll get well so soon I won’t get to read enough…. I do think Mr. Micawber is the killingest person I have run across in any book anywhere. He is exactly true to life. I know a half-dozen of him right here in Grandview. They are always waiting for something to turn up….

Then, out of the blue, that June, he proposed to her by mail, mixing affection with a little self-deprecation and caution, fearful she might laugh at him.

You know, were I an Italian or a poet I would commence and use all the luscious language of two continents. I am not either but only a kind of good-for-nothing American farmer. I’ve always had a sneakin’ notion that some day maybe I’d amount to something. I doubt it now though like everything. It is a family failing of ours to be poor financiers. I am blest that way. Still that doesn’t keep me from having always thought that you were all that a girl could be possibly and impossibly. You may not have guessed it but I’ve been crazy about you ever since we went to Sunday school together. But I never had the nerve to think you’d even look at me…. You said you were tired of these kind of stories in books so I am trying one from real life. I guess it sounds funny to you, but you must bear in mind that this is my first experience in this line and also it is very real to me.

Three weeks passed without a word from her. He waited, agonizing, then wrote to ask if he had said anything to offend her. She responded by turning him down, and apparently over the phone. That same day he wrote as follows:

Grandview, Mo.

July 12, 1911

Dear Bessie:

You know that you turned me down so easy that I am almost happy anyway. I never was fool enough to think that a girl like you could ever care for a fellow like me but I couldn’t help telling you how I felt. I have always wanted you to have some fine, rich-looking man, but I know that if ever I got the chance I’d tell you how I felt even if I didn’t even get to say another word to you. What makes me feel good is that you were good enough to answer me seriously and not make fun of me anyway. You know when a fellow tells a girl all his heart and she makes a joke of it I suppose it would be the awfullest feeling in the world. You see I never had any desire to say such things to anyone else. All my girlfriends think I am a cheerful idiot and a confirmed old bach. They really don’t know the reason nor ever will. I have been so afraid you were not even going to let me be your good friend. To be even in that class is something.

You may think I’ll get over it as all boys do. I guess I am something of a freak myself. I really never had any desire to make love to a girl just for the fun of it, and you have always been the reason. I have never met a girl in my life that you were not the first to be compared with her, to see wherein she was lacking and she always was.

Please don’t think I am talking nonsense or bosh, for if ever I told the truth I am telling it now and I’ll never tell such things to anyone else or bother you with them again. I have always been more idealist than practical anyway, so I really never expected any reward for loving you. I shall always hope though….

Then, promising to put on no hangdog airs when next he saw her, he changed the subject. Did she know of any way to make it rain?

They exchanged photographs and Harry had a standing invitation to Sunday dinner at the Gates house. Week after week, with no success, he tried to get her to come to Grandview. In August, he announced he was building a grass tennis court for her on a level place near the house. She could bring her friends, make a day of it. At Montgomery Ward in Kansas City he bought a heavy roller. Since neither he nor anyone else on the farm, or anyone in Grandview, played tennis or knew the requirements for a court, he had her send directions. He hoped to have everything ready by Labor Day. Mamma would cook a chicken dinner, he promised. “Not town dinner but midday meal, see? So be sure and come…. Now be sure and come out on Labor Day.”

In the flurry of excitement, seeing how intent on success he was, Matt decided to have several rooms papered. With only three days to go, Harry sent Bessie a map with directions. The Sunday before Labor Day he worked the day through on the court and by nightfall had everything ready, including a supply of watermelons.

But she didn’t come. She sent word it was raining in Independence. He wrote at once of his “disappointment” and asked if she could make it another time, adding that Mamma would still like her to come for dinner and that the weather in Grandview on Labor Day had been fine. When she did at last appear, for an impromptu visit some weeks later, the court was found to be insufficiently level for a proper game.

Yet, he would not be discouraged. He kept at courtship as he had kept to his piano lessons, with cheerful, willing determination. He told her of his progress in the Masons, he sent her books, commented on stories in his favorite magazines, Everybody’s, Life, and Adventure. “I was reading Plato’s Republic this morning,” he also informed her at one point, “and Socrates was discoursing on the ideal Republic…. You see, I sometimes read something besides Adventure.”

He knew he had a gift for conversation. He had found he could get most anything he wanted if he could only talk to people. The letters were his way to talk to her as he never could face to face.

That he particularly liked cake, pie, Mozart, Chopin, and Verdi became clear. She learned also how much there was he did not like: dentists, guns, snobs, hypocrisy in any form, prizefighters, divorce, the Kansas City Star (for its Republican bias), lawyers (now that his grandmother’s will was being contested), and Richard Wagner, who he thought must have been “in cahoots with Pluto.” He regretted much about his looks. He wrote of his “girl mouth” and the fact that he blushed like a girl. He confessed to such other ladylike traits as yelling when he had a tooth pulled and an “inordinate desire to look nice” when having his picture taken. Coming home alone in the dark, he could get “scared to an icicle,” he told her. He was afraid of getting knocked on the head by the hoboes who hung about at the point where he changed trains at Kansas City, fearful of both ghosts and hoboes as he made his way home on foot from the Grandview depot on nights when there was no moon.

Once approaching the house in the pitch dark, groping his way to the kitchen door, he walked headlong into the pump. The next day, he painted the pump white.

One man was as good as another, he thought, “so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” His Uncle Will Young, the Confederate veteran, had a theory that “the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.” Apparently Harry thought this would amuse her. “He does hate Chinks and Japs. So do I,” he continued. “It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

But on an evening when Mary Jane was practicing a Mozart sonata at the piano, he wrote, “Did you ever sit and listen to an orchestra play a fine overture, and imagine that things were as they ought to be and not as they are? Music that I can understand always makes me feel that way.” Had Bessie been the girl in a stage musical of the kind he took her to see, she would have accepted him then and there.

The fact that he had no money and that he craved money came up repeatedly, more often and more obviously than probably he realized. In Grandview circles, financial wealth was something people seldom talked about or judged one another by. “We never rated a person by the amount of money he had,” remembered Stephen Slaughter. “Always, first and foremost, it was his character, his integrity.” No family, not even the Slaughters, had large bank accounts or costly possessions. Everybody, including the Slaughters, had debts. But Harry wanted more than what sufficed for Grandview; or, in any event, he clearly wanted Bessie Wallace to think he aimed higher.

He told her of his longing for an automobile. “Just imagine how often I’d burn the pike from here to Independence.” He saw a $75 overcoat in Kansas City that he wanted. If ever he were rich, he too would live in Independence. Writing one cold night before Christmas 1911, he told her also of the secret burden he carried with his father, the “hat-full of debts,” asking only that she keep this to herself since no one knew. Later, he said he had two reasons for wanting to be rich. The first was to pay his debts and build his mother a fine house. The second was to win her.

If only she cared a little, he would double his efforts “to amount to something.” Bessie replied saying that she and Mary Paxton had concluded that a woman should think seriously only of a man who could support her in style. Harry said he would take this as a sign of encouragement, whether she meant it that way or not.

He wanted so to live up to expectations, and his own most of all, but he didn’t know what to do with his life, what in the world to be. Like David Copperfield, he longed to know if he would turn out to be the hero of his own story.

He was pleased to learn that her mother admired his piano playing. (Mrs. Wallace herself was considered an accomplished pianist. In her youth she had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory.) “I really thought once I’d be an ivory tickler but I am glad my money ran out before I got too far,” Harry told Bess honestly. He had dropped out of the National Guard. Military life, too, had lost its pull: “I am like Mark Twain. He says that if fame is to be obtained only by marching to the cannon’s mouth, he’s perfectly willing to go there provided the cannon is empty….”

He had been offered a job running a small bank in the southern part of the county, but from what he had seen of bankers he had little heart for it. “You know a man has to be real stingy and save every one-cent stamp he can. Then sometimes he has to take advantage of adverse conditions and sell a good man out. That is one reason I like being a farmer. Even if you do have to work like a coon you know that you are not grinding the life out of someone else to live yourself.”

He admitted he was thinking about politics. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be like a Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday.” Mostly, he was restless.

With two other men from Grandview he went by train to South Dakota to take part in an Indian land lottery. At stations along the way people on the returning trains had shouted at them, “Sucker! Sucker!” Nothing came of the trip, or of another after it, to look at land in New Mexico, though he traveled some “mighty pretty country.” Approaching Santa Fe by train, up the valley of the Rio Grande, he saw a rainbow that held in the sky ahead for mile after mile. “I wanted to get off,” he wrote to her, “and chase the end of it down, thinking perhaps it really might be on a gold mine out here.”

She had lately told him Bessie was a name she no longer cared for. So his letters now began “Dear Bess,” though they closed as always, “Sincerely, Harry,” or sometimes, “Most sincerely, Harry.”

IV

The years Harry Truman spent on the farm were to be known as the golden age of American agriculture, with farm prices climbing steadily. If ever there was a time to have been a farmer, this was it. Wheat, corn, hay, everything was going higher—wheat was up to 90 cents a bushel in 1912—and for Harry and his father it meant continuously harder, longer days. Once in the summer of 1912 they spent twelve hours loading nearly three hundred bales of hay into a railroad car. It was the hottest work Harry had ever done. By sundown he was ready to collapse. But that night, seeing lightning on the horizon, his father insisted they go back out again and cover the hay that had still to be baled. They worked on in the dark, Harry handing 14-foot boards up to his father, who placed them on the top of the haystack—thirty-two 14-foot boards by Harry’s count.

John Truman bought more cows, more than doubling their herd, from thirty to eighty-two. “I have been working like Sam Hill this morning sowing wheat,” Harry informed Bess in a letter written in September 1913. “Papa has a fit every time I heave a one-hundred-pound sack of wheat…. Get to lay off the wheat this afternoon and pitch hay while they thresh.” That year they had enough hay for six hundred bales, and his father talked of a wheat crop for the next year of four hundred acres, enough, if all went well, to put them “out of the woods.” At night in the parlor, as Harry sat writing to Bess, his father would fall asleep in his chair.

It was a killing schedule Harry was keeping, with his work, his travels to Independence and Kansas City, his Lodge nights and letter writing. Though few sons were ever so dutiful, John accused him of losing interest in the farm and many mornings had trouble waking him. Once, when Harry missed his train and arrived home extremely late, he found his father still up and in a “terrible stew,” certain that something awful had happened to him. “He was sure I had been knocked on the head or fallen in the creek. When I told him I’d missed the car he had another fit….”

But Harry’s main concern was his father, who, he was sure, was working too hard. When he learned that John, through friends at the Independence Courthouse, was going after the job of road overseer for the southern half of Washington Township, which included Grandview, Harry had immediate misgivings. The upkeep and repair of country roads was a task performed by local men with their own teams of horses, either for hire or as a way to work off a six-dollar school tax. The work was never-ending and the job of overseer, an appointed political post, was one that paid two dollars a day and that almost nobody wanted. It was his father’s incurable love of politics that made him go after the job, Harry told Bess. “Politics is all he ever advises me to neglect the farm for.” If Harry could have his way, his father would have no part of it.

When John Truman got the job of overseer, others in Grandview took it as a sign that the Trumans were “strapped” and needed the money. John was considered a good man and a good neighbor. As Stephen Slaughter would recall, “I don’t think we would have traded him for anybody.” But by contrast to the Slaughters, the Trumans always seemed hardpressed financially. The Slaughter farm was not as large as the Truman farm, their land no better than the Truman land, yet the Slaughters prospered. O. V. Slaughter sent all eight of his children to college. “I never understood,” said Stephen years later. “They raised crops on that farm. We raised crops. They were always broke. We weren’t broke.”

Nonetheless, the improved quality of work on the roads under John Truman’s supervision was soon apparent. And with his father determined to keep the roads, no less than the farm, in prime condition, Harry thought he’d best help with the roads too. But should his father, on the strength of this job, decide to run for any other political office, Harry told Bess, then he, Harry, would go out and make speeches against him.

The truth was, Harry went on, warming to his subject, he was torn by his own yearnings. He wanted money, yet he knew it to be a less than satisfactory measure of success, let alone personal value. He saw the seductions and the pitfalls of politics. He knew it to be a dirty business and he scorned the kind of posturing it produced in some men. Yet the fascination remained. It was a remarkable letter:

Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man. Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well. Still, if I were real rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos. Success seems to me to be merely a point of view anyway. Some men have an idea that if they corner all the loose change they are self-made successful men. Makes no difference to them if they do eat beans off a knife or not know whether Napoleon was a man or a piece of silver.

Some others have a notion that if they can get high offices and hold up themselves as models of virtue to a gaping public in long-winded, high-sounding speeches that they have reached the highest pinnacle of success. It seems to me that the ability to hand out self-praise makes most men successes in their own minds anyway. Some of the world’s greatest failures are really greater than some of the other kind. To succeed financially a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egoist or a fool or a ward boss tool. To my notion, an ideal condition would be to have to work just enough so if you stopped you’d not go busted at once—but still you’d know if you didn’t work you couldn’t live. And then have your home and friends and pleasures regulated to your income, say a thousand a month. I am sure I’d be satisfied then to let vile ambition, political or monetary, starve at the gate.

When the newspaper in Belton called John Truman one of the “henchmen” of the Jackson County Court, John took off for Belton to “whip” the editor, but failed to find him, which Harry thought much for the best. “I told him that was a very mild remark and should be accepted as a compliment to a man who has a political job.” It was the first sign of John’s old temper in years and privately Harry appears to have been pleased.

He himself was known as the “mild-tempered” Truman. Through the furor over Grandma Young’s will, in the crossfire of charges and countercharges in court and out, Harry alone of the family seemed able to get along with everyone. He was the one person they could all talk to, the family peacemaker.

In September 1913 he made another try in an Indian land lottery, traveling this time farther from home than ever before, nearly to the Canadian border in northeastern Montana, in the company of a half-dozen other Grandview men, including his father. Harry loved these trips, but this one most of all. On a postcard to Ethel Noland mailed from Minneapolis, he said he was “feeling as good as an angel full of pie.”

Then, at long last, on a Sunday in November 1913, as Harry sat speechless, Bess said that if ever she married anyone it would be him. She wrote a letter to confirm the promise. They agreed they were secretly engaged. Harry was beside himself, “all puffed up and hilarious and happy.” She had made a confirmed optimist of him, he said. She called him an enigma. He said that sounded fine to him and especially coming from her, “for I always labored under the impression that it took smart people to be one.”

On a date in Kansas City, he took her to see Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starring in a new show, The Girl from Utah, and held her hand as the handsome dark-haired leading man sang the show’s biggest hit, a song by Jerome Kern, “They’ll Never Believe Me.”

And when I tell them, and I’m certainly going to tell them,

That I’m the man whose wife one day you’ll be,

They’ll never believe me, they’ll never believe me,

That from this great big world you’ve chosen me.

There were no bounds now to his horizons. “How does it feel to be engaged to a clodhopper who has ambitions to be Governor of Montana and Chief Executive of the U.S.?” he inquired, the expansive aspirations intended as humor only. To his surprise, she wrote at once to say how much she cared for him. “I know your last letter word for word and then I read it some forty times a day,” he said. “Oh please send me another like it.” He thought perhaps he should put it in a safe deposit vault to keep from wearing it out.

You really didn’t know I had so much softness and sentimentality in me, did you? I’m full of it. But I’d die if I had to talk it. I can tell you on paper how much I love you and what one grand woman I think you, but to tell it to you I can’t. I’m always afraid I’d do it so clumsily you’d laugh…. I could die happy doing something for you. (Just imagine a guy with spectacles and a girl mouth doing the Sir Lancelot.) Since I can’t rescue you from any monster or carry you from a burning building or save you from a sinking ship—simply because I’d be afraid of the monsters, couldn’t carry you, and can’t swim—I’ll have to go to work and make money enough to pay my debts and then get you to take me for what I am: just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right. You’ll not have any trouble getting along with me for I’m awful good…. Do you suppose your mother’ll care for me well enough to have me in her family?

This last point was a large question indeed, for Madge Wallace remained, as would be said, a virtual “prisoner of shame” over her husband’s suicide and clung to Bess as a figure of strength greater than her own. She needed Bess quite as much as John Truman needed Harry. As the only daughter of an important family, Bess would have been a guarded “prize” even under normal circumstances. The prospects for a debt-ridden, farm-boy suitor would have been extremely remote, however persistent or well mannered he might be.

“Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry,” remembered one of the Noland family, all of whom were strongly on Harry’s side. “And she says, ‘You don’t want to marry that farmer boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’ And so she didn’t push it at all. She kind of tried to prevent it….”

Every call Harry made at 219 North Delaware Street could only have been a reminder of what distances remained between his world and hers. The etched glass in the front door, the plum-colored Brussels carpets, the good china and heavy lace curtains at the long parlor windows, the accepted use of silver dessert forks, the absence of any sign that survival meant hard physical labor day in, day out, the whole air of privacy, of unruffled comfort and stability, reflected a way of life totally apart from anything in his experience. (“We have moved around quite a bit and always the best people are hardest to know,” he once told Bess defensively.) Had he only to overcome the obvious differences in their station, he would have had an uphill haul, as he would have said. But the problem was greatly compounded by how Madge Wallace felt toward anyone or any cause that threatened to take Bess from her.

“Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think Harry was good enough for Bess,” a member of the Wallace circle would comment with a smile sixty years afterward, her memory of it all quite clear. “But then, don’t you see, Mrs. Wallace didn’t think any man was good enough for Bess.”

In March 1914 his own mother suddenly took ill. The local doctor called in a specialist who decided that an operation for hernia must be performed and at once, there in the house. Harry had to stand beside her bed and hold a kerosene lamp while the doctor worked and “parts” were removed from his mother. It was, Harry said afterward, an experience he hoped he would never have to repeat.

Apologetically he told Bess he would be unable to leave home for several days. Mamma, as he had once written, was a person for whom there was no substitute. “I hope she lives to be a hundred and one.”

How direct a connection there was between his steadfast performance during the operation and afterward and the event that followed is not certain. But it was only a few weeks later when Mamma gave him the money to buy an automobile. And it was to be no farmer’s Model T Ford. If anyone had ever rewarded a son with one grand generous gesture, she had. Nothing could have pleased him more or made such an immediate difference in his life. He had never had anything of his own of such value or that drew such attention. He was to love automobiles all his life, but this was the automobile of his life.

It was a big, black, five-passenger 1911-model Stafford, hand-built in Kansas City by a man named Terry Stafford. Only three hundred of the cars were ever made. It had a four-cylinder engine, right-hand drive, a high brass-framed windshield, and Presto-Lite lamps nearly the size of the lamps on locomotives. On a good road, Harry soon demonstrated, it could do 60 miles an hour. It was a rich man’s car. New, it sold for $2,350. Harry paid $650. The house needed paint; payments on loans and the cost of the lawsuit over his grandmother’s will had stretched the family’s finances to the limit. From all practical viewpoints such an automobile was a huge extravagance—$650 would have been more than enough to pay for two hired men for a year—but to Harry $650 for such an automobile was a “bargain.” While not the first in Grandview, it was certainly the fanciest. In Independence, not even George Porterfield Gates had anything like it. With a little work on the engine, Harry found, he could go up Dodson Hill—considered the great test locally—so fast he had to shut off the power before reaching the crest.

He could come and go as he pleased now, and mostly it was go, on Blue Ridge Boulevard to Independence. Rolling through the shaded streets of Independence on a spring Sunday, wearing a sporty new cap, a fresh white shirt and proper Sunday necktie, the top down on the car, its brass all polished, he would never be taken for a hayseed. Bess and three or four others would pile into the “machine,” off with him for an afternoon of fishing on Blue River or a picnic at the waterworks beside the Missouri at Sugar Creek. Or Harry would treat them to “a spin” in the country.

He had a gang again, as he had not since boyhood. Besides Bess and the Noland sisters, there were Bess’s two brothers Frank and George and their best girls, Natalie Ott and May Southern. Harry and his car were the center of attention. They would all pose for pictures with the car, Harry at the wheel. Harry was always good company, said May Southern, who would soon marry Bess’s brother George. Harry, she said a lifetime later, never complained about anything unless there were onions in the potato salad. “Harry didn’t like onions.”

Uncle Harrison also enjoyed “a spin” with the top down, in any weather. One expedition for his benefit was to Monegaw Springs, an old Missouri spa about eighty miles from Grandview. Mamma, too, had insisted on going along for the ride in Lizzie, as Harry was calling the car by this time.

I started for Monegaw Springs on Sunday [he began a memorable account for Bess]. Mamma went along and we almost reached the springs without an accident. We got within a half mile of them and ran over a stump. I spilled Uncle Harry over the front seat and threw Mamma over my own head. Neither of them were hurt, except Uncle Harry renewed his profane vocabulary. I backed Lizzie off the stump and ran her into town with a badly bent axle. Mamma and I started for home at 6:00 A.M. on Monday. Got within seventy-five miles of it and it began to rain. Had the nicest slipping time you ever saw. What with a crooked axle and a bent steering wheel I could hardly stay in the road. Five miles south of Harrisonville Lizzie took a header for the ditch and got there, smashing a left front wheel into kindling. I phoned to Ferson and he sent me his front wheel. The accident happened within a half mile of a R.R. station, Lone Tree by name. Mamma and I sat there from 1:30 till 8:00 P.M. waiting for the wheel. It arrived all right and I couldn’t get it on. Then it began to rain in real earnest. I got soaked. A good farmer came and took us up to his house and we stayed all night. Next morning he hitched his team to Lizzie and pulled her out of the ditch. (I had tried to put the wheel on wrong end to, the night before.) He would not have a cent for keeping me nor pulling the car out. We started for Harrisonville and got about five miles north of there when we ran through a puddle and got the mag wet. Had to phone back to Harrisonville and get a man to come and tear it up—cost a five-dollar bill. Another good farmer took us to dinner free. Finally got to Grandview at 3:00 P.M.…

Mary Jane had spoken up, saying she wanted driving lessons—“I guess I’ll have to do it, though,” said Harry reluctantly, “since Mamma paid for the thing.” When Mary Jane crashed into the front gate, Harry was thankful it was only the gate she hit and not the stone post.

In three months he drove 5,000 miles. Not since his first pair of eyeglasses had anything so changed his life, and again it was Mamma who made it happen. Her decision was also, of course, a way of telling him she approved of his reason for wishing to be on the road. If Bess Wallace was what he wanted, she would do what she could to see nothing stood in the way.

In time, Papa, too, declared himself “well pleased” with the purchase and by midsummer would “raise a rumpus” for Harry to drive him out to survey the roads. “Imagine working the roads in a machine,” Harry wrote.

But by midsummer 1914, the summer the Great War began in Europe, it had become apparent that something was seriously the matter with John Truman. He had strained himself sometime earlier, exactly as he had so often warned Harry not to. Trying to move a boulder from one of the roads, the hard, stubborn little man had refused to give up and so had been done in by a stone in the path, like some figure in a parable.

Though the pain persisted, he refused to see the specialists, as Matt had, fearing an operation. By Labor Day an X-ray revealed that a severe hernia was causing an intestinal block. John was told he had to decide between surgery or the grave. He had already lost a great deal of weight and looked dreadful.

“If anyone asks him how he’s feeling,” wrote Harry, “he always says fine, even if he can’t raise up his head.” Fearing the worst, Harry urged the operation as the only choice left.

The automobile now became the means for getting his father to and from the doctor in Kansas City, who was a Chinese, the supposed family hatred of Orientals notwithstanding. Harry worried continually. He didn’t see how he could ever get by without his father, he confessed to Bess. “You know he is sixty-three and an operation at that age is nearly always fatal.”

Harry ran the farm, took over the road work, and drove John to the doctor as often as four times a week. He wondered if the fates were conspiring against him, he told Bess, but her “good letters” helped “put that backbone into me to accomplish what I’ve set out to do in spite of the devil and all his angels.” Some evenings his father could hardly talk and Mamma, as she had never done before, asked Harry to forgo the trips to Independence. Meantime, it was essential that Harry “make things hum” and get in 200 acres of wheat.

The operation on John Truman was performed at the Swedish Hospital in Kansas City in October. Bess sent flowers, which greatly pleased Harry and his father, who refused to let the nurse throw them away until they were entirely gone. John returned home, but Harry knew he could not last long. Word of his condition spread and neighbors began to call.

“I remember the Sunday afternoon Father and Mother drove over to the Truman home to visit him,” wrote Stephen Slaughter. “It was known at the time that Mr. Truman had only a short time to live. And I remember the sadness Father and Mother felt after the visit.” Full of despair, John had said he was a failure in life. “Father had given him what comfort he could,” Stephen remembered. John was told what a good neighbor he had been. He was reminded of the friends he had made, the useful work he had done, the fine family he had raised. Undoubtedly Harry was present as his father talked of his failure, for by this time Harry was rarely away from his father’s side.

John Truman died the morning of Monday, November 2, 1914.

“I was with him,” Harry said years later. “I had been sitting with him and watching a long time. I nodded off. When I woke up he was dead.”

Brownie Huber, the hired man, who was also at the house, recalled: “Harry and I often got up real early and very quietly so as not to awaken his mother and sister. He would make biscuits, cook oatmeal and fry eggs. That is the way it was the morning his father died. I was eating breakfast while Harry went in to stay with the old gentleman, when he appeared at the door and said, ‘Dad just passed away.’ ”

The day of the funeral, schools were closed in Grandview. Friends came to the service at the house from everywhere in the county. Their buggies and horses and Model T’s were drawn up all along the drive beneath the bare trees. A headline in the Independence Examiner reported the loss of “An Upright Citizen Whose Death Will Be a Blow to His Community.” Burial was at the old Forest Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, at the brow of a slope beside the graves of Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young.

To Bess, Harry wrote: “I have quite a job on my hands now…. You know, I’ve been in the habit of running the farm for some time, but Papa always made it go.”

V

If it was sure-enough war, wheat would go higher still, farmers had been saying all summer. And then it had come, in the first week of August, when sixty thousand German troops crossed into Belgium at Liège. The papers were filled with war news and as Willa Gather would write, even to “quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster….” By September the German armies had swept through Belgium and into France as far as the Marne River, where the French were making a heroic stand.

To Harry, with his sense of history, his fascination with military heroes, his previous part in the National Guard, all this, presumably, should have been of greatest interest. But the letters he wrote said nothing of the war. Even after his worries and grief over his father had passed, the subject of the world at large received no mention. To judge by what he was writing to Bess Wallace, little beyond his own immediate life ever drew his attention or thoughts from the time he first began corresponding with her in 1910. The only exception was the presidential contest of 1912 that elected Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland, and to Harry, a great man. If he was at all concerned about what was happening in France, or perceived any connection between the war headlines in the papers and his own fate, he gave no sign of it except once, two years later, when he told Bess he had had a dream. He had fallen from a plane over France and wound up in a hospital crying because he couldn’t see her.

As it was, he had plenty to think about. He felt the responsibility of the farm keenly and “gave it everything he had,” as his sister later said. “I almost got done planting corn this evening…. I was in the field at six o’clock and quit at seven. Nearly a day’s work,” he informed Bess in April 1915. “…I’ve simply got to make things come across this year if I have to work night and day.” He worried about the weather. He worried about his debts. He worried that the men would never work for him as they had for his father.

He kept on as road overseer for another six months, until a rival faction took over at the Independence Courthouse and he was out. From February to August he also served as postmaster in Grandview, though in name only, since he left the work to an assistant, a widow, who he thought needed the money more than he did.

He was up with the sun every morning, still, even with Papa gone. Early morning was the best time for “solid thinking,” he liked to say. He was thirty years old. He had been on the farm eight years, or more than a quarter of his life. He had lost none of his devotion to the family, or his determination to win Bess Wallace, or his good humor. (She must send him another picture of herself soon, he said, so he could have one downstairs as well as up. “It’s right unhandy to chase upstairs every day to see how you look.”) Yet his restlessness was greater than ever. He hated his “slow progress” at home, even with the rise in farm prices. He had reached a point, in fact, where he might have gone off in any of several directions with his life, given the opportunity.

With Uncle Harry in tow, he traveled to Texas hoping to entice him into some land speculation. The trip, like his earlier ones, came to nothing. Involved next in a zinc mine in Oklahoma, he told Bess, “There’s no one wants to win half so badly as I do.” He pictured the two of them in an ideal country house and the thought made the delays nearly unbearable. “Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of paint and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.”

When the suit over his grandmother’s will was settled at last, after six years, his mother wound up no better off than before. She won the case and kept the farm, but what money came of it was consumed in lawyers’ fees. Even before John Truman’s death she had been forced to put another mortgage on the land. To pay off doctors’ bills and funeral expenses, Harry had to sell some Black Angus cattle he had only recently acquired. Now, along with Uncle Harry, his mother was advancing him money for his zinc-mine venture, which infuriated Vivian, who thought Harry had already been given quite enough and would be better off paying attention to the farm.

Vivian proved correct. The zinc mine was Harry’s first big experience with failure of his own doing.

The mine was located at a point called Commerce in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, just over the Missouri line, and 192 miles from Grandview. If the weather was right, the roads passable, and provided he had no blowouts and succeeded in fording four river bottoms, he could make it in the Stafford, he claimed, in seven hours. More often he took the train.

“This place down here is certainly one beyond the limit,” he wrote from Commerce early in 1916. “When it rains there is water six inches deep over everything. When it’s dry the dust is as deep over everything.” He was homesick, lonesome, yet expecting to be “on velvet” before long. Someday, he vowed, he would have a Pierce Arrow.

“I don’t suppose I’d ever have been real pleased if I hadn’t tried just once to get rich quickly,” he would tell Bess before it was over.

He had put up several thousand dollars to go into partnership with two brother Masons, Thomas Hughes, a Grandview farmer, and a Kansas City promoter named Jerry Culbertson, neither of whom knew any more about mining than he did. They called themselves the T-H-C Mining Company and bought what was known as the Eureka Mine at Commerce, hoping to cover their start-up expenses with the waste ore that had been left lying about above ground by the previous owner. Their troubles began almost immediately. The superintendent they hired turned out to be a crook. A rival group shut off the water needed for processing the ore. Equipment failed. Meantime, Harry kept shunting back and forth to Grandview, often twice a week, trying to hold things together at both ends.

Jerry Culbertson had no interest in the day-to-day operations of the mine, and when lightning struck Tom Hughes’s barn at Grandview, burning it to the ground, Hughes refused to give any more of his time, leaving the job to Harry, whose outlook swung from “blue-sky” confidence to abject gloom and back again. It was proving a liberal and expensive education, he observed during one of his high points. Of necessity he became a mechanic, mine superintendent, night watchman, and, above all, “official straightener” of mix-ups. He had never worked so hard or worried so much. And he refused to give up. “I can’t possibly lose forever,” he wrote plaintively to Bess. He had put Mary Jane in charge at home, but the hired men resented taking orders from a woman. When two of them quit, Harry had to catch the next train.

He saw his money vanishing. On May 19, 1916, feeling unusually sorry for himself after a trying day at Grandview, he wrote Bess a letter of a kind she had not seen before. He had begun to think his knack for failure was hereditary:

The mine has gone by the board. I have lost out on it entirely. If Uncle Harry had not been sick I should have gone down there Tuesday evening. It is a setback from which I don’t suppose I shall very soon recover. If I don’t lose all the livestock I have, it will only be because I shall turn it over to Mamma. I shall join the class who can’t sign checks of their own I suppose. It is a hard nut to crack but it had to be done. There was never one of our name who had sense enough to make money. I am no exception.

I shall endeavor to make the farm go as usual but I’ll have to stay on it. My finances are completely exhausted…. You would do better perhaps if you pitch me into the ash heap and pick someone with more sense and ability and not such a soft head.

Then, after a good night’s sleep, his first in a long while, he assured her he was as hopeful as ever. He could “continue business as Harry Truman yet.” Frank Blair at the Belton Bank had come to the rescue with a loan, after telling Harry what a mistake he had made ever getting involved with Culbertson. How would Bess like coming in as a partner and help run the mine, Harry wanted to know.

“It’s about 110 degrees in the shade all the time down here,” he wrote from Commerce in July. “We also have a very active brand of mosquitoes. They work all night every night. The flies work in daytime.” It was the summer of the battles of Verdun and the Somme.

“Wish heavy for me to win,” he told her. “Keep wishing me luck because it means everything to me,” he urged again in August.

He wanted to buy an engagement ring but felt he must hold off because buying it with borrowed money would be bad luck. His luck, their luck, the will of the Fates, were all uppermost in his mind. He talked of opening a Ford agency in Commerce, certain now that that was the path to fortune.

The zinc mine closed that September of 1916. By November Harry was in the business of buying and selling oil leases, out of an office in Kansas City. Again he had gone in with Jerry Culbertson, despite Frank Blair’s warning, despite what he must have known himself from the experience at Commerce. But he was after the main chance now, as much as ever John Truman had been. The third partner in this new venture, David Morgan, later said it was actually the gamble of the business—the “hazard”—that appealed to Harry. Morgan, an Oklahoma lawyer and oil man, also knew what he was doing, as Harry appreciated.

Harry put in $5,000—five notes for $1,000 due in ten months, these, according to the contract, to be “signed also by Martha E. Truman, the mother of said Harry S. Truman.” She urged him to keep her father in mind, rather than his father. Grandpa Young, she said, had been wiped out three times that she knew of, but he “came up every time with something else.” Grandpa Young, the family success, the strong, self-made man who had never given up trying, was the example to take heart from.

Morgan was the president of what became the Morgan Oil & Refining Company. Culbertson handled sales and promotion. Harry was treasurer and so listed on the firm’s new stationery. However, a bookkeeper named Brelsford later said Harry’s real specialty was seeing people. “Truman was surrounded by people, people, people. Salesmen, lease men, lease owners, scouts, and what-have-you. Morgan had his duties, but he shoved quite a burden of seeing people over to Mr. Truman.”

Though he appears to have made no sales himself, Harry had become a boomer. “If this venture blows, I’ll know I’m hoodooed,” he told Bess, who was among those who bought stock.

If Harry had no premonitions about American involvement in the European war, Culbertson was banking on it. “In the event this country is unfortunately brought to war,” said a newspaper advertisement written by Culbertson, “the absolute necessity of gasoline and other byproducts of crude petroleum are bound to come to such urgent demand that the price will soar beyond all expectations….”

Morgan was convinced that fortunes were waiting beneath the farmlands of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The company leased thousands of acres in all three states and in Louisiana as well. But then in April 1917 Woodrow Wilson was calling on Congress for a declaration of war and the war, rather than bringing a bonanza to Morgan Oil & Refining, eventually finished it off. There was no manpower to pursue oil, investors disappeared, the company went out of business. Only later was it discovered that one of their leases in southeastern Kansas was part of the famous Teeter Pool, a supply of oil that would have made millions for the company and its officers had they just drilled deeper.

Bess, like other investors in the venture, lost all she had put in, while Harry seems to have come out even. How much he lost altogether in the zinc mine is unclear. He said $11,000 at the time, but later gave a figure of $7,500. Either way it was a lot of money and all of it borrowed money. If his part in his father’s debts was $12,000—the figure he once confided to Bess—then possibly his total indebtedness by this time was $23,000. Perhaps not coincidentally, Matt put another mortgage of $25,000 on the farm in 1917.

Yet as bad as Harry felt about all this—and he could get extremely blue—the farm, mortgages and all, meant security as almost nothing else could have. Good years brought a clear income of maybe $4,000, at a time when the average working family earned less than $1,000. Exceptional years might mean $7,000, and apparently the Trumans had a few such years.

Further, the farm now belonged solely to the Trumans. The previous summer of 1916, Uncle Harrison had died, leaving all of his part to Matt and her children. In plain monetary terms they were sitting on a fortune. The price of wheat in 1916 hit a new high of $1.65 a bushel. Good land in Jackson County by 1917 was selling for $200 an acre. At the least the farm was worth $100,000, but it might have sold for twice that. Matt had no intention of selling any of it. Still, there it was if troubles came, and it was in prime shape still, since, as their neighbors so often said, the Trumans were good farmers.

Ethel Noland, who understood Harry as well as anyone, said she knew all along he was never meant for a farmer. And clearly he knew it, too. Yet he had held on for ten years, doing his share and more. He had also discovered in Commerce, Oklahoma, that between farming and zinc mining, he would take farming.

Much later he would remember the years on the farm as invaluable experience. He would talk of the drudgery, and he would call it the best time he ever had in his life. A farm gave a person time alone to himself, which he liked and needed, for all his enjoyment and need of people. “Riding one of these plows all day, day after day, gives one time to think,” he would say, reminiscing long afterward. “I’ve settled all the ills of mankind in one way or other while riding along….”

As would be said later in newspaper articles, he never lost the farm habits of early rising and hard work. His mother would say the farm was where Harry got his common sense. “It takes pride to run a farm same as anything else,” he would tell her, sounding very like his father.

4
Soldier

It is the great adventure, and I am in it.

—CAPTAIN HARRY TRUMAN, AEF

I

The war in Europe that changed the world in such drastic fashion need hardly have concerned Harry Truman of Grandview, Missouri, much beyond what he might have read in the Kansas City papers or some of his favorite magazines. Had he chosen, he could have played no part in it, and nobody would have expected him to have done otherwise. He turned thirty-three the spring of 1917, which was two years beyond the age limit set by the new Selective Service Act. He had been out of the National Guard for nearly six years. His eyes were far below the standard requirements for any of the armed services. And he was the sole supporter of his mother and sister. As a farmer, furthermore, he was supposed to remain on the farm, as a patriotic duty. Upon the farmers of the country, said President Woodrow Wilson, rested the fate of the war and thus the fate of the nation and the world.

So Harry might have stayed where he was for any of several reasons. That he chose to go, almost from the moment of Wilson’s call to Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917, was his own doing entirely and the turning point in his life. He left the responsibility for the farm and care of his mother to his sister Mary Jane, who, later, would say simply and dutifully, “We got through,” but whose own life as a consequence was not to be the same.

She had grown into an attractive young woman with a bright smile and even disposition. Some people thought her the best looking and, overall, the most appealing of the Trumans. In a studio photograph made for Harry to take with him to war, she posed in a big picture hat with an expression that seemed to combine both strength and gentleness. She was twenty-eight the summer he left for Camp Doniphan. She was still unmarried and without serious prospects for marriage, but popular. From that point on, she was to have little life of her own or any society much beyond Grandview. The worries and responsibilities that had weighed so heavily on Harry since their father’s death were all now hers, and she would be more alone than ever he had been, a point he seems to have felt deeply after a time. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he conceded years afterward. His idealism and “overzealous conduct” got him “into things” before he had a chance to realize what the consequences might be to others. Mary Jane, who adored him, also thought he had grown a bit self-preoccupied and conceited.

Bess Wallace’s response to his decision was to say they should be married at once. Harry, almost unimaginably, said no. She must not tie herself to a man who could come home a cripple or not at all, he said. They would wait until he came home whole.

In an effort to explain why he went, he offered most of the reasons given by hundreds of thousands of American men in that emotionally charged time. He still disliked guns, he had never been in a fight of any kind or risked his life over anything. But it was “a job somebody had to do.” It would make a man of him. He would not be a “slacker” no matter what, however old, blind, or untried he might be, and no one who understood him or cared for him should expect otherwise. Besides, he would say, there wasn’t a German bullet made for him and the war would soon be over, once Americans were in the fight. He would remember feeling “we owed France something for Lafayette,” and being “stirred heart and soul” by the war messages of Woodrow Wilson. Greatest of all was the sense of joining in a noble crusade across the sea, “over there” in old Europe.

Over there. Over there.

Send the word, send the word over there,

That the Yanks are coming…

He played it now on the piano, along with the other rousing and sentimental songs—“Good-bye Broadway, Hello France,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Trying long afterward to describe the emotions of the time, he would stress that most Americans responded as he did, “stirred by the same flame that stirred me in those great days.”

The hard truth was that human beings had never been slaughtered in such numbers or so rapidly as in this hideous war. Nor with less to show for it. The machine gun, automatic rifles, massed artillery, poison gas, flamethrowers, the airplane, and the tank made a mockery of old-style textbook stratagems and old-style battlefield heroics. In the previous year, 1916, there had been 2 million casualties on the Western Front, the line of battle that reached all the way from the North Sea to the Swiss border, 350 miles in length, and despite such appalling butchery the line had hardly moved either way. In just four months at the Battle of the Somme, between July and October 1916, the Germans alone lost more men than were killed in all four years of the American Civil War. That spring of 1917, as Harry Truman, feeling “all patriotic,” helped organize a new Missouri artillery battery, a frontal assault by the British at Ypres gained 7,000 yards at a cost of 160,000 dead and wounded in five days.

Initially, the common view had been that the fighting wouldn’t last long. It was a war that would be quickly over. But from the summer of 1914 the slaughter had continued year after year, consuming a whole generation of English, Scots, French, and Germans. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,” Woodrow Wilson had said, stating the harsh reality, in his famous war message. Yet it was a war like the Civil War, the imagined pageantry of bright legions and banners flying, and such ringing words as Pétain’s at Verdun, “They shall not pass,” that stirred the souls of the young Americans signing up to “make the world safe for democracy,” the noble phrase of Wilson’s that people remembered above all.

Harry Truman felt, he later said, as if he were “Galahad after the Grail, and I’ll never forget how my love cried on my shoulder when I told her I was going. That was worth a lifetime on this earth.”

His convictions made him an effective recruiter. He painted the Stafford automobile bright red and went dashing about Kansas City in it wearing his new uniform. He lived in uniform. Nothing even remotely so exciting had ever happened to him before. Every day had focus now.

He had little trouble rejoining the National Guard and went immediately to work organizing a new artillery battery, Battery F, expecting to be made a sergeant. Instead, he was elected a first lieutenant, officers in the Guard then still being chosen by the men as in Civil War days. It was one of life’s great moments. He had never been elected anything until now.

Drilling began in May in the streets of Kansas City across from Union Station and inside Convention Hall. When the 2nd Missouri Field Artillery, as they were known, became the 129th Field Artillery of the 60th Brigade attached to the 35th Division, Harry had to face a regular Army physical for the first time. He was stripped, weighed, measured, examined for hernia, gonorrhea, piles, fallen arches, and defects of vision. He managed to pass the eye examination, according to his brother Vivian, by memorizing the chart. (Harry, Vivian liked to say, couldn’t see over the fence without his glasses.) The actual record of the examination shows that Harry had uncorrected vision of 20/50 in the right eye, 20/400 in the left eye, which theoretically meant he was blind in the left eye.

According to the same record he also stood 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 151 pounds, which made him 10 pounds heavier and an inch taller than the average recruit. His chest measured 33 inches “at expiration,” 37 inches “at inspiration.” All else was categorized “normal.”

The first units of the American Expeditionary Forces were by now in France, under the command of General John J. Pershing, who as every true son of Missouri knew was Missouri born and raised. On July 4, 1917, when Harry turned up at Bess Wallace’s house in full uniform, sporting silver spurs and a riding crop, American infantry of the 1st Division were parading through Paris to a tumultuous welcome.

In September Harry was on his way to Doniphan, a huge new tent encampment on a windswept plain adjacent to Fort Sill, at Lawton, Oklahoma, within the old Comanche Indian Reservation. There was not a tree, and Lawton, a prairie tank town, was twenty miles away. Except for some barren hills to the west, the hard country was as flat as a tabletop. Approaching trains could be seen for miles. The camp had been named for Alexander Doniphan, a Mexican War hero who had led a band of eight hundred Missouri volunteers on one of the longest marches in military history, more than 3,000 miles from Santa Fe to El Paso to Chihuahua to Buena Vista, while defeating several larger Mexican forces en route.

Reveille was at 5:45, breakfast at 6:30 A.M. Drill began at 7:30. Nights were surprisingly cold and the wind that blew almost constantly day or night was described in one formal account as “misery-producing.” “It was sure enough cold and still is,” Harry recorded early in October. Soon the dust storms struck. “A tent fifty yards away is invisible. Dust in my teeth, eyes, hair, nose, and down my neck.” The men were saying they would give Oklahoma to the Germans and call it even. On the rare days when the wind didn’t blow, Harry reported, “we are all very happy.”

The truth was he was happy under nearly any conditions. Bess was not to worry for a minute. He was too busy to be down in spirits or getting into any “meanness,” he told her, by which he seems to have meant troubles with women of the kind soldiers were known to be susceptible to. (In one letter he said she need not worry about him thinking of anyone but her, since there were only Indians in Lawton and “ugly ones at that,” but then, thinking better of what he had written, he quickly added that it wouldn’t matter if “all the Lillian Russells and Pauline Fredericks in this Republic were down here for I don’t like but one style of beauty and that’s yours.”)

His duties with the men included instruction in the handling of horses—about which he knew more than most new officers—trench-digging exercises, and artillery training with 3-inch guns which were few in number. He tried to accustom himself to thinking and figuring in the metric system. Most artillery terms were already familiar from his earlier days in the Guard: Defilade, “Protection from view by an object in front, such as a hill, a wood or building….” Enfilade, “To rake a line lengthwise from the side, by rifle or shell fire….” Field of fire, “The area which is within range of a gun or battery and not protected by intervening obstructions or defilade.” He stood inspection, played his part on the drill field. “I have been squads east and squads sideways, arms up and hands down until I can’t open my mouth without telling someone to straighten up and get in step.” He could march perfectly at the prescribed cadence of 120 steps a minute, 32 inches per stride. He was also acquiring an ability to curse like Captain Kidd, he said, and wondered if he might sometime have to face a high reckoning for it.

Each evening officers assembled for “school” on artillery fire and field service regulations, or to hear someone report on operations in France. “I learned how to say Verdun, Vosges, and Belgium, also camouflage,” he wrote after a lecture from a French officer. Another night, having listened to an English colonel who had been on the Western Front, he wrote to Bess, “He made us feel we were fighting for you and mother earth and I am of the same belief. I wouldn’t be left out of the greatest history-making epoch the world has ever seen for all there is to live for….”

In a twenty-four-hour exercise under “actual battlefield conditions,” he spent a night in the trenches and observed for the first time the famous rapid-firing French 75 in action. At special instructions on gas protection, he learned to put on a mask, then sat in a so-called “gas house” for ten minutes. When a rainstorm in January 1918 turned to snow to sleet to the worst blizzard he had ever seen, it made him think of Grandpa Young and all he had endured on the plains. For weeks the temperature stayed at zero or below. The bread froze and had to be cut with a saw. He was still living in a tent, heated by a Sibley stove of the kind used by the Army in the time of the Plains Indian wars.

After a day on horseback in February he decided he must be getting pretty tough, since he wasn’t the least tired. To find he could also make men “toe the line” seems to have come as an even greater revelation.

In addition to his regular duties, he had been assigned to run the regimental canteen—a dispensary for candy, sodas, cigarettes, tobacco, shoelaces, writing paper—and it was this that soon made him known to nearly everyone in camp. (Virgil Thomson, the future composer, who had also enlisted in the 129th and was at Doniphan at the same time, would remember Lieutenant Truman years later as “one of our most effective officers.”) To help make the operation a financial success (as most Army canteens were not) Harry took on a partner, Sergeant Edward Jacobson, a former clerk in a Kansas City clothing store. “I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson and he is a crackerjack,” he told Bess, as if that were all the reason anyone would need to expect a profitable outcome. And it was indeed Jacobson who ran things, as Harry was always first to acknowledge.

They became fast friends. “Each day Harry would write a letter to his girl, Bess Wallace,” Jacobson remembered, “and I would write one to my sweetheart Bluma Rosenbaum…and when I went into town [to replenish supplies], I would mail them.” Harry had brought the Stafford to camp and had it stripped down to serve as a truck. The bright red car, with Truman at the wheel, Jacobson beside him, became a familiar sight rolling through camp, trailing a column of dust.

To finance the canteen every man in the regiment was assessed $2, which produced an instant capitalization of $2,200. In no time Truman and Jacobson had a “grand, rushing” business, taking in $500 to $900 a day. A barbershop and a tailor shop were added. After six months business was so successful overall that the canteen paid dividends of $10,000, which made Truman and Jacobson extremely popular and led them to conclude they were an unbeatable business combination. Some of the other officers began kidding Harry, calling him a “lucky Jew” and “Trumanheimer.” “I guess I should be very proud of my Jewish ability,” he said.

His one private worry was that he might somehow fail to measure up as an officer and be disqualified and disgraced. Rumors of an imminent departure for France had by now become commonplace. Faced with another physical exam and a doctor who twice refused to pass him because of his eyes, Harry simply kept talking until the doctor relented. He supposed he could put on a “real good conversation when circumstances demand it,” he told Bess. But it had been a close call.

He missed her terribly. “Jacobson says he’d go into the guardhouse thirty days for one night on Twelfth Street. I’d go for forty days if I could see you thirty minutes.” After a flying visit to Independence during which he was able to see her for little more than an hour, he wrote, “I didn’t know how crazy I was about you until I went to leave.” His letters, however, carried none of the old anguish over what he might make of himself in life. There was no more self-doubt, or self-pity over his supposedly bad Truman luck. Except for an attack of what he discreetly described as “indigestion,” he remained in perfect health, and even the indigestion ended quickly when a young Catholic chaplain, Father L. Curds Tiernan, came to the rescue with a bottle of whiskey.

Sergeant Jacobson and Father Tiernan were among the half dozen or so he counted now as his real pals. The others were fellow officers, including three from Independence, Edgar Hinde, Spencer Salisbury, and Roger Sermon. Another, James M. Pendergast, was the nephew of the Kansas City politician T.J. Pendergast. When Lieutenant Pendergast was called before a board of inquiry after the death of three of his men in the explosion of a live shell they had found on the reservation, it was Lieutenant Truman, as a member of the board, who did the most to defend him and to see that he was exonerated.

It was also at Harry’s urging that two of his superior officers, Colonel Karl D. Klemm and Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Danford, joined the Masons and this, too, he felt, helped greatly to expand his influence. Both Klemm and Danford were West Point graduates, Class of 1905, which would have been Harry’s class had he been admitted to the Academy. Klemm, a Kansas City man, was efficient, humorless, and, like Harry, had been elected to his position. Considered a strict, “Prussian type” officer, he would, as time went on, cause Harry and others considerable grief. “We elected Klemm and then were sorry we had,” Harry later admitted.

Danford, by striking contrast, had all the qualities in a leader that Harry most admired and hoped to cultivate in himself. Danford knew what he was talking about (he had helped write the artillery manual), and while an exacting disciplinarian, he knew also to treat those under him with kindness and understanding. Though Harry would serve under Danford but briefly, and only in training, he was never to forget him and the example he set. “He taught me more about handling men and the fundamentals of artillery fire in six weeks than I’d learned in the six months I’d been going over to the school of fire and attending the regimental schools.” While other instructors seemed determined to make a dark mystery of the mathematics involved, Danford, who had taught military science at Yale, emphasized that the point was to make the projectile hit the target. That Danford was among the few officers who also wore, eyeglasses must have provided still further reason to admire him.

The closest friend, however, was First Lieutenant Ted Marks, who was nothing like the rest of the Missouri men, but an Englishman with what seemed a natural military bearing, a pleasant, open face, and protruding ears. Two years older than Harry, Marks was a Kansas City tailor in civilian life whose beautiful custom-made suits sold for as much as $75. He had been born in Liverpool, ran away from home at age sixteen, and served three years in the Grenadier Guards before coming to America. He and Harry had first met more than ten years earlier, in 1906, when Marks walked into the National Guard offices to join up and found a bespectacled young corporal named Truman officiating behind the desk. As Marks would always remember, Harry had asked him how long he had been in the country. Marks said six months and Harry responded, “You speak pretty good English for the time you’ve been here,” which led Marks to wonder what sort of a country he had come to after all.

On one of the bitterest of Camp Doniphan’s bitter cold days, Marks, Truman, and another lieutenant, Newell Paterson, went for examination for promotion before General Lucian D. Berry, a hard-bitten old Army martinet who, with his big mustache, looked like a figure out of a Frederic Remington painting, and had a reputation for chewing up National Guard officers. By his lights, they were no better than “political officers,” unworthy of rank or respect. Once, when Truman’s captain, also a Guard officer, submitted an efficiency report full of praise for Harry Truman and recommending promotion, General Berry sent it back with the comment, “No man can be that good.”

The three lieutenants stood in the numbing cold outside Berry’s office waiting their turns. The temperature was near zero. When Lieutenant Paterson was called first, Marks and Truman remained standing for another hour and a half. When Harry’s turn came, the general and three colonels took him “over the jumps” for more than an hour, Berry becoming so loud and rough that Harry had trouble remembering anything. If he had the right answer, it only made Berry more angry. If he was unable to answer at all, Berry would stalk up and down the room pulling on his mustache and shouting, “Ah, you don’t know, do you?” or, “It would be a disaster to the country to let you command men!”

Harry came out flushed and angry and fearing the worst. Then, because it was nearly the lunch hour, Marks was kept only thirty minutes. As it turned out, all three lieutenants were passed, though Harry was not to learn of his promotion for another several months. He was told only that he and Paterson would be going overseas in advance of the others, as part of a select group of ten officers and one hundred men to be given further training in France, which he knew to be a high commendation.

“I suppose you will have to spend the rest of your life taking the conceit out of me,” he wrote Bess. “Mary is fully convinced that I am overloaded with it, although I never thought so.”

On the eve of departure, not knowing what else to do about his automobile, he sold it for $200.

The night of March 19, 1918, he was “moving out at last,” by troop train, the ride so rough he could hardly complete his letter to Bess. “I’d give anything in the world to see you and Mamma and Mary before I go across,” he wrote. “…You can write me Detachment 35th Division, 129th F.A., Camp Merritt, New Jersey, and I’ll probably get it.” When the train stopped briefly in the Kansas City yards, he was out of the car in an instant, running down the tracks in the dark looking for a telephone. A switchman in a shed told him to help himself. “The phone’s yours,” Harry would long remember the man saying. “But if she doesn’t break the engagement at four o’clock in the morning, she really loves you.”

On leave in New York before sailing, he and four other officers put up at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway, and “did the town” as best they could in the little time available. They saw a vaudeville show at the Winter Garden, rode the subway, walked up Broadway after dark, up Fifth Avenue the next morning. By high-speed elevator they went to the top of the fifty-eight-story Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, ate in a Chinese restaurant. Harry, who had expected to be overwhelmed with admiration for New York, found it all very much overrated. The show at the Winter Garden was a flat disappointment. The celebrated lights on Broadway looked no different to him than those on 12th Street in Kansas City. The McAlpin was no better than Kansas City’s Muehlebach (which he spelled Muleback). And besides there were too many Jews. He called it a “Kike town” in a letter to Bess, and to the Nolands explained that in addition to the millions of “Israelitist extraction,” there were millions of “wops” as well. As for pretty girls, Kansas City had twice as many.

Only the Woolworth Building lived up to expectations. The view from the top was well worth the 50-cent admission.

Shopping on Madison Avenue, he was touched by the patriotic feelings of an optometrist who charged him just $17.50 for two pairs of aluminum-framed glasses, much less than he would have had to pay at home. To be on the safe side Harry was going to France with six pairs of glasses, all pince-nez.

“I imagine his vision with glasses is 20–20, but without the glasses he couldn’t recognize his brother twenty feet away,” another officer named Harry Vaughan would later explain. They had become friends at Doniphan. “So, he always has had several pair on hand in case…he would be so helpless without them, and he was advised that he could not wear the ordinary glasses with the side pieces over the ears in action, because it would interfere with wearing your gas mask, you see. It would leave a hole on either side that you would be able to get gas through. So he brought…I believe he said, four or five of his lens prescriptions in pince-nez.”

The George Washington, a confiscated German luxury liner with seven thousand troops aboard, sailed the night of March 29, 1918, Good Friday, nearly a year to the day since the President’s declaration of war. “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses,” Harry remembered. He and Lieutenant Paterson stood at the rail for some time talking about German submarines and “a lot of things ahead.” Then they went below and, as Harry recalled, passed the rest of the night playing poker.

The weather was clear the whole way across, perfect submarine weather. The ship was part of a convoy, sailing a zigzag course once it reached the submarine zone. There were endless lifeboat drills and calisthenics on deck. Life preservers were worn at all times. At night, the ship was dark, smoking on deck forbidden. No one had much space. Officers were sleeping six to a cabin. As the time passed, Harry, who did not know how to swim and had never seen an ocean, wondered why anyone would ever want to be a sailor. He ached for home. The water was either blue or lead-colored, he noted, depending on whether the sun was out or in. The only variety in the panorama came at sunrise or sunset, and the sunsets weren’t half as good as back home.

II

The George Washington steamed into the crowded harbor of Brest the morning of April 13. The day was warm and sunny, and First Lieutenant Truman thought the town looked “quite wonderful.” It wasn’t Paris, but if Paris was as much livelier as it was bigger, then Paris had to be “some town.” Bands were playing, welcoming crowds lined the shore, thousands of people cheering and waving flags.

The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France by this time numbered nearly a million men, a figure that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Only the summer before, on July 4, when the first American infantry unit marched through Paris, there had been just fourteen thousand American troops in all of France. Now, the seven thousand “doughboys” who came down the gangways from the George Washington were but a fraction of the monthly total. That April, 120,000 arrived. Soon there would be 250,000 landing every month until eventually there were 2 million American troops in France.

Four hundred miles away from the docks at Brest, to the northeast at the Belgian border, one of the most savage battles in history was raging. Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff had launched a massive frontal assault on the Allied lines along the River Lys, near Armentiéres. With Russia out of the war since December, after the fall of the czarist regime, the Germans were free to concentrate on one front, as they had wanted from the beginning, and this was intended to be their deciding offensive. The losses were appalling. Only the day before, April 12, the British commander, General Sir Douglas Haig, issued his famous order: “With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.” The Battle of the Lys lasted three weeks until the Ludendorff offensive was stopped. Winston Churchill would consider it the critical struggle on the Western Front and, thus, of the war. Yet to Lieutenant Truman and the thousands arriving with him, none of this was apparent. What they saw their first days ashore and for weeks, even months to come, was the France that was not the war. As Harry wrote to the Noland sisters, he felt like Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, as much a tourist as a soldier.

Being an officer in the AEF, he found, meant accommodations such as he had never known or expected. At the hotel in Brest he had a room to himself larger than any in the Gates mansion. There were double lace curtains at the window and a white marble mantelpiece with a seventeenth century Dutch clock under a glass case, a beautiful affair even if it didn’t run. Chairs were upholstered in red plush, floors polished smooth as glass. He admired a crystal water decanter and a mahogany wardrobe with a full-length mirror in which he could also admire himself in his new overseas cap and Sam Browne belt.

For nearly two weeks he did little more than enjoy himself. If he had been disappointed by New York and the Atlantic Ocean, France more than made up for it. He enjoyed the food (the bread especially) and the wine. He admired gardens so well cultivated and cared for that there was hardly a weed to be seen. The whole surrounding countryside with its irregular patchwork of fields and hedgerows made him wish he were a painter, he told Bess. “The people generally treat us fine and seem very glad to accommodate us in any way they can.” Later he wrote, “I’m for the French more and more. They are the bravest of the brave.” They also knew how to build roads as smooth and solid as a billiard table “and every twenty meters there are trees on each side.” Nor could he get over the way audiences at the movies clapped and cheered during the love scenes. “They are the most sentimental people I ever saw,” he noted approvingly. If ever he had to give up being a Missourian, he decided, he would be a citizen of France, though so far he hardly dared try the language other than to say, “Je ne comprends pas.”

Good food, wine, and cognac were all plentiful and an American soldier’s pay went far. Harry calculated that his came to 1,100 francs a month, enough nearly “to retire on over here.” A fine meal cost about 10 francs. Wine and cognac were a comparable bargain. Most of the 35th Division, having been too long in Oklahoma, seemed determined to drink France dry. But they were certain to fail, he also noted, the supply being “inexhaustible.”

As he did not report to Bess, women, too, were plentiful. Temptation beckoned in Brest, as it would later in every interior city he went to in France. One American lieutenant wrote in his diary, “Wandering through dark streets. Ever-present women. So mysterious and seductive in the darkness…. A fellow’s got to hang on to himself here. Not many do.” But apparently Harry did.

“Personally, I think Harry is one of the cleanest fellows…the cleanest fellows morally that I ever saw, or know,” First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde of Independence would remember. “I never saw him do anything out of the way that would be questionable in the way of a moral situation. He was clean all the way through. I always admired him for that quality and you know when a man’s in the Army, why his morals get a pretty good test.”

“Wish I could step in and see you this evening,” Harry wrote to Bess the night of April 17, after five days in France. “Have only seen one good-looking French woman and she was married to some French general or admiral or something, anyway he had seven or eight yards of gold braid on him.”

At the end of April he was assigned to an elite artillery school 500 miles to the east, near the hilltop town of Chaumont, in Lorraine where Pershing had his headquarters. The first-class coach Harry traveled in was upholstered like a Pierce Arrow limousine, he reported happily to Ethel Noland. No wealthy civilian on tour ever had things better.

His new quarters were even more splendid than anything he had yet seen, a seventeenth-century gray stone chateau set in a lovely, walled park in the middle of a picture-book village called Montigny-sur-Aube, this in turn set in a gently sloping valley. There was a magnificent garden, a moat, stone walls six feet thick, tile floors, marble stairs, hand-carved woodwork, “everything you like to read about,” he told Ethel. “You’d never think that a war was raging in this same land, it is so peaceable and quiet and pretty.” Spring had arrived in full glory, with soft, fragrant air and trees along the brows of near fields all a delicate green. His one problem was the bells that kept him awake the first few nights. The church clock would strike eleven, “and then the clock on the Hotel de Ville would strike eleven five minutes later and then five minutes later some clock that I haven’t been able to locate yet would strike eleven. By that time the church clock had started on eleven fifteen and it was one continual round of pleasure all night long.”

Forbidden to give his location, he was able to say only that he was “somewhere in France.”

The first week at the artillery school was the most difficult ordeal he had ever experienced. After that, the work got harder. He felt he was in over his head, having never been to college, and worried constantly that he would fail. The mathematics was all at the college level. He studied surveying and astronomy. There was no time for anything but work, from seven in the morning until ten at night. There was hardly time to get from one class to the next. He had no idea what was happening in the war and of the outside world, he said, he was as ignorant as if he were in Arkansas.

Training in the classroom and on the firing range centered on the French 75-millimeter gun, a small, rapid-fire, rifled cannon known for its mobility and phenomenal accuracy. It had been developed twenty years before, its technology guarded by the French as a military secret. The slim, 6-foot barrel was of nickel steel and other alloys that were kept classified. The breechblock, gun carriage, and hydropneumatic recoil system were all of special design. Because the gun recoiled on its carriage, it stayed in place with each shot, and thus no time was lost correcting its aim between shots, which was the secret of its rapid fire. It could get off twenty to thirty shots a minute and had an effective range of five miles. Being light in weight compared to most cannon, a little over a ton and a half, and maneuverable with its high-spoked wooden wheels, it was considered ideal for trench warfare. The fire from a battery of four was murderous.

It was called the marvel weapon. The French would later say it won the war for them. No American or British-made fieldpiece could compare and American units relied on it almost exclusively. (Virtually no American fieldpieces-or American airplanes or tanks-were used in the war, for all the troops supplied by the United States.) To the Germans, it was the “Devil Gun.”

I’ve studied more and worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever did before in my life [Harry wrote to Bess at the end of May]…right out of one class into another and then examinations and thunder if you don’t pass.

We had a maneuver yesterday and General Pershing himself was there. I was in command of a battalion of artillery and he did not even come around to see if I could fire that many guns…. My part was mostly play-like except the figures. I was supposed to have three batteries, which were represented by three second lieutenants. Had a second lieutenant for adjutant and a major for regimental commander. We had a good time and walked about six miles besides. There were Major Generals, Brigadiers, Colonels, Majors and more limousines than a January funeral. It was a very great pleasure to see a Major General click his heels together and nearly break his arm coming to a salute when The General came along. You don’t often see Major Generals do that.

On Sundays he attended services at the Catholic church, where the air was chill and he was unable to understand a word. France was a grand place for Frenchmen, he had decided, and he didn’t blame them for fighting for it; “and I’m for helping them, but give me America, Missouri and Jackson County for mine with the finest girl in the world at the county seat,” he wrote on May 5, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday.

One of his examinations given on a Saturday in May would have driven the president of Yale University to distraction, he reported. The Sunday after, with little to do, he discovered volumes of music-Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann-and a “dandy” piano in a YMCA that had once been the home of a wealthy local family. He played at length while the other officers listened. “It sure was a rest after the week’s work.”

After five weeks, his ordeal over and feeling extremely lucky to have “slipped through,” he was ordered to rejoin his old regiment, which by now had arrived in France and was stationed at Angers. Heading west again by train, he seldom took his eyes off the passing scenery. Like so many American soldiers, he was astonished not only at how beautiful the country was but how very old. A young officer traveling with him, Arthur Wilson, remembered being amazed at Harry’s knowledge of French history. “He had maps and he knew where we were going. It didn’t mean anything to me….” During a wait at Orleans, Harry insisted they get out and see the city’s famous cathedral and the equestrian bronze of Joan of Arc in the main square.

At Angers, to his total surprise, he learned he had been made a captain months earlier. No one had bothered to tell him. He only found out when he saw it reported in The New York Times.

As adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, he was assigned to teach the other officers what he had learned. “I just barely slipped through at the school, and now they’ve got me teaching trig and logarithms and surveying and engineering,” he told Bess. Didn’t she think it amusing that an “old rube” from Missouri was handing out such knowledge to the Harvard and Yale boys? In another letter, he said he had never known how valuable a university education was until now.

She wrote to him faithfully, as did Mamma, Mary Jane, and Ethel Noland. Their letters took a month or more to reach him and arrived usually in batches of six or seven. “Please keep writing,” he told them. Knowing how they worried, he said nothing upsetting, never a word of discouragement or serious complaint. “No I haven’t seen any girls that I’d care to look at twice….” He was eating well, walking as much as fifteen miles a day. He never felt better, nor looked so good with his new captain’s bars. “I look like Siam’s King on a drunk when I get that little cockeyed cap stuck over one ear, a riding crop in my left hand, a whipcord suit and a strut that knocks ’em dead.” (“That was one of the things about this war,” Willa Cather would write, “it took a little fellow from a little town, gave him an air and a swagger….”) He had Arthur Wilson take his picture sitting on a horse. Like every good American soldier, Captain Harry Truman conceded, he had an “insane desire” to let the home folks know how he looked.

In the chest pockets of his tunic he carried three photographs. In the right pocket were Mamma and Mary Jane in her picture hat. In the left, over his heart, was a wistful portrait of Bess that he adored more than any ever taken of her. She had written on the back for him: “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”

The first week of July the 129th Regiment moved from Angers to what had once been Napoleon’s artillery base, Camp Coëtquidan, near Rennes, for final training before going into action. Again to his enormous surprise, Captain Truman learned he was to be a battery commander. He was summoned before Colonel Karl D. Klemm and told to begin at once. It was his highest ambition come true and he was scared to death. He would have command of 4 guns and 194 men.

Thursday morning, July 11, 1918, shoulders back, head up, he walked out onto the parade field to face for the first time Battery D of the 2nd Battalion, 129th Field Artillery, “Dizzy D,” by reputation, most of them Irish Catholics from Kansas City. “They were a pretty wild bunch of Irish, I’ll tell you that,” remembered Lieutenant Hinde. “They had [had] one captain named Charlie Allen and they had two or three others there, none of them could handle them, and finally they assigned Truman to command the battery. He was a third degree Mason in a Catholic battery and we thought he was going to have a pretty rough go of it….”

He was not at all what the men expected. One of them, recalling the scene, said he looked like “a sitting duck.” Another remembered “a stirring among the fellows…. Although they were standing at attention, you could feel the Irish blood boiling—as much as to say, if this guy thinks he’s going to take us over, he’s mistaken.” A private named Vere Leigh would recall “a rather short fellow, compact, serious face, wearing glasses. And we’d had all kinds of officers and this was just another one you know.” To others Harry looked, with the pince-nez spectacles, like a store clerk or a professor and totally out of his element. “Yes,” said Private Edward McKim, “you could see that he was scared to death.”

Harry, who would remember the moment more vividly than anyone, said he had never been so terrified. He could feel all their eyes on him, feel them sizing him up. “I could just see my hide on the fence…. Never on the front or anywhere else have I been so nervous.”

According to Private Albert Ridge, who later became a judge in Kansas City, the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them. As he was to confess long afterward, writing about himself in the third person, “He was so badly scared he couldn’t say a word….”

At last he called, “Dismissed!” As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer. (“And then we gave Captain Truman the Bronx cheer, that’s a fact,” said Vere Leigh.) As the day wore on, they staged a sham stampede of their horses. After taps, a fight broke out in the barracks and several men wound up in the infirmary.

In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were “busted” in rank. “He didn’t hesitate at all,” remembered Private Leigh. “The very next morning this was on the board. He must have sat up all night…. I think the First Sergeant was at the head of the list.”

Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. “I didn’t come over here to get along with you,” he said. “You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you right back now.” There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, “We got along.” But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn’t.

He proved a model officer and extremely popular with “wild Irish” Battery D. “Well, I would say that his major characteristic was great friendliness, that he had such warmth and a liking for people,” recalled Arthur Wilson. “He was not in any way the arrogant, bossy type, or Prussian type of officer. A lot of us youngsters, you know, when they put gold bars on our shoulders, why we thought that we sort of ruled the world. And he had, as an older man, a very quiet sort of a way of serving as a leader…. And he was a disciplinarian but he was very fair. I don’t know, I can’t describe what the personal magnetism was except that he had it.”

“You soldier for me, and I’ll soldier for you,” Harry told the men. “Soldier, soldier all the time,” his favorite colonel, Robert Danford, had said at Camp Doniphan.

For one month he drilled the men on the firing line, trying to teach them everything he knew about the French 75. They thought the weapon a wonder and, with practice, claimed, in Missouri style, that they could pick off a sparrow on a wire at 9,000 yards.

Working them hard, insisting on strict behavior, making them “walk the chalk,” and driving himself no less, he found his satisfaction in the task, his pride in the men, as well as his own newfound sense of power, were like nothing he had ever known. “Talk about your infantryman,” he boasted, “why he can only shoot one little old bullet at a time at the Hun. I can give one command to my battery and send 862 on the way at one round and as many every three seconds until I say stop.” Whatever dislike or fear of guns he had known before appears to have vanished. He knew how much was riding on his judgment now. “You’ve no idea what an immense responsibility it is to take 194 men to the front,” he told Bess. Were he to get them killed, he would never be able to look anyone in the face again.

How brave he might be once the high-explosive shells began flying weighed heavily on him. He kept thinking of a man Uncle Harrison once described who had the bravest kind of head but whose legs “wouldn’t stand.”

Enthusiasm in the camp was fueled now by daily dispatches of Americans in action at last. Through most of that spring, while Captain Truman was at Montigny-sur-Aube, the numerical superiority of the Germans on the Western Front had become clear. The great question was whether American forces would arrive in time and in sufficient strength to make the difference. By June the Germans were back again on the banks of the Marne, within cannon shot of Paris. The situation was grim. The leaders of France, Italy, and Great Britain warned Woodrow Wilson of the “great danger of the war being lost” unless American forces became available as rapidly as possible. Pershing had been bound and determined to commit his troops only as a separate American command, but because of the emergency more than 250,000 Americans were rushed to the front to support the French under the command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The Americans fought bravely at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Then, on July 15, the Germans unleashed another huge offensive aimed at Paris, the Second Battle of the Marne, sending fifty-two divisions against thirty-four Allied divisions, nine of which were American. In three days, from July 15 to July 18, the tide of battle turned. To Ludendorff, American forces had been the “decisive” factor, and the German chancellor later confessed that “at the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced…that before the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals…. That was on the 15th. On the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”

But for the Americans, the worst was still ahead.

In the time allotted, Captain Truman had transformed what had been generally considered the worst battery in the regiment to what was clearly one of the best, as was demonstrated in conspicuous fashion the day of their departure for the front, on August 17. The 129th Field Artillery began moving out from a nearby railyard, one battery at a time. To a very large degree the war was fought with railroads. The movement of troops and equipment by rail was ever critical, hence great store was set on how well officers and men managed things when the time came to go. For artillerymen especially, “moving out” was a terrific undertaking. The trains for each of the batteries were comprised of some seventeen flat-cars, thirty “dinky” French boxcars (these marked “40 Hommes, 8 Chevaux”), and a single passenger coach for officers. Everything needed had to go aboard—troops, guns, caissons, field kitchens, horses, harness, hay, feed, battery records, extra supplies of every sort—in the quickest time, with the least wasted motions possible.

As it was, each battery managed to get on board and under way in about an hour. The time for Battery D was 48 minutes, a record.

They were rolling by eight in the morning and the trip lasted two days, their train passing close enough to Paris that they could see the top of the Eiffel Tower. Beyond Paris, except for the scars of war, the rolling countryside might have been Missouri or eastern Kansas. Then they were beside the Marne, traveling past Château-Thierry, scene of a great American victory, then along a narrowing valley, past Epernay, in the heart of the champagne country. They turned southeast. For mile after mile, in a landscape of broken wooded hills, one small village after another looked much alike with their orange tile roofs and single church steeples.

They were heading for the beautiful Vosges Mountains, in Alsace, nearly to the Swiss border, which was the extreme eastern end of the front. Long the sleepiest sector of the war, it was, the American high command had decided, the ideal place for green troops to get some experience holding the lines, as a preliminary to an all-out American offensive. The first American battle casualties had been suffered in the Vosges, the autumn before, and in the time since one division after another had been moved in and out.

The end of the line, hours later in the dark, was the town of Saulxures, by a swift little river in a mountain valley. In mid-August, on the night Battery D arrived, the air outside the train was sweet with the smell of giant firs and patches of purple thyme along the river banks. Harry would remember, too, how good the local beer tasted.

The following morning, August 20, puffs of white smoke could be seen in the sky five or six miles to the east, and, in the middle, a moving speck. It was anti-aircraft shrapnel being fired at an enemy observation plane, and the first real sign of war. But by then Harry was already on his way into the mountains.

III

“It was just a quiet sector to give the boys a little indoctrination in trench warfare,” recalled Sergeant Frederick Bowman, one of the small detachment that went with Captain Truman to locate a gun position. They traveled by truck at first, over twisting roads to a tiny, picturesque village called Kruth. Then, with horses and accompanied by a French officer who spoke no English, they began a hard, steady climb into the fir-clad mountains, up logging roads as steep as a roof. It was terrain such as the Missouri men had never seen, with rushing streams, beds of green moss inches deep, great granite boulders heaped on all sides, and everything heavily shadowed beneath the huge, shaggy trees. The enemy’s batteries were on an opposite mountainside. As Sergeant Bowman said, the topography was “kind of a V-shaped affair,” and so wild and rugged, it appeared, that either side might fire away endlessly and do no harm.

The sky was clear, the day warm and sunny, visibility excellent—not ordinary conditions in the Vosges—but the men and horses were well concealed under the trees. At one point only, when they came to an open ridge in plain view of the Germans, did the French officer have them go at intervals, one man at a time.

They found the spot they wanted at the edge of the trees at an elevation, Harry reckoned, of more than 2,000 feet above the valley. The men would remember making a meal of cold beans and beef, hardtack and a mess kit full of wild red raspberries picked en route, these topped off with champagne provided by the French officer.

Camping in the woods, they spent several days getting set up. Then the rest of the battery began the long, hard climb from below, hauling the guns. “It was surely some steep hill,” Harry wrote. Once, a can of lard broke loose from a wagon and bounced the whole way to the bottom. Clouds had moved in on the mountain, meantime, shrouding the trees in mist. The chance of being seen was no longer a worry, but in the damp air now even the least sound carried. To muffle the wheels of the guns Harry had them wrapped in burlap, which struck some of the men as silly. And indeed, the whole struggle of hauling everything into place seemed doubly absurd when, after days of doing nothing in the clouds, then days of rain, the battery was told to pack and move on again.

Harry had been ordered to take up a position about a mile closer to the German lines and prepare to fire a gas barrage. So his first action would be to shell the enemy with poison gas.

The battery moved after nightfall, horses, guns, and men laboring up and down roads now slick with mud and rain. And it was raining still the next afternoon when they took their new position, everyone exhausted from no sleep but also extremely excited and eager to commence firing for real at last. The targets were some German batteries four miles distant. The barrage was to begin after dark and to be what in artillery parlance was called “fire for neutralization,” to “suppress the activities of the enemy” without necessarily destroying his position.

When the command was given at precisely 8:00 P.M., August 29, four batteries of the 129th opened up. The piercing crash of the 75s went on for half an hour. Battery D fired five hundred rounds. “We were firing away and having a hell of a good time doing it,” remembered Private Leigh, “until…[we] woke somebody up over there.”

The barrage over, the night was suddenly still. There was only the sound of the rain. At this point the battery was supposed to move out with all speed, to take a new position before the Germans had time to return the fire. Horses were to be brought up at once from the rear, the guns hauled away. But the first sergeant in charge of the horses was nowhere to be found. The job of first sergeant was assigned on a rotating basis and the first sergeant that night was Glen Wooldridge, who didn’t appear with the horses for nearly half an hour. Then, with everybody charging about in the dark rushing to make up for lost time, things became miserably scrambled. Fearing the Germans would retaliate with a gas barrage of their own, the men had their masks on. Some were struggling frantically to get masks on the horses.

When the first German shells came screaming over, Harry was up on a horse trying to see what was going on. A shell burst with a shattering roar not 15 feet from him. His horse was hit—or slipped—and went over into a shell hole and rolled on top of him, pinning him down helplessly. By the time he was pulled free by a big, heavy-shouldered lieutenant named Vic Housholder, his breath was nearly gone—Housholder remembered him “gasping like a catfish out of water.” Meantime, half the horses and two of the guns had charged off in the dark, over a hill in the wrong direction to become hopelessly mired in the mud. Then all at once, the same unfortunate Sergeant Wooldridge, in panic, began yelling at the top of his voice for everyone to run, saying the Germans had a “bracket” on them.

Wooldridge himself took off. Others ran after him, though how many is uncertain. No one could see much of anything in the black night and pouring rain, and with such wild confusion all around. With their masks on, telling who was who was nearly impossible, even at close range. Private Walter Menefee said later there was only Captain Truman and maybe three or four others who didn’t run. “I led the parade!” Menefee admitted. Vere Leigh thought hardly anyone took off except Wooldridge.

In any event, Captain Truman stood his ground, and once having recovered his breath, let fly with a blast of profanity that had stunning effect chiefly because it came from the officer who, heretofore, had seemed so proper and reserved. “I got up and called them everything I knew,” was how Harry himself remembered the moment. He was livid and terrified.

For years afterward at reunions in Kansas City, with whiskey flowing, there would be much lighthearted banter and kidding over this first encounter with the enemy, Battery D’s so-called “Battle of Who Run.” But there was nothing the least comical about the situation at the time.

With his blistering verbal barrage and the vivid example of his own fierce courage under fire, Captain Truman succeeded finally in getting things in control. Two horses were dead, two others had to be shot. The guns, in mud to their axles, were impossible to move with manpower only. They could be rescued later, he decided, and marched the men back to base position through the dark and the continuing downpour.

At about four in the morning, after a hot meal, he went to his tent, collapsed, and slept for twelve hours.

He was worried sick, sure he was disgraced. But his superior, Major Marvin Gates, told him reassuringly that green troops often behaved badly their first time and to forget about it. Gates recommended only that Sergeant Wooldridge be court-martialed at once. Unable to bring himself to do that, Harry had Wooldridge broken to private and transferred to another battery, where, as it turned out, he later performed well and bravely.

In a letter to Bess, Harry said it had not been until the day after that terrible night that he figured out what had happened. “The men think I am not much afraid of shells but they don’t know I was too scared to run and that is pretty scared.”

Because no one had been killed in the melee, the men decided that Captain Truman—Captain Harry—besides being cool under fire, was good luck. When time came to go back for the abandoned guns, a potentially perilous mission, every man in the battery volunteered. Harry, deeply touched, did the job with only the necessary men and horses.

At first light, September 3, the regiment was on the move again and in full battle dress—helmets, gas masks at the ready, blanket rolls, and full packs that weighed as much as 70 pounds, or more than half the weight of some of the men. A sign on Grand Avenue, Kansas City, had said: “Join the Artillery and Ride.” Now, to save the horses on the steep roads, everybody was on foot, officers included.

Harry was struck by the beauty of the mountain valleys. Hay and grain were being harvested, but by old people and children, the old women all in black. “It was literally true that the manhood of France was in the army,” wrote a lieutenant named Jay Lee. “Only the very old and the crippled were exempt from the army, but not from the work.”

At the village of Vagny two days later, the regiment boarded another train, this bound north. The next night, at Bayon on the Moselle River, a curious incident occurred that frightened Harry more than he let on. At the station a young lieutenant colonel from a Missouri infantry division told him to get his men off the train and find cover fast, before daylight. The whole area, he said, was under bombardment from German planes. In the dark Harry could make out the carcasses of two dead horses beside the platform. The colonel introduced himself. He was Bennett Clark, the son of Speaker of the House of Representatives Champ Clark of Missouri, who had been one of John Truman’s favorite Democrats. Colonel Clark said he would hate to see Harry and his men suffer the same fate as the horses. “Well, I was scared green,” Harry later wrote. “I was in command of the train and there was absolutely no one to pass the buck to. I simply had to unload that battery and find a place for it before daylight.” Guns, horses, ammunition were off the train and into the pine woods in the least time possible, everybody moving with breakneck urgency. But as the morning passed and no German planes came, Harry walked back to the station, where he found Clark grinning. The joke was on Harry, Clark said. There had never been any German planes. When Harry asked about the dead horses, Clark said they had been shot by a veterinarian.

Harry appears to have taken this in good spirits, partly because his men had enjoyed a much-needed rest and a chance to bathe in the river. He and Bennett Clark were to have a great deal to do with one another in time to come, but for now neither had any reason to expect to see the other ever again.

By dusk the regiment was on its way on foot. They marched most of the night and the following day. In a pocket diary Harry marked their progress: “September 10. Leave Coyviller at dark. Rain…September 11. Leave Bosserville at 7:30 P.M. Rain Rain Rain Went through Nancy dark as hell.”

“Who can ever forget the impression of those night marches!” Lieutenant Jay Lee would write after the war, in a privately published history of the 129th Regiment.

We sometimes went as far as 30 or 35 kilometers [18 to 20 miles] in a night, which wasn’t so bad except when, as so often happened, obstruction or congestion in the road caused…fretful stops and starts. The wonderous fact of all these men over there made a vivid and solemn impression…the long line of horses, limbers, guns, caissons and men stringing out interminably before and behind…thousands of men, all alike in outward appearance of round helmets and army raincoats; all with common purpose and determination, but each occupied with his own thoughts….

They were part of the first big American push, half a million men on their way to Saint-Mihiel, south of Verdun.

So slow was our progress that after six hours we had only advanced three or four miles [continued Lieutenant Lee, describing the night march through Nancy] when…the whole front to our north broke out in flame, and a tremendous, continuous and awe-inspiring roar of artillery began; while huge searchlights, interspersed with many-starred signal rockets, shot their shafts like the Northern Lights constantly across the sky. We had heard or seen nothing in our experience like it….

“American drive begins,” Harry scrawled in his diary on Thursday, September 12. “Heard first roar of American artillery.”

They were held in reserve short of Saint-Mihiel for several days, horses harnessed, everything ready to move at a moment’s notice. It was now that Harry felt himself in “the great adventure” at last. In long lines, thousands of bedraggled German prisoners marched past. “We are doing our best to finish the job and get home,” he wrote to Bess, “but we can’t leave until it’s done. In fact, we don’t want to leave until it’s done.”

Among those in his command he had come to depend on were Sergeant Edward Meisburger, who in the midst of the chaos at “Who Run” never flinched, and Sergeant Ralph Thacker, who, though only nineteen, had the judgment and staying quality of a much older man. Lee Heillman, the cook, Frank Spina, the barber, were the best in the Army. Harry Kelley, the instrument sergeant, was “very, very bright,” an “excellent soldier,” who could figure the firing data quite as well as Harry could.

The night of September 16, in bright moonlight, they began the forced march that none of them would forget. Orders had changed. Saint-Mihiel had been a sudden, resounding American victory. The Germans were overrun in two days. So the 129th was en route to the Argonne Forest.

“It was march all night and part of the day, grab a few hours sleep and march some more,” Harry wrote.

The Supreme Command had decided on a colossal, all-out offensive to end the war. The attack, infinitely greater than any that had gone before, would extend along the entire Western Front from Verdun to the sea. The sector allotted to the American Army ran from the Meuse River, north of Verdun, to the Argonne Forest, a distance of twenty-four miles. The American objective was to cut the German rail lines at Sedan.

This great Meuse-Argonne offensive, as it would be known, was the largest action in American military history until then. No larger American army had ever been seen than the one now on the roads. Fifteen divisions were moving up—600,000 men, nearly 3,000 artillery pieces, trucks, tanks, supply wagons, more than 90,000 horses—a logistical problem of staggering proportions that had been worked out by an exceptionally able officer on Pershing’s staff, Colonel George C. Marshall. Infantry and ammunition were carried by big, lumbering, chain-drive trucks, but because the horse-drawn artillery moved so much more slowly, the order of march was mixed, to keep solid columns. Discipline on the road was poor, congestion often a nightmare. Everything was moving up by just three roads and much of the time the traffic was two-way, with the French troops that were being relieved coming back from the front. Furthermore, to keep the Germans from knowing what was happening, nothing could go forward or back except under the cover of darkness. Officers in charge of the roads had often to brandish revolvers to keep traffic moving. And after the first moonlit night, a fine rain fell nearly all the while, turning the roads to rivers of mud. Many horses were in such poor shape by this time that they began dropping in their traces and had to be destroyed.

To lessen the burden on the horses, the artillerymen carried all they could. “And there was an order out,” Private Floyd Ricketts remembered, “that we cannoneers who were walking and following the guns were not to hold onto any part of the gun or caissons so as not to put any more burden on the horses. But walking along almost dead on your feet, you could hardly resist grabbing a hold of the caisson to help you along.”

Colonel Klemm, in a state such as the men had never seen, kept riding up and down the line shouting orders “like a crazy man” and at one point senselessly ordered an advance at double-time up a long hill. Had he not been wearing a yellow rain slicker, some of the men later speculated, he might have been shot in the back. But because Father Tiernan had on the same color coat no one would have risked making a mistake in the dark.

Harry took the men off the road to rest. Klemm found out and demanded to know what he was doing. “Carrying out orders, sir,” Harry answered, after which, it is said, the men adored him as never before.

Later, Harry let a man with a twisted ankle, Sergeant Jim Doherty, ride his horse, which was against orders. Klemm, seeing Doherty, flew into a rage and ordered him down. Harry told Klemm that as long as he, Harry, was in command of the battery, Doherty would ride. Klemm, furious, turned and rode off, but not, apparently, before telling Harry what he thought of him.

“The Colonel insults me shamefully,” Harry wrote in his diary. “No gentleman would say what he said. Damn him.”

(Reminiscing about the march long afterward, some of the men would speculate that Klemm really had gone crazy for the moment, or was drunk. Klemm would remain a troubling memory for years. In 1925 in his Kansas City business office, he shot and killed himself.)

The march went on for a week. “The weather was bad, rainy, and we would sleep in the daytime in thickets or in woods and then take off at dusk and march all night,” said Private Ricketts. They passed places called Ourches, Loisy, and Rembercourt, which were nothing but ruins. Sometimes Harry and Father Tiernan walked together at the head of the battery, talking about “the history of the world and I don’t know what all,” Harry remembered. If all priests were like him, he told Tiernan, there wouldn’t be any Protestants.

The morning of September 22, they pulled off to sleep in a rain-soaked forest opposite Rarécourt, close to their final position. From here on they would travel light, free of their supply train, and as rapidly as possible, everybody riding.

Harry’s diary entry for Monday, September 22, says only, “Wild ride to position tonight.” Later, for Bess, he wrote this vivid account:

I stripped the battery for action. I knew I was in for it this time because I only took the firing battery and just enough men to run the guns and they for the first time were allowed to ride. I got stuck getting out of the woods. One caisson got pigheaded and I couldn’t budge the cussed thing with either prayers or cuss words. I tried both. Finally hooked all the men onto it with ropes and got it out and then and there began the wildest ride I ever hope to have. It seemed as though every truck and battery in France was trying to get to the same front by the same road that I was going. I had twelve carriages in my column, four guns, six caissons and two fourgon wagons, one of them full of instruments and one full of grub. I don’t know which I’d rather have lost…. Well I finally got my battery out on the main highway and headed for the front. The real front this time west of Verdun and just alongside the Argonne Forest. Those devilish trucks kept trying to cut me in two. It was necessary to keep the battery moving at a trot and a gallop nearly all the way and I had to ride the line to see that they stayed closed up. Every time I’d get a chance I’d cut in ahead of a row of trucks and sew ’em up until I got the whole battery by and every time a truck would get a chance he’d cut through the battery. They didn’t get very many chances because when we got the right of the road I made it a point never to let ’em through…. I don’t know if I told you but it was raining as usual and the road was as slick as glass.

It had been a forced march of nearly 100 miles and they arrived on time. Indeed, the whole massive move to the front had been a total success. Incredibly, not a single unit failed to reach its appointed place on schedule. The 129th Regiment’s designated position was Hill 290, a gradual slope half a mile from a crossroads village called Neuvilly, which consisted mainly of a ruined stone church that would serve as a field hospital and where a much-published photograph would be taken of the wounded in stretchers crowded beneath a huge painting of the Ascension that had miraculously survived and still hung on the shattered wall above the altar.

Captain Truman and Battery D were assigned to a clump of saplings near a fair-sized wood across a field of mud. They arrived in pitch dark at 3:00 A.M., the rain still coming down, men and horses exhausted. Only by hitching twelve horses to each gun and having every man push were they able to get all four guns in place by daylight. In the distance, across an open No-Man’s-Land, was the German strongpoint of Boureuilles.

The next three days were spent in preparation for “H-Hour.” Trenches were dug, ammunition stacked, trees cleared for a field-of-fire. From time to time, German shells came screaming over. The second night several hit the exact spot where Harry had slept the first morning and would have made small pieces of him, as he said, had he not shifted locations. The evening of Wednesday, September 25, in Colonel Klemm’s dugout, the battery commanders received their orders. The offensive was to begin in the morning, “H-Hour,” at 5:30 A.M. Each battery was to fire 1,000 rounds an hour. This meant six rounds per gun per minute, since each gun would need ten minutes every hour for cooling off. The first hour, before the infantry moved out, would be “preparation” fire, to destroy barbed-wire entanglements. Afterward, at “H-Hour,” would come a two-hour “rolling” barrage during which the range of fire would have to advance steadily, 100 meters every four minutes, over the heads of the advancing infantry. Thus even a small mistake by battery commanders or gun crews could bring down disaster on their own troops.

“Everything was now in readiness, with the quiet which precedes the storm,” wrote Lieutenant Jay Lee in his formal history. “Late in the afternoon Captain Roger T. Sermon, Regimental Personnel Officer, paid the men, according to routine, a ceremony that never failed to arouse general interest, even on so eventful an occasion as this.”

Harry, Lieutenant Housholder, and Sergeant Kelley were up all night going over their final computations.

At a different point along the line, a swashbuckling American tank commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Patton, impatient for morning, wrote to his wife, “Just a word to you before I leave to play a part in what promises to be the biggest battle of the war or world so far.”

The bombardment began long before daylight when the air was chill, at 4:20 A.M., the morning of Thursday, September 26, 1918. Two thousand seven hundred guns opened fire all along the front with a roar such as had never been heard before. In three hours more ammunition was expended than during the entire Civil War—and at an estimated cost of a million dollars per minute. The American air ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who took off in his plane before daybreak, said, “Through the darkness the whole western horizon was illumined with one mass of jagged flashes.” From Hill 290 it looked as though the sky was on fire—“as though every gun in France was turned loose,” said Harry.

At 5:30, “H-Hour,” exactly on schedule, the rolling barrage opened up. “That gun squad worked just like clockwork,” remembered Corporal Harry Murphy. “It was—it was a sight, they just were perfect. They just got those rounds off so fast that—unbelievable.”

“My guns were so hot,” wrote Harry, “that they would boil [the] wet gunnysacks we put on them to keep them cool.”

When the barrage ended all was still except for distant machine-gun fire that sounded oddly, Harry thought, like a typewriter.

The infantry had pushed off into a charred, cratered landscape with no visible landmarks, then disappeared into a thick white fog. The first phase of the fighting, as George Marshall would write, was “confusing in the extreme.” The Germans, though greatly outnumbered, were solidly dug in on high ground, ideal ground defensively, and a nightmare for those on the attack. Up the center ran a huge hogback, heavily wooded, with high points where the Germans had all the advantage, after four years of work on their defenses. Most of the American divisions being hurled at them had never had contact with an enemy before. Some troops had never handled a rifle until now.

The 129th Field Artillery was ordered forward, to follow the infantry. Captain Truman and Major Gates went out ahead trying to spot enemy gun emplacements and for a while were pinned down on a road by machine-gun fire. From where they had started to the sheltering woods on the other side of No-Man’s-Land was only about a mile and a half, but hauling the guns through the shell-blasted muck, craters, and twisted barbed wire was a long day in hell. The crossing took twelve hours, the struggle lasting into the night. Men and horses pushed and hauled under nearly constant fire. The German shells came over with a sound like the scream of air brakes, then hit with a terrific explosion, throwing up dirt and pieces of iron in all directions. Yet so exhausted were the men as night wore on that some of them were falling asleep on their feet.

The next day, after some confusion in orders, they started forward again. They saw the dead now, scattered here and there, and nearly all were Americans, since the retreating Germans carried their dead and wounded back with them. At a crossroads near Cheppy, heaped in a pile, were seventeen American dead, infantrymen, while down the road a dozen more were lying “head to heel,” all “shot in the back after they’d gone by,” Harry surmised. He would remember how quiet his men became at the sight and the sergeant who spoke up, “Now you sons-of-bitches, you’ll believe you’re in a war.”

West of Cheppy the battery moved into a peach orchard. Harry and one of his lieutenants, Leslie Zemer, Sergeant Kelley and Corporal William O’Hare went out ahead to establish an observation post, stringing a telephone line and advancing, unknowingly, several hundred yards beyond the infantry. About dusk, from the crest of a hill, Harry saw an American plane drop a flare off to the west, then turning his field glasses on the spot, saw a German battery pulling into position on the left flank, across a small river in front of the 28th Division, which was beyond his own assigned sector. Standing orders were to fire only at enemy batteries facing the 35th Division. Harry decided to disregard that.

“Truman didn’t panic,” remembered Private Leigh, “he let them [the Germans] take their horses away from the guns, which was exactly what he should have done. If it had been me I would have hollered for D Battery to start firing as soon as I saw them. He didn’t do that, he let them get into position, get all set to fire, with their horses by this time a couple of miles away. Then he had his firing data exact. It’s no good to have a man up there if he don’t know what the hell he’s doing….”

“Truman sent back the data,” Private McKim recalled. “We went into action and he said, ‘Fire at will, fire as fast as you can,’ and we just poured them in there.”

The decision undoubtedly saved lives in the 28th Division, and though an outraged Colonel Klemm was on the phone almost at once, threatening Captain Truman with court-martial for violating orders, nothing came of it.

A German plane, meantime, had spotted the battery in the peach orchard—the pilot had actually flown in at about 300 feet and lobbed down a few German “potato-masher” hand grenades—so Harry, back with his battery, ordered everyone to pull out at once. German artillery fire, a “lot of heavy stuff,” came soon after. “You know,” said Vere Leigh, “when you’re in the artillery they don’t shoot at you with machine guns. You’re back from the line, and they shoot at you with that heavy stuff. They wiped that peach orchard out.”

This was on September 27. Later that same night, as the battery moved on, Harry was on horseback when he was hit in the face by a low-hanging branch and suddenly found himself without his glasses and unable to see. The horse kept moving with the column. Harry turned frantically in the saddle to look behind, only to find the glasses sitting nicely on the horse’s back.

In his diary he had time for the barest record:

September 28: Moved to position on Cheppy-Varennes road Fire on Boche O.P. [Observation Post]…on Boche Bty moving out.

September 29: Fired barrages

September 30: Same as yesterday

One soldier wrote, “The artillery fire has been something awful for the past two days. Shells are screaming over our heads constantly. The Germans shell us quite often, and we are continually hugging the earth, making ourselves as thin as possible. I feel like a man of fifty….”

On the afternoon of the 29th, reports came that the infantry was losing ground. American stragglers began streaming past. The Germans were about to counterattack. Harry’s immediate superior was Major John Miles and as every man knew there were just two possible orders to give for a position about to be overrun. One was “direct fire”—point-blank fire into the advancing enemy—and then stand by the guns to die or be captured. The other was to abandon the guns and fall back. “Well, men,” Miles said. “Get ready and we’ll give them direct fire.”

The German attack never came. Still, as Lieutenant Lee would write, “The coolness, the steady courage, the readiness to stand fast to the last, evidenced by Major Miles and his men on that anxious afternoon, were none the less inspiring that they were not pressed to the final sacrifice.”

Casualties among the infantry were heavy—as high as 50 percent in the 35th Division. Litter cases at the dressing station at Cheppy numbered in the hundreds. Fourteen ambulances loaded with wounded had been sent to the rear from that one station in a single day. On September 30 thousands of men were being fed there, most of whom had been wounded or gassed. Father Tiernan was busy burying the dead under fire all afternoon. One ambulance company alone suffered more than fifty casualties.

The Meuse-Argonne offensive was to have been another swift, smashing American victory, like Saint-Mihiel, but it was not. Sedan was ultimately taken, but at appalling cost. The Meuse-Argonne was the battle that produced the so-called “Lost Battalion,” an infantry unit that was trapped for five days and suffered casualties of nearly 70 percent, and also the most appealing American hero of the war, infantryman Alvin York from the hills of Tennessee, who single-handedly captured 132 Germans in one day. In all, in 47 days of fury, there were 117,000 American casualties. In the military cemetery on the Romagne Heights, at the center of the battlefield, 14,246 dead would be buried, making it the largest American military graveyard in Europe.

“It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s bad enough,” Harry wrote Bess in the first week of October. The heroes, he added, are all in the infantry.

The regiment was pulled back for rest. His own men looked like scarecrows and their respect for him had never been greater. “He was the Captain, he was the head man,” Vere Leigh said later, “and he was treated as such, we respected him, and he earned it. That’s why we respected him, because he earned it…. He’s not a dramatic type or anything like it. He’s no Patton, you know. He might have been a better soldier than Patton, but he was not a showoff.”

Harry had lost 20 pounds. He could hardly believe what he had been through. Terrible as it had been, it was also “the most terrific experience of my life.” He couldn’t help feeling proud. His men were alive and in one piece.

In mid-October, with the weather still cheerless and colder than before, the regiment took up new positions on the bleak heights east of Verdun, above the Meuse River Valley, in preparation for what was to be the final drive. Days were spent laying telephone wires, digging new dugouts, and camouflaging. His battery was soon so perfectly concealed that Harry himself had trouble finding it after dark. His dugout, down the road, was a “palace,” with stove, table and chair, a telephone beside his cot—“all the comforts of home except that I’ll have such a habit of sleeping underground that I’ll have to go to the cellar to sleep when I get home.”

Lieutenant Harry Vaughan, who was in a different regiment and who had been out of touch with Harry since Camp Doniphan, was seeing more of him now and puzzled how, after weeks in the trenches, any man could look so consistently clean and dapper.

Before Battery D, in the distance, rising on the grim horizon like the hump of an evil subterranean monster, was the famous bastion of Douaumont, once the showpiece of French defenses, the greatest fortress in the world. Harry thought it and the surrounding landscape comprised the most dreary prospect he had ever looked upon. Shattered dead trees stood like ghosts. The ground everywhere was a mass of shell craters. In Verdun itself not a building remained undamaged. The ancient city had caught the full force of the war. The civilian population had long since fled. Harry tried to imagine the same panorama before the war, with everything as cultivated and beautiful as the rest of France he had seen.

To stem the German tide in 1916, France had sent an unending column of men and artillery to Verdun. The fury and horror had been like nothing in history. The French, Harry was told, had put their 75s “hub-to-hub” for direct fire at the advancing enemy. The battle lasted ten months, the longest ever. Casualties on both sides came to 900,000 men. The ground everywhere was still a rubbish heap of weapons, shells, shreds of clothing, and no one knew how many dead. In a letter to the Noland sisters, he described a field a short distance to the west of his position “where every time a shell lights it blows up a piece of someone.” In none of his letters did he complain. In none did he even begin to describe the truth of the horrors he had seen. Like nearly every man writing home, he tried to put a good face on things. Only now did he seem to waver somewhat. He couldn’t shake the presence of the dead from his mind. “When the moon rises…,” he told Bess, “you can imagine that the ghosts of the half-million Frenchmen who were slaughtered here are holding a sorrowful parade over the ruins.” He did not, however, mention the smell or the rats everywhere.

To Ethel Noland he sent a poppy he found among the rocks near his new observation post, close to the German lines, at the end of a four-mile, zigzag hike through the trenches. He had brought back two flowers, the other for Bess.

The men were kept busy working on their positions, gas-proofing dugouts, moving ammunition, standing guard. The shelling continued. Guns boomed somewhere, near or far, almost continuously.

The weather turned colder. There was more rain. A day with sunshine was an event worth noting in his diary. “Fine day,” Harry wrote October 28. “Very fine day,” reads the entry for October 29. Before dawn on November 1 came another “show” like the one at the Argonne, as every battery opened up on the German lines for five straight hours.

For weeks there had been rumors of peace. A German pilot shot down just behind Battery D said the war would be over in ten days. On November 7 a United Press correspondent, Roy Howard, sent a cable from Paris saying hostilities had ceased at two o’clock that afternoon. The news was false.

On November 9 the infantry went forward once more, after an hour-long barrage. Harry’s friend Captain Ted Marks, and Battery C, were ordered forward in support of the infantry. The next day the drive and its artillery support continued. The morning of November 11, Battery D was firing again when, at about 8:30, Captain Truman was notified by headquarters that in exactly two and a half hours, at 11:00 A.M.—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the Germans would sign an armistice agreement.

Sergeant Meisburger was called to Captain Truman’s dugout, where he found the captain stretched on the ground eating a blueberry pie, a wide grin on his face. “He handed me a piece of flimsy and said between bites, ‘Sergeant, you will take this back and read it to the members of the battery.’ ” What puzzled Meisburger was where Captain Truman had obtained the blueberry pie.

“My battery fired the assigned barrages at the times specified,” Harry wrote. “The last one was toward a little village called Hermeville…. My last shot was fired at 10:45.”

When the firing ceased all along the front line [he continued] it…was so quiet it made me feel as if I’d been suddenly deprived of my ability to hear.

The men at the guns, the Captain, the Lieutenants, the sergeants and corporals looked at each other for some time and then a great cheer arose all along the line. We could hear the men in the infantry a thousand meters in front raising holy hell. The French battery behind our position were dancing, shouting and waving bottles of wine…. Celebration at the front went on the rest of the day and far into the night. Very pistols, rockets and whatever else was handy were fired.

I went to bed about ten P.M. but the members of the French Battery insisted on marching around my cot and shaking hands. They’d shout “Vive le Capitaine Américain, vive le Président Wilson,” take another swig from their wine bottles and do it over. It was 2 A.M. before I could sleep at all.

A lieutenant named Broaddus of Battery F had been up in a balloon directing artillery when the cease-fire came. Below him, he remembered, “people went so wild celebrating that they forgot to pull me down…and I sat there for two hours.”

“You’ve no idea how happy we all were to have the war end,” wrote Harry to Ethel Noland. “You know that the continual and promiscuous dropping of shells around you will eventually get on your nerves considerably and mine were pretty tightly strung by 11 o’clock November 11. It was the most agreeable sigh of relief I ever have [had] when word came to cease firing.”

The Great War was over and to the victors it seemed a triumph for civilization. It was left now to the statesmen to make a lasting peace. In less than a month President Wilson was on his way to France on the George Washington, the ship that had brought Harry and so many thousands.

For the 129th Field Artillery the war had been the Meuse-Argonne offensive and it had cost the regiment 129 battlefield casualties. Battery D suffered only three men wounded, one of whom later died, but they had been on a special detail with an ammunition train at the time, not under Captain Truman’s command. “We were just—well, part of it was luck and part of it was good leadership,” said Private Vere Leigh. “Some of the other batteries didn’t have that kind of leadership.”

IV

Two weeks and two days after the Armistice, Captain Harry Truman was on leave in Paris dining at Maxim’s. At a nearby table he saw the prettiest woman he had laid eyes on since coming to France and to his delight found she was an American with the Red Cross. After dinner he and several other officers went to the Folies-Bergère, where the “little ladies” clustered about them during the intermission. (Years later he would call the show “disgusting,” but at the time he told Ethel Noland it was about “what you’d expect at the Gaiety only more so.”) He saw Notre Dame and Napoleon’s Tomb. At the Arc de Triomphe, his trench coat belted tight against the November air, he posed for a snapshot beside a captured German cannon. He rode a taxi the length of the Champs-Elysees, up the Rue Royale, down the Madeleine, back up the Rue de Rivoli, over the Seine by the ornate Alexander III Bridge. He visited the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, strolled the Boulevard de l’Opéra, “and a lot of side streets besides.” All in twenty-four hours.

From Paris they took the train to Nice. Paris, said Harry, was “as wild as any place I saw.” Nice was “ideal,” with the Mediterranean on one side, the foothills of the Alps on the other. His hotel, “a dandy place,” overlooked the sea. “The view from my window is simply magnificent…. There is no blue like the Mediterranean blue,” he told Bess, “and when it is backed by hills and a promontory with a lighthouse on it and a few little sailing ships it makes you think of Von Weber’s ‘Polacca Brillante,’ which I am told was composed here.” She was all that was needed to make the place heaven.

He saw his first palm trees, walked in the sunshine, ate like a king, and in the first days of December drove to Monte Carlo, where he was startled to see a real-life princess drinking beer. He and Major Gates hired a car and drove to the Italian border, returning to Nice by way of the Grande Corniche, “the most beautiful drive I ever had.”

In Paris again, his leave about over, he and Major Gates went to the opera, to a performance of Thaïs by the French composer Massenet, which was then immensely popular in France. The Place de l’Opéra was ablaze with lights, as it had not been since 1914. After his days on the Riviera, with his longing for the woman he loved, the sensuous music stirred him deeply. It was “beautifully sung and the scenery [more palm trees] was everything that scenery can possibly be.” This, he emphasized in his letters, was the “real” opera. He would have paid the admission if only to see the gilded glory of the building.

He returned to a division encampment near Verdun notable only, he said, for its copious mud. The wait to go home became endless. “To keep from going crazy we had an almost continuous poker game,” remembered his friend from Independence, Captain Roger Sermon of Battery C. When news of the influenza epidemic at home reached camp, Harry became so alarmed he hardly knew how to contain himself. Bess and her brother Frank had both been down with the “Spanish flu,” he learned, Mary Jane and Ethel Noland as well, all through the weeks he had been on leave, and though all four were on the mend he kept worrying. “Every day nearly someone of my outfit will hear that his mother, sister or sweetheart is dead,” he wrote. “It is heartbreaking almost to think that we are so safe and so well over here and that the ones we’d like to protect more than all the world have been more exposed to death than we.” By the time the epidemic ran its course, vanishing mysteriously early in 1919, the number of deaths in the United States reached 500,000, including 25,000 soldiers, or nearly half the number of American battlefield deaths in the war. At Camp Doniphan alone fifty-one had died.

When in late January Harry learned that his favorite battery clerk, Sergeant Keenan, had died in the base hospital of appendicitis, he wrote in his diary, “Would as leave lost a son.”

General Pershing and the Prince of Wales came for a division review. Pershing shook Captain Truman’s hand and told him he had a fine-looking bunch of men and to take them home as “clean morally and physically as they were when they came over….” Harry took the order quite to heart.

It’s some trick to keep 190 men out of devilment now [he wrote later to Ethel Noland]. I have to think up all sorts of tortures for delinquents. It’s very, very lucky that we are far from wine, women and song or we’d have one h--- of a time. Sometimes I have to sock a man with extra duty that I sure hate to punish. You know justice is an awful tyrant and if I give one man a nice muddy wagon to wash on Sunday, because he went to Verdun without asking me if he could, why I’ve got to give another one the same duty if he does the same thing even if he has the most plausible excuse. I’m crazy about every one of ’em and I wouldn’t trade my messiest buck private for anybody’s top sergeant. It very nearly breaks my heart sometimes to have to be mean as the dickens to some nice boy who has been a model soldier on the front and whose mail I’ve probably censored and I know he’s plum crazy about some nice girl at home but that makes no difference. I have to make ’em walk the chalk. You’d never recognize me when I’m acting Bty Commander.

He was thinking constantly of home and what was ahead for him. He wrote in his letters of returning to the farm, but he mentioned also the possibility of running for political office on his war record—for eastern judge in Jackson County, possibly even for Congress. After what he had seen of peacetime Army life, he said, he would give anything to be on the House Military Affairs Committee. Like a great many of his fellow reserve officers, he had acquired a decided bias against West Pointers. He thought most of them pompous, lazy, and overrated, and couldn’t imagine himself living under such a system. “I can’t see what on earth any man with initiative and a mind of his own wants to be in the army in peacetimes for,” he wrote. “You’ve always got some fossil above you whose slightest whim is law and who generally hasn’t a grain of horse sense.” As a boy, he told Bess, he had “thirsted for a West Point education…only so you could be the leading lady of the palace or empire or whatever it was I wanted to build.” All he knew now for certain was that he longed to get “back to God’s country again,” to “the green pastures of Grand Old Missouri”; that, in fact, he had no place to go but home; that he was broke, and in love—“I love you as madly as a man can”—and eager to be both out of the Army and married just as soon as possible. He dreamed of walking down North Delaware Street. He dreamed of owning a Ford and touring the country with her. “Maybe have a little politics and some nice little dinner parties occasionally just for good measure. How does it sound to you?”

“We’ll be married anywhere you say at any time you mention,” he wrote in another letter, “and if you want only one person or the whole town I don’t care as long as you can make it quickly after my arrival.”

“You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote in response, in the earliest of her letters to have survived. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.” Her mother, she said, hoped they would move in with her at 219 North Delaware. “Just get yourself home and we won’t worry about anything.”

He hated the waiting. He wished “Woodie” (Woodrow Wilson) would quit his “gallivanting” in France and depart, so every American soldier could, too. Saving the world was of no concern any longer. “As far as we’re concerned,” he told Ethel Noland, “most of us don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether Russia has a Red Government or no Government and if the King of the Lollypops wants to slaughter his subjects or his Prime Minister it’s all the same to us.”

In March, the regiment moved south to Courcemont, near Le Mans, where the officers were again quartered in luxury at the Château la Chenay, once the home of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the great canal builder. Harry had one more chance at a flying visit to Paris, during which he saw Woodrow Wilson ride by and, in a shop on the Rue de la Paix, he bought a wedding ring. Then on April 9, 1919, with the 52 other officers and 1,274 men of the 129th Field Artillery, he sailed for New York on the former German liner Zeppelin.

On this homeward voyage, the last act of his great adventure, the returning hero was violently seasick nearly the whole way. For a time he wished he were back at the Argonne where he might die honorably. Yet he could bear any agony, he knew, given the direction they were heading.

Part Two
Politician

5
Try, Try Again

I’ve had a few setbacks in my life, but I never gave up.

—HARRY TRUMAN

I

As his observant cousin Ethel Noland once remarked, Harry Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man. He had been born when Chester A. Arthur was President and among the more pressing issues was whether the nation should continue building a wooden Navy. He was a grown man, thirty-three years old, middle-aged nearly, by the time of the Great War, the event which, more than any turn of the calendar, marked the end of the old century and the beginning of something altogether new. His outlook, tastes, his habits of thought had been shaped by a different world from the one that followed after 1918. As time would show, the Great War was among history’s clearest dividing lines, and much that came later never appealed to Harry Truman, for all his native-born optimism and large faith in progress.

He had been more at home in the older era. He never learned to like the telephone, or daylight saving time, an innovation adopted during the war. He tried using a typewriter for a while, but gave it up. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens remained his favorite authors. Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee were to be his lifelong heroes. Until he met George C. Marshall, he wondered if the “modern” times were capable of producing a great man.

The kind of art that had burst upon the public with New York’s Armory Show of 1913—the first big American exhibition of modern paintings, which included Marcel Duchamp’s sensational Nude Descending a Staircase— had no appeal or meaning for Harry Truman. “Ham and eggs art,” he called it. He liked the old masters. His taste in American art, not surprisingly, ran to the paintings of Missouri riverboatmen and Missouri politics by George Caleb Bingham, or the western scenes of Frederic Remington, who had once owned a saloon in Kansas City.

If Harry Truman had even a little interest in the theories of Einstein or Freud, he never said so. Words like “libido” or “id,” so much in vogue after the war, were never part of his vocabulary. Indeed, he despaired over a great deal that became fashionable in manners and mores. He disliked cigarettes, gin, fad diets. He strongly disapproved of women smoking or drinking, even of men taking a drink if women were present. When after much debate Bess decided it was time she bobbed her hair, he consented only reluctantly. (“I want you to be happy regardless of what I think about it,” he told her.) He disliked the very sound of the Jazz Age, including what became known as Kansas City jazz. Life in the Roaring Twenties as depicted in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O’Hara was entirely foreign to his experience, as it was for so much of the country. He never learned to dance. He never learned to play golf or tennis, never belonged to a country club. Poker was his game, not bridge or mah-jongg. “It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all,” insisted F. Scott Fitzgerald, but Harry Truman, in those years, discovered politics to be his life work.

As the war was a watershed time for the world, so it was in his life. “I have always wondered,” he later wrote, “how things would have turned out in my life if the war had not come along just when it did.” What it most obviously did was to take him from the farm, and he would not go back again, except as a visitor. That much was settled for him, as it was for tens of thousands of others who came home. (“How you gonna’ keep ’em down on the farm/After they’ve seen Paree?” went the hit song of 1919.) More important, he was not the same man who left for France only the year before. The change was astounding. He had new confidence in himself. He had discovered he could lead men and that he liked that better than anything he had ever done before. He found he had courage—that he was no longer the boy who ran from fights—and, furthermore, that he could inspire courage in others.

He had come home with a following, his biggest, best “gang” ever, his battery “boys,” who looked up to him as they would an older brother. He was the captain who brought so many sons of Jackson County home safe and sound. Alone in the dim light of his tent or dugout in France, late at night, he had spent hours answering letters from the mothers and fathers of men in his command, a consideration not commonplace among officers of the AEF, and one that would not soon be forgotten in Kansas City.

He had been a big success as a soldier. The war had made him a somebody in the eyes of all kinds of people, including, most importantly, Bess Wallace, who had only decided to marry him once she heard he was enlisting. By nice coincidence, the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles and their wedding took place on the same day.

Also because of the war he had met and befriended Eddie Jacobson and Jim Pendergast, who, with Bess, were to have so much to do with the new and different life that began the morning the 129th Field Artillery had its triumphal return.

“Well, I remember when he came back, what a day it was,” said Ethel Noland. “We all went into the city and saw them parading through the streets…. Then we went to the Convention Hall and had a great reception.”

The 129th marched uptown from Union Station in dazzling morning sunshine, under full packs, wearing their “tin derbies,” as they had marched in France. Harry and the other officers were on horseback. Flags brightened buildings and lampposts. The crowds along both sides of Grand Avenue were fifty deep. At 11th Street stood a huge Welcome Arch. People were cheering, weeping, holding up children to see. One young woman, carrying a baby, walked parallel to her husband from the station all the way to the Convention Hall in high heels.

Three days later, May 6, at Camp Funston, Kansas, the men were given their final discharges, and seven weeks and four days after that Bess and Harry were married. But not before two important events took place.

On May 8, Harry’s birthday and his second day home, he and Bess had their first and apparently their last heated argument. Possibly it was over the wedding plans, or possibly over her mother’s insistence that they live with her. Whatever the cause, Harry would remember the day and its misery for the rest of his life. In a letter to Bess written thirty years later, he would refer to it as their “final” argument.

Then, a month in advance of the wedding, he and Eddie Jacobson took a lease on a store in downtown Kansas City. Though Jacobson had served with another battery in France, they had seen each other occasionally and Jacobson, too, had come home on the Zeppelin. They had decided to join forces again and open a men’s furnishing store, a haberdashery, convinced their partnership at Camp Doniphan had been only a prelude to great merchandising success. It was a decision made quickly, even impulsively, and, on Harry’s part, it would seem, one designed to impress Bess and her mother.

The wedding, on Saturday, June 28, 1919, took place at four in the afternoon in tiny Trinity Episcopal Church on North Liberty Street in Independence, and the day was the kind Missouri summers are famous for. The church, full of family and friends, became so stifling hot that all the flowers began to wilt.

The bride wore a simple dress of white georgette crepe, a white picture hat, and carried a bouquet of roses. Her attendants, cousins Helen Wallace and Louise Wells, were dressed in organdy and they too carried roses. The groom had on a fine-checked, gray, three-piece business suit made especially for the occasion, on credit, by his best man, Ted Marks, who had returned to his old trade of gentleman’s tailor. The groom also wore a pair of his Army pince-nez spectacles and appeared, as he stood at the front of the church, to have arrived directly from the barbershop.

Frank Wallace, the tall, prematurely balding brother of the bride, escorted her to the altar, where the Reverend J. P. Plunkett read the service.

Present at the reception afterward, on the lawn at the Gates house, were Mrs. Wallace and her mother, Mrs. Gates, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wallace, Mr. and Mrs. George Wallace, and young Fred Wallace, while the “out-of-town” guests, as recorded in the papers, included Mrs. J. A. Truman, her daughter Miss Mary Jane Truman, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Vivian Truman. All the Nolands attended, of course, as did several of Harry’s former brothers in arms. One who was unable to be there wrote to him, “I hope you have the same success in this new war as you had in the old.”

Punch and ice cream were served. The wedding party posed for pictures, Harry looking extremely serious, Bess a bit bemused. Presently, bride and groom departed for the train in Kansas City, driven by Frank Wallace, with more cars following.

At the station, waiting on the platform, Ted Marks remarked to Harry’s mother, “Well, Mrs. Truman, you’ve lost Harry.”

“Indeed, I haven’t,” she replied.

Recalling the day years later, Mary Jane spoke more of what she had been through before she and Mamma ever reached the church. They had been harvesting wheat at the farm. Mary Jane had cooked noon dinner for twelve farmhands—meat, potatoes, fresh bread, homemade pies, “the usual,” she said.

Ethel Noland remembered Harry’s expression as he stood watching Bess come down the aisle. “You’ve just never seen such a radiant, happy look on a man’s face.”

It had been nine years since the night Harry returned the pie plate. He was now thirty-five; Bess was thirty-four.

The honeymoon couple stopped at Chicago, Detroit, and Port Huron, Michigan. In Chicago, they stayed at the Blackstone. At Port Huron, they were at the beaches of Lake Huron, where the weather was as perfect as their time together. So sublime were these days and nights beside the ice-cold lake that for Harry the very words “Port Huron” would forever mean the ultimate in happiness.

It was all too brief. Worried over her mother’s health—Madge Wallace suffered from sciatica, among other real and imagined complaints—Bess felt they must return to Independence sooner than planned. As her mother wished, they moved into 219 North Delaware, taking Bess’s room at the top of the stairs on the south side. The immediate household now consisted of Bess, Harry, Madge, Fred, who was a college student and his mother’s pet, and the elderly Mrs. Gates, who had a room on the first floor off the front parlor. In back of the house, beyond the driveway, in what was formerly the garden, two small, one-story bungalows had been built, facing Van Home Boulevard, one each for brothers Frank and George and their wives. Thus the whole family was together still in a “kind of complex,” under the watchful eye of Mother Madge Wallace, a neat, straight little woman with a rather sweet expression, her hair done up in a knot, who still wore an old-fashioned velvet choker. Among the neighbors she was perceived as possibly the most perfect lady in town and “a very, very difficult person.”

Bess considered the arrangement temporary. She and Harry would stay only long enough for her mother to become accustomed to the idea that she was married. Harry moved in with his clothes, a few books, and a trunk full of his Army things, which was nearly all he owned.

II

Truman & Jacobson was located at 104 West 12th Street, Kansas City, on the ground floor of the Glennon Hotel, catty-cornered from the larger Muehlebach Hotel, which made it a choice location. By agreement Harry was to keep the books; Eddie would do the buying. Between them they would take turns with the customers.

Jacobson, short, cheerful, and conscientious, was twenty-eight years old, but with his glasses and rapidly thinning hair looked perhaps thirty-five, and unlike Harry, he had had twelve years’ experience in the retail clothing business. One of six children and known by everyone as “Eddie,” never “Edward,” he was the son of impoverished immigrant Jews from Lithuania who had settled first on New York’s Lower East Side, where he was born, and later in Kansas City, where he went to work at age fourteen as a stock boy in a dry goods store. Eddie, too, was soon to be married—to Bluma Rosenbaum at B’nai Jehudah, Kansas City’s oldest Reform temple, in December of that year—and so, like Harry, he had every reason to wish to succeed.

It was to be a “first-class operation,” specializing in famous brands. They would sell no suits or coats, but a full line of “gents furnishings”—shirts, socks, ties, belts, underwear, hats. To get started, they combined their money and borrowed from the bank. The store was remodeled inside and out. The cost of their initial inventory came to $35,000.

Harry put in $15,000, most of which he obtained by selling off livestock and machinery from the Grandview farm. He had hoped the farm might continue as before and tried to persuade Mary Jane to keep it running, but she refused if he was unwilling to be there and do his part. Two years had been enough, she said. That fall they auctioned off horses, hogs, plows, seed drill, nearly everything, the proceeds going to Harry for the store, an arrangement that was hardly fair to Mary Jane, given all she had done, and that pleased no one in the family except Harry. The land would now be rented for someone else to farm.

The store opened for business in late November 1919, and would be remembered by friends and patrons as “right up to snuff,” “a sharp place.”

The name “Truman & Jacobson” was set in colored tiles at the street entrance, between two large plate-glass show windows filled with shirts in striped pastels, fifteen to twenty hats, and a hundred or more stiff, detachable collars, suspended by wire in vertical columns. The shirts and collars were all Ide brand, as proclaimed in formal lettering across the top of the storefront, above the plate-glass windows. Inside, long showcases were filled with shirts, leather gloves, belts, underwear, socks, collar pins, cufflinks, while behind, on open shelves, were boxes of more shirts, more detachable collars—“Marwyn” collars by Ide, which, like those in the windows, featured “the smart roll-front.” But what immediately caught the eye was a display of silk neckties, hundreds of ties in every color and pattern, strung from an overhead wire on the left that reached the length of the store.

It all looked fresh and clean. The tiled floor was kept shined. Glass countertops gleamed. There were big electric fans overhead, a glistening new cash register, and close by on one showcase, the store’s proud conversation piece, a huge silver loving cup, four feet high, a gift to “Captain Harry” from the boys of Battery D. Above the hat shelves at the back of the store, arranged like a bouquet, were the five flags of the Allied nations.

With the loving cup and flags, the atmosphere was not unlike that of a college shop, the college in this instance having been the war. For anyone who liked clothes as Harry did, who had liked always to “look nice,” the effect must have been very pleasing.

Yet it is hard to imagine the adjustment from battery commander to storekeeper as anything but difficult, hard to imagine him not finding it a painful comedown from such career aspirations as he had confided to Bess, or from parading with a victorious army up Grand Avenue. Nor does there appear to be an explanation, unless it was that he—and Bess also—wanted money quite as much as in the years before the war and saw the partnership as the opportunity, while at the same time keeping contact with his “boys,” the city, and people of a kind who might do him good should politics ever become his “line.” His only explanation later was, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

He and Eddie opened their door regularly at eight every morning and remained open until nine at night. Times were prosperous. “Sporty” 12th Street—the 12th Street of Twelfth Street Rag—was “jumping.” Conventioneers poured in and out of the Muehlebach. In the Dixon Hotel, across the street, were two gambling houses. Prostitutes worked the neighborhood. Day or night, salesmen, secretaries, shoppers from outlying towns, nearly everybody seemed to have money to spend. “Twelfth Street was in its heyday and our war buddies and the Twelfth Street boys and girls were our customers,” Eddie Jacobson would recall with pleasure. “Silk underwear for men, and silk shirts, were the rage. We sold shirts at sixteen dollars. Our business was all cash. No credit.” Shirts, the main stock in trade, were Eddie’s specialty. Harry, who called it “the shirt store,” would stand poised for business between two of the showcases, an elbow on one countertop, a hand on the other, his shoes shined, tie straight, the overhead lights glinting in his thick glasses. Like the store, he always looked fresh and clean.

As hoped, it became a rendezvous for their Army pals, a number of whom now looked to Harry as financial adviser, legal adviser, “and everything else,” as Eddie said. “We’d all drop in there sometime during the day—it was the hangout,” remembered Eddie McKim. Some evenings there was barely room for the real customers. “But Harry seemed glad to have us,” said former Sergeant Meisburger. Even the policeman on the corner, Walter “Cushionfoot” Teasley, had been a first lieutenant with the battery at Camp Doniphan.

Harry returned the favor of their patronage as best he could. He bought his suits from Ted Marks, had his hair cut at Frank Spina’s barbershop. They were just like his family, he would say. Bess objected to the haircuts. But Frank Spina was one of his boys, Harry would explain. “You can’t quit them.”

Others living elsewhere around the country wrote to wish Harry well. “I see no reason,” said one man, “why you, with your engaging personality and honest morals, should not be very successful in that business.”

“Well, sir, don’t forget me,” wrote another, Eugene Donnelly, in a letter from a remote Texas oil field, “and when you see a keen young lady come out of the Muehlebach, just say to yourself gee I’d hate to be old Donnelly, living seven miles from a railroad, enjoying the company of two hundred men.” Once, in France, after the Armistice, when Donnelly and several others from Battery D were due to go to Paris on furlough but had no money, Harry had found out about it and loaned them what they needed. “We’d have done anything for him then,” Donnelly would say in an interview years afterward, “and nobody that I know has changed his mind.”

Eddie’s wife Bluma said later that her husband never worked as hard as he did that first year in the 12th Street store, nor Harry either, she supposed. There were no signed agreements between them, there was never a need for it. “They just felt that close to one another that they could trust each other, which they did all through their lives.”

By the year’s end they had sold $70,000 worth of goods, which meant a high return on their investment.

In his campaign for President in 1920, the handsome Republican candidate, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio—who had been picked in a famous “smoke-filled room” at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, just a year after Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman stopped there—called for a return to “normalcy.” The American people, Harding said, had had enough of heroism, and he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, defeated the Democratic ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt with a bigger majority than in any previous election. Normalcy seemed indeed to be what the country wanted, and in this respect Truman and Jacobson, restocking their shelves in Kansas City, waiting on customers, seemed in perfect step with the times. Harry joined the Kansas City Club, the Triangle Club (a businessmen’s lunch group much like Rotary), and the Kansas City Athletic Club, where, with relentless determination, he taught himself to swim, using a strange, choppy, self-styled sidestroke, his head above water, so he could keep his glasses dry. With Ted Marks or Jim Pendergast, he ate regularly at the Savoy Grill, in the old Savoy Hotel on 9th Street, his favorite place for lunch. He dreamed also of a new car, to replace the second-hand, four-cylinder Dodge roadster he was driving to and from the city.

The one looming worry was that the farmers were hurting and the reasons were plain enough at the same Kansas City grain exchange where John Truman had lost his money twenty years earlier. Prices were tumbling. Wheat that had sold for a record $2.15 a bushel in 1919 had dropped to $1.44 a bushel by the fall of 1920. Farm prices overall fell 40 percent and the farmers’ plight began to spread. The Middle West was especially hard hit. By 1921 the silk shirt that had been such a symbol of the postwar boom became the shirt Truman & Jacobson could no longer sell. By mid-year their “flourishing business” had evaporated. With the country in a full-scale depression, Harry and Eddie Jacobson were in trouble. To keep their stock up to date, they were forced to borrow more money.

The same old friends kept dropping in, but no one was buying as before. Several now found the store a convenient place to borrow an extra five or ten dollars. It became a combination club and unemployment agency, and, because of Harry’s generosity, small loan office. If they came in asking for “Captain Harry,” Eddie Jacobson recalled, he knew it was for a touch. If they asked for “Captain Truman,” he knew he had a sale.

It was Harry also who paid for the damages after a Battery D reunion on St. Patrick’s Day, 1921, a dinner at the Kansas City Elks Club that turned into a brawl, with the “boys” hilariously “airlining” soup and dinner rolls at one another. There had been no shortage of whiskey for the evening, Prohibition notwithstanding, and things were finally so out of hand that the police had to be called. But then one of the police turned out to be a former Battery D sergeant, George Brice, who, to the delight of the other police, was unceremoniously relieved of his revolver and most of his clothes.

As the depression grew worse and the partners had less and less to do, Harry became increasingly restless. “He would get out and go to lunches and mix with people…and Eddie Jacobson would stay around and take care of business,” said Ted Marks, who had not encouraged Harry to go into the retail line. Now they talked about anything and everything but Harry’s troubles. “We all were having a hard time those days…. Rents were high and starting anew—it was pretty rough,” Marks remembered.

Harry and Eddie had an ink blotter printed up as a flyer to hand out at the counter:

Dr. A. Gloom Chaser Says:

“It Takes 65 Muscles of the Face to Make a Frown and 13 to Make a Smile—Why Work Overtime?”

Buy Your Men’s Furnishings from Us at New Prices. YOU Will Smile at the Great Reductions. WE will Smile at the Increased Business. Then NONE of US Will be Overworked.

In the fall of 1921, when plans were announced for an American Legion convention in Kansas City, as part of ceremonies to dedicate the site for a colossal new war memorial, Harry at once volunteered his services. As chairman of the decorations committee, he raised money, ordered flags and bunting, and launched a campaign to have every downtown business, trade association, club, every household “show the flag” in what he promised would be the most patriotic gathering ever in the country and one certain to make Kansas City “the most talked about town in the world.” He was brisk, enthusiastic, and effective. The big day was November 1. France sent Marshal Ferdinand Foch; Great Britain sent Admiral Earl David Beatty; Italy, General Armando Diaz; and Belgium, General Baron Jacques, a strapping figure with a pink face and huge cavalryman’s mustache. General Pershing came to town—a thrill for Harry—and Eddie Rickenbacker and Vice President Coolidge, who, reportedly, looked and acted so effacingly vice-presidential that he had trouble gaining admittance to several gatherings. Eighty-five bands marched and sixty thousand men of the American Legion, including former Captain Harry Truman, who was chosen for the honor of presenting flags to the Allied commanders. Foch, whose presence on the reviewing stand electrified the crowds, said he had never seen such a display of feeling, such patient, “almost sacred,” attention from so many people. More than a hundred thousand had turned out.

Later activities, however, were considerably different in spirit. “That,” remembered Harry’s friend and fellow legionnaire, Harry Vaughan, “was when we took the Hotel Baltimore to pieces.” Somebody drove a Texas steer into the hotel lobby. A crap game in the street outside stopped traffic. Eddie McKim could not recall Harry taking part in any of the “high jinks…except he probably looked out of his haberdashery store door and would see some of the ladies’ negligées floating down from the windows of the Muehlebach Hotel. They used to lodge in the trolley wires….”

The goodwill and mutual respect between Harry and Eddie Jacobson, meantime, seemed not to suffer from the strain they were under, though it remained at heart a business friendship. Eddie’s wife sensed a certain distance between the Trumans and the Jacobsons that she took to be a sign of anti-Semitism among Harry’s in-laws. The Wallaces, she said, were considered aristocracy, and under the circumstances the Trumans could not afford to have Jews in their house. But then Harry seldom if ever brought any of his friends home to North Delaware Street. The privacy of Madge Wallace’s world was one thing, the world without was another, and so it would remain.

Truman & Jacobson failed in 1922. After much discussion, the partners decided not to file for bankruptcy—and thereby wipe out their debts—but to try to pay off their creditors as best they could, little by little as time went on. The business was approximately $35,000 in the red. Eddie, who went on the road as a shirt salesman, did all he could to meet his part of the debt, but in three years, unable to keep up, was forced to declare himself bankrupt. Some time later, when the two friends met for lunch downtown, Harry, seeing Eddie’s frayed suit, gave him some money and told him to buy some new clothes. Fifteen years after the store went under, Harry would still be paying off on the haberdashery, and as a consequence would be strapped for money for twenty years. But like his father, he never ever neglected appearances.

The store had been a dismal failure. Yet few thought it Harry’s fault. He was the victim of circumstances, the times were against him. “It was a nice store, and he was just a victim of circumstances like all the rest of us,” remembered former First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde, who was trying to sell Willys-Overland automobiles in Independence. “It was rough, I’ll tell you, it was rough!” The price of wheat in 1922 was 88 cents a bushel.

An exception to this view was Harry’s former Grandview neighbor and Lodge brother Gaylon Babcock, who remembered Harry’s downfall coming as no surprise. To Babcock, whose father had put money in the store, it was just another case of “There goes Harry again.”

Harry blamed the Republicans in Washington. The fault was neither in himself nor in his stars, but in the tight money policy of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, he insisted. But it could also be said that the trouble began in 1920 when the Wilson administration suddenly cut government spending and raised taxes.

III

To his wife Bess, who regarded most of his Army friends as roughnecks, Harry once described Jimmy Pendergast as “a nice boy and as smart as the old man he’s named for.”

The old man in question, the original James Pendergast, was the legendary Alderman Jim, the first Pendergast in Kansas City politics and founding father of what became a famous, or infamous, depending on one’s point of view, Kansas City dynasty. His was a familiar American story. The son of Irish Catholic immigrants who had settled and raised a numerous family in St. Joseph, upstream on the Missouri River, Alderman Jim had come to Kansas City in the centennial year of 1876, a young man with neither money nor connections and in desperate need of a job. He found work first in a slaughterhouse, then in an iron foundry, in the West Bottoms, a roaring industrial section that stretched across the muddy lowlands between the river’s great bend and the bluffs of the city. Jim Pendergast was brawny and gregarious and with his sunny disposition made friends rapidly. He also saved his money and in 1881, after betting on a winning horse called Climax, he purchased a combination hotel and saloon which, in tribute to his lucky horse, he called the Climax. Other saloons were acquired as years passed, these, too, proving popular and profitable, especially with the added attraction of back-room gambling. In addition, Jim Pendergast moved into the wholesale liquor business.

His real love, however, was politics. He was of course a Democrat and a natural vote-getter. In time, with the hardworking, hard-drinking, steadily expanding populace of the West Bottoms, the First Ward, as his base of power, he built Kansas City’s first political organization and made himself boss, a term he disliked. “I’ve got friends,” he would say cheerfully. “And, by the way, that’s all there is to this boss business—friends.” In 1889, Jim brought three younger brothers, Michael, John, and Thomas, on from St. Joseph to help manage things. Three years later, in 1892, he ran for alderman from the First Ward. “There is no kinder hearted or more sympathetic man in Kansas City than Jim Pendergast,” said one devoted Democrat introducing the candidate. It was a reputation not lightly earned.

No deserving man, woman or child that appealed to Jim Pendergast went away empty-handed [remembered a contemporary], and this is saying a great deal, as he was continually giving aid and help to the poor and unfortunate…. There was never a winter in the last twenty years that he did not circulate among the poor of the West Bottoms, ascertaining their needs, and after his visit there were no empty larders. Grocers, butchers, bakers, and coal men had unlimited orders to see that there was no suffering among the poor of the West Bottoms, and to send the bills to Jim Pendergast.

He remained on the city council for eighteen years, never losing an election. He was “Big Jim,” “King of the First,” conspicuously, proudly Irish and Catholic, with a physical resemblance to the great Irish-American hero of the day, prizefighter John L. Sullivan, which did him no harm as a public personality. With his love of good food he had grown to well over 200 pounds. He had a thick, black handlebar mustache, wore small black bow ties and a heavy gold watch chain, and worked steadily for public improvements—parks, boulevards, buildings, all projects that meant work for his people. He fought for higher pay for firemen. He fought the anti-Catholic American Protective Association. He fought the reformers, kept the saloons open and purchased another on Main Street, a block from City Hall, which he made his headquarters. He had courage and a much-loved sense of humor. When a bill was put before the state legislature in Jefferson City that would have prohibited anyone who owned a saloon from holding elective office and reporters asked what he thought of it, Alderman Jim said probably the bill was intended as a way of improving the reputation of saloonkeepers.

With the city growing by leaps and bounds, he reached out more and more to constituencies other than the Irish—to blacks, Poles, Slavs, Croatian slaughterhouse workers, to every immigrant group, and particularly the largest, the Italians, whose stronghold lay beyond the First Ward in the teeming, crime-ridden North End. The peak of his power came after the turn of the century, at the time when the bankrupt Truman family had moved to Kansas City. By then he had picked his own mayor, James A. (“Fighting Jim”) Reed, in addition to nearly every other key office at City Hall. Charges of vote fraud in the First Ward led to investigations that produced no evidence of wrongdoing. “I never needed a crooked vote,” Jim enjoyed telling reporters. “All I want is a chance for my friends to get to the polls.”

Following his death in 1911, a ten-foot bronze statue was erected in Mulkey Square, on the heights overlooking the West Bottoms, a commanding seated figure of Alderman Jim paid for by public subscription and inscribed “to the rugged character and splendid achievements of a man whose private and public life was the embodiment of truth and courage.” Even the Kansas City Star, arch-opponent of machine politics, lamented his passing. His word had been his bond, said the paper. “His support of any man or measure never had a price in cash.”

It was the Pendergast “organization,” however, that stood as Big Jim’s great legacy, and it was to his brother Tom, sixteen years his junior—young enough nearly to have been his son—that he passed the mantle of leadership. “Brother Tom will make a fine alderman, and he’ll be good to the boys—just as I have been,” an ailing Jim had reassured a gathering of patrons at his Main Street saloon. As bookkeeper for the saloons and precinct captain, young Tom had learned the business and politics from the ground up, rising to superintendent of streets, a job second only to mayor in the patronage it offered. At Jim’s retirement, Tom was elected to Jim’s old seat on the city council. But unlike Jim, Tom cared little for public office and retired from the council in 1915, not to run for anything ever again.

Tom—Thomas Joseph Pendergast, or T.J.—was no one to quarrel with. Though only 5 feet 9, he was a blond, ruddy-faced bull of a man, with a head so massive it looked oversized even on so large and powerful a body. His neck seemed part of his heavy shoulders, almost as though he had no neck, and it was well known that he could knock a man senseless with a single blow. Yet for all this, he had a kind of jauntiness, an appealing ease of manner. People spoke of the warmth, not menace, in his large, oddly protruding, pale blue eyes. It was the eyes, in combination with his “hugeness,” according to a close observer named William Reddig, that made Tom look both formidable and engaging. To Reddig, a veteran reporter for the Star, Tom was one of the most arresting figures ever seen in Kansas City, and once seen, never forgotten.

Like his brother, Tom was a saloonkeeper who abhorred drunkenness and drank only an occasional glass of beer. He dutifully attended early mass every morning. He liked to say he had never spent a night away from his wife. Further, as Big Jim had long appreciated, Tom was acutely intelligent.

Though the Pendergast operations had never suffered from lack of money, and money, as often said, was nowhere more useful than in politics, Tom, the bookkeeper, perceived politics as a business opportunity to a degree Jim never had. He acquired more saloons. He expanded the wholesale liquor business. Brother Mike Pendergast, meantime, was made the liquor license inspector for all Jackson County, which gave him the power to say yes or no to the operations of more than six hundred saloons, this naturally depending in no small part on how willingly the proprietors did business with the Pendergasts.

Even more important, as time would tell, was the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company established by Tom, one of the first companies anywhere to mix concrete in a plant, then deliver it by truck to the construction site. With his love of public improvements, Jim had been known as a builder—all the Pendergasts were builders—but Tom, with the city growing as never before, saw no reason why others should profit from the work if the organization could. In addition to the Ready-Mixed Company, he eventually founded or had substantial interest in the W. A. Ross Construction Company, the Midwest Paving Company, the Midwest Precoat Company, the Kansas City Concrete Pipe Company, the Centropolis Crusher Company, a cigar company, an oil company, and something called the Public Service Pulverizing Company. To charges that he used his political power to control contracts and furnish material for public use, Tom would reply, “Yes. Why not? Aren’t my products as good as any?” And, by and large, they were, often better.

Hundreds of people from all walks of life, every level of society, would later testify to the kindness, generosity, and fundamental decency of Tom Pendergast, not to say his impressiveness as a political leader. “He was a master! He had an analytical mind,” said one loyal foot soldier in the organization, a street repair inspector. “He ran the organization for people. His first concern was always people…. He was a man of immense heart and imagination…. He was always courteous. He would always listen you out.” To a young lawyer with no connection to the organization, a single face-to-face meeting with Tom was enough to convince him that “that fellow could probably talk anyone into anything.”

“He did so much for poor people,” it would be said again and again. “Oh, he was a wonderful man. To me he was a Robin Hood,” said a woman for whom he had found a job in a hospital laundry, one of the thousands of jobs he had provided over the years. “No, I never had a sense of evil when I was with him,” remembered a Catholic priest. “The man never exuded a sense of evil.” Even the judge who later sent Pendergast to prison would concede afterward that had he known him, he, too, very likely would have been one of his friends.

Reticent by nature, Tom kept himself to himself, as would be said, and this supposedly was his “edge.” But those associated with him in his long career, including Harry Truman, were to hear certain observations repeated many times:

The amateur failed in politics because politics was concerned with “things as they are.” “Most people don’t think for themselves. They lean on newspapers.” “You can’t make a man good by passing a law that he must be good. It’s against human nature.” Politics, as his brother Jim had so often professed, was primarily a business of friends. “We have the theory that if we do a man a favor he will do us one. That’s human nature.” Few people were ingrates. Ingratitude was a cardinal sin. “Let the river take its course.”

To reporters, with whom he was invariably courteous, he would describe himself only as a realist and claim to know more about how the people felt than anyone in town, or any newspaper. “It’s my business to know.”

As his admirers also liked to point out, Tom Pendergast was not the kind to flaunt his power. He was never seen parading about the courthouse or City Hall. He preferred to run things quietly, keeping tabs on the precincts where the organization was in business 365 days a year.

“Politics is a business, an all-the-year-round competitive business. To the victor belong the spoils. I might as well be honest about it. It may be cynical but that’s the fact. It’s the same locally and nationally. Nobody gets a job on an appointment because he’s a nice fellow. He must deserve it politically. It’s the same as in any other business.”

The pattern of the organization followed the pattern established by law for election purposes. There was a ward leader, a precinct captain for each precinct, and a block leader for every square block within the precinct. The precinct captain was the first person who called on newcomers to the neighborhood, who saw that their water was connected, gas and electricity turned on. Coal in winter, food, clothing, and medical attention were all provided by the organization to whoever was in need at no charge, and as those benefiting from such help would remember fondly, the system involved no paperwork, few delays, no stigma of the dole. “When a man’s in need,” T.J. would lecture, “we don’t ask whether he’s a Republican or Democrat…. We function as nearly as we can 100 percent by making people feel kindly toward us.”

Politics was personal contact. When winter storms hit the city, trucks from the various Pendergast enterprises would arrive in the West Bottoms loaded with overcoats and other warm clothing to be handed out to the homeless, the drunken derelicts, to any and all who were suffering. At Christmas, Tom gave out three thousand free dinners. Many people would remember for the rest of their lives how at the height of the deadly influenza epidemic in 1918-19 and at great personal risk Tom Pendergast had made a personal survey, house to house, to see who needed help.

All that was expected in return was gratitude expressed at the polls on election day. And to most of his people this seemed little enough to ask and perfectly proper. Many, too, were happy to be “repeaters,” those who voted “early and often” on election day. The woman who worked in the hospital laundry, as an example, started as a repeater at age eighteen, three years shy of the voting age, and enjoyed every moment. She and several others would dress up in different costumes for each new identity, as they were driven from polling place to polling place in a fine, big car. It was like play-acting, she remembered years later. She would vote at least four or five times before the day ended. “Oh, I knew it was illegal, but I certainly never thought it was wrong.”

But for all his sway and subsequent notoriety as the machine overlord of Kansas City, Tom Pendergast was not without rivals. His power was as yet limited, even as late as the 1920s. In opposition was another Democratic faction led by another exceedingly adroit, popular Irish-Catholic politician named Joseph B. Shannon. In the parlance of Jackson County, Pendergast Democrats were the “Goats,” whereas Shannon’s people were the “Rabbits,” and both sides proudly so. The names began, supposedly, because the poverty-stricken families aligned with Alderman Jim had kept goats on the bluffs above the West Bottoms, while the Shannon people occupied a territory overrun by rabbits. It was also said that once on a march to a political convention Alderman Jim had roared, “When we come over the hill like goats, they’ll run like rabbits.” In any event, Joe Shannon was nothing like a rabbit in temperament. He was smooth, well dressed, and handsome in much the way Warren G. Harding was handsome. He was also quite as fearless as any Pendergast and had both the pluck and personality to inspire a following. And since the Republicans rarely had support enough to carry a general election in the county, the real knockdown contests were always in the primaries, among Democrats, where the lines were sharply drawn. Every Democrat counted himself either a Goat or a Rabbit, whether in town or out in the country. John Truman in his time had been a Goat and it was his Goat friends at the Independence Courthouse who made him a road overseer. So in that sense John Truman had been a Pendergast man, as was Harry briefly when he replaced his father as overseer.

The difference in the two factions was mainly a matter of style. The Goats liked to win with strength, with big turnouts on election day. The Rabbits were known for their cleverness. But both sides could play rough—with money or by calling out the saloon bullies. Strong-arm tactics at the polls, ballot-stuffing, ballot-box theft, the buying of votes with whiskey or cash, bloody, headlong street brawls, all the odious stratagems that had made big-city machine politics notorious since the time of New York’s Boss Tweed, had been brought to bear to determine which side within the party gained the upper hand. “Stealing elections had become a high art,” wrote one man, “refined and streamlined by the constant factional battles….” And the prize at stake always was power—jobs, influence, money, “business,” as Tom Pendergast would say. It was “the game” played by “the boys” with zest, and never over such issues of reform as inspired periodic Republican or independent citizens’ crusades. That the Republicans so rarely ever triumphed was taken by Democrats, whether Rabbit or Goat, as proof that Republican bosses just weren’t as smart as a Joe Shannon or a Tom Pendergast.

Years before, in the time of Alderman Jim, a landmark bargain had been struck, largely because Alderman Jim had at last concluded that the Rabbits were there to stay. He and Shannon reached what became known as the Fifty-Fifty Agreement, whereby the prize of patronage after every election was to be divided evenly, no matter which faction won, thereby guaranteeing that neither side could ever lose. But Goat and Rabbit loyalties remained strong all the same, the battles continued. Politics, after all, in the words of one Casimir Welch, a tough ward boss of “Rabbit persuasion,” was “a game for fighters.”

To every Goat Tom Pendergast was the Big Boss, while his brother Mike was the “enforcer of loyalty.” Mike was hard and combative, yet a charmer when he wished, or at least an easier man to talk to than Tom. Mike, who ran the “Bloody Tenth” Ward, liked to get out and see people, in contrast to Tom, who preferred to stay in his cubbyhole office off the lobby of the somewhat disreputable Jefferson Hotel, another Pendergast enterprise. They were different in appearance as well. Mike stood six feet tall. He was broad-shouldered and slim, his hips so narrow that to keep his trousers in place he felt obliged to wear both belt and suspenders. Mike had a resolute, chiseled look, strong chin, and eyes of an even paler blue than Tom’s. He was really quite a handsome man. His great flaw, as everyone knew, was his temper. He was a “tenacious fighting type of the old school,” a hothead who hated double talk and compromise, which was why Alderman Jim had passed him over and put Tom at the head of the organization. There was never any halfway ground with Mike. As was said, you were either with him or against him. He detested all Rabbits and was credited with claiming their extinction as among his foremost ambitions. One Saturday he had walked alone into a saloon famous for being a Rabbit stronghold, and after inviting a half-dozen men to join him for a drink at the bar, for a toast to the spirit of Fifty-Fifty, he hurled his glass in their faces, only to be jumped and severely beaten. But it had all been worth it, Mike said afterward.

Because of his closeness to Tom, who called him “Michael,” Mike’s views were invariably taken as Tom’s own, and this gave him a standing second to none except Tom. Also, besides the Tenth Ward, Mike had responsibility for what was called the country vote, the whole outlying eastern section of the county that included such towns as Grandview, Lee’s Summit, and Independence. (For some reason, as Harry Truman would recall, Tom Pendergast had no interest in the country vote.) In addition, most importantly, Mike had produced the heir apparent. Tom had three children, but two were girls and his only son was still, in the early 1920s, a small child. Mike, however, had a daughter and six sons, the oldest of whom was being groomed to take over. He was Harry’s friend Jim Pendergast, and it was pleasant-mannered, pleasant-looking Jim who one day brought his father around to the haberdashery on 12th Street to meet Harry Truman.

The time of the meeting was probably the late fall or early winter of 1921, which was still several months before the final collapse of Truman & Jacobson but well past the point when Harry knew the business was doomed.

They wanted to know if Harry would like to run for eastern judge of Jackson County, a courthouse job in Independence, which under the Missouri system was not a judicial post but administrative, the equivalent of a county commissioner, and a prime spot politically, which Harry already understood. With three judges on the court—an eastern judge (for the outlying country), a western judge (for Kansas City), and a presiding judge—having one vote of the three was worth a great deal, if only for trading purposes. The judges had control of the county purse strings. They hired and controlled the road overseers, as well as road gangs, county clerks, and other employees numbering in the hundreds. They could also determine who was awarded county contracts, and for the county road system, such as it was, there seemed a never-ending need for maintenance and repairs.

According to Pendergast family tradition, the idea of running Harry was Jim’s alone, and, interestingly, his father gave his consent even before meeting Harry because, in part, of what he knew of John Truman. If Captain Truman was all Jim said, and he was John Truman’s son, then, providing he had no link to the Ku Klux Klan or any such anti-Catholic faction, Captain Truman was all right with Mike.

Harry accepted their offer at once, with no hesitation. To a friend he wrote, “They are trying to run me for Eastern Judge, out in Independence, and I guess they’ll do it before they are through.” This was in a letter dated February 4, 1922, suggesting the anonymous “they” already had things so well in hand there could be no turning back. At a meeting at Mike’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club, Harry sat quietly as Mike, who disliked making speeches, got up and said, “Now, I’m going to tell you who you are going to be for, for county judge. It’s Harry Truman. He’s got a fine war record. He comes from a fine family. He’ll make a fine judge.”

Had he wished, Mike could also have stressed that Harry Truman was a Baptist and a Mason who could talk farming with farmers as no big-city Irish politician ever could, that Harry was of old pioneer stock, the son of an honest farmer and an honest road overseer, that Harry was a fresh face in county politics, and, not incidentally, known himself to be an honest and honorable man—strong attributes under any circumstances, but ideal for what the organization needed to win the country vote. Indeed, for the Pendergasts’ purposes, Harry Truman was just about ideal, a dream candidate, which is what led some to observe then, as later, that he offered more to the Pendergasts than they to him.

“Old Tom Pendergast wanted to have some window-dressing,” Harry’s friend Harry Vaughan would later explain, “and Truman was really window-dressing for him because he could say, ‘Well, there’s my boy Truman. Nobody can ever say anything about Truman. Everybody thinks he’s okay.’ ”

For Harry, the timing could not have been better. He badly needed rescuing. To some latter-day admirers and students of his career, the suggestion that he turned to politics in desperation, because of his business failure, would be unacceptable, a fiction devised to cast him in the worst possible light. It would be stressed that his interest in politics was longstanding, that the Pendergasts had come to him, not he to them, and that in any event their power then was by no means absolute, hardly enough to dictate a political destiny. And all this was true. Yet to Harry himself there was never much question about the actual state of his affairs or to whom he owed the greatest debt of gratitude.

“Went into business all enthusiastic. Lost all I had and all I could borrow,” he would write in a private memoir. “Mike Pendergast picked me up and put me into politics and I’ve been lucky.” Mike was nothing less than his “political mentor,” continued Harry. “I loved him as I did my own daddy.”

He remembered he had been standing behind the counter “feeling fairly blue” the day Mike and Jim came into the store. What he wished to make especially clear was not that the Pendergasts had played no part of consequence, or that he had little indebtedness to them, but that it was Mike, not Tom, the Big Boss, whose interest made the difference. Harry was not even to meet Tom Pendergast for some time to come.

The job of eastern judge paid $3,465 a year. If elected, Harry would serve two years.

His Army friends were nearly unanimous for the idea. Only a few tried to dissuade him. Eddie McKim, his former sergeant, told him he was crazy. When Harry sat down with Edgar Hinde, in Hinde’s Willys-Overland garage in Independence, to explain what he was about to do—grinning, as Hinde recalled—Hinde told him he wasn’t the political type, to which Harry responded, “Well, I’ve got to eat.”

To sample opinion among those of the older generation who had influence in Independence, Harry called on Colonel William Southern, editor of the Examiner. Colonel Southern, whose rank was strictly honorary, was the father of May Southern Wallace, Bess’s brother George’s wife, which, in a manner of speaking, made him one of the family, as well as someone whose goodwill and backing could matter significantly. A short, pink-faced, cigar-chewing man with a goatee, who customarily wore his hat at his desk, the colonel listened patiently to Harry, then told him what a fool he would be to “mess up” his life with politics. “I told him all the bad effect a life of chronic campaigning could have on a man,” he would later recount. “I told him how poor were its rewards…how undermining the constant need for popular approval could be to a man’s character.” Harry, smiling, only shook his head and said he had made up his mind.

What opinions Bess had, what her mother was saying privately, or Mamma Truman thought, are not recorded. Ethel Noland, it is known, strongly approved and would later explain Harry’s willingness to take up with the Pendergasts as succinctly as anyone would: “They always like to pick winners, and they endorsed him. And, indeed, if he hadn’t been endorsed by the machine he couldn’t have run. He was very grateful to them….”

IV

Candidate Truman opened his campaign two months short of his thirty-eighth birthday, March 8, 1922, at a rousing, foot-stamping rally of war veterans in an auditorium at Lee’s Summit. About three hundred people turned out for speeches, free cigars, and music, and to see Harry Truman launched, ostensibly, as the American Legion candidate, an idea acclaimed as admirably new and progressive. (“If they [the veterans] want to mix in politics it is their right and when they take such matters into their hands they will settle affairs of state as they settled the Kaiser’s in France,” said the Lee’s Summit Journal.) The Battery D “Irish bunch” were there in force, along with a “sprinkling” of Pendergast people. Harry, when introduced by former Colonel E. M. Stayton, another veteran of the Argonne, said he was willing to run and was only just able to say that, so “thoroughly rattled” was he by stage fright. “That first meeting was a flop for me,” he would recall long years afterward. “I was scared worse than I was when I first came under fire in 1918.” But his speech was all the crowd wanted. The highlight of the evening came when Ethel Lee Buxton of Kansas City, who had been a Red Cross entertainer in France, sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” then closed with “Mother Machree.”

Another evening Harry spoke at Grandview, another from a rough wooden platform in front of the Hickman’s Mills church, and on neither occasion was he able to say much more than that he was in the race and welcomed the support of his friends. At Hickman’s Mills the introduction was made by his old neighbor O. V. Slaughter, who had headed the Jackson County Red Cross during the war and was now president of the Grandview Bank, the kind of man who knew senators and governors, yet remained “strictly and primarily” a farmer. Gray-bearded, he looked like an old-style patriarch, and though seldom known to speak in public, he was considered highly persuasive when he did. One line only would be remembered from his remarks. “I knew Harry Truman before he was born,” he said, and to others who had known John and Matt Truman, or who, like Slaughter, remembered Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, no stronger endorsement could have been spoken. Reportedly there were only three votes in the precinct against Harry.

Four other Democrats were in the race—a farmer and road overseer named Thomas Parent; an Independence businessman, James V. Compton; another Independence man, George W. Shaw, who was a road contractor; and Emmett Montgomery, a banker from Blue Springs—and all were thought formidable opponents. Parent had the support of a former judge, a flashy politician named Miles Bulger, who was neither Rabbit nor Goat but a spoiler. Compton had served previously on the court and could stress the value of experience. Shaw was known to be honest, which, as Harry said, was considered unique in a contractor. But the man to beat was Emmett Montgomery, the Rabbit candidate.

Harry Truman stood for better roads and a return to sound management of county business. The most that could be said for his early speeches was that they were brief. One, at a night rally at Sugar Creek, an oil refinery town in the lowlands by the river just north of Independence, was remembered by Edgar Hinde as “the poorest effort of a speech I ever heard in my life. I suffered for him.” But as the weeks wore on, and with the oncoming summer and the increased demands of a “hot race,” the speeches improved somewhat. “If you’re going to be in politics,” Harry later reflected, “you have to learn to explain to people what you stand for, and to learn to stand up in front of a crowd and talk was just something I had to do, so I went ahead and did it.”

Edgar Hinde, Eddie McKim, Tom Murphy, and Ted Marks worked steadily, knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, showing up wherever and whenever needed. “We’d do whatever was necessary to help Harry,” remembered Tom Murphy, who had been a sergeant in Battery D. As the campaign went on, Murphy, McKim, and the others put out a flyer proclaiming Harry Truman “the best liked and the most beloved Captain, officer in France or elsewhere.”

Frank and George Wallace lent a hand. Harry’s former Latin teacher, Ardelia Hardin Palmer, organized a door-to-door canvass in Independence to bring out the women’s vote, a new element in the political picture.

Harry spoke at White Oak, Raytown, Lone Jack, Englewood, and Blue Springs. He covered every township and precinct, driving himself in the old four-cylinder Dodge over roads so rough he had to put sacks of cement in the trunk for ballast, to keep the car from slamming him through the windshield.

The main event of the political summer took place in July, a picnic at Oak Grove attended by four thousand people, twice the number expected. Every Democratic candidate was scheduled to speak. As a way of giving Harry added attention, Eddie McKim arranged for him to arrive by airplane. Harry and the pilot, another war veteran named Clarence England, sailed over the crowd in the open cockpits of a two-seat Jenny of the kind flown in France. After circling several times, dropping leaflets, they landed in a pasture beside the picnic ground, stopping with difficulty just short of a barbed-wire fence. As the crowd rushed forward, the candidate climbed out, leaned over the fence, and became violently ill. Apparently it had been his first ride in a plane. He then proceeded to the rostrum.

It was by far the largest crowd he had ever faced and an opportunity, he knew, such as he had not been given before. He was the last to speak. “I am now going to tell you what I stand for and why you should vote for me,” he began in a flat, rapid voice. “The time has arrived for some definite policy to be pursued in regard to our highways and our finances. They are so closely connected with our tax problem that if they are properly cared for the tax problem will care for itself….”

Eddie McKim, remembering earlier appearances in the campaign, thought Harry had come a long way. A style was evolving. Having stated the problem, he proceeded to a solution joined to a fundamental philosophy plainly expressed.

“I want men for road overseers who know roads and who want work—men who will do a day’s work for a day’s pay, who will work for the county as they would for themselves. I would rather have 40 road men for overseers who are willing to work than to have 60 politicians who care nothing about work. I believe that honest work for the county is the best politics anyway.”

Running the county into debt was bad business and bad politics, he said. He wanted it stopped.

Thus far in the campaign only one charge had been brought against him—that in an election in 1920 he had voted for a Republican, Major John Miles, who had been his superior officer at the Argonne. It was the worst his opponents had been able to come up with, and given the spirit of Jackson County politics, it was a serious charge. He chose the moment now to explain himself.

“You have heard it said that I voted for John Miles as County Marshal. I’ll plead guilty…along with 5,000 other ex-soldiers. I was closer to John Miles than a brother. I have seen him in places that would make hell look like a playground.” His tone was flat no longer.

I have seen him stick to his guns when Frenchmen were falling back. I have seen him hold the American line when only John Miles and his three batteries were between the Germans and a successful counterattack. He was of the right stuff and a man who didn’t vote for his comrade under circumstances such as these would be untrue to himself and to his country. My record has been searched and this is all my opponents can say about me and you knowing the facts can appreciate my position. I know that every soldier understands it. I have no apology to make for it. John Miles and my comrades in arms are closer than brothers to me. There is no way to describe the feeling. But my friend John is the only Republican I ever voted for and I don’t think that counts against me.

At that moment, for many who were listening, the primary election for eastern judge was over, and Harry Truman had won.

No county election in years had aroused such interest, a phenomenon attributed by some to the novelty of the women’s vote. Harry, however, was dwelling more and more on what the influence might be of the Ku Klux Klan, the growing strength of which was another sign of the times. Crosses had been burned near Lee’s Summit. Klan membership was growing in Independence and two of his opponents, Parent and Shaw, had Klan support. Edgar Hinde urged Harry to sign up with the Klan, to join immediately, convinced it was “good politics.” Hinde himself had already joined, “to see what was going on, you know,” as he later explained. A Klan organizer named “Jones” told him to bring Harry in any time, saying it was all Harry had to do to guarantee Klan backing.

Harry refused at first, but then gave Hinde $10 for membership. “Jones” insisted on meeting Harry privately at the Baltimore Hotel and Harry agreed. But when at the meeting “Jones” told him he would get no support unless he promised never to hire Catholics if elected, Harry ended the discussion. He had commanded a mostly Catholic battery in France, he said, and he would give jobs to whomever he saw fit. Apparently the $10 was returned.

It had been a grievous mistake ever to have said he would join in the first place. It was an act either of amazing naivete, or one revealing a side he had not shown before, a willingness under pressure to sacrifice principle for ambition. Either way the whole incident was shabby and out of character, and hardly good politics. How he thought Klan support might offset the devastating effect such an alliance would have on the Pendergasts—not to say the effect on his own beloved “Irish bunch”—is difficult to imagine.

In his defense later, it would be said that the Klan in 1922 seemed still a fairly harmless organization to which a good God-fearing patriot might naturally be attracted, that it offered a way for those who felt at odds with the changes sweeping the country to make known their views. Yet only the year before Harry had lent his support to a Masonic effort to suppress the Klan in St. Louis. He had to have known what the Klan was about. William Reddig of the Star would remember Jackson County Klansmen of the time as anything but good fellows. “They didn’t just hate Catholics, Jews, and Negroes,” Reddig wrote. “They hated everybody.”

A rumor was now circulated by the Klan that Harry’s grandfather, Solomon Young, was a Jew. At a Klan meeting in Independence just before the primary on August 1, a guest speaker from Atlanta said Harry Truman was less than 100 percent American—that is, not sufficiently opposed to Catholics and Jews. Edgar Hinde stood up and protested. There were shouts to throw him out. A friend of Harry’s from Grandview named Toliver rose to say they could throw him out, too, which, as Hinde remembered, had a “cooling influence.” But the Klan’s previous indifference to the Truman candidacy had ended.

He said later it was the soldier vote plus “kinfolks in nearly every precinct” that put him over. He would talk of being “accidentally” elected and suggest that his failure with the haberdashery also had an important influence. “Most people were broke and they sympathized with a man in politics who admitted his financial condition.” Others close to the campaign said the deciding factor was Harry Truman. People liked him—and largely because he so obviously liked them and being among them.

Privately, Harry was disappointed in the efforts of the Pendergast people in his behalf. He had expected more.

The campaign ended with a big Saturday night rally at the courthouse. On election day cars covered with placards were busy back and forth across town bringing people to the polls. “The smell of old ’alky, hooch, and ‘good’ whiskey is on the breath of many a man,” wrote Colonel Southern, a teetotaler.

As the day wore on, the rough play began. At a polling place at Fairmont Junction, close to the Kansas City line, an armed gang of Shannon henchmen tried to make off with the ballot box before the Pendergast people could get to it, only to be confronted by two deputy marshals who had rushed to the scene on orders from Harry’s Republican friend, Marshal John Miles. Guns were drawn, when suddenly Shannon himself materialized out of the shadows and with the barrel of Deputy John W. Gibson’s 45-caliber automatic pressing on his ample stomach, announced it would be best if everybody quieted down and went home. Had Shannon’s men succeeded in their mission, Harry would most likely have lost the election. As it was he defeated the Rabbit candidate, Emmett Montgomery, by a bare 279 votes out of a total (for all five in the race) of more than 11,000.

It was “the damn Republicans” who were to blame, Joe Shannon complained bitterly. If they had only kept out of things, Harry Truman would never have won. Probably that was so. Deputy Gibson, the man with the 45, was, like John Miles, a veteran of the 129th Field Artillery.

V

The fall electi on was a formality only—every Democrat won—and on New Year’s Day, 1923, in a ceremony at the courthouse, the new county court was seated. The other two judges were Elihu Hayes and Henry McElroy. Hayes was the presiding judge, and though a Rabbit, “a fine old gentleman” in Harry’s estimate. McElroy, the new western judge, was a through-and-through Goat and close associate of Tom Pendergast, a spare, bucktoothed, ambitious businessman commonly praised for his efficiency. The huge basket of red roses in the courtroom was the gift of McElroy admirers from Little Italy.

To be called “Judge” pleased Harry immensely. He enjoyed the prestige of the job and the way people greeted him as he walked briskly to and from the courthouse. He had rank again.

As presiding judge, Elihu Hayes should have been the dominant figure and leader of the court, and by the Fifty-Fifty Agreement his Rabbit friends looked forward to an equal share in county jobs and every other form of largess under the court’s control. Things did not work out that way, however. It was Henry McElroy who took charge from the start and McElroy showed no desire to give anything to the Rabbits. With Judge Truman voting with him, there was not much to keep McElroy from having his way. (“He ran the court with my vote,” Harry later said.) The roster of road overseers was filled with Goats only. Goats were named to county jobs large and small. Rabbits already on the payroll were always the first to be fired.

The old adage of Andrew Jackson, that to the victors belong the spoils, was gospel again in Jackson County, Missouri. The decision had come down from the Pendergasts. Fifty-Fifty was finished. And though in hindsight Harry would see the peril in this, at the time he did not. He was preoccupied with being businesslike, concentrating on cost cuts, improvements in services, determined to perform as promised.

He also knew what pleasure the plight of the Rabbits was bringing to his mentor, Mike Pendergast.

“We ran the county, but we ran it carefully and on an economic basis,” Harry claimed later, and in truth the new court stood in striking contrast with what had gone on before under the renegade Miles Bulger. Under McElroy and Truman a county debt of more than a million dollars was cut in half. The county’s credit rating improved. So did county services and, most notably, the quality of work on the roads. Harry Truman, as he later boasted, made himself “completely familiar with every road and bridge…visited every state institution in which the county had patients.” Years of mismanagement and crooked contracts had produced roads so poorly constructed that they caved in like pie crusts. Bridges were inadequate or in sad repair. The improvements made now were impossible to ignore. Even the Kansas City Star had praise for what was happening under the crisp, efficient new county administration. And if Harry was taking McElroy’s cue on matters political, McElroy appeared no less dependent on Harry on practical questions. “When a road project or a bridge application is brought before the county court, here is what happens,” wrote one Republican. “Judge McElroy turns to Judge Truman and asks him what about it. Nine times out of ten Judge Truman already has been on the ground and knows all about the proposition. He explains it to the court. Judge McElroy then says, ‘All right, if you say so I move the work be done,’ and it is ordered.”

At a Triangle Club lunch at the Muehlebach Hotel, Judges Hayes, McElroy, and Truman were given a standing ovation. It seemed a new era had dawned.

But the job, Harry discovered, wasn’t enough to satisfy. To his surprise, he felt restless for more to do. He wanted other ways to make himself known, other associations beyond “the courthouse crowd.” He grew increasingly active in the Masons and the Army reserve. He became Deputy Grand Master of the 59th Masonic District of Jackson County. The summer of 1923 he spent two weeks on active duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, his first long separation from Bess since their wedding day. In September he enrolled in night courses at the Kansas City School of Law, where he studied hard (Blackstone, contracts, criminal law), keeping pages of notes. Only someone of extraordinary energy could have maintained the pace.

Meantime, life at home at 219 North Delaware—the Gates house, as Harry would always refer to it—went on quietly and privately. Bess had taken no part in his political campaign because, as known only within the family, she had suffered a second miscarriage. The first had occurred the spring of 1920, when prospects were still bright at the store, and nothing had been said then either. With friends Harry left no doubt that he and Bess wanted children but implied that if there was a problem it was with him. When a cousin, Ralph Truman, wrote from Springfield to say he had a new child, Harry responded, “I wish you would send me a pair of your old breeches to hang on the bed, maybe I can have some luck.”

His devotion to Bess was unstinting as ever and because of their separation the summer of 1923, when he was at Fort Leavenworth and they were again corresponding, it is known how much she, too, cared for her “Old Sweetness.”

“It is now 10:20 and I am in bed. There was a black bug on my bed when I turned the sheet down and I had to kill it myself—but that wasn’t the first time I had wished for you,” she wrote. “Lots and lots of good night kisses.”

She would wait for hours by the front window watching for the postman. A night toward the end of the two weeks was “the worst night yet.”

“You be a good girl and I’ll be a good boy,” he wrote. A week later he was saying he hoped he would never have to be away so long again. He was feeling “marvelous,” he told her, ready to come home and “lick all the Rabbits.”

As they both knew, she was already two months pregnant.

The arrival of the baby, in the midst of a snowstorm, Sunday, February 17, 1924, was, with the exception of his wedding day, the biggest event of Harry Truman’s life thus far, and the one bright moment in what otherwise was to be a bad year for him.

He had urged Bess to go to a hospital. She and her mother insisted the baby be born at home. Out of superstition that too much advance fuss could again bring disappointment, there was not even a crib or cradle at hand. The baby would spend the first days of life on pillows in a bureau drawer.

About noon, Harry was told to call the doctor, Charles E. Krimminger, a big red-faced man remembered for his huge hands—“hands as big as a frying pan”—who came in covered with snow and went directly upstairs. A practical nurse, Edna Kinnaman, arrived soon after and would remember Mrs. Wallace and Harry waiting patiently through the afternoon in the upstairs hall, the very proper Mrs. Wallace seated on a cedar chest, Harry in a chair looking amazingly composed.

Bess, according to Nurse Kinnaman, “got along beautifully.” It was a normal birth. The baby, a girl, weighed 7½ pounds. “We didn’t have to announce it [when the baby arrived]…because they heard her cry and the grandmother and daddy came into the room.” It was five o’clock. Harry called his mother and sister and told them the name would be Mary Margaret, after Mary Jane and Mrs. Wallace. The wife of a friend who saw him soon afterward said “his face just beamed.”

There had not been a baby in the old house since Madge Wallace’s own childhood. Now, for several months, until the death of Mrs. Gates that spring, there were four generations in residence. Little Margaret, as everybody was calling her, was more than just Bess and Harry’s firstborn, she was the delight and center of attention for great-grandmother, grandmother, four Wallace aunts and uncles in the adjoining houses to the rear who remained childless, Uncle Fred, who was still part of the household, and the two Noland sisters across the street. Her arrival changed the entire atmosphere of the family. For Harry, on the verge of forty, life had new meaning. Nurse Kinnaman remembered his devotion to the child was both remarkable and instantaneous.

For Democrats everywhere it was a dismal time. At the national convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden the delegates took a record 103 ballots to pick an unknown, unlikely Wall Street lawyer as their candidate for President, John W. Davis, who seemed destined to lose. A drive to nominate the colorful Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, had failed, along with a resolution to denounce the Ku Klux Klan. When William Jennings Bryan tried to speak, he was rudely shouted down. To the Jackson County delegation it was a pathetic show. The single ray of hope was Franklin Roosevelt, who, though crippled with polio, made the nominating speech for Smith. Tom Pendergast was “carried away” by it and said Roosevelt would have been the choice of the convention had he been physically able to withstand the campaign. “He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met,” Pendergast later declared.

The Republicans, to the surprise of no one, nominated Calvin Coolidge, who had assumed the presidency the year before, after the sudden death of Warren G. Harding. And though the Harding administration had left a trail of scandal, giving the Democrats a promising campaign issue, Coolidge, who sat out the campaign in the White House, was to win in November by a popular margin of nearly two to one.

If Judge Truman saw actual defeat in store when he began to campaign for reelection that spring, he never let on. As friends were to observe so many times in his life, Harry refused ever to look discouraged. The remedy of “Dr. A. Gloom Chaser” was not forgotten. “He kept his feelings to himself,” remembered a young Pendergast worker named Tom Evans, “and he was always very, very cheerful….”

The Shannon forces, bitter over how they had been treated, burning for revenge, lined up with the Ku Klux Klan to try to beat both McElroy and Truman in the primary—the fact that Joe Shannon was a Catholic, the fact that Shannon personally spoke out against the Klan at the national convention, all notwithstanding. When McElroy and Truman won in the primary, Shannon quietly decided to bolt the ticket in the fall and throw his support, with that of the Klan, to the Republicans.

That Harry Truman survived the primary, winning by more than 1,000 votes, was impressive under the circumstances, and due in good measure to all-out support from the Kansas City Star. Putting aside its distaste for Pendergast for the moment, the paper had declared candidates McElroy and Truman superior public servants. It seemed inconceivable, said the Star, that the Democrats could care more about “factional advantage” than efficiency in public office. “The record of the county court of Jackson County is refreshing…. Expenditures of the court last year were more than $640,000 less than those of the previous year. To date the deficit has been reduced nearly one half, and there is now a cash balance of more than a quarter of a million dollars.” Harry Truman, said the Independence Sentinel, was the very model of a public man. “To even talk about throwing him out of office after two years of faithful service would be to destroy the incentive for a public official to make good,” declared the paper, and the Star agreed, saying everyone who believed in good government should vote for Judge Harry Truman.

In the same issue of the Star the local head Klansman, Todd George, announced that his organization was “unalterably opposed” to Harry Truman. Later, Harry said the Klan had threatened to kill him. When the Klan staged a big outdoor, daylight rally at Lee’s Summit, Harry decided to drive out and confront them. Perhaps a thousand people were gathered, many of whom he knew. “I poured it into them,” he remembered. “Then I came down from the platform and walked through them to my car.” On the way home, he met another car headed for the rally filled with “my gang” armed with shotguns and baseball bats. Had they come earlier, he knew, things might have become very unpleasant.

The Republican nominee for eastern judge was Henry Rummel, the Independence harnessmaker who, years before, had made the special equipage for the team of red goats to pull the Truman children in a miniature farm wagon. Harry, who liked “old man” Rummel and respected him, said nothing against him in the campaign.

Rummel won. Harry was out of a job again, and McElroy also. Harry showed no sign of bitterness. The morning after the election, on a corner near the square, seeing a friend, Henry Chiles, who had worked hard with the Rabbits for Rummel, he crossed the street to shake hands and say there should be no hard feelings. When Chiles expressed regret over the part he had played in defeating Harry, saying he felt ashamed of himself, Harry told him to put it out of his mind. “You did what your gang told you and I did what my gang told me.” That was the way it was in politics.

Cousin Ralph Truman, in a letter of encouragement, said that were Harry to run again in two years he would win by a landslide, a conclusion Harry had already reached on his own.

In the intervening time, he became something of a man of affairs in Kansas City. From an office in the Board of Trade Building, he began selling memberships in the Kansas City Automobile Club, working on commission, which, after expenses, came to approximately five dollars for every new member he recruited. In a year he had sold more than a thousand memberships and cleared $5,000, which, with a family to support and debts to pay, he greatly needed. Roads, highways, the new age of the automobile had become his specialty. He was named president of the National Old Trails Association, a nonprofit group dedicated to building highways along the country’s historic trails and to spreading the concept of history as a tourist attraction. (Writing from Kansas during one of many trips in behalf of the group, he told Bess, “This is almost like campaigning for President, except that the people are making promises to me instead of the other way around.”) He kept up contacts with old friends, stayed active in the Masons and the Army reserve. Only his interest in law school seemed to suffer. After nearly two years of work there, he dropped out.

In times past, during the early days of the Morgan Oil Company, he had been described as constantly surrounded by people—“people, people, people.” It was the same again now. Ted Marks would remember him everlastingly on the move. “If one thing did not work—he’d get into something else right away. He was never idle, always operating.”

One thing he got into was another of his mistakes. With Colonel Stayton, Spencer Salisbury, and several others he took over a tottering little bank called the Citizens Security, in Englewood, adjacent to Independence. He and his partners soon discovered they had been lied to about its assets. Reporting the situation at once, they got out as quickly as possible, selling their interest to new management. No one made money in the transaction. There is no evidence of wrongdoing. But the bank failed soon afterward and its new president, B. M. Houchens, a brother of Harry’s high school classmate Fielding Houchens, killed himself in his garage. To many people the whole episode seemed shadowy and left bad memories.

A further venture involved selling stock in the new Community Savings and Loan Association of Independence, and in this, too, Spencer Salisbury was in league—a sign, many were to say later, that Harry was not always the best judge of character when it came to his friends. Another of the Argonne brotherhood, Salisbury belonged to an old, well-to-do Independence family and was a lifelong operator, lively, talkative, and “smart,” by reputation, though “a little slick.” Tall and spare, he was known to those who knew him best as “Snake-eye” Salisbury. Even his own sister would remember him as “kind of a cold bird.” Asked long afterward why Harry ever associated himself with the man, Edgar Hinde replied, “Anybody who’s ever been a friend of his…they’ve got to hit him right in the face before he’ll drop them. And I think that’s one of Harry’s big faults.”

Salisbury was cheating him in the business, Harry concluded after a while, and so withdrew, saying nothing publicly. Only in private did he vent his anger, writing some years later that Salisbury “used me for his own ends, robbed me, got me into a position where I couldn’t shoot him without hurting a lot of innocent bystanders, and laughed at me. It nearly makes me a pessimist.” He had never had an enemy before.

Seeing Harry Truman go on to bigger and better things in later years, Salisbury would refer to him as “a no-good bastard.” But Truman by then had used his influence in Washington to put federal investigators on to Salisbury’s subsequent business activities in Independence, with the result that Salisbury spent fifteen months in Leavenworth prison. In turn, a few years after that, it was Salisbury, an avowed member of the Klan, who told reporters that Harry Truman had definitely joined the Klan, which was a lie and potent enough to carry far.

Between times, in the years 1925 and ’26, Harry kept in close touch with Jim and Mike Pendergast. On pleasant evenings he would drive into town to sit and talk for hours on Mike’s big front porch on Park Avenue. Mike thought Harry should run next time for county collector, an appealing prospect since the job offered an inordinately high salary of $10,000 plus allotted fees that could mean that much again. But then Mike took Harry to meet Tom, who said he had already promised the job to someone who had been with the organization longer than Harry. Tom thought that Harry, with his experience on the court, would be better suited for presiding judge, which had a salary of $6,000. Mike advised Harry to fight for the collector’s job, if that was what he wanted, but Harry thought it better to do as Tom wished.

For Harry, this apparently was the first face-to-face encounter with the Big Boss. It took place early in 1926, in Tom’s office at 1908 Main Street, the new headquarters for the Jackson Democratic Club, a nondescript two-story building of pale yellow brick that Tom had had put up beside the small Monroe Hotel, which he also owned. The neighborhood was one of drab little stores, cheap restaurants, and machine shops, anything but a center of power by appearances. The big banks, office towers, and department stores, all that visitors took as emblematic of Kansas City wealth and vitality, were six or seven blocks to the north. The club’s meeting room and Tom’s office were on the second floor, over a wholesale linen supply store. The aura of the narrow stairway, a flight of twenty wooden steps, was about that of the approach to a dance studio or tailor shop.

So it was settled. Harry would run for presiding judge, and since the Pendergasts and Joe Shannon had by now patched up their differences, there was never much doubt about the outcome. Harry ran in the primary unopposed. In November, he and the entire Democratic slate swept into office. Henry McElroy became the new city manager of Kansas City. As presiding judge, Harry Truman himself had real authority at last.

VI

The term of office was four years, rather than two, and he served two consecutive terms, eight years, from January 1927 to January 1935. His performance was outstanding, as judged by nearly everyone—civic leaders, business people (Republicans included), fellow politicians, the press, students of government (then and later) and, emphatically, by the electorate. In the 1926 election he won by 16,000 votes. When he ran again for presiding judge in 1930, his margin of victory was 58,000.

Something unusual had happened, said the Independence Examiner halfway through his first term: “No criticism or scandals of any importance have been brought with the county court as a center and no political charges of graft and corruption have been made against it.” The Star praised him for his “enthusiastic devotion to county affairs.” Harry Truman was efficient, known to be always informed. “Here was a man you could talk to that knew what was going on, and knew what ought to be done about it,” said a representative of the Kansas City Civic Research Institute. At a conference on better state and local government sponsored by the University of Missouri at Columbia, an editor of the St. Louis Star-Times noted that Judge Truman was the only Missouri official present who could discuss administrative problems on an equal basis with visiting experts.

Every subject of debate tended sooner or later to center in the views of a quiet-spoken man who sat across the table from me [wrote the editor]. It was with surprise amounting almost to incredulity that I observed this trend of affairs, for the quiet man whose opinions had so much respect in a gathering of reformers was the presiding judge of…Jackson County…home bailiwick of the notorious Pendergast machine.

More important and equally unexpected was the way in which he proved himself a leader. His first day in office he Spoke to the point:

We intend to operate the county government for the benefit of the taxpayers. While we were elected as Democrats, we were also elected as public servants. We will appoint all Democrats to jobs appointable, but we are going to see that every man does a full day’s work for his pay. In other words we are going to conduct the county’s affairs as efficiently and economically as possible.

The other new members of the court, Howard Vrooman and Robert Barr, were expected to follow his lead. Vrooman, the western judge, was an affable Kansas City real estate executive and a Rabbit. Barr, a gentleman farmer and graduate of West Point, had been Harry’s own choice to fill his former position as eastern judge. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Presiding Judge Truman was the chief executive officer. Later in his political career it would be charged that he had had no executive experience. But in fact he was responsible now for an annual operating budget of $7 million, more than the budget of some states, and for seven hundred employees—county treasurer, sheriff, county councilor, road overseers, surveyors, highway engineer, health officials, parole officers, purchasing agents, a coroner, a collector (the job he had wanted), a recorder of deeds, superintendent of schools, liquor license inspector, election commissioners, and nine justices of the peace. He had overall responsibility for the county home for the aged, the county hospital, the McCune Home for (white) Boys, the Parental Home for (white) Girls, the Home for Negro Boys and Girls, and more than a thousand miles of county roads. He also had charge of two courthouses (with jails), since Kansas City, too, had a courthouse. He had the most say in apportioning the budget, and keeping the books was ultimately his responsibility. It was, theoretically, within his power now to award contracts, adjust tax rates, float bond issues, or determine what sums for the county would be borrowed from which banks and when. As the county’s topmost official he was also expected to be its chief spokesman, to appear at business lunches, take part in conferences, spread the word of Jackson County progress and opportunities.

In theory, he had only the electorate to report to, and his constituency was no longer just the country vote, as before when he was eastern judge. It was the whole county now, including all Kansas City, which had a population of nearly 500,000. Theory apart, there was also Tom Pendergast, with whom he had had almost no prior contact. Mike Pendergast could be counted on to stand by him. Mike came calling frequently at the court, still the mentor, arriving in a dark green Peerless sedan with Jim driving and accompanied sometimes by Mike’s youngest son Robert, a small boy who liked to take a turn spinning about in Judge Truman’s swivel chair. But Mike was not Tom. Mike, furthermore, had suffered something like a nervous breakdown from the strain of political battles, and at the urging of his doctors and family, he had eventually to relinquish his place in the organization.

Instead of borrowing county funds from Kansas City banks at 6 percent interest, as had been the practice for years, Judge Truman went to Chicago and St. Louis and negotiated loans at 4 percent, then 2½ percent. Told by outraged Kansas City bankers that he was inflicting unjust punishment on their stockholders, he said he thought the taxpayers of the county had some rights in the matter, too.

When the Republican National Committee announced Kansas City as the choice for their national convention in 1928, then appeared to be reconsidering because of costs, Harry helped raise money locally for the Republicans, on the sensible ground that the Kansas City economy could only benefit. (It was in Kansas City’s Convention Hall, on June 12, that the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover.)

He hired Democrats only, as promised, both Goats and Rabbits, and apparently on an even basis. He also put his brother Vivian on the payroll, as purchasing agent for the county homes, and hired Fred Wallace, his youngest brother-in-law, as county architect, primarily to appease Bess and her mother. Fred, like his father, was a drinker and a worry, and still the apple of his mother’s eye.

Roads, however, were the priority. Within days after taking office, Judge Truman named a bipartisan board of two civil engineers, Colonel (later General) E. M. Stayton and a Republican named N. T. Veatch, Jr., to appraise the roads of the entire county and draw up a plan, something that had never been done before. He also accompanied them on much of their survey, covering hundreds of miles in all. The report, issued three months later, described 350 miles of “ ‘pie crust’ roads clearly inadequate to stand the demands of modern traffic,” and stressed that the cost just to maintain them would exceed what might be raised by taxes. The plan was to build 224 miles of new concrete roads, in a system so designed that no farmer would be more than two miles from at least one of them. The cost was to be $6.5 million, this raised by a bond issue, which, again, was something that until now had not been done for roads in Jackson County. Bond issues of any kind had seldom fared well in years past. Harry, however, was convinced the people would support the program if guaranteed honest contracts and first-rate construction.

Great skepticism was expressed by the Kansas City Star and by Tom Pendergast, when Harry went for his approval. “You can’t do it. They’ll say I’m going to steal it,” Harry would remember “the Big Boss” insisting. If he told the people what he meant to do, they would vote the bonds, Harry said. He could tell the voters anything he liked, Pendergast replied, which Harry took to mean he had an agreement.

It was as though all he had absorbed in his readings in the history of the Romans, the memory of the model of Caesar’s bridge, the experience of countless misadventures by automobile since the days of the old Stafford, the memory of the roads he had seen in France, not to say his own experience with the farm roads in and about Grandview and the father who had literally died as a result of his determination to maintain them properly, converged now in one grand constructive vision. He would build the best roads in the state, if not the country, he vowed, and see they were built honestly.

He set off on another speaking tour, town to town. “I told the voters we would let the contracts to low bidders and build under the supervision of bipartisan engineers.” It was early spring, the mud season, so no one needed reminding of the condition the roads were in. Every voter received a map showing where the improvements would come.

The bond issue was enlarged to include a new courthouse and jail for Kansas City, a new county hospital, and a home for retarded children. The courthouse, jail, and children’s home were voted down. The roads and hospital carried, the vote taking place on Harry’s forty-fourth birthday, May 8, 1928. It was a stunning victory—the vote in favor of the bond issue was three to one. Good as his word, he let a first contract of $400,000 to a construction firm from South Dakota. Other work soon went to other firms not usually chosen for public projects in Jackson County.

The roads were built, and extremely well. Five years later, in 1933, the Examiner could report:

It is now generally recognized that every promise made at that time [1928] by the County Court…and by General E. M. Stayton and N. T. Veatch, Jr., the bipartisan board of engineers, selected to supervise the construction of the system of roads…has been carefully fulfilled. Every road proposed in the plans submitted has been built exactly as promised, and all well within the money voted and the estimates of the engineers.

Trees were planted along the sides, as Harry remembered from France, seven thousand seedling elms and poplars in all, though to his sorrow, Jackson County seemed as yet unready for the look of the Loire Valley. The farmers mowed them down.

He repeatedly stressed the practical in much of what he said, but he attempted the trees and, with the roads completed, he published a handsomely designed booklet, Results of County Planning, showing in more than a hundred pages of photographs what beauty there was in the landscape of the county to be enhanced, not destroyed, by progress, and for the benefit of everyone. “Here were hundreds of square miles…hundreds of thousands of people…each dependent on the other…and only a plan and a determined spirit needed to develop these opportunities and make each available to an understanding of the other!” In time, the report continued, would come “parks and recreation grounds at points easily available to all the county population—the healthful places of diversion that every large and growing population needs for its own pleasure and for the sake of coming generations.” The pictures were of schools, farms, industry, main streets and the mushrooming Kansas City skyline, bridges over the Missouri, the Blue and Little Blue, and mile after mile of roads through rolling countryside, where so much pioneer history had taken place. The interest in history, felt so strongly by the presiding judge, was all through the book. A caption under a photograph of Raytown’s main street read: “Raytown, once a favorite place for assembling teams for Santa Fe caravans, also had the distinction of a home nearby which was framed and cut in Kentucky and shipped here by water—the Jesse Barnes home, 2½ miles southwest of Raytown. A part of the house is still standing.” Another photograph showed the path worn by the wagons where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Big Blue. Under another, of a frame house set among old elms, the caption read: “Since 1867, Mrs. Martha E. Truman has lived on this farm on Blue Ridge Boulevard. She was born in Jackson County in 1852. She is the mother of Judge Harry S. Truman, presiding judge of the County Court.”

“Oh! If I were only John D. Rockefeller or Mellon…I’d make this section (six counties) the world’s real paradise,” he wrote privately. As it was, the road system was completed on schedule and, almost unimaginably, for less than the original estimate.

Another bond issue was voted, for more roads, for the Kansas City Courthouse, and for a total remodeling of the Independence Courthouse. The new Kansas City Courthouse, to replace a Victorian firetrap with creaking elevator and oiled wood floors, would be the county’s part in an extensive Ten-Year Plan that would include a new City Hall and civic auditorium. It was among the most ambitious city projects in the country and one championed vigorously by both the Star and, Tom Pendergast, which meant it was certain to go forward.

Brisk about his business as always, seemingly tireless, Harry insisted that everything be done just so and concerned himself with details of a kind others would never have bothered with. Raised on the idea that appearances mattered, as an expression of self-respect, raised on the old premise that any job worth doing was worth doing well, ambitious for his community and for himself, he was determined to give the county a courthouse in Kansas City second to none.

Unsure of exactly what he wanted in the new building, he decided he wouldn’t know until he had educated himself. Thus he set off by automobile—in his own car, at his own expense—on an amazing cross-country tour to look at public buildings of all kinds and to talk to their architects. He traveled thousands of miles—as far west as Denver and Houston, east all the way to Brooklyn, south as far as Baton Rouge—and took with him, for company and to help with the driving, a man named Fred Canfil, whose companionship he apparently enjoyed, but who to a great many people seemed to personify nearly everything odious about Kansas City politics. By appearance, manner, by reputation, Canfil was the typical Pendergast roughneck, “a loudmouthed, profane, vulgar, and uncouth person…a low ward heeler of the worst type,” in the words of testimony that would be taken some years later by agents of the FBI. He was considered a bully, a braggart, “a big bag of wind,” overbearing and crude. Six feet tall and built like a heavyweight wrestler, he had a dark, glowering expression nearly all of the time. He wore the brim of his hat low over his eyes and stood with his legs apart, feet firmly planted, as if braced to block a doorway. He was called peculiar and secretive, “a mystery man,” and as time went on, because of his booming voice, “Whispering Fred.” And it was whispered of “Whispering Fred” that he had a criminal record.

People who had worked with him for years had no idea where he lived or where he came from, whether even he was married. Earlier, before going to work for Judge Truman, Canfil had kept an office in the Board of Trade Building, but there had been no name on the door or telephone listed. He drove a good car, his suits were custom-tailored. Yet no one knew what he did for a living. One prominent Kansas City Democrat who was considering Canfil for a job tried in vain to find out more and finally asked him face to face, “What the hell do you do for a living?” Canfil only laughed and said lots of people would like to know. Refusing to give up, the man asked the police commissioner, as a favor, to put a tail on Canfil. But after several days the police could report only that Canfil had lunch regularly in a booth at the Savoy Grill with Harry Truman and Ted Marks. (Probably this was in 1925, when Harry was selling memberships for the Kansas City Automobile Club and had his own office in the Board of Trade Building, as did Ted Marks, who no doubt made the good suits Canfil wore.)

The facts about Canfil, as Harry Truman knew, were these:

He was Harry’s own age and had grown up on a farm in Kansas. Unmarried, he lived with a sister in a small house on East 77 Terrace, Kansas City. Until the war, he had worked briefly as treasurer for a circus and for several years ran the service department of a Cadillac agency in Shreveport, Louisiana, his mother’s hometown. At the time he had the office in the Board of Trade Building, Canfil was working as a rent collector for a Kansas City landlord. Contrary to rumor, he had no criminal record.

How long he had been involved with the Pendergast organization is not known, but, according to later testimony, it was his association with Judge Truman that had kept him in good graces with the organization and not the other way around.

Harry had met Canfil first in the Army. After being elected to the court, he hired Canfil as a tax investigator. Harry liked him, liked how he went about his work. “Fred’s a little rough, but Fred’s all right; he’s as loyal as a bulldog,” he would explain long afterward, recalling the years Canfil had been at his side. The loud mouth and crude language were largely a front. As a soldier Canfil had been superb, rising from sergeant to lieutenant by dint of his own merit, a point that counted greatly with Harry, and one that later investigators would find amply documented in Canfil’s service record. “Character excellent right along and recommended as an unusually efficient officer,” read one entry in the file at the War Department. “He generally worked twelve to fifteen hours a day,” read another. “But I never saw him worn out or tired. He was ever full of enthusiasm and eager for the next task….”

It was in Shreveport, Canfil’s old place of business, that Harry saw a building that he admired more than any others on the tour, the massive new Caddo Parish Courthouse, and decided to hire its architect, Edward F. Neild, as a consultant. The building was in what would later be known as the Art Deco style. Though disdainful of the “modern” in painting, Harry was very definite in his admiration of Art Deco.

As he would have trees for his roads, so he determined now to have an equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson for the front of the courthouse. In Charlottesville, Virginia, he saw one of Stonewall Jackson that he thought exceptional and at once commissioned its sculptor, Charles L. Keck of New York. Concerned about historical accuracy—and out of long affection for “Old Andy”—he drove to the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Tennessee, to make measurements of Jackson’s clothing. He would have his hero’s statue no larger or smaller than life. “I wanted a real man on a real horse.”

The Kansas City Times declared the new road system “a distinct achievement that would be creditable to any county in the United States,” which it was. The Star lauded the “extraordinary record” of Presiding Judge Truman. He was elected the president of the Greater Kansas City Plan Association, made the director of the National Conference of City Planning.

With his reputation fast growing he seemed to everyone who knew him still the cheery, optimistic “same old Harry,” for whom work was a tonic. But it was not that way entirely. He had become so tense, so keyed up, as he wrote Bess from one of his journeys, “that I either had to run away or go on a big drunk.” He loathed the sound of the telephone and at home or his office the telephone rang incessantly—“and every person I’ve ever had any association with since birth has wanted me to take pity on him and furnish him some county money without much return.” He suffered from headaches, dizziness, and insomnia. As time went on and the stress of the job increased, the headaches grew more severe. The telephone and headaches were among the chief reasons he went away so often, on his cross-country surveys of public buildings or to Masonic meetings or to summer Army camp, where, interestingly, the Army doctors found him exceptionally fit. One said he was as physically sound as a twenty-four-year-old.

“I haven’t had a headache since I came,” he wrote to Bess three days after arriving at Camp Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1927. “This day has been successful. I have a letter from you, have been horseback riding, watched the Battery fire nine problems, had an hour swim, a good meal and am tired as I can be without any headache,” he told her another day. Some of the other officers in the reserve, like Harry Vaughan, wondered at times why they bothered keeping up with it. “We didn’t have any equipment,” Vaughan would remember. “We didn’t have any enlisted personnel, we had no materiel…we just didn’t have anything.” But for Harry the chance to be outdoors, the exercise, the companionship without the pressures of politics, were a godsend.

He had become a terrible worrier. He was anxious about little Margaret, who was too thin and pale, too often ill. He began taking medicine for his nerves. He worried about money. He worried about possible entrapment with women, an old device for destroying politicians. Once, responding to a call for a meeting in a room at the Baltimore Hotel, he asked Edgar Hinde to go along, just in case. When they knocked at the room, Hinde remembered, a blond woman in a negligée opened the door. Harry spun on his heels and ran back down the hall, disappearing around the corner. Hinde thought it was a fear verging on the abnormal.

I’ve been around Legion conventions with him. He’d have his room there, [and] naturally, everybody would kind of gravitate to his room. If some fellow brought a woman in there, or his wife even, I’ve seen him pick up his hat and coat and take off out of there and that would be the last you’d see of him until those women left. He just didn’t want any women around his room in a hotel…. He had a phobia on it.

“Three things ruin a man,” Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. “Power, money, and women.

“I never wanted power,” he said. “I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.”

On April 30, 1929, after Harry had assigned something over $6 million in road contracts, a judgment by default for $8,944.78 was brought against him for his old haberdashery debts. His mother, meantime, had been forced to take another mortgage on the farm. Yet when one of his new roads cut 11 acres from her property, he felt he must deny her the usual reimbursement from the county, as a matter of principle, given his position. Had he not been the presiding judge, her payment would have been $1,000 an acre or $11,000.

He was scrupulous over money almost to a fault, but also over the range of small favors and shortcuts, the expedient little “arrangements” by which politicians traditionally benefited—so much so that stories about him would be told for years.

A young man from Independence named Yancey Wasson, who worked for his cousin at Guy Wasson’s Fabric Company on Magee Trafficway in Kansas City, would remember Judge Truman coming in to buy seat covers for his car. The bill came to $32, but on instructions from his cousin, young Wasson said Judge Truman could forget the bill if he just arranged for the company to get some business on county cars and trucks. Harry gave him a look. “Son, I don’t do business that way,” he said, and paid the bill.

Sometime later, when Tom Pendergast ordered seat covers for his car that were to cost $65 and Yancey Wasson, calling at Pendergast’s office, made a similar offer, Pendergast, leaning back in his chair, said, “I think we can do that.”

“About two hours later,” Wasson recalled, “I walked out of the police garage with an order for 200 quick-change seat covers for 100 cars on the police register and an order for 20 front rubber mats.”

On September 2, 1929, seven weeks before the stock market crash, Mike Pendergast, whom Harry had “loved like a daddy,” died of heart failure. With the onset of the Depression, the pressures on Judge Truman, as the county’s chief executive, intensified dramatically, for the harder work was to find, the more farms and businesses failed, the more his county contracts and county employment mattered. Even the most insignificant jobs that he had to give out became plums. Friends and family were after him continually and at the very time he had to start cutting back on the payroll, since the county, too, was in trouble, as increasing numbers of people fell delinquent on taxes. At the end of the day when he had at last to fire two hundred county employees, he went home and became sick to his stomach.

With Nurse Kinnaman accompanying her, Bess had taken Margaret to Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf, in the hope that a change of climate for a few weeks might restore the child’s health. To find a little peace and quiet for himself, and a night’s rest, Harry would drive to Grandview and sleep in his old bed over the kitchen, or arrange with the manager of a downtown hotel to give him a room without registering, “so no job holder who wants to stay on can see or phone me.”

The afternoon of Monday, November 3, 1930, on the eve of election day, an attempt was made to kidnap six-year-old Margaret from her first-grade classroom at the Bryant School on River Boulevard, just four blocks from home.

According to her teacher, Madeline Etzenhouser, an unknown middle-aged man who kept his hat on appeared at the door of the room shortly before the afternoon recess, saying he had come to pick up Judge Truman’s child, Mary Margaret. “I was a little curious about that,” Miss Etzenhouser later said, “since we always called her Margaret, never Mary Margaret. I also was puzzled because either Mrs. Truman or one of Margaret’s uncles always picked her up after school.” Telling the man to wait, she hurried to the principal’s office. When she returned, the man was gone. “In a few minutes Mrs. Truman came into the room. She was panicky. I believe she thought Margaret was not there, and she was extremely relieved to find her all right.” Judge Truman and several deputy sheriffs arrived soon after. “It was quite a stir….”

The following day, election day, while Harry was out in the county visiting the precinct polls, Margaret and her mother, accompanied by the deputy sheriffs, were taken to a hotel in town to spend the day under close security. To what extent the incident was connected with politics, Bess and Harry could only wonder. Nothing further was learned. But Margaret was to be closely watched thereafter and the tragedy of the Lindbergh kidnapping two years later was deeply felt by the Trumans.

As he never let on at the time, Harry was in terrible turmoil over what he had found politics to be in reality. He was suffering from disillusionment and pangs of conscience such as he had never before known, all of which may have had a great deal to do with his headaches.

“While it looks good from the sidelines to have control and get your name in both papers every day and pictures every other day, it’s not a pleasant position,” he confided to Bess. “Politics should make a thief, a roué, and a pessimist of anyone,” he said in another letter, “but I don’t believe I am any of them….” But could he withstand the pressures?

Later would come a vivid, if fragmented, picture of what he was going through behind the scenes, described in occasional reminiscences, and in one long, extraordinary, private, undated memoir written on two or three different nights when he hid away alone in the Pickwick Hotel in downtown Kansas City, pouring himself out on paper, writing page after page for no one but himself.

VII

Trouble had come immediately after the road bond issue passed, as soon as Tom Pendergast discovered that Harry meant to keep his promise to the voters and refuse favoritism on contracts.

“The Boss wanted me to give a lot of crooked contractors the inside and I couldn’t,” he wrote. Pendergast became furious when Harry held his ground. The code of honor that meant so much to Harry, said T.J., was worth nothing in the real world. He dismissed the road plan as needless fuss that would serve only to give the engineers big reputations. Bids need merely be doctored so that the right people got the contracts, Pendergast told him. Harry held firm, arguing that his way was the best for the public and for the party, and it seems Pendergast realized for the first time the sort of man his brother Michael had brought into the organization. Possibly T.J. had been testing Harry. In any event, his anger appeared to pass. A meeting was called at his office, a confrontation that may have been arranged in part for T.J.’s own amusement, and one that Harry would enjoy recounting in later years.

The office at 1908 Main was so small, all of 12 by 14 feet, that it seemed overcrowded when T.J. sat there alone. Two windows with Venetian blinds overlooked the street. Furnishings were sparse—a rolltop desk against the wall, a few chairs and spittoons, a faded green rug, and over the desk, in a frame, the original drawing of an old cartoon from the Star showing an expansive Alderman Jim with a box of First Ward votes in his grip. The spittoons were an accommodation for guests, since T.J. smoked cigarettes only, using an elegant cigarette holder. Customarily he also kept his hat on while at his desk and sat well forward in his wooden swivel chair, as though about to leave on other business, a technique, he found, that helped keep conversations short. Stationed just outside the office was his massive, veteran secretary, or gatekeeper, Elijah Matheus, a former riverboat captain called “Cap,” who was as large as T.J. himself.

Five were present for the meeting—Pendergast, Harry, and three road contractors who were old friends of the organization and all extremely upset over Harry’s attitude, according to Harry’s later account, which is the only one available. One man, Mike Ross, was not only head of Ross Construction, in which T.J. had part interest, but ward boss in Little Italy, which made him extremely important. Privately Harry considered Ross “a plain thief.”

“These boys tell me that you won’t give them contracts,” Pendergast began.

“They can get them if they are low bidders,” Harry answered, “but they won’t get paid for them unless they come up to specifications.”

“Didn’t I tell you boys,” said Pendergast. “He’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri.”

When the meeting ended and the three contractors left, Pendergast told Harry to go ahead and run things as he thought best, adding only that of course he, Pendergast, always had the two other judges to call on if he needed to vote Harry down.

From that point forward apparently Pendergast was as good as his word, never asking Harry to do anything dishonest. “And that’s the God’s truth. I did my job the way I thought it should be done,” Harry said in an interview years afterward. “And he never interfered….”

They were not close—there was never to be the kind of relationship Harry had with Mike—but they grew to respect one another. Pendergast recognized Harry’s integrity as an asset. Harry, in the Pickwick Hotel memoir, written close to events, portrayed the Big Boss as a man of parts whose code, though very different from his own, he could not help but admire. Pendergast was no hypocrite, no “trimmer,” however rough and sordid his background. “He, in times past, owned a bawdy house, a saloon and gambling establishment, was raised in that environment, but he’s all man.” He wondered, Harry wrote, who was worth more in the sight of the Lord, Tom Pendergast or the “sniveling church members who weep on Sunday, play with whores on Monday, drink on Tuesday, sell out to the Boss on Wednesday, repent about Friday and start over on Sunday?”

He felt he understood Tom Pendergast. At least he knew where he stood with him. It was Vrooman and Barr, the other two on the court, who dismayed and infuriated him. Any man who was dissolute with women, Truman believed, was not a man to be trusted entirely. He had discovered that Vrooman and Barr both “loved the ladies” and kept “telephone girls” on the payroll. (“I’ll say this for the Big Boss,” he wrote as an aside, “he has no feminine connections.”) Vrooman, the western judge, though a “good fellow,” seemed determined to make any profit possible from county transactions. Barr, the eastern judge and Harry’s own choice for the job, was a total disappointment, and, to Harry, beyond understanding:

Since childhood at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living as its own reward. I find a very small minority who agree with me on that premise. For instance, I picked a West Pointer, son of an honorable father, a man who should have had Washington, Lee, Jackson, Gustavus Adolphus for his ideals, to associate with me in carrying out a program and I got—a dud, a weakling, no ideals, no nothing. He’d use his office for his own enrichment, he’s not true to his wife (and a man not honorable in his marital relations is not usually honorable in any other). He’d sell me or anyone else he’s associated with out for his own gain….

Worse than Barr’s immorality, more troubling than anything for Harry, was a situation, only vaguely described in his account, in which he had found it necessary to do wrong himself in order to prevent a greater wrong. Barr, it appears, had been in on the theft of some $10,000, and Harry, who found out, felt he must let Barr get away with it to protect his bond issue and to keep Barr from stealing even more.

This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss’s…I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out…I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer, a friend of the Boss’s, steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don’t know…. Anyway I’ve got the $6,500,000 worth of roads on the ground and at a figure that makes the crooks tear their hair. The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institution in spite of my drunken brother-in-law [Fred Wallace], whom I’d had to employ on the job to keep peace in the family. I’ve had to run the hospital job myself and pay him for it…. Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can’t.

This and more came pouring out of him in the hotel room. He went on for pages. He described how Vrooman and Barr would shoot crap while court was in session, crouching down behind the judge’s bench as Harry tried to transact business. (He had actually found it easier to get things accomplished if they were so occupied.) He had always thought most men had a sense of honor. Now he wasn’t at all sure. Pendergast, as if lecturing a slow student, had told him that very few men stayed honest if given opportunity to cheat and get away with it. What chance was there for a clean honest government, he wondered, when a bunch of vultures sat on the sidelines? “If we only had Tom to deal with, the public might have a chance, but Tom can’t operate without Joe [Shannon] and Cass [Welch]. Cass is a thug and a crook of the worst water, he should have been in the pen twenty years ago. Joe hasn’t got an honest appointee on the payroll….”

The more Harry wrote, the angrier he grew:

I wonder if I did the right thing to put a lot of no account sons of bitches on the payroll and pay other sons of bitches more money for supplies than they were worth in order to satisfy the political powers and save $3,500,000. I believe I did do right. Anyway I’m not a partner of any of them and I’ll go out poorer in every way than I came into office.

He reckoned he could already have pocketed $1.5 million, had he chosen, which, as future disclosures would make plain, was altogether realistic. As it was, “I haven’t $150.” He wondered if he might be better off if he quit and ran a filling station.

“All this,” he added, “gives me headaches….”

To little Sue Ogden, the big house where her playmate Margaret Truman lived was a magnificent sanctuary secure from the troubles of Depression times. Margaret’s Grandmother Wallace was an elegant lady who wore her old-fashioned clothes with style. Margaret had a beautiful new bicycle. Margaret had a new swing set. Whenever Margaret’s father came home from a trip, he brought her a present. “She had everything she wanted,” Sue remembered. Judge Truman always looked dressed up and there was a black servant, Vietta Garr, who did the cooking and waited on the table.

Independence was hard hit by the Depression. In 1931, three banks closed within three weeks. Hundreds of families were suffering. According to the records, in the fiscal year 1931–32 more than 900 families in town, some 2,800 people, were receiving relief—food and clothing—from a half-dozen organizations, including the Community Welfare League, the Red Cross, the Kiwanis Club, and the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army had set up a soup kitchen on the Square. The Welfare League had taken over the old county jail as a distribution center and the lines there grew steadily longer. In 1932–33, families “comprising 4,347 individuals” received help, more than half again the number of the year before. Sue Ogden’s father, a machinist, had trouble finding work of any kind and kept leaving town to look elsewhere. She would remember being hungry during the times her father took the family away with him to other towns. Margaret, she knew, was never hungry. To Sue and her family, Margaret Truman was a child of wealth and privilege.

Margaret would remember that because of the Depression her allowance had been cut from 50 cents a week to 25 cents. “And this was a disaster!”

Sue Ogden and her older sister Betty lived next door, across a narrow alley on the south side. Mrs. Truman encouraged Margaret to play with the two Ogden girls, who were tomboys, as Mrs. Truman had been once, and because they lived so close by. They were playmates “without risk,” as Sue remembered, and since the kidnapping scare, the Trumans were “terribly fearful” about Margaret. “We kind of had to teach her how to play.”

Judge Truman seemed always relaxed and friendly, “just a father.” He “wasn’t upset to be caught in his pajamas. He was just very calm about having us around the house. We played on his rowing machine in the bathroom and he didn’t mind.”

The two Ogdens were in and out of the house as if it were their own, or playing out back on the driveway, where Mrs. Truman or Vietta Garr could keep watch. The house was a “wonderful place” to play. A basement called “the dungeon” was big enough to ride Margaret’s bicycle in. A “fine attic” was filled with old-fashioned clothes for dressing up. It was a household that seemed to run smoothly year after year, with never a sign of friction. “If there was ever any bad feeling, even an undercurrent of bad feeling, they certainly hid it well,” Sue recalled. Vietta Garr, who had first come to work in 1927, said later, “I never heard a squabble the entire time I was with them. I have never seen Mr. Truman angry….” Her father had been groomsman for Grandfather Gates. “The whole family had good dispositions and were easy to work for,” she remembered. “They liked things nice, and that is the way I liked them, so we got along fine.”

For Bess, life was ordered, private, sociable within bounds. She belonged to a bridge club and served as secretary of the Needlework Guild, a group of women who collected clothing for the needy—such activities as appeared among the society items dutifully reported by young Sue Gentry in the Independence Examiner. And for Bess that was quite enough. Her family was her life. She had no wish for more, no desire whatever for public attention or acclaim.

Margaret would remember her own life being nearly perfect. “I was an only child and I had lots of aunts and uncles with no children. And everything went to Margaret. It was lovely.” The only disciplinarian in the household was her mother, whose eyes could turn steely and who on occasion spanked her, as her father never did. Her mother, Margaret recalled, was far more likely than her father to be hard on people who deserved it. “I could twist him around my little finger.”

At dinner, Grandmother Wallace sat at the head of the table, Father at the other end. Margaret sat with her mother on one side, with Uncle Fred opposite. Dinner was served at 6:30. There was a white linen tablecloth, linen napkins, and good silver. Father did the carving, and “beautifully,” according to Vietta Garr. The atmosphere was calm and proper, always. Grandmother Wallace did her hair a little differently for dinner and put on a fresh dress. “My manners were expected to be perfect,” Margaret remembered. If her father and uncle discussed politics, her mother occasionally joined in, but never her grandmother, who did not care for politicians, or politics. “Her presence was very much felt. Even though she didn’t talk a great deal.”

The food, ordered each morning by Madge Wallace by telephone, was straightforward and ample—baked Virginia ham, standing rib roast, warm bread and old-fashioned biscuits, baked sweet potatoes, fresh vegetables in season, cakes, pies, peach cobbler. Harry particularly liked corn bread and Missouri sorghum. His favorite dessert was angel food cake, according to Vietta Garr, who, in all, would spend thirty-six years with the Truman family. “Yes, I spoiled him,” she would say, “but he was always such a nice man.”

On Sundays, Harry, Bess, and Margaret would drive to Grandview for a big, midday fried chicken dinner at the farm, where, as Margaret remembered, the atmosphere was “entirely different.” It was not just that her father looked forward to these visits, but her mother as well. “She liked Mamma Truman immensely.” Mamma was “full of spice,” with opinions on nearly everything, including politics. The difference between this spry little “country grandmother” and the one in Independence was extreme. With Mamma Truman one felt in touch with pioneer times, with a native vigor and mettle that seemed ageless. Mamma still went rabbit hunting with Margaret’s boy cousins, Vivian’s sons. Once when she offered food to a tramp at the back porch and the tramp complained the coffee wasn’t hot enough, she took the cup, went inside, and promptly returned with a shotgun. He could be on his way, she said, or she would warm more than his coffee for him.

It pleased Margaret to see the enjoyment her father took in Mamma’s company. “Now Harry, you be good,” she would say as they were leaving. But Mamma could also observe that “Being too good is apt to be uninteresting,” a line they all loved.

With the Ogden sisters and a half-dozen other neighborhood girls, Margaret put on plays in the backyard at 219 North Delaware. For one called The Capture of the Clever One, with Margaret in the title role, the Examiner sent a photographer to make a portrait of the cast. Performances were after dark. A Ping-Pong table tipped on its side served as a backdrop, lights were strung, kitchen chairs set out for the audience. Harry attended dutifully. “I want her to do everything and have everything and still learn that most people have to work to live, and I don’t want her to be a high hat,” he had written to Bess.

He was habitually dutiful and responsible about all kinds of family matters, the sort of father who checked to see that the tires had good tread and 35 pounds of pressure, who had the oil changed every 1,000 miles without fail. “The car was washed every few days,” Margaret would remember. “And the upholstery was vacuumed and cleaned and people did not throw gum wrappers around—they were put in the ashtray—and he did not like people to smoke because he had never smoked and because the smoke would get into the upholstery…. He was very particular about his cars.” And about himself—his suits, ties, his shoes. He never went out the door without his hat, as few gentlemen of the day ever would, and his hat was always worn straight on his head. “Straight, absolutely straight,” she remembered.

He was interested in the weather, like most farmers. “He read all the weather maps in the papers and he always had a barometer where he could see it.”

He was a string saver. He could get two weeks’ use out of a straight razor by stropping the blade on the palm of his hand before each shave. Interestingly, for all his years on the farm, for all he knew about tools and odd jobs, he did no repairs around the house, never cut the lawn or put up screens. Undoubtedly, his mother-in-law had some say in this. Such work was for the yard man.

“It never seemed like the Truman house,” Sue Ogden remembered. “It was so clearly Mrs. Wallace’s house. And she was clearly in charge of everything about it.”

Another of Margaret’s childhood friends, Mary Shaw, would remember hearing her parents say, “How does Harry put up with that?”

“It was very hard on my father,” Margaret would concede long afterward, while showing a visitor through the house. “You know, my father was a very quiet, nontemperamental man at home. He got along. I mean, he made it his business to get along…because he loved my mother and this was where she wanted to live.”

Up early every morning, well before dawn, and always before anyone else, he had the house to himself, to read the papers, including the comic strips which he loved, and especially Andy Gump. (Told that as county judge he could have any license plate number he wished, he had picked Number 369, because it was Andy Gump’s number, a point he delighted in explaining to anyone who asked.)

In the evenings he would turn to his books and become wholly immersed. “You could talk to him if he were reading and you wouldn’t get an answer.” Indeed, Margaret could not recall her father sitting down quietly at home without a book in his hand.

He became a great joiner. In addition to the Masons, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he belonged to the Elks, the Eagles, the International Acquaintance League. Monday nights he went uptown to the Square to play poker in a back room over the Farmer & Merchants Bank. It was a regular game among the same old friends, several of them Army pals like Edgar Hinde and Roger Sermon, a grocer who had become the town’s mayor. They named themselves the Independence Harmonicon Society, or Harpie Club, because one of their number had once distinguished himself playing the harmonica, or French harp, extremely poorly but with exuberance in a contest at the local movie house. The game had a 10-cent limit. A little beer or bourbon was consumed, Prohibition notwithstanding, and the conversation usually turned to politics. Such was the social life of Judge Harry Truman in the early 1930s, the worst of the Depression, years when Adolf Hitler was rising to power and Japan invaded Manchuria.

As much as he enjoyed going out to the farm to see his mother and sister, he had no desire ever again to live in the country. He loved the town. “He liked his walk up to the courthouse square,” said Margaret. “He liked people…he genuinely liked people and he liked to talk to them….”

In many ways it was still the town he had grown up in. Farmers crowded the Square on Saturday nights, but the rest of the week, nights were quiet, broken only by the sound of passing trains and the striking of the courthouse clock. Margaret Phelps and Tillie Brown still taught history and English at the high school. The town directory listed most of the old names of the original settlers—Boggs, Dailey, Adair, McClelland, Chiles, Hickman, Holmes, Ford, Davenport, McPherson, Mann, Peacock, Shank, not to say Truman, Wallace, and Noland. Harry knew nearly all the family histories—it was good politics to know, of course, but he also loved the town.

His devotion to Bess appears to have been total, no less than ever. On his travels, at summer Army camp, he wrote to her nearly every day. How had he ever gotten along without her before they were married was a mystery he pondered in a letter from Fort Riley, Kansas, the summer of 1930. “Just think of all those wasted years….”

“Have you practiced your music?” he wrote to Margaret from. Camp Ripley, Minnesota, another summer. He had splurged and for Christmas bought her a baby grand piano, a Steinway, a surprise she did not appreciate. She had dreamed of an electric train. “I’m hoping you can play all those exercises without hesitation. If you can I’ll teach you to read bass notes when I get back.”

As early as 1931 there was talk of Harry Truman for governor, a prospect that delighted him. “You may yet be the first lady of Missouri,” he told Bess. Whatever inner turmoil he suffered, however many mornings of dark despair he knew, the truth was he loved politics. He was as proud of the roads he had built and of the new Kansas City Courthouse as of anything he had ever accomplished, or hoped to. Work was progressing on the new Independence Courthouse, his courthouse, as he saw it, and everyone approved. “From the time of the establishment of Jackson County until now,” wrote Colonel Southern in the Examiner, “men with the same indomitable courage of the county’s namesake, Andrew Jackson, have dwelt in this ‘garden spot of Missouri’—with eyes always fixed on the future greatness of this great domain and with the thought uppermost to build, build, build a county that the rest of the state would be proud of.”

But the greater satisfaction for Harry was in what he had been able to do for ordinary people, without fanfare or much to show for it in the record books—things he could only have done as a politician. Years afterward, over lunch in New York with the journalist Eric Sevareid, he would describe how as a county judge in Missouri he had discovered that through a loophole in the law, hundreds of old men and women were being committed to mental institutions by relatives who could not, or would not, cope with their care or financial support, and how by investigating the situation he had restored these people to their rights and freedom. This, he said, had given him more satisfaction than anything.

“He loved politics,” remembered Ted Marks, “and he strived for something and never let loose until he got there. I think no matter what job he held he put all he had into it. He enjoyed it and did the best he knew how….”

He had not found his real work until late in life, not until he was nearly forty. But then, observed Ethel Noland, hadn’t he been a late bloomer all along? “He didn’t marry until he was thirty-five…. He didn’t do anything early.” Politics came naturally. “There,” she said, “he struck his gait.”

Harriet Louisa Gregg Young and Solomon Young.

Mary Jane Holmes Truman and Anderson Shipp Truman.

Martha Ellen Young Truman and John Anderson Truman at the time of their marriage, December 1881.

Harry S. Truman at about age ten.

In a graduation portrait of the Class of 1901, seventeen-year-old Harry Truman stands fourth from the left at the back. Bess Wallace is on the far right, second row, and Charlie Ross sits on the far left in the front row. The Latin inscription over the door says: “Youth the Hope of the World.”

The center of Independence, Jackson Square, at the turn of the century. The courthouse is on the right.

Truman at about the time he was employed as a clerk at the National Bank of Commerce, Kansas City. “His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best,” wrote a supervisor.

Cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to whom he was the adored “Horatio.”

The junior partner of J. A. Truman & Son, Farmers, stands with his mother and grandmother Young by the front porch of the house at Grandview.

The work day began with his father’s call from the foot of the stairs at 5:30 A.M. Here, Truman rides the cultivator across a field of young corn.

Truman at the wheel of the second-hand, right-hand drive, 1911 Stafford touring car that transformed his life. With him are Bess Wallace (in front), sister Mary Jane Truman, and cousin Nellie Noland.

A summer outing on the Little Blue River with Harry at the oars, Bess with the fishing pole. “Harry was always fun,” remembered Ethel Noland.

The portrait of Bess that Harry carried to war in 1918. “Dear Harry,” she wrote on the back, “May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”

His AEF identity card shows a newly commissioned Captain Harry S. Truman with no glasses and a regulation haircut.

With Harry “over there,” Mary Jane was left to run the farm. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he later conceded.

Truman (third from right) poses with some of his fellow artillery officers “somewhere in France.”

Wounded soldiers from the Argonne are tended beneath an undamaged painting of the Ascension in a ruined church in Neuilly, September 1918.

The war over, Captain Truman (on the right) relaxes in the sunshine at Monte Carlo.

Harry and Bess Truman pose for their wedding portrait with bridesmaids Louise Wells (left) and Helen Wallace, Bess’s brother Frank (center rear), who gave her away, and best man Ted Marks, who made the groom’s suit on special order. The day, Saturday, June 28, 1919, was extremely hot and humid—standard for summer in Missouri.

The Gates-Wallace house, 219 North Delaware Street, Independence, as it looked at the time the Trumans moved in “temporarily” with Bess’s mother, following their honeymoon.

Truman & Jacobson, “the shirt store,” as Truman called it, opened for business on 12th Street, Kansas City, in November 1919. Above, on the left, haberdasher Harry S. Truman strikes a characteristic pose at the sales counter.

Thomas J. Pendergast, the “Big Boss” of Kansas City, beams for photographers at his daughter’s wedding.

All but lost in floral tributes, Truman is sworn in for a second term as Presiding Judge of the Jackson County Court, January 1931.

Michael Pendergast, whom Truman “loved as I did my own daddy.”

James Pendergast, Michael’s son and Truman’s devoted friend.

Judge Truman speaks at the dedication of the new Independence Courthouse on September 17, 1933, one of the proudest days of his life.

Ten-year-old Margaret with her parents, the summer of Truman’s first campaign for the Senate, 1934.

Throughout the campaign Truman stressed his farm background. At right, for a publicity photograph, he sits on the porch swing at Grandview with the two other most important women in his life, his mother and sister Mary Jane.

Crisscrossing the state, the candidate spoke at one county seat after another, his platform usually the courthouse steps. Town loafers and boys on summer vacation often represented a good part of his “crowd.” He was not a captivating or impressive speaker, but people also had no difficulty understanding what he meant and seemed to feel better for having listened to him. The punishing heat and time on the road bothered him not at all.

At first “under a cloud” in the Senate because of his Pendergast connection, Truman nonetheless kept a portrait of “T.J.” prominently displayed in his office.

A rare photograph of Truman and Tom Pendergast together was taken at the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. With them are Kansas City attorney James Aylward (center), FDR’s political adviser, James A. Farley (the tall figure at rear), and David E. Fitzgerald, Sr., Democratic National Committeeman from Connecticut (right foreground).

John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers (seated near left), makes a dramatic appearance before the Truman Committee, as Chairman Truman (far right) listens impassively.

Truman, who loved the Senate “club,” became one of its most popular members. Here, in his office, he is surrounded by fellow Truman Committee members (from left to right) Homer Ferguson, Harold H. Burton, Tom Connally, and Owen Brewster.

In the midst of the 1944 Democratic National Convention at Chicago, Truman signals his feeling about the drive to make him FDR’s running mate.

Bess and Margaret at the moment Truman is named the nominee for Vice President. Margaret would be remembered cheering as if at a football game. Bess, however, rarely smiled for photographers.

Truman and Roosevelt smile for photographers at lunch in the Rose Garden at the White House, August 18, 1944. Shocked by the President’s appearance, Truman later told an aide, “His hands were shaking…physically he’s just going to pieces.” This was one of the few occasions when Truman and Roosevelt were seen together.

6
The Senator from Pendergast

Friends don’t count in fair weather. It is when troubles come that friends count.

—HARRY TRUMAN

I

Francis M. Wilson, known to rural voters as the Red-Headed Peckerwood of the Platte, was a freckled, old-fashioned Missouri stump speaker who excelled at charming country crowds with his poetic tributes to the natural splendors of their beloved state. A convivial man, he had also attained, by age sixty-four, something of the air of a statesman, and in 1932, as the Pendergast choice for governor—and with Franklin Roosevelt heading the national ticket—he could look forward to certain election.

Though Wilson maintained a voting address in rural Platte County, his home was a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on East Linwood Boulevard, Kansas City, and it was there before sunup one morning in October 1932, just three weeks before the election, that he complained to his wife Ida of not feeling well. As only she and a few close friends knew, he had been suffering with bleeding ulcers. She immediately telephoned his brother, R. P. Wilson, a physician, who, with his wife and son, arrived as it was getting light.

At six o’clock Francis M. Wilson died. When someone mentioned calling the mortician, Ida Wilson said no. Once the mortician knew, the news would be out. She said to phone Tom Pendergast.

Dr. Wilson made the call, telling Pendergast only that he should come at once. At seven o’clock T.J. arrived, breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs. The Wilson boy answered the door. “Mr. Pendergast didn’t ask why or what or when,” he later recounted. “He said, ‘Have you called the mortician?’ ” Told they had not, T.J. asked what their wishes were about a replacement for Wilson in the election. The family said they thought it should be Guy B. Park, a Platte County circuit judge and neighbor, to which T.J. responded, “Who the hell is Guy Park?” After some discussion, Pendergast, who kept standing the whole time, told them he had to leave and that they should speak to no one until he called back.

They waited for nearly four hours, the body of Francis Wilson on the bed in the adjoining room. At eleven o’clock Pendergast called and said only three words, “Call the mortician.”

Thus it was that white-haired, sober-looking Guy B. Park went to the governor’s mansion, and Harry Truman did not.

Harry Truman had wanted more than anything to be the nominee for governor, and well before T.J. ever picked Francis Wilson. Encouraged by friends and complimentary comments in several papers suggesting he would make a good chief executive for the state, he had been hugely disappointed when Pendergast refused him the nod. Then came the stunning news of Wilson’s death the afternoon of October 12, the same afternoon, it happened, that Harry and thirty-five thousand others were celebrating the completion of the road program at reputedly the biggest country barbecue ever put on in Jackson County. “It was my big day,” he remembered bitterly.

Apparently he lost no time in getting to Tom Pendergast, only to be told once again he was not the choice, that Guy Park had been decided on. That night Harry drove to the little resort town of Excelsior Springs north of the river and checked into a hotel to remain in seclusion for several days.

His anguish over his future was deep-seated and painful. Having served two consecutive terms in the court, he was ineligible to run again for county judge, and unlike so many others in public life, he had no law practice or insurance business to fall back on, nor any private income. He questioned seriously whether he had made the right choice in life. In a letter of advice to a nephew, he wrote, “It will be much better for you to go to work for a bank or some mercantile institution and get real experience than to get a political job where you learn nothing and lose out when the administration changes.” With the end of his term in 1934, Harry Truman would be fifty years old, and without the blessing of Tom Pendergast there was really not a lot more he could do in politics, whatever his aspirations. As he himself said, everything would be all right only as “long as the Big Boss believes in me….”

The previous June he had traveled to Chicago with T.J. as part of the Missouri delegation to the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt. Pendergast had announced himself for former United States Senator James Reed of Missouri, who had begun his career as mayor of Kansas City in the era of Alderman Jim. The brilliant, egotistical Reed had been one of the “nine willful men” in the Senate who killed the League of Nations, and Harry consequently had no use for him. Pendergast’s enthusiasm was mostly a pose to please Reed. In reality he was playing a somewhat complicated game of a kind new to Harry. Pendergast, Harry was later to say, “understood political situations and how to handle them better than any man I have ever known.”

T.J. had already made a special trip to confer with Roosevelt at Albany before the convention. James A. Farley, Roosevelt’s highly influential political adviser, had also been warmly received by the Kansas City organization at a lunch at the Muehlebach. If anything, T.J. was more enthusiastic about Roosevelt this time than in 1924. Still, he put on a show for Reed under the lights at Chicago Stadium, and Harry, swallowing his distaste for Reed, went through the motions, the dutiful soldier, until the Big Boss began letting votes go to Roosevelt, a little at a time, exactly as Jim Farley wanted, to keep the Roosevelt tally steadily building with each ballot. At the end, Pendergast, Harry, the whole Jackson County delegation had come home extremely pleased with the outcome.

By the following spring of 1933 Harry felt he was more in favor than ever before. “I had a fine talk with T.J. yesterday,” he reported to Bess in high spirits, “and I am still on top. He told me to do as I pleased with the county payroll…he’d put the organization in line behind me. He also told me I could be Congressman or collector. Think of that a while.”

The power of Tom Pendergast had become as great as or possibly greater than that of any political boss in the country. Major changes had taken place, promising larger roles for nearly everyone of ability in the organization.

In 1930, the year Harry was reelected presiding judge, T.J. had at last resolved the old, nettling problem of the Rabbits by simply convincing Joe Shannon that he belonged in Congress. The silver-haired, silver-tongued Shannon was put nicely out of the way in Washington, where he served six terms in the House, distinguishing himself as an apostle of the old-time faith of Thomas Jefferson. Only those who had been through the Goat-Rabbit struggles of past decades could appreciate what a singular victory this was for the Big Boss, and all so smoothly done.

The year after, in 1931, Kansas City achieved “home rule,” which meant control of its own police, who until then had been under state authority. Thus for all practical purposes, the organization now ran the police department.

In 1932, the Missouri legislature failed to establish new congressional districts as required by Congress, with the result that every candidate for the House had to be elected at large, instead of by districts. The possibilities in this for increased Pendergast power were almost too great to imagine, since the big Jackson County vote—the Pendergast vote—now bore directly on all congressional elections everywhere in the state. T.J. could not only name his own governor, but thirteen men for Congress as well. And that fall he had but one disappointment when Bennett Champ Clark of eastern Missouri made a vigorous campaign for the Senate and won, in open opposition to the Kansas City organization. (This was the same Bennett Clark, the son of Missouri’s famous Champ Clark, who at the railroad station in France had fooled Harry Truman into believing an enemy air attack was imminent.) So by the start of 1933, with Park in office as governor, Pendergast was riding higher than ever. The Capitol in Jefferson City was spoken of now as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” With Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal taking over in Washington, the prospects for the future looked boundless. In the small office at 1908 Main Street, a portrait of FDR now held the place of honor over T.J.’s rolltop desk.

Even in the depths of the Depression’s worst years, Kansas City was enjoying a building boom. A new thirty-four-story Power & Light Building, the tallest skyscraper in Missouri, stood over the city like a shining statement of faith. Swinging his car out of the driveway each morning, heading to town on Van Horne Road, Judge Truman would see it rising proudly against the horizon, the very picture of progress.

A new Nelson Art Gallery was under construction at a cost of $3 million. As part of Kansas City’s Ten-Year Plan, work began on a magnificent municipal auditorium that would fill an entire block, include an arena seating twelve thousand and an elegant music hall. A new police building was also part of the plan, along with a new waterworks system and a new public market. A few blocks from Judge Truman’s skyscraper courthouse, a still larger City Hall was going up.

Compared to other cities, the Kansas City outlook was confident and expansive. There were jobs, and local government—the organization—was providing most of them. Under the direction of City Manager Henry McElroy, thousands were put to work with picks and shovels, while heavy machinery was left standing by unused, so that more men could be employed. (McElroy would later claim it was the Kansas City make-work program that inspired the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the WPA.) One seemingly endless project involved paving mile after mile of Brush Creek with a thick bed of Pendergast’s Ready-Mixed concrete.

If Judge Truman felt besieged by job applicants in these early Depression years, his was a small burden compared to what T.J. faced. The lines outside the yellow-brick building on Main Street began gathering before dawn most weekdays and by mid-morning stretched two or three blocks. He saw as many people as possible, on a first-come-first-served basis, no matter who they were, keeping the interviews to a few minutes at most, beginning about nine and ending promptly at noon when he stopped for lunch. Rarely was anyone sent away feeling empty-handed. Invariably courteous, Pendergast would listen attentively, ask a few questions, then scrawl a note on a slip of paper requesting somebody somewhere in one or another city or county organization, or in one of his own enterprises, to consider the needs of the bearer “and oblige,” these final two words seeming to carry the full weight of his command. Actually, it depended on which color pencil he used. If the note was written in red, his “and oblige” meant the applicant should be given a job or granted a favor without delay. If, however, the Big Boss wrote in blue, then this was only someone to keep in mind should anything turn up. If the note was written with an ordinary lead pencil, the bearer was nobody to bother with.

When a reporter questioned Pendergast whether jobholders were ever asked to donate to the organization at election time, he said, “Why shouldn’t they be? That’s how they got their jobs.”

Harry loved to tell the story of the day when there was a particularly large crowd waiting to see Pendergast, and his gatekeeper, “Cap” Matheus, went out to say that if there was anyone in line who had anything to give Tom, he should come directly in. But no one moved.

The old Pendergast policy that politics was chiefly a business of making friends placed no limits because of ethnic background, religion, or race. To be a Democrat was to be a Democrat. Tolerance was good politics. And while less was done to alleviate suffering in the desperate Negro wards, the attitude of the Pendergast organization was seen by black people as progress. As one of them remembered, “The machine did small favors mainly, but small favors were better than no favors at all.”

Business people had few quibbles about the organization or the man who ruled it. Taxes were low. With a phone call or two, a talk with T.J. or young Jim, red tape wondrously dissolved, projects went forward. People in business found they could get quick, reliable answers to important questions, that problems with the city could be resolved with amazing dispatch. The comment most often heard about Tom Pendergast was that “he got things done.”

Even the editors of the Star at this point were impressed by the executive ability of City Manager McElroy, a judgment they lived to regret. Kansas City probably had “the most efficient city government in its history,” said the Star in 1930. Presiding Judge Truman was frequently cited as an exemplary public official.

But others, too, commanded respect and deservedly. Harry Truman was not, as sometimes implied later, the sole exception-to-the-rule in a wholly nefarious crowd. Jim Pendergast was able and honest and had, as remembered his priest, Monsignor Arthur Tighe, a remarkable “kind of gentleness about him for being a politician.” Attorney James P. Aylward, T.J.’s friend and adviser, and chairman of the Democratic County Committee, was astute, hardworking, and well regarded within Kansas City professional circles.

Even Pendergast himself had lately acquired some of the trappings of respectability, a degree of polish unimaginable in earlier times. He dressed now in conservative, well-tailored suits. He and his wife had been to Paris. T.J. would expound on his love of Paris, without apology. He had developed a great fondness for French cooking, his friends knew. His new home on Ward Parkway, in the Country Club district, Kansas City’s loveliest residential section, was an exact copy of a house he had seen in France, a red-brick mansion in the Regency style, perfect in every detail.

Life had never been better. And by the close of the year, with Prohibition ended in December 1933, the Pendergasts would be back in the legal liquor business again. Best of their line was “Old 1889 Brand,” named for the year Tom first arrived in Kansas City. It was seven-and-a-half-year-old Kentucky bourbon, one hundred proof.

That gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, the sale of narcotics, and racketeering were a roaring business in Kansas City was all too obvious. Nor did anyone for a moment doubt that the ruling spirit behind it all remained Tom Pendergast. It was the Pendergast heyday. Never, not even in the gaudy era following the Civil War, had the city known such “wide-open” times. Forty dance halls and more than a hundred nightclubs were in operation, offering floor shows, dancers, comedians, and some of the best blues and jazz to be heard anywhere in America—the Bennie Moten Orchestra at the Reno, and later at the Reno, Count Basie and his Kansas City Seven doing “The One O’clock Jump,” trumpeter Hot Lips Page at the Subway, blues singer Julia Lee at the Yellow Front Saloon. Musicians from all over the country, most of them black and all hard hit by the Depression, came to Kansas City, knowing there was work. “Every joint had music,” one of them remembered, “every joint.”

This, too, was heartland America, no less than the old-fashioned, country-town peace and quiet of nearby Independence.

“Dance All Night Long!” said an advertisement in the Star for the Musicians Ball at the Labor Temple, in the spring of 1932, at which Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, Walter Page and his Blue Devils, the Nighthawks—in all, eight orchestras—played until sunup.

There were no closing hours. At the Subway, in a basement at 18th and Vine, thirty to forty musicians would “crowd in” to play. “Everybody played that wanted to play…and every night you could find music there…. It never really did open until after 1:00 [in the morning].” “A cracker town, but a happy town,” Count Basie remembered.

The red-light district ran for blocks, on 13th and 14th Streets. One high-priced place called the Chesterfield Club offered a businessman’s lunch served by waitresses clad only in high heels and cellophane aprons.

A lifetime resident of Kansas City named John Doohan, trying years later to describe the rollicking city it had been, would suddenly stop in mid-sentence, realizing how much he missed it. “See…there just wasn’t any law,” said Doohan, whose job in the research library at the Star required keeping watch on the unfolding history of the city.

The clubs stayed open all night. Liquor flowed. There was a band in every place…and gambling, even around the Star [at Grand and 17th]…. On the northeast corner there was a bookmaker and gambling. On the southeast corner there was a bookmaker and gambling. Two doors north of the Star, there were two bookie joints. And then as you went on Main, there were gambling places at 31st…at 31st and Prospect, 34th and Main….

Gambling places…Prostitution—wide open. Knocking on windows. Two bits, quarter and fifty-cent places.

Whenever questioned about this, Tom Pendergast customarily replied, “Well, the rich men have their clubs, where they can gamble and have a good time. Would you deny the poor man an equal right?”

“Ours is a fine, clean, and well-ordered town,” Pendergast would insist repeatedly, and John Doohan, too, would remember there being little fear of violent crime.

I will say the town was safe. You never got mugged. You could walk around downtown any time of the day or night. You could walk through the colored district, and there weren’t any problems. I mean things were…you know, there wasn’t much crime. But there were the rackets.

Others, including respected, proper citizens, conceded privately that “wide open” was good business, particularly in hard times.

The head of the rackets, one of T.J.’s acknowledged “chief lieutenants,” was a small, dapper Italian-American with a master-of-ceremonies personality named Johnny Lazia, who had earlier served a prison sentence for armed robbery. Lazia was the King of Little Italy, where, in 1926, he had seized power from T.J.’s old Ninth Ward leader, Mike Ross. T.J. had accepted Lazia as part of the organization largely because he had no choice and apparently with the understanding that Lazia would keep Al Capone and other out-of-town gangsters clear of the city. “Our Johnny,” it seems, relied on his charm as well as his power, and he and Boss Tom soon were “fast friends.” Also, importantly, T.J. had by this time become a heavy gambler on horse races and so was in continuous need of such “fast friends.” At the office at 1908 Main, he had installed his own direct wire to tracks in the East, even set up betting cages at the rear of the clubroom. Across the Missouri River in Platte County he had established his own race track, the Riverside Park Jockey Club, where he also kept his own stable of horses.

In return for his support in the Ninth Ward, Lazia was to have control over liquor and gambling in the city, as well as a say in hiring policies at the police department. Allegedly, Lazia even had his own office at the police department. A federal agent sent to investigate Lazia’s activities reported to Washington that when he called Kansas City police headquarters, Lazia answered the phone.

Lazia, too, knew how to be a friend in need. When former Senator James Reed’s companion (later wife) Nell Donnelly was kidnapped in 1931, it was to Lazia that Reed went immediately for help, and Lazia who brought her safely home. Two years later, in 1933, when City Manager McElroy’s stylish twenty-five-year-old daughter Mary was kidnapped, it was again “Our Johnny” who came to the rescue, this time producing the ransom money, $30,000 in cash, which he collected with astonishing speed from friends among the gamblers.

Through all this, only one brave voice was raised in protest, Samuel S. Mayerberg, the rabbi of Temple B’nai Jehudah, who in the spring of 1932 decided to speak out before a government study club, a meeting of perhaps forty people, most of whom were women. It was then that a reform movement began, though few, and clearly no one in the organization, seemed particularly concerned, nor was there a rush of good citizens to join his ranks. “One of my hardest jobs was not fighting the underworld,” Mayerberg later said, “but in using my energy and time to convince thoroughly nice people, honorable men…that as respectable citizens, they ought to be in it [the fight] also.”

When federal investigators started proceedings against Lazia for income tax evasion in 1933, T.J. wrote at once to Jim Farley, the new Postmaster General in Washington and part of FDR’s inner circle, to stress how extremely important Lazia was to him. “Now Jim,” he wrote, “Lazia is one of my chief lieutenants and I am more sincerely interested in his welfare than anything you might be able to do for me now or in the future….”

But then, only weeks later, came the stunning news of Kansas City’s “Union Station Massacre,” one of the most sensational atrocities of the whole gangster era. On Saturday, June 17, 1933, three notorious bankrobbers and killers, Verne Miller, Adam Richetti, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd, armed with submachine guns, attempted to rescue another “public enemy,” Frank (“Jelly”) Nash, as Nash, in handcuffs, was being escorted by law officers from a train to a waiting car at Union Station, to make the short drive to the federal prison at Leavenworth. The three killers, who were waiting in the parking lot outside the station, made their move as Nash was being put in the car. One officer turned and fired with a pistol. The three then opened up with machine guns, killing five men—two Kansas City policemen, an agent of the FBI, a police chief from Oklahoma, and Nash—after which the killers vanished. And though none of the three had any known ties to Kansas City, a local racketeer named Michael James (“Jimmy Needles”) LaCapra would later testify that it was Johnny Lazia who arranged to get them safely out of town. True or not, Lazia became the most talked-about man in Kansas City, drawing more popular attention even than Tom Pendergast.

In what was to be a long, often trying, and continuously eventful public life, some days for Harry Truman would stand out always as moments of great personal satisfaction. One was Tuesday, September 5, 1933, in the middle of what otherwise was a particularly difficult and uncertain time for him.

On Tuesday, September 5, the completed new $200,000 county courthouse at Independence—the fifth so-called “remodeling” of the building since 1836—was dedicated with ceremonies and festivities that began early in the morning and stretched on into the night. There were horseshoe-pitching contests, an old fiddlers’ contest, a Negro dancing contest, music from seven marching bands and seven drum corps, a bathing beauty contest, a horse show, a street dance, a parade of floats by local merchants, and a historic pageant. The formal dedication itself took place in the afternoon, beginning at two by the old four-faced courthouse clock (it, too, newly refurbished and set now in a colonial cupola), and included speeches by Governor Park and Judge Harry S. Truman.

The day was warm and sunny, the large crowd in good spirits, everybody enjoying the occasion. The homely Victorian scruffiness of the old courthouse had been transformed into something larger, more spacious, and in a style vaguely like that of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, though the architect, Harry’s brother-in-law Fred Wallace, was quoted in the day’s special edition of the Examiner saying that his inspiration for the north and south porticos had been the Greek “Temple of the Winds.”

The new building had little of the character of what had stood there before, but was neat and trim, it seemed, with its pink brick and columned porticos, its cupola and refurbished clock and marble lobby—a clear improvement to nearly everyone and to those especially who would work there, numbers of whom were looking down from the open windows upstairs as Judge Truman, in a white suit, delivered his brief, unexceptional remarks from the speaker’s platform. The Examiner called the building “dignified, spacious, symmetrical” and praised the leadership of the man who, more than any other, had made it possible.

“During the six and one half years of his administration as presiding judge, Harry S. Truman, with the hearty cooperation of his associates on the county bench, has done a number of remarkably big things that will occupy a large place in the history of the county,” said the paper, which then went on to list “a few”: a $10 million road and bridge system built by two bond issues, a modern hospital at the Jackson County Home for the Aged and Infirm, a Girls’ Home for Negroes on the County Farm, a new Kansas City Courthouse estimated to cost $4 million, and now the $200,000 Independence Courthouse. It was a record unmatched in the history of the county.

During these years of strenuous service to Jackson County [the Examiner also wrote of Judge Truman] he has found time to serve as president of the National Old Trails Association, an office he still holds. He has become widely known throughout Missouri, and many of his friends have expressed the opinion that he will fill the office of governor someday….

But to Judge Truman himself, his future remained a large mystery and a worry.

Later in the fall of 1933, outraged that the Roosevelt administration had appointed a Republican as director of the federal reemployment service in Missouri, Tom Pendergast complained to Washington, with the immediate result that the Republican was fired and the job given to Judge Truman. Having no wish to relinquish his place on the county court any sooner than necessary, Harry agreed to serve in this new federal post without pay. He waived the $300-a-month salary and began driving to and from the federal office in Jefferson City, halfway across the state, twice a week. The task was to channel unemployed laborers into jobs with contractors on federal public works, and, with his experience in county projects, he was ideally suited. The long drives also provided time to think about the future.

For Pendergast it was another giant step. In a few months The Missouri Democrat (a paper controlled by the organization) could report that 100,000 men and nearly 10,000 women were employed in the state under the new federal (Democratic) program.

Harry found himself reporting to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s public works official, and traveling to Washington on government business, something he had never done before.

At long last Harry made up his mind. He would run for Congress, he decided, against the wishes of his wife, who had liked the sound of the collector’s job, with its high pay and security, and who greatly preferred staying in Independence. In Congress, Harry told her, he would have the chance for some “power in the nation.”

But when he went to see T.J., he was told the choice was no longer his. Pendergast had picked another man, a circuit court judge named Jasper Bell (who would win handily in the primary, and again in November, and go on to serve six terms in Congress). Crestfallen, Harry found himself out in the cold again, “maneuvered out,” as he said.

Weeks went by. Nothing more was mentioned, no further offer made. His spirits fell to a new low.

Then, in early May 1934, without warning, everything changed. Stopping at Warsaw, Missouri, on a speaking tour, he received a call from Jim Pendergast asking him to meet as soon as possible at the Bothwell Hotel in Sedalia. It was a matter of importance.

The drive to Sedalia took about half an hour. Pendergast had Jim Aylward with him and the three of them drew up chairs in a corner of the hotel lobby. Harry had no idea what was coming.

There had been a meeting, he was told. T.J. wanted him to run for the United States Senate. Harry was incredulous, almost speechless.

“The Boss is 95 percent for you,” Aylward assured him.

“What’s wrong with the other five percent?” Truman asked.

“Oh you know what I mean,” Aylward said. “The Boss is for you.”

He needed time to think, Truman said. They told him he had to do it for the good of the party, and this apparently settled the issue. He agreed to run but said he was broke. In another day or so, Aylward and Jim Pendergast each gave him $500 to get started.

As Harry learned soon enough, he was anything but T.J.’s first choice for the Senate. T.J. had asked at least three others to run, only to be turned down by all three. Jim Reed had been asked first, largely as a courtesy. (The New York Times had predicted Reed would be the choice.) When Reed said no, T.J. turned to Joe Shannon, who professed feeling too out of sympathy with the New Deal and said that at his age he preferred to remain in the House. The third and most serious choice was Aylward, who, everyone agreed, would have made a strong candidate and a first-rate senator if elected. His name had been mentioned repeatedly in the papers as a prime possibility. But Aylward had no longing for the life in Washington, he told T.J., no wish to give up time with his family or leave his law practice.

Other names came up. When Jim Pendergast suggested Harry Truman, whose name to this moment had never been on anyone’s list, Aylward enthusiastically agreed. T.J. was skeptical. “Do you mean to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be elected to the United States Senate,” Aylward would remember Pendergast exclaiming. But Aylward and Jim persisted until T.J. agreed.

Joe Shannon, when consulted, said he thought T.J.’s initial reaction had been the right one. Truman was “too light,” Shannon thought. “A very pleasant sort of fellow,” Shannon would later explain to a reporter. “And he’s clean…. On the other hand…I don’t think he’s heavy enough for the Senate. I can’t imagine him there….” But, added Shannon, “Tom hasn’t got a field of world-beaters to pick from.”

The Truman candidacy was announced on May 14, 1934. Before dawn that morning, alone in a room at the Pickwick Hotel, he had written:

Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4 A.M., I have to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me.

II

The state of Missouri comprises nearly 70,000 square miles, an area larger than all New England. The population in 1934 was 3.7 million, with more than 1 million people, roughly a third, concentrated in the two largest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, some 260 miles apart at opposite ends of the state.

The landscape varied enormously, from the low alluvial cottonlands of the southeastern “Boot Heel,” along the Mississippi, to the rugged Ozark Hills in the south-central section, to the prairie farmlands along the Kansas border. A dozen railroads crisscrossed the state and a half-dozen airlines flew in and out of St. Louis and Kansas City, while charter plane service was available for such smaller cities as St. Joseph, Springfield, and Joplin. But it was by automobile that Missouri Democrats waged their primary battles for Congress that summer of 1934, with candidates and campaign workers, hundreds of soldiers in the ranks, fanning out over the state, traveling many thousands of miles. And though the two major highways between Kansas City and St. Louis—Route 40 through Columbia, and Route 50 by way of Jefferson City—were the fastest, main-traveled roads, there was hardly a road anywhere, hardtop or dirt, that went untraveled, as each faction tried to win the courthouse towns in a state where there were a total of 114 county seats. And it was a task made no easier by the fact that the summer of 1934 in Missouri was the hottest on record.

The heat came up from the highways in shimmering waves, like a mirage on the desert. “It was 104 yesterday and 102 today,” Kathleen Pendergast, the wife of Jim Pendergast, read in a letter from her husband, who had been on the road, “busy running hither and thither,” as he said, ever since Harry Truman made his announcement. Jim Pendergast and Jim Aylward had driven first to Jefferson City, to be sure Guy B. Park was “in line,” and to call on those state employees—a very great number indeed—who, like Governor Park, owed their jobs to the Kansas City organization. At the same time, some fifty others from Kansas City were traveling the state, dispatched to whichever county or small town they had originally come from, to drum up support for Judge Truman. Jim’s assignment for the moment was to call on local newspapers. Distressed by the weather, he longed for a storm to clear the air. But in all the temperature would register 100 degrees or above for twenty-one days in July. Only Harry Truman appeared untroubled by the heat, a peculiarity that would be noticed often in times ahead.

It was Aylward, now chairman of the state committee, who ran the campaign, and the opening Truman rally at Columbia was a model operation, as “Kansas City took over Columbia.” An estimated four thousand people filled the lawn in front of the Boone County Courthouse, close by the University of Missouri campus. Besides the busloads of people from Kansas City, a big Jefferson City turnout had been orchestrated—state employees from every department reportedly—and a “newfangled loud speaking truck” stood by to carry Judge Truman’s speech, a sure sign, said the papers, of politics brought up to date. With the noise and color of the gathering crowds and an American Legion band pumping away, the mood seemed more like that of a homecoming game.

Harry had two opponents in the race, Jacob L. (“Tuck”) Milligan from Richmond, and John J. (“Jack”) Cochran from St. Louis, both of whom were Missouri congressmen experienced in the ways of Washington and far better known than Harry. Cochran, a big, friendly, humorous, and honest man, was favored to win. He was “a congressman’s congressman,” someone known to understand the “wheels-within-wheels” intricacy of government, and who, importantly, also had the support of the St. Louis counterpart of the Pendergast machine, the so-called “Igoe-Dickmann organization.” Tuck Milligan, in his favor, was backed by Senator Bennett Clark—Milligan was seen as Clark’s way of again challenging Tom Pendergast and gaining a second seat for himself in the Senate—and like his father before him, Clark was a colorful, two-fisted stump speaker.

Opening their campaigns weeks earlier, Milligan and Cochran had both focused on Harry Truman’s one clear advantage in the race, the Pendergast power behind him, as his greatest liability, portraying him as a mere machine stooge. Their attacks, furthermore, came just as the excesses of the organization had again become lurid news, as violence in Kansas City’s municipal elections left dozens of people injured and four dead. So Harry was an easy mark.

Now, at Columbia, in a speech carried statewide by radio, he lashed back. “It will be remembered that Mr. Milligan and Mr. Cochran journeyed to Kansas City two years ago and sought and received the endorsement of the Kansas City organization for their races for the nomination as congressman at large for Missouri.” As for Bennett Clark, he only wanted more power, to make himself boss.

In days following, in Saline County and at Boonville, Harry tried to change the tone and subject. The Depression was the issue, he insisted, declaring his all-out faith in the New Deal. (“A New Deal for Missouri” said a placard in the window of the “newfangled loud speaking truck.”) He talked of the capitalist domination of government in bygone Republican times, praised the determination of FDR to end the “rule of the rich” and give the average American a chance. Ninety percent of the wealth of the country was in the hands of 4 percent of the population, he said at Springfield. Roosevelt was “the man of the hour” to chase the moneychangers from the temple, “so that the common people of the country could have a chance at the good things of life.” The party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was the party “for the everyday man just like you and me.” He called for shorter working hours, higher pay, old-age pensions, payment of the soldiers’ bonus. He also called his opponents in the primary his friends and said any remarks he might make about them would be of a purely political nature.

But the Pendergast issue would not go away. And since Milligan and Cochran were both stressing their own all-out support for Roosevelt, Pendergast was in practicality the only issue.

Then, on Tuesday, July 10, with Harry’s campaign not yet a week old, the quiet of night in Kansas City exploded with machine-gun fire. It happened at 3:00 A.M. The victim this time was Johnny Lazia, cut down as he was about to open a car door for his wife in front of the Park Central Hotel. Two unknown assailants had been waiting in the dark. Lazia was hit eight times. “Why to me, to Johnny Lazia, who has been a friend to everybody?” he moaned to a doctor at the hospital. According to the account spread across the front page of the early morning edition of the Kansas City Journal-Post, he then delivered what were very nearly his last words: “If anything happens, notify Mr. Pendergast…my best friend, and tell him I love him.”

Tom Pendergast and City Manager McElroy were prominent among the mourners at Holy Rosary Catholic Church for Lazia’s funeral, the biggest ever seen in Kansas City, despite a temperature of 106 degrees. “There were at least ten thousand people down around the church who couldn’t get in,” Jim Pendergast recorded. “Of course a lot of them were simply curiosity seekers, but Johnny did have a world of friends.”

The next night, across the state near St. Louis, at Washington, Missouri, Senator Bennett Clark, in support of Tuck Milligan, pulled off his tie, loosened his collar, and tore into Harry Truman as no one ever had until then. It was Missouri politics “with the bark off,” the style Missouri loved.

It seems my old friend Judge Harry S. Truman finds it easier to abuse me than to set forth his own qualifications [the senator began slowly]. His opening speech at Columbia, which was attended almost exclusively by a mob from Kansas City—in fact I am informed the natives looked over the crowd to see if Dillinger was there—by a lot of state employees ordered out by their superiors as a condition to holding their jobs and herded over in buses like trucks carrying cattle to market, was largely an attack on me.

Harry fears that someone from the eastern part of Missouri may undertake to set up as boss. Harry Truman fears a boss in Missouri—God save the mark! Harry places the intelligence of the Democrats of Missouri so low and estimates their credulity so high that he actually went into great length in promising people that if elected to the Senate he would not set up as a boss or undertake to dictate to anybody. Why, bless Harry’s good kind heart—no one has ever accused him of being a boss or wanting to be a boss and nobody will ever suspect him of trying to dictate to anybody in his own right as long as a certain eminent citizen of Jackson County remains alive and in possession of his health and faculties…. In view of the judge’s record of subserviency in Jackson County it would seem that his assurances against any assumption of boss-ship are a trifle gratuitous to say the least.

When all three candidates, plus Bennett Clark and Governor Guy B. Park, appeared at a huge picnic in Clay County, north of Kansas City, an annual affair sponsored by St. Munchins Catholic Church, Harry was clearly outclassed. Bennett Clark held the crowd spellbound, though it was Milligan who got the biggest applause. Ten thousand people sat resolutely through four hours of political oratory, as the sun beat down. “Deeply interested in the array of political lights that paraded across the rough board rostrum,” wrote a reporter, “the perspiring crowd held its ground throughout.”

The president of the Missouri Farmers’ Association, William Hirth, joined the Cochran campaign and began referring to Truman as “Tom Pendergast’s bellhop.” “For this bellhop of Pendergast’s to aspire to make a jump from the obscure bench of a county judge to the United States Senate is without precedent. When one contemplates the giants of the past who have represented Missouri this spectacle is not only grotesque, it is sheer buffoonery.”

Striking back, Harry charged Milligan with padding the government payroll with relatives, but saved his harshest invective for Bennett Clark. The senator, said Harry, ran for office on his father’s reputation, but his record proved there was nothing in heredity.

Many who thought they knew Judge Truman were astonished by the different man he became now, under attack. “Judge Truman is unobtrusive in his work,” wrote a correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “His decisions are made in low tones; there is no braggadocio about him. He sees his job and does it quietly. But in a fight, this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire….”

Truman, said Bennett Clark, was conducting a campaign of “mendacity and imbecility” unmatched in Missouri history. “What Harry is really trying to do is to secure a good county job for himself on his retirement from the county court of Jackson County next January…. Harry himself told me of his hopes.” Perhaps the heat was affecting Harry Truman, Clark surmised, because ordinarily he was neither vicious nor inventive enough to tell such lies. Further, Clark charged that seven or eight thousand state employees were out campaigning for Truman, all at the taxpayers’ expense—but then such, alas, was the Pendergast way.

T.J., demonstrating that he still knew a few things about bringing politicians down to size, invited a reporter into his office and in the course of an affable, soft-spoken conversation remarked, “Why, Senator Clark is a friend of mine. He was in here just the other day.”

Jack Cochran, to his credit, tried to keep the debate on a serious level. Mud slinging, Cochran said, was a luxury for prosperous times and had no place when conditions were so desperate and so many were suffering. In a speech in front of the Capitol at Jefferson City, Harry Truman, too, talked of his sadness over so much that he had seen traveling the countryside.

Farm prices, in steady decline since the Coolidge years, had gone from bad to worse. Eggs that normally sold for 25 cents a dozen were bringing 5 cents. Since 1930, more than eighteen thousand Missouri farms had been foreclosed. Abandoned houses, their windows boarded, fences falling, dotted the landscape. Sharecroppers were living in two-room, dirt-floor shacks, walls insulated with old newspapers. The look of the land, and in the faces of farm families in this summer of 1934, was as bleak as in anyone’s memory. Certainly, Harry Truman had never seen anything comparable. It was both the worst of the Depression and the year dust storms on the western plains began making headlines. With no rain and the fierce heat continuing, crops were burning up all over Missouri. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch assumed a biblical cadence in its description of the tragedy: “Under merciless summer suns the fields ached, and the corn withered, and the cattle perished, and the rivers became as scars of dust, as the drought droned its hymn of hate.”

Conditions, said Truman in one speech, were “such as to make any human with a heart anxious to alleviate them.”

He presented himself as a common-sense country boy. He was the good Baptist farmer from Grandview, repeatedly poking fun at his rivals as “city farmers.” And he looked the part, deeply tanned from days in the sun, lean, fit, “hard as nails” by one account. He was fifty now and there was considerably more gray in his hair, yet he seemed much younger. He smiled constantly—a big politician’s grin, his even, white teeth looking whiter than usual because of the tan, his eyes flashing behind the steel-rimmed glasses. Joe Shannon, among others, thought he smiled entirely too much.

One blistering day, on a road near Mexico, Missouri, seeing a farmer in a field having trouble with his binder, Harry stopped the car, climbed the fence, introduced himself, took off his coat, “and proceeded to set up the binder under a hot sun for his new found friend,” as reported in the local paper in a story that did him no harm with the local farmers.

Truman and Cochran were both battling for the farm vote, knowing it could decide the election. Neither of them had a chance without the support of their respective big-city machines, but if the votes for Cochran in St. Louis and those for Truman in Kansas City proved equal, then it would be the farmers who named the winner. Jim Pendergast worried that the farmers were more concerned about the prospects for rain than about politics.

In six weeks candidate Truman covered the greater part of Missouri by automobile, by main highways and winding back roads, until he had appeared before, shaken hands, and “visited” with courthouse crowds in more than half of the 114 county seats. It was hot, exhausting, throat-parching day-and-night work and he greatly enjoyed nearly every moment. He had always liked being on the road. “Fact is, I like roads,” he would say. “I like to move….” He felt as good as if he were on vacation, he told reporters, and he looked it.

Again, as on the earlier cross-country courthouse survey, he was accompanied by Fred Canfil, whose hulking, blustery presence left some people wondering. If a man could be judged by the company he kept, why on earth would Judge Truman choose such a companion? But Canfil was as hardworking, as willing to put in ten to fifteen hours a day as ever. Besides, Harry found him amusing, good company, if eccentric and at times exasperating. Arriving at a hotel, Canfil would immediately check Harry’s quarters to see that all was satisfactory—bathroom, sink, toilet, bathtub—and oblivious to the fact that he was scattering his cigarette ashes everywhere he went. Canfil and Truman were to be together for years, as things turned out, Truman refusing to abandon Canfil or to make apologies for him.

Some days that summer, they covered several hundred miles, stopping for food and gas and speeches at a dozen or more places. Some towns were good-sized, like Hannibal on the Mississippi, Mark Twain’s town, which had grown to twenty thousand people, or Poplar Bluff, seat of Butler County, on the bright, clear, misnamed Black River, in the southeastern corner of the state. Poplar Bluff had a population of ten thousand. More often the candidate spoke in places like Laddadonia, Elmo, Liberty, or Benton, towns of six hundred people or less. At Benton, seat of Scott County, population four hundred and known for its chicken-calling contest on Neighbor Day each October, bobcats were still a sufficient menace in the 1930s to require an organized “drive” on them. At Liberty, just north of the Missouri River from Independence in Clay County, the little, two-story bank building on the northeast corner of the courthouse square looked no different from the day in 1866 when it was held up by Jesse James.

The crowds that turned out to hear Judge Truman were seldom large, no more usually than a cluster of a few hundred people standing quietly, attentively in the shade of a courthouse lawn, while in his rapid-fire fashion he spoke from the courthouse steps. A good part of his usual audience was composed of courthouse loafers, old-timers with nothing better to do, and, invariably, small boys free from school for the summer. The atmosphere was old-fashioned and neighborly, and though the response to him was rarely demonstrative, he seemed always to leave his crowds feeling better.

For a scrapbook of the campaign, Fred Canfil kept clipping the local papers along the way. One item dated August 3, from an unidentified paper, acknowledged that Judge Truman was no orator, but then this was an argument in his favor since there was already too much oratory in the United States Senate.

At a banquet in his honor at the Baltimore Hotel in Kansas City the week before the primary, Tuck Milligan brought seven hundred people to their feet cheering when, without mentioning Tom Pendergast by name, he said that anyone who perpetrated vote fraud in America ought to be treated as a common criminal. As for his opponent Harry Truman, who was still campaigning at the other end of the state, Milligan joked, “Why, if Harry ever goes to the Senate, he will grow calluses on his ears, listening on the long-distance telephone to the orders of his boss.”

Milligan by now was clearly falling behind, while Cochran and Truman appeared to be neck and neck.

On the day of the primary, August 7, once the smoke blew away, as Harry said, he had won by 40,000 votes. The final tally was Truman, 276,850; Cochran, 236,105. Milligan, who ran a poor third, received 147,614.

Harry had done well with the farmers, but so had Cochran, carrying as many counties as Truman. The big margin of victory after all was in Jackson County, where a grand total of 137,000 votes had been rolled up for Truman, nearly half of all he received. Two years before, with Pendergast support in his race for Congress, Cochran had carried Jackson County by an overwhelming 95,000 votes. This time, with the organization against them, Cochran and Milligan together received all of 11,000 votes. In some Kansas City precincts Cochran failed to get a single vote.

Cochran felt his big mistake in the race had been to predict he would get 125,000 votes in St. Louis. This, he thought, had only made the Pendergast people work harder. As it was, Cochran’s margin in St. Louis (and St. Louis County) was 112,000–25,000 votes less than what had been achieved by the machine at the other end of the state.

The Kansas City Star called it a Pendergast triumph pure and simple. The one consolation was that western Missouri would now have representation in the Senate. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expressed the view that the winning of the Democratic nomination for United States Senator by Judge Harry S. Truman of Independence was “without significance.”

No one seemed to think that Truman himself had had a thing to do with his victory, and he himself was quoted saying only how much he appreciated all that his friends had done for him.

As expected, the general election in the fall was a “pushover.” Harry’s Republican opponent was the incumbent who proudly carried the name of an infamous New York Republican of the Grant era, Roscoe Conkling. He was Roscoe Conkling Patterson. Harry’s expenses in the primary had come to $12,286. In the general election they were $785.

Afterward, he and Jim Aylward made a flying visit to Washington to call on Bennett Clark, who had been the biggest loser in the primary fight and who now, looking to his own reelection a few years hence, preferred to forget all he had ever said against his “good friend” Harry Truman and the Kansas City organization.

In a talk before the Kansas City Elks Club, Harry said he hoped to keep his feet on the ground in Washington.

By December, the final touches were being added to the handsome new, twenty-one-story courthouse in Kansas City. On the day of its dedication, after Christmas, as her father beamed with pleasure, ten-year-old Margaret Truman helped pull the string to unveil Charles Keck’s equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson. Margaret had grown tall for her age, “skinny and all one color—faded blonde,” a friend would remember, and clearly she enjoyed being her father’s daughter.

As a reward for faithful service, Fred Canfil was made Building Director of Jackson County, a kind of glorified custodian or janitor for the new courthouse, and would, according to later testimony, prove “very energetic” and “very noisy and loudmouthed,” and run things better than any other previous custodian.

They were exciting days for the Trumans. The week after, on January 3, 1935, Bess and Margaret, with Jim Pendergast, watched from the visitors’ gallery in the United States Senate as Harry, “barely recognizable” in morning coat and striped pants, walked with Senator Clark down the blue-carpeted aisle to the dais, to take the oath of office from Vice President John Nance Garner.

On the day Harry bid goodbye to Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Pendergast had told him, “Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.”

III

Harry Truman had an unusually retentive mind. He remembered people—names, personal interests, family connections. He remembered things he had read or learned in school long before, often bringing them into conversation in a way that amazed others. He remembered every kindness he had ever been shown, the help given in hard times, and particularly would he remember those who treated him well when he first arrived in Washington, at age fifty, knowing almost no one and entirely without experience as a legislator. He would fondly recall Harry Hopkins, for example, because Hopkins had shown him kindness in this most difficult of times in his life. Another was William Helm, Washington correspondent for the Kansas City Journal-Post, to whom the new senator had gone for help at the start, confessing he was “green as grass” and in need of someone to show him around. At first, Helm took this as a joke. Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn’t take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex.

Two other new Democratic senators, Carl Hatch of New Mexico and Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington, went out of their way to be friendly. Hatch was self-effacing and bookish, Schwellenbach “a real guy” and “a wheel horse.” Among the older, veteran senators, Harry could count a half dozen from both sides of the aisle who gave encouragement, and like Hatch and Schwellenbach, they were all from the West, or were at least western in outlook.

Extremely important to Harry, as events proved, was Burton K. Wheeler, a lanky, independent-minded Montana Democrat, something of a rogue, who smoked big cigars and ran the powerful Interstate Commerce Committee.

Carl Hayden of Arizona, another Democrat, had come to Congress in 1911, as a territorial representative. “He took the trouble to explain some of the technicalities and customs of the Senate which appear pretty confusing to a newcomer,” Harry would write. Republicans Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and old William E. Borah, “the Lion of Idaho,” never treated him as anything but an equal. And most memorable was seventy-two-year-old J. Hamilton (“Ham”) Lewis of Illinois, the majority whip, who wore pince-nez, wing collars, spats, and a wavy pink toupee to match his pink Vandyke whiskers and sweeping mustache, and who one day came and sat down in an empty seat beside Senator Truman.

“Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said kindly. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”

He was liked also by the red-faced, hard-drinking Vice President, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, who still dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and striped pants, and who, echoing T.J.’s parting words, told Truman to study hard and keep quiet until he knew what he was talking about. It was advice Garner always gave beginners, but that not all heeded. He, too, was a man of little formal education and obscure background. Now and then as time passed, he would ask Truman to take the Vice President’s chair and preside over the Senate. On a day when Will Rogers came to Capitol Hill for lunch, Garner invited Harry to come along, a favor and an occasion Harry would never forget.

Such gestures were the exception, however. “I was under a cloud,” he would say later. The Kansas City reputation had followed him to Washington. Bennett Clark was spoken of as the Senator from Missouri. Harry Truman was the Senator from Pendergast.

Bronson Cutting of New Mexico had a way of looking through Truman as though he didn’t exist. Pat McCarran of Nevada later recalled, “I never considered him a Senator.” George W. Norris of Nebraska, the great voice of reform in the Senate, thought he was “poison,” and refused to speak to him.

When a congressional aide named Victor Messall, a native Missourian and an experienced hand on the Hill, was offered a job on Senator Truman’s staff, he refused, fearing what the association might do to his career. “Here was a guy…sent up [to Washington] by gangsters,” he remembered. “I’d lose my reputation if I worked for him.”

Messall only changed his mind after volunteering to help the senator hunt for an apartment, which they found on Connecticut Avenue—four rooms in the Tilden Gardens apartments for $150 a month. Later, they stopped at a piano store, where Truman sat down and played several before choosing one to rent for five dollars a month. From there they went to a bank. While Messall waited, the senator took out a loan for furniture.

This, Messall decided, was an altogether different kind of man from what he imagined and one he now wanted very much to work for. A slim, snappy dresser, his hair slicked back Fred Astaire style, Messall became number one of a staff of five in Truman’s office. The reporter William Helm would describe him watching over the senator thereafter with “doglike devotion.”

Making his first call at the White House in February, a nervous Senator Truman found Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and one or two others high up in the administration sitting about the waiting room, busily talking and paying no notice of him. Though scheduled for fifteen minutes with the President, his time was cut to seven, during which he remained tongue-tied before Roosevelt. “It was quite an event for a country boy to go calling on the President of the United States,” he remembered. His telephone calls to the White House in the months to follow often went unanswered.

“He came to the Senate, I believe, with a definite inferiority complex,” wrote his boyhood friend Charlie Ross, who had become a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He was a better man than he knew.”

His diligence was noteworthy. Most mornings, he turned up at his office so early—about seven—and so in advance of everyone else in the building that it was decided he should have his own passkey, reportedly the first ever issued to a senator. Indeed, he would rise and be on his way so early in the morning that by mid-afternoon he would look in need of another shave. He carried himself straighter than a tall man would, walked considerably faster than customary in Washington. On good days he walked the several miles to the Capitol, moving-along at a steady military clip of 120 paces a minute and stopping usually at Childs restaurant for breakfast. When he didn’t walk, he took the trolley that ran down Connecticut Avenue, then swung east on Pennsylvania, past the White House, and on up to the Capitol.

“By the time his colleagues get down to work,” wrote William Helm, “Senator Truman has been through the morning mail, dictated several hundred letters, fixed up as many deserving Democrats with jobs as possible and is rarin’ to go.”

That his ties to Tom Pendergast continued, he left no doubt. To one Kansas City job applicant who asked his support, he wrote, “If you will send us the endorsements from the Kansas City Democratic Organization, I shall be glad to do what I can for you.” This, in his view, was how the game had always been played, not by Tom Pendergast only, but in American politics overall, from the beginning, and he was never to view it differently. To the victors went the spoils.

He saw to the appointment of hundreds of people to hundreds of different jobs in Missouri, including old friends and family. His brother Vivian would go to work for the Federal Housing Agency in Kansas City. Ted Marks was set up in a job with the Labor Department, in the Veterans Employment Service in Kansas City. Edgar Hinde became postmaster in Independence, a job he held for twenty-five years.

In the reception area of his office, over the marble mantelpiece where no one could possibly miss it, Senator Truman put a framed portrait of T.J. Pendergast.

His office was Number 248, on the second floor of the immense Senate Office Building (later named the Russell Building) northeast of the Capitol, his windows looking onto an interior courtyard. In the Senate Chamber he was assigned seat 94, one of seven newly installed behind the back row on the Democratic side to accommodate the disproportionate Democratic majority. To his right sat Sherman Minton of Indiana. The seat on the left remained empty until June when the newly elected Senator from West Virginia, Rush Holt, would turn thirty and thus be old enough, according to the Constitution, to take his place.

Of the ninety-six senators in this the 74th Congress, there were, including Senator Holt, sixty-nine Democrats and twenty-seven Republicans. Bennett Clark sat almost directly ahead, two rows down. Beyond Clark, about midway in the second row, was Tom Connally of Texas, who still wore the black bow tie and old-fashioned stand-up collar of the classic southern statesman. Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Hugo Black of Alabama, two senators of great importance to the administration, were also in the second row, and Ellison DuRant (“Cotton Ed”) Smith of South Carolina, who was known for his orations on King Cotton and Southern Womanhood and his near-perfect aim with tobacco juice. In the majority leader’s front-row seat on the aisle sat Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, while over near the other end of the first row, to Harry’s left, in seat 17, was the storm center of the chamber, the place of Huey Long of Louisiana, whose rampant outbursts against the administration lately included the charge that Franklin Roosevelt was personally trying to destroy him.

The year before, Long had proclaimed his “National Share Our Wealth Program,” promising to make “Every man a king, every girl a queen,” and through Harry Truman’s first months in the Senate, Long dominated, upstaging everyone. In early February he opened an assault on Jim Farley, charging that Parley’s operations were steeped in corruption. Then, on February 20, calling Farley a “political monster,” Long inserted in the Congressional Record an article from the Post-Dispatch describing how T.J. Pendergast had arranged with Farley to call off Internal Revenue investigations of Johnny Lazia. Long afterward told Harry it was only a little politics to please the home folks.

On the day of another Long tirade, when Harry was presiding in the Vice President’s chair, most of the Senate got up and walked out. Later, when he and Long found themselves crossing the street together, heading for the Senate Office Building, Long asked how Harry had liked the speech. He had stayed, Harry said, only because he was in the chair and had no choice. Thereafter Long refused to speak to him. In September in Louisiana, Long would be shot and killed by an assassin.

But if repelled by someone like Huey Long, Harry cared little more for other celebrated “speechifiers” in the Senate. Admittedly fearful of making a speech himself, he seemed to resent particularly those who could and who made their reputations that way. They were the “egotistical boys” whose specialty was talk.

Watching Senator Truman from the press gallery, William Helm wrote, “He sits in the back row of the top-heavy Democratic side of the Senate at every session, listening, absorbing, learning…. His is the conventional way. He ruffles no oldster’s feathers, treads on no toes.”

Four months passed before he dared introduce his first bill. It concerned a subject he knew about from experience–“A Bill to provide insurance by the Farm Credit Administration of mortgages on farm property”—and was sent by Vice President Garner to the Committee on Banking and Currency, where it promptly died.

As customary for freshman senators, he was assigned to two major and several lesser committees. In former days, the Committee on Appropriations would have been a position of dignity, little work, and little significance, but in the New Deal Washington of 1935 it was the largest committee of all, its power unprecedented. The appropriation that January of $4.8 billion for work relief represented approximately half what the government spent. Interstate Commerce, the committee of which Burton K. Wheeler was chairman, seemed a natural place for Harry, with his background in roads and highways, his lifelong fascination with railroads. The smaller assignments included the Public Buildings and Grounds Committee, and the Printing Committee, headed by Carl Hayden and responsible primarily for the Congressional Record. (Mamma Truman had asked Harry to put her on the list for the Record and became a steadfast reader.) The one assignment he did not care for was the District of Columbia Committee, which eventually he quit. He thought the District ought to have self-government.

He worked exceedingly hard at his assignments. Indeed, his first years in the Senate were devoted almost exclusively to committee work. Seldom did he miss a meeting of the two major committees, where, it was also noted, “He speaks rarely, listens much.” He was getting acquainted with the way things were done, which most veteran senators and staff people knew to be an art in itself. He was acutely aware of his limited formal education, and in a determined effort to compensate for it, he never let up. Assigned by Senator Wheeler to a new Interstate Commerce subcommittee investigating railroad finances, he searched the Library of Congress for books on railroad management, railroad history, until more than fifty volumes were piled in his office. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here,” he vowed privately. What surprised and disappointed him was to find how few others from Congress ever used the Library.

He had come into national public life at the start of “the Second Hundred Days,” the high tide of the New Deal. The crusade now was not just recovery from the Depression, but for reform, and he voted with the Democratic majority time after time, helping to pass some of the most far-reaching legislation in the history of Congress. He never once spoke for a measure, never took part in debate. He just voted—for the Wagner Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing the right of workers to join unions and to bargain collectively; for establishment of the Works Progress Administration; for the Social Security Act; and for rural electrification, which may have changed the way people lived more than any other single measure of the Roosevelt years. In his own state in 1935, nine out often farms had no electricity.

As a member of the Interstate Commerce Committee, he worked intensively on what became the Public Utility Holding Company Act, designed as a blow against public power cartels, and in the process had his first brush with big-time lobbying and high-powered witnesses. The lobby set up headquarters in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel.

He resolved to deny no one a hearing. “I’ll take all the dinners he has to put out,” he would later write of a lobbyist for a midwestern railroad, “and then do what I think is right.” A true son of Missouri, he wanted all the facts. “I can see no harm in talking to anyone—no matter what his background. In fact I think everyone has a right to be heard if you expect to get all the facts.”

At the hearings, witnesses for the public utilities included such prominent Wall Street figures as Wendell Willkie, president of the Commonwealth & Southern, and John W. Davis, the former Democratic presidential candidate. The “propaganda barrage,” as Truman attested, was such as no county judge in Missouri had ever experienced. Constituents with utility stocks sent thirty thousand letters and telegrams. (He burned them all, Harry claimed years later, though Mildred Dryden, his secretary, would remember no such conflagration.) The lobby also sent people to Kansas City to see Tom Pendergast, who apparently took their side. But that too failed, according to Harry. In June, the bill passed the Senate by a wide margin as expected, with Senator Truman paired in favor. Detained “on important business,” he had arranged to vote for the bill if the outcome looked close. (The important business was driving Bess and Margaret back to Independence for the summer. After five months, they had had enough of Washington.)

“I was a New Dealer from the start,” he would say firmly and proudly later, and the record showed that few in the Senate could match his record of support for Franklin Roosevelt. Senator Robert Wagner of New York, author of so much New Deal legislation, was to praise Senator Truman as extremely useful. Yet in manner, background, language, age, choice of companions, he bore no resemblance to the ardent young New Dealers portrayed by one historian as “trained in the law, economics, public administration, or new technical fields, brilliant and dedicated…nurtured on progressive ideals, schooled in the improved universities of the 1920’s.” Like so many things about Washington, liberals were a new experience for him, and generally speaking, he didn’t care for them, unless they were of the Burton Wheeler variety, western in style and a bit rough about the edges. The rest seemed lacking in common sense, for all their education. He was heart and soul an Andrew Jackson—William Jennings Bryan—T. J. Pendergast kind of Democrat. He loved politics in large part exactly because it meant time spent with men like Cactus Jack Garner (who would be remembered for observing that the vice presidency was not worth a pitcher of warm piss). Privately he enjoyed poking fun at “the boys with the ‘Hah-vud’ accents,” though never, as far as is known, at the Harvard man in the White House.

He voted with the President repeatedly because he genuinely wanted to do what was best for the common people at a time when so many were in desperate need of help. He considered himself one of them. He knew what they were suffering. But he knew also, of course, the value of voting with the President—the leader, “the Boss”—both as an article of faith and as a way ahead. Alben Barkley of Kentucky, assistant to the majority leader, would describe later how he had liked Harry Truman almost at once, instinctively. “As the old political saying goes, he ‘Voted right’.”

To many liberals in the Senate he was “go-along, get-along Harry,” a decent, sincere man whose company they often enjoyed—“I liked Harry Truman,” Claude Pepper of Florida remembered—but he was not someone to take seriously.

The President had told Congress it could not go home without passing his entire program. So Congress labored through the sweltering summer of 1935, the worst summer of the Dust Bowl, the summer when, for the benefit of the newsreel cameras, on a day the temperature hit 110 degrees, one Texas congressman fried an egg on the Capitol steps. Harry called it “a hot wave,” in a letter to Bess and Margaret, but he never complained about the heat or the work, only about their being so far from him.

He gave up the apartment, moved to a hotel to save money, and wrote to them constantly, from his room or the office, or at his desk in the Senate and particularly if someone like Huey Long were “spouting.” Long had begun calling the President a “faker” and predicting revolution if things didn’t soon change. Once he held the floor for fifteen and one-half hours, sometimes reading from the Bible or offering recipes for Roquefort salad dressing.

Harry’s spelling was not much improved from years past, for all he had advanced in station. He had trouble with words like “occasion,” which he wrote “occation.” He couldn’t spell “Hawaii” and wrote of Senator Byrnes as “Senator Burns.” He failed even with the spelling of his own home address, addressing envelopes repeatedly to Mrs. Harry S. Truman at 219 North “Deleware” Street.

In the month of July alone, he wrote thirty-four letters to her. To pass the evenings, he read Volume One of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Or he would work his way through The New York Times. Always an ardent reader of newspapers, like most politicians, he was now taking the Washington Star, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun, in addition to several Missouri papers, but he saved, The New York Times for the quiet of evening. It was the summer Will Rogers was killed in a plane crash in Alaska, news that left Harry feeling devastated. Rogers had been a second Mark Twain, he told Bess. “No one has done more to give us common sense.”

One evening, with a dozen others from the Senate, he crossed the Potomac to attend a party given by the chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph P. Kennedy, at Kennedy’s rented estate, Marwood, a thirty-three-room Renaissance château in the cool of the woods above the river. In a letter to Bess, Harry described it as “a grand big house a half mile from the road in virgin forest with a Brussels carpet lawn of five acres all around it, a swimming pool in the yard, and all the other trimmings.” He had never been in such a house. He was told it had cost $600,000 to build. He felt complimented to be included in such a party, but of his host he had nothing to relate.

He was trying to find an apartment they could afford for the year ahead:

Found a rather nice place at 1921 Kalorama Road. It was a northwest corner, fifth-floor apartment—two bedrooms, two baths, living room, small dining room, large hall, $125 per month. No garage. Then I looked at a house at 2218 Cathedral, a block north of Connecticut…. They were painting and papering it from cellar to attic. It had a two-car garage…. They wanted $90 per month. I then went down to the Highlands at California and Connecticut. They had a nice two-bedroom apartment on the southeast corner, fourth floor, at $125—better I think than 1921 Kalorama Road. Then I looked at the Westmoreland right behind the Highlands on California. They wanted $100 for a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor, and $79.50 for one on the fourth floor that had four rooms. It is an old place but the location and rooms were very nice…. I am going back to look at 2400 Sixteenth Street and the Jefferson tomorrow and a couple of houses. I bet I find something that’ll suit before I quit.

Not only was he the Senator from Pendergast, he was one of the poorest of senators, a point he felt acutely. He never ceased worrying about money and whether he could make ends meet in Washington on a salary of $10,000. In his letters to Bess he reported the amount of his bus fare (20 cents), the charge for six months of the Washington Post ($7.50), an old grocery bill ($9.53). Thinking he might go over to the Maryland seashore for the Fourth of July weekend, he was “extravagant” and bought a bathing suit, but then went to a public health dentist to have two teeth filled. He had always wanted to be able to buy house furnishings of his own choosing. He dreamed extravagant dreams, he told her—of paintings by Holbein and Frans Hals, of Bokhara carpets, Hepplewhite dining table and chairs, and mahogany beds (“big enough for two”). But she must have faith in him:

I am hoping to make a reputation as a Senator…if I live long enough that’ll make the money success look like cheese. But you’ll have to put up with a lot if I do it because I won’t sell influence and I’m perfectly willing to be cussed if I’m right.

On three occasions in midsummer he traveled to New York to see Tom Pendergast, who was living like a potentate in a twenty-ninth-floor suite at the Waldorf-Astoria at a daily rate that would have covered Harry’s rent for a month. To his surprise and delight, T.J.’s welcome was the warmest ever. “Pendergast was as pleased to see me as if I’d been young Jim,” Harry reported to Bess after the first meeting. “We talked for three hours about everything under the sun.” On the second visit, two weeks later, T.J. was “as pleased to see me as a ten-year-old kid to see his lost pal.”

Hints of a huge insurance scandal were in the wind, involving a Pendergast man in the state government, R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Marquis Childs of the Post-Dispatch had been to the Waldorf to interview T.J. earlier in the spring, before T.J. sailed for France on the new Normandie, and in the course of the questioning, T.J. had said, “Yes, I told O’Malley to approve the insurance deal,” adding angrily, “And what’re you going to do about it?” which had been a mistake. (When Childs went to the ship later, to see T.J. off, he found him in a better mood. “Pendergast and the very blond Mrs. Pendergast were ensconced in the living room of their suite which was almost literally filled with flowers, orchids and lilies of the valley, expensive flowers. This was Pendergast, the Maharajah of Missouri, in all his glory.”) But apparently Harry’s conversations at the Waldorf included none of the truth of what was going on behind the scenes with O’Malley, even if to Harry it appeared as though he and T.J. had covered “everything under the sun.”

One topic they did take up was a replacement for Governor Park, who by Missouri law could serve only a single term. Harry thought perhaps it should be a wealthy Pike County apple grower named Lloyd C. Stark. Harry and Stark had met through the American Legion—Stark, too, had served as an artillery officer in France—and had compared notes as time went on, Stark confiding his own political ambitions. Harry had been a guest at Stark’s estate in Pike County, in northeastern Missouri, home of the Stark nursery, largest in the United States and famous for the Stark “Delicious” apple. At Stark’s urging, Harry had provided him with a list of key people throughout the state and put in a word for him at 1908 Main Street. “Confidentially, I had a fine visit with our mutual friend in Kansas City last Friday,” Stark had written Harry that spring of 1935, delighted by how things were shaping up.

But T.J. didn’t like Stark and had already crossed him off as a possible governor at the time of Francis Wilson’s death. (At Wilson’s funeral, a news photographer happened to catch the massive Big Boss and the trim, elegantly tailored apple grower, each with cigarette in hand, deep in conversation among the parked cars.) Neither T.J. nor Jim Aylward thought Stark could be trusted and told Harry so.

“He won’t do,” said T.J. “I don’t like the son-of-a-bitch. He’s no good.”

Long afterward, Harry would remark to a friend, “The old man had better judgment than I did.”

However, as was said, the apple grower was also an accomplished apple polisher, and when Harry took both Stark and Bennett Clark with him on a third trip to the Waldorf that summer, T.J. at last consented. Stark was to have the organization’s full support—which meant Stark could count on being the next governor—and, of course, with the implicit understanding that the organization could in turn count on Stark.

On the train back to Washington, Stark, “the most grateful man alive,” promised to do anything to help Harry any time. He had only to say the word.

Relations with Bennett Clark, meanwhile, were also improving. Few in the Senate had been quite so contemptuous of Truman as Clark during Harry’s first several months, and Clark still did little to make Harry’s job any easier. Clark also seemed to go out of his way to annoy or embarrass the administration, and yet invariably it was Clark that Roosevelt worked with on federal appointments in Missouri, not Senator Truman, who voted consistently with the administration. It was Roosevelt’s way of trying to win Clark over, and Clark’s way of getting more than his share of patronage, all of which left Harry far out in the cold, trying to swallow his pride and resentment. Further, Clark had little time for what Harry called “the ordinary customers” from back home who had favors to ask or troubles to settle.

But Clark, as Harry recognized, was a man with an extraordinary mind, who knew the Constitution and parliamentary law as well as anyone in the Senate. He was hugely entertaining, a good host, a good cook—country ham with red-eye gravy and turnip greens his specialty—and like Cactus Jack Garner he enjoyed a sociable “libation” over lunch, or in mid-afternoon, or day’s end, or most any time. Harry adored the banter and storytelling that went with this side of senatorial life. It was closer to the comradeship of Army life than anything else he had known. He enjoyed Clark’s humor as they “took a little something to settle the nerves.” At a lunch for the health faddist Bernarr Macfadden, they regarded each other with long faces across the table. “Kind of hard on Bennett and me to attend a dry lunch in this town,” Harry noted.

In his office, for special guests like Clark, Harry kept a supply of T.J.’s best bourbon. (“And while I heard criticism aplenty of Pendergast himself,” recorded William Helm, “I have yet to hear a noble senator raise his voice against the quality of Pendergast liquor.”) Other “supplies for the thirsty” were kept by the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin Halsey (and later by his successor, Les Biffle), in an office only a short stroll across the hall from the chamber. Unlike Clark, Harry kept to a rule of one stroll, one drink only.

Though younger than Harry by six years, Clark was heavyset and jowly, and with his thinning hair looked both older and more senatorial. Clark’s biography in the Congressional Directory, written by Clark himself, took up nearly three-quarters of a page of fine print. Senator Truman’s, also self-penned, consisted of three lines.

A year later, in the summer of 1936, as the Democrats convened in Philadelphia to renominate Franklin Roosevelt for a second term, Harry was with T.J. again, and more conspicuously now than at any time in years past. Just back from still another European vacation—he had returned this time on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary—T.J. came down to Philadelphia by train from New York, planning to commute back and forth every day from his suite at the Waldorf. He arrived Tuesday, June 23, the morning the convention opened. Jim Farley, chairman of the national committee, Jim Aylward, and Senator Truman clustered about him to pose for pictures on the convention floor, T.J. beaming as the flash cameras exploded.

All the big bosses of the Democratic Party were gathered in Philadelphia—Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite, the urbane, affable, extremely powerful Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx; tall, natty Frank Hague of Jersey City, who would be remembered by history for his comment, “I am the law” Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago; E. H. (“Boss Ed”) Crump of Memphis, former farm boy and noted bird lover; and T. J. Pendergast, a white carnation in his lapel, who the day before had celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday. At one time or other, Roosevelt had courted and worked with them all, depending on their help, and he would again. He called them all his friends. And all appreciated perfectly what wonders the Roosevelt magic had worked for them in four years. As Marquis Childs observed, “The vast expenditures of the New Deal had put into their hands power they had hitherto scarcely dreamed of.” Though no one could know it at the time, the day was to mark T.J.’s last big public appearance. So, as a gathering of the era’s big-city Democratic bosses, all figuratively on stage together, it was a final, historic moment.

Harry, who had driven up from Washington, had no real part to play. He had been named to no committees of importance. He was only a delegate-at-large. He was there really to be with Pendergast, and indeed the group photograph taken on the convention floor is the only known picture of him at the Boss’s side.

Returning by train to New York that night, Pendergast was suddenly taken ill. The doctors diagnosed coronary thrombosis. Harry, who had stayed on in Philadelphia but did not bother to remain for Roosevelt’s speech the final night, apparently was not told for some time how serious the situation had become. In August, still confined to his hotel room, T.J. suffered another relapse and was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital for surgery. He had intestinal cancer and the operation required the closing of his rectum. For T.J. it meant the use of a tube in his side for the rest of his life.

Had T.J. only died that summer, Harry Truman would later reflect, his reputation would have been secure as the greatest political boss of the time. But it was not to be.

Not until September was Pendergast able to return to Kansas City, traveling by train in a special car and with great secrecy. By then the primaries were over, the organization having performed at peak efficiency: Lloyd C. Stark was the Democratic nominee for governor and as certain of election in November as was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

IV

During the second half of his first term in the Senate, Truman felt the cloud he was under begin to recede. His standing among his colleagues improved. He was assigned more spacious offices down the hall, suite No. 240, again looking onto the interior courtyard. By his own staff, by others on his committees, he was perceived as dogged, productive, respectful of the opinion of others, good-natured, and extremely likable. “We all found Truman a very nice man…[and] his heart was in the right place,” recalled the historian Telford Taylor, who was then a young attorney on the Interstate Commerce Commission. The senator’s patience, even with the dreariest assignments, seemed infinite. And though no one would have singled him out as exceptional in any particular way or predicted a brilliant future—“But he showed no signs of leadership,” Taylor also remembered—his reputation was clearly on the rise.

The Republican Borah, one of the Senate’s certified great men, made a point one day of throwing his arm about Senator Truman’s shoulder in an open show of friendship. Truman was even attempting an occasional speech in the chamber by this time, reading always from prepared texts heavy with facts and figures. Once, in the middle of a debate, Arthur Vandenberg called on him to substantiate a point and after Truman obliged, Vandenberg told the Senate, “When the Senator from Missouri makes a statement like that we can take it for the truth.” It was a gesture Harry would not forget.

“He was always going out of his way to do favors for others and you couldn’t help but like his smiling, friendly manner,” said Vic Messall, “…and he was that way with everyone. I never heard him say a cross word to his staff, and that’s a real test….” Mildred Dryden, Truman’s secretary, said, “Never in all the years that I worked for him did I ever see him lose his temper. He was always soft-spoken and very considerate to his staff….” She remembered no “salty language” either, never ever if women were present.

Alben Barkley, though he had liked Harry Truman “instinctively” from the start, said that his real appreciation of the man only came clear to him at the dramatic climax of the battle over Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan, the contentious, frustrating issue that dominated in 1937.

In his acceptance speech at the Philadelphia convention—the speech Harry had missed hearing but called a masterpiece after reading it in the papers—Roosevelt said, “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” In his second inaugural address in January 1937, the President became more specific. “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he said, and the Congress, like the country, had waited in anticipation to see what new legislation he would demand.

In the first week of February came the surprise. It was the Supreme Court he was out to “reform”—really to reshape to his liking—because the Court had found some earlier New Deal programs unconstitutional. His scheme was to enlarge the Court from nine members to fifteen if justices refused to retire at the age of seventy, and after the landslide in November, which gave him the largest majority in Congress ever enjoyed by a President, Roosevelt felt confident of having his way. He neither consulted with the leadership in Congress nor gave any advance word of what he was up to. The President was wrong in his approach; the whole attempt to influence the decisions of the Court by increasing its size was a blunder, damaging to Roosevelt and to the Senate.

Opposition in the Senate was fierce, and especially among Democrats, including not just conservatives like Carter Glass and Bennett Clark, but such formerly reliable Roosevelt men as Connally and Wheeler, who now led the fight against the Court-packing bill. Barkley, Truman, virtually every Democratic senator who had been a steadfast Roosevelt supporter now found himself caught between vehement pressure from the White House on the one hand and, on the other, outrage at home over the whole idea. By June, even Garner, Roosevelt’s own Vice President, had become so infuriated over the affair that he packed his bags and went back to Texas. “The people are with me,” Roosevelt had snapped when Garner took issue with him. A disappointed Carter Glass thought probably the Senate was with him, too, so great was the Roosevelt magic. “Of course I shall oppose it,” said Glass. “I shall oppose it with all the strength that remains to me, but I don’t imagine for a minute that it’ll do any good. Why, if the President asked Congress to commit suicide tomorrow they’d do it.”

Truman, like Barkley, decided to stand with the President, on the grounds that the size of the Court had been changed before in times past. But he took no part in the debate. He was preoccupied with the railroad investigations, where Wheeler, because of his part in the Court battle, had lost interest and left him most of the work, making Truman vice-chairman of the subcommittee. In June, in the midst of the Court fight, Harry ventured his longest, most daring speech thus far in the Senate, a preliminary report of the railroad investigations. As summer came on, he would have preferred greatly to stay free of the whole Court issue and like so many wished only that it had never happened. He found himself deluged with angry mail. Having announced his position on the bill, he was accused of being a Roosevelt stooge. His headaches returned.

At the White House the President’s advisers were saying that if this fight were won, everything else he wanted would “fall into the basket.”

But all strategies were suddenly shattered on July 14, when Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who had been carrying the fight for Roosevelt, fell dead in his apartment across from the Capitol, the victim of a heart attack. Only days before Senator Royal Copeland, who was a physician, had slipped into a seat beside Robinson to warn him that he should slow down.

Bess, who was suffering acutely from Washington’s oppressive heat, voiced worries about her own husband’s stamina in a letter to Ethel Noland. “H. is worn out and is not well and will simply have to have a good rest or he will be really ill.”

The fight on the Court was deferred until a new majority leader could be named. In the running were Barkley and the arch-conservative “Pat” Harrison of Mississippi, chairman of the Finance Committee. It was a critical juncture that could determine the future of the New Deal in the Senate, and Roosevelt, determined to see Barkley win, wrote an open “Dear Alben” letter in which he referred to Barkley as the “acting” majority leader. To many in the Senate this seemed arrogant interference with what was solely Senate Business, and so another bitter fight resulted.

From a private poll, Jim Farley calculated that Harrison stood to win by a single vote. Pressure from the White House grew intense—and not especially subtle. Senator William H. Dieterich of Illinois, who had pledged himself to Harrison, received a call from Boss Kelly of Chicago promising Dieterich a say in the appointment of two federal judges, should he vote as Roosevelt wished, which was quite enough to convince Dieterich to switch sides. On July 19, a day before the vote, Harry heard from Tom Pendergast, who had been called by the White House and asked to “tell” Harry Truman how to vote. Only in this instance no offer of patronage was forthcoming.

Harry told T.J. that he had already promised Pat Harrison his support and could not go back on his word. “Jim Aylward phoned me, too,” Harry told William Helm an hour later. “I didn’t mind turning Jim down, not so much, anyhow, but to say No to Tom was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.” According to Harry, this was the one and only time T.J. had ever called him about a vote. Normally, T.J. made his views known by telegram.

But possibly T.J. did not like pressure from the White House any more than Harry, for as Harry also related, Pendergast had said it “didn’t make a helluva lot of difference to him….”

Why Harry had ever lined up with Harrison remains a mystery—he liked Barkley, nor had he any reason to oppose him—unless he saw it as a way to show the President he could not be taken for granted any longer.

He refused to be budged and was so furious with the people at the White House, the President included, that he could hardly contain himself. By going to Pendergast, rather than coming directly to him, they had left little doubt as to what they really thought of him. In their eyes, he was still truly the Senator from Pendergast, It was the worst insult he had suffered since coming to Washington and he decided to let Roosevelt know how he felt. Told that the President was not available, he talked to Steve Early, the press secretary. He was tired of being “pushed around” and treated like an office boy, Truman said. He expected the consideration and courtesy that his office entitled him to.

Senator Barkley, all the while, was under the impression that Harry Truman had given him his pledge of support. Barkley would later describe how Harry had come to him saying, “The pressure on me is so great [to vote for Harrison] that I am going to ask you to relieve me of my promise.” It was this foursquare approach of Truman’s that so impressed him, Barkley said. “I always admired him for the courage and character he displayed in coming to me as he did. Too often in politics the stiletto is slipped between your shoulder blades, while its wielder continues to smile sweetly….”

On July 21 the Democratic members of the Senate met in the white marble Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to vote for a majority leader by secret ballot. The winner was Alben Barkley by one vote. (Barkley would later speculate on how he might have felt about Harry Truman had he lost by one vote.) Harry immediately pledged Barkley his support and they were to be friends and allies thereafter.

The steam was gone from the Court bill. On July 22, by a margin of 50 votes, the Senate sent it back to the Judiciary Committee, where it died. The President had suffered his first and worst defeat since taking office, which to Harry’s mind he richly deserved. The whole affair, Harry thought, had been a mistake and very badly managed by Roosevelt.

As time passed, in the comparatively few months of each year when Bess and Margaret were with him in Washington, the Trumans moved from one small, temporary apartment to another—to Sedgwick Gardens on Connecticut Avenue in the spring of 1936, to the Carroll Arms on 1st Street in early 1937, the Warwick Apartments on Idaho Avenue in 1938. In 1939 they were back again at Tilden Gardens, where they began. Margaret, who had grown taller and even more spindly, was attending Gunston Hall, a private school for girls, which was another financial worry for Harry. Independence, however, remained “home” for Margaret, as for Bess, who felt the constant pressure of her mother’s need for her. Madge Wallace, who still believed Bess could have done better in the way of a husband, gave no sign of interest in Harry or his career.

The long separations grew no easier. “I just can’t stand it without you,” he wrote to Bess as the new session got under way in 1937. She was not only Juno, Venus, and Minerva to him, he wrote, but Proserpina, too, and urged her to look that up. Proserpina, as Margaret would remember ever after, was a goddess who spent half of each year in Hades with her husband Pluto, separated from her grieving mother.

His letters dutifully reported his modest social life. He went to the movies, played some penny-ante poker, listened to the symphony or opera on the radio. One weekend he drove to Gettysburg to hike over the battlefield with John Snyder, a St. Louis banker he had gotten to know at summer Army camp over the years. Another day he “played hooky” from the Appropriations Committee and went to the War College to hear Douglas Southall Freeman lecture on Robert E. Lee, which he thought “one of the greatest talks I ever heard.”

His health was uneven and he worried about it perhaps more than necessary. In the wake of the Court-packing fight, he felt so wretched he went to the Army-Navy Hospital at Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a checkup and complete rest. A month or so later, working harder than ever, nerves ragged, he was beset again by savage headaches. “This so-called committee work is nothing but drudgery and publicity,” he wrote, “all so depressing sometimes.” Vic Messall thought possibly he was drinking too much. William Helm wrote later that he had never known anyone who could hold his liquor so well as Senator Truman. On one occasion Helm had seen him take five drinks and show no effect. “Not once did I ever see him under the slightest influence of liquor.”

The records from his stay at the Army-Navy Hospital at Hot Springs say only that he had developed severe headaches and “a sense of continually being tired,” a “general malaise.”

The President and his people continued to exhibit only supreme indifference toward him, which became especially grating whenever the governor of Missouri, Harry’s friend Lloyd C. Stark, came to town. It had been Harry who arranged for Stark to meet Roosevelt for the first time, in October 1936, when Stark was running for governor. By mail and telegram Harry had urged the President to invite Stark and his wife to join him on board his train, as he campaigned across Missouri. “They are charming people,” Harry had assured the President in a telegram from Independence. Now Stark went frequently to the White House and spoke warmly of Roosevelt as “the Chief.” Stark was invited to join poker parties on the President’s yacht on cruises down the Potomac, something Senator Truman could only dream of. Senator Truman often had difficulty getting the President’s secretary even to return his calls.

Once, on a quick visit to Capitol Hill, Stark poked his head in at Harry’s office door to say that some of the folks in Missouri were trying to get him to run for the Senate when Harry came up for reelection, but that Harry need not worry. When Stark had gone, Harry told Vic Messall, “That son-of-a-bitch is fixing to run against me.”

Alone one night in October listening to the radio, he began to weep. “A couple of kids were singing ‘They’ll Never Believe Me’ from the Girl from Utah,” he wrote to Bess, “and I sat here and thought of another couple of kids listening to Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian singing that beautiful melody and lovely sentiment, and I wished so badly for the other kid that I had to write her to sort of dry my eyes.”

No one ever seemed to understand how sentimental he was, below the surface. He was lonely, homesick, feeling unappreciated, feeling sorry for himself, thinking often of times gone by. “Today is my father’s birthday,” he wrote on December 5. “He’d be eighty-six, if he’d lived. I always wished he’d lived to see me elected to this place. There’d have been no holding him.”

The brighter side was an unlikely new friendship. A staff member of the railroad subcommittee, Max Lowenthal, had invited him to meet Justice Louis D. Brandeis, at one of the winter teas that Brandeis and his wife gave Sunday afternoons in an old-fashioned apartment on California Street. These Brandeis teas, as Marquis Childs would write, had become a “slightly awesome institution” in the capital, with Mrs. Brandeis presiding as umpire over a kind of musical chairs game designed to give the justice ten or fifteen minutes of individual conversation with as many guests as possible within an hour and a half. Truman was not accustomed to meeting such people, he had told Lowenthal candidly when the invitation was first issued. But to his surprise, Brandeis had spent more time with him than any of the other guests, wanting to hear about Harry’s railway investigations and appearing extremely pleased to learn that Harry had read some of his books.

They sat in stiff, uncomfortable chairs in a large living room where little had changed since the time of Woodrow Wilson, the walls decorated with photographs of classical ruins. Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court and the country’s most distinguished Jeffersonian liberal, was by then in his eighties and to Harry, “a great old man.” The day was cold, with snow forecast, but Harry felt warmed by the whole experience, a little out of place, yet more welcome than he had ever expected. “It was a rather exclusive and brainy party. I didn’t exactly belong but they made me think I did.”

He went several times again, and as he later wrote, he found that he and Brandeis were “certainly in agreement on the dangers of bigness.” The influence of Brandeis was apparent soon enough.

On Monday, December 20, 1937, Senator Truman delivered the second of his assaults on corporate greed and corruption. In the earlier speech in June he had recalled how Jesse James, in order to rob the Rock Island Railroad, had had to get up early in the morning and risk his life to make off with $3,000. Yet, by means of holding companies, modern-day financiers had stolen $70 million from the same railroad. “Senators can see,” he said then, “what ‘pikers’ Mr. James and his crowd were alongside of some real artists.” Now, in a prepared address written and rewritten several times with the help of Max Lowenthal, he attacked the power of Wall Street and the larger evil of money worship, sounding at times not unlike his boyhood hero, William Jennings Bryan. He had announced the speech in advance, so as to be heard by something more than an empty chamber. “It probably will catalogue me as a radical,” he warned Bess, “but it will be what I think.”

His lifelong hatred of high hats and privilege, all the traditional Missouri suspicion of concentrated power and of the East, came spouting forth with a degree of feeling his fellow senators had not seen or heard until now. He attacked the “court and lawyer situation” in the gigantic receiverships and reorganizations that destroyed railroads, and named the powerful law firms involved—Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood of New York; Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardner & Reed, also of New York; Winston, Strawn & Shaw of Chicago. He cited the immense fees taken by the attorneys for the receivers, told how some attorneys took their families on free vacations to California in the private cars of a bankrupt line, how a receivership judge on the federal bench had a private car on the bankrupt Milwaukee & St. Paul at his beck and call.

“Do you see how it pays to know all about these things from the inside?” he asked.

How these gentlemen, the highest of the high-hats in the legal profession, resort to tricks that would make an ambulance chaser in a coroner’s court blush with shame? The same gentlemen, if the past is any guide to the future, will come out of the pending receiverships with more and fatter fees, and wind up by becoming attorneys for the new and reorganized railroad companies at fat yearly retainers; and they will probably earn them, because it will be their business to get by the Interstate Commerce Commission, to interpret, and to see that the courts interpret, laws passed by the Congress as they want them construed.

These able and intelligent lawyers, counsellors, attorneys, whatever you want to call them, have interviews and hold conferences with the members of the Interstate Commerce Commission, take them to dinner and discuss pending matters with them. The commission, you know, is the representative of the public and it has its lawyers also, but the ordinary government mine-run bureaucratic lawyer is no more a match for the amiable gentlemen who represent the great railroads, insurance companies, and Wall Street bankers than the ordinary lamb is a match for the butcher.

The underlying problem throughout, he said, was avarice, “wild greed.”

We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considered Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steelworkers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and a dozen other similar performances. We worship Mammon; and until we go back to ancient fundamentals and return to the Giver of the Tables of Law and His teachings, these conditions are going to remain with us.

It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best law brains in the country, has not produced some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and self interest. People can stand only so much, and one of these days there will be a settlement….

He saw the country’s unemployment and unrest as the fault of too much concentration of power and population, too much bigness in everything. The country would be better off if 60 percent of all the assets of all insurance companies were not concentrated in four companies. A thousand insurance companies, with $4 million each in assets, would be a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life, with its $4 billion in assets. Just as a thousand towns of 7,000 people were of more value than one city of 7 million.

Wild greed along the lines I have been describing brought on the Depression. When investment bankers, so-called, continually load great transportation companies with debt in order to sell securities to savings banks and insurance companies so they can make a commission, the well finally runs dry…. There is no magic solution to the condition of the railroads, but one thing is certain—no formula, however scientific, will work without men of proper character responsible for physical and financial operations of the roads and for the administration of the laws provided by Congress.

The speech was front-page news in The New York Times and drew the immediate attention of labor leaders and reform-minded citizens across the country. Nor did anyone in the Senate doubt that he had done his homework. Not even the dullest of hearings seemed to wear him down and some were as dull as any ever recorded at the Capitol. Many times he was the only senator present.

In the eyes of those working with him, he had also shown uncommon courage. Much of the focus had been on the financial finagling behind the bankrupt Missouri Pacific Railroad. Max Lowenthal, a former labor attorney, had written a critical analysis of railroad reorganization, The Investor Pays. As an expert on the subject, he warned the senator that the inquiries might produce some “pretty hot stuff,” and that this could be embarrassing for him in Missouri. Truman instructed Lowenthal and the staff to proceed as they would with any other investigation. Pressures on him to call off the hearings, or at least to go easy, did become intense. But there was no letting up, Lowenthal did not think there were a half-dozen others in the Senate who could have withstood the pressure Truman took.

The hearings continued, the senator cross-examining witnesses in a courteous but persistent fashion. Lowenthal would remember that it seemed “an innate part of his personality to be fair and to know what is fair, and to exercise restraint when he possesses great power, particularly the power to investigate…the power to police…. He gave witnesses all the time they wanted.”

Ironically, the senator whose own background had seemed so suspect was gaining a reputation as a skilled investigator.

Though it did not seem of particular importance at the time, Truman was also taking positions on civil rights that appeared to belie his Missouri background. He consistently supported legislation that would abolish the poll tax and prevent lynchings. In 1938, in a Senate battle over an anti-lynching bill, he voted to limit debate on the bill in an unsuccessful effort to break a filibuster against it.

Still more outspoken were his feelings on “preparedness,” national defense. “We must not close our eyes to the possibility of another war,” he warned an American Legion meeting at Larchmont, New York, in 1938, “because conditions in Europe have developed to a point likely to cause an explosion any time.” He called for the establishment of an air force “second to none.” No one could be more mistaken than the isolationists, he said. America had erred gravely by refusing to sign the Versailles Treaty and refusing to join the League of Nations. “We did not accept our responsibility as a world power.” America couldn’t pull back and hide from the world. America was blessed with riches and America wanted peace, but “in the coming struggle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy must be prepared to defend its principles and its wealth.”

The end for Tom Pendergast was drawing near. The once robust, florid Big Boss looked dreadful, gray, drawn, physically diminished, and for all his high style of living he was close to financial ruin as a consequence of his chronic, consuming need to gamble. In one month he lost nearly $75,000 betting on the horses. His new private secretary at 1908 Main Street, Bernard Gnefkow, regularly kept tabs on bets of $5,000 to $20,000 on a single race. Later estimates were that T.J. may have squandered $6 million on the horses. But as would be shown, he had kept these transactions cleverly hidden from friends and family, as well as the government, by using cash only and devising fictitious names to conceal where the money came from and where it went. In the last part of the 1930s he had become so in debt to gamblers and bookmakers around the country as to be virtually in their control. They spoke of him not as “the Big Boss” but “the Big Sucker.” To anyone who knew the story of the Pendergasts and their dynasty this seemed an odd turn of fate, since it was luck at the track that had given them their start, with Alderman Jim and his winnings on the horse called Climax.

Later, in an effort to explain the downfall of Boss Tom, his admirers, including Senator Harry Truman, would insist that he was “not himself,” that failing health and the gambling fever drove him to do things he never would have done in his prime. A Kansas City police officer named John Flavin, a veteran of years on the force, would remember that on the day T.J. gave him his job, he had said, “Don’t ever take any money that doesn’t belong to you and you’ll never have any trouble in life.”

A new federal district attorney for Kansas City had begun investigations, focusing first on vote fraud in the ’36 elections. He was Maurice Milligan, the younger brother of Tuck Milligan, and he, too, was Bennett Clark’s man (Clark had arranged his appointment). But after the ’36 elections Milligan’s chief ally in the assault on Pendergast was Governor Lloyd C. Stark, whose own rise to office owed so much to T.J. and the whole Kansas City organization. Stark had turned on Pendergast as no one ever had—or ever dared try—determined to destroy him once and for all. It was Stark’s conviction that his loyalty belonged to the people, not to any machine or its boss.

The documentation amassed by Milligan and a swarm of FBI agents revealed that approximately 60,000 “ghost” votes had been cast in Kansas City in 1936. Many precincts had registration figures exceeding the known population. Hundreds of defendants were brought to court and, as the Star reporter William Reddig noted, what surprised most people from Kansas City, who had heard about election thieves for years, was to find how many of them looked just like ordinary citizens, as indeed most were. The trials, lasting nearly two years, led to 279 convictions, and Milligan, a handsome, pipe-smoking “country lawyer,” became a local hero.

But what would prove the crucial investigation began only after Governor Stark, accompanied by Milligan, went to Washington. Bennett Clark had given Roosevelt the tip that Pendergast had failed to report huge sums of income on his tax returns. Roosevelt notified the Treasury Department and it was then that Treasury investigators started looking into the story of the insurance bribe first described by Marquis Childs in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1935. Before they were finished, Stark and Milligan had five federal agencies at work on special assignment.

They found that an official of the Great American Insurance Companies, Charles Street, had met with Pendergast in a Chicago hotel in January 1935, or just as Senator Truman was trying to learn his way about Capitol Hill. The Chicago meeting had been arranged by R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Charles Street, speaking for some eight different insurance companies, told Pendergast he wanted the settlement by O’Malley’s office of an old issue over fire insurance rates that had kept nearly $10 million impounded. And that of course he was willing to pay for it. When Street offered $200,000, T.J. declined. When Street offered $500,000, T.J. said yes. Later, An the interest of speeding things along, the $500,000 was increased to $750,000.

A first installment of $50,000 in cash was delivered to T.J. personally at his Main Street office on May 9, 1935. An agreement releasing the insurance money was then worked out in a room at the Muehlebach Hotel by Street, O’Malley, and attorneys for the insurance companies, after which further payments on the bribe continued. One delivery to T.J.’s house on Ward Parkway in the spring of 1936 was for a total of $330,000 in cash in a Gladstone bag.

Though none of this was disclosed for some while, Stark fired O’Malley and rumors were rampant. How much or little Senator Truman knew is not recorded. Probably it was very little, in view of how hard he took the news when it broke. But when District Attorney Milligan’s term expired early in 1938 and both Stark and Roosevelt were calling on the Senate to confirm his reappointment, Harry Truman found himself facing the nearly certain prospect of being the lone senator with objections. By senatorial custom, he could have blocked the reappointment simply by saying that Milligan was personally obnoxious to him. This he did not do, however, because Franklin Roosevelt called him on the phone and asked him not to, as a personal favor.

He could also, of course, have had nothing to do with the matter, and remained silent.

Instead, on Tuesday, February 15, 1938, he marched through the swinging doors of the Senate Chamber and delivered a full-scale attack on Milligan, as well as on the federal judges in Kansas City, a scathing, bitter speech that helped his reputation not at all, nor served any purpose other than to release a great deal of pent-up fury and possibly bring Tom Pendergast a measure of satisfaction. Milligan, he said, was Roosevelt’s “personal appointment” and made to appease the “rabidly partisan press.” He called Milligan corrupt, and charged the judges with playing politics, since they had been appointed by Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge, “I say, Mr. President, that a jackson County, Missouri, Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin.”

It was the one time he had ever attacked the President, the one time he had ever touched on, let alone defended his political origins in the Senate, and it was his worst moment in the Senate. Again he read from a prepared text. Yet he seemed out of control, grossly overreacting even if some of his points deserved hearing—the refusal of the courts, for example, to let anyone from Jackson County sit on the juries.

“The manner in which the juries were drawn,” remembered a federal district judge in Kansas City years later, “and the fact that only Democrats were indicted in the polling precincts in which the vote fraud occurred, when it was obvious that the Republican judges and clerk of elections in the same precincts were equally guilty, distorted Truman’s view beyond comprehension. He felt he had to blast, and blast he did—to his discredit.”

Possibly, with a more measured, thoughtful defense, he could have taken his audience beyond the stereotypical picture of boss rule. By his own bearing, the decency and common sense that were so much a part of him, he might have encouraged appreciation of the accomplishments of the Kansas City organization that he himself so admired. As it was, he achieved nothing. When the time came to confirm Milligan by vote, he was the lone senator in opposition.

To his credit, it would be said only that he had made a brave gesture of loyalty to an old friend. At least he had not “run for cover.”

So harsh were the expressions of disapproval issued at the White House that Truman began feeling his career was over. He brooded for days. In a confidential letter to a friend, he said that “in view of my speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday and the reaction to it from the White House,” he would not be running for reelection in 1940—though later he would ask for return of the letter.

He had made matters no better, meantime, by announcing his intention to have his burly factotum, Fred Canfil, custodian of the Jackson County Courthouse, appointed a U.S. Marshal in Kansas City, an idea that met with immediate outrage there. The Justice Department sent FBI agents to begin inquiries and across one interdepartmental memorandum J. Edgar Hoover scrawled: “I want to make certain a very complete and thorough investigation is made of this man.” By early March 1939, sensing the tide of opinion on Canfil was strongly against him, Truman said he was for Canfil or nobody. “I am for Canfil, first, last, and all the time.” But Canfil was found unsatisfactory and rejected, chiefly because of the volume of adverse rumors and opinion gathered by the FBI. Five months earlier, in November, the senator had been assured through channels high up in the Justice Department that Canfil was acceptable and would be approved. “They figure they’ll need Harry next session,” he had said of the administration in a letter to Bess. But that was in November.

In Kansas City, by appearances, the functioning of the organization continued as before, T.J. somehow managing a serene face to the world. He went to his office as usual, except that now, because of his health, he rode the elevator in the adjacent hotel and crossed through to 1908 at the second-floor level, to avoid the stairs. In a municipal election in the spring of 1938, despite a new election board appointed by Governor Stark, despite the sensation of the vote fraud trials, the organization’s candidates won by large margins. Considering the forces aligned against him, it was T.J.’s most impressive triumph ever, showing, as was said, that “the party in power…had lost none of its hold on honest voters.” An exuberant, immensely gratified T.J. issued a rare statement to the press:

If it is true…that the Democratic President of the United States was against us, that the Attorney General of the United States was against us, that the Governor of Missouri was against us, that the independent Kansas City Star newspaper was against us—I think under those circumstances we made a wonderful showing.

To Senator Truman it seemed to prove, as it did to many observers, that prior vote frauds had been unnecessary; the party would have won anyway.

How often or to what degree T.J. and Harry were in contact at this stage is again unknown. Mildred Dryden, Harry’s secretary, could recall no correspondence from Tom Pendergast.

Only one communication written in T.J.’s own large, clear hand has survived, a note in red pencil on a single sheet of Jackson Democratic Club stationery: “Please help Sam Finklestein. He will explain. He has been my friend for 40 years. T.J. Pendergast.” As Sam Finklestein did explain when he carried the note to Senator Truman in December 1938, he was trying to get two of his relatives out of Germany, Siegfried and Paula Finklestein of Berlin. Harry moved quickly, but in a report to T.J. mailed just before Christmas, Vic Messall could say only that the matter had been taken up with the American consul general in Berlin and that as soon as more information was available T.J. would be advised “immediately.” For the moment the quota was full. Whether the Finklesteins ever succeeded in escaping to America is not known.

On Tuesday, April 4, 1939, J. Edgar Hoover himself arrived in Kansas City. On Friday, April 7, T. J. Pendergast was indicted for tax evasion. In Washington, Senator Truman was reported to have looked “hurt and astounded” at the news. “I am sure he had little inkling of his old friend’s troubles before the grand jury returned its indictment,” wrote William Helm. “Even then he seemed to cling to the hope that Pendergast somehow would prove his innocence….” Asked for a comment by reporters, Harry said, “I am very sorry to hear it. I know nothing about the details…Tom Pendergast has always been my friend and I don’t desert a sinking ship.”

To Bess he would write, “The terrible things done by the high ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on.”

On May 22, at the federal court in Kansas City, T.J. pleaded guilty. The total in evaded taxes, including fines, came to $830,494.73.

R. Emmett O’Malley and the director of the Kansas City police department were also convicted of tax evasion, as was Matthew S. Murray, the city’s Director of Public Works. Charles Street, the insurance executive involved in the bribe, was dead. Edward L. Schneider, secretary treasurer of seven Pendergast companies, killed himself, or so it appeared, after making a full statement of his transactions to the grand jury. How many millions of dollars had been stolen from the city was never precisely determined. City Manager Henry McElroy, who also died while facing indictment, was found to have misplaced some $20 million with his unique system of bookkeeping, a figure nearly twice the city’s annual budget. The assertion later by several of his friends that Harry Truman could have walked off with a million dollars during his time as presiding judge, had he chosen, seems an understatement.

“He was broke when he went to the Senate,” Edgar Hinde would say. “He didn’t have a dime and he had all the opportunity in the world. He could have walked out of that office [as county judge] with a million dollars on that road contract. You know that would have been the easiest thing in the world. He could have gone to one of those contractors and said, ‘I want ten percent.’ Why you know they would have given it to him in a flash. But he came out of there with nothing.”

“Looks like everybody got rich in Jackson County but me,” Harry wrote privately to Bess from Washington.

At 8:45 A.M., May 29, accompanied by his son, T.J., Jr., and Jim Pendergast, T.J. arrived at the east gate of the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth to begin serving a sentence of fifteen months, reduced from three years in view of his age and health. On the day of his sentencing, the judge had remarked to reporters that he could well understand the feelings expressed for Pendergast by his friends. “I believe if I did know him I, too, might have been one of his friends. I think he is a man of character that makes friends.”

In all that was revealed by the investigations there was nothing to suggest any involvement with illegal activities on the part of Harry Truman. As District Attorney Milligan, never a particular admirer of the senator, would state: “At no time did the finger of suspicion ever point in the direction of Harry Truman.”

In its issue of April 24, 1939, Life magazine devoted six pages to the meteoric rise of Governor Lloyd C. Stark, the article illustrated with numerous lurid photographs of the Pendergast debacle. Governor Stark, said the magazine, was the new Democratic version of young Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican racket-buster of New York, and claimed that the major result of Pendergast’s fall was to “catapult honest, efficient Lloyd Stark, an apple grower, right into the presidential ring.” Or at the least to a seat in the United States Senate. (Elsewhere there had been talk of Stark as the next Secretary of the Navy.)

In Missouri, praise for Stark was overflowing. He was called “Missouri’s Moral Leader,” a figure of national importance, a presidential possibility, and in any event, “a man with a future.”

“He has earned the high estimate,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an editorial that Stark clipped and sent to Roosevelt.

He chose the hard way, and, of course, the right way, of meeting all the obligations of his office. He could have chosen the easiest way. He might have gone through the routine perfunctorily, basked in the approval of the all-powerful Pendergast machine that had supported him for the nomination, acquiesced in the Boss’s few but salient demands, kept the peace…. The Governor entered his office under the shadow of the Kansas City machine. He had to live down the suspicion of being a Pendergast man….

The contrast to the path chosen by Senator Truman went without saying.

Life, too, acknowledged that Stark had accepted Pendergast support in 1936, but stressed there was nothing new in American politics about a governor turning on the machine that helped elect him. Theodore Roosevelt had done it in 1899, Woodrow Wilson in 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. All three became President, and “square-shouldered, poker-faced, dignified” Lloyd C. Stark, too, would like to be President, “quite definitely.”

In September, Stark announced he was running for Truman’s seat in the Senate.

V

It was the toughest campaign of Harry Truman’s career. “If Governor Stark runs against me,” he had told the papers, “I’ll beat the hell out of him.” But this was mostly bluff; he knew what the odds were.

Franklin Roosevelt, who could have made all the difference, only toyed with him awhile, leading Truman to think he was on his side. Truman had gone to the White House about some pending legislation and the President insisted instead on talking Missouri politics. He spoke of Stark as “funny,” meaning phony, as Harry explained to Bess. “I do not think your governor is a real liberal,” Roosevelt said. “He has no sense of humor…. He has a large ego.” Later Harry had run into Bennett Clark, who, though “cockeyed,” also promised his support. It was all too much for one day, Harry decided.

But Roosevelt gave no endorsement or even encouragement, no help at all except to let the senator know in roundabout fashion that he would be glad to appoint him to a well-paid job on the Interstate Commerce Commission. “Tell them to go to hell,” Harry responded. If he couldn’t come back as a senator, he didn’t want to come back at all.

Clearly he would be on his own this time. Tom Pendergast was in prison, the organization in shambles. At best Roosevelt could be counted on to remain neutral, but then not even that was certain. For all his loyal service to the New Deal, Senator Truman was not someone Roosevelt was willing to stand by or utter a word for. In Washington, as columnist Drew Pearson observed, “the wise boys” wrote Truman off.

In Missouri every major paper was against him but one, the Kansas City Journal-Post. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch summed up Truman’s chances as “nil.” He was without money, while Lloyd Stark, riding a wave of publicity, had all the marks of a winner, including plenty of money and the apparent endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt. If ever anyone had a reason to detest Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman as 1940 approached.

Privately, he was in despair over Roosevelt, Pendergast, and the “terrible” state of the world. In late August 1939, Hitler and the Russians had signed a nonaggression pact. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany. Margaret had never known her father to be in such low spirits. He went to the Washington premiere of the new Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, hoping it would cheer him up, but came away, as he wrote to Bess, greatly discouraged by its blanket portrayal of senators as crooks and fools. Doubtless he was distressed too by the fact that the chief figure of corruption in the story was a fat, heavy-handed machine boss who acted much like Tom Pendergast and ruled a city called Jackson.

Public opinion of the New Deal seemed to be at a low ebb. Roosevelt was getting nowhere with Congress. New Deal cures for hard times had been insufficient, the Depression persisted. Eight million people were still unemployed.

Harry worried over money owed on his mother’s farm. To meet notes coming due, Vivian had exchanged a mortgage on the farm for $35,000 from the Jackson County School Fund, this according to a law that allowed the loan of school money not currently needed. Harry’s secret hope was to sell the farm and clear all the debt on it—he wished now it had been sold when he came home from France—but he knew how much the place meant to his mother. Giving it up at her age might be more than she could take.

For the record, he had kept out of the loan arrangement and later said he had known nothing about it, which was undoubtedly less than the truth, since, along with Vivian, Fred Canfil, too, had signed the papers.

The continued ranting of Adolf Hitler on the radio left him increasingly gloomy. He met for lunch in Washington with Robert Danford, his old superior officer at Camp Doniphan, now a general, and talking of events in Europe and Germany’s apparent military superiority, they both became “mighty blue.” Harry feared a Nazi world. He dug out some of his old Army maps of France and tacked them to his office wall to follow the fighting. In open opposition to such strident isolationists in the Senate as Wheeler, Borah, and his fellow Missourian, Bennett Clark, he spoke out still more and strongly for “preparedness,” called on the President to summon a special session of Congress to revise the Neutrality Act of 1936, which he himself had voted for but now realized was a mistake. In a speech in Missouri in October, he said the three dictators, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, had reverted to the code of “cave-man savagery.” American neutrality was obsolete in the face of such reality, he said. The arms embargo must be lifted. “I am of the opinion that we should not help the thugs among nations by refusing to sell arms to our friends.” With Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina, he urged larger appropriations for defense, an immediate buildup of the Army, and a Navy “second to none.” He was outraged by the arguments of the America First movement and the speeches being made by Charles Lindbergh. On November 11, Armistice Day, he wrote to Bess: “You know it makes some of us who went on that first Crusade…wonder sometimes just what fate really holds for civilization.”

But as so often in his life, he went ahead uncomplaining, determined to defeat the “double-crossing” Stark and return to the Senate, where, he knew, history was going to be made as never before. His back was up. He would find out who his real friends were.

Meantime, with five other senators, he flew off to Mexico and Central America on a so-called “fact-finding” trip—“a pleasure trip,” he was frank to admit. There was “too much poverty” in San Salvador, he thought, but Costa Rica from the air looked like a painting by one of the old masters: “Smoking volcanoes, blue lakes and the Pacific Ocean all in view at the same time from 134 miles in the air,” he wrote to Bess. In Panama, he toured the length of the Canal by plane, inspected the giant 16-inch defense guns, watched a ship pass through the Miraflores Locks, and found himself “treated royally” by everyone. One artillery officer whom he had known from summer camp at Fort Riley “treated me as if I were the President of the U.S.A.”

In Nicaragua on the return route, President Somoza impressed him as “a regular fellow.” In Mexico City, he tried to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. But it was arriving at San Francisco and stopping at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill that he enjoyed most. He loved San Francisco. “This, you know, is one of the world’s great cities and it is San Francisco—not Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma retired farmers as the city in southern California is,” he wrote, referring to Los Angeles, a city he disliked. When others in the party went out on the town, on a “slumming expedition” in search of female companionship, he bowed out. “I guess I’m not built right,” he told Bess. “I don’t enjoy ’em—never did, even in Paris, and I was twenty years younger then.”

At a first campaign strategy meeting in St. Louis, at the Hotel Statler in January 1940, fewer than half of those invited appeared and some only to explain sheepishly why they would be unable to take an active part. The few with serious interest included his old friend Mayor Roger Sermon of Independence, Harry Vaughan, John Snyder, and James K. Vardaman, who, like Snyder, was a St. Louis banker. They would support Harry no matter what, they said, though Roger Sermon, who was known as “a plodder” and “all business,” thought Harry should understand the outlook was extremely bleak. “Harry, I don’t think you can win and that’s not merely my personal opinion but after inquiring around.” Having heard several more comparably discouraging forecasts, Harry said only that he would appreciate a little talk about electing Senator Truman.

Jim Pendergast, who was unable to attend, had asked Vic Messall earlier to tell the senator that “if he gets only two votes in the primary one will be mine and the other will be my wife’s.” Jim Aylward decided to sit the campaign out. Congressman Joe Shannon wanted time to make up his mind. But Jim Pendergast, as surviving head of what was left of the organization, would work as few men ever did for Harry and produce considerably more than two votes.

On February 3, 1940, Truman announced formally that he was filing his declaration of candidacy for reelection to the United States Senate, and said further that he was both opposed to President Roosevelt’s seeking a third term and that his own choice for President was Bennett Clark.

Seldom had he appeared more the politician, in the least complimentary understanding of the term. That he, Harry Truman, could honestly propose conservative, isolationist, alcoholic Bennett Clark for the presidency at any time, let alone now, with the world as it was, seemed so blatantly hypocritical and expedient as to be laughable. Nor did his promise, “as a faithful Democrat,” to support Roosevelt, should he become the nominee, take any of the edge off the announcement. Clearly, it was Clark’s support in eastern Missouri that he was after, that and a little satisfaction perhaps in letting Roosevelt know how he felt and that he too could play the game.

His opposition to a third term, however, was entirely sincere. The idea went against his fundamental political faith. “There is no indispensable man in a democracy,” he wrote privately. “When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar. I do not believe that the fate of the nation should depend upon the life or health or welfare of any one man.”

To no one’s surprise, the Bennett Clark presidential boom came to nothing.

Vaughan and Snyder raised what little money there was to begin with and set up headquarters in a “borrowed” room in the Ambassador Building in St. Louis. “We borrowed clerks, we borrowed furniture, we borrowed everything we could,” Snyder recalled. Almost no one seemed willing to give money. Mildred Dryden, who had left the Washington office to help with the campaign, remembered having trouble finding money enough to buy stamps. One mailing of eight hundred letters asking for donations of a dollar produced about $200, hardly worth the effort. According to Rufus Burrus, an Independence lawyer and another of Harry’s Army reserve friends, funds were so low at one point that there was not money enough for a hotel room, so the candidate slept in his car. “A United States Senator…sleeping in his car!”

The first of Harry’s Senate friends to lend a hand was Lewis Schwellenbach, who arrived in time for the official opening of the campaign at Sedalia, in the heart of the state, the night of Saturday, June 15, 1940, one day after German troops occupied Paris. A crowd of several thousand turned out, which was fewer than expected, but having Schwellenbach there counted heavily with the candidate. Mary Jane and Mamma Truman were in front-row seats on the lawn. Bess and Margaret were seated on the platform. “At sixteen,” Margaret later wrote, “I was able to feel for the first time the essential excitement of American politics—the struggle to reach those people ‘out there’ with ideas and emotions that will put them on your side.” Mamma Truman, who was nearly eighty-eight, shook hands among the crowd, a campaign aide at her side to help with names. Probably, as one of her generation, she never thought of the people as “out there.”

“Is he our friend?” she would ask about those she met.

More fellow Democrats from the Senate arrived in Missouri to lend a hand, an unusual gesture in a primary campaign and a very real measure of their regard and affection for Harry Truman. Carl Hatch, Sherman Minton, and Lewis Schwellenbach, three old friends, came to give vocal support. However pointedly Roosevelt ignored him, Truman was running hard on his New Deal record. “While the President is unreliable,” he confided to Bess, “the things he’s stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country….” Senator Jimmy Byrnes, hearing of Truman’s financial troubles, talked the New York financier Bernard Baruch into contributing a desperately needed $4,000 to the campaign. And at the last, Alben Barkley, too, would appear for speeches in St. Louis and Kansas City. But Bennett Clark appeared determined to do nothing. What had Harry Truman ever done for him, Clark is said to have remarked in Washington.

In full-page newspaper ads, the president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, A. F. Whitney, called for help for “our good friend” Harry Truman, and in another few weeks the railroad unions provided the only big money behind the senator, some $17,000. Harry, as always in his political life, refused to handle any money, leaving that to the others. Eventually, however, to meet expenses he had to borrow $3,000 on his life insurance policy.

Four years of investigations into railroad finances had resulted in the Truman-Wheeler Bill, still to be passed, providing protection for the railroads as a mainstay of the nation’s transportation system. He had supported the Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, and after passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, giving farmers price supports, he had said on the floor of the Senate that until the farmer got his fair share of the national income there could be no real agricultural progress. In 1939 he had voted for expanding the low-cost housing program, for increased funds for public works, increased federal contributions to old-age pensions. Particularly was he proud of his part in the Civil Aeronautics Act (1938), to bring uniform rules to the burgeoning new aviation industry.

On the issues of national defense and how the country should meet the crises in Europe, he was adamant. America “ought to sell all the planes and materials possible to the British Empire,” he said in a radio address on June 30.

It was the record he ran on, and tirelessly. Through July he crisscrossed the state in his own car, a ’38 Dodge, again with Fred Canfil along to share the driving, or Vic Messall or his old Kansas City friend Tom Evans. When Harry drove, he drove fast—too fast, the others thought.

Between times he was traveling back and forth to Washington, where, because of the war in Europe, Congress was still in session. Yet he seemed to thrive on it all, just as in the last campaign. Tom Evans, who was twelve years younger, had to give up and go home, no longer able to keep the pace.

Truman’s speeches were without charm. He made no attempt at eloquence or the kind of slowly building, tall-tale exaggeration and pleasure in words for their own sake that Missouri audiences traditionally adored. His voice was both flat and high-pitched—and the larger the crowd, the higher the pitch. In normal conversation he spoke in rather low, pleasing tones, but something happened as soon as he stepped to a podium. Trying to emphasize a point, he would chop the air rapidly, up and down, with both hands, palms inward, while at the same time, and in the same rhythm, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet, a style some of his detractors loved to imitate.

He had little skill for making politics a good show. It was a talent he greatly admired in others, but that he did not have now any more than before. The Senate had taught him little in that respect. Compared to someone like Bennett Clark, who after half an hour on the stump was only warming up, he was a flat failure. Yet in his own face-to-face way of campaigning he could be very effective. Once, in the course of the campaign, he told a friend how to do it: “Cut your speech to twenty-five minutes, shake hands with as many people as you can for a little while. Afterward, even if you have time left, leave. If you have no place to go, you can always pull off the road and take a nap.”

Moving among country crowds, pumping hands, he would say, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I’m from Jackson County.”

He also took a stand on civil rights, and while by later standards what he said would seem hardly daring or sufficient, for Missouri in 1940 it was radical. He stated his position at the very start, in Sedalia, to a nearly all-white audience:

I believe in the brotherhood of man; not merely the brotherhood of white men, but the brotherhood of all men before the law…. If any class or race can be permanently set apart from, or pushed down below the rest in political and civil rights, so may any other class or race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful associates, and we may say farewell to the principles on which we count our safety….

Negroes have been preyed upon by all types of exploiters, from the installment salesman of clothing, pianos, and furniture to the vendors of vice. The majority of our Negro people find but cold comfort in shanties and tenements. Surely, as freemen, they are entitled to something better than this.

Privately, like the country people whose votes he was courting, he still used the word “nigger” and enjoyed the kind of racial jokes commonly exchanged over drinks in Senate hideaways. He did not favor social equality for blacks and he said so. But he wanted fairness, equality before the law. He had been outraged by reports of black troops being discriminated against at Fort Leavenworth and used his office to put a stop to it.

At the National Colored Democratic Association Convention in Chicago that summer, he told a black audience that raising educational opportunities for Negro Americans could only benefit all Americans. “When we are honest enough to recognize each other’s rights and are good enough to respect them, we will come to a more Christian settlement of our difficulties.” Legal equality was the Negro’s right, Truman said, “because he is a human being and a natural born American.”

In one respect it was like 1934 all over again. There were three in the running and again one was named Milligan, for District Attorney Maurice Milligan had decided that he, not Lloyd Stark, was the one who had brought down Tom Pendergast and so deserved to be the next Senator from Missouri. Later speculation that Milligan was, in fact, cleverly maneuvered into the race by some of the Truman people—in order to divide the Stark vote—would never be substantiated, but that was what happened (just as Tuck Milligan had divided the vote for Cochran in 1934), and for Truman his entry into the contest could not have been more welcome.

In the first weeks the odds were heavily in favor of Stark, with Milligan second, Truman a very distant third. (A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the Post-Dispatch showed two heavy trucks marked “Stark” and “Milligan” in head-on collision high above a tiny toy truck marked “Truman.” “No place for a Kiddie car,” said the caption.) The Milligan candidacy rapidly faded, however. It soon became a race between Stark and Truman, and one of Truman’s chief advantages proved to be Stark himself, as Harry Truman seems to have known intuitively from the beginning. Over dinner at the Willard Hotel one evening in Washington, well before the campaign began, he had told friends he was sure Stark would attack him personally and that if he, Harry, were not even to mention Stark, then Stark would begin making mistakes—“enough errors to give me a definite opportunity.”

As predicted, Stark tore into Truman at first chance, calling him a Pendergast lackey, a rubber-stamp senator, and a fraud. “The decent, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of Missouri,” said Stark in a speech at Joplin, “know him for what he is—a fraudulent United States Senator, elected by ghost votes, whose entire record in public office has been devoted to one purpose alone, and that is to the service of the corrupt master who put him into power….”

In Truman’s files still was the letter from Stark thanking him for the introduction to Tom Pendergast. Learning of this, several on the campaign staff urged Harry to release it, certain it could settle the outcome of the election in one blow. But Harry refused, saying he would let Stark destroy himself.

Little things about Stark began to draw attention. It was noted, for example, that his chauffeur was required to give him a military salute. Then, with only weeks to go, Stark went to the national convention in Chicago as an announced candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, as well as for the Senate, and Bennett Clark, who had at last concluded that Harry Truman deserved his help, rose to the occasion in grand style. To a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Clark observed:

Lloyd’s ambitions seem to be like the gentle dew that falls from heaven and covers everything high or low. He is the first man in the history of the United States who has ever tried to run for President and Vice-President, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, Governor General of the Philippines, Ambassador to England and United States Senator all at one-and the same time…. I understand, too, that he is receiving favorable mention as Akhund of Swat and Emir of Afghanistan.

Stark was one of seventeen in a vice-presidential race that included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead, William O. Douglas, Jimmy Byrnes, Henry A. Wallace, and Congressman Sam Rayburn. At Chicago, Stark passed out bushels of apples and wound up with 200 votes on the first ballot. The final decision, however, was made in Washington by Roosevelt, who had by then accepted the draft of the convention for a third term. He chose Henry A. Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture, a former Republican from Iowa, a former editor of Wallace’s Farmer, which had been founded by his grandfather, and an ardent liberal.

Truman had come to Chicago with the Missouri delegation and held a seat on the resolutions committee, an important role. The convention opened on July 15. But in Kansas City the following day, an event took place that rocked him as very little ever had. The Republicans who controlled the county court had decided to foreclose the court-held mortgage on the homeplace at Grandview, and on Tuesday, July 16, 195 acres of the farm were sold at auction on the courthouse steps in Kansas City. The Star carried a front-page picture of the auction crowd and a caption explaining that the farm belonged to Martha E. Truman, mother of the Missouri senator. How much warning Harry had is unknown, but clearly he was helpless to find the money to save his mother from eviction. He was also certain it had been done for political reasons only, to humiliate him in the middle of the campaign, which seems to have been exactly the case.

Two days later at the convention, in the middle of the fight over the vice-presidential nomination, Harry felt suddenly so tired and weak he thought he was having a heart attack. Reaching out desperately, he clutched at a railing and hung on for ten or fifteen minutes, totally unable to move, until someone, seeing what was happening, helped him to a chair.

The homeplace on Blue Ridge was gone—though it would be recovered later. His mother and sister moved into a small, rented house in Grandview, where, not long afterward, Mamma Truman slipped on the unfamiliar steps and broke her hip. As broken hips were then often fatal, Harry thought it meant the end for her. But it was not, nor did she complain about the new quarters.

In a letter home, he asked Bess to try to imagine the shame she would feel if her mother were evicted from 219 North Delaware.

Election day for the primary would be August 6; from Washington in late July, he wrote, “I’m thinking August 6 all the time.” Theodore Roosevelt had once written that “black care rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.” It seemed to be his own cure, too.

Will call you from Sedalia tomorrow night. Taking train to arrive there at 9:30 P.M. Will start out at Salisbury at 10:00 A.M. Thursday, Keytesville at 2:00 P.M., Brunswick 4:00, and Carrollton at 8:00 P.M., Hardin at 9:00 P.M. Next day Cuba and Cape Girardeau. Saturday, Sikeston, Maiden, and Poplar Bluff. Rest Sunday and start at Lamar, Nevada, Rich Hill, and Butler Monday. Harrisonville, Belton, and K.C. Tuesday. Will stay at home Tuesday night…and go to St. Louis, thirty-first. Barkley is coming to K.C. and St. Louis on thirtieth and thirty-first. Will stay in St. Louis until Saturday and then come home.

The night of the big speech with Barkley in St. Louis was a fiasco. In a hall big enough to seat more than three thousand people, a grand total of three hundred showed up.

And yet it was in St. Louis in the final week that events turned suddenly and unexpectedly in Harry’s favor. When the campaign was over and the results final, he would comment to Bess, “Anyway we found out who are our friends….”

As valuable as any, surprisingly, ironically, was Bennett Clark. From a hotel room in St. Louis, Clark began calling people all over the state. “He finally ended up in a hospital and we continued to push him even there,” remembered a Truman campaign worker, “and he kept his telephone busy.”

Still more important was Clark’s influence on a hale, broad-shouldered young Irish-American named Robert E. Hannegan about whom until now Truman knew nothing. A St. Louis police chief’s son, Hannegan had been a star athlete at St. Louis University and for a while, after law school, played semi-professional baseball. Since 1933, he had been extremely active in Democratic politics, in the rough school of the Dickmann organization, eventually becoming city chairman. But up to now, Hannegan had been working for Stark. Whatever it was that Bennett Clark said or promised to make him switch must have been extremely convincing, for with just two days to go before the primary, Hannegan suddenly deserted Stark and went to work feverishly for Truman. In hindsight, Harry would see it as the biggest break of the campaign, and thereafter the tall, good-looking young man in the loud neckties could do no wrong in Harry’s estimation, though had anyone ever walked out on him as Hannegan had on Stark, it would have been seen as rank betrayal.

On election night Truman was heard to remark, “Well…I guess this is one time I’m beaten,” to which his friend Edgar Hinde replied that it was a long time until morning.

Margaret, however, would remember her father going to bed after calmly announcing he would win. They had been listening to the returns on the radio in the living room. By eleven o’clock Stark had an 11,000 vote lead. For her mother, Margaret would write, it was one of the worst nights of her life. They were both in tears. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, after everyone was in bed, it was Bess who answered. A campaign worker in St. Louis, David Berenstein, wished to congratulate the wife of the Senator from Missouri. Bess took it as a bad joke and slammed down the receiver. But Berenstein called back. Truman was carrying St. Louis.

It was an extremely close shave, as Truman said. He won by not quite 8,000 votes out of 665,000 cast. And 8,411 votes were also his margin over Stark in St. Louis, where, thanks to Bennett Clark, Hannegan had done his last-minute work. But the black vote, too, had gone to Truman, and he did better with the farmers this time than he had in 1934. Most importantly, he carried Jackson County by 20,000 votes, which was only a fifth of his margin in 1934, but still 20,000 votes in the place where supposedly anyone ever associated with the Pendergasts was done for. His own standing with the people, the work of Jim Pendergast and what remained of the organization, had counted more than all the sensation of the scandals, the charges of his opponents, and the relentless opposition of the Star. It was truly an extraordinary victory.

Maurice Milligan sent his congratulations and promised Truman his support in the fall election. Governor Stark said nothing publicly, but in private correspondence with Roosevelt blamed his defeat on “the machine vote, backed by Bennett Clark with every force at his command,” plus “virtually all the Federal appointees, including Postmasters and WPA workers,” who had made the difference for Truman. Besides, said Stark, “our rural vote, which is strong for me,” had failed to materialize, “due primarily to the severe drought.”

In order to run in the primary Milligan had been required to quit as district attorney. When Milligan applied for reappointment, Truman wrote Roosevelt a letter saying that in fairness Milligan should have his job back. However, when Stark’s term as governor expired and word reached Truman that Stark was being considered by Roosevelt for a position on the Labor Mediation Board, Truman saw that he did not get it. Stark, who had seemed so destined for glory, was to withdraw from politics in disgust, never again to hold public office.

Three days after the primary election, when Harry Truman walked into the Senate Chamber, both floor leaders and all the Democrats present “made a grand rush” to greet him. Les Biffle, Secretary to the Majority, told him that no political contest in memory had ever generated such interest in the Senate as had his race in Missouri. Biffle had arranged a surprise lunch in his honor. “I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me,” Harry later wrote Bess, his joy in the day still overflowing. “Barkley and Pat Harrison were almost as effusive. Schwellenbach, Hatch, Lister Hill, and Tom Stewart, and Harry Schwartz almost beat me to death. Dennis Chavez hadn’t taken a drink since the Chicago convention but he said he’d get off the wagon on such an auspicious occasion, and he did with a bang. Minton hugged me…. Well, as you can see it was a grand party.”

Though in the general election in the fall Truman failed to do as well as Franklin Roosevelt in his race with Wendell Willkie, he nonetheless won resoundingly, defeating his Republican opponent, Manvel Davis, by 44,000 votes.

His one last worry, before returning to Washington, was over delay of the papers certifying his reelection—papers that, by law, required the signature of Governor Lloyd C. Stark. “Has my certification of election been officially received by you?” he anxiously cabled the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin A. Halsey, on December 13. By return telegram Halsey assured him that all was in order.

In a brand-new pearl gray, two-door 1941 Chrysler Royal, a car that was to be in steady service for the next fifteen years, he and Bess set off again for Washington.

7
Patriot

War has many faces; or, rather, in war men and nations wear many faces.

—ERIC SEVAREID

I

In “Locksley Hall,” the poem by Tennyson that young Harry Truman had copied down in his last year in high school, and that he carried still, neatly folded in his wallet, were lines describing an aerial war of the future, lines written well before the invention of the airplane:

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue…

In July of 1940 began the first great air battle in history, the Battle of Britain, as day after day Hitler’s Luftwaffe crossed the Channel to bomb British ports, airfields, and London, and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the Royal Air Force went up to “grapple” in defense. It was all Tennyson had foreseen and worse. In a raid on London, September 7, there were 375 German bombers, an unprecedented force. Then the night raids began, and devastation from incendiary bombs that Americans read about in dispatches by correspondents Robert Bunnelle and Helen Kirkpatrick, or heard described firsthand by the dramatic radio voice of Edward R. Murrow. “As I watched those white fires flame up and die down, watched the yellow blazes grow dull and disappear,” said Murrow in his broadcast of October 10 at five in the morning, London time, “I thought, what a puny effort is this to burn a great city.” Hitler boasted that his air Blitz would break the will of the English people. On Sunday, December 29, London was subjected to the most savage bombing yet. More than a thousand fires raged across the city.

In Washington that same night, Franklin Roosevelt was wheeled into the oval-shaped Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House to deliver by radio the “fireside chat” to be known as his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech. The Nazis, he said, were determined to enslave the world and he warned that stroking a tiger would never make it a kitten. He saw American civilization in graver peril than at any time since Plymouth and Jamestown. It was not war he wanted, but all-out, massive production for war to supply those nations under Nazi attack. “We must become the great arsenal of democracy. For this is an emergency as serious as war itself….”

On January 6, 1941, at a joint session of the new Congress, Senator Harry Truman listened as Roosevelt delivered a second ringing summons to action, in support of those nations fighting in defense of what he called the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. To Truman, it was the President at his best. A few days later came Roosevelt’s plan for Lend-Lease, to send Britain arms on credit, and in both houses of Congress the fight was on. Isolationists in the Senate—Wheeler, Vandenberg, Bennett Clark, Gerald P. Nye, Taft of Ohio—objected bitterly, calling the bill the road to war. Wheeler, Truman’s old mentor, was the most scathing of all, saying it would “plow under every fourth American boy,” which Roosevelt called “the rottenest thing” that had been said in public life in his generation. Wheeler, Clark, and the others could not have been more wrong or shortsighted, Truman felt. Bennett Clark had made himself a favorite of the America First movement, praised Lindbergh, and claimed, “We have everything to lose and nothing to gain in a war.” Clark opposed aid to Britain, opposed further involvement of any kind by the United States. If Hitler conquered Europe, he said, “we’re better off defending the United States than frittering away our supplies in Europe.”

Clark was destroying himself politically, Truman was certain, and plainly Clark was having increasing difficulty staying sober. Repeatedly, Truman voted against amendments designed to restrict Roosevelt’s execution of the bill.

Truman was by now a member of both the Military Affairs Committee and the Military Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. In September he had voted for the first peacetime draft. By December, more than $10 billion had been awarded in defense contracts in a country that was officially still at peace. Testifying on the Hill, the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, had called for a force of 2 million men, and another $1 billion to cover expenses, and said the money was only a start. Questioned whether he was not asking for more than necessary to meet the emergency, he replied, “My relief of mind would be tremendous if we just had too much of something besides patriotism and spirit.”

Senator Truman, who was by now a colonel in the reserves, and who knew how critical was the shortage of qualified officers, went to Marshall’s office in the rabbit warren of the old Munitions Building and tried to enlist. Pulling his reading glasses down on his nose, Marshall told him he was too old and could better serve his country in the Senate.

Events were moving rapidly. An older, simpler way of life in Washington was passing. It was becoming a different city overnight. All through the Depression years, even with the changes imposed by the New Deal since 1933, it had remained a small town in most ways, southern at heart and unhurried. Now there were new people everywhere, swarms of new federal employees, more automobiles, more rush and confusion. The year before, it appeared the old “temporaries” on the Mall, acres of unsightly structures like the Munitions Building put up during the First World War (as it was now being called), might at last be torn down and taken away. Instead, the demand was to increase their number. A hodgepodge of new war agencies was sprouting with names and initials difficult to keep straight—the NDMB, National Defense Mediation Board, the OPM, Office of Production Management, and later the OEM, Office of Emergency Management. There was the SPAB, Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board, and the DPC, Defense Plants Corporation.

Every month was adding five thousand people to the city’s population. Already, the shortage of housing was more acute than in 1918. The Trumans were extremely lucky to find a new apartment, five small rooms at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, on the street side of the building, second floor, for $120 a month. And this time they would hold on to it, Bess—the Madam or the Boss, as the senator referred to her—having decided she and Margaret would stay through the year.

There were lines at movie theaters, constant crowds at Union Station. Hotel bars and the best restaurants were a hubbub of manufacturers’ agents in search of defense contracts and influence peddlers claiming to have an inside track. The talk was different, more urgent and full of new expressions like “stockpile,” “tooling up,” and “mobilize.” The New Deal was passé now, the Depression a bygone era. The hero of the hour, so different from the kind who had flocked to Washington in the early Roosevelt years, was the “dollar-a-year man,” a high-powered, high-priced corporation executive who had taken a government post but kept his old corporate salary, an innovation that some, like Senator Truman, looked on with great skepticism.

Yet as fast as the pace was picking up, it was hardly enough, given the urgency of the crisis. To those like General Marshall who knew the truth of the country’s military strength and were trying desperately to do something about it, the overriding worry was how slowly change was taking place.

In the beginning Truman had little idea what he was getting into.

Concerned about complaints from constituents of gross extravagance and profiteering in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, a new camp for draftees in south-central Missouri, concerned also that his home state was not getting its share of defense contracts, he decided on “a little investigation” of his own. Setting off from Washington in the old Dodge, he drove south as far as Florida, then on into the Midwest, eventually swinging north to Michigan, stopping at Army installations and defense plants all along the way. It was another of his automobile odysseys, like the courthouse survey of earlier years, and he later claimed to have rolled up 30,000 miles, or 5,000 miles more than the distance around the world, which was preposterous. Still, he probably covered 10,000 miles, and the experience was an eye-opener, as he said. Hard times were plainly in retreat in the biggest boom in the history of the country. But great haste in the buildup for war was making unconscionably great waste. It was the same everywhere, he found. Millions of dollars were being squandered. Had there been such mismanagement of federal help for the poor and unemployed a few years earlier, he thought, the outcry would have been overwhelming. As it was, no one seemed to care or to be saying anything. If national defense was the issue, the sky was the limit.

At Fort Leonard Wood he found costly equipment and material lying about in the snow and rain “getting ruined, things that could never be used, would never be used….” The contractor had had no previous construction experience. “And there were men, hundreds of men, just standing around collecting their pay, doing nothing.” Truman walked about this and other sites taking notes on what he saw and whatever people were willing to tell him. Unless asked, he seldom said who he was.

Much camp construction, he discovered, was being done on a cost-plus basis—the contractor was paid for all costs plus a fixed percentage profit—which could be virtually an open ticket for piling up excessive profits. He was disturbed, too, by the obvious fact that the vast part of defense work was going to a small number of large corporations and these mainly in the East. He feared that many of the safeguards usually observed in government transactions were being thrown aside. He felt the President should be informed at once.

Returning to Washington, he called the White House for an appointment and from the moment he was ushered into the Oval Office, his reception could not have been more cordial, or more gratifying personally. Roosevelt was in grand form. He gave the senator a hearty welcome from his chair, flinging one arm in the air in characteristic gesture. He called him “Harry,” repeatedly, as for half an hour they talked across the clutter of papers and knickknacks covering the big mahogany desk. Yet, when the session ended, Truman came away wondering if he had made any impression at all. As he wrote to a friend, Roosevelt was so courteous and cordial it was hard to know just what he thought or where one stood with him. “Anyway,” he concluded, “I’m going to lay it before the Senate.”

He spent weeks preparing a speech, consulting other senators, asking for suggestions from friends and staff. He told William Helm he was outraged over the greed of big business at such a time, and of some of the labor unions. “There’s too much that is wrong here!” he insisted.

On Monday, February 10, 1941, Truman stepped into the well of the Senate to describe the problem as he saw it and to propose the establishment of a special committee to look into the awarding of defense contracts. It was his own idea, his own moment. His obscurity in national life, and in the course of the war, was about to end—and it was of his own doing.

Reaction in the Senate was immediately favorable. (Besides sounding an alarm on the scandalous state of military spending, he struck a responsive chord everywhere on the Hill by calling it grossly unfair for the War Department to ignore the suggestions of members of Congress concerning defense contracts. “It is a considerable sin,” he said, “for a United States Senator from a State to make a recommendation for contractors, although he may be more familiar with the efficiency and ability of our contractors than is anybody in the War Department.”) Referred first to the Committee on Military Affairs, Resolution 71 was reported out unanimously in a matter of days. But then back it went to the Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate. There it might have languished indefinitely, for the committee’s chairman was Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina, who was close to the administration, and the administration had no wish to see its method of handling things scrutinized or stalled by any congressional committee. Roosevelt’s continuing admonition to everyone involved with defense production was, “Speed, speed, speed.”

To bring some semblance of order to operations Roosevelt had established a National Defense Advisory Commission, then an Office of Production Management, but there was really no clearcut administrative system, or any one person in charge. In effect, the sprawling defense effort was being handled by the White House, where the last thing anyone wanted was a pack of congressional investigators to contend with. There was alarm, too, at the War Department. A single nettlesome senator could mean unending problems and bad publicity, let alone an ambitious chairman of an investigating committee whose main, underlying intent, more than likely, would be to advance his political fortunes. Constant congressional probing could well delay or deter the whole program.

Only one voice cautioned against a “resentful attitude”—Chief of Staff Marshall, who said it “must be assumed that members of Congress are just as patriotic as we.”

Truman understood the potential peril in what he was proposing. From his reading of Civil War history he knew what damage could be done to a President by congressional harassment in a time of emergency, and the lives it could cost by prolonging the war. Abraham Lincoln had been subjected to unrelenting scrutiny by the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which caused continuing trouble and delays. Its Radical Republican leadership had insisted even on a say in the choice of field commanders and battle strategy, and as often as not it was the Confederates who benefited. Robert E. Lee once remarked that the committee was worth two divisions to him, an observation Truman would often cite. He had gone to the Library of Congress for the Civil War records to verify for himself what mistakes the committee had made.

Like others, Truman had little use for investigations after-the-fact such as those conducted by Senator Gerald P. Nye and his committee, who in examining the causes of the First World War had raised a conspiratorial theory of the role played by the munitions makers. The Nye Committee, Truman felt, had been a major cause of isolationist sentiment in the Congress and contributed more than anything else to the nation’s woeful unpreparedness. It did no good, Truman said, to go digging up dead horses once a war was over. “The thing to do is to dig this stuff up now and correct it.”

But what saved his proposal was another one put forward in the House by a belligerent Georgia Democrat, Eugene Cox, who openly despised Roosevelt and wanted the establishment of a joint congressional committee to investigate “all activities” involving national defense. At a White House meeting, Jimmy Byrnes stressed to the President how much better off he would be “in friendly hands”—with a Truman committee—and Roosevelt agreed. Byrnes also wanted Truman to be given an absurdly modest funding of $10,000, a shoestring, to keep watch on expenditures that in 1941 alone would exceed $13 billion; though Truman objected vigorously, he managed only to get the appropriation raised to $15,000.

Resolution 71 was reported out on a Saturday afternoon in March, when a total of sixteen senators were on the floor, none of whom objected as Byrnes asked for immediate adoption. The vote was unanimous. A week later in a late-night session, after beating back isolationist amendments, the Senate passed the Lend-Lease Bill, which called for the spending of another $7 billion.

Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee. There were seven members, five Democrats, two Republicans. Except for Tom Connally of Texas, all, like the chairman, were junior senators and, in the words of one observer, distinguished only by their “unspectacular competence.” The Democrats included Connally, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, Monrad C. Wallgren of Washington, and James Mead of New York. The Republicans were Joseph H. Ball of Minnesota and Owen Brewster of Maine.

“Looks like I’ll get something done,” Harry wrote to Bess. The summer before, in the midst of the primary, he had told her, “The political situation is going to be something to write history about next year, and if I do win watch out.” He felt himself a participant in history again, as he had not since France. This second term in the Senate would be nothing like the first, he knew. Washington and the world were no longer the same. He was no longer the same. His proposal, as even his critics acknowledged, was a masterstroke. He had set himself a task fraught with risk—since inevitably it would lead to conflict with some of the most powerful, willful people in the capital, including the President—but again as in France, as so often in his life, the great thing was to prove equal to the task.

From his railway investigations he had learned the importance of a committee staff. Now, on the advice of Attorney General Robert Jackson, he hired a young Justice Department lawyer named Hugh Fulton, who had just convicted a federal judge for fraud. Fulton was only thirty-five years old and memorable, a big, apple-cheeked figure, over six feet tall and rotund, who wore a black derby and spoke with a piping voice. He told the senator he wanted a salary of $9,000, or more than half the whole appropriation. Truman hired him, confident that if they produced results, money would be no problem.

Like Truman, Fulton was an early riser and a steady worker. He was bright, tenacious, and, as time proved, a superb choice. For several months he would be all the committee could afford in a paid staff, though the problem was temporarily circumvented with the old senatorial device of “borrowing help” from some of the “downtown” (executive) agencies. The first investigator hired was young Matthew J. Connelly from Boston, who had worked for a Senate committee investigating campaign expenses. Others included George Meader, who would later become a member of Congress; Harold Robinson, a former FBI agent; Agnes Strauss Wolf, the one woman in the group; Morris Lasker, a recent graduate of the Yale Law School; William Boyle, a young man from Kansas City who had worked his way up in the Pendergast organization from precinct captain to acting director of the Kansas City police; and the ever faithful Fred Canfil, who operated out of Truman’s office in the Federal Building in Kansas City.

The only major change on Truman’s senatorial staff was the departure of Vic Messall under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Apparently, for all his devotion to the senator, Messall had been dipping into campaign funds for his own purposes—or Truman thought so—and he was told to find work elsewhere.

As a replacement for Messall, Truman brought his jovial friend Harry Vaughan to Washington and made him both his secretary, as the position of administrative assistant was still called, and a liaison for the committee with the military services, Vaughan being a lieutenant colonel in the reserves. (Later, Vaughan would leave to go on active duty with the Army Air Corps.)

There was to be no whitewash or witch-hunt, Truman told his committee staff, no grandstanding for headlines or any attempt ever to forestall the defense effort. But neither were they to be cowed by rank or political pressure. The primary task was to get the facts. “There is no substitute for facts,” he would say. They must know what they were about. “Give the work all you’ve got,” he urged, warning them never to tell those under investigation they were doing a good job. “If you do and it is later found they haven’t done a good job, then they can say our committee agreed with what they did.”

Their time was to be spent only where there were clear and present problems. They were not to go looking for trouble where none was known—and this applied to staff investigators and committee members alike. Once, in a closed, or executive, session, a senator not on the committee, Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, who was sitting in, asked out of curiosity, “What are you fishing for this morning?” It seemed a fair question, he thought, in an executive session.

Truman was offended. “This committee does not go on fishing expeditions,” he answered.

“I think the distinguished chairman resented my question,” Wiley observed.

“I do not like it,” said Truman. “I resent it. We are not on a fishing expedition.”

All findings were to be reported as the work of the full committee, not of any one senator or of the chairman. The committee would have no say on military strategy, military personnel, or the size or disposal of the defense effort.

What Truman came to appreciate most in Hugh Fulton was his “honesty of purpose,” and Fulton’s contribution overall was to be of such obvious value that some observers would later speak of him as the driving force of the committee. But this was not the case. The driving force was Senator Truman.

The long process began on April 15, 1941, with the appearance before the committee of a dozen highest-ranking officials, military and civilian, including the elderly Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and Chief of Staff Marshall. When the problem of seniority in the Army was discussed, Marshall insisted on the need for selective promotion. “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed,” he said, looking at the chairman; “you give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail.” Years later, Truman would say that his respect for George Marshall had its beginning at this first session of the committee hearings.

On April 23, the committee went to nearby Camp Meade in Maryland, the first of nine camps on a cross-country inspection tour. One camp, at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, was found to have cost more than ten times the original estimate. Another, Camp Wallace in Texas, which was supposed to have been built for $480,000, wound up costing $2,539,000. In several instances the Army had shown “fantastically poor judgment” in selecting camp sites (Fort Meade was a prime example), and an estimated $13 million had been wasted just by renting trucks and other construction equipment instead of buying it all outright at the start.

The Army had made a special study of camp construction following the last war, when rampant waste and inefficiency had also prevailed, but as the committee discovered, this special study had been lost, news that left the chairman “utterly astounded.” If plans for the country’s military campaigns were comparable to those for construction, Truman reported to the Senate, the situation was truly deplorable.

The central problem was the system of cost-plus contracts. “There was no attempt to ask contractors what they had been in the habit of making in peacetime or even what they were willing to take,” Truman would write. “Huge fixed fees were offered by the government in much the same way that Santa Claus passes out gifts at a church Christmas party.” Some contractors were making in a few months three to four times what they normally cleared in a year, and at no risk. One architect-engineer was found to have increased his income through an Army contract by 1,000 percent.

Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, the hot-tempered Chief of Services of Supply, who was known for his efficiency, complained loudly about the committee as a creature “formed in iniquity for political purposes.” It was “axiomatic,” he said, that time and money could not be saved at the same time.

“General Somervell was a very brilliant general,” remembered Matt Connelly, the chief investigator, “but he was also a martinet, and he resented any intrusion or stepping on his toes. But that did not impress Senator Truman. He went ahead anyway.”

Later Somervell would concede that in fact the Truman Committee’s investigations of Army camp building alone had saved the government $250 million. Further, as the committee had strongly recommended, the responsibility for camp construction was taken away from the Quartermaster Corps and given to the Corps of Engineers, as it should have been in the first place.

The senators on the committee worked extremely hard, almost without exception, and the chairman hardest of all. A few nights before the first interviews with Stimson and Marshall in April, Truman had what was diagnosed as a gallbladder attack. He had been wrenched from his sleep by such excruciating pains that Bess thought he must be having a heart attack. But there was no easing up on his schedule, and by June he was again badly exhausted.

“My standing in the Senate and down the street [at the White House] gets better and better,” he wrote on June 19, 1941, in a letter to Bess, who was back in Missouri once more. “Hope I make no mistakes.” If he weren’t working so hard, from daylight until dark, he didn’t know what he would do without her, he said, adding plaintively, “Hope I won’t be long here alone.”

On June 22 came the stunning news that Hitler had turned and attacked Russia along an 1,800-mile front. Asked what he thought of this colossal turn of events, Truman spoke his mind in a way no one could fail to understand and that would not be soon forgotten. “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia,” he said, “and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” It was hardly an appropriate observation at this juncture, but like many Americans, and many in Congress, Truman saw little difference between the totalitarianism of Fascist Germany and Communist Russia, and particularly since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and Russia’s invasion of tiny Finland. Nor was he willing to close his eyes to the realities of the Soviet regime just because suddenly it was Russia under Nazi assault. Stalin was only getting what he had coming to him was the feeling, and one shared by a very large segment of the American people.

Worried about the world, worried about himself, he went to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for a checkup, only to be told there was nothing the matter with him beyond fatigue. He was suffering from severe headaches and nausea, he told the examining physician, who recorded in the senator’s medical record:

Last year he ran for reelection and had a particularly fatiguing campaign…in which a great deal of vilification was hurled at him…. The attack on him affected him and caused him much mental anguish. His symptoms increased more than ever from this time on. In the last few months there has been an increased amount of activity in the Senate…he felt that he would be unable to continue his present pace.

But back to work he went, the pressures on him only growing, his pace easing not at all, as increasingly the investigations seemed to cast a shadow on the White House. He refused to equivocate and people began taking notice as they had not before. In August, while speaking in the Senate, he was pressed by Senator Vandenberg to admit that the President was culpable. “In other words,” said Vandenberg, a leading Republican, “the Senator is now saying that the chief bottleneck which the defense program confronts is the lack of adequate organization and coordination in the administration of defense…. Who is responsible for that situation?”

“There is only one place where the responsibility can be put,” Truman answered.

“Where is that—the White House?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thank the Senator.”

With others on the committee, senators and staff investigators, he traveled the length of the country—mostly by plane. They would put down at a city or military base, go through their routine for a day or so, and then be off again, like a roadshow, everybody by now knowing just what to do. War plants were inspected, hearings held in local hotels. In some places they found nothing out of line. They were in Memphis and Dallas in late August, then on to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Spokane. Bess was kept posted nearly every day, by letter or phone call, often by both, no matter how grueling his schedule. Some letters spoke candidly of what they were finding:

Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif.

Thursday, August 21, 1941

Dear Bess:

Well I spent yesterday at San Diego. The navy sent a big transport plane for us. We left the airport at 9:00 A.M., arrived at San Diego at 10:00, and Admiral Blakely took us in charge for the usual show around. Looked at marine barracks under construction and had lunch with the recruits. A Missouri boy from St. Louis waited on me, one from New York took care of Mead, and one from Washington, Wallgren.

Looked over the new marine base camp and then got another walk around a plane plant, the Consolidated—said to be the biggest of ’em all. The managers are all such liars you can’t tell anything about the facts. Each one says he’s having no trouble and everything is rosy but that the other fellow is in one awful fix. By questioning five or six of them separately I’ve got an inkling of the picture, and it’s rather discouraging in some particulars but good in others. We are turning out a very large number of planes and could turn out more if the navy and army boys could make up their minds just what they want.

Labor is a problem. The same brand of racketeer is getting his hand in as did in the camp construction program. Some of ’em should be in jail. Hold some hearings today and tomorrow, spend Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco, and open in Seattle Monday….

Kiss Margie, love to you,

Harry

Flying in and out of Washington’s new National Airport, he looked down on the tremendous gouge in the mud flats along the Virginia side of the Potomac, downstream from Arlington Cemetery. It was the site of a gigantic new five-sided headquarters for the military, the Pentagon, a larger office building than any in the world and a clear sign of the direction the country was taking.

From modest beginnings and in only a few months, the committee proved its value, producing both results and attention. By fall its appropriation was increased from $15,000 to $50,000, its membership enlarged by one more Democrat, Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, and two Republicans, Harold Burton of Ohio, who was to become one of the most dedicated members, and Homer Ferguson of Michigan, a former judge, who, like Brewster of Maine, was to be a particularly tenacious interrogator at hearings. The staff, too, was expanded. Eventually there would be fifteen investigators and as many clerks and stenographers.

Hearings were held in the committee’s headquarters on the fourth floor of the Senate Office Building, Room 449, or, in special cases, in the great marble Caucus Room on the third floor. Frequently business was also transacted in what was called the Dog House, a small room behind Truman’s office with a few worn leather chairs, refrigerator, whiskey, and walls covered with Civil War scenes and photographs and cartoons telling the chairman’s political life story.

At Truman’s insistence any member of the Senate was welcome to sit in and take part in the hearings. When presiding, he seemed invariably well prepared and in charge, yet he seldom dominated. Instead, he would go out of his way to let other senators hold the stage. No one could remember congressional hearings being handled with such straightforwardness and intelligence. As in his earlier railroad investigations, witnesses were shown every courtesy, given more than ample time to present their case. There was no browbeating of witnesses, no unseemly outbursts tolerated on the part of anybody. One reporter wrote of a “studious avoidance of dramatics, no hurling of insults or threats of personal violence that characterize so many other congressional hearings.” Yet Truman could be tough, persistent, in a way that took many observers by surprise. It was a side of the man that they had not known. Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that one of the most remarkable developments of the committee was its chairman. “Slightly built, bespectacled, a lover of Chopin and a shunner of the limelight, Truman is one of the last men in Congress who would be considered a hard-boiled prober. In manner and appearance he is anything but a crusader.”

Above all the chairman was eminently fair. Once, during testimony from one of the dominant figures in the American labor movement, the flamboyant, pugnacious head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, Senator Ball questioned whether the witness was to be taken at his word when he said workers were going hungry:

“Mr. Lewis, you are not seriously trying to tell the committee that any large number of workers in the United States don’t get enough to eat? That is demagoguery, pure and simple, and you know it.”

Lewis, sitting forward on the edge of his chair, a dark scowl across his massive face, responded angrily in a deep stentorian voice that filled the room:

“If you ask the question, I will answer it. But when you call me a demagogue before you give me a chance to reply, I hurl it back in your face, sir.”

Truman broke in. “Now, Mr. Lewis, we don’t stand for any sassy remarks marks to the members of this committee,” he said, “and your rights will be protected here just the same as those of everybody else. I don’t like that remark to a member of the committee.”

“Senator, did you object when the Senator called me a demagogue?” replied Lewis, a man of fierce pride.

“Yes,” Truman said, “it works both ways. I don’t think the Senator should have called you a demagogue.”

The documenting of waste and mismanagement in the construction of Army camps had been comparatively easy work, a way to give the committee credence in about the least time possible, which was why Truman had started with the camps. The larger work—more difficult, more time-consuming, more important, and much more risky politically—was the investigation of defense production, the gathering of facts, figures, specific detail, and no end of opinion on the building of ships and warplanes, on ordnance plants, automobile plants, labor unions, government contracts, the roles played by the giant corporations and small business, the stockpiling of vital materials. And what the committee turned up was extremely alarming: bad planning, sloppy administration, sloppy workmanship, cheating by labor and management, critical shortages everywhere.

There was too little aluminum, so vital for warplanes, too little copper, zinc, and rubber. Even after drastic cutbacks in production for civilian use, the annual output of aluminum was only about half the demand for building planes. One producer, Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America, had a near monopoly on the manufacture of the lightweight metal and kept claiming it could supply both domestic and defense needs, yet could not come even close. Production of magnesium was even more woefully behind, and the reason, when revealed, would cause a sensation. An arrangement had been made through an interlocking cartel, between Alcoa and the giant German firm of I. G. Farben. To safeguard its American market for aluminum, Alcoa had agreed to hold back on producing magnesium, also to sell what magnesium it owned to the Germans at a cut price, with the result that Germany had far more magnesium than the United States.

Standard Oil of New Jersey, through its agreements with I. G. Farben, had intentionally delayed the development of synthetic-rubber plants. “Standard Oil,” reported Truman,

had agreed with the German I. G. Farben Company that in return for Farben giving Standard Oil a monopoly in the oil industry, Standard Oil would give the Farben Company complete control of patents in the chemical field, including rubber. Thus when certain American rubber manufacturers made overtures to Standard Oil Company for licenses to produce synthetic rubber, they were either refused or offered licenses on very unfavorable terms…. Needless to say, I. G. Farben’s position was dictated by the German government.

There was no “unpatriotic motive” involved here, concluded the committee in its report. It was only “big business playing the game according to the rules,” with a heavy price “to be borne by the entire nation.”

The American government, too—specifically the Office of Production Management—had been negligent in seeing the need for a greatly increased output of copper, lead, and zinc. For his part, Truman worried that shortages of steel were the most serious of all.

Automobile manufacturers had been allowed to do as they wished, which was to keep turning out cars as usual in 1941, on the grounds, they said, that only 10 percent of their equipment could be used for war production anyway. Automobile production for the first eight months of 1941 actually exceeded production during the same months in 1940, and consumed quantities of strategic materials—some 18 percent of the nation’s available steel, 80 percent of available rubber. The aircraft program was dawdling because the Army and the Navy had left it largely to the manufacturers to decide what planes to build. “There is no planned or coordinated program for the production of aircraft,” Truman would report. The committee uncovered “negligence and willful misconduct” in the Navy Bureau of Ships. (When Admiral S. M. Robinson, Chief of the Bureau of Ships, said he believed the efficiency of private and Navy shipyards to be about the same, but told the committee that comparisons were difficult because of different bookkeeping systems, the committee declared that in a matter of such importance the Navy should take steps to ascertain the actual facts.) With private shipbuilders the Navy was found to be “extremely liberal.” A representative of the Todd Shipyards Corporation in testimony about one contract with the Navy said that if it weren’t for taxes the company could not have handled its profits with a steam shovel.

By late October the German Army had advanced to within seventy miles of Moscow and Roosevelt offered Stalin a billion dollars worth of supplies.

The root of most troubles and delays, the committee concluded, was the Office of Production Management, the President’s own ungainly creation, where there were two heads instead of one, William S. Knudsen, formerly of General Motors, and labor leader Sidney Hillman, founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Roosevelt wanted the power divided. He had no wish to create a so-called “production czar,” which, the committee decided, was exactly what was needed most, a strong man with clear authority. This was the conclusion of the committee’s first annual report being prepared in the final months of 1941. Truman in particular had been outraged to discover Hillman withholding a construction contract from a low bidder because of his fear of trouble from “irresponsible” elements in the American Federation of Labor. “First of all,” Truman told the Senate on October 29, “the United States does not fear trouble from any source…. If Mr. Hillman cannot, or will not, protect the interests of the United States, I am in favor of replacing him with someone who can and will.”

The record of the OPM, said the report, was not impressive. Its leadership was inept. “Its mistakes of commission have been legion; and its mistakes of omission have been even greater. It has all too often done nothing when it should have realized that problems cannot be avoided by refusing to admit that they exist.”

The committee had also decided it would be best for the country and for the defense effort to dispense as soon as possible with all dollar-a-year men, of whom there were more than 250 in the Office of Production Management. Such corporate executives in high official roles were too inclined to make decisions for the benefit of their corporations. “They have their own business at heart,” Truman remarked. The report called them lobbyists “in a very real sense,” because their presence inevitably meant favoritism, “human nature being what it is.” They should be paid government salaries in keeping with other government positions of comparable responsibility, concluded the committee, and required to disassociate themselves from any other employment or any payment from companies with defense contracts. Divided loyalties, like the divided command at the top of the Office of Production Management, were a bad idea.

On October 30, the American destroyer Reuben James was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Iceland, with a loss of 115 men. Talk of war had become commonplace in Washington, though no one seemed to be doing anything very specific about it. Writing in his diary on December 2, during a stop in the city, David Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, said it looked as if a war with Japan, not Germany, was only days off. Yet people seemed unconcerned. He wondered if the democratic system was capable of coping with the world as it was. On December 4, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared, “No matter what happens the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.”

Having no wish to embarrass the administration—and thereby harm the defense effort—Truman saw that the President received an advance copy of the committee’s findings, and in an eleventh-hour decision, before the report was released, Roosevelt disbanded the OPM and announced the establishment of an all-new War Production Board under a single head, Donald M. Nelson of Sears, Roebuck. Others had been pressing Roosevelt to make the change, including Secretary of War Stimson, but for the Truman Committee it was a signal victory. “We have fought to get you this job,” Truman would tell Nelson later. “We are going to fight to support you now in carrying it out.”

But by then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and it was Nelson’s task to mobilize for all-out war. By then even the likes of Burton K. Wheeler were saying that the only thing left to do was beat the hell out of them.

Truman had been in Missouri the first week in December, busy with political chores. The night of December 6, he checked into a hotel in Columbia, hoping to catch up on some greatly needed sleep. How he heard the news the next day and managed to get back to Washington in time for Roosevelt’s momentous address to Congress on December 8, he recounted a week later in a letter to Ethel Noland, probably because he had always seen her as the one in the family with the greatest feeling for history.

Dec. 14, 1941

Dear Ethel:

Well at last I am sitting at my desk, the office is empty for the first time since I returned. One reason is the doors are locked and it’s Sunday, I came down to clean off my desk and find out just how many important letters were covered up on it. Do you remember that picture with W. C. Fields as the efficiency filing expert. Well my desk is just like his was. Whenever the girls can’t find a letter in the files they are morally certain it’s lost on my desk and the pitiful part about it is sometimes it’s true.

Well there’s been a lot of happenings since I was calling on you on my daddy’s birthday [December 5]. I have been afraid it would come but not just the way it did. We’re always surprised of course even when the expected happens—if it’s war anyway. I left Saturday for Columbia to get a good night’s sleep over the weekend before Monday at Jeff City. In fact I was hoping for two. Went to bed at the Pennant Hotel outside of town about seven o’clock Saturday night and had breakfast Sunday at 8. Called the madam and went back to bed. The boy who drove me down left about noon and at three o’clock called me from Cross Timbers (I bet you never heard of it) and told me that the Japs had bombed Honolulu. The boy was a Deputy U.S. Marshal and he was on his way to Springfield. Well I phoned the St. Louis office of T.W.A. and told ’em I had to be in Washington the next morning and about that time Bess called and said the Sec. of the Senate had called to say there’d be a joint session Monday and that I should be there. Well I had no car and no driver so I called the little airport at Columbia right across the road from the hotel and the manager said he had a plane and would take me to St. Louis. We left at 4:50 and I was on the ground and in the station of the St. Louis Airport at 5:35. It took us just 40 minutes to fly 130 miles. Then my trouble began. I tried to go to Chicago and then tried Memphis and finally I think T.W.A. dumped somebody off and I got on the 11 P.M. plane for Pittsburgh. Sat up all night and listened to the radio, got to Pittsburgh at 3:30 where I met Senator Chavez of N. Mex who came from Chicago, Sen. Davis of Pa. who lives there and Curley Brooks, the great Republican Isolationist from Chicago. He’s a new Senator from Ill, Legionnaire, fat, curly haired, has a small synthetic blonde wife and is a most important Chicago Tribune Senator. He looked as if he’d swallowed a hot stove and that’s the way all those anti-preparedness boys looked the next day. It wasn’t because they’d been up all night getting there either.

I went home (we got here at 5:30 A.M.), found Bess up getting breakfast. My new secretary, Harry Vaughan, was at the airport with my car and I was at home by 6 o’clock. Went to bed and slept until ten and then came to the Senate. It was quite an occasion. Guess you heard it on the radio. Then on the 11th we had to accept another invitation from Germany and Italy. Goodness knows where it will end. I wish I was 30 and in command of a Battery. It would be a lot easier….

II

“Harry Truman was one of the liveliest, most vital Senators in my time,” wrote a veteran Senate employee, the liaison for the press, Richard Riedel, who had first come to work as a Senate page at the age of ten in 1918. Riedel had observed them all, from the days of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., and doubted that any had ever enjoyed public life as much as Truman, or took it so in stride. “An easygoing joviality emanated from him…[he had] an interest in everything and everyone….” But often at the hearings of his committee, Truman seemed to present a different face to the world. “When he got down to business, the twinkle in his eyes would be replaced by a look of concentration. At such times, at close range the thick lenses of his glasses gave his eyes a fearsome, eerie stare so stern that it gave the weird illusion that one was confronting an entirely different person.” At such times, said Riedel, he was grateful Senator Truman was his friend.

In the frenzied, confusing weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, had urged the President to do away with the committee, saying it would “impair our activity if we have to take time out to supply the Truman Committee all the information it desires.” But Roosevelt had no such wish, and as the work of the committee continued, the energy and effectiveness of its chairman drew increasing attention. The first annual report was presented to the Senate on January 15, 1942. In time would come 50 additional reports, as a consequence of extensive, careful research, and more than 400 hearings at which 1,798 witnesses appeared. Amazingly, all reports of the committee were to be unanimous. Asked how this could happen, Republican Owen Brewster said it was not hard to get men to agree when the facts were known.

Early 1942 was a dark time. Singapore fell to the Japanese, then Bataan, with the surrender of General Wainwright and some 75,000 American and Filipino troops, the largest surrender of an American fighting force since Appomattox. Leningrad was still under siege, after more than six months, and along the eastern seaboard of the United States, off shores long thought safe from Europe’s wars, German U-boats were sinking oil tankers almost at will—and “so close,” wrote Eric Sevareid, “that a chorus girl in a Miami penthouse could see men die in flaming oil.” Washington made ready for air raids. Bess Truman had blackout curtains on order for the Connecticut Avenue apartment. The senator took his World War I helmet to the office and at night would lie awake tossing and turning, “fighting the war.” In April, driving through North Carolina on committee business, he tried to think only of spring returning, “the return of Ceres from Pluto’s palace.” The dogwood and apple orchards were in bloom along the winding road, and at the hotel at Chapel Hill all was quiet and restful. Still he couldn’t sleep, fretting over the course of the war.

In a speech on the Senate floor that summer of 1942, he called for a second front in Europe to relieve the Russians—as a matter of clear military necessity. In a speech at home in Jackson County he said the war was only a tragic continuation of “the one we fought in 1917 and 1918.” The victors in that war, he argued, “had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war for many generations. But they missed the opportunity.” A “spirit of isolationism” had brought the worse calamity of the present conflict. It must never happen again.

Disclosures produced by his committee were shocking. Curtiss-Wright was discovered manufacturing faulty airplane engines for delivery to combat forces. One inspector for Curtiss-Wright, a man with two nephews in the Army Air Corps, broke down and wept as he told a committee investigator what was going on. “If I were the executive in charge of a plant of that sort, I would know what was going on,” Truman told an Air Corps officer who testified, “and I think it is plain negligence, and maybe worse than that…that they didn’t know. They should have known.” The officer agreed. “No doubt about it,” said Truman. The Air Corps had denied that there were problems. Curtiss-Wright launched an advertising campaign stressing the company’s contribution to winning the war. But the faulty engines were a reality, and as Truman surmised, more than negligence was involved. As an aftermath of the committee’s investigation one Air Corps general involved was sent to prison.

Questioning the cause of troubles with the B-26 bomber built by the Glenn Martin Company, the committee was informed by Martin himself that the wings were not wide enough. Truman asked why the wings weren’t fixed. Martin said plans were too far along and that besides he already had the contract. Truman said that if that was how Martin felt, then the committee would see the contract was ended. Martin said he would correct the size of the wings.

They saw a lot of the seamy side of the war effort, Truman once remarked, speaking for the committee. Yet for Truman the disclosures appeared to confirm many of his worst suspicions about big business in America. He was truly a Jeffersonian in spirit; William Jennings Bryan remained a political hero. The things Truman had said in the Senate in earlier years about the evils of big banks, big insurance companies, big corporations had been said in earnest. He had never really known any industrialists or heads of giant corporations, most of whom were Republicans. He had never counted such people among his personal or political friends.

Nor, at this stage, does he appear ever to have accepted the view that a certain amount of corporate stupidity and corruption was inevitable in an undertaking so massive and involving so many interests as the war effort. In fact, the American industrial powerhouse, America’s phenomenal productivity was what would turn the tide against Germany and Japan. It would prove the decisive factor in the war, and Truman was to give too little credit to the vast majority of patriotic business people and industrialists who were making this happen. At times, in what he wrote and said, he made it seem as though the committee and its investigators were the only ones doing their duty. He didn’t believe that, of course. Also, from what he and his investigators were finding, it is easy to understand why he might have felt as he did.

A classic case and one of the most memorable days of testimony concerned the United States Steel Corporation and its subsidiary, Carnegie-Illinois Steel. At issue was the quality of steel plate being produced for ships.

As frequently happened, the committee’s first hint of trouble came in letters from employees who felt it their patriotic duty to report what was going on. At first little was done. The volume of similar complaints and warnings from around the country had become too great to handle. Much of it was obviously crank mail and to follow every lead would have been impossible. But when a newly launched ship, a tanker called Schenectady built by Henry J. Kaiser, broke in two at Portland, Oregon, in January 1943, the question of steel plate became one of vital importance.

At the Irvin Works, the Carnegie-Illinois rolling mill at West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, investigators for the Truman Committee found that at least 5 percent of the plant’s production, or about 3,000 tons of steel per month, failed to meet Navy specifications, yet was being labeled and delivered as up to standard. The results of quality tests—chemical analysis conducted in the mill to determine the quantity of carbon and other elements in the steel—were simply altered (as were other tests for tensile strength) “to conform to what the customer expected to receive,” in the words of the chief specifications examiner, a man named Murray Stewart. If the chemical analysis of a “heat” of steel wasn’t known, he said, then they would just make one up for the record book.

Stewart was among the first to appear on the day of the hearing, March 23, 1943, and he provided some of the most damaging of all testimony, as well as a touch of unintended humor, when Hugh Fulton encouraged him to explain how exactly the system worked:

FULTON: In other words…you would make up a chemical analysis which you thought would fit what the steel should have been.

STEWART: That is right.

FULTON: And how would you deal with that in that particular record book?

STEWART: In order to keep our records so that we would know when it was an incorrect heat number, we would enter it in this book in pencil.

FULTON: How were the other entries made?

STEWART: They were made in ink.

FULTON: And did you, in addition to making them in pencil, put any prefix letter in front of them?

STEWART: It was a common practice to put an “F.”

FULTON: What did “F” mean?

STEWART: Fake.

FULTON: You told our investigator originally that it meant phone.

STEWART: That is right.

FULTON: But now under oath you desire to state it meant fake?

STEWART: That is correct. The investigator was a stranger to me and I was sort of pressed for something to say at the moment.

An assistant metallurgist, David B. Ireland, Jr., testified—apparently hoping to put operations at the Irvin mill in a better light—that he learned how to fake the tests at the Edgar Thomson Works, another giant Carnegie-Illinois mill near Pittsburgh. Indeed, he had become so proficient, said Ireland, that he could readily fool a Navy inspector, whenever one was on hand. To date only one tester had been caught cheating by a Navy inspector, Ireland continued, but there was an explanation for that: “He cheated more than he was supposed to cheat.”

Was the man fired, asked Senator Homer Ferguson. No, said Ireland, he was demoted. Was he demoted because he went too far, Chairman Truman asked a higher-ranking employee, chief metallurgist W. F. McGarrity.

“Yes, sir,” said McGarrity.

“Going a little too far, he was demoted,” repeated Truman. “He wasn’t fired, he was just demoted.”

“And through satisfactory work elsewhere he was brought back to a better paying job,” added McGarrity.

Three investigators from the committee had gone to the Irvin Works earlier in March, or roughly two months after the Schenectady incident. They had called first at the Carnegie-Illinois headquarters in Pittsburgh, where they were told by the president of the corporation, J. Lester Perry, that they could speak to no employee unless a company attorney were present. Nor would they be permitted inside the mill until he, Perry, put through a call to Senator Truman to see what this was all about, a move that infuriated Senator Truman and made him immediately suspicious that Perry was trying to hide something. When the investigators arrived at Irwin about noon they were kept waiting for half an hour, then invited to lunch at the company cafeteria. They did not want lunch, they said, they wanted to see the record book from the mill at once. But they were kept waiting another hour, and when the book was at last made available at two in the afternoon, they learned it had been taken apart the night before and distributed among several people who were “doing work” for the company attorney. Two hours had been required to put it back together again. How much had been removed or altered they had no way of knowing, wrote one of the investigators in his report to Chairman Truman.

“I don’t think that was exactly strong cooperation, Mr. Perry,” Truman said when Perry took his place at the witness table, after Stewart, Ireland, and McGarrity had all completed their testimony. “And I was also rather surprised…that you didn’t take immediate action to clean the plant and find why this procedure was followed. I want you to explain to the committee fully why that was.”

“Senator Truman, it is not my intention to explain this and to be controversial,” Perry answered smoothly.

“You can be as controversial as you like,” said Truman. “It is your privilege.”

He had never had any desire except to cooperate, Perry insisted. Perhaps he had not appreciated the full importance of the investigators’ visit, perhaps he should have done more. He had demonstrated goodwill, he thought. As he recalled, it was only late in the day when the seriousness of the situation became clear to him. “That afternoon, late, it appeared definitely that they wanted to make an investigation,” he said.

“We don’t send investigators to plants just for fun,” Truman snapped.

“I understand that now,” replied Perry.

Truman pressed him again on what action had been taken to straighten things out in the mill. Had anybody been fired? What corrections had been made? Trying first to evade the questions, Perry admitted that as yet nothing had been done. He needed time to get all the facts, “the fullest implications.” Truman found that unacceptable. If he had been president of the company, he said, he would have gotten to the bottom of the situation at once. “You had all this information as soon as our investigators had it.”

It was Perry’s position, as expressed in a prepared statement and in the course of testimony, that while management deplored such devious practices as had been disclosed by the committee’s investigators—practices that higher management had no part in—even the substandard plates supplied by the mill were “entirely suitable for their intended use.” If the Navy was not getting what it ordered exactly, what it was getting was good enough for the purpose. “The only explanation which can be given for the failure to carry out prescribed testing procedures is that a few individuals…grew lax under the pressure of heavy production….” He found the word “cheat” as used in other testimony unacceptable. He preferred “misrepresentation.”

Most important, concerning the Schenectady, he said that failure of steel plate in the ship had not been the cause of its breakup and even if that were the problem, the plate at the point where the break began was not a product of the Irvin Works.

Of the senators present, it was Ferguson and Brewster, the two Republicans, who bore down hardest on Perry, while Fulton or Truman would move in with a question or comment from time to time. Ferguson picked up quickly on the question of where the Schenectady plate had been made. It was not made at Irvin, Perry affirmed again. Then where, asked Ferguson. Homestead, admitted Perry.

“Didn’t you hear the witness testify here that he was taught how to cheat down at the Homestead Works?” Ferguson asked.

“Senator, this word ‘cheat’…”

“Have you a better one?”

Senator Brewster then read aloud from the report of an investigation conducted by the Bureau of Ships, stating quite plainly that “a very poor quality of steel” had been “most directly responsible” for the failure of the Schenectady. The plate was “of definitely inferior quality,” Brewster read on. It was so brittle it was more like cast iron than steel.

Had Perry read the report? He had read parts of it, he replied. Brewster, his anger becoming more apparent, wondered how Perry might feel if he had a son going overseas in a ship made of such steel.

Perry answered, “Why, Senator, I don’t for a moment condone poor steel, defective steel in ships or anywhere else that has to do with the war effort. Don’t worry about how I feel about the sons going over there.”

Truman interposed to explain that Senator Brewster had a son overseas in the war.

“If a customer asks you for a strength of 60,000 pounds, the breaking point on a test,” Ferguson said, “and you give him a product of 57,000 pounds, but you represent to him in figures that you have tested it and it did test 60,000 pounds, is that a misrepresentation of a material fact?”

PERRY: Yes, sir.

FERGUSON: You understand that was done up to five percent of the material furnished?

PERRY: That is the evidence here this morning.

FERGUSON: Do you say that that was not selling a product to the United States Government under false representations?

PERRY: If that was done, to that extent it would be.

FERGUSON: You heard the testimony. Is there any doubt in your mind that it was done?

PERRY: There is a doubt in my mind as to whether it was done in regard to material that was furnished to Government specification and testing where the Government made the inspection or supervised the inspection.

FERGUSON: Do you mean to say—do I understand you now to say that you don’t believe the testimony of your own men here under oath?

PERRY: Did they actually testify to that point that where inspection was made by the Navy…?

FULTON: And also to the Navy where they said it was possible to cheat with the Navy inspector standing right there.

PERRY: I have stated that where that was done it was a misrepresentation.

FERGUSON: Do I understand that you still insist that no inferior material was sold to the Government?

PERRY: I still insist that it was not inferior for the end use to which it was put….

FERGUSON: In other words, you are the man who is stating what you think the Government should buy, is that right?

PERRY: No, sir.

FERGUSON: Then, why don’t you live up to the Government specifications?

PERRY: We should.

FERGUSON: Why didn’t you?

PERRY: We will.

TRUMAN: I’ll say you will….

The hearing lasted five hours. When the company’s attorney, testifying after Perry, talked of his need to master the technicalities of the steel business before “justifying this situation,” Truman broke in to ask what knowledge of technicalities had to do with removing cheaters from jobs of critical responsibility. “I don’t know anything about the steel business,” Truman said, “and don’t expect to know about it, but I can tell you when the books have been tampered with and when there is a bunch of crookedness going on. That is plain enough for me to see.”

But the question of who ultimately had been responsible for what went on—of how high up the blame should go—was never really answered. No one above the chief metallurgist, McGarrity, would admit to any knowledge of rigging tests or falsifying records. Nor did the hearing disclose a substantial motive for passing off the inferior steel. Those in the mill involved in the deception had nothing to gain by their actions and everything to lose if found out. The one plausible explanation offered was that it was all in an effort to set an impressive production record.

In any event management promised to set everything straight, and in the final hour the president of U.S. Steel, Benjamin F. Fairless, promised Truman that whoever was responsible would “walk the plank.”

“You realize, Mr. Fairless,” said Senator Brewster, “how incredible it seems that subordinates in the company would risk their entire future without hope of reward of any character. That, of course, is what impresses the committee and makes it so amazing.”

Senator Ferguson was curious whether Mr. Fairless thought, from what he had heard during the day, that the operation of Carnegie-Illinois Steel was an example of good management. “I certainly do not,” said Fairless. “I consider it was very, very poor management.”

At the close of the hearing, asked by a reporter for his personal comment on what had been divulged during the day, Truman said he did not think that could be printed.

On the issue of the dollar-a-year men on the War Production Board, Truman stood fast, stressing with great feeling the essential injustice of the system, but giving in at last, much against his better judgment, because the production czar he had helped create, Donald Nelson, argued otherwise. Nelson wanted no change in the system, insisting it was the way to get maximum results from industry. He had to have people who understood how industry worked, he told the committee. Asked why such men should be allowed to retain their corporate ties and benefits, he said people with big salaries had big expenses—mortgages, insurance, and the like—and could not make the change to government pay without suffering hardship.

“I don’t think there should be any special class,” Truman responded. Only that morning he had received a letter from a man who had been earning $25,000 a year, a reserve officer who had been called up for duty. “He is going to get $140 a month, and he can’t draw his $25,000 while he is gone,” Truman said. “He is satisfied to do that because he wants to win the war, just as you do and just as I do, by every means possible, no matter what it costs him, because if he doesn’t win it his $25,000 a year won’t be worth a cent. I am laboring, and have been, under the delusion, maybe, that if the government had the power to take these young men away from their jobs and their outlook on life for the purpose of this emergency, the dollar-a-year men could face the same situation and face it adequately, and would be glad to do it.”

He was not opposed to the dollar-a-year men because they were businessmen—he wanted more businessmen in government, especially in the war effort—but he knew how “human” it was for a steel executive on loan to the war administration to hesitate in ordering any action that might injure the standing of his company or industry once the war was over. He had learned that certain high-ranking dollar-a-year men had initially delayed the construction of new furnaces when they were needed because of concern over what increased ingot capacity might do to their postwar profits.

But reluctantly he backed off, saying that if Nelson felt the system was what it took to win the war, then the committee should not stand in the way. In a letter to Nelson a few days later, he was more specific. The committee did not like having procurement matters entrusted to those who were such obvious hostages to fortune, he wrote.

However, the committee believes that the best interests of the procurement program require that it be administered by a single head who will be able to do things in his way and who will be judged by his accomplishments as a whole…. The committee will, therefore, support you even on matters in which it disagrees with you….

By pushing harder on the issue, he felt, the committee could run the risk of overreaching its power, to the point of dictating policy, like the intrusive Civil War committee.

In backing Nelson he was also standing by a fundamental conviction that control of the war effort must be kept in civilian hands. In just the first six months of 1942 military contracts added to the economy totaled $400 billion. He saw ambitious generals and admirals on all sides gaining influence over industry and agriculture and he worried what this could mean for the future. In the fall of 1942, on a broadcast for “The March of Time,” he called the issue of civilian control the foremost of the day and warned it could shape the whole political and economic structure of the country after the war. “The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles,” he said, “and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.”

General Brehon Somervell, wearing three stars now, was again called before the committee to explain an incredible project, called Canol, after “Canadian oil.” The scheme was to build a four-inch oil pipeline across 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska, and it had been launched “on the nod” from Somervell, secretly, with little thought to the realities of terrain, climate, available materials, available manpower, or the views of oil experts, the Corps of Engineers, and the War Production Board. An item was added to the War Department budget of $25 million with no description except that it was for the construction of military facilities in Canada and Alaska.

The shroud of secrecy had been primarily to avoid interference from other civilian sides of government, and in particular the notoriously irascible Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior and head of the Petroleum Administration. Employees of the contractor, Stephen Bechtel, began calling Canol “the greatest project since the Panama Canal.” But then Ickes found out about it and went before the Truman Committee to say the whole project “grew entirely out of a one-page memorandum from General Somervell, who was anxious to conserve paper….” Ickes called the pipeline useless and the committee came to much the same conclusion, having heard more from Somervell’s chief adviser for the project, James H. Graham, a dollar-a-year man who, Ickes said, was “worth every penny of it.” Graham, the committee found, had no idea how long the pipeline was to be. He had made no estimate of the cost, nor did he believe anybody else had. “I don’t regard cost in time of war,” he told the committee more than once.

“The committee damns it up and down while the War Department is as usual scrambling desperately to save face instead of having the guts to admit a mistake frankly and go on from there,” wrote a new observer on the scene, a young reporter for the United Press named Allen Drury, on the day of Somervell’s appearance. “All the desperate assertions of an embarrassed incompetence have been hurried forth to justify the thing, but the committee is unimpressed.”

Somervell had paraded into the hearings flanked by four brigadier generals and several majors. At one point, as Drury happily recorded in his journal, Somervell asked for some water, handing his glass to a brigadier who handed it to a major who, finding no one of lesser rank available, filled the glass himself and returned it to the brigadier who returned it to the general.

The committee hammered away at Somervell for four and a half hours, with Hugh Fulton and Senator Harley Kilgore doing most of the questioning. The chairman listened quietly. But in winding up the day Truman read Somervell a letter he had received from the Navy Department—a letter, he explained, written in answer to his own question whether the Navy had ever been asked for its opinion on Canol, or requested to participate. According to the letter, a search of Navy files had turned up no communication indicating such an inquiry. No officers or officials of the Navy Department had ever been questioned orally about Canol.

Somervell said he never implied that he had asked the Navy. “It is not a Navy situation. Not any more than a bakery we might build….”

Truman suggested that very possibly it could have to do with the Navy, since ships burn a good deal of oil.

“Yes, sir,” replied Somervell, who now said the Chief of Naval Operations and others had “expressed themselves in favor of the project.”

“The Secretary of the Navy, however, has the other opinion,” said Truman. “The committee will stand adjourned.”

Worn down at day’s end, he would complain to Bess that the pressures on him had begun to tell again. She knew of his headaches and exhaustion and worried he might push himself to the point of collapse. Witnesses at the hearings got on his nerves far more than he let on, he told her. He talked of just going away somewhere and reading Shakespeare and Plutarch “over and over and over.”

Yet nothing about his public manner revealed any of this. He was brisk and cheerful as always. He radiated good health and youthful energy. In contrast to so many among the congressional brotherhood, the gray, double-chinned, food-stained veterans of Capitol Hill, he appeared abnormally fit and his good clothes, his one indulgence, were spotless. Though not a fancy dresser—he remained too much the midwesterner for that—he looked always, as Margaret said, as if he had just stepped from a bandbox. His suits were perfectly cleaned and pressed, his shirts immaculate. (He had had a time his first few years in Washington finding a dry cleaner who could do his clothes to his satisfaction.) He had dozens of suits—some old favorites custom-made by Ted Marks, others from Eddie Jacobson’s new store in Kansas City or from Garfinckel’s in Washington, mostly double-breasted, grays and blues, and cut to accentuate how trim he was. (He could still get into his old Army uniform, he liked to tell people.) Lately, too, he had begun wearing bow ties—a departure viewed by his wife and daughter with considerable disfavor—and there was always a fresh, perfectly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket showing five points, always the World War I service pin in his lapel. He looked crisp. He moved with a bounce, even in the heat of summer, his two-tone summer shoes clicking down the marble halls more rapidly than any. Richard Riedel, the young press liaison who prided himself in being able to get about the Capitol in double-quick time, remembered Truman’s good-natured approval of the pace he set. “One day in a typical kidding mood he [Truman] started in behind me and walked lock-step through the Lobby to the amusement of all who saw him.”

His vitality seemed greater than ever, in keeping with his new confidence. He had “arrived” in the Senate, as everybody knew, and it agreed with him. He was having a splendid time being Senator Harry Truman of the Truman Committee.

Yet he acquired no airs, for all this. He was as unpresuming, as accessible as always, despite the extraordinary new power he had and the urgent, wartime atmosphere of Washington. Self-importance was on display in the city in many quarters to a greater degree than ever in memory, but Truman seemed somehow unaffected. A reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described later how he had been sent by his editor to see the senator, who was reportedly back in town briefly after one of his committee forays and staying at the Jefferson Hotel on 16th Street:

I went up to the front desk and asked the room clerk for the number of Senator Truman’s room. He gave it to me. I went to a house phone and called the Senator’s room. The phone was answered not by a security guard, not by an aide, not even by a secretary. It was answered by Harry Truman. I identified myself, and he said sure, come on up. I knocked on his door, and the door was opened by Senator Truman. He was alone, in his shirt sleeves, with a book held closed on a finger. He put the book aside, offered me a chair, poured us each a bourbon highball, and sat back with a friendly smile. We talked, without interruption, for almost an hour. What we talked about, what I later wrote, I have no real recollection of. All I remember is that the book he was reading was Volume III of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. That the bourbon we drank was Old Crow. That he was completely relaxed and responsive. And that there was no one else around.

Nearly everything being said about him in the papers was complimentary, and the committee and its work now had the respect of the administration. “I am more surprised every day at the respect with which the special committee is regarded by people in high places,” he wrote to Bess, very pleased. “If I can just keep from making any real errors, we are on the way to really help win the war and to make the job more efficient and quicker. That means fewer of our young men killed and a chance for a more honorable settlement. So you must pray for me to go the right way.”

In the Senate, where he was always well liked, he had achieved a new stature, even among liberals who, until now, had regarded him as pleasant enough and conscientious, but bland. “The man from Missouri,” remembered Claude Pepper, “had dared to say ‘show me’ to the powerful military-industrial complex and he had caught many people in the act.”

He was notable too for so much that he was not. He was not florid or promiscuous. He made no pretense at being superior in any regard. He did not seem to need the limelight, flattery, or a following. He did not want to be the President.

To his pleasure, he was recognized now in restaurants and hotel lobbies, as he had never been before except in Missouri, and not always there. “Now you’ve got to help me more than ever so I won’t be a damn fool or stuffed shirt,” he told Bess.

Margaret, now in her late teens, had begun singing lessons and was doing splendidly, he thought. She was talking already of a singing career. Neither he nor Bess was a singer. Margaret never heard him even try to sing, which seemed odd for someone with such love for music. But he did nothing to discourage her, said only that she must first finish college.

He called her “Margie” or “Miss Skinny.” Alert and energetic, with a sunny disposition, she was one of the great satisfactions of his life.

They so clearly enjoyed one another’s company that it gave pleasure to others. “One time, one Christmas,” remembered a niece of Ethel Noland’s, who lived in the Noland house on North Delaware, “Margaret was with him and they came across for a little visit Christmas morning. And I don’t think I ever laughed any harder…. They just gave it back and forth…. They were as fun as can be. Repartee! He was so crazy about Margaret, just enjoyed being with her and talking with her and we sat there just entranced….”

With friends in Washington he could talk about her by the hour, as she knew.

You have a good mind, a beautiful physique and a possible successful future outlook—but that now is up to you [he wrote when she turned eighteen]. You are the mistress of your future. All your mother and dad can do is to look on, advise when asked and hope and wish you a happy one. There’ll be troubles and sorrow a plenty but there’ll also be happy days and hard work.

From a financial standpoint your father has not been a shining success but he has tried to leave you something that (as Mr. Shakespeare says) cannot be stolen—an honorable reputation and a good name. You must continue that heritage and see that it is not spoiled. You’re all we have and we both count on you.

Later, to Bess he would write, “Tell my baby she has a most beautiful voice-to keep it natural without any gimcracks, pronounce her words clearly and in English so they can be understood—and she’ll be a great singer.” She too must never become a damn fool or a stuffed shirt.

They remained an extremely close-knit family, their social schedule modest, their way of life private and quiet. At home in the small, simply furnished apartment on Connecticut, Truman’s corner of the living room included a chintz-covered armchair, a reading lamp, his phonograph, and his record collection. In a small, free-standing bookcase within arm’s reach was a leatherbound set of Plutarch’s Lives, a two-volume Andrew Jackson by Marquis James, all four volumes of Freeman’s Lee, the Bible, Stories of the Great Operas, a biography of John Nance Garner, and Don Quixote.

Bess, now in her fifties, looked plumper and more matronly by the year, and was enjoying Washington as she never had. The stepped-up pace of wartime agreed with her. He had put her on the office payroll, a not uncommon practice, but one he had criticized others for, most notably Tuck Milligan during his first Senate race. Her salary was $2,400. Truman worried about damaging publicity if ever this were known, but the extra income made a difference. How much real work she did would remain a matter of opinion among the staff, none of whom were as well paid. At one point he advised her privately to “only just drop in and do some signing” of letters. “It helps all concerned.” She was working also at the USO one day a week, and reportedly “reveled” in the excitement he was causing on the Hill.

In a letter from Independence during a visit in June of 1942, she told him how much better he was sounding on the radio. A speech explaining the rubber shortage had been broadcast nationwide. She thought it his best yet, and Ethel Noland agreed. His consonants had all been pronounced just right, Ethel said.

The day before their twenty-third wedding anniversary, he sent Bess twenty-three roses, then telephoned her that night and wrote a letter the next morning:

Washington, D.C.

June 28, 1942

Dear Bess:

Well this is the day. Lots of water has gone over the dam. There’ve been some terrible days and many more nice ones. When my store went flooey and cost my friends and Frank [Wallace] money, when Margie came, don’t think I ever spent such a day, although the pains were yours. And to name one more, when we thought Stark had won and when I lost actually for eastern judge. But the wins have far outweighed ’em. June 28, 1919, was the happiest day of my life, for I had looked forward to it for a lifetime nearly or so it seemed. When a man gets the right kind of wife, his career is made—and I got just that.

The greatest thing we have is a real young lady who hasn’t an equal anywhere. That’s all the excuse we need for living and not much else matters.

It was grand to say hello last night. I was so tired I could hardly sit up. Went to bed right away after playing Margie’s song record and the Minuet (in G) and Chopin waltzes. It’s pretty lonesome around here without you….

Kiss Margie, lots and lots of love and happy returns,

Harry

In November 1942, after the American landing in North Africa, he was praised in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a way that would have been inconceivable a few years before. Harry Truman, wrote Marquis Childs, had become “one of the most useful and at the same time one of the most forthright and fearless of the ninety-six” in the Senate. In a book published that same fall, a brilliant portrait of Washington going to war called I Write from Washington, Childs also contrasted the appalling revelations of the Truman Committee to the kind of false picture presented by the Office of Facts and Figures, a new propaganda agency.

Truman and his committee were now known nationwide, observed the Washington Star. So great was their reputation, said BusinessWeek, that “often a threat to ‘take everything to the Truman Committee’ is sufficient to force a cure of abuses.” The whole country was greatly indebted to Senator Truman and his colleagues, wrote The Nation.

Arthur Krock of The New York Times so admired the senator’s “objectivity at the total expense of partisanship” in his running of the committee that he invited a select few of his fellow journalists to lunch with Senator Truman at the renowned Metropolitan Club and wrote later of the “excellent impression” he made.

By 1943 the committee had produced twenty-one reports covering a wide range of subjects—gasoline rationing, lumber, farm machinery, the loss of American shipping to U-boats. The week of March 8, 1943, “Investigator Truman” was on the cover of Time. In many ways, said Time, the Truman Committee was among the outstanding successes of the entire war effort. It was the “watchdog, spotlight, conscience and spark plug to the economic war-behind-the-lines,” and a heartening sign that even in wartime a democracy could keep an eye on itself. Hardly less remarkable, said the magazine, was the transformation of Harry Truman, from Pendergast errand boy to able, energetic committee chairman just when he was needed:

For a Congressional committee to be considered the first line of defense—especially in a nation which does not tend to admire its representatives, in Congress assembled—is encouraging to believers in democracy. So is the sudden emergence of Harry Truman, whose presence in the Senate is a queer accident of democracy….

Truman himself, wrote Time, was “scrupulously honest…. His only vices are small-stakes poker, an occasional drink of bourbon.” (“WHAT DO THEY MEAN AN OCCASIONAL DRINK OF BOURBON?” Lewis Schwellenbach cabled from Spokane.)

In a poll of Washington correspondents conducted by Look magazine, Senator Truman would be named one of the ten men in Washington whose services had been the most important to the war effort. Further, he was the only one on the list from either branch of Congress.

On April 14, 1943, putting aside his committee work, Truman flew to Chicago to champion a cause that had little to do with the war effort and that seemed a bit surprising for a midwestern senator, a Baptist, a Mason, and proud member of the American Legion to involve himself with. He spoke at a huge rally called to urge help for the doomed Jews of Europe. Chicago Stadium was packed, the crowd estimated at twenty-five thousand. The chairman was a prominent Roman Catholic, Federal Judge William J. Campbell. The keynote speaker was Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York, head of the American Jewish Congress.

The war in which he and his comrades fought twenty-three years earlier, said Senator Truman in his speech, had been waged “not only that nations might be free but also that the people who make up those nations might be free.” Now that freedom had been trampled to dust under the “iron heel of the barbarian.” The Jews of Europe, through the edict of “a mad Hitler,” were being “herded like animals” into concentration camps. It was time something was done about it.

In private, Truman was a man who still, out of old habits of the mouth, could use a word like “kike,” or, in a letter to his wife, dismiss Miami as nothing but “hotels, filling stations, Hebrews, and cabins.” But he spoke now from the heart, and with passing reference to Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” made an implied criticism of the President for doing too little to help the Jews. Truman was not among those who refused to believe the Germans capable of such atrocities as were being reported from Europe.

Merely talking about the Four Freedoms is not enough. This is the time for action. No one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts. We know that they plan the systematic slaughter throughout all of Europe, not only of the Jews but of vast numbers of other innocent peoples.

Now was the time for fighting, he continued, but no less important was planning for the day when the war would end. “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” Free lands must be opened to them, he said.

Their present oppressors must know that they will be held directly accountable for their bloody deeds. To do all this, we must draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed, and on our great national generosity. This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.

It was a remarkable speech, one of the strongest he ever made. How very important it was that he felt as he did, neither he nor any of his audience could possibly yet know.

With other senators on the committee—Hatch, Ball, Harold Burton—Truman was giving more and more thought to problems of the postwar world. And though he played no direct part in the drafting of a Senate resolution for the establishment of a postwar international organization, a United Nations—a resolution sponsored by Senators Ball, Burton, Hatch, and Lister Hill, and hence known as B²H²—Truman was the acknowledged guiding spirit. The United States could, “not possibly avoid the assumption of world leadership after this war,” he was quoted in The New York Times. And with Republican Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, who had also fought in World War I, Truman set out on a Midwest speaking tour in the summer of 1943 to spread the internationalist word under the sponsorship of the United Nations Association. He kept hammering at the same themes over and over across Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. “History has bestowed on us a solemn responsibility…. We failed before to give a genuine peace—we dare not fail this time…. We must not repeat the blunders of the past.”

Not all the Truman Committee’s efforts were successful. The Canol Project went on and wound up costing $134 million, all money that need never have been spent, and more serious even than the financial waste was the misuse of vitally needed manpower and materials. (At one point 4,000 troops and 12,000 civilians were involved.) Corporations and government agencies found to be bungling things or committing outright fraud, like Carnegie-Illinois Steel, were frequently let off the hook to keep production rolling. “We want aluminum, not excuses,” Truman said after the committee’s tangle with Alcoa.

Yet overall the committee’s performance was outstanding. It would be called the most successful congressional investigative effort in American history. Later estimates were that the Truman Committee saved the country as much as $15 billion. This was almost certainly an exaggeration—no exact figure is possible—but the sum was enormous and unprecedented, and whatever the amount, it was only part of the service rendered. The most important “power” of the committee was its deterrent effect. Fear of investigation or public exposure by the committee was enough in itself to cause countless people in industry, government, and the military to do their jobs right, thereby, in the long run, saving thousands of lives.

It was not just that the production of defective airplane engines or low-grade steel had been exposed; the committee also made positive contributions to the production of improved military equipment. The most notable—and one that saved many lives—was the famous, hinge-prowed Higgins landing craft used for amphibious assault, which was built and ordered by the Navy’s Bureau of Ships only after heavy prodding from the committee. With the new Higgins craft troops could be landed on a variety of shallow beaches, rather than just established harbors. It increased mobility for the offense, made obsolete much of the old coastal defenses. Yet until the committee looked at the subject with a fresh eye, Navy bureaucrats had been trying to force the adoption of a plainly inferior design.

The committee was also a continuing source of information about the war effort for the whole country. In its report on the loss to U-boats, for example, the committee said 12 million tons of American shipping were destroyed in 1942, an alarming figure. This was 1 million tons more than all the nation’s shipyards were then producing. The Navy immediately denied the validity of the report. But when Secretary of the Navy Knox appeared before the committee in executive session, he admitted the committee was telling the truth.

Unquestionably, the relentless “watchdog” role, the attention to detail during the hearings, the quality as well as the quantity of the reports issued, all greatly increased public confidence in how the war was being run. Further, anyone called before the committee could count on a fair hearing. The chairman would have it no other way.

From what he had observed of Chairman Truman during the day of General Somervell’s testimony, Allen Drury of United Press recorded: “He seems to be a generally good man, probably deserving of his reputation.” But after watching several more sessions, including one in which Truman went out of his way to keep some of the other senators from browbeating a witness, Drury could hardly say enough for the head of the committee:

April 12, 1945: Harry S. Truman takes the oath of office from Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

Expressions of grief, as well as confidence in Harry Truman, fill the front page of the Independence Examiner.

James F. Byrnes (left) and Henry A. Wallace, ardent candidates for the vice-presidential nomination only the summer before, wait with Truman for Roosevelt’s funeral train at Washington’s Union Station. Below: The new President of the United States at his desk.

July 1945: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Truman, and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, “The Big Three,” meet at Potsdam, Germany.

Conference table, Cecilienhof Palace.

Truman in Berlin with Generals Eisenhower and Patton. Eisenhower was high on the new President’s list of favorite generals; not so Patton.

Above: Truman’s headquarters during the Potsdam Conference was No. 2 Kaiserstrasse, the “nightmare” house where the decision on the atomic bomb was made. Below: Truman’s desk in the second-floor study.

Above: Truman’s order, handwritten in pencil to Secretary of War Stimson, to use the atomic bomb on Japan. Below: At his desk in the Oval Office, 7:00 P.M., August 14, 1945, Truman announces the surrender of Japan.

May 25, 1946: As he calls on Congress for the power to draft striking rail workers into the Army and thus break a nationwide shutdown, Truman is handed a note saying the strike has ended. Left: He and the First Lady had hosted a reception for wounded veterans the day before, just as worries over the rail strike were at their worst. The postwar burdens of his office bore heavily on Truman (opposite). But he had discovered a retreat away from Washington, the naval base at Key West, Florida, and aide Clark Clifford (shown below with Truman at Key West) had emerged as a bright new star on the White House staff.

Two who helped turn the tide in 1947: Left: Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg shaking hands on March 12, as Truman is about to ask Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey—the speech that introduced the Truman Doctrine; and (opposite) Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the “great one,” as Truman called him, who in a commencement speech at Harvard on June 5 proposed what came to be known as the Marshall Plan.

Eddie Jacobson, a behind-the-scenes key figure in the decision to recognize Israel, talks with his old friend and former business partner.

Chaim Weitzmann, the new president of Israel, presents Truman with the Torah scrolls during a first official call at the White House.

Opposite: In the first address ever made by a President to the NAACP, Truman speaks from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of ten thousand, June 29, 1947.

America’s best-known walker steps out in a 35th Division Reunion parade in Kansas City.

Past 2:00 A.M., July 15, 1948, his hands chopping the air, Truman tells cheering convention delegates at Philadelphia, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election…arid don’t you forget that!” His odyssey began in September. Below: From the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan at Richmond, Indiana, Truman makes one of hundreds of “whistle-stop” speeches.

After Stalin clamped a blockade on Berlin on June 24 (the day Dewey was nominated), Truman launched the Berlin Airlift. Tensions over Berlin continued for months.

Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey and his wife. According to the press, only a miracle or a series of unimaginable Republican blunders could save Truman from defeat.

In one of the most memorable photographs in the history of American politics, the “sure loser” holds aloft a premature Chicago Tribune headline. Heading east after the election, Truman’s train had stopped at St. Louis where he was handed a copy of the paper. Below: Part of the throng that welcomed Truman back to Washington. Some 750,000 people filled the streets in the largest outpouring for a President that the capital had ever seen.

There are a number of times, when it is quite easy to find oneself thanking whatever powers there be that the country has Harry Truman in the Senate. He is an excellent man, a fine Senator and sound American. The debt the public owes him is great indeed. And Boss Pendergast put him in. Politics is funny business….

III

For quite some time staff investigators had been picking up puzzling hints of a secret enterprise larger even than the Canol Project, odd bits and pieces of information indicating huge, unexplained expenditures for something identified only as the Manhattan Project. On June 17, 1943, Truman telephoned Secretary of War Stimson. Their conversation was brief:

STIMSON: Now that’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am the only one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it.

TRUMAN: I see.

STIMSON: It’s part of a very important secret development.

TRUMAN: Well, all right then—

STIMSON: And I—

TRUMAN: I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won’t have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me that’s all I want to hear.

STIMSON: All right…

TRUMAN: You assure that this is for a specific purpose and you think it’s all right. That’s all I need to know.

STIMSON: Not only for a specific purpose, but a unique purpose.

TRUMAN: All right, then.

STIMSON: Thank you very much,

Apparently, however, more information kept coming to Truman in one way or other, and by July he had been told enough to know the essential nature of the “very important secret development.” Incredibly, he even put it in a letter to Lewis Schwellenbach, who had since left the Senate to become a federal district judge in Spokane. Schwellenbach had been concerned over sudden, enormous land condemnations for the DuPont Company along the Columbia River near a desolate railroad town called Hanford. Nearly half a million acres were involved and he had written to Truman to inquire about it. On July 15, 1943, Truman wrote to say he shouldn’t worry.

“I know something about that tremendous real estate deal,” he said, “and I have been informed that it is for the construction of a plant to make a terrific explosion for a secret weapon that will be a wonder.” He added, “I hope it works.”

This was a terrible breach of security on Truman’s part, an astonishing lapse of simple good judgment—to have passed on such information in so offhand a fashion in an ordinary letter sent through the mail. It was exactly the sort of “insider” talk, one member of the senatorial “club” to another, that gave generals and admirals nightmares and little desire ever to tell politicians anything more than necessary. Truman had not bothered even to write in private, but dictated the letter to Mildred Dryden, which means that as of then she too was aware of the making of “a terrific explosion.”

But apparently no one ever found out about the letter. Neither Schwellenbach nor Dryden said a word more on the subject, as far as is known.

Curiosity and concern over the DuPont operations at Hanford did not end there. Senator Elbert Thomas of Oklahoma wanted the situation investigated. He, too, apparently had been hearing stories. A staff man on the Truman Committee informed the chairman confidentially that complaints of waste and inefficiency at Hanford had become “chronic,” and added, “In my humble opinion, I believe that this is another ‘Canol,’ wherein the guise of secrecy is being resorted to by the War Department to cover what may be another shocking example when the lid is finally taken off.”

Truman felt pressured to know more, his agreement with Stimson notwithstanding.

On November 30, 1943, he informed Senator Thomas, “I have sent an investigator to look into it, and I hope we can find out what is wrong.”

A few weeks afterward, Fred Canfil walked into a Western Union office in Walla Walla, Washington, and sent the following telegram, collect to Senator Truman. It must have made interesting reading to whoever put it on the wire:

COLONEL MATHIAS, COMMANDING OFFICER DUPONT PLANT, TOLD ME THAT YOU AND THE SECRETARY OF WAR HAD AN UNDERSTANDING THAT NONE OF YOUR COMMITTEE WOULD COME INTO THE PLANT. THROUGH ANOTHER AGENCY I FOUND THAT WITHIN THE LAST 10 DAYS A CONFIDENTIAL LETTER WAS RECEIVED FROM THE WAR DEPARTMENT…TO ARMY OFFICERS AND TO HIGH CIVILIAN ENGINEERS…. TO THE EFFECT THAT THESE PEOPLE WERE TO SEE THAT NO SENATOR OR ANYONE CONNECTED WITH THE SENATE WAS TO BE GIVEN ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT.

Canfil, who may not have known as much as Truman about the purpose of the plant, was only doing his duty. Truman thought him overly efficient. “Whenever he finds out that I want something,” he once said of Canfil, “he never stops until it is done….”

But after the wire from Walla Walla, committee interest in the Manhattan Project cooled. The understanding with Stimson was honored again. Nor is there anything in the record to suggest that Truman ever heard of separating plutonium from U-238 (the work going on at Hanford) or had any idea how “the terrific explosion” was to be made.

Only a few months later, Stimson, General Marshall, and Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, drove to the Capitol for a private meeting in Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office. Present besides Rayburn were the House majority and minority leaders, John McCormack and Joe Martin. It was then, in February 1944, that Stimson and Marshall revealed “the greatest secret of the war” for the first and only time on the Hill. As Joe Martin wrote years later:

The United States was engaged in a crash program to develop the atomic bomb before the Germans perfected one. Marshall described the design of the bomb in some technical detail. Stimson said that if the Germans got this weapon first, they might win the war overnight. They told us that they would need an additional $1,600,000,000 to manufacture the bomb. Because of an overriding necessity for secrecy, they made the unique request that the money be provided without a trace of evidence to show how it was spent.

The three legislators agreed to do what was necessary. Senator Truman was told nothing.

Yet according to Stimson’s diary, the chairman of the investigating committee was soon after him once more. Truman was now asking that a member of the committee staff, General Frank Lowe, be taken into Stimson’s confidence about the Hanford Works. Stimson by now was extremely annoyed with Senator Truman. Stimson thought he had an agreement. He told Truman no, a response Truman did not take lightly. “He threatened me with dire consequences. I told him I had to do just what I did,” said Stimson in his diary, adding, “Truman is a nuisance and a pretty untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but he acts meanly.” Under no circumstances was Senator Truman to be told anything more.

8
Numbered Days

I hardly know Truman.

—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JULY 1944

I

It was in early summer of 1943, one year in advance of the Democratic National Convention, that Senator Truman recorded on paper for the first time that in some circles he was being talked of as a candidate for Vice President, assuming the President were to run for a fourth term. He had been invited to Sunday lunch at the Washington home of Senator Joe Guffey, a staunch New Dealer who took him out into the garden to ask “very confidentially” what he thought of Vice President Henry Wallace. Truman had smiled and said Wallace was the best Secretary of Agriculture the country ever had. Guffey, laughing, said that was what he thought, too. “Then he wanted to know if I would help out the ticket if it became necessary by accepting the nomination for Vice President,” Truman recorded. “I told him in words of one syllable that I would not….”

And though the idea was talked about with increasing frequency thereafter, Truman, when asked his opinion, always gave the same answer. He wanted to stay in the Senate.

Moreover, he believed in being realistic. Franklin Roosevelt had shown no sign of dissatisfaction with the Vice President, nor any inclination to abandon him. And even if Roosevelt were to change his mind, there were a number of others—Jimmy Byrnes and Alben Barkley, to name the two most obvious possibilities—who were better known, more experienced, and who would leap to the opportunity. Jimmy Byrnes, a small, tidy, vivid man whom Truman greatly admired, was a southerner, a lapsed Catholic, and sixty-four years old, all of which could count against him. But he had done virtually everything there was to do in government, his experience ranging across all three branches, beginning with seven terms in the House before going to the Senate. Named to the Supreme Court in 1941, Byrnes had resigned after only one term to become Roosevelt’s War Mobilization Director, with an office in the East Wing of the White House. Popularly referred to as “Assistant President,” he was the consummate “insider” whose political judgment, whose ability to funnel money where needed in the party (such as to Senator Truman in 1940) were thought second to none. Roosevelt relied heavily on him and liked him. By contrast to such a man as Byrnes, Truman was small potatoes, as he well knew, and no closer to Roosevelt now than he had ever been.

In fact, lately, a distinct chill had been felt at the White House concerning Truman, ever since publication in American Magazine of a ghost-written article about the findings of the committee that Truman had allowed to be published under his name without bothering to read it very carefully. Too late had he discovered how critical it was of the administration’s handling of the war effort. (“Leadership is what we Americans are crying for,” the article said. “We are fighting mad, and ready to tackle any job and to make any sacrifice…. All we ask is that we be intelligently and resolutely led.”) He was certain that the President didn’t like him, Truman told friends in the Senate.

Still the vice-presidential speculation continued, and with Truman’s name spoken often, for the reason that certain influential figures in the Democratic Party had joined in a pact to keep Henry Wallace off the ticket.

They were only a handful, only a half dozen or so to begin with, but they were among the most powerful men in the party, and they had taken it upon themselves to talk down Wallace at every opportunity and begin organizing wider opposition to him. They included the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Frank Walker, who had replaced Jim Farley as Postmaster General; Ed Pauley, a wealthy California oilman who was treasurer of the national committee; George E. Allen, a jovial man-about-Washington, lobbyist, and secretary of the national committee; and Robert E. Hannegan, Truman’s last-minute savior in the 1940 campaign, who had since advanced to Commissioner of Internal Revenue and was now not only a great favorite of the President’s but in line to replace Walker as national chairman. General Edwin “Pa” Watson, appointments secretary at the White House, had also agreed to clear the way whenever possible for anti-Wallace Democrats to see the President. Watson, it was hoped, could serve as counterbalance to Mrs. Roosevelt, a known champion of the Vice President.

But the key man in the “conspiracy” was Edward Joseph Flynn of the Bronx, who, since the downfall of Tom Pendergast, was considered the most powerful political boss in the country and who in looks and manner bore little resemblance to the usual picture of a successful Irish politician. At fifty-two, Flynn was tall and handsome, with thinning gray hair and gray eyes, beautifully dressed, well educated, an ardent gardener, a student of history. Most importantly, he was a devoted friend of Franklin Roosevelt and his influence on Roosevelt on political matters exceeded that of anyone inside or out of the administration. It was Ed Flynn who ran the President’s successful bid for a third term in 1940, and it was Ed Flynn now, more than any of the others, who saw defeat in November unless something was done about the Vice President. For Henry Wallace was not their idea of a politician.

Henry Wallace was one of the most serious-minded, fascinating figures in national public life, a plant geneticist by profession who had done important work in the development of hybrid corn and whose Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company was a multimillion-dollar enterprise. He was an author, lecturer, social thinker, a firm advocate for civil rights and thorough New Dealer with a large, devoted following. With the exception of Franklin Roosevelt, he was the most popular Democrat in the country. Those who loved him saw him as one of the rare men of ideas in politics and the prophet of a truly democratic America. But he was also an easy man to make fun of and to these tough party professionals, Wallace seemed to have his head in the clouds. They had never wanted him for Vice President. He had been forced upon them in 1940, when Roosevelt threatened not to run again unless he could have Wallace as his running mate. Wallace was too intellectual, a mystic who spoke Russian and played with a boomerang and reputedly consulted with the spirit of a dead Sioux Indian chief. As Vice President he seemed pathetically out of place and painfully lacking in political talent, or even a serious interest in politics. When not presiding over the Senate he would often shut himself in his office and study Spanish. He was too remote, too controversial, too liberal—much too liberal, which was the main charge against him.

Of the group only Ed Flynn appears to have personally admired Wallace and his ideas, but as the political writer Richard Rovere observed of Flynn, he considered candidates only as good as their chances of winning.

None of this would have mattered greatly had the President said Wallace was again his choice. But Roosevelt preferred to let things slide. His mind was on the war. He was also just as happy to keep everyone guessing as long as possible.

The first meeting with Roosevelt to discuss the “advisability” of ditching Wallace took place at the White House in January 1944, six months in advance of the national convention, and Truman’s name figured prominently in a discussion of alternative choices that included Byrnes, Barkley, Sam Rayburn, Ambassador John G. Winant, Senator Sherman Minton, and Justice William O. Douglas, who had replaced the late Louis D. Brandeis on the Supreme Court. It was Hannegan who had the most to say about Truman, but Hannegan appeared equally enthusiastic about Byrnes, and as a whole the group was more against Wallace than for any one possible replacement.

Roosevelt declined to give a clear sign of what he wanted. As the historian James MacGregor Burns, then a member of the White House staff, later wrote, Roosevelt never pursued a more Byzantine course than in his handling of this question.

Truman, who was party to none of the discussions, thought Sam Rayburn would be the best nominee and said so publicly.

By spring Jimmy Byrnes looked like the clear favorite at the White House, though Wallace was leading in the polls. Harry Hopkins, the only one closer to Roosevelt than Byrnes, made a point of telling Byrnes that Roosevelt very much hoped he would be on the ticket. (Flying home from the Teheran Conference, looking out at the stars, Hopkins had asked the President who he thought would be the best man to take over his duties if something happened to the plane and it went down. “Jimmy Byrnes,” Roosevelt said without hesitation.) When Byrnes appeared reluctant to try for the job, others began putting pressure on him.

For by then there was concern over more than just losing votes in November. The President’s declining health could no longer be ignored, though in wartime nothing on the matter could be said publicly. After a bout of so-called “walking pneumonia” in April, Roosevelt, with much wartime secrecy, went to Bernard Baruch’s estate in South Carolina for what was supposed to have been a two-week rest but that stretched to a month. Seeing the President after his return to the White House, Ed Flynn was so alarmed by his appearance that he urged Mrs. Roosevelt to use her influence to keep him from running again. “I felt,” Flynn later said, “that he would never survive his term.” Ed Pauley would say that his own determination to unseat Wallace came strictly from the conviction that Wallace was “not a fit man to be President…and by my belief, on the basis of continuing observation, that President Roosevelt would not live much longer.” George Allen, remembering these critical months just before the 1944 convention, wrote that every one of their group “realized that the man nominated to run with Roosevelt would in all probability be the next President….”

The worry aroused by the President’s appearance was more than justified. His condition was worse than all but very few were aware of. Secretly, he was under the constant supervision of a cardiologist, who after a thorough examination in March reported that given proper care he might live a year.

In May, Roosevelt sent Henry Wallace on a mission to China, which many took as a sign that Wallace was finished. Then in early June, just after news of the Allied landings at Normandy, and with only a month to go before the convention, Hannegan dropped in on Byrnes at the White House, where, for several hours, he tried to convince Byrnes to become a candidate for Vice President. The President himself, Hannegan said, had told him Byrnes was the man he had really wanted as his running mate in 1940 and that he would rather have Byrnes on the ticket this time than anybody. Later, Pa Watson telephoned Byrnes to confirm everything Hannegan had said.

On June 27, Hannegan took things a step further. He told Roosevelt that Wallace had to come off the ticket. All he had to do, Hannegan said to the President, was to agree to Jimmy Byrnes and they could “sail through” the convention and the election.

“That suits me fine,” Roosevelt responded. “He was my candidate for Vice-President four years ago [at the 1940 convention], but religion got messed up in it.”

“That won’t matter a damn bit,” Hannegan answered. “I am a Catholic and I can talk on that subject….”

While Truman had been a great backer of Hannegan, ever since the 1940 Senate race, it was Byrnes, with his influence with Roosevelt, who had had the most say in making Hannegan Commissioner of Internal Revenue and now the new chairman of the Democratic Party.

Roosevelt asked Byrnes to go with him to Shangri-la, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, to talk campaign strategy for a few days, after which, wrote Byrnes, “I did conclude that he was sincere in wanting me for his running mate….”

Yet at the time, at the end of a long day, Byrnes also remarked to one of his aides, “Now, partner, let’s not get too excited on this vice-president business. I know that man [FDR] more than anybody else.”

Asked by two or three of his staff who were gathered about his desk what he thought of Harry Truman, Roosevelt said he didn’t know much about him. But Henry J. Kaiser, the famous shipbuilder, he said, was somebody else “we have got up our sleeve.”

Having completed a cross-country survey at Roosevelt’s request, Ed Flynn told him that opposition to Wallace was greater even than anyone supposed. Both Flynn and Roosevelt knew the election in the fall would be close, that Roosevelt was by no means a certain winner. Wallace on the ticket, Flynn warned, could mean the loss of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California, which was undoubtedly an exaggeration. The problem was to find someone who would hurt Roosevelt’s chances least. So together, according to Flynn’s subsequent account, the two of them ran down the list, weighing the negative sides of all the other candidates.

Byrnes was the strongest choice, Flynn agreed, but Byrnes, who had been raised a Catholic, had left the Church when he married, to become an Episcopalian, and in Flynn’s view the Catholics “wouldn’t stand for that.” Organized labor had no enthusiasm for Byrnes since he had opposed sit-down strikes in wartime. But far more serious to Flynn was Byrnes’s southern background and recorded positions on racial issues. This was the crucial flaw. In 1938, Byrnes had been in the forefront of those southern senators fighting against a proposed federal anti-lynching law, and in a speech on the Senate floor he had turned much of his fire on Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “The Negro has not only come into the Democratic Party,” Byrnes had said, “but the Negro has come into control of the Democratic Party.” Then, pointing to the gallery where White was sitting, Byrnes exclaimed, “If Walter White…should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.”

When asked who he thought should run with Roosevelt, Byrnes usually mentioned Truman, Rayburn, and Henry J. Kaiser.

Sam Rayburn was a good man, Flynn and Roosevelt agreed, but Rayburn was from Texas, another southerner, and so “couldn’t be considered.” When they went through the list of the entire Senate, only one fitted the picture, Harry Truman. As Flynn wrote:

His record as head of the Senate Committee…was excellent, his labor votes in the Senate were good; on the other hand he seemed to represent to some degree the conservatives in the party, he came from a border state, and he had never made any “racial” remarks. He just dropped into the slot.

Flynn left the White House convinced he had an agreement, that Roosevelt saw Truman as the one who would do the ticket the least harm. This was not exactly a rousing endorsement for the Senator from Missouri, but it was what Flynn had wanted to hear, which is probably the main reason Roosevelt, given his manner of operation, sent him on his way with that impression.

About this same time, Roosevelt asked a favor of Mrs. Anna Rosenberg, a member of the War Mobilization Advisory Board, whose office, like that of Byrnes, was in the East Wing. Mrs. Rosenberg had become a favorite of the President’s. A highly attractive woman, she dressed smartly, wore expensive perfume, and lent an air of femininity to the White House that he greatly welcomed. In contrast to Mrs. Roosevelt, she also appreciated good food and would on occasion smuggle in jars of caviar to the President, sometimes also baskets of paprika chicken cooked by her Hungarian mother, which she and Roosevelt would happily devour together in his office in secret, “like naughty children,” she would remember. Roosevelt told her now that Byrnes was the best man, but asked her to go tell Byrnes he was not to be the vice-presidential choice, because of the Negro vote. Mrs. Rosenberg, who admired Byrnes greatly and wanted him on the ticket, said she couldn’t do that. If the President wanted Byrnes to know he had no chance, then the President would have to tell him himself, she said. But Roosevelt never did, never could, as she knew.

Truman was trying to clear up his work and get away for a few days in Missouri before the convention opened in Chicago on July 19. With so little time remaining, gossip over the vice-presidential question had become intense. To any and all who asked if he was interested in the nomination, Truman said no—“no, no, no.” The whole matter was getting on his nerves. He had not seen the President. It had been more than a year since he had seen the President. Nor would he make any effort to do so now.

“I don’t want to be Vice President,” he told William Helm as they were rushing along a hall in the Senate Office Building, and, as Helm wrote later, anyone who saw the look on his face would have known he meant it.

The number of other Democrats in the Senate reputedly in the running had grown to such a list, reporters were joking, that it was easier to tally those who were not candidates. On July 6, to judge by corridor gossip, Wallace had the nomination sewed up. On July 7, the word from “informed sources” was that the President wanted Wallace but he also wanted three or four “acceptable” names held in reserve, should the convention refuse to “swallow Henry.” In that case Barkley was first choice. On July 9, it was noted that Senator Truman, by continuing to do battle with the War Production Board and the armed services, was killing whatever chance he might have had.

“The Vice President simply presides over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral,” Truman explained to a friend. “It is a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don’t have any ambition to hold an office like that.”

Max Lowenthal and Les Biffle were after him to run for Vice President. “The Madam doesn’t want me to do it,” he told Lowenthal. To Margaret he wrote, “It is funny how some people would give a fortune to be as close as I am to it and I don’t want it.” Then, making it unmistakable that his thoughts, too, were on the obvious mortality of Franklin Roosevelt, not to say his own advancing years, he added, “1600 Pennsylvania is a nice address but I’d rather not move in through the back door—or any other door at sixty.”

The letter was written on July 9, just as he started the long drive home alone to Missouri.

On Monday, July 10, after an all-night flight from Seattle, an exhausted Vice President of the United States arrived in Washington at the end of a 51-day, 27,000-mile mission to China, and at 4:30 that afternoon he met with the President to report on what he had seen. Roosevelt was cordial as always. For a long while they talked about China and Wallace’s venture to Outer Mongolia, where no American had set foot in seventeen years. (Wallace had brought Roosevelt some Mongolian stamps for his collection.) As Wallace recorded in his diary, it was Roosevelt who at last “opened up on politics saying that when I went out I should say that no politics were discussed.”

Roosevelt assured Wallace that he was his choice as running mate and that he intended the fourth term to be “really progressive.” He talked of the professional politicians who thought Wallace might mean a loss of 2 or 3 million votes (figures Ed Flynn had supplied). “Mr. President,” Wallace interjected, “if you can find anyone who will add more strength to the ticket than I, by all means take him.” Roosevelt warned Wallace of the ordeal he might face at Chicago trying to get the vice-presidential nomination and expressed concern about the pain this could mean for Wallace’s family. “Think of the catcalls and jeers and the definiteness of rejection,” Roosevelt remarked. Wallace said he was not worried about his family.

The next day, Tuesday, July 11, the President announced formally that he was running for another term. (Young Allen Drury wrote that he would never forget the look on the faces of Democratic senators when the news reached the Hill. “It was as though the sun had burst from the clouds and glory surrounded the world. Relief, and I mean relief, was written on every face. The meal ticket was still the meal ticket and all was well with the party.”) At lunch that day, July 11, Hopkins again asked Roosevelt who he thought would make the best President, Byrnes or William O. Douglas. “Jimmy Byrnes,” Roosevelt said, “because he knows more about government than anybody around.” Hopkins asked who the President thought would win the nomination if the convention were left free to decide. “Byrnes,” Roosevelt said again.

Then that night, following dinner, in the President’s blue Oval Study on the second floor of the White House, the full anti-Wallace coalition—Flynn, Hannegan, Walker, Allen, Pauley, plus one more exceptionally influential “practical” politician, Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago—gathered with the President for what they were to regard as the decisive meeting.

Because of the muggy heat, everyone was in shirtsleeves. Drinks were passed, and again the full list of vice-presidential possibilities was taken up one by one. Again Byrnes and Rayburn were rejected. Now, for the first time, Barkley, too, was ruled out, and by Roosevelt, because Barkley was too old. Like Byrnes, Barkley was sixty-six, which made him Roosevelt’s senior by only four years, but the Republicans at their convention in Chicago had just nominated for President Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, who was all of forty-two, the age Roosevelt’s Republican cousin Theodore had been when he took office, and so age could very likely be an issue in the campaign.

Roosevelt thought a young man was needed on the Democratic ticket, and to the surprise of the others, he proposed William O. Douglas, an idea none of them had ever seriously entertained. Douglas, he said, was youthful (he was forty-six), dynamic, a good liberal, and he had a kind of Boy Scout quality that would appeal to voters. Besides, Roosevelt thought, Douglas played an interesting game of poker.

But the idea fell flat. No one wanted Douglas any more than Wallace.

Again the talk turned to Harry Truman, Roosevelt contributing little to the conversation except to observe that he had set Truman up in his committee (which was not so) and thought he was doing a commendable job. Truman was able and loyal to the administration, Roosevelt agreed, and “wise to the way of politics.” Reportedly, the question of Truman’s association with the Pendergast machine was “thoroughly discussed” and dismissed as irrelevant.

One point only troubled the President-Truman’s age. He was not sure, Roosevelt said, but he thought Truman was nearly sixty. Hannegan, who knew Truman was already sixty, tried to change the subject, but Roosevelt sent for a Congressional Directory and the conversation continued. When the Directory arrived, Ed Pauley quietly took it and said no more.

As to which candidate might be best suited and prepared for the burdens and responsibilities of the presidency, there appears to have been little or no discussion. Apparently, only Roosevelt touched on the subject, saying again that, all in all, Jimmy Byrnes was the best-qualified man.

It would also be remembered how tired and listless the President was all through the stifling, hot evening. Frank Walker commented later that he had never known Roosevelt to stand so willingly on the sidelines “and let others carry the ball.”

Exhausted he was, and preoccupied by the war. Since the Allied landings at Normandy on June 6, the Germans had launched their first V-1 “buzz bombs,” Hitler’s terrifying Vergeltungswaffe, the vengeance weapon, against London. In the Pacific, the American assault on the island of Saipan had been met with Japanese resistance as fierce as any since the fighting began. Just the week before, on the night of July 6, three thousand Japanese had hurled themselves against the 27th Division in one mass banzai charge, all to be killed. No one, and least of all Roosevelt, expected the final stages of the war to become anything but more and more costly.

At last, turning to Hannegan, Roosevelt said, “Bob, I think you and everyone else here want Truman.”

Roosevelt had not said yet whether he himself wanted Truman, but at this point, Ed Pauley, still holding the Congressional Directory, rose and suggested they break up, then hurried everybody out of the room before Roosevelt had a chance to say anything more. Downstairs, as they were about to leave, Hannegan decided to go back up and get something in writing. By several accounts he returned with a note that Roosevelt had scrawled on an envelope: “Bob, I think Truman is the right man, FDR.” But an offhand, personal note was hardly conclusive, and as George Allen observed in understatement, “Roosevelt was still free to change his mind….”

A day or so later, writing in his diary, Harold Ickes, the Secretary of Interior, recorded that in a conversation with the President about the vice-presidential issue, little had been said about Senator Truman. “I gathered that he felt, as I do,” wrote Ickes, “that Truman might do but that he might raise a political-boss issue that would be especially welcomed by Dewey whose rise to political prominence has been due to fighting political bosses.”

It was a pattern. No matter how many talked to Roosevelt on the subject, each and all came away feeling he thought just as they did. For the moment anyway.

At first chance the morning of Wednesday, July 12, Hannegan went to see Henry Wallace at his apartment at the Wardman Park—a mission undertaken, according to Hannegan’s later account, at the request of the President. He told Wallace he would be a detriment to the ticket and must therefore withdraw. Wallace said they might as well understand one another. He was not withdrawing as long as the President preferred him.

On Thursday, the 13th, Wallace met for lunch with Roosevelt, who reported the meeting of the night of the 11th in some detail, explaining the preference of the professional politicians for Truman as “the only one who had no enemies and might add a little independent strength to the ticket.” Wallace showed him a new Gallup Poll reporting 65 percent of Democratic voters in favor of Wallace, while Byrnes had but 3 percent, Truman 2 percent. The only other potential candidate with even a modest showing was Alben Barkley, with 17 percent.

It was his intention, Roosevelt said, to send a letter to the chairman of the convention, Senator Samuel Jackson, saying that if he were a delegate he would vote for Wallace. Would he offer any alternative name, Wallace asked. No, Roosevelt assured him, he would not.

The Vice President stood to leave. At fifty-five, he was slim and fit, a man who was regularly out of bed at 5:30 in the morning to play tennis. Yet he had an untidy look, which with his underlying shyness and the shock of reddish-gray hair that hung over the right side of his forehead, made him seem almost rustic, and so entirely different from the seated President.

“Well, I am looking ahead with pleasure to the results of next week no matter what the outcome,” Wallace said.

Roosevelt, his head up, beaming, drew Wallace close and with a vigorous handclasp said, “While I cannot put it just that way in public, I hope it will be the same old team.”

In another exchange earlier that same morning, Roosevelt had told Jimmy Byrnes he was certain Wallace could not win at Chicago, but that he would endorse no candidate other than Wallace. Byrnes pointed out that he had not allowed himself to become seriously interested until Bob Hannegan had told him, in effect, that he was the President’s first choice. On the question of his standing with black voters, Byrnes said only that he didn’t think that would matter, when all was said and done. He showed the President a photograph he had just received from Aiken, South Carolina, in which Mrs. Roosevelt was seen addressing a group of blacks. “Look at the expressions on their faces,” Byrnes said. “That is idolatry. You can’t tell me that because you have a Southerner on the ticket that those people are going to turn against Mrs. Roosevelt and the President who have done more for them than anybody….” Roosevelt said he thought Byrnes was right.

“Mr. President, all I have heard around this White House for the last week is Negro. I wonder if anybody ever thinks about the white people. Did you ever stop to think who would do the most for the Negro. This is a serious problem, but it will have to be solved by the white people of the South….”

He wanted an open convention, Roosevelt said, which Byrnes, understandably, took to mean that he himself had every chance for the nomination. “You are the best qualified man in the whole outfit and you must not get out of the race,” Roosevelt told him. “If you stay in you are sure to win.”

Meeting with Hannegan and Frank Walker for lunch the next day, Byrnes repeated what Roosevelt had said. Hannegan was incredulous. “I don’t understand it,” he said. Neither did Byrnes, who, determined to settle the matter, returned to his White House office and put through a call to Roosevelt, who by this time was at his home in Hyde Park, New York. Byrnes, who had once been a court stenographer, took down their conversation in shorthand.

Roosevelt said again he was not favoring anybody. “I told them so. No, I am not favoring anybody.”

BYRNES: Bob Hannegan and Frank Walker stated today that if at the convention they were asked about your views, they would be obliged to say to their friends that from your statements they concluded you did not prefer Wallace but did prefer Truman first and Douglas second, and that either would be preferable to me because they would cost the ticket fewer votes than I would.

ROOSEVELT: Jimmy, that is all wrong. That is not what I told them. It is what they told me. When we all went over the list I did not say I preferred anybody or that anybody would cost me votes, but they all agreed that Truman would cost fewer votes than anybody and probably Douglas second. This was the agreement they reached and I had nothing to do with it….

Byrnes pressed him. If Hannegan and his friends were to release any kind of statement saying the President preferred Truman and Douglas, that could make things very difficult for his own cause.

“We have to be damn careful about language,” Roosevelt answered. “They asked if I would object to Truman and Douglas and I said no. That is different from using the word ‘prefer.’ That is not expressing a preference because you know I told you I would have no preference.”

Roosevelt asked Byrnes whether he would try for the nomination. Byrnes said he was considering it, but he needed to know the President’s views. Roosevelt replied, “After all, Jimmy, you are close to me personally and Henry is close to me. I hardly know Truman. Douglas is a poker partner. He is good in a poker game and tells good stories.”

Finishing the call, Byrnes went directly down the corridor to Hopkins’s office and repeated what the President had said. If anyone knew Roosevelt’s mind supposedly it was Hopkins, who now told Byrnes the President was sure that if Byrnes entered the race he would win, he would be nominated.

According to Byrnes, it was then that he phoned Harry Truman in Missouri, though Truman would remember the call coming early in the morning, as he was about to leave for Chicago. Whether this was Friday morning or Saturday morning is not clear, nor important. But presumably Byrnes would not have called Truman until after he had talked with the President, so most likely it was Saturday morning.

Truman was staying at the President Hotel in Kansas City. Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace were visiting Fred Wallace at his new home in Denver.

Byrnes asked if Truman was serious when he told the newspapers he did not want the vice-presidential nomination. Yes, Truman replied, absolutely. He was not a candidate. Byrnes said he had been given the “go sign” from Roosevelt and would like nothing better than to have Truman make the nominating speech for him at Chicago. Truman accepted at once, saying he would be delighted and would do all he could to line up the Missouri delegation. Clearly he, too, was convinced by this time that Byrnes was both the President’s choice and the best one, and his source for such confidence must have been Bob Hannegan. Otherwise, he would never have responded so affirmatively and without hesitation.

Again by Truman’s recollection, he had no sooner put down the phone than it rang a second time. Alben Barkley now wanted him to make his nominating speech at Chicago. He was sorry, Truman replied, but he had just said yes to Jimmy Byrnes.

II

The turmoil at the Chicago convention was entirely over the vice presidency and at no time did the outcome appear inevitable. Ambitions were too large, the opportunities for deceit and maneuver and the play of emotion too plentiful, the dictates of Franklin Roosevelt too capricious and uncertain for there to have been even a momentary sense of events moving as if on a track. Things could have gone differently at any of several points, and with the most far-reaching consequences. As Alben Barkley would write, the denouement in Chicago of all the plotting that had gone on in Washington was a fascinating political drama. It was politics for the highest stakes, politics at its slipperiest, and the only real drama of either national convention that summer.

A few weeks before, when the Republicans filled the same hotels and picked their nominees in the same steaming hall, there had been no contest and no surprises. Thomas E. Dewey was smoothly nominated on the first ballot and his only near rival, Senator John W. Bricker, was the choice for running mate. Now the assembling Democrats were to be denied the chance even to see their standardbearer, their hero, whose overwhelming endorsement for yet another term was a foregone conclusion. Roosevelt had declined to appear before the convention because of his duties as Commander in Chief, he said, just as he had agreed to run again because he saw it as his duty as a “good soldier” in time of war. His acceptance speech was to be delivered by radio hookup from some undisclosed location on the West Coast.

But as so many of the Democrats who converged on Chicago understood, the task of choosing a Vice President had unique importance this time. The common, realistic, and not unspoken view was that they were there to pick not one, but two presidents, and if the identity of the first was clear, that of the second was not.

Had there been a poll of the delegates as they checked in at the hotels, the choice of the majority would have been Henry Wallace. I. F. Stone, writing in The Nation, said that on the basis of his inside sources he could report for certain it would be Wallace. Yet the eminent radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn virtually announced the nomination of Alben Barkley, while Arthur Krock of The New York Times said the prime contenders, after Wallace, were Byrnes, Barkley, and Douglas, in that order, and made no mention of Harry Truman. Speaking for the Democratic National Committee, George Allen thought it would be Truman but he couldn’t be sure. Hannegan and Mayor Kelly, meantime, two of the most powerful figures on the committee, had concluded it would be Byrnes.

But, of course, nobody really knew, since so much depended on Franklin Roosevelt, and as George Allen also aptly observed, “Roosevelt could, of course, have named anybody.”

Privately, and as he would tell no one until much later, Truman thought it would be Wallace.

Looking back on what happened, Alben Barkley would conclude that he had been sadly naive about the whole business. He had been in politics nearly forty years, this was his eleventh national convention, but he had never seen anything like what went on.

Truman drove to Chicago from Kansas City on Saturday, July 15, four days before the convention was officially to open, and the same day the President’s westbound train made an unscheduled stop at Chicago.

As later disclosed, Roosevelt was en route to San Diego, where a cruiser would take him to Hawaii for meetings with General Douglas MacArthur. But at three that afternoon his train was shunted onto a siding so that Bob Hannegan could come aboard for a private talk in the President’s new armor-plated private railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, another innovation resulting from the war. They were together approximately half an hour. “The train stood in the Chicago yards during this conference and none of us showed ourselves outside,” wrote the President’s secretary, Grace Tully. Though nearly everything said between Roosevelt and Hannegan was kept secret, one request by Roosevelt would become the best-known line of the convention. Whatever was decided, said the President, Hannegan must first “Clear it with Sidney,” meaning that Sidney Hillman was to have the final say—Hillman, who now ran the CIO’s well-heeled Political Action Committee, or PAC, which was something new in American politics.

Hannegan also came off the train with a letter on White House stationery, which, in lieu of a briefcase, he carried inside a copy of the National Geographic Magazine. The letter was postdated July 19:

Dear Bob:

You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas. I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.

Always sincerely,

Franklin Roosevelt

Whether it had been written earlier in Washington or was produced to order that day is not certain. Grace Tully, however, said Hannegan had come out of the President’s sitting room with a letter in his hand naming two acceptable running mates, William O. Douglas first, Harry Truman second, and that Hannegan told her the President wanted it retyped with the order of the names reversed. To her, the reason for the switch seemed obvious. “By naming Truman first it plainly implied…that he was the preferred choice of the President.” Hannegan would later deny making any such switch, and since the first copy of the letter was thrown away by another secretary who did the actual typing, there was no way to confirm or disprove the story. Ed Pauley, who claimed to have been with Hannegan when he went to see Roosevelt, said later that Hannegan was back at his hotel before he discovered to his horror that Douglas was even mentioned. Also a note dated July 19 in Roosevelt’s hand, as well as a typewritten duplicate on White House stationery, have survived with Truman’s name listed first. But Grace Tully was not known for fabricating stories, nor was there any reason why she should have done so in this instance.

In any event, the handsome, gregarious Hannegan—Mr. Busyman Bob, as he would be remembered—was playing an extremely deceitful game at this his first national convention, possibly at Roosevelt’s direction, and possibly not. For his next move was to call Jimmy Byrnes in Washington, a second call to Byrnes that day. The first, made by Mayor Ed Kelly in the morning, had been to tell Byrnes that he, Kelly, and Hannegan were no longer worried about losing the Negro vote if Byrnes were on the ticket, and that this was the message Hannegan would take to Roosevelt when the presidential train came in. Now, in the second call, Hannegan told Byrnes that the vice presidency was all set. Byrnes was the one. “The President has given us the green light to support you and he wants you in Chicago.”

Byrnes left Washington for Chicago at once and, seeing Tom Connally on the train, confided triumphantly that the nomination was his. Roosevelt himself had passed the word. “Harry Truman will nominate me,” Byrnes said.

Arriving in Chicago the morning of Sunday the 16th, Byrnes found a bright red fire chief’s car and driver waiting at the station for him, courtesy of Mayor Kelly. He was taken directly to the mayor’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive for a breakfast meeting with Kelly and Hannegan, who assured him he was the chosen man. “Well, you know Jimmy has been my choice from the very first. Go ahead and nominate him,” they quoted Roosevelt as having instructed. A little afterward, Alben Barkley, too, was told by Kelly that “it was in the bag for Jimmy.”

Hannegan and company spent most of the day with Byrnes mapping out strategy. Hannegan even ordered “Roosevelt and Byrnes” placards printed. By late afternoon, the word had spread among the delegates and reporters milling about in the hotel lobbies.

The Roosevelt letter to Hannegan was kept secret. Hannegan was showing it to no one, because of its mention of Douglas, he later said. And no one apparently had said anything about it as yet to Senator Truman, who by now had his nominating speech for Byrnes all prepared.

Sitting beside an open window in his hotel room that evening, the flat, gray-blue panorama of Lake Michigan in the distance, Truman talked at length to a St. Louis reporter, with the understanding that most of what he said was off the record. Although Bess and Margaret, due to arrive from Denver on Tuesday, would be staying at the Morrison Hotel, the senator had taken a suite in the Stevens, across the street from the venerable Blackstone, so that his “politicking” would not disturb their sleep. Jimmy Byrnes, his candidate, was also in the Stevens, six flights up on the twenty-third floor, in the hotel’s plush Royal Skyway, the same rooms occupied a few weeks earlier by Thomas E. Dewey.

He was determined to stay out of the running, Truman said. He knew his Pendergast background would be dragged out again and he wished none of that. He had worked too hard to build a good name in the Senate. The reporter remarked that as Vice President he might “succeed to the throne.” Truman shook his head. “Hell, I don’t want to be president.” He then described the failures and scorn experienced by every Vice President who had succeeded to the highest office, beginning with John Tyler and overlooking the most obvious example to the contrary, Theodore Roosevelt.

To another reporter that same evening Truman repeated much the same thing. Those who had succeeded dead presidents were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, and lost any vestige of respect they had before. “I don’t want that to happen to me.”

Nobody, it would seem, was avoiding the central issue of Roosevelt’s health and what the vice-presidential nomination really meant. Truman’s Kansas City friend Tom Evans later said Truman knew perfectly well that Roosevelt’s days were numbered and this was precisely why he had no desire to be on the ticket. “I’m satisfied with where I am,” Evans remembered him saying. “Just a heartbeat, this little,” said Truman, making a tiny space between forefinger and thumb, “separates the Vice President and the President.”

Since arriving in Chicago, he had hardly been able to sleep at night. He hated the thought of intrusions on his family’s privacy, and what so much notoriety might do to Margaret at such an important stage in her life. He was worried about skeletons in the closet, he told Evans—about Bess being on the office payroll in Washington and what the papers would make of that. Writing years later, Margaret would say that most of all he feared what a disclosure and retelling of David Wallace’s suicide would do to Bess and her mother.

Evans, an old Pendergast loyalist who had grown rich with a chain of drugstores that also sold quantities of Pendergast beer and whiskey, had come to Chicago at Truman’s request for the supposed purpose of helping him fend off the nomination, as had Eddie McKim and John Snyder. Scowling, heavy-handed Fred Canfil, too, was on hand in his role as general factotum and looking, noted one reporter, “as if he could throw a bull in two falls out of three.” (Canfil would later complain of missing much of the drama on the convention floor because “somebody else wanted some booze and I had to help him.”) Yet they all seem to have spent most of their time talking Truman up as the ideal choice—McKim liked to say it was a question of destiny—and trying to persuade Truman to change his mind.

Roy Roberts, the fat, hard-drinking, opinionated editor of the Kansas City Star, who was a Republican and a man Truman loathed, also came and went, perspiring heavily and acting like a kingmaker, which aggravated Truman greatly.

None of them lost sight of the point that it was really the presidency at stake. As McKim remembered, they “got Truman in a room and…explained the situation to him.” After much talk, McKim told him, “I think, Senator, that you’re going to do it.” What gave him that idea, Truman snapped. “Because,” said McKim, “there’s a little, old ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, that would like to see her son President of the United States.” Truman, in tears, stomped out of the room.

Bess, Margaret, Mildred Dryden, his little band of Missouri friends, as well as his brother Vivian, who was in Chicago to see his first national convention, were all sure he did not want the nomination and would all later stress how extremely stubborn he grew as pressures on him increased. Only Vic Messall, who was still out of favor but on hand as a spectator, thought differently. Truman was always politically ambitious, Messall said. “I’m sure he wanted to be Vice President. But he had to pretend he didn’t.”

Reflecting on Truman’s frame of mind years later, John Snyder would say that it wasn’t so much that Truman didn’t want to be President but that he didn’t want to succeed Franklin Roosevelt, which was different.

For Truman, in memory, the convention would always be “that miserable time” in Chicago, the most exasperating experience of his life. Marquis Childs, a practiced Truman observer, described him as plainly “scared to death.”

The sensation of Monday, July 17, was the release by convention chairman Samuel Jackson of Roosevelt’s letter about Wallace. A hundred reporters or more fought for the mimeographed copies. It had been written at Hyde Park on Friday, the same day as Roosevelt’s reassuring telephone conversation with Jimmy Byrnes:

I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice President [read the key paragraph of the instantly famous document], for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his nomination if I were a delegate to the convention.

To many it seemed a kiss of death for Wallace—“the coolest and cruelest brushoff in all the long Roosevelt career,” in the words of one account. Unquestionably, it threw the choice of a running mate wide open. He did not “wish to appear to be in any way dictating to the convention,” Roosevelt had also written. If anybody benefited, said several papers, it was Jimmy Byrnes. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the letter a spur to the “already soaring campaign stock of energetic little Jimmy Byrnes.” But the Wallace forces, including Sidney Hillman and Phil Murray of the CIO, took the announcement as a sign of hope, since theirs was the only candidate who now had something in writing from the President. “It was generally regarded as a Roosevelt endorsement,” remembered Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, a Wallace floor leader, who, from his conversations with Roosevelt in Washington, was certain Roosevelt wanted Wallace.

It was only now, in response, that Hannegan began saying he, too, had a letter from the President, which named Truman. But no one was allowed to see it.

Hannegan’s corner suite on the seventh floor of the Blackstone, Rooms 708–709, had become the convention nerve center, since Hannegan alone claimed direct telephone contact with the President. In the red-carpeted hall outside, reporters and photographers set up a round-the-clock vigil to see who came and went. At first Hannegan tried to discourage them, insisting that nothing was happening there. Mayor Kelly, who was in and out “continually,” kept mentioning the Roosevelt letter. “Do you want to see it?” he asked a skeptical representative of the United Auto Workers. Indeed yes, said the man. “I haven’t got it with me,” Kelly replied, “but I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”

At a dinner that night arranged by Kelly in a private apartment on Chicago’s North Side, a location kept secret from the press, Byrnes was man of the hour. It was only when everybody was about to leave that Hannegan mentioned one further detail, the need, as required by the President, to “Clear it with Sidney,” a point Hannegan seemed to regard as only a formality.

On Tuesday morning Senator Truman and Sidney Hillman had orange juice, eggs, and bacon sent up by room service to Hillman’s suite at the Ambassador East, “the fancy hotel,” as Truman called it. Born in Lithuania, educated to be a rabbi, Hillman had been an eight-dollar-a-week apprentice pants cutter in the garment district of New York when Truman was still riding a plow on the farm. He had led his first strike at twenty-three and founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America by the time he was thirty. He had also joined the Socialist Party and still spoke with a slight accent, which would have been more than enough in places like Grandview, Missouri, to have made him seem a dangerous radical. To party chiefs like Hannegan and Kelly, he was an amateur and therefore not wholly trustworthy, whatever the power of his PAC or his allegiance to the President. Hillman wasn’t even a registered Democrat. In addition, as co-director of the former Office of Production Management in Washington, he had come under heavy fire from the Truman Committee, which had been mainly responsible for his removal. And so Truman had no reason to expect much from him in the way of cooperation or favors.

Truman asked for Hillman’s support for Byrnes. Hillman declined and refused to be budged. He was working hard for Henry Wallace, Hillman said. If it could not be Wallace, then he wanted either William O. Douglas or Harry Truman.

Truman said he was going to nominate Byrnes. Hillman said that would be a mistake.

Truman reported directly to Byrnes all that Hillman had said, but Byrnes seemed not to care, and with reason. By reliable reports he had already lined up more than 400 of the 589 votes needed to nominate.

When Ed Flynn arrived in Chicago later that morning, Tuesday the 18th, Hannegan rushed him into a corner to say it was all over. “It’s Byrnes!” Flynn said it was no such thing and demanded a meeting of the select committee, the same group as the night before, which convened again in the same secret North Side apartment, except that this time Sidney Hillman was included and Jimmy Byrnes was not.

There was only one man to nominate, Flynn insisted, and that was Harry Truman, because Harry Truman was what they had agreed to with the President.

Flynn was extremely angry. “I browbeat the committee, I talked, I argued, I swore,” he later wrote. Hillman declared Byrnes unacceptable to organized labor. Flynn said Byrnes would cost no less than 200,000 Negro votes in New York alone. Byrnes was a “political liability.” Roosevelt could lose the election. Everyone agreed—Hannegan, the party’s chairman, Pauley, Walker, Allen, Hillman for labor, Kelly the big-city boss. Reporters were to call them “the Harmony Boys.”

Flynn put through a call to Roosevelt in San Diego and one by one each man got on the line. In the end Roosevelt agreed it should be Truman.

Though accounts differ somewhat, this appears to be what happened next: Within a short time that evening Byrnes and Truman were individually told what the President had said. Truman heard it from Hannegan, who came to his room at the Stevens, and also showed him a longhand note from the President saying, as Truman remembered, “Bob, it’s Truman, F.D.R.,” a different wording from what Roosevelt had supposedly scrawled for Hannegan the night of the 11th at the White House. Also, by Truman’s recollection, the note he was now shown was written on scratch paper, not an envelope. Truman doubted Roosevelt had written it. “I still could not be sure this was Roosevelt’s intent,” he would recall.

An hour or so later Truman went alone to the Royal Skyway to square things with Byrnes. He asked to be released from his promise of support. Byrnes said he understood perfectly, given the circumstances. Whether he would stay in the race, Byrnes said, was a question he would have to sleep on. When Byrnes tried to get through to Roosevelt by phone, he was told the President was unavailable.

Word of the sudden turn in events spread fast. Ed Flynn had been in town less than a day and everything had changed. In a long account by Turner Catledge in The New York Times the next morning, Wednesday, July 19, opening day for the convention, was a revealing paragraph:

Reports that Senator Truman was to be the choice of the anti-Wallace forces were heard in the New York state delegation…. Edward J. Flynn, New York national committeeman, in a conference with leaders, informed them that the decision of the Wallace opponents was to back Senator Truman, and that the New York delegation might be voting for him at least after the first ballot. The group agreed to accede to this decision.

Byrnes dropped out of the race and the talk everywhere was that the bosses killed his candidacy. In a release to the press, Byrnes said he was withdrawing “in deference to the wishes of the President.” He then left for home in a fury, feeling he had been betrayed by Roosevelt. In a parting conversation with Alben Barkley, who was scheduled to nominate the President, Byrnes remarked sourly, “If I were you I wouldn’t say anything too complimentary about him.”

Barkley was as upset as Byrnes, furious over Roosevelt and his games at their expense. He was sick and tired of trying to determine which shell the pea was under, Barkley told a reporter, and threatened to tear up his nominating speech and be done with the whole affair.

For Truman, events were out of hand. These were three or four of the most critical days of his life and they were beyond his control, his destiny being decided for him by others once again. Speculation now centered on him. But as his stock rose, so did objections to him, because of the Pendergast connection. Jim Pendergast was prominent in the Missouri delegation, which was the first to name Truman its choice for Vice President, quite against his wishes. Running into his old high school classmate Charlie Ross, now a contributing editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Truman said, “Feel sorry for me. I’m in a terrible fix.”

How much faith he had in Hannegan at this point, he never said, but to many it looked as though the young party head was out of line in taking such an overtly partisan role. He appeared to be constantly improvising, seldom sure of his ground. To prove he really did have something in writing from Roosevelt about Truman, he at last released the much-talked-of letter. But this only produced more grumbling and controversy. Why hadn’t he said it mentioned Truman and Douglas? His claim of an endorsement for Truman was only half true and wasn’t a half-truth as good as a lie? And how much credence should be given to a letter released on July 18 that was supposedly written on July 19?

Among those most surprised by the letter when he later saw accounts of it in the papers was William O. Douglas, who at the time of the convention was in Oregon hiking in the mountains. No one had told him he was being considered.

Meantime, Henry Wallace had arrived in Chicago, and at a packed press conference at the Sherman Hotel, sitting on a table with his long legs swinging, Wallace said he was there to fight to the finish. His supporters were claiming 400 votes on the first ballot. In a secret caucus of the political action committee at the Sherman, CIO president Phil Murray shook his fist and said in his deep Scottish burr, “Wallace…Wallace…Wallace. That’s it. Just keep pounding.”

A sluggish, entirely routine first session of the convention opened just before noon inside Chicago Stadium, the same giant arena where Roosevelt had been nominated in 1932 and again in 1940. From steel girders overhead hung a huge Roosevelt portrait used in 1940, only retouched a little to make him look a bit less pale. There was a prayer. There were speeches. The real business continued at the hotels.

III

Only narrow Balbo Street separated the Stevens from the Blackstone, and it was to the Blackstone, to Hannegan’s seventh-floor suite, that Truman was “summoned” that afternoon, Wednesday, July 19. Hannegan, collar open, his shirt damp with perspiration, had assembled the inner core—Pauley, Walker, Kelly, Flynn—plus, for the first time, Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, who had never cared particularly for Senator Truman and who until now had been telling delegates that he didn’t want Truman because his nomination would only stir up the whole boss issue.

It was clearly a gathering arranged for effect, for Truman’s benefit. (Barkley would later refer to Hannegan as “the stage manager” at Chicago.) The time had come for a decision from the senator. They were placing a call to San Diego.

Truman sat on one twin bed. Hannegan, phone in hand, sat on the other. “Whenever Roosevelt used the telephone,” Truman remembered, “he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.”

“Bob,” Roosevelt’s voice boomed, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”

“No,” said Hannegan. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”

“Well, you tell the Senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.” With that Roosevelt banged down the phone.

Truman said later that he was completely stunned. “I was floored, I was sunk.” Reportedly his first words were “Oh, shit!” He himself recalled saying, “Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

That evening Henry Wallace made a surprise appearance on the floor of the convention, and the roar of approval from the galleries astonished everyone, including, noticeably, Henry Wallace.

“Ye gods!” wrote Margaret Truman in her diary. “The Missouri delegation has decided to nominate Dad for V-P. Vice President Wallace is very strong so I doubt if we win, although the South doesn’t want Wallace at all.”

To judge by her use of the word “we,” Bess, too, had resigned herself to the decision.

On Thursday, July 20, an immense crowd filling the hall, the convention became a thundering, old-fashioned political circus. Alben Barkley, bathed in spotlights on the podium, his broad face streaming with perspiration, his anger at Roosevelt forgotten for the moment, delivered a fulsome tribute to the great leader that set off a demonstration lasting forty minutes. In seconding the nomination, Henry Wallace gave one of the strongest speeches of his career, an impassioned, straight-from-the-shoulder declaration of liberal principles that brought the huge, roaring audience to its feet time after time. The only chance for the Democratic Party, he said, was to keep on its liberal course.

In a political, educational and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work regardless of sex or race….

By evening, as time for the President’s address approached, the crowd had grown far beyond what the arena was built to hold. It was packed to the roof with perhaps forty thousand people. Reportedly fifteen thousand counterfeit tickets had been printed and distributed with the blessing of Mayor Kelly, who for all his apparent Truman fervor was secretly hoping for a Truman-Wallace deadlock, so the prize would go to his own candidate, Illinois’s favorite son, Senator Scott Lucas. But the ticket ploy resulted in thousands of additional Wallace supporters, many supplied by the CIO, who jammed the galleries and worked their way onto the convention floor, while thousands more milled about in the corridors. The Wallace people were determined to see the nomination decided there in the hall and not by the “big boys” in a smoke-filled room. The idea was to stampede the convention.

Nominations for the vice presidency were scheduled for the next day, but as the evening wore on, with more speeches and fanfare for Roosevelt, the surge for Wallace kept growing. The heat inside the hall was nearly unbearable.

At the Blackstone, Hannegan told Truman he might have to be nominated that night, depending whether they had the votes. They would have to be ready to move fast. Bennett Clark was supposed to nominate Truman, but no one knew where he was. Clark, whose wife had died the year before, had been drinking more than usual. Truman went to look for him. Hannegan started for the convention hall.

When the speeches and roll call ended, and the President was swiftly renominated, the delegates settled down to hear his speech. The familiar voice came booming from a cluster of amplifiers, as the huge crowd sat watching the empty podium. Absolute silence hung over the darkened hall, even during the President’s pauses. With no one on stage, the effect was eerie. Roosevelt was speaking from his railroad car in San Diego.

“What is the job before us in 1944?” the great, disembodied voice asked. “First, to win the war—to win the war fast, to win it overpoweringly. Second, to form worldwide international organizations, and to arrange to use the armed forces of the sovereign nations of the world to make another war impossible…. "

No sooner was the speech over than a Wallace demonstration erupted. From every corner of the stadium came a chant of “We want Wallace!” The organist, catching the spirit, began pumping away at the Wallace theme song, “Iowa, Iowa, That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” over and over. Ed Pauley, livid with rage, threatened to chop the wires to the amplifiers unless the tune was changed.

Bob Hannegan was seen hurriedly conferring with Mayor Kelly in the Illinois delegation. Then they were both up on the podium, heads together with Chairman Jackson. To several of the Wallace floor leaders it looked suddenly as if the time to nominate their man was then, that night, and the quicker the better.

“I sat there and watched the demonstration and I saw it growing in volume,” remembered Claude Pepper, who, as head of the Florida delegation, was positioned on the aisle. “I stood up on my seat, and I could see the whole convention hall then. And I said [to myself], ‘You know, that’s a real demonstration….’ So after it got into full speed and steam, I said, ‘If we could bring this nomination up right now, we could nominate Henry Wallace.’ ”

At the rear of the hall now, Hannegan had started throwing open the outer doors to let more people in, while, at the same time, Ed Kelly kept shouting about fire rules.

Desperate to get the chairman’s eye, Pepper tried hopping up and down on his chair, waving the Florida banner, but to no avail. His floor microphone had been turned off.

He jumped down and started up the aisle, fighting his way through the crowd. Reporters, hundreds of delegates, and spectators saw him and knew at once what he was trying to do. If he could get to the podium, he would make the nominating speech himself with no more delay.

And then when I got to the little gate [remembered Pepper], the little fence around the podium where the Chairman presided…well, fortunately, there was a railroad labor man that was minding the gate. He was a friend of mine, so he opened the gate and let me in…I got up to about the second step from the top going just as hard as I could to get up that stairway, and I saw the Chairman look over there. He had seen me coming up the aisle. And so, immediately—by this time I got about nearly to the first step—the Chairman said, “Motion made. The convention adjourned. All in favor of the motion, let me know by saying ‘Aye, aye.’ ” And, “That’s it.” And, “The convention’s adjourned.” And I by that time was just about to the top step. And they started roaring, “No, no, no, no.”

Jackson later told Pepper he had hated to do what he did, but that he had promised the newspaper and radio people to hold the vice-presidential decision until the next day when they would be better prepared. Jackson admitted he had seen Pepper trying to get his attention, that he had an eye on him the whole time he was heading for the podium, and knew perfectly well why he was coming. What he did not tell Pepper was that he and Bob Hannegan had already made an agreement to shut things down that night before the Wallace people could start the nominations. The public explanation was that the decision was a matter of necessity, because of fire laws.

Harry Truman had witnessed none of this. He had spent the night in search of Bennett Clark, finding him finally in a room where he was not supposed to be, at the Sherman, and too drunk to say much more than hello. By then it was past midnight. “So I called Bob [Hannegan],” Truman remembered, “and said, ‘I found your boy. He’s cockeyed. I don’t know whether I can get him ready or not, and I hope to Christ I can’t.’ ”

Of all those in Missouri who had kept track of Harry Truman’s activities and accomplishments in the Senate over the past nine years, none had been so attentive, appraising his every move, as his mother Martha Ellen Truman, who remained a close reader of the Congressional Record and a more partisan Democrat than almost anyone he knew. Once, introducing her to a political friend, Truman told her the man had grown up in Mississippi and had never seen a Republican until he was twelve. “He didn’t miss much,” she replied.

For days now, in her small parlor at Grandview, she had been sitting close to the radio, following the convention. Interviewed by reporters, she said she did not want her son to become Vice President. He should stay in the Senate, she said emphatically.

“I listened to all the Republican Convention, too. They keep predicting that Roosevelt will die in office if he’s elected. The Republicans hope he will. They keep saying that I’ll die, too, and I’m almost 92.1 hope Roosevelt fools ’em.”

The final session inside the stadium, Friday, July 21, lasted nine hours and would be described as the strangest, most bitter conclusion to a national convention in a very long time.

Senator Bennett Clark, after a great deal of black coffee, a shower, and some food, had, with Hannegan’s help, pulled himself together sufficiently to appear on the podium. But his speech for Truman was short and had none of his usual flair. He moved the audience not at all. (In another few weeks, as Truman had anticipated, Bennett Clark went down to defeat in the Democratic primary in Missouri, thereby ending a career in the Senate that many, including Truman, had once thought could lead to the White House.)

Nor were the seconding speakers much of an improvement. A labor leader from Pennsylvania said that while he did not know the senator personally, he thought Truman would make the strongest possible running mate for the reason that he was a Democrat and an American.

By contrast, a vigorous speech for Henry Wallace, delivered by an Iowa judge named Richard Mitchell, touched off another noisy demonstration, and Claude Pepper, given a turn at the podium at last, made a moving plea to the Democratic Party not to repudiate the man who more than any other symbolized the democracy of Franklin Roosevelt. Wallace’s delegate strength for the first ballot appeared to be gaining.

But Hannegan, Flynn, Kelly, and the others had been working through the night, talking to delegates and applying “a good deal of pressure” to help them see the sense in selecting Harry Truman. No one knows how many deals were cut, how many ambassadorships or postmaster jobs were promised, but reportedly, by the time morning came, Postmaster General Frank Walker had telephoned every chairman of every delegation.

The strategy of the Truman forces was to organize as many favorite-son nominations as possible and thereby keep Wallace from winning on the first ballot. The result was a total of sixteen nominations for Vice President, and as the speeches continued through the long afternoon, delegates in groups of twos and threes were seen going to and from a private air-conditioned room beneath the platform, Room H, at the end of a narrow, dark hall, where, for hours, Senator Truman stood shaking hands. Only later did he emerge to join Bess and Margaret in a box just behind the podium. Henry Wallace was waiting out the session in his hotel room, in keeping with custom, but Truman sat in full view munching on a hot dog and enjoying the spectacle.

The nominating session had drawn some interesting visitors, including film stars Gloria Swanson, who occupied a box close by, and Spencer Tracy, who was besieged by autograph hunters. Among the delegates were seventeen of Truman’s fellow Democrats from the Senate. Ed Flynn and Frank Hague could be seen conferring on the platform, a tableau that caused some veteran observers among the press to recall earlier times when the “big boys” were more discreet about their conniving. But the crowds in the galleries were nothing like the night before. Mayor Kelly’s police had been checking tickets, with the result that thousands of Wallace supporters had been kept out.

The first ballot began at 4:30 P.M. and Wallace stayed in the lead the whole way, rolling up 429 votes to Truman’s 319, with the remainder divided among Alben Barkley and the favorite sons. By the time the tally became official, it was past six. The convention had been in session for nearly seven hours without pause and the crowd expected to recess for dinner, before the night session. But then Chairman Jackson stepped to the microphones to announce that a second ballot would be taken at once. The convention was still in its afternoon session, which meant no tickets for the night meeting would be honored—and therefore no more Wallace crowds admitted. It was a daring stroke by Hannegan.

On the second ballot the excitement began to build almost at once. Wallace was ahead until suddenly, just as had been forecast for the second ballot, Ed Flynn delivered to Truman 74 votes from the New York delegation, which had been divided the first time around. Now Truman moved out in front.

For a moment, the count narrowed again, Wallace pulling to within 5 votes of Truman. Then the break came. Alabama’s favorite son, Senator John Bankhead, withdrew his name and cast 22 Alabama votes for Truman, which gave Truman nearly 500. Delegates rose from their chairs. South Carolina switched 18 votes from Bankhead to Truman and the stampede was on. Indiana, Wyoming, and Maine went over to Truman, while from the galleries came an insistent roar of “We want Wallace!” Photographers were clustering about the Truman box. The senator was smiling broadly. Even Bess, who had looked intermittently grumpy and skeptical through the first ballot, was seen beaming now and turning, as requested, to pose with her husband. Margaret was jumping up and down, cheering as if at a college football game. Over in the Illinois delegation Mayor Kelly shouted to Senator Lucas, “Christ Almighty, let’s get in this thing.” The whole crowd was on its feet.

Truman only needed one big state. Ohio announced for Truman, which would have been enough but a delegate challenged the count and Ohio passed. Then Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts declared that Massachusetts changed its vote to 34 for Truman, and that did it.Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, “unofficially but conclusively,” was the party’s nominee for Vice President.

Illinois, a little late, piled on another 55 votes for Truman and more states followed. Bennett Clark started a Truman procession down the aisles, as a phalanx of police escorted the nominee to the platform. The official tally was running late, but at 8:14, Chairman Jackson formally announced the Truman victory. The final count was Truman 1,031, Wallace 105. William O. Douglas had 4 votes.

The acceptance speech, one of the shortest in American political history, lasted less than a minute. The nomination was an honor for Missouri, Truman said, and an honor that he accepted “with all humility.” More than the speech, it was the shy, almost embarrassed way he stepped up to the bank of microphones, and the way he stood waiting for the crowd to settle down, that many people would remember. He looked out at the huge hall in tumult, his glasses glinting in the spotlight. Then he stepped back slightly.

“Now, give me a chance,” he said.

He was called “the Missouri Compromise” and “the Common Denominator” of the convention. To many it had all been a sad spectacle. “I don’t object to Truman,” wrote Harold Ickes to Bernard Baruch, “but I react strongly against the method of his nomination and the seeming dominating position that the corrupt city bosses now have in the Democratic National organization.” The senator’s Pendergast roots figured in editorials across the country. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called him one of the weakest candidates ever nominated. Time magazine, which only the summer before had lauded his work on the Truman Committee, portrayed him now as a drab mediocrity, “the mousy little man from Missouri.”

“Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic:

Truman and the people are the ones who will suffer from that convention deal between Roosevelt and the bosses. Truman is a nice man, an honest man, a good Senator, a man of great humility and a man of courage. He will make a passable Vice President. But Truman as President of the United States in times like these?

Yet, on balance, the reaction was favorable, if not enthusiastic. For all his machine background, said the Kansas City Star, Harry Truman had “unusual capacity for development.”The New York Times praised his personal qualities and said he had the advantage of having been through the political mill.

He has known the dust and heat of a political campaign, and has learned the art, not to be despised, of seeking that middle course which will appeal to a majority of the voters. He fought with distinction in the First World War; he has been a farmer; he has known firsthand the difficulties of a small businessman. He has had the kind of experience, in short, likely to make a realist sympathetic to the problems of the varied groups rather than to produce the doctrinaire or the zealot.

Astonishingly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called him an excellent choice. Even Richard Strout in his otherwise gloomy New Republic essay took heart from the idea that Truman, while not brilliant, had character.

Reflecting on the nomination in the privacy of his diary, reporter Allen Drury wrote:

On the credit side, the Senator is a fine man: no one would do a better job of it in the White House if he had to. On the other side the Pendergast background made him entirely too vulnerable to Republican attack, and no one who knows him likes to see him subjected to that kind of smearing…. I think Senator Truman is one of the finest men I know.

Again at Chicago, as so consistently through the Truman career, it had been the system of politics, the boss system, that counted in deciding his fate. There had been no popular boom for him for Vice President. Nor had personal ambition figured. As Richard Rovere wrote, no one ever contrived less at his own elevation than Harry Truman at Chicago. And as time would tell, everything considered, the system, bosses and all, had produced an excellent choice.

In Independence a few days later, three thousand people streamed across the back lawn at 219 North Delaware to shake hands with the senator, who, in a white seersucker suit, stood beneath a blooming rose arbor beside his wife and daughter. Bess was performing the expected public role, though far from happily. At Chicago after the nomination, as they fought their way out through the crowds to a waiting limousine, with police pushing and shoving, she had turned and glared at her husband, demanding, “Are we going to have to go through this for the rest of our lives?” On the drive home through the smothering July heat of southern Illinois, the atmosphere inside their own car was, as Margaret recalled, “close to arctic.” “Dad tried to be cheerful and philosophical simultaneously. Mother said little.”

No sooner had they arrived in Independence than Margaret’s Aunt Natalie Wallace, Uncle Frank’s wife, took it upon herself to tell Margaret that her Grandfather Wallace had shot himself. Margaret ought to know, she said, since the story was bound to come out any time now. Shattered, disbelieving, Margaret rushed to the kitchen to ask Vietta Garr if this were true. Vietta nodded. Unable to face her mother, Margaret waited until evening to tell her father what she had heard, and for the first and only time in her life he turned his fury on her.

“He seized my arm in a grip that he must have learned when he was wrestling calves and hogs around the farmyard,” she remembered. “ ‘Don’t you ever mention that to your mother,’ he said.” Then Truman “rocketed” out the door to find Aunt Natalie.

I wish I could tell you that years later I asked Mother if her anxiety about her father’s death was the hidden reason for her opposition to Dad’s nomination [Margaret would write years later]. But to the end of her life, I never felt free to violate the absolute prohibition Dad issued on that summer night in 1944.

Out-of-town reporters, looking over the old gray Victorian house for the first time, saw that it needed paint.

The defeated Henry Wallace immediately declared his all-out support for the ticket, exhibiting no bitterness, and in turn he was praised for his courage and forthrightness. Contrary to predictions, he had had real delegate strength after all and had nearly carried the convention despite all the forces aligned against him. Roosevelt would have had no trouble whatever getting him nominated, had he so decided. But then no one seemed nearer to understanding Roosevelt after the convention than before.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote sympathetically to Wallace, “I had hoped by some miracle you could win out, but it looks to me as though the bosses had functioned pretty smoothly. I am told that Senator Truman is a good man, and I hope so for the sake of the country.”

What was not perceived as yet, because so little was known of what went on behind the scenes at Chicago (as well as in Washington before the convention), was the critical part played by Ed Flynn—the fact that it was Flynn, more than anyone, who had convinced Roosevelt that Wallace was a liability and urged Harry Truman on him as the safest alternative; that it was Flynn, the day he arrived in Chicago, who refused to accept Jimmy Byrnes as a fait accompli, as Kelly and Hannegan had; that it was Flynn, with perfect timing on the second ballot, who delivered the important New York vote.

Southern opposition to Wallace because of his views on racial equality was clear, as was the refusal of northern liberals to accept the southerner Byrnes for his opposing views on the same subject. What was not so clear still was the degree to which Flynn worried over the black vote in New York, the point he had stressed at the secret White House meetings in the spring. It was vital that Truman had no opposition from organized labor, as Byrnes did. It was important that Truman was seen by the conservative side of the party—the southerners’ side—as the kind of politician they could work with, who would “go along” in the old phrase, as Wallace never could. It was also very important that Truman had no enemies, that nearly everybody liked Harry Truman, and especially in the Senate, where there would be much work to do when the war was over and the Senate once again, as after the first war, would take part in establishing the peace. But given Ed Flynn’s concern about the black vote, it was, after all, Truman’s record on civil rights—his stand in the Senate against the poll tax, his Sedalia speech in 1940, his talk to black delegates at the 1940 convention—that made him the right man, a somewhat ironic turn for the son of unreconstructed Missouri lineage who would soon be accused of having once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Roosevelt declared himself well pleased with the outcome and wired Truman his congratulations. Harry Hopkins, somewhat in contradiction to what he had told Jimmy Byrnes, said later that the President had had an eye on Truman all along. “People seemed to think that Truman was just suddenly pulled out of a hat—but that wasn’t true,” said Hopkins. Bernard Baruch said that while everyone professed a willingness to do what the Boss—Roosevelt—wanted, the Boss did what Ed Flynn wanted.

Roosevelt’s son Jimmy, a Marine officer who had been with him in San Diego at the time of the nomination, later wrote of his father’s “irritability over what was happening in Chicago” and of his “apparent indifference as to whom the convention selected” as a running mate. “Although Father did not commit himself, I came away with the distinct impression that he really preferred Justice William O. Douglas as the vice-presidential nominee. But he professed not ‘to give a damn’ whether the delegates came up with Justice Douglas, Jimmy Byrnes, or Harry Truman.”

On the very day of his renomination at Chicago, Roosevelt had had a seizure, as only his son Jimmy knew. He had suddenly turned deathly pale, with a look of agony in his face, “Jimmy, I don’t know if I can make it—I have horrible pains,” Roosevelt said, barely able to get the words out. Jimmy helped him lie down on the floor of the railroad car and watched over him for about ten minutes, terrified, until his father asked to be helped to his feet again. Soon afterward the Commander in Chief was driven to a hilltop above the Pacific where—chin up, smiling, intent—he watched ten thousand Marines storm ashore from Higgins boats in a dress rehearsal for an amphibious landing.

IV

On Tuesday, August 18, 1944, in the shade of a magnolia tree said to have been planted by Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had lunch on the South Lawn of the White House. Because of the heat, Roosevelt suggested they take off their jackets. So it was in their shirtsleeves, seated at a small round table set with crystal and silver from the Coolidge years, that the two men posed together for photographers for the first time.

In background, interests, personality, in everything from the sounds of their voices to the kind of company they enjoyed to the patterns of their careers, they could not have been much more dissimilar. Roosevelt was now in his twelfth year in office. He had been President for so long and through such trying, stirring times that it seemed to many Americans, including the junior Senator from Missouri, that he was virtually the presidency itself. His wealth, education, the social position he had known since boyhood were everything Harry Truman never had. Life and customs at the Roosevelt family estate on the upper Hudson River were as far removed from Jackson County, Missouri, as some foreign land. Roosevelt fancied himself a farmer. To Truman, Roosevelt was the kind of farmer who had never pulled a weed, never known debt, or crop failure, or a father’s call to roll out of bed at 5:30 on a bitter cold morning.

Truman, with his Monday night poker games, his Masonic ring and snappy bow ties, the Main Street pals, the dry Missouri voice, was entirely, undeniably middle American. He had only to open his mouth and his origins were plain. It wasn’t just that he came from a particular part of the country, geographically, but from a specific part of the American experience, an authentic pioneer background, and a specific place in the American imagination. His Missouri, as he loved to emphasize, was the Missouri of Mark Twain and Jesse James. In manner and appearance, he might have stepped from a novel by Sinclair Lewis, an author Truman is not known to have read. To anyone taking him at face value, this might have been George F. Babbitt having lunch with the President under the Jackson magnolia.

Roosevelt, on the other hand, was from the world of Edith Wharton stories and drawings by Charles Dana Gibson. He was the authentic American patrician come to power, no matter that he loved politics or a night of poker with “the boys” quite as much as the Senator from Missouri, or that he, too, was a Mason and chose a bow tie as many mornings as not, including this one. Roosevelt had been given things all of his life—houses, furniture, servants, travels abroad. Truman had been given almost nothing. He had never had a house to call his own. He had been taught from childhood, and by rough experience, that what he became would depend almost entirely on what he did. Roosevelt had always known the possibilities open to him—indeed, how much was expected of him—because of who he was.

Both were men of exceptional determination, with great reserves of personal courage and cheerfulness. They were alike too in their enjoyment of people. (The human race, Truman once told a reporter, was an “excellent outfit.”) Each had an active sense of humor and was inclined to be dubious of those who did not. But Roosevelt, who loved stories, loved also to laugh at his own, while Truman was more of a listener and laughed best when somebody else told “a good one.” Roosevelt enjoyed flattery, Truman was made uneasy by it. Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations. He was a master of the circuitous solution to problems, of the pleasing if ambiguous answer to difficult questions. He was sensitive to nuances in a way Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly, too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions. His answers to questions, even complicated questions, were nearly always direct and assured, plainly said, and followed often by a conclusive “And that’s all there is to it,” an old Missouri expression, when in truth there may have been a great deal more “to it.”

Each of them had been tested by his own painful struggle, Roosevelt with crippling polio, Truman with debt, failure, obscurity, and the heavy stigma of the Pendergasts. Roosevelt liked to quote the admonition of his old headmaster at Groton, Dr. Endicott Peabody: “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward….” Assuredly Truman would have subscribed to the same vision. They were two optimists at heart, each in his way faithful to the old creed of human progress. But there had been nothing in Roosevelt’s experience like the night young Harry held the lantern as his mother underwent surgery, nothing like the Argonne, or Truman’s desperate fight for political survival in 1940.

Roosevelt, as would be said, was a kind of master conjurer. He had imagination, he was theatrical. If, as his cousins saw him, Harry Truman was Horatio, then Franklin Roosevelt was Prospero.

Truman was often called a simple man, which he was not. “I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up,” he had once confided to Bess, and some who knew him well would, in retrospect, feel he had withheld too much of himself from public view, and that this was among his greatest limitations. But in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt—and it was Truman’s destiny from this point forward to be forever contrasted to Roosevelt—he was truly uncomplicated, open, and genuine. In private correspondence Truman could be extremely revealing, whereas Roosevelt never dropped the mask, never poured his heart out on paper as did Truman in hundreds of letters and notes to himself, even after it was clear that he was to be a figure in history.

To many Americans, Truman would always be the “little man from Missouri.” Roosevelt was larger than life, even in a wheelchair. He had that force of personality that Truman so admired in a leader and to a degree rarely equaled in the ranks of the presidency. This, too, was something Truman knew he did not have himself, as he knew he had no exceptional intellectual prowess, as had, say, Henry Wallace. “I am not a deep thinker as you are,” he had told Wallace only a day earlier when asking Wallace for his help in the campaign ahead. Yet Truman, as Republican Congressman Joe Martin would write, was “smarter by far than most people realized.”

In some ways Truman would have felt more in common, more at ease, with the earlier Roosevelt, Theodore, had he been host for the lunch. They were much more alike in temperament. They could have talked books, Army life, or the boyhood handicap of having to meet the world wearing thick spectacles. Or possibly the old fear of being thought a sissy. Like Theodore Roosevelt, and unlike Franklin, Truman had never known what it was to be glamorous.

The contrast in appearance between the President and his new running mate was striking. Truman looked robust, younger than his age. The President, though only two years older, seemed a haggard old man. He had returned only the day before from his long mission to the Pacific, and from the sag of his shoulders, the ashen circles under his eyes, it was clear the trip had taken its toll. Truman, who had not seen the President in more than a year, was stunned by how he looked. Even the famous voice seemed to have no energy or resonance.

The lunch was sardines on toast. The conversation dealt mainly with the campaign ahead and was not very private or revealing, since the President’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, joined them. Truman would later repeat only one remark of Roosevelt’s. The President told him not to travel by airplane, because it was important that one of them stay alive.

To his dismay, Truman noticed that Roosevelt’s hand shook so badly he was unable to pour cream in his coffee.

“The President looked fine and ate a bigger lunch than I did,” Truman told reporters afterward, already becoming party to the fiction of a steady hand at the helm. To Bess and Margaret, who were still in Independence, he described how Roosevelt had given him two roses, one for each of them. “You should have seen your Pa walking down Connecticut Avenue…with his hat blown up by the wind (so he looked like a college boy—gray hair and all) and two rosebuds in hand,” he wrote, as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. But arriving at his Senate office, he appeared noticeably upset. He was greatly concerned about the President, he told Harry Vaughan, and described how Roosevelt’s hand had trembled so pouring his cream in his coffee that he put more in the saucer than in the cup. “His hands were shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty…. It doesn’t seem to be any mental lapse of any kind,” Truman said, “but physically he’s just going to pieces.”

In September, Truman took Eddie McKim to a White House reception, where McKim was so shocked by the President’s appearance he wondered if Roosevelt would live long enough to be inaugurated, if Henry Wallace might become President after all. On the way out, as they were walking through the gate, McKim told Truman to turn and look back, because that was where he would be living before long. “I’m afraid you’re right, Eddie,” Truman said. “And it scares the hell out of me.”

To his cousin Laura Delano, Roosevelt would later remark that he liked Harry Truman. “Harry is a fine man, intelligent, able, and has integrity. He doesn’t know much about foreign affairs, but he’s learning fast…”

How Truman honestly felt about Roosevelt can be deduced only from odd remarks to friends or in his private notes and correspondence, and the picture that emerges, though incomplete, is not complimentary. He called him Santa Claus. He called him a prima donna and a fakir. Writing about Bernard Baruch, whom he disliked, Truman would say, “There never was a greater egotist unless it was Franklin D.” Another time, describing Roosevelt to Bess, he wrote, “He’s so damn afraid that he won’t have all the power and glory that he won’t let his friends help as it should be done.”

There was little subtle about Truman. He was never remote, rarely ever evasive. He had been raised on straight answers by people who nearly always meant what they said. Roosevelt wasn’t that way. “You know how it is when you see the President,” Truman once told Allen Drury. “He does all the talking, and he talks about what he wants to talk about, and he never talks about anything you want to talk about, so there isn’t much you can do.”

To Republican Owen Brewster, Truman said he had but one objection to the President and that was “he lies.”

Such feelings, however, would never be publicly expressed, not by Senator Harry Truman of his President, his Commander in Chief and leader of the Democratic Party. That would be unthinkably disloyal, not to say politically unwise and unprofessional. On occasion Truman could also rise to Roosevelt’s defense and in a manner not unlike that of his father. At a meeting in Boston in a room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel that fall, halfway through the campaign, Joe Kennedy began vilifying Roosevelt. “Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son-of-a-bitch that killed my son Joe?” Kennedy said, referring to his oldest son, who had died in the war. Kennedy went on, saying Roosevelt had caused the war. Truman, by his later account, stood all he could, then told Kennedy to keep quiet or he would throw him out the window. Bob Hannegan had to step in and take Truman aside to remind him of how important Kennedy’s money was to the Democratic Party.

His first official speech of the campaign was delivered on a steamy, full-moon night in front of the old red-brick courthouse in Lamar, just up the street from the house where he was born. He spoke for half an hour, never once referring to himself. Experience was what the country needed in such critical times. Franklin Roosevelt was what the country needed. “You can’t afford to take a chance. You should endorse tried and experienced leadership,” Truman said, as if his own comparative inexperience were in no way part of the equation.

And this was the theme that he carried cross-country, traveling by rail in an old combination sleeper and dining car called the Henry Stanley. Hugh Fulton, Matt Connelly, Eddie McKim, and Fred Canfil were along to assist.

The youthful, handsome Connelly, whose own experience thus far had been only as an investigator for the Truman Committee, would remember how the senator recruited him as a political right-hand man:

Truman came back from Chicago after the convention and the office was a madhouse…photographers, press, so at 5 I locked the door and said, “I think you’ve had enough for today.”

He said, “Yes, it was quite a day. Let’s go back to the ‘doghouse,’ I want to talk to you.” There he said, “How about a drink? You like that damn Scotch, don’t you?”

I said, “I’ll mix them.”

He said, “No, I’m up to something. I’ll mix them.” So he made a drink and sat down. He said, “You know, I’ve got to make a campaign trip.”

I said, “I assumed you would.”

He said, “I want you to go along with me.”

“You want me to go along with you! What do I know about politics?”

He said, “Never mind that. You’ve got a pretty good teacher.”

The route was from New Orleans through Texas and New Mexico, then up the Pacific coast to Portland and Seattle, then east all the way to Boston, with a dozen stops en route. From Boston Truman went to New York, then Washington, where finally he turned homeward again, by way of Wheeling, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis.

At Uvalde, Texas, the morning the train stopped, old John Nance Garner was waiting on the station platform dressed in khaki work pants and a battered ten-gallon hat, his hands stained from picking pecans. “I’m glad to see you, Harry. Bless your old soul,” said the former Vice President, who after falling out with Roosevelt had left Washington vowing never again to cross the Potomac River as long as he lived, a vow he kept. Somewhere in the world it must be twelve o’clock and time for a drink, Garner speculated. Truman told him to come right aboard.

In Seattle he addressed a crowd of ten thousand. At little Avery, Idaho, beside the Shoshone National Forest, only three women, schoolteachers, were waiting when the train stopped, but he spoke for fifteen minutes just the same. It wasn’t their fault they were the only ones there, Truman would explain. “He’s just like the rest of us,” said Montana Congressman Mike Mansfield, introducing Truman at a lunch in Butte. On a drive through Pittsburgh he had a twenty-six-man motorcycle escort and huge crowds stretching for miles.

He was not an exciting speaker. It was not a colorful campaign. He just kept pounding away at the need for Roosevelt’s leadership to win the war and establish the peace. There could be no return to the isolationism of the Republicans once the war was over, no Congress in the control of Republicans like Nye and Taft. To one reporter on the train, it was “the farmer-neighborliness,” the “genuineness” of the candidate that made him appealing and believable, far more than anything he said.

Once, on the train, he was wrenched from his sleep by a vivid nightmare. He had dreamt Roosevelt was dead and he, Harry Truman, was President.

The Republicans tried hard to make him an issue. “Clear it with Sidney” became a Republican war cry. But all efforts by Republicans and reporters to turn up something unsavory from his Pendergast years came to nothing.

Bess’s Senate salary was reported and deplored, just as he had feared. He was portrayed repeatedly as small-time, backwater Harry, the failed haberdasher. (“He couldn’t even make good selling shirts.”) A rumor spread that he was part Jewish, again, as in years past, on the basis that he had a grandfather named Solomon. He was not Jewish, Truman responded, but if he were he would never be ashamed of it.

The charge that he had been a member of the Klan, which he categorically denied, appeared first in the Hearst papers. The story broke shortly before he reached Boston, where, with the Irish-Catholic vote at stake, it might have done irreparable harm. To Truman and his entourage there was no question that the story had been Seen purposefully planted to hit Boston just in time for his arrival and that the day was only saved by the celebrated former Governor of Massachusetts James Michael Curley, then a member of Congress, who spoke from the same platform with Truman.

“Jim Curley got up to make his little speech,” remembered Matt Connelly, for whom it was one of the memorable moments of the campaign, “and [he] said, ‘We have a very unusual candidate for Vice President. He goes to California, the word comes back to us he’s a Jew; he arrives in the Midwest, the word comes back to us that he’s a member of the Klan.’ And he turned, ‘Mr. Vice President, I invite you to join my lodge, The Ancient Order of Hibernians. We’d be glad to have you as one of our members, and I assure you, we will get out the vote.’

“I said to Mr. Truman, ‘That takes care of the Klan.’ ”

But it was the old Pendergast association that dogged him most, and especially when coupled with the question of Roosevelt’s health. Attacks by the Chicago Tribune were sharpest of all:

If they confess that there is the slightest chance that Mr. Roosevelt may die or become incapacitated in the next four years, they are faced with the grinning skeleton of Truman the bankrupt, Truman the pliant tool of Boss Pendergast in looting Kansas City’s county government, Truman the yes-man and apologist in the Senate for political gangsters.

To the immense relief of the Trumans, nothing was said of the death of Bess’s father, and Truman’s anger erupted only over remarks by Republican Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous wife of publisher Henry Luce, who, poking fun at the idea of Bess working on his Senate staff, began calling her “Payroll Bess.” If, as Truman had said, his mother didn’t bring him up to be a statesman, then she would not be disappointed, Mrs. Luce also declared.

In the normal rough-and-tumble of a campaign, Truman could take nearly anything said about him, but at any mention of his family, even an implied slight, he got “hotter than a depot stove.” He would have nothing but contempt for Clare Boothe Luce from that point on, commenting privately that she spelled her name L-O-O-S-E.

Between Truman and the White House there was little or no communication. The real battle, after all, was the one Roosevelt was waging against Dewey, and to the delight of those close to the President, the battle revived him wonderfully. Though he made few public appearances, one before the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington was considered the best campaign speech of his entire career. He seemed his old self, spontaneously adding a little extra to the prepared text, delivering it with great, feigned gravity and savoring the moment as only a seasoned performer could:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks—on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but [pause] Fala does resent them….

As Robert Sherwood, his speechwriter, later observed, the Fala story put the needed excitement into the campaign. “The champ” was back. Ed Flynn, after all his anguish and exertions over the choice of a Vice President, would later tell friends that Roosevelt was in such fine form in the campaign that he could have won had he put Fala on the ticket.

The night the President spoke in Chicago, more than a hundred thousand people packed Soldier Field. He “improved visibly in strength and resilience,” recalled Sherwood. In New York, in the face of a cold driving rain, he rode for hours in an open car, bare-headed, so millions of people could see him with their own eyes and know he was all right. It was an ordeal that could have put a younger, stronger man in the hospital, but at the end Roosevelt seemed exhilarated, glad for the chance to show what he could take.

Dewey had raised the specter of Communist infiltration in Washington. “Now…with the aid of Sidney Hillman…the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal…to control the Government of the United States,” Dewey warned. Roosevelt had grown to detest Dewey as he never had a political opponent, and like the driving rain, this too seemed to brace him up.

The Trumans waited out the returns in Kansas City, in a suite at the Muehlebach, a throng of old political and Battery D friends on hand to help celebrate, and before the long night ended a large number of them were extremely drunk. “I was shocked,” remembered Margaret.

One old political friend from southwest Missouri, Harry Easley, stayed on with Truman after everyone had left. Stretched out on a bed, Truman talked of how lonely he had felt through the campaign. He had seen the look of death in Roosevelt’s face, Truman said. “And he knew…that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley remembered. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends…people like me, he said…he knew that he was going to be the President of the United States, and I think it just scared the very devil out of him…even the thought of it.’

It was nearly four in the morning before Dewey conceded, and the victory was narrow, the closest presidential election since 1916. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won by 3 million votes, carrying thirty-six of the forty-eight states. Yet a shift of just 300,000 votes in the right states would have elected Dewey and Bricker. Dewey asked all Americans to join him in the hope that “in the difficult years ahead Divine Providence will guide and protect the President of the United States.”

Roosevelt, before turning in at Hyde Park, said, “I still think he is a son-of-a-bitch.”

In deference to the tragedy of war and the President’s limited strength, the inauguration at noon, January 20, 1945, was a somber affair lasting less than fifteen minutes. It was the first wartime inauguration since Lincoln and the first ever held at the White House, the ceremony conducted on the South Portico before a crowd that included numbers of disabled soldiers. A thin crust of snow covered the lawn. The day was grim. There were no parades. The red jackets of the Marine Band were the one note of cheer in the whole chill, muted scene.

Truman, wrapped in a heavy dark blue overcoat, his shoulders braced as if at attention, took the oath of office from Henry Wallace, a serious look on his face. Then the President was helped to his feet by his Marine son Jimmy and a Secret Service agent. Roosevelt wore only a thin summer-weight suit and moved slowly, stiff-legged from his braces, until he could reach out and grip the edge of the lectern. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, standing close by, was suddenly reminded of how her husband had looked when he went into his decline.

V

Truman was Vice President for eighty-two days and as busy as he had ever been, doing what was customarily expected of a Vice President—presiding over the Senate, attending parties and receptions, shaking endless numbers of hands. Roosevelt was out of the country until the end of February. He had slipped away from Washington in strictest secrecy just two days after the inauguration, traveling by rail to Norfolk, where the cruiser Quincy carried him to the Mediterranean Sea, to the island of Malta. From Malta he went by plane to the old Black Sea health resort of Yalta, for his second Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin. Jimmy Byrnes had gone, too, as a special adviser, and so had Ed Flynn, as a kind of official stowaway. Vice President Truman had been told only that if it was “absolutely urgent,” he could make contact with the President through the White House. Since taking office, Truman had seen nothing of Roosevelt nor had he been told anything at all about the conference. Truman had not even met the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius.

To his surprise, however, he was enjoying himself. The round of social engagements not only didn’t bother him, he delighted in it. “The amiable Missourian with the touch of country in his voice and manner,” reported Time, “had conquered a schedule that had Mrs. Truman and Capitol society writers breathless.”

Perle Mesta, heir to Oklahoma oil money and the widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh toolmaker, gave a party in the Vice President’s honor that was described as “one of the most glittering in Washington’s long history of glittery parties.” Mrs. Mesta had come to Washington initially as a Republican, but “jumped the fence” to become a Democrat only the summer before, because the Republicans had refused to renominate Wendell Willkie. Now she had “taken up” Harry Truman.

[The party] had all the charm of an English court tea, the sparkle of a Viennese ball, and the razzle-dazzle of a Hollywood premiere. The best names in officialdom and society attended. Shirt fronts gleamed with star-ruby studs. Evening gowns fairly dripped with diamonds and pearls. Champagne, at $20 a bottle, flowed in cascades….

“He circulated around in as comfortable, unpretentious, and agreeable manner as could be,” wrote the author John Gunther, after seeing Truman at a dinner party given by the foreign affairs editor of the Washington Post. Truman had been the first to arrive, Gunther noted.

He was lively and animated…a guest among other guests.

I had the impression of what you might call bright grayness. Both the clothes and hair were neat and gray. The gray-framed spectacles magnified the gray-hazel eyes, but there was no grayness in the mind…. His conversational manner is alert and poised. He talks very swiftly, yet with concision. You have to listen hard to get it all.

Later, during an interview on the Hill, when Gunther asked him what he liked most, Truman answered, “People.”

Old friends on the Hill found him wholly unaffected by his new role, “homespun as ever.” He kept his same quarters in the Senate Office Building, Room 240, using the Vice President’s office in the Capitol mainly as a place to greet visitors, under the dazzle of a seven-tiered crystal chandelier.

For senators of both parties it became, as Charlie Ross wrote, “the most natural thing in the world” to drop in on Truman for a chat, or perhaps a nip of bourbon. “Many of them observed on these occasions that they had never been in the Vice President’s office when Henry Wallace was there. Wallace to them was otherworldly. He didn’t speak their language; Truman does.”

He, Bess, and Margaret were still living in the same five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue at the same $120-a-month rent. The only difference was that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, had also moved in.

“Harry looks better than he has for ages—is really putting on weight,” Bess wrote to Ethel Noland. “Marg has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party,” she told Ethel in another letter. “Mother is practically asleep in her chair—so it’s very peaceful.”

The one new personal convenience with the job was an official car, a black Mercury limousine, and a driver, Tom Harty, who picked the Vice President up each morning and returned him home again at day’s end. En route to the Capitol, they would drop Margaret off at George Washington University, where she was in her junior year. Also, in the front seat rode a young man whom Truman at first assumed was a friend of Harty’s who needed a lift. He was George Drescher, the first Secret Service man to be assigned to a Vice President. The idea had been suggested by Harry Vaughan, who had returned from active duty with the Air Corps to become Truman’s military aide, another first for a Vice President. Appalled to find that no security arrangements had been made for Truman, Vaughan went to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and told him it seemed a bit incongruous to have seventy or a hundred people guarding the President and no one at all guarding the Vice President.

“I used to get down here to the office at 7 o’clock,” Truman wrote his mother and sister from his office.

But now I have to take Margaret to school every morning and I don’t get here until 8:30. Reathel Odum [who had replaced Mildred Dryden as his stenographer] is always here at that time and we wade through a stack of mail a foot high. By that time I have to see people—one at a time just as fast as they can go through the office without seeming to hurry them. Then I go over to the Capitol gold-plated office and see Senators and curiosity seekers for an hour and then the Senate meets and it’s my job to get ’em prayed for—and goodness knows they need it, and then get the business going by staying in the chair for an hour and then see more Senators and curiosity people who want to see what a V.P. looks like and if he walks and talks and has teeth.

What inner fear or concern Truman still felt over the President’s health, he seems to have kept to himself. Nor did he appear to be making any effort to prepare himself for Roosevelt’s death. It was as if all the dire speculation of the summer before, the nightmare he had had on the campaign train, were forgotten, locked away, now that the unthinkable was so much nearer at hand. The closest he came to open speculation on the future and its problems was an off-the-record conversation with a correspondent for Time, Frank McNaughton, who later wrote to his editor in New York:

Truman says simply that he hopes to be of value to the administration through his contacts in the Senate, and he conceives the VP’s job to be a sort of liaison between the executive and legislative branches. Truman is fervent in his declared hope that he can do this right up to the hilt.

“There is a difficult situation after every war, and disagreements and misunderstandings spring up between the executive and legislative,” Truman, an expert on history, says. “Madison encountered it, Andrew Jackson experienced it in an aggravated degree, and Woodrow Wilson had to struggle with it. There is always a tremendous reaction after every such emergency. I don’t think the human kind has changed so much, in that regard, but I have hopes that this will be a period in history when all will rise to the seriousness of the occasion and cooperate for the good of this country and the people.”

We can’t attribute it to Truman, but he is tremendously afraid that there will be a postwar struggle between executive and legislative, and between the Allied powers, that will wreck the peace once and for all. He believes it is going to take the greatest sagacity and diplomacy to prevent postwar national and international struggles for power and prestige, and he conceives it to be his job to effect, to the best of his ability, a smooth cooperation and liaison between the Senate and the President….

His more immediate task was to help get Henry Wallace approved by the Senate as the new Secretary of Commerce. However, it was his part in two other events, both occurring in Roosevelt’s absence, that drew the greatest attention.

In Kansas City, on January 26, less than a week after the inauguration, Tom Pendergast died at the age of seventy-two. Since his return from prison nearly five years before, Pendergast had been living in the big red brick house on Ward Parkway, where, in steadily declining health, he was seen by few outside his immediate family. His name rarely appeared in the papers any longer. His political influence was entirely gone. By court ruling, he was even restricted from setting foot ever again at 1908 Main Street. Truman is not known to have called on him from the time Pendergast left prison, but then to have done so would have been extremely difficult.

But on hearing of T.J.’s death, Truman decided at once that he would attend the funeral. He took off for Kansas City in an Army bomber and was among the several thousand mourners who filed past the bier at Visitation Catholic Church. He was photographed coming and going and paying his respects to the family, all of which struck large numbers of people everywhere as outrageous behavior for a Vice President—to be seen honoring the memory of a convicted criminal. Yet many, possibly a larger number, saw something admirable and courageous in a man risen so high who still knew who he was and refused to forget a friend.

Two weeks later he was back in the news, with more pictures, and again, to some, as a figure of ridicule. He had agreed to take part in a stage show for servicemen held at the Washington Press Club’s canteen. He was playing an upright piano, to an audience of about eight hundred men in uniform, when actress Lauren Bacall, also part of the entertainment, was boosted on top of the piano to strike a leggy pose as the delighted crowd cheered and flashbulbs popped. “I was just a kid,” she would remember. “My press agent made me do it.” “Anything can happen in this country,” a soldier was quoted at the time. The photographs of the Vice President serenading the glamorous Hollywood star were an instant sensation. What disturbed many people was that Truman appeared to be having such a good time, which he was. Bess was furious. She told him he should play the piano in public no more.

On March 1, in the House Chamber, at a solemn joint session of Congress, with Majority Leader John McCormack beside him, Vice President Truman sat on the dais behind the President as in slow, often rambling fashion Franklin Roosevelt reported on some of what had happened at Yalta. He read the speech sitting down, explaining it was easier not to carry 10 pounds of steel on his legs, which was the first time he had made public mention of his physical disability.

He appeared more pale and drawn than ever. His left hand trembled noticeably as he turned the pages. “It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree it has been so far, a fruitful one.” At times, losing his place, he ad-libbed. “Of course there were a few other little matters, but I won’t go into them here.” At times, his voice seemed to give out and his hand shook again as he reached for a glass of water. “Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.”

Here and there in the chamber, listening to him speak, were more than a few who knew enough to have sensed what meaning could lie in these last words—John McCormack, Minority Leader Martin, Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, Henry Wallace, Jimmy Byrnes, Sam Rosenman, who had written much of the speech, Steve Early, the President’s press secretary, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who was watching from the gallery, perhaps a dozen in total who knew the great secret about which the Vice President had been told nothing.

“I saw the President immediately after his speech had been concluded,” Truman wrote. “Plainly, he was a very weary man.” Roosevelt, as he told Truman, was leaving as soon as possible for Warm Springs, Georgia and a rest.

In the stack of mail on his desk to be answered the morning of Thursday, April 12, was a letter from Jim Pendergast, who needed his old friend Harry’s help. “For about a year,” Jim wrote, “the Pendergast Wholesale Liquor Company has been trying to get bottles and cartons in order to carry on their business. They have made three applications and these applications have all been approved by the local office of the War Production Board but when they get to Washington they have all been rejected.” The company, Jim explained, had over eleven thousand barrels of straight bourbon whiskey stored in Kentucky but no bottles or cartons. The situation was serious.

“We will see what we can do right away,” Truman dictated to Miss Odum.

He had dressed for the day with customary care, in a double-breasted gray suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket neatly folded so that three corners were showing, a white shirt, and a dark blue polka-dot bow tie. He looked scrubbed and well barbered, the picture of health and self-possession. In the Senate Chamber later in the day, reporters in the press gallery would comment on his obvious enjoyment of people as he moved among different groups of senators on the floor. “It’s wonderful, this Senate,” he had said in a press conference only the day before. “It’s the greatest place on earth…. The grandest bunch of fellows you could ever find anywhere.”

The rest of the mail took longer than usual, so that he was late getting over to the Senate Chamber, where the day’s work had already begun, Alben Barkley substituting for him on the dais. The time of Truman’s arrival was approximately 11:30 A.M.

Senator Willis of Indiana was just relinquishing the floor. Truman and Barkley shook hands and Truman, taking his seat, handed a few official communications to the reading clerk, who announced them to the Senate. One concerned plans being made by the town of Patton, Pennsylvania, for a welcome-home celebration in honor of General George S. Patton. Another was a request from the legislature of Alaska to increase the reindeer herds in Alaska’s national parks by declaring open season on wolves and coyotes.

Many of those in the chamber were people Truman had known since he first came to the Senate ten years earlier. And for all that the world had changed, all the tumult and tragedy of the war, the old room itself looked much the same, except for a mass of ugly steel girders overhead, supports put up in 1940 to hold an old ceiling that had been on the verge of collapse. They had been installed as a temporary expedient only, but then, because of the war, the restoration work had to be postponed, and so there they remained, “barn rafters,” beneath which the business of the Senate continued.

Senator Hawkes of New Jersey asked for printing in the Congressional Record of a petition from the Order of the Sons of Italy to invite Italy to the forthcoming San Francisco Conference to organize the United Nations. Senator Reed of Kansas asked that nineteen letters and telegrams be printed in the Record, all describing the critical shortage of boxcars for grain shipments. The boxcar situation, said the senator, was the worst he had ever seen; wheat was spoiling on the ground.

The main business before the Senate was the ratification of a water treaty with Mexico, affecting use of the Colorado and Rio Grande. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Connally spoke first, followed by Ernest McFarland of Arizona. Both urged ratification. Truman had a page deliver a note to Republican Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts, asking Saltonstall to come up and take his place. “I have a Missouri soldier boy in my office,” explained Truman, who promised to be back in no more than an hour. Noticing an apple on the dais, Saltonstall asked what would happen if he ate it.

“You will take the consequences,” Truman said.

Truman had always been a man of his word, Saltonstall would remember, telling the story years later. “He was back in an hour.”

At another point, the Vice President was seen in a friendly huddle with Republicans Wiley of Wisconsin and Wherry of Nebraska. Allen Drury, watching from the press gallery, remarked to Tony Vaccaro of the United Press that Roosevelt was fortunate to have so good a man as Truman to deal with the Senate. Vaccaro, frowning, said Roosevelt would make no use of him. Vaccaro, who had lately been spending time with the Vice President, said, “Truman doesn’t know what’s going on. Roosevelt won’t tell him anything.”

As the record would show, Truman had met with the President exactly twice, except for Cabinet meetings, since becoming Vice President—once on March 8 and again on March 19, ten days before Roosevelt left for Warm Springs—and neither time was anything of consequence discussed.

About midway through the afternoon Senator Alexander Wiley, Republican of Wisconsin, commenced his remarks on the Mexican water issue, speaking not always to the point and in numbing detail when he did:

It may be noted that the report of the Bureau of Reclamation of the problems of the Imperial Valley and vicinity considered that 800,000 acres ultimately would be irrigated in Mexico, and that some storage would be required for this purpose. Under the present duty of water in the Mexico area, the 800,000 acres of land would require a diversion from the river of 4,800,000 acre-feet of water. The aggregate acreage under the two items to which the footnote in the above table applies is…

Truman decided to make other use of his time by writing a letter to his mother and sister, even though he had little news to report:

Dear Mamma and Mary—I am trying to write you a letter today from the desk of the President of the Senate while a windy Senator from Wisconsin is making a speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar….

Hope you are having a nice spell of weather. We’ve had a week of beautiful weather but it is raining and misting today. I don’t think it’s going to last long. Hope not, for I must fly to Providence, R.I., Sunday morning.

Turn on your radio tomorrow night at 9:30 your time and you’ll hear Harry make a Jefferson Day address to the nation. I think I’ll be on all the networks so it ought not to be hard to get me. It will be followed by the President, whom I’ll introduce.

Hope you are both well and stay that way.

Love to you both.

Write when you can.

Harry

At the conclusion of Wiley’s speech, Barkley moved for a recess. It was four minutes to five by the clock over the main lobby entrance.

Truman came down from the dais, went out through the swinging doors on his left, crossed the Senators’ Private Lobby, and stepped into the Vice President’s office to tell Harry Vaughan that he would be with Sam Rayburn should anybody want him.

Then, eluding his Secret Service guard, the Vice President walked the length of the Capitol, cutting through the Senate Reception Room, out past the eight-foot white marble statue of Benjamin Franklin, down the long, tiled corridor, around “Mark Twain’s Cuspidor” (the columned well of the Senate Rotunda, so named by Twain because of the tobacco leaves on its columns), on through the main rotunda under the dome, through Statuary Hall (the old House Chamber), and briefly along another corridor to a stairway; down the stairs to the ground floor, left down one hall, right down another to Room 9, Sam Rayburn’s private hideaway, known unofficially as “the Board of Education.”

Rayburn, who referred to it simply as “downstairs,” met there for a “libation” every afternoon, once the formal business of “upstairs” was concluded. It was an important part of his day, and to be invited to join him, even once or twice in a term, was considered the sign that one had arrived. Truman was among the regulars.

Moving along at his usual brisk pace, he would have covered the distance from the Vice President’s office in less than three minutes. So it must have been just after five o’clock when he came in.

Though pictured often as small and plain, the room was about 20 feet in length, its ornate ceiling busy with painted birds and animals. The furnishings, too, were large, comfortable and utilitarian—big, worn black leather chairs, a long couch, a sink, and a large refrigerator that was camouflaged with veneer to more or less match the big desk, where Rayburn kept the whiskey.

Two others were already with the Speaker when Truman arrived, Lewis Deschler, the House Parliamentarian, and James M. Barnes, a staff man at the White House assigned to congressional liaison. The gray afternoon outside was fading, the room growing dim. No one had bothered yet to turn on the lights.

Apparently it was Deschler who reminded Rayburn that Truman had had a call from the White House.

“Steve Early wants you to call him right away,” Rayburn said. Truman mixed himself a drink, then dialed the number, National 1414.

“This is the V.P.,” he said.

Steve Early’s voice sounded tense and strange. Truman was to come to the White House as “quickly and as quietly” as he could, and to enter by the main entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As Lewis Deschler later recounted, Truman lost all his color. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” he said, putting down the phone.

He was wanted at the White House right away, he told the others. They must say nothing.

He went out the door alone. Then he began to run, taking a different route. He kept to the ground floor this time, racing down a hall between a double line of bronze and marble Civil War generals and forgotten state governors, his shoes pounding on the marble floor. He ran through the echoing old Crypt, past the Senate barbershop, then up a flight of stairs with brass banisters to his office—to get his hat.

He told Harry Vaughan he was on his way to the White House and to keep that to himself. In minutes he was in the big Mercury with Tom Harty driving, but still no Secret Service guard, moving with all possible speed through the evening traffic. By now it was approximately 5:15 P.M.

What thoughts were rushing through his mind, he never fully revealed. “I thought I was going down there to meet the President,” he later said.

“I didn’t allow myself to think anything else.” To his mother he would write it occurred to him that perhaps Roosevelt had returned from Warm Springs because the retired Episcopal bishop of Arizona, an old friend of the President’s, had been buried that day. “I thought that maybe he wanted me to do some special piece of liaison work with the Congress and had sent for me to see him after the funeral.”

But if this was so, why had he run back to his office? “I ran all the way,” he told her. What did he imagine he was running toward? Or leaving behind?

At the White House, the long black car turned off Pennsylvania, through the northwest gate, and swept up the drive, stopping under the North Portico. The time was 5:25.

Two ushers were waiting at the door. They took his hat and escorted him to a small, oak-paneled elevator, more like an ornate cage, that had been installed in the Theodore Roosevelt era and that ascended now very slowly to the second floor.

In the private quarters, across the center hall, in her sitting room, Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting. With her were Steve Early and her daughter and son-in-law, Anna and John Boettiger. Mrs. Roosevelt stepped forward and gently put her arm on Truman’s shoulder.

“Harry, the President is dead.”

Truman was unable to speak.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said at last.

“Is there anything we can do for you,” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

Part Three
To the Best of My Ability

9
The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets

So ended an era and so began another.

—ALLEN DRURY

I

The news broke at 5:47 P.M., Eastern War Time, April 12, 1945.

International News Service was first on the wire, followed seconds later by the Associated Press, United Press, the four radio networks, and the Armed Forces Radio Service. In New York CBS interrupted a children’s serial about Daniel Boone called “Wilderness Road.” NBC broke into “Front-Page Farrell,” ABC interrupted “Captain Midnight,” and Mutual, “Tom Mix.”

In minutes the bulletin had reached every part of the country and much of the world. The time in London was near midnight. In Berlin, where it was already another day, Friday the 13th, an ecstatic Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, telephoned Hitler personally to proclaim it a turning point written in the stars. In Moscow, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, was hosting an embassy party when a duty officer called to report what he had heard on a late broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service. At the Armed Forces Radio Station in Panama, Sergeant James Weathers, assigned to answer incoming calls, began picking up the phone and answering, “Yes, it’s true,” “Yes, it’s true,” over and over again.

Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 4:45 in the afternoon (3:45, Warm Springs time). Two hours earlier, sitting at a card table signing papers, he had complained of a terrific headache, then suddenly collapsed, not to regain consciousness. As many accounts stated, his death at age sixty-three came in an hour of high triumph. “The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander-in-Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands…and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.”

From the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt sent cables to her four sons in the service, saying their father had done his job to the end, as he would want them to do, a point Steve Early included in the initial White House announcement. To Early and Harry Truman she had also expressed a wish to fly to Warm Springs, but questioned whether it would be proper now for her to use a government plane. Truman, unhesitatingly, said she should. This and the arrival of Secretary of State Stettinius were among the few things he would remember from the scene in her study. Stettinius had appeared in the doorway with tears streaming down his face.

They agreed the Cabinet should be assembled at once and the Chief Justice summoned to administer the oath of office. Truman started downstairs for the West Wing. From the President’s office he telephoned Les Biffle. He wanted the congressional leadership to come at once, and a car sent for Mrs. Truman and Margaret. He then called the apartment and told Bess what had happened. She had not had the radio on. It was the first she had heard.

The West Wing throbbed with activity and tension. Reporters, photographers, White House staff people, the Secret Service, and a few of Truman’s own staff converged from several directions, crowding corridors and offices. Voices were hushed and tense. Telephones kept ringing. In the twilight outside, across Pennsylvania Avenue, in Lafayette Square, thousands of people gathered in silence.

By seven o’clock nearly everyone who was supposed to be there had assembled in the Cabinet Room: Stettinius and Chief Justice Harlan Stone, Sam Rayburn, John McCormack, Joe Martin, Henry Stimson, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Attorney General Francis Biddle, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Julius Krug, War Production Board Administrator, Fred M. Vinson, Director of the Office of War Mobilization, Admiral William Leahy, who was Roosevelt’s personal chief of staff, Bob Hannegan, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the only woman present until the arrival of Bess and Margaret. Missing were Postmaster General Frank Walker, who was ill, and Alben Barkley, who had decided to stay with Mrs. Roosevelt. Uniformed White House guards were at the doors.

Truman sat by himself in a brown leather chair, looking dreadful, “absolutely dazed.” When Bess came in, he crossed the room and took her hand. Little was said by anyone. Then, for what seemed an extremely long time, they all stood waiting while several of the staff went in search of a Bible. “It was a very somber group,” Stimson would record.

Bess, who had been crying almost from the moment she heard the news, dabbed repeatedly at her eyes with a handkerchief. Margaret would remember feeling as if she were going under anesthesia. None of it seemed quite real.

The only Bible to be found was an inexpensive Gideon edition with garish red edging to the pages. It had been in the desk drawer of the fastidious head usher, Howell Crim, a short, stooped, bald-headed man who now made sure it was properly dusted before placing it on the table. Truman would later tell his mother he could have brought Grandpa Truman’s Bible from his office bookcase had he only known.

He and Justice Stone took their places by the marble mantelpiece at the end of the room, beneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Bess, Margaret, and the others filed in around them. A few reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen were told to come in. One of the staff recalled much milling about and confusion. The time on the clock on the mantel was 7:09, 2 hours and 24 minutes since Roosevelt’s death.

Truman glanced at the clock. “It said nine past seven when I started to swear the oath—I remember,” he later said. “I looked at it. And I remember the faces all around me….”

He picked up the Bible and held it in his left hand. He raised his right hand.

“I, Harry Shipp Truman,” Justice Stone began.

“I, Harry S. Truman,” Truman corrected him.

“…do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“So help you God,” added the Chief Justice.

“So help me God.”

His “sharp features taut,” as a reporter noted, Truman looked straight ahead through his thick, round glasses. The sudden, fervent way he kissed the Bible at the end of the ceremony impressed everyone present. It had all taken not more than a minute.

Afterward he asked the Cabinet to remain.

They were assembled about the table when Steve Early came in to say the press wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would open as planned in twelve days, on April 25. As several in the room knew, Roosevelt had often sat alone at the same table looking at the Wilson portrait, pondering the tragedy of Wilson’s failure to create the League of Nations. The answer was emphatically yes, Truman said, making his first decision as President.

In his brief remarks to the Cabinet he said he intended to carry on with Roosevelt’s program and hoped they would all stay on the job. He welcomed their advice. He did not doubt that they would differ with him if they felt it necessary, but final decisions would be his and he expected their support once decisions were made.

Stimson, the senior member, said it was time to close ranks. When the meeting ended, Stimson remained behind. There was a matter of utmost urgency to be discussed, he told Truman. It concerned a new explosive of unbelievable power. But he gave no further details, which left Truman no better informed than before.

In his diary later that night, Stimson wrote that the new President had conducted himself admirably, considering the shock he had been through and how little he knew.

Truman, before leaving for home, remembered that Eddie McKim was in town and that they had a date to play poker that night at McKim’s room at the Statler. “I guess the party’s off,” Truman said, once the White House operator had McKim on the line.

By 9:30 he was back at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace, he found, had gone to the apartment of neighbors next door, a general named Davis and his wife, where they were lingering over the remains of a turkey and cake. Margaret remembered her father saying little except that he had had nothing to eat since noon. Mrs. Davis fixed him a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk. Shortly, he excused himself, went to the apartment, and called his mother to tell her he was all right and not to worry. He then went to bed and, he later said, immediately to sleep.

Automobile traffic and streetcars passed beneath his open window as though nothing were different. People walking by took no more interest in the building than on other nights. Other residents, coming or going, some with dogs on leashes, were surprised to find reporters in the lobby and Secret Service men standing about.

The reporters had taken over two couches beside a stone fireplace. In a corner was the telephone switchboard for the building and a bank of mailboxes. Box 209 carried a printed card, “Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Truman,” with “Margaret Truman” handwritten in ink below. The switchboard operator said she regretted very much that the Trumans would be leaving. “Such lovely people,” she said.

A widely repeated story in Washington that the switchboard at 4701 Connecticut Avenue was the busiest in town that night—because news of Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s swearing in meant there would soon be an apartment available in the building—is apparently apocryphal.

To the country, the Congress, the Washington bureaucracy, to hundreds of veteran New Dealers besides those who had gathered in the Cabinet Room, to much of the military high command, to millions of American men and women overseas, the news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, followed by the realization that Harry Truman was President, struck like massive earth tremors in quick succession, the thought of Truman in the White House coming with the force of a shock wave. To many it was not just that the greatest of men had fallen, but that the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men—had assumed his place.

“Good God, Truman will be President,” it was being said everywhere. “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next-door neighbor.” People were fearful about the future of the country, fearful the war would drag on longer now. “What a great, great tragedy. God help us all,” wrote David Lilienthal, head of TVA. The thought of Truman made him feel physically ill. “The country and the world don’t deserve to be left this way….”

The fact that Roosevelt had died like Lincoln in the last stages of a great war, and like Lincoln in April, almost to the day, were cited as measures both of Roosevelt’s greatness and the magnitude of the tragedy. But implicit also was the thought that Lincoln, too, had been succeeded by a lackluster, so-called “common man,” the ill-fated Andrew Johnson.

Stettinius, who as Secretary of State was next in line now to succeed to the presidency, wondered privately if the parallel was not closer to what followed Woodrow Wilson, after the last war, if the country was in for another Harding administration, with cheap courthouse politicians taking over.

Senators, according to the conventional wisdom, didn’t make strong presidents. Harding had been the only other President drawn from the Senate thus far in the century and the feeling was he had been taken from the bottom of the barrel. Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, even Coolidge had all been governors. And governors, from experience, knew something about running things.

In a house at Marburg, Germany, three American generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, sat up much of the night talking about Roosevelt and speculating on the sort of man Truman might be. All three were greatly depressed. “From a distance Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt’s large shoes,” Bradley wrote. Patton was bitter and more emphatic. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.”

It had been an unusually difficult day for the three commanders, even before the news about Roosevelt. They had seen their first Nazi death camp, Ohrdruf-Nord, near Gotha. As they bid good night to one another, an aide recalled Eisenhower looking deeply shaken.

For thousands of men in the ranks, as for many at home, the question was not so much was Truman qualified, as who was he.

In the chill of dawn in Germany, a private named Lester Atwell remembered, his battalion had been lined up for breakfast beside a country road:

“Men”—an officer came quickly along the line…“I have an announcement to make: President Roosevelt died last night.”

“What?” You heard it from all sides. “What? President Roosevelt? Roosevelt’s dead?” We were astounded.

The officer’s voice continued. “We don’t know any particulars, except that he’s dead. I think it was very sudden. Probably a stroke. Truman, the Vice-President, will take over.”

“Who? Who’d he say?”

“Truman, ya dumb bastard. Who the hell you think?”

There were some, however, who, facing the prospect of a Truman presidency, felt confident the country was in good hands. They knew the man, they said. They understood his origins. They had seen how he handled responsibility and knew the inner resources he could draw on. As before and later in his life, confidence in Harry Truman was greatest among those who knew him best.

“Truman is honest and patriotic and has a head full of good horse sense. Besides, he has guts,” wrote John Nance Garner to Sam Rayburn, who was himself assuring reporters that Truman would make a good, sound President “by God,” because, “He’s got the stuff in him.” To arch-Republican Arthur Vandenberg, writing the night of April 12, Truman was “a grand person with every good intention and high honesty of purpose.” Could Truman “swing the job?” Vandenberg speculated in his diary. “I think he can.”

Asked years later what his feelings were when he realized Truman was President, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, said, “Oh, I felt good. Because I knew him. I knew the kind of man he was.”

Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to his son in the Navy that as a consequence of a long, recent meeting with Truman he had a definite impression:

He was straightforward, decisive, simple, entirely honest. He, of course, has the limitations upon his judgment and wisdom that the limitations of his experience produce, but I think that he will learn fast and will inspire confidence. It seems to me a blessing that he is the President and not Henry Wallace.

Even I. F. Stone of The Nation, long an outspoken Wallace supporter, would write: “I hate to confess it, but I think Mr. Roosevelt was astute and farsighted in picking Mr. Truman rather than Mr. Wallace as his successor. At this particular moment in our history, Mr. Truman can do a better job.”

At home in Independence, editor William Southern wrote in the Examiner that the country was “in the hands of an honorable man, not just a politician.”

Among such old faithfuls as Eddie McKim, Ted Marks, John Snyder, Jim Pendergast, and Eddie Jacobson, there was never a doubt. “GET IN THERE AND PITCH. YOU CAN HANDLE IT,” Jim Pendergast cabled immediately from Kansas City. “I wish people knew him as I do,” Eddie Jacobson told a reporter.

At Grandview a day or so later, questioned by reporters, the mother of the new President offered as fair and memorable a comment as any: “I can’t really be glad he’s President because I am sorry President Roosevelt is dead. If he had been voted in, I would be out waving a flag, but it doesn’t seem right to be very happy or wave any flags now. Harry will get along all right.”

Truman was immensely pleased and proud of her. Her statement was “a jewel,” he wrote in his diary. “If it had been prepared by [the] best public relations [advisers] it could not have been better.”

Only gradually would he reveal his own feelings, making plain that if anyone was stunned by the turn of fate, or worried over the future, or distressed by the inadequacies of the man stepping into the place of Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman.

At the White House the difference was felt at once. Arriving at 9:00 the next morning at the West Wing, where a cluster of reporters were waiting, Truman stepped from the big White House Cadillac followed by Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press. Vaccaro had gone early to the Connecticut Avenue apartment. He had been standing alone on the curb outside the building hoping to catch a glimpse of the new President as he started off for his first day. Truman told him to hop in if he wanted a ride.

“There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping,” Truman had said as they headed downtown. “I pray God I can measure up to the task."

It was Friday, April 13, 1945, twenty-seven years to the day since he landed at Brest as a First Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force.

In the President’s office everything was as Roosevelt left it, the arrangement of furniture, his ship models, his naval prints on the apple green walls. Only the desk had been touched, cleared of its pictures and knick-knacks by Jonathan Daniels of the Roosevelt staff, who stood by waiting now as Truman came in. He felt the presence of Roosevelt acutely, Truman later wrote, and so did Daniels, whose personal ties to Roosevelt went back to World War I, when his father, Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, had been Roosevelt’s boss. “It seemed still Roosevelt’s desk and Roosevelt’s room,” Daniels remembered. “It seemed to me, indeed, almost Roosevelt’s sun which came in the wide south windows and touched Truman’s thick glasses.” He watched as Truman sat in the President’s high-backed leather chair, rolled back and forth, turned, leaned back, as if testing it, and he thought how pathetically undersized Truman looked.

The first visitor was Eddie McKim. “Eddie, I’m sorry as hell about last night,” Truman greeted him, getting up from the desk. McKim, who was extremely nervous and straining at formality, felt he must remain standing as Truman sat down again. He didn’t know what to do in front of a President, McKim blurted. Truman told him to come over and have a chair. When McKim remarked that he would be heading home that afternoon, Truman asked him to stay on, saying, “I need you.”

He saw Secretary Stettinius twice, for forty-five minutes that morning and again at the end of the day. (At the conclusion of the morning meeting Truman asked Stettinius for a written report summarizing diplomatic problems in Europe and said he wanted it by the close of business.) Stimson, Marshall, Leahy, Forrestal, and Admiral Ernest J. King came in about an hour before noon to sketch in general terms the status of the war. And beginning about three o’clock he talked about “everything from Teheran to Yalta…everything under the sun,” with Jimmy Byrnes, who had flown in from Spartanburg, South Carolina, the night before, as soon as he heard the news.

The White House was in a state of chaos meanwhile. Several of the Roosevelt staff had been up all night making arrangements for the funeral. Reporters jammed the press room and lobby. The President was granting no interviews, they were told, yet apparently the President was taking almost any out-of-town call from friends. Once Byrnes departed, the door was opened to Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, who squeezed his immense bulk into one of the maple armchairs beside the President’s desk to carry on a half hour conversation that resulted in a widely syndicated article in which Roberts made much of the fact that Truman was the typical, average American. “What a test of democracy if it works!” he wrote.

But the big surprise of the day came at noon, when suddenly, defying tradition, Truman left the White House and drove to the Hill, saying he wanted to be with his friends. A lunch had been arranged in Les Biffle’s office for a select seventeen from both parties and both houses, but mostly from the Senate. Truman arrived at the Capitol with full presidential entourage—cars, police, Secret Service—and walked surrounded by armed men down halls where only the day before he had walked free and alone. The lunch was private, reporters excluded. Pale and tense-looking, Truman took a drink and insisted on informality. The meal was salmon, cornbread, peas, and potatoes, and soon most of the group were calling him “Harry” again. He wanted to tell them in person, he said, that he needed their help in a “terrible job.” He felt overwhelmed and he didn’t mind saying so. What did they think of an address to a joint session on Monday, after the funeral? There was some discussion and indecision. He told them he would be coming and to prepare for it.

When, the lunch over, he came out into the hall still looking tense, a crowd of reporters stood waiting. “Isn’t this nice,” Truman said, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. “This is really nice.” In his years in the Senate he had made no enemies among the working press. Reporters liked him, he was relaxed, easy with them, liked them individually, considered several real friends.

“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

“For just a moment he had taken us into his confidence,” wrote Allen Drury, “and shown us frankly the frightening thing that had happened to him—shown us, who represented something, a free and easy camaraderie and naturalness to which he knew he could never, for the rest of his life, quite return.” Also, for a new, untried President to have come to the Hill in such fashion seemed an auspicious first move. “Characteristically he came to them. He did not, this first time, ask them to come to him,” wrote Drury.

To Republican Arthur Vandenberg, Truman’s surprise appearance on the Hill marked an end to years of “executive contempt for Congress” under Roosevelt. But among Roosevelt’s people, the reaction was altogether different, as Jonathan Daniels recorded. They took it as a sign of regression, from a strong, independent presidency to a lonely, perhaps subservient one. Daniels himself felt crushed and resentful, anything but admiring of Truman.

Signing his first official document late the afternoon of his first day, a proclamation announcing Roosevelt’s death, he felt strange writing his name, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Had he come into the office in normal fashion, there would have been two months grace after election day, time in which to get used to the idea and prepare himself. As it was, he had no time. He was President now and would be all the rest of the day, and all night, and all tomorrow and the next day and the next. He had been through the morning papers before breakfast. The war news ran on for pages. Ninth Army tanks had pushed beyond the Elbe River, nearly to the suburbs of Berlin. At some points, American and Russian forces were only seventy-five miles apart. The terrible Battle of Berlin was nearing its climax. In the Pacific, American infantry had landed on Bohol, last of the central Philippines still in enemy control. In one huge daylight raid more than four hundred B-29 Superfortresses had bombed Tokyo for two hours.

As the morning papers reported, the war thus far had cost 196,999 American lives, which, as Truman knew, was more than three times American losses in his own earlier war. The new total for American casualties in all categories—killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners—was 899,390, an increase in just one week of 6,481, or an average of more than 900 casualties a day. In the Pacific the cost of victory was rising steadily.

And he, not Roosevelt, was responsible now. He was the Commander in Chief—of armed forces exceeding 16 million men and women, of the largest naval armada in history, of 10 battleships, 27 aircraft carriers, 45 cruisers, of more planes, tanks, guns, money, and technology than ever marshaled by any one nation in all history, and in the critical last act of the most terrible war of all time. In their report that morning, the Chiefs of Staff had said fighting in Europe could last six months longer; in the Pacific, possibly another year and a half.

And what would follow? What might peace bring? Relations with Russia were deteriorating rapidly. The State Department report provided by Stettinius was hardly encouraging: “Since the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Government has taken a firm and uncompromising position on nearly every major question….” In Poland, now occupied by Soviet forces, the situation was “highly unsatisfactory,” with Soviet authorities failing repeatedly to keep agreements made at Yalta. The Russians were trying to “complicate the problem” by supporting their own Warsaw Provisional Polish Government to speak for Poland. There was no exchange of liberated prisoners. Direct appeals to Stalin had had little effect.

Until that afternoon the Soviets had been refusing to send their foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, to the San Francisco Conference. Now, suddenly, Stalin had changed his mind, as a gesture in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, a gesture that had been urged on him by the American ambassador in Moscow, Harriman. He would send Molotov, Stalin said, if the new President would request it—which Truman did at once, achieving thereby what appeared to be a first diplomatic breakthrough. But as Harriman himself wrote, the gesture resolved none of the basic difficulties. Churchill and the British government were more apprehensive than ever about Russia.

Truman had had no experience in relations with Britain or Russia, no firsthand knowledge of Churchill or Stalin. He didn’t know the right people. He didn’t know Harriman. He didn’t know his own Secretary of State, more than to say hello. He had no background in foreign policy, no expert or experienced advisers of his own to call upon for help. Most obviously, he was not Franklin Roosevelt. How many times would that be said, thought, written?

Roosevelt had done nothing to keep him informed or provide background on decisions and plans at the highest levels. Roosevelt, Truman would tell Margaret privately, “never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for peace after the war.” He was unprepared, bewildered. And frightened.

“It is needless to say that President Truman comes into this gigantic assignment under a handicap,” said the solemn editorial in that morning’s Washington Post.

He must pick up the work of a world-renowned statesman who had had more than 12 years of experience in the White House…[and] we should be less than candid at this grave moment…if we did not recognize the great disparity between Mr. Truman’s experience and the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.

He was the seventh man to have succeeded to the office after the death of a President, the first having been John Tyler of Virginia, to whom Truman mistakenly believed he was related through his great-grand-mother, Nancy Tyler Holmes. John Tyler had replaced William Henry Harrison in 1841, the year Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young migrated to Missouri, and Tyler had set an important precedent, by deciding to be President in name and in fact and not the Vice President acting as President, which many at the time thought proper, the Constitution being somewhat ambiguous on the subject. Truman was born during the White House years of Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded to the presidency after the assassination of Garfield, and in Truman’s lifetime two more vice presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, had become President following the deaths of McKinley and Harding. But with the exception of Andrew Johnson, no Vice President had ever succeeded so towering a figure as Franklin Roosevelt, and though Lincoln loomed larger than any President in history, Lincoln had not been a world leader, nor the Civil War a titanic, global conflict.

Truman felt great division within himself. Like John Tyler, he must be President, act presidential, but could he ever feel he was? “I’m still Harry Truman,” he had said several times to different people since 7:09 the evening before.

A Pentagon information officer who had been sent to the White House that morning with a statement to the overseas troops for the President to sign, was asked to wait in the Fish Room and would remember always the moment when a “small, gray man” walked in, put out his hand, and said, “I’m President Truman,” with the accent on the “I,” as though there might be some other President Truman.

On the one hand he was determined to establish that he was in fact in charge. On the other, he felt the constant, nearly overbearing presence of Roosevelt. He would have a portrait of Roosevelt—Roosevelt in his Navy cape turned as if facing a storm—hung to the right of the desk and, pointing to it, would tell visitors, “I’m trying to do what he would like.” Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, complained to friends, “I still can’t call that man [Truman] President.” But then Truman himself still thought of Roosevelt as President. “He’s the only one I ever think of as President,” he would write to Mrs. Roosevelt months later.

His own favorite President of the century, Woodrow Wilson, had had a brilliant academic career. Herbert Hoover had been a world-famous engineer. Franklin Roosevelt, heir to a great name, had been the popular governor of New York, the nation’s richest, most populous state. And who was he, Harry Truman? What qualifications had he beside such men, or so many others in public life who wanted the job?

Alben Barkley told Truman he must stop deprecating his ability to carry on. “Have confidence in yourself,” Barkley said. “If you do not, the people will lose confidence in you.”

Sam Rayburn came to deliver stern advice of another kind. “I have come down here to talk to you about you,” Rayburn began.

You have got many great hazards, and one of them is in this White House. I have been watching this thing a long time. I have seen people in the White House try to build a fence around the White House and keep the very people away from the President that he should see. That is one of your hazards. The special interests and the sycophants will stand in the rain a week to see you and will treat you like a king. They’ll come sliding in and tell you you’re the greatest man alive—but you know and I know you ain’t.

On Saturday morning, April 14, his second day in office, having decided to make John Snyder a federal loan official, Truman called Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to tell him that “the President” had made the appointment. Jones, understandably, asked if the President had made the decision before he died. “No,” snapped Truman. “He just made it now.”

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau arrived, intending to ask Truman a number of questions, as a way of assessing him. Truman said he did not wish to take up Morgenthau’s time. He asked for a comprehensive report on the nation’s financial standing and, as with Stettinius, he said he wanted it quickly, demonstrating that he, Harry Truman, was not on trial, Morgenthau was.

To Morgenthau, who had not known him, Truman seemed courteous as well as decisive. “But after all, he is a politician,” added Morgenthau in his diary, “and what is going on in his head only time will tell.”

When the train bearing Roosevelt’s body came into Union Station from Warm Springs later the morning of Saturday the 14th, Truman was waiting on the platform beside the Roosevelt family and flanked by the two men who had the most reason to see themselves in his place, Henry Wallace and Jimmy Byrnes. Truman had asked them to accompany him to the station, knowing the photographers would record the moment. It was a generous, respectful gesture on his part, but seen also as a mark of confidence. Like the lunch at the Capitol, it seemed exactly the right thing for him to have done.

The day was extremely warm and muggy, the sun burning through a haze. To the steady beat of muffled drums, the three men in their dark suits rode together in the long, slow funeral procession to the White House. Tremendous crowds stretched the length of Constitution Avenue, waiting to see the caisson and casket roll past pulled by six white horses. Never would he forget, Truman wrote, the sight of so many people in grief.

At midday the weather changed dramatically, with heavy clouds rushing in and the wind whipping the flags that stood at half-mast everywhere in the city. Then rain came in torrents. At the four o’clock service in the East Room, where several hundred had gathered—the Cabinet, Supreme Court, foreign diplomats, the Chiefs of Staff in uniform, Thomas E. Dewey, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—not one person thought to stand when Truman entered, nor did he appear to notice. With Bess and Margaret beside him, he sat motionless through the service, staring straight ahead at the flag-draped casket.

His schedule had been crowded all day. With the capital and nation in mourning, with the Roosevelt family still in residence, he had wanted no more attention than necessary drawn to activities in the West Wing—no further official pronouncements, nothing until Roosevelt was decently buried. Still, in the time between the return from the station and the East Room service, there had been a steady procession in and out of his office—Harry Hopkins, Ed Flynn, Admiral Leahy, Jimmy Byrnes. The longest session was with Hopkins, who had left a sickbed in Minnesota to attend the funeral and looked like death itself. Truman asked him how he felt. “Terrible,” Hopkins answered. “I knew what he meant,” Truman wrote. For nearly two hours they reviewed the history of the Roosevelt years, talked about Stalin and Churchill, as the rain beat against the tall windows. Lunch was brought in and Hopkins pulled his chair up to the desk.

There were no eulogies in the East Room service, at Mrs. Roosevelt’s request. Two hymns were sung, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and “Faith of Our Fathers.” After the final prayer, Bishop Angus Dun, again as Mrs. Roosevelt wished, read the famous line from the 1933 inaugural address, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself….”

On Sunday morning, April 15, after a night trip by presidential train, many of the same group were gathered at the graveside in the rose garden of Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate. The weather, mercifully, had turned fair and cool. It was a perfect spring day, the Hudson Valley glorious with spring green, the river sparkling. Truman stood with Bess and Margaret, hat in hand, his head bowed as Taps were sounded.

II

The first test was his address to Congress the afternoon of Monday, April 16, and he passed with flying colors. Indeed, for days, for weeks, he seemed to do nearly everything right. Congress, the press, the public liked what they saw and heard—even a little mix-up at the start of the speech, when Truman began before he was supposed to.

He came down the aisle to a standing ovation, went directly to the rostrum, opened a large black looseleaf notebook, and started in, addressing not just the packed chamber but an enormous radio audience. Speaker Rayburn leaned forward. “Just a minute, Harry, let me introduce you,” he interrupted, his voice coming over clearly on the battery of microphones. In a phone call only that morning, Rayburn had told him, “Mr. President, you are not ‘Harry’ to me any more.” But in his own excitement Rayburn had forgotten and the moment—amusing, poignant—would be recalled for years.

The speech lasted just fifteen minutes. Speaking slowly and carefully, Truman was interrupted by applause again and again, seventeen times before he finished.

“With great humility,” he said, “I call upon all Americans to help me keep our nation united in defense of those ideals which have been so eloquently proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt.

“I want in turn to assure my fellow Americans and all those who love peace and liberty throughout the world that I will support and defend those ideals with all my strength and all my heart. That is my duty and I shall not shirk it.”

People everywhere felt relief, even hope, as they listened. He seemed a good man, so straightforward, so determined to do his job. The voice and accent would take some getting used to—he pronounced “United States” as “U-nited States,” said “nation” almost as though it rhymed with “session,” at times “I” came close to “Ah”—but he sounded as though he meant every word.

He would prosecute the war without letup, Truman said, work for a lasting peace, work to improve the lot of the common people.

All of us are praying for a speedy victory. Every day peace is delayed costs a terrible toll. The armies of liberation are bringing to an end Hitler’s ghastly threat to dominate the world. Tokyo rocks under the weight of our bombs…. I want the entire world to know that this direction must and will remain—unchanged and unhampered!

“Our demand has been, and it remains—Unconditional Surrender,” he declared, his voice rising suddenly in pitch on the last two words, which brought a storm of applause.

He spoke of the necessity for a “strong and lasting” United Nations organization. Isolationism was a thing of the past. There could be no more safety behind geographical barriers, not ever again.

“The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.”

The conservative columnist David Lawrence, watching from the press gallery, wrote that between the man on the rostrum and the audience before him there was a “bond of friendship” such as few presidents had ever experienced.

Much of the speech had been written on the train returning from Hyde Park. Jimmy Byrnes and Sam Rosenman, author of innumerable Roosevelt speeches, had played a large part. But the conclusion, delivered to a hushed chamber, was entirely Truman’s own. His face lifted, his hands raised, in a voice of solemn petition, he said:

At this moment I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon: “Give therefore Thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?” I ask only to be a good and faithful servant of my Lord and my people.

The old struggle to determine good from evil—it had been with him for so very long. “[I am] just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right,” he had once told Bess Wallace in a love letter from the farm.

The applause, sudden and spontaneous, was such as few had ever heard in the chamber. Senators, members of Congress, old friends wanted him to succeed in a way they had not felt before. And because he wasn’t Roosevelt, he would need all the help he could get. Because he wasn’t Roosevelt, it was easier to feel a common bond. The morning after he became President, Republicans in the Senate had filed into their big conference room No. 335 and after passing a resolution of regret over Roosevelt’s death, talked of Harry Truman’s strengths and shortcomings, and decided it was no time to rock the boat. “He’s one of us,” reporters were told afterward. “He’s a grand fellow, he knows us, thinks like us.” Even those inclined to fight him felt obliged to help him get his feet on the ground. “We know how we’d feel thrust into such a job, and we know Harry Truman would be one of the first to help us.”

Messages of approval poured into the White House. “I was tired of Eastern accents,” wrote a woman from Indiana. Midwestern native good sense meant good things for the future, said a letter from Illinois. (“His diction comes out of the wide open spaces and will find an echo out of these same wide-open spaces,” the Washington Post had said.) “Your modesty, your humility, your earnestness, have captivated the hearts of your American people,” a woman in Georgia assured him. “Friend Harry,” another letter began. There was heartfelt sympathy for his “tremendous burden,” his “terrible responsibility.” He was urged to trust in God, keep his health, get enough sleep, eat right. Labor unions, groups of company employees, veterans organizations, local chapters of the Communist Party, fraternal orders, and church groups pledged their cooperation. One correspondent from Port Jervis, New York, said that while he had “never known a man named Harry who really amounted to a damn,” he would lend his support anyway.

From the Time and Life Building in New York, publisher Henry Luce informed Truman that at a meeting of his business friends he had found unanimous confidence in “your ability to discharge successfully the great duties of your office in your own way.” In Topeka, a doctor who was delivering a baby during the broadcast of the speech stopped to shake hands with the newborn citizen—to congratulate him for making his entrance at so auspicious a moment in history. “May I say,” wrote the doctor to Truman, “that in our locality I have never seen such unity of purpose as is manifest toward you and toward the administration you are beginning.” And he was a Republican, the doctor said.

Every new President had his “honeymoon” with Congress and the country, of course, but this, the feeling that Truman was “one of us,” was something more. The day of the speech the Trumans moved from their apartment to Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to stay temporarily until Mrs. Roosevelt moved out. For several days, his Secret Service convoy keeping step, Truman walked briskly across the street to work at about eight o’clock every morning. Once a taxi slowed, the driver put his head out the window and called, “Good luck, Harry,” as if speaking for the whole country.

“Well, I have had the most momentous, and the most trying time anyone could possibly have,” his mother and sister in Grandview read in a letter written from Blair House the night of April 16.

This afternoon we moved to this house, diagonally across the street (Penn. Ave.) from the White House, until the Roosevelts have had time to move out of the White House. We tried staying at the apartment, but it wouldn’t work. I can’t move without at least ten Secret Service men and twenty policemen. People who lived in our apartment couldn’t get in and out without a pass. So—we moved out with suitcases. Our furniture is still there and will be for some time…. But I’ve paid the rent for this month and will pay for another month if they don’t get the old White House redecorated by that time.

My greatest trial was today when I addressed the Congress. It seemed to go over all right, from the ovation I received. Things have gone so well I’m almost as scared as I was when Mrs. R. told me what had happened. Maybe it will come out all right.

That same day the Russians had begun their final drive on Berlin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov concentrating twenty thousand guns to clear a path.

The first press conference, the next morning, April 17, was the largest that had ever been held in the White House, with more than three hundred reporters packed shoulder to shoulder in the President’s office, those in front pressed against his desk. “The new President made an excellent impression. He stood behind his desk and greeted the correspondents smilingly. He answered their questions directly and avoided none of the queries put to him,” recorded another of the Roosevelt staff, a press aide named Eben Ayers.

Truman began with a reading of the same wartime ground rules as established by Roosevelt. All off-the-record comments were to be kept in confidence. Background material must remain that only and not be attributed to the President, who was to be quoted directly only when he gave his express permission. With so much to do, Truman said, he expected to be able to hold only one press conference a week.

Would he go personally to the San Francisco Conference? No. Had he taken any steps to meet with Churchill and Stalin? Not as yet. What about David Lilienthal, whose term as head of TVA was about to expire? He was not ready to discuss appointments. How did he stand on race relations? His record in the Senate spoke for itself.

“Do you expect to see Mr. Molotov before he goes to San Francisco?”

“Yes. He is going to stop and pay his respects to the President of the United States. He should.”

Admiral Leahy, who had witnessed so many Roosevelt press conferences, was delighted with the President’s “direct” performance. Truman had already asked Leahy to stay on as Chief of Staff, with the understanding that he, Leahy, would always speak his mind. The old sailor, now past seventy, was also known for his “direct” performance.

The applause at the end of the session was unprecedented. To reporters long accustomed to Roosevelt, who had made every press conference a kind of circuitous game and charm show, the change was startling and to most, extremely welcome. Privately, Truman felt he had lived five lifetimes in five days.

Three days later, when he called them in again to say his old boyhood friend Charlie Ross was to be the new press secretary, replacing Steve Early, who had retired after twelve years in the White House, the announcement received unqualified approval. Ross had first come to the capital as a young reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1918, and in 1931 won a Pulitzer Prize for a study on the effects of the Depression. He was widely liked and respected. Steve Early had been hard-boiled. Many reporters were afraid of him. Ross was more professorial and patient, gentle-mannered, soft-spoken. “There is no more beloved or more highly regarded newspaperman in this city than Charlie Ross,” said the Washington Post.

Hiring Ross had been Bess’s idea. Truman had invited him to Blair House, where they talked for two consecutive evenings before Ross agreed. He was nearly sixty and understood perfectly how demanding the job would be. It also meant a severe cut in salary, from $35,000 a year at the Post-Dispatch to $10,000. “But Charlie,” Truman told him, “you aren’t the kind of man who can say ’no’ to the President of the United States.” Later they had put through a call to Independence to their old teacher, Tillie Brown, to tell her the news.

The reporters wanted to be sure they had her name right.

“Miss Tillie Brown,” Truman said. “Matilda Brown. We always called her Tillie…”

Was that in grade school?

“High school. She taught Charlie and me English.”

(In her own interview with reporters, Tillie Brown would remember Charlie as a “naturally smart boy,” while Harry was “a bright boy who had to dig.”)

On a first tour of the West Wing offices, Truman was annoyed to find that the half-dozen press photographers who covered the White House were allowed none of the comforts of the press room, but confined to a cramped, windowless space of their own. This was how it had always been, he was told. It was not the way it would be any longer, he said. Photographers were to have the same privileges as reporters, beginning immediately. “He made first-class citizens of us,” remembered photographer George Tames of The New York Times, whose first presidential assignment, the year before, had been to photograph Roosevelt and Truman at lunch under the Jackson magnolia.

Reporters found they now had to be on duty at 8:00 in the morning, rather than 10:00 or 10:30 when Roosevelt’s day had begun. They complained jokingly to Truman of having to get up in the middle of the night to be on time for work. “Stick with me and I’ll make men of you yet,” he assured them with a grin.

Among staff holdovers attitudes were changing appreciably, almost by the day, the more they saw of him. He was friendly, considerate, interested in them individually. His physical energy seemed phenomenal and the most startling difference of all from what had been. Lieutenant George M. Elsey, a young Naval Intelligence officer assigned to the top-secret Map Room, remembered being astonished by the simple realization that here was a President who walked, and quickly. “He was alert, sharp…he looked good, very vigorous, very strong,” Elsey recalled. The Secret Service, long accustomed to a President who could move only when they moved him, found themselves suddenly on the go, with a man who could pick up and leave for lunch on the Hill, or anything else he wished, at any moment. With his braces and wheelchair, Roosevelt had been virtually their prisoner.

“See, with President Roosevelt, he was a man you had under control,” remembered Floyd M. Boring of the White House Secret Service detail. “He couldn’t move without you…. Now, here’s a guy, you had to move when he moved. And he moved fast! He was a whiz, just like that! He’d go—and went! And you had to go with him. So, we had to revise our thinking, and the whole strategy of the place changed because of his ability to be in movement and motion.”

One day at noon Truman decided to make an impromptu visit to the Hamilton National Bank a few blocks from the White House at 14th and G. He simply put on his hat and went out the door, with the result that he created a half-hour traffic jam. The lesson learned was that the bank would have to come to the President, not the President to the bank.

Jonathan Daniels, who at first had considered Truman “tragically inadequate,” began to see him in new light. Here, Daniels decided, was no ordinary man. “The cliché of the ordinary American in the White House was a snob phrase,” Daniels would write, “invented by those who, after Roosevelt’s death, hoped to minimize the Presidency.” Further, Truman was not poorly prepared for the presidency, as commonly said. Because he knew so much of American life, because he had experienced himself so many of the “vicissitudes of all the people,” he was really exceptionally well prepared. (In time to come the historian Samuel Eliot Morison would take the same view, calling Truman as well prepared for the presidency as any of his immediate predecessors.) It was Truman’s “too evident modesty” that was so misleading, Daniels decided. Asked by the President to stay on a while longer, he gladly agreed.

Sam Rosenman, a dedicated Roosevelt adviser, press aide Eben Ayers, David Niles, who had handled minority issues and patronage for Roosevelt, and Bill Hassett, Roosevelt’s correspondence secretary, had all, like Daniels, talked of quitting at first chance. Now, when asked to stay by Truman, they too accepted.

Bill Hassett, who had been with Roosevelt at the time of his death at Warm Springs, wrote in his diary on Monday, April 16:

To the White House this morning at the usual time, but with a strange feeling—impossible to realize that F.D.R’s day was done and another had taken over…. The President sent for me. He was very gracious; invited me to remain on the job; frank and forthright in manner. Said that unexpectedly he had been called upon to shoulder the greatest responsibilities, in the discharge of which he would need all the help and cooperation he could get and added, “I need you too.” His attitude toward his duties and obligations magnificent.

None of the staff, however, thought much of the people Truman was installing. “Missourians are most in evidence,” wrote Ayers privately, “and there is a feeling of an attempt by the ‘gang’ to move in.” After a visit to the White House, the journalist Joseph Alsop wrote to his cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, in dismay. In Franklin’s time, it had been a great seat of world power. Now the place was like “the lounge of the Lion’s Club of Independence, Missouri, where one is conscious chiefly of the odor of ten-cent cigars and the easy laughter evoked by the new smoking room story.”

Eddie McKim, clearly out of his depth, made much of his own importance and on occasion drank too much. Jonathan Daniels thought McKim was “weird.” Harry Vaughan, loud and jolly, seemed to serve no purpose beyond comic relief. A strange figure named Johnny Maragon, a former Kansas City bootblack who was in and out of Vaughan’s office, claiming to be the new head of White House transportation, looked to Eben Ayers exactly like a Prohibition gangster. Hugh Fulton, meantime, bragged of his closeness to the President and the lead part he would be playing in policy matters as the President’s speechwriter, once things settled down.

“We were all a strange lot to them and vice versa,” remembered Sam Rosenman. “I had never heard of any of them before they moved in.”

Only two of Truman’s own people appear to have made a favorable impression—Matt Connelly, who would be the President’s appointments secretary, and Rose Conway from Kansas City, a shy, industrious “little bird of a woman” in her late forties who had joined Vice President Truman’s staff only weeks before and who would serve as the President’s secretary.

But McKim would soon be gone. With great regret Truman told him it would be best if he went home to Omaha. (“Well, he was a sergeant in my battery once, I busted him and I can bust him again,” Matt Connelly would remember Truman saying.) Nor was Hugh Fulton to have a place. As Truman had rid himself of the devoted Vic Messall after his first term in the Senate, so he now sent Fulton packing. Messall’s downfall appears to have been some form of financial scheming that Truman found unacceptable. Fulton, it appears, was guilty primarily of sounding his own horn. To everyone’s surprise, the long-serving, unquestionably astute Fulton was offered no official post, nothing whatever, and apparently because he had boasted too often and too conspicuously of his own importance, Truman, for all his reluctance ever to fire anyone, could not tolerate what he called “Potomac Fever,” which he described as a prevalent, ludicrous Washington disease characterized by a swelling of the head to abnormal proportions.

Harry Vaughan, who struck many as the most miscast figure of the lot, remained, as the President’s military aide. When Truman made him brigadier general, it seemed to many a bigger joke than the stories Vaughan told. Vaughan would become to the official family a figure not unlike Truman’s Uncle Harry, a big, voluble, easygoing pal, which gave Vaughan singular importance. Truman seemed to need him around and would tolerate no criticism of him. “I’m still with ya, Chief,” Vaughan would boom with a grin. Vaughan’s stories, contrary to what was said, were not filthy, but more of the barnyard kind. Truman liked earthy humor but never told stories that had to do with sex, nor did he care to hear them. Also contrary to the popular impression, Vaughan never took a drink. Nobody disliked him, though some worried he could mean trouble down the line. “The fact is,” wrote Ayers, “Vaughan, while likeable, seems to lack balance and tact and a sense of proportion.”

In later years, it would be said by some who knew Truman well that for him Harry Vaughan was the fool in the Shakespearean sense, the fool who spoke wisdom, who could cut through the obfuscation and insincerity of so much that a President had to listen to day in, day out, who was incapable of posturing or pretense, and whose occasional uncouth moments, the very lack of “balance and tact and a sense of proportion” that upset people like Eben Ayers, provided not only laughter for Truman but a way of bringing everyone else back down to earth a little.

Truman liked a variety of people around him. He wanted contrasts in style and outlook. It was essential, he thought. The country, after all, was composed of all kinds and he understood how many Harry Vaughans there were. Importantly, Truman also knew from experience how extremely loyal Vaughan was, and for now he needed all the loyalty possible.

When Vaughan brought him some phone taps made by the FBI—a common practice under Roosevelt—and asked if he was interested, Truman glanced at a few pages that concerned the activities of the wife of a White House aide and said he had no time for such foolishness. “Tell them I don’t authorize any such thing,” he said.

Truman had little use for the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt, who had liked the way Hoover got results and greatly enjoyed the spicy secrets Hoover passed on to him about the private lives of important people. It had been Roosevelt, in 1936, who had quietly ordered Hoover to begin gathering political information, a policy Truman strongly disliked. Truman considered Hoover and the FBI a direct threat to civil liberties, and he made no effort now, as Roosevelt had, to ingratiate himself with Hoover—as Hoover saw at once and found infuriating.

Hoover had chosen an FBI agent with a hometown, Truman connection, Morton Chiles, Jr., one of the big Chiles family of Independence, to call at the White House as Hoover’s emissary—to explain to the President that if there was anything the FBI could do for him, he had only to say the word. But having courteously thanked the young man, Truman told him to inform Mr. Hoover that any time the President of the United States wished the services of the FBI, he would make his request through the Attorney General. From that point on, according to a later account by one of Hoover’s assistants, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds.”

“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman would write in his diary after only a month as President. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail…. This must stop….”

Very likely, Truman’s dislike of Hoover had something to do also with the part Hoover and his agents had played in bringing down Tom Pendergast, though he is not known ever to have said so.

Vaughan, nonetheless, appears to have thought well of Hoover, or at least to have liked dealing with Hoover behind the scenes. In time Vaughan would request an FBI phone tap on Thomas Corcoran, the celebrated “Tommy the Cork,” a former Roosevelt aide and Washington attorney, who was said to know everyone of importance in town and was thought to be working against Truman by leaking denigrating material to influential liberals and the press. Truman disliked and distrusted Corcoran, as Vaughan knew. The justification for the tap was White House security, but it was political surveillance pure and simple, and as much as Truman disapproved of such practices—and his contempt for Hoover notwithstanding—he gave his consent. The tap, as it turned out, produced nothing of consequence. Still, Hoover would continue to regard Vaughan as his friend at the White House.

In his first week as President, Truman signed a bill authorizing payment of $135.67 that for sixty-seven years the government had owed to one Charles Dougherty, Sr., for overtime work performed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the year 1879. He signed the Mexican Water Treaty that had been before the Senate his last day presiding there. He received his first foreign dignitary, the very elegant British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who later telegraphed Churchill that the new President seemed “honest and friendly,” and a delegation of Republican senators who had seldom ever set foot in the Executive Office in the Roosevelt years. Robert A. Taft, who led the group, had not been to the White House since 1932. George Aiken of Vermont, glad to see so much all-around good feeling for Truman, was sure it wouldn’t last. “He’ll make enemies sooner or later,” Aiken told Allen Drury later. “If he doesn’t make enemies he just won’t be a very good President, that’s all.”

He saw Sam Rayburn, Bob Hannegan; Huseyin Ragip Baydur, the Turkish ambassador; Sergio Osmeña, president of the Philippines; T. V. Soong, foreign minister of China; Georges Bidault, the French ambassador; his own brother Vivian and Fred Canfil, who took turns sitting in his chair. He was photographed with three survivors of the Iwo Jima flag raising—Pfc. René Gagnon, Pharmacist Mate John H. Bradley, and Pfc. Ira Hayes—and with five-year-old Margaret Ann Forde, the child of a disabled serviceman, as she pinned a poppy on his lapel to launch a fund drive for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Between times, he decided to make Jimmy Byrnes his Secretary of State, and though the announcement would not be made until weeks later, word spread quickly. On Capitol Hill the feeling was he could have made no better choice. Byrnes knew the ropes in Washington as few men did; he understood the Senate and the workings of the White House from experience; he knew Churchill; he had met Stalin. Roosevelt had thought him the man best equipped to be President, and as Secretary of State, he, not Stettinius, would be next in line for the presidency, a consideration that weighed heavily in Truman’s decision.

Sam Rosenman warned Truman that he was making a mistake. Rosenman had become highly cynical about Byrnes, considered him a man primarily interested in himself. “I don’t think you know Jimmy Byrnes, Mr. President,” Rosenman said. “You think you do. In the bonhomie of the Senate, he’s one kind of fellow. But I think you will regret this and if I were you I wouldn’t do it.”

“It was a wonderful relief to preceding conferences with our former Chief to see the promptness and snappiness with which Truman took up each matter and decided it,” Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote after a Cabinet meeting. “There were no long drawn out ‘soliloquies’ from the President, and the whole conference was thoroughly businesslike so that we actually covered two or three more matters than we had expected to discuss.”

Accompanied by Admiral Leahy, Truman went frequently to the Map Room, which had been established by Roosevelt on the ground floor of the main house as a means for him to follow the course of the war, an idea Roosevelt had borrowed from Churchill, who had a similar arrangement at 10 Downing Street. The low-ceilinged room was under tight security. There were blackout curtains at its single window and large maps covering the walls, these filled with colored pins indicating the latest disposition of ships and armies. To Truman, who had been trying to follow the war on his old World War I maps tacked to the wall of his Senate office, the place was a wonder. “Changes in the battle situation were immediately marked…as messages came in from commanders in the field,” he wrote. “Messages came constantly throughout the day and night so that our military picture was always accurate up to the moment.” Leahy was struck by how much world geography and military history Truman knew, and how quickly he absorbed new information. An assistant to the naval aide, Lieutenant William Rigdon, who had been on duty at the White House since 1942, said later of Truman that he never knew anyone to work so hard “to get on the inside of all that had taken place.”

He saw the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold D. Smith, who said he would always be bringing him problems, and on Friday, April 20, he saw Rabbi Stephen Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, to discuss the question of resettlement for Jewish refugees in Palestine. Buchenwald, largest of the Nazi death camps, had been liberated. “I pray you believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” Edward R. Murrow had broadcast from the scene. However, a warning from the State Department that the problem of Palestine was “highly complex” had already crossed Truman’s desk. Rabbi Wise, whose appointment was at 11:45, was given fifteen minutes only. At noon Ambassador Harriman arrived.

W. Averell Harriman was the son of E. H. Harriman, the “Little Giant” of Wall Street who ran the Union Pacific Railroad and was said to have feared neither God nor J. P. Morgan. The son looked nothing like his father. He Was tall slim, handsome as the man in the Arrow Collar, as was said, though somewhat cheerless in manner. His low, cultured voice could also lapse into a monotone that some who didn’t know him mistakenly took as a sign of low vitality.

As heir to one of the great American fortunes, Harriman had grown up in luxury surpassing anything known by his friend Franklin Roosevelt. The Harriman estate on the Hudson comprised 20 square miles, included forty miles of bridlepaths and a stone château of one hundred rooms. Young Averell had been to Groton, them Yale, and after his father’s death was virtually handed the Union Pacific, eventually becoming its chairman of the board. He was an art collector—Cézanne, Picasso—and at one point, the country’s fourth-ranking polo player. But he was also a tenacious worker, who had built his own shipping empire and, at age forty, helped found the immensely successful and respected Wall street banking firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman. Until joining the New Deal, he might have been the model for the kind of man that Harry Truman, with his Jacksonian Populist faith, believed to be the root cause of most of the country’s troubles, and that Truman had earlier, in the heat of his railroad investigations, castigated unmercifully on the floor of the Senate. Harriman had what his number two man in Moscow, George Kennan, called “a keen appreciation of great personal power.”

As ambassador to Russia since October 1943, he was known to work eighteen to twenty hours a day. His long, detailed reports were famous at the State Department. In all he had spent more time with Stalin than had any American, or any other diplomat. At the moment he appeared extremely tired and worried. There was a slight tick, a sort of wink, in his right eye.

Truman had never met Harriman until now, nor had he ever really worked with anyone of such background. Harriman was another new experience, and the first of several men of comparable education and eastern polish—Charles Bohlen, John J. McCloy, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson, Robert A. Lovett—who were to play vital roles in Truman’s administration. Even the redoubtable Henry stimson was as yet to Truman a remote presence.

Accompanying Harriman now were Stettinius, Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, and Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, the department’s Russian expert. Stettinius made the introductions, but in the half hour following, he, Grew, and Bohlen said very little.

Truman asked for a rundown of the most urgent problems concerning the Soviet Union.

The Russians had two contradictory policies, Harriman began. They wanted to cooperate with the United States and Great Britain, and they wanted to extend control over their neighboring states in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, some within Stalin’s circle mistook American generosity, and readiness to cooperate as a sign of “softness” and this had led Stalin to think he could do largely as he pleased. Nonetheless, it was Harriman’s view that the Soviets would risk no break with the United States. Their need of financial help after the war would be too great, and for this reason the United States could and should stand firm on vital issues.

Truman said he was not afraid of the Russians and intended to be firm. And fair, of course. “And anyway the Russians need us more than we need them.”

Harriman had wondered how much Truman knew of recent correspondence between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, as well as his own dispatches, and was pleased to find it was quite a lot. Truman had been reading steadily from the Map Room files, night after night, so much that he feared he might be seriously straining his eyes.

Concerns about the Soviet Union had prevailed all through the war but had taken a more serious cast by the winter of 1944–45, even before Yalta. “I can testify,” wrote one State Department official, “that there was no time when the danger from the Soviet Union was not a topic of anxious conversation among officers of the State Department; and by the winter of 1944–45, as the day of victory approached, it became the predominant theme in Washington.”

In March, Churchill warned that the Yalta agreements on Poland were breaking down, that Poland was losing its frontier, its freedom. Harriman reported that American prisoners of war who had been liberated by the Russians were being kept in Russian camps in “unbelievable” conditions. (At lunch one day with Anna Rosenberg, Roosevelt had banged his hand down on the arm of his wheelchair, saying, “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin.”) In April an American-British effort to negotiate a surrender of the German armies in Italy brought a stinging cable from Stalin, who accused Roosevelt and Churchill of trying to bring off their own separate peace with the Nazis. Roosevelt, infuriated, had kept his response moderate:

It would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life material and treasure.

Churchill cabled Roosevelt urging a “blunt stand” against the Russians, and Roosevelt responded, “We must not permit anybody to entertain a false impression that we are afraid.”

A secret OSS report for the President dated April 2, ten days prior to Roosevelt’s death—a report since made available to Truman—warned that once the war was over, the United States could be faced with a situation more perilous even than the rise of Japan and Nazi Germany:

Russia will emerge from the present conflict as by far the strongest nation in Europe and Asia—strong enough, if the United States should stand aside, to dominate Europe and at the same time to establish her hegemony over Asia. Russia’s natural resources and manpower are so great that within relatively few years she can be much more powerful than either Germany or Japan has ever been. In the easily foreseeable future Russia may well outrank even the United States in military potential.

Russia might revert to the predatory tradition of the czars and “pursue a policy of expansion aimed at bringing all Europe and perhaps Asia under her control,” the report warned. “If she should succeed in such a policy she would become a menace more formidable to the United States than any yet known….”

Harriman had become so exercised over the state of Soviet-American relations that he had wanted to fly home to Washington even before word came of Roosevelt’s death. On April 6, in a lengthy cable to the State Department, he had said the time had come when “we must…make it plain to the Soviet Government that they cannot expect our cooperation on terms laid down by them.”

“We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interest,” he declared in another strongly worded report.

The Soviet Union and the minority governments that the Soviets are forcing on the people of Eastern Europe have an entirely different objective. We must clearly recognize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know and respect it.

Roosevelt had undergone a profound change in outlook. Stalin was not a man of his word, he confided to Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times before leaving for Warm Springs.

Still, he had refused to give up trying to work with the Russians. In a last message to Stalin sent the day of his death, Roosevelt said that in the future there must be no more mistrust between them, no more such “minor misunderstandings” as over the German surrender issue. (Before passing the message along to Stalin, Harriman had urged the deletion of the word “minor,” but Roosevelt refused.) To Churchill that same day he wrote: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out….” He added only: “We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”

Harriman told Truman that Russian control in Poland or Romania meant not just influence over foreign policy, but use of secret police and an end to freedom of speech. What they were faced with, Harriman said, using a phrase Truman would not forget, was a “barbarian invasion” of Europe.

American policy must be reconsidered. Any illusion that the Soviet Union was likely to act in accordance with the accepted principles in international affairs should be abandoned. He was not pessimistic, Harriman insisted. He believed workable relations with Russia were possible, with concessions on both sides.

Truman said he understood that 100 percent cooperation from Stalin was unattainable. He would be happy with 85 percent.

Molotov was due in Washington in two days. Truman said that if the Polish issue were not settled as agreed at Yalta, then the Senate would very likely reject American participation in the United Nations, and that he would tell this to Molotov “in words of one syllable.”

Harriman told the President how relieved he was “that we see eye to eye.”

On a first inspection tour of the private quarters at the White House, their future home, Bess and Margaret were crestfallen. “The White House upstairs is a mess…I was so depressed,” wrote Margaret. The Roosevelts had lived comfortably among possessions shabby and fine, old, new, ordinary, and sentimental, with little concern for color harmony or ever any attempt at show. They had lived as they had at home, like an old-fashioned country gentleman’s family of “comfortable circumstances.” Mrs. Roosevelt had left untouched the $50,000 allocated by Congress for upkeep and repair on the house. Her focus was on other concerns.

Carpets were threadbare. Walls looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in years and were covered with lighter patches where pictures had hung. The scant remaining furniture was in sad disrepair. Some of the draperies had actually rotted. It looked like a ghost house, remembered the assistant head usher, J. B. West, who led the tour. Mrs. Roosevelt had told Bess she could expect to see rats.

The group that filed into the Oval Office for what was to be a landmark meeting at two o’clock the afternoon of Monday, April 23, was the same as Franklin Roosevelt would have assembled for the same purpose. There was no one from Truman’s old Senate staff, no new foreign policy adviser or Russian expert of Truman’s own choice, no Missouri “gang,” no one at all from Missouri but Truman. They were all Roosevelt’s people: Stettinius, Stimson, Forrestal, Marshall, King, Leahy, Harriman, Bohlen, Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, and General John R. Deane, who was head of the Moscow military mission.

Molotov was expected shortly. He had arrived in Washington the day before, and he and Truman had already met briefly and quite amicably after dinner at Blair House, where Molotov, too, was staying. Truman had spoken of his admiration for the part Russia played in the war and told the Soviet minister he “stood squarely behind all commitments and agreements taken by our late President” and would do everything he could to follow that path. It had been Truman’s first encounter with a Russian and it had gone smoothly. But now Stettinius reported the Russians were insisting on their puppet government in Poland regardless of American opinion. Truman remarked that so far agreements with the Russians seemed always a one-way street. If the Russians did not want to cooperate, they could “go to hell.”

Asking for opinions, he turned first to the elderly Henry Stimson, who thought it extremely unfortunate the Polish issue had ever come to such a head. It seemed unnecessary, too hurried, too dangerous. Stimson was greatly alarmed, “for fear we are rushing into a situation where we would find ourselves breaking our relations with Russia….” The United States must be very careful, try to resolve things without a “headlong collision.”

Forrestal strongly disagreed. The situation in Poland was not an isolated example. The Russians were moving in on Bulgaria, Romania. Better to have a showdown now than later, he said. The real issue, added Harriman, was whether the United States would be party to a program of Soviet domination in Poland.

Admiral Leahy, from his experience at Yalta, was sure the Russians would never allow free elections in Poland, and warned that a break with the Soviet Union over Poland could be a “serious matter.”

Truman broke in to say he had no intention of issuing an ultimatum to Molotov. He wanted only to be firm and clear.

Stimson interjected that in their concern about Eastern Europe, the Russians “perhaps were being more realistic than we in regard to their own security.”

From his experience in Moscow, said General Deane, any sign of fear on the part of the United States would lead nowhere with the Russians.

Agreeing with Stimson, General Marshall urged caution. His great concern, Marshall said, was that Russia might delay participation in the war against Japan “until we have done all the dirty work.”

Stimson found himself feeling pity for Truman, as he wrote later in his diary:

I am very sorry for the President because he is new on his job and he has been brought into a situation which ought not to have been allowed to come this way. I think the meeting at Yalta was primarily responsible for it because it dealt a good deal in altruism and idealism instead of stark realities on which Russia is strong….

As the meeting ended, it was clear the tone of American dealings with Russia would now take a different turn. Truman remarked that he would follow the advice of the majority.

“Indeed, he did,” remembered Bohlen.

A survivor of revolutions, Siberia, purges, and war, Vyacheslav Molotov was one of the few original Bolsheviks still in power in the Soviet Union, his importance second only to that of Stalin. Molotov was tough and extremely deliberate in manner, with never a sign of emotion, not a hint of human frailty except for a stutter. In his customary dark blue European suit, with his pince-nez and small mustache, he looked like a rather smug English schoolmaster.

Molotov arrived at the President’s office promptly at 5:30, accompanied by his interpreter, V. N. Pavlov, and the Russian ambassador, Andrei Gromyko. With Bohlen serving as his interpreter, Truman came directly to the point. He wanted progress on the Polish question, he said. The United States would recognize no government in Poland that failed to provide free elections. He intended to go ahead with the United Nations, irrespective of differences over “other matters,” and he hoped that Moscow would bear in mind how greatly American foreign policy depended on public support, and that American economic assistance programs after the war would require the vote of Congress.

Molotov said the only acceptable basis for Allied cooperation was for the three governments to treat one another as equals. The Poles had been working against the Red Army, he insisted. Truman cut him short. He was not interested in propaganda, Truman said. He wished Molotov to inform Stalin of his concern over the failure of the Soviet government to live up to its agreements.

According to Bohlen’s later account, Molotov turned “ashy” and tried to divert the conversation. Truman said he wanted friendship with Russia, but Poland was the sore point. The United States was prepared to carry out all agreements reached at Yalta. He asked only that the Soviet government do the same.

In Truman’s recollection of the scene, Molotov responded, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”

“Carry out your agreements,” Truman told him, “and you won’t get talked to like that.”

By Bohlen’s account, however, this last exchange never happened. Truman just cut the conversation off, saying curtly, “That will be all, Mr. Molotov. I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin.” Thus dismissed, Molotov turned and left the room.

But whichever way the meeting ended, there had been no mistaking Truman’s tone. Even Harriman admitted to being “a little taken aback…when the President attacked Molotov so vigorously.” In retrospect, Harriman would regret that Truman “went at it” quite so hard. “I think it was a mistake….”

Bohlen, for his part, thought Truman had said only about what Roosevelt would have in the same situation, except that of course Roosevelt would have been “smoother.” The difference was in style.

When word of what happened reached Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg called it the best news he had heard in a long time.

Stimson was gravely worried. There was more the President needed to know. “I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” he wrote in a hurried letter to Truman.

I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.

At noon, Wednesday, April 25, Truman’s twelfth day in office, the day after Molotov’s visit and the same day as the opening of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, Stimson again went to the White House, but this time alone. General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, or S-1 as Stimson preferred to call it, was brought in a little later through a side door and by way of the ground floor, to avoid being seen, and asked to wait in a room adjoining the President’s office. General Marshall stayed away entirely, so great was their concern over rousing curiosity among the press.

The war and a lifetime of service to his country had taken a toll on Stimson. On doctor’s advice he was now going home for an afternoon nap whenever possible. The first President he had known was Theodore Roosevelt, who made him an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1905, at the time Truman was clerking in the Union National Bank. When Truman was learning about life on the farm, Stimson had become Secretary of War under William Howard Taft. Coolidge appointed him governor-general of the Philippines. Hoover made him Secretary of State. By the time Franklin Roosevelt made him Secretary of War again in 1940, Stimson was an elder statesman of seventy-two.

A graduate of Yale and the Harvard Law School, a lifelong Republican, Stimson was widely and correctly seen as a figure of thorough rectitude, if a bit old-fashioned and austere. He spoke with a faintly scratchy old man’s voice, wore a heavy gold watch chain across his vest, and parted his hair in the middle, the bangs combed forward over the forehead, a style that had disappeared with wing collars. He was also one of the few men ever to admonish Franklin Roosevelt to his face. “Mr. President, I don’t like you to dissemble to me,” Stimson had once lectured, shaking a crooked, arthritic finger.

Reflecting on Stimson a few years later, Truman would describe him as “a real man—honest, straightforward and a statesman sure enough.” Like Truman he had no patience with hypocrisy or circumlocution. Like Truman he was extremely proud of his service in the field artillery in France in 1918 and preferred still to be called “Colonel Stimson.”

He had first learned of S-1 in November of 1941, when named by Roosevelt to a committee to advise the President on all questions relating to nuclear fission. Since then, he had overseen every stage of development.

He and Truman were alone in Truman’s office. Stimson took from his briefcase a typewritten memorandum of several pages and waited while Truman read it. The words were Stimson’s own and the first sentence especially was intended to shock. Stimson had finished writing it only that morning.

Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.

Although the United States and Great Britain had shared in the development of this “most terrible weapon,” at present only the United States had the capability of producing it. Such a monopoly could not last, however, and “probably the only nation which could enter production within the next few years is Russia.”

Stimson was anything but sanguine. Considering the state of “moral advancement” in the world, “modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”

When Truman finished reading, General Groves was shown in to present another report of some twenty-five pages on the status of the Manhattan Project, which Truman was again asked to read.

The President took one copy [Stimson wrote] and we took the other and we went over it and answered his questions and told him all about the process and about the problems that are coming up and in fact I think it very much interested him…. He remembered the time when I refused to let him go into this project when he was the chairman of the Truman Committee…and he said that he understood now perfectly why it was inadvisable for me to have taken any other course than I had….

Stimson, said Truman later, seemed as concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in shaping history as in its capacity to shorten the war. Stimson asked for authorization to establish a special select committee to study the implications of “this new force” and to advise Truman—to help him in his decision. Truman told him to go ahead.

What questions Truman had asked, neither Stimson nor Groves later said, but in a memorandum for his files, Groves noted: “The President did not show any concern over the amount of the funds being spent but made it very definite that he was in entire agreement with the necessity for the project.” Also, according to Groves, Truman had bogged down several times while reading the longer report, saying he didn’t like to tackle so much all at once. Groves and Stimson replied there was no way they could be more concise. “This is a big project,” Groves told the President.

In fact, S-1 was the largest scientific-industrial undertaking in history, and the most important and best-kept secret of the war. Overall responsibility had been given to the Army Corps of Engineers, with Groves, who had overseen the building of the Pentagon, in charge. It had been launched out of fear that the Nazis were at work on the same thing, which they were, though with nothing like the seriousness or success that were imagined. In less than three years the United States had spent $2 billion, which was not the least of the hidden truths, and, one way or other, 200,000 people had been involved, only a few having more than a vague idea of what it was about. That the diligent chairman of the Truman Committee had known so little was a clear measure of how extremely effective security had been. But then neither did General MacArthur or Admiral Chester A. Nimitz or a host of others in high command know what was going on.

While the United States and Great Britain shared in the secret and technical-scientific details, it was in all practicality an American project—initiated, supervised, financed, and commanded from Washington. Ultimately it was Franklin Roosevelt’s project, his decision, his venture. Without his personal interest and backing it would never have been given such priority. For Truman it was thus another part of the Roosevelt legacy to contend with and again Roosevelt was of little help to him. Roosevelt had left behind no policy in writing other than a brief agreement signed with Churchill at Hyde Park the previous autumn saying only that once the new weapon was ready, “It might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”

Whether the bomb would work, no one could say for certain. According to Groves, a first test would not be ready until early July.

The Washington Star needed to know what the President ate for breakfast (orange juice, cereal—usually oatmeal—toast, and milk, no coffee). Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London wrote for the President’s exact measurements, requesting that the information be transmitted as soon as possible, and his office obliged: Height—5′9″, chest measurement—42½, waist measurement—35½, size of shoes—9B, size of collar—15½, size of gloves—8, size of hat—7 3/8;.

He addressed the United Nations conference by radio hookup. A poor speech, it was full of windy, mostly meaningless pronouncements of exactly the kind Truman disliked and would never normally use. “None of us doubt,” he said, “that with Divine guidance, friendly cooperation, and hard work, we shall find an adequate answer to the problem history has put before us.” As I. F. Stone observed in The Nation, what Truman would normally have said was, “It’s a tough job. I’m not sure we can do it. But we’re going to try our best.”

On the afternoon of April 25, he went to the Pentagon to talk to Churchill by the transatlantic “secret phone.” There had been a secret German offer to negotiate, a peace feeler from Heinrich Himmler, received through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler wanted to capitulate, but only to the Western Allies, not to the Russians. Obviously the Nazis would have to surrender to all the Allies simultaneously, Churchill said. “That is right. That is exactly the way I feel…. I agree to that fully,” Truman responded. He would cable his news to Stalin at once.

Taking time out for his own first look at the White House living quarters, Truman moved through room after room “at a brisk trot,” according to the assistant head usher J. B. West, for whom this was a first chance for a close-up look at the President. West was struck by how large Truman’s glasses made his eyes appear. “I had the feeling he was looking at me, all around me, straight through me.”

On April 27, fifty miles south of Berlin, American and Russian troops met at the Elbe. A day later came word that Mussolini had been killed by partisans, his body strung up by the feet like a slaughtered pig. On Tuesday, May 1, Hamburg Radio broke the sensational news that Hitler, too, was dead, by his own hand in the command bunker in Berlin. On May 2, the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, the President had to call a press conference to say there was no truth to the rumor of a final German surrender, though Churchill kept hinting at peace within the week.

The Postmaster General and the Secretary of Labor wished to retire. The Attorney General did not, but Truman wished he would. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget needed more of the President’s time. The Secretary of War returned to go over a list of names for the special committee on S-1.

It would be hard to imagine a President with more on his mind.

From Grandview, Missouri, all the while, came a series of memorable letters from Mary Jane Truman—to keep Harry abreast of the trials she was enduring.

April 24, 1945

Dear Harry,

We have received so much mail I cannot remember all the details…. We try to read all about what you are doing and have kept up pretty well so far. I’ve lost seven pounds the last week, but no wonder, breakfast is the only meal we have had on time since you went into office…. someone called for pictures yesterday of Mamma, said he was an artist from Washington. I told him I was sorry but Mamma had had all the pictures she could pose for at present….

Mary Jane’s recurring theme through much of what she wrote was the considerable disservice he had done to them by becoming President. Of immediate concern was whether he could get home for Mother’s Day or whether she and Mamma would have to come to Washington, as he had suggested.

May 1, 1945

Dear Harry,

I do hope that you can come, but if not I feel sure we can persuade Mamma to make the trip. And please tell me if you have any suggestion to make about what you would like me to bring in the way of clothes, for I want to look my best and also get Mamma fixed up all right too and it’s a pretty large order on such short notice….

May 7, 1945

Dear Harry,

I arrived home yesterday and found Mamma well and very much inclined to go Friday if possible. I had planned to go in [to Kansas City] today to get whatever is necessary, but it’s pouring down rain and I have lost my voice, so Dr. Graham said I should stay in. Why do such things have to happen when I have so much to do? I am hoping and hoping that I can get everything ready to go Friday. However, you call me Wednesday instead of me putting the call through. If you can, call early as you can, for if I cannot go shopping tomorrow and Wednesday I don’t see how I can get it all done….

Understandingly, he wrote, “You both have done fine under this terrible blow.”

The five-year-long war in Europe, the most costly, murderous conflict in history, ended on May 7, when the German High Command surrendered to the Allied armies. The terms were signed at 2:40 A.M., in a brick school-house at Reims, Eisenhower’s headquarters. The surrender was unconditional.

Churchill had wanted to make the announcement at once, but Stalin, with the situation on the Russian front still uncertain, insisted they wait. Truman agreed that the announcement would be made by all three Allies at the same time the following morning, May 8, V-E Day.

He broke the news to reporters in his office at 8:30. At 9:00, from the Diplomatic Reception Room where Roosevelt had so often broadcast to the country, he spoke to the largest radio audience yet recorded.

This is a solemn but glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day…. We must work to finish the war. Our victory is but half-won….

In a separate statement he called on Japan to surrender, warning that “the striking power and intensity of our blows will steadily increase,” and that the longer the war lasted the greater would be the suffering of the Japanese people, and “all in vain.” Unconditional surrender, further, did “not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”

New York, London, Paris, Moscow, cities around the world, had erupted in wild celebration, but not Washington, where it was raining and thousands of government workers, having listened to the broadcast, remained at their desks. “I call upon every American to stick to his post until the last battle is won,” Truman had said.

May 8 was his sixty-first birthday. He had been President for three weeks and four days. The day before, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House and the Trumans moved in, “with very little commotion,” as he later wrote, “except that Margaret’s piano had to be hoisted through a window of the second-floor living room.” To move Mrs. Roosevelt out had required twenty Army trucks. To move the Trumans from Blair House across the street had required only one.

III

The “Russian situation” concerned Truman more than he let on. Patience must be the watchword if there was to be peace in the world, he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, knowing that she, like some others, was apprehensive about his approach to the Russians. To Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to Moscow, he described how he had given Molotov a “straight one-two to the jaw,” but then asked, “Did I do right?” The Russians, Truman told Henry Wallace, were “like people from across the tracks whose manners were very bad.” Wallace had begun to worry that Truman was reacting too quickly, without sufficient information and thought.

Truman had made a sudden, arbitrary move to cut back on Lend-Lease not only to Russia but to France and Great Britain, as soon as the war in Europe ended. Ships already under way had been recalled. Apparently he signed the order without reading it, going on the word of State Department officials that Roosevelt had approved. It was a serious blunder, and he had quickly to countermand his own order.

Some nights he was so exhausted he went to bed at eight. One morning, after staying up much of the night to read the Yalta agreements again, he said that every time he went over them he found new meanings. “His sincerity and his desire to do what is right is continually evident,” observed Eben Ayers.

In a top-secret telegram sent on May 6, even before the German surrender, Churchill had urged that the British and American armies “hold firmly” to their present positions in Germany and Eastern Europe and not pull back to the occupational line agreed to earlier with the Russians, It was essential, Churchill said, to “show them how much we have to offer or withhold.” On May 9, Truman responded, saying, “it is my present intention to adhere to our interpretation of the Yalta agreements.” In Germany this would mean withdrawing from the Elbe back as much as 150 miles, to as far west as Eisenbach.

On May 11 came two more cables from the prime minister, setting forth his anxieties over the Russians and the future of Europe. “Mr. President, in these next two months the gravest matters in the world will be decided,” he said in the first cable. “I fear terrible things have happened during the Russian advance through Germany to the Elbe,” he said in the second. Russian domination in Poland, eastern Germany, the Baltic provinces, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, a large part of Austria, would constitute “an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel.” It was essential that the Allied armies not withdraw from their present positions “until we are satisfied about Poland and also about the temporary character of the Russian occupation of Germany,” as well as “the conditions to be established” in the rest of Eastern Europe. All such matters, Churchill warned, could only be settled before American forces withdraw from Europe “and the Western world folds up its war machines.”

In a telegram of May 12, Churchill’s tone grew still more alarming:

I am profoundly concerned about the European situation…. I learn that half the American air force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific Theater. The newspapers are full of the great movements of the American armies out of Europe. Our armies also are under previous arrangements likely to undergo a marked reduction. The Canadian Army will certainly leave. The French are weak and difficult to deal with. Anyone can see that in a very short space of time our armed power on the continent will have vanished except for moderate forces to hold down Germany.

Meanwhile what is to happen about Russia?

“An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill continued, using a new expression for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.”

Both men agreed to the importance of meeting somewhere soon with Stalin, though Truman felt that for domestic political reasons he should not leave Washington until after June 30, the end of the fiscal year. In the meantime, he would send Harry Hopkins to see Stalin.

Writing to an old friend in Independence on May 13, a month to the day since he took office, Truman said, “It is a very, very hard position to fall into as I did. If there ever was a man who was forced to be President, I’m that man…. But I must face the music, and try to the best of my ability. You just keep on praying and hoping for the best.”

Calling on Truman on May 14, to discuss the joint meeting with Stalin, Anthony Eden was struck by his “air of quiet confidence in himself.”

“I am here to make decisions,” Truman said, “and whether they prove right or wrong I am going to make them.”

“To have a reasonably lasting peace the three great powers must be able to trust each other and they must themselves honestly want it,” he wrote privately. “They must also have the confidence of the smaller nations. Russia hasn’t the confidence of the small nations, nor has Britain. We have.” Then, in frustration, he added, “I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it.”

To Hopkins, he advised using either diplomatic language with Stalin or a baseball bat, whichever would work.

The Hopkins mission had been urged by Bohlen and Harriman, who had flown back to Washington from San Francisco greatly distressed that the United Nations conference was in trouble. Molotov was heading home. Hopkins, it was thought, might succeed in patching things up, since he would be seen by Stalin as both someone who had been close to Roosevelt and who had worked hard all along for a policy of cooperation with Russia. Hopkins could also handle arrangements for the Big Three conference. Though still gravely ill, Hopkins had at once agreed to go.

Meantime, accompanied by Mary Jane, ninety-two-year-old Martha Ellen Truman had arrived for her first visit ever to Washington, after her first flight in an airplane, for a first look at her oldest son since he had become President.

Truman had sent the presidential plane for them, the same four-motored, silver C-54, nicknamed The Sacred Cow, that had carried Roosevelt to Casablanca, Teheran, and Yalta, and to Truman’s delight Mamma was a hit with the Washington press from the moment she stepped from the plane. “Oh, fiddlesticks!” she exclaimed, seeing how many had turned out to meet her. Had she known there would be such fuss, she said, she never would have come. Small and bent, but “chipper as a lark,” she wore a large orchid on the lapel of a dark blue suit and a blue spring straw hat trimmed with a gardenia.

In the car on the way to the White House, Margaret asked Mamma teasingly if she would like to sleep in the Lincoln bed. Mamma, her Confederate blood rising, said if that was the choice she would prefer the floor. Truman thought she would be most comfortable in the Rose Guest Room, where so many queens had stayed, but his mother found the bed too high, the room too fancy. Offering it to Mary Jane, she chose a smaller room next door.

She had arrived in time for Mother’s Day. She stayed a little more than a week, and charmed everyone at the White House. “Oh, you couldn’t help but like her,” Secret Service agent Floyd Boring would remember. “She was point blank, you know.” The second Sunday, a brilliant, blue-sky day with the Capitol dome and Washington Monument gleaming in sunshine, Truman took her for a cruise on the Potomac in the presidential yacht.

Working with J. B. West and a Kansas City decorator, Bess was transforming the private quarters of the White House. Rooms were scrubbed, painted, furniture repaired or discarded. New furniture was purchased (mostly reproduction antiques). New curtains and draperies were installed, walls hung with paintings (landscapes primarily) borrowed from the National Gallery. Bess’s mother moved in, taking a guest room over the North Portico. Reathel Odum, from Truman’s Senate office, who was to serve both as Bess’s personal secretary and as a companion for Mrs. Wallace, was given a room beside Mrs. Wallace.

Truman, Bess, and Margaret had separate rooms. Truman slept in an antique, canopied four-poster in the President’s Bedroom, the room Roosevelt had used, just off the large, central oval room on the south side, which, again like Roosevelt, Truman would use as his private study. It was in this oval room that John Adams had held the first White House reception on New Year’s Day 1801, and that Roosevelt had met with Bob Hannegan, Ed Flynn, and the others on the steaming July night less than a year earlier to decide who was to be number two on the Democratic ticket.

Bess had two rooms—sitting room and bedroom—adjoining the President’s Bedroom, while Margaret was across the hall from her mother, in a corner room overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. “My bedroom is pink with antique white furniture. Deep pink draperies and white window curtains,” Margaret wrote happily in her diary. “It also has a fireplace and mirror. High (25 ft.) ceilings.” She was the first young resident in the White House since the Wilson years and concerned mainly at this point with final exams at George Washington University.

For exercise, Truman had begun using the swimming pool Roosevelt had had built on the ground floor. Truman tried to do six or eight laps in his choppy, self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, and hoped to get to where he could swim a quarter of a mile.

In the evening before dinner, he and Bess would relax with a cocktail in the so-called “sitting hall,” but as J. B. West remembered, it took a while for the staff to learn their tastes.

On an evening when Bess first ordered old-fashioneds, the head butler, Alonzo Fields, a proudly accomplished bartender, had fixed the drinks his usual way, with chilled glasses, an ounce of bourbon each, orange slices, a teaspoon of sugar, and dash of bitters. But the night following she had asked that the drinks not be made quite so sweet and so Fields had tried another recipe.

This time she waited until morning to complain to J. B. West. They were the worst old-fashioneds she had ever tasted. She and the President did not care for fruit punch. West spoke to Fields, who, the third night, his pride hurt, poured her a double bourbon on ice and stood by waiting for the reaction as the First Lady took a sip.

“Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds,” she said, smiling.

Fields, a tall, handsome black man, would later say of Mrs. Truman that she would “stand no fakers, shirkers or flatterers,” and that the only way to gain her approval was to do your job as best you could. “This done, you would not want a more understanding person to work for.”

J. B. West, who had grown up in Iowa, found her down-to-earth and personable, “correct but not formal.” He liked her. “Like most Midwestern women I’d known, her values went deeper than cosmetics.”

The President impressed him as someone who knew who he was and liked who he was. And as a family all three were extremely fond of each other. “They were essentially very private people who didn’t show affection in public,” West wrote. “But they did everything together—read, listened to the radio, played the piano, and mostly talked to each other.” In twelve years Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had never been in residence in the White House alone. Rarely had they ever taken a meal together.

The full staff for the main house—butlers, cooks, maids, doormen, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, gardeners—numbered thirty-two, of whom the highest ranking were the head usher, Howell Crim; the First Lady’s social secretary, Edith Helm; and the housekeeper, elderly, gray-haired Henrietta Nesbitt, a favorite of Mrs. Roosevelt’s, who had charge of the food and who was the only one who appeared to be a problem, since the food was uniformly dreadful. Ira Smith, who was Chief of Mails, had first come to work as a messenger at the White House in 1897. Samuel Jackson, the President’s personal messenger, had begun his duties during the Taft administration, as had John Mays, the head doorman.

Truman got along splendidly with them all. In time he knew everyone’s name and all about their families and years of service in the house. If there were guests, he would introduce each of the servants, something none of them had ever known a President to do before.

“He knew when a stenographer’s baby caught a cold; when a White House servant lost a relative,” Merriman Smith, White House correspondent for United Press, would remember. “He thought it was hilarious when LeRoy, the White House leaf-raker whom he knew and liked, fobbed himself off as an important official and was shown a box at Hialeah (Florida) race track.”

One story would be told for a long time. On the night of the German surrender, May 8, Truman’s birthday, the head cook, Elizabeth Moore, had baked him a cake. Dinner over, Truman had gone to the kitchen to thank her, and as Alonzo Fields would note, this was the first time a President had been in the White House kitchen since Coolidge, who had been in and out so often it was said he was only being nosy—to see no handouts were being given away.

“I always felt that he [President Truman] understood me as a man, not as a servant to be tolerated,” Fields would write, “and that I understood that he expected me to be a man…. President Roosevelt was genial and warm but he left one feeling, as most aristocrats do, that they really do not understand one.”

Harry Hopkins had told Truman he had made a mistake ever asking the Roosevelt Cabinet to stay. A President ought to have his own people around him, Hopkins lectured. Now the changes began.

Bob Hannegan, to no one’s surprise, was named Postmaster General, the traditional reward for a party chairman, to replace the ailing Frank Walker, who had talked of retirement since before Roosevelt’s death. Lewis Schwellenbach, Truman’s old Senate friend and confidant, was to be the new Secretary of Labor, succeeding Frances Perkins, who had been the first to tell Truman she wished to step down. For Secretary of Agriculture, after the resignation of Claude Wickard, he picked Congressman Clinton Anderson of New Mexico. To replace Roosevelt’s aristocratic Attorney General, Francis Biddle of Philadelphia, he named a relatively unknown Texan, Tom Clark, an assistant attorney general who had run the Criminal Division.

Announcement of the changes caused little stir. At his press conference Truman was asked only if Clark spelled his name with an “e” on the end. Nor did Truman regret the departures. Walker he thought a decent enough man but lacking in ideas. Perkins, though “a grand lady,” knew nothing of politics, and besides he didn’t like the idea of a woman in the Cabinet. As for Biddle, Truman had never much cared for him.

The only sour note was Biddle’s removal, which Truman mishandled. He had no heart for firing people. “Not built right, I guess, to man a chopping block,” he had once observed to Bess. To avoid a confrontation with Biddle, he had one of the staff contact him by phone. Biddle, greatly insulted, said that if the President wished his resignation, the President could ask for it himself. A Cabinet officer should expect no less. So Truman sent for him and admitted he had gone about things the wrong way. He told Biddle he had not wanted to face him. He then asked for his resignation.

“The President seemed relieved,” Biddle wrote in his version of the scene. “I got up, walked over to him and touched his shoulder. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘it’s not so hard.’ ”

The eventual announcement that Jimmy Byrnes would succeed Stettinius as Secretary of State brought the number of replacements to five, half the Cabinet. Just three of the old New Dealers remained—Wallace, Ickes, and Morgenthau—and the expectation was they wouldn’t last much longer. Stimson intended to serve only until the war ended, which left Forrestal as the only one who seemed likely to stay.

In surface ways the new group was a projection of Truman himself. Everybody but Byrnes was from west of the Mississippi. There was no one who was notably brilliant or colorful or a vociferous liberal. All were good, solid Democrats, all perfectly safe choices. But most important, three of the five—Byrnes, Schwellenbach, and Anderson—had served in Congress. Truman was determined both to have a strong Cabinet to which he could delegate a large part of his responsibilities, and to get along with Congress better than Roosevelt had. Even Tom Clark was chosen chiefly on Speaker Sam Rayburn’s recommendation.

To the regret of Admiral Leahy and other career Navy men, Truman also brought in a reserve officer, another Missourian, Navy Captain James K. Vardaman, Jr., to be his naval aide, an appointment approximately on a par to that of Harry Vaughan. Like Vaughan, Vardaman had stood by Truman when it mattered, in the 1940 Senate race. Like Vaughan, he knew how to amuse “the Boss.” After one poker-party cruise on the Potomac in the presidential yacht with Vaughan, Vardaman, George Allen, and John Snyder, Truman wrote in his diary that his sides were sore from laughing.

One further appointment, however, was seen as a first sign of genuine political courage on Truman’s part. Clearly it was not a case of politics as usual, or politics in the Roosevelt style.

With David Lilienthal’s term as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority about to expire, Truman was under great pressure from conservative Democrats to dump him. Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, “Old Mack,” the craggy, slouched president of the Senate and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was in a “pow’ful tempuh,” threatening to lead the biggest confirmation fight in memory if Truman dared reappoint the liberal Lilienthal, who insisted on merit rather than patronage appointments at TVA. To avoid trouble with McKellar, Roosevelt had already spoken of naming Lilienthal to another job.

Lilienthal, a steadfast, idealistic New Dealer who had been made nearly ill by the thought of Truman taking Roosevelt’s place, was called to the White House. It was Truman’s impression that Lilienthal had been doing a first-rate job and Truman told him so. Then, smiling, he asked if Lilienthal was ready to carry on at TVA. If so, he was reappointed. There would be troubles with McKellar, of course, Truman said, but he had tangled with McKellar before.

And that was about all there was [recorded Lilienthal, incredulous and thrilled]…. No talk about what a “rap” he, as President, was assuming in naming me…no talk, such as…President Roosevelt had given me, about what McKellar could do to disrupt the peace if his wishes concerning me were not respected—none of that—just there it was.

It was an admirable performance. Simple. No mock heroics. Nothing complex. Straightforward!

As it turned out, McKellar’s opposition had little effect. The nomination was confirmed by the Senate on May 23.

Earlier, talking with his staff before seeing Lilienthal, Truman had said with a pleased look, “Old Mack is going to have a hemorrhage.”

Another morning in late May, at their regular nine o’clock meeting, Truman told his staff he had done something about which there might be objection. He had invited Herbert Hoover to come see him. He had written Hoover in longhand the night before. The letter was already in the mail, so there was no use trying to stop it.

The former President had been persona non grata at the White House since Roosevelt first took office in 1933. Truman thought it was time that ended. He wanted to talk with Hoover, he said, about famine relief in Europe. Also, as he did not say, Hoover was the one other mortal who had ever sat in his place, or who knew the feeling of being constantly compared to Roosevelt.

“Saw Herbert Hoover,” Truman wrote in his diary, “…and had a pleasant and constructive conversation on food and the general troubles of U.S. Presidents—two in particular.”

Things were going so well overall, Truman also recorded, that he hardly knew what to think. “I can’t understand it—except to attribute it to God. He guides me, I think.”

IV

Besides Henry Stimson, who served as chairman, the newly organized, entirely civilian and highly secret Interim Committee on S-1 included eight members, three of whom were eminent scientists involved with the project: James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, who was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee; Karl T. Compton, president of M.I.T.; and Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institute in Washington and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Ralph A. Bard was Under Secretary of the Navy and a former Chicago financier. William L. Clayton was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and a specialist in international trade. George L. Harrison was the president of the New York Life Insurance Company and Stimson’s special assistant on matters related to S-1.

The eighth man was Jimmy Byrnes, who had been appointed by the President as his personal representative.

The first meeting was held on Wednesday, May 9, 1945, in Stimson’s office at the Pentagon. “Gentlemen, it is our responsibility to recommend action that may turn the course of civilization,” the venerable Secretary of War began. Meetings followed on May 14 and May 18. On Thursday, May 31, the committee convened for a crucial two-day session, joined now by an advisory panel of four physicists actively involved with development of the bomb: Enrico Fermi and Arthur H. Compton of the University of Chicago; Ernest O. Lawrence of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley; and, most important, J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was being assembled.

A wide range of subjects was covered at this final session, including relations with Soviets. General Marshall raised the possibility of inviting the Russians to send some of their scientists to witness the first test. Byrnes objected, expressing a view agreed to by all present, that the best program would be to “push ahead as fast as possible in production and research to make certain that we stay ahead and at the same time make every effort to better our political relations with Russia.”

After much discussion, the committee and scientific panel reached three unanimous conclusions:

The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.

It should be used against war plants surrounded by workers’ homes or other buildings susceptible to damage, in order “to make a profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.” (Oppenheimer had assured them the “visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous.”)

It should be used without warning.

Byrnes went directly from the meeting to the White House to report to Truman, and Truman, according to Byrnes’s later recollection, said that “with reluctance he had to agree, that he could think of no alternative….”

Stimson, in the meantime, had received a long letter that impressed him greatly and that he passed on immediately to Marshall, calling it a “remarkable document” from an honest man. It was addressed to the President and had come through regular security channels. “I shall take the President’s copy to him personally,” Stimson wrote in reply, “or through Byrnes….”

Dated May 24, it was from an unknown engineer named O. C. Brewster of 23 East 11th Street, New York, who had worked on uranium isotope separation for S-1, but who, since the defeat of Germany, had become tormented over what the release of the energy “locked up in the atom” might mean for the future. “The idea of the destruction of civilization is not melodramatic hysteria or crackpot raving. It is a very real and, I submit, almost inevitable result.” In the early stages of the project, like many others, Brewster had hoped it would be conclusively proved impossible. “Obviously, however, so long as there was any chance that Germany might succeed at this task there was only one course to follow and that was to do everything in our power to get this thing first and destroy Germany before she had a chance to destroy us…. So long as the threat of Germany existed we had to proceed with all speed…. With the threat of Germany removed we must stop this project.” He urged a demonstration of one atomic bomb on a target in Japan, but then no further production of nuclear material.

I do not of course want to propose anything to jeopardize the war with Japan but, horrible as it may seem, I know it would be better to take greater casualties now in conquering Japan than to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material…. In the name of the future of our country and of the peace of the world, I beg you, sir, not to pass this off because I happen to be unknown, without influence or name in the public eye….

The letter reached the White House, but whether Truman saw it is not known. It was, however, returned shortly with no sign of presidential reaction.

The one hint of Truman’s state of mind to be found in his own hand is a diary entry on Sunday, June 3: “Have been going through some very hectic days,” is his only comment. Later, he would say that of course he realized an atomic explosion would inflict damage and casualties “beyond imagination.”

Actually, no one was very clear on what power the weapon might have. Forecasts provided by the scientific panel for the explosive force varied from the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT to 20,000 tons.

Estimates by the scientists on how long it might take the Soviets to develop such a weapon ranged from three to five years, although General Groves personally reckoned as much as twenty years.

Stimson was thinking more of the larger historic consequences. At the final meeting of the committee he had said how vitally important it was to regard the bomb not “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and like O. C. Brewster, he warned that the project might mean “the doom of civilization.” It might be a Frankenstein monster, or it might mean “the perfection of civilization.” (Ernest O. Lawrence of the scientific panel had forecast the day when it might be possible to “secure our energy from terrestrial sources rather than from the sun.”) But no one knew.

On Wednesday, June 6, Stimson came to discuss the report with the President in more detail.

Stimson told Truman he was deeply troubled by reports of the devastation brought on Japan by the B-29 fire raids. He had insisted always on precision bombing, Stimson said, but was now informed by the Air Force that that was no longer possible, since in Japan, unlike Germany, industries were not concentrated but scattered among and closely connected with the houses of employees.

As Stimson appreciated, attitudes about the bombing of civilian targets had changed drastically in Washington, as in the nation, the longer the war went on. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1937, it had been viewed as an atrocity of the most appalling kind. When the war in Europe erupted in 1939, Roosevelt had begged both sides to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism” of bombing civilians. His “arsenal of democracy” speech in December 1940 had had particular power and urgency because German bombers were pounding London. (“What a puny effort is this to burn a great city,” Edward R. Murrow had said.) But the tide of war had turned, and the “ghastly dew” raining from the skies in the Tennyson poem that Truman still carried in his wallet had become more ghastly by far. That winter, in February 1945, during three raids on Dresden, Germany—two British raids, one American—incendiary bombs set off a fire-storm that could be seen for 200 miles. In all an estimated 135,000 people had died.

A recent issue of Life carried aerial photographs taken after three hundred B-29 bombers swept such destruction on Tokyo, said Life, as was hitherto visited on the city only by catastrophic earthquakes. The magazine said nothing of how many men, women, and children were killed, but in one such horrendous fire raid on Tokyo the night of March 9–10, more than 100,000 perished. Bomber crews in the last waves of the attack could smell burning flesh. With Japan vowing anew to fight to the end, the raids continued. On May 14, five hundred B-29s hit Nagoya, Japan’s third largest industrial city, in what The New York Times called the greatest concentration of fire bombs in the history of aerial warfare. On May 23, five square miles of Tokyo were obliterated. Thirty-six hours later, 16 square miles were destroyed. As weeks passed, other coastal cities were hit—Yokahama, Osaka, Kobe.

Stimson told Truman he didn’t want to see the United States “outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” But he was also concerned that targets in Japan might become so bombed out by conventional raids that S-1 would have no “fair background” to show its strength, an observation that seems to have struck Truman as so odd, coming on top of Stimson’s previous worry, that he actually laughed, then added that he understood.

Neither Stimson nor General Marshall was concerned over whether the bomb should be used on Japan, only with how to use it to stop the slaughter as quickly as possible. Stimson’s directive to General Groves in 1942 had been to produce the bomb at “the earliest possible date so as to bring the war to a conclusion.”

As Stimson stressed, the committee’s role was advisory only. The responsibility for a recommendation to the President was his alone, and he was painfully aware of all that was riding on his judgment.

The ultimate responsibility for the recommendation to the President rested on me [he would later write], and I have no desire to veil it. The conclusions of the Committee were similar to my own, although I reached mine independently. I felt that to extract a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisers, there must be administered a tremendous shock which could carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire. Such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost.

The possibility of dropping the atomic bomb on some target other than a city, as a harmless technical demonstration for the Japanese, had been considered by the committee and by the scientific panel and it had been rejected. General Marshall had thought initially that the weapon might first be used against such a “straight military objective” as a large naval installation, and then, if necessary, against manufacturing centers, from which the people would be warned in advance to leave. “We must offset by such warning methods,” Marshall had said, “the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.” But by now apparently Marshall had changed his mind, and besides, he was not formally a member of the committee. The scientists were able to propose no demonstration sufficiently spectacular to give the needed “tremendous shock.” Probably only one bomb would be ready. There were worries it might not work, and that any advance announcement of a supposedly all-powerful secret weapon that failed would be worse than no attempt and only bolster Japanese resolve to fight on. Writing for the scientific panel, Oppenheimer said:

The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiation will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternates to direct military use.

Byrnes had introduced the further thought that if the Japanese were told in advance where the bomb was to be dropped, they might bring American prisoners of war to the area. Oppenheimer, who supposedly knew the most about the bomb, stressed that the number of people killed by it would be considerably less than in a conventional incendiary raid. Oppenheimer’s estimate was that twenty thousand would die.

Stimson told Truman what the committee had stressed, and what all his senior military advisers were saying, that it was the “shock value” of the weapon that would stop the war. Nothing short of that would work.

Okinawa was on Stimson’s mind—Okinawa was on all their minds. An attack on the American armada by hundreds of Japanese suicide planes, the kamikaze, had had devastating effect—thirty ships sunk, more than three hundred damaged, including carriers and battleships. Once American troops were ashore on the island, the enemy fought from caves and pillboxes with fanatic ferocity, even after ten days of heavy sea and air bombardment. The battle on Okinawa still raged. In the end more than 12,000 Americans would be killed, 36,000 wounded. Japanese losses were ten times worse—110,000 Japanese killed—and, as later studies show, civilian deaths on the island may have been as high as 150,000, or a third of the population.

“We regarded the matter of dropping the bomb as exceedingly important,” General Marshall later explained.

We had just been through a bitter experience at Okinawa. This had been preceded by a number of similar experiences in other Pacific islands. [The first day of the invasion of Iwo Jima had been more costly than D-Day at Normandy.]…The Japanese had demonstrated in each case they would not surrender and they fight to the death…. It was to be expected that resistance in Japan, with their home ties, could be even more severe. We had had one hundred thousand people killed in Tokyo in one night of bombs, and it had seemingly no effect whatsoever. It destroyed the Japanese cities, yes, but their morale was affected, so far as we could tell, not at all. So it seemed quite necessary, if we could, to shock them into action…. We had to end the war; we had to save American lives.

Among some scientists connected with the project, but not party to the committee’s discussions, there was sharp disagreement with such reasoning.

In early April, Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago, the brilliant Hungarian-born physicist who, with Einstein, had helped persuade Roosevelt to initiate the project in the first place, wrote a long memorandum addressed to Roosevelt saying that use of an atomic bomb against Japan would start an atomic arms race with Russia and questioning whether avoiding that might be more important than the short-term goal of knocking Japan out of the war. Because of Roosevelt’s death, the memorandum was not sent. Instead, Szilard set about arranging an appointment with Truman through a friend and colleague at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, a mathematician named Albert Cahn, who came from Kansas City and had once, to pay his way through graduate school, worked for Tom Pendergast. A date was made for Szilard to see Matt Connelly, the new appointments secretary, and Szilard went to the White House. Connelly, having read Szilard’s memorandum, agreed it was a serious matter. (“At first I was a little suspicious,” he also said, “because the appointment came through Kansas City.”) He told Szilard it was the President’s wish that he see Jimmy Byrnes, and Szilard, who was unaware of Byrnes’s role on the Interim Committee or that Byrnes was soon to become Secretary of State, took an overnight train to Spartanburg, accompanied by a University of Chicago dean, Walter Bartky, and another noted physicist, Harold Urey.

The three men saw Byrnes on May 27, just days before the crucial, last meeting of the Interim Committee. Reading the memorandum, Byrnes was at once annoyed by its tone. The true situation, it said, could be evaluated “only by men who have firsthand knowledge of the facts involved, that is, by the small group of scientists who are actively engaged in this work.” Byrnes was put off also by Szilard himself, a notably eccentric man of expansive ego. “His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy making made an unfavorable impression on me,” Byrnes later wrote.

According to Szilard, Byrnes said he understood from General Groves that Russia had no uranium and that through possession of the bomb America could “render the Russians more manageable.” Szilard felt certain it would have precisely the opposite effect.

According to Byrnes, what Szilard, Bartky, and Urey told him about the power of the bomb did nothing to decrease his fears of “the terrible weapon they had assisted in creating.”

Szilard left Spartanburg determined to draw up a petition to the President opposing on “purely moral grounds” any use of atomic bombs on Japan. Stopping again in Washington en route to Chicago, he saw Oppenheimer.

Like Stimson, like so many, Oppenheimer by this time was worn out, his nerves on edge. There were problems at Los Alamos. Detonators were not firing as they should, the work was falling behind schedule. Oppenheimer looked a wreck. He had been stricken with chicken pox and lost 30 pounds. Though over six feet tall, he weighed all of 115 pounds.

“Oppenheimer didn’t share my views,” Szilard recalled. “He surprised me by saying, ‘The atomic bomb is shit…a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon that is useful in war.’ ”

To what extent Byrnes discussed Szilard with Truman, if at all, is not recorded. But in his discussions about the atomic bomb, Admiral Leahy had been assuring Truman that “the damn thing” would never work. To Leahy it was “all the biggest bunk in the world.”

On Saturday, June 2, after less than a month in residence, Bess, her mother, and Margaret had packed and left Washington by train to spend a long summer in Independence. Madge Wallace was not happy with life in the White House, nor was Bess. “We are on our way home, underlined, four exclamation points,” wrote Margaret, who, to her father, seemed in a very unsatisfactory humor. “I hope—sincerely hope,” he wrote privately, “that this situation (my being President) is not going to affect her adversely.”

At home, the old house at 219 North Delaware was being patched up and repainted after years of neglect. It would be gray no more, but white now, with “Kentucky green” trim at the windows, as befitting the “summer White House.”

After only a few nights alone, Truman began feeling desolate and more than a little sorry for himself. The first Sunday, giving no advance notice, he walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church and slipped into a back pew unnoticed by most of the congregation. It was where Lincoln had sometimes worshiped, he knew. “Don’t think over six people recognized me,” he wrote in his diary.

One evening Admiral Leahy stayed over for dinner and afterward he and Truman played hosts at a reception for White House employees and their families. But most nights were taken up with work in the upstairs Oval Study, where the long windows stood open to the mild spring air.

From sounds in the night, Truman became convinced the house was haunted and tried to imagine which former residents might be involved:

June 12, 1945

Dear Bess:

Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President. Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.

I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches—all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show the din is almost unbearable….

General Eisenhower made a triumphal return to the city, spoke to a joint session of Congress, and Truman gave a stag dinner for him at the White House, which everyone thought a big success. “He’s a nice fellow and a good man,” Truman reported to Bess. “He’s done a whale of a job.” There was talk everywhere of running Eisenhower for President, which, Truman told her, was perfectly fine by him. “I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”

Alone in the old house he would poke about in the closets, adjust the clocks. He hated being by himself, hated having breakfast alone, or even going through the motions of dressing for the day. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves. I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes generally,” he lamented in his diary. “I usually put on a terrible tie not even Bob Hannegan or Ed McKim would wear just to get a loud protest from Bess and Margie. When they are gone I have to put on the right ones and it’s no fun.”

Yet the truth seemed to be that things were going exceedingly, inexplicably well for him. His popularity was beyond imagining. A Gallup Poll reported that 87 percent of the people approved his conduct of the presidency, which was a higher rating even than Roosevelt had ever received. Nor was the woeful man of the evening letters the one who turned up in the office each day. “And as usual, he is in good humor,” Eben Ayers noted one Monday morning. Truman was pleased with his popularity on the Hill, pleased with his press conferences, his staff. He loved having Charlie Ross on duty. Most heartening was the “good progress” made by Hopkins, who returned from Moscow on June 12 and, with Joseph Davies, came for breakfast the next morning. Davies was back from a mission to London to see Churchill.

In long cables from Moscow Hopkins had given full account of his every conversation with Stalin. Though greatly offended by the manner in which Lend-Lease had been shut off, Stalin seemed willing to let the matter pass. He had agreed even to the American position on voting procedure in the United Nations Security Council, which in effect meant the San Francisco Conference was saved.

Churchill, in further cables, had been urging again that there be no withdrawal of American forces to the designated occupation zones in Europe. “Nothing really important has been settled yet,” he warned Truman, “and you and I will have to bear great responsibility for the future.” But Hopkins told Truman any delay in the withdrawal of American troops from the Soviet zone was “certain to be misunderstood by the Russians.” Reportedly General Eisenhower also thought it unwise to keep American forces in the Russian zone. Truman, determined still to do nothing in violation of Roosevelt’s agreements at Yalta, and believing this the best possible way to demonstrate America’s good faith to the Russians and to induce them to carry out their own obligations in return, informed Churchill on June 11 that, as agreed, American troops would pull back, which Churchill saw as a terrible mistake. A few years later, Truman would write:

We were about 150 miles east of the border of the occupation zone line agreed to at Yalta. I felt that agreements made in the war to keep Russia fighting should be kept and I kept them to the letter. Perhaps they should not have been adhered to so quickly….

Regarding Poland, Stalin had told Hopkins he was willing to talk. All of which meant the issue stood again where it was when Roosevelt came home from Yalta, except that now the place and time for such talk was settled. Truman had wanted to meet in Alaska. But as twice before—for both the Teheran and Yalta conferences—Stalin was granted his way. It would be Potsdam, a Berlin suburb in the zone held by the Red Army. The date chosen was July 15.

Truman was so pleased by what Hopkins had achieved, he even thought Hopkins, whose deathlike appearance stunned others at the White House, looked improved in health. The trip had done Hopkins good, Truman felt sure. The Russians, he wrote in his diary, had “always been our friends and I can’t see why they shouldn’t always be.”

By leaving his sickbed to go to Moscow, Hopkins had performed heroic service for his country. Truman was enormously grateful to him and thanked him. Hopkins, who had worked so long and closely with Roosevelt, later told Charlie Ross that it was the first time he had ever been thanked by a President.

The President was trying to understand what to do in the Pacific, trying to fathom MacArthur, whom he had never met, but didn’t like from what he had read and heard—“Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” Truman referred to him in the privacy of his diary. “Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.”

His mind was on plans for the invasion and a proposed Navy blockade designed to starve Japan into submission. In a memorandum stamped URGENT, Admiral Leahy noted the President wanted to know the number of men and ships needed:

He wants an estimate of the time required and an estimate of the losses in killed and wounded that will result from an invasion of Japan proper…. It is his intention to make his decision on the campaign with the purpose of economizing to the maximum extent possible in the loss of American lives. Economy in the use of time and in money cost is comparatively unimportant.

“I have to decide Japanese strategy—shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade?” Truman pondered in his diary. “That is my hardest decision to date.” S-1 was not mentioned.

Nor was it mentioned at the extremely important White House meeting to review the invasion plans the afternoon of Monday, June 18, 1945, and this, as the hour passed, struck one of Stimson’s staff, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, as extremely odd. Things were proceeding, McCloy saw, as if the bomb did not exist.

The plan, as presented by General Marshall, was for a two-phase invasion, beginning in November with the southernmost of the Japanese islands, Kyushu, only 350 miles from Okinawa. The operation, said Marshall, would be as difficult as Normandy, but he thought it the only course to pursue. Casualties were hard to predict. He estimated that in the initial phase, the first 30 days only, losses would be similar to those on Luzon, which was about 31,000.

Admiral King said Okinawa would be a more realistic measure, and put the number at 41,000. Admiral Nimitz would forecast 49,000 casualties in the first 30 days, 7,000 more than at Normandy in an equal span of time. MacArthur’s staff estimated 50,000, though MacArthur, who was all for the invasion, considered that too high.

Another estimate at the Pentagon included the invasion of both southern and northern Kyushu, as well as Japan proper (“the decisive invasion”), and the cost of this plan came to 220,000 casualties, nearly a quarter of a million men. But a memorandum of June 4, 1945, written by General Thomas Handy of Marshall’s staff, in listing the advantages of making peace with Japan, said America would save no less than 500,000 to 1 million lives by avoiding the invasion altogether—which shows that figures of such magnitude were then in use at the highest levels. Stimson was certain the Japanese would fight as never before, soldiers and civilians alike, and that the cost of life on both sides would far exceed all other campaigns of the war. The number of American dead and wounded, Stimson feared, could reach a million.

The code name for the overall plan was “Downfall.” The assault on Kyushu, called “Olympic,” was to begin November 1. Operation Coronet, the larger invasion of Japan proper, the main island of Honshu, would follow in March 1946. Prior to the invasion of Honshu, air bombardment would be increased to an absolute maximum, to the point where, said one memorandum, “more bombs will be dropped on Japan than were delivered against Germany during the entire European War.”

Truman approved the plan.

McCloy, who had expressed his own views to Stimson at length the night before, kept silent throughout the discussion. But as the meeting ended, he remembered, “We were beginning to get our papers together and the President saw me. ‘McCloy,’ he said, ‘nobody leaves this room until he’s been heard from.’ I turned to Stimson and he said, ‘Go ahead.’ ”

McCloy replied that the threat of the bomb might provide a “political solution.” The whole invasion could be avoided. An immediate hush fell on the room, as if the mere mention of the ultra secret was out of order.

“I said I would tell them [the Japanese] we have the bomb and I would tell them what kind of a weapon it is. And then I would tell them the surrender terms.” He thought the Japanese should also be told they could keep their Emperor. What if they refused, he was asked. “Our moral position will be stronger if we give them warning.”

Truman indicated he would think about it.

He flew to San Francisco on The Sacred Cow to speak in the Opera House on June 26 at the official signing of the United Nations Charter. They were there, he told the delegates, to keep the world at peace. “And free from the fear of war,” he declared emphatically, both hands chopping the air, palms inward, in rhythm with the words “free,” “fear,” and “war.” San Francisco was his first public appearance since becoming President, and the reception the city gave him took his breath away. A million people turned out to cheer him as he rode in an open car.

A day later he flew into Kansas City for the first time as President, and to the biggest welcome home ever seen in Jackson County. “Dad loved every minute of it,” remembered Margaret. He was photographed having his hair cut in Frank Spina’s barbershop downtown. He dropped in at Eddie Jacobson’s Westport Men’s Wear, drank bourbon and swapped stories with Ted Marks, Jim Pendergast, and seven or eight others from Battery D after dinner at the home of Independence Mayor Roger Sermon. When he spoke at the huge auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, every seat was filled. “I shall attempt to meet your expectations,” he said humbly. “But do not expect too much of me.”

The next day, after receiving an honorary degree from the University of Kansas City, he described how, on the flight from San Francisco, after a stop at Salt Lake City, he had looked down on the great plains and thought of his grandfather, Solomon Young. From Kansas City to Salt Lake and home again had taken Solomon Young three months each way. Now his grandson had done it in three and a half hours.

“I am anxious to bring home to you that the world is no longer county-size, no longer state-size, no longer nation-size,” he said. “It is a world in which we must all get along.”

On July 2, he went before the Senate to urge ratification of the United Nations Charter: “It comes from the reality of experience in a world where one generation has failed twice to keep the peace.”

With the time for his departure for Berlin fast approaching, he spent longer hours in his office, which looked more as he himself wanted it to look. Everything belonging to Franklin Roosevelt had been removed. A Rembrandt Peale portrait of George Washington, on loan from the National Gallery, hung now to one side of the mantel facing him. On the other side was a portrait of Simon Bolívar given to him in 1941 by the Venezuelan ambassador. (The gift, on behalf of the Venezuelan government, was to the largest community in the United States bearing the name of the great liberator—Bolivar, Missouri.) Above the mantel was a Remington entitled Fired On, borrowed from the Smithsonian. It showed Indian fighters on horseback under attack in ghostly green moonlight, one horse rearing violently in the foreground, as Truman’s own horse had reared the night in the Vosges Mountains when Battery D was fired on.

Roosevelt’s naval scenes had been replaced with a series of prints of early airplanes. The Roosevelt portrait remained on the wall to Truman’s right. On a table that once held a ship model was a bronze replica of the equestrian Andrew Jackson by Charles Keck that stood in front of the Kansas City Courthouse. Behind his desk, on a table in front of the windows, were portraits of Bess, Margaret, and Mamma Truman, and a hodgepodge of books.

Franklin Roosevelt’s desk had been removed—given by Truman to Mrs. Roosevelt—and replaced with a seven-foot walnut desk that had belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Its surface, by FDR’s standards, was bare and tidy. Besides a large green blotter and telephone, there were several pairs of eyeglasses in separate cases, two small metal ashtrays for visitors, a model cannon, a clock, two pen sets (one fancy, one plain), pencils, date stamp, calendar, two magnifying glasses, paste jar, glass inkwell, and a battered old ice-water vacuum pitcher, the one item from among FDR’s personal effects that Truman had asked to keep.

In a small silver frame was the 1917 photograph of Bess that he had carried with him to France. Another small frame held a motto of Mark Twain’s, in Twain’s own hand: “Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

There was no buzzer on or beneath the desk. Truman didn’t like to “buzz” people. He would get up and go to the door instead. Further, he ordered the removal of a hidden recording device that Roosevelt had used now and then.

To an artist named S. J. Woolf, sent by The New York Times to do a sketch of the President at work, Truman seemed surprisingly relaxed, in view of all that must be on his mind. The responsibilities resting on a President, said Truman, were so heavy that if he were to keep thinking of them and considering what might happen as a result of the decisions he had to make, he would “soon go under.”

Truman was sure the Russians wanted to be friends. He saw “no reason why we should not welcome their friendship and give ours to them.” He looked forward to meeting both Stalin and Churchill, he said. But to Bess he wrote of feeling “blue as indigo” about going.

Henry Stimson, who had attended neither of the previous Big Three conferences, had not been invited to make the trip. This was out of consideration for his health, Truman told him. Acutely aware of how much could hang on last-minute developments concerning S-1, Stimson chose to invite himself. He would go by plane, arriving in Berlin in advance of the President.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was also extremely eager to be included, and extremely upset when he found he was not. Morgenthau had a plan to strip Germany of all heavy industry and reduce it to an agricultural land, an idea Truman had never taken seriously and that Stimson ardently opposed, on the grounds that an economically strong and productive Germany was the only hope for the future stability of Europe. “Punish her war criminals in full measure,” Stimson advised Truman. “Deprive her permanently of her weapons…. Guard her governmental action until the Nazi-educated generation has passed from the stage…. But do not deprive her of the means of building up ultimately a contented Germany interested in non-militaristic methods of civilization.”

It had also been pointed out to Truman that if some unfortunate mishap were to occur on the trip to Berlin, and he and Secretary of State Byrnes were both to die, then, as the law of succession stood, Henry Morgenthau would become President, a thought that distressed Truman exceedingly; but whether this was because Morgenthau was a Jew—the reason Morgenthau suspected—is not indicated in anything Truman said or wrote.

Morgenthau came to see him in the Oval Office on July 5 to say, according to Truman’s account of the meeting, that it was essential that he, Morgenthau, play a part at Potsdam, and that if he could not, he would resign. If such was the case, said Truman, then his resignation was accepted at once. The announcement was made the same day.

To replace Morgenthau at Treasury, Truman named Fred M. Vinson, who had served fourteen years in Congress, where he was considered an expert on fiscal matters, and five years as a judge on the Circuit Court of Appeals, before being named by Roosevelt to head the Office of Economic Stabilization and later the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Vinson was a versatile, diligent public figure, if unimpressive in appearance. With his receding chin, the dark circles under his eyes, he had a weary, hound-dog look. He was also an affable old-style Kentucky politician—down-to-earth, humorous, shrewd—and in Truman’s estimate one of the best men in government.

In his own diary account of the breakup Morgenthau made no mention of the Potsdam issue, only that Truman seemed “very weak and indecisive” about whether he wanted Morgenthau to stay on the job until the war ended. According to Morgenthau, he told Truman, “Either you want me to stay until V-J Day or you don’t…. After all, Mr. President, I don’t think it is conceited to say that I am at least as good or better as some of the five new people you appointed in the Cabinet, and on some of them I think you definitely made a mistake.”

A number of years later, in a conversation with Jonathan Daniels, Truman would say, “Morgenthau didn’t know shit from apple butter.”

“I am getting ready to go see Stalin and Churchill,” he wrote to his mother and sister. “I have to take my tuxedo, tails, Negro preacher coat, high hat, low hat and hard hat…. I have a briefcase filled up with information on past conferences and suggestions on what I’m to do and say. Wish I didn’t have to go….”

“How I hate this trip!” he wrote again in his diary on Sunday, July 7, on board the cruiser Augusta, under way to Europe once more for the first time since 1918.

10
Summer of Decision

Today’s prime fact is war.

—HENRY L. STIMSON

I

Truman was accustomed to looking after himself on his travels. He had always bought his own train tickets, carried his own bags, paid his own hotel bills. Traveling by automobile, he liked to be the one to decide which route to take and where to stop for the night. In the glove compartment of the gray Chrysler were the logs he kept, thin little paper-bound notebooks of the kind given away at Standard Oil gas stations. He made careful note of mileage and expenses, recorded that 10 gallons of gas at Roanoke had cost $2.25, or that lunch in Nashville was 45 cents, or that on the drive from Connecticut Avenue to 219 North Delaware Street he put 1,940 miles on the car. Even on campaign swings, with Fred Canfil along, he had preferred to do his own driving and make his own arrangements, which was why traveling now as President was such a change for him.

He could do almost nothing on his own any longer. Everything had to be planned for him. Hundreds of people had to be involved, as he had learned on the trip to San Francisco. For him to go anywhere was “like moving a circus,” he said. So to transport him overseas was a production of phenomenal proportions. For the conference at Potsdam, the State Department, War Department, Army, Navy, and Air Corps, the White House staff and Secret Service were all involved. As were the British and the Russians. Just his own immediate party, a fraction of the total, numbered fifty-three, and the 10,000-ton cruiser Augusta that carried him across the Atlantic went accompanied by the light cruiser Philadelphia. (“It seems to take two warships to get your pa across the pond,” he wrote to Margaret.) At the approach to the English Channel, a British cruiser and six British destroyers were waiting to escort him past the cliffs of Dover. At Antwerp, where the Augusta docked on Sunday, July 15, after eight days at sea, General Eisenhower headed the welcoming delegation. Driving south to an airfield at Brussels, Truman rode in a forty-seven-car caravan along a highway patrolled by the 35th Division, his old outfit, in full battle regalia. At the airfield, the presidential plane, The Sacred Cow, plus two other C-54 transports were waiting to take him and his party on the final leg, a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Berlin. Beyond Frankfurt he had an escort of twenty P-47 Thunderbolts.

The Germany passing below his window was an appalling spectacle. “You who have not seen it do not know what hell looks like from the top,” General Patton would say in a speech. Truman could see shattered bridges, railroads, the wreckage of factories, entire cities in ruins, a scarred, burned land where, he knew, people were living like animals among the debris, scavenging for food. The threat of disease and mass starvation hung everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of displaced, homeless, and dispossessed people wandered the country. Not Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, not any war President in American history, had ever beheld such a panorama of devastation.

His plane put down at Gatow airfield in the blazing heat of mid-afternoon and the reception this time included Secretary Stimson, Ambassador Harriman, Admiral King, two Russian generals, the Russian ambassador, Gromyko, and an honor guard from the 2nd Armored Division who had been waiting in the sun since early morning. From Gatow to his final destination, a drive of ten miles through the Soviet-controlled sector, the route was lined with Russian frontier guardsmen, elite Asiatic-looking troops in green caps who stood with fixed bayonets every twenty feet, mile after mile.

The number of Americans attending the conference would be four times greater than at Yalta. Truman’s entourage included Byrnes, Leahy, Bohlen, Charlie Ross, Lieutenant Elsey and Captain Frank Graham from the Map Room; a physician, Captain Alphonse McMahon; a presidential valet, Arthur Prettyman, who had served Roosevelt; a Navy photographer; eleven Navy cooks and stewards; General Vaughan, Captain Vardaman, and, once again, Fred Canfil, the U.S. Marshal of Kansas City, who was temporarily attached to the Secret Service detail as a special bodyguard for the President. (Truman would take particular delight in introducing his burly former courthouse custodian to the Russians as Marshal Canfil, a title they took to signify military rank and so showed him utmost deference.) “He was the most vigilant bodyguard a President ever had,” Truman would say later. “While the conferences were going on, he would stand by a window with his arms folded and scowl out the window at everybody who passed…as if he would eat them alive if they bothered the President of the United States.”

Food supplies, cases of liquor and wine, were flown in. A planeload of bottled water from France arrived daily. Because a planeload of pillows went astray, everybody below the rank of major general would be sleeping without one. So that Truman could maintain private communications with Washington, the Army had spent weeks installing wireless relays and teleprinter circuits across the 100 miles of Soviet-occupied territory separating the conference site from the American sector.

Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were to be quartered in three of twenty-five large houses that had been commandeered and hurriedly refurbished in a wooded Berlin suburb called Babelsberg, beside Lake Griebnitz, three miles from Potsdam. The lakeshore community had survived comparatively undamaged and was now under the intensely watchful eye of thousands of Russian troops and security agents, in addition to swarms of British and American military guards. The green-capped Russian soldiers were everywhere, along streets and highways, at every crossroad, and along the lakefront. They would appear out of the trees, look about, then be gone again. In all, the Russian complement—military, diplomatic, and security—exceeded twenty thousand people.

Truman was staying at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, a three-story yellow-stucco villa on the lakeshore to be known as the “Little White House.” He was told it had belonged to the head of the Nazi movie industry, who had been sent to Siberia. In fact, it had been the home of a noted publisher, Gustav Müller-Grote, and his large family, whose tragic story Truman would only learn years later in an extraordinary letter from one of the sons. Built before the turn of the century, the house had been for years a gathering place for German and foreign scientists, writers, and artists.

At the end of the war my parents were still living there, as indeed they lived there their whole lives. Some of my sisters moved there with their children, as the suburb seemed to offer more security from bombings…. In the beginning of May the Russians arrived. Ten weeks before you entered this house, its tenants were living in constant fright and fear. By day and by night plundering Russian soldiers went in and out, raping my sisters before their own parents and children, beating up my old parents. All the furniture, wardrobes, trunks, etc. were smashed with bayonets and rifle butts, their contents spilled and destroyed in an indescribable manner. The wealth of a cultivated house was destroyed within hours.

Told only that the house was to serve a “prominent purpose,” the family was ordered to pack and be gone in an hour, after which the Russians stripped it of everything, including a library of rare books and manuscripts that were hauled away with a forklift truck to fill a bomb crater. The furnishings Truman found on arrival—dark, heavy Teutonic sideboards and tables, a huge carved desk, overstuffed chairs, a grand piano—had been confiscated elsewhere and rushed in at the last minute.

An American correspondent who managed to get a look inside some weeks later called it a “nightmare of a house.” It was, wrote Tania Long of The New York Times, “oppressive and awesome in its gloom,” filled with depressing still-lifes and hideous lamps. Truman, too, would use the word “nightmare” to describe the interior, though with his interest in architecture he was bothered more by the exterior. Remembering how he had once been quartered in such places as lovely little Montigny-sur-Aube, he called the house a ruined château—ruined, he said, by a German need to cover up anything French. “They erected a couple of tombstone chimneys on each side of the porch facing the lake so they could cover up the beautiful chateau roof and tower,” he wrote in his diary. “Make the place look like hell but purely German….”

There were no screens in the windows, and the mosquitoes, according to several in the party, were as plentiful as at Yalta. Bathroom facilities, in the words of the official log, were “wholly inadequate.”

Still, Truman thought the place adequate under the circumstances, and was not told that the former owners were living in misery only a short distance away. His second-floor suite included a bedroom, living room, large office, and a porch with a view of the lake, which was narrow and winding and looked more like a river, with the woods beyond seeming very near at hand. On the lawn that sloped down to the water’s edge stood three or four American MPs in their white gloves and leggings. It was said the Russians had thrown some German soldiers into the lake who were too severely wounded to walk.

Admiral Leahy was down the hall from the President; Secretary Byrnes and Chip Bohlen on the first floor. Charlie Ross, Vaughan, Vardaman, Canfil, and the Secret Service detail were on the third floor. The Map Room was set up in an L-shaped space off the stair landing, between the first and second floors. The telephone switchboard was in the basement.

Truman arrived appearing rested and well prepared. The weather on the Atlantic had been so fair, the crossing so smooth, he had suffered not at all from seasickness. With the war in Europe over, there had been no need any longer for a zigzag course or darkened ship at night—all very different from his crossing in 1918—and this time he had the admiral’s cabin. There were movies on board and a number of “satisfactory” poker games with Ross, Vaughan, and some of the wire-service reporters who had been allowed to make the trip. Truman took early morning walks on deck and with binoculars watched gunnery practice. To the family in Grandview, he wrote of meeting a seaman on board named Lawrence Truman. “He comes from Owensborough, Ky., and is the great grandson of our grandfather’s brother. He’s a nice boy and has green eyes just like Margaret’s.”

But the week at sea had been primarily a working session with Byrnes, Leahy, and Bohlen, all of whom had been closely associated with Roosevelt and at his side at Yalta. The President had squeezed facts and opinions out of them all day, Leahy later said. Bohlen, too, was struck by how Truman “stuck to business,” rarely taking up time with small talk. Averell Harriman would later find the President “astonishingly well prepared.”

The central issues to be resolved at Potsdam were no different from those at Yalta: the political future of Eastern Europe (and Poland in particular); the occupation and dismantling of Germany; and a commitment from Russia to help defeat Japan, which Truman viewed as his main purpose in going. General Marshall and Admiral King had both stressed the need for Soviet action against Japan, to shorten the war and reduce American casualties. General MacArthur had twice insisted that Russian help was needed.

Truman also had a pet proposal of his own for ensuring free navigation on all inland waterways and the great canals, an idea he was sure would go far to guarantee future peace in the world.

But a further extremely important reason—in many ways the most important reason—for the meeting and for all the trouble and effort of coming so far was his need to get to know the other two of the Big Three (“Mr. Russia” and “Mr. Great Britain,” Truman called them), to see them face to face and size them up, and they him. As American as anything about this thoroughly American new President was his fundamental faith that most problems came down to misunderstandings between people, and that even the most complicated problems really weren’t as complicated as they were made out to be, once everybody got to know one another. He knew also the faith Roosevelt had in personal diplomacy as a consequence of his two meetings with Stalin, at Teheran and Yalta.

Truman had always wanted to succeed at whatever he undertook. There was no one who wanted to win “half so badly as I do,” he had confided to Bess years before, and he had not changed. He knew the value of preparation, of homework—especially if he felt out of his depth, if he were thrown in among and were to be judged by others who appeared to know so much more. “I’ve studied more and worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever did in my life,” he had written in 1918 from the elite artillery school at Montigny-sur-Aube, where everyone else in the class was a college graduate. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here,” he had vowed after coming to the Senate.

But from boyhood he also prided himself in his gift for conversation. Given the chance to talk to people, he felt he could get pretty much anything he wanted. “Haven’t you ever been overawed by a secretary,” he had remarked only recently to a visitor in his office, “and finally, when you have reached the man you wanted to see, discovered he was very human?” He was sure that if he could meet Stalin and deal with him, then he could get to know Stalin and understand him; in this, like so many others before him, he was greatly mistaken.

On visits to Washington to see Roosevelt during the war, Winston Churchill had made a point of meeting those senators who were known to have influence. The junior Senator from Missouri, however, had not been on the prime minister’s list. So, while Truman and Churchill had maintained steady correspondence in recent months, and talked by phone, the morning of Monday, July 16, 1945, when the familiar stout figure arrived at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, marked their first meeting. Churchill had wanted his call on the President to be the first order of business. Truman had named the hour—11:00 A.M.—and Churchill arrived on the dot.

Churchill, too, had landed at Gatow the previous afternoon and was staying in a comparably large, if more attractive, lakeside house nearby. With him now were Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, whom Truman had met, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and the prime minister’s daughter and driver, Mary Churchill, who was dressed in the uniform of a junior commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and who told Harry Vaughan her father had not been up this early in ten years.

Nor had Churchill prepared himself for the Big Three conference in anything like the way Truman had. He had bothered with no briefings, he came with no agenda. He required neither, he felt. He had spent a holiday near Biarritz painting, as his way of preparing for Potsdam.

Churchill was in the seventy-first year of a life in which he had seen and done more than all but a few. He had been a cavalry officer, foreign correspondent, a prisoner of war in South Africa, head of the British Board of Trade, and First Lord of the Admiralty as early as 1911. He was the author of nineteen books, a painter, husband, father, ardent holiday bricklayer. Once, needing cash, he made $50,000 on a lecture tour in just five months. Born in a palace, he was the son of a lord, the grandson of a duke. His mother, as everyone knew, was an American, the brilliant, beautiful Jenny Jerome of New York. In politics he had begun as a Conservative, changed to a Liberal, switched back to a Conservative again. He had overcome political defeat and disgrace, survived his own recurring dark moods, and being struck down and nearly killed by an automobile in New York. As prime minister through the war, as the pungent, indomitable voice of British resolve, he had become the British lion incarnate, and the great words were his words, not the artifice of a ghost. “The nation had the lion’s heart,” he would say. “I had the luck to give the roar.”

The scowl, the familiar upraised V-sign and jutting cigar, his command of the English language had made him a surpassing symbol and clearly one of the great figures of the age. If asked who in the world they most admired, now that Roosevelt was gone, most Americans would have said Churchill, and probably, after some thought, Truman would have, too. Yet the prospect of sharing the spotlight with such a man was extremely unsettling. Behind all of Truman’s privately expressed apprehension over coming to Berlin was a great deal of plain stage fright—anxiety accentuated by memories of Churchill and Roosevelt together, posing for pictures, commanding attention and affection as few men ever had, and always with perfect confidence and obvious regard for one another. Roosevelt and Churchill had met nine times and exchanged, by Churchill’s count, 1,700 messages. On visits at the White House, the prime minister had made himself so at home that Mrs. Roosevelt decided it was time an official guest residence be established, which led to the acquisition of Blair House. (If one favorite Washington story can be believed, she had found the prime minister padding down the hall in his nightshirt sometime before dawn one morning, a cigar and brandy in hand, saying he had still more to discuss with Franklin and must wake him at once.) He and Roosevelt saw the history of their times as Homeric drama and they the lead players, two professionals perfectly cast and at the top of their form.

“It is fun to be in the same decade with you,” Roosevelt had told him, and in a recent letter to Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt had written how important it was that he get along with Winston. He should talk to him about books, she advised, or let him quote from his marvelous memory of everything from nonsense rhymes to Greek tragedy.

But Churchill had aged. He looked old, he sounded tired and disheartened. The empire he had led with such verve was nearly bankrupt, a great power no longer. On July 5, there had been a general election, the result of which would not be known for another ten days, when the soldier vote was in. The election could have been put off, but Churchill had gone ahead with it on the advice that his popularity was at a peak. While others were confident his victory would be substantial, he, privately, was not so sure.

It would become part of the mythology of the Truman presidency in time to come that Churchill, at their first meeting, thought little of Truman, an idea amplified by Churchill himself in a famous toast years later on board the presidential yacht. “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard,” he would begin. “I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt….” But in fact Truman made a strong impression from the start. They talked for two hours, and, according to Truman, no business of the conference was considered; but walking back to his own quarters afterward, Churchill told his daughter how much he liked the new President. “He says he is sure he can work with him,” Mary Churchill wrote to her mother. “I nearly wept with joy and thankfulness, it seemed like divine providence. Perhaps it is FDR’s legacy. I can see Papa is relieved and confident.”

Asked later by his friend and physician, Lord Moran, if Truman had ability, Churchill replied that he thought so. “At any rate, he is a man of immense determination,” Churchill said. “He takes no notice of delicate ground, he just plants his foot down firmly upon it.” To make his point, Churchill jumped a little off the wooden floor and brought both bare feet down with a smack.

Truman’s impressions, recorded at the day’s end in his diary, were not so favorable, however. As the White House butler, Alonzo Fields, had noted, commenting on Bess, flattery did not go far with the Trumans.

We had a most pleasant conversation [Truman wrote of Churchill]. He is a most charming and a very clever person—meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me etc. etc. Well…. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap.

Stalin, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Where he was, or why, were not known, but the opening of the conference had to be postponed a day.

In the time since Truman had left Washington, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, on orders from Tokyo, had begun discussions with the Soviets on the possibility of bringing an end to the war. On July 12, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigenori Togo, sent a “Very Secret, Urgent” radio message to Ambassador Sato stating that the Emperor was “greatly concerned over the daily increasing calamities and sacrifices faced by the citizens of the various belligerent countries” and that it was “His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war.” His Majesty wished to send Prince Konoye as a special envoy to Moscow to talk.

Sato responded that it was pointless talking about peace with the Soviets. Such proposed negotiations were entirely unrealistic, he stressed. Molotov was not interested. “In the final analysis,” Sato bluntly told Togo, “if our country truly desires to terminate the war, we have no alternative but to accept unconditional surrender or something very close to it.”

The messages were intercepted by American monitors (the Japanese code having been broken years before) and promptly reached Truman. And so, importantly, did Tokyo’s repeated warnings to Sato that Japan would not consent to unconditional surrender.

Also available to the President was a Combined Intelligence Committee report warning that the Japanese might try to cause dissension among the Allies by just such peace overtures. And even had there been no such warning, there was for Truman, as for others trying to appraise the situation, the bitter memory of Japanese peace talks in Washington in December 1941 at the very time of the attack at Pearl Harbor.

On the afternoon of the 16th, his schedule open, Truman decided to see Berlin. A motorcade assembled in the drive outside Number 2 Kaiserstrasse and in ten minutes, with Byrnes and Leahy beside him in the back seat of an open Lincoln, he was speeding down the empty four-lane Autobahn. The day was stifling hot and the wind came as a great relief.

Halfway to the city they met the entire American 2nd Armored Division deployed for his inspection along one side of the highway, a double row of Sherman tanks and halftracks reaching as far as the eye could see. The motorcade drew up, Truman got out. It was the largest armored division in the world, he was told, and a spectacle of military power such as he might only have imagined until now. He climbed into a halftrack, and to review the formation rode standing, slowly, for twenty minutes, down a line of soldiers and equipment for a mile and a half—“good soldiers and millions of dollars of equipment, which has amply paid its way to Berlin,” he thought.

Heading on, the motorcade passed miles of ruin and desolation, bomb craters, blackened burned-out buildings, and seemingly endless processions of homeless Germans plodding along beside the highway carrying or dragging bundles of pathetic belongings. They were mostly old people and children who appeared to be headed nowhere in particular, with nothing but blank expressions on their faces, no anger, no grief, no fear, which Truman found extremely disturbing. At the end of the last war, when the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, came to Paris, exuberant crowds had acclaimed him as a hero and savior. Now most of those trudging past never bothered even to look up.

In the center of Berlin, or what had been Berlin, the world’s fourth largest city and capital of the Reich that was to have lasted a thousand years, the small presidential caravan moved down the famous old streets—Bismarckstrasse, Berlinerstrasse, and Unter den Linden, where the once celebrated Linden trees were no more. The Russians had cleared the main thoroughfares with bulldozers. Rubble on all sides was heaped two and three stories high, between the windowless, roofless hulks of bomb-gutted buildings. Everything was black with soot, and in the oppressive heat the smell of death and open sewers was nearly overpowering.

American and British bombers had laid waste to the city around the clock. Probably fifty thousand people had been killed, five times as many as in the London Blitz. Then, in April, came the Russian artillery and the Russian Army.

On Wilhelmstrasse, Truman’s car pulled up beside the Reich Chancellery and the shell-blasted stone balcony where Hitler had harangued his Nazi followers. Truman did not get out. “It is a terrible thing,” he began, knowing he was expected to say something, “but they brought it on themselves. That’s what happens when a man overreaches himself.” It was all he could find to say.

He saw the Brandenburg Gate and the wreckage of the Tiergarten, the city’s once beautiful central park. In 1939, to honor his fiftieth birthday, Hitler had paraded columns of troops and tanks here, before a crowd of 2 million cheering Berliners.

Slowly the motorcade moved on, winding past the ruins of the Sports Palace, where huge crowds had shouted “Hail, the Führer,” and “Leader, command, we follow,” as Propaganda Minister Goebbels asked if they were true believers in the “final total victory” of the German people; then past the giant, gutted Reichstag, seat of parliament, where a fire set by the Nazis in 1933 and blamed on the Communists had given Hitler the excuse he needed to seize dictatorial power.

Despite all they had read, all they had been told in advance, the photographs and newsreels they had seen, the visiting Americans were unprepared for the reality of conquered Berlin. “I never saw such destruction,” recorded Truman, who had seen his share in 1918. It was “absolute ruin.” To Admiral Leahy, whose military career had begun with the famous voyage of the old Oregon around the Horn to Cuba in 1898, it was a calamity against the civilized laws of war. At a notably subdued dinner that night they talked quietly among themselves of the horrible destructiveness of modern war, now “brought home,” as Leahy said, “to those of us who fought the war from Washington.” Truman was as low as he had felt in a long time.

I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking…[of] Scipio, Rameses II…Sherman, Jenghiz Khan [he wrote that night in his diary]…. I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.

He kept thinking of the devastated people he had seen wandering in the debris. But they had brought it on themselves, they did it, he would write to Bess.

Churchill, on a tour of Berlin of his own that afternoon, had spent half an hour exploring the Chancellery, the site of Hitler’s bunker. (“This is what would have happened to us if they had won the war,” Churchill was heard to say. “We would have been the bunker.”) Truman had not wished to walk among the ruins, he said, because he would never want those unfortunate people to think he was gloating over them.

Because the reporters who had come to Berlin to cover the conference were excluded from all transactions of importance, denied access to the participants or even to the compound at Babelsberg, and provided with only occasional press releases by Charlie Ross, they had often to concoct stories from very little. Anne O’Hare McCormick speculated in a column for The New York Times that the mysterious Joseph Stalin, too, must have been there somewhere in Berlin that same afternoon, but had kept his presence unknown. It was hard to imagine the Soviet Generalissimo not wanting to survey the conquered city, she wrote, and she described all three men stalking about in the dust and wreckage.

There are moments when the drama of our times seems to focus on a single scene. The meeting at Potsdam is one of those moments. We can hardly take in the sense of what happened until it is spelled out in a picture like this. The picture of three men walking in a graveyard. They are the men who hold in their hands most of the power in the world….

Yet the devastation of Berlin was small scale compared to what had become possible that same afternoon of Monday, July 16. What Truman did not yet know, what none of them knew, was that at a remote part of the Alamogordo Air Base in the desert of New Mexico, at 5:29 in the morning (1:29 in the afternoon in Berlin) there had been a blinding flash, “a light not of this world,” from the first nuclear explosion in history. Stimson received word at his Babelsberg quarters that evening at 7:30, a top-secret telegram from George Harrison in Washington, which Stimson took directly to Truman.

“Operated on this morning,” it said. “Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations.” Details would follow.

II

“Promptly a few minutes before twelve, I looked up from the desk and there stood Stalin in the doorway,” wrote the President in his diary.

It was midday, Tuesday, July 17, and from the high window behind Truman’s shoulder, sunlight streamed into the room. A gilt-framed Victorian still-life of fruit and a dead duck hung over a small marble mantelpiece. His desk—a monstrous, deeply carved affair with huge clawed feet—had been positioned at an angle, facing the door, in the corner of a large Oriental rug. With the Generalissimo were Molotov and the interpreter, Pavlov.

Stalin had arrived the night before and was staying in a thickly wooded area closer to Potsdam, but this, like the time of his arrival and the fact that he had traveled by train more than 1,000 miles from the Kremlin, were all kept secret. It was said he had been detained by official business. The truth was he came late primarily to accentuate his own importance.

Had Truman been outside waiting for Stalin’s arrival, he would have seen a dozen heavily armed Russian guards materialize out of nowhere and surround the house, then, in minutes, the appearance of a long, closed Packard with bulletproof glass so thick that the figures inside were only a blur. As Stalin got out of the car, Harry Vaughan came bounding down the front steps to greet him like a fellow Rotarian, as George Elsey remembered. The Russian guards outside the yellow house were not quite sure what to do.

“I got to my feet and advanced to meet him,” continues Truman’s diary account. “He put out his hand and smiled. I did the same, we shook, I greeted Molotov and the interpreter….”

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili—Stalin, “the Man of Steel”—was the single most powerful figure in the world. He was the absolute dictator over 180 million people of 170 nationalities in a country representing one sixth of the earth’s surface, the Generalissimo of gigantic, victorious armies, and Harry Truman, like nearly everyone meeting him for the first time, was amazed to find how small he was. “A little bit of a squirt,” Truman described him, Stalin standing about 5 feet 5.

He was dressed simply in a lightweight khaki uniform with red epaulets and red seams down the trousers, and he wore no decorations except a single red-ribboned gold star, the Order of the Hero of the Soviet, over the left breast pocket, which gave him a kind of understated authority. His small, squinty eyes were a strange yellow-gray and there were streaks of gray in his mustache and coarse hair. He was badly pockmarked, his color poor—he had what in high Soviet circles was known as “Kremlin complexion,” an unhealthy, indoor pallor made worse by a recent illness—and his very irregular teeth were darkly tobacco-stained. Truman had been told of his crippled left arm, the result of a childhood accident, but this was not especially noticeable. A chain smoker, Stalin held his cigarette in his right hand and gestured with his right hand only. He had unusually large, powerful-looking hands—hands as hard as his mind, Harry Hopkins once said.

Bohlen, who was standing by to translate for Truman, thought Stalin had aged greatly in just the few weeks since he and Hopkins had met with him in Moscow. Stalin moved slowly, stiffly, spoke little and in a very low tone. To Truman he seemed an old man, yet there was less than five years difference in their age. Born in abject poverty in Georgia in 1879, Stalin was the son of a semi-literate, drunken shoemaker and a doting mother who took in laundry. Initially, before turning revolutionary, he had studied for the priesthood.

Truman, in his freshly pressed double-breasted gray suit and two-toned summer shoes, looked a picture of vitality by contrast.

They sat in overstuffed chairs, flanked by Byrnes, Molotov, Bohlen, and Pavlov. Truman told Stalin he had been looking forward to their meeting for a long time. Stalin agreed solemnly that such personal contact was of great importance. In an effort to ease the tension, Byrnes asked Stalin about his habit of sleeping late. Stalin said only that the war had changed many of his habits. Truman tried an informal reference to Stalin as Uncle Joe, the nickname Roosevelt had used, but this too fell flat with the humorless Russian.

Truman said he hoped to deal with stalin as a friend. He was no diplomat, Truman went on. He would not beat around the bush. He usually said yes or no to questions after hearing all the argument. Only then did stalin appear pleased.

They talked briefly of the defeat of Germany, stalin saying he was sure Hitler was alive and in hiding somewhere in Spain or Argentina. Then, abruptly, and entirely on his own initiative, Stalin said that as they had agreed at Yalta, the Soviets would be ready to declare war on Japan and attack Manchuria by mid-August. He had already assured the Chinese that Russia Recognized Manchuria as part of China and that there would be no Soviet interference with internal political matters there.

Truman said he was extremely pleased. But Stalin, as if to be sure Truman understood, repeated that by the middle of August the Red Army would be in the war with Japan, “as agreed at Yalta,” to which Truman expressed his every confidence that the Soviets would keep their word.

At this point Harry Vaughan slipped into the room to ask Truman in a whisper if he was going to invite “these guys” to lunch.

What was on the menu Truman whispered. Liver and bacon, vaughan said. “If liver and bacon is good enough for us, it’s good enough for them,” Truman replied.

When he asked Stalin to stay, Stalin protested, saying it would be impossible. “You could if you wanted to,” Truman said. And Stalin stayed—for creamed spinach soup, liver and bacon, baked ham, Julienne potatoes, string beans, pumpernickel bread, jam, sliced fruit, mints, candy, cigars, which Stalin declined, and a California wine that he went out of his way to praise.

Truman thought the whole occasion went well, exactly because it was so spur of the moment and informal. He liked Stalin, he decided, “and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement satisfactory to the world and to ourselves,”

But Stalin nearly always made a good impression of foreigners. Churchill, who once called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and who warned both Roosevelt and Truman repeatedly of the Russian menace to Europe, confessed still to liking Stalin the man. Roosevelt had been convinced almost to the end that he could get along with “Uncle Joe.” “The truth is,” wrote Jimmy Byrnes, recalling Stalin’s performance at Yalta, “he is a very likeable person.” Joseph E. Davies, who had been ambassador to Russia briefly and would be at Truman’s side daily at the potsdam conference table, had said in a superficial and immensely popular book, Mission to Moscow, published in 1941, that Stalin was uncommonly wise and gentle. “A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him,” wrote Davies. Even Eisenhower, after a visit to Moscow later that summer, would describe Stalin in much the same fashion, as “benign and fatherly.”

Truman, as he wrote, found Stalin to be polite, good-natured, businesslike, “honest—but smart as hell.” There had been not a hint of contention between them. The conference hadn’t even begun, yet already Truman had achieved his main objective, as he recorded triumphantly in his diary. “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about…. I can deal with Stalin.”

That Stalin was also secretive to the point of imbalance, suspicious, deceitful, unspeakably cruel, that he ruled absolutely and by terror and secret police, that he was directly responsible for destroying millions of his own people and the enslavement of many millions more, was not so clearly understood by the outside world at this point as it would be later. Still, the evil of the man was no secret in 1945. In a February issue, published just before Yalta, Time magazine had noted that Stalin and his regime had deliberately caused the deaths by starvation of at least 3 million peasants and liquidated another 1 million Communists who opposed his policies. Facts are stubborn things, said the article, borrowing a line from Lenin, and these were the facts. Actually the facts were more horrible. Probably 5 million peasants had died; probably 10 million had been sent to forced labor camps. “I was remembering my friends,” the composer Shostakovich once remarked, “and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses.”

Stalin himself had told Churchill in 1942 that “ten millions” of peasants had been “dealt with.” At one point in 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he had had many thousands of Polish officers murdered, in what became known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. In truth, “Uncle Joe” was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler.

Yet, wrote Bohlen, “There was little in Stalin’s demeanor in the presence of foreigners that gave any clue of the real nature and character of the man.” Stalin had perfected a talent for disguise:

At Teheran, at Yalta, at Potsdam and during the ten days I saw him during the spring of 1945 with Hopkins, Stalin was exemplary in his behavior. He was patient, a good listener, always quite in his manner and in his expression. There were no signs of the harsh and brutal nature behind this mask….

The mask was the artifice of an accomplished actor and it rarely slipped. Once was at Teheran. Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Stalin responded, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.”

Twenty years in politics had taught him a thing or two about people, Truman thought. He had only to look a man in the eye to know. “I was impressed by him,” he would write of Stalin, remembering this first meeting. “…What I most especially noticed were his eyes, his face, and his expression.”

With the lunch over and the opening session of the conference not scheduled to begin until five o’clock, Truman went upstairs in the “nightmare” house and took a nap.

III

The first of the plenary sessions of the Potsdam Conference, last of the wartime meetings of the Big Three, code-named “Terminal,” was held in the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, the former summer residence of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, which had served more recently as a military hospital, first for the Germans, then the Russians. A sprawling two-story, ivy-covered stone building in the neo-Tudor style, it looked very like a vast English country house, with gardens extending to the lake and an inner court where the Russians had planted a giant star of red geraniums.

The oak-paneled reception hall, a cavernous, dim space lit by heavy wrought-iron chandeliers, served as the conference room. The color scheme was dark red, black, and gold, and the effect rather foreboding, except for one immense window two stories tall looking onto the gardens and lake.

At the center of the room was a circular conference table 12 feet in diameter, covered in a burgundy cloth, and around it, evenly spaced, were fifteen chairs, five each for the three countries. The three chairs reserved for Churchill, Stalin, and Truman were immediately identifiable by their larger size and an incongruous pair of gilded cupids perched on the back of each. Additional chairs and several small desks were arranged in a larger circle behind, these for other members of the delegation, advisers and specialists, who would come and go as different topics arose.

To enter the room, the three leaders had their own separate doors, each of these heavily guarded by Russian soldiers. When everybody was assembled, the guards withdrew, the doors were closed.

Though wearing the same gray suit as earlier, Truman had put on a fresh white shirt and a bow tie. Churchill, like Stalin, was in a summer-weight khaki uniform and as they took their places, he lit up an eight-inch cigar. Stalin was carrying a briefcase, which he tossed onto the table, as if to say he was ready for business.

Truman sat with Byrnes and Leahy on his right, Bohlen and Davies on the left. In Churchill’s group now was Clement Attlee, Churchill’s Labor Party opponent in the general election, whom the prime minister had decided to include in the national interest, in the event that Attlee turned out to be his successor.

“Never in history has such an aggregation of victorious military force been represented at one conference,” wrote The New York Times; “never has there been a meeting which faced graver or more complex issues; and never have three mortal men borne so heavy a responsibility for the welfare of their peoples and mankind.”

No correspondents for the Times were present, however, nor any of the nearly two hundred other reporters who had made their way to Berlin to cover the story and were, as Churchill said, “in a state of furious indignation.” For the “lid was on” at Potsdam, “everything conducted behind a ring of bayonets,” as Stalin had insisted. Even the number of authorized people permitted in the room at any one time was strictly limited. Once when Byrnes’s secretary brought him some papers and had to wait a few minutes, two women from the Russian staff entered immediately and took chairs until she left.

The conference was officially called to order at 5:10 P.M. Stalin spoke first, saying that President Truman, as the only head of state present, should preside. Churchill seconded the proposal. Truman expressed his appreciation. Then, as in his first speech to Congress, he plunged directly into his prepared remarks, moving rapidly down an item-by-item order of business that he thought the conference should follow. He proposed the establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers to make the necessary preparations for a peace conference. Immediately Stalin was dubious, questioning any participation by China in a European peace settlement. Truman submitted a draft on how the administration of Germany should be handled. Churchill said he had had no opportunity to examine it. Truman read a prepared statement on implementation of the Yalta Declaration, which pledged the three powers to assist the people of all liberated European countries to establish democratic governments through free election. He was wasting no time getting to the sorest of subjects. “Since the Yalta Conference,” he read, “the obligations assumed under this declaration have not been carried out.” Of particular concern were Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Again Churchill said he needed time to consider the document.

Truman moved quickly on, calling for a change in policy toward Italy. As soon as possible, Italy must be included in the United Nations. Churchill now protested and to make his point invoked the memory of Roosevelt. They were trying to deal with too many important matters too hastily, said Churchill. He reminded Truman that Italy had attacked Britain at the time France was going down, and that Roosevelt himself had called this a stab in the back. The British had fought the Italians for two years in Africa before American forces ever arrived.

Truman paused, as if brought up short by the mere mention of Roosevelt.

Speaking more slowly now, he said he appreciated the honor of having been made chairman of the meeting. He had come to the conference with certain trepidation, he said. He had to replace a man who was irreplaceable. He knew full well the goodwill and friendship Roosevelt had achieved with the prime minister and the Generalissimo, both for himself and for the United States, and he, Harry Truman, hoped he might merit the same friendship and goodwill as time went on. It was simply and well expressed and what he should have said at the start, and the atmosphere changed at once, as Churchill responded in fulsome, Churchillian fashion. Though no official verbatim record was being kept, Llewellyn Thompson, from the American Embassy in London, and Ben Cohen of Byrnes’s staff were both taking notes:

Churchill [recorded Thompson] said he should like to express on behalf of the British delegation his gratitude to the President for undertaking the Presidency of this momentous Conference and to thank him for presenting so clearly the views of the mighty republic which he heads. The warm and ineffaceable sentiments which they had for President Roosevelt they would renew with the man who had come forward at this historic moment and he wished to express to him his most cordial respect. He trusted that the bonds not only between their countries but also between them personally would increase. The more they came to grips with the world’s momentous problems the closer their association would become.

On behalf of the Russian delegation, said Stalin, he wished to say they “fully shared” the sentiments expressed by the prime minister.

It was a pattern that would prevail, Churchill rumbling on, Stalin being as direct and to-the-point as Truman.

Taking his turn now, his voice very low, Stalin spoke in short segments, leaving ample pauses between, as one practiced in working with an interpreter. He wished to discuss acquisition of the German Navy (which was then in British hands), German reparations, the question of trusteeships for the Soviet Union (by which he meant colonies), the future of Franco Spain, and the future of Poland.

Churchill agreed that the Polish question was foremost, but said the agenda for the next session should be left to the foreign ministers to decide (Eden, Byrnes, and Molotov). Stalin and Truman concurred.

“So tomorrow we will have prepared the points most agreeable,” said Churchill.

“All the same, we will not escape the disagreeable,” countered Stalin.

“We will feel our way up to them,” said Churchill, who was ready to stop for the day.

Stalin turned again to the question of including China in preparations for the peace conference. Churchill thought it a needless complication to bring in China. Perhaps the matter could be referred to the foreign ministers, suggested Stalin, playing Churchill’s game now. If the foreign secretaries decided to leave China out, said Truman, he had no objections.

“As all the questions are to be discussed by the foreign ministers, we shall have nothing to do,” observed Stalin, producing the first laughter at the table.

Churchill thought the foreign ministers ought to provide three or four points for discussion per day, “enough to keep us busy.”

Truman was on edge. This wasn’t at all what he had come for. “I don’t want to discuss,” he said, “I want to decide.”

“You want something in the bag each day,” Churchill responded, as if he were just now beginning to understand the new American President.

Yes, and next time he wished to begin at an earlier hour, Truman said.

“I will obey your orders,” responded Churchill, and at once Stalin stepped in, his eyes on Churchill.

“If you are in such an obedient mood today, Mr. Prime Minister, I should like to know whether you will share with us the German fleet?”

The fleet should either be shared or destroyed, exclaimed Churchill. Weapons of war were horrible things.

“Let’s divide it,” said Stalin. “If Mr. Churchill wishes, he can sink his share.”

The Foreign Secretary thought the prime minister’s performance had been pathetic. The “P.M.” was “woolly and verbose,” and too much under Stalin’s spell, noted Anthony Eden, and he let others know, which annoyed Truman, who took it as an act of disloyalty to Churchill. Alexander Cadogan, in a letter to his wife, said the P.M. simply talked too much, while Truman was admirably businesslike.

It had made presiding over the Senate seem tame, Truman wrote to Bess, clearly pleased with himself and with the comments of his staff.

The boys say I gave them an earful. I hope so. Admiral Leahy said he’d never seen an abler job and Byrnes and my fellows seemed to be walking on air. I was so scared I didn’t know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not. Anyway a start has been made and I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it…. I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing….

Wish you and Margie were here. But it is a forlorn place and would only make you sad.

The letter was written early on July 18 before the day began. To his mother and sister he wrote, “Churchill talks all the time and Stalin just grunts but you know what he means.”

Mamma and Mary Jane had already written six times since he left Washington and he would keep them posted through the entire conference. This morning he had news he knew they would like. Sergeant Harry Truman, Vivian’s oldest son, had joined him for breakfast.

He was on the Queen Elizabeth at Glasgow, ready to sail [for New York]. I told them to give him the choice of coming to the conference or going home. He elected to come and see me. I gave him a pass to Berlin signed by Stalin and by me. Will send him home by plane and he’ll get there almost as soon as if he’d gone on the Elizabeth. He sure is a fine looking soldier, stands up, dresses the part and I’m proud of him.

About mid-morning, Henry Stimson came in looking extremely excited. A second cable from George Harrison had arrived during the night:

Doctor had just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm.

The decoding officer at the Army message center had been amazed, assuming that the elderly Secretary of War had become a new father. Stimson explained the cable to Truman. The flash at Alamogordo had been visible for 250 miles (the distance from Washington to Highhold, Stimson’s estate on Long Island), the sound carrying 50 miles (the distance to Harrison’s farm in Virginia). Truman appeared extremely pleased and at lunch with Churchill, at Churchill’s house, Number 23 Ringstrasse, he showed him the two telegrams. Stalin ought to be told, Truman offered. Churchill agreed that Stalin should know “the Great New Fact,” but none of “the particulars.” Better to tell him sooner than later, Churchill suggested. But how? In writing or by word of mouth? At a special meeting or informally?

Truman thought it best just to tell him after one of the meetings. He would wait for the right moment, Truman said.

They were dining alone. Churchill lamented the melancholy state of Great Britain, with its staggering debt and declining influence in the world. Truman said the United States owed Britain much for having “held the fort” at the beginning of the war. “If you had gone down like France,” Truman told Churchill, “we might be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time.”

They talked of the war in the Pacific and Churchill pondered whether new wording might be devised so that the Japanese could surrender and yet salvage some sense of their military honor. Truman countered by saying he did not think the Japanese had any military honor, not after Pearl Harbor. Churchill said that “at any rate they had something for which they were ready to face certain death in very large numbers, and this might not be so important to us as it was to them.” At this Truman turned “quite sympathetic,” as Churchill recounted, and began talking of “the terrible responsibilities upon him in regard to unlimited effusion of American blood.”

“He invited personal friendship and comradeship,” Churchill wrote. “He seems a man of exceptional character….”

From the Churchill lunch Truman went to pay a return call on Stalin, accompanied now by Byrnes and Bohlen, and to his surprise found a second lunch waiting, an elaborate meal in his honor, which in Russian fashion called for numerous toasts.

Stalin told Truman of the secret Japanese peace feeler and passed the Sato message across the table. It might be best, said Stalin, to “lull the Japanese to sleep,” to say their request for a visit by Prince Konoye was too vague to answer. Truman said nothing to indicate he already knew of the Japanese overtures. He would leave the answer up to Stalin, he said.

Bohlen would remember Stalin’s disclosure of the Japanese proposal making a very great impression on Truman, as a sign the Russians might be ready after all to deal openly with them. To his delight Truman also discovered that Stalin, the supreme Soviet strong-man, was substituting white wine for what was supposedly vodka in his glass. The Generalissimo must visit the United States, Truman said. If Stalin would come, Truman promised, he would send the battleship Missouri for him.

He said he wanted to cooperate with U.S. in peace as we had cooperated in war but it would be harder [Truman recorded later]. Said he was grossly misunderstood in U.S. and I was misunderstood in Russia. I told him that we each could remedy that situation in our home countries and that I intended to try with all I had to do my part at home. He gave me a most cordial smile and said he would do as much in Russia.

As the conference resumed that afternoon Churchill again grew extremely long-winded, and though an outward show of friendship continued around the table, an edge of tension could also be felt. In an exchange with Truman, in a single sentence, Stalin hit on the hard reality underlying nearly every issue before them, the crux of so much of the frustration and divisiveness to come:

“We cannot get away from the results of the war,” said Stalin.

The formal business was to be Germany and Truman had suggested they begin at once. Churchill insisted on defining what was meant by Germany. If it meant Germany as geographically constituted before the war, then he agreed to discussion—his obvious point being that the Germany of the moment was one with eastern boundaries being determined by the position of the Red Army.

STALIN: Germany is what has become of her after the war. No other Germany exists….

TRUMAN: Why not say the Germany of 1937?

STALIN: Minus what she has lost. Let us for the time being regard Germany as a geographical section.

TRUMAN: But what geographical section?

STALIN: We cannot get away from the results of the war.

TRUMAN: But we must have a starting point.

Stalin agreed. Churchill agreed. “So it is agreed that the Germany of 1937 should be the starting point,” said Truman, as if they had made a major step forward.

They turned to Poland, a subject that moved Churchill to talk longer even than usual, and so went the remainder of the session.

Truman was exasperated. He could “deal” with Stalin, as he said, but Churchill was another matter. “I’m not going to stay around this terrible place all summer just to listen to speeches,” he wrote that night. To Bess, earlier in the day, he had said Stalin’s agreement to join in defeating Japan was what he came for. Now, his patience low at day’s end, he wrote in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [the Manhattan Project, S-1] appears over their homeland.”

At session three the day after, there was sharp talk across the table, much of it from Truman. When the subject of the German Navy was raised again, he said he agreed to dividing the ships three ways, but only after the surrender of Japan. Merchant ships especially were needed. “We will need every bomb and every ton of food.” On the future of Franco Spain, a sore subject with Stalin, Truman said he had no love for Franco, nor had he any wish to take part in another civil war in Spain. “There have been enough wars in Europe.” When the Yalta Declaration came up, Stalin insisted such matters be put off until another time.

Truman was impatient for progress of almost any kind. He was homesick, “sick of the whole business,” he confided to Bess.

The day was saved only by the party he gave that night, a banquet for Churchill and Stalin at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse with music provided by a twenty-seven-year-old American concert pianist, Sergeant Eugene List, who was accompanied on the violin by Private First Class Stuart Canin. Stalin was charmed. To the Americans present it would remain the most memorable evening of the conference.

The two musicians, both in uniform, had been flown in from Paris at Truman’s request. The grand piano had been moved onto the back porch overlooking the lake, where, after dinner, in the lingering light of the summer evening, the whole party gathered. At one point Truman himself played Paderewski’s Minuet in G, the piece Paderewski had demonstrated for him in Kansas City forty-five years earlier. But the highlight was Sergeant List’s performance of the Chopin Waltz in A Minor, Opus 42, which Truman had asked for specifically. List had not known the piece nor had there been time to learn it. Later, in a letter to his wife, he described what happened when he asked if someone in the audience would be good enough to turn the pages of the music for him.

A young captain in the party started toward the piano mumbling something about not knowing how to read music but that he would take a stab at it if I would tell him when to turn. Whereupon…the President waved him aside with a sweeping gesture and volunteered to do the job himself! Just imagine! Well, you could have knocked me over with a toothpick!

Thank goodness I was able to get through the waltz in creditable, if not sensational, manner, despite the general excitement and the completely unexpected appearance of President Truman in the role of page-turner. Imagine having the President of the United States turn pages for you!…But that’s the kind of man the President is.

Truman was delighted to see Stalin so obviously enjoying himself. “The old man loves music,” he told Bess. “Our boy was good.”

By Friday the 20th, the week nearly over, there was still no further word on the test explosion in New Mexico. But when Truman invited Generals Eisenhower and Omar Bradley to lunch, the talk, according to Bradley’s later account, focused on strategy in the Pacific and use of the atomic bomb.

Bradley, a fellow Missourian, had never met Truman until now and liked what he saw. “He was direct, unpretentious, clear-thinking and forceful.” To Bradley it seemed that Truman had already made up his mind to use the new weapon. Though neither Bradley nor Eisenhower was asked for an opinion, Eisenhower said he opposed use of the bomb. He thought Japan was already defeated. To Stimson earlier he had expressed the hope that the United States would not be the first to deploy a weapon so horrible. In time, however, Eisenhower would concede that his reaction was personal and based on no analysis of the subject.

Eisenhower also advised Truman not to beg the Russians to come into the war with Japan, though he acknowledged that “no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.”

If Truman, as implied in his diary, truly believed that “Manhattan” would bring such victory instantly, this would have been the time for him to have said so. But he did not, which suggests either that he was still less than sure about the bomb, or that, contrary to Bradley’s impression, he had still to make up his mind.

“But all of us wanted Russia in the war,” he would tell his daughter some years later. “Had we known what the bomb would do we’d never have wanted the Bear in the picture.”

Lunch over, accompanied by the two generals, Truman went again to Berlin, to the American sector this time, to speak at the raising of the flag that had flown over the Capitol in Washington the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. The ceremony took place in a small cobbled square in glaring sunshine. Stimson and General Patton were present, the tall, theatrical Patton resplendent in buckled riding boots, jodhpurs, and a lacquered four-star helmet. Patton seemed to glow from head to foot. There were stars on his shoulders, stars on his sleeves, more stars than Truman had ever seen on one human being. He counted twenty-eight.

Truman spoke without notes and with obvious emotion, choosing his words carefully, as he stood shoulders braced, thumbs hooked in the side pockets of his double-breasted suit, his eyes shadowed by his very un-military western-style Stetson. It was his own kind of speech—exactly what his address to the United Nations was not—and the first public pronouncement by any of the Big Three since arriving in Germany:

We are here today to raise the flag of victory over the capital of our greatest adversary…we must remember that…we are raising it in the name of the people of the United States, who are looking forward to a better world, a peaceful world, a world in which all the people will have an opportunity to enjoy the good things of life, and not just a few at the top.

Let us not forget that we are fighting for peace, and for the welfare of mankind. We are not fighting for conquest. There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.

We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole. [Here the thumbs came out of the coat pockets, his freed hands chopped the air in unison, the familiar gesture, as he stressed each word, “peace and prosperity for the world as a whole.”] We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war.

If we can put this tremendous machine of ours, which has made victory possible, to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind. That is what we propose to do.

It was not what Abraham Lincoln might have said, or what Robert Sherwood might have written for Franklin Roosevelt, but it was deeply moving, even for hard-shelled reporters and old soldiers. “What might easily have been made a routine patriotic display,” wrote Raymond Daniell of The New York Times,“and hardly a day passes without one in Berlin, was turned into a historic occasion by the President’s simple, homely declaration of the faith that had sent millions of American boys into battle far from home for a belief few of them could express.” As no one had anticipated, Truman made it a moment “of lasting inspiration to all of us who were there,” recorded General Lucius D. Clay. “While the soldier is schooled against emotion,” Clay wrote years later, “I have never forgotten that short ceremony as our flag rose to the staff.”

On the ride back, Truman was in a generous mood. Turning to Eisenhower he said out of the blue, “General, there is nothing you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”

Bradley remembered trying to keep a straight face. Eisenhower looked flabbergasted. “Mr. President,” he replied, “I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I.”

That night, recording his thoughts on the day’s session at the conference table, Truman said only that “Uncle Joe looked tired and drawn today and the P.M. seemed lost.” The main topic had been Italy. Little was accomplished.

Before noon on Saturday, July 21, Henry Stimson received by special courier the eagerly awaited report from General Groves, the first description of the first nuclear explosion and, as Stimson said, an “immensely powerful document.” By early afternoon he and General Marshall had reviewed it together, and at 3:30 Stimson brought it to the President. Byrnes was summoned, the doors were closed. Stimson began to read aloud in his scratchy old man’s voice.

The test had been “successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone.” The test bomb had not been dropped from a plane but exploded on top of a 100-foot steel tower. The “energy generated” was estimated to be the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.

For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion…. For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over ten thousand feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen clearly at Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso and other points generally to about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only few windows were broken although one was some 125 miles away. A massive cloud was formed which surged and billowed upward with tremendous power, reaching the substratosphere at an elevation of 41,000 feet, 36,000 feet above the ground, in about five minutes, breaking without interruption through a temperature inversion at 17,000 feet which most of the scientists thought would stop it. Two supplementary explosions occurred in the cloud shortly after the main explosion. The cloud contained several thousand tons of dust picked up from the ground and a considerable amount of iron in the gaseous form. Our present thought is that this iron ignited when it mixed with the oxygen in the air to cause these supplementary explosions. Huge concentrations of highly radioactive materials resulted from the fission and were contained in this cloud.

The report described how the steel from the tower had evaporated, and the greenish cast of the pulverized dirt in a crater more than 1,000 feet in diameter.

One-half mile from the explosion there was a massive steel test cylinder weighing 220 tons. The base of the cylinder was solidly encased in concrete. Surrounding the cylinder was a strong steel tower 70 feet high, anchored to concrete foundations. This tower is comparable to a steel building bay that would be found in a typical 15 to 20 story skyscraper or in warehouse construction. Forty tons of steel were used to fabricate the tower which was…the height of a six story building. The cross bracing was much stronger than that normally used in ordinary steel construction. The absence of the solid walls of a building gave the blast a much less effective surface to push against. The blast tore the tower from its foundations, twisted it, ripped it apart and left it flat on the ground. The effects on the tower indicate that, at that distance, unshielded permanent steel and masonry buildings would have been destroyed…. None of us had expected it to be damaged.

Groves also included the impressions of his deputy, General Thomas F. Farrell, who was with Oppenheimer at the control shelter.

“Everyone in that room knew the awful potentialities of the thing that they thought was about to happen,” reported Farrell, who wrote of the explosion’s “searing light” and a “roar which warned of doomsday,” and described how, when it was over,

Dr. Kistiakowsky…threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and embraced him with shouts of glee. Others were equally enthusiastic. All the pent-up emotions were released in those few minutes and all seemed to sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists. All seemed to feel that they had been present at the birth of a new age….

In his conclusion, Groves wrote, “We are all fully conscious that our real goal is still before us. The battle test is what counts….”

To read it all took Stimson nearly an hour. Whether Truman or Byrnes interrupted with questions or comments is unknown. But when Stimson stopped reading, Truman and Byrnes both looked immensely pleased. The President, in particular, was “tremendously pepped up,” wrote Stimson. “He said it gave him an entirely new confidence and he thanked me for having come to the Conference and being present to help him this way.”

Indeed, all three men felt an overwhelming sense of relief—that so much time and effort, that so vast an investment of money and resources had not been futile. It was not just that $2 billion had been spent, but that it was $2 billion that could have been used for the war effort in other ways. The thing worked—it could end the war—and, there was the pride too that a task of such complexity and magnitude, so completely unprecedented, had been an American success.

Clearly, Truman was fortified by the news. It is hard to imagine that he would not have been. That he and Byrnes felt their hand might be thus strengthened at the bargaining table with the Russians in time to come is also obvious—and perfectly understandable—but by no means was this the primary consideration, as some would later contend.

Truman went directly from the meeting to the Cecilienhof Palace where, as the next session got under way, the change in him was pronounced. He was more sure of himself, more assertive. “It was apparent something had happened,” wrote Robert Murphy, a political adviser to General Eisenhower. Churchill later told Stimson he could not imagine what had come over the President. (When Stimson went to see the prime minister the next day, to read him Groves’s report, Churchill’s response was more emphatic than Truman’s by far: “Stimson, what was gunpowder?” exclaimed Churchill. “What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.”)

In an exchange across the table, Stalin said the three governments should issue a statement announcing a renewal of diplomatic relations with the former German satellite nations of Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland. When Truman disagreed, Stalin said the questions would have to be postponed.

“We will not recognize these governments until they are set up on a satisfactory basis,” said Truman.

Again they addressed the thorny question of Poland. In vague language at Yalta it had been agreed that Poland was to get new territory on the west, from Germany, to compensate for what Russia had taken from Poland on the east. At issue was Poland’s western border and the fact that the Polish government of the moment (and the Red Army) had already taken over what had been a sizable part of Germany. Truman thought such matters should be settled at the peace conference. It had been agreed, he said, that the Germany of 1937 was to be the starting point.

“We decided on our zones. We moved our troops to the zones assigned to us. Now another occupying government has been assigned a zone without consultation with us…. I am very friendly to Poland and sympathetic with what Russia proposes regarding the western frontier, but I do not want to do it that way.”

In other words, the Russians could not arbitrarily dictate how things were to be, and there would be no progress on reparations or other matters concerning Germany until this was understood.

“I am concerned that a piece of Germany, a valuable piece, has been cut off. This must be deemed a part of Germany in considering reparations and in the feeding of Germany. The Poles have no right to seize this territory now and take it out of the peace settlement. Are we going to maintain occupied zones until the peace or are we going to give Germany away piecemeal?”

He was not contentious, only unequivocal. Churchill was delighted. Eden thought it the President’s best day thus far, as did Leahy, though Leahy was certain the Russians had no intention of changing their course in Eastern Europe, regardless of what was said. Poland was a “Soviet fait accompli,” thought Leahy, and there was little the United States or Britain could do about it, short of going to war with the Russians, which was unthinkable.

There was no trace of tension at the lavish party given by Stalin that night, in honor of his Western Allies. Truman had the best time of his entire stay at Potsdam. Stalin’s affair was a “wow,” he reported to his mother and sister.

Started with caviar and vodka and wound up with watermelon and champagne, with smoked fish, fresh fish, venison, chicken, duck and all sorts of vegetables in between. There was a toast every five minutes until at least 25 had been drunk. I ate very little and drank less, but it was a colorful and enjoyable occasion.

When I had Stalin and Churchill here for dinner I think I told you that a young sergeant named List, from Philadelphia played the piano and a boy from the Metropolitan Orchestra played the violin. They are the best we have, and they are very good. Stalin sent to Moscow and brought his two best pianists and two feminine violinists. They were excellent. Played Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikowsky and all the rest. I congratulated him and them on their ability. They had dirty faces though and the gals were rather fat. Anyway it was a nice dinner.

To Bess he reported that the evening had meant more progress in his relations with Stalin and said again that he already had what he wanted, the promise of Russian support against Japan. Possibly Stalin may also have told him that a million Russian troops were now massed along the Manchurian border.

“He talked to me confidently at the dinner, and I believe things will be all right in most instances. Some things we won’t and can’t agree on, but I already have what I came for.”

Churchill, who cared little for music, told Truman he was bored to tears and going home. Truman said he would stay until the party was over. So Churchill stalked off to a corner, where, with Leahy for another half hour—until the music ended—he “glowered, growled, and grumbled,” as a delighted Truman would tell the story.

Two nights later, when it was his turn as host, Churchill had his revenge. He summoned a Royal Air Force band and instructed them to play as loud as possible all through dinner and afterward.

Possibly the hardest judge of character in the whole American delegation was Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, whose strong mind and long experience had made him invaluable to Roosevelt. A poised, impressive-looking man, King had played a part in every major conference of the war, beginning with the shipboard meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill that produced the Atlantic Charter in the summer of 1941. On the night of Stalin’s dinner at Potsdam, King had leaned over to whisper to Lord Moran.

“Watch the President,” he said, “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job, not only for the United States but for the whole world.”

Bohlen, who had been at Roosevelt’s side as interpreter at Teheran and Yalta, later described his amazement at Truman’s natural self-possession, his ease with people, the way he “moved through the conference with the poise of a leader of much greater experience.”

The President’s physical well-being impressed nearly everyone. “Churchill and Stalin were given to late hours, while I was an early riser,” Truman would later comment. “This made my days extra long….” Yet he seemed above fatigue. He was out of bed and dressed by 5:30 or 6:00 regularly every morning and needed no alarm clock or anyone to wake him. Subordinates found him invariably cheerful and positive. He was never known to make a rude or inconsiderate remark, or to berate anyone, or to appear the least out of sorts, no matter how much stress he was under. From first to last, he remained entirely himself. “There was no pretense whatever about him,” recalled the naval aide, Lieutenant Rigdon, who was charged with keeping the daily log. The great thing about the President, said Floyd Boring, one of the Secret Service men, was that he never got “swagly.” “He never came on as being superior…. He could talk to anyone! He could talk to the lowly peasant. He could talk to the King of England…. And that was, I think, his secret…. He never got swellheaded—never got, you know, swagly.”

In Berlin the black market—trade in cigarettes, watches, whiskey—and prostitution were rampant. One evening at the end of an arduous session at the palace, a young Army public relations officer, seeing that Truman was about to leave alone in his car, stuck his head in the window and asked if he might hitch a ride. Truman told him to get in and Floyd Boring, who was driving, could not help overhearing the conversation as they headed off. The officer said that if there was anything the President wanted, anything at all he needed, he had only to say the word. “Anything, you know, like women.”

“Listen, son, I married my sweetheart,” Truman said. “She doesn’t run around on me, and I don’t run around on her. I want that understood. Don’t ever mention that kind of stuff to me again.”

“By the time we were home,” Boring remembered, “he got out of the car and never even said goodbye to that guy.”

Another member of the delegation, a State Department official named Emilio Collado, would recall a scene at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse on the afternoon of Saturday the 21st. Arriving with a document for the President to sign, Collado was shown into a large empty room overlooking the lake, where he saw seated at a grand piano “an alert small man in shirt sleeves with a drink on the corner of the piano.” Gathered beside him, singing, were Byrnes and Leahy, both with their jackets off.

I thought it was nice [Collado said years later]…. The President played the piano quite well, in a rather old-time, ragtime manner, and they were having a fine time. They weren’t drunk or anything like that. They each had a drink. I have often thought of that picture: the five-star admiral, the Secretary of State and the President, together on a Saturday afternoon, having a little music. The fact of the matter is that Harry Truman was a very human man. They were having a little quiet relaxation. They had had their lunch…. They had a little free time and there they were…. I can’t say that the singing was very high quality, but the piano playing was quite good.

IV

With the start of his second week at Potsdam, Truman knew that decisions on the bomb could wait no longer.

At 10:00 Sunday morning, July 22, he attended Protestant services led by a chaplain from the 2nd Armored Division. Then later in the morning he went to a Catholic mass conducted by his old friend Father Curtis Tiernan, the chaplain of Battery D, who was serving as Chief of Army Chaplains in Europe and had been flown to Berlin at Truman’s request.

“I’m going to mass at 11:30 presided over by him,” Truman wrote to Bess at mid-morning. “I've already been to a Protestant service so I guess I should stand in good with the Almighty for the coming week—and my how I'll need it.”

Stimson had appeared at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse shortly after breakfast, with messages from Washington saying all was about ready for the “final operation” and that a decision on the target cities was needed. Stimson wanted Kyoto removed from the list, and having heard the reasons, Truman agreed. Kyoto would be spared. “Although it was a target of considerable military importance,” Stimson would write, “it had been the capital of Japan and was a shrine of Japanese art and culture….” First on the list of approved targets was Hiroshima, southern headquarters and depot for Japan’s homeland army.

Early on Monday, Stimson came again to Truman’s second-floor office. A warning message to Japan, an ultimatum, was nearly ready, the document to be known as the Potsdam Declaration. Stimson thought it unwise at this point to insist on unconditional surrender, a term the Japanese would take to mean they could not keep their Emperor. He urged a revision to read that the Allies would “prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist.” But Byrnes had vehemently opposed any such change. Unconditional surrender was an objective too long established, too often proclaimed; it had been too great a rallying cry from the time of Pearl Harbor to abandon now, Byrnes insisted. Truman had reaffirmed it as policy in his first speech to Congress on April 16. It was what the Nazis had been made to accept, and its renunciation with the Japanese at this late date, after so much bloodshed, the acceptance of anything less with victory so near, would seem like appeasement. Politically it would be disastrous, Byrnes was also sure. To most Americans, Hirohito was the villainous symbol of Japan’s fanatical military clique. A Gallup Poll in June had shown that a mere fraction of Americans, only 7 percent, thought he should be retained after the war, even as a puppet, while a full third of the people thought he should be executed as a war criminal. Like others who had been advising Truman, Byrnes considered any negotiations with Japan over terms a waste of time and felt that if Hirohito were to remain in place, then the war had been pointless. Though Truman listened carefully, Stimson failed to convince him otherwise.

Tuesday, July 24, was almost certainly the fateful day.

At 9:20 A.M. Stimson again climbed the stairs to Truman’s office, where he found the President seated behind the heavy carved desk, “alone with his work.” Stimson had brought another message:

Washington, July 23, 1945

Top Secret

Operational Priority

War 36792 Secretary of War Eyes Only top secret from Harrison.

Operation may be possible any time from August 1 depending on state of preparation of patient and condition of atmosphere. From point of view of patient only, some chance August 1 to 3, good chance August 4 to 5 and barring unexpected relapse almost certain before August 10.

Truman “said that was just what he wanted,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “that he was highly delighted….”

Later, Truman wrote of a consensus at Potsdam, among Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, Marshall, and General Arnold, that the bomb should be used. He recalled that Marshall again stressed the number of lives that would be saved. “I asked General Marshall what it would cost in lives to land on the Tokyo plain and other places in Japan. It was his opinion that such an invasion would cost at a minimum a quarter of a million American casualties….” He himself reached his own conclusion only “after long and careful thought,” he wrote, adding, “I did not like the weapon.”

Very possibly there was no one, clearcut moment when he made up his mind, or announced that he had. Most likely, he never seriously considered not using the bomb. Indeed, to have said no at this point and called everything off would have been so drastic a break with the whole history of the project, not to say the terrific momentum of events that summer, as to have been almost inconceivable.

Some critics and historians in years to come would argue that Japan was already finished by this time, just as Eisenhower had said and as several intelligence reports indicated. Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted, since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued. In theory, Japan had been defeated well before Truman became President. (Studies by the Japanese themselves had determined a year and a half before, by January 1944, that Japan had lost the war.) Yet in the three months since Truman took office, American battle casualties in the Pacific were nearly half the total from three years of war in the Pacific. The nearer victory came, the heavier the price in blood. And whatever the projected toll in American lives in an invasion, it was too high if it could be avoided.

“We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos,” remembered a captain in Military Intelligence, Charlton Ogburn, Jr. “Thousands of our Marines and soldiers had died rooting Japanese from their foxholes and bunkers when they were perfectly aware that their situation was hopeless.” During the whole war, not a single Japanese unit had surrendered.

While intelligence reports indicated that Japan was beaten, they also forecast that the Japanese would hold out for months longer, meanwhile issuing intermittent peace feelers, both to bring the war to what they would regard as an acceptable conclusion, and “to weaken the determination of the United States to fight to the bitter end….”

The basic policy of the present [Japanese] government [said a combined Intelligence Committee report of July 8, 1945] is to fight as long and as desperately as possible in the hope of avoiding complete defeat and of acquiring a better bargaining position in a negotiated peace. Japanese leaders are now playing for time in the hope that Allied war weariness, Allied disunity, or some “miracle” will present an opportunity to arrange a compromise peace.

Nor, it must be stressed, was there ever anything hypothetical about preparations for the invasion—on both sides—a point sometimes overlooked in later years.

Truman had earlier authorized the Chiefs of Staff to move more than 1 million troops for a final attack on Japan. Thirty divisions were on the way to the Pacific from the European theater, from one end of the world to the other, something never done before. Supplies in tremendous quantity were piling up on Saipan. Japan had some 2.5 million regular troops on the home islands, but every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty, every female from seventeen to forty-five, was being conscripted and armed with everything from ancient brass cannon to bamboo spears, taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. One woman would remember being given a carpenter’s awl and instructed that killing just one American would do. “You must aim at the abdomen,” she was told. “Understand? The abdomen.” The general in charge of defense plans told other senior officers, “By pouring 20 divisions into the battle within two weeks of the enemy’s landing, we will annihilate him entirely and insure a Japanese victory.” Thousands of planes were ready to serve as kamikazes.

To no one with the American and Allied forces in the Pacific did it look as though the Japanese were about to quit. On July 15, The New York Times reported that twenty-five war-front correspondents from the United States and Australia had compared notes and their guess was the war would not end for nearly a year, not until June 1946. At the Pentagon, a long-remembered poster in the halls showed the face of a combat-hardened infantryman looking with grim determination at a map of the Japanese home islands, while across the top in bold letters was slashed the single word “Next!” There was no talk at the Pentagon of an early end to the war. The great concern was the likelihood of huge Japanese forces in China and Southeast Asia fighting on even if the government in Tokyo were to give up.

Truman foresaw unprecedented carnage in any attempted invasion. “It occurred to me,” he would remark a few months later, “that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.” But whether 250,000 or 20,000 casualties would result was not the issue at the moment, not if the shock effect of a single devastating blow, or two, could stop the war—and particularly when devastating blows, in the form of B-29 raids, had become the standard, almost daily routine.

“Today’s prime fact is war,” Henry Stimson had said at the start of one Interim Committee meeting. The Japanese were the despised enemy, perpetrators of the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor (and then in the midst of peace talks), perpetrators of the bombing of Manila and the Bataan death march. They were the murderers of American prisoners of war, the fanatics who ordered the seemingly insane kamikaze attacks. The details of the Bataan death march had become known only in February and enraged the country. Other atrocities included the Palawan Massacre, during which Japanese soldiers on the Philippine island of Palawan lured 140 American prisoners of war into air-raid trenches, then doused them with gasoline and burned them alive. A few days after the German surrender in May, the papers had carried a photograph of a blindfolded prisoner of war, an American flyer down on his knees, his hands tied behind his back, about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer swinging a sword.

At Potsdam, as Bohlen was to write, “the spirit of mercy was not throbbing in the breast of any Allied official,” either for the Germans or the Japanese.

And how could a President, or the others charged with responsibility for the decision, answer to the American people if when the war was over, after the bloodbath of an invasion of Japan, it became known that a weapon sufficient to end the war had been available by midsummer and was not used?

Had the bomb been ready in March and deployed by Roosevelt, had it shocked Japan into surrender then, it would have already saved nearly fifty thousand American lives lost in the Pacific in the time since, not to say a vastly larger number of Japanese lives.

Nor had anyone ever doubted that Roosevelt would use it. “At no time, from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the President, or by any other responsible member of the government, that atomic energy should not be used in the war,” wrote Stimson. “All of us of course understood the terrible responsibility involved…President Roosevelt particularly spoke to me many times of his own awareness of the catastrophic potentialities of our work. But we were at war….”

Leahy later said, “I know FDR would have used it in a minute to prove that he hadn’t wasted two billion dollars.”

“I’ll Say that We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman had told Bess in a letter the week before, speaking of Stalin’s agreement to come in against Japan, “and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That’s the important thing.” To him it was always the important thing. An invasion of Japan would be work for ground troops, dirty, God-awful business for infantry and artillery, as he knew from experience. For unlike Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, or any Commander in Chief since the advent of modern war, Truman had been in combat with ground troops. At the Argonne, seeing a German battery pull into position on the left flank, beyond his assigned sector, he had ordered his battery to open fire, because his action would save lives, even though he could face a court-martial. “It is just the same as artillery on our side,” he would say later of the bomb, which would strike many people as appallingly insensitive and simplistic, but he was speaking from the experience of war.

Once, when presiding judge of. Jackson County, he had, by his own private confession, allowed a crooked contractor to steal $10,000 in order to forestall the stealing of ten times the amount. He had permitted evil in order to prevent a larger evil and saw no other choice. Had he done right, had he done wrong, he had asked, writing alone late at night in the Pickwick Hotel. “You judge it, I can’t.”

Conceivably, as many would later argue, the Japanese might have surrendered before November and the scheduled invasion. Conceivably, they could have been strangled by naval blockade, forced to surrender by continued fire bombing, with its dreadful toll, as some strategists were saying at the time. Possibly the single sticking point was, after all, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. But no one close to Truman was telling him not to use the new weapon. General Marshall fully expected the Japanese to fight on even if the bomb were dropped and proved as effective as the scientists predicted. Marshall saw the bomb more as a way to make the invasion less costly. That it might make the invasion unnecessary was too much to expect. “We knew the Japanese were determined and fanatical…and we would have to exterminate them man by man,” he would later tell David Lilienthal. “So we thought the bomb would be a wonderful weapon as a protection and preparation for landings.” Marshall had been so appalled by American casualties at Iwo Jima that he had favored using poison gas at Okinawa.

A petition drawn up by Leo Szilard, urging on grounds of morality that Japan be warned in advance, had been signed by seventy scientists but was not delivered to Washington until after Truman had left for Potsdam. Truman never saw it. But neither did he see the counter opinions voiced by those scientists urging that the bomb be used, and on grounds of morality. “Are not the men of the fighting forces…who are risking their lives for the nation, entitled to the weapons which have been designed,” said one petition. “In short, are we to go on shedding American blood when we have available means to a steady victory? No! If we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon—now!”

It is hard to imagine anything more conclusive than the devastation of all the eastern coastal cities of Japan by fire bombs [wrote another scientist]; a more fiendish hell than the inferno of blazing Tokyo is beyond the pale of conception. Then why do we attempt to draw the line of morality here, when it is a question of degree, not a question of kind?

In a poll of 150 scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, 87 percent voted for military use of the weapon, if other means failed to bring surrender. Arthur Compton was asked for his opinion:

What a question to answer [he later wrote]! Having been in the very midst of these discussions, it seemed to me that a firm negative stand on my part might still prevent an atomic attack on Japan. Thoughts of my pacifist Mennonite ancestors flashed through my mind. I knew all too well the destruction and human agony the bombs would cause. I knew the danger they held in the hands of some future tyrant. These facts I had been living with for four years. But I wanted the war to end. I wanted life to become normal again…. I hoped that by use of the bombs many fine young men I knew might be released at once from the demands of war and thus be given a chance to live and not to die.

Churchill was to write of the decision that was no decision, and in retrospect this seems to have been the case. “The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time,” Churchill wrote, “that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”

“Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made,” recalled George Elsey, remembering the atmosphere of the moment. “He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track…. It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.”

For his part, Truman stated later:

The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used. The top military advisers to the President recommended its use, and when I talked to Churchill he unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war.

Though nothing was recorded on paper, the critical moment appears to have occurred at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse later in the morning of Tuesday, July 24, when, at 11:30, the combined American and British Chiefs of Staff convened with Truman and Churchill in the dining room. This was the one time when Truman, Churchill, and their military advisers were all around a table, in Churchill’s phrase. From this point it was settled: barring some unforeseen development, the bomb would be used within a few weeks. Truman later told Arthur Compton that the day of the decision was the same day he informed Stalin, and that occurred late the afternoon of the 24th.

It happened at the end of a particularly contentious session at the Cecilienhof Palace. The meeting was just breaking up when Truman rose from his chair and alone walked slowly around the table to where Stalin stood with his interpreter.

“I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” Truman remembered. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ”

Truman did not specify what kind of weapon it was—he did not use the words “atomic bomb”—or say anything about sharing scientific secrets. Stalin seemed neither surprised nor the least curious. He did not ask the nature of the weapon, or how it was made, or why he hadn’t been told before this. He did not suggest that Soviet scientists be informed or permitted to examine it. He did not, in fact, appear at all interested.

To Bohlen, who was watching closely from across the room, Stalin’s response seemed so altogether offhand that Bohlen wondered whether the President had made himself clear. “If he had had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious,” wrote Churchill, who had kept his eye on Stalin’s face. Byrnes, too, was certain Stalin had “not grasped the importance of the discovery,” and would soon be asking for more details. But this Stalin never did. He never mentioned the subject again for the remainder of the conference.

The fact was Stalin already knew more than any of the Americans or British imagined. Soviet nuclear research had begun in 1942, and as would be learned later, a German-born physicist at Los Alamos, a naturalized British citizen named Klaus Fuchs, had been supplying the Russians with atomic secrets for some time, information that in Moscow was judged “extremely excellent and very valuable.” Stalin had understood perfectly what Truman said. Later, in the privacy of their Babelsberg quarters, according to Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Stalin instructed Molotov to “tell Kurchatov [of the Soviet atomic project] to hurry up the work.” (Also, according to the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin went even further that evening when he cabled Lavrenti Beria, who had overall supervision of the project, to put on the pressure.)

In years to come Truman often said that having made his decision about the bomb, he went to bed and slept soundly. He would be pictured retiring for the night at the White House, his mind clear that he had done the right thing. But in the strange “nightmare” house at Babelsberg, in the unremitting heat of the German summer, he was sleeping rather poorly and in considerably more turmoil than his later claims ever suggested.

“No one who played a part in the development of the bomb or in our decision to use it felt happy about it,” recalled Jimmy Byrnes, who was quartered downstairs.

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” Truman wrote in his diary on Wednesday, July 25, the day the general military order was issued to the Air Force to proceed with the plan, and “terrible” was the word he would keep coming back to. He wondered if the bomb might be “the fire of destruction” prophesied in the Bible. As if to convince himself, he wrote of how it would be used on military targets only, which he knew to be only partly true.

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace had been spared thus far].

He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them a chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made useful.

Whether this final thought—that it could be made useful—was his irrepressible, native optimism and faith in progress coming to the fore, or yet another way of trying to convince himself, or both of these, or merely means useful to end the war, is open to question.

V

It would be the thesis of some historians that the atomic bomb figured importantly at Potsdam as Truman’s way of putting pressure on the Russians. But except for his private show of bolstered confidence after hearing Groves’s report, Truman neither said nor did anything of consequence to support this theory and the whole idea would be vigorously denied by those who were present and witness to events. Once, sometime before the test at Alamogordo, Truman reportedly remarked to some of his aides that if the bomb worked, he would “certainly have the hammer on those boys,” but whether by this he meant the Russians or the Japanese was unclear, and there was no intimation ever of a “hammer,” no flaunting of power, in his dealings with Stalin. “The idea of using the bomb as a form of pressure on the Russians never entered the discussions at Potsdam,” wrote Harriman. “That wasn’t the President’s mood at all. The mood was to treat Stalin as an ally—a difficult ally, admittedly—in the hope that he would behave like one.”

At the conference session preceding Truman’s disclosure to Stalin of the bomb secret, the Generalissimo had been as “difficult” as at any time thus far. Truman was firm in his positions, yet never belligerent or reproachful. He had no intention to make reflection upon Stalin or his government, he stressed. The sharp exchanges were between Churchill and Stalin—Churchill having at last recovered much of his old spirit.

The topic on the agenda was the admission to the United Nations of Italy and the Balkan states formerly allied with Germany, the so-called “satellite countries.” It was the American and British position that Italy should be admitted but that Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (all now firmly in Russian control) should not, until democratic governments were established. Stalin observed that since no democratic elections had been held in Italy either, he failed to understand this benevolent attitude toward Italy. The difference, said Truman, was that everyone had free access to Italy, while for the Western Allies there was no free access to the Balkan countries. (It was a point that Byrnes, too, had been making in meetings of the foreign ministers.)

“We are asking for the reorganization of the satellite governments along democratic lines as agreed upon at Yalta,” Truman said.

Stalin’s calm rejoinder was very simple: “If a government is not fascist, a government is democratic,” he said.

Churchill pointed out that Italy was an open society with a free press, where diplomatic missions could go freely about their business. At Bucharest, by contrast, the British mission was penned up as if under arrest. An iron fence had descended, said Churchill darkly.

“All fairy tales!” exclaimed Stalin.

“Statesmen may call one another’s statements fairy tales if they wish,” answered Churchill.

As Bohlen was to write, no moment at the conference so revealed the gulf between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.

Taking Churchill’s side, Truman said that difficulties encountered by the American missions in Romania and Bulgaria had also been cause for concern. (That night Churchill would go on at length to Lord Moran about his admiration for Truman’s plain, direct way with Stalin. “The President is not going to be content to feed out of anyone’s hand; he intends to get to the bottom of things,” Churchill would say, rubbing his eyes as if to remind himself he was not dreaming. “If only this had happened at Yalta.” But then after a pause, he added sadly, “It is too late now.”)

Truman tried to salvage the afternoon with progress in another direction. The previous day he had formally introduced his plan to internationalize the world’s inland waterways, rivers, and canals, including the Danube, the Rhine, the Dardanelles, the Kiel Canal, the Suez and Panama canals. All nations, including Russia, were to have access to all the seas of the world. “I do not want to fight another war in twenty years because of a quarrel on the Danube,” he had said. “We want a prosperous, self-supporting Europe. A bankrupt Europe is of no advantage to any country, or to the peace of the world.” Stalin had said he wanted time to consider. So now Truman brought it up again, hoping for the best. Clearly it was important to him.

Stalin cut him off, declaring, “The question is not ripe for discussion.”

On Wednesday, July 25, the conference was put on hold. Churchill was about to leave for London to face the final results of the general election. Anthony Eden and others of the British delegation were also to depart, as well as Churchill’s opponent in the election, the quiet, mousy Clement Attlee, who dressed in a three-piece suit, despite the summer heat, and who seemed as convinced as everyone else that Churchill was certain to win and would return in a matter of days.

Churchill, privately, was full of foreboding. He had had a dream in which he saw himself lying dead beneath a white sheet in an empty room. He knew who it was, he told Moran, because he recognized the protruding feet.

“What a pity,” Stalin said at the close of that morning’s session, when Churchill announced he had no more to say.

Outside afterward, by the front door of the palace, Churchill, Stalin, and Truman posed for a final portrait. Truman, looking very much the American politician, stood in the middle with crossed arms, shaking hands with both men at once, smiling first at one, then the other, as a battery of photographers and newsreel cameramen recorded the moment. Even Stalin broke into a grin.

The next day from London came the stunning news that the Labor Party had won, Churchill was defeated, Clement Attlee was the new prime minister. Hardly anyone could believe it, but the Russians seemed most upset of all. How could this possibly be, Molotov kept demanding. How could they not have known the outcome in advance? Stalin postponed the conference for another few days and was seen by no one.

First Roosevelt, now Churchill, Truman noted privately. The old order was passing. Uneasily he wondered what might happen if Stalin were suddenly to “cash in” and a power struggle convulsed the Soviet Union. “It isn’t customary for dictators to train leaders to follow them in power. I’ve seen no one at this Conference in the Russian lineup who can do the job.” His feelings about Churchill were mixed, as much as he liked him. It was too bad about Churchill, he wrote to his mother and sister, but then he added that “it may turn out to be all right for the world,” suggesting that this way, without Churchill around, he might make better progress with Stalin.

That same day, July 26, at the island of Tinian in the Pacific, the cruiser Indianapolis delivered the U-235 portion of an atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” That evening, Byrnes and Truman decided to release the Potsdam Declaration.

Phrased as a joint statement by Truman, Attlee, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, it assured the Japanese people humane treatment. They would not be “enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation.” Once freedom of speech and religion were established, once Japan’s warmaking power had been eliminated and a responsible, “peacefully inclined” government freely elected, occupation forces would be withdrawn.

The words “unconditional surrender” appeared only once, in the final paragraph, and then specified only the unconditional surrender of the armed forces, not the Japanese nation. The alternative was “prompt and utter destruction.”

The fate of Emperor Hirohito was left ambiguous. He was not mentioned. Nor was there any explanation of what form the “prompt and utter destruction” might take.

The declaration was picked up by Japanese radio monitors at six in the morning, July 27, Tokyo time, and Prime Minister Kautaro Suzuki and the Cabinet went into an all-day meeting. Meanwhile, over Tokyo and ten other Japanese cities, American planes were dropping millions of leaflets with a printed translation of the declaration.

Suzuki’s decision was to ignore the matter. The declaration, he said at a press conference, was nothing but a rehash of old proposals and as such, beneath contempt. He would “kill [it] with silence,” he said.

Clement Attlee and his new foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, arrived at Babelsberg the night of Saturday the 28th and Truman was impressed with neither—a couple of “sourpusses,” he decided. Bevin looked as though he weighed 250 pounds.

Mr. Attlee is not so keen as old fat Winston and Mr. Bevin looks rather rotund to be a Foreign Minister [Truman wrote to Margaret]. Seems Bevin is sort of the John L. Lewis type. Eden was a perfect striped pants boy. I wasn’t fond of Eden—he is a much overrated man; and he didn’t play fair with his boss. I did like old Churchill. He was as windy as Langer [Senator William Langer of North Dakota], but he knew his English language and after he’d talked half an hour there’d be at least one gem of a sentence and two thoughts maybe which could have been expressed in four minutes. But if we ever got him on record, which was seldom, he stayed put. Anyway he is a likeable person and these other two are sourpusses. Attlee is an Oxford graduate and talks with that deep throated swallowing enunciation same as Eden does. But I understand him reasonably well. Bevin is a tough guy. He doesn’t know of course that your dad has been dealing with that sort all his life, from building trades to coal mines. So he won’t be new.

“We shall see what we shall see,” he wrote to Bess.

Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had only just arrived, found Truman in an optimistic mood concerning the Russians, in contrast to others in the delegation. Harriman was “very gloomy.” Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.”

All messages to the President from the War Department came in to Babelsberg a half block down the street from Number 2 Kaiserstrasse at the Army message center, where they were immediately decoded. From there they were taken to Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, to the officers on duty in the Map Room, who would give them to the President.

Late on Monday, July 30, another urgent top-secret cable to Truman was received and decoded, but held for delivery until morning in order not to disturb the President’s rest. It was from Harrison in Washington:

The time schedule on Groves’ project is progressing so rapidly that it is now essential that statement for release by you be available not later than Wednesday, 1 August….

The time had come for Truman to give the final go-ahead for the bomb. This was the moment, the decision only he could make.

The message was delivered at 7:48 A.M., Berlin time, Tuesday, July 31. Writing large and clear with a lead pencil on the back of the pink message, Truman gave his answer, which he handed to Lieutenant Elsey for transmission:

Suggestion approved. Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.

Elsey, a lanky, earnest, good-looking young officer, a Princeton graduate who had a master’s degree in history from Harvard, would not remember feeling that he was witness to one of history’s momentous turning points. “Everything seemed momentous in those days at Potsdam,” Elsey would recall. What impressed him was that Truman “didn’t want anything happening until he got away from Stalin, away from Potsdam.” All efforts now were to wind things up by August 2. Stimson was already back at the Pentagon. Marshall was to leave later that day.

The Potsdam Conference should have been a time of celebration. It should have been the most harmonious, most hopeful of the Big Three conferences, a watershed in history, marking the start of a new era of good feeling among the Allied powers now that the common foe, the detested Nazi, was destroyed. Such at least was the promise of Potsdam. But it wasn’t that way, nor in practicality had there ever been much chance it would be. At lunch the first day they met, Stalin had told Truman he wanted to cooperate with the United States in peace as in war, but in peace, he said, that would be more difficult. It was what they all knew, and the underlying tensions felt at the beginning remained to the end.

Truman had kept insisting on results, not talk, something in the bag at the end of every day, as Churchill observed—it was why he was there, Truman would say—and as impatient as he grew, he seems to have felt right to the end that he could succeed. “We have accomplished a very great deal in spite of all the talk…. So you see we have not wasted time,” he wrote to Bess just before Churchill departed. He wanted the future of Germany settled satisfactorily. Germany was the key, the overriding question. He wanted free elections in Poland, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. He wanted Russia to join in the assault on Japan as soon as possible. But only on this last item could he feel he had succeeded. For the rest he faced ambiguity, delays, and frustration, Stalin having no wish to accept any agreement that threatened the control he already had, wherever the Red Army stood. Try as he might, Truman could make little or no progress with Stalin.

Could Roosevelt have done better? It was a question Truman must have asked himself many times. Chip Bohlen thought Roosevelt would have been less successful, since, with his personal interest in earlier agreements with Stalin, Roosevelt would have acted more angrily than Truman when faced with Stalin’s intransigence. To Bohlen, Harriman, and others experienced in dealing with the Russians, Truman had acquitted himself well. “He was never defeated or made to look foolish or uninformed in debate,” Bohlen would write. And since neither Stalin nor Molotov ever tried any tricks or subtleties, but only held stubbornly to their own line, the President’s inexperience in diplomacy did not greatly matter after all. There was never any room for maneuver.

“Pray for me and keep your fingers crossed too,” he wrote to Bess as the final week began.

We are at an impasse on Poland and its western boundary and on reparations [he wrote in his diary]. Russia and Poland have agreed on the Oder and West Neisse to the Czechoslovakian border…without so much as a by your leave. I don’t like it.

But the Red Army had pushed to the Oder River and the western Neisse River and so those rivers were agreed to as Poland’s western frontier. Further, Poland was given the southern portion of East Prussia, including the port of Danzig, while the Soviet Union was granted the northern portion. As for free elections in Poland, it was agreed only that they should be held “as soon as possible,” which in reality meant the Polish issue remained unresolved.

The future of Germany’s former allies in the war—Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania—was postponed, left to the Council of Foreign Ministers to resolve at some unspecified time in the future.

Germany, already portioned off into four zones of military occupation—American, British, Russian, and French—was in effect divided down the middle, between East and West. A complete demilitarization of the German state was agreed to. There was never an argument on that. Nazi war criminals were to be brought to justice. And there was no argument here either, not even over the place where the war crimes tribunal would sit—Nuremberg was the decision. And by a complicated formula for reparations the Soviet Union got the lion’s share—mainly in capital equipment—in view of the fact that the Soviet Union had suffered the greatest loss of life and property.

In some instances Stalin did not get what he wanted—Soviet trusteeship over Italy’s former colonies in Africa, a naval base on the Bosporus, four-power control over Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley. But it was the Western leaders who made the big concessions, because they had little choice—Russian occupation of Eastern Europe was indeed a fait accompli, as Leahy said—and because they hoped to achieve harmony with Stalin. It was never possible to get all you wanted in such situations, Truman would explain to the American people, trying to put a good face on the situation. “It is a question of give and take—of being willing to meet your neighbor halfway.”

To such experienced Soviet specialists as Harriman and George Kennan, it was foolishness in the extreme to imagine the Russians ever keeping faith with such words as “democratic” and “justice.” Or to see the arrangement agreed to for Germany as anything other than unreal and unworkable. Kennan, who was not present at Potsdam, would later despair over Truman’s naivete. Harriman, who was present throughout, found himself so shut out of serious discussions by Byrnes that he decided it was time for him to resign.

Truman’s waterways proposal got nowhere. On the next to final day of the conference, August 1, he made one last try, asking only that it at least be mentioned in the final communiqué. Attlee said this was agreeable with him, but again Stalin refused. Truman pointed out that the proposal had been discussed and that he was pressing only this one issue. “Marshal Stalin, I have accepted a number of compromises during this conference to confirm with your views,” he said, “and I make a personal request now that you yield on this point…”

Stalin broke in even before his interpreter had finished with the President’s statement.

“Nyet!” said Stalin. Then, with emphasis, and in English for the first time, he repeated, “No, I say no!”

It was an embarrassing, difficult moment. Truman turned red. “I cannot understand that man!” he was heard to say. He turned to Byrnes. “Jimmy, do you realize we have been here seventeen whole days? Why, in seventeen days you can decide anything!”

In a letter to his mother, Truman called the Russians the most pigheaded people he had ever encountered. He knew them now to be relentless bargainers—“forever pressing for every advantage for themselves,” as he later said—and in his diary he left no doubt that he understood the reality of the Stalin regime. It was “police government pure and simple,” he wrote. “A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” Later he would tell John Snyder of an unsettling exchange with Stalin about the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940. When Truman asked what had happened to the Polish officers, Stalin answered coldly, “They went away.”

Still—still—Truman liked him. “I like Stalin. He is straightforward,” he wrote to Bess near the windup of the conference. Stalin could be depended upon to keep his word, he would later tell his White House staff. “The President,” wrote Eben Ayers, “seemed to have been favorably impressed with him and to like him.” Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing, Truman would tell Henry Wallace. Furthermore, Truman was pretty sure Stalin liked him. To Jonathan Daniels, Truman would say he had been reminded of Tom Pendergast. “Stalin is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know.”

Not for a long time, not for a dozen years, would Truman concede that he had been naive at Potsdam—“an innocent idealist,” in his words—and refer to Stalin as the “unconscionable Russian Dictator.” Yet even then he added, “And I liked the little son-of-a-bitch.”

As Truman would later tell the American people, no secret agreements or commitments were made at Potsdam, other than “military arrangements.” However, one secret agreement concerning “military operations in Southeast Asia” was to have far-reaching consequences. He, Churchill, and their combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Vietnam, or Indochina, would, “for operational purposes,” be divided, with China in charge north of the 16th parallel and British forces in the southern half, leaving little chance for the unification or independence of Vietnam and ample opportunity for the return of the French. Truman so informed the American ambassador in China, Patrick J. Hurley, by secret cable the last day of the conference, August 1. At the time, given the other decisions he faced, both military and political, it did not seem overly important.

The thirteenth and concluding session at the Cecilienhof Palace that evening was devoted almost exclusively to the wording of the final communiqué and did not break up until past midnight. The struggle had come down to fine points. Molotov suggested an amendment in a paragraph that described Poland’s western frontier as running from the Baltic through the town of Swinemünde. He wished to substitute the words “west of” for “through,” Molotov said.

“How far west?” asked Byrnes.

“Immediately west,” suggested Bevin.

“Immediately west will satisfy us,” Stalin affirmed.

“That is all right,” said Truman.

“Agreed,” said Attlee.

Truman, in announcing that the business of the conference was ended, said in all sincerity that he hoped the next meeting would be in Washington.

“God willing,” exclaimed Stalin, invoking the deity for the first and only time. Then, in a conspicuously unusual tribute, Stalin commended Byrnes “who had worked harder perhaps than any of us…and worked very well.”

There was much hand shaking around the table and wishes for good health and safe journey. As it turned out, Truman and Stalin were never to meet again. Potsdam was their first and only big power conference.

In his private assessment, Stalin later told Nikita Khrushchev Truman was worthless.

VI

Packing had been going on at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse for several days, everyone, and especially the President, extremely ready to leave.

At 6:45 Thursday morning, August 2, his motorcade was drawn up in the driveway. By 7:15 they were on their way to Gatow airfield, where, at Truman’s request, there were to be no ceremonies. At 8:05 The Sacred Cow was airborne, heading for Plymouth, England, to meet the U.S.S. Augusta. “That will save two days on the ocean because it takes so long to get out of the English Channel when we leave from Antwerp,” he explained in a letter to his mother and Mary Jane. He would be having lunch with the English King, he wrote.

The lunch with King George VI took place on board the British battle cruiser H.M.S. Renown, which, with the Augusta and Philadelphia, was anchored in Plymouth Roads. To his surprise, Truman found the King “very pleasant,” “a good man,” and extremely interested in hearing all about Potsdam.

We had a nice and appetizing lunch [Truman recorded]—soup, fish, lamb chops, peas, potatoes and ice cream with chocolate sauce. The King, myself, Lord Halifax [the British ambassador to Washington], a British Admiral, Adm. Leahy, [Alan] Lascelles [the King’s private secretary], the Secretary of State in that order around the table. Talked of most everything, and nothing…. There was much formality etc. in getting on and off the British ship.

That afternoon, returning the call, the King came aboard the Augusta, inspected the guard, “took a snort of Haig & Haig” (as Truman happily recorded), and asked Truman for three of his autographs, one each for his daughters and the Queen.

Fifteen minutes after the King’s departure, at 3:49, the Augusta was under way.

The following day, August 3, his first full day at sea, Truman called the few members of the press who were on board into his cabin. Seated at a small table covered with green felt, a looseleaf notebook open in front of him, he began telling them about the atomic bomb and its history. He spoke slowly, in measured tones. His emotions seemed divided. “He was happy and thankful that we had a weapon in our hands which would speed the end of the war,” remembered Merriman Smith of the United Press. “But he was apprehensive over the development of such a monstrous weapon of destruction.” How long the United States could remain the “exclusive producer,” Truman wasn’t sure. The material in the notebook was his statement for the country, which had been prepared in advance, before he left for Potsdam.

The frustration of the reporters was extreme. “Here was the greatest news story since the invention of gunpowder,” wrote Smith. “And what could we do about it? Nothing. Just sit and wait.”

On August 4, according to the official log, the President was up and strolling the decks at five in the morning, looking “completely rested from the strain of the long and tiring conference discussions.” After an early breakfast, he spent the day studying conference reports and working on an address to the country. On Sunday, August 5, he attended church services, then returned to his work. Merriman Smith remembered the day as extremely tense and Truman looking worried. Smith and the other reporters tried to talk of other things. “The secret was so big and terrifying that we could not discuss it with each other.” The ship, meantime, was boiling along at a full speed of 26.5 knots.

On the morning of Monday, August 6, the fourth day at sea, the President and several of his party spent time on deck enjoying the sun and listening to a concert by the ship’s band. The ship had entered the Gulf Stream, south of Newfoundland. The sun was out, the weather considerably warmer. The crew had changed now to white uniforms that looked sparkling in the sunshine.

At noon the ship’s position was latitude 39-55 N, longitude 61-32 W. The sea was calm.

Shortly before noon, Truman and Byrnes had decided to have lunch with some of the crew below deck in the after mess. Truman was seated with six enlisted men and just beginning his meal when Captain Graham, one of the Map Room officers, hurried in and handed him a map of Japan and a decoded message from the Secretary of War.

Hiroshima had been bombed four hours earlier. “Results clear-cut successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test,” Truman read. On the map Captain Graham had circled the city with a red pencil.

Suddenly excited, Truman grabbed Graham by the hand and said, “This is the greatest thing in history,” then told him to show the message to Byrnes, who was at another table. It was just after noon. Minutes later a second message was brought in:

Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington-time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.

Truman jumped to his feet now and called to Byrnes, “It’s time for us to get home!” Like the scientists at Alamogordo at the moment of the first test, Truman was exuberant. Tapping on a glass with a fork, he called for the crew’s attention. “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!”

With the crew cheering, he rushed out to spread the news. “He was not actually laughing,” wrote Merriman Smith, “but there was a broad smile on his face. In the small dispatch which he waved at the men of the ship, he saw the quick end of the war written between the lines.” At the officers’ ward, telling the men to stay seated, he repeated what he had said in the mess, then added, “We won the gamble.” He said he had never been happier about any announcement he had ever made.

All this happened very fast, and as George Elsey was to recall, the President’s response seemed in no way inappropriate. “We were all excited. Everyone was cheering.” Within minutes, the ship’s radio was carrying news bulletins from Washington about the bomb. Then came the broadcast of the President’s message, the text of which had been released at the White House only moments before, at 11:00 A.M. Washington time.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima…. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe…. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war…. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth….

Not in this or any of the broadcasts was there mention of how much damage had been done at Hiroshima, since no details were yet known in Washington.

Excitement, feelings of relief swept the country—and especially among families with sons or husbands in the service. Surely the war would be over any day.

To the millions of men serving in the Pacific, and those in Europe preparing to be shipped to the Pacific, the news came as a joyous reprieve. One of them was the writer Paul Fussell, then a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant with an infantry platoon in France who was scheduled to take part in the invasion of Honshu, despite wounds in the leg and back so severe that he had been judged 40 percent disabled. “But even if my legs buckled whenever I jumped out of the back of the truck, my condition was held to be satisfactory for whatever lay ahead.” After Hiroshima, he remembered, after the realization “that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Yet, even so, news of the bomb brought feelings of ambiguity and terror of a kind never before experienced by Americans. Children in households that had been untouched by the war would remember parents looking strangely apprehensive and wondering aloud what unimaginable new kind of horror had been unleashed. Could the poor world ever possibly be the same again?

“Yesterday,” wrote Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times on August 7, “we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind.”

Editorial speculation was extremely grave. “It is not impossible,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “that whole cities and all the people in them may be obliterated in a fraction of a second by a single bomb.” “We are dealing with an invention that could overwhelm civilization,” said the Kansas City Star, and in St. Louis the Post-Dispatch warned that possibly science had “signed the mammalian world’s death warrant and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.” The Washington Post, in an editorial titled “The Haunted Wood,” said that with Truman’s revelations concerning the new bomb it was as if all the worst imaginary horrors of science fiction had come true.

The weather in Washington had turned abnormally cool for August, making ideal nights for sleeping, but, observed James Reston of The New York Times, thoughtful people were not sleeping so well.

“Some of our scientists say that the area [in Hiroshima] will be uninhabitable for many years because the bomb explosion had made the ground radioactive and destructive of animal life,” wrote Admiral Leahy, who had flown home ahead of the President. “The lethal possibilities of such atomic action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.”

Robert Oppenheimer had predicted a death toll of perhaps 20,000. Early reports from Guam on August 8 indicated that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been leveled and that the number of killed and injured might reach as high as 200,000. In time, it would be estimated that 80,000 people were killed instantly and that another 50,000 to 60,000 died in the next several months. Of the total, perhaps 10,000 were Japanese soldiers.

Many thousands more suffered from hideous thermal burns, from shock, and from radioactive poisoning. Later also, there would be eyewitness accounts of people burned to a cinder while standing up, of birds igniting in midair, of women “whose skin hung from them like a kimono” plunging shrieking into rivers. “I do not know how many times I called begging that they cut off my burned arms and legs,” a fifth-grade girl would remember.

Anne O’Hare McCormick, who had described Truman, Churchill, and Stalin poking about the graveyard of Berlin, wrote now of the bomb as the “ultimatum to end all ultimatums” because it was only a small sample of what might lie in store in laboratories where scientists and soldiers joined forces.

No one as yet was blaming the scientists or the soldiers or the President of the United States.

On the afternoon of August 7, just before 5:00 P.M., the Augusta tied up at Norfolk. Truman left immediately by special train for Washington and by the morning of the 8th the country knew he was back at his desk. There was still no word from Japan, no appeal for mercy or sign of surrender. At the Pentagon, Stimson and Marshall worried privately that the bomb had failed to achieve the desired shock effect.

On August 9, the papers carried still more stupendous news. A million Russian troops had crossed into Manchuria—Russia was in the war against Japan—and a second atomic bomb had been dropped on the major Japanese seaport of Nagasaki.

No high-level meeting had been held concerning this second bomb. Truman had made no additional decision. There was no order issued beyond the military directive for the first bomb, which had been sent on July 25 by Marshall’s deputy, General Thomas T. Handy, to the responsible commander in the Pacific, General Carl A. Spaatz of the Twentieth Air Force. Paragraph 2 of that directive had stipulated: “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff….” A second bomb—a plutonium bomb nicknamed “Fat Man”—being ready, it was “delivered” from Tinian, and two days ahead of schedule, in view of weather conditions.

Later estimates were that seventy thousand died at Nagasaki, where the damage would have been worse had the bombardier not been off target by two miles.

“For the second time in four days Japan felt the stunning effect of the terrible weapon,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which like most papers implied that the end was very near. On Capitol Hill the typical reaction was, “It won’t be long now.”

Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., of Georgia, one of the most respected, influential figures in Washington, sent a telegram to Truman saying there must be no letup in the assault on the Japanese.

Let us carry the war to them until they beg us to accept unconditional surrender. The foul attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into the war, and I am unable to see any valid reason why we should be so much more considerate and lenient in dealing with Japan than with Germany…. If we do not have available a sufficient number of atomic bombs with which to finish the job immediately, let us carry on with TNT and fire bombs until we can produce them…. This was total war as long as our enemies held all the cards. Why should we change the rule now, after the blood, treasure and enterprise of the American people have given us the upper hand?…

Truman sent Russell a heartfelt answer written that same day, August 9:

I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.

For myself I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the “pigheadedness” of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into the war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.

My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a human feeling for the women and children of Japan.

That night, in his radio address on Potsdam, he made a point of urging all Japanese civilians to leave the industrial cities immediately and save themselves.

“I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” he told the American people.

Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it….

We won the race of discovery against the Germans.

Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

Reflecting on the future and “this new force,” he said with feeling: “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.”

On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, a crucial meeting of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had been taking place in Prime Minister Suzuki’s bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The meeting was deadlocked, with three powerful military commanders (two generals and one admiral) arguing fervently against surrender. It was time now to “lure” the Americans ashore. General Anami, the war minister, called for one last great battle on Japanese soil—as demanded by the national honor, as demanded by the honor of the living and the dead. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” he asked. But when news of Nagasaki was brought in, the meeting was adjourned to convene again with the Emperor that night in the Imperial Library. In the end, less than twenty-four hours after Nagasaki, it was Hirohito who decided. They must, he said, “bear the unbearable” and surrender.

The Japanese government would accept the Potsdam Declaration with the understanding that the Emperor would remain sovereign.

Truman had been up early as usual the morning of Friday, August 10, and was about to leave his private quarters when, at 6:30, a War Department messenger arrived with the radio dispatch. Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, and Forrestal were summoned for a meeting at 9:00. “Could we continue the Emperor and yet expect to eliminate the warlike spirit in Japan?” Truman later wrote. “Could we even consider a message with so large a ‘but’ as the kind of unconditional surrender we had fought for?”

Stimson, as he had before, said the Emperor should be allowed to stay. He thought it the only prudent course. Leahy agreed. Byrnes was strongly opposed. He wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender, the policy Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, and he was certain the American people felt the same. The Big Three had called for unconditional surrender at Potsdam, he reminded them. He could not understand “why now we should go further than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb and Russia was not in the war.” Truman asked to see the Potsdam statement.

Forrestal thought that perhaps with different wording the terms could be made acceptable and this appealed to Truman.

He decided against Byrnes. He decided, as he recorded in his diary, that if the Japanese wanted to keep their emperor, then “we’d tell ’em how to keep him.” The official reply, as worded by Byrnes, stated that the Emperor would remain but “subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.” If it was not unconditional surrender, it was something very close to it, exactly as Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, had warned Tokyo it would be a month before.

At a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Truman reported these developments in strictest confidence. The Allied governments were being notified. Meantime, he had ordered no further use of atomic bombs without his express permission. (One more bomb was available at the time.) The thought of wiping out another city was too horrible, he said. He hated the idea of killing “all those kids.”

To Henry Wallace afterward, Truman complained of dreadful headaches for days. “Physical or figurative?” Wallace asked. “Both,” Truman replied.

Attlee cabled his approval that evening, but the Australians were adamantly opposed. “The Emperor should have no immunity from responsibility for Japan’s acts of aggression…. Unless the system goes, the Japanese will remain unchanged and recrudescence of aggression in the Pacific will only be postponed to a later generation,” said the Australians, who had been excluded from Potsdam and who had fought long and suffered greatly in the war with Japan.

At the same time shattering news was released in Washington, reminding the country that the war continued. On the night of July 29, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the ship that had delivered the core of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship sank in minutes, taking hundreds of its crew with it and leaving hundreds more drifting in the sea. They were there for days, many eaten by sharks. By the time rescue ships arrived, eight hundred lives had been lost.

Chiang Kai-shek cabled his agreement the next morning, Saturday, August 11, and so, reluctantly, did the Australians. The Soviets appeared to be stalling in the hope of having some say in the control of Japan and to drive farther into Manchuria, but eventually Stalin, too, agreed. A formal reply was transmitted to Tokyo. Then the wait began.

Bess Truman had arrived at the White House from Independence; after an absence of more than two months, a semblance of normal domestic life had resumed. On Sunday, Truman was at his desk writing a letter. It was his sister’s birthday. He would have written sooner, he told her, but he had been too busy. “Nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one, but after it’s over, it isn’t so bad….”

To reporters his composure was extraordinary. He took it all, “the drama and tenseness, the waiting and watching of war’s end,” in “cool stride markedly lacking in showmanship and striking for its matter-of-factness.” Secretary Byrnes, who kept coming and going from the somber old State Department Building next door, seemed “a little frantic” by contrast. Rumors were everywhere. Peace was imminent. Crowds had gathered outside, expecting an announcement any moment.

But Sunday passed without word from the Japanese. And so did Monday the 13th. Truman confided to his staff that he had ordered General Marshall to resume the B-29 raids. Late in the day Charlie Ross told reporters the staff would remain on duty until midnight.

The wait continued the next morning. “It began like the days that had preceded it…reporters and correspondents jamming the press room and lobby, some of them worn and tired after hours of waiting and from the tenseness of the waiting and uncertainty,” wrote Eben Ayers. The crowds outside grew noticeably larger by the hour. Across Pennsylvania Avenue thousands of people filled Lafayette Square, the majority of them servicemen and women in summer uniforms.

The answer reached the President at five minutes past four that afternoon, Tuesday, August 14. Japan had surrendered. At 6:10 the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington arrived at the State Department to present Secretary Byrnes with the Japanese text, which Byrnes carried at once to the White House.

(The document would have arrived ten minutes sooner but for the fact that a sixteen-year-old messenger, Thomas E. Jones, who picked it up at the RCA offices on Connecticut Avenue to deliver it to the Swiss legation, had been stopped by the police for making a U-turn on Connecticut.)

Just before 7:00 P.M., reporters jammed into Truman’s office for the announcement. Truman stood behind his desk. Seated beside him, or standing in back, were Byrnes, Leahy, Bess, most of the Cabinet, and Sue Gentry of the Independence Examiner, who happened to be in town and had accepted an invitation to tea with Bess that afternoon. Truman had told her to stick around because she “might get a story.” (“He’d just been for a swim,” she remembered. “And I thought, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that he could be relaxed and go take a swim!’ ”)

It was still bright daylight outside, because of the summer clock. In Lafayette Square at least ten thousand people were congregated, held in check only by a thin line of police barriers and Military Police alone Pennsylvania Avenue.

Truman looked crisp and formal in a double-breasted navy blue suit, blue shirt, silver-and-blue striped tie with matching handkerchief. There was some shuffling among the reporters. Truman, smiling, said hello to one or two. A Secret Service man announced, “All in.” Klieg lights were turned on for the newsreel cameras. Truman glanced at the clock. At exactly seven, his shoulders squared, he began reading slowly and clearly from a sheet of paper held in his right hand: “I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government…. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.” General MacArthur had been appointed the Supreme Allied Commander to receive the surrender.

The reporters charged for the door. Truman and Bess returned to the living quarters, but the celebration outside kept growing.

In Grandview, Missouri, in the living room of her small clapboard house, Martha Ellen Truman excused herself to take a long-distance phone call in another room.

“Hello…hello,” a guest heard her begin. “Yes, I’m all right. Yes, I've been listening to the radio…. Yes, I’m all right…. Now you come and see me if you can…. Yes, all right…. Goodbye.”

“That was Harry,” she said returning through the door. “Harry’s a wonderful man…. I knew he’d call. He always calls me after something that happens is over…”

In Lafayette Square someone had started a conga line. Within minutes throngs of people had broken past the barriers and MPs and surged across the street to crowd the length of the White House fence. Streetcars and automobiles stranded in the mob were quickly covered with sailors in white who clambered on top for a better view. Everyone was cheering. Bells were ringing, automobile horns blaring. The crowd set up a chant of “We want Truman! We want Truman!”

With the First Lady beside him, the President went out on the lawn to wave and smile. He gave the V-sign as cheer after cheer went up. “I felt deeply moved by the excitement,” he remembered, “perhaps as much as were the crowds….” He and Bess returned to the house, but the call for him continued, so he came out again onto the porch to make a few impromptu remarks over a microphone.

“This is a great day,” he began, “the day we’ve been waiting for. This is the day for free governments in the world. This is the day that fascism and police government ceases in the world.” The great task ahead was to restore peace and bring free government to the world. “We will need the help of all of you. And I know we will get it.” Another roar of approval reverberated through the trees, as it would have whatever he said.

He crossed the lawn again, coming closer this time to the high iron fence, beaming, waving until his arm ached, the crowds growing ever more exuberant, in what was to be the biggest night of celebration Washington had ever seen. Half a million people filled the streets. The crush around the White House grew to fifty thousand or more. As reported in the papers the next day, one jubilant soldier flung his arms around a civilian, shouting, “We’re all civilians now!”

In just three months in office Harry Truman had been faced with a greater surge of history, with larger, more difficult, more far-reaching decisions than any President before him. Neither Lincoln after first taking office, nor Franklin Roosevelt in his tumultuous first hundred days, had had to contend with issues of such magnitude and coming all at once. In boyhood Truman had pored over the pages of Great Men and Famous Women and Plutarch’s Lives and concluded that men made history, and he had never changed his mind. He remained old-fashioned in this as in other ways. But if ever a man had been caught in a whirlwind not of his making, it was he. “We cannot get away from the results of the war,” Stalin had said at Potsdam, and it was just such results that had beset Truman since the night he raised his right hand and took the oath of office beneath the Wilson portrait. The launching of the United Nations, the menacing presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, Britain’s bankruptcy, the revealed horrors of the Holocaust, the wasteland of Berlin, the advent of the nuclear age in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—all were the results of the war, as indeed was his own role now, if one accepted the premise, as most did, that it was the strain of the war that killed Franklin Roosevelt.

What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time. “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know,” he would one day tell an interviewer. But clearly unparalleled power and responsibility had been thrust upon him at one of history’s greatest turning points, and the atomic bomb, the looming shadow of the mushroom cloud, were absolutely “new things” in the world. The old rules didn’t apply any longer. Europe was a ruin, Britain finished as a world power, Asia devastated and in a state of horrendous confusion. And who was to say about Stalin?

Only once did Truman suggest that history might be something other than he cared to say, that history had its own kind of direction and force—the “greater-than-man force” that Willa Cather wrote of, when describing the start of the earlier world conflict and its effect on the lives of so many small-town men such as he from the heartland of America. In a letter to his mother on August 17, Truman spoke of the past few days as a “dizzy whirl” in which he stood at the center trying to do something.

“Everyone had been going at a terrific gait,” he wrote, “but I believe we are up with the parade now.”

Part Four
Mr. President

11
The Buck Stops Here

Look at little Truman now

Muddy, battered, bruised—and how!

—Chicago Tribune

I

“Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister at the beginning of autumn, 1945.

There were more prima donnas per square foot in public life in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist, he told them another day, writing at his desk in October when the trees outside the White House had begun to turn.

On a bunting-draped platform at an American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, he said that after every war came an inevitable letdown. Difficulties would follow. “You can’t have anything worthwhile without difficulties.” Mistakes would be made. No one who accomplished things could expect to avoid mistakes. Only those who did nothing made no mistakes.

All Americans must cooperate, he said, dedicating a dam at Gilbertsville, Kentucky. It was time for everyone to “cut out the foolishness” and “get in harness.”

A war President no longer, he was finding the tasks of peace more difficult and vexing than he ever imagined. “We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war,” he had said with such conviction in July, at the small military ceremony in the cobbled square in Berlin. “If we can put this tremendous machine of ours…to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind.” But how? How possibly now, when no one wanted to cooperate any longer?

His troubles had begun with his first postwar message to Congress, only days after the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Sent to the Hill on September 6, the message was 16,000 words in length (the longest since the Theodore Roosevelt era) and presented a 21-point domestic program that included increased unemployment compensation, an immediate increase in the minimum wage, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, tax reform, crop insurance for farmers, a full year’s extension of the War Powers and Stabilization Act, meaning the government would keep control over business, and federal aid to housing to make possible a million new homes a year.

We must go on. We must widen our horizon further. We must consider the redevelopment of large areas of the blighted and slum sections of our cities so that in the truly American way they may be remade to accommodate families not only of low-income groups as heretofore, but every income group….

It was an all-out, comprehensive statement of progressive philosophy and a sweeping liberal program of action that Truman had begun work on, dictating his thoughts to Sam Rosenman, on board the Augusta returning from Potsdam, and that he had since put in a full ten days of concentrated effort on, adding new sections, editing and revising. He had no wish to wait for his State of the Union address to present his domestic program. Nor did he intend to go to Congress with it on a piecemeal basis. He wanted one big message, and as time would tell, its significance was enormous, setting his domestic program on a liberal path at the very start. It was one thing to have voted for this kind of program in the Senate, when he was following the head of his party, Rosenman told him. It was quite another to be the head of the party and recommend and fight for it.

For those Republicans and conservative Democrats who had been happily claiming that the New Deal was as good as dead, that the “Roosevelt nonsense” was over at last, because they “knew” Harry Truman, it was a rude awakening. Not even FDR had ever asked for so much “at one sitting,” complained House Minority Leader Joe Martin, and many of Truman’s own party in Congress were equally distressed, equally disinclined to go along with him. The same conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats that had stymied Roosevelt since 1937 stood ready now to block his successor. The House Ways and Means Committee, with fourteen Democrats and ten Republicans, voted to reject the unemployment compensation proposal, and shelved any further consideration of aid to the jobless. As the newspapers were saying, Truman’s anticipated six-month “waltz with Congress” was over before it began.

Labor leaders demanded an end to wage controls, but a hold on prices. Business leaders demanded the opposite. Nobody wanted more inflation of the kind the war had brought. Yet while most everyday commodities were in short supply, nearly everyone seemed to have money to spend—billions of dollars put aside in war bonds and savings accounts.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon rushed to cancel billions of dollars—$15 billion in less than a month. Boeing aircraft laid off 21,000 workers, Ford laid off 50,000, at the very moment when hundreds of thousands of soldiers were pouring home expecting to find jobs. Fully 12 million men and women were in uniform and hoping to return to “normal” life as soon as possible.

Prophecies of economic doom had become commonplace. His own downfall as a post-World War I haberdasher vivid in memory, Truman reminded Congress of what the country had experienced then. “We found ourselves in one of the worst inflations in our history, culminating in the crash of 1920 and 1921. We must be sure this time not to repeat that bitter mistake.” Worse by far and closer to mind was the Great Depression, which had never really ended by 1939, when the war began in Europe. If the end of the war truly meant a return to what had been “normal” before the war, then the prospect was grim indeed.

As everyone knew, the nation had thrived on the war. Production of goods and services in 1945 was more than twice what it had been in 1939. If the cost of living was up by some 30 percent, the income of the average worker had also doubled and unemployment was less than 2 percent, an unbelievable figure. Farm income was five times what it had been when Truman was running the farm at Grandview. Never had Americans known such prosperity. Yet the certainty that hard times would return was also widespread and deeply ingrained. For a whole generation of Americans, fear of another Depression would never go away. It was coming “as sure as God made little green apples,” fathers warned their families at the dinner table, and next time it would be “bad enough to curl your hair.” Nor were the supposed experts any less pessimistic. In his report to the President at a Cabinet meeting on October 19, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace estimated that the drop in the gross national product in the coming months would be $40 billion, the drop in wages $20 billion, which by spring could mean 7 or 8 million unemployed—1939 all over again.

Even had there been time to plan and prepare, even if it had been possible to ignore the clamor to “bring the boys home” and demobilize in a slower, more orderly fashion, the problems of “reconversion” would have been staggering. As it was, sudden peace had caught the country almost as ill-prepared as had sudden war. A populace that had been willing to accept shortages and inconveniences, ceilings on wages and inadequate housing since 1941—because there was “a war on”—seemed desperate to make up for lost time, demanding everything at once.

By October, the country was facing the biggest housing shortage in history. In Chicago alone, reportedly, there were 100,000 homeless veterans. (The city of Chicago would shortly offer old streetcars for sale, for conversion into homes.) Among the letters pouring into the White House was one from a man in Los Angeles who told of meeting a homeless veteran, a medical sergeant, his pregnant wife and small child, and described how he had taken them in for the night because they had no place to go. “Do something,” the writer urged the President.

Labor unions, free of their wartime pledges not to strike, called for “catch-up” pay hikes. Strikes broke out in nearly every industry. In New York, 15,000 elevator operators went out. Elsewhere 27,000 oil workers and 60,000 lumber workers walked off their jobs. In Washington, meantime, New Dealers were leaving the government in droves.

For Truman all this was extremely difficult to understand. He knew relatively little of economics and the economics of reconstruction were complicated. He failed to comprehend how a people who had shown such dedication and will through the war could overnight become so rampantly selfish and disinterested in the common good. “The Congress are balking, labor has gone crazy and management isn’t far from insane in selfishness,” he reported to his mother, who in her small frame house in Grandview remained an indispensable sounding board. He believed as ever in the ancient republican ideals of citizenship. Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman warrior who, after saving his country, laid down his arms and returned to the farm, remained a personal hero. As he liked to point out to visitors, he had replaced the model cannon on his desk with a shiny model plow.

His response was to work harder than ever, as if by keeping a fuller, busier schedule, moving faster, seeing more people, traveling more, he could at least set an example. On one not untypical morning he saw more than a dozen visitors in two hours, including Congressman Albert Gore of Tennessee, who brought him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s; Senator Wheeler; his old Truman Committee aide, Max Lowenthal; the governor of the Virgin Islands; another congressman, Pat Cannon of Florida, who wanted to talk about hurricane damage; the young Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, and his wife; and a group of women sponsoring an Equal Rights amendment. (“A lot of hooey about equal rights,” Truman noted on his appointment sheet as the last of these went out the door.) He “zipped” through work in what one account called “the decisive style that is now recognized as typically Truman.” He made changes with “hurried” strokes of the pen, seldom anything earthshaking, “but everything brisk.” At one press conference he took all of five minutes to announce that he was reorganizing the Labor Department, transferring authority over the Office of Economic Stabilization to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion under John Snyder, appointing Stuart Symington of St. Louis to a new Surplus Property Administration, accepting the resignation of Secretary of War Stimson, appointing Under Secretary Robert Patterson as Stimson’s replacement, and naming Senator Harold H. Burton of Ohio to the Supreme Court. “Anything else, Mr. President?” asked a reporter, and the room erupted with laughter.

He greatly enjoyed such moments. He loved rewarding a loyal old friend like Snyder with the prestige and power of an important job. It was among the prime satisfactions of the successful politician’s life, not to say what was expected of him as a good Jacksonian Democrat. He had always taken care of his own with jobs large and small, as best he could. He had hated firing Eddie McKim and eventually arranged a vague job for him with the Rural Finance Commission. When Jake Vardaman, the naval aide, began flaunting his supposed authority beyond bounds, irritating too many people at the White House, including Bess Truman, and Vardaman, too, had to be eased out, Truman put him on the Federal Reserve Board, a position for which Vardaman was plainly ill-suited. Even former Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri, who had so often made life difficult for him over the years, was not forgotten. On September 12, Truman made Clark a Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and shortly afterward, when Clark was remarried in the little northern Virginia town of Berryville, Truman stood beside him as best man, something he had never done before.

Two official ceremonial duties that fall moved him deeply, which made both occasions especially memorable.

Before a small, sunny gathering in the Rose Garden on September 21, the day of Henry Stimson’s retirement, Truman presented the elderly Secretary of War with the Distinguished Service Medal and did so with great simple dignity. As his staff had come to appreciate, it was at such occasions that Truman excelled. He was at his best with small groups, close-up and entirely himself, yet keenly aware of the meaning of the occasion. It was Stimson’s seventy-eighth birthday and his last day in Washington. “If anyone in the government was entitled to one [a medal] it is that good man,” Truman wrote to Bess, who was back in Independence.

In November, in the courtyard at the Pentagon, at another no less moving farewell, this for General Marshall, Truman again presented the Distinguished Service Medal, which was the general’s only American military decoration of the war. (Marshall had refused repeatedly to accept any such honors, saying it would be improper for him while men were dying overseas.) To Truman, Marshall, more than any other man, had been responsible for winning the war, and he spoke now of Marshall as a tower of strength to two presidents. “He takes his place at the head of the great commanders of history,” Truman said, clearly meaning that exactly. Later, Truman said there wasn’t a decoration big enough for General Marshall.

But such occasions were rare. More often he was feeling close to despair over how much needed to be done and how little real say he had, how little time there was ever to focus on any one problem. The strain began to tell. “The pressure here,” he told his mother, “is becoming so great I hardly get my meals in, let alone do what I want to do.”.

His speaking trips around the country, intended as a way to bring his message to the people, too often resulted in adverse publicity that was seen as his own doing. At the American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, talking of the “difficulties” to be faced, he spoke seriously and thoughtfully of the atomic bomb. He had asked Congress for the establishment of a new Atomic Energy Commission under civilian, not military, control, saying, “the release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Sounding like the naive Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he told the crowd that the way to get along in the world was to apply the Golden Rule.

We can’t stand another global war. We can’t ever have another war, unless it is total war, and that means the end of our civilization as we know it. We are not going to do that. We are going to accept that Golden Rule, and we are going forward to meet our destiny which I think Almighty God intended us to have.

But at Caruthersville, in the cotton country of Missouri’s southeastern “Boot Heel,” he also paused on a morning walk to spit in the Mississippi River—an old local rite, he explained to astonished reporters. He played the piano in the little hotel dining room, held open court in a drugstore, went to the races, signed autographs on napkins and blank checks, posed with Legionnaires on a mock locomotive, rang the bell, “did everything,” said the Washington Post, “except have himself shot from the mouth of a cannon.”

At a conference of several hundred Democratic congressmen and senators at a clubhouse on Jefferson Island in Chesapeake Bay, he encouraged everyone to call him Harry and joined a game of stud poker on the porch. An unnamed senator later reported that Harry Truman played “a damn good game,” while another eyewitness (also unnamed), describing what a good time everyone had, said, “There was all we could eat and more than we could drink—only two people passed out.”

The word “cronies” appeared with increasing frequency to depict the President’s friends and associates. Harry Vaughan, his sudden eminence obviously having gone to his head, began holding his own press conferences and making speeches. Vaughan boasted of how at Potsdam he had sold a $55 watch to a Russian for $500, and in a talk before a group of Presbyterian women in Virginia, in an attempt to explain the difference between Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, he said that after a diet of caviar the country was ready for ham and eggs.

Several of the presidential staff grew concerned over the mounting confusion at the White House. Budget Director Harold Smith judged Truman to be a man of “fine keen intelligence,” but regrettably disorganized. At a staff meeting in mid-October, Truman himself admitted to being “in the doldrums” over how things were going. He would cut back on his appointments, he said, cancel some trips—news that “delighted” everyone, wrote Eben Ayers, the assistant press secretary, who worried especially over stories about Harry Vaughan and poker games and drinking, certain that sooner or later they would bring trouble. An unobtrusive, soft-spoken man who was known among the White House press as “Mumbles,” Ayers was secretly keeping a diary that would one day provide an invaluable “inside” record of the Truman years.

Outwardly, Truman appeared unchanged. Reporters described him as “chipper,” “affable,” “jaunty,” looking “rested, fresh, and bouncy,” looking always, wrote columnist Westbrook Pegler, “like his old maw just dressed him up and slicked his hair for the strawberry social.” And he was still exceptionally popular, his approval rating at about 80 percent.

If Congress balked at his requests, he just asked for more. There was nothing unusual about a President being rebuffed by Congress. What was novel was a President who, when repeatedly rebuffed, refused to change his tactics.

He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And with the cry for demobilization at a peak, he went before a joint session to call for universal military training, an idea that stood no chance, but that he believed in fervently. “We must face the fact that peace must be built upon power, as well as upon good will and good deeds.” Never again could the country count on the luxury of time to arm itself. He wanted mandatory training for one year for all young men between eighteen and twenty, not as members of the armed services, but as citizens who would comprise a trained reserve, ready in case of emergency.

One morning, standing at his desk, he presented to the press a new presidential flag, telling Harry Vaughan to hold it high enough so that everyone could see, “This new flag faces the eagle toward the staff,” Truman explained, “which is looking to the front all the time when you are on the march, and also has him looking at the olive branch for peace, instead of the arrows for war….” Both the flag and presidential seal had been redesigned for the first time since the Wilson years, and Truman meant the shift in the eagle’s gaze to be seen as symbolic of a nation both on the march and dedicated to peace.

On October 26, he went to New York, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to commission a huge new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later, from the deck of the battleship Missouri, he reviewed a line of fifty warships in the Hudson River, while overhead flew twelve hundred Navy planes. The eagle had never held such arrows. It was a spectacle of national power such as no Commander in Chief had ever beheld. And it was all rapidly dissolving. Had he tried then, in these last days of 1945, to halt the pell-mell demobilization under way and keep American fighting forces intact, he might have been impeached, so overwhelming was the country’s desire for a return of its young men and women now that the war was won, the enemy crushed. It wasn’t demobilization at all, he later remarked. “It was disintegration.”

Riding in a caravan to Central Park to deliver a Navy Day speech (the first presidential address to be broadcast on television), he was cheered by tremendous crowds—3 to 5 million people at least, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia told Truman and Admiral Leahy as they waved from the open car. To Leahy it was a triumphal procession such as no Roman emperor could have dreamed of.

Yet the press was already judging Truman only fair at his job. He was faulted for dealing with large issues in a “small-scale way,” for too often “muddling through,” while banking on “an apparently irrepressible and often-expressed belief that everything will always work itself out.”

The labor situation grew steadily worse. Picket lines became an established sign of the times. And Truman wavered. In seeming support of labor, he called for reasonable pay raises through collective bargaining. Then, under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to get tough with the unions, he asked Congress to forbid strikes in large national industries for thirty days, until the situation could be appraised by a fact-finding board—an idea that pleased neither labor nor management nor Congress. In the meantime, 175,000 employees of General Motors, workers in plants in 19 states, walked out in a strike that would last more than three months.

His was a thankless job, Truman told the writer John Gunther, who had not seen him since he was Vice President and was struck by the change. “Tiny lines had grown around his mouth,” Gunther wrote. “He looked tired, perplexed, and annoyed.”

On another day Robert Oppenheimer came to see him privately, and in a state of obvious agitation said he had blood on his hands because of his work on the bomb. For Truman, it was a dreadful moment. Oppenheimer’s self-pitying, “cry-baby” attitude was abhorrent. “The blood is on my hands,” he told Oppenheimer. “Let me worry about that.” Afterward he said he hoped he would not have to see the man ever again.

In November the American ambassador to China, Patrick J. Hurley, who had returned to Washington for consultation, announced unexpectedly that he was resigning because of the way the State Department was siding with the Chinese Communists. Hurley broke the news in a speech at the Press Club, barely an hour after telling Truman that all was under control in China and that he would be returning there shortly. “To me, this was an utterly inexplicable about-face, and what had caused it I cannot imagine even yet,” Truman would write years later. At the time he was more explicit. Tearing a yellow news copy from the White House ticker, he stormed into a Cabinet meeting saying, “See what a son-of-a-bitch did to me.”

Clinton Anderson, the Secretary of Agriculture, suggested that the President immediately name General Marshall as the new special ambassador to China and thus take the headlines away from Hurley. It was an inspired suggestion. From the Red Room, Truman telephoned Marshall at his home in Leesburg, Virginia.

“General, I want you to go to China for me,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Marshall replied and hung up.

Truman had hated to make the call. Marshall by then had had all of six days of retirement. Marshall said later that he had ended the call abruptly because his wife walked into the room and he wished to explain to her himself, rather than have her overhear a telephone conversation.

At a Gridiron Club dinner in December, only half in jest, Truman declared that General William Tecumseh Sherman had been wrong. “I’m telling you I find peace is hell….”

His health insurance plan was getting nowhere. Another message, and of equal importance to Truman, called for unification of the armed forces, under a single Secretary of Defense, an idea the Navy vehemently opposed and that Bob Hannegan thought politically unwise, arguing that it was foolish ever to wage an unnecessary fight that he might lose. But Truman insisted. He wanted to break up the power of the West Point and Annapolis cliques, to make the armed services more democratic—a noble aspiration, many around him agreed, but impossible, they felt. It was his duty to send the message, he said, because it represented his conviction.

To Sam Rosenman, who had grown immensely fond of Truman, the chief difference between Truman and Roosevelt was that Truman “paid much less attention to what his actions were doing towards his chances for reelection…. Truman did a great many things that Roosevelt, because he knew the effect it would have, never would have done.”

To many it appeared that the President’s easy familiarity with members of Congress—their talk of good old Harry and so forth—was proving a handicap. If his program was steadfastly in the Roosevelt tradition, they could be quite as obdurate as they had been with Roosevelt just before the war, only now without the fear that, like Roosevelt, Truman might take his case to the country with powerful effect. Truman couldn’t “awe them,” and as was said, in American politics “a fearsome respect” usually achieved better results than camaraderie.

Meantime, privately, Truman felt that Jimmy Byrnes, who was in Moscow at a Foreign Ministers’ Conference, was failing to keep him sufficiently informed. To Henry Wallace he expressed concern that the peacetime use of atomic energy might so reduce the length of the working day that people would “get into mischief.” Once, at a Cabinet meeting in December, Wallace politely but pointedly lectured him for not knowing how many atomic bombs were in stock and for saying further that he really didn’t want to know. “Mr. President, you should know,” Wallace insisted. “The President retreated in some confusion and said he guessed he should know and then covered up by saying, ‘I do know in a general way,’ ” Wallace noted in his diary.

From Byrnes and Wallace both, Truman got the distinct impression that each thought his own judgment considerably superior to that of the President.

To many of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years, as to prominent liberals elsewhere, it appeared the administration was going to pieces. In the stridently liberal New York newspaper PM, columnist Max Lerner offered a scathing assessment of the President, calling him one of history’s “wild accidents.” There had been leaders in the past who had greatness thrust upon them by circumstance, but never one who wore the mantle of great office so uneasily, wrote Lerner, who had been to Missouri and felt he now understood Truman’s strengths and defects. The President’s “first quality” was personal honesty. He was also loyal to his friends and a hard worker. The overriding problem, said Lerner, was his “middle-class mentality”:

In a crisis the middle-class mind falls back on personal virtues and personal relations. In a crisis the middle-class mind shows itself more fearful of labor and strikes and labor’s political power than of anything else. In a crisis the middle-class mind tries to assume a lofty detachment from the deep issues of the day, and tries to blink the real social cleavage and struggles.

These struggles are not reconcilable by a personal appeal for cooperation. In the end you have to choose your side and fight on it…. In the end, President Truman’s basic weakness lies in his failure to understand imaginatively the nature and greatness of the office he holds.

Though Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace departed for Independence a week before Christmas, Truman remained at the White House until Christmas morning when he decided to fly home despite dreadful weather. The first snow of winter had fallen on Washington two weeks earlier. On the 19th another five inches fell in a storm that hit much of the country. Christmas morning he awoke to a driving wind, sleet and rain. National Airport was sheathed in ice, he was told. All commercial flights were canceled. But after conferring with his pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Myers, Truman decided to go, and when The Sacred Cow at last appeared out of the clouds over Kansas City, it was more than an hour overdue. Newspapers and radio commentators called the trip foolhardy—“one of the most hazardous ‘sentimental journeys’ ever undertaken” by a chief of state, said The New York Times. Had anyone known the sort of welcome he received on reaching the big gray house on North Delaware Street, the journey would have seemed even more unnecessary, his position still more pathetic. For Bess had been anything but sentimental or approving. At his desk in Washington three days later, Truman would write one of the most forlorn letters of his life:

December 28, 1945

Dear Bess:

Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. I feel like last year’s bird’s nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you, too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you. But it isn’t intended for that purpose….

You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in and tell me I’ve come in at last because I couldn’t find any reason to stay away. I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up?.

This head of mine should have been bigger and better proportioned. There ought to have been more brain and a larger bump of ego or something to give me an idea that there can be a No. 1 man in the world. I didn’t want to be. But, in spite of the opinions to the contrary, Life and Time say I am. [He was on the cover of Time that week as “Man of the Year.”]

If that is the case, you, Margie, and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance; because no one ever needed help and assistance as I do now. If I can get the use of the best brains in the country and a little help from those I have on a pedestal at home, the job will be done….

Kiss my baby and I love you in season and out,

Harry

But thinking better of it, he never mailed the letter. It was tucked in a desk drawer together with its unused envelope.

The grim weather held as he struggled to keep control of events, his chief aggravation now the behavior of his Secretary of State.

Before returning from Independence, Truman had been notified by Charlie Ross that Byrnes, in winding up the Moscow conference, had released a communiqué in advance of any summary report to the President. To make matters worse, Byrnes, en route home, notified Ross to arrange air time on all the radio networks, so that he could report to the nation before seeing the President. Clearly, Byrnes had forgotten his manners.

Senator Vandenberg, disturbed that Byrnes had been too conciliatory with the Russians, rushed to the White House demanding to know what was going on.

This was on Friday, December 28, the day of Truman’s plaintive letter to Bess. Afterward, he left for a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht, Williamsburg, again disregarding the miserable weather. When Byrnes landed in Washington the following day, Saturday the 29th, a telegram from Truman was waiting for him: “Suggest you come down today or tomorrow to report your mission…. We can then discuss among other things the advisability of a broadcast by you….”

The relationship between the two men had never been easy or entirely candid. Byrnes did indeed consider himself better equipped and more deserving than Truman to be President and he was not always successful in concealing that. Though Truman considered Byrnes extremely bright, his experience in government unequaled, he had never felt he could entirely trust him. En route to Potsdam, Truman had referred to him in a diary entry as his “able and conniving” Secretary of State. “My but he has a keen mind,” Truman wrote. “And he is honest. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings.”

After a hurried flight by special plane, Byrnes went aboard the Williamsburg at Quantico, Virginia, and met with Truman privately in Truman’s stateroom. A cold rain was falling on the river. Everything outside was gray and forbidding.

By Truman’s account, written much later, he closed the door and gave Byrnes a sharp dressing down:

I told him I did not like the way in which I had been left in the dark about the Moscow conference. I told him that, as President, I intended to know what progress we were making and what we were doing in foreign negotiations. I said that it was shocking that a communiqué should be issued in Washington announcing a foreign-policy development of major importance that I had never heard of. I said I would not tolerate a repetition of such conduct.

Byrnes, however, would insist the conversation was entirely pleasant, and according to others on board, it was not so much Truman as Admiral Leahy who gave Byrnes a hard time. (Leahy, as was known, considered Byrnes “a horse’s ass.”) Dean Acheson, who was not present, but who developed an understanding of both Truman and Byrnes, later speculated that both their impressions were genuine; that Truman, in recalling such encounters, was inclined to exaggerate his “bark,” when in reality he was nearly always extremely considerate of the feelings of others; and that Byrnes, as a veteran of South Carolina politics, would never have taken as personal criticism Truman’s demand to be kept informed.

In any event, the meeting marked a change in the relationship. There was no open break, but Truman’s confidence in his Secretary of State was not to be the same again. Six days later, still steaming mad, he wrote longhand letter to “My dear Jim,” saying that while he wanted to give members of his Cabinet ample authority, he had no intention of relinquishing the authority of the President or “to forego the President’s prerogative to make the final decision.” He was intensely concerned about Russia, tired of “babying” the Soviets. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand, ‘How many divisions have you?’ ”

According to an account that Truman wrote years later, he then called Byrnes to his office and read the letter aloud. But again Byrnes declared that no such scene occurred—if it had, Byrnes said, he would have resigned at once. But for the record Truman noted on the letter in his own hand at the time: “Read to the Sec. of State and discussed—not typed or mailed.” Later, in a conversation with Eben Ayers, Truman said he had most definitely read the letter to Byrnes, “right here in this office with him sitting right where you are. I told him I was not going to give him the letter but wanted to read it to him.” Byrnes’s face, said Truman, had turned “fiery red.”

It was a letter like others to come in Truman’s presidency. He called them his “longhand spasms,” and there appears indeed to have been something sudden and involuntary about them. They seemed to serve some deep psychological need, as a vent for his anger, and were seldom intended for anyone to see. They cleared the air for him. He felt better almost immediately and, unsent, they did no one any harm. Yet in tone and content they bore little or no resemblance to the way he was ordinarily with people. “I have never heard him say, or heard of him saying a harsh, bitter, or sarcastic word to anyone, whatever the offense or failure,” Dean Acheson would write.

II

With the new year under way, there was little time for brooding, seldom time enough for anything. A steel strike loomed, threatening the whole economy. Hurried meetings were held. Official cars came and went in the White House drive. “1946 is our year of decision,” Truman had told the country in a radio broadcast. “This year we lay the foundation for our economic structure which will have to serve for generations.”

The steel workers’ union, headed by Phil Murray, called for a wage increase of 19½ cents an hour. The steel companies, represented by Benjamin Fairless of U.S. Steel, offered 15 cents. At the conclusion of a long, arduous session at the White House on January 12, Truman was able to announce that Murray had agreed to postpone the strike for one week. After another session on the 17th, and still no agreement, Truman proposed that the steel companies grant an increase of 18½ cents. Both sides wanted time to consider and were told that they had until noon the following day.

Murray accepted the President’s proposal, but Fairless refused. On January 19, 1946, at more than 1,000 mills across the country, 800,000 steel workers walked off the job in the biggest strike in history.

The whole country was in the grip of strikes. Some 200,000 meatpackers had struck by now. There was a glass workers’ strike, a telephone strike, a coffinmakers’ strike, a huge strike at General Electric. In Pittsburgh a strike of 3,500 electric company employees caused plant closings that affected 100,000 other workers. Streetcars stopped running, office buildings closed. “This is a disaster,” said Pittsburgh’s Mayor David Lawrence in a radio plea to the strikers to go back to their jobs—and Mayor Lawrence, a Democrat, was long considered a solid friend of labor.

Pressed for a statement about the steel strike at his next press conference., Truman replied, “I personally think there is too much power on each side, and I think it is necessary that the government assert the fact that it is the power of the people.”

But how would the government assert itself?

“We are doing everything we possibly can,” he answered, giving no one much hope.

A week later, he could say only, “We have been working on it all the time.”

No one who had never had the responsibility could possibly understand what it was like to be President, Truman would write later, not even his closest aides or members of his family. There was no end to the “chain of responsibility that binds him, and he is never allowed to forget that he is President.” Problems and decisions of every conceivable variety wound up on his desk, as did criticism and blame. In the fall, Fred Canfil had given him a small sign for the desk. “The Buck Stops Here,” it said. Canfil had seen one like it in the head office of a federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and asked the warden if a copy might be made for his friend the President, and though Truman kept it on his desk only a short time, the message would stay with him permanently.

What sustained him, Truman said, was the belief that there was more good than evil in human beings. Now even that was being put severely to the test. Congress and labor had let him down. Mrs. Roosevelt was telling friends he had the wrong sort of people around him, a theme struck also by columnist Walter Lippmann. The “blunt truth,” wrote Lippmann, was that the men nearest the President did “not have the brains, and have practically none of the wisdom from experience and education to help him be President….” A cartoon in the arch-conservative Chicago Tribune pictured the President as Little Lord Fauntleroy being baited and knocked about by a gang of tough street urchins labeled “Labor,” “Management,” “Party Radical,” “Party Conservative,” and “Foreign Diplomacy.” The caption was in verse:

Little Truman Fauntleroy “

Famous as “that model boy”

Always trying to do good

In the name of brotherhood

Was the leader of his class

Temporarily—alas.

Look at little Truman now.

Muddy, battered, bruised-and how!

Victim of his misplaced trust,

He has learned what good boys must.

In the alley after school,

There just ain’t no golden rule.

The Saturday Evening Post, which claimed to represent the views and values of middle America, said the Truman administration, after ten months in office, could be labeled “at best, undistinguished.” Some Washington journalists, who admired the President’s fundamental decency and determination, felt sorry for him. “It was a cruel time to put inexperience in power,” wrote Richard Rovere.

In the new hit movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which had been written by Roosevelt’s former speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, and was to win nine Academy Awards, actor Fredric March, playing one of the three heroes of the story, three returning veterans of the war, declared bitterly, “Last year it was kill Japs, this year it’s make money,” while at another point his teenage son voiced his fear of the future—of atomic bombs, guided missiles, “and everything.”

People were “befuddled” and needed “time out to get a nerve rest,” Truman wrote to his mother. He wouldn’t mind going on strike himself, he said. As it was, he was planning a trip to Florida.

He had installed a new White House physician, a thirty-five-year-old Army doctor, Colonel Wallace H. Graham, who was the son of the Independence doctor who looked after Mamma Truman. Concerned that the President was working too hard, Graham urged a vacation. On Graham’s orders, Truman had begun taking a brisk walk of two or three miles every morning before breakfast—walks, Truman told Charlie Ross, that were helping him sleep better.

To replace Henry Stimson as Secretary of War, he had named Robert Patterson, and for Chief of Staff, to replace George Marshall, General Eisenhower, both regarded as excellent appointments. But his choice for a new Under Secretary of the Navy had suddenly blown into storm. Truman had picked Ed Pauley, the California oil man and Democratic money raiser who helped engineer his nomination for the vice presidency and who, more recently, had been working on reparation problems in Europe and Japan. Truman liked Pauley, thought him tough, straightforward, and capable of getting things done. He intended that Pauley replace Forrestal eventually, then become the first Secretary of Defense once that office was created. (“I wanted the hardest, meanest son of a bitch I could get,” Truman later said.) He also knew Roosevelt had been planning to make Pauley the Under Secretary of the Navy, and further, that Forrestal approved. But Pauley’s business and political background made him an unwise choice, as others at the White House saw at once. “An oil man should not be head of the department which has such a vital interest in the conservation of the nation’s oil reserve,” noted Eben Ayers privately, “and a politician should not be at the head of the navy.”

The trouble broke when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. On the train returning from Roosevelt’s funeral, Ickes revealed, Pauley had had the nerve to question him on tidelands oil policy—Pauley’s very unsubtle implication being that huge campaign contributions would be made available if California’s jurisdiction over the tidelands went uncontested. Truman, when he heard what Ickes had said, was beside himself, for in a meeting with Ickes just prior to Ickes’s testimony, Truman had told him that while of course he must speak the truth to the committee, Truman hoped he might also be “gentle” with Pauley.

Truman felt betrayed. Ickes felt he had had no choice but to tell what he knew. Asked by reporters if he would withdraw Pauley’s nomination, Truman said he would not. Asked if his relations with Ickes had changed, he said Ickes could be mistaken the same as anyone.

Ickes resigned on February 13, declaring at his own press conference that he had been “unable to commit perjury for the sake of the party” and that he could not possibly serve in the Cabinet any longer and maintain his self-respect. He was against “government by crony,” Ickes further stated, an expression that would not be forgotten.

Outraged that Ickes had implied that he, the President, had asked him to commit perjury, Truman not only accepted the resignation but told Ickes he had three days to clear out.

Though Pauley denied under oath that he had ever made any such proposition to Ickes, the appointment was doomed, and once the committee agreed to affirm Pauley’s personal integrity, the nomination was withdrawn at his request.

The whole affair had been extremely unpleasant, recalling for many people memories of the Harding administration, with its Teapot Dome oil scandals. Ickes, celebrated as “Honest Harold” and the “Old Curmudgeon,” was incurably hard to deal with, as everyone knew, but he had been an exceptional Secretary of Interior and served longer in the job than anyone. Except for Henry Wallace, Ickes was the last of the New Dealers in the Truman Cabinet and his departure, in combination with the bitterness of his parting remarks, was taken by liberals especially as still another extremely discouraging sign. “One has the feeling,” wrote the New York Post, “that a poorer and poorer cast is dealing desperately with a bigger and bigger story.”

Remembering Ickes years later, Truman would describe him as a chronic “resigner.”

He reminded me of old Salmon P. Chase, who was Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln’s Cabinet, and he thought he ought to be President, that he’d be a better President than Lincoln, and he was always resigning. He must have resigned a dozen times….

Lincoln said someplace that old Chase wasn’t happy unless he was unhappy, and that was just about the case with Ickes. I knew he’d turned in his resignation a few times while Roosevelt was President….

The whole thing…was a great pity because he’d been a good man in his day.

The Florida trip was canceled. Truman kept thinking each week that perhaps the next would not be so hectic, he told his staff, but then the next week was always worse. There was always a crisis just around the corner and he had to do something about it. Many in Washington wondered if this was to be the pattern—taking problems as they came, rather than working to achieve large, clear objectives.

His popularity was tumbling. From the record high of 87 percent approval in the months after Roosevelt’s death, it had fallen by February to 63 percent, according to the Gallup Poll.

Some things of importance had been accomplished: A new Central Intelligence Group was organized, a civilian agency separate from the military and the State Department, to gather and analyze intelligence data for the President; Herbert Hoover was appointed to make a survey of the world food crisis; and an Employment Act had been passed by Congress, a landmark for the Truman administration. Though failing to call for full employment, as Truman wished, it did empower the federal government “to use all practical means” to foster “maximum employment,” and set up a President’s Economic Council, something new, to appraise the economic outlook and consider the effect of government programs on the economy.

In addition, Truman had become the first President to recommend statehood for Alaska and Hawaii.

His new Secretary of the Interior, to fill Ickes’s place, was Julius Krug, who was young and widely respected. Privately, and somewhat bitterly, Truman mused that perhaps he should add some new Kitchen Cabinet secretaries as well: a Secretary of Inflation to convince everyone that however high or low prices went, it didn’t matter; a Secretary of Reaction, to abolish airplanes and restore ox carts and sailing ships; a Secretary of Columnists, to read all the columns and report to the President on how the country should be run; and a Secretary of Semantics, to supply big words as well as to tell him when to keep quiet.

The trouble with the President, it was being said, was not that he spoke his mind too often or too candidly, but that he wanted too much to please, to get along with everybody, agree with everybody. It was an approach that might serve in the Senate but not in the Executive Office. In an article titled “Everyman in the White House,” Kenneth G. Crawford wrote in The American Mercury that while Truman was proof of the great American myth that anyone could become President, he was a flat disappointment, “essentially indecisive…essentially vacillating,” too ready to see two sides to every argument.

“He does so like to agree with whoever is with him at the moment,” wrote Henry Wallace, who, as Secretary of Commerce, had been seeing more of Truman than usual during the labor strife. Wallace’s principal worry was American policy concerning the Soviet Union. Expressing his views privately with Truman—arguing that every effort must be made to get along with the Soviets—Wallace found that Truman invariably agreed with him. Yet Wallace knew the contrary views the President was receiving from people like Harriman and Leahy, and felt sure that in private Truman agreed with them, too.

Leahy, for his part, saw Byrnes and others at the State Department as too ready to accommodate the Russians. He worried that “appeasement” would lead to war, as at Munich. In his diary in late February, Leahy recorded that the President “appears to consider it necessary to adopt a strong diplomatic opposition to the Soviet program of expansion….”

In fact, Truman was not of one mind regarding the Soviets, any more than official Washington was, or the country. He did truly wish to get along with the Russians quite as much as did Wallace and, like Leahy, he was steadfastly against appeasement. Nor did he see why he should consider such attitudes contradictory. He had no clear policy or long-range objectives. He was facing events only as they came, trying to be patient, trying to be prudent and maintain balance. But at bottom he had no intention of being either belligerent or weak.

Then, in a rare public address in Moscow on February 9, Stalin declared that communism and capitalism were incompatible and that another war was inevitable. He called for increased production in a new five-year plan to “guarantee our country against any eventuality.” Production of materials for national defense were to be tripled; consumer goods, Stalin said, “must wait on rearmament.” Confrontation with the capitalist West, he predicted, would come in the 1950s, when America would be in the depths of another depression.

Washington was stunned. Even the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it the “Declaration of World War III.” Since Stalin had decided to make military power his objective, wrote Walter Lippmann, the United States was left with no choice but to do the same.

The Red Army was still in Manchuria. The Russian garrison in Iran’s northernmost province, Azerbaijan, was still in place, in disregard of an agreement that it would be withdrawn within six months of the German surrender. On February 16, just a week after the Stalin speech, came the sensational news from Ottawa that a spy ring had been uncovered and charged with trying to steal information on the atomic bomb for the Russians, and the ring included a member of the Canadian Parliament.

But nothing so highlighted Truman’s ambivalence about relations with the Soviets as events surrounding the speech given by Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in the first week of March 1946, a speech Truman had encouraged and that he knew about in advance and approved of, despite what he later said.

Located twenty miles north of Jefferson City in rolling farm land, the little town of Fulton was the site of tiny Westminster College, a Presbyterian men’s school where Harry Vaughan had once played center on the football team. The idea to invite Churchill to speak there had been the inspiration of Dr. Franc L. McCluer, president of the college. McCluer had traveled to Washington to see Vaughan, who took him in to meet “the Boss.” Truman was immediately enthusiastic and penned a postscript to Churchill at the bottom of the invitation: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you. Best regards.”

In reply, Churchill told Truman, “Under your auspices anything I say will command some attention….”

In February, while vacationing in Florida, Churchill made a flying visit to Washington to talk with Truman about the speech. “The subject…will be the necessity for full military collaboration between Great Britain and the U.S. in order to preserve peace in the world,” Admiral Leahy recorded. On March 3, returning again to Washington from Florida, Churchill conferred still further with Leahy, this time at the British Embassy, where, propped up in bed, puffing on a huge cigar, Churchill kept scattering ashes over the manuscript pages strewn about him. Leahy found “no fault” in the speech.

The following day, Monday, March 4, riding in Roosevelt’s armored railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, Truman and Churchill left by special train for Missouri, accompanied by Leahy, Vaughan, Charlie Ross, Colonel Graham, and a half-dozen others from the White House staff, plus forty-three reporters and photographers. Truman’s obvious high spirits impressed everyone. He was delighted to be traveling in such good company and bringing Churchill, the most famous speaker in the world, to a college in his home state that no one ever heard of. His mood was infectious. Churchill recited Whittier’s “Barbara Fritchie” and drank five Scotches before dinner.

“Mr. President,” Churchill said later at the card table, “I think that when we are playing poker I will call you Harry.”

“All right, Winston,” Truman replied.

As the evening passed, feigning ignorance of the game, Churchill would remark, to the great amusement of the others, “Harry, what does a sequence count?” Or, “Harry, I think I’ll risk a shilling on a couple of knaves.”

He took a boy’s delight in the game [wrote Charlie Ross]. He couldn’t seem to get the hang of the joker as a wild card for aces, straights and flushes, and so at his suggestion we made the joker completely wild. We played straight poker. The President and the rest of us would have liked to introduce some wild games, but the Prime Minister thought this would be too confusing. Colonel Graham was the principal winner.

About 2:30 in the morning, in the middle of a hand, Churchill put down his cards and said wistfully that if he were born again he would wish to live in the United States, though he deplored a few of its customs. Which customs did he have in mind, the others asked. “You stop drinking with your meals,” he said.

The next morning, Tuesday, March 5, as the train raced along the banks of the Missouri River, Churchill made a few final changes in his speech, which was then mimeographed for distribution on board. It was, he said, the most important speech of his career. Truman, having read his copy, told Churchill it would “do nothing but good” and surely “make a stir.”

Pointing to the President’s seal on the wall of the car, Truman explained that he had had the eagle’s head turned to face the olive branch. Churchill said he thought the eagle’s head should be on a swivel.

The setting and reception at Fulton were all Truman could have wished for. The day was sunny, the temperature in the high sixties, the little town spruced up and looking exactly as he liked to think of Missouri. This was the America he knew best and that he wanted Churchill to see. Thousands of people, many in from the surrounding country, were waiting to cheer them as their motorcade rolled down the red-brick main thoroughfare. At a corner near the college, on the curbstone, sat a delegation of elderly gentlemen with old-fashioned high-topped shoes and canes, who waved colored balloons, and standing behind them were several sailors in uniform.

The Westminster campus, like the town, was decked with both British and American flags. Following lunch at the home of President McCluer, an academic procession started for the gymnasium, Churchill conspicuous in the scarlet robes and plush black cap of Oxford.

In his introduction, Truman said he had never met either Churchill or Stalin until Potsdam, and that he became fond of both. Then, calling Churchill one of the outstanding men of the ages, he said, “I know he will have something constructive to say to the world….”

It was a great honor, perhaps almost unique, Churchill began, for a private visitor to be introduced to an academic audience by the President of the United States.

Amid his heavy burdens, duties, and responsibilities—unsought but not recoiled from—the President traveled a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting here today and to give me an opportunity of addressing this kindred nation, as well as my own countrymen across the ocean, and perhaps some other countries too.

The President has told you that it is his wish, as I am sure it is yours, that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times. I shall certainly avail myself of this freedom….

He had, he said, high regard for the Russian people and for his wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. “We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.” Still, it was his duty, Churchill said, to present “certain facts.” And thus he launched into that part of the speech that was to cause a sensation, giving his own kind of glowering, dramatic emphasis to the indisputable fact that an “iron curtain” had descended in Eastern Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow….

The Soviets did not want war, but rather the fruits of war, “and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrine.” What was needed in response was a union of the Western Democracies, specifically an English-speaking union of Britain and the United States. For he knew the Russians and there was nothing they so admired as strength, nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, and military weakness most of all.

From the expression on Truman’s face, his applause at several points, it was obvious he approved, as did the audience.

The immediate reaction in the country, however, was strongly in opposition. Editorials accused Churchill of poisoning the already difficult relations between the United States and Russia. America had no need for alliances with any other nation, said The Wall Street Journal. Truman, declared The Nation, had been “remarkably inept” in ever associating himself with the occasion. To Walter Lippmann the speech was an “almost catastrophic blunder.” In Moscow, Stalin said it was a “call to war” with the Soviet Union.

Truman was stunned by the criticism. Returning to Washington, he quickly backed off from responsibility, telling reporters he never knew what Churchill was going to say. It was a free country, he added. Churchill had had every right to speak as he pleased. To Henry Wallace, Truman was equally disingenuous, insisting he had never seen the speech in advance, and that Churchill had “put me on the spot.” When reporters pressed him for his opinion of the speech, now that he had had time to think about it, Truman lamely pleaded “no comment.”

To placate Stalin, he wrote a letter offering to send the Missouri to bring him to the United States and promising to accompany him to the University of Missouri so that he too might speak his mind, as Churchill had. But Stalin declined the invitation.

It was a bad time for Truman. To the press and an increasing proportion of the country, he seemed bewildered and equivocating, incapable of a clear or positive policy toward the Russians. Nor did the situation appear any more focused to those in the administration who were supposedly in the know. At the same time he was disavowing Churchill’s speech, he was also telling Averell Harriman that the refusal of the Soviets to withdraw from Iran could mean war. Harriman, who had quit the Moscow Embassy and was now, at Truman’s urging, to become ambassador to Great Britain, approved wholeheartedly of what Churchill had said, as did Leahy, Forrestal, and Dean Acheson all of whom, like Harriman, would have welcomed a strong endorsement by the President, and blamed Byrnes, whom they saw as too much the compromising politician in his dealings with the Soviets.

In an 8,000-word message from the Moscow Embassy that was to become known soon as “the long telegram,” George Kennan, the scholarly chargé d’affaires, had tried to dash any hopes the administration might have of reasonable dealings with the Stalin regime. The Kremlin, wrote Kennan, had a neurotic view of the world, at the heart, of which was an age-old Russian sense of insecurity. For this reason, the Soviet regime was “committed fanatically” to the idea that in the long run there could be no “peaceful coexistence” with the United States, and further that “it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state broken….” Stripped of the “fig leaf” of Marxism, Kennan said, the Soviets would stand before history “as only the last of a long session of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security for their internally weak regimes.”

But Soviet power, he stressed, was highly sensitive “to the logic of force,” and for this reason usually backed off when faced with strength.

The message had been received at the State Department in February, two weeks before the Churchill speech. Harriman sent a copy to Forrestal, who thought Kennan’s thesis so important he had it mimeographed and circulated through the entire administration, to virtually anyone who had anything to do with foreign and military affairs. Truman, too, read it. But though its long-range influence would be considerable, it was not the immediately galvanizing document sometimes portrayed—not at the White House. On Truman in particular, it does not appear to have had any profound or immediate effect, and most likely for the reason that he had heard much the same case made by Harriman, with his talk of a “barbarian invasion of Europe” at their first meeting the year before. In any event, for attribution, he was taking no stand one way or the other.

At a Cabinet meeting on March 22, Truman expressed surprise over the fact that the Navy was inviting some sixty members of Congress to witness the series of atomic bomb tests scheduled to be held soon on the tiny Pacific atoll of Bikini. He didn’t care how many went after July 1, Truman said, but until then Congress had business to attend. Byrnes questioned the wisdom of such tests, calling them “extremely ill-advised at this time” and warning of detrimental effect on relations with the Soviets. Vice Admiral William Blandy, who was in charge of the operation, reported that 37,000 men were already assigned to take part. When Truman said a decision was needed “here and now,” Byrnes declared he would prefer no tests, but that later would be better. Wallace concurred. Truman said that if the tests were canceled, $100 million would be wasted. He decided the tests would be put off until summer.

The next night Charlie Ross went to the President’s private quarters at the White House to see Truman about a statement announcing the postponement. “He was in his study, working…Mrs. Truman was away and he was waiting for Margaret to come in,” wrote Ross. “We had a drink together. He seemed lonesome.” To Ross, in confidence, Truman said he was less worried about Russia than were most other people.

When reporters questioned whether he shared Harriman’s view of the Russian threat, Truman replied, “I have nothing to say about it.” The easy camaraderie of his earlier press conferences had given way to an atmosphere of greater caution and tension. His sister Mary Jane, who had delighted in sitting in on several of his sessions with reporters during her stay at the White House the previous year, would describe how the questions then had come “thick and fast.” To her it was a wonder that Harry could answer so quickly. “It just didn’t seem to me that they gave him any time at all,” she said, “and all of them got a big bang out of it.” Everybody had seemed to be enjoying every moment. “Once in a while he got a kind of a smarty question,” she remembered. “But…[he] had just as smarty an answer.” Now the smarty answers were to be avoided. Increasingly at press conferences, on the advice of Ross and others on the staff, Truman’s response was “No comment,” or, “Your guess is as good as mine,” or, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

On April 1, April Fool’s Day, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers called a nationwide coal strike. For hundreds of thousands of miners Lewis was a leader such as had only been dreamed of in years past. As he once told them, “I have pleaded your case not in the quavering tones of a mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.” Understandably, their loyalty to him was unswerving. If he said it was time to strike, they struck. And in the weeks following, on the anniversary of Truman’s first year in office, a flurry of newspaper and magazine articles appeared, appraising his performance as President to date. Truman, who still began the day with four or five morning papers and regularly saw a half-dozen different magazines, probably read them all.

The Saturday Evening Post said charitably that perhaps every President had to learn the hard way. (Truman might have added that that was about the only way he had ever learned anything in his life.) To reporters Bert Andrews and Jack Steele, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, the central question was whether the President would grow in office. “New Dealers are still unhappy, conservatives are critical, middle-of-the-roaders uncertain. They still find it impossible to decide which way Truman is going.”

Noel F. Busch, in an article in Life, noted a curious quality to be observed often again as time passed. Showing visitors about the presidential yacht, Truman would point out the lounge, the galley, and, guest rooms, then say, “And this is the President’s suite,” as though the President were not aboard and he himself were merely an aide or guide.

Such remarks [wrote Busch] may serve as evidence of tact or humility or both. Taken in conjunction with many other traits of speech and behavior on Truman’s part, they also show a curious reluctance or even inability to think of himself as President without a conscious effort of will.

To the editors of Life’s more overtly Republican sister publication, Time, it was by now quite clear that Truman was a mediocre man, the job too big for him.

A current Washington wisecrack was, “I’m just mild about Harry.” Truman, went another joke, was the weakest President since Pierce. “What did Pierce ever do?” the listener was supposed to ask. “That’s the point!” the teller would exclaim.

To Mrs. Robert A. Taft, wife of the conservative Republican senator from Ohio, was attributed the line, “To err is Truman.”

Some observers, however, were not so quick to dismiss him! “Here is to be seen no flaming leadership,” wrote Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, “little of what could be called scholarship and no more that is profound. But it is very good and human and courageous. Common sense shines out….”

III

Even without the coal strike it had become the longest, most costly siege of labor trouble in the nation’s history. At one point more than a million workers were out on strike, and though the most crippling shutdown thus far, in the steel industry, was by now settled, the solution had been to grant not just higher wages but an increase in steel prices, all of which was certain to spur further inflation. Nor had its settlement of the steel strike done anything to improve the standing of the administration. Truman’s offer of an 18½ cent increase to the steel workers’ hourly wage had been made without even waiting for his own fact-finding board to report. So now an 18½ cent raise was what everyone wanted.

The General Motors strike dragged on. From the day John L. Lewis pulled his men out of the mines, every major industry was affected. Without coal, the steel plants were again banking their furnaces. Ford and Chrysler were forced to close. Freight loadings were off 75 percent. In Chicago the use of electricity was ordered cut by half.

The issue this time with Lewis was a proposed miners’ welfare fund to be financed by a 5 cent royalty on every ton of coal produced. But Truman detested the hulking Lewis, remembering his bluster and arrogance before the Truman Committee and the strikes he had called during the war. Privately, Truman thought Roosevelt would have been justified if he had had Lewis shot as a traitor. When Truman announced his concern over the legality of the proposed welfare fund, Lewis answered, “What does Truman know about the legality of anything?”

Yet more worrisome still was the mounting threat of a nationwide railroad strike, a calamity no one seemed able to face or forestall and which, when it came, revealed more about Harry Truman than all but a few episodes in his entire presidency.

His public statements were models of restraint. On the surface he was all restraint, unrattled, entirely his familiar, chipper self, the double breasted suits smoothly pressed, shoes shined, a spring to his step, a look of alert vitality behind the thick glasses. He had time still for streams of visitors—“the customers,” he called them—time always to praise or thank those on the staff who had put in longer hours than usual. He rarely missed his half-hour nap after lunch, rarely avoided the variety of ceremonial chores expected of him, and whatever the occasion, he appeared always to be enjoying himself, as though there was nothing else on his mind. In early May, Time portrayed him meeting successive waves of crisis like a swimmer bobbing “lightheartedly” in the surf. “In the week of his 62nd birthday, apparently nothing could shake him.”

Only now and then were there momentary flashes of temper of a kind not seen before. Asked by one of the regular White House reporters at a press conference why they had been given no advance notice of a Cabinet meeting, Truman snapped, “I can hold a Cabinet meeting whenever I choose, I don’t have to tell you….” In the notes he kept on his daily appointment sheets, he now had something caustic or derogatory to say about nearly everyone, including old Senate friends like Burton K. Wheeler, whom he now lumped with the “spineless liberals.” His own _recent choice as the American representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Baruch, was described as wanting “to run the world, the moon and maybe Jupiter.”

Inwardly Truman was an extremely frustrated, resentful, and angry man, worn thin by criticism, fed up with crises not of his making and with people who, as he saw it, cared nothing for their country, only their own selfish interests. “Big money has too much power and so have the big unions—both are riding to a fall because I like neither,” he had written to his mother earlier, and his mood since had only worsened.

A railroad strike coming on top of the coal strike would mean almost unimaginable catastrophe, paralysis everywhere. Negotiations between railway management and twenty different railway unions had dragged on for months, with Labor Secretary Schwellenbach serving not very effectively as Truman’s mediator, while assisted by a new man on the White House staff, a big, gregarious, gum-chewing, former economics professor and labor specialist from Alabama named John R. Steelman. The unions had demanded higher wages. Truman, invoking the Railway Labor Act that provided for a sixty-day mediation period, had ordered a delay in the strike. In April the negotiations fell apart and the strike was set for May 18. More talk followed, Steelman now replacing Schwellenbach as Truman’s principal representative and apparently making progress. Of the twenty unions involved, all but two were ready to reach an accommodation.

The problem was that the two holdouts were the two major unions. What so exasperated Truman was that they were also headed by two of his old allies, A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, and Alvanley Johnston, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the same pair who in his “hour of greatest need” in the 1940 senate race backed him when no one would, providing the lion’s share of the money for his campaign. Moreover, at Chicago in 1944 they had been in the thick of the drive to make him Roosevelt’s running mate.

Whitney and Johnston were two white-haired, veteran battlers, both now in their seventies. Whitney, whom Truman knew best and liked, had by far the greatest power, since he represented more than 200,000 trainmen in 1,145 “lodges” nationwide. Johnston, who looked like a cartoonist’s version of a labor boss, with a girth so broad he had difficulty buttoning his suit jacket, spoke for 80,000 locomotive engineers. Between them they could shut down every railroad—all passenger service, all freight movement—from coast to coast and there appeared to be nothing anyone could do about it.

As the coal strike continued, John L. Lewis—large, theatrical, perpetually scowling under a broad-brimmed black fedora—was seen coming and going from the West Wing of the White House, his entrances and exits made always, for the benefit of the newsreel cameras, at a slow, ambling walk, a man very conscious of the fact that he was the center of attention. On May 13, Lewis agreed to a twelve-day truce. But only days later the coal negotiations collapsed and Truman, reading from a prepared statement, told reporters the country was truly in “desperate straits.”

When, at a Cabinet meeting, Truman asked for constructive suggestions On how to handle the strike situation, nobody could offer any.

On May 17, with only a day remaining before the scheduled railroad walkout, Truman summoned Whitney and Johnston to his office. Whitney said they had to go through with the strike. “Our men are demanding it.”

“Well then,” Truman replied, hunching forward in his chair, “I’m going to give you the gun.” As they watched, he signed an executive order for the government to seize and operate the railroads, effective the next day.

Not quite twenty-four hours later, on Saturday the 18th, the two labor leaders agreed to postpone the strike for another five days.

On Sunday with apprehensions growing on all sides, Truman took off on a flying visit to Kansas City for the announced purpose of receiving an honorary degree from little William Jewell College at nearby Liberty, Missouri. He also wanted to see his mother. With the help of friends, he and Vivian had finally managed to buy back from the county all of the old homeplace on Blue Ridge, the farm she so loved, even though, because of her deteriorating health, she would be unable to move back there. (She and Mary Jane would continue on in the small yellow frame bungalow in Grandview, where they had been living since 1940.)

In conversation with friends in Missouri, Truman kept referring to Washington derisively as “that place,” and to the graduating class at William Jewell he said leadership wasn’t worth much without some followers. What the country needed was people who were willing to work, he said, speaking without notes.

We have a society which is organized, and if one cog in the organization gives out the whole structure begins to shake loose. Now let me urge upon you: Get in line, get on the team, do a little work; help make the United States what it must be from now on: the leader of the world in peace, as it was the leader of the world in war. I urge you to be good workers in the ranks.

A White House reporter who made the trip, Felix Belair, Jr., of The New York Times, asked Truman’s physician, Colonel Graham, if perhaps the President was working too hard. Graham agreed, adding with emphasis that there was also nothing anyone could do about it. “That’s the way he is,” said Graham. “I try using a little applied psychology, but you know the President has a pretty good psychology of his own. He does the best he can by his job and he knows there’s no use worrying about it after that.”

But two old Truman friends from Independence, Mayor Roger Sermon and Henry Bundschu, a dry goods merchant and neighbor of the Trumans, warned Belair to watch out for the President’s temper. He might be “an easygoing fellow,” but he was also no one to trifle with. “When the ‘feuding blood’ of his Kentucky ancestors was allowed to get the upper hand, Harry Truman was a man to be avoided,” Belair wrote after talking with Sermon and Bundschu, who said they would prefer three or four ordinary men for enemies to one like Harry.

To Belair, the President was becoming an increasingly fascinating subject, not at all the simple man he had supposed but a “complex personality,” something others had known for a long time and would talk of again. In Independence forty years later one of Truman’s nephews, J. C. Truman, Vivian’s second son, would be asked by a visitor how he would describe his uncle Harry, beyond what everyone knew. After a long pause, he answered, “Complicated!”

On Tuesday, day three of the five-day postponement of the railway strike, Ed Flynn of the Bronx flew in to Washington to see if he could help sway Whitney and Johnston, but without success. Nothing seemed to work. No compromise appeared likely. On Wednesday, Truman ordered seizure of the coal mines and proposed an 18½ cent raise for the rail workers—again more than his own emergency fact-finding board had recommended—and still Whitney and Johnston “viewed the proposal unfavorably.!” By Thursday, May 23, the day the strike was scheduled to begin at 5:00 P.M., Washington time, the situation at the White House had become extremely tense.

The two union leaders were summoned one more time, along with officials representing management, and assigned to different rooms to resume bargaining, John Steelman moving back and forth between them. When Whitney and Johnston again refused Truman’s offer, Steelman told them they simply couldn’t say no to a President, insisting that that was just not done. Their response was that nobody paid attention to this President anyway.

“This was the fifth day of the postponement of the railroad strike and…[it] turned into one of the wildest days at the White House since the end of the war,” wrote Eben Ayers in his diary:

Newsmen thronged the lobby, tense and excited. The President was in his office as usual and met from time to time with Steelman, John Snyder and Schwellenbach…. This situation went on all day long. Early in the afternoon the President ordered John Pye, the colored messenger, who runs the executive lunchroom, to prepare some sandwiches…and they were sent in to the railroad people. I did not go out for lunch nor did my secretaries.

During the course of the day Secretary of State Byrnes came over, secretly, so newspapermen did not know of his visit, and he argued with Whitney and Johnston for some time, trying to point out to them the effect upon our international relations of a general rail strike at this time.

At about four in the afternoon, with only an hour to go before the strike would begin, Truman went out to the South Lawn to host a reception for nearly nine hundred convalescent veterans from Walter Reed and other nearby military hospitals, among, whom were amputees and others so severely disabled that they moved forward in the receiving line on crutches and in wheelchairs, attended by nurses in starched white uniforms. Such garden parties for hospitalized veterans had been an annual May tradition at the White House since 1919, but were discontinued during the war. Truman, some weeks earlier, had asked that the tradition be revived.

The spring afternoon was ideal, with bright sunshine, blue sky, and flowers in bloom. Several of the Cabinet were present with their wives, as were Admiral Nimitz and General Bradley. The Marine Band played. Strawberry ice cream and lemon punch were served, and for more than an hour Truman stood warmly greeting his guests, who were all in uniform and wearing their campaign ribbons.

Always moved by the sight of wounded veterans, Truman was struck especially now by the contrast between these respectful young men who had made such sacrifices for their country, and who were so plainly pleased to meet him, and the two contentious old union bosses inside. He kept smiling, chatting, patting the men on the back, asking where they were from, making every effort to see that they had a good time.

Only once was he seen glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the Cabinet Room, where the long French windows, under the colonnade, stood open to the air. Rumors were passed of progress in the negotiations. A soldier in a wheelchair said, “Draft all the strikers—all of them.” Another claimed he wouldn’t be President for anything. Truman drank a glass of punch. When a Strauss waltz was played, he walked over beside the band to sit and eat a heaping dish of ice cream, tapping his foot in time to the music. By then it was well past five and the strike was on.

There had never been a total railroad stoppage until now. Almost at once the whole country was brought virtually to a standstill. Of 24,000 freight trains normally in operation, fewer than 300 ran; of 175,000 passenger trains, all of 100 moved. Rush-hour commuters were stranded in New York and Chicago. In the West, coast-to-coast “streamliners” stopped and disgorged passengers at tiny way stations in the middle of the desert.

There were poignant scenes [reported Newsweek]: The Chicago woman kept from her father’s deathbed in Minnesota; the 13-year-old Arizona boy en route for an emergency brain operation in California; the woman taking the body of her husband back to Cleveland for burial. Other less painful dilemmas: the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra’s San Francisco-bound special train was abandoned by crewmen; ball clubs found their mid-season travels stymied; the circus, scheduled to leave for Philadelphia, was forced to give Boston an extra dose of the biggest show on earth. Everywhere, the stranded who refused to sleep on emergency cots set up in hotel basements or armories took to bus, airplanes, taxis, and hitchhiking. Washington cabbies had a field day; their price for a ride to Boston was $150, to Atlanta $100.

Newsreel camera crews rushed to film hundreds of freight cars standing motionless in railyards as far as the eye could see, loaded coal cars standing idle, and baggage piled head high in big-city stations.

There were reports of fortunes in lettuce and fruit rotting in Kansas and California. Officials in Washington announced that in Europe hundreds of thousands of people would starve if grain shipments were held up as much as two weeks. Panic buying for food and gasoline broke out everywhere in the country. No one, no community was untouched.

Telegrams flooding the White House came from every quarter and minced no words:

ALL TRAIN SERVICE OUT OF NEW YORK CANCELLED. WHAT NOW?…

HATCHERIES [in Henry County, Missouri] NOW PRODUCING MILLIONS OF CHICKS WEEKLY WHICH ARE A TOTAL LOSS UNLESS SHIPPED IMMEDIATELY BY RAIL WHEN HATCHED….

THIS AGRICULTURAL AREA [Coining, Calif.] WILL BE RUINED IF THE STRIKE CONTINUES….

MR. PRESIDENT, ZERO HOUR IS HERE. WHO IS TO RULE OUR NATION? THE LEGALLY CONSTITUTED AUTHORITIES OR ISOLATED DOMESTIC GROUPS?…

PLEASE FORGET SELFISH POLITICS LONG ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT OTHER PEOPLE BESIDES LABOR LEADERS HAVE TO LIVE AND EAT. THEY ALSO VOTE….

IS THE PRESENT INCUMBENT IMPOTENT IN THE RAILROAD STRIKE? IF SO HE SHOULD RESIGN….

WHY DON’T YOU GO AHEAD AND ACT IN THIS NATIONAL CRISIS. YOU'RE OUR LEADER….

PROMPT ACTION IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE OUR COUNTRY….

LESS TALK AND MORE ACTION….

QUIT PLAYING POLITICS….

TIME TO GET TOUGH….

RESPECTFULLY URGE YOU TO RISE TO THE OCCASION….

Truman had had all he could take. Alone at his desk upstairs at the White House, on a small, cheap ruled tablet of the kind schoolchildren use, he began to write. It was the draft of a speech, a speech he had no intention of giving, but that he needed desperately to get off his chest. It was another of his “longhand spasms,” and the worst.

He filled seven pages. All the pent-up fury of the past weeks, the feelings evoked by the wounded men on the South Lawn, his sense of betrayal at the hands of old friends Whitney and Johnston—and the sense that they were flouting the highest office, not to say belittling him personally—all his stubborn pride, came spewing forth in one of the most intemperate documents ever written by an American President. It was as though somewhere deep within this normally fair-minded, self-controlled, naturally warmhearted man a raw, ugly, old native strain persisted, like the cry of a frontier lynch mob, and had to be released. Probably he wrote in a state of exhaustion late that night. Possibly whiskey played a part. But no one knows. The “speech” could also have been written in the cold light of the next morning, which, if so, makes it still more appalling.

Under his constitutional powers as President, he would call for volunteers to support the Constitution, he said at the start. Then, after a few pages of praise for the Constitution and for the decisive role America had played in winning the war, he continued with what was on his mind:

At home those of us who had the country’s welfare at heart worked day and night. But some people worked neither day nor night and some tried to sabotage the war effort entirely. No one knows that better than I. John Lewis called two strikes in war time to satisfy his ego. Two strikes which were worse than bullets in the back to our soldiers. He held a gun at the head of the Government. The rail unions did exactly the same thing. They all were receiving from four to forty times what the man who was facing the enemy fire on the front was receiving. The effete union leaders receive from five to ten times the net salary of your president.

Now these same union leaders on V.J. day told your President that they would cooperate 100% with him to reconvert to peacetime production. They all lied to him.

First came the threatened automobile strike. Your President asked for legislation to cool off and consider the situation. A weak-kneed Congress didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to pass the bill.

Mr. Murray and his Communist friends had a conniption fit and Congress had labor jitters. Nothing happened. Then came the electrical workers’ strike, the steel strike, the coal strike and now the rail tie-up. Every single one of the strikers and their demagogue leaders have been living in luxury, working when they pleased….

I am tired of the government’s being flouted, vilified and misrepresented. Now I want you men who are my comrades in arms, you men who fought the battles to save the nation just as I did twenty-five years ago, to come along with me and eliminate the Lewises, the Whitneys, the Johnstons, the Communist Bridges [head of the maritime union] and the Russian Senators and Representatives and really make this a government of, by and for the people. I think no more of the Wall Street crowd than I do of Lewis and Whitney.

Let us give the country back to the people. Let’s put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, make our own country safe for democracy, tell the Russians where to get off and make the United Nations work. Come on boys, let’s do the job.

It was patriotism run amok, as well as absurdly inaccurate. Rail workers earned nothing like forty times the pay of a soldier. The salaries of the union leaders were less, not more, than Truman’s own of $75,000 a year, and to describe Whitney or Johnston or John L. Lewis as “effete” was laughable. He was even off in his math, calculating the time elapsed since his war of 1918.

What was very accurately reflected, however, was the intensity of his rage and his determination now to set things straight.

The look on Truman’s face as he strode into a special meeting of the Cabinet Friday morning, May 24, was one White House reporters would not forget. The gray-blue eyes blazed behind his glasses. His mouth was “a thin, hard line pulled down at the corners,” his back straight as a rod of steel. “In the manner of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation,” remembered Cabell Phillips of The New York Times, “he had summoned them not to solicit their views but to tell them what he was going to do.” It was a Harry Truman they had not seen before, but that some on his staff knew well and liked.

“He’s one tough son of a bitch of a man,” Harry Vaughan would say. That was the key to understanding Harry Truman.

With the Cabinet assembled around the table, he asked for suggestions on operation of the railroads. No one had any.

He would go before Congress the following day, he told them, but first address the country by radio that night. He had decided to draft the striking rail workers into the Army.

There was a moment of stunned silence. The Attorney General, Tom Clark, questioned whether the President was overstepping the bounds of the Constitution. Truman was not interested in philosophy. The strike must stop. “We’ll draft them and think about the law later,” he reportedly remarked.

His seven-page speech draft was handed over to Charlie Ross, who, having read it, told Truman as an old friend that it wouldn’t do. Sam Rosenman was sent for and a new speech written, with Rosenman, Ross John Snyder, and Truman himself all contributing. But the main work and at Truman’s request, was done by a rising new star at the White House, Navy Captain Clark Clifford, who had been posted temporarily the summer before as assistant to Jake Vardaman, and then, when Vardaman was removed, had stepped in as naval aide. Clifford was thirty-nine years old, over six feet tall, broad in the shoulders, slim-waisted, and handsome as a screen actor, with wavy blond hair and a silky baritone voice. In his Navy uniform he looked almost too glamorous to be true, or to be taken seriously; but he was calm, clearheaded, polished as a career diplomat, and, as Truman had quickly perceived, exceedingly capable. Indeed, Clifford’s almost chance presence on the staff would prove to be one of the luckiest breaks of Truman’s presidency.

“I’d never been in the White House,” Clifford would remember. “Never occurred to me I ever would be in the White House. Oh, it was exciting! And [at first] as naval aide, there wasn’t much to do. You’re kind of a potted plant…. The first time I arrived there, the first day, Vardaman took me in, he said, ‘President Truman, this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Clifford who is going to look after my office.’ And Truman looked up and said, ‘Big fellow, isn’t he!’ ”

Clifford had been raised in the fashionable west end of St. Louis. His father was an official with the Missouri Pacific Railroad, his mother a lecturer and author of children’s books. An uncle, for whom he was named, Clark McAdams, had been a brilliant editorial page editor for the Post-Dispatch. Educated at Washington University, where he also took a law degree, Clifford himself had been a highly successful trial attorney in St. Louis before the war, while still in his early thirties.

“I think he did feel an affinity with those who had come from that part of the country and been schooled in that part of the country, and spoke very much as he did,” Clifford would say of the President years later. “It was an important factor. I’m not sure he would have admitted to its being, but it happened to be so.” But in no respect did Clifford resemble the other Missourians around Truman. He was of a different generation, an entirely different style, as even the sharpest critics of the administration would acknowledge. “Alone of all the Truman entourage, Clifford has the brains, the personal élan, and the savoir-faire requisite of a big-leaguer,” Washington correspondents Robert S. Allen and William V. Shannon would soon write in a highly critical book called The Truman Merry-Go-Round. Clifford, they judged, was “really of White House class.”

Clifford, who had had little knowledge of Truman, or any particular interest in him, prior to coming to the White House, soon found himself greatly impressed—devoted to the man in a way he would never have expected. “The President is intelligent, forthright and reasonable,” Clifford had written to his mother. “I have developed a deep and abiding affection for him and hope and trust that I may be able to be of some small assistance to him….”

Late the afternoon of the 24th, with no time to spare, Clifford went to work on his first major assignment. Alone at the long, polished table in the Cabinet Room, he labored as he would often again, “grubbing it out” with a yellow legal pad and a soft pencil. For all his many abilities, Clifford was not a facile or inspired writer, nothing like Sam Rosenman. He was not even a good writer, as he conceded, but he worked intensely, writing, erasing, and rewriting one sentence after another, laboriously down the page. He began at five o’clock. By eight a rough draft was ready, and by then a dozen people were in the President’s office, waiting to take part. The revisions went on to the very last minute. Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, was still typing the final pages of his reading copy as he went on the air.

Truman’s own efforts on the ruled tablet paper, meantime, were tucked away in Clifford’s file, to remain undisclosed for another twenty years.

Truman spoke to the country at ten o’clock, eastern time. Margaret, who had been in New York to see a play with her friend Drucie Snyder, John Snyder’s daughter, and who, because of the strike, had had to borrow a car and drive back to Washington, fighting heavy traffic the whole way, arrived at the White House as her father’s broadcast was about to begin. She would remember him looking as tired as she felt.

“I come before the American people tonight at a time of great crisis,” he said. “The crisis of Pearl Harbor was the result of action by a foreign enemy. The crisis tonight is caused by a group of men within our own country who place their private interests above the welfare of the nation.”

His voice was firm, deadly serious. It was “time for plain speaking.” This was no contest between labor and management, but between two willful men and their government.

I am a friend of labor…[but] it is inconceivable that in our democracy any two men should be placed in a position where they can completely stifle our economy and ultimately destroy our country.

He called on the striking railroad workers to return to their jobs as a duty to their country, and warned that if a sufficient number did not return by 4:00 P.M. the next day, he would call out the Army and do whatever else was necessary to break the strike.

He did not say anything about drafting the strikers. That he was saving for his speech to Congress the next afternoon.

Sam Rosenman, who was up most of the night working on the Congress speech, was opposed to the whole idea of drafting the rail workers. Attorney General Clark had also by now put his concerns in writing: “The Draft Act does not permit the induction of occupational groups and it is doubtful whether constitutional powers of the President would include the right to draft individuals for national purposes.” Jimmy Byrnes, too, was strongly opposed. But Truman would not be budged.

The conference on the speech to Congress took place Saturday morning in Truman’s office. John Steelman, meanwhile, had hurried off to see Whitney and Johnston at their suite at the Statler Hotel, determined to make one last try. Truman’s appearance before Congress was scheduled for four o’clock.

The speech was nearly ready at three when Steelman called from the hotel to say he was making progress. The strike might be settled within the hour.

Rosenman and Clifford went into the Cabinet Room and wrote three or four alternative pages. At 3:35 Steelman called again, to report the, situation still unresolved. By now it was past time for Truman to leave for the Capitol. Clifford, the new pages in hand, had to run to catch the President’s car.

It was another sparkling day and as warm as summer. In the crowded House Chamber, even with the air conditioning on, many of the members sat mopping their brows. In the gallery Bess and Margaret could be seen quietly waiting.

When at a few minutes past four Truman walked in, a grim look on his face, the whole room resounded with the biggest ovation he had yet received as President, while in Sam Rayburn’s office close by, Clifford was frantically on the phone again with Steelman, who now said a settlement was “awful close.” Steelman had an agreement on paper in longhand, but it had still to be typed and signed. “He said they had verbally agreed to the points which they had in writing,” Clifford remembered, “but there was no knowing whether they would finally sign.” He would stay by the phone, Clifford told Steelman.

“For the past two days the Nation has been in the grip of a railroad strike which threatens to paralyze all our industrial, agricultural, commercial and social life…. The disaster will spare no one,” Truman said from the rostrum. Strikes against the government must stop. The Congress and the President of the United States must work together—“and we must work fast.”

In the packed press gallery behind him, reporters were writing furiously. “Spotlights blaze, cameras whir, his Missouri voice covers America,” wrote Richard Strout of The New Republic.

He was calling, Truman said, for “temporary emergency” legislation “to authorize the President to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government.” The audience roared its approval.

At that moment, Les Biffle, Secretary of the Senate, hurried into the chamber and handed Truman a slip of red paper, a note from Clifford. Truman glanced at it, then looked up.

“Word has just been received,” he said, “that the railroad strike has been settled, on terms proposed by the President!”

The whole Congress rose to cheer and applaud, everyone on both sides of the aisle. The sudden interruption by Biffle, the red note in Truman’s hand, the surprise of his announcement had all been like something in a movie. (Some in the audience suspected the entire scene had been concocted for effect, which it had not.) Yet Truman himself made no attempt at dramatics. His grim expression never changed and having come that far in the speech, he continued on, delivering the rest of it as he would have anyway.

The President, who of late had seemed so often bewildered and inadequate, had proved himself extremely tough and decisive when the chips were down, and the reaction of the Congress—and of the country by and large—was instantaneous approval. His “bold action” was praised in the press and by leaders in both parties. He had “grown in national stature,” said the Atlanta Constitution. He had “met magnificently one of the greatest tests of courage ever to face an American President,” declared the Philadelphia Record. Harry Truman, wrote Felix Belair in The New York Times, had shown

he could be tough—plenty tough—when the occasion demanded. He was no less “the average guy” on the streetcar…or driving with the family on Sunday such as he had always been pictured. But just now he was also a man who could rise to the occasion.

The House of Representatives gave him all he wanted, passing the bill to draft the strikers by a margin of 306 to 13, after a debate of less than two hours that same evening.

The Senate, however, refused to be stampeded, largely at the insistence of Senator Taft, who was outraged by the bill, certain that it violated every principle of American jurisprudence. And there were concerns among liberals on the Democratic side as well. Claude Pepper said he would rather give up his seat in the Senate than support such a measure.

A. F. Whitney declared that Truman had signed his own political death warrant. “You can’t make a President out of a ribbon clerk,” Whitney exclaimed at a cheering labor rally in New York’s Madison Square Park. Placards in the crowd said: “Down with Truman,” “Break with Truman.” He was denounced as the country’s number one strikebreaker, called a Fascist, a traitor to the union movement. Later, vowing revenge, Whitney claimed he would spend the last dollar in the treasury of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen to defeat Harry Truman, should he dare run for reelection in 1948.

Prominent liberals were thunderstruck. Sidney Hillman, who was on his deathbed, spoke out against Truman as he never had. “Draft men who strike in peacetime, into the armed services!” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic. “Is this Russia or Germany?” To Truman, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote politely that “there must not be any slip, because of the difficulties of our peacetime situation, into a military way of thinking.”

Ultimately, the proposal to draft the strikers was defeated in the Senate, 70 to 13, the initial cries of Taft and Pepper having grown to a chorus.

But the strike was over, the trains were running again. To the great majority of Americans, Truman had exhibited exactly the kind of backbone they expected of a President. To most it seemed he had been left no other choice. He had done only what he had to do, and shown at last that somebody was in charge.

“I was the servant of 150 million people of the United States,” Truman himself would later say, “and I had to do the job even if I lost my political career.” He had no regrets.

Days later the coal strike, too, ended. On May 29, John L. Lewis met with the coal operators at the White House to sign a new contract. Lewis, it appeared, would be a problem no more, having achieved all he wished for his miners: an 18½ cent-per-hour raise, $100 in vacation pay, a guaranteed five-day workweek, and the 5 cent royalty on every ton of coal mined to go into a welfare fund. While other labor leaders continued the uproar over Truman, the habitually orotund Lewis at last, amazingly, kept silent.

For Truman himself the crisis had provided a chance finally to stand his ground, even take the offensive, none of which did his spirits any harm. Also, importantly, the crisis marked the emergence of Clark Clifford. In another few weeks, Clifford took Sam Rosenman’s former position as legal counsel to the President, and would remain at Truman’s side almost constantly.

IV

The lift that came from settlement of the rail and coal strikes was shortlived for Truman, and whatever confidence he had gained with the American people by his actions, he seemed incapable of holding onto it. As June came and went, as the summer wore on, criticism in the press, dissatisfaction on the Hill continued. Little went right, and with Bess and Margaret back in Independence through the hot months, Truman found himself beset again by loneliness. In August, when Congress left town for its first real break since before the war, and he attempted a vacation of his own, it got off in the wrong direction at first and ended in a storm. Then, in September, he stepped into a silly tangle with Henry Wallace that made him look more of a bumbler than ever in his career. As George Elsey was to remark years later, “Nothing about the Wallace affair was well done. It was miserably handled from one end to the other.”

On June 6, without warning, Truman announced two major appointments, expecting wide approval. To replace Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who had died in April, he had picked Fred Vinson, the Secretary of the Treasury. To fill Vinson’s place, he chose John Snyder. He thought they were exceptionally able men, and trusted both implicitly. Yet to many they were singularly uninspiring choices and seemed to have been made in haste, an impression Truman had only himself to blame for. Asked the day of the announcement when had he made up his mind on Vinson, he snapped, “About an hour and a half ago.”

As Secretary of the Treasury, Vinson had seemed very suitably cast—solid, knowledgeable, with a broad understanding of government machinery. Truman, who had not known Vinson well in the Senate, had since come to admire him greatly, considered him a “devoted and undemonstrative patriot” with, as Truman would write, “a sense of personal and political loyalty seldom found among the top men in Washington.” But Vinson was known more for political sagacity than judicial brilliance, and the choice of the colorless Snyder as his replacement seemed only to underscore the charge of “government by crony.” Portrayed in the press as a “dour little St. Louis banker,” Snyder seemed hardly adequate for the second highest ranking position in the Cabinet. To liberals and former New Dealers especially, Snyder was a pathetic choice. Unadmiring reporters described him as a “repressed” man, with a “pinched, unhappy look,” who “occasionally tries to loosen up with a hefty intake of bourbon or by telling a dirty story.” Among fiscal conservatives, the best that could be said for Snyder was that he might prove cautious. In fact, he was quite cautious, quite conservative, a “plugger” who worked long hours often seven days a week. His appearance to the contrary, he was also a man of much personal warmth, and though lacking in imagination, he had, like Vinson, a great deal of common sense—a quality Truman had often found wanting in more brilliant or charming men. In Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” the poem still neatly folded in his wallet, was the line affirming that it was “the common sense of most”—the common sense of ordinary humanity—which would ultimately “hold a fretful realm in awe.”

In Paris in July, at another drawn-out, acrimonious session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Secretary of State Byrnes was making little progress with Molotov in the peace treaty negotiations. In April, his relations with the President still strained, Byrnes had told Truman privately that he wished to resign, pleading health problems, but Truman had asked him to stay on at least until the end of the year. Confidentially, through General Eisenhower, Truman informed George Marshall in China that he wanted him to become the next Secretary of State, once Byrnes departed.

Senator Vandenberg, who was part of the American delegation in Paris, came home to report “appalling disagreement” over Germany, and “intense suspicions” between Russia and the West.

There were worries over Russia, worries over Europe, worries over China. In France and Italy, the Communists were emerging as the strongest single political units. In China, the Red Armies of Mao Tse-tung were making steady gains against the Nationalist government forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. To a group of editors and executives from the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company who met with him informally in his office, Truman conceded that the difficulties with China were “very, very bad.”

He was even having troubles back home in Jackson County. Infuriated by a congressman from his own district, Democrat Roger C. Slaughter, who, as a member of the House Rules Committee, had been stalling progress on the Fair Employment Practices bill, Truman decided not to support him for reelection and made a show of bringing Jim Pendergast to the White House to talk about it. “If Mr. Slaughter is right, I’m wrong,” Truman told reporters. He had Pendergast back another candidate in the primary, Enos Axtell, with the result that some in the old Kansas City organization began resorting to their former ways, causing a storm of outrage in the Kansas City Star. When Truman returned to Independence the first week in August to vote in the primary, he discovered that the Star had a reporter staked out with binoculars keeping watch on 219 North Delaware, to record his every move. Seeing the reporter early the next day, Truman made a point of telling him in detail exactly how he had spent the morning thus far, including certain acts performed in the bathroom.

Axtell’s victory in the primary was hailed by Bob Hannegan as a vote of confidence for the President. Reporters in Kansas City, however, turned up evidence of vote fraud, and though three federal judges found only minor violations in the election, Truman’s involvement looked none too good, reviving old stories of his own past connection to the Pendergast machine, not to say doubts about his sense of propriety.

Clark Clifford remembered it as a summer of “wallowing.” Even the President’s health declined. He suffered from an ear infection and a return of stomach pains such as he had not had in years, the result, said Wallace Graham, of “a nervous condition.”

“Obviously, he needs a rest from the strain he’s under,” noted Charlie Ross in his diary, “though he looks the picture of health.”

“Had the most awful day I’ve ever had Tuesday,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister on July 31, “saw somebody every fifteen minutes on a different subject, held a Cabinet luncheon and spent two solid hours discussing Palestine and got nowhere. Today’s been almost as bad but not quite. Got in a swim for the first time since February.”

He was distressed about his mother’s failing health. “She’s on the way out,” he wrote to Bess. “It can’t be helped…. She’s a trial to Mary, and that can’t be helped either.” He wished Bess would be more patient with them.

Bess and Margaret remained in Independence, Bess looking after her own mother, Margaret working with a voice teacher from Kansas City. “Be good and be tough,” she advised her father at the close of one chatty, affectionate letter.

“I still have a number of bills staring me in the face,” Truman wrote to Bess on August 10.

Byrnes called me from Paris this morning asking me not to veto a State Department reorganization bill, which I’d told Clark Clifford I was sure is a striped-pants boy’s bill to sidetrack the Secretary of State. Jimmy told me it wasn’t but I’m still not sure.

I have another one under consideration, which restores civil and military rights to a captain in the quartermaster department. He was court-martialed in 1926 in Panama for some seven or eight charges under the ninety-third and ninety-sixth articles of war. Dick Duncan [a federal district judge in Missouri and former congressman] is interested because the fellow’s from St. Joe and he put the bill through the House and I put it through the Senate on two occasions, and Roosevelt vetoed it both times.

When I read the record I’m not so sure Roosevelt wasn’t right! Ain’t it awful what a difference it makes where you sit! I gave the whole thing to Clifford and told him to give me a coldblooded report on it.

I have another one which is a pain in the neck. Hayden [Senator Carl Hayden], my good friend, and [Congressman Cecil Rhodes] King want it signed. [Clinton] Anderson wants it disapproved and it looks like Anderson is right. It sure is hell to be President.

Longing for a vacation, eager to get away from both Washington and Independence, he had thought first of going to Alaska—he had always wanted to see Alaska—but decided instead on a cruise on the Williamsburg to New England in August and invited his old friend and best man, Ted Marks, to join an all-male party that included Snyder, Ross, Clifford, Vaughan, George Allen, Matt Connelly, and Colonel Graham, enough for an eight-handed game of poker.

Truman loved the Williamsburg. “It’s just wonderful,” he often told its commander, Donald J. MacDonald. “In ten minutes I’m away from everything.” He loved cruising on the river, in placid waters, the green Virginia shoreline slipping by, other boats passing.

When he wasn’t napping or playing cards [MacDonald remembered years later], President Truman was often up on the bridge with us, or sitting on deck. Boats would come alongside and [people] wave to him, which he seemed to enjoy. The boaters were just thrilled to see him. It was a different time, and no one thought of taking a potshot at him. In fact, I think the Secret Service thoroughly enjoyed whenever he went on the Williamsburg, because he became my responsibility. They just went along for the ride. I think often of this….

The first few days, Truman gave up shaving and dipped into Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, The Age of Jackson. But the poker and the comradeship were, as so often, what he obviously liked best and needed most. “Getting together with his old friends with whom he was completely comfortable was the greatest relaxation he had,” remembered Clifford.

See, he had no airs. He never put on airs of any kind. He was much more relaxed with them. He didn’t have to be careful with them. And if he wanted to have a couple [of drinks], why he felt perfectly at ease…nobody ever did it to excess, but that was part of the relaxation. And some of the jokes would be of the type that would not have been told in the White House, and they’d be awfully funny. And perhaps Missouri rural jokes of one kind, and then he had a wonderfully expansive, expressive laugh.

They were important [such times on the Williamsburg]—more important than most people might know because he felt the strains very, very much. He liked to pretend a little that he didn’t. He’d say, “Oh, I sleep fine at night.”

Asked once by a reporter what his attitude was toward card games, Truman replied with a twinkle in his eye, “Card games? The only game I know anything about is that game—let me see—I don’t know what the name is, but you put one card down on the table and four face up, and you bet.”

His enjoyment of poker came mainly from the companionship it provided. He was considered a “fairly good” player, but by no means exceptional.

He was what was called a “loose” player, rarely staying out of a pot and often betting freely with an occasional bluff. He was “full of mischief” at the table. Dealing left-handed, he loved to taunt anyone needing a particular card. Sometimes, after taking a poll of what the others wanted to play, he would deal something else. He liked games with wild cards, and especially a version of ordinary stud poker that he called “Papa Vinson,” after Fred Vinson, who was a particularly skillful player.

“He always plays a close hand, I’ll say that,” Ted Marks remembered. “You can tell when he’s winning, because there’s a kind of smile on his face….” As Truman himself conceded, poker was by far his favorite relaxation, “my favorite form of paper work.” It took his mind off other things more than anything else. It made no difference to him if the stakes were nickels and dimes, and no apparent difference to his enjoyment of the game if he won or lost. Wallace Graham thought the President played poker as much for what it revealed about the other players at the table as for the pleasure of the game itself. The fact that Vinson, for example, was an expert player was not incidental to Truman’s high regard for Vinson.

Clifford, who had played little until coming to the White House, but had bought a book on the game and studied. “assiduously,” would remember that on this and other trips on the yacht, poker, except for meals, took up the better part of most days, but that lunch often lasted two hours or more, because of all the talk, Truman obviously enjoying every moment and contributing more than his share. “I will bet that the subject of his selection as Roosevelt’s running mate in Chicago must have come up forty times…[all the] different facets about it.”

The President’s drinking, widespread stories notwithstanding, was moderate. Some mornings on deck, he might squint at the sky and comment that it must be noon somewhere in the world, and ask for a bourbon. On occasion he would show the effects of several drinks, expressing himself, as Clifford later wrote, “in language less restrained and more colorful than he would otherwise use,” and especially if he had had a particularly vexing week. But he could also nurse a single drink through a whole evening of talk and poker.

“The Williamsburg, being a commissioned vessel, was not supposed to serve liquor,” recalled MacDonald, but as Commander in Chief it was, “of course,” Truman’s prerogative to drink on board if he so wished. “I made no issue of that…. Old Grandad was his favorite.”

When, at Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, they hit cold winds, rain, and fog, Truman ordered a change in plans. They turned and headed south to Bermuda, which, he knew, had been Woodrow Wilson’s favorite retreat, and where finally, in ideal weather, he enjoyed a few days of peace and uninterrupted sunshine. “This is a paradise you dream about but hardly ever see,” he wrote to Margaret on August 23.

But in Hampton Roads on the return to Washington, they sailed straight into a storm. The 244-foot Williamsburg, built in 1930 as a private yacht and purchased by the Navy at the outset of the war, had never been a particularly good seagoing vessel, even after several hundred tons of pig iron were put down in the bilges to improve stability. Now the ship “did all sorts of antics,” as Truman would tell his mother. Violently ill, he took to his bed. “The furniture was taking headers in every direction,” he told Bess, “and it was necessary to stay in bed to keep your legs on.” His stateroom was a shambles. “Papers, books, chairs, clothing, yours, Margaret’s, and Mamma’s pictures mixed up with Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, luggage, pillows. Looked as if it never would be in shape again….”

The summer heat of Washington held, and again he was alone in the great white jail, as he had begun calling the White House. Some of the servants had been telling him how the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had appeared over the years. Truman became convinced the house was haunted:

Night before last [he reported to Bess] I went to bed at nine o’clock after shutting my doors. At four o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one there. Went out and looked up and down the hall, looked into your room and Margie’s. Still no one. Went back to bed after locking the doors and there were footsteps in your room whose door I’d left open. Jumped up and looked and no one there! Damn place is haunted sure as shootin’. Secret service said not even a watchman was up here at that hour.

More and more he disliked living there. Better it be made a museum, he thought, and give the President a rent allowance. That way, he told Bess, they could move back to the apartment on Connecticut Avenue, an idea he knew she would welcome.

“You better lock your door and prop up some chairs and next time you hear knocks, don’t answer,” Margaret advised him. “It’ll probably be A. Jackson in person.”

The little oak-paneled elevator that had carried him to the second floor the afternoon of Franklin Roosevelt’s death was being replaced with new equipment. (The old elevator, dating from Theodore Roosevelt’s day, had moved too slowly for Truman and on one occasion broke down, leaving him stranded between floors. He had to ring a gong and wait for the workmen to hurry to the basement and jiggle the apparatus back into motion.) New chandeliers were being installed, his bathtub fitted with a glass shower stall. But he had little faith in the old house.

The stock market was falling. A maritime strike that had begun on the West Coast was rapidly spreading. Next thing, he thought, the White House roof would cave in.

“I’m in the middle no matter what happens,” he wrote mournfully the second week of September, on the eve of the Wallace fiasco.

At a press conference in his office the afternoon of Thursday, September 12, the President was asked by a reporter to comment on a speech scheduled to be given by the Secretary of Commerce at a political rally in New York at Madison Square Garden that evening, copies of which had already been distributed to the press. Truman said he couldn’t answer questions about a speech that had not yet been delivered, at which Charlie Ross and others of the staff standing by appeared to breathe a sigh of relief. “If the President had only stopped there!” Ross later wrote.

The reporter, William Mylander of the Cowles newspapers, pressed on, saying Secretary Wallace referred in the speech to the President himself, which was why he had asked. There was laughter and Truman good-naturedly said that being the case perhaps he should hear the question.

Mylander, who held a copy of the speech in his hand, said it contained a sentence asserting that the President had “read these words” and that they represented administration policy.

That was correct, said Truman.

Was he endorsing a particular paragraph or the whole speech?

He had approved the whole speech, Truman said breezily. Reporters looked at one another.

“Mr. President,” asked Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “do you regard Wallace’s speech a departure from Byrnes’ policy…”

“I do not,” Truman snapped back, before Brandt could finish his sentence.

“…toward Russia?”

“They are exactly in line,” said Truman, in a manner implying the question was frivolous, and that he wished reporters would ask something harder.

In truth, he hadn’t read all the speech—or hadn’t been paying attention when Wallace went over it with him—and had given it no thought since. The President, noted Charlie Ross in his diary, had now been “betrayed by his own amiability.”

According to Wallace’s diary account, he and Truman had run through the speech together “page by page,” and Truman agreed with everything in it. “He didn’t have a single change to suggest,” Wallace wrote. Clark Clifford, too, would remember Wallace reading through the speech for the President. But Truman, in his own diary, said he had been able to give Wallace only ten or fifteen minutes, most of which had been taken up with other matters. He had tried to skim through it, Truman wrote, assuming that Wallace was cooperating in all phases of administration policy, including foreign policy. “One paragraph caught my eye. It said that we held no special friendship for Russia, Britain or any other country, that we wanted to see all the world at peace on an equal basis. I said that is, of course, what we want.” It was on the basis of this single paragraph only, according to Truman, that he gave his approval, “trusting to Henry to play square with me.” In private conversation with Charlie Ross, he also admitted that he had looked at only parts of the speech, relying on Wallace’s assurance that the rest was all right.

And most of the speech was indeed “in line” with administration policy. Wallace urged support for the United Nations, called for increased international trade and international control of atomic weapons. But he also condemned British “imperialism” and appeared to be advocating American and Russian spheres of interest in the world, a concept strongly opposed by Byrnes. The United States, Wallace said, had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America….” Any “Get Tough” policy was foolhardy. “‘Get Tough’ never brought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world power,” Wallace said. “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.”

At Madison Square Garden, departing from his prepared text, Wallace told an audience of twenty thousand—an audience, in part, vociferously pro-Soviet—“I realize that the danger of war is much less from Communism than it is from imperialism….”

As James Reston wrote in The New York Times the following day, Truman appeared to be the only person in Washington who saw no difference between what Wallace had said and his own policy, or that of his Secretary of State in Paris, who, reportedly, was outraged. An angry Arthur Vandenberg declared there could be only one Secretary of State at a time.

Saturday morning, the 14th, his immediate staff gathered about his desk, Truman openly berated himself for having made so grave a “blunder.” At a press conference that afternoon, he read a carefully prepared statement, and this time no questions were permitted. There had been “a natural misunderstanding,” Truman said. His answer to Mr. Mylander’s question had not conveyed the thought intended. It had been his wish only to express approval of Secretary Wallace’s right to deliver the speech, Truman insisted, not approval of the speech itself.

Having stumbled into trouble, he was clumsily and obviously fabricating in a desperate effort to get himself out and get Byrnes “off the hook” in Paris. “There has been no change in the established foreign policy of our country,” he also said, which was true but did no good. “The criticism continued to mount,” wrote Ross, who had helped prepare the statement.

Dispatches from Paris…indicated that Byrnes and his delegation felt that something more needed to be done. And, indeed, they were right. The question still remained whether Wallace was to be allowed to go on attacking in public the foreign policy line laid down by Byrnes at Paris. The press secretary’s seat became warmer and warmer. I could only reply to questions that the President and Byrnes were not in communication.

The “Wallace episode” boiled on for days. As Wallace continued to tell reporters that he stood by his speech, Truman kept to a light schedule, saying nothing further for attribution.

Then Ross, too, blundered badly. Hearing that columnist Drew Pearson had obtained a long private letter written by Wallace to Truman two months earlier—a letter apparently “leaked” to Pearson by someone in the State Department—Ross, without approval from Truman, agreed with Wallace that the letter should be released to the press, in order to deny Pearson the limelight. When Ross informed the President of what he had done, Truman told him to call Wallace at once and stop release of the letter. But by then it was too late, the letter was out.

Dated July 23, it consisted of twelve single-spaced typed pages more critical even of administration policy than Wallace’s speech had been. Forcefully advocating a new approach to the Soviet Union, Wallace charged, among other things, that certain unnamed members of the U.S. military command advocated a “preventive war” before Russia had time to develop an atomic bomb.

“I’m still having Henry Wallace trouble and it grows worse as we go along,” Truman confided plaintively to his mother on Wednesday, September 18. Wallace was expected momentarily at the White House. “I think he’ll quit today and I won’t shed any tears. Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making. But when I make a mistake it is a good one.”

To Wallace, too, Truman said he had only himself to blame for most of what had happened. He had not known so many sleepless nights since the convention at Chicago.

They talked alone in the Oval Office, Wallace giving no sign that he intended to quit. His mail, Wallace said, was running five to one in favor of his New York speech. “The people are afraid that the ‘get-tough-with-Russia’ policy is leading us to war,” Wallace told him. “You yourself, as Harry Truman, really believed in my speech.” He advised Truman to be far to the left when Congress was not in session, then move to the right when Congress returned. That was the Roosevelt technique, Wallace said. Roosevelt had never let his right hand know what his left hand was up to. “Henry told me during our conversation that as President I couldn’t play square,” Truman would report to Bess, “…that anything was justified so long as we stayed in power.” If Truman would only lean more in his direction, Wallace said, it could mean victory for the Democrats in Congress in November. Truman told him he thought the Congress would go Republican in any event.

He asked Wallace to stop making foreign policy speeches—“or to agree to the policy for which I am responsible.” But Wallace would not agree.

Still Truman refused to fire him. Indeed, he hardly dared offend him. As the last surviving New Dealer in the Cabinet, Wallace was too important symbolically—as Wallace knew, and as Wallace knew Truman knew. For countless liberal Democrats Wallace remained the rightful heir to the Roosevelt succession, while Truman was only a usurper. For Truman to have an open break with Wallace, anything like the Ickes affair, could be politically disastrous. The only agreement reached at last, after two and a half hours of talk, was that Wallace would say no more on foreign policy at least until Byrnes came home.

In the lobby afterward, when reporters asked if everything had been straightened out, Wallace replied, “Everything’s lovely.”

“Henry is the most peculiar fellow I ever came in contact with,” Truman informed his mother. In his diary, he was more explicit. Wallace was unsound intellectually and “100 percent” pacifist.

He wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic bomb secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a “dreamer” like that…. The Reds, phonies and “parlor pinks” seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.

I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin. They can see no wrong in Russia’s four-and-a-half million armed force, in Russia’s loot of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Manchuria. They can see no wrong in Russia’s living off the occupied countries to support the military occupation.

At the Pentagon, at Truman’s request, Secretaries Patterson and Forrestal issued a joint statement denying they knew of any responsible Army or Navy officer who had ever advocated or even suggested a policy or plan of attacking Russia.

From Paris, Byrnes sent Truman a long, reasoned message asking to be relieved at once:

When the administration is divided on its own foreign policy, it cannot hope to convince the world that the American people have a foreign policy…. I do not want to ask you to do anything that would force Mr. Wallace out of the Cabinet. However, I do not think any man who professes any loyalty to you would so seriously impair your prestige and the prestige of the government with the nations of the world…. You and I spent 15 months building a bipartisan policy. We did a fine job convincing the world that it was a permanent policy upon which the world could rely. Wallace destroyed it in a day.

At 9:30, the morning of Friday, September 20, Truman called Wallace on the phone and fired him, and, as Truman confided to Bess, Wallace was “so nice about it I almost backed out.” Then he added, “I just don’t understand the man and he doesn’t either.”

Further, Wallace offered to return an angry, longhand letter—“not abusive, but…on a low level,” as Wallace described it—that Truman had sent him the night before. “You don’t want this thing out,” Wallace told Truman and Truman gratefully agreed. He was very happy to take it back. Later, Wallace crossed the street from his office and posed for photographers sitting peacefully on a park bench reading the comic papers.

When at a crowded, hurriedly called press conference in his office Truman made the announcement, there were audible gasps from reporters and one long, low whistle. Once the room was cleared, Truman sat down at his desk and turning to Ross, who was standing nearby, said, “Well, the die is cast.”

He had shown, Ross told him, that he would rather be right than President. “I would rather be anything than President,” Truman said.

“No man in his right mind would want to come here [to the White House] of his own accord,” he had written earlier to Margaret. Now, wishing as always to shine untarnished in her eyes, he tried to excuse his handling of the Wallace affair by saying he had no gift for duplicity. To be a good President, he told her, one had to be a combination Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Cesare Borgia, and Talleyrand, “a liar, double-crosser and unctuous religio (Richelieu), hero and whatnot,” and he didn’t have the stomach for it, “thanks be to God.”

He was mulling history and his own life more and more. On September 26, anniversary of the start of the Argonne offensive of 1918, reflecting on the intervening years, he wrote in his diary as follows, referring to himself only as “a serviceman of my acquaintance.” The rage that filled his earlier rail strike “speech” was absent now, replaced by a kind of melancholy and disappointment, and an underlying resolve to face whatever he must:

Sept. 26, 1918, a few minutes before 4 A.M. a serviceman of my acquaintance was standing behind a battery of French 75’s at a little town called Neuville to the right of the Argonne Forest. A barrage was to be fired by all the guns on the Allied front from Belgium to the Swiss border.

At 4 A.M. that barrage started, at 5 A.M. the infantry in front of my acquaintance’s battery went over. At 8 A.M. the artillery including the 75 battery referred to moved forward. That forward movement did not stop until Nov. 11, 1918.

My acquaintance came home, was banqueted and treated as returned soldiers are usually treated by the home people immediately after the tension of war is relieved.

The home people forgot the war. Two years later, turned out the Administration which had successfully conducted our part of the war and turned the clock back.

They began to talk of disarmament. They did disarm themselves, to the point of helplessness. They became fat and rich, special privilege ran the country—ran it to a fall. In 1932 a great leader came forward and rescued the country from chaos and restored the confidence of the people in their government and their institutions.

Then another European war came along. We tried as before to keep out of it. We refused to believe that we could get into it. The great leader warned the country of the possibility. He was vilified, smeared, misrepresented, but kept his courage. As was inevitable we were forced into the war. The country awoke—late, but it awoke and created the greatest war production program in history under the great leader.

The country furnished Russia, Britain, China, Australia and all the allies, guns, tanks, planes, food in unheard of quantities, built, manned and fought the greatest navy in history, created the most powerful and efficient air force ever heard of, and equipped an army of 8½ million men and fought them on two fronts 12,000 miles apart and from 3,000 to 7,000 miles from the home base, created the greatest merchant marine in history in order to maintain those two battlefronts.

The collapse of the enemies of liberty came almost simultaneously in May for the eastern front and in August for the western front.

Unfortunately the great leader who had taken the nation through the peacetime and wartime emergencies passed to his great reward just one month before the German surrender. What a pity for this to happen after twelve long years of the hardest kind of work, three and a half of them in the most terrible of all wars.

My acquaintance who commanded the 75 battery of Sept. 26, 1918, took over.

The same elation filled the home people as filled them after the first world war.

They were happy to have the fighting stop and to quit worrying about their sons and daughters in the armed forces.

Then the reaction set in. Selfishness, greed, jealousy, raised their ugly heads. No wartime incentive to keep them down. Labor began to grab all it could get by fair means or foul, farmers began black-marketing food, industry hoarded inventories and the same old pacifists began to talk disarmament.

But my acquaintance tried to meet every situation and has met them up to now. Can he continue to outface the demagogues, the chiselers, the jealousies?

Time only will tell. The human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.

V

Harold Ickes called him “stupid.” If the world had to depend on Truman and his administration to keep it out of trouble, wrote Time, then the world had much to worry about. Not in eighty years, not since Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, had a President been the target of such abuse. He was made fun of for his mid-American mannerisms, his Missouri pals, the by now famous devotion to his mother. “Every day is Mother’s Day in the White House,” it was said with a snicker. According to one of the latest Washington jokes in the autumn of 1946, Truman was late for a Cabinet meeting because he woke up stiff in the joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth. A joke from Texas began with reflections on how Roosevelt might have handled the country’s problems, then ended with the line, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” A Chicago Sun cartoon that was reprinted widely showed him popeyed and befuddled, one hand on his aching head, asking, “What next?” In Boston, the Henry M. Frost Advertising Agency came up with an inspired two-word campaign slogan for the Republicans: “Had enough?”

Truman’s popularity had vanished. Poll results released the first week in October, a month before the congressional elections, showed only 40 percent of the country approved his performance.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in what struck many as a bald play for the Jewish vote in New York, he called for admitting 100,000 Jewish refugees to the British protectorate in Palestine. But the fact was he had already made the same statement months before, and Republican Thomas E. Dewey, who was running for reelection as governor of New York, now quickly outbid him for Jewish support by demanding that several hundred thousand Jews be permitted to migrate to Palestine.

In another few weeks Truman’s standing in the polls plunged to a low of 32 percent, nearly 50 points below where it had been the year before.

The depression that everyone had so feared had not come. Employment, even with all the strikes, was high. Money was plentiful. Business was booming. But the cost of living had also leaped 6½ points just since the end of 1945 and there were still acute shortages of the things people most wanted—housing, automobiles, refrigerators, nylon stockings, sugar, coffee. And, increasingly, meat. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, fearing a Democratic debacle at the polls, complained to a friend, “This is going to be a damned ‘beefsteak election’!” As November drew closer and the meat shortage grew worse, the Republicans capitalized on a made-to-order issue. Cattle raisers staged a strike, refusing to send cattle to market. “Nothing on meat, Mr. President?” Truman was asked by reporters on October 10. “Nothing on meat,” he said.

Democratic Party Chairman Bob Hannegan warned Truman that if controls on meat prices were not dropped, he could expect a Republican sweep. Truman told his staff he was sure to be damned whatever he did. If he ended controls, he would be accused of caving into pressure. If he left things as they were, he would continue to be seen as cause of all the trouble.

Talk of his Pendergast connection was encouraged, as Republicans stepped up the heat. He became, again, the little machine hack from backwater Missouri. New York showman Billy Rose suggested W. C. Fields for President in 1948, saying, “If we’re going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee, declared nothing remained of the Democratic Party but three distasteful elements: southern racists, big-city bosses, and radicals bent on “Sovietizing” the country.

Discontent over meat shortages was one thing, fear of Communist influence and infiltration was quite another and in the long run far more important. A Red scare was clearly on the rise. Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post found “hatred of communism rampant” everywhere he traveled. Harry Truman, the. Republicans charged, was pursuing a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering communism at home. The Democratic Party, said Senator Taft, was “so divided between Communism and Americanism that its foreign policy can only be futile and contradictory and make the United States the laughing stock of the world.” John Taber, a Republican congressman from Auburn, New York, who had a voice like a bullhorn, warned of Communist infiltration of the universities, even the Army, while in California, another Republican congressional candidate, young Richard M. Nixon, castigated high officials “who front for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise.”

Yet such attacks were hardly different in spirit from Truman’s own private anxieties over “Reds” and “parlor pinks,” and who could say, after the uncovering of the Ottawa spy ring, that there was no cause for alarm? That summer, under pressure from Attorney General Clark, Truman had secretly agreed to continuation of electronic surveillance in cases where the national defense was involved, a policy instituted by Roosevelt, although, as Clark neglected to tell Truman, Roosevelt’s original authorization in 1940 had been limited to aliens only. In a speech at San Francisco, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI warned that no less than a hundred thousand Communists were loose in the country.

“The shrill pitch of abuse heaped upon the President continued to echo,” wrote Time. “So mild a man as Harry Truman might well wonder at the temper of his countrymen.”

Democrats were filled with despair. Bob Hannegan advised Truman that it would be best if he made no campaign appearances or political speeches, a decision Truman accepted. He kept to the White House. For days, for a portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, the British artist who had done Roosevelt, Truman posed in Charlie Ross’s office, where three windows provided ample north light. On the afternoon the Supreme Court was to make its traditional White House call, he was listening to the deciding game of the 1946 World Series—the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Boston Red Sox—when a staff aide told him the justices would soon be arriving in formal attire. Truman hurried upstairs and changed into striped trousers and a swallowtail coat, only to find at the reception that he alone was formally dressed.

Few campaigning Democrats even so much as mentioned the President’s name. In some congressional contests, Democratic candidates resorted to playing old recordings of Roosevelt speeches to boost their chances. Senator Harley Kilgore, a warm friend and admirer of Truman, who was running for reelection in West Virginia, found that in the back hollows and coal fields the mere mention of Truman’s name brought a chorus of boos and catcalls. “Here was a man who was actually doing an excellent job,” Kilgore would recall, “but the most you could do was to defend him in a humorous fashion by using the old Western saloon refrain: ‘Don’t shoot our piano player. He’s doing the best he can.’ ”

The capacity to smile when in trouble is a prime requirement for a politician, as Truman, a career politician, had long understood, and now, as so often before in difficult times, he revealed no sign of anger or gloom. He never complained, never acted sorry for himself, or blamed others. He was as cheerful and optimistic, as interested in others, as pleased to see them and to be with them, as ever. As Alonzo Fields, who saw him daily and close-up as only a butler could, later wrote of Truman, he “never seemed to have a problem,” at this or any other time when worries beset him. “I am sure no one in the household could tell when he was troubled.”

On October 14, three weeks before the election, Truman went on the radio to announce that reluctantly he was lifting price controls on meat. On October 23, he flew to New York to address the General Assembly of the United Nations at Flushing Meadow. “The course of history,” he said in a well-reasoned speech, “has made us one of the stronger nations of the world. It has therefore placed upon us special responsibilities to conserve our strength and to use it rightly in a world so interdependent as our world today.” Even the Russians complimented him.

“We went to the Waldorf [afterward],” he wrote Margaret. “Your Ma put on her best bib and tucker and we went down to the ballroom for a reception. Shook hands with 835 people in one hour flat….”

Still he kept silent on politics. Traveling home by train to Independence to vote, he was greeted at Jefferson City by a crowd of cheering schoolchildren who set up a chant: “Make a two-hour speech; make it a full holiday.” But Truman, all smiles, only waved and shook his head, then clamped one hand over his mouth.

The Republicans swept the election, carrying both houses of Congress for the first time since before the Depression, an era so distant to most people that it seemed another world. The margin in the House was 246 Republicans to 188 Democrats, in the Senate, 51 to 45. The Republicans took a majority of the state governorships as well, including New York, where Thomas E. Dewey was reelected by the largest margin ever recorded. In one city after another—Chicago, Detroit, Jersey City, New York—Democratic machines went down to defeat. In Kansas City, Truman’s own handpicked candidate for Congress, Enos Axtell, lost to his Republican opponent by 6,000 votes, which Margaret Truman remembered as “mortifying” for her father.

The Chicago Tribune hailed the Republican triumph as the greatest victory for the country since Appomattox. The New Deal had been finally put to flight, the grip of the Democrats in Washington broken at last. Harry Truman, the “accidental” President, was now also a “minority” President. A young Democratic congressman from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, was so distressed by the Republican landslide and the likelihood of a two-year stalemate in Washington that he proposed Truman appoint Arthur Vandenberg Secretary of State, then resign, and thus make Vandenberg President—an idea that led Truman to refer to Fulbright thereafter as “Halfbright.”

Truman and his family started back to Washington on election day without waiting for the polls to close. By arrangement, however, the election returns were to be put on board the train every hundred miles or so.

That night, Charlie Ross came through the train to invite several Washington reporters to join the President in his private car for a poker game. “The game was hot and heavy until about 2 A.M.,” remembered Merriman Smith of United Press. “The returns had been arriving in a steady stream since 9 P.M. Not once did Truman look at them, nor did he refer to the elections.”

At one point Margaret interrupted to say the results from Independence had come in. Truman, glancing at the slip of paper, shook his head and smiled up at her.

“Why bother with this sort of thing?” he said. “Don’t worry about me—I know how things will turn out and they’ll be all right.”

“Probably no President since Andrew Johnson had run out of prestige and leadership more thoroughly than had Harry Truman when he returned almost unnoticed to Washington on that bleak, misty November morning in 1946,” wrote Cabell Phillips. At Union Station Truman stepped from his car silent but smiling, a book under his arm.

12
Turning Point

This is a serious course upon which we embark…

—Truman to congress, 1947

I

Was Harry Truman an ordinary provincial American sadly miscast in the presidency? Or was he a man of above-average, even exceptional qualities and character, who had the makings of greatness?

“What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star had written on Truman’s first day in office. Now, less than two years later, Walter Lippmann, like a great many others, was convinced the test had not worked. To Lippmann, regarded as the most thoughtful, authoritative political commentator of the time, Truman was an embarrassment. His bravado and quick decisions, Lippmann thought, were a facade for an essentially insecure man filled with anxieties. How could the affairs of the country be conducted by a President who not only had lost the support of his party, but was no longer in command of his administration?

In the years on the farm, when courting Bess—his first campaign—Truman himself had professed to being only a common everyday fellow. He could promise her no more. But he had written also that every farmer “thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little better,” meaning that by the old Jeffersonian faith in which he had been raised, what was ordinary grass-roots American was as good as the best.

Questioned once by a reporter whether he considered himself the sublimation of the average man, Truman rejected the fancy phrase and asked in turn, “Well, what is wrong with being the average man?”

Since 1945 numbers of others had judged him as anything but ordinary. At Potsdam, Churchill immediately perceived the new President to be “a man of immense determination,” and in the fateful spring of 1947, from Chartwell, his home south of London, where he was busy with his memoirs, Churchill would write to tell “My dear Harry” how much he admired “what you have done for the peace and freedom of the world….” For Churchill, the presidency of Harry Truman had become the one cause for hope in the world.

Dean Acheson, who could be extremely hard, even contemptuous in his judgment of men he did not consider his equals, had described Truman, after Roosevelt’s death, as straightforward, decisive, honest, and if inexperienced, likely to learn fast. And in the time since, Acheson had found no reason to think differently. On the morning in November 1946 when Truman arrived at Washington’s Union Station, his political stock at an all-time low, Acheson alone of all the administration was waiting on the platform to greet him, a gesture that Truman, understandably, never forgot. Acheson looked to Truman as a leader. “The captain with the mighty heart,” Acheson would call him.

Arthur Krock of The New York Times, foremost of Washington correspondents, was another who had seen something “very good and human and courageous” in this unlikely President, and at a point when many political commentators were ready to write him off. Felix Belair, White House correspondent for the Times, had decided that while Truman might look as much like “the average guy on the streetcar” as ever, he was a man to rise to the occasion.

So testament from experienced observers that this was a President of considerable substance—and that It would be a mistake to count him out—was already plentiful, even before the great change that came in 1947.

David E. Lilienthal, whom Truman had earlier reappointed head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was a trim, agreeable-looking man in his mid-forties, the son of Jewish immigrants, a graduate of DePauw University and the Harvard Law School, and regarded still as a model New Dealer. TVA was a huge success. It had built dams, created lakes, forests, new industries, new farming methods, brought electricity to some 700,000 users, and, during the war, fueled the giant uranium plants at Oak Ridge. And Lilienthal, as much as anyone, had made TVA.

Unlike so many New Dealers who had quit since Roosevelt’s death—who had fled government, as Clark Clifford said, “so fast they were falling all over each other”—Lilienthal had chosen to stay, not once, but twice. In October he had resigned from TVA to become Truman’s designated, though still unconfirmed, head of the new Atomic Energy Commission, which Truman insisted be under civilian control. It was a position potentially as important as almost any in postwar Washington and one for which Lilienthal felt himself inadequately qualified. But then who was qualified? And the President had been extremely persuasive and patient, while Lilienthal went through days of soul searching.

Hardworking, articulate, Lilienthal was an exceptionally able man, if by some people’s standards overly liberal, and his presence in the administration—like that of Byrnes, Marshall, Harriman (who had returned from London to replace Henry Wallace at the Department of Commerce), Acheson, Bohlen, and Clark Clifford—belied the whole idea that Truman had surrounded himself only with Missouri fools and mediocrities.

Lilienthal did not entirely approve of Truman’s performance thus far. As a liberal he had been so shattered by Truman’s call to draft the striking rail workers that after hearing Truman’s speech over the radio, Lilienthal walked out into his garden in Tennessee and stood in a drenching rain, hoping it might wash away his misery. Still Lilienthal had faith in Truman, faith in the man—because Truman had shown such faith in him, but also because he saw qualities of courage and candor rare in a politician. Indeed, he felt better about working for the Truman administration, Lilienthal said, than he had working for Roosevelt, because now he could get straight answers.

Since November, Lilienthal had been extremely concerned about the effect so humiliating a defeat in the elections might have on Truman’s self-confidence and thus on his program. Lilienthal’s own appointment, as a prime example, was bound to stir up a hornets’ nest, once the confirmation process began on the Hill, since the aging, vituperative Senator McKellar of Tennessee, who had fought to deny Lilienthal’s reappointment at TVA and despised him no less than ever, had just been reelected to another term.

Not for a month after the elections did Lilienthal actually see the President, and then only by chance. It was at about five o’clock on an afternoon in early December, when Lilienthal and Clifford were working quietly in the Cabinet Room. The day was nearly over, it was growing dark outside. Clifford nudged him to look up at the French doors that opened to the outside passage to the main house. The President was standing on the other side of the glass, looking in at them and smiling. Not knowing what else to do, Lilienthal rose and bowed awkwardly. Truman waved, still smiling, then moved quickly on, a Secret Service man a half step behind.

Nothing had been said, the whole incident occupied only seconds, but to Lilienthal it was a moment of encouragement worth recording in his diary, as he would also record the hearty welcome Truman gave him a few days later in the Oval Office, when, with the four others on his new commission, Lilienthal came to make a brief progress report. The Army would relinquish no more control over atomic energy than it could possibly avoid, Truman warned. “I know how they are, they are trained not to give up. I know because I am one of them.” Again he was smiling.

As the meeting ended and the group wished the President luck, Truman, thanking them, replied that his luck had been improving lately, this in reference to a recent test of wills with John L. Lewis. But what impressed Lilienthal was “the kind of grim gaiety in his tone and manner….”

The change in the President became more obvious by the day. There had been a “showdown” with John L. Lewis, just after the November elections. At Clark Clifford’s urging, Truman had challenged the legality of still another threatened coal strike. Except this time it was to be a “fight to the finish,” as Truman said. “Oh, God, it was the chance of a lifetime,” Clifford would remember. “ ‘Be right, be strong. Nobody’s bigger than the President of the United States.’ All the signs were right. It looked like Lewis had violated the law…. Roosevelt had toadied to him time and again. But now he pushed the President the wrong way. And he just said one day, ‘Okay, we’re going to go!’ ”

The administration took the powerful labor boss to court, on the grounds that he was violating the Smith-Connally Act, which prohibited strikes against government-held facilities, the coal mines being still technically under government seizure. An injunction was served, and when Lewis let the strike begin on November 20, a federal district judge ordered him to stand trial for contempt. Lewis refused. On December 4, the judge hit the United Mine workers with a stunning $3 million fine, and fined Lewis personally $10,000. Truman, meanwhile, had been to Florida and back, for a few days of vacation at the Key West naval base. On December 7, Lewis gave up and ordered his men back to the mines, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. (In March 1947 the Supreme Court upheld the contempt ruling, though the fine against the union was later reduced.)

It was a resounding victory for the administration and another step up for Clifford. Established now in Sam Rosenman’s old office, the second largest and best office in the West Wing, Clifford was only twenty paces from the President’s desk and saw him six or seven times a day. Often they ate together in the basement lunchroom.

Truman was hugely pleased by the collapse of Lewis. For the first time in months, he was being praised by the press—“Harry S. Truman stood fast, where Franklin Roosevelt met [Lewis] halfway,” said Newsweek—and this, too, of course, he greatly enjoyed. But the real change, in the view of his old friend Charlie Ross and others, had come with the elections. It was the sweeping Republican triumph, ironically, that had given Truman a new lease on life, freeing him at last from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt as perhaps nothing else could have. He owed no one anything any longer. He was free to take charge, to be himself, and show what he could do if he had to. He was on his own again, much as he had been in the 1940 Senate race, when Tom Pendergast was out of the picture and Roosevelt had abandoned him; or as he had been on the farm when his father died, or in France in 1918, when, with his new captain’s bars, he stood alone, trembling, and speechless before his new command.

The President was “now a free man and can write a fine record,” Ross wrote to his sister. “The real Truman administration,” Ross told White House reporters, “began the day after the elections.”

And clearly Truman agreed. In a letter to Bess from Key West, he had vowed, “I’m doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them.”

Far from being downcast or tentative about his new role as a “minority” President, he had returned from Florida tanned, rested, eager to get going. He had accepted the verdict of the people in the spirit, he said, that “all good citizens accept the results of any fair election.” The change in Congress did not alter the country’s domestic or foreign problems, and in foreign affairs especially it must be “a national and not a party program.” Of course, conflicts would arise between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. That was to be expected. But he, Harry Truman, would be guided by a simple idea: “to do in all cases…without regard to political considerations, what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people….”

In the new 80th Congress, Joe Martin would replace Sam Rayburn as Speaker of the House. In the Senate, instead of Alben Barkley, Taft and Vandenberg would hold the reigns of power, and with the tacit understanding that Taft would attend to domestic issues, Vandenberg to foreign affairs, as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Truman knew the three Republican leaders from years of experience. Vandenberg, whom he knew best and liked best, had been a friend since Truman’s first days in the Senate, and Truman considered him both able and trustworthy. A former newspaper editor from Grand Rapids, “Van” had been an all-out isolationist until the war, but Pearl Harbor, he liked to say, had ended isolationism for any realist. (Once in London during an attack of German robot bombs, Vandenberg remarked to a friend, “How can there be immunity or isolation when men can devise weapons like that?”) It was a conversion of far-reaching consequence. Not only was Vandenberg one of the Senate’s inner circle, and among Republicans the undisputed authority on foreign affairs, but he was a formidable force as a speaker. Large and hearty, he had the mannerisms of a somewhat pompous stage senator—the cigar, the florid phrase, and more than a little vanity, carefully combing a few long strands of gray hair sideways over the top of his bald head. When making a point on the Senate floor, he favored the broad gesture, grandly flinging out one arm in a sweeping arc. His prestige reached beyond national boundaries, and like Truman during his years in the Senate, he had made no enemies.

Vandenberg was the son of a harnessmaker, Joe Martin the son of a blacksmith, backgrounds Truman could identify with, as he could not with the privileged world of Robert A. Taft, whose father had been President William Howard Taft. Martin, who came from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, a factory town south of Boston, had arrived in Congress first in 1925, when his friend Calvin Coolidge was President. And for forty-two years Martin’s outlook had remained fundamentally that of Coolidge. No legislation of importance had been attached to his name, no memorable declaration of political philosophy, but he was a good cloakroom organizer and known as dependable and fair-minded, “straight as a string,” as was said in the home district. A short, square man, he wore poorly fitting three-piece navy blue suits and boxy black policeman’s shoes. Even when speaking to small groups at home he would stand on a chair in order to be seen. A lock of dark hair that fell over the right side of his forehead had become a trademark.

Like his Democratic counterpart, Sam Rayburn, Martin was a bachelor. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor showed much interest in anything beyond politics and the hometown newspaper he owned, the North Attleboro Chronicle. Whatever was good for the district, Joe Martin held, was “pretty much good” for the nation.

On New Year’s Day, busy placing calls to his Cabinet to wish them a Happy New Year, Truman decided to phone Vandenberg and Martin as well, and was encouraged by the results. Vandenberg was “very pleasant,” Martin even more so, assuring the President that cooperation was uppermost in his mind. “He told me that he would be most happy to talk to me any time on any subject,” Truman recorded. “I am inclined to believe that he meant what he said.”

Taft, whom Truman did not call New Year’s Day, was a remote, self-absorbed man, “a cold fish” in the view of many. (“Bob is not austere,” his wife once explained. “He’s just departmentalized.”) Younger than Truman by five years, Taft had been born into affluent, cultivated surroundings in Cincinnati. He had stood first in his class at Yale and later at the Harvard Law School. Though he had served in the Senate since 1938, he looked more like a banker than a politician. He wore rimless spectacles and, like Harry Truman, his hat at dead center. His Cheshire Cat grin was famous.

Often tactless, habitually brusque with those less intelligent than he, Taft was a poor “mixer,” a poor public speaker. He had trouble remembering names. His reputation for hard work and standing by principle, however, his fund of knowledge and ability to cut to the heart of an issue were considered second to none in the Senate. He was “Mr. Republican,” incorruptible, extremely conservative, and, unlike Vandenberg, a confirmed isolationist. But he could also be highly independent—and exasperate the old guard of his party—by advocating such liberal programs as federal aid to education, health, and housing. Senator Wallace H. White of Maine, a quiet, colorless figure, was to be the Republican majority leader in name only; Taft would be the one running things.

Taft, Vandenberg, and Martin were all determined to restore Congress to the prestige and authority that had been lost during the Roosevelt era. Martin would insist in his first address as Speaker, “Our American concept of government rests upon the idea of a dominant Congress.” All three men, furthermore, were considered presidential prospects for 1948, and Taft in particular. Determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, Taft had already tried for the Republican nomination in 1940. Now, with Harry Truman in office, his opportunity looked greater than ever.

Nor, importantly, was Taft interested in cooperating with the administration. “The purpose of the opposition is to oppose,” he was fond of saying. And unlike Vandenberg and Martin, he had little regard for Truman, who to Taft was truly an ordinary man, deficient in background and education, ill-equipped in nearly every way for so heavy a responsibility, in addition to being overly susceptible to the bad advice of liberals.

Among the new faces in Republican ranks in the 80th Congress were Representative Richard M. Nixon of California, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Among the relative handful of new Democrats elected was Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Joe Kennedy.

For all the labor strife of the year before, the country was prospering as it never had, just as Truman declared in his State of the Union message on January 6, 1947. Food production was at a new high. The national income was higher than ever before in peacetime. “We have virtually full employment,” he said with satisfaction.

He looked like a man befitting the message, healthy and purposeful. At seven that morning he had walked from the White House to Union Station to meet the train from Missouri bringing Bess and Margaret, who sat now listening in the gallery.

He called for far-ranging improvements in labor-management relations, a strengthening of the anti-trust laws, a national health insurance program, including support for mental health, child care, and hospital construction. He wanted a “fair level of return” for farmers, aid to veterans, an “aggressive” program of home construction. He promised new progress in civil rights.

In no way was the speech a retreat from the domestic programs he had set forth in his message of 1945. Yet the tone was different, more reasonable, more optimistic. He advocated a balanced budget, a streamlining of the military establishment, international control of atomic energy. He ended with what would later seem a prescient line, about sharing America’s bounty with the war-stricken peoples over the world.

Also, notably missing this time was any mention of Franklin Roosevelt.

Written in large part by Clark Clifford, with help from George Elsey, who like Clifford was in naval uniform no longer but serving as Clifford’s assistant, the speech went far to raise Truman’s standing with Congress. Even greater was the effect of the surprise announcement he made at the White House the following evening: George C. Marshall was to be the new Secretary of State. Jimmy Byrnes had resigned. Marshall was already en route from China.

The appointment of Marshall was one of the best, most important decisions of Truman’s presidency. One wonders, as Truman must have in later years, how differently history might have unfolded had Marshall declined to serve as Secretary of State at that particular moment in world affairs. The reaction everywhere was immediate, virtually unanimous approval. Henry Stimson might have been speaking for the whole nation when he wrote to Marshall: “Your appointment as Secretary of State has filled me with a great sense of security so far as our country is concerned. Mr. Truman made a wise as well as a very shrewd appointment.”

On Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg pushed the nomination through the Foreign Relations Committee without a hearing or opposition, and by calling for a suspension of the rules, ran it through the Senate for unanimous approval the same day. The one possible shadow on the appointment, in the view of some Republicans, was the chance that it might set Marshall up as a future candidate for President, an idea Marshall himself put to rest the same morning he arrived in Washington. He would never be a candidate for any political office, he said, and being Marshall he was taken at his word.

He was sworn in at the White House by Chief Justice Vinson later that morning, Tuesday, January 21, 1947. When a beaming Truman shook his hand and said how much he appreciated Marshall’s willingness to accept “this burden,” Marshall replied simply that he would do his best.

At sixty-six, George C. Marshall was the first career soldier to become Secretary of State. He had been born on the last day of 1880 in Union-town, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, where through boyhood, from his businessman father, he heard repeated accounts of his distinguished Virginia ancestry, including the distantly related John Marshall, the great Chief Justice. “I thought that the continuing harping on the name John Marshall was kind of poor business,” he later said. “It was about time for somebody else to swim for the family.” Graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1901, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and advanced steadily thereafter, serving in the Philippines, Oklahoma Territory, and Fort Leavenworth, until World War I when, as Pershing’s aide, he directed the American advance to the Argonne. Between the wars, he had served three years in China. In 1939, Roosevelt made him chief of staff.

He was slightly under six feet tall, with sandy-gray, close-cropped hair and light blue eyes. His long face, with its long upper lip, had a homespun, fatherly quality and often, in repose, he looked quite sad. With age his shoulders had begun to stoop slightly. As Dean Acheson would write, there was little military glamour about him, nothing pretentious. Rather it was an intangible aura that affected people. Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, Marshall was a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult. Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Bill Hassett on Truman’s staff spoke of the “reverence” Marshall inspired. Imperturbable under pressure—“the imperturbability of a good conscience,” George Kennan called it—invariably courteous, he was without a trace of petty vanity or self-serving ambition.

As one of his staff at the State Department later wrote, Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance of someone like Acheson, or the gift of eloquence, but he could distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, and this made him invaluable.

Acheson liked to recall in later years that the moment Marshall entered a room, one could feel his presence. “It was a striking and commanding force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.” At the Pentagon some lower-ranking officers had been known to exit from Marshall’s office backwards, and no one of any rank, not even the President, called him “George,” only “General Marshall,” a title, as Acheson said, that suited him as though he had been baptized with it. Once, reportedly, when Roosevelt had called him “George,” he responded, “It’s General Marshall, Mr. President.”

Truman described Marshall as “astute,” “profound,” and more of a listener than a talker. “He never made any speeches at you,” Truman would gratefully recall. “Sometimes he would sit for an hour with little or no expression on his face, but when he had heard enough, he would come up with a statement of his own that would invariably cut to the very bone of the matter under discussion.” But it was Marshall’s rock-bound sense of duty, his selflessness and honesty that Truman especially prized. “He was a man you could count on to be truthful in every way, and when you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.”

As Truman the politician also appreciated, Marshall stood high with Republicans on the Hill in a way almost no one else did, and this irrespective of the fact that he had worked so closely through the war with the Democrat they all liked least, Franklin Roosevelt. It had been Marshall who got the first peacetime draft past Congress, Marshall who had confided the secret of the atomic bomb to the congressional leadership, trusting them to keep the secret.

For Marshall, his recent mission to China had been a heavy disappointment. Trying to mediate a peace between the two Chinas of the Nationalist Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung, he had achieved only a tentative cease-fire. “I hate failure,” he told a friend. But failure was what he had had to announce on the eve of his departure from China. “On the one hand the leaders of the Government are strongly opposed to a communistic form of government,” he reported. “On the other, the Communists frankly state that they are Marxists and intend to work toward establishing a communistic form of government in China….” His efforts with the Kuomintang had been frustrating in the extreme. It was a government riddled with corruption, overburdened with too many generals. “Though I speak ‘as a soldier, I must deplore the dominating influence of the military.” But the Communists fostered only chaos and violent anti-American propaganda, and with more than a million men under arms, their power was gaining.

Marshall had failed in his mission to China, yet no one blamed him for the failure, such was the scale of the problem and his own reputation. No one looked on his new assignment as anything but a very large step forward for the troubled Truman administration.

Marshall assumed his new duties at once and at once the difference was felt. Jimmy Byrnes had been a hardworking Secretary of State, and more effective than generally acknowledged, or than Truman would portray him in his later reflections. But Byrnes had been maddeningly independent, determined to do everything himself, and continuously, uncurably on the move. In 546 days as Secretary, Byrnes had been away 241, and had shown little interest in the department itself. Under Marshall all that changed. “He gave a sense of purpose and direction. His personality infected the whole Foreign Service,” Bohlen remembered. “There was greater clarity in the operation…than I had ever seen before…[and] Marshall never forgot, as Byrnes did, that Truman was President.”

With Truman’s blessing, a new Policy Planning Staff was established under the brilliant George Kennan, who had been recalled from Moscow. Organization overall was made more orderly and efficient. When section heads fell into dispute in his presence, Marshall would tell them, “Gentlemen, don’t fight the problem. Solve it!”

Acheson, who had wished to return to private life, was persuaded to stay on as Under Secretary for another six months. Acheson found working with the general such a joy, wrote David Lilienthal after a dinner at Acheson’s Georgetown home, that he could “hardly talk about anything else.” Marshall, like Truman, was decisive. When Acheson informed Marshall that the State Department had outgrown its quarters in the old Victorian structure beside the White House, and that a new building was available near the Potomac, in the section called Foggy Bottom, Marshall said, “Move.”

To no one was Marshall’s presence more reassuring, or inspiriting, than to Truman. “The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am he’s the great one of the age,” Truman wrote not long after Marshall’s swearing in. “Marshall is a tower of strength and common sense,” he noted privately another time. It was admiration such as Truman felt for no other public figure, no one he had ever known, not Roosevelt, not Churchill, not anyone. Nor was he at all hesitant or concerned over having such a strong-minded man as his Secretary of State—Marshall, Harriman, Patterson, Forrestal, Lilienthal, Eisenhower, they were all strong-minded. Conceivably, Truman could have worried that someone of such Immense reputation as Marshall in so prominent a role would diminish his own standing with the country, that he might suffer by comparison, and Marshall be perceived as more the sort of man who ought to be President. But Truman was neither jealous nor intimidated. He was not so constructed. “I am surely lucky to have his friendship and support,” he wrote, and that was that.

By early February 1947 White House reporters were commenting on the President’s greater ease and relaxation. “He no longer moans to every visitor that he doesn’t want the job and never did,” wrote Joseph Alsop to a friend. After a social call on the President, the former heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney, said he had never seen a more solid citizen. “His eye is clear and he is just as solid as a wall. His jaw is square and his stomach is just as flat as an athlete’s.”

Truman’s popularity in the polls, due in large measure to Marshall’s presence, was back up to 48 percent.

The whole atmosphere was different. Truman had opened the White House to sightseers again after a six-year wartime ban on all but official callers. He and Bess reinstated formal receptions and state dinners for the first time since 1941, and the contrast between the Trumans “at home” in their private quarters and their official social life was amazing.

The President, with his sense of history, wanted White House entertaining done just so, “done to the minute,” by rules that had not changed in half a century, except in wartime. “They brought back all the pageantry,” assistant head usher J. B. West remembered approvingly, “all the formality, all the pomp that we had all but forgotten how to execute.”

We [the White House staff] had to work out the details, so that all the President and his wife had to do was to be in the right place at the right time. For a reception, they’d march down the stairs to the Blue Room and receive the guests, and then march back upstairs. But behind the scenes, we spent weeks of preparation and scheduling for each detail of that “right place” and “right time.”

Attendance at the first reception, to honor the Supreme Court on December 10, had been 1,333. Dress was white tie, the Marine Band played. “The papers say today that Bess and I have shaken hands with 7,000 people this season,” Truman wrote to his mother on February 9. At a full-dress affair for Senator Vandenberg in the State Dining Room, the gold service was used. The night of the diplomatic reception again more than a thousand attended. (Before the war only about five hundred people in total had been accredited to the embassies and legations in Washington.) For one occasion Truman asked Eugene List, the concert pianist, to perform for “the customers,” and again, as at Potsdam, List played the President’s favorite Chopin Waltz in A Minor, but this time without the President’s help as page-turner.

I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment [Truman told his mother], because Mr. Grim the usher and Jim Rowley [of the Secret Service] came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching…. I let the show go and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen I’d been in a real fix….

Truman was glad to see Lent arrive and put an end to such affairs, he told his mother. He was tired of “smirking at people I don’t like.” On February 19, in another letter to Grandview, he could report that “the season” was over, “thank goodness.” But the truth was he had had a fine time, every time. J. B. West would remember that “despite all the denying in the world (which he did), we could see the President enjoyed it. He was an extrovert, a friendly man, and he liked company.”

Hearings on the Lilienthal nomination were causing a sensation, meanwhile, with Senator Kenneth McKellar insisting TVA was a “hotbed of Communism” and that David E. Lilienthal was more than a little suspect. The senator thought it was General Groves who had discovered the secret of splitting the atom and failed to understand why Groves should not therefore be left in command of his discovery.

Looking down from the bench, the senator asked Lilienthal where his parents had been born. When Lilienthal was unable to answer with certainty, McKellar acted as though he had scored an important point. He pressed the issue again another day. This time Lilienthal said he had been able to determine only that it had been in Austro-Hungary, somewhere near Pressburg, in what had since become Czechoslovakia. Again McKellar smiled at the audience as if everything were going his way—Czechoslovakia being under Soviet influence. But when he turned and abruptly asked Lilienthal to explain his views on “the communistic doctrine,” the answer Lilienthal gave held the room spellbound. With his hands folded on the table in front of him, Lilienthal spoke for several minutes, his eyes not on McKellar or the committee, but on a spot somewhere just above his hands, almost as though he were talking to himself. He had felt a kind of smoldering within, he later wrote, “far from anger or temper, but some emotional tempo quite different, but definitely emotional.” As he talked he kept saying to himself, “Don’t deny; affirm.”

I believe in, [he said] and I conceive the Constitution of the United States to rest, as does religion, upon the fundamental proposition of the integrity of the individual; and that all Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual….

Any forms of government, therefore, and any other institutions, which make men means rather than ends in themselves, which exalt that state or any other institutions above the importance of men, which place arbitrary power over men as a fundamental tenet of government, are contrary to this conception; and therefore I am deeply opposed to them…. The fundamental tenet of communism is that the state is an end in itself, and that therefore the powers which the state exercises over the individual are without any ethical standards to limit them. That I deeply disbelieve.

It is very easy simply to say one is not a Communist. And, of course, if despite my record it is necessary for me to state this very affirmatively, then this is a great disappointment to me. It is very easy to talk about being against communism. It is equally important to believe those things which provide a satisfactory and effective alternative. Democracy is that satisfying alternative.

And its hope in the world is that it is an affirmative belief, rather than simply a belief against something else….

I deeply believe in the capacity of democracy to surmount any trials that may lie ahead provided only we practice it in our daily lives.

And among the things that we must practice is this: that while we seek fervently to ferret out the subversive and anti-democratic forces in the country, we do not at the same time, by hysteria, by resort to innuendo and sneers and other unfortunate tactics, besmirch the very cause that we believe in, and cause a separation among our people, cause one group and one individual to hate one another, based upon mere attacks, mere unsubstantiated attacks upon their loyalty….

Hearsay and gossip had no place in courts of justice. If the principles of protection of an individual and his good name against gossip and hearsay were not upheld by legislatures in their investigating activities, that too would be a failure of the democratic ideal. Then, pausing, he unfolded his hands and said, “This I deeply believe.”

For a moment the room was silent. Then, almost in a rush, members of the committee and people from the audience began crowding around him to praise Lilienthal for what he had said.

From the White House Truman let Lilienthal know that he would not only stand behind the nomination but was in the fight with all he had “if it took 150 years.”

In the days following, a strain of anti-Semitism in the opposition to the appointment became increasingly apparent. Then, without warning, and without waiting for the committee report to reach the floor, Senator Taft announced he would oppose the nomination on the grounds that Lilienthal was not only a “typical power-hungry bureaucrat,” and “temperamentally unfitted” for the job of heading the Atomic Energy Commission, but “soft on the subject of Communism.” Until this point it had been McKellar’s show, and thus largely personal and predictable. (In earlier days the senator had seen Communists behind the anti-poll tax bill, too.) But now with Mr. Republican stepping in, it became a distinctly partisan issue, and, as was said, a major Capitol crisis. The phrase “soft on Communism” caught on immediately.

Lilienthal did not see how he could possibly win with the Republican majority lined up against him. The Taft speech had been “a kick in the teeth.” How long the confirming process might take, and at what toll, no one could say.

“Courage: What is it?” Lilienthal asked in his diary. “Isn’t it the capacity to hang on?”

II

He had been trying for days to find time to write to her, Truman told his sister in a letter in February.

He was more concerned than usual about staying in touch. Mamma had had a fall and fractured her hip. Truman had flown home to see her, but remained gravely worried—and concerned, too, about the burden of care on Mary Jane. “Now Mary, don’t you work too hard.” If she needed help, she was to get it.

“Things have been happening here in a hurry,” he told her. Foreign affairs were uppermost. Marshall was to leave for Moscow in little more than a week, for his first Foreign Ministers’ Conference. He himself would be flying to Mexico in three days, for the first visit to Mexico ever by a President of the United States. “I am spending every day with Marshall going over policy and hoping we can get a lasting peace. It looks not so good right now.”

The date was February 27, 1947. Six days earlier, on the 21st, a month to the day since Marshall took up his duties as Secretary of State, an urgent formal message, a so-called “blue paper,” from the British ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, had been delivered to the State Department. Marshall had been out of town, speaking at Princeton University’s bicentennial convocation. So it was Under Secretary Acheson who telephoned Truman that afternoon. Great Britain, its financial condition worsening, could no longer provide economic and military support for Greece and Turkey. The cost was too great. The Attlee government would withdraw forty thousand troops from Greece and all economic aid would halt as of March 31. The United States, it was hoped, would assume the responsibility.

The news was both momentous and not wholly unexpected. Britain was in desperate straits. All Europe had been hit by one of the worst winters on record. In France, the cold destroyed millions of acres of winter wheat. Snow fell in Paris for the first time in years. In Berlin, where temperatures hovered around zero, people were dying of the cold. Ice clogged the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the North Sea. Food and fuel were scarce everywhere. In Prague, electric current was being shut off for three hours a day. But Britain was hit hardest, the whole country virtually snowbound. Factories and schools closed. Huge snowdrifts blocked highways and railroads, closed coal mines, and isolated hundreds of small towns. When a bus on a main coastal road ran into a ten-foot drift and a snowplow was brought to the rescue, reported The Times of London, the snowplow, too, was buried. “Weather Threatens Coal Supply,” read the headline in The Times on. February 6. To save power, London offices were being lit with candles. And the storms continued. On February 21, the day of Lord Inverchapel’s message, it snowed again over most of the country.

On January 20, meantime, the British government had issued an economic White Paper describing Britain’s position as “extremely serious.” That Britain would soon have to cut back on its armed forces and overseas commitments was self-evident. The situation, wrote Walter Lippmann, would “shake the world and make our position highly vulnerable and precariously isolated.”

Specific warnings had been crossing Truman’s desk for weeks. As early as February 3, the American ambassador in Athens, Lincoln MacVeigh, reported rumors that the British were pulling out of Greece, where, since 1945, their troops and money had helped maintain a royalist government in a raging civil war with Communist guerrillas. On February 12, another dispatch from MacVeigh urged immediate consideration of American aid to Greece. A few days later, Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a member of a United Nations investigating committee, cabled from Athens that Greece was a “ripe plum” ready to fall into Soviet hands.

Warnings about Turkey had come even sooner. Turkey had “little hope of independent survival unless it is assured of solid long-term American and British support,” cabled General Walter Bedell Smith, who had replaced Averell Harriman as the American ambassador in Moscow.

Truman himself, furthermore, had already made his concern for the future of Greece clear to the Greek government, if not, as yet, to the American people. In the fall of 1946, through Ambassador MacVeigh, Truman had acknowledged that Greece was of vital interest to the United States and promised substantial aid to maintain its independence, providing the Greek government could show that democracy survived there—a question of considerable importance, since the Greek government, as Truman knew and later wrote, “seemed to encourage irresponsible rightist groups.”

But while the crisis in Greece and Turkey came not without warning, the formal announcement of British withdrawal did come, as Truman said, “sooner than we expected,” and its very formality made it seem especially dramatic and unsettling.

February 21 was a Friday. Truman asked Acheson for a report by Monday, and Acheson, Bohlen, and others worked through the weekend at the old State Department, where packing boxes cluttered the halls in preparation for the move to Foggy Bottom. On Monday, Marshall and Acheson met with the President and urged “immediate action” to provide help for Greece, and, to a lesser degree, for Turkey as well. To Marshall the British announcement of withdrawal from Greece was tantamount to British withdrawal from the whole Middle East. He, too, saw the situation as extremely serious. The sum needed for Greece alone just for the remainder of 1947 was a quarter of a billion dollars.

Truman agreed. Greece would have to be helped, quickly and with substantial amounts.

But aid to Greece was only one aspect of the problem. It had been a year now since Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech at Fulton. Something more than a simple aid bill was called for. On this Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Clifford—virtually all who had a say in policy—were agreed. One ranking State Department official, Joseph M. Jones, urged that Secretary Marshall, not the President, go before Congress, to rouse the nation to the reality of the crisis, because, as Jones wrote in an internal memorandum, Marshall was “the only one in Government with the prestige to make a deep impression.”

Things were indeed “happening in a hurry,” as Truman told his sister. The morning of the 27th, he called the congressional leaders to his office for a crucial meeting. They listened first to Marshall, who, in measured tones, told them, “It is not alarmist to say that we are faced with the first crisis of a series which might extend Soviet domination to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.” The choice was “acting with energy or losing by default.”

Acheson, who thought Marshall had failed to speak with appropriate force, asked to be heard. There was no time left for a measured appraisal, Acheson said. Greece was the rotten apple that would infect the whole barrel. “The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to win all the possibilities.” When Acheson finished (according to his own later account), Vandenberg told the President in a sonorous manner that if he would say the same thing in the same way to Congress, then he, Vandenberg, would lend his support and so would a majority on Capitol Hill—his clear implication being that aid to Greece and Turkey could be had only if Truman shocked Congress into action. But in his memoirs, for all his regard for Acheson, Truman would make no mention of Acheson’s remarks or the Vandenberg response as described by Acheson. Truman said only that Marshall had made it “quite plain” that the choice was to act or lose by default—“and I expressed my emphatic agreement to this.”

The meeting ended at noon. Nothing was disclosed of what had been said.

The crowds in Mexico City were such as Truman had never experienced. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets to see and cheer an American President for the first time. The trip had been Truman’s idea and the acclaim was thrilling. He returned the “Vivas!” of the throngs (one woman shouted, “Viva Missouri!”), and several times broke away from his Mexican and Secret Service escorts to shake hands with people. “I have never had such a welcome in my life,” he told the Mexican legislature, to whom he pledged anew Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. To a crowd of American citizens later, he said he hoped they would remember that they, too, were ambassadors.

The next morning, he announced suddenly that he wished to make an unscheduled stop at Mexico City’s historic Chapultepec Castle, where, with one simple, unheralded gesture, he did more to improve Mexican—American relations than had any President in a century. Within hours, as the word spread, he had become a hero.

The long motorcade pulled into the shade of an ancient grove of trees. Truman stepped out of his black Lincoln and walked to a stone monument bearing the names of Los Niños Héroes, “the child heroes,” six teenage cadets who had died in the Mexican-American War in 1847, when American troops stormed the castle. According to legend, five of the cadets had stabbed themselves, and a sixth jumped to his death from a parapet rather than surrender. As Truman approached, a contingent of blue-uniformed Mexican cadets stood at attention. As he placed a floral wreath at the foot of the monument, several of the cadets wept silently.

After bowing his head for a few minutes, Truman returned to the line of cars, where the Mexican chauffeurs were already shaking hands with their American passengers.

The story created an immediate sensation in the city, filling the papers with eight-column, banner headlines. “Rendering Homage to the Heroes of ‘47, Truman Heals an Old National Wound Forever,” read one. “Friendship Began Today,” said another. A cab driver told an American reporter, “To think that the most powerful man in the world would come and apologize.” He wanted to cry himself, the driver said. A prominent Mexican engineer was quoted: “One hundred years of misunderstanding and bitterness wiped out by one man in one minute. This is the best neighbor policy.”

President Truman, declared Mexican President Miguel Alemán, was “the new champion of solidarity and understanding among the American republics.”

Asked by American reporters why he had gone to the monument, Truman said simply, “Brave men don’t belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it.”

The three-day whirlwind visit ended on March 6, when the presidential party departed on The Sacred Cow before dawn. Moonlight reflected on the plane’s wings as Truman looked out the window. Despite the hour and the chill morning air, a thousand people had come to see him off.

Less than a year before, in July 1946, as only a few were aware, Truman had asked Clark Clifford to prepare a comprehensive analysis of Soviet-American relations, the first of its kind.

The project began at once, and though Clifford remained in charge, and with his editing gave the finished effort much of its tone and emphasis, the real work—research and writing—was done by his assistant, George Elsey, who had suggested the project in the first place. He had felt, Elsey later explained, that Truman was judging Russia on “too narrow a basis,” his concerns limited too often to whether or not Russia was keeping its agreements.

By the time Elsey was finished in September 1946, the report ran to nearly 100,000 words. It was immensely detailed and clearly influenced by Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” but most of it had been drawn from interviews with or written reports from a dozen or more key people within the executive branch, including the State and War departments, and in all it was a far more alarming state paper than the “Long Telegram,” even though, as Elsey himself later said, most of the material had been previously called to Truman’s attention by Byrnes, Forrestal, Harriman, Leahy, even Harry Hopkins as early as April 1945.

Titled “American Relations with the Soviet Union,” it began by stating that such relations posed the gravest problem facing the United States and that Soviet leaders appeared to be “on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world domination by the U.S.S.R.”

The Soviet Union was “consistently opposed” to British-American efforts to achieve world peace agreements, because the longer peace settlements were postponed, the longer Red Army troops could “legally” remain in “enemy” countries. Moreover, the Soviets were maintaining excessively large military forces in the satellite countries. The Soviets already dominated Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. In Austria only the presence of British, French, and American occupation troops prevented a Soviet takeover.

Communist parties were growing in France and Italy. In a weak and divided China, the USSR was “in a position to exert greater influence there than any other country.” The Soviets were supplying the Communist forces in China, while in Korea, the Soviets had shown that they would consent to the unification of the country only if assured of a “friendly” government.

Most ominous was Soviet military power:

Generalissimo Stalin and his associates…are supporting armed forces stronger than those of any potential combination of foreign powers and they are developing as rapidly as possible a powerful and self-sufficient economy. They are seizing every opportunity to expand the area, directly or indirectly, under Soviet control in order to provide additional protection for the vital areas of the Soviet Union.

The menace was gathering. Russia was rapidly developing “atomic weapons, guided missiles, materials for biological warfare, a strategic air force, submarines of great cruising range….” The Soviet Union, the grim report continued, was also actively directing espionage and subversive movements in the United States.

Since the “language of military power” was the only language the Russians understood, it was necessary that the United States maintain sufficient military strength to “confine” Soviet influence. Therefore, the United States, too, must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare. “The mere fact of preparedness may be the only powerful deterrent to Soviet aggressive action and in this sense the only sure guarantee of peace.”

In reviewing the situation in the Middle East, the report noted that the Soviets hoped for the withdrawal of troops from Greece to establish another of their “friendly” governments there. The Soviet desire for Turkey was a puppet state to serve as a springboard for the domination of the eastern Mediterranean.

Finally, the report concluded that in addition to maintaining its military strength, the United States “should support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.”

George Kennan, when asked to look at a nearly completed draft, judged it “excellent.” Truman, who was up much of one night reading the final report, called Clifford at his home early the next morning to ask how many copies there were. Ten, Clifford said. Truman wanted the other nine put immediately “under lock and key.” The report was so “hot,” he told Clifford, that if it ever came out its effect on his efforts to resolve the East-West conflict peacefully would be “exceedingly unfortunate.”

How much effect it had on Truman is difficult to gauge. He never said. Clifford, when recounting the Truman years, would stress its great far-reaching influence, while Elsey would be far more modest. “The impact of having it all drawn together may have had some influence on the President,” Elsey would speculate. “Again, I don’t think one can—you never know and neither the President nor anyone else is ever able—to say exactly what all the influences are that help make up his mind.”

All the same, it was Clifford and Elsey who, after Truman’s return from Mexico, put the finishing touches to the historic speech Truman would make before Congress concerning the situation in Greece, and much that was in the speech came directly from the report.

At a Cabinet meeting on March 7, Truman’s first day back from Mexico, Acheson said the complete disintegration of Greece was only weeks away. “If we go in we cannot be certain of success in the Middle East and Mediterranean. If we do not go in there will be a collapse in these areas.” There was also, of course, the possibility of “military risk.”

Truman felt he faced a decision as difficult as any ever to confront a President. The money for Greece was only the beginning. “It means the United States is going into European politics….” The President’s staff viewed the speech as potentially the most important of his career.

A first draft had been prepared at the State Department, but Truman thought it too wordy and technical, more like an investment prospectus, as he later wrote. He also wanted the addition of a strong statement of American policy. Acheson made cuts and revisions, modified several passages, including a key sentence that essentially repeated what had been in the Clifford-Elsey report about helping countries in jeopardy from the Soviet Union, only here the Soviet Union was not to be mentioned by name.

“It is the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” the line read in its original state. Acheson changed it to, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States….”

To Clifford, it was time to take a stand against the Soviets, time for “the opening gun” in a campaign to awaken the American people. As he had urged the President to stand fast against John L. Lewis, so Clifford now urged a strong response to Stalin.

George Kennan, on the other hand, thought the speech went too far, and in Paris, Marshall looked it over with Chip Bohlen, who was accompanying him to Moscow, and both felt there was “too much rhetoric.”

When Bernard Baruch, who had no official position in the administration, let it be known that he too wished to have a say in the matter, Truman refused. “If you take his advice,” Truman said, “then you have him on your hands for hours and hours, and it is his policy. I’m just not going to do it. We have a decision to make and we’l l make it.”

(Hearing the story later from Clifford, David Lilienthal wrote in his diary that “the President’s comment interested me because it was so human: one of the few things a President can enjoy is to decide whom he will consult.”)

Truman had Clifford and Elsey finish up the final draft as suited him. He was no Woodrow Wilson, who could sit down at a typewriter the night before addressing Congress at an historic juncture and tap out his own speech. But he knew what he wanted. “I wanted no hedging…. It had to be clear and free of hesitation or double talk.”

In answer to Marshall’s concern about “rhetoric,” Marshall was told that in the opinion of the executive branch, including the President, the Senate would not approve the new policy without emphasis on the Communist threat. Probably that was correct.

“There is, you know, such a thing as being too intellectual in your approach to a problem,” Clark Clifford would say years later in an interview.

The man who insists on seeing all sides of it often can’t make up his mind where to take hold.

Without any disparagement, that was never a problem for Mr. Truman. He wanted all the facts he could get before he made up his mind. But if he could get only 80 percent of the facts in the time available, he didn’t let the missing 20 percent tie him up in indecision. He believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all. And when he made up his mind that was it….

We’d been through the greatest war in which the world had ever been involved…. This is 1947. The war ended in August of 1945. There was every reason for Harry Truman to say, “This is not for us.” And he kept worrying about it, thinking about it…. I remember thinking there was really nothing to impede the Soviet forces, if they chose to, from just marching straight west to the English Channel…. And yet he decided that it had to be done…. Harry Truman looks at this, and he just steps up to it….

The speech setting forth what became known as the Truman Doctrine was delivered in the House Chamber before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, March 12, 1947, beginning a few minutes past one o’c lock. It was a straightforward declarative statement lasting eighteen minutes. Greece was in desperate need, the situation was urgent. The existing Greek government was not perfect, and the government of the United States, no less than ever, condemned extremist measures of the right or left. Though Turkey, unlike Greece, had been spared the destruction and suffering of the war, Turkey also needed American support.

One of the primary objectives of American policy, Truman said, was “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free of coercion.” This had been a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan, countries that had tried “to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other countries.”

Dressed in a dark suit and dark tie, he read from an open notebook slowly and with great force. His audience listened in silence. Hardly anyone moved. In the front row, John Snyder had his head bowed. Beside him the perfectly tailored Acheson sat as stiff and straight as if at a memorial service, hands folded in his lap. Further along in the same row, Senator Taft fiddled with his glasses, rubbed his face, then yawned. On the dais behind Truman, Speaker Martin and Senator Vandenberg were following the speech line by line in printed copies.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes….

Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East.

We must take immediate and resolute action….

To many who were listening there in the chamber and over the radio, it seemed an odd, ironic time for a crisis. The United States was the richest, strongest country in the world and prospering as few could have ever imagined. Production was up. Incomes were up. There were few strikes. There was no more waiting for new automobiles, no meat shortages any longer. White shirts, nylon stockings, fishing tackle, and golf balls were back on store shelves. Because of the GI Bill, more than 4 million veterans were attending college, as most never could have in other times. Yet the speech seemed disturbingly like a call to arms, “Well, I told my wife to dust off my uniform,” an ex-soldier enrolled at the University of Oklahoma remarked to a reporter.

The cost of winning the war had been $341 billion. Now $400 million was needed for Greece and Turkey. “This is a serious course upon which we embark,” Truman said at the finish, and the look on his face was serious indeed. “I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious…. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”

The entire room rose in applause, but as Acheson later wrote, it was more as a tribute to a brave man than a unanimous acceptance of his policy. Truman, holding the closed notebook with the speech in front of his chest with both hands, nodded to the applause left and right, several times, but he never smiled.

Editorial reaction was overwhelmingly supportive. The New York Times compared the speech to the Monroe Doctrine. To the editors of Time and Life it was a great clearing of the air at long last. “Like a bolt of lightning,” said Life, “the speech cut through the confused international atmosphere.” The President, said Collier’s, had “hit the popularity jackpot.” But support was often expressed with troubling reservations—“Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco Examiner—and some of the liberal press was outraged. PM charged Truman with scrapping Roosevelt’s whole policy on Russia.

Most important was the objection of Walter Lippmann, who, though favoring aid to Greece, disapproved of the President’s tone. “A vague global policy which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits,” Lippmann warned. “It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted.”

That the speech was of immense importance, signaling a turning point, no one seems to have doubted. “If words could shape the future of nations,” wrote Newsweek, “these unquestionably would. They had clearly put America into power politics to stay.”

On Capitol Hill Senator Vandenberg was quick to stress that he did not consider Greek-Turkish aid as a “universal pattern,” but something only “to fit a given circumstance.” Acheson, too, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the bill was not intended to establish a pattern for the future. The United States, he stressed, would “of course” act “according to the circumstances of each specific case.”

Objections in Congress came from liberals and conservatives alike. Senator Pepper was sure such a policy would destroy all hope of reconciliation with Russia. Senators Byrd and McKellar were opposed chiefly because of cost. “I guess the do-gooders won’t feel right until they have us all broke,” said Republican Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota.

Truman, within minutes after delivering the speech, had been on his way to the airport and another flight to Florida. The President, explained Wallace Graham, had been “going pretty hard lately” and needed a rest. In plain truth, the President was exhausted. Writing to Margaret from Key West, he said no one had any idea how “worn to a frazzle” he was by “this terrible decision.” But the police state of communism was no different from the police state of the Nazis, he told her. He had known that since Potsdam.

In the time between Truman’s dramatic appearance before Congress and the final vote on aid to Greece and Turkey, the fight in the Senate over the Lilienthal nomination grew intense and abusive. The opposition was nearly all Republican. Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944, warned that it might be the last chance ever to get the Atomic Energy Commission out of the hands of leftists. Capehart of Indiana said that especially now, in view of the situation in Greece and Turkey, control of atomic energy ought to be returned to the Army, an idea that appealed also to Senator Taft. Brewster of Maine, who had once served on the Truman Committee, claimed Lilienthal’s indifference to communism made him no less a threat than if he were an outright party member.

“If Mr. L. is a communist so am I,” Truman wrote privately. He would carry the fight to the end, Truman vowed. “It is a matter of principle and we cannot let the peanut politicians ruin a good man….” Taft, Truman thought, was succeeding only in making himself look like a fool.

A few Republicans—Knowland of California, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Aiken of Vermont—declared support for the nominee. But the decisive moment came when Vandenberg spoke to a tense session on the afternoon of April 3, giving what many thought was his finest speech ever.

David Lilienthal, Vandenberg said, was “no part of a communist by any stretch of the imagination.” When Vandenberg called for Lilienthal’s confirmation, the galleries roared with applause.

There was a test vote on an amendment. Lilienthal was with Truman at the White House when Charlie Ross put his head in at the door to report the result. They had won by a margin of 14 votes, more than anyone had thought possible. Truman and Lilienthal shook hands. Atomic energy was “the most important thing there is,” Truman remarked, looking subdued and thoughtful. “You must make a blessing of it, or,” he said, pointing to a large globe in the corner, “we’ll blow that all to smithereens.”

The final, formal vote in the Senate came on April 9, when a total of twenty Republicans defied Taft to support Lilienthal. Of the southern Democrats, only four besides McKellar voted against him. The nomination was confirmed by 50 to 31. It was Truman’s first test of strength with the new Congress and a sweet victory.

Yet the issue of loyalty—the issue of who was or who was not, in Taft’s phrase, soft on communism—was by no means ended. The Republican leadership, having made communism a theme with such success in the fall elections, would keep up the demand for investigations, and Truman, to head off such attacks from conservatives in both parties, had by this time accepted the view of a special commission—and of Attorney General Clark and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that a program of loyalty reviews was necessary. The whole concept troubled him. In notes he made of a conversation with the President in May 1947, Clark Clifford wrote: “[He is] very strongly anti-FBI…. Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo.’ ”

Further, much too much was being made of “the Communist bugaboo,” Truman thought, and said so in a letter to a former Pennsylvania governor named George Earle. The country was “perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have far too many sane people.”

The political pressures bore heavily, however. Attorney General Clark, conceding that the number of disloyal employees in the government was probably small, argued that even one such person posed a serious threat. J. Edgar Hoover wanted authority to remove anyone from public service whose views were politically suspect. Such people, Hoover warned, might well influence foreign policy in a way that could “favor the foreign country of their ideological choice.” Like many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Hoover saw the State Department as the core of the problem. In his first speech as the new Speaker of the House, Joe Martin had declared there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.” Accusations that the New Deal had been riddled with Communists were made repeatedly and widely believed, however unfounded. “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Martin much later. “Fear of Communist penetration of the government was an ugly new phenomenon. Suspicion of the State Department was rife. We were disturbed and bewildered by the new power of the Soviet Union.”

Truman worried particularly about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the extremes it might go to under its vile-tempered, and to Truman contemptible, Republican chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. By acting first on the loyalty issue, Truman hoped to head Thomas off. Also, importantly, he wanted no accusations of administration softness on communism at home just as he was calling for a new hard approach to communism abroad.

On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he did so with misgivings.

Roosevelt, in 1942, had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify anyone from government employment where there was a “reasonable doubt of loyalty,” and by executive order Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and FBI to check on the loyalty of government workers. But that had been during the war. Until now, no such step had ever been taken in peacetime.

His purpose, Truman later wrote, was twofold: to guard against disloyal employees in the government work force, and to protect innocent government workers from unfounded accusations. To show that he had no intention of playing politics with the program, he put a conservative Republican, a prominent Washington lawyer named Seth Richardson, in charge of its Review Board.

All federal employees were to be subject to loyalty investigations, whatever their jobs. FBI files and the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee would be called into use. Anyone found to be disloyal could no longer hold a government job. Dismissal could be based merely on “reasonable grounds for belief that the person is disloyal,” yet the term “disloyal” was never defined. Moreover, those accused would be unable to confront those making charges against them, or even to know who they were or what exactly the charges were. In addition, the Attorney General was authorized to draw up a list of subversive organizations.

To David Lilienthal, who well knew the torment that self-proclaimed Communist-hunters could bring down on a loyal government employee, the whole program looked ominous. Anyone serving in the government could be at the mercy of almost any malevolent accuser. “In practical effect,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “the usual rule that men are presumed innocent until proved guilty is in reverse.” Yet Lilienthal, too, conceded that something of the sort probably had to be initiated, and so staunch an upholder of liberal principle as the New York Post called the program a logical answer to subversion. At his next press conference, Truman was asked little or nothing about it. Of more interest was his letter to the former Pennsylvania governor. Was he truly so unconcerned about “the Communist bugaboo”?

“I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the government of the United States,” Truman replied, “but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the government of the United States, holding a government job.” At the time it seemed all the answer anyone could ask for.

In another few months the FBI would begin running “name checks” on every one of the 2 million people on the federal payrolls, a monstrous, costly task. Over four years, by 1951, 3 million employees would be investigated and cleared by the Civil Service Commission, and another 14,000 by the FBI. Several thousand would resign, but only 212 would be dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None would be indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.

Clark Clifford would say sadly years later that the whole program had been “a response to the temper of the times,” and that he did not see how Truman could have done otherwise.

But in an interview with the journalist Carl Bernstein, Clifford was considerably more blunt:

It was a political problem. [Clifford told Bernstein] Truman was going to run in ‘48, and that was it….

My own feeling was there was not a serious problem. I felt the whole thing was being manufactured. We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem…. the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it….

There was no substantive problem…. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured….

(To Bernstein, this was a particularly chilling revelation, since his own parents had been among victims of the Loyalty Program.)

And politically the effect of Executive Order No. 9835 was indeed pronounced, for the moment at least, as Time’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Frank McNaughton, described in a confidential report to his editors:

The Republicans are now taking Truman seriously…[his] order to root out subversives from government employment hit a solid note with Congress, and further pulled the rug from under his political detractors. The charge of “Communists in government” and nothing being done about it, a favorite theme of the reactionaries, simply will not stick any longer…. The Republicans are beginning to realize Truman is no pushover.

That Truman’s concern over J. Edgar Hoover continued to trouble him there is no question. “If I can prevent [it], there’ll be no NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] or Gestapo in this country,” he wrote privately to Bess. “Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me….”

Writing in his memoirs years later, well after the pernicious influence of the Loyalty Program had become all too clear, Truman could say only in lame defense that it had started out to be as fair as possible “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” In private conversation with friends, however, he would concede it had been a bad mistake. “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.

On April 22, 1947, the Senate overwhelmingly approved aid to Greece and Turkey by a vote of 67 to 23. On May 9, the House, like the Senate, passed the bill by a margin of nearly three to one, 287 to 107. On May 22, while visiting his mother in Grandview, Truman sat at the Mission oak table in her small parlor and signed the $400 million aid package. The Truman Doctrine had been sanctioned.

Though it seemed so at the time, and would often be so presented in later accounts, the Truman Doctrine was not an abrupt, dramatic turn in American policy, but a declaration of principle. It was a continuation of a policy that had been evolving since Potsdam, its essence to be found in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and in the more emphatic Clifford-Elsey Report. It could even be said that it began with Averell Harriman’s first meeting with Truman before Potsdam.

But, be that as it may, the Truman Doctrine would guide the foreign policy of the United States for another generation and more, for better or worse, despite any of the assurances by Acheson and Vandenberg that this was not the intent.

III

It could not have been a more exciting or important time, Clark Clifford would say, recalling events of 1947 and ‘48. “I think it’s one of the proudest moments in American history. What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.”

Others felt the same. A young economic adviser at the State Department, Paul Nitze, would reflect after a long, eventful career in public service that nothing had given him such satisfaction as the work accomplished then. Dean Acheson, Speaking for all of them, would write that they had been “present at the creation.”

Their exhilaration derived in part from the tremendous urgency of the moment. Events moved rapidly. “There was much to be done and little time to do it,” Truman would remember. Plans had to be conceived and clarified with minimum delay, imagination applied, decisions reached, and always with the realities and imponderables of politics weighed in the balance. The pressure was unrelenting. “You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points,” George Elsey would say, in response to latter-day critics. “You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.”

With the stress of deadlines and long hours, emotions often ran high. The struggle to draw up a preliminary report for what would become the Marshall Plan was for George Kennan “an intellectual agony” greater than any he had known. So intense did a debate with his associates become one harried night at the State Department that Kennan had to leave the room and go outside, where he walked, weeping, around the entire building.

What they were attempting was, besides, different from what had gone before. They were pioneering, the state of the world being, as Acheson said, “wholly novel within the experience of those who had to deal with it.”

Of great importance also to everyone’s morale in the spring of 1947 was the changed outlook of the President, a subject which by now had drawn much attention. Dozens of articles appeared describing the “new” Truman, and for the reason that the change was truly striking. He was in “top spirits,” reported The New York Times; the whole “political picture has changed in Washington.” The President was “very different” now, “calm and forceful,” wrote Alden Hatch in Liberty magazine. “The recent change in Harry Truman has been variously ascribed to new advisers, a difference of political climate, or a change in his nature. The fact is that it is not change, but growth.” His voice, his whole manner had a “new authority,” said Collier’s. He was no longer Roosevelt’s “stand in.” Noting that Truman’s public approval rating was up sharply, to 60 percent, Time lauded his “new sense of the dignity of his office.” The President, said Time, had acquired “a new confidence and a new formula: be natural.”

On an afternoon in mid-April, speaking extemporaneously to several hundred members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors who crowded into his office, Truman was as impressive as he had ever been before such a group-relaxed, sure of himself, convincing in a way that seemed to take many of them by surprise. The Truman Doctrine, he said, was no “sudden” turn in policy, and he traced the history of relations with Russia from the time of his first meeting with Molotov there in the same room two years before. He was sure a solution to the problems with the Soviets would be found and that a long era of peace was in store. “I believe that as sincerely as I am standing here.” It was essential “to stand for what we believe is right,” hard as the Russians were to negotiate with. “They deal from day to day, and what’s done yesterday has no bearing on what’s done today or tomorrow. We have to make up our mind what our policy is.”

He had just been talking with a pilot who had flown around the world in sixty-eight hours, he told them. “We must catch up morally and internationally with the machine age. We must catch up with it…in such a way as to create peace in the world, or it will destroy us and everybody else. And that we don’t dare contemplate.”

To his staff it was an inspiring performance, a long way from the fumbling press conferences of the previous year.

The morale of the staff had never been higher. Truman spoke of them proudly and affectionately as his “team.” They were devoted to him, and increasingly as time went on, the better they knew him, quite as much as those who had served with him in the Army. They liked him as a man, greatly respected him as a leader, admiring his courage, decisiveness, and fundamental honesty. The President they worked for, the Harry Truman they saw day to day, bore almost no resemblance to the stereotype Harry Truman, the cocky, profane, “feisty little guy.” Rather it was a quiet-spoken, even-tempered and uncommonly kind-hearted person, whose respect for the office he held enlarged their appreciation not only of him but of their own responsibilities.

“He was, as I’m sure you know, an extremely thoughtful, courteous, considerate man,” George Elsey would tell an interviewer years later. “He was a pleasure to work for…very kindly…never too busy to think about members of his staff…. He had a tremendous veneration and respect for the institution of the Presidency. He demanded at all times respect for the President of the United States….”

William J. Hopkins, an executive clerk who would serve nearly forty years in the White House, said later of Truman that no President in his experience had “set a comparable tone.” Truman, Hopkins emphasized, “liked people, he trusted people, and in turn he engendered a feeling of unqualified loyalty and devotion among his staff.”

A measure of the Truman manner and outlook was the way he conducted his regular morning meeting with the staff, one of the most important events of their day, for the information and sense of direction provided, but also for its overall atmosphere. The staff numbered thirteen, two more than in Roosevelt’s time, and Truman was his own chief of staff. The meetings were informal, yet orderly and businesslike. Truman would open the door of his office on the dot of nine o’clock and one by one they would file in and take their seats.

He was seated at his desk…the staff assembled in a semi-circle around his desk, and much of the day’s business was gone over [remembered Hopkins]. He usually started with Matt Connelly, who would bring up matters relating to presidential appointments, what was on the agenda for the day and upcoming appointments. He would also bring to the President’s attention requests for speeches throughout the country, getting the President’s reactions and (in some cases) commitments. The President would then turn to Charlie Ross and see what problems might arise during the day in his relations with the press. Many matters were discussed in terms of how to answer press questions and deal with certain problems.

Dr. Steelman, of course, was there, and Clark Clifford…and they brought up matters in their areas of responsibility. It was an opportunity to listen to the President’s philosophy and get his directions for the day.

President Truman was a prodigious reader, and each night he would carry home a portfolio, often six or eight inches thick. The next morning, he would have gone through all that material and taken such action as was needed. He had a desk folder labeled for each of his staff members, and at this staff meeting, he would pass out to them documents in their area of responsibility, or on which he wished their advice or recommendations, or on matters he wanted raised with the various departments and agencies. In this way each staff member knew basically what the others were doing, knew to whom the President had given which responsibility—whether it was to respond to a certain request, or to follow through on the preparation of an Executive Order or a speech, or things of that nature.

Truman was as tidy about his desk as he was about his clothes. The “flow of paper was probably the best I have experienced,” remembered Hopkins, whose job, as executive clerk, was to bring to the President and keep track of the immense range of documents requiring his attention or signature—enrolled bills, executive orders, proclamations, executive clemency cases, treaties, departmental directives, nominations for federal office, commissions, messages to Congress—in addition to “gleanings” from the incoming mail, which were routinely delivered to Truman’s desk twice a day, in the morning and again after lunch.

Hopkins, who was himself extremely punctual, also noted admiringly of Truman, “When he went to lunch, if he left word that he would return at 2:00 P.M., he was back without fail, not at 2:05, not at 1:15, but at 2:00 P.M.” The longer he was in office, the more conscious Truman seemed of time. On his desk now he had a total of four clocks, as well as two others elsewhere in the room and his own wristwatch.

Ross, Clifford, Elsey, could each tell his own stories of Truman’s exceptional diligence, the long hours he kept, working as hard or harder than any of them. “Lots of times I would be down there [at the White House] in the evening,” Clifford would remember, “and he’d be sitting upstairs, in the Oval Room upstairs, with an old-fashioned green eye shade on, like bookkeepers wear, and he’d be sitting there reading all this material…and we would talk together, and he took it very, very seriously. And the strain of the job was enormous.”

“He spent virtually every waking moment working at being president,” said Charles Murphy, a new man on the staff in 1947, who was Clifford’s assistant. To convey the kind of sustained effort the presidency demanded, Murphy would compare it to cramming for and taking an examination every day, year after year, with never a letup.

Murphy particularly admired Truman’s gift for simplification. “Not only could he simplify complex matters, he could also keep simple matters simple.”

The staff was continuously amazed by the President’s knowledge of the country, acquired from years of travel by automobile and from the territory covered at the time of the Truman Committee investigations. Charlie Ross claimed that Truman could look out of his plane at almost any point and name the exact region he was flying over.

They liked his sense of humor. “An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.” And all of them, it seems, admired his sense of history, which they saw as one of his greatest strengths. “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” When Truman talked of presidents past—Jackson, Polk, Lincoln—it was as if he had known them personally. If ever there was a “clean break from all that had gone before,” he would say, the result would be chaos.

Once, that spring, at lunch on the Williamsburg, during a brief cruise down the Potomac, Truman and Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, began talking about the Civil War. As the others at the table listened, the conversation ranged over several battles and the abilities and flaws of various Union and Confederate generals, Truman, as often before, impressing everyone with how much he had read and remembered.

He would like to have been a history teacher, Truman said.

“Rather teach it than make it?” Clifford asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Truman replied. “It would be not nearly so much trouble.”

Clifford had, become particularly important to Truman, in much the way Harry Hopkins had been to Roosevelt, and it was vital, they both knew, that Clifford understand Truman and what he was trying to accomplish in the long run. He did not want an administration like Roosevelt’s, Truman said. Too many of those around Roosevelt had been “crackpots,” he thought. “I want to keep my feet on the ground, don’t feel comfortable unless I know where I’m going. I don’t want any experiments. The American people have been through a lot of experiments and they want a rest from experiments.” He disliked the terms “progressive” and “liberal.” What he wanted was a “forward-looking program.” That was it, a “forward-looking program.”

Perhaps more than Truman knew, they all appreciated the respect he showed them. Charles Murphy, a shy man who spoke only when spoken to, would later remark, “In many ways President Truman really was as tough as a boot, but with his personal staff he was extremely gentle…and his staff returned his kindness with an extraordinary amount of hard work, voluntary overtime, and wholehearted, single-minded devotion.”

By later presidential standards the staff was small and unlike the White House staffs of some later presidencies, those serving Truman made no policy decisions. As George Elsey would remember, no one on Truman’s staff would have dreamed of making policy or making decisions on fundamental economic or political issues, “or any other kind of issue.”

It just has to be said over and over again [Elsey would comment in an interview years later]. There was no vast foreign policy machinery at the White House. There was no vast machinery on any subject at the White House…. [And no one trying to] make their reputations by undercutting…by slitting the throat of a Secretary of State…by proving to the President, by trying to prove to the President, that they’re smarter and more brilliant and their ideas are better [than the Secretary of State]…. None of that existed. Had anybody at the White House tried to behave that way, he would have been out of there in thirty seconds flat.

The loyalty of those around Truman was total and would never falter. In years to come not one member of the Truman White House would ever speak or write scathingly of him or belittle him in any fashion. There would be no vindictive “inside” books or articles written about this President by those who worked closest to him. They all thought the world of Harry Truman then and for the rest of their lives, and would welcome the chance to say so.

For Charlie Ross, the senior member of the staff and the one who had known Truman the longest—longer than anyone in the administration—serving with him, for all the strain of the job and the drastic cut in income it had meant, was the privilege of a lifetime, as Ross would write privately to Truman later that year, on Christmas Day, 1947:

Dear Mr. President:

There is nothing in life, I think, more satisfying than friendship, and to have yours is a rare satisfaction indeed.

Two and a half years ago you “put my feet to the fire,” as you said. I am happy that you did. They have been the most rewarding years of my life. Your faith in me, the generous manifestations of your friendship, the association with the fine people around you—your good “team”—all these have been an inspiration.

But the greatest inspiration, Mr. President, has been the character of you—you as President, you as a human being. Perhaps I can say best what is in my heart by telling you that my admiration for you, and my deep affection, have grown steadily since the day you honored me with your trust.

Truman had rarely received a letter that meant so much to him.

To Dean Acheson it was Truman’s “priceless gift of vitality, the life force itself,” that was his strongest, most inspiriting quality, and always in the darkest, most difficult of times. The President’s supply of vitality and good spirits seemed inexhaustible, wrote Acheson, who, to make his point, would quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V the lines delivered the night before Agincourt:

…every wretch, pining and pale before,

Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…

His liberal eye doth give to every one…

A little touch of Harry in the night.

It was this “little touch of Harry” that “kept all of us going,” Acheson would remember.

In addition, there was the example of General Marshall, who lent everyone confidence and raised morale not just at the State Department but throughout the administration. “Gentlemen, enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not,” Marshall would tell those who served with him. “I expect all officers in this department to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale.” Morale improved steadily.

As Acheson would stress, he and others at the State Department felt they were being led by two men of rare quality, the President and the Secretary. On Capitol Hill, in his speech in support of the Truman Doctrine, Sam Rayburn had said the nation “again has leaders asking for certain action,” and his emphasis on leaders in the plural did not go unnoticed.

Marshall’s entire personality inspired confidence, Truman would write. It was Truman’s long-held conviction that men make history. Clearly in the spring of 1947, with the Marshall Plan following on the heels of the Truman Doctrine, things of immense importance happened principally because a relative handful of men made them happen, almost entirely on their own, against great odds, and in amazingly little time.

On Saturday, April 26, 1947, Secretary Marshall returned to Washington from Moscow gravely worried and upset. His sessions with Molotov had been an ordeal, dragging on day after day with little purpose, Molotov acting all the while as if time and the frustrations of the Western Allies were of no concern. Marshall wanted an agreement on the future of Germany. Hoping he might do better dealing directly with Stalin, he made a courtesy call at the Kremlin. But Stalin had asked what difference it made if there was no agreement. “We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after,” Stalin said, as he idly doodled wolves’ heads with a red pencil.

Stalin’s indifference made a profound impression on Marshall. The Soviets, it seemed, were quite content to see uncertainty and chaos prevail in Europe. It served their purposes to let matters drift. Particularly, they had no wish for a return of order and stability in Germany, let alone a revived prosperity there. Marshall had thought the Russians could be negotiated with, but at Moscow he decided he had been mistaken.

Before leaving Washington, he received an urgent memo from Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton warning that conditions in Western Europe were more serious than generally understood. During stops in Paris and Berlin, while going to and from Moscow, Marshall was stunned by what he saw and heard. On the plane back to Washington, he talked of little else but what could be done to save Western Europe.

Time was of the essence, Marshall stressed to Truman. “The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate,” he told the nation in a radio broadcast, April 28.

The next day Marshall summoned George Kennan, instructed him to assemble a special staff “immediately,” and to report “without delay” on what should be done to save Europe. As Kennan later recalled, Marshall had only one piece of advice: “Avoid trivia.”

The idea of economic aid to Europe had been on Truman’s mind for some while. Two years past, in one of their earliest conversations in the Oval Office, Henry Stimson had pointedly told him that an economically strong, productive Germany was essential to the future stability of Europe, a concept Truman readily accepted. In his own State of the Union message in January, Truman had struck the theme of sharing American bounty with war-stricken peoples, as a means of spreading “the faith” of freedom and democracy, and on March 6, even before announcement of the Truman Doctrine, he had said in a speech at Baylor University, “We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends upon us.”

Early in May, Truman sent Dean Acheson to fill in for him with a foreign policy speech in a remote little town in Mississippi called Cleveland, at the Delta State Teachers’ College. Kennan and his special staff had as yet to make their report, but Truman had already made up his mind, from what Marshall had said after returning from Moscow, that Europe had to be rescued and quickly. The speech Acheson made was the alarm bell that Truman wanted sounded. The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could afford to buy nothing. Financial help was imperative, but, as Acheson stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of industry, agriculture, and trade. The margin of survival was so close in Europe that the savage winter just past had been nearly disastrous. Massive funding was needed if Europe was to be saved. “It is necessary if we are to preserve our own freedoms…necessary for our national security. And it is our duty and privilege as human beings.”

What was Europe now, Winston Churchill asked rhetorically in a speech in London on May 14. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.”

The Kennan Report, “Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the United States Standpoint,” was delivered to Marshall on May 25. American response to world problems must be more than defensive reaction to Communist pressure, it said. An American aid effort in Europe “should be directed not to combating Communism as such but to the restoration of the economic Health and vigor of European society.” Two days later, Under Secretary Clayton, having just completed an inspection tour of Europe, sent another urgent memo. The situation was worse than anyone supposed. Millions of people were slowly starving. A collapse in Europe would mean revolution and a tailspin for the American economy.

Long sessions followed at the State Department and around the President’s desk. With Truman’s approval, Marshall decided to make a speech at Harvard, where he had been invited to receive an honorary degree at commencement exercises on Thursday, June 5, an idea Acheson opposed for the reason that no one ever listened to commencement speeches. When the moment came, at the podium in the sunshine of Harvard Yard, before an audience of seven thousand, Marshall read his remarks in a soft voice, his head down, as though he did not care especially if they were listening.

The speech had been written by Bohlen in about two days, drawing heavily on the Kennan Report. Whether Truman saw a copy in advance is not recorded, but given Marshall’s extreme care to keep the President always informed, it is almost certain they discussed the matter.

As Marshall wanted, there were no oratorical flourishes. Nor was there any strident anti-Communist language.

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

Two ideas were new and distinguishing. He was calling on the Europeans to get together, and, with American help, work out their own programs. And, by inference, he was leaving the door open to the Soviets and their satellite countries to take part.

It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. That is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support for such a program so far as it is practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all, European nations.

Then, speaking directly to the American people, Marshall said it was virtually impossible by merely reading articles or looking at photographs to grasp the real significance of conditions in Europe—“and yet the whole world’s future hangs on proper judgment, hangs on the realization by the American people of what can best be done, or what must be done.”

The speech caught nearly everyone by surprise, in Europe no less than in the United States. “We grabbed the lifeline with both hands,” said British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who was the first to see the momentous import of what Marshall had said.

At a staff meeting the next day at the State Department, Marshall asked Kennan and Bohlen whether the Soviet Union would accept an invitation to join the plan. They did not think so, said the two Russian experts, but advised him to “play it straight” with the Soviets and exclude no one. It was a calculated gamble—since Congress was not likely to support any aid program that included the Soviets—but a gamble Marshall was willing to take and that Truman backed.

As kennan later wrote, authorship of the plan was variously claimed and imputed, and he, Bohlen, Acheson, and Clayton were only some of a dozen or more who had had a hand in its creation. Marshall would praise kennan’s work in particular. Clark Clifford would stress the part Acheson played. But Clifford himself had been involved at every stage. In fairness it might have been called the Acheson-Clifford-Marshall Plan.

Truman would always give Marshall full credit. When Clifford urged that it be called the Truman Plan, Truman dismissed the idea at once. It would be called the Marshall plan, he said.

More than once in his presidency, Truman would be remembered saying it was remarkable how much could be accomplished if you didn’t care who received the credit. But in this case he insisted that Marshall be the one most honored because Marshall deserved no less.

He also commented realistically, “Anything that is sent up to the Senate and House with my name on it will quiver a couple of times and die.”

But Truman was the President and so the Marshall Plan would be his inevitably, be it a success or failure. His confidence in Marshall could have misfired and brought embarrassment and trouble to the administration. A Marshall Plan that failed would assuredly have become a Truman Plan.

One member of the Policy Planning Staff, Louis J. Halle, later said of Truman that he had in Marshall a soldier of the highest prestige, in Acheson a man of both commanding intellect and fierce personal integrity who at critical moments, like Truman, was willing to risk his own career rather than abstain from doing what he conceived to be right, and in Kennan a man of Shakespearean insight and vision. Among Truman’s own strongest qualities was “his ability to appreciate these men and to support them as they supported him.”

The Republicans were determined to cut taxes and expenditures, and already since the war, $3 billion had been spent in foreign relief. In a single grant in 1946 the United States had loaned Britain $3.25 billion and now, it seemed, to little purpose. By Will Clayton’s calculations, the Europeans would need $6 or $7 billion in the coming two or three years. When Arthur Vandenberg read this is The New York Times, in an article by James Reston, to say that surely he was misinformed. Congress, Vandenberg said, would never approve such sums, not to save anybody.

As all who were involved with the project appreciated, an enormous effort was called for if the people and the Congress were to be Convinced, and the appeal would have to be both American altruism and American self-interest—the same motivating factors that had propelled the idea from the beginning. When Truman called Sam Rayburn to the White House to brief him on what the cost might be, Rayburn was as incredulous as Vandenberg and insisted it would bankrupt the country. Truman said there was no way of telling how many hundreds of thousands of people would starve to death in Europe and that this must not happen, not if it could be prevented. He was also sure, Truman said, that if Europe went “down the drain” in a depression, the United States would follow. “And you and I have both lived through one depression, and we don’t want to have to live through another one, do we, Sam?”

With Britain’s Bevin taking the lead, a hasty conference was organized in Paris, to which the Soviets sent a sizable delegation headed by Molotov. The provisional and largely Communist-dominated government of Czechoslovakia had already indicated that it wished to be included in the program. Communist leaders in Poland and Romania had shown interest. But five days into the conference, after being handed a telegram from Moscow, Molotov stood up from the table and abruptly announced that the Soviet Union was withdrawing. The Marshall Plan, he said, was “nothing but a vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy its way” into the affairs of Europe.

Stalin had found unacceptable two particular American conditions, a pooling of resources that would include Soviet funds to rebuild parts of Western and Central Europe, and an open accounting of how American money was being spent. Eventually seventeen nations would take part; but under Soviet pressure, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and the other satellite countries of Eastern Europe did not.

By refusing to take part in the Marshall Plan, Stalin had virtually guaranteed its success. Sooner or later congressional support was bound to follow now, whatever the volume of grumbling on the Hill.

Officially it was called the European Recovery Program, or ERP, and the total sum requested was colossal indeed, $17 billion. Bohlen, Kennan, and others from the State Department were assigned to “sell” it to Congress, while a draft of specific plans was being drawn up by Paul Nitze, the young economic adviser. Arthur Vandenberg again played a vital role in the Senate. Marshall himself would eventually make a cross-country speaking tour, to convince business and civic groups, and with great effect, though the daring, wholehearted plan he proposed was not about to happen overnight.

Nor was there a letup in the pressure of events overall. That June, “to curb the powers of big labor,” the Republican-controlled Congress passed by large majorities the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed the closed shop, made unions liable for breach of contract, prohibited political contributions from unions, required them to make financial reports, required their leaders to take a non-Communist oath. On Friday, June 20, after two weeks of deliberation, Truman vetoed the bill, calling it an attack on the workingman, though all the Cabinet but Schwellenbach and Hannegan had urged him to sign it, including John Snyder, his closest friend in the Cabinet. Clark Clifford, however, saw it as another chance to take a stand. Clifford wanted Truman to move more to the left on most matters, “to strike for new high ground,” as he later said. “Most of the Cabinet and the congressional leaders were urging Mr. Truman to go slow, to veer a little closer to the conservative line,” Clifford remembered. “They held the image of Bob Taft before him like a bogeyman.” Thousands of letters pouring into the White House also favored the veto, and Truman, who genuinely believed it was a bad bill, knew a veto would go far to bring labor back into Democratic politics. As his daughter Margaret would one day write, remembering the Taft-Hartley veto, “While he was responding to his presidential conscience, my father did not by any means stop being a politician. The two are by no means incompatible.”

It was only a matter of days until Congress voted to override the veto, and in the House more Democrats voted against the President than with him.

On July 25, Congress passed Truman’s sweeping National Security Act, legislation he had sent to the Hill in February and that would mean mammoth change for the whole structure of power in Washington. Its primary purpose was to unify the armed services under a single Department of Defense and a single Secretary of Defense, a goal Truman had been striving for since taking office. It also established the Air Force as a separate military service, set up a new National Security Council, and gave formal authorization to the Central Intelligence Agency.

IV

Though he felt she needed more training before making a professional debut as a concert singer, Truman had supported his adored daughter Margaret in her ambitions all along. So also had her aunt Mary Jane and Mamma Truman, who had been the most enthusiastic, telling her to “go at it, hammer and tongs.” Bess, however, was not pleased, and Grandmother Wallace declared that the stage was no life for a lady.

“If she wants to be a warbler and has the talent and will do the hard work necessary to accomplish her purpose, I don’t suppose I should kick,” Truman had written to his mother and sister. “She’s one nice girl,” he told them in another letter, “and I’m so glad she hasn’t turned out like Alice Roosevelt and a couple of the Wilson daughters.” To Margaret he wrote that it took “work, work and more work” to get satisfactory results, “as your pop can testify.”

She talked for a while of singing under the name of Margaret Wallace, so as not to appear to be capitalizing on his position. But Mamma Truman, extremely displeased, couldn’t understand any name being substituted for Truman.

Since the start of the year Margaret had been living in a small apartment overlooking Central Park in New York, working with her Kansas City teacher, Mrs. Thomas J. Strickler, who also stayed with her in the apartment as chaperon. Truman felt her absence acutely. Like his mother’s precarious condition since her fall in February, it gave him a feeling of emptiness not easy to face. While he was so intensely preoccupied with his responsibilities, time was moving on, life passing him by.

For someone who had spent so much of his life in such male-dominated vocations as the military and politics, he had few close male friends and no real confidants among the men he knew or worked with, any more now than in boyhood. It was the four women in his life, Bess, Mamma, Mary Jane, and Margaret, who mattered above all, whose company and approval he most valued and needed. Now two of them, Mamma and Margaret, appeared to be deserting him.

“Margaret went to New York yesterday and it leaves a blank place here,” he had written to his mother and sister in January 1947. “But I guess the parting time has to come to everybody….”

In early March, with her first performance in the offing, she received a quick note from him:

Here’s a little dough in case you need R.R. tickets to some mysterious town.

Now don’t get scared, you can do it! And if anyone says you can’t I’ll bust him in the snoot.

Margaret Truman, coloratura soprano, made her radio debut in Detroit on March 16, 1947, as a guest on the Ford Motor Company’s “Sunday Evening Hour,” with the Detroit Symphony conducted by Karl Krueger. As reported in the papers, possibly no vocal performer in history had ever appeared for the first time under such pressure, or before so big an audience and so many critics. The broadcast was nationwide on ABC and reportedly 15 million people were listening, making it the largest radio audience ever for such a performance. “She could not help realizing,” observed The New York Times, “that not only the immense listening public, but…every vocalist, every singing teacher and vocal student who has access to a radio set, was critically appraising her voice and her interpretations.” In addition, singing with an orchestra was a new experience for her.

Scheduled to have appeared on the program the week before, she had had to back out at the last minute because of a sudden attack of throat and chest pains, diagnosed by Wallace Graham as bronchial pneumonia.

Truman was in Key West the night of the broadcast, still resting after his March 12 speech to Congress. The half hour he spent sitting by the radio, waiting for Margaret’s turn on the show to come, was, he said afterward, as long as any he could remember. “Perhaps,” she later wrote, “sheer naivete saw me through.” She was the first daughter of a President ever to attempt a professional career of her own.

I was aware that my father was glued to a radio in the Navy Commandant’s quarters in Key West; that my mother was listening in the White House, that Mamma Truman was listening from her bed in Grandview, and that Grandmother Wallace, who didn’t have much use for the stage, was listening critically in Independence. I couldn’t let anybody down.

She sang three selections, beginning with the Spanish folk song “Cielito Lindo,” then an aria from Félicien David’s La Perle du Bresil, and finishing with “The Last Rose of Summer,” a request of her father’s.

The orchestra indicated its approval with spontaneous applause, and though the Detroit Times said she sang no better than a fairly talented student, the reviews were generally good—kinder than she deserved, she later acknowledged. Noel Straus, music critic for The New York Times, described her voice as “interesting,” and said she had shown remarkable poise and self-control, considering the pressures she was under. Her phrasing was careful, the legato smooth throughout. “Miss Truman’s work from start to finish,” the reviewer concluded in a judgment that greatly pleased her father, “had an allure that resulted from deep sincerity and an unaffected simplicity of approach.”

At home in Kansas City, to the delight of her father, the Star praised her for her courage and called it a “highly agreeable” occasion. The White House switchboard was so engulfed by calls of approval that it had to close down temporarily.

To reporters gathered around at Key West, Truman said he thought she had done “wonderfully,” and for weeks after his return to Washington, it was obvious that nothing pleased him quite so much as to have visitors mention they had heard Margaret on the radio and enjoyed her singing.

Another performance, a full concert this time, was scheduled for May in Pittsburgh. Truman wanted only success for Margaret, but by no means should she become a prima donna.

Wish I could go along and smooth all the rough spots—but I can’t and in a career you must learn to overcome the obstacles without blowing up. Always be nice to the people who can’t talk back to you. I can’t stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy an ego.

The Pittsburgh concert had to be postponed at the last minute, however, when word came that Mamma Truman had suffered a stroke and was not expected to live.

Truman flew from Washington immediately. It was his fifth trip home since his mother first fell and broke her hip. Ross, Wallace Graham, the whole presidential entourage were with him and set up headquarters on the eleventh floor of the Muehlebach Hotel. Mamma seemed to improve, knowing he was there, and he stayed on at the Muehlebach for nearly two weeks, driving out from Kansas City to Grandview every day. The weather was poor, chill and raining, and she slept most of the time. As the papers said, “the eyes of the world” were focused on the small yellow clapboard house day after day. Truman worked at the Mission oak table in the parlor. (It was then that he signed the bill for aid to Greece and Turkey.) “Whenever she wakes up,” he told reporters, “she wants to talk to me. I want to be there.”

But then to everyone’s amazement she made a comeback and Truman returned to Washington. He called her nearly every day thereafter, returned for another visit in mid-June, and wrote regularly to Mary Jane, who would read the letters aloud for Mamma. He kept her posted on politics, as he knew she liked. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Taft is no good and Hartley is worse,” he wrote. He also warned her he was about to make a speech she wouldn’t like. It was for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He would be quoting Abraham Lincoln, he said.

Delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on June 29, to a crowd of ten thousand people, it was the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln, and the first speech ever by a President to the NAACP. Full civil rights and freedom must be obtained and guaranteed for all Americans, Truman said, with Walter White, head of the NAACP, standing beside him.

When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.

Many of our people still suffer the indignity of insult, the narrowing fear of intimidation, and, I regret to say, the threat of physical and mob violence. Prejudice and intolerance in which these evils are rooted still exist. The conscience of our nation, and the legal machinery which enforces it, have not yet secured to each citizen full freedom of fear.

We cannot wait another decade or another generation to remedy these evils. We must work, as never before, to cure them now.

He called for state and federal action against lynching and the poll tax, an end to inequality in education, employment, the whole caste system based on race or color. That someone of his background from western Missouri could be standing at the shrine of the Great Emancipator saying such things was almost inconceivable. As he listened, Walter White thought of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “I did not believe that Truman’s speech possessed the literary quality of Lincoln’s speech,” he later wrote, “but in some respects it had been a more courageous one in its specific condemnation of evils based upon race prejudice…and its call for immediate action against them.”

Late in 1946, at the urging of White and others, Truman had established his own blue-ribbon commission on civil rights, with Charles E. Wilson, the head of General Electric, as chairman. It was an unprecedented step and Truman, White was sure, had put his political fortunes on the line. “Almost without exception,” White wrote, “Mr. Truman’s political advisors from both South and North were certain that his authorization of inquiry into the explosive issue of civil rights was nothing short of political suicide…. Mr. Truman stood firm.” The report of the commission would not be ready until October.

Taking his seat again after the speech, Truman turned to White and said he meant “every word of it—and I’m going to prove that I do mean it.”

To his mother, Truman said it was a speech he wished he did not have to make. “But I believe what I say,” he told her, “and I’m hopeful we may implement it.”

He described for her the flowers in bloom at the White House, “down in the yard.” With so much wet weather, were Vivian’s sons able to get in the hay crop, he wanted to know.

He was thinking more than usual about times gone by. The morning of July 26, writing to Bess in Independence, he found himself reminiscing about Uncle Harrison and about Tasker Taylor, their high school classmate who had drowned in the Missouri River after graduation. July 26 had always been known to Missouri farmers as Turnip Day, the day to sow turnips, he told Bess. Once, in 1901, a particularly dry year, Uncle Harrison had walked into the seed store and declared he needed six bushels of turnip seed. Asked why so large an amount, Uncle Harrison said he understood turnips were 90 percent water and that maybe if he planted the whole farm in them the drought would break.

But he must not dwell on the past. “You see age is creeping up on me. Mamma is ninety-four and a half because she never lived in the past.”

An hour or so later, Mary Jane telephoned from Grandview to say Mamma had pneumonia and might not live through the day. Truman ordered his plane made ready, but there was a delay. He wanted to sign the National Security Act and name James Forrestal the new Secretary of Defense before Congress recessed. A few congressional signatures were still needed. At the airport, he held off departure, waiting beside the plane for nearly an hour until the bill was brought to him. Minutes later the plane was airborne.

Somewhere over Ohio, dozing on a cot in his stateroom, he dreamt Mamma came to him and said, “Goodbye, Harry. Be a good boy.” He later wrote, “When Dr. Graham came into my room on The Sacred Cow, I knew what he would say.”

She had died at 11:30 that morning. “Well, now she won’t have to suffer any more,” Truman said. For the rest of the flight he sat by the window looking down at the checkerboard landscape and saying nothing.

Martha Ellen Young Truman had been born in 1852, when Millard Fillmore was President, when Abraham Lincoln was still a circuit lawyer in Illinois, when her idolized Robert E. Lee was Superintendent at West Point, overseeing the education of young men from both North and South. She had seen wagon trains coming and going on the Santa Fe Trail. She had been through civil war, survived Order No. 11, survived grasshopper plagues, flood, drought, the failures and death of her husband, the Great Depression, eviction from her own home. She had lived to see the advent of the telephone, electric light, the automobile, the airplane, radio, movies, television, short skirts, world wars, and her adored eldest son sitting at his desk in the White House as President of the United States. As Margaret would write in memory of her “country grandmother” some years later, “Everything had changed around her, but Mamma Truman had never changed…. Her philosophy was simple. You knew right from wrong and you did right, and you always did your best. That’s all there was to it.”

The funeral at the house in Grandview was simple and private. She was buried on the hillside at the Forest Hill Cemetery, next to her husband.

A few days later in Washington Truman asked Charlie Ross to bring the White House press into the Oval Office.

“I couldn’t hold a press conference this week,” Truman began quietly when they were assembled, “but I wanted to say to you personally a thing or two that I couldn’t very well say any other way, so I asked Charlie to ask you to come in.

“I wanted to express to you all, and to your editors and publishers, appreciation for the kindness to me during the last week.

“I was particularly anxious to tell the photographers how nice they were to me, and to the family, and I didn’t know any other way to do it but just call you in and tell you.

“I had no news to give you, or anything else to say to you, except just that, and I felt like I owed it to you.

“You have been exceedingly nice to me all during the whole business, and I hope you believe it when I say to you that it is from the heart when I tell you that.”

To Margaret he wrote, “Someday you’ll be an orphan just as your dad is now.” Later, when she was on tour, he would tell her:

You should call your mamma and dad every time you arrive in a town…. Someday maybe (?) you’ll understand what torture it is to be worried about the only person in the world that counts. You should know by now that your dad has only three such persons. Your ma, you and your aunt Mary.

On August 24, Margaret sang at the Hollywood Bowl before nineteen thousand people. To the Los Angeles Times her performance was only “satisfactory,” but the audience brought her back for seven curtain calls. On October 17, she returned to Pittsburgh to make her first full-length concert appearance at the city’s immense old Syria Mosque auditorium, before a full house that included her mother, who was hearing her sing in public for the first time. Truman stayed away because he wanted Margaret to have all the attention.

Again her stage presence and rapport with the audience were remarkable for someone so young and inexperienced. The audience loved her. She had nine curtain calls, sang three encores. Everyone seemed to be pulling for her, even the ushers and the press, wrote the music editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Donald Steinfirst. “You felt it in the waves of kindly feelings directed to this girl, standing assuredly with complete poise over the footlights in the spotlight. You wanted to feel that this young girl, who gave up most of the pleasures of White House living, if any such there might be, for a career in music, would realize her life’s ambitions.”

She was wearing a full-length, off-the-shoulder gown of pink taffeta, her blond hair in soft curls, and she sang, as she had in Detroit and Los Angeles, as if she were enjoying every moment. But this time the critics were considerably less kind.

The bold fact is [wrote Steinfirst] that Miss Truman, judging from last night’s performance, and with the usual allowances for youth and debut, is not a great singer; and, in fact, is not at this stage of her career, even a good singer. She is a young woman of a great deal of personal charm, considerable stage presence, apparently a fair knowledge of the fundamentals of singing, but she is not an artist by commonly-accepted standards.

Others said she had launched her career too soon, before she was ready, just as her father had worried she might. The critic in the Pittsburgh Press thought her training “very faulty.”

“I called up Daddy after the concert, and he seemed to be satisfied,” she remembered. “I can’t say I was.”

The tour went on. She sang in Fort Worth, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Shreveport, and Tulsa, and she did better. “Margaret seems to be making a hit wherever she goes,” Truman reported to Mary Jane. Fort Worth was a sellout. So was Amarillo. All the same, he wished she would come home and stay.

Sometimes, relaxing with friends, Truman liked to say that he and his small family might have been a hit as a vaudeville team. Margaret would sing, he would play the piano, and Bess would manage the act. He would then grin at Bess, while she responded with a skeptical look. It had become a family joke.

To those who knew Bess well the manager’s role was perfect casting, and greatly to her husband’s advantage. Margaret spoke of her mother as “the spark plug” of the family. Truman himself said many times he seldom made a decision without consulting “the Boss.”

She had no more interest than ever in the limelight of public life, no desire to play any part beyond that of wife and mother.

Old friends from Independence or members of the White House domestic staff who saw her on an almost daily basis would speak warmly of her kindness, her “rollicking sense of humor.” She would laugh so hard her whole body would shake, laugh, remembered one of the servants, Lillian Parks, “as if she had invented laughter.”

No First Lady in memory had been so attentive to the welfare of the servants, and particularly in the summer months, before the advent of air conditioning in the White House. “It’s too hot to work,” she would say. “If it wasn’t hot,” remembered Lillian Parks, “she’d say, ‘You’ve been working too long. Stop now.’ [She] was the kind of First Lady who hated fussiness, loved cleanliness and neatness and an all-things-put-away look, but who didn’t want her servants to keep working all the time and would order, yes order, them to rest.”

To nearly everyone she seemed “the perfect lady,” the phrase used so often to describe her mother. “She’s the only lady I know who writes a thank you note for a Christmas card, and she writes it in a beautiful hand,” a Kansas City friend would tell a reporter. Marquis Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called her the perfect Missouri lady. Once, when Childs and his wife gave a party at their Washington home for a poet who was an old friend, they invited the Trumans. “Mrs. Truman came with great apologies for her husband…who just couldn’t possibly get away,” Childs remembered. “And the wife of the poet had too much libation, and had to be taken off somewhere, put to bed somewhere. But Mrs. Truman was very polite and never made any fuss of this at all. She was a very proper woman. I think her whole life was Harry Truman….”

Reathel Odum, her secretary, remembered Bess as “the white gloves type.” Serene, shy, and stubborn were other words used often to portray her.

California Congressman Richard Nixon and his wife, attending their first White House reception, were impressed by the way both the President and Mrs. Truman made them feel at home. “They both had the gift of being dignified without putting on airs,” Nixon wrote. “Press accounts habitually described Mrs. Truman as plain. What impressed us most was that she was genuine.”

The longer people knew her, the more they appreciated her quiet strength and quality. Among her greatest admirers were Robert A. Lovett and his wife. Lovett, who, at the end of June 1947 replaced Dean Acheson as Under Secretary of State, was a suave, urbane New York investment banker, a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a Yale graduate like Harriman and Acheson. To Lovett there was no question about the importance of Bess Truman. She was “one of the finest women I ever saw in my life,” Lovett remembered. And, “of course,” she helped Truman “immeasurably”: “My wife and I absolutely loved her. She was simply superb….”

Clark Clifford would later describe her as “a pillar of strength to her husband” and credit her with “better insight than her husband into the quality and trustworthiness of people who had gathered around him….”

But if Truman relied on her, as he himself also attested, she clearly was extremely dependent on him. Years later, when asked by a friend what she considered the most memorable aspect of her life, Bess answered at once: “Harry and I have been sweethearts and married more than 40 years—and no matter where I was, when I put out my hand Harry’s was there to grasp it.”

Five foot four and stout, Bess Truman stood as straight as a drum major, head up, shoulders squared. She dressed simply and conservatively. There was nothing ever in any way mannered or pretentious about her. (Throughout her years in Washington, as Jonathan Daniels reported, she laughed at nothing so heartily as the sudden pretensions of some officials’ wives.) She was exactly as she had always been and saw no reason to change because she had become First Lady. Some guests at the White House found her so natural and unprepossessing they had to remind themselves to whom they were speaking. Time said somewhat condescendingly that with her neatly waved gray hair and unobtrusive clothes she would have blended perfectly with the crowd at an A&P.

Asked once by reporters for his view of her appearance, Truman said he thought she looked exactly as a woman her age ought to look.

Many people, meeting Bess Truman for the first time, were surprised by how much younger and more attractive she appeared than in photographs, where her expression was often somber, even disapproving. Something seemed to come over her in public, and particularly when photographers pressed in on her. In receiving lines she often looked bored, even pained, as if her feet hurt—a very different person from the one her friends knew. A Louisiana congressman’s wife, Lindy Boggs, would remember how vivacious the First Lady could be while arranging things for a reception, what delightful company she was behind the scenes. “And then…the minute the doors would open and all those people would begin to come in, she would freeze, and she looked like old stone face. Instead of being the outgoing, warm and lovely woman that she had been previously, the huge crowds simply made her sort of pull up into herself.”

Where Eleanor Roosevelt had seen her role as public and complementary to that of her husband, Bess insisted on remaining in the background. “Propriety was a much stronger influence in her life than in Mrs. Roosevelt’s,” remembered Alice Acheson, the wife of Dean Acheson. It was widely known that Bess played cards—her bridge club from Independence had made a trip to Washington in the spring of 1946, stayed several days at the White House, and was the subject of much attention in the papers—and that she and Margaret, unlike the President, were movie fans. Bess also loved reading mysteries and was “wild” about baseball, going to every Senators game she could fit into her schedule. But she had no interesting hobbies for reporters to write about, no winsome pets, no social causes to champion or opinions on issues she wished to voice publicly. Her distaste for publicity was plain and to many, endearing. She refused repeatedly to make speeches or give private interviews or to hold a press conference, no matter how often reporters protested. “Just keep on smiling and tell ‘them’ nothing,” she advised Reathel Odum. “She didn’t want to discuss her life,” Margaret remembered.

Two early public appearances had turned into embarrassments. She had been asked to christen an Army plane, but no one had bothered to score the champagne bottle in advance, so it would break easily. She swung it against the plane with no result, then kept trying again and again, her face a study in crimson determination. The crowd roared with laughter, until finally a mechanic stepped in and broke the bottle for her. Truman, too, had been amused, as was the country when the newsreel played in the movie theaters, but not Bess, who reportedly told him later she was sorry she hadn’t swung that bottle at him.

The other episode concerned her acceptance, in the fall of 1945, of an invitation to tea from the Daughters of the American Revolution at Constitution Hall, a decision protested vehemently by Adam Clayton Powell, the flamboyant black congressman and minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, whose wife, the pianist Hazel Scott, had been denied permission to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race. Bess, however, refused to change her mind. The invitation, as she wrote to Powell, had come before “the unfortunate controversy,” and her acceptance of such hospitality was “not related to the merits of the issue.” She deplored, she said, any action that denied artistic opportunity because of race prejudice. She was not a segregationist, but she was not a crusader either. Powell responded by referring to her publicly as “The Last Lady of the Land,” which caused Truman to explode over “that damn nigger preacher” at a staff meeting, and like Clare Boothe Luce, Powell would never be invited to the White House.

When at last in the fall of 1947 Bess agreed to respond to a questionnaire from reporters, her answers were characteristically definite and memorable:

What qualities did she think would be the greatest asset to the wife of a President?

Good health and a well-developed sense of humor.

Truman, President in his own right, and Vice President Alben Barkley on the reviewing stand, Inauguration Day, January 20, 1949.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson, by far the strongest, most brilliant, and most controversial member of Truman’s Cabinet through all of the second term. “Do you suppose any President ever had two such men with him as you and the General [Marshall]?” Truman would later write to Acheson.

Truman’s World War I pal and presidential military aide, General Harry Vaughan, who was seen as the ultimate White House “crony.”

Alger Hiss, symbol of Republican charges that the administration was “soft on communism.”

Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Truman loathed and mistakenly believed time and the truth would soon destroy.

Opposite: At midday, June 27, 1950, having announced that Amercian forces would intervene in Korea, Truman, accompanied by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath (left) and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, heads from the White House to his temporary residence across Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House (above). It was at Blair House, after meeting there with his advisers the two previous nights, that Truman reached his fateful decision on Korea—the most difficult and important decision of his presidency, he felt.

On October 15, 1950, a month after the stunning success of General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise assault at Inchon (above), Truman and MacArthur met at Wake Island in the Pacific, driving off for a first private talk in a battered Chevrolet (below). By all signs the Korean War, Truman’s “police action,” was nearly over.

On his return from Wake, Truman is met at the airport by his Washington high command (from left to right): Special Assistant Averell Harriman, Secretary of Defense Marshall, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., and General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

In late 1950, as the Korean War entered its darkest time, Truman had also to oversee the complete reconstruction of the White House within the gutted shell of the old exterior walls (opposite). And on November 1, two fanatical Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate him (right, one lies wounded at the Blair House front steps).

On December 6 (left), a Washington Post music critic roundly panned his daughter Margaret’s singing, eliciting from her father the most stinging letter of his presidency.

Pages from Truman’s diary, April 6 and 7, 1951.

General MacArthur addresses Congress, April 19, 1951.

MacArthur’s replacement as Far East Commander, General Matthew B. Ridgway (with hand grenades strapped to his chest).

Though often called one of Truman’s most courageous decisions as President, the firing of MacArthur was to Truman simply something that had to be done to keep control of the military where it belonged, in the Oval Office. Left: The outlook from the seat of responsibility and (below) a cartoon from the time by Herblock.

Chicago, July 26, 1952: Truman introduces to the Democratic National Convention the new, somewhat reluctant standard-bearer, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois.

Oxford, England, June 20, 1956: The former President is congratulated by Lord Halifax, Chancellor of Oxford University, after receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Laws.

Florence, Italy, May 27, 1956: Truman chats with Renaissance art authority Bernard Berenson, who found him very unlike the “Give ’Em Hell Harry” of the cartoon at left.

Washington, November 1, 1961: To the delight of President John F. Kennedy, the First Lady, and guests, Truman plays a bit of Paderewski’s Minuet in the East Room, after an absence from the White House of eight years. The principal performer of the evening, Truman’s favorite concert pianist, Eugene List, stands at right.

Margaret and Clifton Daniel on their wedding day, April 21, 1956.

From the window of the Daniels’ New York apartment, Truman greets reporters with grandsons Clifton and William.

A resident of Independence for the last twenty years of his life, Truman said of his time as President, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I was going back to.”

Did she think there would ever be a woman President of the United States?

No.

Would she want to be President?

No.

Would she want Margaret ever to be First Lady?

No.

If she had a son, would she try to bring him up to be President?

No.

If it had been left to her own free choice, would she have gone into the White House in the first place?

Most definitely would not have.

What was her reaction to musical criticism of Margaret’s singing?

No comment.

Did any of the demands of her role as First Lady ever give her stage fright?

No comment.

What would you like to do and have your husband do when he is no longer President?

Return to Independence.

“She seems to think Harry ought to run the country, not her,” a Washington cab driver was quoted as saying. It was a sentiment widely shared, and according to Jonathan Daniels, Truman “conspired willingly” with her to protect her privacy.

Asked once if she was interested in any particular period of White House history, Bess said the Monroe years—an interesting observation that the press passed by. James Monroe’s wife, another Elizabeth—Elizabeth Kortright Monroe—had followed the gregarious Dolley Madison, who had been as much the center of attention in her time as had Eleanor Roosevelt. A quiet aristocrat, Elizabeth Monroe married a hard-drinking politician and made a good marriage. In the White House, she had insisted on keeping her life a private matter.

As manager of household expenses, Bess was extremely frugal. She cut back on the size of the White House staff. Mrs. Nesbitt, the elderly housekeeper responsible for years of dreary food on the Roosevelt table, had been sent packing, with the result that both the cooking and the housekeeping improved. Most objectionable had been the cold, hard, dinner rolls, long a White House staple, but which to anyone raised as Bess had been on traditional hot southern biscuits—biscuits baked with Waggoner-Gates “Queen of the Pantry Flour”—were altogether inedible. “It was only on the command of President Truman,” wrote the American correspondent for the BBC, Alistair Cooke, “that her recipe was passed on to the chef and the Trumans reverted to breaking the bread of their fathers.”

“Mrs. Truman was no fussier than her predecessor…. It was just that she had been brought up to be house proud,” recorded J.B. West. She kept close watch on the cost of food, kept her own books, went over all the household bills “with a fine tooth comb,” and wrote every check herself.

According to West and Lillian Parks, both of whom later wrote books about their years of service in the White House, the staff felt closer to the Trumans than to any of the other presidents and their wives, which was saying a great deal, considering how long some of the staff had been employed. John Mays, a doorman who also cut Truman’s hair every two weeks, had been on duty at the White House since the time of Woodrow Wilson. The way the Trumans lived, remembered West, the White House “might as well have been in Independence. As far as everyday living goes, they were no different.” And for all the President’s talk of not liking life in the White House, said West, “He liked living there better than living in his mother-in-law’s house in Independence.”

Truman’s salary in his last years in the Senate, plus what Bess had earned, came to $14,500. As Vice President, his pay was $20,000; as President, it was $75,000. But nearly half of that would go to taxes, and while the government paid for the White House servants, Bess had to pay for their food, plus all meals for the family and guests. In Roosevelt’s time, monthly food bills alone sometimes reached $7,000. Bess had been able to cut that back to about $2,000. In their twelve years in the White House the Roosevelts had never lived within the President’s salary, but the Trumans had no family fortune to fall back on. Margaret would later describe her mother as a chronic penny pincher, of necessity. Still, she was able to save very little year to year. After expenses and taxes on his $75,000 salary, it was reported, the President had about $4,200 left.

In a smart Washington dress shop, browsing one day with Mrs. John Snyder, Bess told the sales clerk mildly but firmly there was no use for her to try on anything, since she couldn’t afford the prices.

According to J.B. West, Bess guarded her privacy like a precious jewel, yet within that privacy played a role far exceeding what any but a few suspected. She did indeed advise Truman on decisions. “And he listened to her.”

Margaret would later write that in her father’s first months in office, Bess had felt shut out of his life, “more and more superfluous,” and especially after the realization that he had not discussed with her his decision on the atomic bomb. The feeling of being left out, wrote Margaret, combined with Bess’s original opposition to Truman’s ever becoming President “to build a smoldering anger that was tantamount to an emotional separation,” which may explain some of her long absences from Washington. Still, Margaret, too, would stress her mother’s influence on her father, saying he constantly talked things over with Bess and would often do as she said. He was “very, very conscious” of her views and needed her approval. “Have you ever noticed Father when he’s with Mother at any sort of public gathering?” Margaret remarked to a reporter at the time. “He’s always trying to catch her glance to see if she approves of what he is saying or doing.”

She remained, as she had been for more than thirty years, the most important person in his life.

Among family and old friends, he freely acknowledged the difference “Miss Lizzie” had made to the course of his life. “Suppose Miss Lizzie had gone off with Mr. Young, Julian Harvey or Harris,” he wrote to Ethel Noland from the White House, recalling old suitors from days long past. “What would have been the result? For Harry I mean. He probably would have been either a prominent farmer in Jackson County or a Major General in the regular army….”

To judge by the letters he wrote to Bess in the fall of 1947, while she was with her mother in Independence, he did indeed want her to know his mind and the details of the problems he faced in a “topsy-turvy world.”

He was preoccupied with the immense projected cost of the Marshall Plan.

Marshall and Lovett were in yesterday and went over the European situation from soup to nuts with me. If it works out as planned it will cost us about 16 billion over a four-year period…. This amount of 16 billion is just the amount of the national debt when Franklin took over. He ran it up to 40 odd and then the war came along and it is 257 but we can’t understand those figures anyway.

A few days later, on September 30, he went on, telling her more:

Yesterday was one of the most hectic of days…. I’m not sure what has been my worst day. But here is the situation fraught with terrible consequences. Suppose, for instance, that Italy should fold up and that Tito then would march into the Po Valley. All the Mediterranean coast of France then is open to Russian occupation and the iron curtain comes to Bordeaux, Calais, Antwerp, and The Hague. We withdraw from Greece and Turkey and prepare for war. It just must not happen. But here I am confronted with a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890; it is not representative of the country’s thinking at all. But I’ve got a job and it must be done—win, lose, or draw.

Sent letters to Taber, Bridges, Vandenberg, and Eaton requesting them to call their committees together as soon as possible. Had my food committee together and will make a radio speech Sunday. To feed France and Italy this winter will cost 580 million, the Marshall Plan 16.5 billion. But you know in October and November of 1945 I cancelled 63 billion in appropriations—55 billion at one crack. Our war cost that year was set at 105 billion. The 16.5 is for a four-year period and is for peace. A Russian war would cost us 400 billion and untold lives, mostly civilian. So I must do what I can. I shouldn’t write you this stuff but you should know what I’ve been facing…. I haven’t resumed my walks yet but will in a day or two. Too much to read. General Bradley made a report to me today on his European trip and he remarked on my having had to make more momentous decisions than nearly any other President. He’s right, and I hope most of ‘em have been right….

In a month’s time that fall he wrote twenty-two letters to her. That he adored her as much as ever was also among his reasons for the letters. The following June, on their anniversary, he would write:

Dear Bess:

Twenty-nine years! It seems like twenty-nine days.

Detroit, Port Huron, a farm sale, the Blackstone Hotel, a shirt store. County Judge, defeat, Margie, Automobile Club membership drive, Presiding judge, Senator, V.P., now!

You still are on the pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890. What an old fool I am.

Except for Bess and Margaret, and his secretary, Rose Conway, few women ever had the opportunity to observe Truman close at hand or privately. There were no women on his staff in any but secretarial roles, none who sat in on staff meetings or who worked with him or accompanied him beyond the White House. But in that crucial year of 1947, a young Austrian-born artist named Greta Kempton came to the West Wing and with the help of two Secret Service agents set up her heavy wooden easel in the Cabinet Room. She was the first woman who had ever been invited to do a presidential portrait—Truman’s official White House portrait as it would turn out—and she had never met the President. In all there would be five sittings.

“I was very impressed with him,” she remembered. “He came in. I asked him to sit down. He had some papers, but I told him he couldn’t study papers. ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘This is the time I’m working. You are going to relax.’”

Unaware that the two who had helped her get set up were Secret Service men, she turned and said there would be nothing more, they needn’t stay. Truman, amused, nodded to them and they left.

He sat down…and I could only see a big important man and a big important portrait. I had to switch canvases. It had to be bigger….

The smaller the person, the more against posing they are, the more they feel they’re doing you a favor. Not Mr. Truman…. He never seemed irritated or annoyed…never seemed impatient. He would settle down…and [the room] seemed to take on a feeling of grandeur and peacefulness. I felt very inspired…. He was always helpful. He wanted the finished portrait to be as good as I could possibly make it.

The more he sat the more interested he became in the work, my work—the technique of painting, the canvas. He took a serious interest….

She had told him at the start that under no circumstances was he to see the portrait until it was finished. But once, during a break, he decided to take “a little walk” around the enormous Cabinet table, his direction, as she remembered, “easing toward the canvas.” Sensing what he was up to, she told him again there could be no peeking.

“You mean I can’t have a look at my own portrait?” he said.

She told him no, and with good grace he went back to his chair.

When she had finished and asked if he would like to take a look, he stood in front of the easel for several minutes. “Well, I certainly do like that,” he said, “but, of course, I wouldn’t really know. I’ll have to ask the Boss.”

He telephoned Bess, who came at once, looked at the picture, and heartily approved. It was exactly as she saw him herself, she said.

Against a darkening sky, he sat foursquare, unsmiling, jaw firm, hands at rest on the arms of a wooden chair—a figure of strength and determination in a dark double-breasted suit, white shirt, dark striped tie, the familiar handkerchief in place, the service pin on his lapel, and in the distance, the Capitol Dome.

Now and then, during the sittings, Greta Kempton remembered, he had seemed a little hurried. “But in general I felt he had a great confidence in himself, as if, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ But also some humbleness…. I think he was very even.”

In the summer of 1947, in the journal Foreign Affairs, George Kennan had published an article in which he introduced the idea of “containment,” an expression already in use at the State Department by then. Kennan recommended “a policy of firm containment [of Russia]…with unalterable counterforce at every point where the Russians show signs of encroaching”—until the Soviet Union either “mellows” or collapses. The article was signed simply “X,” but the identity of the author was known soon enough, and in another few months Walter Lippmann issued his own strong rebuttal to the concept in a book called The Cold War, an expression Bernard Baruch had used earlier in a speech, but that now, like the Iron Curtain, became part of the postwar vocabulary.

When and why the Cold War began—whether with announcement of the Truman Doctrine, or earlier, when Truman first confronted Molotov, or perhaps with the eventual sanction of the Marshall Plan by Congress—would be the subject of much consideration in years to come. But the clearest dividing point between what American policy toward the Soviets had been since the war and what it would now become was George Marshall’s return from Moscow. The change came on April 26, 1947, when Marshall, of all men, reported to Truman what Truman had already privately concluded, that diplomacy wasn’t going to work, that the Russians could not be dealt with, that they wanted only drift and chaos and the collapse of Europe to suit their own purposes.

Chip Bohlen, who had been witness to so much—Molotov’s first call on Truman in the Oval Office, the meetings at Potsdam, Marshall’s pivotal session with Stalin at the Kremlin—said the Cold War could really be traced to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. It had begun then, thirty years before.

Truman, looking back on his first years in office and the decisions he had made, would regret especially that he had been unable to stop wholesale demobilization after the war ended. It had been a grave mistake, he felt.

The Cold War was an expression he never much cared for and seldom used. He called it “the war of nerves.”

In later years, he would be charged with acting too impulsively and harshly with the Russians, with making snap judgments as a new President, without the benefit of experience or understanding. But “patience, I think, must be our watchword if we are to have world peace,” he had written to Eleanor Roosevelt less than a month after assuming office, and, in fact, it had taken two years to arrive at a policy toward the Soviets. He had moved slowly, perhaps too slowly, and always with the close counsel of the same people Franklin Roosevelt too had counted on, and particularly George Marshall.

In September, Truman received a handwritten note from Churchill, to say “how much I admire the policy into wh[ich] you have guided y[ou]r g[rea]t country; and to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you are doing to save the world from Famine and War.”

In a note of thanks, Truman said no man could carry the burden of the presidency and do it all right, but that he had good men around him now.

In mid-October, at an informal meeting in his office with newspaper editorial writers from around the country, he spent most of the time expounding on the vital need for the Marshall Plan. At the end, he was asked whether the United States would ever “get any credit…for sending this stuff to Europe?”

“I’m not doing this for credit,” Truman answered. “I am doing it because it’s right, I am doing it because it’s necessary to be done, if we are going to survive ourselves.”

The Marshall Plan was voted on by Congress in April 1948, almost a year after Marshall’s speech at Harvard, and passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses. It was a singular triumph for the administration, “the central gem in the cluster of great and fruitful decisions made by President Truman,” as Arthur Krock would write. Indeed, it was to be one of the great American achievements of the century, as nearly everyone eventually saw.

“In all the history of the world,” Truman wrote privately a few days after final passage of the program, “we are the first great nation to feed and support the conquered. We are the first great nation to create independent republics from conquered territory, Cuba and the Philippines. Our neighbors are not afraid of us. Their borders have no forts, no soldiers, no tanks, no big guns lined up.”

The United States wanted peace in the world and the United States would be prepared “for trouble if it comes.”

13
The Heat in the Kitchen

If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen.

—a favorite Truman saying

I

Exactly when Truman made up his mind to run for reelection is not known. Several times in 1947 he expressed reluctance to face another four years in the White House, “this goldfish bowl,” and again he considered the idea of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate for the Democrats. He would “groom” the general to follow him, Truman said privately. But when once more he broached the subject to Eisenhower, early in 1947, Eisenhower again declined, saying he had no political ambitions—not that he was not a Democrat.

According to Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall, Truman even offered to go on the ticket with Eisenhower as Vice President, if Eisenhower so desired. “Mr. Truman was a realist and from time to time doubted whether he could win in 1948,” Royall later explained. Eisenhower was the most popular man in America. To judge by the polls he had only to nod his head and the presidency was his.

Except for the “reward of service,” Truman told Secretary of Defense Forrestal, he had found little satisfaction in being President. Bess would “give everything” to be out of the White House, and he and Bess both regretted greatly the constrictions on Margaret’s life. No man in his right mind, Truman wrote to his sister in November 1947, would ever wish to be President if he knew what it entailed.

Aside from the impossible administrative burden, he has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues…. The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ‘em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

“President Truman did not want to run in 1948,” John Steelman later said emphatically.

Yet to others equally close day to day, it was clear the job agreed with him and they were certain he would never willingly abandon it. The whole pattern of his life had been a succession of increasingly difficult tests of his capacity to prove equal to tasks seemingly too large for him. Nor had he failed to meet this latest and greatest of tests. The feelings of inadequacy that had so troubled him after Roosevelt’s death were by now past. He liked being in charge. It showed in his face and in the way he carried himself.

He was a picture of health, his color good, his weight 175, blood pressure 120–128 over 80, which was considered excellent. He still took his daily walks and still at his old Army pace of 120 steps a minute, although lately, with the press of events, he often went in the evening instead of early morning.

He would complain at times of “the folderol” of the presidency, but unquestionably he enjoyed the power of the office and its trappings—the limousines, the yacht, the airplane, the special railroad car—as any vital, ambitious man would. The “abuse” he complained of to his sister was something he had long ago learned to live with. As Cabell Phillips of The New York Times would recall, Truman was “blessed with a tough hide and a secure conscience, so that he could roll with the punches…he responded with simple and exuberant delight to the flattery and deference that were showered upon him wherever he went in public life.” And he did indeed value the “reward of service” in the presidency, as in every office he had held since entering public life. A career politician, he had attained the summit of his profession, and if it was fate that put him there, then that was all the more reason to win it now on his own merits. “The greatest ambition Harry Truman had,” according to Clark Clifford, “was to get elected in his own right.”

Having kept so silent and so uncharacteristically detached during the off-year elections in 1946, only to see his party and himself humiliated, Truman now relished the prospect of taking on the Republicans in an all-out, full-scale championship fight, as he said. He was nothing if not a partisan politician and this was the fight he simply could not walk away from. He had much he wished still to accomplish. And he knew how quickly his own and New Deal programs, the liberal gains of sixteen years, could be undone by a Republican President and a Republican Congress. He felt it his duty to “get into the fight and help stem the tide of reaction,” as he later wrote. “They [the Republicans] did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person…. Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”

He saw himself battling as Jefferson had against the Federalists, or Jackson staging a revolution “against the forces of reaction.” In the long line of Republicans who had occupied the White House, he admired but two—Lincoln, for his concern for the common man; Theodore Roosevelt, for his progressive policies. To Truman, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were the giants of the century, and he had no choice, he felt, but to fight for the Democratic heritage that had been passed on to him. “What I wanted to do personally for my own comfort and benefit was not important. What I could do to contribute to the welfare of the country was important. I had to enter the 1948 campaign for the presidency.”

So by late autumn 1947 it was well known within the official family that he was in the race, and by the start of the new year nearly everyone in Washington had concluded he was running and that therefore just about anything he did or said was with that in mind, starting with his State of the Union address.

The speech, an uncompromising reaffirmation of his liberal program, delivered before Congress on Wednesday, January 7, 1948, evoked little applause and little praise afterward. The Republicans, as anticipated, did not like it at all, any more than did the southern Democrats. In less than an hour at the podium, Truman called again for a national health insurance program, a massive housing program, increased support for education, increased support for farmers, the conservation of natural resources, and a raise in the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour. To compensate for rising prices, he proposed a “poor man’s” tax cut, whereby each taxpayer would be allowed to deduct $40 for himself and for each dependent from his final tax bill. (“Tom Pendergast had paid two dollars a vote,” exclaimed the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Harold Knutson, “and now Truman proposes to pay forty dollars.”) Further, Truman announced he would be sending Congress a special message on civil rights. “Our first goal,” he said, “is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens.” The distress among southern Democrats was considerable.

Three weeks later, on February 2, 1948, without conferring with his congressional leaders, he sent the civil rights message. Based on the findings of his own Civil Rights Commission, it was the strongest such program that had ever been proposed by a President. Indeed, until now there had never been a special message on civil rights.

Not all Americans were free of violence, it began.

Not all groups are free to live and work where they please or to improve their conditions of life by their own efforts. Not all groups enjoy the full privileges of citizenship….

The Federal Government has a clear duty to see that the Constitutional guarantees of individual liberties and of equal protection under the laws are not denied or abridged anywhere in the Union. That duty is shared by all three branches of the Government, but it can be filled only if the Congress enacts modern, comprehensive civil rights laws, adequate to the needs of the day, and demonstrating our continuing faith in the free way of life.

Truman called for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.” He wanted more effective statutory protection of the right to vote everywhere in the country, a law against the poll taxes that prevailed in seven states of the Old South, the establishment of a Fair Employment Practices Commission with authority to stop discrimination by employers and labor unions alike, an end to discrimination in interstate travel by rail, bus, and airplane. He announced also that he had asked the Secretary of Defense to look into discrimination in the military services and to see it was stopped as soon as possible.

In a final request, he asked Congress to act on the claims made by Americans of Japanese descent who, during the war, had been forced from their homes and kept in confinement “solely because of their racial origin”—claims that would not be met until years later.

It was a brave, revolutionary declaration, given the reality of entrenched discrimination and the prevailing attitudes of white Americans nearly everywhere in the country, but especially in the South, where the social status and legal “place” of black citizens had advanced not at all in more than half a century. That Truman believed in both the spirit and the specifics of the message there is no question. Asked at a press conference a few days later what he had drawn on for background, he replied, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Whether the message was bad or good politics in the year 1948 was a matter of opinion. Clark Clifford was certain the President was doing the right thing, morally and politically. To Boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx, who was no less concerned about losing the black vote in New York than he had been in 1944, it was extremely welcome news. But the angry outcry on the Hill suggested that if Truman meant what he said, he was finished in the South and therefore in November as well. Southern congressmen lashed out in language often too raw to print. Harlem, it was said, had more influence with this administration than all the white South. Tom Connally of Texas, an old Truman ally in the Senate, called the message a lynching of the Constitution and vowed the South would not “take it lying down.” Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina boycotted the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner at the Statler Hotel, where Truman was the guest of honor, because, as Johnston explained to reporters, he and his wife might be seated beside a “Nigra.” (As it was, the three black Democrats attending the dinner were at a table in the rear.)

When several southern Democrats, meeting privately with the President, suggested all would turn out well if he “softened” his views, Truman, in a written reply, said his own forebears were Confederates and he came from a part of Missouri where “Jim Crowism” still prevailed.

But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.

Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.

On racial matters, Truman had not entirely outgrown his background. Old biases, old habits of speech continued, surfacing occasionally offstage, as some of his aides and Secret Service agents would later attest. Privately, he could still speak of “niggers,” as if that were the way one naturally referred to blacks. His own sister told Jonathan Daniels that Harry was no different than ever on the subject. Daniels, who had gone to Missouri to gather material for a biography of the President, recorded in his notes that as Mary Jane drove him south from Independence to Grandview one morning, she turned and said, “Harry is no more for nigger equality than any of us”—a statement Daniels, as a southerner, found reassuring.

But Mary Jane, like others, failed to understand that Truman knew now, if they did not, that as President he could no longer sit idly by and do nothing in the face of glaring injustice. The findings of his Civil Rights Commission, in a landmark report entitled To Secure These Rights, had been a shocking revelation. When a friend from “out home” wrote to advise him to go easy on civil rights, appealing to Truman as a fellow southerner, Truman took time to answer privately and at length:

The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves. I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [surrounding] country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.

When a mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.

On the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway when coal burning locomotives were used, the Negro firemen were the thing because it was a back-breaking job and a dirty one. As soon as they turned to oil as a fuel it became customary for people to take shots at Negro firemen and a number were murdered because it was thought that this was now a white-collar job and should go to a white man. I can’t approve of such goings on and I shall never approve of it, as long as I am here…. I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause….

The murder of four blacks by mob gunfire referred to in the letter had occurred in Monroe, Georgia, in July 1946. Two men and their wives were dragged from a car and gunned down so savagely their bodies were scarcely identifiable. One of the victims, Truman knew from the report of his Commission, had been a newly returned war veteran, and this, like the account of the men dumped from the truck in Mississippi, and of the young black sergeant, Isaac Woodward, who had been pulled from a bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, and brutally beaten and blinded by police, made an everlasting impression on Truman, moving him in a way no statistics ever would have.

“The wonderful, wonderful development in those years,“ Clark Clifford would reflect long afterward, “was Harry Truman’s capacity to grow.”

Of all the President’s aides and Cabinet officers no one had done more than Clifford to push for a strong stand on civil rights, as part of a larger effort to, in Clifford’s words, “strike for new high ground” whenever confronting the Republican Congress. And it was strategy based on close study, no less than moral conviction, for Clifford did nothing without careful preparation and planning. (On the golf course he was known as someone never to play behind, if it could be avoided, since he took so many practice swings before every shot.) A special, confidential report had been prepared on “The Politics of 1948,” a document of thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages prepared by a young Washington attorney and former Roosevelt aide named James A. Rowe, Jr., who had been talking with labor leaders, professional politicians, and newspaper people. It was a political forecast, with suggestions based, as Rowe stressed, solely on appraisal of “the politically advantageous thing to do.” Because Rowe was a law partner of Thomas Corcoran, the influential “Tommy the Cork,” whom Truman so disliked, Clifford decided not to tell Truman of Rowe’s part in the report, but to submit it as his own. And with some editing and added refinements by Clifford and George Elsey it was perceived as, if not exactly a blueprint for the Democrats in 1948, then a guide to navigation.

That Rowe’s authorship was so brushed aside then and later distressed Rowe very little. Such was the nature of the system. “This is, as you know, a typical and acceptable White House staff technique,” he would write to a political scholar years later, “and one which I followed in the days when I was Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt.” Who got the credit was not the point. They were all there to serve the President. Roosevelt especially had preferred people working for him to be equipped with “a passion for anonymity.”

In the Roosevelt and Truman years, George Elsey would remember, “staff was staff.”

The Republican nominee, Rowe predicted, would be Dewey, and Dewey, a “resourceful,” “highly dangerous” candidate, would be more difficult to defeat than in 1944. To win, the Democrats had to carry the West and the farm vote. Labor would have to be “cajoled, flattered and educated,” not because labor might vote Republican, but because labor might “stay home” on election day. The liberals, on the other hand, had to be “fed” idealism. For while few in number, the liberals, like the manufacturers and financiers in the Republican ranks, were extremely influential: “The businessman has influence because he contributes money. The liberal exerts influence because he is articulate.”

The black vote was crucial. “A theory of many professional politicians,” Rowe reported, “is that the northern Negro vote today holds the balance of power in Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a block but are geographically concentrated in the pivotal, large and closely contested electoral states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.” Unless the administration made a determined campaign to help the Negro, Rowe insisted, the Negro vote was already lost.

No candidate since 1876, except Woodrow Wilson in 1916, had won the presidency without carrying New York, and crucial to New York, along with the black vote, was the Jewish vote, concentrated in New York City. But unless the Palestine issue was “boldly and favorably handled” by the administration, the Jewish vote was certain to go to the “alert” Dewey, or to Henry Wallace.

Housing and high prices would be the chief domestic issue. The foreign policy issue, of course, would be American relations with the Soviet Union, and, according to Rowe, there was “considerable political advantage” to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin. The Cold War made good election year politics.

In times of crises the American citizen tends to back up his President. And on the issue of policy toward Russia, President Truman is comparatively invulnerable to attack because of his brilliant appointment of General Marshall, who has convinced the public that as Secretary of State he is nonpartisan and above politics.

In a flank attack tied up with foreign policy, the Republicans are trying to identify the Administration with domestic Communists. The President adroitly stole their thunder by initiating his own Government employee loyalty investigation procedure and the more frank Republicans admit it. But their efforts will intensify as the election approaches….

Leadership in the Democratic Party was moribund or worse. It had been so long in power that it was “fat, tired and even a bit senile.” The old boss-run machines were a shambles.

The President appeared to be liked by the American people. “They know that he is a sincere and humble man and, in the cliché often heard, that he is a man ‘trying to do his best.’ ” The problem was the people saw him still as fundamentally a politician, and the politician as such did not hold first place in the ranks of American heroes. The “public picture” of the President, unfortunately, was “not sufficiently varied.” The people wanted more in a chief executive. To resolve the problem, Rowe suggested that Truman be seen less in the company of politicians and more often with such interesting people as famous scientists and best-selling authors. Further, the President should divest himself as rapidly as possible of any remnants of the “Missouri gang.” Rowe (and subsequently Clifford in the final version of the report) proposed that Truman invite Albeit Einstein to lunch at the White House, that Truman, as a matter of routine, be seen and photographed with not less than two interesting, admirable, nonpolitical figures per week.

Most important of all, the President must be seen more by the people. He must get away from Washington, travel the country.

Since he is President he cannot be politically active until after the July convention…. So a President who is also a candidate must resort to subterfuges—for he cannot sit silent. He must be in the limelight. He must…resort to the kind of trip which Roosevelt made famous in the 1940 campaign—the “inspection tour.” No matter how much the opposition press pointed out the political overtones of those trips, the people paid little attention because what they saw was the Head of State performing his duties.

In several respects the report was decidedly mistaken. There was the assumption, for example, that Truman would agree to an idea like inviting Einstein to lunch. Truman had no patience with such public relations gimmickry. It would be synthetic and out of character and he wouldn’t do it, he told Clifford. Nor was he about to cashier Harry Vaughan or Wallace Graham in order to enhance his standing in the public eye. But more striking was Rowe’s mistaken confidence that the solid South would remain loyal to the Democratic Party. It was, he said, inconceivable that any policies initiated by the administration, no matter how liberal, could so alienate the South it would revolt in an election year. “As always the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy it can be safely ignored.”

Since the Republicans controlled Congress, and since the southern Democrats who went along with the Republicans time and again were not about to change their attitudes, there was no reason to try to placate either faction.

“We were telling the President,” Rowe later recalled, “ ‘You can’t get anything done up there on the Hill, so, in effect, you want to send all the legislation you can up there and then give them hell for not doing anything about it….’ ”

How much real influence the memorandum had on Truman is impossible to measure. Probably it was relatively little, certainly less than later claimed. According to Rowe—who was told by James Webb—Truman kept it in the bottom drawer of his desk and read it “every once in a while.” But others would insist the memorandum made little if any impression on Truman, since he already knew most of the best that was in it. “To a politician of Harry Truman’s experience and resourcefulness,” remembered Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, “the ‘famous political memorandum’ would have been a primer.” And in any event Truman would be running the campaign his own way, according to his own ideas, his own political instincts.

As things developed, the boycotting of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner by Senator Johnston was only a mild preview of southern outrage. Fifty-two southern Democrats in Congress pledged themselves to fight any civil rights program in the Democratic platform and, by implication, any Democratic candidate for President who advocated such heinous liberal ideas. There were threats of a white southern march on Washington and Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, speaking for a committee of southern governors, pledged to defend white supremacy and warned the leadership of the Democratic Party that the South was no longer “in the bag.” The Mississippi Democratic Committee said it would withdraw from the national convention unless “anti-Southern laws” were rejected.

Truman took all this very calmly. Then, on March 8, without fanfare, Senator J. Howard McGrath, Bob Hannegan’s replacement as national chairman, announced formally that the President was in the fight for reelection, adding also that the President’s position on civil rights remained unchanged.

Immediately Alabama’s Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, two of the South’s most liberal voices in Congress and old friends of Harry Truman, called on him to withdraw and said they would give him no support at the convention. Clearly, a southern rebellion of major proportions was under way.

Troubles of an entirely different nature were besetting Truman, meantime, some minor, even trivial, yet conspicuous and time-consuming just the same.

A huge stir of disapproval and ridicule—editorial indignation, jokes, cartoons—had erupted when he announced a plan to add a new balcony to the South Portico of the White House, extending from his upstairs Oval Study, so that he and his family could enjoy some outside “breathing space” with a degree of privacy. It would mean the first major change in the mansion since the time of Andrew Jackson, when the North Portico was added.

The balcony project was Truman’s own idea and to his extreme annoyance, it met with instant disapproval from the Fine Arts Commission, as well as a large part of the press. He was called “Back Porch Harry” and accused of meddling with a structure that not only didn’t belong to him, but that he was not likely to be occupying much longer. Republicans were delighted, as the “Truman Balcony” became an overnight sensation. Truman, his temper up, stood his ground, arguing that Jefferson himself had used just such upstairs galleries or balconies in his columned buildings at the University of Virginia. (The Washington Star expressed gratitude that the President had never seen the Taj Mahal or the old Moulmein Pagoda, or he might have had even more outrageous notions.) The balcony would make the White House “look right,” Truman insisted. It would do away with the need for the unsightly awnings used in summer to shade the mansion’s downstairs rooms on the south side. “The awnings you will remember were attached about halfway up the beautiful columns and looked always as if they’d caught all the grime and dirt in town,” he wrote to his sister. “Had to be renewed every year [at a cost of $780] and cost $2,000 a year in upkeep. In eight years the portico will be paid for in awning cost and the White House from the south will look as it should.” On his morning walks, when approaching the White House from the south side, he hated the sight of the dirty awnings and the way they “put the beautiful columns out of proportion.” He would go ahead with his balcony. And that was that.

To compound his concerns over the old house, he was informed discreetly by Head Usher Howell Crim that the whole second floor was in imminent danger of falling down. After close examination, an engineer told Truman the ceiling in the State Dining Room was staying in place largely from “force of habit.”

Charlie Ross was in a fury because Harry Vaughan insisted on making his own announcements to the press. The soft-spoken, thoughtful press secretary and the Falstaffian military aide had come to dislike one another more and more. Ross was “terrifically upset,” warning there had to be a showdown; “it had to be either Vaughan or himself,” recorded Eben Ayers.

Wallace Graham, the President’s physician, was accused of gambling in grain futures at the very time the President had denounced commodity speculation as a contributing cause of inflation, and the implications were that Graham had benefited from inside information. Though at first Graham insisted he had “lost his socks” in the market, he eventually admitted to having made a profit of $6,000 on an investment of $5,700. Nonetheless he, like Harry Vaughan, remained on duty at the White House, and the more the press deplored their presence, the more Truman dug in his heels.

“You can guard yourself against the wiles of your enemies,” Ross observed ruefully to Ayers, “but not the stupidity of your friends.”

Henry Wallace, meantime, was crusading up and down the country and drawing huge crowds. His followers included ardent young liberals, working people, blacks, and, conspicuously, members of the American Communist Party. Attacking the Democrats and Republicans alike for their internal “rot,” Wallace proposed turning America’s atomic weapons over to the United Nations, and called for a massive reconstruction program for the Soviet Union to be financed by the United States. He repudiated the Marshall Plan as a marshal plan. He talked of nationalizing the country’s coal mines and railroads. Truman’s political strategists worried that the effect of the Wallace movement on Democratic loyalties could do more damage than defections in the South.

But above all, it was the urgent problem of what to do about Palestine that troubled Truman. Reflecting on her father’s White House years long afterward, Margaret Truman would call this in some ways his most difficult dilemma of all.

II

The issue was complicated, baffling, and charged with emotion, “explosive,” as Truman said, and in the heated climate of an election year, exceedingly sensitive. Its consequences in human terms—for the Jewish people, the Arab Palestinians, in its effect on Middle Eastern relations—could clearly be momentous and very far-reaching.

Truman felt pulled in several directions. Like the great majority of Americans, he wanted to do what was right for the hundreds of thousands of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered such unimaginable horrors. His sympathy for them was heartfelt and deep-seated. As senator, at the mass meeting in Chicago in 1943, he had said everything “humanly possible” must be done to provide a haven for Jewish survivors of the Nazis. Often as senator, he had personally assured Zionist leaders he would fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As President, he was further impressed by the report of an emissary sent the summer of 1945 to investigate displaced person camps in Europe and talk to Jewish survivors. Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, had supplied Truman with an exceedingly moving document describing misery that, as Truman said, “could not be allowed to continue.” And it reinforced his own belief that Palestine was the answer. Palestine, reported Harrison, was “definitely and preeminently” the choice of the Jewish survivors in Europe. Only in Palestine would “they be welcomed and find peace and quiet and be given an opportunity to live and work. No other single matter is, therefore, so important from the viewpoint of Jews in Germany and Austria and those elsewhere who have known the horrors of concentration camps as is the disposition of the Palestine question.”

The two ardent champions of the Jewish cause on the White House staff were Clark Clifford and David K. Niles, Truman’s special assistant for minority affairs. Niles, one of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years and himself a Jew, sensed in Truman a fundamental sympathy for the plight of the Jews that he had never felt with Roosevelt. Had Roosevelt lived, Niles later said, things might not have turned out as they did.

Niles was a short, dark, round-faced, nearsighted man with a receding hairline—as unremarkable in appearance as Clifford was striking—and an extremely shrewd, experienced political troubleshooter with longstanding contacts among Jewish leaders in every part of the country. To White House reporters, as to others on the White House staff, he seemed oddly secretive, even mysterious, spending long weekends in New York with theater people, or in Boston, his home town. It was a reputation Niles cultivated. His own “passion for anonymity” verged on being a mania. “I am a man of no importance,” he would insist quietly. In his tiny, cluttered office on the second floor of the old State Department Building next door, he spent most of his time on the telephone. Between them, Niles and Clifford would keep key Zionists informed of what was going on in Washington and within the White House at almost every step.

Both men were keenly attuned to the politics of the Palestine issue, though Clifford vehemently objected to any charges, then or later, that the November election was the real heart of the matter, that it was all “just politics” to get the Jewish vote.

Support for a Jewish homeland was, of course, extremely good politics in 1948, possibly crucial in such big states as Pennsylvania or Illinois, and especially in New York where there were 2.5 million Jews. More important even than Jewish votes to the destitute Democratic Party could be Jewish campaign contributions. Nor was there any doubt that the Republicans stood ready to do all they could for the Jewish cause and for the same reasons. But beyond the so-called “Jewish vote” there was the country at large, where popular support for a Jewish homeland was overwhelming. As would sometimes be forgotten, it was not just American Jews who were stirred by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.

Politics and humanitarian concerns and foreign policy were all closely, irrevocably intertwined. Yet for Truman unquestionably, humanitarian concerns mattered foremost. His sympathies were naturally with the underdog, but he was influenced too by a lifelong love of ancient history, his own remarkable grasp of the whole complicated chronicle of the Fertile Crescent. For Truman, Palestine was never just a place on the map.

And his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine [Clifford remembered], even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil. He did not need to be convinced by Zionists. In fact, he had to work hard to avoid the appearance of yielding to Zionist pressure…. I remember him talking once about the problems of displaced persons. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has someplace to go back to,” he said. “But the Jews have no place to go.”

To Truman, as he himself wrote, it was “a basic human problem.” When his Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, reminded him of the critical need for Saudi Arabian oil, in the event of war, Truman said he would handle the situation in the light of justice, not oil.

Any implication by Forrestal or officials from the State Department that he somehow failed to appreciate the complexities involved, Truman greatly resented. As President he could not possibly dismiss the strategic and economic importance to the United States and Europe of the rapidly developing Middle Eastern oil reserves. Like most Americans, he knew relatively little about the Arabs and their culture, but at the same time he had no wish to damage relations with the Arabs, whose hostility to the establishment of a Jewish state in their midst appeared implacable. American relations with the Arab states had been good until now and like Forrestal, the Chiefs of Staff, fearing an “oil-starved” war, put great stress on the importance of maintaining those relations. To the Arabs it seemed they were being made to pay for the crimes of Hitler.

Much blood had already been spilled in Palestine. Arab groups had attacked Jewish settlements. Jewish terrorists had attacked British troops. Zionist leaders had been jailed. In the summer of 1946, the Jewish terrorist group Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people. And while Truman remained sympathetic to the claim of the Jews on Palestine and knew that more than 600,000 Jews were already there, he also knew the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Arabs. As he said many times, he had no wish to send American troops to guarantee the survival of the new Jewish state; and from the advice he was getting, that was exactly what would be required.

Also he found the mounting pressures on him by Jewish organizations extremely vexing. A good listener, he had been listening to their pleas and arguments since his earliest days in office, when Rabbi Stephen Wise first called on him, and he had become not just worn down by it all but increasingly suspicious, increasingly resentful of the politics of Palestine. In late 1947, the White House received more than 100,000 letters and telegrams concerning Palestine.

“Mr. President, it is up to you and the other leaders of the American people to set an example to the rest of the world…. Give your support to the Zionist Movement, just as the late President Roosevelt would have done,” he read in a letter from Brooklyn. A telegram from the Philadelphia Womens Division of the American Jewish Congress said:

OUR GOVERNMENT IS HONOR BOUND BY ITS PLEASURES AND PROMISES AND MUST KEEP FAITH WITH HUMANITY. WE MUST GIVE OUR LEADERSHIP AND STRENGTH FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE.

Truman became so exasperated by the flood of Jewish “propaganda,” he told Senator Claude Pepper, that he took a great stack of such mail and “struck a match to it”—a claim that may have expressed his true desire but that appears to have no basis in fact. (“I don’t remember that incident at all,” his secretary Rose Conway later told writer Robert Donovan.)

“What I am trying to do is make the whole world safe for the Jews. Therefore I don’t feel like going to war in Palestine,” Truman wrote in response to one Zionist group, in a letter he never sent. To Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he had made a delegate to the United Nations, he wrote: “The action of some of our United States Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

When a congressional delegation from New York came to see him about the issue, he sat at his desk irritably shuffling papers and said he wished more people would call on him about the country’s problems, and not their own.

“I am not a New Yorker,” he is supposed to have said at another meeting. “All these people are pleading a special interest. I am an American.” He abhorred special interests of any kind, but several individuals had begun to get under his skin.

Particularly offensive to Truman was the attitude of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, who, with Stephen Wise, was co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. A Republican and close ally of Senator Taft, Rabbi Silver had helped write a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform. At one point during a meeting in Truman’s office, Silver had hammered on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. “Terror and Silver are the causes of some, if not all, of our troubles,” Truman later said, and at one Cabinet meeting he reportedly grew so furious over the subject of the Jews that he snapped, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”

To his sister Mary Jane he wrote, “I’m so tired and bedeviled I can’t be decent to people.”

When several American diplomats, who had been called home from the Middle East to advise him, finished presenting the Arab point of view, Truman’s comment was that he didn’t have a great many Arabs among his constituents.

Forrestal’s intense, repeated warnings of the importance of Arab oil, Forrestal’s bitter opposition to any American action that would favor the Zionist cause, had also begun to play on Truman’s nerves. And for his part, Forrestal found himself thinking less and less of a President who seemed so willing to cave in to cheap political expediency.

Truman had not, however, shut himself off from Zionist spokesmen, or, importantly, from contact with his old friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson. Like many American Jews, Jacobson was not a Zionist. But he looked to Zionist leaders to solve the problems of the Jewish refugees, and he had been trying to do his part, both for the refugees and for the cause of the Jewish homeland, by escorting small groups to the White House to explain the Zionist position. (Following one such visit in 1946, when he had accompanied Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld of New York, and Charles Kaplan, the vice president of a shirt company, to see the President, Jacobson quipped to reporters, “Kaplan sells shirts, I sell furnishings, and the Rabbi sells notions.”)

Truman was as fond of Jacobson as ever. He knew him to be a devout Jew and a patriotic American and trusted him absolutely, and this was to give Jacobson a role of unusual importance as events unfolded. Until now, Jacobson had asked no favors of Truman or presumed ever to impose on his time. “And when the day came when Eddie Jacobson was persuaded to forego his natural reluctance to petition me and he came to talk to me about the plight of the Jews…I paid careful attention,” Truman later wrote. Indeed, said Truman, it was “a fact of history” that Jacobson’s contribution was of “decisive importance,” a point quite unknown at the time.

The call to make Palestine a Jewish homeland had begun in the late nineteenth century, and prominent among American champions of the cause had been Truman’s late friend Justice Louis Brandeis, who had helped win Woodrow Wilson’s approval of the Zionist dream. In 1917, during the Great War, the British had seized Palestine from the Turks; that same year, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration, the British government formally endorsed the idea of a future Jewish home in Palestine, the ancient kingdom of Israel, a narrow streak on the map, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, comprising all of 10,000 square miles, about the size of Sicily or Vermont.

The war over, Britain was granted a special mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, with the understanding that independence would soon follow. But the British mandate had continued. Only after another world war, only in 1947, had the Attlee government announced that it would withdraw from Palestine, as from Greece, and turn the whole thorny issue over to the United Nations.

So, in effect, Palestine and the destiny of Europe’s displaced Jews was another of those results of World War II—like the bomb and the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe—that had been left for Truman to face.

American policy, generally speaking, favored immediate independence for Palestine, which would then be divided, or “partitioned,” into two separate states, one Jewish, one Arab, joined in an economic union. The United States also supported the idea of large-scale Jewish immigration to the new homeland.

Jews everywhere favored partition. The Arab states were vehemently opposed. The British thought the plan unworkable, and though Winston Churchill, at the peak of his power, had championed a Jewish homeland—“I am a Zionist,” he had bellowed at a meeting in Cairo in 1944—the Attlee government opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. To the British, Harry Truman seemed “carelessly pro-Zionist.” When, in 1946, Truman had called for the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ascribed it to a crude desire for votes in New York and suggested Truman had no wish to see more Jews come to the United States, remarks that set Truman’s teeth on edge.

The more attention given to the issue, the more divisive it became, dividing Jews from Arabs, British from Americans, and more and more in Washington threatening to divide the White House from the State Department, where it was strongly felt the Arabs would never accept partition except under force, and might very well turn to the Soviets for help—a move that could bring the Soviets into the Middle East on the pretext of keeping the peace.

Like the British, senior officers at the State Department favored a United Nations trusteeship over Palestine until the contention between Arabs and Jews could somehow be resolved. George Kennan considered the Palestine situation insoluble for the time being. More outspoken was the head of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, Loy W. Henderson, a suave, knowledgeable career diplomat with a strong sense of duty who was convinced partition of Palestine had no chance of success. Henderson worried about the consequences to the Marshall Plan should Arab oil be cut off, Europe being dependent on the Arab states for 80 percent of its oil. The creation of a new Jewish state at this particular moment, he stressed to Marshall, could be disastrous to the long-range interests of the United States.

Relations between the State Department and such members of Truman’s staff as Clifford and Niles grew extremely difficult. “Some White House men still believe that a number of positions taken by career men on this matter were based on anti-Semitism, not diplomacy,” Jonathan Daniels was to write, naming no names. “And there are men in the State Department who believe that some of the presidential staff were clearly more concerned about Israel in terms of American politics than in terms of American security.” If Clifford was reluctant to stress the domestic political stakes involved, Niles was not. Henderson would remember Niles turning to him at one point and saying sharply, “Look here, Loy, the most important thing for the United States is for the President to be reelected.”

According to Dean Rusk, who was then Marshall’s assistant secretary in charge of U.N. affairs, the real cause of difficulty was not any deviousness on the part of the State Department, but the “conflicting objectives” in the President’s own mind. “This wasn’t understood at the time. With Marshall and State working toward a long-range solution, the Zionists branded anyone not 1,000 percent behind the Zionist cause as having betrayed the president.”

Clifford remained certain the State Department, “to a man,” was doing everything possible to thwart the President’s intentions, and he told Truman so. Truman thought Clifford unduly concerned. “I know how Marshall feels and he knows how I feel,” Truman said, meaning if Marshall was with him, that was all he needed to know.

In Palestine, the whole time, violence and terrorism continued.

It was in late 1947, on Saturday, November 29, over the Thanksgiving weekend, that the United Nations, at the end of a dramatic two-and-a-half-hour session, voted for partition by a narrow margin, the United States taking a lead part behind the scenes to see the measure through. (“We went for it,” Clifford told Jonathan Daniels. “It was because the White House was for it that it went through.”) The Soviet Union, too, had joined the United States in support.

Eddie Jacobson recorded in telegraphic style his own chronicle of the unfolding drama:

Nov. 6th—Wash.—Pres. still going all out for Palestine.

Nov. 17th—Again to White House….

Wed., 26—Received call from White House—everything O.K.

Nov. 27—Thanksgiving. Sent two page wire to Truman.

Friday, received call from his secretary [Matt Connelly] not to worry.

Nov. 29th—Mission accomplished.

Truman, Jacobson noted, had told him that “he [Truman] and he alone was responsible for swinging the votes of several delegations.”

Zionists, Jews everywhere, were elated. In the lobby outside the General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters at Flushing Meadows, in what had been the New York City Building at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Jewish delegation was swept up in the embrace of delegates and visitors from all but the Arab countries. In the hall itself, while members of the Arab delegations walked out, Zionists in the audience were rejoicing. “This is the day the Lord hath made!” a rabbi cried in the delegates’ lounge. “There were Jews in tears, and non-Jews moved by the nobility of the occasion. Nobody who ever lived that moment will ever lose its memory from his heart,” recalled Abba Eban, who was then a young liaison officer with the Jewish Agency, the official Zionist organization.

To the Zionist Organization of America, the vote was “a triumphant vindication” of the Zionist dream and “a victory for international equity.” Rabbi Silver called it a turning point in history, and expressed particular appreciation for the part played by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Here, said the New York Herald-Tribune, was “one of the few great acts of courageous collective statesmanship which our shattered postwar world has been able to achieve.” At a Zionist rally in New York to celebrate the occasion, twenty thousand people tried to jam into an auditorium on 34th Street, a crowd three times the seating capacity.

Britain announced that responsibility for Palestine would be turned over to the United Nations in less than six months, on May 14, 1948. The Arabs said partition meant war, and Truman was warned by the Chiefs of Staff that military intervention by the United States to protect a new Jewish state would require no less than 100,000 troops. (The British were about to withdraw 50,000 troops.) The Arabs, Forrestal told Clifford, would “push the Jews into the sea.”

The hard truth, as Forrestal reported to Truman, was that the deployable troops then available totaled less than 30,000, plus perhaps 23,000 Marines.

Nor was Palestine by any means the sole concern in early February 1948. In Czechoslovakia, a violent coup backed by the Red Army had imposed a pro-Communist government with bewildering speed. It was one of the traumatic events of the postwar era. A feeling of revulsion swept much of the world, as it had only ten years before when the Nazis seized Czechoslovakia. Italy and France appeared to be headed for the same fate.

Truman left for Key West for another greatly needed rest and change of scene which, after all, did little to improve his outlook. “Things look black,” he told Margaret in a letter from Key West on March 3. Russia had kept none of its agreements. “So that now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938/39 with Hitler.”

Two days later, on March 5, came a top-secret cable from General Lucius D. Clay in Berlin reporting a worrisome shift in Soviet attitudes in Berlin, “a new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relations.” Until recently, Clay had felt another war was not likely for at least ten years. His sense now was that war could come any time and “with dramatic suddenness.”

If, as later suggested, the real purpose of Clay’s message was to impress Congress on the need to reinstate the draft, this was not understood at the time and its effect on Washington was stunning and entirely real. General Bradley said later that it “lifted me right out of my chair.” Secretary of the Army Royall checked with David Lilienthal to see how long it would take to move atomic bombs to the Mediterranean, closer to Russia. “The atmosphere of Washington today,” wrote Joseph and Stuart Alsop in their column, “is no longer postwar. It is a prewar atmosphere.”

“The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the U.N.,” Truman would write years later, bitter still over the memory. “Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that, and the other. I think I can say that I kept the faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews.”

Hundreds of thousands of postcards flooded the White House mail, nearly all from Jewish interest groups. Largely as a result of the efforts of the American Zionist Emergency Council, thirty-three state legislatures passed resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. Forty governors and more than half the Congress signed petitions to the President. David Niles grew so emotional at one meeting in Truman’s office that he threatened to quit unless Truman moved more emphatically in support of the Jewish cause. Ed Flynn came down from New York to tell the President that he must either “give in” on Palestine or expect New York’s opposition to his renomination in July.

Truman’s patience wore thin. He refused to make further comment on Palestine, refused to see any more Zionist spokesmen, even ruling out a visit from Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the grand old man of world Zionist leaders, who, despite failing health, had sailed from London for the expressed purpose of seeing him. Weizmann, a renowned scientist, now seventy-four, had devoted a large part of his life to the dream of a Jewish homeland. Small, charming, and clever, he had been one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration. Also, he and Truman already knew and liked one another. At their first meeting, as Truman remembered, he had not known how to pronounce “Chaim.” “So I called him ‘Cham.’ He liked it. He was a wonderful man, one of the wisest people I think I ever met…a leader, one of the kind you read about.”

They had met secretly in the White House in November 1947, just before the U.N. vote on partition, and the effect on Truman was nearly as pronounced as it had been on the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, thirty years earlier. Spreading a map on Truman’s desk, Weizmann had fascinated the former Missouri farmer with the agricultural possibilities in the Negev Desert, the future control of which was still at issue. Truman pledged his support for the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state. “You can bank on us,” Truman had said, and as Weizmann would write with wry understatement, “I was extremely happy to find that the President read the map quickly and clearly.”

But now Truman had closed the door to “the little doctor,” and this to Weizmann and his American Zionist allies was an especially distressing sign. Through Clifford and Niles, they already knew in detail what opposition they faced at the State Department.

A secret paper from George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff recommended no further support for partition. A report from the new Central Intelligence Agency concluded that partition would not work and urged reconsideration. More important to Truman were the views of George Marshall who, at a meeting of the National Security Council on February 12, had said the United States was “playing with fire while having nothing with which to put it out.”

Marshall saw America as gravely threatened by the Soviet Union, and as a soldier, he was acutely aware of the vital importance of Middle Eastern oil in the event of a war in Europe, which seemed more likely by the day. Marshall had besides a soldier’s distaste for politics. Writing about the Palestine question in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he had said candidly that “the political situation in this country doesn’t help matters.” At a press conference he was still more emphatic. As long as he was Secretary of State, there would be no “bending” to either political or military threats.

Clifford grew increasingly concerned. “On five occasions I told the President that our position on Israel was going sour,” Clifford recorded. “On each time the President replied, ‘No, Marshall knows how I feel.’”

At the State Department, thousands of letters were received demanding the dismissal of Loy Henderson for being “pro-Arab.”

Henderson was summoned to Truman’s office, to a meeting attended by Clifford and Niles, and asked to defend his position. Henderson felt Clifford and Niles were trying to humiliate him in front of the President. “I pointed out that the views which I had been expressing were those, not only of myself,” Henderson remembered, “but of all our legations and consular offices in the Middle East and of all members of the Department of State who had responsibilities for that area.” The cross-questioning by Clifford and Niles became more and more harsh, until finally Truman stood up and said, “Oh, hell, I’m leaving!”

From his bearing and facial expression [Henderson remembered] I was not at all convinced that even at that late date the President had made the final decision to go all out for the establishment of the Jewish state. Although I was not in a position, of course, to know what his real feelings were, I had the impression that he realized that the Congress, the press, the Democratic Party, and aroused American public opinion in general, would turn against him if he should withdraw his support of the Zionist cause. On the other hand, it seemed to me he was worried about what the long-term effect would be on the United States if he should continue to support policies advocated by the Zionists. He was almost desperately hoping, I thought, that the Department of State would tell him that the setting up in Palestine of Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the U.N. Commission would be in the interest of the United States. This, however, the Department of State thus far had not been able to do.

On arriving at New York from London, Chaim Weizmann had taken ill from the “strain” of events. Every effort to make contact with Truman had failed. Then, late the night of February 20, as Weizmann lay in his room at the Waldorf-Astoria, the president of the national B’nai B’rith, Frank Goldman, put through a call to Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, getting Jacobson out of bed to ask if he would be willing to help. No one, not even Ed Flynn, could budge the President, Goldman said.

In a hurried letter to Truman, Jacobson begged him to see Chaim Weizmann as soon as possible. But in response, in a letter from Key West dated February 27, Truman said there was nothing new that Weizmann could tell him. The situation, Truman added, was “not solvable as presently set up.”

Jacobson refused to accept defeat. No sooner had Truman returned to Washington than Jacobson arrived from Kansas City. On Saturday, March 13, without an appointment, he walked into the West Wing of the White House, where, outside Truman’s office, Matt Connelly warned him that under no circumstances was he to mention Palestine.

Entering Truman’s office, shaking hands with his old friend, Jacobson was pleased to see how well he looked. Florida had done him good, Jacobson said. For a while they chatted about their families and Jacobson’s business, a subject in which Truman, Jacobson said, “always had a brother’s interest.” They were alone, and with the West Wing largely unoccupied on Saturday, the hush of the room was greater than usual.

Jacobson brought up Palestine. Truman, suddenly tense and grim-faced, responded in hard, abrupt fashion, not at all like himself, Jacobson thought. “In all the years of our friendship he never talked to me in this manner, or in any way even approaching it,” Jacobson would remember. Truman later told Clark Clifford he was not angry at Jacobson so much as at the people who were using Jacobson to get to him.

He had no wish to talk about Palestine or the Jews or the Arabs or the British, Truman said. He would leave that to the United Nations. He spoke bitterly of the abuse he had been subjected to, of how “disrespectful and mean” certain Jews had been to him. Jacobson thought suddenly and sadly that “my dear friend, the President of the United States, was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be….”

Jacobson tried arguing back—“I am now surprised at myself that I had the nerve,” he later wrote—but Truman was unmoved. Jacobson felt crushed.

On a table to the right, against the wall, was one of the President’s prized possessions, a small bronze of Andrew Jackson on horseback, the model of the statue by Charles Keck that Truman had commissioned for the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City. Jacobson had noticed it on other visits, but now, pointing to it, he found himself making an impassioned speech:

Harry, all your life you have had a hero…. I too have a hero, a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived…. I am talking about Chaim Weizmann. He is a very sick man, almost broken in health, but he traveled thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my people. Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders, even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults and would be the last man to be party to them. It doesn’t sound like you, Harry, because I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out….

As Abba Eban later wrote, the comparison between Weizmann and Andrew Jackson was unimaginably far-fetched. And it worked.

Truman began drumming his fingers on the desk. He wheeled around in his chair and with his back to Jacobson sat looking out the window into the garden. For what to Jacobson seemed “like centuries,” neither of them said anything. Then, swinging about and looking Jacobson in the eye, Truman said what Jacobson later described as the most endearing words he had ever heard: “You win, you baldheaded son-of-a-bitch. I will see him.”

From the White House Jacobson walked directly across Lafayette Square and up 16th Street to the bar at the Statler where, as never before in his life, he downed two double bourbons.

On March 16, the morning papers were filled with rumors of war. Truman’s concern was extreme. The Marshall Plan was insufficient to check the Soviet menace. American military strength must also be reestablished and quickly. “It is the most serious situation we have faced since 1939,” he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. “I shall face it with everything I have.”

He must awaken the Congress and the country. “It was better to do that than be caught, as we were in the last war, without having warned the Congress and the people,” he told his staff.

On March 17, a fine, bright St. Patrick’s Day in Washington with the forsythia in bloom, he went before a joint session on the Hill to ask for immediate passage of the Marshall Plan, for universal military training still one more time, and for a “temporary reenactment” of the draft, to meet the rapid changes taking place in Europe that threatened national security. It was almost exactly a year since his speech from the same podium announcing the Truman Doctrine. And for the first time now, he identified the Soviet Union as the one nation blocking the way to peace. It was a forceful, historic statement:

Since the close of hostilities [World War II], the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

It is this ruthless course of action, and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations in Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today…. I believe that we have reached the point at which the position of the United States should be made unmistakably clear…. There are times in world history when it is far wiser to act than to hesitate.

The will to peace, he said, must be backed by the strength for peace. “We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we shall pay the price of war.”

But Congress was fundamentally unmoved.

To Arthur Krock of The New York Times, an acknowledged “hardliner,” Truman deserved great praise for his courage, as well as his disregard for political considerations, since calling for the draft in an election year seemed the poorest possible political strategy. Yet to many in the audience, talk of the “growing menace” of the Russians seemed a blatant election year ploy, and, as such, a poor one. “Frankly, candidly,” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic, “we think Harry Truman is licked. We don’t think any ‘crisis atmosphere’ will elect him.”

A new Gallup Poll indicated that almost irrespective of what Truman might or might not do, he would lose in November to any of four possible Republican nominees: Dewey, Vandenberg, former Governor Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota, and General Douglas MacArthur.

“The simple fact is that Truman isn’t the type of strong man to whom folks turn in time of national danger,” concluded Strout. “The idea of Truman as a ‘man on horseback’ is just funny.”

Shortly after dark on the evening of Thursday, March 18, to avoid being seen by reporters, Chaim Weizmann was ushered quietly into the White House by way of the East Wing. Truman, who had not informed the State Department of what he was up to, insisted the meeting be kept secret. Eddie Jacobson, by now a familiar face to the White House press, had agreed to stay away.

According to later accounts by both Truman and Weizmann, the meeting went well. They talked for three quarters of an hour. Truman said he wanted to see justice done without bloodshed and assured Weizmann that the United States would support partition. “And when he left my office,” Truman would write, “I felt that he had received a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted.” Recalling the event years later, Truman would also remember Eddie Jacobson being present—but then, in a sense, he was.

The situation, however, had become more complicated than Weizmann knew, or than Truman himself seems to have understood, as would be revealed quite dramatically in less than twenty-four hours.

And Truman was partly, if unintentionally, to blame for what happened. He had not only neglected to tell Secretary Marshall, or anyone at the State Department, of Weizmann’s visit and what had transpired—possibly because Marshall was on the West Coast, or more likely because he refused to accept the possibility that he and Marshall might be working at cross-purposes—but he seems to have wholly misjudged the reaction of Jewish groups to the abrupt reversal of American policy that he himself had tacitly sanctioned several weeks before while in Key West and that his own ambassador to the U.N., former Senator Warren Austin, now presented, without warning, on Friday, March 19, the very day after Truman and Weizmann reached their “understanding.”

To give all sides in the Palestine controversy time to cool down, Austin announced before the General Assembly, the United States recommended abandoning the partition plan and called for a temporary U.N. “trusteeship” over Palestine.

It was a complete, seemingly inexplicable turnabout by the administration, and for Jews everywhere shattering, almost unbelievable news. The American Jewish Congress, in an emergency meeting, charged the State Department with conduct both un-American and “thoroughly dishonorable.” On Capitol Hill there were cries of “sellout.” No more shameful decision in international politics had ever been made, charged Congressman Emanuel Celler, Democrat from New York, while a Democratic senator who chose to remain anonymous predicted that the antagonism of Jews in those states where their number was greatest could produce a revolt at the polls in November every bit as damaging to Truman as the anti-Catholic movement had been to Al Smith in 1928.

The New York Times accused the administration of unprecedented ineptness and of caving in to base material concerns:

A land of milk and honey now flows with oil, and the homeland of three great religions is having its fate decided by expediency without a sign of the spiritual and ethical considerations which should be determining at least in that part of the world. Ancient Palestine was once described as “not the land of philosophers but the home of prophets.” It would take a prophet sitting on a rapidly spinning turntable to have foreseen the course which our Government has pursued during the last few months.

The White House was deluged with letters, telegrams, and petitions to the President filled with alarm and outrage over such “whimsical and cynical action,” such “vacillating” and “disastrous” policy. Nor were they all from Jews or Jewish organizations.

“This change can mean nothing but the complete annihilation of that wonderful home loving race of people who have demonstrated the wonders they can accomplish in that country which actually before God and man belongs to them,” wrote a municipal court judge from Council Bluffs, Iowa, named John P. Tinley. “They must not be betrayed. For God’s sake and the sake of humanity do something to correct this terrible blunder.” “Oh, how could you stoop so low!” declared Professor Samuel A. Sloan of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. “Was your action of Friday a ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ with England and the Arab interests? This revolting move must and should be the death of the United Nations…. Won’t you stop trying to be a statesman and act like a human being!”

For Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, March 19 was “Black Friday.” People enraged over the news kept calling him all day. How did he feel now that his friend Truman had turned out to be a traitor to the Jewish people? “There wasn’t one…who expressed faith and confidence in the word of the President of the United States,” remembered Jacobson, who felt so heartsick he had to take to his bed for the remainder of the weekend.

Not until Monday, when he was back at his store, did Jacobson hear from Chaim Weizmann, who called personally to tell him not to despair. Weizmann, who had more right than anyone to feel betrayed, was certain the President had meant what he said when they met. Jacobson must not forget, Weizmann stressed, that his friend Harry S. Truman was the single most powerful man in the world, and it was up to Jacobson to keep the White House door open.

Truman’s first news of what had happened at the United Nations came in the morning papers, Saturday, the 20th, the day after Austin’s speech. At 7:30 A.M. Truman was on the phone to Clifford at his home, telling him to get down to the White House immediately.

This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy [Truman wrote in a fury on his calendar]. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I never felt so in my life.

There are people on the 3rd and 4th levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat. They are succeeding in doing it…

Still unable to accept the idea that it might be Marshall who was opposing his position, or who misunderstood his position, he saw the State Department itself, “the striped pants boys,” as the perpetrators of his troubles.

“Truman was in his office as disturbed as I have ever seen him,” Clifford remembered. “ ‘I don’t understand this,’ he said. ‘How could this have happened! I assured Chaim Weizmann…he must think I’m a shitass.’”

“The President’s statement that the action [at the U.N.] had come without his knowledge seemed incredible,” wrote Eben Ayers after an emergency staff meeting. “The political effect may be terrifically bad and it seemed impossible to believe that those responsible for the action could not have realized the reaction that would result.”

Calling a press conference in Los Angeles that evening, Secretary Marshall said he regarded trusteeship over Palestine as “the wisest course.” He himself had recommended it to the President, Marshall said, and the President had approved. The statement was brief, unadorned, accurate, and helped Truman not at all.

Marshall flew home the following day, Sunday the 21st, and on Monday the 22nd, at the White House he and Loy Henderson met with a calmer, more composed President, who now, in obvious deference to Marshall, said he had given approval to the idea of trusteeship as an intermediate step, and that it was only the “timing” of Austin’s speech that had upset him.

But as he came out of the meeting, Truman was heard to mutter, “This gets us nowhere.”

The fact was he had also specified earlier that nothing be done before the General Assembly that could be taken as a retreat from the partition plan. Further, he had insisted he be shown Austin’s speech in advance. “Send final draft of Austin’s remarks for my consideration,” he had directed on February 22, which clearly the State Department had not done. As Charlie Ross observed in his diary, “No pronouncement of the momentous nature of Austin’s should have been made without prior consultation with the P[resident] or someone on his staff.” But as Ross also observed, it would be unthinkable now for Truman to disavow what Austin had said.

Though Truman made none of these points to Marshall, he felt them acutely, as he felt still that it was those below Marshall who were determined to sabotage his policy, the “striped pants conspirators,” as he now referred to them in a letter to his sister.

At a press conference, speaking anything but plainly, he said trusteeship did not necessarily “prejudice the character of the final political settlement.” Was he then in favor still of partition at some future date? “That is what I am trying to say here as plainly as I can.”

He was straddling, obfuscating. He knew it, the reporters knew it, and he felt miserable. “It was one of the worst messes of my father’s career,” Margaret would attest, “and he could do nothing but suffer.”

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to submit her resignation as a delegate to the United Nations, while two of her sons, Franklin, Jr., and Elliott, joined a disparate but growing number of worried Democrats who wanted to draft General Eisenhower for the presidential nomination.

Truman refused to accept Mrs. Roosevelt’s resignation and paid no attention to her sons.

On April 9, writing to the President from New York, Chaim Weizmann, after thanking Truman for “the personal kindness which you have so often shown me” and for “the sympathetic interest which you have constantly devoted to the cause of our people,” stressed the gravity of the moment and Truman’s own historic role in it:

The choice for our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination. History and providence have placed this issue in your hands and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of moral law.

On Saturday afternoon, April 11, to avoid the few reporters hanging about the White House, Eddie Jacobson slipped in through the East Wing. Again Truman reaffirmed—and “very strongly,” according to Jacobson—what he had told Weizmann. Moreover, he now assured Jacobson he would recognize the new Jewish state. “And to this,” wrote Jacobson later, “he agreed with his whole heart.” Harry Truman had made up his mind.

As the likelihood of war breaking out in Palestine grew more ominous and the time before the British withdrawal grew shorter, tension at the White House increased measurably and the strain on the President himself did not go unnoticed. “The President,” wrote David Lilienthal after a meeting on April 21, “looked worn—as I haven’t seen him look since I have known him.”

There was never enough time. There was always more than one reasonable, prudent course of action to take. Nothing seemed simple.

At Griffith Stadium, throwing out the first ball at the start of the new baseball season—at a Senators-Yankees game—the ambidextrous President seemed hesitant even about which arm to use, then threw with his left.

News accounts described him as “whirling” about Washington. “Not once, but twice,” Truman had “tootled off” to the National Gallery to see a collection of paintings by the old masters discovered by the American Third Army in a salt mine in Germany. He attended the Gridiron dinner, another rite of spring, and the funeral of a veteran White House clerk, Maurice C. Latta, who had been employed since 1898. From a flag-festooned platform on Constitution Avenue, he reviewed an Army Day parade and later at the White House welcomed the very nervous, young Prince Regent of Belgium with a state dinner. At the nearby Loew’s Capitol Theater, accompanied by Bess and Margaret, he saw the premiere of Frank Capra’s new movie, State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, which gave him a lift as nothing had in a long while. “It is a scream,” he wrote to Mary Jane. “If you get a chance go see it. It gives the Republicans hell and, believe it or not, is favorable to your brother.”

The latest Gallup Poll reported his approval rating at only 36 percent. Republicans were overjoyed, Democrats and the liberal press increasingly downcast. “Must it be Truman?” asked The Nation. “Truman Should Quit,” said the front cover of The New Republic. “Harry Truman has none of the qualities demanded by the presidency.” He was “colorless,” “a little man” with a “known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” In The New York Times, Arthur Krock wrote grimly:

When he [Truman] vetoed what he called the “rich man’s” tax bill, which Congress had substituted for his own “poor man’s” bill, numerous Democrats in Congress jumped on the bandwagon to override the veto.

The Democratic Party is imperiling the President’s effectiveness as no major party in this country has done since the Republican radicals impeached Andrew Johnson…. A President whose defeat at the next poll is generally prophesied faces difficulties in performing his office that conceivably bring disaster…. At this writing, the President’s influence is weaker than any President’s has been in modern history.

Early in May, in advance of what was to be a crucial White House strategy conference on Palestine, Truman asked Clark Clifford to prepare the case for immediate recognition of the new Jewish state, which as yet had no name. He was to prepare himself, Truman told Clifford, as though presenting a case before the Supreme Court. “You will be addressing all of us present, of course,” Truman said, “but the person I really want you to convince is Marshall.”

Truman, as he told Clifford, was inclined to think that Marshall was opposed to such recognition. But this had nothing to do with Truman’s regard for the general. Nor was there the least question about Marshall’s own feelings. “I want you to know,” wrote Marshall in a personal birthday greeting to the President on May 8, “that I am keenly aware of the remarkable loyalty you have given me. In return, I can only promise you to do my best and assure you of my complete loyalty and trust in you.”

At a private birthday party for the President, Marshall had been still more emphatic, expressing his regard for the President in words no one present would forget. Indeed, it was one of the greatest tributes ever paid to Harry Truman. The party, at the nearby F Street Club, was given by Attorney General Tom Clark for some forty guests, including the President and Mrs. Truman, and marked one of the rare times that Marshall and his wife accepted an invitation to dine out in Washington. Clark and John Snyder each rose after dinner to offer toasts. Then, unexpectedly, Marshall stood up, pushed his chair out of the way, and leaning forward with his hands on the table began to speak, his expression very serious. Marshall, as everyone present was well aware, never complimented the people with whom he worked. It was not his way.

“The full stature of this man,” he said, his eyes on Truman, “will only be proven by history, but I want to say here and now that there has never been a decision made under this man’s administration, affecting policies beyond our shores, that has not been in the best interest of this country. It is not the courage of these decisions that will live, but the integrity of the man.”

Truman, his face flushed, rose slowly to respond but was unable to speak. The silence in the room was stunning. He stood with his arms half outstretched trying to compose himself. Finally he could only gesture to Marshall and say, “He won the war,” but he spoke with such simplicity and feeling that many guests were crying.

The meeting in the President’s office on the afternoon of May 12 began at four o’clock, just two days and two hours before the British mandate in Palestine was to expire.

Present were Marshall, Robert Lovett, and two of their State Department aides, Robert McClintock and Fraser Wilkins; Clifford, Niles, and Matt Connelly. Saying little, they took seats around Truman’s desk, Marshall and Lovett on the President’s left, with McClintock and Fraser just behind, Clifford sitting directly in front of the President, with Niles and Connelly to his left. Truman made a few preliminary remarks, in which he said nothing about recognition of Palestine, then turned to Marshall, who asked Lovett to present the case for trusteeship. Lovett spoke at some length, during which Marshall intervened briefly to report that during a recent conversation with Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency, he, Marshall, had warned that militarily the Jews were embarked on a very risky venture in Palestine, and should the tide turn against them, there was nothing to guarantee help from the United States.

Truman then called on Clifford, who for the first time mentioned recognition, proposing that the United States make the move quickly before the Soviet Union did. The United States should not even wait until the new Jewish state was declared but announce American recognition the very next day, May 13.

“As I talked,” remembered Clifford, “I noticed the thunder clouds gathering—Marshall’s face getting redder and redder.”

“This is just straight politics,” Marshall said. “I don’t even understand why Clifford is here. This is not a political meeting.”

“General,” Truman answered softly, “he is here because I asked him to be here.”

Clifford continued with his statement, speaking for perhaps fifteen minutes. He was calm, orderly, and unhurried, his rich voice, as always, beautifully modulated, one clear, perfectly structured sentence flowing smoothly, flawlessly after another. (“I had really prepared!” he would say, remembering the moment a lifetime later.) But Clifford was also twenty-six years younger than Marshall—and new to the experience of great power and large world decisions. Marshall’s prestige was a palpable presence in the room and made especially memorable, especially intimidating, by his anger. He sat glaring at Clifford the entire time. Possibly it was Clifford’s manner that upset Marshall, who was deeply worried about the world.

Recognition of the new Jewish state, Clifford said, would be wholly consistent with what had been the President’s policy from the beginning. It would be an act of humanity, “everything this country should represent.” The murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis had been the worst atrocity of all time. Every thoughtful human being must feel some responsibility for the survivors, who, unlike others in Europe, had no place to go. He explained the Balfour Declaration. He cited lines from Deuteronomy verifying the Jewish claim to a Palestine homeland.

Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swear unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.

There was no real alternative to the partition of Palestine, he said, or to recognition by the United States, since no postponement of the kind imagined by the State Department would ever be tolerated by the Jews. A separate Jewish state was inevitable. It would come to pass in a matter of days. “No matter what the State Department or anybody thinks, we are faced with the actual fact that there is to be a Jewish state.” To think otherwise was unrealistic.

Lovett spoke again. To recognize a Jewish state prematurely, before its boundaries were even known or government established, would be buying a pig-in-a-poke. He produced a file of intelligence reports indicating that numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine were Communists or Soviet agents. The entire matter should remain a U.N. problem, Lovett argued. The United Nations was struggling to determine the future government in Palestine, and this at the specific urging of the United States. Any premature, ill-advised recognition of the new state would be disastrous to American prestige in the United Nations and appear only as “a very transparent” bid for Jewish votes in November.

On this note, Marshall broke in, speaking gravely and with all the weight of his reputation, his anger just barely in control.

Clifford’s suggestions were wrong, Marshall said. Domestic political considerations must not determine foreign policy. At stake was “the great office of the President.” Indeed, said Marshall, looking directly at Truman, if the President were to follow Clifford’s advice, and if in the elections in November, he, Marshall, were to vote, he would vote against the President.

It was an extraordinary rebuke for Truman—“the sharpest rebuke ever for him,” Clifford felt certain—coming as it did from Marshall, “the great one of the age,” whose presence in his administration gave Truman such pride and feeling of confidence.

“That brought the meeting to a grinding halt. There was really a state of shock. The President, I think, was struck dumb by it,” Clifford would say, trying years later to evoke the feeling in the room. “There was this awful, total silence.”

Yet Truman showed no sign of emotion. His expression, serious from the start, changed not at all. He only raised his hand and said he was fully aware of the difficulties and dangers involved, as well as the political risks, which he himself would run. He was inclined to agree with General Marshall, but thought it best they all sleep on the matter.

Marshall and his retinue departed, Marshall refusing even to look at Clifford, who, seething within, began gathering up his papers. It was Marshall’s “righteous goddamn Baptist tone” that was so infuriating, he would later tell Jonathan Daniels—Marshall “didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.” The President, Clifford could only conclude, had agreed with Marshall in order not to embarrass the general in front of the others.

“That was rough as a cob,” Truman said to Clifford, once everyone was gone. Truman told him not to feel badly. As a trial lawyer, Clifford said, he had lost cases before.

“Let’s not agree that it’s lost yet,” Truman said.

Would the United States recognize the new Palestine state, reporters asked the next day.

He would cross that bridge when he came to it, Truman replied.

But by then the bridge was already underfoot. Lovett had telephoned Clifford the evening before, less than an hour after the meeting broke up, to say he and Clifford must talk as soon as possible. Clifford had gone to Lovett’s home in Kalorama, where, over drinks, they agreed something had to be done, or there could be a serious breach between the President and the Secretary. Conceivably, Marshall might resign, which, as Clifford knew, would be the heaviest possible blow to Truman’s standing with the country and undoubtedly destroy whatever small chance he had of being reelected. “Marshall was the greatest asset he had,” Clifford would recall. “He couldn’t afford to lose him.” It was painfully ironic: Marshall, who insisted there be no political considerations, Marshall who was so “above politics,” had himself become the largest of political considerations.

Lovett asked Clifford to think about it, but when Lovett called Clifford the next morning, Clifford told him there was nothing he could do. Lovett would have to persuade Marshall he was wrong.

Truman’s reaction, when Clifford reported all this, was that Marshall, in Truman’s words, needed a little more time.

That was on Thursday, the 13th.

On Friday, May 14, the day the new Jewish state was to be declared at midnight in Jerusalem—6:00 P.M. Washington time—Clifford and Lovett met for lunch in the quiet of the F Street Club and worked out the wording of a statement to be released by the President. Lovett now urged only that there be no “indecent haste” in recognizing the new Jewish state, so that the American delegation at the United Nations could have ample warning. Clifford, however, could not promise that.

Sometime that afternoon, Marshall called the President to say that while he could not support the position the President wished to take, he would not oppose it publicly.

“That,” said Truman to Clifford, “is all we need.”

Clifford put through a hurried call to Elihu Epstein, an official at the Jewish Agency in Washington, to tell him that recognition would occur that day, and to get the necessary papers ready and over to the White House at once. When Epstein asked what was needed, Clifford had to say he didn’t exactly know. “This is very unusual,” Clifford said, “a new country asking for recognition—it doesn’t happen every day.”

Clifford called the State Department, then reported back to Epstein. When the papers finally arrived, the name of the new country had been left blank—to be filled in later—because it was still unknown.

The new Jewish state—the first Jewish state in nearly two thousand years—was declared on schedule at midnight in Jerusalem, 6:00 P.M. in Washington, Eleven minutes later at the White House, Charlie Ross announced de facto recognition by the United States of Israel, as it was to be called.

The American delegation at the United Nations was flabbergasted. Some American delegates actually broke into laughter, thinking the announcement must be somebody’s idea of a joke. Ambassador Austin, the only one of the delegation who had been notified in advance and only at the last moment, was so upset he went home without telling any of the others.

At the State Department, meantime, Marshall had dispatched his head of U.N. affairs, Dean Rusk, by plane to New York to keep the whole delegation from resigning.

There was dancing in the streets in Brooklyn and the Bronx, a huge “salute-to-Israel” rally at the Polo Grounds. In synagogues across the country thanksgiving services were held. At 2210 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, headquarters of the Jewish Agency, a new flag was unfurled—pale blue and white, with a star of David in the center.

In Kansas City, Eddie Jacobson packed his bags and left immediately by plane for New York to see Chaim Weizmann, who was to be the new President of Israel. Three days later, on May 17, Jacobson presented himself at the White House as Israel’s “temporary, unofficial ambassador.”

It would be pointed out as time went on that the United States had granted only de facto recognition of the new Jewish state, whereas the Soviet Union followed with a more formal de jure recognition; that Truman in succeeding months, as Israel was under attack by Arab armies, refused to lift an American embargo on arms shipments to Israel; and that in the United Nations, through that summer and fall, the United States strongly supported a policy of mediation and compromise that the Israelis opposed. But such observations failed to diminish the larger symbolic force and importance of what Truman had done: it was the President of the United States of America who had granted the world’s first recognition of the new Jewish nation. And while experienced observers, including most of his own experts on foreign affairs, considered much of his performance a sorry spectacle of mismanagement—“a comic opera performance,” Time magazine said—there was immense approval in the country. An editorial in the Washington Star expressed well what most Americans felt:

There is a great deal to be said against the past gyrations and topsy-turvy handling of American policy regarding Palestine. But that aspect of the situation is completely overshadowed at the moment…by the swift and dramatic decision of the United States to take the lead among all nations in recognizing the new Jewish State of Israel. It is a wise decision and a heartening one….

As the popular radio commentator and world traveler Lowell Thomas said in his broadcast that evening, Americans in every part of the country would be turning to the Bible for some historical background for “this day of history.”

Truman had no regrets. He had achieved what he intended and had, besides, established a point about who, after all, was in charge of American policy:

The difficulty with many career officials in government [he would later write] is that they regard themselves as the men who really make policy and run the government. They look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants. Every President in our history has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy…. Some Presidents have handled this situation by setting up what amounted to a little State Department of their own. President Roosevelt did this and carried on direct communications with Churchill and Stalin. I did not feel that I wanted to follow this method, because the State Department is set up for the policy of handling foreign policy operations, and the State Department ought to take care of them. But I wanted to make it plain that the President of the United States, and not a second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making policy….

He felt great satisfaction in what he had been able to do for the Jewish people, and was deeply moved by their expressions of gratitude, then and for years to come. When the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, called at the White House, he told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.”

“I thought he was overdoing things,” remembered David Niles, “but when I looked over at the President, tears were running down his cheeks.”

Loy Henderson was removed from his job. Truman had him reassigned far from Washington and the concerns of American policy in the Middle East. He was made ambassador to India. Interestingly, Henderson would also remain a staunch admirer of Truman, considering him one of the great American presidents. “In my opinion,” Henderson later said, “the morale and effectiveness of the [State] Department were never higher than during the period that Truman was President…. The morale of the department is usually higher when the President is a man who is not afraid to make difficult decisions and who is prepared to accept the responsibilities that flow from such decisions.”

General Marshall continued in his duties as before. When some of Marshall’s friends urged him to resign, Marshall allegedly replied that one did not resign because a President who had the constitutional right to make a decision made one. However, Marshall would not speak to Clark Clifford ever again.

Asked long afterward what he had thought to say to Marshall, to get him to agree at the last moment to American recognition of Israel, Robert Lovett said: “I told him that it was the President’s choice.”

III

The year of the birth of Israel, the year of the Republican tax cut and the Truman Balcony, would be remembered also as the year green (chlorophyll) chewing gum became a fad, the year of a new word game called “Scrabble,” of tail fins on Cadillacs, and an unimaginably daring new bathing suit called the bikini, after the island where the atomic bomb tests were carried out the summer before.

The economy was booming. Profits were up. Farmers were prospering. American prosperity overall was greater than at any time in the nation’s history. The net working capital of American corporations hit a new high of nearly $64 billion. For the steel, oil, and automobile industries, it was a banner year. Unemployment was below 4 percent. Nearly everyone who wanted a job had one, and though inflation continued, people were earning more actual buying power than ever before, and all this following the record year past, 1947, which, reported Fortune magazine, had been “the greatest productive record in the peacetime history of this or any other nation.”

In London, the same summer of the 1948 national political conventions, American athletes—Bob Mathias, Harrison Dillard, Melvin Patton—swept the field in the first Olympic Games since 1936 in Berlin, winning thirty-eight medals.

It was a time of extraordinary technical and scientific achievement. A 200-inch telescope, the world’s largest, was unveiled at Mount Palomar, California. Test pilot Chuck Yeager, flying a revolutionary rocket-plane, the Bell X-l, broke the sound barrier. The transistor was developed, a new antibiotic, Aureomycin, and cortisone to treat rheumatoid arthritis. A new kind of fuel, liquid hydrogen, promised, its inventor claimed, to “send men to the moon.”

For evening entertainment the country was tuning in to such radio favorites as “Duffy’s Tavern” and the Jack Benny Show. Radio dominated, for news and entertainment. But approximately one family out of every eight now owned a “television machine,” as Truman called it, and 1948 would be remembered as the premier year for the “Camel Newsreel Theater,” with John Cameron Swayze, the first nightly television news program. Also, for the first time ever, there would be television broadcasts of the political conventions, these to be held in the same city, Philadelphia, in order to make such coverage easier.

It was the year, too, of Christina’s World, a haunting portrait by Andrew Wyeth of a crippled woman and a forsaken house on a bleak New England hill—a world bearing no relation to that of green gum and supersonic flight—that would become one of the most popular paintings ever done by an American.

The music being sung and danced to in 1948 included such hit songs as “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” “It’s a Most Unusual Day,” and a new rendition by Pee Wee Hunt of the old Kansas City favorite, “Twelfth Street Rag.” Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate was on Broadway, and several of the new motion pictures were some of the finest ever made—The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Red Shoes, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Among the best-selling books were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Eisenhower’s account of the war, Crusade in Europe, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, an Indiana University professor whose statistical revelations concerning male promiscuity in postwar American life caused a sensation.

In January, Mahatma Gandhi had been murdered while walking through a garden in New Delhi. In March, Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose father founded Czechoslovakia as a free democracy, either jumped or was pushed to his death from a third-floor window in Prague, news that stirred grief and anger as almost nothing else had done since the end of the war. (“But let the world not misunderstand what he said, with that leap,” wrote Dorothy Thompson. “He said: He who collaborates with Communism chooses slavery, treason, dishonor—or suicide.”) In June would come a crisis in Berlin.

In July, one of Truman’s favorite Americans, General John J. Pershing, died at age 87, and his body lay in state under the Capitol dome. Truman rode to the Capitol without police escort to pay his respects, as he said, “in my role as a Field Artillery Captain in World War I.”

As time would tell, the politics of 1948 would also introduce a number of new words and expressions into common American usage—“whistle-stop,” “Dixiecrat,” and “red herring.”

According to “scientific” polls given much attention in the press, 94 percent of the American people believed in God. According also to the polls, Harry Truman stood no chance of remaining President. “Obviously the Republican star is approaching its zenith,” reported Life, the country’s most popular magazine. Indeed, for all the change and tumult of the times, among the few accepted certainties was that it would be a Republican year, a dull campaign, and a debacle for Truman and the Democrats worse even than 1946.

Two experiences greatly influenced Truman’s outlook through what remained of that spring, and on into summer and fall, giving him both courage and seemingly irrepressible confidence no matter how bleak the forecasts—and they grew steadily bleaker—or how many people deserted him—and there were to be many.

The first had happened eight years before. Nothing, no struggle, no road traveled, could ever again be so difficult or look so hopeless, he felt, as had his chances in the Senate primary of 1940, the summer he ran against Lloyd C. Stark. It was a segment of Truman’s past that many political commentators and forecasters might well have studied closely in 1948. Courage, the saying goes, is “having done it before,” and in 1948 Truman knew he had done it before—against the odds, without money, without newspaper support, without the blessing of Franklin Roosevelt or any serious speculation by those supposedly in the know that he might actually wind up the winner. The persistent talk of his coming defeat in November, the tone of smug certainty in so much that was written and said, all had a very familiar ring to him.

Of greatest importance also was the more immediate experience of a much publicized “nonpolitical” tour made by rail cross-country in June, exactly as recommended in the Rowe Report. For while the two-week expedition was not without its blunders and embarrassments and seemed at times to have been a mistake, Truman found it exhilarating in a way nothing else could have been, and he returned to Washington looking and feeling as vigorous and sure of himself as at any time in his political life.

But courage and confidence, however important, would have been hardly enough without such other imponderable attributes as genuine sympathy for human feelings, humor, common sense, physical vitality—truly exceptional physical vitality for a man in his middle sixties—pride, determination, and a fundamental, unshakable Jacksonian faith in democracy, which to his mind mattered above all. Harry Truman trusted the American people. It would be said often, it sounded corny, and it was true. He loved the politician’s work of “getting out among the people,” loved seeing the country, loved the crowds. When local politicians came aboard the train to shake his hand, at one stop after another on this and later trips, and Truman took time for each of them, he was never just going through the motions, he genuinely liked such people, enjoyed seeing them.

As President he felt more than ever a need to see and make contact with what he called the everyday American. And he always felt better for it. On a recent evening in Washington, on one of his walks, he had decided to take a look at the mechanism that raised and lowered the middle span of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. Descending some iron steps, he came upon the bridge tender, eating his evening supper out of a tin bucket. Showing no surprise that the President of the United States had climbed down the catwalk and suddenly appeared before him, the man said, “You know, Mr. President, I was just thinking about you.” It was a greeting Truman adored and never forgot.

In the primary summer of 1940 in Missouri, he had worked his way through small-town crowds pumping hands and saying, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I am from Jackson County.” Now, across the West, the refrain, somewhat modified, was heard again: “I am coming put here so you can have a look at me and hear what I have to say, and then make up your mind as to whether you believe some of the things that have been said about your President.”

His sixteen-car “Presidential Special” departed from Union Station the night of June 3, Truman traveling again in his special armor-plated car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and accompanied by about twenty of the White House staff, including Secret Service agents, and fifty-nine reporters and photographers, which made it a record press party.

The excuse for this “nonpolitical” tour was an invitation to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley, but no one took the nonpolitical claim seriously, least of all Truman, who began with his first brief stop at noon the next day, June 4, at Crestline, Ohio. “On this nonpartisan, bipartisan trip that we are taking here,” he said to the obvious enjoyment of the crowd, “I understand there are a whole lot of Democrats present….”

The principal reason for declaring it an official presidential trip was that the Democratic Committee had no money. The cost was thus charged to the President’s annual travel fund, to the outrage of leading Republicans and much of the press.

What surprised everyone on board, and pleased Truman exceedingly, was the size of the crowds that turned out—1,000 people at little Crestline, 100,000 at Chicago, where he rode to the Palmer House in an open car.

At Omaha, an embarrassing foul-up caused by his old friend Eddie McKim produced much adverse publicity. Fewer than two thousand people attended a major speech, sitting down front in the huge Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward) Auditorium, leaving eight thousand freshly polished, empty seats stretching behind. McKim, in charge of arrangements, had neglected to publicize the fact that the speech was open to the public and not just to Truman’s old war outfit, the 35th Division, which was holding its reunion in Omaha. It was a stupid blunder. Photographs of the nearly vacant hall appeared all over the country, as a show not only of Truman’s pathetically low popularity but of obvious political ineptitude. Yet Truman did not seem to mind. He went on stage as if speaking to a packed house. Nor did he blame or criticize McKim. “I don’t give a damn whether there’s nobody there but you and me,” McKim would always remember him saying. “I am making a speech on the radio to the farmers. They won’t be there—they’ll be home listening to that radio. They’re the ones I’m going to talk to.”

Far more important to Truman, a better measure than the rows of empty chairs that night, was the welcome he had received in the streets of Omaha earlier the same day, when marching with the 35th Division. Wearing a light tan double-breasted gabardine suit and his favorite two-tone summer shoes, he stepped along at the head of his own Battery D, doffing a western-style hat right and left. He looked as happy as a man could be and the enormous crowd responded wholeheartedly—in Omaha, a Republican town. As Edward T. Folliard reported in the Washington Post, “They lined the streets in this Republican stronghold, 160,000 of them, and gave President Truman a welcome reminiscent of his ‘honeymoon’ days in the White House three years ago.” Frank Spina, Truman’s old barber, marched beside him, carrying the original Battery D guidon. Behind came Eddie Jacobson, Monsignor Tiernan, Eddie McKim, and Jim Pendergast.

The onlookers were thrilled and charmed. Mr. Truman, sensing their friendliness, never looked more pleased [said the Omaha Morning World Herald].

President Truman was at his best Saturday morning…. He marched jauntily, shoulders back. He smiled and waved his hat. Those watching the parade, astonished to see the President walking on the streets of Omaha, laughed and cheered.

In April, in a conversation in his office with Arthur Krock, in answer to Krock’s question whether he detected any change in his own makeup since becoming President, Truman had said he could think of nothing, except a growing sense of being “walled-in.” Now away from Washington, back among his own kind of people, people who would naturally laugh and cheer to see him walking their streets, he felt both free from the walls and much more himself. “The President, you know, is virtually in jail,” he had told the crowd by the tracks at his first stop at Crestline. “He goes from his study to his office and from his office to his study, and he has to have guards there all the time…but when you go out and see people and find out what people are thinking about, you can do a better job….” Now, again and again, he let his audiences know how much being with them was doing for him, how much it meant to him to see them, how buoyed up he felt by their numbers. “It almost overwhelms me to see all the people in western Nebraska in this town today,” he said at little Sidney at the western end of the state, and he was “certainly happy to see this enthusiastic crowd!” at Laramie, Wyoming. “My goodness!” he exclaimed looking over the turnout at Dillon, Montana.

At Butte, a cheering throng lined the sidewalks several deep beside a four-mile parade route. When his train pulled into Missoula late at night and a crowd waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, he appeared in his pajamas and bathrobe. “I am sorry I had gone to bed,” he said. “But I thought you would like to see what I look like, even if I didn’t have on any clothes.”

He was folksy—he just wanted to say “Howdy”—and often corny—he was on his way “down to Berkeley to get me a degree”—and the crowds grew steadily bigger.

They told me at a little town in Idaho at 5:15 A.M. the whole town was out [he wrote to Mary Jane]. I wasn’t up. At Pocatello, Id. at 7:15 there were 2000 people and at Ketchum, the P.O. for this place, everybody in the county was there.

There was another widely reported gaffe at Carey, a little town in southern Idaho. Dedicating the new Willa Coates Airport, Truman began to praise the brave boy who had died for his country, only to be informed by a tearful Mrs. Coates that “our Willa” was a girl and that she had died in a civilian plane crash.

Charlie Ross and Clark Clifford had been urging Truman to speak extemporaneously as much as possible, certain that with practice he could become as effective in front of a crowd as they had seen him be so often with small groups in his office. If only the public could know the Harry Truman he knew, Ross often said. In April Truman had spoken off-the-cuff to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in May to a rally of Young Democrats in Washington, and both times with notable success. The press had commented favorably on “the new Truman.” But at times now things he said made his staff cringe. “I have been in politics a long time, and it makes no difference what they say about you, if it isn’t so,” he declared unexpectedly at Pocatello. “If they can prove it on you, you are in a bad fix indeed. They have never been able to prove it on me.”

Reporters on board began singing a many-versed song that included the refrain:

They can’t prove nothing;

They ain’t got a thing on me.

I’m going down to Berkeley

For to get me a degree.

Editorials in the East deplored the carnival air of the trip. The President, said the Washington Evening Star, was making “a spectacle of himself.”

At Eugene, Oregon, recalling his meeting with Stalin at Potsdam, Truman suddenly confided to the crowd gathered about the rear platform of his car: “I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow.” The remark sent reporters scrambling and caused an immediate sensation. From the State Department, Robert Lovett put through an urgent call to Clifford, who tactfully advised the President not to repeat the remark ever again. And Truman never did. “Well, I guess I goofed,” he said, as he rolled on in good spirits.

Crossing into Washington, he made stops at Spokane, Ephrata, Wenatchee, Skykomish, Everett, Bremerton, Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. At Spokane, he judged, there were “about two acres of people.” At Seattle more than 100,000 people turned out, the largest crowds seen in Seattle in thirty years. Not even Franklin Roosevelt had been given such a reception.

By now a decided pattern had begun to emerge in the speeches, a free-swinging style with Congress the main target.

“You know, this Congress is interested in the welfare of the better classes. They are not interested in the welfare of the common everyday man,” he said at Bremerton.

“Pour it on, Harry!” someone shouted.

“I’m going to, I’m going to,” Truman responded happily.

“Educate yourselves,” he told his audience at Olympia. “You don’t want to do like you did in 1946. Two-thirds of you stayed at home in 1946, and look what a Congress we got! That is your fault, that is your fault.”

A remark to a reporter that the 80th Congress was the worst in history produced immediate howls of outrage from Republicans in Washington. Harry Truman, said House Majority Leader Charles Halleck, was the worst President in history, while Representative Cliff Clevenger of Ohio called him a “nasty little gamin” and a “Missouri jackass.” Speaking in Philadelphia, Senator Taft deplored the spectacle of an American President “blackguarding Congress at whistle stops across the country,” and Democratic Party Chairman Howard McGrath and his publicity director, Jack Redding, immediately saw an opportunity too good to miss. Telegrams went out to the mayors of thirty-five western towns and cities on Truman’s, route to ask if they agreed with Senator Taft’s description of their community as a whistle-stop. “Must have the wrong city,” responded the mayor of Eugene, Oregon. “Grand Isle was never a whistle-stop,” came a reply from Nebraska.

In his commencement address at Berkeley, which was carried on a nationwide radio broadcast, Truman turned to foreign affairs and delivered one of the finest, most thoughtful speeches of his presidency. The setting was the University of California’s huge, sun-drenched football stadium, with fully 55,000 people present, twice the usual attendance at such ceremonies.

The world, said Truman, was in a twilight time between a war so dearly won and “a peace that still eludes our grasp.” The chief cause of unrest was the Soviet Union. The great divide was not between the United States and the Soviet Union, but between the Soviet Union and all the free nations of the world. The refusal of the Soviet Union to work with its wartime Allies for world recovery and world peace was “the most bitter disappointment of our time.”

Different economic systems could live side by side and in peace, he said, but only providing one side was not bent on destroying the other by force.

Our policy will continue to be a policy of recovery, reconstruction, prosperity—and peace with freedom and justice. In its furtherance, we gladly join with all those of like purpose.

The only expansion we are interested in is the expansion of human freedom and the wider enjoyment of the good things of the earth in all countries.

The only prize we covet is the respect and good will of our fellow members of the family of nations.

The only realm in which we aspire to eminence exists in the minds of men, where authority is exercised through the qualities of sincerity, compassion and right conduct….

I believe the men and women of every part of the globe intensely desire peace and freedom. I believe good people everywhere will not permit their rulers, no matter how powerful they may have made themselves, to lead them to destruction. America has faith in people. It knows that rulers rise and fall, but that the people live on.

Two days later, on June 14, at Los Angeles, an estimated 1 million people packed both sides of his parade route from the railroad station to the Ambassador Hotel. “They clung to the roofs of buildings, jammed windows and fire escapes and crowded five deep along the sidewalk,” reported the Los Angeles Times. It was the first visit to the city by a President in thirteen years.

Los Angeles, said Truman with a grin that night at the Press Club, was quite a whistle-stop. Stepping up the attack on Congress, he called for action on price controls, housing, farm support, health insurance, and a broader base for Social Security. Only that morning he had vetoed a Republican bill that would have taken 750,000 people off Social Security.

Schools were overcrowded, he said, teachers underpaid. A bill for aid to education had passed the Senate and would take only ten minutes for the House to pass, but the House was “roosting on it,” he said. “No action! No action!”

The one issue passed over, in this and other speeches along the way, was civil rights. Truman’s advisers were divided over which would help him more, saying nothing about it for now, or speaking out. Truman had decided to say nothing for the time being.

When a smiling Jimmy Roosevelt turned up at the Ambassador Hotel for a private conference, and stood towering over Truman as they shook hands, Truman jabbed his forefinger into Roosevelt’s chest, and according to the only witness to the scene, Secret Service Agent Henry Nicholson, said to him, “Your father asked me to take this job. I didn’t want it…and if your father knew what you are doing to me, he would turn over in his grave. But get this straight: whether you like it or not, I am going to be the next President of the United States. That will be all. Good day.”

Turning east, the train crossed Arizona, New Mexico, and Kansas, with stops the whole way, then on into Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The crowds continued large and friendly. “Are the special privilege boys going to run the country, or are the people going to run it?” he asked. This was the theme. The election, he was sure, would ride on it.

He covered 9,505 miles through 18 states, delivered 73 speeches, and was seen by perhaps 3 million people. The train reached Union Station on a steamy Washington afternoon, Friday, June 18. Truman, his sunburned nose peeling, his lips cracked, was, as reported, “full of bounce.”

From the first day of the 1948 Republican National Convention, when former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce told the cheering, amused crowd that Harry Truman was a “gone goose,” to the final celebration on the convention floor, there was never anything but a feeling of victory in the air.

The convention opened in Philadelphia on Monday, June 21. Of the five most publicized contenders for first place on the Republican ticket—Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg, Stassen, and Martin—Dewey, the favorite of the party’s eastern liberal wing, showed almost overriding strength from the start and won on the third ballot, after Stassen refused to release his delegates to Taft. For his running mate, Dewey chose Governor Earl Warren of California, making it a “dreamboat of a ticket”—two popular, youthful, progressive governors of the two largest, wealthiest states in the Union. If Dewey seemed overly cool and self-assured in manner, Warren had more than compensating warmth. Nor had anyone forgotten how close Dewey had come the last time to defeating the Champion, Franklin Roosevelt. Time and Newsweek agreed that only a miracle or a series of unimaginable political blunders could save Harry Truman from overwhelming defeat.

Truman thought the Republicans had made a mistake. They would have been better off with Taft, he said privately; Taft was an honorable man who deserved the nomination and would have made a tougher opponent than Dewey.

In his acceptance speech, Dewey talked of national unity. “Our people yearn to higher ground, to find common purpose in the finer things which unite us…”

Truman had little time to dwell on the Republicans and their convention. On the day Dewey was chosen, Thursday, June 24, 1948, the Russians clamped a blockade on all rail, highway, and water traffic in and out of Berlin. The situation was extremely dangerous. Clearly Stalin was attempting to force the Western Allies to withdraw from the city. Except by air, the Allied sectors were entirely cut off. Nothing could come in or out. Two and a half million people faced starvation. As it was, stocks of food would last no more than a month. Coal supplies would be gone in six weeks.

Truman faced the issue with notable caution and firmness. It was suggested that the Allies force their way into Berlin by land, with an armored convoy. It was suggested that the United States retaliate by closing its ports and the Panama Canal to Russian ships. Truman rejected such ideas. When, at a meeting in his office with Forrestal, Lovett, and Secretary of the Army Royall, the question was asked whether American forces would remain in Berlin, Truman said there was no need for discussion on that: “We stay in Berlin, period.”

Royall asked skeptically if the consequences had been thought through.

“We will have to deal with the situation as it develops,” Truman said. “We are in Berlin by the terms of the agreement, and the Russians have no right to get us out by either direct or indirect pressure.”

Lovett cabled the American ambassador in London that night: “We stay in Berlin.”

General Clay, the American commander in Berlin, had already begun shipping supplies by air, on a very limited scale, a step considered little more than a palliative. On Monday, June 28, Truman ordered a full-scale airlift.

The same day he sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany, the giant planes known to the world as the kind that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. But in fact, these had not been modified to carry atomic bombs, a detail the Russians were not to know.

That the Berlin Airlift was about to become one of the most brilliant American achievements of the postwar era and one of Truman’s proudest decisions, strongly affecting the morale of Western, non-Communist Europe, and the whole course of the Cold War, as well as Truman’s own drive for reelection, was by no means apparent to anyone at this point. No one had any idea how things would turn out in Berlin, and Truman was no exception. General Bradley, who had replaced Eisenhower as Chief of Staff, thought the President was being far too vague, when, as Bradley later wrote, “we were nose to nose with massive Soviet military power.” It hardly seemed realistic to expect a major city to be supplied entirely by air for any but a very limited time.

In making his decision, for all the political heat and turmoil of the moment, Truman had consulted none of the White House staff or any of his political advisers. Indeed, throughout the blockade, as George Elsey would recall, the White House staff “had no direct role whatever in any decisions or in the execution of any of the carrying out of the airlift.” There was no talk of how the President’s handling of the crisis would make him look, or what political advantage was to be gained. And neither did Truman try to bolster the spirits of those around him by claiming the airlift would work. He simply emphasized his intention to stay in Berlin and left no doubt that he meant exactly what he said.

Summer had arrived in Washington and that same evening, Monday, June 28, the President and the First Lady took their dinner on the South Porch of the White House, Truman seated so he could enjoy the view. A scrap of paper on which he recorded the scene would later be found among his papers:

A ball game or two goes on in the park south of the lawn. Evidently a lot of competition, from the cheers and calls of the coaches. A robin hops around looking for worms, finds one and pulls with all his might to unearth him. A mockingbird imitates robin, jays, redbirds, crows, hawks—but has no individual note of his own. A lot of people like that. Planes take off and land at National Airport south of the Jefferson Memorial. It is a lovely evening….

In imagination he pictured the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal crossing the grounds of the Washington Monument, as it had long ago, barges anchored somewhere west of the Monument.

“I can see old J. Q. Adams going swimming in it and getting his clothes stolen by an angry woman who wanted a job,” he wrote. “Then I wake up, go upstairs and go to work….”

As Churchill had observed at Potsdam, Truman was a man of immense determination. “Stubborn as a mule,” others often commented. And in nothing that Truman, or anyone else wrote or said as 1948 unfolded is there any indication that once having made up his mind to run for reelection he was ever tempted to withdraw, or like the mockingbird, to sing a song not his own.

“I am not a quitter,” he would say, and that was all there was to it.

Yet game as he may have been, as restored in spirit as, he may have felt after his swing west, there was by all signs no cause for hope among Democrats. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, his prospects could not have appeared much more grim. It was not just that he faced a strong, heavily financed, supremely confident Republican opponent, or the threat of the Wallace movement cutting away at his support among liberals. The whole Democratic Party, the famous, disparate Democratic “coalition” of labor, intellectuals, city bosses, and southern segregationists fabricated by Franklin Roosevelt, was coming to pieces. Harold Ickes, as if to settle old scores with Truman, wrote to tell him:

You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity, or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry. Have you ever seen the ice on the pond suddenly break in every conceivable direction under the rays of a warming sun? This is what has happened to the Democratic Party under you, except that your party has not responded to bright sunshine. It has broken up spontaneously.

The biggest break came now from Ickes’s own liberal side of the party, the doctrinaire New Dealers. The call for Eisenhower started by Roosevelt’s sons had swelled to a chorus, with Claude Pepper, Chester Bowles, former head of the Office of Price Administration, who was now running for governor of Connecticut, Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, who was running for the Senate, all favoring an Eisenhower draft at the convention. The Americans for Democratic Action, the ADA, recently formed as a non-Communist liberal response to the Wallace movement and sometimes known as the “New Deal in Exile,” voiced its preference for Eisenhower over Truman, and if not Eisenhower, then Justice William O. Douglas. Such professional Democrats as Jake Arvey of Chicago, Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York, and Boss Frank Hague of New Jersey also decided it was time for Eisenhower. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Phil Murray of the CIO joined the Eisenhower movement. And so did Alabama Senators Hill and Sparkman and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, making it appear almost as though the old Roosevelt coalition were regrouping around the glamorous general, who by this time had become president of Columbia University.

And all this was made more remarkable by the fact that no one knew anything of Eisenhower’s politics. No one could say even whether he was a Democrat, let alone what his position on issues might be—on civil rights, Social Security, taxes. Or how to keep peace with Stalin.

To Truman and those loyal to him, the revolt of the old New Dealers was especially grating. It seemed besides an act of personal betrayal, wholly unprincipled and intellectually dishonest. Truman had borne the banner of the New Deal as faithfully as any successor to Franklin Roosevelt possibly could have, was their feeling. No more progressive program had ever been put before Congress than the Truman program. That was a matter of record.

Though Eisenhower had stated publicly several times that he was not a candidate and did not want the nomination, this did little to dissuade his new admirers. Over the Fourth of July weekend, a week in advance of the Democratic Convention, the Eisenhower faction, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, wired each of the 1,592 delegates to choose the “ablest, strongest man available” as their candidate, adding that “no man in these critical days can refuse the call to duty and leadership implicit in the nomination and virtual election to the Presidency of the United States.”

Truman, concluded the veteran New York Times political reporter James C. Hagerty, could look forward to “a hard and possibly losing fight for the nomination….”

In six months he had faced some of the roughest abuse and difficulties of any President in history. He had been castigated by southern Democrats over civil rights, repudiated by a Republican Congress, ridiculed for his White House balcony and his Missouri cronies. He had faced the pressures of the Palestine issue, the increasing threat of war over Berlin, watched his popularity disintegrate in the polls, seen himself portrayed in the press as inept and pathetic. His party was broke. And now the New Dealers were abandoning him, and noisily. No President in memory, not even Herbert Hoover in his darkest days, had been treated with such open contempt by his own party.

“If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen,” Truman liked to say, an old line in Missouri that he had first heard in the 1930s, from another Jackson County politician named E. T. (“Buck”) Purcell.

To a few former New Dealers the whole spectacle was appalling. “I am simply aghast at the unfair way in which President Truman is being ‘judged,’ if the current lynch-law atmosphere can be called ‘judging’!” recorded David Lilienthal in his diary. “And the attitude of liberals and progressives, now whooping it up for Eisenhower or Douglas, is the hardest to understand or to be other than damn mad about.”

Truman’s record [continued Lilienthal on July 5] is that of a man who, facing problems that would have strained and perhaps even floored Roosevelt at his best, has met these problems head on in almost every case. The way he took on the aggression of Russia…his civil rights program, upon which he hasn’t welched or trimmed—My God! What do these people want?

If it is said that he wobbled on veterans’ housing or Palestine or this or that, did F.D.R. never wobble? Don’t be funny; F.D.R. wobbled through the Neutrality Act and Arms Embargo (isolation of the very worst and blindest kind); he wobbled on economic matters all the time…Did F.D.R. ever stand up for public development of power, or human rights, or labor, essentially any more firmly than Truman? And who knows what Eisenhower would do on any of these issues! Bah!

It is grossly unfair. They say the people want someone else; that the people aren’t for him. Well, who in the hell but the Southern extremists and the perfectionist “liberals” together have created the impression (eagerly encouraged, of course, by the reactionaries and the Republicans) that the people don’t have confidence in him?

That makes me mad and rather ill, these hounders of a real man.

When Matt Connelly reported the defection of Frank Hague to Truman, he merely said, “All right, let him go. I never did like him anyhow.” Writing in his diary later the same day, Truman would describe Hague, Jimmy Roosevelt, Jake Arvey, and the ADA as “double-crossers all,” adding, “But they’ll get nowhere—a double dealer never does.” The Democratic leaders opposing his nomination were all acting very foolishly. He was certain Eisenhower was not a candidate, perhaps not even a Democrat. “I don’t think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway,” he wrote to a friend. The influence of a sitting President—as leader of his party—was too great to be thwarted. Not even Theodore Roosevelt with all his popularity had been able to deny the Republican nomination to the incumbent Taft in 1912, he reminded his staff.

Did he think he would have enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot at Philadelphia, Truman was asked at his press conference on July 1.

“Sure,” he said.

But he may not have been so sanguine as professed—not according to a f story later recounted by Arthur Krock, whose source apparently was Kenneth Royall.

At a “bull session” over drinks among some half-dozen administration figures on the South Portico of the White House one evening shortly before the convention, Truman asked what they all thought would happen were Eisenhower’s name put in nomination. Claude Pepper, already in Philadelphia, had proposed that the convention draft Eisenhower as a “national” rather than a party candidate. Everyone but Royall assured the President he would make short shrift of any such attempt. Truman, noticing Royall’s silence, asked for his view. Ike would be nominated by acclamation, Royall said, causing a furor among the others. Truman said nothing, but afterward, at the White House door, an usher told Royall the President wished to see him upstairs. He found Truman in the Oval Study with John Snyder.

“I wanted to tell you,” Truman said, “that I agree with you.”

Then, according to the story, Truman asked how the presentation of Ike’s name could be prevented, and Royall, assuring Truman that the general, too, had the same objective, agreed to see what he could do. “In a telephone conference with Ike,” wrote Arthur Krock, “Royall worked out the statement that Eisenhower sent to Pepper and others that put an end to the effort to present his name.”

On Friday, July 9, Eisenhower again said no, his refusal this time “final and complete,” and “no matter under what terms.” On reading the Eisenhower telegram, Boss Hague reportedly crunched out his cigar, saying, “Truman, Harry Truman. Oh my God!”

Claude Pepper, refusing to give up, declared it “no time for politics as usual” and announced he would run himself. His candidacy lasted a day.

Clark Clifford slipped in and out of Philadelphia to pass the word that the President had telephoned William O. Douglas, who was on vacation in Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Douglas was Truman’s choice for Vice President. He would give the ticket geographical balance. He was youthful, strong on civil rights, a solid New Dealer. Douglas only wanted time to consider.

Clifford was in the thick of things as usual, but more out of devotion to Truman than any high expectations. “None of us,” he later admitted, “really felt at the time that the nomination meant very much. Our aim was just to get the President nominated. Because it would have been an unconscionable reflection on him, if after four years, the party had turned him down and gone to somebody else.”

Though the Eisenhower boom had passed, it had been a measure of how intensely fearful Democrats had become of a debacle in November. It was not just that Harry Truman would fail to be reelected, but that he would pull everyone down with him. After sixteen years with the all-time winner, FDR, as their standardbearer, they now faced the prospect of a certain loser. And if there was anyone left banking on a revival of party spirit, once everybody was gathered in Philadelphia, the illusion was quickly disabused. The newly arrived delegates who wandered through the city’s empty Sabbath streets on July 10, the day before the opening gavel, looked, it was reported, like nothing so much as mourners at a funeral.

“We got the wrong rigs for this convention,” a cab driver was quoted. “They shoulda given us hearses.”

Attendance was below expectations. Hotels that had been booked solid, their lobbies a continuous hubbub during the Republican Convention just weeks before, were receiving cancelations. Bunting and flags left over from the Republican affair looked pathetically shopworn.

“You could cut the gloom with a corn knife,” remembered Alben Barkley. “The very air smelled of defeat.”

The crowd expected for the opening day at Convention Hall failed to materialize. The galleries were largely empty. Delegates down on the floor milled about during the speeches, or shifted restlessly in their seats, fanning themselves furiously in the almost unbearable heat, for though the auditorium had been refurbished at great expense for this and the Republican Convention, there was no air conditioning and the big television lights, in combination with Philadelphia’s oppressive summer weather, had made the place a steambath. The temperature at the rostrum was 93 degrees.

It was the presence and paraphernalia of television, the lights, cables, wires, microphones, amplifiers, cameras, the swarms of technicians, and the theatrics involved, that gave the event what novelty and interest it had. For many who attended, television would be the best-remembered part of the 1948 Democratic Convention.

Everything possible had been done to make the “political show” come off, and like their Republican counterparts, one Democrat after another now submitted to pancake makeup and eye shadow before going to the rostrum or in preparation for a “candid” off-the-floor interview. Several women addressed the convention wearing brown lipstick, because they were told it would look better on the black-and-white home screens. Reporters in the press gallery wore dark glasses in order to work in the fierce glare of the lights.

At the White House, arrangements had been made for Truman to watch as much or as little of the proceedings as he wished. A new console type DuMont television set with a 12-inch screen had been brought into his office and positioned against the wall to his left. So, in somewhat fuzzy black-and-white images, he would follow the proceedings right from his chair, like no President ever before. When television cameras were set up in the press room for the first time on the afternoon of the 12th, for an NBC broadcast of a half-hour discussion with several White House correspondents, Truman and his staff gathered about the new set to watch.

William O. Douglas had by now decided to refuse second place on the ticket, for the reason, he told Truman, that he wished to remain on the Supreme Court. Truman was deeply hurt. “I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas and he cut the limb out from under me,” he remarked to his staff. Reportedly Douglas had told others he did not want to be number two man to a number two man.

From the podium at Philadelphia that night, in a rousing keynote address, Alben Barkley brought the convention to life for the first time. The band played “My Old Kentucky Home.” Delegates cheered and stomped. It was a speech made for the occasion, as the old warhorse politician, an orator of the old school and a sentimental, favorite Democrat who had been born in a log cabin, evoked the past glories of the New Deal and heaped unmerciful scorn on the opposition. And it was a speech, not incidentally, made for television. Truman, watching at the White House, was nearly as pleased as the crowd at Convention Hall.

Dewey, in his acceptance speech, had vowed to clean the cobwebs from Washington. Barkley, with perspiration pouring from his brow and nose, declared he was not an expert on cobwebs. “But if memory does not betray me, when the Democratic Party took over the government sixteen years ago, even the spiders were so weak from starvation that they could not weave a cobweb in any department of the government in Washington.”

For the first time it seemed a real convention. Barkley was a hero and a favorite for second place on the ticket. There was even talk of Barkley for President.

Yet Barkley had never said a word about victory in November and mentioned Truman only once in a speech lasting more than an hour. Truman, as much as he had enjoyed the performance, commented that Barkley had all the markings of a man trying for the presidency.

Howard McGrath called from Philadelphia to find out if the President had seen the speech and to say it had put Barkley “out in front” for the nomination for Vice President. If Barkley was what the convention wanted, Truman said, then Barkley was his choice, too.

He tried to reach Barkley by phone that night, but Barkley had gone to bed.

Until now Truman had felt he needed someone like Douglas, a strong liberal, to run with him, and preferably someone younger than he. Barkley was neither. At seventy-one, he was seven years older than Truman, and coming from Kentucky, he would bring no geographical balance to the ticket. The contrast with the Republican ticket could be damaging.

But by phone the next morning Truman asked Barkley why he had never told him he wanted to be Vice President.

“I didn’t know you wanted the nomination,” Truman said.

“Mr. President, you do not know it yet,” Barkley answered.

“Well, if I had known you wanted it, I certainly would have been agreeable,” Truman said, which though hardly a ringing confirmation was sufficient for both to consider the decision settled, and almost immediately afterward in Philadelphia, McGrath told reporters that if the convention saw fit to nominate Senator Barkley for Vice President, the President would be “most happy.” (Barkley, who had been available as a vice-presidential choice at every convention since 1928, told friends that if the nomination were to be his, he wanted it quickly. “I don’t want it passed around so long it is like cold biscuit.”)

As it was, Truman showed more distress over the Douglas refusal than enthusiasm over Barkley. To his staff, he seemed oddly, almost irresponsibly disinterested in the whole matter. He, if anyone, should have appreciated the potential importance of the decision. Yet there was no sign of thoughtful deliberation on his part. “Talking about the vice-presidency,” wrote Eben Ayers, “the President said he never did care much who was nominated with him.”

Excitement over Barkley was quickly eclipsed as a floor fight broke out over civil rights.

“A Negro alternate from St. Louis makes a minority report suggesting the unseating of the Mississippi delegation,” Truman recorded, as he watched the drama unfold on the tiny black-and-white screen. “Vaughan is his name. He’s overruled. Then Congressman Dawson of Chicago, another Negro, makes an excellent talk on civil rights. These two colored men are the only speakers to date who seem to be for me wholeheartedly.”

The following day, Wednesday, July 14, the day scheduled for Truman’s nomination and acceptance speech, the uproar over civil rights turned angry, as a vehement ADA faction headed by Mayor Hubert Humphrey demanded a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform. The existing plank was substantially what it had been in the 1944 platform—mild and ambiguous enough to mollify the southern delegations—and the wording had been agreed to at the White House, Truman and his advisers having decided now was no time to alienate the southerners. Humphrey was warned he would split the party and ruin his own career if he persisted.

But Humphrey and his forces held out for a plank that would emphatically endorse Truman’s own civil rights program, item by item—anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, fair employment laws, an end to segregation in the armed services. In bitter, heated sessions of the platform committee on the top floor of the Bellevue-Stratford, Humphrey charged that the administration plank was a “sellout” to states’ rights over human rights. When the committee approved the moderate plank, the Humphrey forces took the fight to the convention floor. “We were inherently stronger than Truman’s followers had believed,” remembered one of them, Paul Douglas, a candidate for the Senate in Illinois.

As the majority report of the platform committee was being read before the convention and Humphrey sat near the rostrum waiting his turn to speak, Boss Ed Flynn beckoned Humphrey to show him the minority report, and having looked it over, Flynn said, “Young man, that’s just what this party needs.”

Unlike Jake Arvey and Frank Hague, Flynn had thought the whole Eisenhower idea silly, and that those who imagined otherwise were hacks and amateurs, blind to his own favorite political maxim: “Never confuse wishes with facts.” There was no question that Harry Truman would be nominated, Flynn had been saying, and he wanted to see Harry Truman win.

Humphrey stepped to the podium, his face shining, the audience suddenly hushed. He spoke less than ten minutes and he made history. It was time for the Democratic Party to move forward. “There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years late…. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

As the convention roared its approval, the California and Illinois delegations marched into the aisles. Others followed, joined by a forty-piece band led by James C. Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, while here and there glum, silent southern delegations kept their seats. At the podium Sam Rayburn of Texas, permanent chairman of the convention, looked down disapprovingly, fearing a southern “walkout” would destroy whatever slim chance Truman might have in November and devastate the party, possibly forever. Rayburn tried to stall a vote, but when it came the Humphrey forces won a resounding victory.

Told the Alabama delegation intended to lead a walkout that night, on the final roll call, Rayburn ordered a voice vote instead and the convention again thundered its approval.

At the White House, angered by the turn events were taking, Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as “crackpots” who hoped the South would bolt. But the fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reelect Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.

There were television cameras at Union Station for the President’s departure that evening and there would be more cameras at the Philadelphia station when he arrived. “No privacy sure enough now,” he wrote, though he remained calm and composed. He had a surprise for the convention and he knew what the effect would be. On their home screens, those still relatively few Americans who owned television sets in 1948 saw him sitting quietly at the window of his private railroad car waiting to leave the station.

The First Lady, Margaret, Charlie Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Ayers, Connelly, and Sam Rosenman were’on board with him, and had dinner en route, while Truman kept to himself in his room going over his notes. It was by radio, approximately halfway to Philadelphia, that he heard the Alabama delegation and part of the Mississippi delegation stage their walkout. “Hard to hear,” he noted. “My daughter and my staff try to keep me from listening. Think maybe I’ll be upset. I won’t be.”

At Philadelphia, where a fine rain was falling, he stepped from the train at 9:15, looking relaxed and spotless in a white linen suit. From the station he was driven directly to the convention hall, now packed to capacity, the crowd noisy and full of anticipation—and suffering intensely from the heat, suit jackets long since discarded, ties and collars undone, shirts stained dark with perspiration.

The seconding speeches had begun and as they dragged on, Truman was kept out of sight, first in McGrath’s so-called “office,” a stifling room with no windows, then in the somewhat cooler air on an outdoor ramp near the stage entrance, overlooking an alley and the railroad tracks. He was joined by Alben Barkley and together they sat chatting side by side hour after hour, Truman in a straight-backed wooden chair, Barkley in a more accommodating red leather armchair that someone had borrowed from the speaker’s platform.

To many who had attended other national conventions over the years, this one was as bungled, as badly managed as any in memory—Newsweek called it the worst-managed, most dispirited convention in American political annals—and the idea that a President of the United States had to wait his turn as Truman did, under such conditions, seemed the final straw. The scene would be portrayed in some accounts as one of the extreme low points of Truman’s career. However, neither Truman nor Barkley saw it that way. Barkley would remember having “a very agreeable visit,” during which they talked about “many things: politics, trivia, how to bring up daughters….” To Truman, too, it was “an interesting and instructive evening,” as he recorded in his diary. Tom Evans, remembering the “hot, horrible night,” would describe Truman sitting calmly in his white suit, “and I give you my word of honor, there wasn’t a wrinkle in it—he was cool…collected…it didn’t seem to bother him at all.”

To be a professional in politics required patience, often great patience, and the strength not to take things too personally, and Truman and Barkley were two veteran professional politicians.

“They did what you do under such circumstances,” recalled George Elsey. “They waited.”

Nearly four hours went by, as the seconding speeches were followed by the balloting for President. At 12:42 Truman was finally nominated, receiving 948 votes, while 263 votes went to Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the last-minute candidate of the South. Then, by acclamation, Barkley was nominated for Vice President.

So it was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Truman and Barkley at last made their entrance, striding onto the platform as the band played “Hail to the Chief.”

Considering the time, the fatigue of the crowd, it was a scene made for failure. Any radio or television audience that Truman might have hoped for was long since asleep. To make matters a little worse, the sister of a former Pennsylvania senator suddenly released a flock of white pigeons—“doves of peace” supposedly—from a floral Liberty Bell, where they had been held all night, cooped up in the heat. The distraught birds careened desperately into the air every which way, smashing into the balcony, the lights, bombarding spectators, and swooping so low over the rostrum that Chairman Rayburn had to fend off several at once, to the delight of the crowd as well as Truman and Barkley who were laughing uproariously. (Years later Truman would describe how one pigeon had actually landed on Rayburn’s bald head, a claim that Rayburn, who saw nothing funny in the situation, stoutly denied, telling an interviewer, “Harry Truman’s a goddamn liar. No pigeon ever lit on my head.”)

Barkley spoke first, and briefly. Then came Truman’s turn.

He advanced to the microphones, his natty white suit gleaming now in the full glare of the lights. And despite the hour, the heat, the discomfort and weariness of his audience, he did what no one would have thought possible. Wasting no time with pleasantries or grand phrases, his head up as he spoke without a script, his voice strong, hands chopping the air, he brought the convention immediately to its feet cheering.

“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that.” Not until this moment had anyone used the word “win” as though he meant it.

The Democratic Party would win in November because the Democratic Party was the people’s party. The Republicans were the party of the privileged few, as always.

For the first time since 1945 he was speaking not as a leader by accident, by inheritance, but by the choice of his party. He was neither humble nor elegant nor lofty. The contrast with Dewey’s stilted acceptance speech from the same platform could not have been greater. In manner as well as content he was drawing the line so there could be no mistaking one candidate for the other. Mere victory was not the purpose, Dewey had proclaimed, as if he had already been elected. “Our task,” Dewey had said, “is to fill our victory with such meaning that mankind everywhere, yearning for freedom, will take heart and move forward….” Truman declared: “Now it is time for us to get together and beat the common enemy.” He was cracker-barrel plain, using words like “rotten” (for the Republican tax bill) and “poppycock” (for the Republican platform promise to increase Social Security benefits). Life magazine called it his “Li’l Abner Ozark style.” It was exactly in the spirit of the vehement backcountry politics he loved, and where he knew he belonged, the tradition of Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, alive and full of fight.

He listed the gains for farmers, for labor and the poor achieved under sixteen years of Democratic leadership, and he tore into the Republican-dominated 80th Congress for holding up progress on housing, aid to education, medical care, and yes, civil rights.

Everybody knows that I recommended to the Congress the civil rights program. I did that because I believed it to be my duty under the Constitution. Some of the members of my own party disagree with me violently on this matter. But they stand up and do it openly. People can tell where they stand. But the Republicans all professed to be for these measures. But the Congress failed to act….

Indeed, he said, there was a long list of promises in the new Republican platform, things of great importance that the Republicans claimed they wanted but that the Republicans who controlled Congress had prevented his administration from doing.

It was then he unveiled his surprise, his bombshell, and speaking so rapidly the words seemed to run together, as though all joined by hyphens.

I am, therefore, calling this Congress back into session July 26.

On the 26th of July, which out in Missouri we call “Turnip Day,” I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis—which they are saying they are for ‘in their platform…. I shall ask them to act upon…aid to education, which they say they are for…civil rights legislation, which they say they are for….

The cheering and stomping in the hall was so great he had to shout to be heard.

Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind the Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the 80th Congress. They can do this job in 15 days, if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office.

He was calling the Republicans’ bluff—“Let ’em make good!”—and the delegates were ecstatic. He had “set the convention on fire,” said The New York Times. “He walked out there,” remembered Clark Clifford, “and reached down within himself, found the strength and the inspiration to make that fiery speech which was necessary to put him over.”

Critics on the left and the right found themselves grudgingly moved by such nerve and audacity in the face of the odds and by his effect on the crowd. “They sensed,” wrote Max Lerner, “that this was the most militant Presidential acceptance speech in either party since Bryan. They liked the fact that he came out of his corner fighting…. It was a great speech for a great occasion, and as I listened I found myself applauding.”

Even The New Republic bestowed the ultimate compliment: the speech was as “cannily suited” to the time and setting as any Franklin Roosevelt might have made. “For that night at least, Harry Truman was a real leader.”

“You can’t stay cold about a man who sticks out his chin and fights,” Time reported one delegate exclaiming.

Truman was likened to the brave sea captain who rallies the crew to save the sinking ship. In fact, he was exactly like the Missouri artillery captain in the Vosges Mountains in 1918 who when his battery panicked under enemy attack stood by his guns and with a fierce harangue got his men back in order again.

The Republicans charged him with crude politics. The call for a special session of Congress was “the act of a desperate man,” “the last hysterical gasp from an expiring administration.”

“Of course, it was politics,” wrote Jonathan Daniels, “and effective politics, tough and native.”

What it did above all, as Truman intended, was to put the focus on Congress and thus on the split between those Republicans who, like Dewey and Earl Warren, favored much that had been set in motion since the 1930s by the New Deal, and those Republicans who remained obstructionists. It made the 80th Congress the issue, put the Republicans on the defense, and left Dewey with the dubious choice of either standing up for the 80th Congress, and thereby assume a share of responsibility for its failings, or remain aloof, which would seem less than courageous for a standardbearer.

As a political strategist Truman had been “devilishly astute,” Speaker of the House Joe Martin later conceded. No President had called an emergency session of Congress in an election year since 1856. “On the 25th of July,” went an old Missouri saying, “sow your turnips wet or dry.” The Congress that met on the 26th (the 25th was a Sunday) would be known as the Turnip Congress.

“Arrived in Washington at the White House at 5:30 A.M., my usual time getting up,” Truman jotted on his calendar for July 15, after the return from Philadelphia.

But go to bed at 6:00 and listen to the news. Sleep until 9:15, order breakfast and go to the office at 10:00. I called a special session of the Congress. My, how my opposition screams. I’m going to attempt to make them meet their platform promises before the election. That is according to the “kept” press and the opposition leadership “cheap politics.” I wonder what “expensive politics” will be like!

In a red-brick auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, two days later, a hurriedly assembled conference of states’ rights Democrats, “Dixiecrats” as they now called themselves, waved Confederate flags and cheered Alabama’s former Governor Frank M. Dixon as he denounced Truman’s civil rights program as an effort “to reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race,” then unanimously chose Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to be their candidate for President, and for Vice President, Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi. The Dixiecrat platform called for “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” Their hope was to deny both Truman and Dewey a majority and thus throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Asked why he was breaking with the Democratic Party now, when Roosevelt had made similar promises as Truman on civil rights, Strom Thurmond responded, “But Truman really means it.”

On July 27, once again at the Philadelphia Convention Hall, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Citizens of America, with more than three thousand delegates—far more than at either the Republican or Democratic conventions—rallied to acclaim Wallace their candidate for the presidency, and Senator Glen H. Taylor, the “Singing Cowboy” of Idaho, as their improbable choice for a running mate. (Taylor, a Democrat, had campaigned for the Senate in 1944 singing, “Oh, Give Me a Home by the Capitol Dome.”)

Black delegates were present in impressive numbers. Nearly a third of the delegates were women. Youth predominated. The average Progressive on hand in Philadelphia was described as twenty years younger and 30 pounds lighter than his or her Democratic or Republican counterpart. Comparably little alcohol was consumed and there were no “smoke-filled rooms” this time. But there was also a noticeable absence of political experience on hand, and though neither Wallace nor Taylor, nor any but a small minority of delegates, were Communists, the conspicuous presence of such celebrated pro-Communists as Paul Robeson and New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, plus the obvious dominating presence of Communists throughout the whole new helter-skelter Progressive organization, was to many observers and much of the country deeply disturbing.

As he had from the start of his “crusade,” Wallace refused to repudiate his Communist support. He would not repudiate any support that came to him, he said, “on the basis of interest in peace.” Senator Taylor stressed the distinction between “pink” Communists and “red” Communists, telling reporters that the pink variety wished to change the American system through evolution rather than revolution, and that they would support the Progressive cause. In contrast, the red variety would be backing Dewey on the theory that revolution would inevitably follow another Hoover-style administration.

The Progressive platform that emerged from the convention was virtually no different from the Communist Party platform in its denunciation of the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the new draft law, and called for the destruction of American nuclear weapons, which were still the only nuclear weapons known to exist. When a Vermont farmer named James Hayford introduced an amendment saying it was not the Progressive Party’s intention to endorse the foreign policy of any other country, the idea was denounced as “the reflection of pressure from outside” and voted down—which Wallace knew to be a mistake but did nothing to stop.

Wallace delivered his acceptance speech at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park before an exuberant crowd of more than thirty thousand people who had paid for their seats, a Progressive innovation to meet expenses. He blamed American policy for most of the world’s troubles and tensions, never once criticizing the Soviet Union. Concerning Berlin, he said, there was nothing to lose by giving it up in the search for peace. “We stand against the kings of privilege who own the old parties…[who] attempt to control our thoughts and dominate the life of man everywhere in the world.”

IV

In the stifling, relentless heat of summer in Washington, the Turnip Congress got reluctantly under way. Tension over Berlin increased almost by the hour. And to Truman’s extreme annoyance, James Forrestal launched a campaign behind closed doors to turn custody of the atomic bomb over to the military chiefs.

From testimony being given before the House Un-American Activities Committee by a woman named Elizabeth Bentley and a Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, both former Communists, it also appeared a major spy scandal was unfolding.

Visitors to the President’s office found him looking tired and preoccupied. Bess and Margaret having made their annual summer departure for Missouri, he was feeling particularly alone again. “It is hot and humid and lonely,” he wrote the night after putting them on the train. “Why in hell does anybody want to be a head of state? Damned if I know.”

He had had no change of heart about Berlin. American forces would remain. That was his decision, he said again, meeting with Marshall and Forrestal on July 19, and he would stand by it until all diplomatic means had been tried to reach some kind of accommodation to avoid war. “We’ll stay in Berlin—come what may…. I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make,” he noted privately. He was convinced, as was Marshall, that the future of Western Europe was at stake in Berlin, not to say the well-being of the 2.5 million people in the city’s Allied sectors. Stalin was obviously determined to force the Allies out of Berlin. “If we wished to remain there, we would have to make a show of strength,” Truman later wrote. “But there was always the risk that Russian reaction might lead to war. We had to face the possibility that Russia might deliberately choose to make Berlin the pretext for war….” The Allies had all of 6,500 troops in Berlin—3,000 American, 2,000 British, 1,500 French—while the Russians had 18,000 backed by an estimated 300,000 in the east zone of Germany.

With the airlift now in its fourth week, heavily laden American and British transports were roaring into Berlin hundreds of times a day, and in all weather. They came in low, one after another, lumbering just over the tops of the ruined buildings, as crowds gathered in clusters to watch. German children with toy planes played “airlift” in the rubble as the real drama went on overhead.

It had been General Clay’s initial estimate that possibly 700 tons of food could be delivered to the beleaguered city by air in what would be a “very big operation.” Already some days the tonnage was twice that and now, too, almost unimaginably, coal was arriving out of the sky by the planeload. Pilots and crew were making heroic efforts. At times planes were landing as often as every four minutes—British Yorks and Dakotas, American C-47s and the newer, much larger, four-engine C-54s, which had been dispatched to Germany from Panama, Hawaii, and Alaska. Most planes averaged three flights a day from Frankfurt to Berlin’s Gatow or Templehof fields, a distance of 275 miles. Ground crews worked round the clock. “We were proud of our Air Force during the war. We’re prouder of it today,” said The New York Times. Already, three American crewmen had been killed when their C-47 crashed.

Still, the effort was not enough. On July 15, a record day, 1,450 tons were flown into Berlin. Yet to sustain the city 2,000 tons of food alone were needed every day, plus 12,000 tons of fuel and supplies. In winter, the demands for fuel would be far greater. The mayor of Berlin had said it would be impossible to provide the necessary food and coal supplies by air. “But every expert knows,” reported a London paper, “that aircraft, despite their immense psychological effect, cannot be relied upon to provision Berlin in the winter months.” Allied officials in Berlin worried about the increased activity of Russian Yak fighter planes in the air corridors.

Secretary of the Army Royall ordered General Clay to fly home to Washington to report to the President, which Truman thought a mistake. (“My muttonhead Secretary [of the] Army ordered Clay home from Germany and stirred up a terrific how-dy-do for no good reason,” he wrote to Bess.) At a National Security Council meeting on July 22, Clay said the people of Berlin would stand firm, even if it meant further hardships. Probably the Russians would try to stop any attempt by an armed convoy to break through at this stage, but they were not likely to interfere with air traffic, unless, of course, they were determined to provoke a war. Did the Russians want war, Truman asked. Clay did not think so. No one could be sure. Truman rejected the convoy idea.

When Truman inquired what problems might result from increasing the airlift, General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force Chief of Staff, voiced concern that American air strength elsewhere in the world would dangerously be reduced. But that was a risk Truman would take. The airlift would be vastly increased, he decided, expressing again his “absolute determination” to stay in Berlin. More of the big C-54 transports would be sent. Clay ordered another Berlin airfield built and in response to his call, 30,000 Berliners went to work to clear the rubble and grade the runways.

“There is considerable political advantage to the Administration in its battle with the Kremlin,” James Rowe had written in his effort to outline a political strategy for 1948. “In time of crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.” So by such reasoning, the Berlin crisis, if kept in bounds, was made to order for Truman. Yet in nothing he said or wrote is there a sign of his playing the situation for “political advantage.” Rather, the grave responsibilities he bore as President at this juncture seem to have weighed more heavily on him than at any time since assuming office. He felt the campaign and its distractions, the drain it put on his time and strength, could not be coming at a worse time, as he told Churchill in a letter on July 10:

I am going through a terrible political “trial by fire.” Too bad it must happen at this time.

Your country and mine are founded on the fact that the people have the right to express themselves on their leaders, no matter what the crisis….

We are in the midst of grave and trying times. You can look with satisfaction upon your great contribution to the overthrow of Nazism and Fascism in the world. “Communism”—so-called—is our next great problem. I hope we can solve it without the “blood and tears” the other two cost.

Only the day before the National Security Council meeting about Berlin On July 21, at the meeting arranged by Forrestal to discuss the custody of the atomic bomb, Truman had looked dreadful and in a moment of annoyance revealed as vividly as he ever would how much more he dwelt on the horror of the atomic bomb than most people, even those close to him, imagined, or than he wished anyone to know.

“The President greeted us rather solemnly. He looked worn and grim; none of the joviality that he sometimes exhibits, and we got right down to business,” wrote David Lilienthal in his diary that night, when the whole scene and everything said were still fresh in his mind.

It was an important session, and a kind of seriousness hung over it that wasn’t relieved a bit, needless to say, by the nature of the subject and the fact that even at that moment some terrible thing might happen in Berlin…. I rather think it was one of the most important meetings I have ever attended.

Present besides Truman, Forrestal, and Lilienthal were the four other members of the Atomic Energy Commission, plus Secretary of the Army Royall, Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, and Donald F. Carpenter, an executive of the Remington Arms Company who was chairman of the Military Liaison Committee of the National Military Establishment.

It was Carpenter who opened the discussion by reading aloud a formal letter requesting an order from the President that would turn custody of the atomic bomb over to the Joint Chiefs, on the grounds that those who would be ultimately responsible for use of the weapon should have it in their possession, to increase “familiarity” with it and to “unify” command. Truman, who did not appreciate being read to in such fashion, cut him off, saying curtly, “I can read.” He turned to Lilienthal, who said the real issue was one of broad policy and that the bomb must not be the responsibility of anyone other than the President, because of his constitutional roles as both Commander in Chief and Chief Magistrate. Civilian control was essential, Lilienthal said.

But then Symington spoke, delivering an incongruously lighthearted account of a visit to Los Alamos where “our fellas” told him they should have the bomb just to be sure it worked, though one scientist had said he did not think it should ever be used.

“I don’t either,” Truman interjected, his face expressionless. He went on. “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that…[and here, as Lilienthal recorded, Truman paused and looked down at his desk “rather reflectively”]—that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. [“I shall never forget this particular expression,” wrote Lilienthal.] It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”

In times past Truman had spoken of the bomb as a military weapon like any other. In times past he had spoken of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets. Not any more. It was an extraordinary declaration, refuting absolutely—as Lilienthal understood—any thought that Truman was insensitive to the horror of the bomb or took lightly his responsibilities as Commander in Chief.

Yet Symington seemed not to understand Truman’s point or the mood of the moment. “Our fellas need to get used to handling it,” Symington repeated, referring now to the military.

They had to understand, Truman said sternly and solemnly, that he had other considerations to weigh. “This is no time to be juggling an atom bomb around.”

He rose from his desk. He had had more than enough. The discussion was ended. The others stood and departed.

“If what worried the President, in part, was whether he could trust these terrible forces in the hands of the military establishment,” wrote Lilienthal that night, “the performance these men gave certainly could not have been reassuring….”

Two days later, at the close of a Cabinet meeting dealing with domestic issues, Truman held Forrestal a moment longer than the others to tell him the bomb would continue in civilian custody.

Privately, Truman had been expressing concern about Forrestal, who, as Truman said, seemed lately unable to “take hold.”

“I went down the river on the yacht Friday at noon and slept around the clock,” Truman wrote to Mary Jane first thing Monday morning, July 26.

I sure enough needed it. And I’ll need some more before November. It’s all so futile. Dewey, Wallace, the cockeyed southerners and then if I win—which I’m afraid I will—I’ll probably have a Russian war on my hands. Two wars are enough for anybody and I’ve had two.

I go to Congress tomorrow and read them a message requesting price control, housing and a lot of other necessary things and I’ll in all probability get nothing. But I’ve got to try.

On Capitol Hill, the special session of Congress opened and later that same day Truman sprung another surprise. Without warning, he announced executive orders to end discrimination in the armed forces and to guarantee fair employment in the civil service.

His reception when he appeared before Congress the next day was noticeably cool. (As a show of their resentment, some members did not even rise from their seats as he entered.) He called for action on an eight-point program, including civil rights—controls on consumer credit, an excess profits tax, strengthened rent control, price controls, action on housing, farm support, aid to education, an increased minimum wage, and change in the Displaced Persons Act that discriminated against Catholics and Jews—all that he had asked for before and had been denied.

From his office in Albany, Governor Dewey said nothing one way or the other, but through his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, encouraged Republican leaders in Congress to give careful consideration to the President’s program. Taft absolutely refused, saying, “No, we’re not going to give that fellow anything.” To Taft, as to most Republicans and much of the public, the whole affair was a cheap political ploy.

The two-week session accomplished little, as Truman had anticipated, except to make his point that a Republican Congress was the great road-block to social progress for the country and to show the gulf between Republican promises and Republican performance.

“They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens,” he told Bess. “If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans….”

On August 4 on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Time editor Whittaker Chambers charged that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Foundation and once one of the “bright young men” of the New Deal, a former official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, serving fourteen years in the State Department, had been his accomplice in a Communist network. “For a number of years, I, myself, served in the underground in Washington, D.C.,” said Chambers. “I knew it at its top level…. A member of this group…was Alger Hiss.” The news rocked the city. Official Washington was described as “stunned with anger and disbelief.” Speaking off the record, Sam Rayburn told a reporter, “There is political dynamite in this Communist investigation. Don’t doubt that.”

But when, at his press conference the following day, Truman was asked whether he thought the “spy scare” on Capitol Hill was only “a red herring” to divert public attention from inflation, he said he agreed. The hearings were “a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they ought to do…. They are slandering a lot of people that don’t deserve it.”

Could they quote him, reporters asked. Yes, Truman replied, adding further to his troubles.

A week later, with the special session of Congress ended, he was fed another line by another reporter, but this time to his benefit. Did he think it had been a “do-nothing” Congress? “Entirely,” Truman said. He thought that was quite a good name for the 80th Congress.

Upstairs at the White House the decline and fall of the old building was no longer theoretical. The floor of Margaret’s sitting room, across the hall from his study, had caved in beneath her piano. His own bathroom, the President was informed, was about to collapse. Nothing of this was disclosed, however, nor would it be until after the elections. “Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story?” Margaret would recall. “The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman.”

“Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling,” he reported to his sister on August 10. “They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the Red Parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath.”

He was sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, in “old Abe’s bed,” he added, and finding it quite comfortable.

14
Fighting Chance

It will be the greatest campaign any President ever made.

Win, lose, or draw people will know where I stand….

—Truman to his sister, autumn 1948

I

The Ferdinand Magellan was the only private railroad car ever fitted out for the exclusive use of the President of the United States. Eighty-three feet in length and painted the standard dark green of the Pullman Company, it had been built originally in 1928 as one of several luxury cars named for famous explorers—Marco Polo, David Livingstone, Robert Peary—then taken over by the government for Franklin Roosevelt’s use during wartime, in 1942, when it was completely overhauled to become a rolling fortress.

The windows were three-inch, bulletproof glass, the entire car sheathed in armor plate—sides, top, bottom, ends, and doors—with the result that it weighed a colossal 142½ tons, or as much as a locomotive, Special trucks and wheels had to be built to carry the weight.

For security reasons during the war, only the word “Pullman” appeared on the outside, and still, in 1948, the only distinguishing exterior features were the presidential seal fixed to the rear platform and three loudspeakers mounted on top of the platform roof.

Inside everything was designed for comfort. At the forward end were galley, pantry, servants’ quarters, and an oak-paneled dining room, which doubled as a conference room for the President, this furnished with china cabinets, a mahogany dining table, and six matching chairs upholstered p in gold-and-green striped damask. Beyond, down a side aisle, were four staterooms, marked A, B, C, and D, the two middle rooms, B and C, forming the Presidential Suite with joining bath and shower. Stateroom B, for the First Lady, was a pale peach color. Stateroom C, the President’s room, had blue-green walls and carpet and satin chrome fixtures.

Past the staterooms, at the rear, was the observation lounge with blue and brown chairs and a blue sofa, walls covered with an attractive light brown tufted material resembling leather, blue velvet curtains at the windows and at the door opening onto the rear platform. The carpeting was dark green.

The whole car was air-conditioned—to its immense weight under way were added some 6,000 pounds of ice for the cooling system—and each room had a telephone that could be hooked up to a trackside outlet whenever the train was standing at a station.

To Truman, who loved trains and loved seeing the country, it was the perfect way to travel, and one he had enjoyed frequently since becoming President. There had been the memorable night of poker with Churchill on the way to Missouri for the “iron curtain” speech, the long “nonpolitical” swing west in June. More recently, he had made a quick one-day tour of Michigan for a Labor Day speech at Detroit’s Cadillac Square, to open his campaign for reelection. Yet for all the miles covered, the days and nights spent on board the Magellan, these prior expeditions had been only prologue to the odyssey that began the morning of Friday, September 17, 1948, when the Magellan, at the end of a seventeen-car special train, stood waiting on Track 15 beneath the cavernous shed of Washington’s Union Station. In June, he had gone 9,000 miles. Now, on what was to become famous as the Whistle-stop Campaign, he would travel all told 21,928 miles, as far nearly as around the world—as far nearly as the voyage of Magellan.

The idea was his own. “I want to see the people,” he had said. There would be three major tours: first cross-country to California again, for fifteen days; then a six-day tour of the Middle West; followed by a final, hard-hitting ten days in the big population centers of the Northeast and a return trip home to Missouri.

“There were no deep-hid schemes, no devious plans,” remembered Charlie Ross, “nothing that could be called, in the language of political analysts, ‘high strategy.’ ” The President would simply take his case to the country in a grueling, no-quarter contest. Mileage meant crowds.

According to Ross, it had been Truman’s original intention to go into all forty-eight states, including those of the Deep South. “He rather relished the prospect effacing up to the Dixiecrats on their homegrounds.” (How did he expect to be received in the South, Truman was asked. “Why with courtesy, of course,” he replied.)

The idea of a Southern trip held appeal [wrote Ross], because it would show that the Boss had courage, but the plan was ultimately ruled out on the ground that every ounce of energy should be used in places where material political gain might be expected. The political courage of the President had already been amply demonstrated.

So for a total of thirty-three days, more than a month, the Magellan was to be center stage for a fast-rolling political roadshow, which, as was said, had but one act and that one act built around just one performer. “We play more towns than the World of Mirth or Brunk’s Comedians…and we work longer hours,” an accompanying reporter would write. For Truman, away from the White House, the big private car would be home, office, presidential command center, campaign headquarters, and the place where, day after day, he would somehow, bravely, almost inconceivably keep hope alive.

No President in history had ever gone so far in quest of support from the people, or with less cause for the effort, to judge by informed opinion. Nor would any presidential candidate ever again attempt such a campaign by railroad.

As a test of his skills and judgment as a professional politician, not to say his stamina and disposition at age sixty-four, it would be like no other experience in his long, often difficult career, as he himself understood perfectly. More than any other event in his public life, or in his presidency thus far, it would reveal the kind of man he was.

“It’s going to be tough on everybody,” he told the staff. “But that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff—and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that.”

The rest of the train was made up of diners, lounges, sleepers, a press car, a dynamo car for power, and a communications car (a converted baggage car operated by the Signal Corps), where radio teletype would provide continuous contact with Washington and thus the rest of the world, a point of critical importance to Truman, who had become more and more uneasy over the situation in Berlin. “I have a terrible feeling…that we are very close to war,” he had written privately the night of September 13.

Security would be a major undertaking. Every grade crossing would have to be checked in advance by the Secret Service. A pilot train—a single locomotive and one car—would run five miles ahead of the President’s train to “absorb” any possible trouble. The railroad official in charge, who had been handling presidential trips since the time of Warren G. Harding, admitted he was a nervous wreck. “Every grade crossing has to be manned when the train passes and I just can’t tell you how many switches have to be spiked until we’ve moved on,” he told a reporter. Once rolling the train would travel under the code name “POTUS,” for “President of the United States,” which gave it the right of way everywhere in the country.

Truman liked to move fast. Roosevelt, because of his infirmities, had preferred a smooth, easy pace of no more than 35 miles an hour when traveling in the Magellan. Truman liked to go about 80.

A cheer went up from the moderate-sized crowd gathered at the Union Station platform, the sound echoing under the vaulted roof as his limousine, easing through a break in the crowd, pulled right to the gate. Truman stepped out looking “positively buoyant,” Margaret close behind. Marshall and Barkley had come to see him off. The First Lady would catch up with the caravan at Des Moines.

Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, Matt Connelly, George Elsey, Charlie Murphy, White House physician Wallace Graham, and Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, were all present and waiting to go on board, in addition to several White House stenographers, Jonathan Daniels, who would help with speeches, and three new speechwriters, David M. Noyes, Albert Z. Carr, and John Franklin Carter. Bill Boyle of Kansas City, an old Truman friend and aid who had served on the Truman Committee, would, like Matt Connelly, be handling political chores.

Counting the whole staff, the Secret Service detail, forty-four reporters and five photographers, the complete entourage numbered some seventy people. The one notable, absentee was Harry Vaughan, who would remain out of sight—and out of contact with the press—for the duration of the campaign, at Truman’s request.

With everything ready, Truman and Barkley posed together on the rear platform for a few last pictures.

“Mow ‘em down, Harry,” Barkley exhorted.

“I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to give ‘em hell,” said Truman, setting the theme at the start.

The odds against him looked insurmountable. The handicaps of the Truman campaign, wrote columnist Marquis Childs, one of the writers on board, “loomed large as the Rocky Mountains.” Henry Wallace and the Dixiecrats had split the Democratic Party three ways. Conceivably, New York and the South were already lost to Truman. The victory of the Republicans in the elections of 1946 had been resounding, and ever since the Civil War, the party winning the off-year election had always gone on to win the presidency in the next election. At Washington dinner parties, as Bess Truman had heard, the talk was of who would be in the Dewey Cabinet. Some prominent Democrats in Washington were already offering their homes for sale. Even the President’s mother-in-law thought Dewey would win.

In the West, where Truman had made an all-out effort in June, predictions were that at best he might win 19 of the 71 electoral votes at stake. Only Arizona, with 4 votes, looked safe for Truman. And the West was essential.

A Gallup Poll of farm voters gave Dewey 48 percent, Truman 38. And the farm vote, too, was essential.

On September 9, a full week before Truman’s train departed Washington, Elmo Roper, a widely respected sampler of public opinion, had announced his organization would discontinue polling since the outcome was already so obvious. “My whole inclination,” Roper said, “is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and efforts to other things.” The latest Roper Poll showed Dewey leading by an “unbeatable” 44 to 31 percent. More important, said Roper, such elections were decided early.

Political campaigns are largely ritualistic…. All the evidence we have accumulated since 1936 tends to indicate that the man in the lead at the beginning of the campaign is the man who is the winner at the end of it…. The winner, it appears, clinches his victory early in the race and before he has uttered a word of campaign oratory.

The idea that the campaign was “largely ritualistic,” a formality only, became commonplace. Life, in its latest issue, carried a picture of Governor Dewey and his staff under the headline: “Albany Provides Preview of Dewey Administration.”

Yet, inexplicably, Truman had drawn tremendous crowds in Michigan on Labor Day. A hundred thousand people had filled Cadillac Square. By train and motorcade he rolled through Grand Rapids, Lansing, Hamtramck, Pontiac, and Flint, where to Truman and his staff the crowds were even more impressive. “Cadillac Square…that was organized,” remembered Matt Connelly. “But we rode from there up to Pontiac…[and] from Detroit to Pontiac I’d see people along the highway. This was not organized and there were a lot of them out there!” According to police estimates the turnout at Truman’s six stops in Michigan totaled more than half a million people.

Often, in later years, the big Truman crowds would be remembered as a phenomenon of the final weeks of the campaign. But this was a misconception. They were there from the start, in Michigan and in traditionally Republican Iowa—in Davenport, Iowa City, Grinnell, Des Moines—beginning September 18, his first full day heading west.

“Newsmen were nonplused,” reported Time. “All across Republican Iowa large crowds turned out…a good deal of the cheering was enthusiastic.”

The main event of the day was the National Plowing Contest at Dexter, forty miles west of Des Moines, where Truman spoke at noon, in blazing sunshine, standing front and center on a high, broad platform, a sea of faces before him, a giant plowing scoreboard behind. The crowd numbered ninety thousand.

The long horizons were rimmed with ripening corn. The atmosphere was of a vast county fair in good times, with throngs of healthy, well-fed, sun-baked and obviously prospering people enjoying the day, as dust swirled in a steady wind and more families arrived in new trucks and automobiles. Lined up in an adjoining field, their bright colors gleaming in the sun, were perhaps fifty private airplanes.

It was a Republican crowd. Iowa had a Republican governor. All eight Iowa representatives in Congress, and both senators, were Republicans. In the last presidential election Iowa’s ten electoral votes had gone to Dewey. But more important to Truman, nearly all his audience were farmers and in the Depression, he knew, Iowa farmers had voted for Roosevelt.

Years before, in 1934, when he had been running for the Senate the first time, a St. Louis reporter had written, “In a fight this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire.” Now at Dexter he ripped into the Republican “gluttons of privilege…cold men…cunning men,” in a way no one had heard a presidential candidate speak since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The difference between Republicans and Democrats was a difference in “attitude”:

You remember the big boom and the great crash of 1929. You remember that in 1932 the position of the farmer had become so desperate that there was actual violence in many farming communities. You remember that insurance companies and banks took over much of the land of small independent farmers—223,000 farmers lost their farms….

I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you?…

The Democratic Party represents the people. It is pledged to work for agriculture…. The Democratic Party puts human rights and human welfare first…. These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men.

They are cunning men…. They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship….

It was language that, to many, seemed oddly archaic and out of place in the midst of such obvious prosperity. The Des Moines Register would point to the “incongruity of being a prophet of doom to an audience in time of harvest of bumper crops.” Truman, it was said, was sadly miscast as the new Bryan, his speech “harsh and demagogic.” But he was leading to something quite specific.

In June, when rewriting the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)—the agency for federal farm loans—Congress had included an obscure provision prohibiting the CCC from acquiring additional grain-storage bins. It was meant as an economy measure. But since farmers were required to use storage facilities approved or maintained by the CCC in order to qualify for price supports, they stood to lose heavily in the event of wheat and corn crops too large for the existing facilities to handle. If there were no approved bins to store the surplus of a bumper yield, then for the farmers a bumper yield could mean not prosperity but heavy losses.

The bill had gone through unopposed by the Democrats and Truman had signed it. But that was in June when no one was paying it much attention. Now the prospect of a bumper year was no longer hypothetical. The corn harvest would not begin until October, but all that day crossing Iowa, since early morning, those on board the train had seen little else but corn in abundance. The talk in Iowa was of yields of 135 bushels to the acre.

It was the Republican Congress that rewrote the charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation, Truman now charged at Dexter. The Republican Congress, said Truman, had “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.” Nor would the Republicans stop with limits on grain storage. The “whole structure of price supports” was in jeopardy.

“I’m not asking you to vote for me. Vote for yourselves,” he said, a theme he would strike over and over. To reporters covering the event, the huge crowd seemed friendly yet unmoved. But then who was to say.

Afterward, in a tent behind the platform, a perspiring President in his shirtsleeves pulled up a wooden folding chair to a long table with a red-check cloth and ate country fried chicken and prize-winning cake and pie with thirty farmers and their wives. Asked if he would please speak again, only on a more personal level this time, Truman agreed and returned to the platform.

Was it true he had once been able to plow the straightest furrows in his part of Missouri, he was asked. Yes, said Truman, but only according to an exceedingly partial witness, his mother. But he did have a reputation, he said, for never leaving a “skip place” when he sowed wheat. “My father always used to raise so much fuss about a skip place.”

He talked of the 12-inch, horse-drawn gang plow he rode at Grandview and how it had taken him sometimes four days to plow a field. He didn’t want to go back to those days. “I don’t want to turn back the clock. I don’t want to go back to the horse and buggy age, although some of our Republican friends do,” he said, and this brought a warm cheer.

“He was delightful and the people were delighted,” wrote Richard Rovere of The New Yorker, who had thought the earlier speech “deplorable.”

Truman had begun the day at 5:45. There had been six stops and six speeches before Dexter. After Dexter, he spoke at Des Moines, Melcher, and Chariton, Iowa. “At each stop,” reported the Des Moines Register, “the listeners massed for his rear platform talk were larger than the town’s population.”

“You stayed at home in 1946 and you got the 80th Congress, and you got just exactly what you deserved,” he said at Chariton. “You didn’t exercise your God-given right to control this country. Now you’re going to have another chance.”

He was on a crusade for the welfare of the everyday man, he said next, across the state line, at Trenton, Missouri. At Polo, Missouri, just after 8:00 P.M., he told the delighted crowd he had not been sure whether he would be able to stop there, but that the railroad had finally consented. It was his thirteenth speech of the day and he was sounding a little hoarse.

After a brief visit home Independence the next day, Sunday, September 19, he was on his way again. Crossing Kansas that night, the engineer had the train up to 105 miles per hour, which Truman, from his chair in the lounge, decided was too fast, considering the weight of the Magellan and what might happen to the forward cars should the engineer suddenly have to stop. Calmly, quietly, he asked Charlie Ross to send word to the engineer that there was no great hurry. Eighty miles an hour would do.

“Understand me, when I speak of what the Republicans have been doing. I’m not talking about the average Republican voter,” Truman told the twenty-five thousand people spread across the lawn of the State Capitol at Denver.

Nobody knows better than I that man for man, individually, most Republicans are fine people. But there’s a big distinction between the individual Republican voter and the policies of the Republican Party.

Something happens to Republican leaders when they get control of the Government…

Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests.

He had just one strategy—attack, attack, attack, carry the fight to the enemy’s camp. He hammered the Republicans relentlessly, in speeches at Grand Junction, Colorado, Helper, Springville, and Provo, Utah. “Selfish men have always tried to skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed. And…[their] instrument in this effort has always been the Republican Party,” he charged at Salt Lake City, to a standing-room-only crowd in the cavernous Mormon Tabernacle. At Ogden, he warned of “bloodsuckers who have offices in Wall Street.” The 80th Congress, he said at Reno, Nevada, was run by a “bunch of old mossbacks still living back in 1890.”

The country must not go backward, he would keep saying over and over, because he felt with all his heart that Americans were a forward-looking people and that his own program, as he had told Clark Clifford earlier, was a forward-looking program. If the old guard Republicans were to get control under a Republican administration, they would dismantle the progress made by the New Deal and in foreign affairs, retreat back into isolationism, which would be disastrous for the country and the world. He was certain of this and determined to keep it from happening.

To the crowd beside the Southern Pacific tracks at Roseville, California, he declared the Republican “do-nothing Congress tried to choke you to death in this valley,” by cutting off appropriations for publicly owned electric power lines. “You have got a terrible Congressman here in this district. He is one of the worst,” he told the citizens of Fresno, referring to Republican Bertrand W. Gearhart, who had once denounced George Marshall on the floor of the House.

One correspondent, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, would later characterize the Truman campaign as “sharp speeches fairly criticizing Republican policy and defending New Deal liberalism mixed with sophistry, bunkum piled higher than haystacks, and demagoguery tooting merrily down the track.”

Truman was at his best speaking to small crowds and without notes and, often, when the subject was himself, his family, his own pioneer background and outlook on life. He was described by some of the eastern reporters as a “feed mill type of talker” and “excellent indeed” with a small-town crowd. These “little speeches,” thought Charlie Ross, were more important than the major addresses. “They got him close to the people.”

At both Grand Junction, Colorado, and the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he reminisced about Grandfather Solomon Young and his journeys over the plains, his friendship with Brigham Young. “Oh, I wish my grandfather could see me now,” he said spontaneously at Salt Lake, and the audience first laughed, then broke into prolonged applause. “Those pioneers had faith and they had energy,” he said, seeming himself to embody an excess of both qualities.

Though he refused to put on Indian war bonnets or to kiss babies, he was thankful always for the gifts ceremoniously presented at stop after stop—hats, spurs, baskets of fruit (“I’ll be eating peaches from now until I get to Washington”). And nearly always he had something to say about the local scenery, local history, local achievements and interests.

They tell me [he said at Mojave] that in 1883—that was the year before I was born—that a gentleman by the name of Webb built ten grand, big wagons here in this town, bought himself a hundred head of mules, and began to haul borax out of the Mojave Desert—and that was the origin of Twenty-Mule Team Borax which we always kept in the house when I was a kid. I never thought I would be here as President at the place where it originated and talking to you people about your interests in the welfare of the country.

He expressed love of home, love of the land, the virtues and old verities of small-town America, his America. “Naturally, if we don’t think our hometown is the greatest in the world, we are not very loyal citizens. We all should feel that way,” he told the loyal citizens of American Fork, Utah.

“You don’t get any double talk from me,” he declared from a brightly decorated bandstand first thing in the morning sunshine at Sparks, Nevada. “I’m either for something or against it, and you know it. You know what I stand for.” What he stood for, he said again and again, was a government of and for the people, not the “special interests.”

He was friendly, cheerful. And full of fight.

“You are the government,” he said time after time. “Practical politics is government. Government starts from the grass roots.” “I think the government belongs to you and me as private citizens.” “I’m calling this trip a crusade. It’s a crusade of the people against the special interests, and if you back me up we’re going to win….”

“The basic issue of this campaign is as simple as can be: it’s the special interests against the people.” “I’m here on a serious mission, and because it is so serious, I propose to speak to you as plainly as I can.” “In 1946, you know, two-thirds of you stayed home and didn’t vote. You wanted a change. Well, you got it. You got the change. You got just exactly what you deserved.” “Now use your judgment. Keep the people in control of the government….” “I not only want you to vote for me but I want you to vote for yourselves, and if you vote for yourselves, you’ll vote for the Democratic ticket….”

The crowds would be gathered at station stops often from early morning, waiting for him to arrive. Men and boys perched on rooftops and nearby signal towers for a better view. There would be a high school band standing by, ready to play the national anthem or “Hail to the Chief,” or to struggle through the Missouri Waltz, a song Truman particularly disliked but that it was his fate to hear repeated hundreds of times over. His train would ease into the station as the band blared, the crowd cheered. Then, accompanied by three or four local politicians—usually a candidate for Congress or state party chairman who had boarded the train at a prior stop—Truman would step from behind the blue velvet curtain onto the platform, and the crowd, large or small, would cheer even more. One of the local politicians would then introduce the President of the United States and the crowd would cheer again.

At the ten-minute stops, he would speak for five minutes, beginning with praise for the local candidate for Congress or some issue of local interest, then moving quickly from the general to the particular. He would lambaste the Republican Congress for the high cost of living or failing to vote the grain-storage bins, for the Taft-Hartley Act or the “rich man’s tax bill,” for slashing federal support for irrigation and hydroelectric power projects in the West. It was the Republicans in Congress who were holding back progress in the Central Valley of California. Republicans at heart had no real interest in the West—not in water, not in public power. The Republicans who controlled the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate, those upon whom the future of federal projects in the Central Valley depended were not Californians, they were not westerners: “They are Eastern Republicans.”

“Give ‘em hell, Harry!” someone would shout from the crowd—news accounts of his promise to Barkley to “give ‘em hell” having swept the country by now. The cry went up at one stop after another, often more than once—“Give ‘em hell, Harry!”—which always brought more whoops, laughter, and yells of approval, but especially when he tore into the 80th Congress.

(“I never gave anybody hell,” he would later say. “I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.”)

At the close, he would ask if they would like to meet his family and the crowd never failed in its response. The routine became standard. He would first introduce Bess—“Miz Truman”—who would step out from behind the blue curtain, looking pleased and motherly. He would take her hand and she would stand at his right, saying nothing. If the crowd was small and especially friendly, he would refer to her as “the Boss.” Then, proudly, he would present “Miss Margaret,” whose appearance nearly always brought the biggest cheer of all, and to the obvious delight of her father. She would be carrying an armful of roses, a few of which she would throw to the crowd. Truman would lean over the brass rail to grasp one or two outstretched hands. Someone would signal the local band to start playing again, and with warning toots of the whistle, with reporters scrambling to get back on board, the crowd cheering and the three Trumans waving, the train would pull slowly out of the station.

No matter what the outcome of the campaign, wrote Richard Rovere, millions of Americans would remember for the rest of their lives this final tableau of the “Three Traveling Trumans.”

It will be a picture to cherish and it will stand Harry Truman in good stead for the rest of his life. Travelling with him you get the feeling that the American people who have seen him and heard him at his best would be willing to give him just about anything he wants except the Presidency.

It could be said also they had seen and heard for themselves a President who was friendly and undisguised, loyal to his party, fond of his family, a man who cared about the country and about them, who believed the business of government was their business, and who didn’t whine when he was in trouble, but kept bravely, doggedly plugging away, doing his best, his duty as he saw it, and who was glad to be among them. He wasn’t a hero, or an original thinker. His beliefs were their beliefs, their way of talking was his way of talking. He was on their side. He was one of them. If he stumbled over a phrase or a name, he would grin and try again, and they would smile with him.

“There is an agreeable warmheartedness and simplicity about Truman that is genuine,” wrote Richard Strout for his column in The New Republic. A presidential train was probably the worst of all places to gauge public opinion, he added. “Nevertheless, reporters keep pinching themselves at the size of the crowds and their cordial response.”

At Los Angeles, at Gilmore Stadium, with screen stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan—all ardent liberal Democrats—seated prominently on stage beside him, Truman hit hard at Henry Wallace, warning liberal Democrats to “think again” if they thought a vote for the third party was a vote for peace. With Communists “guiding and using” it, the third party did not represent American ideals. A vote for Wallace only played into the hands of the Republican “forces of reaction.” Now was the hour for the liberal forces of America to unite. “Think again. Don’t waste your vote.

At San Diego, ten thousand turned out, despite threatening skies and the early hour of 9:00 A.M., and gave him the most enthusiastic welcome thus far. After the stop at Oceanside, California, where the train pulled within sight of the rolling surf of the Pacific, the route was east again.

By then, Friday, September 24, he had been on the road a week, and while some on board had already begun to show signs of strain, Truman, who bore much the heaviest burden, remained steady as a rock. Nor had he left the duties and concerns of the Oval Office. A White House pouch arrived daily—papers requiring his signature, letters to be signed, letters to be read, reports from department heads, reports to Congress, sealed manila envelopes marked “Confidential,” as well as copies of the Kansas City Star and the Independence Examiner. A memorandum from Head Usher Howell Crim reported on the quantity of plaster descending in the East Room.

The Berlin crisis and the risks involved in the airlift weighed heavily on Truman. Though the quantity of supplies being flown into the city had increased since August, the disturbing truth was that the airlift was supplying less than half of what Berlin needed. “We are not quite holding our own,” General Clay had cabled. In another few days, in Dallas, at Truman’s request, General Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to Moscow, would come quietly aboard the train to give his assessment to Truman of Stalin’s mood and the chances of war.

Staff work on board had acquired a pattern of a kind, though little about it was systematic or efficient or ever very formal. Of the major speeches only the one at Dexter, Iowa, had been prepared well in advance. The rest—for Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles—were produced under way, with the combined efforts of Ross, Clifford, Elsey, Murphy, and the new writers Noyes, Carr, and Carter. No speech was ever the work of one writer, and no speech failed to go through several drafts. Truman himself went over every line, worked “painstakingly” on every draft, and was the first to approve suggested deletions. “That’s good,” he would say. “Never use two words when one will do best.” Convoluted structure and highblown or evasive phrases greatly annoyed him. “That’s not the way I would say it,” he would remark as the group sat around the mahogany table in the dining room of the Magellan, working late into the night. “Let’s just say what we mean.”

“Nobody had any special pride of authorship, but we did get into heated arguments now and then,” wrote Ross. “The President would grin and say, ‘All right, you fellows fight it out and I’ll decide.’ ” Ross wanted Truman to ease up on the abusive language and state his case in more dignified fashion. But Truman was determined to keep the heat on. He had also introduced a new line about the housing shortage that made the others wince. If they went to the polls and did their duty on November 2, Truman would tell the crowd with a smile, then he wouldn’t have to go “hunting around in this housing shortage.” He could stay right in the White House. It was a line he liked and that he was sure the people liked. So he kept it.

Background material, particularly material useful for the rear platform appearances, was provided by a “Research Division” of the Democratic National Committee—three or four “bright young men” who had been holed up in a small office off DuPont Circle in Washington and who, according to George Elsey, “worked like dogs and ground out an incredible amount of material. All kinds of historical, literary, political and economic data flowed through them, and news clippings, photostats of useful documents, anything that would give spark and vitality and originality and vigor to President Truman’s campaign effort.”

Elsey’s task was to sort and edit it all, then keep the President supplied with pertinent items to choose from, and in proper order as they sped along. “I was the ‘whistlestopper’ on the job doing the outlines, getting the stuff together, and feeding these back to him,” he remembered. “I felt I got twenty-five years exercise walking from my car to his car in the weeks of the campaign.”

Bill Boyle would be credited with “planning every inch” of Truman’s itinerary. Constantly in touch with state party leaders, he advised Truman on which towns mattered, and why.

Traveling ahead of the train, as “advance men,” were Oscar Chapman, the Under Secretary of Interior, and Donald Dawson, of the White House staff. They were responsible for all the details of local ceremonies, to make sure the local politicians knew where and when to come on board Truman’s train, and that no such fiasco as the empty hall at Omaha in June ever happened again.

Between stops, in the comparative quiet and privacy of the Magellan, the candidate himself remained even-tempered and steadfastly confident. The strain on him was unrelenting. Yet he showed no signs of wear-and-tear or faltering expectations. He knew he was behind and in private said so. But he was also sure he would catch up and move ahead by November, when it would count—a view shared by almost no one else on board, though few, other than the press, ever talked about it.

Once, late in an especially long day, a noticeably weary First Lady asked Clark Clifford if he thought the President really believed he could win and Clifford said yes. “He gives every appearance under every condition,” Clifford answered.

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t know where it comes from.”

Though several of his staff were gravely concerned about the split in the Democratic ranks—the campaigns under way by the Progressives and the Dixiecrats—Truman seems never to have taken the candidacies of Wallace and Thurmond as serious threats.

Henry Wallace was running hard. In August he had bravely campaigned through the South, decrying segregation and refusing to stay in hotels that enforced discrimination. In North Carolina angry crowds pelted him with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Traveling the rest of the country mainly by plane, he would eventually roll up more mileage even than Truman, his main theme remaining constant throughout: the Progressive Party was “the peace party” that could end the Cold War through direct negotiations with the Soviet Union. At Los Angeles, speaking at the same stadium where Truman had, Wallace drew a larger crowd than Truman had, and it was a paying crowd. But attendance overall at Wallace rallies and speeches was falling off, the excitement of his Progressive “crusade” plainly in decline, as he was perceived—and portrayed more and more in the press—as “playing Moscow’s game.” Of the Republicans and Democrats, he said they were “equally sinister” in their policies, both being in the grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Strom Thurmond kept harping on states’ rights and demanding that the “evil forces” in control of the Democratic Party be “cast out.” He called Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Committee “communistic.” Racial integration of the armed services was “un-American.” The South must hold the line. “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” He and the Dixiecrats would win 140 electoral votes in the South, Thurmond said, more than sufficient to force the election into the House. But almost no one took the claim seriously, and Truman least of all.

In his speeches, Truman never mentioned Wallace or Thurmond by name. But then never in the major addresses or in any of his largely extemporaneous remarks to small crowds in out-of-the-way places did he speak of Dewey by name. Dewey was always “my Republican opponent,” or “the other fellow.”

He never criticized or ridiculed Dewey in a personal way. Interestingly, Dewey was never even a subject of discussion on board the Ferdinand Magellan. There was no talk of Dewey’s personality or failings, no gossiping about him, or ever any consideration of attacking him on personal grounds. It would not be recalled that the President ever even mentioned Dewey.

II

Governor Thomas E. Dewey had gone aboard his own campaign train at Albany on Sunday, September 19, two days after Truman left Washington, and Dewey, too, delivered his first major speech in Iowa, at Des Moines on Monday the 20th, two days after Truman spoke at the Dexter plowing contest. Starting later than Truman, Dewey would travel nowhere near so far, and at a much more leisurely pace. And he would deliver far fewer speeches—all this, like everything about the Dewey campaign, having been carefully thought out in advance. As the candidate and his advisers proudly informed the press, nothing was to be left to chance.

Press coverage of Dewey’s advance across the country was also to be far greater than that Truman received. There were ninety-two reporters riding the “Dewey Victory Special”—ninety-eight by the time the train reached California—roughly twice the number traveling with the President, and they were catered to, their everyday needs handled with a skill and efficiency unknown on the Truman train. Copies of the candidate’s speeches were nearly always available twenty-four hours in advance, as they seldom ever were on the Truman train. An internal public address system fed Dewey’s remarks directly to the press car and dining cars, so reporters need not bother leaving their air-conditioned comforts. Coffee and sandwiches were provided to reporters at odd hours, their laundry attended to, their luggage moved from train to hotel for overnight stops. To those who had traveled with both candidates, the Truman operation, by comparison, was forty years behind the times.

“If you wanted anything laundered [on the Truman train], you did it yourself, in a Pullman basin,” Richard Rovere informed his readers in The New Yorker.

When you detrained anywhere for an overnight stay, it was every man for himself. You carried your duffel and scrambled for your food. If a man was such a slave to duty that he felt obliged to hear what the President said in his back-platform addresses, he had to climb down off the train; run to the rear end, mingle with the crowd, and listen. Often this was a hazardous undertaking, for the President was given to speaking late at night to crowds precariously assembled on sections of roadbed built up fifteen or twenty feet above the surrounding land. The natives knew the contours of the ground, but the reporters did not, and more than one of them tumbled down a cindery embankment.

A condescending tone entered into a lot of what was written about Truman and his efforts. His whole campaign, as Jonathan Daniels said, was given a “sort of rube reputation” by the largely eastern press traveling with him. The Dewey campaign, by contrast, was described as “slick,” “tidy as a pin,” everything handled with “junior-executive briskness.” The favored drink on board the “Dewey Victory Special” was the martini, not bourbon as on the Truman train. The favorite game was bridge, not poker. Dewey himself was cool, careful, “supremely self-confident,” and from the start elevated in tone.

“Tonight we enter upon a campaign to unite America,” he told the crowd at Des Moines, where, reportedly, he was leading Truman by a resounding 51 to 37 percent.

“We propose to install in Washington,” Dewey said, “an administration which has faith in the American people, a warm understanding of their needs and the competence to meet them. We will rediscover the essential unity of our people and the spiritual strength which makes our country great. We will begin to move forward again shoulder to shoulder….”

There were no harsh or divisive accusations, no pitting of farmers against Wall Street, no pitchforks in the back or angry, staccato assaults on any segment of government or society.

A Republican congressman from Minnesota, August H. Andresen, had written to warn Dewey of discontent among farmers, saying, “We cannot win without the farm vote.” But Dewey refrained also from any mention of farm problems.

His voice was deep and resonant, as flowing as the smoothest radio preacher—everything Truman’s voice was not. Dewey was dignified. He spoke ill of no one, offended no one. He had no surprises, he took no risks. And the pattern prevailed, his text seldom more rousing than a civics primer. “Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government,” he would say with a grand preacherlike sweep of the right arm.

“America’s future is still ahead of us,” he also said.

They were not speeches of the kind he had given in 1944, when he had hit hard and often, charging Franklin Roosevelt with failure to end the Depression, failure to build American defenses before Pearl Harbor. At one point, he had called Roosevelt truly “the indispensable” man—“indispensable to the ill-assorted, power-hungry conglomeration of city bosses, Communists, and career bureaucrats which now compose the New Deal.” But there would be no such harangue this time, because this time Dewey was not the challenger. This time he had the election sewed up.

It was an odd reversal of roles, with the incumbent President running as the challenger and his opponent performing as though he were already elected and the campaign a mere formality. Dewey had only to mark time, be careful, make no mistakes, say or do nothing silly or improper, and the presidency was his.

So the speeches were kept unceasingly positive. He was for unity, for peace, for “constructive change.” He was not running against the New Deal. He was not even running against Harry Truman, whom he never mentioned, any more than Truman spoke of him, which was another odd turn. “Governor Dewey is deliberately avoiding any sharp controversy with the Democratic incumbent,” reported The New York Times as the “Victory Special” rolled through California, passing, at one point, within only a few miles of the Truman train.

In some ways the two candidates were much alike. Both were efficient with their time, alert, and energetic. They always looked spanking clean and pressed. Both were men of medium stature, though Truman, the one so often referred to disparagingly as “the little man,” was an inch taller than Dewey, who was 5 feet 8 inches. And unlike Truman, Dewey was extremely sensitive about his height.

They were each diligent, career public servants who genuinely believed that good government was possible and the best politics. They both loved music. Truman had dreamed of being a concert pianist, Dewey of being a concert singer and still loved to sing (especially “Oklahoma” in the bathtub). Each was devoted to his family. Dewey’s wife, Frances, a particularly photogenic woman with a somewhat shy but winsome manner, was generally seen as an asset to his political career; and they had two teenage sons, Tom, Jr., and John.

Like Truman, Dewey was a product of small-town middle America. He had grown up in Owosso, Michigan, where his father, the editor of the local newspaper, was vitally interested in politics, just as John Truman had been.

Beyond there, however, the similarities ended. Where Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man—raised, educated, formed in thought and outlook in the era before World War I—Dewey was of a different generation. Dewey had never lived with the burden of farm debt; he had never been to war, he had never been bankrupt. Born in 1902, eighteen years after Truman, he was the first candidate for President born in the twentieth century. His middle American origins, moreover, were hardly apparent any longer. Educated at the University of Michigan and the Columbia Law School in New York, he had made his entire career in the East, and with his homburg hats and cultivated voice, he had left Owosso far behind.

Where Truman had been, as Nellie Noland said, “a late bloomer all along,” attaining prominence only past the age of fifty, Dewey had soared almost from the start, achieving national fame as the crusading district attorney of New York while still in his thirties. He was “the Gangbuster,” a national hero. In 1938, at age thirty-six, he had made his first run for governor of New York. Trying again in 1942, he became New York’s first Republican governor in twenty years. Running for a second term in 1946, he rolled up the biggest victory in the state’s history, winning by nearly 700,000 votes.

As governor he cut taxes, doubled state aid to education, raised salaries for state employees, reduced the state’s overall indebtedness by over $100 million, and put through the first state law in the country prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. If elected now, he would be, at forty-six, the youngest President since Theodore Roosevelt. Given his youth, ambition, his proven ability, it was not inconceivable that Thomas E. Dewey could serve as long as, or longer than Franklin Roosevelt. If he were to have four full terms, he would be in the White House until 1965, and even then would still be younger than was Truman in 1948.

But, as often noted, Dewey was also extremely cautious and cold in manner, at least in public, which for a politician was what mattered. On the campaign trail, he seemed not to care for the gifts he was offered or to mix with the crowd. He was incapable of unbending. Where Truman, at the end of a platform talk, would ask, “Would you like to meet my family?” Dewey would say stiffly, “I’m pleased to present Mrs. Dewey.”

“Smile, governor,” a photographer had called at a campaign stop in 1944. “I thought I was,” said Dewey. A remark attributed to the wife of a New York Republican politician would be widely repeated. “You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.”

He was so self-controlled as to seem mechanical—Dewey came on stage, wrote Richard Rovere, “like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind”—and there was a hard look in the dark eyes, a look that had served him well as a prosecutor. “Those eyes tell you this guy doesn’t crap around,” a staff man once said.

It was Dewey’s small, dark “bottle-brush” mustache that the public knew him best for and that many people disliked, or wished he would get rid of, mustaches having been long out of fashion among public men. He had grown it on a bicycle tour of France years earlier and kept it because his wife approved. To the actress Ethel Barrymore, the mustache and Dewey’s diminutive size made him look “like the bridegroom on the wedding cake,” a remark greatly amplified by the acerbic, much-quoted daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and that may have done Dewey real harm in the campaign.

To the reporters on board his train, he seemed aloof, even haughty. They were kept at a distance, and though they were certain he would win—and most believed he would make an efficient chief executive—almost none of them liked him, which was quite the reverse of how they felt about Truman. Dewey’s “mechanical smile…and his bland refusal to deal with issues, have got under everybody’s skin,” wrote Richard Strout of the mood in the press car. Dewey, it was cracked, was the only man who could strut sitting down.

In sharp contrast to Truman, who had never wanted to be President, Dewey had started running for the job as early as 1939, in advance of the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie. Dewey believed it was his destiny to be President. “It is written in the stars,” he said privately.

That it was written in the polls as well also carried enormous weight with him, for, unlike Truman, Dewey took such samplings with utmost seriousness. He was the first presidential candidate to have his own polling unit.

On several major issues Dewey, as a liberal Republican, held the same or very similar views as Truman. Dewey backed aid to Greece. He supported the Marshall Plan. He believed in a strong military defense, including Universal Military Training. He was for recognition of Israel. He supported the Berlin Airlift and wanted further progress made in civil rights. As he and his advisers saw things, the real struggle waited beyond November, not with the Democrats in Congress, but with Taft, whom Dewey intensely disliked. (On more than one occasion Dewey had been heard to say that the Ohio senator should have carnal relations with himself.)

The dominating strategy of the Dewey campaign, to say as little as possible, was Dewey’s own—“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” he would tell the Republican politicians who came aboard his train. The “Dewey high command,” however, had more influence than did the people around Truman. They included campaign manager Herbert Brownell, Jr., whose headquarters were in Washington, but who talked to Dewey every night by phone; Paul Lockwood, Dewey’s veteran executive assistant; and Elliott Bell, an old friend who wrote speeches and served as unofficial chief of staff on the train. These were able, experienced men. Brownell had been Dewey’s campaign manager the last time, as well as chairman of the Republican Party. Lockwood had been with Dewey since his days as district attorney. Elliott Bell, a former financial writer for The New York Times, had managed Dewey’s two triumphant campaigns for governor.

And they all agreed: the campaign was going fine. Nor had other Republican politicians objected thus far. “We always asked them what our strategy should be,” remembered Bell, “and they all said that as matters stood Dewey was in and the thing to do was not stir up too much controversy and run the risk of losing votes.” The consensus was that Dewey would have done better in 1944 had he not gone on the attack as he did. So why repeat the mistake?

“The tone of his campaign was set,” wrote Time approvingly—Time, like its sister publication Life, having concluded that Dewey was as good as elected. The real concern among the Dewey staff, reported Time, was over what Truman might do between now and January to upset things, and particularly in the field of foreign policy. “The responsibilities of power already weighed on them so heavily that a newsman inquired blandly: ‘How long is Dewey going to tolerate Truman’s interference in the government?”

Dewey, said Life, would keep his composure “no matter how much his rival taunted, teased and dared him to come out in the alley and scrap.” Dewey himself remarked that he would never “get down in the gutter” with Truman. He would have preferred a more worthy opponent. In the seclusion of his private car, Dewey wondered aloud, “Isn’t it harder in politics to defeat a fool, say, than an abler man?”

To help guarantee a Dewey victory, J. Edgar Hoover was secretly supplying him with all the information the FBI could provide. Dewey and Hoover were old friends and got along well. Hoover had put the resources of the bureau at Dewey’s disposal months before, in the expectation that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General. “The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” remembered an assistant to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, who was one of those assigned to cull the files.

We resurrected the president’s former association with Jim Pendergast…and tried to create the impression that Truman was too ignorant to deal with the emerging Communist threat. We even prepared studies for Dewey which were released under his name, as if he and his staff had done the work…. No one in the bureau gave Truman any chance of winning.

Only on the issue of Communists in government was Dewey willing to taunt Truman. “I suggest you elect an administration that simply won’t appoint them in the first place,” Dewey said at one stop after another, the line always drawing applause.

In Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl, flanked on stage by Republican movie stars—Gary Cooper, Jeanette MacDonald, and Ginger Rogers, who came from Independence, Missouri—Dewey described communism on the march. “The tragic fact is that too often our own government…seems so far to have lost faith in our system of free opportunity as to encourage this Communist advance, not hinder it…. Communists and fellow travelers [have] risen to positions of trust in our government…[and yet] the head of our own government called the exposure of Communists in our government ‘a red herring.’ ”

Dewey did not try to inflame crowd passions. He opposed outlawing Communists. “We’ll have no thought police,” he said. Still the charge that the government was “coddling” Communists, a charge that had been injected into the campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee, would be made again and again at nearly every stop.

Joseph Alsop described the typical Dewey speech as “over-rehearsed” and “a trifle chilling.” Marquis Childs warned in his column that in the “very expertness” of his campaign, Dewey might be “laying up future trouble for himself.” Privately among the Dewey people there was an increasing uneasiness over the size of the crowds, which, as Time conceded, were “good—but no more than good.” At Salt Lake City, Dewey, like Truman, filled the Mormon Tabernacle to overflowing, but the turnout along the streets had been nothing like that for Truman. “We hit Salt Lake City about five P.M.,” Elliott Bell would recall. “I was struck by the fact that there were very few people on the sidewalks—and a good many people walking hardly bothered to look at the motorcade.”

“Then we went into Texas and everybody said Texas was going to be cold to the President,” Truman would later tell a crowd in Neosho, Missouri, recounting his latest adventures.

And the first city we stopped in was El Paso, and everybody in El Paso was down at the station. The Chief of Police said he estimated the crowd at 25,000. Then we went over and had breakfast with John Garner, former Vice President, a good friend of mine, and he gave me a breakfast to write home about. We had chicken and white-wing dove, and we had ham and bacon and scrambled eggs and hot biscuits and I don’t know what all. And the governor of Texas met me there as did Sam Rayburn, and we went across Texas, and I must have seen a million people in Texas.

Pounding his way across Texas, Truman had seemed to gather strength by the hour and give more of himself to the campaign with every stop. He was fighting for his political life and having a grand time at it.

“He is good on the back of a train because he is one of the folks,” said Sam Rayburn. “He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them.”

With the rest of the Old South in revolt over his stand on civil rights, Truman had to hold on to Texas and its twenty-three electoral votes. Yet racial bias ran strong in Texas—segregation, poll taxes, outright race hatred. In Texas he was in Dixiecrat territory for the first time, which was why a “cold” reception had been assumed. There had even been rumors of threats on his life, of Dixiecrats claiming “they’d shoot Truman, that no-good son-of-a-bitch and his civil rights.” It was the first time a Democratic nominee for the presidency had ever found it necessary to court Texas, and banking on friendships with such longstanding, powerful Democrats as Rayburn and Garner, Truman had decided to make it the most strenuous campaign ever waged there by a non-Texan.

A high point was the breakfast put on by “Cactus Jack” Garner at Uvalde, which, reporters discovered to their surprise, was a tree-shaded town with neat green lawns and no sign of anything remotely like cactus. Served on the glass-enclosed porch of Garner’s big, buff-colored brick house, the breakfast was the best he had had in forty years, Truman later told the delighted crowd outside. Ten thousand people and a high school band had been at the Uvalde station to greet him at 6:50 that morning. Now several thousand cheered as he stood on the front porch with Garner, Rayburn, and Governor Beauford Jester, none of whom was known for his devotion to civil rights. (Jester, not long before, had called Truman’s civil rights program a “stab in the back.”)

John Garner and he had been friends “a long, long time,” and they were going to be friends as long as they lived, Truman said. “I’m coming back for another visit sometime. I fished around for another invitation and got it.”

Old friendships, old loyalties would hold, in other words, not only now for the sake of politics, but later, too, whatever changes were in the wind. The crowd understood what he meant and the crowd applauded.

So pleased was Bess Truman by the warmth of the reception that she broke precedent and stepped forward to the microphone to say thank you, proving thereby “beyond all doubt,” reported Robert Donovan in the New York Herald-Tribune, “what an extraordinary occasion it was.”

At San Antonio later the same day, Sunday, September 26, an estimated 200,000 people filled the streets, and at a dinner that night at the Gunter Hotel, speaking spontaneously and simply of his feeling for people and his wish for peace, Truman achieved what Jonathan Daniels called “an eloquence close to presidential poetry.”

Our government is made up of the people. You are the government, I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that….

I believe that if we ourselves try to live as we should, and if we continue to work for peace in this world, and as the old Puritan said, “Keep your bullets bright and your powder dry,” eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.

We have got to harness these inventions for the welfare of man, instead of his destruction.

That is what I am interested in. That is what I am working for.

That is much more important than whether I am President of the United States.

“Truman Gains Texas Votes by ‘Human Touch’ Method,” read the headline in the San Antonio Express. When a reporter for the Express polled the correspondents on board the train, he found nearly all now thought Truman had at least “a fighting chance.”

In not quite four days in Texas, he made twenty-four stops, spoke twenty-five times. He had perfect weather and enthusiastic crowds the whole way. Monday, September 27, the biggest day, began with a rear platform talk at San Marcos at 6:40 in the morning. As the day wore on he spoke at Austin, Georgetown, Temple, Waco, Hillsboro, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Dallas, Greenville, and the little rail stop of Bells, where he told the crowd, “I am going over to Bonham…and make the speech…. It’s only 12 miles—why don’t you just get in the car and come on over to Bonham, and I will give the Republicans the gun over there. I think you will like it!” The Bonham speech, last of the day, was carried by radio nationwide.

On board with him through the day were Rayburn, Governor Jester, and Congressman Lyndon Johnson, candidate for the Senate, who had just been certified by the Democratic State Convention as having defeated his rival in the primary, former Governor Coke Stevenson, by a total of 87 votes out of roughly 1 million cast.

At Waco a boy waved a Confederate flag and there were scattered boos from the crowd when Truman shook hands with a black woman. Otherwise, all was harmonious. But then neither did he mention civil rights.

At Rebel Stadium in Dallas, where authorities quietly did away with segregation for the day and blacks and whites were mingled in the cheering crowd as never before, Truman, for the first time, hit hard at the Republicans for the hypocrisy of their “high-level” campaign—the Dewey speeches:

So in making their speeches they put them on a very high level, so high they are above discussing the specific and serious problems which confront the people…. Republican candidates are apparently trying to sing the American voters to sleep with a lullaby about unity…. They want the kind of unity that benefits the National Association of Manufacturers…the real estate trusts…[the] selfish interests…. They don’t want unity. They want surrender. And I am here to tell you people that I will not surrender….

Bonham, in the fertile Blackland Prairie, was Sam Rayburn’s hometown, and at Bonham Truman went after Dewey again, saying Republican unity meant unity of the Tafts and the Martins of Congress—“unity in giving tax relief to the rich…unity in letting prices go sky high…unity in whittling away all the benefits of the New Deal.” Was that really what they wanted, he asked the crowd.

Some things are worth fighting for…. We must fight isolationists and reactionaries, the profiteers and the privileged class…. Our primary concern is for the little fellow. We think the big boys have always done very well, taking care of themselves…. It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal…. Ask Sam Rayburn how many of the big money boys helped when he was sweating blood to get electricity for farmers and the people in small towns….

It was all language his audiences understood. He was truly, as Rayburn said, “one of the folks” and they let him know how much they approved.

At a reception later, at Rayburn’s white frame house west of town, hundreds of people waited in a long line across the front lawn. “They came in droves and kept coming,” remembered Margaret. When Truman’s Secret Service detail, worried for his safety, refused to let him stand in the receiving line unless the names of all the guests were provided Rayburn exploded, “I know every man, woman, and child here.” They were all his friends, every one, Rayburn said; he would vouch for them personally.

So while Truman stood at the door shaking hands, and sipping now and then on a surreptitious bourbon-and-water, Rayburn called out each name. But then Rayburn exclaimed to the governor, “Shut the door, Beauford, they’re comin’by twice.”

For the Republicans money was never a problem. Talk of the big money behind Dewey was another sign supposedly of just how far out in front Dewey was, how certain his victory—on the theory that big money never followed a loser. But to find backing for Truman was nearly impossible. At small White House receptions for Democrats that spring and summer, Truman himself had had to ask for financial help, something he detested, just to get his campaign under way. At one such gathering in the Red Room in early September he had stood on a chair to say, in effect, that while he knew most people thought he was going to lose, he thought the President of the United States should have sufficient funds to take his case to the people, but that as things were he could not do that. There was no money to buy radio time. One of the most important parts of his speech in Detroit on Labor Day had to be cut, he said, because of insufficient funds to stay on the air. Now there was not money enough to get the train out of Union Station. His plea, reportedly, produced over $100,000.

When Truman asked Bernard Baruch to serve on the finance committee, Baruch refused, saying it was not his policy to play so partisan a role—an answer that infuriated Truman, who in sharp reply wrote, “A great many honors have passed your way…and it seems when the going is rough it is a one-way street.” Baruch, his pride hurt, spoke of the President as “a rude, ignorant, uncouth man.”

Others, too, turned him down, until finally he named for financial chairman Louis A. Johnson of Clarksburg, West Virginia, a former commander of the American Legion and Assistant Secretary of War who had headed the finance committee of the Democratic Party from 1936 to 1940. Johnson was a looming, bald-headed, headstrong corporation lawyer and millionaire who stood over six feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. A subject of controversy in the past, he would be again in time to come, to Truman’s regret. But he took the job now when nobody else would, and he achieved amazing results, given the fact that no one other than Truman thought the ticket had the slightest chance.

Averell Harriman and Will Clayton were among the larger contributors. Harriman gave $5,000; Clayton, $9,000. Others included Stuart Symington; David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers; Milton S. Kronheim, Sr., who controlled the wholesale liquor business in Washington; Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee; William Helis, a Louisiana oil man known as “the Golden Greek,” who had been Governor Earl Long’s biggest money backer; Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney; and Pearl Mesta, the Washington hostess who came on board the Truman train at Gainesville, Texas, for the ride across Oklahoma, where her first husband had made a fortune in oil.

Floyd B. Odlum, the head of Atlas Corporation, a Wall Street investment company, put in $3,000, then rounded up another $20,000 from his associates. But the largest contribution seems to have come from Truman’s old Kansas City friend Tom Evans, the drugstore king, who, after giving $3,000 himself, raised some $100,000 more in the Middle West.

As the train headed across Oklahoma, the weather remained ideal. Truman in “fine fettle,” spent much of the time out on the back platform waving at people as he sped along. If he was worried about campaign funds or anything else, no one would have known it. During a stop at Ardmore, having expressed his admiration for the Palamino horse of a cowboy who met the train, Truman examined the animal’s mouth and declared it was six years old. “Correct!” exclaimed the delighted cowboy and the story appeared across the country: “Truman Gets Right Dope from Horse’s Mouth.”

The crowd at Ardmore was somewhere near forty thousand, more even, it was said, than for Gene Autry. At remote stations where no stops were scheduled people waited just to see the train go through. At Paul’s Valley, Truman asked if it was true they grew taller corn than in Iowa and five thousand people happily roared yes. “Hello Harry,” came shouts from the throng at Norman.

At Oklahoma City 100,000 turned out; 20,000 were at the State Fair Grounds for his speech. He had chosen Oklahoma as the time and place to answer Republican charges of communism in government and he was “strictly on the offensive.” Such Republican tactics were only a “smoke sreen” to hide their failure to deal with housing, price controls, education—real problems. His own Loyalty Program, he claimed, had proven the loyalty of 99.7 percent of all federal workers. It was not Republican talk that checked the Communist tide, but programs like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, and that was “a plain and unanswerable fact.” The government was not endangered by Communist infiltration. Publicity-seeking, electioneering Republicans with their irresponsible charges were doing more to damage national security than to strengthen it.

The speech was considered so important that for the first time the Democratic National Committee had dipped into its slim resources to pay for nationwide radio time.

But by then the money had run out. There was not enough even to move the train out of the station.

The crisis was resolved when Governor Roy J. Turner of Oklahoma, and a businessman from Shawnee, W. Elmer Harber, organized an emergency collection party on board the Ferdinand Magellan and raised enough contributions—“a substantial sum”—to keep the train rolling for another several weeks. But even so, remembered Charlie Ross, the campaign was never more than “one jump ahead of the sheriff.”

The day following, Wednesday, September 29, was one of the biggest of the campaign. At Eufaula, Oklahoma, Truman gave his one hundredth speech. Before the day ended, he spoke sixteen times. There were crowds at Shawnee, Seminole, Wewoka, Muskogee, “tremendous” crowds at Tulsa. Crossing into Missouri, Truman told the throng at Neosho that he had already talked to 500,000 people that day—an understandable overstatement, given all he had seen. And so it went the rest of the journey through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. At Mount Vernon, Illinois, leaving his train to travel by motorcade, he stumped the down-state mining country for 140 miles, through five counties that had not gone Democratic in fifty years. “Mr. Truman [reported The New York Times] was the first Chief Executive to campaign in southern Illinois and the people turned out by the thousands, breaking through police lines, swarming around and through the procession of cars and yelling a noisy greeting.”

With his headlong lambasting of Wall Street and “the special interests,” the constant harkening to grim memories of the Depression, he sounded often as if he were running against Herbert Hoover. But at Carbondale, the sixth of nine stops in southern Illinois, he talked as he had not until now of the postwar era, of the “history” he himself felt responsible for and proud of, knowing how many in his audience remembered how differently things had gone after the first war.

A Democratic administration working with a Democratic Congress had seen to a swift reconversion in 1945, not only avoiding a postwar recession but achieving

a peak of more jobs, a higher civilization, and better standards of living than ever before.

There is nothing like that in the history of the world after a great war. Bear that in mind…. Not very much has been said about that, but we had no riots and no bloodshed. We didn’t have people crying for jobs. We didn’t have farmers marching on Washington. We didn’t have returning soldiers marching on Washington, because we took care of them in educational institutions and absorbing them back into the economy of the country without a debacle.

We enacted the Employment Act of 1946, pledging all our resources and efforts to the maintenance of prosperity.

We brought the United States to a position of unquestioned leadership in world affairs. Don’t let anybody tell you anything different.

A warm reception in Kentucky had been anticipated, if for no other reason than Alben Barkley’s presence on the ticket. But the crowds there surpassed all predictions. Truman was “never more human,” reported the Louisville Courier-Journal. “He got down to earth and talked the language of the people….” At Shelbyville, where a banner stretched ln front of a wood-frame depot said: “Welcome Home President Truman and Family, Grandchildren of Shelby County,” he talked of his grandfather, who had been married there. At Lexington, heart of the Bluegrass horse country, he reminded everyone that it didn’t matter which horse was ahead or behind at any given moment in the race—it If was the horse ahead at the finish that counted. To the several thousand gathered on the tracks at Morehead, Kentucky, pressing as close as possible to the rear platform of his car, he left no doubt what he expected of them:

Now, whatever you do, go to the polls early on election day, and don’t waste any time. Just take that ticket and vote the Democratic ticket straight down the line, and you will be helping your country, and helping yourselves. You will not only be voting for me…but you will be voting for yourselves and your best interests. And I believe that is exactly what you are going to do.

At Montgomery, West Virginia, the final stop at 10:45 that night, Truman was so stunned by the size of the turnout at such an hour that before beginning his remarks he asked the photographers to turn their cameras around and take a picture of the people. That was the real news to show he country, he said.

But what to make of the phenomenon of the Truman crowds?

Most correspondents attributed it to ordinary curiosity. Truman had made his campaign a vaudeville act, said Time, so naturally people would come out to see the show. The American people had a high regard for the office of President and so naturally wanted to see the man who occupied it, wrote Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, who had been on the train from the beginning. Fletcher Knebel of the Cowles papers would remember in particular the stop at Shelbyville:

The early morning haze was still hanging over the hills, and the sun wasn’t up. But gathered around the railroad tracks, as far as you could see in any direction, was this incredible crowd of people—men holding kids up on their shoulders so they could see, little boys climbing trees and roofs, old grandpappies and men in overalls. Of course, we experts in the press car talked about the crowd, and we finally decided it didn’t mean a damned thing. “Anybody will come out to see a man who is President of the United States, just to say they’ve seen one in the flesh. But that doesn’t mean they’d vote for Harry Truman.” He was going to lose. We believed it, because we wrote it every day.

Some correspondents, Jonathan Daniels noted, had convinced themselves that Truman’s crowds were not Truman followers at all, but people wishing to see a very nice man on his way to oblivion.

To Walter Lippmann, who, as usual, was observing the world from his ivy-covered home in Washington, all such speculation was immaterial. Lippmann deplored the whole spectacle of a President chasing about the country devoting himself to parades and hand shaking, trying to “talk his way to victory.” To Lippmann, who was secretly offering Dewey advice on foreign policy and who shared Dewey’s contempt for Harry Truman, this was no time for a President to be away from his duties, and this President had been gone sixteen days. Unwittingly, wrote Lippmann, Truman had proven how little he mattered.

He had only begun to fight, Truman told the crowd waiting to welcome him at Union Station in Washington, Sunday morning, October 2. He would be heading off again in another few days. Others—his wife, daughter, his press secretary—looked exhausted, but not the President.

To his sister he wrote, “We made about a hundred and forty stops and I spoke 147 times, shook hands with at least 30,000 [people] and am in good condition to start out again….” It would be the greatest campaign any President had ever made, he promised. “Win, lose, or draw people will know where I stand….”

So much would be written and said about the Truman campaign of 1948, about the scrappy “Give-’em-hell-Harry” style that evolved, the headlong vigor and determination of the folksy, doomed candidate, that other factors bearing on the outcome were often overlooked. Truman was and remained his own show. Nor had any President ever worked harder at running for reelection. But other efforts behind the scenes were of considerable importance. Like all campaigns, his was a combination of many elements besides the candidate himself. Jack Redding, publicity director for the Democratic National Committee, would later write of the “classic unities of politics,” saying they were as vital to a campaign as were the unities of time, place, and action to a successful drama. “When the unities fuse, the results achieved are far in excess of the sum of the parts.” That Redding, Howard McGrath, and others worked as hard and effectively as they did was all the more remarkable given that they, too, knew perfectly what the odds were against them.

It was Redding, for example, who enlisted the services of the manager of a Polish-language newspaper in New York, Michel Cieplinski, who saw that all Truman press releases were translated into various foreign languages before being sent to foreign-language papers and radio stations around the country. Later, this would seem an obvious idea, but no one else had done it until then, and as Redding recalled, acceptance of the material was immediate. Truman stories were carried substantially as written—in Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Swedish—and with 35 million people of foreign birth in America, or roughly 25 percent of the population, of whom 11 million were eligible to vote, this was no small break.

McGrath appreciated particularly the political importance of foreign-born Americans—it was with their support that he had been elected governor three times in Rhode Island—and he understood how greatly the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as Truman’s policy on immigration, mattered to such groups, that for no other reason than his stand on foreign policy, Truman had an excellent chance of winning their support.

It was arranged for the President to have his portrait painted by a beloved Polish artist, Tadé Styka, who, though an avowed Republican, became an immediate convert after hearing Truman speak to a group of Polish editors about the problems of the world as they affected Poland. (“Another hell of a day. I’m sitting for an old Polish painter, and I don’t like to pose—but it’s also part of the trial of being President,” Truman had written in his diary on September 14. “He’s painted a nice stuffed-shirt picture.”) In October, after Styka presented the portrait at a formal ceremony at the White House, all seventy-two Polish papers in the country ran a picture of the painting, as well as Styka’s personal praise for the President. To publicist Redding, it was a “political triumph.”

Meantime, for the amusement of the press, a selection of the platitudes and banalities of the Dewey speeches was prepared and distributed:

“Our streams abound with fish.”

“The miners in our country are vital to our welfare.”

“Everybody that rides in a car or bus uses gasoline and oil.”

“Ours is a magnificent land. Every part of it.”

A sixteen-page, four-color comic-book biography was produced, The Story of Harry Truman, which, panel-by-panel, portrayed the Independence boyhood, the courtship of Bess Wallace, Truman’s time on the farm, and how the neighbors judged him (“By crackies, in spite of Harry Truman’s newfangled ideas about farmin’, he’s a durned good ‘un!”). His part in the war took up two and a half pages, followed by his business failure (“You’d think the Republican Administration would do something to help small businessmen”), and the high points of his public service, including the presidency. To many the comic-book format seemed highly unfitting for a President. Several at the White House complained that it should never have been permitted without Truman’s knowledge. But he had known and approved, and the book was a success. Three million copies quickly disappeared. In some places schools permitted distribution among students, who took the books home. Time, in a special feature, hailed it as “something new in ‘campaign literature’,” while regretting that it made no mention of “the late, great-bellied” Tom Pendergast.

Even more important and effective was a ten-minute Truman film, a “short” to be shown in movie theaters. (With approximately 20,000 theaters in the country, the weekly movie audience in 1948 was about 65 million.) Hearing that a Dewey film was being produced and paid for by the Republicans, Jack Redding, with no money available for films, threatened to have theaters picketed as unfair unless a “balancing” Truman story were made available. In response, the movie industry decided to produce a Truman film for nothing—Universal Newsreels lost the flip of a coin and did the work. With so little time left, and to keep costs to a minimum, The Truman Story was put together almost entirely from available newsreel footage, with the result that the finished production had a feeling of authenticity missing in the Dewey film, most of which had been staged. The candidate was seen as “neighbor Truman,” shaking hands with people on the streets of Independence (including a black man in bib overalls). He was shown visiting Eddie Jacobson in his store, at Grandview with his mother, but above all as the President, signing the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, addressing Congress, reviewing troops, conferring with Secretary Marshall beside the large globe in the Oval Office.

The two-reel film that had cost the Truman campaign nothing and was considered much more effective than its counterpart on Dewey would, in the final week before the election, play in theaters in every part of the country. “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President,” boasted Redding, who considered it the most important publicity break of the campaign.

Seventy-one-year-old Alben Barkley, meantime, was crisscrossing the country in a chartered DC-3 called The Bluegrass. In contrast to his much younger Republican counterpart and rival, Earl Warren, who was touring by train, Barkley had initiated what he called history’s first “prop-stop” campaign. He flew 150,000 miles and delivered 250 speeches, mostly in small cities, farm towns, coal and railroad towns, labor halls, and small hotel dining rooms, his audiences sometimes numbering only in the hundreds. The press called him “the poor man’s candidate,” and Barkley enjoyed himself hugely, telling stories, speaking extemporaneously at almost any length, and giving no sign of wanting anything for himself, only to help the President and any number of local Democratic candidates. His own best help, he liked to say, came from the Republicans. Dewey’s speeches reminded him, Barkley said, of an old Tennessee politician known as “Fiddlin’ Bob” Taylor, who, in the era of the free silver issue, ran for governor by playing a violin and using his magnificent speaking voice to say as little as possible about anything specific, until finally he was pressed to state where he stood on the money question. “He paused dramatically,” Barkley would say, savoring the story, “and he said, ‘Here is where I stand. I am for a little more gold, a little more silver, a little more greenback—and a sprinkling of counterfeit.’ ”

When a reporter in New Haven, Connecticut, asked Barkley if he honestly thought the Democrats had a chance, Barkley replied, “Certainly. What do you think I’m running around for?”

One idea hatched behind the scenes by two of the new speechwriters proved a major embarrassment. David Noyes and Albert Carr, who were partial to the dramatic phrase or gesture—it was they who contributed the “pitchfork-in-the-back” line at Dexter—had concluded that the President needed to announce a bold move to dramatize his desire for world peace, and soon.

They proposed he send the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, on a special mission to Moscow to see Stalin. That Vinson, as a member of the Supreme Court, had no connection with the diplomatic role of the executive branch, that Vinson knew nothing of the crisis in Berlin beyond what was in the papers, or had any experience in Soviet affairs, or in dealing with Stalin, were apparently not considered serious drawbacks.

Truman agreed to the scheme—a decision that suggested as nothing else would that for all his show of confidence he knew perfectly how desperate his situation was and was therefore willing to try almost anything. Undoubtedly, too, he hoped that so daring and unorthodox an approach might just give Stalin the chance to “open up,” as he later wrote. He still thought Stalin could be reached, reasoned with, man-to-man. “If we could only get Stalin to unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust fully, I thought perhaps we could get somewhere.”

On his second day back at the White House, Sunday, October 3, without notifying George Marshall, who was at a United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris trying to deal with the Berlin crisis, Truman called the Chief Justice to his office and asked him to make the trip.

Vinson was astonished. Members of the Court, he said, should confine themselves to their Court duties, and especially in an election year. But then, dutifully, Vinson consented to go.

The plan was for Truman to announce the mission on a special radio broadcast to the nation. Charlie Ross was instructed to arrange with the networks for a free, nonpolitical half-hour, for a statement of “major importance.” The State Department was alerted, to make the necessary clearances with Stalin. Truman would remember requesting also that “every possible precaution” be taken against premature leaks.

The atmosphere at the White House was extremely uneasy. Nerves were on edge. Those of the staff who had been traveling with the President were still exhausted, while a number of those who had remained behind felt overworked and unappreciated. “There is much confusion and taut nerves [recorded the faithful diarist Eben Ayers], due to…the belief that the President is going to be defeated. There are a few optimists in the place. There are jealousies and undercurrents all through the staff.”

The proposed “Vinson Mission” made tensions still worse. Clifford and Elsey argued vehemently against it, “almost violently,” Elsey remembered.

But when Truman met with his advisers in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday, October 5, the majority view was that only a dramatic, “even desperate” measure could save the campaign.

Excusing himself from the meeting, Truman went to the Map Room to inform Marshall by teletype. But Marshall, appalled by the very idea of the Vinson scheme, vehemently objected, with the result that Truman immediately called the whole thing off.

When he returned to the Cabinet Room to report his decision, several at the table, including Jonathan Daniels, addressed him in no uncertain terms, arguing that the mission was his last, best chance. But Truman cut them off. “We won’t do it,” he said.

To Daniels, it was one of the most vivid moments of all he had witnessed in the White House. If ever there was a point when Truman seemed at his best, when he was more than large enough for the job, Daniels later wrote, it was then, and

at a time when, by all reports, he seemed smaller than ever.

He got up and went out of the glass-paned door to the terrace by the rose garden and walked alone—very much alone that day—back toward the White House itself. He was wrong, I thought, but he was strong, I knew. There were no dramatics about it. He never said he would rather be right than President. The next time I saw him he was laughing with the reporters, the politicians and the police as he got back on that long train which everyone seemed too sure was taking him nowhere.

He was gone just three days this time. A quick swing through eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York had been decided on, as an extra effort. The “Vinson Mission,” presumably, was dead and buried, and no one the wiser. But there had been a leak. The radio networks, understandably, had insisted on knowing the nature of the “nonpolitical” announcement before relinquishing a free half hour in the middle of a presidential campaign. So Ross had told them “in confidence.”

The story of the aborted peace mission broke wide open. Editorials accused Truman of attempted appeasement, of playing politics with foreign policy. “His attempted action was shocking because it showed that he had no conception whatever of the difference between the President of the United States and a U.S. politician,” wrote Time. The campaign that had never had a chance was said to have been dealt a fatal blow. Dewey, publicly, decided to let the President’s action speak for itself. Off the record, he told reporters huffily, “If Harry Truman would just keep his hands off things for another few weeks! Particularly, if he will keep his hands off foreign policy, about which he knows considerably less than nothing.”

When Marshall flew in from Paris on Saturday, October 9, and stepped from his plane looking “ashen-faced,” it was said he had come home to resign. In fact, though Marshall was in poor health, his relations with Truman were excellent. Indeed, Marshall assumed part of the blame for what had happened, apologizing to Truman for not having kept him better informed on the progress of negotiations in Paris.

Truman was not worried about the fuss in the papers. He found it hard to believe that the American people would fault a President too harshly for wanting to achieve peace in the world. He had been encouraged also by his three-day swing. At Albany, Dewey’s own capital, ten thousand people had come down to the station in an early morning downpour to cheer and shout, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”

On Sunday, October 10, he was back on board the train, still behind in the polls, still exuding confidence, and with just three weeks to go.

III

Were one to pick a single representative day of all the many days in Harry Truman’s drive for the presidency in 1948, a day that in spirit and content could serve as a classic passage in his whistle-stop odyssey, probably it would be Monday, October 11, when he barnstormed through central Ohio at the start of what was to prove a crucial swing into the Middle West.

Like the larger campaign; the day began in an atmosphere of gloom.

When Truman arrived in Cincinnati at 7:00 A.M., it was cold and raining. The streets from the railroad station to the Netherland Plaza Hotel, where he was to speak, were deserted. A reporter for the Des Moines Register, who had been traveling on board the Truman train for weeks, described him as looking that morning “like a man who had received bad news but felt the show must go on.”

The morning was bleak and the whole plan for the day seemed pointless. At stake were Ohio’s twenty-six electoral votes, but Ohio, the Buckeye State, was as formidable a Republican stronghold as any of the forty-eight states, with a Republican governor, nineteen Republican congressmen (as opposed to four Democrats), and two famous Republican senators, Taft and John Bricker, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944. Moreover, Truman had decided to spend much of the day in rural Ohio, in places where, in 1944, the vote had run as much as 70 percent for Dewey.

It had been Bill Boyle who had urged Truman to campaign in Ohio and whose political sagacity Truman had decided to bank on. Boyle, who was still in charge of Truman’s itinerary, was directing things now from an office at Democratic headquarters in Washington.

From Cincinnati, home of the Tafts, in the southwest corner of the state, Truman would head north on the B&O Railroad to Hamilton and Dayton, then on to a string of little towns, Sidney, Lima, Ottawa, and Deshler, where the train would turn east on the main line of the B&O, to stop at Fostoria, Willard, Rittman, and finally, that night, at industrial Akron, in the northeast corner. It was a trip of 350 miles. That Truman would even bother with towns like Ottawa or Willard struck many as a waste of time. But then to many observers the whole campaign was a waste of time. Dewey, who had carried Ohio against Roosevelt in 1944, was so sure of carrying it again, he would not actively campaign there. At one point while stopped in Ohio, Dewey did not trouble himself even to step out onto the rear platform, but sat in his compartment with the blind drawn. Told there was a crowd outside hoping to catch a glimpse of him, Dewey did not bother to raise the blind.

In eleven speeches at eleven stops, in the span of a fifteen-hour day, Truman hammered away steadily and happily at his same favorite themes—the high cost of living, the need for adequate housing, the intransigence and shortsightedness of the 80th Congress, the evils of the Taft-Hartley Act, and his desire for peace. He sang the praises of Franklin Roosevelt, and in the speech at Akron, the major speech of the day, he embraced as he never quite had in so many words the “entire philosophy” of the New Deal as his own, vowing “to build upon it an always better way of life.”

There were no startling claims or announcements. He just kept pressing the attack, mindful always of where he was and to whom he was speaking. He praised the people of Hamilton for their wartime production record, a subject he knew about, he said, from his years on the Truman Committee. “I grew up on a farm and I always like to see good farming country,” he said at rural Ottawa, then spent ten minutes describing the gains and prosperity achieved by farmers in the “Democratic years” since 1932.

At Lima, home of a locomotive factory, he shouted, “I’ve worn out three locomotives and we’ll use three more before we get through, so that will make it good for business here….”

“Well, I say thank God for the whistle-stops of our country. They are the backbone of the nation,” he told the citizenry of little Fostoria.

Bess and Margaret appeared on cue from behind the blue curtain and always to the delight of the crowd. “Would you like to meet the Boss?” Truman asked at Lima, adding that most married men had bosses at home. “He’s the President,” wrote the editor of the Lima News, and yet, “he’s just an ordinary family man, proud of his wife and daughter. He has something in common with many who heard him.”

(It was shortly after this that Bess told the candidate that if he called her “the Boss” one more time, she would get off the train.)

After the dreary start at Cincinnati the skies had literally cleared. The rain ended, the sun broke through. A crisp autumn wind was blowing, and with the maples beginning to turn gold and red, Ohio was a calendar picture for October in small-town, rural America.

From Hamilton on, the whole way, the crowds were big and responsive and Truman’s vitality returned, as if he had been given a powerful injection. The sight of ten thousand people spilling out in all directions at Hamilton produced what the Des Moines reporter called “the most striking change in the Democratic candidate’s demeanor I have witnessed in all our trips.” Everyone was surprised by the size and mood of the crowds. Ohio’s youthful, handsome former governor, Frank Lausche, who was running a “lone wolf campaign for another try at the governorship, had come aboard at Cincinnati, not at all sure that being seen with Harry Truman was the best thing for his fortunes. But as he told Truman in dismay, he had never seen such throngs. At Dayton, where he and Truman rode in a motorcade, there were fifty thousand lining the route. Lausche, who had planned to get off the train at Dayton, decided he would stay on board.

No two of Truman’s speeches were the same. Nearly all of what he said was spontaneous, his energy and enjoyment appearing to compound as the day went on, the more miles he covered, the more he talked of “the common people,” “the American people,” or “you good people of Deshler,” or Dayton or Fostorfa or Willard. As before, he played on fear of hard times, the memory of lean years, knowing from experience what so many who turned out to see him had been through, knowing, for example, how, among farmers, recollection of the 1920s in no way resembled the cliché, good-time picture of the Jazz Age. “If you don’t want to go backward,” he said at Ottawa, “if you don’t want to slide downhill to bankruptcy and poverty the way you did in the Republican 12 years of rule back there in the 20’s, you better get out early on election day and look after your own interests.” He knew, he had been through it.

Take stock of your prosperity now, he was saying. Remember, it wasn’t the Republicans who pulled the country back on its feet.

His opponent, he said, talked all the time of unity, because he didn’t dare do anything else. “He’s afraid that if he says anything, he will give the whole show away.” Meantime, the real leaders of the Republican Party in the “do-nothing” 80th Congress had been “sent off into the bushes to hide until the campaign is over.”

The people had a right to know where the candidates stood. That was why he had come to their town. They were entitled to know what the issues were, entitled to take a look at their President and hear what he had to say and decide for themselves. That was the idea of democracy: the people decide.

“They tell me that Seneca County is a Republican county,” he said at Fostoria. “Well, that’s all right with me. I want the Republicans of Seneca County to know what I think…”

His best trackside talk of the day was at Willard, in Huron County, Ohio, at 4:55 in the afternoon. It was a perfect example of Truman the barnstormer at top form.

A railroad town of plain, square frame houses and a population of four thousand, Willard had been called Chicago Junction until 1917, when it was renamed for Daniel Willard, president of the B&O Railroad. There was a surgical gloves factory in town, a Rotary Club, a good high school football team, and a World War II honor roll at the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Pearl Street listing 876 names. Will Rogers was known to have had lunch once in the restaurant in the red-brick, Italianate railroad station.

Truman’s train stopped just east of the station, and Truman, looking west from the rear platform, the late afternoon sun full in his face, appeared still fresh and clean in a dark blue double-breasted suit and dark blue tie. Flags snapped in the wind. A crowd of several thousand pressed closer, cheering, waving to him, calling, “Hi, Harry!” As in so many other places, people who had brought small children held them on their shoulders, so they could say one day they had seen the President.

The excitement in Willard had begun building long before the train appeared down the tracks. When Franklin Roosevelt’s train stopped at Willard during the campaign of 1944, and thousands of people had gathered, Roosevelt never appeared. They saw only his dog Fala.

Truman was introduced by Harlow A. Stapf, the proprietor of a popular bar and grill in Willard and president of Huron County’s Young Democratic Club, who, to Truman’s delight, was wearing a campaign necktie with Truman’s portrait on it.

Truman began with a few customary words of appreciation for the warm welcome, which he followed with a note of local history, in this instance, Daniel Willard, who, as Truman said, was still fondly remembered for his generosity to suffering families of the town during the Depression. Several key themes were then sounded—housing, inflation, the 80th Congress—and Truman did a little advance drumbeating for the main speech to come, at Akron, which was to be carried by radio.

A personal observation on the value of opinion polls was also added at Willard, for the first time. The complete talk, all spontaneous, lasted twelve minutes. Characteristically, it was without flourishes. There were no quotations for effect, no big words. He used no jargon, no stock jokes, nothing cute. But the intent of his thought was always clear. He spoke in good, solid, complete sentences—as indeed he did the whole way along, through the entire campaign. From what he said, his audience never had any trouble knowing what he meant.

I have had a most wonderful reception in Ohio today. It has been just like this all across the State of Ohio. We started in Cincinnati and came up the western border of the State, and now we are headed for Akron, and it seems as if everybody in the neighborhood and in every city has turned out, because they are interested in what is taking place in the country today and in the world.

It is good to be here in Willard this afternoon, even for a short stop. You people here in Willard have a great tradition, a tradition set by Dan Willard many years ago when he was President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. I think it is significant that the name of Dan Willard is loved and respected all over the country, because he was the man who believed in the common people of the nation. He liked and respected the people who worked for him, and he recognized their right to join a union and bargain collectively.

Now, Dan Willard did not sneer at the “whistle-stops” of our country. He trusted people, and people trusted him. I think that is a good principle. It is a good way to run a railroad, and it is a good way to run a country. That is the way I have tried to run the country, but the Republican Congress would not cooperate, this 80th Congress.

Now, that is the way, with your help, we are going to run the country for the next 4 years.

The Republican candidate and the Republican Congress do not trust the people. They just work along at their old problem of trying to fool the people into voting for the interests of the few. They try to do it without telling you what they think. I have been out among the people now for nearly a month. I believe you have got a right to know what I think, and I have been telling you what I think.

Tonight, in Akron, I am going to talk over the radio about the Republican Taft-Hartley law. I am really going to tear the mask off the Republican Congress and the Republican candidate.

In Cincinnati this morning, at a splendid meeting, I talked about housing. I told the people there how your President had tried for 3 years to get a decent housing bill passed. At other places we stopped at in Ohio, I talked about prices. I told the people how your President had twice called Congress into special session in an effort to get something done about inflation that is picking your pockets.

Since I have been in the White House, there has not been a moment of doubt about where I stood on issues which are of concern to the people of America today. I have always spoken out and I have taken a stand on every issue as it has come up. I don’t wait for any polls to tell me what to think. That is a statement some of the Republican candidates cannot make.

You know, since I started this campaign, I have talked to over 3 million people in various communities. They have come down to the train, just as you did this afternoon, because they were interested in this election. They know that the peace of the Nation and the peace of the world depend, to a large extent, on this election. They know that the continued prosperity of our Nation depends upon this election, and they want to know where the candidates stand on the issues. And that is what I have been telling you as simply and as plainly as I know how.

There is not a single, solitary man or woman in the United States today who can’t find out in two minutes where I stand on the important matters like foreign policy, labor, agriculture, social security, housing, high prices, and all the other problems we as a nation have to face.

But there is not a single, solitary man or woman in the United States who has been able, within the last 2 months, to find out where the Republican candidate stands on these issues.

I think he is going to get a shock on the second of November. He is going to get the results of one big poll that counts—that is the voice of the American people speaking at the ballot box.

And he is going to find out that the people have had enough of such fellows as the one from this district who has been helping the 80th Congress to turn the clock back. And I think you are going to elect Dwight Blackmore to Congress in his place. And I think you are going to elect Frank Lausche Governor of Ohio.

If you do that, you will be voting in your own interests, and when you vote in your own interests on the second of November, you cannot do anything else but vote the straight Democratic ticket, and I won’t be troubled with the housing problem. I will live in the White House 4 more years.

Now, that will be entirely to your interests. You will have a Congress who believes in the people, and you will have a President who has shown you right along that he believes in the welfare of the country as a whole, and not in the welfare of just a few at the top.

Akron, heart of the rubber industry, a big labor town, solidly Democratic, had been expected to give the Democratic standardbearer a good reception, however dismal his prospects. But the welcome at Akron was “tumultuous,” everything that Cincinnati failed to provide, and more. People jammed the streets three and four deep, an estimated sixty thousand, in what was reported in the national press as “the biggest political show in the city’s history,” everyone “cheering wildly” as Truman passed. The Akron Armory was packed. It was the perfect, grand finale for the day and Truman was radiant.

“I have lived a long time—64 years—and I have traveled a lot,” he told the crowd, “but I have never seen such turnouts as I have seen all over this great country of ours…. The Republicans have the propaganda and the money, but we have the people, and the people have the votes. That’s why we’re going to win!”

Reporters traveling with Truman agreed it had been one of if not his best day of the campaign. By conservative estimates, the day’s crowds totaled 100,000 people, even before Akron.

By eleven that night he was back on the train and heading west again. At 8:00 A.M. the next morning, at Richmond, Indiana, he was out on the rear platform ready to start another day.

It had been known for some while that Newsweek magazine was taking a poll of fifty highly regarded political writers, to ask which candidate they thought would win the election. And since several of the fifty had been on the train with Truman during the course of the campaign—Marquis Childs, Robert Albright of the Washington Post, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune—there had been a good deal of speculation about the poll. It appeared in Newsweek in the issue dated October 11, and on the morning of Tuesday, October 12, three weeks before election day, at one of the first stops in Indiana, Clark Clifford slipped off the train to try to find a copy before anyone else. The woman at the station newsstand pointed to a bundle wrapped in brown paper, telling him to help himself. “And there it was!” remembered Clifford years afterward.

Of the writers polled, not one thought Truman would win. The vote was unanimous, 50 for Dewey, 0 for Truman. “The landslide for Dewey will sweep the country,” the magazine announced. Further, the Republicans would keep control in the Senate and increase their majority in the House. The election was as good as over.

Returning to the train, Clifford hid the magazine under his coat. With the train about to leave, the only door still open was on the rear platform.

So I walked in. President Truman was sitting there, and so I cheerily said, “Good morning, Mr. President.” He said, “Good morning, Clark.” And I said, “Another busy day ahead.” “Yes,” he said…. So I walked off…and I got almost by him when he said, “What does it say?” And I said, “What’s that, Mr. President?” He said, “What does it say?” And I said, “Now what does what…?” He said, “I saw you get off and go into the station. I think you probably went in there to see if they had a copy at Newsweek magazine.” And he said, “I think it is possible that you may have it under your jacket there, the way you’re holding your arm.” Well, I said, “Yes, sir.”

So I handed it to him…. And he turned the page and looked at it…[and] he said, “I know every one of these 50 fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.”

Truman put the magazine aside and made no further mention of it. “It just seemed to bounce right off of him,” Clifford remembered.

There were three stops in Indiana, four crossing Illinois, where farmers on tractors waved small flags or held up hand-lettered “Vote for Truman” signs.

“I was with Truman in the central part of the state,” wrote Paul Douglas, Democratic candidate for the Senate. “There was great applause, and there were constant shouts of ‘Give ‘em hell, Harry’…and he was at home with the crowd…he was simple, unaffected, and determined. We were proud of him.”

At Springfield after dark old-time campaign flares burned, the streets were filled with people. No one could come to Springfield without thinking of Abraham Lincoln, Truman said in his speech.

I just wonder tonight, as I have wondered many times in the past, what Lincoln would say if he could see how far the Republican party has departed from the fundamental principles in which he so deeply believed. Lincoln came from the plain people and he always believed in them….

He crossed into Wisconsin and Minnesota. At Duluth, where he rode in an open car with Hubert Humphrey, fully half the population, some sixty thousand people, lined Superior Street for two miles, crowding so close in places that the car brushed their clothes.

At St. Paul, an overflow crowd at Municipal Auditorium whistled, stamped, and shouted as he delivered one of the best fighting speeches of the campaign.

Now, I call on all liberals and progressives to stand up and be counted for democracy in this great battle…. This is one fight you must get in, and get in with every ounce of strength you have. After November 2nd, it will be too late…. The decision is right here and now.

But we are bound to win and we are going to win, because we are right! I am here to tell you that in this fight, the people are with us.

The crowd at St. Paul numbered 21,000—15,000 inside the auditorium, another 6,000 outside. Dewey, in his appearance at St. Paul two days later, drew only 7,000.

Heading east again, Truman said there were going to be “a lot of surprised pollsters,” come November 2.

Some of the Dewey people were beginning to worry. When Dewey asked his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, how he thought Truman was doing, Hagerty said, “I think he’s doing pretty well.” Dewey replied that he thought so, too.

When at Kansas City Dewey met privately with Roy Roberts of the Star, he was told the farmers of the Middle West were defecting from the Republican ticket in droves and that he had better do something about it quickly. Time was now describing Dewey’s crowds as only “mildly curious,” his speeches as “not electrifying.”

“Our man is ‘in,’” reporters were assured by the Dewey staff. “He doesn’t have to win votes, all he has to do is avoid losing them.” Dewey himself told Taft that he had found over the years that when he got into controversies he lost votes—an observation Taft thought disgraceful.

There was much that Dewey could have said in answer to Truman. The “do-nothing” 80th Congress was after all the Congress that had backed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Truman’s assault on the Taft-Hartley Act failed to note that a majority of his own party in the House had voted approval and then to override his veto. The evil influence of Wall Street on the Republican Party, as described by Truman, might have been made to sound a bit hollow, had it been pointed out that such important figures within his own official family as Harriman, Lovett, and Forrestal had all come to Washington from Wall Street. Truman’s dismissal of Henry Wallace had been a fiasco. His handling of the railroad strike might well have been made a major issue. “The only way to handle Truman,” Taft wrote later, “was to hit every time he opened his mouth.” But Taft was a cantankerous man and Dewey was determined to stick to his own strategy.

Meantime, a “slight misadventure” at a town called Beaucoup, in Illinois, had raised a stir. Just as Dewey was about to speak at Beaucoup, his train had suddenly lurched a few feet backward toward the crowd. There were screams, people fell back in panic. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey blurted angrily into the microphone. “He probably ought to be shot at sunrise….”

The cold arrogance of the remark did Dewey great damage. The story appeared everywhere, and with it, the observation of the engineer—“the lunatic”—who said, “I think as much of Dewey as I did before and that’s not very much.”

With only two weeks to go, a new Gallup Poll showed Dewey’s lead cut to six points. In the seclusion of the Governor’s Mansion at Albany, Dewey ordered a showing of all the newsreels of the campaign and what he saw left him greatly disturbed. He was losing ground steadily, he was told. But when his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, put through calls to some ninety Republican committeemen and women around the country, all but one urged him to keep to the present strategy.

Among professional gamblers, the betting odds against Truman on the average were 15 to 1. In some places, they were 30 to 1.

Besides the gamblers’ odds, the opinion polls, the forecasts by columnists, political reporters, political experts, Truman by now had the majority of editorial opinion weighed heavily against him. His frequent claim that 90 percent of the papers opposed his election was a campaign stretch of the truth. It was 65 percent, which in fact meant overwhelming press support for Dewey, and especially since it included virtually all the biggest, most influential papers in the country. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Star, the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Wall Street Journal all endorsed Dewey. The Detroit Free Press called Truman intellectually unqualified. The Chicago Tribune, though far from admiring the liberal Republican candidate, simply dismissed Truman as “an incompetent.”

An editorial backing Truman, such as appeared in the Boston Post, under the heading “Captain Courageous,” was a rare exception. Harry S. Truman, said the Boston paper, was

as humbly honest, homespun and doggedly determined to do what is best for America as Abraham Lincoln.

In standing by his party and its inherent principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, he has emulated other great Americans—Jefferson, Jackson, Cleveland, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Alfred E. Smith. Like them, in the words of the old song, he—

Dared to be a Daniel,

Dared to stand alone,

Dared to hold a purpose firm

    Dared to make it known.

By that token he should win. America likes a fighter.

More representative were such conclusions as drawn in the Los Angeles Times: “Mr. Truman is the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time.”

Even papers that expressed an open fondness for the President as a man chose not to support him. “However much affection we may feel for Mr. Truman and whatever sympathy we may have for him in his struggles with his difficulties,” said a front-page editorial in the Baltimore Sun, “to vote him into the presidency on November 2 would be a tragedy for the country and for the world.”

For Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, George Elsey, for everyone riding the Truman train, the campaign had become an unimaginable ordeal—interminable, exhausting in a way comparable to nothing in their experience.

“If you’re winning, you’d be surprised how you can withstand fatigue,” Clifford would say later. “If you’re losing it becomes oppressive…. They were long, long days. I was young and strong, and in perfect health. From time to time I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.”

The candidate, who bore the main brunt, seemed indefatigable, his outlook entirely positive. Between speeches he could lie down and go immediately to sleep, however pressed others were, however rough the road bed. “Give me 20 minutes,” he would say.

“Strain seemed to make him calmer and more firm,” Jonathan Daniels recalled. At no point in the entire campaign did any of the staff, or the press, or his family ever see Truman show a sign of failing stamina, or failing confidence.

Once during a lull en route to St. Paul after the stop at Duluth, Truman had asked George Elsey to write down the names of the forty-eight states, after which he gave Elsey the number of electoral votes for each and told him how they would go. By his count he would win with 340 electoral votes. Dewey would have 108, Strom Thurmond 42, Henry Wallace none.

“He was not putting on a show for anybody,” Elsey would recall. “Obviously he wasn’t trying to influence or persuade or sell me. This is what the man himself believed.”

“He either honestly believes he will win…or he is putting on the most magnificent and fighting front of optimism that any doubtful candidate ever did,” wrote Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune.

The Truman staff was another matter, Andrews noted. They all appeared “a bit grim.”

The work went on from seven in the morning until past midnight, day after day, until they lost all sense of time, until every day became merged with every other and everything became a blur. Margaret would remember the world beginning to seem like an endless railroad track. She would sit by the window and take idle snapshots of the passing countryside—telephone poles whizzing past, empty plains, country roads that seemed to lead nowhere.

As Ross wrote, the President was driving himself “unmercifully,” and no one on the staff wished to do any less. Ross, “the old philosopher,” suffered from arthritis and heart trouble, yet worked twelve, fourteen hours a day, knowing how much Truman counted on him. “For years afterward,” Clifford said, “I’d sometimes wake up at night in a cold perspiration thinking I was back on that terrible train.”

And day by day, steadily, the crowds grew larger. Clearly, something was happening. The mood of the crowds, their response to Truman was changing. People seemed always to be happier after hearing him speak.

“I remember thinking,” said Clifford, “ ‘Well, I don’t know whether we’re going to make it or not, but, by God, I bet if we had another week we would surely make it.’ There was something rolling…. We could sense it and the newspapermen could sense it.”

Robert C. Albright, the veteran political correspondent for the Washington Post, speculated, “Could we be wrong?”

“We’ve got them on the run and I think we’ll win,” Truman wrote to his sister from the White House on October 20. After a day in Washington, he had flown to Miami, where 200,000 people filled the streets. From Miami he flew north to Raleigh, where there were “people all along the way from the airport which is fifteen miles out of town.”

Things were looking decidedly more hopeful on several fronts. In Berlin, with improved landing facilities and more efficient air-traffic control after months of experience, the airlift was plainly succeeding at last, against all odds and forecasts. At his desk in the Oval Office on Friday, October 22, Truman authorized the dispatch to Berlin of still more of the giant C-54 transports, another twenty-six planes. “The airlift will be continued until the blockade is lifted,” General Clay declared triumphantly in Berlin. Winter supplies for the city were guaranteed.

Back on his train again, Truman was telling a delighted crowd at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that the GOP stood for “Grand Old Platitudes,” and at a thunderous rally at Hunt Armory in Pittsburgh, he declared, “I am an old campaigner, and I enjoy it.”

His opponent, Truman said, acted like a doctor whose magic cure for everything was a soothing syrup called unity. And here were the American people going for the usual once-every-four-years checkup.

“Say you don’t look so good!” Truman said, acting the part of the doctor.

“Well, that seems strange to me too, Doc,” he answered, as the voice of the people. “I never felt stronger, never had more money, and never had a brighter future. What is wrong with me?”

“I never discuss issues with a patient. But what you need is a major operation.”

“Will it be serious, Doc?”

“Not so very serious. It will just mean taking out the complete works and putting in a Republican administration.”

The audience roared with laughter. He had made the cool, letter-perfect Dewey a joke at last.

Chicago went all out. Politicians who had taken part in the great Roosevelt rallies of 1936 and 1940 said they had never seen anything like it. Possibly as many as fifty thousand people marched in the parade from the Blackstone to Chicago Stadium. Another half million lined the route. Marching bands blared, fireworks burst overhead. Yet, oddly, not everyone was cheering. Here and there, remembered Paul Douglas, were people with tears in their eyes. “The newspapers had convinced them that Truman was going to lose, and they believed that the gains they had made under the New Deal were going to be taken away. They seemed to feel something precious was about to be lost, and they wanted to come out and show their sympathy arid support for the doughty little warrior who was doing battle for them against such great odds.” Privately, Douglas felt that he, too, like Truman would go down to defeat in his bid for the Senate.

At the packed stadium, to a crowd of 24,000 Truman delivered his most savage speech of the campaign, a wild attack, uncalled for, in which he said a vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism. The authors of the speech were again David Noyes and Albert Carr, whose main purpose, Noyes later said, was to provoke Dewey into fighting back, a strategy Truman accepted. “An element of desperation comes into a campaign,” Clifford would say in retrospect. “And fatigue leads to it.”

Dewey was properly outraged, so much so he drafted a new speech for his own scheduled appearance at Chicago, but then was persuaded by his advisers to drop it, not to get into a slugging match with Truman. He mustn’t get nasty, mustn’t make mistakes with victory so close. Reportedly, Dewey’s wife said that if she had to stay up all night to see him tear up what he had written, she would do it.

“They have scattered reckless abuse along the entire right of way coast to coast,” Dewey would say only in Chicago, speaking of Democrats in general, “and now, I am sorry to say, reached a new low in mudslinging…. This is the kind of campaign I refuse to wage….”

Truman offered no explanations or apologies. He was on his way east, and the “tide was rolling.” Dewey’s “Victory Special” would follow directly after him a day later.

At Boston a quarter of a million people banked Truman’s parade route, cheered and yelled and enjoyed the obvious enjoyment written all over the candidate’s face. To the packed house at Mechanics Hall, Truman said Republican talk of unity was all “a lot of hooey—and if that rhymes with anything, it is not my fault.”

On Thursday, October 28, after nine stops and nine more speeches in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the Truman campaign reached New York, where the outpouring of humanity and enthusiasm exceeded everything thus far. Had Truman’s whole career gone uncelebrated until now, the roaring, ticker-tape welcome that New York gave him would have made up for it. Over a million people turned out. Arriving at Grand Central Station in late afternoon, Truman set off on a nine-mile tour through the city, through the October twilight, led by a thundering motorcycle escort of a hundred machines. Truman was perched on the top of the back seat of an open car. Bess and Margaret followed six cars back.

The confetti, ticker-tape and [shredded] telephone book demonstration along 42nd Street was extraordinary [wrote Meyer Berger in The New York Times]. It fell in great flurries and much of it landed on the Open cars. It curled and twisted from high windows. It fell in other places like driven snow. Through it all, the President’s figure, at times, was only dimly seen. He was smiling and he never stopped waving to curb crowds and to men and women clustered at high windows….

As he rolled through Seventh Avenue, in the garment district, loudspeakers, cranked to full volume, blared “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

He made three rousing outdoor speeches—at Union Square, City Hall, and Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side—spoke at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, then again that night, his fifth speech of the day, at Madison Square Garden, where two of his old nemeses, Albert Whitney and Harold Ickes, joined him on stage while the band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” A crowd of sixteen thousand roared its approval when Truman—evoking the memory of Al Smith, Robert Wagner, and Franklin Roosevelt—pledged his faith in the New Deal, pledged his support of Israel, and again, as at Pittsburgh, brought down the house with another doctor story. For weeks, he said, he had had the odd sensation that someone was following him. It had troubled him so he asked the White House physician about it, but the White House physician had said not to worry. “There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you—and that’s into the White House.”

The race nearly over, Truman was determined to finish strong. Friday the 29th, under a clear blue sky, in what by now was being described as “Truman weather,” he covered thirty-six sunlit miles through the city. He was seen and cheered, police said, by 1,245,000 people. There was not a discordant note through the whole day. Tugs on the East River tooted a greeting. In the Bronx, crowds screamed: “Hi, Harry” and “Hi, Margaret.” “You can throw the Galluping polls right into the ash can,” he told a delighted throng in Queens. If the campaign was only a ritual, as said so often, then it was a ritual people loved and they loved him for embracing it with such zest.

In Harlem he made his only civil rights speech of the campaign. It was no impassioned personal declaration, but focused on the work of his Civil Rights Commission and its “momentous” report. Nonetheless, his appearance marked the first time a major party candidate for President had stumped Harlem, and after reminding his almost entirely black audience that he had already issued two executive orders to establish equal opportunity in the armed services and federal employment, he vowed to keep working for equal rights and equal opportunity “with every ounce of strength and determination I have.” The cheering in Harlem was the loudest of all.

When he rose to speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that evening, the audience gave him a twelve-minute ovation.

For months efforts had been made to persuade Eleanor Roosevelt to say something, anything, to help Truman—efforts that Truman himself refused to have any part in—but all to no avail. From Paris, where she was attending the United Nations session, she wrote to Frances Perkins that she had not endorsed Truman because he was “such a weak and vacillating person” and made such poor appointments. Now, at the last minute, she changed her mind, hoping to help the Democrats to carry New York.

“There has never been a campaign where a man has shown more personal courage and confidence in the people of the United States,” she said in a broadcast from Paris.

The scene of the final rally of the campaign, and the last platform appearance Harry Truman would ever make as a candidate for public office, was the immense Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, where there was not an empty seat.

Discarding the speech efforts of his staff, he went on the attack, lashing out one last time at the Republican Congress, the Republican press, the Republican “old dealers,” and the Republican candidate. The stomping, cheering crowd urged him on.

He felt afterward that he had done well. In any case, he had done the best he knew how.

The odyssey was over. Sunday, October 31, Halloween, was spent at home at 219 North Delaware Street. “Home!” remembered Margaret. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Truman worked on an election-eve radio address to be delivered from the living room the following night.

From the bottom of my heart I thank the people of the United States for their cordiality to me and their interest in the affairs of this great nation and of the world. I trust the people, because when they know the facts, they do the right thing….

Election day, up at five, he took his usual morning walk, read the papers, and had breakfast. Then, trailed by a swarm of reporters and photographers, he, Bess, and Margaret went to Memorial Hall three blocks away on Maple Avenue and voted.

A final Gallup Poll showed that while he had cut Dewey’s lead, Dewey nonetheless remained a substantial five points ahead, 49.5 to 44.5. The betting odds still ranged widely, though generally speaking Dewey was favored 4 to 1.

The New York Times predicted a Dewey victory with 345 electoral votes. “Government will remain big, active, and expensive under President Thomas E. Dewey,” said The Wall Street Journal. Time and Newsweek saw a Dewey sweep. The new issue of Life carried a full-page photograph of Dewey “the next President” crossing San Francisco Bay by ferry boat. Alistair Cooke, correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, titled his dispatch for November 1, “Harry S. Truman, A Study in Failure.”

Changing Times, the Kiplinger magazine, announced on its front cover in bold, block type, “What Dewey Will Do.” Walter Lippmann wrote about the work Dewey had cut out for him in foreign policy. Drew Pearson, who thought Dewey had run “one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent years,” surveyed the “Dewey team,” the “exciting, hardworking, close-knit clique” that would be moving into the White House. Marquis Childs questioned whether the Democratic Party could ever be put back together again, while in their final column before election day the Alsop brothers worried over “how the government could get through the next ten weeks with a lame-duck president: Events will not wait patiently until Thomas E. Dewey officially replaces Harry S. Truman.”

For Truman there were but two irregular, entirely unprofessional samplings to take heart from. One was from Les Biffle, the Senate Secretary, who, on his own, posing as a “chicken peddler,” had traveled about rural areas asking people how they felt about the election. Truman needn’t worry, Biffle had reported—the common people were for him. The other was from the Staley Milling Company of Kansas City, which had taken a “pullet poll” among farmers who bought chicken feed in sacks labeled “Democratic” or “Republican.” The Democratic feed had pulled well ahead, but then the company decided there must be something wrong and so abandoned its polling efforts.

Among the campaign staff, the state of physical and emotional exhaustion, the sense of relief that finally the ordeal was over, all but precluded any capacity for rational judgment of the outcome. Their devotion to the President was greater than ever, but that, of course, was another matter. Yet some now honestly thought he might just make it. In Washington, after a quiet day at the White House, Eben Ayers worked out his own remarkable assessment of the situation in the privacy of his diary:

Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has an excellent chance. All the signs that I see indicate it. The crowds which have turned out for him on his campaign trips have grown steadily…. I cannot believe they came out of curiosity alone. Other conditions are favorable to the President, the general prosperity of the country. It is contrary to political precedent for the voters to kick out an administration in times of prosperity.

The Dewey personality and campaign has not been one to attract voters. He is not liked—there is universal agreement on that. I have repeatedly asked individuals, newspapermen and others, if they could name one person who ever said he liked Dewey and I have yet to find one who would say “yes.” The Dewey campaign speeches have dealt only with national “unity,” with the promise to do things better and more efficiently. He has not discussed issues clearly or met them head-on at any time. I have repeatedly asked my wife if it is possible that the American people will vote for a man whom nobody likes and who tells them nothing.

Late in the afternoon of election day, Truman decided to disappear from the scene. It was an odd move and one never quite explained. The impression was he wanted to be alone, simply to get away from everyone and everything and be by himself. Only his immediate family and the Secret Service knew where he was going.

The Secret Service was about to have a changing of the guard at 219 North Delaware. At 4:30 a Secret Service field car, a black four-door Ford carrying the night shift, pulled into the driveway behind the house. The day shift was ready to leave, to drive back to Kansas City, to presidential headquarters at the Muehlebach Hotel.

A crowd had gathered in front of the house. Truman went out the kitchen door and climbed into the back seat of the Ford with Agents Henry Nicholson and Gerard McCann on either side of him. Agent Frank Barry took the wheel and Jim Rowley, head of the detail, got quickly into the front seat beside the driver. The car pulled away, drawing no attention.

They drove to Excelsior Springs, the little resort town across the Missouri in Clay County, and checked into the Elms Hotel, the same place Truman had escaped to sixteen years earlier, crushed by disappointment the night he learned he was not to be Tom Pendergast’s choice for governor.

The sprawling three-story stone-and-timber hotel was the latest of several that had occupied the site since mineral springs were discovered there in the 1880s. Its chief attractions were seclusion, peace, and quiet. Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Al Capone were all known to have escaped from public view at the Elms. On this November night the place was nearly deserted.

The rooms picked by the Secret Service were on the third floor rear, at the end of a long hall. Truman, who had left home without baggage, borrowed bathrobe and slippers from the hotel manager and went for a steambath and a rubdown, after which, at 6:30, he had a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of buttermilk sent up to his room. As he ate, he switched on the bedside radio.

The first final returns were from a town in New Hampshire called Hart’s Location, where the vote, including two absentee ballots, was Truman 1, Dewey 11. By eight o’clock Missouri time, Dewey was ahead in such key eastern states as New York and Pennsylvania, but Truman was leading in the popular vote overall, nationally.

About nine, Truman called Jim Rowley into the room. He was going to get some sleep, Truman said, but Rowley was to wake him if anything “important” happened.

“We all, of course, stayed awake,” remembered Agent McCann. “There was nothing to do but stay awake.”

The head of the Secret Service, James J. Maloney, was in New York, having decided Governor Dewey was certain to be the next President. Maloney and five of his men had taken up positions outside an upper-floor suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Dewey was relaxing with family and friends waiting to go down to the packed Roosevelt ballroom to announce his victory.

The crowd outside 219 North Delaware had grown larger, filling the sidewalks on both sides of the street and much of the front lawn. A stream of automobiles passed steadily by, their drivers slowing to see the excitement or to call to friends. Newspaper and radio correspondents had set up headquarters across the street, on the porches of the Luff and the Noland houses.

The night air was cool. Lights burned in every window of the Truman house, though the shades were all drawn except in the window of the upstairs hall, where a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt could be plainly seen.

Reporters were counting on the President to make an appearance. “We waited and waited and waited,” remembered Sue Gentry of the Examiner, for whom, like others who lived in the neighborhood, it was turning into one of the most exciting nights ever in Independence. For by 11:00 P.M., though several commentators and the Republican chairman, Brownell, were still predicting a Dewey victory, Truman, incredibly, was still ahead in the popular vote. The crowd on the lawn began singing—“For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

Then the porch light went on and Margaret came out. She stood on the porch smiling and making a hopeless gesture with both arms.

“Dad isn’t here,” she announced. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, which wasn’t true.

The reporters were incredulous. “We couldn’t believe it,” remembered Sue Gentry. Some of the crowd began drifting away.

The lights in the windows remained on all night, as they would remain on in houses all over town and all over the country.

“What a night,” Margaret wrote in her diary, conscious that she was at the center of history in the making. By midnight Truman was ahead in the popular count by 1 million votes.

I haven’t been to bed at all. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all night answering the phone on the direct-line telephone [to the Presidential Suite at the Muehlebach] to Bill Boyle who gave me the returns. We are ahead, but at about 1:30 A.M. we hit a slump—then gradually came up again. Dad has slipped away to Excelsior Springs and the reporters are going crazy trying to find him. They have offered me anything if I’ll just tell them in which direction he went.

Sometime near midnight, Truman awoke and switched on the radio, picking up NBC and the clipped, authoritative voice of political commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, the voice that had reported Munich in 1938 and that to much of America was the very sound of the news. Though the President was ahead by 1,200,000 votes, Kaltenborn said, he was still “undoubtedly beaten.” Truman switched him off, turned over, and went back to sleep.

Through their vigil over the next several hours, Agents Rowley, Nicholson McCann, and Barry also stayed tuned to NBC. “And all of a sudden,” remembered Rowley, “about four in the morning comes this thing that the tide has changed. And so I figured, ‘This is important!’ And so I went in and told him. ‘We’ve won!’ And he turns on the radio.”

Truman, Kaltenborn was saying, was ahead by 2 million votes, though Kaltenborn still did not see how Truman could possibly be elected, since in key states like Ohio and Illinois the “rural vote,” the Dewey vote, had yet to be tallied.

“We’ve got ‘em beat,” Truman said. Rowley was told to get the car ready. “We’re going to Kansas City.”

IV

The black Ford pulled in front of the Muehlebach a few minutes before six o’clock, just as it was getting light. The street was empty.

At presidential headquarters, the penthouse on the seventeenth floor, Truman found only four who were up and about—Matt Connelly, Bill Boyle, and two Kansas City attorneys, Jerome Walsh and young Lyman Field, who had been barnstorming for Truman on his own all across Missouri, and who now, as the one nearest the door, had the honor of being the first to shake the President’s hand and wish him congratulations.

Charlie Ross, sprawled across one bed, appeared to be dead drunk, but 1 he was only exhausted. It had been a rough night for all of them, but for Ross especially. The press had been furious with him for not saying where Truman was, and Ross, finally, had lost his temper, showing “his first case of nerves” since the campaign began. He didn’t know where the President was, nor did Matt Connelly. None of them knew.

The rooms were a shambles. “The`re wasn’t a drop of liquor around, by the way,” wrote Jerome Walsh later, trying to describe the scene. “It was all black coffee and cigarettes and four telephones jangling…. At 6:00 we were out on our feet.”

Truman, though unshaven, appeared rested and bright-eyed, “as refreshed as a man with two weeks’ vacation behind him.” Shedding his coat, he sat down on the couch and asked “how things were going.”

Though Dewey had carried New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Truman had won in Massachusetts, carried all the Old South but four states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which had gone to Thurmond—and was leading in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado. He was ahead by slim margins in Illinois, Ohio, and, so far, crucially, in California. In the popular count he was ahead by nearly 2 million votes. Dewey had yet to concede.

But what most impressed those in the room was Truman’s perfect calm at such a moment. To Lyman Field, the President seemed “wholly unconcerned.” Here, by every sign, was a man on the verge of pulling off the biggest political upset in American history. He had confounded the experts, the professionals in both parties, not to say a nationwide chorus of columnists and poll takers. The President who had had to fight just to get the nomination from his own party was beating the opponent everybody had said was unbeatable. It was not only a supreme moment of triumph in a long political life, but one of the greatest personal victories of any American politician ever. Yet here he sat as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “He just seemed the same old Harry Truman,” Field would say forty years later, the memory of that morning still a wonderment to him.

Jerome Walsh was so moved by Truman’s total composure that he decided to record the scene while everything was still fresh in his mind, in a letter to a friend written just days later:

He displayed neither tension nor elation. For instance someone remarked bitterly that if it hadn’t been for Wallace, New York and New Jersey would have gone Democratic by good majorities. But the President dismissed this with a wave of his hand. As far as Henry was concerned, he said, Henry wasn’t a bad guy; he was doing what he thought was right and he had every right in the world to pursue his course. Someone else pointed to a Kansas City Star headline which read, “Election in Doubt” or something like that. The President grinned. “Roy Roberts will change that in a few hours,” he said. I did not hear the name Dewey mentioned by the President.

I am trying to give you…a sense of the astonishment we all felt at the unbelievable coolness with which the President faced up to the whole situation, the manner in which he took the thing for granted, as if he had read the answer in a crystal ball two weeks before. At 6 A.M. there still was plenty of reason for Governor Dewey to refuse to concede. Conceivably Ohio might have switched in late returns. California or Illinois might have toppled and the President’s lead been sharply reversed…. Actually, Mr. Truman, at 6 A.M., hardly seemed interested in the matter. To him the election was won, had always been won since the day he began carrying his fight to the people, and his mind was already turning to other aspects of his program…. The serenity of the President…suggested to all of us, I think, that his years of crisis in office have equipped him with a very large reserve of inner strength and discipline to draw upon.

Walsh, as he further wrote, could not help but think of Abraham Lincoln. “Is this sentimental outpouring?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

Charlie Ross would remember being awakened by somebody shaking him at 6:30. “I looked up and there was the boss at my bedside—grinning. We all started talking at once.”

Truman put through a call to Bess and Margaret, both of whom burst into tears at the sound of his voice.

He called in a barber, had a shave and a trim, then changed into a fresh white shirt, blue polka-dot tie and double-breasted blue suit.

By 8:30, Ohio went for Truman, putting him over the top with 270 electoral votes. A celebration broke out in the Presidential Suite. Vivian Truman, Ted Marks, Eddie Jacobson, Al Ridge, Tom Evans, and Fred Canfil arrived. The hall outside was jammed with exuberant well-wishers.

At 9:30 Truman was declared the winner in Illinois and California. By now, too, it was clear the Democrats had won control of both houses of Congress.

At 10:14 (11:14 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York), Dewey conceded the election. A wild cheer went up on the seventeenth floor of the Muehlebach, and as the doors to the suite were thrown open, more friends, politicians, and reporters pushed their way in.

“Thank you, thank you,” Truman kept saying, shaking hands, and behind the thick glasses there were tears in his eyes.

At Independence, minutes later, every bell, whistle, siren, and automobile horn seemed to go off at once. It had never occurred to anyone in town to plan a victory celebration, but now Mayor Roger Sermon quickly declared a holiday. Schools were let out and at day’s end in a roaring spontaneous outpouring of pride and goodwill forty thousand people jammed the Square to see and honor the victorious native son.

Speaking from a small podium, visibly touched by what was the biggest crowd in the history of the town, with his courthouse behind him, Truman called it a celebration not for him but for the country.

V

The country was flabbergasted. It was called a “startling victory,” “astonishing,” “a major miracle.” Truman, said Newsweek on its cover, was the Miracle Man.

He had won against the greatest odds in the annals of presidential politics. Not one polling organization had been correct in its forecast. Not a single radio commentator or newspaper columnist, or any of the hundreds of reporters who covered the campaign, had called it right. Every expert had been proven wrong, and as was said, “a great roar of laughter arose from the land.” The people had made fools of those supposedly in the know. Of all amazing things, Harry Truman had turned out to be the only one who knew what he was talking about.

Actress Tallulah Bankhead sent Truman a telegram: “The people have put you in your place.” Harry Truman, said the radio comedian Fred Allen, was the first President to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk.

A few papers had predicted a close election. A Washington correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black paper, had also described how, in theory, Truman might win. John L. Clark of the Courier had traveled with the Truman train part of the time and had taken seriously the size of the crowds. Victory for the President in twenty-three states outside the South, plus a break in the South, or an upset in California or New York, could spell victory for the President, Clark wrote, though he did not predict this would happen. Nor did the author Louis Bean, who, in a book published in July, How to Predict Elections, also offered the theoretical possibility of a Truman upset.

As it was, Truman carried 28 states with a total of 303 electoral votes, and defeated Dewey in the popular election by just over 2,100,000 votes. In the final tally, Truman polled 24,105,812, Dewey 21,970,065.

Dewey, who won in 16 states, had 189 electoral votes. Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond each polled slightly more than 1,100,000 votes. Thurmond, with his victory in four southern states, had 39 electoral votes. Wallace, who failed to carry a single state, thus received no votes in the Electoral College.

The outcome in the congressional races was 54 Senate seats for the Democrats, 42 for the Republicans. In the House the Democratic victory was overwhelming, 263 seats to 171.

Though Dewey had carried the three industrial giants of the Northeast, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as well as his own home state of Michigan, Truman had defeated him soundly in thirteen of the country’s biggest cities and captured the Republican stronghold of the rural Midwest, carrying Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Iowa, “the very citadel of Republicanism.” Truman held on to seven states in the South, despite Strom Thurmond. He carried the four border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and his own Missouri, where he won by more than a quarter of a million votes. In the West, where at the start only Arizona had looked safe for the Democrats, he took every state but Oregon.

Truman also held Dewey to a smaller part of the total vote nationwide (45.1 percent) than Dewey had in 1944 running against Roosevelt.

As would be pointed out, Truman’s margin of victory in such key states as Ohio, Illinois, and California had been narrow. He won Ohio by a bare 7,000 votes, Illinois by 33,000, California by 17,000. A switch in any two of these three states would have left him with less than a majority in the Electoral College and thrown the decision to the House of Representatives. Had Dewey won in all three states, then Dewey would have eked out victory in the electoral vote and thus won the presidency, while Truman finished in front in the popular tally. A cumulative shift of just 33,000 votes apportioned to the three states would have done it.

But it was also true that a similar shift in other states would have made Truman an even bigger winner. Truman very nearly won in New York, for example, and unquestionably would have had it not been for Henry Wallace, who rolled up half a million votes in the state (which was half Wallace’s national total). “I think the mistake was not giving more time to New York. We should have carried New York,” Clark Clifford would say. Dewey won there by only 61,000—in his own state—and New York meant 47 electoral votes. Had there been no Henry Wallace, or a Strom Thurmond, Truman might well have gained another 85 electoral votes, giving him an Electoral College landslide.

Efforts to explain why the impossible had happened began at once, as did, understandably, a great deal of soul searching among reporters, editors, and broadcasters who had fallen down on the job so very conspicuously.

To H. L. Mencken, who delighted in the outcome exactly because it “shook the bones of all…[the] smarties,” the answer was simply in the contrast of the two contestants as they presented themselves to the voters. “Neither candidate made a speech on the stump that will survive in the schoolbooks, but those of Truman at least had warmth in them,” wrote Mencken in one of his last columns, at the close of a long career of appraising the American political scene. “While Dewey was intoning essays sounding like the worst bombast of university professors, Truman was down on the ground, clowning with the circumambient morons. He made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them.”

To Dewey himself, it had all turned on the farm vote. “The farm vote switched in the last ten days,” he claimed in a letter to Henry Luce, “and you can analyze figures from now to kingdom come and all they will show is that we lost the farm vote….”

Joe Martin, who with the new Democratic majority in the House was to be Speaker no longer, said the fault was with the Republican Party, which had “digressed” too far from the people. Like many of the old guard, Martin and Taft both thought Dewey had run an abysmal campaign. “You’ve got to give the little man credit,” said Arthur Vandenberg, in a somewhat patronizing tribute to Truman. Taft, furious, said, “I don’t care how the thing is explained. It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House.”

To the surprise of many, it would turn out that the Democrats had spent more on the campaign than the Republicans, the common impression to the contrary, $2,736,334 compared to $2,127,296—though many of the largest donations to the Democrats came pouring in after the fact, after November 2, some $700,000 in postdated checks.

A special study drawn up by the Republican Policy Committee would conclude, in essence, that the Republicans had only themselves to blame. They had “muffed” their best chance in sixteen years to win the presidency and keep control of Congress. The fault was mainly with the Dewey strategy and the Dewey performance, his “aloofness,” speeches “high above the voters’ heads,” the mistake of “swallowing uncritically the Democratic propaganda.” Dewey, said the report, had been “drugged” by the polls, and thus “sacrificed the initiative.” Truman’s hard-hitting assault on the 80th Congress, “however unprincipled and demagogic,” had been “brilliant” since it had enabled him to “divert the battle” away from his own and his party’s record. “He succeeded in arousing public indignation…. The Democratic sweep in Congress and its retention of the presidency is eloquent testimony to the brilliance of their strategy.”

As amply substantiated by a number of studies, the farm vote, the labor vote, the black vote, and the vote of the West had all counted heavily in Truman’s success and in the Democratic sweep overall—just as the Rowe memorandum had forecast.

Nor was there any question about the value of the kind of campaign Truman chose to run. His big effort in Texas, for example, gave him the largest majority in Texas of any state. The extra swing by automobile that he made in the traditionally Republican counties of downstate Illinois turned the tide there and was decisive in carrying Illinois. The campaign through rural Ohio on October 11, the whistle-stop day that had seemed to others a wasted effort, apparently did make a difference. In counties that Dewey had carried in 1944, Truman was the winner.

Ethnic minorities voted strongly for Truman. Catholic voters, too, it was found, had gone Democratic in large majorities. In some predominantly Catholic wards in Boston and Pittsburgh the vote for Truman exceeded past tallies for Al Smith and FDR.

In the noise and excitement of the Presidential Suite after Dewey conceded, Truman reportedly said, “Labor did it.” But while several of the biggest unions in the country did work hard to get out the vote and supplied major financial backing for his campaign, John L. Lewis and Alvanley Johnston were in Dewey’s camp, and to lose in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan was hardly a sign that labor had carried the day.

More important, as Dewey said, was the farm vote and here, just as the Truman forces foresaw, the drop in the price of corn played a part. Once, in 1921, falling grain prices had bankrupt haberdasher Truman. Now they helped keep President Truman in the White House. Of the eight largest corn-producing states, he carried all but two.

Black support for Truman had been overwhelming. He polled more than two thirds of the black vote, a percentage higher than ever attained by Franklin Roosevelt. In such crucial states as Ohio and Illinois it could be said that the black voter had been quite as decisive as anyone in bringing about a Truman victory. Speaking of Truman’s civil rights program and its impact on the election, J. Howard McGrath called it both honest statesmanship and politically advantageous. “It lost us three Southern states, but it won us Ohio, Illinois, would have carried New York for us if it had not been for Henry Wallace, and it was a great factor in carrying California.”

The precarious state of the world also appeared to have benefited the Truman campaign, and particularly as it became clear that the Berlin Airlift was a resounding success. Several of Truman’s sharpest critics, Walter Lippmann among them, now also grudgingly concluded that even the “inept” Vinson affair had proved a political net gain for Truman after all. “The bear got us,” said Dewey’s staff man, Elliott Bell, referring to the Russian menace.

Also, clearly, a host of strong Democratic candidates were a major factor. In Illinois, most notably, Truman’s slim but crucial margin of 31,000 votes stood in sharp contrast to the resounding triumphs of Paul Douglas in his senate race and Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for governor. Douglas won by 400,000 votes, Stevenson by a still more astonishing 570,000 votes.

Hubert Humphrey had won his senate race in Minnesota. Estes Kefauver, who had campaigned in a coonskin cap, was the new Senator-elect from Tennessee, another state in the Truman column. Democratic candidates for governor had won in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Frank Lausche had been elected governor in Ohio by a margin of more than 200,000 votes.

Predictions of a Dewey landslide, it was widely believed, had lulled Republican voters into a state of false complacency. Had the polls not been so one-sided and unanimous, many argued, there would have been a bigger Republican effort, fewer Republican “stay-at-homes” on election day, and a Dewey victory. But a study of the campaign conducted by analyst Samuel Lubell for the Saturday Evening Post indicated quite the opposite. Republican victories in the industrial East, said Lubell, had been largely the fault of apathy among old Roosevelt voters who had concluded Truman didn’t have a chance. “Far from costing Dewey the election, the [Democratic] stay-at-homes may have saved him almost as crushing a defeat as Landon suffered in 1936.”

George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and other public opinion specialists were openly dumbfounded. He didn’t know what happened, Gallup said. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. Why I don’t know,” Roper admitted.

From later studies, it appears the polls were reasonably accurate up until mid-October, the point when Gallup completed his final survey of the campaign for the forecast that was released just before election day. The fault was probably not that the polls were imperfect, but that they were two weeks out of date. And it was in those final two weeks apparently that a massive shift took place.

Nearly everywhere in the country, it seems, a large number of people who agreed that Dewey was certain to win, and who no doubt would have bet on his winning, went to the polls and voted for Truman.

In Ohio, “up and down the state,” reported William Lawrence of The New York Times, not a single Truman voter with whom he talked had expected Truman to win. “But a majority of the ‘little people’ from the mines, mills and farms, having made their decision quietly and thoughtfully, went out and voted for him anyway.”

Two Ohio farmers, joking about the dissatisfaction of a neighbor who had voted for Dewey, were overheard saying, “What’s the matter with that fellow anyway? Can’t he stand four more years of prosperity?”

“I kept reading about that Dewey fellow,” said another man, “and the more I read the more he reminded me of one of those slick ads trying to get money out of my pocket. Now Harry Truman, running around and yipping and falling all over his feet—I had the feeling he could understand the kind of fixes I get into.”

He had talked all summer of voting for Dewey, a farmer in Guthrie County, Iowa, told a reporter. “But when voting time came, I just couldn’t do it. I remembered…all the good things that have come to me under the Democrats.”

She voted for Truman, said Freda Combs of Decatur, Illinois, because he was “the common man’s man.”

To his immense readership in every part of the country, Walter Lippmann explained the outcome as a posthumous triumph for Franklin Roosevelt. The election, Lippmann said, was simply another victory for the New Deal.

It was a view with which Truman modestly concurred. “It seemed to have been a terrific political upset when you read the papers here in this country,” Truman would write in response to a letter of congratulations from Winston Churchill. “Really it was not—it was merely a continuation of the policies which had been in effect for the last sixteen years and the policies that the people wanted.”

But to Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, as to most others who had witnessed the campaign firsthand, what it had all come down to was Harry Truman’s own “gallant battle,” his faith in himself and in the voters. As a barnstormer, the President was “surely the best of his time.”

There was something in the American character that responded to a fighter, said the Washington Post on its editorial page. “The American people admire a man with courage even though they don’t always agree with him,” wrote Drew Pearson, who had been as blatantly mistaken in what he wrote prior to November 2 as almost anyone in journalism. “You just have to take off your hat to a beaten man who refuses to stay licked,” conceded the ultra-conservative New York Sun.

Richard Strout, in The New Republic, would describe election night as an experience no political writer would ever forget:

There was personal humiliation for us as a prophet, but a glowing and wonderful sense that the American people couldn’t be ticketed by polls, knew its own mind and had picked the rather unlikely but courageous figure of Truman to carry on its banner.

The feeling was widespread that so heavy a blow to the prestige of the polls could only be good for the country. As Eben Ayers wrote, “There has been a danger, it has seemed to me, that the polls would reach a point, if they continued to be right, where they could easily control the outcome of an election.”

Some of the most intense and interesting of all postmortems went on at the New York headquarters of Time Incorporated, where telegrams from readers poured in saying, “Ha, Ha, Ha!” A “burden of doubt” had been cast over Time and Life, the editors were “deeply unhappy,” said editor-in-chief Henry Luce in a confidential memorandum to his department heads. Luce blamed himself as much as anyone. “I personally paid less attention to this campaign than to any previous campaign in my lifetime,” he admitted. Reporters and editors had been deluded not just by the polls but by politicians in both parties. Everybody should have known better, everybody should have taken his job more seriously, Luce said, and worked right to the end—“like Harry Truman did!”

To Luce the main cause for Dewey’s defeat was Dewey. “His personality was against him.”

The managing editor of Time, T. S. Matthews, took the position that there was nothing new about the press being wrong on elections. The press was often out of touch with the popular will.

I think the press has been pretending to much more wisdom (or is it smartness?) than it had any right to claim, and has been getting away with murder for some time [Matthews wrote to Luce]. The plain fact now appears to be that (as far as politics is concerned, at least) the press hasn’t known what time of day it is for years.

The great mistake now would be to see Truman as a political miracle-worker. “It was not a one-man miracle—that’s too easy—but an unsuspected, overlooked, misreported national phenomenon.”

But to the managing editor of Life, Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., the problem centered on bias. “Of course, we did not intentionally mislead our readers,” he wrote.

But I do think that we ourselves were misled by our bias. Because of that bias we did not exert ourselves enough to report the side we didn’t believe in. We were too ready to accept the evidence of pictures like the empty auditorium at Omaha and to ignore the later crowds. We were too eager to report the Truman “bobbles” and to pass over the things that were wrong about the Republican campaign: empty Dewey speeches, the bad Republican candidates, the dangers of Republican commitments to big business. I myself had many misgivings about these things but thought that what the hell, the election was already decided, we could get after the Republicans later….

Truman’s victory, said Thorndike, was “primarily a personal triumph.”

And this, as it turned out, was the conclusion of Time in its first issue after the election. “He did it all himself,” said the magazine in tribute to Truman the politician. He was the “new champion” in American politics, “the absolute boss of a resurgent Democratic party.”

“TRUMAN WORKS A POLITICAL MIRACLE,” ran the headline on the lead story in Life. Truman was now “the durable hero in shining spectacles,” “one of the fightin’est men” who ever went through a campaign.

To such staunch Truman loyalists as Sam Rayburn and George Marshall, to the weary White House staff workers who had been with him all the way, there was never any question as to why Truman won. He had done it by being himself, never forgetting who he was, and by going to the people in his own fashion.

Harry Truman deserved 90 percent of the credit, said Sam Rayburn. “You have put over the greatest one-man fight in American history,” wrote Marshall to Truman on November 4. “You did exactly what you told me and what nobody else believed possible.”

“I think that Harry Truman grew, too,” wrote Charlie Ross, “grew spiritually.” Truman had campaigned so hard, said Ross, because he genuinely believed the essential welfare of the country was at stake. He wanted peace in the world, prosperity at home, and he wanted to make the Democratic Party truly the party of the people. Also, wrote Ross, there was a “purely personal” motive. “He had been described as a little man, fumbling, inept, not measuring up to the President’s job. He had a human desire to prove his detractors wrong.”

Like others, Clark Clifford thought Dewey’s people had done a poor job. “I think Dewey’s whole campaign was a mistake…. They were greedy and dumb, and anxious to get back to power.” But that was not the explanation for Truman’s success. Nor did Clifford think it was due to extraordinary political acumen on Truman’s part.

It wasn’t in my opinion because he was a skilled politician that he won. He was a good politician…a sensible politician…. But that wasn’t why he was elected President…. It was the remarkable courage in the man—his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win….

It wasn’t Harry Truman the politician who won, it was Harry Truman the man.

Early the morning of Thursday, November 4, as Truman stepped out onto the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan during a brief stop in St. Louis, photographers snapped the picture that would be remembered and enjoyed more than any other of the campaign. Truman was smiling, chatting with reporters, when someone handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune, his least favorite newspaper, across the front of which ran the huge, soon-to-be famous headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Holding the paper aloft with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, the man who had been given no better than a fighting chance seemed to be saying not only, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” but that in America it is still the people who decide.

Like some other photographs of other presidents—of Theodore Roosevelt in a white linen suit at the controls of a steam shovel in Panama, or Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, or Franklin Roosevelt, chin up, singing an old hymn beside Winston Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in the dark summer of 1941—this of Harry Truman in 1948 would convey the spirit of both the man and the moment as almost nothing else would.

On Friday, November 5, Truman returned to Washington in triumph. The welcome was the biggest, most enthusiastic outpouring for a President in the history of the capital. So great had been the excitement in the city the day before that the papers had forecast crowds of perhaps half a million people. But at least 750,000—two thirds of the city—lined his route from Union Station to the White House.

The day was warm, sunny, perfect. Truman, Bess, Margaret, Vice President-elect Barkley and his daughter, Mrs. Max Truitt, and Howard McGrath rode in a huge, seven-passenger open Lincoln, with two Secret Service men standing on the rear bumper. Truman and Barkley sat up on the back of the rear seat.

Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the second floor: WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS.

The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited. The main course was to be old crow en glâce. Truman alone would be served turkey. Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth. In response Truman had written that he had “no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eat crow figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”

Confetti showered down. A band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Truman waved his hat and smiled.

At the White House, he stepped to a microphone on the North Portico to say thank you. The whole stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, all of Lafayette Square, everywhere, as far as he could see, there were people, waving, cheering, calling out to him.

Part Five
Weight of the World

15
Iron Man

Clearly he was conscious of the terrible responsibility his victory had won him. His would be decisions affecting, possibly, the very future of mankind. Ahead of Harry Truman’s America, nameless, half-imagined dangers lurked in every shadow. None knew this better than he.

—Washington Evening Star, Inauguration Day, 1949

I

Thursday, January 20, 1949, was chill and dazzling in Washington, with a stiff wind out of the north and “100 percent” sunshine, as the National Weather Bureau reported. The cloudless sky over the city was a vivid sea blue. Colors everywhere stood out in the sparkling winter atmosphere. Everything gleamed in sunlight—white marble, band instruments, scarlet tunics, brass buttons, long lines of polished black official cars. From Capitol Hill to the White House, along the whole length of Pennsylvania Avenue, hundreds of flags whipped in the wind like the flags in patriotic films.

It was a day made to glorify the occasion, “a perfect Inaugural Day,” as the President’s daughter wrote in her diary. The temperature by noon was in the high 30s, though with the wind, it felt colder.

There had been no full-scale inaugural festivities in Washington since before the war, and this was to be the biggest, most costly inauguration on record, the parade the greatest in the city’s history. The year before, when their return to presidential power had seemed such a certainty, the Republicans who controlled the 80th Congress had voted an unprecedented $80,000 for the most lavish inaugural day ever. Now the jubilant Democrats, with delighted approval from the President, had decided to spend it all.

The size of the crowds was astonishing. More than a century before, in 1829, on a comparably bright winter day, Democrats had descended upon the city from “every point on the compass” to see Andrew Jackson take the oath in front of the East Portico of the Capitol. It was the first time the ceremony had been held there, and fifteen to twenty thousand people attended. At Jackson’s famous White House reception afterward, the mob had grown so unruly that to relieve pressure and save the building, pails of whiskey had been carried out onto the lawn. Now, to see Harry S. Truman, the modern Jacksonian, another “man of the common people” and “hero of the great political drama of 1948,” ride to the Capitol and take the same oath at the same place, more than a million people were gathered, more than ever before in history.

They had been pouring into the city for days, whole delegations in western hats, big-city politicians with their retinues, labor bosses, committeewomen, delegates from the American Legion, the NAACP, Boy Scout troops, Florida bathing beauties, and fifty extremely proud residents of Independence, Missouri, led by Mayor Roger Sermon, as well as ninety-eight veterans of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, with Monsignor Curtis Tiernan as their nominal leader. Entertainers and screen stars arrived—Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Jane Froman, Lena Horne, Edgar Bergen, Abbott and Costello—and the big bands of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, in addition to Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra.

Most hotels were sold out, some at triple the normal rate, and for the first time in the city’s history black guests were staying at several of the best hotels, since Truman, as no President before, had ordered that black Americans were to be as welcome as anyone at the main events of the inaugural.

The “invited guests” for the East Portico ceremony alone, those with seats beneath the inaugural stand, numbered 17,740, and another 44,000 paid $2 to $10 for seats in the wooden grandstands along the parade route.

It was also to be the first inauguration broadcast on television. As great as were the crowds on hand, another audience ten times greater would be watching—an estimated 10 million in fourteen cities connected by coaxial cable. This would make it the largest number of people ever to watch a single event until then. Indeed, more people would see Harry Truman sworn in as President on television on January 20, 1949, than had witnessed all previous presidents taking the oath since the first inauguration of George Washington. (As far away as St. Louis, the western limit of the cable, the pictures, like the day in Washington, were reported “bright and clear.”) And 100 million more would be listening by radio.

Yet, as often said afterward, there was no one who took part, no one watching the parade, no one at the dinners and dances, who had a better time than the man at the center of the spectacle, for whom, by all signs, it was the happiest day of his life, “his day of days,” as his daughter would say. “Weather permitting, I hope to be present,” Truman had written in high spirits, in answer to his own invitation to the ceremonies.

It had been two months since the Key West vacation in November, and much had transpired. Because of conditions at the White House, the President and his family were now living across the way in Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue. The old Executive Mansion, as Truman had been informed the day of his return to Washington after the election, was in such a “dangerous” state it could collapse any moment. Ironically, the only safe place in the building was his new balcony. (“Doesn’t that beat all!” he said.)

The facts of the situation were made public for the first time; the White House was closed to visitors. The President, the First Lady, and Margaret all departed for Key West—for Bess and Margaret it was a first visit to the “Little White House” in Florida—and with painters and decorators working night and day, Blair House was made ready, furniture moved in, in time for the family’s return at Thanksgiving.

Privately Truman could not have been happier with the change and for the chance to make sure the White House was restored as it should be. With his love of building, love of history, he was genuinely interested in every detail of the project. “It is the President’s desire that this restoration be made so thoroughly complete that the structural condition and all principal and fixed architectural finishes will be permanent for many generations to come,” wrote Lorenzo Winslow, the architect in charge. At the time, it was thought the job would take a year.

The West Wing, built by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, remained sound and would continue in service. So again Truman was “commuting” to the Oval Office on foot from across Pennsylvania Avenue, as he had in the first weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Flanked by Secret Service agents, he would cross the street in the morning, twice again at lunchtime, and again at day’s end. Traffic stopped, tourists gaped. Once, in early December, when a car with Virginia plates nearly ran him down, the driver, after a screeching stop, pressed his hands to his head, pondering what he had nearly wrought, but Truman walked on unconcerned. It was obvious from the President’s stride, wrote Life, reporting the incident, that he was “a new and very happy man…[who] knew where he was going….”

Shortly after Thanksgiving, Truman had made one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency. George Marshall, who was soon to undergo surgery for the removal of a kidney, had said he wished to retire, and Truman, after some deliberation, picked Dean Acheson to be the next Secretary of State, beginning with the new term. Truman had made the offer to Acheson privately at Blair House. At first speechless, Acheson had said he was not qualified to meet the demands of the office. This, responded Truman, was undoubtedly so, but then he could say the same for himself, or any man. The question was whether he would do the job?

Often in informal conversation, Truman would say there were probably a million men in the country who could make a better President than he, but that this was not the point. He, Harry Truman, was the President. “I have the job and I have to do it and the rest of you have to help me.”

The Berlin Airlift, still proceeding with great effect, was never far from his mind. China was a worry, more and more, as the forces of Mao Tse-tung won one smashing victory after another. From Tokyo, General MacArthur was warning that the “fall” of China imperiled America, while at home, the Red scare grew worse. On December 15, Alger Hiss had been indicted for perjury.

In Independence for Christmas, Truman took his daily walks, tipped his hat to neighbors, and, as reporters noted, carefully knocked the snow from his boots before going into the house. Between Christmas and the inauguration, his days grew increasingly crowded. Up regularly before dawn, he was busy every hour, except for a brief nap after lunch. Members of Congress and the Cabinet made a steady parade in and out of his office. He approved the withdrawal of the last American troops from Korea—a decision to which no great portent was attached by anyone at the time—and, on New Year’s Day, issued a statement recognizing the new Republic of Korea. On Wednesday, January 5, 1949, he went to the Hill to deliver his State of the Union message to the new 81st Congress, calling again for the same progressive social measures he had championed the year before, except now he had a new name for his domestic program, “the Fair Deal,” a name he had coined himself; and, unlike January 1948, when almost no one was listening, everyone now paid close attention.

At a news conference on January 7, visibly moved, he announced the retirement of Marshall and Acheson’s appointment. Another day, he slipped out of the West Wing to fly to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to visit with the convalescing Marshall.

There was the new budget to present, calling for $41.9 billion, the largest ever in peacetime, half of which was to go for defense and foreign aid. There was his inaugural address to work on, meetings to prepare for, more press conferences, a Truman-Barkley Club dinner, and, the night before the inauguration, at the Mayflower Hotel ballroom, a full-dress Presidential Electors dinner, where he surprised and delighted his audience with an impromptu impersonation of H. V. Kaltenborn declaring on election night, in his hard, clipped style, that, “While the President is a million votes ahead in the popular vote…when the country vote comes in, Mr. Truman will be defeated by an overwhelming majority.” The audience exploded with laughter and applause. Truman seemed to glow with vitality and confidence.

He was a man with much to be pleased about, and at age sixty-four, after nearly four years in office and the most arduous political campaign ever waged by a President, he looked as he said he felt, “fit as a fiddle.” His personal popularity, according to the latest polls, had bounced back up to 69 percent, as high as it had been in three years. Congress had raised his salary, from $75,000 to $100,000, and added an extra $50,000, tax-free, for expenses. Bess, all through the week before the inauguration, is said to have positively “bubbled” with good humor.

But there was also a strain of somber obligation in what he said to the crowd at the Mayflower. “I was not in any way elated over the election. In no sense did I feel anything unusual had happened to me. I felt only the responsibility, and that is what we are faced with now.” Privately he worried about the dangers of being in the midst of such immense power and influence as to be found in Washington. “Every once in a while I notice it in myself,” he confided to some of his staff, “and try to drag it out in the open.”

His inaugural day had begun at 6:45, when, having had four and a half hours sleep following the gala of the night before, he stepped out onto the front stoop at Blair House. It was still dark. Pennsylvania Avenue was quiet. A pale moon hung over the great granite confection of the Old State Department Building across the street.

“Happy Inauguration Day, Mr. President,” a reporter called from the sidewalk.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Truman said, glancing at the sky. “Looks like old man weather is going to be with us again.”

He was wearing a dark overcoat, gray suit and gray fedora. He looked alert and rested. Secret Service men moved up and down the steps, or stood at the curb beside his waiting limousine. The move to Blair House was causing them increased concern, since the four-story building fronted directly on the busy avenue, nearly flush with the sidewalk, the front door only ten steps above street level. Scores of pedestrians passed by at all hours of the day. Every time the President came out the door he would be an easy mark. His bedroom, on the second floor, faced the street.

In minutes he was off in the car, again to the Mayflower for a reunion breakfast of Missouri ham and grits with “the boys” from Battery D, who, to the tune of “Tipperary,” sang: “You’re a great, great guy—Harry Truman, for you we’d march through hell.” He didn’t give a damn what they did after one o’clock that afternoon, he told them, but until then they were to stay sober.

“These boys are real,” he told reporters. “They have no axes to grind. They don’t want any jobs. They’re just here. They don’t call me Mr. President. They call me Captain Harry.” He wanted them with him today, as a “kind of honor guard.”

From the Mayflower the big car sped to the White House, flags snapping from the front fenders. Already crowds were converging on Lafayette Square. People waved as the car passed, or shielded their eyes against the morning sun, trying to catch a glimpse of him. From the West Wing, after perhaps fifteen minutes at his desk, he returned to Blair House to change. At ten on the dot, in inaugural attire, frock coat and striped trousers, and accompanied now by Bess and Margaret, he drove the two blocks to St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, the historic “Church of the Presidents,” for a prayer service. Only a small number attended—the Cabinet, a few friends, a few parishioners—since at Truman’s request there had been no prior announcements of the service. Sitting in pew 63, traditionally reserved for the President since the time of James Madison, he joined in the opening hymn, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” and read responsively from the 122nd Psalm: “Pray for peace…Peace be within thy walls…Peace be within thee…”During the prayers, as Bess and Margaret, both Episcopalians, knelt beside him, Truman sat with his head bowed. “With Thy favor…behold and bless Thy servant, Harry, the President of the United States, and all others in authority.”

It was a day in which he would fill many roles, from Captain Harry to Servant Harry to President of the United States. For a time, technically, he was not even President but plain Citizen Harry again, for by law his term of office expired at noon and as the morning wore on, things began falling behind schedule.

He rode to the Hill with Alben Barkley, the two of them now in white silk scarfs and top hats, sitting up for all to see in the back of the huge open Lincoln. At the Capitol, the ceremonial greetings inside the Rotunda took longer than expected. By the time everyone was in place outside on the inaugural platform, by the time the invocation had been delivered, by Dr. Edward Pruden of Washington’s First Baptist Church (Truman’s church), the national anthem sung by tenor Phil Regan, and Alben Barkley, looking like an old Roman, sworn in as Vice President by Justice Stanley Reed, and another prayer spoken by Rabbi Samuel Thurman of the United Hebrew Congregation of St. Louis, it was approaching 12:30.

Truman put aside his hat, scarf, and overcoat. He stood bareheaded in the wind, his right hand raised, a straight-backed, bespectacled figure with closely cropped gray hair, his expression deadly serious. Above him in the winter sun rose the immense white columns and dome of the Capitol. His wife and daughter and some fifteen members of his family sat nearby among the highest officials of the land, many of whom he had known since first coming to Washington. And it was Chief Justice Vinson, his mop of gray hair blowing in the wind, who administered the forty-three-word oath, which Truman repeated slowly and clearly, his left hand on two Bibles, a large facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible, a gift from the people of Independence, and, on top, the same small Gideon edition that had served under such different circumstances on April 12, 1945.

The oath completed, Truman, like Andrew Jackson at his inaugural, bent quickly and kissed the Bible.

It was 1:29, and for the first time as President in his own right, he turned to face the microphones and the expectant crowd.

I accept with humility the honor which the American people have conferred on me. I accept it with a resolve to do all I can for the welfare of this nation and for the peace of the world….

(“How strange the matter-of-fact Missouri twang had sounded in the spring of 1945 to a world familiar with another man’s phrase and another man’s diction,” wrote one reporter. “Today for listeners everywhere there was nothing strange about it. This simply was the President speaking.”)

Each period of our national history has had its special challenges. Those that confront us now are as momentous as any in the past. Today marks the beginning not only of a new administration, but of a period that will be eventful, perhaps decisive, for us and for the world.

He looked solemn and determined as he read from a looseleaf notebook. The voice was surprisingly strong. There was no hesitation, no stumbling over words. It was plain that he had worked on all of it, knew every line. Those close by on the platform could see his breath frosting the air.

The speech was devoted exclusively to foreign policy. Though a major statement of American aspirations, its focus was the world—the “peace of the world,” “world recovery,” “people all over the world.” He denounced communism as a false doctrine dependent on deceit and violence. The line between communism and democracy was clear:

Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters.

Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and fairness.

Communism subjects the individual to arrest without lawful cause, punishment without trial, and forced labor as the chattel of the state. It decrees what information he shall receive, what art he shall produce, what leaders he shall follow, and what thoughts he shall think.

Democracy maintains that government is established for the benefit of the individual, and is charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of the individual and his freedom in the exercise of those abilities….

The future of mankind was at stake, and without naming the Soviet Union, he stressed that “the actions resulting from the Communist philosophy are a threat to the efforts of free nations to bring about world recovery and lasting peace.”

Democracy was the “vitalizing force” in the world. The American people stood “firm in the faith” that had inspired the nation from the beginning. Americans were united in the belief “that all men have a right to equal justice under law and equal opportunity to share in the common good.”

He was affirmative in spirit, and characteristically he had specific proposals to make, four points, as he said. The United States would continue to support the United Nations; it would keep “full weight” behind the Marshall Plan; and the United States would join in a new “defense arrangement” among the freedom-loving nations of the North Atlantic, “to make it sufficiently clear…that any armed attack affecting our national security would be met with overwhelming force.”

But it was the final proposal, his fourth point, that caught everyone by surprise. He called for a “bold new program” for making the benefits of American science and industrial progress available to “underdeveloped” countries. It was the first mention of what would become known as the Point Four Program.

The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—had no place in the plan, Truman said. Half the people in the world were living in conditions close to misery, and for the first time in history the knowledge and skill were available to relieve such suffering. The emphasis would be on the distribution of knowledge rather than money.

The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible…. Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies—hunger, misery, and despair.

The applause was immense and sustained. He was extending the promise of America beyond America. Poverty, he had said in his State of the Union address, was just as wasteful and just as unnecessary as preventable disease. Now he had extended that idea.

“Truman Proposes ‘Fair Deal’ Plan for the World,” said the headline in the Washington Post. Moreover, he had been eloquent and moving, as he had seldom ever been. Many thought it the finest speech he had ever made. Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln would all have approved and joined in the applause, said The New York Times.

Before the parade, in the interlude during which the President was to be received at lunch in the Capitol, a giant air armada like none ever seen over Washington roared across the sky, some seven hundred planes, including transports like those supplying Berlin and five gigantic new six-engined B-36 bombers that had flown, nonstop, 2,000 miles from Texas.

As the last of the planes passed, the grim President of the inaugural platform, the man with the weight of the world on him, became radiant Harry Truman once more, as he and Barkley, bundled again in overcoats and grinning broadly under their high silk hats, pulled away in the open Lincoln and started slowly back down Pennsylvania Avenue.

To either side now marched the Battery D honor guard, two lines of somewhat portly, gray-haired middle Americans swinging white ash walking canes, keeping pace with the big car rather smartly and all more or less in step as the delighted crowd cheered them on. (Only two would drop out in the mile-and-a-quarter route to the White House.)

The whole pageant struck countless viewers, including many who had witnessed numerous inaugurations, as profoundly stirring. It was a day of dedication for the democratic spirit, with all elements large and small momentarily in harmony.

The clear sunlight, the President’s evident high spirits [said The New York Times], the patience and cheerfulness of the great crowds, such moving episodes as the presence of a guard of honor of Mr. Truman’s comrades of the First World War…the slowly moving masses of men and vehicles coming down the Avenue from the seat of the national legislative power to the seat of its executive power, the booming of the Presidential salute, the planes overhead, the whole mood of the occasion—all these things seemed to speak of a confident and even exultant Americanism…. It was democracy looking homeward across a great continent, but also looking outward toward the world in which democracy will never again be impotent or ashamed or apologetic.

Behind the President, the procession stretched seven miles and would take, in all, three hours to pass. Truman, on reaching the White House, watched the show from a glass-enclosed reviewing stand and he missed none of it. West Point cadets, midshipmen from Annapolis, the Marine Band, the United States Army Band, all came swinging by, companies of WACS, WAVES, the Richmond Blues wearing white-plumed helmets, high school bands, police bands, drum majorettes, beauty queens, trick riders, state governors in open cars, a mounted posse of Kansas City “cowboys”—15,153 men, women, and children in costume, uniform, and civilian dress, more than 40 bands, 55 floats, trucks, jeeps, armored cars, more than 100 horses, 4 mules from Lamar, Missouri, and an old-time circus calliope tooting “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” With Barkley beside him, Truman clapped his gloved hands, waved, chatted, laughed out loud, beat time to the Marine Hymn, swayed his head to the strains of “Dixie,” bounced up and down on the balls of his feet to keep warm while sipping from a white paper cup of what was reportedly coffee but assuredly was not. “Like the honest Missouri extrovert that he is,” wrote Roger Butter-field for Life, “he did not try to hide his moods—the crowds and the cameras saw them all.”

Governor Adlai Stevenson passed by in advance of the Illinois float. General Eisenhower, in a spontaneous tribute that the crowd adored, stood in the back of his open car and saluted the President. Truman beamed and waved his top hat. When a Plymouth Rock float passed by, its cast of Pilgrims suddenly broke out cameras and began snapping pictures of him.

Every state, every size, shape, and color of American democracy, passed in review in the chilly afternoon sunshine. The last inaugural parade, eight years before, in 1941, when the country was arming for war, had been a grim procession of military might. The mood now was different. The crowd in the grandstand opposite the President, people in bright scarfs and winter coats, some wrapped in blankets, was a happy crowd; just as it was now a larger, more plentiful America by far. Harry Truman was President of a nation of 147 million people, an increase in population of more than 15 million since the census of 1940. No President in history had ever taken office at a time of such prosperity and power. Industrial production outstripped any previous time in the nation’s past, and all other nations of the world. The bumper harvest of the previous fall had been the biggest on record. “There never was a country more fabulous than America,” the British historian Robert Payne would write in 1949, after an extensive tour of the country:

She bestrides the world like a Colossus: no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations…. It is already an axiom that the decisions of the American government affect the lives and livelihood of the remotest people. Half the wealth of the world, more than half the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world’s machines are concentrated in American hands….

“The parade was the most fun I have ever had at a parade,” wrote David Lilienthal. But the President, as the papers said, was “the fellow who was having the best time of anyone.”

Only twice did he seem to register disapproval. When the Dixiecrat candidate, Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, rode by waving happily, Truman gave him a cold stare. Then as Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia, another champion of white supremacy, approached, Truman turned his back. But the only real snub was of Thurmond. Truman had turned as Talmadge passed because an electric heater beneath his feet had short-circuited, sending up smoke, and he was trying to put out the fire.

As the sun fell behind the Old State Department Building and the afternoon grew colder, a Texas delegation appeared, led by a car with a banner on its side: “Lieutenant Governor Shivers.” The crowd and the President roared.

Truman stayed to the end, and at the inaugural ball that night at the armory, he was still going strong at nearly two in the morning. No dancer, he watched and waved from a balcony to a crowd of some five thousand people. He was dressed in white tie and tails, while Bess, “smiling and vivacious,” wore a shimmering, full-length gown of silver lamé. With them were Mary Jane Truman, J. Vivian Truman and his daughter Martha Ann, Frank and Natalie Wallace, George and May Wallace, Nellie and Ethel Noland.

“Everybody looked wonderful,” wrote Margaret, who wore pink tulle and spent most of the night on the dance floor. Happiest of all was her father, “whose face was shining like a new moon.”

II

In contrast to his first years in office, and so much to follow, the first six months of the new term were a breather for Truman. Until midsummer 1949, things went well on the whole, the outlook remained hopeful. No calamitous domestic issues erupted. There were no sudden international crises to contend with. Greece and Turkey did not fall to Communist takeovers, nor would they. Nor would France or Italy. Best of all was a decided easing of tension over Berlin that began just days after the inauguration.

Realizing that the airlift was an established success, and that in fact the blockade had backfired on them, the Russians signaled “a change in attitude.” Stalin was backing down. For the first time since Potsdam, the tide seemed to be turning. Secret negotiations followed—“It can almost be stated as a principle that when the Soviets are serious about something they do it in secret,” Chip Bohlen observed—and on May 12, 1949, the blockade ended: The lights of Berlin came on again. The airlift was over, after a year and two months, 277,804 flights, and the delivery of 2,325,809 tons of food and supplies.

For Truman it was a momentous victory. Firmness and patience had prevailed without resorting to force. War had been averted.

On May 12 also, the Allied powers approved establishment of a new German Federated Republic, whereby the West Germans were to rule themselves with their own government at Bonn.

Things overall looked “fifty percent better” than a year ago, Truman confided to Lilienthal. Not even the advance of Communist forces in China seemed to discourage him. At Potsdam, Stalin had told him the people of North China would never be Communists and Truman thought that was “about right.” The dragon was going to “turn over,” he said, “and after that perhaps some advances can be made of it.” With what Lilienthal described as a “big grin and a large dose of his particular brand of charm, which is not inconsiderable,” Truman talked enthusiastically of what a program like TVA could mean for a country like China, “to put it on its feet.”

By then, too, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington on April 4, after much hard, skillful negotiation by Secretary of State Acheson. The United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries joined in a defense pact whereby an attack on any one would be taken as an attack on all: For the United States, it marked a radical departure with tradition—the first peacetime military alliance since the signing of the Constitution—but had such an agreement existed in 1914 and 1939, Truman was convinced, the world would have been spared two terrible wars. He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency, and was certain that time would prove him right. And though Acheson and British Foreign Secretary Bevin had done most of the work, it was Truman who provided the commitment, unreservedly, just as he had with the Marshall Plan. His first major act after the election in November had been to instruct the State Department to open negotiations for the new alliance, and he rightly considered it his treaty. “We have really passed a milestone in history,” he said in his toast at the state dinner at the Carlton Hotel, following the signing ceremony.

Objections in the Senate, among conservative Republicans, might be fierce, but he had no doubt the treaty would be approved. As it turned out, opposition in the Senate and the press was unexpectedly mild, approval broad. On July 21, the Senate voted ratification by a vote of 82 to 13.

The establishment of NATO, the success of the Berlin Airlift, the prospect of a prosperous, self-governing West Germany as part of the Western Alliance, all made for a greatly improved atmosphere for Truman. “He looks more relaxed…those drawn lines from his eyes across his cheekbones seemed to be considerably modified,” Lilienthal noted.

In March he had taken off again for Key West, for another “working vacation,” his sixth at Key West since becoming President. The place appealed to him as nowhere else. He loved the warm sea bathing and balmy tropical nights, as perhaps only an inland North American can. His quarters were in what had been the commandant’s residence at the Key West naval base, a modest-sized white frame house in the West Indian, style with jalousied porches, simply but comfortably furnished. Hibiscus and bougainvillaea bloomed in the garden. The cares, the pressures, the formality of the presidency, all began to subside almost from the moment he arrived.

He put on bright patterned sports shirts—“Harry Truman shirts,” as they became known—and set off on his early morning walks through the picturesque old town of Key West, stopping sometimes for a cup of coffee at a local lunch counter. The White House pouch arrived daily; members of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, the Joint Chiefs, flew in and out for meetings, and some days he was on the phone far more than he liked; but he enjoyed a daily swim, or rather churning the turquoise water in his self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, while one or two Navy boats stood guard, to keep other boats at a distance and to watch for barracudas. He loafed in the sun with members of the staff, joked, swapped stories, read, listened to classical music on the phonograph, took an afternoon nap, played poker on the porch nearly every evening, slept soundly, and started off each new day, before his walk with a shot of bourbon.

His privacy on the base was complete. Nor was security ever a problem, which pleased the Secret Service. The staff all enjoyed themselves, as did the thirty-odd reporters who usually made the trip and who had little else to do but enjoy themselves. And with everyone so obviously pleased with his choice of vacation spot, so pleased to be included, pleased to be with him, Truman enjoyed himself that much more. “He was great down in Key West!” remembered Jim Rowley, by then head of the Secret Service detail.

Soon they were all sporting Harry Truman shirts. To Truman’s great delight, even Sam Rayburn, during a visit in November, had put on one printed with flocks of cranes and swaying palm trees.

Back in Washington on May 8, at a party celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in the ballroom of the palatial Larz Anderson House on Embassy Row, as toasts were raised, Truman looked better by far than he had since 1945, “like a man who had few qualms about the future,” according to one account. “The President,” said his physician, Wallace Graham, “is as close to being an iron man as anyone I know at his age.”

The one distinct shadow on these “first sunny months” of 1949 was the tragic fate of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who as far back as the previous summer had begun looking weary and troubled and who, since the election, had been acting quite strangely. An intense, introverted, extremely dedicated man by nature, Forrestal had worked himself to a state of near collapse, yet wished only to hold on and work harder.

Truman had begun losing confidence in Forrestal even before the fall campaign. Struggling to bring about the reorganization of the military services—an unprecedented, killing task—Forrestal had become increasingly indecisive and absorbed in details. “He won’t take hold,” Truman complained. At one point, exasperated with Forrestal’s handling of a problem, Truman had sent an uncharacteristically curt note saying, “This is your responsibility.” Then, with the campaign under way, there had been suspicions about Forrestal’s loyalty, whether his meetings with Thomas E. Dewey really concerned defense matters, as Forrestal said, or were arranged in the hope of staying on in the Dewey administration. Drew Pearson called it an open secret that Forrestal wanted to hold on to his job regardless of the outcome in November, and several of those closest to Truman grew convinced that politically the Secretary of Defense was no longer to be trusted.

Forrestal had also been one of the few members of the Cabinet since the departure of Henry Wallace to disagree with the President over policy—over Palestine and civilian control of the atomic bomb most notably—and now he was adamantly opposed to Truman’s position on defense spending. To achieve a balanced budget, Truman insisted on a defense ceiling of $15 billion, a sum equal to more than a third of the entire federal budget, but that Forrestal thought dangerously low given the scale of the Soviet menace.

Criticism of Forrestal by the press had grown steadily since his unpopular stand on the Palestine issue, with Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell leading the attack in their columns and radio broadcasts. And for Forrestal who had long courted the press, this was all extremely painful. He was called a tool of Wall Street and the oil companies, an imperialist, an anti-Semite. Pearson and Winchell tried to create doubt about his personal courage, with a trumped-up account of how years before, Forrestal had fled out the back door of his New York City home as jewel thieves accosted his wife. On an NBC Radio broadcast in January, a guest claimed that the I. G. Farben works in Frankfurt had not been bombed during the war because Forrestal owned I. G. Farben stock—a totally false charge that NBC later retracted.

The more amplified the attacks became, the more Truman, who hated to dismiss anyone under almost any circumstances, was inclined to keep Forrestal where he was. Truman would not have him leave “under fire.” In February, Drew Pearson had attacked Harry Vaughan for accepting a decoration from the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, a decoration that several others, including Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, had received earlier, but about which nothing had been said. Pearson had called for Vaughan’s immediate dismissal and Truman publicly responded by calling Pearson an “S.O.B.,” which raised a new storm of adverse comment and gave Truman a great deal of satisfaction. “No commentator or columnist names any members of my Cabinet, or my staff,” he said. “I name them myself And when it is time for them to be moved on, I do the moving—nobody else.” It was a sentiment that had been felt by other presidents before him and would be often again by more who followed in his place, but that none stated so openly in so many words.

Forrestal, as he told a friend, felt that Truman had always been very fair with him. Truman was “the best boss I have ever known.” To another friend he wrote that the American people were fortunate to have in the highest office “a man who, while he reflects the liberal forces both in this country and throughout the world, is nevertheless conservative in the real sense of that word—a conserver of the things we hope to keep.”

Forrestal was still greatly admired by several of those whose judgment Truman particularly valued. Eisenhower, whom Truman had recently asked to serve as an informal “presiding officer” of the Joint Chiefs, considered Forrestal one of the best men in public life and, as Eisenhower recorded privately, more perceptive than Truman concerning “the mess we are in due to neglect of our armed forces.”

Except for my liking, admiration, and respect for his [Forrestal’s] great qualities I’d not go near Washington, even if I had to resign my commission completely [Eisenhower wrote in his diary in January 1949]. To a certain extent these same feelings apply to H.S.T., but he does not see the problems so clearly as does Jim, and does not suffer so much due to the failure to solve the problems. I like them both.

But Forrestal, as Eisenhower also noted, was “looking badly…. He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.”

(Eisenhower would himself soon find the bickering between the services all but intolerable. He was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and worrying about his blood pressure. By mid-March he was suffering from severe stomach cramps, and Truman sent him off to recuperate for three weeks at the Little White House in Key West.)

A reporter seeing Forrestal on inauguration day was shocked by his “baffled” look. Afflicted with insomnia and loss of appetite, Forrestal appeared strangely drawn and aged, his shirt collars too large for him. Some days he would telephone the President several times on the same subject, which left Truman mystified. Privately, Forrestal told a few close friends his phone was being tapped. At meetings he would unconsciously scratch at a particular part of his scalp until it turned raw.

When, in early February, Forrestal told Truman he was resigning and would leave by June 1, Truman saw it would have to be sooner than that.

As Forrestal knew, Truman, for some time, had been considering Louis Johnson as his replacement—Johnson the headstrong financial wonder-worker of the Whistle-stop Campaign, who had once served as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of War—and Forrestal agreed with the choice, or so he said. Johnson, on meeting Forrestal to discuss the transition, concluded after an hour, as he later told Drew Pearson, that Forrestal was insane, or possibly taking drugs.

“Forrestal wanted to resign long before he did,” Truman would write, “and I kept him from it, although I realized later that I should have let him quit when he wanted. He left because of failing health, and that’s all there was to it.”

On Tuesday, March 1, Truman summoned Forrestal to the White House to ask for his resignation. Truman also urged him to take a vacation, though he said nothing about seeking medical attention.

Forrestal maintained the necessary composure for public appearances in the following weeks, but only barely. He was present at the Pentagon on March 28 when Louis Johnson was formally installed as Secretary of Defense, and later in the day he stood mute at another ceremony at the White House, when Truman presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. But the next day, Forrestal, “a very sick man,” was flown to Florida, to Robert Lovett’s home at Hobe Sound, where he told Lovett, “They’re after me.” In the days following he made at least one attempt at suicide.

Unaware of what was happening in Florida, but having now heard reports that Forrestal thought he was being followed by foreign agents, Truman asked the head of the Secret Service, U. E. Baughman, to look into the matter at once. The report, marked “Secret” and dated March 31, said Forrestal’s suspicions were unfounded, that he had become of late “exceedingly nervous and emotional,” and so distraught by the time of his last day as Secretary of Defense that he had not even known his own servants.

As a result of his apparent lack of ability to make a positive decision and carry it out, he was assisted and escorted to the plane [to Florida] by two friends and former associates. When Mr. F. exhibited a last minute reluctance to make his departure, one of the friends reportedly said to the other: “We have to do something—we can’t keep him around here.”

Forrestal, the report concluded, was suffering from a “slight nervous breakdown,” which apparently was as much as Truman had been told up to that point.

In Florida, a Navy psychiatrist and the renowned Dr. William C, Menninger had been sent for, and on April 2, Forrestal was flown back to Washington to be admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment of “nervous exhaustion.”

Drew Pearson reported that Forrestal was “out of his mind” and claimed incorrectly that in Florida Forrestal had rushed out into the street screaming, “The Russians are coming.”

Truman called on Forrestal at Bethesda the first week in May and thought Forrestal seemed “his old self.”

Two weeks later, on Sunday, May 22, at two in the morning, Forrestal sat in his room on the sixteenth floor of the hospital copying lines from Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax”:

Worn by the waste of time—

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

In the dark prospect of the yawning grave…

About three o'clock he walked across the hall to a small kitchen. After tying one end of the sash from his bathrobe to a radiator and the other end around his neck, he jumped from the unbarred window. His body was found on the roof of the third floor, the sash still around his neck.

The news rocked Washington. Suicide among high-ranking government figures was unknown. Other Cabinet members had resigned over the years, or been fired under a cloud, but none had ever taken his own life. Truman, in his words, was “inexpressibly shocked and grieved.” The First Lady, haunted by memories of her father, was, as Margaret later revealed, “terribly shaken.” At Easter, only the week before, Bess had sent Forrestal a bouquet of roses and in a note of appreciation he had said how much they had “helped brighten a bleak day.”

I am moved that you should trouble to send me a token but it’s typical of your thoughtfulness. A Happy Easter to you and the President and Miss Truman. You all deserve it.

The President and Vice President, former President Hoover, the Cabinet, much of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, General Marshall, an estimated six thousand people were present for Forrestal’s burial with full military honors at Arlington.

Truman, angry, troubled, doubtless remorseful that he hadn’t acted sooner to relieve Forrestal from duty, accused Drew Pearson of “hounding” him to death. Pearson wrote that it was Truman’s call for Forrestal’s resignation that “undoubtedly worsened the illness.” David Lawrence, in his column in the Washington Star, said it was not work that killed Forrestal, but the President’s loss of confidence in him.

Questions about the tragedy persisted. Why had Forrestal, in his condition, with suicidal tendencies, been placed in a sixteenth-floor room? Had his priest been denied the chance to see him? As time went on, and fear of Communist conspiracy spread in Washington, it would be rumored that pages from Forrestal’s diary had been secretly removed on orders from the White House—that Forrestal, the most ardent anti-Soviet voice in the administration, had in fact been driven to his death as part of a Communist plot and the evidence destroyed by “secret Communists” on Truman’s staff.

But as ever in Washington, it was who was in power that mattered most and so the focus of attention swiftly shifted to the new Secretary of Defense, who, with his previous experience in the department, his reputation for getting things done, had seemed well equipped for the job. Louis Johnson was tough, hardheaded, and, importantly, committed to the President’s policy of holding the line on spending. On the Hill, Democrats and Republicans liked what they saw. The Senate approved the appointment unanimously. But in little time Johnson’s personal style and mode of operation made him a figure of extreme controversy. He hit the Pentagon like a cyclone.

Johnson’s first move was to evict several high-ranking officers from the largest office in the building and make it his own. He resurrected General Pershing’s old desk and installed Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, as a deputy. Half of all Pentagon employees, some twenty-five thousand people, were shuffled about in a gigantic game of musical chairs. He did away with outdated service boards, cut back the use of official cars.

Johnson was doing what Truman had asked for. From his experience on the Truman Committee, Truman was convinced that huge sums were being wasted in defense spending. He had a basic distrust of generals and admirals when it came to spending money. In late April, with no advance warning to the President or the Secretary of the Navy, Johnson suddenly canceled construction of a new $186 million supercarrier, United States, a major component in the Navy’s whole program—with the result that the Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, resigned in a rage. Truman, who liked Sullivan and did not blame him for resigning, nonetheless approved the cancelation. Still, Johnson’s manner troubled him greatly.

In May, to the disbelief of the Joint Chiefs, Johnson ordered another $1.4 billion slashed from the military budget. To those who charged he was weakening the country’s defense, Johnson boasted that the United States could “lick Russia with one hand tied behind our back.”

Where Forrestal had been small, introverted, and apolitical almost to a fault, Johnson was a great boisterous bear of a man who shouted to make his point to an admiral or general, and exuded such overt political ambition, stirred such speculation as to his true motives, that he felt obliged after only a few months on the job to state publicly several times that he was not running for President. The press quoted an unnamed high official who said Johnson was making two enemies for every dollar he saved.

As was becoming rapidly apparent, Louis Johnson was possibly the worst appointment Truman ever made. In a little more than a year, many who worked with him, including Truman and Dean Acheson, would conclude that Johnson was mentally unbalanced. “Unwittingly,” wrote General Bradley later, “Truman had replaced one mental case with another.”

The President, the country read, was “in high good humor,” “cheerful and chipper.” And busy. He named Attorney General Tom Clark to the Supreme Court, made Howard McGrath the new Attorney General, put Bill Boyle, his old Kansas City protégé and whistle-stop mastermind, in McGrath’s place at the head of the Democratic Party. He also picked Perle Mesta to be the new minister to Luxembourg, an appointment of no great importance but remembered fondly because it inspired a hit Broadway musical, Call Me Madam, with music by Irving Berlin, and Ethel Merman in the title role.

But even before spring vanished in the furnace heat of June and another long summer settled on the city, Truman’s good cheer and optimism were being put to the test. The wave of anti-communism that had been gathering force since the charges against Alger Hiss erupted the previous summer now grew more serious, with Cardinal Spellman of New York, among others, saying America was in imminent danger of a Communist takeover. In December 1948, Hiss was indicted for perjury, but the real issue, everyone knew, remained the same: Was he or was he not a Communist spy? And how many more like him were there in government?

The country, Truman assured reporters, was not going to hell. They ought to read some history. America had been through such times before. “Hysteria finally died down, and things straightened out, and the country didn’t go to hell, and it isn’t now.” When the Hiss trial ended in a hung jury in July, another trial was scheduled for the fall. As Truman failed to foresee, the issue was not going to go away.

Then at midsummer the outlook became dramatically worse. Indeed, by August 1949 Truman had entered a time of severe trial. Events beyond his control—in China and the Soviet Union—rocked the Western world as nothing had since the war, while on Capitol Hill, as if to provide a kind of perverse comic relief, Harry Vaughan was summoned before a Senate investigating committee.

The news from China had been grim all year, Truman’s oddly sanguine remarks on the subject to David Lilienthal notwithstanding. The Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek had been crumbling fast before the onrush of the Communists. The American military adviser to Chiang, General David Barr, reported that

the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could effect a remedy…. No battle has been lost since my arrival due to lack of ammunition or equipment…. [The Nationalist] debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership…the widespread corruption and dishonesty through the [Nationalist] armed forces….

In April a Communist army of a million men crossed the Yangtze River, south into the last provinces still loyal to Chiang. The outcome, the complete fall of China to the forces of Mao Tse-tung—an outcome implicit as early as 1946 in what George Marshall reported after his fruitless year in China—had by spring become a foregone conclusion.

Vehement alarm was sounded. Angry, vindictive charges were made against the administration by what had become known as the “China Lobby,” whose numbers included religious and patriotic groups across the country, prominent Republicans in Congress, and Time and Life publisher Henry R. Luce, who was the son of missionaries to China. Life had carried an article by General MacArthur titled “The Fall of China Imperils the U.S.” Time warned that the Red tide rising in Asia threatened to engulf half the peoples of the world.

Yet it was the administration’s own attempt to account for its China policy, an effort intended to clarify what was about to happen in China before it happened, and thereby calm the country, that gave focus to this momentous turn of history as nothing else had, and with unexpected consequences.

At a morning press conference on August 4, Truman announced the release of a massive State Department report, United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949, 409 pages in length, with another 645 pages of appended documents in smaller print. He had asked to have it compiled, Truman said, as a “frank and actual record…clear and illuminating…everything you want to know about the policy” from the 1840s forward.

As Dean Acheson stressed in a preface to the report, the United States had poured more than $2 billion into support for Chiang Kai-shek since V-J Day—money and arms to help destroy communism in China—but it had not been enough. The fault, said Acheson, was in the internal decay of the Nationalist regime, its rampant corruption, lack of leadership, its indifference to the aspirations of the Chinese people. “The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the…United States…. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.”

Truman, his spelling no better than ever, had said in a handwritten note earlier that a “currupt” Nationalist government was the cause of China’s woes. “We picked a bad horse,” he told Arthur Vandenberg.

The “China White Paper” caused a sensation. Affection for China was widespread in the country. Generations of American children had carried nickels and dimes to Sunday School to support missionaries in China. Books by Pearl Buck about Chinese peasant life had won the hearts of millions of readers; Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo, and his smiling, photogenic, Wellesley-educated wife had been America’s loyal allies through the war. Now the State Department was declaring officially that China, the largest nation on earth, was lost to communism. Instead of serving as a palliative, as Truman and Acheson intended, the report inflamed the controversy. The New York Times judged it a “sorry record of well-meaning mistakes.” More outraged critics called it a whitewash, a deliberate distortion, and worse, “a smooth alibi for the pro-Communists in the State Department who…aided in the Communist conquest of China.” In the Senate, Republican William Knowland of California wondered aloud, and without a shred of evidence, whether Alger Hiss had helped shape China policy. The China Lobby raised the cry that Truman and Acheson had “lost” China, as though China had been America’s to lose. A few Democrats, too, joined in the attack, including Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

At the same time, Harry Vaughan was back in the news in what had all the signs of a full-blown White House scandal. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Democrat Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina had begun investigating so-called “five percenters,” those who, for 5 percent commissions, used their supposed influence to secure contracts or favored treatment from the government. Vaughan, it was revealed by several witnesses, had used his high position—“his general’s stars, his White House telephone and his place in Harry Truman’s affections”—to ease the way for such men-about-Washington as James V. Hunt, a former Army officer who claimed to be one of Vaughan’s best friends, and “Mysterious” John Maragon, truly an old friend of Vaughan’s, who in the first weeks of Truman’s presidency in 1945 had been seen about the West Wing so often he was thought to be one of the staff.

When it was shown that Hunt had improper influence with the chief of the Army Chemical Corps and the Quartermaster General, Truman immediately ordered the retirement of the first and the suspension of the second officer.

Most of Vaughan’s activities in behalf of such friends dated from just after the war. As a favor to Hunt he had helped obtain scarce lumber for construction of a California race track, a project being blocked by government restrictions on building materials needed for housing. For Maragon, he secured a permit for the purchasing of molasses, another scarce item. For a Chicago perfume manufacturer, another of Hunt’s clients, he arranged a priority flight to Europe by Air Transport Command—at the time when Germany had just surrendered and virtually all transport facilities were preempted for military use—an arrangement whereby the Chicago manufacturer returned home with perfume essence valued at $53,000.

There was nothing illegal about the operations of the five percenters, nothing illegal about what Vaughan had done. But as had also been disclosed, the same Chicago perfume manufacturer, David A. Bennett, had made Vaughan a gift of a cold-storage food container, a “deep freezer,” valued at approximately $400. Moreover, at Vaughan’s suggestion, Bennett sent five more freezers: one to the First Lady, which broke down and had to be junked, one to Fred Vinson, who was then Secretary of the Treasury, one to J. K. Vardaman, who installed it in his Rappahannock County, Virginia, mountain retreat, another to Matt Connelly, and another to John Snyder, who returned it.

Summoned before the Hoey Committee, Vaughan insisted he had only been trying to be helpful. “I do these people a courtesy of putting them in contact with the persons with whom they can tell their story,” he explained.

It was, of course, what every politician in Washington did almost daily. Nor was there a law against public officials accepting gifts from friends and constituents, as many news accounts were careful to point out. The President himself was constantly receiving and accepting gifts of all kinds—paintings, prize turkeys, country hams, Havana cigars, liquor, even a Ford automobile, during his first year in office. The freezers, said Vaughan, were “an expression of friendship and nothing more,” and Chairman Hoey, after Vaughan’s two days of testimony, acknowledged there was no evidence of corruption on Vaughan’s part. Yet the damage was done. The freezers had been kept confidential and Vaughan’s use of his privileged position, if not illegal, had been decidedly inappropriate and inept. His poor judgment, the almost ludicrous lack of propriety that had so long concerned others at the White House like Charlie Ross and Eben Ayers, had caught up with him.

Though his manner before the committee was calm and respectful, even impressive at times, by appearance Vaughan seemed anything but a figure of rectitude. Grossly overweight, his uniform, for all its brass and ribbons, looking about as military as pajamas, he was like a cartoonist’s portrait of corruption. Thomas Nast would have gloried in the chance to draw him, as slouching back in his witness chair Vaughan lit up a big cigar.

The Republicans on the committee had prepared, as Time wrote, for a political barbecue with Vaughan as the pig on the spit. But the one who enjoyed it most, glowering at the witness, pointedly addressing the uniformed general as “Mr. Vaughan,” was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Was it true, asked McCarthy, that he had taken campaign contributions from “Racket King” Frank Costello?

“Am I supposed to know Frankie Costello?…How did he get in here?” responded Vaughan, rightfully incredulous.

If the hearings had proven anything, it was only that Vaughan was an embarrassment who in the guise of a general played courthouse politics from the White House in a style reminiscent of the Harding days. “Five percenters” and “deep freezers” became odious new catchwords, to the extreme pleasure of the Republicans.

“Ross and I discussed the whole thing at some length,” wrote Eben Ayers. “We agreed that Vaughan is entirely to blame for his troubles and the troubles he has brought on the President and others. But he seems to have no realization of what harm he has caused….”

What Truman did was just what everyone who knew him well knew he would do. Had he been constituted differently, had he been able to see the commotion over Vaughan as justified, and not an attack on him personally—which was how he interpreted it—had he been able to see that Vaughan was a serious liability and been willing to sacrifice him for the sake of the public trust, not to say his own reputation, then things might have gone differently. But he did not, and this, as time would tell, was a mistake.

Beneath everything, Truman not only liked Vaughan, but liked how Vaughan conducted himself, and particularly with respect to the press. When, in the midst of the hearings, Vaughan had arrived back in Washington after a vacation and was confronted by reporters at Union Station, he had warned them to go easy on him. “After all I am the President’s military aide, and you guys will all want favors at the White House someday.” Asked about his connection with the five percenters, he said, “That’s nobody’s goddamn business and you can quote me,” a response that so warmed Truman’s heart when he read it that he pinned a mock decoration on Vaughan for “Operation Union Station.”

“I think,” Alben Barkley would later comment, “that Mr. Truman was far too kind and loyal to certain old friends who took advantage of him and whose actions sometimes were no credit to his administration.”

When Vaughan offered to resign, Truman told him to say no such thing in his presence ever again. They had come into the White House together, Truman said, and they would go out together.

Only weeks later came the most stunning news of all, portending, as David Lilienthal wrote, “a whole box of trouble.” An Air Force weather reconnaissance plane, flying at 18,000 feet from Japan to Alaska, had detected signs of intense radioactivity over the North Pacific, east of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Soon planes elsewhere over the Pacific were reporting radioactivity as much as twenty times above normal. The radioactive cloud was tracked by the Air Force from the Pacific nearly to the British Isles, where it was picked up by the RAF.

It took several days for scientists to analyze the data. Their conclusion was reached the afternoon of Monday, September 19. Lilienthal, who was on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, received the news that night in memorable fashion. As he and his wife were returning from a dinner party to their house near the northern shore of the island, they saw the figure of a man suddenly loom up out of the ground fog, caught in the glare of their headlights. It was General James McCormack, who looked bemused, thought Lilienthal, “as if I frequently found him on a windswept moor, in the dead of night, on an island….”

Later, alone with Lilienthal in an upstairs room lit by a single kerosene lamp, McCormack gave Lilienthal his report.

The coal-oil lamp between us [Lilienthal wrote], the shadows all around; outside, through…[the] windows, the Great Dipper and the North Star off toward the lights of New Bedford…. I took it with no outward evidence of anything more than a budget problem….

Was he disturbed over something, his wife asked after they had gone to bed. “Oh some. One of those things,” he said.

By 8:20 the next morning, he and McCormack were on their way to Washington in an Air Force C-47. Lilienthal was to see Truman at the White House that afternoon. By 11:30 he was at his office conferring with a hurriedly assembled advisory commission of nuclear scientists, chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who looked frantic. There was no question, said Oppenheimer, the Russians had detonated an atomic bomb.

“Vermont affair, we are here,” Lilienthal wrote, “Vermont” being the code name for the Russian bomb.

How was the President taking the news? Would he tell the country? And how soon?

Lilienthal saw Truman promptly at 3:45 and later, in his diary, in almost telegraphic style, he put down this extraordinary account of their half hour together:

The President was reading a copy of the Congressional Record, as quiet and composed a scene as imaginable; bright sunlight in the garden outside….

He said: want to talk about this detection report—knew about it—knew it would probably come—German scientists in Russia did it, probably something like that. Be glad to call in the Joint Committee [on Atomic Energy] chairman, ranking minority member, tell them…. Not going to say anything myself now; later when this [Truman pointed to a newspaper with headlines about the devaluation of the British pound] quiets down, maybe in a week; realize may leak, lots people know—still take that chance, meet it when it comes.

I said: may I have permission to state [my] views, despite fact you have reached conclusion? He took off his glasses, first time I saw him without them, large, fine eyes. Considerate, fine air of patience and interest. I tried to set out affirmative virtue of making it [the announcement] now and initiating matter rather than plugging leaks…. First, would show Pres. knows what is going on in Vermont [Russia]…. Second, Pres. knowing and saying so would show him not scared, hence others needn’t be; third, would show Pres. will tell people when things come along they need to know that won’t hurt being told.

[The President agreed that] maintaining confidence of people in him, taking cue from his own calm, was good point, but not afraid of that. Can’t be sure anyway [that the Russians actually had the bomb]. I stepped into that: is sure, substantial—and great surprise even to [the] most pessimistic. Really?—sharp look….

But [an announcement] by him [might] cause great fears, troubles. They [the Russians] changed…talking very reasonably again, things look better [since the end of the Berlin crisis]; this may have something to do with it. Not worried; took this into account; going to work things out….

Three days later, the morning of Friday, September 23, with the White House press crammed into his office, Charlie Ross asked first that the door be closed, then passed out a mimeographed statement from the President. In an instant reporters were stampeding for the press telephones, smashing the head of a stuffed deer in their rush.

I believe the American people, to the fullest extent consistent with national security, are entitled to be informed of all developments in the field of atomic energy. That is my reason for making public the following information.

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R….

As the statement also said, the eventual development of “this new force by other nations was to be expected.” Nonetheless, the news was three to five years ahead of most predictions and the realization came as an immense shock. The four-year American monopoly on the atomic bomb was over. And though there was no panic in the country, the fears and tensions of the Cold War were greatly amplified. It was a different world now.

A week later, on October 1 in Peking, the People’s Republic of China, the most numerous Communist nation in the world, with more than 500 million people, one fifth of humanity, was officially inaugurated.

Very soon afterward, in October 1949, in a series of highly secret meetings at the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission, discussion began on the subject of a thermonuclear or hydrogen weapon—a superbomb, or “Super”—which would have more than ten times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian bomb, it was felt, had changed the situation “drastically.” And if the Russians were capable of producing an atomic bomb, then the Russians too were in a position now to push forward with the more devastating weapon.

The initial proposal for the “Super” had come from Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, with strong support from the physicist Edward Teller.

James B. Conant, who had served on the President’s Interim Committee on the first bomb, was flatly opposed. So was Oppenheimer. Enrico Fermi seemed at first to favor going ahead, then changed his mind. In the end, the scientific advisory committee expressed its opposition to the project on both technical and moral grounds. General Bradley was for it mainly for its “psychological” importance. Clearly, there would have to be a presidential decision.

Lilienthal had privately concluded that he, too, was against the Super. (“We keep saying, ‘We have no other course!’ Lilienthal wrote. “What we should be saying is, ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’”) But the morning of Tuesday, November 1, he met with Dean Acheson to explain the “essence of the business,” so Acheson might take it up with the President “soon,” before he, Lilienthal, and others presented it in greater detail.

What a depressing world it was, Acheson remarked after listening to Lilienthal. He didn’t know how Lilienthal had lived with “this grim thing.”

In the evening of that same first day in November 1949, the President sat down to dinner at Blair House alone. Bess Truman, as she had been for most of the summer, was away in Independence, looking after her mother; Margaret was in New York, pursuing her singing career, and as always, their absence left him feeling downcast, if not occupied with work or people around him. Several times over the long, difficult summer, in letters home, he had grown more reflective than usual, recounting events that had brought him to where he was. “We can never tell what is in store for us,” he had said to Bess. “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think or wish for such a position,” he told Nellie and Ethel Noland. He had “succeeded in getting myself into more trouble than Pandora ever let loose in the world.”

If he felt Bess’s absences more than usual, it was because their life together now, in Blair House, seemed such an improvement over what it had been across the avenue. The house itself, even with the quick cosmetics applied the year before, was not only nothing very grand, but a bit dowdy. It creaked and groaned, trembled noticeably whenever streetcars passed by outside. Its dark, old cellar was full of rats, as was well known by the Secret Service men, who hated ever having to go down there. And with Washington’s Emergency Hospital located just around the corner on F Street, ambulance sirens screamed by in the street below the President’s bedroom window often several times a night. Of all the presidents they had known, some of the Secret Service men would later say, only Harry Truman would have been willing to live in the place.

But with Margaret no longer at home, and without the burden of White House entertaining, the President and the First Lady had more time alone together, sitting in the small back garden reading, having lunch, or resting. Indeed, it was the first time in their married life that they had ever had a house to themselves. “Very discreet, very polite, they spent a lot of time behind closed doors in Blair House,” remembered J. B. West. Maids joked about the “lovebirds” upstairs, and in recounting his memories of the Truman years, West would later provide the one known suggestion of the sexual attraction between these two very private, essentially Victorian people.

Sometime earlier that fall, when Bess had returned from a long stay with her mother in Independence, both she and the President had been so “jubilant,” so obviously happy to be with each other again, that the whole domestic staff felt a lift of spirits. Everybody kept grinning, West remembered.

The next morning, when West reported to the First Lady’s study at nine as usual, to go over the day’s menu, she told him “in a rather small, uncomfortable voice” that there was a little problem with the President’s antique bed. Two of the slats had broken during the night, she said, blushing.

He would attend to it immediately, said West, who had concluded, as he later wrote, that the Trumans were definitely not “antiques.”

Now, the evening of November 1, with Bess back again in Independence, and after “another hell of a day,” Truman penned one of the most delightful of all his diary sketches of himself—part melancholy, part amusing, entirely human and in character:

Had dinner by myself tonight. Worked in the Lee House office until dinner time. A butler came in very formally and said, “Mr. President, dinner is served.” I walked into the dining room in the Blair House. Barnett in tails and white tie pulls out my chair, pushes me up to the table. John in tails and white tie brings me a fruit cup. Barnett takes away the empty cup. John brings me a plate, Barnett brings me a tenderloin, John brings me asparagus, John brings me carrots and beets. I have to eat alone and in silence in a candle lit room. I ring—Barnett takes the plate and butter plates. John comes in with a napkin and a silver crumb tray—there are no crumbs but John has to brush them off the table anyway. Barnett brings me a plate with a finger bowl and doily on it—I remove finger bowl and doily and John puts a glass saucer and a little bowl on the plate. Barnett brings me some chocolate custard. John brings me a demitasse (at home a little cup of coffee—about two good gulps) and my dinner is over. I take a hand bath in the finger bowl and go back to work.

What a life!

III

Of the nine members of his Cabinet, none was so conspicuous or had more influence on Truman than the elegant, polished Dean Acheson, Secretary of State. His place was unrivaled. Unlike Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait over the mantel in the Cabinet Room still kept watch over gatherings of the Cabinet each Friday morning at ten, Truman had no inside adviser like Colonel Edward House. Nor was there anyone serving as international troubleshooter the way Harry Hopkins had for Roosevelt. The relationship between Truman and Acheson was clear and unimpeded, as Truman wished. Acheson ran the vast operations of State, With its twenty-two thousand employees, but he was also the President’s continuous contact with the world, his reporter and interpreter of world events, as well as his chief negotiator and spokesman on foreign policy. Apart from Cabinet meetings, where Acheson sat on Truman’s immediate right, they saw each other regularly twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays at 12:30—and talked by phone almost daily.

Truman considered the importance of the office of Secretary of State second only to his own, and had filled the job three times now with men of proven ability and strong personality. Of Edward Stettinius, the Secretary he had inherited from Roosevelt and quickly replaced, Truman wrote, “a fine man, good looking, amiable, cooperative, but never an idea old or new.” No figurehead Secretary, no mere dispenser of White House policy would answer. But in Acheson he had found his most exceptional Secretary, and one who, unlike either of his two predecessors, Byrnes and Marshall, had assumed the responsibilities of the office after years of experience in the department and after having already played a decisive part in the two landmark achievements of Truman’s first term, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

There was no one in the administration, or in the Cabinet, or on the White House staff, whose views overall, whose sense of proportion, timing, sense of history, whose personal code and convictions concerning America’s role in the world carried such weight with the President as Acheson, or whose trust and friendship were to mean as much in the long run.

“It was a great thing between Mr. Truman and me,” Acheson would recall.

Each one understood his role and the other’s. We never got tangled up in it. I never thought I was the President, and he never thought he was the Secretary…. It is important that the relations between the President and his Secretary be quite frank, sometimes to the point of being blunt. And you just have to be deferential. He is the President of the United States, and you don’t say rude things to him—you say blunt things to him. Sometimes he doesn’t like it. That’s natural, but he comes back, and you argue the thing out. But that’s your duty. You don’t tell him only what he wants to hear. That would be bad for him and for everyone else.

Truman often referred to Acheson as his “top brain man” in the Cabinet.

That Harry Truman of Missouri, product of the Pendergast machine, “bosom pal” of Harry Vaughan, could possibly have anything in common with Dean Gooderham Acheson, Groton ’11, Yale ’15, Harvard Law ’19, or feel at ease in such a partnership, struck many as almost ludicrous. Acheson was still another surprise in the presidency of this continuously surprising President.

He seemed to be everything Truman would find objectionable, the ultimate “striped pants boy,” were one to judge by appearance—and in Acheson’s case it was nearly impossible not to judge by appearance, since that, at first glance, was much the most impressive thing about him.

With his beautiful, chalk-stripe English flannel suits, his striking carriage, his bristling guardsman’s mustache and luxuriant eyebrows, Acheson looked not quite real, more like an actor cast for the part of Secretary of State, a tall, slim, imperious, emphatically English-looking Secretary of State. Everything was in order—expensive English shoes rubbed to a fine gloss, the correct quantity of cuff showing spotlessly, hair brushed back from a noble brow. He was just over six feet tall, but the perfect tailoring and perfect posture, the lift of the head, made him seem taller still. He could not go unnoticed. Among the fond memories of Washington in these years would be the sight of the Secretary of State on his way to work in the morning, leather dispatch case in hand, walking the mile and a half from his home in Georgetown accompanied by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who, nearly a head shorter, seemed to take two steps for every one of the Secretary's. Two celebrated conversationalists, they talked the whole way, and reportedly never about government, while Frankfurter’s car followed behind to drive him to the Court, once he and Acheson parted company at the steps of the State Department.

“If Harry Truman were a painter,” said a Republican congressman, “and had never laid eyes on Acheson, and sat down to paint a picture of a foreign minister, he would come up with a life-size oil of Dean.” For years Senator Lyndon Johnson entertained friends with his imitation of Acheson entering a committee room, nose in the air. Averell Harriman, who had known Acheson since they were undergraduates at Yale and who worried that Acheson’s appearance might prove a handicap, urged him to at least get rid of the mustache, saying, “You owe it to Truman.” But the mustache would stay, and if anything about Acheson’s appearance or manner or background ever bothered Truman, he did not say so.

To Truman the State Department was “a peculiar organization, made up principally of extremely bright people who made tremendous college marks but who have had very little association with actual people down to the ground.” They were “clannish and snooty,” he thought, and he often felt like firing “the whole bunch.” Yet no such feelings applied to the Secretary. Acheson was doing a “whale of a job.” Truman hoped he would never leave the government.

Acheson, who was fifty-six years old in 1949, had been raised in the small-town America of other times, in Middletown, Connecticut, at the turn of the century, a setting not unlike Independence, Missouri. His mother was the heir to a Canadian whiskey fortune. His father, English by birth and a veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles, was an Episcopal minister, and later bishop of Connecticut, whose frequent admonition to his son was, “Brace up!” Like Truman, Acheson had had his first youthful brush with the “real world” working with a railroad crew. Like Truman, he relished history and biography. He, too, adored Mark Twain. If Acheson was a fashion plate, so, of course, was Truman in his way.

They had their morning walks in common. Both were men of exceptional physical vitality. Both were amateur architects. Truman spoke often of the influence Justice Brandeis had on him in his first years in Washington; Acheson had first come to the city, after law school in 1919, to clerk for Brandeis, from whom, he often said, he learned more than from anyone. Politically, like Truman, Acheson considered himself a little left of center.

His stiff appearance to the contrary, Acheson was also a warmhearted man with a wit of a kind that greatly appealed to Truman. Acheson enjoyed a convivial drink, a good story. (With his father a minister and his mother a distiller’s daughter, he liked to say, he knew both good and evil at an early age.) And like Truman, he was devoted to his family. When his oldest daughter, Mary, was stricken with tuberculosis in 1944 and had to be sent to a sanatorium at Saranac, New York, for an extended cure, Acheson wrote to her every night, often revealing how much more of life he savored than was commonly understood.

At lunch at the Capitol I was asked to sit at a table with Jessie Sumner of Illinois, the worst of the rabble rousing isolationists…. We got along famously. She is a grand old girl and reminded me of the madam in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, sort of low, humorous and human. We became great friends and are going to lunch again. I often wonder whether I have any principles at all. It’s a confusing world.

Writing once to Ethel Noland, Truman had said, “You know all of us have a very deep sentimental streak in us, but most of the time we are too timid or too contrary to show it.” Acheson, when asked years later by Eric Sevareid how so much trust and affection could have developed between two such seemingly different men as he and the President, said the answer was complicated, but that much of it had to do with what he called Truman’s “deeply loving and tender nature,” adding, “This isn’t the general impression of him at all.” When Acheson’s daughter had to undergo a serious operation while Acheson was out of the country, and it was not certain she would pull through, Truman personally called the hospital every day for a report, which he himself then transmitted to Acheson by overseas phone.

“Well, this is the kind of person that one can adore,” Acheson later said. “You can have an affection for that man that nothing can touch.”

Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.”

It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little.

“And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.”

Moreover, Truman welcomed other people’s ideas. “He was not afraid of the competition of other ideas…. Free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job.”

Felix Frankfurter, in listing the elements of Acheson’s personal code, would put loyalty first, followed by truthfulness, and “not pretending to be better than you are.” Truman had not forgotten that it was Acheson alone who was at Union Station to greet him, after the humiliation of the off-year elections in 1946. Acheson, Truman told David Lilienthal, was a fine man, “loyal, sensible, not like some men who are brilliant.”

That Acheson had an exceptional capacity for hard work, that he also subscribed to the philosophy that civilization depended largely on a relatively small number of people who were willing to shoulder the hard work necessary, contributed greatly to Truman’s regard for him. Acheson believed in clear, orderly thinking. He knew there were no easy answers, no quick remedies. With the world as it was, he said, Americans would have to get over the idea that the problems facing the country could be solved with a little ingenuity or without inconvenience.

He did not see the Cold War as an inevitable clash between good and evil. To say that good and evil could not exist in the world was absurd, he told an audience of military officers at the National War College in December 1949:

Today you hear much talk of absolutes…people say that two systems as different as ours and that of the Russians cannot exist in the same world…that one is good and one is evil, and good and evil cannot exist in the world…. Good and evil have existed in this world since Adam and Eve went out of the Garden of Eden.

The proper search is for limited ends which soon enough educate us in the complexities of the tasks which face us. That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the search for the absolute, to find out what is within our powers…. We must respect our opponents. We must understand that for a long, long period of time they will continue to believe as they do, and that for a long, long period of time we will both inhabit this spinning ball in the great void of the universe.

As would become apparent to everyone soon enough, Acheson was not only the most important member of Truman’s Cabinet, but the most important appointment Truman ever made. And unlike Byrnes and Marshall, he would serve as Secretary throughout a full term, despite vilification such as few in American public life had ever known. He would be seen as an immense political liability, called a fool and a traitor. Nor were his critics and adversaries to be found only among the ranks of the Republicans. One especially determined to challenge his authority at every chance, to see Acheson taken down several pegs, if not entirely, was Louis Johnson, who clearly disliked him and whose cutting remarks soon reached the White House. Greatly displeased, Truman warned Johnson to stop it. “Acheson is a gentleman,” Truman told James Webb, the former Director of the Budget, who was now Acheson’s under secretary. “He won’t descend to a row. Johnson is a rough customer, gets his way by rowing. When he takes out after you, give it right back to him.”

Others who knew Acheson thought that in a showdown Johnson wouldn’t have a chance. Oliver Franks, the British ambassador and a close friend, described Acheson as “a romantic” and “a blade of steel.”

He had a serious—a very serious—problem to decide before long, Truman told Lilienthal on November 7, Acheson having by then talked to him about the superbomb.

He hoped to have a full report from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) committee soon, Lilienthal replied.

Yes, said Truman. He wanted the facts, of course.

The report, with its unanimous conclusion by the advisory committee that the superbomb should not be developed, plus a concurring recommendation by the AEC, was delivered two days later, on November 9. The AEC had decided against the bomb by 3 to 2, with Lilienthal the deciding vote. The following day, Truman named Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal to act as a special committee of the National Security Council—the Z Committee, as it was called—to advise him whether to proceed with the Super and whether “publicity” should be given the matter. A week later all Washington knew a superbomb was under consideration.

A Washington Post reporter, Alfred Friendly, had picked up the first hint of the story from remarks made on a local television broadcast in New York by Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, who made his disclosure while airing his fears about the ability of scientists to keep secrets. So suddenly the “H-bomb,” a new word, was a public issue.

Physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence were lobbying hard for proceeding with it. Karl T. Compton, who served on the Interim Committee in 1945 and had only just retired as head of MIT, wrote to Truman saying that in the absence of an international agreement on the control of atomic energy, the United States had no choice but to go ahead with the Super.

At the State Department, stirred by moral outrage, George Kennan labored intensively on a close analysis of the problem and in a long memorandum to Acheson, a plea “as earnest and eloquent” as he knew how to make it, he not only declared against the project but urged that the United States set an example. The last hope for humanity was international control of all weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. The United States should announce it was “prepared to go very far, to show considerable confidence in others, and to accept certain risk for ourselves,” in order to achieve international agreement. To go forward with this still more fearsome next step would be to commit the country and the world to an indefinite escalation of destructiveness and cost.

So the voices against the Super were essentially three, Lilienthal, Kennan, and Oppenheimer, who apart from his own moral objections did not think such a bomb was technically feasible.

But Kennan, like Lilienthal, was about to retire, and the new head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, Paul Nitze, agreed with the Joint Chiefs. To Nitze, Soviet possession of the atomic bomb meant not only that the United States must proceed with work on the H-bomb but build up its conventional forces as well.

Acheson, who, after Hiroshima, favored an atomic partnership with the Soviet Union, had by now come full circle. In effect, he told Kennan to take his Quaker ideas and go.

I told Kennan if that was his view he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel but not push it within the Department. He had no right being in the Service if he was not willing to face the questions as an issue to be decided in the interests of the American people under a sense of responsibility.

“How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example’?” Acheson asked rhetorically in conversation with another associate.

The top-secret debate went on for three months, from November 1949 to the end of January 1950, and much of it in Acheson’s immense fifth-floor office at the State Department—a room that reminded him, he said, of the cabin-class dining salon on one of the old North German Lloyd ocean liners. But the three-man Z Committee of Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal met only twice, due primarily, as Acheson said, “to the acerbity of Louis Johnson’s nature.” Johnson and Lilienthal argued bitterly.

The first of these sessions was on December 22, the second and last on January 31.

Between times Truman kept to a full presidential schedule. He appointed Oscar Chapman as Secretary of Interior, after the resignation of Julius Krug. He received the new Shah of Iran on a first state visit; posed for photographs with five crippled children for the March of Dimes campaign; issued an executive order authorizing the Federal Housing Administration loans of $20 million for low-rent housing in twenty-seven states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico; issued an executive order to the FHA to deny financial assistance to new housing projects with racial or religious restrictions; exchanged Christmas greetings with the Pope; and learned from the Secret Service that in 1949 alone there had been a total of 1,925 threats, Written or oral, against him or his family. (“The day will come,” said one, “when I will have your heart out and give it to the ants as food.”)

Four days into the new year, in a recently redecorated House Chamber, he delivered his fifth State of the Union message. If American productive power continued to increase at the same rate as it had in the previous half century, he told the Congress, then national production fifty years hence would be four times as great, the average family income three times what it was in 1950, or $12,450 a year, which struck many as unimaginable. “Today, by the grace of God, we stand in a free and prosperous nation with greater possibilities for the future than any people have ever had before in the history of the world….”

At a press conference on January 7, 1950, he presented his annual budget—a big green book the size and weight of a New York telephone directory—and answered questions about it. The total figure was $42.4 billion, which included an increase of $1 billion for domestic programs. But most, some $30 billion, was to pay for wars past and for the present national defense, listed to cost $13.5 billion. It was a budget that did not balance. The estimated deficit was $5 billion, which would mean a national debt by 1952 of $268.3 billion.

In a message to Congress he asked for a “moderate” tax increase to bring in an additional $1 billion.

For an hour at the Shoreham Hotel one night, he stood at the door of a private dining room shaking hands with virtually every Democrat in Congress. He addressed the A.F. of L. dinner and a civil rights conference; he held five more press conferences.

He also faced the fact that Clark Clifford and David Lilienthal, two of his best, were leaving in February, to return to private life. The loss of Clifford would be a real blow. But Clifford was worn out and deeply in debt, his living expenses over the past four years having run far ahead of his White House salary. He would stay on in Washington to practice law. Lilienthal, too, was exhausted and knew the time had come to move on. Truman, as he said, felt as though “the bottom had fallen out.”

More serious, and worrisome, however, was the assault on Dean Acheson. In December, angry over the loss of China and the supposed infiltration of Communists everywhere, the Republicans in both houses of Congress called on Truman to fire Acheson. Then, in New York, on January 21, at the end of a long second trial, Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury—he had lied about passing secret documents—and that night Republican Congressman Richard Nixon, who as the only lawyer on the House Un-American Activities Committee had played a leading part in the case against Hiss, went on the radio to accuse the administration of a “deliberate” effort to conceal the Hiss “conspiracy.” On Wednesday, January 25, the day Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, Acheson was asked at a press conference at the State Department if he had any comments.

The question was not unexpected. At his confirmation hearings the year before, Acheson had acknowledged that Hiss was a friend and remained a friend, adding that his own friendship was not easily given nor easily withdrawn. Hiss’s brother, Donald, a partner in Acheson’s law firm, had served as Acheson’s assistant when Acheson was Assistant Secretary of State. Now to the throng of reporters he said, “I should like to make it clear to you that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers may take in this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”

It was no impulsive response. Acheson had thought long about what to say, and as many in the room sensed at once, it was a decisive moment in the history of the Truman administration. He continued, his voice full of emotion:

I think anyone who has known Alger Hiss or has served with him at any time has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is and what his conduct should be. That must be done by each person in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me there is little doubt about those standards and principles. I think they were stated for us a very long time ago…on the Mount of Olives and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34.

An aide stood at the door with a Bible ready for those reporters who wished to check the reference: “I was a prisoner and ye came unto me.”

Perhaps the voice of the late bishop of Connecticut, Acheson’s father, sounded in the citation, wrote the New York Herald-Tribune, one of the few papers to praise Acheson for what he had said.

This newspaper has felt it necessary at times to criticize and oppose Mr. Acheson in his policies…. But of this statement made on Wednesday in a difficult hour, we are glad to declare in our judgment it was as courageous as it was Christian.

It was also a political disaster. The news reached Capitol Hill almost instantly. Senator Joseph McCarthy interrupted the flow of business in the Senate to report “the most fantastic statement” just made by the Secretary of State. Did this mean, McCarthy asked, that the Secretary would “not turn his back on any other Communists in the State Department?”

His press Conference ended, Acheson went immediately to see Truman, who by then had seen the news ticker story. Acheson offered to resign. Truman, Acheson wrote to his daughter, was “wonderful about it…said that one who had gone to the funeral of a friendless old man just out of the penitentiary [Tom Pendergast] had no trouble knowing what I meant and proving it.

“So there we are,” Acheson added, “and as the Persian King had carved on his ring, ‘This, too, will pass.’ ”

But pass it did not. The damage done to himself and the President was worse than either knew. Richard Nixon called Acheson’s statement “disgusting.” Republican Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska exploded in a tirade. “I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, ‘Get out! Get out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!’”

The atmosphere in Washington, the atmosphere in which the decision on the hydrogen bomb was being weighed, had become charged with rancor and fear. At his press conference the next afternoon, Friday, January 27, Truman was asked first whether he too would refuse to turn his back on Alger Hiss—to which he replied, “No comment”—then, what his views were on the H-bomb, as though the two issues were directly connected. He would have nothing to say until he made a decision, Truman answered, thus acknowledging for the first time that the issue existed.

Comment and speculation on the bomb continued. Headlines called it the “Ultimate Bomb,” the “Hell Bomb.” Life ran an aerial photograph of Chicago showing how much of the city would be obliterated—50 square miles—by one such weapon. In the Washington Post, where for years he had been drawing the atomic bomb as a sinister presence looming over peace conferences or taking the measure of the world, cartoonist Herb Block now portrayed the atomic bomb holding the giant hand of an infinitely larger, more menacing creature labeled “Superbomb,” and asking a terrified Uncle Sam, “Want to meet my friend, too?”

Eleanor Roosevelt and Bernard Baruch announced their support for building the bomb. Harold Urey of the University of Chicago, a leader in atomic research who, in 1934, had won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of heavy hydrogen, declared in a speech in New York that the United States could not intentionally lose the armaments race without risking its liberties.

Rumors of bitter animosity within the administration, talk of who was for and who was against the H-bomb became a Washington obsession. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was reportedly “almost in tears” over the prospect of the bomb not proceeding. War with the Russians was inevitable, the powerful senator assured Lilienthal. The thing to do was “blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us—we haven’t much time.” To Truman he wrote, “If we let Russia get the Super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain—whereas if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.”

The Joint Chiefs wanted a “crash program.” General Bradley wrote that it was “folly to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another. For, in a larger sense, it is war itself which is immoral, and the stigma of such immorality must rest upon the nation which initiates hostilities.” Despite an understanding that deliberations on the bomb would be kept within the Z Committee, Louis Johnson quickly sent Bradley’s memorandum to Truman.

Like a patient sitting in a doctor’s anteroom while the specialists discuss his case [wrote Time], the U.S. public…sat outside while the President, his military, scientific and diplomatic advisers debated whether to construct the…most powerful explosive weapon the world has yet dreamed of…. But since the principle of the hydrogen bomb was also known to the Russians, temporizing was risky and might be fatal. The simple fact, unpleasant though it might be, was that if the Russians are likely to build an H-bomb, the U.S. will have to build it, too.

When on Tuesday, January 31, 1950, Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal with several of their aides convened for the final session of the Z Committee in Room 216 of the Old State Department Building, it was Acheson who took charge. He had concluded that work should proceed on the hydrogen bomb and presented the draft of a statement to be made by the President.

Johnson agreed, but Lilienthal did not like rushing things through in an “atmosphere of excitement.” A decision to go ahead with the bomb now would probably make a new approach to the atomic arms race impossible. He thought the country’s almost sole reliance on this kind of weapon was extremely unwise and that going ahead with it would give the American people a “false and dangerous assurance…that when we get this new gadget ‘the balance will be ours’ as against the Russians.” He questioned what the project would do to defense budgets and foreign policy.

Acheson, who greatly admired Lilienthal and who would later describe Lilienthal’s objections as “eloquently and forcefully” expressed, said he could not overcome two “stubborn facts”: that delaying work on the bomb would not delay Soviet work on their bomb; and that the American people would simply not tolerate a policy of delay.

“We must protect the President,” Johnson said. And though he still had grave reservations, Lilienthal, too, agreed to sign the statement.

Accompanied by Admiral Sidney W. Souers, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, the three men walked to the White House. Their meeting had lasted two and a half hours. The meeting with the President took seven minutes.

Truman had already made up his mind, perhaps as much as ten days earlier, or at least that was the impression of his immediate staff, though he had said nothing specific. Acheson knew this. Apparently they all did. The President, wrote Lilienthal, was “clearly set on what he was going to do before we set foot inside the door.”

As Truman looked over the statement, Acheson said Lilienthal had some additional views to express.

Truman, turning to Lilienthal, said he had always believed the United States should never use “these weapons,” that peace was “our whole purpose.” Lilienthal said that while he did not overrate the value of his own judgment, he felt he must express his grave reservations about the proposed course. Try as he might, he could not see it as the wisest move. However carefully worded, however issued, the statement would only magnify the essentially mistaken policy of relying on atomic weapons as the country’s chief defense.

There was too much talk in Congress “and everywhere,” Truman broke in. People were “so excited.” He didn’t see that he had any alternative.

“Can the Russians do it?” he asked the group. It was his only question. They all nodded.

“We don’t have much time,” interjected Admiral Souers.

“In that case,” said Truman, “we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.”

As he signed the statement, Truman said he recalled another meeting of the National Security Council concerning Greece, when “everybody predicted the end of the world if we went ahead, but we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end.” It would be “the same case here,” he said.

While the President went home to Blair House for lunch, Charlie Ross again handed out a mimeographed sheet.

It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor. Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb….

Lilienthal described the mood at the AEC afterward as that of a funeral party. For him it was a night of heartache. “I hope I was wrong, and that somehow I’ll be proved wrong,” he wrote. “We have to leave many things to God….” Albert Einstein, in a rare appearance on television, talked of the radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and warned, “General annihilation beckons.”

To what extent Truman had struggled with the decision, or dwelled on it afterward, is not known. He left nothing in writing. Nor can Acheson’s influence on him be readily gauged, though doubtless it was considerable. Acheson, as Truman said, was one of the most persuasive men he had ever known.

It would have been preferable surely—wiser, more prudent—to have given the entire question longer, closer examination, and under less stress, even assuming Truman would have decided no differently. The country could have been better prepared. There would have been time for a clear, explanatory presidential address to the nation, instead of a mimeographed announcement. So disquieting, so momentous, and so costly a step deserved better.

In any event, as anticipated, public and editorial approval of the decision was overwhelming—the President had made “the right and inevitable” decision. Then, in only a matter of days, the level of apprehension was raised still higher by news from London that Klaus Fuchs, a former atomic scientist at Los Alamos, had confessed to being a Russian spy, and by the sudden claim of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he had in his possession a list of more than two hundred known Communists employed at the State Department.

IV

With the onrush of so much sensational, seemingly inexplicable bad news—China lost, the Russian bomb, Alger Hiss, the treason of Klaus Fuchs—breaking with such clamor, all in less than six months, the country was in a state of terrible uncertainty.

“How much are we going to have to take?” asked Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana.

Life devoted much of one issue to show how vastly Russian military strength exceeded that of the United States—an army of 2,600,000 men, compared to an American force of 640,000, 30 Russian armored divisions to one American. The United States produced 1,200 new planes a year, the Russians 7,000. Only the American Navy stood first, but the Soviets already had a more powerful fleet than Germany had had at the start of the last war and three times the number of American submarines. While America spent 6 percent of its national income on military strength, the Russians were spending 25 percent. And so on. “War Can Come; Will We Be Ready?” asked the Life headline.

It was, of course, a question of paramount importance within the administration. For months behind the scenes Acheson had been arguing that Truman’s $13 billion limit on defense spending was no longer realistic. Now with his decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb Truman authorized a complete review of military policy. At both the State Department and the Pentagon, work began on a sweeping new report, and with the pressure on, relations between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense grew steadily more contentious. At a meeting in March, Louis Johnson exploded with such temper—banging down his chair, shouting objections, hammering his fist on the table—that Acheson could only conclude that Johnson, like Forrestal, had cracked under the strain.

When Acheson reported to Truman what had happened, Truman was appalled. Probably it was then he knew that Johnson would have to go—when the time was right.

Fear gripped Washington and the country. “The air was so charged with fear,” remembered Herb Block, “that it took only a small spark to ignite it.” And the spark was McCarthy. When Block, in one of his cartoons in the Post, labeled an overflowing barrel of tar “McCarthyism,” another new word entered the language along with the H-bomb.

Until that January, Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin’s forty-one-year-old junior senator, had been casting about for an issue that might lift him from obscurity. All but friendless in the Senate, recently voted the worst member of the Senate in a poll of Washington correspondents, McCarthy appeared to be a hopeless failure. Over dinner one evening at the Colony Restaurant, a Catholic priest, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, suggested he might sound the alarm over Communist infiltration of the government, and McCarthy, who had already made some loud, if unnotable, charges about Communist subversion, seems to have realized at once that he had found what he needed. A month later, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in West Virginia, he waved a piece of paper, saying he had “here in my hand” the names of 205 “known Communists” in the State Department. The speech went largely unnoticed, but at Salt Lake City and Reno soon afterward he made essentially the same claim, except the number was cut to fifty-seven, and they were referred to now as “card-carrying” Communists. He made headlines across the country. Back at the Senate he carried on for five hours, claiming to have penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy” and come up with eighty-one names.

The charges were wild and unsupported. McCarthy had no names, he produced no new evidence. He was a political brawler, morose, reckless, hard-drinking, a demagogue such as had not been seen in the Senate since the days of Huey Long, only he had none of Long’s charm or brilliance. The press called him desperate, a loudmouth and a character assassin. His Communist hunt was “a wretched burlesque of the serious and necessary business of loyalty check-ups.” But he was no more bothered by such criticism than by his own inconsistencies, and whatever he said the press printed, his most sensational allegations often getting the biggest headlines. To more and more of the country it seemed that even if he might be wrong in some of his particulars, probably he was onto something, and high time.

Harry Truman, McCarthy charged, was the “prisoner of a bunch of twisted intellectuals” who only told him what they wanted him to know. Attacking Acheson, he said, “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” As McCarthy kept up the assault, Acheson received so much threatening mail that guards had to be posted at his house around the clock.

While numbers of his fellow Republicans silently deplored McCarthy’s methods, others—Bridges, Brewster, Capehart, Mundt, Wherry—began lending support. “I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy,” said Brewster. Encouragement came too from Senator Taft, who had been the first to introduce the “soft on Communism” issue in the 1946 elections and who now admitted publicly that he was egging McCarthy on, to press the attack, to “keep talking and if one case didn’t work out, to bring up another.” All the anger and resentment felt by Republicans like Taft over Truman’s surprise upset in 1948 had found an outlet.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called for a complete investigation of McCarthy’s charges. A special subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee began hearings under the chairmanship of Millard Tydings of Maryland, one of the most respected, influential Democrats in the Senate. The assumption was that in the bright light of public exposure, McCarthy and his tactics could not long survive.

But the attention only magnified him. The hearings in the Senate’s marble-columned Caucus Room gave him center stage and the full attention of the press day after day. “You are not fooling me,” he said. “This committee [is] not seeking to get the names of bad security risks, but…to find out the names of my informants so they can be kicked out of the State Department tomorrow.” By the end of March, in the six weeks since his initial outburst at Wheeling, McCarthy had not named a single Communist.

He announced he had the name of the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States, indeed the “onetime” boss of Alger Hiss and his espionage ring. The man, said McCarthy, was Owen J. Lattimore, formerly of the State Department and currently director of the Johns Hopkins School of International Relations. As time would show, Lattimore was neither a Communist nor ever an influential figure at the State Department. He had worked for the department all of four months in 1946, as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan. The accusation was a fraud. “If you crack this case,” McCarthy told the committee, “it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country.” He was willing, he said, to stand or fall on that.

In mid-February 1950, at about the time McCarthy’s reckless charges were first making headlines, Truman agreed to an exclusive interview with Arthur Krock of The New York Times, during which he impressed Krock as a man of exceptional inner calm and strength.

In an age of atomic energy, transmuted into a weapon which can destroy great cities and the best works of civilization, and in the shadow of a hydrogen detonant which could multiply many times that agent of destruction, a serene President of the United States sits in the White House with undiminished confidence in the triumph of humanity’s better nature and the progress of his own efforts to achieve an abiding peace.

Harry S. Truman, said Krock, might seem to many a controversial figure. But to those who had the chance to talk with him intimately, his faith in the future had a “luminous” quality.

He sits in the center of the troubled and frightened world…. But the penumbra of doubt and fear in which the American nation pursues its great and most perilous adventure…stops short of him. Visitors find him undaunted and sure that, whether in his time or thereafter, a way will be discovered to preserve the world from the destruction which to many seems unavoidable….

David Lilienthal, who came to the Oval Office on February 14 for a final farewell meeting with the President, described it later as “one of the happiest sessions I’ve ever had with him.”

“About these scientists,” Truman said, “we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.”

Lilienthal, perhaps as much as anyone, knew the weight of the burdens Truman carried. Yet Truman looked “tip-top…his eye clear.” Studying him, listening to him talk, Lilienthal was amazed. As he later wrote, “My admiration and wonder at his relaxed way of looking at things, and his obvious good health…reached a new high.”

But his wife of thirty years knew differently, and to her alone, he portrayed himself differently. She grew increasingly concerned about his health, the stress the McCarthy attacks put on him. His headaches had returned. In mid-March Bess urged another retreat to Florida, to recover his strength. “You see everybody shoots at me, if not directly, then at some of the staff closest to me,” he wrote to her from Key West.

In the Senate, Republican Styles Bridges had now joined McCarthy and stepped up the attack. Truman had liked Bridges, long considered him a friend. John Snyder had become a target lately. Rumors were Snyder was drinking too much.

Caustic comments in the press about Harry Vaughan, the almost constant abuse of Dean Acheson, and belittling comments on his own performance, all that he seemed impervious to, in fact bothered Truman greatly and he was feeling not just a little sorry for himself.

The general trend of the pieces [he wrote to Bess] is that I’m a very small man in a very large place and when some one I trust joins the critical side—well it hurts. I’m much older and very tired and I need support as no man ever did.

What has made me so jittery—they started on Snyder and have almost broken him, then Vaughan, whose mental condition is very bad. Now they are after my top brain man in the Cabinet. The whole foreign policy is at stake just as we are on the road to a possible solution…. I’m telling you so you may understand how badly I need your help and support now.

McCarthy, he felt, was a temporary aberration, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” Even so he had had enough. On March 30, midway through his Key West stay, Truman decided to speak out. By then, according to the polls, half the American people held a “favorable opinion” of the senator and thought he was helping the country. Truman’s own standing, by stark contrast, had plunged to 37 percent, nearly as low as in the spring of 1948.

He called a rare press conference on the lawn beside the Little White House, where with sunny skies overhead and a breeze stirring the palms, talk of the junior senator from Wisconsin seemed strangely incongruous. Looking well tanned and fit in a light linen suit and open shirt, Truman sat in a white wicker chair, with reporters gathered about him in a circle.

Did he expect Senator McCarthy to turn up any disloyalty in the State Department?

“I think,” he said with a hard look, “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”

And there were others, he said—Wherry and Bridges. The Republicans had been searching in vain for an issue for the fall elections. They had tried “statism,” the “welfare state,” “socialism.” Some were even trying to dig up “that old malodorous dead horse called ‘isolationism.’” He was furious. This “fiasco” going on in the Senate, he said, jabbing a finger in the air, was an attempt to sabotage bipartisan foreign policy. It was a dangerous situation, and it had to be stopped. Dean Acheson, he added emphatically, would go down in history as one of the great secretaries of state. There was no question about that.

Was Owen Lattimore a Russian spy?

“Why of course not. It’s silly on the face of it.”

It was a dramatic moment, a performance, reporters thought, that equaled Franklin Roosevelt at his angry best.

Taft accused Truman of having libeled McCarthy. “Do you think that’s possible?” Truman responded, when a reporter raised the question at the next press conference, back in Washington.

To a gathering of the Federal Bar Association, he gave his assurance that no known instance of Communist subversion, or subversion of any kind, had gone uninvestigated by the FBI or as a result of his own Loyalty Program. “There is no area of American life in which the Communist Party is making headway, except maybe in the minds of some people….” That his own Loyalty Program might have contributed to the overall atmosphere that gave rise to McCarthy is a thought he seems not to have entertained—not then at least.

“I think our friend McCarthy will eventually get all that is coming to him. He has no sense of decency or honor,” Truman wrote to Owen Lattimore’s sister.

You can understand, I imagine, what the President has to stand—every day in the week he’s under a constant barrage of people who have no respect for the truth and whose objective is to belittle and discredit him. While they are not successful in these attacks they are never pleasant so I know just how you feel about the attack on your brother. The best thing to do is to face it and the truth will come out.

Yet nothing Truman or anyone else said seemed to diminish McCarthy or the fear he spread in the government and the nation. When Truman, who had first refused to turn security files over to the Tydings Committee as a matter of principle, decided to let Tydings and the committee come to the White House to look at the files of the eighty-one people accused by McCarthy—in an effort to help Tydings discredit McCarthy and answer a Republican charge that he, Truman, was “covering up” evidence—it proved a bad decision. Now even the President appeared to be caving in to Joe McCarthy.

Tydings, in a state of near panic, was on the phone to the White House three and four times a day. Truman’s staff grew extremely worried and on edge. Truman told them to stay calm. McCarthy would destroy himself, he said. The man was a liar. He would be found out and expelled from the Senate. That was how these things worked, and that was how it should be handled. Truman wondered only if there was anyone in the Senate with backbone enough to do the job.

When, in the first week of June, the senator with backbone turned out to be a Republican and the Senate’s only woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who declared she did not want to see the Republican Party “ride to victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear,” Truman told his staff she had done “a fine thing,” though he thought she should have been tougher still and more specific.

It was on a particularly glorious day that spring, on Sunday, April 9, 1950, with lilacs and azaleas blooming in profusion and the cherry blossoms coming full around the Tidal Basin, that Truman drafted a statement in his own hand that he planned to make public two years hence. April 11 marked the end of his fifth year in office, and he had decided not to run for another term.

In 1947, as a rebuke to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt and his four terms, the Republicans of the 80th Congress had passed the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment Truman opposed, limiting presidents to two terms. With ratification by the states, it would become law in 1951. But since it had been worded not to include Truman, he was free to run again in 1952, as many if not most people assumed he would.

He had been thinking about the “lure in power,” and the example set by his hero Cincinnatus, the Roman general who had turned away from power. He was neither discouraged nor angry over the course of events. He remained in many ways a man of iron, as Wallace Graham said, and more, “a happy man,” in the words of one White House reporter, “and as far as the observer could tell boundlessly sure of himself.” But quietly on his own, without discussion with anyone other than his wife, he had decided he would announce his retirement in the spring of 1952, when he would be sixty-eight:

I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention.

My first election to public office took place in November 1922. I served two years in the armed forces in World War I, ten years in the Senate, two months and 20 days as Vice President and President of the Senate. I have been in public service well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.

Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, as well as Calvin Coolidge stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded.

In my opinion eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in this capacity.

There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.

This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want the country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then we will start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by F.D.R. It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not by Constitutional amendment but by custom based on the honor of the man in office.

Therefore to reestablish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I have only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.

The tone, to be sure, was a bit self-congratulatory, and whether his confidence in reelection was altogether sincere or an added touch for the record—lest anyone see him retiring from the field in fear—is hard to say. The implied charge that Franklin Roosevelt had been something less than a man of honor by choosing to run more than twice was in keeping with his own position on the issue in 1940, but not in 1944, when he was the running mate. Still, it was a statement of conviction like none written by an American President. Nor is there any doubt of his devotion to the Cincinnatus ideal. As events would verify, this was no whim of the moment.

He said nothing on the matter. The two handwritten pages were quietly put away.

The explosive secret report on the country’s military strength known as NSC-68 (Paper No. 68 of the National Security Council) was ready by the end of the first week in April. Produced primarily by Paul Nitze, under the direction of Dean Acheson and with the participation of the Defense Department, it was delivered to Truman on April 7 and discussed with him for the first time at a White House meeting of the National Security Council on Tuesday, April 25. Like the Clifford-Elsey memorandum of an earlier day, it was intended to shock. Charlie Murphy, who had replaced Clark Clifford as special counsel to the President, would remember being so frightened by what he saw in an early draft that he spent a whole day reading it over and over.

An apocalyptic theme was struck at the start: “This Republic and its citizens, in the ascendancy of their strength, stand in their deepest peril….” The American colossus, the report said in effect, was sadly wanting in real military might. Its policy of “containment,” as advanced by George Kennan, was no better than a policy of bluff without the “superior aggregate military strength”—the conventional forces—to back it up. Nuclear weapons were insufficient and, in any event, the Soviets would probably achieve nuclear equality by 1954.

A massive military buildup was called for. This would put “heavy demands on our courage and intelligence.” The financial burden would be extreme. Though no cost estimates were included, the figures discussed with Truman ranged from $40 to $50 billion a year, at least three times the current military budget.

“The whole success,” Truman read in the concluding paragraph, “hangs ultimately on recognition by this government, the American people and all the peoples that the Cold War is in fact a real war in which the survival of the world is at stake.”

So, while Albert Einstein was warning that annihilation beckoned, the Secretary of State and his associates, as well as the Defense Department, were saying anything short of a massive military buildup, including nuclear arms, was to put survival at risk.

In writing such papers, papers intended to shape national policy, Acheson would later explain, one could not approach the task as one would in writing a doctoral thesis. “Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” In the particular instance of NSC-68, he conceded, the purpose was to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government.’”

Truman, however, was not to be bludgeoned. His response was the same as it had been with the Clifford-Elsey Report. He put it away under lock and key. NSC-68 and Life magazine might both point up in dramatic fashion the perilous state of American military strength, but he refused to rush to a decision, even if he did not dispute their claims. His approach was essentially what it had been at the time of the Berlin crisis, essentially what it was in the face of McCarthy—he would make no drastic moves until he knew more.

Feeling the need for contact again with the American people, he set off by train in May for another “nonpolitical” cross-country tour, ostensibly to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. Not once in two weeks of travel, never in more than fifty speeches in fifteen states, did he mention Joe McCarthy or sound a call to arms. Instead, he seemed to glow with patience and optimism. The Cold War would be “with us for a long, long time,” he lectured. “There is no quick way, no easy way to end it.” Yet even so, in the long run, there were no problems that could not be solved.

Whether he would have attempted anything like the buildup called for in NSC-68 had events not taken the calamitous turn they did in late June, will never be known. But it seems unlikely.

At his weekly press conference on June 1, he said he thought the world was closer to real peace than at any time in the last five years.

V

The silver plane of the President began its long, smooth descent over the farmland of Missouri at approximately 1:45, Central Standard Time, the afternoon of Saturday, June 24. Truman had planned a weekend at home with his family, nothing official on the schedule, “a grand visit—I hope,” as he said in a note to a friend early that morning. “I’m going from Baltimore to see Bess, Margie and my brother and sister, oversee some fence building—not political—order a new roof for the farm house….”

He had begun his day at Blair House as customary, scanning the Post, the Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, all filled that morning with the spreading Communist scare. The University of California had fired 157 employees for refusing to sign an anti-Communist oath. At an annual convention in Boston, the NAACP had resolved to drive all known Communists from its membership. In Washington, a federal judge had denied pleas for acquittal to three screenwriters, part of the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” who had refused to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether they were Communists. In a photograph on page 1 of the Times, a round-faced former Army sergeant named David Greenglass was being escorted in handcuffs from a New York court where he was charged with being part of the Klaus Fuchs spy ring at Los Alamos. On page 4 of the Times, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie of Norway, was reported responding angrily to a reporter’s question as to whether he was, or ever had been, a Communist. “By God, there should be some respect for my integrity,” he had exploded.

The one encouraging note for Truman was an announcement by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a member of the Tydings Committee, that weeks of effort at the White House, going over the files of the eighty-one “cases” charged by Senator McCarthy, had produced no evidence of consequence.

The weather forecast, an item Truman never failed to check, called for a hot and humid day, with a high of 90 degrees and a chance of late thundershowers.

His plane, the Independence, took off from National Airport at mid-morning and before heading west, stopped briefly at Baltimore, where Truman dedicated the city’s new Friendship Airport, with an eight-minute speech stressing peace and constructive confidence. (“We would not build so elaborate a facility for our air commerce if we did not have faith in a peaceful future….”) Through much of the flight afterward, huge thunderheads loomed in the distance. In a violent storm earlier in the day, a Northwest Airlines plane had gone down over Lake Michigan with fifty-eight people on board, all of whom were lost in the nation’s worst air disaster. But Truman’s trip was smooth and uneventful. Landing at Kansas City at two o’clock, he came down the steps from the plane looking fresh, relaxed, even “jaunty” in the Missouri heat.

At the house in Independence, a crowd of several hundred waited beside a new iron fence five feet high recently installed by the Secret Service. The time was now past when anyone could mingle on the Truman lawn.

As he stepped from the car, somebody shouted that he should have been at the Eagles’ meeting the night before. “There are lots of places I’d like to go that I can’t get to,” Truman answered cheerfully with a wave, then started up the walk.

The baking summer afternoon passed quietly, the windows of the old house open wide to what little air was moving. Bess and Margaret had gone to a wedding. Automobiles passed on Van Horne, now renamed Truman Road—a gesture by the town that had pleased Truman not at all—but the sound was faint, mild compared to the steady hubbub outside Blair House. The lazy privacy of the interlude was just what Truman needed. He had not been home since Christmas.

Dinner was called by Vietta Garr at 6:30. Truman and Mrs. Wallace took their customary places at either end of the table. Margaret would recall a “very pleasant family dinner,” after which they moved out onto a newly expanded, screened porch off the kitchen, where they sat talking, “small talk,” until dark, when everyone moved back inside to the study.

By nine, Truman was ready for bed. It had been a long day. The time difference between Independence and Washington was two hours, since western Missouri was not on daylight saving time.

At about 9:20, the telephone rang in the hall. Dean Acheson was calling from his country house in Maryland.

“Mr. President,” he said, “I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”

There had been a report from John Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul, Acheson explained. The North Koreans had crossed the 38th parallel, in what Muccio, an experienced officer, described as a heavy attack, not just a patrol foray of the kind there had been before.

Acting on his own initiative, Acheson had already notified the Secretary General of the United Nations to call a meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

He would leave for Washington at once, Truman said. (“My first reaction was that I must get back to the Capital,” he later wrote.) Acheson, however, advised him to wait. There was no need to take the risk of a night flight, and it might alarm the country.

“Everything is being done that can be,” Acheson said. “If you can sleep, take it easy.” He would call tomorrow when he knew more.

According to Margaret, her father returned from the phone in a state of extreme agitation, having already concluded the worst. “My father,” she wrote, “made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening of World War III.” It was to be a long night for the family.

Sunday morning, the feeling again was of full summer in Missouri, hot and humid.

Of the seventeen churches in Independence, the first to sound its bells, at eight o’clock, was St. Mary’s, the old red-brick Catholic church on North Liberty, followed later by the new clarion at First Presbyterian, two blocks from the house, which played hymns until 10:45, by which time church bells all across town had begun their Sunday crescendo.

Bess and Margaret would leave for services at Trinity Episcopal shortly before eleven. But Truman by then had driven off to Grandview in a Secret Service car. They were all to act as normal and unconcerned as possible, “business as usual,” he had instructed before leaving.

He stretched his stay at Grandview through most of the morning. Chatting amiably with his brother Vivian, he looked over a new milking machine, admired a new horse, and shook hands with Vivian’s five grandchildren before moving on to see Mary Jane. To no one did he say anything about Korea, even though reports of the invasion were in the morning headlines and on the radio.

He reached 219 North Delaware shortly before noon to find Eben Ayers waiting with a copy of Ambassador Muccio’s telegram: “IT WOULD APPEAR FROM THE NATURE OF THE ATTACK AND MANNER IN WHICH IT WAS LAUNCHED THAT IT CONSTITUTES AN ALL-OUT OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA.”

A swarm of reporters and photographers appeared at the front gate. On his way out, Ayers told them that naturally the President was concerned.

Bess and Margaret had only just returned from church when Acheson’s second call came at about 12:30.

Dad took it [Margaret recorded in her diary] and a few minutes later he went to pack and told me to call Kansas City and get Eben Ayers to call all the people who came out with him to say that he would arrive at the airport between 2:00 and 2:15.

The departure from Kansas City was so swift and sudden that some of Truman’s own staff, as well as the White House correspondents who traveled by chartered plane, were left behind. As the Independence took off, Bess, Margaret, and Vivian Truman stood watching in silence, Bess looking much as she had the night of Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

“Everything is extremely tense,” wrote Margaret at home that night. “Northern or Communist Korea is marching in on Southern Korea and we are going to fight.” Apparently from what she had seen and heard, she had no trouble knowing her father’s mind.

The Independence touched down at National Airport at 7:15 that evening, Sunday, June 25. Dean Acheson, Louis Johnson, and Budget Director James Webb were waiting on the tarmac as Truman stepped from the plane looking grim and troubled. “That’s all,” he told photographers who were pressing for another shot. “We’ve got a job to do.”

Webb would later recall Truman saying in the limousine as they sped to the city, “By God, I am going to let them have it,” and Louis Johnson, in the jump seat in front of Truman, swinging about to shake his hand.

On the flight from Missouri, by radio, Truman had notified Acheson to summon an emergency meeting at Blair House, beginning with dinner at 7:30. His hours of privacy in the plane had provided opportunity for a lot of hard thinking, Truman later wrote. This was not the first time in his generation when the strong had attacked the weak. He had thought about Manchuria and Ethiopia.

I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead…. If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors. If this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.

The attack by North Korea had come as a total surprise. There had been incidents along the 38th parallel, Korea had been seen as a potential trouble point, but it was only one of numerous trouble points around the world and had never figured high on anyone’s list. The last American troops had recently been withdrawn from South Korea. Describing the perimeter of American interests in the Pacific in an extemporaneous speech at the National Press Club in January, Acheson had not even included Korea. (The charge made later that the speech had thus inspired the Communist attack on South Korea would prove groundless.) Just that June, testifying on the Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk had said he saw no likelihood of war in Korea. Indeed, among the manifold uncertainties at the moment was whether the invasion of South Korea was only a feint, a preliminary to a larger attack elsewhere, on Yugoslavia perhaps, or Formosa, or Iran.

As Truman had been notified en route to Washington, the U.N. Security Council had met that afternoon and adopted an American resolution calling for immediate cessation of “hostilities” and the withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th parallel. The vote was 9 to 0. There was no Soviet vote—no Soviet veto—because the Soviet representative, Jacob Malik, had walked out earlier in the year, when the Security Council refused to unseat Nationalist China, and he had not returned.

Besides the President, Acheson, Johnson, and Webb, the group gathered at Blair House included ten others: three from the State Department, Dean Rusk, Philip Jessup, and John Hickerson; the three service secretaries, Frank Pace, Jr., who had replaced Kenneth Royall as Secretary of the Army, Francis P. Matthews of the Navy, and Thomas K. Finletter of the Air Force; General Omar Bradley; and the three Chiefs of Staff, General Lawton Collins, Admiral Forrest Sherman, and Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg. That made fourteen and they arrived, reported The New York Times, “as an atmosphere of tension, unparalleled since the war days, spread over the capital.”

Drinks were served in the garden after Truman came downstairs from calling Bess to say he had arrived safely. He asked that there be no discussion of the crisis until dinner was over and the Blair House staff had withdrawn. Shortly after eight, dinner was announced by Alonzo Fields. They ate at the long mahogany table in the dining room, doors to the garden open to the warm evening air, and, for some reason, the hurriedly assembled meal—fried chicken, shoestring potatoes, asparagus, biscuits, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce—would be remembered as especially good and well served, “excellent,” according to Acheson.

With the table cleared, it became the conference table and the meeting began, Acheson opening with a “darkening report,” after which Truman asked for everyone’s views.

The United States, said Rusk, had occupied South Korea for five years and had therefore a particular responsibility for South Korea, which, if absorbed by the Communists, would be “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Bradley, who with Louis Johnson had just returned from Japan, and was feeling so ill he barely made it through the evening, said, “We must draw the line somewhere” and Korea was as good a place as any. (Acheson, some months later, was to say that if the best minds in the world had set out to find the worst possible location to fight “this damnable war,” the unanimous choice would have been Korea.) Russia, in Bradley’s view, was not ready for war, only “testing us.”

There was no dissenting response. Nor did anyone present have the least doubt that what was happening in Korea was being directed from Moscow. But then this was also the prevailing view in the country and the press. It was the “Russian-sponsored” North Korean Army that had launched the invasion, according to bulletins in the papers. As Bradley would write, “Underlying these discussions was an intense moral outrage, even more than we felt over the Czechoslovakia coup in 1948.”

That everyone at the table was in fundamental agreement became quickly clear, Truman’s own obvious resolution having stiffened them all. “He pulled all the conferees together, by his show of leadership,” one of them would say later, preferring to remain anonymous. Repeating Bradley’s phrase, Truman agreed the line must be drawn “most emphatically.” North Korea must be stopped. The Russians, he said, were trying to get Korea by default, gambling that the United States would be so fearful of starting another world war that it would put up no resistance.

“I thought we were still holding the stronger hand,” he later wrote, “although how much stronger, it was hard to tell.”

Admiral Sherman and General Vandenberg thought a combination of naval forces and air cover would be sufficient to do the job. And though Generals Bradley and Collins disagreed, they opposed any commitment of American ground forces in Korea, at least for the time being.

The possibility of active intervention by Soviet forces greatly concerned Truman. No one seemed to think the Russians were ready for a world war, but who was to say. Truman asked about Russian fleet strength in the Far East, Russian airpower, and requested an immediate intelligence report on “possible next moves” by the Soviets elsewhere in the world.

Recalling the evening, Truman would write that what impressed him most was “the complete, almost unspoken acceptance on the part of everyone that whatever had to be done to meet this aggression had to be done. There was no suggestion from anyone that either the United Nations or the United States should back away from it.”

As Truman had determined, it was Acheson who led the meeting, Acheson who proposed the decisions Truman made. General MacArthur was to send arms and supplies to South Korea as swiftly as possible. American civilians in Korea were to be evacuated under the cover of American airpower. The Seventh Fleet would proceed from the Philippines to guard the Formosa Strait, to prevent any attack from Communist China on Formosa, or, as Acheson said, vice versa.

As the meeting was breaking up, Johnson made what in time would be remembered as a remarkable observation. Having just been with MacArthur in Japan, he thought it important that any instructions to the general be detailed, “so as not to give him too much discretion.”

Truman, in an exchange with John Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. Affairs, said the decisions he had just made had been for the United Nations. He had believed in the League of Nations with all his heart, Truman said, but the League had failed. The United Nations must not fail. “It was our idea, and in this first big test we just can’t let them down.”

As the group departed just before eleven, using the back door to avoid reporters, Truman said no one was to make any statement until he did.

It would be said of Harry Truman that without consulting Congress or the American people, he had rushed to judgment; that “as Hermann Goering, when he heard the word culture, reached for his gun, Harry Truman when he heard the word problem, reached for a decision.” But the last thing Truman wanted was a war in Korea, or anywhere, and angry as he may have been over the attack, as determined as he obviously was to do what he felt had to be done, he had nonetheless, so far, made no irrevocable move.

On Monday, as the news from Korea grew worse, he issued a statement notable only for its generalities. The widespread impression was that the United States was going to take little or no action. According to the latest communications from MacArthur, the South Koreans appeared incapable of stopping the North Korean advance: “Our estimate is that a complete collapse is imminent.”

That night, after supper alone, Truman summoned another emergency session, a second “war cabinet” meeting at Blair House, and decided to provide American air and naval support to the forces of South Korea and to press for immediate United Nations support.

No action should be taken north of the 38th parallel, he said, adding, “not yet.”

In addition, he ordered an increase of American forces in the Philippines and a speedup of military aid to Indochina.

No ground troops had yet been committed to Korea. And no one at the meeting recommended that. General Bradley would remember Acheson “dominating” the meeting, as he had the night before. Bradley, as he wrote later, was gravely concerned over the possibility of a ground war in Asia. Whatever troops were sent, MacArthur would surely ask for more. Besides, “We had no war plan for Korea.” Bradley suggested they “wait a few days.” Acheson agreed.

“I don’t want to go to war,” Truman said with a force they would all remember.

“Everything I have done in the past five years,” he remarked sadly as the meeting ended, “has been to try to avoid making a decision such as I had to make tonight.”

Headlines the next day, Tuesday, June 27, reported North Korean tanks sweeping into the South Korean capital of Seoul. The government of South Korea had fled, its president, Syngman Rhee, bitterly describing American help as “Too little, too late.” In a broadcast from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, Communist Premier Kim II Sung vowed to “crush” South Korea as swiftly as possible.

At the White House events moved rapidly, as the leaders of Congress, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs rolled up to the West Wing in one official car after another. More than forty people were gathered. By 11:30 the doors of the Cabinet Room were closed. Half an hour later the meeting had ended. The congressional leaders had given the President their undivided support. No one had said a word against what he had decided. Further, he had been advised to proceed on the basis of presidential authority alone and not bother to call on Congress for a war resolution. A hundred reporters stood waiting anxiously in the lobby when minutes later Charlie Ross set off a “whirlwind,” handing them the first word from Truman that he had ordered American air and naval forces to support South Korea in its hour of peril:

“The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war….”

Cheers broke out in the House and Senate when the statement was read aloud. By a vote of 315 to 4, the House promptly voted a one-year extension of the draft law. In the Senate, Republican William Knowland called for “overwhelming support” for the President from all Americans regardless of party.

At the United Nations, debate began on a resolution to back the American decision—a resolution adopted that night at 10:45, the Soviet Union being still absent. For the first time in history, a world organization had voted to use armed force to stop armed force.

The response of the American people—by mail, telegrams, phone calls to the White House and Congress—the response of the press, of nearly everyone whose opinion carried weight in Washington and in the country, was immediate, resounding approval—a point that would be very soon forgotten. Editorials praised Truman for his “bold course,” his “momentous and courageous act.”

Although the President was well and faithfully advised [wrote Joseph and Stewart Alsop], no one can fail to admire the blend of plain guts and homely common sense that has marked his own handling of his immense crisis. This, indeed, was one of the occasions when Truman seemed to sum up the good things in America.

James Reston said much the same thing in The New York Times. Truman, said the Washington Post, had given the free world the leadership it desperately needed.

These are days calling for steady nerves, for a strict eye on the ball, and for a renewed resolve to keep our purposes pure in the grapple we have undertaken with men who would plunge the world into darkness. The occasion has found the man in Harry Truman.

The Wall Street Journal, Walter Lippmann, Thomas E. Dewey, George Kennan, General Eisenhower, all agreed it was time to draw the line. Eisenhower believed, “We’ll have a dozen Koreas soon if we don’t take a firm stand.” Henry Morgenthau, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., Phil Murray, Walter Reuther, and Sam Goldwyn sent telegrams in praise of Truman’s decision. Cordell Hull called.

White House mail ran strongly in favor of the President’s action. “You may be a whiskey guzzling poker playing old buzzard as some say,” wrote a Republican from Illinois, “but by damn, for the first time since old Teddy left there in March of 1909, the United States has a grass roots American in the White House.”

Even Taft and Henry Wallace gave their support, though Taft urged some congressional say in the matter. British Ambassador Oliver Franks reported to his government that virtually all shades of opinion backed the President. The entire mood in the capital had suddenly, dramatically changed. “I have lived and worked in and out of Washington for twenty years,” wrote Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor. “Never before in that time have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through the city.”

Appearing before a meeting of the Reserve Officers Association, an audience of a thousand people at the Mayflower Hotel, Wednesday morning, Truman received a standing ovation.

On Thursday, June 29, at his first press conference since the crisis began, he said with emphasis, “We are not at war.” Could he be quoted? “Yes,” Truman said. “We are not at war.”

Would it be correct, asked a reporter, to call this a police action under the United Nations? “Yes,” Truman replied. “That is exactly what it amounts to.”

Later this would be called another of his press conference blunders—he had allowed a reporter to put words in his mouth. But it was no mistake. A “police action under the United Nations” was precisely how he wished it to be viewed. Nor, importantly, did anyone see reason then to fault him.

It was in the middle of the night in Washington, at 3:00 A.M. Washington time, Friday, June 30, that the Pentagon received still another report from General MacArthur, this based on his first personal inspection of the situation in Korea. “The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later lost ground,” it said, “is through introduction of United States combat forces into the Korean battle area.” Any further attempt to check the North Korean advance with air- and seapower alone would be a waste of time. So bleak were things at this stage, even an all-out U.S. effort—Army, Navy, and Air Force—might be “doomed to failure.” Time was of the essence—“a clear-cut decision without delay is imperative.”

When Frank Pace telephoned Blair House, it was still dark outside. Truman was already up and shaved. He took the call by his bedside at 4:47 A.M. Pace relayed the grim report. MacArthur wanted two divisions of ground troops.

Truman never hesitated. It was a moment for which he had been preparing himself for days and he made his decision at once.

Later he would say that committing American troops to combat in Korea was the most difficult decision of his presidency, more so than the decision to use the atomic bomb. He did not want to start another world war, he had been heard to say privately more than once during that most crucial week. “Must be careful not to cause a general Asiatic war,” he now wrote in his diary, later that same day, Friday, June 30. What would Mao Tse-tung do? he wondered. Where would the next Russian move come?

“Now, your job as President,” Acheson would observe years later, “is to decide. Mr. Truman decided.”

Later, too—many years later—Acheson would make public a note he received from the President that, as Acheson said, well illustrated the quality of the man who “bound his lieutenants to him with unbreakable devotion.” It was written in longhand:

7/11/50

Memo to Dean Acheson

Regarding June 24 and 25—

Your initiative in immediately calling the Security Council of the U.N. on Saturday night and notifying me was the key to what followed afterwards. Had you not acted promptly in that direction we would have had to go into Korea alone.

The meeting Sunday night at Blair House was the result of our action Saturday night and the results afterward show that you are a great Secretary of State and a diplomat.

Your handling of the situation since has been superb.

I’m sending you this for your record.

Harry S. Truman

16
Commander in Chief

There was nothing passive about Harry Truman. He was the commander in chief in law and in fact.

—GEORGE ELSEY

I

In the five years since the nation was last at war, the President’s office had changed very little, with one notable exception. The melodramatic, moonlit Remington, the painting called Fired On that had hung over the mantelpiece opposite Truman’s desk in 1945, had been replaced by a commanding, full-figured portrait of George Washington, while below, in front of the fireplace, stood Truman’s big office globe, his gift from General Eisenhower.

Thus from his desk now, Truman could look up at both the nation’s first Commander in Chief, resplendent in full uniform, and the world at large, a subject that weighed on him more now than ever—the world and the threat of global war, the world and the imperative need not to repeat past mistakes, the world and Harry Truman.

He was not one to worry about decisions, once made, he told a reporter, but with the “Korean affair” he could not help worrying about the inevitable consequences. “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” he would tell the nation in an historic radio and television broadcast the evening of July 19, still unwilling to call what was happening in Korea a war, but an “act of aggression” by the Communist leaders.

The Washington portrait, by Rembrandt Peale, was on loan from the National Gallery. The globe, which, with its heavy three-legged stand of polished mahogany, stood nearly chest high, had been Eisenhower’s when he was Allied Commander in Europe. Truman had chosen the new arrangement himself. He was acutely conscious of everything in the room, liked it all just so. Once when Charlie Ross picked up Truman’s engagement calendar from the desk to check something, then put it back down slightly askew, Truman, while chatting on, immediately lined it up again as before.

The globe especially gave the fireplace end of the room, the northern arc of the Oval Office, a weight and importance it had not had before. Photographers now, when posing the President, liked to have him stand there, particularly for portraits with his generals. He would be asked to put his right hand on the globe, as if explaining something, a natural pose, since in discussions with the Joint Chiefs—or members of the Cabinet or Congress or his own staff—Truman would frequently go to the globe to make a point. “Harry, don’t you sometimes feel overwhelmed by your job?” he had been asked by Republican Senator Tobey of New Hampshire, and Truman had stepped to the globe and turning it slowly said, “All the world is focusing on this office. The nearest thing to my heart is to do something to keep the world at peace. We must find a way to peace, or else civilization will be destroyed and the world will turn back to the year 900.”

Now, in the first weeks of the Korean crisis, he would put his finger on various spots in Europe or the Middle East—on the Elbe or the Iranian-Soviet border—then turning the globe, point to the pale gray, of the Korean peninsula, between the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, a place most Americans still had trouble finding on a map.

“This is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman would say. “If we are tough enough now, there won’t be any next time.”

The whole of the Korean peninsula, north and south, was almost half again the size of Greece, roughly 84,000 square miles in total. The distance from top to bottom, from the Yalu River, which formed North Korea’s border with Manchuria, to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, was about 600 miles, while the distance across varied from 125 to 200 miles.

The Republic of South Korea—everything below the arbitrary dividing line of the 38th parallel—was slightly larger than the state of Indiana. Its population of 20 million was double that of North Korea, and its economy chiefly agricultural, whereas most Korean industry was in the north.

The demarcation line of the 38th parallel had no basis in Korean history, geography, or anything else. It had been settled on hastily in the last week of World War II, as a temporary measure to facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops—those north of the line had surrendered to the Soviets, those south, to American forces. The decision had been made late one night at the Pentagon by then Colonel Dean Rusk and another young Army officer named Charles Bonesteel, who picked the line of latitude 38 degrees north because it had the advantage of already being on most maps of Korea.

From Seoul, South Korea’s fallen capital city, to Pusan, its largest port at the southeastern end of the peninsula, was 275 miles by the main road and rail line—all extremely crucial miles just now, as news of the advancing North Korean “People’s Army,” the NKPA, grew steadily worse. July 1950 had become a wretched time in Korea and in Washington. News accounts portrayed Truman as “chipper” or “jaunty” no more, but as looking exhausted, seeming to “walk with the weary man’s heavy tread.” One Sunday, on a rare outing on the Williamsburg down the Potomac, he excused himself after lunch with his staff and slept the rest of the afternoon.

His press conferences were no longer held in his office but across the way in the old State Department Building, in the ornate, musty Indian Treaty Room, which offered more space for an expanding press corps. (He was also fed up with the way reporters spilled ink from their fountain pens on the rug in his office.) To repeated questions about his outlook, he maintained that “of course” he was hopeful. But as they knew from daily bulletins, and he knew better still from his morning briefings by Omar Bradley, the news from Korea was nearly all bad.

Bradley, one of the outstanding generals of World War II, was not given to exaggeration. Plain-mannered, likable, raised in Moberly, Missouri, he was Truman’s kind of man, with more inner iron than generally understood and what his deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, General Matthew Ridgway, described as “a fine, orderly mind.” Until the Korean crisis, Bradley had reported to the President only on occasion, but he came now to the Oval Office every morning at 9:30 sharp, to unfold his map of Korea and commence his grim report in the dry, oddly high-pitched voice of a Missouri schoolteacher.

American ground forces and what was Left of the Army of the Republic of Korea, the ROKs, were being rapidly chopped to pieces. The first American ground troops—all of 256 men, two and a half companies of the 24th Infantry Division—had gone into action south of Seoul, making a brave stand near Osan, on July 5, and they had been falling back ever since, fighting desperately to keep retreat from turning to rout. Airlifted from Japan, they had been rushed into action without adequate preparation. Many were young draftees with no combat experience; nearly all were soft from garrison duty in Japan; and, like their ROK allies, they were pathetically ill-equipped in the face of a highly disciplined enemy advancing in massive numbers and with heavy Russian T-34 tanks. As the newspapers were saying, it was all tragically reminiscent of the Nazi Blitzkrieg in France in 1940. “The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up,” Truman would tell the nation, “make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted all along.”

When at a meeting of the National Security Council on July 6, Vice President Barkley asked how many North Koreans were in the operation, Bradley said 90,000. American forces numbered about 10,000, the South Koreans 25,000.

In combat, American and ROK forces were often outnumbered three to one, or ten to one, in some places twenty to one. They had no tanks, no artillery, or any weapons capable of slowing the Russian tanks. (It had actually been American policy to keep the South Korean forces under-equipped before this, so as not to encourage aggressive action by South Korea against the North.) World War II bazookas bounced off the Russian tanks like stones. Matthew Ridgway would later say it was as if a few troops of Boy Scouts with hand weapons had tried to stop a German Panzer unit.

The retreat was fought in drenching rains and punishing heat, temperatures regularly over 100 degrees. July was the monsoon season in Korea. Weapons rusted, clothes rotted. With communications broken and mud roads clogged by tens of thousands of fleeing refugees, the chaos was overwhelming. American troops were wholly unfamiliar with the terrain. They knew nothing of the Korean people or the Korean language. They fought and fell back, fought and fell back, with little sleep or food, and in the terrible heat drank from drainage ditches by rice fields fertilized with human manure. As a consequence, violent dysentery ripped through their ranks. “Guys, sweat soaked, shitting in their pants, not even dropping them, moved like zombies,” remembered an American infantryman. “I just sensed we were going to find another hill and be attacked, then find another hill and so forth, endlessly forever.” Casualties were as high as 30 percent. “What a place to die,” a young soldier was quoted in the papers. Some Americans cut and ran, victims of “bugout fever.”

With his map propped on an easel before the President’s desk, Bradley went over the situation one morning in mid-July, pointing out various units, noting the length of the American-ROK line across the peninsula and the necessity of gradual withdrawal. The hope was to continue delaying actions—the most difficult kind of military maneuver—pulling back until a defensive, shortened line in the southeastern corner was reached and established.

American and ROK forces fell back from Osan to the Kum River, then to the temporary capital of Taejon, where a furious, house-to-house battle raged on July 19 (July 18 in Washington). With the city in flames, the commanding general of the 24th Division, William F. Dean, disappeared, reportedly last seen trying to stop an enemy tank with his Army .45 revolver.

Published accounts described suicidal enemy attacks, “waves” of North Koreans, a “Red tide.” “For every ten we killed another ten came charging over the hill to replace them,” an American soldier was quoted in the Washington Post. Before breakfast one morning at Blair House, Truman read on the front page of The New York Times of seven slaughtered American soldiers, prisoners of the North Koreans, who had been found by the roadside, their hands tied behind their backs and shot through the face.

“This is no orthodox war,” wrote Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald-Tribune, the only woman covering the war thus far.

“The stragglers are still coming in—small exhausted groups of them,” reported a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, a few days after the Battle of Taejon.

Their wits and will to live carried them through enemy lines, over mountain trails, through sniper-infested country to this rain-soaked river bottom where camp is pitched.

More than 200 of them had walked out. They had been forced to the hills after fighting in Taejon Thursday. By round-about trails that took them 50 miles through hostile country they reached safety before dawn today [July 22].

Another group of 25 arrived later in the morning, led by a lieutenant colonel. They had started about 80 strong, but only this handful made it all the way. The others dropped from exhaustion along the route.

The retreat continued, through the steep passes of the Sobaek Mountains, to still another defensive line, on high ground behind the Naktong River. In seventeen days of savage fighting, American and ROK forces had fallen back seventy miles.

It was, in many respects, one of the darkest chapters in American military history. But MacArthur, now in overall command of the U.N. forces, was trading space for time—time to pour in men and supplies at the port of Pusan—and the wonder was the North Koreans had been kept from overrunning South Korea straightaway. Despite their suffering and humiliation, the brutal odds against them, the American and ROK units had done what they were supposed to, almost miraculously. They had held back the landslide, said Truman, who would rightly call it one of the most heroic rearguard actions on record.

On July 29, the tactical U.N. commander in the field, General Walton Walker, issued a “stand-or-die” order. There would be no more retreat, Walker said. Pusan must not fall. “There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan.” Every man must fight to the death if necessary, until help arrived.

The speech, designed no doubt for home consumption, struck the troops as uncalled for. The prospect of another Dunkirk or Bataan had I not occurred to them. “I never did like running,” a private from Philadelphia told Marguerite Higgins.

One of Truman’s important but little noted first moves in the fateful last week of June had been to recall Averell Harriman from Europe, where he had been a kind of roving ambassador, and make him a special assistant to help with war emergency problems; and one of Harriman’s first moves in his new role was to press upon the President the need for congressional support for what he was doing in Korea. He urged Truman to call for a war resolution from Congress as soon as possible, while the country was still behind him. Dean Acheson, however, disagreed, insisting that such a resolution was unnecessary and unwise. The President, said Acheson, should rest on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief. It was true that congressional approval would do no harm, but the process of obtaining it, Acheson thought, might do great harm. In the mounting anxiety over how things were going in Korea, the timing was wrong.

Truman sided with Acheson, telling Harriman further that to appeal to Congress now would make it more difficult for future presidents to deal with emergencies.

Later when Robert Taft and others began criticizing the President [Harriman would recall] I was convinced the President had made a mistake. This decision, however, was characteristic of President Truman. He always kept in mind how his actions would affect future presidential authority.

In the first week of July MacArthur requested thirty thousand American ground troops, to bring the four divisions of his Eighth Army to full strength. Just days later, on July 9, the situation had become so “critical” that MacArthur called for a doubling of his forces. Four more divisions were urgently needed, he said in a cable that jolted Washington.

How much more could the United States commit to Korea, given the dangers in other parts of the world? General Bradley and the Joint Chiefs continued to view what was happening in Korea as a possible feint in a larger Kremlin strategy. Truman, at a meeting of the National Security Council, said he would “back out” of Korea only if a “military situation” had to be met elsewhere.

The hard reality was that the Army had only ten divisions. In Western Europe there was but one, and as Winston Churchill noted in a speech in London, the full allied force of twelve divisions in Western Europe faced a Soviet threat of eighty divisions. The NATO allies were exceedingly concerned lest the United States become too involved in distant Korea.

Years of slashing defense expenditures, as a means to balance the budget, had taken a heavy toll. And while the policy of “cutting the fat” at the Pentagon had been pushed by Republicans and Democrats alike—with wide popular approval—and lately made a noisy crusade by Louis Johnson, it was the President who was ultimately responsible. It was Truman’s policy—and along with the “fat,” it was now painfully apparent, a great deal of bone and muscle had been cut. For all its vaunted nuclear supremacy, the nation was quite unprepared for war, just as such critics of the policy as James Forrestal had been saying.

Now, in these “weeks of slaughter and heartbreak,” all that was to change dramatically and with immense, far-reaching consequences.

Truman himself had changed. Members of the White House staff spoke of the “aching pain” of the President’s disappointment, since the Communist invasion of South Korea crushed his dream of peace. He was working eighteen hours a day and the strain showed. Margaret would write of her father’s anguish as American troops were hurled back. Korea was “constantly” on his mind.

At the same time, Truman was undergoing extensive dental treatment. In three weeks beginning July 8, he had two bridges, four single crowns, and a filling replaced, in a series of twelve sessions at Walter Reed Hospital. And through all this, according to the records, he had anesthesia only once, for one of the crowns. Why he subjected himself to such an ordeal just then is puzzling, unless it was to safeguard his health overall, in anticipation of the stress of the war only growing worse.

Solemn, “war-conscious” crowds, as they were described, gathered outside Blair House every time word spread that he was meeting with his military advisers. Many Americans, perhaps most, had first thought of the Korean conflict as truly a “police action,” a mere brushfire affair that would be quickly extinguished once American forces arrived. Now letters and telegrams poured into Washington, to the White House and Congress, decrying the way things were being handled. “It would seem General Vaughan is running the Korean situation,” said one. “Are we being sabotaged by the State Department?” asked another. Those addressed to Truman were at one point running twenty to one against the war:

I wonder how well you have been sleeping these last nights? Mothers and fathers all over our beloved land are spending sleepless nights worrying again over their boys being sent to fight wars on foreign soil—wars that are no concern of ours….

WE DEMAND THAT YOU STOP MURDERING AMERICAN BOYS AND KOREAN PEOPLE….

In heaven’s name, what are you doing? The blood hasn’t dried from World war 2…. We have nothing to do with Korea. These people are capable of settling their own affairs….

LET THEM HAVE THE ATOM BOMB NOW….

I am the mother of a soldier in Korea. I am an American, I mean a good American. I love this country and all it stands for…. I am writing to you, because I want my son home, he is my only child, and very young. Please, Mr. President, I implore you….

YOU DID IT ONCE BEFORE STOP DROP ONE OVER THE KREMLIN AND GET IT OVER WITH.

In the Senate, Taft called for Dean Acheson to resign. Owen Brewster wanted to let MacArthur use the atomic bomb “at his discretion.” Newspapers carried photographs contrasting the cheerful, confident President of spring with die grave, lined President of summer. “The grin in which his face was formerly permanently wreathed has disappeared,” wrote the Alsop brothers. “So, at last, has the euphoric presidential conviction that ‘everything’s going to be all right.’ ”

To the Alsops and others who had long deplored the decline of American military power, it was a case now of “we told you so.” The influence of Louis Johnson at the Pentagon had been “little less than catastrophic”—“damn near treasonous,” Joseph Alsop would later say privately. Truman had been naive at best. With the Korean crisis, however, Truman had undergone a “complete change.”

The great historic shift began at a meeting of the Cabinet on Friday, July 14. Again, as at the fateful Blair House sessions, it was Acheson who took the initiative, urging an immediate expansion of all military services and huge increases in military spending. Truman agreed. And from this point forward there was to be no turning back, not in his lifetime or in that of any of those around the table.

On Wednesday, July 19, first in a special message to Congress, then in an address to the nation, Truman said the attack on Korea demanded that the United States send more men, equipment, and supplies. Beyond that, the realities of the “world situation” required still greater American military strength. He called for an emergency appropriation of $10 billion—the final sum submitted would be $11.6 billion, or nearly as much as the entire $13 billion military budget originally planned for the fiscal year—and announced he was both stepping up the draft and calling up certain National Guard units.

“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression…I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.”

As a call to arms it was not especially inspirational. Nor did he once use the word “war” to describe what was happening in Korea. But then neither was there any question about his sincerity, nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country. The “job” was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, “stern days ahead.”

Possibly in time the strident warnings and enjoinders of NSC-68 would have effected such a turn in policy. But Korea made all that academic now. Truman’s commitment to military power was theoretical no longer. In another televised address at summer’s end, he would announce plans to double the armed forces to nearly 3 million men, saying such costs and obligations were to be part of the nation’s burden for a long time to come.

Congress appropriated the money—$48.2 billion for military spending in fiscal 1950–51, then $60 billion for fiscal 1951–52.

Was he considering use of the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman was asked at a press conference the last week of July. No, he said. Did he plan to get out of Washington any time soon? No. He would stay on the job.

That Truman was extremely vexed with his Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, and less than fond or admiring of his Far Eastern Commander, Douglas MacArthur, was well known to his staff and a cause of gathering concern at the Pentagon. “He would have saved himself a lot of grief had he relieved both men at the onset of the war,” was the subsequent view of General Bradley. Johnson had begun to show “an inordinate egotistical desire to run the whole government,” Truman later recorded. “He offended every member of the cabinet…he never missed an opportunity to say mean things about my personal staff.” His Secretary of Defense, Truman speculated, was suffering from a “pathological condition.”

When Truman learned from Averell Harriman that Johnson had been praising Senator Taft—over the phone, and in Harriman’s presence—for Taft’s attacks on Acheson (and then promised Harriman to do all he could to make Harriman Secretary of State, once Acheson was out of the way), Johnson was, in effect, finished. From Eben Ayers’ diary, it is known that the President confided Harriman’s story to Charlie Ross on July 3. The next morning, July 4, Truman drove to Leesburg, Virginia, with Margaret for what was ostensibly a holiday visit with General Marshall, who, since recovering his health, had become head of the American Red Cross. “A most interesting morning,” was all that Truman noted in his own diary.

Yet to fire Johnson then, with things going so badly in Korea, to shame the man who had been most conspicuous in carrying out Truman’s own policies at the Pentagon, would not have been a move of the kind Truman admired. So weeks passed and Louis Johnson remained.

As for MacArthur, Truman’s private view seems to have been no different from what it had been in 1945, at the peak of MacArthur’s renown, when, in his journal, Truman had described the general as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” The President, noted Eben Ayers, expressed “little regard or respect” for MacArthur, called him a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” But working with people that one did not necessarily like or admire was part of life—particularly the politician’s life—and if removing Louis Johnson would have been difficult under the circumstances, firing the five-star Far Eastern Commander would have been very nearly unthinkable. John Foster Dulles told Truman confidentially that MacArthur should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Dulles, the most prominent Republican spokesman on foreign policy and a special adviser to the State Department, had returned from a series of meetings with MacArthur in Tokyo convinced that the seventy-year-old general was well past his prime and a potential liability. In a private conference in the Oval Office, Dulles advised Truman to bring MacArthur home and retire him before he caused trouble. But that, replied Truman, his blue-gray eyes large behind his glasses, was easier said than done. He reminded Dulles of the reaction there would be in the country, so great was MacArthur’s “heroic standing.”

In later years it would be stressed by some writers that Truman had little regard for generals, even viewed them with contempt, considering them limited in outlook and ability. He himself, in retirement, would say most generals were “dumb,” “like horses with blinders on,” and would Fault their West Point education (the education he had so wanted as a youth but was denied). His bias, however, was not against generals overall, but such figures as MacArthur who seemed to feel they were above everyone else. Truman hated caste systems of any kind, disliked stuffed shirts of all varieties, and his experiences in France in 1918 had left him with an abiding dislike of the military caste system and its West Point stuffed shirts in particular.

However, his latter-day remarks notwithstanding, Truman’s regard for such generals as Bradley and Ridgway (both West Pointers) could not have been much greater. He had long considered Bradley a model officer and very quickly that summer he had come to rely on Bradley as an adviser more than anyone in his administration except Acheson. Ridgway, too, greatly impressed Truman and would in time more than justify Truman’s confidence in him. Then there were Eisenhower and Marshall—Eisenhower, the man Truman had been willing to step aside for, to make him President, and Marshall, “the great one,” whom Truman revered above all men.

Nor, importantly, did Truman at this stage express any doubt concerning MacArthur’s ability. If anything, he seems to have been banking on it.

By the first week in August, American and ROK forces, dug in behind the Naktong River, had set up the final defense line to be known as the Pusan Perimeter, a thinly held front forming an arc of 130 miles around the port of Pusan. On the map it looked like a bare toehold on the peninsula. On the ground the fighting went on as savagely as before. The monsoons had ended. Now the troops cursed the heat and dust so thick that supply trucks kept their headlights on at midday. But the retreat was over. Besides, the headlong advance of the North Koreans had cost them heavily—their casualties had been worse even than the Americans imagined. Their supply lines were now greatly overextended. U.N. forces controlled the sea and air, while at Pusan, the buildup of American tanks, artillery, and fresh troops was moving rapidly. At his briefing for the President on Saturday, August 12, in his customary, dry, cautious way, Bradley, for the first time, described the situation as “fluid but improving.”

Averell Harriman, meanwhile, had returned from a hurried mission to Tokyo, bringing the details of a daring new MacArthur plan.

Harriman had been dispatched to tell the general of Truman’s determination to see that he had everything he needed, but also to impress upon him Truman’s urgent desire to avoid any move that might provoke a third world war. This was Truman’s uppermost concern and there must be no misunderstanding. In particular, MacArthur was to “stay clear” of Chiang Kai-shek—a sore point since MacArthur had made a highly publicized flying visit to Formosa on July 31 to confer with Chiang, after which he had been photographed kissing Madame Chiang’s hand. Chiang, Truman had instructed Harriman to tell MacArthur, must not become the catalyst for a war with the Chinese Communists.

Harriman, as Truman appreciated, had known MacArthur on a first-name basis since MacArthur was Superintendent at West Point in 1920.

Accompanied by Ridgway and General Lauris Norstad of the Air Force, Harriman had left for Tokyo on August 4, and on the morning of their return to Washington, August 9, Harriman went directly from the airport to Blair House, taking no time to shave or shower or have breakfast. As he would later explain, Harriman had scheduled his return so he could see the President at about 7:00 A.M., the best time to “catch him alone.”

MacArthur had no reservations about the decision to fight in Korea, “absolutely none,” Harriman reported. MacArthur was certain neither the Chinese Communists nor the Russians would intervene in Korea. Concerning Chiang Kai-shek, MacArthur had assured Harriman that of course, as a soldier, he would do as the President ordered, though something about MacArthur’s tone as he said this had left Harriman wondering.

Of greater urgency and importance was what Harriman had to report of a plan to win the war with one bold stroke. For weeks there had been talk at the Pentagon of a MacArthur strategy to outflank the enemy, to hit from behind, by amphibious landing. The details were vague and the Joint Chiefs remained highly skeptical. But in Tokyo, Harriman, Ridgway, and Norstad had been given a grand unveiling, a brilliant, two-and-a-half-hour exposition delivered by MacArthur “with all his dramatic eloquence,” as Ridgway wrote. The three men were completely won over, “enthralled,” said Harriman, and ready to go home and argue for the plan. It could mean “our salvation,” Harriman told Truman.

The idea was to make a surprise amphibious landing on the western shore of Korea at the port of Inchon, 200 miles northwest of Pusan. The problem was that Inchon had tremendous tides—tides of 30 feet or more—and no beaches on which to land, only sea walls. Thus an assault would have to strike directly into the city itself, and only a full tide would carry the landing craft clear to the sea wall. In two hours after high tide, the landing craft would be stuck in the mud.

To Bradley it was the riskiest military proposal he had ever heard. But as MacArthur stressed, the Japanese had landed successfully at Inchon in 1904 and the very “impracticabilities” would help ensure the all-important element of surprise. As Wolfe had astonished and defeated Montcalm at Quebec in 1759, by scaling the impossible cliffs by the Plains of Abraham, so, MacArthur said, he would astonish and defeat the North Koreans by landing at the impossible port of Inchon. But there was little time. The attack had to come before the onset of the Korean winter exacted more casualties than the battlefield. The tides at Inchon would be right on September 15.

“I made clear to the President the difficulties of the plan,” Harriman later said, “including the very heavy tide which would make landing any reinforcements impossible until the next high tide.”

Truman told him to see Johnson and Bradley “as fast as you can.” Though Truman had made no commitment one way or the other, Harriman left the house convinced that Truman approved the plan.

At the Pusan Perimeter desperate fighting raged on, American casualties mounting—6,886 by August 25, by mid-September double that number. Soldiers who had fought in Europe were calling Korea a tougher war than any they had known. In a long, searing dispatch in Time and Life, correspondent John Osborne described it as “an ugly war,” “sorrowful,” “sickening,” “an especially terrible war.” No one who saw it firsthand would ever speak of it as a “police action.” The savagery of the North Koreans was appalling, but that of some South Korean police was hardly less. Americans described seeing enemy troops within plain sight changing from the green uniforms of the North Korean Army to the common white trousers and blouses of the Korean peasants. The awful uncertainty of who was friend and who was foe had already forced American troops to their own appalling acts and attitudes.

This means not the usual, inevitable savagery of combat in the field but savagery in detail—the blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shooting and shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans in the anonymous white clothing of the Korean countryside, or who may be screening an enemy march upon our positions….

The buildup of men and arms pouring into Pusan was phenomenal. Still, warned Osborne, “We may be pushed out of Korea.”

By early August, General Bradley could tell the President that American strength at Pusan was up to 50,000, which with another 45,000 ROKs and small contingents of U.N. allies, made a total U.N. ground force of nearly 100,000. Still the prospect of diverting additional American forces for MacArthur’s Inchon scheme pleased the Joint Chiefs not at all. Bradley continued to view it as “the wildest kind” of plan.

But on August 10, after a series of intense White House meetings, the Joint Chiefs and National Security Council approved the strategy in principle. As further sessions followed in Tokyo and in Washington, Bradley, Admiral Sherman, and General Collins expressed “the gravest misgivings,” as Bradley reported to Truman at a briefing Saturday, August 26, the same day the Associated Press broke a statement from MacArthur to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he strongly defended Chiang Kai-shek and the importance of Chiang’s control of Formosa: “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.” It was exactly the sort of dabbling in policy that MacArthur had assured Harriman he would, as a good soldier, refrain from.

Truman was livid, “his lips white and compressed.” Dispensing with the usual greetings at his morning meeting with Acheson, Harriman, Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs, he read the whole of MacArthur’s statement aloud. Acheson, outraged, called it rank insubordination. To Bradley the message was “the height of arrogance.” Harriman was the most upset of all. Truman would later say he considered but rejected the idea of relieving MacArthur of field command then and there and replacing him with Bradley. “It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of demotion, and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.”

Truman asked Louis Johnson to have MacArthur withdraw the statement. When Johnson demurred, Truman dictated the message himself and told Johnson to act on it at once.

But whatever his anger at MacArthur, to whatever degree the incident had increased his dislike—or distrust—of the general, Truman proceeded with discussion of the Inchon plan, and in spite of objections voiced by Bradley and the others, he decided to give MacArthur his backing. “The JCS inclined toward postponing Inchon until such time that we were certain Pusan could hold,” remembered Bradley. “But Truman was now committed.” On August 28, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur their tentative approval.

It was, they all knew, an enormous gamble. Several of MacArthur’s own staff, as would later be known, thought the plan unwise. MacArthur himself called it a 5,000-to-l shot. Bradley wrote that “a failure could be a national or even international catastrophe, not only militarily, but psychologically.” Truman had been strongly influenced by Harriman and by a memorandum of support from Ridgway. But in the last analysis, he relied on his own instincts. “It was a daring strategic conception,” he would write later. “I had the greatest confidence it would succeed.”

In time to come, little would be said or written about Truman’s part in the matter—that as Commander in Chief he, and he alone, was the one with the final say on Inchon. He could have said no, and certainly the weight of opinion among his military advisers would have been on his side. But he did not. He took the chance, made the decision for which he was neither to ask nor receive anything like the credit he deserved.

“Hell and high water every day,” was Truman’s description of the next several weeks. He had decided to show Louis Johnson the door.

On Wednesday, September 6, General Marshall came alone to the White House, and Truman, as he had twice before when he needed him, asked Marshall to return to service, this time as Secretary of Defense. Marshall warned Truman to consider carefully. “I’ll do it,” he said. “But I want you to think about the fact that my appointment may reflect upon you and your administration. They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang’s government in China. I want to help, not hurt you.”

Greatly moved, Truman wrote to Bess, “Can you think of anyone else saying that?”

Three days later, Saturday, September 9, after one last Oval Office session on Inchon, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur a final go-ahead. The landing was to take place on September 15, in less than a week.

On Monday, the 11th, Truman summoned Louis Johnson and told him he must quit. Further, in announcing his resignation, Johnson was to recommend General Marshall as his successor.

Johnson looked as if he might faint. Truman felt dreadful. Johnson pleaded for time to think it over. He could have a day, Truman said, but there would be no change. Returning the next afternoon with an unsigned letter of resignation in hand, Johnson begged Truman not to fire him. When Truman insisted he sign the letter, Johnson broke down and wept. He had seldom ever been so miserably uncomfortable, Truman later said. He had known Johnson for thirty years.

The resignation of Johnson and the nomination of Marshall were announced at once.

In the early hours of September 15—it was afternoon in Washington, September 14—the amphibious landing at Inchon began. As promised by MacArthur, the attack took the enemy by total surprise, and as also promised by MacArthur, the operation was an overwhelming success that completely turned the tables on the enemy.

The invasion force numbered 262 ships and 70,000 men of the Tenth Corps, with the 1st Marine Division leading the assault. Inchon fell in little more than a day. In eleven days Seoul was retaken. Meantime, as planned, General Walker’s Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and started north. Seldom in military history had there been such a dramatic turn in fortune. By September 27 more than half the North Korean Army had been trapped in a huge pincer movement. By October 1, U.N. forces were at the 38th parallel and South Korea was in U.N. control. In two weeks, it had become an entirely different war.

In Washington the news was almost unbelievable, more by far than anyone had dared hope for. The country was exultant. It was a “military miracle.” A jubilant President cabled MacArthur: “I salute you all, and say to all of you from all of us at home, ‘Well and nobly done.’ ”

For nearly three months, since the war began, the question had been whether U.N. forces could possibly hang on and survive in Korea. Now suddenly the question was whether to carry the war across the 38th parallel and destroy the Communist army and the Communist regime of the north and thereby unify the country. MacArthur favored “hot pursuit” of the enemy. So did the Joint Chiefs, the press, politicians in both parties, and the great majority of the American people. And understandably. It was a heady time, the excitement of victory was in the air. Except for a few at the State Department—Chip Bohlen, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, who had returned to service temporarily—virtually no one was urging a halt at the 38th parallel. “Troops could not be expected…to march up to a surveyor’s line and stop,” said Dean Acheson. “As a boundary it had no political value.”

Truman appears to have been as caught up in the spirit of the moment as anyone. To pursue and destroy the enemy’s army was basic military doctrine. If he hesitated or agonized over the decision—one of the most fateful of his presidency—there is no record of it.

The decision was made on Wednesday, September 27. MacArthur’s military objective now was “the destruction of the North Korean Armed Forces”—a very different objective from before. He was authorized to cross the 38th parallel, providing there was no sign of major intervention in North Korea by Soviet or Chinese forces. Also, he was not to carry the fight beyond the Chinese or Soviet borders of North Korea. Overall, he was free to do what had to be done to wind up the war as swiftly as possible. George Marshall, now Secretary of Defense, told him to “feel unhampered tactically and strategically,” and when MacArthur cabled, “I regard all of Korea open for military operations,” no one objected.

Carrying the war north involved two enormous risks—intervention by the Chinese and winter. But MacArthur was ready to move, and after Inchon, MacArthur was regarded with “almost superstitious awe.”

By diplomatic channels came warnings from the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, Chou En-lai, that if U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel, China would send troops in support of North Korea. In Washington—at the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House—such warnings were judged to be largely bluff.

At the end of the first week of October, at Lake Success, New York, the United Nations recommended all “appropriate steps be taken to ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea,” which meant U.N. approval for proceeding with the war. Just days later, on October 9, MacArthur sent the Eighth Army across the 38th parallel near Kaesong, and the day following, Truman made a surprise announcement. He was flying to an unspecified point in the Pacific to confer with General MacArthur on “the final phase” in Korea.

II

It was the kind of grand, high-level theater irresistible to the press and the American public. Truman and MacArthur were to rendezvous, as was said, like the sovereign rulers of separate realms journeying to a neutral field attended by their various retainers. The two men had never met. MacArthur had been out of the country since 1937. Truman had never been closer to the Far East than San Francisco.

The meeting place was a pinpoint in the Pacific, Wake Island, a minute coral way station beyond the international date line.

The presidential expedition was made up of three planes, the Independence with Truman, his staff, physician, and Secret Service detail; an Air Force Constellation carrying Harriman, Rusk, Philip Jessup, Army Secretary Pace, and General Bradley, plus all their aides, secretaries, and Admiral Arthur Radford, commander of the Pacific Fleet, who came on board at Honolulu; and a Pan American Stratocruiser with thirty-five correspondents and photographers. General MacArthur flew with several of his staff, a physician, and Ambassador John Muccio.

As a courtesy, Truman let MacArthur choose the place for the meeting, and for Truman, Wake Island meant a flight across seven time zones, a full round trip from Washington of 14,425 miles, while MacArthur had only to travel 4,000 miles from Tokyo and back. Events were moving rapidly in Korea, Truman would explain, “and I did not feel that he [MacArthur] should be away from his post too long.”

To many the whole affair looked like a political grandstand play to capitalize on the sudden, unexpected success of the war and share in MacArthur’s Inchon glory on the eve of the off-year elections in November. The President had been out of the headlines for some time, it was noted. Now he was back, and for those Democrats in Congress who were up for reelection, it was “the perfect answer to prayer and fasting.” MacArthur himself, en route to Wake Island, appeared disgusted that he had been “summoned for political reasons.” In fact, the idea for the meeting had originated with the White House staff as “good election year stuff,” Charlie Murphy remembered, and at first Truman had rejected it for that very reason, for being “too political, too much showmanship.” Apparently it was only after being reminded that Franklin Roosevelt had made just such a trip to meet with MacArthur at Hawaii in 1944 that Truman changed his mind.

Dean Acheson, who was conspicuously absent from the presidential entourage, had strongly disapproved and asked to be excused. “While general MacArthur had many of the attributes of a foreign sovereign…and was quite as difficult as any, it did not seem wise to recognize him as one,” Acheson would write. “The whole idea was distasteful to me. I wanted no part in it and saw no good coming from it.”

Truman, too, appears to have had second thoughts, even as he flew the pacific. “I’ve a while of a job before me,” he wrote to Nellie Noland from the plane east of Hawaii. “Have to talk to God’s right-hand man tomorrow….”

That a dramatic meeting between the President and his Far East Commander could, at this juncture, have great political value was, of course, undeniable. But to many who took part in the meeting, the charge that it was only, or even primarily, a political ploy would be emphatically dismissed as absurd. “Sheer nonsense,” said Bradley.

The importance of the occasion, like its drama, centered on the human equation, the vital factor of personality. For the first time the two upon whom so much depended, and who were so strikingly different in nature, would be able to appraise one another not at vast distance, or through official communiqué or the views of advisers only, but by looking each other over. As Admiral Radford commented at the time, “Two men can sometimes learn more of each other’s minds in two hours, face to face, than in years of correct correspondence.” Truman, after returning, would remark simply, “I don’t care what they say. I wanted to see General MacArthur, so I went to see him.”

Also what would be largely forgotten, or misrepresented by both sides in time to come, after things turned sour, was how the meetings at Wake Island actually went, what the President and the general actually concluded then, once having met.

Truman’s plane put down at 6:30 A.M., Sunday, October 15, just as the sun rose from the sea with spectacular brilliance, backlighting ranks of towering clouds. The single airstrip stretched the length of the island.

MacArthur was there waiting. In a later account of Truman’s arrival at Wake, as given to the author Merle Miller by Truman and Wallace Graham, MacArthur would be pictured deliberately trying to upstage Truman by circling the airstrip, waiting for Truman to land first, thus putting the President in the position of having to wait for the general. But it did not happen that way. MacArthur was not only on the ground, he had arrived the night before and was at the field half an hour early. Averell Harriman, whose plane had come in a few minutes before the Independence and who stood waiting with MacArthur, would remember MacArthur asking what the meeting was about. Harriman had said it was to discuss how a political victory could be attained in Korea, now that MacArthur had won such a brilliant military victory. “Good,” said MacArthur. “The President wants my views.”

With an eye on Truman’s plane as it began its approach, MacArthur took Harriman by the arm and started walking toward the runway. Harriman spoke of the strong support the President had given the Inchon operation. MacArthur said that at Inchon, he, MacArthur, had taken “grave responsibility” upon himself. Perhaps, said Harriman, MacArthur should consider the responsibility the President had assumed in backing him, and to this, noted Harriman, MacArthur registered keen interest.

As Truman stepped from the plane and came down the ramp, MacArthur stood waiting at the bottom, with “every appearance of warmth and friendliness.” And while onlookers noted also that the general failed to salute the President, and though Truman seems to have been somewhat put out by MacArthur’s attire—his open-neck shirt and “greasy ham and eggs cap” (MacArthur’s famed, gold-braided World War II garrison cap)—the greeting between them was extremely cordial.

MacArthur held out his hand. “Mr. President,” he said, seizing Truman’s right arm while pumping his hand, which experienced MacArthur watchers knew to be the number one treatment.

“I’ve been waiting a long time meeting you, General,” Truman said with a broad smile.

“I hope it won’t be so long next time, Mr. President,” MacArthur answered warmly.

Truman was dressed in a dark blue, double-breasted suit and gray Stetson. In Honolulu, he had outfitted his whole staff in Hawaiian shirts, but he looked now conspicuously formal, entirely presidential, and well rested, having slept during most of the last leg of the flight.

For the benefit of the photographers, he and MacArthur shook hands several times again, as a small crowd applauded. Then the two men climbed into the back seat of a well-worn black two-door Chevrolet, the best car available on the island, and drove a short distance to a Quonset hut by the ocean, where, alone, they talked for half an hour.

According to Secret Service Agent Henry Nicholson, who rode in the front seat beside Floyd Boring, the driver, Truman began talking almost immediately about his concern over possible Chinese intervention in Korea. Nicholson would distinctly recall Truman saying, “I have been worried about that.”

At the Quonset hut, according to Truman’s own account in his Memoirs, MacArthur assured him victory was won in Korea and that the Chinese Communists would not attack. When MacArthur apologized for what he had said in his Veterans of Foreign Wars statement, Truman told him to think no more of it, he considered the matter closed—a gesture that so impressed MacArthur that he later made a point of telling Harriman.

What more was said in the Quonset hut is not known, since no notes were taken and no one else was present. But clearly the time served to put both men at ease. Each, to judge by his later comments, concluded that the other was not as he had supposed.

Like so many others meeting MacArthur for the first time, Truman was struck by the engaging manner, the remarkable physical bearing, the celebrated “presence.” The general, Truman would write, “seemed genuinely pleased at this opportunity to talk with me, and I found him a most stimulating and interesting person. Our conversation was very friendly—I might say much more so than I had expected.”

MacArthur, for his part, later told Harriman that newspaper accounts and magazine articles did not do the President justice. In his own Reminiscences, MacArthur would write: “I had been warned about Mr. Truman’s quick and violent temper and prejudices, but he radiated nothing but courtesy and good humor during our meeting. He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue, and I liked him from the start.”

About 7:30 they reemerged in the brilliant morning sunshine and again drove off in the Chevrolet, now to a flat-roofed, one-story, pink cinder-block shack, a Civil Aeronautics administration building with a wind sock floating above, close to the beach where the Japanese had stormed ashore in 1941. Beyond the beach, blue Pacific rollers crashed over the dark hulks of two Japanese landing boats.

Others, some seventeen advisers and aides, were waiting in a large, plain room opening onto several smaller anterooms, these separated only by half-length, louvered swinging doors. Truman, setting a tone of informality, said it was no weather for coats, they should all get comfortable. He sat in his shirtsleeves at the head of a long pine table, MacArthur on his right, Harriman on the left, the rest finding places down the table or against the walls. MacArthur, taking out a briar pipe, asked if the President minded if he smoked. Everyone laughed. No, Truman said, he supposed he had had more smoke blown his way than any man alive.

The conference lasted less than two hours, during which Harriman, Bradley, Dean Rusk, and Philip Jessup each kept notes, and quite openly. A State Department stenographer, Vernice Anderson, who was sitting in an adjoining room just beyond one of the half doors, and could thus hear clearly most of what was said, also took notes in shorthand. She had been asked to wait outside until she was needed to type up a final communiqué at the close of the meeting, but she kept her shorthand record of the meeting “automatically,” as she later explained, because it seemed the thing to do. No one had told her to and no one had told her not to. Because she remained out of sight, she would be portrayed later by MacArthur’s admirers as a “planted” eavesdropper “lurking behind the door,” her presence decried as “playing politics at about its lowest level.” MacArthur was said to have been deeply offended when a transcript of the meeting, based on a composite of all the notes taken, including those by Anderson, was made public. Yet when MacArthur received copies of the transcript less than a week after the conference, he expressed no surprise or displeasure, and suggested no changes.

The meeting proceeded without formal agenda, and as MacArthur later wrote, no new policies or war strategies were proposed or discussed. But the discussion was broad-ranged, with MacArthur doing most of the talking, as Truman, referring only to a few handwritten notes, asked questions. As so often before, MacArthur’s performance was masterful. He seemed in full command of every detail and absolutely confident. “He was the most persuasive fellow I ever heard,” remembered Charlie Murphy; “indeed a military genius,” said Frank Pace. The time moved swiftly.

MacArthur had only good news to report. The situation in Korea was under control. The war, “the formal resistance,” would end by Thanksgiving. The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, would fall in a week. By Christmas he would have the Eighth Army back in Japan. By the first of the year, the United Nations would be holding elections, he expected, and American troops could be withdrawn entirely very soon afterwards. “Nothing is gained by military Occupation. All occupations are failures,” MacArthur declared, to which Truman nodded in agreement.

Truman’s first concern was keeping it a “limited” war. What were the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention, he asked. “Very little,” MacArthur said.

Had they interfered in the first or second months it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful of their intervention…. The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Of these probably not more than 100,000 to 125,000 are distributed along the Yalu River. They have no Air Force. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter.

The Russians, MacArthur continued, were a different matter. The Russians had an air force in Siberia and could put a thousand planes in action. A combination of Chinese ground troops and Russian airpower could pose a problem, he implied. But coordination of air support with operations on the ground was extremely difficult and he doubted they could manage it.

The support he had been given from Washington was surpassing, MacArthur stressed. “No commander in the history of war,” he said, looking around the table, “has ever had more complete and adequate support from all agencies in Washington than I have.”

How soon could he release a division for duty in Europe, Bradley wished to know. By January, MacArthur assured him.

Dean Rusk, concerned that the discussion was moving too fast, passed Truman a note suggesting he slow down the pace. Too brief a meeting, Rusk felt, would only fuel the cynicism of a press already dubious about the meeting. Truman scribbled a reply: “Hell, no! I want to get out of here before we get into trouble.”

Much of the time was taken up with questions concerning the rehabilitation of Korea, now that victory was at hand. There were questions about costs, concern over what to do about war criminals, a question from Bradley on what was to be done with some sixty thousand North Korean prisoners. (“They are the happiest Koreans in all Korea,” MacArthur said. “For the first time they are well fed and clean.”) Then, briefly, the discussion moved to the French effort against the Communists under Ho Chi Minh in Indochina, a situation Truman and MacArthur both found puzzling. MacArthur could not understand why the French couldn’t “clean it up” in a few months. He couldn’t understand it either, Truman said. Later, talking with Dean Rusk, MacArthur said that all the French needed was an aggressive general.

When Truman said there was no need for discussion of Formosa, since he and MacArthur had already talked “fully” about it and were in “complete agreement,” MacArthur said nothing—which suggests either that he and Truman covered more concerning Formosa than MacArthur’s VFW remarks, or, more likely, that MacArthur had no inclination to disagree now, no desire to say anything that might detract from the rosy picture he was painting or disrupt the harmony of the moment.

As to the need for additional United Nations troops, MacArthur would leave that for Washington to decide, and it was then, at about 9:05, that Truman called a halt.

“No one who was not here would believe we have covered so much ground as we have been actually able to cover,” he said. He suggested a break for lunch while a communiqué was prepared. But MacArthur declined, saying he was anxious to get back to Tokyo and would like to leave as soon as possible, which to some in the room seemed to border on rudeness. “Whether intended or not,” wrote Bradley, “it was insulting to decline lunch with the President, and I think Truman was miffed, although he gave no sign.”

“The communiqué should be submitted as soon as it is ready and General MacArthur can return immediately,” Truman said. The conference had lasted one hour, thirty-six minutes.

In later studies, some historians would write that Truman had traveled extremely far for not much. But to Truman, at the time, it had all been worth the effort. He was exuberant. He had never had a more satisfactory conference, he told the reporters present. Tony Leviero of The New York Times described him beaming “like an insurance salesman who had at last signed up an important prospect.”

As the communiqué was being drawn up, Truman and MacArthur, off to themselves, even talked politics. MacArthur asked the President whether he planned to run for reelection—the Emperor of Japan wished to know, MacArthur quickly added. Truman responded by asking MacArthur what his own political ambitions were.

“None whatever,” MacArthur said. “If you have a general running against you, his name will be Eisenhower, not MacArthur.”

Truman laughed. He liked and admired Eisenhower, considered him a friend, but, said Truman, “Eisenhower doesn’t know the first thing about politics.”

The communiqué, which MacArthur read and initialed, stressed “the very complete unanimity of view” that had made possible such rapid progress at the conference table and called MacArthur “one of America’s great soldier-statesmen.” At the airstrip, in a little ceremony just before boarding his plane, Truman said still more as he honored MacArthur with a Distinguished Service Medal. He praised MacArthur for “his vision, his judgment, his indomitable will and unshakeable faith,” his “gallantry and tenacity” and “audacity in attack matched by few operations in history.”

Later, on the way home, in a speech at San Francisco carried worldwide by the Voice of America in twenty-six languages, Truman would refer repeatedly to MacArthur, the man who had written a “glorious new page” in military history. “It is fortunate for the world that we had the right man for this purpose—a man who is a very great soldier—General Douglas MacArthur.”

There was no substitute for personal conversation with the commander in the field who knows the problems there from firsthand experience, Truman said in the speech. But he had felt also a “pressing need” to make clear that there was “complete unity in the aims and conduct of our foreign policy.”

MacArthur, too, left Wake Island in high spirits. On the flight to Tokyo, according to Ambassador Muccio, MacArthur was at his “sparkling best,” “effervescent.” After listening to Truman’s San Francisco speech, he immediately cabled the President his warm approval.

The whole spirit of Wake Island was one of relief and exhilaration. The awful bloodshed in Korea, the suffering, was all but over, the war was won. If MacArthur said there was “very little” chance of the Chinese coming in, who, after Inchon, was to doubt his judgment, and particularly if what he said confirmed what was thought in Washington? (“On this one MacArthur and the rest of us were all wrong,” Dean Rusk would write in retrospect.) If Truman and MacArthur had disliked or distrusted one another before the meeting, they apparently did so no longer. If the conference had accomplished that alone, it had been a success.

As things looked late the morning of Sunday, October 15, 1950, on Wake Island, MacArthur would be winding up the war almost any day. “Come up to Pyongyang. It won’t be long now,” were his parting words to the Washington reporters who saw him off at the airstrip. The problems ahead in Korea, presumably, were to be problems only of peace and rehabilitation, problems of just the kind MacArthur, with his experience in postwar Japan, was equipped to handle.

For Truman, the Commander in Chief, his decision of June 30, to commit American arms and prestige to check aggression in Korea, the moves made to make it a United Nations effort, had never looked so sound. His “police action,” for all the dark hours of summer, had succeeded. The Communist advance was thrown back. He had matched words with deeds. He had done what he felt he must for the good of America and the world, made the right choices after all, chosen the right general, backed him, gambled on his audacity. And it had all worked. Korea, it seemed, could be included now with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, as among the proudest accomplishments of his presidency. With the Korean crisis settled, the war nearly over, the dreadful possibility of a larger world conflict was also passing, which, to Truman, exceeded all other considerations. If he was beaming like a successful insurance salesman, if MacArthur was “effervescent,” they had good reason.

Truman believed and often said that how a person stood in history had a lot to do with the timing of his death. Had he or MacArthur died then or shortly after—had one of their planes gone down, or either succumbed to heart failure—their place in history and their record of achievement would have looked quite different from what would follow.

They said goodbye in the glaring sunshine of midday at Wake Island as Truman boarded the Independence.

“Goodbye, sir,” MacArthur said. “Happy landing. It has been a real honor talking to you.”

It was their first and their last meeting. They never saw each other again.

III

By all signs Truman gave little thought to his own physical safety while President. When your time was up, it was up, was his feeling and it did not matter much what precautions were taken. He liked the Secret Service agents who watched over him, most of whom came from small towns or backgrounds much like his own and none of whom ever asked anything of him. “I like them more than all the top-notchers,” he once told Margaret. Particularly he enjoyed chatting with the two or three who regularly accompanied him on his morning walks. He knew where they came from, whether they were married or had children, which church they attended. “He would treat us almost like sons,” remembered one, Rex Scouten. “He talked nearly the whole time as we walked—about the Army [Truman liked the fact that Scouten, too, had been in the artillery], about his growing up in Missouri, and the Civil War. He’d go by a building and he’d tell you all about the building and why it was designed the way it was….”

His interest in them, they knew, was more than passing. When Truman learned, for example, that Floyd Boring’s wife had had a baby, he had another Secret Service man drive him to the hospital to visit with her and see the child.

But the unbroken presence of protectors, the feeling of being constantly under guard, grated on him. He never became accustomed to it. He would have much preferred less security than more. If after moving to Blair House he had any misgivings about the security problems it posed, he never said a word.

At midday on Wednesday, November 1, 1950, two weeks after the Wake Island conference, Truman returned to Blair House at the end of an extremely disquieting morning. According to a report from his new head of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, it had been “clearly established” that the forces now opposing U.N. troops in North Korea included Chinese Communist soldiers, their numbers estimated as high as fifteen to twenty thousand.

The day in Washington was unseasonably hot—the hottest November day on record, 85 degrees in the shade along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Truman joined Bess and Madge Wallace for a quiet lunch, then went upstairs for a nap. At 2:50 he was scheduled to leave for Arlington Cemetery, to speak at the unveiling of a statue of British Field Marshal Sir John Dill, a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II, who had died in Washington in 1944 as a result of his wartime service.

Because of the heat, Truman took off his clothes and stretched out on the four-poster bed in his underwear, the window open.

The rest of the house grew quiet. Bess and her mother had retired to another room. Downstairs, the front door stood open to the street, the screen door latched. On duty in the comparative cool of the front hall was Secret Service Agent Stuart Stout.

“The house was so quiet, the day so close, it was a struggle to stay awake,” remembered the assistant head usher, J. B. West, who with head usher Howell Crim was in their small office just off the hall.

Outside, three White House police were posted, all sweltering in winter uniforms. Except for the heat, the afternoon was passing like any other. People strolled by beneath the President’s window. Streetcars and automobiles moved along in the bright sun of the avenue. Autumn leaves floated down from the trees.

To ease the monotony somewhat, the guards worked on a rotation system, “the push,” and at 2:15 the push began, placing Private Donald Birdzell at the bottom of the front steps, just under the canopy, where he stood facing the street. In two white-painted guard booths on the sidewalk to his left and right, about 30 yards apart, were two more uniformed White House guards. In the booth to the left, east toward Lafayette Square, Private Joseph Davidson sat talking with Agent Floyd Boring. (“I’d come out more or less to chat,” Boring recalled. “[Davidson] had a pair of glasses on, and I’d never seen him with glasses on before…. I said, ‘Why the glasses? To see these girls going by here?’ ”)

In the guard booth up the sidewalk, to the right, was Private Leslie Coffelt.

A fourth White House policeman, Joseph Downs, who had just been relieved by Coffelt, was starting for the basement door when two slim, neatly dressed men approached Blair House from opposite directions, coming along the sidewalk with the other pedestrians. The time was 2:19.

The two looked so subdued and unobtrusive in their dark suits and hats that a clerk in the hotel near Union Station where they stayed the night before had mistaken them for divinity students. The man approaching from the west, toward Leslie Coffelt’s booth, was Griselio Torresola. He was twenty-five years old. The other, coming from the east, was Oscar Collazo, who was thirty-six. They were both from New York, both Puerto Ricans, and fanatic Puerto Rican nationalists. To bring attention to their cause they had decided to kill the President.

Torresola was armed with a German Luger. Collazo, who had never fired a pistol before, carried a German Walther P-38. Between them they had sixty-nine rounds of ammunition.

Torresola paused at the window of Coffelt’s booth and began saying something in a loud voice, apparently in an effort to divert attention from his partner, Collazo, who by then had walked directly past the other booth—past Davidson and Boring—and was heading straight for the Blair House stoop, where Donald Birdzell had his head turned, looking west toward Coffelt.

Birdzell would remember hearing a faint but unmistakable metallic click. Whirling about, he saw Collazo just eight or ten feet away, pointing the P-38 at him and trying to fire.

The gun went off, as Birdzell grabbed for his own pistol. Birdzell was hit in the right leg, but amazingly, instead of shooting back, and despite his leg, he had the presence of mind to run out into Pennsylvania Avenue, to draw the fire away from the President’s quarters. As he moved, Collazo pivoted and kept firing, hitting him again. Birdzell crumpled by the streetcar tracks, but turned on one knee and shot back.

By now gunfire was exploding on all sides. Torresola had stepped to the open door of the west sentry booth and opened up on Coffelt point-blank. With bullets ripping his chest and stomach, Coffelt went down and began slowly to bleed to death. Torresola spun and fired at Joseph Downs, the White House policeman at the basement door, hitting him three times. Downs somehow struggled through the door yelling for help.

“It all happened so rapidly…I didn’t really know what the hell was going on,” Floyd Boring remembered. There were screams, shouting. People everywhere were running for cover. The noise of gunfire was terrifying—twenty-seven shots in two minutes.

Boring and Davidson opened fire on Collazo. A bullet clipped his ear, another his hat. With his second shot Boring hit him in the chest and Collazo went face down on the sidewalk, legs splayed out beside the front step, his hat still on.

Torresola, meantime, had wheeled and fired at Birdzell out by the streetcar tracks. Struck now in his good leg, Birdzell pitched forward, yet kept firing, his pistol braced on the pavement at arm’s length. Then the dying Leslie Coffelt somehow got hold of his own pistol and brought Torresola down with a single shot through the head.

With that, suddenly, it was over and for a few seconds, strangely silent. Then people came running from every direction—more police, photographers, Secret Service agents and reporters from the White House, a crowd of hundreds.

In the front hall, Agent Stout, who had rushed to the gun cabinet in the usher’s office, stood ready now at the front door with a Thompson submachine gun.

J. B. West, stepping into the hall, saw the First Lady on the stairway. What was happening, she asked. There had been a shooting, West said. He remembered her gazing at him, “eyes wide,” then hurrying back up the stairs.

Truman, in the roar of gunfire, had jumped from his bed and rushed to the window. Seeing him, someone on the sidewalk had shouted, “Get back! Get back!” until he moved away.

Ambulances nosed through the crowd outside. A rumor spread that the President had been murdered. Traffic backed up for blocks in every direction.

Birdzell lay motionless in the street, blood flowing onto the pavement from both legs. Coffelt was sprawled on his back beside his sentrybox. Downs, who had been dragged to a basement room, was asking for a priest.

Torresola was dead, doubled in a heap beneath a boxwood hedge. Collazo was still alive.

Truman quickly dressed and came downstairs. Looking out from the first floor, he could see a cluster of police bending over Collazo at the front stoop and Charlie Ross making his way through the police and up the steps. Would the President still be going to Arlington? “Why, of course,” Truman said.

In another fifteen minutes, he was on his way out the back door, and with seven or eight Secret Service men following immediately behind in a big open car, some of them hanging onto the sides, his limousine wheeled out of the driveway and sped across the Potomac.

At Arlington, the several hundred people gathered for the ceremonies saw Truman step from the car looking grim but calm. No one knew what had happened, until ten minutes later when a motorcycle messenger arrived to pick up a photographer’s film and immediately the word spread, a murmur running through the crowd. Standing beside the equestrian bronze of Sir John Dill, Truman kept to his prepared remarks as if nothing had happened. “It is important to the peace of the world to understand each other and have full faith in each other’s sincerity. That is all we ask. That is all we want….”

Only afterward, on hearing that Private Leslie Coffelt had died at the hospital, did Truman become extremely upset. As he would say later, when a plaque in Coffelt’s memory was placed on a new iron fence in front of Blair House, Coffelt had been one of the best-liked officers on the White House force.

Officers Birdzell and Downs eventually recovered from their wounds and returned to their jobs.

Ironically, Truman had done more for Puerto Rico than any previous President. He favored the right of the Puerto Rican people to determine their political relationship with the United States and had said so several times. He had named the first native Puerto Rican as governor of the island, and extended Social Security to the people of Puerto Rico.

“But Truman was…just a symbol of the system,” Oscar Collazo would insist in explanation. “You don’t attack the man, you attack the system.”

Convicted on four counts, including the murder of Coffelt, Collazo was sentenced to death in the electric chair. However, in 1952, and as a gesture to the people of Puerto Rico, Truman would commute the sentence to life imprisonment. In 1979, after twenty-nine years in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Collazo would be pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.

“A President has to expect these things,” Truman told reporters as he set off on his morning walk the day after the shooting. The outing looked casual, as though nothing had changed. Truman, stepping out at his usual brisk pace through the quiet city, appeared no different than on other mornings. But he was being watched over now by at least a dozen more Secret Service men in addition to the four immediately beside him—some walking well ahead or across the street, others, more heavily armed, following in a slow-moving automobile.

Keeping his regular scheduled press conference that afternoon, Truman insisted in response to questions that he had never been in danger. The only thing one need worry about, he told Admiral Leahy, was bad luck and that was something he never had. But he kept thinking about what had happened. It had all been so “unnecessary,” he said in a note to Acheson, “and the people who really got hurt were wonderful men.” The gunmen had been fools, “stupid as they could be.” “I know I could organize a better program than they put on,” he wrote, a sign that he knew perfectly well how differently things might have gone. His plan to attend the ceremony at Arlington had been in the morning paper. The assassins had only to have waited another twenty minutes, until he came out of the house.

On November 5, in St. Louis, on his way to Independence to vote, he sat in a hotel room writing in his diary:

[Leaving the airport] we started for St. Louis in a closed car. It was cold and the wind was northwest. People all along the way wanted to see the President—not me! Some saw me and the usual “There he is!” “Hello, Harry” was the result. Most of the people in the U.S.A. are kindly happy people and they show it by smiling, waving and shouting….

Because two crackpots or crazy men tried to shoot me a few days ago my good and efficient guards are nervous. So I’m trying to be as helpful as I can. Would like very much to take a walk this morning but the S[ecret] S[ervice]…and the “Boss” and Margie are worried about me—so I won’t take my usual walk.

It’s hell to be President….

He was “really a prisoner now,” he told Ethel Noland. The “grand guards” protecting him at Blair House had never had a fair chance. “The one who was killed was just cold bloodedly murdered before he could do anything.”

In Washington henceforth there would be no more walking across the street from Blair House to the West Wing. Truman would be driven back and forth in a bulletproof car with a roof that, as he said, would “turn a grenade,” a floor to “stop a land mine.”

He had always imagined he might take care of any would-be assassin, as had Andrew Jackson, who, when shot at by a deranged assailant at the Capitol, went after the man with his cane.

IV

From November 1, the day of the assassination attempt, through December 1950 was a dreadful passage for Truman. Omar Bradley was to call these sixty days among the most trying of his own professional career, more so even than the Battle of the Bulge. For Truman it was the darkest, most difficult period of his presidency.

The off-year elections, though nothing like the humiliation of 1946, were a sharp setback for the Democrats and in some ways extremely discouraging. Local issues were decisive in many congressional contests, but so also were concerns over the war in Korea and what Time referred to as the suspicion that the State Department had “played footsie with Communists.” “The Korean death trap,” charged Joe McCarthy, “we can lay at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President, if you please.” Senator Wherry said the blood of American boys was on Acheson’s shoulders. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen, running against Senator Scott Lucas, the Democratic majority leader, said, “All the piety of the administration will not put any life into the bodies of the young men coming back in wooden boxes.”

McCarthy, who was not up for reelection, had vowed to get Lucas and Millard Tydings both, and both senators, two of the administration’s strongest supporters, went down in defeat. Tydings especially was the victim of distortions and lies. In the campaign in Maryland, McCarthy and his aides circulated faked photographs showing Tydings chatting with Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party. In the California Senate race, Richard Nixon defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas by calling her, among other things, “pink down to her underwear.”

One of the saddest things of all, Truman told a friend, was the way McCarthyism seemed to have an effect. In thirty years of marriage, Bess Truman had seldom seen him so downhearted, blaming himself for not keeping the pressure on McCarthy.

Fifty-two percent of the votes cast in the country had gone to the Republicans, 42 percent to the Democrats. The Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress, but the Democratic majority in the Senate had been cut from twelve to two, in the House from seventeen to twelve. And though Truman had taken no time for campaign speeches, except for one in his own state, in St. Louis on the way home to vote, the outcome was seen as a personal defeat. In the Senate, for all practical purposes, he no longer had control. Furthermore, Arthur Vandenberg, upon whom Truman had counted so long for nonpartisan support, was seriously ill and not likely to return.

“Some Republicans interpret the election as meaning that you should ask for the resignation of Mr. Acheson,” a reporter said at his next press conference.

Mr. Acheson would remain, “Period,” said Truman.

Was he blue over the elections? Not at all, he said. And in truth, the elections were a minor worry compared to what was happening in Korea.

That Chinese troops were in the war was by now an established fact, though how many there were remained in doubt. MacArthur estimated thirty thousand, and whatever the number, his inclination was to discount their importance. But in Washington concern mounted. To check the flow of Chinese troops coming across the Yalu, MacArthur requested authority to bomb the Korean ends of all bridges on the river, a decision Truman approved, after warning MacArthur against enlarging the war and specifically forbidding air strikes north of the Yalu, on Chinese territory.

Another cause of concern was MacArthur’s decision, in the drive north, to divide his forces, sending the Tenth Corps up the east side of the peninsula, the Eighth Army up the west—an immensely risky maneuver that the Joint Chiefs questioned. But MacArthur was adamant, and it had been just such audacity after all that had worked the miracle at Inchon. “Then there were those,” wrote Matthew Ridgway, “who felt that it was useless to try to check a man who might react to criticism by pursuing his own way with increased stubbornness and fervor.”

With one powerful, “end-the-war” offensive, one “massive comprehensive envelopment,” MacArthur insisted, the war would be quickly won. As always, he had absolute faith in his own infallibility, and while no such faith was to be found at the Pentagon or the White House, no one, including Truman, took steps to stop him.

Bitter cold winds from Siberia swept over North Korea, as MacArthur flew to Eighth Army headquarters on the Chongchon River to see the attack begin. “If this operation is successful,” he said within earshot of correspondents, “I hope we can get the boys home for Christmas.”

The attack began Friday, November 24, the day after Thanksgiving. Four days later, on Tuesday, November 28, in Washington, at 6:15 in the morning, General Bradley telephoned the President at Blair House to say he had “a terrible message” from MacArthur.

“We’ve got a terrific situation on our hands,” Truman told his staff a few hours later at the White House, having waited patiently through the morning meeting, dealing with routine matters, as those around the room brought up whatever was on their minds.

The Chinese had launched a furious counterattack, with a force of 260,000 men, Truman said. MacArthur was going over on the defensive. “The Chinese have come in with both feet.”

They were all the same, familiar faces around him—Charlie Ross, Matt Connelly, Harry Vaughan, Charlie Murphy, Bill Hassett, George Elsey, William Hopkins—with one addition, the author John Hersey, who was writing a “profile” of the President for The New Yorker and had been given permission to follow him through several working days, routine working days presumably. (It was unprecedented access for a writer, but Hersey had appealed to Truman on the grounds that what he wrote might be a contribution to history.)

Truman paused. The room was still. The shock of what he had said made everyone sit stiff and silent. Everything that had seemed to be going so well in Korea, all the heady prospects since Inchon, the soaring hopes of Wake Island were gone in an instant. As Hersey wrote, everyone present knew at once what the news meant for Truman, who would be answerable, “alone and inescapably,” for whatever happened now in Korea. The decision to go beyond the 38th parallel had been his, just as the decision to risk the Inchon invasion had been his. Only this time the results had been different.

William Hopkins, the executive clerk, handed the President a stack of letters for his signature, most of them responses to correspondence about the assassination attempt. (In the weeks following the attempt, Truman received some seven thousand letters expressing gratitude that he was unharmed. He insisted that each of these be answered and he personally signed all seven thousand letters of acknowledgment.) As he wrote his name again and again, working down the pile, he talked of the “vilifiers” who wanted to tear the country apart. The news from Korea meant the enemy had misjudged American resolve. There had been an article in Pravda about deep divisions in Washington, he said. “We can blame the liars for the fix we are in this morning…. What has appeared in our press, along with the defeat of leaders in the Senate, has made the world believe that the American people are not behind our foreign policy….”

He began outlining the immediate steps to be taken to inform the Cabinet and the Congress. Thus far he had shown no emotion. But now he paused again, and suddenly, as Hersey recorded, all his “driven-down” feelings seemed to pour into his face.

His mouth drew tight, his cheeks flushed. For a moment, it almost seemed as if he would sob. Then in a voice that was incredibly calm and quiet, considering what could be read on his face—a voice of absolute personal courage—he said, “This is the worst situation we have had yet. We’ll just have to meet it as we’ve meet all the rest….”

There were questions. Was the figure really 260,000 Chinese? Yes, Truman replied. Probably nothing should be announced yet, said Ross. Truman agreed. For the staff, watching him, the moment was extremely painful. Unquestionably, as he had said, it was the worst news he had received since becoming President.

But then he seemed to recover himself, sitting up squarely in his high-backed chair. “We have got to meet this thing,” he said, his voice low and confident. “Let’s go ahead now and do our jobs as best we can.”

“We face an entirely new war,” MacArthur declared. It had been all of three days since the launching of his “end-the-war” offensive, yet all hope of victory was gone. The Chinese were bent on the “complete destruction” of his army. “This command…is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.”

In following messages MacArthur called for reinforcements of the “greatest magnitude,” including Chinese Nationalist troops from Formosa. His own troops were “mentally fatigued and physically battered.” The directives under which he was operating were “completely outmoded by events.” He wanted a naval blockade of China. He called for bombing the Chinese mainland. He must have the authority to broaden the conflict, MacArthur insisted, or the administration would be faced with a disaster.

That same day, November 28, at three o’clock in the afternoon, a crucial meeting Of the National Security Council took place in the Cabinet Room—one of the most important meetings of the Truman years. For it was there and then in effect, with Truman presiding, that the decision was made not to let the crisis in Korea, however horrible, flare into a world war. It was a decision as fateful as the one to go into Korea in the first place, and stands among the triumphs of the Truman administration, considering how things might have gone otherwise.

General Bradley opened the discussion with a review of the bleak situation on the battlefield. Alben Barkley, who rarely spoke at such meetings, asked bitterly why MacArthur had promised to have “the boys home for Christmas”—how he could ever have said such a thing in good faith. Army Secretary Pace said that MacArthur was now denying he had made the statement. Truman warned that in any event they must do nothing to cause the commander in the field to lose face before the enemy.

When Marshall spoke, he sounded extremely grave. American involvement in Korea should continue as part of a United Nations effort, Marshall said. The United States must not get “sewed up” in Korea, but find a way to “get out with honor.” There must be no war with China. That was clear. “To do this would be to fall into a carefully laid Russian trap. We should use all available political, economic and psychological action to limit the war.”

Limit the war. Don’t fall into a trap. The same points would be made over and over in time to come. “There was no doubt in my mind,” Truman would write, “that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap.”

“We can’t defeat the Chinese in Korea,” said Acheson. “They can put in more than we can.” Concerned that MacArthur might overextend his operations, Acheson urged “very, very careful thought” concerning air strikes against Manchuria. If this became essential to save American troops, then it would have to be done, but if American attacks succeeded in Manchuria, the Russians would probably come to the aid of their Chinese ally.

The thing to do, the “imperative step,” said Acheson, was to “find a line that we can hold, and hold it.”

Behind everything they faced was the Soviet Union, “a somber consideration.” The threat of a larger war, wrote Bradley, was closer than ever, and it was this, the dread prospect of a global conflict with Russia erupting at any hour, that was on all their minds.

The news was so terrible and came with such suddenness that it seemed almost impossible to believe. The last thing anyone had expected at this point was defeat in Korea. The evening papers of November 28 described “hordes of Chinese Reds” surging through a widening gap in the American Eighth Army’s right flank, “as the failure of the Allied offensive turned into a dire threat for the entire United Nations line.” The whole Eighth Army was falling back. “200,000 OF FOE ADVANCE UP TO 23 MILES IN KOREA” read the banner headline across The New York Times the following day. The two calamities most dreaded by military planners—the fierce Korean winter and massive intervention by the Chinese—had fallen on the allied forces at once.

What had begun was a tragic, epic retreat—some of the worst fighting of the war—in howling winds and snow and temperatures as much as 25 degrees below zero. The Chinese not only came in “hordes” but took advantage of MacArthur’s divided forces, striking both on their flanks. The Eighth Army under General Walton Walker was reeling back from the Chongchon River, heading for Pyongyang. The choice was retreat or annihilation. In the northeast the ordeal of the Tenth Corps was still worse. The retreat of the 1st Marine Division—from the Chosin Reservoir forty miles to the port of Hungnam and evacuation—would be compared to Xenophon’s retreat of the immortal ten thousand or Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow.

“A lot of hard work was put in,” Truman would remember of his own days in Washington.

For most of his time in office, Truman had enjoyed extremely good relations with the working press of Washington. He genuinely liked and respected most reporters—made himself available to them for questioning at regular weekly press conferences, or on his morning walks to any who felt up to it. “Remember, photographers are working people who sell pictures,” he once advised Margaret. “Help them sell them. Reporters are people who sell stories—help them sell stories.” And in turn reporters liked and respected him more perhaps than he realized. When he stepped before them in the Indian Treaty Room, at his press conference the day after the assassination attempt, the long applause they gave him was from the heart.

“No President of the last 50 years was so widely and warmly liked by reporters as Mr. Truman,” Cabell Phillips would write.

He “used” the press occasionally as most Presidents have done to test the wind. But he never tried to “con” them with flattery and devious favoritism…. Harry Truman worked less to ingratiate himself with people but succeeded better at it than any important public figure I have ever known. He did it, I think, because he was so utterly honest with and about himself, so free of what we call “side” or “put on.”

Press Secretary Charlie Ross, too, deserved part of the credit for such feelings, for never had he thought it necessary to “sell” Truman to them.

It was the great press lords of the day, the powerful publishers and editors, and several of the syndicated columnists—the “paid columnists,” the “guttersnipe columnists”—whom Truman despised: “What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts, editor of the Kansas City Star, had written in patronizing fashion on Truman’s first day in office. Henry Luce considered Truman the “reductio ad absurdum of the common man.” Michael Straight, editor of The New Republic, had written in 1948 that Truman had “a known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearson had all hit him hard, and in ways he would not forget.

Privately he spoke of the lot with vivid contempt. Roy Roberts was “a fat no-good can of lard,” Pegler “a rat,” Winchell and Pearson “newsliars.” The Alsop brothers were “the Sop Sisters.” He detested the newspapers of the Hearst and Scripps-Howard chains, and the lowest of all, still, was Colonel Robert (“Bertie”) McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. As Truman saw things, McCormick and his kind made their fortunes as character assassins, while those who did the dirty work for them, like some of the columnists, were no better than whores in that they offered their favors for money. “The prostitutes of the mind in my opinion…are much more dangerous to the future of mankind than the prostitutes of the body,” he wrote in a letter he never mailed to Frank Kent, a columnist for the Washington Star whom he particularly disliked. That November, hearing from a friend that a Chicago Tribune writer named Holmes was in Kansas City asking questions about Truman and his family, Truman wrote in reply, “You might tell the gentleman named Holmes that if he comes out with a pack of lies about Mrs. Truman or any of my family his hide won’t hold shucks when I get through with him.”

But for those who covered him daily at the White House, who had traveled with him in 1948, who had been to Key West, he had no such feelings—Cabell Phillips and Tony Leviero of The New York Times, Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, Merriman Smith of United Press, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, Robert Nixon of the International News Service, Joe Short of the Baltimore Sun. And it was they, his friends, not the “newsliars” or the Bertie McCormicks, who again stood to ask their questions at a sensational press conference the morning of November 30, 1950, when Truman stumbled into still more trouble, blundering as he had never before with reporters, his remarks sending shock waves around the world.

The Indian Treaty Room was packed—more than two hundred stood as he came in—and at first all went well. He began by reading a prepared text, a strong, compelling statement of policy.

Neither the United States nor the United Nations had any aggressive intentions against China. What was happening in Korea, however, was part of a worldwide pattern of Russo-Communist aggression and consequently the world was threatened now with a serious crisis.

As he had once decided to take a stand at Berlin, Truman was now resolved to stay in Korea, and he said so. He was not bombastic, he was not eloquent, only clear and to the point.

We may suffer reverses as we have suffered them before. But the forces of the United Nations have no intention of abandoning their mission in Korea….

We shall continue to work in the United Nations for concerted action to halt this aggression in Korea. We shall intensify our efforts to help other free nations strengthen their defenses in order to meet the threat of aggression elsewhere. We shall rapidly increase our military strength.

The statement had been worked over with extreme care by a dozen or more of the White House staff and State Department. It said nothing about the atomic bomb. The subject of the bomb had never even been discussed during preparation of the statement.

But then the questions began, reporters rising one by one, Folliard of the Post first asking Truman if he had any comments on the criticism of MacArthur in the European press.

“They are always for a man when he is winning, but when he is in a little trouble,” Truman replied, “they all jump on him with what ought to be done, which they didn’t tell him before.” General MacArthur was doing “a good job.”

Taking an exaggeratedly deep breath, Folliard then said the particular criticism was that MacArthur had exceeded his authority, went beyond the point he was supposed to go.

“He did nothing of the kind,” Truman snapped.

Other reporters began pressing him. What if the United Nations were to authorize MacArthur to launch attacks across the Yalu into Manchuria?

Truman stood erect as always, his fingertips pressing on a tabletop as he spoke. Sometimes between questions he would sip from a glass of water or twist the heavy gold Masonic ring on his left hand.

“We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.”

Did that include the atomic bomb?

“That,” said Truman unhesitatingly, “includes every weapon we have.”

Did this mean there was “active consideration” of use of the bomb?

The room was still. The topic that had never been considered appropriate for a press conference had suddenly become the focal point. Truman should have cut off discussion of the bomb before this. But he seems not to have understood where the questions were leading him, while the reporters saw no reason to refrain from pressing him, if, as it appeared, he meant to rattle the bomb a little.

“There has always been active consideration of its use,” Truman replied, adding, as he shook his head sadly, that he did not want to see it used. “It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”

Merriman Smith, sensing that the President had said more than he meant to, offered him a chance to back off by asking for clarification. “Did we understand you clearly that the use of the bomb is under active consideration?”

Yet Truman insisted: “Always has been. It is one of our weapons.”

Did this mean use against military objectives or civilian, another of the veteran White House press, Robert Nixon, started to ask, but Truman cut him off, saying, “It’s a matter that the military people will have to decide. I’m not a military authority that passes on those things.”

The correspondent for NBC, Frank Bourgholtzer, wished him to be more specific.

“Mr. President, you said this depends on United Nations action. Does that mean we wouldn’t use the atomic bomb except on a United Nations authorization?”

“No, it doesn’t mean that at all,” Truman shot back. “The action against Communist China depends on the action of the United Nations. The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has.”

He had said far more than he ever intended and had been inaccurate besides, but the reporters had their story. The press conference ended at 10:30 A.M. By 10:47 a United Press bulletin was on the wire: President Truman said today that the United States has under consideration use of the atomic bomb in connection with the war in Korea. The Associated Press followed, adding that whether the bomb was used depended on American military command in the field, the clear implication being that the decision was being left to MacArthur. Huge headlines filled the early editions of the afternoon papers.

Truman’s answers had been devastatingly foolish, the press conference a fiasco. The White House was besieged with calls. An exhausted Eben Ayers, writing privately that night, would describe it as one of the “wildest days” ever. The reaction in Europe was extreme alarm, and especially in Britain, where the news threw the House of Commons into a state of panic such as old-time members had never seen. Acheson hurried to the White House with the draft of a “clarifying” statement. Charlie Ross, under greater pressure than at any time since becoming press secretary, was called into the Oval Office to lend a hand in “damage control.” The statement, ready by mid-afternoon, said that while “the use of any weapon is always implicit in the very possession of that weapon,” only the President, by law, could authorize use of the atomic bomb, and “no such authorization had been, given.” Ross, as he presented the statement, looked and sounded completely spent, the circles under his eyes deeper and darker even than usual, his voice husky. The damage, he knew, had already been done.

By late afternoon came word from London that Prime Minister Clement Attlee was on his way to “confer” with the President. “PRESIDENT WARNS WE WOULD USE ATOM BOMB IN KOREA,” said the front page of The New York Times the next morning. “NO NO NO,” ran a headline in the Times of India.

The air of crisis rapidly compounded. The next morning, Friday, December 1, Truman met with the congressional leadership in the Cabinet Room to hear Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA, explain before a huge map of the Soviet Union and its satellites how events in Korea related to events in Europe. The Russians, Smith reported, had just completed maneuvers involving more than half a million men and consolidated their Siberian forces under a single command, an unusual step that “deserved watching.”

There were joint State-Defense “crisis meetings” in the War Room at the Pentagon later in the day and again on Sunday, December 3, some six hours of talk.

As Acheson would write, all the President’s advisers, civilian and military, knew something was badly wrong in Korea, other than just the onslaught of the Chinese. There were questions about MacArthur’s morale, grave concern over MacArthur’s strategy and whether on the actual battlefield a “new hand” was needed to replace General Walker. It was quite clear, furthermore, that MacArthur, the Far East Commander—contrary to the President’s reassuring remarks at his press conference—had indeed deliberately disobeyed a specific order from the Joint Chiefs to use no non-Korean forces close to the Manchurian border.

But no changes in strategy were ordered. No “new hand” replaced Walker. No voices were raised against MacArthur. Regrettably, the President was ill-advised, Bradley later observed. He, Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, had all “failed the President.” Here, in a crucial few days, said Acheson later, they missed their chance to halt the march to disaster in Korea. Acheson was to lament their performance for the rest of his life. Truman would never put any blame on any of them, but Acheson would say Truman had deserved far better. “I have the unhappy conviction,” Acheson wrote nearly twenty years later, “that none of us, myself prominently included, served him as he was entitled to be served.”

Matthew Ridgway would “well remember” his mounting impatience “that dreary Sunday, December 3,” as hour after hour in the War Room discussion continued over the ominous situation in Korea.

Much of the time the Secretaries of State and Defense participated in the talks, with no one apparently willing to issue a flat order to the Far East Commander to correct a state of affairs that was going from bad to disastrous. Yet the responsibility and authority clearly resided right there in the room….

Unable to contain himself any longer, Ridgway spoke up, saying immediate action must be taken. They owed it to the men in the field and “to the God to whom we must answer for those men’s lives,” to stop talking and do something. For the first time, Acheson later wrote, “someone had expressed what everyone thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” But of the twenty men who sat at the table, including Acheson, and twenty more along the walls behind, none spoke. The meeting ended without a decision.

Why didn’t the Joint Chiefs just send orders and tell MacArthur what to do, Ridgway asked General Vandenberg afterward. Because MacArthur would not obey such orders, Vandenberg replied.

Ridgway exploded. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” he said. But Vandenberg, with an expression Ridgway remembered as both puzzled and amazed, only walked away.

The day following, in another closed session, this time at the State Department, Dean Rusk would propose that MacArthur be relieved of command. But again, no one chose to make further comment.

MacArthur, meanwhile, was being taken to task by the press, as he had never been. Time, which had long glorified him, charged him with being responsible for one of the worst military disasters in history. The “colossal military blunder” in Korea, declared an editorial in the New York Herald-Tribune, had shown that MacArthur would “no longer be accepted as the final authority on military matters.” Unused to such criticism, his immense vanity wounded, MacArthur started issuing statements of his own to the press. He denied that his strategy had precipitated the Chinese invasion and said his inability to defeat the new enemy was due to restrictions imposed by Washington that were “without precedent.”

Truman did not hold MacArthur accountable for the failure of the November offensive. But he deplored MacArthur’s way of excusing the failure, and the damage his statements could do abroad, to the degree that they implied a change in American policy. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” he would write much later.

As it was, he ordered that all military officers and diplomatic officials henceforth clear with the State Department all but routine statements before making them public, “and…refrain from direct communications on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, and other publicity media.” Dated December 6, the order was widely and correctly seen as directed to MacArthur. He was still expected to express his opinions freely—it was his duty to express his opinions—but only within the councils of the government.

Truman did not relieve the Far East Commander, he later explained, because he knew no general could be a winner every day and because he did not wish to have it appear that MacArthur was being fired for failing.

What he might have done had Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs spoken up and insisted that MacArthur be relieved is another question and impossible to answer.

For now the tragedy in Korea overshadowed everything. If MacArthur was in trouble, then everything possible must be done to help. “We must get him out of it if we can,” Truman wrote in his diary late the night of December 2, following an intense session at Blair House with Acheson, Marshall, and Bradley that had left him feeling desperately low. “The conference was the most solemn one I’ve had since the Atomic Bomb conference in Berlin.”

The talk had been of evacuating all American troops—of an American Dunkirk in Korea after all. Marshall was not even sure such an operation would succeed, should the Chinese bring in their own airpower. “It looks very bad,” Truman wrote.

Yet bad as it was, there was no mood of panic, and this, as those around him would later attest, was principally because of Truman’s own unflinching response. “Mr. President, the Chinese simply must not be allowed to drive us out of Korea,” Acheson said at one point, when things looked darkest, and Truman calmly agreed. When Clement Attlee arrived in Washington and argued, in effect, that the Far East should be abandoned in order to save Europe, Truman said no.

The bloody retreat in Korea continued. Pyongyang fell “to overwhelming masses of advancing Chinese,” as the papers reported. General Walker’s Eighth Army was heading for the 38th parallel. “World War III moves ever closer,” said Life. “The Chinese Communist armies assaulting our forces…are as truly the armies of the Soviet Union as they would be if they wore the Soviet uniform.” Everywhere in Washington the talk was of the “desperateness” of the situation. Senator McCarthy called on Acheson and Marshall both to resign and talked of impeaching Truman. But Truman remained calm and steady. “I’ve had conference after conference on the jittery situation facing this country,” he wrote in his diary. “Attlee, Formosa, Communist China, Chiang Kai-shek, Japan, Germany, France, India, etc. I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here. I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”

[The President] thought that if we abandoned Korea the South Koreans would all be murdered and that we could not face that in view of the fact that they have fought bravely on our side and we have put in so much to help them [read the official minutes of his discussions with Attlee]. We may be subject to bombing from Manchuria by the Russians and Chinese Communists which might destroy everything we have. He was worried. He did not like to go into a situation such as this and then to admit that we were licked. He would rather fight to the finish. That was the way he had felt from the beginning…. He wanted to make it perfectly plain here that we do not desert our friends when the going is rough.

When Attlee urged that no decision be made on use of the atomic bomb without prior consultation with the British government, and possibly a formal agreement, Truman declined. He would not use the bomb without consulting the British government, Truman replied, but then neither would he state that in writing. If a man’s word wasn’t any good, he said, it wasn’t made better by putting it on paper.

The goal of uniting Korea by force had been abandoned. The best hope now was to arrange an armistice back at the 38th parallel, and to this end the British agreed to help through the United Nations. On the policy that the war must not be widened, Truman and Attlee were in full agreement.

Attlee arrived in Washington on Monday, December 4. Little was said to the press about the substance of the first day’s meeting, but at the end of the second day, Tuesday, December 5, in response to the pressures on him to release something, Charlie Ross met with some forty reporters at the White House. It was early evening, and Ross, like the President and the prime minister, was planning to attend a conceit by Margaret Truman scheduled to begin in another few hours at Constitution Hall.

Limited as to how much he could say, Ross took time to describe in detail the luncheon held for the prime minister on board the Williamsburg, and with mock patience, spelled out such terms as “au jus” for the benefit of the reporters. “Charlie,” wrote Eben Ayers, “seemed in good form….”

The briefing over, Ross agreed to repeat the essence of what he had said for Frank Bourgholtzer and the NEC television crew. A microphone was set up on his desk. As he waited, Ross lit a cigarette and leaning back in his chair, smiled at his secretary, Myrtle Bergheim.

“Don’t mumble,” she kidded him.

“You know I always speak very distinctly,” he joked, then fell over sideways.

Bourgholtzer thought he was clowning. Myrtle Bergheim grabbed for the phone and called Wallace Graham, whose office was on the floor below and who immediately dashed upstairs. But Charlie Ross was already dead of a coronary occlusion.

In the tribute he wrote shortly afterward in longhand, alone at his desk in the Oval Office, Truman said:

The friend of my youth, who became a tower of strength when the responsibilities of high office so unexpectedly fell to me, is gone. To collect one’s thoughts to pay tribute to Charles Ross…is not easy. I knew him as a boy and as a man….

Patriotism and integrity, honor and honesty, lofty ideals and nobility of intent were his guides and ordered his life from boyhood onward. He saw life steady and saw it whole…

But when Truman walked down the corridor to the press lounge where the reporters waited, he found he was unable to read what he had written. His voice broke on the first sentence.

“Ah, hell,” he said. “I can’t read this thing. You fellows know how I feel anyway…” He turned and with tears running down his face walked back to his office.

Ross had been sixty-five, a year younger than Truman. As Wallace Graham now revealed, Ross had had two or three prior mild heart attacks, but had refused to retire, preferring to remain on the job.

Concerned that the news of Ross’s death would be too upsetting for Margaret before she went on stage, Truman gave orders that she was to be told nothing until after the concert, a decision she would later resent. Had she known, she could have said something in tribute to Ross, or possibly changed her repertoire.

The President and First Lady accompanied the prime minister to Constitution Hall, where all 3,500 seats were taken, the place aglow with a “brilliant audience.” When Margaret came on stage, radiant in pink satin, and made her bow to the presidential box, Truman smiled and applauded. No President had ever been such a frequent concertgoer in Washington. He was a “regular” at Constitution Hall, at times, if the program included Mozart or Chopin, bringing the score with him. But tonight, even with his “baby” on stage, Truman looked extremely downcast.

She sang a light program that included selections from Schumann, Schubert, and a Mozart aria from The Marriage of Figaro. She drew waves of applause and was called back for four encores. A complimentary review in the Washington Times-Herald the next day would say she sang “better than ever before in her brief career.” The Mozart aria was “fresh” and “unforced,” her voice “charming.”

“Afterward, Dad was effusive, even for him,” she herself would write. “He hugged me and said he had never heard me sing better.”

But others in the audience had found the performance wanting. She was “really pretty bad that night,” recalled John Hersey. “She had a nice voice, but somebody, her coach, must have been pushing her too far.” And the Times-Herald review was not the one her father saw first thing the next morning.

At Blair House at 5:30 A.M. Truman opened the Washington Post to a review in the second section, page 12, by music critic Paul Hume. “Margaret Truman, soprano, sang in Constitution Hall last night,” it began.

Miss Truman is a unique American phenomenon with a pleasant voice of little size and fair quality. She is extremely attractive on stage…. Yet Miss Truman cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time—more last night than at any time we have heard her in past years. There are few moments during her recital when one can relax and feel confident that she will make her goal, which is the end of the song.

Miss Truman has not improved in the years we have heard her…she still cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish.

She communicates almost nothing of the music she presents…. And still the public goes and pays the same price it would for the world’s finest singers….

It is an extremely unpleasant duty to record such unhappy facts about so honestly appealing a person. But as long as Miss Truman sings as she has for three years, and does today, we seem to have no recourse unless it is to omit comment on her programs altogether.

It was a truly scathing review, though many of its harshest criticisms had been expressed before and Margaret, for some time now, had been advised by the Wagnerian opera star Helen Traubel not to rush her career, that her voice was as yet too small and inexperienced. Traubel, who liked Margaret and greatly admired her determination, said she needed five more years of study, at the least. When Traubel stressed this to the President, insisting that Margaret be able to stand on her own and not rely on his position, Truman, according to Traubel’s later account, banged his fist on the desk in firm agreement. “That’s exactly what I want.”

It was the timing of the review in the Post, more than what Paul Hume had said, that caused Truman to explode. If it hadn’t been the review, it might have been something else, given the stress he was under and his grief.

In the Blair House study, on a White House memo pad, he began what was to be his most notorious “longhand spasm” of all, a seething 150-word letter to Hume that he sealed in an envelope, addressed, fixed with a 3-cent stamp, and carried with him over to the White House.

To an elderly White House messenger named Samuel Mitchell, Truman asked if it was not an especially pleasant day. When Mitchell agreed, Truman suggested that he might like to take a stroll outside and on his way drop a letter in a mailbox on the street.

Had Charlie Ross still been on duty, the letter might have been stopped in time. Seeing the review, Ross would have known at once what Truman’s response would be. “Charlie Ross would never have let the Paul Hume letter get out,” George Elsey would say. “Charlie was…a calming fine influence on Truman, a tempering influence…much more than a press secretary.”

Though Hume and his editor at the Post decided to do nothing about the President’s letter, copies were apparently made and in short order it appeared in full on page 1 of the tabloid Washington News.

Mr. Hume: I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” [Truman here was quoting a phrase he had once heard used by Steve Early.]

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man [Hume was thirty-four] who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.

Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

[Westbrook] Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

Margaret, who was by then in Nashville continuing her tour, refused to accept the news. She was positive, she said, that her father would not use such language. “In the first place, he wouldn’t write a letter to Mr. Hume. My father wouldn’t have time to write a letter.” It was not hard to get hold of White House notepaper, she added, though she didn’t know why anyone would do such a thing and sign her father’s name.

Privately, Truman agreed he should never have written the letter, but now that he had, he would stand by it. To Margaret he said he had the right to be two people, the President and himself. It was Harry S. Truman the human being who wrote the letter, he told her.

But to the devoted White House staff, this inclination to see himself as both Truman the President and Truman the human being was not entirely a virtue or necessarily an admirable characteristic. Truman, remembered George Elsey, would forget that the rest of the country might not make such a differentiation. “When he would write a boiling hot letter to a music critic or would call Drew Pearson a son-of-a-bitch…behaving as Harry S. Truman, not as President of the United States…this caused embarrassment to him and I think reflected on the office, which, of course, was the last thing in the world he wanted to have happen.”

Earlier embarrassing outbursts had included the angry letter to Bernard Baruch during the 1948 campaign that caused Baruch to call Truman a “rude, uncouth, ignorant man,” and a letter in which Truman had said he wouldn’t appoint John L. Lewis dog-catcher. In another, a letter to a congressman written the previous summer, he had called the Marine Corps “the Navy’s Police Force” and accused the Marines of having “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s,” a charge for which he had publicly apologized. But nothing equaled the furor that erupted now over the Hume letter.

Hume himself, who greatly regretted that the letter had ever been made public, told reporters he was entirely sympathetic to the President. “I can only say that a man suffering the loss of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper.” But the gesture had little dampening effect.

The Chicago Tribune put the American people on notice that their President’s “mental competence and emotional stability” were in question. A flood of letters-to-the-editor in papers across the country expressed shock over the President’s “uncouthness,” his lack of self-control. “It cuts to the quick to realize that we have a President who isn’t even a gentleman,” read one of hundreds of letters to the White House, and this from an “out-and-out” Democrat. “Truly we have chosen a ‘common’ man President. Yes—very common.” There were suggestions also that Truman might begin to take himself and his daughter a bit less seriously. “My sympathy is with you about Margaret,” wrote one man. “My four children cannot sing either.”

While some who wrote took Truman’s side, saying he had done only what any loyal, loving father worth his salt would have under the circumstances, such sentiments were in the minority. White House letters and telegrams ran nearly two to one against him and many, from mothers and fathers for whom the incident could only be seen in the context of the tragedy in Korea, voiced a deep-seated outrage that had to have touched Truman more than he ever let on.

In times such as the present when the entire country is under abnormal duress and strain, your undue “concern” over your daughter’s music career is completely ridiculous.

Why don’t you apologize to Mr. Hume, and then persuade your daughter to give up singing and take up some kind of war work where the public will appreciate her efforts.

HOW CAN YOU PUT YOUR TRIVIAL PERSONAL AFFAIRS BEFORE THOSE OF ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE. OUR BOYS DIED WHILE YOUR INFANTILE MIND WAS ON YOUR DAUGHTER’S REVIEW. INADVERTENTLY YOU SHOWED THE WHOLE WORLD WHAT YOU ARE. NOTHING BUT A LITTLE SELFISH PIPSQUEAK.

How many of these Truman actually saw is not known. But one letter from a Mr. and Mrs. William Banning of New Canaan, Connecticut, he both saw and held on to. It had been mailed with a Purple Heart enclosed.

Mr. Truman:

As you have been directly responsible for the loss of our son’s life in Korea, you might just as well keep this emblem on display in your trophy room, as a memory of one of your historic deeds.

One major regret at this time is that your daughter was not there to receive the same treatment as our son received in Korea.

Truman put the letter in his desk drawer, keeping it at hand for several years.

V

It was Harry Truman’s longstanding conviction that if you did your best in life, did your “damndest” always, then whatever happened you would at least know it was not for lack of trying. But he was a great believer also in the parts played by luck and personality, forces quite beyond effort or determination. And though few presidents had ever worked so hard, or taken their responsibilities so to heart in time of crisis as Truman had since the start of the war in Korea, it was luck, good and bad, and the large influence of personality, that determined the course of events time and again, and never more so than in late December 1950, in the midst of his darkest passage.

Two days before Christmas, on an icy highway north of Seoul, General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, was killed when his jeep ran head on into an ROK Army truck. Walker’s replacement—as requested by MacArthur and approved immediately by Truman—was Matthew Ridgway, who left Washington at once, arriving in Tokyo on Christmas Day. At his meeting with MacArthur the next morning, Ridgway was told to use his own judgment at the front. “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” MacArthur, wrote Dean Acheson later, “never uttered wiser words.”

That afternoon, Ridgway landed at Taegu, and in the weeks following came a transformation no one had thought possible. Rarely has one individual made so marked a difference in so little time. With what Omar Bradley called “brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership,” Ridgway restored the fighting spirit of the Eighth Army and turned the tide of war as have few commanders in history.

Since the Chinese onslaught of November 28, the Eighth Army had fallen back nearly 300 miles, to a point just below the 38th parallel, and for a while, Ridgway had no choice but to continue the retreat. Press reports described U.N. forces rolling back down the two main roads through Seoul as a continuous flow morning until night. “The retreating ROK soldiers were the most miserable troops I ever saw,” wrote one correspondent. Millions of Korean refugees had also taken to the roads. “What are you going to do when the enemy doesn’t care how many men he loses?” an American officer was quoted. Seoul was in flames again. President Rhee and his government had fled to Pusan. Abandoning Seoul, Ridgway withdrew as far as Oswan, near the very point where the first green American troops had gone into action in July. Now, instead of the murderous heat of summer, they fought in murderous cold.

The mood in Washington remained bleak. MacArthur continued to urge a widening of the war—again he proposed bombing and blockading China and utilizing the troops of Chiang Kai-shek—and as before his proposals were rejected. Dire consequences would follow, he implied, unless policy were changed.

The troops are tired from a long and difficult campaign [MacArthur reported], embittered by the shameful propaganda which has falsely condemned their courage and fighting qualities…and their morale will become a serious threat in their battlefield efficiency unless the political basis upon which they are being asked to trade life for time is clearly delineated….

Truman found such messages “deeply disturbing.” When a general complained about the morale of his troops, observed George Marshall, the time had come for the general to look to his own morale.

The CIA was advising that it would be “infeasible under existing conditions…to hold for a protracted period a position in Korea.” The best hope was an armistice. His primary consideration, MacArthur was told, was the safety of his troops and the defense of Japan.

Under the extraordinary limitations and conditions imposed upon the command in Korea [MacArthur responded]…its military position is untenable, but it can hold, if overriding political considerations so dictate, for any length of time up to its complete destruction.

MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the “state of war” imposed by the Chinese, then to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.

The Joint Chiefs, too, told Truman that mass destruction of Chinese cities with nuclear weapons was the only way to affect the situation in Korea. But that choice was never seriously considered. Truman simply refused to “go down that trail,” in Dean Rusk’s words.

Only once do I recall serious discussion about using nuclear weapons [Rusk later wrote]: when we thought about bombing a large dam on the Yalu River. General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff, personally had gone to Korea, flown a plane over the dam, and dropped our biggest conventional bomb on it. It made only a little scar on the dam’s surface. He returned to Washington and told us that we could knock the dam out only with nuclear weapons. Truman refused.

Truman also still refused to reprimand MacArthur. Rather he treated MacArthur with what Acheson considered “infinite patience”—too much infinite patience, Acheson thought, having by now concluded that the general was “incurably recalcitrant” and fundamentally disloyal to the purposes of his Commander in Chief. On January 13, 1951, Truman sent MacArthur a long, thoughtful telegram, generously praising him for his “splendid leadership” and stressing again the great importance of the whole costly effort in Korea as a means “to demonstrate that aggression will not be accepted by us or by the United Nations.” But “great prudence” must be exercised, Truman stated.

Steps which might in themselves be fully justified and which might lend some assistance to the campaign in Korea would not be beneficial if they thereby involved Japan or Western Europe in large-scale hostilities….

In the worst case, it would be important that, if we must withdraw from Korea, it be clear to the world that that course is forced upon us by military necessity and that we shall not accept the result politically or militarily until the aggression has been rectified.

Truman had by now declared a national emergency, announced emergency controls on prices and wages, and still greater defense spending—to the amount of $50 billion, more than four times the defense budget at the start of the year. He had put Charles E. Wilson, head of the General Electric Company, in charge of a new Office of Defense Mobilization, appointed General Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of NATO, and in a radio and television address to the nation on December 15, called on every citizen “to put aside his personal interests for the good of the country.” So while doing all he could to avoid a wider war, he was clearly preparing for one.

As General Marshall later attested, “We were at our lowest point.”

But then the morning of Wednesday, January 17, Marshall telephoned Truman to read an astonishing report just in from General Joe Collins, who had flown to Korea for talks with Ridgway. “Eighth Army in good shape and improving daily under Ridgway’s leadership,” Marshall read. “Morale very satisfactory…Ridgway confident he can obtain two to three months’ delay before having to initiate evacuation…. On the whole Eighth Army now in position and prepared to punish severely any mass attack.”

Plainly MacArthur’s bleak assessment of the situation, his forecasts of doom, had been wrong and the effect of this realization was electrifying. As the word spread through the upper levels of government that day, it would be remembered, one could almost hear the sighs of relief. The long retreat of the Eighth Army—the longest retreat in American military history—had ended. On January 25, 1951, less than a month after Ridgway’s arrival, the Eighth Army began “rolling forward,” as he said.

Ridgway had gone about his business with drive and common sense, seeing first to the basic needs of his troops—better food, warmer winter clothing, improved Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH units). He emphasized close communications, less dependence on roads and highways, more attention to holding the high ground, and better, more punishing use of airpower and artillery. With his own confidence, his natural vitality, his frequent and conspicuous presence at the front, dressed for battle with two hand grenades strapped to his chest, he set a strong example. The Army had been Ridgway’s life, as it had been for his father before him. He was keenly intelligent, austere, superbly fit at age fifty-six, and already celebrated as the pioneer of the airborne assault in World War II. But Ridgway also understood MacArthur. He admired MacArthur’s abilities and knew his limitations. More important, Ridgway both understood and approved of the administration’s policy. Not only did he admire Harry Truman, he thought him a great and courageous man.

In Washington, every inclination now, as Bradley would write, was to look “beyond MacArthur” to Ridgway for reliable military judgments. Until now Washington had been almost entirely dependent upon MacArthur’s headquarters for information, dependent on MacArthur’s own opinions, his strategy. Now all that was over, his influence on planning was ended, a new phase of the war had begun. As far as military operations were concerned, wrote Bradley, MacArthur had become “mainly a prima donna figurehead who had to be tolerated.”

With the Eighth Army on the offensive again, advancing relentlessly—to the Han River, to Inchon, then Seoul, retaking what was left of the capital city on March 15—morale in Washington revived. The advent of the new field commander was, as Acheson said, an event of immeasurable importance. “While General MacArthur was fighting the Pentagon, General Ridgway was fighting the enemy.”

With a force of 365,000 men, Ridgway faced an enemy of more than 480,000, but Ridgway’s use of concentrated artillery, “the really terrifying strength of our firepower,” as he said, plus the spirit of “as fine a fighting field army as our country has yet produced,” more than made up for the difference. By the end of March, having inflicted immense casualties on the Chinese, the Eighth Army was again at the 38th parallel.

Yet Ridgway’s progress seemed only to distress MacArthur further. The American ambassador in Tokyo, William Sebald, found the Far Eastern Commander “tired and depressed.” Unless he was allowed to strike boldly at the enemy, MacArthur said, his dream of a unified Korea was impossible. He complained of a “policy void.” He now proposed not only massive attacks on Manchuria, but to “sever” Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, “the by-products of atomic manufacture,” all along the Yalu River. As so often before, his request was denied.

MacArthur’s need to upstage Ridgway verged on the ridiculous. On the eve of a new Ridgway offensive in late February, MacArthur flew to the front and standing before a dozen correspondents, while Ridgway remained in the background, declared he had “just ordered a resumption of the offensive,” when in fact he had had nothing to do with any part of the operation.

Talking to journalists on March 7, MacArthur lamented the “savage slaughter” of Americans inevitable in a war of attrition. When by the middle of March, the tide of battle “began to turn in our favor,” as Truman wrote, and Truman’s advisers both at the State Department and the Pentagon thought it time to make a direct appeal to China for peace talks, MacArthur refused to respond to inquiries on the subject. Instead he decried any “further military restrictions” on his command.

To MacArthur, as he later wrote, it appeared that Truman’s nerves were at a breaking point—“not only his nerves, but what was far more menacing in the Chief Executive of a country at war—his nerve.”

Truman ordered careful preparation of a cease-fire proposal. On March 21, the draft of a presidential statement was submitted for approval to the other seventeen U.N. nations with troops serving in Korea. On March 20 the Chiefs of Staff had informed MacArthur of what was happening—sending him what Truman called the “meat paragraphs” of the statement in a message that seems to have impressed MacArthur as nothing else had that there was indeed to be no all-out war with Red China. His response so jarred Washington as to leave a number of people wondering if perhaps he had lost his mind—first there had been Forrestal, then Louis Johnson, now MacArthur. Years afterward Bradley would speculate that possibly MacArthur’s realization that his war on China was not to be “snapped his brilliant but brittle mind.”

On the morning of Saturday, March 24, in Korea (Friday the 23rd in Washington), MacArthur, without warning, tried to seize the initiative in a manner calculated only to inflame the situation. He issued his own florid proclamation to the Chinese Communists, which in effect was an ultimatum. He began by taunting the Red Chinese for their lack of industrial power, their poor military showing in Korea against a U.N. force restricted by “inhibitions.” More seriously, MacArthur threatened to expand the war.

The enemy, therefore, must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United States to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the areas of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to his coastal areas and interior bases, would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.

In conclusion, MacArthur said he personally “stood ready at any time” to meet with the Chinese commander to reach a settlement.

All Truman’s careful preparations of a cease-fire proposal were now in vain. MacArthur had cut the ground out from under him. Later MacArthur would dismiss what he had said as a “routine communiqué.” Yet his own devoted aide, General Courtney Whitney, would describe it as a bold effort to stop one of the most disgraceful plots in American history, meaning the administration’s plan to appease China.

The news reached Washington after nightfall.

MacArthur, with his “pronunciamento,” wrote Acheson, had perpetrated a major act of sabotage. To Acheson, it was “insubordination of the grossest sort”; to Bradley, an “unforgivable and irretrievable act.”

At eleven o’clock that night in Washington, Friday, March 23, Acheson, Lovett, Rusk, and two other senior State Department officials, Alexis Johnson and Lucius Battle, met at Acheson’s house in Georgetown and talked until past midnight. Lovett, ordinarily a man of imperturbable temperament, was angriest of all. MacArthur, he said, must be removed at once. Acheson agreed and quoted Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

At Blair House, Truman sat in an upstairs study reading and rereading the text of the MacArthur ultimatum. “I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that,” he would say in later years, trying to recall the disappointment and fury he felt. “I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea…I was never so put out in my life…. MacArthur thought he was the proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased.”

In his Memoirs, Truman would write that he now knew what he must do about MacArthur.

This was a most extraordinary statement for a military commander of the United Nations to issue on his own responsibility. It was an act totally disregarding all directives to abstain from any declarations on foreign policy. It was in open defiance of my orders as President and as Commander in Chief. This was a challenge to the President under the Constitution. It also flouted the policy of the United Nations….

By this act MacArthur left me no choice—I could no longer tolerate his insubordination….

And yet…MacArthur was not fired. Truman said not a word suggesting he had reached such a decision. At a meeting with Acheson, Lovett, and Rusk in the Oval Office the next day, Saturday the 24th, Truman, by Acheson’s account, appeared to be in a state of mind that combined “disbelief with controlled fury.” Acheson and Lovett, for all their own anger, worried about adverse public reaction, given the mood of the country and MacArthur’s immense prestige. People were fed up with the war. MacArthur was promising victory. If the President challenged that, he would appear to be, as Lovett said, “on the side of sin.” Truman’s decision was to send MacArthur only a restrained reprimand, a message he himself dictated to remind MacArthur of his order of December 6 forbidding public statements that had not been cleared with Washington.

Truman was moving with extreme caution. Some, later, would call this an act of political guile. Others would see it as another of those critical moments, like the Berlin crisis, when he drew on his better nature as President, refusing to act impulsively or irresponsibly, whatever his own feelings.

Meantime, on March 14, the Gallup Poll had reported the President’s public approval at an all-time low of only 26 percent. And by the end of March, there were appalling new statistics on the war from the U.N. Secretariat: U.N. forces had now suffered a total of 228,941 casualties, the greatest part of them by far being South Korean (168,652) and American (57,120).

Truman was dwelling on the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan during the Civil War, in the autumn of 1862, when Lincoln had been forced to relieve McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac. Truman had sent one of his staff to the Library of Congress to review the details of the Lincoln-McClellan crisis and give him a report. Lincoln’s troubles with McClellan, as Truman knew, had been the reverse of his own with MacArthur. Lincoln had wanted McClellan to attack and McClellan refused time and again. But then, when Lincoln issued orders, McClellan, like MacArthur, ignored them. Also like MacArthur, McClellan occasionally made political statements on matters outside the military field. Asked what he thought about this, Lincoln, according to a story Truman loved, said it reminded him of the man who, when his horse kicked up and stuck a foot through the stirrup, said to the horse, “If you are going to get on, I will get off.”

Lincoln was patient [Truman later wrote], for that was his nature, but at long last he was compelled to relieve the Union Army’s principal commander. And though I gave this difficulty with MacArthur much wearisome thought, I realized that I would have no other choice myself than to relieve the nation’s top field commander….

I wrestled with the problem for several days, but my mind was made up before April 5, when the next incident occurred.

On Thursday, April 5, at the Capitol, House Minority Leader Joe Martin took the floor to read the text of a letter from MacArthur that Martin said he felt duty-bound to withhold no longer.

In February, speaking in Brooklyn, Martin had called for the use of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Korea and accused the administration of a defeatist policy. “What are we, in Korea for—to win or to lose?…If we are not in Korea to win, then this administration should be indicted for the murder of American boys.” Martin had sent a copy of the speech to MacArthur, asking for his “views.” On March 20, MacArthur had responded and virtually all that he said was bound to provoke Truman, as Martin well knew. Since MacArthur’s letter carried no stipulation of confidentiality, Martin had decided to make it public.

The congressman was right in calling for victory, MacArthur wrote, right in wanting to see Chinese forces from Formosa join the battle against communism. The real war against communism was in Asia, not in Europe: “…here [in Asia] we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words…if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom…. There is no substitute for victory.”

The letter was on the wires at once. At the White House, a new assistant press secretary named Roger Tubby took the ticker bulletin and rushed to the Oval Office, to find Truman sitting quietly reading General Bradley’s book, A Soldier’s Story. Truman appeared unconcerned.

“Mr. President,” said Tubby, “this man is not only insubordinate, but he’s insolent, and I think he ought to be fired.”

Truman looked again at the ticker sheet. “Well,” he said, “I think they are maneuvering the general out of a job.”

At the Pentagon, Bradley called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs. “I did not know that Truman had already made up his mind to relieve MacArthur,” Bradley remembered, “but I thought it was a strong possibility.” The Joint Chiefs, however, reached no conclusion about MacArthur.

On Friday, April 6, official Cadillacs filled the White House driveway. Marshall, Bradley, Acheson, and Harriman met with the President for an hour. Saying nothing of his own views, Truman asked what should be done. When Marshall urged caution, Acheson agreed. To Acheson it was not so much a problem of what should be done as how it should be done.

The situation could be resolved [remembered Acheson] only by relieving the General of all his commands and removing him from the Far East. Grave trouble would result, but it could be surmounted if the President acted upon the carefully considered advice and unshakable support of all his civilian and military advisers. If he should get ahead of them or appear to take them for granted or be impetuous, the harm would be incalculable.

“If you relieve MacArthur,” Acheson told Truman, “you will have the biggest fight of your administration.”

Harriman, reminding the President that MacArthur had been a problem for too long, said he should be dismissed at once.

“I don’t express any opinion or make known my decision,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Direct the four to meet again Friday afternoon and go over all phases of the situation.”

He was a model of self-control. MacArthur, in his own memoirs, would describe how, having read Truman’s letter to the music critic, he saw, himself “at the apex of a situation that would make me the next victim of such uncontrolled passion.” But those close to Truman knew that “uncontrolled passion” was never a problem. Under the pressures of this tensest of times, with so much of his own stature and political welfare riding on his every move, he was at his steadiest. For the next several days an air of unnatural calm seemed to hang over the White House. “The wind died down,” remembered Joe Martin. “The surface was placid…nothing happened.”

Truman telephoned the Vice President. Given all that had happened, Barkley concluded reluctantly, a compromise was out of the question—MacArthur would have to go. When Truman called Chief Justice Vinson and Speaker Sam Rayburn to the Oval Office, Vinson, like Marshall, advised caution. What Rayburn said is not known.

On Saturday, Truman met again with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman, and again nothing, was resolved. Marshall and Bradley were still uncertain what to do. They were hesitating in part, according to Bradley’s later account, because they knew the kind of abuse that would be hurled at them personally—an understandable concern for two such men at the end of long, distinguished careers. The previous fall, in acrimonious Senate debate over Marshall’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense, Republican William E. Jenner of Indiana had called Marshall “a front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” Firing MacArthur now, wrote Bradley, was certain to provoke more such savage assaults on Marshall by those Acheson called the “political primitives.” Nor could he, Bradley, expect to escape similar treatment.

On Monday, April 9, the same foursome convened with the President once more, this time at Blair House. But now the situation had changed. The Joint Chiefs had met the afternoon before and concluded that from a military point of view, MacArthur should be relieved. Their opinion was unanimous.

“There was no question about the Chiefs being in thorough agreement on this,” Bradley’s aide, Colonel Chester Clifton, would later say:

They had become disenchanted with MacArthur…and on military rather than on political grounds.

A part of their dissatisfaction was with some of his strategic and tactical decisions, such as, splitting his forces in Korea and jumping off on his November offensive with inadequate field intelligence about the enemy….

What really counted was that MacArthur had lost confidence in himself and was beginning to lose the confidence of his field officers and troops. There is nothing in the book that more seriously undermines a commander’s effectiveness than this. When it happens, he’s through….

And when he committed the final error of insubordination to the Commander-in-Chief—and there’s absolutely no question about that—they had no trouble at all deciding what had to be done.

Now at Blair House, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman all agreed that MacArthur should be relieved, and only after each had spoken, Truman, for the first time, said he was of the same opinion. He had made his decision. He told Bradley to prepare the necessary papers.

“Rarely had a matter been shrouded in such secrecy at the White House,” reported the Washington Post the morning of Tuesday, April 10. “The answer to every question about MacArthur was met with a ‘no comment’ reply.”

On Capitol Hill, an unidentified “congressional official” told the Post that the President had decided against removing the Far East Commander. Representative Martin said he favored bringing MacArthur home to report to Congress. In Tokyo, according to a United Press dispatch, a member of MacArthur’s staff said meetings between the general and Secretary of the Army Pace were “going forward with an air of cordiality”—thus seeming to refute rumors that Pace had been sent to dismiss MacArthur. A photograph on page 1 of the Post showed a smiling MacArthur welcoming an even more smiling Pace on his arrival at the Tokyo airport.

A Post editorial, meantime, expressed concern that MacArthur’s repeated efforts “to run away with the diplomatic ball” had “excited little more than a ripple among the American people,” and blamed the administration for its “muting” of the issue. Civil supremacy was at stake. The President ought to take a firm hand. “Any reassertion of the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and initiator of the country’s foreign policy would win him, we feel sure, the support of the American people. That’s what they are crying out for—leadership….”

The morning cartoon by Herb Block showed “Captain Harry Truman” asleep on his World War I army cot, trembling in fear, too terrified to challenge the five-star general.

At the end of a routine morning staff meeting, the President quietly announced—“So you won’t have to read about it in the papers”—that he had decided to fire General MacArthur. He was sure, Truman added, that MacArthur had wanted to be fired.

He was sure also that he himself faced a political storm, “a great furor,” unlike any in his political career. From beyond the office windows, the noise of construction going on in the White House was so great that several of the staff had to strain to hear what he was saying.

At 3:15 that afternoon, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman reported to the Oval Office, bringing the drafted orders. Truman looked them over, borrowed a fountain pen from Bill Hassett, and signed his name.

They were to be sent by State Department channels to Ambassador Muccio in Korea, who was to turn them over to Secretary Pace, who by now was also in Korea, with Ridgway at Eighth Army headquarters. Pace was to return at once to Tokyo and personally hand the orders to MacArthur—this whole relay system having been devised to save the general from the embarrassment of direct transmission through regular Army communications. All aspects of the issue thus far had been kept secret with marked success, but it was essential there be no leaks in the last critical hours, as Truman made clear to his new press secretary, Joe Short, the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun whom Truman had picked to replace Charlie Ross. Announcement of the sensational MacArthur news was not to be made until the following morning.

The next several hours passed without incident, until early evening, after Truman had returned to Blair House. Harriman, Bradley, Rusk, and six or seven of Truman’s staff were working in the Cabinet Room, preparing material for release, when Joe Short received word that a Pentagon reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd Norman, was making inquiries about a supposed “major resignation” to take place in Tokyo—the implication being that somehow MacArthur had already learned of Truman’s decision and was about to resign before Truman could fire him.

Bradley telephoned Truman at about nine o’clock to report there had been a leak. Truman, saying he wanted time to think, told Bradley to find Marshall and Acheson. Marshall, it was learned, had gone to a movie with his wife, but Acheson came to the White House immediately, and like Rusk and George Elsey, he thought it would be a mistake to do anything rash because of one reporter’s inquiry. As he had from the start, Acheson again stressed the importance of the manner in which the general was dismissed. It was only fair and proper that he be informed before the story broke.

Harriman, Charlie Murphy, Matt Connelly, Joe Short, and Roger Tubby argued that MacArthur must not be allowed to “get the jump” on the President. The story must come from the White House, not Tokyo. The announcement should be made that night.

Such a decision, thought Elsey, would look like panic on the part of the White House. It would be undignified, unbefitting the President. But as Elsey later recalled, “There was a degree of panic.”

There was concern that MacArthur might get wind of this and might make some grandstand gesture of his own. There were rumors flying around that he was going on a world-wide broadcast network…. And in effect, the White House was, I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say it, panicked by the fear that MacArthur might get the jump.

Meantime, something apparently had gone wrong with the transmission of the President’s orders. Nothing had been heard from Muccio about their receipt.

Had George Marshall been present that night—or Charlie Ross—possibly things would have been handled differently.

Truman would remember Bradley “rushing over” to Blair House at a late hour. Actually, the time was just after ten and Bradley came accompanied by Harriman, Rusk, Joe Short, and Matt Connelly. By 10:30, Truman had decided.

Short telephoned Roger Tubby at the White House to have all the orders—those relieving MacArthur, as well as those naming Matthew Ridgway his successor—mimeographed as quickly as possible.

“He’s not going to be allowed to quit on me,” Truman is reported to have said. “He’s going to be fired!” In his diary, Truman recorded dryly, “Discussed the situation and I ordered messages sent at once and directly to MacArthur.”

From a small first-floor study in his Georgetown home, Dean Acheson began placing calls to Tom Connally, Les Biffle, and John Foster Dulles, to tell them what was about to happen. At the State Department, Rusk spent a long night telephoning the ambassadors of all the countries with troops in Korea. “Well, the little man finally did it, didn’t he,” responded the ambassador from New Zealand.

At the White House, switchboard operators began calling reporters at their homes to say there would be an extraordinary press conference at 1:00 A.M. And at 1:00 A.M. in the White House press room, Wednesday, April 11, Press Secretary Short handed out the mimeographed sheets.

Truman, in his second-floor bedroom at Blair House, was by then fast asleep.

General MacArthur learned of his recall while at lunch in Tokyo, when his wife handed him a brown Signal Corps envelope.

If Truman had only let him know how he felt, MacArthur would say privately a few hours later, he would have retired “without difficulty.” Where the Tribune reporter got his tip was never learned. MacArthur would later testify that he had never given any thought to resigning.

According to what MacArthur had been told by an unnamed but “eminent” medical authority, Truman’s “mental instability” was the result of malignant hypertension, “characterized by bewilderment and confusion of thought.” Truman, MacArthur predicted, would be dead in six months.

Truman Fires Macarthur

The headline across the early edition of the Washington Post, April 11, 1951, was the headline everywhere in the country and throughout much of the world, with only minor variations. The reaction was stupendous, the outcry from the American people shattering. Truman had known he would have to face a storm, but however dark his premonitions, he could not possibly have measured what was coming. No one did, no one could have. One southern senator in the course of the day described the people in his part of the country as “almost hysterical.” The senator himself was almost hysterical. So were scores of others on Capitol Hill and millions of Americans.

The day on Capitol Hill was described as “one of the bitterest…in modern times.” Prominent Republicans, including Senator Taft, spoke angrily of impeaching the President. The full Republican leadership held an angry emergency meeting in Joe Martin’s office at 9:30 in the morning, after which Martin talked to reporters of “impeachments,” the accent on the plural. “We might want the impeachments of 1 or 50.” A full-dress congressional investigation of the President’s war policy was in order. General MacArthur, announced Martin, would be invited to air his views before a joint session of Congress.

Senator Nixon demanded MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement. Senator Jenner declared the country was “in the hands of a secret coterie” directed by Russian spies. When, on the floor of the Senate, Jenner shouted, “Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction,” the gallery broke into applause.

A freshman Democrat from Oklahoma, Senator Robert Kerr, rose to defend the President. If the Republicans believed the nation’s security depended on following the policy of General MacArthur, Kerr said, then they should call for a declaration of war against Red China. Otherwise, Republican support of MacArthur was a mockery. Tom Connally reminded his colleagues that Americans had always insisted on civilian control over the military, and three Senate Republicans, Duff of Pennsylvania, Saltonstall and Lodge of Massachusetts, spoke in agreement.

But such voices were lost in a tempest of Republican outrage. The general’s dismissal was “another Pearl Harbor,” a “great day for the Russian Communists.” MacArthur had been fired “because he told the truth.” “God help the United States,” said Senator James P. Kem, Republican of Missouri.

In New York two thousand longshoremen walked off their jobs in protest over the firing of MacArthur. A Baltimore women’s group announced plans for a march on Washington in support of the general. Elsewhere enraged patriots flew flags at half-staff, or upside down. People signed petitions, fired off furious letters and telegrams to Washington. In Worcester, Massachusetts, and San Gabriel, California, Truman was burned in effigy. In Houston, a Protestant minister became so angry dictating a telegram to the White House that he died of a heart attack.

The legislatures of four states—Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and California—voted resolutions condemning the President’s action, while the Los Angeles City Council adjourned for a day of “sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination of General MacArthur.” In Chicago, in a front editorial, the Tribune called for immediate impeachment proceedings:

President Truman must be impeached and convicted. His hasty and vindictive removal of Gen. MacArthur is the culmination of a series of acts which have shown that he is unfit, morally and mentally, for his high office…. The American nation has never been in a greater danger. It is led by a fool who is surrounded by knaves….

“IMPEACH THE IMBECILE”…“IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN STUPIDITY FROM KANSAS CITY”…“SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE,” read telegrams typical of those pouring into Washington. In the hallways of the Senate and House office buildings, Western Union messengers made their deliveries with bushel baskets. According to one tally, of the 44,358 telegrams received by Republicans in Congress during the first 48 hours following Truman’s announcement, all but 334 condemned him or took the side of MacArthur, and the majority called for Truman’s immediate removal from office.

Republicans were overjoyed. “This is the biggest windfall that has ever come to the Republican Party,” exclaimed Senator Styles Bridges.

A number of prominent liberals—Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Justice William O. Douglas—publicly supported Truman. Douglas, who had told Truman as early as October that MacArthur should be fired, wrote, “In the days ahead you may need the strength of all your friends. This note is to let you know that I am and will be in your corner…I know you are right.”

While by far the greatest clamor came from those in the country outraged over what Truman had done, there was no lack of conviction, even passion, among people who felt he was in the right, that a fundamental principle was at stake. And to many of these same people, how one felt about Harry Truman personally was immaterial.

“It makes not the slightest difference if Mr. Harry Truman is an ignorant person who never graduated from college, who once worked in a haberdashery shop, who was a protégé of one of our worst city bosses and came into the presidency through accident,” the Reverend Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair said in a sermon at the Fountain Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Neither does it make any difference if General MacArthur is a man of astounding personality, tremendous achievement, graduated first in his class in the great College of the Army and has had a distinguished career and has proven a wonderful administrator of the Japanese people or that we like him better than we do Harry S. Truman. Principle, principle, must always be above personality and it must be above expediency. The principle here we recognize…[is] that control of this country must come through the president and the departments that are organized under him and through Congress, and that any decision that comes from that person through those means is not to be dismissed because we don’t like the personality who expressed it, nor is it to be overridden because we have a conquering hero….

Another letter of support addressed to the President came from the Washington Post music critic, Paul Hume.

Throughout Europe, MacArthur’s dismissal was greeted as welcome news. “MAC IS SACKED,” declared the London Evening Standard. The French, reported Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, were “solidly for Truman.” Not a single paper in Paris had failed to support his decision.

But most impressive was the weight of editorial opinion at home, despite vehement assaults in the McCormick, Hearst, and Scripps-Howard newspapers, or the renewed glorification of MacArthur in Henry Luce’s Time and Life.

The Washington post, The New York Times, the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Miami Daily News, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Denver Post, the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor, all these and more endorsed Truman’s decision. Importantly the list also included such staunch Republican papers as the Des Moines Register and Tribune and the New York Herald-Tribune, which went out of its way to praise Truman as well for his strength of character:

The most obvious fact about the dismissal of General MacArthur is that he virtually forced his own removal. In high policy as in war there is no room for a divided command…. General MacArthur is a soldier of the highest abilities…to lose his service and his talents is in a very true sense a tragedy for the nation, yet he is the architect of a situation which really left the President with no other course. With one of those strokes of boldness and decision which are characteristic of Mr. Truman in emergencies, a very difficult and dangerous problem has been met in the only way it could have been met….

In his “Today and Tomorrow” column, Walter Lippmann commended Truman and Marshall both for having “done their duty.” And the working press, according to the Saturday Review, privately sided with Truman by a margin of six to one, though most reporters thought the dismissal had been poorly handled.

The clamor in the country, the outrage, the noisy hostility to Truman, the adulation of MacArthur continued, however, and would grow greater still when MacArthur made his triumphal return. Nothing had so stirred the political passions of the country since the Civil War.

At the heart of the tumult was anger and frustration over the war in Korea. Nobody liked it. Senator Wherry had begun calling it “Truman’s War,” and the name caught on. People were sick of Truman’s War, frustrated and a bit baffled by talk of a “limited war.” America didn’t fight to achieve a stalemate, and the cost in blood had become appalling. If it was a United Nations effort, then the United States seemed to be bearing the heavy side of the burden. According to the latest figures, there were more than ten thousand Americans dead, another fifty thousand wounded or missing in action. The country wanted it over. MacArthur at least offered victory.

To a great part of the country MacArthur was a glorious figure, a real-life, proven American hero, the brilliant, handsome general who had led American forces to stunning triumph in the greatest of all wars wherein there had never been any objective but complete and total victory. “Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man…Harry Truman was almost a professional little man,” wrote Time in a considerably less than unbiased attempt to appraise the national mood, but one that nonetheless applied to a large part of the populace. For someone of Truman’s modest attainments, a man of his “stature,” to have fired Douglas MacArthur seemed to many Americans an act smacking of insolence and vindictiveness, not to say dreadful judgment. Nor did the way it happened seem right. Reportedly, the firing had been carefully timed so as to make the morning papers “and catch the Republicans in bed.” Rumors also attributed the announcement to another of Truman’s dead-of-the-night temper tantrums, or heavy drinking. In a speech in Milwaukee, having called Truman a “son-of-a-bitch,” Joe McCarthy charged that the decision had been influenced by “bourbon and Benedictine.” Even to more fair-minded Republicans than McCarthy and others of the party’s vociferous right wing—as to a great many Democrats—it seemed to have been a graceless, needlessly unkind way to terminate a great career. Who did “little Harry Truman” think he was?

Old admirers of Franklin Roosevelt speculated on how differently “the master politician” might have handled things—made MacArthur ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, perhaps.

But in a larger way, for many, the firing of MacArthur was yet another of those traumatic turns of events of recent years—like the fall of China to Communist control, like the advent of the Russian bomb—that seemed to signal a world out of joint, a world increasingly hard to understand and threatening.

According to a Gallup Poll, 69 percent of the country backed General MacArthur. The fact that the country and nearly every leading Republican had strongly supported Truman’s decision to go into Korea the previous June, the fact that in November MacArthur, the supreme military strategist, had presided over one of the worst debacles in American military history, or that only 30 percent of the country expressed a willingness to go to war with China, were all overlooked.

Truman was not to appear at a big public event until April 20—not until after MacArthur had made his return and appeared before Congress—and when he did, to throw out the first ball at the opening game at Griffith Stadium, he was booed to his face, something that had not happened since Herbert Hoover attended a ball game in 1931.

Except for a brief broadcast from the White House the night following his dismissal of MacArthur, April 11, Truman had maintained silence on the matter. General MacArthur was “one of our greatest military commanders,” he told the nation, but the cause of world peace was far more important than any single individual.

The change in commands in the Far East means no change whatever in the policy of the United States. We will carry on the fight in Korea with vigor and determination…. The new commander, Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, has already demonstrated that he has the great qualities of military leadership needed for this task.

We are ready, at any time, to negotiate for a restoration of peace in the area. But we will not engage in appeasement. We are only interested in real peace….

We do not want to widen the conflict….

He went about his schedule as though all were normal. On April 13, he had his picture taken as, smiling confidently, he began his seventh year in the Oval Office. One evening he and Bess went to the theater, another to see a British film of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman.

MacArthur landed at San Francisco Tuesday, April 17, to a delirious reception. He had been away from the country for fourteen years. Until now, the American people had had no chance to see and cheer him, to welcome the hero home. Ten thousand were at the San Francisco airport. So great were the crowds on the way into the city, it took two hours for the motorcade to reach his hotel. “The only politics I have,” MacArthur told a cheering throng, “is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—God Bless America.”

When Truman met with reporters the next day, April 18, at his first ‘press conference since the start of the crisis, he dashed all their expectations by refusing to say anything on the subject. Scheduled to appear before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Thursday, April 19, the day MacArthur was to go before Congress, Truman canceled his speech, because he felt it should be the general’s day and did not wish anything to detract from it.

Only in a few personal letters did Truman touch on the matter, and then briefly, simply, and without apologies or complicated explanations. “I was sorry to have to reach a parting of the way with the big man in Asia,” he wrote to Eisenhower, “but he asked for it and I had to give it to him.”

There would be “hell to pay” for it for perhaps six or seven weeks, he told his staff and the Cabinet. But eventually people would come to their senses, including more and more Republican politicians who would grow doubtful of all-out support for the general. Given some time, MacArthur would be reduced to human proportions. Meanwhile, Truman could withstand the bombardment, for in the long run, he knew, he would be judged to have made the right decision. He had absolutely no doubt of that. “The American people will come to understand that what I did had to be done.”

As a boost for failing spirits, someone circulated among the White House staff a mock “Schedule for Welcoming General MacArthur” to Washington:

As it was, a cheering crowd of twelve thousand people waited until past midnight at National Airport to welcome MacArthur when his plane landed.

Secretary Marshall, General Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs were at the foot of the ramp to greet him, as Truman had agreed was only proper. But so also was Major General Vaughan, whose presence may have been Truman’s idea of a small joke of his own.

At 12:31 P.M., Thursday, April 19, in a flood of television lights, Douglas MacArthur walked down the same aisle in the House of Representatives as had Harry Truman so often since 1945, and the wild ovation from the packed chamber, the intense, authentic drama of the moment, were such as few had ever beheld.

Neither the President’s Cabinet, nor the Supreme Court, nor any of the Joint Chiefs were present.

Wearing a short “Eisenhower” jacket, without decoration, the silvery circles of five-star rank glittering on his shoulders, MacArthur paused to shake hands with Vice President Barkley, then stepped to the rostrum, his face “an unreadable mask.” Only after complete silence had fallen did he begin.

“I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country.”

There was ringing applause and the low, vibrant voice continued, the speaker in full command of the moment.

The decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea had been sound from a military standpoint, MacArthur affirmed. But when he had called for reinforcements, he was told they were not available. He had “made clear,” he said, that if not permitted to destroy the enemy bases north of the Yalu, if not permitted to utilize the 800,000 Chinese troops on Formosa, if not permitted to blockade the China coast, then “the position of the command from a military standpoint forbade victory….” And war’s “very object” was victory. How could it be otherwise? “In war, indeed,” he said, repeating his favorite slogan, “there can be no substitute for victory. There were some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They were blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches, with unmistakable emphasis, that appeasement begets new and bloodier war.”

He was provocative, and defiant. Resounding applause or cheers followed again and again—thirty times in thirty-four minutes. He said nothing of bombing China’s industrial centers, as he had proposed. And though he said “every available means” should be applied to bring victory, he made no mention of his wish to use atomic bombs, or to lay down a belt of radioactivity along the Yalu. He had been severely criticized for his views, he said. Yet, he asserted, his views were “fully shared” by the Joint Chiefs—a claim that was altogether untrue and that brought a deafening ovation. Republicans and most spectators in the galleries leaped to their feet, cheering and stamping. It was nearly a minute before he could begin again.

To those who said American military strength was inadequate to face the enemy on more than one front, MacArthur said he could imagine no greater expression of defeatism. “You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” To confine the war to Chinese aggression in Korea only was to follow a path of “prolonged indecision.”

“Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He paused, then, softly, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “I could not answer.”

A record 30 million people were watching on television and the performance was masterful. The use of the rich voice, the timing, surpassed that of most actors. The oratorical style was of a kind not heard in Congress in a very long time. It recalled, as one television critic wrote, “a yesteryear of the theater,” and it held the greater part of the huge audience wholly enraptured. Work had stopped in offices and plants across the country, so people could watch. Saloons and bars were jammed. Schoolchildren saw the “historic hour” in classrooms or were herded into assemblies or dining halls to listen by radio. Whether they had any idea what the excitement was about, they knew it was “important.”

“When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams,” MacArthur said, his voice dropping as he began the famous last lines, the stirring, sentimental, ambiguous peroration that the speech would be remembered for.

The hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” And like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.

Goodbye.

A “hurricane of emotion” swept the room. Hands reached out to him. Many in the audience were weeping. “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” exclaimed Republican Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, a former preacher. To Joe Martin, it was “the climaxing” of the most emotional moment he had known in thirty-five years in Congress. Theatrics were a part of the congressional way of life, Martin knew, but nothing had ever equaled this.

It was MacArthur’s finest hour, and the crescendo of public adulation that followed, beginning with a triumphal parade through Washington that afternoon, and climaxing the next day in New York with a thunderous ticker-tape parade, was unprecedented in American history. Reportedly 7,500,000 people turned out in New York, more than had welcomed Eisenhower in 1945, more even than at the almost legendary welcome for Lindbergh in 1927. It was “awesome,” wrote Time. “Everybody cheered…a man of chin-out affirmation, who seemed a welcome contrast to men of indecision and negation.”

But, in fact, not everybody cheered. There were places along the parade route in New York where, as MacArthur’s open car passed, people stood silently, just watching and looking, anything but pleased. In Washington, one senator had confided to a reporter that he had never feared more for his country than during MacArthur’s speech. “I honestly felt that if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House.” Even Time noted that while Republicans in Congress might consider MacArthur a godsend, few were ready to endorse his proposals.

Truman had not listened to MacArthur’s speech, or watched on television. He had spent the time at his desk in the Oval Office, meeting with Dean Acheson as usual at that hour on Thursdays, after which he went back to Blair House for lunch and a nap. At some point, however, he did read what MacArthur had said. Speaking privately, he remarked that he thought it “a bunch of damn bullshit.”

As Truman had anticipated, the tumult began to subside. For seven weeks in the late spring of 1951, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held joint hearings to investigate MacArthur’s dismissal. Chaired by Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell, the inquiry opened on May 3 in the same marble Caucus Room, 318 of the Senate Office Building, where the Truman Committee had conducted its sessions. Though the hearings were closed, authorized transcripts of each day’s sessions, edited for military security reasons, were released hourly to the press.

MacArthur, the first witness, testified for three days, arguing that his way in Korea was the way to victory and an end to the slaughter. He had seen as much blood and disaster as any man alive, he told the senators, but never such devastation as during his last time in Korea. “After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited. Now are you going to let that go on…?” The politicians in Washington had introduced a “new concept into military operations—the concept of appeasement,” its purpose only “to go on indefinitely…indecisively, fighting with no mission….”

But he also began to sound self-absorbed and oddly disinterested in global issues. He would admit to no mistakes, no errors of judgment. Failure to anticipate the size of the Chinese invasion, for example, had been the fault of the CIA. Any operation he commanded was crucial, other considerations were always of less importance. Certain that his strategy of war on China would not bring in the Soviets, he belittled the danger of a larger conflict. But what if he happened to be wrong, he was asked. What if another world war resulted? That, said MacArthur, was not his responsibility. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various agencies of the Government are working night and day for an over-all solution to the global problem. Now I am not familiar with their studies. I haven’t gone into it….” To many, it seemed he had made the President’s case.

The great turning point came with the testimony of Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs, who refuted absolutely MacArthur’s claim that they agreed with his strategy. Truman, from the start of the crisis, had known he needed the full support of his military advisers before declaring his decision on MacArthur. Now it was that full support, through nineteen days of testimony, that not only gave weight and validity to the decision, but discredited MacArthur in a way nothing else could have.

Speaking solemnly, Marshall began by saying it was “a very distressing necessity, a very distressing occasion that compels me to appear here this morning and in effect in almost direct opposition to a great many views and actions of General MacArthur. He is a brother Army officer, a man for whom I have tremendous respect….”

The administration was not turning its back on an easy victory in Korea, Marshall said, because there could be no easy or decisive victory in Korea short of another world war. The present policy might indeed seem costly, but not compared to an atomic war. There had been complaints of stalemate, demands for quick, decisive solutions at the time of the Berlin crisis, too, he reminded the senators. The war in Korea was in its tenth month, but the Berlin crisis had lasted almost fifteen months before ending in a “notable victory.”

Just what did Secretary Marshall consider the “Korean business,” he was asked. “A police action? A large or small war?…”

“I would characterize it as a limited war which I hope will remain limited,” Marshall replied evenly.

Bradley, his first day in the witness chair, testified with unexpected vigor and delivered a telling blow with what would be the most quoted line of the hearings. MacArthur’s program to step up and widen the war with China, Bradley said, would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

Never, said the Joint Chiefs, had they subscribed to MacArthur’s plan for victory, however greatly they admired him.

From a purely military standpoint, General Collins was asked, had General MacArthur’s conduct of the war in Korea been compatible with General MacArthur’s outstanding conduct of the war in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945? That, said Collins, was a question he would prefer not to answer, and no one insisted.

The dismissal of MacArthur, said all of them—Marshall, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs—was more than warranted, it was a necessity. Given the circumstances, given the seriousness of MacArthur’s opposition to the policy of the President, his challenge to presidential authority, said Marshall, there had been “no other course but to relieve him.”

The fidelity of the military high command to the principle of civilian control of the military was total and unequivocal.

Such unanimity of opinion on the part of the country’s foremost and most respected military leaders seemed to leave Republican senators stunned. As James Reston wrote in The New York Times, “MacArthur, who had started as the prosecutor, had now become the defendant.”

The hearings ground on and grew increasingly dull. The MacArthur hysteria was over, interest waned. When in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away.

The furor of the MacArthur crisis had taken a heavy toll. It had spread confusion and increasing doubt about the war in Korea, increasing skepticism about the leadership in Washington and particularly about the President himself. Politically, the damage to the administration and to the Democratic Party had been serious. Even among Truman’s strongest supporters, he was criticized for both the way the dismissal had been handled and for failing to convince the country that he was right. Where was the eloquence, the power of “the bully pulpit” of the presidency when it was so desperately needed? “Having made this courageous decision, Truman failed to mobilize the country behind him,” Bradley would write in retrospect. Truman’s address to the nation the night of the MacArthur dismissal had been, in Bradley’s estimate, “a complete flop.”

A Gallup Poll in late May showed that while support for MacArthur had dropped to 30 percent, support for Marshall and Bradley was only 19 percent, and three out of four of those polled regarded the MacArthur hearings as “just politics.”

Many then, and more in time to come, would say that Truman’s biggest mistake had been not firing the general months before, a view with which Truman himself wholeheartedly concurred.

Truman would regard the decision as among the most important he made as President. He did not, however, agree with those who said it had shown what great courage he had. (Harriman, among others, would later speak of it as one of the most courageous steps ever taken by any President.) “Courage didn’t have anything to do with it,” Truman would say emphatically. “General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That’s all there was to it.”

But if the firing of MacArthur had taken a heavy toll politically, if Truman as President had been less than a master of persuasion, he had accomplished a very great deal and demonstrated extraordinary patience and strength of character in how he rode out the storm. His policy in Korea—his determined effort to keep the conflict in bounds—had not been scuttled, however great the aura of the hero-general, or his powers as a spellbinder. The principle of civilian control over the military, challenged as never before in the nation’s history, had survived, and stronger than ever. The President had made his point and, with the backing of his generals, he had made it stick.

“Truman’s conflict with MacArthur,” wrote Dean Rusk, “was more than a clash of egos or contest of wills; Truman was concerned about the presidency…. I am convinced that 95 percent of Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur hinged on the relationship of the president as the Commander in Chief to his general and on civilian control of the military.”

MacArthur did truly believe that he was above the President. MacArthur himself later told the historian Samuel Eliot Morison that a theater commander should be allowed to act independently, with no orders from the President, the United Nations, or anyone; then, to be sure that there could be no mistaking his meaning, MacArthur repeated the statement.

President Harry S. Truman was President and Commander in Chief still, and he was Harry S. Truman still, anything but disconsolate or defeated. Already, before the Senate hearings ended, he had reemerged and begun fighting back in his own way, sounding often as he had in the 1948 campaign. Speaking at an Armed Forces Day dinner on May 18 at the Statler, Truman reminded his full-dress audience that even as “we sit here tonight…partaking of food on white tablecloths and enjoying ourselves…there are men fighting and dying…to reach that peace for which we have been striving since World War II…. You must quit your bickering here at home…you must quit playing petty politics….”

Of the war in Korea, he said, “We are fighting for time…for us. There is always an emphasis on the casualties in Korea…. But did it ever occur to you that [they] will be one small drop in the bucket from one of those horrible bombs of which we talk so much.

“Think—think—think,” he said, his voice low, almost shaking, “what a responsibility your President faces. If you would think, and think clearly, you would get behind me and help win this peace…. It is up to you.”

If “victory” in Korea meant risking a world war—a war of atomic bombs—Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective.

“And look at the alternatives these critics have to present,” he said in a speech at Tullahoma, Tennessee.

Here is what they say. Take a chance on spreading the conflict in Korea. Take a chance on tying up all our resources in a vast war in Asia. Take a chance on losing our allies in Europe. Take a chance the Soviet Union won’t fight in the Far East. Take a chance we won’t have a third world war. They want us to play Russian roulette with the foreign policy of the United States—with all the chambers of the pistol loaded.

This is not a policy…. No president who has any sense of responsibility for the welfare of this great country is going to meet the grave issues of war and peace on such a foolish basis as that.

In the same speech, delivered June 25, almost a year to the day since his decision to go into Korea, he said, in effect, that he was ready to negotiate a settlement of the war at the 38th parallel.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Jacob Malik, had just proposed a Korean armistice. At Tullahoma, Truman gave the Soviets his fast answer.

“We are ready to join in a peaceful settlement in Korea now, just as we have always been.”

17
Final Days

I have tried to give it everything that was in me.

—TRUMAN

I

In the summer of his seventh year in office, the sixty-seven-year-old President looked the picture of health. His color was good; his clothes, impeccable as always, fit perfectly; his walk was firm and full of purpose. He saw people all day, yet seemed to have time for everyone. Visitors to the Oval Office found a man who stood immediately to greet them, shoulders back and smiling, and who, at his desk, gave them his full attention. Radiating vitality and confidence, he seemed completely at home in his job, as one could only be with experience. Mens sana in corpore sano was the old adage he had learned in high school Latin, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Clark Clifford, who dropped by on occasion, would say he never knew anyone of the President’s age who remained physically and psychologically so sound and solid.

He still walked two miles “most every morning,” Truman had recorded in his diary.

I eat no bread but one piece of toast at breakfast, no butter, no sugar, no sweets. Usually have fruit, one egg, a strip of bacon and half a glass of skimmed milk for breakfast; liver and bacon or sweet breads or ham or fish and spinach and another nonfattening vegetable for lunch with fruit for dessert. For dinner I have a fruit cup, steak, a couple of nonfattening vegetables and an ice, orange, pineapple or raspberry…So—I maintain my waist line and can wear suits bought in 1935!

The morning bourbon—an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk—had also become routine. Whether the bourbon was on doctor’s orders, or a bit of old-fashioned home medicine of the kind many of his generation thought beneficial to the circulation past age sixty (“to get the engine going”), is not known. But it seemed to agree with him.

And how Harry Truman looked, how he carried himself, the timbre of his voice, his air of confidence were all subjects of increasing interest in the summer of 1951, once the MacArthur crisis had passed, as a means of divining whether he intended to carry on in the job beyond the next election. Did he or did he not plan to run again in 1952?

At a press conference, a visiting reporter from Macon, Georgia, said with a drawl, “Mr. President, this is my first conference. My impression of you is that you look a lot younger than I thought you would.” With everyone in the room, Truman laughed.

“Could you tell me if you feel like you are in better physical condition now than you were when you first became President?”

He never felt better, Truman said, looking pleased. “I am still young enough to make a good race—foot race, I mean.” And there was more laughter.

“That wouldn’t be an announcement, would it?”

“No, no.”

To those at the White House who saw him daily, at all hours and often under extremely trying circumstances, he was still the Truman of old, hardworking, cheerful, never short with them, never petty. He seemed to have some kind of added inner balance mechanism that held him steady through nearly anything, enabling him not only to uphold the fearful responsibilities of his office and keep a killing schedule, but to accept with composure the small, silly aggravations that also went with the job. It was a level of equanimity that at times left those around him hugely amused and even more fond of him.

At still another banquet at the Statler one evening, the head table waiters managed to confuse the orders they had about a special meal for Joe Short, who had ulcers. It was Truman who was served a bowl of milk toast, which he ate without complaint, thinking that perhaps Dr. Graham had requested it for him.

One day on the Williamsburg, Graham sat on the fantail dictating into a recording machine, his lap full of letters, mostly inquiries about the President’s health, his weight, diet, manner of exercise. Truman walked over, picked up the letters from Graham’s lap, and threw them overboard. “You constantly tell me to relax. Now you relax,” Truman said laughing.

His resilient cheerfulness was both a wonder and, to some who worked with him, disconcerting at times. It was almost as though he did not fully understand how serious his troubles were, how truly grim and menacing his horizons appeared, even with the MacArthur crisis out of the way. Only in the eyes, behind the thick glasses, could the fatigue sometimes be seen. Only on rare off moments would he say something to suggest how much else he felt.

Once, while paying a visit to the office of the engineer in charge of the White House renovation, General Glen E. Edgerton, whose desk was in a shack on the South Lawn amid a cluster of temporary buildings put up when the work began, Truman had paused to read a framed verse on the wall. Written for Edgerton by a plumbing contractor named Reuben Anderson, it so appealed to Truman that he read it aloud:

Every man’s a would be sportsman, in the dreams of his intent,

A potential out-of-doors man when his thoughts are pleasure bent.

But he mostly puts the idea off, for the things that must be done,

And doesn’t get his outing till his outing days are gone.

So in hurry, scurry, worry, work, his living days are spent,

And he does his final camping in a low green tent.

“Hurry, scurry, worry, work!” Truman sighed. “That’s the way it is.”

Another day, in September, riding in his limousine on the way to make a speech to a gathering of churchmen, he again sighed and said that sometimes he wondered if it was all worth the effort.

Though peace talks had begun in Korea, at Kaesong on July 8, the war was grinding on with unabated savagery. Joe McCarthy continued to spew charges of treason and espionage, the worst of his venom aimed now at George Marshall. Congress was stalling on a raise in taxes to pay for the war, threatening to cut foreign aid, and there were new charges of further scandal within the administration. Earlier, in the lull after the MacArthur hysteria, Herb Block, in a Washington Post cartoon titled “The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart,” had shown Truman working alone into the night, his desk piled with reports labeled “Korea,” “Europe,” “A-Bomb,” “H-Bomb,” “Troops,” “Planes,” “United Nations,” “Economic Program,” “Peace,” and “War.” In the time since his burdens had only increased.

By midsummer, American troops had been fighting and dying in Korea for as long nearly as Truman and his generation had fought and died in France in World War I, and the struggle in Korea had become increasingly like World War I. The seesaw swings of fortune, the sweeping end runs and pellmell retreats and advances, were past now, the fighting concentrated near or along the 38th parallel. Some of the bloodiest, most desperate battles of the war were fought for limited topographical features—a numbered hilltop or ridgeline—where often, as in France in 1918, the enemy was heavily dug in, fortified with barbed wire, mines, and elaborately camouflaged tunnels. Newspapers and news broadcasts were filled with accounts of the Battle of Hill 1179, Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge. American casualties ran sometimes as high as three thousand a week, never less than three hundred. By late August the peace talks had broken down. By summer’s end total American casualties had passed 80,000, with 13,822 dead. Losses among the ROK and other U.N. forces were greater still. What the costs had been to the enemy in dead and wounded, or to the people of Korea, were as yet undetermined.

The war Truman had never wanted or expected, but knew to be of utmost importance to the future of the world—the most important decision of his presidency, he believed—had come to overshadow his whole second term. He knew what the reality was in Korea. “I know what a soldier goes through,” he would say with feeling. He knew the anguish of families at home. But when would it end? Who could say? What could he do that he was not already doing? The worries and frustrations were incessant.

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not “a member of the Caucasian race” and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do.

The scourge of Joe McCarthy, that Truman had thought would end soon, was poisoning the entire political atmosphere all the while. McCarthy’s attack on Marshall from the floor of the Senate in mid-June was his most vile yet, a wild harangue lasting nearly three hours. The “mysterious, powerful” Marshall and Dean Acheson were part of a Communist conspiracy, a conspiracy of infamy so immense, said McCarthy, that it surpassed any “such venture” in history. It was Marshall who had created the disastrous China policy, Marshall whose military strategy had made the war in Korea a pointless slaughter. Harry Truman, no longer master of his house, was being guided by a “larger conspiracy, the world-wide web of which has been spun in Moscow.” In the final hour of the speech McCarthy was addressing a virtually empty chamber—all but three senators had walked out. The press deplored these “senseless and vicious charges,” but McCarthy carried on, traveling the country. He still had no evidence. He exposed not a single Communist in government. Yet none of that seemed to matter, as he shouted and threatened and waved fistfuls of so-called “documentation.”

One night in the dining room at Blair House, Truman had called a secret meeting attended by Attorney General McGrath, four Democratic senators—Anderson, Monroney, Hennings, and Sparkman—a veteran Kentucky congressman named Brent Spence, Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman, Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, Clark Clifford, who again sat in, and the author John Hersey as a kind of witness to history. Truman wanted confidential advice. What could be done about McCarthy?

As Hersey would recall, Truman gave a “pithy and bitter” summary of McCarthy’s methods—“his hectoring and innuendo, his horrors and dirty tricks…his bully’s delight in the ruin of innocents.” All this was tearing the country apart, Truman said. But what antidote could he as President use against such poison?

Senator Clinton Anderson mentioned a “devastating” dossier that had been assembled on McCarthy, complete with details on his bedmates over the years, enough to “blow Senator McCarthy’s whole show sky high.” Suggestions were made that the material be leaked to the press. But Truman smacked the table with the flat of his hand, and as Hersey remembered, “His third-person self spoke in outrage; the President wanted no more such talk.”

Three pungent comments of Harry Truman’s on the proposal that had just been made have stuck in my mind ever since [Hersey would write]. This was their gist:

You must not ask the President of the United States to get down in the gutter with a guttersnipe.

Nobody, not even the President of the United States, can approach too close to a skunk, in skunk territory, and expect to get anything out of it except a bad smell.

If you think somebody is telling a big lie about you, the only way to answer is with the whole truth.

Now repeatedly at press conferences when asked his views on the senator or the influence of McCarthyism, Truman, though plainly seething, would answer only, “No comment.”

Marshall, too, refused to respond, saying privately that if at this point in his life he had to explain that he was not a traitor, then it was hardly worth the effort.

To what degree the attacks by McCarthy influenced Marshall’s decision to retire is not clear. But on September 12, with great reluctance, Truman announced that the Secretary of Defense was stepping down for the final time, the extraordinary career was over. No man, said Truman, had ever given his country more distinguished and patriotic service.

There was a gathering sense of strong, central figures leaving the stage. Arthur Vandenberg had died of cancer in the spring. Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations and one of the keenest and best of Truman’s military advisers, dropped dead of a heart attack in August. Now Marshall, Truman’s “strong tower,” was departing.

Nor were Truman’s days in the West Wing quite the same without Charlie Ross. Press secretary Joe Short was highly professional, but a taut, intense man, very different from the gentle, wise Ross. The only one left on the staff who came close to filling Ross’s place in Truman’s affections was Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, who was of the same generation as Truman, and whose kind-hearted outlook, interest in history, and sense of humor greatly appealed to Truman. Hassett would bring him funny items clipped from magazines, joke with him about the endless obligatory letters that had to be cranked out to every conceivable kind of organization, the absurd proclamations that were called for. And from years of experience as a Vermont newspaperman and working for Roosevelt, Hassett had his own kind of wisdom to contribute. But Hassett was seventy-one years old and an alcoholic, as Truman knew.

With charges of scandal—mounting evidence of favoritism, outright corruption—filling the headlines again, the whole atmosphere in the West Wing grew increasingly strained. Joe Short, Roger Tubby, George Elsey, and Bill Hassett were seething with indignation over the damage done by the “chiselers” within. They saw the President being used by so-called loyal associates for their own pernicious ends, and his continuing tolerance of them could only mean shame and trouble ahead, not just for Truman but for the Democratic Party.

“My house is always clean,” Truman had said at a press conference in March. Somehow, he seemed incapable of imagining any of his people doing anything illegal or dishonorable. The accusations and innuendo coming from the Hill, the reports in the papers were all exaggerated, Truman insisted.

“He tended to live a day at a time and do the best he could each day as it came along,” George Elsey remembered. “Maybe it was the farmer in him. You go out and do the day’s work.”

In February 1951 a Senate subcommittee chaired by Arkansas Democrat j, William Fulbright had issued a preliminary report called Study of Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Favoritism and Influence that implied misconduct in the operations of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which dispensed low-interest government loans to business. Among those implicated were Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, White House aide Donald Dawson, who was Truman’s administrative assistant in charge of personnel, and a former RFC examiner and friend of Dawson’s named E. Merl Young, whose wife, Loretta, also worked at the White House, as an assistant to Rose Conway, Truman’s secretary.

The implication was of an influence ring, the power of which stemmed directly from the White House itself. Newspaper accounts indicated that Boyle and Dawson both had been unduly active in support of loan applicants. Dawson, reportedly, had exercised “considerable influence” over certain RFC directors, even “tried to dominate” the agency. But the one mentioned most frequently and who attracted the most attention was E. Merl Young. Though he was no relation to Truman, Young, for years, had allowed people to think he was, supposedly through Truman’s grandparents, Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, and the odd part was that Young looked enough like Truman to be taken for his son. As a high-paid, fast-talking Washington “expeditor,” Young traded on his former association with the RFC, his friendship with Dawson; and as now disclosed he had lately given his wife, the White House stenographer, a $9,540 pastel mink coat paid for by the attorney for a firm that received an RFC loan. Overnight the mink coat, like Harry Vaughan’s deep freezers, became a symbol of corruption in the Truman White House. The fact that Boyle, Dawson, and E. Merl Young were also all from Missouri—like Vaughan, like Wallace Graham, who had had his troubles earlier over speculation on grain futures—served not only to renew old charges of “government by crony,” but to recall Truman’s past connections to the Pendergast machine.

After careful study of the “peculiar Washington species known as the influence peddlers,” wrote Time, the Senate investigating subcommittee had discovered some distinctive markings and characteristics:

The finest specimens claim Missouri as their habitat, have at least a nodding acquaintance with Harry Truman, a much chummier relationship with his aides and advisers, and can buzz in and out of the White House at will. They also have a great fondness for crisp currency.

Truman denounced the report, called it “asinine,” because while its insinuations were in effect serious charges, it also piously stressed that no charges were being made. “Well, now,” he told reporters, recalling his own experience as head of a Senate investigating committee, “when I made a report to the Congress, I made specific charges if I thought they were necessary.” But like his dismissal of the Hiss case as a “red herring,” the word “asinine” struck sparks, infuriating Senator Fulbright, who announced he would begin public hearings. Nor did Truman improve matters by portraying Fulbright as “an overeducated S.O.B.”

Truman had somebody from the White House staff make a fast check of RFC correspondence and was told, as he had anticipated, that the RFC files contained hundreds of “pressure letters” from members of Congress, including a number from Fulbright himself and Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, another Democrat on the investigating committee. (Douglas, quickly checking his own files, found three such letters, which he immediately read into the record, conceding that probably he had “gone too far.”) His temper up, Truman put through a call to the Capitol and had Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, the leading Republican on the committee, summoned away from an executive session. Tobey, a veteran on the Hill, was a man Truman had long liked and admired, but now Truman angrily warned him to watch his step. Paul Douglas would later write that Tobey returned from the call looking pale and solemn. Truman had told him the “real crooks and influence peddlers” were members of the committee, as they might soon find out.

But when Democrats Fulbright and Douglas went to the White House to meet with Truman, to urge him to “clean house” and allow Dawson to testify before the committee, they found him disarmingly subdued.

“You have been loyal to friends who have not been loyal to you,” said Douglas, who would remember the silence that followed as Truman turned in his chair and looked sadly out the window at the slanting rain.

“I guess you are right,” he said softly.

In May, Truman put Stuart Symington in as head of the RFC and Symington moved expeditiously to straighten things out.

There was an increasing sense nationwide that the moral fabric was breaking down all about. For a year now, Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had been staging televised hearings in one city after another, looking into activities of organized crime, and the testimony of such big-time underworld figures as Joe Adonis and Frank Costello had caused a sensation.

“You bastards. I hope a goddamn atom bomb falls on every goddamn one of you,” said the girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel, Virginia Hill Hauser, who wore a $5,000 silver-blue mink stole the day of her appearance before the Kefauver Committee.

The New York advertising firm of Young & Rubicam took a full page in the newspapers to register concern:

With staggering impact, the telecasts of the Kefauver investigation have brought a shocked awakening to millions of Americans.

Across their television tubes have paraded the honest and dishonest, the frank and the furtive, the public servant and the public thief. Out of many pictures has come a broader picture of the sordid intermingling of crime and politics, of dishonor in public life.

And suddenly millions of Americans are asking:

What’s happened to our ideals of right and wrong?…

What’s happened to our principles of honesty in government?

What’s happened to public and private standards of morality?

That summer of 1951 came the shocking news that ninety West Point cadets, including a large part of the Army football team, were expelled for cheating on examinations. Truman was sickened by the West Point scandal. It made him feel discouraged, he said, in a way nothing else had in a long time. When other colleges began making offers to the dismissed football players, he felt even worse.

As time passed and Dawson, Young, and Boyle testified on the Hill, along with scores of others, it often became difficult to distinguish truth from hearsay, or to tell how much that had gone on was illegal or only an impropriety, or old-fashioned, petty political wangling and stockjobbing. Corporations of questionable stability had been propped up or rescued by multi-million-dollar RFC loans, and too often, it appeared, because of political influence. A director of the RFC named Walter L. Dunham testified that Donald Dawson had told him to clear all top personnel matters of the RFC with the White House, and Dunham’s telephone log showed 45 calls from or about Dawson, 151 calls from Bill Boyle or his office, mostly all to urge Dunham to see some “very dear friend” or other on an RFC matter. Yet Dunham also stressed that Dawson had never tried to influence him on an RFC loan.

Dawson, in his turn, insisted he had done no wrong. Acknowledging that he had stayed without charge at a Miami hotel on three different occasions, Dawson said he understood this was a common practice, that even some senators were on the hotel’s free list, a point no one on the committee chose to press. A handsome man with a smooth, ingratiating manner, Dawson gave the appearance of someone who definitely knew his way around, yet claimed he never realized that the Miami hotel had a $1.5 million RFC loan. “I did nothing improper, but I would not do it again,” said Dawson. In conclusion, Senator Fulbright assured Dawson that the object of the hearings was not to embarrass him. “You were sort of a necessary background,” Fulbright said. As Senator Douglas later conceded, Dawson made a “good showing,” only “minor peccadilloes” were proved against him.

While the RFC hearings continued, a House committee began investigations of irregularities in the tax administration, looking into charges of bribes, shakedowns, and gross negligence.

To his staff, Truman said it was all politics and all aimed at him. He could not see that either Dawson or Boyle had done anything seriously out of line and refused even to reprimand them. He liked people, he told Bill Hassett privately, and was loath ever to think of anyone as evil or unredeemable.

“Mr. President,” Joe Short warned, “I don’t think this business is going to blow over.”

Meanwhile, Merl Young, who, because of his wife, had a White House pass, would breeze in cheerfully after work to pick her up. Seeing Young one evening, Roger Tubby had a momentary urge to slam into him. “He was dressed in flashy sport clothes and talked almost gaily to Officer Ken Burke at the door,” Tubby wrote later, still angry.

It was the appearance of wrongdoing, the presence of someone like Merl Young at the White House, that Truman seemed unwilling to respond to with appropriate action, and the appearance of wrongdoing, whether representative or not, only grew worse.

In July the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke a story charging that Bill Boyle had received $8,000 for arranging a half-million-dollar RFC loan for a St. Louis printing firm, the American Lithofold Corporation, and that part of the fee had been paid after Boyle became chairman of the Democratic Party.

“Ah, me,” wrote Roger Tubby, after returning to the White House from a vacation. “I wonder if this is all as bad as it appears—yes—then, is it as bad or worse than the stuff which goes on in every presidency?” Tubby was forty, a bright, idealistic Yale graduate and former Vermont newspaper reporter who had been a press aide at the State Department before coming to the White House and who in the time since had become devoted to Truman. Like his predecessor as assistant press secretary, Eben Ayers, Tubby was keeping a diary. He was also a great worrier, with premonitions of Truman ending up, as some critics were saying, like Warren G. Harding. “Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much,” Tubby had commented on Truman in his diary at Key West in April, “a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement?…companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?” Now Tubby wrote:

T[ruman] has to take strong action to save himself…. There are rumors of new exposés in Internal Revenue—let the W[hite] H[ouse] take the lead in checking and cleaning up, instead of appearing to be forced to action as in RFC business. Check, then fire Boyle. Lay about with a good broom. It probably won’t be done—probably too late anyhow…to do good politically…never too late otherwise.

In Vermont for two weeks—yes, guess that’s right, Truman and Acheson made good decisions. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MINK COAT? WHAT ABOUT THAT LETTER TO THE MUSIC CRITIC?

So he has an Achilles heel, maybe two of ’em. But he fights doggedly on for the right things. But why, why, why doesn’t he make it easier for himself, for all of us, really, in the world?

Another day, Tubby would write of the President, “He does not like to dwell upon the weakness and foibles of his party, or even of the GOP—he is a builder, looking far into the future….”

Once when he had served as budget director, prior to becoming Secretary of the Army, Frank Pace had asked the President why he continued to tolerate the influence of machine politicians on his administration, and Truman, with a chuckle, had replied, “Frank, you make a splendid director of the budget, but a lousy politician.”

For Truman, the attack on Boyle was cutting close to the bone. He had known Boyle since Boyle was a child in Kansas City, growing up in a prosperous Irish Catholic family where politics was a life force. Boyle’s mother, Clara, had been a Pendergast precinct worker, an energetic, God-fearing woman still honored and respected in Kansas City, and someone Truman greatly admired, calling her “one of the best Democrats Missouri ever produced.” By age sixteen Boyle had organized a Young Democrats Club in the city’s affluent Fourth Ward, and until now he had never been accused of misconduct or dishonesty. Truman liked him. He had put Boyle in one job after another over the years, and from the time Truman first brought him to Washington, as an assistant counsel for the Truman Committee, Boyle had remained a staunch, resourceful enthusiast, working hard for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket in 1944 and harder still for the Truman campaign in 1948, while between times prospering as a Washington lawyer. Boyle was commonly credited as one of the “masterminds” of Truman’s upset victory in 1948. Once Truman installed him as chairman of the Democratic National Committee he became truly, as the papers said, a political power-house.

No one seeing Bill Boyle in the lobby of the Mayflower or the Statler would have had trouble guessing his occupation. A well-dressed, six-foot, fleshy “good fellow” with a round Irish face, he was the picture of a professional politician. He had a “nice way” about him, an “index card memory” for names, and though not known for efficiency or a particularly sharp mind, he knew politics from experience in a way that others, like most of Truman’s staff, never would. He talked the language, he had “the feel.”

Boyle’s chief trouble was with alcohol, and this had infuriated Truman more than once in times past. On the night of the 1944 presidential election, Boyle had been one of those in the suite at the Muehlebach who got so drunk that Bess and Margaret left in disgust. “Your views on Mr. Boyle and the other middle-aged soaks are exactly correct,” Truman had written to Margaret afterward, apologetically.

I like people who can control their appetites and their mental balance. When that isn’t done I hope you will scratch them off your list. It is a shame about Boyle. I picked him up off the street in Kansas City, because I thought he’d been mistreated by the people out there for whom he’d worked. He had the chance of a lifetime to become a real leader in politics and to have made a great name for himself. John Barleycorn got the best of him and so far as I’m concerned I can’t trust him again….

But Truman had not scratched him from his own list, he did trust Boyle again, and remained genuinely fond of him. “Bill’s all right! Don’t let anybody tell you differently!” he had told those gathered for a huge black-tie dinner in Boyle’s honor at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium in September 1949. Truman and Barkley both had flown from Washington for the occasion. “All these are friends to tie to,” Truman had continued, sparkling with warmth for Boyle, McGrath, and Bob Hannegan, his three party chairmen since becoming President. “They are there when you need them, and that’s the kind of friends I like to have around me.” It was the old professional creed—politics as a matter of friends—and his Kansas City audience gave a roar of approval.

But conspicuously present among the more than two thousand at the dinner had been several well-known North Side gamblers, including the ruling Kansas City racketeer of the day, Charles Binnagio, who only months later was shot to death in a gangland killing reminiscent of the city in its worst days. The press had taken careful note of such “friends” present to honor Boyle, just as the press highlighted the fact that Binnagio had been gunned down in a Democratic clubhouse located on Truman Road and that his bullet-riddled body fell beneath a poster-sized portrait of President Harry S. Truman.

To many on the White House staff Boyle now looked like a very large liability.

“So Boyle is not only stupid and inefficient, but also, it seems, a crook,” wrote Roger Tubby, so angry he could hardly contain himself.

He should of course resign, or offer his resignation. But these chiselers who use, and who do terrible damage to, the President don’t resign. He should be fired as soon as the President is satisfied there has been wrong doing…. The important thing is that the President be saved from his friends.

Bill Hassett urged Truman to rid himself of Boyle without delay. “Your friends will destroy you,” Hassett pleaded.

“It’s all right, Bill,” Truman said, as if trying to calm a child. “It’s all right.”

Truman quietly ordered a confidential investigation by Charlie Murphy, his precise, scrupulously honest counselor whose importance was far greater than generally understood. Murphy’s report was ready by midsummer, and at a subsequent press conference, Truman said he would stand by Boyle. No one connected with the Democratic National Committee ought ever to take fees for favors or services, Truman said, and it was his impression that Boyle had not. “I have the utmost confidence in Mr. Boyle. And I believe the statements that he made to me.”

In his memorandum, Murphy reported that a thorough search of the RFC records had revealed “no effort of any kind whatever” by Boyle to influence the loan made to the American Lithofold Corporation.

Monthly reports filed by the Company with the St. Louis office of the RFC during 1949 and 1950, while the loan was outstanding, indicate that the Company paid Boyle $1500 in the Spring of 1949…. This appears to be entirely consistent with the statement which Boyle has made that he was retained by the Company for general legal services for two and one half months in the Spring of 1948, that he gave up the account voluntarily in April 1949, when he became a full-time, salaried employee of the Democratic National Committee….

The RFC examiner for the Lithofold loan had never met Boyle, never communicated with him directly or indirectly on that particular subject or any other. Murphy had concluded there was nothing “fishy” about the RFC loan. “I believe that the facts I have developed substantiate the statement Mr. Boyle himself has already issued concerning this matter, and that they indicate pretty clearly that he had nothing to do with the granting of the loans in question and that there is no reason why he should be subjected to criticism, express or implied, on that account.”

Murphy’s report could only have pleased Truman greatly, while also reinforcing his own natural inclination to see attacks on any of his people as fundamentally political and directed at him. It might sound egotistical, Truman remarked, but he thought he was as good a judge of people as anyone who had ever sat in his chair. He had made some mistakes, and he had had to fire some people consequently. But, he added, “You can’t punish a man for not seeming to be right if he isn’t wrong.”

In October, a new revelation relieved considerably the sting of the Boyle accusations. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Guy George Gabrielson, testified that he had been paid $25,000 for “looking after” the loans of a Texas corporation, Carthage Hydrocel, Inc., and had intervened many times with the RFC on behalf of the firm. Gabrielson found it amusing that anyone might think his activities improper. “It is inconceivable to me,” he told the committee, “to believe that a chairman of a party that is not in power could have any possible influence.” But as reported, embarrassed Republicans in Congress did not think it would sound so inconceivable to the voters.

When, in time, the Senate committee issued its final report, Boyle would be cleared of any wrongdoing. In the oddly inverted wording of the report, he was guilty only of conduct that was “not such that it would dispel the appearance of wrong-doing.” But by then, “for reasons of health,” Boyle had also resigned as Democratic national chairman and scandals in the tax bureau loomed larger than any thus far.

For more than a year, Treasury Secretary John Snyder had been trying to get to the bottom of persistent rumors of corruption in various tax collectors’ offices around the country. But Snyder had made little progress. Then in April 1951, the collector in St. Louis, James P. Finnegan, resigned only after being cleared by a grand jury. In July, Truman had to fire two more collectors, Denis W. Delaney in Boston and James G. Smyth in San Francisco. Eight of Smyth’s associates were also suspended, and a few months later, the collector in Brooklyn, Joseph P. Marcelle, was fired.

All four men—Finnegan, Delaney, Smyth, and Marcelle—had been appointed by Bob Hannegan, when Hannegan was head of the Bureau of Internal Revenue under Roosevelt, and all had taken their jobs with the understanding that tax collection need only be a part-time responsibility, that they were free to do other things as well. Like Hannegan, all four men were also the products of big-city Democratic machines, and in fact corrupt practices—or at the least flagrant “irregularities”—had been rampant during their terms of office. Finnegan was indicted for bribe taking and misconduct, Delaney, the Boston collector, for taking bribes to “fix” tax delinquencies. In San Francisco, Smyth, too, was indicted—for fixing tax fraud claims—and in Brooklyn, Marcelle was found to have cheated on his own tax returns and amassed, through his law practice, nearly a quarter of a million dollars beyond his $10,750-a-year salary as tax collector.

Meantime, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, George J. Schoeneman, had suddenly resigned “for reasons of health,” and the resignations of the assistant commissioner, Daniel A. Bolich, and the bureau’s chief counsel, Charles Oliphant, followed almost immediately.

In November, Truman had to fire the head of the tax division at the Justice Department, Assistant Attorney General T. Lamar Caudle. A House investigating committee would conclude that Caudle, though undoubtedly an honorable man, had been naive in his dealings with tax fixers.

By December, George Elsey would report in a White House memorandum that signs of corruption were spreading so fast the staff was unable to document them all.

In Truman’s defense, it was stressed that the tax collectors under fire were holdovers from the Roosevelt administration. Also, Truman had moved swiftly and forcefully to clean house in the tax bureau, a point no one could contest. By December, 113 employees of the Internal Revenue Bureau, including six regional collectors, had been fired from their jobs. When Boyle was replaced by a new Democratic national chairman, Frank E. McKinney, Truman also determined that collectors of the Internal Revenue would no longer be patronage jobs but put under civil service.

Nonetheless, corruption in the tax bureau was truly appalling, the housecleaning long overdue, and if Bob Hannegan had made his key appointments under Roosevelt, Hannegan had also been known as a thorough Truman man, another Missouri crony. Hannegan had himself been a first-rate head of the tax bureau, but Hannegan was no longer available to speak in his own defense—he had died of heart failure in October 1949. And whatever the comparative guilt or stupidity of an unfortunate figure like T. Lamar Caudle, it would be remembered that his wife, too, was the recipient of a mink coat, a Christmas present from an attorney who had dealings with the tax division.

Would he be taking drastic action to clean up the government, Truman was asked at a press conference in December. “Let’s say continue drastic action,” he replied.

“Wrongdoers have no house with me,” he said, an expression that left reporters looking puzzled and that Truman later told his staff he had used since boyhood. (Time would report that it was a colloquialism as old at least as Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet’s father, angry with her for refusing to marry Paris, tells her: “Graze where you will, you shall not house with me.”)

Did he ever feel as though he had been “sold down the river” by his friends?

“Well, who wouldn’t feel that way,” he snapped angrily. But beyond that he would say no more.

“Boss, you’re going to have to run in ’52,” Harry Vaughan told him one day, as Truman sat at his desk. “Who else is there?”

“We’ll get someone,” Truman answered, a twinkle in his eye.

“You know there isn’t anybody else. You’ll have to run.”

“We’ll see,” said Truman, and Vaughan came out of the office convinced the President would run again.

Vaughan, as he told the others, had no misconceptions about what was ahead for him personally, should Truman not run.

“Once I’m outa the White House,” Vaughan said one noon hour in the staff lunchroom downstairs, “I know perfectly well that these jokers who bow and scrape and call me General would pass me by on the street and if they saw me say, ‘Why there goes that fat god-damned son-of-a-bitch!’ ”

It was one of those moments when several of the staff were reminded why, after all, the President had kept Vaughan around for so long.

The only one not pointedly urging Truman to run again was Bill Hassett, who was due to retire soon himself and who told Truman that for his own sake and the sake of his family, he should do the same.

In Korea, though peace talks had resumed, now at Panmunjom, the war went on. The sticking point in the talks was the fate of 132,000 North Korean soldiers held prisoner by the U.N. Command. Originally, it had been agreed that the end of hostilities would bring an immediate exchange of all prisoners. But now the United States opposed that policy, since nearly half of the North Korean prisoners of war, some 62,000, had no wish to be repatriated. Truman insisted that they be given the choice of whether to go home. At the end of World War II Stalin had executed or sent to Siberia thousands of Soviet soldiers whose only crime was to have been captured by the enemy. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery,” Truman declared, and he would not be budged.

American casualties in Korea were now far less than in the first year of the war. Still every week meant more death and suffering. Korea was consuming lives and resources, poisoning American politics, devastating Truman’s presidency. No one wanted the war ended more than he. According to the polls, half the American people favored using the atomic bomb to get it over with. And though determined to keep to his policy of restraint, even he had his own fantasies about the ultimatum he might hand the Soviets. In another of his solitary ventings of anger and frustration, a lengthy private soliloquy in longhand, he wrote:

Dealing with Communist Governments is like an honest man trying to deal with a numbers racket king or the head of a dope ring…. It seems to me that the proper approach now would be an ultimatum with a ten day expiration limit, informing Moscow that we intend to blockade the China coast from the Korean border to Indo-China, and that we intend to destroy every military base in Manchuria, including submarine bases, by means now in our control, and if there is further interference we shall eliminate any ports or cities necessary to accomplish our peaceful purposes.

That this situation can be avoided by the withdrawal of all Chinese troops from Korea and the stoppage of all supplies of war and materials by Russia to Communist China. We mean business. We did not start this Korean affair but we intend to end it for the benefit of the Korean people, the authority of the United Nations and the peace of the world.

We are tired of these phony calls for peace when there is no intention to make an honest approach to peace….

Stop supplying war materials to the thugs who are attacking the free world and settle down to an honorable policy of keeping agreements which have already been made.

This means all out war. It means that Moscow, St. Petersburg, Mukden, Vladivostock, Pekin[g], Shanghai, Port Arthur, Dairen, Odessa, Stalingrad and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union will be eliminated.

This is the final chance for the Soviet Government to decide whether it desires to survive or not.

But no one heard him ever say such things. He had no such intentions. The seven sheets of desk notepaper that he had filled were put away in a drawer and on he went with the hard work of his responsibilities. “I know of no easy way to be President,” he would say.

At Washington dinner parties, and increasingly to reporters, prominent Republicans talked almost gleefully of the “damndest” campaign ever in 1952 on the issues of communism, corruption, and Korea. Taft was already running. Others, Republicans and Democrats, spoke more and more of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate. By December, Attorney General McGrath was being questioned by the House committee investigating the Internal Revenue scandals and Truman’s standing in the polls had fallen to an all-time low. Only 23 percent of the country approved of how he was handling his job.

But by then the staff had been told. In mid-November, during a brief vacation at Key West, Truman had gathered them about the poker table on the porch at the Little White House to read aloud the statement he had written on April 12, 1950, and that he planned to release in the coming spring, in April 1952, well in advance of the Democratic National Convention. He was not running again; but for the next five months, he cautioned them, there must be utmost secrecy. He was only telling them now, he explained, so they could start making their own plans. Once having told them, he seemed greatly relieved.

“From that day forward,” Roger Tubby was to write several months later, “I have not discerned any difference in any of our feelings for, or relations with the President—we are, and I think it proper to generalize for the staff, devoted to him as before.”

Later still, it would be seen as a measure of that devotion that none of those who knew Truman’s plans for 1952 ever said a word. The secret was kept for five months, as he had asked.

In the first week of the new year, on January 5, 1952, Winston Churchill, who in recent months, at seventy-seven, had returned to office as prime minister, arrived for a brief visit. Churchill had sailed on the Queen Mary. Truman sent the Independence to New York to bring him to Washington and Truman was there at National Airport to welcome him. Churchill, white-haired, wearing the familiar derby and smoking a long cigar, looked greatly aged, more stooped than ever, his walk slower. But to those watching as he and Truman greeted one another, he was “the old warrior,” “the old lion” still, with an air of dramatic dignity about him. To Truman, Churchill was the greatest public figure of the age, as he often said. To Dean Acheson, this was an understatement. One would have to go back four centuries to find his equal, Acheson insisted. “What Churchill did was great; how he did it was equally so…. Everything felt the touch of his art—his appearance and gestures….”

That evening, following dinner on board the Williamsburg, the table cleared, Churchill began talking of the state of the world, the menace and paradoxes of the Soviet empire. He acknowledged the importance of American nuclear power, and warmly praised Truman’s leadership of the free world, including, as Churchill said, Truman’s “great decision” to commit American forces in Korea. For Acheson, Averell Harriman, and others present, it was an occasion to be long remembered.

Looking at Truman, Churchill said slowly, “The last time you and I sat across the conference table was at Potsdam, Mr. President.” Truman nodded.

“I must confess, sir,” Churchill went on, “I held you in very low regard then. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt.” He paused. “I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

In a dark period for Harry Truman, a winter of tawdry scandal, of interminable war in Korea and greatly diminished public confidence in his leadership, the gallant old ally had again, and as only he could, served as a voice of affirmation.

II

During his initial years in the White House, Truman had often referred to it derisively as “the great white jail,” “the great white sepulcher of ambitions,” or “the taxpayers’ house.” He had found living there difficult, often very lonely. But he was also the President who, with the war over, reestablished state dinners and receptions in the grand, formal rooms of the mansion, insisting on respect for tradition in most every detail. He and the First Lady had returned “pageantry” to the White House, as J. B. West said, and plainly this had given him great pleasure.

As much perhaps as anyone who had ever lived there, Truman felt the aura of the old structure’s past, the lingering presence of the strong personalities who had been its occupants down the years, even to the point, some nights, of hearing their ghosts stalking the center hall upstairs or knocking at his door. As Ethel Noland and others had observed, history for Truman was never just something in a book, but part of life, and of interest primarily because it had to do with people. Often when he spoke of Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams or Abraham Lincoln, it was as if he were talking about someone he knew. One cold Saturday morning near the end of 1950, he had led John Hersey on a tour of the White House renovation, at a time when the inside of the building looked like any big construction project, with steel beams, raw concrete floors, and metal ductwork contained within the shell of the old exterior walls. There were no partitions. Nothing remained of the original interior. It looked, thought Hersey, as if someone had decided to set up a modern office inside a deserted castle. Yet Truman stepped briskly along describing the historic features of one room after another, as though they were all still there, everything in place. The tour became a kind of fantasy, “a game of imagining,” as Hersey wrote. Truman pointed out the Red Room, the Blue Room, the Green Room, then, at the far end, the East Room.

“You know, the White House was started in 1792,” he said, “and the first ones to move in were John Adams and his wife, in 1800, and when they moved in, only six rooms in the whole building were ready to be lived in. This East Room was just a stone shell, so Abigail Adams used to string up her wash to dry in here. Imagine it! Later on, when the room was dolled up, Jackson bought twenty spittoons to go in here. They cost twelve-fifty apiece.”

When Hersey asked if the intention was to restore the interior more or less as it had been before the building was dismantled, Truman answered emphatically, “Oh, yes indeed!”

History aside, Truman also understood the building’s immense power as symbol. Since his first weeks in office, he had made steady use of such lesser symbols as the presidential yacht, the presidential plane, railroad car, and limousines. It was not just that he enjoyed them, but that he knew the degree to which they represented the dignity and importance of the office. Now, in an ironic bit of timing, as his tormentors in the press and opposition party made much over the “mess in Washington” by use of such other symbols as deep freezers and mink coats, Truman found some relief from his daily burdens, welcome diversion from war and scandals and politics, in the work of saving and returning to service the ultimate symbol of his high place in American life. The creator of acclaimed Missouri roads and courthouses—and of what had become the nation’s best-known balcony—could be a builder again, restorer and guardian of one of democracy’s shrines, the oldest building of the federal city. And little else that he was able to accomplish in these last years of his presidency would give him such satisfaction.

From its beginning stages he had cared intensely about the project. “It is the President’s desire,” the official White House architect, Lorenzo Winslow, had written in the spring of 1949, “that this restoration be made so thoroughly complete that the structural condition and all principal and fixed architectural finishes will be permanent for many generations to come.”

The first dismantling had begun December 13, 1949, after six months of planning. Truman had hoped to have full responsibility for the project—it was, after all, the President’s house—but was turned down by Congress. A Congressional Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion was established, its six members appointed by the President, including two from the Senate, two from the House, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the president of the American Institute of Architects. The senior member of the commission, old Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, the president pro tempore of the Senate, who was by then eighty, became chairman, while Glen E. Edgerton, a retired major general from the office of the Army Chief of Staff, was made executive director of the work. But it was the White House architect, Winslow, who worked most directly with Truman, and it was to be Truman, in the last analysis, who made nearly all the major decisions and a good many others as well.

The last major overhaul of the old mansion had been in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, in 1902. Under the direction of Charles McKim of the renowned New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, & White, the main floor especially had been transformed from something resembling a dowdy Victorian hotel to a kind of Beaux-Arts elegance, with the added touch of magnificent new electrical light fixtures and chandeliers. But the work was fundamentally cosmetic and accomplished in a huge rush. Structural needs had been bypassed, making the house in all less stable than it had been before. It had been truly a “botch job,” as Truman said, and a principal cause of the conditions Truman faced forty-seven years later.

Although the exterior sandstone walls, the roof, and a fire-resistant third floor that had been added in the 1920s, during the Coolidge era, were in stable condition, the rest of the house was on the verge of collapse and a fearful fire hazard. Great loads had been put on the interior bearing walls. Beams had been notched or cut for plumbing or electrical wiring. The entire second floor, most of which had been rebuilt after British soldiers burned the house in 1814, was unsafe. “The character and extent of structural weakness were found to be truly appalling,” said the Commissioner of Public Buildings in his report. (Winslow had claimed he could prove mathematically that it was impossible for the house to remain standing.) The plumbing was all largely makeshift and long outdated, the heating system and electrical wiring all inadequate and obsolete.

The main question to be decided in 1949 was whether to remove the existing interior of the house below the third floor, keeping the outside walls, and then rebuild everything within; or to take down the whole building, preserving and numbering the exterior stones in the process, so they could be reassembled when the new building went up. In the words of a later report, “The decision between these plans presented a matter of not inconsiderable complexity, especially since there were involved not only the construction factors, but the compelling sentimental aspects of the matter.” To have proceeded by dismantling the outside walls would have made the project less difficult and less costly, saving as much as. $300,000 or $400,000. But only one member of the commission, Democratic Congressman Louis C. Rabaut of Michigan, had argued for that approach. To the rest, tearing down the White House was unacceptable. It would have seemed an act of desecration. Truman never considered the idea.

Had he and the commission decided otherwise, the walls of the White House would have begun coming down in early 1950, as McCarthy was beginning his assault. The country would have had to have seen the complete demolition of the building, down to the ground, at about the time the news from Korea had turned so dreadful the following summer, with American troops fighting desperately to hang on at the Pusan Perimeter.

As it was, the exterior remained intact, while within, everything below the third floor was removed, piece by careful piece to begin with—after which came the full-scale demolition until the entire inside was hollowed out and the house had become a cavernous empty shell, the old outside walls held in place by steel framing. Trucks and bulldozers moved in to begin excavation for two entirely new basement levels. It was an extraordinary sight. “They took the insides all out,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Dug two basements, put in steel and concrete like you’ve never seen in the Empire State Building, Pentagon or anywhere else.” He loved making inspection tours, often using the workers’ catwalks, high above ground.

The work was projected to cost $5,412,000 and be completed by December 1951. John McShain, Inc., of Philadelphia was, as low bidder, made general contractor. The firm had built the Pentagon, the Jefferson Memorial, and had a high reputation in Washington, but when Truman, walking over from Blair House one morning, saw a big McShain sign on the North Lawn of the White House, he told head usher Howell Grim to have “that thing” removed at once.

The project was far bigger and more complicated than commonly appreciated. Most of Washington and the country never realized all that was involved or the extent to which it was to become the house that Harry Truman built.

For 149 years the outside walls of the house had been standing on clay. Now, for proper underpinning, 4-foot-square pits were dug to a depth of about 25 feet, down to a firm stratum of gravel—some 126 pits in all, these filled with reinforced concrete, thereby forming the foundation for the structural steel frame of the house that went up within the original walls. The old brick of the interior bearing walls—the backing for the stone—was also found to be too soft and had to be removed, thus for the first time revealing the inside surfaces of the original stones, many of which, to Truman’s delight, bore the mark of Masonic symbols. (He was also pleased to learn that on the Saturday in October 1792 when the Free Masons of Georgetown had laid the first stone, in the presence of President George Washington and the architect of the house, James Hoban, they had afterward paraded back to Georgetown, to “Mr. Sutter’s Fountain Inn,” where toasts were raised to the fifteen United States, the President, and “masonic brethren throughout the universe.”)

Original ornamental plaster cornices designed by James Hoban were found in the East Room hidden behind plaster put on in 1902. A well dug by Thomas Jefferson was discovered beneath the east wall. In his temporary office out on the South Lawn, General Edgerton kept an assortment of curiosities uncovered: a brick with a dog’s footprint in it, a pike blade found buried under the North Portico, an ancient pair of workman’s shoes.

All the principal rooms of the main floor—those used for state occasions—were to be rebuilt as “faithful reproductions” of the original rooms. The second and ground floors, too, would be restored with only minor changes.

The best of the original furnishings, beyond what was already at Blair House, had been put in storage at the National Gallery. Old mahogany doors and window sashes, mantelpieces, hardware, and floorboards deemed worth saving for reuse in the building, all paneling from the East Room and State Dining Room, were numbered, tagged, and carried away to federal warehouses across town. Twenty surplus mantels were given to museums, while some 95,000 old bricks were trucked off to Mount Vernon for the restoration of garden walls and to reconstruct George Washington’s orangery.

The public, too, was offered the choice of a dozen different White House relic “kits,” these ranging from a single foot-long piece of original, hand-split lath, for 25 cents, to a single brick (“as nearly whole as possible”) for a $1, to enough old pine to make a walking stick or gavel, for $2. The charge was intended only to cover the cost of distribution. A small metal “authentication plate” was also provided with each item. For $100, one could get enough bricks to surface a fireplace.

Truman had warmly endorsed the idea of offering such souvenirs, and receipts wound up exceeding expenses by $10,000. Originally he had said he wanted to send gavels made of White House wood to all forty-eight state governors. When the stones showing the original stonemasons’ marks were uncovered, he ordered a large number of them removed, some to be reset in the walls of the restored ground-floor kitchen, the rest to be sent to the grand lodges of the Masonic orders of every state, as a token of the bond between Freemasonry and the founding of the nation.

But as the pace of demolition stepped up, an immense quantity of material that might have been saved was not. Tons of old pine flooring, scrap lumber, ancient plumbing fixtures, pine doors, brick, and stone were hauled away to Forts Belvoir and Myer in nearby Virginia, some of it to be used in construction, but the large part as landfill. Chair rails, door frames, beautiful plaster moldings (once they had been measured and cast for reproduction) were scrapped, as part of the wreckage. For nearly a month, trucks loaded with White House “debris” went rolling back and forth across the Potomac to Virginia.

By the standards of latter-day preservation work, this was a needless and tragic loss. The justification would be cost and the President’s own desire to see the job finished in reasonable time.

Before the renovation, there had been sixty-two rooms in the mansion, twenty-six halls and corridors, fourteen bathrooms. With the project complete, there were to be more than one hundred rooms, forty corridors and halls, and nineteen bathrooms. There would be 147 windows, 412 doors, 29 fireplaces, 12 chimneys, 3 elevators. There would also be a television broadcast room and a bomb shelter, two definite and costly signs of the times.

Most of the additional rooms and baths were on the third floor (thirty-one rooms and nine baths) and in the new basement levels, which, when finished, would resemble the off-stage service and utility complex of an up-to-date 1950s hotel. There were storage rooms, a laundry, a dental clinic, medical clinic, staff kitchen, barbershop, pantries, everything very institutional-looking. Few buildings anywhere in the country had such advanced mechanical and electrical equipment as went into the new White House that was emerging. The main electrical control board looked big enough for a theater. Plumbing, heating, air conditioning, kitchen appliances, elevators, incinerator, fire alarm systems, wall safes—all were the most advanced of the day, and cost well over $1,250,000. To accommodate the refrigeration compressors for the air conditioning, a tremendous additional excavation had to be made outside, next to the North Portico.

To make the lowest basement bombproof, an additional $868,000 was spent, and with no questions asked. The Secret Service and Truman’s military advisers had convinced him of the necessity. The decision was made in the grim first months of the Korean War, when it seemed a third world war could come any time. “The President has authorized certain protective measures at basement level in and adjacent to the wings of the White House,” the commission was informed on August 16, 1950. “Plans for this work are now being developed by the Architect of the White House….”

The change meant many tons of additional steel and concrete in corridor walls and the floor above, work that was rushed ahead full speed. The bomb shelter was completed in less than a year, long before the upstairs levels were even close to finished.

The entrance, at the end of a subterranean passage at the northeast end of the house, was a four-inch steel door with a narrow window at eye level, like the entrance to a speakeasy. In the event that the President and those with him reached the shelter after an atomic attack had already occurred, they were to shed their clothes once inside a small entrance hall, then, naked, proceed into another somewhat larger hall, where they would shower—to remove any radioactive material—and put on emergency clothing, which by the summer of 1951, like everything else in the shelter, was all ready and waiting.

Beyond was a large room with some seventy army cots neatly stacked against one wall, gas masks, chemical toilets, and acetylene torches (in case the occupants had to cut their way out of the steel door). In adjacent rooms were an emergency generator, a larder of Army rations, and a communications center, with radios, cryptographic machines, and telephone switchboard with direct lines to the Pentagon, state police headquarters, and a secret military relocation center near Leesburg, known as Mt. Weather. Accommodations for the President and his family consisted of an 8 by 10-foot room, four bunk beds, a toilet, and a supply of books.

Those inside, Truman was informed during a first visit to the shelter, would probably survive an atomic attack. The facility, however, would not sustain a direct hit. As the Secret Service and most of his staff already knew, Truman intended, in the event of an attack, to remain at the White House or in the shelter, both during and afterward, largely for “morale reasons.”

(Once when a radar operator incorrectly reported the approach of twenty-five unscheduled, unidentified planes—which turned out to be one plane—and several of the White House staff went below to the shelter, Truman did not.)

In the early months of the White House project, the work had proceeded ahead of schedule; but with the onset of the Korean War, and increasing shortages of building materials, progress slowed, costs began to rise. About 250 men were on the job. The work went on six days a Week. Truman came and went repeatedly, so often as time passed that the men scarcely bothered to glance up or take notice.

“He considered it his project. He was saving the White House,” remembered Rex Scouten, one of the Secret Service agents who regularly accompanied the President on such rounds and who, years later, would become head usher, then curator of the White House. “He was also showing his desire to get it done with.”

Truman wanted everything handled correctly, on the job and on paper. When he learned of a movement within the commission to dispense with making complete plans of the installations in the new building—as a way of cutting costs—he responded at once with a terse memorandum to the head of the General Services Administration:

It is absolutely essential that the conduits, both wire and water, and all the complicated arrangements underneath the floors and the air conditioning service, be put on paper so that future mechanics of the White House can find things when it is necessary to make repairs. One of the difficulties with the old White House was that nobody knew where anything went and why it was there.

Now there just isn’t any sense in not having in the Archives, in the General Service Headquarters and in the White House complete plans of all installations. I want this done and if it requires an extra appropriation to get it done we will get that done too.

His own principal contribution to the design of the building concerned the grand stairway, which he insisted be relocated to the east side of the main entrance hall and made more open, more fitting for the ceremonial processions of the President and his guests of honor. Before, the stairway had been largely out of sight.

Often over the years, Truman had told friends and members of his staff that had he been forced as a young man to choose a profession other than politics, he would have been either a farmer, an historian, or an architect. Now, working with Winslow, he could pore over plans and drawings to his heart’s content, as he had once with Edward Neild, when building the Kansas City Courthouse; and at first, he and Winslow got along extremely well. A tall, personable, highly gifted man, Winslow had been an important figure at the White House since the 1930s. He cared intensely about the building, knew and loved its history. Privately, he even communed with the spirits of a few departed presidents. (“Franklin Roosevelt appeared and presented a rose to me as did Andrew [Jackson],” Winslow had recorded in his diary after an evening over a Ouija board in the summer of 1950.) A married man, he was also romantically involved with several women, and while Truman seems to have been aware of this, he appears only to have grown annoyed by it when the project started to fall behind schedule. Losing his patience, Truman could often become quite abrupt with Winslow.

Most of the time, however, they worked smoothly together, each admiring the other’s strengths and pleased to find how often they agreed. Winslow would write long memoranda reporting on progress, or listing current problems, and Truman would give his answers in the margins or between paragraphs in longhand. When, for example, Winslow reported that the commission intended to dismantle the temporary sheds on the South Lawn and set up various storage rooms and facilities for the workers in the new basement areas, Truman scrawled, “No! HST.”

It is probable [Winslow continued] that ground floor areas will be…used for contractor’s offices [and] without a doubt there will be considerable damage done to the various interior finishes that cannot be repaired satisfactorily at the last minute.

Don’t use them. HST

The basement areas should be kept as clean as possible after being finished. For any of these areas to be put into use as storage and dressing rooms for laborers and mechanics is inconceivable in a residence of this kind.

Just do not do it. HST

I am inclined to believe that the sheds on the south lawn should remain until nearly all the work is finished throughout the interior of the building. If this is done all tools, paints and other materials may remain stored outside the building where they properly should be stored.

Right.

As each room is completely finished it should be locked and kept locked until the furnishings are moved in for occupancy. After that time no workmen or government personnel should be permitted free access throughout the building without specific permission from the Executive Director of the Commission.

Right as can be. HST

In August 1951 the plasterers went out on strike for two weeks, slowing progress still more. The laying of the fine parquet floors, a slow process at best, seemed to go on endlessly, since few craftsmen could be found who knew how the work should be done and those available were often advanced in years and worked very slowly.

The contract for furnishing and decorating the house went to B. Altman & Company of New York, which did the entire project at cost. When a number of socially prominent New Yorkers who had served on a White House advisory committee in years past began pressing for the chance to contribute their views, Truman wrote that

I want it distinctly understood that this matter will be closely watched by me and that no special privileged people [will be] allowed to decide what will be done….

I am very much interested in the proper replacement of the furniture in the White House in the manner in which it should be placed, and since I am the only President in fifty years who has had any interest whatever in the rehabilitation of the White House, I am going to see that it is done properly and correctly.

This settled, the work went on, directed principally by B. Altman’s young chief of design, Charles T. Haight, who was tireless, forceful, and got along well with both the President and the First Lady, even as Truman made his presence felt more and more.

He kept pressing for greater speed. He wanted everything ready by Christmas 1951. He hoped to have at least a year in the house, before his term of office expired. As the new year began, work on the floors was still behind schedule. Installation of marble and paneling was incomplete. Bath fixtures had yet to arrive, and though some twenty painters were at work, only the third floor, the guest and servant quarters, had been finished.

There was no letup in the racket and confusion. In February 1952, the main floor was a thicket of scaffolding, paint buckets, and stacks of lumber, as Truman led a half-dozen reporters on a preview tour. The builders were speeding things up, he said, obviously pleased. He had “taken a curry comb to them.” He intended to move in by April. The reporters confessed difficulty in imagining how the finished interior would look.

On March 15, The New York Times reported that things were “moving at the double quick” at the White House.

Two large moving vans stood under the White House front portico. From them movers carried furniture through the White House double doors. Graders were smoothing off a new front lawn just ahead of landscapers who were rolling down turf that arrived in great truck-loads….

Twelve days later, late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, Truman arrived back in Washington after a week’s stay at Key West and, joined by Bess, was driven to the White House, entering by the north gate on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It was spring again and the mansion looked warm and cheerful in the dusk, with lights glowing from every window on the ground floor. As a further note of cheer, a large cherry tree in full blossom had been planted just that day in the front lawn.

Beneath the North Portico several of the White House staff, members of the commission, and others stood waiting, with a cluster of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen. Along the sidewalk, by the iron fence, a crowd applauded and called welcome.

Head usher Howell Crim greeted the President at the door. John Mays, the veteran doorkeeper who had been at the White House since the time of William Howard Taft, took the President’s coat.

Truman, “tanned and appearing in excellent health,” “obviously highly pleased,” as reporters jotted in their notebooks, stepped inside. After an absence of three years, four months, the President of the United States was again in residence at the White House.

Every light was burning, everything shimmered with light—crystal chandeliers and red carpets, window glass, marble columns, gilt-framed mirrors. Wood floors shone like polished glass. Walls and ceilings glistened with new paint. The effect was stunning. It all looked much the same as before, yet brighter, more spacious, and finished to perfection.

With Bess, Truman toured the whole of the first floor. To the white and lemon-gold splendor of the East Room had been added new mantelpieces of Tennessee marble, in honor of the chairman of the commission, Senator McKellar. Except for two magnificent grand pianos standing in opposite corners and two newly acquired Adam benches against the far wall—eighteenth-century benches designed by John Adam of Edinburgh—the room was bare of furniture, its parquet floor shining like glass beneath the same two crystal chandeliers that had hung there before but that had been reduced slightly in scale. The Green Room—once Jefferson’s bedroom, later a dining room, later still a diplomatic reception room—looked no different from before, with the same silk on the walls, the same white Carrara marble mantels ordered by James Hoban in 1816. Above the entrance to the Blue Room, however, was a new presidential seal. Previously the seal had been embedded in the floor of the main hallway, but Truman had insisted it be moved—he didn’t like the idea of people walking on it.

The oval-shaped Blue Room itself had been changed from dark to royal blue, with a large motif in gold on its silk damask walls, while the Red Room had new damask walls, new draperies and valances—all very red—setting off another Hoban mantel of lustrous white Carrara marble. Truman was particularly fond of a small French clock on the mantel in the Red Room and of four portraits on the walls: of William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. The painting of Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, was, Truman liked to say, “the most expensive picture” in the house.

Where the State Dining Room had been formerly rather subdued, even somber, with dark oak paneling, it was now painted a soft green, a “lovely color,” Truman thought, and a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George P. A. Healy hung now over the mantel in a heavy gilt frame.

Because Bess had made a previous commitment to appear at a Salvation Army dinner at the Statler that evening, Truman dined alone, in the family dining room, off the State Dining Room, under a recently donated antique cut-glass chandelier and a spotless replacement of the ceiling where Margaret’s piano had once poked a hole.

“Bess and I looked over the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room,” he recorded that night. “They are lovely. So is the hall and state stairway…. I spent the evening going over the house. With all the trouble and worry, it is worth it….” The cost had been $5,832,000. It could have been done for less, he thought, and taken less time, if he had been fully in charge. But he was extremely pleased all the same. He had been told by the architect and engineers that it had been built to last another five hundred years. He hoped it would be a thousand years.

On Tuesday, April 22, when the White House was reopened for public tours, 5,444 people went through. On Saturday afternoon, May 3, with the pride of a new householder, Truman led his own television tour of the mansion. The broadcast was carried by all three networks and three network announcers—Walter Cronkite of CBS, Bryson Rash of ABC, and NBC’s Frank Bourgholtzer—took turns accompanying him and asking questions. Thirty million people were watching, the largest audience ever for a house tour. There was no script and Truman was at his best, relaxed, gracious, amusing, and knowledgeable. “His poise, his naturally hearty laugh, and his intuitive dignity made for an unusual and absorbing video experience,” wrote Jack Gould, television critic for The New York Times. In the East Room, to demonstrate the tone of the magnificent Steinway—“the most wonderful tones of any piano I have ever heard,” Truman told Frank Bourgholtzer—he sat down and gave an impromptu performance of part of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, then crossed the room to the Baldwin, an American-made piano, as he said, and from a standing position, played a few more bars on it as well.

He spoke of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding in the East Room and recalled that Franklin Roosevelt had lain in state there.

The President was an inexhaustible source of information [wrote Jack Gould]. He explained the decor and furnishings and offered a host of anecdotes on former occupants of the White House. Yet through his narratives there always ran an underlying note of deeply sincere and moving awe for the historic continuity of the Presidency.

Time called his performance “outstanding.” The country loved the new White House and, for the moment, very much liked the man who occupied it.

III

For quite some time, Truman had been thinking about the question of a successor, someone to head the Democratic ticket in November 1952 and take his place in the White House after inauguration day in January 1953. The Republicans, he expected, would choose Taft, and the prospect of Taft as President was intolerable to Truman. There must be no isolationist takeover that would destroy everything he had worked for.

By late summer 1951, he appears to have concluded that the ideal Democratic candidate, “the most logical and qualified,” was Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Vinson declined, saying he had been out of politics too long. In November Truman tried again, inviting Vinson to Key West where they could talk freely in the privacy of the Little White House, but not until after Truman had had a meeting with Eisenhower over which there was to be a good deal of controversy.

Whether Eisenhower, still the nation’s number one hero, would run for President, remained the great imponderable, though to judge by reports coming from his NATO headquarters in Paris, he was warming to the idea.

The first week of November, on a brief visit to Washington, the general had lunch with Truman at Blair House and reportedly Truman again offered his full support if Eisenhower would accept the Democratic nomination. The meeting took place on the 5th. On the 7th, Arthur Krock broke the story in The New York Times. Krock’s source, he later disclosed, was Justice William O. Douglas, who told Krock he had heard it from Truman himself and in the presence of Chief Justice Vinson and one or two others from the Court, during a reception at Blair House later the same day as Truman’s lunch with Eisenhower. “You can’t join a party just to run for office,” Eisenhower was described saying to Truman. “What reason have you to think I have ever been a Democrat? You know I have been a Republican all my life and that my family have always been Republicans.”

At Key West a week later, Truman denied the story, as had Eisenhower in Paris, both publicly and privately. “He told me Arthur Krock’s story that Truman had offered him the Democratic candidacy in 1952 wasn’t really true,” Krock’s colleague on the Times, C. L. Sulzberger, recorded after an evening with Eisenhower in Paris.

He told me this twice—before dinner and after dinner. When he first met Truman on this trip, they winked at each other and by mutual agreement said right away there was one subject they weren’t going to talk about, and that was the closest they ever came to politics.

When Vinson arrived at Key West, Truman told him the nomination was his if he would accept. Vinson was tentative, saying he needed time to discuss the matter with his wife. Later, in Washington, Vinson told Truman he did not think the Supreme Court should be seen as a stepping stone to the White House. When Truman countered with the example of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who as the Republican candidate in 1916 nearly defeated Woodrow Wilson, Vinson declined for reasons of health, and apparently to Truman’s great surprise. But Vinson, who had always looked sallow, was indeed in poor health. He would die two years later, in September 1953, at age sixty-one.

As the year ended, Truman seems to have been in something of a quandary, even about his own intentions, as implied in a longhand letter to Eisenhower dated December 18, 1951:

Dear Ike:

The columnists, the slick magazines and all the political people who like to speculate are saying many things about what is to happen in 1952.

As I told you in 1948 and at our luncheon in 1951, do what you think best for the country. My own position is in the balance. If I do what I want to do I’ll go back to Missouri and maybe run for the Senate. If you decide to finish the European job (and I don’t know who else can) I must keep the isolationists out of the White House. I wish you would let me know what you intend to do. It will be between us and no one else.

I have the utmost confidence in your judgment and your patriotism.

He, too, would like to live a semi-retired life with his family, Eisenhower wrote in reply to Truman. “But just as you have decided that circumstances may not permit you to do exactly as you please, so I’ve found that fervent desire may sometimes have to give way to conviction of duty.” He would not seek the presidency, Eisenhower said. Further, “you know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”

Eisenhower’s letter was dated New Year’s Day, 1952. Five days later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge announced in Washington the formation of an Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the following day in Paris, January 7, Eisenhower announced he was prepared to accept the Republican nomination.

Asked at his next press conference what he thought of the announcement, Truman had only praise for Eisenhower. He was “a grand man,” Truman said. “I am just as fond of General Eisenhower as I can be. I think he is one of the great men produced by World War II…. I don’t want to stand in his way at all, because I think very highly of him, and if he wants to get out and have all the mud and rotten eggs thrown at him, that’s his business….”

As the Eisenhower boom gathered force, Truman would remark to his staff, an edge of sadness in his voice, “I’m sorry to see these fellows get Ike into this business. They’re showing him gates of gold and silver which will turn out copper and tin.”

With Vinson no longer a possibility for the Democratic nomination, Truman decided the best choice would be Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. Alben Barkley, at seventy-four, was too old. The presidency would kill Barkley in three months, Truman thought. (“It takes him five minutes to sign his name,” Truman noted sadly in his diary.) Averell Harriman, whom Truman judged “the ablest of them all,” had never run for office and would be severely handicapped by his Wall Street background. (“Can we elect a Wall Street banker and railroad tycoon President of the United States on a Democratic ticket?”) Senator Estes Kefauver, a possibility, was a man Truman instinctively disliked and distrusted, a feeling shared by most of the party regulars. Privately, Truman referred to him as “Cowfever.”

Adlai Stevenson, by contrast, was comparatively young at fifty-one. He was able, progressive, the governor of a major industrial state, a champion of honest government, and a new face. Stevenson had carried Illinois in 1948 by an overwhelming 570,000 votes, in his first campaign for any office, a point that greatly impressed Truman. “He proved in that contest,” Truman would write, “that he possessed a knowledge and ‘feel’ for politics, that he understood that politics at its best was the business and art of government, and that he had learned that a knowledge of politics is necessary to carry out the function of our form of free government.”

That Truman should turn to Stevenson was greatly to Truman’s credit, for not only was Stevenson still a political unknown nationally, but a man altogether unlike Truman. A graduate of Princeton, well born, a prosperous lawyer, eloquent, witty, urbane—and divorced—Stevenson could hardly have been more different from Truman, or from most political figures of the day. Further, Truman hardly knew him. But Truman had read Stevenson’s speeches; he liked what he heard, admired Stevenson’s political philosophy, his Midwest background, his political heritage—the fact that Stevenson’s grandfather, the first Adlai E. Stevenson, had been a Democratic congressman and Vice President under Grover Cleveland. (“He comes of a political family,” Truman noted approvingly.) Also, several of the younger aides at the White House were keenly interested in Stevenson, seeing in him qualities of the kind needed to revitalize the Democratic Party.

Dispensing with any pretense of round-about overtures, Truman asked the governor to come see him, and for an hour or more, the evening of Tuesday, January 22, 1952, they met alone in the seclusion of Blair House—once Stevenson had talked his way past the guards outside who had never heard of him.

As Truman later recounted the conversation, he spoke to Stevenson at length about the office of the presidency, then asked him to take it, saying he need only agree and the nomination was his. He could count on Truman’s unqualified endorsement. “I told him I would not run for President again,” Truman recorded in notes made afterward, “and that it was my opinion he was best fitted for the place.”

He was, overcome…. [I] offered to have him nominated by the Democratic Convention in July. I had to explain to him that any President can control his party’s convention. Then I cited Jackson, Hayes, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and myself at Philadelphia in 1948. I reminded him that Washington picked John Adams, that Jefferson did the same with Madison and Monroe before conventions were used…I told him I could get him nominated whether he wanted to be or not. Then I asked what he’d do in that case. He was very much worried and said that no patriot could say no to such a condition.

But that night Stevenson said no. “He apparently was flabbergasted,” concluded Truman, who refused to give up.

Stevenson, according to a close friend, came away filled with admiration for Truman, who had been sitting by the fire reading the Bible when Stevenson arrived.

Stevenson was impressed with this self-contained, internally secure man that Truman was [remembered Carl McGowan]. A simple man of great strength. Stevenson, with his own churning around, was impressed with the calm, serenity, self-contained quality.

As Stevenson later confided to James Reston, Truman had said Stevenson was the man to defeat Eisenhower, who would most likely be the Republican candidate. Eisenhower’s intentions were good, Truman had said, but he was inexperienced in politics and bound to become the captive of Taft and so destroy Truman’s foreign and domestic programs. It was therefore essential that a Democratic administration be continued in the White House. The President wanted him to save the world from Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson told Reston, highly agitated.

According to another Stevenson friend, George Ball, who had driven Stevenson to and from Blair House that night, Truman had also observed at one point, “Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

But Stevenson had said no to Truman. Not only did he wish to remain governor of Illinois, he was less than certain that a change in Washington, a Republican administration, would be a bad thing for the country. Privately he wondered if the Democrats had been in power too long. And, in any event, he did not feel that being Truman’s handpicked candidate would be necessarily an advantage, given the woeful state of Truman’s popularity. If Eisenhower were the Republican candidate, Stevenson told George Ball, nobody could beat him.

On March 4, Truman and Stevenson met again at Blair House, this time at Stevenson’s request.

[He] came to tell me that he had made a commitment to run for reelection in Illinois [Truman wrote] and that he did not think he could go back on that commitment honorably. I appreciate his view point…. He is an honorable man. Wish I could have talked with him before his announcement. He is a modest man too. He seems to think that I am something of a superman which isn’t true of course…he argued that only I can beat any Republican be he Taft, Eisenhower or Warren, or anyone else! My wife and daughter had said the same thing to me an hour before. What the hell am I to do? I’ll know when the time comes because I am sure God Almighty will guide me.

For several weeks Truman toyed with the prospect of running again. Some of the staff felt sure he had changed his mind and was about to announce his candidacy.

On March 11, Estes Kefauver won a stunning victory in the New Hampshire primary, having stumped the state wearing his trademark coonskin cap and accusing the administration of doing too little to get rid of corruption. Truman had allowed his name to be entered, but did not campaign. He thought primaries were a lot of “eye-wash.” Still, Kefauver had challenged a President and won handily.

At a small private dinner at Blair House for a few close advisers, including the new Democratic chairman, Frank McKinney, Truman polled the table. Should he become a candidate to succeed himself? The answer, put as tactfully as possible, was no.

Truman left for Key West and on March 22 called Clark Clifford and asked him to come down. The following day, they sat alone in the garden behind the Little White House. Clifford told the President he hoped he would not run again. Truman expressed concern over the effect his withdrawal might have on the war in Korea. Clifford answered that the course of the war had long been established.

The same day from Key West, March 23, a White House aide named David Lloyd, who had once worked with Stevenson when Stevenson was with the State Department, wrote to the governor without Truman’s knowledge, urging him to reconsider, and in large part because of Truman:

Anybody who works closely with that man loves him, so I am prejudiced, and think, like the others, that he ought to have what he wants. Because of all he has put into the job, because of the way he has given himself to it, because of the things he has done for us all, I feel that if he wants to quit, and wants you to take the job, he ought to have his way. This may sound a little rough on you. But there is more to it than my personal feelings about him. We have to support him because of the things he represents, which are the things we believe in. If we don’t support him, then we signify to the world that we aren’t really taking seriously the things we talk about and work for, and the world will cease to take us seriously….

On their way to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, the huge, annual $100-a-plate black-tie gathering of Democrats held the evening of March 29 in the National Armory, Alice Acheson asked her husband if he thought the President might disclose his political future in his after-dinner speech. “Not at all,” said the Secretary of State in what, as she subsequently told him, was a notably superior manner. It would be too early for the President to announce an intention not to run again, Acheson explained, and too disappointing to many at the dinner were he to announce the contrary.

Truman appeared at the podium looking tanned and uplifted by the occasion. At the end of a lively, righting speech, having duly assaulted the Republicans and championed his own record, he put aside his prepared text and gave his answer:

“I shall not be a candidate for re-election. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

It was said without buildup, almost matter-of-factly, and for a few seconds the immense audience sat silent and confused. Then followed a strange mixture of automatic applause and shouted cries of “No,” even from some of those who had hoped he would step down. “I found myself shouting ‘No’ with vigor,” recalled Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had tried to stop Truman’s nomination in 1948. “Then I wondered why the hell I was shouting ‘No,’ since this is what I had been hoping would happen for months. Still the shouts of ‘No’ seemed the least due to the President for a noble and courageous renunciation.”

Truman left the hall quickly, smiling, waving, yet looking somewhat tense, though the First Lady had a very different expression. “When you made your announcement,” Harry Vaughan later told the President, “Mrs. Truman looked the way you do when you draw four aces.”

At the White House, as the President and First Lady arrived, many of the household staff who stood waiting at the door were crying.

Did he plan to run for the Senate, Truman was asked a few days later, at his next press conference. No, he said. (Mrs. Truman did not want him to, he had told his staff.) Did he favor Governor Stevenson for the nomination? No comment.

From Springfield, Stevenson had written:

I was stunned by your announcement Saturday night after that superb speech. I can only accept your judgment that the decision was right, although I had hoped long and prayerfully that it might be otherwise. As for myself, I shall make no effort to express the depth of my gratitude for your confidence. I hope you don’t feel that I am insensitive to either that confidence or the honor you have done me.

Replying immediately, Truman said he appreciated Stevenson’s letter “most highly.” The need was for a man who would “carry on the Foreign Policy of the United States as it was established in 1938 by President Roosevelt and carried through by me, to the best of my ability…. We must also have a President who believes in the domestic policies which have made the Foreign Policy possible,” for the one was not possible without the other. “I sincerely hope you will not take yourself completely out of the picture.”

Characteristically, whatever his frustrations with Stevenson, Truman would keep trying.

IV

How the President got through the first weeks of April, wrote Roger Tubby, was a testimony to his amazing stamina. Tubby himself, as he wrote, felt more dead than alive.

On April 3, Truman fired Attorney General McGrath, who for months had appeared to be obstructing the investigations Truman ordered into corruption in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Feeling he had been “sold down the river” by people whom he trusted, Truman had turned the “cleanup job” over to McGrath in January 1952, which raised charges of an attempted whitewash, since McGrath was a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McGrath had then named a respected New York lawyer, a Republican, Newbold Morris, to head the investigation. But Morris had soon quarreled with McGrath and annoyed Congress. When Morris issued a long, intricate questionnaire to be filled out by all federal employees, including the Cabinet, listing all assets and sources of income, McGrath exploded, calling the questionnaire an invasion of privacy and a violation of individual rights. McGrath refused to fill out the questionnaire, and after reading a copy, Truman, too, decided it should not be used.

Truman despaired over McGrath’s “inability to get on top” of his job. He liked McGrath—“I don’t think there was the slightest thing wrong with Howard personally at all,” he would later say—but found his performance frustrating. When, on April 3, McGrath announced he had fired Newbold Morris, and apparently with the idea that this was what Truman wanted, Truman fired McGrath.

With this farcical denouement, as Cabell Phillips would write, the administration’s housecleaning effort seemed to have blown to pieces. “It had been a miserable performance from start to finish, almost a burlesque of executive management, and the net result was to underline ‘the mess in Washington’ as a good deal more than a gloating Republican catchphrase.” Truman felt wretched about it all. In his Memoirs he would say nothing of the episode, but shortly afterward he wrote to McGrath, “I want you to know that my fondness for you has not changed one bit. Political situations sometimes cause one much pain.”

And by then, Truman was caught up in telephone and telegraph strikes, land the threat of another nationwide steel strike. He was showing the strain as those close to him had seldom seen. He looked stern in repose, his face deeply lined. After one morning staff meeting, when William Hopkins put the usual stack of papers in front of him to sign, Truman begged off until later, “when I’m not so shaky.” He was tired, terribly tired, he admitted. At the White House the evening before, he had fallen asleep in his chair, something he almost never did.

He seemed overburdened by his duties and decisions in a way he had never been before. It was as if the decision not to run again, the prospect of not being President, had taken something from him.

In his diary, Roger Tubby wrote:

McGrath, Korean truce talks perhaps heading up to a settlement, the steel, telegraph and telephone strikes, and his decision not to run again have been among the recent events draining on his emotional reserves…we were urging him to take a weekend off, to cut down on his afternoon appointments. He brightened, said he thought [it] a good idea to go down river on the Williamsburg…. But Matt reminded him he could not get away, there was a wreath laying ceremony Sunday at the Jefferson Memorial. “God, what a three weeks,” he said with feeling.

His appointment schedule for Tuesday, April 8, the crucial day, was typical and did not even include what was to be the most important event of the day.

As it turned out, he did not speak at the Shoreham as scheduled—the Secretary of State took his place—for it was that night, in a nationwide radio and television broadcast from the White House, that he announced he was seizing the steel mills.

It was one of the boldest, most controversial decisions of his presidency, and like so much else, the seriousness of the crisis was compounded by Korea, the war that had come to overshadow his whole second term and that was rarely ever out of his thoughts. “These are not normal times,” he would stress in his broadcast. “I have to think of our soldiers in Korea…the weapons and ammunition they need….” Also, it being an election year, with, as he saw it, his whole domestic and foreign program at issue, he had no wish to alienate labor.

From his reading of history, Truman was convinced his action fell within his powers as President and Commander in Chief. In a state of national emergency, Lincoln had suspended the right to habeas corpus, he would point out. Tom Clark, now on the Supreme Court, had once, as Attorney General, advised him that a President, faced with a calamitous strike, had the “inherent” power to prevent a paralysis of the national economy.

Truman’s legal advisers supported his views. And so, significantly, did Fred Vinson. According to later comments by John Snyder, the Chief Justice had confidentially advised the President that, on legal grounds, he could go ahead and seize the mills. Such counsel clearly violated the division between branches of government and was particularly improper in this instance, since a seizure of the steel industry was bound to be challenged in the courts and thus Vinson himself, very likely, would wind up having to weigh the case. But out of friendship and loyalty, Vinson offered advice that was taken quite to heart.

The path was clear, Truman told the ever cautious Snyder, who opposed seizing the mills. “The President has the power to keep the country from going to hell,” Truman would assure his staff.

A steel crisis had been a long time coming. Driven by the demands of the war, the mills were producing record tonnage. Profits, too, were on the rise. Yet steel workers, unlike workers in the auto and electrical industries, had had no pay raise since 1950. In November 1951, the 650,000 United Steel Workers, who were part of the CIO and headed by Phil Murray, called for a boost in wages of 35 cents an hour. Management refused to negotiate. The union gave notice that it would strike when its contract expired on December 31. On December 22, Truman referred the dispute to his Wage Stabilization Board recommended an hourly raise of 26 cents, and the union quickly agreed, the companies denounced the proposal as unreasonable, unless they could add a hefty increase of $12 a ton to the price of steel.

Negotiations continued, only to end in deadlock. With the April deadline approaching, the country, as said in the press, was caught “squarely on the griddle.” To Truman, the pay increase proposed by the Wage Stabilization Board seemed both “fair and reasonable,” and the most direct way to prevent a strike that would not only be a national emergency but would critically impair the flow of munitions to Korea and to the buildup of NATO forces in Europe, which he saw as crucial.

Secretary of Defense Lovett [Truman later wrote] said emphatically that any stoppage of steel production, for even a short time, would increase the risk we had taken in the “stretch-out” of the armament program. He also pointed out that our entire combat technique in all three services depended on the fullest use of our industrial facilities. Stressing the situation in Korea, he said that “we are holding the line with ammunition, and not with the lives of our troops.” Any curtailment of steel production, he warned, would endanger the lives of our fighting men.

Truman refused to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act—by which the government could enjoin a strike for eighty days pending an impartial study—because he saw no sense in delaying a settlement still further and felt the facts were already well known. Also, the steel workers had remained on the job voluntarily for nearly three months as it was. For them to continue thus another eighty days with no change in pay seemed to him unfair. Nor did the prospect of resorting to a law he disliked, and that labor despised, have any appeal.

But it was Truman’s fundamental feeling about the giants of the steel industry, the old distrust of big corporations that he had voiced with such passion during his years in the Senate, that moved him now, more than sympathy for the position of the steel workers. He considered the industry’s proposed price increase little better than profiteering, and saw the steel companies, with U.S. Steel in the lead, attempting to force a compromise that would ultimately play havoc with his anti-inflation policies and raise the cost of the war. “The attitude of the companies seemed wrong to me, since under the accelerated defense program the government was by far the biggest customer for steel and steel products. To hike prices at this time meant charging the government more for the tools of defense.”

While conceding that a modest ($4.50) increase in steel prices might be tolerated, Truman stubbornly rejected industry demands out of hand and went over the head of his own director of defense mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, who saw validity in the industry position. As a result Wilson resigned, a turn of events that Truman regretted and that brought down still more criticism on him.

To Truman, seizure of the mills was a temporary last resort. On Tuesday, April 8, only hours before the mills were scheduled to be struck, he made his move, signing Executive Order No. 10340.

“The plain fact of the matter is that the steel companies are recklessly forcing a shutdown,” he told the country when he went on the air at 10:30 that night.

They are trying to get special, preferred treatment…. And they are apparently willing to stop steel production to get it. As President of the United States it is my plain duty to keep this from happening…. At midnight the Government will take over the steel plants….

The broadcast over, on his way to his room, Truman looked so exhausted Joe Short thought he might collapse.

In some ways it was as though, in the last act of his presidency, with less than a year to go, he had reverted to the man he had been in the spring of 1946, after less than a year in office, when, faced by the great railroad impasse, he had tried to draft the striking workers into the Army.

At some eighty-eight steel mills across the country, the morning of April 9, 1952, things appeared the same as usual. The morning shifts arrived, production continued, the mills worked by the same men and managed by the same officials. The one clearly visible sign of change were the American flags that flew over the mills. In Washington, the Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, had assumed legal command of the industry.

But Truman had brought on an additional crisis, a constitutional crisis, just as he would have in 1946 had the railroad unions not agreed at the last minute to settle the strike. The outcry now was instantaneous and as scathing nearly as what he had faced after the firing of MacArthur. He was called a Caesar, a Hitler, a bully and lawbreaker. In reporting his action to Congress, in a special message delivered to the Hill immediately that same day, April 9, he stressed that his action had been taken with utmost reluctance: “The idea of government operation of the steel mills is thoroughly distasteful to me and I want to see it ended as soon as possible.” He acknowledged the power of Congress to supersede his policy and act on its own to pass a new law enabling the government to operate the mills as an emergency measure. Such legislation, he said, might be “very desirable.” But Congress did not choose to grant him such power. Instead, there were calls for congressional investigations, calls for his impeachment.

The President’s “evil deed” had no precedent in history, said the head of Inland Steel, Clarence Randall, in a radio and television broadcast. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, all attacked Truman. The “Truman talent for trouble,” said Newsweek, gave him and the nation no rest. The New York Times accused him of acting on “almost inconceivably bad advice.” The Washington Post predicted his seizure of the mills would probably go down in history as one of the most high-handed acts ever committed by an American President. Truman, said the Post, had grossly usurped the power of Congress, and in a constitutional democracy there was no more serious offense against good government. “Nothing in the Constitution can be reasonably interpreted as giving to the Commander in Chief all the power that may be necessary for building up our defenses or even for carrying on a war.”

If he could seize the steel mills under his inherent powers, could he therefore, Truman was asked at a press conference, also seize the newspapers and radio stations?

“Under similar circumstances, the President of the United States has to act for whatever is best for the country,” he answered abruptly and imprudently, stirring speculation that he was indeed planning to seize the press, an idea that had never occurred to him and that he couldn’t imagine happening.

The steel industry sued to get its property back. Swiftly, a federal district judge, David A. Pine, determined that seizure of the steel industry was illegal and the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case.

“I believe,” wrote Judge Pine in a 4,500-word opinion, “that the contemplated strike, if it came, with all its awful results, would be less injurious to the public than the injury which would flow from a timorous judicial recognition that there is some basis for this claim to unlimited and unrestrained Executive power….”

He had read the Pine opinion, Truman told his staff—“read it, read it and read it”—and still could not understand why he had been judged wrong. To Secretary of Commerce Sawyer, he confided that he would be “terribly shocked, disappointed and disturbed,” should the Supreme Court, too, decide against him.

The President was depressed, recorded Roger Tubby after a morning staff meeting.

[I] had never seen him so quiet and down. Occasionally there seemed to be…[an] effort by him to laugh at our sallies, but the laughs were brief, his countenance mostly serious…. Of course the steel wrangle has troubled him, the touch-and-go situation in Korea, the Democratic Party uncertainties—and he’s been terribly tired.

He would, of course, abide by the Court’s ruling, Truman told reporters. He had no ambition to be a, dictator. He just wanted to keep the country running.

The case against the President was argued in the Supreme Court by the attorney for the U.S. Steel Corporation, white-haired John W. Davis, who had been the Democratic candidate for President in 1924 when he lost to Calvin Coolidge, and who in a distinguished career had argued more than a hundred cases before the Court. Defending the President was Solicitor General Perlman, whom Truman would later describe as an “outstanding” lawyer who presented the government’s case ably and forcefully.

On Monday, June 2, the Court declared the President’s action unconstitutional by a crushing majority of 6 to 3. Those in the majority were Hugo L. Black, who delivered the official opinion, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, and, as infuriated Truman, Tom Clark.

“We cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production,” Justice Black read slowly and calmly. “This is a job for the Nation’s lawmakers, not for its military authorities.”

“Today,” wrote Justice Douglas, in a concurring opinion, “a kindly President uses the seizure power to effect a wage increase and to keep the steel furnaces in production. Yet tomorrow another President might use the same power to prevent a wage increase, to curb trade unionists, to regiment labor as oppressively as industry thinks it has been regimented by this seizure.”

The Chief Justice, who strongly upheld the President, arguing that he had acted entirely within his constitutional responsibilities, was joined in the minority by Justices Stanley F. Reed and Sherman Minton. Any man worthy of the office of the presidency, Vinson argued, should be “free to take at least interim action necessary to execute legislative programs essential to survival of the nation.” Nor was there any question that “the possession [of the steel industry] was other than temporary in character and subject to Congressional approval, disapproval,” or regulation of “the manner in which the mills were to be administered and returned to the owners.”

For Truman it was a humiliating defeat, and at the hands of old friends and fellow spirits. It was a liberal Court. Hugo Black had been an ardent New Dealer. All nine justices had been appointed either by Truman or Roosevelt. That Tom Clark had gone against him would anger Truman for years. Putting that “damn fool from Texas” on the Supreme Court, he would one day tell the author Merle Miller, was the biggest mistake he made as President, though this, like others of his observations to Miller, was more harsh than he meant or than he indicated at the time.

As a gesture of friendship and goodwill, Hugo Black invited the President and the justices to a party at his beautiful home across the river in Old Town Alexandria. At the start of the evening, Truman, though polite, seemed “a bit testy,” remembered William O. Douglas. “But after the bourbon and canapes were passed, he turned to Hugo and said, ‘Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.’ ”

The steel strike that began after the Court decision of June 2 dragged on for seven weeks, until midsummer 1952, making it the longest, most costly steel strike in the nation’s history. Losses in production, losses in wages were unprecedented—21 million tons of steel and $400 million in wages, as 600,000 steel workers and 1,400,000 others in related industries were idle. The military output scheduled for 1952 was cut by a third. “No enemy nation could have so crippled our production as has this work stoppage,” said Robert Lovett bitterly. “The weird and tragic thing is that we have done this to ourselves.”

The settlement called for a 21 cent an hour raise for the workers and a steel price increase of $5.20 a ton, which was the same as the $4.50 offered by the government months earlier, plus 70 cents for increased freight rates.

In the long weeks of the strike, Truman had grown increasingly distressed over congressional inaction. Congress declined to do anything more than request—rather than direct—him to use the Taft-Hartley Act, thus sending the problem—and responsibility for the decision—right back to him. And whether steel production would resume, were he to invoke Taft-Hartley, was highly debatable.

“The Court and Congress got us into the fix we’re now in,” he told his staff. “Let Congress do something about getting us out.”

Discouraged that so few Democrats on the Hill had come to his support, discouraged that practically no Democrats “up there” were fighting for his foreign aid bill, he grumbled that maybe it might be good for the Democrats to be out of power for a while.

For the first time since taking office, he felt ill. At the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, years earlier, a special Presidential Suite had been set up on the third floor, in the event that he needed medical attention, but it had never once been used. Truman had never been sick until the morning of July 16, when he awoke feeling “poorly” and Wallace Graham found he was running a low fever. Two days later, with what Graham called a mild virus, he was driven to Walter Reed. He stayed three days, during which he was gone over by some eight different specialists. He ate well, slept well, signed more than two hundred bills, and, as he later told his staff, spent a lot of time thinking about what he would say at the Democratic Convention. He delivered his speech to the bedpost, Truman said. “If the doctor had come in then he would have found my temperature up two degrees and might have thought me off my trolley.” He wanted to talk not only about his record, “but about the future and what we can make of it.”

What could be done about the steel strike, Joe Short asked him his first morning back at the Oval Office, July 21, when Truman still looked pale and subdued. He didn’t know, Truman said.

“It’s a lockout, that’s what it is. U.S. Steel is against the little fellows, want to take them over, and of course they’re against labor and against me.”

Three days later, on July 24, he summoned Phil Murray and the head of U.S. Steel, Benjamin Fairless, to his office, demanded a settlement, and got it. “This should lead to a speedy resumption of steel production,” he said in a brief formal announcement that the strike was over.

The following day, he left for Chicago and the convention that was already under way.

V

Truman’s distress over the choice of a Democratic standardbearer had grown extreme. Firm in his belief that any red-blooded Democrat ought to be ready and willing to run against any Republican, he had become increasingly annoyed with Adlai Stevenson, whose reluctance to commit himself had begun to strike Truman as not only tiresome but perhaps something of an act.

As the press was saying, nearly all the old Democratic bosses were gone now. Jim Farley was long past his prime. Tom Pendergast and Bob Hannegan were dead. Ed Flynn was ill. Frank Hague no longer ruled in New Jersey, and Kefauver, with his primary campaigns, had eclipsed Ed Crump of Tennessee. “There was no one to supply party-wide leadership except the President,” reported Newsweek, and he was “under tremendous pressure to name his preference for the nomination….”

Truman continued to wait, holding out for Stevenson. It was only a week before the convention, his patience gone and resolved to do almost anything to stop Kefauver, that he at last suggested that Barkley would be a good choice—and then wished he hadn’t because Averell Harriman, having declared himself a candidate, was proving a spirited champion of the whole New Deal—Fair Deal program in a way that made Truman glow.

When someone raised the point that Harriman had never run for public office, and so might not be up to a sustained campaign, Truman remarked, “You never know what’s in you until you have to do it.”

The Republicans opened their convention in Chicago on July 7. Taft had the largest number of committed delegates. Attacking what he called the “me-too” Republicanism of the party’s eastern liberals—the Dewey people who were backing Eisenhower this time—Taft said it was time to give the American people a clear choice. The floor fight before the balloting turned bitter. “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat,” declared Senator Everett Dirksen from the podium, shaking his finger at the New York delegation, where Dewey sat. “And don’t do this to us again.” But such were the tactical skills of the Eisenhower managers, combined with the glamour of the Eisenhower bandwagon, that the general swept to victory on the first ballot—as no doubt he would have done at the Democratic Convention, too, had he been willing.

Of the Democratic candidates, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Kefauver was far in the lead, claiming 257 delegates, or nearly half what was needed for the nomination. Richard Russell, running as the candidate of the South, had 161, Harriman 112, Stevenson a mere 41 while Truman, it was believed, could swing at least 400 votes to whomever he chose. As Time reported, Truman’s hold on Democratic leaders continued remarkably strong because they saw him as the smartest practical politician around. “If Harry Truman turns out to have an enormous influence on the convention, it will not be a case of delegates doing his bidding, but of their following his highly respected judgment.”

A Barkley boom began and gathered surprising force, only to be abruptly terminated when the leaders of organized labor met with Barkley and told him the blunt truth. It was not that they objected to him on issues, as they had with Jimmy Byrnes in 1944, he was just too old.

Barkley called Truman to say he was withdrawing, and on the afternoon of July 24, the day of the steel strike settlement at the White House, Stevenson telephoned from Illinois to ask Truman if it would embarrass him were he, Stevenson, to allow his name to be placed in nomination. Truman, as he later said, chose some “rather vigorous” words. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that,” he told the governor. “Why would it embarrass me?” Stevenson could count on his full support. As far as Truman was concerned, Stevenson was as good as nominated.

On the floor of the immense international amphitheater at the Chicago Stock Yards, a headlong Stevenson boom was already under way, as a result of the governor’s own brilliant welcoming address to the convention. James Reston in The New York Times called Stevenson “a leaf on a rising stream.” When, during the first ballot the next afternoon, Friday, the 25th, the Missouri delegation was polled, the President’s own alternate, an old Pendergast stalwart named Tom Gavin, was seen voting for Stevenson just as the President and First Lady were leaving from Washington on the Independence. On television the two events were shown simultaneously on a split screen.

Heading west, Truman watched the convention on television “all the way” in flight, something no President had done before. He saw the results of the first ballot—Kefauver 340, Stevenson 273, Russell 268, Harriman 123—and the start of the second. By the end of the second ballot, at 6:00 P.M. Chicago time, with Stevenson gaining but still no decision, Truman was at the Blackstone working on his speech in Room 709, the same corner suite where he had taken the fateful call from Franklin Roosevelt eight years before. To others in the presidential entourage, he appeared in high gear.

With the convention in recess until nine o’clock, Truman went by motorcade and booming motorcycle escort to the Stockyards Inn and dinner in a private dining room with Jake Arvey, Sam Rayburn, and Democratic Chairman Frank McKinney. From there, he also sent word to the governors of Massachusetts and Arkansas, as well as to Averell Harriman, to release their delegates to Stevenson. Charlie Murphy was the messenger sent to see Harriman, who, as it happens, had already decided on his own to withdraw in favor of Stevenson.

The convention’s dramatic turn to Stevenson came on the third ballot, with the release of the Harriman delegates. But it was past midnight before the vote was made unanimous, and not until 1:45 in the morning, as late nearly as four years before, when the nominee and the President entered the hall arm in arm, down the floodlit runway to the rostrum, Truman exuberant, a spring to his step, Stevenson, a short, rather dumpy figure, looking slightly uncertain.

They had picked a winner, Truman assured the crowd. “I am going to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win.”

Stevenson spoke briefly and eloquently. “The people are wise,” he said, “wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s party, not the party of labor, not the farmer’s party—it is the party of no one because it is the party of everyone.” The ordeal of the twentieth century was far from over. “Sacrifice, patience, understanding and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s talk sense to the American people….”

Later, Stevenson, Truman, Rayburn, McKinney, and four or five others met backstage. Stevenson asked for advice on a running mate. The Republicans had chosen Senator Richard Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate. Stevenson mentioned Kefauver, but when Truman vigorously objected, Rayburn and McKinney backed him. Barkley and Russell were also mentioned and rejected. Finally, the choice was Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. “Stevenson made his decision with Harry Truman’s help,” one of those present explained afterward to a reporter.

In his room that morning at 6:40, Saturday, July 26, having slept perhaps an hour, if at all, Truman wrote a warm letter to the nominee on a sheet of Blackstone Hotel stationery; a letter such as he himself had never received from Franklin Roosevelt.

Dear Governor:

Last night was one of the most remarkable I’ve spent in all my sixty-eight years. When thousands of people—delegates and visitors—are willing to sit and listen to a set speech and introduction by me, and then listen to a most wonderful acceptance speech by you, at two o’clock in the morning, there is no doubt that we are on the right track, in the public interest.

You are a brave man. You are assuming the responsibility of the most important office in the history of the world.

You have the ancestral, political and educational background to do a most wonderful job. If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.

When the noise and shouting are over, I hope you may be able to come to Washington for a discussion of what is before you.

But though Stevenson sent a gracious reply and would eventually meet with Truman at the White House, he was no less determined than before not to be seen as Truman’s candidate. “He was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration and was frantic to distance himself from Truman,” his friend George Ball would remember. In quick succession, Stevenson replaced Truman’s party chairman, McKinney, with a Chicago friend, Stephen A. Mitchell, an attorney with little political experience, and announced that Democratic headquarters henceforth would be in Springfield, Illinois, not Washington—decisions certain to offend Truman. Nor did he make any effort to solicit Truman’s advice on plans for the campaign.

Stevenson’s attitude toward him was a “mystery,” Truman would write in his Memoirs. But in a letter he never sent, Truman told the nominee, “I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner…. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov. 4.” He did not like being treated as a liability. Frank McKinney, he wrote, had been the best party chairman in his memory. “I can’t stand snub after snub by you….”

In August, to make matters worse, Stevenson carelessly signed a letter prepared by an assistant in answer to a question from the Oregon Journal. “Can Stevenson really clean up the mess in Washington?” the editor of the Portland paper had asked. “As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington,” read the Stevenson reply, “I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.” The Republicans quickly made the most of the letter, as confirmation by Stevenson himself that there was truly a mess in Washington, and Truman, in another letter he never mailed, said Stevenson had now made the whole campaign “ridiculous.”

I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.

At a later point, Stevenson sent Chairman Mitchell to tell Truman that it would greatly help the campaign if Dean Acheson were to announce his plan to retire as Secretary of State once the election was over—an idea Truman bluntly rejected.

But as his daughter Margaret would recall, Truman was more sad than angry. “Oh, Stevenson will get straightened out,” he told his staff. “The campaign hasn’t really started.” And in time to come, he would write that Stevenson conducted himself magnificently in the campaign:

His eloquence was real because his words gave definition and meaning to the major issues of our time. He was particularly effective in expressing this nation’s foreign policy. He made no demagogic statements…. While some felt he may have talked over the heads of some people, he was uncompromising in being himself. His was a great campaign and did credit to the party and the nation. He did not appeal to the weakness but to the strength of the people. He did not trade principles for votes. What he said in the South he would say in the North, and what he said in the East he would say in the West. It will be to his credit that, although given provocation by the opposition, he stayed away from personalities and accusations…. I hold him in the highest regard for his intellectual courage.

On August 12, Stevenson came to the White House at Truman’s invitation to have lunch with the Cabinet and be briefed at length on the state of the Union. In the course of three hours of discussion, Truman said more than once that he wanted to do everything possible to be of help. He did not wish to direct or dominate the campaign in any way. Stevenson was the boss, Truman stressed. “I think the President wants to win this campaign more than I do,” Stevenson remarked. “As much as you do,” interrupted Truman, who appeared to be greatly enjoying himself, until the meeting ended and he and Stevenson stepped outside to talk to the press.

Truman came out the door first, as customary, only now the photographers shouted to him, “Wait for the Governor, Mr. President.” A new order had clearly begun. “That’s your point of contact right there, Governor,” Truman said, gesturing to the microphones.

Stevenson joked about the size of the lunch he had just enjoyed, saying if he had another he would be too fat to campaign. Truman, usually the first to laugh at such banter, barely smiled, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “There was just a hint of tension in the atmosphere,” wrote Andrew Tully of The New York Times, “and of sadness—as Harry Truman watched this man taking over….” When Stevenson finished, Truman did not linger, but turned and walked back to his office, “slowly, head erect.”

Several of the White House staff watched in pain. Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring turned to Roger Tubby and remarked, pointing to the President, “There’s a man of granite. And him [pointing to Stevenson], he looks like a sponge.”

With the campaign under way in September, Truman quickly forgot any injured pride he felt and joined the fray with all his old zest. Though not the candidate, he saw the election as a referendum on his presidency. Nor, constituted as he was, could he possibly have stayed out once the fight was on. “We didn’t have to ask Mr. Truman to get into the campaign,” remembered the new party chairman, Stephen Mitchell. “He was raring to go…and he put on a great show.”

He took to the rails, crisscrossing the country again in the Ferdinand Magellan. Stevenson traveled by plane and they kept entirely different schedules, never appearing on the same platform. Stevenson was eloquent as no presidential candidate had been in more than a generation. Truman was the fighter, the believer. “When you vote the Democratic ticket…you are voting for your interests because the Democrats look after the interests of the everyday man and the common people,” he said, sounding very like the candidate of 1948. He praised Stevenson. He evoked the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, heaped scorn on the Republican Party, stoutly championed his own Fair Deal programs. Toward the Republican candidate He was unexpectedly gentle at first. It was Taft he attacked.

He liked Ike, too, Truman would say, seeing Eisenhower buttons or signs in a crowd. But he liked him as a general in the Army. As it was, Ike didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “I think Bob Taft and all the Republican reactionaries are whispering in his ear, and pulling his leg,” he told the people of Whitefish, Montana. “If you like Ike as much as I do, you will vote with me to send him back to the Army, where he belongs.”

The truth was he did still like Ike. Even when Eisenhower refused Truman’s invitation to the same kind of briefing as he had given Stevenson, Truman had written to Eisenhower privately to express his friendship as much as his distaste for those now advising the general:

What I’ve always had in mind was and is a continuing foreign policy. You know that is a fact, because you had a part in outlining it.

Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States. I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us….

May God guide you and give you light.

From a man who has always been your friend and who always wanted to be!

In conversation on board his train, Truman could swing from premonitions of Eisenhower as a dangerous President, “a modern Cromwell,” to open expressions of sympathy. “You know, I still feel sorry for Ike. He never should have gotten into this.” When it was revealed in mid-September that Eisenhower’s running mate, Nixon, had been subsidized by a secret fund subscribed by California millionaires, and others traveling with Truman were cheered by the news, he commented only, “This will help us, but I’m sorry to see it happen, for it lowers public opinion of politics.”

As so often before, the grueling business of a campaign seemed to restore and enliven him. He would be remembered rolling along at night in the dining room of the Ferdinand Magellan, eating fried chicken with his fingers, enjoying stories and “matching wits” with his staff, while every now and then in the darkness outside a lonely light flashed by. He would be remembered washing his socks in the bathroom sink in California and after a day of eight speeches from Ohio to upstate New York, sitting in a hotel in Buffalo playing the piano at 1:30 in the morning.

The pace and heat of the contest picked up rapidly.

The Republicans, campaigning under the slogan “Time for a Change,” had no intention of repeating Dewey’s bland glide to defeat. Much of what was said by both sides became very unpleasant. “I nearly choked to hear him,” Truman remarked privately after Eisenhower, stepping up the attack, assaulted the foreign policy that, as Truman saw it, Eisenhower himself, as Chief of Staff and head of NATO, had helped shape and implement. Eisenhower, Truman now charged, had become “a stooge of Wall Street.” He was “owned body and soul by the money boys.” Eisenhower, because of his career in the Army, knew little of the realities of life, didn’t “know the score and shouldn’t be educated at public expense.”

Eisenhower, for his part, deplored the “top-to-bottom mess” in Washington, “the crooks and cronies,” while Nixon hammered at what became known as “K₁C₂”—“Korea, Communism and corruption.” When Nixon accused Truman, Stevenson, and Dean Acheson of being “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe,” Truman understood this to mean Nixon had called him a traitor, and he would not forget it.

There was no Charlie Ross to help this time, no Clark Clifford. Press Secretary Joe Short had recently been hospitalized for what was thought to have been a mild heart condition. When Truman received word that Joe Short was dead, he took it very badly, feeling acutely, personally responsible. “I feel as if I killed them,” he said, remembering Ross as well.

Stevenson “has the most wonderful command of the language and he is delighting audiences wherever he goes,” recorded Roger Tubby, who took over in Short’s place.

[Stevenson’s] humor, his gift of satire and the devastating barb are irrepressible and so, thank God, the nation is being treated as it has not in some time, perhaps not since Lincoln…. Nevertheless some observers wonder whether S[tevenson] is “getting across” to the people, and compare his style unfavorably with the President’s, which is simple, declarative sentences, blunt and hard-hitting. Ike meanwhile goes blundering along, often badly tangled in his thoughts and words, but sticking persistently to a couple of simple themes: get rid of corruption, throw the rascals out….

Most newspapers backed Eisenhower. The Republicans were also out-spending the Democrats by more than two to one. But Truman’s crowds at times were as large and friendly as in 1948. In West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, across New England, his crowds were often bigger than those that turned out for Eisenhower.

The searing moment of the campaign for Truman came in early October, when Eisenhower went into Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy’s home state, where McCarthy in a drive for his own reelection continued to vilify George Marshall. Many of Eisenhower’s backers, many of his own aides, were confident he would eventually repudiate McCarthy and speak up for Marshall, and as he crossed Illinois, heading for Wisconsin, Eisenhower decided now would be the time, “right in McCarthy’s backyard.” A personal tribute to Marshall was prepared for a speech at Milwaukee. But then Eisenhower’s political advisers adamantly objected. McCarthy himself flew to Peoria, Illinois, and crossed into Wisconsin on board the general’s train. Reportedly, when McCarthy argued against any mention of Marshall, Eisenhower reacted with “red-hot anger.” Still, in a speech at Green Bay, Eisenhower expressed his gratitude to the senator for meeting him in Illinois and told his audience it was only in methods, not objectives, that he and McCarthy differed. Then in the speech at Milwaukee, with McCarthy seated behind him on stage, Eisenhower declared that a national tolerance of communism had “poisoned two whole decades of our national life,” thus creating “a government by men whose very brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit.” The fall of China, he charged, the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe could be attributed to the Reds in Washington. There was no mention of Marshall; the tribute had been cut. But because Eisenhower’s aides had been telling reporters all day about the Marshall tribute they would hear, its removal made more news than the rest of the speech. Even staunch Eisenhower supporters were appalled.

“Do I need to tell you that I am sick at heart?” Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, wired Eisenhower’s personal campaign manager, Sherman Adams.

To Truman, with his devotion to George Marshall, Eisenhower had committed an act of unpardonable betrayal. Truman tried to contain his fury. The spectacle of the Republican candidate campaigning against his own record, his own better nature and principles, was “very sad and pathetic,” Truman said in Oakland, California.

And I wish for the sake of history, and for the sake of future generations who will read about him in the schoolbooks, that he had not so tarnished his own bright reputation as a commander of men. And I mean that with all my heart.

Heading east, Truman remarked to his staff that probably he should “lay off Ike for a while…got to be very careful we don’t overdo the attacks.” But the outrage within seemed to gather force by the day, the more he thought about Marshall, the more he thought about Eisenhower and McCarthy, the more Eisenhower attacked his foreign policy and handling of the Korean War.

“The general whose words I read, whose speeches I hear, is not the general I once knew. Something, my friends, has happened to him,” he told the crowd at Colorado Springs. “I thought he might make a good President,” he said at Muncie, Indiana, “but that was a mistake. In this campaign he has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for.”

Finally, in a rear platform speech at Utica, New York, Truman lashed out full force. Eisenhower, he said, had betrayed his principles, deserted his friends.

He knew—and he knows today—that General Marshall’s patriotism is above question…[he] knows, or he ought to know, how completely dishonest Joe McCarthy is. He ought to despise McCarthy, just as I expected him to-and just as I do.

Now, in his bid for votes, he has endorsed Joe McCarthy for reelection—and humbly thanked him for riding on his train.

I can’t understand it. I had never thought the man who is now the Republican candidate would stoop so low. I have thought about this a great deal. I don’t think I shall ever understand it….

And he never did, never really got over Eisenhower’s ingratitude to the man who had made him. For years to come Truman would harbor intense anger. “Why, General Marshall was responsible for his whole career,” he would say. “When Roosevelt jumped him from lieutenant colonel to general, it was Marshall’s recommendation. Three different times Marshall got him pushed upstairs, and in return…Eisenhower sold him out. It was just a shameful thing.”

Eisenhower, stunned by Truman’s attack, was enraged. “Just how low can you get?” He would never ride down Pennsylvania Avenue with Truman on inauguration day, he vowed.

The polls showed Eisenhower well in the lead. The polls also showed that the stalemate in Korea was what worried most voters. The election had become a referendum on Korea, and Eisenhower stepped up the attack on the administration’s handling of the war. On October 24 at Detroit, in a blistering speech broadcast on national television he called Korea “the burial ground for twenty-thousand American dead,” and promised to end the war. If elected, Eisenhower declared dramatically, “I shall go to Korea.”

Truman issued a statement stressing that the general had been in agreement with administration policy concerning Korea from the start. To a crowd at Winona, Minnesota, Truman warned, “No professional general has ever made a good President. The art of war is too different from the art of civilian government’’

If Eisenhower had a way of ending the war in Korea, he should tell him now, Truman said. “Let’s save a lot of lives and not wait…. If he can do it after he is elected, we can do it now.” Such “demagoguery used in connection with this tragic situation is almost beneath contempt,” he would write to Stevenson. No man, Truman thought, had less right than Eisenhower to use Korea for political advantage.

At the Pentagon, Eisenhower’s old friends among the Joint Chiefs were hardly less furious than the President. “Ike was well informed on all aspects of the Korean War and the delicacy of the armistice negotiations,” recalled Omar Bradley. “He knew very well that he could achieve nothing by going to Korea.”

In the final days of the campaign, Truman was still going strong. A local reporter in Iowa noted that the President “never looked more fit or pleased with the rigorous job of ‘giving ‘em hell.’ ”

But with his dramatic promise to go to Korea, Eisenhower had decided the election, as Truman seemed to know. “Roger, we may be up against more than we can control,” he told his press secretary.

The Eisenhower victory was overwhelming—he carried all but nine of forty-eight states, including Stevenson’s Illinois and Truman’s Missouri, his percentage of the popular vote was bigger than any Democratic victory since Roosevelt in 1936—and the issue that cut deepest was Korea. But with his radiant smile, the unequaled place he held in the affections of the people, Eisenhower had also proven an exceptional candidate. His popularity had made him all but impregnable. And prevalent as the feeling may have been that a change was due in Washington after so long a Democratic reign, it was clearly an Eisenhower, not a Republican, triumph. In Congress the Republicans barely gained control. Their margin in the Senate was one seat.

As Truman would comment privately, probably no one could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. That some observers, including the Kansas City Star, were saying that he, Truman, had done Stevenson more harm than good left him feeling deeply hurt.

He sent Eisenhower his congratulations and offered him use of the Independence to fly to Korea, but not without adding, “if you still desire to go to Korea,” a final partisan jab that not surprisingly infuriated Eisenhower, who declined the offer.

Eisenhower flew to Korea by military plane and under greatest security at the end of November. For three days he toured the front lines, then flew home having concluded only that the situation was intolerable.

“I sincerely wish he didn’t have to make the trip,” Truman had written in his diary on November 15. “It is an awful risk. If he should fail to come back I wonder what would happen. May God protect him.”

With no hesitation or the least sign of bitterness, Truman immediately invited Eisenhower to the White House to discuss the turnover of power. He was determined, as he wrote to the general, to guarantee “an orderly transfer of the business of the executive branch.” The gesture was unprecedented, and to those around Truman a vivid example of his ability to separate his personal feelings from the larger responsibilities of his office. He would do all he could to help the new President. He only wished someone had done as much for him.

Eisenhower arrived at the White House just before two o’clock, the afternoon of Tuesday, November 18, for a meeting first with Truman in his office, then an extended briefing in the Cabinet Room by Truman, his Cabinet and staff. All went very formally and without incident, though Eisenhower remained unsmiling and wary—“taciturn to the point of surliness,” thought Acheson. To Truman, Eisenhower was a man with a chip on his shoulder. He would remember Eisenhower’s “frozen grimness throughout.”

When Truman offered to give Eisenhower the big globe that Eisenhower had given him years before, and that for Truman had come to symbolize so much of the weight of his responsibilities, Eisenhower accepted it, though “not very graciously,” in Truman’s view. Nor from Eisenhower’s reactions during the briefing in the Cabinet Room did Truman feel the general truly comprehended the extent or complexity of the task that faced him. “I think all this went into one ear and out the other,” Truman recorded. Later, at his desk, talking with some of the staff, he would remark, “He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

VI

Upstairs at the White House a death watch had begun. In the bedroom across from Truman’s study, ninety-year-old Madge Gates Wallace lay in a coma.

“The White House is quiet as a church,” Truman wrote in his diary at five in the morning, November 24. “I can hear the planes at the airport warming up. As always there is a traffic roar—sounds like wind and rain through the magnolias.

“Bess’s mother is dying across the hallway….”

She had never been an easy person to get along with. Even as a resident of the White House she had let it be known in small ways to some of the servants and staff that she still thought Harry Truman not quite good enough for her Bess. But Truman, who had never been known to say anything critical about her, even by inference, was greatly saddened. “Since last September Mother Wallace has been dying…but we’ve kept doctors and nurses with her day and night and have kept her alive. We had hoped—and still hope—she’ll survive until Christmas. Our last as President.” When she died, on December 5, he wrote, “She was a grand lady. When I hear these mother-in-law jokes I don’t laugh.”

For a while the mood overall seemed one of a death watch over his own presidency. New poll results showed that only 32 percent of the people approved of the way he was handling his job; and 43 percent thought it had been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Korea. But polls meant no more to him now than ever before. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” he wrote Privately, in an undated memo to himself. “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel?…It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong.”

To Ethel Noland, he wrote that no one knew what responsibilities the job entailed, except from experience—“It bears down on a country boy.” The people had never been better off, yet they wanted a change. He felt “repudiated.” The people were fine about supporting the President in time of crisis, he told his staff, recalling the first weeks of the Korean War, “but when there is a long row of corn to shuck, they want an easy way out.”

A new census report confirmed that gains in income, standards of living, education, and housing since Truman took office were unparalleled in American history. As Truman would report in his final State of the Union message to Congress, on January 7, 1953, 62 million Americans had jobs, which was a gain of 11 million jobs in seven years. Unemployment had all but disappeared. Farm income, corporate income, and dividends were at an all—time high. There had not been a failure of an insured bank in nearly nine years. His most important accomplishments, he knew, were in world affairs. Yet he could rightly point with pride to the fact that the postwar economic collapse that everyone expected never happened, that through government support (the GI Bill) 8 million veterans had been to college, that Social Security benefits had been doubled, the minimum wage increased. There had been progress in slum clearance, millions of homes built through government financing. Prices were higher, but incomes, for the most part, had risen even more. Real living standards were considerably higher than seven years earlier.

Truman had failed to do as much as he wanted for public housing, education, failed to establish the medical insurance program he knew the nation needed, but he had battled hard for these programs, set goals for the future. He had achieved less in civil rights than he had hoped, but he had created the epoch-making Commission on Civil Rights, ordered the desegregation of the armed services and the federal Civil Service, done more than any President since Lincoln to awaken American conscience to the issues of civil rights. Until the onset of the Korean War, he had also kept the budget in line, actually reduced the national debt.

With the establishment of a unified Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA, he had changed the structure of power in Washington in ways surpassing even the sweeping measures of FDR. With the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, he had kept the control of nuclear power in civilian hands.

Reminiscing with his staff, and occasionally with reporters, he talked of the accomplishments he was most proud of-aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Point Four (which, if not a massive program, had also set a goal for the future), the Berlin Airlift. And Korea, “the supreme test,” as he called it. The nation’s military power had been restored, the nation’s prestige was high.

In an extraordinary article in Look magazine the summer before, the historian Henry Steele Commager had written that by all normal measures the Truman administration had been one of almost uninterrupted, unparalleled success—a view that not only conflicted with popular opinion at the moment but with which the editors of the magazine specifically expressed their own disagreement.

“We cannot know what verdict history will pronounce upon it [the Truman record], but we can make a pretty good guess,” wrote Commager.

It will perhaps record the curious paradox that a man charged with being “soft” on communism has done more than any other leader in the Western world, with the exception of Churchill, to contain communism; that a man charged with mediocrity has launched a whole series of far-sighted plans for world reconstruction; that a man accused of being an enemy to private enterprise has been head of the Government during the greatest period of greatest prosperity for private enterprise; that a man accused of betraying the New Deal has fought one Congress after another for progressive legislation.

Reviewing the record—for his message to Congress, for his farewell broadcast—improved Truman’s spirits. He was in “high good humor,” “vigorous, hearty,” obviously happy as he worked to wind things up properly. He insisted on writing his farewell speech himself, and at the big table in the Cabinet Room one evening, the staff gathered, he read it aloud, stopping at the end of each page for their comments. Recounting the decision on Korea, he described how he had flown from Independence to Washington, the fateful Sunday in June 1950. “Flying back over the flatlands of the Middle West,” he read, “I had a lot of time to think.” Roger Tubby suggested he make it “rich flatlands”—““rich flatlands” would sound better, Tubby said. “The parts of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio that I flew over are not rich, Roger,” Truman replied. Plain “flatlands” it remained.

Pictures came down from his office walls. His desk was cleared of knickknacks, clocks, everything personal. Packing boxes lined the halls of the West Wing, as painters moved from room to room. Already he was making plans for his presidential library. Some four hundred steel file cabinets filled with his private and presidential papers had been shipped to Missouri. When his old friend Senator Kilgore came by for a last visit, Truman told him that if he had known there would be so much work in leaving, he would have run again.

Questioned whether he wanted to live in Washington, Truman said no. Asked about his future plans, he said he had none as yet.

He was “full of bounce” at his last press conference—his 324th—and applauded lustily at the end by some three hundred reporters. There were farewell letters to write. “You have been my good right hand,” he wrote to Dean Acheson.

Certainly no man is more responsible than you for pulling together the people of the free world, and strengthening their will and their determination to be strong and free.

I would place you among the very greatest of the Secretaries of State this country has had. Neither Jefferson nor Seward showed more cool courage and steadfast judgment.

There was a last meeting with the Cabinet, a final session with his staff, a round of farewell dinners. The closer inauguration day drew, the happier Truman became. “Why, you’d have thought the President won the election the way he acts,” the White House valet, Arthur Prettyman, told a reporter for the Washington Post.

Bennett Clark, Louis Johnson, Clark Clifford, and Senator—elect John F. Kennedy, among others, came to say goodbye. A select few reporters and writers were given the chance for a final, private interview. He felt much as he had when he was heading home from France after World War I, not knowing what the future held in store for him, Truman told Tony Leviero of The New York Times.

The critic and author John Mason Brown, who came and went several times, was surprised to find Truman looking “anything but old” and in “the most benevolent of valedictory moods,” gentle, self-possessed.

“In personality, conversation, and manner he bore no resemblance, even coincidental, to the quick-to-anger or the “pour-it-on Harry” of the whistle-stop tours….

Whenever I saw him, Truman was unfailingly equable and considerate of everyone on every level who worked with him or came to see him. The dreadful responsibilities he still bore, the appalling daily schedule which continued to be his, the abuse that had been heaped upon him, the annoyances of moving, the pangs of farewell, the drastically changed life that would soon face him, the uncertainties of his own future, and the verdict of history-none of these disturbed him.

The President’s physical and mental “resilience,” wrote Brown, was incredible. In fact, Truman, at sixty-eight, was leaving office in better health than when he came in in 1945 and better than any departing President, since Theodore Roosevelt left the White House at age fifty in 1909.

Churchill arrived for a farewell call at the West Wing and to host a dinner for “Harry” at the British Embassy. Considerably more spry than on his last visit, Churchill was in “rollicking form” and Truman hugely enjoyed his company.

From Pennsylvania Avenue now, the White House was all but obscured behind the wooden grandstands set up for Eisenhower’s inauguration.

Truman’s farewell address was delivered from his desk in the Oval Office by radio and television the night of Thursday, January 15, 1953, at 10:30 Washington time. It was a speech without rhetorical flourishes or memorable epigrams and it was superb, Truman at his best. In what it forecast concerning the Cold War, it was more extraordinary than could possibly have been understood at the time. He was clear, simple, often personal, but conveying overall a profound sense of the momentous history of the times, the panoramic changes reshaping the world, and the part that he, inevitably, had had to play since that desolate day when he was summoned to the White House and told of Roosevelt’s death. It was not a nostalgic farewell. He hated to think he was writing a valedictory, he had said privately beforehand. “I’m not through. I’m just starting.”

“Next Tuesday,” he began, “General Eisenhower will be inaugurated as President of the United States. A short time after the new President takes office, I will be on the train going back home to Independence, Missouri. I will once again be a plain, private citizen of this great Republic. That is as it should be….”

Four years earlier, in his inaugural address, his emphasis had been on the world—democracy looking outward to the world. Now, reviewing his full time as President, he again struck the same theme. His very first decision as President, he reminded his audience, had been to go forward with the United Nations. He recalled the German surrender, his meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, the first atomic explosion in the New Mexico desert, his decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan—all this, as he said, within a little more than four months. He did not say, as he could have, that no President in history had had to face so many important problems in so brief a time, or found it necessary to make so many momentous decisions so quickly or with such little preparation. What he said was that the greatest part of a President’s responsibilities was making decisions. A President had to decide. “That’s his job.”

Yet it was not for the decisions of his first months in office that he would be remembered, Truman speculated.

I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives.

I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle…. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.

But when history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it….

The decision to go into Korea, he said, was the most important of his time in office. Korea was the turning point of the Cold War. Whereas free nations had failed to meet the test before—failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the Nazi takeover in Austria and Czechoslovakia—“this time we met the test.” Yet the horrific potential of modern war had not been allowed to get out of hand. That was what was so important to understand. The issue was world peace in the nuclear age.

In his State of the Union message of the week before, which he had sent to Congress rather than delivering personally before a joint session, Truman had reported that in recent thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok Island in the Pacific, “we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy,” which was correctly understood to mean that the age of the H-bomb had arrived. The President who had ushered in the atomic bomb in 1945 was departing in 1953 at the start of a new era of destructive power “dwarfing,” as he reported to Congress, “the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

His intent in Korea, he now said, was to prevent World War III. “Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable….”

How then would the Cold War end, he asked. How and when?

He offered a simple forecast, a long-range prediction that, at heart, was a statement of faith. His whole life Truman had been moved primarily by faith. Now in this last chance to talk to the country, in his attempt to read the history of the future, he trusted again to an unwavering faith. To millions who listened then, it seemed a striking expression of the best instincts of America. Read many years later, in the light of what happened at the end of the Cold War, it would seem utterly extraordinary in its prescience. He appeared to know even then the essence of what in fact would transpire, and, more importantly, why.

As the free world grows stronger, more united, more attractive to men on both sides of the Iron Curtain—and as the Soviet hopes for easy expansion are blocked—then there will have to come a time of change in the Soviet world. Nobody can say for sure when that is going to be, or exactly how it will come about, whether by revolution, or trouble in the satellite states, or by a change inside the Kremlin.

Whether the Communist rulers shift their policies of their own free will—or whether the change comes about in some other way—I have not a doubt in the world that a change will occur.

I have a deep and abiding faith in the destiny of free men. With patience and courage, we shall some day move on into a new era….

He was “glad the whole world will have a chance to see how simply and how peacefully our American system transfers the vast power of the Presidency….” Looking back at his time in office, he said, he had no regrets, and he thanked the people for their support.

When Franklin Roosevelt died, I felt there must be a million men better qualified than I, to take up the Presidential task. But the work was mine to do, and I had to do it. And I have tried to give it everything that was in me….

Good night and God bless you all.

The speech, indeed Truman’s whole handling of his departure, was praised on all sides. The speech was the finest of his presidency, it was said; he had finished strong. Walter Lippmann, who had been so consistently critical for years, wrote that

in the manner of his going Mr. Truman has been every inch the President, conscious of the great office and worthy of it.

His farewell messages are those of the man of whom it can fairly be said that he had many opponents and few enemies, that he had many more who wished him well and liked him than he had political supporters. He was often enough angry himself, and it was not hard to become angry with him. But neither he nor his critics and opponents were able to keep on being angry. For when he lost his temper, it was a good temper that he was losing. He has the good nature of a good man, and with his wife and daughter who are universally respected and liked, there is no bitter after-taste as the Truman family leave the White House.

Inauguration day was as sunny as it had been four years earlier, only warmer, with blue skies and again tremendous crowds. The ceremonies for Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States and the first Republican to hold the office in twenty years, went smoothly.

Up early, Truman spent an hour or so winding up odds and ends in his office and saying goodbye to the secretarial staff and Secret Service agents. Relaxed, exuding good cheer, he popped in and out of the other offices. “Looks mighty bare in here,” he said. He was wearing the formal gray-striped trousers and Oxford gray coat that had been decided on as the inaugural attire. Many of the staff had brought their children to see him and say goodbye. At 10:30 there was a small reception for the Cabinet and their wives in the Red Room, as Truman waited for the President-elect to arrive.

The papers had been making much of a presidential hat crisis. Without consulting Truman, Eisenhower had announced he would be wearing a homburg, instead of the traditional top hat. So what would Truman wear, it was wondered? He had no wish to have his last quarrel over a hat, Truman told his staff. He would wear a homburg.

Further speculation had followed over whether the Eisenhowers would call on the President and First Lady before Inauguration Day, as was customary. Truman’s hopes, it was said, “remained touchingly, almost boyishly high” that the tradition would be honored, and when the Eisenhowers declined an invitation to lunch, he felt insulted. Reportedly the general did not wish to enter the house until he was President. When, at 11:30, the Eisenhowers arrived at the North Portico, to start the drive to the Capitol, they refused to come in for a cup of coffee, but sat in the car waiting. Only when the Trumans appeared did they step out of the car to greet them.

“It was a shocking moment,” recalled CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, who was on the porch close by. “Truman was gracious and he had just been snubbed. He showed his superiority by what he did.”

From the way the two men looked as they drove off in the big Open Lincoln, J. B. West remembered, “I was glad I wasn’t in that car.”

“I ride with Ike in car No. 1 along with Joe Martin and Styles Bridges. Bess and Margie ride with Mrs. Ike,” Truman recorded in his diary. “Conversation is general—on the crowd, the pleasant day, the orderly turnover, etc.”

Later accounts of what was said would differ, but both Truman and Eisenhower would recall an exchange over the presence of Eisenhower’s only son, Major John Eisenhower, at the inaugural ceremonies. Eisenhower asked Truman who had ordered John back from Korea, and according to Eisenhower, Truman said simply, “I did.” But according to Truman what he said was, “The President thought it was right and proper for your son to witness the swearing-in of his father to the Presidency.” In any event, three days later, Eisenhower would send Truman a gracious letter thanking him for “the very many courtesies you extended to me and mine during the final stages of your Administration…I especially want to thank you for your thoughtfulness in ordering my son home from Korea…and even more especially for not allowing either him or me to know that you had done so.”

Truman had been President for seven years, nine months, for 2,841 days, and at noon it was over. He tried to pay attention to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, he later wrote, but his mind was on other things.

Less than half an hour later, he was being driven in a closed limousine back from the Capitol toward Georgetown when at 7th and D streets the driver stopped for a red light. It was the first time that a car in which Truman was riding had had to stop for a traffic light since 1945.

A farewell luncheon for the Trumans, before their train, had been arranged at the Achesons’ home. It was to be a small, private party for the Cabinet, White House aides, and a few close friends, but as the car swung into P Street a crowd of several hundred people, massed in front of the red-brick house, set up a cheer. Truman was astonished. “The street in front of Dean’s house,” he wrote, “was full of people who cheered as if I were coming in instead of going out.”

Swallowing hard, he told them, “I appreciate this more than any enthusiastic meeting I attended as President, Vice President and Senator. I’m just plain Mr. Truman now, a private citizen.”

Elsewhere in the city, as the Eisenhower inaugural parade filled Pennsylvania Avenue, others were telephoning friends to say that perhaps, even with the city tied up in traffic, they ought to try to get down to Union Station so that at least someone would be there to see the Trumans off.

Margaret would describe the lunch at the Achesons’ as “an absolutely wonderful affair full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.” By the time the party broke up, the crowd in P Street reached the length of the block. Traffic was backed up far beyond. When the Trumans went for their train, thousands were at the station to see him, wave to him, cheer and call, “So long, Harry!” “Good luck, Harry!” People pressed forward reaching for his hand.

The Ferdinand Magellan, provided as a courtesy by the new President, had been attached to a regular B&O train bound for Missouri. The police formed a flying wedge to get the Trumans through the crowd.

Old friends, Democratic senators, Supreme Court justices, members of the Cabinet, generals and ambassadors, piled aboard to shake Truman’s hand one more time. “There’s the best friend in the world,” Acheson said above the noise, when a reporter tapped him on the arm. “There’s nothing like that man.”

He kept smiling, waving. Bess looked radiant.

“I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred,” Truman said from the rear platform. Then, chopping his hands in the air with the familiar gesture, he said with a grin, “And that’s just what I intend to do!”

At 6:30, with the crowd singing “Auld Lang Syne,” the train began pulling slowly out of the station, until it was beyond the lighted platform. It had been a long road from Independence to the White House, and now Truman was going home.

“Crowd at Harper’s Ferry…and it was reported to me at every stop all night long,” he recorded. “Same way across Indiana and Illinois.”

Part Six
Back Home

18
Citizen Truman

Been going over a book on what former Presidents did in times past. Maybe I can get some ideas.

—TRUMAN TO DEAN ACHESON, APRIL 1953

I

For as far back nearly as he could remember, Truman had held to the ideal of the mythical Roman hero Cincinnatus, the patriot farmer who assumes command in his country’s hour of peril, then returns to the plow. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be like Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday,” the farmer from Grandview had written long ago to Bessie Wallace. It was an ideal upon which the nation had been founded. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, in their inaugural procession through the Rotunda of the Capitol, had passed by John Trumbull’s immense painting of George Washington as Cincinnatus—Washington resigning his commission to the Congress as commander-in-chief of the Army, Washington, farmer and hero, turning away from power in 1783. Now, in 1953, having become considerably more than constable, having turned by his own choice from the most power ever vested in a single human being in all history until then, Truman would note in his diary that Cincinnatus knew not only when but how to lay down power.

It was the common belief in America, Truman wrote, that anyone could become President, and then, when the time was up, go back to being “just anybody again.” Recalling his years in the White House, he would say, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I would go back to.” In actual practice, however, it was not so simple. A cartoon in the Saturday Review showed a small boy with glasses and a book under his arm, a boy very like Truman had been, walking beside a friend who said, “O.K., so you grow up to be President, and you even get reelected, that’s still only eight years. What do you do with the rest of your life?” With his pen, Truman scrawled boldly across the bottom, “God only knows!!!”

He had traveled home from Washington unprotected by Secret Service agents and there were to be none watching over him. He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.56 a month. He was provided with no government funds for secretarial help or office space, not a penny of expense money, and while he and Bess had managed to put aside part of his $100,000-a-year salary as President during his second term, primarily in government bonds, it was in all probability a modest amount. Estimates at the time ranged as high as a quarter of a million dollars, but there was no evidence to support such a figure, or any sum. In fact, it is known that Truman had been forced to take out a loan at the National Bank in Washington in his last weeks as President, to tide him over, though the amount was never disclosed.

With his brother and sister, he had inherited Martha Ellen Truman’s farm land at Grandview, and while official disposition of the old house at 219 North Delaware had yet to be made, he and Bess would soon become joint owners. Certainly, as things were, there could be no extravagant living. In effect they were land-rich only. The estate of the supposedly well-to-do Madge Wallace, not including the house, totaled all of $33,543.60, which after being divided four ways among Bess and her brothers, left Bess with a cash inheritance of $8,385.90. Indeed, among the reasons why they had come back to Independence and the old house was that financially they had little other choice.

The town buzzed with speculation over where the Trumans might live now, whether they would stay on in “the old Wallace place,” which to many seemed unlikely for someone who had been President of the United States. “Rumors have it that they will buy a fine home and live in Kansas City,” wrote Sue Gentry in the Examiner. “Other rumors predict they will build a home on farm land Mr. Truman owns at Grandview, a part of his old home place.” A local attorney and old friend of the family, Rufus Burrus, had picked out an elegant house in a new section of town that he thought perfect, much more suitable for a former President. But all such talk was beside the point, finances notwithstanding. The Trumans had no intention of living anywhere else, no interest in living somewhere warmer or less expensive or more glamorous.

Herbert Hoover, the country’s one other surviving former President, was a man of wealth who lived in style at the Waldorf Towers in New York. Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, none of those who had faced the prospect of being a former President since the start of the century, had had worries about money; none but Calvin Coolidge who, downcast over the death of a son and in poor health, lived less than three years after leaving office. Theodore Roosevelt had gone storming off to Africa to hunt big game; Taft became a professor of law at Yale, then Chief Justice of the United States. Wilson with his wealthy second wife, retired in style to a twenty-two-room house on S Street in Washington and lived a few more years in semi-seclusion. For his part, Truman had neither wealth to sustain him nor any particular prospects at the moment, no plans for future employment. His only intention, as he said, was to do nothing—accept no position, lend his name to no organization or transaction—that would exploit or “commercialize” the prestige and dignity of the office of the President.

He had had a number of offers already from undisclosed organizations for jobs paying $100,000 a year or more, and calling for little commitment of his time. A letter from a Miami real estate developer inviting him to become “chairman, officer, or stockholder, at a figure of not less than $100,000” would turn up later in his files, but what the other propositions were is not clear, though none apparently was from a corporation or organization of particular renown. In any event, he had turned them all down and would continue to do so. His name was not for sale. He would take no fees for commercial endorsements or for lobbying or writing letters or making phone calls. He would accept no “consulting fees,” nor any gifts that might appear as a product endorsement on his part. Offered a new Toyota, by Toyota’s American public relations firm, as a demonstration of improved good feelings between Japan and America, he flatly refused. Moreover, he wrote in response, there was no possibility of his ever driving a foreign car of any make. He believed in driving cars made in America.

He liked to say he was just a plain American citizen again. It confirmed his democratic philosophy. It pleased people and pleased him. But the difficulties in practice were more than he had anticipated. “I still don’t feel like a completely private citizen and I don’t suppose I ever will,” he told a reporter. “It’s still almost impossible to do as other people do, even though I’ve tried. You can’t always be as you want to be after you’ve been under those bright lights.”

Further, he missed the bright lights. He missed the pace of the presidency, felt strange without the constant pressures. He missed the people terribly. In thanking Dean Acheson for the farewell luncheon, he wrote that he had never been to such a party “where everybody seemed to be having the best time they ever had.” Then he added, “I hope we will never lose contact.”

The cheering throng that welcomed the Trumans home at the Independence depot the night of their return exceeded all expectations. Perhaps ten thousand people were waiting in the cold when the train came round the bend at 9:03, an hour late because of other crowds at earlier stops across Missouri. Truman was astonished, overjoyed. “Well, Harry, this makes it all worth it,” Bess said to him.

They had arrived the night of Wednesday, January 21. The morning after, asked by NBC correspondent Ray Scherer what was the first thing he planned to do, Truman said he was going to “carry the grips up to the attic,” a remark that would become famous. (Scherer, like Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press, had accompanied Truman from Washington on the train, as had Roger Tubby.) But in another hour, Truman was on his way out the door, heading downtown to Kansas City in a state highway patrol car, riding up front with Sergeant Art Bell, a former Battery D “boy” who had been assigned by the governor as a temporary driver. Truman went to see his new offices, four corner rooms on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Bank Building, at 10th and Grand. The faithful Rose Conway was already on duty sorting through several thousand letters, mostly expressions of praise and gratitude, all of which Truman felt obliged to answer.

There was no official welcome in Kansas City, but this seemed to bother him not at all. When, with Roger Tubby, he walked five blocks to the Muehlebach for lunch with his brother Vivian, and few passers-by took notice, Truman kept on smiling and talking as though all were perfectly fine.

The following day the weather turned foul, with a sudden drop in temperature—down to the 20s—accompanied by a biting north wind, sleet, and snow. Ignoring the weather, Truman set off for Grandview, to look over the site for the library he planned to build. Roger Tubby had arranged for some of the local press to join him and the group made a memorable picture, the old President, his collar up against the wind, tramping across the snow-covered fields, talking rapidly of his childhood and of his $1,500,000 project and what it would mean to the young students “who will take over the destiny of our country,” while a half-dozen reporters, his former White House press secretary, and one-time comrade-in-arms Sergeant Bell in his state police uniform, all tried their best to keep up and stay warm.

The library was the “big interest now.” Truman’s papers, for the time being, were stored at the county courthouse in Kansas City. Since the time of George Washington, it had been commonly understood that a President’s papers were his own personal property, and that he was free to do with them as he wished. The Franklin Roosevelt Library had been established at Hyde Park, New York, the first so-called “Presidential Library,” on the grounds of the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson, but Roosevelt had not lived to take part in the project. Truman, before leaving office, had sent George Elsey out from Washington to look over the farm with his brother Vivian and architect Edward Neild. Vivian had led them to the spot where he thought the library ought to go: a low-lying, swampy corner close to the railroad tracks. When Elsey and Neild pointed to a more attractive site on a high rise with views in all directions, Vivian objected. That was good land, Vivian said, and he saw no reason to waste good land on “any old dang library.”

Truman had already made some sketches. He wanted the building to look like his Grandfather Solomon Young’s house, the big house of his own childhood memories. Truman had made a rough drawing of the house as best he could remember it.

“A cold wind whipping around us,” Roger Tubby would record in his diary, “and he talks of the library. ‘This America of ours…we look out over the prairies, envision cities or universities and lo, they arise!’ ”

The former President, reported the Examiner, seemed to enjoy the brisk weather.

A few days later, on a Sunday, he set off early, before it was fully light, on his first walk through town, free of Sergeant Bell or bodyguards of any kind for the first time in more than seven years. He covered some fifteen blocks, rounding Jackson Square en route, and nothing he had done thus far, he later wrote, had given such a striking sense of being on his own at last. “More than any other single thing, this marked the abrupt change in my life.”

Speaking at a huge welcome-home banquet at the auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, Truman said simply and from the heart, “There never is and never can be anything like coming back home.”

He bought Bess a new car, a four-door black Chrysler with white-wall tires, and started driving himself again. As sightseers and the curious kept coming around the house almost daily, he decided not to have the iron fence taken down. Often whole delegations—Girl Scouts, tourists—stood outside looking through the fence. “Is this where Truman lives?” a man called to him at seven one morning from a car at the curb.

He kept to the routine of the morning walks, kept up with the mail pouring into the office in Kansas City—72,000 pieces in the first two weeks alone. He refused to be idle. His name was painted in black block letters on the door marked 1107. He arrived regularly before nine each morning.

Nearly anyone who wished could come into the office to shake hands with him or visit. As he told a friend, “You don’t need an appointment to see me now.” Yet he was worse than alone, his friend Tom Evans would remember. “He was utterlylost. After all those years in the White House with somebody around to do everything for him, he didn’t know how to order a meal in a restaurant. He didn’t know when to tip. He didn’t even know how to call a cab and pay for it.” But as Evans also remembered, Truman never said a word of complaint.

At home the house seemed “quiet and too big,” with only Bess and Vietta Garr, who went to her own home after dinner. Every night, he and Bess would call Margaret in New York.

By early February, less than a month since the return, it began to look as though their financial worries were over. He was about to sign a book contract for a “fantastic sum,” Truman wrote to Acheson, and on February 12, the press reported that he had sold the exclusive worldwide rights to his memoirs to Life magazine for an undisclosed amount. In fact, the figure was $600,000—truly a fantastic sum in 1953—which, by a contract negotiated for him by Sam Rosenman, was to be paid in installments over five years.

At the end of March, he, Bess, and Margaret went off on a dream vacation trip to Hawaii, traveling first to San Francisco as the guests of Averell Harriman in his private railroad car. From San Francisco, they sailed on the President Cleveland, of the American Presidents Line, down the bay and out under the Golden Gate Bridge. Of the morning they arrived off Oahu, Truman wrote: “Diamond Head and then Honolulu with the Pali in the background, rainbows, clouds, sunshine and a beautiful city all in one scene.”

It was one of the most enchanting experiences of their lives. Hawaii was “Paradise,” and they stayed a month, as the guests of Ed Pauley at his estate on little Coconut Island, in Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Long a champion of statehood for the islands, Truman was given an effusive Hawaiian welcome from the moment the ship landed. Government and military officials, the press, a dozen different reception committees rushed on board to escort him ashore. “[They] covered us with leis and smothered us with questions and flash bulbs.” He accepted an honorary degree at the University of Hawaii, toured Oahu, and on a flying visit to the big island of Hawaii in a Navy C-47, soared over the saddle between the snow-capped volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. When, on the return flight to Oahu, he spotted a school of whales off Maui, the Navy pilots told him it meant good luck. He swam, loafed, read, and thoroughly enjoyed “the wonderful people” of the islands…And then the month was over and he was home again at North Delaware Street, Where the house was still quiet and too big.

He bought another car, this one for himself, a two-tone green Dodge coupe, to drive to his office. He loved cars no less than ever and was as fussy as ever about their appearance.

“This morning at 7 A.M., I took off for my morning walk,” begins a diary entry from that spring.

I’d just had the Dodge car washed a day or so ago and it looked as if it had never been used.

The weather man said it would rain so I decided to put the washed car in the garage and use the black car which was already spotted and dusty. My sister-in-law, watching me make the change, which required some maneuvering due to the location of several cars in the driveway, wanted to know if I might be practicing for a job in a parking station!

He knew he must get started on his memoirs, but dreaded the prospect. Hawaii had made him “lazy as hell.” He wished he had never agreed to do the book.

On his walk that same spring morning he stopped to watch a construction project, the widening of Truman Road.

A shovel (automatic) and a drag line were working as well as some laboring men digging in the old fashioned way. The boss or the contractor was looking on and I asked him if he didn’t need a good strawboss. He took a look at me and then watched the work a while and then took another look and broke out in a broad smile and said, “Oh yes! You are out of a job aren’t you.”

He felt a constant need to be on the move. So in the heat of June, he and Bess started for Washington in the new Chrysler. He wanted to give the car “a real tryout,” he said. Bess was delighted. Friends and family tried to talk them out of going. He and Bess had not traveled on their own by automobile in nine years, not since their return from the Chicago convention in 1944. Yet off they went, making an early start, Truman at the wheel. Wasn’t it good to be on their own again, she said. They got as far as Hannibal before stopping for lunch at a roadside restaurant, only to find how difficult being on their own was going to be. As Truman later wrote to his old Army friend, Vic Householder, “Everything went well until a couple of old-time County Judges came in and saw me. They said, ‘Why there’s Judge Truman’—and then every waitress and all the customers had to shake hands and have autographs.”

At Decatur, Illinois, 150 miles later, Truman pulled into a Shell station where he had often stopped for gas in years past, traveling to and from Washington. An elderly attendant who kept studying him while filling the tank, finally inquired if he wasn’t Senator Truman.

I admitted the charge [Truman continued in his letter to Householder] and asked him if he could direct me to a good motel in town. We’d never stayed at one and wanted to try it out and see if we liked it. Well he directed us but he told everybody in town about it. The Chief of Police got worried about us and sent two plain clothes men and four uniformed police to look after us. They took us to dinner and to breakfast the next morning and escorted us out of town with a sigh of relief.

Bess insisted he keep to the 50-mile-an-hour speed limit. But going “so slowly,” as he said, meant others passing had a chance to look them over. “Hi, Harry!” people shouted as they went by. “There goes our incognito,” he told her. At the hotel where they stopped in Wheeling, West Virginia, the lobby was jammed with reporters and photographers.

But there was no doubt that he loved the attention. When, at Frederick, Maryland, he saw several familiar faces from the Washington press corps waiting in a car to escort him into the city, he greeted them like long-lost brothers. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he exclaimed. Pulling up at the Mayflower Hotel, he stepped from the car in his shirtsleeves to be immediately surrounded by a crowd of more reporters and photographers and hotel employees, all trying to shake his hand. He was there only to have a good time, he said, his face beaming in the late afternoon sunshine—“carefree as a schoolboy in summer,” according to the account in the Post the next morning. To all questions concerning Congress, the President, the Korean War, Truman said, “No comment, no comment, no comment.”

A steady stream of old friends, members of his Cabinet, Democratic senators, members of Congress came to call. It was “like a dream,” Truman later wrote. “The suite we stayed in at the Mayflower could have been the White House…. Everything seemed just as it used to be—the taxi drivers shouting hello along the line of my morning walks, the dinners at night with the men and women I had worked with for years, the conferences, the tension, the excitement, the feeling of things happening and going to happen….”

And the “good time” continued over the next weekend, when he and Bess drove on to New York and checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. With Margaret they dined at the Twenty-one Club and saw Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town at the Winter Garden. As they came into the theater, the whole audience rose and applauded.

Cab drivers in New York did not just call to him, they pulled to the curb and jumped out to shake his hand. He was still their man, he was assured. “If you’d go again tomorrow, Harry, you’d win.”

Heading home for Missouri, “perking along” on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Truman was signaled to pull over by the police. According to what State Trooper Manly Stampler told reporters, “Mr. Truman” had twice cut in front of vehicles trying to pass him. “He was very nice about it and promised to be more careful.” But according to Truman, who had never had a traffic violation, the young man had only wanted to shake hands.

It was his last venture with Bess on their own by automobile. Thereafter, they would go by train, plane, or ship.

On March 5, in Moscow, after nearly three decades in power, Joseph Stalin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age seventy-three. Ten days later, Stalin’s successor, Georgi M. Malenkov, declared in a speech that there was no issue between Moscow and Washington that could not be resolved by peaceful means. Two weeks after Malenkov’s speech, the Communists in Korea suddenly agreed to an exchange of wounded prisoners and said that this should lead to a “peaceful settlement” of the entire prisoner issue. Then in the final week of July, as Truman, in the heat of high summer in Missouri, was beginning work on his memoirs, an armistice was signed at Panmunjom; the Korean War was over.

It was an armistice with voluntary repatriation, and the dividing line between North and South Korea was to remain the 38th parallel. So President Eisenhower had achieved essentially the very same settlement that had eluded Truman—a “no-win” agreement, as Truman’s Republican critics would have called it. As Senator Paul Douglas observed, Truman “would have been flayed from one end of Washington to the other if he had accepted the present agreement.”

Stalin’s death had unquestionably had an effect; so also had Eisenhower’s threats to use newly developed tactical nuclear weapons in Korea.

The war had caused terrible bloodshed and destruction—perhaps as many as 2 million civilian dead according to some estimates, 4 million casualties overall. The Americans killed in battle numbered 33,629 and another 20,617 Americans died of other causes.

To many Americans at home, it seemed the war had resolved nothing. But to Truman, as to a great many others, it was a major victory for the United States and the United Nations. Military aggression had been stopped. The Communist advance in Asia had been checked; South Korea and possibly Japan as well had been saved from what had seemed an inexorable “Red tide.” The United Nations had been shown to be something more than a world debating society. “As for the United States [wrote The New York Times], the action in Korea represented something of a regaining of our national soul and conscience. We did a difficult and costly thing because we thought it was right.”

Asked for his opinion about the armistice settlement, Eisenhower said simply, “The war is over, and I hope my son is coming home soon.” Truman said nothing for attribution. Though undoubtedly and understandably resentful that his successor had achieved what he himself had failed to attain, and without resulting political rancor, he kept silent. Privately he thanked God it was ended. “Of course I’m happy about the truce in Korea,” he wrote to a friend. “It doesn’t make any difference about the credit for holding back Soviet aggression. The fact that the shooting has stopped is a very satisfactory one.”

The following October, when Eisenhower came to Kansas City for a speech to the Future Farmers of America, and was staying at the Muehlebach, Truman tried to reach him at the hotel by phone, to say he would like to drop by to pay his respects, but was told by an aide that the President’s schedule was too full, a meeting would be impossible. Truman was shattered. In explanation, Eisenhower’s office later said that whoever answered the phone must have thought it was a crank call.

II

With the task of the memoirs that he had been putting off finally under way, and with his efforts to launch the library, Truman found himself more occupied than he had ever anticipated. “The book is doing fine but what a slave it’s made of me,” he would report to Dean Acheson in the fall.

Of all the presidents until then, only Herbert Hoover had written his own story in his lifetime. (“How much is lost to us because so few Presidents have told their own stories,” Truman was to say in the preface to his own work.) John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk had written extensively about their time in office, but in their private diaries. Ulysses S. Grant, dying of cancer, had spent his final days laboring heroically on his memoirs as a means to provide financial security for his family, but Grant chose not to include his shadowed years in the White House. Even Theodore Roosevelt, with his sense of history and of his own importance to history, was oddly superficial when describing his presidency in his popular autobiography. Nor had Herbert Hoover, in telling his story, been obliged to recount anything approaching the world-shaking tumult, the watershed history, of the Truman years. The closest thing to what Truman would be attempting was Winston Churchill’s magisterial history of World War II, which had also appeared first in Life, and against which, as Truman knew, whatever he produced was bound to be compared.

“I’m not a writer!” those working with him on the project were to hear him say many times. He was not after their sympathy, only stating what he saw as the heart of the problem. Before the task was finished a full dozen people would be involved.

The first called in to help were William Hillman and David Noyes, both of whom had served on the White House staff as speechwriters and whose loyalty to Truman verged on adoration. Hillman, a hulking veteran newspaper correspondent, had already published a eulogizing Truman portrait called Mr. President, a book of photographs with text compiled mainly from Truman quotes and selections from his private papers. Noyes was in advertising in California, a short, wiry, talkative man, who had worked on the 1948 campaign and was best known for initiating the controversial scheme to send Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow. His claim to have been one of Truman’s key advisers was greatly exaggerated.

Promising to “protect” Truman from the publisher, Hillman and Noyes set up a working procedure for the memoirs. They offered advice and they came and went, flying in and out of Kansas City, as need be, every month or so, while a paid staff of three was established in Room 1002, on the floor below Truman at the Federal Reserve Bank Building. The plan was for Truman to “talk” the book. For months, he talked to a recording machine supplied by Life—a device he hated—responding to questions put to him by the hour by a University of Southern California professor of journalism named Robert E. G. Harris. Meantime, two young research assistants checked all that Truman said against what was in the files. By late fall, more than 100,000 words had been transcribed, all beautifully typed and arranged in looseleaf notebooks. But there was very little in the way of an actual manuscript, and what Truman saw of this, he didn’t like. “Good God, what crap!” he scrawled across the top.

Professor Harris was dismissed, his place taken by another academic scholar, Morton Royce, a highly disorganized, excessively profane man, who continued on with the interviews, but ever so slowly, pressing Truman over and over for more complete and detailed answers, often returning to the same questions several times, and particularly about the atomic bomb. As a consequence, Truman grew extremely annoyed with Royce and the whole process.

The editor of Life, Ed Thompson, flew in from New York for a first look early in 1954. Truman had agreed to deliver 300,000 words by June 30, 1955. As it was, perhaps thirty-five pages of manuscript were ready. The raw material, Truman’s own recollections, Thompson thought “lively” and “honest.” But far greater progress was needed, and soon.

Morton Royce departed and two new writers were taken on, young Herbert Lee Williams, a doctoral candidate from the University of Missouri, and Francis H. Heller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

Williams would remember being astonished by the volume of official and private papers at hand:

The cream of the White House communications mix from 1945 to 1952 had been systematically ladled into 50 large metal file cabinets which now lined the walls of the eleventh-floor suite, Truman’s offices [upstairs]. In these were all of the personal and official correspondence of the President: transcripts of 2,003 public speeches and 324 press conferences; a multitude of inter-office memoranda and directives; minutes of countless executive sessions; copies of more than 31,000 dictated letters, plus handwritten notes to Mamma or sister Mary….

The first bundle of files I was given, to take down to 1002 where I was to digest the contents and regurgitate them in memoirs form, covered the entire lend-lease story, from the time that Truman inherited it from FDR….

Entering Truman’s office one morning in search of a reference book, Williams was also astonished to find the former President fixing himself a drink. (As Williams strongly disapproved of drinking, he would, as time went on, decline invitations to join Truman for lunch, which customarily began with “a little H₂O flavored with bourbon,” as Truman would say.)

As manuscript chapters began to emerge, they were reviewed page by page during lengthy sessions in Truman’s office, a good-sized room comfortably furnished with leather chairs, a flag, portraits of Jackson and Jefferson, and books across one wall. The windows faced west over a panoramic view of the city and the distant hills of Kansas. As someone on the staff read aloud, Truman would sit listening intently. “His approval or criticism was solicited almost paragraph by paragraph. The whole idea was to jog the memory of the man who had been there, to add the auto to the biography,” Williams would recall in an article somewhat vainly and inaccurately titled, “I Was Truman’s Ghost.” In fact, he was only a minor ghost among the several enlisted, and his participation was to be relatively brief.

As time went on, various members of Truman’s White House staff, as well as Dean Acheson, John Snyder, General Bradley, and others of Truman’s Cabinet would come to Kansas City to take part in these review sessions.

The man who had been rising early and going off to work every morning most of his long life had by now settled again into the old pattern. At the house on North Delaware the lights started coming on well before dawn, usually at 5:30, at the sound of the courthouse clock. His morning paper, the Kansas City Times, arrived shortly afterward, tossed over the iron fence from a passing car, and he would unlatch the front door and come down the porch steps in his shirtsleeves to retrieve the paper from the front walk.

About seven he would emerge again from the front door, in suit jacket and hat now, a walking cane in hand. He would go out the front gate—in turn unlocking, closing, and checking to see it was secure—then start off on his walk, a half hour tour that took him through the same neighborhoods, over much the same ground in memory, that he was covering in the memoirs. Across the street still was the little Victorian Noland house, occupied still by his Noland cousins, Ethel and Nellie. Rounding the corner from North Delaware, left onto Maple and heading east, “uptown” to the Square, he would pass the red-brick First Presbyterian Church where he and Bess had met in Sunday School. (She had golden curls and has, to this day, the most beautiful eyes, he was saying in the memoirs.) At the Square, Clinton’s drugstore was now Helzberg Jewelers, but looked not greatly different from when he had worked there so diligently as a boy (…mopping the floors, sweeping the sidewalk, and having everything shipshape when Mr. Clinton came in).

The courthouse, the “new” courthouse as his generation still called it, his courthouse, held sway over the Square no less than ever, its white cupola catching the morning sun ahead of the rest of the town. Tourists would ask which was his office, which were his windows. (The judges of these Missouri county courts are not judges in the usual sense, since the court is an administrative, not a judicial body….)

The town had greatly changed in the two decades since he had first gone to Washington. The town was still changing, growing. New sections of new houses seemed to spring up overnight. Traffic was heavier. The population was now past 40,000, more than five times what it had been when he was a boy. More and more, Independence was becoming a suburb of Kansas City. Yet the old part of town, the Square, the neighborhoods of his boyhood looked much like they always had, and he felt great affection for all of it.

Others who were up and about early often made an effort to say hello, to introduce themselves and shake his hand as he came down the sidewalk at his steady clip. “I always try to be as pleasant as I can,” he wrote in his diary. “They, of course, don’t know that I walk early to get a chance to think over things and get ready for work of the day.” If he didn’t know them, he usually knew something about someone they were related to or descended from, and these recollections always pleased him.

“Well, I went to Maple Ave., turned left ‘toward town’ and spoke to several people, turned south on Pleasant Street,” continues the diary account of one such morning.

After I’d passed the light at Lexington I met a young man, Frank A. Reynolds, who introduced himself as John Strother’s son-in-law. We talked a few minutes and I thought of the Strother family—one of the best old families in the County.

John was Democratic Committeeman from Blue Township (Independence) from the time I was road overseer in Washington Township until I went to Washington as U.S. Senator from Missouri. He was a grand man—but wouldn’t tell his age! He was my father’s generation and he always wanted to be young with the young men. He was a good lawyer and an honest one too.

Just as I started to leave Mr. Strother’s son-in-law—and there were other great Strothers: Sam, who was a pillar of the Democratic Party in Kansas City; a second generation Judge, Duvall, and many others—as I say, just as I started to walk again a car stopped across the street and the man jumped out and came over to shake hands and said, “I’m sure you can’t remember me—it’s been so long since you’ve seen me.” I did though. I told him whose son he is and who his grandfather was! Some feat for a man who has met millions of people.

He belonged to the Pugh family. His grandfather, Noah E. Pugh, was one fine man. He came out to Missouri in 1894 or 1895 and settled on my mother’s part of her father’s estate, 160 acres south east of the farm about three miles. Mr. Pugh had several sons and daughters older and younger than I. Conley Pugh was a few years older than I and was married to a nice Grandview girl when they were very young. It was a happy marriage and the man who stopped me is Conley’s oldest boy. He told me he had four children. It is remarkable indeed how time flies and makes you an old man whether you want to be or not.

His mother had never looked back, always forward, he liked to remind himself. It was part of her strength. With the work on his memoirs, and these daily tours through the old neighborhoods now after so many years, he was thinking more than ever of both parents.

He varied his route one day to another, but it hardly mattered. Whichever way he went was a walk through the past. The boyhood home at River and Waldo was still standing, as was the old house on South Crysler, near the depot. (When we moved to Independence in December 1890, my father bought a big house on South Crysler Street with several acres of land….)

There was to be only one chapter about his early life, taking him from boyhood to his return from France in 1919. But it was a part of the story only he could tell, for which there were no file drawers to search, and the words would be his.

(In the fall of 1892 Grover Cleveland was re-elected over Benjamin Harrison, who had defeated him in 1888. My father was very much elated by Cleveland’s victory. He rode a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade and decorated the weather vane on the tower at the north-east corner of the house with a flag and bunting. The weather vane was a beautiful gilded rooster.)

Once at the White House, a magazine writer had remarked to him that his father had been a failure. How could he be called a failure, he had answered, if his son became President of the United States.

During the half hour or so that he was gone from the house, at about 7:15, Vietta Garr would arrive by taxi at the side gate to begin fixing breakfast. The schedule rarely varied. He would return through the front gate at 7:30, not to reemerge until roughly 8:15, but from the back porch this time and carrying an aluminum briefcase, with the manuscript pages he had brought home the night before. He would head for the garage. Then the two-tone green Dodge would be seen backing cautiously out the driveway and off he would go, west down Truman Road, the Kansas City skyline dead ahead and on sunny mornings shining like an artist’s picture of America on the rise.

His regular parking space was in an open lot a block from the office. He would pay a dollar in advance and walk to the bank building. Entering in the lobby, he would tip his hat to the elevator operator, Kay Walker, and greet her by name. By 8:45, he was at his desk.

“I have been working on the opening chapter of my purported memoirs,” Truman wrote to Dean Acheson from the office on January 28, 1954, trying to get to the bottom of why he found the task so very difficult.

I have tried to place myself back into the position I was on April 12, 1945. I have read letters to my mother and sister, to my brother and cousins. I have read telegrams to and from Churchill and Roosevelt, to and from Stalin and Roosevelt. I’ve read memos I made of visits to the White House from April 12th back to July 1944. I’ve read Ike’s, Leahy’s, Churchill’s, Grew’s, Cordell Hull’s books. Memos from Hopkins, Stimson, Assist. and Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson; reports from Marshall, Eisenhower, King, Bradley. Communiqués of Teheran, Cairo, Casablanca, Quebec, Yalta, Byrnes’ book on it, etc., etc. ad lib and still I am living today….

So you see the past has always interested me for use in the present and I am bored to death with what I did and didn’t do nine years ago.

But Andrew Johnson, James Madison, even old Rutherford B. Hayes I’m extremely interested in as I am [in] King Henry IV of France, Margaret of Navarre, Charles V and Philip II of Spain and Charlie’s Aunt Margaret.

Wish to goodness I’d decided to spend my so called retirement putting Louis XIII, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu and five tubs of gold together instead of writing about me and my mistakes….

On St. Patrick’s Day, he wrote again to tell Acheson he was thinking still about the relationship between history and government. “Our tribal instinct has not been eliminated by science and invention. We, as individuals, haven’t caught up physically or ethically with the atomic age. Will we?”

Perhaps their grandchildren would do better, though, he added, in his case this remained a hypothetical statement. (Margaret as yet had shown no signs of getting married.)

He sensed a change in how the country regarded him and was heartened by it. “The tone of my mail has changed completely. It still comes in by the bushel but there’s hardly a mean one in two hundred….”

The increase in interest and appreciation at home in Independence was even more striking. Automobiles and sightseeing buses now cruised slowly by on North Delaware nearly all day. When Bess sent some of his clothes to her church rummage sale, word spread that one item, an overcoat, had been worn at Potsdam—a silly claim since the meeting at Potsdam had taken place in midsummer, but the coat brought a big price just the same. A sign at the depot now proclaimed: “Independence, the Home of Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States”—a sign that annoyed Truman, who, with his concern for historical accuracy, insisted he was the thirty-second president since Cleveland served twice.

Some people in town, mainly among Republicans, thought no better of him than they had before. But they were a decided minority. By strong consensus the town thought it wonderful that the Trumans were home to stay. People liked the way they had both stepped modestly back into the life of the town, and especially the way “Mr. Truman” conducted himself, as a fellow citizen. They were as proud of him for his lack of side, his fundamental small-town genuineness after all, as they were of anything about him. “I used to say that Harry Truman lived around the corner from me,” his old friend and ardent Republican, Henry Bundschu, told a magazine writer from the East, “now there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t tell myself that you live around the corner from Harry Truman and don’t you forget it.”

Largest and most generous of the town’s gestures, and much the most appreciated by Truman, was the donation of a town park north of the Square as a site for his library. He could not have been more pleased. Independence would be a far more appropriate location than Grandview and more accessible. Slover Park, a quiet, picturesque 13-acre knoll, was just beyond U.S. Highway 24. To have turned over a comparable portion of the Grandview farm, furthermore, would have meant a major financial sacrifice not only for Truman, but Vivian and Mary Jane, for the land at Grandview was becoming more valuable all the time. Also, the Independence site was only a mile from 219 North Delaware, nothing at all for a good walker.

“All partisanship and selfishness were left behind months ago and this home city of this world-famous statesman is the most logical place to establish such a national Shrine as the Harry S. Truman Library,” wrote the Kansas City Times.

Besides the work on the memoirs, Truman threw himself into raising money for the library, attending dinners, making speeches around the country, and writing thouands of letters. A fund-raising auction for the library at the National Guard Armory in Independence went on for seven hours. The government in Washington was to contribute nothing to the cost of creating the library. He would raise all the money himself. It was another campaign for him, and in a year and a half he would build a fund of more than $1 million. “The pace he set absolutely terrified me,” Margaret would remember.

Past the age of seventy, Truman often said, one was living on borrowed time. Yet in the spring of 1954, turning seventy, he gave no sign of exerting or enjoying himself any less than ever. He was putting in seventeen hours a day on the book, the mail, and seeing the “customers” who came by the office, he reported to Acheson on May 28, Nor was that all on his mind:

I’m worried about our world situation. We are losing all our friends, the smart but inexperienced boys at the White House are upsetting NATO and throwing our military strength away. Yet they seem to want to intervene in Indo-China….

In June, when the Irving Berlin hit musical Call Me Madam, about Perle Mesta, came to Kansas City’s outdoor theater, Truman happily agreed to make a surprise appearance in the last act, playing the part of himself. Waiting backstage, the night of June 18, he was suddenly ill with violent pains in his stomach. Bess rushed him home and the lights were on at the house all night. On June 20, in an emergency operation at Research Hospital, he had his gallbladder and appendix removed by Wallace Graham, who, since leaving the White House, had resettled in Kansas City to practice surgery. Infection set in. Graham grimly reported that, due to an “unusual hypersensitivity” to modern drugs, the former President was in serious condition. For several days there was extreme concern. It was “a hell of a time,” Truman later said. “They gave me about five or ten gallons of antibiotics by sticking needles in veins. But they just couldn’t kill me.”

But the crisis passed and Truman, improving rapidly, was the model patient. Nothing seemed to bother him. Western Missouri was in the grip of a fierce heat wave. By midday thermometers outside the hospital windows ranged between 110 and 114 degrees and the hospital had no air conditioning. Nevertheless, he was content. When the director of the hospital insisted on putting an air conditioner in his room, he refused. He wanted no special treatment. It was only after Tom Evans pointed out that Bess, who had been sitting with him day after day, was suffering from heat if he wasn’t, that Truman sent for the director and had the air conditioning installed immediately.

“When the papers tell us that you had a gangrenous gall bladder,” wrote Acheson, “I was at once prepared to tell Doc Graham how you got it. It comes from reading the newspapers. No one can escape some malady from this cause. With me it has taken the form of an attack of gout….”

For Truman’s convalescence, Acheson sent a copy of The Reason Why, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade. “When you get acquainted with Lords Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan you will be reminded of a certain General we know,” Acheson said, meaning MacArthur.

To Bess, Acheson wrote, “It is touching the way so many people—elevator boys, our cook, taxi drivers, people on the street—keep asking me about the President. He is deeply loved—even by the press.”

More than a hundred thousand cards and letters poured in to Truman, wishing him a speedy recovery, and enough flowers, as he said, “to supply every customer” in the hospital.

From his hospital room on July 6, he pledged to do “everything possible” to get his library started and finished as soon as possible. Once released from the hospital, he was immediately back at work.

Ed Thompson flew in from New York in November to find that the “raw material” of the memoirs had grown beyond limits, yet the manuscript was still far from ready. Tactfully he proposed to the former President that one of Life’s best staff writers, Ernest Havemann, be sent in to do some reshaping and polishing. But Truman declined. “More important to me,” he wrote to Thompson, “especially at this stage, than style or organization of the material are the facts…so that the record of the years of my Presidency may be correct. Until this part of the job is completed I would like you to hold up sending Mr. Havemann; or anyone else….”

Havemann’s turn came three or four weeks later, and for the first time, Truman had an experienced writer working with him. Francis Heller would recall how much he himself learned from Havemann—though Havemann did no actual writing—and how hard everyone worked, six, sometimes seven days a week, “going great guns,” as Truman said. “The damned thing is turning out much better than I thought it would,” he reported to Acheson. But apparently Havemann found the former President a difficult collaborator, and the staff even more troublesome to work with. After a month, he asked to be relieved.

Another writer, Hawthorne Daniel, was recruited, now at the request of Doubleday, the publisher that would be bringing out the book, once Life had launched its installments. Eventually, too, Doubleday’s editor-in-chief Ken McCormick would take part in the cutting and refining, and both Dean Acheson and Sam Rosenman would be asked by Truman to go over the whole “accumulation.” Acheson’s comments were to be of particular value.

The material is more interesting and gripping when you are talking about your own life and your own ideas than it is when you are giving lists of callers at the White House and the activities of the Truman Committee which do not reveal much about you as a man [Acheson advised in one extended critique].

Page 114, line 3. You use the cliché, “striped pants boys in the State Department.” I should like to see you change this to “people in the State Department,” not merely because the phrase is tiresome, but because it gives quite a wrong impression of the tremendous support which you gave to the career service and for which they will be forever grateful.

In places, as he told Truman, Acheson found the manuscript brusque, didactic, and superficial, “quite contrary to what you are.”

Acheson’s lengthy, single-space typed comments, running to many pages, would be gone over closely by the staff, who, in turn, would give Truman their own lengthy comments on Acheson’s comments.

Ken McCormick sensed that Bess Truman was also playing more of a role than met the eye, since Truman seemed to make better decisions about the manuscript, seemed to improve in his judgments, after having talked with her at home in the evenings. “She was his true North, I think,” McCormick said years later, remembering how the work had gone.

The financial burden of all this for Truman was mounting, for as yet he had received no money. The first payment of his $600,000 from Life was not due until June 30, when he was supposed to deliver the finished manuscript.

By early 1955, the manuscript had grown to approximately 2 million words, whereas the contract had called for only 300,000. After some negotiations, Life agreed to accept 580,000 words, but still the project was behind schedule. Hillman and Noyes now spent more time in Kansas City, cutting and trimming.

Doubleday, faced with the size of the manuscript, decided to bring the memoirs out in two volumes, and so through the first six months of 1955, all concentration was on finishing up Volume One—dealing with only the first sixteen months of the presidency, plus the one chapter on his early life and two others covering the political career prior to Roosevelt’s death.

Things were moving fast. And things were changing. Acheson and his wife Alice arrived—Acheson to help with the manuscript—and were overnight guests at 219 North Delaware, an event that had the whole town talking, both because there had never before been a former Secretary of State in residence in Independence and because there had never before been “house guests” at 219 North Delaware, as far as anyone could recall.

On May 8, Truman’s seventy-first birthday, with some two thousand people gathering in Slover Park, he turned the first spade of earth at an old-fashioned home-style groundbreaking ceremony for his library, complete with band music. Then, as they had also never done before, he and Bess hosted a buffet dinner at home for some 150 people. It was a sight, wrote Margaret, that she never thought she would see. There was her mother standing at the door of her “sanctuary,” welcoming each guest.

Flying to San Francisco on June 24, to attend a tenth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Truman looked out over Wyoming and the Rockies from the vantage point of 14,000 feet, and as he wrote in his room that night in the Fairmont Hotel, he couldn’t help but think of Solomon Young.

We’d left home at 7 A.M. and at 11 A.M. were all past the high mountains. Grandpa would have left home at what is now Grandview at four A.M. and in all probability would have been ten or twelve miles west of the Missouri line. What an age we live and have our being in! We had a mountain lake trout lunch and before we realized it were descending into the Great Salt Lake Valley….

With the deadline pressure on in the offices at the Federal Reserve Bank Building, the work hours grew longer. In the final days of June, some of the staff were working round the clock.

Truman handed over a 500,000-word manuscript to Ed Thompson in Kansas City on July 4, 1955, and told him, “I never really appreciated before what is involved in trying to write a book.”

His first check was for $110,000, and with it came five promissory notes for the rest of the $600,000, the last installment not to be paid until January 1960.

The opening installment of the Memoirs, titled “The Most Momentous First 18 Days,” appeared in the September 25 issue of Life, with a cover photograph of the former President and First Lady standing in front of their Independence home. Doubleday’s publication of Volume One, called Year of Decisions, followed five weeks later, with an author’s autographing party in the grand ballroom of the Muehlebach, on Tuesday, November 2, 1955.

To the delight of the publisher, Truman had agreed to sign books for all who came. “I expect to use, probably, a couple of $1.75 fountain pens that I bought at the Twenty-five Cent Store, along with a half dozen others that I happen to have, and I don’t want to be in any advertising stunt [for the pens] whatever,” Truman had written to Samuel Vaughan, Doubleday’s advertising manager. “I will go along with any party arrangements which you make for Doubleday, but don’t get me into any advertising for pens, cakes or anything, because I won’t do it.”

Arriving in Kansas City a few days in advance to make arrangements, Vaughan was distressed to hear people asking why they would want to come to such an occasion for Truman, “when we see him all the time anyway.” Greatly concerned, Vaughan worked to line up Battery D veterans, the Boy Scouts, anyone he could think of, to be sure there was a crowd. But he need not have bothered. More than three hundred people were already in line waiting before the party began.

“Hand Firm to the End” was the headline in the next morning’s paper.

It was almost unbelievable. “I had no idea it would be anything like this,” Truman said as he saw the crowds grow, the people still coming, hour after hour. His hand fairly flew as he signed books, until he was doing six to eight autographs a minute. If ever there was a demonstration of his extraordinary vitality, this was it. He kept going hour after hour, not only signing his name but greeting people. “There, that one’s all slicked up,” he would say with satisfaction, finishing his signature and handing over the book.

By the end of the first session, he had signed over a thousand copies In all, incredibly, he turned out four thousand autographs in just five and a half hours. Reporters on hand, his publishers, watched in amazement. Earlier, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had suggested to Truman that perhaps he might prefer to have the autographs done by a machine Truman had replied, “I will autograph as many as I can. I am not an expert with a machine, and I would rather do it by hand.”

Reviewers rightly treated the book as a major event. “The first volume of Harry Truman’s Memoirs (Doubleday) provides a more detailed report on life at the summit of American politics than a President has given since the early days of the Republic,” wrote Richard Rovere in The New Yorker. Truman was commended for his contribution to history, his understanding of presidential power, his clarity, attention to detail, “his appealing mixture of modesty and confidence,” as the historian Allan Nevins wrote on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. There was too little autobiography, it was thought, too much that read like an official paper worked over by many hands. (In the preface, Truman freely acknowledged the help he had been given.) Richard Rovere, having covered Truman for years, missed the characteristic pungent manner of expression, Truman in his own words, and wished there were more of what was to be found in Truman’s letters to his mother, eighteen of which were included in the book, providing, as Rovere said, not only relief from the state-paper style but “wonderful insights” into Truman’s style as a human being.

As the reviewers implied, too many people had been involved in the task. Truman had been homogenized. He had been made at times even tedious. Acheson’s warnings should have been taken more to heart. Truman himself—the vitality, the vividness of his letters, his own way of expressing himself—was missing through great portions of the book. But to a large degree, of course, Truman himself had been responsible for this, by agreeing to the process by which the work was produced. Also, from the start, he seems to have seen the task more as one of recording history than telling his own story. Francis Heller, for example, would never recall Truman speaking of the work in progress as “memoirs,” only as “my history.”

The inevitable comparisons with Churchill’s history of the war were made, though not so unfavorably as might have been supposed. As a literary performance, said Allan Nevins, Truman’s book did not rank among the best memoirs of the era. Nevertheless, Nevins emphasized, this was a “volume of distinction.” His praise exceeded his criticism and the review, like others, became as much a judgment of the author as of the book. If not one of the landmark memoirs of the century, it was nonetheless an admirable work by one of the most important figures of the century.

Altogether, it well expressed one of the most conscientious, dynamic and (within his horizons) clearsighted Presidents we have ever had [wrote Nevins]…. His penetrating shrewdness has been underrated…. We are equally impressed by his exceptionally high conception of the Presidency and his determination to live up to it…. In ordinary affairs he seemed commonplace, and in small matters he could make curious blunders. But he grew in his office as few Presidents have ever done; and he was sustained by an unusual knowledge of American history and a firm grasp of our best traditions. To the major crisis he brought statesmanlike insight, energy, and courage. There was greatness in the man….

The large effect of the book and the series in Life—and Volume Two, which appeared the next spring—was to create renewed interest in Truman and a reconsideration of his presidency. And while his account of events also stirred controversy—protests and rebuttals by such major protagonists as Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace—publication of the Memoirs marked the beginning of what was to be a steady revival of Truman’s reputation, and the beginning of an exceptionally happy time for him. Indeed, it may be said that publication of the Memoirs marked the opening of one of the happiest passages in his long life.

III

Truman had always wanted a son. It was why he had called Margaret “Skinny” as she grew up, he recently explained in a letter to Acheson. “But I wouldn’t trade her for a houseful of boys although I always wanted a couple and another girl.”

In mid-March 1956, at a press conference at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, Margaret announced she was engaged to be married to Elbert Clifton Daniel, Jr., who was an assistant foreign news editor of The New York Times and at forty-two, ten years older than his fiancée. The news was a surprise. Though her parents had known for several weeks, Margaret had succeeded in keeping her romance private.

Margaret and Clifton, as he was called, had known each other for more than a year. He was of slightly less than medium height, slim, handsome well dressed, and spoke with a trace of a British accent, acquired, it was said, from ten years as a foreign correspondent in England. He appeared very polished and sophisticated, but as the country soon learned, he, like Margaret, had grown up in a small town, Zebulon, North Carolina, where his father, Elbert Clifton Daniel, Sr., had a drugstore.

Alone at his office desk, Truman took up one of his $1.75 pens and wrote a two-page letter to Acheson. Their friendship, the great trust and mutual admiration, the enjoyment they found in exchanging news on life’s turns and human folly, everything that had made the seemingly incongruous bond between them so important during the presidency, had come to mean still more to Truman now. The truth was that the number one citizen of Independence, Missouri, the President who had come home to be “plain Mr. Truman” again, sorely missed the company and stimulation of just such people as the worldly Acheson. The letters to and fro between them would steadily increase, Truman speaking his mind—writing from the heart—as he had only, until now, to the women who were dear to him. He even told Acheson, as once he had told Bess Wallace, that he wrote sometimes just to get a letter in return. “When I hear from you I always feel better,” he would write. “Wish I could sit and talk with you for an hour or thirty minutes or even for five minutes. My morale would go up 100%.”

Unexpectedly and most happily, at this late date, Truman found his life enlarged by this close, if distant friend, a brother in spirit, a confidant—indeed a male friend such as he had never had before—and this as much as anything was to account for his great increased enjoyment of these years.

Now he addressed himself to the latest turn in his personal life. “Margie has put one over on me and got herself engaged to a news man!” he began, the words advancing steadily across the page, the bold certainty of every stroke looking no different from the handwriting in letters written to Bess Wallace from Grandview nearly fifty years before.

He strikes me as a very nice fellow and if Margaret wants him I’ll be satisfied. He seems to be very highly thought of in newspaper circles and particularly by The New York Times people.

The young lady told us about it just a week or two before the announcement and swore us to secrecy. In fact, she made me hang up while she told her mother. Did your daughter do you that way? I was forbidden to tell my brother and sister. Like a couple of amateurs they went to North Carolina to see his mother and father (nice people by the way) and then had dinner with Jonathan Daniels, of all people, hoping to keep a secret! The next day they called Daddy and wanted to know what to do. Well Dad announced the engagement the next morning without a chance to tell his friends. Again did your daughter do that?

Well, we’ve had at least two thousand letters and telegrams and she’s had twice as many—serves her right. As every old man who had a daughter feels, I’m worried and hope things will work out all right. Can’t you give me some consolation?

Acheson replied at once:

Consolation is just what I can give. In the first place about Margaret’s choice. She has always had good judgment and has shown it again here. Alice and I had dinner with them here on her birthday—just a year before we celebrated it in Independence with you. I was completely captivated by Clifton Daniel. He has charm and sense and lots of ability. On the way home I told Alice that there was romance in the wind and that I was all for it. She somewhat acidly remarked that I had so monopolized Mr. Daniel that she hadn’t been able to get any idea of Margaret’s view of him, and that I was getting to be an old matchmaker. This only made my triumph all the sweeter when the announcement came. I stick by my guns and am sure that the man Margaret has chosen is first class and just the one for her. Marriage is the greatest of all gambles. But character helps and my bets are all on the success of this venture.

Now as to the behavior of daughters and the position of the father of the bride. Daughters, I have found, take this business of marriage into their own hands and do as they please. So do sons—or perhaps someone else’s daughter decides for them. I explained most lucidly to Mary and David that they should wait until the end of the war to get married. So they got married at once. All in all, the father of the bride is a pitiable creature. No one bothers with him at all. He is always in the way—a sort of backward child—humored but not participating in the big decisions. His only comforter is a bottle of good bourbon. Have you plenty on hand?

The wedding took place in Independence on Saturday, April 21, 1956, in little Trinity Episcopal Church on Liberty Street, where Bess Wallace and Harry Truman had been married in 1919. It was also followed by a small reception at the home of the bride that was not greatly different from the reception there in 1919—except the party this time was held indoors, out of view of the hundreds of reporters and photographers at the iron fence and the carloads of sightseers passing the house bumper to bumper. The temperature was in the 80s, the shaded lawn clipped and green, the spirea bushes by the porch in bloom. Margaret wore an ankle-length, full-skirted pale beige wedding dress, fashioned of two-hundred-year-old Venetian lace. At the church, when arriving by limousine with Margaret, and later during the ceremony, the father of the bride appeared “a pitiable creature” indeed, unhappy and unsmiling. Later at the reception he brightened noticeably—possibly by Acheson’s remedy.

Less than a month after, he and Bess departed on what was described as a honeymoon of their own, the finest trip of their lives, across Europe in grand style.

They were gone seven weeks, touring Europe by train—France, Italy, Austria, West Germany, France again, Brussels, the Netherlands, England. It rained a good part of the time—“rain, rain, rain, day after day, with sometimes a peep of sun,” he wrote in his diary—yet nothing seemed to lessen his spirits.

Bringing the suitcases down from the attic the morning they left home, Truman had slipped on the stairs and twisted his ankle, so that it swelled to the size of two, as he said. But he took a shiny black cane and carried on, covering whatever ground had to be covered the first few days only a little slower than usual. They departed from the independence depot at 7:15, the morning of May 8, his seventy-second birthday. A crowd of friends and family came to see them off. A birthday cake was cut and passed out—“a grand party”—and there were to be crowds everywhere from then on.

The reason given for the trip was a longstanding invitation to Truman to accept an honorary degree at Oxford, and the ceremony at Oxford on June 20 would prove the highlight. “I was so afraid I’d let you down at Oxford, but apparently I didn’t,” he told Acheson, who, like George Marshall, had already been honored there.

Former President Ulysses S. Grant, as part of a famous trip around the world, had spent months touring Europe where he was received as royalty, and in 1910, at the end of his African safari, former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a series of lectures across Europe and at Oxford, where he received an honorary degree. For Truman it was a third trip to Europe, but his first as a private citizen. (He was carrying his first passport.) He and Bess had long dreamed of a chance to travel abroad. For both it was the trip of a lifetime, and for Bess a first venture ever overseas. They would be two of the 500,000 American tourists in Europe that year.

Sailing from New York on the United States, accompanied by Stanley Woodward, who had been Truman’s chief of protocol, and his wife Sara, they landed at Le Havre. From there they went directly by train to Paris. By midday May 17, his first full day in Paris, Truman was sitting happily at a small outdoor table, sipping coffee at the venerable Café de la Paix, close to the Opéra, where only after a while did heads begin to turn and passers-by stop to stare. He had been there before, he explained, during World War I. At home the papers carried a wire-service photograph of the former President strolling the Place de 1’Opéra swinging his cane like a boulevardier.

Reporters dogged his steps wherever he went. Several hundred had been waiting at the Gare Saint-Lazare when he arrived in the city and there were scarcely ever less than a dozen at his side afterward. “Mr. Truman is as popular in Europe as he is in Missouri,” readers of the Independence Examiner learned in a United Press story from Paris. He was cheered and welcomed by people in the street. In Rome the welcome at the railroad station was tumultuous, with a crowd of hundreds shouting, “Viva Truman!” and even, in English, “Hi, Harry!” He and his party stayed at the Hassler Hotel at the head of the Spanish Steps.

For a conducted tour of Rome’s ancient monuments, Truman had as a guide, of all people, Henry Luce, who was filling in for his wife, Clare Booth Luce, the American ambassador to Italy, who had taken ill. The sight of Harry Truman and Henry Luce side by side speculating on the vanished empire of the Romans as they sat in the Colosseum was one not to be forgotten.

Scores of American tourists cheered Truman and followed along. On Rome’s Capitol Hill, in front of the giant equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, he started introducing himself and shaking hands.

“How are you? I’m Harry Truman.”

“I’m Paul Schultheiss of Rochester, New York,” responded the amazed tourist.

He and Bess had a rare Sunday audience with Pope Pius XII, that marked the first time an American President had been received at the Holy See since Woodrow Wilson’s formal visit on Pope Benedict XV in 1919. Bess wore black and a lace veil over her head, Truman a black cutaway coat, striped trousers, and a top hat. A “most happy visit indeed,” he said.

Then, in two weeks’ travels through Italy, they saw Mt. Vesuvius, the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Greek temples of Paestum, near Salerno. They explored the green hills of Umbria where St. Francis once lived with the birds and animals; they shopped for leather goods on the centuries-old Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence, gazed at the Botticellis in the Uffizi Gallery. In Venice, he and Bess, like every other tourist, strolled St. Mark’s Square and rode together in a gondola down the Grand Canal.

Between times Truman told reporters that the weather in Italy reminded him of Texas. He declared that victory for the Democrats in the presidential election in the fall was not probable but inevitable, and got himself in a good deal of hot water by saying that the bloody World War II battles of Salerno and Anzio had been unnecessary and the fault of “some squirrel-headed general.”

He was having a glorious time, enjoying immensely the setting of so much of the history he had loved since boyhood—and enjoying immensely the attention he received. At Naples, the crowds had tossed flowers in his path. “This is fantastic!” he said, openly astonished.

If the picture of Truman with Henry Luce amid the ruins of ancient Rome had seemed the unlikeliest of holiday vignettes, Truman succeeded in topping it at Florence, when he, Bess, and the Woodwards were the luncheon guests of Bernard Berenson at Berenson’s famous villa, I Tatti, overlooking the city. It was a luminous setting of incomparable paintings, sculpture, a library of 55,000 volumes, and the place where the legendary Berenson, “B.B.,” widely regarded as the consummate connoisseur, “the world’s last great aesthete,” held court. A Lithuanian Jew by birth, a graduate of Harvard, and a leading authority on Italian Renaissance art, he had made I Tatti his home—shrine, institution—since before World War I, when Truman was still on the farm. A tiny, frail, but godlike figure with a white beard, now nearly ninety-one, Berenson was still immensely vital and talkative. His flow of guests, of celebrated literary and theatrical figures, was unending—J. B. Priestley, Robert Lowell, Alberto Moravia, Laurence Olivier, Mary McCarthy. They came to listen—since customarily “B.B.” did most of the talking—and, of course, to be able to say they knew the great man.

“We just had to look him up. He was the best in his line,” Truman would later tell Merle Miller.

In his diary at the time, Truman said he found Berenson as “clear headed and mentally alert as a man of 35 or 40.”

He is considered the greatest authority on Renaissance Art and is noted for his epigrams, one of which struck me forcibly. We were discussing world affairs and he remarked that modern diplomacy had degenerated into “Open insults openly arrived at.” We discussed the causes of the first World War, the Austrian Prime Minister at that time, the Serbian situation and the whys and wherefores of the Austrian ultimatum which started the war.

Truman was greatly stimulated by Berenson’s company and delight in conversation, much as he had been years ago at the Sunday afternoon teas with Louis Brandeis. In a letter to Berenson later, recalling the pleasant visit, Truman wrote in a postscript: “I wish the Powers-that-be would listen, think, and mock at things as you have.”

But more remarkable was Berenson’s reaction to the former American President, which Berenson recorded in his own diary at the time:

[Harry] Truman and his wife lunched yesterday. Came at one and stayed till three. Both as natural, as unspoiled by high office as if he had got no further than alderman of Independence, Missouri. In my long life I have never met an individual with whom I felt so instantly at home. He talked as if he had always known me, openly, easily, with no reserve (so far as I could judge). Ready to touch on any subject, no matter how personal. I always felt what a solid and sensible basis there is in the British stock of the U.S.A. if it can produce a man like Truman. Now I feel more assured about America than in a long time. If the Truman miracle can still occur, we need not fear even the [Senator Joe] McCarthys. Truman captivated even Willy Mostyn-Owen, aged twenty-seven, ultra-critical, and like all Englishmen of today hard of hearing anything good about Americans, and disposed to be condescending to them—at best.

At Salzburg, in Truman’s honor, the organist of Salzburg Cathedral played Mozart’s Ninth Sonata on a 250-year-old organ, and at Mozart’s birthplace, Truman himself played a Mozart sonata on Mozart’s own clavichord. (“I found that it was somewhat different from the modern piano but it makes beautiful music…. This Mozart town has certainly been a joy to me….”)

From Salzburg, the expedition moved on to Bonn, capital of the West German Republic that Truman had helped create, and during a brief rain-soaked stay he met with Konrad Adenauer for the first time. Swinging back through France again, the tourists kept to a steady schedule, stopping at Versailles, which Truman did not much enjoy (he kept thinking of how the money to build it had been “squeezed” from the people), Chartres Cathedral, which he loved despite the pouring rain, then Chenonceau, the lovely sixteenth-century château in the Loire Valley, which he had wanted particularly to see because of its connection to Catherine de Médicis, one of his favorite historic figures. (“Of course, there are all sorts of traditions and stories about the happenings of the days of Catherine,” he observed in his diary, “but she was a remarkable woman and a Medici, all of whom believed in government by deviation as set out in The Prince by Machiavelli. Catherine was the mother of ten children, three of whom became kings of France and two of whom became queens. Quite a record for a tough conspiratorial old woman.”)

Truman was tireless, determined to see everything, and fascinated by nearly all he saw. Bess tried valiantly to keep the pace, seldom smiling, at least in view of the photographers. The itinerary would have exhausted people half their age.

Their route in France, interestingly, included no return visits to the Vosges Mountains, the Argonne, or Verdun, Truman apparently having no wish to see any of those places ever again.

There were big crowds to cheer him at the train stations in Brussels, The Hague, and Amsterdam, where at the Dutch State Museum he and Bess saw the largest exhibit of Rembrandts ever held, and had lunch with Queen Juliana at the Royal Soestdikk Palace.

Then, on June 17, they were on their way to England, the part of the trip Truman had looked forward to most of all. “We crossed the Channel on the night boat,” he recorded, “and landed at the English side in beautiful sunshine….”

It may be fairly said that in his long, eventful life, in an extraordinary career with many surprising turns and times of great fulfillment, there were few occasions that meant so much to Truman as the ceremony that took place at Oxford on Wednesday, June 20, 1956. Wearing the traditional crimson robe and crushed black velour hat of Oxford, the man who had never been to college, nor ever made a pretense of erudition, walked at the head of the procession, beside the Public Orator, at one of the world’s oldest, most distinguished universities.

“Never, never in my life,” he had whispered to a reporter, “did I ever think I’d be a Yank at Oxford.”

The ceremony, called the Encaenia and conducted in Latin, was held in Oxford’s 300-year-old Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Christopher Wren. The audience numbered more than a thousand people. As Truman stood in the center facing the crimson-robed professors of Oxford, he heard the Public Orator present “Harricum Truman,” for an honorary degree of “Doctoris in lure Civili” (Doctor of Civil Law). Then the towering, ornately robed Earl of Halifax, chancellor of the university and former British ambassador to Washington, admitted Harricum Truman into the ancient fellowship of Oxford, lauding him, in Latin, as

Truest of allies, direct in your speech and in your writings and ever a pattern of simple courage…(sociorum firmissime, qui missis ambagibus et loqueris et commentaries scribis veraeque constantiae specimen semper dedisti).

The applause that followed went on for a full three minutes. Truman, moved to tears, searched beneath his academic gown for a handkerchief. An elderly professor told a reporter that he had attended many such convocations but had never heard such applause. “Mr. Truman is very popular in this country,” he said. Recovering himself, Truman smiled broadly.

That night he was honored at a white-tie dinner for four hundred returning graduates of Christ Church College. “Every person born in the twentieth century is entitled to the benefits of the twentieth century,” he said in his speech.

…we must declare in a new Magna Carta, in a new Declaration of Independence, that henceforth economic well being and security, that health and education and decent living standards, are among our inalienable rights.

Every man and woman was entitled to the full benefit of the best in medicine, he added, striking an old theme. Every child was entitled to a first-rate education. There should be no economic worries for the elderly in their declining years.

“Give ‘em hell, Harricum!” the students of Oxford called from their windows as he departed.

A still more dazzling white-tie dinner followed the next night in London, at the Savoy—the annual stag dinner of the Pilgrims, the leading Anglo-American society dedicated to maintaining close ties between the two nations. And again Truman was a triumph, Lord Halifax paying him what to most present was the ultimate compliment. “I think we in this room feel that you are the sort of chap with whom all of us would be quite happy to go tiger hunting.”

He had been getting along very well in England, Truman said, at the start of his remarks. So far, he had not needed an interpreter.

“A good many of the difficulties between our two countries,” he continued, “spring not from our differences but from the fact that we are so much alike…. Another problem we have…is that in election years we behave somewhat as primitive peoples do at the time of the full moon.” But the essence of his warning was that “a great, serene and peaceful future can slip from us quite as irrevocably by neglect, division and inaction, as by spectacular disaster.” He hoped that both nations would never become careless about “our strength and our unity.”

And—not least of all—let us escape from this modern idea of the mass psychologists that we should be guided not by what we honestly believe is wise and right, but by some supposed reflecting of what other people think of us. I am ready to give up the complexity of propaganda, with its mass psychology, in favor of Mark Twain’s simpler admonition:

“Always do right. It will please some people and astonish the rest.”

He was “most happy” to see London, Truman wrote in his diary. “Never been here. It is a wonderful city.”

Visiting the House of Commons on Home Affairs Day, he listened to the opposition ask questions “about everything from roads to bawdy houses and gangsters.” At the House of Lords he sat through a long-winded speech as “boresome” as any in the United States Senate.

England is prosperous, cordial and courteous [he recorded]. From Lords to taxi drivers and policemen they recognize and wave and bow to the former President. When they have a chance they show by word and deed that they still like us and appreciate our friendship. It is heart warming.

On June 24, at Chartwell, the Churchill family estate 40 miles south of London, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, daughters Sarah and Mary and Mary’s husband, Christopher Soames, and Lord Beaverbrook were in the driveway waiting as the Trumans arrived for lunch in a chauffeur-driven Armstrong Siddeley. “This is just like old times,” Truman said, as he and Churchill greeted each other. Inside, a butler brought a tray of drinks, and before a bronze bust of Franklin Roosevelt the two men made what appeared to be a silent toast. Lunch finished, each swinging a walking stick, they strolled in the gardens.

“It was all over too soon,” Truman wrote in his diary.

The house faces a hill covered with rhododendrons, which were in full bloom. Behind the house is a beautiful garden and below that a valley containing a lake in the distance, a lovely view which Sir Winston called the Weald of Kent.

He showed me a large number of his paintings in the house and told me he had some 400 more in his studio in the valley below the house. We didn’t have time to visit the studio. It was a very pleasant visit and a happy one for me.

Churchill, Truman thought, seemed as alert mentally as ever. “But his physical condition shows his 82 years. He walks more slowly and he doesn’t hear well.”

He told me that he could do whatever had to be done as he always did but that he’d rather not do it. He walked around and up and down steps with no more effort than would be expected of a man his age. He remarked that it would be a great thing for the world if I should become President of the United States again. I told him there was no chance of that.

They said goodbye not knowing if they would ever see one another again, and they did not.

On June 26, as reported in the Independence Examiner, “Mr. and Mrs. Truman joined the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace” for lunch. On June 28, from Southampton, their grand tour over, the Trumans sailed for home.

During the visit at Chartwell, Lord Beaverbrook had told Truman that on his European trip he had made the greatest ambassador of goodwill America ever had. Now, the same refrain was heard repeatedly.

“Too bad he’s not campaigning for anything in this country,” an American reporter overheard an English spectator remark as Truman boarded the boat train in London. “He’d win any election.” The London Evening Standard headlined the visit as the “Truman Triumph.” The Daily Telegraph described him as the “living and kicking symbol of everything that everyone likes best about the United States.”

In the tradition of homespun Benjamin Franklin, he had charmed Europe by being himself. “Never [said the United Press] has an ‘ordinary’ American been given such a red carpet treatment from the brass and such a warm welcome from the people as was accorded that jaunty traveler from Missouri.”

On reaching home, Truman never let up the pace. He was scarcely unpacked before plunging into election-year politics, in a determined and unsuccessful effort to see Averell Harriman, rather than Adlai Stevenson, win the Democratic nomination. Arriving in Chicago for the convention in August, Truman backed Harriman, who had been elected governor of New York two years earlier, because, as Truman said, he thought the country needed a President who wanted the job. Stevenson “lacks the kind of fighting spirit we need to win,” Truman charged at a jammed press conference at the Blackstone. (A few weeks earlier, while stopping at the Blackstone for a Truman Library dinner, Truman had talked privately with Stevenson, who asked what he was doing wrong. Truman had gone to the window and pointing to a man in the street below said, “The thing you have to do is learn how to reach that man.”) For a time it appeared Truman might turn things on end.

Harry S. Truman had the Democratic party chewing its fingernails down to the cuticle today and he loved every second of it [wrote Russell Baker in The New York Times].

While the party’s other demi-gods fretted and stewed and guessed, Mr. Truman was as exhilarated as a small boy given free run of the circus.

At the height of the suspense, he blithely took off from the politicians and went down to the south side of town to lead a parade. There for Chicago’s vast Negro population, it was Bud Billiken Day. Bud Billiken is a mythical heroic godfather for the town’s Negro children. In the parade Mr. Truman drove 2½ miles to the enthusiastic cheers of 100,000 spectators.

But in fact his efforts came to nothing. The nomination went easily to Stevenson, and to many it seemed Truman had succeeded only in making himself a contradictory, even pitiful figure who confused his popularity with real power. Truman, however, showed no signs of bitterness or regret, and immediately endorsed the nominee—Stevenson’s chances in November were “perfectly wonderful”—and pledged the full support of the “old man from Missouri.”

Besides, as he liked to say, he had had himself a time.

“When I arrived in Chicago,” he wrote to Acheson, “things were dead, no life, no nothing. I decided to wake them up…. I am going to do all I can to help win this election. How I wish I were ten years younger!”

He campaigned actively for the ticket, traveling to Milwaukee, Texas, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Gary, Indiana, and Pittsburgh, where he and Eisenhower were staying at the same hotel but never met.

A month after Stevenson’s defeat and Elsenhower’s reelection, Truman was writing to Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, “I have never wanted to pose as a prophet, nor do I intend to be one now, but I do want to keep the Democratic Party a party of the people. We can never win unless it is.”

Nineteen fifty-seven was a landmark year for Truman. On June 5, in New York, Margaret had a baby son, and both Trumans were on the train heading east the very next day. On June 7 The New York Times carried a photograph of the proud grandparents at the hospital looking through the window at the baby, Clifton Truman Daniel. When, in another few days, Margaret and the baby came home to the Daniels’ New York apartment and her father asked if he might hold the baby, she insisted he first take off his jacket and be seated. “Dad sat there for a long time, rocking him back and forth.”

Less than a month later, Truman was moving out of the Federal Reserve Bank Building and into an all-new suite of offices at the new Truman Library. Formal dedication of the building took place on July 6. The two things he had said he wanted most after leaving the White House—to become a grandfather and to see his library established—had both come to pass.

Former President Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Speaker Sam Rayburn, four United States senators, nine governors (including Averell Harriman), Dean Acheson, John Snyder, some dozen or more from Truman’s White House staff, his family, neighbors, a crowd in all of five thousand people were present for the dedication, a fortunate few seated in the shade of the trees, the majority taking the full force of the Missouri summer sun. In the history of Independence there had been no occasion like it. (“I expect to be knee deep in ‘Big Shots’ July 6th and I want you and Alice to be here to help me out of what Huey Long would call a deep ‘More Ass!’ ” Truman had written excitedly to Acheson. “Be sure and come.”) The main speaker, addressing the crowd from the steps of the building, was the former governor of California and Republican candidate for Vice President, Earl Warren, now the Chief Justice of the United States, who acclaimed the library as a milestone in American history, and Harry S. Truman as a man of action, “tireless, fearless, and decisive,” adding that he himself had personally learned to appreciate the former President’s “dynamic, fighting qualities” in the fall of 1948.

Mr. Truman, who has an abiding interest in our national history, has arranged for the preservation of his papers in this library in such manner that his administration will be one of the “clearest ages” of history. It is in compliance with his public-spirited generosity that I dedicate this building as a museum and a library to safeguard, exhibit, and facilitate the use of its valuable resources that the American people, and all the peoples of this earth, may gain by their wide and wise use understanding of ourselves and our times, and wisdom to choose the right paths in years that lie ahead.

The building was long and low, crescent-shaped and built of Indiana limestone in an architectural style that no one was quite able to categorize—“modern” seemed to apply, though the main entrance with its square columns also had a decidedly classic Egyptian look. It had been designed by a local architect, Alonzo H. Gentry, assisted by Edward Neild, who came up with a scheme quite unlike what Truman had been expecting but that he decided not to reject. Though only one story tall, the building, with its full basement, had a total of 70,000 square feet of floor space. Finished in two years, it had cost thus far $1,800,000. Two Truman Library dinners in. New York and Philadelphia in 1954 had raised $45,000 each. More than thirty different labor unions had contributed generously—$25,000 from Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, $10,000 from the American Federation of Musicians, $10,000 from John L. Lewis, $250,000 from the United Steel Workers. Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Ed Pauley, and William Clayton made substantial private donations. But in all, the money had come from some 17,000 contributions large and small, from every part of the country, and Truman acknowledged every gift, regardless of the amount.

The 3.5 million documents already in the library were only the beginning of the collection that was to be amassed as time went on, when other figures from the Truman administration such as Acheson contributed their own papers.

For Truman personally from this point on, the library was to be the focus of his life. If the immense effort devoted to the memoirs had proven something of a disappointment, his library was to be an unqualified success.

He was also successful in convincing Congress—working through Democratic Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts—that all existing presidential papers should be indexed and put on microfilm. As he said, this was something that should have been done generations earlier. Yet until he raised the issue, no one had bothered to make the effort—a point for which he deserved far more credit than he received.

With the library established and in operation in Independence, a large part of the Truman land at Grandview was sold to a Kansas City developer, B. F. Weinberg & Associates. The old farmhouse, its barn and immediate acres were kept in the family, but some 224 acres of the prime land where Solomon Young had long ago staked his claim, and where Truman had labored so many seasons, were now to give way to the advance of suburbia and become a shopping center. For Truman it meant the end of a heritage that had come to mean more and more to him, partly out of sentiment but also from a realization of how much his own makeup and attitudes derived from his rural background. He took particular pleasure—obvious pride—in describing himself as a retired farmer. “Hey there, farmer!” Sam Rayburn would greet him over the telephone, knowing how it pleased him.

“I sure hate to see the old place go,” he was quoted in the Kansas City Star.

But the sale, as he also said, meant financial security at last, for Truman, as for Vivian and Mary Jane. And while, with the transaction went a good deal of sadness, it affirmed the old faith that come what may, land was wealth to count on. It wasn’t Truman’s rise to political power or his world renown, his books or lectures or the legacy of his wife’s family that saw him through in the end, but the old farm at Grandview.

The sale was announced in January 1958. What the final figure was, what his share came to, are not known. However, a tallying up of all his bank balances a year and a half later, dated August 14, 1959, has survived and shows him with a total of $208,548.07. And this did not include what he had in government and municipal bonds and a few stocks.

The final financial returns on his Memoirs, after expenses and taxes, were turning out to be very much less than anticipated. Even with his payments from Life extended over five years, he had still to pay 67 percent federal and state income taxes, and this he found particularly discouraging, since in 1949 General Eisenhower had been permitted by the Internal Revenue authorities to treat his sale of Crusade in Europe for $635,000 as a capital gain, on the grounds that he was not a professional author; Eisenhower had paid a tax of only 25 percent. At the time the Eisenhower question was at issue, the White House had intervened; now the Eisenhower White House declined to become involved. Truman’s expenses for the Memoirs, for staff and office space, had amounted to $153,000, according to a letter he wrote to John McCormack. His net profit, over the five-year period, would end up, he figured, at about $37,000.

“Had it not been for the fact that I was able to sell some property that my brother, sister and I inherited from our mother I would practically be on relief, but with the sale of that property I am not financially embarrassed.”

He was not asking for a pension, he told McCormack. He wanted justice. He thought the least a former President merited was a government allowance covering perhaps 70 percent of the necessary office expenses and overheads to meet his responsibilities.

As you know, we passed a Bill which gave all five star Generals and Admirals three clerks, and all the emoluments that went with their office when they retired.

It seems rather peculiar that a fellow who spent eighteen years in government service and succeeded in getting all these things done for the people he commanded should have to go broke in order to tell the people the truth about what really happened. It seems to me in all justice a part of this tremendous overhead should be met by the public.

With the help of Charlie Murphy, he took his case to Speaker Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, with the result that in 1958 Congress passed a law providing former presidents with a $25,000 annual pension, money for staff, office space, and free mailing privileges.

For quiet some time, since even before Truman left the White House, Dean Acheson had been eager to arrange for him to come to Yale. Truman would be the recipient of what was known at Yale as a Chubb Fellowship, whereby he would be the honored guest of the university for several days, to lecture and to meet with students and faculty.

The prospect delighted Truman. He thought highly of Yale, out of regard for Acheson—and such other Yale graduates in his administration as Harriman, Lovett, and Roger Tubby—but also because Yale, as Truman said, was the kind of great university he wished he had been able to attend. What pleased him most was that Acheson wanted him to do it.

“I would be proud to appear anywhere with you from Yale to 1908 Main in Kansas City. (That’s the address of the Pendergast Club),” Truman had written in 1952, obviously enjoying the picture of his elegant Secretary of State hobnobbing with the “Boys” at 1908 Main—as he knew Acheson would, too.

Acheson, who was a member of the Yale Corporation, had set things in motion, and in a letter to Professor Thomas G. Bergin, who would be Truman’s host, Acheson provided what stands as one of the finest, most perceptive descriptions ever written of his friends the President:

Mr. Truman is deeply interest in and very good with the young. His point view is fresh, eager, confident. He has learned the hard way, but he has learned a lot. He believes in his fellow man and he believes that with will and courage (and some intelligence) the future is manageable.

This is good for undergraduates. He is easy, informal, pungent. He should not be asked to do lectures for publication. The pressures on him are too great, and it is not his field. It is not what he says but what he is which is important to young men and this gets communicated…I should want Mr. Truman to be received at Yale with honor, with simplicity—not as a show, not with controversy, not as a lecturer in a field which I do not believe is yet a discipline, “political theory or science”—but as one who could, if in some way we were wired for spirit, give our undergraduates more sense of what their lives are worth (how to spend them for value) than anyone I know.

As it was, Truman did not go to Yale until the spring of 1958. He stayed three days and was an immediate hit with students and faculty. Even the crusty Yale librarian, an arch-Republican who had openly stated his distaste for Truman, refusing at first to receive “that man” when Truman expressed interest in seeing the Franklin Papers, wound up wanting Truman to stay longer, so they might talk at greater length, and afterward told others he had had no idea how much the President knew or how far-ranging were his interests. On his early morning walks through campus, Truman was trailed by students and local reporters. There were dinners in his honor and repeated warm applause, and he loved it all. “I have never had a better time anywhere,” he wrote Acheson. “Yale still rings in my ears. What a time we had,” he said again, in another letter.

He was in steady demand now, with two to three hundred speaking invitations a month. At home he seemed to radiate good feeling. “He’s so damn happy,” said a friend, “that it makes me happy just being around him.”

Tom Evans had asked him to join a regular group for noontime bourbon, lunch, and poker at the Kansas City Club, an exclusive gathering known as the 822 Club, for the suite it occupied. Though Truman had been an honorary member of the Kansas City Club since he was elected to the Senate, he had never felt particularly welcome by its members, most of whom were Republicans. The Kansas City Club had never been exactly his crowd. He had been looked down upon as both a Democrat and a politician, not the sort one would want to know personally. But in no time he had become the most popular member of the group, the pride of the 822 Club, an “elevating influence,” as was said. “It was just terrific. He really bowled them over,” Evans told Life writer John Osborne for an article titled “Happy Days for Harry.” Osborne was struck by Truman’s “phenomenal vigor,” the pleasure of his company to others. “Why, goddamnit, Mr. President, I’m going to raise you,” he heard exclaimed over the poker table at the 822 Club.

The “major achievement of his latter years,” wrote Osborne, was “a rare one of its kind, and it has a place in the story of our times…. At the age of 74, in the bright winter of his life, Harry Truman is a genuinely happy man.”

At a benefit performance of the Kansas City Philharmonic, Truman in white tie and tails conducted the orchestra in Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. Soon he and Bess were off again for another summer sojourn in Europe, a more private, quiet tour this time, through the South of France accompanied by Sam and Dorothy Rosenman.

That fall, in the 1958 congressional campaign, Truman was back on the trail again, delivering some twenty-five speeches in twenty different states. Lecturing at Columbia University the next year, he referred to himself as “an old stiff,” but few people in the busiest part of their lives were as active as he.

Truman, reported Cabell Phillips, was getting a bigger kick out of life than ever before. In an article for The New York Times Magazine on the former President as he turned seventy-five, Phillips quoted a Kansas City friend saying, “Harry feels that he’s square with the world, that he gave it his best, and got its best in return. Now he’s enjoying the dividends….”

“I found him looking pink and fit, with the same crisp smile and sparkling eyes and the same firm handshake which I remembered from earlier years,” wrote Phillips. And increasing numbers of writers, reporters, and well-wishers made the pilgrimage to see him at the Truman Library, to try to divine what the magic was.

To Dean Acheson, Truman’s salient quality was his vitality. Here was “a man overflowing with life force, with incurable curiosity…no brooding image in a history book…[but] vigorous, powerful…full of the zest of life.”

Margaret had told her father that he talked too much. “She says I am just like my two year old grandson,” Truman cheerfully related to a reporter from out of town. “She says that he runs all the time, never walks, and talks all the time and never says anything.”

Showing visitors “the layout” of “my library,” he would move briskly down the halls talking a steady stream, pausing frequently to greet groups of visitors and especially if they were students. The library proper—the actual collection of presidential papers—would not be open to researchers until May of 1959, but for now there was the museum to see, with displays of photographs, gifts to the President, everything from an ear of Iowa corn to a jewel-encrusted sword from Ibn Saud; there was a small auditorium and a replica of the Oval Office, which though slightly reduced in scale, was furnished as it had been during his years in the White House.

“I want this to be a place where young people can come and learn what the office of the President is, what a great office it is no matter who happens to be in it at the time.” He did not “care a damn” about all the attention on himself. “They said it was necessary to put me all over the place just to show how one particular President worked.” But clearly the focus on his life and achievements pleased him very much indeed.

He loved his office, a bright, spacious room with books and sliding glass panels that opened onto a private patio and garden. His desk was the same big mahogany desk he had used in the upstairs study at the White House. He was there nearly every day, Sunday included, except when he was traveling. As was often said, the most interesting item on display at the Truman Library was Truman himself.

He was always on the job early. Some mornings, at his desk before the staff arrived, he would answer the phone himself, telling callers what the library hours were, or, in reply to further questions, saying he knew because it was his library. “This is the old man himself.”

About noon, if not going into town to the 822 Club, he would go home for lunch. Bess remarked privately that if she never saw another sardine or peanut butter sandwich, she would be very happy.

You know this five day week doesn’t work with me [he told Acheson]. I guess I’m old fashioned. I work every day and Sunday too even if Exodus 2–8.9.10 and 11 and Deuteronomy 5–13 and 14 say I shouldn’t. I think probably those admonitions were the first labor laws we know about…. But someone had to fix things so the rest can work five days—coffee breaks and all.

Having the library gave purpose to his days. The most satisfactory part of the whole effort of creating the library, said David Lloyd, a former White House aide who had taken the leading part in the fund raising and organization of the project, was that it provided Truman with a base, “where he can sit happily among his beloved books, conducting his tremendous correspondence, saying what he thinks and doing as he pleases…able to carry on his old fashioned American occupation of being himself.”

He was there in total six and a half days a week for nine years, longer than his two terms in the White House. And as at the White House, the staff adored him. “Mr. Truman was one of the most thoughtful persons we have known,” remembered Dr. Philip C. Brooks, the first director.

[He] had an optimistic outlook, and a conversation with him never failed to give one’s spirits a lift…. Many times people have written about Mr. Truman as having a temper and “shooting from the hip” in his remarks. We never saw the temper, though we saw plenty of candor…. He was rarely wrong….

David Lloyd and the Archivist of the United States, Wayne Grover, had convinced Truman that there ought to be a mural in the main lobby, to enliven the space and strike an appropriate historic theme for visitors as they entered the building. When Lloyd and Grover recommended the Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose great-uncle and namesake had been one of Missouri’s first two U.S. senators, as the perfect artist to undertake the work, Truman bluntly said no. He thought Benton had made a mockery of Tom Pendergast in a mural at the Capitol in Jefferson City done in 1936. Further, he did not care for Benton’s style. Shown a Benton painting called The Kentuckian, Truman recalled that both of his grandfathers were from Kentucky and neither looked like “that long-necked monstrosity.”

Nevertheless, a meeting was arranged by Lloyd and Grover who were sure that Truman and Benton would like each other if given the chance to discover how much they had in common. Benton, gruff, opinionated, outspoken to a fault, often profane and extremely vital, had been born, like Truman, in southwestern Missouri, in little Neosho in 1889, and had grown up with politics. His father had served several terms in Congress. Truman went with Lloyd and Grover to visit Benton at his studio in Kansas City in the spring of 1957. As predicted, the two men quickly became fast friends. A contract was signed in 1958; and with the mural under way, Truman took obvious pleasure in Benton’s company, pride in Benton’s friendship, and at one point, at Benton’s urging, climbed up the scaffold to help him paint a corner of the sky.

The first day Truman offered Benton a drink in his office, pulling a bottle of bourbon from his desk and saying, “I hear you like this,” Benton took it as a calculated provocation by Truman, a way to test him.

“This performance on the part of a president of the United States embarrassed me,” Benton remembered. “There is no good reason why it should have, because it was a common act of human hospitality, but there was still about Harry Truman an aura of power….”

Later, as the bourbon ritual became more established, and Benton would ask for a second drink, Truman would tell him no. “Tom, you’re driving a car. You can’t have another because you’ve got some work to do around here and I’m not going to take any risks with you.”

“I was now, in effect, his man,” Benton wrote, “and he was going to protect me. And he did.”

The theme for the mural was arrived at only after considerable discussion. Truman had first thought it should be about Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, with the emphasis on Jefferson’s foresight. Benton had said there was no way he could paint foresight. “Well, what the hell is it you can paint?” Truman said. Benton suggested that the mural be about Independence and its importance in the opening of the West, and so it was agreed.

“I thought at first that the President would also want to be included in the mural,” Benton later told an interviewer, “but he very emphatically turned that down.”

Benton’s fee was $60,000. The work took him two years. Completed in 1961 and titled Independence and the Opening of the West, the mural included no specific events of written history nor any identifiable personages. The theme was expressed with symbolic figures, the great human stream that had passed through—with Plains Indians, trappers, hunters, French voyageurs giving way to a tide of settlers and their black slaves. It was robust, colorful, romantic, and as literal as a magazine illustration, with two additional lower panels showing the Missouri River landing and Independence Square in the 1840s, the time when Truman’s grandparents arrived. Truman thought it was wonderful. Showing visitors about the library, he rarely failed to stop in front of the mural, to praise it and explain the history portrayed. His friend Tom Benton, he now liked to say, was the “best damn painter in America.”

Attendance at the library was up to more than 150,000 people a year, a figure that delighted him. In May 1960, Margaret had a second child, another boy, William Wallace Daniel. Meantime, Truman was finishing up another book to be called Mr. Citizen, a collection of essays on life and the world at large written originally for The American Weekly, the Sunday supplement owned by Hearst, Truman’s past nemesis. He had liked particularly being paid and publicized by Hearst. There was no praise sweeter, he said, than the praise of old enemies.

As Acheson observed, Truman was no brooding image in a history book. He expressly disliked the term “elder statesman” as applied to him. “When a good politician dies he becomes a statesman,” he would say. “I want to continue as a politician for a long time.” It had become a standard line. “I like being a nose buster and an ass kicker much better,” he told Acheson privately.

To mark his seventy-fifth birthday on May 8, the Democratic National Committee staged a nationwide celebration, a star-spangled television broadcast that included appearances by Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jack Benny, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, H. V. Kaltenborn, and such old personal friends as Monsignor Curtis Tiernan, in a series of spoken and musical tributes, much of the broadcast originating at a $100-a-plate dinner for Truman at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. A few days earlier in Washington, he had said he had no favorite candidate for 1960 as yet, only that he wanted to see the party nominate a man who could win and he had every intention of taking part. “What do you think? How are you going to keep me home?”

In October 1959, George Marshall had died, and for Truman it was another and the heaviest of a succession of personal blows, as slowly but steadily close friends and favorite members of his former official family began to pass from the scene. Fred Vinson had died in 1953, Eddie Jacobson in 1955, Alben Barkley in 1956, Admiral Leahy in July 1959. Hearing that Marshall was dying, Truman had telephoned Marshall’s wife in North Carolina to say he was on his way by plane. But she told him not to come because the general would not know him. “She and I spent most of my call weeping,” Truman wrote to Acheson.

“Do you suppose any President of the United States ever had two such men with him as you and the General?” he would say in another letter.

At a brief Episcopal funeral service for Marshall in the chapel at Fort Myer, Virginia, Truman and Eisenhower sat side by side in the same pew at the front, their common grief partly easing the strain between them.

A new generation of politicians was bidding to take power. With Eisenhower retiring from office and Richard Nixon the probable choice for a Republican nominee, the chance of a Democratic victory looked promising. Of those Democrats in the running, Truman’s favorites were Stuart Symington and Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom had much of a chance. Truman refused to consider Stevenson for a third try. Nor was he enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy, whom he considered too young and inexperienced. He did not want a Catholic—it was not that he was against Catholics, only that he was against losing. Remembering what had happened to Al Smith, he did not think a Catholic could be elected. He also thought Kennedy had been too approving of Joe McCarthy and he disliked Kennedy’s father quite as much as ever. Joe Kennedy had spent over $4 million to buy the nomination for his son, Truman told Margaret. To others he quipped, “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.”

John Kennedy had called on Truman at the Mayflower Hotel in January 1960, during one of Truman’s visits to Washington. According to Kennedy’s own notes on the meeting, he urged Truman not to announce his support for any candidate until he, Kennedy, had had a chance to come to Independence and “give him all the facts as I saw them.” If, at the convention, the contest became a deadlock, then, Kennedy suggested, Truman could intervene in the name of party unity. But until then it was important, Kennedy said, to let the primary process run its course. Truman expressed warm regard for both Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, the other leading contender, and ended the meeting by telling Kennedy he would do nothing to hurt him.

Bess Truman was advising her husband to stay out of the whole affair. “She refused to get excited about the Democratic party and told Dad he was crazy if he went to another convention at the age of seventy-six,” remembered Margaret. “Let the next generation fight it out among themselves—that was her attitude.” But like John Strother, the man he had recalled when meeting the son-in-law on his morning walk—“the grand old man” who wouldn’t tell his age—Truman, too, wanted “to be young with the young men.”

He sometimes felt forgotten. On Capitol Hill in Washington late one evening, a young Senate aide answered the phone. The operator said she had a long-distance, person-to-person call for Senator Symington. When the aide said the senator had gone for the day and asked if he might know who was calling, he heard a familiar, clipped voice come on the line. “Just tell him Harry S. Truman called. Used to be President of the United States.”

In April, Acheson wrote to tell Truman that if Kennedy were to “stub his toe” in the West Virginia primary, then probably the nomination would go to Stevenson. “I hate to say this but I think the only possible alternative is Stu and I doubt very much, though I am for him, that he can make it. He just doesn’t seem to catch hold. Maybe we should all give Jack a run for his money—or rather for Joe’s.”

In May, with Kennedy out in front after an upset victory over Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia, Truman announced his support for Missouri’s own Symington, calling him “without doubt” the best qualified for the presidency. Asked what objections he had to Kennedy, Truman said, “None whatever. He’s a fine young man and I know and like him. The only thing is, he lives in Massachusetts.”

Acheson grew greatly concerned that Truman might now go on the attack against Kennedy and say things that could cause long-lasting harm, not only about Kennedy but about civil rights. For lately Truman had been expressing views that left many feeling chagrined and disappointed, and especially those who knew how committed he was to equality before the law. Truman strongly disapproved of the methods of the civil rights movement, the sit-ins and marches. The leaders of the movement, it seemed to him, were flouting the law, resorting to mob rule, which was not his idea of the right way to bring about progress. He also appeared to take seriously the view of J. Edgar Hoover that much of the movement was Communist-inspired.

On June 27, his greatest admirer and most devoted friend, Dean Acheson, wrote to set him straight in no uncertain terms and to ask him to agree to a few specific “don’ts” concerning the weeks ahead. It was a remarkable letter, attesting not only to Acheson’s exceptional skill and value as an adviser, but to the confidence he had in the strength of their friendship:

Dear Boss:

As the Convention approaches we partisans are likely to become, shall we say, emphatic in our statements to the press. Could we make a treaty on what we shall not say?

On the positive side we can, and doubtless will, say that our candidate—yours and mine—has all the virtues of the Greats from Pericles through Churchill. St. Peter and Pee-pul forgive this innocent though improbable hyperbole. But there are some things that no one should, and few will, forgive.

These fall into several groups, but the common denominator is the harm that comes from allowing the intensity of the personal view to dim a proper concern for the common cause. The list of the “It’s not dones,” as I see it, goes like this:—

I. About other Democratic Candidates:

(a) Never say that any of them is not qualified to be President

(b) Never say that any of them can’t win.

(c) Never suggest that any of them is the tool of any group or interest, or is not a true blue liberal, or has (or has used) more money than another.

The reason: At this point public argument is too late—Deals may still be possible. I just don’t know. But sounding off is sure to be wrong. If our candidate is going anywhere—which I doubt—it will not be because of public attacks on other candidates. And such attacks can do a lot of harm when they are quoted in the election campaign.

II. About the Negro sit-in Strikes:

(a) Do not say that they are communist inspired. The evidence is all the other way, despite alleged views of J. Edgar Hoover, whom you should trust as much as you would a rattlesnake with the silencer on its rattle.

(b) Do not say that you disapprove of them. Whatever you think you are under no compulsion to broadcast it. Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.

The reason: Your views, as reported, are wholly out of keeping with your public record. The discussion does not convince anyone of anything. If you want to discuss the sociological, moral and legal interests involved, you should give much more time and thought to them.

III. About Foreign Policy:

(a) For the next four months do not say that in foreign policy we must support the President.

The reason: This cliché has become a menace. It misrepresents by creating the false belief that in the recent disasters the President has had a policy or position to support.

This just isn’t true. One might as well say “Support the President,” if he falls off the end of a dock. That isn’t a policy. But to urge support for him makes his predicament appear to be a policy to people who don’t know what a dock is.

So, please, for just four months let his apologists come to his aid.

We have got to beat Nixon. We shall probably have to do it with Kennedy. Why make it any harder than it has to be. Now, if ever, our vocal cords ought to be played on the keyboard of our minds. This is so hard for me that I have stopped using my cords at all. By August they will be ready to play “My Rosary.” So I offer you a treaty on “don’ts.” Will you agree?

In reply, Truman wrote, “You’ll never know how very much I appreciated your call and your good letter. I tried my best to profit by both…thanks to a real friend and a real standby.”

When it appeared that Kennedy already had the nomination in hand, Truman kept insisting it would be an open convention and, by inference, one he would influence if not control. “A bandwagon only begins to roll after the third or fourth ballot,” he told reporters. He was greatly looking forward to the convention. “I am going to Los Angeles and make the best fight I can,” he wrote to Agnes Meyer, wife of the owner of the Washington Post. “I am not a pessimist and always fight until the last dog dies….”

In reality, Kennedy had all but settled the matter, as Truman’s ever devoted advisers Hillman and Noyes reported to him from Los Angeles. The game was over. “Your coming here is considered routine and not calculated to make any significant change. This is the judgment of even those who are partial to you.” But they urged him to say nothing about the convention being “rigged—or you will be charged with November defeat—a prospect that seems all but certain.”

But Truman—angry, bitter—would speak his mind. On July 2, at a dramatic televised press conference at the Truman Library, he lashed out at Kennedy in a way certain to infuriate a great many Democrats, exactly as Acheson had urged him never to do. He not only announced he would not attend the convention as a delegate, because the Kennedy forces had it “rigged,” but, facing the television cameras, leveled his remarks directly at Kennedy: “Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is ready for you in the role of President in January 1961?” He had no doubt, Truman said, about the political heights to which Kennedy was destined to rise.

But I am deeply concerned and troubled about the situation we are up against in the world now and in the immediate future. That is why I hope that someone with the greatest possible maturity and experience would be available at this time. May I urge you to be patient?

Kennedy responded quickly and smoothly. If fourteen years in major elective office was insufficient experience, he said, then that would have ruled out all but a handful of presidents, including Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman.

No one applauded Truman for what he had done. Acheson wrote to him after the convention:

I listened to your press conference and regretted that you felt impelled to say anything, though what you said was better than what you first told me that you intended to say. It seemed quite inevitable that Jack’s nomination would occur and that all you and Lyndon said you would both have to eat—as indeed you have.

Poor Lyndon came off much worse, since he is now in the crate on the way to the county fair and destined to be a younger and more garrulous—if that is possible—Alben Barkley. It is possible that being a smart operator in the Senate is a special brand of smartness which doesn’t carry over into the larger field…Jack and his team were the only “pros” in Los Angeles, so far as I could see….

Well, we’re off to the races…. I hope it is still true that the Lord looks benignly after children, drunks and-the U.S.A….

Again as in 1956, Truman was ready to join forces and do his part. When Kennedy called him from Hyannis Port on August 2, he said at once that he was ready to help. “He could not have been kinder to me,” Kennedy remarked privately.

Truman’s own disappointment and anger had to be put aside. He was “blue as indigo” over what had happened at Los Angeles, he wrote in a letter to Acheson that he decided not to send. The choice of Kennedy or Nixon was a bleak prospect. “You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So—I’m taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible. So, there we are.”

Accompanied by Stuart Symington, Kennedy came to the Truman Library, where Truman, who was old enough to be Kennedy’s father, met him at the door. “Come right on in here, young man. I want to talk to you.”

Two days later Truman wrote to Sam Rosenman, “Don’t get discouraged. The boy is learning—I hope.”

To the surprise of no one who knew him, Truman joined the campaign. The Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960 was to be his “last hurrah,” as assuredly he knew, and he pitched in for all he was worth.

“Now you are in for it,” wrote Acheson. “Just don’t exhaust yourself through sheer nonsense.”

Traveling by plane, train, and automobile, Truman covered nine states, delivered 13 speeches. He rode in parades, held press conferences, shook hands, waved, smiled, kept everyone with him on the run, and as always thrived on it. The one thing he insisted on was his midday nap. “A nap after lunch is imperative and cannot be missed under any consideration,” his aide, David Stowe, was instructed.

Only in overcrowded rooms, when people began pushing and shoving to meet him, did he show the strain.

Although he moves into and through situations with the same good humor and smiles [wrote Stowe in his notes], apparently this problem bothers him to some extent because it became a frequent topic of conversation. Conceivably, it is a warning to those who work with him to be on our toes to avoid in our planning any large gatherings in which he can be mauled and shoved around. After all he is 76.

“The campaign is ended and we have a Catholic for President,” Truman wrote to Acheson on November 21.

It makes no difference, in my opinion, what church a man belongs to, if he believes in the oath he takes to support and defend the Constitution….

If our new President works on the job, he’ll have no trouble. You know, I wish I’d been young enough to go back to the White House and make Alibi Ike wear a top hat!

The day after Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, Truman was welcomed back to the White House and the Oval Office for the first time in eight years, for which, as he wrote the President, he was extremely grateful. The following November, the Trumans and Margaret and Clifton Daniel were guests at the White House for a white-tie dinner in Truman’s honor and for an overnight visit. The grouse served at dinner was so tough as to be nearly inedible, but with many of his old Cabinet assembled for the occasion, and with the hospitality shown by the President and First Lady, Truman was radiant. For the after-dinner entertainment, in the East Room, the Kennedys had arranged a piano concert of Truman’s favorites—Mozart and Chopin—played by Eugene List, who had first performed for Truman at Potsdam. When, at one point, List invited the former President to take a turn at the big Steinway, Truman obliged, looking as pleased as a man could possibly be.

IV

With the passing of time, old political wounds began to fade. Truman made amends, restored friendship with one former adversary or critic after another—Henry Wallace, Joe Martin, Joe Alsop, Drew Pearson, even Paul Hume, the Washington Post music critic who came to Kansas City to review a concert of Maria Callas and decided to drive out to the Truman Library. As Hume later recounted, he and Truman had a “wonderful visit,” Truman taking an hour to talk and show him about the library. “I’ve had a lot of fun out of you and General MacArthur over the years,” Truman said as Hume was leaving. “I hope you don’t mind.”

At the concert that night, Hume found himself sitting across the aisle from the Trumans. When he went over to say hello, Truman turned to Bess and said, “See, I told you that Paul Hume was in my office today.”

(Following the performance, Truman went backstage to meet Maria Callas and later, catching up with friends walking to their cars in the garage across the street, Truman, looking tremendously pleased, said, “You know, she remembered me!”)

Only three remained for whom he had little or nothing good to say: Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Richard Nixon. The man he had hated most, Joe McCarthy, was dead, of acute alcoholism at age forty-eight in 1957.

In November 1961, at Sam Rayburn’s funeral in Bonham, Texas, with twenty thousand people standing in the cold outside the packed church, Truman was seated with both Kennedy and Eisenhower, all three in the same front pew, Truman and Eisenhower looking—as the nation saw on television—like very elder statesmen indeed, next to the young President. For Truman, with his fond memories of Rayburn, it was a particularly painful ceremony; but like the Marshall funeral, it was another step in what was becoming a slow but steady reconciliation with Eisenhower.

For eight years, Truman had hoped Eisenhower would sometime call on him for advice or ask him to take on a project, as Truman had asked Herbert Hoover, but it had never happened. Nor did it now with Kennedy, and Truman felt terribly let down. “You are making a contribution,” he told Acheson, who was being called on by Kennedy for advice. “I am not. Wish I could.”

The morning walks continued, though he went accompanied now by a bodyguard, a big, solid-looking Independence police officer in plain clothes named Mike Westwood, who was being paid by the town and would stay at Truman’s side in all seasons.

His chief pleasures remained constant—his books, his library, his correspondence with Acheson, his family. To Clifton Daniel, he was the ideal father-in-law, “just great,” never interfering, always considerate. “ ‘Give-’em-hell Harry’ didn’t give anybody hell at home,” Daniel would remember.

Needless to say, I was always respectful of him both as a father-in-law and a former President. In public I addressed him as “Mr. President” and in private, after our first son was born, as “Grandpa.” Before I avoided calling him anything whenever I could. It would have made us both uncomfortable for me to say “Dad,” and for his generation and mine “Harry” was unthinkable. I used “Sir” as much as possible.

In the summer of 1961, Truman had begun work on what was to be a series of television films about the presidency, but dealing primarily with his own years in the White House. It was still another effort, like the Memoirs and the Truman Library, intended to educate the country, and especially young. Americans. “I’m mostly interested in children,” he often said. The films were to be produced and financed by David Susskind and his company, Talent Associates. The writer and general “organizer” of the project was Merle Miller, a novelist and former reporter for Yank, who had been chosen not only to add a “creative spark,” but because it was felt that he and the former President had much in common. Miller, too, had grown up in the Midwest, a book-loving boy with eyeglasses and early dreams of glory. But more important and influential than the films that eventually resulted was the portrait that Miller would compile from recorded conversations with Truman in a book called Plain Speaking—a book that would not be published for another dozen years.

Ironically, because of his background, Miller had not expected to like Truman, imagining him to be far too much like people he had known growing up in Marshalltown, Iowa. “I had thought he was not what we want in a President,” Miller remembered. “I think we want in a President something somewhat regal….”

But here, he remembered, was

an extraordinarily intelligent, informed human being.

If I had a father who was smart, or if I had a father who read a book, if I had a father who knew how to get along with people…this was he…. How could you not like him! He was such a decent human being with concern, a genuine concern, for your welfare. “Well, how are you?” “How’s your hotel?” “How’s the food?”…He wanted to make you comfortable, and he did make you comfortable. I never had an uncomfortable moment with him except toward the end when it appeared that there was never going to be a show….

With Truman, Miller felt, “You could reach out and there was somebody there. There was a person there!…He was there for you.”

The producer assigned to the series, Robert Alan Aurthur, found Truman brisk, opinionated, and during one morning session, Aurthur thought, possibly more fortified with bourbon than ever the doctor ordered.

“Don’t try to make a play actor out of me!” Truman insisted to them. A day of shooting was arranged at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Truman was to sit with a selected group of officers and talk about Korea. Everyone had expected Truman to be at his best in such a setting, with nothing rehearsed. Instead, he was “terrible,” as Robert Aurthur remembered. Truman was told how good he had been, but clearly he knew better. “You’re trying to make a playactor out of me…and it won’t work.”

Using a tape recorder, Miller and Aurthur spent hours—eventually days—interviewing Truman. The stories, the pithy observations came pouring forth. Listening to him, Merle Miller thought Truman had been ill—served by those who had worked with him on the Memoirs. “I think there were people, Noyes and Hillman being foremost among them, who wanted to make him something he wasn’t, largely dull.”

Truman still told stories wonderfully and with an infectious enjoyment. He was also inclined to exaggerate, even invent. Miller was reminded of Huck Finn’s comment about Mark Twain, “He told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

Truman described the old Democratic picnics at Lone Jack and the oratorical mannerism of the old-time politicians, and particularly Colonel Crisp, who had said, “Goddamn an eyewitness, he always spoils a good story.” He described seeing William Jennings Bryan sitting at lunch in Kansas City with a bowl full of radishes and a plate of butter. “He’d just sit there buttering the radishes and eating them. Ate the whole bowl.”

When Miller asked if he ever “identified” with Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer when growing up, “No,” Truman said. “I wasn’t in that class, I was kind of a sissy when growing up.” Wearing glasses, he said, “makes a kid lonely and he has to fight for everything he wants. Oh, well, you had to be either intellectually above [the others] or do more work than they did…. Then you have to be careful not to lord it over those that you’ve defeated in that line.”

He talked of political bosses. (“The boss is not the boss unless he has the majority of the people with him.”) He talked of Franklin Roosevelt. (“He had something like Bryan had. He could make people believe what he wanted to do was right.”) He told the story of the Chicago convention of 1944, recounting how he had felt when he put down the telephone in Bob Hannegan’s room after talking to Roosevelt and described how the others in the room looked, waiting to hear what he would do. (“I walked around there for about five minutes and you should have seen the faces of those birds! They were just worried to beat hell.”) He described how, during the 1944 campaign, he had threatened to throw Joe Kennedy out the window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, when Kennedy kept maligning Roosevelt. “I haven’t seen him since.” But then he warned Miller not to use the story, “because his son’s President of the United States and he’s a grand boy.”

An optimist was a person who thinks things can be done. No pessimist ever did anything for the world. Billy Graham said the end of the world was coming, but Truman didn’t believe it. Courtesy mattered greatly to him. He had heard a story of a gas attendant who refused to fill Tom Dewey’s tank, and Truman strongly disapproved. Later he would chide the press for calling the First Lady “Jackie.”

The great men of the Roman Republic were not military men, he said. Hadrian was the greatest; his own favorite, however, was Marcus Aurelius, who thought always of the welfare of his people.

Listened to long afterward the tapes would be extremely difficult to follow, full of static, full of the sound of other voices in Truman’s office, as people came and went. His own voice was strong, lower and more appealing than his platform voice. Often everyone would break into laughter. The mood was one of a good time, good fellowship, and clearly Truman delighted in it.

Unlike the day at Fort Leavenworth, some of the filming sessions went extremely well. His answers “came back rich with detail, and with all the sharp authority of the man who’d been there,” remembered Robert Aurthur of one particularly good session in New York. “Two or three times it was Mr. Truman who asked for another try, saying he could do better.” When, at one point, concern was voiced over whether the President was wearing the same necktie as he had during previous sessions in Independence, Truman asked if that really mattered. “Because if while I’m talking about Korea people are asking each other about my necktie it seems to me we’re in a great deal of trouble.”

To Miller and Aurthur, he seemed exceptionally alert and fit. His first impression, Miller remembered, was, “My God, he’s not old at all!” But in fact Truman had begun to slow down, even slip a little. To those who had worked with him at the White House, those who had known him from years past in Independence and Kansas City, he was noticeably different from the man he had been. He moved with less authority. He had become slightly hard of hearing. Responding to questions, he was often inclined to give a quick abrasive answer for effect, an old man’s wisecrack. He had been asked so many of the same questions so often in recent years that he had developed a set of pat answers that sounded no better than pat answers. Sometimes he talked as if quoting his own books or old speeches. Other times, and only in the company of men, he used more profanity than in days past. And while the famous smile, the cheerful, personable demeanor remained, his private disdain of certain people and trends of the moment was greater than ever before. He hated the fashion of long hair on young men, and greatly disliked being called “senior citizen.” Asked if he thought there would ever be an expedition to the moon, he said probably, but he could not imagine why.

In private, every once in a while, he could revert still to old habits of the mouth as if he were not aware of what he was saying. “People in Independence haven’t changed a darned bit,” he remarked at one point. He had nothing against Mormons, he told Miller, they were exceedingly hardworking people. But a lot of old-timers in town “hate them just as bad as they ever did,” Truman said, and “for the same reason some people hate to eat at the same table with a nigger.” It was prejudice, he said.

He worried about the mounting national debt and “this poor broke government of ours,” He intensely disapproved of what he saw happening to politics because of television. “I don’t like counterfeits and the radio and television make counterfeits out of these politicians.”

He hated to see the town being swallowed up by tract houses, billboards, gas stations, and traffic. And ironically, sadly, it was the automobile and the highway, two of the loves of his life, causing the change. Most mornings now, he had to stop and pick up litter—beer cans and candy wrappers—thrown into his front yard.

His lingering anger over General MacArthur seemed excessive. “There were times,” Merle Miller remembered, “when you wanted to say to him, ‘Look, you know, you had the last word. Leave it lay and bask in your triumph.’ ”

Of Eisenhower, he could hardly say anything without resorting to profanity.

But then Kennedy, too, seemed nearly as misguided to him as had Elsenhower. Truman was utterly appalled by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, as was Acheson.

There was an unfortunate preoccupation at the Kennedy White House with “image,” Acheson wrote to Truman.

This is a terrible weakness. It makes one look at oneself instead of at the problem. How will I look fielding this hot line drive to short stop? This is a good way to miss the ball altogether. I am amazed looking back to how far you were from this. I don’t remember a case where you stopped to think of the effect on your fortunes—or the party’s for that matter—of a decision in foreign policy.

“Keep writing,” Truman replied, “it keeps my morale up—if I have any.”

“You must remember our head of State is young, inexperienced and hopeful,” he told Acheson in another letter. “Let’s hope the hopeful works.”

Hearing that the Democratic Party, at Kennedy’s suggestion, was going to put on a $l,000-a-plate dinner, Truman was appalled. “If as and when that happens we’ll just quit being democrats with a little d.” Nobody had consulted him on the matter. “To hell with these millionaires at the head of things.”

Of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he said, “I just don’t like that boy, and I never will.” In May of 1960, Matt Connelly had begun serving a prison sentence for income tax evasion. Convinced of Connelly’s innocence, and like others, convinced that Connelly was being made the victim of a Republican vendetta, Truman had done all he could, including helping to raise money to defray Connelly’s legal expenses. In March 1961 he had written to Bobby Kennedy to urge a pardon for Connelly, who was by then out of prison on parole. But Kennedy had responded by saying only that he was studying the problem. In May, Truman wrote again, providing more detailed background information, and again Kennedy guaranteed his personal attention. But nothing happened, and by the start of 1962, a furious Truman wrote in longhand to the Attorney General:

Matt Connelly has been abused and mistreated as I told you in my original letter. I want him pardoned and his full rights restored. I’ve never spoken to your brother about this and I don’t intend to. But if you think that I enjoy mistreatment and injustice to one of my best employees, you are mistaken. So don’t smile at me any more unless you want to do justice to Matt Connelly, which is the right thing—a full pardon.

In November 1962, Connelly was pardoned by President Kennedy, and it was to the President that Truman sent his letter of gratitude.

Bess, who had been suffering increasingly with arthritis in her knees and hands, had discovered a lump in her breast. Although reported to be benign, it had invaded the lymph nodes and Wallace Graham performed a mastectomy.

The ordeal had been extremely distressing for Truman, who was also later hospitalized, in January 1963, to be operated on for an intestinal hernia—a “little butchering” as he said. In fact, it was an extremely serious operation for someone his age, and he was a long time recovering.

The man who had always loved clocks—who on restless nights had wound the clocks at the White House and kept eight or nine in the Oval Office, who had always wanted to be on time wherever he went—now saw time as the enemy, the pursuer. “That old lady ‘Anno Domini’ has been chasing me and I have to slow up a little bit,” he wrote to Acheson, “particularly since she has a partner in Mrs. Truman.” All three of Bess’s younger brothers, Frank, George, and Fred Wallace, were dead by now.

“At 79 you go to funeral after funeral of your friends, most of whom are younger than 79—and you sometimes wonder if the old man with the scythe isn’t after you,” Truman said in another letter in May 1963, following his birthday.

The murder of John F. Kennedy that fall left him feeling devastated. He had been having lunch at the Muehlebach when he heard the news that Kennedy had been shot, but it was not until later, in his car driving home, that he learned that Kennedy was dead.

“Having come so close to that fate himself,” wrote Margaret, “Dad was terribly shaken by it. For the first time in his life he was unable to face reporters.”

As I was preparing to fly to Washington [Truman later wrote in reply to a query from the author William Manchester] I received a call from President Johnson telling me that a plane was being sent for me and I was able to arrive the day before the funeral. I went directly to Blair House. Shortly after arriving there we rode over to the White House to call on Mrs. Kennedy. I found her as I expected, remarkably self possessed and poised, but to me the deep sadness in her eyes came through. She said to me her husband, the President, spoke of me often and with much feeling and understanding of what we tried to do, and I found myself choked up with emotion.

It is difficult for one who has lived through the Presidency and the trials and burdens that go with it, not to realize the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen the nation and the tragic blow that was visited on his family, and particularly the wife of the President.

Bess had been ill and unable to make the trip. Margaret and Clifton had come down from New York to stay with Truman at Blair House. Seeing her father, Margaret grew concerned. He looked dreadful. A doctor was sent for. Truman obediently went upstairs to his room and was served his dinner in bed. But he was back on his feet the next day to attend the funeral and graveside services, after which he returned to Blair House in the same car with the Eisenhowers. For about an hour in the front parlor at Blair House the two men sat talking. Then Eisenhower returned to his home in Gettysburg and Truman flew back to Missouri.

In the aftermath of the Kennedy tragedy, a bill was passed by Congress authorizing Secret Service protection for former presidents, and so a Secret Service detail arrived in Independence. But when one of the agents called at the Truman house to introduce himself, and told the President that he would no longer have a need for his own bodyguard, Mike Westwood, Truman told him, “Well, I no longer have a need for you, so get out of here.”

Neither of the Trumans had any wish for the Secret Service to return to their lives. Margaret described her mother reacting as if they had just told her she was going to have to spend four more years in the White House. Bess, too, refused to allow the agents on the property. But then President Johnson personally telephoned one evening and convinced Bess that the Secret Service should be reinstated and the Trumans agreed. They were to be watched over from then on, though Mike Westwood continued accompanying the President as before.

Celebrations of Truman’s eightieth birthday in May 1964 went on for more than a week in Independence, Kansas City, and Washington. There was a huge lunch in his honor in Independence and another at the Muehlebach. In Washington on May 8, he celebrated with “characteristic verve and vinegar,” drawing cheers and praise wherever he went. Invited to address the Senate, he sat in a front seat, a rose in his lapel, and listened to glowing tributes from twenty-seven senators, including two of his favorites from his own years in the Senate, Republicans George Aiken and Leverett Saltonstall. It was an historic occasion, the first time the Senate was making use of a new rule, adopted the year before, whereby former presidents could be granted “the privilege of the floor”—a point that Truman felt so deeply that when he rose he was scarcely able to speak.

Thank you very much. I am so overcome that I cannot take advantage of this rule right now. It is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me in my whole lifetime.

It is unique. It is something that has never been done before. And between you, and me, and the gatepost, since I profit by it, I think it is a good rule.

“You can wish me many more happy birthdays, but I’ll never have another one like this,” he said as senators crowded about him to shake his hand.

Five months later, on October 13, 1964, Truman tripped on the sill going into the upstairs bathroom at 219 North Delaware. He fell, cracking his head against the washbasin, his glasses shattering and cutting him badly over the right eye. He then fell against the bathtub, fracturing two ribs. Though still conscious, he was unable to move.

The police were called and he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Two days later, Wallace Graham reported that his patient was “much improved,” his condition “very satisfactory.” But though Truman was soon home again and eventually returned to something like his old routine, he never fully recovered from the fall. He began losing weight, his face becoming drawn, the eyes behind the thick glasses appearing disproportionately large. “He doesn’t look a thing like he used to,” his sister Mary Jane said. “He always had a full face and always looked so well. He takes a miserable picture now, he is so thin. He’s always taken such a nice picture.”

Yet on he went, taking his morning walks with Mike Westwood, or on occasion with Thomas Melton, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, who lived just across Truman Road—the pace a little slower each year, but Truman doing most of the talking, as Melton remembered. Passing an enormous gingko tree on Maple Street, one of the largest, most spectacular trees in town, Truman would customarily speak to it, too.

And what would the President say to the tree, Melton would be asked by a visitor years later. “He would say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ ”

He and Bess became steady patrons of the Independence Public Library. In another new Chrysler, this a light green model, Mike Westwood would drive them, Truman riding in front, Bess in back. At the library she would go in and return with an armload of books.

The correspondence with Acheson also continued, Acheson writing at length to keep Truman posted on the Johnson presidency, as he knew Truman wanted. But Truman dictated his letters now and had less and less to say.

In the summer of 1965, Vivian Truman died at age seventy-nine. “His passing has meant a great loss to me,” Truman told Acheson. Within days Ted Marks, too, was dead and Truman attended both funerals.

When, on July 30, 1965, President Johnson came to Independence, to sign the new Medicare bill in Truman’s presence at the Truman Library, there was, in the words of one account, “sad amazement” expressed in the large Washington contingent over Truman’s pitifully frail appearance. His voice, however, remained firm and he talked of several projects he planned for the library.

Sitting at Johnson’s elbow, a cane in his lap, he watched the signing into law of legislation for health care for the aged such as he had proposed twenty years before.

“You have made me a very, very happy man,” Truman told the President.

Nellie Noland died, and Jim Pendergast. Among the private sorrows of Truman’s final years had been a falling out with his old friend Jim Pendergast. There had been a misunderstanding in 1958 over the endorsement of a local Democratic candidate, which left each of them convinced the other had betrayed their friendship. It was a sad, unfortunate impasse, and when Jim Pendergast, after a long battle with cancer, died in the spring of 1966, Truman, who attended the funeral, knew another chapter of his life was closed and not at all as he wished.

Attending funerals had become a part of his life. Thomas Melton, the Presbyterian pastor, would later recount an unforgettable graveside scene one grim winter day in Independence:

Quite often we have committals for people who are not from this area when they die. It was in February if I recall correctly and it was very cold and bitter, a lot of snow that year. And we were going to have a committal at the city cemetery. So I went to the appointed place…. There was no one there but the undertaker…no pallbearers. And we thought we’d wait until the appointed time [as announced] in the newspapers, in case anybody would come…. In came this green Chrysler and I recognized the car immediately. I knew it was Mr. Truman’s car. The Secret Service man got out and stood in his position and Mr. Truman walked over to the bier, and I was amazed. I went ahead with the committal. Snow was still in the air, cold…. After I had my benediction, I asked him, I said, “Mr. President, why are you here? It’s cold and bitter. Did you know this gentleman?” And he said, “Pastor, I never forget a friend.” And I was just speechless. This was the President of the United States.

Lyndon Johnson came to Independence several times again, hoping to enlist Truman’s endorsement of the war in Vietnam. But Truman, who as President had first pledged American support for the French against Ho Chi Minh, made no statement about the war. Privately, he had become more and more disillusioned with Johnson’s leadership.

In 1967, in his eighty-fourth year, Truman stopped coming to the library on a regular basis. Nothing was said in explanation; he just was not there much any more.

When, in early 1969, the new President, Richard Nixon, expressed a desire to come see Truman, he and Bess agreed. The President and First Lady called at 219 North Delaware on March 22. They were with the Trumans for half an hour, then drove to the library, where Truman, who was not having one of his best days, stood expressionless while Nixon, at a concert grand piano outside Truman’s office, played “The Missouri Waltz.” To many who were present, and who knew how much Truman disliked the song, it was a difficult moment. But when Nixon finished, Truman turned to Bess and asked what it was he had played.

Margaret and Clifton Daniel had had two more children by now—Harrison and Thomas—making a family of four sons. Twice with the Daniels, in late March 1968 and again the same time the next year, the Trumans returned to Key West, where, with the four boys, Grandpa would be seen walking the streets of the old town wearing a blue blazer and a baseball cap, enjoying the air and sunshine as in times past. These would be remembered as among the happiest weeks for all of them. He felt “damn good for an old man,” Truman told reporters.

But he had been hospitalized for the flu that winter and was beginning to feel like the last leaf on the tree. Adlai Stevenson, Churchill, Douglas MacArthur were all dead. During the stay at Key West came the news of the death of Eisenhower. Truman wrote a gracious tribute.

On June 28, 1969, the Trumans celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at home. There was no party. Only a few friends dropped by. As Bess explained to reporters, the President was not up to standing for a long time shaking hands.

Once, in 1913, writing from the farmhouse at Grandview, he had told her, “It seems a hollow week if I don’t arrive at 219 Delaware at least one day in it.” Now, there were few days that he did not spend there. His books became his life more and more. Cars passing on Truman Road, neighbors out for a walk in the evening, could see him in the window, sitting with a book under his reading lamp. What would her father’s idea of heaven have been, Margaret would be asked years later. “Oh,” she said, “to have a good comfortable chair, a good reading lamp, and lots of books around that he wanted to read.” Once in New York, when Ken McCormick of Doubleday had called on him early in the morning at his hotel, Truman had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom with several new books stacked on a table beside him. Did the President like to read himself to sleep at night, McCormick asked. “No, young man,” said Truman, “I like to read myself awake.”

Thomas Hart Benton came to the house to sketch the frail, old figure in his chair with his books, and the drawing Benton made was one few Americans would have recognized as Harry Truman. Benton thought there was more character in the face now.

“I was greatly pleased by your kind and generous letter on my eighty-seventh birthday,” Truman wrote to Acheson on May 14, 1971. “Coming from you, this carries a much deeper meaning for me.” The signature was still recognizable as his own, but just barely.

Ethel Noland died that summer. Then, on Tuesday, October 12, at his farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland, Acheson was found slumped over a desk in his study, dead of a heart attack at age seventy-eight. “Oh, no,” Bess Truman said when called by The New York Times. Mr. Truman, she said, would have no immediate comment, but added, “I know he’ll be very disturbed.”

The summer of 1972 Truman was hospitalized—first after another fall, then for two weeks with gastrointestinal troubles.

Late the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5, he was taken again to the hospital, leaving the house on North Delaware by ambulance for the last time. His condition, as given to reporters at Research Hospital by Wallace Graham that night, was “fair.” He was suffering from lung congestion.

On December 6, his condition listed as “critical,” bulletins were issued throughout the day. The doctors were trying to unclog his lung with antibiotics and oxygen, but were hampered because the former President was also suffering from bronchitis and because hardening of the arteries was causing his heart to race periodically.

Margaret, who was in Washington for a reception celebrating her new book about her father, Harry S. Truman, flew to Kansas City immediately in a White House jet provided by President Nixon.

In another few days, Truman appeared to rally and was taken off the critical list. But as his battle went on, Wallace Graham could say only that his condition was “very serious.”

Bess and Margaret were with him daily in his room on the sixth floor. Mary Jane Truman dropped by. She too was a patient in the hospital, having injured herself in a fall several weeks before. Truman was reported awake and smiling. Asked how he was feeling, he answered, “Better.” There were Christmas decorations in his window, reporters were told. Mrs. Truman “remained in good spirits.” “He smiled at us and gave yes and no answers to our questions,” Margaret told the press on December 10. On the night of December 11, when asked how he felt, Truman reportedly said, “I feel all right.” Asked if he hurt anywhere, he said, “No.” On December 14, he was reported no longer able to talk.

The struggle went on for three weeks, during which Margaret returned to her family in New York. By now he was suffering from lung congestion, heart irregularity, kidney blockages, and a failing digestive system.

One of the special duty nurses who had been with him as his night nurse since he was first admitted on December 5, Mrs. Walter Killilae, described him later as “warm, sweet and most appreciative of anything you did for him.” On Sunday morning, December 24, her night duty ended, she leaned over to tell him she was to have the night off, Christmas Eve, and asked him if he would be there when she got back. “He squeezed my hand,” she later said, “which leads me to believe his mind was still responsive….”

On Christmas Eve, he grew progressively weaker. On Christmas morning he was reported in a deep coma and near death. Margaret arrived by plane from New York. A 2:00 P.M. bulletin reported his condition “unimproved” and the hospital’s chief of staff, Warren F. Wilhelm, called his chances of survival “very, very small.” Asked why Mr. Truman was being kept alive this long, Dr. Wilhelm replied, “It’s an ethical question. Who would decide? You can always hope that he will rally.”

Bess, who had been staying overnight in the hospital and was with her husband through most of every day, had reached a point of almost total exhaustion. Greatly concerned, Margaret persuaded her mother to go home with her to Independence that Christmas night. “Dad was in a coma and there was nothing we could do to help him.”

Truman died in Kansas City’s Research Hospital and Medical Center on Tuesday, December 26, 1972, at 7:50 A.M. Central Standard Time.

An elaborate, five-day state funeral had been planned years before, with everything to be conducted by the Fifth Army from Fort Sam Houston, Texas. “O Plan Missouri,” as it was called, ran to several hundred pages, with everything specified in elaborate detail. Originally, Truman’s body was to be flown to Washington to lie in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol, then returned to Missouri for burial. As it was, in the three weeks when he lay dying in the hospital, the Army’s aging “Black jack,” the horse that had become such a symbol of tragedy for the nation during the Kennedy state funeral, was taken up in a plane several times to prepare him for the flight to Missouri.

Truman had been shown the entire plan one day in his office at the library and approved nearly all of it, subject to changes his family might wish. He thought it sounded like a “fine show” and was sorry to have to miss it, he said. He objected only to lying in state in Washington. He wanted to be buried “out there,” he had said, turning in his chair to look into the courtyard. “I want to be out there so I can get up and walk into my office if I want to.”

But the funeral on December 27 was greatly reduced in scale, to be more what Bess wanted. “Keep it simple, keep it simple,” she told Margaret and Clifton Daniel. Even so, the military presence was to be substantial, as several thousand troops arrived in Independence to take part in the ceremonies.

After a private service for the family at Carson’s Funeral Home, the body was taken to lie in state in the lobby of the Truman Library, the hearse moving slowly through the streets of the town—along Lexington, River Boulevard, Maple, and North Delaware, all lined with soldiers. An honor guard was posted at the library steps. Six howitzers lined the front lawn.

President and Mrs. Nixon came to pay their respects and to place a wreath of red, white, and blue carnations on the casket. Lyndon Johnson was present with all of his family. Johnson, who looked gaunt and greatly aged, would himself die just three weeks later.

For the rest of the day and through the night and on into the morning, thousands of people—seventy-five thousand people, it would be estimated—passed by the closed casket in the lobby of the Truman Library in front of the Benton mural. The line stretched half a mile, to beyond the highway. “This whole town was a friend of Harry’s,” one man told a reporter.

That afternoon, Thursday, December 28, as he had wished, Truman was buried in the courtyard of the library. With space for the service in the library auditorium limited, only 250 people were invited. Among those present were Averell Harriman, Clark Clifford, Charlie Murphy, Rose Conway, Harry Vaughan, and Sam Rosenman.

Bess Truman, Margaret and Clifton and their four sons, sat behind a green curtain, screened from the others. It was an Episcopal service, as Bess wished, though a Masonic rite was included and a Baptist minister read a prayer. There was no eulogy, no hymns were sung.

Outside afterward, at the gravesite, it was cold and raw, and as the howitzers roared a twenty-one-gun salute and Taps was sounded, the day seemed to turn dramatically colder still. Later, there was snow in the air, and a few of the library staff would remember standing at a window looking out into the empty court and feeling great sympathy, as assuredly Truman would have too, for the men who were working in the cold and dark to fill in the grave.

V

“He was not a hero or a magician or a chess player, or an obsession. He was a certifiable member of the human race, direct, fallible, and unexpectedly wise when it counted,” wrote Mary McGrory in the Washington Star the next day, in one of hundreds of published tributes.

He did not require to be loved. He did not expect to be followed blindly. Congressional opposition never struck him as subversive, nor did he regard his critics as traitors. He never whined.

He walked around Washington every morning—it was safe then. He met reporters frequently as a matter of course, and did not blame them for his failures. He did not use the office as a club or a shield, or a hiding place. He worked at it…. He said he lived by the Bible and history. So armed, he proved that the ordinary American is capable of grandeur. And that a President can be a human being….

He was remembered in print and over the air waves, in the halls of Congress and in large parts of the world, as a figure of courage and principle. Even Time and The Wall Street Journal, publications that had often scorned him in years past, acclaimed him now as one of the great figures of the century.

The obituary in The New York Times ran seven pages. (When the writer, Alden Whitman of The Times, had been preparing it in advance years before and went to Independence to interview Truman himself, feeling extremely uneasy about the whole assignment, Truman greeted him with a smile, saying, “I know why you’re here and I want to help you all I can.”)

In a day of memorial tributes in the Senate chamber that he so loved, he was eulogized as the president who had faced the momentous decision of whether to use the atomic bomb, praised for the creation of the United Nations, for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the recognition of Israel, NATO; for committing American forces in Korea and for upholding the principle of civilian control over the military—“decisions many of us would pale before,” said Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.

He was remembered as the first president to recommend Medicare, remembered for the courage of his stand on civil rights at the risk of his political fortunes. The whistle-stop campaign was recalled as one of the affirming moments in the history of the American political system.

His lack of glamour, the “cronies” and loud Florida shirts, the angry letters and the taint of the “Truman scandals,” seemed to fade in memory. The scandals, squalid as they were, would with time appear almost tame in contrast to the corrupt excesses of later administrations.

The frequently quoted view of Sam Rayburn that Truman was right on all the big decisions, wrong on all the little ones, was hardly accurate. His Loyalty Program, a very large decision, had been woefully wrong—as was the appointment of Louis Johnson, as was the high-handed seizure of the steel industry—while the restoration of Herbert Hoover to public service and public esteem was not only a right and generous “small” decision, but one that said much about Truman’s essential human quality.

That he would later be held accountable by some critics for the treacheries and overbearing influence of the CIA, as well as for the Vietnam War, was understandable but unjustified. He never intended the CIA to become what it did. His decisions concerning Vietnam by no means predetermined all that followed under later, very different presidents.

His insistence that the war in Korea be kept in bounds, kept from becoming a nuclear nightmare, would figure more and more clearly as time passed as one of his outstanding achievements. And rarely had a president surrounded himself with such able, admirable men as Stimson, Byrnes, Marshall, Forrestal, Leahy, Acheson, Lovett, Elsenhower, Bradley, Clifford, Lilienthal, Harriman, Bohlen, and Kennan—as time would also confirm. It was as distinguished a group as ever served the country, and importantly, he had supported them as they supported him.

Born in the Gilded age, the age of steam and gingerbread Gothic, Truman had lived to see a time of lost certainties and rocket trips to the moon. The arc of his life spanned more change in the world than in any prior period in history. A man of nineteenth-century background, he had had to face many of the most difficult decisions of the unimaginably different twentieth century. A son of rural, inland America, raised only a generation removed from the frontier and imbued with the old Jeffersonian ideal of a rural democracy, he had had to assume command of the most powerful industrial nation on earth at the very moment when that power, in combination with stunning advances in science and technology, had become an unparalleled force in the world. The responsibilities he bore were like those of no other president before him, and he more than met the test.

Ambitious by nature, he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. Yet he was not and had never been a simple, ordinary man. The homely attributes, the Missouri wit, the warmth of his friendship, the genuineness of Harry Truman, however appealing, were outweighed by the larger qualities that made him a figure of world stature, both a great and good man, and a great American president.

“Watch the President,” Admiral King had whispered to Lord Moran at Potsdam. “This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job….”

With his ability to “take it,” his inner iron, his bedrock faith in the democratic process, his trust in the American people, and his belief that history was the final, all-important judge of performance, he was truly exceptional. He never had a doubt about who he was, and that too was part of his strength, as well as the enjoyment of life he conveyed.

He was the kind of president the founding fathers had in mind for the country. He came directly from the people. He was America. In his time, in his experience, from small town to farm to World War in far-off France in 1918; from financial failure after the war to the world of big-city machine politics to the revolutionary years of the New Deal in Washington to the surge of American power during still another terrible World War, he had taken part in the great chronicle of American life as might have a character in a novel. There was something almost allegorical about it all: The Man of Independence and His Odyssey.

The “lesson” of Truman’s life, said Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III of Illinois, was a lesson about ourselves: “an object lesson in the vitality of popular government; an example of the ability of this society to yield up, from the most unremarkable origins, the most remarkable men.”

Dean Acheson had called him the Captain with the Mighty Heart; George Marshall, in 1948, had said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages, more even than the courage of his decisions. Eric Sevareid, who observed at close range so much of the history of the era and its protagonists, would say nearly forty years later of Truman, “I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”

He had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Bess Truman lived on at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982, and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.

Acknowledgments

For a biographer, the great body of surviving letters, diaries, private memoranda, and autobiographical sketches written by Harry S. Truman is a treasure beyond compare. There is really nothing like the Truman manuscript collection at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. The letters he wrote between 1910 and 1959 to the idolized love of his life, Bess Wallace Truman, are thought to number 1,302—but no one really knows what the exact total may be—and there are thousands more in his own hand, to his mother, his sister, to his cousins Nellie and Ethel Noland, to old Army friends, Dean Acheson, fellow politicians, newspaper editors, friend, and foe, as well as long diary entries. Truman poured himself out on paper with vigor and candor all of his adult life. For a latter-day writer trying to understand him and tell his story in the context of his times, it is Truman himself, again and again, who makes it possible to go below the surface, to know what he felt, what he wanted, his worries, his anger, the exceptional and the commonplace details of his days. Few Americans of any era, irrespective of background or profession, have left such a vivid personal record, quite apart from the immense volume of his official papers, and it is almost certain that we will never again have a President who leaves so candid and revealing an account. Or one written in such a clear hand. In addition to all else that he did for his country, Harry Truman gave us a very large part of himself and his times in his own words, and in my efforts to write his life, during ten years of work on this book, there has been no one to whom I have felt more gratitude.

The staff archivists, librarians, and other specialists at the Harry S. Truman Library have been helpful in countless ways, instructive, patient, generous with their time, generous with ideas and advice, since the morning I first walked in the door one very cold winter day early in 1982. Though they are in no way responsible for any errors of fact or judgment in these pages, there is no part of the book in which they have not played a role, both in what they have helped to uncover in the library collection and in what they themselves know of Truman’s life from years of interest and study. In my experience, there is no more agreeable place in which to do research than the Truman Library. Nor has there been anyone on the staff who has not shown an interest in my work or failed to be helpful. I am grateful to them all. But for their particular help and friendship over the years I wish to express my utmost thanks to: Benedict K. Zobrist, director, and George Curtis, assistant director; archivists Philip D. Lagerquist, Erwin J. Mueller, and Dennis Bilger; photographic librarian Pauline Testerman; the very good-natured, resourceful Elizabeth Safly, research librarian and creator and keeper of the so-called vertical file, a mine of marvelous information; Vicky Alexander, Clay Bauske, Robin Burgess, Carol Briley, Millie Carol, John Curry, Patricia Dorsey; J. R. Fuchs, Ray Geselbracht, Anita Heavener, Jann Hoag, Niel Johnson, Earl Pennington, Warren Ohrvall, Ruth Springston, and Mark Beveridge, who knows more about World War I than anyone I know.

I wish also to express my particular indebtedness to the following published works about Truman: his own two-volume Memoirs and Margaret Truman Daniel’s Harry S. Truman, a lively, often moving memoir by an adoring daughter; The Man of Independence by Jonathan Daniels, which though incomplete as a biography and anything but impartial (it was written while Truman was still President and Daniels served on Truman’s staff), nonetheless contains much on Truman’s early life not to be found elsewhere; Truman by Roy Jenkins, a too-brief survey of the Truman presidency, but very valuable for its insights; John Hersey’s Aspects of the Presidency, which includes his deft New Yorker profile of Truman, written after an unprecedented chance to follow the President through several crucial days during the second term; The Truman Presidency, The History of a Triumphant Succession by Cabell Phillips, who wrote from firsthand observation as a correspondent for The New York Times; and Plain Speaking, Merle Miller’s popular compilation of reminiscences by the elderly former President and others close to him. Though not altogether reliable as to fact, it has the vitality of its subject and contains much of value.

The three leading Truman scholars of our day are Alonzo L. Hamby, Robert J. Donovan, and Robert H. Ferrell, and I have benefited greatly from their work—from Professor Hamby’s many articles; from Robert Donovan’s comprehensive two-volume study of the Truman presidency, Conflict and Crisis and The Tumultuous Years, fine books by a writer who covered the Truman White House as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune; and from Robert H. Ferrell for his advice, friendship, and a whole shelf of Truman books, including The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman, a skillful stitching together of Truman’s own sketches about himself, and two collections of Truman letters and other writings, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman and Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959. Everyone who writes about Truman is indebted to Professor Ferrell for these invaluable books.

My bibliography follows, with the principal sources of manuscript and published works, and includes the names of the more than 125 people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I thank each and all many times over. A number of the interviews were done over several days, and at intervals of several years. Most of the longer interviews were taped, unless this was against the wishes of the interviewee. When a tape recorder was not used, I kept notes. And while all those who generously gave of their time contributed to my understanding of the subject—and including many who are not directly quoted in the book—I want to thank the following especially: Margaret Truman Daniel for three long interviews, including an all-day session in the Truman home at Independence done for the public television series Smithsonian World; Clifton Daniel, who talked for several hours over lunch in New York and during a thirty-block walk back uptown; Clark Clifford, who gave many hours of his time over a span of ten years and whose recollections and insights were of greatest possible value; George Elsey, who, like Clark Clifford, played a key role in the Truman administration and whose memory for details and sense of history has helped to give life and balance to my recounting of events in ways that would never have been possible otherwise; Rex Scouten, Curator of the White House, and Floyd Boring, both of whom were part of President Truman’s Secret Service detail and who not only spent hours recalling people and events, but took a Saturday afternoon to walk me through what happened at Blair House, inside and out, the day the Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill the President; James and Martha Ann Truman Swoyer of Oskaloosa, Kansas, who, in addition to talking with me at length about their Uncle Harry, let me see and make notes from his high school workbooks, wonderful, important documents that are quoted here for the first time; the late Merle Miller, who gave me one of the earliest, most interesting of the interviews, and granted me exclusive access to his recorded conversations with former President Truman which are on file at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library but closed to researchers at Miller’s request; the late Stephen Slaughter, who grew up next door to the Truman farm, who knew Harry Truman when he was a farmer, and whose superb book, History of a Missouri Farm Family, and personal recollections of life in Grandview helped immeasurably in recreating that vanished time and way of life; Joe Pruett of Kansas City, who helped track down former members of the Pendergast organization, who took me to 1908 Main, up the narrow stairs, to see where Tom Pendergast once ruled, and who, with his wife Catherine Pendergast Pruett, let me examine a wealth of Pendergast family letters, photographs, and memorabilia, and talked with great candor and understanding about the whole Pendergast era; and Sue Gentry, who began writing about life in Independence in the 1930s as a reporter for the Examiner and is still going strong, in her “Local Gentry” column in the paper. From the vantagepoint of her home on West Waldo, around the corner from the Truman house, she knows “the whole story.”

For their very valuable comments and suggestions on various portions of the manuscript, I thank Paul Horgan, Charlton Ogburn, Anna Loomis McCandless, John T. Galvin, John Zentay, Paul Nagel, George Elsey, Mark Beveridge, Liz Safly, Erwin Mueller, Lyman Field, the late John Oliver, Charles Guggenheim, and Richard Baker, Historian of the United States Senate.

Richard Baker also arranged for me to retrace the steps of Vice President Harry Truman at the Capitol the fateful evening of April 12, 1945, and with Capitol police officers William E. Uber and John D. Roach, we ran, as Truman did, from one end of the Capitol to the other, from what was Sam Rayburn’s hideaway back along the lower halls and corridors to the Vice President’s office. When I first inquired if it would be possible for me to make the run, Dr. Baker said, “Only if I can come too.”

Paul Nagel, Pat O’Brien, and Brent Schondelmeyer, three historians and authors who grew up in Independence and share a passion for Missouri history, gave me a wonderful day’s tour of Jackson County for which I will always be grateful. Lyman Field recalled his memorable experience with President Truman the morning after the 1948 election and introduced me to dozens of people in Kansas City who took an interest in my project.

I wish to thank also for their continuing help and interest: the staff of the Boston Athenaeum, and especially director Rodney Armstrong and research librarian Jan Malcheski; David Wigdor and others of the Manuscript Division, the Library of Congress; Carol Dage of the Liberty Memorial Library in Kansas City; the staff of the National Archives, and particularly Military Historian Edward Reese, who saved me many hours and much frustration in documenting the casualty estimates anticipated in an invasion of Japan in 1945; the staff of the Jackson County Historial Society; Norman J. Reigle and others of the National Park Service who do such an excellent job at the Truman home—the Harry S. Truman National Historic Site; Aurora Davis of the Kansas City Star Library; Ralph Graves, former Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc., who arranged access to the Time-Life files; Harry Middleton and his staff at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; Helen Bergen of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, Washington, D.C.; the Yale University Library; the West Tisbury Public Library; the Cornell University Library; the Smithsonian Institution.

To the following I am also indebted in many ways: Henry Adams; Clarence A. Barnes, Jr., Mary Margaret Bell of the Kentucky Historical Society; the late Walter H. Bieringer; Robert Blafield; Barrington Boardman; Walt Bodine; Daniel J. Boorstin; Charles Burke; Brian Burns; the late Martin Carr; Major General William A. Carter; Carl Charlson; Bernice J. Conley, County Clerk at the Kansas City Courthouse; Paul W. Cook, Jr.; L. P. Cookingham, Frances Cottingham and the Shelby County Historical Society; Annette Curtis; Albert A Eisele; Christa Fischer; Pauline Fowler; Andrew J. Glass; Neil Goodwin and Margot Barnes Street; Katherine Graham; William and Joyce Graves; Shannon Gregory; David Grubin; Janet Helm; Thomas Hill; William F. P. Hugonin; Oliver Jenson, who let me borrow his complete bound set of Life for the Truman years; Emerson and Matilee Johnson; Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.; Chester and Joan Kerr; James Ketchum; Richard Ketchum; Arthur M. Klebanof; Jill Kneerim; the late Kathleen Moore Knight; Professor Robert Knowles; Laurelle O’Leary; Mark Mazer; John Mayhew; Harry McPherson; Cynthia Miller; Richard Miller; Wilson D. Miscamble; James Mongello; James Morrison; Royall O’Brien; Pat O’Neill; Margaret K. Olwine; Harlene Stapf Palkuti; Arva Parks; Eleanor R. Piacenza; Monty B. Poen; Barbara J. Potts, former mayor of Independence; Henry Hope Reed; Donald Ritchie; Judge Howard Sachs; Professor William Sand; Francis N. Satterlee; Michael Shapiro of the St. Louis Art Museum; Al Silverman; Robert C. Smith; Raymond W. Smock, Historian of Congress; Richard Snow; Marie-Cecile and Alfred E. Street; Audrey Stubbart; the late Barbara Tuchman; Geoffrey Ward; Laura and Robert Wilson; Philip F. Ziedman; William Zinsser.

I am deeply grateful to: the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship grant that helped make possible an additional year of research; J. Gordon Kingsley, president of William Jewell College in Liberty, for the opportunity to learn about Missouri by living there, as writer-in-residence at William Jewell; Haroldine Helm, who provides welcome comforts of home for researchers at the Truman Library, even researchers and their families; the tireless, resourceful Mike Hill, research specialist, who helped through thick and thin; Shirley Mayhew, Sarah Mayhew, Lynn S. Worthington, Ed Wise, and Eric Moe, who, with Mike Hill, assisted with the source notes.

For the design and production of the book I gratefully acknowledge the work of three splendid people, Eve Metz, Frank Metz, and Sophie Sorkin of Simon & Schuster. I thank Wendell Minor for his stunning original portrait of Truman for the dust jacket. And for the immensely helpful contributions she has made as copy editor, I thank Ann Adelman.

To Richard Snyder and Peter Schwed of Simon & Schuster, for their initial enthusiasm for a Truman biography, my wholehearted appreciation. I thank especially my editor, Michael Korda. With his professional advice and good cheer, my friend and literary agent Morton L. Janklow has been a mainstay throughout, for which I am extremely grateful.

For all their efforts typing the manuscript, I thank Patricia Kendall and Kathryn Harcourt. I thank again my daughter. Melissa and her husband John McDonald, for a wealth of favors and interest; my son David, for his invaluable suggestions on the manuscript; my son Bill, for research assistance in Missouri and for traveling with me as driver, photographer, companion, and “interpreter” across France, following Captain Harry Truman through World War I; my son Geoffrey, for his help with research at the Library of Congress; and my daughter Dorie, who uncovered valuable material about the White House, who, when the end seemed near, warned, me not to let up, and to whom the book is happily, proudly dedicated.

And with all my heart I thank my wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, who took part every step of the way and always to the benefit of the work and the author.

—David McCullough

   Washington, D.C.; Liberty, Missouri;

   Ithaca, New York; West Tisbury, Massachusetts

January 11, 1992

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Source Notes

Part One

1. Blue River Country

“Lord, grant”: Gilbert, Westering Man, 21.

One side-wheel steamer: Blue Springs (Missouri) Examiner, April 26, 1989.

One traveler described: Waugh, “Desultory Wanderings…,” Missouri Historical Society, April 1950.

“The Missouri is constantly’: Parkman, Oregon Trail, 14.

in a letter from Missouri dated July 24, 1846: Nancy Tyler Holmes to Mary Jane Holmes, Harry S. Truman Library (cited hereafter as HSTL).

“As for myself’: Anderson Shipp Truman to Mary Truman, September 16, 1846, HSTL.

“grand prairie ocean”: Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 59.

“Mules, horses”: Parkman, Journals, Vol. 2, 419.

“To live in a region:” History of Jackson County, 73.

“rich and beautiful uplands’: Gregg, 163.

“without other warrant”: History of Jackson County, 255.

Mormons must leave or be “exterminated”: Ibid., 268.

a lone assassin: Ibid., 257.

“Awful cold”: Quoted in Slaughter, Missouri Farm Family, 45.

“a gun and an axe”: John W. Meador, Oral History, HSTL.

“She was a strong woman”: HST quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 62.

In 1850, his recorded wealth: U.S. Census, 1850.

at nearly $50,000: U.S. Census, 1860.

a man “who could do pretty much anything”: HST quoted in Miller, 62.

“The wagons were coupled”: Deseret News, August 15, 1860, 188.

In the spring of 1849: History of Jackson County, 96.

In 1851 cholera struck again: Ibid.

“Come on then, gentlemen”: Quoted in Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, 80.

“enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist”: Ibid., 89.

John Brown…come to “regulate matters”: Ibid., 130.

A Jackson County physician named Lee: History of Jackson County, 272.

“They asked me”: Ibid., 300.

Quantrill struck Kansas: Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 286; Josephy, Civil War, 373.

Jim Crow Chiles: Sheley, “James Peacock and ‘Jim Crow’ Chiles,” Frontier Times, May 1963.

In the formal claim Harriet Louisa Young filed: U.S. House of Representatives, 59th Congress, 1st Sess., Sen. Doc. No. 901, June 19, 1906.

Recollection of Martha Ellen Young: Berger, “Mother Truman’s Life Not All Frontier Toil,” Kansas City Times, June 30, 1946 (reprinted from The New York Times).

“It is heartsickening to see”: Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy, 126-27.

“I hope you have not turned”: John Truman to Anderson Truman, October 8, 1861, HSTL.

the Red Legs had arrived: Daniels, Independence, 36.

Anderson loaded his five slaves: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“They never bought one”: Ibid.

He was “universally hated”: Mary Paxton Keeley, Oral History, HSTL.

To black people he was a living terror: Donald R. Hale, “James Chiles—A Missouri Badman,” The West, October 1968.

“to see them jump”: Ibid.

the confrontation on the west side: Ibid.

it was said of John A. Truman: History of Jackson County, 986.

a three-drawer burl walnut dresser: Martha Ann Truman Swoyer, author’s interview.

The couple’s own first home: Kornitzer, “The Story of Truman and His Father,” Parents Magazine, March 1951.

Lamar Democrat: June 28, 1883.

a Baptist circuit rider: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 20.

“Baby is real sick now”: Letter of Mary Martha Truman, April 7, 1885, HSTL.

he was chasing a frog: Autobiography, 3.

his mother, for fun: Ibid.

2. Model Boy

the happiest childhood: Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (cited hereafter as Memoirs), Vol. I, 113.

The farm was “a wonderful place”: Ibid., 115.

“I became familiar with every sort of animal”: Ibid.

“there were peach butter”: Ibid., 114.

The child liked everybody: Ibid., 124.

“flat eyeballs”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 49.

Mamma taught that punishment followed: Autobiography, 33.

enough to “burn the hide off: HST quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 63.

John Truman acquired a house: Memoirs, Vol. I, 115.

“I do not remember a bad teacher”: Ibid., 118.

“When I was growing up”: Ibid., 124-25.

“He just smiled his way along”: Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, December 21, 1947.

diphtheria: Memoirs, Vol. I, 116-17.

“didn’t scare easy”: Daniels, 53.

“not once,” he said: Quoted in Miller, 48.

“It was just something you did”: Ibid., 52.

“Harry, do you remember”: Daniels, 57.

“It’s a very lonely thing”: Quoted in Miller, 277–78.

Caroline Simpson taught: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 24.

“To tell the truth”: Quoted in Miller, 32.

“They wanted to call him”: Henry P. Chiles, Oral History, HSTL.

“intended for a girl” anyway: HST to EW, April 8, 1912, in Ferrell, ed., Dear Bess (cited hereafter as Dear Bess), 80.

He patented a staple puller: Original patents, HSTL.

automatic railroad switch: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“A mighty good trader”: Ibid.

“fight like a buzz saw”: Quoted in Steinberg, 17.

“A fiery fellow”: Stephen Slaughter, author’s interview.

“No one could make remarks”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 124.

“He had no use for a coward”: Parents Magazine, March 1951,

“Our house became headquarters”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 117-18.

“Harry was always fun”: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“If I succeeded in carrying”: “Pickwick Papers,” May 14, 1934, HSTL.

“No! No! Harry was a Baptist”: Mary Paxton Keeley, Oral History, HSTL.

men with their blazing torches: Paxton, Memoirs, 22.

cows to milk: Autobiography, 30.

“in regard to integrity”: An Illustrated Description of Independence, Missouri, ca. 1902.

“There was conversation”: Quoted in Miller, 32.

“No town in the west”: An Illustrated Description of Independence, Missouri.

“Harry always wanted to know”: Amanda Hardin Palmer, Oral History, HSTL.

“The community at large”: Independence (Missouri) Examiner, August 23, 1901.

“Never, never give up”: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“In those days”: Quoted in Miller, 62.

“Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God”: HST Diary, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record (cited hereafter as Off the Record, 188.

“There must have been a thousand”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 121.

“In a little closet”: Ibid., 122.

“the biggest thing that ever happened”: Ibid.

“I don’t know anybody”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“He had a real feeling for history”: Quoted in Miller, 50.

“Reading history, to me”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 119.

“the salt of the earth”: Ibid., 118–19.

“It cultivates every faculty”: Course of Study and Rules and Regulations of the Independence Public Schools, March 15, 1909, HSTL.

HST composition books: Collection of James F. and Mary Ann Truman Swoyer.

“Mothers held him up as a model”: Leviero’, “Harry Truman, Musician and Music Lover,” The New York Times Magazine, June 18, 1950.

he genuinely adored the great classical works: Ibid.

“all right,” John Truman said: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

picnics every August at Lone Jack: Miller, 66–67.

HST at 1900 Democratic National Convention: Daniels, 58.

Caesar’s bridge: Miller, 33.

“over a good deal”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“‘Progress’ is the cry”: The Gleam, Independence High School Annual, May 1901.

3. The Way of the Farmer

“I’m fine. And you?”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 12.

“plunged” into railroads: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“He got the notion he could get rich”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 59.

“mud horse”: Ibid.

Tasker Taylor tragedy: Independence Sentinel, August 23, 1902.

“A very down-to-earth education”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 123.

“He’s all right”: Jonathan Daniels interview notes, July 28, 1949, HSTL.

“Are you good at figures?”: April 24, 1903, HSTL.

“He is an exceptionally bright young man”: A D. Flintom to C. H. Moore, April 14, 1904, HSTL.

“Trueman,” as Flintom spelled it: A. D. Flintom to C. H. Moore, July 27, 1904, HSTL.

“never so happy as when”: Autobiography, 20.

Wallace suicide: Jackson Examiner, June 19, 1903.

“an attractiveness about him”: Ibid.

“Why should such a man”: Ibid.

wedding of Madge Gates to David Wallace: Kansas City Journal, June 15, 1883.

“[Bessie] was walking up and down”: Mary Paxton Keeley, Oral History, HSTL.

“Ties Collar Cuffs Pins”: HST Expenses Diary, HSTL.

A note from “Horatio”: HST to EN, February 2, 1904, HSTL.

A performance by Richard Mansfield: Autobiography, 22.

“They wanted to see him grin”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 84.

“I was twenty-one”: Autobiography, 27.

dress uniform episode: Ibid., 28.

“when a bachelor”: Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh, 1.

Virgil Thomson, who was to become: Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 3.

“Harry and I had only a dollar a week”: Daniels, 70.

Trumans move back to Grandview: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 32.

His friends were sure: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“and woe to the loafer”: Autobiography, 36.

“Well, if you don’t work”: Robert Wyatt, Oral History, HSTL.

“The simple life was not always”: Stephen Slaughter, author’s interview.

“My father told me”: Quoted in Daniels, 76.

Yet John Truman was happier: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“Yes, and if you did a good job”: Gaylon Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

A few days later: Renshaw, “President Truman. His Missouri Neighbors Tell of His Farm Years,” The Prairie Farmer, May 12, 1945.

Harry also kept the books: HST Account Books, HSTL.

“The coldest day in winter”: HST to EW, May 19, 1913, Dear Bess, 125.

“finest land you’d find”: Quoted in Miller, 89.

“always bustling around”: The Prairie Farmer, May 12, 1945.

“The ground was terribly hard”: Ibid.

“He was so down-to-earth”: Pansy Perkins, Oral History, HSTL.

“He always looked neat”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“Harry was a very good lodge man”: Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

“Frank Blair got Harry interested”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“Papa buys me candy”: HST to EW, April 27, 1911, Dear Bess, 30.

“To be a good farmer in Missouri”: Vivian quoted in Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“You know as long as”: HST to EW, October 16, 1911, Dear Bess, 52.

“Well, I saw her”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 32.

“Isn’t she a caution?”: HST to EW, March 19, 1911, Dear Bess, 25.

“I’m always rattled”: HST to EW, postmark illegible, ibid., 134.

“Say, it sure is a grand thing”: HST to EW, February 13, 1912, ibid., 73.

“It is necessary to sit”: HST to EW, July 8, 1912, HSTL.

“This morning I was helping”: HST to EW, January 26, 1911, Dear Bess, 21.

“I have been to the lot”: HST to EW, April 1, 1912, ibid., 80.

“I’m horribly anxious for you”: HST to EW, April 8, 1912, ibid., 81.

“You know when people can get excited”: HST to EW, March 19, 1911, ibid., 25.

“you’ve no idea”: HST to EW, May 17, 1911, ibid., 33.

“I am by religion”: HST to EW, February 7, 1911, ibid., 22.

“Lent and such things”: HST to EW, March 19, 1911, ibid., 24.

“I have been reading David Copperfield”: HST to EW, May 3, 1911, ibid., 31.

“you know, were I an Italian”: HST to EW, June 22, 1911, ibid., 39.

“You know that you turned me down”: HST to EW, July 12, 1911, ibid, 40.

In August, he announced: HST to EW, August 27, 1911, ibid., 44; September 5, 1911, 45.

“I was reading Plato’s Republic”: HST to EW, November 6, 1912, ibid., 103.

“He had found he could get”: HST to EW, May 23, 1916, ibid., 200.

“girl mouth”: HST to EW, November 19, 1913, ibid., 145.

“so long as he’s honest”: HST to EW, June 22, 1911, ibid., 39.

“Did you ever sit”: HST to EW, November 1, 1911, ibid., 57.

“We never rated a person”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“Just imagine how often”: HST to EW, November 1, 1911, Dear Bess, 57.

“hat-full of debts”: HST to EW, December 21, 1911, ibid., 64.

two reasons for wanting to be rich: HST to EW, January 25, 1912, ibid., 69.

“I really thought once I’d be”: HST to EW, May 23, 1911, ibid., 36.

“I am like Mark Twain”: HST to EW, May 17, 1911, ibid., 34.

“You know a man has to be”: HST to EW, July 12, 1911, ibid., 41.

“who knows, maybe I’ll be”: HST to EW, May 23, 1911, ibid., 36.

“Sucker! Sucker!”: HST to EW, October 22, 1911, ibid., 53.

three hundred bales of hay: HST to EW, August 12, 1912, ibid., 93.

“I have been working like Sam Hill”: HST to EW, September 30, 1913, ibid., 137.

father in a “terrible stew”: HST to EW, postmarked November 11, 1913, HSTL.

“Politics is all he ever advises me”: HST to EW, August 6, 1912, Dear Bess, 92.

“I don’t think we would have traded him for anybody”: Slaughter, author’s interview.

“I never understood”: Ibid.

“Politics sure is the ruination”: HST to EW, postmark illegible, Dear Bess, 132.

“I told him that was a very mild remark”: HST to EW, May 26, 1913, ibid., 126.

He was the one person: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

another try in an Indian land lottery: HST to EW, September 30, 1913, Dear Bess, 138.

“all puffed up”: HST to EW, November 4, 1913, ibid., 141–42.

“How does it feel to be engaged to a clodhopper”: HST to EW, November 10, 1913, ibid., 143.

“I know your last letter word for word”: HST to EW, November 19, 1913, ibid., 145.

“Oh please send me another like it”: Ibid.

“Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry”: Ardis Haukenberry, author’s interview.

“We have moved around quite a bit”: HST to EW, February 16, 1911, Dear Bess, 24.

“Yes, it is true that Mrs. Wallace did not think”: May Wallace, author’s interview.

mother’s operation for a hernia: HST to EW, March 20, 1914, Dear Bess, 161.

“I hope she lives to be”: HST to EW, January 26, 1914, ibid., 157.

Mamma gave him the money for an automobile: HST to EW, May 12, 1914, ibid., 168.

“Harry didn’t like onions”: May Wallace, author’s interview.

“I started for Monegaw Springs”: HST to EW, no postmark. Dear Bess,183.

“Imagine working the roads”: HST to EW, August 8, 1914, ibid., 172.

“If anyone asks him how he’s feeling”: HST to EW, September 28, 1914, ibid., 176.

“good letters” helped “put that backbone into me”: HST to EW, September 17, 1914, ibid., 175.

his father, who refused to let the nurse: HST to EW, November 1914, ibid., 178.

“I remember the Sunday afternoon”: Slaughter, History of a Missouri Farm Family, 71.

“I was with him”: Daniels, 74.

“Harry and I often got up”: Parents Magazine, March 1951.

“An Upright Citizen”: Independence Examiner, November 3, 1914.

“I have quite a job on my hands”: HST to EW, November 1914, Dear Bess, 178.

“quiet wheat-growing people”: Cather, One of Ours, 143.

“gave it everything he had”: Quoted in Miller, 90.

“I almost got done planting”: HST to EW, April 28, 1915, Dear Bess, 182.

“It’s right unhandy to chase”: HST to EW, Grandview, 1915, ibid., 181.

he traveled to Texas; HST to EW, February 16, 1916, ibid., 185.

“There’s no one wants to win”: HST to EW, February 19, 1916, ibid., 187.

“This place down here”: HST to EW, date illegible, ibid., 193.

“I don’t suppose”: HST to EW, June 3, 1916, ibid., 201.

“I can’t possibly lose forever”: HST to EW, April 24, 1916, ibid., 198.

“The mine has gone by the board”: HST to EW, May 19, 1916, ibid., 199.

He could “continue business”: HST to EW, May 23, 1916, ibid., 200.

“It’s about 111 degrees in the shade”: HST to EW, July 30, 1916, ibid., 206.

“Wish heavy for me to win”: HST to EW, July 28, 1916, ibid.

“Keep wishing me luck”: HST to EW, August 4, 1916, ibid., 207.

buying and selling oil leases: Steinberg, 39.

“signed also by Martha E. Truman”: Ibid, 39.

“came up every time with something else”: HST to EW, August 5, 1916, Dear Bess, 209.

“Truman was surrounded by people, people, people”: Daniels, 81.

“If this venture blows”: HST to EW, January 23, 1917, Dear Bess, 213.

“In the event this country”: Daniels, 83.

Teeter Pool discovered: Memoirs, Vol. I, 127.

He said $11,000 at the time: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 56.

If his part in his father’s debts: HST to EW, April 28, 1915, Dear Bess, 182.

he was never meant for a farmer: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“Riding one of these plows all day”: HST, “Autobiographical Sketch,” HSTL.

“It takes pride to run a farm”: HST to MET and MJT, September 18, 1946, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 96.

4. Soldier

“It is the great adventure”: HST to EW, September 15, 1918, Dear Bess, 271.

“we got through”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 93.

Some people thought her the best looking: Gaylon Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

“It was quite a blow”: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 42.

She must not tie herself: HST to EW, July 14, 1917, Dear Bess, 225.

the reasons to go to war: HST to EW, January 18, 1918, HSTL.

there wasn’t a German bullet: HST to EW, February 1, 1918, Dear Bess, 242.

“Galahad after the Grail”: Autobiography, 41.

passes eye exam: U.S. Army Medical Records, August 9, 1917, HSTL.

On July 4, 1917, when Harry turned up: HST to EW, July 4, 1918, HSTL.

“It was sure enough cold”: HST to EW, October 9, 1917, HSTL.

“A tent fifty yards away”: HST to EW, October 18, 1917, Dear Bess, 231–32.

“all the Lillian Russells”: HST to EW, September 30, 1917, ibid., 228.

artillery terms: Lee, The Artillery Man, 326.

“I have been squads east”: HST to EW, February 3, 1918, Dear Bess, 242.

“I learned how to say Verdun”: HST to EW, October 27, 1918, HSTL.

“He made us feel”: HST to EW, January 27, 1918, Dear Bess, 241.

“one of our most effective officers”: Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 35.

“I have a Jew in charge”: HST to EW, October 28, 1917, Dear Bess, 233.

“Each day Harry would write a letter”: Mayerberg, “Edward Jacobson: President Truman’s Buddy,” Liberal Judaism, August 1945.

“I guess I should be very proud”: HST to EW, February 3, 1918, Dear Bess, 242.

“real good conversation”: HST to EW, February 23, 1918, ibid., 245–46.

“Jacobson says he’d go”: HST to EW, November 24, 1917, ibid., 238.

“I didn’t know how crazy”: HST to EW, January 10, 1918, ibid., 240.

Tiernan provides whiskey: HST to EW, October 23, 1917, ibid., 232.

“We elected Klemm”: Truman interview with Jonathan Daniels, November 12, 1949.

“He taught me more about handling men”: Autobiography, 44.

“You speak pretty good English”: Ted Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

“No man can be that good”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 128.

Berry would stalk up and down: Steinberg, 43.

“I suppose you will have to spend”: HST to EW, March 16, 1918, HSTL.

“I’d give anything in the world”: HST to EW, March 20, 1918, Dear Bess, 251.

“The phone’s yours”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 129.

“On leave in New York”: HST to EW, March 24 and March 26, 1918, Dear Bess, 252–53.

a “Kike town”: HST to EW, March 27, 1918, ibid, 254.

“Israelitist extraction”: HST to EN, ca. 1918, HSTL.

“I imagine his vision”: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“There we were watching”: Autobiography, 45.

He ached for home: HST to EW, April, 1918, Dear Bess, 256.

arrival at Brest: Autobiography, 45.

At the hotel in Brest: HST to EW, April 14, 1918, Dear Bess, 257.

The whole surrounding countryside: HST to EW, April 23, 1918, ibid, 260.

“The people generally treat us fine”: HST to EW, April 12, 1918, ibid, 259.

“I’m for the French more and more”: HST to EW, June 27, 1918, ibid, 264.

They also knew how to build: HST to EW, May 19, 1918, ibid, 262.

“They are the most sentimental people”: HST to EW, June 2, 1918, HSTL.

“Je ne comprends pas”: HST to EW, April 17, 1918, Dear Bess, 259.

determined to drink France dry: HST to EW, April 14, 1918, ibid, 258.

“Wandering through dark streets”: Quoted in Freidel, Over There, p. 80.

“Personally, I think Harry”: Edgar Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“Wish I could step in”: HST to EW, April 17, 1918, Dear Bess, 259.

the first-class coach: HST to EN, May 17, 1918, HSTL

account of château: HST to EW, April 28, 1918, Dear Bess, 260.

“You’d never think that a war”: HST to EN, May 1, 1918, HSTL.

“and then the clock on the Hôtel de Ville”: HST to EW, April 28, 1918, HSTL.

“I’ve studied more and worked harder”: HST to EW, May 26, 1918, HSTL.

“We had a maneuver yesterday”: HST to EW, May 26, 1918, HSTL.

Sundays at church: HST to EW, April 28, 1918, Dear Bess, 261.

“and I’m for helping them”: HST to EW, May 5, 1918, ibid.

discovered volumes of music: HST to EW, May 19, 1918, HSTL.

“He had maps”: Arthur Wilson, Oral History, HSTL.

“I just barely slipped through”: HST to EW, June 14, 1918, Dear Bess, 263.

“old rube” from Missouri: HST to EW, June 27, 1918, ibid, 263.

value of a university education: HST to EW, July 22, 1918, ibid, 267.

“No I haven’t seen any girls”: HST to EW, June 27, 1918, ibid, 264.

“I look like Siam’s King”: HST to EW, June 19, 1918, HSTL.

“That was one of the things”: Cather, One of Ours, 319.

“Dear Harry, May this photograph”: EW inscribed photograph, HSTL.

“They were a pretty wild bunch”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“a sitting duck”: Eugene Donnelly quoted in Miller, 97.

“a stirring among the fellows”: Ibid, 96.

“a rather short fellow”: Vere Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“You could see that he was”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“I could just see my hide”: Autobiography, 46.

“Never on the front”: “Pickwick Papers,” HSTL.

Ridge recollection: Miller, 96.

“He was so badly scared”: “Pickwick Papers,” HSTL.

“And then we gave Captain Truman”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“He didn’t hesitate at all”: Ibid.

“I didn’t come over here”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 95.

“Well, I would say”: Wilson, Oral History, HSTL.

“You soldier for me”: Ibid.

“soldier, soldier, all the time”: Lee, 33–34.

“Talk about your infantryman”: HST to EN, August 5, 1918, HSTL.

“You’ve no idea what an immense responsibility”: HST to EW, August 13, 1918, HSTL.

train passing close enough to Paris: War Diary of Captain Keith W. Dancy, Battery A, Liberty Memorial, Kansas City, Missouri.

“It was just a quiet sector”: Frederick J. Bowman, Oral History, HSTL.

“It was surely some steep hill”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“we were firing away”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“gasping like a catfish”: Columbus (Kansas) Daily Advocate, August 16, 1950.

“I led the parade!”: Walter Menefee, Oral History, HSTL.

“I got up and called them everything”: Daniels, 96.

“The men think I am not much”: HST to EW, September 8, 1918, HSTL.

“It was literally true”: Lee, 67.

Bennett Clark incident: Steinberg, 47.

“Well, I was scared green”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“September 10. Leave Coyviller”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“Who can ever forget”: Lee, 75.

“So slow was our progress”: Ibid, 72.

“American drive begins”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“The great adventure”: HST to EW, September 15, 1918, Dear Bess, 271.

“We were doing our best to finish”: HST to EW, September 15, 1918, HSTL.

“And there was an order out”: Floyd Ricketts, Oral History, HSTL.

“like a crazy man”: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

Tiernan’s coat: Ibid.

“The Colonel insults me shamefully”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“The weather was bad”: Ricketts, Oral History, HSTL.

“the history of the world”: Miller, 101.

“If all priests were like him: Ibid, 103.

“I stripped the battery for action”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“Everything was now in readiness”: Lee, 93.

“Just a word to you”: Toland, No Man’s Land, 403.

Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who took off: Ibid, 432.

“That gun squad worked”: Harry E. Murphy, Oral History, HSTL.

“My guns were so hot”: HST to EW, November 23, 1918, HSTL.

“confusing in the extreme”: Marshall, Memoirs of My Services in the World War, 160.

At a crossroads near Cheppy: Truman, “The Military Career of a Missourian,” HSTL.

“Truman didn’t panic”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“Truman sent back the data”: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“You know…when you’re in the artillery”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“The artillery fire has been something”: Minder, This Man’s War, 328.

“Well, men,” Miles said: Lee, 167.

“The coolness, the steady courage”: Ibid., 168.

“It isn’t as bad as I thought”: HST to EW, October 8, 1918, Dear Bess, 274.

“He was the Captain”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“The most terrific experience”: HST to EW, October 8, 1918, Dear Bess, 274.

“all the comforts of home”: HST to EW, October 30, 1918’, ibid., 276.

consistently clean and dapper: Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“where every time a shell lights”: HST to EW, November 1, 1918, Dear Bess, 277–78.

“When the moon rises”: HST to EW, October 30, 1918, ibid., 276.

sends a poppy: HST to EN, November 1, 1918, HSTL.

“He handed me a piece”: Meisburger quoted in Peoria Journal-Star, May 6, 1970.

“My battery fired the assigned barrages”: Weintraub, A Stillness Heard Round the World, 169.

“When the firing ceased”: Ibid.

“People went so wild”: Ibid, 170.

“You’ve no idea”: HST to EN, December 18, 1918, HSTL.

“We were just—”: Leigh, Oral History, HSTL.

“what you’d expect at the Gaiety”: HST to EN, December 18, 1918, HSTL.

Paris tour: HST to EW, November 29, 1918, Dear Bess, 283.

“as wild as any place”: HST to EN, December 18, 1918, HSTL.

“a dandy place”: HST to EW, November 29, 1918, Dear Bess, 283.

“beautifully sung”: HST to EW, December 18, 1918, ibid., 284.

“To keep from going crazy”: Steinberg, 50.

“Every day nearly someone”: HST to EW, January 12, 1919, Dear Bess, 292.

“Would as leave lost a son”: HST War Diary, HSTL.

“It’s some trick to keep”: HST to EN, January 20, 1919, HSTL.

the possibility of running for political office: HST to EW, November 1, 1918, Dear Bess, 277.

“I can’t see what on earth”: HST to EW, December 19, 1918, ibid., 287.

“thirsted for a West Point education”: HST to EW, December 14, 1918, ibid., 286.

“back to God’s country again”: HST to EW, November 1, 1918, ibid., 277.

“Maybe have a little politics”: HST to EW, December 14, 1918, ibid., 285.

“We’ll be married anywhere”: HST to EW, February 18, 1919, ibid., 296.

“You may invite the entire 35th Division”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 77.

“As far as we’re concerned”: HST to EN, January 20, 1919, HSTL.

he bought a wedding ring: Truman, 78.

violently seasick nearly the whole way: HST to EW, April 24, 1919, Dear Bess, 297–98.

Part Two

5. Try, Try Again

“I’ve had a few setbacks”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 70.

nineteenth-century man: Ibid., 43.

“I want you to be happy”: HST to EWT, July 9, 1925, Dear Bess, 319.

“It was characteristic”: Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 83.

“I have always wondered”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 127.

answering letters from the mothers and fathers: Miller, 97.

“Well, I remember when he came back”: Ethel Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

last heated argument: HST to EWT, June 29, 1949, Dear Bess, 558.

Truman wedding: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 79–80.

“I hope you have the same success”: Unidentified letter from member of Battery D, Waco, Texas, to HST, July 15, 1919; HSTL.

“Well, Mrs. Truman, you’ve lost Harry”: Ted Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

Mary Jane had cooked noon dinner: Miller, 107.

“You’ve just never seen such a radiant”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“a very, very difficult person”: Miller, 106.

“I didn’t know”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man of Independence, 100.

“Twelfth Street was in its heyday”: Ibid., 105–06.

“We’d all drop in”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“But Harry seemed glad”: Miller, Harry S. Truman, 155.

“You can’t quit them”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 92.

“I see no reason”: Unidentified letter to HST, December 14, 1919, HSTL.

“Well, sir, don’t forget me”: Eugene Donnelly to HST, October 4, 1920, HSTL.

“We’d have done anything for him”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 97.

husband never worked as hard: Ibid., 112.

Battery D reunion: E. J. Becker to HST, March 22, 1921, HSTL.

“He would get out and go’: Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

Dr. A. Gloom Chaser: HSTL.

war memorial ceremonies: Kansas City Times, October 17, 1921.

“That was when we took”: Quoted in Daniels, 119.

“high jinks”: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

a sign of anti-Semitism: Miller, Plain Speaking, 106.

Eddie’s frayed suit: Daniels, 109.

“It was a nice store”: Edgar Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“There goes Harry”: Gaylon Babcock, Oral History, HSTL.

“a nice boy”: HST to EWT, September 20, 1921, Dear Bess, 312.

“I’ve got friends”: Quoted in Reddig, Tom’s Town, 28.

“There is no kinder hearted”: Kansas City Times, March 26, 1892.

“No deserving man”: Quoted in Dorsett, The Pendergast Machine, 21.

reputation of saloon keepers: Kansas City Star files, undated.

“I never needed a crooked”: Quoted in Reddig, 32.

“His support of any man”: Ibid., 72.

“Brother Tom will make”: Ibid.

Thomas Joseph Pendergast: Ibid., 33.

“Yes. Why not?”: O. K. Armstrong, “Crusade in Kansas City,” This Week, March 13, 1938.

“He was a master!”: Matt Devoe, author’s interview.

“that fellow could probably talk”: Conn Withers, author’s interview.

“Oh, he was a wonderful man”: Geraldine Ketchum, author’s interview.

“No, I never had a sense of evil”: Monsignor Arthur Tighe, author’s interview.

Tom kept to himself: Mason, Truman and the Pendergasts, 33.

“You can’t make a man good”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1937.

“We have the theory”: Ibid.

“Let the river take its course”: Mason, 25.

“Politics is a business”: Kansas City Star, March 31, 1966.

“When a man’s in need”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1937.

happy to be “repeaters”: Ketchum, author’s interview.

woman in the hospital laundry: Ibid.

“Oh, I knew it was illegal”: Ibid.

“When we come over the hill”: Reddig, 34.

“Stealing elections”: Quoted in Mason, 46.

Fifty-Fifty Agreement: Dorsett, 62–63.

“enforcer of loyalty”: Reddig, 97.

“tenacious fighting type”: Unidentified obituary of Pendergast, September 2, 1929.

Mike passed over because of temper: Robert Pendergast, author’s interview.

idea of running Harry: Joseph and Catherine Pruett, author’s interview.

If Captain Truman was all Jim said: Ibid., and Robert Pendergast, author’s interview.

“They are trying to run me” HST to Ernest Schmidt, February 4, 1922, HSTL.

“Now, I’m going to tell you” Quoted in Daniels, 114.

“Old Tom Pendergast wanted”: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“Went into business all enthusiastic”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“I loved him as I did my own daddy”: Ibid.

“feeling fairly blue”: Daniels, 109.

“Well, I’ve got to eat”: Ibid., 110–.

“mess up” his life with politics: Ibid., 110–.

“They always like to pick winners”: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

auditorium at Lee’s Summit: Lee’s Summit Journal, March 9, 1922.

“thoroughly rattled”: Quoted in Truman, Mr. Citizen, 156.

“I was scared worse”: HST Diary, September 23, 1952, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record 271.

“I knew Harry Truman”: Stephen Slaughter, author’s interview.

“the poorest effort of a speech”: Hinde Oral History, HSTL.

“If you’re going to be in politics”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 128.

“We’d do whatever was necessary”: Ibid.

sacks of cement: Memoirs, Vol. I, 137.

to arrive by airplane: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“I am now going to tell you”: Independence Examiner, July 18, 1922.

“I want men for road overseers”: Quoted in Daniels, 142.

“You have heard it said”: Ibid., 118.

Edgar Hinde urged Harry: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“They didn’t just hate Catholics”: Quoted in Reddig, 113.

“The smell of old ‘alky’ ” Independence Examiner, August 1, 1922.

Shannon henchmen: Ibid., August 2, 1922.

Gibson’s 45-caliber: Ibid.

Fifty-fifty was finished: Kansas City Times, September 2, 1929.

“We ran the county”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 137.

“When a road project” Independence Examiner, July 9, 1919.

suffered a second miscarriage: Truman, 88.

“I wish you would send me”: HST to Ralph Truman, February 23, 1923, HSTL.

“It is now 10:20”: Quoted in Truman, 90.

She would wait for hours: Ibid.

“You be a good girl”: HST to EWT, July 21, 1923, Dear Bess, 314.

Nurse Kinnaman’s account of baby’s birth: From reporter Champ Clark’s files dated February 1951, Time-Warner archives.

“He has the most magnetic personality”: Quoted in Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 376–77.

“He kept his feelings to himself” Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 127.

“The record of the county court”: Kansas City Star, July 17, 1924.

“To even talk about throwing” Independence Sentinel, undated, General Family Files, HSTL.

Klan rally: Daniels, 126.

“You did what your gang told you”: Henry P. Chiles, Oral History, HSTL.

Kansas City Automobile Club: Autobiography, 59.

“This is almost like campaigning”: HST to EWT, November 9, 1926, Dear Bess, 323.

“If one thing did not work”: Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

called the Citizens Security: Daniels, 134–35.

“kind of a cold bird”: Mary Salisbury Bostian, author’s interview

“Anybody who’s ever been a friend”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“used me for his own ends”: Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“a no-good bastard”: Jonathan Daniels interview notes, September 25, 1949, HSTL.

run for county collector: Memoirs, Vol. I, 139.

Collector’s job: Daniels, 138.

“No criticism or scandals”: Independence Examiner, July 27, 1928.

“Every subject of debate”: New Republic, April 30, 1945.

“We intend to operate”: Independence Examiner, January 3, 1927.

spinning about in Judge Truman’s swivel chair: Robert Pendergast, author’s interview.

nervous breakdown: Ibid.

“You Can’t do it”: Quoted in Daniels, 145.

“I told the voters”: Ibid., 146.

“Here were hundreds of square miles”: Results of County Planning, 7, 9.

Farm on Blue Ridge Boulevard: Ibid., 97.

“Oh! If I were only John D. Rockefeller”: Pickwick Papers, HSTL.

“a loudmouthed, profane, vulgar”: FOIPA No. 297,745, FBI.

“What the hell do you do”: Ibid.

The facts about Canfil: Ibid.

“Fred’s a little rough” Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri., 257.

“Character excellent”: FOIPA No. 297,745, FBI.

an equestrain bronze of Andrew Jackson: Steinberg,95.

“I wanted a real man”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 139.

“that I either had to run away”: HST to EWT, February 12, 1931, Dear Bess, 343.

“and every person I’ve ever had”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

exceptionally fit: U.S. Army Personnel Records, 1925, 1936, HSTL.

“I haven’t had a headache”: HST to EWT, July 13, 1927, Dear Bess, 329.

“We didn’t have any equipment”: Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’ve been around Legion conventions”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“Three things ruin a man”: Quoted in New York Post December 29, 1972.

“I never wanted power”: Ibid.

Truman buying seat covers: Kansas City Star, November 14, 1990.

attempt to kidnap Margaret: From reporter Champ Clark’s file dated February 1951, Time-Warner archives.

“While it looks good”: HST to EWT, August 27, 1933, Dear Bess, 358.

“Politics should make a thief”: HST to EWT, May 7, 1933, ibid., 353.

“The Boss wanted me”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

Meeting with Pendergast: Daniels, 146–47.

Harry’s later account: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“Didn’t I tell you boys”: Daniels, 147.

“And That’s God’s truth”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 137.

“He, in times past”: “Pickwick Papers”, HSTL.

“Loved the ladies”: Ibid.

“Since childhood at my mother’s”: Ibid.

“This sweet associate of mine” Ibid.

Pendergast lecturing: Ibid.

To little Sue Ogden: Sue Ogden Bailey, author’s interview.

“And this was a disaster!”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

Sue Ogden’s memories: Bailey, author’s interview.

“I never heard a squabble’: Vietta Garr quoted in Kansas City Star, April 18, 1945.

“I was an only child”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“I could twist him”: Ibid.

“My manners were expected”: Truman, 109.

“Her presence”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“Yes, I spoiled him”; Kansas City Star April 18, 1945.

“She liked Mamma Truman”: Truman, 109.

Once when she offered food: J.C. Truman, author’s interview.

189The Capture of the Clever One: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“I want her to do everything”: HST to EWT, July 17, 1929, Dear Bess, 338.

“The car was washed” Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“Straight, absolutely straight”: Ibid.

“He read all the weather maps”: Ibid.

“How does Harry put up”: Mary Shaw Branton, author’s interview.

“It was very hard”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

picked Number 369: Sue Gentry in Independence Examiner, April 25, 1979.

Harpie Club: Daniels, 152.

“He liked his walk”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

the town directory: Independence City Directory, 1934.

“Just think of all those wasted years”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1930, Dear Bess, 339.

“Have you practiced your music?”: HST to EWT and MT, July 10, 1932, ibid., 347.

“You may yet be the first lady”: Daniel, 117.

over lunch with…Eric Sevareid: Sevareid, “A Truly Great Man,” McCall’s, March 1973.

“He loved politics”: Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

hadn’t he been a late bloomer: Noland, Oral History, HSTL.

“There, he struck his gait”: Ibid.

6. The Senator from Pendergast

“Friends don’t count”: Autobiography, 74.

Francis M. Wilson: Kansas City Star, February 2, 1982.

“It was my big day”: Autobiography, 71.

Excelsior Springs seclusion: Ibid.

“It will be much better”: HST to Robert Ragland, January 17, 1923, HSTL.

“long as the Big Boss”: HST to EWT, April 14, 1933, Dear Bess, 348.

“understood political situations”: Autobiography, 83.

Big Boss began letting votes go: Dorsett, The Pendergast Machine, 106–07.

“I had a fine talk”: HST to EWT, April 23, 1933, Dear Bess, 350.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: Kansas City Star, July 4, 1976.

McElroy would later claim: Art Brisbane, “Kansas City Needs an Honest Boss Tom,” Kansas City Star, May 3, 1982.

Pendergast would listen attentively: Kansas City Times, April 21, 1986.

“Why shouldn’t they be?”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 12, 1937.

“The machine did small favors”: Dorothy Davis Johnson, author’s interview.

“the most efficient city government”: Reddig, Tom’s Town, 128.

“kind of gentleness”: Monsignor Arthur Tighe, author’s interview.

“See…there just wasn’t any law”: John Doohan, author’s interview.

“The clubs stayed open all night”: Ibid.

Kidnapping of McElroy’s daughter: Reddig, 255–56.

“Now Jim”: Congressional Record, February 20, 1934.

“Union Station massacre”: Reddig, 257-59.

new county courthouse: Independence Examiner, September 7, 1933.

“During the six and one half years”: Ibid.

“During these years of strenuous service”: Ibid.

“maneuvered out”: Quoted in Memoirs, Vol. I, 141.

Truman meeting with Jim Pendergast and Aylward: James Aylward, Oral History, HSTL; correspondence in the collection of Joe and Catherine Pruett.

Pendergast offer to Joe Shannon: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 167.

“A very pleasant sort of fellow”: Quoted in Helm, Harry Truman, 32–33.

“Tomorrow, today, rather”: “Pickwick Papers,” HSTL.

“It was 104 yesterday”: Letter from Jim Pendergast to Kathleen Pendergast, postmarked July 4, 1934, Pruett Collection.

opening Truman rally: Kansas City Star, July 7, 1934.

“a congressman’s congressman”: Quoted in Childs, I Write from Washington, 96–97.

“wheels-with-wheels”: Ibid.

“It will be remembered that”: News-Press, July 6, 1934, Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Johnny Lazia killing: Kansas City Journal-Post, July 10, 1934.

“tell him I love him”: Ibid.

“There were at least ten thousand”: Jim Pendergast letter to Kathleen Pendergast, undated, Pruett Collection.

“It seems my old friend”: Kansas City Star, July 11, 1934.

a huge picnic in Clay County: News-Press, July 16, 1934, Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“For this bellhop of Pendergast’s”: Kansas City Star, July 29, 1934.

“Judge Truman is unobtrusive”: St. Louis Globe-Democrat (undated), Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“mendacity and imbecility”: El Dorado Springs (Missouri) Gazette, July 23, 1934.

“Why, Senator Clark is”: United Press, July 30, 1934, Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Since 1930, more than eighteen thousand: Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 29, July 1935.

“such as to make any human”: Kansas City Star, July 31, 1934.

“Fact is, I like roads”: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 37.

Canfil would check out room: HST to EWT, October 25, 1942, Dear Bess, 491.

scrapbook of the campaign: Fred Canfil Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“why, if Harry ever goes”: Kansas City Times, August 1, 1934.

On the day of the primary: Autobiography, 67.

“without significance”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 8, 1934.

a “push-over”: Autobiography, 68.

“skinny and all one color”: Mary Shaw Branton, author’s interview.

Fred Canfil descriptions: FOIPA No. 297,745, FBI.

“green as grass”: Quoted in Helm, 7.

Hatch and Schwellenbach friendly: Ibid., 70.

“He took the trouble”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 144.

“Harry, don’t start out with”: Ibid.

the Senator from Pendergast: Miller, Plain Speaking, 158.

“Here was a guy”: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri. 125.

“doglike devotion”: Quoted in Helm, 13.

“It was quite an event”: Steinberg, 130.

“He came to the Senate”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 1945.

“He was a better man”: Ibid.

his own passkey: Kansas City Journal-Post (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, 1933–41, HSTL.

“By the time his colleagues”: Ibid.

“If you will send us”: HST to L.T. Slayton, February 5, 1935, HSTL.

“political monster”: Congressional Record, February 30, 1935, 2352–59.

Thereafter Long refused to speak: Memoirs, Vol. I, 146.

“He sits in the back row”: Kansas City Journal-Post (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, 1933–41, HSTL.

“He speaks rarely”: Ibid.

“I’m going to be better informed”: HST to EWT, December 11, 1935, Dear Bess, 382.

“I’ll take all the dinners”: HST to EW, December 6, 1937, ibid., 408.

He burned them all: Memoirs, Vol. I, 157.

“I was a New Dealer from the start”: Ibid., 149.

“As the old political saying goes”: Quoted in Barkley, That Reminds Me, 155.

“I liked Harry”: Claude Pepper, author’s interview.

“a hot wave”: HST to EWT, August 15, 1935, Dear Bess, 377.

read Southall Freeman: HST to EWT, July 9, 1955, ibid., 369.

“No one has done more”: HST to EWT, August 19, 1935, ibid., 378.

“a grand big house”: HST to EWT, June 29, 1935, ibid., 366.

“Found a rather nice place”: HST to EWT, July 17, 1935, ibid., 372.

bus fare and bathing suit: HST to EWT, July 3, 1935, ibid., 367.

“big enough for two”: HST to EWT, December 5, 1937, ibid., 407.

“I am hoping to make”: HST to EWT, June 28, 1935, ibid., 365.

“Pendergast was as pleased”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1935, ibid., 374.

“as pleased to see me”: HST to EWT, August 11, 1935, ibid., 376.

“Pendergast and the very blond”: Childs, 111.

“Confidentially, I had a fine visit”: Lloyd C. Stark to HST, March 22, 1935, HSTL.

Pendergast at Wilson’s funeral: Kansas City Star archives.

“He won’t do”: Jonathan Daniels interview notes, November 12, 1949, HSTL; Daniels, The Man of Independence, 181.

“The old man had better judgment”: Quoted in Daniels, 181.

“the most grateful man”: Autobiography, 73.

“Kind of hard on Bennett”: HST to EWT, June 22, 1935, Dear Bess, 365.

“And while I heard”: Quoted in Helm, 10.

“The vast expenditures”: Childs, 110.

Pendergast ill: Kansas City Times, January 27, 1945.

“We all found Truman”: Quoted in Louchheim, ed., The Making of the New Deal, 243.

“But he showed no signs”: Ibid.

“When the Senator from Missouri”: Quoted in Steinberg, 127.

“He was always going out of his way”: Ibid., 126.

“Never in all the years”: Mildred Dryden, Oral History, HSTL.

liked Harry Truman “instinctively”: Barkley, 155.

“H. is worn out”: EWT to EN, undated, HSTL.

“tell” Harry how to vote: Helm, 51.

“Jim Aylward phoned me”: Ibid.

By going to Pendergast: Daniels, 180.

tired of being “pushed around”: Helm, 53.

“The pressure on me”: HST quoted in Barkley, 155–56.

“I always admired him”: Ibid.

“I just can’t stand it”: HST to EWT, January 5, 1935, Dear Bess, 391.

he “played hooky”: HST to EWT, February 11, 1937, ibid., 397.

“This so-called committee work”: HST to EWT, November 7, 1937, ibid., 403.

“Not once did I ever see him”: Quoted in Helm, 11.

“a sense of continually being tired”: U.S. Army Medical Records, September 13, 1937, HSTL.

“They are charming people”: HST to Marvin Mclntyre, October 11, 1936, FDRL.

“That son-of-a-bitch”: Steinberg, 167.

“A couple of kids”: HST to EWT, October 29, 1937, Dear Bess, 402.

“Today is my father’s birthday”: HST to EWT, December 5, 1937, ibid., 407.

Brandeis teas: Daniels, 185–86.

“slightly awesome institution”: Childs, 43.

not accustomed to meeting such people: Daniels, 186.

Brandeis had spent more time: HST to EWT, December 13, 1937, Dear Bess, 409.

“It was a rather exclusive”: HST to EWT, December 13, 1937, ibid., 100.

“certainly in agreement on the dangers”: HST quoted in Miller, 151.

December 20, 1937, speech: Congressional Record, December 20, 1937, 2482–95.

“It probably will catalogue me”: HST to EWT, December 12, 1937, Dear Bess, 409.

The speech was front-page news: The New York Times, December 21, 1937.

Max Lowenthal comments about pressure: Daniels, 185.

“an innate part of his personality”: Gosnell, Truman’s Crises, 129.

“We must not close our eyes”: Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Pendergast betting: Reddig, 278; Kansas City Star, December 27, 1974.

“Don’t ever take any money”: Quoted in Kansas City Star, March 1, 1984.

Truman speech on February 15, 1938: Congressional Record, February 15, 1938, 1962–64.

“The manner in which the juries”: John Oliver, author’s interview.

“in view of my speech”: Kansas City Star, September 15, 1978.

“They figure they’ll need”: HST to EWT, November 17, 1938, Dear Bess, 412.

“If it is true”: Reddig, 303–04.

“Please help Sam Finklestein”: T.J. Pendergast to HST, undated, HSTL.

“I am sure he had”: Helm, 47.

“I am very sorry”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, undated, Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“The terrible things”: HST to EWT, October 1, 1939, HSTL.

“He was broke”: Edgar Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

“Looks like everybody got rich”: HST to EWT, October 27, 1939, Dear Bess, 426.

“I believe if I did know him”: Kansas City Star, May 22, 1939.

“At no time”: Quoted in Daniels, 196.

“He has earned the high estimate”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 12, 1939.

“If Governor Stark runs”: Associated Press (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“I do not think”: HST to EWT, August 8, 1939, Dear Bess, 418.

“Tell them to go to hell”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 130.

“the wise boys”: Quoted in Drew Pearson column (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Washington premiere: HST to EWT, October 18, 1939, Dear Bess, 426.

mortgage on the farm: Daniels, 192.

“mighty blue”: HST to EWT, September 22, 1939, Dear Bess, 419.

“I am of the opinion”: Miscamble, “The Evolution of an Internationalist,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, August 1977.

“You know it makes some of us”: HST to EW, November 11, 1939, Dear Bess, 428.

“a pleasure trip”: HST to EWT, November 16, 1939, ibid., 430.

“a regular fellow”: HST to EWT, November 22, 1939, ibid., 431.

“This, you know”: HST to EWT, December 1, 1939, ibid., 432.

“I guess I’m not built”: HST to EWT, December 1, 1939, ibid.

“Harry, I don’t think”: Quoted in Daniels, 198.

“if he gets only two votes”: Quoted in Helm, 126.

reelection announcement: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 5, 1940.

opposed to FDR third term: Ibid.

“There is no indispensable man”: Hassett, “The President Was My Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, November 28, 1953.

“We borrowed clerks”: John Snyder, Oral History, HSTL.

“A United States Senator…sleeping”: Quoted in Miller, 166.

“At sixteen”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 139.

“While the President is unreliable”: HST to EWT, September 24, 1939, Dear Bess, 420.

Bernard Baruch contribution: Byrnes, All in One Lifetime, 101.

America “ought to sell”: Miscamble, “Evolution of an Internationalist.”

Tom Evans, who was twelve years: Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

“Cut your speech”: Quoted in Daniels, 202.

“I just wanted to come down”: Ibid.

“I believe in”: HST quoted in Helm, 137.

“When we are honest enough”: Speech before National Colored Democratic Association Convention, July 14, 1940, HSTL.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch cartoon: March 29, 1940.

“enough errors to give me”: Quoted in Daniels, 205

“The decent, honest”: St. Louis Globe-Democrat (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

Truman urged to release letter: Daniels, 205.

Stark’s chauffeur: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 141.

“Lloyd’s ambitions”: Ibid., 132–33.

foreclosure on farm: Kansas City Star, July 17, 1940, Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

thought he was having a heart attack: HST to EWT, November 15, 1941, Dear Bess, 468.

the shame she would feel: HST to EWT, August 13, 1940, ibid., 442.

“I’m thinking August 6”: HST to EWT, June 23, 1940, ibid., 440.

“Will call you from Sedalia”: Ibid.

“Anyway we found out”: HST to EWT, August 9, 1940, ibid., 441.

“He finally ended up”: Daniels, 209.

Bob Hannegan: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 24, 1944.

“Well…I guess”: Hinde, Oral History, HSTL.

it was Bess who answered: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 145.

“the machine vote”: Lloyd C. Stark to FDR, August 9, 1940, FDRL.

“I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes”: HST to EWT, August 10, 1940, Dear Bess, 441.

“Has my certification of election”: Edwin A. Halsey, telegram to HST, December 13, 1940, HSTL.

7. Patriot

“War has many faces”: Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream, 164.

“Locksley Hall” poem in wallet: Hillman, ed., Mr. President, 206.

“As I watched those white fires”: Quoted in Flower and Reeves, eds., The Taste of Courage, 135.

“We have everything to lose”: Kansas City Times, May 2, 1941.

Clark was destroying himself: HST to EWT, October 3, 1941, Dear Bess, 466.

“My relief of mind”: Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope, 59.

Marshall told him he was too old: HST “Autobiographical Sketch,” HSTL.

Washington a different city: Green, Washington, 466–73; Brinkley, Washington Goes to War.

“a little investigation”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 165.

automobile odysseys: Ibid.

“getting ruined…And there were men”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 175.

“There’s too much that is wrong”: Helm, Harry Truman, 151.

“It is a considerable sin”: Schlesinger and Bruns, Congress Investigates. A Documented History, 1792–1974, 3121.

it “must be assumed that”: Pogue, 108.

Nye Committee: Baruch, Public Years, 269.

“The thing to do”: Time, March 8, 1943.

Byrnes $10,000 committee funding: Memoirs, Vol. I, 166.

“Looks like I’ll get something”: HST to EWT, March 19, 1941, Dear Bess, 456.

“The political situation”: HST to EWT, August 1, 1939, ibid., 416.

Hugh Fulton: Memoirs, Vol. I, 167.

departure of Messall: Tom Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

“What are you fishing for?” Executive Session, June 8, 1942, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA.

“You give a good leader”: Papers of George C. Marshall, Vol. 2, 483.

“There was no attempt”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 171.

saved the government $250 million: Riddle, The Truman Committee, 147.

gallbladder attack: U.S. Army Medical Records, 1941, HSTL; Truman, Bess W. Truman, 200–01.

“My standing in the Senate”: HST to EWT, June 19, 1941, Dear Bess, 457.

“If we see that Germany”: The New York Times, June 24, 1941.

“Last year he ran”: U.S. Army Medical Records, 1941, HSTL.

pressed by Vandenberg: Schlesinger and Bruns, 3127.

“Well I spent yesterday”: HST to EWT, August 21, 1941, Dear Bess, 461–62.

“studious avoidance of dramatics”: Salter, ed., Public Men In and Out of Office, 12.

“’Slightly built, bespectacled”: Tri-County News, Long City, Missouri (undated), Messall Scrapbooks, HSTL.

“Mr. Lewis, you are not seriously”: John L. Lewis testimony, March 26, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA, 55.

“Standard Oil” and I. G. Farben: HST Broadcast, “Rubber in America,” Blue Network, June 15, 1942, printed copy, HSTL.

“First of all”: Truman before Senate, October 29. Congressional Record, 77th Congress, 1st Sess., 1941, Vol. XXCVII, 8303.

The record of the OPM: January 15, 1942, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, 77th Congress, 2nd Sess., 6.

Lilienthal on war with Japan: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. I, 408.

“No matter what happens”: Boardman, From Harding to Hiroshima, 250.

“We have fought to get you”: Schlesinger and Bruns, 3131.

“Well at last I am sitting”: HST to EN, December 14, 1941, HSTL.

“Harry Truman was one of the”: Riedel, Halls of the Mighty, 173–75.

it would “impair our activity”: Gosnell, Truman’s Crises, 161.

unanimous reports: McCune and Beal, “The Job That Made Truman President,” Harper’s, June 1945.

“so close that a chorus girl”: Sevareid, 213.

“the return of Ceres”: HST to EWT, April 26, 1942, Dear Bess, 473.

Still he couldn’t sleep: HST to EWT, April 30, 1942, ibid., 474.

he called for a second front: Miscamble, “Evolution of an Internationalist,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, August 1977.

“If I were the executive”: Closed Hearing on Wright Aeronautical Corporation, May 24, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA, 13.

Glenn Martin Company: Memoirs, 184.

Carnegie-Illinois Steel hearing: March 23, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA, 820.

Stewart testimony: Ibid., 817.

“He cheated more than he was supposed”: Ibid., 833.

McGarrity testimony: Ibid., 837.

Irwin Works investigation: Ibid., 843–74.

“I don’t know anything about”: Ibid., 886.

Benjamin Fairless testimony: Ibid., 896–97.

asked by a reporter for his personal comment: Washington Post, March 24, 1943.

Canol Project: Testimony of General Brehon Somervell, December 20, 1943, Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, United States Senate, NA.

“The committee damns it up and down”: Drury, A Senate Journal, 29.

“all the desperate assertions”: Ibid.

reading Shakespeare and Plutarch: HST to EWT, June 18, 1942, Dear Bess, 477.

as if he had just stepped: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“One day in a typical”: Riedel, 174.

“I went up to the front desk”: The New Yorker, November 23, 1987.

“I am more surprised every day”: HST to EWT, August 21, 1942, Dear Bess, 487.

“The man from Missouri”: Pepper, with Gorey, Pepper, 129.

never heard him even try: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“One time, one Christmas”: Ardis Haukenberry, author’s interview.

“You have a good mind”: HST to MT, March 13, 1942, Truman, Letters from Father, 40.

“Tell my baby”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1942, Dear Bess, 480–81.

to “only just drop in”: HST to EWT, April 30, 1942, ibid., 474.

“Well this is the day”: HST to EWT, June 28, 1942, ibid., 480.

“one of the most useful”: Helm, 228.

Truman and his committee known nationwide: Washington Star (undated), HSTL.

that “often a threat”: Business Week, June 26, 1943.

The whole country was greatly indebted: The Nation, January 24, 1942.

“objectivity at the total expense”: Krock, Memoirs, 220.

286Look poll: May 16, 1944.

He spoke at a huge rally: Chicago Daily News, April 15, 1943.

“hotels, filling stations”: HST to EWT, December 21, 1939, Dear Bess, 436.

merely talking about the Four Freedoms: Chicago Daily News, April 15, 1943.

Summer 1943 speaking tour: Miscamble, “The Evolution of an Internationalist.”

“History has bestowed”: Ibid.,

“We want aluminum”: Schlesinger and Bruns, 3129.

saved…as much as $15 billion: Memoirs, Vol. I, 186.

“He seems to be a generally”: Drury, 29.

“There are a number of times”: Ibid, 106.

“Now that’s a matter”: Telephone conversation between HST and Stimson, June 17, 1943, HSTL

“I know something about”: HST to Lewis Schwellenbach, July 15, 1943, HSTL.

“In my humble opinion”: Memorandum to Mildred Dryden, December 3, 1943, HST Senate Papers, HSTL.

“I have sent an investigator”: HST to Senator Thomas, November 30, 1943, HST Senate Papers, HSTL.

“COLONEL MATHIAS”: Fred Canfil to HST, December 7, 1943, HSTL.

“Whenever he finds out”: HST to EWT, October 25, 1942, Dear Bess, 491.

“The United States was engaged”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 100–01.

“He threatened me with dire consequences”: Stimson Diary, Yale University.

8. Numbered Days

being talked of as candidate: HST to EW, May 7, 1943, HSTL.

“Leadership is what we Americans”: Truman, “We Can Lose the War,” American Magazine, November 1942.

key man in the “conspiracy”: Quoted in HST memorandum to Jonathan Daniels, HSTL.

Flynn admires Wallace: The New Yorker, September 8, 1945.

First meeting with FDR: Flynn, You’re the Boss; Allen, Presidents Who Have Known Me.

“I felt that he would never”: Flynn, 179.

Secretly, he was under: Bishop, FDR’s Last Year, 94.

Hannegan on Wallace: Brown, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, A Remembrance (manuscript), 255–56.

Byrnes influence on FDR: Ibid., 259.

“I did conclude”: Quoted in Byrnes, All in One Lifetime, 221.

“Now, partner”: Quoted in Brown, 258.

somebody else “we have got”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man from Missouri, 243.

Loss of New York: Flynn, 180.

“The Negro has not only”: Quoted in Brown, 264–66.

When they went through the list: Flynn, 181.

“His record as head”: Ibid.

FDR asked a favor: Anna Rosenberg, author’s interview.

smuggle in jars of caviar: Ibid.

“I don’t want to be”: Quoted in Helm, Harry Truman, 220.

the word from “informed sources”: Drury, A Senate Journal, 215–16.

“The Madam doesn’t want”: Max Lowenthal, Oral History, HSTL.

“It is funny”: HST to MT, July 9, 1944, Margaret Truman, Letters from Father, 55.

“opened up on politics”: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 361.

“Mr. President, if you can find”: Ibid., 362.

“Think of the catcalls”: Ibid.

“It was as though”: Drury, 216.

“Jimmy Byrnes”: Quoted in Brown, 269.

the decisive meeting: Allen, 128–29.

“I gathered that he felt”: Ickes Diary, July 16, 1944, LC.

“the only one who had”: Wallace, 366.

a new Gallup Poll: Allen, 130.

“Well, I am looking”: Wallace, 367.

“Look at the expressions”: Quoted in Brown, 276.

“Mr. President, all I have heard”: Ibid.

“You are the best qualified”: Quoted in Byrnes, 222.

“I don’t understand it”: Ibid., 223.

“I told them so”: Ibid, 224–25.

“We have to be”: Ibid.

Byrnes went directly down: Ibid.

Truman accepted at once: Ibid., 226.

Truman to nominate Barkley: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 189.

As Alben Barkley would write: Ibid., 190.

Arthur Krock: The New York Times, July 16, 1944.

“Roosevelt could, of course”: Allen, 130.

“The train stood”: Tully, F.D.R., My Boss, 276.

“Dear Bob”: Robert Hannegan to FDR, July 14, 1944, HSTL.

“By naming Truman”: Tully, 276.

“The President has given”: Quoted in Byrnes, 226.

“Well, you know Jimmy”: Ibid., 226–27.

Hannegan showing note to no one: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 21, 1944.

He was determined to stay out: Salter, ed., Public Men In and Out of Office. 4–5.

“Hell, I don’t want”: Ibid.

“I don’t want that”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 183.

“I’m satisfied”: Tom Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

Writing years later, Margaret: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 227.

they “got Truman”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’m sure he wanted”: Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 203.

it wasn’t so much: John Snyder, author’s interview.

“that miserable time”: HST to Mrs. Emmy Southern, May 13, 1945, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 23.

“scared to death”: Childs, “He Didn’t Want the Job,” Liberty, September 23, 1944.

“I have been associated”: Washington Post, July 18, 1944.

“the coolest and cruelest”: Drury, 218.

“already soaring campaign stock”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 18, 1944.

“It was generally regarded”: Claude Pepper, author’s interview.

Hannegan’s corner suite: Life, July 31, 1944.

“Do you want to see it?”: Washington Post, July 28, 1944.

“Clear it with Sidney”: Quoted in Byrnes, 227.

Sidney Hillman: Time, July 24, 1944.

Hillman’s support: HST “Autobiographical Sketch,” HSTL.

“It’s Byrnes!”: Quoted in Flynn, 182.

“I browbeat the committee”: Ibid.

200,000 Negro votes: Byrnes, 228.

“Bob, it’s Truman”: Steinberg, 213.

An hour or so later: Byrnes, 229.

Turner Catledge account: The New York Times, July 19, 1944.

“If I were you”: Quoted in Barkley, 190.

“Feel sorry for me”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 19, 1944.

secret caucus: Time, July 31, 1944.

“the stage manager”: Barkley, 191.

“Whenever Roosevelt”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 192.

“Oh, shit”: George Elsey, Notes, Ayers Papers, HSTL.

“Well, if that’s the situation”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 193.

“Ye gods!”: Truman, Souvenir, 66.

“In a political”: Wallace, 368; Time, July 31, 1944.

“What is the job”: Quoted in Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 507.

“I sat there”: Claude Pepper, author’s interview.

“And then when I got”: Ibid.

“So I called Bob”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 194.

Martha Ellen Truman: Ibid., 149.

Interviewed by reporters: Washington Star, July 20, 1944.

Bennett Clark…pulled himself together: Miller, 194.

“a good deal of pressure”: The New York Times, July 22, 1944.

Truman and hot dog: Truman, Souvenir, 67.

“Christ Almighty”: Time, July 31, 1944.

he accepted “with all humility”: The New York Times, July 22, 1944.

“Now, give me a chance”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1944.

“the Missouri Compromise”: Life, July 31, 1944.

“the Common Denominator”: Kansas City Star, July 22, 1944.

“I don’t object to Truman”: Baruch, The Public Years, 339.

one of the weakest candidates: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 23, 1944,

“the mousy little man”: Time, July 31, 1944.

“Poor Harry Truman”: New Republic, July 31, 1944.

“unusual capacity”: Kansas City Star, July 22, 1944.

“He has known the dust”: The New York Times, July 22, 1944.

an excellent choice: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1944.

Even Richard Strout: New Republic, July 31, 1944.

“On the credit side”: Drury, 220.

“Are we going to have to”: Quoted in Truman, Bess W. Truman, 231.

“Dad tried to be cheerful”: Ibid., 233.

Margaret learns of grandfather’s suicide: Ibid., 234.

“He seized my arm”: Ibid.

“I wish I could tell you”: Ibid., 235.

looking over the old gray Victorian house: Life, August 21, 1944.

“I had hoped”: Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War, 20–21.

the critical part played by Ed Flynn: The New Yorker, September 8, 1945.

“People seemed to think”: Daniels, 259.

his father’s “irritability”: Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R., 351–52.

FDR seizure: Ibid.

FDR lunch with Truman: There has been speculation that at this lunch Roosevelt told Truman about the atomic bomb. The source is an interview with Truman’s friend Tom Evans made many years later as part of the Truman Library’s oral history program. There is no possibility that it is correct, since the President’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, was also present at the lunch, as were a half dozen or so photographers, cameramen, and servants. Nor would Roosevelt have brought up the matter on such an occasion in any event.

“I wonder why we are made”: HST to EWT, December 28, 1945, Off the Record, 75.

“I am not a deep thinker”: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 373.

“smarter by far”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 176.

FDR told Truman not to travel: Memoirs, Vol. I, 5.

FDR’s hand shook: Truman, Harry S. Truman, p. 203.

“You should have seen”: Ibid., 201.

He was greatly concerned: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

Ed McKim and Truman: McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“Harry is a fine man”: Hatch, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 376.

“There never was a greater”: HST to EWT, June 15, 1946, Dear Bess, 526.

“He’s so damn afraid”: HST to EWT, December 21, 1941, ibid., 470.

“You know how it is”: Drury, 327.

“he lies”: Ickes Diary, December 16, 1944, LC.

“Harry, what the hell”: Quoted in Miller, 199; also Miller Tapes, LBJL.

“You can’t afford”: Audio Collection, HSTL.

Recruitment of Matt Connelly: Matt Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’m glad to see you, Harry”: Steinberg, 225.

it was “the farmer-neighborliness”: McNaughton and Hehmeyer, This Man Truman, 182.

Truman dream about FDR: Pearson, “The Man Who Didn’t Want to Be President,” Vertical file, HSTL, April 16, 1945.

A rumor spread: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 204.

Klan story: Hearst papers, October 26, 1944.

Curley speech: Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

Chicago Tribune attacks: October 17, 1944.

“hotter than a depot stove”: HST to EWT, July 25, 1945, Dear Bess, 521.

Teamsters appearance: Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 523.

“He improved visibly”: Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 825.

“I was shocked”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 240.

“And he knew”: Harry Easley, Oral History, HSTL.

“I still think”: Quoted in Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R., 294.

only if it was “absolutely urgent”: Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR, 6.

“The amiable Missourian”: Time, February 5, 1945.

“He circulated around”: Gunther, Procession, 256–57.

Truman answered, “People”: Ibid., 260.

“the most natural thing”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 1945.

“Harry looks better than he has”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 247.

“I used to get down here”: HST to MET and MJT, April 11, 1945, Off the Record, 13.

“Truman says simply”: Frank McNaughton Papers, December 14, 1944, HSTL.

Pendergast’s death: Washington Post, January 27, 1945.

Pendergast funeral: Miller, 210.

“I was just a kid”: Lauren Bacall, author’s interview.

“Anything can happen”: Washington Post, February 11, 1945.

Bess was furious: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 245.

“I saw the President”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 3.

April 12 Pendergast letter: T.J. Pendergast to HST, April 7, 1945, HSTL.

“We will see”: Ibid.

“It’s wonderful, this Senate”: Drury, 410.

Senator Hawkes: Congressional Record, April 12, 1945, 3284.

Senator Reed: Ibid, 3285.

“I have a Missouri”: Remarks by Former President Harry S. Truman, 88th Congress, 2nd Sess, Sen. Doc. No. 88, May 8, 1964.

remarked…that Roosevelt was fortunate: Drury, 410.

“Truman doesn’t know”: Ibid.

“Dear Mamma and Mary”: HST to MET and MJT, April 12, 1945, HSTL.

Tells Harry Vaughan: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

“Steve Early wants you”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 4.

as “quickly and as quietly”: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

“I ran all the way”: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

“Harry, the President is dead”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 5.

“Is there anything we”: Ibid.

Part Three

9. The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets

“So ended an era”: Drury, A Senate Journal, 412.

“Yes, it’s true”: Quoted in Yank, 122.

“The armies and fleets”: The New York Times, April 13, 1945.

Stettinius…with tears streaming: Memoirs, Vol. I, 6.

“It was a very somber”: Stimson Diary, April 12, 1945, Yale University.

Margaret feeling as if under anesthesia: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 229.

Truman would later tell his mother: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

first decision as President: HST Diary, April 12, 1945, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 15–16.

brief remarks to the Cabinet: Memoirs, Vol. I, 9–10.

a matter of utmost urgency: Ibid., 10.

had conducted himself admirably: Stimson Diary, April 12, 1945.

“I guess the party’s off’: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

immediately to sleep: Miller, Plain Speaking, 215.

“What a great, great tragedy”: Lilienthal, Journals, April 14, 1945, Vol. I, 693.

“From a distance”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 429.

“It seems very unfortunate”: Ibid.

Eisenhower shaken: Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, 763–64.

Lester Atwell: Quoted in Flower and Reeves, eds., The Taste of Courage, 996.

“He’s got the stuff’: Quoted in McNaughton Papers, April 13, 1945, HSTL

“a grand person”: Vandenberg, ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, April 13, 1945, 167.

“Oh, I felt good”: John J. McCloy, author’s interview.

He was straightforward: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 104.

“I hate to confess it”: Stone, The War Years 1939–1945, 274.

“GET IN THERE”: Telegram from Jim Pendergast to HST, April 12, 1945, HSTL.

“I can’t really be glad”: Quoted in Off the Record, 17.

“a jewel”: HST Diary, April 15, 1945, ibid., 19.

“There have been few men”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 13.

Truman later wrote: Ibid., 29.

“It seemed still”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man of Independence, 27.

“Eddie, I’m sorry”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 234.

“everything from Teheran”: HST Diary, April 13, 1945, Off the Record, 17.

“What a test”: Kansas City Star, April 15, 1945.

Truman left the White House: Drury, 412.

“Isn’t this nice”: Quoted in ibid., 413.

“Boys, if you ever pray”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 19.

“For just a moment”: Drury, 413.

“executive contempt for Congress”: Vandenberg, April 13, 1945, 167.

Stettinius report: Quoted in Memoirs, Vol. I, 15.

“never did talk”: Truman, Letters from Father, March 3, 1948, 106.

“It is needless”: Washington Post, April 13, 1945.

“I’m President Truman”: Paul Horgan, Oral History, HSTL.

“I still can’t call”: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 448.

“He’s the only one”: HST to Eleanor Roosevelt, September 1, 1945, Off the Record, 63.

“Have confidence”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 197.

“I have come down here”: Quoted in Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography, 311–12.

“No…He just made it”: HST Diary, April 14, 1945, Off the Record, 18.

not on trial: Bishop, FDR’S Last Year, 646.

“But after all”: Morgenthau, Diaries, Vol. III, 423.

“Terrible”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 31.

“Mr. President”: Ibid, 42.

“With great humility”: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Harry S. Truman…(cited hereafter as PP, HST), April 16, 1945, 2.

“bond of friendship”: Washington Star, April 17, 1945.

“At this moment”: PP, HST, April 16, 1945, 3.

“He’s one of us”: McNaughton Papers, April 14, 1945, HSTL.

“your ability to discharge”: Henry Luce to HST, April 17, 1945, HSTL.

“May I say”: Archibald John Brier to HST, April 17, 1945.

“Good luck, Harry”: Quoted in Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 19.

“Well, I have had”: HST to MET and MJT, April 16, 1945, HSTL.

First press conference: PP, HST, April 17, 1945, 8–13.

“direct” performance: Leahy, I Was There, 349.

lived five lifetimes: Memoirs, Vol. I, 53.

Three days later: PP, HST, April 20, 1945, 16–19.

“naturally smart boy”: Newsweek, August 15, 1949.

“He made first-class citizens”: George Tames, author’s interview.

“Stick with me”: Quoted in Smith, ed., Merriman Smith’s Book of Presidents: A White House Memoir, 56.

“He was alert”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“See, with President Roosevelt”: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“tragically inadequate”: Daniels, 27.

“To the White House this morning”: Hassett, “The President Was My Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, November 28, 1953.

“Missourians are most in evidence”: Ayers Diary, April 17, 1945, HSTL.

“the lounge of the Lion’s Club”: Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 13.

McKim was “weird”: Jonathan Daniels, Oral History, HSTL.

Prohibition gangster: Ayers Diary, April 17, 1945, HSTL.

“We were all a strange lot”: Rosenman, “Harry S. Truman: Man from Independence,” American Heritage (unpublished), 70.

“Well, he was a sergeant”: Matt Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

“The fact is”: Ayers Diary, May 14, 1945, HSTL.

“balance and tact”: Ibid.

“Tell them I don’t authorize”: Harry Vaughan, Oral History, HSTL.

“Hoover’s hatred”: Sullivan, The Bureau, 38.

“We want no Gestapo”: HST Memorandum, May 12, 1945, Off the Record, 22.

“honest and friendly”: Quoted in Churchill, The Second World War. Vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy, 484.

“He’ll make enemies”: Drury, 418.

“I don’t think you know”: Samuel Rosenman, Oral History, HSTL.

“It was a wonderful relief’: Stimson Diary, April 18, 1945.

“Changes in the battle situation”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 51.

Leahy was struck: Leahy, 348.

“to get on the inside”: Rigdon, with Derieux, White House Sailor, 183.

“I pray you believe”: Quoted in Snyder, The War, 520.

“a keen appreciation”: Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, 233.

“And anyway the Russians”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 70–71.

“I can testify”: Quoted in Halle, The Cold War as History, 38.

“Averell is right”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 255.

“It would be one”: Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 437.

“We must not permit”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 437.

“Russia will emerge”: OSS File, April 2, 1945, HSTL.

April 6 cable: Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 201.

not a man of his word: Morgan, F.D.R., A Biography, 762.

“minor misunderstandings”: Harriman and Abel, 439–40.

“I would minimize”: Ibid.

“barbarian invasion”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 73.

happy with 85 percent: Gaddis, 203.

“The White House upstairs”: Quoted in Truman, Bess W. Truman, 260.

like a ghost house: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 58.

“go to hell”: Quoted in Forrestal Diaries, 50.

“for fear we are rushing”: Stimson Diary, April 23, 1945.

Forrestal strongly disagreed: Forrestal Diaries, 50.

no intention of issuing: Memoirs, Vol. I, 78.

“until we have done”: Ibid., 79.

“I am very sorry”: Stimson Diary, April 23, 1945.

“I have never been talked to”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 82.

Bohlen’s account: Bohlen, Witness to History, 213.

“a little taken aback”: Harriman and Abel, 453.

the best news he had heard: Vandenberg, 176.

“I think it is very important”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 85.

“Mr. President, I don’t like”: Quoted in Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, 609.

“a real man”: HST to Jonathan Daniels, February 26, 1950, unsent, Off the Record, 174.

“Within four months”: Stimson Diary, April 25, 1945.

“The President took”: Ibid.

Truman told him to go ahead: Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 616.

“The President did not show”: Quoted in Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 293.

“This is a big project”: Quoted in Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 625.

“It might perhaps”: Quoted in Sherwin, 284.

Truman measurements: Paul Shinkman to Eben Ayers, May 10, 1945, HSTL.

“It’s a tough job”: Stone, The War Years. 1939–1945, 281–82.

“He ought to surrender it”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 91.

“at a brisk trot”: West, with Kotz, 61.

“We have received so much mail”: MJT to HST, April 24, 1945, HSTL.

“I do hope”: MJT to HST, May 1, 1945, HSTL.

“I arrived home”: MJT to HST, May 7, 1945, HSTL.

“You both have done”: HST to MET and MJT, April 21, 1945, HSTL.

“This is a solemn”: PP, HST, May 8, 1945, 44.

“straight one-two to the jaw”: Sherwin, 172.

“like people from across”: Wallace, 450–51.

“His sincerity”: Ayers Diary, May 26, 1945, HSTL.

“show them how much”: Churchill, 437.

“it is my present intention”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 216.

“Mr. President, in these next two months”: Churchill, 497.

May 12 Churchill telegram: Gilbert, Winston Churchill. Never Despair, 6.

“It is a very, very hard position”: HST to Mrs. Emmy Southern, May 13, 1945, Off the Record, 23.

“air of quiet confidence”: Eden, Memoirs, 621.

“To have a reasonably”: HST Diary, May 22, 1945, Off the Record, 35.

Martha Ellen Truman’s visit: The New York Times, May 12, 1945.

prefer to sleep on the floor: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 266.

“Oh, you couldn’t help but”: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“My bedroom is pink”: Truman, Souvenir, 98.

story of the old-fashioneds: West, with Kotz, 75.

“stand no fakers”: Fields, My 21 Years at the White House, 122.

“correct but not formal”: West, 58.

“He knew when a stenographer’s”: Smith, 60.

“this was the first time”: Fields, 120.

“Not built right”: HST to EW, March 19, 1941, Dear Bess, 455.

“The President seemed relieved”: Quoted in Donovan, 28.

“And that was about all”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. I, 698.

“Saw Herbert Hoover”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 40.

“I can’t understand it”: HST Diary, May 27, 1945, ibid., 38.

“push ahead as fast”: Quoted in Rhodes, 646.

“visual effect of an atomic bombing”: Quoted in Sherwin, 208.

“with reluctance”: Quoted in Wyden, Day One, 163.

“a remarkable document”: Ibid., 154.

“The idea of”: Yale University Atomic Bomb File, HSTL.

“Have been going through”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 39.

“as a new weapon”: Stimson Diary, May 31, 1945.

June 6 Stimson meeting: Stimson Diary, June 1 and 6, 1945.

“What a puny effort”: C. L. Sulzberger, World War II, 114.

“outdoing Hitler”: Stimson Diary, June 6, 1945.

“the earliest possible date”: Quoted in Morison, 621.

“The ultimate responsibility”: Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 617.

“straight military objective”: Cray, General of the Army, 538.

“We must offset”: Quoted in Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman 1945–1959, 17.

“The opinions of our scientific”: Quoted in Bundy, Danger and Survival, 71.

“shock value”: Stimson, On Active Service, 617.

“We regarded the matter”: Quoted in Mosley, Marshall, 337–38.

“only by men”: Quoted in Rhodes, 637.

“His general demeanor”: Quoted in Wyden, 143.

“render the Russians”: Ibid., 142.

“Oppenheimer didn’t share”: Ibid., 143.

“the damn thing”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 54.

“We are on our way”: Quoted in Truman, Souvenir, 109.

“I hope—sincerely hope”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 40.

“Don’t think over six”: Ibid.

“Just two months ago”: HST to EWT, June 12, 1945, Dear Bess, 515–16.

“He’s a nice fellow”: HST to EWT, June 19, 1945, Ibid., 516.

“I’m always so lonesome”: HST Diary, June 1, 1945, Off the Record, 40.

A Gallup Poll: Donovan, 21.

“And as usual”: Ayers Diary, June 18, 1945, HSTL.

“Nothing really important”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. I, 92.

“always been our friends”: HST Diary, June 7, 1945, Off the Record, 44.

First time Hopkins thanked: Miller, 225.

“Mr. Prima Donna”: HST Diary, June 17, 1945, Off the Record, 47.

“He wants an estimate”: Quoted in Sherwin, 336.

“I have to decide”: HST Diary, June 17, 1945, Off the Record, 47.

June 18, 1945, meeting: Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, 10.

“We were beginning”: John J. McCloy, author’s interview.

June 26, 1945, speech: PP, HST, June 26, 1945.

“Dad loved”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 266.

“I shall attempt”: HST, Speech Files, June 27, 1945, HSTL.

“I am anxious”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 279–280.

July 2, 1945, speech: PP, HST, July 2, 1945, 153–55.

no buzzer: Woolf, “President Truman Talks About His Job,” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1945.

he would “soon go under”: Ibid.

“Punish her war criminals”: Stimson Diary, May 16, 1945.

Morgenthau meeting: Morgenthau, 466.

Morgenthau didn’t know: Jonathan Daniels interview with HST, November 12, 1949, HSTL.

“I am getting ready”: HST to MET and MJT, July 3, 1945, HSTL.

“How I hate”: HST Diary, July 7, 1945, Off the Record, 49.

10. Summer of Decision

“Today’s prime fact”: Stimson quoted in Compton, Atomic Quest, 219.

“like a moving circus”: HST to MET and MJT, January 27, 1947, HSTL.

“It seems to take two warships”: HST to MT, July 14, 1945, HSTL.

“You who have not seen”: Film Collection, HSTL.

Truman on Fred Canfil: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 39.

“At the end of the war”: O. Müller Grote to HST, February 10, 1956, HSTL.

a “nightmare of a house”: The New York Times, August 3, 1945.

“They erected a couple of”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 50.

“wholly inadequate”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 9.

“He comes from Owensborough”: HST to MET and MJT, January 27, 1947, HSTL.

Bohlen, too, was struck: Bohlen, Witness to History, 226.

“astonishingly well prepared”: Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 485.

“Mr. Russia” and “Mr. Great Britain”: HST Diary, July 7, 1945, Off the Record, 49.

“half so badly”: HST to EWT, February 19, 1916, Dear Bess, 187.

“I’ve studied more”: HST to EWT, May 26, 1918, HSTL.

“Haven’t you ever been”: Woolf, “President Truman Talks About His Job,” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1945.

Prime Minister padding down the hall: Wilroy and Prinz, Inside the Blair House, 7–8.

Eleanor Roosevelt had written: Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 29.

“I must confess, sir”: See note for page 874, Chap. 17.

“He says he is sure”: Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Never Despair, 61.

“We had a most pleasant”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 51.

“Very Secret, Urgent”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. I, 876.

Sato responded: Ibid., 883.

“good soldiers and millions”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 52.

“It is a terrible thing”: The New York Times, July 17, 1945.

“I never saw such destruction”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 341.

“absolute ruin”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 52.

modern war…“brought home”: Leahy, I Was There, 396.

“I thought of Carthage”: HST Diary, July 16, 1945, Off the Record, 52.

He kept thinking: HST to EWT, July 20, 1945, Dear Bess, 520.

“This is what would have happened”: Gilbert, 61.

Anne O’Hare McCormick column: The New York Times, July 18, 1945.

“Operated on this morning”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1360.

“Promptly a few minutes”: HST Diary, July 17, 1945, Off the Record, 53.

The truth was: Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 499.

As Stalin got out of the car: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“I got to my feet”: HST Diary, July 17, 1945, Off the Record, 53.

“A little bit of a squirt”: Film Collection, HSTL.

Stalin sure Hitler was alive and in hiding: Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 68.

“as agreed at Yalta”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1586.

“You could if you wanted to”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 541.

“and I felt hopeful”: Ibid., 342.

“The truth is he is a very likeable person”: Byrnes, 45.

“honest—but smart as hell”: HST Diary, July 17, 1945, Off the Record, 53.

“He’ll be in the Jap War”: Ibid.

Time magazine on Stalin: Time, February 5, 1945.

“There was little in Stalin’s demeanor”: Bohlen, 340.

“When one man dies”: Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of Tyranny, 278.

“I was impressed”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 340–42.

“Since the Yalta Conference”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 643.

“Churchill said he should like”: Ibid, p. 54.

“So tomorrow we will have prepared”: Ibid., 61.

“Let’s divide it”: Ibid, p. 59.

“woolly and verbose”: Gilbert, 65.

HST took as act of disloyalty: HST to MT, July 29, 1945, HSTL.

“The boys say”: HST to EWT, July 18, 1945, Dear Bess, 519.

“Churchill talks all the time”: HST to MET and MJT, July 18, 1945, HSTL.

“Doctor had just returned”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1360–61.

HST appeared extremely pleased: Churchill, 554.

“at any rate they had something”: Ehrman, Grand Strategy, 302–03.

“lull the Japanese”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1588.

Stalin’s disclosure: Bohlen, 236.

The Generalissimo must visit: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

“We cannot get away”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 96.

“I’m not going to stay”: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

To Bess, earlier in the day: HST to EWT, July 18, 1945, Dear Bess, 519.

“Believe Japs”: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

“sick of the whole business”: HST to EWT, July 20, 1945, Dear Bess, 520.

“A young Army captain”: The New York Times, August 14, 1945.

“The old man loves music”: HST to EWT, July 20, 1945, Dear Bess, 520.

“He was direct, unpretentious”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 444.

Eisenhower opposed use of the bomb: Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 443.

Eisenhower would concede: Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, 692.

truly believed that “Manhattan”: HST Diary, July 18, 1945, Off the Record, 54.

“But all of us wanted”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 316.

“We are here today”: PP, HST, July 20, 1945, 195.

“of lasting inspiration”: Clay, Decision in Germany, 44–45.

“General, there is nothing”: Bradley and Blair, 444–45.

“Uncle Joe looked”: HST Diary, July 20, 1945, Off the Record, 55.

“immensely powerful document”: Stimson Diary, July 21, 1945.

“successful beyond the most optimistic”: Groves Memorandum, Foreign Policy of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1362.

HST and Byrnes both looked pleased: Stimson Diary, July 21, 1945.

“It was apparent”: Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, 273.

“We will not recognize”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 216.

the Russians had no intention: Leahy, 406.

“Started with caviar”: HST to MET and MJT, July 23, 1945, HSTL.

“He talked to me confidently”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1945, Dear Bess, 521.

“Watch the President”: Moran, Diaries, 303.

“There was no pretense”: Rigdon, with Derieux, White House Sailor, 183–84.

“swagly.” “He never came on”: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“I thought it was nice”: Emilio Collado, Oral History, HSTL.

“I’m going to mass”: HST to EWT, July 22, 1945, HSTL.

“Although it was a target”: Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, 625.

“prosecute the war against Japan”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 391.

“alone with his work”: Stimson Diary, July 24, 1945.

July 23, 1945, cable: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1374.

“said that was just what he wanted”: Stimson Diary, July 24, 1945.

HST wrote of a consensus: Memoirs, Vol. I, 415.

“I asked General Marshall”: HST to Professor F. Cate, undated letter, HSTL.

battle casualties during HST’s three months in office: Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II, Department of the Army.

“We had only too abundant”: Charlton Ogburn, Jr., author’s interview.

“The basic policy of the present”: Combined Intelligence Committee Report, July 8, 1945, HSTL.

conscription of Japanese people: The New York Times, August 5, 1985.

“the spirit of mercy”: Bohlen, 231.

“At no time, from 1941 to 1945”: Stimson and Bundy, 613.

“I know FDR”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 281.

“I’ll say that we’ll end”: HST to EWT, July 18, 1945, Dear Bess, 519.

“It is just the same as artillery”: The New York Times, May 3, 1959.

“We knew the Japanese were determined”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 198.

A petition drawn up: Wyden, Day One, 180.

“Are not the men”: Compton, 242.

“It is hard to imagine”: Evan J. Young of Clinton Laboratories to M.D. Whittaker, undated, HSTL.

“What a question”: Compton, 247.

“The historic fact”: Churchill, 553.

“Truman made no decision”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“The final decision”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 419.

HST later told Arthur Compton: Compton, 245.

“I casually mentioned to Stalin”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 416.

Stalin’s response offhand: Bohlen, 237.

“If he had had the slightest idea”: Churchill, 580.

“not grasped the importance”: Byrnes, 263.

“No one who played”: Ibid., 265.

“We have discovered”: HST Diary, July 25, 1945, Off the Record, 55.

“The idea of using the bomb”: Harriman and Abel, 490.

“We are asking for the reorganization”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 360.

“If a government”: Ibid.

an iron fence had descended: Ibid., 362.

“I do not want to fight”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 313.

“The question is not ripe”: Ibid., 373.

Churchill full of foreboding: Moran, 306.

“What a pity”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 389.

old order passing: HST Diary, July 30, 1945, Off the Record, 58.

It was too bad about Churchill: HST to MET and MJT, July 28, 1945, HSTL.

“enslaved as a race”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 392–93.

“kill it with silence”: Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 236.

“Mr. Attlee is not so keen”: HST to MET and MJT, July 29, 1945, HSTL.

“We shall see”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1945, Dear Bess, 522.

HST in an optimistic mood: Forrestal Diaries, 79.

“The time schedule on Groves’ ”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1374.

“Suggestion approved”: Declassified “Urgent—Top Secret Message,” Stimson to HST, July 30, 1945: HST’s handwritten message on back, HSTL.

“Everything seemed momentous”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“We have accomplished a very great deal”: HST to EWT, July 25, 1945, Dear Bess, 521.

“Pray for me”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1945, ibid., 522.

“We are at an impasse”: HST Diary, July 30, 1945, Off the Record, 58.

“It is a question of give and take”: PP, HST, August 9, 1945, 209.

foolishness in the extreme: Kennan, Memoirs, 259, 290.

“Marshal Stalin I have accepted”: Murphy, 278.

Stalin broke in: Ibid., 279.

HST called Russians pigheaded: HST to MET and MJT, July 31, 1945, HSTL.

“police government”: HST Diary, July 26, 1945, Off the Record, 57.

“They went away”: Donovan, 73.

“I like Stalin”: HST to EWT, July 29, 1945, Dear Bess, 522.

“The President seemed to have been”: Ayers Diary, August 7, 1945, HSTL.

Stalin was a fine man: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 490.

“Stalin is as near”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 23.

“an innocent idealist”: HST to Dean Acheson, March 15, 1957, unsent, Off the Record, 348–49.

“for operational purposes”: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), 1945, Vol. II, 1321.

Discussion of Poland’s frontier: Ibid., 597–601.

Stalin on HST: Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 221.

“That will save two days”: HST to MET and MJT, July 31, 1945, HSTL.

HST found the King “very pleasant”: HST Diary, August 5, 1945, Off the Record, 59.

“Here was the greatest news story”: Smith, Thank You, Mr. President, 256.

“completely rested”: Official log of the Augusta, HSTL.

“Results clear-cut”: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 421.

“This is the greatest thing”: Smith, 257.

“Big bomb dropped”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 421.

“Please keep your seats”: The New York Times, August 7, 1945.

“He was not actually laughing”: Smith, 258.

“We were all excited”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“Sixteen hours ago”: PP, HST, August 6, 1945, 196–200.

“But even if my legs”: Kansas City Star, July 28, 1965.

“Some of our scientists”: Leahy Diary, August 8, 1945, LC.

“ultimatum to end all ultimatums”: The New York Times, August 8, 1945.

Stimson and Marshall worried: Mosley, Marshall. Hero for Our Times, 338.

“Additional bombs”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 420.

“For the second time”: L.A. Times, August 9, 1945.

Russell telegram to HST: Richard B. Russell to HST, undated, HSTL.

HST note to Russell: HST to Richard B. Russell, August 9, 1945, HSTL.

“I realize the tragic significance”: PP, HST, August 9, 1945, 212.

“Would it not be wondrous?”: Washington Times, August 6, 1985.

“Could we continue”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 428.

Stimson said the emperor: Ibid.

“we’d tell ’em how to keep him”: HST Diary, August 10, 1945, Off the Record, 61.

“subject to the Supreme Commander”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 429.

“all those kids”: Wallace, 474.

“Nearly every crisis seems to be”: HST to MET and MJT, August 12, 1945, HSTL.

“it began like the days”: Ayers Diary, August 14, 1945, HSTL.

“might get a story”: Sue Gentry, author’s interview.

“I have received this afternoon”: PP, HST, August 14, 1945, 216.

“I felt deeply moved”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 437.

“This is a great day”: The New York Times, August 15, 1945.

“The only thing new”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 69.

“Everyone had been going”: HST to MET and MJT, August 17, 1945, Off the Record, 62.

Part Four

11. The Buck Stops Here

“Everybody wants something”: HST to MET and MJT, September 22, 1945, HSTL.

more prima donnas per square foot: HST to MET and MJT, October 23, 1945, HSTL.

“You can’t do anything worthwhile”: PP, HST, October 7, 1945, 380.

“cut out the foolishness”: Ibid., October 10, 1945, 394.

“We must go on”: Ibid., September 6, 1945, 291.

Wallace’s estimate of drop in GNP: Wallace, The Price of Vision, 495.

“The Congress are balking”: HST to MET and MJT, October 23, 1945, HSTL.

“Anything else, Mr. President?”: PP, HST, September 18, 1945, 326.

“If anyone in the government”: HST to EWT, June 22, 1945, Dear Bess, 523.

“The pressure here”: HST to MET and MJT, October 13, 1945, HSTL.

“We can’t stand another global war”: PP, HST, October 7, 1945, 381.

“did everything…mouth of a cannon”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 129.

“in the doldrums”: Ayers Diary, October 19, 1945, HSTL.

call for universal military training: PP, HST, October 23, 1945, 404, 413.

HST shows new presidential flag: Ibid., October 25, 1945, 415–417.

“It was disintegration”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 509.

“Tiny lines had grown”: Gunther, Procession, 260.

Encounter with Oppenheimer: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 118.

“See what a son-of-a-bitch”: Quoted in Wallace, 519.

Marshall ends call abruptly: Miller, Plain Speaking, 252.

“paid much less attention”: Samuel Rosenman, Oral History, HSTL.

“Mr. President, you should know”: Wallace, 530.

“wild accidents”: Quoted in Lerner, Actions and Passions, 219.

“one of the most hazardous”: Time, December 8, 1947.

“Well I’m here in the White House”: HST to EWT, December 28, 1945, Dear Bess, 523–24.

“able and conniving”: HST Diary, July 7, 1945, in Ferrell, ed, Off the Record, 49.

“I told him I did not like”: Memoirs, Vol. I, 550.

“a horse’s ass”: Clifford quoted in Jonathan Daniels interview notes, HSTL.

Acheson impressions of HST: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 136.

HST longhand letter for Byrnes: HST to James F. Byrnes, January 5, 1946, unsent, Off the Record, 79–80

“1946 is our year of decision”: PP, HST, January 3, 1946, 1.

“This is a disaster”: Quoted in Goulden, The Best Years 1945–1950, 113.

“I personally think there is”: PP, HST, January 24, 1946, 92.

The “blunt truth”: Time, January 14, 1946.

Chicago Tribune cartoon: Reprinted in Time, February 4, 1946.

“at best, undistinguished”: MacKaye, “Things Are Different in the White House,” Saturday Evening Post, April 20, 1946.

People were “befuddled”: HST to MET and MJT, January 23, 1946, HSTL.

“An oil man”: Ayers Diary, January 18, 1946, HSTL.

Ickes resignation: The New York Times, February 14, 1946.

a chronic “resigner”: Quoted in Miller, 226.

“There would have been no rest”: HST to MET and MJT, February 7, 1946, HSTL.

American Mercury article: Crawford, “Everyman in the White House,” February 1946.

“appears to consider it necessary”: Leahy Diary, February 21, 1946, LC.

Stalin statement on war: Donovan, 187.

Justice Douglas reaction: Ibid.

“I will call you Harry”: Ross Diary, March 7, 1946, HSTL.

“Harry, what does a sequence count?”: Quoted in Daniels, The Man of Independence, 279.

“He took a boy’s delight”: Ross Diary, March 7, 1946, HSTL.

Churchill wish to be born American: Gilbert, Winston Churchill. Never Despair, 146.

“You stop drinking”: Ibid., 147.

“do nothing but good”: Ibid.

HST and Churchill on eagle’s head: Ross Diary, March 9, 1946, HSTL.

“Iron curtain” speech: Quoted in Gilbert, 198.

HST denies knowing what Churchill would say: Wallace, 558.

HST pleads “no comment”: PP, HST, March 8, 1946, 145.

“the Long Telegram”: Donovan, 187–88.

“here and now”: Matt Connelly Papers, HSTL.

“He was in his study”: Ross Diary, March 23, 1946, HSTL.

Mary Jane’s reaction to HST press conference: Mary Jane Truman, Oral History, HSTL.

492Life article: Busch, “A Year of Truman,” April 8, 1946.

“Here is to be seen”: The New York Times Magazine, April 7, 1946.

494Time article: May 6, 1946.

“I can hold a Cabinet meeting”: PP, HST, May 2, 1946, 227.

“Big money has too much”: HST to MET and MJT, January 23, 1946, HSTL.

“I’m going to give you the gun”: Quoted in Daniels, 325.

“We have a society”: The New York Times, May 22, 1946.

“That’s the way he is”: Ibid., May 26, 1946.

a “complicated”: J. C. Truman, author’s interview.

“This was the fifth day”: Ayers Diary, May 23, 1946, HSTL.

HST meeting with veterans: Washington Star, May 24, 1946.

“There were poignant scenes”: Newsweek, June 3, 1946.

Telegrams flooding the White House: White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“At home those of us”: HST speech draft, undelivered, Clifford Papers, HSTL.

“In the manner of Lincoln”: Phillips, 115.

“I’d never been in the White House”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“Alone of all the Truman entourage”: Quoted in Allen and Shannon, The Truman Merry-Go-Round, 61.

“The President is intelligent”: Clifford, with Holbrooke, Counsel to the President, 274.

“I come before the American people”: PP, HST, May 24, 1946, 274.

“He said they had verbally agreed”: Clifford interview, Daniels notes, HSTL.

“For the past two days”: PP, HST, May 25, 1946, 277.

“Spotlights ablaze”: New Republic, June 3, 1946.

“he could be tough”: The New York Times, May 26, 1946.

“Draft men who strike”: New Republic, June 3, 1946.

“I was the servant”: Film Collection, HSTL.

“Nothing about the Wallace affair”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“If Mr. Slaughter is right”: PP, HST, July 18, 1946, 350.

HST’s health: Ross Diary, July 20, 1946, HSTL.

“Had the most awful day”: HST to MET and MJT, July 31, 1946, HSTL.

“She’s on the way out”: HST to EWT, August 9, 1946, Dear Bess, 530.

“Be good and be tough”: MT [Margaret Truman] to HST, June 14, 1946, Truman, Letters from Father, 142.

“I still have a number of bills”: HST to EWT, August 10, 1946, Dear Bess, 530.

“It’s just wonderful”: MacDonald, “President Truman’s Yacht,” Naval History, Winter 1990.

“See, he had no airs”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“He always plays a close hand”: Ted Marks, Oral History, HSTL.

“The Williamsburg”: MacDonald, “President Truman’s Yacht.”

“This is a paradise”: HST to MT, August 23, 1946, Truman, Letters from Father, 69.

“did all sorts of antics”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 366.

“The furniture was taking headers”: HST to EWT, September 2, 1946, Dear Bess, 534.

“Night before last”: HST to EWT, September 9, 1946, ibid., 535.

disliked living there: HST to EWT, September 3, 1946, ibid., 534.

“You better lock your door”: Truman, Letters from Father, 144.

“I’m in the middle”: HST to EWT, September 10, 1946, Dear Bess, 536.

HST press conference: PP, HST, September 12, 1946, 426–29.

“If the President”: Ross Diary, September 21, 1946, HSTL.

Wallace account: Wallace, 612–13.

tried to skim through it: HST Diary, September 17, 1946, Off the Record, 94.

Reston column: The New York Times, September 13, 1946.

“The criticism continued to mount”: Ross Diary, September 21, 1946, HSTL.

“I’m still having Henry Wallace trouble”: HST to MET and MJT, September 18, 1946, HSTL.

“Henry told me”: HST to EWT, September 20, 1946, Dear Bess, 539.

“Everything’s lovely”: Quoted in Acheson, 192.

“Henry is the most peculiar fellow”: HST to MET and MJT, September 20, 1946, HSTL.

“He wants to disband”: Quoted in Donovan, 227.

Byrnes telegram: Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 241–42.

“so nice about it”: HST to EWT, September 21, 1946, Dear Bess, 539.

“I would rather be anything”: HST to MET and MJT, September 20, 1946, HSTL.

“No man in his right mind”: HST to MT, September 9, 1946, Truman, Letters from Father, 71.

“a liar, double-crosser”: HST to MT, September 17, 1946, ibid., 75.

“Sept. 26, 1918”: HST Diary, September 26, 1946, Off the Record, 98.

Ickes called him “stupid”: Time, September 30, 1946.

32 percent poll results: Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, 604.

“Nothing on meat”: PP, HST, October 10, 1946, 447.

Truman continues electronic surveillance: Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 344.

“The shrill pitch of abuse”: Time, October 28, 1946.

he alone was formally dressed: Ibid.

“Here was a man”: Kilgore quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 288.

“never seemed to have a problem”: Fields, My 21 Years in the White House, 187.

“We went to the Waldorf: HST to MT, October 26; 1946, Truman, Letters from Father,81.

Jefferson City stop: Time, November 11, 1946.

“Probably no President”: Phillips, 161.

12. Turning Point

“This is a serious course”: PP, HST, March 12, 1947, 179.

Lippmann on HST: Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 455.

“My dear Harry”: WC to HST, May 12, 1947, quoted in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Never Despair, 326.

Acheson alone…was waiting: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 200.

“The captain with the mighty heart”: Ibid., dedication page.

“so fast they were falling all over”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

Lilienthal in rain: Lilienthal Journals, Vol. I, 54.

“the kind of grim gaiety”: Ibid., 118.

“Oh, God, it was the chance”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“now a free man”: Quoted in Time, April 7, 1947.

“I’m doing as I damn please”: HST to EWT, November 18, 1946, Dear Bess, 540.

“How can there be immunity”: Goldman, The Crucial Decade—And After, 29.

“He told me that he would”: HST Diary, January 1, 1947, in Ferrell, ed, Off the Record, 107.

“Bob is not austere”: Time, January 20, 1947.

HST walks to Union Station: Ayers Diary, January 6, 1947, HSTL.

“your appointment as Secretary of State”: Mosley, Marshall: Hero for Our Times, 390.

“I thought that the continuing harping”: Cray, General of the Army, 17.

Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance: Halle, The Cold War as History, 113.

“It was a striking and commanding force”: Acheson, 140–41.

exit office backwards: Paul Horgan, author’s interview.

“He never made any speeches”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 251.

“Sometimes he would sit”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 112.

“He was a man you could count on”: Quoted in Miller, 250.

“On the one hand”: Pogue, George C. Marshall. Statesman, 141–42.

“He gave a sense of purpose”: Bohlen, Witness to History, 259.

“Gentlemen, don’t fight”: Quoted in Pogue, 148.

Acheson found working with the general: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 159.

“The more I see and talk”: HST appointment sheet, February 18, 1947, Off the Record, 109.

“Marshall is a tower”: HST Diary, May 7, 1948, ibid., 134.

“I am surely lucky”: HST appointment sheet, February 18, 1947, ibid., 109.

“He no longer moans”: Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War,1941–1947, 347.

“His eye is clear”: Quoted in Time, January 27, 1947.

48 percent poll rating: Time, February 10, 1947.

“They brought back all the pageantry”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 91.

“The papers say today”: HST to MET and MJT, February 9, 1947, Off the Record, 108.

“I was somewhat nervous”: HST to MET and MJT, February 13, 1947, HSTL.

“despite all the denying”: West, 91.

Lilienthal nomination hearings: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 141–42.

“far from anger or temper”: Ibid., 141.

“I believe in”: Ibid., Appendix B, 646–48.

HST supports Lilienthal: Ibid., 144.

Taft opposes nomination: Time, February 24, 1947.

“Courage: What is it?”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 160.

“Now Mary, don’t you work too hard”: HST to MET and MJT, February 27, 1947, HSTL.

Lincoln McVeigh reported rumors: Memoirs, Vol. II, 99.

Greece a “ripe plum”: Ibid.

“little hope of independent survival”: Quoted in Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 277.

“the only one in Government”: Gaddis, 346, note.

“It is not alarmist”: Quoted in Pogue, 164.

“The Soviet Union was playing”: Acheson, 219.

Vandenberg told the President: Ibid.

“and I expressed my emphatic”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 103.

Mexico City visit: Newsweek, March 17, 1947.

Clifford memo: appears in full in Krock, Memoirs, Appendix, 419–82.

“The impact of having it all”: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“If we go in”: Matt Connelly Papers, HSTL.

most important of his career: Ayers Diary, March 8, 1947, HSTL.

“I believe it must be”: Clifford, Counsel to the President, 136.

“too much rhetoric”: Bohlen, 261.

“If you take his advice”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 163.

“I want no hedging”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 105.

Truman Doctrine speech: PP, HST, March 12, 1947, 176–80.

“Well, I told my wife”: Time, March 24, 1947.

“A vague global policy”: Quoted in Steel, 438–39.

a “universal pattern”: Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 61.

would “of course” act: Acheson, 225.

“I guess the do-gooders”: Newsweek, March 24, 1947.

“If Mr. L is a communist”: HST, draft unreleased statement, March 1947, Off the Record, 113.

“no part of a communist”: Vandenberg, ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, 355.

“the most important thing”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 166.

“[He is] very strongly anti-FBI”: Clark Clifford Papers, HSTL.

“The long tenure”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 163.

“I am not worried”: PP, HST, April 3, 1947, 190.

“It was a political problem”: Bernstein, Loyalties, 195–98.

“The Republicans are now taking”: Frank McNaughton Papers, March 28, 1948, HSTL.

“If I can prevent”: HST to EW, September 27, 1947, Dear Bess, 550.

“Yes, it was terrible”: Joseph Rauh quoted in Bernstein, 196.

“I think it’s one of the proudest”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“There was much to be done”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 104.

“You don’t sit down”: Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

Kennan leaves the room: Kennan, Memoirs, 328, note.

meeting with newspaper editors: PP, HST, April 7, 1947, 207–10.

“He was…an extremely thoughtful”: Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“When he went to lunch”: Quoted in Heller, The Truman White House, 46.

“Lots of times I would be”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“He spent virtually every waking”: Quoted in Heller, 119.

HST would like to have been history teacher: Ayers Diary, April 26, 1947, HSTL.

Clifford insists HST not be FDR: Markel, “Truman As the Crucial Third Year Opens.”

“In many ways President Truman”: Quoted in Heller, 120.

“It just has to be said”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“There is nothing in life”: Quoted in Farrar, Reluctant Servant, 195.

“priceless gift of vitality”: Acheson, 730.

the nation “again has leaders”: Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography, 328.

Marshall’s return of April 26, 1947: Memoirs, Vol. II, 112; Bohlen, 262–63; Kennan, 325.

The Soviets, it seemed: Marshall quoted in Pogue, 196.

“The patient is sinking”: Ibid., 200.

“Avoid trivia”: Kennan, 326.

Clayton memo: Pogue, 206.

Marshall speech: Mosley, 404–05.

“We grabbed the lifeline”: Quoted in Pogue, 217.

“play it straight”: Bohlen, 264.

part played by Acheson: Clark Clifford address, American Ditchley Foundation, April 5, 1984.

“anything that is sent up”: Clifford, author’s interview.

Halle’s comments on staff: Halle, 115–16.

“And you and I have both lived”: Quoted in Miller, 264.

“While he was responding”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 383.

“If she wants to be a warbler”: HST to MET and MJT, January 30, 1947, HSTL.

“She’s one nice girl”: HST to MET and MJT, February 19, 1947, HSTL.

Mrs. Thomas J. Strickler: Kansas City Star, April 18, 1946.

“Margaret went to New York”: HST to MET and MJT, January 30, 1947, HSTL. ’

“Here’s a little dough”: HST to MT, February 28, 1947, Truman, Letters from Father, 89.

Margaret Truman’s radio debut: Kansas City Star, March 7, 8, 9, and 17, 1947.

“Perhaps, sheer naivete”: Truman, Souvenir, 162.

“Wish I could go along”: HST to MT, May 14, 1947, Truman, Letters from Father, 92.

“Whenever she wakes up”: Time, June 2, 1947.

“When I say all Americans”: PP, HST, June 29, 1947, 311–13.

“I did not believe”: White, A Man Called White, 348.

“Almost without exception”: White, How Far the Promised Land, 74.

he meant “every word of it”: White, A Man Called White, 348.

“But I believe what I say”: HST to MJT, June 28, 1947, HSTL.

reminiscing to Bess: HST to EWT, July 26, 1947, Dear Bess, 549.

“Goodbye, Harry”: HST Diary, November 24, 1952, Off the Record, 275.

“Well, now she won’t have to suffer”: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 295.

“Everything had changed”: Truman, Souvenir, 174.

“I couldn’t hold a press conference”: PP, HST, August 5, 1948, 365.

“Someday you’ll be an orphan”: HST to MT, August 1, 1947, Truman, Letters from Father, 96.

“You should call your mamma”: HST to MT, December 3, 1947, Truman, Harry S. Truman, 404–05.

“I called up Daddy”: Truman, Souvenir, 191.

a hit as a vaudeville team: Daniels, “The Lady from Independence,” McCall’s, April 1949.

She would laugh so hard: Parks and Leighton, My Thirty Years Backstage at the White House, 28.

“She’s the only lady I know”: Randall Jessee quoted in the Dallas Morning News, February 9, 1976.

“Mrs. Truman came with great apologies”: Marquis Childs, author’s interview.

“the white gloves type”: Reathel Odum, author’s interview.

“They both had the gift”: Nixon, In the Arena, 231.

“one of the finest women”: Robert Lovett, Oral History, HSTL.

HST’s reliance on Bess: Quoted in Means, “What Three Presidents Say About Their Wives,” Good Housekeeping, August 1963.

Bess laughs at pretensions: Daniels, “The Lady from Independence.”

“And then…the minute the doors”: Lindy Boggs, author’s interview.

“Propriety was a much stronger influence”: Alice Acheson, author’s interview.

“Just keep on smiling”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 265.

“She didn’t want to discuss”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

Bess Truman questionnaire: Time, November 10, 1947.

“She seems to think Harry”: Asbury, “Meet Harry’s Boss, Bess,” Collier’s, February 2, 1949.

Bess interested in Monroe administration: Daniels, “The Lady from Independence.”

“Mrs, Truman was no fussier”: West, 83.

“might as well have been in Independence”: J. B. West, author’s interview.

“And he listened to her”: Ibid.

Bess’s emotional separation: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 272.

“Suppose Miss Lizzie”: HST to EN, June 22, 1949, Off the Record, 157.

“Marshall and Lovett”: HST to EWT, September 23, 1947, Dear Bess, 549–50.

“Yesterday was one of the most hectic”: HST to EW, September 30, 1947, ibid., 550–51.

“Twenty-nine years!”: HST to EWT, June 28, 1948, Dear Bess, 554.

Greta Kempton portrait: Greta Kempton, author’s interview; Kempton letter to the author, June 20, 1984; Kempton, “Painting the Truman Family,” Missouri Historical ’ Review, April 1973; “An Interview with Greta Kempton,” Whistlestop, Vol. 15, no. 2, 1987.

a handwritten note from Churchill: Gilbert, Winston Churchill. Never Despair, 351.

“In all the history of the world”: HST speech draft, undelivered, April 1948, Off the Record, 133.

13. The Heat in the Kitchen

Eisenhower again declined: Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 338.

“Mr. Truman was a realist”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 197, note.

“give everything”: Ayers Diary, January 19, 1948, HSTL.

“Aside from the impossible”: HST to MET and MJT, November 14, 1947, HSTL.

“President Truman did not want to run”: Quoted in Donovan, 338.

“blessed with a tough hide”: Phillips, 140.

“The greatest ambition”: Quoted in Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 9.

“get into the fight”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 171–72.

“What I wanted to do personally”: Ibid., 174.

speech before Congress: PP, HST, January 7, 1948, 1.

message to Congress: Ibid., February 2, 1948, 121.

press conference on civil rights: Ibid., February 5, 1948.

black Democrats at rear table: Time, March 1, 1948.

“But my very stomach turned”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 429.

Privately could speak of “niggers”: Rex Scouten, author’s interview; Miller, Plain Speaking, 195.

“Harry is no more”: Jonathan Daniels interview with Mary Jane Truman, October 2, 1949, HSTL.

“The main difficulty”: HST to Ernest W. Roberts, August 18, 1948, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 146.

murder of four blacks: To Secure These Rights: Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 22.

“The wonderful, wonderful development”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“strike for new high ground”: Quoted in Ross, 19.

Clifford on golf course: David Acheson, author’s interview.

Clifford decided not to tell HST: Clifford, author’s interview.

“This is, as you know”: James Rowe, Jr., to William Sand, July 8, 1971.

“In the Roosevelt and Truman years”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“The Politics of 1948”: Memorandum by James H. Rowe, Jr., Miscellaneous Historical Documents, HSTL.

“We were telling the President”: James H. Rowe, Jr., author’s interview.

HST kept memo in bottom drawer: Ibid.

“To a politician of Harry Truman’s”: Washington Post, undated, Vertical Files, HSTL.

Hill and Sparkman call for HST’s resignation: Ayers Diary, March 23, 1948, HSTL.

instant disapproval: Washington Star, May 25, 1965.

“Back Porch Harry”: Time, January 26, 1948.

Jefferson himself: PP, HST, April 15, 1948, 217–18.

Washington Star: Donovan, 351.

“The awnings you will remember”: HST to MJT, January 30, 1948, HSTL.

“Had to be renewed”: HST to George Rothwell Brown, January 20, 1948, HSTL.

danger of second floor falling: Ayers Diary, March 6, 1948, HSTL.

Ross “terrifically upset”: Ibid., February 6, 1948, HSTL.

“You can guard yourself: Ibid., December 30, 1947, HSTL.

his most difficult dilemma: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 416.

“humanly possible”: Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1948.

“could not be allowed to continue”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 138.

“definitely and preeminently”: Harrison quoted in Eban, An Autobiography, 59.

“would they be welcomed”: Ibid.

Niles sensed HST’s sympathy with Jews: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 304.

“I’m a man of no importance”: Steinberg, “Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man,” Saturday Evening Post, December 24, 1949.

“just politics”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“And his own reading”: Weisberger, interview with Clark Clifford, American Heritage, December 28, 1976.

justice not oil: HST quoted in Wallace, The Price of Vision, 607.

no wish to send American troops: PP, HST, August 6, 1945, 228.

“What I am trying to do”: HST to Joseph H. Ball, November 24, 1945, unsent, HSTL.

“The action of some of our American Zionists”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 420.

he wished more people: Donovan, 319

“I am not a New Yorker”: Quoted in Wallace, 605

“Terror and Silver”: HST Memorandum to David Niles, May 13, 1947, HSTL.

“Jesus Christ couldn’t please them”: Quoted in Wallace, 607.

“I’m so tired”: HST to MJT, February 11, 1948, HSTL.

not a great many Arab constituents: Donovan, 322.

Forrestal thought less of HST: Forrestal Diaries, 309, 363.

“Kaplan sells shirts”: Quoted in Donovan, 317.

“And when the day came”: Washington Star and Daily News, December 31, 1972.

“carelessly pro-Zionist”: Jenkins, Truman, 116.

Kennan on Palestine: Pogue, George C. Marshall: Statesman. 356.

Henderson worried about consequences: The New York Times, March 26, 1986.

“Some White House men”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 317.

“Look here, Loy”: Loy Henderson, Oral History, HSTL.

“conflicting objectives”: Rusk, As I Saw It, 147–48.

“I know how Marshall feels”: Quoted in Daniels, 318.

“We went for it”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949.

Eddie Jacobson account: Washington Post, May 6, 1973.

“he [Truman] and he alone”: Ibid.

Jewish delegation swept up: The New York Times, November 30, 1947.

“There were Jews in tears”: Eban, 99.

“a triumphant vindication”: The New York Times, November 30, 1947.

turning point in history: New York Herald-Tribune, November 30, 1947.

“one of the few great acts”: Ibid., December 1, 1947.

“push the Jews”: Weisberger interview with Clark Clifford, American Heritage, December 28, 1976.

Forrestal report to HST: Forrestal Diaries, March 4, 1948, 386.

“Things look black”: HST to MT, March 3, 1948, Truman, Letters from Father, 108.

“a new tenseness”: Forrestal Diaries, 387.

“lifted me right out”: Smith, Lucius D. Clay, 466–67.

to move atomic bombs: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. I, 302.

“The Jewish pressure”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 160.

Niles grew so emotional: Letter from Joseph Alsop to Martin Sommers, June 1, 1948, LC.

either “give in”: Ibid.

“So I called him ‘Cham’ ”: Film Collection, HSTL.

They had met secretly: Memoirs, Vol. II, 161.

“You can bank on us”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 318.

“I was extremely happy”: Weizmann, Trial and Error, 459.

Kennan’s paper: Donovan, 370.

“playing with fire”: Forrestal Diaries, 373.

“the political situation”: Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 127.

no “bending”: Pogue, 361.

“On five occasions”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949.

“pro-Arab”: Loy Henderson, Oral History, HSTL.

“I pointed out that the views”: Ibid.

“Oh, hell, I’m leaving”: Ibid.

Frank Goldman call to Jacobson: Kansas City Times, May 13, 1965.

Connelly warned Jacobson: Adler, Roots in a Moving Stream, 210.

“always had a brother’s interest”: Kansas City Times, May 13, 1965.

HST suddenly tense: Ibid.

“In all the years of our friendship”: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948,” American Jewish Archives, April 1968.

“disrespectful and mean”: Ibid.

“Harry, all your life”: Ibid.

HST reaction to Jacobson: Ibid.

Jacobson has drink: Kansas City Times, May 13, 1965.

“It is the most serious situation”: HST to Eleanor Roosevelt, March 16, 1948, Off the Record, 126.

“It was better to do that”: Ayers Diary, March 16, 1948, HSTL.

Joint Session speech: PP, HST, March 17, 1948, 182–86.

“And when he left my office”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 161.

HST and Weizmann reached “understanding”: Ibid.

“A land of milk and honey”: The New York Times, March 21, 1948.

“whimsical and cynical action”: Letter from Tucson Jewish Community Council, undated, White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“vacillating”: Letter from Democratic Council, undated, Whittier, California, White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“This change can mean”: Judge P. Tinley to HST, March 25, 1948, HSTL.

“Oh, how could you stoop”: Samuel A. Sloan to HST, March 19, 1948, HSTL.

“Black Friday”: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948.”

“There wasn’t one”: Ibid.

Weizmann certain what HST had meant: Adler, 211.

Jacobson must not forget: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948.”

“This morning I find”: HST Diary, March 20, 1948, Off the Record, 127.

“the striped pants boys”: HST to MJT, March 21, 1948, HSTL.

“Truman was in his office”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949; Daniels interview notes, HSTL.

“The President’s statement”: Ayers Diary, March 20, 1948, HSTL.

“the wisest course”: The News York Times, March 21, 1948.

“This gets us nowhere”: Quoted in Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 307.

“Send final draft”: Foreign Relations of the United States. Vol. V: The Far East, South Asia and Africa, 645.

“striped pants conspirators”: HST to MJT, March 21, 1948, HSTL.

“prejudice the character”: PP, HST, March 25, 1948, 190, 192.

Eleanor Roosevelt resignation: Lash, 130.

“The choice for our people”: Weizmann, 474.

“very strongly”: “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948.”

“the President looked worn”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 320.

“It is a scream”: HST to MJT, April 8, 1948, HSTL.

Gallup Poll: Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–71, 727.

“When he [Truman] vetoed”: The New York Times, April 4, 1948.

“You will be addressing all of us”: Weisberger interview with Clifford.

“I want you to know”: George C. Marshall to HST, May 8, 1948, HSTL.

Marshall speech: As reported in Frank McNaughton Papers, December 18, 1948, HSTL.

May 12, 1948, meeting: Clay, General of the Army, 658, 661.

“As I talked”: Address by Clark Clifford, American Ditchley Foundation, April, 5, 1984; Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“This is just straight politics”: Ibid.

“General, he is here”: Ibid.

“I had really prepared!”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“everything this country should represent”: Ibid.

“Behold, I have set the land”: Clifford, letter to the author.

“No matter what the State Department”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949, HSTL.

“the sharpest rebuke ever”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“the great one of the age”: HST appointment sheet, February 18, 1947, Off the Record, 109.

“That brought the meeting”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“righteous goddamn Baptist”: Clark Clifford interview with Jonathan Daniels, October 26, 1949, HSTL.

“didn’t know his ass”: Ibid.

“That was rough as a cob”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“I will cross that bridge”: PP, HST, May 13, 1948, 253.

“Marshall was the greatest asset”: Clifford, author’s interview.

Lovett would have to persuade: Ibid.

Marshall called HST: Ibid.

“That is all we need”: Ibid.

“This is very unusual”: Ibid.

name of new country left blank: Ibid.

reaction of American delegation: The New York Times, May 16, 1948.

“temporary, unofficial ambassador”: Adler, 212.

“There is a great deal to be said”: Washington Star, May 16, 1948.

“The difficulty with many career”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 165.

“God put you in your mother’s womb”: Quoted in Steinberg, 308.

“In my opinion”: Henderson, Oral History, HSTL.

Marshall never spoke to Clifford again: Pogue, 377.

“I told him that it was”: Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 433,

Crestline, Ohio: PP, HST, June 4, 1948, 284.

Omaha stop: Ayers Diary, June 7, 1948, HSTL.

“I don’t give a damn”: Edward McKim, Oral History, HSTL.

“President Truman was at his best”: Omaha Morning World-Herald, June 8, 1948.

“walled-in”: Krock, Memoirs, 242.

“It almost overwhelms me”: PP, HST, June 6, 1948, 288.

“My goodness!”: Ibid., June 8, 1948, 303.

Butte, Montana, stop: Idaho Daily Statesman, June 9, 1948.

“I am sorry I had gone to bed”: New York Sun, June 9, 1948.

“down to Berkeley”: Donovan, 400.

“They told me at a little town”: HST to MJT, June 8, 1948, HSTL.

Carey Airport gaffe: Montana Standard, June 9, 1948.

“I have been in politics”: PP, HST, June 8, 1948, 301.

a many-versed song: Kansas City Star, March 23, 1969.

“a spectacle of himself”: Steinberg, 312.

Eugene, Oregon, stop: PP, HST, June 11, 1948, 329.

“about two acres of people”: Ibid., June 14, 1948, 348.

“You know, this Congress”: Ibid., June 10, 1948, 314.

“blackguarding Congress”: Redding, Inside the Democratic Party, 178.

telegrams to mayors: Ibid.

Berkeley-commencement address: PP, HST, June 12, 1948, 336–40,

“Our policy will continue”: Ibid., 340.

“they clung to the roofs”: Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1948.

HST jabbed his forefinger: Donovan, 401.

June 18 return to Washington: Time, June 28, 1948.

a “gone goose”: Ibid.

Dewey acceptance speech: Time, July 5, 1948.

“We stay in Berlin”: Forrestal Diaries, 454–55.

“We stay in Berlin”: Pogue, 301.

“we were nose to nose”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 481.

“had no direct role whatever”: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“A ball game or two”: HST Diary, June 18, 1948, Off the Record, 140.

“I am not a quitter”: Krock, 241.

“You have the choice”: Ickes quoted in Donovan, 389.

decided it was time for Eisenhower: Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 186.

Eisenhower did not want nomination: Steinberg, 309–10.

Jimmy Roosevelt wired: Goulden, The Best Years, 1945–1950, 381.

“a hard and possibly losing fight”: Ross, 113.

“I am simply aghast”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 378–79.

“All right, let him go”: Ayers Diary, July 6, 1948, HSTL.

“double-crossers all”: HST Diary, July 6, 1948, Off the Record, 141.

“I don’t think he would be a candidate”: HST to James W. Gerard, April 27, 1948, HSTL.

Krock story: Krock, Memoirs, 242.

Pepper proposing Eisenhower draft: Newsweek, July 19, 1948.

“I wanted to tell you”: Krock, 243.

“In a telephone conference”: Ibid.

“final and complete”: Newsweek, July 19, 1948.

“Truman, Harry Truman”: Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After, 83.

“no time for politics as usual”: Ross, 115.

“None of us”: Phillips, 218.

’We got the wrong rigs”: The New York Times, July 12, 1948.

“You could cut the gloom”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 200.

Douglas wished to stay on Court: HST Diary, July 12, 1948, Off the Record, 141.

“I stuck my neck”: Ayers Diary, July 13, 1948, HSTL.

“But if memory does not betray”: Redding, 188–89.

If Barkley was what convention wanted: Newsweek, July 26, 1948.

Barkley gone to bed: HST Diary, July 13, 1948, Off the Record, 142.

Barkley never told HST he wanted to be VP: Ross, 119.

“I don’t want it passed”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 12.

“Talking about the vice-presidency”: Ayers Diary, July 13, 1948, HSTL.

“A Negro alternate from St. Louis”: HST Diary, July 13, 1948, Off the Record, 142.

“sellout” to states’ rights: Ross, 121.

“We were inherently stronger”: Douglas, In the Fullness of Time, 137.

“Young man, that’s just what”: Goulden, 385.

“There are those who say”: Ross, 125.

southern “walkout” would destroy: Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography,337.

as “crackpots”: HST Diary, July 14, 1948, Off the Record, 143.

“No privacy sure enough”: Ibid.

“Hard to hear”: Ibid.

“a very agreeable visit”: Barkley, 203.

“an interesting and instructive evening”: HST Diary, July 14, 1948, Off the Record, 143.

“hot, horrible night”: Tom Evans, Oral History, HSTL.

“They did what you do”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“Harry Truman’s a goddamn liar”: Hardeman and Bacon, 338.

“Senator Barkley and I”: PP, HST, July 15, 1948, 406.

“Our task is to fill”: Smith, 500,

“Now it is time for us”: PP, HST, July 15, 1948, 406.

“Everybody knows that I recommended”: Ibid., 408.

“He walked out there”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“They sensed”: Lerner, Actions and Passions, 233.

“Of course, it was politics”: Daniels, 356.

“devilishly astute”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 178.

“Arrived in Washington”: HST Diary, July 15, 1948, Off the Record, 144.

“to reduce us to the status”: Ross, 131.

“the segregation of the races”: Ibid.

“but Truman really means it”: Steinberg, 315.

“on the basis of interest”: Ross, 158.

“We stand against the kings”: Time, August 2, 1948.

Forrestal and atomic bomb: HST to EWT, July 23, 1948, Dear Bess, 555.

“It is hot and humid”: HST Diary, July 19, 1948, Off the Record, 145.

“We’ll stay in Berlin”: Ibid.

“If we wished to remain”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 124.

a “very big operation”: Davidson, The Berlin Blockade, 105.

“We were proud of our Air Force”: Quoted in Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, 167.

“But every expert knows”: Quoted in Davidson, 125.

“My muttonhead Secretary”: HST to EWT, July 23, 1948, Dear Bess, 555.

“There is considerable political”: Memorandum by James H. Rowe, Jr., Miscellaneous Historical Documents, HSTL.

“I am going through a terrible”: HST to WC, July 10, 1948, Truman, Letters from Father, 110.

“The President greeted us rather solemnly”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 388–89.

“This is no time”: Ibid., 391.

“If what worried the President”: Ibid.

Truman held Forrestal: Forrestal Diaries, 461.

seemed lately unable to “take hold”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 386.

“I went down the river”: HST to MJT, July 26, 1948, HSTL.

“No, we’re not going to give”: Quoted in Donovan, 411.

“They sure are in a stew”: HST to EWT, July 23, 1948, Dear Bess, 66.

“For a number of years”: Phillips, 369.

“a ‘red herring’ “: PP, HST, August 5, 1948, 433.

“Entirely”: Ibid., August 12, 1948, 438.

floor of Margaret’s room: HST to MJT, August 10, 1948, HSTL.

“Can you imagine?”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 329.

“Margaret’s sitting room”: HST to MJT, August 10, 1948, HSTL.

“old Abe’s bed”: Ibid.

14. Fighting Chance

“It will be the greatest”: HST to MJT, October 5, 1948, HSTL.

“There were no deep-hid schemes”: Ross, “How Truman Did It,” Collier’s, December 24, 1948.

“It’s going to be tough”: Ibid.

“I have a terrible feeling”: HST Diary, September 13, 1948, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 149.

“Every grade crossing”: The New Yorker, October 9, 1948.

“I’m going to give ’em hell”: Time, September 27, 1948.

Gallup Poll: Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, 757.

“My whole inclination”: Time, September 13, 1948.

“Cadillac Square”: Matt Connelly, Oral History, HSTL.

“You remember the big boom”: PP, HST, September 18, 1948, 504.

plow the straightest furrows: Ibid., 506.

“You stayed at home in 1946”: Ibid., 501.

“Understand me, when I speak”: Ibid., September 20, 1948, 518.

“Selfish men have always”: Ibid., September 21, 1948, 531.

“sharp speeches”: Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, 425.

These “little speeches”: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

“Oh, I wish my grandfather”: PP, HST, September 21, 1948, 531.

“They tell me [he said at Mojave]”: Ibid., September 23, 1948, 554.

“I’m here on a serious mission”: Ibid., September 22, 1948, 544.

“In 1946, you know”: Ibid., September 20, 1948, 512, 514.

“Give ’em hell”: Clark Clifford, author’s interview.

“I never gave anybody hell”: The New York Times, December 27, 1972.

“It will be a picture”: The New Yorker, October 9, 1948.

Los Angeles speech: PP, HST, September 24, 1948, 559.

“We are not quite holding our own”: Tusa, The Berlin Airlift, 235.

“That’s good”: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

a “Research Division”: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“He gives every appearance”: Clifford, author’s interview.

the “evil forces”: Time, October 11, 1948.

HST never mentioned Dewey: Clifford, author’s interview.

“If you wanted anything”: The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

“sort of rube reputation”: Daniels, The Man of Independence, 358.

Description of Dewey campaign: The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

“Tonight we enter upon a campaign”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 193.

“We cannot win without”: Quoted in Donovan, 420.

“Smile, governor”: Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, 26.

“You have to know Mr. Dewey well”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 32.

“like a man who has been”: The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

“It is written in the stars”: Smith, 17.

carnal relations: Ibid., 34.

“When you’re leading”: Ibid., 30.

“We always asked them”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 166.

“How long is Dewey”: Life, October 25, 1948.

“get down in the gutter”: Quoted in Smith, 515.

“Isn’t it harder in politics?”: New Republic, November 1, 1948.

“We resurrected the president’s”: Sullivan, The Bureau, 44.

“The tragic fact is”: Time, October 4, 1948.

“We’ll have no thought police”: Quoted in Smith, 508.

“We hit Salt Lake City”: Quoted in Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 207.

“Then we went into Texas”: PP, HST, September 29, 1948, 629.

“He is good on the back”: Quoted in Hardeman and Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography, 340.

“they’d shoot Truman”: Quoted in Steinberg, 325.

“an eloquence close to”: Daniels, 362.

“Our government is made up”: PP, HST, September 26, 1948, 210.

“I am going over to Bonham”: Ibid., September 27, 1948, 591.

“So in making their speeches”: Ibid., 589.

“Some things are worth fighting for”: Ibid., 593, 595.

“They came in droves”: Truman, Souvenir, 231.

“I know every man, woman, and child”: Hardeman and Bacon, 341.

“Shut the door, Beauford”: Quoted in Truman, Harry S. Truman, 37.

“A great many honors”: Baruch, The Public Years, 399.

“one jump ahead of the sheriff’: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

“There is nothing like that”: PP, HST, September 30, 1948, 650.

“Now, whatever you do”: Ibid., October 1, 1948, 664.

“The early morning haze”: Quoted in Goulden, The Best Years 1945–1950, 399.

“We made about a hundred and forty”: HST to MJT, October 5, 1948, HSTL.

“classic unities of politics”: Redding, Inside the Democratic Party, 202.

“Another hell of a day”: HST Diary, September 14, 1948, Off the Record, 149.

selections from Dewey speeches: Goulden, 400.

HST campaign movie: Redding, 254.

“He paused dramatically”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 204.

“If we could only get Stalin”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 215.

“every possible precaution”: Ibid., 216.

“There is much confusion”: Ayers Diary, October 6–7, 1948, HSTL.

“He got up and went out”: Daniels, 29.

“If Harry Truman would just”: Goulden, 414.

Dewey with blind drawn: Smith, 536.

“I grew up on a farm”: PP, HST, October 11, 1948, 737.

If HST called Bess the Boss; Truman, Bess W. Truman, 330.

“If you don’t want to go”: PP, HST, October 11, 1948, 736–37.

Willard, Ohio, stop: Willard Times; Joseph Dush, author’s interview; materials supplied by Harlene Staptf Palkuti.

“I have had the most wonderful”: PP, HST, October 11, 1948, 740.

“I have lived a long time”: Ibid., 743, 747.

“And there it was!”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“So I walked in”: Ibid.

“I was with Truman”: Douglas, In the Fullness of Time, 138.

“I just wonder tonight”: PP, HST, October 12, 1948, 760.

“Now, I call on all liberals”: Ibid., October 13, 1948, 774.

“a lot of surprised pollsters”: Time, October 25, 1948.

“I think he’s doing pretty well”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 215.

“The only way to handle Truman”: Patterson, Mr. Republican. A Biography of Robert A. Taft, 424–25.

“That’s the first lunatic”: Time, October 25, 1948.

Boston Post editorial: October 27, 1948.

“If you’re winning”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“Strain seemed to make him”: Daniels, 361.

“He was not putting on”: Elsey, author’s interview, and Oral History, HSTL.

“For years afterward”: Clifford, Oral History, HSTL.

“We’ve got them on the run”: HST to MJT, October 20, 1948, HSTL.

“The airlift will be continued”: Tusa, 245.

“Say you don’t look so good!”: PP, HST, October 23, 1948, 839.

“The newspapers had convinced them”: Douglas, 138.

attack on Dewey: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 235.

“An element of desperation”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“They have scattered reckless abuse”: Smith, 536.

“The confetti, ticker-tape”: The New York Times, October 29, 1948.

“There is one place”: Quoted in Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 237.

“Such a weak and vacillating”: Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 153.

“There never has been a campaign”: The New York Times, November 1, 1948.

“I became President”: PP, HST, October 30, 1948, 934.

“pullet poll”: Life, November 15, 1948.

“Were it not for all”: Ayers Diary, November 1, 1948, HSTL.

“We all, of course, stayed awake”: Gerard McAnn, author’s interview.

Maloney and his men: Smith, 40.

“We waited and waited”: Sue Gentry, author’s interview.

“We couldn’t believe it”: Ibid.

“What a night”: Truman, Souvenir, 242.

“And all of a sudden”: Jim Rowley, author’s interview.

“his first case of nerves”: Letter from Jerome K. Walsh to Morris J. Ernst, undated, HSTL.

“He just seemed the same old”: Lyman Field, author’s interview.

“He displayed neither tension”: Letter from Jerome K. Walsh to Morris J. Ernst, undated, HSTL.

“Thank you, thank you”: Time, November 8, 1948.

Bankhead telegram: Goulden, 421.

“I think the mistake was”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“shook the bones”: Baltimore Sun, November 7, 1948.

“The farm vote switched”: Thomas Dewey to Henry Luce, undated, L. C.

“You’ve got to give the little man”: Vandenberg, Private Papers, 460.

Taft comment: Steinberg, 332.

Republican Policy Committee Report: December 17, 1948, HSTL.

“Labor Did It”: Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, 255.

“The bear got us”: Smith, 543.

“Far from costing Dewey”: Quoted in Phillips, 250–51.

“I couldn’t have been more wrong”: Life, November 15, 1948.

“What’s the matter with that fellow”: The New York Times, November 28, 1948.

“I kept reading”: Goldman, The Crucial Decade, 87.

“But when voting time came”: Ibid.

“the common man’s man”: Life, November 15, 1948.

“It seemed to have been”: Donovan, 438.

“There was personal humiliation”: New Republic, November 15, 1948.

“There has been a danger”: Ayers Diary, November 4, 1948, HSTL.

Luce memo: November 11, 1948, Time-Warner archives.

“His personality was against him”: Henry Luce memorandum, November 5, 1948, Ibid.

“I think the press”: T. S. Matthews memorandum to Henry Luce, November 4, 1948, Ibid.

“Of course, we did not intentionally”: J. J. Thorndike, Jr., memorandum to Henry Luce, November 5, 1948, Ibid.

90 percent of the credit: Hardeman and Bacon, 342.

“You have put over”: George C. Marshall to HST, November 4, 1948, HSTL.

“I think that Harry Truman grew”: Ross, “How Truman Did It.”

“I think Dewey’s whole campaign”: Clifford, author’s interview.

“no desire to crow”: HST to the Washington Post, November 6, 1948, HSTL.

Part Five

15. Iron Man

“Clearly he was conscious”: Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1949.

“his day of days”: Truman, Souvenir, 255.

“It is the President’s desire”: Seale, The President’s House, Vol. II, 1027.

“I have the job”: Washington Post, January 20, 1949; Time, January 31, 1949.

State of the Union message: PP, HST, January 5, 1949, 1.

H. V. Kaltenborn impersonation: Ibid., January 19, 1949, 110.

“I was not in any way elated”: Ibid.

“Wonderful, wonderful”: Washington Post, January 21, 1949.

Battery D reunion: Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1949.

prayer service: Washington Post, January 21, 1949.

inaugural address: PP, HST, January 20, 1949, 112–16.

“How strange”: Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1949.

“The clear sunlight”: The New York Times, January 21, 1949.

“At the reviewing stand”: J. B. West, author’s interview.

“There never was a country”: Payne, Report on America, p. 3.

“The parade was the most fun”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 448.

“the fellow who was having”: Washington Post, January 22, 1949.

“It can almost be stated”: Bohlen, Witness to History, 284.

“fifty percent better”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 527.

“He looks more relaxed”: Ibid., 463–64.

“He was great down in Key West!”: James Rowley, Jr., author’s interview.

“The President is as close to being”: Time, May 16, 1949.

“He won’t take hold”: Lilienthal Journals, Vol. II, 386.

“No commentator”: Time, March 7, 1949.

HST fair with Forrestal: Forrestal Diaries, 551.

“The best boss I have ever known”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 345.

“a man who, while he reflects”: Forrestal Diaries, 529.

“the mess we are in”: Eisenhower Diaries, 152–53.

his “baffled” look: Washington Post, January 21, 1949.

Forrestal was insane: Pearson, Diaries, 1949–1959, 42.

“a very sick man”: Krock, Memoirs, 253–57.

Secret Service Report: March 31, 1949, HSTL.

“out of his mind”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 506.

Bess was “terribly shaken”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 346.

25,000 Pentagon employees: Time, June 6, 1949.

“Unwittingly”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 503.

“in high good humor”: Time, April 25, 1949.

Cardinal Spellman: Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After, 130–31.

“Hysteria finally died down”: PP, HST, June 16, 1949, 294.

“The military situation”: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 305.

morning press conference: PP, HST, August 4, 1949, 408.

“The unfortunate but inescapable”: Acheson, 303.

“his general’s stars”: Time, August 22, 1949.

“I do these people a courtesy”: Dunar, The Truman Scandals and the Politics of Morality, 70.

“an expression of friendship”: Time, September 12, 1949.

Was it true, asked McCarthy: Ibid.

“Ross and I”: Ayers Diary, August 12, 1949, HSTL.

“After all I am”: Abel, The Truman Scandals, 42–43.

“I think that Mr. Truman”: Barkley, That Reminds Me, 212.

When Vaughan offered to resign: Dunar, 64.

“a whole box of trouble”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 569.

“as if I frequently found him”: Ibid.

“The President was reading a copy”: Ibid., 570–71.

“I believe the American people”: PP, HST, September 23, 1949, 485.

“We keep saying”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 577.

“this grim thing”: Ibid., 584.

“We can never tell”: HST to EWT, June 29, 1949, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 158.

“Never in my wildest dreams”: HST to EN, September 8, 1949, ibid., 163–64.

rats in the White House: Floyd Boring and Rex Scouten, author’s interviews.

“Very discreet”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 111.

“Had dinner by myself”: HST Diary, November 1, 1949, Off the Record, 168–69.

“a fine man”: HST to Jonathan Daniels, February 26, 1950, unsent, ibid., 174.

“It was a great thing”: Dean Acheson, Oral History, HSTL.

Acheson descriptions: Time, February 28, 1949; The New Yorker, November 12 and 19, 1949; The New York Times, October 13, 1971; Clark Clifford and George Elsey, author’s interviews.

“You owe it to Truman”: Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 547.

“a peculiar organization”: HST to David H. Morgan, January 28, 1952, Off the Record, 235.

“At lunch at the Capitol”: Acheson, 107.

“You know all of us”: HST to EN, September 24, 1950, Off the Record, 194.

“deeply loving and tender nature”: Sevareid, Conversations with Eric Sevareid, 73.

“Well, this is the kind of person”: Ibid.

“It was good of you to see us off”: HST to Dean Acheson, November 28, 1949, HSTL.

“And then he was so fair”: Sevareid, 74.

“He was not afraid of the competition”: Acheson, 732–33.

“not pretending to be better”: McLellan, Dean Acheson, 19.

“Today you hear much talk”: Ibid., 173–74.

“Acheson is a gentleman”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 565.

“I told Kennan”: McLellan, 176.

“How can you persuade”: Isaacson and Thomas, 487.

“The day will come”: Time, January 23, 1950.

“Today, by the grace of God”: PP, HST, January 4, 1950, 3.

“I should like to make it clear”: Acheson, 360.

“I think anyone who has known”: Ibid.

“This newspaper has felt”: New York Herald-Tribune, January 27, 1950.

“wonderful about it”: Acheson, 360.

“I look at that fellow”: Quoted in Goldman, 125.

“blow them off the face of the earth”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 585.

“Like a patient”: Time, January 30, 1950.

an “atmosphere of excitement”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 628–29.

“eloquently and forcefully”: Acheson, 349.

“We must protect the President”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 630.

he felt he must express: Ibid., 632.

“Can the Russians?”: Quoted in Donovan, Tumultuous Years, 156.

“It is part of my responsibility”: PP, HST, January 31, 1950, 138.

“I hope I was wrong”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 633–34.

“General annihiliation beckons”: Quoted in Goldman, 137.

“How much are we going”: Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, 507.

“The air was so charged”: Block, The Herblock Book, 144.

205 “known communists”: Reeves, Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, 224, 237.

“When this pompous diplomat”: Bernstein and Matusow, eds., The Truman Administration, 407.

“I will not turn my back”: Washington Post, June 25, 1950.

“keep talking and if one case”: Reeves, 263.

“top Russian espionage agent”: Time, April 3, 1950.

“In an age of atomic energy”: Krock, In the Nation: 1932–1966, 145–46.

“One of the happiest sessions”: Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. II, 635.

“You see everybody”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 351.

“What has made me so jittery”: Ibid.

“a ballyhoo artist”: Donovan, 166.

plunged to 37 percent: Time, April 24, 1950.

Little White House press conference: PP, HST, March 30, 1950, 232–38.

Federal Bar Association speech: Ibid, April 24, 1950, 269.

“I think our friend”: Quoted in Donovan, 170.

Maragaret Chase Smith: Acheson, 365.

the “lure in power”: HST Diary, April 16, 1950, Off the Record, 177.

“I am not a candidate”: Ibid.

NSC-68: Acheson, 374.

“bludgeon the mass mind”: Ibid.

“with us for a long, long time”: PP, HST, May 9, 1950, 335.

“a grand visit”: HST to Stanley Woodward, June 24, 1950, Off the Record, 184.

“We would not build”: PP, HST, June 24, 1950.

nation’s worst air disaster: The New York Times, June 25, 1950.

“There are lots of places”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1950.

Dean Acheson call: Memoirs, Vol. II, 332.

“My first reaction”: Ibid.

“It would appear”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 334.

“Dad took it”: Truman, Souvenir, 275.

departure so swift: Memoirs, Vol. II, 332.

Bess looking as she had the night FDR died: The New York Times, June 26, 1950.

“By God, I am going to”: Quoted in Donovan, 197.

“I remembered how”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 332–33

Rusk had seen no likelihood of war: Rusk, As I Saw It, 161.

Blair House meeting: Memoirs, Vol. II, 333.

dinner meeting: Smith, “Why We Went to War in Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, November 11, 1950.

a “darkening report”: Acheson, 406.

“a dagger pointed at the heart”: Rusk, 162.

“We must draw the line”: Bradley and Blair, 534–35.

“Underlying these discussions”: Ibid., 535.

“He pulled all the conferees together”: The New York Times, June 28, 1950.

“I thought we were still holding”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 335.

“the complete, almost unspoken”: Ibid., 334.

“so as not to give him too much”: Bradley and Blair, 536.

“It was our idea”: Donovan, 199.

“as Hermann Goering”: Jenkins, Truman, 164.

“Our estimate is that a complete collapse”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 337.

adding “not yet”: Department of State Memorandum for the Secretary, June 30, 1950, HSTL.

“We had no war plan”: Bradley and Blair, 539.

“Everything I have done”: Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 289.

“Too little, too late”: Washington Post, June 27, 1950.

“The attack upon Korea”: PP, HST, June 27, 1950, 492.

“Although the President”: Alsop, “Why Has Washington Gone Crazy?”, Saturday Evening Post, July 29, 1950.

“These are days”: Washington Post, June 28, 1950.

“We’ll have a dozen Koreas”: Eisenhower Diaries, 175.

“You may be a whiskey guzzling poker playing”: Harry Abel to HST, June 27, 1950, HSTL.

“I have lived and worked”: Time, July 10, 1950.

“We are not at war”: PP, HST, June 29, 1950, 504.

“The only assurance for holding”: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 334.

“Must be careful not to cause”: HST Diary, June 30, 1950, Off the Record, 185.

“Now, your job as President”: Sevareid, 74.

“Memo to Dean Acheson”: Acheson, 415.

16. Commander in Chief

“There was nothing passive”: Elsey, “Memoir: Some White House Recollections, 1942–1953,” Diplomatic History, Summer 1988.

“This is the Greece”: Quoted in Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 297.

“walk with the weary man’s”: Time, July 10, 1950.

Bradley meeting with HST: Time, August 21, 1950.

“The size of the attack”: PP, HST, July 19, 1950, 538.

as if a few troops of Boy Scouts: Ridgway, The Korean War, 17.

“Guys, sweat soaked”: Knox, The Korean War, Pusan to Chosin, 71.

“What a place to die”: New York Herald-Tribune, July 6, 1950.

Acheson, however, disagreed: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 414.

“Later when Robert Taft”: Heller, The Truman White House, 13.

HST said he would “back out”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 340.

her father’s anguish: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 357.

telegrams and letters to White House: White House Correspondence File, HSTL.

“The influence of Louis Johnson”: Joseph Alsop, author’s interview.

July 14 meeting: Acheson, 421.

July 19 message to Congress: PP, HST, July 19, 1950, 527–37.

press conference: Ibid., July 27, 1950, 560–64.

“He would have saved himself”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 542.

“an inordinate egotistical desire”: HST Diary, September 14, 1950, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 192.

a “pathological condition”: Bradley and Blair, 542.

HST confiding Harriman’s story: Ayers Diary, July 3, 1950, HSTL.

“A most interesting morning”: HST Diary, September 14, 1950, Off the Record, 192.

“Mr. Prima Donna”: HST Diary, June 17, 1945, ibid., 47.

“little regard or respect”: Ayers Diary, July 1, 1950, HSTL.

Dulles advised HST: Ibid.

HST’s little regard for generals: HST memorandum, April 24, 1954, Off the Record, 303.

“likes horses with blinders on”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 220.

“fluid but improving”: Ayers Diary, August 12, 1950, HSTL.

HST’s uppermost concern: Memoirs, Vol. II, 351.

“catch him alone”: Quoted in Heller, 14.

MacArthur assured HST: Memoirs, Vol. II, 351.

“with all his dramatic eloquence”: Bradley and Blair, 546.

the riskiest military proposal: Ibid., 544.

“I made it clear to the President”: Quoted in Heller, 14.

“as fast as you can”: Bradley and Blair, 546.

“This means not the usual”: Osborne, Life and Time, August 21, 1950.

“the wildest kind”: Bradley and Blair, 556.

“the gravest misgivings”: Ibid., 547.

“Nothing could be more fallacious”: Manchester, American Caesar, 568.

“his lips white”: Bradley and Blair, 551.

rank insubordination: Ibid.

“the height of arrogance”: Ibid.

HST rejects idea of relieving MacArthur: Memoirs, Vol. II, 355–56.

HST asks Johnson to have MacArthur’s statement withdrawn: Bradley and Blair, 551.

“The JCS inclined toward postponing”: Ibid., 547.

“a failure could be a national”: Ibid., 545.

“It was a daring strategic conception”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 358.

“Hell and high water”: HST to EWT, September 7, 1950, Off the Record, 189.

“I’ll do it”: Ibid.

“Can you think of anyone?”: Ibid.

Johnson told he must quit: HST Diary, September 14, 1950, ibid., 193.

a “military miracle”: Ridgway, 44.

“I salute you all”: Quoted in Phillips, 313.

“Troops could not be expected”: Acheson, 445.

to “feel unhampered”: Ridgway, 45.

“an almost superstitious awe”: Ibid., 61.

warnings a bluff: Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War, 87.

“and I did not feel”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 368.

“the perfect answer”: Wiltz, “Truman and MacArthur: The Wake Island Meeting,” Military Affairs, December 1978.

“good election year stuff”: Donovan, Tumultuous Years,284.

“While General MacArthur”: Acheson, 456.

“I’ve a whale of a job”: HST to Nellie Noland, October 13, 1950, Off the Record, 196.

“Two men can sometimes learn”: Time, October 23, 1950.

“I don’t care what they say”: Ibid.

MacArthur had arrived the night before: Ibid.

Harriman exchange with MacArthur: Bradley and Blair, 573.

“grave responsibility”: Ibid.

MacArthur greeting: New York Herald-Tribune, October 15, 1950.

“I have been worried”: Quoted in Donovan, 285.

MacArthur assured him victory was won: Memoirs, Vol. II, 365.

“seemed genuinely pleased”: Ibid.

“I had been warned”: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 361.

Vernice Anderson incident: Jessup, “Research Note/The Record of Wake Island—A Correction,” The Journal of American History, March 1981.

when MacArthur received transcript: Bradley and Blair, 575.

“He was the most persuasive fellow”: Quoted in Manchester, 592.

“the formal resistance”: Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference on October 15, 1950, compiled by General Omar Bradley, declassified, 1, HSTL.

By January: Ibid.

Dean Rusk concerned: Rusk, As I Saw It, 169.

“Hell no!”: Ibid.

“They are the happiest”: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950. Vol. VII: Korea, 953

the French couldn’t “clean it up”: Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference, 17.

MacArthur declined lunch: Ibid.

“Whether intended or not”: Bradley and Blair, 576.

“The communiqué should be submitted”: Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference, 23.

MacArthur asked the President: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 362.

“Eisenhower doesn’t know the first thing”: Ibid., 363.

“the very complete unanimity of view”: PP, HST, October 15, 1950, 672.

“his vision, his judgment”: Donovan, 288.

a “glorious new page”: PP, HST, October 17, 1950, 674.

“On this one”: Rusk, 169.

“Come up to Pyongyang”: Newsweek, October 23, 1950.

“Goodbye, sir”: Time, October 23, 1950.

“I like them more”: Truman, Letters from Father, 97.

“He would treat us”: Rex Scouten, author’s interview.

Floyd Boring’s wife: Floyd Boring, author’s interview.

“The house was so quiet”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 116.

“I’d come out more or less”: Boring, author’s interview.

mistaken for divinity students: Life: November 13, 1950.

assassination attempt: Boring, author’s interview; Scouten, author’s interview; Life, November 13, 1950; The New York Times, November 2, 1950; Time, November 12, 1950; Whistle Stop, Fall 1979.

“Why, of course”: Time, November 12, 1950.

“It is important”: PP, HST, November 1, 1950, 693.

“But Truman was…just a symbol”: Kansas City Times, September 11, 1979.

“A President has to expect”: The New York Times, November 2, 1950.

HST insisted he was in no danger: PP, HST, November 2, 1950, 696.

so “unnecessary”: HST to Dean Acheson, November 2, 1950, HSTL.

“[Leaving the airport)”: HST Diary, November 5, 1950, Off the Record, 198.

“really a prisoner now”: HST to EN, November 17, 1950, ibid.

“The Korean death trap”: Donovan, 295.

“All the piety”: Ibid., 297.

Bess had seldom seen HST so downhearted: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 363–64.

“Some Republicans interpret”: PP, HST, November 16, 1950, 714.

“Then there were those”: Ridgway, 61.

“If this operation is successful”: Manchester, 606.

“a terrible message”: Ibid., 608.

“We’ve got a terrific”: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 27.

“The Chinese have come in”: Ibid.

“alone and inescapably”: Ibid., 28.

seven thousand letters: Heller, 47.

“We can blame the liars”: Ibid., 30.

“His mouth drew tight”: Ibid., 28.

“We have got to meet this thing”: Ibid., 30;

“We face an entirely new war”: Quoted in Acheson, 469.

November 28, 1950, meeting: Ibid., 469, 471.

“There was no doubt”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 378.

“We can’t defeat the Chinese”: Acheson, 471.

the “imperative step”: Ibid.

“The threat of a larger war”: Bradley and Blair, 599.

“hordes of Chinese Reds”: Washington Star, November 28, 1950.

“A lot of hard work”: Memoirs Vol. II, 388.

“Remember, photographers are”: Truman, Letters from Father, 99.

“He ‘used’ the press”: Phillips, The New York Times, December 31, 1972.

“a fat no good can of lard”: HST to MJT, July 25, 1947, Off the Record, 115.

“the Sop Sisters”: HST to EWT, June 11, 1950, Ibid., 179 and 41, note.

“The prostitutes of the mind”: Poen, Strictly Personal and Confidential, 24.

“You might tell the gentleman”: HST to Joseph J. McGee, November 22, 1950, Off the Record, 199.

November 30, 1950, press conference: PP, HST, 724–728.

“No, it doesn’t mean”: Ibid., 727.

the “wildest days” ever: Ayers Diary, November 30, 1950, HSTL.

“the use of any weapon”: PP, HST, November 30, 1950, 727.

HST ill-advised: Bradley and Blair, 604.

in a crucial few days: Acheson, 466.

“I have the unhappy conviction”: Ibid.

“well remember”: Ridgway, 61.

“someone expressed what everyone”: Acheson, 475.

“You can relieve any commander”: Ridgway, 62.

Rusk proposes relieving MacArthur: Acheson, 476.

“I should have relieved”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 384.

“We must get him out”: HST Diary, December 2, 1950, Off the Record, 202.

“It looks very bad”: Ibid.

“Mr. President, the Chinese”: Rusk, 170.

“I’ve had conference after conference”: HST Diary, December 9, 1950, Off the Record, 204.

“[The President] thought that if”: Quoted in Donovan, 317.

He would not use the bomb: Ibid., 318.

“Charlie seemed in good form”: Ayers Diary, December 5, 1950, HSTL.

Death of Charlie Ross: Washington Post, December 6, 1950.

“The friend of my youth”: PP, HST, December 5, 1950, 737.

“Ah, hell”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 545–46.

previous Ross heart attacks: Washington Post, December 6, 1950.

HST keeps Ross death from Margaret: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 546.

“Afterward, Dad was effusive”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 366.

“really pretty bad that night”: John Hersey, author’s interview.

Hume review: Washington Post, December 6, 1950.

“That’s exactly what I want”: Traubel, St. Louis Woman, 211.

“longhand spasm”: HST to Dean Acheson, April 8, 1957, HSTL.

“Charlie Ross would never have”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“Mr. Hume: I’ve just read”: HST to Paul Hume, December 7, 1950.

“In the first place”: Time, December 18, 1950.

To Margaret he said: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 547.

“When he would write”: Elsey, Oral History, HSTL.

“a propaganda machine”: Time, September 18, 1950.

“I can only say”: Time, December 18, 1950.

letters and telegrams to White House: General Correspondence File, HSTL.

letter from the Bannings: HSTL.

“The Eighth Army is yours”: Ridgway, 83.

“never uttered wiser words”: Acheson, 512.

“brilliant, driving”: Bradley and Blair, 608.

“The troops are tired”: Ibid., 619.

“Under the extraordinary”: Quoted in Donovan, 346.

to recognize the “state of war”: Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 550.

atomic bombs: Schaller, Douglas MacArthur, 225.

“go down that trail”: Rusk, 170.

“infinite patience”: Acheson, 515.

“steps which might in themselves”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 438, 436.

“We were at our lowest”: Bradley and Blair, 620.

“Eighth Army in good shape”: Ibid., 623.

“rolling forward”: Ridgway, The Korean War, 106.

to look “beyond MacArthur”: Bradley and Blair, 623.

Ridgway thought HST a great and courageous man: Ridgway, author’s interview.

“mainly a prima donna”: Bradley and Blair, 623.

“While General MacArthur was fighting”: Acheson, 517.

“the really terrifying strength”: Ridgway, 111.

“tired and depressed: Goulden, Korea, 453.

“just ordered a resumption”: Ridgway, 109.

“not only his nerves”: MacArthur, Reminiscences, 393.

“snapped his brilliant”: Bradley and Blair, 626.

“The enemy, therefore”: MacArthur, 388.

his “pronunciamento”: Acheson, The Korean War, 101.

“unforgiveable and irretrievable act”: Bradley and Blair, 627.

“Whom the gods would destroy”: Acheson, Korean War, 100.

“I couldn’t send a message”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 559.

“This was a most extraordinary”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 441–42.

“disbelief with controlled fury”: Acheson, Korean War, 102.

“Gallup Poll: The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, 970.

“If you are going to get on”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 443–45.

“What are we in Korea for”: Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics, 203.

“Mr. President, this man is not”: Roger Tubby Diary, April 5, 1951.

“I did not know”: Bradley and Blair, 629.

“The situation could be resolved”: Acheson, Korean War, 104.

“If you relieve MacArthur”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 447.

“I don’t express any opinion”: HST Diary, April 5, 1951, Off the Record, 211.

“at the apex of a situation”: MacArthur, 394.

“The wind died down”: Martin, 207.

because they knew the kind of abuse: Bradley and Blair, 633.

MacArthur firing would provoke: Ibid.

“There was no question”: Phillips, 346–47.

He told Bradley to prepare: Memoirs, Vol. II, 448.

Speculation about MacArthur: Washington Post, April 10, 1951.

“So you won’t have to read about it”: Tubby Diary, April 12, 1951.

a supposed “major resignation”: Bradley and Blair, 636.

“There was a degree of panic”: Elsey, author’s interview.

“He’s not going to be allowed”: Phillips, 343.

“Discussed the situation”: HST Diary, April, 9, 1951, Off the Record, 211.

“Well, the little man”: Rusk, 172.

would have retired “without difficulty”: Schaller, 239.

HST’s “mental instability”: Donovan, 360; Goulden, 495.

“Our only choice”: Washington Post, April 12, 1951.

Tom Connally reminded: Ibid.

Chicago Tribune editorial: April 12, 1951.

“This is the biggest windfall”: Washington Post, April 18 1951.

“In the days ahead”: Letter from W. O. Douglas to HST, April 11, 1951, HSTL.

“It makes not the slightest”: The President vs. the General,” Sermon by Dr. Duncan E. Littlefield, April 15, 1951, Fountain Street Baptist Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, HSTL.

“The most obvious fact”: New York Herald-Tribune, April 13, 1951.

“bourbon and Benedictine”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 14, 1951.

Gallup Poll: Goldman, The Crucial Decade, 203.

HST booed at Griffith Stadium: Washington Post, April 21, 1951.

April 11, 1951, broadcast: PP, HST, April 11, 1951, 223–27.

“The only politics I have”: Time, April 30, 1951.

“I was sorry to have to reach”: HST to Eisenhower, April 13, 1951, HSTL.

mock “Schedule for Welcoming…”: HSTL.

“I address you”: New York Herald-Tribune, April 20, 1951.

“When I joined the Army”: MacArthur, 405.

“The hopes and dreams”: Quoted in Manchester, 661.

“We heard God speak”: Ibid.

“I honestly felt that if the speech”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 563.

“a bunch of damn bullshit”: Quoted in Miller, Plain Speaking, 337.

“After I looked at that wreckage”: Time, May 14, 1951.

“a very distressing necessity”: Ibid.

“Having made this courageous decision”: Bradley and Blair, 637.

“Courage didn’t have anything”: Quoted in Phillips, 350.

“Truman’s conflict with MacArthur”: Rusk, 172.

MacArthur to Samuel Eliot Morison: Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, 1072.

May 18 dinner: PP, HST, May 18, 1951, 292–93.

Tullahoma, Tennessee, speech: Ibid., June 25, 1951, 357–63.

17. Final Days

“I have tried to give it”: PP, HST, January 15, 1953, 1202.

“I walk two miles”: HST Diary, January 3, 1952, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 226.

“Mr. President, this is my first”: PP, HST, July 12, 1951, 387.

HST served bowl of milk toast: Tubby Diary, May 21, 1951.

“You constantly tell me to relax”: Ibid., April 13, 1952.

a framed verse: Hersey, Aspects of the Presidency, 108.

it was all worth the effort: Tubby Diary, October 15, 1951.

“I know what a soldier goes through”: PP, HST, January 15, 1953, 1200.

Sergeant John Rice: The New York Times, August 29, 1951.

“mysterious, powerful” conspiracy: Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, 372.

a “pithy and bitter” summary: Hersey, 137–38.

“Three pungent comments”: Ibid.

HST announces Marshall stepping down: PP, HST, September 12, 1951, 516.

Hassett would bring him funny items: Tubby Diary, June 24, 1951.

Hassett an alcoholic: Ibid., September 18, 1951.

the “chiselers” within: Ibid., early June, 1951.

“He tended to live”: George Elsey, author’s interview.

“an overeducated S.O.B.”: Douglas, In the Fullness of Time, 222.

he had “gone too far”: Ibid., 223.

“real crooks and influence peddlers”: Ibid.

“You have been loyal to friends”: Ibid., 224.

“You bastards”: Quoted in Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After, 196.

“With staggering impact”: Ibid., 198–99.

HST and Army football scandal: Tubby Diary, August 3 and 8, 1951.

“I did nothing improper”: Douglas, 224.

He liked people: Tubby Diary, August 3, 1951.

“He was dressed in flashy”: Ibid., September 13, 1951.

“Ah, me. I wonder”: Ibid., early June, 1951,

like Warren G. Harding: Ibid., September 13, 1951.

“Poker, poker”: Ibid., April 2, 1951.

“Truman has to take strong action”: Ibid., early June, 1951.

“He does not like to dwell”: Ibid., October 15, 1951.

Boyle background: Kansas City Star, August 31, 1951.

“I like people who can”: HST to MT, December 3, 1944, Truman, Letters from Father, 60.

Charles Binnagio: The New York Times, April 7, 1950; Life, April 17, 1950.

“So Boyle is not only stupid”: Tubby Diary, early June, 1951.

“It’s all right”: Ibid.

“I have the utmost confidence”: PP, HST, August 9, 1951, 454.

Murphy memorandum: Charles S. Murphy to HST, August 9, 1951, HSTL.

Gabrielson revelations: Time, October 15, 1951.

Elsey report: Dunar, The Truman Scandals, 128.

“Let’s say continue”: PP, HST, December 13, 1951, 641.

“Boss, you’re going to have to run”: Tubby Diary, October 15, 1951.

“Once I’m outa the White House”: Ibid.

Gallup Poll: The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–71, 1032.

“From that day forward”: Tubby Diary, January 16, 1952.

“Dealing with Communist Governments”: HST, private longhand note, January 27, 1952, HSTL.

Churchill trip to Washington: Gilbert, Winston Churchill, Never Despair, 675.

“What Churchill did was great”: Acheson, Present at the Creation, 595.

Churchill acknowledged American nuclear power: Tubby Diary, January 16, 1952.

HST’s “great decision”: Gilbert, 676.

“The last time you and I sat”: This often repeated tribute appears to have been recorded by Joe Short, who was on board the Williamsburg. It is paraphrased in Roger Tubby’s diary and would later appear in Margaret Truman Daniel’s book about her father and in several obituaries at the time of Truman’s death.

“the great white jail”: HST to EWT, September 13, 1946, Dear Bess, 536.

Hersey tour of White House: Hersey, 88.

“It is the President’s desire”: Winslow Diary, January 14 1949, OCWH (Office of the Curator, White House).

Congressional Commission established: Scale, The President’s House, Vol. II, 1029.

“The character and extent”: The White House Report of the Commission of Public Buildings, 91.

“The decision between these plans”: Ibid., 48.

Rabaut argued for dismantling: Renovation Commission Hearing Minutes, July 19, 1949, HSTL.

“They took the insides all out”: HST Diary, March 2, 1952, Off the Record, 243.

for proper underpinning: Seale, Vol. II, 1034.

“faithful reproductions”: The White House Report of the Commission of Public Buildings, 93.

“The President has authorized”: Seale, Vol. II, 1039.

description of bomb shelter: Tubby Diary, July 26, 1951.

for “morale reasons”: Ibid.

False radar report: Ibid.

“He considered it his project”: Rex Scouten, author’s interview.

“It is absolutely essential”: HST to Les Larson, June 12, 1951, HSTL.

HST forced into politics: Hersey, 88.

communing with White House spirits: Seale, Vol. II, 1047.

Winslow memo to HST: H. G. Grim to Lorenze S. Winslow, September 13, 1951, HSTL.

“I want it distinctly”: HST to William Adams Delano, August 25, 1950, HSTL.

“moving at the double quick”: The New York Times, March 15, 1952.

“Bess and I looked over”: HST Diary, March 27, 1952, Off the Record, 246.

“The President was an inexhaustible”: The New York Times, May 4, 1952.

“the most logical and qualified”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 489.

Eisenhower lunch with HST: Krock, Memoirs, 267-68.

“You can’t join a party”: Ambrose, Eisenhower, Soldier and President, 259-60.

“He told me Arthur Krock’s story”: Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles, 693.

“Dear Ike: The Columnists”: HST to Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 18, 1951, Off the Record, 220.

“a grand man”: PP, HST, January 10, 1952, 21, 22.

“I’m sorry to see these fellows”: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“Can we elect?”: HST Diary, July 6, 1952, Off the Record, 261.

“He proved in that contest”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 491.

“He comes of a political family”: Ibid.

Stevenson talked his way past the guards: Martin, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, 523.

“I told him I would not run”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 491.

“He was overcome”: HST Diary, March 4, 1952, Off the Record, 245.

“He apparently was flabbergasted”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 492.

“full of admiration”: Quoted in Martin, 523.

“Stevenson was impressed”: Ibid., 524.

“Adlai, if a knucklehead like me”: McKeever, Adlai Stevenson, His Life and Legacy, 179.

“If Eisenhower were the Republican”: Ibid., 178.

“[He] came to tell me”: HST Diary, March 4, 1952, Off the Record, 245.

Clifford advice to HST: Clifford, with Holbrooke, Counsel to the President, 283.

“Anybody who works closely”: Quoted in Martin, 544-45.

“Not at all”: Acheson, 632.

“I shall not be a candidate”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 492.

“I found myself shouting”: Quoted in Martin, 547.

“When you made your announcement”: Tubby Diary, April 3, 1952.

Did he plan to run: PP, HST, April 3, 1952, 233-34.

“I was stunned by”: Quoted in Martin, 553.

HST response to Stevenson: Ibid.

his amazing stamina: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“inability to get on top”: Dunar, 119.

with this farcical denouement: Phillips, The Truman Presidency, 413.

“I want you to know”: Dunar, 119.

“when I’m not so shaky”: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“McGrath, Korean truce talks”: Ibid.

HST appointment schedule: HSTL.

“These are not normal times”: PP, HST, April 8, 1952, 246.

“The President has the power”: Tubby Diary, April 6, 1952.

“Secretary of Defense Lovett”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 469.

“The attitude of the companies”: Ibid., 468.

“The plain fact of the matter”: PP, HST, April 8, 1952, 249.

HST looked so exhausted: Tubby Diary, April 13, 1952.

“very desirable”: PP, HST, April 9, 1952, 251.

one of the most high-handed acts: Washington Post, April 10, 1952.

“Nothing in the Constitution”: Ibid.

“Under similar circumstances”: PP, HST, April 17, 1952, 273.

“I believe that the contemplated strike”: Time, May 12, 1952.

“read it, read it”: Tubby Diary, May 3, 1952.

“[I] had never seen him”: Ibid.

an “outstanding” lawyer: Memoirs, Vol. II, 475.

“We cannot with faithfulness”: Donovan, “Truman Seizes Steel,” Constitution, Fall 1990.

“Today a kindly President”: Ibid.

“damn fool from Texas”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 242.

“a bit testy”: Donovan, “Truman Seizes Steel.”

“No enemy nation could”: Newsweek, August 4, 1952.

“The Court and Congress got us”: Tubby Diary, May 30–June 1, 1952.

“If the doctor had come in”: Ibid, July 21, 1952.

“It’s a lockout”: Ibid.

“This should lead to”: PP, HST, July 24, 1952, 501.

any red-blooded Democrat: Time, July 7, 1952.

“You never know what’s in you”: Tubby Diary, July 2, 1952.

“We followed you before”: Time, July 21, 1952.

“If Harry Truman turns out”: Ibid., July 7, 1952.

“I have been trying”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 496.

“I am going to take my coat off: Ibid., 497.

“The people are wise”: Time, August 4, 1952.

“Sacrifice, patience”: Quoted in McKeever, 201.

“Stevenson made his decision”: Time, August 4, 1952.

“Dear Governor: Last night”: HST to Adlai Stevenson, July 26, 1952, Off the Recora 263.

“He was affronted by”: Quoted in McKeever, 198.

“I have come to the conclusion”: HST to Adlai Stevenson, early August 1951, Off the Record, 266.

“Can Stevenson really clean up”: Martin, 644.

“rather ridiculous”: HST to Adlai Stevenson late August 1952, unsent, Off the Record, 268.

“Oh, Stevenson will get”: Tubby Diary, August 21, 1952.

“His eloquence was real”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 497.

HST would do everything possible: Tubby Diary, August 13, 1952.

“There’s a man of granite”: Ibid.

“When you vote the Democratic ticket”: PP, HST, September 29, 1952, 621.

“What I’ve always had in mind”: HST to Dwight Eisenhower, August 16, 1952, Off the Record, 263-64.

“a modern Cromwell”: Tubby Diary, September 17, 1952.

“This will help us”: Ibid., September 22, 1952.

“I nearly choked to hear him”: Ibid., September 14, 1952.

“I feel as if I killed them”: Ibid., September 22, 1952.

“red-hot anger”: Reeves, 439.

“Do I need to tell you”: Ibid., 440.

“very sad and pathetic”: PP, HST, October 4, 1952, 711.

“lay off Ike for a while”: Tubby Diary, early October, 1952.

“The general whose words”: PP, HST, October 7, 1952, 738.

“betrayed his principles”: Ibid., October 10, 1952, 784.

“Why, General Marshall was responsible”: Quoted in Miller, 370.

“Just how low”: Quoted in Donovan, 401.

“Ike was well informed”: Bradley and Blair, A General’s Life, 650.

no one could have beaten Eisenhower: HST memorandum, December 22, 1952, Off the Record, 282.

“if you still desire”: Donovan, 402.

“I sincerely wish”: HST Diary, November 15, 1952, Off the Record, 273.

“an orderly transfer”: Memoirs, Vol. II, 505.

he wished someone had done: Tubby Diary, November 24, 1952.

“not very graciously”: HST Diary, November 20, 1952, Off the Record, 274.

“He’ll sit right here”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 603.

“The White House is quiet”: HST Diary, November 24, 1952, Off the Record, 275.

“Since last September Mother Wallace”: Ibid.

“She was a grand lady”: HST Diary, December 6, 1952, ibid., 279.

32 percent: Gallup, 1102.

43 percent: Ibid.

“I wonder how far Moses”: HST Memorandum, 1954(?), Off the Record, 310.

“It bears down on a country boy”: HST to EN, January 2, 1952, Off the Record, 287.

felt “repudiated”: Tubby Diary, February 1, 1953.

reminiscences with staff: Ibid, February 2, 1953.

916Look magazine article: Commager, “A Few Kind Words for Harry Truman,” Look, August 1951.

“Flying back over the flatlands”: Tubby Diary, February 3, 1953.

“Certainly no man”: PP, HST, January 16, 1953, 1203.

“In personality, conversation”: Brown, Through These Men, 41.

farewell address: PP, HST, January 15, 1953, 1197-1202.

“in the manner of his going”: New York Herald-Tribune, January 19, 1953.

Inauguration day: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 287.

“I was glad I wasn’t”: West, with Kotz, Upstairs at the White House, 126.

“I ride with Ike”: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 257.

“the very many courtesies”: Ambrose, 296.

“It was a shocking moment”: Eric Sevareid, author’s interview.

“The street in front of Dean’s house”: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 288.

“an absolutely wonderful affair”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 610.

“There’s the best friend”: Washington Post, January 21, 1953.

“I’m just Mr. Truman”: The New York Times, January 21, 1953.

“Crowd at Harper’s Ferry”: HST Diary, January 20, 1953, Off the Record, 288.

Part Six

18. Citizen Truman

“Been going over”: HST to Dean Acheson, April 18, 1953, HSTL.

“Who knows”: HST to EW, May 23, 1911, Dear Bess, 36.

“I tried never to forget”: Miller, Plain Speaking, 10.

“Rumors have it”: Independence Examiner, January 22, 1953.

Burrus had picked out house: Rufus Burrus, author’s interview.

exploit or “commercialize”: Associated Press, January 23, 1953.

a Miami real estate developer: Samuel Q. Goldman to HST, October 7, 1952, HSTL.

Toyota offer: HST to Paul Butler, March 3, 1959, HSTL.

“I still don’t feel”: Quoted in Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency, 153.

“where everybody seemed”: HST to Dean Acheson, February 7, 1953, HSTL.

“take the grips up”: Ray Scherer, author’s interview.

HST set off for Grandview: Tubby Diary, February 5, 1953; Independence Examiner, January 23, 1953.

That was good land: George Elsey, Oral History, HSTL; author’s interview.

“A cold wind whipping”: Tubby Diary, February 5, 1953.

“More than any other single”: Harry S. Truman, Mr. Citizen, 25.

“He was utterly lost”: Osborne, “Happy Days for Harry,” Life, July 7, 1958.

“Diamond Head”: HST Diary, April 1953, in Ferrell, ed., Off the Record, 290.

“This morning at 7 A.M.”: HST Diary, May 20, 1953, Ibid., 292.

“A shovel (automatic)”: Ibid.

“a real tryout”: Truman, 64.

“Everything went well”: HST to Vic H. Housholder, November 29, 1953, Off the Record, 298.

“I admitted the charge”: Ibid.

“There goes our incognito”: Truman, 65.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes”: The New York Times, June 22, 1953.

“like a dream”: Truman, 67.

“If you’d go again”: The New York Times, June 29, 1953.

“He was very nice”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 6, 1953.

“The book is doing fine”: HST to Acheson, November 5, 1953, HSTL.

Paul Douglas observation: Quoted in Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 663.

“As for the United States”: July 27, 1953.

“The war is over”: Manchester, 663.

“Of course I’m happy”: HST to Bela Kornitzer, August 7, 1953, HSTL.

“I’m not a writer!”: Francis Heller, author’s interview.

Hillman and Noyes: Miller, 20.

Promising to “protect” HST: Heller, author’s interview.

recording machine: Heller, “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Winter 1983.

Royce highly disorganized: Heller, author’s interview.

HST annoyed: Heller, “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs.”

“lively” and “honest”: Elston, The World of Time Inc., 299.

“The cream of the White House”: Williams, “I Was Truman’s Ghost,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

“His approval or criticism”: Ibid.

HST begins his day: Erskine, “Truman in Retirement,” Collier’s, February 4, 1955.

“She had golden curls”: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 116.

“I always try to be”: HST Diary, July 8, 1953, Off the Record, 293.

“After I’d passed”: Ibid.

“When we moved”: Memoirs, Vol. 1, 115.

“In the fall of 1892”: Ibid., 116.

How could father be called failure: Steinberg, The Man from Missouri, 15.

“I have been working on”: HST to Acheson, January 28, 1954, HSTL.

“Our tribal instinct”: HST to Acheson, St. Patrick’s Day, 1954, HSTL.

“I used to say”: Osborne, “Happy Days for Harry.”

auction at the Armory: Independence Examiner, November 19, 1954.

“I’m worried about our world”: HST to Acheson, May 28, 1954, HSTL.

Truman stricken at Call Me Madam: Kansas City Star, June 19, 1954.

gall bladder operation: The New York Times, June 21, 1954.

“a hell of a time”: HST to Acheson, October 14, 1954, HSTL.

“When the papers tell us”: Acheson to HST, June 21, 1954, HSTL.

“When you get acquainted”: Ibid.

“It is touching”: Acheson to EWT, June 30, 1954, HSTL.

“going great guns”: HST to Acheson, January 11, 1955, HSTL.

“The material is more interesting”: Acheson to HST, June 21, 1955, HSTL.

“Page 114, line 3”: Ibid.

“She was his true”: Ken McCormick, author’s interview.

“We’d left home”: HST Diary, June 24, 1955, Off the Record, 317.

“I never really appreciated”: Elston, 299.

“I expect to use, probably”: HST to Samuel S. Vaughan, October 22, 1955, HSTL.

“when we see him”: Samuel S. Vaughan, author’s interview.

“I had no idea”: Ibid.

“There, that one’s all slicked up”: Paul Horgan, author’s interview.

“I will autograph”: HST to Ken McCormick, July 1, 1955, Off the Record, 319.

only as “my history”: Heller, author’s interview.

“Altogether, it well”: The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1955.

called Margaret “skinny”: HST to Acheson, January 11, 1955, HSTL.

“When I hear”: HST to Acheson, January 25, 1955, HSTL.

“Margie has put one over”: HST to Acheson, March 26, 1956, HSTL.

“He strikes me as a very nice”: HST to Acheson, March 26, 1956, HSTL.

“Consolation is just what”: Acheson to HST, March 27, 1956, HSTL.

“rain, rain, rain”: HST Diary, June 21 (?), 1956, Off the Record, 336.

“I was so afraid”: HST to Acheson, July 20, 1956, HSTL.

welcome in Rome: Time, May 28, 1956.

Henry Luce tour: The New York Times, May 20, 1956.

Paul Schultheiss: Independence Examiner, May 19, 1956.

“He is considered the greatest”: HST Diary, May 27–29, 1956, Off the Record, 329.

“[Harry] Truman and his wife lunched”: Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, 436.

“I found that it was somewhat”: HST Diary, June 4, 1956, Off the Record, 332.

“squeezed” from the people: HST Diary, June 1956, ibid., 333.

“We crossed the Channel”: HST Diary, June 21 (?), 1956, ibid., 336.

“Never, never in my life”: Kansas City Times, June 20, 1956.

“Truest of allies”: The New York Times, June 21, 1956.

“Mr. Truman is very popular”: Kansas City Times, June 20, 1956.

“Every person born”: Ibid., June 21, 1956.

“Give ’em, hell, Harricum!”: Ibid.

“I think we in this room”: The New York Times, June 22, 1956.

“A good many of the difficulties”: The Times (London), June 22, 1956.

“And—not least of all”: Ibid.

visit to London: HST Diary, June 21 (?), 1956, Off the Record, 336.

“England is prosperous”: Ibid., 337.

“It was all over too soon”: HST Diary, June 24, 1956, ibid., 338.

“He told me that he could do”: Ibid.

“Too bad he’s not campaigning”: Kansas City Times, June 29, 1956.

“Never [said the United Press]”: Independence Examiner, June 28, 1956.

“lacks the kind of fighting spirit”: McKeever, Adlai Stevenson, 376.

“Harry S. Truman had the Democratic”: The New York Times, August 12, 1956.

“When I arrived in Chicago”: HST to Acheson, August 29, 1956, HSTL.

“I have never wanted to pose”: HST to LBJ, December 11, 1956, LBJL.

“Dad sat there for a long time”: Truman, Harry S. Truman, 621.

“I expect to be knee deep”: HST to Acheson, June 7, 1957, HSTL.

“Mr. Truman, who has abiding”: The New York Times, July 7, 1957.

labor union contributions: “Contributions of Labor Unions to Harry S. Truman Library, Inc.,” HSTL.

“Hey there, farmer!” HST telephone conversation with Sam Rayburn, July 15, 1958, Off the Record, 364.

net profit: Kirkendall, ed., The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia, 129.

“Had it not been”: HST to John W. McCormack, January 10, 1957, Off the Record, 346.

“As you know, we passed”: Ibid.

“I would be proud”: HST to Acheson, October 15, 1952, HSTL.

“Mr. Truman is deeply”: Acheson to Thomas Bergin, July 12, 1954, HSTL.

HST and Yale librarian: Chester Kerr, author’s interview.

“I have never had a better time”: HST to Acheson, April 16, 1958, HSTL.

“Yale still rings”: HST to Acheson, May 15, 1958, HSTL.

“He’s so damn happy”: Osborne, “Happy Days for Harry.”

getting a bigger kick: Phillips, “Truman at 75,” The New York Times Magazine, May 3, 1959.

“a man overflowing with life”: Ibid.

“She says I am just like”: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 10, 1959.

“You know this five day week”: HST to Acheson, April 10, 1968, HSTL.

“where he can sit”: Unidentified article, February 3, 1960, Vertical Files, HSTL.

“Mr. Truman was one of the most thoughtful”: Essay by Phillip C. Brooks, February 16, 1971, HSTL.

HST and Benton’s drinking: Kansas City Star, March 14, 1989.

“Well, what the hell”: Benton, An Artist in America, 351.

“When a good politician”: Kansas City Star, April 27, 1959.

“I like being a nose buster”: HST to Acheson, April 20, 1955, HSTL.

“She and I spent”: HST to Acheson, February 19, 1959, HSTL.

“Do you suppose any President”: HST to Acheson, November 24, 1959, HSTL.

“It’s not the pope”: Miller Tapes, LBJL.

Kennedy’s notes: “Interview with Truman,” Dictated to Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, 12:00 Noon, January 10, 1959, HSTL.

“Just tell him it was Harry Truman”: John Zentay, author’s interview.

“stub his toe”: Acheson to HST, April 14, 1960, HSTL.

“I hate to say this”: Ibid.

“without doubt”: Kansas City Star, May 13, 1960.

Acheson letter: Acheson to HST, June 27, 1960, HSTL.

“You’ll never know”: HST to Acheson, July 9, 1960, HSTL.

“I am going to Los Angeles”: HST to Agnes E. Meyer, June 25, 1960, Off the Record, 386.

“Your coming here is considered”: Memorandum from Hillman and Noyes to HST, undated, Post-Presidential Files, HSTL.

“rigged—or you will be charged”: Ibid.

HST press conference: The New York Times, July 3, 1961.

“I listened to your press”: Acheson to HST, July 17, 1960, HSTL.

“He could not have been”: Notes from Conversation of United Press Newsman with JFK, undated, HSTL.

“blue as indigo”: HST to Acheson, August 26, 1960, unsent, Off the Record, 390.

“Don’t get discouraged”: HST to Samuel Rosenman, August 22, 1960, HSTL.

“Now you are in for it”: Acheson to HST, August 12, 1960, HSTL.

“A nap after lunch”: “Memo on Mr. Truman’s Trips,” David Stowe Papers, HSTL.

“Although he moves into and through”: “Notes on Truman Trips During 1960 Presidential Campaign,” David Stowe Papers, HSTL.

“The campaign is ended”: HST to Acheson, November 21, 1960, HSTL.

“I’ve had a lot of fun”: HSTL research staff phone conversation with Paul Hume, December 21, 1979, HSTL.

“See, I told you”: Ibid.

“You know, she remembered”: Peggy Scott, author’s interview.

“You are making a contribution”: HST to Acheson, July 7, 1961, Off the Record, 395.

“Needless to say”: Ibid.

“I had thought he was not”: Merle Miller, author’s interview.

“Don’t try to make a play actor”: Aurthur, “The Wit and Sass of Harry S. Truman,” Esquire, August 1971.

“I think there were people”: Miller, author’s interview.

inclined to exaggerate: Miller, 13.

“Goddamn an eyewitness”: Miller Tapes, LBJL.

“He had something like Bryan”: Ibid.

“I haven’t seen him”: Ibid.

“He was a good man”: Ibid.

“came back rich with detail”: Aurthur, “Harry Truman Chuckles Dryly,” Esquire, September 1971.

“Because if while I’m talking”: Ibid.

“My God, he’s not old”: Miller, author’s interview.

hated long hair: Byron Stewart, Jr., author’s interview; Miller, 456.

“People in Independence”: Miller Tapes, LBJL.

“There were times”: Miller, author’s interview.

HST appalled by Bay of Pigs: HST to Acheson, May 3, 1961, HSTL.

“This is a terrible weakness”: Acheson to HST, July 14, 1961, HSTL.

“Keep writing”: HST to Acheson, July 18, 1961, HSTL.

“You must remember”: HST to Acheson, September 25, 1961, Off the Record, 397.

“If and when that happens”: HST to Acheson, December 20, 1962, HSTL.

“I just don’t like”: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 230.

“Matt Connelly has been”: HST to RFK, January 24, 1962, HSTL.

HST sends letter of gratitude: HST to JFK, December 3, 1962, HSTL.

“That old lady”: HST to Acheson, May 14, 1963, Off the Record, 407.

“Having come so close”: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 418.

HST put to bed at Blair House: Wilroy and Prinz, Inside Blair House, 117.

Secret Service protection: Robert Lockwood, author’s interview.

“Thank you very much”: Remarks by Former President Harry S. Truman, Being the Occasion of Mr. Truman’s 80th Birthday, May 8, 1964, 88th Congress, 2nd Sess., Sen. Doc. No. 88.

HST falls: HST to Acheson, January 12, 1965.

“He doesn’t look a thing”: Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency, 159.

“He would say ‘You’re doing…’ “: Thomas Melton, author’s interview.

“sad amazement” at HST’s appearance: Merriman Smith, UPI, July 31, 1965.

“Quite often we have”: Melton, author’s interview.

Nixon visit: Independence Examiner, March 21, 1969.

asked what he had played: Elizabeth Safly, author’s interview.

HST with grandchildren in baseball cap: Photo Archives, HSTL.

“Oh, to have a good comfortable”: Margaret Truman Daniel, author’s interview.

“No, young man”: Ken McCormick, author’s interview.

December 5 illness: Research Hospital and Medical Center, press release, December 5, 1972, HSTL.

December 6 “critical”: Ibid., December 6, 1972, 10:23 P.M. CST, HSTL.

“very serious”: Ibid, December 14, 1972, 9:00 A.M., CST, HSTL.

he answered, “Better”: Ibid., December 10, 1972, 2:00 P.M., HSTL.

“warm, sweet and most appreciative”: Quoted in Belton (Missouri) Star-Herald, December 28, 1972.

“He squeezed my hand”: Ibid.

“very, very small”: The New York Times, December 26, 1972.

Bess almost exhausted: Truman, Bess W. Truman, 421.

“Keep it simple”: Ibid., 422.

“This whole town”: Time, January 8, 1973.

staff watching grave filled in: Safly, author’s interview.

“He was not a hero”: Washington Star, December 29, 1972.

Alden Whitman interview: Whitman, Come to Judgment, xvii.

“I’m not sure”: Eric Sevareid, author’s interview.

Bibliography

AUTHOR’S INTERVIEWS

Alice Acheson, Washington, D.C. • David Acheson, Washington, D.C. • Pat Acheson, Washington, D.C. • Joseph Alsop, Washington, D.C. • James P. Aylward, Jr., Kansas City, Missouri • Lauren Bacall, Washington, D.C. • Sue Bailey, Lincoln, Nebraska • Lindy Boggs, Washington, D.C. • Richard Bolling, Crumpton, Maryland • Floyd Boring, Washington, D.C. • Mary Salisbury Bostian, Independence, Missouri • Bernard Brannon, Kansas City, Missouri • Mary Shaw Branton, Kansas City, Missouri • Ellsworth Bunker, Washington, D.C. • Rufus Burrus, Independence, Missouri • Hilary Bush, Kansas City, Missouri • Jack Capps, West Point, New York • Liz Carpenter, Austin, Texas • Jimmy Carter, Atlanta, Georgia • Marquis Childs, Washington, D.C. • Clark Clifford, Washington, D.C. • Wilbur Cohen, Austin, Texas • John Sherman Cooper, Washington, D.C. • Bill Crotty, Kansas City, Missouri • Clifton Daniel, New York City • Margaret Truman Daniel, New York City • Matt Devoe, Kansas City, Missouri • John Doohan, Kansas City, Missouri • Peggy Dow, Copenhagen, Denmark • Joseph Dush, Willard, Ohio • Alfred Eisenstaedt, Menemsha, Massachusetts • George Elsey, Washington, D.C. • Lyman Field, Kansas City, Missouri • Stanley Fike, Washington, D.C. • Francis Fitzgerald, Kansas City, Missouri • Gerald Ford, New York City • Polly Fowler, Independence, Missouri • Clayton Fritchey, West Tisbury, Massachusetts • Virginia Geier, Kansas City, Missouri • Sue Gentry, Independence, Missouri • Rosalind Gibson, Independence, Missouri • D. W. Gilmore, Kansas City, Missouri • T. Sterling Goddard, Grandview, Missouri • Wallace Graham, Kansas City, Missouri • John Hahn, Washington, D.C. • Elliott Harris, Kansas City, Missouri • Steve Harrison, Independence, Missouri • Ardis Haukenberry, Independence, Missouri • Ken Hechler, Boston, Massachusetts • John Hersey, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, Bedford, New York • Bernard Hoffman, Kansas City, Missouri • Robert Hopkins, Washington, D.C. • Paul Horgan, Middletown, Connecticut • Dorothy Davis Johnson, Kansas City, Missouri • Lady Bird Johnson, Austin, Texas • J. Walter J. Jones, Kansas City, Missouri • Greta Kempton, New York City • Chester Kerr, New Haven, Connecticut • Geraldine Ketchum, Kansas City, Missouri • Kathleen Moore Knight, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Philip Lagerquist, Independence, Missouri • Johanna Laughlin, Kansas City, Missouri • Tom Leathers, Kansas City, Missouri • Sol Linowitz, Washington, D.C. • Robert B. Lockwood, Independence, Missouri • Eugene McCarthy, Woodville, Virginia • Gerrard McCann, Norfolk, Virginia • John J. McCloy, New York City • Ken McCormick, New York City • Harry McPherson, Washington, D.C. • David Melton, Independence, Missouri • Thomas Melton, Independence, Missouri • Merle Miller, Brewster, New York • Grace Minor, Independence, Missouri • Gerald Mitchell, Kansas City, Missouri • Paul Nagel, Independence, Missouri • Terence O’Brien, Kansas City, Missouri • Reathel Odum, Charleston, South Carolina • Charlton Ogburn, Beaufort, South Carolina • Gertrude Field Oliver, Kansas City, Missouri • John W. Oliver, Kansas City, Missouri • Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Chilmark, Massachusetts • Frank Pace, Jr., Boston, Massachusetts • Beverly Pendergast, Kansas City, Missouri • Robert Pendergast, Kansas City, Missouri • Claude D. Pepper, Washington, D.C. • Catherine Pruett, Kansas City, Missouri • Joseph Pruett, Kansas City, Missouri • Jennings Randolph, Washington, D.C. • Ronald Reagan, Washington, D.C. • James Reston, Washington, D.C. • Richard Rhodes, Kansas City, Missouri • Abe Ribicoff, New York City • Matthew Ridgway, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Chautauqua, New York • James H. Rowe, Jr., Washington, D.C. • James Rowley, Washington, D.C. • Liz Safly, Independence, Missouri • Harrison Salisbury, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Dwight Salmon, Chilmark, Massachusetts • Frank Sayre, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts • Ray Scherer, Washington, D.C. • Peggy Scott, Chilmark, Massachusetts • Rex Scouten, Washington, D.C. • Eric Sevareid, Washington, D.C. • Robert Sherrod, Washington, D.C. • Stephen Slaughter, Grandview, Missouri • John Snyder, Charleston, South Carolina • John Steele, Washington, D.C. • Byron Stewart, Jr., Independence, Missouri • Charlotte Stewart, Independence, Missouri • Nathan Stinnette, Crescent City, Florida • Chris J. Stolfa, Kansas City, Missouri • David Stowe, Washington, D.C. • Richard L. Strout, Boston, Massachusetts • James Swoyer, Oskaloosa, Kansas • Martha Ann Truman Swoyer, Oskaloosa, Kansas • James Symington, Washington, D.C. • George Tames, Washington, D.C. • Arthur Tighe, Kansas City, Missouri • J. C. Truman, Independence, Missouri • Roger Tubby, Washington, D.C. • Regna Vanatta, Grandview, Missouri • Sam Vaughan, New York City • May Wallace, Independence, Missouri • J. B. West, Falls Church, Virginia • David Wheeler, Kansas City, Missouri • Conn Withers, Liberty, Missouri • John Zentay, Washington, D.C. • Benedict K. Zobrist, Independence, Missouri

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS CONSULTED AT THE HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY, INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI

Papers of Harry S. Truman

Papers of: Dean Acheson • Eben A. Ayers • James P. Aylward • Jordan Bentley • Henry A. Bundschu • Fred Canfil • Oscar L. Chapman • Tom C. Clark • Will L. Clayton • Clark M. Clifford • Matthew J. Connelly • Clifton Daniel and Margaret Truman Daniel • Jonathan Daniels • Robert L. Dennison • Harry Easley • George M. Elsey • Tom L. Evans • Alonzo Fields • Hugh Fulton • Harold F. Gosnell • William D. Hassett • Lou E. Holland • Edward Jacobson • Joseph M. Jones • Mary Paxton Keeley • Edward B. Lockett • J. Howard McGrath • Frank McNaughton • Edward P. Meisburger • Victor R. Messall • Charles S. Murphy • Philleo Nash • David K. Niles • Mary Ethel Noland • Frank Pace, Jr. • William M. Rigdon • Samuel I. Rosenman • Charles G. Ross • John W. Snyder • L. Curtis Tiernan • Jerome K. Walsh

OTHER ARCHIVAL PAPERS

Congressional Quarterly Library • Democratic National Committee • Miscellaneous Historical Documents • President’s Committee on Civil Rights • Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program • U.S. Army 35th Division Records • White House Daily Schedule Logs • White House General Correspondence • White House Reconstruction Commission • White House Social Office • White House Telephone Office

ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPTS

Dean Acheson • Eben A. Ayers • Gaylon Babcock • Thomas Hart Benton • Frederick J. Bowman • Welbern Bowman • Oscar L. Chapman • Henry P. Chiles • Tom C. Clark • Lucius D. Clay • Clark M. Clifford • Emilio G. Collado • Matthew J. Connelly • Clifton Daniel • Jonathan Daniels • Donald S. Dawson • Mildred Lee Dryden • Harry Easley • George M. Elsey • Tom L. Evans • Stanley R. Fike • Edward T. Folliard • Sue Gentry • Esther M. Grube • William D. Hassett • Loy W. Henderson • Edgar G. Hinde • Johannes U. Hoeber • William J. Hopkins • Mary Paxton Keeley • Leon H. Keyserling • Vere C. Leigh • Katie Louchheim • Robert A. Lovett • Max Lowenthal • Ted Marks • Edward D. McKim • George Meader • John Meador • Walter B. Menefee • Charles T. Morrissey • John H. Muccio • Charles S. Murphy • Harry E. Murphy • Robert G. Nixon • Mary Ethel Noland • Edwin G. Nourse • Frank Pace, Jr. • Amanda Hardin Palmer • Pansy Perkins • Floyd T. Ricketts • Samuel I. Rosenman • Pauline Sims • John W. Snyder • John J. Strode • Richard L. Strout • George Tames • Mary Jane Truman • Roger Tubby • Regna Vanatta • Harry H. Vaughan •, Fred M. Vinson • Margaret Weddle • Arthur W. Wilson • John Woodhouse • Robert B. Wyatt

DISSERTATIONS

Heed, Thomas J. Prelude to Whistlestop: Harry S. Truman the Apprentice Campaigner. Ed. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1975

Schmidtlein, Eugene F. Truman the Senator. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1962

AUDIO-VISUAL ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Audio Collection • Newsreel, Film and Motion Picture Collection • Photographic Collection

OTHER LIBRARY AND ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library • Independence Examiner files ‘Jackson County Historical Society “Joint Collections of the University Of Missouri Western Historical Manuscript Collection and the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri • Kansas City Star Archives • Liberty Memorial Research Archives

Library of Congress Manuscript Division—Papers of Joseph Alsop • William O. Douglas • Philip C. Jessup • Kathleen S. Louchheim • Robert A. Taft

Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library

National Archives, Washington, D.C.—Genealogy Division • Military Reference Branch’•

Records of the Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion • Time-Warner Incorporated—Time Magazine Archives • U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation • Yale University Library—Papers of Henry L. Stimson

OTHER UNPUBLISHED MATERIALS

American Heritage, eds. Harry S. Truman. Man from Independence. Narrative text by Louis Koenig • Brown, Walter, J. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. A Remembrance. Manuscript. • Chiles, Mary Sue. “A Brief History of the Six Mile Territory,” Joint Collection of the University of Missouri Western Historical Manuscript Collection and the State Historical Collection of Missouri Manuscripts, Columbia, Missouri • Sherrod, Robert. Transcript of interview with Harry S. Truman, April 9, 1964. • Tubby, Roger, Journal—1950–1951.

PUBLISHED SOURCES

OFFICIAL AND SEMI-OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS

Ballou, M. E. Official Report on the Resources and Opportunities of Jackson, County, Missouri. 1926.

Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774–1971. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971.

Budget Fiscal Year, 1934. Jackson County, Missouri.

Congressional Record, Washington, D.C.

Course of Study and Rules and Regulations of the Independence Public Schools. March 15, 1909.

Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers. The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference) 1945. Vols. I and II. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960.

Foreign Relations of the United States 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa. Vol. V. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976.

Gallup Political Almanac for 1948. Compiled by the American Institute of Public Opinion, Princeton, New Jersey. Manchester, New Hampshire: Clarke Press, 1948.

Guide to Research Collections of Former United States Senators 1789–1982. Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, United States Senate, 1983.

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. Cultural Landscape Report. United States National Park Service, 1989.

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. Historic Structures Report. Restoration Associates, 1987.

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Independence, Missouri. Historic Structures Report: History and Significance. United States National Park Service, Midwest Regional Office, 1984.

Hearings Before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives on H. Res. 505. Losses of Thirty-fifth Division During the Argonne Battle. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

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——. Morning and Noon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

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——. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper, 1947.

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——. Tumultuous Years. The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949–1953. New York: Norton, 1977.

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——. The White House Years. Mandate for a Change. 1953–1956. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963.

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——. From Trust to Terror; The Onset of the Cold War. New York: Norton, 1970.

——. The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970.

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Ferrell, Robert H. American Diplomacy: A History. New York: Norton, 1980.

——, ed. Dear Bess. The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959. New York: Norton, 1983.

——. Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency, Oscar Handlin, ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.

——, ed. Off the Record. The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman. New York: Penguin, 1980.

——, ed. The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman. Boulder, Colorado: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980.

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——, ed. Truman in the White House. The Diary of Eben A Ayers. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Fields, Alonzo. My 21 Years in the White House. New York: Coward-McCann, 1961.

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Fredericks, Pierce G. The Great Adventure. New York: Dutton, 1961.

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——. The Colonel. The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867–1950. New York: Knopf, 1990.

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ARTICLES

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——. “How Our Foreign Policy Is Made,” Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1949.

——. “If Russia Grabs Europe,” Saturday Evening Post, December 20, 1947.

——. “If War Comes,” Saturday Evening Post, September 11, 1948.

——. “The Lesson of Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, September 2, 1950.

——. “What Kind of President Will Dewey Make?” Saturday Evening Post, October 16, 1948.

——. “Why Has Washington Gone Crazy?” Saturday Evening Post, July 29, 1950.

Alsop, Stewart, and Dr. Ralph Lapp. “The Inside Story of Our First Hydrogen Bomb,” Saturday Evening Post, October 25, 1952.

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Bradley, Lenore K. “Building Jackson County,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 13, no. 2, 1985.

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Brinkley, Alan. “Minister Without Portfolio,” Harper’s, February 1983.

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Clifford, Clark. “Recognizing Israel,” American Heritage, Vol. XXVIII, no. 3, April 1977.

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Cole, David. “McCarran-Walter,” Constitution, Winter 1990.

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Dains, Mary K. “Fulton’s Distinguished Visitors: Truman and Churchill, 1946,” Missouri Historical Review, April 1984.

Daniel, Margaret Truman. “Bess,” Parade, March 30, 1986.

Daniels, Jonathan. “How Truman Writes Those Letters,” Collier’s, February 24, 1951.

——. “The Lady from Independence,” McCall’s, April 1949.

Davies, Richard O. “Whistle-Stopping Through Ohio,” Ohio History, July 1962.

Davis, Elsie Spry. “Forebears of Solomon Young,” 1980.

Divine, Robert A. “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History(1972).

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Donovan, Robert. “Truman Seizes Steel,” Constitution, Fall 1990.

Dorsett, Lyle Wesley. “Alderman Jim Pendergast,” Missouri Historical Bulletin, October 1964.

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Erskine, Helen Worden. “The Riddle of Mrs. Truman,” Collier’s, February 9, 1952.

——. “Truman in Retirement,” Collier’s, February 4, 1955.

Essary, Helen. “Bess Truman: The President’s Boss,” Vertical File, HSTL.

Everett, Glenn D, “Wow! Did Truman Ever Fool the Farmers!” Saturday Evening Post, August 16, 1952.

Farrar, Ronald. “Ross Tops as Newsman; Truman Press Secretary,” Journalism Alumni News, May 1966.

Ferrell, Robert, ed. “A Visitor to the White House, 1947: The Diary of Vic H. Householder,” Missouri Historical Review.

Fischer, John. “Mr. Truman Reorganizes,” Harper’s, January 1946.

——. “Mr. Truman’s Politico,” Harper’s, June 1951.

Fitzmaurice, Walter. “President Truman’s Campaign Special,” Trains, March 1949.

Fitzsimmons, Tom. “The Nation Talks Back to McCarran,” The New Republic, January 12, 1953.

Frank, Reuven. “1948: Live…From Philadelphia…It’s the National Conventions,” The New York Times Magazine, April 17, 1988.

Franklin, Jay. “Inside Strategy of the Campaign,” Life, November 15, 1948.

Furman, Bess. “Independent Lady from Independence,” The New York Times Magazine, June 9, 1946.

Gentry, Sue. “What Was the City Like in ‘09? A Peek into the Past Reveals an Answer,” Independence Examiner, July 6, 1971.

Gervasi, Frank. “A President Grows Up,” Collier’s, May 24, 1947.

——. “The Truth About Truman,” Collier’s, January 22, 1949.

Giglio, James. “Harry S. Truman and the Multifarious Ex-Presidency.” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

Gilmer, Carol Lynn. “Missouri’s One-Family Newspaper,” Harper’s, October 1954.

“The Gold Coast Railroad Museum’s Famous U.S. Presidential Car No. 1 Ferdinand Magellan. A National Historic Landmark” (brochure).

Grant, Philip A. “The Election of Harry S. Truman to the United States Senate,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 36 (1980).

Graybar, Lloyd J. “The Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?” The Journal of American History, March 1986.

Griffith, Robert. “Harry S. Truman and the Burden of Modernity,” Reviews in American History, September 1981.

Grose, Peter. “The Partition of Palestine 35 Years Ago,” The New York Times Magazine, November 21, 1982.

Grothaus, Larry. “Kansas City Blacks, Harry Truman and the Pendergast Machine,” Missouri Historical Review, October 1974.

Guard, Samuel R. “From Plowboy to President,” Breeder’s Gazette, June 1945.

Hale, Donald R. “James Chiles—A Missouri Badman,” The West, October 1968.

Hall, Norman S. “Five Red Days,” Liberty, May 14, 1927.

Hamburger, Philip. “Profiles: Mr. Secretary” (Dean Acheson), The New Yorker, November 12, 1949; November 19, 1949.

Hamby, Alonzo L. “An American Democrat: A Reevaluation of the Personality of Harry S. Truman,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, no. 1, 1991.

——. “Harry Truman, Small-Town American,” History Today, December 1989.

——. “One Hundred Years of Harry Truman,” The American Spectator, July 1984.

——. “‘The Great Drive Has Taken Place and I had a Part in It’: Truman, Battery D, and the Meuse-Argonne Campaign,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 15, no. 4, 1987.

——. “Truman vs. Dewey: The 1948 Election,” The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1988.

Hart, Scott. “Truman and Ross: America’s No. 1 Team,” Coronet, January 1946.

Hassett, William D. “The President Was My Boss,” Saturday Evening Post, October 10, November 28, 1953.

Hatch, Alden. “The New Truman,” Liberty, July 5, 1947.

Heaster, Brenda L. “Who’s on Second: The 1944 Democratic Presidential Nomination,” Missouri Historical Review, January 1986.

Hehmeyer, Walter. “The President Keeps Himself Fit,” Parade, May 25, 1947.

Heller, Francis. “The Writing of the Truman Memoirs,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Winter 1983.

Henry, Frank. “Artilleryman Truman in the First World War,” The Baltimore Sun Sunday Magazine, May 13, 1945.

Hoy, P. R. Journal of an Exploration of Western Missouri in 1854. Under the Auspices of the Smithsonian Institution.

Hughes, Emmet John. “Our Presidents, Heroes or Nobodies: They All Had Their Own Style,” Smithsonian, March 1972.

Huie, William Bradford. “How to Think About Truman,” American Mercury, August 1951.

Hume, Paul. “The Music Critic and the President: The Second Time Around,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 16, no. 2, 1988.

“I.H.S. Class of ’01. Forty-one Boys and Girls Receive High School Diplomas—Commencement Exercises,” Jackson Examiner, May 31, 1901.

Isaacson, Walter. “Essay: Why Did We Drop the Bomb?” Time, August 19, 1985.

Jacobson, Edward “Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948,” American Jewish Archives, April 1968.

Jessup, Philip C. “Research Note/The Record of Wake. Island—A Correction,” The Journal of American History, March 1981.

Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, School of Advanced International Studies. “Dean Acheson and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy,” Washington, D.C., April 6, 1989.

Karp, Walter. “Truman vs. MacArthur,” American Heritage, April/May 1984.

Kempton, Greta. Interview in Whistle Stop, Vol. 15, no. 2, 1987.

——. “Painting the Truman Family,” Missouri Historical Review, April 1973.

Kirdendall, Richard S. “Harry S. Truman, a Missouri Farmer in the Golden Age,” Agricultural History, 1974.

——. “Truman and Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review, LXXXI, January 1987.

Knebel, Fletcher. “We Shall All Miss Him. President, Newspaperman, and Sigs Mourn Passing of Charles G. Ross,” The Sigma Chi, March 1951.

Kornitzer, Bela. “Harry Truman, Musician and Critic,” Pathfinder, January 9, 1952.

——. “The Story of Truman and His Father,” Parents Magazine, March 1951.

La Cossitt, Henry. “He Takes the President on Tour,” Saturday Evening Post, June 16, 1951.

Lahey, Edwin A. “Good-bye, Mr. Truman!” Extension, December 1952.

Larkin, Lew. “The Other Side of Tom Pendergast,” Missouri Life, April 11, 1978.

Laurence, William L. “The Truth About the Hydrogen Bomb,” Saturday Evening Post, June 24, 1950.

Lee, R. Alton. “Rebuilding the White House.” American History Illustrated, February 1978.

Lehman, Milton. “The White House Shudders,” Collier’s, November 13, 1948.

Leuchtenburg, William E. “Give ‘Em Harry,” The New Republic, May 21, 1984.

Leviero, Anthony. “Harry Truman: Musician and Music Lover,” The New York Times Magazine, june 18, 1950.

Lewis, Anthony. “Shadow on the Stone,” The New York Times, August 5, 1985.

Littlefield, Dr. Duncan E. “The President Versus the General” (sermon delivered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 15, 1951).

Lubell, Samuel. “What You Don’t Know About Truman,” Saturday Evening Post, March 15, 1952.

——. “Who Really Elected Truman?” Saturday Evening Post, January 22, 1949.

Macdonald, Rear Admiral Donald J., U.S. Navy (Retired). “President Truman’s Yacht,” Naval History, Winter 1990.

MacKaye, Milton. “He’ll Sink or Swim with Harry,” Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1948.

——. “Things Are Different in the White House,” Saturday Evening Post, April 20, 1946.

Markel, Lester. “After Four Years: Portrait of Harry Truman,” The New York Times Magazine, April 10, 1949.

——_. “Truman as the Crucial Third Year Opens,” The New York Times Magazine, March 16, 1947.

Mayerberg, Samuel S. “Edward Jacobson: President Truman’s Buddy.” Liberal Judaism, August 1945.

McCarthy, Joe. “A Walk Through History with Harry Truman.” Holiday, November/December 1963.

McCormick, Anne O’Hare. “Abroad: The Promethean Role of the United States,” The New York Times, August 8, 1945.

McCoy, Donald R. “Harry S. Truman: Personality, Politics and Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

McCune, Wesley, and John R. Beal. “The Job That Made Truman President,” Harper’s, June 1945.

Means, Marianne. “What Three Presidents Say About Their Wives,” Good Housekeeping, August 1963.

Michener, James. “A Tough Man for a Tough Job,” Life, May 12, 1952.

Miles, Rufus E., Jr., “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved,” International Security, Fall 1985.

Miller, M. F. “A Century of Missouri Agriculture,” University of Missouri Bulletin, May 1958.

Miller, Merle. “Mr. Truman’s Hometown,” Holiday, May 1970.

Miner, Paul V. “Boss Tom Pendergast’s Wide Open Town,” Kansas City Star Magazine, July 4, 1976.

Miscamble, Wilson D. “Anthony Eden and the Truman-Molotov Conversations, April 1945,” Diplomatic History, Spring 1978.

——. “Harry S Truman, The Berlin Blockade and the 1948 Election,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Summer 1980.

——. “The Evolution of an Internationalist: Harry S. Truman and American Foreign Policy,” The Australian Journal of Politics and History, August 1977.

Mixson, James M., D.M.D. “The Two Crises That Faced President Truman: Korean and Dental,” Bulletin of the History of Dentistry, October 1988.

Mumford, F. B. “A Century of Missouri Agriculture,” Missouri Historical Review January 1921.

Nelson, Anna Kasten. “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” The Journal of American History. September 1985.

Oberdorfer, Don. “Ex-Democrat, Ex-Dixiecrat, Today’s Nixiecrat,” The New York Times Magazine. October 6, 1968.

O’Brien, Pat. “Old Rail Depots in Independence Represent Important Era of History.” Jackson County Historical Society, April–June 1982.

“Original Landowner Map of the City of Grandview,” Jackson County Advocate November 6, 1975.

Osborne, John. “Happy Days for Harry,” Life, July 7, 1958.

Pearson, Drew. “The Man Who Didn’t Want to Be President,” April 16, 1945.

Perry, George Sessions. “Independence, Missouri,” Saturday Evening Post, September 2, 1950.

Phillips, Cabell. “How the President Does His Job.” The New York Times Magazine, January 4, 1948.

——. “Truman at 75,” The New York Times Magazine, May 3, 1959.

——. “Truman Likes These,” The New York Times Magazine, June 17, 1951.

——. “Truman’s Home Town Is ‘Smalltown, U.S.A.’ ” The New York Times Magazine July 1, 1945.

Potts, Edward W. “The President’s Mother: Martha Ellen Truman,” The Christian Advocate (n.d.).

Renshaw, Bill. “President Truman. His Missouri Neighbors Tell of His Farm Years,” The Prairie Farmer, May 12, 1945.

Reston, James. “Dawn of the Atom Era Perplexes Washington,” The New York Times, August 12, 1945.

Rigdon, Commander William, U.S.N. “We Kept Truman’s Big Secret,” Collier’s, July 4, 1953.

Robbins, Jhan and June. “Six Great Turning Points of American History,” This Week, February 22, 1959.

Roper, Elmo, and Louis Harris. “The Press and the Great Debate,” The Saturday Review of Literature, July 14, 1951.

Rosenberg, David Alan. “The U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–1950,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1982.

Rosenberg, J. Philip. “The Belief System of Harry S. Truman and Its Effect on Foreign Policy Decision-Making During His Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

Ross, Charles G. “How Truman Did It,” Collier’s, December 25, 1948.

Rothe, Albert J., as told to Beverly Smith. “Pst! Truman’s Got a Cowlick,” Saturday Evening Post, November 12, 1949.

Rovere, Richard H. “Letter from the Campaign Train,” The New Yorker, October 9, 1948.

——. “Letter from the Campaign Train,” The New Yorker, October 16, 1948.

——. “Letter from Washington,” The New Yorker, July 28, 1975.

——. “President Harry,” Harper’s, July 1948.

——. “Profiles: Nothing Much to It,” The New Yorker, September 8, 1945.

——. “The Last Days of Joe McCarthy,” Encounter, December 1958.

——. “The Most Gifted and Successful Demagogue This Country Has Ever Known,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1967.

Safly, Elizabeth. “Truman’s Books. The Post-Presidential Years,” Whistle Stop, Winter 1979.

——. “Truman’s Books. Part II,” Whistle Stop, Spring 1979.

Schnell, J. Christopher, Richard J. Collings, and David W. Dillard. “The Political Impact of the Depression on Missouri, 1929–1940,” Missouri Historical Review, January 1991.

Schumach, Murray. “The Education of Matthew Ridgway,” The New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1952.

Sevareid, Eric. “A Truly Great Man,” McCall’s, March 1973.

——. “The Human Truman,” Vertical file, HSTL

Severo, Richard, and Lewis Milford. “Sweet Wine at Last,” Military History Quarterly, Winter 1989.

Sheley, O.C. “James Peacock and ‘Jim Crow’ Chiles,” Frontier Times, May 1963.

Shogan, Robert. “1948 Election,” American Heritage, June 1968.

Slichter, Sumner H. “The Past Year and the Next in Our Economy,” The New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1951.

Slomovitz, Philip. “Harry S. Truman: The Modern Cyrus,” The American Jewish Outlook, January 23, 1953.

Smith, Beverly. “The Curious Case of the President’s Bathtub,” Saturday Evening Post, August 23, 1952.

——. “Washington’s Greatest Storyteller,” Saturday Evening Post, July 2, 1949.

——. “What a Spanking He Gave Truman!” Saturday Evening Post, August 2, 1952.

——. “Why We Went to War in Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, November 11, 1951.

Smith, Gaddis. “The Acheson Papers,” Whistle Stop, Spring 1973.

Smith, H. Allen. “A Friend of Ours Named Harry,” This Week, April 5, 1964.

Snyder, John W. “Unforgettable Harry Truman,” Reader’s Digest, November 1980.

Staley, J. W. “Eyes Across the DMZ,” Army Digest, October 1969.

Steinberg, Alfred. “How Harry Truman Does His Job,” Saturday Evening Post, March 3, 10, 1951.

——. “Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man,” Saturday Evening Post, December 24, 1949.

Sutton, Horace. “Key West, The Living End,” Saturday Review, January 7, 1978.

Tammeus, William D. “He Plowed a Straight Furrow,” Whistle Stop, Vol. 12, no. 4, 1984.

Thierman, Sue McClelland. “A Church with Roots in History.” Louisville Courier-Journal, June 3, 1945.

Truman, Harry S. “My First Eighty Years,” Saturday Evening Post, June 13, 1964.

——. “The Most Mistreated of Presidents,” The North Carolina Historical Review, April 1959.

Truman, Margaret. “Memories of a Cherished Home,” The New York Times, April 22, 1984.

Tucker, Captain Frank C. III, USAR. “Reserve Duty Means Adventure for HST,” The Officer, May 1984.

“Two Presidents and a Haberdasher—1948,” American Jewish Archives, April 1968.

Vaccaro, Ernest B. “Harry Truman and the Press,” The Quill, February 1973.

Waugh, Alfred S. “Desultory Wanderings in the Years 1845–46,” edited by John Francis McDermott. Missouri Historical Society, April and October 1950.

White, Hollis L. “Champ Clark, The ‘Leather-Bound’ Orator,” Missouri Historical Review, October 1961–July 1962.

White, Theodore H. “‘Wise Man’ in Quest of Security,” The New York Times Magazine, March 16, 1952.

Whitman, Walter. “Take a Tip from Harry Truman. ‘Wake Up and Walk!’ ” This Week, June 4, 1961.

Williams, Herbert Lee. “I Was Truman’s Ghost,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Spring 1982.

Wills, Garry. “I’m Not Wild About Harry,” Esquire, January 1976.

Wilson, Richard. “Truman Brings Back Boss Pendergast,” Look, October 29, 1946.

Wiltz, John Edward. “Truman and MacArthur: The Wake Island Meeting,” Military Affairs, December 1978.

Woolf, S. J. “President Truman Talks About His Job,” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1945.

Wyden, Peter. “The Sudden Dawn,” The Washingtonian, July 1985.

Yancey, Noel. “The Day Truman Dropped In,” Spectator, August 1, 1985.

Yergin, Daniel. “Harry Truman—Revived and Revised.” The New York Times Magazine, October 24, 1976..

REFERENCE SOURCES

American Heritage, eds. The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents of the United States. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: American Heritage Publ. Co., 1968.

Bartlett’s Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.

Boorstin, Daniel J., and Brooks Mather Kelley, with Ruth Frankel Boorstin. A History of the United States. Lexington, Massachusetts: Ginn and Co., 1981.

Britannica Book of the Year 1949. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1949.

Britannica Book of the Year 1951. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1951.

Britannica Book of the Year 1952. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.

Britannica Book of the Year 1953. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1953.

Cohen, J. M. and M. J. The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.

Conrad, Howard L., ed. Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri. A Compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference. Vol. III, Vol. VI. New York: Southern History, 1901.

Current Biography

Daniel, Clifton, ed. Chronicle of the 20th Century. Mount Kisco, New York: Chronicle Publications, 1987.

Foner, Eric and John A. Garraty, eds. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Gordon, Lois, and Alan Gordon. American Chronicle. Six Decades in American Life 1920–1980. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

Information Please Almanac 1949. New York: Farrar, Straus. 1949.

Irvine, E. Eastman, ed. The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1945. New York: New York World-Telegram, 1945.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg. Concise History of the American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Palmer, Alan. The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth Century History 1900–1978. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

Presidents. New York: New England Publishing Associates, 1988.

Schoenebaum, Eleanora W., ed. Political Profiles: The Truman Years. New York: Facts on File, 1978.

Taylor, Tim. The Book of Presidents. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

Time Magazine, eds. The American Presidents. Special Report. New York: Time, Inc., 1976.

White House Historical Association. The White House. An Historic Guide. Revised Edition. Washington White House Historical Association with the cooperation of the National Geographic Society, 1979.

Young, Brigadier Peter, ed. The World Almanac Book of World War II. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1981.

MAGAZINES AND JOURNALS CONSULTED

American Heritage • American History Illustrated • American Jewish Outlook • American Mercury • American Spectator • Bulletin of Atomic Scientists • Collier’s • Coronet • Esquire • Etude • Fortune • Harper’s • History Today • Liberty • Life • Look • McCall’s • Military History Quarterly • Missouri Life • Nation • New Republic • New Yorker • New York Times Magazine • Newsweek • Parade • Parents Magazine • Reader’s Digest • Saturday Evening Post • Saturday Review • Smithsonian • This Week • Time • Wallace’s Farmer • Washingtonian • Whistle Stop.

NEWSPAPERS CONSULTED

Albuquerque (New Mexico) Journal • American Observer • Arizona Republic • Atlanta Journal • Baltimore Sun • Belton (Missouri) Star-Herald • Blue Springs (Missouri) Examiner • Boston Daily Globe • Boston Globe • Boston Post • Catholic Herald Citizen • Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette • Chicago Daily News • Chicago Sun • Chicago Sun-Times • Chicago Tribune • Christian Science Monitor • Cincinnati Enquirer • Cleveland Plain Dealer • Columbus (Ohio) Evening Dispatch • Daily Oklahoman • Dallas Morning News • Denver Post • Deseret News (Utah) • Des Moines Register • Detroit Free Press • Detroit News • Emporia (Kansas) Daily Gazette • Hartford Courant • Idaho Daily Statesman • Illinois State Register • Independence (Missouri) Examiner • Independence (Missouri) Sentinel • Indianapolis Star • Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News • Jackson County (Missouri) Advocate • Jackson County (Missouri) Examiner • Kansas City Jewish Chronicle • Kansas City Business Journal • Kansas City Journal-Post • Kansas City Star • Kansas City Times • Kansas City Weekly Enterprise • Knoxville (Tennessee) News-Sentinel • Lamar (Missouri) Democrat • Lansing (Michigan) Star Journal • Liberty (Missouri) Tribune • Long Island (New York) Press • Louisville Courier-Journal • Memphis Commercial Appeal • Miami Herald • Montana Standard • Morning World Herald (Omaha, Nebraska) • New Bedford (Massachusetts) Standard Times • New York Herald-Tribune • New York Times • New York World-Telegram • Philadelphia Inquirer • Pittsburgh Courier • Pittsburgh Post-Gazette • Portland (Oregon) Journal • Prairie Farmer • Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle • Salt Lake City Tribune • San Antonio Express • San Francisco Chronicle • Seattle Times • Shelby (Kentucky) Sentinel News • Skaneateles (New York) Press • South Bend (Indiana) Tribune • St. Louis (Missouri) Globe-Democrat • St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch • St. Louis (Missouri) Star-Times • St. Paul Pioneer Press • Syracuse Post Standard • Times (London) • Toledo Blade • Tucson Daily Citizen • Wall Street Journal • Washington (D.C.) Daily News • Washington (D.C.) Post • Washington (D.C.) Star • Washington (D.C.) Times Herald • Willard (Ohio) Times

PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Harry S. Truman Library • Jackson County Historical Society • Joseph C. Pruett • Kansas City Star • Library of Congress • National Archives • United States Senate Historical Office • Washington Star

Index

Acheson, Alice

Acheson, Dean

atomic bomb and

attacks on

background of

China and

Churchill and

death of

defense spending and

Europe and

farewell luncheon for Trumans given by

Greece and

Hiss and

on HST

HST’s correspondence with

HST’s library and

HST’s memoirs and

and HST’s remarks on Kennedy and civil rights

HST’s retirement and

HST’s Yale visit and

influence of

Kennedy and

Korean War and

MacArthur and

McCarthy’s attacks on

on Marshall

Marshall Plan and

NATO and

Nixon’s attack on

NSC-68 report and

physical appearance of

as Secretary of State

Truman Doctrine and

as Under Secretary of State

on Z Committee

Acheson, Mary

ADA (Americans for Democratic Action)

Adam, John

Adams, Abigail

Adams, John

Adams, John Quincy

Adams, Sherman

Adenauer, Konrad

Adonis, Joe

AEC, see Atomic Energy Commission, U.S.

Age of Jackson, The (Schlesinger)

Agricultural Adjustment Act (1938)

Aiken, George

aircraft production

Air Force, U.S.

Alamogordo, atomic tests at

Alaska

Albright, Robert C.

Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America)

Alemán, Miguel

Allen, Charlie

Allen, Fred

Allen, George E.

Allen, Robert S.

Alsop, Joseph

Alsop, Stewart

Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa)

aluminum production

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

America First movement

American Federation of Labor

American Jewish Congress

American Legion

American Lithofold Corporation

American Magazine

American Mercury

“American Relations with the Soviet Union” (Clifford and Elsey)

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)

American Weekly

American Zionist Emergency Council

Anami, Korechika

Anderson, “Bloody Bill,”

Anderson, Clinton

Anderson, Reuben

Anderson, Vernice

Andrew Jackson (James)

Andrews, Bert

anti-trust laws

Arabs, Palestinian

armed forces, see military

Armory Show of 1913

Army contracts, see defense spending

Arnold, Henry H. “Hap,”

art, HST’s views on

Arthur, Chester A.

Arvey, Jake

Atlanta Constitution

Atlanta Journal

Atlantic Charter

atomic bomb, atomic energy

Acheson and

Alamogordo test of

in attacks on Japan

Bikini tests of

Forrestal and

hydrogen, see hydrogen bomb

Interim Committee on

Korean War and

Manhattan Project and

military vs. civilian custody of

morality of

as nonmilitary weapon

Soviet Union and

Atomic Energy Commission, U.N.

Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), U.S.

Lilienthal as head of

superbomb and

Attlee, Clement

Atwell, Lester

Audubon, John James

Aurthur, Robert Alan

Austin, Warren

Australia

Austria

automobile industry

auto workers’ strike (1946)

Axtell, Enos

Ayers, Eben

Vaughan and

Aylward, James P.

Azerbaijan

B-26 bomber

B-29 bomber:

in Berlin Airlift

in fire bombing of Japan

Babcock, Gaylon

Bacall, Lauren

Baker, Russell

Baldwin, Hanson

Balfour, Arthur, Lord

Balfour Declaration

Balkan states

Ball, George

Ball, Joseph H.

Baltic provinces

Baltimore Sun

B. Altman & Company

Bankhead, Tallulah

Bankhead, William B.

Banning, Mr. and Mrs. William

“Barbara Frietchie” (Whittier)

Bard, Ralph A.

Barkley, Alben

death of

HST as seen by

HST’s Senate reelection and

as majority leader

prop-stop campaign of

as vice-presidential candidate (1944)

as vice-presidential candidate (1948)

Barnes, James M.

Barr, David

Barr, Robert

Barry, Frank

Barrymore, Ethel

Bartky, Walter

Baruch, Bernard

Bataan

Battery D (2nd Battalion, 129th Field Artillery)

Battle, Lucius

Battle of Britain

Baughman, U.E.

Baydur, Huseyin Ragip

Bay of Pigs

Bean, Louis

Beatty, Earl David

Beaverbrook, William Aitken, Lord

Bechtel, Stephen

Belair, Felix, Jr.

Bell, Art

Bell, Elliott

Bell, Jasper

Benedict XV, Pope

Bennett, David A.

Benny, Jack

Bentley, Elizabeth

Benton, Thomas Hart (artist)

Benton, Thomas Hart (senator)

Berenson, Bernard

Berenstein, David

Bergen, Edgar

Berger, Meyer

Bergheim, Myrtle

Bergin, Thomas G.

Beria, Lavrenti

Berlin

Berlin, Irving

Berlin crisis

airlift in

turn of tide in

Vinson mission and

Bernadotte, Folke

Bernstein, Carl

Bernstein, Leonard

Berry, Lucian D.

Best Years of Our Lives, The

Bevin, Ernest

Bidault, Georges

Biddle, Francis

Biffle, Les

Bikini

Bingham, George Caleb

Binnagio, Charles

Birdzell, Donald

Black, Hugo L

Blackmore, Dwight

blacks

Byrnes and

murders of

Roosevelt and

as voters

see also civil rights; racial prejudice

Blair, Frank

Blair House

Blandy, William

Blaustein, Jacob

Blitz, Samuel

Block, Herb

Boeing

Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt

Boettiger, John

Bogart, Humphrey

Boggs, Lilburn W.

Boggs, Lindy

Bohlen, Charles “Chip,”

on Marshall

at Potsdam

Bolich, Daniel A.

Bonesteel, Charles

Boone, Daniel

Boone, Daniel Morgan

Borah, William E.

Border War

Boring, Floyd M.

Boston Globe

Boston Post

Bourgholtzer, Frank

Bowles, Chester

Bowman, Frederick

Boyd, William

Boyle, Clara

Boyle, William

accusations against

background and character of

resignation of

Bradley, John H.

Bradley, Omar

atomic bomb and

Berlin crisis and

Korean War and

MacArthur and

Brandeis, Louis D.

Brandeis, Mrs. Louis D.

Brandt, Raymond

Brewster, O. C

Brewster, Owen

Brian, Donald

Brice, George

Bricker, John W.

Bridges, Styles

Brooks, Curley

Brooks, Philip C

Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Brotherhood

Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen

Browder, Earl

Brown, John

Brown, John Mason

Brown, Matilda D. “Tillie,”

Brownell, Herbert, Jr.

Bryan, William Jennings

Bryant, Paul

Buchenwald

Buck, Pearl S.

Bud Billiken Day

budget, national

Bulgaria

Bulger, Miles

Bundschu, Henry

Bunnelle, Robert

Burke, Ken

Burns, James MacGregor

Burrus, Florence

Burrus, Rufus

Burton, Harold H.

Busch, Noel F.

Bush, Vannevar

Business Week

Butler, Hugh

Butterfield, Roger

Buxton, Ethel Lee

Byrd, Harry Flood

Byrnes, James

atomic bomb and

blacks and

defense spending and

HST’s difficulties with

HST’s Senate reelection and

on Interim Committee on S-1

Japan and

at Potsdam

railway strike and

resignation of

Resolution 71 and

as Secretary of State

Soviet Union and

On Stalin

Truman Committee and

as vice-presidential candidate

Wallace’s New York speech and

Cadogan, Alexander

Cahn, Albert

California, University of

California, University of, at Berkeley

California and Oregon Trail, The (Parkman)

Callas, Maria

Call Me Madam

Campbell, William J.

Canfil, Fred

at Potsdam

Canin, Stuart

Cannon, Pat

Canol Project

Capehart, Homer

Capone, Al

Capra, Frank

Carnegie-Illinois Steel

Carpenter, Donald F.

Carr, Albert Z.

Carter, Jimmy

Carter, John Franklin

Carthage Hydrocel, Inc.

Casablanca Conference (1943)

Cather, Willa

Catholics

Catledge, Turner

Caudle, T. Lamar

CCC (Commodity Credit Corporation)

Celler, Emanuel

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Central Intelligence Group

“Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the United States Standpoint” (Kennan Report)

Chambers, Whittaker

Changing Times

Chapman, Oscar

Charles, Prince of Wales

Chase, Salmon P.

Chavez, Dennis

Chiang Kai-shek

MacArthur and

Chiang Kai-shek, Madame

Chicago Sun

Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Tribune

child care

Childs, Marquis

Chiles, Elijah

Chiles, Henry

Chiles, James J. “Jim Crow” (uncle)

Chiles, Morton, Jr.

Chiles, Sarah Ann “Sallie” Young (aunt)

Chiles, Sol (cousin)

China

civil war in

Marshall and

Soviet Union and

see also Formosa; Manchuria

China, People’s Republic of:

inauguration of

Korean War and

China Lobby

China White Paper

Chinese Communists

see also China, People’s Republic of

Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang)

see also Chiang Kai-shek; China; Formosa

“Chorus from Ajax” (Sophocles)

Chou En-lai

Christian Science Monitor

Christina’s World (Wyeth)

Chrysler

Churchill, Clementine

Churchill, Jenny Jerome

Churchill, Mary

Churchill, Sarah

Churchill, Winston

Acheson and

background of

Berlin tour of

death of

election defeat of

HST as seen by

HST on initial meeting with

HST’s admiration of

HST’s Berlin crisis letter to

“iron curtain” speech of

map room of

on Marshall

at Potsdam

in return to office

Roosevelt and

Stalin and

World War II history written by

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

see Mormons

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)

Cieplinski, Michel

Cincinnatus

Citizens Security

Civil Aeronautics Act (1938)

civil rights

anti-lynching legislation and

black vote and

HST’s Harlem speech on

HST’s Lincoln Memorial address on

HST’s private vs. public views on

HST’s senatorial reelection campaign and

sit-ins and marches for

southern Democrats and

“Turnip” congressional session and

Civil Rights Commission

civil service

Civil Service Commission

Civil War, U.S.

Lincoln’s problems with McClellan in

Clark, Bennett Champ

HST attacked by

as HST’s choice for President

Milligan supported by

in World War I

Clark, Champ

Clark, John L

Clark, Tom

Clay, Lucius D.

Clayton, William L.

Cleveland, Grover

Clevenger, Cliff

Clifford, Clark

background of

on Bess Truman

character and appearance of

coal strike and

government post left by

on HST

as HST’s legal counsel

HST’s presidential reelection campaign and

on loyalty issue

Marshall Plan and

as naval aide

Palestine issue and

preparation in work of

report on U.S.-Soviet relations by Elsey and

Clifton, Chester

Clinton, J. H.

coal mines

coal strike (1946)

Coates, Willa

Cochran, John J. “Jack,”

Coffelt, Leslie

coffinmakers’ strike (1946)

Cohen, Ben

Cold War:

Acheson’s view of

Berlin Airlift and

Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech and

Clifford-Elsey Report and

containment policy and

end of

HST’s view of

Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and

as 1948 election issue

origins of

Truman Doctrine and, see Truman Doctrine

U.S. atomic bomb monopoly ended in

in Wallace’s campaign

see also Soviet Union

Cold War, The (Lippmann)

Colgan, Emma Truman (aunt)

Collado, Emilio

Collazo, Oscar

Collier’s

Collins, Joe

Collins, Lawton

Combs, Freda

Commager, Henry Steele

Commerce of the Prairies (Gregg)

Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC)

Communists, communism

in China

civil rights movement and

Eisenhower on

fear of infiltration by

Forrestal and

in Greece

HST on democracy vs.

HST’s Loyalty Program and

J. Edgar Hoover’s warnings about

in Korea see also Korean War

McCarthy’s charges and

Marshall’s speech and

Nazism compared with

Progressive Party and

Taft-Hartley Act and

see also House Un-American Activities Committee

Community Savings and Loan Association of Independence

Compton, Arthur H.

Compton, James V.

Compton, Karl T.

Conant, James Bryant

Confederate Army

Congress, U.S.:

aid to Turkey and Greece approved by

civil rights messages delivered to

“do-nothing” description of

farm support and

House committees of, see House Un-American Activities Committee; House Ways and Means Committee

HST’s presidential “honeymoon” with

Joint Committee on Atomic Energy

Korean War and

Lilienthal confirmation and

Marshall confirmation and

national health insurance proposals and

1946 Republican electoral victories and

1950 Republican electoral victories and

postwar domestic program and

presidential papers and

presidential pensions and

Senate committees of, see Senate, U.S.

southern Democrats in

special “Turnip” session of

Truman Doctrine speech delivered to

Congressional Record,

Conkling, Roscoe

Connally, Tom

Connelly, Matthew J

Constitution, Twenty-second Amendment to

consumer credit

containment policy

Conway, Rose

Cooke, Alistair

Coolidge, Calvin

Cooper, Gary

Cooper, James Fenimore

Copeland, Royal

Corcoran, Thomas “Tommy the Cork,”

Costello, Frank

Council of Foreign Ministers

Cowherd, William S

Cox, Eugene

Cox, James

Crawford, Kenneth G

Crim, Howell

Crisp, Colonel

Cronkite, Walter

Crump, E. H. “Boss Ed,”

Crusade in Europe (Eisenhower)

Cuba

Culbertson, Jerry

Curley, James Michael

Curtiss-Wright

Cutting, Bronson

Czechoslovakia

coup in

Dahlberg, Edward

Dailey, David

Daily Telegraph (London)

Danford, Robert M

Daniel, Clifton Truman (grandson)

Daniel, Elbert Clifton, Jr. (son-in-law)

Daniel, Elbert Clifton, Sr

Daniel, Harrison (grandson)

Daniel, Hawthorne

Daniel, Mary Margaret “Margie” Truman (daughter)

attempted kidnapping of

birth of

character and appearance of

childhood of

children of

Constitution Hall concert of

diary of

engagement and marriage of

first full-length concert appearance of

health of

on her grandmother

at Hollywood Bowl

HST’s biography written by

HST’s death and

Daniel, Mary Margaret “Margie” Truman (daughter)

HST’s letters to

HST’s presidency and

HST’s reelection campaign and

HST’s relationship with

Hume’s review of

Independence summers of

piano of

plays put on by

radio debut of

Roosevelt’s death and

singing career of

White House quarters of

Daniel, Thomas (grandson)

Daniel, William Wallace (grandson)

Daniell, Raymond

Daniels, Jonathan

Daniels, Josephus

Daughters of the American Revolution

David, Daniel H

David Copperfield (Dickens)

Davidson, Joseph

Davies, Joseph E

Davis, James J

Davis, John W

Davis, Manvel

Dawson, Donald

Dean, William F

Deane, John R

“deep freezers,”

Defense Department, U.S.

see also War Department, U.S.

Defense Plants Corporation (DPC)

defense spending

Byrnes and

contracts in see also Truman Committee

Forrestal and

Korean War and

Delaney, Denis W

Delano, Laura

democracy, HST on communism vs

Democratic National Committee

Democratic National Conventions:

of 1944

of 1948

of 1952

of 1956

of 1960

Democratic Party

Dixiecrat split in

Jewish votes and

Progressive Party and

southern faction of

see also election of 1948; elections; specific individuals

Denver Post,

Depression, Great

Deschler, Lewis

Des Moines Register,

Des Moines Register and Tribune,

Detroit Free Press,

Detroit Symphony

Detroit Times,

Dewey, Frances

Dewey, John

Dewey, Thomas E

background of

character and appearance of

as district attorney

film on

as governor

HST compared with

Lippmann and

presidential campaign of (1944)

presidential campaign of (1948)

as presidential candidate

presidential election defeat of (1948)

speeches of

train incident and

Dewey, Tom, Jr.

Diaz, Armando

Dickens, Charles

Dieterich, William H.

Dill, John

Dillard, Harrison

Dillinger, John

Dirksen, Everett

Displaced Persons Act (1948)

Dixiecrats

Dixon, Frank M.

Doherty, Jim

dollar-a-year men

Doniphan, Alexander

Donnelly, Eugene

Donnelly, Nell

Donovan, Robert

Don Quixote (Cervantes)

Doohan, John

Doubleday

Dougherty, Charles, Sr

Douglas, Helen Gahagan

Douglas, Paul

Douglas, William O

Downs, Joseph

DPC (Defense Plants Corporation)

draft, military

railway strike and

Drescher, George

Drury, Allen

Dryden, Mildred

Dubinsky, David

Duchamp, Marcel

Dulles, John Foster

Dun, Angus

Duncan, Dick

Dunham, Walter L

Dunn, James

DuPont Company

dust storms

Eagles

Earle, George

Early, Steve

Easley, Harry

Eaton, Charles

Eban, Abba

economy

Eden, Anthony

Edgar Thomson Works

Edgerton, Glen E

education

Einstein, Albert

Eisenhower, Arthur

Eisenhower, Dwight David

death of

Forrestal and

HST and

inauguration of

Korean War and

McCarthy and

Marshall and

as NATO commander

as presidential candidate

reelection of

retirement of

on Stalin

vice-presidential candidacy declined by

Eisenhower, John

Eisenhower, Mamie

election of 1948:

Barkley as vice-presidential candidate in

Clifford’s role in

Democratic Convention and

Dewey’s campaign in

Dewey’s candidacy in

Dewey’s defeat in

Eisenhower considered in

HST’s campaign funds for

HST’s campaign in

HST’s election in

Republican Convention in

Ross’s role in

Thurmond and Dixiecrats in

Wallace’s candidacy in

elections:

of 1910

of 1912

of 1924

of 1932

of 1934

of 1936

of 1940

of 1944

of 1946

of 1948, see election of 1948

of 1950

of 1952

of 1956

of 1960

see also specific candidates

electrical workers’ strike (1946)

Elks

Elsey, George M

on HST

HST’s reelection campaign and

at Potsdam

report on U.S.-Soviet relations by Clifford and

employment

Employment Act (1946)

England, Clarence

Eniwetok Island

Epstein, Elihu

Equal Rights amendment

Ethridge, Mark

Etzenhouser, Madeline

European Recovery Program (ERP), see Marshall Plan

Evans, Tom

Evening Standard (London)

“Everyman in the White House” (Crawford)

Ewing, Thomas

excess profits tax

Fair Deal

Fair Employment Practices Committee

Fairless, Benjamin F

Farley, James A

farmers, federal support for

Farm Tenancy Act (1937)

Farrell, Thomas F

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Dewey campaign aided by

HST’s distrust of

see also Hoover, J. Edgar

Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program

Ferdinand Magellan,

see also Whistle-stop Campaign

Ferguson, Homer

Fermi, Enrico

Field, Lyman

Fields, Alonzo

Fields, W. C

Fillmore, Millard

Finklestein, Paula

Finklestein, Sam

Finklestein, Siegfried

Finland

Finletter, Thomas K

Finnegan, James P

Fired On (Remington)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Fitzpatrick, Daniel

five percenters

Flanner, Janet

Flavin, John

Flintom, A. D

Floyd, “Pretty Boy,”

Flynn, Edward Joseph

Foch, Ferdinand

Folliard, Edward T

Forde, Margaret Ann

Ford Motor Company

Foreign Affairs,

foreign policy, see specific countries, individuals, and issues

Formosa:

MacArthur’s views on

U.S. defense of

see also China; Chinese Nationalists

Formosa Strait

Forrestal, James

atomic bomb and

Berlin crisis and

criticism of

Dewey and

resignation of

as Secretary of Defense

suicide of

Fort Leonard Wood

Fortune

France

Lend-Lease and

Franco, Francisco

Frankfurter, Felix

Franklin Roosevelt Library

Franks, Oliver

Freeman, Douglas Southall

Free-Soilers

Frémont, John Charles

Freud, Sigmund

Friendly, Alfred

Froman, Jane

Fuchs, Klaus

Fulbright, J. William

Fulton, Hugh

Fussell, Paul

Gabrielson, Guy George

Gagnon, René

Gallup, George

Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Mahatma,”

Garfield James A

Garner, John Nance “Cactus Jack,”

Garr, Vietta

Garrett, Will

Gates, George Porterfield

Gates, Madge, see Wallace, Madge Gates

Gates, Marvin

Gates, Mrs. George Porterfield

Gavin, Tom

Gearhart, Bertrand W

General Electric

General Motors

General Order No

Gentry, Alonzo H

Gentry, Sue

George, Todd

George VI, King of England

German Federated Republic (West Germany)

Germany, Nazi

atomic bomb and

defeat of

Soviet pact with

surrender of

U.S. business agreements with companies in

war criminals of

Germany, occupied

division of navy of

Gestapo

GI Bill

Gibson, Charles Dana

Gibson, John W

Girl from Utah, The

Glass, Carter

glass workers’ strike (1946)

Gleam, The

Glenn Martin Company

Gnefkow, Bernard

Goebbels, Joseph

Goering, Hermann

Goldman, Frank

Goldwyn, Sam

Goodman, Benny

Gore, Albert

Gould, Jack

Graham, Billy

Graham, Frank

Graham, James H

Graham, Wallace H

Grant, Ulysses S

Great Britain

atomic bomb and

decline of

Greece and Turkey aided by

Korean War and

Lend-Lease and

Palestine and

Soviet Union and

U.S. relations with

Wallace’s New York speech on

Great Depression, see Depression, Great

Greater Kansas City Plan Association

Great Men and Famous Women

Greece

British aid to

Soviet Union and

U.S. aid to

Greenglass, David

Gregg, Josiah

Gregg, William

Grew, Joseph C

Gromyko, Andrei

Grover, Wayne

Groves, Leslie R.

Guffey, Joe

Gunther, John

Hadrian, Emperor of Rome

Hagan, John

Hagerty, James C

Hague, Frank

Haig, Douglas

Haight, Charles T

Halifax, Edward Wood, Lord

Halle, Louis J

Halleck, Charles

Halsey, Edwin

Hampton, Lionel

Handy, Thomas T

Hannegan, Robert E

background of

HST’s Senate reelection campaign and

vice-presidential nomination (1944) and

Harber, W. Elmer

Hardin, Ardelia

Harding, Warren G

Harpie Club (Independence Harmonicon Society)

Harriman, E. H

Harriman, W. Averell

as ambassador to Great Britain

background of

character and appearance of

as HST campaign contributor

Johnson and

Korea and

MacArthur and

Moscow post quit by

at Potsdam Conference

as presidential candidate

as Secretary of Commerce

Harris, Robert E. G

Harrison, Benjamin

Harrison, Earl G

Harrison, George L

Harrison, Pat

Harrison, William Henry

Harry S. Truman (M. Truman)

Harry S. Truman Library

Harry Truman shirts

Harsch, Joseph

Hartley, Fred Allan, Jr

Harty, Tom

Harvard University

Harvey, Julian

Hassett, Bill

Hatch, Alden

Hatch, Carl

Hauser, Virginia Hill

Havemann, Ernest

Hawaii:

statehood of

Truman family’s vacation in

Hawkes, Albert Wahl

Hayden, Carl

Hayes, Elihu

Hayes, Ira

Hayford, James

H-bomb, see hydrogen bomb

health care and insurance

Healy, George P. A

Heillman, Lee

Helis, William

Heller, Francis H

Helm, Edith

Helm, William

Henderson, Loy W

Hennings, Thomas Carey, Jr

Henry M. Frost Advertising Agency

Henry V (Shakespeare)

Hepburn, Katharine

Hersey, John

Herzog, Isaac Halevi

Hickerson, John

Higgins, Marguerite

Higgins landing craft

Hill, Lister

Hillman, Sidney

Hillman, William

Himmler, Heinrich

Hinde, Edgar

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan

Hiroshima, bombing of

Hirth, William

Hiss, Alger

Hiss, Donald

Hitler, Adolf

Stalin’s pact with

see also Germany, Nazi

Hoban, James

Ho Chi Minh

Hoey, Clyde R

Hoey Committee

Hollywood Bowl

Hollywood Ten

Holmes, Nancy Tyler (great-grandmother)

Holt, Rush

Hoover, Herbert

Hoover, J. Edgar

civil rights movement and

on Communist danger

Dewey aided by

Vaughan’s relationship with

Hopkins, Harry

Hopkins, William J

Home, Lena

Houchens, B. M

Houchens, Fielding

House, Edward

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC):

Dewey campaign and

Hiss case and

Hollywood Ten and

Loyalty Program as response to

House Ways and Means Committee

Householder, Vic

housing

Howard, Roy

How to Predict Elections (Bean)

Huber, Brownie

Hughes, Charles Evans

Hughes, Thomas

Hull, Cordell

Hume, Paul

Humphrey, Hubert H

Humphrey, Muriel

Hungary

Hunt, James V

Hurley, Patrick J

hydrogen bomb (H-bomb; superbomb)

debate on

testing of

Ickes, Harold L

resignation of

I. G. Farben

Igoe-Dickmann organization

Independence, Mo.

blacks in

Depression in

Mormons in

Independence and the Opening of the West (Benton)

Independence Examiner

Independence Harmonicon Society (Harpie Club)

Indianapolis

Indochina

inflation

influenza epidemic (1918-19)

Inland Steel

Interim Committee on S-1

Internal Revenue Bureau

International Acquaintance League

International News Service

Interstate Commerce Commission

Inverchapel, Lord

Investor Pays, The (Lowenthal)

Iran

Ireland, David B., Jr.

Irgun

“iron curtain,”

Israel

see also Palestine

Italy

Iwo Jima

I Write from Washington (Childs)

Jackson, Andrew

statue of

Jackson, Robert H

Jackson, Samuel

Jackson, Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall,”

Jackson County, Mo.

Goat vs. Rabbit Democrats in

HST as eastern judge of

HST as presiding judge of

Mormons in

slavery in

Jacobson, Bluma Rosenbaum

Jacobson, Edward

death of

as HST’s business partner

Palestine issue and

Jacques, Baron

James, Frank

James, Jesse

James, Marquis

Japan

atomic bombing of

atrocities committed by

China bombed by

fire bombing of

Korea and

Pearl Harbor attacked by, see Pearl Harbor attack

Potsdam Conference and

proposed invasion of

Soviet Union and

surrender of

Japanese-Americans

Jayhawkers

Jazz Age

Jefferson, Thomas

Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners

Jefferson Memorial

Jenner, William E

Jennison, “Doc,”

Jessup, Philip

Jester, Beauford

Jewish Agency

Jews

as voters

see also Israel; Palestine; Zionists

John McShain, Inc

Johnson, Alexis

Johnson, Andrew

Johnson, Edwin

Johnson, Louis A

controversy of

HST’s problems with

resignation of

as Secretary of Defense

on Z Committee

Johnson, Lyndon B

Johnston, Alvanley

Johnston, Olin

Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy

Jones, Jesse

Jones, Joseph M

Jones, Thomas E

Judd, Walter

Justice Department, U.S.

Kaiser, Henry J

Kaltenborn, H.V.

kamikazes

Kansas

Kansas City, Mo

building boom in

“home rule” in

HST’s first presidential visit to

Union Station Massacre in

“wide-open” era in

Kansas City Athletic Club

Kansas City Automobile Club

Kansas City Club

Kansas City Journal-Post,

Kansas City Star

Kansas City Times

Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)

Kaplan, Charles

Katyn Forest Massacre

Keck, Charles L.

Keenan, Sergeant

Kefauver, Estes

Kefauver Committee

Kelley, Harry

Kelly, Edward J.

Kelly, Gene

Kem, James P.

Kemper, William T.

Kempton, Greta

Kennan, George F.

atomic bomb and

“Long Telegram” of

on Marshall

Marshall Plan role of

Palestine issue and

Policy Planning Staff of

Kennan Report

Kennedy, Jacqueline

Kennedy, John F.

assassination of

Kennedy, Joseph, Jr.

Kennedy, Joseph Patrick

Kennedy, Robert F.

Kent, Frank

Kentuckian, The (Benton)

Kentucky

Kern, Jerome

Kerr, Robert

Khrushchev, Nikita

Kilgore, Harley

Killilae, Mrs. Walter

Kim Il-sung

King, Cecil Rhodes

King, Ernest J.

King David Hotel, bombing of

Kinnaman, Edna

Kinsey, Alfred

Kirkpatrick, Helen

Kistiakowsky, Dr.

Klemm, Karl D.

Knebel, Fletcher

Knowland, William

Knox, Frank

Knudsen, William S

Knutson, Harold

Konoye, Prince Fumimaro

Korea

Korean War

atomic bomb and

Battle of Taejon in

casualties in

cease-fire proposal in

Chinese intervention in

Congress and

Eisenhower and

end of

fighting conditions in

Inchon landing in

MacArthur in

North Korean prisoners in

as “police action,”

press conference on

Ridgway in

Soviet Union and

steel crisis and

38th parallel in

as U.N. action

U.S. responsibility in

U.S. troops committed to

Krimminger, Charles E.

Krock, Arthur

Kronheim, Milton S., Sr.

Krueger, Karl

Krug, Julius

Ku Klux Klan

Kuomintang, see Chinese Nationalists

Kurchatov, Igor V.

Kyoto

labor, labor unions

Taft-Hartley Act and

see also strikes

Labor Department, U.S.

LaCapra, Michael James “Jimmy Needles,”

LaGuardia, Fiorello

Lane, James Henry

Langer, William

Lascelles, Alan

Lasker, Morris

Latta, Maurice C.

Lattimore, Owen J.

Lausche, Frank

Lawrence, David

Lawrence, Ernest O.

Lawrence, William

Lawrence Massacre

Lazia, Johnny

League of Nations

Leahy, William

death of

at Potsdam

Lee, Dr.

Lee, Jay

Lee, Robert E.

Lee’s Summit Journal

Leigh, Vere

Lelyveld, Arthur J.

Lend-lease’ Act (1941)

Lenin, V.I.

Leningrad

Lerner, Max

LeRoy (White House leaf-raker)

Leschetizky, Theodore

Lesseps, Ferdinand de

Leviero, Tony

Lewis, J. Hamilton “Ham,”

Lewis, John L

Truman Committee appearance of

Lewis, Sinclair

Lhévinne, Josef

Liberty

Lie, Trygve

Life

Churchill’s book in

HST’s memoirs in

Lilienthal, David E.

atomic bomb and

on Atomic Energy Commission

communism and

on Z Committee

Lima News

Lincoln, Abraham

Gettysburg Address of

McClellan and

Lindbergh, Charles

Lindbergh kidnapping

Lippmann, Walter

List, Eugene

Littlefair, Duncan E.

Lloyd, David

“Locksley Hall” (Tennyson)

Lockwood, Paul

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Sr.

Long, Earl

Long, Huey

Long, Tania

“Long Telegram,”

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt

Look

Los Alamos

Los Angeles Times

“Lost Battalion,”

Louisville Courier-Journal

Lovett, Robert A

Lowe, Frank

Lowenthal, Max

Loyalty Program

Lubell, Samuel

Lucas, Scott

Luce, Clare Boothe

Luce, Henry R

Ludendorff, Erich

Lykins, Johnston

lynchings

McAdams, Clark

MacArthur, Douglas

Chiang and

death of

divided-forces tactic of

end-the-war offensive of

farewell speech of

heroic standing of

HST’s firing of

HST’s opinion of

HST’s Wake Island meeting with

Inchon victory of

insubordination of

in Korean War

letter to Martin from

Reminiscences of

Senate investigation on firing of

speaking tour of

VFW statement of

McCann, Gerard

McCarran, Pat

McCarthy, Joseph R.

death of

Eisenhower and

Marshall attacked by

McCarthyism

McClellan, George B.

McClintock, Robert

McCloy, John J.

McCluer, Franc L.

McCormack, James

McCormack, John

McCormick, Anne O’Hare

McCormick, Ken

McCormick, Robert “Bertie,”

MacDonald, Donald J.

MacDonald, Jeanette

McElroy, Henry

McElroy, Mary

Macfadden, Bernarr

McFarland, Ernest

McGarrity, W. F.

McGowan, Carl

McGrath, J. Howard

firing of

McGrory, Mary

McKellar, Kenneth “Old Mack,”

McKim, Charles

McKim, Edward

McKim, Mead, & White

McKinley, William

McKinney, Frank E.

McMahon, Alphonse

McMahon, Brien

McNaughton, Frank

MacVeigh, Lincoln

Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum

Madison, Dolley

Madison, James

magnesium production

Malenkov, Georgi M.

Malik, Jacob

Maloney, James J.

Manchester, William

Manchester Guardian

Manchuria:

Japan’s invasion of

in Korean War

Soviet Union and

Manhattan Project (S-1)

see also atomic bomb, atomic energy

Manila

Mann, Betsie

Mann, Christopher

Mansfield, Mike

Mao Tse-tung

Map Room

Maragon, “Mysterious” John

Marcantonio, Vito

Marcelle, Joseph P.

March, Fredric

“March of Time, The”

Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome

Marine Corps

maritime strike (1946)

Marks, Ted

Marshall, George C.

atomic bomb and

background of

Berlin crisis and

character and appearance of

China mission of

confidence and morale inspired by

death and funeral of

Eisenhower and

Europe and

Harvard commencement speech of

on HST

HST on

Japan and

Korean War and

MacArthur’s firing and

McCarthy’s attack on

Palestine issue and

at Potsdam

retirement of

as Secretary of Defense

as Secretary of State

Vinson mission and

in World War I

World War II and

Marshall, John

Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program; ERP)

authorship and naming of

conception of

congressional approval of

cost of

Harvard commencement speech on

Kennan’s role in

1948 campaign and

partition of Palestine and

Progressive Party’s denunciation of

Martin, Glenn

Martin, Joseph

background of

and firing of MacArthur

as presidential candidate

as Speaker of the House

Masaryk, Jan

Masons

HST’s membership in

Matheus, Elijah “Cap”

Mathias, Bob

Matthews, Francis P.

Matthews, T. S.

Mayerberg, Samuel S.

Mays, John

Mead, James

Meader, George

meatpackers’ strike (1946)

meat prices

meat shortages

medical care, see health care and insurance

Medicare

Médicis, Catherine de

Meisburger, Edward

Mellon, Andrew

Melton, Thomas

Memoirs (Truman)

Mencken, H. L.

Menefee, Walter

Menninger, William C.

Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare)

Merman, Ethel

Messall, Victor

Mesta, Perle

Meuse-Argonne offensive

Mexican-American War

Mexico:

HST’s visit to

water treaty with

Meyer, Agnes

Miami Daily News

Middle East

see also specific countries

Miles, John

military

civilian control of

discrimination in

NSC-68 report on

strength of

unification of forces in

universal training for

see also defense spending; draft, military

Miller, Merle

Miller, Verne

Milligan, Jacob L. “Tuck”

Milligan, Maurice

Milwaukee Journal

minimum wage

mink coats

Minton, Sherman

Mission to Moscow (Davies)

Missouri

congressional districts in

Depression in

General Order No. 11 and

migration to

slavery in

see also Jackson County, Mo.; specific cities and towns

Missouri Compromise

Missouri River

Mitchell, Richard

Mitchell, Samuel

Mitchell, Stephen A.

Molotov, Vyacheslav M.

Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright

Monroe, James

Monroe Doctrine

Monroney, A. S. Mike

Montgomery, Emmett

Moore, Charles H.

Moore, Elizabeth

Moran, Lord

Morgan, David

Morgan Oil and Refining Company

Morgenthau, Henry

Morison, Samuel Eliot

Mormons

Morris, Newbold

Mostyn-Owen, Willy

Mount Palomar

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

Mr. Citizen (Truman)

Mr. President (Hillman)

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Muccio, John

Müller-Grote, Gustav

Mundt, Karl Earl

Murphy, Charles

Murphy, Harry

Murphy, Robert

Murphy, Tom

Murray, Matthew S.

Murray, Phil

Murrow, Edward R.

Mussolini, Benito

Myers, Hank

Mylander, William

Nagasaki, bombing of

Nagoya, bombing of

Napoleon I, Emperor of France

Nash, Frank “Jelly”

Nation

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

National Bank of Commerce

National Conference of City Planning

National Defense Advisory Commission

National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB)

National Guard

National Old Trails Association

National Security Act (1947)

National Security Council (NSC)

Korea and

military strength report (NSC-68) of

Z Committee of

NATO, see North Atlantic Treaty Organization

natural resources

Navy, U.S.

contracts for, see defense spending

Navy Bureau of Ships

Nazis, see Germany, Nazi

NDMB (National Defense Mediation Board)

Nebraska

Neild, Edward F.

Nelson, Donald M.

Nesbitt, Henrietta

Neutrality Act (1936)

Nevins, Allan

New Deal

Communists and

Second Hundred Days of

New Republic

Newsweek

election poll in

New Yorker

New York Herald-Tribune

New York Post

New York Sun

New York Times

see also Krock, Arthur

New York Times Book Review

New York Times Magazine

Nicholson, Henry

Niles, David K.

Nimitz, Chester A.

Niños Héroes, Los

Nitze, Paul

Nixon, Pat

Nixon, Richard M.

Nixon, Robert

Noland, Ella Truman (aunt)

Noland, Ethel (cousin)

Noland, Joseph (uncle)

Noland, Nellie (cousin)

Noland House

Norman, Lloyd

Norris, George W.

Norstad, Lauris

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

North Attleboro Chronicle

Noyes, David M.

NSC, see National Security Council

NSC-68 report

nuclear weapons, see atomic bomb, atomic energy

Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp)

Nuremberg

Nye, Gerald P.

Nye Committee

Odlum, Floyd B.

Odum, Reathel

O’Dwyer, William

Office of Defense Mobilization

Office of Economic Stabilization

Office of Emergency Management (OEM)

Office of Facts and Figures

Office of Production Management (OPM)

Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion

Ogburn, Charlton, Jr.

Ogden, Betty

Ogden, Sue

O’Hara John

O’Hare, William

Ohrdruf-Nord

oil industry

Middle East and

Okinawa

Oliphant, Charles

Olympic Games (1948)

Omaha Morning World Herald

O’Malley, R. Emmett

OPM (Office of Production Management)

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

Order No. 11 (Bingham)

Oregon Journal

organized crime

Osborne, John

Osmeña, Sergio

Ott, Natalie

Oxford University

Pace, Frank, Jr.

PACs (Political Action Committees)

Paderewski, Ignace Jan

Palawan Massacre

Palestine

Arabs in

Forrestal and

Great Britain and

partitioning of

U.N. and

Zionists and

see also Israel

Palmer, Ardelia Hardin

Palmer, W. L. C.

Parent, Thomas

Park, Guy B.

Parkman, Francis

Parks, Lillian

Paterson, Newell

Patterson, Robert

Patterson, Roscoe Conkling

Patton, George S.

Patton, Melvin

Pauley, Ed

Pavlov, V.N.

Paxton, Mary

Payne, Robert

Peabody, Endicott

Peacock, James

Peale, Rembrandt

Pearl Harbor attack

Pearson, Drew

Forrestal and

Vaughan and

Pegler, Westbrook

Pendergast, James “Alderman Jim”

Pendergast, James M.

Pendergast, John

Pendergast, Kathleen

Pendergast, Michael

Pendergast, Mrs. Thomas

Pendergast, Robert

Pendergast, Thomas Joseph “T.J.,”

Benton and

character and appearance of

death of

downfall of

HST’s first meeting with

HST’s relationship with

HST’s Senate campaign and

illness of

Lazia and

Pendergast, T. J., Jr.

Pendergast political machine

as stigma on HST

Pentagon

see also Defense Department, U.S.

Pepper, Claude

Perkins, Frances

Perlman, Philip B.

Perón, Juan

Perry, J. Lester

Perching, John J.

Pétain, Henri Philippe

Peters, Mize

Petrillo, James C.

Petroleum Administration

Phelps, Margaret

Philadelphia Record

Philippines

Phillips, Cabell

photographers

Pierce, Franklin

Pilgrims

Pine, David A.

Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company

Pittsburgh Courier

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Press

Pius XII, Pope

Plain Speaking (Miller)

Plunkett, J. P.

Plutarch

PM

Point Four Program

Poland

Potsdam Conference and

Soviet occupation of

Policy Planning Staff

Political Action Committees (PACs)

“Politics of 1948, The” (Rowe)

Polk, James Knox

poll taxes

Potsdam Conference (1945

atomic bomb and

central issues at

HST’s quarters at

results of

Potsdam Declaration

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

Powell, Hettie

Powell, Jane

Prague

Pravda

presidential flag and seal, redesigning of

President’s Economic Council

press conferences, SIS-819

press photographers

Prettyman, Arthur

Progressive Citizens of America

Prohibition

Proxmire, William

Pruden, Edward

Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935)

Puerto Rico

Pugh, Conley

Pugh, Noah E.

Purcell, E. T. “Buck,”

Pye, John

Quantrill, William

Rabaut, Louis C.

racial prejudice

HST and

in military

see also civil rights

Radford, Arthur

radio

Railway Labor Act (1934)

railway strike (1946)

Randall, Clarence

Rash, Bryson

Rayburn, Sam

funeral of

HST’s reelection campaign and

1948 Democratic Convention chaired by

Truman Doctrine supported by

as vice-presidential candidate

Reagan, Ronald

Reason Why, The (Woodham-Smith)

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)

Reddig, William

Redding, Jack

Red Legs

Reece, Carroll

Reed, Clyde Martin

Reed, James A. “Fighting Jim,”

Reed, Nell Donnelly

Reed, Stanley F.

Regan, Phil

Remington, Frederic

Reminiscences (MacArthur)

rent control

Republican National Committee

Republican National Conventions:

of 1944

of 1948

of 1952

Republican Party

Jewish votes and

1946 congressional elections won by

1950 congressional elections won by

see also election of 1948; elections; specific individuals

Resolution

Reston, James

Results of County Planning

Reuben James

Reuther, Walter

Reynolds, Frank A.

RFC (Reconstruction Finance Corporation)

Rhee, Syngman

Rice, John

“Richard Cory” (Robinson)

Richardson, Seth

Richetti, Adam

Rickenbacker, Eddie

Ricketts, Floyd

Ridge, Albert

Ridgway, Matthew

in Korean War

Riedel, Richard

Rigdon, William

Roberts, Roy

Robeson, Paul

Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Robinson, Harold

Robinson, Joseph T.

Robinson, S. M.

Rockefeller, John D.

Rogers, Ginger

Rogers, Will

Romania

Roosevelt, Alice

Roosevelt, Eleanor

HST endorsed by

husband’s death and

Roosevelt, Elliott

Roosevelt, Franklin Jr.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

“arsenal of democracy” speech of

background of

Barkley and

blacks and

bombing and

Byrnes and

Churchill and

Clark and

Congress and

Court-packing plan of

death of

declining health of

Dewey and

dog of

electronic surveillance and

Ferdinand Magellan and

Flynn’s influence on

Four Freedoms of

fourth term of

funeral of

Good Neighbor Policy of

health of

Herbert Hoover and

HST compared with

HST on

HST’s relationship with

“inspection tour” of

King and

Lend-Lease program of

Long and

loyalty issue and

MacArthur and

Map Room established by

Marshall and

New Deal of, see New Deal

1944 elections and

office of

OPM and

Palestine issue and

Pauley and

Secret Service and

seizure suffered by

Soviet Union and

Stalin and

Stark and

Truman Committee and

Wallace and

War Production Board established by

at Yalta

Roosevelt, James “Jimmy,”

Roosevelt, Theodore

Roper, Elmo

Rose, Billy

Rosenbaum, Bluma, see Jacobson, Bluma Rosenbaum

Rosenberg, Anna

Rosenman, Dorothy

Rosenman, Sam

Ross, Charlie

death of

on HST

as HST’s childhood friend

HST’s reelection campaign and

loyalty of

at Potsdam

press secretary appointment of

Vaughan and

Wallace’s New York speech and

Ross, Mike

Rovere, Richard

Rowe, James A., Jr.

Rowley, Jim

Royall, Kenneth C.

Royce, Morton

rubber production

Rummel, Henry

Rusk, Dean

Russell, Richard B., Jr.

S-1, see Manhattan Project

St. Louis Globe-Democrat

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

St. Louis Star-Times

Saint-Mihiel

Salisbury, Frank O.

Salisbury, Spencer

Saltonstall, Leverett

San Antonio Express

Sanderson, Julia

San Francisco Conference (1945)

San Francisco Examiner

Sargent, John Singer

Sato, Naotake

Saturday Evening Post

Saturday Review

Saudi Arabia

Sawyer, Aaron

Sawyer, Charles

Schenectady

Scherer, Ray

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr.

Schneider, Edward L.

Schoeneman, George J.

Schultheiss, Paul

Schwartz, Harry

Schwellenbach, Lewis

Scott, Hazel

Scouten, Rex

Seattle Times

Sebald, William

Secretary of Defense, creation of office of

Secret Service, U.S.

assassination attempt and

at Potsdam

Senate, U.S.:

Appropriations Committee

Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate

District of Columbia Committee

Hoey Committee

HST’s career in

Interstate Commerce Committee

Kefauver Committee

Military Affairs Committee

Nye Committee

Printing Committee

Public Buildings and Grounds Committee

Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, see Truman Committee

Tydings Committee

see also Congress, U.S.

Sermon, Roger T.

Sevareid, Eric

Seward, William H.

Shakespeare, William

Shanghai

Shannon, Joseph B.

Shannon, William V.

Shaw, George W.

Shaw, Mary

Sherman, Forrest

Sherman, William Tecumseh

Shertok, Moshe

Sherwood, Robert

Short, Dewey

Short, Joe

Shostakovich, Dmitri

Siddeley, Armstrong

Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy,”

Silver, Abba Hillel

Simpson, Caroline

Simpson, “Letch,”

Singapore

Slaughter, Elizabeth

Slaughter, O. V.

Slaughter, Roger C.

Slaughter, Stephen

slavery

Sloan, Samuel A.

Smith, Alfred E.

Smith, Ellison DuRant “Cotton Ed,”

Smith, Harold D.

Smith, Ira

Smith, Jabez

Smith, Joseph

Smith, Margaret Chase

Smith, Merriman

Smith, Walter Bedell

Smith-Connally Act (1943)

Smyth, James G.

Snyder, Drucie

Snyder, John

Snyder, Mrs. John

Soames, Christopher

Soames, Mary Churchill

Social Security

Social Security Act (1935)

Soldier’s Story, A (Bradley)

Somervell, Brehon B.

Somoza, Anastasio

Soong, T. V.

Sophocles

Souers, Sidney W.

Southern, William

Soviet Union

atomic bomb and

Berlin and

China and

Cold War with, see Cold War

expansionist policy of

Germany and

Great Britain and

Greece and

HST’s forecast for

Iran occupied by

Japan and

Korean War and

Lend-Lease and

Marshall Plan and

military strength of

Nazi pact with

Palestine and

Poland occupied by

Potsdam Conference and, see Potsdam Conference

Turkey and

U.S. relations with

Vinson mission and

Wallace’s New York speech on

in World War II

Yalta agreements and

see also Stalin, Joseph

Spaatz, Carl A

SPAB (Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board)

Spain

Sparkman, John

Spellman, Francis Joseph Cardinal

Spence, Brent

Spina, Frank

Spitalny, Phil

Stafford, Terry

Staley Milling Company

Stalin, Joseph

atomic bomb and

Berlin and

character and appearance of

Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech and

death of

Germany and

Marshall Plan and

at Potsdam

Roosevelt and

Vinson mission and

Stampler, Manly

Standard Oil of New Jersey

Stapf, Harlow A.

Stark, Lloyd C.

Stassen, Harold E.

State Department, U.S.

see also Acheson, Dean; Byrnes, James; Marshall, George C.; specific foreign policy issues

State of the Union

Stayton, E. M.

Steele, Jack

steel industry

crisis in

HST’s seizure of

Korean War and

Steelman, John R

steel strikes:

of 1946

of 1952

Steinfirst, Donald

Stern, Isaac

Stettinius, Edward

Stevenson, Adlai E.

background of

death of

as governor of Illinois

HST’s plea for candidacy of

as presidential candidate

Stevenson, Adlai E.

Stevenson, Adlai E. (Vice President)

Stevenson, Coke

Stewart, Murray

Stewart, Tom

Stimson, Henry L

atomic bomb and

on Germany

Marshall and

political career of

at Potsdam

retirement of

Stone, Harlan

Stone, I. F

Story of Harry Truman, The

Stout, Stuart

Stowe, David

Straight, Michael

Straus, Noel

Strauss, Lewis

Street, Charles

Strickler, Mrs. Thomas J.

strikes

auto workers’

coal

electrical workers’

railway

steel, see steel strikes

Taft-Hartley Act and

telegraph

telephone

Strother, John

Strother, Sam

Strout, Richard

Study of Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Favoritism and Influence

Styka, Tadé

Sullivan, John L.

Sullivan, William C.

Sulzberger, Arthur Hays

Sulzberger, C. L.

Summer, Grace

“Sunday Evening Hour,”

superbomb, see hydrogen bomb

Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB)

Supreme Court, U.S.

Roosevelt’s plan for

steel mill seizure and

Surplus Property Administration

Susskind, David

Suzuki, Kantaro

Swanson, Gloria

Swayze, John Cameron

Swope, Chrisman

Symington, Stuart

Szilard, Leo

Taber, John

Taft, Mrs. Robert A

Taft, Robert A

character and appearance of

Dewey and

on Lilienthal

as presidential candidate

Taft, William Howard

retirement of

Taft-Hartley Act (1947)

Taiwan, see Formosa

Talmadge, Herman

Tames, George

tax collection, corruption in

taxes

Taylor, “Fiddlin’ Bob,”

Taylor, Glen H.

Taylor, Tasker

Taylor, Telford

Teapot Dome scandal

Teasley, Walter “Cushionfoot,”

telegraph strike

telephone strikes:

of 1946

of 1952

television

films about presidency on

political conventions on

presidential inauguration on

White House tour on

Teller, Edward

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord

Thacker, Ralph

“They’ll Never Believe Me” (Kern)

Thomas, Elmer

Thomas, J. Parnell

Thomas, Lowell

Thompson, Dorothy

Thompson, Ed

Thompson, Llewellyn

Thomson, Virgil

Thorndike, Joseph J., Jr.

Thurman, Samuel

Thurmond, J. Strom

Tiernan, L. Curtis

Tighe, Arthur

Time

Times (London)

Times of India

Tinley, John P.

Tito, Marshal (Josip Broz)

Tobey, Charles

Togo, Shigenori

Tokyo

Torresola, Griselio

To Secure These Rights

Tracy, Spencer

Traubel, Helen

Triangle Club

Truitt, Mrs. Max

Truman, Anderson Shipp (Shippe) (grandfather)

Civil War and

slaves owned by

Truman, Elizabeth Wallace “Bess” (wife)

and assassination attempt on HST

character of

death of

European vacations of

farewell luncheon for HST and

father’s suicide and

as First Lady

Forrestal and

frugality of

HST’s Christmas visit and

HST’s courting of

HST’s engagement to

HST’s “final” argument with

HST’s hiring of

HST’s letters to

HST’s political career and

HST’s presidency resisted by

HST’s reelection campaign and

HST’s relationship with

HST’s war service and

HST’s wedding to

Independence summers of

as influence on HST

Margaret’s singing and

mastectomy of

miscarriages of

oil venture and

physical appearance of

privacy guarded by

Roosevelt’s death and

Ross’s post and

on Senate staff

Washington apartments of

White House and

Truman, Emma

Truman, Harry (nephew)

Truman, Harry S.:

aging of

ambition of

in American Legion

in Army reserve

at Army summer camp

artistic tastes of

assassination attempt on

automobile travels of

bank jobs of

Bible reading of

birthday parties for

birth of

“The Buck Stops Here” sign of

campaign style of

character and appearance of

childhood accidents of

childhood of

Chubb Fellowship given to

Citizens Security bank venture of

clubs joined by

as “common man” president

confidence of

congressional position sought by

construction timekeeper job of

corruption attributed to administration

courage of

cronyism ascribed to

death of

diary of

diligence of

drugstore job of

as eastern judge of Jackson County

Court

education of

energy of

European vacations of

eyeglasses and eyesight of

fairness of

falls of

farewell address of

farewell luncheon for

as farmer

as father

as federal reemployment service director

film on

first automobile of

first Cabinet appointments of

first congressional address of

first postwar message to Congress of

first presidential term of

first press conference of

friends hired by

funeral of

Gates residence of

“give-’em-hell-Harry” style of

as “go-along, get-along Harry,”

governor’s post desired by

growth and changes of

headaches of

health of

heroes of

history and

Independence homes of

as investigator see also Truman Committee

as Jeffersonian

jokes about

in Kansas City

Kansas City Automobile Club job of

land speculation trips of

last press conference of

last weeks of presidency of

as late bloomer

law school courses of

“longhand spasms” of

long-range objectives lacked by

as Mason

memoirs of, see Memoirs

memorial tributes to

men’s furnishing store of

morals and integrity of

name and middle initial of

in National Guard

as nineteenth-century man

“nonpolitical” cross-country tours of

in oil venture

as Pendergast man, see Pendergast political machine

piano playing of

politics as interest of

politics as life work of

politics as seen by

popularity of

portraits of

on presidency

presidency resisted by

presidential “honeymoon” of

presidential inauguration of

presidential reelection campaign funds for

presidential reelection campaign of

presidential reelection of

as presiding judge of Jackson County Court

press conferences of

reading of

religious views of

retirement announcement of

retirement financial situation of

retirement of

road overseer job of

salaries of

second presidential term of

Senate campaign of (1934)

Senate campaign of (1940)

Senate career of

on Senate committees; see also Truman committee

shirts of

speeches of

staff’s relationship with

in stage show

in television films

temper of

theater-going of

vacations of

values and beliefs of

vice-presidency resisted by

as Vice President

as vice-presidential candidate

Washington apartments of

West Point aspirations of

Whistle-stop Campaign of

World War I service of

at Young farm

zinc-mine venture of

Truman, J. C. (nephew)

Truman, John (great-uncle)

Truman, John Anderson (father)

businesses and jobs of

character and appearance of

as farmer

financial misfortunes of

houses and farms of

illness and death of

politics as interest of

Truman, John Vivian (brother)

birth of

death of

HST’s hiring of

marriage of

Truman, Lawrence

Truman, Luella Campbell (sister-in-law)

Truman, Margaret (aunt)

Truman, Margaret (daughter), see Daniel, Mary Margaret “Margie” Truman

Truman, Martha Ann (niece)

Truman, Martha Ellen “Mattie”; (mother)

accident of

character and appearance of

Chiles and

death of

eviction of

failing health of

farm mortgages of

hernia operation of

HST’s automobile and

HST’s buying back farm of

HST’s letters to

HST’s war service and

as influence on HST

Margaret’s singing and

marriage of

piano of

pneumonia of

stroke of

surgery of

Washington visit of

Truman, Mary (aunt)

Truman, Mary Jane (sister)

birth of

character and appearance of

farm run by

HST’s letters to

HST’s relationship with

HST’s war service and

letters from

Truman, Mary Jane Holmes (grandmother)

Truman, Mary Martha (aunt)

Truman, Ralph (cousin)

Truman, William (great-grandfather)

Truman, William (uncle)

Truman & Jacobson

Truman Balcony

Truman Committee (Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program)

appropriation for

atomic bomb and

camp construction investigated by

corporations investigated by

dollar-a-year men opposed by

Roosevelt and

staff of

steel plate production investigated by

Truman Doctrine

Acheson’s role in

aid to Greece and Turkey in

as continuation of historic U.S. policies

HST’s speech to Congress on

leadership demonstrated in

1948 campaign and

Progressive Party’s denunciation of

Truman Library, see Harry S. Truman Library

Truman Merry-Go-Round, The(Allen and Shannon)

Truman Story, The

Truman-Wheeler Bill

Trumbull, John

Tubby, Roger

Tully, Andrew

Tully, Grace

Tunney, Gene

Turkey

British aid to

Soviet Union and

U.S. aid to

Turner, Roy J.

Turnip congress

TVA, see Tennessee Valley Authority

Twain, Mark

Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution

Twyman, Dr.

Twyman, Elmer

Tydings, Millard

Tydings Committee

Tyler, John

unemployment

Union Army

Union National Bank

unions, see labor, labor unions

Union Station Massacre

United Mine Workers

United Nations (U.N.)

Atomic Energy Commission of

Charter of

Korean War as action of

Palestine issue and

San Francisco Conference on

Security Council of

United Nations Association

United Press

United States

United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949

United Steel Workers

Urey, Harold

U.S. News and World Report

U.S. Steel Corporation

V-l rockets

Vaccaro, Tony

Vaile, Harvey

Vandenberg, Arthur

character and appearance of

as former isolationist

Lilienthal and

Vandenberg, Hoyt

Vardaman, James K. “Jake,” Jr.

Vaughan, Harry

character and appearance of

on HST’s eyeglasses

s HST’s military aide

J. Edgar Hoover and

pearson’s attack on

at Potsdam

self-importance of

Senate investigation of

senatorial staff position of

Vaughan, Samuel

Veatch, N. T., Jr.

Versailles Treaty (1919)

veterans:

aid to

black

garden parties for

GI Bill and

housing for

Veterans of Foreign Wars

Vietnam

Vietnam War

Vinson, Fred M.

special mission planned for

Vivian, John

Volkogonov, Dmitri

Vrooman, Howard

wages

Wage Stabilization Board

Waggoner, William

Wagner, Robert

Wagner Labor Relations Act (1935)

Wainwright, Jonathan M.

Wake Island Conference (1950)

Walker, Frank

Walker, Kay

Walker, Walton

Wallace, Carrie

Wallace, David, suicide of

Wallace, Frank

Wallace, Fred

Wallace, George

Wallace, Helen

Wallace, Henry A.

character of

China trip of

HST’s firing of

as presidential candidate

Progressive Party of

speech fiasco and

as Vice President

as vice-presidential candidate

Wallace, Madge Gates

death of

HST’s residence at house of

Margaret’s singing and

Wallace, May Southern

Wallace, Natalie Ott

Wallace, Natalie

Wallgren, Monrad C.

Wall Street Journal

Walsh, David I.

Walsh, Edmund A.

Walsh, Jerome

War Department, U.S.

see also Defense Department, U.S.

War Mobilization

War Powers and Stabilization Act (1942)

War Production Board

Warren, Earl

Washington, George

Washington Evening Star

Washington News

Washington Post

Washington Press Club

Washington Star

Washington Times-Herald

Wasson, Guy

Wasson, Yancey

waterways proposal

Watson, Edwin “Pa,”

Weathers, James

Webb, James

Weizmann, Chaim

Welch, Casimir

Wells, Louise

West, J. B.

West Germany (German Federated Republic)

Westminster College

West Point:

cheating scandal at

HST’s aspirations to

HST’s views of

Westwood, Mike

Wharton, Edith

Wheeler, Burton K.

Wherry, Kenneth Spicer

Whistle-stop Campaign

White, Grace

White, Wallace H.

White, Walter

White House

balcony added to

bomb shelter in

collapsing structure of

entertaining at

as haunted

Public tours of

renovation of

television tour of

Whitman, Alden

Whitney, A. F.

Whitney, Albert

Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt

Whitney, Courtney

Whittier, John Greenleaf

Wickard, Claude

Wiley, Alexander

Wilhelm, Warren F.

Wilkins, Fraser

Willa Coates Airport

Willard, Daniel

William Jewell College

Williams, Herbert Lee

Williamsburg

Willis, Raymond

Willkie, Wendell

Wilson, Arthur

Wilson, Charles E.

Wilson, Ellen

Wilson, Francis M.

Wilson, Ida

Wilson, R. P.

Wilson, Woodrow

Winant, John G.

Winchell, Walter

Winslow, Lorenzo

Wise, Stephen

Wolf, Agnes Strauss

women’s vote

Wonderful Town

Woodham-Smith, Cecil

Woodward, Isaac

Woodward, Sara

Woodward, Stanley

Wooldridge, Glen

Woolf, S.J.

Works Progress Administration (WPA)

World War I

HST’s service in

World War II:

aftermath of

aid to European Jews in

atomic bombing of Japan in

Battle of Britain in

Big Three conferences in see Potsdam Conference; Yalta Conference

Churchill’s history of

civilian control of military in

demobilization after

division of Korea in

end of

HST’s sudden responsibilities in

Manhattan Project in

mobilization for

Nazi attack on Soviets in

Nazi-Soviet Pact and

1944 presidential campaign and

Roosevelt’s death and

Senate probe of spending in, see Truman Committee

vice-presidential selection and

war agencies developed for

WPA (Works Progress Administration)

Wright, Fielding L.

Wyeth, Andrew

Xenophon

Yale University

Yalta Conference (1945)

Yalta Declaration

Yeager, Chuck

York, Alvin

Young, Ada (aunt)

Young, Brigham

Young, Ed

Young, E. Merl

Young, Elizabeth (aunt)

Young, Harriet Louisa Gregg (grandmother)

death of

Lane and

will written by

Young, Harrison “Harry” (uncle)

character and appearance of

death of

Lane and

Young, Hiram

Young, Jacob (great-grandfather)

Young, Laura Jane (aunt)

Young, Loretta (Mrs. E. Merl Young)

Young, Rachael Goodnight (great-grandmother)

Young, Sarah Ann, see Chiles, Sarah Ann “Sallie” Young

Young, Solomon (grandfather)

death of

farms of

Kansas City exile of

slaves owned by

wagon-train expeditions of

Young, Susan Mary (aunt)

Young, William (uncle)

Younger, Coleman

Younger, Henry

Yugoslavia

Z Committee

Zeisler, Fannie Bloomfield

Zemer, Leslie

Zhukov, Georgi

Zionist Organization of America

Zionists

see also Palestine

Photo Credits

SECTION 1

Harry S. Truman Library: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 32, 37, 39

Library of Congress: 8, 35

U.S. Army: 19

Joe Pruett Collection: 25, 27, 28

Kansas City Star: 29, 30, 31

AP/Wide World: 33

UPI/Bettmann: 34, 36

Chicago Sun-Times: 38

SECTION 2

Harry Goodwin, Washington Post: 1

Independence Examiner: 2

Abbie Rowe, U.S. National Park Service: 3, 11, 20

U.S. Army: 4, 6, 7, 8, 9

U.S. Navy: 5, 14

Harry S. Truman Library: 10

Photo World/ FPG/International: 12, 22

AP/Wide World: 13, 25, 27

UPI/Bettmann: 15, 17, 19, 21, 24

Copyright Washington Post; Reprinted by permission of D.C. Public Library: 16

Kansas City Star: 18

Courtesy Selby Kelly: 23

St. Louis Globe-Democrat: 26

SECTION 3

U.S. Overseas Mission: 1

Harry S. Truman Library: 2, 6, 14

Copyright Washington Post; Reprinted by permission of D.C. Public Library: 3, 5, 16

UPI/Bettmann: 4, 9, 11

AP/Wide World: 7, 12, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25

U.S. Navy: 8

Abbie Rowe, U.S. National Park Service: 10, 13, 15

Herblock/Washington Post: 18

U.S. Army: 17

Chicago Tribune: 21

Levi Photo: 22

Bradley Smith: 26, 27

Randall Jessee/Harry S. Truman Library: 28

By David McCullough

JOHN ADAMS

TRUMAN

BRAVE COMPANIONS

MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS

THE GREAT BRIDGE

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD

Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
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Copyright © 2004 by David McCullough
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission from
W. W. Norton & Company to reprint material from
Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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ISBN 0-7432-6783-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-743-55038-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5

THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS

WASHINGTON, D.C.
MAY 15, 2003

Dr. Cole, ladies and gentlemen, to be honored as I am tonight in the capital of our country, in the presence of my family and many old friends, is for me almost an out-of-body experience. Had someone told me forty years ago, as I began work on my first book, trying to figure out how to go about it, that I would one day be standing here, the recipient of such recognition, I would, I think, have been stopped dead in my tracks.

I’ve loved the work, all the way along—the research, the writing, the rewriting, so much that I’ve learned about the history of the nation and about human nature. I love the great libraries and archives where I’ve been privileged to work, and I treasure the friendships I’ve made with the librarians and archivists who have been so immensely helpful. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my subjects, I feel. The reward of the work has always been the work itself, and more so the longer I’ve been at it. And I’ve kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I’ve come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don’t get to read other people’s mail.

I have also been extremely fortunate in the tributes that have come my way. But this singular honor, the Jefferson Lecture, is for me a high point, and my gratitude could not be greater.

AMONG THE DARKEST TIMES in living memory was the early part of 1942—when Hitler’s armies were nearly to Moscow; when German submarines were sinking our oil tankers off the coasts of Florida and New Jersey, within sight of the beaches, and there was not a thing we could do about it; when half our navy had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor. We had scarcely any air force. Army recruits were drilling with wooden rifles. And there was no guarantee that the Nazi war machine could be stopped.

It was then, in 1942, that the classical scholar Edith Hamilton issued an expanded edition of her book, The Greek Way, in which, in the preface, she wrote the following:

I have felt while writing these new chapters a fresh realization of the refuge and strength the past can be to us in the troubled present. . . . Religion is the great stronghold for the untroubled vision of the eternal, but there are others too. We have many silent sanctuaries in which we can find breathing space to free ourselves from the personal, to rise above our harassed and perplexed minds and catch sight of values that are stable, which no selfish and timorous preoccupations can make waver, because they are the hard-won permanent possessions of humanity....

When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.

In the Rotunda of the Capitol hangs a large painting of forty-seven men in a room. The scene is as familiar, as hallowed a moment in our history as any we have.

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence[shown on the cover of this book] has been a main attraction on Capitol tours for a very long time, since 1826. It draws crowds continuously, as it should, every day—from three to five million people a year. It’s probably been seen by more Americans than any painting ever—and the scene as portrayed never took place.

Trumbull said it was meant to represent July 4, 1776, and that’s the popular understanding. But the Declaration of Independence was not signed on July 4. The signing began on August 2, and continued through the year as absent delegates returned to Philadelphia. No formal signing ceremony ever took place.

The scene comes closer to portraying June 28, when Thomas Jefferson submitted his first draft of the Declaration. But then, too, there was no such dramatic gathering.

The room is wrong, the doors are in the wrong place. The chairs are wrong. (They were Windsor chairs of the plainest kind.) There were no heavy draperies at the windows. The decorative display of military trophies and banners on the back wall is purely Trumbull’s way of dressing the set.

Yet none of this really matters. What does matter greatly—particularly in our own dangerous, uncertain time—is the symbolic power of the painting, and where Trumbull put the emphasis.

The scene proclaims that in Philadelphia in the year 1776 a momentous, high-minded statement of far-reaching consequence was committed to paper. It was not the decree of a king or a sultan or emperor or czar, or something enacted by a far-distant parliament. It was a declaration of political faith and brave intent freely arrived at by an American congress. And that was something entirely new under the sun.

And there Trumbull has assembled them, men like other men, each, importantly, a specific, identifiable individual.

The accuracy is in the faces. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were painted from life. Before he was finished, Trumbull painted or sketched thirty-six of the faces from life. It took him years, and he spared no expense, because he wanted it right. He wanted us to know who they were.

Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin stand front and center exactly as they did in the real drama of the Revolution.

A number who signed the Declaration are not shown. Several who did not sign are present.

Most conspicuous by his absence is George Washington, who had departed Congress the year before to take command of the army.

LORD BOLINGBROKE, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, said that “history is philosophy teaching by examples.” Thucydides is reported to have said much the same thing two thousand years earlier.

Jefferson saw history as largely a chronicle of mistakes to be avoided.

Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, has wisely said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.

One might also say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past! Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes!” They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have.

Nor were they gods. Indeed, to see them as gods or godlike is to do disservice to their memories. Gods, after all, don’t deserve a lot of credit because they can do whatever they wish.

Those we call the Founders were living men. None was perfect. Each had his human flaws and failings, his weaknesses. They made mistakes, let others down, let themselves down.

Washington could be foolhardy and ill-tempered. Adams could be vain, irritable; Jefferson evasive, at times duplicitous. And even in their day, many saw stunning hypocrisy in the cause of liberty being championed by slave masters.

They were imperfect mortals, human beings. Jefferson made the point in the very first line of the Declaration of Independence. “When in the course of human events . . .” The accent should be on the word human.

And of course their humanity is not evident only in their failings. It’s there in Adams’s heart-felt correspondence with his wife and children, in Jefferson’s love of gardening, his fascination, as he said, in every blade of grass that grows.

Washington had a passionate love of architecture and interior design. Everything about his home at Mt. Vernon was done to his ideas and plans. Only a year before the war, he began an ambitious expansion of the house, doubling its size. How extremely important this was to him, the extent of his esthetic sense, few people ever realized. He cared about every detail—wallpaper, paint color, hardware, ceiling ornaments—and hated to be away from the project even for a day.

The patriotism and courage of these all-important protagonists stand as perhaps the most conspicuous and enduring testaments to their humanity. When those who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged their “lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor,” that was no mere verbiage. They were putting their lives on the line. They were declaring themselves traitors to the King. If caught they would be hanged.

Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who suffered from palsy, is said to have remarked as he signed his name, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

Hopkins was a grand old figure who had seen a lot of life. You can’t miss him in the Trumbull painting. He’s at the back with his broad-brimmed Quaker hat on. In after-hours he loved to drink rum and expound on his favorite writers. “He read Greek, Roman, and British history, and was familiar with English poetry,” John Adams wrote. “And the flow of his soul made his reading our own, and seemed to bring recollection in all we had ever read.”

We must never forget either how hard they worked. Nothing came easy. Nothing. Just getting through a day in the eighteenth century meant difficulties, discomforts, and effort of a kind we seldom ever think about.

But it is in their ideas about happiness, I believe, that we come close to the heart of their being and to their large view of the possibilities in their Glorious Cause.

In general, happiness was understood to mean being at peace with the world in the biblical sense, under one’s own “vine and fig tree.” But what did they, the Founders, mean by the expression “pursuit of happiness”?

It didn’t mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the liberty to think for oneself.

Jefferson defined happiness as “tranquility and occupation.” For Jefferson, as we know, occupation meant mainly his intellectual pursuits.

Washington, though less inclined to speculate on such matters, considered education of surpassing value, in part because he had had so little. Once, when a friend came to say he hadn’t money enough to send his son to college, Washington agreed to help—providing a hundred pounds in all, a sizable sum then—and with the hope, as he wrote, that the boy’s education would “not only promote his own happiness, but the future welfare of others . . .” For Washington, happiness derived both from learning and employing the benefits of learning to further the welfare of others.

John Adams, in a letter to his son John Quincy when the boy was a student at the University of Leiden, stressed that he should carry a book with him wherever he went. And that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin were essential, he must never neglect the great works of literature in his own language, and particularly those of the English poets. It was his happiness that mattered, Adams told him. “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

The Revolution was another of the darkest, most uncertain of times and the longest war in American history, until the Vietnam War. It lasted eight and a half years, and Adams, because of his unstinting service to his country, was separated from his family nearly all that time, much to his and their distress. In a letter from France he tried to explain to them the reason for such commitment.

I must study politics and war [he wrote] that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

That was the upward climb envisioned for the good society in the burgeoning new American republic. And Adams was himself vivid proof of the transforming miracle of education. His father was a farmer, his mother almost certainly illiterate. But with the help of a scholarship, he was able to attend Harvard, where, as he said, he discovered books and “read forever.”

His Harvard studies over, Adams began teaching school at Worcester, then virtually the frontier. One crystal night, in 1756, twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, he stood beneath a sky full of stars, “thrown into a kind of transport.” He knew such wonders of the heavens to be the gifts of God, he wrote, but greatest of all was the gift of an inquiring mind.

But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses . . . are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision, that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.

He had decided to study law. “It will be hard work,” he told a friend. “But the point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself.”

Of all the sustaining themes in our story as a nation, as clear as any has been the importance put on education, one generation after another, beginning with the first village academies in New England and the establishment of Harvard and the College of William and Mary. The place of education in the values of the first presidents is unmistakable.

Washington contributed generously, some $20,000 in stock, to the founding of what would become Washington and Lee University in Virginia. His gift was the largest donation ever made to any educational institution in the nation until then and has since grown to a substantial part of the endowment.

Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. But then it may be fairly said that Jefferson was a university unto himself.

The oldest written constitution still in use in the world today is the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, drafted by John Adams in 1778, just two years after the Declaration of Independence and fully a decade before our national Constitution. In many respects it is a rough draft of our national Constitution. But it also contains a paragraph on education that was without precedent. Though Adams worried that it would be rejected as too radical, it was passed unanimously. Listen, please, to what it says:

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties. [Which is to say that there must be wisdom, knowledge, and virtue or all aspirations for the good society will come to nothing.] And as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people [that is, everyone], it shall be the duty [not something they might consider, but the duty] of legislatures and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests and literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them . . . public schools, and grammar schools in the towns.

And he goes on to define what he means by education. It is literature and the sciences, yes, but much more: agriculture, the arts, commerce, trades, manufacturers, “and a natural history of the country.” It shall be the duty, he continues,

to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty [we will teach honesty] . . . sincerity, [and, please note] good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

What a noble statement!

Years before, while still living under his father’s roof, Adams had written in his diary, “I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.”

They were nearly all young men in 1776, it should be remembered, young men who believed, as Thomas Paine proclaimed, that the birth of a new world was at hand.

Jefferson was thirty-three, Adams, forty, Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician, was all of thirty when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Rush, one of the most interesting of them all, was a leader in the antislavery movement, a leader in prescribing humane treatment for the insane, and the first to champion the elective system in higher education.

When George Washington took command of the army, he was forty-three. He had never led an army in battle before in his life, any more than the others had had prior experience as revolutionaries or nation builders.

And what of Franklin? Franklin, oldest and wisest, is for me a special case.

I MET MY FIRST revisionist historian when I was six.

His name was Amos and he was a mouse, an eighteenth-century church mouse to be exact, one of twenty-six children who with their mother and father lived in Old Christ Church in Philadelphia. I can never be in Old Christ Church without wondering if perhaps some of Amos’s line are still there, back behind the paneling.

Amos, who took up lodging in Benjamin Franklin’s fur hat, is the narrator of a little book called Ben and Me by Robert Lawson.

Most so-called historians have had Franklin all wrong, according to Amos. “Ben was undoubtedly a splendid fellow, a great man, a patriot and all that,” he writes, “but he was undeniably stupid at times and had it not been for me—well, here’s the true story . . .”

I was six, as I say, and I was hooked. I learned all about Philadelphia, printing presses, electricity, Franklin stoves, and the Palace of Versailles. I got to know Benjamin Franklin and, like Amos, relished his company.

And that was the start. I learned to love history by way of books. There was The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds; The Last of the Mohicans, with those haunting illustrations by N. C. Wyeth; the Revolutionary War novel Drums, by James Boyd, with still more Wyeth paintings.

That was in the day when children were put to bed when sick, and I remember lying there utterly, blissfully lost in those illustrations.

The first book I ever bought with my own money was a Modern Library edition of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. I was fifteen. In a bookshop in Pittsburgh, I picked up the book from a table, opened to the start of chapter 1, read the first sentence, and knew I had to have that book:

The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim, on her voyage from Boston, ’round Cape Horn, to the western coast of America.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, I had never seen the ocean or heard the cry of a seagull or smelled salt air.

I read Kenneth Roberts’s Oliver Wiswell, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, and A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord. I thank my lucky stars for Robert Abercrombie, who taught history my senior year in high school and made Morison and Commager’s The Growth of the American Republic required reading. In the college years, I must have read a half dozen novels on the Second World War, including Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions.

Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, a graduation present, started me reading more about the Civil War and started me thinking that maybe some day I might try writing something of the kind. I remember reading long passages of Margaret Leech’s splendid Reveille in Washington over and over, trying to see how she did it.

I loved all those books, and they’re all still in print, still being read, which is no mystery. They’re superbly well done, wonderfully well written.

There should be no hesitation ever about giving anyone a book to enjoy, at any age. There should be no hesitation about teaching future teachers with books they will enjoy. No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

WE ARE WHAT WE READ more than we know. And it was true no less in that distant founding time. Working on the life of John Adams, I tried to read not only what he and others of his day wrote, but what they read. And to take up and read again works of literature of the kind we all remember from high school or college English classes was not only a different kind of research, but pure delight.

I read Swift, Pope, Defoe, Sterne, Fielding, and Samuel Johnson again after forty years, and Tobias Smollett and Don Quixote for the first time.

I then began to find lines from these writers turning up in the letters of my American subjects, turning up without attribution, because the lines were part of them, part of who they were and how they thought and expressed themselves.

But we do the same, more often than we realize. Every time we “refuse to budge an inch,” or speak of “green-eyed jealousy,” or claim to be “tongue-tied,” we’re quoting Shakespeare. When we say “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” or “to err is human,” or observe sagely that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” we’re borrowing from Alexander Pope, just as when you “slept not a wink,” or “smell a rat,” or “turn over a new leaf,” or declare “mum’s the word,” you’re quoting Cervantes.

When young Nathan Hale was hanged by the British as a spy in New York in 1776, he famously said as his last words, “My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country.” That’s a line from the popular play of the eighteenth century, Cato, by Joseph Addison, a play they all knew. Washington, who loved the theater, is believed to have seen it half a dozen times.

Imagine how it must have been for Nathan Hale, about to be hanged. Who, in such a moment, could possibly think of something eloquent to say. I think he was throwing that line right back at those British officers. After all, Cato was their play.

I imagine him delivering the line, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

One needs to read the great political philosophers—Hume, Locke, Ferguson, Montesquieu—whose writings had such profound influence on the Founders. Yet there is hardly a more appealing description of the Enlightenment outlook on life and learning than a single sentence in a popular novel of the day, A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne.

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

THE STIMULATION, the motivation, the hard work and pleasures of writing history are mainly in the material. It’s the finding and figuring out that keep you in pursuit. And you never know . . . you never know where you will find something, see something that’s gone unnoticed, or make some unexpected connection that brings things into focus in a new or different way.

The truth of history is the objective always. But the truth isn’t just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

As the incomparable Francis Parkman wrote:

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes.

“I hear all the notes, but I hear no music,” is the old piano teacher’s complaint. There has to be music. History at best has to be literature or it will go to dust.

The work of history—writing history, teaching history—calls for mind and heart. Empathy is essential. The late J. H. Plumb, the eminent British historian, said that what is needed is more “heart-wise” historians.

What happened? And why? Who were those people? What was it like to have been alive then, in their shoes, in their skins? Of what were they afraid? What didn’t they know?

Studying his face in the mirror, John Adams decided, “I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” He was fishing. He was anything but ordinary and it is not possible to understand what happened in that tumultuous, protean time without knowing and understanding him and the others.

There are, of course, great sweeping tides in history—plague, famine, financial panic, the calamities of nature and war. Yet time and again, more often than not history turns on individual personality, or character.

I am presently at work on a book about the Revolution, with the focus on Washington and the army in the year 1776, which in the last months was the nadir of the fortunes of the United States of America, when the army was down to little more than three thousand men. By December, by all signs, the war was over, and we had lost. Fortunately Washington did not see it that way. Had it not been for Washington and his little ragtag army, the Declaration of Independence and all it promised would have truly been “a skiff made of paper.”

There are no paintings or sketches of the soldiers done at the time. Most that we have are by Trumbull, himself a veteran of the war, but his were all painted afterward.

It’s in the surviving diaries, journals, letters, pension files, in descriptions posted for deserters that those in the ranks begin to emerge as flesh-and-blood individual men caught up in something far bigger than they knew.

There was Jabez Fitch, for example, a Connecticut farmer with eight children, who liked soldiering and kept a diary describing the war as he saw it day by day. There was young John Greenwood, a fifer boy, who at age sixteen walked all alone 150 miles from Maine to Boston to join up with Washington’s army. And Mathias Smith, a deserter, who was described as: “a small smart fellow, a saddler by trade, grey headed, has a younger look in his face, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ And between his words will spit smart; had on a green coat, and an old red greatcoat; he is a right gamester, although he wears something of a sober look.”

“Greece,” wrote Edith Hamilton, “never lost sight of the individual.” And neither should we, ever.

They were hungry, starving some of them, and without warm clothes as winter set in. Not all were patriots. Not all were heroes. Not all came home. But they were once as alive as you and I.

“Posterity who are to reap the blessings,” wrote Abigail Adams, “will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”

HISTORY IS—or should be—a lesson in appreciation. History helps us keep a sense of proportion.

History teaches that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman, that we are all shaped by the influences of others, including so many we’ve never seen because they are back there in history.

History teaches that nothing happens in isolation, or without cause and effect, and that nothing ever had to happen as it did.

History teaches tolerance, and the value of common sense, and as Voltaire (and who knows how many others) observed, common sense is anything but common.

History is about high achievement, glorious works of art, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, science and medicine—not just politics and the military—as the best of politicians and generals have readily attested. History is about leadership, and the power of ideas. History is about change, because the world has never not been changing, indeed because life itself is change.

History is the course of human events. And it must therefore be, if truthful, about failure, injustice, struggle, suffering, disappointment, and the humdrum. History demonstrates often in brutal fashion the evils of enforced ignorance and demagoguery. History is a source of strength, a constant reminder of the courage of others in times more trying and painful than our own. As Churchill reminded us, “We have not journeyed all this way . . . because we are made of sugar candy.”

History is filled with voices that reach out and lift the spirits, sometimes from the distance of centuries.

Is it possible to imagine not learning from the wisest, most thoughtful people who shaped the world, or to fail to take heart from manifest courage?

Is life not infinitely more interesting and enjoyable when one can stand in a great historic place, or walk historic ground, and know something of what happened there and in whose footsteps you walk?

For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential, if we are to hold on to and sustain our freedom.

But I don’t think history should ever be made to seem like some musty, unpleasant pill that has to be swallowed solely for our civic good. History, let us agree, can be an immense source of pleasure. For almost anyone with the normal human allotment of curiosity and an interest in people, it is a field day.

Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written.

I guess if I had to boil it down to a few words, I would say history is a larger way of looking at life.

ONE OF OUR innumerable advantages as a nation and a society is that we have such a specific moment of origin as the year 1776. And that we know who the Founders were—indeed we know an immense amount about an immense number of those at all levels who in that revolutionary time brought the United States of America and the reality of freedom into being.

But while it is essential to remember them as individual mortal beings no more perfect than are we, and that they themselves knew this better than anyone, it is also essential to understand that they knew their own great achievements to be imperfect and incomplete.

The American experiment was from its start an unfulfilled promise. There was much work to be done. There were glaring flaws to correct, unfinished business to attend to, improvements and necessary adjustments to devise in order to keep pace with the onrush of growth and change and expanding opportunities.

Those brave, high-minded people of earlier times gave us stars to steer by—a government of laws not of men, equal justice before the law, the importance of the individual, the ideal of equality, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and expression, and the love of learning.

From them, in our own dangerous and promising present, we can take heart. As Edith Hamilton said of the Greeks, we can “catch sight of values that are stable because they are the hard-won possessions of humanity.”

Blessed we are. And duty bound, to continue the great cause of freedom, in their spirit and in their memory and for those who are to carry on next in their turn.

There is still much work to be done, still much to learn.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .

On we go.